ERVs, Giant Squid, Language, Origin Story

exciting news you can now purchase my book rational answers to stupid questions simply by clicking the top Link in the description the book is available exclusively on book baby who has been my partner in creating my book enjoy the video here's the planet Peterson Origins Story how did I get started on this track well it started like 27 years ago or whatever I remember when I was a little kid uh we went to Watertown South Dakota which was this nearby Big Town of like 20,000 people and there was this there was this woman and she had this house and in the house she had this basement and in the basement was this enormous library of just all kinds of books and my dad has like over a thousand books books and we would go there and just look for stuff and I got a couple of books there uh when I was when I was little and this is one of them um let me see if I can find real quick cuz that last guest was talking about the Wolverine and Wolverine 82221 see if I can find it I still remember what the picture looks like in my head because it always kind of freaked me out as a kid um sorry this is taking way too long aha there it is so the The Wolverine there you can see the the picture of it looking pretty pretty ferocious there we go so anyways anyways um I just for whatever reason you can see like all my underlining and like brackets in here um in here it talks about oh yeah so oh I forgot about that I used to I've that I'm kind of an artist so I you guys probably can't see it but there's like pencil marks on here because I traced this because I was like drawing pictures as a kid but anyways it talks about in here how a wolverine once uh broke out of a zoo and killed a polar bear and so I was always like dang the Wolverine's like that's the most badass animal of all time isn't it cuz like they're not big but they're so ferocious and so I just as a kid very young age I was always just like the The Wolverine is like the craziest most ferocious animal and then you grow up and you learn about Honeybadger and Honeybadger don't give a [ __ ] right so anyways um that book that this whole book is it's just animal stuff and this an old book it's from like the 60s or whatever but I would just sit down in the living room on my belly uh just reading this book night after night after night after night just learning all I could about animals and stuff and that's kind of part of the big thing about what got me into science was like animals and dinosaurs or whatever but then did I read the selfish Gene yeah I read that like almost 10 years ago uh this book also so this is a huge book and it's kind of falling apart but uh the children's book of questions and answers and this is just like it's literally everything is in this book so why don't trees trees grow on mountain tops when were breakfast cereals first used Where is the longest snake in the world not what is where is the longest snake in the world uh why was gunpowder wait what why was the Gunpowder Plot that's what that says why was the Gunpowder Plot I have no idea what that's supposed to mean when was the French Revolution when was aspirin first used it's just so my headphones so same thing I would just for just well when I was a kid it felt like hours but it was probably just minutes um I would just sit there and look and look and look through this and read through all this stuff and just learn as much as I could and uh that is my origin story that's how I got into just loving to learn about the world um and I saw a a theist object and it kind of put the atheist in position of not being able to answer when they argued that this integration of the Erv into the germine DNA is purely random and that science has proven this That Is Random and has no like oh I'm trying to think not random was rather that or that that was the worst thing they could have said well that's essentially where it went and I have I don't study biology I had no way to gather if it was wrong or not yeah no it's correct and it's devastating for their position so it is random where the it's it's not a 100 well okay it is random but it's not random in a in in a certain certain way so a a retrovi can't insert its DNA anywhere in the genome but there's but our genome is huge so there's massive uh there's a huge number of different site locations where it can be put in like preferred Target sites right yeah basically but they they go all throughout our genome now it is random where it ends up right um that's completely true but this is part of how we know that us and chimpanzees are related um uh I'm not sure if people are sick and tired of me saying this but I actually wrote about this in my book um so let me actually pull that up real quick so I can get the the numbers exactly right um the genetic comparison between humans and chimpanzees reveals many ervs in the same genomic locations supporting the consensus that humans and chimpanzees share common ancestor around around 5 to 7 million years ago of the 21 known retrovirus insertions in the human genome chimpanzees share 205 of them the genome has well over 10 million locations where a retrovirus could insert itself uh the probability of sharing even 12 specific locations within another with another species is less than one over the total number of atoms in the observable universe but we don't share 12 we share 205 so the thing about it being random uh does nothing to support their claim because we've compared yes it is random but we've compared exactly where we have these and exactly where they have them and 205 out of 2 of them match perfectly which now you can't argue oh yeah but it's not all of them we've been separated from our common ancestor for millions of years of course there would be a few others so how much does genetics versus the environment affect our voices and how we sound well in terms of like the the like actual tone tenor of your voice that's basically 100% genetic because it depends on the shape of your skull the shape of your vocal cords the shape of like your mouth even like the shape of your teeth and stuff like that um but in terms of like the way people speak I mean first first generation immigrant children have like if they move to America they have American accents um they don't grow up with the accents that their parents have um and that's really fascinating it's it's almost entirely social in that regard um it's it's pretty cool there's actually some really cool studies on children that have invented like their own languages too like there there are these language things called pigeons and Creoles a pigeon is basically a really rudimentary language that people that a lot of this happened because of slavery tragically like in Haiti uh because people from different parts of Africa that didn't speak the same language came together and so they come up with like a really rudimentary language at first to be able to communicate and that's what a pigeon is and then a cre is just like a a blending of languages but it becomes its own like fully developed language with its own like unique grammar and tense structure and and all kinds of interesting things so okay so so pretty much is like uh you're saying so the vocal the actual tones is genetic but like our accents and stuff is mainly social yeah basically it's completely social pretty PR much unless you're I mean unless you're like somehow not allowed to like leave the house or or socialize or whatever then then you would have probably the same accent whatever that your parents have um but no kids kids grow up speaking like their peers yeah that's that was kind of a followup question I was going to ask so like if you had like a child right let's hypothetically they grew up like very isolated pretty much like by themselves no talking like whatsoever with other people if they were to then like when they grow up as an adult come into the real world they wouldn't sound that socially like uh socially distant from everyone else no well it could depend I have like I teach in California every single one of my students is Hispanic right um some of them like I heard one of them the other day they said like English isn't my first language and I was like I was really Blown Away by that because they don't have have an accent at all um so they grew up first speaking Spanish um and then and then started speaking or and yeah and then and then learned English but yeah I mean I I have I have students who are still mastering the English language and you can tell that they have an accent like it's it's really obvious but yeah this student I was like that's fascinating I wonder at what age that that started happening I thought that was pretty cool but um uh if a child was like totally like neglected basically there is a critical age where if you don't ever get exposed to a language you will never ever learn it there was actually this girl she was from California this was like in the '90s or something she was just kept in a basement her whole life when she was like 13 or 15 she escaped and she never ever learned how to actually speak she could say words but she completely lacked the ability to to do any kind of grammar to form sentences she would just accidentally sometimes say things like juice want you know but it was just complete complete crapshoot okay that's inter I've never heard of that before so there's like a moment where like your brain just can no longer like uh understand those languages or get to know them can't understand any language it's fascinating you can you can take any child born anywhere in the world and they can be transplanted to any family anywhere in the world and they will learn any language uh it's really cool but yeah there's a critical stage where if it doesn't happen before it's around the age five or six where it'll you'll just never be able to figure it out the language Instinct by Steven Pinker is a really cool book about language so if anybody wants to check it out I'm going to check that out uh thank you so when I was really little I wanted to be an oceanographer um because I wanted to be the first person to ever film a uh a giant squid that was like really specifically what I what I wanted to do but I lived in South Dakota and so I was like how's that ever going to happen and then when I was like it's still in Middle School somebody somebody filmed one in the wild and so it's not exactly that my dream was crushed but I just I don't know that it didn't it didn't last but I think we kind of all have dreams like that when we're little and and very few of us follow up on it in terms of like areas of active research I mean I wouldn't say I'm a researcher I'm just a I'm a learner I would say and I I just like to learn stuff now like science like Evolution mostly is what I like to read about the most and I I really like like evolutionary psychology and like group think and how that plays into how do people form beliefs and like how do political identities align with that that's that interests me a lot and I was really into that for a while but um this kind of started I don't know about 10 years ago I'm and I think it was just because of a couple of books I read I'm am extremely into uh learning about Native American history like uh North and South America I don't I I know really very little about like Central American history like the uh the Triple Alliance we usually call them the Aztecs and the and the MCHS and the uh and the Maya I don't really know very much about them I I I I guess I would say I know a pretty decent amount about the Triple Alliance because I've read a lot about it but funny enough I went to Barnes & Noble the other day and uh the line went all the way to the back of the store so I ended up putting all my books away but I picked up like five books um actually I took photographs of them I don't remember what they all what the titles of all of them were but I can pull them up um because where are they um here they are these were the books that I picked up oh no I can't what when I try to make the picture bigger it zooms me in so right and reign of the mammals that's a that's more of an evolution book but uh uh book about Columbus's voyages mon when montazuma met Cortez last days of the Inca and then that's a book about the Roman Empire and then there was one other book but I don't see it on there it just I don't know it's not in the photo for some reason so I would say that's my in terms of like current areas of like interest or quote unquote research I would I would say that ancient history I got exposed to a lot of that like in school and on TV so it doesn't interest me all that nearly as much but um if anybody's interested in that kind of thing I cannot possibly recommend high enough the podcast called fall of civilizations you can listen to it on on Spotify but you really should watch them on YouTube cuz the footage that this guy it's like all stock footage but the way they put it together is so unbelievably immersive and beautiful the podcast some of them are up to four hours long but most of them are shorter but the the way he describes things it's so rich that you feel like you read an 800 page book when you listen to one of his podcasts so I just finished listening to One about the Egyptian uh like the entire history of ancient Egypt it's really really great but his he has like a 4-Hour thing on when the when the Spanish overthrew moaz Zuma and it's it's just absolutely amazing it's it's literally it's not a book but if it were a book it would be like the best history book I've ever read um I cannot recommend it enough it's called fall of civilizations so check it out oo nice and like I guess the part two to that you know right now imagine like you had unlimited funding you know right to conduct any research project or to have um people who are very qualified to like do all the work you know right what is something that you a research project that you would really want to fund if you had unlimited funding and why would you want to fund it or like why would that be your choice man I I don't know this is way too good of a question so off the top of my head couple of things that I have actually thought a lot about because I think these are significant like world problems um uh desalination like basically making fresh water like we kind of know how to do that but it it's not really actually scalable and there are other like significant problems that that causes I think that would be um um I think that would be transformative for the entire world I think it would solve a lot of global problems as well so based strictly on like a utilitarian point of view I would say that it's not like the most groundbreaking thing it's not super sexy it's not like on the edge of what we don't know it's just like I just think it's like super important you know um but other than that um I the other thing I would say is you know if we had kept funding NASA the way we had like in the in the 60s and 70s we people would have landed on Mars in the 90s um and I it's just what what we would know now and like the technical offshoots that would have come with that um I think are just the return on investment for that is so great so I would basically that would be like my other answer like improve our or like significantly increase our uh funding toward NASA basically because I'm a shill yeah honestly like that's something I still wish that would happen like I remember being a little I think 10 or 11 at the time right I remember hearing originally when NASA lost a ton of funding and actually being dist over it as a little kid cuz I was really into that stuff but I guess like the final thing I want to ask you know right and this is just going to be very simple how' you come up with the name and design for Spanky or Lord and Savior I don't know I just started I started saying that way before I ever like bought a Spanky you know well he's right here um before I ever bought spinky I talked about spinky for for months and then uh here's the anti- spinky right here um I like literally just one day was talking to some apologist and they were like no cuz the reason the universe exists or whatever blah blah blah it's cuz God and the way Spanky actually started out was I said okay well I believe in a purple H hippopotamus that lives in my ass named Spanky very few people remember that detail that Spanky originally the the origin story of him is that he lives in my ass um so it was it was completely um ad ad [Music] lib

Channel: Planet Peterson

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Id: Cn8rPQgXtgQ

Length: 20min 24sec (1224 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024