#137 Hostile Work Environments & Folks Who Love Them (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 137th 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.This week, we discuss Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in the academy, and ask: does DEI belong in science? If the answer is no, are we contributing to a hostile or alienating workplace? We argue that it is the DEI enthusiasts who are creating hostile and alienating spaces for all of the rest of us. Then: laboratory o...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
Number 137 is it?
137.
137.
I'm going to guess that it probably is prime.
You might know better than I.
137 is prime.
137 is apparently a very special number to some number of physicists, but I admit that I have only discovered that so recently that I can't really say much more than that.
1936 paper in the journal Nature called The Mysterious Number 137 and a companion piece I think published in an Indian Journal of Science about 137.
I am going to stop there.
That's interesting.
I have always felt like 137 is a number we can do without.
Really?
I do use it occasionally, but I try to do that as little as possible.
137 in particular.
No, that's not true.
But I can't say that I see it as special.
I'm curious as to what might be special about it other than its primeness.
Yeah.
I shouldn't have said anything, probably.
No, probably not, because now you can't follow through.
I mean, I could say a few more things, but I'd probably start getting details wrong very fast.
So maybe we'll revisit this next week when we will not be prime.
No, for sure not.
Yeah.
And maybe we won't.
This week, however, we're going to talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion, whether or not it belongs in science.
Wonderful.
You might imagine how we feel about that.
How do we heal, and how does illness affect our perception of same?
And land sharks.
Yeah, man.
Land sharks.
Yeah, I think.
I mean, that's basically all you've told me.
Land sharks.
No, no.
It's land sharks.
Land sharks.
Yeah.
Excellent.
We're going to save land sharks for last.
I mean, of course.
Obviously.
Save them for last.
Keep people tuning in if they are weary of the diversity, equity, inclusion discussion.
Yes?
Tuna-ing in.
No different.
Well, I mean, in this case, the sharks are unlikely to eat tuna, although presumably tuna start very small.
True, and also tuna and sharks actually have a convergent form of being sort of very streamlined for speed as top predators of open ocean hunting.
Right, so it's sort of a badass coefficient causes a change in the morphology to facilitate the rapid wiggle waggle towards the edible things.
Not from the most professional sentences I've ever uttered.
No, no, no, I thought that was great.
That was great.
You know.
That works.
They work in a pinch.
Yes, and you don't want to be pinched by either a tuna, or a shark, or a land shark.
Or a goose, by a goose, whatever.
Yeah, all these things to be avoided if possible.
You know, maybe it's us.
We scared the dog away.
At the point your Labrador grows weary of you, you know you've done something wrong.
Right, that's true.
That is true.
Yeah.
All right.
Should we do some logistics and then embark?
Logistics, pay the rent, and then we head right for it.
Indeed.
We follow these livestreams with the Q&A, and we will do so this week.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com, and we will get to as many of them as we can.
We start that about 15 minutes after the end of this main episode.
We of course have our Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century out now in English, French, and Spanish, and this month it's coming out in a few new places in the Spanish edition in Latin America, and I forgot to look.
It's either in August or in September that the Spanish edition is coming into the U.S.
as well.
Which we're pretty excited about.
We are live on YouTube and Odyssey, and the chat is live on Odyssey.
We've got a new store at darkhorsestore.org slash home.
You could check out My weekly-ish writings at naturalselections.substack.com.
This week I wrote a short piece that got a lot of positive attention, which I think I titled, You Were Not Alone, about what many people are feeling right now going against what we are told is the only legitimate opinion to have in a number of areas.
Although I was specifically responding to a number of correspondents who are writing that they're losing friends, some have lost jobs, some are losing touch with family over their position as to how to stay healthy during this particular pandemic that we seem to be at risk of finding ourselves in permanently, given how the public health response has been.
More like has and continues to been.
Exactly, yes.
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The feel that you get on all those different substrates is so cool.
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All right.
All right.
Let us start talking about DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Somebody's favorite topic, I imagine.
Yeah.
I am a fan of all three of those things, by the way.
Even equity?
Yeah, the original flavor though, equity, which they have borrowed and turned into a very ironic term, as they have with all of these things.
But yeah, I believe that there was, you know, it's rather like the term woke, that there was an original meaning.
That was very, very high quality.
It did have subtlety and nuance to it.
And of course, that nuance was the gateway through which the hijacking took place.
Anyway, so I didn't mean to derail you, but yes, I am.
You know, I'm also, you know what matters?
Black lives.
I've always believed that, right?
But again, it's in the fine print, which you find out when you pursue these slogans, woke, diversity, equity and inclusion.
Yeah.
Well, as you had a particularly pithy way of describing the problem, this is from before, you know, when we were still more or less happily, and we thought comfortably, tenured at Evergreen, that the, you know, the wrapping on the box, the label on the box is not a match for the contents.
And this is, of course, it's a great publicity stunt.
All you have to do, apparently, to confuse a lot of people is to stick a label on a thing.
And you can convince them that the Trojan horse is indeed a horse.
There's a lot of mixed things there.
No, no.
The label on the box doesn't fit the contents is exactly what's going on.
And you know, at some point we're going to get wise to this ploy.
Yeah, a lot of people, a lot of people are confused.
So we talked, you know, we've of course, talked a fair bit about intrusions into academia and into science in particular, via this route having been, you know, run off of our own campus now five plus years ago.
And In June of 2021, in Livestream 84, where we were also talking about George Orwell's book 1984, we discussed Dr. Anna Kryloff's excellent article, which was also published that month, June of 2021.
It's called The Peril of Politicizing Science.
And here it is, Zach, you can show.
This was the piece that we discussed, again, 13 months ago, published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
And this is actually the very same version that I highlighted for our discussion 13 months ago.
So I've got my highlights here.
She starts with a quote from George Orwell, in which he says, It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
Don't you see that the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?
In the end, we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
And I'm just going to scroll to one of the things that I highlighted when we were talking about this last time, which is this paragraph here.
The answer is simple.
Our future is at stake.
As a community, we face an important choice.
We can succumb to extreme left ideology and spend the rest of our lives ghost-chasing and witch-hunting, rewriting history, politicizing science, redefining elements of language, and turning STEM—science, technology, engineering, mathematics— Education into a farce.
Or, we can uphold a key principle of democratic society, the free and uncensored exchange of ideas, and continue our core mission, the pursuit of truth, focusing attention on solving real important problems of humankind.
Now, Dr. Krylov, who I have now been fortunate enough to meet and talk with, and she is fantastic, she's also a Gen Xer like ourselves, but, you know, unlike ourselves, was born into the Soviet Union, and so grew up in a totalitarian regime, and so knows wherever she speaks.
Specifically, when she compares what she is seeing in the movement to censor and to cancel and to shut down dissent and argument to what she saw living under Soviet rule for the first few decades, I think, of her life.
So this is an excellent piece.
I highly recommend it.
We talked about it a lot in episode 84, which is up on Odyssey.
I think this was the first time that we were concerned that YouTube was going to actively shut us down.
And so I don't think they took it off YouTube, but it is not available on YouTube.
Interestingly, the episode in which we talk about censorship, one of the episodes in which we talk about censorship and Orwell is only up on Odyssey, but it is there.
Yep.
You were going to say something?
No.
So, she...
She actually, she's a professor, she's a chemist at USC, and USC actually gave her its award for science communication.
Let me see if I can find this.
Yeah, here we go.
You can, again, if you like, show my screen here, Zach.
Inaugural, so this is the first year that USC was offering the Communicator of the Year Award to honor scholars who engage with the public.
And this is, This is a picture of the winners from the various divisions at the university who received this.
If you scroll down and look at what they have to say about Anna, Communicator of the Year in Natural Sciences and Mathematics, they celebrate her.
for starting a conversation, or at least beginning a conversation in many circles where a lot of us have been talking, and she was certainly talking before she wrote this piece, in a way that got the attention of more people.
And so kudos to the University of Southern California for recognizing her, frankly, bravery, for stepping into the fray and saying, actually, this is not what science is.
This is not how science works.
And remarkable that she should actually be literally awarded, you know, rewarded for having done so.
You have something to add here?
I will when you get to the end of this thought.
No, you go for it.
Well, I just want to, no, I think it requires you to continue the story.
I just wanted to not forget.
Okay.
Okay.
So all of that is for the good.
We have conversation.
We have a scientific journal that has published a piece by an eminent chemist, a practicing chemist, that says the madness must stop.
We must actually have science as science is done and not have it be impinged upon and infringed upon by ideology and politics.
And she speaks from a position of some personal authority, having observed what that looks like, what it looked like in the Soviet Union when that happened.
And we see the university where she is tenured actually, I believe, actually celebrating her for that.
That's terrific.
However, now, in the same journal that published that piece, we have, let me see, sorry about this, We have a new piece in, again, the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
Kudos to the journal for publishing what is effectively a rebuttal, although it's 13 months later, so it's not exactly a rebuttal, but it is de facto a rebuttal to Kryloff's work.
It is called Words Matter on the debate over free speech, inclusivity, and academic excellence.
And if you look, I'm not going to read the whole thing aloud here, but if you look at who they appear to be, that's not good.
Who they appear to be responding to, who they cite, it's Krylov's original piece and two pieces that she has published since then with some other co-authors.
So it really does seem to be a response in kind, and these are also other chemists.
Let's just start with the first two paragraphs from this piece.
Again, published, I think it's July, I think it's last month, in the same journal, Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
What do we value as an academic in a scientific community, they ask?
Do our core values include only the pursuit of facts and inventions to the exclusion of other considerations?
Or do we accept that scientists have a responsibility to serve society beyond simply expanding the knowledge base, and should therefore concern themselves, at least in part, with how their words and actions intersect and impact the human sphere?
A scientist's innovations might be profound, benefiting many, but if that person's words or actions create an alienating or hostile workplace or learning environment, then how should the scientific community evaluate that person's overall contribution to humanity?
How should society view such a person?
These questions lie at the heart of an emerging conversation regarding what equality means for the greater scientific enterprise as we pursue increased diversity and inclusion of underrepresented groups at our universities.
So I have a number of little excerpts to share from this, but I know you have something to say here.
Let me just comment on this particular excerpt first.
Right off the bat here, they have created a straw man.
The idea that Dr. Kryloff is interested, or doesn't care, has not a care for the creation of an alienating or hostile work environment, is patently false.
And it is a strawman position, which, once you hear that, if you imagine that these people who are scientists and therefore should know something about what a complete solution set of hypotheses on the table looks like, if you hear this and you take it to be, well, there's two positions, and obviously I don't like the idea of a hostile work environment, and if you're saying that's fine with you, then I'm in the other camp.
I'm on the other side.
And that's not what the landscape actually looks like, right?
It has never looked like that.
And one of the ways that that is a false representation of what those of us who are resisting diversity, equity, inclusion measures are saying is that your measures are actually making the problem worse.
Many of us can see that there certainly has been, and to some degree remains, problems with systemic racism, sexism, etc.
But the idea that believing anyone's feelings as soon as they speak them out loud, and that trusting those feelings to be representative of what needs to happen in order to make it better, Is the way to make a more diverse, equitable and inclusive society is, for most of us who are speaking out about it and have thought about it carefully, exactly the opposite of what you should be doing.
So the straw man is not just a straw man, it's actually the opposite of what is true in many ways.
Yeah, it's the inverse of right, which increasingly the inverse of right is something that we have to watch for.
Anytime you see it, it's an indicator that some process is afoot that is not the one that is being described.
I would point out a couple things.
One, I have come to detest awards.
And the reason that I've come to detest awards is that they always get hijacked, right?
The purpose of awards, at least in principle, is a noble one.
The idea is you want to take something like Dr. Kryloff's courageous point And you want to add a benefit to having made it, especially one that's unexpected, that then will embolden such a person to continue to do such a thing and will show others, hey, this might be a scary thing to say out loud, but it does get noticed and it gets noticed in a way that's actually something you can put on your CV, right?
So the potential benefit to awards is huge as the benefit to something like tenure that protects a person who has contributed at a certain level so that they can be free to say uncomfortable, difficult things.
But what happens to these things is they are equally useful as a mechanism for emboldening those who shouldn't be emboldened.
And so anyway, in this case, it sounds like USC gave a proper award.
This isn't a case of the corruption, but I will say that the flip side of this predicts the story here.
The flip side of the award situation is spite.
And we're going to get to the technical definition here in a second, but the point is when somebody like Dr. Kryloff makes a point like this one in a way that is then recognized by her university, Then the danger she poses to the false, whatever the contents of the box labeled diversity, equity, and inclusion is, the threat she poses is that much greater.
That's what the award is for, right?
The award is for speaking truth to some kind of cryptic illegitimate power.
And so the cryptic illegitimate power now- And to prompt conversation.
Right, to prompt conversation, to defuse the bomb, right?
To the extent that this bomb allows- But even if she were wrong, That's what I'm saying.
But maybe she's not in this case.
But even if she were wrong, and what it does is prompt conversation and allows for a greater understanding of the basis on which the original communication were wrong, that is worthy.
Of high notice as well because that is what we are trying to do is we discuss in order to discover.
A hundred percent.
We discuss in order to discover.
And the folks who are engaged in this illegitimate revolution know that what they have to do is make conversation impossible.
Yes.
Right?
Here are the things you have to believe and conversation about whether that's the things that you really do have to believe has to become impossible.
Those are the two necessary things.
So to the extent that somebody steps in and says, actually I can discuss these things.
I'm not afraid to discuss race.
I'm not afraid to discuss gender.
I'm not afraid to discuss history and what our obligations based on it are.
That person is an extra threat.
And so now we get to this question of what spite is.
Spite is something that has been carefully considered inside evolutionary biology.
And the basic point is spite is the acceptance of a cost in order to inflict a cost.
Right?
And that may sound bizarre, right?
Why are you interested in inflicting costs?
And why would you accept a cost?
That sounds like it's all bad, right?
And it is.
Inside the matrix of costs and benefits, why would you accept a cost to inflict a cost?
Because the cost to you of not doing so is larger in the long term.
Now, this makes a lot more sense if you think in terms of lineages.
But if you have a person who is profiting by doing bad things, It may be expensive to make it difficult for them to continue.
That's, I'm going to accept a cost in order to inflict a cost.
Policing is the acceptance of a cost.
We in civilization pay to have police.
What police do is they drive up the cost of committing crimes, right?
So what we want is for crime not to pay.
If crime doesn't pay, we won't see it.
And how do you make crime pay?
Well, you have a certain number of people paid to find the criminals and make sure that they are punished.
And it doesn't have to be 100%.
It just has to be enough that engaging in crime is not a wise thing to do.
Right?
So, the point is, when somebody like Dr. Kryloff steps into the fray and says, actually, based on what I've seen, I know what we need to be talking about, and I'm going to show you that it can be done.
the necessity for those engaged in this illegitimate revolution to punish her is going to be obvious.
And so- So at some level, this newest article was inevitable.
Something was certainly going to fill that space and that it happens to be an article, that it happens to have been written by the people.
It was written by who knows what Whatever the point is, it could have been anything, but what must not stand is, oh, she said this daring thing and then got an award.
Maybe we should say daring things, maybe we'll get awards, right?
That can't stand.
So, you can expect that there will be, somebody is going to come up with something to rob that award of its power To make this behavior more calm.
So, yes, so I would argue that trajectory is inevitable.
The particulars are not, but this is exactly what happened to us too, right?
Because we had a community of people, because it was diverse in every regard, right?
We had trans people in our community at Evergreen.
You're talking about our students, right?
Your professors.
Yep.
We had trans people, we had people of many different races, we had wide economic diversity amongst our students, and they were all thrilled to be doing what we were doing together.
And so that was a danger to the story that Evergreen had a terrible problem with white supremacy, that it was impossible for students of color to get a decent education, blah blah blah blah blah.
We had to be punished, and we were.
So I would just say... Yep.
We need to zoom out and notice that transition.
Somebody shows it can be done, somebody has to punish them for doing so.
Fascinating.
Yeah.
Okay, let me read another small section from this just-published article again by… Sorry, I've forgotten the name.
It's Herbert et al.
in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.
Unnaming the Buildings, this two-paragraph section is called.
Recently, four buildings at the University of California, Berkeley, were unnamed following a substantive and transparent process that acknowledged both the eponymous individual's contributions to their disciplines and to the university, but also their considerable flaws.
In each of these four cases, it was ultimately concluded that the latter outweigh the former and that the individuals in question can no longer be viewed as exemplifying the values that the university seeks to champion.
For example, a building formerly known as LeConte Hall was a historical honor bestowed in recognition of John LeConte, Berkeley's first faculty member and its first acting president.
Yet LeConte was also known as a virulent racist.
Other institutions are also undertaking the difficult but necessary work to recognize the implications and significance of honorific building names.
Our values, our priorities, and our biases are reflected in those we choose to honor, and our community sends a message about institutional values when it renames or unnames a lecture, an award, or a building.
This is not canceling, but rather recalibrating.
Institutions and institutional values evolve over time, and the people who those institutions choose to exalt should evolve in tandem.
We need to consider our appellations wisely, aiming for enduring values and acknowledging that decisions made in the past may no longer reflect who we are or who we aspire to be as a scientific and an academic community.
Let me read the choices sentence one more time, italics in the original.
This is not canceling, but rather recalibrating.
Yes, that is now a term.
If that doesn't sound totalitarian and newspeak-y, I don't know what does.
Yeah, it's another term where a term that we used to be able to use that was highly effective, for which there is no obvious synonym, right, is now compromised by the fact that it is going to be used as a weapon.
And so, you know, Well, I mean, obviously things need calibrating.
We know that.
We're scientists.
We know that we've got to recalibrate our stuff every now and then, so sometimes our names need to be recalibrated.
Recalibrating.
Yeah.
It's clever.
I mean, I'll give them that.
Yeah.
No, stupid they're not.
I'll just read a few more things for us to riff on.
They say in the next section here about a number of journals, and I'm not going to go into the background of exactly which journals they're talking about, but they say, these journals do not censor new science or scientific disagreements unless remain aligned with their primary purpose.
Now, on what basis are they claiming that journals do not censor new science or scientific disagreements?
They have no basis.
And in fact, they tell a story in here about a paper having been, they say, retracted.
And in fact, they're misspeaking, and I'm not going to go into that story here.
But they are playing very fast and loose with both immediate past history, but also presumably knowingly.
are eliding truth at best by saying these journals do not censor new science or scientific disagreements.
Now, what could you call an editorial decision to publish this and not that a form of censorship, even if it really was not?
You could, and you might be wrong, right?
So there is going to be gray area where actually that's not what our journal does, or that's not within the purview of, you know, that's not within the scope of this journal, is a completely legitimate thing for a journal to say, and that does not make what that journal is engaging in censorship.
But we also know, we have seen, especially in these last two years through COVID, we're closing in on two and a half now, gosh yeah, how many times articles have actually either been en route to publication, having gone through peer review successfully, or even having been published, and then they're retracted.
And that actively looks like censorship.
Yeah, I mean it clearly is censorship.
For those who want an example, the McCullough and Rose paper, which had passed peer review, was headed to publication and then suddenly was unpublished by the publisher.
It's a great one.
In that case, I'm not sure retracted is technically the right term, but at some level it doesn't.
What happened, they played by all the rules that we in science are supposed to play by when we're trying to get published, and those rules are increasingly stacked against those who speak truth that doesn't match what the mainstream narrative says.
Despite that, and despite the fact that what they were writing about did not match the mainstream narrative, they got through it, but then they didn't.
Then they got sidelined.
So if you go back to that sentence that you read that basically says papers are not being censored by journals.
Yep.
That is again.
And they're talking about particular journals, but yeah.
It is a totally predictable.
That argument is necessary, right?
It has to be made.
It has no information.
And untestable.
Right.
The basic point is, look, if it were true that there were censorship, and then you could say, well, there's a bunch of censorship.
We're not in favor of scientific censorship.
We don't like censorship.
Right.
So the point is, well, no.
There has to be an argument that rolls its eyes and says, there is no censorship.
It's not censorship, right?
That will be there no matter what.
It would be there if it were true.
It would be there if it's false.
It's a non-informational sentence.
There it is.
But it does begin to point.
So the thing about Orwell that always troubled me, that now doesn't trouble me at all, having lived through the last few years.
Is that it was too stark to be real.
The inversion of language was cartoonish.
It was absurd.
Yeah.
And I thought, he's making a point by overdrawing it.
And that's a little unfortunate.
And now it's like, no, I'm watching the complete inversion of reality.
He was telling us what was going to happen and it was impossible to see if you hadn't lived it, which is part of why people from the Soviet Union and elsewhere have contacted us and said, you should know what that is you're seeing.
We've seen it before.
Yes, it can happen here is one of the things we hear.
Right, and this is another thing people have said to us so many times.
They've heard our story, our personal story, and they were polite and quiet about it.
They assumed we must be exaggerating.
Maybe that's not the worst human fault.
And then they encounter it and they contact us and they say, whoa, you weren't exaggerating.
If anything, you were downplaying it, which we were because we were trying to be cautious.
Yeah.
So I guess The rather complete vindication of Orwell is an amazing fact, and you're seeing it in real time in a scientific context.
Indeed.
Okay.
A couple more sections from this new paper.
On faculty hiring, they say, we note with dismay that hiring of black faculty at colleges and universities in the United States has actually decreased in recent years.
At the current rate, the percentage of black faculty will not reach parity with the percentage of black Americans within our lifetimes.
So, in the current cultural climate, I didn't go and look at their references, so I don't know if it's true, what they're claiming.
I don't know if the stats are good, and I don't know what recent years refers to.
But if these authors are actually claiming that in the last, certainly 10, but I would say 20 years, that there is active racial bias against faculty of color, I cry foul.
I find this to be absurd.
And what we do know is that in, for instance, historically black neighborhoods, There are economic disadvantages that persist to this day.
So we have everything from food deserts to poor educational opportunities.
And maybe, if we actually care the way that so many people are willing to say they care by putting stickers on their windows and such, We should consider increasing the quality of the science education in the schools in historically black neighborhoods.
This, it seems to me, would do a better job of increasing the pool of people who are interested in and qualified to become faculty in the sciences, for instance, than in enforcing a... I mean, they don't even have a
A plan here, but what they seem to be saying is what we need is to to to enact affirmative action at the faculty hiring level in order to get the racial makeup of our faculty to match the racial makeup of the country.
I think you're being too gentle.
And I will say, I aspire to live in a world in which, roughly speaking, it won't be precise, but there is parity between the racial makeup of society and the racial makeup of academic faculties and the racial makeup of boardrooms and all of that.
A healthy society would produce that in general on average.
And we don't have that, but for various different reasons.
So you said there isn't?
That parody doesn't exist.
Yes.
It just sounded like you said there is.
No, no.
A world that functioned really, really well in which your race might be an interesting fact about you, but didn't predict your success or anything like that.
It would do that in general.
I would see that kind of thing.
And if the public schools look like the communities that they're in, shouldn't the industries in a society look like the society that they're in?
It would be cool, you know, if opportunities were equally distributed and people had the ability to generate interests that just simply, you know, were passions that they followed, they would end up in these roles in rough proportion to their prevalence in society.
That'd be great.
However, there's a much better explanation here for why this isn't happening, right?
And I'm sorry, but at this moment, there's almost got to be something wrong with you to go into academia.
No, there does.
You have to be missing… I didn't see that coming.
What?
I didn't see that coming.
I mean, I know that's what you believe, I just didn't see that coming.
Right, but okay, especially in the sciences.
Let's suppose you're passionate about seeking the truth.
You're really going to enter an environment that's being overrun by zealots who wrote whatever that freaking sentence was about the obligation of scientists?
Right?
Now we're going to come back to that in a second here.
Basically, they made some argument about are we really going to allow people to make scientific discoveries and not pay any attention to their moral failings or whatever crazy version of the argument they made.
And, you know, again, I want to come back to that because there is a proper argument to be rescued from it, but what they've done is another straw man.
But in any case, I would point out something that we noticed in all of the mentoring we did of all of the students who passed through our classrooms while we were professors.
There were a couple groups of people that were particularly unlikely to go into academia, right?
What I saw were the children- Which for us meant academic science, because that's what we were teaching.
Right.
Children of immigrants and minority children who had, or they weren't children at the point they reached us, but people who had grown up with some sort of adversity and had made it to college, right?
Now, the reason was perfectly apparent in talking to them.
Which is in a family that has struggled, right?
If you start talking about, oh, I want to go into women's studies, right?
Somebody, hold on.
No, no, but that's a straw man.
I'm going to come back to it.
I'm just trying to make the point about how this works.
Let's say it was as bad as mom, dad, I'm thinking of going into women's studies.
Somebody grabs you by the lapels and says, look, the fact is this isn't just about you.
There isn't a future in that thing.
And what you should go into is something where there's potential.
Right?
Now, the academic sciences were better.
I'm not sure they are better now, right?
Because the only opportunity that exists in science, the real opportunity, comes from insight.
And if insight is now going to be filtered through some evaluation of your moral quality and whether or not you take the right positions on men choosing to be women or whatever it is, right?
Then the point is, well, there's no opportunity there either.
So not only are you choosing an academically hobbled environment where the upside of being a scientific academic is low to begin with.
Your likelihood of surviving is low because there are way too few jobs for the number of PhDs produced for reasons we've talked about at other times.
So the point is, you're going into a dead-end path.
Now, you'd be better off becoming a doctor, or a nurse, or learning to code, or whatever it is.
And so the point is, families that have struggled often have kids who are directed, I know how I'm going to make my way in the world.
They're much more economically focused.
And so to the extent that such people might look at the opportunities of joining the professorate with some sort of skepticism, that's partially on the professorate for not providing an environment that makes any sense.
It's absolutely true.
And I think I've said this on Dark Horse before, but I actually had more than one conversation in which this was explicit back when we were at Michigan.
When we were in grad school and I was a TA, and we both TA'd for I think 10 semesters there, And we did some higher-level stuff, but we both did a couple of terms of the Intro Bio series, which was one of the weed-out courses for the pre-health, including pre-med, pre-dental, pre-nursing, all of it.
And very, very low percentage of the students were actually interested or saying at that point, oh, I want to go into science, I want to become a scientist.
They would say, I want to be a doctor, or I want to be a dentist, I want to be a nurse.
But I ended up talking at one point to, in one class, you know, labs are wonderful, teaching labs are wonderful in part because they give opportunity for small discussions that can go on for a fair bit of time, sort of like field trips.
And so I ended up, as I remember it, talking with two or three young men, African American men, who had not come from a lot of money, but also, you know, they weren't upper middle class by, you know, by their backgrounds, but they weren't desperately poor.
But their families didn't have much.
And it's been a lot of years, so I don't remember the specifics, and I may be combining some individuals here.
But they had a lot of potential, and I was talking to them about what their plans were.
And one of them said to me, and the other or others concurred rapidly, look, I love the science.
I love what we're doing in this class.
But there's no chance I'm going into science.
Because I need to be able to provide not just for me, but for my family in order to keep us moving in the economic trajectory that I am helping us move now.
And this is now changing too, of course, but at that point in the 90s, when we were grad students, It looked like becoming a doctor was a secure financial move and becoming a professor really wasn't.
What are you going to do there?
And also there's no guarantee the way that, you know, if you are smart and work hard and could get through medical school, there was going to be demand for you.
You weren't going to be knocking on doors looking for a place to hang up your shingle.
And in fact, we did not recommend, it wasn't like these arguments were made and we were like, no, come on, you should go pursue a PhD.
The fact is it would have been irresponsible to advise most students to do it.
Even the ones, maybe even in some cases, especially the ones who were unusually gifted in our field, right?
Do you really, you know, what I did and what I assume you did, was sat down with them and gave them a very frank view of what it looks like.
And the answer is, okay, you're good at evolutionary biology.
Are you good at the kinds of things you will need to be good at to get through grad school?
Because those are very different things, right?
Are you gonna be able to do it?
Are you gonna be able to put up with the years of trying to get into a secure position?
What's gonna happen if you end up exploited as an adjunct or a lecturer or whatever else?
So many people are right and so the fact is some of them some of and I don't mean favorite in any sense but one does look at a student who has an unusual gift for the field that it means so much to you and Yes, you would love to have them follow in your footsteps But at some level the advice was no no no no take that gift that you have and pointed at something where you might be Rewarded for it was much better advice.
I Indeed.
I want to say one more thing before we move on.
Your point about where you cried foul, right?
This point about, well, we're not hiring minority faculty, the rate is dropping.
Yeah.
That may be the case.
It may be.
For reasons you and I have both described reasons that that might be the case that has nothing to do with racism, right?
Now, my point would be we've lived inside the academy.
This is just like the example I use of the bike shop, right?
Black bicyclists are less common than you would expect based on the percentage of black people in the population.
Is that because the bike store is reluctant to sell bikes to black people?
Hell no!
It's the absolute opposite, right?
You would find that environment very welcoming, right?
It's other things.
It's whether the roads that you grew up around were hospitable to bikers or they were too dangerous to contemplate it.
Who knows?
It could be a lot of things, but it's not... Well, there's something to the idea of role models who remind you of yourself.
And so, you know, this is one of the things that some on the right who decry diversity, equity, and inclusion, uh, take aim at.
Like, ah, you don't, you know, you don't need role models that look like you.
It's like you don't need them.
But having stories in which people who are doing things that you now aspire to remind you a little bit of yourself do make it easier for a child to imagine themselves attaining that.
Right.
And so if you never see anyone on a bike, if the only time you see a bike is when you watch some Hollywood movie, and it's always white characters, maybe it just feels like that's not something that people like me do.
Yeah, or it's always a BMX bike.
And so it doesn't seem like a thing adults do or whatever.
But the point is, if you stood by the bike lane, and you, you know, counted people from different backgrounds as they went by, And then concluded it must be racism keeping people out of the bike lane, you'd be wrong.
It's other processes.
Not that that claim hasn't been made.
Right.
Oh, the claim is made.
And you know, I'm not ruling out the possibility that it does play a role somewhere.
Is there racism in the Tour de France?
I don't know.
Maybe.
Right.
The point is, in the Academy, is it plausible that racism is causing people to hire white folks over equally qualified minority candidates?
It's preposterous.
It's preposterous.
It would be so far in the opposite direction based on the culture of the Academy that it is not only a place to cry foul, but it is simply impossible that that's the causal mechanism here.
That's right.
So I got two more bits from this paper and then a little post-amble of word?
Post-amble, yes.
Post-amble.
A little post-amble.
It might have to be done walking.
I think, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A perambulatory post-amble or something.
Yes.
These guys, Herbert et al., 2022, actually make a point that I agree with in this paper, believe it or not.
Many of the metrics traditionally used to define excellence, such as hailing from elite institutions, are proxies with considerable inherent bias.
Yes, they are.
Yes, they are.
And I actually did not look into the histories of the authors of this piece.
I don't know if they came from elite institutions, but it's absolutely true.
And elite institutions means something slightly different in each field.
There are always universities in every field that are top 10 for that field that maybe, as an outsider, you wouldn't inherently.
Intuit, but many of the metrics traditionally used to define excellence, such as hailing from elite institutions, are proxies with considerable inherent bias.
This is absolutely true.
And it's part of why we rail against not just elitism, but the institutions who basically prize themselves on being elite and on the very idea of being elite in part also, because what we saw Again at Evergreen, which was, you know, we loved it.
I'm saying this with love for the institution as it was, maybe the opposite of an elite institution.
If one of the measures by which you would assess whether an institution is elite is the acceptance rate of the applicants, right?
So Evergreen Basically accepted every single person who applied.
It had something above a 99% acceptance rate.
And most people who heard that number assumed that Evergreen was ashamed of it and really trying to get that number down because isn't everyone, isn't the number of people you turn away a sign of how amazing you are?
And there is some truth sometimes in that assessment.
But what we found was that this allowed people to sort once they were there.
And did that mean that a lot more people walked away?
Yeah, I think it did.
Because Evergreen was quite unique.
And it wasn't for everyone, and everyone wasn't for it.
So even though it took most comers, a lot of people decided after arriving there that it wasn't the right fit.
And unfortunately, there was a whole lot of grift and graft there.
And so you could find some programs, some faculty who would just basically help you get a degree if you didn't do anything.
But at least in the sciences, at least in some parts of the sciences there for a long time, it was possible to do extraordinarily high quality work, even if, and we would argue in some cases, maybe especially if, your experience up until that point academically was one of being told,
You're not good enough, you're not smart enough, oh, you've got ADHD, you've got anxiety, you need to be on pharmaceutical drugs, you can't do the math, you don't read well enough, and very often those people were brilliant, extraordinarily capable, had real life experience that demonstrated their capacities, and what they needed was an environment that didn't judge them based on a checklist, and actually assessed whether or not they could think.
Yeah, the problem is one of high variance.
The fact that Evergreen did not turn people away meant that there were people there who just simply weren't, you know, the euphemism was college ready.
But the number of people who absolutely were ready for the intellectual environment that maybe didn't have the background or all of the skills necessary to slot well to be a good student in a normal college where they were anonymous, To make a faculty and a college's life easier.
Right.
And so the point was, if you had faculty willing to think carefully about why a particular student was not succeeding, and you had students willing to try to figure out, you know, how I can learn this in spite of the fact that I'm not good at X or Y, It was ideal, but you know, it carries those two things together and separating them would be a good thing to do because a lot of those students that are, you know, in many cases our highest potential students are not a good fit for our system.
Yes, and therefore explicitly not a good fit for elite institutions.
They are exactly who get missed by so-called elite institutions.
Okay, one more sentence from this piece.
We can do better, they say.
Scientists, even as we are part of a wonderful universal system for generating knowledge, are not necessarily wiser or better than other human beings.
Can you imagine writing that sentence and putting it into a published piece?
No, I really can't.
That's all.
I don't know these guys.
I don't want to take them on personally, but come on.
That sentence, that tells me right there that all this talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion is an act.
You don't know what you're doing.
Scientists aren't necessarily better than other human beings.
What are you on about?
That's just, that's an insane thing to do.
It's an insane sentence to write.
It really is.
Go for it.
I just wanted to add one more thing.
We promised to come back to this question of denaming buildings, renaming them, recalibrating buildings, recalibrating the buildings.
First of all, I think it is Jonathan Haidt who did this first, but his point was, look, you've got to choose.
You can't have a social justice-oriented university and a truth-seeking university.
You have to pick between those things.
The type specimen of scientists pretending that you can do both and the point is look the purpose of science is truth-seeking and Here's where they've buried the bodies Their point is well, are we really going to accept?
that scientists don't have an obligation to be decent people and No.
The fact is, scientists have the same obligation as everyone else to be decent people, and it may exist in a somewhat different context because of the authority that is carried by having a scientific degree.
But no, we need to be tolerant of the flaws of scientists.
We need to recognize that people who have absolutely vile pieces of their character may also have transcendent insight, right?
I wish that wasn't the case.
It would be cool if the best people were always the most insightful people, but it's not true.
Isaac Newton was a fucking dick.
Now, we are not going to de-Isaac Newton, the physics textbook, because the man was a jerk.
Likewise, Edison.
Likewise, R.A.
Fisher, the father of statistics.
The father of statistics was an evolutionary biologist.
His work was absolutely transcendent.
Now, he was also an anti-Semite.
Should I Not listen to his insights on biology because he happened to be an anti-Semite?
That doesn't make any sense, right?
The fact is what I should do is I should say, here is a deeply flawed person who had some insights about biology that were truly important and well ahead of their time, and I can live with those two things because I'm an adult and there's nuance in my mind, right?
That is what we should be doing.
Now there is a question.
There is a question about who you want a statue of on your campus and who a building should be named after.
I don't think every time we find a flaw in somebody that we should go de-name the building, right?
That doesn't make any sense.
But I do think there are cases… Especially given how much real work needs to be done.
Right.
First of all, there is real work.
Second of all, you're… You're also doing something to people's, even the statues of people who we might rather, we wouldn't today build a statue of, right?
My feeling is, you know what?
Cristóbal Colón, who goes by another name.
Are you going to tell people what it is?
Christopher Columbus.
That's how you say it in American.
But Cristóbal Colón, I don't believe, is a figure that we should be especially honoring, especially as Americans.
And it's not that I don't think that there was something about what he did that was important and probably involved a whole lot of personal strength.
But the problem is, America is not downstream of Christopher Columbus, right?
We are a people that includes Indians, right?
Who suffered greatly as a result of the personal strengths of Cristóbal Colón.
And so, my point is celebrating him together as a people doesn't really make sense.
But I don't want to pretend he didn't exist either.
And I'm not I guess the point is, if there's a statue of Cristóbal Colón, I think it should stay.
Would I argue to put one up?
No, I wouldn't.
Right?
That's where we are.
But I do want people... And such is the nature of history.
And we disappear our own history at our peril.
We disappear our own history at our peril.
And frankly, I want to be able to stand in front of a statue that has a mixed heritage along with a Native American and say, yeah, I get the problem of that guy, right?
And you get the importance of it.
And also, I mean, just the nature of public art and by which perhaps I'm including the names of buildings on a public university campus or even a private university campus.
You know, art that is available for people who are freely walking and can stumble upon it and say, Oh, oh, well, I wasn't expecting to see that.
I don't want to be thinking about this right now.
I didn't know anything about that.
Well, that's ugly.
Is it?
Is it a better human experience to be guaranteed that you will never stumble upon something that makes you feel ill?
That makes you feel a little gross or a lot gross or like, Damn.
Genocide?
Really?
Here?
At this spot?
I didn't know, and it was that guy?
Why are we celebrating this guy?
Well, maybe the public representation of a person or an event isn't inherently about glorification.
Right.
Maybe it's about representation, and representation also isn't inherently about celebration.
Maybe all of this is a way of educating us and making us more aware of both of our history and of what we are capable of in the future.
And it shouldn't be Well, whitewashed, honestly, is a weird word to be using here, but it shouldn't be cleansed of all the things that a person who happens to be alive and making decisions in 2022 decides is the thing that needs to happen.
Because we don't only exist at this moment, and it is beyond foolish to imagine that that's the world we live in.
Yeah, enough of this recalibration culture.
I want to say just a little vignette before we move on to the next issue, because this made me think about something that I experienced this week.
This new Herbert paper, it seems like in response to the Krylov paper from 13 months ago, which we talked about when it came out.
And, you know, this Herbert paper begins, as I read, with the idea that those of us who are resisting such measures are interested in maintaining an alienating or hostile workplace, which is absurd.
It's just absurd on its face.
But I actually, I think it's not just absurd, but I think it's quite the opposite.
I think that what you DEI people are doing is creating an alienating and hostile workplace and, in fact, ecosystem For all of the rest of us, everyone who resists.
And I have a not workplace story because my workplace is here and you are not creating an alienating or hostile workplace for me.
Well, thank you.
For which I appreciate you and the fact that you're not.
I can't recover grammatically from that construction.
I appreciate you trying to finish the sentence.
Yeah, no, thank you.
Period.
But I had an experience this week that struck me as clearly downstream of one of the sets of initiatives that the DEI people would have us embrace.
I went to a market.
You're not writing something for me to say.
No, it's a note to remember.
Sorry.
I went to a local market that has a parking lot such that there's really only one way in and you have to, there's basically one parking space that is the most prominent in the parking lot and there was a big guy sitting in that most prominent space.
In a minivan with the driver's door propped open and he kind of had one of his legs hang out at the door, a really big guy, very masculine seeming, seemed very strong, kind of time-worn, embattled, and bittered.
I don't know the guy.
I know that I walked out of my way not to walk past him, which is the natural way to get into that market.
Anyone who has ever been at this market will know that the way you would normally go into the market through that parking lot is right past his open door where he had his leg out.
And I noticed both on my way in and my way out, it was a beautiful day and there were a lot of people around, that I was not the only one, that no one was walking right by him, which they normally would have done.
And the thing is, he wasn't just a big potentially threatening dude who was doing something kind of display-like with his door open and his leg out, but he was also wearing fishnet stockings and I think a mini skirt and garish makeup on his face.
And that didn't make him a woman.
But what it did do, I suspect, was made a lot of people more confused about their own responses.
If that had just been a guy dressed like a guy, that guy dressed like that guy doing that thing, it would have been read as what it was, which was a subtle threat to really everyone, but certainly women.
And because he was dressed in sort of feminine tropes, Nothing happened.
Now, would anything have happened?
Would an employee from the store have come out and told him that he needed to close his door and go somewhere else if he had just been dressed as a guy?
I don't know.
Maybe not.
But I think the chances that this would happen with him dressed the way he was are much, much lower.
And this is downstream of diversity, equity, and inclusion stuff.
Because until yesterday, everyone knew what a woman was and that putting on a skirt doesn't make you a woman.
And as we've said over and over and over again, this does not deny actually truly trans people.
But this man?
No.
This man was doing something aggressive and threatening in a public place in a way that made it less likely that anyone would call him out on it.
All right, this only works at the rule of thumb level, but all of the trans people that I have known well enough to really say that I know them as people, to a person, have made every effort to fit in to their chosen gender as seamlessly as possible, right?
What you're describing is somebody who has weaponized their chosen gender and raises questions about why they chose it.
In other words, is the point that you get a weapon for doing this?
Is the point that you get to be a burly guy who people steer clear of, but now you get to make them feel uncomfortable about it because, you know, is it transphobia that's causing them to do that?
Right, so I guess the question is, every time I see somebody for whom their presentation is aggressive, in which the point is not to minimize the sense of discourse-ness or discourse-ness, no, discordant-ness would be the word I was looking for.
You know, any time somebody is aggressively Utilizing those tropes so that they are in conflict with how they present, such that they would know that that's what they're doing, it raises a question about why they're doing it.
Yeah.
Yes.
No, that's exactly right.
So just one more note about this.
I've been reading of late some historical fiction about World War II and pre-World War II era.
I think I mentioned a number of weeks back about a novel about Hedy Lamarr, and I've also been reading some fiction written during the Gilded Age, and all of these books have strong female characters.
What?
When you say Hedy Lamarr, it is almost impossible not to quote Harvey Korman and say, Hedley.
Blazing South.
Blazing South, yes.
Yeah, not that Lamarr, the real Lamarr.
Well, but he spent that whole movie correcting people because of that exact problem.
Yes, exactly.
So books ranging from 1880s through 1940s written either about that era or during that era with strong female characters, which reveal, of course, that there have been strong women who have been fighting against the particular strictures of the cultural expectations of them because of the sex they were born to for a long time.
I was reminded with running into this guy in this parking lot of this flyer of a 1914 feminist rally that a few years back Barry Weiss actually posted.
And if you can show my screen here, this is from 1914.
What is feminism?
Come and find out.
First feminist mass meeting.
At the People's Institute at Cooper Union, 1914.
And the topics, the subject is supposedly breaking into the human race, and the topics given by a series of speakers are the right to work, the right of the mother to her profession, the right to her convictions, the right to her name, the right to organize, the right to ignore fashion, I love that one, and the right to specialize in home industries.
Yeah.
I don't know what that last one means, but all the rest of them, I think, are extraordinary.
Right.
And I could probably figure it out.
I welcome someone telling me what the right to specialize in home industries means.
Because it seems like that is the thing that women have always been, in fact, you know, catalyzed into.
Right.
No, that does specialize within home industries.
Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, but the rest of them, you know, the right to her own name, to her convictions, to organize, to ignore fashion, to work, and the right of the mother to her profession.
Not just to work, but to work even after you've become a mother.
This is feminism in 1914.
This is what women were fighting for.
And in response to Berry back in early 2018, so this is several years old at this point, Why is my computer not coming up?
I said, okay, so in feminism 1914, we had the right to work, to have convictions, to keep one's name, to organize, and to ignore fashion.
Feminism in 2018, and this holds today, unfortunately, the right to ignore science, to attain power through victimhood, and to make arguments that nobody is allowed to dispute.
So this was sort of just as, let's see, early 2018, maybe this was before actually Me Too really came No, Me Too had happened.
Me Too was full swing, and Me Too was a movement that we needed, and it was not the movement that we needed.
Me Too needed to say some things to the world.
We needed a Me Too movement, not the one we got.
Yeah, exactly.
And so, in sort of the thick of that, there was a hashtag BelieveAllWomen.
Moment as if women like all the other human beings out there that's to say the other 50% can't and wouldn't lie for you know for personal profit under some circumstances not all.
But also not not not none right and so that you know what feminism has become is.
Terrible it's a it's tragic but it's also just become even more ridiculous by the idea now that well okay well if women get that right.
And you're a dude, and you don't have anything else to recommend to the progressive stack.
Well, then all you have to do is put on fishnets, and now you've got to believe me.
Not only that I'm a woman, but anything else I want to claim.
So that's part of what, and it's not entirely on your doorstep, DEI guys, but the diversity, equity, and inclusion community has brought us that.
That nightmare.
Which is effectively a hostile and alienating space.
It's not just a workspace, it's an everything space.
Hostile and alienating to everyone who is interested in being good and doing good for each other.
So I want to definitely resonate with your point about hostile work environment and larger environment.
But I also want to point out, it's not just that the EI creates a hostile work environment.
That is its mechanism of action.
That's its MO.
It's modus operandi.
And the point is, that's how it gains power, is by creating an environment in which you are unsafe and in which what happens is At the point that the mob focuses on you, you are now in danger, not only of being accused of terrible things, but losing your right to earn, losing your ability to advance, right?
So the point is what you want to avoid is the anger of the mob, which causes you to become their tool or to be cast out.
Yes.
And so it reminds me a little bit, there was an, I think it was the Delilo affair at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration.
There was this one Democrat who had been brought in, and I forgot what he did, but something in the White House.
And he wrote an article at some point.
He was very alarmed that there was no policy arm of the administration.
It was all PR going on in the White House.
It was all spin.
And there were no discussions about what we should be doing as a nation to solve X, Y, and Z problem.
All it was, was basically how do we accomplish these goals that we walked through the door with, right?
And it alarmed him in any way he wrote about it.
And terrible things happened, of course, because you're not allowed to say those kinds of things.
But somewhere in that affair, I believe that's where this comes from.
The point was, not only are these people abusing power, it's who they are.
That's what this is.
This administration is about the abuse of power.
I would say the same thing about the Biden administration, incidentally.
But the fact is, Creation, A, claiming that we have a hostile work environment and we need to render it un-hostile as you are making that environment hostile.
And really the point is, oh, you want to make it hostile and you want to be immunized from anybody pointing out that that's what you're doing.
And so the whole point is, well, what we're trying to do is create an un-hostile environment.
No, quite the opposite.
Preemptively claim that your goals are the opposite of what they are, or are the opposite of what you are actually going to do, perhaps it's just collateral damage.
Even if, you know, maybe you just don't even care that it's hostile now.
And I guess the one final thing I would say here before we move on is...
We were getting there, right?
And this again is a point that we've made a lot, but the 20th century saw tremendous advances.
Women's rights, civil rights, gay rights, workers' rights, children's rights, you know, all of these demographics and all of these real pressing human rights issues.
That really, the liberals won.
Yep.
We did it.
No, we weren't there.
We did it.
We made the world better.
We weren't there.
And in fact, there are a lot of conservatives out there, the vast majority of them, who adopted those values as part of their own and are now the defenders of them.
Because what we have now is people who call themselves on the left, destroying it, you know, undoing, undoing the gains.
So many people now would never say, yeah, I'm a feminist.
Or would question whether or not we need movements to maintain the hard-won civil rights that happened, you know, through have happened throughout history, but you know, came to a came to a fore in the 1960s.
And these are not, by and large, bad people or mean-spirited people.
They're just fed up with the lies that they're being told about what is actually happening.
So stop undoing history.
Stop pretending that we haven't already gotten a tremendous amount of the way that we need to go.
If you're a scientist, consider doing science.
Consider actually, when you're trying to figure out if something is true, like for instance, there are, you know, not enough, however you define that, black faculty among the sciences, among scientists.
What are your possible explanations for why?
And you need to come up with all of them.
You can't come up with one and stick with that one and claim that you're doing science, because you're not.
Yep, absolutely.
We need science back in science.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Segway, not totally obvious.
We'll find a way to connect it.
Yeah.
Healing and illness and pathogens and joints.
Yeah, I want to... I don't think we should smoke on air.
Oh, that's not the kind of joint you meant.
I'm just trying to figure out if we know where bong is.
I don't think we do.
No.
No.
Nor would I know where to put my hands on a joint.
But anyway, that was an odd digression.
I blame you, man.
Yeah, I blame me also.
Who else would we blame?
The dog isn't even here.
No, it's not like that.
We know that.
They don't know that.
It's not like that.
It's not like that.
The dog knows it's not like that.
You're about to talk about your joints.
Yes, I am about to talk about my joints.
All right, so I need to tell a little story here.
This all goes under the heading of Laboratory of the Self, which is a term that we use in our book, and I will defend here before I tell you what I think I've discovered.
So, I was sick.
About a week ago, I had a little cold that I picked up from one of our kids, and it was annoying.
And then it seemed to go away.
It seemed to be breaking up.
I was coughing, but I was coughing up stuff.
It was productive.
I tested negative for COVID twice.
Certainly wasn't COVID.
And yesterday, things took a turn for the worse.
We happened to be out of the house.
We went to lunch.
I felt okay at lunch.
And then after lunch, my cough picked up like crazy.
I definitely felt sick.
And anyway, it was, it got progressively worse through the day and through yesterday evening.
So I raised this because a couple of phenomena went along with this.
A, you know, I just sort of had the sense of There's a metaphor I like, circling the drain.
I like circling the drain as a metaphor because you can circle the drain at a great distance and you're a long way from going down the drain.
But there's a point at which you just feel that force a little bit and you're like, well, you know, under ordinary circumstances it's kind of hard to imagine how you end up dead, but from here I can see how it could happen, right?
You didn't tell me yesterday that you felt like you might be circling the drain.
I was circling the drain at a great distance.
Good lord, man!
You might mention these things to your wife.
I can hear me coughing.
Anyway, this is the reason.
I mean, I knew you weren't doing well.
I wasn't well, and I wasn't worried.
You asked me if I was worried.
I wasn't worried.
I just had the sense of like, oh, homeostasis.
Yeah, actually, I didn't ask you if you're worried.
I said, I'm worried.
You're like, no, I'm not.
I'm like, well, OK.
In any case, it was bad.
But a couple of things happened yesterday also.
One, My so you those who are long term or even short term watchers of the podcast will know that I fell off my bike a couple weeks ago and was injured in a number of ways.
The injuries have progressed a little bit.
So, I believe I know through seeing our wonderful doctor, Dr. Miller, that I fractured my sacrum.
So, right above the tailbone.
And I've been sort of hobbling around.
It's been getting better, fits and starts.
If I push things too much, it gets a little worse.
If I take it easy, it gets a bit better.
It's been getting better though over the course of this time.
But the pain has moved around.
Okay, it's moved into my right hip socket.
And I think that's because whatever the sacrum injury is, is causing me to walk a little asymmetrically.
And so anyway, it's putting strain on whatever other damage I did when I fell.
And anyway, it's been a slower process healing than I would have liked.
But it's been getting progressively better over the last couple of weeks.
And yesterday, it started getting way worse.
And I thought, first of all, I should tell you, Dr. Miller told me a ghost story.
Neither of us thought that this was likely to be the case, but he said, look, I think you're going to get better, but there is one bad outcome that we can't rule out here.
And the bad outcome is if you do, if you fracture the head of your femur, That basically the head of your femur could die from lack of circulation and then you'd need a hip replacement.
Neither of us thought it was likely enough for me to get an x-ray, but it was a ghost story he told me that has not apparently gone away.
So, when my pain flared up yesterday in my hip, it was like, oh geez, why am I getting worse?
And I didn't initially put it together, but it came with one other factor.
I have this wound on my hand, right, from when I fell.
And, you know, I'm in my 50s.
The first thing you notice as you get older is wound healing gets way slower.
And you'll even notice that in your 30s, right?
It's like really conspicuous how slow wound healing goes.
And this one has been getting better, and it's annoying that two weeks out I still, you know, have this wound.
But it's been getting better every day, and I've been paying attention to that.
And yesterday it started getting way worse.
Now, visibly, there was no change, but the pain associated with it was just, you know, like 10 times what it had been in the last week.
And that caused me to think, and this is where we get to the laboratory of the self.
And all of this fits together, so I should say, just let me complete the pathogen part of the story.
Last night, or yesterday evening, I went to bed at, I don't know, 7, 8 o'clock at night, and I didn't get back up.
Until this morning, but in the middle of the night, I clearly had a fever and then it broke and I feel loads better today.
In fact, I feel pretty well other than the fact that I have this cough, which I think is just the final stages of the illness.
But here's what I realized.
The pattern of pain in my hip and my hand suggests that one of the mechanisms of illness involves a threshold of sensitivity to pain.
Right?
Now, the counterintuitive part of this, evolutionarily speaking, is we have sensory neurons all over our bodies for obvious reasons.
They send information that's important in order to keep you functional, right?
If you do a little damage to some soft tissue, maybe you need some pain in order to get you to not use that tissue in order to give it time to heal, this sort of thing.
But even at subconscious levels, right?
Like you're constantly navigating and adjusting in ways that you don't even know you're adjusting because your body is sending you signals that allow you to, you know, ease up on something so that some healing that is from some injury you don't even know existed can progress.
Totally.
And in fact, we could say that some fraction, maybe it's even all, but at least some large fraction of what we call discomfort are these little subliminal messages that tell us, you know, take it easy on that elbow or, you know, you've been leaning too hard on that side for too many hours or whatever.
So mostly our bodies have a ton of data flooding towards our brain at all times and almost all of it is thrown out almost all of the time because it's not useful to you, right?
So the point is there's a huge amount of potential information you could tune into.
Most of it never gets to the part of you that takes action or changes anything and some of it gets to not quite conscious but enough to get you to shift in your chair or whatever.
But the fact that both my hip and my hand went in the wrong direction yesterday, I know nothing about my hand was any worse, it just felt way worse, tells you what's going on here in all probabilities.
So this is a hypothesis, obviously.
But what's going on is that there's a threshold of pain that can be adjusted in the context of illness, which raises a question about the kinds of joint aches that go along with something like the flu.
Right?
Are those joint aches the result of the fact that those tissues are in some way affected by the illness?
Or is it the result of some other mechanism that is causing pains that you are ordinarily completely incapable of detecting to suddenly be above threshold where you pay attention?
And I'm going to make an argument that there are a couple reasons you might have such a system.
But, what happened when I got better last night, when my fever broke, my hip feels fine today.
In fact, it feels better than it's felt by a fair amount than it did three days ago.
Well, you were super easy on it for a solid day.
That's certainly true, but it is also true that the threshold, my hand also feels just fine.
So, and interestingly, none of my other joints hurt.
So, what I think happened was the threshold was... Now you're just gloating.
Not exactly, but we can get there.
But what I think happened was this illness, whatever it was, caused a threshold adjustment in my sensitivity that did not go as far as a flu does where all of your joints ache.
I didn't tune into any of my joints other than the one that was above normal in terms of pain.
And the indicator that this was just a pain threshold issue is my hand, which I'm certain was as good yesterday as it is today, but felt loads worse.
Yeah, and it's fabulous at one level that you have those two very distinct types of injuries from the same event, that you had input in the same direction yesterday with regard to your hip, you have no independent way.
You have no way of knowing if the healing is getting better or worse or slowed or anything.
But when you're talking about a wound on the skin, a flesh wound, I can see it.
You can see it.
Yeah, I can see it.
And I'm not doing the story justice really, but the way in which the degree to which the part of me felt bad was in lockstep between these two things, right?
As my hips started to drive me crazy yesterday, my hands started to drive me crazy.
Her experience.
So, you know, the boys and you and I and our dog all went down to the river.
And I think it was hard for all the other four of us, including the dog, although she said less about it.
At any moment, it was like, well, wait a minute, what is it that you're feeling?
You're clearly not doing well.
But you know, is it your hip?
Or is it the cold?
Like, which is it?
And it was just like, it was everything all at once.
So it all sort of Congealed into a single pain event, which was very interesting because they have completely different ideologies.
Yeah, so this actually brings me to the question of so the hypothesis is that there's this threshold and it's a general pain sensitivity threshold that usually hides everything from us.
That's one part of the hypothesis.
The other question is, is that an adaptation or is that a failure?
Does illness disrupt the system?
My instinct here is that it doesn't.
This is an adaptation and the question is why?
Why would you have such a threshold?
And I've come up with, so by analogy, I want to use a camera.
So, first of all, let's just, let's talk for a second about fever, because fever is a very interesting phenomenon, right?
Remember the last fever you had when you were, when you were really sick, right?
You feel very cold.
You've got the chills, right?
You get under the covers, right?
Because your sensation is you're very cold, and then somebody puts their hand in your forehead.
Oh, you're burning up!
You are hot, but you feel cold.
Now, the reason for that is very straightforward.
There's a reason to have a fever, an adaptive reason.
We talk about it in our book.
People now understand that fever is a way of taking a pathogen that is adapted to a particular temperature, i.e.
human temperature, and throwing it a curveball.
Hey!
Now it's going to get super hot, right?
So, that's a good way of fighting a pathogen.
But how does it get accomplished?
Well, it's as if you've got Some sort of a formula that keeps your temperature really close to 98.6 Fahrenheit because your enzymes and everything else about you requires it's very narrow tolerances right a couple degrees off really throws a curveball at your whole system.
So if you're going to Um, generate a fever in order to defeat a pathogen.
It's like you take whatever the various, uh, it's not a, it's not going to function in the, in the way of formula does, but there's something that's akin to a formula in your system that keeps that temperature in the same place.
And it adjusts how much you're radiating, how much fuel you're burning so that, you know, you end up at that, that target place.
Well, imagine that in the condition that your body detects that you're sick with something for which a fever would be useful.
It subtracts two degrees from the final output of the equation, so that instead of being 98.6, you're two degrees up, right?
You now have a fever.
But what would that feel like?
I'm two degrees colder than I would like to be, right?
Relative to the ambient environment, which didn't change.
Relative to the ambient environment, which then of course makes the fever cheaper.
You diving under the covers, right, an insulative layer, means that the amount of fuel that has to be burned in order to generate that is much lower than if you were out in the wind, right?
So anyway, it's that, you know, subtract 2 or subtract 3 from the final output of all of the detectors that tell you how hot you are and therefore whether you need to radiate more or generate more heat, right, is rather like the adjustment, I don't know if you can see that, on a camera, a good one, there's an adjustment for the sensitivity of the light meter to light.
In the case that you have a subject that will confuse the light meter, like a backlit subject, right, where the subject will end up very, very dark, you say, well, I want you to overexpose by a stop.
That means double the amount of light hitting the sensor before you tell me I've got enough.
Oh, is it long?
Or one stop is a double?
Each stop, one full stop is a double, is a doubling of incident light.
So, that kind of calibration or recalibration in light of a corrective factor can then fix the photo and what I'm arguing is that this pain threshold thing is likely to function in the same way and that my weird set of injuries overlapping this pathology reveals that thing.
Now, why would the pain threshold, you know, so then this implies that something like a flu in which your joints ache Right?
Maybe even the headaches or whatever that comes along with such things might just be that you're tuning into a bunch of data that's ordinarily invisible to you.
Right.
And that that, you know, maybe that's what a headache is, right?
Maybe it's the buzz of data coming off of your brain and you're tuning into it or maybe not.
But anyway, why?
All right, two hypotheses.
One of the hypotheses is that, and I think we know this to be true, there are certain kinds of healing that can only happen while you're dormant.
I don't know if you have to actually be asleep.
But there's certain kinds of processes that you actually can't be, you know, out and about.
And so my experience when we were out yesterday before I was able to come home and go to sleep was, you know, I just wanted to sit somewhere.
I didn't really want to interact.
I just wanted to find a place, you know, and just sort of sit and for you guys to do your thing.
And you guys, of course, were like a little concerned about me and didn't want to leave me alone.
But the point was the, The pain threshold thing might serve to get you to not push any limits, to seek out a place where you could just sort of stop moving, that those things might be key to healing.
The other thing, the other possible explanation would be, this requires you to think in terms of lineage for it to make sense, but in the context of a pathogen.
An individual's interests.
Involve not just getting better, but not giving the pathogen to those with whom they have aligned interests or shared genes.
Right?
So not getting you to pass on your illness is key.
And so another thing, another effect of feeling uncomfortable and in pain and all of those things might be to get you to just kind of not hang out with people.
And you know, this would also potentially have value of feeling a bit grumpy about it.
All the things that come along with it.
Making people not want to hang out with you either is the idea?
Oh, that's good!
Yes!
Becoming intolerable could save them catching the path.
Anyway, so these hypotheses are not all equal strength.
I'm not sure I heard clearly the distinct hypotheses here.
So the first hypothesis is the pain threshold adjustment issue.
Assuming that's adaptive and not a failure, right?
Assuming it's a feature and not a bug.
One thing is it could be that increasing your sensitivity to your joints, then causing you to feel painful all over, could cause you to stop being active, which could be key to healing, right?
The dormancy could be the value.
Or it could be breaking your usual social patterns to protect others who it would be better if they didn't get sick.
So that's two, right?
No, three.
Pain threshold adjustment is an adaptation.
Why would it be an adaptation?
A, it could be about increasing speed of healing.
B, it could be about not passing on the disease.
Well, it's two alternative hypotheses predicated on a first one.
So, there's an alternative.
So, the second unnamed one to the first level is it's not an adaptation.
It's just an effect.
It's noise.
So, you test that one first.
You say, okay, if so, if adaptation, then adaptation for what?
And then you've got two downstream of that.
Right.
And so, I mean, to complete it, we've got predictions for all of these.
So, first of all, let me defend laboratory of the self for a second.
People, you've got a problem, which is yourself is a difficult environment to do science on, because you're not objective about it.
Right?
You're a big anecdote.
Well, you are a big anecdote.
Or maybe the pants just make you look like a big anecdote.
But nonetheless, you're a big anecdote.
It's self a hypothesis worthy of being tested.
Worthy of being tested, although.
But anyway, here's the thing.
You are a big anecdote.
That's a problem.
On the other hand, You have more information about yourself than you do the next nearest person by a huge degree, right?
I know you better than anyone else on earth knows you, but the degree to which Things about you are mysterious to me that I don't even know they're questions because they happen internal to your mind and you don't tell me enough that I would detect them.
I know much less about what it's like to be you than to be me, obviously.
Right.
So that means that the degree to which being an anecdote is bad, Is in some sense offset by the degree to which you have way better data on yourself than anyone else.
And so paying attention to these patterns internally is a great way of discovering the way certain things work.
And a number of places where I've found stuff out that actually allowed me to make my life materially better by noticing a pattern as large.
It generates hypotheses.
You then need to figure out how to test them.
And so one question would be, do others see a relationship between injury and illness that reveals the same threshold adjustment?
Right?
And the pattern is, you know, complex enough.
That it should be conspicuous if it's visible.
In other words, I got to the place that my injury showed up as pains, but my regular, my other joints that were not injured did not.
That's an interesting pattern.
The question about whether or not it is a matter of
Protecting others from a pathogen suggests, and this is a tougher one to test, but it's at least a prediction, a proof of concept that you could have such a prediction, would be that species in which sociality brings individuals together would show this threshold effect much more precipitously than species that were not generally social.
Good, yes.
And then the one about healing, this is a weaker test because there are other things that might point in the same direction, but that the triggering of this threshold mechanism would result in an increased rate of healing for those who were in a position to respond to it and those who were not.
Right.
In other words, if you had to go to work anyway, and so you were still active, did it increase the amount of time that the pathogen took to go away?
Something like that.
I had one more thing, but I can't remember what it was.
Well, we've been at it for a while.
You also wanted to talk about land sharks.
Well, of course.
Do you still want to talk about land sharks?
No.
Or do you want to save land sharks for next week?
Let's do it quickly.
Okay.
All right, so what I'm going to do is show you a little video that emerged apparently as a part of Shark Week.
Now, I am not a member of the religion that celebrates Shark Week.
What is Shark Week?
I think it's a Discovery Channel thing where they spend a whole week on sharks.
Oh, it's actual sharks.
It's not like financial advisors or loan sharks.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
That's spelled differently.
No, it's not.
No, it's not, is it?
No.
Shark Week.
Okay.
Do they have Ray Week?
Do they have Skate Week?
Uh, no, I think there's a roller derby week, but that's obviously much narrower.
Sure.
Yeah.
So, elasmobranchs, we're going to celebrate them, but only the sharks.
Only the sharks.
Yeah, we're going to celebrate the sharks and we're just going to pretend awkwardly at times.
The rays and the skates don't exist.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Wow, not the choice I would have made.
Uh, right.
Me either, but you know, that's why we don't have a gigantic nature channel.
I guess that is the reason.
Yeah, so Shark Week is celebrating all things shark.
I don't really know.
I've never seen it, but I understand from the channels I pay attention to that this piece of video emerged on Shark Week and caused a certain amount of... Okay, so I have not seen the video in question.
There's no sound being... There's no sound, so we can talk right over it.
You don't really need the sound.
Now what we have here is a shark.
Oh, that is a shark.
Yeah.
And he's maneuvering around using his pectoral fins.
And at one point here, he actually kind of goes over a little barrier.
That's not a shark.
No, that is not a shark.
But anyway, we're about to get- I guess we've got very shallow, presumably saltwater here, like an intertidal zone almost maybe.
Yeah.
With a shark.
Right.
Little leopard spotted shark, cute little guy, using his breast side, his pectoral fins to, gosh, propel himself in very, very shallow water.
Now, can we agree?
I mean, his gills are still underwater, right?
Yeah.
Well, they're moist.
I think the gills go out of water here briefly, and then he maneuvers into the next little pool.
Now, the claim here is that this is the first time this has been seen.
Who said that?
The Discovery Channel, Shark Week, did I mention that?
Shark Week.
It said the first time it's been seen.
Yeah.
By the sharks, presumably.
Ah, well, that's the question I wanted to raise.
This is like Cristóbal Colón discovering America.
Right.
It's the first time sharks have done this.
No.
So, right.
Cristóbal Colón, who discovered a pair of continents with something like 50 million people living very well there.
Sharks have presumably been trying this out.
Did I ever tell you about the time I discovered Manhattan?
How much did you pay for it?
Too much and I didn't even get to keep it, but yeah.
Yeah, I mean, is it possible that some videographer witnessed the very first time that a shark?
No, it's possible, but.
Very unlikely.
But even the claim that this is the first time it's been observed, I find very unlikely for reasons I want to briefly explore.
Okay.
Observed by people is the idea.
Yeah.
Okay.
In evolutionary biology, we sometimes use the metaphor of the adaptive landscape in which opportunities are pictured as peaks and obstacles of moving from one opportunity to the next are valleys.
Now, the reason that this is useful As a metaphor, is that it highlights certain counterintuitive things about what actually drives and impedes evolution, or adaptive evolution at least.
Which is to say, the depth of a valley dictates the likelihood of a creature evolving from one opportunity to a better opportunity, not the difference in height between the two opportunities.
There can be some very good way of being that's pretty near where you are, but if the evolutionary obstacle to getting there is particularly deep, you're unlikely to jump that gap.
Now, the opposite is also true.
We don't talk about this as much.
But opportunities where there is no gap, where what there is is a gentle slope where if you evolve in this direction, things just simply start getting better and keep getting better for some long period, those are almost certain to be crossed.
And so, my point would be, this exact adaptation is known from, I've got at least four examples in mind, different clades that have done it.
Alright, we've got coelacanths, we've got lungfish, we've got mudskippers, and now I've forgotten my fourth.
Coelacanths and lungfish could...
Could plausibly be the same event, given that they're both near the base of the Sarcopterygian tree, and we tetrapods are the other big group, and since we're out of water, who knows?
It's possible that at the base of the Sarcopterygian, the lobe-finned fish tree, Possible.
I think, and it's been many years since I looked at it, but I think it's more likely to be a parallelism where those two clades both had the characteristics that made this likely to evolve.
Yeah, and it's been a while since I've taught vertebrate evolution, so I haven't looked.
But as I remember it, these sort of coelacanths, lungfish, tetrapods group, the resolution between those three clades isn't totally clear.
I don't think we know for sure who's most basal within that group.
It's a scaly question at the very least.
Yeah, sorry.
But anyway, the point is... So wait, you had mudskippers, seal counts, lungfish, you have another one?
I've forgotten what it is.
I had one.
Okay, so mudskippers being actinops, ray-finned fish.
Yep.
You know, solidly within basically name of fish, it's probably an actinopterygian.
Okay.
Sharks aren't, seal counts aren't, lungfish aren't, but almost every sturgeon Sturgeon are actinopterygians, but not teleosts.
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
But point is, look, there are lots of circumstances in which something that we would call a fish, fish by common parlance, faces a situation in which either It's trapped with a danger that it could survive if it can get out of the body of water that has the danger and into a body of water that doesn't.
Or more often, there's some opportunity.
There's a puddle that contains prey over there, but I'm over here and there's a little bit of somewhat dry land between here and there.
And if I could only just, you know, wiggle my way across that piece of land.
There are lots and lots of circumstances in which it's useful to be able to do a little bit of locomotion on land.
And they happen to be armed with pectoral fins.
Terrible.
No, pretty good actually.
But anyway, lots of circumstances in which it would be useful to be able to do that.
The mode of locomotion actually leads directly to this discovery.
In other words, the wiggling motion of a fish in swimming also puts the pectoral fins alternately on the substrate.
And so my point is, This is one of these things that is probably unknown because we haven't looked for it.
Not because it's uncommon.
Yes.
And this is, there's another one of these that's really... They're not just going to lay there and die.
They're going to do everything they can to get out of a situation if suddenly they find themselves in shallow water.
Right, it's bound to have been... And they've got lateral undulation, and they've got pectoral fins, and, you know, put them together and do what you can.
Right.
And the number of individuals who were birthed to some creature who succeeded at this and therefore didn't starve is liable to be large.
And so the question really is, A, how common is this behavior in clades where we haven't seen it?
My guess is it's a lot more common than we think.
Yeah.
Any kind of like, you know, fish.
Probably not like a deep body form fish, but any kind of fish that tends to be in intertidal zones with tide pools that sometimes will dry up more than they were expecting.
Yeah, tide pools that dry up or tide pools where an unusual tide will make a puddle wet and an animal will get trapped and it has to get out because that pool isn't going to be wet again for another month or something.
Yeah, and just so deep body form just refers to sort of a Like an angelfish.
Imagine an angelfish or a sunfish, one of these fish that's basically like a disc on the side, where no matter how hard they try, they try to use their pictorial fins tend to be up on the body, so they probably wouldn't even reach, but they'd also just tip over.
So you need to have a somewhat flattened form for this to work.
But anyway, the number of circumstances is huge.
It's not likely to happen for anything in deep bodies of water, but there are a lot of animals that have a niche that puts them in proximity with idiosyncratic shorelines, this, that, the other.
Bound to be somewhat common, and also highly likely, this is one of these questions where If you were to survey the indigenous people of all of the coastlines of the world, my guess is you'd come up with a bunch of them that had seen this behavior.
Of course sharks do that.
Right.
Of course sharks do that.
Yeah.
And that this is new to science, which I don't even know if it is new to science, but if it's new to science, it's really cool.
If it's not new to science, it's still really cool.
Well, I mean, one of the things you're saying, maybe the least interesting one, but you know, if it's not new to science, Discovery Channel will hear about it.
If it's not new to humanity, but it is new to science, the claim stands.
This is the kind of thing that the DEI folks claim to be caring about, right?
Don't imagine that you with your wonderful, wizarding, scientific ways can come in and see things that actually other people have been observing for a while and claim it as your own.
Well, okay.
Let's imagine that given what this particular thing is, it almost certainly has been seen by other human beings.
But that doesn't mean that those other human beings inherently had the scientific abilities to consider what it means or under what circumstances it would evolve or when it might happen.
When it might happen, they might have the skills to have deduced that if it had practical application for them.
If the sharks are good eating and there is a way to predict when they might go kind of pseudo-terrestrial and thus get them to go into something where they'll be easier to catch, well, you can be pretty sure that where those sharks exist, there are going to be people who have a good sense of how it is that they locomotive or land when they do.
Yep.
And I must tell you, in this case, Had we been somewhere in the field and observed this, I would definitely have thought it was hugely cool and I would remember it for the rest of my life and I would have certainly discussed it.
I don't know that I would have even thought that what I was looking at was new to science and therefore needed a report.
And you know, there is a mechanism.
It gets done, I think, less these days.
But there used to be natural history notes where important features of behavior that had never been observed before, never been recorded.
scientific literature before, could be reported without you needing to have a data justification.
It's just, I saw this animal do that thing, which says that happens.
I published one of these about my frogs.
It's like some little piece of observed predation, attempted predation on these poison frogs in Madagascar, where like, okay, enough people are just interested But also enough people are thinking about both the boas and the zonosaurs, which are these lizards, and these frogs, and the toxins in the frogs.
There's a lot of ways in that you might really want to know if anyone has ever observed either successful or attempted predation on these frogs.
And, you know, I happen to see two, and I don't know the fate of the zonosaur, and I do know the fate of the boa, which is that The boa took this frog into its mouth, gently chewed on it for 10 minutes, finally released the frog.
Frog went on to be fine, went on to become a mother who fed her kids, and the boa moved dens shortly thereafter, and I think was fine, although I'm not actually totally sure because I didn't see it after a couple weeks.
But anyway, Natural History Notes, where there's no The pretense of hypothesis or experiment or rigorous data collection, it's, hey, I was in the field and I saw this.
And this is interesting, maybe it's just interesting, but it might also be useful to other people.
Well, I mean, I think there is a way in which it fits exactly the falsificationist ethos of science in the following sense.
Anything that you have seen happen once happens.
Absolutely.
And so if we assume that the hypothesis is that that behavior does not exist until evidence accumulates that it does, how much evidence do you need?
One honest report of having seen it is enough to say that it is at least within the realm of things that happen.
That's exactly right.
And also, there's always a problem for animal behaviorists, in that in order to do careful, rigorous work, we need to, you know, spend hundreds, thousands of hours in the field taking careful notes by, you know, whatever means that we have established in advance.
But the really coolest stuff may still be out of our view.
The more socially complex the organisms are that we're watching, the more likely they're going to hide from us and not do the interesting stuff where we can see it.
And it's also just very likely to be rare.
And so one event.
You cannot run statistics on, but it still is worthy of discussion and of publication and of figuring out what else must be true if that thing happens.
If, for instance, what she called, I think, aptly war that Jane Goodall observed between the two troops of chimps at Gombe, which there's objection to the term.
But never again did she see anything exactly like that, and thank God that she didn't.
It was like, well, I can't report that because I just saw it once.
Like, no, you report when the chimps engage in war.
You totally report that.
That's a great example.
Yeah, I would point out, actually, there's one of these for me where I have not published a note, but probably should have.
When I was working on tent making bats, there was a survey article that compiled, a review article that compiled all of the information on tent making bats and it had useful tables in it where it took all of the species or 16 species that are known to engage in the behavior and described what sorts of plants they used and the architectures and all.
But the problem is I became quickly convinced that the species that was most commonly observed to be a tent maker never makes tents at all, that it's a tent thief.
Is this AJ?
Yeah, Artibius Chimaecensis.
And the thing that first clued me into that was it was the only one that used all of the architectures that were known from that location.
Right?
So, you have to understand, nobody had seen a bat make a tent.
So, the inference that they make… You were the first person ever to either see… Yeah, well, and in this case, you… So, I mean, how are we not in a little bit of the same situation?
Are you certain?
How certain are you that no native peoples had ever observed a bat make a tent?
Pretty sure.
It's a lot more subtle and cryptic for a number of reasons than sharks going over land.
Yeah, but there's also a technical reason.
Okay.
Bats are very shy about Making tents.
So they kind of don't do it when you're standing there.
Yeah.
They do it under cover of darkness.
Yeah.
Under cover of the leaves that they are modifying to make into the tents.
Right.
So the point is these are happening low in the understory of a forest that absorbs 99% of the light that hits it before it gets to the floor.
So the dark floor in the night And they are very sensitive about people.
So what I was able to do to observe this was I knew enough about the tense and the behavior to spot one that had just begun.
And I set up infrared.
This was before infrared cameras were, I mean, the cameras were available, but there wasn't night shot on video cameras that you could buy, so I made an illuminator out of LEDs from basically remote controls for TVs.
I built them into a Lucite block.
BatBright 150.
No, it was the BatBright 4000.
I knew 150 was low.
I kept making ones that didn't have enough power, and I kept increasing the power.
The BatBright 4000 is the one that really revolutionized the industry, me being the industry.
But anyway, I built this thing and it was powered off of 12 volt batteries, which I hauled into the forest and hauled out during the day and charged them.
And I set up these infrared cameras, basically just bank surveillance cameras, which are sensitive in the infrared.
And I was able to put that under the leaf that was being modified and I could sit, you know, 50 meters away where I wasn't disturbing the animal and just quietly sit there and watch the thing happen.
So, the point is, the conditions A, if I hadn't had the tech, I wouldn't have been able to see anything.
If I'd stood there with a light, it wouldn't work.
If I'd stood there at all, it probably would have dissuaded the animal from building.
So in that case, probably.
On the other hand, some of the species do build these things in urban area, so it's possible that, you know, in a village somewhere, bats building in a palm high up above the ground might not have been as disturbed.
Could have done it.
But anyway, to go back to the Artebius thing.
Before you continue, so AJ, Artebius Gymnosensis, is described with particularly sort of juicy detail.
Bites ferociously when handled.
Yes.
Which it does.
Yes.
Yeah, it's a very aggressive- Those are the field notes for how to identify.
What bat are you holding?
Bites ferociously when handled.
Ah, that'll be the one then.
Yeah.
Okay.
So it's larger than the other tent makers.
Which is still like, body size is still very small.
I mean, wingspan- Yeah, wingspan would be six, eight inches.
It's like the size of a fist, the animal's body.
It's a pretty large animal.
The thing is, the tent makers are all small.
This one's conspicuously large and it doesn't stick with the tent style.
All of which made me- Trans tent makers.
It made me suspect something was not right about this bat.
And then I started to test that hypothesis by looking at the data that other people had taken on tents.
And the point was there was no case in which this animal had ever built a tent, had ever been observed to inhabit a tent that was not also the species of plant and the architecture of tent built by some other animal in the same location.
That was St.
Patrick, yep.
Right.
So that is strongly suggestive evidence.
Then the natural history observation is the observation that a tent that I knew was inhabited by another species was taken over by Artebias jamesensis, proving it's a thief.
Right, so the point is that kind of information doesn't prove it's only a thief, but the circumstantial plus that suggests that and the fact that he doesn't look like any other tentmakers, right?
So all of those things combined, but the point is the one thing there that is.
more than just suggestive is the fact that it is known, at least in one case, to inhabit tents that were previously inhabited by a different species.
So, anyway, that's worthy of a note because it means that anybody later on studying these animals can at least say, well, I'm starting from the knowledge that sometimes Artebius jimae sensus does take over a tent from another species.
Yeah.
No, it's a first step.
It's a foundation on which another research program could be built, and it's worthy of being shared.
This is what the scientific record is supposed to be doing for us.
And instead, it's increasingly being filled with garbagey claims about people wanting an alienating work environment, as evidenced by those who are making those claims actually creating an alienating environment for everyone.
Yes, exactly.
And feeling good about themselves for doing so.
No, I don't know.
Maybe.
Or just feeling like they're secure in their jobs now that they have stood up for the currently fashionable thing.
And that's not what scientists are supposed to be doing.
Nope.
They're supposed to be standing up for the currently fashionable thing.
Right.
Yeah.
Which actually connects the feminism poster to science here, because the right to ignore fashion, it should be an obligation of scientists to ignore fashion.
Yeah, I wonder if, let's see, if we can change scientists rather than women.
The right to work, the right, ah, it doesn't really work.
The right to, well, the right of the mother to her profession doesn't really work.
But scientists, the right to their convictions, to their name, to organ, ah, it doesn't work, never mind.
No, it doesn't work.
Depends what they've been convicted of.
All right.
Are we there?
I think so.
I think we're there.
Okay.
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