All Episodes
Previous Next
April 11, 2020 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
02:15:52
E06 - The Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying | Death & Peer Review | DarkHorse Podcast

Bret and Heather discuss the pitfalls of the peer review process as well as the continuing developments surrounding COVID-19. Technical issues occurred during the recording of this episode which resulted in uneven quality and some lost footage. Support the Show.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
This is the sixth in a series of live streams with Dr. Heather Hine, sitting as always to my right.
We have some interesting things to discuss with you today, and it is in some sense an unusual podcast.
We will start with corrections and then we will get to the part that is in many ways much more personal.
I should also add that we are working on technical aspects of the podcast and so anyway this is a painful process.
We are discovering all sorts of wrinkles that need to be ironed out of our system.
Hopefully we will have Fewer dropped frames today, and better continuity with the sound.
I will try to remember to speak into the microphone, which sometimes I don't do when I'm looking at my lovely wife.
So, if you have other observations that we ought to know about, please don't be shy about sharing them, and we will attempt to refine this process as we go.
All right.
As far as corrections go, we have a few things to discuss.
First, I had a number of people tell me that we had it wrong with respect to whether or not urine is sanitary.
And I would have to go back and look at exactly what we said.
Sterile was the word that we used.
Sterile.
Ah, okay.
So, I think the problem here, there is a correction that needs to be made, which is that it certainly can't be considered sterile.
There are, in fact, things that are transmitted in urine.
They tend to be difficult to transmit that way, but they have been cultured by people who have looked for it.
That is to say there is bacterial load in urine, there is bacteria in the bladder.
At some point it was imagined that maybe there wasn't, and there's more bacteria in the bladder and urine of people with current urinary tract infections, but there's always some bacteria in even the healthiest urine.
The issue, though, comes down to one of extremophiles and evolution.
So, while urine is not sterile, it does have some sanitizing properties by virtue of the high salt content.
And it is not that things cannot adapt to the high salt content.
Clearly, urinary tract infections manage it.
It is difficult to evolve those things, and to the extent that things evolve resistance to extreme environments, they have a difficult time with normal environments.
So there's a trade-off there, and this explains why it was the Maasai who utilized cow urine to wash their hands.
There is some sanitizing capacity there, so it's a partial correction in that case.
And it's certainly more useful as a sanitizer than any other bodily excretion I can think of.
Wow.
Okay.
Well, I mean, yes, you could go gross with that, but you could also say, okay, spit, does spit work?
No.
Right.
And, you know, anything blood?
No.
Feces?
Obviously not.
Right.
Okay, good.
Second, some folks challenged me.
I was asked what sort of preparatory materials did I leave when we moved out of Olympia and to Portland, and I mentioned off the top of my head Compressed air and the tools that go with it and I had said that this could be useful in the event of a Collapse scenario and many people said it's a terrible idea.
It's too hard to generate the pressure and to an extent they're right and In fact, we have switched over to battery powered tools Which in many scenarios are just simply so far superior to air powered tools if the power goes out that it's no contest but I would point out that
There are many different collapse scenarios, and battery-powered tools are great if what you have is a short-term collapse scenario where things go back to normal after a few months, let's say.
In the event that civilization actually came apart, your batteries would die, your tools would become useless, and there'd be no way to power them alternatively.
So, it really depends on what scenario you're preparing for, and one of the difficult things for people who are interested in preparing for all sorts of unforeseen
Outcomes is trying to figure out what the kit is that you want to assemble that covers you for the maximum number of scenarios and so things that are belt driven and can therefore be driven by something like a bicycle are Desirable from that perspective even if they're not ideal from the perspective of actually the amount of work it takes to get power out of the tools All right third thing
Has to do with smallpox blankets, and I said that the stories about smallpox blankets being delivered to natives of the New World were apocryphal, and indeed they are when it comes to the conquistadors.
There are a couple of credible instances where this took place on the American frontier, where it is more often invoked.
It was apparently not a widespread practice.
It's not that this was something that accounted for the massive outbreak of smallpox across native populations.
That was just simply the confrontation between this novel pathogen and a population that had no evolutionary preparedness for it.
But, nonetheless, there are a couple of credible instances it's well worth looking into.
And the final correction.
Oh, I've got a few.
Oh, well, I have one more and then whatever list you have.
The final one has to do with the focus of the last live stream was on the question of whether or not hypoxia and depletion of iron and porphyrin from hemoglobin was more credibly the cause of the symptoms in the COVID-19 than is simple viral pneumonia.
And I don't have a correction here.
I think what we said turns out to be important, but what has emerged is a tension between doctors who are seeing different things.
And we have doctors who are seeing the
Failure of the blood to transport oxygen as a primary driving force and there are other doctors who say no in fact this really does look like pneumonia and the piece of evidence that I heard marshaled against the hypoxia Argument or their primary hypoxia argument was that the dissolved oxygen in the plasma Plasma is the blood absent the cells the plasma doesn't carry very much oxygen, but it carries some
And were it simply the failure of hemoglobin to be transporting oxygen, you would expect the plasma oxygen levels to be normal.
And in fact, they are not normal in the case of some of the doctors who are arguing against the hypoxia as the driving force here.
And the point is that is more consistent with oxygen failing to cross from the lungs into the bloodstream rather than the blood failing to carry oxygen.
Yeah, that's a great illustration of a prediction that would appear to, not necessarily falsify, but run counter to what it was that we were talking about.
Right.
Although, the final thing I'll say about it is that these two things are not mutually exclusive.
And they're not mutually exclusive in two ways.
One, it could be that COVID-19 causes both problems, right?
And so to decide that one is not the cause and the other is, is a mistake in either case.
Which is, it won't always be the case, of course, that you can have two hypotheses that aren't mutually exclusive.
And it is cleaner when we have ones that are, such that when you falsify one, whichever one is left standing is the most likely to be true.
But in this case, there's no reason to expect that there's a single mechanism of action.
Right, in fact, what we have here is, this is a classic for biological thinking, because consider the puzzle that COVID-19, or the virus that's causing the syndrome, is facing.
It has to get into a body which requires it to invade human cells and then it has to spread cell to cell.
But the particular site that it invades and the cells that it skips to have a lot to say about the symptomatology from the point of view of the patients and the doctors who are seeing them.
So you shouldn't expect that this virus causes one set of symptoms.
A lot is contingent on the exact path it took to get to the place where the doctor first sees the patient.
So it is actually quite likely That different doctors are seeing different things that could be the result of genetic variation between strains of the virus or patients or patients or both different developmental trajectories of the patients.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So this is this is the The lesson of biology is that the temptation to simplify what you're seeing is obviously important, but it's very easy to take it too far in biology because complexity is, you know, is present in every biological facet.
Okay, so the corrections that I had, we already covered one about urine.
It turns out that eggs do have salmonella inside of them, because salmonella is actually sometimes found, in some cases, in the ovaries of chickens.
And so, yes, most of the salmonella is coming from the surfaces of eggs, and if you wash the surface of your egg just before you break it, you are much less likely to get salmonella, but it is sometimes inside of the egg from the beginning, which is news to me.
To me as well.
And then the final one was with regard to UV light and viral decay.
You had raised the question in light of something I had said earlier about, isn't sunlight a great disinfectant?
Something to that effect.
And I said, oh, actually it seems like it's UVC that's the best.
Um, best route to, uh, to decaying viruses and such.
Uh, and it turns out I had just received a paper, uh, that I had not yet read, uh, which called The Influence of Simulated Sunlight on the Inactivation of Influenza Virus in Aerosols.
So this is about influenza virus, uh, which is not a coronavirus, um, but it is a virus.
Uh, and, um, and it's a simulation, uh, but what, what they find is indeed, uh, that the half-life of viruses, of the influenza virus in a dark room is something like half an hour, whereas in full intensity against simulated sunlight, uh, it's 2.4 minutes.
2.4 minutes.
2.4 minutes compared to a half an hour for the half-life, basically how long it takes for half of the virus to decay and become inactive and incapable of being active in full sunlight.
Well then, I'm proud to say that the Dark Horse Podcast is the first place that you will hear that simulated sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Excellent, yeah.
So, interestingly, this will be, you know, our topics today are going to be about death and also peer review.
And this is not related to the death topic, but this article, which is in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, is actually published in 2020, but it is not, it went through peer review, you know, over the last probably year or two.
So it just happens to have been published in the log of publication to emerge just as this global pandemic is hitting, which is just an accident.
Most everything that we are hearing from scientific research right now about the SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes COVID-19 pandemic are on top.
We will return to that topic when we get to the question of peer review later on.
Yeah.
All right.
And it's up to us, everyone, basically, to assess whether or not it's true or not.
All right.
We will return to that topic when we get to the question of peer review later on.
Yeah.
All right.
How would you like to...
Do you have something planned with respect to how we...
Not exactly.
I mean, I have some things I want to say, but if you wanted to start, go for it.
Yeah, how about I do that?
So, today is a somber day for us.
It is the anniversary of the death of Heather's father seven years ago.
It's hard to believe it was seven years ago.
And Heather will say more about what took place and what it meant, but I will just say for my part that Heather's father was an extremely unusual guy.
His name was Doug and He and I didn't get along perfectly at first.
I think that's kind of normal with You know fathers and their daughters and their daughters Would be boyfriends and all but ultimately we came to be quite close and I must say I Still in some sense have not reckoned my reconciled myself to his death he is somebody we comment on frequently we I
Given all that we've been through in the last few years, we've often wondered what he would make of it, and we really wished we had his perspective.
He was a... Heather will tell you more about his professional background, but he was a computer scientist who was regarded as a mentor by many, which was interesting.
We discovered that, in a sense, after he was gone, when people told us what their relationships with him Yeah.
had been, but he was a man of very few words.
He was an excellent teacher, but it was not primarily about him telling you what to do.
It was, he taught through other ways.
And one of them was by illustrating.
So we miss him a great deal.
And we are very much still grappling with the loss. - Yeah.
So a tremendous number of people are dying now in the US.
from COVID-19, and it's possible that there are slightly fewer deaths from a few other sources because of the lockdown.
But by unfortunate happenstance, there are two other deaths in our world this week.
And, you know, maybe we'll say a few words about at least one of those at the end of this, but knowing that this was coming, that we were due to do another live stream on the anniversary of my father's death, I was thinking about it in light of what it might tell us about what the deaths from COVID-19 are doing to people and how particularly this disease, which of course my father knew nothing about, having died seven years ago,
Is affecting people in ways that it's hard to quantify, but pretty easy to qualify if you start putting stories together.
Did you say that the two deaths in our world were not COVID-19 related?
Yeah, we so far have no one that we know directly.
You know, there's a couple of second order, you know, we know of some academics and such who have died from COVID-19, but the two people who died or experienced deaths this week had nothing to do with COVID-19.
So, in 2012, Brett and I were both teaching at Evergreen, and it was an early spring morning, and for some reason I'd gotten up very, very early.
And was building curriculum for the day.
It was maybe the first week of spring quarter, and the boys were asleep and Brett was asleep, and my phone rang.
And normally I wouldn't have been up at 6.10 or so.
It was my mom.
And she said, your dad's having a heart attack.
The paramedics are here.
I don't know what to do.
They had, my parents had moved to Olympia the year before, year and a half before, to be near us, to be near us and their grandchildren.
And I ran upstairs to get changed and Brett woke up and said, we're raking the kids, we're taking them.
I said, no, don't, no, we don't need to.
And you said, yeah, no, we need to take them over there.
And you drive fast under normal conditions, but you drive as fast as I remember you driving to get to my parents' house, and there were three emergency vehicles in the driveway.
Again, it's long before dawn at this point.
And I said, Brett, stay in the car with the boys.
I'm going to run in.
You wanted to see what the situation was?
I wanted to see what the situation was.
Our kids were at that point almost nine and seven, and I just didn't want them walking in on a scene that was really gruesome.
And I went to the door, and it was locked, which was strange.
And I banged on it, and my mom opened the door, and there's my dad.
My dad was a big guy, 6'2", and big.
He's on the floor, and there were seven, eight, or nine first responders there.
Um, EMTs and firemen working on him and my mom was standing there with the main guy and she came over to me and said, um, he says, your dad's gone.
They've been working on him for 20 minutes and he's had no sign of life and he's gone.
And I start crying.
I hugged her, and then there's a knock on the door, and it's Brett with the boys.
He's come with them.
And the EMTs, we open the door, and they see these two children in the doorway.
And I tell them, your grandfather's died.
And they start crying.
And the first responders keep working on my father, and they bring him back.
They bring him back, which is just extraordinary, and it points to the connection that we have between us as human beings that sometimes is the difference between life and death.
Now he had been out, he had been without a heartbeat for at least 20 minutes and I have no idea how much longer than that it actually was because it took some time for them to arrive after my mother called them and she of course has no idea how long that actually was, but they then got him The hospital and Western Medicine just did wondrous things for him over the next seven weeks in the ICU.
Seven weeks in the ICU.
Out of the ICU a few times, but mostly in.
They put him into a cold coma.
They basically dropped his core temperature to, I don't even remember what it was.
It was like 92 degrees, I want to say, but I don't remember.
I didn't look it up.
Um, the idea being based on just empirical results that people who die in, um, people who almost drown in cold water tend to have better results cognitively later on than people who almost drown in warm water.
That the slowing down of, um, the slowing down of all biological and chemical processes basically stops damage as well, slows damage as well.
So they put him into this cold coma, and the amazing cardiologist whom we spoke with in the hospital that morning said, any outcome is possible.
You may never interact with him again, and he may get up and walk away from this and be fine.
And we really can't say.
At least, we can't make any predictions at all until we begin to pull him out of the medically-induced cold coma in 24 hours or so.
He was, I wouldn't say, just to jump forward, not to tell the entire story here, but I wouldn't say he was 100% after he came out of the ICU seven weeks later, but he was really close.
He went through open heart bypass surgery, he was on a heart and lung machine, this kind of medical intervention which is extraordinary and saved my father's life a number of times during that spring of 2012.
Was remarkable.
So, I must say, I was never sure whether the little bit that he didn't seem to come back was the fact that he was so shaken by what had happened to him, and that, you know, you can imagine being in his shoes, you would always, every time you forgot something, you would wonder, was that some capacity I lost?
So, there was a way in which he was shaken.
I never saw anything that Actually caused me to think up.
Yeah, he's definitely definitely lost some capacity Yeah, I agree, I think, mostly.
He was a, oh boy, I don't know the lingo because I don't play bridge, but he was an extraordinary bridge player who was still playing in and I think winning some tournaments in that year after he had been in the ICU for seven weeks.
I had some questions for him about our taxes and I worked on taxes with him and he seemed to be the usual, his usual intact self.
But now, fast forward.
So we all, my mother and our boys and us, got another year with him.
And it was such a gift.
And it was, in part anyway, given to us by not just those amazing EMTs who continued working on him after they had said there was no hope.
But also the remarkable medical intervention by the people at the hospital, by the doctors at the hospital at St.
Pete's in Olympia.
But by the beginning of 2013, all the same issues that had been plaguing him before were coming back.
He had long-term heart damage.
He had, what is it, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD, CPO, COPD.
He was overweight, and he was a drinker.
He had all of these, I guess they're comorbidities, right?
And he had always been someone.
He grew up on a pig farm in Iowa, in northeastern Iowa.
He used to call himself a little country programmer.
He went to Notre Dame, then went to Carnegie Tech before it was Carnegie Mellon, and worked for a series of the big companies in computer science.
He was translating.
He basically, he translated.
He spoke both hardware and software, and he worked as the interface both between those two domain levels and between the people who often couldn't speak directly to one another.
And through all of that, he had, you know, he had the farm boy in him.
And part of that was, we eat from the land when we can, and I, Douglas Hying, am not going to take drugs unless I have to.
But especially in that year after he had been in the ICU for so many weeks, they just were stacking drug upon drug upon drug on him.
And he didn't want it, but it's hard to say no when you know that your life is hanging in the balance.
So by By early April of 2013, it looked like he needed another bypass surgery, another open heart surgery, and he was scheduled for one for April 12th of 2013.
And I was supposed to be getting back from a field trip that I was leading with my class then, so I said, Hey Dad, can I borrow your car?
I'm taking my class up to Arcas Island, the San Juan Islands.
Just gorgeous, gorgeous spot.
Camp Moran, a place that we've taken a few field trips, a few classes.
But I'll come home a day early.
I've got two amazing former students who are acting as my TAs and they can wrap up the field trip on the final day and I'll get the first ferry out of there on Friday and come home and be And be in the hospital with you and mom on the day of your surgery.
But in talking with my mom on Monday and Tuesday of that field trip, I just had this sense that things were not going well.
And so I left my field trip in the steady and capable hands of, gosh, I think it was Dallas and Corey.
Um, and, uh, and drove home early Wednesday.
Drove straight to the hospital, and he was there in his room with my mom, and he and I shared maybe eight minutes of conversation, during which time I told him I loved him, and he told me he loved me, and reminded me how much he loved the children, our children.
He loved you very much.
And then he seized, and I never saw him conscious again.
But it was hours later, I had time to call you and to say, bring him now.
Bring the boys.
You come and bring the boys now.
He's back in the ICU.
I think this is it.
And the five of us.
My mom, his wife, and you and I, Brett, and our two children were around him as he died and were able to be in the room.
A terrible ICU room.
for an hour or so afterwards.
And then we later, I don't know how many days later, accompanied his body to the crematorium.
He had been Catholic in sort of a past life, but he had no objection to that ending for him.
And In his ending, I thought, this is how no one wants to die, ever.
No one wants to die in the hospital.
Americans don't know how to die.
We've lost track of most of our ancient rituals.
Every society that has been looked at, every culture that's been looked at, has death rituals.
And to the extent that individuals are still from cultures that do, or have created some for themselves, Our governmental and medical establishment has mostly kept us from those rituals under times of extreme duress.
And he was luckier than most because he had five... They let the children into the ICU because it was the end, which normally they wouldn't have done.
And so he had five people around him who loved him deeply.
But people dying of COVID-19 generally don't have that at all.
And that loss of contact between humans is so profound and so extreme, and it must be so alienating and isolating and lonely.
And it feels like there must be something that we can do to make better deaths, not just now, in this time of global pandemic, but across all deaths.
Yeah, it's really a difficult problem, too, because so many deaths now take place in the hospital, and obviously at this moment, if you can avoid being in the hospital, it's exactly the last place you want to be, just from the perspective of catching this virus.
So, yeah, you know, obviously it can't be the same priority level as figuring out how to treat people and prevent them from dying, but there are going to be deaths and, you know, even deaths from other things under these circumstances are just so compromised by the regulations around who can be where.
Yeah.
But it does need to be addressed.
I have an interesting list here of ways that death is celebrated.
It's from the introduction of this pretty good paper called Not Just Dead Meat, an evolutionary account of corpse treatment in mortuary rituals across 59, I think it is, cultures from 2017.
Just this list alone is worth considering.
Even a cursory examination of the anthropological record reveals the many ways that people treat their dead prior to disposal.
Corpses are washed, embalmed, anointed, pickled, dismantled, painted, adorned with jewelry, clothed, wrapped, placed in a container, moved, viewed extensively, touched, embraced, wept over, shouted at, danced over, and force-fed food, among other practices.
And that just celebrates humanity right there, that we have come up with so many.
For every single one of us, some of those sound crazy.
And for someone on Earth, whatever sounds crazy to the rest of us, it feels like the most natural thing in the world.
Yeah, but everywhere there's something.
Everywhere there's something.
Everywhere there's something.
It's a human universal.
Birth rituals are almost ubiquitous.
Death rituals seem to be ubiquitous.
Yeah, and our culture has done so much to turn them generic and to sanitize the process and to turn it into a commodity.
It's frightening.
Yeah.
All right, is there more to say, you think, on this topic?
I think there may well be more, but maybe we stop for now.
Okay.
Did you want to say, what's that?
30 minutes.
30 minutes, okay.
Yeah, maybe that's good.
Okay.
All right, so the other topic is a... It's tempting to try to find a connection between death and peer review.
Peer review is sometimes the death of good ideas.
Yes, it's where good ideas go to die.
But in any case, I wanted to raise an issue with respect to peer review because of what I'm seeing unfold, which Is a very very unusual circumstance so for those of you who are not academics and have not been academics There's a part of the world of how science and other disciplines unfold that you can't see and you probably can't intuit which is that
Well, there's this principle called the Matthew Principle, which is something to the effect of, to those with much, much is given.
The idea being a positive feedback loop where those who have lots of something end up with more and those who have little end up with less.
This is found across our system.
There are amplifiers that take disparities and increase them.
And one of the places that this happens is in terms of academic access.
So, at a very high-powered university, you will have incredible access to what we call the literature, right?
Your library will have a great many of those things available to you, and there's ways to access any that aren't present in your library.
And you sort of come to think this is just the nature of the world.
You've now joined a field, you have access to all the things that take place.
And it turns out that as soon as you leave a major university, even if you step to a just somewhat less renowned place, you discover a spectacular decrease in what you have access to.
And if you go to a college, you find that your access plummets.
And if you leave academia altogether, you find yourself facing a paywall that's asking you to pay 35 bucks to glimpse a paper that you just need to look at a little bit to figure out whether some result makes sense.
So anyway, there's a A problem with peer review that begins with the fact that it is a gate through which most people cannot pass.
Hey folks!
Sorry about that.
We had some kind of a momentary power failure that took out cameras, computer, everything associated with the podcast, and it took us a moment to get back.
I've got a conspiracy hypothesis.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah.
It was the editors at Nature what took us out.
The editors at Nature, what took us out.
I like that hypothesis, and I like the phrasing of it.
Thank you.
All right, well, again, apologies.
I think what we will do is we will have this second Part 2 stream also be the Super Chat Answer stream.
We will just combine them.
Okay.
Does that work?
Sure.
Good.
All right, so let me just finish up what I was getting at.
The fact of the literature being available in proportion to the prestige of your university is a hidden fact about the way peer review works.
But there is another set of facts that Sorry, there are things being done here to resurrect the stream.
Our amazing technical support, Zachary, who had nothing to do with the failures so far as we can tell, is creeping around.
You can come up here if you need to.
I think we've got it.
All right, so here's what I want to get at.
I'll just cut to the chase so that we don't face another set of problems.
The COVID-19 situation is revealing something.
It's actually a kind of test of something that we have been talking about, the dangers of peer review.
Eric, my brother, has been talking about the dangers of peer review on the Portal podcast, his podcast.
And the long and short of it is this.
Peer review sounds like something that you need to have, because of course work that doesn't withstand the review of peers isn't very high quality.
But that does not mean that peers need to have veto power on whether your work ever sees the light of day, because your peers, of course, may have a conflict of interest about whether or not they Um, want your work to see the light of day or they may be so myopic that they can't see the wisdom in what you're saying and therefore they will block it because they say it's low quality when really what it is is very far ahead of its time.
Or you and a few of your dearest friends have formed a cabal and you effectively peer review each other into lots of publications without saying anything about the quality of the work.
That is very frequent.
So, why are we raising this now?
We're raising it because the COVID-19 situation is producing an alternative view of an alternative way of doing science, which is to say, because COVID-19 is unfolding in real time and because it is very important that we figure out how it works, how it's infecting people, what its vulnerabilities may be, how it is that we can behave so that we don't catch it.
All of these things.
This is unfolding outside of peer review.
There's no time for the journals to send these papers out and have peers review the work and decide whether or not it should be published.
There's no time to publish it on paper.
So it's unfolding on these pre-print servers.
And what that means is that people are putting up papers.
They're accessible to anybody with an internet connection.
They vary a tremendous amount.
They're not.
I don't think any of the pre-print servers are behind a paywall.
Right.
And so you know the preprint servers weren't really designed for this purpose.
The preprint servers were designed in effect so that anybody could lodge an idea irrespective of where they were in peer review and later on you could see it.
So immediate access was important and such things.
But very often they actually are limited in terms of who can use them.
In other words you have to be sort of a member in good standing within a field or something like this.
That's all neither here nor there.
The important point is that These papers are emerging in real time.
Every day there are new papers available that discuss the mechanisms at work with the virus, the symptomatology of the patients, the epidemiology, all of these things.
They are accessible to anyone.
Most of us do not know who these authors are, so these things are now being broadcast to something much larger than a field.
They're being broadcast to anybody who has a scientific interest in understanding how this thing works.
It is effectively the proof that this does function.
That the fact of no quality control on these things is not creating a hazard, it's creating an opportunity that we can now You, the public, if you want to, can tune in to the dialogue between, you know, let's say doctors who are seeing symptoms that are somewhat inconsistent with each other.
You can tune in as the virologists are discussing the similarities of the receptor molecules in one virus versus another.
And the fact that this works is tremendously important.
And what I very much hope is that at the end of The COVID-19 situation that we do not simply decide that peer review has to be re-established as the only way to maintain quality.
What I hope is that we will recognize that we've discovered that in fact peer review is the abomination many of us think it is and that it should be replaced by some sort of open source alternative.
Yeah, so there's a related Thank you, Zach.
There's a related issue.
I'm not actually sure.
It might be interesting to figure out, to hear with you live, how exactly you think it interplays.
But there's a related issue that you alluded to with regard to R1 universities, you know, the big research universities with a lot of funding, have the gold standard in terms of journal access.
And if you're a faculty or a student at one of those universities, It's invisible to you.
Once you know how to use the system, it just slides right through.
In fact, this paper that I mentioned at the beginning of the first livestream, The Influence of Simulated Sunlight and the Inactivation of Influenza Virus in Aerosols, that came to us through Princeton.
It's so easy.
We now, for right now, have this R1 university-level access, and all you have to do is ask.
You have to be able to find it, but then you just ask and it shows up for you.
Um, so there's, there's a maintaining of the status quo by virtue of the fact that if you're at one of these places you have access to literature, and if you're not at one of these places you don't have access, you don't know what you're missing, and it's very hard to jump into even knowing what it is that you're missing and therefore what to ask for.
Um, so when we were at Evergreen, uh, which is, you know, a public liberal arts college and was, was once capable of doing very high quality work, um, at the, both the faculty and the student level.
Um, one of my soap boxes the entire time that we were there was trying to get access to, um, mostly it was Web of Science, which is, you know, the Science Citation Index, which is this indexing database.
That indexes so many journals across a wide array of fields.
It's mostly natural sciences, natural and physical sciences, and it's not a full text database.
You can't from there get to all of the full text, but by learning how to use its search function well, you really can find, you can do the lit review, you can do the beginning of the lit review that everyone needs to be able to do.
But it's very expensive, and Evergreen was never rich, and early in our tenure there, I was able to convince the then-library dean to buy it for the school, and I taught my students it every single quarter and said, you know, this is the access that you need.
And then it got cut a few years before we left, a few years before we did get cut.
And the argument made to me, obviously ultimately it was a financial argument, it was expensive, but the argument made to me by some of the people within library administration there was basically As a researcher, as a scholar, as a faculty member, there are only a couple of journals that you are probably interested in looking at anyway.
What the hell do you need all this really broad access for?
And this, to me, is just an encapsulation of one of the things that is most wrong with higher ed now.
And not just the educational end of it, but the research end.
The idea that most people are doing research by being really, really familiar with a couple of journals, and maybe they also get the Tables of Contents for Nature and Science and one or two other pretty big journals in their inboxes, if they're scientists.
But otherwise, they just read a couple, and they don't need to look through, to draw on anything outside of the very narrow field.
Well, of course we have a crisis in science, and in replication, and in hypothesis testing, and in peer review, in everything.
Of course we do, because we're training a bunch of people to do brick-on-the-wall science instead of big, potentially paradigm-shifting, hypothesis-driven science.
We are forcing specialization at an absurd level.
Exactly.
Which is not only terrible for academics, but absolutely awful for students.
It's terrible.
You should not be teaching your students to specialize at this level.
Undergraduates need to understand the general underlying stuff before there's any argument for specialization.
For them not to have broad access across the literature is just catastrophic.
It's frankly criminal.
It doesn't look like an education.
If you're going to be relying on the literature at all, if you're going to expect students to learn literature review skills, and maybe that's just not your thing at all.
Like, you know, it didn't tend to be your thing, right?
But if you, like I, also want students to be able to really review the literature, they have to be able to review it broadly.
They have to be able To assess the claims across a number of domains, knowing that they will be expert, to begin with, in none of them, and they will never be expert in all of them, but that they go in and they read it and they read it again, and at first everyone's thought is, almost everyone's thought is, I can't understand this.
I must be too dumb to understand it.
I must not have the level of education required to understand it.
And after a while, the best students begin to sense, you know what?
Maybe this is written in a way such that I am not meant to understand it.
There are these barriers to entry put up at every single step to keep basically the riffraff.
Well, there are two things.
You have terms of art, which are necessary in order to do the high-quality work, and then you have jargon, which masquerade as terms of art, that are basically there just to keep people who aren't inside the club from knowing what's being said.
Oh, that's an important distinction.
Yeah, I think it is.
Okay.
So, on to your Super Chat questions.
Here we go.
Oh, wait, you were going to tell a story.
Oh, the story was the following.
Your father... My father.
...who art in heaven... Maybe.
He's somewhere.
Right.
He's not here.
Your father, the computer engineer, programmer extraordinaire, had a picture Of himself sitting at a terminal debugging software with a toilet plunger on the monitor.
I have that in the WordPress site that I created for him after he died.
I have that picture.
It's an excellent picture.
It's a marvelous picture, yes.
And it sort of reflected his approach to things like debugging.
He was definitely a no-nonsense, get-it-unplugged kind of guy.
That's right.
All right.
All right.
First super chat, spot on.
Thank you.
Nate says, a question about models, specifically pertaining to non-regular, non-repeating events.
Are they predictive, or do they serve a different purpose?
If predictive, how do they derive an ought, the future, from an is, the present?
Is this an inductive versus deductive question?
Is that what he's after?
Maybe, maybe so.
Models.
They claim they're predictive, of course, but is it inductive versus deductive?
I'm not sure.
Here's what I would say.
I wish I knew which of these mics was picking us up.
Yeah, I'm not sure what the question means, but I have the sense that this is the answer you're looking for.
Unfortunately, models are being abused.
They are taken to be reflective of the things that are being modeled.
And in a complex system, it's very hard to get the model right enough, and it is very easy to fool yourself into thinking that you have the model right enough.
So, what I would argue is that the philosophy of science Logically applied to models.
Suggests that models can be valid places to generate hypotheses which then need to be tested against nature.
They are not valid tests of hypotheses.
I can't say no model ever has been.
You could obviously in a very simple scenario build a model in which you can test a hypothesis.
But in a complex system, there are valid ways to generate hypotheses.
You may be able to observe something in a model that you didn't expect, but you can't test things there.
And that's, I think, what we're doing wrong.
Good.
Good.
Fellow biologist and academic here, what is your take on Dr. David Sinclair's information theory of aging, as well as his and Aubrey de Grey's approach to combat senescence and aging?
Love you guys.
Wonderful.
I sure hope the audio is on for this.
I fixed it.
It's better now.
It's not coming out of that.
Okay.
Out of the...
It's recording from my laptop.
Now it's coming out of that.
Okay, great.
All right.
David Sinclair's informational theory of aging.
I believe, now I'm not thoroughly versed in David Sinclair's, probably it's a hypothesis and not a theory.
What I would say is that in my paper on telomeres, I advanced what I believe to be the same hypothesis.
I made an error, which is that I used a term which I now know would have been better replaced with another term.
I said, histological entropy, which many people took to be an analog for normal entropy.
What I should have said was epigenetic entropy.
So what do you, I mean I loved the phrase histological entropy as you know, but what do you mean by it for those?
What I mean by it is if you look at the way development unfolds, cells know what to do, that is to say they know which of their genes to transcribe based on two kinds of information, based on a history of what cells they came from, that is to say their lineage.
and information from things like neighbors that says where they are.
As you get old, they lose track of these kinds of information because A, they are no longer the next cell in the logical sequence from development, What many of them are, are cells that have stepped in to replace a cell that was lost due to damage or wearing out.
And so the amount of information about where a cell is, is reduced Based on, basically, increasingly bad information.
And that bad information compounds, because to the extent that one cell is confused, it's putting out a confusing message to all of its neighbors.
And so what you get is informational breakdown of the natural order in cells, which perfectly reflects what you see under a microscope, which is, from a young animal, tissues are very well organized, and the older the animal is, the more chaotic they become.
And just at the gross phenotype level, an example that I think will fit for people is, you know, as you age, hair starts showing up in places that it doesn't normally show up.
Yep.
Right?
And not just, you know, during puberty you get secondary sex characteristics and hair grows in your pits and your groin and such, but you get, you know, the stereotype of the old man with the crazy eyebrows and the hair growing out of his ears and... I resent that!
...and such, is, I think, a realization of this histological entropy.
Yep, now that was my original example, was a hair follicle out of place, and I've heard David Sinclair, the reason I believe these two things to be... So just to be clear, your paper predates Sinclair's or it comes after?
Well, it's possible that he wrote something much earlier, but I don't think so.
I think mine is far earlier, and that...
I wish I had called it epigenetic entropy.
I think it would have been much clearer.
Histological entropy is, I think, a very valid term, but it did lead some people to misunderstand what was being said.
And what about de Grey?
What about Aubrey de Grey?
Aubrey de Grey's perspective, and I'm basically just repeating what he has said, is that The failure of the human body due to senescence is effectively an engineering problem, and that if it is addressed as an engineering problem, it has a small number of causes, and if we address those causes one by one, lo and behold, we will defeat aging and
I agree with him that if you do defeat aging, that living a thousand years becomes readily within shooting distance.
Where we disagree is that the fact that it may technically be an engineering problem has anything to say about how tractable it is.
And in fact, years ago, Technology Review out of MIT ran a contest for any academic who could show that de Grey was not worth taking seriously.
And I did not yet have my PhD.
I don't think I was taken very seriously by the judges.
But my point...
But you submitted.
Oh, I did submit one.
And my point was, okay, so aging is an engineering problem.
Here's another engineering problem.
Taking a 1965 Ford Mustang and allowing it to transport people to the moon without ever taking it out of service, right?
In other words, having a functional vehicle every step along the way as you convert that Ford Mustang into, you know, an Apollo 11 or something like that.
And the point is, yeah, that's an engineering problem.
It's just not tractable.
So, my basic opinion is that Aubrey de Grey has led us to a kind of false optimism about how tractable this problem is.
I also, in my response to him, took him to task for having essentially no plan for addressing the informational breakdown of the mind.
That even if you were to solve all of the cellular aging and tissue aging problems of the body, you have another kind of problem, which is that the brain is not Designed to function for a thousand years.
So, you know, how much do you remember as a young person if you're planning to live a thousand years?
You may be so forgetful as a young person that it's not worth it.
That's right.
The algorithms that work for memory for an 80 to 100 year old lifespan will be very very different.
Yeah.
If the primary treatment is ventilators, which are 20% effective, why do models show massive deaths in an overrun medical system?
Shouldn't the increase be 20% at most?
Can simpler care be performed at home?
Could you do that one more time?
Yeah.
I think that there's a couple logical leaps here that don't quite track.
If the primary treatment is ventilators, parentheses, 20% effective, why do models show massive deaths in an overrun medical system?
Shouldn't the increase be 20% at most?
Can simpler care be performed at home?
You get it?
I feel like maybe there's just some words missing.
Maybe it's not logical leaps, but I'm not quite tracking what the question is.
The primary treatment seems to be ventilators, which as we talked about last time, may not be the right tool to be using.
I don't know where this 20% effective number is coming from.
I've heard, you know, in some countries, once you put on a ventilator, it seems like you got a 50-50 chance.
I've not heard 80% of people who go on ventilators end up dying, so I don't know what the measure of efficacy here would be.
And then, you know, ventilators versus over... You have something more here?
I don't really.
I think...
At some level, the question comes down to if the failure of the system, because it's overloaded, is the cause of death, then we should be able to estimate the degree to which we have a higher residual than expected, based on how many ventilators we can't find for people.
But I don't quite get how... Maybe I'm just misunderstanding the question.
Yeah, no, and I guess there's another interpretation there, that if If the tool that you get in a hospital, if the major treatment is a ventilator, and it's not very effective, and you're of course more at risk in a hospital of having other problems, maybe there's a point at which even if you're really, really sick, the best move is to be at home rather than in a hospital.
That may be the question, and I think there is something to be investigated there.
I'm going to just ask you to look at the chat sack, and every couple of minutes we're going to check in and say, can you hear us okay?
Because I have no sense of… They can hear you and the audio is now much better.
Okay, great.
I'm just looking at the chat, I don't have anything else to do.
All right.
Please tell us about The Handsome Selectric 2.
So we have no idea what you can see, but I know generally I block it, but I think it's Somebody can see well enough and knows enough to know that that must be a Selectric too, which indeed it is.
Yeah, it has a little story that goes along with it.
You and I both as kids grew up in a house that happened to have... Two houses even.
Two separate houses, because otherwise that'd be gross, but two separate houses that had a Selectric typewriter.
And I remember thinking this was a very, I was a very mechanically inclined kid, and this was a super interesting device.
Now you never took apart your childhood home Selectric.
Oh boy, my parents learned quickly that I had a tendency to take things apart and as I recall it I was more or less forbidden to touch this electric tube because it was a very fancy typewriter and although I was good at putting things back together I was expected not to be able to do it maybe.
Can I interject here and point out that you taught our younger son yesterday how to take apart a carburetor.
Yes.
So you're still at it.
I'm still at it.
And you rebuilt it.
Yeah.
But actually this device here, so we both grew up in homes that had a Selectric typewriter, and I wanted I wanted my kids to have a Selectric typewriter that we could turn into a printer by basically triggering the switches in the keys.
Basically, I wanted to hack into the typewriter and then trigger the individual letters to type by triggering the switches associated with each key.
And we happened across this typewriter, which looked to be in great shape.
I plugged it in at goodwill.
Didn't really work.
It came on, but it did not work.
And it was 11 bucks.
And I thought, 11 bucks?
I'll buy it.
I bet you I can fix that bad boy.
And got it home and opened it up and discovered, A, wow is that thing wild on the inside, and B, there ain't no switches.
In fact, there are only two electric parts in the entire thing, and they literally are the motor and the switch.
Everything else in there is mechanical and run.
The motor is basically sending power through a belt into this whole system, and everything else that happens in there is mechanical.
So you could technically power that with a bicycle?
You could totally power that with a bicycle.
And I probably should, just despite those people who were dubious of my plan with the compressed air.
Didn't you also discover that there are like two or three Selectric repairmen left in the country?
Oh, it's more than that.
It's a small number and they're dwindling.
I mean, those things, it's got to be one of the most complex, it's not really a consumer object, it was a business object, but one of the most complex commodities ever devised.
The thing is amazing.
And there were repairmen whose job was to travel around and service those things in place on a regular schedule.
Right, but that was the, what, late 70s or early 80s?
Right, but the point is most of those people are now dead.
There are a small number of them still out there.
Some of them are refurbing these things, you know, and selling.
You could buy them for, like I did, 11 bucks, and then you refurb it and you sell it for a few hundred or something.
But anyway, it's a fantastically complicated object, and I sort of, at the point I realized how complex it was, I started figuring out how to Fix it.
And I'm still learning.
It's very difficult.
But anyway, I've got that one up and running.
It works.
The correction works.
It can actually lift letters off the page.
So anyway, that's the story.
Excellent.
In light of the disappearance of Dr. Ai-Fen, I probably am mispronouncing the name.
In light of the disappearance of Dr. Ai-Fen, who leaked the first report on the COVID virus, would it be advisable to protect future whistleblowers with something akin to diplomatic immunity?
I think whistleblowers deserve diplomatic immunity, some kind of immunity.
It's hard to know in advance.
How do you know that you are worthy of immunity before you get disappeared?
Well, I would say, if and only if you want an honorable system, figure out how to protect whistleblowers.
A hundred percent.
A lot of people give lip service to the idea of protecting whistleblowers, but it is absolutely essential.
And I say that, I feel like a whistleblower when it comes to mouse telomeres.
And you know, it's like, fortunately it's the wrong metaphor.
I tried to sound the alarm and the bell wouldn't ring, the whistle wouldn't blow, whatever it was.
It just didn't work.
Hypoxia hypothesis.
Current and former smokers are showing up underrepresented in the ICU data.
Would this suggest evidence for the hypothesis?
Now, I feel like I saw something, and I don't have it in front of me, and this isn't my computer, this is yours, I can't look at... I thought I saw the opposite.
I thought I saw that smoking was one of the risk factors, one of the top six risk factors.
I just saw a list today where diabetes was the top risk factor, kidney disease was in there, COPD was in there.
I thought smoking was, so I don't... We can still take this on, but I would put a strong caveat on, I'm not sure that the claim is right.
With regard to the hypoxia hypothesis, current and former smokers are showing up underrepresented in the ICU data.
That's the claim here.
Would this suggest evidence for the hypoxia hypothesis?
It almost feels to me like it should go the other way.
Why would they be underrepresented in the ICU data?
Is that suggesting that they are healthier because they've already faced a low oxygen Like they're effectively acclimated?
Yeah, I don't quite see the connection, so if you want a question like that addressed, spell out a little bit more what you think the connection might be, and also let us know where we can find the evidence that you're going on that the connection is there.
I don't know if there are character limits on the Super Chat, but definitely a link to a reference would help here.
I tweeted y'all an account of a woman with strange symptoms who tested positive for COVID.
I'll resend if needed.
Wondering your thoughts.
I don't remember offhand which one this was.
This was strange symptoms who tested positive for COVID.
Do resend.
I don't remember offhand what this is.
I don't either, but I will just say that is certain to be a pattern.
Because so many people who are infected with this virus are asymptomatic, and so many people have symptoms for which no known cause exists, that surely you're going to end up testing some people, finding out they're positive, and you don't want to... Misattributing perhaps symptoms they have that are unrelated to COVID-19.
Absolutely.
Hawaii, H-I, Hawaii has implemented a curfew.
Michigan is preventing the sale of non-essential items.
When is it too far?
How do we respond once we determine it is?
Yeah.
I am wondering this very much lately.
The part, the node here that I'm tracking most acutely is preventing people from going into nature.
And this misread, this very, not just authoritarian, but didactic, like, we said stay at home.
We said shelter in place.
That means you don't, there's a report out of Southern California, I think, Encinitas, actually, where we've got some friends who were in their, people were in their cars watching the sunset.
Alone in their cars or in their cars with the people whom they were already quarantining with watching the sunset and they can receive either a thousand dollar fine or six up to six months in jail for not sheltering in place.
They're in their cars watching the sunset.
Yep.
This is an incredible either just blatant abuse of power or more likely a confused interpretation of a far too broad directive.
So I would add, I don't believe you can make a society functional without discretion.
And so in some sense what we are seeing is a failure to either provide discretion or to utilize it properly.
What you need is people who understand what the objective of the policy is and know how to make exceptions that don't violate the spirit of the policy.
And so to the extent I don't remember where I encountered it might even be a friend got evicted from a public park They were sitting on a bench alone, you know 50 feet from the nearest person and they were apparently told that they were in violation of the law and the fact is You know We use the analogy sometimes that we are physically a robot.
But that robot has a computer riding on its shoulder and that computer is... it has needs.
And so if we simply start figuring out what the robot needs to do in order not to catch this virus and we stop paying attention to the fact that you're going to drive people stark raving mad if you lock them down and don't let them access those things that would make them feel some degree of normalcy and have almost no risk of Catching or transmitting the disease.
And give them no sense of legitimate hope where this thing ever ending.
Yeah, then, you know, we're going to create a catastrophe.
And also, next time this happens, we in the Northern Hemisphere might be heading into winter, not summer.
Right?
We are in some sense lucky that even if the virus doesn't respond to warmer weather, the fact that people, you know, many of them might have a courtyard they can go sit in, or a tree they can sit under, that's very helpful.
But we need to figure out how to do this humanely.
And That means, you know, the question is apt.
When is it too much?
No, it's quite apt.
It seems like it is too much, but part of how it's too much is the rote and robot-like receiving and dispensing of orders.
So I'm reminded of, you know, we're not going through these as quickly as I was hoping we would before, but I wonder if you would talk a little bit about First, it's going to sound like it's coming out of nowhere, but your experience during Occupy when you insisted on engaging with the policemen who showed up to disband the Occupy... Participants.
Yeah, the participants who were...
Who were at the Capitol campus in Olympia, Washington?
And you know there were a number of our students who were up there with us and then I think on a couple of occasions the police showed up and so I I left with our children because it was important that People were going to be arrested.
No.
You know it didn't happen to both, but You talked to the police.
Yeah, I thought it was very important that the police understand that they were facing human beings and There were some bad cops, I remember them.
There were some people who were clearly interested in exercising power, but they were also compassionate people.
That's most of what you interacted with.
Yes, and the thing is...
Many of the people who were associated with Occupy had a strong anarchist bent.
I'm quite anti-anarchist, but the anarchists have this sense that all cops are bastards and all of this stuff.
And what that resulted in was not engaging the cops as if they were human, treating them as if they are not human, which resulted in the cops feeling like they were dealing with non-humans on the other side.
And it was just a catastrophe waiting to happen.
And they thought you were being a patsy for wanting to engage, right?
So the idea, you know, some of the anti-occupied people would say you're being ridiculous for engaging with the occupied people at all.
And the people with an occupier were saying, not only how foolish of you, but how dare you interact with the cops.
And, you know, you had good human interactions with the policemen who had been sent to disband a group and with whom you had human interactions.
And I'm waiting for those stories here, now, and I don't see them yet.
There is so much contradictory information being given to us.
Wear a mask, masks won't make any difference, stay home, go out and get sun, etc.
How do we sift through what will prevent the spread of COVID-19?
Well, part of why we're doing what we're doing is so that you will hear how people who have a background in biology and have a lot of experience, you know, teaching students are parsing these questions themselves.
And, you know, if you optimize for Zero likelihood of spread.
You will end up in a completely paralyzed universe, right?
In fact, you'll starve because you won't be able to go out and get food and at some point your supplies will dwindle.
And you'll be psychologically destroyed.
You'll be psychologically destroyed along the way.
So, in essence, what I really... I hesitate to say this because I don't want somebody to get sick because somebody else makes a bad call, but In essence, what you need is to understand as much as possible about how the virus functions, both in terms of how it invades a person, how it spreads from person to person, and how it spreads across a population.
And then you need to figure out how to compile a package of responses that reduces the likelihood of transmission as much as possible.
And, you know, to those of you who say, no, that's not good enough.
It's got to be zero.
Look, every time Amazon delivers you something, it's a trade-off.
You didn't go out to get it.
That's good.
On the other hand, it could come through your door on the package.
And so, Knowing that it could come through the door on the package means you can minimize that chance by dealing with the packages if it's not safe.
But basically, what you need is a model.
The model's not going to be perfect, but you need a good enough model that you can then extrapolate and make decisions that are safe enough.
And it will never be perfect because the information, what we believe to be true now, not all of that is going to end up being true.
Yeah.
And this, this will always be, this will always be a more true statement with something that is evolving as rapidly as not just this virus, but specifically our relationship with it.
Brett, I don't understand, I can't see the rest of this question.
Brett, I don't understand how traditional evolution, small random mutations, can explain the Cambrian explosion.
Is it related to the explorer mode you previously talked about?
Please explain in such a way that a software developer understands it.
Yeah, so I've taken a lot of flack from some fairly prominent people over Explorer Modes, which I find funny.
I can't say what the particulars are, but my basic point is I don't believe that random mutation on its own results in the kind of diversity that we have.
I believe random mutation and selection built an earlier world in which selection then figured out how to explore more efficiently.
And that exploring more efficiently is still a Darwinian process.
It's just not so haphazard.
And so when we see something like the Cambrian explosion, we may not know what innovation it was that set loose this tremendous diversity.
But the question is, look, random mutation might not get you there, but random mutation building a mechanism, you know, it's like Well you've got three things all working together and sort of leapfrogging over one another, but not necessarily in a particular order.
I mean there's of course more, the mechanisms of microevolution include other things, but the three things you just mentioned are random mutation, selection, and exploration.
And exploration does not show up in the usual list of mechanisms of microevolution.
It's not gene flow, it's not drift.
We've overly fallen in love with the random part of the story when it was never the important part of the story.
But, you know, I would say the question is a little bit analogous to, you know, a colony of cells.
How does it navigate around the room?
Right?
Are you telling me that colony of cells, you know, well, I'm a colony of cells.
How did I know where the glass of water was?
Well, it happens that some of those cells are organized into a pattern that allows me to detect the precise location of the glass and, you know, is it amazing?
You better believe it's amazing.
But is it inexplicable?
No, it's totally explicable.
So anyway, it's that kind of thing.
Yes, Selection has figured out a bunch of tricks to make its exploration of design space more efficient.
Good.
Hello, Brett and Heather.
I'm a current Masters of Public Health candidate and COVID-19 has now overtaken, as it should, our daily discussions in class.
Stay safe and healthy.
Thank you.
As the global supply chain responds, we'll likely see 3D printers decrease the cost of acquiring guns, disrupting societies that don't have pervasive gun ownership.
Might the Second Amendment be a memetic exaptation of a sort?
That's the Steel Man podcast's question for the day.
I thought I understood the question until the end.
A memetic exaptation?
So, exaptation are things that happened for one reason and are evolutionarily co-opted for something else.
This is a Ghoulianism to distinguish between adaptation and exaptation.
Yes.
Probably every adaptation that we can name could technically be argued to be a stack of exaptations or something.
So, the question is about gun ownership.
Decrease the cost of acquiring guns, potentially.
I think that that is possible now, although...
Societies that don't have pervasive gun ownership, but that do have the materials and printers to be 3D printing guns at home.
Is that going to be Europe, mostly?
I don't know.
I mean, there's a lot of ifs here.
And neither you nor I can make total sense of mimetic acceptation.
Yeah, I mean, I get what the words would mean together.
I don't get how they apply here.
I will say, For better or worse, 3D printers make the question of how to make a gun relatively trivial.
On the other hand, you know, the same thing is true for a metal lathe and a mill, right?
And we can't very well limit people's access to the stuff... It's tougher, though.
You need more know-how with a metal lathe and a mill to construct a firearm, don't you?
Yeah.
Well, let's put it this way.
You know, the blueprints, the recipes, whatever you call them, exist.
You get the 3D printer, you get the recipe, you get the materials.
Yeah, you don't really need to know anything to tell your 3D printer to do it.
On the other hand, you need to know somewhat more to get a CNC machine to make the parts.
However you get there, we're headed to the same place, which is a gun just isn't that complicated.
And so how much know-how do you need to make one?
Not nearly as much as you'd think.
It's, you know, it's just a question of really whether you're... As long as they're cheap, it doesn't happen that often.
If they become illegal, I imagine it will happen more.
Yep.
Chomsky claims 99% of language use is internal.
Hence, its characteristic use indicates that its primary function is for thought, and not to facilitate communication.
Do biologists generally accept this view?
I don't.
I don't know what biologists generally think, but yeah, I don't.
You don't.
I'd say the opposite is true, which is that it is, I believe, clear that language has evolved for communication between individuals.
But once you communicate between individuals efficiently with a language, it becomes a very useful shorthand internal to the mind.
Stay tuned, because we will cover the question of consciousness, and it is wrapped up in this very set of issues.
Yep.
Now in the whole, the penultimate chapter in our book on the distinctions between culture and consciousness.
Yep.
Where was I?
Does nature act as a system, or are individual organisms simply looking out for themselves?
In other words, are viruses or diseases a response of the system to the overpopulation of a certain species?
Nature does not act as a system in that way.
The Gaia hypothesis is not right.
Forests don't evolve in the same way that individual trees and tree species do.
Amazing things are possible.
Mutualism is real and there's no upper limit to how many creatures could participate in one, but there is a practical limit on how far that goes.
So I would say emergent phenomena are real.
It is not right to say that forests don't exist, but it is right to say that they do not evolve.
They do not have the prerequisites to evolve.
So really what you have is a virus taking advantage of the kind of closeness that occurs at high population density.
It's not that it is a integral participant in some agreement to thin the population or something like that.
It succeeds more in conditions for which it does the most harm at the moment.
But that is not it being sent to do the most harm.
How does sickle cell and gene variance possibly relate to the reasons why this disease affects African American communities the most?
Well, it would seem to me that it's relatively simple to test whether or not the disproportionate effect in African American communities is sickle cell related.
In other words, if we control for those people who carry the sickle cell trait into adulthood, do we still see disproportionate effects?
My guess is you would.
It's not clear to me from this question if he is referring to our conversation last time or if this is coming de novo.
Yeah But it's you know, it's certainly possible and would be relatively easy.
Yeah to test but let's just say it is It's possible that sickle cell, which reduces the capacity of the blood to carry oxygen, puts people who carry the trait as a heterozygote, that is to say they have one copy of the sickle cell gene and one copy of the normal gene, it would put them at disproportionate risk, which might result in more extreme cases.
It is also possible that economic factors or demographic factors are the reason for the connection and it has nothing to do with sickle cell.
This does raise another, um, correction of sorts.
In talking about sickle cell anemia last time, uh, I had suggested that if you're heterozygous, um, you seem to do fine, but you probably aren't going to be an elite athlete.
And a few people pointed out, is it David Goggins, I think, who is maybe a former Marine and an elite athlete and is also heterozygous for sickle cell.
Really?
There will be, you know, there will be exceptions, but that's extraordinary.
That is extraordinary.
Yeah.
I hope I've gotten the name right.
I wasn't aware of him before this.
Let's entertain, oh boy, Let's entertain the conspiracy of COVID being caused by 5G.
If in fact your theory is correct, could 5G possibly interfere with hemoglobin because the iron is some kind of cellular antenna?
I'm going to let you take this one.
You're going to let me take that one.
Well, thank you.
You're welcome.
I would say I am not a fan of the idea of 5G for so many different reasons.
I don't think we need it.
And I don't think doing high energy stuff in such close proximity to people is a good idea.
I have no idea.
I've heard these connections too.
I haven't yet seen anything that compels me.
It's worth going down that road.
I'm open to the possibility that there's some evidence that I need to see.
But anyway yes it is unprecedented in many ways or it's not 5g 5g is unprecedented and so could it have effects that we have yet to discover of course yep and you know we got two unprecedented things coming together at more or less the same time so of course they've been put together causally but yeah it could be I want to see the evidence that makes it worth my time to chase this particular connection.
Many species go extinct due to rainforest destruction for animal agriculture.
Isn't it smarter to let pigs, cows, and chicken go extinct to save more species?
You want me to do that?
Sure.
Okay.
First of all, farming where tropical rainforest once stood is never a good idea.
It doesn't work very effectively because the very nature of tropical rainforests is that they sit on top of soils which some will claim are paradoxically depleted.
I don't think it's paradoxical at all.
This is one of the things I addressed in my dissertation, but The fact is there are places that you can raise animals and do it properly.
I am no fan of factory farming.
I think it's despicable and it cannot be morally justified.
But that does not require us, not growing animals on fragile thin tropical soils and not growing animals in an inhumane way on a feedlot or at a high density in a cage or whatever.
That does not Force us to go all the way to driving them extinct.
We could eat a lot less meat and not eat zero.
That would address many of the health problems that arise when people go to zero with respect to meat, and it can be done in a way that doesn't involve a moral compromise.
So, yeah, I don't want to see rainforests cleared to raise these animals, but it's never been a good idea in the first place.
Let's just put a tiny bit more nuance on that, too, and say it's not all tropical soils that are poor, right?
You know, the tropics being that part of the earth between 23.5 degrees north and 23.5 degrees south.
It's a huge swath of the earth.
It's specifically the lowland, usually previously alluvial soils that are high clay that tend to now have rainforests on them or those rainforests have recently Which is to say, sort of since the Industrial Revolution, been cut.
But there are plenty of areas in the tropics that have rich soils, you know, anything that's volcanic.
You know, the entire Andes and the Cordillera through Central America, for instance, have higher quality soils that can withstand both plant farming and animal agriculture without destroying the soils inherently.
Okay, regarding your concept of metaphorical truth, why use the word truth when useful or advantageous would do?
Why create different kinds of truth?
Well, I think the long and short of it is lots of people seem to have preferences for how we describe things so that we don't tread on their particular sacred belief.
And I do think that while what I call metaphorical truth is not true in the same way that scientific truth, literal truth, laboratory truth is true, that when something is true enough to be the difference between life and death, that it that when something is true enough to be the difference between life and death, that it is actually
So my go-to example would be the Moken people of the Andaman Sea, who survived the tsunami, the Boxing Day tsunami, as a result of a myth told around the campfire about something called the lavoon that seeks to taste human flesh.
And anyway, it was a perfect warning for the tsunami.
And my point is, as far as we know, no Moken people died from the tsunami, right?
That's an incredible track record given how closely associated with the exact epicenter of the earthquake that caused the tsunami that they were.
So, this myth was so good that it saved Hundreds, maybe thousands of Moken lives.
Who are we to say it's not true in some sense?
I'm not claiming it's literally true, but it is true enough to save lives.
And it's paired, right?
It's this four-word phrase that has two terms in it.
Literally false, metaphorically true.
And it allows people to go into myth and say, okay, No one outside of the Moken people believe in the Lafoon?
Is that what it's called?
It's Lavoon.
And yet you can objectively observe the survival rates of the Boken compared with other people the same distance from the epicenter of the Boxan Day Tsunami and say, well, something in that belief was so effective that it saved all of their lives.
Is the story of the particular god that got angry true?
Those of us with a scientific sort of post-enlightenment worldview would say no, but it created such the right behavior that is literally false, metaphorically true.
It's the pairing that is important.
I agree it's the pairing.
I know we need to move on, but I want to say one other thing, which is I am fond of the idea that for most of us, leveling up Tends to come in the form of a vindication that is tied to a bitter pill and my feeling about the pairing as you put it between literally false and metaphorically true is that if you find yourself on one side of this divide or the other It's those two things.
You get a vindication and a bitter pill, right?
Metaphorically true is a vindication for people who have these metaphorical beliefs and want them treated respectfully.
But it comes right after the phrase where they're told, no, that's literally false.
It's literally false, metaphorically true.
And until you deal with the package, you're taking license that you're not entitled to because both things are true.
Keep up the good work.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Please come to Pittsburgh and have coffee with me.
I'd love to sit down with you both.
I hear that Pittsburgh is gorgeous.
So, maybe we'll get to Pittsburgh.
My father was in grad school in Pittsburgh many, many years ago.
Yep.
Pittsburgh is now not a place we can go because there are people there and social distancing requires that we... It's true.
Yo, Matthew Principal Blues, love the discourse, love from Scotland.
Look here, Brett, please discuss the potential connective strand of meaning between your latent programming versus Jordan Peterson's Jungian shadow.
That was like poetic word salad.
Yeah, well, yeah, I can't.
At the very end, it got less Yeah, what are the two things that... Your latent programming, which is not a phrase exactly that you use.
I don't think he's talking about mine.
I think he's talking about our latent programming, right?
Discuss the potential connective strand of meaning between your latent programming versus JP's Jungian shadow.
Yeah, I mean, it seems to me obvious that your latent programming would contain all sorts of things relevant to many phenomena, many historical circumstances, and that the Jungian shadow is Jung's attempt to systematize these things, or it's part of his attempt.
So, it seems to me like the connection is...
Rather dependent on whether Jung had that right.
Jung is mapping the programming at some level.
Yeah.
But anyway, I don't see anything... It doesn't bother me that the two would be connected.
All right.
Stream is frozen.
Yes.
Okay.
Keep up the great work.
Would you talk about Jeffrey Epstein?
Steen?
Did I say that right?
Yeah.
And the new episode from Eric's podcast.
I think Eric put something new up today.
He did?
Yeah, I think.
Episode 25.
Don't know about it.
Yep.
Would you talk about Jeffrey Epstein?
I don't have anything to say about Jeffrey Epstein.
Well, I have said previously that the Jeffrey Epstein story did not kill itself.
I felt very clever when I came up with that.
Apparently you still do.
Apparently I still do, yes.
Yeah, I don't know exactly what to say.
It does seem like there are an awful lot of questions that would reasonably be answered, and as Eric routinely points out, the failure of journalism to be pursuing questions that seem to be on a great many minds is conspicuous, if nothing else.
So anyway, yes, there are lots of questions and the strata to which Epstein was connected does raise all sorts of possibilities.
Both the depth and the breadth of his connections.
Yeah, and the nature of them.
Yes.
Please, can you discuss invasive species?
Is this a real thing?
Is there debate here?
Aren't conservationists simply picking a point in time and saying, we like this best, let's keep it this way, thanks?
Oh my god.
There's so much here.
So this is many, many hours of conversation.
Let me try first.
I'm going to go backwards through the questions.
Aren't conservationists simply picking a point in time and saying, we like this best, let's keep it this way?
There is some of that for sure, right?
There is sort of a moment of this is when we, the ecologists, started paying attention, and we've declared that the moment in time that we're going to try to preserve.
And it forgets that environments change and that evolution happens, and it's a pretty naive view of nature.
here.
That said, invasive species are real, and when it is humans with our modern technology who are moving things around the world, either intentionally or not, and bringing them into environments where they have no native competitors or pathogens or predators, allowing them to take off and become monocultures to the benefit of nothing but those species, there's a problem, and you've rendered ecosystems unhealthy.
Yeah, this is another thing I covered in my dissertation.
We have a problem that is very serious with what are called invasive species.
One has to be careful not to declare anything that shows up in some place where it didn't exist before invasive, because that's not what they are.
There are ornamentals, there are non-native species, but invasive Well, and you've got a predictive paradigm as to which ornamentals, for instance, are likely to escape from their ornamental status and become invasive versus stay in a garden and be just fine.
Yeah.
And I would also say that in traveling the world, the devastation of habitats that comes from invasive species is absolutely jaw-dropping.
My least favorite creatures on earth are probably trees in the eucalyptus family because they have absolutely devastated habitats in California, in fact all
Along the whole west coast of the U.S., the Andes are utterly transformed by them, where eucalyptus is everywhere, and the native trees that were there are found mostly in places where they've been cultivated.
It's so destructive.
Well, just to be clear, eucalyptus is native to Australia.
It didn't start out in the New World at all.
It was humans who brought it to the New World, and it spread so fast.
It spreads so it is simply a superior competitor and the I think the answer you're looking for whether you want to hear it or not is that the problem is There's a trade-off between competitive ability and dispersal ability.
And so the limits of where things are found are very often structured by that.
Very ferocious competitors are often limited in where they can get.
And so when we transport something like eucalyptus, what we're effectively doing is saying, let every habitat be dominated by the same critters.
And what that means is an overall loss in the diversity of critters around.
And I don't want to live in a less diverse world for lots of reasons, having everything to do with human utility and well-being.
I want to live in a highly diverse world.
And so if I want to live in a highly diverse world, um, invasive species are among the greatest threats because once unleashed, it's almost impossible to do anything about them.
If they're really good competitors like eucalyptus, then, you know, a single error where they get released is out of control almost instantly.
How does, how does fungi reprogram ant brains?
It's fun.
It's a good question.
I don't know how it does it.
I don't think anybody does.
But what I can say is that the real question is how do ant brains work?
So they have, don't they, a bunch of ganglia.
So they don't have a centralized brain.
They have, I think, Well, at the very least, they don't have something that we would all agree is a brain, but they do have neurological processing that results in coordinated behavior.
And in order to understand how a fungus intervenes to get a creature to behave in this way, you probably have to realize what heuristics are running about inside an ant's head, which I don't think we know.
But lots of, you know, to the extent that rabies causes You know, anger in an infected dog that causes the dog to behave in a way that spreads the rabies.
It's the same kind of process, but maybe it's easier to understand in a dog how you would trigger anger, because lots of things can fuse.
Because we know that mammals experience these kinds of emotions because we're mammals.
Yeah.
So it's harder to understand what seems like a complex behavioral response in an organism that we don't think of as having individually complex behavior.
Yeah.
All right.
Please, can you discuss... Sorry, I switched it out.
Please can you... Oh, same question.
No?
Okay.
The invasive species question again.
I think we did it.
Did you see the videos regarding Philly Metro personnel and security aggressively kicking people off for failure to wear masks?
This is from Jadis.
I apologize if I'm mispronouncing your name.
Someone we know on Twitter.
Didn't.
I didn't see these videos.
I didn't either.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know what to say I didn't see the video so I don't know whether it would be obviously beyond the pale or You know justified but I can say I have watched a radical transformation in how what percentage of people are wearing some kind of mask and I regard that as on the one hand very good news people are taking this seriously and on the other hand How many people are going to die because other people were afraid to stand out?
Right?
In other words, if you weren't wearing a mask because other people weren't wearing masks and you'd feel dumb wearing a mask, or somebody hadn't given you the kind of license you would need to innovate some kind of a mask, Then other people were put at risk and so what I hope is that next time we will remember that we all ended up wearing the masks and we will be able to jump to it and you know a lot of lives could be saved.
Yeah.
The biggest expert in a research area usually has the most motivation to dishonestly kill work that is disruptive.
True.
How is it that this obvious conflict of interest is overlooked when a paper is assigned reviewers?
Yeah.
Well let's just be clear.
Assigned reviewers is already the problem.
The idea that the field has the right to kill off concepts because they're not high quality doesn't make any sense.
It made sense maybe in a world where ink and paper were limited and you had to figure out on what to spend them, but we are now talking about pixels.
Pixels are not expensive.
If you want to put out an idea that everybody thinks is stupid, well, let's let you put it out, and if you turn out to be right a hundred years from now, we can come back to it and we can say, well, we got that wrong.
So where's the harm in it?
So let's just do the process of reviewing other people's work in public, where the people who turn out to be right, especially people who turn out to be right and way ahead of their time, are ultimately vindicated, and the people who we thought were experts who turn out to be wrong again and again and again stop being listened to.
So there are going to be one piece of pushback there.
It's going to be, you know, everyone complains about reviewer two, right?
Three papers, three reviewers, and it's always reviewer two who comes up with the most ridiculous arguments against the paper.
But in general, what those three reviewers, peer reviewers on any paper are supposed to be doing is looking at different aspects of the paper.
So if this is all to happen in public, Very few people have equal facility in, say, assessing whether or not the theoretical framework for a paper makes sense.
And this is actually building on the thing that the authors are claiming.
And whether or not the experimental design and the prediction and the hypothesis that is being tested is actually being tested with this experimental design, whether or not the predictions inherently follow from the hypothesis.
So that's a second realm.
Data analysis is a hugely technical realm and most of the people who can do that really well are statisticians who don't necessarily have the chops to do the hypothesis assessment and experimental design assessment and I would say you don't
It is useful to know that someone with the chops that you don't have has looked at a paper and said, yeah, that passes muster over in my end of things.
Especially now with the ridiculously complicated statistics that people are using often to cover their tracks, but sometimes because the data really do call for complicated statistics.
Yes, but again, and I really want to emphasize, if you have some kind of scientific background, whether it's formal or not, you just have an interest and you've spent some time thinking about it, check out what's going on with the papers that are emerging every day on COVID-19 and the lectures that are being delivered on YouTube by one professional to others.
This is happening in real time, and it's happening the way actual progress happens, which is to say people are disagreeing with each other in public.
They're taking a stand.
I believe that this disease is progressing this way because of these things that I've observed.
No, I've observed these other things.
And the point is, when it plays out in public like that, A, it has a much higher tendency to be honorable, where you're playing with your own reputation and you're saying, no, I think it's this way because of this thing.
Well, that's a risky position to take.
So anyway, I guess once you start doing this in private and you have reasons to, you know, you're engaged in quality control, I think it's very hard to rescue that system.
And the reviewers are anonymous.
Right.
So anyway, let's just do this in the open.
Can COVID be transmitted through farting?
I haven't heard anyone say that.
Mostly when people are farting in public, they've got something covering themselves.
But given that apparently it is in fecal matter and it can spread through air, I suppose so.
Yeah, I mean, let's put it this way.
You've set a kind of a low bar for, can it be?
Yeah.
Like, yeah, you could probably generate a scenario.
On the other hand, it's probably a pretty easy scenario to prevent from occurring very frequently.
Yeah.
Wear underwear.
Yes.
Hey guys, what do you think, why do you think anti-Semitism is so persistent?
It seems to be rearing its head again at both ends of the political spectrum.
Yes, it does.
Yep.
Yes, it does.
Yeah, I think...
Well, let's put it this way.
We don't really have the bandwidth to do this here, but I have talked elsewhere about the tendency of human populations to seek different kinds of growth, be it through the discovery of new lands, the discovery of technologies that allow you to do more with the lands you already have available to you, and when those things run out, our addiction to growth causes us to identify populations who can't protect, can't defend what they've got,
And to make up reasons to attack them and so basically Antisemitism comes down to the fact of Jews being an unusual population that lives at low density in many places It's a it's a diaspora population and not all of it obviously But a large fraction of it and so that large fraction is always vulnerable to the population that isn't Jewish Turning their, uh, or turning on them.
And so anyway, I think it, I've, my first evolutionary project actually was a paper arguing that, um, antisemitism, uh, evolves and that it has to be stopped.
That it's basically a rationalization for lineage against lineage genocide or warfare.
And, um, that it's frankly not that hard to understand.
Good.
We're going to try to be a little speedier here.
Speedier.
All right.
No more adverbs.
What are your thoughts on UBI and the issues it is trying to solve?
Are there alternative solutions to those issues?
Go.
All right.
UBI.
I am Annoyed that this couldn't be discussed ten years ago.
Somehow people had to, lots of us may have been involved in a discussion about the fragility of the system and the danger of people's incomes being dependent on certain things.
Suddenly UBI became discussable because people who were powerful started talking about it.
That's too bad that it required that, but okay.
I don't think it's a great solution.
I think it's a kludge, and it addresses a real problem, and it's better than no solution.
But I think we have to address the underlying issue that causes us to engage UBI as a solution.
And I must say, in the era of COVID-19, I think we are finally, we have a circumstance that is finally forcing us to understand that a system built around economic efficiency is a fragile system.
And, you know, so even the Trump administration is talking about a stimulus package in which they're going to infuse cash by delivering it to people who are now suddenly in dire straits.
So, you know, this has gone from an idea that was undiscussable almost anywhere to an idea that's being discussed, you know, at the head of the Republican Party.
So Anyway, let us learn the lesson of this so that we can get to a better discussion next time Which is if UBI is no good, what would be?
Good Nate writes again to say thanks.
That clears up my confusion of models a bit.
Good.
Welcome.
Total U.S.
deaths from flu and pneumonia the last bad flu year were about 65,000.
Deaths this year since COVID-19 from non-COVID flu and pneumonia effectively zero.
Not sure that's true, but lower than expected.
How?
Well, part of it is that social distancing for COVID-19 works just as effectively and probably more effectively against other viruses that don't have quite as high transmissibility.
So we're doing all of the things that we should have been doing all along, much more so, right?
But being very careful to wash our hands and think about putting our hands on our faces after we've been touching receipts and frequently used surfaces.
And the social distancing is far more than any society could put up with for years and years and years and years.
But maybe we can learn from this the parts of this that are not that hard to maintain and that would actually solve, save many many lives and also just many many sick days.
Yep.
You're here.
All right.
I'm being told, Zach, you forgot my two Super Chat questions from this week, being of chat, plus one from last week.
Thanks to you all, you are very inspiring.
We are now using an app which is doing it-- We're talking about ones from before the stream starts, but when it's up.
We don't log those.
Ah, OK.
I don't know if you guys could hear that.
If they show up before, what did you say?
Before we're live.
Before we're live.
Then they don't get logged by the app.
Apologies for that.
The character, oh, this is just a description.
The character limit is based on how much you pay in Super Chat.
$2.50 characters, $5.50 characters, et cetera.
OK, thank you.
The impact of the virus will more than likely be devastating to the existing economic model.
Could this crisis facilitate a radical rethink of the monetary system?
We were just there.
Yes, and it must.
It must.
If this isn't the wake-up call, then the wake-up call may be too devastating for us to recover from.
Yeah, exactly.
Love you too, Brett.
Your story on Eric's Chan was...
Heather, I was frustrated by the fact that nobody in the public sphere would speak of gametes.
You are the first person who ever used that word in public.
Presumably we're talking about what makes sex, what the actual most fundamental definition of biological sex is.
There are lots and lots of Indicators from primary and secondary sex characteristics to differences in brain structure to genitals to chromosomes in the case of mammals and birds and a few other organisms but it's gametes that's a distinction so thank you.
Gamete size and motility.
Yeah, so if you are a biologist in the field and you discover a new species and somehow you have no idea what's going on with it, and there's plenty of species out there where you can't tell phenotypically or behaviorally if they're male or female, if you find that one individual has gametes that are large-ish
Um, larger than average cells within that, within that organism, and sessile, don't tend to move, then that's a female you got on your hands.
And if you have gametes that are very small, stripped of cytoplasm, and tend to be speedy, at least in some parts of their life cycle, uh, there you have a male.
So sperm or pollen, um, being the animal and plant versions of the male gametes and eggs.
Being a female.
And yeah, it really does make it simple.
And it is just the fundamental underlying what the distinction is.
Let's see.
Is it possible to detect a less lethal mutation right now and try to purposefully spread that mutation?
This is in effect... I don't want to go that far.
I've been toying a lot with the question about sublethal infections here.
And one of the questions, which I really, I would love to hear somebody who's well versed in this, who knows the answer.
If it was true that infections that are asymptomatic are not destructive And not frequently transmitted, which is plausible because it is the destruction that causes symptoms and it is also it's the lesions that are spilling virus into your lungs or wherever.
That are causing the transmission.
So if it were true that an asymptomatic case was not destructive to your body, or not very destructive to your body, and not highly transmissible, then in effect it functions like a vaccine.
If on the other hand it is true... And the virus wins in a way.
It slows down its rate of spread, but it also never ends up in a host that dies.
Well, and this is, we've been saying since our first live stream that there tends to be an evolution towards a... Lower virulence.
A lower virulence, lower damage infection over time, and this would be that accelerating.
So, you know, the virus doesn't want to make you sick, it wants to be passed on, to the extent that want is a fair shorthand here.
And so to be passed on asymptomatically Would be fine, and anyway, there's a question about whether or not the host is the place where this evolution takes place, which I think in general that is, but there will also be some evolution on the part of the viruses, and to the extent that less lethal ones spread, it is likely to our benefit.
But, you know, I don't know where we are and I'd love to know what is true in these asymptomatic cases with respect to damage and further infections.
We need so much more information than we have.
Is hydrochloroquine, and I had said hydrochloroquine at one point, and I think it's actually hydroxychloroquine.
I think I said hydrochloroquine and you corrected me.
But in an earlier episode I think I said hydrochloroquine, so I may have put that in your head.
Is hydroxychloroquine used to essentially keep the body from burning itself up?
It regulates the immune system from swaying out of balance, correct?
I don't know that I would characterize it that way, but I don't know what exactly.
Either it tends to do in the case of malaria, nor do I know what it is, what we think its mechanism of action against COVID-19 is.
Yeah, I think that I want to look this one up and figure out if we can say something concise about it next time.
Okay.
Thanks Brett and Heather for the engaging content.
You're making the isolation very stimulating.
You're welcome.
Do you have plans for an evolutionary lecture series?
Maybe.
Yeah, I would say we have plans.
Probably after our book emerges, I think we will endeavor to put some flesh on those bones.
Yeah, good.
What about Wim Hof?
Voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system and attenuation of the innate immune response in humans as a method to not overreact to virus.
We got a couple of questions about Wim Hof, maybe the first Q&A that we did.
And neither of us looked into it afterwards.
We both had some exposure.
I looked into it a little, but not enough to say yet.
I'm still curious about what he's... Still a possibility.
And I think it is what Jamie Wheal let us in.
And he, Jamie, knows what he's doing.
And I trust that if he thinks that something is valuable, it probably has at least some value to it.
Yep.
Okay.
COVID released on purpose?
Says who?
Thanks.
I think what we said last time was that it seemed unlikely this was released on purpose and likely that this was released by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan.
Yeah, but it's open.
Yeah.
We don't know.
Does the current working assumption that this is not a bioweapon prevent treatment protocols to be more flexible and limit the research focus?
Thank you.
Prevent, treat my family.
My assumption from the beginning has been there comes a point if this was a weapon, then it would predict certain things about it.
But until we have evidence that positively suggests that it is actually a weapon, that it doesn't add anything, we would do the same thing at an epidemiological level.
Again, I want to see the evidence that says it's worth our time to pursue the, this is a bioweapon line of inquiry, and until I see that, my sense is I don't want to get distracted by it.
- Yeah, we're drowning in a sea of misinformation and under information and trying to imagine all the possible ways that, you know, like a switch could have been built into this if it was a bioweapon that could change what it's doing.
Like, who knows?
It's an infinite, it just opens up the possibilities to infinity and we already don't have enough, we already can't limit the degrees of freedom enough. - Yeah. - Watch all your vids, keep it up if you can.
Thank you.
Carbon monoxide therapy for COVID patients.
I can't find out if anyone has tried this clinically.
I was reading on the connection with malaria vaccines, they're not vaccines, and stumbled across fascinating legit research.
So again, if you are referring to fascinating legit research, link it here or find some other way to link it.
I don't know.
Carbon monoxide therapy seems... Sounds very dangerous.
My understanding is that carbon monoxide binds hemoglobin better than oxygen and CO2, thus displacing them.
So I can easily imagine you making a case of COVID-19 vastly worse.
On the other hand...
You would need to, I mean, if it was like a way of pulling out the hemoglobin that's been attacked and then simultaneous with blood transfusion from healthy...
Yeah, I wouldn't want anybody who didn't know what they were doing, experimenting with carbon monoxide.
Yeah.
Why isn't the Dorfman method used anywhere?
I don't I don't know.
Yeah!
I don't know what the Dorfman Method is.
Why isn't the Dorfman Method used anywhere?
What's the Dorfman Method, Brad?
What is the Dorf... I'm glad you... Well, no chalkboard.
Okay, I don't know what the Dorfman Method is, so it doesn't really matter even if we had a chalkboard.
Apologies, we don't know what it is.
Yeah.
Do you have the uncut Weinstein vs. Dawkins debate?
Pangburn version deceptively edits out all the parts where you school Dawkins.
Tons of missing film.
I don't think Pangburn did that intentionally.
Pangburn was, I believe, being a cheapskate and decided not to actually record the thing properly, and it was being recorded on a Handycam.
Now, if I had known that that was the case, I would have had somebody in the audience record it, but I didn't know that that was the case until a fragmented partial video was released, and so the only hope, I think, is The venue may have recorded it and I have called them up and tried to find out and I've gotten nowhere but If the Chicago Theatre has a copy maybe somebody here knows somebody at the Chicago Theatre who could Dredge it up.
I would be forever grateful.
Yeah, no, it'd be great.
We don't have it And as far as we know Pangbird doesn't have it either and no it doesn't it doesn't seem like that was intentional on his part Just cheapskatery.
Yeah Please read my two questions at the beginning of this chat.
We just don't have them, man, if they started before.
Regarding athletics and exercise, how does the impact of tearing down muscle apply to cellular senescence?
Does this speed up the aging process?
So, I think I know what this question is about.
There's long been evidence that athletic activity does not advance senescence, which is at first pass paradoxical because it involves some wear and tear.
On the other hand, muscle is an unusual tissue because it's multi-nucleate and so the tendency for cellular reproduction to run away in muscle, at least striated muscle, is greatly reduced But there may be other pathologies that look like it.
So I don't know the answer to the question, but let's just say first step would be recognizing that skeletal muscle is distinct in its cellular nature and therefore doesn't fit in the same trade-off matrix or doesn't fit in the same way.
All right.
Could you talk about Gilbert syndrome?
Why it was selected for and how it's linked to hemoglobin could relate to COVID-19.
Wow.
I don't know what Gilbert syndrome is.
I am far better versed in Sullivan syndrome.
Sorry, I don't mean to be dismissive.
No, we just wait.
I mean, that's just too very quickly that we don't know what it is.
Do antibodies after infection mean immunity?
Okay.
So this is written interestingly.
I don't know if you can see it.
Do antibodies after infection mean immunity over inability to infect others over inability to become reinfected?
I'm not- It's slashes, right?
Yeah, but there's also- It's all of these three things.
Fancy parentheses.
And the three things are- Immunity.
Immunity.
Inability to infect others, and inability to become reinfected.
Okay, I got it.
So, if you have antibodies after infection, does that mean these three things?
Does it mean you are immune, that you cannot infect others, and you cannot become reinfected?
We think so, yes.
Oh, it's not the antibodies.
Right.
If you test positive for a serology test slash antibody test, the presence of your antibodies indicate that.
Well, the presence of antibodies says you were exposed.
Yes.
Okay?
If exposure... And you had a strong enough immune response to produce antibodies.
Yeah.
If your immune response is the result of having been infected, what we assume, and I think now have pretty good evidence, we don't see a lot of double infections, people who recover and then get sick again.
We've seen none.
There are a couple of cases that Nicholas Christakis was talking about earlier on that he thinks were due to the problem of false negatives.
Right.
That people appeared to have been recovered, tested negative, and then tested positive again, but probably just had not recovered yet.
But the short answer is... Those aren't serology tests.
Those were antigen tests, PCR tests.
The mechanism is what are called memory cells, and at some point I think I'm going to put together a lecture on how the immune system works.
It's one of the most stunning things I've ever heard, and it's well worth exploring at an evolutionary level.
But the thing is, your body fights an infection.
As it's fighting, it has effectively an army of cells that are specifically targeted at the infectious agent.
And it fights this battle and eventually, if you don't die of it, it wins.
When it wins, that army edits down and you create what are called memory cells.
And these memory cells remember the formula for defeating that enemy.
And so if you are challenged with another particle, a viral particle that's close enough, then the infection never gets far enough for you to detect that you had another encounter.
So it's those memory cells that would do it.
So in order to get to the three things where you can't be infected again, you can't infect others.
And what was the third one?
And you are immune.
I guess, in some ways, that's the same.
Yes, the same thing.
One and three are the same thing.
So, the answer is, if the virus doesn't evolve too quickly, then probably having had it once is enough to prevent you from ever getting it again, because your memory cells will persist, and they will spot it the next time it shows up, and at the point that you fully recover, unless it's one of these viruses that retreats to some tissue, which I think we would also know that.
Already, you think?
Yeah, because I think we'd see some recurrences that wouldn't make sense.
Unless it's a longer-term re-emergence, the way that 5X malaria tends to hide in the liver for months or years.
Yeah, I don't think, but again, that's malaria, it's not a virus.
But there are viruses that do it, and I just don't know that we have seen a coronavirus that does this.
So in other words, it's resident in a population, but it's not that it hides in a tissue of an individual.
So, assuming you beat the pathogen, You're free of active particles hiding out in some tissue, and you have memory cells that can spot it, then all three of those conditions will obtain.
Which may actually be two conditions.
Yeah.
A study shows SARS-2 affects ACE2 in testes, decreasing testosterone.
With elderly, compromised, unhealthy, and dense groups, thoughts on depopulation?
Well, if it's affecting the elderly, it's not going to have much of an effect.
Yep.
And, you know, it does, it clearly is affecting, or it's killing men and making men at higher rates than it's killing women.
And it's making men sicker when they do get sick than it's making women.
But men aren't the limit on population size.
So it's unlikely to affect population.
Yep.
Clothes get darker when wet because of light trapping.
See DOI.
Also, is dyslexia an evolutionary adaptation?
All right.
Let's talk dyslexia.
Here's the thing.
Dyslexia is a kind of a garbage category that covers all sorts of things that interfere with what is considered normal reading.
In my opinion, it's not really a disability because reading is too new.
In other words, to say that somebody like me is... I'm not against being defective, but in this case, to say that somebody like me who has challenges when reading is defective It pays no heed to the fact that reading at a maximum goes back 8,000 years and wasn't a common feature of a human existence until a few hundred years ago.
And so we basically are not evolutionarily prepared for it.
So what I would say is it is a novelty problem where reading is novel.
You probably have a bell distribution of, you know, how good you are at reading.
And there's some arbitrary threshold at which we decide that your reading is compromised enough that you have A, uh, um, some kind of a failure, a system failure, but that that's arbitrary.
And my argument would be everybody's dyslexic when they're tired or their glasses are dirty, you know, or there's loud music playing, right?
There's lots of things that can interfere.
And some of us are just dyslexic at 12 point font under decent lighting.
And so it gets noticed.
And being imperfectly matched for the dominant paradigm forces you to do end runs around the dominant paradigm and thus find solutions elsewhere.
So, as we've talked about elsewhere, dyslexia is one of these.
I don't think of myself as doing end runs around the dominant paradigm.
I think of myself as running circles around the dominant paradigm.
Yes, you do.
And yes, you are.
Um, but autism spectrum, color blindness, left handedness, there are all sorts of these things where there is a dominant way of being.
And if you are somewhere outside of that dominant way of being, you're forced into solution making that looks different.
And it often ends up resulting in pretty heterodox thinking.
Can the Earth be considered an organism or superorganism from an evolutionary biological perspective?
Nope, it's too flat.
Can it be considered an organism?
No, it's not an organism.
Nope.
Nor is it a superorganism.
Nope.
Just like forests don't evolve, the earth doesn't evolve.
We have shared fate here on the earth, but that does not mean that it is an organism or a superorganism.
My previous question, and I don't know which that was, was intended to discover whether you believe it is possible that non-COVID flu and pneumonia deaths are being counted as COVID.
Oh yeah, it's possible.
I think there's not a ton of it probably going on, but it's certainly possible that some are, although... I think it's almost certain that some are, by virtue of the fact that you have everything through asymptomatic cases of COVID, and so people come into the hospital... If you test positive for COVID and you die, it's going to be classified as COVID.
But we don't know whether it's enough to make a dent in what we think is going on or if it's just a rare case, but it's certain not to be zero.
Right.
Good.
Is there a compromise between protection from COVID-19 while allowing the economy to work?
Perhaps continue telecommute, mask wearing, distancing in public places, but let work continue.
Yeah.
So far I see almost no economies, no nation-states making plans.
And there is reference to what South Korea did, which was pretty damn effective.
But there is such a paucity of testing in the US and Europe anyway.
That What are we supposed to do before we know what percentage of the populace?
Has been affected and therefore what the actual case fatality rate is.
Yeah, it's high transmissibility If the case fatality rate is ten times the flu, but not a hundred times the flu.
It's a totally different landscape have 2% of the US population at this point been exposed and infected?
Or 20%?
Or 50%?
We have no idea.
We've got to find out.
We've got to find out, and it seems like that just... I hate it when people make these arguments, but it just doesn't seem like it should be as hard as it seems to be.
Yes.
I would also say we should figure out how to be surgical about what work we stop and what work we allow, even if that doesn't come into play here, even if we were on the verge of a breakthrough.
And I must say, the vaccine, if it comes, is going to be a long way off.
I've now seen proper analysis that suggests that.
But Whatever the mechanism that gets us through COVID-19, this is probably not the last time we will face it.
And so figuring out how work continues without allowing an epidemic to continue spreading, as hard as it is to figure that out now, it's not going to get easier.
And this is our moment because we've already done a lot of the heavy lifting.
I don't know how other places, how other jurisdictions are defining essential services, but in Portland anyway, and I assume throughout the state of Oregon, hardware stores are open, nurseries are open, landscaping supply places are open.
And for us, this means that we're still stuck and there's a tremendous amount of restriction in terms of what we can do, but we are able to continue to do a lot of work in and around our house that could have easily been delayed for months or years.
And so, in what way is a nursery an essential service?
You can't make that argument from the perspective of, you know, I'll die if I don't have this plant.
On the other hand, for those people who do spend time outside and plant their own plants, it is potentially a difference between coming out of this psychologically intact and not.
How many more do we have?
We have... I see closer to ten, but maybe it's not.
Let's see.
Sorry, I'm trying to figure out where I was.
Previously, you spoke of COVID being able to switch its behavior to mutate more easily.
What possible mechanism could do this and be accurate?
Well, mutation generally isn't accurate.
Most of the mutations would cause it to fail, and then those very, very rare mutations that worked would be selected for and proceed.
Yep, a facultative program that allowed greater variation when something told some strain of the virus that it was in a cul-de-sac could be advantageous.
Not saying it happens, but it's possible.
Absolutely.
Can you explain if it is possible for the virus to have spread from a bat biting an animal that was then consumed by humans?
We don't know, but it's certainly plausible.
It's pretty unlikely.
For one thing, we're talking about a horseshoe bat.
But again, it might be zero, but it's possibly not zero.
Much more likely that a bat, I mean especially, if this thing is depleting oxygen capacity either by messing up the lungs or messing with the hemoglobin, a bat's going to suffer from that very quickly because of the way in which oxygen is used.
So a sick bat's not going to last very long unless this thing is at a really, really low level, which is also possible.
Or somehow it manifests quite differently in different hosts.
Yep.
In different host species, like it's always asymptomatic in bats.
Right, which is possible.
But I would also argue that that's going to come with low transmissibility.
You know, if the bat is... Yeah, the biting thing here.
Horseshoe bats don't tend to... a horseshoe bat biting a pangolin would be quite a natural history scenario.
Right.
On the other hand, falling out of the sky because it's sick and couldn't make it back and some animal trundling along and happening onto it is possible.
They do trundle, don't they?
They do.
On the other hand, the...
The wet market connection is looking very tenuous to me.
I started to do some looking into the distribution of bats around Wuhan.
I'm having trouble buying that this was the wet market.
I think it's much more likely the virology lab.
All right.
Interesting.
Please let us know Bye, thank you.
By the way, if you'll consider questions asked before live next time.
Okay, so we'll try to figure that out.
Sure.
It's not hard to do, I just didn't.
Okay, Zach says sure.
So we will do it next time.
Yes, we will.
Also, watch out for bots.
Thank you.
I don't know how to pronounce your name, Akko Furr.
The Dorfman method is group testing.
Combining samples to one repeat RP-CPR test?
Why isn't it used anywhere?
That gets us a little bit closer, but I still don't really know what it's referring to.
Sorry.
Thank you both for your work.
You're welcome.
Possible evidence of tissue retreat.
Okay, so there's a link here.
We'll take a look.
Three more questions.
Can you guys give us a tour of your house video?
We don't have a house video.
And if we did... It would be on VHS and you'd just, like, look at it.
There you go, yeah.
I don't know, that's kind of a frightening prospect, but we'll think about it.
Yeah, maybe we'll give you a tour of three corners.
Three well-chosen corners of the house.
Confusing question from episode four.
Could an organism carry a benign virus that kills predators?
Any known examples?
Presumably the virus would function like toxin.
Yeah, I don't know of any examples of this.
I will repeat what I said last time, which is that the problem with this as an evolutionary mechanism is that the best deal, if you had a virus that predators Feared rationally, let's say.
You would have to have some sort of an advertisement that you had the virus in order for predators to know to avoid you.
But then the best deal is to use the advertisement and not have the virus at all.
And so, until you can get an honest advertisement of the virus, I don't see how it could evolve.
Yeah.
Okay, two more questions and then we are done.
Do you believe that Homo sapiens are the final carbon-based life form in our evolutionary lineage?
Well, yes, unless we figure some shit out pretty quickly here.
Yeah, and we could declare ourselves, you know, we could declare our children a new... The problem is the term species has these two different meanings, right?
And so Creatures in a sequence are different.
We can declare our kids a new species because it's not the same criteria you would use to separate two bat species, let's say, two co-existing bat species.
Yeah, but he says in our evolutionary lineage.
He makes a point of not saying species.
Right, but that's my point.
Our lineage is continuing at least another generation.
Yeah.
So I don't know how to answer the question.
Okay.
One more question.
Is it possible that the functionality of the memory cells is being hijacked by COVID and causing them to initiate hemolysis?
That's how that's pronounced, right?
Hemolysis?
Subsequently releasing ferritin and kicking off an IL-6 cytokine storm.
Well, the cytokine storm has been observed as a, I don't know what the proper term would be, but a major correlate of the worst cases of COVID-19.
Yeah.
You want to define it?
I don't want to define it because I will screw it up and then I will end up having to make another correction next time.
So, cytokine storm, yes.
As for the several links in the chain you described, don't know enough to say.
I will say that there are two possibilities.
What was I reading?
It had to do with whether or not COVID-19 was attacking the immune system, which would be a very frightening prospect.
That's what AIDS does.
HIV attacks the activated T cells.
And then the alternative possibility was Don't have it.
I don't have it.
But it looked like it was not attacking the immune cells specifically.
So, you know, who knows?
That evidence will develop.
Again, I've now got a bunch of things I need to look into, but I will see if I can't come up with the particular paper I was looking at and pass it along next time.
Okay, one more question and then we're out.
All right.
Has any of you, have any of you spoken with Paul Stamets?
Could mushrooms play a role in resolving COVID-19?
No one by reputation, but not the man.
Yeah.
Don't know if he's working on something.
He's a fellow greener, though.
He's a, he is a fellow greener.
Fellow greener.
So anyway, yeah, I don't know.
He seems to find mushrooms have utility in lots of things.
So I wouldn't be altogether shocked.
But anyway, Paul, if you got something, contact us.
That's right.
All right.
All right.
Well, this has been harrowing with all of the technical failures.
Thank you for sticking with it.
And I think we will try to compile these together in some way.
We will upload a final with all of them together or a pair.
In any case, we will edit out the catastrophes.
We will see you next time.
Hopefully, we'll have our technical difficulties ironed out fully by then.
We'll be back on Tuesday, 3.30 p.m.
Pacific.
Okay.
▲
Export Selection