#156 Who Lost the Plot? (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 156th 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 new research on the mechanism of action of ivermectin against SARS-CoV2. We also discuss several organizations that have lost the plot: the Red Cross (with regard to who can donate blood), the American Museum of Natural History (with regard to who should be educating teens on the viral outbreaks)...
Wow, it is 2023 and we are off to a roaring start.
What number is it again?
156.
Yes.
Yes.
Right.
Well, here we are.
Here we are.
Today we are going to talk a bit about... Can we even say the word at this point, or is it still Voldemort?
No, I believe we can say the word.
We can say the word?
I think if we pronounce it in British, then we're safe.
So today we might be talking about Ivermectin.
That wasn't British.
No, I don't know what that was.
I was gonna say Ivermectin, which I don't think is how the Brits pronounce it.
Oh, oh, just a- It's plausible.
As long as there are no Brits watching, I think it'll do.
Okay.
I thought you meant an accent as opposed to a different pronunciation.
But I can't, like it doesn't have enough, I don't even know.
Can we start over?
Ivamectin?
This is gonna be the thing that finally cancels us.
Yes.
Yes.
Finally.
Yeah.
To many people's great relief and others tremendous horror.
That was the wrong two.
I thought you were going to say two yanks finally pushed it.
Two yanks finally pushed it a bit too far.
Indeed.
Okay, so we're going to talk about Ivermectin a little bit, and then some organizations that seem to have lost the plot.
The Red Cross, the American Museum of Natural History, a biological organization for which you ended up at the conference of this week.
Yes, I did.
Somehow.
I went to a biology conference.
Yeah, you didn't actually go to a biology conference.
You went to Austin to talk to... To Joe Rogan, of course.
The awesome Joe Rogan.
The awesome Joe Rogan.
But I did go to a biology conference.
And the hotel you're at happened to be hosting a biology conference.
I crashed a biology conference.
Yes, you did.
Yes.
Yes, you did.
So we're going to talk about that a little bit.
And we're also going to talk about fourth grade me trying not to lose the plot at the end.
All right.
And you don't know what that is.
Well, I have no idea where that's going.
No, no.
Okay, but first some logistics.
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Probably.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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Is that correct, Mr. Producer Ma'am?
Okay.
We are producing, we are streaming on Odyssey and that is where the chat is live.
If you are watching us live, you can go over there.
And we encourage you to check out our book, Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, my Substack, naturalselections.substack.com, where this week I wrote about connecting and my desire to befriend seals.
Hmm.
Among other things.
Approving seals.
I guess I need them to be approving if I am to befriend them, yes.
Of course, I will let everyone fill in their own punchline on that.
Yes, indeed.
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No, he looked at it, he's like, Stalin, yeah, lie to Stalin.
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Alright!
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No, I had to use the room temperature, which is just not a good substitute.
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And we were going to start off today talking about the mechanism of action of ivermectin.
What?
Mechanism of action of ivermectin.
I remember, I remember a particularly nasty interaction where one of our detractors took me to task for admitting that I did not know by what mechanism ivermectin seemed to be working.
And she said, And if you don't know, it must not work!
Right, exactly.
How can you say that something works if you don't know the mechanism of action?
And of course, that's not how science works at all.
You can absolutely know that something works and not know the mechanism of action, but it appears... And frankly, such a mechanistic approach to science is almost always hand-in-hand with a reductionist approach, and Almost always revealing of a relatively small mind who may generate sort of bricks in the wall that already exist in science but is very unlikely to discover new truths.
That is 100% not the way that science has to work.
There is good mechanistic science out there as I think this paper we're going to talk about today reveals.
But the idea that if you don't know mechanism you can't know the thing is functional, No.
Right, and any fool knows this, right?
I mean, how many games of Ultimate Frisbee have taken place entirely on a field with nobody on it who could explain what the relationship is between the Bernoulli effect and the way the damn thing flies, right?
No, you just know how to throw the Frisbee, right?
So, anyway, yeah.
Knowing how it works is not Essential, but it's fantastic when it happens because it allows you to go that much farther.
You can extrapolate in ways that you could not necessarily otherwise extrapolate.
So anyway, it's great that a mechanism of action seems to have emerged.
Indeed.
So we ran across this on Dr. McCullough's Substack.
He published a short piece called, Ivermectin's Mechanism of Action Against SARS-CoV-2 Described Shame on the hospital systems that systematically denied patients and their begging families this FDA-approved, Nobel Prize-winning wonder drug.
He is talking about, he is referring to this paper that came out in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, which you can show my screen if you like, Zach, just recently.
It's actually end of 2022.
And the title is, SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Induces Hemagglutination Implications for COVID-19 Morbidities and Therapeutics and for Vaccine Adverse Effects.
Okay.
I think we had talked about me just sharing a couple of excerpts from the paper before we talk about it.
Yes, well there was one other thing that was, I don't remember if it's in the paper, it was certainly in McCullough's brief treatment of it, which I wanted to remind people of, because there's been so much effort put into confusing people about ivermectin and whether or not it works for SARS-CoV-2, that I just wanted
to highlight this piece of information, which is that ivermectin was known to have broad scale effects against RNA viruses generally.
There's a large number of RNA viruses in which it has been shown to be useful.
So to the extent that people are scratching their heads over why a dewormer has an effect on SARS-CoV-2, This is a highly bioactive molecule that has effects, yes, on parasitic worms.
Also appears to have effects counteracting RNA viruses, of which SARS-CoV-2 is of course one.
Yep.
A lot of them.
And we wrote that into the piece that we published on mysubstack as well.
It is a kind of a wonder drug, and there's a reason that it was on the WHO's list of essential medicines, and that's not Roger Daltrey's doing.
That's the other WHO, and that's the WHO that has since, like, you know, taken out.
Where did Roger Daltrey come from?
You know, until 2020, when you said the WHO, most people who weren't associated with the World Health Organization are in that sphere somehow, I would think, you know, Peter Townsend and regidulatory and such.
But, you know, this isn't a sleight of hand on our part going like, yeah, some, you know, rock stars think that ivermectin works.
Like, no, the WHO, it's still on their list of essential medicines.
And I believe it's back on a number of other health agencies' lists of recommended medicines for COVID too, but I did not look into that.
It is actually, I checked before the podcast, I have to delve deeper to see exactly what it means, but it is actually on the NIH site.
So be careful there, because it was on the NIH site for a while, but they basically said, yeah, but not really.
So I don't know if something's changed.
Yeah, but for research or something like that.
Anyway, it's beside the point.
I will point out that in terms of, yes, you can know that something works before you know how it is that it works, that there is also something to be said for the integrative aspect of this, right?
You have a bacterium found in Japanese soil.
I believe a golf course is the original source.
Yeah, I didn't know that.
But in any case... That makes it weirder, in a way.
It does make it weirder.
Yeah, selective effects from the stuff you have to put on grass to make it into a golf course.
Either that or it's very tolerant and Satoshi Omura was at the golf course because it's a place that brings people.
I don't know exactly what the explanation would be.
But the thing that I would point out is there's bound to be a fascinating ecological story underlying the question of why this bacterium has effects against a broad range of creatures.
creatures.
In other words, if you studied the bacterium instead of studying the compound, You might find that it has a unique environment in which fending off these things is particularly relevant to some story I think that we don't yet know.
And I would love to hear that story.
How is it that some creature as inconspicuous as this one came to have all of these effects that we find so useful?
Right.
And without understanding why or even yet what many of the effects were, the discovery by Umura won him a Nobel Prize back in… 2015.
2015.
So not that long ago, actually, even though the discovery was many decades before.
That is as often the case with, I mean, maybe always the case with the Nobel, right?
At least in physiology and medicine.
that the award gets granted often decades after the discovery in question.
I think all of the sciences, maybe peace not so much, and maybe literature not so much, although literature tends to be across for a lifetime.
Anyway, I digress.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Neither here nor there. - Sure.
Okay, so this article published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences finds that, and you may show my screen if you like, Zach, this is just the second half of the abstract.
The results of these experiments were, first, that spike protein from these four lineages of SARS-CoV-2 induced HA, which is hemagglutination Assay?
I want to say that has to be assay, although the way they've got this... that's weird.
Omicron induced HA at a significantly lower threshold concentration of spike protein than the three prior lineages and was much more electropositive on its central spike protein region.
IVM, that's ivermectin, blocked HA when added to red blood cells prior to spike protein and reversed Hemagglutination when added afterwards.
These results validate and extend prior findings on the role of glycan bindings of viral spike protein in COVID-19.
They furthermore suggest therapeutic options using competitive glycan binding agents such as ivermectin, and may help elucidate rare serious adverse effects associated with COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, which use spike protein as the generated antigen.
So that's highly technical, as abstracts will tend to be, but it clears up a little bit with a few more sections.
And for those, glycan is just a polysaccharide.
So hemagglutinating property basically just means clumping, okay?
So this clumping of red blood cells.
This hemagglutinating property of SARS-CoV-2 has important clinical consequences.
First, with trillions of red blood cells each circulating through narrow pulmonary capillaries about once per minute, even small dynamically aggregating and disaggregating red blood cell clumps, as can form even in the absence of pathogens, can impede red blood cell oxygenation.
Peripheral ischemia, endothelial damage, and vascular occlusion are indeed frequently observed in serious cases of COVID-19, as reviewed in these references.
In COVID-19 patients, damaged endothelium of pulmonary capillaries is often observed adjoining relatively intact alveoli, while hypoxemia is manifested despite normal breathing mechanics.
These morbidities of COVID-19 parallel those of severe malaria, in which clumping of parasite-infected red blood cells to other red blood cells via SA... I don't remember what that is... terminal residues and endothelial cytohesion also often result in fatal outcomes.
So they are saying this looks similar to malaria.
We now are seeing what SARS-CoV-2 is doing, which is it's causing red blood cells to clump, the word being hemagglutination.
And we, the authors of this paper, are putting together that thing that we are seeing with the observation, the clinical observations, of how it is that people suffering from bad cases of COVID are manifesting in terms of their symptoms.
So, I don't know if you want to continue there or I want to add a couple of things.
Go for it.
So, to translate some of that.
It is counterintuitive that capillary beds are actually basically composed of of Arterials that are so tiny that basically the blood cells go through close to single file and any clumping causes these things not to be able to get through and what they're saying is
is that that results in damage from these tissues not being perfused with oxygen and any tissue that is denied oxygen long enough basically ends up dying, which they're saying matches some of the pathologies that we see from a severe COVID infection.
They also say That the lungs are failing to engage in gas exchange, even though the mechanics are working.
And the basic point is, in order for gas exchange to work, the blood has to get right to this very cusp of contact with the air that you're breathing in.
And to the extent that the capillary beds in your alveoli are not perfused with blood cells, because the blood cells Can't get in a single file to get into those tiny little arterioles.
It's not working, so they're not presumably dumping carbon dioxide and picking up oxygen, which then results in the hypoxia that was talked about so much earlier in the COVID pandemic.
Yeah, just a semantic point.
So the heart, as mammals, we have a fully four-chambered heart in which we have blood coming out of the heart and going to systemically coming back in and then going to the other side of the heart and going out into the lungs.
The lungs and then back.
And in both of those circuits, be it out to the body and then back, or out to the lungs and then back, you basically go out on the biggest, most muscularized vessels, the arteries, and then as they get smaller, there's no real category difference, but then they become arterioles, And then at the point that they are at their smallest, where the blood cells may in fact be going single file, we call those capillary beds.
We don't really call them arterioles, at least over in comparative biology land, where I've never dissected a human, but dissected a lot of cats.
And then as they come out of the capillary beds, like venules, I think, and then veins, as they get bigger, and veins are under much less pressure.
And so the sides of them are much less thick.
And you end up with these pools in your veins, potentially, if you aren't otherwise very healthy or if you're old, in a way that you don't really get pools in your arteries.
Because the blood coming directly out of your heart before it hits capillaries is under fairly high pressure.
But after having gone through the capillary beds, it's coming back more sluggishly and also deoxygenated.
And the thing about the alveoli of the lungs is that basically the pulmonary circuit out of the heart is a way to get the blood back into oxygenated state.
Right.
So, you know, the pulmonary artery is the least oxygenated vessel in the body, the least oxygenated big vessel in the body, even though in general, when we think of arteries, it's like, oh, you know, the blood is pumping fast, it's full of oxygen, but only if it's recently come back from the lungs and is now going out into the body.
Right, and so I did screw up.
I used arterial where I should have said capillary, but in any case, it's amazing how well this actually fits a lot of the stuff that was discussed early in COVID.
The hypoxia is basically, if you imagine that what you did You know, even if your red blood cells are just a little bit tending to stick together, that's enough to keep them from flowing through those capillary beds the way they're supposed to.
And so you can imagine they put that pulse ox thing on your finger and basically what it's reading is that to the extent that oxygenated blood landed in your tissues, like the ones in your fingers, it burned its oxygen.
And then wasn't in a position to go back and play another round of the game.
And so you would see this now.
What I don't hear explained in here is why.
You will remember that the syndrome was called something like happy hypoxics.
You had people who had such low oxygenation that they should have been on the floor and yet they didn't even register to themselves that they were struggling to oxygenate.
So I'm looking for, I'm waiting for that explanation.
Yeah.
But anyway, so far interesting.
Yeah, so a few more bits from this paper.
This is just something that we've talked about before, but Ivermectin-achieved Nobel Prize-honored distinction for success against global parasitic scourges, but is of disputed efficacy in the treatment of COVID-19, as indicated, for example, by the disparity in the conclusions of this editorial, cited, and its key cited meta-analysis, cited.
So this is just So these authors, like all the authors trying to publish, all the scientists trying to publish on COVID right now, who are in any way dissidents from the mainstream narrative, have to do a little bit of this.
Like, oh, but the vaccines are great.
Oh, but you know, things don't work when we've been told they don't work, even if they really kind of do.
And so there's always a little, you know, there's ways that you can get in the critique, and this is them doing that.
The conclusions of the editorial that they cite are, you know, we need to stop using drugs that don't work.
And then the meta-analysis, and that includes ivermectin, and the meta-analysis that that editorial cites finds that it does work.
So, you know, even the Even the medical journals that seem to be doing the right thing are citing things backwards throughout the pandemic.
I guess what you're saying is you can detect the massive force that wants to tell you what you can and cannot say, even in a paper that's reporting something here that's clearly a vindication of those who have been But this is them going like, yeah, look, look at what these guys did.
At the disparity between the, yeah.
Yeah, but you have to, I'm not going to do it here, but you're like, I did before we came on camera.
You have to go and look and say, oh, okay, so this is them revealing something that to the casual reader won't be revealed, but it's in here.
Okay, so, sorry about the scrolling.
Where's the next thing?
HA, hemoglutinating.
So that's just the tendency of the red blood cells to stick together.
The hemagglutinating-inducing activity of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is especially potent for Omicron, raises questions as to potential risks for COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, which use spike protein as the generated antigen, even though serious adverse effects linked to spike protein, such as myocarditis, are rare.
Detectable levels of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and S1 in serum or plasma have been found to persist for as long as 50 days following such vaccinations.
The possibility that spike protein migrating into the bloodstream could in rare cases prompt such hemagglutinating-associated adverse events is suggested, for example, by a study of 1,006 subjects experiencing adverse events after receiving a Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna mRNA vaccination Which found a significant degree of red blood cell aggregation in the blood of 948 of those subjects.
948 of 1006.
These risks may be increased for younger age groups with 301 adolescents of 13 to 18 years of age who received two doses of the BioNTech mRNA COVID-19 vaccine in one study having a 29.2% rate of cardiac adverse events ranging from tachycardia or palpitation to myopericarditis.
Wow.
Wow.
Yeah, so what they're saying, I should say there's a piece of conservatism in here that doesn't, that needs to be highlighted, which is that yes the spike protein has been found up to 50 days but it's actually been found longer than that and we really don't know at what rate it dissipates.
I remember, I know you're going somewhere, persists for as long as 50 days following such vaccinations.
I did not click through on these links, but I remember us talking in an earlier Dark Horse about some of the research that was finding that it was persisting.
And the research was saying, you know, up to 50 days or something like that.
And when you go into the paper, it actually says, well, we actually just stopped looking after 50 days.
So it's not that they are saying, and then it's gone.
They're saying, and then we don't know, which is an important distinction.
I don't know that's the case here, but it may well be.
It is also the case that people should remember the spike protein is not supposed to be free-floating after these vaccines anyway, right?
It's supposed to be sticking in the membrane of the cells that have been transfected and those cells are not supposed to be anywhere and everywhere in the body.
They're supposed to be limited to the deltoid and the lymphatic system associated with it.
where the antigen presenting cells were supposed to pass it off to the the immunological cells, the B's and T cells that learn the formula.
And anyway, so the point is we're talking about design failure after design failure.
The choice of spike protein, itself dangerous, Why?
Well, we now know at least one reason why, which is that it causes this agglutination.
It's hemoagglutinating-inducing.
Right.
Choice of the spike protein.
In fact, the spike protein is showing up independent of the cells that were transfected.
All of these things are suggesting a kind of blood disorder that is mimicking malaria.
And there's a whole other story that we could get into.
But nonetheless, the idea that this is creating this overall malfunction of the red blood cell half of the system is profoundly disturbing.
And the mechanism of action, therefore, I don't know if you had a piece you wanted to read or if we should just describe it in plain English.
Of ivermectin?
Yeah.
We'll do this first, then we'll translate into plain English.
Good.
Ivermectin, a macrocyclic lactone indicated to bind strongly to multiple glycan sites on SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, blocked hemagglutination when added to red blood cells prior to spike protein and reversed hemagglutination when added afterwards, which suggests therapeutic options for COVID-19 treatment using this drug or other competitive glycan binding agents.
So that's in a dish, right?
But ivermectin blocks hemagglutination before exposure and it reverses hemagglutination after exposure to the spike protein in a dish, in a petri dish.
Suggesting that, given that, we now know that, one of, if not the primary mechanism of action by which SARS-CoV-2 is doing damage to people is hemagglutination.
And we know separately that IBM, that ivermectin, and it's not the only one that does it, but that ivermectin is both incredibly safe and oops, effective in blocking or reversing hemagglutination.
Hey, it works against COVID.
Yeah, works against COVID, also potentially works against vaccine adverse events that are caused by spike protein.
I will say it is, if this paper holds, it is a validation of one of the hypotheses that we explored early on, that the mechanism of action of ivermectin might be the binding of spike protein, that that might be why it has general applicability.
And there's one other thing I wanted to... Yeah, I don't think it's...
But that's not what's going on here, it's not binding the spike protein.
The question is, so you'll also recall that with Dr. Malone on the episode that I did with him and Steve Kirsch, we talked about the fact that the spike protein is covered in these sugars, right?
It's covered in these sugars, presumably as effectively a cloaking mechanism.
Right?
So if it is pulling these sugars out of the blood and therefore being encrusted in something that doesn't trigger the immune system, that allows it to evade the surveillance that happens there.
And so anyway, it's interesting how this result seems to line up with some of the speculating that we did about why things functioned the way they did early on in the pandemic before this stuff was known.
So kind of cool.
It's very cool.
And, you know, it's not misinformation, it's not disinformation, but it's probably still malinformation.
Because it's true and it makes you distrust your government?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm not sure what we can do about that, really.
Better government, I think.
Wow.
Yeah.
You said a mouthful.
Right.
Yeah.
So if we had trustworthy government, then we could at least be emotionally disturbed at things that made you distrust it.
But with a distrustful government, it's hard to know if you're just distrusting it because it sucks.
Right.
Yeah.
You can't know if you're paranoid if they're actually after you.
Exactly.
It's very hard to diagnose paranoia when they're out to get you.
Yeah.
Yes.
All right.
All right, so... There?
Yeah, I mean, let's just say this is exciting for more than one reason.
A, it's beginning to fill in a piece of the puzzle.
B, it's operationalizable.
Yeah.
Right?
To the extent that people... Which is cool.
Mechanism is cool.
We don't need it.
Often, but it's cool when you got it.
But it's cool when you got it.
And actually, I remember, I don't think Pierre said this on the podcast, but he certainly said it to me and maybe us privately, that as he was discovering that ivermectin was not only a great preventative for COVID, a great treatment for COVID, but it also worked for long COVID and adverse events.
He was like, this kind of sucks, because I feel like a one-trick pony.
I keep pointing people to this stuff, but it works.
And anyway, this begins to explain why it is that it's just sort of generally useful in this, because spike protein is such a large part of the pathology associated with both the disease and the so-called vaccines.
Well, and I think I read it, but I glossed over it, because it was a highly technical paragraph.
You know, they also say the hemagglutinating property of SARS-CoV-2 is much reduced in Omicron.
And so quite separately, and I don't know, I don't know if he said it publicly, but to us, Dr. Corey, when we got Omicron a year ago, he said, yeah, you could take the ivermectin, but it seems to be not as effective.
With Omicron, and that is also consistent with this finding that Omicron has a lower hemagglutinating tendency than the other strains.
Isn't it crazy when all of the lines of evidence line up?
Yeah, indeed.
Okay, since we're talking about blood, let's talk about the Red Cross.
Oh, hell yeah.
And Fairfax, who loves to talk about the Red Cross.
Yes, it's our semi-domesticated animal.
Indeed.
Okay, where do I even start here?
The Red Cross.
Sorry, I gotta figure out what I'm doing here.
Okay.
I will link to the page, but I'm just going to show you a series of screenshots with regard to things that are coming up on the Red Cross site at the moment.
They have LGBTQ plus donors.
This page is supported by the American Red Cross LGBTQ plus team member resource group.
Learn about federal regulations related to blood donation by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and gender nonconforming individuals.
American Red Cross values.
If anyone watching doesn't know what the American Red Cross is, which I find dubious, they are a lot of things, but in the United States anyway, the primary way that Americans end up running into them is with blood drives.
They are, I think, by far the largest collector of blood, often encouraging people to donate blood, and actually just, yeah, you can leave my screen up, and therefore distributor of blood.
And, of course, back in the 80s, when I think most of these corrections to who could donate when were happening in the 80s with the AIDS pandemic.
Pandemic?
Epidemic?
Epidemic, maybe.
I don't know.
When AIDS came on the scene and had everyone terrified and then, you know, in short order, people were beginning to get sort of a handle on, well, who's really at risk?
There were, of course, restrictions put in place in terms of who could donate blood.
And one of those restrictions was men who have sex with men, which we'll see this here in a minute.
MSM is the acronym, non-acronym, the abbreviation they're using.
Men who have sex with men and have had sex with men within the last three months are not allowed to donate, are on a temporary hold.
And if you are a man who has sex with men but hasn't had sex with any men in the previous three months, then you're allowed to donate.
Because many sexually transmitted diseases stay in the blood and are particularly suited to transmission through male homosexual sex.
Okay, so American Red Cross values, such as the background.
Our top priority, they say, is the safety of our volunteer blood donors and the patients in need of life-saving blood products.
Our employees and volunteers are trained to be sensitive to the needs of all potential blood donors.
The American Red Cross believes blood donation eligibility should not be determined by methods that are based upon sexual orientation.
We are committed to working with partners towards achieving this goal.
We understand that there is a difference between biological sex and gender.
No, they don't.
The Food and Drug Administration Guidance, Revised Recommendations for Reducing the Risk of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Transmission by Blood and Blood Products, states, quote, In the context of the donor history questionnaire, FDA recommends that male or female gender be taken to be self-identified and self-reported.
In a linked document in which they're talking about what the rules are supposed to be, they're suggesting, and everyone who's collecting blood, I think it's in the U.S., this is from the FDA, has to abide by these guidelines, that blood donors must defer for three months from the most recent sexual contact of men who has had sex with another that blood donors must defer for three months from the most recent sexual contact of men and And a woman who must defer for three months from the most recent sexual contact.
A female who has had sex during the past three months with a man who has had sex with another man in the past three months.
So those are the guidelines, supposedly as they stand.
And yet, back on the Red Cross's site, under men who have sex with men, they say, again, the FDA guidance, what I just read, defer for three months from the most recent sexual contact.
A man who has had sex with another man during the past three months.
All U.S.
blood collection organizations must follow this federal requirement.
But the Red Cross continues.
The Red Cross recognizes the hurt this policy has caused many in the LGBTQ plus community and believes blood donation eligibility should not be determined by methods that are based upon sexual orientation.
We are committed to working with partners towards achieving this goal.
And when you go into their frequently asked questions, I'm a trans woman and I have not been eligible to donate because my assigned sex at birth was male and I had sex with a man.
Can I donate blood?
Individuals who identify as female and have sex with a man may be eligible to donate blood if all other blood donation eligibility criteria are applicable.
If an individual is previously deferred from donating blood due to being a man who has sex with men, that person will need to call the donor and client support center, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
All you have to do, if you are a man who has sex with men, and has been actively having sex with men, if you want to donate blood, and thus potentially corrupt the blood supply, is walk in, and as long as you have not tried this before, and admitted that you're actually a man, and said, nope, I'm a woman, and they will let you donate blood.
So it's the ultimate proof that this entire societal disorder, whatever it is, amounts to the prioritization of the perceptual world over reality.
Yes, so that's the postmodern part, right?
And then it's a prioritization of the perceptual world of Mentally ill people, right?
Like, it's one thing to have gender dysphoria and feel like I really, in order to feel my most true self, I need to present as the sex that I am not.
It is quite another thing to say, nope, I'm a dude.
Not.
I never felt like it either, but like, it's a different, it's that.
Furthermore, if you go in to the Red Cross knowing what everyone knows about the ways that things like monkeypox are transmitted, and you say, yep, I'm a woman, yep, I've had sex with men, and yes, I was assigned male at birth, but I'm actually a woman today, and you donate blood knowing that?
You're a psychopath.
Well, I won't say that.
I don't know.
People are confused in a lot of different ways.
People take advantage of these confusions in other ways.
But I will say, the problem is that this actually, in the same era that we have been told what we absolutely must do, for example, take an experimental gene therapy, In order to protect vulnerable people, even if we ourselves do not believe ourselves to be vulnerable to COVID based on well understood patterns of transmission.
Oh, and by the way, it doesn't protect vulnerable people.
Right, it doesn't.
But the point is, you know, at best, they thought it did.
And if they did think it did, and that's what was supposed to have morally required us, because protecting other people was the motivating factor.
Why is protecting other people not the motivating factor here?
And the answer is, look, if you Are a biological male and you have had sex with other men, you can't donate blood, right?
Not for a period of three months, right?
That's simple.
Nobody's asking you to out yourself.
The point is, here's the guideline.
Don't donate blood if you don't qualify.
Here's how you'll know.
And the point is in order to... But it's caused hurt.
In order to humor this alternative perspective.
And I'm not arguing that there is not a gentleman's agreement level of decency if somebody has transitioned and they wish to be, you know, called female, fine.
But the point is that this does not change things when you get to the doctor's office.
It does not change things when you go to donate blood.
There's a physical reality And that's not about courtesy, right?
That's about other things.
In this case, it's about the transmission of a communicable disease. - Yep, it sure is.
And here, this felt a little bit related.
Don't put it up yet, Zach.
People will probably remember Dylan Mulvaney, the very talented young man who less than a year ago decided that transitioning publicly on TikTok was actually going to be the way to acquire the fame that he had clearly so long desired.
And now has, you know, days of girlhood.
And it's quite something.
It's quite something.
And has recently undergone facial feminization surgery and has not yet revealed the new feminized face to the world.
But here is the top of a TikTok post.
For the new year, you may show it, in which Dylan Mulvaney says a friendly reminder as we start the new year.
Not all trans people desire affirming surgeries or hormones.
They are still trans.
But when we do, it's a necessity and a win.
Please show up for all trans people the way you have showed up for me.
Happy new year and love ya.
You can't have it all the ways.
It is an opt-in, get-out-of-jail-free, as many times as you want, it's even better than Monopoly's get-out-of-jail-free card, because you don't have to turn it in once you use it.
All you have to do is say, nope, not the sex I actually am, and all the doors open.
Including the ability to pollute the blood supply, apparently.
Why would we open that door for people?
Why would we do that?
Yeah, and just the maddening inconsistency Of it.
I mean really I I'm having a hard time getting over a society that you know Wants to manipulate us with claims that we have obligations to keep other people safe Which of course we do have obligations to keep other people safe, but they often then as soon as you say well, yeah, I agree There's a requirement to keep other people safe then they smuggle in all the stuff that puts you in tremendous danger for no obvious reason and Well, they also redefined safe, right?
Of course.
And violence.
And everything.
And everything.
But, you know, safe...
Safe means feeling safe.
Yeah.
Right?
And that's been being done for a long time, actually.
Are you safe and do you feel safe are two reasonable questions.
Do you feel safe and is that the indicator of whether or not you are safe?
There's a logical problem in that.
And some people probably are very, very good Having been in lots of different kinds of situations, encountered lots of different kinds of ways that they might actually not be safe.
That having those two things, feeling safe and actually being safe, be as tightly coupled as possible, and we should all try for that.
But some people seem actually interested in decoupling those things as much as possible.
And of crying about not being safe, you know, shouting from the rooftops about how at risk they are, and how if you don't do what they want, they're going to hurl themselves off the roofs.
And when in fact there was no threat, why are we letting them rule?
Why are we letting them make the decisions?
Yeah, and frankly, it's pretty obvious that this society is not really concerned about safety in any deep way, right?
The food supply can tell you that, the quality of the air, you know, microplastics, all of these things are places where tremendously unsafe stuff has been produced in such a way that it impacts the development of children and The chemicals in the water supply that we're drinking, both from pharmaceuticals and from insecticides and pesticides.
I guess what I would say is that every time that same system, which is obviously indifferent to the harm it does to people, right?
It's going to shove Mike Mew out of his profession rather than address the question of, you know, must we continue to harm children by feeding them stuff that's too soft when they're young, right?
It doesn't care about the well-being of kids.
So then every time it uses safety as its excuse for taking some new kind of power, I officially don't believe it.
Right.
If it was really interested in safety, it would be behaving differently.
And even if it wasn't very good at protecting us, it would at least be consistent in desiring that we do things that are safer.
But hell no.
I mean, it is...
You know, it likes to inflict stuff on us and it basically laughs when we, you know, take the bait.
Yep.
And then it suddenly shouts safety and everybody's supposed to adjust everything about, you know, either you're supposed to throw out the precautionary principle in the interest of safety, right?
Like, what the hell is that?
Yes.
Well, we're talking safety, not precaution.
Precautions are a totally different thing.
Right.
Oh, precaution, that's dangerous.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're putting everyone in danger with all that precaution.
Let us do your thinking for you.
Yeah, nothing safer than that.
Indeed.
Okay, well, remember the American Natural History Museum?
Oh, I do.
A-M-N-H-A-M.
American Museum of Natural History.
I messed that up.
It's the American Museum of Natural History.
And they're important and big, and it's a lovely museum in New York, but they've also got AmNet, right?
The journal, one of the top journals in organismal biology, and of course they have what they may not even own anymore.
It certainly went off the rails a long time ago, but the Lay Magazine Natural History, I think that was also a MNH publication for a while.
Well they have, apparently it's 150 years, you can show my screen here now, Teen Sci Café.
That's S-C-I for those who are not watching.
So it's Teen Science Café.
They've got sort of these events that they are running, and it's brought to my attention that an upcoming event is Species Jumping Viruses.
This is a week from now.
Uh-uh.
Uh-huh.
So you did not know what was coming, but you're about to learn.
Okay.
Teen Sci Cafe at the American Museum of Natural History is offering a little A little walkthrough on species-jumping viruses next Saturday.
What do Zika, West Nile, Ebola, HIV, and SARS-CoV-2 all have in common?
They are all zoonotic viruses.
Viruses that affect other species and have evolved to infect humans, who can in turn pass viruses to other species.
Why are they now?
Join Mark Vellitutto, VMD, Senior Field Veterination for, wait for it, the EcoHealth Alliance to learn about how zoonotic viruses jump from one species to another and how scientists are using this information to prepare for and prevent future pandemics.
I can see the lesson now.
Typically, a virus will go from its host species and it will move to an intermediate species like a ferret badger or a laboratory of virology and then it will jump into humans from there.
Well, but usually there's like an intermediate vector, I would say, between ferret badger and humans that involves a popsicle.
The frozen ferret badger steaks.
I do remember that trial balloon well.
Yes, that was a good one.
That was a good one.
I enjoyed that moment.
Yeah, so EcoHealth Alliance, for those who have forgotten, is... God, I mean... We don't know what it is.
They've had their hand in everything, but they were the sort of the... they were the pass-through organization.
Right?
They were the pass-through organization where NIH was giving them the grants, and they were shunting the money to the Wuhan lab that was doing the gain-of-function research that is almost certainly where SARS-CoV-2 came from.
Meaning, like, not zoonotic, no, not unless you're taking a really big definition of zoonotic there, and clearly that's not what is meant to be implied here.
But also then the president or the founder or whatever was put on lead on the trip to China to discover whether or not SARS-CoV-2 could possibly have come from the lab or much more likely from the frozen ferret badger steaks.
It's basically all of those very, very bad habits of the very, very bad Chinese people, but it was us Who were talking about LabLeak, who were the racist ones.
Right, the ones who thought that this was American work from North Carolina that had been offshored to China because of the... Via the past two organizations, that's EcoHealth Alliance.
Right.
Also white guys, you know, for example, Peter Daszak, the head of that organization.
Yeah, it's...
It's unbelievable that they would try to pawn this off on kids.
Yeah.
Right?
14 year olds and up.
They do recommend for Teen Psy Cafe that you be 14 or older.
So have you heard Jeffrey Sachs talk about this?
Jeffrey Sachs has switched sides in the origins debate and he's been on a tear because actually he got taken advantage of as the head of the panel looking into the question.
of origins who put peter dasik on it and uh anyway he's fascinating to listen to because basically what he discovered was that his entire panel had conflicts of interest and relying right and you know this is well through sex um so anyway it's my god Yeah.
So the American Museum of Natural History is doing this to us.
You can put my screen back up.
What do Zika, West Nile, Ebola, HIV, and SARS-CoV-2 all have in common?
Well, I hope they don't all have the fact that they're not zoonotic in common.
I didn't even think of that interpretation.
But you click through, and it's just easier for me to do this with screenshots, past events.
Teen Psy Cafe, your friendly neighborhood coyote?
Okay.
Teen Psy Cafe.
Health equity, racial inequality, and COVID-19.
Wait, what?
Okay, so let's click through and see what Teen Psy Cafe is.
This is what the kids call a risky click.
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
Health equity, racial inequality, and COVID-19.
What do we have to learn from AMNH?
This was an event that already happened in November.
The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected communities of color across the U.S.
How has the legacy of systemic racial inequality in the United States contributed to higher rates of infection and death and lower rates of vaccination in communities of color?
Join First Deputy Commissioner and Chief Equity Officer of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Torian Easterling, MD, to find out how the history of medical treatment and mistreatment in the BIPOC community set the stage for inequities during the pandemic and what we can do to reach equity in the future.
Couple things.
Oh yeah, let's hear them.
Couple things.
People of color, BIPOC, people of color, whatever, right, have darker skin.
I was going to mention this.
It's synonymous.
That's a tautology, right?
Darker skin is an adaptation to having had ancestors who are more recently hearkening from closer to the equator.
And it is preventative against skin cancer In places where there is so much sun that the need to make vitamin D at the most optimal rate, the most efficient rate, is not there because you're already getting so much.
And so what darker skin does, while also being a preventative against skin cancer, is it reduces the skin's ability to synthesize vitamin D.
Which means especially as you, being a dark-skinned person, move farther and farther from the equator and put on more and more clothes because you're farther and farther from the equator, you are much more likely to be vitamin D deficient even than white-skinned folk who are living farther from the equator and also spending too much time inside and too much time covered up.
White skin is more likely to burn, more likely to result in sunburn and therefore skin cancers, but much more efficient at synthesizing vitamin D.
We know, and this has nothing to do with racism, that dark-skinned cannot synthesize vitamin D as effectively, and therefore dark-skinned people who live farther from the equator are more likely to be vitamin D deficient, and we also know that vitamin D deficiency is a factor in bad COVID outcomes.
Yeah, both increases the likelihood of contracting COVID and the badness of the interaction with the disease.
Exactly.
It's also true That the history of racism in the United States, which is true and real, has created some really terrible events in African American history, like Tuskegee, right?
And so African Americans are appropriately skeptical when the government comes to them and says, trust us, it's safe, do it.
Do what we say.
In this case, the fact that black Americans, African Americans, are less vaccinated than their white and Asian counterparts probably was the right move.
But American Museum of Natural History is looking to redress that inaction.
Yes.
Yes.
Of course they are.
While Heidi, well we don't know for sure that they didn't talk about vitamin D but given the way they set that thing up basically the idea is the cause of this is racism.
Right.
Rather than the cause of this is a physiological distinction that has a perfectly well understood explanation that has nothing to do with anybody engaging in racism.
It has to do with the angle of the sun coming through the atmosphere And the relative risk of cancer versus vitamin D deficiency and anyway.
Trade-offs are racist.
That's a weird perspective.
I mean, I guess the third point, you know, again, we didn't, I didn't even know about this thing until after it happened.
And we obviously weren't there.
We don't know what was said.
So I read the blurb that was all that was available publicly.
But it's also true that it would, the blurb would seem to be implying that part of the problem was that some demographics didn't have access to the vaccines.
Everyone had access.
It was beyond access.
It was forced down our throats at every opportunity, all the time, you know, advertised everywhere, come here, go there, anywhere you want, it's available, it's free, it's easy, you must, you know, it was beyond accessible.
So the idea that it was racial inequity that kept black people from getting vaccinated?
No.
Yeah.
No.
No, it's obviously a preposterous explanation, right?
You had to be somewhat clever not to get vaccinated while you weren't paying attention.
Yeah.
Okay.
We got the Red Cross losing the plot.
We got AMNH, which I stupidly called A-M-A-N-H-M first, but I got it.
I'm back.
You did that and then somehow you dragged me in and I signed on to that misspelling of the acronym.
Again, I got taken to task.
It's not an acronym, just an abbreviation.
Acronyms are pronounceable.
Okay, so the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.
Wow, that feels strangely familiar.
Yeah.
Oh, should we, should we don our masks for this section or not?
I don't know.
Did you lose yours?
I have.
Yeah, so the, here we go.
That is, uh, that's right side up.
No, I think so, yeah.
I can't do it.
Yeah, this is not a very useful way to prevent yourself from getting COVID, but it is a useful way of signaling something.
You picked these up at the conference, at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology conference, is that right?
I did, I did.
You also picked this up, which is awesome, conference program.
Yes, they gave that to me.
Yeah, and I have begun reading it and I have some things to share from it.
It's actually super awesome in a lot of ways.
Yes.
And then not so awesome in some ways.
So let me just say... Oh, wait, the pride masks.
The pride masks have attracted the cat who has just changed things on my computer by walking across it.
He is nothing if not proud.
So let me just say I was in Austin, of course, for the Joe Rogan experience.
And My hotel turned out to be the epicenter of this conference, which I did not know was going to be there, and it just sort of emerged around me, and I was, you know, riding the elevators with these people.
So this was the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, which, you know, that's not a conference I ever attended.
It's always at this moment.
It's always during the winter break for colleges.
One of our friends in grad school used to always go to it.
It's not one I attended, but it's certainly material.
Much of the topic, the subject area, is stuff that's squarely in the area we trained in.
Yep, in fact I'm going to share a few of those.
So anyway, it was interesting for me.
I will say there was a part of it that was absolutely surreal because this is a world we used to be embedded in and now it feels kind of remote and I was just sort of watching it anthropologically as you would certainly have done if you had been there.
And, you know, I saw, like, two kinds of people, and it was really, like, in some ways really clear that everybody was in one category or the other.
There were bedraggled, joyless faculty members, right, who were clearly, like, laboring under the weight of trying to do this in 2023, and bright-eyed, bushy-tailed graduate students who Haven't gotten the memo that they're going into a field that is dying?
I mean, part of this is just... It's not a field.
Century I don't even know like something that is they are training for something that no longer exists and You know a there's a part of this that's just it's got to just be what it is to be older, right?
I was looking at these graduate students and thinking We were never that young right that that's a level of young that just I'm sure we were older than that when we were in graduate school Which can't possibly have been right.
But anyway, I And, you know, there was a lot of, like, excitement among these bright-eyed, bushy-tailed graduate students who were clearly, you know, ready to, you know, confront science.
It's a big conference, and for some of them it would have been their first.
It's a big conference, lots of opportunities to meet, you know, your future mentor, you know, the guy whose paper you just read and you really want to ask him a question.
Yeah.
It's potentially very exciting.
It was!
It was, which also allowed me, every time I got on the elevator, I was with folks from this conference, and I was very interested to hear their elevator pitch for what they do.
So you would ask them, they didn't recognize you, they didn't know you were a biologist, and you would say, hey, what's it about?
I'd say, oh, are you at the conference?
What do you study?
And I would get the little elevator pitch for what they study, and sometimes it was fascinating, and sometimes they struggled to String three consecutive thoughts together?
Convey what it was together.
And, you know, I would ask a good question.
They would look at me like, what planet did you come from?
And anyway, that sort of thing.
But it was sort of fun from that perspective.
But I will say at some point I became really curious about what was going on in there and I decided to kind of crash it.
And I went into the conference area and discovered that there was a mask mandate right which surprised me yes yeah i mean these were not the official masks i will say there were they were being handed out uh yes these were free from what i've looked into of the conference that i know what group of people was handing out the pride masks yeah and i mean you know um on the one hand pride masks Sure.
On the other hand, that mask isn't useful for, this is a biology conference where they're supposed to be integrating, and that mask is not evidence of their being on board with the latest understanding of This pathogen and how it transmits.
So this is basically, you know, it's a choice to signal instead of prevent disease, which, you know, if that had happened at the Modern Art Conference, right, it would have a little different of an implication.
But in this case, it was a little bit strange about the mask mandate itself.
Yep.
Right.
And the In any case, my overarching sense was that you've got this conference in which, well, as you're I'm sure going to point out, there were some oddities in the material presented at the conference.
And there was a context for every event of the conference, which was wearing masks, which are not known to be a especially useful mechanism to prevent the transmission.
Absolutely.
and what does it mean to be at a conference of biologists in which some fraction of the material is actually smoke and mirrors and a biologist should easily see that?
Right.
Absolutely.
So here's just, I stopped going to conferences before I should have because I found them infuriating and meat marketing.
But I always loved this part of it and thinking about, just as I always loved a course catalog, like thinking about, okay, which of these sessions am I going to go to?
And so I went, I haven't looked through all of it yet, it's long, and online you can find the abstracts, if this had the abstracts it would be you know 10 times as thick more than that um but just from the titles i see a lot to be excited about at this conference which is still going on right now they're having like their end of it's a long conference second through the seventh third through the seventh so it started when you halfway through you you being in austin
um you know they've got sessions on abolition of behavior sexual selection communication locomotion uh an entire session called i think yeah an entire session called heads or tails control surfaces and aquatic locomotion uh just Just from just three pages, I've got these three talks.
Rules for emergent synchrony during bioluminescent behavior of sea fireflies.
So, you know, how is it rules for emergent synchrony during bioluminescent behavior of sea fireflies?
I never heard of a sea firefly before.
But how do these presumably marine insects End up syncing up what they're doing.
Now, wait a second.
Fireflies.
Sea fireflies.
Yeah, I know.
But fireflies proper.
All I've got is the title, incidentally.
So we can talk about this, but I got nothing more than that.
We're going to speculate, Anne.
If the sea fireflies are offended, that's going to be... they can write a sternly worded letter.
Okay.
But in actual fireflies... All I've got is the authors.
That doesn't help.
No.
In actual fireflies, you've got two kinds of synchrony.
You could potentially have synchrony of emergence, which is kind of implied by that title.
Yes.
And you could have synchrony of luminescing, right?
So there are some fireflies on Earth in which a tree will luminesce in sync.
We don't know which that is.
We don't know which it is, no.
I mean, in a way that actually makes for a really cool talk because you're like, oh, I want to know.
Or, if you were actually deciding between this and one of the ten other concurrent sessions, you would probably go online and look at the abstract and see if they were actually doing anything interesting before going and spending whatever it was.
I didn't even look.
Ten or twelve minutes of the talk.
Another title that I thought I would have been interested to go to if I had been at this conference, Alligators Use Elastic Energy Storage in Ankle Extensions During Steady State Walking.
Alligators, ankle extensions.
Ankle extension, walking.
So this put me in mind of archosaur ankles, which you can just very quickly, Zach, put this on screen and then take it down because I'm not going to walk through it.
But this is a slide for my archosaur evolution lecture back when I gave archosaur evolution lectures.
Archosaurs being birds, dinosaurs, and crocodilians.
And archosaur ankles Think about a bird and think about how they walk along on their legs and they just kind of like paddle along.
I can't really do it because I got cats and a computer and everything.
Whereas if you've ever watched video of or been lucky enough to be around a crocodilian, crocodile, alligator, gharial, caiman, usually they kind of sit in this position, right?
And they even will move a little bit in the slow position.
But if you excite them, or anger them, or scare them, they will move their legs under them, and they do a high walk that can be very, very fast.
And that is because they've got this thing called a querotarsal ankle, in which they can basically have their bones in this orientation, or in this orientation, and it's stable both ways.
Whereas the other archosaurs, the birds and the dinosaurs, were stuck in a flat-footed position.
So if they were to be attacked by hymenopterans of some kind, they could scurry away rapidly.
And if I studied that, and I was going to deliver a talk, it could be archosaurs' aunts and uncles.
Okay.
All right.
I'm not sure it's worth it.
It wasn't worth it?
See, aunts and uncles, as opposed to aunts and uncles.
Never mind.
I just thought I'd try it.
You know that when you do that sort of thing, it makes the person who you're doing it to think, he can't have been listening to what I was saying.
No, I was.
No, no, no, no.
On the contrary, I was listening.
You had to be listening to some of it.
Yes.
And I noted your beautiful diagram and was impressed that you happened to have a slide on this exact topic.
Well, so elastic energy storage and ankle extensions, I assume that that talk on alligators at this Conference, still going on right now, was actually about soft tissue, elastic energy storage.
That sounds like soft tissue rather than bone, but it's related.
Elastic energy storage is going to be like the bounce that comes from not contracting a muscle.
Right, but that's the soft tissue stuff.
So it's going to be ligaments, tendons, muscles.
And then just one more title.
War and sex in the tropics.
Performance trade-offs in the world's largest Semelparis mammals.
So I'm sharing this and I'll read that again for you to for you to parse it.
I'm sharing these in part because these academic conferences may seem from the outside like they couldn't have any value at all, they're really boring and everything.
But you know, people are having fun with the titles, they're having fun with the abstracts, having fun with the science.
Like if the science isn't enjoyable to do, do some other kind of science or don't do science at all.
All right, so war and sex in the tropics performance trade-offs in the world's largest Semelparis mammals.
I don't know that I actually did in this case go to the abstract because I was like what do they think the world's largest Semelparis mammals are?
Semelparis just refers to an organism that has sex As one mating event, maybe it may be a short period of events, but then dies.
So for instance, Pacific salmon famously do, you know, spend all this non-repetitive time out at sea and then they return, that's the anatomy part, back to their natal stream and they have a series of mating events and then they die.
They do not go back out to sea and come back and have another.
So this is gonna have to be a rodent?
It's no, it's a marsupial.
It's the quoll.
Q-U-O-L-L, the quoll.
But even they're abstract.
So what we're talking about now is what is the world's largest Semelparis mammal?
That is a mammal that by by its very being has sex once or has a brief mating season and then dies and doesn't have another mating season afterwards.
But I take slight issue because, as it turns out, quolls are... the males are almost always semelparous, but the females actually have a couple of mating seasons.
Oh, now that you mention it, I do recall that.
So it's one sex semelparity and the other sex not so much, but anyway, it made for a good title.
Yep.
Yeah.
So it's probably both the world's largest and smallest arguably semelparous mammal.
Well, yes, unless there's another right there within that clade of marsupials, I think, because there aren't any placental mammals, which is like all the mammals you can think of that aren't... What's the one in the New World?
What?
The marsupial.
Oh, didelphus.
Yeah, possums.
Possums, yeah.
Basically, if it's not a possum or it lives in Australia, it's probably a placental, unless it's an echidna or a platypus.
- Okay. - We're now driving people off by the minute. - Driving people off, yeah. - By the minute, yeah.
- Okay.
Yeah, I'll skip that.
I'm gonna skip that.
Integrative biology incubator.
How do plants, animals, fungi, and algae solve the same problems differently?
It's a brainstorming workshop that they had.
And what they say in the description of the brainstorming workshop, what blind spots become apparent in our core biological concepts when we compare and contrast solutions from different biological kingdoms.
Awesome.
Yes!
That's the sort of thing that should be happening at scientific conferences.
Pull people together from all over the world, mostly the U.S., but all over the world, and put those who want to be there in a room together and say, okay, you have expertise in frogs and you have expertise in tomatoes and you have expertise in morels and, you know, how do they all solve the problem of getting, of growing, of getting nutrients, of, you know, whatever it is, of cell recovery, you know, whatever it is.
When are these solutions shared and between which clades and when are they different and what can we learn?
Like, that's awesome.
That's part of what drove me to be interested in biology.
If well done, awesome.
If well done, awesome.
However, However, there were nine symposia at the conference.
Symposia basically being conferences within a conference.
So a symposia has sort of a higher level of prestige than just the sessions, it's been organized carefully, and you probably had to sort of submit something.
It was a higher standard to be admitted in both to be a symposium and then to be able to talk at the symposium.
And several of those, several of the symposia, look really fascinating.
One of them was Biology at Birth, The Role of Infancy in Providing the Foundation for Lifetime Success, and a number of really interesting talks.
But there's also the Sexual Diversity and Variation Symposium.
Which I suspect it was those people who were handing out these guys, these pride masks.
It did include some talks that appear to be actual science, but it's mostly a smorgasbord of self-indulgent confusion and was co-organized by a graduate student.
Who will no doubt go far, given that he's playing by all the current ideological rules and fashions, but his Twitter profile, and I'm not going to share details or specifics of exactly who he is or what his institution is, so I've taken out the identifying features here.
Twitter profile reads, without the identifying features, queer trans evolutionary biologist, aspiring plant, hashtag psycom, hashtag psycom, drag king, Relentlessly Earnest They-Them.
This is one of the co-organizers of one of the symposia at one of the biggest biology conferences going on at all, and happens to be going on right now.
Some of the talk titles organized by this They-Them queer trans evolutionary biologist aspiring plant person are Linnaean Libertines, The Queer Possibilities of Plants, And, and this one appears to be from the lab of someone who should know better, but the talk is, fluidity and inconstancy.
Australian bush tomatoes, solanum, as an exemplar of non-normative sex expression in plants and across life.
Non-normative sex expression.
In plants.
Normative.
Normative.
In tomatoes.
Well, if you were going to have something non-normative in plants... I mean, Australian bush tomatoes, which are, you know, pretty non-normative.
As far as plants go in the direction of non-normativity, I would imagine that tomatoes, and especially the Australian bush variety, would be at the top of the list.
It was the low-hanging fruit.
That was pretty well done, actually.
Yeah, the low-hanging fruit.
But, alright, so this does... Seriously, people, I mean, come on!
This does get to the central question, though.
My claim is, if you have I don't know how many people were at this conference.
It was hundreds.
It's a big conference.
It's a big conference.
If you have all of these people actively involved in academic biology studiously not making eye contact with the fact that there are symposia that make no sense going on at the conference where they are, abiding by mandates that make little sense at the conference where they are, the field doesn't exist.
Because the basic idea is The whole point of science is that you're supposed to follow the evidence using the hypothetico-deductive method of science to figure out what is actually true, and that is the North Star.
To the extent that a field is going to kowtow to fiction, right, then it's not a scientific field.
And it doesn't matter that it may occasionally do something scientific because the point is it has signed up For a value system in which something else apparently has priority.
And, you know, I mean, I don't know anything about this person who organized the symposium, but you can certainly imagine, knowing what we saw in academia, as you say, a person's likely to go far.
Why?
Because nobody's going to be in a position to say, actually, that work wasn't good enough.
That work didn't mean anything.
What's more, it wasn't scientific.
Right?
Because if you did say that to somebody who claimed to be Trans, then the point is, oh, well, you're discriminating against me because I'm trans.
Check and mate.
Check and mate.
And also, I mean, he's doing it very effectively now because just like Publisher Parish used to be the rule of law in academia, and it's sort of expanded to, well, also you're expected to do outreach and you're supposed to have all of these different kinds of experiences wherein you engage with the broader community.
And so it's not just Publishing peer-reviewed academic papers on which we've talked a lot about the problems there, but that had been the gold standard.
This person has now organized a symposium at one of the largest biological conferences and previously gave an invited talk at another conference.
And those two things on a CV, applying out of grad school for a postdoc, That's huge.
Most people don't have that.
Most grad students don't have that.
And yet, the topics of both the talk, which I'm not going to spend time on here, and this symposium at this conference, are not scientific.
There's no science there, as far as I can tell.
And no, I wasn't there, and they don't have the talks up yet.
They are going to post the talks, and I was going to watch them, but they're not up yet.
But it gives the appearance.
It's like, it's Potemkin science.
It's Potemkin academia.
It's, you know, this facade.
And all you have to, you know, the line on the CV is what potential employers, you know, academic employers will be looking for.
Like, oh, well, look at you.
Aren't you a go-getter?
Haven't you done a lot of good work?
Like, well, I did do work.
Doesn't look like it was good.
No, but it's even worse than that.
I'm sure of it.
Well, here's how it's worse.
Imagine that your core desire in life was trans activism.
Yeah.
You know what's a real pain in the ass if you're a trans activist?
Evolutionary biology, right?
So if your core thing was to shut those evolutionary biologists up, right?
People who understand that reef fish aren't the invalidation of binary sex, right?
You might go get yourself one of them fancy PhDs in evolutionary biology and you might wield it like a weapon.
So I'm expecting that we're going to see this emerge as, you know, and you can imagine, unless the world gets over the idea...
That as soon as you're trans, you're right.
You know, as soon as we get over that idea, we can skip this.
But until then, what this means is that as this person is able to set up symposia and give invited talks in order that people can, you know, I don't know, satisfy their Cowtowing obligations or whatever, right?
This person is going to gain power and that power is going to be used for what I call ideal laundering, right?
He's going to launder Wrong ideas into evolutionary biology, which is going to make it harder and harder to do high quality evolutionary biology because, you know, are you going to cite it?
Are you going to ignore it?
What do you do, right?
And I will point out, I think it's Michel Foucault who essentially argued to Trojan horse fields to enter them And disrupt their ability to do what they do.
Maybe it was Marcuse, but I think it was Foucault.
But in any case, it's somebody's idea that the purpose of this stuff is actually its activism and disruption.
And so, you know, wake up evolutionary biologists.
There's one headed your way.
Yeah.
Right?
And you know, it's already inside the house.
Right.
The call is now coming from inside the house.
And I will just say, you know, This is not to say that trans people shouldn't be able to do evolutionary biology, but if your purpose is to disrupt evolutionary biology with nonsense stuff, right?
I mean, the fact is, if you land in evolutionary biology as a trans person, what are the chances that you also land on that as your topic?
Right?
In other words, why are you not studying chelation and the scales of a You know, fence lizards or something, right?
Why are you studying that exact thing?
And does that not suggest that maybe you've landed there because evolutionary biology is not your top priority, but something else is?
Exactly.
So I've told this story before, but the line in the bio of the person who co-organized the symposium Queer slash trans evolutionary biologist.
Whenever I see something modifying evolutionary biologists, that isn't like a narrowing of what kind of evolutionary biologist you are.
I think to I know exactly what you're saying.
Yeah, you know the story I'm going to tell.
I think to when I was trying to sell my first book, Antipode, and it was about my research and life in Madagascar.
And I had a good agent, and he was pitching it, and this was long before we ever lived in Portland or anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, but actually there was a small press in Portland That showed the first interest.
I ended up getting it published by a major publishing house, but the small press showed interest.
And they were offering, you know, a nice amount of money for a grad student.
We hardly made any money at all at that point.
And they were super interested because they said, it's a story of feminist science.
I said, nope, can't go there, won't go there, because that's not a thing.
And I'm like, well, what do you mean?
There's no mention of feminism in the book.
But I said, well, you know, as a woman who goes alone to these places, you must be a feminist.
And at that point, this would have been late 90s, early aughts.
I was like, you know, I actually do.
I did still.
I think of myself as a feminist at that point, but that's separate from being a scientist.
And you can't modify scientist with feminist, because feminism is an ideological position.
And if that is informing, if that is modifying, linguistically, scientist, Then your science is suspect, and your science is flawed, and you aren't holding the scientific process as the thing that is most important.
Because if you're doing science, and you ask a question that comes up with an answer that you come up with an answer that you don't like, you're not expecting, you wish weren't true, it's still the answer.
And if you are informing your science with some ideology, which is likely to have you push some answers and deep six others, then you're not really doing science.
So same thing, queer, trans, evolutionary biologist, like you can be, we've talked, like no one can define queer, so let's just put queer.
No, no, no, no.
Two things.
One, it's not the story I thought you were going to tell, but the fact that queer shows up Without a meaning in this case.
Right.
Right?
Is in and of itself an indication that something is up here, right?
How is it not redundant with trans?
Yeah, but I mean like, as you already said, you can be trans and you can be an evolutionary biologist, but putting them together invalidates the scientist part.
Totally agree, but the fact of putting queer and trans together as a co-modifier, right?
That sounds like it's rather full of meaning.
What exactly is that meaning?
Right?
So I once, long ago, tweeted something like, if the Q were removed from LGBTQ, who exactly would be excluded?
And got not a single useful answer.
So saying, well then what is this community?
Right?
I'm not saying there's no community, but I'm saying why is there an extra letter in there if not as some kind of mechanism to do something other than convey meaning yeah if there's no meaning but the story i thought you were going to tell was when we were at evergreen there was a hire that was advanced for a feminist economist and you and i both raised this exact issue saying an economist no yeah
an economist is supposed to describe how economics works and the idea that you've put an ideological modifier on it means that's not what you're doing right You've effectively advertised a filter, so it's the same meaning.
When I argued against that position, because I think both you and I were on sort of the general hiring committee to decide at that point, so we both supposedly had some voice there, but it didn't make a difference.
Well, I believe I told the story that I just told here then, too, because it just can't work that way.
And everyone is buying the press of the people who are claiming to be the most damaged and hurt by societal strictures.
And we just have to stop.
We have to stop.
Yeah.
I'm an environmental mathematician.
I don't know.
It doesn't mean anything.
Okay.
One last thing.
We just lost half of our light.
Yep.
All right.
No, we've got mood lighting.
It's for the one last thing.
No, let's play it as a feature.
It's play it as a feature.
Well, I'm going to keep going.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I went looking this week, uh, for reasons that may become clear in natural selections and my sub stack, um, for some of my old music books.
And in looking for some of my old music books, I found, I found this.
Our natural science world, a project of the tri- actually Zach, I need you back here to show my screen.
Fairfax, can you do it?
Hey Zach.
Like, I actually can't do this without the screen.
I'm not sure what to do.
Zach?
Here, talk about it.
He'll come back.
Okay.
The lighting is much less important than actually being able to show the screen here.
Zach, I need you to show my screen.
Okay, so I found this and it turns out to be a piece of work that I did in fourth grade when I was... this was right...
This is right around when kids in LA in the public schools were being bused, and so I was being bused for half a year, and I was at Baldwin Hills, and this is at the end of the year, science lab, and I do this bit on, it's a 16-page document in fact.
That does sound like you.
Here's the table of contents.
Wow!
Color-coded and everything.
Oh my god, so I got scientific instruments, three natural science kingdoms, what?
Which apparently are mineralogy, plants, and animals.
Oh, it's like 20 questions.
Oh man.
And I mean, there's some really good stuff in here, I gotta say.
And I'm only going to show you five pages.
I've already shown you two.
So, you know, we got Mineralogy, what makes soil, plant propagation, invertebrates, vertebrates, fish class, amphibian class, reptilia class, aves class, and class mammalia.
So, you know, very typical for the era and for elementary school, even in an advanced Fourth grade science class.
We have, for instance, cricket observation.
I mean, look at this.
It's pretty well done here.
I did the drawing of the various parts of the cricket, and I even gave the temperature formula at the bottom for how to tell what temperature it is by how many chirps they've got going per minute.
I got some good stuff here.
But then we get to vertebrates.
I don't even know what the amoeba-looking thing is supposed to be.
My best guess is the cross-section of a vertebra, but it doesn't really work.
But whatever, I'm not really totally sure what's going on there.
And I've got the five groups of vertebrates again.
You know, this is not actually how evolution worked, but I got a really unhappy-looking frog, but it's the only one I did in color.
And Aves is represented by, it looks like a cat got to it.
Yes.
It's just two feathers.
Reptilia, represented by the snake, as you know, I was already into snakes, so I'm doing snakes.
And then the mammal, mammal-y, as I describe it there, is, I think that's just fur.
I think that's just fur.
A clump of fur.
Like the birds and the mammals both got just like their representative things.
Could have done a glass of milk.
Yeah, but you know, large size, long lives mostly.
Not many started 420 million years ago.
I got like some good stuff in here, but I was just flipping through this.
I was all alone.
You were in Austin.
I'm like, I don't remember anything about this.
I don't remember anything about even making this book at all.
It was clearly, it was a big, big project.
And then I get to the birds.
Avius.
Backbones, feathers, endothermic, beaks or bills, good brain, eyesight, keen hearing.
Audubon.
I don't know what that means.
Audubon.
Okay?
Like he studied birds?
Sure.
Yes.
And then finally, and there's a lot more good stuff here, but I have the classifications of the birds.
Okay, you ready?
Yeah.
Okay, so we got four types of birds.
There's four types of birds.
Water birds, predatory birds, unusual birds, and pet birds.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
And I have to say that despite such ridiculousness, I got an excellent work.
Of course you did.
Of course you did.
Unusual birds and pet birds were two of my four comedic horrors of birds.
There are some unusual birds and there are some pet birds.
There are.
There are.
No, I feel strangely teleported back to... was that fourth grade?
Fourth grade, yeah.
To my fourth grade self and I feel unable to compete with that overachieving girl who doesn't know when to quit with her four...
I mean, there's more.
I'm going to stop.
At the point that I got to pet birds is one of the categories of birds.
Yeah, don't show that to Arnold.
My graduate advisor.
He would not approve.
Um, so anyway, that's it.
I was trying, I was, I was trying to not lose the plot.
Yes.
Back and forth grade.
Trying to figure out the plot.
I mean, I mentioned Condricthy's in there.
Hey, look at that.
And so we were lit.
And thus there was light.
And thus there was, again, light for who knows how long.
Um, that's all I got.
All right.
Well, I think we've arrived there.
Okay.
There are no doubt questions.
There will be, I think.
There will be questions.
And we will endeavor to answer them.
Indeed.
And so you can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
There will certainly be already some questions there, but you can continue to ask questions.
And again, we encourage you to join our Patreons where you can have access to our Thriving Discord community, and Brett is having a conversation on his Patreon tomorrow.
Evolutionary.
Evolutionary conversation at 9am Pacific.
Come find me at Natural Selections on Substack, read our book, and until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
