#153: Science So Big (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 153rd 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 the committee newly empaneled by Florida governor Ron DeSantis to explore Covid policy and treatment, in which Bret is a part. It has been roundly mocked in the media, who cite a truly remarkable piece of non-research that contains no new data, no references, and methods and results that cannot b...
We got two more that we're going to do before the end of the year, actually.
Yeah.
We're not going to come to you on Christmas Eve, though.
Next week we'll be coming a day early on the 23rd of December, on Friday.
The 23rd.
And then we're going to be here on New Year's Eve, actually, with you guys.
But this is our last livestream before the solstice.
Yes, indeed.
Which means that the next time We see you.
Winter will no longer be coming.
It will be here, and we will be enduring.
No doubt.
Yes, I hope so.
Yes, well, I'm assuming.
Yes.
All right, much has happened, but we will start with the usual spiels and logistics.
But first, let's just give an indication of where we're going.
We're going to talk a bit about the shadow CDC, and how many people have been saved by the COVID vaccines, and our Lord and Savior, Tony Fauci.
And the White House Summit on Equity and Inclusion in STEM with two M's.
The second M is for medicine.
So that's science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine.
And, of course, we're going to talk about snake genitalia.
Of course.
Yep.
It's, you know, it's traditional.
Let's put it that way.
Now, I said that, I indicated that in the tweet that I put out in advance of today's show, and I do think that some people thought I was joking, but no, I am not.
Yeah, well, snake genitalia... They don't know me very well.
No, they don't.
It's a weird subject, and I don't know what's coming.
No, you don't.
No.
I thought I'd keep it from you.
I'm ready.
Yes, I know you are.
Yeah.
Always.
Apparently, our heating system thinks that winter's already here, and it's just kicked into gear.
That's amazing.
Yeah, so apologies if y'all can hear that.
Thermostats.
What will they think of next?
Yeah, well it's better that than us freezing here.
Alright, we're going to follow today with a live Q&A as we usually do.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
If you are still looking for holiday gifts, well, we did a special holiday gift episode some time ago.
I don't even remember.
Lots has happened.
I was in Mexico.
Brett was in Florida.
We did a gift episode where we recommended some things, including, we recommend that episode, but including Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, which is now available in several languages besides English, although we can only vouch for the English one.
If you're watching on YouTube, you can switch to Odyssey.
Chat is live on Odyssey.
You can find things that I write on Natural Selection.
Since we saw you last, I'm not going to be talking about today, but I alluded to something that I would be announcing in my sub stack, Natural Selections.
.substack.com the last time we were live, and I have tendered my resignation from the Board of Trustees at the University of Austin.
I posted my resignation letter along with some additional background, although not enough to appease many people, at Substack, at Natural Selections, and I also wrote this week about the value of dawn and dusk I experienced in Mexico.
I was in La Paz In Baja and there is a waterfront boardwalk that is very popular and it is extremely well lit and at least in the Christmas season it is even more than usually well lit and it takes away the possibility for the slow fading or the slow growing of light that we of course evolved with and that allows us
To readjust our senses and rely slowly on other senses as the light is fading and before our eyes sort of tune in.
And it really is a loss.
So that's what I wrote about this week.
I agree.
Having not read your piece on this, I encountered what I can only describe as the extreme defiling of palm trees that takes place in the Southeast.
In Florida, yeah.
So in the opposite in La Paz, which is on the Sea of Cortez, the southern tip of Baja, on the Sea of Cortez.
Usually it's just a lot of street lamps, but yes, they've wrapped the palm trees.
Which is cool.
I guess why you would do it the first time.
But they've also wrapped them, at least on the malecon in La Paz, in extraordinarily cold, bright, white LEDs.
No warmth to them, no subtlety.
You actually can't look at them directly without, at least for me, getting a headache right away.
They're so bright, and you know, it's festive, sort of.
Well, my sense is, you know, with great lumens comes great responsibility.
Most people who have this at their disposal are not using it.
Oh man, yeah.
Good.
With great lumens comes great responsibility.
Would that those with the lumens understood that.
Yeah.
We also, of course, have merchandise at our store at darkhorsestore.org, including Lie to a Tyrant hoodies.
Oh, stickers that I actually have a sheet of now that I was going to show you and I've left off camera.
Which I apologize, but lots lots of cool stuff there.
And finally, we are supported by our audience and also our sponsors.
With regard to our audience, one of which is meowing in the near distance now, we appreciate you, all of you, even the feline members of the audience.
Hello!
Subscribing to the channels, YouTube main channel, the Dark Horse Podcast Clips channel, Odyssey Channels, we are of course on Spotify as well, Apple Podcasts, all the places that you might find podcasts.
YouTube is putting ads on our videos now, but they're not paying us anything.
They demonetized us.
Get your tongue out of my water.
Brett.
Now our listeners who do not watch are not going to have any idea what's going on.
No, that was not kind.
I'm sorry.
That was the cat reaching for my water.
But you can join either our Patreons, which helps us tremendously, and we do several monthly conversations.
Brett has at his the first Saturday and Sunday of the month conversations.
That you call Evolution Roundtable and Coalition of the Reasonable?
Coalition of the Reasonable.
The other one doesn't have an official name, but it's an evolutionary discussion that is quite lively and lots of folks have been helping to guide the direction of the discussion.
All roads lead to Rome with respect to evolution, so we can sort of start anywhere and pursue it.
It's great fun.
And that's not going to happen for a couple of weeks, but tomorrow we have the private Q&A that we both do, which you can access at my Patreon, and right now the question asking period is open.
Usually that's the last Sunday of the month at 11am Pacific for two hours, and we keep it up so you can watch it anytime if you don't want to join live.
But if you join live, it's a lot of fun.
The chat is small enough that we can actually engage with the chat, and we're not going to do one on Christmas this month, so we're doing it tomorrow instead.
And also at our Patreon you can join the Discord server and get access to things like coffee hours and book clubs.
And we have sponsors to whom we are very grateful.
We start, top of the hour we do three, we read ads for three sponsors whom we have carefully vetted.
We do not have sponsors for whom we do not actually believe in their products and or have use for or have someone that we are close to who has use for them.
So without further ado, our ads for this week.
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Yes, this was a much larger sofa and we made it smaller so that we could fit it all on screen and actually engage with each other on camera and didn't have to lay out any more expense or some sweat equity, right?
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Okay, we're going to continue to live stream from this sofa for the foreseeable future until we get our permanent studio set up, which who knows when that's going to be.
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Not because the sofa is not comfortable.
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Pets not included, no.
We didn't ask actually, but I think it would not, they wouldn't ship.
I checked the box, there were no pets included.
Ah, well maybe it's just because you didn't check the box in advance.
Oh, that's possible.
Like, you want us to include pets?
Parakeets, turtles, what?
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Excellent.
Well, I think we should start With talking about the Shadow CDC.
The Shadow CDC.
Yes.
Right.
All right, well, maybe I should do that, having encountered the Shadow CDC in person, and in fact being I guess a member of it.
Yes, and being shadowed right now by an epic tabby.
Yes, I am.
So what has happened is Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has made several announcements.
He is pursuing a grand jury investigation of malfeasance during COVID.
He's doing that As Florida's governor, the idea being that Floridians were harmed like every other group and that we should check out these harms and figure out how they arose in any case.
He has also announced a... I'm not sure I love the term Shadow CDC.
Frankly, I'm not even sure that that is a term that came out officially, but those who are involved with it, you've seen it.
So what it is, is it's a group of
Folks with various different kinds of expertise who have been impaneled to essentially talk about what we should be doing with respect to COVID and to comment on what we have been doing and to compare these things because many of us, of course, many Dark Horse listeners, in fact, all longstanding Dark Horse listeners and viewers will know that we've been quite disturbed by the policy that has emerged in the aftermath
Yes, all of the policies that have followed the emergence of COVID.
The official emergence being the very final days of 2019.
Many of us believe that the actual emergence of the virus was quite a bit earlier than that.
In fact, there is strong evidence that it was circulating at the Wuhan Military Games in September.
I'm virtually sure it was September of 2019.
So that is among the many errors.
Our failure to acknowledge that the virus was circulating early is certainly on that list with significant consequences.
So maybe, Zach are you ready to show that clip?
I cannot get that video All right, well, I guess we will have to skip the video from the event.
What I said during the event is...
Governor DeSantis and his Surgeon General, Dr. Ladapo, is that his name?
I should have asked him in person how to pronounce it, but it's either Ladapo or Ladapo.
I've heard it pronounced both ways.
Pulled together a group of scientists and doctors and medical doctors.
I don't know if you want to just mention... I want to say a few people are likely to know Jay Bhattacharya is on it.
Martin Kulldorff is on it.
I was on it.
I don't know how I'm going to pronounce Tracy's last name.
It's basically like a Kung name and you have to have special phonemes in order to get there, but I think the way we traditionally butcher it in English is Tracy Hoag.
Christine Stable-Ben is on it anyway.
And I think there are others yet to come on the group, so stay tuned to see who arrives there.
But it's a lot of people who have made important contributions.
Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, of course, being primary authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.
Christine Stable-Benn, being somebody who our viewers and listeners will be familiar with from her excellent UnHerd interview, and we discussed her work revealing that the mRNA vaccines appear to cause an increase in all-cause mortality.
So anyway, all of these people were gathered, several of them virtually.
There were, I don't know, I guess six of us there in person.
And we had some back and forth and We had several people, we had some vaccine-injured folks tell their story as well.
It's quite heart-wrenching to hear what these people have been through, and as I've said many times, the gaslighting of the vaccine-injured is among the most shocking things to emerge in this whole pandemic.
Because it really requires a willingness on the part of governmental bureaucrats to insist that people take a remedy and then pretend that they have not been injured, which just seems, you know, one struggles to find words other than diabolical for that level of callousness.
Yeah, it's analogous, it's an imperfect analogy, but it's analogous to not taking care of your veterans.
It is exactly the same thing, and how it is that these bureaucrats do not understand that we will look at how the vaccine injured were treated, and then the next time they tell us, well, here's a vaccine that you must take.
That cannot help but be a primary factor.
It would be a factor for any intelligent person.
They're creating actual anti-vaxxers.
They are creating real anti-vaxxers and they are fueling it.
They are giving it a credible reason to exist, which is an unthinkable error on their part.
There were a number of things I wanted to discuss.
It's a pity the clip isn't working, but I will say in my introduction I argued That the decision making in and around COVID from the decision to find the ancestor virus in the wild to bring it into the lab to enhance its capacity to infect humans.
Then they lost control of it, presumably, and it got into the human population.
They failed to acknowledge that it was taking place.
That evidence is increasingly clear.
And then they deployed a strangely top-down response to this virus, which presumably they knew very little about its effect on humans, because presumably they had not seen it in humans until it got into somebody and left the lab.
So, for them to have a top-down response ready, and to enforce it, you know, coercively, aggressively, on the medical profession, is an insane inversion of the normal order.
Normally, if you had some disease, if some disease really had leapt out of nature, And had begun infecting humans.
The people who would be in the best position to tell you how to deal with it would be doctors who had been treating it clinically.
And while those doctors would at first have known nothing, what they would have done is they would have followed hunches.
They would have looked at symptoms.
They would have said, ah, this symptom is failing.
Here are some pharmaceuticals that are useful in treating that symptom.
They would have deployed those things, deployed techniques.
Some of them would have worked.
Some of them would not have worked.
They would have discussed what they had seen, what they thought was working, you know, with other doctors at the water cooler, and that we would have gotten good at treating it.
To have it come down from above meant that process didn't happen.
And the argument for, for instance, lockdowns and mandatory universal masking in many places looks much different if this is just emerging and we've got to shut down travel and we've got to shut down borders and we've got to shut down everything.
Or, this has actually been circulating for half a year already.
And now we've got to do this right away, we've got to do this as urgent.
Right?
Like, you can't create a sense of urgency in a populace if you tell them this has been out there for six months.
Not only can you not create it, but the utility of trying it is already gone.
This is one of the points that Jay Bhattacharya makes.
There's two different things.
Could this potentially be useful, and is it possible to implement this on a population?
You shouldn't think about implementing it unless it could be useful.
But they are really too, you know, one of them is downstream of the other, but you need to satisfy both of those criteria before you decide to do it.
Before you would decide to do anything so disruptive.
And so I will point people to, you know, why would they have delayed?
Once the thing had escaped it seems like time is of the essence and you want people to be a you know how much time was wasted doctors seeing a disease that they didn't know was novel and therefore we're not categorizing it as novel and not learning the things that they might have been learning about what to deal with it right That's one amongst a dozen different problems that emerge when you delay that awareness.
So why would they have delayed it?
Well, I would invite people to go back and look at our discussion of the time-traveling money printer hypothesis, right?
Because it may be that this was the cynical recognition by those who did not alert us that there was something circulating, that they had an opportunity that if they were willing to prevent us from deploying a rational response that they were in an excellent economic position to anticipate the future and that there's a lot of ways to turn that into money.
That was episode 150, incidentally.
I strongly encourage people to go back and consider whether or not that is the explanation.
But I did want to highlight one thing from this meeting in Florida.
First of all, I will say there is a wide range of opinion on this panel.
I would say everybody there is a COVID dissident, but we've all arrived at our positions independently, and therefore those are not the same positions.
And this emerged in one interesting place that I wanted to point to.
So in my introduction, I argued that from the sourcing of the ancestral virus in the wild, the enhancing its capacity with gain of function, Research and then the decision making around how to treat it once it had emerged into the into the human population.
All told, that constitutes the largest blunder in human history.
And I believe it does constitute the largest blunder in human history.
There are some equally terrible or worse incidents, but they're not blunders.
So in any case, I made this argument, and Martin Kulldorff picked up on it, and he said, Dr. Weinstein is right, this is the largest blunder in public health history, or something like that, or words to that effect.
And we didn't get a chance.
There wasn't enough time to have an interaction about it.
But what I wish I had been able to say, and mind you, there's nothing negative here about Martin.
I'm a big fan of his work, and I tremendously appreciate the courage he has shown and the insight that he has delivered during the pandemic.
But he misunderstood what I said.
I said it was the largest blunder in human history, and he took that to be in a medical context.
And I wanted to...
Defend my position a little bit so that people can understand.
So one of the things that we did disagree on within the panel is whether or not there was a role for the so-called vaccines in a rational response to COVID.
And my position is these vaccines, these vaccines, right?
Well, I would have loved to have seen a vaccine that was worth that label that did not require, for example, a redefinition of the term vaccine in order for it to apply.
But what we got was a technology that turned our bodies into vaccine factories, right?
That's a highly novel phenomenon.
And the question is, okay, given what they were, given what we thought we understood about their efficacy, Was there a role for those technologies to play?
And others on the panel argue that there was a role that for people who had comorbidities that made them especially vulnerable, these things might well have been justified.
And I take the position that these were prototypes that should never have been injected to human beings.
And what I want To make the argument I want to make now to clarify why this distinction exists.
I believe that those who disagree with me on this point are functioning downstream of a very honorable and correct instinct.
But it has been miswired, not in them, but in our entire context.
And what it is, is I would just simply say this.
If it is true That the facts of these technologies, the actual facts of how effective they are and how dangerous they are, mean that they should not have been emergency use authorized.
Then it is inherently true that they should have been given to no one.
And my point is, given what we know about these things now, given what the facts that we have learned as a result of what happened when they were deployed at wide scale, I think it's very clear that emergency use authorization made no sense.
Given this pathogen, there was no justification for taking something that has as many negative consequences and as serious a set of negative consequences.
Well, and given that by the time the EUAs for the vaccines were being considered, there had been many months of work by clinicians, by doctors on the ground with patients, discovering what worked and what didn't.
And those protocols have changed over time as the virus has evolved, both because viruses evolve and Presumably because we put greater selective pressure on it by vaccinating the population.
But the fact is that there were and remain treatments.
And given the language of the Emergency Use Authorization from the federal government, which I read from back in Gosh, it would have been early 2021 on Dark Horse.
That right there suggests that there was no justification for an EUA because there were effective treatments available.
Right.
That's an excellent point.
This is one of several points that head in the same direction.
One is what we now see is that even in the trials that argued that these things were safe and effective, the evidence that they were neither safe nor effective was already present.
And so in light of that, an emergency use authorization should not be granted.
The fact that we They had safe and effective treatments among the repurposed drugs, in and of itself should have killed off the emergency use authorization.
And given that, they shouldn't have been given to anybody.
So, in any case, giving them to people, at wide scale, in a completely indifferent way with respect to the age stratification of the risks of the vaccines, the so-called vaccines, And the risk stratification in exactly the inverse form in their potential value.
These things should have been DOA.
They should never have been authorized.
And in light of that, the authorization and everything downstream of it strikes me as illegitimate.
Okay, but they've saved so many lives.
Really?
Can we go there?
Sure.
All right.
Many listening will have heard that COVID vaccines saved 1 million lives.
No, wait, it's actually 3 million.
Correction.
And reduced hospitalizations by like 18 million.
I think this is the U.S.
only or is this worldwide?
That is the U.S.
only.
U.S.
only.
That is the claim.
And for instance, Apologies, I was going to, I did not have this queued up because I thought we were going to show that video that didn't work.
So here's a, apologies, I really had not queued this up.
So here's just a typical tweet about, no hold on, about the research that is being alluded to.
New study!
I just took off the person tweeting it because I don't, she doesn't need to be dragged.
For this in particular, although she should really wake up since she claims to be a medical doctor.
New study out shows that COVID-19 vaccines have averted over 3 million deaths, 18 million hospitalizations, and saved $1 trillion in medical costs in the U.S.
And it's a link to an article at CommonwealthFund.org.
Hold on.
Two years of U.S.
COVID-19 vaccines have prevented millions of hospitalizations.
So I actually have, Zachary, a PDF of that to show where I've got some stuff highlighted.
Let me just make it full screen here.
Okay, you can show it now.
So this is a PDF.
We will also link to the link to the article on the web.
This is the research in question.
This is the research that finds that 3 million deaths in the U.S.
have been averted with these vaccines and 18 million hospitalizations and saved at Yes, this research.
And it's out of the University of Maryland and Yale and Yale School of Public Health and all sorts of important places.
Well.
Yes, this research.
How, pray tell, did they manage to wrestle this pattern from the data?
Yeah, well, as it turns out, this is literally a blog post.
So let's just start there.
I'm burying the lead here, but this is literally a blog post.
Now, this thing has now been cited by, well, apparently Anthony Fauci himself.
This research is now the biggest news in how amazing the COVID vaccines are.
This is literally a blog post.
This is from the same category of people, the same class of people, who throughout COVID, when many of us have been talking about papers on preprint servers that haven't yet been peer-reviewed, oh you can't talk about that because until it's been peer-reviewed it's not real science.
This is a blog post.
There aren't even any References.
It's not even that they didn't include the references, but they clearly have them.
There aren't even any references, okay?
So...
This ain't research.
They may have done research, and we're going to get to what in fact they claim to have done, but this is all that is available that all of the headlines and all of the doctors online are referring to is a report in which all of the actual stuff that was done is completely opaque.
That's not how science works.
Okay, so two connections.
One, we've seen this trick before.
Oh, so many times.
So many times.
The TOGETHER trial, right?
We had a slide from a presentation for more than half a year before they even showed us the method section, which then took experts weeks to unpack.
But it's the Yale School of Public Health.
What could go wrong?
I mean, come on.
These are the experts.
These are the authorities.
I'm sure they've got glassware.
I'm sure they've got lab coats.
I know they've got the relevant degrees.
Oh, I'm not sure they have any of those things.
I know what they've got, though.
Grant money.
So can we show the clip of Anthony Fauci referring to this piece of research?
Before we get to what it actually says?
Yeah, I think it's kind of the right order to do it.
Excellent.
Yes, let's do it.
So Zach has that?
Yeah.
But the latest now, Dr. Fauci, is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
He's now asking the Florida Supreme Court to greenlight an investigation into, in the way he put it, is any and all wrongdoing in Florida with respect to COVID-19 vaccines.
What's your reaction to that?
I don't have a clue, Kate, what he's asking for.
I mean, we have a vaccine that unequivocally is highly effective and safe and has saved literally millions of lives.
The Commonwealth Fund has come out with a report just this past week that vaccinations that have been administered over this period of time, this last year and a half to two years, has saved 3.2 million lives.
18 million hospitalizations and approximately $1 trillion in costs.
So, what's the problem with vaccines?
I mean, vaccines are life-saving.
So, quite frankly, Kate, I'm not sure what they're trying to do down there.
It kind of gets at a bigger issue I've been wanting to ask you as in one of our final interviews in your role in public health is just the one result of the pandemic has sadly been that science has become a divisive topic politicized and weaponized by some people.
Have you thought about how do you pull that back?
How do you turn that around?
You know, Kate, if I had an easy answer, I'd give it to you, but it's a very difficult situation.
You're absolutely correct.
It has been politicized, and it has been politicized in a way that has actually caused lives, because if people don't get... All right, so that was Anthony... So, unfortunately, I haven't seen that, and the way we have things set up, I couldn't hear it, so I don't know what he said.
So, that was Anthony Fauci, in response to the question about what Governor DeSantis Is doing with his call for a grand jury.
That is Anthony Fauci saying, I don't know what Ron DeSantis is up to.
The vaccines have saved, you know, a report out this week says the vaccines have saved more than three million lives.
Do you know what they actually did?
I do.
They took the assumption that vaccines save lives.
And they plugged that into their model, and then they said, now let's imagine a universe with vaccines that save lives, and without vaccines that save lives, and see if at the end of that running of that simulation, the universe in which the vaccines, which do save lives, have saved lives.
Like, at the end of the simulation, are more lives saved in a universe in which vaccines that save lives exist?
Are there more lives saved in a world without vaccines that do save lives?
They started with the conclusion, which we've also seen over and over and over again, and then they, voila, acted surprised when out popped their results.
In a model which is not data, right, they plugged in an assumption which would automatically give them an astronomical number for the number of lives saved.
So specifically, just in terms of what they did, Zach if you would show my screen again.
This again, the so-called research that everyone is alluding to, the thing that is not a research paper in any way, at the very end there's a How We Conducted This Study section, which in a normal paper would be right after the introduction, between the introduction and the results, and would actually spell out precisely what was done and would reference all of the claims that are in any way not general knowledge already.
How We Conducted This Study at the end of this blog post is Them saying basically what I just said, and then... That's it.
Right.
That is the evidence.
That is.
against infection and symptomatic and severe disease for different vaccine types for each variant and by time since vaccination were drawn from published estimates.
That's it.
Right.
That is the evidence.
That is.
And we don't even know what the published estimates are.
Well...
This is beyond scientific malpractice.
Yes.
This is complete insanity and is being, you know, all the CNN viewers are now convinced that St.
Fauci has spoken the word of God because the Yale School of Public Health has just done this research, which no, like they did something for sure, but they put out a blog post in which they buried the actual thing that they did by saying that Their evidence that these vaccines are effective was drawn from published estimates.
What estimates were those?
How were those gathered?
And were they themselves accurate?
That is what we need to know to know if the vaccine saved lives.
They did not assess anything to do with whether or not the vaccines actually saved lives.
Right.
Now, there have been a number of good analyses of this, and they have discovered where the bodies are buried here, or not buried as the case may be.
Meaning they have actually found the references?
They have found the model on which these things are built, because this is of course the second report from this group, and so there's a history of... Right, the model in which it's built is one thing, but like the estimates...
I would point people to Brett Swanson's Substack.
He's a data analyst who has been excellent on questions regarding COVID.
And he reveals that this model, in this case, requires an estimate of the number of people who would have died from COVID that consistently exceeds the maximum number that ever did on a daily basis.
Right?
So they have simply taken an absurd number in light of a...
Okay, but that's a different question.
I mean, that's a different problem with the model, right?
The problem that I'm pointing out is they have made the claim that the vaccine saved lives.
Right.
Like, far aside from the actual research that we can see that they did here, which is, given that we started with the assumptions that we can't, we won't tell you exactly how we made them and exactly the nature of what they were, but now let's start with these These models of the population and such, that's the level you're talking about because that is transparent-ish if you know how to read this blog post.
Right.
Now, what you're saying is, and I totally agree with this, this is fraud because it's being done by people who understand why you can't do this.
This isn't high school students, right?
These are presumably people who have Study the data sets and know what you can and cannot do.
I wouldn't have passed this paper if it came to me as a college class.
Because it doesn't matter what level of study you're at, this is perfectly circular.
What they did is they told a model that these were highly effective vaccines at saving lives, and then they asked them whether they were highly effective at saving lives.
It's perfectly circular.
Yes.
Now if you For those of us who saw that clip of Fauci on CNN saying, basically parroting this as if it was a result, which it is not.
It is a model, right?
For somebody like Fauci to invoke that number taken from this source tells you something that many people have been reluctant to accept.
This is a knowing lie.
Dr. Fauci has plenty of training and a tremendous amount of experience.
He knows the difference between this and a result that shows that this has happened.
So I actually, with the amount of Skepticism that I've had to keep actively on board for the last three years now.
I really thought I'm missing something like this blog post is linking like I and I still hope I'm wrong like where is the research guys it's Well, but it's it's not here, but okay take the alternative hypothesis Which is that from whatever point it happened?
There was some idea of what we were going to do.
And from that point, every decision has been subordinated to whether It supports that plan or argues against it.
And so any piece of evidence that would get in the way of your Vaccinate Everyone program has been obscured.
And every result, no matter how garbagey, no matter how circular, no matter how much it is based on models that are not actually evidence of anything, it is.
It is promoted to the very highest levels, right?
To have Anthony Fauci on CNN say a knowing lie, and it can't be anything else.
Incompetence does not explain why somebody with a full career's worth of experience in this exact field would parrot a result this dumb.
He's a lot of things, but dumb bunny he ain't.
He ain't a dumb bunny.
Mm-hmm.
So, and then, but this result, you've probably seen it.
You and I have not been together since this result came out.
We've been in separate places, but I've seen it in many, many different places.
Everybody on the blue team is championing this.
It's like, see, we were right.
New data!
Right.
No, actually no new data at all.
Now?
Nothing.
So this is actually a good moment to reveal that Tony is in fact our Lord and Savior.
If you could show my screen here, this editor-in-chief of Science Magazine this week published this editorial in the Science.
The headline is, Thank You Tony!
Okay, so he, the editor-in-chief of Science Magazine, one of the two premier science journals in the world, has done an interview with Tony Fauci and he's just put some of the highlights into this thing and then you can go listen.
I have not.
You can go listen to the whole interview if you like.
Anthony Fauci, Tony, to friends, colleagues, and many journalists, has never backed down from controversy.
It begins, just a few quotes here.
We talked a lot about this.
The Editor-in-Chief of Science and Tony Fauci, we talked a lot about misinformation and the forces sowing doubts about COVID-19 vaccinations and interventions such as masks and lockdowns.
Did you?
Love to hear that.
We agreed that one of the biggest challenges with which the scientific community must grapple is misinformation that comes from within.
I ran to that like a stone wall at a congressional hearing, he said, describing how his skepticism of an argument put forward by researchers who question the necessity of COVID-19 lockdowns was met with admonishment.
Quote, you're arrogant because you're disrespecting other scientists, he was told.
Fauci's response, quote, you don't want to be disparaging of anyone, but you've got to come back and push against those things that are not true.
Like, this is so backwards and upside down, and one more thing, we also talked about how we need to do a better job of conveying that science is a process, and not a collection of facts set in stone.
Nowhere's that a guy named Anthony Fauci, frankly!
Can you believe this guy?
I don't like the way they've titled this.
I think it really should have been titled, Oh, Tony, your science is so big.
Science me harder, Tony.
Or something, right?
No, but it's the Christmas season, so I think... All right, so they toned it down for the kids, but... No, he's Christ.
I mean, they're making him in... They are.
They are.
And, you know, well, that's a promotion, because he was just science before, and now... Now he's both.
He's science and Christ.
He's ascended.
Yes, he has ascended in his stepping down from his former role.
But, okay.
This is frankly, right, if there wasn't so much riding on all this, this is funny, right?
The fact that people cannot help but die from the terrible advice and treatments they're getting makes this utterly ghastly, but the absurdity of it would be funny otherwise.
But I wanted to point out, this isn't just The science types and the science journals getting tangled in knots about this and your doctor giving you bad advice.
The public... It's not just all of that.
It's not just all of that.
What's happened is they have carved out the space to make a completely fictional scientific reality that is not obligated to match anything in the actual real world anymore.
And everybody who, you know, signed up for the idea that they were the real scientists is now being carried into this fantasy science world along with them.
Can you show the Stephen Colbert clip?
Clives.
So, to take full command of the GOP, all DeSantis has to do is reel in the coveted conservative demographic of angry conspiracy QAnon all-meat-diet-tan-your-testicle-boys.
And his opening offer to all of them is calling for a grand jury investigation of COVID vaccines. - Lord!
You stupid mother Pfizer.
You want an investigation?
Let me save you some time and money.
In the U.S.
alone, the COVID vaccines have saved more than 3 million lives and helped prevent And helped prevent 18.5 million hospitalizations.
And, if that's not enough, and because idiots in your party politicized the vaccine, almost twice as many Republicans died from COVID before the midterms than the Democrats.
Y'all killed your own voters!
It's the stupidest political strategy since the Whigs' slogan of 1840, tip a canoe and taunt a grizzly.
I think, was it the drummer in the background that they showed?
I feel like there was one person in the band, I think the drummer, the woman in the background, who did not look thrilled.
I have hopes.
You have hopes.
Well, what shocks me about that, I mean, not only has this blog post taken on a life of its own as if it were just true, as if... Well, it did come out of the Yale School of Public Health.
I mean, I guess it did, but not only is it being rendered into this phony reality as if it was actually like three million people alive who otherwise wouldn't be, right?
A complete bit of nonsense.
But the uproarious laughter and applause at this, the idea that this is so transparently correct that this audience of sophisticated people is, you know, ready to just laugh at the beauty of what we've done with these things.
Well, it's tribalism and it's dehumanizing.
It's, you know, this continues.
This, you know, blue team loves to argue that it was Trump who turned the American political system into the complete carnival that it is today.
That it was, yeah, it was going there and like, you know, Newt Gingrich started in the 90s and all of this, and it goes all the way back, but it was really Trump who did it.
And They need it now, and God, is that the first time I've referred to them as them?
Maybe?
But, you know, Blue Team needs the division, needs the dehumanization, needs the tribalism in order to keep... I don't even know what they're trying to keep.
They're trying to keep the power, and the fact is they actually can't afford not to have the power, because what they've done is So dangerous, and so harmful, and frankly, if one is allowed to do a proper investigation, it's not that hard to prove, right?
These are not, it's not a complicated question at a scientific level, you know, did these so-called vaccines increase the level of all-cause mortality, or didn't they, right?
That's a relatively straightforward thing to test, as Christine Stable-Benn has shown.
And so her work was better than this work I'm about to show you, but also this week.
Nature, an editorial, if you will show this, Zachary.
Missing data means we'll probably never know how many people died of COVID.
Huge discrepancies in estimates of excess mortality revealed not just how difficult the calculations are, but how far the world has to go in recording how people die.
Now, excess mortality.
Estimates of excess mortality specifically don't require that you know how people died.
That's the point.
Right.
That is the point.
Also, this editorial, I was going to walk through how stupid it is, but I'm not going to.
So again, we've already had science anointing Fauci as the Next coming of Jesus Christ and now we have in the same week Nature, the other preeminent science journal in the world, with this pap and they are referring to an article that they published this week out of, oops,
called The WHO Estimates of Excess Mortality Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic and in this article we have figure one which has global excess and reported COVID-19 deaths and death rates per 100,000 population.
Now this is cumulative But check out how COVID was killing people and then the rate increased in 2021.
And then this is not cumulative, this is just reported COVID-19 death rate per 100,000.
This is figure 1b of the same article that just came out.
The death rate per 100,000 and COVID was killing people, northern summer of 2020, it dipped slightly and then it, boy, did it start killing people again.
Except it's not the COVID was killing people, right?
It's that we have excess mortality, right?
So it's the red line.
So I'm reading that like someone, I was saying that as if someone might look at this go like, oh my god, look at all the COVID deaths, like no, we have deaths attributed to COVID with the red line.
And we have excess mortality with the purple line here.
And the purple line has some spikes, honestly, right around the rollout of the vaccine, and then right around when suddenly everyone had access to the vaccine.
And you can't say from this that it was COVID, or it was the vaccine, or it was hepatitis, or it was cancer, it was heart disease, it was anything.
But what you can do is you can say, Let's look at data on excess mortality, which is death counts.
That's all it takes.
Death counts.
Compare it to previous death counts.
And then separately, let's look at all of the things that happen in the world to which particular spikes might be attributed.
So this is consistent.
The WHO's report published in Nature this week is consistent with BEM's work from earlier.
But somehow the Nature News report, the editorial version of Nature, instead reports this headline.
Missing data mean we'll probably never know how many people died of COVID.
That's actually not the message of the work they're reporting on.
Yeah, well, it's funny.
It's like, I mean, we know that people in many places, worst of all science, but many places, people report, you know, they read the title of a paper that leans in some direction they want, or they read the title in the abstract And they don't delve any further than this.
They cite it because they've become advocates for some position, and the thing seems to push in that direction, so it doesn't almost matter what it says.
And so, in some sense, this phony world that they've created, the phony Tony world, is Basically hungry for stuff that you can point to for your laugh line if you're Stephen Colbert or whatever.
It's just stuff.
It doesn't matter that there's anything underneath it.
It can just be an assertion that comes from a place like Yale, right?
And it's good enough.
And so that, you know, whoa, boy, that sounds like a sophisticated analysis that there's missing data that's going to prevent us from ever knowing, right?
They want to seed the idea, oh, we're never going to know.
Why are we never going to know?
Because we're never going to do the right study.
And why are we never going to do the right study?
Because a lot of people can't afford for us to do the right study.
It's not hard.
The data isn't missing.
Yes, it will be noisy.
But, you know, do you know what those giant buildings full of people who do science are about?
Knowing how to study questions like this.
And frankly, once you've paired it all away and you've realized that, oh my god, the PCR tests aren't the right things to be testing for this, and died with versus died of COVID is really messy and we're never going to fully untangle that.
The measure of excess mortality doesn't require any of that.
It doesn't require that we untangle any of that.
It doesn't require that we know any of it.
It is so beautiful.
It is so simple.
And yes, if there's something else that happened in late 2019, early 2020, Or in late 2020, early 2021 through now, that we are yet unaware of, we will potentially mistake one one pattern for the other.
But excess mortality simply looks at how many people died.
And historically, at the same time of year, how many people died?
And how many more are there?
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, even if there were something that magically showed up at that same moment, right?
We have various different countries in which we had different patterns, and so you can unpack that as well.
There's nothing here that is beyond study.
This is not harder than your average question.
In fact, this is so much easier than we are making it out to be.
Yes, it is.
And unfortunately, we're now, I think the new game is that they've reversed the burden of proof, which is one of their favorites.
That's what happened with these people who are extremely high quality scientists on DeSantis' panel.
The reason that we disagree is that they've had the burden of proof reversed on them and so they're trying to be very careful because they've spent careers being careful.
But the problem is careful has been flipped on its head.
There's no reason, I will point out, it's not the only thing that went missing according to this report.
Do you notice that Pfizer's document, its agreement with Israel, went missing?
What report?
What are we talking about?
The report that you just put up saying that the data is missing and that it will prevent us from knowing whether or not we've had an increase in Oh, something else has gone missing.
Something else has gone missing.
And it is what?
It is the agreement between Pfizer and the state of Israel has apparently also gone missing.
It's just gone?
They don't know.
Yeah.
Apparently they had someone in over the weekend to clean up.
And so anyway, it's possible she placed it somewhere.
That'll happen.
Yeah, it does happen.
Right.
I mean, sure.
But yes.
Israel should really get its act together.
It's very disorganized and not, you know, not able to get things done in general, right?
No, that's like every other nation state after Israel.
I mean, let's, you know, let's steel man their argument.
I mean, Israel, you know, it's a small country, but it's still a big place.
There are a lot of places they could have, you know, so there are some... Presumably they haven't checked absolutely everywhere.
Right.
They're going to have to do a systematic check of all of the cubbies and other small places in Israel that this document could be hiding.
Right.
Oh, and that's before they even get to the computers.
I was just going to say, not to say anything about the virtual universe.
Right, yeah.
So many cubbies.
Yeah, in Israel, inside their computers, there's got to be, I mean, hundreds of places that document could hide.
Maybe even orders of magnitude more than that.
Who knows?
So, here's another thing that happened this week.
Okay.
The White House had a summit on STEM equity and inclusion.
Really?
Yeah.
I watched it.
I'm not sure why.
This is STEM.
STEM, yes.
Which I'd never seen before, that acronym.
Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Medicine.
And I guess it's because I subscribe to science.
I still feel like I need to, and I don't have an institutional affiliation because they've all gone completely insane, and so I got an announcement the morning of, hey, we're doing this, we're streaming the White House Summit on STEM Equity and Inclusion sponsored by Science.
Okay, let's go look.
So there's a lot to say, but I just, and you know, it wasn't, it wasn't entirely ridiculous, but Because we have a lot of other things that we're talking about today, I will restrict my comments to Quoting the president of Harvey Mudd College, whose name I failed to write down, I apologize, concludes her comments.
She's on one of many panels, and she concludes her comments by saying, so Harvey Mudd College is one of the Claremont Colleges.
It is a very small, very elite, mostly engineering school, a STEM school, basically STEM with one M. And, you know, it vies, she claims, but it's true, it vies for undergraduates.
I think it's entirely undergraduate.
I'm not sure about that, actually.
With the likes of MIT and Caltech.
And she has some good things to say.
You know, she talks about... She and others talk about the science of belonging, which sounds ridiculous, but actually the idea that when you walk into a classroom, you shouldn't assume that you belong because of your demographics, nor should you assume that you don't belong because of your demographics.
And the professor and everyone else in the room Should also not make those assumptions.
And this is something that we did without ever hearing of the science of belonging, right, in the classroom.
But the idea that actually college administrators and faculty are waking up to this, you know, decades too late, is at least something valuable.
But she concludes her comments by saying that on campus, quote, We also continuously celebrate our cultural value that every person, every student, every faculty member, every staff member, is responsible for the success of every other person on campus.
That struck me as something that could just be washed away, ignored, whatever, okay, you think you're doing good for people and helping, you know, raise everyone by not, you know, making sure that no one is left behind, but This Strikes Me is insane.
Completely insane.
Completely anti-meritocratic.
Opposed to the idea of striving on your own, for instance, or being held responsible for your own failures.
Both of those things are weakened by the idea that you, no matter how good you are, no matter how bad you are at whatever it is that you're trying to do, are responsible for the success of everyone around you.
Well, no, you're not.
You know, it's funny because I remember running into what is effectively a different version of the same concept.
I remember running into it the first time, and it was as Evergreen was coming apart.
And the claim, again these claims they sound so lovely, right, on first hearing, but the claim was that Evergreen had a very serious problem because people graduated with different levels of capability.
And the idea was that Evergreen was actually morally required To ensure that everyone graduated equally capable.
It's Harrison Berger on university!
Right.
And I heard that and I thought, there is only one way to do that.
Which is to hobble those who are highly capable.
Even if they were right, which they weren't, but even if they were right that these disparities were the result of unfairness.
Right?
That was based on sex or race or whatever.
Even if they were correct, the idea that somebody who enters college gifted in math, right, has to basically graduate with people who are either brought up to their level, which will be impossible, right, because you can't take somebody who has no math skill and bring them up to the most capable person's level, or they will have to be sabotaged for four years.
And it's like they don't First of all, I'm not even sure that they wouldn't come up with euphemisms for sabotage that would make them comfortable, but they wouldn't even stop upon hearing that and thinking, oh yeah, now we can't have everybody graduate at the same level because that means ruining everybody's capacity that they have, right?
The only level you can equalize them all to is completely incapable, right?
That's the only achievable place where that can happen.
And you would be a fool to go to a school, to matriculate at a school that had that as its, what does she say, cultural value.
That would be an insane place to go if they really are serious about it.
In fact, this is an argument that I made in an email to our colleagues at Evergreen.
I said, you can't do this because nobody, you are effectively talking about transferring educational well-being from certain students to other students, and the students from whom you are transferring it will simply not show up.
You will get your wish, because the standards will plummet.
Well, the standards will plummet, but the point is you need all of those, you know, this was not a rich college.
It needs a student body willing to come and pay tuition.
And, you know, to the extent that you're going to drive those who are most capable off, you know, it doesn't matter whether they were capable for reasons that ultimately come from unfairness.
You need them to show up in order to have a college.
Well, you also need the most capable people to show up to To be awesome, to inspire, to educate others, to provide foils for the faculty to help bring the other students who maybe are less capable because they've been disadvantaged and could become more capable, but they need to be able to hear the conversation.
Some people are less capable because they're just less capable.
But a lot of people are less capable because they've been disadvantaged, but they're not going to learn how to be more capable if the only people they're surrounded with are also not capable.
That's not how learning happens.
No, it's complete nonsense.
And the irony of ironies in the case of our former college was that our former college was unique in the fact that it was really well designed to deal with high potential people who hadn't been well served by whatever system they came from.
Right.
It was well positioned.
Students were awesome.
Yeah, they really were.
And the possibility to take people who had high potential but hadn't been reached by anybody and give them a lifeline was a mission that Evergreen was uniquely positioned to address.
And it's so rewarding.
My god.
It's so amazing.
To, you know, at a moment when people are claiming, claiming that, you know, everyone needs to be forced to succeed on, you know, on the rubric that someone else has created who maybe never even met a kid, right?
And then to actually be able to, to kind of like open up the world to people who know that they're hungry but don't know what they're hungry for and maybe haven't even really ever had a meal.
Like, here, this is this is a bunch of options.
You start making choices and then maybe you start getting funneled here or there, but how extraordinary, you know?
As opposed to, no, just accept that because the first 18 years of your life you didn't get good education or you had No.
We need institutions.
or you were malnourished or any number of things, well, then just give up now.
Like, no.
We need institutions.
We need more than functional, outstanding institutions that do not discriminate against students who didn't have advantages but have extraordinary potential and...
And Evergreen was that place, and I don't think there is a place now that does it.
And it is ideas like this that apparently I had forgotten, actually.
You would have heard it, Evergreen.
I heard come from the current president of Harvey Mudd College, an elite school, as if this is an honorable thing to be doing.
And it's not.
It's the death of the university.
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it's cognitive communism.
And the point is, look, the problem with all... I was trying not to use the word, but yeah, this is what it is.
The problem with all versions of communism is that it's an empty space.
It's not a real place you can go, right?
It's not obvious that it would be desirable if you could go there, but it doesn't work, right?
In the theoretical solution set, you want to have it taking up a space, but...
It's not available in design space.
It is inherently self-unstable and doesn't accomplish the things you need to accomplish in order to make a civilization work.
It doesn't accomplish the things you need to make a university work.
And so the question is, all right, in light of the fact that communism is both sucky and impossible, right, what else might we do?
Hey, here's an idea.
How about we increase everybody's capacity as much as we can in the brief period of time we have contact with them, right?
Wouldn't that be cool?
If I may, by analogy, in light of the fact that the vaccines are neither safe nor effective, what else might we do to treat COVID?
Like, is it possible?
There's another possibility on the table.
Yeah, anybody?
Anybody?
And then, you know, the next thing is overlooking Dr. Corey and Dr. Bhattacharya and all of these other folks.
Everyone else.
Yeah.
It's sucky and impossible.
Yeah, but other than that...
Yes.
You got anything better?
Like, yes, we got lots of better things.
Does anybody have any other ideas that we haven't yet declared evil, you know?
Okay, well, that's all very well and good, and you know, I understand it's important to talk about the future of humanity and society and everything, but sometimes, sometimes, instead of COVID and public health and the nature of viruses and how not to do science and how to convince people that the fact that they don't understand science should really mean that they should learn how to understand science and admit that that's what they've been doing is the opposite, sometimes What I actually want to think about is not any of those things, but about whether or not female snakes experience sexual pleasure.
Wow.
Alright.
Didn't see that coming.
No, you didn't.
Maybe I should just leave it there.
Well, it depends.
Do you know the answer?
There's some new research out that's actually good.
Was it a model that decided that they don't experience pleasure because the model told them that they didn't experience pleasure?
It's not that.
That's right.
Well, okay, so I'm actually, I'm going to not say yet exactly what it is.
I will say just a little bit first about phylogeny and about Character evolution, which sounds, you know, we start with female sexual pleasure and we're going to character evolution?
What the hell?
Snakes are lizards, which usually even phylogeneticists who study snakes or lizards will, when they're talking about the group that includes snakes, will say lizards and snakes, even though snakes are lizards.
So together the lizards and the snakes are the squamates, the squamata, And the squamata have, as every good clade, monophyletic clade.
That is, there is a point in time when that clade originated and it has diversified radically, and so that clade is monophyletic.
It includes all of its descendants of that first proto-squamate.
And there are characters, that is, in normal parlance you would say characteristics, although evolutionary biologists say characters, There are characters that diagnose the clade even though members of that clade could then lose those characters, and that doesn't mean that they lose their representation in the clade.
Diagnose doesn't mean that the clade is sick.
Well, so things that you would recognize would be that mammals have, as these diagnostic characters, synapomorphies in the technical language of evolutionary biology, have, for instance, mammary glands, but not nipples, because the monotremes, the echidnas and the platypus... You mean echidna.
At the base of the mammal tree actually don't have nipples, but they do have mammary glands.
And fur is a diagnostic characteristic.
And that, you know, you can lose your fur, as we have, and you remain a mammal.
But it was a character that diagnosed the origin of the clade.
And so a synapomorphy, a diagnostic, a shared derived character of squamates, which is again lizards and snakes, is having hemipenes, which is two reversible Peens, which is really how it's pronounced.
I would have said penises, but as a herpetologist, that is to say someone who studies the creepy crawlies that include the amphibians and reptiles, I know that you're supposed to pronounce it hemipenes.
So for those of you tuning in late, Heather has not had a stroke.
She's just teaching you how to speak about the phylogeny of snakes and lizards.
Well, I also think it's super amusing to start with sexual pleasure in female snakes and then go immediately into the really dry stuff.
Oh, don't be a beakhead.
Which are not They are not lizards.
No, scissors.
They're sister to otars because rhynchocephalians are, I believe, sister to squamates, if I remember correctly.
Yes, they're not sister to lizards.
Oh, I guess they are.
Yes, because lizards include snakes.
Got it.
I've caught up now.
I've had my stroke.
Yeah.
Okay, so hemipenes, which is these shared, two-eversible, meaning they can be tucked into the body and they come out.
Penises, peons, it's peons actually, that males have, and every male squamate, and they're used alternatively during successive mating.
So if you've ever seen snakes mate, which like I recommend it actually, it's kind of interesting, lizards too, they go at it from the side.
And so like lizards will like wrap themselves around each other, and if you are able to watch them long enough, if they don't mind you watching them, And you follow them, because this is what herpetologists do in the field sometimes.
You will see that if the same pair, or even if just the same male, you see him mate another time, he will use his other penis.
He will use the other side.
So, there's a lot of diversity across squamates.
That is, again, lizards and snakes in size, in shape.
Other characteristics, like some of them are spiny, some of them have spines, but not all of them.
This has all been known for a long time.
I actually didn't look up how long hemipenes have been understood to be one of the diagnostic characteristics of squamates, but it's been a long time.
And hat tip here to our friend from grad school, Jennifer Ost, who pointed me to this new research.
And she, in turn, hat tipped her and my graduate advisor, Arnold Kluge,
Um, because apparently, and I was never, somehow I missed out on his soliloquies about how all the research into hemipenes, um, always avoided talking about the, um, the, the compatible part in females, which would be, um, it's not pronounced hemiclitorises, it's hemiclitteries, I guess.
Okay?
So here we are.
Here we go.
Apparently Kluge, my graduate advisor, has been arguing for decades that now what female snakes have is not just underdeveloped hemipenes.
Thank you very much.
Which, of course, because herpetology, even more than many fields within biology, was very dominated by men for a very long time, and because female genitalia in general is considered like, oh, do we have to?
And it's a little less obvious and all of this, to the degree that anything was ever noticed in female snakes.
It was usually kind of like, okay, that's just underdeveloped hemipenes, nothing to see there, let's move along.
And so, you know, hats off to Kluge for, you know, well before his time being like, no, I don't think so.
I think there's something there there.
Well, wait a second.
Do we have any idea how many parties Kluge ruined by mentioning this?
I suspect, having been at only a very few parties that Kluge was at, that he was the life of many parties.
Yes, I actually think that he was the life of many parties, and that this probably caused an awkward silence of maybe 30 seconds to a minute and a half, and then people would move right along.
On the other hand, you invite Invite Arnold Kluge to a party, you probably know what you're getting yourself into.
Yeah, you did it to yourself, pretty much.
You did it to yourself.
Okay, so I'm just going to read a couple things from this fabulous new paper.
This is published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
First evidence of hemicliterias in snakes from out of University of Adelaide, Mount Holyoke, and actually University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, which was of course where Jennifer and I were working with Kluge, and he wasn't on your committee, but you were also his student.
Yep.
So, the very first sentence of the abstract of this paper, female genitalia are conspicuously overlooked in comparison to their male counterparts, limiting our understanding of sexual reproduction across vertebrate lineages.
I would say they are inconspicuously overlooked.
Inconspicuously overlooked.
Well, conspicuous to some people.
The overlooking is conspicuous, yeah.
Yes, yeah, exactly.
So later in the abstract, histology of the hemiclitaries and Australian death adders, Acanthophis antarcticus, showed erectile tissue and strands and bundles of nerves, but no spines, as is found in male hemipenes.
These histological features suggest the snake hemiclitaries have functional significance in mating and definitively show that the hemiclitaries are not underdeveloped hemipenes or scent glands, which have been erroneously indicated in other studies.
So first off, just notice the care and the rigor of the scientific argument here.
Here's what hemipenes have.
Here's what we are finding in the death adders.
I love that they use death adders.
They actually use nine species, but they went deep on the death adders.
That's just so that they would have a story.
That's like studying lichen on the face of El Capitan, right?
Yeah, I know.
Let's do it in death adders, you know.
The first author is at the University of Adelaide, although everyone else is... I don't know.
There's two authors in Australia.
But they said, okay, so the existing hypotheses are it's just scent glands or it's underdeveloped hemipenes.
If it was underdeveloped hemipenes, you would expect to see the same structures in hemipenes, but less so.
And what they're saying is, no, we did the dissections, we did the histology, no, no, and no.
It's different.
It is presumably homologous, the hemiclitoris in the female death adders and the hemipenes in the male death adders, but one is not just like a half-assed version of the other, sorry.
No, and this is the story of research on female sexuality in general, not just in humans, but in snakes, snakes as well.
So, genitalia are some of the fastest evolving characteristics of amniotes with internal fertilization.
So that, don't get me started on that, but that's fascinating as well.
Because sexual selection drives rapid evolution.
Because sexual selection drives rapid evolution, but specifically the question of internal fertilization.
Well, because the shape of the structure then is relevant to the sexual selection.
Yes, so the piece that I would love to be talking about, but I won't do here for fear of losing more of our audience, is the conditions under which internal fertilization versus external fertilization evolve, and what happens when you have, you know, once you have internal fertilization, live birth versus egg birth versus ovoviviparity, which is like you have
Eggs inside your body that then hatch so that you give birth to something alive but there wasn't any placental fetal transfer of nutrients or resources along the way.
All of these are fascinating and actually snakes make an excellent system for looking at the diversity of within internal fertilization of those types of types of birth.
Variation in clitoris morphology has been linked to different degrees of sexual arousal that could lead to increased reproductive fitness by enticing females to copulate or forming social bonds.
So this is the author's, in the introduction, way of saying, guess what, guys?
This actually matters.
Like, this is relevant, it is interesting, and it does matter if you think you're interested in sexual selection, evolution at all, really, behavior, social bonding, all of these things.
And then they say, again, even when hemicletteries are described in lizards, these have been hypothesized to provide a stimulatory role for the male during intromission.
So, to the degree that there are, like, tissues in female genitals that could provide pleasure, no, it's probably just to provide the male pleasure.
Like, this is literally what's in the literature.
Well, it also implies it's a very long movie if there's an intromission.
So, I will say, you know this already.
Intromission is different from intermission.
Ah, okay.
Okay, just a couple more things here.
Unlike lizard hemiclitaries, all snake hemiclitaries examined lacked spines, sulcus promaticus, and retractor muscles and could not be averted by manual manipulation, suggesting that something different and interesting is going on in snakes.
And I think there's one more thing.
I don't need to show the clitoris in detail.
The presence of erectile bodies with blood cells suggests that the hemiclitaries engorge with blood, while the presence of abundant nerve bundles suggests that their stimulation may provide sensory feedback to the females.
So, maybe that's all I'll share from the paper right now.
You can't, of course, Interview snakes and ask them about their choice of partners or whether or not they're choosing to engage now because they're sexually aroused.
But you also can't do the kinds of things that you would do in even other mammals and look at, you know, basically measure emotion in the same way.
You can't, you know, you can't look, you can't do the same kind of analysis.
Especially if you've chosen to do it in death adders.
It would be dangerous.
Can I just have, never mind.
You just go about your business.
You But so they've done exactly the work that you would want to have done if you were interested in whether or not female snakes experience sexual pleasure, which is, OK, there's actually structures here.
And no, they're not just kind of halfway to what the males have.
They're actually distinct structures, and they both have erectile capability and abundant nerve bundles.
And they seem to do the same thing that clitoris, apparently is the plural, do in all the other species.
Um, that have them.
And yes, they did it in death adders and eight other species of snakes.
Okay, but, so, I mean, this is the nature of science, right?
Because each study reveals the next question that you want to answer, but it sounds like they did not answer the question, alright, you've got snakes with hemiclitori, but they don't say what fraction of male snakes are aware that female snakes have hemiclitori.
Yes, the male snakes are continuing the story to the degree that the female hemiquaries are there at all.
It's just to help the males feel better about themselves.
Only the toxic male snakes are saying that.
The male snakes are presumably also possessed of the idea that each individual is the best one that their female snake has ever had.
That's right, and obviously this conversation is making our female Labrador really unhappy.
I think she just has to sneeze.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I got.
All right, well...
All right, I tell you what, I will wrap up with a vignette that I think... I just got back last night, so... Yes, and you left literally the day that I got back from Mexico, so we've basically not seen each other since the last livestream.
I left as soon as the last livestream ended, and here we are.
Yeah.
All right, so I got to Florida.
As you know, Fort Lauderdale, where the airport is, is not close to West Palm Beach, where the DeSantis panel was.
This was all on very short notice, so I decided to rent a car.
And you know that time, that moment when you've rented a car at the counter and then they take you out and you go into the parking lot and they say, you can have anything in this row, right?
And so I got to my row and it was like, Not impressive, right?
There was like a tricycle, and there was a scooter with a trash bag that you could wear to keep the rain off, and you know, not great stuff.
But there was also, inexplicably to me, a convertible Mustang.
With a horse?
No, no, an actual car.
Because I don't know how you would convert a horse.
Yeah, it's good.
I think they're all kind of already convertibles with the top down, inherently.
But anyway, so I looked at the woman who had taken me out there, like that one is obviously in the wrong row, and she's like, no, no, you can have that one.
Okay, but then I had this argument with myself about, so you're gonna show up to the governor's thing, In a convertible Mustang?
Like, that sends a kind of a weird non-academic message, right?
But then, you know, I realized I really just did not want to touch any of these other, you know, vehicles.
It's sort of like vaccines, these other vehicles that I might have got.
So I was like, yeah, okay, I'll do it, right?
And I got the thing, and it was kind of crazy.
But it didn't leak?
It didn't have some obvious, like it had a transmission?
Well, let's put it this way.
The rear windows, once opened, did not fully close.
OK.
OK.
But that was the extent of the leaking.
OK.
And other than that, it was kind of interesting.
And you weren't held responsible for the fact that you returned the car soaking wet?
No, in fact, when I did return the car, the guy told me that Ford had just elected never to solve that problem.
It was well known, and that you had to physically pull the windows up.
So anyway, Ford, I don't know what you're up to.
So I rented the car, and I did show up to the governor's thing in the convertible Mustang.
But nobody saw.
And then later, some of us who were on the panel had gone out to a meal, and I offered to drive Jay Bhattacharya back to his hotel.
Of course.
Because he had not read it.
Right, he had not done that.
And I had this moment, like, you know, I'm not a very insecure person, but I had this moment of insecurity, like, oh my God, Jay Bhattacharya is about And so I started making excuses and telling him I had rented this car and it was the only one that was tolerable and all of this stuff.
And anyway, Jay gets to the car and he's like, oh my God, my 16 year old self would have loved this car!
And so then, you know, Jay bought a Chariot and I tooled around on the way to his hotel in a convertible Mustang in West Palm Beach.
So anyway, that's a vignette for you.
Nice.
That's excellent.
Yeah, that's excellent.
All right, well, we'll be back in 15 minutes, but we'll also be back, for those of you who've had enough of us for now, in six days.
We will be live streaming on December 23rd, Friday, December 23rd at the usual time.
But until then, we also have our Patreon, our private Q&A tomorrow, so join us there!
Come find me at my Patreon and we will be doing a live Q&A tomorrow, 11 a.m.
to 1 p.m.
with questions that are awesome and a group that's really great as well.
But we'll be back shortly with a different Q&A.
You can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
Any logistical questions that you have can be sent to darkhorsemoderator at gmail.com.
And there's lots of other true stuff to say.
But until next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
