In this 45th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world though an evolutionary lens. Find more from us on Bret’s website (https://bretweinstein.net) or Heather’s website (http://heatherheying.com).Become a member of the DarkHorse LiveStreams, and get access to an additional Q&A livestream every month. Join at Heather's Patreon. Like this content? Subscribe to the channel, like this video, follow us ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 4500. welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 4500.
Hard to believe it's number 45 already.
With time standing still, how have we done so many live streams?
Boy, it is hard to imagine.
It is hard to imagine.
I found myself tweeting about where we were in history and claiming that it was still August, even though we were nearly halfway through September at the time.
But I'm not embarrassed.
I'm just, I'm going with it.
Yeah, I feel like our particular situation here and personalities and living situation allowed us to get through lockdown, which is still persisting with a fair bit of grace, but the effective lockdowns that the fires have caused now in the Pacific Northwest are actually really doing a number on both of us.
Being actually forced to stay inside and still having air quality inside begin to decay because no building is completely smokeproof is, well it's actually, it's exhausting on top of everything else.
It's actually tiring to feel this kind of trapped.
Yeah, it's both physically tiring.
I have a feeling that, you know, I feel I'm doing better with the smoke than I would have expected, but it's beginning to be physically tough to just deal with it day after day.
But also, you and I have obviously been talking about the fact that we were lucky to be locked down as the weather was getting nicer and the days were getting longer.
Yeah.
And we were fearing what would happen when winter drove people indoors and the fires have created a little taste of what that will be like.
And I must say, it really does increase the challenge so much because the loophole in COVID was that outdoors was safe.
Well, this is, I mean, this is, I think, worse, because going outside, even when you're masked, and you know, we don't have surgical masks, so it might be better if you actually had an N95, but your lungs and sinuses start to hurt pretty quickly at this level of smoke, at least for us, and so One of the beautiful things about the Pacific Northwest is that basically you can dress for almost any weather condition and go out in it.
Most of those weather conditions won't be your preferred weather condition, but you can deal with it.
This actually just doesn't allow for that.
I saw something on one of my weather apps today that I actually hadn't seen before.
I've seen dense fog advisories.
We've had now for days apparently a dense smoke advisory.
We've got our wildfire evacuation zone here in Portland is getting downgraded, which is to say that the areas in Clackamas County that are in the sort of get ready to evacuate zones are receding somewhat, but the fires are still completely uncontained.
And the rain, the promised rain didn't come and hopefully it will come soon, but it sort of, it feels like this, this endless, endless awfulness.
The difference between this and early COVID lockdown is you look out the window and you see sort of this yellow toxicity in the air.
Yeah, I looked at the weather app, Dark Sky, and it said, winter is coming and full of terrors, which I thought suggested a not too careful reading of Game of Thrones at the very least.
Yeah, absolutely.
But yeah, it's really tough and it's day after day.
It really has taken even the strange way that time was proceeding before the fires and Seemingly grounded to a halt, just it constantly looks the same out the window and very bleak.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So for those of you not in the Pacific Northwest, congratulations.
Good on you.
And for those of you who are, I expect you know exactly what we're talking about.
This is different from anything I've experienced before.
I did want to start today by just doing a little follow-up on, you know, we spent almost all of last episode talking about the fires and the human history with fires and the American West's history with fires.
And I wanted to do a little follow-up on that and a little follow-up on the other thing we talked about in the last episode, which was the Netflix distributed film Cuties.
Okay.
And then get into all sorts of other stuff, including, I promise we're going to talk about virgin birth and snakes before the end of the hour.
I mean, when don't we?
I tend to, a fair bit.
Yeah.
Okay.
Let's see, one thing I wanted to say is that the lead author on one of the papers we talked about last time, which found, let me pull this up, which, oh, this is the paper that looked at fire climate interactions in the American West for the last over 600 years.
And was doing this, you know, very nuanced, careful analysis of the factors and the factors leading to the particular moments of high fire activity has now published a really good op-ed.
The woman's name is Valerie Truitt.
I did not look up how to pronounce it.
Zach, you could show this just briefly.
And The Guardian.
The Guardian is as woke on the other side of the pond as The New York Times is on this side of the pond by a lot, but this is quite a good op-ed.
I think because this researcher, I think she's a dendrochronologist, so her background is specifically in looking at tree rings and assessing not just age, but climatic and weather events from tree rings.
She argues here, as she did with her co-authors in this 2010 paper, and has presumably many times since, as we did in our last episode, against the 20th century regime of fire suppression in the American West, and for what we were calling following, I believe it was like a 1991 paper or something, Pyrodiversity, which I just kind of like the term, and so I want to keep saying it.
The idea being that more types of smaller, more heterogeneous fires in the American West, and presumably anywhere where there is a normally recurring fire regime, will actually increase lots of things around ecosystem health, but specifically the measure that I found evidence for was biodiversity.
I'm not buying this pyrodiversity thing at all.
Really?
I'm not falling for it this time.
I'm going for pyroequity.
That's what I want to see.
Oh no!
Yes.
So all fires have equal outcomes?
Is that what we're shooting for?
No, I don't.
I think it's more like the burning of white people.
I don't know, but something good.
And the conversation grinds to a halt.
We're only minutes in.
Only minutes in.
So one of the things she says in this very good op-ed in The Guardian is, we cannot reverse the anthropogenic heat and forest drought situation that we have created, by which she's referring to climate change, that portion of the increased fires in the American West that are attributable to climate change.
She says we cannot reverse that situation, at least in the short term.
But we can aim to reverse the effects of our century-long fire deficit.
I think this is exactly the kind of analysis that we need.
She's not pretending that long-term we don't have the ability to, nor do we And we have the need to actually address the anthropogenic climate change, the 30-50% by the numbers that I was finding and reporting on last time of the increased fires in the West that are attributable to anthropogenic climate change, but there's an awful lot left that needs to be explained.
Some of it is there will always be fires, but all fires are not created equally, of course.
The sheer, the rapidity of the spread of these fires and the absolute terrifying damage and death that they have wrought is not a normal feature of an American West burning as far as we can tell either in modern times or from like tree ring and pollen core studies.
So, um, there are a number of ways to look at this.
One, I would say, I saw this article, I also saw there was one in ProPublica earlier this week, um, with the title something like, given that we know how to stop these fires, um, why don't we?
Yeah.
And I read it and it mirrored almost exactly the perspective that we advanced off the cuff on our last live stream, which was, you know, reassuring.
Um, it did It was off the cuff for you, but I had done some preparation.
You had done some preparation.
But in any case, the problem here is that we are again wandering into a politicized landscape which makes it impossible to do what needs to be done.
So at some level, we're looking for an analysis that says something like the following.
We have an entirely anthropogenic problem.
Some of that anthropogenic problem can be addressed with solutions that we have, and some of it is now outside of our control.
To the extent that we have altered the climate, that is not something that we have the technology to unalter at the moment.
To the extent that we have altered The key question is one of equilibrium.
of fire suppression, we do have the ability to address this.
Yes.
And again, as I said in our last live stream, the key question is one of equilibrium. - Yes. - If you think about the fuel that ends up accumulating, if you prevent fuel from burning off, it accumulates on the forest floor or as decaying biomass, it accumulates on the forest floor or as decaying biomass, And then when a fire does come, it's hotter and bigger than it would otherwise be.
It may take out species that are otherwise built to deal with fire.
And so the real question is, how much stuff has built up ready to burn?
And if you are removing one of the processes that eliminates that stuff, then you will have a disproportionately large amount of it, which will cause an ecologically unusual Phenomenon.
So you have to get back to equilibrium somehow, or you have to set an equilibrium that you now know how to manage.
There's no two ways about this.
Yeah.
No, I agree with this.
The only issue I would take with what you just said is that you led with, we have an entirely anthropogenic problem.
And I'm not sure by what analysis you arrived there.
You know, the West Coast of North America, unlike the East Coast for instance, Tends to burn regularly, even absent modern levels of population density, industrialization and agriculture.
And it seems even before there were people, you know, the pre-Columbian people, the first Americans were here setting regular fires to do a kind of a landscape management.
You know, we have pollen cores going back, if memory serves, from the last livestream, like 200,000 years, and there have been regular fires.
Of course.
This is exactly what I'm saying.
So, obviously, fire in the American West is not entirely an anthropogenic problem.
The problem is that the disaster is anthropogenic.
Fire is natural.
And the point is, what does fire look like under normal circumstances?
Well, it looks like a pattern in which you get chaotic sparking from lightning, primarily, That results in places that have accumulated more fuel being more likely to catch fire, and then it's spreading to a point and burning out.
And is it that California would catch fire?
No, it's never been that way.
Pieces of California will catch fire, while others have so recently caught fire that they're not vulnerable anymore.
And so what you get is a natural patchwork dynamic in which the ecosystem, the species that are in the location are adapted to the fire regime, because the fire regime has existed for millions of years.
Everything functions this way.
You walk in, it can't be exactly like that anymore.
But the naive thing is to assume that you can just simply intervene and bend it to your will.
And the answer is nature bats last, right?
It has the capacity to, you know, yes you can suppress fire for a hundred years and then what happens?
Then you have these mega fires that you can't manage, right?
So what we need to do is Recognize that the wise approach is the one that disrupts the regime that functions as little as possible, which doesn't mean zero.
But the ProPublica article mentioned all of the stuff we talked about.
It mentioned the fact that sprawl is causing a problem, the fuel load is causing a problem.
And I should say, the president said something crazy about trees exploding, which he got dragged for on Twitter.
But in some sense, what he was struggling to articulate was this point about fuel buildup.
Trees exploding?
Okay.
Well, he said something crazy and, you know, true to form, it was sort of off-the-cuff nonsense.
I think I'm going to remain blissfully unaware of the specifics.
Perfect.
Well, anyway, what he was talking about was the accumulation of fuel and its impact on fire regimes.
And so the point is, you know, everybody's aware of this problem.
At what point are we going to modernize our approach?
Yeah.
All right.
Well, one more thing to say about fires to follow up from last time is, There's an observation from some Zoom Earth real-time satellite images.
Zach, if you would show the screen.
This was sent to us by a listener with considerable background in this kind of in this kind of analysis, and said, just take a look, this person said, just take a look at what the fires in the Pacific Northwest, specifically in Oregon, look like from the beginning of September.
And so, without saying anything more about that, I'm just going to move through September 1st.
All the little red things are, you know, fires, obviously, and we've got cloud cover, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, now we've got smoke as well as the atmospheric stuff, 13th, 14th, 15th, and that gets us to today.
So, let me just go back to the 7th, where for those listening only and not watching, you see some fires scattered throughout the Pacific Northwest in eastern Washington, looks like the Okanagan in Central Oregon, a few little ones in Oregon, and some certainly up in sort of Trinity Alps area and such in Northern California.
And then you go one day forward, and suddenly we've got a tremendous number of fires.
And roads aren't on here, but to anyone familiar with the Pacific Northwest, That looks like a line of fires along the five, along the interstate five to me, and I'm not saying that is what it is.
I have not mapped this onto the five, nor can we say at this point for sure what exactly is going on, but we know We know for sure that at least some of the fires that have been happening in the Pacific Northwest in the last couple of weeks were arson, were human set, were intentional.
And the fact that you have a sudden upsurge in the fires all along a line that is easy to access on one day is certainly suspicious.
And what we see is what looks like sort of a knee-jerk rejection of the idea that any of the fires are arson from the official sources, at least in the state of Oregon.
Which, you know, given how busy everyone is right now, the idea that effective analysis has already been done and they can completely rule out arson for any of these strikes me as itself an indicator that perhaps something is being covered up.
So let's just do this correctly.
There are processes that could associate fires with roads that have nothing to do with arson.
For example, people sometimes pull a car onto a median that has grass and the hot exhaust of the car can catch stuff on fire.
It's usually completely obvious when this has happened.
In general, these things, you know, catch grasslands on fire and they're quickly put out, but not always.
And there was a severe wind event that was happening.
There was a severe wind event.
There are, of course, you know, people find patterns and of course it could be that, you know, the pattern was the wind regime which dried things out and then, you know.
A lot of cars that broke down and got the grass hot under them and set fires that otherwise wouldn't have become raging inferno.
Yep, or sparks that would not have ordinarily triggered fires, might under those unusual conditions from many sources have produced fires.
Could be accidents, I mean people don't fling cigarette butts out the window the way they once did from their cars, but things like that.
So there's lots of stuff that could create a pattern, including it could be random and look like a pattern to us, you know, because sometimes random points line up.
On the other hand, what I think we do know is, and I thought a little bit about your term, knee-jerk rejection of the idea that these fires were intentionally set, and I've gone both ways on it and thinking about it.
I think what we have is an environment in which the claim that a fire started with arson is now a political claim.
That's right.
And because it is a political claim, this isn't even knee-jerk, suggesting uninvestigated.
That's right.
This is an automatic... It's tribesmanship.
It snitches.
It's tribal.
And the problem is, you can't run a society this way.
You cannot have a disagreement over facts because the facts point in an inconvenient political direction.
And of course we've seen this many times.
We've seen it with climate change and other such things.
And, you know, very frequently people like you and me who reason from first principles and try to do so, you know, soberly with a scientific background are often caught In between the two camps, right?
You and I fall out in the anthropogenic climate change camp, but we're no fan of the models that are usually used to defend this position, right?
So, and you know, there's Or the, you know, we're scientists, trust us, do what we say because we're wearing the right clothes and have the right degrees approach, which is itself, of course, you know, leading by authority, which is just a step away from authoritarian approach, which is anti-scientific.
Right.
And so at some level, the...
We are staring at the collapse of civilization from no cause greater.
You don't need anything more than the simple agreement to take the facts and capture them for your side.
That's sufficient because that will collapse Medicine, it will cause economics to fall apart or to serve one side at the expense of another.
You cannot have a situation in which we can't at least agree on what took place before we get around to arguing what to make of it.
And the idea that we are living in a state in which fires are raging out of control, health is severely compromised, and There is any possibility that we would even have to worry that we were being protected from the information that fires were the result of arson is already evidence that we are in a just a dire scenario.
Yeah, that's right.
Even if they're not arson, we want to know that that idea has been fully vetted before it's been rejected.
And we know that in some cases it's unambiguous, right?
We can see on Twitter evidence of fireworks associated with certain fires where citizens put them out.
So yeah, man, how did we end up here?
Yeah, that's some of what we're trying to talk about and figure out, isn't it?
But let's pivot, if we can, because there's a lot of stuff not related to what we talked about in the last episode that we want to talk about.
But I did want to spend a moment returning to this Cuties film, which we watched the night before our last live stream, and we talked about it, and we are not fans.
Afterwards, I watched a Excellent.
And many viewers will be familiar with it.
An excellent six minute, um, Zach, if you would just show the super, super briefly and then take it off.
Um, let's see, let me take it back to the beginning.
You weren't quite there.
So this is, um, okay, you can take it off now so that I can talk again.
Um, This is a six minute video interview with the writer-director of Cuties, Maimouna Doucouré, I think is how she was pronouncing her name.
And it's really exquisite.
She compels me that as you were arguing in our discussion of the film, That the message is not, that the message that she was trying to convey is not that this hypersexualizing of preteen girls is an apt response to the disempowerment and desexualization of a traditional Islamic household.
That is not an honorable thing.
She finds problems in both approaches.
And as I said then, it's no more empowering of women to do what is being depicted in this film than to have to hide under a burqa your entire adult life.
So I was compelled by her.
She's clearly an extremely smart, beautiful woman who's pulling a lot of what she's talking about in this film from what she's seen in her own life, and she interviewed a lot of preteen girls herself in Paris, immigrants from Senegal.
And so, you know, that all suggests that this work had a lot of work behind it, this art had a lot of work behind it, but she doesn't achieve what she tried to do, and the ends don't justify the means.
So I wanted to say, you know, I recommend watching her 6-minute video interview, while I don't recommend watching the film.
And it reminded me, I've seen people defending the film.
I've seen a lot of people rejecting the film on social media, and I suspect that they haven't seen it.
I've similarly seen a lot of people defending the film on social media, and I sort of suspect that many of them haven't seen it.
And I suspect actually that if you'd seen the six minute video, as opposed to the clip of the girls twerking, and that was all you had seen, you would find it very easy to get slotted into one of these positions or the other.
And that frankly, the sort of intelligentsia on the left is much more likely to be compelled by this You know, beautiful and eloquent and smart filmmaker speaking for six minutes about her intentions than other people might be.
So I was reminded of actually just my first first two years in college when I was a literature major before I ran away precisely because of the kinds of conversations that were happening that they were That there was just no way to assess the validity of the narratives that were being put forward to explain what we were reading in these clearly fictional narratives.
So the discussions, this would have been back in the late 80s, surrounded around whether or not we should assess art on its own, or if we needed to include an awareness and an analysis of the creator and his or her intentions in the art.
And broadly speaking, this is a sort of a brand of theory called historical biographical criticism, and it is a critical method that, and here I'm quoting Wikipedia, the excellent source, that historical biographical criticism is a critical method that sees a literary work chiefly, if not exclusively, as a reflection of its author's life and times.
That is, you cannot be expected to actually take the art and assess the art on its own.
You have to wrap it up in all of its context.
And to that I would say I'm often, you know, most people are often interested in the backstory of the creator of a piece of work or to read an artist statement if it's available, right?
But it shouldn't and it can't be critical to interpreting the art.
The art must stand on its own.
And the idea that, especially when we have a piece of art that looks like this, the idea that you have to include the intentions of the creator in your assessment of whether or not it's an honorable thing to be out there, I think is exactly wrong.
So, I've seen it argued that there was no intention that this was sexually exploitative, and therefore it's not, right?
And I don't buy that.
Now, neither of us are calling this porn, so we don't have to go there.
But we did, and we are calling it sexual exploitation of preteen girls, both of the actresses and potentially leading to more of the same by people watching it.
And the fact that the intention might have been in fact the opposite by the creator doesn't actually change the fact of the art itself.
Well, I'm not 100% convinced that the background of the maker can never be required for the art to be interpreted, so I'm just imagining that there's certain things There's certain things that require standing.
In other words, if a Holocaust survivor wants to make a piece in which they humanize a guard in a concentration camp, that's very different than if some person with no connection decides to do it.
And so I'm not saying that the art shouldn't be able to stand on its own, but I'm saying that in that case, the context might allow me to engage the art openly.
It might allow a window into it.
It might allow you to approach it in a way that you would not otherwise choose to approach it.
And I think that sounds completely valid to me.
I guess in this case, I worry that this will do that job.
Oh.
Right?
That we did watch it.
We did not speak publicly about it before we had actually seen the film.
And, you know, in many ways it was, you know, beautifully done, but the girls are heavily sexualized.
And, you know, even if it's only those four child actors, even if that's the only effect, it's too much.
It's too much.
And, you know, your point last episode was if this were a book, that would be a different situation.
Right.
Because you could explore something without anybody being hurt.
Yeah.
Now, in this case, I think if we're, you know, now that we know that, you know, based on your viewing of this six minute piece, that my interpretation of that last scene, which is too brief to make its point is actually the right one, that actually she's judging both these things, both the overly restrictive, you know, Muslim upbringing and the overly Liberated, which isn't even the right word, but sexualized Western alternative.
She's judging both of them, which I actually think is a very important point.
But what happened here is a perfectly predictable Western tragedy, which is that this person who has standing sees a problem.
Delivers a film and it is, two things happen.
One, it is co-opted by a very Western entity, Netflix, right?
Which sees this as a much, as a very saleable property precisely for the, you know, it invalidates half of the filmmaker's point in order to sell this thing.
This is a small art film.
It's not that Netflix distributing it was a fail.
That was potentially a huge win, but allowing them to do the marketing once they had signed on to the distributing.
Which clearly did indicate exactly the fail that you're talking about.
Right.
And frankly, I think the only reason that Netflix gives a shit about this film, which they clearly did, was that they could use it for an ironic purpose, which was to capture an awful lot of attention either because of the controversy or because they had these sexualized girls, you know, and that that should sell even though it shouldn't sell, right?
Netflix, what it did is despicable.
It creates a lens through which most people arrive at the film, which will cause them to get the wrong message out of it, which will cause, you know, so it distorts the film.
And the other thing, which I think is even more frightening, is that Because we live in a culture that is constantly pushing youthful female sexuality to sell everything, right?
Because that's the lens that is being imposed on society by marketers.
Um, and presumably people who sell porn, right?
That lens means that this film, which is supposed to repulse you with the sexualization of these young girls, doesn't work that way for the whole audience.
There's some fraction of the audience that finds it positive and therefore gets entirely the wrong message from the film.
So, um, you know, that is, uh, it's an incredibly revealing phenomenon that this film has created.
Well, you know, in addition to the phenomenon that you point out, which is that anyone and everyone considers themselves an expert on this film, whether or not they've seen anything beyond the poster.
Right.
Right.
So, yeah, this one way or the other, this film seems to reveal a tremendous number of failings in our system.
That's right.
You know, what to do about it is a question, but obviously the market didn't solve problems here.
The market created many problems.
Yes, yes.
All right, well, um, lots of other places to go.
We could, uh, we could rip the New York Times to shreds.
Oh my god, you mean physically, or?
I didn't bring it.
No.
No, I just have to be with words.
Let's do it metaphorically.
You want to start there?
Why not?
Okay, so let's see if I can pull this up.
Hold on, where did it go?
Okay, Zach, would you show this?
This is from the Sunday, this last Sunday's New York Times, the front page, very front page, September 13th, 2020, has this graphic for those of you who are listening, not watching.
Biden stays ahead.
Joe Biden is leading among likely voters in four swing states, including one Donald Trump narrowly won in 2016.
And it would appear to be a simple graphic.
It would appear to be deeply quantitative, wouldn't it?
Just like looks like numbers and therefore you can trust them.
Because once it's numbers, once it's been counted, it's got the stamp of authority on it.
So what we have is the results of a poll from September 2020, and in four states with Biden leading in all of them.
And we are, the New York Times is comparing that to the results from 2016 in which, um, in which, well, it doesn't even matter in which.
Sorry, I got distracted there looking at these numbers, as one does.
That is not the comparison that this calls for.
In what world does it make sense, actually?
to compare the results of a poll in September 2020 to the actual election results following the 2016 election.
What I want to see, and what would actually have been worth noting and looking at and considering, is the results of a September 2020 poll compared to the results of a September 2016 poll.
If you want to also include the 2016 results, okay, and then you can also compare those not just to what people are thinking right now, but to how people either changed their minds in two months in 2016, or lied to the pollsters, because we know there was a lot of that.
The polls, one way or another, were really, really inaccurate in 2016.
So we are being asked to compare a poll.
Why do we think those are more accurate now?
I think, if anything, they're less accurate.
We're being asked to compare the results of a poll to actual election results and not being given the actual item that we should be comparing to.
This is a kind of enumeracy, and it's hard to name because it's like a category error.
But this is, and I fear, actually, and I know for sure, that there are many practicing scientists out there who don't understand statistics well enough to understand what things need to be compared when they're actually employing even basic statistical tests, and therefore you can't trust their results because they haven't compared the right things.
Sorry, I'll stop.
You're looking at me like, is she ever going to stop?
I'm troubled that you're not going to use the obvious fruit analogy.
Fruit, yes.
They've compared apples to oranges.
You're supposed to say that, and I'm supposed to push back and say no, they've compared apples to apples, but in the sense of having compared a Granny Smith to an iPhone X.
Yeah, there's a reason I don't say they've compared apples to oranges in front of you, because you always do that sort of thing.
Because you know that I will do that sort of thing.
Yes, now this is absurd.
This is the New York Times engaged in the construction of fictional narrative using pseudo-quantification.
By comparing two things that are not in and of themselves comparable They have created the impression of a story that is going to unfold.
In other words...
Biden is going to beat Trump, because if we look at the, you know, the past example, it tells us that we're actually ahead of where we would have been.
I'm speaking from their perspective, but that we're ahead of where we would have been in 2016, which is not the case.
Right.
So... I don't actually know.
I mean, I assume that, you know, we, quote unquote, are not, you know, of course, what we hear is the New York Times speaking for the Democrats, because the New York Times has just stopped pretending that it's anything but, you know, the voice of the DNC over in political space.
But, you know, if I had to guess, my guess is that those numbers would look kind of similar for Clinton for a 2016 poll as they do for Biden for a September 2020 poll, if I had to guess.
Not that I have access to those data, because the New York Times decided to show something that is not actually comparable.
So, I want to confess something.
Do it.
I am not innumerate, but I looked at this, and the first pass at this chart succeeded in misleading me.
I believed that they were making an apples-to-apples comparison.
The proper apples-to-apples comparison.
See, now you've done it to yourself.
Apples-to-apples.
I have done it to myself, which is only fair.
But you were tricked.
You were fooled.
I was tricked because I was only dedicating part of my mind to looking at this and just trying to extract the data, which is, you know, look, if you have a newspaper that honestly reports, there's something to be said for the ability to quickly look at a presentation, a chart or something, and derive meaning from it.
And the problem is now we're in the situation where it's like, You have to, you know, consider the source and what kind of scrutiny and skepticism you have to deploy in order to correct for the biases, and it's just not workable.
No.
No, it's not.
So, that's kind of all I have on that.
Yeah.
It wasn't even embedded in the story.
It was just a little graphic that purports to tell you something that it actually doesn't tell you.
Well, I would add one thing here, not so much about the publication or this particular duplicitous graph or chart, but the fact is, if you increasingly have been asked about how to deal with the vagaries of the moment, and one of the things that is absolutely high, maybe top of the list, is that you have to tune into
Sources that you're not supposed to be looking at right so that you can correct for the biases of each one This is a very important skill under the best of circumstances, and we're not in the best of circumstances We're in circumstances where you can't even reconcile perspectives from different sources but the Where was I headed?
Damn, I have lost my train of thought has anyone seen my train of thought I Man, that is unlike you two.
That is, I suspect that is smoke talking and not anything you've inhaled intentionally for fun.
No, nothing that I have inhaled intentionally.
We were talking about the New York Times, the correcting for the biases, and I don't have it.
It'll be back in a minute.
I swear it.
Well, this might be a place to go next.
Scientific American has, for the first time in their 175 year history, endorsed a presidential candidate.
And of course they've endorsed Joe Biden.
And they say, Oh, you know what?
They've changed their headline, I believe.
I thought that it had said that this was a life or death moment, but I'm not seeing that here now.
So either I imagine that or they have in fact changed their headline sometime over the last several hours, which is quite possible.
I guess that's the hazard of doing this from a live webpage.
Yeah, that's right.
I didn't screenshot it.
Here we go.
So they say a bunch of things about Trump, some of which I think are true.
The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September.
Certainly inept, and I think probably dishonest in many ways as well.
I think it was the low point of his presidency in many, many regards.
Scientific American says he, meaning Trump, has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges.
Yep.
I mean, he's out there with his sword sort of slashing at whoever irritates him in the moment.
I'm sure that's happened in all those cases.
That is why, Scientific American continues, we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to protect our health, our economy, and the environment.
These and other proposals he has put forth can set the country back on course for a safer, more prosperous, and, wait for it, more equitable future.
Equity.
Equity.
There it is, rearing its ugly little head.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I also question that Biden has put forth any proposals recently.
Well, I agree.
He's not running on anything positive.
There's also- No, I just don't think that he's- Right.
He's not running.
He's not the one leading.
I would agree.
He's also played games with all of these claims about racial injustice and all of these things, which are- Yeah.
For whatever reason very difficult to demonstrate scientifically and so this is not a simple puzzle of one of these parties being The proper defender of science or anything like it, right?
I did recover my train of thought I knew I would and by the way I have a little trick for how you do that Which is why I don't tend to get too lost on these things You're going to say the thing and then you're going to give us the trick?
Yeah, I am.
So the thing was that I am hearing from the different places that I am tuned in, some of which are places that I find simpatico and other places are ones that I find frightening in one way or another, but I am hearing Totally divergent narratives about where we are in terms of who's ahead, how far ahead, and what's coming.
You're talking about the presidential race in particular.
Yes.
In other words, I think, especially if I listen to Democrat space, there is an all out push to sell the idea that Biden is clobbering Trump by the numbers.
Now, mind you, that was exactly what we heard in 2016.
It couldn't be more similar, actually.
It's amazing.
I know you're going someplace and we don't want you to lose this again, but I bought it in 2016.
I and many, many, many people were shocked when we woke up the day after the election.
Could not believe it.
Like really thought it was an impossibility.
Yeah, I bought it in spite of myself.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, yes, in spite of some of us it was in spite of ourselves, but I really believe it to be true.
They're saying exactly the same stuff.
And then they're putting things like this graphic in the New York Times in which they're making false comparisons and acting like they're the right ones.
Well, why do we think this is any different?
Right.
And, I mean, the thing is, we know in retrospect what the problem was in 2016, which was that there was noise in the data that came from people not being honest with those who were taking the polls.
So what you would want if you were going to do the analysis and say, oh, this time the Democrats really are ahead, you would want to know why this circumstance was less prone to that noise.
I have it.
The reason that the polls this time were more reliable than last time.
Is that the culture of fear that was predominating in the country in 2016 has disappeared.
There's no more fear.
We no longer have any of that.
We have achieved the inclusive and equitable society that the people on the fringe left have been fighting for in the streets with riots almost nightly since the end of May, and because of that we have arrived at a fully peaceful unicorn-filled and rainbow-filled utopia.
Right.
I think that's right.
No, I think you've nailed it.
Let's put it this way.
We have an added factor on the table, right?
And people are going to take this the wrong way.
I am not going to vote for Donald Trump.
I'm not going to do it.
But I want people to notice what situation we're in here in Portland.
Right?
We have nightly riots.
I have to confess, I don't know what's going on while we've had this thick smoke.
I think it's been reduced.
The meaning of it, I don't know.
But we had something like a hundred consecutive nights of protests that were all, or almost all, followed by violent riots later in the evening.
We have a civil authority in the city of Portland that does not enforce the law and is constantly broadcasting a message to those who are breaking the law that they will not be treated in a serious fashion.
They are being handled with kid gloves.
The governor of the state will not step in in the absence of, you know, in the face of the mayor's dereliction of duty, right?
That leaves the federal government as the only line of defense that citizens of the city of Portland have against a violent roving riot, right?
That is an argument for voting for Donald Trump.
Because the democratically elected Democrats in the state and the city refuse to do their job.
This is a little bit weird to be talking about now because we're now over a week into a completely different situation with the fires and the smoke.
Um, and so, you know, things have changed and whether or not, um, the rioters will have gotten out of the habit of rioting, uh, when the smoke clears, I don't know, although I doubt it.
I think they will come back to it.
Uh, but it, what are we supposed to do?
Like we're, we're supposed to continue to support a total lack of leadership, um, which is potentially putting, um, many or all of us at actual risk.
Well, this is, this, this is a sane move.
Well, let me just say, I won't vote for Biden and I won't vote for Trump, OK?
I'm not going to vote for either one of them.
But I do want those who are so confident that this time we're finally on the right track electorally, those Democrats who are beating that drum, they are missing the fact that they are placing people like citizens of Portland in a position where there is a rational argument for voting for Trump, where I don't think that argument existed in 2016.
That's right.
Even more people will not say to their friends and family, and certainly not to pollsters, you know what, this time I'm doing it.
They will lie to protect the peace within their own spheres.
And we know that was happening last time.
And it's, I just, anecdotally we have seen, we've heard from so many people, and we see the situation that you have just laid out on the ground here and in many other places.
Where cities which tend to vote blue, which tend to vote Democrat, there have got to be a lot of citizens in a lot of places going, I'm not sure what my choice is here.
Yeah.
How about the leadership, the locally elected leadership actually step up and do their job so I'm not forced to do something that I don't want to do?
Yeah.
So, it's a very interesting predicament and it does put the lie to these data which seem to suggest one thing or another because At some level, people have more reason, there's more of a reason for there to be noise in the data that is born of people being dishonest about what they're actually planning to do.
I don't, I mean, I don't, I'm not sure that's noise.
I think it's a hidden pattern that goes the opposite way that the polls are saying.
Yeah, I agree.
It's systematic bias.
Okay, so what's the trick for getting back to your train of thought?
Now, I fear saying this out loud because once you publicly have a trick for getting back to your train of thought, when you lose your train of thought and the trick doesn't work, people are going to think something's up.
But the trick is...
You put yourself, you can very frequently recover the feeling that you had as you were thinking the thought.
Like the emotional feeling?
Absolutely.
And then you find that emotion again, you put yourself back in that emotional mindset and very frequently it sort of edits down the range of things that you might have been thinking and, you know, you sort through six or seven thoughts and there it is.
That's so good.
It's like it's an analogy.
It's emotion-dependent memory analogized, I would say, to state-dependent learning.
That is exactly what it is.
And it's actually, you know, I've talked about state-dependent learning having an important relationship to music and emotion.
And this is where that thought came from, is that these things are There's basically a Dewey Decimal system of, you know, there's an emotional catalog so that you're not constantly searching the sum total of all the things you might say or think.
You're only searching the relevant part.
So, maybe you don't want to go here, but I guess I'm surprised that you can find enough nuance your emotional state from one moment to another, especially when we're live streaming here, that you can identify, Oh, this was like, it was like two minutes ago, I know what I was feeling then, as opposed to the minute either side of it, like how that's, that's the level of specificity that I would, I don't know how I would accomplish that.
Um, I cannot say how easy it will be for others.
It's possible that this is really easy for everyone once you realize to try it.
Um, it's possible that it's one of these things, you know, like, you know, as you know, I'm weirdly good at spotting a particular voice and placing it.
Yeah.
If some, if some voice is used in a commercial, I can very often figure out whose voice it might be.
You know who people are by their voices very well.
Um, so it might be one of those, you know, weird skills.
I sort of suspect it's not.
For some reason, I think probably because the emotion is sort of a bigger category, right?
There's some general emotion that you have towards some specific story, and so that emotion Holds all of the things that you think in its context, and it is therefore slower to dissipate, because as you lose the particular thread, you're still in the same landscape.
So you can very often, if you realize you've lost your train of thought, you can find, well, how do I feel?
I don't know why I feel that way, because I don't know what I was thinking, but I still do feel that way.
And then you can sort of put yourself back there.
And I guess maybe another thing that's surprising me, to me, about this then, is that you don't just feel like, oh shit, I forgot what I was thinking.
How is it that you can find anything through the, like, low grade, but something of a panic response, like, ah, it's gone.
Well, actually, you know, it's funny.
There's an analogy for this and it connects a little bit to my conversation that I had with Greg Gutfeld on his podcast, where he talked about our podcast.
So this is now totally tangled.
But we were talking about lucid dreams and one of the things about lucid dreams, which I learned through some stuff that the Stanford Research, the Sleep Research Center had put out on lucid dreams.
Was that the problem, many people have the beginnings of lucid dreams, but the problem is that the discovery that you're dreaming is so jarring that it wakes you right up, right?
You have to like not look at it, right?
You have to calm yourself to the discovery that you're dreaming so you don't startle yourself awake, and that's sort of how you get through it.
And this is the same thing.
You have to not panic over the fact that you have lost your train of thought, admittedly harder when you're streaming.
To a live audience, but nonetheless, you have to not panic over it.
And actually, as you get better at it, you develop confidence that you can get back to your thought if you work at it, which also makes you calmer.
Ah, right.
So the more you do it, the better you get.
There's a positive feedback.
There's a practice element to it.
Excellent.
Well, let's see.
I definitely do want to talk about this snake at some point.
I don't know if you want to speak about this paper that we were looking at?
Do you want to do that?
Sure, we can speak about this paper.
So actually there are two things.
So I don't know if you want to go to the Zero Hedge article or the actual paper?
Yeah, you might as well.
Let's get ourselves in trouble with all of the people who consider Zero Hedge problematic.
All right, so here we have Zero Hedge's report on this preprint that emerged.
Yeah, I'm not sure it even counts as a preprint, right?
Oh, it's because it's not on a preprint server.
Yeah.
So what is this document?
And I must tell you, one thing... We can also show the document.
Yeah, you want to show the document?
I sent you a PDF.
No, I've got it here.
- Oh, here, hold on.
Just hold on. - Oh, I was gonna. - Oh, maybe I, no.
Yep, you do down here.
So you need to scroll up out here.
That's not going to be, hold on a sec.
Here.
Yeah.
So Brett, for people listening.
Yeah, so for people listening, what we've got is a paper here.
The title of the paper is Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route.
The lead author is Yan.
Now, I must say, I don't know Yan.
She's been in this landscape for months now.
She's a Chinese virologist who had been working and living in Hong Kong, who left Hong Kong without the authorities in her home country wanting her to, presumably in April of this year, I think.
Right.
So I have trepidation about her work, in part because it is traveling outside of the realms that might allow you to, you know, as you point out, not a pre-print, right?
Not on a pre-print server.
Now I'm not sure why I'm more troubled by a paper put out outside of a pre-print server, given that the pre-print servers have requirements about credentials, and that that can be used to bar certain things, but nonetheless.
I mean the fact is that the, regardless of Whose imprimatur is on this with regard to the organization that is named here?
We've got, what is it, four PhDs who've written a paper that is very well researched.
Actually, if you can just put that down a little bit so I can read the screen here.
Here we go.
Just second paragraph of the introduction.
As a coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 differs significantly from other respiratory and or zoonotic viruses.
It attacks multiple organs.
It is capable of undergoing a long period of asymptomatic infection.
It is highly transmissible and significantly lethal in high-risk populations.
It is well adapted to humans since the very start of its emergence.
It is highly efficient in biting the human ACE2 receptor, the affinity of which is greater than that associated with the ACE2 of any other potential host.
And it goes on and on and on.
So A, this fits with a number of things that we talked about early in our live streams and that you talked about with Uri Dagan in the podcast that you did with him.
And you know, they've just, they also, a big part of their argument here is that there has been active censorship by the scientific community and by the journals.
Presumably, at least potentially, also therefore by the preprint servers themselves, against publishing anything that suggests a lab origin for the virus.
We did this for like 18 episodes running back in our first 18 or so episodes.
You know, lab origin is not the same thing as bioweapon.
We're talking about, you know, to say lab origin does not specify whether or not you're talking about an inadvertent escape on one end to an intentional release of an intentional bioweapon on the other or anything of the sort.
Between and, you know, really most of these analyses are imagining it's some sort of like, oh my god, this is being developed and it escaped and no one ever meant it to.
But really nothing about how it got out into the world is part of the analysis around does it or does it not have a lab origin.
I guess the other thing is, as people who've been watching for a long time will understand, that lab origin doesn't mean created from scratch in the lab.
It means, you know, Borrowed from other viruses and made into a chimera slash engineered from parts.
Chimera.
That's one of the things it means.
Composited from natural sources.
But the other thing that it means, which has very ominous implications here, is what's called serial passage experiments basically use selection in the lab, artificial selection, to imbue viruses with capacities that they wouldn't otherwise have.
And so, again, don't know what to make of this paper, though it looks to be very well researched, but The paper is putting together some of the things that we did talk about early on, about how much of the frightening part of this virus, you know, its diversity of organs that it attacks, right?
Its ability to transmit between human beings.
How many of these features are actually the result Of a guided evolutionary process in a lab coupled with a compositing which could be of totally honorable origin.
In other words, people who wish to study a virus that was dangerous to humans may have created a virus that was unusually dangerous to humans and then it got out through an accident.
So that's the most likely scenario as far as I'm concerned.
And we are now beginning to see analyses that strongly reflect this.
So, at a different level, Zach, I would ask you to put up the Alina Chan article from Boston.
Okay, here it is.
Right.
So here what we have is a profile of somebody I've been following online since, boy, I don't know, March?
Something like that.
Alina Chan, who is a young researcher, a problem solver, Who became suspicious of the origin story of SARS-CoV-2 on the basis of many things.
Primary among them is something else you will have heard us discuss here many times, which is the fact that this virus hit the ground running and was already extremely well adapted to infect human beings rather than... Well, that's in that list that I read from here in this paper.
And so, in any case, this article is written for a lay audience.
It's very accessible.
I highly recommend it.
And it does a number of things.
One, it tells, told me a lot of things I didn't know about Dr. Chan.
One of them that I'm particularly intrigued by Is that her story as a scientist is not a typical one of her having been a brilliant student and this and that she is somebody who didn't love school always bridled against its its constraints and has
In spite of those things emerged as a brilliant virologist who has spotted all the things that were wrong about the story of SARS-CoV-2 and investigated them and has established many of these claims on a very rigorous basis.
Falsified, for example, the claim about pangolins and the source of the spike protein.
So anyway, I would just recommend this article to people.
We will post a link to it.
But, I don't know, maybe Dr. Chan will come on the Dark Horse podcast at some point because she seems like a true Dark Horse.
That would be great.
Yep.
Alright, is it snake time?
Yes!
Well, it's always snake time.
It's always snake time.
An hour.
Okay, we'll finish with snakes.
How about that?
Or one snake, really.
So this is a report.
It's also from the New York Times.
I don't know, maybe they got this one right.
A person can hope.
A 62-year-old ball python at the St.
Louis Zoo.
Here we go, Zach, if you want to put that up.
A 62-year-old python at the St.
Louis Zoo, who has not had access to a male for at least 15 years, has laid seven eggs.
And not only has she not had access to a male for at least 15 years, she's already a couple of decades past her sell-by date.
Apparently usually they don't live that long.
But these eggs are... at least some of them are alive.
Ah.
There were seven of them.
Two of them died.
Two of them were, I think, killed for research purposes.
And three of them, as of right now, are still alive and have not there.
Let's see, how do they end the article with, they are not counting their snakes before they're hatched.
So there's three that are still potentially going to hatch.
No!
Mistake!
Mistake!
With all of the scanning technology, it's hard for me to imagine that there was any justification of that.
I'm not actually positive that's what happened to the two of them because it's written for a lay audience and I couldn't quite tell, but I think that they basically collected the eggs for research purposes and in so doing killed whatever embryos might have been developing inside.
But there are three still out there.
This just raises so many interesting questions, doesn't it?
For instance, let's just start with, okay, She hasn't seen a male in 15 years.
Could she have stored sperm for that long?
There are very long sperm storage things that organisms do.
Usually it's not years and years and years, but it certainly is known.
Sperm storage things that organisms do, usually it's not years and years and years, but it certainly is known.
In ants it is.
In ants, yeah.
I said, yeah, it's not...
It's not as common in vertebrates, I think.
The example that I think of with regard to storage... Actually, there's just a whole lot of ways to get around the problem of you want to reproduce, but you're not sure you're going to be able to find a mate at the right moment.
You've all been there.
Oh, my.
We'll have to talk about that later.
Yeah, this is awkward.
I'm not sure wolverines do sperm storage or do they just do delayed implantation?
It's got to be diapause of some kind.
Yeah, so they bring sperm and egg together and then they basically put that zygote into stasis throughout much of the fall and part of the winter while the wolverines are in Basically, in sleep for the winter, and then only at the point that the seasonality is looking right does the zygote get implanted in the uterine lining and start to develop.
It's one way that reproduction can be delayed, but actual just storing of sperm to be used at some later point is common in ants and a lot of other species, right?
A lot of mammals, a lot of bats, and these periods of storage just allow you to break the connection between the mating period and the point at which offspring are born, and there are lots of different versions of it.
The place where the pause happens in the reproductive cycle can be moved along to different spots.
No, and just because I want to talk about wolverines for a moment more.
The example there is that because they live in cold habitat and basically need to hibernate in order to make it through the winter, you're not doing a lot of courtship while you're hibernating.
It's just... I'm sorry, I'm about to reveal my ignorance.
Because wolverines specialize on large carcasses, I thought they weren't hibernating.
Have I misunderstood wolverine behavior?
I should have looked up our former student Alice's work on this before I started talking about wolverines.
It's possible I've misremembered the hibernation thing, but I think not.
And precisely the argument for diapause is that they basically do their meet and greet and courtship and sexual reproduction in the fall when they actually are going around sourcing food.
And then once they're in their dens and it's, and the timing is right, such that a baby could be born as spring was happening.
That's when implantation occurs.
But we'll definitely correct that if I'm wrong about that. - So if you're a wolverine and we've gotten this wrong, Don't panic.
We will fix the record so it correctly reflects your… And Dallas, if you're watching, which I know you have been at some point in the past, definitely correct me if I've got it wrong, which I might be.
But okay, so sperm storage for over 15 years in a ball python where that's never been noticed before?
Probably not.
Possible, but probably not.
So I would say… Chances are very, very, very low, because even if sperm storage were a thing, there is... it's hard to imagine an ecological circumstance that would require that duration of sperm storage.
Therefore, it's unlikely to work over that period.
Yes.
Zoo is a novel environment for ball pythons.
Yes.
Yes, very much so.
So probably it's facultative parthenogenesis.
That's a couple of words put together that sound like biospeed because they are, but facultative being the counterpoint to obligate.
So if something is obligate, it always happens 100% of the time.
So humans are obligately sexually reproducing.
And these ball pythons apparently are facultatively, usually sexually producing, but facultatively parthenogenetic, meaning that they can probably self themselves.
Probably not cloning, but it's possible, but probably selfing.
And let's go back to that because I think there's some fun stuff to talk about there.
But another interesting thing is that all snakes have long been understood to have genetic sex determination.
That they have sex chromosomes just as mammals do, although it's a separate evolution of sex chromosomes.
And just like birds do, in fact, which is again a separate evolution of sex chromosomes from mammals, birds have a ZW system, not an XY system.
So in birds, in mammals, Everyone probably watching or listening to this will know this, but maybe not in these terms, that female mammals are XX, and because the two Xs are the same chromosome, looking chromosome, that's called homogametic, same gamete.
And males, who are XY mammals, are heterogametic, different gametes at that, in the case of humans, 23rd chromosome position.
And that's true for all mammals except the monotremes, which are just weird and they've got like nine pairs of sex chromosomes.
And let's not talk about them at the moment.
That's the duck-billed platypus and the two echidnas.
So they're bizarre, but all of the marsupials and the placental mammals, that's us, have this XY system.
And birds have a different evolution of chromosomal sex determination, which for just reasons of not confusing them is called the ZW system, in which it's the females who are heterogametic.
So females are ZW, and the males are homogametic, and I actually don't remember.
I think it's ZZ.
I don't remember if we call them ZZ or WW.
Just don't remember.
And that actually makes for some interesting predictions about behavior that we won't go into here, but are fascinating.
And for a long time it was thought that all snakes had, like birds but separately evolved, a ZW chromosomal sex determination system.
But a recent paper in 2017 finds that at least two lineages within the boids, a python and a boa, not the ball python, but a different species of python, have an XY system and that the python and the boa are themselves independently evolved.
So we've got all these different evolutions of sex chromosomes within snakes, at least three and probably more.
All right, so am I correct in recalling that it is a python?
There's one snake lineage that has vestigial limbs that is basil.
The boids.
The boids, okay.
And pythons are boids as boas are boas.
So this is weird.
Somewhere within the boid lineage you have an XY system.
Two places apparently.
Alright, now this raises so many questions that we cannot trouble our Dark Horse audience with because they're not going to want to go into the weeds with us.
Well, some of them do.
Here's the question.
Which thing switched?
Hold on, while you talk, Zach, you can just show this so that people can look if they want to.
Discovery of X?
So, okay, I am now frustrated.
Assuming they don't sort this out, I'm frustrated with our colleagues for having defined this as an XY system.
Oh, I agree.
And calling what's happening to all the rest of the snakes a ZW system.
A ZW system, right.
No, it's wrong, because it's not the same.
Every separate evolution of this should have its own set of letters.
A hundred percent, yes.
And talk about it.
And, you know, you could come up with a convention so you knew which was which.
But here's the question.
So, if you have snakes embedded within the boid lineage who have an XY system when the rest of snakes have a ZW system, If this is a reversal, then the question is, which thing reversed?
Was it the sex?
Did the sex flip?
That is to say, the phenomenology of the sex?
Did it change which critter it was appended to?
Or did the chromosomal system switch?
Or, and I think this is more likely given what we see, if we sort of map sex determination systems onto all of vertebrates or all of tetrapods, which is the vertebrates that have come onto land that include the amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, you actually see quite clearly that environmental sex determination is basal, right?
That you have systems and many people will be familiar with the idea that there are some turtles, for instance, where if your egg develops hot you end up female and if it develops cold you end up male.
And then there's some where intermediate ones are female.
I can't remember.
All three of the possible systems are out there in terms of environmental sex determination, which almost always means temperature sex determination.
That only works, of course, for organisms that lay eggs.
A viviparous organism that had temperature sex determination is not going to work because the mother's body temperature can't It can't be totally different for different-sexed broods.
That's just not how anatomy and physiology works.
If you did it, you'd end up with broods that were all the same sex.
Right, but then you'd have to, you know, unless there was a whole part of the population that was at one temperature all the time and only produced female.
It doesn't quite track.
But anyway, environmental sex determination is basal, and genetic sex determination seems evolved multiple, multiple times within the tetrapod lineage.
More likely than some snakes going from a ZY to an XY system directly, they went back to not having sex chromosomes or not having them code for sex, and then evolved or switched them while they weren't coding for sex into the opposite thing.
Which raises a really interesting question about what it is that causes an environmentally sex-determined creature to go chromosomal, etc.
But I think... You don't want to get me started on that.
No, I don't.
Forgive me.
I think you have buried the lead slightly with respect to our audience and what they're going to think.
Well, Faculty of Parthenogenesis.
There you go.
Right.
That's where we're going.
Right here.
Okay, good.
I mean, go for it.
That's the big thing.
But I just didn't want to not talk about the other stuff.
Well, okay, so what I would want us to say is that this is a place where the failure of imagination amongst biologists, the overgeneralization from our own circumstance has, I believe, caused us to miss the boat, and we are now very predictably getting schooled by nature on the following point.
As far as we know, we don't have a mammalian example, except Jesus Christ, of parthenogenesis in a mammal.
Am I right that that's still true?
Parthenogenesis being reproduction of a female with no input from a male.
Right.
So this seems weird to us that anything does this, that any animal does this, or any vertebrate at least.
But if you think about the puzzle of How creatures find new places to do their creature thing.
How we get a species, you know, if you have one species of python over here and then you have a closely related species of python over there that eat something different and behave slightly differently, but anyway, they're related but they ended up in two different places.
What happened?
Well, in general, A creature will have gotten lost or, you know, I don't know, some predatory bird could pick up a python and accidentally drop it as it was carrying it to its nest in some new place.
And this will happen a lot.
And in general, the animal that's dropped won't be able to reproduce because there's only one of them.
And in the absence of a mate, it will maybe get by, maybe not, but it will die.
It will be the end of its lineage.
If it is capable of reproducing, then it could be an evolutionary winner of like an unimaginably great type, which is the founder of a new population.
So the question is, is there a contingency plan built into creatures for those circumstances in which they find themselves in a habitat that's great, but for the absence of a mate?
Now, if you're a mammal, you might get blown off course.
If you're a bat, you might get blown off course pregnant, and you might Find yourself someplace with a couple of offspring and maybe they're the right sex to reproduce and, you know, yes, that's incest, but nonetheless it might still result in the birth of a new population.
But even easier, if you physiologically are built for it, is the production of offspring that would be triggered by extreme loneliness, right?
That the loneliness of a creature would be an indication that there's nobody else of the right kind around And at some point, loneliness would be sufficient to trigger the production of either clonal or self-fertilized eggs, which could then, pending various questions, like do they have the right chromosomal complement that you get multiple sexes out of the brood, that could then found a new population.
That should have happened many times, but the problem is If you don't expect it, because you're not doing the evolutionary theory very well, then you don't notice the fact that this is probably happening with some regularity, even in your zoos.
You have to pay very close attention in order to know that animal has not had access to another animal of its kind, a closely related species with which it might hybridize, right?
You have to know that really well.
And frankly, how many times has some zookeeper who does know it really well said to the higher-ups at the zoo, I don't know where these eggs came from, but that animal hasn't had a mate, and the higher up at the zoo is probably- Oh, you must have messed up, whatever.
Right.
So, now we are in this era where we are discovering that lots of creatures, it turns out, produce offspring without reproducing when we isolate them.
Which undoubtedly is revealing that this is a very common evolutionary mechanism.
We've got several examples now from the Squamates.
Some snakes, some Komodo dragons.
And we've got sharks.
We've seen it in sharks.
Birds?
Have you seen a bird yet?
Not yet?
No, I don't... I don't think that's going to happen.
You don't think it's going to happen?
Yeah.
I think mammals and birds are not going to... it's not going to have happened.
And not that... it's not going to start to happen.
But I think... I don't think... we're missing that why.
Let's see.
Mammals and birds are not each other's closest relatives.
Their most recent common ancestor is the same as their ancestor with this python.
Which was a long time ago at the origin of tetrapods.
No, it wasn't at the origin of tetrapods, but it was a long time ago at the origin of reptiles.
Some combination of their endothermy and their High heart rate, the convergence of cardiac anatomy and endothermy and brain size and I can't quite put it all together, but I actually, I just don't think that mammals or birds are going to end up with facultative pyrethrogenesis and I want to think more on exactly why.
Yeah.
I don't think so.
I don't see the obstacle though, the fact that we haven't seen it in either of these two clades yet suggests you may be right for reasons I can't figure out.
I would say more likely in birds though because of the ZW system, right?
Because a bird female, you need to have an egg-laying creature in order to pull this off, right?
A male mammal can't produce parthenogenic offspring.
So a female has to do it, and a female mammal, at least a marsupial or a placental, would produce female offspring, because she doesn't have a Y chromosome to throw at the problem.
If she produces female offspring, then you get a line of females, which is not necessarily capable of switching back into a sexual mode.
On the other hand, a bird with ZW could produce a brood of eggs.
If she selfed rather than cloned, she could produce a brood of eggs that was partially female and partially male and therefore could reproduce.
The distinction being there are many, many mechanisms for which you can get there, but selfing is basically putting two of your own gametes together to produce a zygote as opposed to cloning.
And so with cell-feng, you end up with a reduction in the... Genetic diversity.
Genetic diversity.
Yeah, that doesn't sound like the right word, but you end up with more homogeneity across loci with cell-feng.
But you could get a Z gamete and a W gamete coming together, or a Z gamete and a Z gamete coming together, even if you yourself are ZW.
Whereas if you're only XX, where would you get the Y gamete?
So you wouldn't be able to produce a A male.
One last thing to your point about, you know, the Komodo dragon that has swum across to a new island and found itself unable to get back because of currents and she is all alone, is that this strategy of using extreme loneliness to prompt a reproductive event Only works for half of the organisms, of course, right?
And males, no matter how lonely, cannot end up selfing or cloning their way into reproducing.
And, you know, this seems like, you know, maybe I'm just being mean or maybe this is a small point, but this is actually the fundamental thing that is why I and many others
are just so adamant about you know what male is real and female is real and no amount of pretending is going to make it any different because it is about the gametes and female is to have a large and sessile gamete and male is to have a small and motile gamete and what makes that gamete large in the case of a female and that gamete being an egg It's all the cytoplasm.
It's all the cellular machinery of life that is necessary to actually make a cell.
You put two sperm together, you're just going to get something zippy that can't actually persist for very long and can't divide and grow.
It just doesn't have the mitochondria and the ribosomes.
It doesn't have all the stuff it needs.
Half of your supremely lonely squamates, say snakes and lizards that end up alone on an island, are still out of luck.
And half of them, if they're male, and half of them if they're female, may actually be able to turn that into a reproductive win.
So your biological essentialism on this point is liable to get you accused of being a transphobe.
And I should say... It's happened before.
I will stand by you because I am not transphobophobic.
I am trans activist phobic increasingly.
Watching how they have treated J.K.
Rowling and others.
But in any case.
Yeah, is there more to say about Parthenogenesis?
No, I think we're good.
I mean, yes, obviously I could go on forever, but maybe we should stop.
All right, yes, maybe we've reached that point.
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