Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Species Bias

[Music] chuck yes i have an idea for an explainer okay it's just i just want to riff on plants and animals okay i don't know if there's a lesson in here or insights but i just have a lot of thoughts i'm just going to sort of spill them out right okay well here's my first thought both delicious [Laughter] [Music] all right so here here i just want to just share some points of view so uh do you remember all of the the concerns people had about uh tuna being caught by nets right and the issue wasn't that tuna were being caught by nets it was that the nets were dolphins dolphins right because dolphins aren't delicious and tuna is no that wasn't okay so the argument was in the net the the tuna can breathe but the dolphin can't right because a dolphin is an air breather and it doesn't breathe in the water so you kill the dolphins if the net doesn't come up quick quickly enough yeah you drown them okay and basically they drown all right so which by the way i'm just gonna say whether you believe in a god or not if i breathe air and i live in the water maybe there's something wrong with that design you had it coming to you yeah you kind of were asking for it okay you breathe air but you live in the water and when you drown you kind of had it coming i was just saying all right well here's something about the dolphin because it breathes and eats from two different orifices in its body it means it can't choke while eating the way we can how you like that well i got it there's no dolphin that ever choked from eating a pastrami sandwich i'm just saying this is true now that that however is not a design flaw for us because i don't want to look at somebody with a butthole in their neck so it's a it's a design failure for us in a design feature for the dolphin they know they're swimming in the water all right here's my point the fact that we're protecting the dolphins but eating the tuna i remember thinking to myself why doesn't anybody care about the tuna right it's it's also a big fish all right it had a life in the ocean and so i realized that we have species bias among us yeah i'm gonna go with i'm we we have species bias we're saying i don't want to admit what you're saying is true and we don't want to admit it well i don't want to admit it but we don't like to admit it yeah but it's there i just want to reveal this in case people hadn't thought it through all right so we're saying we value the dolphin over the we're not talking about vegetarians here who would eat neither but for those who would eat the the tuna and specifically not eat the dolphin because it's a mammal so what you're saying is that in the tree of life which has fungus and bacteria and plants and animals you have taken this slender branch in that tree of life called mammals which is a offshoot from vertebrates okay so both dolphins and and and tuna are vertebrates but dolphins are spin-off of that called mammals and they lactate they give live birth as do we so we are saying you are close enough to us that we value your life above other life on this tree of life and some people said no it's not that they're mammals it's that they have big brains their brain is larger than us okay so now we're saying now we're saying we value them because they have big brains okay all right whatever rules you want to invoke i just want to make sure people fully understand that every living thing on earth is as far away from an evolutionary place from the very first single celled life as is all other life on earth okay so you're saying oh the brain is important for survival oak trees are still alive today and they don't have any brains okay and they're doing just fine earthworms are doing just fine and they coexist with us four and a half billion years after the earth has formed so all i'm saying is that whatever struggles trials and tribulations we went through as vertebrate mammals okay whatever we went through every single other living thing on this earth has also survived to this point species that is or evolved to fit this point so and so you want to value judge it this is a mammal this has a brain all right but have you stopped and thought about what a tree is a tree is different it lives you but but it can't stop me from chopping it down so it doesn't have a say in this okay i will chop down that oak tree and build a boat and then take that earthworm and catch a tuna and eat it chuck you violated [Laughter] chuck don't play all right but you know what the oak tree will do it won't budge when you careen off the road in your car this is true okay the mass of that oak tree vastly exceeds you plus your automobile and so many people have not survived an encounter with a tree well as a survivor i can tell you that you're absolutely right and geico knows it geico knows it and the tree is delivering oxygen to the air cyclically through the seasons that we breathe and one of the most famous poems ever penned was about trees brownings what's that i thought it was joyce kilmer oh is that joyce kilmer i i think that i shall never see a poem lovely as lovely as a tree so for me i like artists and in this case poets i don't need them to commemorate amazing facts and and famous events i need them to remind me of what i've no longer pay attention to and for me that's why that poem rose up that's a beautiful thought yeah it just forces you to reflect on it so at night there's a problem so far with your suppositions and your premise no one has ever written a poem about a tuna maybe i don't know i'm sure there's a japanese person somewhere that wrote a poem about a tuna but it's sushi tuna exactly [Laughter] ain't no bumble bee we're not talking about no bumble bee so here's my point so we go through this tree of life and cherry pick it for things we like for whatever reasons we invoke at the time and we could be influential on others and gather groups of people to feel the same way about that so you will not kill an animal to eat it but you will slaughter all manner of plant life and eat it so you're okay with that but not eating the animals you have judged that your side of the tree of life is more important than this other side of the tree of life and there's another very important point i want to make even sticking with the animal side of the tree of life because we're animals and we're even even so we prefer the fuzzy cuddly ones all right we prefer you know why is it that the squirrel is cute but the opossum is nasty all right is it because the opossum doesn't have hair on its tail yes and it's not bushy and it doesn't look at you it's ugly all right so we are value judging animals on their beauty for what we want to protect and what we don't they're things that we would most of us would just assume not have like lethal viruses like ticks like mosquitoes like like bacteria you know dysentery these are life forms that we share the earth with you know where is the community of people that's saying save the ticks all right somehow we're all okay exterminating them killing them getting them out of there but all because they carry disease uh or uh not only ticks the who the jumpers the um fleas the fleas okay the fleas all by all account carried the bubonic plague if you if the world never had another flea you probably wouldn't miss it but that meant you would be exterminating a branch of the tree of life a species in the tree of life because it's not convenient for you and so i we are about to completely eradicate the there's a worm what's it called the guinea worm any worm which only affects humans all right we're about to completely eradicate that we basically eradicated smallpox right well what about the smallpox microbes all right how do they feel about this so i'm just i'm just saying get a lawyer just like everybody else so i'm not i'm not landed anywhere i just think about all of life and all the struggles that life had to go through to get to where it is today in the tree of life four and a half billion years after life began and so when i when i eat lettuce or cucumber i'm thinking uh you know like as they say with the native americans i'm thankful to the plant any in the same way i'm thankful to the pig or the cow or the you know whatever else these are things that were alive keep in mind we're kind of stuck killing in order to survive as primitive as that might be in the galaxy it's that anything you can digest was once alive be it plant or animal so we live on a planet where all animals kill other living things to survive all animals every single one of them up and down when you're brutal man this earth is brutal people talk about oh let's get in harmony with nature nature's imbalance nature was never imbalanced you go in there this like dog eat dog or plant eat plant kill plant oh let me put shade on you now i got the sunlight and you don't all right and you wither and die and some other plant and the animal eats you and it is it is yeah it feels like it's equilibrium from season to season but you step back year to year decade to decade century to century there's stuff shifting all the time so i i just think of all life as sacred and i don't having after having done so i don't value judge one life over another based on his proximity to us on the tree of life because it's all here and we're all sharing the same earth if i were to design earth differently i'd have everybody have to go through photosynthesis then you wouldn't have to kill anything right just go out and sunbathe i got my day's energy today all right let's go running you know oh god i have a beautiful tan and i'm so full i'm so full of energy that's right that's right so aliens that might only thrive on photosynthesis from their host planet or its equivalent will come here and wonder what the hell is wrong with humans wow man listen this is i don't mean to get all deep on you here but i just i mean this is really some deep philosophical stuff man i think about it all the time when i'm preparing food yeah yeah wow okay i don't want to be speciesist how about this how about this how about if i just cut the leaves off of plants but i never take the plant down i just prune the plant and i eat the parts of the plant like like if i were to harvest children but only eat their fingers what what no no here he would he would be you you harvest colonies of newts and you bite off their legs and tails right how about that that's a new diet the newt diet um yeah so i'm not i this was not a was this an explainer video i don't know it was more just me sharing with you some of my thoughts i don't know man we're definitely gonna get some feedback on this one man but i i think it's a very interesting premise to ponder because it challenges our biases and causes us to re assess our perspectives because most of what we are assigning value to is done so based on what we deem valuable period right period yeah yeah the brain that's a spinal column you know mammal features yeah it's just we've made a judgment and i don't i don't know that i'm prepared to do that because i respect all life and until we have organizations that say save the ticks um i you know save the roaches save the rats now i'm just gonna say that back in the late 80s uh when i used to do this we did have a little save the roaches like uh consortium but it was a different kind of roach okay okay hey man you gonna throw that away no man speaking of animals you needed the alligator clip to hold the roach there you go i'm neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist keep looking [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 133,471

Rating: 4.8686185 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics, vegan, veganism, vegetarianism, vegetarian, nutrition, diet, health

Id: eEmAxtvhTxY

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/jagharingenaning]

JFC I have no clue who that other dude is but he manages to be even more insufferable than NDT.

EDIT: Okay so I actually finished watching the video now. He's doing the typical NDT holier-than-thou shitlording stuff. He says favouring a life form that has a brain is arbitrary bias because every living thing has evolved for the same amount of time from the same point and therefore he values all life sort of equal. What he fails to realise is that valuing life forms the same because they've evolved for the same amount of time is equally arbitrary.

He says he doesn't want to be speciecist and therefore he feels thankful for the lettuce giving its life just as much as the pig in his dinner without realising it's extremely speciecist to completely disregard the actual, physical, measurable, concrete differences that would warrant treating them differently. Because it's convenient to him.

Damn he's dumb...

[u/Vegetablemanwhereru]

Yeah, that’s why I don’t distinguish between any life form at all like NDT. Eating a carrot? cannibalism? same difference.

[u/NuisanceSnoop]

What about the smallpox germ? etc.

Hmm... you claim to be vegan yet kill germs with your immune system... curious...

[u/StonedBotaniest]

Hey y'all, just spitballing, so specie bias is bad. That's why I eat anything, but not people though. - Niel DeGrasse Tyson

P.S. Flesh eating bacteria is alive, therefore it deserves rights. Checkmate vegoons - Also Niel

[u/nusselt44]

If what you care about is the preservation of evolutionary lines, how about following a diet that would contribute less to mass extinction?