#65: Because Science (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 65th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. In this episode, we begin by offering gratitude to Bill Maher and his crew for having us on on January 29—but why didn’t Heather answer his question about vaccines? She does so here, and we discuss a bit more about vaccine technology (also see episode 58 for more on that). Next: What does consensus look like in science, and...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 65.
We believe we have a lot of new people joining us today and so we're going to have to figure out how to intermingle and get the people who know how we think on board and get the people who haven't experienced much yet onto the same page.
If you are new, there are drinks and snacks on the back wall.
Entheogens are in the freezer.
Actually, in the freezer.
Yeah, the freezer moved itself.
No, no, it's over that way.
All right, so, in order to get us onto the same page, we are going to have to introduce some concepts that we use here pretty regularly, and we're going to give you a little thought experiment, and we will return to it later in the podcast.
So, we want you to think about this question.
You walk into a house.
There's a gun on the table.
You pick it up, put it to your head, pull the trigger, and it goes click.
Was your behavior safe?
Alright, we will come back to that and you will see the relevance of it in the context of our discussion of virology, vaccines, etc.
Okay.
On top of the show, I thought we were going to just do a few logistics, so let's just get those out of the way here.
We're thrilled to have the new viewers that we know we've picked up some from our Bill Maher experience last night, which was wonderful, and one of the things we want to do is thank Bill and the whole real-time team for the opportunity.
So, for those who have not been here before, and for those listening, you'll have to switch venues in order to make this happen.
We do this live stream once a week, and we take a 15-minute break or so after an hour, hour and a half, sometimes it goes longer, and then we come back and do a live Q&A.
The questions come from you through Super Chat at this point.
We're working on a different platform, but at this point it's through Super Chat, and so if you put Super Chat questions into the queue now, We will see them.
We never get to all the questions.
We make no promises that we get to them all.
Then questions that you ask in the second hour, we also prioritize in the order in which they come in.
If you're interested in that, stick around.
If you're interested in asking us questions, go for it.
And if you are interested in a more intimate Q&A, we actually do once a month a private Q&A for members of my Patreon.
The questions have all been asked for this at this point, but it's tomorrow at 11am Pacific, and so if you are interested in getting Even more from us on a smaller platform where it's intimate enough that we can actually watch the chat and sometimes engage with it.
Go to my Patreon, Heather Hying, and join there.
So that's logistics.
You gave the teaser you're going to give.
Yep.
And let's just launch right in then.
All right.
So, like I said, gratitude to Bill Maher and the whole team there.
I'd also like to offer an apology.
Why exactly did I not answer his question?
I know why you didn't answer this question.
You do and you could answer this, you know, we'll talk about this just a little bit.
So Bill asked me a few times if I wouldn't be more comfortable taking the AstraZeneca vaccine than either of the mRNA vaccines.
And the fact is he knows the answer to this because we ourselves had discussed this on, I think it was episode 58, an episode that we devoted largely to talking about the different vaccines and what the various risks of them were.
I didn't respond directly either or any of the times.
I'm not sure if he asked me two or three times.
And here's why.
So, you know, the fact is yes.
The answer is yes, I would prefer to take the AstraZeneca vaccine to either of the mRNA vaccines that are currently on the market.
Why?
Not because AstraZeneca is a traditional vaccine.
It's not.
But it has a more traditional, a more established delivery mechanism than the mRNA vaccines do.
So what that means is it's not a traditional, it's not a traditional vaccine.
It does not have an attenuated actual virus associated with it, right?
It's actually a DNA vaccine and the mRNA vaccines are obviously RNA vaccines.
What it has, though, is an adenovirus associated with it, which is its delivery vehicle.
There are a number of gene therapies that have used adenoviruses in the past.
It's been fewer and more recently that they've begun to be used in vaccines.
There's an Ebola vaccine that's beginning to use it.
We have a visit from one of our podcasts you guys may see shortly.
So the adenovirus delivery mechanism is somewhat new, but adenoviruses have been part of the human selective experience, our evolutionary environment, for presumably millions of years.
Whereas the way that the mRNA vaccines get into you and the cells is they're coated in what are called lipid nanoparticles, LNPs.
And so you'll sometimes see them called mRNA-LNP vaccines.
And those are brand new to the human evolutionary environment.
We simply have no history with them.
And they might work.
They might be awesome.
We're like, Everyone who makes any sense is praying that they are, hoping that they are, thinking these mRNA vaccines might be the future of vaccine technology, because one of the things they have going for them is their very rapid development possibilities, as we saw with these two.
But because the LNPs, the lipid nanoparticles, are brand new to the human evolutionary environment, we just can't know yet, and so the risk seems higher.
So that's why I didn't answer your question directly, Bill, and I apologize for it, but yes, I prefer the AstraZeneca vaccine.
All right, so this actually brings us back to the thought experiment.
Great.
And we will link the two up here.
So you recall the thought experiment is you walk into a building, there's a gun on the table, you pick it up, put it to your head, pull the trigger, and it goes click.
Now, was your behavior safe?
No, obviously not.
That's an incredibly reckless thing to do.
Were you harmed?
No, you weren't harmed.
So when we say that something is unsafe, we are talking, we are including the question of uncertainty about harms that may come from something.
And so the question about the various vaccines comes down to harms we know about because they have shown up in the phase 3 trials and harms that are emerging in what's referred to as phase 4, which is where we are now, where a large population is being vaccinated and we're tracking events that may or may not be related.
To those vaccines.
But what we don't know is anything about what happens three years down the road, five years down the road.
There may be nothing.
There may be something.
And frankly, it could go either way.
So the point is, there's a lot to say.
Knowing nothing about the long-term implications of these things, would you bet that a vaccine that is built out of a viral delivery mechanism that is similar to viruses that human beings have been dealing with for Probably, as you say, millions of years.
Or would you go with something where the delivery mechanism is entirely novel, we have no evolutionary history with it, and so no information about how the body deals with it?
Now, it could be, and there are reasons I could make the argument why the mRNA vaccines stand a chance of being safer in the long run.
They don't interact with the nucleus.
A lot is going to come down to differences in which... The cell nucleus.
Right.
So the mRNA is delivered by these lipid nanoparticles into the cytoplasm of the cell where the ribosome is then translated into spike protein which then shows up to the immune system effectively.
It gets displayed on the surface of the cells in which the vaccine has entered and the immune system recognizes it as foreign which is how vaccines work.
Go on, I have one more thing to say about this.
Okay, so it is possible that the bypassing the nucleus has some benefits.
It is essentially certain that there will be different affinity for different cell types between the different vaccines and that may have a lot to say about what risks do and do not exist down the road from here.
But the basic point is we are stuck in the present.
With no information about the long-term impacts of any of these vaccines.
We have some basis to guess on the adenovirus vaccines.
We have no basis to guess for the mRNA vaccines.
And so given that, if you had to pick, what would you do?
This is a relatively simple question.
It's basic precautionary principle, right?
You prefer the technology or solution that's been around for longer, all else being equal.
There's a ton not equal here, but insofar as we can tease away all the other variables, there are some clear ways in which the AstraZeneca vaccine has a more established history.
Its elements have a more established history in the human body.
Right.
And so if you think now back to this little thought experiment and the conclusion that putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger is definitely unsafe, but not necessarily harmful, therefore safety is about risk, then the question is, well, what is the risk?
Now, the harms could go the other way.
There's so much complexity here.
Absolutely.
It's very easy.
We could put together a dozen scenarios in which the actual harm that we would know about 10 years, 20 years down the road, Would go the other way if it shows up at all.
So the problem is it's very hard to get all of that nuance into a very tight discussion in the context of something like Mars Show.
So I guess actually one more thing, as long as we're talking once again about vaccines, which is not mostly where we're going to spend time today.
It occurred to me, actually, when we were down in LA before we went on Realtime last night, you and I were both reading up some more on some of the literature that's out there, and something that many people will have heard is that both the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines need to be stored at extremely low temperatures.
And most people will not have stopped to consider why that might be.
In part, maybe in entirety, at least in large part, it's because RNA is very, very susceptible to decay and that you can basically stall the decay out by keeping it in such low temperatures that it can't.
But not only is it susceptible to decay, but once it gets into the space between the cells in the body, you have ribonucleases All over the place that are just waiting, primed to destroy RNA.
And so the lipid nanoparticle coating the vaccine is basically a way to sneak the RNA past the intercellular space into the cells.
And what all of that means, one of the implications I think, and I don't think I've seen this anywhere else, is that if there is an error in transportation, in storage, in taking too long after you've taken it out of the freezer and gotten it into your arm, It is likely actually, I would think, that these vaccines actually lose efficacy.
And so you are going to get something close to a binary situation of this vaccine is either as effective as it can be and this might mean that our mRNA vaccines are actually really close to 100% effective, Because what you have sometimes is a failure to keep the vaccine cold enough such that the RNA is already completely degraded by the time it gets into you, such that it's not effective at all.
And so what you might expect with the mRNA vaccines, this is a prediction I'm making, is extremely high variance actually.
That you don't have, that you will be less likely to have some protection within an individual, rather you would have like this worked because the vaccine did what it was supposed to because it was kept at the storage, in the storage way that it was required to or it wasn't and therefore it was just getting a placebo.
Well, so I don't see any reason to expect a binary.
I agree with your prediction about the variance, but in effect there's some threshold we're shooting for.
Ideally with a virus you want to see cellular immunity emerge, that is to say T-cells that are responsive in this case to the spike protein that is being encoded by the mRNAs that we're delivering to the cells.
You want to see T cells that react with that would tend to give you a good lasting immunity, which is of course the objective of the vaccine.
And so there's a question about how much of the mRNA has to actually survive to get into cytoplasm to be displayed to the immune system.
To get that response.
There will be individual variation.
There will be individual variation for reasons that probably have to do with variation in individual immune systems.
There's also going to be a certain amount of luck which cells actually get reached by this, you know, this slurry that's going to be injected into people.
It's going to hit some cells and it's going to enter them and how well it is displayed to the immune system will matter.
I also wonder how this interacts With prior exposure to COVID, right?
So the fact that this spike protein is something that some immune systems will have seen and some immune systems will not have seen raises questions.
So anyway, I would expect a lot of variants and The degradation basically if you know just simple chemistry tells us that if the low temperatures are necessary in order to keep these molecules viable in order that they make it into the cells that those that have been kept out of the freezer too long and we've heard multiple stories now of you know what's the word some
A group of vials is warming up and vaccines are delivered to people so they don't go bad, but you would imagine that there would be intermediate cases and what will those look like and how will we recognize them in a data set?
Yeah.
Now in this case, I would not imagine that as they warmed up, they would become dangerous.
They're just going to become not effective.
I agree.
First pass, I'd guess the same, but I'd love to know.
You know, hopefully what happens is the stray mRNAs do just get chewed up in the normal course of the interstitial space being cleared.
So for those of you new here, our producer is our 16-year-old son, Zach.
Zach, can you show my screen?
Do we have that capability at this point?
Cool.
So I just want to read one paragraph.
This is a news article in the journal Nature Biotechnology, which is one of the Nature Group journals.
From the end of November 2020, which was at that point a perspective imagining looking forward and saying what are the vaccines that are likely to be out there and how do they compare and what are the risks?
This is actually an excellent paper and I'll put it in the show notes, but I just want to read one paragraph from it which I've highlighted.
Here we go.
Still, much about the vaccine's efficacy and safety and here she's talking about the mRNA vaccines in particular.
Still, much about the vaccine's efficacy and safety, biological details that could shape the course of the vaccine's impact on containing the pandemic, remain unknown.
Quote, Personally, I'm waiting for further data concerning T cell responses and duration of the antibodies, says Stanley Plotkin, a pioneering vaccinologist and former pharmaceutical executive who now consults for vaccine manufacturers.
And while acknowledging that the data report data are, quote, very encouraging, Plotkin is reserving judgment on the mRNA vaccines until more results become available from late-stage trials of the many other experimental vaccines now moving their way through clinical development.
Later in this news article, I believe it's him who says, by the end of next year, meaning at that point by the end of 2021, we should have enough data to actually compare both efficacy and safety, at least through a year-ish, Of the various vaccine platforms that people are now getting throughout the world.
And he, as everyone should be, is very much looking forward to seeing what those data look like.
Yeah, I think it's important.
We've already seen some changes, of course.
For example, cautions about pregnant women not getting vaccines.
Yeah, although on that one?
So, the WHO and the CDC seemed to be in disagreement.
They were.
And now they've both gone back to the party line.
They're both saying there's no reason to think that the vaccines should harm pregnant women.
As far as I know, those trials don't exist.
They're just sort of saying, again, we don't think it's going to be harmful.
I would be very cautious if I was pregnant about getting anywhere near a very newly developed vaccine.
Yeah, I agree.
And, you know, it cuts both ways.
COVID is liable to be consequential for pregnancy.
So, you know... We've got to be even more careful about lockdown and masks and social distancing.
Yeah.
So we are in a very tough puzzle.
Effectively, we are all guinea pigs in a couple of experiments running in parallel, one having to do with vaccines, the other having to do With this novel virus and it is very difficult to juggle the competing hazards and they're clearly short-term very large hazards that come with coming down with COVID and then we have to compare that to all of the unknowns over in vaccine space and it's not an enviable position we find ourselves in.
Yeah, no it's really not.
So we forgot to do at the top of the hour just a mention of where we're hoping to go.
I think maybe now is a good segue to talk a bit about consensus science and then we'll talk a bit about some of the interesting emerging work on the impact of diet.
On COVID outcomes.
And maybe just finish with a little marine segment.
Talk a little about tuna, maybe, and sea stars, which we've promised.
The sea stars thing.
Just a little true anecdote about sea stars.
It's not an anecdote.
A deep phylogenetic history about sea stars that some people may find interesting.
To our sea star enthusiast fans, we will not disappoint you today.
We will get to the sea stars.
Oh, we're definitely getting there?
I believe we are getting to the sea stars.
Okay.
Now that you've said that, I think we have to.
All right.
We have no choice.
Okay, so consensus science.
Let's do it.
All right.
So let us distinguish first between two kinds of scientific consensus.
On the one hand, we have scientific consensuses that surround things like whether the living creatures of the Earth are the result of a Darwinian evolutionary process.
There is a consensus around this.
Now, those of us who are directly in this field disagree over some of the details about how that might work, but there is no substantial disagreement about whether or not a fundamentally Darwinian paradigm explains the existence and diversity of those creatures.
Now, it is always, because it's scientific, open to some revolutionary discovery that would lead us to understand that we had gotten it wrong.
It could be something like, were we to discover that we were in a simulation and that the simulator started with all of those creatures finished and the fossils were integrated into the simulator in order for us, you know, to see what we would think about it or something like that, or to ensure that we came to a particular conclusion.
Okay, well that would upend Darwinism.
Nobody spends their time worried about this because what we have is a universe that appears to be real and the overwhelming evidence of a Darwinian explanation for life.
Likewise, the Earth goes around the Sun.
HIV causes AIDS.
These are plate tectonics.
Plate tectonics.
These are places where we can legitimately say something about settled science.
No science is so settled that it couldn't be unsettled by a later discovery, but you don't spend your time worrying about it.
But one thing that is notable about all of these examples is that consensus, true consensus, consensus that does appear to reflect underlying reality about what is going on in the universe, takes time.
It never happens overnight.
A pattern does not come to exist in the world and immediately we know and everyone agrees and to consider any other possibility is to be a conspiracy theorist or unscientific.
No, quite the opposite.
Well, all right.
In general, that's going to be true.
And I bet that's always true in our quadrant.
What's the counter example?
In complexity space, this is probably a given.
I'm thinking in particular of gravitational lensing and Einstein's insight that given relativity That a massive object like the Sun would appreciably bend starlight such that it would be visible from Earth.
I don't know enough about the history of what people were thinking, though.
In that case, there was an opportunity due to an astronomical event that allowed that idea to be falsified or not.
Right?
And so there was a moment before and after which you could say, there it is.
This prediction was risky, and we saw it, and there we have it.
But in advance of the observation, I don't know what the collection of scientists were thinking.
Yeah, I'm not an expert on it either, but I would say we know that there was at least diversity of opinion and that the idea of spacetime where gravity is actually a warping of space was certainly not thoroughly accepted.
But my point is that you get effect in physics, you can get turning on a dime.
And so what happened for those of you who don't know the story is that there was a total eclipse of the sun.
You can't observe gravitational.
You need an object really because gravity is so weak.
You need an object that's really large to bend light enough that it can be easily detected.
And the Sun qualifies.
The Sun is big enough, but the problem is the Sun puts out a lot of light of its own, so it creates the impossibility of seeing the stars behind it, right?
So what you need is an eclipse that hides the Sun's direct light and allows you to see where the stars are and the stars move based on the gravity Or basically that the space bends or the gravity bends the the light so but the point is there was a famous excursion to go view the total eclipse and the point is the result of that was Resulted and I believe a very rapid transition in people's acceptance of this idea
Well, and so, you know, you said in complexity space, what I had said about consensus takes time is going to be true.
And, you know, physics is fundamental space rather than emergent or complexity space generally.
I wonder if another, the analogy that could lay directly on top of that, almost like an imperfect Venn diagram overlapping would be sort of population level thinking.
Work that requires population-level thinking, which is to say a recognition of a variance within a population, and your immediate little kludge to figure out if the kind of work you're doing or interested in thinking about requires that is, are you going to need statistics in order to figure out whether or not you've got a pattern that is real as opposed to you've convinced yourself because your biases are strong, right?
And all of our biases are strong.
That's what science is for, in order to reduce the power of our biases and allow us to see reality.
Population level work, work that requires statistics in order to determine whether or not the pattern you think you see is actually a pattern that is different from what you would expect by chance, is very different from Einstein saying, If this is true, then I am right.
And his logic was perfect, his scientific logic was perfect, and all it took was one event.
Because gravity isn't variant in the way that the behavior of mongooses is.
Right.
Okay, good.
Or the evolution of viruses.
Highly variant, right?
We're going to have variable outcomes.
Right.
Okay, so you've got examples of what I would call natural consensus, where the consensus arises out of the fact that the evidence is overwhelming and it eventually persuades everybody who is paying attention to the evidence and knows how hypothetico-deductive work is done.
And then you have this other phenomenon, which is the rush to consensus for some reason.
And it's not going to be obvious to people on the outside, but in effect, the idea that our most powerful notions are the result of demonstrations that produce a consensus Means that it is a tantalizing goal to be able to claim that that is what has happened in this case.
This case is important to me and it also has a consensus.
And so what we see in the case of, for example, the question of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is a rush to claim that there is a scientific consensus that this could not possibly have come from a lab and it must have come from nature.
And that consensus, which was widespread in certain circles, was completely unnatural.
And it was not based on the evidence being compelling.
And as a matter of fact, most of the elements of the hypothesis that was put in front of us as to how this emerged from nature, most of those elements have since been falsified.
And nobody believes them anymore.
The wet market was not part of it.
Pangolins were not part of it.
And so the...
The consensus was about something else.
And I want to try another just simplifying, it's not really a thought experiment, but I want to just try to lay out where I think we find ourselves with respect to what it is that the people best positioned, the virologists and epidemiologists, how it is that we might have arrived at consensus here.
And I just want to draw this picture.
One of two things must have happened.
Either the people who warned us that there were diseases in nature just waiting to find their way into humans and one could cause a terrible pandemic that would grind the world to a halt.
Either those people were right.
And their plea to engage in a rapid program of studying really dangerous viruses by enhancing their pathogenicity was not early enough, but it was the right idea, in which case we should presumably be greatly increasing the amount of resources we throw at gain-of-function research, or
These people caused a research program that enhanced a virus that then escaped and we are now suffering the terrible consequences of the research itself, in which case the belief system of the same group of people has caused all of this harm.
And so I just want to say, When we say, well, there's a consensus among the people who are best positioned to know where this virus might have come from, we are talking about people who are hovering between two interpretations of what has happened.
If this is a natural virus, then they were prophetic and they are the best hope for preventing this from happening again.
If this is laboratory in origin, they are responsible.
Now I want to be, I'm not arguing for moral responsibility here in the sense of If this is a lab leak, it's a massive error in judgment.
It is an international error, but I do not believe it is the result of bad people.
I believe it is the result of bad judgment, and we must learn the lessons.
Right, and just asterisk there.
If it's a lab leak, The evidence suggests that it is a lab leak that is due to a collaboration explicitly between a lot of scientists, at least in the United States and China, and presumably other places as well, but specifically the U.S.
and China.
This isn't the China virus.
None of that, right?
It's the U.S.
and China and a community of scientists who were very good at what they did, and our government funding structures, all of these things are involved.
Now, I will say, moral... I do want to push back on your binary, though.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of, you know, what you said was either or.
Zoonotic diseases are a rising threat.
Zoonotic diseases being those that have been endemic in some species and they jump to a new species, and generally it's only when it jumps to a human species that we tend to think of them and call them zoonotic.
But, you know, any cross-species transfer could be a zoonotic disease, I think.
That may be a semantic thing.
Either that's true or gain-of-function research and serial-passaging research have become dominant in the sort of public health vaccine development research game on viruses and zoonotic diseases
Despite the fact that there is little chance of zoonotic diseases emerging in this way, which is as you said on Mar, it's unusual for a virus to jump and immediately be able to be both Highly infectious of an individual into which it jumps and be able to move quickly between hosts of its new species.
It usually takes some time to adapt and the serial passaging research that we know is being done in various labs in the U.S., in China, elsewhere.
Exactly would facilitate the viruses to be able to do such things, but I don't think it's an either-or, right?
So, actually, I'll let you get back to where you're going in just a minute.
Zach, if you would just show my screen again.
Again, I'll put a link up to this for people who are interested in pursuing it.
Very interesting, I find, article from, oh, I've forgotten when, 2010 sometime, 2012, called Ecology of Zoonoses: Natural and Unnatural Histories.
And it goes through exactly, you know, it's not talking about lab leak, this is 2012, But it goes through how changing, you know, human use of habitats, how changing population densities, how changing diet, how all sorts of things that we are doing in the world can change the chances that a new zoonotic disease will arise.
And this is the kind of analysis, this work right here by Koresh and Andy Dobson and many, many more is the kind of theoretical work, the review of what is known and what the kinds of parameters might be that we should be considering as we think about whether or not Are zoonotic diseases just on the rise and there's nothing we can do about it?
Well, if they really are just on the rise, what is different from now than when they weren't on the rise, right?
So, you know, I just wanted to caution there as an either or.
I think both can be true.
Well, both could be true.
It could be that this is a lab leak, and it is also true that there are viruses hovering out there ready to turn into a pandemic.
That is true, and I thought about how to do this to include that, and it's too complexifying.
Because even if this is the case, right, if it is a lab leak, then the fact is, what we have done is increase the chances of facing a pandemic by solving a problem that most viruses cannot solve.
Right.
How to get into a new species and spread within it is a difficult puzzle.
Not impossible, but difficult.
And so still, from the point of view, I mean, remember, my point here is really about human beings and how they are likely to decide what has happened based on either being the villains in a story or the heroes of the story.
And again, I do want to say also, I I think that this is, you know, as I said on Mar last night, and as I will go into later here probably, I'll talk a little bit about the probabilities, but I think this is highly probable that this came from a laboratory.
It was the result of gain-of-function research.
The instinct to do that research, I believe, to have been a massive error.
The culpability goes to the collective that decided to allow this, if this is what has happened.
This changes, though, at the point that the obviously viable hypothesis that this disease has emerged from a laboratory is shut down with false consensus, right?
That we actually have a right to know, and even if that right to know involves A completely open investigation of the lab leak hypothesis that proves it didn't happen, right?
We have a right to go that route rather than have this shut down so that we know how to protect ourselves going forward.
And at the point that you block that conversation and you demonize people who would start it, now you do have culpability.
And the fact that Life and Limb is riding on this means that Those who are blocking the conversation, to the extent that they are aware that this is actually much more plausible than they are letting on, they are taking responsibility for the deaths that happen that could have been prevented if we had simply been allowed to investigate this question.
Absolutely.
I 100% agree.
Before you talk a little bit about where you arrive at your estimates of probabilities, which you were also doing on, you know, we started this live stream back in late March when very recently at that point the WHO and the Surgeon General were advising everyone not to wear masks and we had been wearing masks in public before anyone else was and feeling kind of awkward about it, but obviously if it's a respiratory disease that's what you should do to stop the spread.
I was the bandit of our local hardware store.
You were the bandit of the local hardware store.
In fact, after everybody started wearing masks, people would comment when I came back in, you were the guy who came in here wearing your bandana back when nobody else was.
Excellent.
So let me just, in service of, there are some voices in the scientific establishment who have been saying this.
What we are not hearing for the most part is these voices in the media.
So Zach, I just want to show a couple of papers from my screen again.
Here we have a Nature paper from 2015.
Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research.
Lab-made coronavirus related to SARS can infect human cells.
That was in 2015, okay?
And then just two for now.
There are a lot of these.
Here we have Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020.
This is November of 2020, just, you know, two months ago.
Opinion.
To stop the next pandemic, we need to unravel the origins of COVID-19.
Here we have, finally and increasingly, scientists in the establishment with faculty and research positions saying, actually, no.
This consensus was arrived at far too fast, without sufficient data, and not only is that unscientific, it's dangerous.
Yes, and we should also point, we will never probably know, but we have arrived at the place where we can now begin to have this conversation in public without the stigmas that come back having a devastating effect.
We have arrived there in large measure because of the so-called drastic group who organized on Twitter.
Some of these people are known, some of them are anonymous, but this is a group of very dedicated scientists who have Doggedly chased down all of these leads and unearthed important pieces of information that we now have at our disposal.
And so anyway, there's a lot more to be said about the drastic group and how they accomplished what they did.
But for the moment, let's just say we owe them a huge debt of gratitude, and I hope that the full impact of their hard work is ultimately understood in this story.
Very good.
All right.
So, whatever you want, I'll talk about diet, but I think you have some of the things you want to do first.
Yeah, all right, so... It looks like you've been colonized, though.
Yes, I have been colonized by this fine felid.
Zach, do you want to put up the diagram I sent you?
So I just wanted to show, so my statement last night that in June, it turns out to have been May, but I said on Marr that I thought as far back as June I had rated the chances of a gain-of-function lab leak as 90%.
And this is something you would have shared on whatever episode that was, right?
Yeah, I did share.
I remember you putting this up.
I absolutely put it up.
So this is my flowchart.
It was my attempt to label all the major possibilities for how the COVID-19 pandemic could have begun, including things like the Wuhan wet market, which is on there.
So these are your estimates.
These are my estimates.
And, you know, you give us no receipts here.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, any one of these things could be... But let's just pick, you know, one or two and let me ask, you know, how do you, you know, how do you arrive at... I don't even know which one, which one would you like me to, which one would you like to explain how you arrive at?
Let's talk about the one on the far right over there since Bill mentioned it last night.
Intentional release?
Yeah, the intentional release of the virus.
I have it at less than one For those of you who are listening rather than watching, this is again a flowchart that Brett made where you start at a wild coronavirus and you end up at the COVID-19 pandemic.
And he has various probabilities, your estimates, in between that include bat to human via intermediate, such as a pangolin, Um, then through human at a Wuhan seafood market or directly, um, something that happened in the, in the labs, um, based on pure research or bioweapon research or, um, you know, or, you know, was a lab leak versus intentional release.
So those are, it's, I'm not going to be able to describe the visual for those who are just listening, but...
A pathway up here that covers all of the plausible explanations.
There's not really crazy stuff.
The virus didn't come from space.
We don't have to worry about that.
So those things aren't on here.
But every plausible thing is embedded at least on one of these paths.
And so the reason that intentional release is down below 1%, but it's on here, is that It's very hard to distinguish a gain-of-function virus, a virus that has been enhanced through gain-of-function research for weapons purposes from one that was done for biomedical purposes.
And in fact, the research is arguably dual purpose, right?
So we don't know who funds it, why, what's going on.
We don't know what we don't know.
So let me just say, I have seen zero evidence that there is a bioweapon.
So instantly, dual purpose, meaning defensive against a presumably naturally emerging zoonotic disease, and potentially then also useful as an offensive weapon.
Right.
Now, we've said up up front when this is a much newer pandemic that this virus did not appear to behave in a way that it would be a highly effective weapon.
Obviously, it has created a huge amount of economic chaos, so who knows what who might be thinking.
But anyway, the intentional release If it happened, if somebody had enhanced the virus somewhere, they might have released it in Wuhan, so that the Wuhan Institute of Virology would take the blame.
They might effectively have framed the Wuhan Institute.
It's very hard to falsify that notion.
That would explain the Wuhan Institute's reaction, which is, we were shocked and worried when we saw this virus showed up, but now we know it had nothing to do with us.
On the other hand, they haven't behaved In a way that a lab that had nothing to hide would tend to behave.
A lab that had nothing to hide would tend to say, hey, take a look at our books, take a look at our freezers, right?
This wasn't us.
We know how it looks, but, you know, you're welcome to check our notebooks and that is the opposite of what has happened.
So, in any case, I would say there is one weird fact that showed up very recently.
Just one?
Well, there are many weird facts and there are many percentages here on this chart that I would change now.
Okay.
The WHO commission looking into laboratory origins, a commission which clearly has conflicts of interest based on Peter Daszak being on this panel, has said something to the effect of it's too early to even say that the virus started in China.
Now, I don't know what the hell they're talking about, but if they have something of that nature, I don't know what to make of it.
I must say, everything I hear from this panel is going to be taken with a grain of salt until they establish they can do the work honestly.
Like so many of these statements.
That could be exactly the kind of due diligence that you want.
from a team of international researchers who are trying to figure out this thing that has, you know, decimated lives and economies, right?
Or it could be a feint and sort of, you know, this is a Potemkin panel that isn't actually interested in figuring out where this thing started, for why.
We may never know.
Right.
They could be trying to get ahead of the story.
They've clearly lost the ability to shut down the discussion about Blablink.
You know, they only got away for so long with accusing us of being conspiracy theorists, and now that accusation has just lost its sting.
So, who knows?
It's still being wielded, of course.
Well, of course, but the point is people are listening less and less because there are enough credible voices saying, actually, you know, there are four different kinds of evidence that are pointing in this direction.
I do wonder, actually, I mean, I do wonder those who have been, you know, shouting loudest about those of us who've been talking lab leak about being conspiracy theorists.
Are they... if LabLeak turns out to be something that is discovered to be true, and whether or not that therefore is something of a cover-up on the order of Chernobyl, right?
If LabLeak turns out to be true, how many of the people who have been saying, not only is LabLeak not true, you are irresponsible to talk about it, How many of them are actually going to own up to the anti-scientific rhetoric that they engaged in?
Oh, I don't expect that at all.
And frankly, the typical thing would be even people who saw the story for what it was and who were falsely demonized will not have their reputations resurrected.
So there's some, you know, obviously something Eric has talked about extensively, but the The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex, what he calls the DISC, is a very effective mechanism for deciding who gets to speak on issues.
And the who gets to speak isn't really about who turned out to be right in the end.
It's a lot about power.
Anyway, I would say, you know, this chart was obviously done back in May.
The idea that the wet market was involved was still a live idea.
That idea has now been falsified by the Chinese.
Many of the initial cases had no connection to the Wuhan seafood market.
So interesting that you had that five times higher than the idea of an intentional release.
Well, the thing is, an intentional release would have to be one of two things, I think, or some version of.
It either would have to be the Wuhan Institute, in which case they wouldn't release it in Wuhan.
That would be insane, right?
Or it would have to be somebody framing the Wuhan Institute, in which case I would want to see some kind of evidence of that before, you know, worrying about it.
Less than 1% is meant to indicate it's very hard to falsify this idea, but there's no positive evidence for it.
And until there's some positive evidence, it's just not, you know, it's on the chart.
You just have to leave it up there as a possibility.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, all right.
So anyway, I would actually say the chances of a lab leak has gone down very slightly, even though the evidence for lab leak has gotten better and better and better over time.
What's that about?
Well, it's about the possibility that there's another route that would have done the same thing.
So, like I said, there are multiple kinds of evidence pointing in the direction of a lab leak.
Some of them having to do with, you know, circumstantial evidence of the way the lab behaved, the deletion of databases, the bizarre relabeling of sample 4991 as RATG13.
There's all sorts of stuff that makes the lab look suspicious.
There's phylogenetic evidence, there's molecular evidence, there's epidemiological evidence that point in this direction.
Point of order though.
I don't know where you're going in terms of why you think, even though the evidence is growing, the chances that it's a lab leak have actually gone down slightly.
That's an amazing sentence.
The phylogenetic evidence to which you just alluded is, if memory serves, that there was this virus that infected six minors in a province almost 1,000 miles away in 2013.
In Yunnan, yeah.
And that it is something over 90% similar, like 96% similar or something, I don't have the numbers in front of me, to SARS-CoV-2.
And the fact that it is, so to us and to many people who are thinking about this carefully and have an evolutionary framework, that seems like that provides some evidence that that was sort of the backbone virus on which some serial passage research, some gain-of-function research was done.
And you would expect the resultant virus to be, you know, very similar and then quite different at a few notable spots, right?
And I have heard mainstream virologists and epidemiologists claiming that the fact that it is not identical SARS-CoV-2 is in fact the phylogenetic evidence against a lab leak.
So this point I think is fascinating because exactly the same data are being interpreted by us and others as that makes it at least possible and perhaps probable that that was the backbone on which gain-of-function research was done, hence the differences.
And is interpreted by others as C, there is no possibility that this escaped from a lab because it's not identical to the virus that was discovered in 2013.
This is sometimes how science looks and I'm not saying that everyone involved here is acting in good faith and with complete honor.
I hope that they are, I don't know that.
But sometimes you have exactly the same data and wildly opposite interpretations.
Yeah, that was not really the phylogenetic evidence I was pointing to.
I would say, you know, the failure of the overall SARS-CoV-2 virus to settle at one position in the phylogeny, that it has, you know, overwhelming similarity in one way to other beta coronaviruses, and then it has That don't belong in beta coronaviruses at all.
Yeah, it's been found.
in beta coronaviruses at all. - Well, there's the fern site, which doesn't belong in beta coronaviruses, where it's literally never been seen in nature, and yet here it is.
And so-- - Yeah, it's been found, it develops in serial passage research in things like mink, right? - Probably ferret, although-- Ferret or mink.
Ferret and mink are very, very closely related.
And then it also, the furrow and cleavage sites have developed in poultry farms.
So in basically domesticated agricultural situations and in research labs, but never in the wild.
Right.
So anyway, it's a phylogenetic anomaly.
Is it impossible to explain it through some natural pathway?
Not impossible, but it's going to be difficult.
And what we would need to see is some evidence that actually there was something capable of doing the heavy lifting, right?
Because we cannot just, you know, phony up a pangolin and, you know, imagine that that explains anything because it turns out it doesn't.
Yeah, they get saucy when you do that, too.
Right.
So, the reason that I think there's a slight decrease in the chances of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute being responsible is that the chances that... So, back in May, we didn't know anything about outbreaks in minks, okay?
We've now seen that minks get and transmit the disease.
So, there have been these little mini epidemics inside these mink farms.
Lots of minks have been destroyed, okay?
That is, in and of itself, very interesting.
There's a perfectly natural way that could arise out of gain-of-function research in which ferrets or minks had been used for serial passaging, which is that the virus is not new to this clade.
So for those of you who aren't mustelid experts, I realize most of you are, you'll just have to maybe take a pee break or something.
For the people who aren't mustelid experts, a mustelid being that clade of organisms that includes minks and ferrets.
Yeah, it's the weasel clade.
So, that clade, and minx and ferrets are, I believe, sister.
They are very close.
Each other's closest extent relatives, you think.
I'm not sure.
I believe that's right.
I believe that there's also the possibility of interbreeding, which would again say very close.
But nonetheless, the idea is if a virus can get into a creature that it's not been in, but very typically when it gets in it has very low capacity, if any capacity at all, to get between individuals, right?
Sick from a wild animal, but it's not the same thing as saying you're gonna get sick and everybody You know is gonna get it too because the chances are the virus won't know how to get out of you and into them But in the case of minks Wow right now.
We've seen others.
We've seen other stuff like Cats, big and small.
Cats, big and small, gorillas in zoos anyway.
Yeah, now the cats, as far as I know, can't transmit it.
They can get sick, but there's no evidence that they can transmit it.
Same goes, I think there's some cases of dogs.
So it's the case that you would expect, which is the virus is infective.
It can leap, but then it can't leap again.
Yeah.
Okay, so anyway.
You can spill over, to use the language.
Right.
Now I'm a little bit concerned saying this out loud, but I think it's better just to say it out loud and let's have a completely open discussion about it.
Do you still want your screen up as it's been for a good long time at this point?
You can take the screen down, Zach.
The reason for my slight adjustment to the lab leak explanation is that the possibility exists for some story to have had a bat infect minks in a mink farm.
This would still be a self-inflicted wound in the sense that the way we farm minks would open the possibility of an accidental natural passage experiment in minks that were housed very densely That could have explained the evolution of certain characteristics that we now see.
Very hard to distinguish between that having happened on a mink farm versus having happened in a laboratory.
Wouldn't explain it all, but anyway, I think the fact that there are mink farms apparently in China and that There's some story like that that could happen, is worth entertaining as a possibility.
That's interesting.
And I happen to have a paper relevant to that queued up too that I wasn't going to talk about, but you can just show it briefly.
This is another 2012 paper from PNAS, from the Proceedings National Academy.
Zoonosis emergence linked to agricultural intensification and environmental change.
What you just suggested is basically adding the caveat and thus adjusting your probabilities based on the new evidence that you didn't have in May that there are outbreaks in mink farms.
So, not expecting.
So anyway, most of the probability that I would put on something like that is borrowed from the collapse of the wet market explanation, pangolins, etc.
But nonetheless, so we're still at a very high percentage.
And, you know, look, that high percentage is not a scientific conclusion in the sense of it is not the result of the scientific method.
It's the result of something like a Bayesian analysis of the various probabilities.
And, you know, The way the scientific method works, we put the hypotheses on the table and we attempt to falsify them, and at the point all have fallen but one, that one becomes a theory.
So this is the reason we are sticklers around here to say that the lab leak hypothesis is a hypothesis and not a theory, I should say.
Bill Maher and his people, who have a wonderful, well-oiled machine of an organization, they put up a clip of us, and they had labeled it, unfortunately, something like Lab Leak Theory, and I asked them if they could change it to Hypothesis, and they were right on it.
So I think the YouTube clip has been changed, and the others, it's gonna have to wait till Monday, but anyway, Thank you very much for adjusting that.
It really helps us keep the discussion careful to be vigilant about the distinction between theory and hypothesis.
All right, should we talk about diet a little bit?
Let's do it.
Let's do that.
What are we at?
We're at closing in on an hour at this point.
Okay, so there are four papers or so.
There are more than that, but it's early yet and there are four papers that went looking at whether or not you might explain something about about the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of both likelihood of people getting infected and if people do get infected, whether or not, you know, how sick they get, if diet has any effect on those things.
So, if diet could mitigate the severity of your symptoms and might actually change whether or not you get it at all.
And of course, at this point, you know, A, even if we had the resources This is not the sort of thing you're going to be doing experimental work on probably, so it's purely correlational and it's basically looking at, you know, widespread, like, what kinds of diets do people in, you know, different parts of India eat and in different parts of Europe.
So the two big studies that I've spent some time with, again, big, correlational, so suggestive but not...
Not decisive by any means, that we're largely looking at differences in COVID-19 rates of diagnosis and outcomes for those who got sick across Europe and in India.
One of these papers is called Oh no, it dropped me out.
That's not nice of it at all.
There it is.
Okay, so one of these papers is from July of last year by, I'm probably going to mispronounce their name, Busquet, Busquet et al., published in Allergy, I think, unless I've got that wrong.
Yeah, Allergy.
Cabbage and fermented vegetables, from death rate heterogeneity in countries to candidates for mitigation strategies of severe COVID-19.
Interesting paper, this one.
And I want to just walk us through a little bit of table one in here, and then talk a bit more broadly about some of the findings from the other papers.
So we have here, this is, you know, again, this is, they've done a good job of not pretending to quantify when they really had no ability to.
So this kind of looks like, you know, they have given one to four pluses here to try to give an estimate, But it's kind of like, you know, it's kind of like what you did with your flowchart.
Like, you know what?
Based on the available evidence, this is what I think is going on.
And so they've said, based on the available evidence, what do each of these risk factors, possible risk factors, how are they going to explain geographical differences in COVID rates and outcomes at both the individual level and the country and region level?
And I'm not going to spend any time really talking about the distinction there.
It's more or less organized from most intensive effects to least.
So, contact with a SARS-CoV-2 infected individual.
That is likely to do it, right?
If anything is, that's going to do it.
Intensity of social contacts, intensity of occupational contacts, and confinement with such people.
All of these things are high, and this is no news to anyone watching this, right?
We moved down a little bit and they've got diet and food and long food chain supply and traditional fermented food as the things that they begin to talk about newly.
Oh, but before we even get there, vitamin D, something you and I have been talking about for a long time, probably since March on this podcast, Other viruses seem to do more poorly in humans.
Not all of them.
Some other viruses seem to do more poorly in humans.
The course of the disease is lessened.
The severity of the symptoms are lower when those people are able to get out in the sun.
So, yes, you can get vitamin D in a pill form, but for all of these things, it is almost certain that if you get it in the form that, you know, it comes to you in the form of food or in the case of vitamin D in the form of sunlight, it's probably going to be more efficacious.
And so they revisit the vitamin D question.
They find when they're just mapping diet onto COVID outcomes that
Low prevalence in Asia and Africa both suggest a role for diet and specifically they find in the next line here with regard to food that fermented food, and this shows up twice here, that fermented food is for a number of reasons, and again I think at this point we don't really have time to get into the diet science too much,
May well be protective against maybe both getting an extremity of disease ideology in COVID-19.
So specifically they talk about both raw cabbage, interestingly, ferments like sauerkraut and kimchi, yogurt, and so within Europe they found I think it was like Turkey and the Balkans which have a lot of yogurt consumption, and then a lot of parts of Germany which have a lot of ferment consumption.
Having lower rates than the areas around them, which also have different cuisines.
And then, and this was, this is one of these things that you and I would refer to as obvious in retrospect.
It had never occurred to me before, but as soon as I saw this in, in this paper, I thought, yeah, that, that makes sense.
Long food chain supply.
Long supply chain for your food.
Yeah, and I just read that off here and I realized that's not organized the right way.
Long supply chain for your food, meaning that it took more steps and probably came from farther away from where it was initially grown to get to you.
...is known from other research to be associated with metabolic disorders.
Okay, so that is fascinating and obvious because, you know, what does a long... how do I order it the right way?
Supply chain.
Supply chain for food tend to mean it's about food being highly processed, having some of its parts taken out and then maybe added back in as if those nutrients were always there.
So it's pieces, parts, it's productionist, and it ends up being shelf stable, maybe freezer stable.
It is very much not often representative of what the original food was.
And what we will see, and you know, maybe this is actually the moment to switch.
So Zach, if I can have my screen back.
from some of the other papers is that specifically plant-based diet, high-fiber diet, high-ferment diet, and one more thing that I'm not going to mention yet while we're just talking about all this, all seem to be negatively correlated with obesity.
With metabolic syndrome, with long supply chain for food, and with positively correlated with good outcomes for COVID.
So, you know, if you're looking for diet advice, you know, we know that obesity is one of the main comorbidities for COVID-19.
And we don't get to talk about it because we don't want to be fat-shaming, which is ridiculous.
Pretending that something isn't good for you is not going to make that thing go away.
We do not actually live in a socially constructed postmodernist universe.
So... Well, what's more, we're denying people a...
Honest to goodness, proper incentive to get to get in charge of their weight on the basis that yes, okay, obesity is bad for you.
It's especially bad for you in light of something like COVID and to not talk about the protective aspect of being at a reasonable weight is, you know, you're hurting the people that you're trying to protect by not shaming them.
So it just makes It makes no sense.
And we have, I don't remember which paper it's in, talks about the inflammatory properties of things like red meat.
We're not vegetarians, we eat red meat.
So this is not about saying you need to adopt this diet and we're perfect here.
We eat vegetarians for breakfast!
I don't.
I don't eat breakfast.
Red meat, gluten, largely in wheat and alcohol are all understood to be inflammatory and background inflammation seems to be contributing again to things like metabolic syndrome and weight gain and once you have weight gain you have obesity.
So there's at least one through line, one direct line from some of these things.
Okay, maybe modifying your diet.
You've always wanted to, and here you go.
This may actually help you stay safer in an era of emerging zoonotic diseases or diseases created for us by people interested in doing research.
Regardless, they're out there, this one's out there, and there will probably be more.
And how is it that we should be trying to keep ourselves safe?
One more thing.
Actually, no, two more.
A couple more things.
Here's a quote from a different Bousquet et al.
paper, so same lead author.
This one titled, Is Diet Partly Responsible for Differences in COVID-19 Death Rates Between and Within Countries?
They say, foods with potent antioxidant or anti-ace activity, like uncooked or fermented cabbage, are largely consumed in low death rate European countries, Korea, and Taiwan, and might be considered in the low prevalence of deaths.
Again, correlational.
There's no ability to establish a causal relationship here.
And then, just to go back to the supply chain issue, quote, The increasing availability of foods from big retail is a revolutionary event that has impacted crops, favoring those that have the best ratio of effectiveness over cost of production, and health at a population size level.
In particular, such a change in food availability has altered alimentary habits, promoting sugar-enriched, vitamin-depopulated foods, and has become one of the causes of the obesity epidemic, especially among adolescents.
These foods come from centralized farms and selected areas of the world that are distributed around the planet, elongating the supply chain of food.
The impact of long supply chain of food on health is measurable by an increase in metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance.
So the one more thing that we haven't mentioned yet that these papers suggest might be implicated as a useful dietary tool to avoid or mitigate the impacts of COVID is intermittent fasting, interestingly.
personally.
So a different paper, Rishi et al.
Diet, Gut Microbiota, and COVID-19 says, intermittent fasting, which includes alternate day fasting or time-restricted feeding, has been reported to favorably influence the gut microbiota by increasing the abundance of beneficial acromantia, mucinophila, and bacteroides fragilis.
In fact, various animal trials and some human intervention studies have clearly demonstrated health benefits associated with IF in people with underlying diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular ailments.
And these authors, if memory serves, specifically find pockets, demographic pockets of people who were effectively forced into intermittent fasting because they didn't have enough food due to the epidemic, due to the pandemic, who had better outcomes when they did end up.
Getting the disease.
So again, correlational, we can't know for sure, but super interesting and suggestive.
And for those who have never heard of intermittent fasting before, you know, it can be anything from you eat only for eight hours a day and not at all from for 16 to you don't eat anything for two days a week, you know, lots of different options.
All right.
Well, that is quite consistent with what we've been seeing.
So the upshot is diet, especially short supply chain, fermented foods, go outside, get your vitamin D, Make vitamin D while the sun shines, as they never say.
That's right.
They don't say it.
And what that also means is if you're outside and you're not around anyone else, get the sun on your face.
You don't need to be wearing a mask if you're outside and not around anyone else.
And it's been shocking to us from the beginning that outside areas were shut down.
And it's one thing if you really can't control the density and people are crowded really close to one another.
So far, so far even these new variants don't seem to be spreading outside.
Okay.
All right.
Well, it seems to me that we've arrived at... You promised sea stars, dude.
I did.
Yeah.
We've arrived at sea stars.
That's what I was... Of course, I wasn't going to leave the podcast without covering this.
Okay.
But no, the segue to sea stars though is through a different marine element.
We're going to go tuna first.
Okay.
Can we go tuna first?
Yep.
Okay.
It's the WAPO article, Washington Post.
Subways tuna is not tuna, but a mixture of various concoctions, a lawsuit alleges.
Really, we just need the headline.
That's kind of all you need.
It's just been taken to court.
We don't know for sure, although some independent analysis found that the tuna in the tuna is not tuna.
Why should we care?
What, like... Oh, we should care.
Yes.
We should care.
I think we should, but why should we care?
So most people, I think, will have this reaction like, that's not okay, but why?
Like, why actually should we care?
Well, A, you have a right to know.
And, you know, as I've discovered as someone who has apparently a severe wheat allergy, It is hard enough even if people attempt to report what's in food to avoid this thing that does substantial harm to some of us.
Because of, you know, small bits of contamination.
But if people are actually distorting what it is that you're eating, then your ability to detect what hurts you and your ability to police your own diet just drops to zero.
And I remember, I mean, my guess is this is going to be a whole suite of stories ultimately, if this turns out to be true and the tuna really isn't tuna.
It reminds me of the story where supermarket honey turned out most of it to be unrelated to honey.
It was some sugar concoction and the way this was detected was that it is impossible to produce honey without getting pollen in it.
And so by buying supermarket honey and testing for pollen and discovering that a large fraction of it had no pollen whatsoever in it, it was discovered that it was Incidentally, it's another risk of a longer supply chain for your food.
Having a close relationship to the people who are producing your food, or producing your food yourself, precludes some of these eventualities.
Absolutely.
And, you know, so this is again a place where the precautionary principle is everything, you know.
It seems like, well, I source my food, you know, at the supermarket rather than the farmer's market.
It's only a couple miles away.
Right.
It seems similar.
But the fact is it's all the difference in the world because all of the things that A, in order to get you an apple from across the country, right, the apple has to be a different apple, effectively.
Yes.
And so, you know, the food has been selected for this at the expense of that.
Tradeoffs are ubiquitous.
And so in order to get a, you know, You end up with a Tommy Atkins mango.
This is exactly where I was going to go.
Our experience having spent a lot of time in the tropics doing research is, you know, like I never understood why people liked bananas until we started doing research in the tropics.
And I had, you know, what I think of as real bananas.
And of course they're still not because, you know, if you've ever noticed that bananas don't have seeds.
So, you know, the modern banana is a human concoction, but the bananas that are growing down in, at least in the Neotropics, the little tiny bananas are so much more flavorful, as are the mangoes that you get straight off a tree in, you know, in the Neotropics.
Champagne mangoes and all.
And if, you know, if the only mango you've ever had is a Tommy Atkins mango, which was specifically selected to endure transport That thing is god-awful, right?
It's not a good mango, and it doesn't... You are going to anger the Tommy Atkins mango enthusiasts.
Oh, they can go straight to hell because... No, there are no Tommy Atkins mango enthusiasts who don't grow Tommy Atkins mangoes.
No, I don't think that's true because I think there are plenty of people who have been introduced to mangoes in American supermarkets and have never had what we think of as, and I'm comfortable calling a real mango.
Okay.
And so, you know, you get if you, I mean, I love mangoes, but you I really love mangoes.
Yes, I do.
And I feel like if you would only, if you had never traveled, if you had never done research, all the places you've done research, that we've done research, you might well taste of Comey Atkins mango just, you know, in the, in that season when, yes, it's been bred for transport, but it's actually available and think, yeah, I really like this fruit.
Well, all right.
I want to go straight to healthy because I thought you were going to say the people who grow Tommy Atkins mangoes were the people that I was going to anger.
And you know, they can go to hell.
But the people who like them, if you haven't had the chance to have another, then I would just advise you can now get good champagne mangoes.
I'm blanking on the name of the other one.
It'll come to me.
Anyway, there are good, the mangoes that have no red on them, they look more boring, they're smaller, but really good flavor.
Have those and have them ripe and it's a whole different ballgame from that Tommy Atkins thing.
We're far afield from tuna here, but part of the issue also with long supply chains for your food and buying everything under wrap and pre-processed in the supermarket is that you lose a sense of the seasonality of food and of life and of everything that is going on outside your climate-controlled home.
And if you start to realize that actually peppers are a summer fruit, as are stone fruits, and yes, you can probably get stone fruit in January if you're having them shipped from Chile or I don't even know where, you know, South Africa maybe, somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere where the seasons are opposite, you can get them.
They're never going to be as good.
Your supply chain for your food just got way long.
And it's actually, in my experience, super pleasurable to have as some part of your sort of weekly and seasonal rhythm going, ah, it's soon going to be citrus season, it's soon going to be strawberry season, spinach season, whatever, right?
And, you know, having that to look forward to and then, you know, eating the food at its peak when it is locally most delicious, and obviously this doesn't work as well for everyone depending on where they're living, Um, but also means that what you, what you get when, you know, for those, for those three, four, five, depending on the year, weeks that the Pacific Northwest has the June-bearing strawberries, and they are the best food in the universe.
We're here in Portland, Oregon, and those strawberries are out of this world.
And the strawberries... And not very durable, so we can't, they, you know, they don't get shipped elsewhere if they don't survive it.
Right, and the strawberries that you get from the same farms, growing strawberries right next to those June berries in August, using the same techniques, same soil, you know, same terroir, just don't compare.
Because an everbearing plant has been selected for something else and it can't maximize both everbearing and flavor at the same time.
And this is, you know, this is the evolutionary lens, right?
Like trade-offs and everything.
All right, so we want to pair these two things though.
There's something to be said for eating stuff at its peak, right, that's locally available, and there's something to be said for eating the stuff that humans have cleverly figured out how to preserve, right?
So this is the ferment stuff.
Yes.
And so the fact is we have all of these things that we modern people think of as, you know, aesthetic in nature.
I think I could go for a pickle, right?
But the pickle is a mechanism for taking a non-durable bit of plant and preserving it so that you can eat it when you're going to need it rather than when it's, you know, ripe on the vine.
And, you know, we could say the same thing about, you know, cheese and, you know, sauerkraut and kimchi, as you mentioned before.
All of these things were developed as a way of stabilizing these fresh foods by spoiling them in a way that is particularly healthy.
And the fact is they have extra benefits as you point to in that paper about COVID well-being.
Kombucha belongs on the list too.
Oh sure, it sure does.
Interestingly though, the other thing that belongs on the list of amazing techniques for preserving food and thus being able to eat your calories after the food was spoiled, Is beer, which is liquid bread.
And you know, we know that gluten is, you know, even if you're, you know, even if you're like a lot of us who don't seem to have a particular gluten sensitivity, unlike you, gluten is inflammatory.
And it doesn't seem to, you know, just be the glyphosate for instance, right?
But beer is full of nutrition, full of calories because it's drinking your bread.
Yeah, just to be clear, I don't think the glyphosate is the thing that we react to.
I think it causes something that then makes us sensitive to wheat.
So it is clear from my own experience that I have a reaction to organic wheat.
It doesn't help me at all that it's organic and therefore presumably free of any glyphosate whatsoever.
I am now sensitive to molecules in wheat, however that happened.
But, alright.
It seems to me that we still, maybe I missed it in there somewhere, but I know that we were going to talk about sea stars.
Were we?
I think we were.
Okay.
Alright.
Why don't you start, since you know what the topic is?
No, it's really just a tiny little thing.
And, you know, maybe later we should revisit behavior in sea stars and other things.
We've actually been, when we've been doing other research, we've been able to see some pretty amazing amalgams of sea stars in places.
No, I was going back through and doing some of the just deep history fact-checking for the chapter of our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, that goes back through the entire history of life on Earth.
It's just one chapter that is like that.
And sea stars, which are echinoderms, are the closest relatives of granates, vertebrates, basically.
And one of the distinguishing features of vertebrates is that we have bilateral symmetry, right?
We have, you know, there's a, there's an axis of symmetry and you can roughly, we're not exactly symmetrical, but you know, along that, that, that sagittal axis, uh, no, that's a, no, it's not, that's not a sagittal axis.
Yeah, I think it is.
Yeah, boy.
Sure, sagittal crest.
I mean, it's right on that axis.
Boy, you know, I used to teach comparative anatomy and know this stuff really, really well.
It's been a few years at this point.
Along that sagittal axis, you could basically fold us in half and get mirror images, right?
And this is true for all the vertebrates.
So, I was thinking, and I really should have known better, but I was thinking, ah, bilateral symmetry evolved at the level of vertebrates because look at our closest relatives, the sea stars, they clearly have radial symmetry, right?
You have a point.
out from which you have a radiation and the symmetry is in that, in sort of those directions as opposed to along an axis.
But no, there is of course the much bigger and older group, the bilateria, where bilateral symmetry originated and the sea stars have reversed.
They've given it up.
And they haven't given it up entirely because their larvae are still bilaterally symmetrical.
So sea star larvae still have a left and a right.
And then as adults, they just say, screw this.
I'm done.
I'm going radial symmetry.
And just Developmental biology is still in some ways in its infancy.
Some of the really important early stuff happened a hundred years ago, but there's still so much that we don't know.
Even things around axis formation is super hard for us to...
As to Grok.
But for me, you know, in no way being a developmental biologist, the idea of a larval form going from bilaterally symmetrical to radially symmetrical is, you know, almost enough for me to have a religious revelation.
It's kind of amazing.
It's pretty interesting.
So, all right.
So, evolutionarily, bilateral symmetry has been lost.
It has evolved away in this highly successful group of creatures.
That's fascinating and unexpected, at least to me.
I would say the lesson for our viewers is bilateral symmetry, use it or lose it, right?
Yes.
Oh, definitely.
So if you want to remain bilaterally symmetrical, at least in, you know, the long haul, then I would say, you know, do stuff that uses that and that'll potentially preserve it.
It's like Lamarckian bilateral symmetry.
I don't know.
I'm struggling to find a lesson that will be relevant to our audience.
That may not have been such a good one, but on the fly I feel like it was... I'm not sure this is a usable piece of information.
It's just fascinating if you're the kind of person who's fascinated by these things.
Can we agree that it won't hurt?
To use it?
Use your bilateral symmetry?
Take a run.
It's not going to be bad for them.
They'll get out in the sun.
They'll make some vitamin D. I hope so.
Use it or lose it.
Better safe than sorry.
Yep.
Yeah, makes sense.
Yep.
And if you find yourself doing cartwheels, you might be tending over towards radial symmetry.
Oh boy, that's a point.
Yep, that's why I never took up cartwheeling.
Is that why?
It's one of the reasons I also never managed to complete a full cartwheel.
Didn't want to be mistaken for a rotifer, maybe?
I didn't want to hurt myself.
I would love to be able to do a cartwheel.
It looks like a tremendous amount of fun, but I'm courageous about certain things.
Yes, you are.
That's not one of them.
Okay.
Well, did we want to show the, so we've got a thumb, we've started to do thumbnails now of photos that we've taken the previous week as opposed to shots of us and whatever cat has wandered by.
So this is a, this is a picture I took in a storefront in the Pearl District of Portland earlier this week.
And it struck me, it's obviously appealing a little bit, as appropriate, given the context of our conversation around consensus science, that many people now are saying, trust the science, follow the science, and, you know, because science, and we are here to say, in part, Absolutely try to engage in scientific thinking and scientific problem-solving as much as you can in the world.
And guess what?
Trusting authorities is actually antithetical to that process.
Yeah, I was thinking about this a bit on the plane, and I should say this was our first plane flight in some time, and we were- For me in, yeah, almost a full year.
You had flown down once before in like June to do Joe Rogan.
Um, but before COVID you and I were, we had gotten very good at getting on planes, getting places, you know, we knew how to pack and all that stuff.
And all I can say is if you are, if you are like us and you know, you had that dialed in and you haven't been doing it for the last year, um, your next trip You may want to budget a little extra time just so you don't forget anything.
I think one or two extra days would be sufficient to make sure you don't forget anything.
But the number of mistakes we made in traveling was spectacular.
I'm glad we heard each other.
Yes.
No.
Something terrible might have happened.
I literally walked off the plane without my bag.
Never done that before.
Yep.
Just walked off.
Totally unlike you.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, in any case, I was thinking on the plane about trust the science, and there's something about it.
It's like, what do the data say?
Data is king.
Data-driven science, where these things sound so right, but then it turns out that they are actually battle cries of a faction that's actually undoing something important.
And interested in rapid consensus.
Right.
Trust the science sounds so right, but the problem is the.
Right?
It's like the last day in MAGA, the the.
And trust the science is the place where the ill deeds are done.
And the point is, if you said trust science, I'd be on board.
Because what that means is the method.
If you've come to a bad conclusion, Cure for bad science is more and better science.
Trust science?
Yeah, I do trust science.
It doesn't mean I inherently trust scientists.
I would like scientists to be better than average, but... Or scientific results, right?
And so what you're saying is science refers to the process.
Science is the scientific process.
Science is not the results of the scientific process or the people doing it.
Or, well, okay, I want to fix that a little bit.
You can't trust any given result, right?
It requires that the experiment was done well, and you're almost never going to be in a position to know.
But, over time, Good science will drive out bad science.
Good conclusions will replace bad conclusions.
And the idea, the whole purpose of this clumsy, difficult endeavor that we call science is to ultimately converge on models of the universe that are so highly predictive that we can call them theories.
That they become the closest thing to a truth claim that we can make.
And so in any case, Trusting in that process over very short timescales is bound to be dangerous.
Trusting in that process over the long timescale is the best hope we've got.
And so anyway, trust science, I would say.
And if you hear somebody say, trust the science, you might mention that they're making a little error.
And probably don't make a friend doing so.
Well, engage in social distancing as you're mentioning this.
That'll give you a buffer zone.
A head start.
Yeah, you'll have a head start if you need to flee.
All right.
Well, we will finish with a few announcements here.
We're going to take a 15-minute break.
For those of you listening on the podcast, we'll be back next week as usual.
For those of you watching on YouTube, we encourage you to take that break with us and then come back with our live Q&A.
We'll be answering questions that you've posed during this Super Chat.
We prioritize questions from the first Super Chat on a monetary basis, and in the second Super Chat, we answer them in the order in which they come in in the second half of the live Q&A.
You can become a Dark Horse member at my Patreon, Heather Haiyang's Patreon.
The private Q&A for next month, we have a two-hour private Q&A, as I mentioned at the top of the hour, hour and a half, whatever we are now, which is always the last Sunday of the month at 11 a.m.
Pacific, is tomorrow.
The questions have already been posed for this month, but it's smaller, we can pay attention to the chat, it's a lot of fun.
We encourage you to join us.
You can also, at either of our Patreons, get access to the Discord server, which is a lively, conversational milieu.
At your Patreon, you have, at a higher price or point, a couple of conversations a month on the first Saturday and Sunday.
Yep, so that's next week.
you'll be having a conversation on the state and fate of the world and what we might do about it.
That's the Saturday conversation.
Right before our live stream.
Yeah.
Sunday, we talk evolution.
And anyway, they're both great conversations.
There's some longstanding people in it, quite a number of new people.
And anyway, they're very, very lively and fun.
We do have stuff for sale.
Mugs, t-shirts, stickers at www.store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
And there is a 10% sale all weekend.
Buy blues, all caps, B-Y-E-B-L-U-E-S is the code.
So if you find that you don't have enough stuff, this is one way to do it.
Yeah, which is definitely most of our problems.
You can email our moderator, darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com for any logistical questions, like how do I pose a question?
Where was the store again?
What's the code?
And yeah, maybe that's it.
I guess, you know, once again, we want to thank Bill Maher and his whole crew, and we'll be back in about 15 minutes.
