Evolutionary Psychologist Edward Dutton
4 December 2025
With Edward Dutton
Global
Edward Dutton, evolutionary psychologist and author of Woke Eugenics, joins Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman to examine why progressive gender ideology has spread so rapidly through institutions. His argument — that ideological conformity may function as a population-level selection mechanism — offers an empirical lens on a debate Ireland has largely conducted in moral terms. The question it raises is stark: did the HSE, schools and publicly funded bodies adopt gender-identity frameworks through genuine deliberation, or through something closer to ideological contagion?
Edward Dutton is an evolutionary psychologist whose work sits at the intersection of population-level behavioural data and the cultural shifts driving contemporary politics. He holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Aberdeen and currently holds a titular professorship at Asbiro University in Poland. His research appears in peer-reviewed journals including Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences, and he reaches a broader audience through his Substack and YouTube channel, The Jolly Heretic. His recent book, Woke Eugenics, advances a striking argument: that progressive ideology — including the gender-identity movement — may be functioning as an involuntary selection event, shaping the psychological and behavioural profile of future generations. This is not a claim about deliberate policy but about emergent dynamics, specifically the idea that strongly ideological environments differentially affect who reproduces, who conforms and who exits mainstream institutions. It is the kind of hypothesis that is difficult to evaluate in real time but is not, in principle, untestable. From an Irish perspective, the timing of this conversation is significant. Ireland moved with unusual speed from having no legal gender recognition framework to passing the Gender Recognition Act 2015, one of the most permissive self-identification regimes in Europe at that time. In the years that followed, gender-identity affirmation language was embedded in HSE communications, in school curricula under SPHE guidelines, and across a range of publicly funded bodies — often before the international evidence base had been properly assessed. Dutton's evolutionary framework raises the question of whether that pace of institutional change reflects genuine critical deliberation or something closer to ideological contagion, a mechanism his analysis is specifically designed to examine. The Beyond Gender hosts bring their own professional scepticism to the conversation. Stella O'Malley's work as a psychotherapist involves seeing the individual-level consequences of ideological frameworks, particularly for young people who may have been steered toward medical pathways rather than exploratory talk therapy. That clinical perspective sits in productive tension with Dutton's population-level analysis, which operates at a very different scale but arrives at related conclusions about the costs of suppressing dissent within institutions. What makes this episode worth considering carefully is that Dutton is making an empirical argument rather than a moral one. Ireland's public conversation about gender has largely been conducted in the language of rights and inclusion, framing that tends to foreclose scientific scrutiny before it begins. An evolutionary framework insists on asking different questions: what selection pressures produce and sustain a belief system, who benefits from its propagation, and what happens to institutions that cannot subject their dominant assumptions to open challenge. These are questions Ireland's health and education bodies have not yet seriously engaged with, and they are unlikely to do so without sustained pressure from researchers and clinicians willing to ask them.
