In this 182nd in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. In this episode we discuss the herbicide atrazine, its effects on reproductive development in amphibians, its persistence in the environment, its safety testing, and its valorization by the New York Times and the CDC. We also discuss male nipples—why do they exist?—and the CDC’s ongoing capitulation to stupid with its...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 180.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, this is Dr. Heather Hying.
We have had some sort of technical glitch happen over on Rumble's End, so we are streaming to YouTube today.
Hopefully these problems will be ironed out and we will not face them again.
Yes.
This is our last live stream until Wednesday, July 9th.
No, July 19th, because that would be tomorrow.
July 19th, at which point we'll be coming to you regularly on Wednesdays at 11.30am Pacific.
And watch out for a great guest episode of Dark Horse between now and then.
No chat today, no chats from now on.
We're going to be doing watch parties at our locals from now on starting on July 19th, so please join us there and we'll be being active there in the near future, including having watch parties every time we do a live stream there.
Looking forward to that.
It's going to be good.
Yeah, I think it's going to be great.
So today's topics include, we're going to talk about some environmental toxins that are disrupting the endocrinological systems and reproductive development of amphibians.
But we ask why some people are blissfully assuming that that has no reason to have, we have no reason to imagine there would be any effect on mammals, which includes us.
So we're going to do that, and then you also want to talk about chest feeding.
Yeah, I want to talk about a number of things, including chest feeding, but before that I thought we need some proper evolutionary context.
So there is a hypothesis I am frequently asked to deliver, and I've taught about it to students, but I think I have not talked about it publicly, about why males have nipples, a great evolutionary mystery that has been pondered over by really everybody who thinks deeply about evolution.
So anyway, stay tuned.
That will be coming in advance of a discussion of the insights that are now being delivered on the CDC website.
Oh boy, are they full of insight.
They're full of something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they don't even offer nipple teasers like you do.
No, no.
This nipple teaser, it's a one-off nipple teaser.
So that's, yeah, it's bespoke.
As I would hope most of them were.
All right.
We are going to do a Q&A today after our regular live stream, so you can ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
And we're going to tell you about all the other ways that you can find us and such at the end, except for our sponsors, who, as usual, we have three ads right at the top from sponsors whom we carefully vet.
And let us go.
I can't speak.
Speaking is only part of the battle.
It's a big part of the battle.
97% but it's still only part of the battle.
It's only by breathing.
There's that as well, exactly the other 3%.
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Let's start by talking about herbicides.
Yum.
Yummy.
I remember when it was assumed that if you were a person on the left, you were more likely to be concerned about eating organic, for instance, and more interested in things like farm-to-table cuisine, while understanding that actual farmers were perhaps more likely to be in what the mainstream media dismissively refers to as the flyover states, right?
And one of the things that we are seeing clearly now, although I do wonder how long it's actually been happening for, is another reversal, really, by many in the mainstream media who are nominally on the left, or at least who still think of themselves as being so, who are simply propping up big ag
Big pharma, big everything, big toxin at some umbrella level, with no apparent recognition that this is what they're doing.
They're acting like this is the obvious position that people on the left have.
Let's share my screen here for a moment.
moment.
This is, um, the EPA, uh, has plugged in.
Yep. It is, it is plugged in on my end.
Um, uh, So the EPA's site talks about atrazine, which is a very common herbicide.
In fact, apparently the most commonly used in the US.
And what the EPA has to say about it is, atrazine is a chlorinated triazine systemic herbicide that is used to selectively control annual grasses and broadleaf weeds before they emerge.
Pesticide products containing atrazine are registered for use on several agricultural crops, with the highest use on field corn, sweet corn, sorghum, and sugarcane.
Additionally, atrazine products are registered for use on wheat, macadamia nuts, and guava, as well as non-agricultural uses such as nursery and ornamental and turf.
EPA's oversight of atrazine is dynamic and includes periodic re-evaluation through the registration review process.
Over the years, EPA has consulted with the FIFRA Scientific Advisory Panel on a variety of atrazine topics.
Well, we'll come back to that at the end of this little review of what some of the science, the so-called basic science, as opposed to the applied science, that is the science that is simply trying to understand what is true, as opposed to being driven to develop a product or solve as opposed to being driven to develop a product or solve a problem that we know ourselves to have as Some of the basic science has been a very interesting thing.
...has been for a long time warning of the dangers of atrazine, and in fact, enough so that we actually talked about it, and we recently responded to a question in a Q&A about this, but we actually talked about this briefly in our book, Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
I'm going to read this, just one paragraph from, this is at the end of most of the chapters in our book, which came out in 2021, We have what we call the corrective lens.
So given the subject of the chapter, in this case it's sex and gender, what might you do to help you resolve whatever issues you might have that stem from a hyper-novel modern environment and get yourself back into a state that is healthier and more productive?
So one of our corrective lens points, finishing the sex and gender chapter in Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, is Keep contaminants away from fetuses and children.
In several species of frogs, there is an established relationship between exposure to common environmental contaminants like atrazine, an herbicide, and an increase in hermaphroditic individuals.
While sex determination in frogs is different than in humans, we will not be surprised if it turns out that some of the modern confusion around sex and gender ends up attributable to widespread endocrine disruptors in our environment.
And we have a footnote there, an endnote.
Pointing to two research papers published in, let's see, 2002 and 1998, which I'm going to talk about a little bit here.
One of the research papers is from the excellent Tyrone Hayes, a researcher out of, I think, Berkeley, if I remember correctly, who I was lucky enough to see at a conference sometime around the late 90s, early aughts.
He's an excellent scientist and also a very dynamic speaker, which always helps.
And he was already on this drum beat back in 2002.
So here's the paper that we referenced in Hunter Gatherer's Guide.
Hayes et al.
Indeed, he was at Berkeley at least at the time.
This is published in PNAS, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Which, for those not in the know, if you care, you can tell that.
I figured that because it was communicated by, in this case, David Wake.
You have to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences to publish in proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences or be recommended by someone who is, and they have a limited number of recommendations they can make per year.
I don't remember what it is.
But the title of this paper, published in 2002, is Hermaphroditic Demasculinized Frogs After Exposure to the Herbicide Atrazine at Low Ecologically Relevant Doses.
And the paper is excellent.
I'm not going to walk us through this in depth.
There are a number of papers I just want to point to here.
But that title says a lot of it right there.
Atrocine, which we've already talked about what the EPA says it is, and it's on a majority of corn crops and many wheat crops and sugarcane as well.
Not allowed to be on crops that are certified organic, but it spreads easily, as we shall learn, through the air, through the soil.
And through water.
And what we have is after exposure to atrazine at what they're calling low ecologically relevant doses, which is to say we had been told that you needed high exposure in order for it to make any difference, frogs are ending up hermaphroditic and demasculinized after such exposure.
Now, as we say in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide, the mechanisms of sex determination in frogs are different from that in humans, but they too are vertebrates with two and only two sexes, and while the mechanism by which what sex an individual frog is, is not, well in some frogs it actually is, but it's a different origin of chromosomal sex determination in some cases, and it's a Environmental sex determination and others.
Still, it is logical to imagine that if other vertebrates are experiencing reproductive difficulties and endocrinological disruption after exposure to low doses of atrazine, that we too should be concerned about the effects on other vertebrates.
So I would just point out that there is a question here about the presumption of safety versus harm.
And especially when you are dealing with a pesticide, you're dealing with something that is biologically active enough to disrupt an organism that is a threat to a crop.
And what one hopes for, of course, is something that disrupts a mechanism that is so unique to the pest That it is not disruptive of other things in the environment and human health and physiology.
But it's very hard to do that because biology is, you know, we are all related and biology is conservative.
It builds on mechanisms that unite us.
And of course there are mechanisms that evolve after our split from a different clade.
And you might occasionally happen on one of these things.
But one should basically assume that something effective enough at disrupting pests has a likelihood of interacting with human physiology in ways that are unpredictable and may take a very long time to discover if you have a system that is immune to perverse incentives looking for the evidence that it either does or does not cause such a disruption.
Yes.
And indeed, although the mechanism of sex determination is separately evolved in frogs and in humans, the pathways of masculinization and feminization and the hormones that are relevant in those pathways, everything from the androgens, the pathways of masculinization and feminization and the hormones that are relevant in those pathways, everything from the androgens, including testosterone, androstenedione, to the estrogens, and progesterone, oxytocin, the other steroid hormones, oxytocin, the other steroid hormones, all of these things well
So there is plenty that is older than the most recent common ancestor of frogs and humans, even though the particular ways that it is determined whether individuals become male or female are different.
Let me just show everyone a few more papers here.
The very following, the next year, we have Hays again, the Hays Lab out of Berkeley.
Atrazine-induced hermaphroditism at 0.1 parts per billion in American leopard frogs, ranipipians, laboratory and field evidence.
And just the beginning of the abstract here, atrazine is the most commonly used herbicide in the United States and probably the world.
Atrazine contamination is widespread and can be present in excess of one parts per billion even in precipitation and in areas where it is not used.
In the current study we showed that atrazine exposure at greater than 0.1 parts per billion resulted in retarded gonadal development, that is gonadal dysgenesis, and testicular eugenesis, hermaphroditism, in leopard frogs.
And slower developing males even experienced oocyte growth, phytogenesis.
So that is reproductive chaos induced by atrazine at very, very low levels in the environment, even in places where it has never been applied in leopard frogs.
That's such an important and non-intuitive point, is that the degree to which these things atomize into the world and exist at very low levels, that is to say, you might not detect them, but that doesn't mean that a biological system will not be disrupted by them, because these biological systems are very sensitive to things that are designed to be disruptive in insects.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So the other paper that we referenced in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide, and just like really a side comment about this, is Reeder et al.
from This was 1998, a few years earlier.
Forms and prevalence of intersexuality and effect of environmental contaminants on sexuality in cricket frogs, Acris crepitans.
So this is a different species, indeed a different family of frogs.
These are hylids, these are tree frogs.
And just here's Here's one true thing.
They say the process of sex determination and the influences on sex determination are not understood for this species.
We are unaware of any reports that Acris crepitans experiences intersexuality or undergoes a sex reversal as a normal part of any of its life stages.
Whereas they are finding, and they're specifically looking at PCBs and PCDFs, but they are finding intersexuality, general again reproductive chaos, and endocrine disruption as a result of exposure in very low amounts.
So, I want to unpack a little bit of the expectation here, the evolutionary expectation.
You've got plants, right?
A biological clade that has an insect problem, because plants are autotrophs.
They take sunlight and they turn the carbon in the atmosphere into structural materials.
Insects don't do this.
So insects have to eat something.
Many of them eat plants, right?
It's one of the go-to things.
And in order to eat plants, insects have to be able to withstand the poisons that plants introduce in order to prevent insects from eating them.
The so-called secondary compounds that plants put into themselves in order specifically to not be eaten.
Right, so secondary compound.
If you're a biologist and you find a compound inside of a given plant and that compound doesn't do anything in the plant, it's not part of photosynthesis or respiration, if it's just existing there without obvious explanation, the explanation tends to be that it is a poison designed to disrupt the physiology of herbivores, especially insects, in order to reduce the amount of material lost to these parasites.
So insects and plants have been involved in an arms race over this very thing since long before there were vertebrates.
I think that's a fair statement.
Yes.
Yeah, so the point is you should expect Plants to create very effective toxins and insects to be very resistant to them.
Which is why it is hard to deal with pests with insecticides.
Because A, it's hard to come up with anything that overcomes the amazing architecture that insects have devised to detoxify this stuff.
And if you do, they have an evolutionary preparedness to evolve past whatever defense you have deployed.
As much as pathogens will tend to evolve out from under the killing effects of antibiotics, insects will, if possible, find a way to evolve out from under the killing effects of herbicides.
Right.
So what you tend to end up doing, if you come up with an herbicide that actually works enough to be useful, It tends to be extremely toxic and highly complex enough to defeat this system in insects.
So, at the point you've discovered something good enough to be an insecticide, you ought to be really worried about the safety of this stuff around other biological organisms.
Well, but luckily, insects are an entirely different evolution of life, and therefore what affects them doesn't affect us.
Would that that were true.
Which actually, you know, there's an echo in here of Jordan Peterson's often misunderstood point about lobsters.
his point is you've got a very ancient system that deals with serotonin, that this is a conserved molecular intermediary in a process that is old enough to go back, you know, so that we find it in lobsters.
And in this case, we find a lot of- - Serotonin turns out to be one of the oldest hormones that we know.
And in fact, the most recent common ancestor of lobsters and humans, both had serotonin.
So, in any case, chemical insecticides are hard to produce.
Why?
Because the world has been engaged in an arms race between plants and insects forever, and that arms race prepares the insects very well.
So, yes, we have some ability to do stuff in a lab that plants have a hard time doing, but the ability to do something worth doing that is safe for other creatures is pretty minimal.
And You know, again, bad enough if you have regulatory agencies that are completely free to discover the harm and forbid the use of stuff that's actually bad for people and the environment.
If you have captured entities, then you're just at the mercy of companies who will make billions of dollars producing these molecules that are not safe for people because they do work on crops, and that's where we're going to find ourselves.
Yeah.
Let's talk about the capture after we finish talking about the science.
Sure.
So this still from this Reader et al.
paper from 1998.
And I include these older papers in part because that's what we cited, but also to indicate for how long research has been going on that is sending up the signal that says, beware, these are not as safe as we are being told they are.
So a couple more pieces from the Reader et al.
1998 paper.
Which I have apparently subtitled, They're Making the Frogs Militant.
I see on my screen here, for those who are carefully reading, sex ratios of cricket frogs shortly after metamorphosis strongly favor females, as was the case at the control sites in Study B. However, at the sites contaminated by PCBs and PCDFs, there was a striking sex ratio reversal in juvenile cricket frogs, resulting in a high number of males.
So sex ratio reversal is a stunning result that apparently is emerging after exposure to some of these environmental contaminants.
And then feminization due to estrogenic and or anti-androgenic contaminants has been well documented in many species of vertebrates.
And they've got, this is again from 1998, so these are all going to be older than 1998 references, and I'm going to scroll down and show you show us those.
Various congeners and mixtures of PCBs, PCDFs, and PCDDs possess a spectrum of estrogenic, anti-estrogenic, and anti-androgenic effects.
We knew a lot of this a long time ago, okay?
So these references, and this is only a tiny bit of the references that are out there, but this very article cites include number five, DDT-induced feminization of gall embryos.
So that's from 1981.
DDT, of course, famously is off the market, but most of these things aren't.
Off the market in the U.S.
It is still used elsewhere.
20.
Environmentally persistent alkyl phenolic compounds are estrogenic.
That's from 1994.
Synergistic activation of estrogen receptor with combinations of environmental chemicals from 1996.
Reference 22.
We have developmental abnormalities of the gonad and abnormal sex hormone concentrations in juvenile alligators from contaminated and controlled lakes in Florida from 1994.
Reference 23, published in Nature.
Persistent DDT metabolite PPDDE is a potent androgen receptor agonist.
And then we have just a few more, and this is again not exhaustive, from 1979.
Estrogenic properties of DDT and its analogues.
We have factors affecting mammary tumor incidence in chlortriazine-treated female rats.
Hormonal properties, dosage, and animal strain.
We have an ecological study of the cricket frog, 1984.
Diothylstilbistrol-associated defects in murine genital tract development.
That's mice.
So now we're talking actually about mammals from 1985.
And in utero and lactational exposure of male rats to one of these toxins.
And I think that paper is this.
And it affects on spermatogenesis and reproductive capability.
So many people will have heard tangentially or not so tangentially about lowering T levels, lowering fertility in men across the world.
Where, well, you know, one of the sets of explanatory factors is right here.
So a couple more pieces of the sort of expected, oh, go ahead.
And that research was published in 1992.
92.
Yeah.
As you say, we've known about this for a very long time.
Very long time.
So you've got insects.
Most of which are involved in parasitizing plants.
So they've been engaged in this arms race that we've been talking about.
In comparison, and you're going to help me here as the herpetologist, frogs... I should have brought my alligator hat.
Well, always.
But frogs are almost entirely predatory.
Entirely?
Is it one of these things where there's no exceptions or close to it?
Actually, a new piece of research that I've been wanting to talk about forever is a new piece of work that suggests some pollinating frogs.
Pollinating?
It's one out of 4,500, 5,000 species of frogs.
Well that doesn't even necessarily mean that they're not.
It could be that they're pollinating.
They're going after insects that are in flowers and they end up doing some pollinating.
They may be herbivorous.
I need to look into it more.
But let's just say the vast majority of them are hunters.
They're insectivores.
There are some that eat some larger prey.
But the point is they are not herbivores.
They have not been involved in this arms race with plants for hundreds of millions of years.
I mean they're second order herbivores like most of us are.
Right, but the point is the insect surviving the encounter with the plant then detoxifies a great majority of the material inside the insect, and when the frog eats the insect, yeah, it'll get a little bit of whatever the insect just ate, so it will have dealt with some toxin, but very little, a tiny fraction of what insects deal with.
So you would expect Something that is built to disrupt insect physiology, and because male and female, despite what the modern academy is claiming to have discovered, male and female go back so far in an unbroken line of dividing things into a binary world of male and female, that those patterns within animals that make you either male or female and not in the middle somewhere, except in rare disrupted cases,
Which don't leave direct descendants.
Right.
So, you know, yes, they exist, but they're errors.
The world is divided into male and female, not only within animals, but in an unbroken way within Animalia.
And the point is, okay, so you've got mechanisms that are involved in taking something that is going to be male and going to be female and Creating a dichotomous world.
You've got plants which can survive better by disrupting something inside of an insect.
But it's far easier to distort an insect than it is to kill it outright.
Right?
So distorting an insect by disrupting some process that causes there to be fewer insects.
Gee, what kind of process could you disrupt that would cause there to be fewer insects?
How about reproduction?
That will make a lot fewer insects.
So plants have explored every possibility here.
But the point is, you've got to give them a very high dose to actually do it because the insects have seen it coming for hundreds of millions of years.
The frogs haven't, right?
So the point is the frogs are more like us, and in fact the frogs are probably more resistant to this stuff than we are, because frogs eating insects do get a little bit of this.
They're not in a direct battle with the plants, but they do eat whatever the insects have consumed before the frog eats them.
That does point in the might-be-more-resistant direction.
Of course, the thing that points in the opposite direction is that being amphibians, amphibios, wherein most species tend to have some part of their life cycle in water and some part on land, some part breathing through the water and some part breathing through the air.
If either system is contaminated, they are likely to show the results of it.
Yes, but I would also point out though that we actually don't know how that plays out, because yes, you and I are not absorbing this stuff from our skin unless we're directly contacting it, presumably.
Some things do oddly cross the skin, but presumably we're not getting very much that way.
We're much more likely to get a dose of it on an apple that we don't wash, or you buy a fruit salad somewhere and they didn't wash it because it doesn't pay for them to put in that kind of work.
But A fetus is in a weird kind of amphibious relationship with its mother.
And so the point is, the placenta, because this stuff is novel, the placenta is not presumably built to be on the lookout for pesticides that the mother has breathed in and taken a little bit into her blood, because that wouldn't have been a feature of the ancestral environment.
At least, it would have been very uncommon for nature to create such a But a mother who breathes the stuff in or eats materials that have the stuff on it that wasn't washed, the fetus is in a very sensitive position because presumably the one thing that would protect it, the placenta, just isn't built for that job in this case.
There's no way selection would have built it to do that job.
Because it hasn't seen it coming.
Because it hasn't seen it coming, right.
That's right.
So the story continues to get worse.
Oh no.
We have known.
Researchers have been doing the research that shows that atrazine and several other chemicals, of which I have talked about a few here, definitely disrupt reproduction and endocrine systems in amphibians, at least.
And furthermore, there's a lot of research about the persistence of, for instance, atrazine in soil and water.
Here we have... Let me make this a little bit bigger, then you can show my screen here, Zach.
Published in 2011, we have a Jablonowski et al.
paper called, Still Present After All These Years, Persistence Plus Potential Toxicity Raised Questions About the Use of Atrazine.
The abstract reads, As one of the world's most heavily applied herbicides, atrazine is still a matter of controversy.
Since it is regularly found in ground and drinking water, as well as in seawater and the ice of remote areas, it has become the subject of continuous concern due to its potential endocrine and carcinogenic activity.
Current findings prove long-held suspicions that this compound persists for decades in soil.
Due to the high amount applied annually all over the world, the soil burden of this compound is considered to be tremendous, representing a potential long-term threat to the environment.
The persistence of chemicals such as atrazine has long been underestimated.
Do we need to reconsider the environmental risk?
So this paper again is published 12 years ago.
And here are just a few more things from it.
Additionally, recent evidence of endocrine disruption, activity of atrazine itself, and environmentally relevant concentrations has caused for serious concerns.
In terms of a precautionary approach, we believe that the further use of atrazine should be halted or greatly curtailed.
Atrazine and its metabolites can persist in water and soil for decades.
Even more than 18 years after it was banned in Germany, atrazine remains the most abundant pesticide in groundwater samples.
I think I have one more.
Oh no, that's it.
Oh um yeah that's that's it for for that paper.
So we know it's disrupting endocrine systems in other vertebrates.
We know it persists for decades after it has stopped being used.
uh, in the soil and is found in seawater, in remote ice.
Uh, so it is, it is everywhere.
And, uh, even in, for instance, Europe, which banned it a number of years ago, um, they, they still see it, uh, in their soil.
So in light of all that, let's go to one of our most trusted news sources, shall we?
A slayer, a true slayer of mis-dis and malinformation.
Who's this going to be?
Upholder of truth, liberty and apple pie, I imagine.
Apple pie with just a hint of atrocity.
Just a hint of atrazine because it's got wheat, it's probably got some corn, it's got apples.
I don't know if you're allowed to use it on apples, but you're allowed to use it on corn and wheat, and they do.
I am talking, of course, about the New York Times.
This week, This week, the New York Times published yet another hit piece on RFK.
Five noteworthy falsehoods Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
has promoted.
A longtime vaccine skeptic, Mr. Kennedy is leaning heavily on misinformation as he mounts a long-shot 2024 campaign.
Thank you, New York Times, for protecting us from his misinformation.
There are five falsehoods that they talk about in this article.
We could talk about all of them.
We're just going to talk about the one that's relevant to what I'm talking about today, right?
So we go down to, he has made baseless claims about a connection between gender dysphoria and chemical exposure.
In an interview last month with Jordan Peterson, a conservative Canadian psychologist and public speaker, Mr. Kennedy falsely linked chemicals present in water sources to transgender identity.
A lot of the problems, he had said, we see in kids, particularly boys, it's probably underappreciated how much of that is coming from chemical exposures, including a lot of sexual dysphoria that we're seeing, he said.
He referred to research on an herbicide, atrazine, in which scientists found that, quote, it induces complete feminization and chemical castration in certain frogs.
Yes, it does.
But, the New York Times continues, no evidence exists to indicate that the chemical, typically used on farms to kill weeds, causes the same effect in humans, let alone gender dysphoria.
And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, quote, most people are not exposed to atrazine on a regular basis.
Well, we know for sure that the CDC is either just wrong or flat-out lying.
And with regard to the research that does not exist, no evidence exists to indicate that the chemical typically used on farms to kill weeds causes the same effect in humans, well, let's just see about that, shall we?
My god.
Okay, so I simply did a search on Google Scholar for atrocine human health effects.
I got many thousands of hits.
Many, many thousands of hits.
One typical paper, and we'll go to the site here in a minute, and I'll post this, but one typical paper finds that sure there are some concerning cancers and endocrinological effects that some research has found to be associated with atrocine, Yeah, but it's really not that bad.
Atrocine disappears really quickly from the environment and from you, and the research wasn't as strong as it seems.
Anyway, signed, yours truly, I kid you not, the Society of Chemical Industry.
That is who is putting out this work.
Okay, so here it is.
This is published in the journal Pest Management Science.
Okay, Pest Management Science, which I don't know if I can zoom in here really well, but you will see that their tagline is, where science meets business.
That is literally the tagline of the journal where this piece of garbage research was published.
Okay, so give me my screen back here for just a minute, Zach, while I find, oh no, here we go.
So here it is, here is their site, the Society for whatever I called it, Pest Management Science is the international journal of research and development and crop protection and pest control.
Look at that banner.
Look at that banner!
Are you interested in receiving this SCI Journal?
You too can have your crops sprayed with a crop duster and everyone will be happy and dead in no time.
I mean, I have a lot more to say, but go for it.
Well, no, I unfortunately have to issue a retraction of a connection that I drew in the beginning of this segment.
Okay.
It's a weed killer.
Everything I've said about insects is true, but it is not relevant to a weed killer.
You would have to do the analysis differently, which we could, but nonetheless.
Atrazine is an herbicide, but the insects that are eating the atrazined weeds are not happy either.
So, there's plenty of insecticides out there.
Most of what we're talking about is atrazine, which is an herbicide.
The journal is called Pest Management Science.
They recently changed the name of the journal to Pest Management Science from Pesticide Science.
They just called it that.
It was called Pesticide Science, the journal.
Published by the Society of Chemical Industry, whose tagline is literally, where business meets science.
Or was it where science meets business?
I don't remember.
Science meets business.
So sorry.
So, it strikes me, I don't know anything about this publication, but based on what you've presented about it, it seems like an analogue for the phony fields surrounding grievance studies, right?
You've got a bunch of fields that pretend to be doing science and revealing new things that we didn't know about the way humans function, and it's what I've called idea laundering, but here you've got business laundering the dirty details of the compounds it's pumping into the world that and their disruptive effect.
So the point is, okay, so industry has created, you know, a nonsense field or the equivalent in order to make its products look safe so that people can muddle any argument that is delivered.
And, you know, they literally are creating the journals in which the people whom they fund can publish scientific research that comes up with the conclusions that they need them to come up with in order to keep dumping and pumping this crap into the environment that we all share.
And we know, we know that whoever controls the press Controls what is published.
And in science, whoever controls what is published, controls what research is done.
And therefore, the New York Times' naive, sycophantic, insidious, and disgusting claim that... What do they say exactly?
Baseless claims about a connection between gender dysphoria and chemical exposure.
There's no evidence?
Well, there's no evidence, in part because the places that are publishing the research that would be relevant here will not publish such evidence.
And it's true.
I don't find the absolutely 100% clear research that demonstrates this connection.
But then those people who want to do that research aren't getting funding.
I mean, it's very much like in, say, 2022, when we're beginning to see a few preprints and a few papers that we're finding some problems with the mRNA vaccines for COVID, all of which, to a paper, said, but these vaccines are still the best to a paper, said, but these vaccines are still the best thing you can do for It's...
It's Don't Hurt Me Walls in a different place.
It's okay, we still believe what you're telling us, but we did find this one little tiny problem.
And that's the kind of research you're going to get in journals like this.
And it has a unfortunate echo in another place to the exact same pattern where, okay, here you've got the New York Times in exactly the place that the people who used to read the New York, you know, our parents who read the New York Times at the, you know, at the Sunday breakfast table.
I read the New York Times.
Of course, but my point is at some point you start reading the New York Times and you think what the fuck is this, right?
But back in the day before the what the fuck is this era, the New York Times would have been expected to be concerned about pesticides in the food supply, in the in the environment, etc.
And the point is that expectation is being disrupted here by a higher priority.
Right.
The corruption of the Democratic Party must be maintained against anything that threatens it.
And Bobby Kennedy Jr. threatens it.
And so the point is, the New York Times will now embrace whatever position undermines Bobby Kennedy, even when his position would be a traditionally liberal position.
So hold on.
The echo is that this sounds a lot like Eric Topol.
Mm-hmm.
Who actually fought to delay the release of the vaccine so that Trump wouldn't get credit for that, right?
The point is, oh, Eric Topol, who's so very concerned about people suffering from COVID, was actually cynically delaying this thing for political reasons.
Here you've got the New York Times.
cynically disrupting an obvious argument about the hazards of pesticides for political reasons.
And the point is, well, is anything sacred?
Is there any principle that you will adhere to even when somebody that you politically fear, you know, says it?
Right?
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's even worse than that.
But I think Zach has something to say.
Yes.
Well, someone in the chat reminded me, you will want to remember, Deb, that Kennedy's term for these idea laundering scientists is biostitutes.
Biostitutes.
Absolutely.
It's not science.
It's paid service to create a scientific article for something.
That is what it is.
Yeah, to create an illusion of science.
Yes.
So okay, Europe actually banned, the European Union banned atrazine back in 2003.
That's 20 years ago.
And here, show my screen one more time here.
This is a 2006 article co-published by a research scientist and a lawyer.
European Union Bans Atrazine While the United States Negotiates Continued Use.
So it was banned in 2003.
This paper is published in 2006.
It begins, Atrazine is a common agricultural herbicide with endocrine disruptor activity.
They just flatly state it.
There is evidence that it interferes with reproduction and development and may cause cancer.
There is.
And the industry-sponsored research says that's not that important.
We don't really think it matters, but I don't know why.
Although the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, approved its continued use in October 2003, the same month the European Union announced a ban of atrazine because of ubiquitous and unpreventable water contamination.
The authors of this paper, and I'm not going to read through all of it, but the authors of this paper reviewed regulatory procedures and government documents and report efforts by the manufacturer of atrazine, Syngenta, to influence the U.S.
atrazine assessment by submitting flawed scientific data as evidence of no harm and by meeting repeatedly and privately with EPA to negotiate the government's regulatory approach.
Many of the details of these negotiations continue to be withheld from the public, despite EPA regulations and federal open government laws that require such decisions to be made in the open.
One more little piece from this paper.
Despite statutory requirements that agency advisory committees must be objective and publicly transparent, EPA officials held approximately 50 private meetings with Syngenta regarding Atrazine in 2003.
EPA established and utilized two advisory committees composed only of representatives of Syngenta and EPA, without any public representation.
EPA's 2003 approval of Atrazine relied on the final recommendations of these two committees, characterized by EPA as joint efforts between EPA and Syngenta, to determine how Atrazine should be regulated and where it should be monitored.
Yeah.
So, those of us in the public who continue to think That the people whose job title suggests that they are looking out for us, that they care about public health, that they recognize that their job in public health is about actually protecting the public's health as opposed to the profits of corporations, those people who still believe that need to wake up.
This has been going on for a very long time.
And for a very long time there's been no one watching out for what's in our food, what's on our crops, what's in our water, what's in our air.
We have the regulatory agencies, but they're doing exactly the opposite of what they're supposed to be doing.
Yeah, we don't, I mean, it's a subtle distinction, we don't have the regulatory agencies.
What we have is something that has hollowed them out and left them there so that we don't even, you know, if you knew, as we know when we travel in other parts of the world, that there's nothing protecting us, we can at least take some steps to protect ourselves.
But when you have something that is ostensibly doing the job, that is specifically not doing the job, in fact it's doing the inverse of the job, You get the danger of the false sense of security and the full exposure to this stuff.
You know, I'm reminded of what I used to say, and then when we taught study abroad together, what we used to say to students before taking them out of the country.
And it's an unintuitive point.
Which is that, you know, we're going to a land with many fewer lawyers than the land in which you grew up, and therefore you have to take greater responsibility for your own safety.
And I wonder if you want to explore that a little bit, because I think it's relevant here precisely because what we are finding is that cryptically, on actually the most important issues, We here in the weird world, including the U.S., have been living in a land effectively without regulation forever, even though we don't have, like, the gringo traps, the giant potholes that you might find on the street in Venezuela, for instance.
Yeah, so let me lay out a bit of the framework here.
You have a system in which lawyers are empowered to find harm, to find causes of action, and to pursue it in a court on behalf of a class or an individual who's been harmed.
That can result in a very unpleasant relationship with lawyers because they're constantly looking for opportunity.
But the point is that system in which lawyers are empowered to get paid for doing this Does do a good job of discovering connections that can be established well enough for a court to see them and to recognize them as justifying of a remedy.
So we have a system that has been very safe, what Heather's calling a gringo trap.
It's a joke.
The joke is if you're in Latin America, sometimes you will find a hole in the sidewalk, often with rebar sticking out of it, right?
And the idea is that, you know, any person who's grown up in such an environment is not on their phone in danger of falling into one of these things because actually they've been trained that the sidewalk isn't as safe as it might be.
But in an environment where you got lawyers looking for causes of action, the sidewalks tend to be pretty safe, right?
So there is this expectation of safety that is now completely out of phase for anything subtle or delayed, right?
There's an obsession with our safety at the instantaneous level and a complete indifference to our safety in the long term, right?
Hence, the madness surrounding mRNA vaccines which were obviously a danger whose full extent we couldn't know for decades right and over an obsession with respect to COVID in the in the moment this comparison results in a
Complete mismapping by citizens who feel the you know, the nanny state trying to protect them from little things all the time They don't realize what benefit they get from it But they also don't realize it does not correctly predict how well protected you are from subtle things, right?
They can shorten your life.
They can cause your children to have terrible deformities and you can't prove the connection so they don't get dealt with and Yep.
And it's no one's job to deal with those things.
The regulatory agencies would have a very difficult, even if they were actually doing what they're supposed to be trying to do, would have a very hard time establishing causality.
The politicians who would go after this are going to be long out of office before anything changes.
And, you know, frankly, it's part it's it's it's a big part of the appeal of RFK, which is that, you know, he is he is staunchly pro-human and pro-environment and has been for a very long time and is willing to look deep into what long term trends are and say, you know what?
It's not that I'm saying you can't ever put stuff on your crops or you can't ever vaccinate your children.
It's that we deserve to have those processes and products be safety tested before we do so.
How did we end up reversing?
How did we end up making the default position be, we're going to add anything we want, and we're going to inject anything we want, and we're going to have you take anything we want you to take, and the burden is on you to prove that it's not okay.
in order to opt out as opposed to the default assumption is opt out don't put that on my food don't put that in my body until you've actually done the safety testing that needs to be done so we have the wrong presumption You also have to establish these things in a slanted academic environment, right?
And I want to pick up on the concept of opting out because it's really the central one here.
Let's suppose that you and I, as biologists, look at this and we say, There's no way that's safe.
There's no way that's safe.
It is too fundamentally disruptive of biology that is long-standing, etc.
I don't want any part of it.
I certainly don't want my kids to have any part of it.
I want out.
Yep.
You can't even opt out.
That's right.
What would you have to do to substantially opt out?
Well, you'd have to stop eating in restaurants.
Maybe you'd have to keep your windows closed and filter the air, right?
You can't control what People are spraying on their crops and opt out.
You know, the point is these processes don't know boundaries.
Diffusion happens.
The stuff persists way longer than we think it does.
It moves around on animals who don't know that they shouldn't be eating something that was just sprayed.
So there is no way to fully opt out at all.
You can spend a huge effort and a lot of money reducing your exposure, which we do.
Right?
We do this.
And the point is, how effective do we actually... And have been for decades.
Right.
So, you know, yes, you can spend more for organic food, right?
And there is a huge push.
There's a huge, presumably industry-sponsored push to make fun of people who insist on eating organic.
There's no demonstrated benefit from eating organic.
There's no nutritional difference.
We didn't say nutritional difference.
We said hazard.
And I also don't believe that.
Right, I don't really believe it either for lots of reasons.
For one thing, you know, a Roundup Ready crop has, you know, trade-off-wise been compromised in order to induce this one characteristic that's agriculturally desirable at a financial level.
So, yes, there will be nutritional differences, but it doesn't matter if there are nutritional differences.
What if I don't want Parkinson's disease and I suspect That pesticides are involved in creating Parkinson's disease.
How much do I have to alter my life to really eliminate those things?
Radically.
It's just not possible to do it completely and to do it substantially is a radical increase in your expenses.
And it shouldn't be this way.
The fact is, the presumption, and you know, we can get into the precautionary principle.
The precautionary principle is logically the right thing.
It is a bit difficult to instantiate well.
It can be taken to an extreme.
It can be onerous.
It can be onerous.
Logically speaking, it's the baseline, right?
These things are dangerous until proven safe and not the other way around.
You will never get there in a world where those who have a perverse incentive can gain control over the academic environment, over the legislative environment, over the regulators.
Right?
You just can't get there because their perverse incentive is concentrated.
They can disrupt our ability to exert a rational control mechanism every time, and it's what they do, and it's making us unsafe, and we have no idea how much of the obvious ill health that the citizenry experiences.
You just stand on the street corner, stand in an airport, watch people go by, Yes, they are living longer.
How healthy do they look?
What is causing that?
Right?
We cannot protect people from this as long as the industries that make the profit have so much say over what the regulations look like.
And yes, that's a very boring and tired point, but it's never going to be untrue.
Yeah.
Right?
It's fundamental.
No, and in this, we've said this before, and many others have as well, but we've become ugly.
And this is just one admittedly subjective at the holistic level measure of our collective ill health but when we were growing up almost everyone was attractive and more so even in the 50s right and it's not true anymore and it's it's sad and this is this is not an attack on the individuals who find themselves having been you know Mamed is the right term.
Mamed!
Having been, you know, birthed into a world where there are not the full set of choices to actually opt out, when what we all should have been allowed to do was choose whether to opt in.
And we have been disallowed from that across domain after domain after domain.
Speaking of which, you wanted to talk about chest feeding.
Oh no, I wanted to talk about nipples first.
So we are regularly asked as evolutionary biologists, what is the explanation for male nipples?
And frankly, I love the question.
I would just say that I, as a female evolutionary biologist, have been asked that question probably less than five times, and you have been asked that question a lot.
In part because you say that you think about it and you have an idea and all this, but I do believe that this is more likely to be a question asked of a man with nipples.
It's liable to be asked a lot of a man without nipples, but they don't exist, so we can't test that hypothesis.
It exists as a pure thought experiment.
That is not the alternative hypothesis, and you know it.
I do.
All right.
So let's just say many, in fact I think all, evolutionary biologists have pondered this question at some point.
And it's a wonderful one, which intersects very well With a concept, I don't want to drag people too deep into the weeds, but decades ago I came up with an adaptive test, a test to see whether a particular feature of organisms should be presumed to be a product of adaptive evolution or not.
And the reason I came up with that was not because this wasn't obvious, I thought it was obvious, but because there was a battle in evolutionary biology over the question of whether Evolutionary biologists were leaping to conclusions imagining that various features of organisms were the result of adaptation when maybe, you know, there are lots of other evolutionary processes.
Could it perhaps be the result of drift or whatever?
So anyway, I came up with a test to free myself from that stupid question which disrupts everything if you let it get away from you.
And the test basically... Can you just make a lot of arm gestures while you describe it?
You want me to do a lot of arm waves?
Yeah, I think you should.
Okay.
The test involves... it's a conservative test.
It will miss some things that are actually the result of adaptive evolution, and it is not 100% conclusive.
It will lead you to the correct presumption if you apply the test correctly.
And it is conservative in that it's got a failsafe in it.
So it basically asks whether several characteristics can be found inside of a particular trait.
So let's say we're talking about the, um, I should have gotten an image for this, but there is a, an extinct reptile, a dinosaur epoch reptile called a plicosaur.
Which has a sail on its back.
This was a clade.
There were lots of different polycasors.
But anyway, Heather will bring up a picture of a polycasor.
So these animals had a sail on their back.
We don't know what the sail was for, because there are no pelicasaurs that we can observe or, you know, bring to the laboratory or anything like that.
So we are left with this structure and no ability to run a test in the present on what it does.
So, my point is, yeah, it's true that we don't know what it does.
One example of something it might do, it might be a solar panel that allows these animals to warm their blood by turning that sail towards the sun.
But again, we can't observe them, so we don't know.
But my point is, that question, the mystery surrounding what the sail on the back of a plicosaur does, is not the same question as whether or not it is the product of adaptive evolution.
Obviously, it's the product of adaptive evolution.
And the test to show that this is the correct presumption is, does it involve high levels of complexity?
Biology, adaptive evolution is the only process that creates high levels of complexity.
So, is this complex?
Yes, there will have been a developmental pathway that has produced this polecasaur.
You know, it has a structure, it has bones, it has skin, all of these things that we can still detect in the fossils.
So it has complexity, it has an expense, it's made out of materials, right?
Materials that could be redirected, materials and energy that could be redirected to something else that would enhance the fitness of the creature.
And it persists over evolutionary time, right?
Complex, it has an expense, and it persists over evolutionary time.
And my point is, If it were not producing a benefit to that organism that exceeds that cost, then over evolutionary time it would be eliminated, right?
And we wouldn't see it.
Instead, what we saw is a whole clade of organisms, different species that had these things, which says that some organism that had less of one was not out competing those that had had more of them.
All right.
So here's the reason that I like this nipple question.
The nipple question passes the male nipple question, passes the adaptive test, right?
It's not hugely expensive, but it is an expense.
Nipples are made out of material.
That material does not have an obvious benefit in males, but there's a complexity to it.
That material and energy that goes into producing a male nipple could be redirected into other fitness enhancing behaviors.
or structures.
And so what the hell is going on?
Given that male nipples are not useful in the feeding of offspring, why would selection not have economized these things out of existence long ago?
Now, here's the hypothesis, which I have come to believe very strongly is likely to be true, but needs a test.
The hypothesis is that if you have a mechanism, if you built into human beings, or to any mammal, if you built in a mechanism, In ethereum.
that would remove nipples when the male physiology program had been triggered.
Anytime something was going to be a male, you economized away the nipples.
Then what you've got is a mechanism that turns nipples off.
Once you've got a mechanism that turns nipples off, A, it can go wrong.
Occasionally, a female who is otherwise reproductively capable will lack nipples and her children will presumably starve.
And B, it creates a target for some, let's say, plant that you're eating to disrupt if it wants, if it sees you as a parasite and is looking to reduce the level of parasitism.
Can it disrupt that pathway now that that pathway exists?
So the hypothesis is that the pathway is so dangerous where milk production is essential to the raising of offspring that Selection has built in a resistance to economizing it away so that no female is born without nipples and therefore those offspring don't starve for the lack of the ability to feed them early in childhood.
Now again, this is a hypothesis.
It has not survived a test so far as I am aware.
I will say, a valid scientific hypothesis requires a test.
It at least needs to be testable in principle, hopefully in practice, but at least in principle to be a valid hypothesis.
Something like, let's say, oh I don't know, string theory, which doesn't provide a mechanism for testing it, is not even, not only is it not a theory, it's not even a hypothesis.
Right?
It becomes a hypothesis at which it makes a test.
So, in this case, there may be better tests.
I may come up with something more elegant and easier to accomplish.
But I would say the correct test that I spot is, if it is true that selection has actively protected nipples from being removed in males because of the danger that it would pose in females to have such a pathway, then we will find That there is a protective mechanism.
In other words, the degree to which different genes are exposed to experimentation, evolutionary experimentation, varies.
There are some genes that are highly experimental because they're involved in arms races, and there are other genes that are very conservative because disrupting them Creates a cascade of bad effects.
I would argue that we will find that the genes involved in the production of nipples have been given that protective characteristic that prevents experimentation with their elimination developmentally, and that that is why we see them, right?
And in fact that would be the adaptive feature, right?
The nipples would be a manifestation of that adaptation which has moved nipples out of the experimental category into a highly conserved It's not exactly a question of low evolvability, but it's about sort of a separate kind of conservatism around what could be changed.
It's hard to operationalize it in part because there's so many possible mechanisms by which that might happen.
But the prediction then that you are making for your hypothesis is that there will be something To be to be specified upon discovery that is that is.
Producing lower rates of change in those genes than in adjacent, otherwise comparable genes that do something else.
Yeah, I wouldn't say adjacent because one of the things that happens is that genes get moved around the genome to protect them from experimentation.
I would point out though, in thinking about this this morning, what I'm really arguing for is the inverse of what I have elsewhere called an explorer mode.
Explorer modes are places where evolution looks around design space for solutions in a direct way.
This is a place where such experimentation is reduced, and it creates a kind of genetic sacredness, or some other kind.
It creates a taboo around genetic experimentation.
But in any case, that's the basic hypothesis.
All right.
The reason that I raised that hypothesis has to do with something that I at least ran across yesterday, which is the CDC's entry in its glossary page.
Zach, do you want to show it?
Okay, so here is, this is on the CDC's site, Center for Disease Control, in their glossary.
I think I can read it.
The glossary has three entries that I'm showing here.
Breastfeeding, the practice of feeding an infant or young child breast milk directly from the breast.
Also, see chest feeding, nursing.
And then next entry, breast milk slash human milk, right?
Breast milk is no longer sufficient.
Milk produced by the human mammary glands to feed infants and young children.
Breast milk and human milk can be used interchangeably.
And then third is chest feeding, a term used by many masculine-identified trans people to describe the act of feeding their baby from their chest, regardless of whether they have had chest-slash-top surgery to alter or remove mammary tissue.
I mean, that's not even... I mean, that's terrible.
But that's not even complete, because the story this week was this I think, because this dude who's been on estrogens who's been feeding whatever thing is coming out of his nipples this baby.
Right.
And so anyway, my point about the glossary, though, is that what we've got is the CDC.
So I tweeted yesterday that 10 years ago, if hackers had breached the CDC website's wall, that they could have put something this absurd on the CDC's page.
Uh, you know, uh, as an act of, uh, as a prank, as an act of vandalism, but that effectively vandals have taken over the CDC, right?
Yeah.
Now there are a couple things worth extrapolating from this.
One, there is a game being played here.
Weeks ago, we talked about the absurdity of chest feeding.
We collectively, I don't know, we also talked about it on Dark Horse, but we were talking about chest feeding, which at the time, what we were talking about were trans men, these are people born female, who therefore have female mammary glands,
feeding their offspring and the suggestion slash coercion to call this chest feeding with the purpose of not offending such people.
And to call them fathers.
Right.
Now that's insane.
Yes.
However, You are at least talking about biological females feeding infants with female breasts and then we are talking about what to call them, right?
Right, and that's what's in the glossary as well.
No, because the glossary is opening the door to whatever it is that is being delivered, being considered feeding.
Can you show it to us again, Zach?
I hadn't seen it before.
Milk produced by the human mammary glands.
So, you know, I don't know.
I don't know what is coming out of that guy's chest.
Yeah.
But even if he's had fake boobs put on, he doesn't actually have mammary tissue.
Well, I don't actually know.
Do you know the distinction in, because, well first of all, there is a case in bats.
Yes.
In which bats have been, male bats have been shown to lactate.
This is in the wild.
Yes.
This is presumably not the result of disruption.
This is, remember what bat?
It's a pteropodid, which is a megabat from the old world.
A large fruit bat, flying fox.
And they have been observed to lactate and actually to feed offspring, I believe.
So the question is whether or not breast tissue is is fundamentally different or whether it is basically latent mammary tissue that can be activated.
Yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, so in any case, the idea that the CDC is broadcasting as if it is a scientific conclusion, this obviously political fact, and I would point out, with no apparent thought to the impact on The baby, right?
This is the orientation here.
Across the board, all of these things, you know, the most defenseless members of society of all are just being completely disregarded.
And they're being disregarded here at a couple of different levels, right?
We're talking, so Breast is best, right?
We have talked about the logic of why that is true, right?
That's not a political assertion.
That is a biological fact.
Yes.
Okay?
So, what we are talking about here is a case in which there might be an argument that breast is not best.
Let's take the case of a female to male trans person who has an offspring.
Right?
Now, that female to male trans person is liable to be on sex-distorting hormones.
So there is a question about whether the disruption to the baby actually reverses the normal logic of the superiority of breastfeeding.
Right.
But I mean, this is like saying we're going to fix some imagined or fix some real ratio that we would like to fix in college, whereas all of the discrimination that may have happened that led to that ratio happening at the K through 12 level.
You're talking about someone who wants to who wants to feed their baby from their body, if they can do that, it's because they were gestating, probably.
And that's the even bigger issue, right?
No, I don't think that if you are a woman who is taking testosterone because you're confused about what sex you are, that you should be feeding a baby milk from your breast, but you
Definitely shouldn't have been gestating for nine months either and frankly like over and over and over again you know you've got at the at the just really really broad brush level you've got two kinds of effects of hormones and I've said this before and it's much more complicated than this but somehow even this level of different kinds of effects is missing from all of the trans ideologues arguments.
Activational effects of, for instance, testosterone are those that have an effect in the moment and at the point that you stop being on the testosterone those effects will disappear.
Organizational effects have effects that lay down pathways, that establish anatomical and physiological realities, that even if later the testosterone stops, the effects of it do not.
They effectively organized, hence organizational effects, organized your body, your shape, your physiology, your anatomy in an irreversible way.
If you have been on testosterone as a woman and you decide, oh, I actually want to become a mother, and you won't call it that because you're that kind of confused, but I, you know, I want to gestate a baby.
And maybe you have one of the better, but still, frankly, should be criminal gender doctors who says, oh, well, you should at least go off the testosterone while you're pregnant.
Still.
What is having Ben on testosterone?
What are the effects of that going to be on your pregnancy?
And once you're not pregnant anymore presumably you're just allowed to go back on it and then you're feeding that directly to your kid.
So none of this is good for the child.
So this is the point I want to get at.
The most fundamental thing, in our book, we talk about love.
We talk about what it is, and the most fundamental kind of love, the elemental kind, from which all of the others are derived, is maternal love of offspring, right?
In mammals, that's where it starts, right?
Now, the problem is, Let's say that you were born female and you feel that your sex is at odds with your body.
Well, you are either in a position that that is your priority, In which case, you should not be producing offspring, because actually, this is inconsistent with the well-being of your offspring, and your obligation as a mother is to your offspring.
Fundamentally.
Fundamentally.
And so the point is, maybe you're born female, you feel male, and you say, you know what?
Maybe I feel male, but my parental obligation supersedes that, right?
And I'm gonna just suck it up and deal with the dysphoria, and I'm gonna Live as a female, right, and I'm going to do right by my offspring, or the point is actually I can't live like this, in which case, oh, then don't have a kid, right?
Because the point is, what do you mean you feel male and you want to have a baby, right?
Like, No, that's inconsistent.
One.
And B, your obligation is to the baby, right?
Parents sacrifice for offspring, period.
The end.
That's what parenthood is.
And if you can't sacrifice... And you can choose not to be a parent.
Right.
And do.
But once you've chosen to be a parent, that is your priority.
Right.
Now, this then raises that other issue that you were talking about, which I guess we don't have a screenshot of, but this person, this male who had quote-unquote transitioned to female, who was nursing an offspring, and... I could find it.
I don't know.
I don't know if we want to see it or not, but... Yeah, well, in any case, people can certainly Conjure the idea of a person a born male Transitioned to female nursing a child or nursing is the wrong term but engaging in behavior that looks like nursing with a child and
Give a thought for a moment to... yeah, do you want to?
Yeah, I don't know.
You don't think so?
I don't know.
I don't, I don't, I don't... yeah, I don't, I don't think anything about this person is, um, sane.
Yeah, no, it, well, it's insane, and maybe not, maybe not, and actually here, here's the reason we mustn't, I would argue.
That baby, is going to grow up and face a world in which people have looked at this image and politicized it.
Yeah.
And... That baby did nothing wrong.
A baby did nothing wrong.
They have been harmed by a society that has rules against people gratifying them sexually with children.
Right?
Very important rules.
Fundamental rules.
For a reason.
Right?
And then we have somebody engaged in some kind of pantomime.
A man appearing to nurse a baby with no thought to what the impact on that baby will be, not only of the behavior itself, but of the fact of having been observed but of the fact of having been observed in this person's self-gratification at whatever level it existed.
I mean it's the reveal that there's no parenting going on, that parenting needs to have a selflessness at its core, a recognition that it's not all about you anymore and at some point it will become entirely not about you and entirely about your child and you have to prioritize them.
And instead what we are doing now is reveling in narcissism, reveling in selfishness.
And in, well, I feel like this and therefore I get to have what I want.
That's just not the way either reality works or society is supposed to work.
And society isn't working, but it's increasingly the way that society is being forced to sort of chug along until it finally dies.
So I want to connect the two topics that we've covered today.
There's a behavior that I would call, I don't know, getting your foot in the door.
So weeks ago, and literally it was weeks ago, we were discussing the absurdity of chest feeding in the form that somebody born female transitions to male and then breastfeeds an offspring and that we have to call it chest feeding for some reason, right?
That is an absurdity at the linguistic level, right?
It is a tiny fraction of the absurdity at the biological level of a person born male who then pantomimes breastfeeding, even if they're leaking at the breast somehow because of some hormone they've been taking.
Yeah, there's some drugs apparently that can promote such discharge.
They can promote a discharge, but the point is, that ain't feedin'.
Right.
But, my point is, once you carve out the idea that, oh, we used to say breastfeeding, but that's disrespectful to some fraction of the population, we must now call it chest feeding, in order not to disrespect certain people.
Oh, you're calling it chest feeding?
Hey, guess who else has a chest?
Right?
Now you've got some dude leaking at the breast, right, photographing himself, and the point is, oh, well, you said you're okay with chest feeding.
How is this not chest feeding?
And the point is, ah, you've got your foot in the door with people born female who want to nurse children and don't want to have it called breastfeeding because it's disrespectful, and now you've got dudes doing it?
You've got your foot in the door, and then you keep the thing wide open.
Here's the connection to the other topic.
The GMO industry, Monsanto in particular, created a market for itself with Roundup Ready crops, right?
Roundup Ready crops are crops that have been engineered to tolerate an herbicide that weeds cannot tolerate, right?
That's the technology.
That technology involves Spraying this stuff early in the life cycle of crops.
Yep.
Right?
That gives, it's not safe, but it gives a lot of time for the thing to degrade in the sun.
It gives a lot of time for it to be washed off the plant so that at the point that you eat, you know, if you sprayed it on early so that the plant erupts from the soil, gets a jump on the weeds, And then it doesn't, you know, once it's a mature plant, it doesn't need that jump on the weed, so you're not spraying it late.
And then, you know, a cucumber emerges from the vine, right?
The point is, how much of that herbicide does the cucumber have?
Some.
It shouldn't.
That's bad.
But it's a tiny fraction of what would happen if you sprayed it on the cucumber.
Now, here's the point.
Roundup Ready Crops got GMOs Through the door and the particular Roundup compound into the agricultural space.
Yeah.
At which point it was discovered that it could be used as a desiccant.
That's right.
And you could spray it on wheat.
When do you do that?
Oh, at the end, after the wheat is dead, right?
So that it doesn't get mold.
You keep it dry by spraying Roundup on it.
Well, wait.
You just sprayed it on something we're going to eat.
It's like, it's not, it's the opposite of the cucumber, where the cucumber didn't get sprayed because the plant was early in its life cycle when you did the spraying, and now you're spraying it on something we're actually going to grind up and turn into loaves of bread.
Right?
Who said that was safe?
The point is, in the mine, you kick the door open with Roundup-ready crops, and then the point is, well, it's the same compound.
You said we could spray it on the, on the crops.
Right?
So now we're going to spray it on the freaking wheat.
And, you know, it's like, Okay.
Chest feeding by someone born male is linguistically twice as dumb as chest feeding by somebody born female who's transitioned to male.
It is biologically 200,000 times as dumb.
Yeah.
Right?
This is the same thing.
Spraying Roundup on your cucumber patch early, before there are any cucumbers, That's dumb.
Yeah.
Spraying it on wheat at the end of its life cycle to keep mold from growing on it?
The very wheat that will be turned into the bread that you eat.
Yeah.
That's orders of magnitude more dumb.
But the point is, you kicked the door open, you know, after you got your foot in, and the point is mentally it didn't seem that different.
So whatever.
That's how it happened.
Yeah.
How are you going to stop it?
There's so many things to worry about.
Just, just trust them.
You know, I know this roundup.
I know it's not good.
Well, it's not one thing.
You're doing two totally different things, right?
Yeah.
You know, it's like the difference between, you know, a glass of water and a lake.
You probably could drown in a glass of water, but you're more likely to drown in a lake.
I think moderns would be more capable of drowning in a glass of water than people 100 years ago.
That might be, yeah, totally.
I think we're creating, among many other disabilities, the ability to drown in amazingly small bodies of water.
That seemed to be what we're working up towards.
Is there anything we can do?
Can we make this a little bit more upbeat?
We're not going to be back for a week and a half.
This is terrible.
Everything here.
The endocrine disruption that we are doing across the board.
It turns out that atrazine is an herbicide.
It's not explicitly targeting an endocrine system of another animal, but there's plenty of actual toxins that we are spraying on things in order to get at the so-called pests, you know, the pesticides that are actually endocrine disruptors that we are also just, you know, spreading across our landscape, into our the pesticides that are actually endocrine disruptors that we are also just, you know, And we can't evade it.
And the New York Times takes a mocking tone and says, there's no evidence that that even, yeah, it messes with frogs, but there's no evidence that could have possibly have any effect on humans.
Have you guys ever thought scientifically for half a second?
Like in any way?
Do you in fact believe in evolution?
You claim to be the ones who are all about evolution.
I don't think you understand a damn thing.
Yeah, well, this is this is a this is a basic failure of our educational system.
And you know, it comes at different levels.
But you know, we meet people all the time.
I wasn't good at biology.
Well, I know what happened to you.
You had a Bad biology teacher who didn't know what they were doing and they tried to make you memorize the Krebs Cycle or they overly focused on, you know, Kingdom, Phylum, etc.
Memorization!
Memorize the 20 amino acids!
Memorize them!
It was boring and it contained no power and you probably didn't get a good grade and you felt like you weren't good at doing biology.
But the result of all of that Is that people do not, A, they are denied the benefit of understanding what they even are, right?
You're a walking miracle in a world of other miracles, and in order to appreciate that fully, you need to understand the biology, and even better if you understand that that miracle came about without a miracle worker, right?
Yeah.
People are denied that value, which is a tragedy, but it is also, it is mentally crippling because you do not intuit the degree to which your body is capable of dealing with all of these insults.
But the cost of the insults is massive.
And, you know, again, back to the idea of what happens if you stand in an airport and just watch people walk by and ask yourself, How healthy do they look, right?
How many people have to pass by before I see somebody and say, actually that person is just attractive in the sense that we used to mean it, right?
You know, we are paying a huge price for things that we don't see.
And the New York Times and all of its, you know, petty little companions in the, what used to be called journalism, are still beating the same drum.
Where it's, you can't prove that's what did the harm.
It's like, okay, but why aren't you interested in what did?
Right?
Precisely.
Precisely.
We've got a rise in all of the indicators of poor human health, and there is very little Evidence for any one particular thing that has changed in the 20th century being the cause for any of them.
Because how could there be?
Because everything changed at once.
But what we did do was we started spraying our lands and filling our water and filling our bodies with a bunch of chemicals, many of which are actually known to be endocrine disruptors and reproductive And reproductive development halters and chaos agents.
And unfortunately it's worse than that.
It's always worse than that.
Yeah, it's always worse than that.
One of the things that we do touch on in our book, and I think is eventually going to become a much broader field, is There are all sorts of things that are capable of doing biological damage that do not come in the form of physical interference or physiological disruption at the chemical level, right?
Like light levels, like noise pollution, Right?
That there is a kind of disruption that you can do to a biological organism, that hyper-novelty basically exists throughout a wide spectrum of possible mechanisms of interference that we do not intuit.
When you flip a light switch, you do not feel like you could be doing anything that could do biological damage.
Right?
Are you telling me that being exposed to light does biological damage?
It does informational damage.
Yeah.
Right?
You don't intuit it.
What we can see is only a tiny fraction of what the spectrum, the electromagnetic spectrum is, and we feel vaguely, unconsciously, subconsciously, after a long time inside that something's not quite right, but we can't see the difference with some light.
With some light we can even see it, but for a lot of light we can't see it, but we feel it.
Our health is affected.
Well, but not only that, you've got the difference in the spectrum which has been edited down to that which you can directly perceive because that's what causes you to buy the bulb, you know, in the shop.
We've got the frequency of the flickering which you can't see but has impacts.
We've got the implication about what time of day it is based on the spectrum of the light.
There are all kinds of ways that electric light can be destructive and we don't intuit it because we tend to think of Creatures with the partially correct analogy to machines, right?
Lots of people say, oh, we're not machines.
We're not computers.
I actually think we are.
We are not machines in the narrowest sense of a car, but we are aqueous machines and computers.
And fantastically, I mean, self-building, right?
Okay, you're a machine, but you're also a self-building machine, right?
How easy is it to disrupt this?
Yeah, I don't like the word machine here.
I know, but the basic point is our intuitions are crappy over what can possibly do damage, and that has made it very easy For people who have a perverse incentive to get in the road of establishing that actually there's a kind of harm that is indirect but profound.
And that's where we are.
We're having the same argument again and again where the people with the perverse incentives are in a position to overwhelm our ability to establish that actually this is bad for us.
Yep.
I don't know what to say to make it to bring us back up before we end.
I thought that was pretty uplifting.
No, you didn't.
All right, maybe I didn't.
Even the dog is disgusted.
He's like, I'm out of here.
Yeah.
I'm gonna go outside and bark at something.
Man's greatest invention.
Yeah, can I go bark at the CDC?
Please.
Yeah, they won't listen though.
All right, we are going to take a 15-minute break and then come back with a short, probably today, live Q&A.
Ask questions at darkhorsesubmissions.com.
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