#66: All Biology is Evolutionary Biology (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 66th 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 discussing what the increasing visibility of a viable hypothesis for the origins of SARS-CoV2 says about modern science and politics. Then: Is eating red meat inflammatory? Is saying that eating red meat is inflammatory, inflammatory? What would it mean for evolutionary biologists to “stay in th...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 66.
Is it 66?
February 6th, 66.
And it is February 6th.
I was going to mention that just so somebody seeing this maybe in the future would know when this was done.
It's always useful.
I guess we've covered it.
We can just tick that box right there.
Timestamp is done.
Now, there's some question.
As to whether or not we clash.
And I must say, I also, I think you and I have a disagreement about this, but I also have some question as to whether or not two separate people clashing is a thing and whether this is not some kind of window into what it means for people to clash color-wise.
Whether or not what is some sort of a window into what it would mean.
Here's the thing.
We can all agree that there are certain colors.
Let's say that if you wear them together, they look bad and somebody who sees you will think that's not right.
And the question is like if you took those two colors and you were wearing one of them and somebody else is wearing the other one and they were sitting right next to you on the subway, would somebody look and say those two people clash or does the brain file that clashes within one person?
In other words, it's an indication of whether that person is chromatically sensible or is it really something about the universe doesn't want those two colors together.
Well, I mean, I think the question is an interesting one, but I do think to the degree that obviously within a person, within a choice that a single person has made, we agree that there is clashing possible.
But I think it is actually, you're reading something about intent, actually, when you are assessing clash.
And so two people sitting next to each other on the subway is not the same category as us sitting here in this room together.
Oh, that's interesting.
There is some question of choice here, at least theoretically.
Right, even though actually we both showed up here having spent some time together earlier today, but not in the clothes we're currently wearing.
So yes, when you sat down, I said, oh, I really like that shirt on you.
We might clash.
And I'm not sure that we actually do, but I think it is possible for two people who are choosing to present to the world together to clash in a way that I would not say necessarily that two strangers on a train would be said to clash.
I think I know how to handle it.
Oh, okay.
We'll just tell the people watching the podcast that they should have no judgment about us in this case, because it is not as if we chose to wear these things.
We are much like people on a subway.
Interesting.
So I will also say that for those of you listening, not watching, we have our black cat, our eldest carnivore in the family, sitting here on the screen, and he goes with everything.
He does.
The cat never clashes.
Yep.
Never, never clashes.
He's not thrilled about the conversation at the moment, but He's not clashing.
Okay, welcome everyone.
Thank you for being here.
We are grateful for the audience and for the remarkable reception we are receiving in the world.
Yeah, we get really good reception.
I don't know how many people we lost on that joke, but it's probably worth it.
Maybe just me.
Oh, that would be bad.
That would be bad.
Alright, let's avoid that.
Okay, so we're just going to make a couple of logistical announcements at the top of the hour, talk a little bit about where we're going today, and then launch in.
Okay.
So, as always, you are encouraged to stay with us if you're watching on YouTube for the Q&A afterwards, and you can ask questions for the livestream Q&A, which we did not post to the audio podcast.
Only this main hour plus goes to the audio podcast.
On Superchat, on YouTube, either in this first hour or in the second hour.
You can also get access to a private Q&A on my Patreon, or access to conversations, longer conversations with Brett on his, and you had one of those this morning already, and you have another one tomorrow morning.
Yep, we almost solved it.
Wow!
I know, I know.
We didn't quite get there.
So join quickly before you're... Next month, we're gonna nail down the final details of the new civilization we will all inhabit, and I think you all are gonna love it.
It's gonna be good.
If I didn't know you, I would find that terrifying.
Right.
I'm just kidding.
We're still working.
I would think so.
It's all being done in pencil.
In pencil, okay.
Let's see what else.
You can email darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com for logistical questions, like how do I pose a question, or where can I get a fancy Dark Horse mug?
Right?
At store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
Yeah, one clarification.
The Q&A is found on Heather's Patreon.
The private Q&A.
The private Q&A, but it's both of us.
Yes, yes.
It is both of us once a month, last Sunday of the month, but we do live public Q&As after every single live stream every week.
So, where are we going to go today?
We're going to spend some time talking about meat, a little bit about meat, a follow-up to a comment I made last week.
We're going to talk about why and when you should follow the science, right?
And where to.
And where to.
And what to do when you find yourself somewhere you really didn't expect.
What to do if you catch the science.
Yes.
Like our dog, always after the deer.
What would you do if you actually caught one of them?
You have no idea.
Talk a little bit about the New York Times suggestion this week about perhaps Editing or moderating encrypted chat programs.
Discuss an analogy that you have about the null hypothesis.
Maybe talk a little bit about a new Sony camera setting situation by which we can gain entry into some evolutionary talk.
That sounds really terrible, but it will be more interesting than it sounds.
I think it really will be.
And then I want to finish by talking about snakes and mangroves.
And there is a connection between the two that is not obvious, but this is the kind of stuff that I want to be talking about all the time.
And because we are obviously not going to get to so much of what is actually going on in the world, which for many months we were spending a lot of time on just responding to what happened this week.
In the world.
As always, if you would like our take, which, you know, we may just say, I just don't know enough to say, you can ask a question in Super Chat and we'll try to get to those questions.
Snakes in mangroves.
Aside from the obvious, I don't know what's coming, so this will be interesting.
Yeah, so, you know, non-teaser, non-hint really, it's not about snakes in mangroves.
Mmm, yep.
Alright, I'm working on it.
Okay, good.
And I will give you more and see if you can- I mean, you, once I talk about the snake angle, will be able, I think, to make the connection.
I'll figure it out.
Alright, I hope so.
Yeah.
Alright.
So, before we talk a little bit about meat though, It feels like something is breaking loose in the conversation, in the visibility of the conversation around lab leak hypothesis.
Does it not?
In service of that, I would say, hey Zach, you can show our screen here for the moment.
This is in the Telegraph today, which is a British paper.
Did the COVID-19 virus really escape from a Wuhan lab?
Fingers have been pointed at bats, pangolins, and a shuttered wet market, but what if the truth is altogether more alarming?
This published today by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan.
Alina Chan being one of the scientists who has been tirelessly working on trying to figure this out.
And there was also a piece, an editorial, I think, in WAPO, in Washington Post this week.
Yeah, there have been three.
I think there was another one, but I've forgotten which publication it was in.
Anyway, yes, something is clearly breaking loose, and I think this has multiple levels of relevance, because on the one hand, there's the question, and I was very pleased to see Matt and Alina address this in terms of the answer to where this virus came from is, I think they say it's maybe the most important question of the century.
And I agree with them.
I don't think we fully understand what we will be able to derive from the answer to that, but I know full well there will be important aspects once we know, whatever the answer is.
If it's a natural origin, we need to know that, because for one thing, if it's a natural origin, it's a very bizarre natural origin.
It doesn't fit any of the others that we know about, and so we will learn something about what is possible that is very important.
On the other hand, Well, the originally proposed hypothesis, which is presented as fact and you can't question it, right, for SARS-CoV-2, was originated in a bat, ended up in the wet market through smuggled pangolins.
Yes.
There's just no evidence for this at this point, practically, or there's a lot of evidence against it.
Yes.
is the mainstream origin story for SARS-CoV-1 is parallel to that.
It seems like a reasonable thing to have thought at first, assuming that all of this is organic and these are good faith players, that SARS-CoV-1 was originally in a horseshoe bat and then showed up in a market having spilled over into a secondary host in some kind of carnivoran.
Palm civet.
Palm civet, yeah.
Palm civet.
So this was a wet market situation.
Right.
But it still doesn't match, okay?
So I must say there are questions about... The original... So SARS-CoV-1 and the proposal on SARS-CoV-2 do not match the evidence.
There's something new going on here because in SARS-CoV-1 you did have rapid evolution of this pathogen in humans.
That's one thing that you would absolutely I don't want to say it's required, because I could imagine, you know, in the way that birds and people or pigs and people exchange certain viruses back and forth, it's possible that you're part of a long-standing system, and therefore the evolution has already taken place at the point something crosses over.
But in this case, that's not what appears to be going on, and so the idea of a virus that is well adapted to humans to begin with, and therefore takes off like a shot, is unique and unlike SARS-CoV-1.
Right, so just to be clear about what you're saying, because I think there are a lot of sort of dangling modifiers in there, this is the second trick to which you have referred both on Bill Maher and many times on here, maybe even in Joe Rogan when you were on Rogan last June.
The one trick of zoonotic diseases is switching hosts.
There are a lot of additional tricks, but the other major trick that we saw with SARS-CoV-2, that we see with anything that becomes pandemic, is then being able to rapidly spread between humans, between individuals, between conspecifics of the species of the new host into which it is spilled over.
And that will almost always take time to evolve.
That capability in the pathogen will take time to evolve.
And what was so notable about SARS-CoV-2 is that it had both tricks on board as soon as we started hearing about it.
Or there's something that we've missed.
Or there's something that we've missed, sure.
Okay, go on.
So A, there's the speed.
B, there's the evidence that would leave in the phylogeny, right?
So if you do the phylogeny, you would have diversity that we don't see here in the initial thing.
So it's possible there's some phase of the story we just don't know.
If this is a natural origin story, you know, the thing that gets said is it could have circulated somewhere else that we still haven't detected.
And then, you know, somebody takes a train and they end up in Wuhan and we notice it and it's already adapted because it's been circulating and evolving.
But the point is, okay, there's been an awful lot of pressure to find evidence of that.
There is no evidence of that yet.
And so what we are left with is an anomaly one way or the other.
And the answer to that anomaly is vitally important to figuring out what to do.
And people have not Alina and Matt were very good about pointing out that it's there, though they don't say what the value is.
But there's that.
And then there's the other question, which is more obvious, which is if this is a lab leak, even if it didn't do anything for us with respect to preparing and fighting COVID going forward, it would do something for the next pandemic, which we are likely to cause by the same route.
Mm-hmm.
If lab leak, it is likely to have been at least partially a result of the gain of function and research that involves serial passaging.
And if that research continues, lab leaks are likely to continue to happen down the road.
Right.
And in fact, one of the things that shows up in a lot of the good reporting on this is that there is a long catalog of accidents where things have leaked out of labs.
This is unprecedented in one regard.
And in another way, it's completely mundane.
You know that nothing about COVID is mundane, but the fact of something having leaked out of a lab would be anything but new.
Yeah.
And I guess, I mean, just one more important distinction between SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 is precisely that SARS-CoV-1 did not become a global pandemic.
It precisely lacked being very good at that second trick.
It was able to move between humans, but not super fast and not nearly as effectively as SARS-CoV-2 seemed to come out of the starting gates being able to do.
So it burned out, which is another typical thing.
Typical thing for a natural zoonotic spillover.
Yeah, exactly.
So, but to the second point, I don't want to take too much time here, but there's two issues happening in parallel.
One is what the hell is COVID and why does it behave the way it does and where did it come from?
Super important.
COVID or SARS-CoV-2?
The disease or the pathogen?
I was calling it COVID just because the, you know, the pandemic, the impact on people is the important thing, but obviously the causal agent is, you know, is where the evidence lives.
But Totally separately from that.
This story, as you point out, something new is breaking loose.
This is a very rare example of the gated institutional narrative not having effectively silenced some uncomfortable, awful possibility that needs to be investigated.
That exceptional fact, what it is that allowed this discussion to actually move in the direction of something reasonable, and although those of us who believe lab leak is a possibility differ, I believe, widely on how likely we think it is.
It's also worth noting, though, that in Ridley and Chan's piece in The Telegraph today, they finish by listing a whole number of virologists and epidemiologists who in the early days were saying Very, very absolute things about this not being a possibility.
And in fact I believe, I did not actually go back and check to make sure this is true, but that like 27 authored paper that was published in I think Nature early in the pandemic saying there's no way this is a natural zoonotic spillover, there's no way this is a lab leak.
Are now when asked by Chan or Ridley and they say and are willing to go on the record saying, well, yes, it's a possibility.
Yeah.
And so we are seeing, we are also seeing a move on the part of the scientists, some of whom were involved in participating in silencing this and silencing actual scientific inquiry in the first place.
So, you know, great that people are actually now saying, yes, it's a possibility, but I would really not want to lose the history here.
That those people who have been involved, and you know, it persists, you know, we're still being called conspiracy theorists and anti-scientific for questioning what the authorities have already declared is true and stamped it on everyone's foreheads.
Like that is still alive and well, and it's still dominant, but sort of slowly behind the scenes you're beginning to see a movement by the actual scientists who never should have come out as certain as they did in the first place.
That was a big part of the problem.
Yeah, it wasn't certain then, and there was a rush to circle the wagons around that certainty, which caused I think a lot of people who were paying slightly less attention to believe it actually was certain, which made it very difficult to I mean, yeah, as I said on Mar, as I've said here, because the possibility of a lab leak came out of Trump's mouth, half the country immediately said, no way, no how, and the media facilitated that.
Mainstream media said, oh, if he said it, Orange Man says it, it must not be true.
Guess what, guys?
That's not only not the way science works, it's not the way reality works.
It doesn't matter who says it.
If it's true, it's true.
Yeah, and you know this story is one, as with all of these stories, the nuanced position that follows the evidence and extrapolates responsibly from it lands on a slate of conclusions that doesn't belong in some camp, right?
You know?
Is there a possibility of a lab leak here?
Yes, the evidence so far points in that direction and not the other direction, but not conclusively.
On the other hand, does that mean that this is a Chinese virus?
No, there's an awful lot of evidence pointing to the fact of an international failure of the proper safety It's an international collaboration virus.
Yes, an international collaboration virus.
And so the point is, you know, this isn't going to play for one team or the other, and you've been fed two possibilities, but they're both wrong, certainly, and the right thing is going to involve having to parse these details.
I actually want to muddle this a little bit more politically for people because I think that actually will help people lose their, but I'm on the blue team therefore I believe this, I'm on the red team therefore I believe this stuff, which is that gain-of-function research has been contentious in the scientific community since it began.
And it rose to the top of people's concern sufficiently that in, I think it was 2014 or 2015, that is during the Obama administration, there was a moratorium at the federal level in the United States put on gain-of-function research in the U.S.
That stopped then, now that actually probably facilitated some of this collaboration that then moved it offshore, which we're not going to go there right now, but that moratorium that the Obama administration put on exactly this gain-of-function research was in fact lifted by the Trump administration at the end of his first year, at the end of 2017.
And so, which team are you playing for now?
How does that stuff make you feel about who the good guys are and who the bad guys are?
Guess what?
Again, reality doesn't care what you think, or the politics of the people involved, or whether or not they're right or wrong about other stuff.
This virus has an origin, and we don't know what it is yet, but a year ago, we were already, as you say, the wagons were already being circled on, there is only one story that we are going to talk about, says the scientific community.
We are scientists.
We are in the scientific community.
And we never wanted to be part of a situation which says, ah, you don't need to know the evidence, but we've already decided what the truth is.
Nope, not science.
And if going forward, you want this never to happen again, you need to empower people to actually deal with the a la carte conclusions rather than signing up for a slate and a team, right?
The whole point is that this is not a clear story.
This is a screw up at multiple levels.
We know that it's a screw up at multiple levels, even if it is natural origin, right?
The fact is we suddenly are all aware that these viruses are being enhanced in laboratories.
This is an obvious hazard, whether or not it actually spilled over from the lab this time.
But you absolutely have to have a free scientific discussion that then is allowed to impact policy without Polarizing this because the polarization is going to have played a huge role if this is a lab leak It's gonna have played a huge role in this the mother of all self-inflicted wounds.
Yeah, right.
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah.
All right No, let's get to the show.
Oh, right.
Okay.
I forgot that we were actually on camera.
Yeah.
So, yes, our dinner conversations do sound like that, and for the most part, our two teenage sons are ready to talk, ready to do it.
And the dog.
The dog, not so much.
She's mostly interested in watching what's on her plate and see if any of it goes to the floor.
I have misunderstood her intent there.
So our two teenage sons, again, as I mentioned last week, Zachary, our 16 year old, who is also the producer of Dark Horse, who's working tirelessly to put together an excellent show.
So let's start, I want to start with a correction, clarification from last week on the inflammatory properties of red meat, which is something that I said is kind of a throwaway line when I was talking about the effects of diet on COVID.
And from this Rishi et al.
2020 paper, which I posted in the show notes, which is to say I have the links in the YouTube descriptions and in the podcast descriptions as well, the line from the paper is, for example, plant-based foods are likely to support a gut microbiome capable of inducing an appropriate level of anti-inflammatory response in the host.
In contrast to a pro-inflammatory immune response elicited by the gut microbiome of individuals consuming food products such as wheat, red meat, and alcohol, thereby resulting in chronic gut inflammation.
So, this was not the focus of the research that I had done, and so I sort of said it, and as I said it, I thought, hmm, I'm not sure.
And the reference that they cite, Rishi et al.
cite, is another 2020 paper, Luthra, Gupta Sarma, and Gupta Sarma, called Inflammation Begets Hyperinflammation in COVID-19, Diet Derived Chronic Inflammation Promotes Runaway Acute Inflammation Resulting in Cytokine Storms.
But it turns out that that paper, as well done as it is in many ways, and I just went to it and read it last night or this morning, that paper merely asserts the association.
It doesn't even have a reference.
It just asserts the association.
So it provides no evidence.
Now, that's not to say that there aren't a lot of papers out there that do exactly claim to find this association.
But this actually wasn't one.
So this was a reference that didn't actually belong there as a reference.
And so this is just that, you know, I'm taking a moment here to say, you know, this is again also not how science is supposed to be done.
When you have a reference, it's supposed to actually point you to the evidence for the thing that's being claimed.
And when there is a claim in your paper that is surprising or new and there's no reference, that is your indication to the world that this is your, the author's idea.
So there's a reference there, went there, just an assertion.
Not scientifically deducible from what was written.
So I was asked about this in our Q&A, which again, not on the audio podcast, but on the YouTube Q&A afterwards.
Appropriately.
And what I said then was that I actually believe that the category red meat is a bit of a junk category, not to use like a phylogenetic term, and that at the very least it's often
What I said was, I believe that to the extent that eating red meat is inflammatory, that this is going to be about these hyper-novel farming techniques, animal farming techniques that we're using, and that you're likely to have the closer to the ancestral diet of the meat that you're eating, that animal had while it was alive, The less likely it is to cause problems for you when you eat it.
So not just grass-fed, which for those of you who don't know, doesn't actually mean that the animal was allowed to eat grass-fed beef.
It was not eating grass until the very end of its life.
It has to stay grass-fed and finished.
And you know, why wouldn't you grass-feed a cow for its entire life if you grass-fed it?
Well, you feed it grain at the end and it's going to cause a A weight gain very quickly, which means you can sell it for more, but it also means that animal is sicker at death and probably causing you problems when you eat that meat.
So, grass-fed and finished beef, I argued in the Q&A, is likely to have fewer inflammatory properties.
I stand by that.
That I believe is true.
But maybe an even bigger issue of the junkiness of the category red meat is simply like whole red meat versus processed red meat.
So, there is a lot out there and I'm not going to spend much time here.
But several papers, several good papers, I skimmed a bunch of them today, do distinguish between these categories sufficiently that in 2015 the International Agency for Research on Cancer issued a press release on the results of the evaluation of the carcinogenicity of red and processed meat.
And I'm quoting here from a Domingo and Nadal 2017 paper, based on the accumulated scientific literature, the consumption of red meat was classified as probably carcinogenic to humans and processed meat as carcinogenic to humans.
So, and you know, the why processed meat, it's going to have a lot to do with the nitrates and nitrites.
And, you know, maybe for another time we can go there, but... Also, there's a potential supply chain issue here, referencing back to our last livestream conversation.
Yes.
But processed meats are almost certain to be much, much farther from, you know, between farm and table, and therefore, you know, breakdown of valuable molecules, the conversion into some semi-random or arbitrary set of other molecules.
I don't know if this is true or not, that's a prediction.
But it's quite possible.
I think that's right.
And it reveals also, you know, this finding that we talked about last week about long supply chains for foods being correlated with things like metabolic disorders.
There are likely to be a lot of reasons for that.
And this therefore, I think, the longer your supply chain for food, the less healthy you are likely to be.
is actually one of these few like actually that's a snapshot rubric that I think is going to stand for all sorts of reasons.
There's gonna be all sorts of ways that that is true and so far at least I haven't thought of any things that would run in the other direction.
Yeah, I mean, at one level, you know, you and I, I think thematically are on board loosely with the idea of paleo diet, the sense that our diets, the more removed they are from ancestral, the less good they're going to be.
But very loosely, paleo TM.
Yeah, that's the thing.
Paleo is a narrow phenomenon is wrong.
But anyway, loosely speaking, the more ancestral your diet, the more likely it is to be healthy for you.
And the point is, long supply chain introduces an arbitrary number of new phenomena, some of which may not matter, but the chances that something that matters will be between you and, you know, and the farm is high.
And so, yeah, I see this as as likely and they're, you know, Probably, ultimately, there'll be a catalog of phenomena and, you know, it's different when you buy the food from the farmer at the farmer's market.
Right.
Yeah.
Let's see.
You prompted something for there.
Hey, you've got a hemipteran.
Yes, I do.
Wow.
A true bug.
A true bug right here on the podcast.
Probably not visible on camera, though.
Boy, I was just going to... What was I going to say in response to...
Yeah, I kind of lost it.
The Hemipteran drew my attention and now he's making a move on my computer.
Oh, I know.
There's a lot to say about Paleo diet as well.
Let's not let that Hemipteran actually into any of the ports of my computer.
That seems like a mistake.
You know that that's where the term computer bug came from, originally.
Probably not a mypteran, something smaller like an ant, but yes.
But computers were at a whole different scale at that point.
Right, right.
Yeah, I remember those computers.
My father having been a computer scientist in the 70s and 80s.
Oh, this was even before that.
These were programmed with Yeah, oh, with cards and such.
There's no wires.
You plugged in large wires between different places.
Okay, so the problem with Paleo diet, you know, sort of trademark Paleo diet, is that it imagines a single past for all humans, and that there is also only one environment of evolutionary Adaptedness that is the one to which we are adapted.
One of the premises of our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, is that yes, we are hunter-gatherers.
We were hunter-gatherers, and that means, evolutionarily speaking, we still are.
By that logic, we are also fish.
Right?
And we are also reptiles, and we are also mammals, and we are also primates, and monkeys, and apes, and humans.
And within humans, yeah, we're hunter-gatherers, but we're also agriculturalists, and we're also post-industrialists.
So we are all of those things, and we are adapted to varying degrees to all of these things.
The parts of us that we retain from our fish ancestry that have been unchanging since then are really, the word in evolutionary biology is basal.
You would tend to hear it said primitive, but it's a word we try to avoid because it has these connotations about it.
Those very basal characters, like having the kind of circulatory system we have, um aren't going to change and um and then but once you get to mammals and we get the origin the evolution of a four-chambered heart um you know that's somewhat newer and yet once you know once a four-chambered heart evolves actually twice separately in mammals and in Either birds or birds and dinosaurs, depending on how it's hard to tell, but probably birds and dinosaurs.
Like there's never any reversals.
And so it's like, it's really going to stick now.
Also agriculture 10 to 12,000 years ago, old or so evolved separately, convergently in several different places around the world.
Yes, Mesopotamia, which is the thing we all learn about in elementary school, but also in the new world, at least a couple of times in China, a couple of times in, in, In several places.
And it doesn't seem to ever reverse.
People don't go back.
And so we are, almost all of us, descendants for 10,000 to 12,000 years of farmers as well.
Which means it's not that we're not adapted to grains.
No, that's not right.
That's just not right.
Do you know what, this is unrelated to the diet issue, but do you know what characteristic I learned this week is a holdover from our aquatic past?
No, I don't.
Dad jokes.
Turns out... Alright, that wouldn't work pretty well.
Also puns, yes.
Both.
I'm not going with puns.
You're not?
No.
Okay.
Dad jokes I'll give you.
Thank you.
That was funny.
I didn't see it coming at all, which is the way it should be.
But I immediately began to try to think of, okay, like, what fish have paternal care?
Because dad jokes don't work in fishy fish unless they have paternal care, because you never meet your dad.
The dad jokes always fall flat.
Yeah, they have to be made at a distance.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Socially distanced dad shows.
There you go.
Okay.
So, oh, just one more thing.
No, a couple more things on this.
I've also got this really good book, actually, which I don't know if you can totally see, called Food and Western Disease, Health and Nutrition from an Evolutionary Perspective, a 2010 book by Stefan Lindbergh.
The setup for just this sentence that he writes is, That it's now thought that inflammation is a An important, sometimes causal, pre-existing condition for many cancers.
Now, there is reason, I think, to think that inflammation is becoming this, like, catch-all category and blamed for maybe even more than it should be being blamed for.
But yes, we have a growing understanding of the role of inflammation in human health and disease.
And what he says here, Citing one of his many, many references here is vegetarianism does not seem to lower the risk of death from cancers, suggesting that meat is not a major culprit.
And the reason that, the way that connects in is if vegetarian diets and omnivore diets, I'm going to just put aside entirely carnivore diets for the moment, if vegetarian diets and omnivore diets
Have equal rates of cancers, and if we are right, that if the current medical thinking is right, that cancers are very often associated with inflammation, then you would also imagine that red meat is not particularly associated with inflammation, that it will be about the diet of the animals you were eating and the degree of processing of the meat that you're eating.
Yeah, I guess one more thing here.
It should be obvious that talking about diet, there's an evolutionary perspective, right?
And while I'm sure there are people out there going, but you're not dietitians, you're not registered nutritionists, you've never even used a bomb calorimeter, have you?
Once.
Oh, you did?
Okay, well then that makes you not an expert.
Still, once, right?
Uh, high school we did a thing that measured the amount of energy in a piece of carrot, was it?
I don't know.
Something like that.
Oh, maybe I have too.
I don't know.
You've forgotten.
You've blocked it out.
Well, I wouldn't have blocked it out, but I mean, given that we actually, for two years of high school, We knew each other and that probably would have been in physics and we were actually in physics together in high school, so maybe we used a bomb calorimeter together.
Yeah, we did.
Point is, obviously an evolutionary perspective, which most nutritionists and dieticians actually lack, is absolutely necessary to understanding what it is that we are as humans, and therefore what it is that we should be eating.
And it's not a very far leap to say, when people say to us, but you're not virologists, you're not public health experts, you're not epidemiologists, stay in your lane, go back and do evolutionary stuff over here.
Back with the dinosaurs.
Exactly!
You're an evolutionary biologist, you must be working on dinosaurs, mustn't you?
And this evolution stuff, guys, sorry if this offends you, but it's everywhere.
If you want to talk about rocks or quarks, cool, we will stay out of it.
But almost everything else is evolutionary, and it is exactly the lack of evolutionary understanding that is likely at base causing some of the confusion in the world.
I actually, God, I heard I'm not going to name names here, but I heard on a popular podcast, a person who has been put forward as one of the experts in talking about this pandemic, based on this person's research, was describing all of the animals for sale at the market in Wuhan, and explaining how many possible spillover species there were.
And they said, and reading from a website, here's the species of wild animals and here's the species of domestic or farmed animals.
And this person then paused and said, well, I have no idea why they'd split those lists up, but let's just proceed.
Listening to this, I thought, if you honestly cannot understand why it's important that wild animals and domestic animals be separated on a list when you are trying to understand the possible origins of this virus, and it is, for instance, known that different viral conditions evolve under captive conditions on, for instance, poultry farms, then you frankly have no business pronouncing yourself as an expert here.
Yeah.
Like no business.
And that's not to say that we won't all, you know, even the most, the people with the most facility with evolutionary thinking will miss some of the evolutionary angles.
But you need to have the perspective of any time you change the conditions in which something is potentially evolving, you create a new selective environment.
And you can expect that that will have effects downstream.
So, I'm going to introduce a concept here, which I think we've probably talked about here before, which is path dependency, or what might be called historical contingency in biology.
But the idea is that certain things are the way they are, not because it's the right way for them to be, but because there was a sequence of events that led to it.
So, you know, When you end up with the bicycle actually depends on all of the things being in place.
You don't have a functional one until you have Dunlop's pneumatic tire, which is the thing that kicks loose the safety bicycle in the end.
But anyway, the thing that people don't get is this.
Many, many fields in and around biology, right?
Including all of the fields of medicine.
came of age in parallel to a new and crude understanding of evolution.
And evolutionists did not branch out into everything because we didn't have the tools to look into, for example, the cell until very recently.
And so you have two, you have a failure from both sides, right?
You've got fields that are thoroughly evolutionary and in which an evolutionary viewpoint is absolutely essential, but these fields proceed as if Darwin had never written The Origin of Species, you know, medicine and psychology being Two places where we do a tremendous amount of harm for lack of an evolutionary perspective.
But on the other side, you also find that evolutionists have gotten used to looking at the world, they're very focused on animal behavior, they're very focused at the phenomenological level, they're hard to interest into mechanism and things like this, because our discipline grew up where the power tools were conceptual and they, you know, the microscopes were crude.
So, in any case, we are left with a world in which a tremendous amount of harm is done because nobody knows what evolutionists are for, right?
Including the evolutionists half the time, or maybe more than half the time.
So, anyway, it's about time we got over this.
Every field of biology is equally evolutionary, with I think one exception.
Ooh, what's that?
It's ecology.
The one field that we typically, if we're going to get rid of the evolutionists and put them in a separate building, we usually house them with the ecologists.
Can I just say that there are lots of things that people try to cancel you and me for?
Yeah.
And then occasionally you say stuff where I think, like, no one's going to come after him for this, but like, that's the actual, like, potentially cancelable offense right there.
Here's the problem.
I'm right, right?
I know.
It's a kind of immunity.
But the point is, why do I say... Being right is a kind of immunity?
Yeah, it's the luxury of being right.
That's a shirt right there.
So why do I say ecology is not as thorough?
And it's not that...
It's tremendously useful to understand evolution in order to do ecology, and evolutionary ecology is a marvelous field that kind of never got off the ground because classic ecology took up all the oxygen in the room.
But the reason that I say this is that creatures are evolved, right?
Combinations of creatures only sometimes and in a very different and lower level way, right?
So ecology is the study of interactions between creatures in general interactions between creatures of different species and that There's lots of implications of evolution in that process, but the relationship does not evolve.
The creatures on both sides of the relationship evolve.
And so it's like one step back from normal, proper evolutionary logic.
Whereas cellular biology, there's no point at which, you know, you get down to things small enough that evolution is no longer the key way to understand them until you get down to particles.
So you introduced this by saying, let me introduce talking about path dependency and sort of historical constraint, phylogenetic constraint.
To me, what you've just landed on is one of my absolutely favorite core concepts in evolution, which is that of shared fate.
If you are trying to understand whether or not two things, whatever they are, are evolving together, have an evolutionary relationship, do they in fact have shared fate?
The An ecologist once said to you... I was wondering whether I should mention him.
So why don't you say this and then I'll finish what I was saying.
So I was sentenced to death after, it's an amusing story I should tell at some point, but I nearly failed out of graduate school in prelims and it was a pre-trans fallacy issue where I I already understood something that I wasn't expected to understand and it made it so that I would not answer questions in the way that they needed to be answered to pass the test.
So anyway, it wasn't the only flaw.
I was a hard student to deal with, I guess.
But anyway, I got sentenced to remedial ecology, which was like torture, right?
Because these people routinely said crazy things from an evolutionary perspective.
And I think the expectation was that I would either Learn to keep my god damn mouth shut or that I would say inflammatory things and be driven into the sea and either way problem solved.
But there was this one instance where it was Earl Werner and hi Earl if you're watching.
Anyway, he was lecturing on the basics of ecology and I was sitting there in the back trying not to scream and he said, he said, trees in a forest compete like cells in the body, right?
And no, that's not true, right?
Precisely because of shared fate.
The cells in your body, if one of your cells kills off your body, the other cell dies.
They have shared fate.
If one tree in a forest dies, The other trees may be affected, it might be positive, it might be negative.
Their shared fate is so much looser.
It's not the same thing.
Not only looser, but there's just no basis for competition to evolve between the cells in your body because they have the same genome and the only way that almost all of the cells in your body reproduce is if they act in a collaborative way such that your gonads get a chance to produce a zygote.
It's interesting, actually.
There was also simultaneously in that department a move afoot to demonstrate that competition was overrepresented in thinking about ecology and cooperation was underrepresented.
As we have said many times, humans in particular, but really all organisms, are both competitive and collaborative.
It depends on what scale you're looking at and what kinds of interactions you're looking at.
But that confusion may actually be downstream of this imagining that there's a perfect analogy to be made between the cells in the body and trees in the forest.
Because cells in the body do not compete.
If some ecologists are claiming that, they are the ones overfitting competition to the world.
That's not what's going on.
And the trees in a forest are competing, actually, and there's also collaboration going on, especially, for instance, between like how we talked about this in our private Q&A last week, you know, the mycorrhizae, the fungus in the soil in collaboration with the rhizae, the roots of trees that help both species do better in the world.
Well, it was a simultaneous overfitting and underfitting, right?
It was imagining competition in the cells that isn't there, and it was making the competition in the forest more benign by analogizing them to a system that didn't have it, right?
Yeah.
Pointed this out and the answer, the thinking was, well, there are resources that have to be divided.
There aren't enough resources for every cell necessarily to have everything it wants, therefore there must be competition, right?
And the point is actually, they're evolved to settle the competition so it doesn't exist because it makes all of them, you know, a cell that dies because it decides not to take up resource But whose genes are then transmitted by the gonads wins, evolutionarily, as weird as that sounds.
And there are trade-offs, but that's not the same as competition.
Yeah.
But anyway, all to say...
Evolution, the logic of evolution, although we are still new at it and we have to get better at it, but the logic of evolution is suffused through every biological discipline equally.
The number of people who die per year because medicine and psychology has failed to grasp the implications of Darwinism for what they do for a living is very large.
And anyway, we're awaiting this recognition.
What gets in the way of it is basically academic politics.
That you are incentivized not to see these connections because it, you know, lets the hordes through the gate.
Right.
We being the hordes, I guess.
That's right.
Okay, well that was item one, I guess.
Should we move on to item B?
Yeah.
So, this section I have titled, follow the science, except when we want you to follow us and we're just going to pretend it's because we're talking science.
One of the many executive orders that Biden introduced, President Biden on January 21st, requires masks in national parks.
Many of you will have heard this.
Reports, news reports on this tend to say masks required inside and outside when in crowded areas like overlooks, which, you know, that sounds reasonable.
That sounds like, yes, 100% when you're indoors with strangers, you should be wearing masks at this point.
And, you know, In a really crowded place on overlooks, okay, sure.
But the actual EO, you can show my screen here for a second, Zach, is this is the executive order on protecting the federal workforce and requiring mask wearing.
The second paragraph, accordingly, To protect the federal workforce and individuals interacting with the federal workforce, and to ensure the continuity of government services and activities, on-duty or on-site federal employees, on-site federal contractors, and other individuals in federal buildings and on federal lands should all wear masks, maintain physical distance, and adhere to other public health measures as provided in CDC guidelines.
Thank you, Zach.
So that doesn't actually specify that you're not required to wear a mask if you're away from people outside, and that worries me.
Because everyone who spends any time outside now, and you all should be, especially if, I mean, you should be in whatever form you can be, but if you're taking walks right now,
I assume anywhere in the world, and I certainly assume anywhere in the United States, although there may be parts where this is less so, and I can only speak to Portland, Oregon, and from a very brief moment last week, Los Angeles, knows the social pressure that is being brought about by this pandemic.
Those of us, like me, who walk around with a mask in my pocket, or depending, in my hand, ready to put on, but not on, ready to put on at a moment's notice should it be necessary, get assessed as if we're all walking around like sneeches.
This is something I was talking about a lot last summer.
It's like we are star-bellied sneeches and sneeches without, and there are indicators by which tribal assessments are immediately made, and once made, you are slotted into a whole lot of other things.
If you are not wearing a mask, some people's eyes will seem to say, and I've indeed seen some, I have not been involved in any of them, but I've seen some sort of yelling altercations between people.
If you're not wearing a mask, that must mean you also believe all this other crazy nonsense, you know, red team stuff, and therefore we don't like you, and you're putting me at risk, and you know, I might die.
You know, we quickly end up in hyperbole, and drama, and performativity, and it's, again, anti-scientific.
So the assessment of like, oh, I get it.
You're one of them.
No, I'm not one of them.
Like, I'm not showing you my belly.
You can't see if I have a star or not based on whether or not when I'm outside, I don't have a mask on.
Because guess what the science actually says is that there's almost no risk of transmission for any of the variants that we have yet seen for which there is our data that this virus is transmitting outside.
Look at all of those, yes, ill-advised protests, massive protests that became riots, you know, daily in some places like Portland last summer into last fall.
There were no super spreader events that I know of.
Those things were happening outside, even with a lot of people jammed together like that, many of whom were not wearing masks, there was very little viral transmission.
This virus is not spreading that way.
Why?
Probably two reasons.
Probably more.
Certainly two reasons.
One, it's about airflow and, you know, just boundary layers.
And if you've got any sort of airflow, the risk of getting the disease and the risk of the severity of the disease being high once you get it are both density dependent on how much virus you were exposed to in the first place.
So you get exposed to a little bit, Maybe it even provides long-term a little bit of immunity to you.
And I'm not arguing that you should go and try to get exposed to a little bit of it, but that might actually be protective.
And again, in service of just getting some nuance going here, also vitamin D. All right, so airflow and vitamin D. You go.
All right, so are you ready for a bit more nuance?
Okay, are you sitting down?
No.
You're not sitting down.
For those of you listening rather than watching, I don't know if you're sitting down because it's pitch black in the studio.
I'm also very short.
Also, she's very short.
Yeah.
No, here's the thing I want to... A, let's say that...
I, you know, let's hope this doesn't happen.
But if we if we're stuck with COVID for good, if we just have to learn to live with COVID, then we should develop a way of taking care of each other relative to the virus without causing undue harm to ourselves, right?
And lots of things function like this, right?
The sophistication around Pathogens and washing one's hand and, you know, food service and all of that.
These are mechanisms in which there is shame directed at those who misbehave and for good reason because there should be a social penalty for behaving badly.
And the problem with the current COVID case with respect to masks functioning as stars on the bellies of snitches is that you've got two sides who look at the other as you're not taking care of us.
Right?
So the one side is saying, you're not keeping us safe from COVID.
You're going to spread it to us because you're not wearing your mask.
So put it on all the time.
Broadcast that you are one of the people who doesn't want to spread COVID.
And the other side is saying, you're not taking care of us.
You're participating in this authoritarian garbage.
These people don't know what they're talking about.
They're crashing the economy and pretending it doesn't matter.
You know, all of these things.
And you know, There's a degree of truth in this.
Those who refuse to wear a mask are definitely putting other people at risk.
And those who are imagining that if you're wearing a mask you're a better human and therefore wearing them all the time is a good idea are participating in spreading authoritarian garbage.
Now, the problem The hyper nuanced issue, as we've been saying from the beginning, COVID does not appear to transmit outdoors, but that doesn't mean it couldn't learn that trick.
If it learns that trick, how will it do it?
It will do it because people are careless outdoors and therefore some, you know, virus that has a little bit of an edge in that regard for some reason or another, just by luck, We'll end up transmitting and creating more cases, and it'll get built up the way every other adaptation does.
So the point is, at the moment, we appear to have a gift.
That we have a way to stay away from COVID, and make ourselves healthier, and make ourselves psychologically more sound, and it works.
But if we treat it carelessly, we could lose it.
So I think the right place for that line to go is exactly where you said.
If you're at an overlook outdoors and it's crowded, you should wear your mask, even though the evidence says you're not going to get COVID there.
Right.
Why?
Because we have to protect the loophole that we've got.
Right.
And so I want to see.
And in fact, we've lived by this.
But if you are alone or just with people that you're already in potting with, you should not be wearing a mask.
Right.
It's actually potentially going to create more health problems for you, especially if it's winter and you're otherwise all covered up and your face is literally the only place that could be exposed to the sun.
Yep.
You want to be exposed to the sun.
Yeah, for vitamin D reasons, which are very directly relevant to COVID.
So what you really want, if we could just take the politics completely out of this question, what you would really want is for us to have a collective discussion like the one that you and I have been having since March, in which we built up a model that would allow you to know whether somebody was being an asshole or whether they were just simply taking advantage of a safe situation, right?
In other words, As you pass somebody on the street, right, the fact that you pass them on the street and you don't pull a mask up is not necessarily bad news.
For one thing, we can keep each other safe.
I sometimes hold my breath.
If I'm not going to put a mask on to do something, I can hold my breath and know that I'm not exhaling COVID if I have a three-second, you know, situation where I pass through somebody else's personal space.
If we can pay attention to these things, you know, the way we do all sorts of stuff about public health and, you know, disease transmission, then we don't have to, you know, persecute people for doing things that are actually perfectly safe and which they're doing them is not evidence that they're insensitive.
It's evidence that they have a good model.
That's right.
That's right.
Yeah, so if you, like I said, if you cover everything on yourself while you're outside, you're probably not going to get COVID.
That's true.
But you're also not going to get any vitamin D. And for similar reasons, I would advocate not hiding yourself under thick layers of sunscreen.
We've talked about this before.
There is finally now, after years of some of us thinking this and talking about it, beginning to be evidence that slathering yourself with sunscreen and therefore reducing the level of sunlight you get is actually linked to some late-life illnesses that yes, people who don't slather themselves in sunscreen End up with a little bit more skin cancer, I think, is the result.
I didn't go back and look at this, but they're less likely to die from it, and they're less likely to die of other diseases.
And if you understand the, you know, just as with the case of there being a threshold dose of COVID that you need before you catch the Disease there are nuances that frankly I don't know what the mechanism is but it's quite clear that a short break from the Sun gives you the ability to go back into the Sun and that one can marshal this in place of sunscreen and if you do that then you know does the slight increase persist my guess would be it doesn't
Yeah, I agree.
In general, I guess the take home here, I mean there are several, but is that I, and I know you as well, are not a fan of reductive solutions to complex problems.
I've been preemptively skeptical of pretty much all of these one word or one phrase, these single note solutions to the pandemic.
Hydroxychloroquine!
Vitamin D!
Vaccines!
Ivermectin!
It's just going to be the one thing?
That seems like a very un-nuanced and un-careful approach.
That said, just on that list that I just gave, those four things, two of them at least have incredible promise and almost no risk.
So, vitamin D and ivermectin.
Ivermectin as potentially prophylactic but almost certainly useful in reducing symptoms if you do contract COVID-19.
Widely available, not still under patent apparently, so quite inexpensive as a treatment rather than a vaccine-level prophylactic for COVID, has Huge promise and I want to say it's just beyond promise, like it's just being used in a lot of protocols at this point.
And there are a lot of papers that show some, you know, that are beginning to be out about vitamin D. You know, the problem is you're better off getting all of your stuff in the ancestral form and so Better than supplementing, if you can at all, to get out in the sun.
And, you know, I've heard this thing like, well, I live so far north that there's no chance of me getting enough vitamin D at this latitude and being healthy during the winter.
Guess what?
People lived far north before there were vitamin D supplements.
Now, in some cases, like in the North Atlantic, they were dealing with that by eating a diet rich in cod, for instance.
There are historical solutions to these problems.
It is simply not possible.
that you need a novel solution to a problem that would have been a problem for historical people living where you are living now if they didn't have access to your novel solution.
Because people were just living.
Well, one caveat, which is...
I was just about to make the caveat here, but no, Go for it.
No, go for it.
All right.
The caveat is that there is no guarantee that your predispositions match their level of solution.
Yes.
Actually, that's a step beyond what I was going to say, and you may not know actually.
Our dear friend and former student and also research assistant on our book, Drew Schneidler, I think we took it out, I think it's not even a footnote anymore, but exactly this on the question of actually exactly vitamin D and historical living where you do, that in the far North Pacific Northwest, the farther North you go, you're told this thing.
And his point was, If you are from the population that lived here 2 or 10 or 15,000 years ago, look to your ancestors' wisdom, look to the cultural practices that they retain, and maybe that ancestral wisdom will apply to you, even if you are from a different population as he is.
Even if you're Anglo living in ancestrally, obviously Native American land, maybe their solutions will work, and maybe their solutions are actually particular to the population to which they belonged.
Usually they won't be, but sometimes they will be.
You can decide this carefully on a step-by-step basis without having to reduce it to a single, like, wear a mask, wear sunscreen.
Yeah, the key is you need the model, you know?
So it's perfectly possible for light-skinned people to... for the ways that dark-skinned people deal with UV radiation near the equator to be insufficient for light-skinned people faced with the same Hazard and vice versa.
It's possible for the solutions that light skin people have for vitamin D to be insufficient for somebody with dark skin if you move far enough north.
So you got to pay attention to those things.
But the point is if your model says, here's how vitamin D is produced, right?
And here's how I interface with that model.
I, you know, am either advantaged or disadvantaged relative to vitamin D production.
Based on melanin content or something like that, you can at least figure out whether you've got something you need to correct for and the ancestral way will do it or it won't do it, in which case you might have to do something else.
Good.
So rather than show you a couple of these papers, why don't we, we've got a lot more stuff that we wanted to get through and we're already at over an hour.
So why don't we move on to a totally different topic.
You wanted to say a few things about this New York Times piece from this week, which is titled, Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hotspot?
Zach, I think you're going to want to show this.
Yeah.
We can scroll up and look at the ad.
So this was a trial balloon floated in the New York Times this week about, now I don't want to frighten people, but their claim is that misinformation can be transmitted over private messaging apps, and there's no way for us to prevent misinformation if we can't read what's in those apps.
So things like Signal, where your communication with your intimate contacts is encrypted and therefore unreadable by authorities, is a very frightening prospect.
That is terrifying.
You know what we might need, actually, is some sort of like closed-circuit television in every room of everyone's house that can just keep an eye on things.
Keep an eye on things.
And it can just, I mean, probably you don't want everyone being able to see everything in everyone's room, but like some authoritative body watching what everyone is doing at all times would be useful for this.
You can't know when you're being watched, so you have to behave as if you're being watched.
How about that?
Well, I mean, you know if you're in your home, you're being watched.
People are shouting Panopticon at the screens of their computers.
But okay, this is an obscene claim here that the fact that misinformation can be spread on encrypted text apps is reason for us to potentially eliminate the rights to have such apps.
And I would just point out, Bad people?
Serial killers.
Okay, you know what serial killers have used since the invention of ROADS?
Granola?
Roads.
They've used roads, right?
You could say, well, the idea that serial killers use roads and serial killers are bad and we all agree to that and therefore we need to, you know, have checkpoints on every road.
No, there's obviously such a huge price to be paid in freedom to, you know, yes, I have no doubt that terrorists will use Paper.
They will use paper clips.
They will use roads.
They will eat food.
They will go outside.
They will make vitamin D without your permission.
They will do all kinds of things.
But in any case, the fact that this article didn't create more of an uproar, I think is troubling.
They are setting us up.
This article was It certainly it's it's it comes under the sort of heading tech fix.
Yeah, tech fix.
Right.
And, you know, the basic premise.
That's probably one of their usual.
The basic premise is, of course, we can kick people who say false things off of tech platforms.
But what about chat?
And, you know, again, as I would point out, every single time this idea comes up, those of you who are focused on the fact that untrue, bad ideas circulate in an environment and therefore think shutting that down is a good idea without giving a thought to the question of how do you distinguish wrong things from novel things?
How do you take the next big idea which is still not understood by people to be true You know, what would have happened, for example, to the lab leak hypothesis if that authoritarian entity, whatever it is, had been able to shut down what it considered a conspiracy theory, which was actually just an obvious hypothesis in need of test?
And how many of those are we living downstream of now?
Right, and how many of those have we had the proper inquiry shut down because somebody appointed themselves the Truth Czar?
And in fact, I believe Truth Czar is proposed in this absurd article.
No.
Yes.
No.
Well, it's certainly proposed in, yeah.
You keep talking, I will search on Truth Czar.
I think Czar would probably cover it.
Did you find it?
No.
I mean, unless they're spelling it the Russian way.
They are, I believe.
No.
No.
Either of the ways that I would spell it.
Different article.
Okay.
Different article.
Okay.
That's it.
I just wanted to call people's attention to the fact that encrypted chat is the next frontier in rights elimination.
It's awful.
Great.
Well, from there, there's no natural – I couldn't figure out where that should go relative to anything else we were going to talk about.
So, another unnatural segue to talking about the nature of the null hypothesis.
You ready?
Yeah.
Okay, so this is an observation that you made this week, and just to let your brain switch gears here, I'll slowly set you up here.
In general, if a new virus emerges, it seems like the null hypothesis, that is to say the default hypothesis, that is to say the thing that is most likely to be true absent evidence of the contrary, is that it has a natural origin.
Right?
And that seems to be, although I've never seen anyone say that in this year that we've been living with this, that seems to be sort of implied in a lot of the arguments.
You know, extraordinary ideas, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
What's your evidence for lab leak?
As if the, you know, pangolin mediated wet market story is a parsimonious null hypothesis, which frankly it never was.
And you came to dinner maybe one time this week and said, okay, that, but maybe in this case, natural origin should not be the null hypothesis.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm not saying it should or it shouldn't, but the point is the assumption that it should is obviously absurd.
I do want to go back and say, I heard Eric say on Clubhouse last night, something that I have often said myself.
I don't know if I've said it on Dark Horse.
I mean, this idea of extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not a scientific principle, right?
No, it's not.
In fact, the rules of engagement are perfectly clear, right?
And the point is, I don't care how extraordinary the claim is, you know, is the hypothesis better supported by the evidence?
And are there any other hypotheses?
If not, it's a theory.
If it is better supported, but there are other viable hypotheses, then it is the best supported hypothesis.
I hope you could detect the mockery in my language when I said that, but it is one of these things that trotted out as if it's a scientific rejoinder to something.
You said, well, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Not inherently, no.
If correlation is not evidence of causation, what is?
So, this little brain teaser, correlation is in fact evidence of causation if there was a causal hypothesis pre-existing the observation of the correlation, and if not... Correlation, sorry, correlation is evidence of causation when preceded by hypothesis that predicted the correlation.
Yep.
I mean, that's it, right?
Yep, that is it.
So in any case, there are all of these little landmines distributed across the landscape.
But in this case, so we're going to get in trouble, as always happens when I talk about null hypothesis in this informal philosophical way, because null hypothesis has a very narrow definition with respect to a statistical test.
In this case, I'm not talking about a statistical test.
What I'm talking about is the default assumption, right?
We can say the default assumption for a new virus is that it emerged, you know, zoonotically, right?
Now, that's not necessarily true because we could say, is that true for New York, right?
If I see a new virus that I haven't seen in my clinic in New York, is the default assumption that it has emerged from an animal?
Here in New York?
No, the default assumption is it probably came in at the airport or the train station or over one of the bridges or something like that.
It came from somewhere else.
So the point is, you could make the argument that the default hypothesis would be zoonotic emergence, but in that case, no, there's a clearly more likely possibility in any locale.
Well, yeah.
It's a zoonotic emergence, but with an additional step added to account for the geographic unlikelihood of a spillover event in the middle of a major city.
Right.
Which gets to the analogy that I came to dinner shaking my fist at the air about, which was this.
I haven't been to a circus in a very long time.
I hope they no longer use bears.
But the idea of the analogy is, were you, let's say, in downtown Dallas.
Maybe you're at the Target parking lot and the circus is in town and a bear wanders by.
Right?
You could say that the null hypothesis is that the bear has emerged from nature but there are no grizzlies in Texas at this point and there is a circus and it might have bears.
The obvious first assumption and the one that any rational person knowing the circus was in town and having seen a bear walk across the parking lot would make is maybe the bear got away from the circus or the zoo, right?
And the point about this is In the case of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, we have this exact case.
It's more subtle because you can't see viruses, and so where they are and aren't isn't familiar.
But we don't have these beta coronaviruses circulating in horseshoe bats near Wuhan, right?
They're a thousand kilometers away in Yunnan, right?
What we do have in Wuhan is an institute that brings those viruses in to study them, right?
And so the point is, we have been sold the idea that the burden of proof is on the hypothesis that suggests anything other than zoonotic emergence, but in this case there's a strong argument to be made that standing in Wuhan and observing this pandemic break out
That actually the default assumption probably is that it came from the place in Wuhan where these viruses actually are known to exist and not that it is zoonotic in origin and previously undetected.
In any case, I'm not going to say that is, but I'm going to say the The argument that is deployed, that obviously the hypothesis that the virus came from the Wuhan Institute is so extraordinary that it requires overwhelming evidence before we even begin to talk about it, is nonsense.
It's clearly one of the hypotheses that belongs on the table.
I would argue that the one with the burden of proof is the more extraordinary of them, which in this case would be that a, you know, zoonotic emergence happened without our detection, refined the virus, turned it into a virus that transmits very well between human beings, and then suddenly showed up without leaving any evidence that we can see in Wuhan, right near the Wuhan Institute.
Yeah, so you're in fact arguing that the Lablik hypothesis sort of has some parsimony already built in on the basis of some of the evidence that we can see even without the help of any of the potential players on the ground there.
And it looks like we're not likely to get any help from the potential players on the ground there, so the evidence is going to require some sleuthing, but it seems more parsimonious from the starting gate.
Well, it seems more parsimonious from the starting gate, and we now have a history.
It's not a real long history, right?
We're talking about one year.
But, you know, we had these hypotheses traveling in parallel, and yes, one of them faced a whole hell of a lot of stigma.
That one remains consistent with all of the evidence that has accumulated in the intervening period.
You know what has not?
The natural origins hypothesis, you know, involved a story that now is strongly suspect on at least two counts, right?
The wet market and the pangolins.
So the point is, over time, one of these hypotheses is getting stronger, one of them is getting weaker, and, you know, doesn't mean it couldn't turn around tomorrow, but, you know, at some level It was clearly a hypothesis in need of testing and those who tried to shut it down did the world no service.
I guess I want to try to be a little, maybe a little bit more careful than that, because I don't think that that is the fair comparison between the two hypotheses.
That lab leak from one of the labs in Wuhan leaves a lot of the details undescribed, right?
And there are several that we have talked about ourselves and sometimes publicly.
And it could go a lot of different ways.
It could be gain of function.
There could be a lot of particulars there.
And natural zoonotic spillover event is, I think, more appropriately the right comparison.
So what we were sold You know, a year ago was, you know, Wuhan wet market and pangolin, and that had a high level of specificity, which is part of why it seemed like, oh, well, I just know it's pangolin.
Wow, what are the chances?
Right.
But, you know, so the details of the thing that was sold to us inappropriately.
Um, so strongly early on have fallen by the wayside, but I would say that we, that really, you know, to compare similar type, similar like levels of granularity of hypotheses, we want like lab leak and natural zoonotic spillover.
And I, you know, I, I still agree with you.
I think, you know, lab leak looks like it is more appropriate than null hypothesis here.
But Lably compared to, you know, Wuhan wet market spillover from horseshoe bat to pangolin to human is unfairly stacking the deck against that as a possibility.
Yeah, I mean, I take your point, and I think philosophically it's the right one, which is that you need to compare things of similar levels of precision.
Yeah.
But at some level, the way I would do that is I would say, you know, lab leak is a cluster of hypotheses, as people saw on the diagram that I put up, as is zoonotic spillover.
Yes.
And the question is, does anything in zone A- Lab leak?
Yeah, lab leak is Zone A. Does anything in Zone A remain consistent with all of the information that we have as of this date?
And then we can do the same trick over here.
Of all the kinds of zoonotic spillover, is anything still completely consistent?
The problem is that the things within zoonotic spillover that are completely consistent with everything we know so far would have to be extraordinary.
I think that's the thing that has me animated is that you could tell a story that would explain every piece of data that we have about SARS-CoV-2 that would be consistent with zoonotic spillover, but it'd be quite a story and the chances that it happened without leaving any evidence that we would have yet found even though The Chinese, at least, are feeling tremendous pressure to find a zoonotic explanation.
Seems very unlikely.
Again, nothing here is conclusive, but in terms of figuring out how to feel about it, to the extent that you've been browbeaten into believing that those who talk about lab leaks are wild-eyed, oh, sorry, we need to cover this, I think.
Okay.
It turns out, we have learned in talking bravely about this question, that there is a misunderstanding amongst people who evaluate these various possibilities, and that the deck has weirdly been stacked against the idea of lab leak because people think what is being suggested is much more extraordinary than what is actually likely to have happened.
So, to the extent That people, when they hear, did the virus come from a lab?
And they imagine that the allegation has something to do with this virus having been assembled in a lab for a purpose, right?
That it's either a completely synthetic virus or, you know, that it was built up like Lego-wise.
And it's not that that's not a component.
Right?
We have chimerism, which can be used to take strains from one naturally occurring virus and strains from another naturally occurring virus and put them into a single virus that has both strains, right?
But I've not seen anyone compellingly argue that this was created from scratch.
There is originally a bat virus backbone to this thing no matter what.
Maybe it's entirely bat virus with spillover, maybe it's bat virus backbone, but this other thing that some people are coming back at us anyway saying like, are you kidding me?
Like, no, literally no one, as far as I can tell, is seriously proposing that.
Literally no one.
No, it's overwhelmingly similar to RATG 13, which turns out to be 4991, which is another piece of evidence that something fishy is going on here.
Again, described in that Ridley and Chan paper that we'll link to.
Right, which people should read.
But the point is, what is being hypothesized with respect to a lab leak is not Out of the range of what we know was going on in the Wuhan Institute.
In other words, these techniques are known.
They're extraordinary, but extraordinary does not mean that we are guessing.
We actually know because they published the various labs involved in this work.
I mean, I guess, again, to get back to, like, what do evolutionary biologists have to say about this?
Like, the nature of this research is precisely, we are going to pass the virus through different selective environments.
And see what pops out.
It is not conclusion-driven.
It is not like, we are trying to get to there.
Maybe they're trying to, but it's actually like, hands off, let's see what mutations pop out and what sticks.
And that is exactly evolutionary process.
There is no other way to describe it.
And I think the uncareful unduanced image that people have in their heads that unfortunately many virologists, many people doing this kind of research, are happy to have people imagine is, oh, you've got a technique and so you know that when you want to have virus A with B in it, you just go chunk!
And like, yes, there is some of that, there is some of the chimerism, but the gain-of-function research, the serial passaging, is not like that.
It does exactly produce results that you cannot completely control.
Not only not completely controlled, but effectively evolution is being used to do things that we don't yet know how to do.
Exactly.
And we don't know what we'll get, and we don't know what all the effects will be, and we have no way to control them if they happen.
So, the importance of this would be hard to overstate.
Now you mentioned, I think you actually mixed two papers.
There's a Lancet paper and a Nature paper that both showed up very early to shut down any inquiry into the idea of lab leak.
The Lancet paper was like the many, many signatories.
You're right.
With Dasik on it.
The Nature paper made the following argument.
It made the argument that although the receptor binding domain of SARS-CoV-2 is very well adapted to bind the protein in question, We did not know enough to make the protein that way.
Anybody who knew what they were doing would not have made the protein this way, therefore it must be natural.
Yes.
Which is a nonsense argument in light of the fact that you've got gain-of-function research to accomplish what you wouldn't know to ask for.
Precisely.
So question, are the scientists doing this research?
That confused about the research they are doing that they themselves don't recognize the power of what they are doing and how it works?
Or are they being intentionally deceitful?
Either way, either way, you need people who actually understand the tools that they're using and the implications if they are going to be allowed to do this kind of research at all.
Again, remember, there was a moratorium on this research in the US for four years, just lifted at the beginning of the Trump administration.
And That claim, I'm sure, I don't know where it was picked up, but I'm sure that was part of what contributed to the, see, there's no way this could be lab leak.
We don't know enough to do that.
Yes, but you know what we do know how to do?
We know how to play God well enough to set evolution on a problem and say, go to it.
Sick it, evolution.
And it happens, and we cannot predict what's going to happen downstream.
So, in effect, what we have is a piece of non-evidence.
The fact that we could not have specified in advance the sequence that we wanted, or that nobody who knew a lot about this would have specified it because it would have sounded like it wouldn't have worked very well.
Yeah, and it was that even weaker claim, actually.
No one would have done this.
Right.
No reasonable person would have done this.
Well, we're not saying any reasonable person did it.
We're saying evolution is cleverer than reasonable people.
But here's the thing.
The paper, I believe it's Christian Anderson's paper in Nature, is still used to silence people who say the lab leak hypothesis is viable.
Right.
The fact of there being a paper in a major journal, peer-reviewed, that claims that this is rock-solid evidence doesn't matter that it has been illustrated to be nonsense because it is not responsive to what actually is imagined to have happened.
That's a very important fact.
All right.
Boy, it's like an hour and a half.
We got Sony camera and we got snakes and mangroves.
Oh my goodness.
All right.
Should we do it?
Yeah.
OK.
Sony released... Totally different topic.
Totally different topic.
Sony released a new deeply secret camera this week, I guess.
The Sony Alpha 1.
And it's a doozy.
But anyway, I was watching... A doozy in a good way?
Yeah, it's… well, here's the thing.
Cameras… So, for those who don't know, and maybe most of you don't, Brett's a camera guy.
Well, yeah, I have been shooting since I was in high school, and I do nature photography is primarily what I do.
But in any case, I pay attention to cameras, and I've noticed some things.
One thing I've noticed is that cameras have gotten incredibly Incredibly capable, and that if you look at the rate at which they are getting more capable, it's approximately the rate at which the Earth is getting uglier and less interesting.
That's unfortunate.
Troubling, yes.
But anyway, they're getting great, so, you know, shoot it while it's still here.
The better to document the end.
Right, exactly, exactly.
But anyway, Sony released this amazing piece of technology This Alpha 1 camera, and there are a bunch of reviews because it's really, you know, it pushes the envelope in many ways.
But I noticed in one review, Zach, can you show the, this is from Tony Northrup's review of the Sony Alpha 1 here.
By the way, Tony's great, does amazing work, but here he reveals that their new Eye Autofocus, which is Eye autofocus is a great thing if you're in nature photography because the camera knows enough about what it's looking at to keep you focused right on the eye, which is a huge benefit.
So for those listening who can't see the screen, what are the options?
The options for eye autofocus are human Animal and bird.
And I really don't want to hold them to an absurd standard.
Obviously humans are animals, but I wouldn't expect, you know, if the thing said human and animal, that would be fine.
That distinction is intuitive.
We all understand, and you know, those of us who traffic in this sort of thing tend to say humans and non-human animals.
We're making that distinction, but that's wordy.
There's no room for that here.
Doesn't need to be on a menu that way.
Fine.
The problem, though, is the distinction between animal and bird, and this is something you and I run into in all kinds of circles.
This is going to seem like a little micro pet peeve that, you know, only people like us would care about.
It's going to seem petty, except I can prove it's not petty in this case.
So the problem is that birds are, of course, animals.
Well, no, it's like, I want to actually ask, you know, we aren't teaching here, we don't have an ability to, like, get a feeling for the room, but, like, what do you think a bird is?
Like, what is it?
Is it a rock?
It's clearly an animal.
Is it a cruciferous vegetable?
Like, what is it if it's not an animal?
So, I think this comes, and actually I'd be curious if this same conflation happens in other languages, because I think this has to do just with the fact that mammal and animal, the kind of mummumum in the middle of the word, you know?
That causes people to think animal and mammal, or maybe because most of the animals that they interact with and think about are mammals, you know, the pets, the farm animals and all of this.
But in any case, the problem is, and why I say I can prove that this matters, is that actually I don't know how to operate the camera with those menus, with those choices, right?
I want to focus on the eye.
That's true irrespective of what kind of animal I'm focused on.
If it's a human, I got it, right?
If it's a non-human animal, okay.
It's quite possible, algorithmically speaking, that birds are special, algorithmically, and therefore birds are a unique category of animal, and that if I'm looking at a lizard, Or a dragonfly that the algorithm will actually work correctly if I have it set to animal.
But we don't know what the algorithm is, right?
And so phylogenetically...
A bird is more closely related to a lizard than it is to us.
But a bird and a mammal, a bird and us, human and bird, are equally as closely related to a dragonfly.
We're no more closely related to a dragonfly or more distantly related to a dragonfly than a bird is, because we have a most recent common ancestor that is between us and dragonfly, evolutionary speaking.
My guess would be, not knowing anything about their algorithm, that if I was shooting a lizard, I'd go with the bird one.
But just because he's going to be caught... But a dragonfly?
I have no idea what you're choosing.
I think the problem is we can't know.
So first of all...
People take more photographs than ever.
Sure.
Photography is more popular than it has ever been and the camera industry is dying because, by and large, cell phones have gotten so good at this job that you only need a DSLR for certain things.
One of those things is nature photography.
Right?
A lot of the people who do nature photography are bird specialists, right?
So it is not surprising, I think.
Birds are weird enough looking and... And challenging.
And challenging.
They're often far away.
They have this nasty habit of flying away from you.
Right.
But not surprising to me at all that the algorithm would break birds out from everything else.
I would not be shocked if actually a lizard or a salamander was closer in algorithm space to a dog.
I would also not be terribly surprised if what they mean is… Although, again, salamander is actually equally disinterrelated to humans and birds.
Right, but my point is, you know, all they care about is that the algorithm finds the eye.
What I care about is that I know what to set it on in order to take the picture I want to take.
And these things are very badly documented.
So I don't know if there is no setting for a lizard or a salamander, if it's in animal and bird is a special category of animal.
If both human and bird are, or if animal is everything else, all the other animals that aren't humans are birds.
So anyway, the way you say this, because so many people get into this puzzle, you know, you could say birds and other animals.
There's nothing wrong with saying birds and other animals.
Birds and other animals is correct, but you don't want to say birds and animals, right?
Birds and animals is, for one thing, it just drives us crazy.
It really drives us crazy to hear that.
But I do think asking people what they think they are then, you know, like, okay, so what is a bird then?
Right.
If you've got this collection of birds and animals, what are they?
I mean, that question gets tougher at like, you know, sponges and things.
I don't see a sponge option on the Sony camera.
Exactly.
But the point is, it's actually, you know, people have to stop and think if you say that about an insect, you know.
Is it an animal?
Yeah, is a fly an animal?
Yeah, it has to be.
What else would it be?
But, you know, it takes people a little bit to get there, and I get it.
That's fine.
But anyway, they should correct us.
The only saving grace of this story is that the camera is so expensive that this is a completely academic question.
I don't have to interact with that menu.
You never will.
Right.
Although, Sony, if you wanted to fix that problem, I'd be willing.
Yeah.
Oh, you're so generous.
Yes, very generous by nature.
All right, snakes and mangroves.
Let's do snakes first.
This question comes to us from the quest, from the perspective of how many ways that snakes move around in the world.
This is an old site, but it's a site of a friend of ours, Zach, if you would show this.
This is Brad Moon, who we went to grad school with.
Awesome, awesome researcher specifically focusing on, I mean, lots of stuff, but biomechanics of snake locomotion is a big part of his His research, and this is, again, this is literally from like a 2001, you can see it was updated in 2001, so that explains why it looks like it's from 2001.
But he's just describing like five types of snake locomotion, and you have most snakes move in what is called lateral undulation, just, you know, this just slowly back and forth, right?
Yeah, traditional snake motion.
Traditional snake motion.
You also have concertina motion where they sort of they do that and they sort of like back themselves up and then they like go forward.
I don't know how to do this for the sound.
Sort of thematically a little bit like a caterpillar.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you have rectilinear, where they're just somehow moving straight.
And boy, did we once see this happen in Costa Rica, our first research season.
God, what was it?
freaking gigantic, fast-moving black snake that came out of nowhere.
It's a snake that hunts poisonous snakes, and one of my friends described them as all piss and vinegar.
It's a very scary snake that actually has a hood that runs the opposite direction of a cobra hood.
It's a very amazing animal.
So it's like an agamid or something, like a lizard.
Anyway.
Anyway, we saw this snake just come out of nowhere, and did it go up or down a tree?
Up a tree, yeah.
And then slide pushing is another thing, but maybe the slide pushing... I didn't actually remind myself.
Is that going to be Sidewinder?
No.
So my point is, let's just skip slide pushing for the moment, because it's one that most people aren't going to be particularly...
familiar with.
Sidewinding is probably the second most common kind of snake locomotion that people think of, even though most of us, including myself, have never seen it.
I'd love to see sidewinders in the wild.
You can give me my screen back now, Zach.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And a New York Times article from this week, which reports out on a paper that I actually can't find, even with our awesome access at the moment to Princeton's University Library, but it's a Reeser et al.
2021 paper from PNAS, from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, called Functional Consequences of Convergently Evolved Microscopic Skin Features on Snake Locomotion.
Okay, rather than go there, we are going to go to this article.
The Skin-Deep Physics of Sidewinder Snakes.
I'm just going to read Read two paragraphs here.
As we know from trying to move on sand at a beach or other places, it can be difficult to move on these materials that yield underneath you as you move forward, said Jennifer Reiser, a professor of physics at Emory University in Atlanta.
Interesting, incidentally, that's a physics professor rather than a biomechanics functional morphology bioperson doing this.
That's why Sidewinders slither sideways.
Although some snakes can move laterally under certain conditions, Dr. Reiser said Sidewinders, the common name for a group of three distantly related vipers, Wait, wait, does that mean that the sidewinding is convergently evolved?
Yeah.
Oh, hell yeah.
Isn't that awesome?
Okay, so we're going to get back to that.
Sidewinders, the common name for a group of three distantly related vipers found in the deserts of Africa, the Middle East, and North America, have raised this unique form of movement to an art.
The sidewinding rattlesnake, for example, can travel at speeds of 18 miles per hour.
What?
Making it the fastest snake in the world.
So I love snakes, but that's terrifying.
That's a fast sidewinding snake that's going to come at you.
It's not the fastest snake in the world.
Okay, who is?
The flying snake.
It depends on how fast it drops from.
Yeah, how high the tree is.
But I mean, I'm just saying, you've got to be careful about planes like that.
I used to use, in my vertebrate evolution lectures on snakes, some of the videos that he had of snakes that were quote-unquote flying.
And they're not really flying, they don't get lift, but they glide and they have surfaces that allow them to sort of Sort of steer, and maybe I should ask him if I could show them in a future episode.
I'm sure I could.
Anyway, don't worry, guys.
They're not actually flying.
Oh, they're plenty worrying.
I mean, flying or not.
I think they're charming.
I think they're wonderful.
I don't know what terminal velocity for a so-called flying snake is.
It's got to be faster than sidewinding, but anyway.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a terminal velocity such that they then don't die upon landing.
Right.
Obviously.
Terminal velocity that isn't terminal.
Yeah, I guess it's not terminal velocity.
Okay.
Okay, so what – this is not the mangrove angle yet, but like, what do you think they do?
How do they manage it?
How do they go so fast?
No!
How do they sidewind?
How?
Given that, like, a rattlesnake can't sidewind.
And sidewinders apparently don't do quite as well doing the lateral undulation thing that, say, a rattlesnake does.
And I'm just picking rattlesnake because they're relatively closely related.
You know, I could pick anything.
Um, any, any thoughts on what they might be doing?
So, you said rattlesnakes can't sidewind.
Aside from sidewinding rattlesnakes, you mean?
Aside from the three snakes that we call sidewinders.
Yeah, so.
Oh, okay.
Um.
Like a timber rattlesnake or something.
How do they do it?
Well, I'm, I'm thinking it through here and I really need a few minutes with a piece of paper.
Yeah.
But does it have something to do with the rolling of the particles of the sand?
I think it is going to have something to do with that, actually.
So again, I couldn't access the full paper, so I'm just going off the abstract of the paper in the New York Times piece here, but check this out.
Here we have two micrographs of, on the left, a skin of the skin.
This is the underbelly, the ventral skin of the Saharan Sand Viper.
On the right, we have a micrograph of the venter of a Mexican lance-headed rattlesnake.
There are spikes in the scales.
I think it's an SEM, although they don't say it's a scanning electron micrograph.
They're little tiny scales that basically hook and provide the friction that allows the lateral insulation of most snakes, which is what we see here on the right with these little tiny hooks.
And on the left, rather than hooks, you actually have pits.
You have little tiny pits, not to be confused with the pits of pit vipers.
But little tiny pits in the belly and it's totally smooth and presumably, and again I can't see the original paper yet, there are other surfaces to which they can grab at all.
So I'm still not sure I understand.
Both of these images are from different clades of sidewinders.
No.
No.
This is, this is a regular lateral, on the right we have a lateral, laterally undulating viper.
So instead of that standard pattern, which somehow I've never seen before, there are little pits that grab individual grains of sand?
You know, the how do they make it work is not described.
And I think it's actually not about grabbing individual grains of sand, but rather not being trapped by those individual grains of sand.
That if you had these little hooks that were going in the same direction as your body, if you're trying to go sideways, you get stuck, right?
You would not be able to go sideways.
Whereas if you have these pits, You now should be able to move equally well in any direction, and presumably not as well going forward as a snake with the hooks on the bottom.
Cool.
Right.
So, I think that's super cool.
In part because I like snakes, but also because... You still haven't told us what the mangroves are doing.
Exactly.
I think maybe the most interesting thing here isn't the snakes, but the convergence.
Like, sidewinding evolved three different times in crotalids, in pit vipers.
And this put me in the mind of mangroves.
So mangrove is also a convergent category.
There is not an evolution of mangroves and then we see them in various places all over the world.
It's an adaptation to a problem To you know, it's a solution to a problem that the animal has encountered So just like the three sidewinding snakes exist in in environments where they have very loose substrate Mangroves have evolved several times in the world in in places where There is either regular flooding and or a lot of salinity in the water You called them you called them animals, which I think is cool.
I think they've earned it Did I call the mangroves animals?
Yes, you did.
Cool, okay.
Birds aren't, but mangroves are.
There it is.
Okay, so I want to just read.
This is from a piece that I wrote.
I posted on my Patreon a few years ago about the fabulous field station Navapatya down near the Sonora-Sinaloa border on the Mainland of Mexico looking west towards the Sea of Cortez, which Steve Herman, who was an extraordinary naturalist and ornithologist who died last year, who was one of the nearly founding faculty members at Evergreen… Who you described on a prior… Who I talked about actually, I think it was episode 17.
I had recently heard of his death and I gave homage to him.
He really was extraordinary and I was actually hired to quote-unquote replace him.
Often faculty positions are like that.
People described him as prickly and I think he was just fed up with the stupidity that was rife in almost everyone.
He liked to be pushed.
Right away upon meeting him, I was willing to disagree with him and he adored that, which actually is the sign of an excellent scientist, right?
So, he had found this place that is now called Navapatya many, many, many years ago.
And at one point early on, a student of his, Adam Hanuksela, was going down with him and he took Steve's daughter Sally, Sally Herman, down.
She is a botanist.
And to surprise Steve for his birthday, anyway, long story short, which I described some of in this piece, Adam and Sally for many years ran Afapatia.
It was a labor of love and I was lucky enough to spend, I don't even remember, like just 10, 12 days or something down there many years ago with Adam and Sally and several Evergreen students.
And it's just, it's a glorious place unlike any place else.
And actually, I believe I believe that our former student Mike Krzwicki is now running Navapatya.
It's fabulous and it's open for people.
You don't have to be an active researcher to go down there.
We have a standing invitation.
I encourage people to look it up.
I give all of that background in a conversation that was supposed to be about snakes and sidewinders to make sense of this third from the last paragraph of this piece.
On my last full day at Navapatya, Sally Herman leads me through the mangrove labyrinth on the island.
We paddle over, then mostly pull ourselves through, holding prop roots and branches, gliding, looking, emerging into an inner lagoon, then to a hidden exit through more mangrove.
Here, there are three species of mangrove.
They look different and accomplish what they do in different ways, but by virtue of their shared habit of having their roots immersed in the tidal zone, and having therefore to pull saltwater in and convert it to fresh, we give them all the name mangrove.
But oh, again, the problem of names.
In this case, that word, mangrove, reflects shared solutions to shared problems, without reflecting shared history.
There are at least 36 unique plant families in which mangroves have been identified, and those families are generally not entirely made up of mangrove forms.
To be a mangrove is to be convergent with many others, not of your own kind, not of your lineage, but others who have encountered a problem.
There is salt in this water all the time.
And also the trade-off on the other side of that problem, There are few other plants here, few who could compete with me if only I could figure out how to clear the salt from my system.
And so mangrove, the strategy, evolved many times over in many places around the coasts of the world.
So there is lifetimes to say about convergence, but the connection there is mangroves.
I did not go back and see what the current phylogenetic thinking is, so that was the current phylogenetic thinking as of whatever, three or four years ago, but 36 times the mangrove habit has evolved in the world.
36 times.
That's amazing.
I will say of convergence this, that if not for convergence, everything in evolution would be a single data point and we would have no idea what's going on.
And so I think convergence is in many ways the most beautiful of evolutionary processes, because when you see evolution do the same trick twice, you know an awful lot about what's going on that you couldn't say for sure.
You know, in fact, things like feathers.
Right?
You would think that the evolution of feathers would be a straightforward thing to explain, and in fact it's not.
I haven't checked in on this recently, but there are multiple hypotheses for the evolution of feathers, and it's very difficult to sort out because feathers have arisen exactly once.
And, asterisk, which will intrigue like two of our viewers, The order in which feathers, endothermy, and flight and arboreality evolved in basal birds is actually a contentious issue.
You might imagine that flight couldn't have happened before.
Some of these things are inherently true, but actually it's a live debate.
Yep.
So anyway, it's a beautiful process and thank goodness for it.
And just the final little piece of that is that there are two parts to evolutionary biology and they are really mirror images almost exactly, right?
So you have phylogenetic thinking where you try to figure out what's related to what, right?
And then you have adaptive thinking which is why does it look that way, right?
Why does it behave that way?
And in order to have any idea why it looks or behaves that way, you have to have a phylogeny that allows you to see who's actually related to whom, in spite of who seems to be related to whom.
And in order to do the phylogenetic work correctly, you have to swamp out the false signal that comes from convergence, which they call homoplasy and define as an error.
And it's like, okay, noise, you've just taken the most beautiful process in evolution, and you've called it error, because it gets in the way because it fools you and you don't like it, which I understand.
But nonetheless, in some ways, these, you know, you would think evolution was one discipline.
And it's really like two disciplines that meet at an uncomfortable border.
And we have history in both of those traditions.
But And the best, you know, as in any field and for anyone, the more specialized you are, the harder it is to see across the gap, to see across into places that you don't have deep familiarity.
But our two advisors, and we really both worked with both of them, but on paper Dick Alexander was your advisor and he was on my committee, but Arnold Kluge was my advisor and Dick Alexander He knew deep things about phylogenetic systematics, but he was in no way a systematist.
He was a micro guy.
He was a behavior and population level processes guy.
And Arnold Kluge was a deep history guy who also actually published a monograph based on almost a year studying the Boy, studying frogs in the canal zone in Panama.
I can't remember at the moment which clade it was, and I'll kick myself.
Gladiator frogs.
Gladiator frogs.
On Pipeline Road.
On Pipeline Road, yeah.
But he made his name for himself, and he still is alive, a towering figure in systematics doing the deep history stuff.
And I remember going to him at one point late in my dissertation after having heard him sort of rail against, you know, Finding convergence places where it was really irritating to find it, going like, Dr. Kluge, you know this is entirely what I'm doing.
This is my work, and I'm your student, and are you in fact finding what I'm doing?
Nothing but error, nothing but noise.
To his enduring credit, he was shocked at the question, right?
He's like, no, you're doing terrific work.
It's not phylogenetic work.
It's different.
So where you are spending time, he said to me, what would be noise to me is pattern for you and vice versa.
And that is one of the additional truths about doing science is that depending on where you're standing, what questions you're asking, The things that you're trying to, like, reduce to the level of, um, I don't need to pay attention to that might be exactly the things that other people are trying to rise up to the surface to try to explain.
Yeah, in fact, um, noise is completely defined with reference to what you're studying, right?
It's all a pattern of one kind or another.
Right.
Um, but, uh, yeah, noise is, um, It's confounding, literally.
Yeah.
All right.
We're there.
We are there.
Do we want to show the thumbnail picture for this week or just have it be up?
Maybe quickly.
Okay.
Zachary, if you can do that.
All right.
So we are going to change up our thumbnail game because pictures of us behind this desk all look alike, more or less.
So we are going to try to use a new photo.
We're setting the challenge of finding a photo that we take each week of something worth photographing.
And this is your photo, Heather.
You want to say what it is?
Yeah, just the sky at dusk last night was extraordinary.
Sure was.
And you went out on your bike and I went out on a walk and it had been dark and dreary and rainy all day and it cleared with high fluffy clouds right about half an hour before sunset through half an hour after sunset, at which point you couldn't tell anymore.
And on this walk, I found myself approaching this tunnel, and I guess it struck both of us as potentially appropriate to use as a thumbnail.
It looks like what's at the other side of the tunnel is the same thing as what is on this side, but you can't totally tell.
There are a lot of such paths that we are all finding ourselves on right now.
Well, do I turn back or do I just go through the tunnel and see what happens next?
And I would say in general we should be going through the tunnels.
Yep.
So this has some meaning for me because, uh, the kids and I had played around in this park on this trail system, um, and anyway, so, uh, I think I had mentioned it to you at some point long enough ago that you hadn't remembered that I'd mentioned it and so you came back excited about this place.
I discovered this park!
I had no idea it existed!
Right, and so, you know, a few questions later it became clear.
I discovered it.
You discovered it, yes, in rather the same way that Cristobal Colón discovered the Americas.
Totally, very much like that.
Exactly that sort of discovery.
But anyway, it is sort of interesting, A, to have you happen onto this place that had really struck us many months ago.
And, you know, then to discover that it was the same place and even just the weird human fact of like, you know, if we didn't have language, we could have been there many months ago and then you could have ended up there today and there'd be no mechanism for exchanging the information or comparing notes.
But anyway, it ain't like that.
Yeah, it's not like that.
So, okay, we are going to take a 15-minute break.
If you are on YouTube, we encourage you to join us after that for live fire Q&A.
We'll be answering questions from Super Chat.
If you are listening to the podcast, we'll be back in a week.
Before then, though, for both YouTube watchers and podcast listeners, there will be an additional episode of Dark Horse that Brett has recorded that will be up maybe Tuesday, Wednesday of this week with Daniel Schmachtenberger.
It should be a terrific conversation.
Well, it was a terrific conversation.
Only you and Daniel know that at this point, and I guess Zach, our producer.
I think we were both pretty jazzed on it.
Excellent.
So, Daniel is a friend of ours.
He's fabulous, and we encourage everyone to listen to that as well.
We will be back, as usual, 12.30 Pacific, Saturday, next week.
Please consider supporting us at either of our Patreons.
Mine, Heather Hine, has the Dark Horse membership where you can get access to the once-a-month private Q&A, which we leave up as a link after, so even if you can't join us live, you can watch.
It's a two-hour Q&A.
We do not guarantee that the answers remain true.
Yes, there's a statute of limitations on the veracity of the answers.
There is.
That's not the right description.
No.
You have conversations at your Patreon, including tomorrow morning.
Tomorrow.
It has been moved one hour earlier than has been our tradition to nine o'clock.
9 to 11 on Sunday.
On either of your Patreons, at $5 or more per month, you can get access to the Discord, where there is an ongoing lively conversation, I hear.
There is also, I think it is now safe to say that we are also, I have done one where I drop in and do a Q&A there.
Maybe you will join me for one of those in the future, but I will certainly head back and do that.
Yeah, I think you're actually on the schedule for next week sometime.
I believe that is true.
You can get your first Against the Wall Club and other merchandise and we'll be coming out with something new again soon at store.darkhorsepodcast.org and maybe that's about it.
That could be it.
That could be it.
Okay, we'll be back in 15 minutes for some of you and a week for the rest of you.
