Your Questions Answered - Bret and Heather 75th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream

hey folks welcome back to the dark horse podcast live stream q a where every pet has a worse case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder than the last yep they sure do they sure do but there will be no unforeseen events this week with them none no unforeseen we foresee the whole thing we foresee everything looks like we have become clairvoyant yes all right let's do this uh episode 75 q a all right here we are here are a couple first from last episode have you looked into the research done on the link between migration theory and eating disorders if so what are your thoughts um yeah you wanna you i don't know anything about this it was intriguing to me i'd never heard anything about this yeah i've never heard anything about it either i will certainly say that i would imagine that there is a lot of interaction between light regime diet of population of origin and uh current eating patterns so yes it's going to be a novelty problem then likely where you've come from has a lot to say about uh what has happened to you so yeah i think it's interesting if that's what it means yeah yeah so i did not have a chance to look this up between now and then i just put it on me like hey let's let's see but anyway it's potentially worth us thinking about yep um oh for god's sake um i'm gonna just read this question wow that's just not okay um we often speak about the destructive effect of pathogens introduced into native populations of america by europeans um but wouldn't there have been a similar effect should we start over um we could we could just start over no okay i think we're good i mean life happens it comes at you fast sometimes in the form of a hurricane cat i did take him to the vet yep i'm hoping anyway he's not been eaten by coyotes for which we are grateful yes all right definitely that was disturbing okay next question you ready i am okay we often speak about the destructive effect of pathogens introduced into native populations of america by europeans but wouldn't there have been a similar effect on europeans from pathogens they had not encountered before is this a matter of historical emphasis or narrative were european pathogens more badass did it play out the way it did due to population sizes what am i missing it's a great question addressed well in guns germs and steel and the idea there actually were some pathogens that went the other direction but far less pernicious and the basic answer seems to be that because of the european association with domesticable creatures which is largely a historical accident of most of the domestic domesticable creatures on earth having been residents of asia and asia being a horizontally laid out continent so that crops and animals could be moved uh as populations migrated that because there is no latitudinal gradient precisely because of what we were talking about in the last hour around why things are not invasible from the tropics into the temperate zone usually right so moving across longitude doesn't pose obvious climatic problems right as long as you stay within a band of latitude um your climate all else being equal tends to be similar right so in any case the basic point was that europeans had longer term um experience with association with these domesticable creatures with whom they exchanged pathogens and so european immunity was higher there are very few uh domesticated large domesticated creatures in the new world as a matter of fact i think only llamas are um are in that category i believe that's right and so in any case the basic point little things like guinea pigs right yeah little things yes but uh big things no and the association with those things is what caused european immunity to be what it was and caused the number of pathogens that therefore circulated amongst europeans and the intensity of those illnesses when people in the new world encountered them to be much greater yep and there was a certain amount of nefarious behavior as well um like spreading of sharing of blankets that had um that had germ in them yes and no this is apparently a fact with some historical backing and also largely apocryphal not as widespread as some would have us believe but it did happen it appears that it did happen but i would point out this is well earlier than the germ theory of disease and so what was understood about what was being distributed and what's effect would be is less clear but yes can we get us both on the screen should we pause and resume or should we just keep going okay okay um yeah let's just continue okay here we are guys um but yeah it as as i had remembered as you just uh explained uh it's it's well it's well explored in guns germs and steel man we have cat madness here today what are you doing man they are going stir crazy as a result of the lack of ability to go outside yeah and i think as a result they ate their treats too fast and made themselves a little sick one of them okay next question this one is from the discord this week the market is a powerful and important force and so is the news as of late the two don't appear to be mixing well however government-controlled news seems even more suspect what is the future of the news and information gathering in this post-truth era i don't think anybody knows but i would just point out that i think we were asking for predictions yeah what we what we had in the prior era was more or less an agreement on a single shared narrative and i think market forces have now driven that uh the dissolving of the shared narrative and so now we have multiple incompatible narratives which is obviously hugely self-destructive the shared narrative wasn't inherently true in the past though it often was because in general there was um there was a reason for people to want an understanding of what was taking place rather than to want an understanding or want a narrative that simply placed them at advantage but at some level we're going to need to have a mechanism for figuring out what is approximately true and um a recognition that one's perspective is always uh inherent in there and the pretense of objectivity is just that a pretense so acknowledging one's biases is much better than pretending they don't exist and you know there are efforts uh along these lines so daniel schmoktenberger is working on a project in which we are consulting which aims to do this but i think we don't really know because we uh we there's too much at stake and no mechanism for preventing the perversion of information uh or the shutting down of those who would attempt to generate something that would falsify the important narratives yeah that's that's good it's not good no it's not good i approve that answer okay okay um sorry i'm a bit thrown by the chaos here breathe yes that's important just to even do it regularly thank you it's these regular reminders from you that keep me going yes well i'm glad to hear that i i feel good that i play some vital role oh so many so many all right it's getting better most of my romantic releases this is the first question that we're reading from this last hour uh most of my romantic relationships have only lasted about four months i've read that a crush lasts four months i've had several relationships go south around that time what is happening to us biologically after four months and can you explain why in the evolutionary context i would say before you start to riff that it that the question hinges on that that four-month thing being something that's real and i i don't know it to be i've never read that and i have so i haven't i haven't seen that in literature it is certainly possible that there's something of a you know of a particular length of time after which the sort of uh you know the lust chemicals give way to the love chemicals as it were right it's the at the mechanistic but um not using technical terms level of analysis but i don't know that to be true i wouldn't say it's uh lust versus love yeah it's not quite right but um there's an infatuation thing and there's a love thing and infatuation sometimes gives way to love but not always and the problem is that um what do you think though about the idea that there is like a reliable time period i would suspect that it might be reliable within individuals and somewhat much more variable between individuals there's probably variable variability between individuals variability between populations and variability even between relationships but what i would say is understanding what those states are is really important right and i would argue that love is an honest state that the purpose of it is to cause a an individual to grant symmetrical status to someone else or something else right to put somebody else on a par with the way you view the importance of self and that infatuation is actually almost the opposite of this that in fact infatuation its function is deceptive right so when somebody is in that state they are in that state in order to deceive the person on the other end of that state into thinking they are better than they are in other words imagine that under normal circumstances you can be x amount good to a partner right but you really want that partner because it's the right person for you or some part of you thinks that it is right and so the idea is well how are you going to lock down a relationship with that person well you're going to convince them that you're able to be better to them than you actually are and it's like the mental acrobatics version of not wearing sweatpants you're just you're putting on your best show right it's it's marketing it's it's it's the pr stage early stage of the relationship it's almost beyond it's an unsustainably good show and so the basic point is that is a built-in um yeah there's a lot of cat stuff going on that is a built-in deceptive program that uh because two people often end up in that state together right if you discover that you're you know crushing on somebody who isn't interested then the point is investing and showing them a better than best self is uh pointless right so you get over it if the other person reciprocates and you're both showing each other an unsustainable level of goodness then the question is well do you discover in this process that the person is worth hanging on to even though they can't deliver on what they seem to be able to deliver on and anyway with respect to your relationships a no idea what fraction of the issue is you know you or who you settle upon or the modern context in which these things unfold which may be setting you up for failure having nothing to do with either of you the context could include uh unusually high standards that are actually unmutable by virtue of you know everything from photoshopping to porn to expectations of social media right and so one thing maybe the most useful thing to say is we are not well served by a set of narratives i think largely driven by the market that conflates um that infatuated state with love itself oh that infatuated state is true love [ __ ] no it isn't right true love is what happens if the relationship has the characteristics necessary to persist indefinitely right that initial state may feel good but it's fake and so by selling people on the idea do you really mean fake i'm trying not to give it more credit than it deserves and the basic point is true love relationships start this way right but then they have this other characteristic lots of relationships the majority of relations which you know i don't know you could analogize it to the frosting or you know like a number of things like it doesn't doesn't make it fake it's just not the same as like calling both things you know if you do end up in a long-term relationship in which you are in love and therefore seeing i was falling in love and that's what that was they're really two very different things using the same word to describe the same those two things is well misleading let's say i am not sure how to put what i'm saying but the fact that that initial state either gives way to true love or doesn't and that from within that state you can't tell right means that it is not you know the just keep talking see this is the thing the honest relationship that ultimately emerges has to endure you know unruly cats and everything all right um there's nothing for him there but the point that i was uh trying to make is that the important question the one with a lot of meaning to it yes is whether or not there is a relationship there that has the characteristics of permanence right and the fact that this other state a very frequently happens without giving way to a relationship that has that state to me means that it is uninformative all it says is the possibility of that other thing existing there is real but you know nothing about whether it is so i do think it's fake and the idea that um because it is intense and because the long-term relationship is not as intense not remotely as intense that the idea that literature and everything else comes to focus on that state as if it is insightful when it is in fact the opposite is it makes for a harder story that's what it is it makes for unfortunately it makes for a saleable story um now i will say we have yeah better yeah better is maybe exactly the wrong choice of words so we've been watching uh with our kids we've been watching uh the hbo miniseries the pacific and in part we were driven to watch it because we had watched a bunch of other world war two stuff that focused on the european theater including band of brothers which immediately was is the same creative team right and i must say one of the things that's very jarring i find about the pacific is this portrayal of actual love and how it starts that is very resonant but does not look like a modern story and my sense is that this has been lost because the market has overwritten the right story of how this works with a phony [ __ ] story that misleads people into thinking they know what they're looking for when really they don't know anything of the kind um so anyway i would say be careful about accepting what the market wants to tell you you're looking for because the market doesn't know [ __ ] other than how to con you into spending money on things that probably aren't in your interest and you know love is complex um definitely worthwhile but uh it doesn't it doesn't sell as much stuff yeah all right next question the cdc says that antibody testing is not recommended to assess for immunity to sars cov2 following coped 19 vaccination can you explain why that would be stay wonderful well so again i don't yeah go on if it's even true right so i was going to say again i don't the the the claim that starts it is one that we have not assessed um that the cdc says right the antibody testing is not recommended to assess for immunity to sars following vaccination so there are two things that could be true okay that we don't know one is that the cdc said this which maybe they did um uh the other is if the cdc said it is it um meaningful biologically right right if it is if the cdc said it and it is meaningful biologically there's a way it could be true which is that the production of antibodies is so reliable from the vaccines or the production the inducing of immunity is so reliable that you don't need antibody testing because it's confirmatory of something that is so close to 100 percent that you just don't need to know no i don't buy that but that's that but it's possible okay so anyway that could be what the claim is um but we don't know uh can you imagine though can you imagine any other if this is if it is true that the cdc has said this can you imagine any other way that biologically it would make sense yeah one other what which is that uh and it's a it's related but um it could be that the immunity which matters is t cell not b cell and therefore the b cell thereby the antibody titer is uh too noisy to be useful and that the information that you have gotten the vaccination is therefore a more reliable indicator than than the uh the test would be yeah i actually i find that a bit more compelling that the the data would be too noisy to interpret as opposed to so guaranteed to be already what we know that we don't needn't even bother yeah which strikes me as a you know deeply anti-scientific reason whereas it's just going to be too noisy we won't be able to make we won't be able to detect pattern we won't be able to make to know anything on the basis of that therefore it's pointless to do um if so yeah that that strikes me as not irresponsible of them if they said it if that is the reason why well what you would want to know is that the work was done properly to tell you what the implications were and you would also want to recognize that let's say antibody titer is too noisy two months after injection to be informative you would still want to know what things looked like six months a year three years six years totally down the road and so at some level i have the sense of there's way too much pretense that we know how this works and therefore understand its implications and are therefore making policy and recommendations on the basis of it that can't possibly be right but yeah yeah you could imagine a data set that would give you reason to say such things next question heather said that abigail schreier wanted her book to be longer i noticed that her book leaves out the medical industrial billionaire philanthropy angle as a reason for the craze did she want this in the book i don't know the answer to that um and i could ask her but i i don't i just don't know because i um i read the version i read one longer chapter in which um that was twice as long as the chapter um that i showed up in briefly from my from her interview with me um and i can speak to i could speak to what was pulled from that but i otherwise read only the book as it is then published um we are breastfeeding a seven week old and may get the j j vaccine next week are there any potential hazards we should consider any benefit to waiting one to two months before deciding on the j j one given that we are isolating and low risk um so i'll just say just this is gonna sound snarky but this is just a long-standing um slight linguistic irritation of mine that um except in extraordinarily rare situations people don't collectively breastfeed their baby um and this started to become a thing like in the 90s i think you know we're pregnant no you're not she's pregnant um we're breastfeeding nope she's breastfeeding well in this one case oh i see the look on your face but i'm right on this one so in this case there's a strong chance that uh they are breast pumping which has its own set of hazards associated with it but it what would the term be if a couple is using breast milk but both of them are doing the feeding yeah i think i would still say you know bottle feeding from breast milk or something just because breastfeeding is um the act the the behavioral interaction as well but you know it's it's a it's a minor thing yeah and this question is terrific and um and certainly the person asking it doesn't deserve any i'm not angry or upset just like i'll bet only one of you is breastfeeding um any potential hazards uh to getting a j j vaccine while breastfeeding a practically a neonate i'm seven weeks isn't neonate but really really quite young still any benefit to waiting one to two months um given that you're isolating in low risk i think so i i think there's a benefit to to just letting that kid get as much life behind him or her as possible before before exposing them i can't remember actually what the schedule of vaccines for babies is it's been a long time since ours were tiny but um i don't think they vaccinate right away do they don't they wait maybe six weeks is actually the first vaccination date and then mostly i don't remember and um so you know we the expectations that this um the effects of any vaccine that mom gets can be passed through breast milk and i don't know for sure that's true here but that's the expectation and so especially if for instance the regular vaccination schedule for baby doesn't start until six months um i would be real shy about um mom who is breastfeeding getting any vaccination not not just one that happens to be brand new with a new technology um well the baby is still so young yeah and that's just that's just caution it's not based on data we don't have the data i i agree um there is some evidence of immunity to sars kobe 2 being passed in breast milk whether that could carry over from a vaccine and whether it even matters in this case since kids seem to be immune to it in the first place or very close to immune to it but you know the the basic answer is you're dealing with a novel intervention in a complex system you don't know what could be downstream of that so caution and therefore delaying things is sensible and what you have to put that up against is something like the risk of contracting of the parent contracting sars kovi ii right um in the interim i would say the non-breastfeeding parent should go ahead with the schedule you know if it were if it were us and we were scheduled and i had a seven week old baby at the breast um and we had decided that now is the time to get the j j vaccine um i would i think that i would push for you to go ahead and get it and me to wait as long as we felt safe and because that would help protect us collectively yes the important thing though is if the decision was that it made sense to get it right if we had come to the conclusion if we had come to that conclusion and so anyway we are not eligible yet so we have not come to any definitive conclusion but i would say you and i both have trepidations about all of these uh novel at various different level vaccines um and are at comparatively low risk based on how much we're interacting with other people so uh it it unfortunately is a very personal decision but yes uh with a with a child breastfeeding um i would say there is extra extra risk and uh reason for caution especially if you're in a safe situation yep can you two-part question can you increase mouse or any animal lifespan by selecting for long-lived mice i.e breeding mice in a lab and continually removing descendants of shorter-loved mice like the bottom half from the breeding group alternatively can you increase mouse lifespan by gradually increasing the age in which they are allowed to reproduce generation over generation selecting for those that can reproduce at every older ages i feel like this is in your wheelhouse yes um yeah 100 you can um the second one you can so my my understanding is that both of these mechanisms will work so i was just clarifying you were you're saying both of these um removing descendants of surety lived mice from the breeding group and um increasing the age at which they're allowed to reproduce yes and i will point out there is one very tantalizing result i'm not sure how well it stood up but back when i was doing my telomere work there was one result that suggested that telomere length which is the regulator of tissue repair and therefore the capacity to live a longer life um telomere length goes up in male in the sperm produced by males with the age of the father so that is to say that across the reproductive lifespan of an individual male the later in the lifespan that the sperm is produced the longer telomeres and therefore uh greater longevity um all else being equal the offspring are predisposed to and so what that suggests that's fascinating because like that runs counter to some of the some of the now known um costs of um babies across mammals born to older fathers right but um [Music] the imagine the following thing imagine that you've got a species in which there is dispersal to new habitats and that the extrinsic risk to an individual varies a lot between habitats so let's suppose you came from a habitat in which the extrinsic risks were very very high and therefore nobody tended to live a very long time and therefore it made sense um to forego the potential for longevity in order to resist cancer at younger ages um but then you moved into some place where there were a lack of predators or whatever and so the question is do you want to wait for evolution to tinker telomere length or do you want to build in a mechanism that detects that males are living longer and ramps up the increase in telomere length by basically saying well if the offspring was produced late then it should have longer telomeres because that means living late is possible right so anyway it's a built-in mechanism that could effectively detect a change in circumstance and rapidly change a population even to uh greater longevity capacity so anyway don't know whether that result has stood up but it was certainly tantalizing very good i have failed for my first university lost two jobs and spent thousands on lost items i suffer from debilitating shame and anxiety attacks when i have to do a dull and menial task and so i have been diagnosed with adhd i also tested with an iq of 143 and i'd love to learn i want to get a phd but i've been told that it's probably not the best idea for me how is this fair why is my intellect less than just because my brain works differently yeah i mean i feel like it's all built into that question um but yeah you know it's not fair yeah it's not fair and it's not probably not the best idea for you well i'm not sure that getting a phd in any modern university is the best idea for anyone but that's not because um you're broken that's because it's broken yep yeah yeah um yeah i mean that and it's just the the tweet that i showed about this new drug for you know adhd you know you know broken children like i i said that hoping that everyone would read it knowing that i was joking that you know we we have we can talk internally about the ways in which we are broken and and um and that can be a useful way of thinking about things and you know some of the trade-offs don't seem as you know as wonderful you know we might if we could go back you know change some of the trade-offs that we are now stuck with but um the pathologizing of all variants is a modern thing that is causing people to feel things like shame and embarrassment and to not pursue things that they would be extraordinarily well suited for if you love to learn and you're mentally gifted of course a phd in some field in which you are passionate should be a great choice for you um again i'm not sure that i'm not sure that the flaming hoops that you're expected to jump through under the best of conditions in the modern university um will you know they might well be nearly impossible for you and add to those the now now even more great has copes hoops around uh diversity equity and inclusion and it may not be worth your while but not because of you yeah i would also say there's really very little that you need unless you're talking about a very technical field there's very little you need a phd program in order to learn it would be lovely if these programs were excellent for fostering uh high quality thought but they're getting worse and worse and and access to information has never been better so if the point is love of learning rather than acquiring a credential don't let the fact that a phd program might not be the right place for you to dissuade you from figuring out how to learn the material that fascinates you it's also possible just one more thing before we move topics i used to stay up on this ish when we were professors because you know part of part of what i saw my job as was to advise people who came to me and said i'm interested in graduate school and so i was thinking a lot about the already by then decaying academic system within the us and um was able at least for a while to uh to feel good about recommending some programs in europe and the uk and australia and i don't know at this point um you know how how captured all the other offshore offshore from the perspective of the us um programs are i think canada is just as bad as the us but australia europe uh uk might have some some pockets um that look a little different but i don't know yep that's a good point and then you get to live somewhere else and experience different cultural expectations and all of that and that in itself is an education i worked in a hospital next question i worked in a hospital for years with a huge psych service there i saw drugs make zombies out of people just good to hear rational thoughts thank you thank you love the book dart recommendation you read my mind on what i needed good also i think every movement could benefit from a good anthem to help convey its message if the unity movement doesn't have one yet may i suggest a better bridge by thrice do you know the song i don't okay well you're gonna look into it all right you're gonna listen to that song and i'm 45 all right oops hold on i just grade that out rather than making it bright it's the exact opposite of what i was trying to do there we go we tend to think of humans as naturally diurnal however for as long as i can remember i've always had an easier time staying awake all night than arising before noon even as a child are some people naturally nocturnal i saw this question and i forgot to grab the book that i wanted to show that i've mentioned on screen before it's called when i think it's called when um and i can't remember anything more about it um except that he basically the author he calls it rather than a a how-to guide a when two guide and basically talks about the diversity um in timing of of people mostly he's talking about weird cultures you know western educated industrialized rich democratic but also i think does some mythological stuff and like sure of course there will be variability in terms of you know larks versus night owls i think is the usual bird analogy that is used wow um so we suggested in a recent live stream that it's possible that older people take on a uh staying up and watching over a population role so that would suggest some reason for variability but not between people yeah that's a change over lifespan right i would just say the important thing to say about are some people nocturnal is no not ancestrally and we know that they're not nocturnal ancestrally because their eyes aren't built for it so to the extent that anything you would do um would require you to be able to see this is really only novelly possible as a result of electric lights yeah we don't have that to penum lucidum that coyotes and cats and other nocturnal mammals do that's how you can really see you can tell is a species historically nocturnal or not that said modernity i went through a stage in which i was much more productive late at night than any other time and the basic reason was because i was easily distracted by interesting stuff going on in the world and when we were limited to interacting with people who were local when the world was asleep it meant there was nothing to do did you also stand up sometimes when you were expected to be sitting uh sometimes i would find myself one minute in a chair the very next minute not in a chair i would stand up and uh whether this was adhd or some as yet undiagnosed non-chair sitting kind of disorder i don't know i feel like i should have been warned you probably should have been yeah but anyway my point is this has changed for me because there's no longer a period when the world is asleep because we now you could just say it because the entire world has gotten so boring nothing is distracting to you anymore no it's quite the opposite the problem is because we're interacting with people from all over the globe there is no period in which if you stay up late enough suddenly you can get work done because there's nobody to talk to right so anyway that ship has sailed but my point is it was a matter of novelty um that people were up to some point it was a matter of convention that people locally would go to sleep leaving you free to work yeah that's now evaporated as a result of the way the internet functions um but none of this is ancestral ancestrally barring the kinds of considerations about older people uh watching out for danger when others are asleep well well no i so not nocturnal versus diurnal but um you know this book and i found the name of it when the scientific secrets of perfect timing by daniel pink published in 2018 um made for me a very compelling argument for natural variation and you know you tend to be most active and alert and able to do sort of creative work in the early morning as opposed to you know midday as opposed to evening before before bed so it's not a diurnal nocturnal question um but a a question of variability within the optimal period of time for which humans are adapted which daylight period which then contracts and expands weirdly for those of us uh living in the temperate zones um so that raises questions too right but um well well anyway i think we've answered it which is yes you're built to be awake when it's light um as for within that there might be variation there probably is um congratulations on 75 episodes you've covered it all from testicular tanning to sexy bees that does seem like a that's a narrow narrow slice uh um unless the where the bees doing the testicular tanning they don't have external genetics yeah um and actually the sexy bees i don't remember what the bees thing was but it's probably all females i can't remember sexy bees i don't remember the bees okay um was that us i'm sure it was shout out to ekko and the rest of the gang for all the cool questions brett paraphrasing paraphrasing has said that he believes individual consciousness to be an illusion an artifact of shared consciousness this sounds very buddhist hindu taoist cool why elaborate please not an illusion a secondary an epiphenomenon right so individual consciousness definitely exists you can check on your own individual consciousness and in fact you have better evidence for your own individual consciousness than you have for anybody else's consciousness or certainly for a collective consciousness however it's very hard to explain individual consciousness in evolutionary terms as the initial driving force because what advantage does subjective experience have it has tons of costs right including misperceiving things uh and just the energetic expense of creating an internal world that mirrors the outside world why not just be wired to do right that is not the case with respect to exchanging ideas right when you exchange ideas with others there is a very definite reason that to have a subjective experience so that you can take what you think is going on and what you believe somebody else thinks is going on and integrate them in order that you know so the conversation really does exist um what's the term for it uh inter-subjectively so anyway if you imagine that there being some place where the content of a conversation is modeled then it's very easy to understand why individual consciousness evolves on top of that because once you have the ability to converse with somebody else and exchange abstract ideas and make progress you also then have the prerequisite to have a dialogue with yourself and debate between two possibilities so if uh consciousness existing between individuals evolves for the obvious reason that it is useful then individual consciousness has a reason to exist but it's hard to understand how you would get to individual consciousness first that's the reasoning very good where did the idea we can't tell people the truth because they won't know what to do with it come from is it true you guys are dope thank you very much for your efforts um yeah i have wondered this i don't know where it came from i think it feels it feels like a mechanism of social control rather than anything that anyone actually ever thought was true but maybe i'm underestimating the dimness of people who make such pronouncements no i think it's purely a rationalization designed to excuse not telling people what the [ __ ] is going on because it's in your interest not to tell them yeah um and so i am i am one who believes it is you know that is not to say that you can't architect a scenario there are situations when you know national security uh means that you can't tell the populace what is going on yeah but there are probably circumstances in which the likelihood of people surviving something goes up if you uh tell white lies about what they're up against blah blah blah you could imagine it in a small context it's very hard to imagine um it being anything other than an excuse when the question is what circumstance is the nation in and what what is its implication for us um although you know i guess i guess you could come up with something where a nation had a low chance of surviving a military encounter and the chance went up if people didn't realize how dire was you could imagine it but in my lifetime i've watched this thing abused so many times god um and then it's abused at all scales this thing is fractal like you see this you see this in classrooms all the time you see so many you know we've we've got more experience seeing other college-level faculty but i assume it also happens in k-12 classrooms where i just lie to students because it's easier for the faculty in the moment yeah about you know about what's true about what's expected about all sorts of things like boy and you're supposed to be educating them right yeah yeah yeah not lying to students is amazing what it does for your ability to be productive with them yeah and like i've had good relationships and yeah it's pretty easy to don't lie every time i try to talk about the loudly hypothesis with my peers i'm shut down and berated people seem to have total apathy towards the origin of covid why is this any advice this is totally related to the last question different person um but uh but you know i don't i i think we've all been informed people who get their news from left-leaning publications have been informed that apathy is the only at some level the only patriotic response that to to to be thinking about it is frankly now to be a cyanophobe uh to you know you're racist you're secretly gonna you know hoping that trump is in office like i don't even know what exactly it is but there's just a whole lot of societal level control behind this thing that comes out looking like apathy yes you've been predisposed to believe that if you question this thing that bad stuff will happen to you so people are rationalizing not doing it there's also though a problem where because people don't understand evolution or complex systems i hear all the time well probably it makes no difference where it came from in terms of what we will do about it but it would be good to know or why do we need to know we wouldn't change anything about how we'd uh approach it which is absolutely and then your motives are suspect why do you care so much right but this is absolutely not true right to the extent that we are talking about something that may have been modified in a lab it has every implication or at least potentially has every implication for what we would do and what we would predict and therefore how we might modify our behavior and basically when somebody tells you well it doesn't make any difference they're telling you they don't understand how evolution works because we're really asking you know where did it come from well if it came from a lab that was trying to make it more transmissible between humans in order to study its effect then that's a whole set of information about what the thing is and how it behaves of course it's going to have implications so um you know i think the answer is sorry you just failed the logic part of the test yeah um you know try again yeah okay one more question then we'll move to the next hour's questions are fingernails are fingernails an evolution of claws or an unrelated adaptation thanks love the podcast yes yeah they are um what's called homologous with claws um and yeah i mean we could go on and on and on but yeah i've always wondered whether they've been modified in order to increase the acuity of the fingertips well so so fingernails is a i believe it's a primate synapomorphy it might be simian so synapomorphy means a shared derived character that is new to that group and new at the new at the level of that group and although the thing might show up in some distantly related group that would be a co-evolution and so for instance you could talk about you know wings in birds are probably a snap morphe for birds but wings and ducks are not a snap morphe all ducks have wings but the wingedness of ducks is not new with ducks you have to go back to the most recent common ancestor of all birds before you find the origin of wings similarly i believe that nails if memory serves um are a it's either a primate synapomorphy or it's a slightly smaller group within primates and um the actually i think i think and it's you know it's not a um discrete character it's not like claws versus nail so i believe that things like lemurs and uh like bush babies and even tarsiers which lives in this weird weird space in the primate philogeny um have a sort of a cl claw like thing and as soon as you get um nails you also get finger pads and toe pads and you get like so you get fingerprints you get toe prints and you get more dexterity yeah yeah well that's more or less what i'm thinking yeah to increase your uh neurological feedback yeah fingers yeah um i will point out though as long as we're here um clause continue in pinnipeds that is seals and sea lions on their flippers so if you look at the flipper of a sea lion you will see that it has the claws on the on the flipper itself even though the fingers have been lost yeah um anyway so it's kind of cool very cool um you remind me actually so i didn't we didn't end up talking about it today and we probably won't later but even if we do i came across just some ridiculous big formal document from i don't think european agency on sex and gender and how we need to be thinking a lot more about how sex gender plays out in medicine and all of this and into the middle of this they're like and in sea turtles the role of gender is important because temperature sex determination yeah because because um suddenly if this is a real concern that there is a because of climate change a lot a lot more turtles are coming out female than male because sex is actually determined by the temperature at which they develop as opposed to by chromosomes which has zero to do with gender it's all about sex and also they put that into a document that's also about how um ai can't recognize trans people as well as people who identify as the sex that they were born to sfc turtles have anything to do with that at all people are just trying to throw everything together and confuse everyone such that they just shut up already yeah hence the apathy yeah um okay we're gonna go to the this hour's questions which will be somewhere have you guys seen it's awfully tiny have you guys seen the not cloning your grandpa clip from rick and morty no i have not either okay that's the answer to that uh is this is from echo is there a purpose to flowers and plants smelling stronger during and after rain even though pollinating insects can't fly during the rain presumably also do animals hunt more after rain when cents are magnified love you both be well yeah it's a good question about whether the plant is investing something in smelling after a rain i can see a lot of arguments for one if you if an insect can't fly during the rain and it normally flies to get to the plants that would be pollinating then there would at least in circumstances where it has rained a lot be an incentive to [Music] um to compete for pollinators at that moment so you might imagine an arms race between plants where they put out more smell chemicals so the prediction of that hypothesis would be that there's actually measurable difference in investment and that the plants are choosing to invest after the rain rather than the rain and the humidity that is therefore around increase the degree to which the plants smell without them changing anything about what they're doing i like it and at a um approximate level it could well be that the types of odorants that plants use are water limiting and so um they don't have to be as um as parsimonious with them um when water is abundant yep that's true i don't i don't know if that's true i like it it's also if if the odor if the production of odorants is water limited normally then okay let's do this also possible that if it is true that insects cannot fly in the rain and certainly many of them will not then the flowers will presumably delay maturation until the rain has stopped which might result in just there being more flowers and therefore more surface area yeah or like a slowing of development and then acceleration development such that you just like put put out more odorant per unit time because you're now you're concentrating that over a smaller array of time and the um the way to test all of these things is to use things that are pollinated by different critters as controls so you know if hummingbirds for example fly during a rain that is sufficiently light whereas insects don't because that same amount of rain disrupts them then you would expect the hummingbird flowers to be less affected so things like that yeah good hummingbird flowers don't smell but i just do not mean to imply that one of the things that diagnoses hummingbird yeah pollinated flowers is that they don't smell in general um bird pollinated bird pollinated flowers and bird dispersed fruits both will have far less smell than mammal dispersed fruits there's not much mammal pollinated that i can think of oh well bad bad stuff of course yeah um or insect both insects and mammals have much more developed sense of smell than birds do yes interestingly bat i forgot about bats there for a moment that's bad bat so you can diagnose what pollinates of something based on things like the intersection of the color and the smell so a beautiful red flower that has no smell tends to be hummingbird a red or yellow flower that has an intense smell tends to be insect a white flower especially if it smells a little bit like a rotting pumpkin tends to be bat um so anyway it's it's interesting but you can walking through the forest with a little bit of knowledge you can almost always figure out what is supposed to pollinate or what yeah there's also the timing of course you get like you know you had some of these crepuscular blooming flowers that are hawk moth pollinated for instance totally yeah um that ones do that too i remember yes photographic again i forgot about the bats yeah again you forgot about the they're beginning to take it personally as am i i know not even four months in uh this person asks says states okay not even four months in and biden is putting kids in cages banning guns by fiat expanding the court bribing illegals ending abraham accords surrendering to china and more anyone regret their vote yet you both are exempted um there's two things on that list so this again is someone writing in and i don't know i don't know anything about the expanding the court i know there's a lot of talk about it before the election um is that is that happening i don't know i don't know anything about it um but yeah there's a few things on this list that i'm not aware of but um yeah you know the kids in cages thing it's just it makes it so clear how much political theater we're engaged in because um as was abundantly clear to anyone paying attention during the trump administration no matter how much you hated the man um this was not new with him yeah and presumably little has changed um since you know the current president's uh president who you know he served under was in office you know i i think that obama trump and biden have all basically kept the same policies um in place and it's it's producing a tremendous amount of of misery and um somehow we see about it only when um we're trying to win political um scores yep now there's an awful awful lot that was just very easy to uh to predict about what was coming um right and here we are here we are shouldn't surprise no matter how you voted this shouldn't surprise anybody right check out jordan's response to red skull he has merchandised it with a comedic and artistic flair with all proceeds going to charity classy i don't know about that um i had a lizard interrupt your live stream as i was doing yard work pacific northwest northeast of seattle can i keep him how do i release him we already have one herp i'll send the moderator a couple of pictures yeah what uh what lizard was was this a scalabrus fence lizard blue belly or northeast of seattle yeah it's going to be shiny kobe and uda send pictures yes i love lizards um and maybe yeah send pictures and maybe we'll return to this next time start with lizards can we do an all lizard podcast maybe we just do all all lizard podcasts but they'll be very rabid in a good way okay is there a theory of homosexuality in evolutionary psychology one source claims it's a strategy for tricking women into sex which seems to ring um no i don't think that's a very good explanation um yeah i got one i haven't i haven't unveiled it yet it's coming though wait wait oh wait which doesn't next question which is not ring true i mean not a strategy for meeting women okay so the person asking the question is not confused by that hypothesis which is a stupid hypothesis yeah that just doesn't fit yeah so you're not going to share what what you think here no it deserves a proper venue um so anyway it's it's coming but it's not uh this isn't the one yeah okay um where are we at zach hour and something yet okay so we're gonna try to get to i don't know five eight more of these did you get a chance to watch the selfish ledger no and i don't even remember it by that name so apologies the novovax vixen seems to use a more traditional mechanism would you feel safer taking novofax once approved pending good trial data versus mrna i don't do you know what no ofx uses um i have been i have been saying you know i wish there was a traditional vaccine available um and i'm not finding it immediately with a quick uh duckduckgo search um so that's probably not the place to do it but um uh you're a year in the making well of course of course it's a year in the making that's not surprising um using moth cells spike proteins yeah i can't tell quickly um so if it was traditional if it was an actually traditional uh form um yes i would be more excited about taking it i don't think that any traditional vaccine has been developed in this amount of time i think that would be that would be i think it's like three years might might be something like the the record for a traditionally uh traditional vaccine development as it is you know as we've said many times the dna vaccines um like j which is available in the u.s now which have one rather than two for the mrna vaccines um very novel pieces of technology that they're employing is also being equal likely to be safer just because there's less totally new stuff that we don't have experience historical experience with um but neither of us know enough about the no facts vaccine to answer that question particularly i am not jealous of bret's hair the next person says i am jealous of eric's hair i save all my alopecia ire for him really i know okay okay sure that's it you got that okay if george bridges resigned oh he's he's leaving he's getting a sweet deal too but if george bridges resigned and you were put in charge of fixing evergreen what steps would you take to curb the problems with our woke educational system uh this is a longer topic yep the fact is it's probably too late for evergreen um maybe not but they've doubled down so many times that's gonna be very hard for them to rescue their reputation with evergreen you'd have to be allowed to clean house yeah both staff and faculty yeah but then i think i think it could be done yeah but the fact is any college that could figure out how to go back to educating and uh resist the woke revolution would have a massive advantage so really the answer is can you figure out how to get the mechanisms that want to enforce uh diversity equity and inclusion fictions onto higher ed can you just fend that off if you can fend that off then you imagine that you were the only college in the country that managed to fend it off of course everyone's going to want to send their kids there because that's where you'll get educated so in some ways it's an easy puzzle logically speaking but obviously those mechanisms are industrial strength or they wouldn't be universal yeah so a conversation many conversations for longer for later but that's a good good first step uh just thank you [Music] thank you for the gratitude it's not it's not that there was no new world megafauna but hypothesis they were driven to extinction by human hunting old world megaphonic co-evolved with humans and no survived and so survived to be domesticated um so i think this is in response to the gun's terms and steel argument that i think there is a misunderstanding of what you had described as this hypothesis which is that there wasn't any um any what you had said was there wasn't anything domesticable in the new world and that is true it is also true and so and and diamond says the lack of domesticable uh megafauna in particular is about basically you know at its far too simple level whether or not the continent is arraigned a rage arranged sort of like along a line of latitude or along several lines of latitude such that um the range in which you can take a once domesticated animal can can travel but it is certainly true that there was a ton of megafauna in the new world and that um largely it went extinct probably um around you know some some combination of sudden extreme hunting pressure and um climate yeah um i will say diamond's model i think which is partially borrowed from other people for why the animals aren't domesticable involves multiple different things um it'd be worth going into in greater depth but for example the fact that um horses have been domesticated but zebras which would be equally useful have never been domesticated equally good one equally useful yes is attributed to the fact that horses have have the right temperament whereas um zebras don't on because of the risk of predation that zebras experience they're too flighty um so anyway the point is there's several characteristics you need in order to be domesticable uh elephants are very useful and have been utilized but they're too slow to reproduce so they are always taken from the wild rather than raised in captivity they've got too many ideas too well then they don't have too many ideas to be put to human work yeah um but anyway so the point is you you did have humans presumably hunting out you know and the overhunting hypothesis is controversial but i think it's almost certain to be right um as a result of the fact that the animals yes in the new world because the animals didn't know to be afraid of people because they hadn't seen any um and so you can still experience their level of indifference to people in the galapagos for example where the animals strangely don't move out of your way tripping over relatively large animals yeah um but in any case that's the only thing that's skittish in the galapagos is the house cats which are um there's an attempt ongoing to exterminate them because they put the bird eggs at risk yeah so anyway the domestic ability question is complex it's multiple factors but those animals that were those large animals that were domesticated uh successfully um were heavily concentrated in asia and then moved into europe so i don't think it is the overhunting that caused there not to be those animals uh where was i here we go would it be viable to distribute the cat droppings or hair balls at increasing distances away from the house to lure coyotes away over time uh no i don't think so we're basically connected via a green space to a many hundred acre park that they are you know rotating among and they you know this is just the longest they've stuck here um usually they would have moved on by now and for some reason they're not but i'm going to skip i'll come back to these questions but there's another one um try wolf urine for the coyote issues i live in the forest and have tons of coyote they were even coming out in the day hunting my chickens and goats no issues since refresh it a few times a year cool where where did we get it yeah i was in there at the extent dinosaur store i don't think they're gonna have it but where do we get it i don't know i would tell us email the mod please yeah or we can google it or duckduckgoat as the case is right you wear it sorry you know i was in a shop looking for a coyote repellent and i couldn't find anybody to talk to and i assumed it didn't exist wolf urine seems really improbable like how do you get enough wolf urine to right they're liable to resist that i'm guessing that the muscle them first and squeeze them right um oh wait that's the herpetologist in me talking it's probably different from mammals i'm guessing that they've figured out what components are uh important constituents yeah it's like vanillin version it's vanilla vanillin is to vanilla as the wolf iron you can buy to right to scare coyotes is too actual but either way if it works that's that's a great suggestion thank you because we are obviously suffering all sorts of downstream effects of this and it's not good no actually it will solve the problem two ways it'll drive the coyotes away and it'll cause the cats never to want to go outside again that's right it'll probably it'll baffle and enrage maddie though yeah our dog will be she may never speak to us again right okay um heather i love your voice and notice that you get hoarse sometimes i suffer from the same problem any tips on how to manage this with your experience as a teacher and public speaker i don't i have actually heard from a couple of people saying find a good speech therapist there are exercises i tried to address this for years and just had terrible doctors who said take our drugs and then take our drugs for the things that these drugs will cause and i never did and they said if you don't take our drugs we can't help you i said why do you think i'm getting hoarse we don't know but we think the drugs might help so i am drinking today however um this gosh this thing is life right and um i used to get actual laryngitis like twice a year and i don't get actual total laryngitis anymore but i do get hoarse a fair bit and this this life elixir is um super hot water with a over full tablespoon or more depending on what you like of real honey and the juice of the juice of an entire fairly large lemon and uh it's just amazing it is amazing it tastes great and you're sick it's really good too oh man um yeah i will say i think there may be nothing to be done for those of us who have these kinds of issues including uh apneas or whatever but i think a lot of it is being caused by deformations of the laryngeal apparatus um that are the result of radical changes in diet check out mike mew um but there's a lot to be said he talks about hoarseness as well no but i'm because i mean apnea sleep jaw stuff like i've heard that but i've never heard anything about um the soft tissue around the lyrics and i don't know why it wouldn't and i actually well he does talk about the soft tissue around the larynx he has not as far as i know talked about hoarseness in particular but my sense is that there's just an awful lot of pathology in this one neighborhood an awful lot of mystery you know why are people so prone to snoring right it's like something novel has happened yeah yeah but i mean that is it feels i feel like that's related but it feels different also like you you're bringing up apneas and here we're talking about like it's it's it's a somewhat different space um i will say um if people if anyone in portland is watching who knows of actual uh voice therapists that they um that they think are actually skilled and qualified i would be very interested to know to know that um because i did i did engage actually in a dialogue with um someone who really knows what they're talking about but they're in europe um who said that they could you know they could probably help uh with what they hear as sort of fatigue very quickly and like that's great but i don't i don't trust anyone here um because i haven't i haven't yet found anyone relevant okay um follow up from last week eg of virus host mutualism supposedly it is it is suggested that parasitoid wasps inject poly dna virus into prey to suppress their immunity so their eggs won't be attacked are there other such examples i'm trying to understand what's being suggested here so we had a question last week about poly dna virus and didn't know what they were talking about and um this person probably the same person it suggested that parasite wasps inject poly dna virus which is a word that i've never heard before into prey to suppress their immunity so their eggs won't be attacked the idea is parasitoid wasps as you know um basically immobilize prey like like tarantulas and lay their eggs inside of it and then as their eggs hatch they basically eat their way out and the prey obviously dies at some point but it doesn't die um until it starts being eaten from the inside out thus basically preserving a living meal for the eggs when they do hatch the eggs of the wasp yeah and i've never heard this hypothesis so i want to know whether or not this is actually a true virus they separately evolved from the wasp or is the wasp injecting something that is having a effect on the uh the prey item yeah anyway yeah interesting we will look into it very cool um and then are there other such examples i don't know of any yeah yeah i didn't know of this one so i don't i don't know of any uh try wolf urine thank you yes um if evolution is try wolf urine great okay we're doing it we urine from amazon where there are no wolves they're bush dogs yes i wonder if bush dog urine would work probably not if evolution is drivel but a drivel [Laughter] we may be about done if evolution is driven by survival of the fittest would you say it's not surprising that capitalism is uh s of tf for the market sfdf um is there any other is there another evolutionary mechanic it means mechanism here i assume that would work on markets so evolution is i'm sure i would know what to make of this i just in the context i'm not being able to fill in the acronym here if evolution is driven by survival of the fittest would you say it's not surprising that capitalism is sotf uh for the market is there another evolutionary mechanism that would work on markets um uh it will occur to me what this question means in about an hour and a half i imagine i don't know what it means sorry um okay we got to get to one or two that we can actually answer well before we stop here um oh here's a link to the antibody testing is not recommended to assess immunity thing from the cdc thank you for that um this first part of this question is in quotes and i don't know who is being quoted and then it has a question tin soldiers and nixon's coming we're finally on our own this summer i hear the drumming for dead in ohio yeah it's a lyric from a crosby stills nash and young song okay um how do you predict a biden presidency will handle massive scale rioting oh boy i mean i'm i'm i'm not sure there's any reason to predict other than um virtue signaling ineffective response uh a um sensitivity to what the claimed motive for a riot is rather than enforcing the law right that's what i'd predict okay one last question i'm just going to jump to the bottom because it's a good one good one to finish on i think and we'll pick up one or two more of these next week um what is your take on woke cdc calling racism a public health threat will this destroy the cdc's already fragile credibility so they just they just did this i mean it's it's akin to what all those public health officials signed that letter at the beginning of last summer shortly after the after george floyd's death um but the cdc is taking this moment um to declare racism a public health threat yes it will destroy comments what little credibility they have i feel like that's certain anything more i don't know what else there is to say i mean obviously racism is bad it is being diagnosed um rather universally even where there's no evidence for it it's not surprising to see government agencies piling on and you know yes it's it's basically what happened to the aclu will happen to the cdc and uh we will end up having to reinvent these things yeah maybe that's the place um to go is that we needed the aclu and now we don't have it and we need the cdc and uh it's not clear to what degree we we have it i have hope yet that it is not lost because i really don't know how how that gets rebuilt yeah especially at a moment like this you play games with these things is insane yeah and that's what it is um they're playing games as if they don't understand what the actual risks are yep um which which yes that does destroy their fragile credibility legitimately because if they don't actually know the risks of the games that they are now playing then um what do they know yep yeah all right um i think that takes us about to the end of this week wow right so um we'll be back in a week uh for episode 76 with the requisite number of trombones um all right yeah is that right yes trombones uh trombones and um yeah please consider joining us on our patreon subscribe to this channel uh subscribe to the clip's channel if if you like hopefully there's a lot more frequent uh videos there uh like um download the audio app too with the audio app the uh the podcast on uh on audio that helps as well and um be good to each other be well see you next week [Music]

Channel: Bret Weinstein

Views: 47,246

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Id: TmjIv4qcLFE

Length: 75min 37sec (4537 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 10 2021