#192 How Now New World Cow (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 192nd 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 how cattle got to the New World, and when and from where, and what that implies about the first cowboys. We discuss the fact that Nature published this compelling piece of research, and Science reported on it all wrong. We marvel that Nature admits that “scientists are under attack for someone els...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 191.
Two.
Two.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Hying.
I have just returned from a trip to hell.
I went to hell.
I am now back.
Welcome back.
Thank you.
I had a run-in with the coronavirus and I know that the variant that is circulating currently is supposed to be very mild.
That was not my experience.
My experience was quite profound.
Now, I should say I did not test positive.
I took six tests, including a PCR, never came up positive, but the symptoms were so square on the money that the nurse who saw me and the doctor with whom I consulted agree with me that it really had to be coronavirus.
But anyway, watch yourselves out there.
It's still out there.
It's not a good disease.
It isn't especially deadly.
I never feared I was going to die, but Man, it was not pleasant.
You were not well.
I was not well.
Yeah, and you're still recovering.
As such, while we are going to cram in a number of live streams here to accommodate the missing ones and to accommodate upcoming travel as well, we are not going to do any Q&As until otherwise noted, and I'm going to read all the ads today, and like that.
So I'm going to respond to each of the ads with a single word that sums up my feelings.
Excellent.
That way I will do my part.
Is that a promise?
It's a threat.
Oh, no, no.
I take it as a promise.
All right.
All right.
It's a promise.
All right.
So join us.
Join us on Rumble.
Join us on Locals.
These are organizations that are fiercely pro Fiercely pro-free speech.
Fiercely free speech.
And right now we are streaming on Rumble and our watch party is on Locals at our Locals station?
Channel?
Community.
Community.
Thank you.
And also at our Locals, we have our private monthly Q&A, which we had to delay last week, but we'll be doing this upcoming Sunday.
Zach and I did a live AMA last Wednesday, which I think is available, right?
That's available.
So you get to see our producer and me answering questions just a week ago now.
And there's going to be Discord servers up there anyway.
Please join us on Locals and join us on Rumble and support these awesome platforms.
We are going to talk about cows today.
Yes, we are.
And I'll just leave it at that, and a number of other things as well.
We always have sponsors at the top of the hour.
We are very grateful to our sponsors.
They help us do what we do, and we are very choosy about whom we accept.
So if you hear us read ads for sponsors for products that are of interest to you here, you can be assured that we are actually vouching for them.
Without further ado, here we go.
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Absolutely.
Terrible.
Terrible.
I'm not fully well.
I'm still recovering.
So, I mean, it wasn't bad.
No, it was terrible.
It was in the right direction.
For those of you who are tuning in in the middle, Brett promised, because I'm going to read all the ads this week on account of his voice going in and out, to offer a single word after I read the ad.
Summation of my feelings upon your completion of the ad, which I did.
M.D.
hearing is awesome.
They are awesome.
Brett's one word summary was terrible.
Oh my god.
That's pretty meta though, the evaluation of my summary being fair to middling.
Oh, no, no.
It wasn't fair to Middling.
It was awful.
Oh, all right.
That was great inflation on my part.
Yes, yes.
An experience with which you have very little.
No experience at all.
You had the opposite.
Yes, I did.
Over and over and over again.
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Delicious.
Is that better?
That's better.
Okay.
Yep.
And you would know.
I'm one of very few who would know.
No, I'm one of many who would know, but one of few who would report out.
Yeah, especially after you admitted that you had tasted it.
Others also tasted it.
They probably did.
No, I was thinking that most of those who know are actually dogs who do not report out.
No, they don't.
But I do.
And there, once again, we have a little sheaf of dog behind us.
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And I will say, I'm just going to take a little aside here within this seed ad, because they suggested we talk about sleep, and so we're not going totally off script here.
We have had the last two nights, and we have one more night coming, county-wide planned power outages in the San Juan Islands.
And from 10 p.m.
to 6 a.m.
ish, although the power comes on a little bit earlier than that.
And it is amazing
how even even for people who work on keeping lights and noise and electronics out of their immediate sleep environment how it feels different when there is no buzz there's no hum there is no background anything going on and you know this again from people who you know we don't have i don't have my phone in the room we don't have electronics we don't have any lights you know it's it's it's dark and quiet and still
You know, the electrons are racing through the walls when the power is on, and it has been remarkable the last couple nights.
Yeah, I notice this whenever I travel, because you and I are ruthless about this stuff.
Yeah.
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The number of, like, LED lights.
Every time we travel, we're like, ah, we have to travel with some electrical tape and just, like, cover the lights, right?
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You can still walk around and see, and it's remarkable.
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Spectacular.
All right.
I blame the cough syrup.
Do you?
Yes, I do.
It is making this broadcast possible, so I'm loathe to give it a hard time.
But yeah, I think that was the cough syrup talking.
Spectacular.
Yeah.
I mean, I think it is a spectacular product, but it's just... It is a spectacular product.
It's generic.
My commentary.
Your one word description for one and three were generic.
I know.
But given where I've been, given where I was four days ago, you know, I feel I'm succeeding at the exercise.
Okay.
Shall I start or should you start?
I think you should start.
Okay, I will start.
I thought, so I think I'm going to save a number of things for Saturday, but I was thinking about talking about how Ridiculous the mainstream media has become, and maybe this is part of where you're going to go.
But I have some examples here from magazines that I subscribe to, that come into our house, and that are just, just have lost the plot if the plot is in fact about journalism, right?
And then into the middle of that comes Nature, one of the two premier scientific journals, adoring, absurd interview with Peter Hotez about his new book and the trials he's been through, which maybe we talk about a little bit.
But into that mix, I find a paper published in the Open Access Nature publication.
This is pretty new.
Within a few decades, we had these two big flagship journals, and now they've got a ton of journals underneath them.
It's a nature journal, but the journal in particular that I'm referring to here is called Scientific Reports.
They've metastasized.
So the research that I came across is remarkable, and I thought, cool, I want to just talk about a result, like a scientific question that's out there, and a result, and it's published in this Nature property called Scientific Reports, and it's awesome, and it sent me down a few other roads, and, uh, I don't know, maybe there's still hope for science?
Maybe?
I'm not talking about the journal.
Oh!
Like, we need for there to be hope for science!
There is nothing but hope for science.
There is no hope for the academic thing that has been captured that pretends to be synonymous with science.
Yeah.
Yeah, so with that intro, it's about cows, which does not sound all that interesting, I imagine.
But this article that's been published changes our understanding of when and where cattle came from in the New World, and what that might mean about the nature of cowboys as well.
So the New World, that's the Americas, North and South America, have no native cattle.
The bovines, and everyone I think knows that a cow is a bovine, the bovines are a larger group that includes water buffalo, some of the things we call antelope, although antelope is a polyphyletic group.
Antelope isn't a good phylogenetic term.
One minor correction.
I think you mean bovids.
Nope.
I mean bovines.
You mean bovines.
All right.
I stand corrected.
You know, I went I went down this little rabbit warren a little bit, and I do not mean lagomorphs.
Right.
Yeah, I had bovids written down and then I went in and I was like, okay, apparently it's bovines, I don't care.
Right.
But it's bovines, larger group that include water buffalo.
And you know, I actually, I think that there's still disagreement in the literature around this, so I don't think we should spend time there.
But it's this larger group that includes water buffalo, some of the things we call antelope, although antelope isn't a good group, and the pronghorn in the New World is not a true antelope, and so it's actually a different kind of organism.
And then bison.
So bison are New World, and bison, of course, were incredibly abundant in the New World at the point that At the point, well, presumably that the first people showed up whenever exactly that was 15,000, 30,000 something years ago, right?
A long time ago.
And still extraordinarily abundant at the point that the Europeans showed up several hundred years ago.
But they're quite distinct.
Bison and cattle, which the domesticated forms that got domesticated at least twice distinctly in the old world and got brought over to the new world, are quite distinct from buffalo.
And in fact, not just phylogenetically distinct, but physiologically and ecologically distinct enough that you can't really You can't just assume that cattle will do well any place that bison did do well.
And in fact, bison don't do well some places that cattle can go in and if they're allowed to just run wild, will do damage.
So, you know, we have these fights, these modern fights around public lands and grazing and such.
And some of the arguments have been like, well, bison, like, well, you know, bison and cattle haven't done the same things.
They haven't been able to go the same places and they don't have the same effects on ecosystems.
Question for you, to which you may not know the answer.
Bison is a wild animal.
Yeah.
Cattle are derived from some wild animal, and I admit that at this moment I'm struggling to remember what its wild progenitor was.
It's, I think it's boss aurochs, maybe?
And I'm probably mispronouncing that word.
It's in this paper somewhere.
Actually, I was going to read this.
So I'll just read this little piece from this paper right now before I continue with my little story that I was going to do.
So you can show this if you like.
So this is actually, Zach, you can show it if you like.
This is in this paper, Scientific Reports, which is actually an open access journal, which is nice.
It's a nature property, but it's open access.
Ancient DNA confirms diverse origins of early post-Columbian cattle in the Americas.
And I was not ready to go here yet, so I'm going to go back to the story I was going to go to, but since you asked the question.
Phylogeographic background of cattle in the Americas.
Let me make that a little bit bigger for those of you at home.
That did not work.
I have to make it smaller again to fit it all on the screen.
Phylogeographic background of cattle in the Americas.
The phylogeographic history of post-Columbian cattle can be described along two main branches, the maternal lineages, defined by mutations to the mitochondrial genome, and the paternal lineages, described by divergences in part of the Y chromosome.
Modern cattle emerged out of two separate domestication events.
Aurochs, Bas primogenius, were first domesticated in southwest Asia around 10,500 years before present, giving were first domesticated in southwest Asia around 10,500 years before present, giving rise to the Taurian lineages, About 8,000 years before present, South Asian wild cattle were then domesticated and gave rise to Bas indicus, the zebu or Indesign domestic cattle.
Got it.
So one of these is a humped... Right.
So what we always saw in Madagascar were Zibu.
So, you know, just further...
A total tangent here, but Madagascar, just off the coast, giant island, fourth largest island in the world, just off the east coast of Africa, is not African.
You know, it's originally part of Gondwana, which split and separated into South America, Africa, Madagascar, India, Australia.
Antarctica, but Africa actually split away earlier such that Madagascar is much more closely aligned evolutionarily and geologically even with India and Australia and South America even, and presumably if we could do ice cores in Antarctica we'd find stuff there too.
But anyway, the cattle that you have in Madagascar are in fact these newer more recently domesticated zebu rather than the ones with which we are mostly familiar in the New World.
Can I get my screen back so I can think?
So, so bison are New World but are not cattle.
We've got two different domestication events in the old world.
And bison, as I was saying before you asked your question, are really distinct, both phylogenetically, but also physiologically and ecologically, and they were never domesticated.
So they were obviously hunted.
There are a lot of ways that the local people across the range of bison in the New World, were hunting bison, but they were not domesticated the way that Bas Taurus and Bas Indicus became domesticated. - So I wanna take a little detour here Go for it.
The book Guns, Germs & Steel is very much worth your time, and if you don't have time to read it, it is very much worth looking at the much slimmer three-volume, three-hour documentary that was made of the book.
It will give you the gist.
But one of the really deep points in Guns, Germs & Steel is that it is not a haphazard assortment of creatures that just happen to be domesticated, where people thought, hey, it would be cool to have one of those where I knew where to find it when I wanted to eat it.
This is not the way this works at all.
And the argument is made in a very compelling way by Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel.
But the point is, when we say that bison were not domesticated, what we are really saying is they are not domesticable.
Because, undoubtedly, it was attempted.
And the point is, the characteristics that are required... Because it's not that the New World peoples didn't domesticate animals.
Right.
They did.
Not very many, but... And in fact, there's only one large mammal that was successfully domesticated in the New World, and it was vicuña, or... it was one of the camelids.
Alpaca, I'm gonna guess, yeah.
But in any case, the point is, one of the really powerful arguments in that book is that the different wealth of different populations on the world came down to historical accident.
That the number of creatures that were useful and domesticable that were concentrated in East Asia was high, and those animals could be moved east to west because climatologically things didn't change radically as you moved across Eurasia.
And That actually tells the story about why certain human groups devastated other human groups.
The luck of having domesticable creatures in your environment was huge.
It was not the only piece of luck, but it was one of the major ones.
So there's one thing buried in what you said that is absolutely true but may not be obvious to people, but it's critical to Diamond's hypothesis and to the understanding of how things interact across the world, which is what you said was, as you move east to west, things don't inherently change climatologically as much as they do as you move north to south.
That is, as you change latitude, as you move from the equator to the poles, you inherently go into more highly seasonal with regard to temperature regime changes and more extreme climates.
And whereas, as you move east to west, you can certainly experience great climatological change.
And coastal regions from inland regions, lowland regions from upland regions, are going to be predictably different from one another.
But especially if you have not particularly changed your distance from a coast or your distance above sea level, your altitude, moving east to west doesn't inherently change much.
And so you should be able to take something from one space and move it, you know, hundreds, even thousands of miles to the left or the right on the globe, effectively east or west.
But if you try to do that north or south, you're likely to run into trouble.
Right.
But anyway, so, you know, bison are what they are from the point of view of the big packet of nutrients that are available to anybody who can bring one down.
And they look similar.
They're closely related, but they're just not identical.
But actually, the key example to the distinction is zebra, right?
A zebra is a striped horse, never domesticated.
Not domesticated because its temperament makes it impossible to domesticate because the environment it lives in is so perilous that what you have is an extremely jittery animal, right?
And that extremely jittery animal can't be domesticated.
So the point is... And those of us who want pet zebras are reduced to turning them into ceramic and putting them on our desks.
We have to go with the second best ceramic zebra strategy.
Mm-hmm.
But this is a really important point because, you know, of course, a zebra would be just as useful as a horse if you could get it to behave in the ways that horses do.
And fancier.
Yeah.
I mean, better all around.
Careful!
You could antagonize the horse contingent here.
I know.
Well, I used to give Dick Alexander a hard time about this because he was a horse fanatic, and I kept telling him that if he really wanted to do the job right, he needed zebras, which never failed to produce annoyance on his part.
But anyway, the domesticability of creatures is the key question, and it didn't happen here for the various reasons that put them off the list.
Indeed.
All right, so bison in the New World were never domesticated, and the stem cattle from which our modern domesticated cattle were domesticated came from the Old World.
So when Columbus arrived in the New World in 1493, he brought with him cattle from Spain.
They had apparently actually come off the Canary Islands, which is 50 miles or so off the west coast of Africa.
But those, we think, we think, historians and others who think about this professionally, think had come from Spanish cattle.
And he thus introduced what become this major transformational species in the New World, because cattle, of course, have become culturally, economically, just a huge piece of what it is to be in the New World.
And this is true now, but it was in some ways even more prominent in the early days of the Spanish colonial activities here.
OK, so it has been assumed, therefore, for a long time that the vast majority of New World cattle come from Europe, which then tells one kind of story about how those cattle were used and who was managing them.
But this new work that was published this week strongly suggests that cattle were brought from Africa far earlier than had been imagined.
And so let me say I've now said, OK, there were two different domestication events.
What was it like 10,500 years ago?
And 8,000 years ago or so.
But the Western, the older domestication event which produced basically the cattle that we are familiar with mostly and the cattle in Europe and Africa are all from that first domestication event.
However, they've been domesticated for so long, and they exist across this great latitudinal gradient from Northern Europe all the way into Africa, that they too have begun to diversify.
And so we can tell with some modern genetic tools, along two different lines of evidence, that something about where these cattle may have been coming from.
So the two different lines of evidence, as was implied but not well spelled out in that little paragraph that I read before, are matriline, which is they can look at mitochondrial DNA, and they're also looking at patriline, which is changes in the evolution of the Y chromosome.
Okay, but I missed something.
I thought I heard you say That cattle were introduced more than once and... Introduced to where?
To the New World.
Well, this is what this news... Okay, go on.
But here's the question.
The cattle that would have been in Africa would not have been Zibu?
No.
They weren't.
Right.
So where in it were these Southern African cattle?
Were they brought in No, no.
It's West Africa, and I don't want to give away the punchline here, but the potentially confusing thing here is that these cattle that we did know that historians, I don't know if it's archaeologists, that people who have been thinking about cattle in the New World and cattle throughout the Old World, and also the people who were working with them,
and what it meant to be a cowboy in the New World did know.
It has been widely accepted, and I think this is not changing, this part of the story is not changing, that the first cattle brought into the New World were brought by Columbus in 1493.
But it has been thought that while there was evidence, and that was basically European cattle, And it's been thought that while there were some African cattle that were brought in that have mixed with the European cattle, both of which are not the Zibu, this is all Bas Taurus, okay, that that happened a couple hundred years later.
And basically at that point, the Spaniards had everything figured out, and they were brought in because they were better, because basically West Africa had some similarity ecologically to some of, for instance, like the Pampas in Argentina, Whereas the cattle coming out of Europe weren't doing as well in some of the landscapes that people were trying to introduce cattle into in the New World.
And the story has been that the Spaniards had all the cattlemanship that they needed, and that they were sometimes employing enslaved populations to work with the cattle, to handle the cattle, but that this was basically just unskilled labor, that this was brute force labor, and that they had nothing to do with the actual working of the cattle.
And so you can maybe begin to see, I'm jumping forward here a little bit, what it might mean to discover that actually African cattle, truly African cattle, had been introduced to the New World earlier than we had thought.
So, what this new research finds by looking at two different kinds of genetic evidence, again, through the mother, the matriline, through mitochondrial DNA, which is only transferred through the matriline, and patriline-level evidence through changes in basically the Y chromosome, And they've begun this research, they've sourced bones from museums all over the New World, and of course, archaeological digs all the time, looking at that also.
What they find is basically out of step with what the historical records have said about when African cattle started to be brought over.
Now, historical records are largely going to have been recorded at the time by religious authorities from Spain, who had an interest in telling a story that befitted them.
And so this paragraph that I already read to you guys sort of recaps what I've said so far about two different kinds of evidence and where the cattle are coming from.
The New Work says, yes, we think it's right, first kettle in the New World, late 1400s, picked up on the Canary Islands, but basically from Europe, from Spain.
Far earlier than we had first thought, in the early 1600s, basically a hundred years after the first introduction of cattle into the New World, we have cattle coming in from Africa.
And let me find this paragraph here, the last paragraph of the discussion, I believe, if I can get my computer to show what I need it to show.
Sorry, guys.
Lineages.
Here we go.
Okay, so my computer is not doing what I want it to do.
I just want to show this paragraph.
Here we go.
Okay, now you can show it.
This is the final paragraph of the discussion, African origins question mark.
The question of the potential African origin of some colonial cattle is of immense historical significance, and has deep social and cultural ramifications, particularly when considering the central role played by African workers in setting up the ranching industry in the colonial Americas.
Our archaeological genetic evidence of cattle parallels these documented aspects of the early Spanish Empire in the Americas, the organization of the colonial labor system, the timing of the African slave trade, and the high specialization of enslaved workers in cattle management.
While the European colonists held most of the economic and political power, they relied on a diverse workforce, mainly composed of native and African coerced workers to generate their wealth in both urban and rural regions from Mexico to Peru.
In rural areas, the knowledge of these laborers and their adaptability to the tropical conditions of some parts of Spanish America were also particularly valued.
Workers of African descent were particularly prominent in one craft in particular—cattle ranching.
Numerous historical sources suggest that this enslaved workforce played a crucial role in the management of the numerous herds of cattle that roamed semi-freely in different regions of the Americas—Caribbean, Gulf Coast of Mexico, Oaxaca, South America, and Llanos.
Overall, it seems that complex trans-colonial collaborations opened a potential conduit for a wide array of products, including cattle, alongside enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and Mesoamerican regions after the 1550s.
Our data, while not fully conclusive, further supports the hypothesis that cattle were also imported from Africa to the Americas, highlighting the central role of African herders in the emergence of a new agricultural landscape mainly based on cattle ranching.
There's a lot there, and one thing to sort of untangle there is
There seems to have been, and this has been long understood by people who are tracking the African slave trade into the new world, a focus in part on pulling people, on stealing people from their homelands and moving them to a totally new place, who were themselves skilled ranchers, who were themselves active domesticators of and herders of cattle.
And with this, with these new, and you know, the data are a little dicey, and I'm not going into it, like the Patraline data only, they had eight, I think, eight samples, only three of them yielded anything.
So, you know, there's, it's, it's not beautiful, you know, beautifully clear data, and it's, you were, you require a lot of inference to, to figure these things out.
But if they're right, if they're right that African cattle were actually brought in only a hundred years or so, about after the first cattle were introduced to the New World, and that is also a very tight fit for when the slave trade started to pick up, then probably what was happening was that the cattle and the people were brought in simultaneously, and the people were brought in in part because they already had expertise with these cattle.
And this begins to change a really important part of a story around, you know, the European peopling of the New World, where this image that we have of, you know, John Wayne-style cowboys on a horse in the American West, while true, was not the first time that we had cowboys in the New World.
And, in fact, what it seems like is that very likely African and African-American peoples were, in fact, the first cowboys in the New World.
All right.
So this the whole time that you were setting this up, there was the elephant shrew in the room for me, which is what we mammologists say instead of the elephant in the room.
You've never said that before?
No, nor has any other mammologist.
Nor even do elephant trees say it.
It is the kind of thing that even in that company would elicit an eye roll if I said something like that, which would make me feel strangely good.
The thing that was not adding up to me at all was the calculus that would cause people to actually import members of a species that was already present on the target end of the journey.
The difficulty of transporting, especially, you know, live creatures that consume vast amounts of resource.
The advantage, you know, the way you set it up, it sounded like, well, these animals were from a place that might make them better prepared.
You know, the language we would obviously use is they'd be better adapted to the habitats where they might be ending up.
But that requires that people understand some analog of better adapted And this would obviously be very early for such an understanding, although there was clearly an understanding of the kinds of selection that one has to go through in order to shape creatures under domestication.
But it did occur to me, in fact it was the hypothesis that I was going to float, was that what they were really importing was a Useful pair, people who knew the animals, and animals that responded in a productive way.
But that requires, I mean, this really tells a very different story, right?
That it would be worth paying the huge cost of importing redundant creatures Because of the much better yield that one would get from people who are already, you're calling them cowboys, but somehow already expert in managing these particular individuals, and presumably that means the exact living individual that was transported.
Presumably it is not that the people in question were better at managing creatures with genetics like the cows that they had been managing.
Right, although there was probably some, there was cultural understanding of how to be a cattle herder among the populations of people who were stolen and enslaved and moved across the Atlantic.
Of course, right, but the point is if what you were really getting was the expertise, which no doubt they did, you don't need to import the animals.
The point is that animal is like the one that you've been dealing with, deal with it the same way.
And this is a step beyond that, the idea that there might be enough value In getting people who were expert at these particular animals, who then might have an impact on their own offspring.
In other words, you have in mammals this capacity to pass inherent information both in the genome and outside of it.
The cow that gives birth to a calf, the cow has an interaction with the person who's managing it and passes on some of the information about how to be managed to her offspring passively.
So it's still hard for me to imagine that that overcomes the huge cost of importing these animals.
But it does demand some sort of an explanation.
There were apparently several importation events.
That sounds like the wrong word, importation.
But there were, the historical record shows, several instances of moving cows over, in part because the initial import was a tiny number of cows.
Well, and that has a couple of downsides.
One, you know, you create a huge bottleneck that has powerful implications over, you know, you have basically a not very diverse offspring population, no matter how big it is, which means It's a slow to adapt be more vulnerable to things like disease But of course the people in question wouldn't really understand that they might have some sort of intuitive sense But they will have they presumably will have been experiencing.
Oh my god, our cattle aren't doing very well.
We need to bring in more somehow, you know these after Make up numbers here.
You know, after 10 generations of breeding these 10 cattle together, these original 10 cattle together, they're getting less and less fecund.
They're getting more and more susceptible to disease.
Maybe we need some new blood.
And, you know, that's a phrase that has been used.
Yeah.
And it's actually, you know, no one had to know what that actually meant.
No one had to know about inbreeding depression in order to say we need some new blood and that's going to help solve this problem.
Right.
And undoubtedly, skilled breeders would have some sort of language for this.
That line is too narrow.
It's too close.
Yeah, much, but I don't think we were really talking about skilled breeders in the 1500s in the New World.
No.
We were talking about, you know, Spanish colonial... I'm talking on the other end.
That you would have people who had had experience successfully, you know, they wouldn't necessarily know what they knew.
Yeah.
Right?
They would, those who... So what, you're talking about Africa now?
Or you're talking about having small African populations of both cattle and people having been brought over?
I'm talking about the people who made the decision to put cattle on ships who are presumably not Africans.
That in farming circles, people had useful knowledge encoded in ways that was only partly literal, right?
There are instincts about, you shouldn't do that, and you may not know exactly why it doesn't work.
So the point is still, you have to get to this, you know, in chemistry we'd call it the activation energy.
The point at which you know that it's not just a good idea to bring in some new cattle to your deceptively I guess it would be a deceptively large population.
It's a effectively small population because it was sourced from a tiny set of progenitors, but it looks like a large population.
To get to the point that you're actually importing new animals when you could get animals where you're going, it has to overcome that huge burden.
Well, I mean, so you've made an assumption that by the time African cattle were being brought over, along with African people being brought over, that there was already a large population of cattle in the New World.
And I don't know that that is true.
And I also suspect that by then, because there had been not that many individuals who had originally been brought over from the European breeds, that those cattle that were in the New World were probably not doing as well as they might have been.
Not doing as well as they might have been.
And so this suggests the other potential hypotheses.
One, you know, to us, looking down on a map of the New World, it sort of seems like, well, there were cattle here.
But, you know, if the cattle are 500 miles away from where you intend to set up cattle ranches, the difficulty of getting them there while smaller over land is not necessarily small.
And so you could imagine somebody making such a decision because they were trying to land some cattle somewhere that they weren't.
Totally.
So, a couple more things here.
There's a piece of work from 2015 by a guy named Sluiter, apologies if I'm butchering his name, published in a journal called Environment and History, called How Africans and Their Descendants Participated in Establishing Open-Range Cattle Ranching in the Americas.
And I have just a little paragraph to read from the paper.
It's a very interesting paper overall.
Before I read this paragraph, let me say there's a word in it.
This haratadera, I believe, is a pike pole tipped with a crescent hawking knife.
Uh, and it had been used, um, to capture feral cattle, um, and then been outlawed by the local Spanish authorities, uh, but enforcement of the law, um, outlawing it, uh, was racially biased.
So the Desjara Tadera, uh, was the way that feral cattle were chased down and they supposedly cut off at the, at the, uh, Achilles and then, and then, you know, pieces taken for whatever parts they wanted and then sort of left for their corpses to be, uh, to be taken by wild animals.
It was very wasteful, it was quite barbaric, and at a point that there was beginning to be food problems in various places, the Spanish authorities were like, no more!
You can't use that thing!
But they basically always punished dark-skinned people when they found them with it, and rarely punished white-skinned people.
So that's just a little bit of background here.
Setting up this conclusion, this very long paper, In which he argues, having laid out all the evidence previously, Africans and Afro-descendants in the Americas had antecedent knowledge of saddlehorns, lassos, and open-range cattle herding.
already knew about these things.
They had already invented them, had a substantial presence on ranches in New Spain, sometimes as major domos and owners with a consequent latitude to innovate, and had a strong motivation for inventing and refining a non-lethal alternative to the disharatadera to avoid the racially-based sanctions of the Mesta Ordinances of the late 16th century.
So that's just a tight summary of a number of pieces of evidence that I'm not going to go through here.
And this piece published eight years ago, in which, before there was any evidence that there were actually African cattle maybe already being brought over, like, you know what?
Actually the story about, yes, we're going to use slave labor to do our brute force work, but they don't know anything, do they?
And we're going to let the Spaniards do all the thinking.
There was already this sort of archival and material evidence around, actually, it seems like the Africans and the African Americans had a lot of knowledge that they would have used, that they actually seemed to have innovated both herding cattle on horseback and lassos, that those were innovations from Africans rather than from Spaniards, which is amazing.
Well, you know, this is the... We have this way that we think about slavery that is itself so deeply racist.
Right?
Totally.
The point about human slaves, and the point every time it's happened, it's not like slavery was invented, you know, for the new world.
Slavery is a very common pattern in human history.
The point is, A human being is smart, can innovate, can do things, can take instructions, and can figure out how to apply them in some situation that they weren't instructed over.
Can recognize patterns, recognize problems, solve the problems by using the patterns they have observed.
Right.
It's the ultimate beast of burden because it's smart.
And so the portrayal that this is about, you know, stupid brutes, no.
That's what the, you know, the animals...
That's what the animals were, right?
Sources of force, right?
The people were sources of innovation, insight, the ability to problem solve, and all of that, and we paper over that.
And it's a very foolish misunderstanding, because you do miss things like that.
You're surprised that, of course, you know, you know, any person set to do any difficult job figures out how to do it in ways that waste less of their time, that put them in less danger, right?
This is, this is the natural orientation of the human mind.
Exactly.
So, Sluyter, the author of the article from 2015, is quoted.
The way I found his work is that he's quoted in a science news article about this research that we've been talking about, which is indeed how I first got here.
Because the science news article is garbage.
It's garbage.
And here's what it looks like.
This is, again, Science in its News section reporting on this article in a Nature publication that we've been talking about, which finds that cows, the cattle, were brought over into the New World from Africa far earlier than we had thought, and what the implications for that are.
America's first cowboys were enslaved Africans, ancient cow DNA suggests.
Cattle may have been imported from Africa centuries earlier than historians thought.
Okay, so far so okay.
Think cowboy, and you might picture John Wayne riding herd across the U.S.
West.
But the first cowboys lived in Mexico and the Caribbean, and most of them were black.
That's the conclusion of a recent analysis of DNA from 400-year-old cow bones excavated on the island of Hispaniola and at sites in Mexico.
The work, published in Scientific Reports, also provides evidence that African cattle made it to the Americas at least a century earlier than historians realized.
So, that may sound like just a kind of slightly bungled and kind of vague report on the research that I've just told you guys about, but no.
The conclusion of the research, the research was African cattle made it to the Americas at least a century earlier than historians realized.
Again, not conclusive, but pretty strong evidence.
That is the actual conclusion.
The conclusion that Therefore, what was going on was Africans and African cattle being imported at the same time, and earliest cowboys in the New World being African.
That is an inference derived from the research.
They have reversed it.
The Science News article has reversed the actual research and claimed that what they were doing was one thing, and then, yes, you can also see this other thing about cows.
And I get it.
Cows aren't as sexy as racism and cowboys.
But, for fuck's sake.
This is why we can't have good science.
Yeah.
That's it right there.
It is.
And, you know.
It's an analog of my principle, which goes, the degree to which you can trust science goes down as you get in close proximity to money.
Right?
The degree to which a result is likely to be true in astrophysics, if we're talking about, you know, remote galaxies where there's no money at stake.
You know, I'm not saying it's true or it's false, but the chances that it's right are much, much higher than if you get anywhere near medicine, for example, where there's so much money at stake that science is just completely overwhelmed.
And in this case, the problem is that the ESGing of the world has meant that now anything that has these characteristics in play,
anything that impinges on narratives of exploitation, racism, anything that impinges on narratives of exploitation, racism, slavery, etc., is so charged that it would be almost impossible just to simply get an uninflected analytical read on the evidence because how would that even happen?
Right.
How would that even happen?
So that's most of what I wanted to say here.
I did want to find just one.
Mostly, I did not independently assess the methods.
Some of them you and I are familiar with, some of them we're not.
You know, a lot has changed since we were learning about molecular systematics in grad school.
You know, they're using maximum likelihood approaches, but they're also, you know, it's a mixture and there's a lot of things there that have room for potential confusion in the data.
Overall, I was impressed with what seemed to be a very careful approach.
But one thing I would love to find this, I'm just not able to find, um, apologies.
Um, I'm not able to find the bit on the methods, uh, which I wanna, I wanted to quote it to you guys directly, but they're talking about having done something in which they've outsourced the analysis, because one often does with lab techniques.
And they chose to do X rather than Y analysis, because that's what the vendor effectively, the vendor who is doing the analysis, and who's going to return their results to them has recommended.
And I read that and I thought, okay, maybe that's the right decision.
I don't know.
We're outside of my field of expertise here.
I don't do this kind of analysis.
I never did.
But it feels, and again, like I think that this research was really well done.
I'm very impressed with it.
This is not at all an attack on this research.
But It's now become sort of de rigueur.
It's expected, like you can't, if you're doing complicated research with a lot of different kinds of techniques, like you are going to outsource some amount of the data analysis.
It's unnerving, and I think dangerous, honestly.
How much of high-tech science is done based on recommendations from vendors?
Wow.
Hold on.
From vendors.
And what we don't have is, okay, so those vendors exist, and they've come up with recommendations, and they're based on something, but they're not publishing science that explains why their recommendations are what they are that we can assess.
Like, everything about that recommendation from that vendor is cryptic to us, and maybe even to the authors of the paper.
So a lot of the analysis here, a lot of these results, depends on correct assumptions and decisions on the part of third-parity labs whose work we can't see.
And so this is just, you know, again, this is like a side note that's critically important and not specific to this work, although it was prompted by seeing just a note in their materials and methods section.
Um, I think you're not being nearly harsh enough on what you found there.
Because, in effect, saying, based on a vendor recommendation, the vendor's recommendation was presumably based on something.
Here it is.
I finally found it.
This kit uses a uracil-tolerant polymerase and performs well with degraded and low-yield samples.
This method was recommended by the vendor as being particularly efficient in converting short, single-stranded fragments of uracil-containing DNA into NGS libraries.
Well, particularly efficient.
So maybe efficient just means you don't have to spend as much and we can get there faster.
But yeah, I mean, if it's just if it's just a technical question, if the point is this is going to work and yield evidence in a way that does not change what the evidence is, then fine.
I don't even think recommendation from the vendor belongs there, though, because what that suggests is I cannot tell you Why the vendor recommended this.
If you can tell it, then the fact that the recommendation came from the vendor is immaterial.
Exactly.
The answer is either this method is more efficient or it isn't.
Vendor is beside the point.
That's what citations is for, right?
This is one of the things that I was always extremely fussy, it seemed to some of my students about, very finicky about.
You attribute To your source, absolutely anything that is not common knowledge and which you are not fully explaining.
And even if you're fully explaining it, if it's someone else's idea, you attribute it.
But in this case, the fact that it's recommended by the vendor is here as the standard, like that's the attribution, right?
Instead of actually, we need to know why.
And the attribution isn't complete because when you cite, you're saying, okay, you can go look at this paper to see on what basis I made that decision, and you should be able to follow it all the way back to the original why.
Why did you do it that way?
That's what the scientific record, that's what the publications are about.
And in this case, recommended by the vendor on what basis?
Where's the publication?
Was there science done, or was this a financial decision on the part of the vendor?
We just don't know.
And again, I'm not saying there's necessarily anything bad that happened here, but that was one of the few red flags that popped up for me as I was reading this paper.
Like, oh, damn, this is the way of modern science.
So much of modern science.
Yeah, I agree.
And it's a shame to explore this on a paper that sounds like it was basically well done.
But what it speaks to is that there's a culture in which nobody blinks if you say, oh, yeah, no, in your method section, yes, this was done because of the recommendation of the vendor.
And it's like, the recommendation of the vendor is based on something.
that's what needs to be in your paper.
All right.
Um, I don't know.
Can I just share a tiny bit about hotels?
Uh, sure.
Yeah.
I mean, he's pretty great.
The amazing Hotez.
The amazing Peter Hotez.
So, A Nature Property published this pretty great paper with a lot of interesting implications around—no, no, please don't show my screen—with a lot of amazing implications about origin of cattle in the New World, and cowboys in the New World, and the African slave trade, and all of this.
And Nature also This week.
So this research we've been talking about was published actually in August and Science News just made its stupid summary of it this week.
That's why I came across it recently.
But here we have Nature this week.
Vaccine specialist Peter Hotez.
Scientists are under attack for someone else's political gain.
You don't say.
I don't think he's talking about us.
No.
You know, the funny thing is... He's right.
He's right.
Scientists are under attack for someone else's political gain, Peter Hotez's political gain, and he's the one doing the attacking in many cases.
Yeah, it's an amazing thing to say.
Yeah.
The physician researcher who spoke out against misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic says attacks against science are formidable.
And getting worse.
Yeah, we noticed.
Okay.
So, I mean, this is ridiculous.
This whole thing is ridiculous.
It's a book review because Hotez has a book out.
Oh, yeah.
And The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, A Scientist's Warning, published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
Johns Hopkins has been terrific during all of this as well.
I just want to scan to the bottom of this ridiculous thing and share the last paragraph.
Okay.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Okay.
How can this be stopped?
What's your advice for dealing with online trolls?
Have you changed anyone's mind?
In your book's dedication, you thank police departments and hospital security forces for keeping your family safe.
How do you deal with fear?
The end of that answer, he says, they, with regard to the right-wing media stoking fear and outrage, no, stoking the faux outrage machine, They couldn't care less about me.
It's what I represent, he says.
Ooh, shades of Fauci.
Shades of Fauci.
Shades of Fauci.
Okay.
So, what's your message to scientists?
Nature asks Hotez in its final, adoring question to him.
Understand, Hota says, that science and scientists are under threat, and it's a coordinated campaign.
What you're doing as a scientist is noble.
Scientists should feel good about what they do.
By reading my book, you shouldn't be demoralized.
Understand that it's not you who's doing something wrong.
You're under attack for someone else's political gain.
Even though it's scary, I think there's some comfort in that.
Yeah, that takes something from a guy who's still pushing mRNA vaccines for kids.
Yeah, the balls on this guy.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Tiny, but very effective, apparently.
Yeah, I guess in this case, maybe the gall is better.
Like, imagine him covered in galls or something.
I will hold my tongue about all the things that one might say connecting.
Galls, for those of you playing along at home, are the swellings on plants induced by insects who then lay their eggs inside these They're not attractive, and the plants presumably don't like them.
They're not good for the plants.
No, it's not good for the plants.
Yeah.
Pretty cool, though.
Very interesting.
I'm intrigued when I encounter them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, Nature, or the Nature group, is still publishing really interesting research, and then also this unintentionally accurate, but not in the way they suspect, hit piece on, like, itself and everything it's doing.
Accurate when understood upside down.
I had a couple things I wanted to do.
I don't think my voice is going to hold out, so I'm just going to do one of the two and we'll come back to the other.
I wanted to talk about two pieces of news, science-y news that emerged this week that I think people are going to need a little bit of translating to understand.
Once you do, I think you'll realize that things are afoot that we need to be aware of.
The first one...
Came from Ralph Baric, who published a paper that once again brings back... That would remind us who Ralph Baric is.
Ralph Baric at Chapel Hill is the The primary architect of the set of techniques in gain-of-function research used to turbocharge and enhance, especially, coronaviruses.
In other words, though we think much of the work that resulted in coronavirus happened in Wuhan, the precursor work that created the insight into how to modify Viruses to take them from a state in which they were not an effective human pathogen into a highly effective human pathogen came from the Barrick Lab.
He famously innovated what he called no-see-um techniques, which meant that not only was he able to make modifications that made these things into deadly pathogens, but he was able to do so in a way that was invisible to those who might look in and see whether some modification had been made.
And the kind of research that he was doing, that he was doing primarily in the US, had a cease and desist order placed on it under the Obama administration.
And then Fauci's NIAID helped move much of that research offshore to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Yeah, so I sort of think of Beric as the guy who made all this possible, and Fauci as the guy who made it all happen.
All right.
Anyway, Beric has been quite quiet.
When he pipes up, it is because something important is afoot.
And so, Zach, if you would show the Beric paper.
You're gonna have to tell me which one that is, because I don't see him.
Wow, don't know what to do about that, Zach.
If you want to forward me things, I can figure it out quickly.
So I will talk about what is taking place.
You please, and I believe I emailed you them as well.
The important piece of information here, Beric is the last author on this paper, which is effectively the power position Nope.
And what happens here is the revival of a hypothesis in a new form.
So what Barrick hypothesizes here is... Are you there?
Yes, he's on the right.
And if you'll scroll down, actually, if you would search for the term immunosuppressed, There it is.
Okay.
What happens here is that Barrick attempts to revive the hypothesis that many will remember from the very early parts of the pandemic that the intermediate host between horseshoe bats and humans for SARS-CoV-2 was pangolins.
Now this work is long discredited.
There were coronaviruses found in pangolins.
These were pangolins that were being smuggled.
There's no ecological explanation for why pangolins would be harboring these bat viruses.
There are many, many reasons to discount this explanation, but what Barrick attempts to do here is create an unfalsifiable explanation of how this virus came to humans and left no trace.
Now as our viewers will remember me talking about... Can I just read what I'm seeing here?
This is brand new to me.
Pangolins, which harbor distinct SARS-CoV-2 related strains, are an endangered solitary species but are valuable as illegal trade commodities.
On the basis of broad ACE2 receptor usage of PGCOVGD, documented airborne transmission potential, and efficient growth in primary nasal airway epithelial cells, we suggest that individual pangolins, or perhaps some other rare wildlife species, was productively infected and served as a nearly untraceable pass-through species that transmitted virus to humans?
Is he serious?
Yes.
And then he says, such rare events might be enhanced if early human cases were immunosuppressed, potentially generating complex mutational variants during persistent infections.
So make no mistake what's going on here.
Barak is creating a theoretically possible pathway that would leave no evidence.
If you started with the, if you said, Dr. Barak, the virus did not come from a lab.
What is your best explanation of how it might have gotten to us without leaving any evidence of an intermediate host in which it circulated, or evidence in early human populations where rapid evolution took place because it was poorly adapted when it first made its way into people?
If you said, come up with your best, Your best scenario that will accomplish these things, you would come up with something like this.
Doesn't make it plausible, but the point is, what he is hypothesizing here... Oh, I think best could be better than this.
Nope.
You don't think so?
You're not understanding the assignment.
Okay, what's the assignment?
Yeah, I don't.
The assignment is, exonerate the lab with an unfalsifiable hypothesis that could have happened.
Oh, you don't mean, like, scientifically best?
Most plotlines?
This is scientific garbage.
Right.
You don't mean actually most supported?
This is unfalsifiable nonsense.
It's like, put aside lab as a possibility, now what's the most supported hypothesis out there?
Right.
So the base... That's not what you're going for.
Is that jumping between species is much much harder than the people who have been getting grant after grant on the basis that it was always threatening to happen have led us to believe.
And it leaves a signature because you have to have these periods of evolution in which the virus gets better at infecting people and then very importantly jumping between them.
It has to do that.
So what he's done He has cooked up a scenario in which an immunosuppressed person becomes like a little gain-of-function laboratory unto themselves, having gotten the virus from a pangolin.
And the basic point is that's why we haven't found any evidence, right?
It's a complete nonsense story designed to exonerate the lab once again, bringing pangolins back in, because as long as we're now dealing with Unfalsifiable fantasy bullshit.
Might as well be pangolins, right?
Might as well be.
Might as well be.
Why not?
So anyway... Another nature property, incidentally.
Yeah, that's diabolical nonsense, but the point is this is now happening outside of your view.
You weren't even supposed to notice that Beric was reviving pangolins as a vector.
All right, that's one of the two pieces I wanted to point to.
The other piece is... I mean, yeah.
This also... This garbage has no place in nature.
It's not nature.
It's not science.
This is cover your ass.
This is Barak covering their asses because what they can't have... He's a they now?
Well, he and all of the people who might face a criminal prosecution or who knows what are looking For a scientific cloak, and Barak is not as good at generating seamless bullshit when it comes to narrative as he is creating seamless bullshit when it comes to genomes.
Okay.
The other thing I wanted to point out at point two was I came across something.
I happen to be looking at Merlin Tuttle's Twitter profile.
He's not highly active on Twitter, but anyway, Merlin Tuttle is somebody I greatly admire.
He is a He's a bat conservationist, he's an excellent scientist, and he is also, I think unarguably, the greatest bat photographer who has ever lived.
He's quite a lovely guy, and I admire his photographic work, his scientific work, and his dedication to saving bats.
And I will say that somehow, you know, Bats are the Jews of the animal kingdom.
They get blamed for all kinds of shit they're not responsible for.
Didn't see that coming.
So the reason I say that is because, I mean, so Merlin Tuttle responded to a Scientific American piece.
Yeah, so begin reading the Scientific American piece.
Okay.
A secret, oh, I'm on my screen.
A secret weapon in preventing the next pandemic, fruit bats.
New research links bat habitat destruction with the spillover of viruses to humans.
More than four dozen Jamaican fruit bats destined for a lab in Bozeman, Montana are set to become part of an experiment with an ambitious goal, predicting the next global pandemic.
Bats worldwide are primary vectors for virus transmission from animals to humans.
Those viruses often are harmless to bats but can be deadly to humans.
Horseshoe bats in China, for example, are cited as a likely cause of the COVID-19 outbreak.
That's good enough.
So the point is, this is nonsense.
The idea that bats are a... Well, Scientific American has become a world-class purveyor of nonsense.
Of nonsense.
But anyway, the idea that bats are this primary reservoir for human disease is wrong, but it's a very appealing notion because people have a sort of creepy feeling about bats.
And anyway, Merlin Tuttle Uh, wrote a piece in which he makes actually many of the same points that I made in my piece in UnHerd several years ago.
When the pandemic first happened and it was clear that a bat virus had made it into people and I had this oh my god moment, I used to work with bats.
I used to work with them with my bare hands and was I risking... You don't have bare hands!
Was I risking, um, putting, you know, creating a pandemic just by the simple fact of my work on, as it was, tent making fruit bats?
In that piece, I concluded, no, in fact, this is nonsense.
A, the line that we are always sold about it is the pressure that human populations are putting on shrinking nature habitat that's putting humans in contact with wildlife evermore.
This is all nonsense.
This is designed to get grant money.
But anyway, put all that aside.
What's troubling here, first of all, I know the particular bats, the 48 bats that are en route to this lab in the U.S.
I know this species very well.
Wait, what are we talking about now?
Jamaican fruit bats.
The article that you were reading from reports that somebody has captured four dozen Jamaican fruit bats and is transporting them to a lab in the US for an ambitious experiment.
Now I would say...
Is it Artibias jamaecensis?
It's Artibias jamaecensis.
It's the most common animal to...
If you put up a net looking for bats in the neotropics, this is the most likely animal that you're going to get.
It's a fairly large animal.
It's very aggressive when you handle it.
And in fact, the key that helps you recognize which bat you're holding always says, bites ferociously when handled.
That's a diagnostic.
It's so great.
It's one of the great diagnostics.
What species do I have?
Oh, he drew blood.
Yeah.
Bites ferociously when handled.
WSJ.
But anyway.
Here's what's troubling.
This is a great story, right?
You've got scientists who have figured out, because bats are this reservoir of potential human diseases, and yet the bats tolerate those diseases so well, what we're going to do is we're going to stop the next pandemic by studying the interaction of viruses with some bats, right?
Now the problem is, this is total horseshit.
Bats is a very big group.
We're talking about something like a thousand different species.
These fruit bats couldn't be farther from those bats that do actually harbor some diseases we need to worry about.
The horseshoe bats.
So say that again.
A quarter of all extant mammals are bats, and there are 5,000 species of mammals.
We're talking about well over a thousand species.
So when you say like, oh bats, oh god, bats are bad!
It's like saying... I don't even know what it's like saying it.
I have no similar... It's insane.
There's so many different kinds of bats out there, and they eat all manner of different things, and therefore have all manner of different risks in terms of what they could give to humans.
Right, and this one would not be high on my list for species to be worried about in this regard because for one thing... It's a dedicated fruit eater, right?
It's a dedicated fruit bat.
It doesn't live in huge aggregations in general.
So, you know, there's a question about, yes, this to somebody who's not paying terribly much attention has money to give for grants.
This may sound like a plausible story and why would we not spend a little bit of money, you know, a few hundred thousand dollars to study the question of how bats tolerate disease so well.
But not only is this just basically a randomly chosen bat, probably chosen because it's relatively easy to source, but it's not going to yield them anything useful.
For one thing, the experiment that they have apparently proposed, they're going to infect it with influenza.
Influenza is not, is, you know, as bad a choice as rando bat is for modeling those few bats that actually harbor something important to people.
This is effectively rando virus relative to the bat.
Well, from the beginning of this pandemic, and of course before that, what we see is category error after category error.
Oh, I'm going to call it a bat.
Okay, bats are bats.
It's a virus.
Viruses is viruses.
This is a vaccine.
Vaccines is vaccines.
And we know we like vaccines.
It's the same trick over and over and over again.
And sometimes it's just ignorance, but sometimes it's not.
The real tragedy here, okay?
First of all, we do this shit all the time.
You know, given the amount of tragedy that we create needlessly in the name of science, it's hard for me to get too upset about, you know, 50 bats.
But A, this is a needless, these bats, A, they're all going to have to be destroyed, okay?
You're giving these bats flu.
These animals are going to need to be destroyed.
You're doing it for no reason.
And worse, and this is the punchline of this story, I bet you the people who are doing this experiment do not even know that they are involved in gain-of-function.
They are involved in the piece of gain-of-function that actually matters.
What they are going to do is they are going to forcibly jump a virus to a creature, right, in order to see what happens when that virus infects What they are doing is they are creating an environment in which that virus can evolve.
Now, is it going to evolve in some way that's going to matter to people?
Maybe, probably not.
But if it did, you're talking about influenza.
You are talking about giving influenza a novel environment inside of creatures that it wouldn't ordinarily be in.
And if it did escape, what that means is it's not a curiosity.
It's now again a problem because you're talking about a human pathogen.
I don't know what we do about this.
I don't know how many dumb grant applications there are in the world like this, where somebody proposes something that's actually dangerous for reasons they may not even understand.
And the people who are granting the funds are so used to ignoring people who say, that's dangerous, don't do it.
That the point is, you know, they listen to that voice from from Hotez.
These are attacks on science.
Yeah.
You know, science has to be done.
You like science, don't you?
Do you really want us not to know how it is that bats endure viruses so well?
That is how we are going to get away from the next pandemic, right?
We have to do this work.
And the answer is, the work is worthless.
It's obvious from a cursory pass over what they're doing that it's not going to yield something useful, right?
It's not even likely to yield information.
But what it is going to do is it's going to take a small risk of releasing something novel that infects people.
And do you know what will happen if that occurs?
What?
A massive fucking cover-up.
We are going to have another cover-up where we are going to pretend that this new influenza that we are seeing that just so happens to have emerged nearby the lab where these fruit bats were being injected, that's a coincidence, right?
And somehow it's going to be racist that we notice.
So you didn't have us read anything from this Tuttle piece.
Yeah.
I just scanned it and I looked at his footnotes and there's something else hidden here which I don't think you know.
So you can share my screen here.
This is again Merlin Tuttle.
Extraordinary bat, and he's a biologist?
Yeah, absolutely.
And photographer.
And he's responding to this Scientific American story called, A Secret Weapon in Preventing the Next Pandemic, Fruit Bats.
He says, the title appears to promote a better appreciation of bats.
However, the next sentence mistakenly claims that bats worldwide are primary transmitters of viruses deadly to humans.
This flawed conclusion reached a worldwide audience in 2017 through a study that reported more viruses in bats than in other mammals.
It examined nearly twice as many bats as all other animals combined, ignoring the fact that new viruses can be found wherever we look.
Nevertheless, it received sensational media coverage worldwide.
In contrast, a far more thorough study concluded that bats did not harbor more viruses than other animals, but continues to be mostly ignored.
As evidenced by the recent Scientific American article, this scary, sensationalist study continues to dominate public perception of bats.
So I thought I'd look at what the original 2017 study was and what the later, as it turns out, 2020 study was.
The 2020 study is by a team of researchers that I don't recognize.
The 2017 study, which is the piece of evidence that has since been debunked, that is the basis on which we are blaming bats for things, was published by a team that includes Peter Desik.
Oh my god.
Oh, so perfect.
It's perfect, right?
It's perfect.
Global Patterns in Coronavirus Diversity, published in Virus Evolution, that is the basis on which now Scientific American and the whole damn world is blaming bats because they're a really easy culprit.
Right.
Blaming bats for our own arrogance.
And so this is the perfect link with Beric, because Beric is here creating fantasy stories, completely unscientific, anti-scientific fantasy stories.
About how it is that this terrible virus got into people, when in fact, how did it get into people?
You, Dr. Barak.
That's how it got into people.
You figured out how to do this, and whether you actually wielded the pipette or it was done in Wuhan doesn't make any goddamn difference.
This was your boilerplate piece that was posted in all of your grant applications and all of the publications that came from them swearing that your work was the thing that was going to prevent the pandemic.
It was the arrogance that allowed you to believe that that shit was true that actually created the pandemic.
And you can blame the bats, you can blame pangolins, you can blame frozen ferret badgers, but the fact is it was you, it was Fauci, it was Daszak, It was Anderson, right?
These people are, you know, from no-see-um edits to cover-up.
These are the people who make this possible.
And by hiding what happened, you're making it certain it's going to happen again.
And in the meantime, you've unleashed a novel virus on the world.
Yeah.
And we'll never get rid of it.
Which we're stuck with.
Yeah, we're stuck with it.
And it's unforgivable.
Honestly.
Well, let's put it this way.
Owning up to what you did would be a start, and you owe it to us, whether or not it's forgivable.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, that was exciting.
Mm-hmm.
So, we, I think, have reached the end for today.
We'll be back on Saturday with another livestream to make up for the one that we lost last week, and hopefully your voice holds.
I think it will.
I think it will.
We have a private Q&A this weekend at our Locals.
We encourage you to join us there.
We also have the Watch Party right now is happening at Locals and lots of other good stuff as well.
We've got a lot of great guest episodes coming out right now.
Uh, always check out what I'm writing at Natural Selections.
And, um, I don't have any, uh, I don't have any darker swag to show, but we got this store that's, that's cool.
It's got great stuff.
We've got a bunch of new, bunch of new things coming out soon, uh, there.
And, oh, I heard I heard that there were no more signed copies of our book available at Darville's here in the San Juan Islands, and it turns out that is true.
And the thing that is stopping us from signing more copies, because the owner of Darville's very much wants to have signed copies, apparently, it's selling like... I don't know if books sell like hotcakes, but it's selling very, very well there.
Of course, the book is Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
It's available everywhere.
In fact, it's coming out in Czech very soon.
But you can get signed copies at Darvill's, except right now, and the thing that's keeping us from them, because we're just a short ferry ride away, is the fact that the ferries aren't running very well because the governor of the state of Washington is an idiot.
That is basically why there are no signed copies of our book at Darvill's at the moment, but there will be again soon.
Okay.
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