Evolutionary Psychologist Edward Dutton
Evolutionary psychologist Edward Dutton is not a conventional gender-critical voice, and that is precisely what makes this conversation worth hearing. Known as The Jolly Heretic, he brings a framework rooted in biology and natural selection to questions about why progressive ideology has spread so rapidly — and what it may mean for future generations. Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman push these ideas where they intersect most sharply with the gender debate.
Edward Dutton operates in a space that most public intellectuals prefer to avoid. As an evolutionary psychologist with a background in religious studies, he draws on genetics, population-level data and the history of ideas to argue that what looks like a cultural or ideological phenomenon may in fact have a biological substrate. That perspective is rare enough in mainstream academia. It is rarer still in conversations about gender. Dutton is perhaps best known for The Jolly Heretic, his YouTube channel and Substack where he engages with contested findings in behavioural genetics and evolutionary science. His academic work has appeared in journals including Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences, and his most recent book, Woke Eugenics, puts forward the striking claim that progressive ideology may function as a selection event — that the values and behaviours associated with contemporary progressivism are actively shaping which traits and tendencies get carried into future generations. Applied to the gender debate, this framework produces questions that cut in an unexpected direction. The usual conversations about gender-identity ideology concern institutions, legislation, safeguarding failures and the welfare of individual children and young people. Dutton's evolutionary lens invites a different level of analysis entirely — one concerned with population-level patterns, heritability and the deeper question of why a particular ideological movement emerged in the societies it did, and accelerated when it did. Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman are well placed to stress-test these ideas. Between them they bring clinical experience, research rigour and psychological training to a guest whose framework is genuinely different from the testimony of detransitioners, the lobbying critiques of gender clinics, or the legal arguments heard in most gender-critical spaces. The conversation is an unusual one for this podcast precisely because Dutton is not, at root, making a safeguarding argument or a clinical one. He is making an argument about the logic of natural selection. The value of this episode lies in the collision of frameworks. What does evolutionary psychology actually contribute to an understanding of gender ideology's spread? Where do biology-level explanations complement or complicate the psychotherapeutic and clinical perspectives the hosts bring? Dutton provokes debate by design — that is the point of The Jolly Heretic — and here he is given interlocutors who know the field well enough to push back. The result is a conversation that reaches well beyond the usual boundaries of the gender debate.
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