What’s the Return on ROI? The 213th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 213th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this episode, we discuss sex, gender, and plants. First up: sex is binary, gender is downstream of sex, and rare Disorders of Sexual Development do not put the lie to the sex binary. Then: Duke University is deep-sixing its world class herbarium. We discuss the value of natural history museums, and of libraries, and d...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 213.
I I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
And yet again, there's stuff that needs discussing.
Yeah.
We're going to talk about sex and gender, plants, politeness.
Plants.
Wow.
All right.
Yeah.
Now I can see a synergy there.
In that order, I think.
And the relationship between the three, undoubtedly.
I don't know about that.
Maybe.
All right.
Not so much.
It's not how I see it, but you never know what will happen.
Emergence happens.
We embrace serendipity here on Dark Horse.
Yep, we sure do.
But only after asking its consent.
No, we don't.
Alright, that was a bridge too far and I recognize it.
Wow, that was quite a look.
Okay, hey, come join us on Rumble and subscribe to our channel here, and please consider becoming a Local Supporter.
Right now we've got the Watch Party going on there.
We did two Q&As on Locals this past week, including our monthly private Q&A that we've been doing since almost the beginning of Dark Horse, which we've moved to Locals.
We don't do any public Q&As anymore.
They're all on Locals, and they're a lot of fun.
Obviously there's been a lot of great stuff on Locals this last month, with conversations that you had with Chris Martinson and with Michael Yon during your trip to Panama, including the Darien and the Panama Canal in January.
And there's lots more great stuff coming up.
So please join, become supporters of ours at Locals and subscribe to our Rumble channel.
And sign up at Locals.
Is there any chance that the Locals watch party will be upgraded to a watchapalooza?
That's really on you.
You're the one who named it.
Oh, I did?
Oh, okay.
Well, let's put it this way.
You're the only one with a dog in this fight, I guess, is the phrase.
Yeah, that is the phrase.
I think we will say it is under discussion, and I expect there to be... Between you and you.
Pretty much, yeah.
I'm debating between the possibility that it will and it won't, and I have a feeling that the negative reaction to that idea will be so powerful that although... Within your own head.
Possibly, but also from people.
All right.
Yeah, we're going to move all the rest of what we want to tell you about in terms of where to find us and such to the end, except that as always – and as always, I start having a frog in my throat.
I should stop eating frogs.
Yes, absolutely.
Yes, I think they would agree.
Yeah.
Right as we're about to go into our ads, we have three sponsors today and always that we do ads for at the top of the air.
If you hear us reading ads, you know we actually truly vouch for these For these sponsors, um, we reject, uh, more than we accept, uh, sponsors who come for- come for us.
That has happened also.
Not with sponsors, I don't think.
Um, so, um, this week it's Sol, Seed, and Moink.
We love all these guys, so without further ado, here we go!
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This is interesting.
Actually, my natural selections this week that I just published this morning was a reprint of something I wrote and published on Patreon in 2018 on the virtues of eating street food when you travel.
And part of that is about getting your gut accustomed to the local microbiota that is common in food.
If you're only going to be someplace for a day or two, you know, maybe not worth it, but if you're actually trying to engage with the local everything and are going to be there for a little while, better to actually eat the food that locals are eating and stop being so scared that any little bit of anything that you get on your food is going to make you sick.
Yeah, I noticed that that was a repeat of that excellent theme, and I of course agree, there's living in terror, you can do that forever, or you can rationally confront the world and get to somewhere better.
Exactly.
So I actually have, unfortunately, Seed has been our sponsor for less time than we have had the opportunity to travel to adventurous places.
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Every time you say it's double hulled, I know this doesn't make any sense, but I see an image in my mind of the Exxon Valdez sailing through Alaska and not having a problem.
Thank you.
So, anyway, I don't know that that makes sense.
Frankly, maybe even the Exxon Valdez was double hulled.
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It's a worthy precaution.
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How do you pronounce that?
Exactly.
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I had to say that because they needed to be of the same level of pluralness.
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Plus, where am I?
No.
Oh, and... You really inverted a disaster there.
Wow, and then I get bucked back by a whole paragraph.
That's not good.
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You did it, man.
Well, hopefully I've gotten the errors out of the way. - Yes, so that is nothing I thought we were gonna be talking about, but that's not what we're starting.
Oh, is it?
I think it might be a couple things just worth mentioning.
I missed that Assange's extradition hearing actually took place, I believe, yesterday.
I feel bad that I missed it because this is an important issue.
But nonetheless, a decision has not been handed down yet.
I hate to say it, but I expect a terrible decision.
I expect he will be extradited.
Nonetheless, I believe this is a very important issue.
He is a political prisoner who has been jailed for doing journalism, which is something that is a sacred right in the U.S., and this is a tragedy, and he's having his life destroyed.
One thing I will say is I personally am not going to vote for anybody who does not pledge to pardon him in this election.
Assuming that the decision to extradite him comes down as I expect it will, then he is depending on somebody to inhabit that office who will free him.
And I think it is it is absolutely fair for Americans to say, look, if you're not willing to pledge to free him, then you're not a viable candidate for this office.
All right, that's one thing.
And the other thing I just wanted to briefly mention is that the Dark Horse podcast, that's this podcast right here.
That's us.
It finds itself in the Spotify American Top 10 of all podcasts.
You want to show a screenshot of that?
Yeah, that's pretty great.
Yeah, number one science podcast in the US and Australia, number two in the UK, and number ten in American podcasts.
That's pretty great.
Across the board.
Across the board, yeah.
That's fantastic.
Anyway, I think that's awesome.
And thank you all for paying attention to Dark Horse and sticking with us.
And anyway, I just thought it was a milestone worth noting.
Yeah, no, it's great.
And I guess for all of you out there who are listening on Spotify, come just subscribe on Rumble, too.
Yeah, would you do that for us?
That would be awesome.
Actually, that would help us keep doing what we're doing.
So anyway, yes, all of you listening on Spotify or anywhere else, really, it's free.
Just come on over to Rumble and sign up.
Okay, so, and actually, one of the other podcasts that has been right around the same area in the rankings of overall American podcasts has been Chris Williamson's podcast, which this week he had on Eric Weinstein, Your Brother, and there's been a clip circulating that Colin Wright
I made a tweet of Eric talking about sex and gender, and you wanted for us to talk about this a little bit, and there are a lot of things to say.
One of the things that I want to do is actually read a somewhat extended excerpt from one of the many places that I've talked about or written about sex and gender.
We don't need to start there, but I don't know if you had a place you wanted to start.
Well, I thought we should... I don't want to play the whole clip, but we're going to start with the beginning of that clip.
Okay.
So, Zach, would you play that?
Like, I won't say there are only two genders.
You know?
Why?
Because it's not true.
In humans?
Yeah.
Two genders or two sexes?
Well, first of all, the gender and sex used to be largely synonymous before we decided that one was, in some sense, obligate biological and the other was software program.
Well, that was a lexical game that was played in the 1950s.
That was played to try and bifurcate the two.
Yeah, but you can make an argument that you need a term.
I don't think the gender should be purposed for that.
But you could make an argument that just like abstracting male and female into top and bottom had some utility.
Okay, so what do you mean when you talk about?
That intersex is a really important category to me.
I know people who are intersex.
And they're screwed.
They were screwed because our society had no way of dealing with them.
The gender binary is so strong that somebody through zero fault of anybody is born with ambiguity in their genitalia, in their chromosome, something.
So yes, there are two intended sexes or genders, but nature isn't good enough to hit that mark all the time.
And those are, those are human beings.
Those are souls.
And the sloppy right-wing thing, which is to find the shelling point where you just sit there and you say, there are only two sexes and two genders.
I understand why you're doing it.
You're trying to stop this crazy conversation that's taken off.
So it's not like I don't have sympathies with why you're saying that.
But when I bring up, you know, my favorite example is persistent mullerian duct syndrome, where somebody goes into their doctor having trouble having a kid and it's like, well, you have twigs and berries, but you've also got a uterus.
You're female on the inside.
Does that person produce both sperm and eggs?
No.
Right.
I don't think so.
But surely that's the definition.
That is the line in the ground around male and female.
Large gametes... Yeah, but sorry, the gentleman who goes into his doctor and to find out that he's got a uterus, who is he?
Alright, so there are a number of things to say here.
One, I think we have to separate why Eric is taking the position that he's taking from what our position is relative to what he's said.
And there are a couple things about this that I think are just right.
Eric's answer to why he refuses to say that gender is binary is because it isn't true.
Now, I'm not saying it is or it isn't true, but the idea that we must be courageous about
When a particular question has descended into a political dynamic where people start rooting for anything that goes in their direction, it is obviously incumbent on those of us who are playing an analytical role in the conversation to maintain a correct position as far as we understand the evidence Rather than be persuaded to join the team that we think is going in the right direction.
So anyway, from the point of view of motivation, it's honorable.
And later on, Eric says that it becomes clear that he is motivated by concern for people who are deserving of compassion.
He talks about intersex people and he talks about the predicament of through no fault of your own finding yourself biologically Intermediate and therefore presumably dysfunctional reproductively that this is a position worthy of compassion and I agree with that that said what he Embarks on here is
I think it is disruptive of the tools that we've already built up in this discussion, which actually are completely consistent with the analytics and do all of the necessary jobs without compromising our stance on the simple question of policy.
What should we do about this set of questions?
And so anyway, I guess Do you want to lay out what you think that toolkit is and how it interfaces with what Eric said, or do you want me to...?
I had a different approach.
I don't know exactly where you're going, so... I have a number of things, of course, I want to say, but... All right, well then let me go another minute or two, and then we can switch gears.
Eric does allude to the distinction between sex hardware and gender software.
So we have laid out this distinction.
Heather and I have slightly different terminology for it, but the basic idea is gender is the software of sex.
And as such, we have, and Chris Williamson deserves a shout out here, he maintains the absolutely analytically correct line here, which is That in the end there are exactly two sexes and as far as we know nobody is ambiguous between them because everybody produces or is built to produce one of the two types of gametes and not both.
Now Eric carves out the possibility that somebody could exist But this is actually wrong.
This is one of the places I wanted to go.
Producing both types of gametes is not an edge case.
No human does it, because no mammals do it, because no mammals are simultaneous hermaphrodites, right?
But being a simultaneous hermaphrodite, as there are many examples of species out there, does not make them edge cases.
Those animals are not intersex, they are hermaphroditic.
The edge case, with regard to what defines actual sex, would be an intermediate gamete.
You know, a speg, right?
And there are none.
They aren't viable, they don't exist.
So, a case of a human that actually produced both gametes would indeed be a simultaneous hermaphrodite, but it doesn't happen.
But that is not actually an edge case, because hermaphrodites prove the binariness of sex, because what they are is both at once, not some third thing.
Right.
No, I agree with that.
I don't know why you say it's not an edge case.
If you had... Because hermaphrodites aren't edge cases in establishing what sex is.
Oh, I agree.
But Eric is sticking to one side of this.
And because his point is about gender, it skirts that issue.
I agree with you.
There are two sexes and there's no worry about an edge case because What you have is an unstable equilibrium that defaults to two different sized gametes with different levels of motility.
And this is so many hundreds of millions of years old that you can see it in a flower as well as you can see it in a mammal.
So anisogamy, the evolution of two differently sized gametes, is so stable, so fit, so fundamental within those clades in which it has evolved that it does not reverse.
So there are a lot of things that are of incredible value that do reverse.
Four legs, Right?
And then you have the return to water among tetrapods of whales and of manatees and of sea snakes, right?
And that doesn't mean that legs aren't valuable, but that does mean that there are conditions under which maybe they aren't doing the thing that you need them to do.
By comparison, two sexes, anisogamy, when it evolves, it sticks 100% of the time.
It does not reverse.
We are in a lineage that has been anisogamous, that has had two and only two sexes consistently for at least 500 million and maybe closer to 2 billion years.
So I would even point out, you can see this very clearly, in the sense that anisogamy is a fixed trait that does not reverse, where we see a reversal of which the heterogametic sex is.
So which chromosome Not a reversal, but a separate evolution.
Did I say reversal?
I didn't mean a reversal.
What I mean is that in birds, for example, we have a different arrangement of sex determination by chromosome than we have in mammals.
And the same can be said of lepidopterans, of butterflies.
And some frogs.
So There are a number of ways that sex can be determined.
We're telling each other things we already know.
There are a number of ways that sex can be determined.
In mammals, we have what is called genetic sex determination.
It might be more accurately called chromosomal sex determination, but okay.
Genetic sex determination.
We have females being the homogametic sex, XX, males being the heterogametic sex, XY, and we have other evolutions of genetic sex determination in which females are homogametic and males are heterogametic, which are separate evolutions of genetic sex determination.
But they are not separate evolutions of anisogamy.
In all of these species that we can talk about, lepidopterans, which is butterflies and moths, and some frogs, and birds and mammals, with two separate evolutions of genetic sex determination in which which sex is heterogametic and which sex is homogametic is reversed.
All of those are separate evolutions of genetic sex determination, but not separate evolutions of sex, of the binary nature of sex, which is far older than any of those.
So, um, This discussion has obviously gone on a very long time, and many people default to... Not as long as sex has been going on.
That is an understatement by hundreds of millions of years at the very least.
So many people, because in humans males are heterogametic, people will default to this as a definition.
And the point is this story, if you take what we just said and you have understood it, then the point is the different size and different motility of the two gametes is a fixed parameter, right?
Males are always the highly motile gamete.
But, which sex has the two different chromosomes switches between groups?
So, the point is, whether you're heterogametic or homogametic, whether you're XX or it's WZ in birds, for example, but whether you're heterogametic or homogametic, that is not a fundamental of sex.
It's an accident of evolutionary history, but the gamete size is a fundamental, and actually Although this is a fact I knew, entered into this discussion, I hadn't thought of it until you pointed it out.
So I think many people, including Chris Williamson, are now on board with the idea that this thing is such an inviolable law of the universe.
That it is the way to think about the sex side of the equation.
Now Eric, I think, is in trouble because he has defaulted to the gender question, the software question.
And here is what I think we ought to be doing with this.
There are two sexes.
Gender is the software of sex, but gender is not Perfectly discrete.
It is closer to bimodal.
There are many traits which are female in nature, and many traits which are male in nature, and there's likely to be no male which has... which... No.
There is likely to be no trait that is relegated entirely to one or the other at the level of the software.
Right?
But it is exactly parallel to the question.
If we say, do male and female heights differ?
Yes.
Male and female heights differ.
Does that mean that we can define a particular height and say, oh, that's a male?
Well, no.
You have to get to the very far end of the high side of height before you come up with a height that has only ever been accomplished by males.
And nothing like that will happen with females on the low side.
It requires population-level thinking at the individual level to say, OK, there is a parameter that is binary, and it manifests in a population of, in this case, 8 billion people.
And it manifests across all of these characters, one of which is height.
And height is going to be normally distributed, you know, in a bell curve.
And there are going to be two different bell curves for men and women.
And men, for any given population, or you could do all of humans, but we know that some populations on the planet tend to be taller than others.
But, you know, take the entire planet, roughly four billion men, roughly four billion women, they're going to each form a bell curve with regard to height.
And I think it's a line from our book, the existence of your very tall friend Rhonda does not put this, does not make this a lie, does not make this untrue.
Of course, I messed up the line, but you know, there will be very tall women and there will be very short men.
And that doesn't mean that the population distribution isn't that men are on average taller than women.
And this is basic, and everyone knows this if you point it out in these terms, but I don't think that's where the confusion is, honestly.
Well, go ahead.
Well, one of the things that Eric says in this clip is gender and sex used to be largely synonymous.
I don't know if that's true, but I also don't care.
This is a classic sort of postmodern bait-and-switch, where the claim is, until we had a word for the thing, the thing didn't exist.
Or the first instance that we can define of that word changing its meaning, or it being used in this way, it was these people that we no longer approve of, and therefore the concept isn't valid.
Well, language doesn't make reality.
We hope that reality at least informs and perhaps makes language, but certainly it ought to be that direction, and it's not the other.
So the idea that in the past sex and gender have been used interchangeably, who cares?
It doesn't matter.
The fact is that there is something called sex, and it is based on gamete size and motility.
And that all of the other stuff that is downstream of that, which includes things that most people wouldn't think of as software, right?
Which includes things like the production of testosterone and the formulation of the primary sex characteristics and the secondary sex characteristics, and yes, also the behaviors.
Which, you know, in a sex-switching, sequentially hermaphroditic wrasse, reef fish, Sex role, which is what we call gender in non-humans, is really tightly prescribed.
And you can actually tell by the way one of these fish is behaving what sex it is.
And then, you know, I don't try this at home, but you can then establish that that is the case by dissecting them or otherwise figuring out what gametes they're producing, right?
And in the sequentially hermaphroditic fish, which actually do sex change, when their sex changes, so does their sex role.
And if they were humans, we would say, but humans can't do this, when their sex changes, so does their gender.
So the, you know, the sex role change happens after the sex change, and it is, you know, utterly scripted in wrasse and reef fish, and in humans, of course, with our much greater range of behavior, our much greater length of of childhood, we have much more culture and software going on in the first place, of course our range of cultural manifestation of gender is going to be far, far wider.
Yes.
And you're going to have a bimodal distribution.
And within each of those distributions, you're going to have a continuum of behaviors.
So, to get to Eric's final point, which is that essentially because there are intersex people, whether that's the right term or not, because such people exist, we are obligated to recognize that gender is not binary,
Couples to something that he didn't actually say in this interview, but he said many times before, which is that he thinks we ought to make a one-time alteration to the language at the level of pronouns to accommodate intersex people.
And I think that this is the...
ultimate failure of this line of argument, right?
He says, for example, he brings up persistent malarian duct syndrome in which somebody who appears to be male externally discovers that they have some internal female reproductive parts.
He says, you know, we effectively have to recognize a non-binariness of Gender because this person exists and they have characteristics, you know, if they if they go to a doctor to have their Reproductive issues sorted out and they discover they have female parts.
What are we to do with them?
you know, who is this guy Eric says and my feeling is that's Ned and He's a guy and I saw him at the shooting range and I've had a couple beers with him and there is no reason whatsoever In what Ned turns out to be, which is somebody who's got a morphological anomaly to mess with the questions of the binariness of sex and the bimodalness of gender.
There is no reason, and there is especially no reason, to carve out a special category.
The best thing you can do for Ned is allow Ned to do what we would do anyway, which is to default into the category that makes the most sense.
Ned's a guy who discovers upon trying to produce a child that he's got a uterus.
Why should Ned alter his presentation to the world?
Why should Ned have to acknowledge this to anybody if he doesn't feel like doing it?
The point is, it is the binariness of the system which actually gives Ned something useful to do, rather than to be put in some third category of human, some unnatural category in which many different errors result in your being clumped together.
So, it is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
Well, I have a slightly different take.
And, you know, intersex is real and extraordinarily rare.
And in speaking about a few things.
Eric is speaking mostly from anecdote.
You know, I know intersex people and, you know, we have also interacted with both people who understand themselves to be trans, but who don't know themselves to have disorders of sexual development, and people who are actually intersex.
And my experience, anecdotally, and that is no different from the basis on which Eric's making his claims, is that those people want privacy, and they want to pass.
And that is in stark contrast to the trans rights activists, which is not everyone who is out there trying to live their lives, but the furor and the chaos that is happening is largely being done by people who, you know, to borrow from Douglas Murray, their prevailing insight in the world is, look at me, right?
And that is I'm sorry, but your feelings don't get to trump reality.
And so, um, you know, I think this is a direct quote from the interview that we just showed.
Intersex is a really important category to me.
I know people who are intersex.
They are screwed.
I would say.
Woman is a really important category to me.
I know people who are women, and they are screwed because of what is happening here.
And I am not saying that a tiny minority deserves to be treated badly, but you don't turn over reality and un...
Undo decades of successful civil rights era activities that have given women equal treatment under the law and in sports and in prisons and everywhere else for the few.
And you certainly don't do it for the unhinged many who are claiming to be trans.
The irony here is that you have people who have chosen nothing who have a morphological or chromosomal defect and the problem is that you know, we've got people that we agree for whatever reason are Uncomfortable with The way they were born, right?
And then you have activists who are abusing this in order to gain special rights, like to compete in the wrong category in sports.
And the last thing that intersex people need is to be lumped together with an activist movement that is destroying reason around this issue for its own power grab.
What I've seen from people, granted, online, is mostly, leave me the hell out of it.
Let me live my life and don't drag me into this.
This is not my fight and I don't want to be a part of this.
Maybe it's time I have a couple more things before you do that.
I just want to point out that first of all, intersex, it's possible that it's more common than it once was because of disruptors in the environment.
But it is highly likely, in fact I think it is certain, that it has always existed.
And in general, only certain cases of it would even have been known, right?
Because chromosomal anomalies would largely have gone undetected.
Somebody might have discovered they were infertile and never known why.
And so the idea that the right thing to do is to emphasize these things rather than the right thing, which is almost always the right thing to do, which is take the cards you've been dealt and play them as best you can.
And in the case that somebody is born with intermediate morphology, what you really want is for doctors who are not affected by the political environment to look at your situation and say, what are you most fundamentally, which is not a difficult question to answer because of which is not a difficult question to answer because of the gamete level issue.
In other words, you are built to produce one or the other gamete.
And so somebody who does a careful analysis of whatever your state is should be able to figure out what it is that your biology thinks you are and then to give you the best shot at seamlessly moving into that developmental role.
I'm not sure I agree with that.
There's a lot.
I think Alice Drager's actually done a lot in this space.
And I am, I think, compelled by the argument that someone born with truly ambiguous genitalia, even if you can tell by doing a karyotype what their chromosomes say, The fact of the ambiguous genitalia tells you that something went on in development that may still be going on, that may render that person at puberty the sex that they don't appear to be.
And that surgically messing before puberty, I am not convinced is the right move.
But, you know, as this excerpt that I want to read here ends with, we are in muddy waters now, in part because we have access to so much technology that allows us to know things that we never could have known before.
Um, so I do think the question that you've posed is an important one.
I would say it is an empirical question.
Um, the... What is an empirical question?
What is in the best interests of the person who finds themselves in some intermediate state?
And the reason it's an empirical... But if they're a baby?
Right, but if they're a baby who is going to spend however many years, 16, 18 years developing with the cost of being in an intermediate state, It is not obvious to me that they end up better off.
There have been too many errors.
I think I fall where I think I do for the same reason that I'm opposed to the death penalty.
The effect of an error is too high.
Right, but in fact one of the famous errors, and I don't remember the details of it, but one of the famous errors involves somebody who had their penis destroyed in some sort of surgical accident early on, and so the idea was that they were morphologically closer to female, and therefore somebody decided to raise them that way, and it resulted in an absolutely catastrophic
development, what that suggests is that a search for what you are most fundamentally, the fact that the surgical areas... But that person wasn't intersex.
Right, I agree.
That seems to me a clear-cut case.
That's not the same kind of situation.
Well, let's put it this way.
It's deeply unfortunate, but that person isn't intersex just because they lost the most obvious external sign of what sex they are.
I guess then probably the way this works out is there are, because male and female are radically different phenomena, that it is probably easy to deduce which way development has chosen early in life.
Relatively early.
That one does not need to wait until somebody is 16.
I don't know.
I have an example in this section that I'll read that demonstrates, as with some number of these DSDs where there is a known genetic mechanism, it reveals itself in puberty.
That is when it reveals itself.
Alright, so that's fair.
You and I end up slightly differently here, but overwhelmingly in the same place.
And I would just say, for my part, compassion for intersex people is best served by maintaining the reality that sex is binary, that gender is bimodal, which is downstream of binary sex.
I mean, I just feel like this is both obvious and a universal position for me, and I think for you.
Polite fictions, if you will, are almost always harmful to the individual, and there are no circumstances under which you should be able to enforce someone's individual fiction on all of society.
You don't get to do that.
The idea that you actually have room under whatever gender you end up with to behave in whatever way you want, that's a question of your personal liberty.
At the point that you start saying how society has to reimagine the reality of sex and gender, No, that's not a freedom that you have.
that's something you're imposing on others.
And so there is a fundamental issue of rights here.
How can you live if you're someone who doesn't feel that the reality of biology is a good fit for what you end up?
The answer is you've got freedom.
But as for causing biology to have to stand down, no, that's not a freedom that you have. - That's right.
So I wanna read several paragraphs from this piece.
You can show my screen here now, Zach.
This essay first appeared in Iconoclasts, which is an anthology edited by Mark Halloran, published by Academica Press in 2022, and I republished it on my Substack last year.
It's called Me, She, He, They.
Reality versus Identity in the 21st Century.
It's a very long piece.
I'm not going to read anything close to all of it, but the part that I want to read goes over some of the ground that we just went over.
Sex is real and ubiquitous.
Sex in this usage is shorthand for sexual reproduction, which is the raison d'etre for there being distinct sexes.
In our lineage, sexual reproduction has an uninterrupted history of at least 500 million years.
It may well be closer to 2 billion years.
Furthermore, sex is binary, at least among all plants and animals.
Sex is not, at its most fundamental, about chromosomes or hormones, about breasts or facial hair, about behavior or fashion.
Sex, at its most fundamental, is about DNA from multiple individuals being brought together to create a zygote.
But DNA isn't sufficient for a new life.
You also need cellular machinery like mitochondria and ribosomes.
Without the cellular machinery, the cytoplasm, no zygote will be formed.
Cellular machinery is big, though, compared to DNA.
Someone's got to bring it if sex is going to work.
So some sex cells, gametes, are big because they contain the requisite cellular machinery.
Those big gametes are eggs.
That's one of the two large problems posed by reproducing sexually, from whence to source the cellular machinery.
The other is how to find a partner.
Trade-offs being what they are, big cells are slower than small cells.
Eggs being big, for cells, they therefore also tend to be slow or entirely sessile.
So, it falls to the other type of gamete to move around its environment looking for eggs.
This other type of gamete is largely devoid of cellular machinery.
It's called pollen in plants, sperm in animals.
Eggs are large and cytoplasm-rich and sessile.
Sperm are small and stripped down and fast.
Two types of gametes.
Two sexes.
In much of life on Earth, in nearly all plants and animals, and in absolutely all mammals, which includes humans, sex is real and ubiquitous.
In his masterful compilation and analysis of the anthropological literature, Donald Brown writes that all cultures, quote, have a sex terminology that is fundamentally dualistic even when it comprises three or four categories.
When there are three, one is a combination of the two basic sexes, for instance a hermaphrodite, or one is a crossover sex, a man acting as a woman.
When there are four, there are then two normal sexes and two crossover sexes.
That's all a quote from Brown's work.
Brown's crossover sex is now referred to as the umbrella term trans.
Trans has emerged in many cultures, but it has never been common, not nearly so common as homosexuality, for instance.
And Brown's hermaphrodites have more recently been called intersex, who are now often referred to as having a disorder of sexual development, DSD.
Although here we begin to run into problems.
The distinction between people with DSDs and trans people is sometimes hard to parse.
The boundaries between them sometimes fuzzy.
Some people who actually have DSDs may never have them diagnosed and may live as trans people, thus belonging in both categories.
Both categories are indeed real and, in contrast to sex itself, very, very rare.
In a few places, Western science has discovered a mechanism which explains a relatively high rate of unusual sexual presentation.
In the village of Las Salinas in the Dominican Republic, for instance, some number of people are understood to be machiambras, which means basically male-female.
Intersex, in fact, by presenting as female through childhood until puberty transforms them into decidedly more male in appearance.
The molecular explanation for this particular DSD is, in part, that mutations in the 5α-reductase type 2 gene, which is autosomal, not on a sex chromosome, affect the steroid 5α-reductase 2 isoenzyme, which in turn causes a dihydrotestosterone deficiency, which in turn inhibits development of male typical characteristics such as external genitalia.
We should all be grateful for the scientists who are driven to discover molecular pathways like the one above, but for most of us, the human side of the story is more compelling.
In Las Salinas, Felicitas was a little girl who enjoyed going to birthday parties with her sister until, as she approached puberty, she came to prefer playing with boys.
During adolescence, as her sister's body became rounded and fuller, Felicita's shoulders broadened and she grew strong and tall.
Like most children with 5-alpha reductase deficiency, she had looked like and been raised as a girl until puberty revealed that for her, the truth was more complicated.
Felicita was a machiembra.
Las Salinas is not the only place on earth in which a DSD has come to be explained by scientists.
A DSD which explains, in retrospect, the relatively high number of people in those communities who transition from female to male during puberty.
Las Salinas is not unique, but it, like DSDs and transness more generally, is very rare.
Those individuals...
Four more paragraphs.
Those individuals who can or will or have or might make eggs are female.
Those individuals who can or will or have or might make sperm or pollen are male.
This is a true binary, which DSDs make more difficult to parse, but DSDs are the extreme exception.
They are indeed disorders.
Sex is not assigned at birth.
Sex is observed at birth.
A baby born with ambiguous genitalia or an undiagnosed DSD may be observed to be the sex that they are not, and that observation is therefore an error.
Development is complicated, but the fact of anisogamy, two different types of gametes, not three or five or thirteen, but two, which come together to create a new life, is true.
Furthermore, development being complicated means that sometimes, some of the manifestations of your sex will be out of sync with your actual sex.
Hence the idea of being, quote, born in the wrong body.
Again, sex is not at its most fundamental about chromosomes or hormones, about breasts or facial hair, about behavior or fashion.
But...
If your sex chromosomes determined your sex accurately with regard to gamete type and primary sex characteristics, but ran into some hiccups as your brain was being formed or as your secondary sex characteristics were developing, you might well feel, as some do, very much at odds with the body you are in.
Of course, you might also feel that way during adolescence regardless.
The vast majority of people who feel uncomfortable in their own bodies as those bodies transform from child to adult are not trans.
Let me be clear.
We are dealing with the interface between long-standing products of evolution, subtle matters of humanity which have blurry borders, and a brave new world of technological modifications that has yet to stand any test of time.
That leaves all of us, even those who are thoroughly versed in the facts and logic of sex and sexuality, grappling with new and genuinely difficult questions.
No one has yet worked out the solutions that best resolve all of the tensions.
Perfect.
Yeah, no, I would say perfectly explored.
Every word of it.
Thank you.
All right, plants?
Obviously.
Okay.
All right, I will take this side of the carefree pollen generating plants and you... No, that's not how this is gonna work.
I get to be choosy then.
Is there more than one of you?
Wow, that got ugly quick.
No, there's not more than one of me and you damn well know it.
Well, then you're not going to be very carefree, are you?
No, I guess not.
I guess not.
Okay, this has been a little lesson in monogamy for all of you viewers and listeners out there.
You tried going all polygynous there on me for a moment and got your crap, didn't you?
Yes, I did.
Flat boy.
Okay.
This is going to seem like something most people don't care about and have no interest in, but there's some news this week out of Duke that's actually very important, and it is It reflects bigger changes in the academy and academia more broadly, and it's to none of our benefit that this is happening, even though it will seem like, what could that possibly have to do with me?
And that is that a dean at Duke University, which has housed one of the most important herbariums in the country, has decided that that herbarium is destined for the dustbin of history, that it is going to be, it is no longer going to be supported.
And the specimens in it, which are extensive, are not going to be destroyed, but they are going to need to be rehomed.
They're going to need to find new homes at other institutions.
But of course, every institution out there is in the process of discovering that natural history collections, which is what an herbarium is for plants, they're called museums of zoology for animals, they're called herbarium, herbaria, when they're plants.
Natural history collections inherently, because what they are is vast collections of lots of specimens of lots of species, take up a lot of space.
And real estate is expensive, and real estate is zero-sum, and especially at universities which are growing and which need room for the new technology increasingly.
And we saw this actually happen at University of Michigan, where we went to grad school, which has also one of the great collections in the country.
Both Museum of Zoology, where we were based, and the Herbarium.
And gosh, I don't remember did it happen while we were there or shortly after we left, but they moved the Herbarium, the University of Michigan Herbarium, Off-site, but it was only by like how far is Ruthven Botanical Gardens?
Like 13 miles or something.
So it was still associated with active research parts of the university that it was still affiliated with, but it did make it harder for people who were on Central Campus to go and spend time with the collections anytime they wanted to, as we were able to as people in the museum collections over across the way at Ruthven Museum.
One point as you are working towards the whole picture here.
Hold on, I misspoke.
It's not the Ruthven Botanical Gardens.
It's the Mathibotanical Gardens.
It's the Ruthven Museum.
Yes.
The Housing of the collections remote from the educational facility itself has a profound impact that nobody is going to intuit.
It's hard to even describe.
I mean, that's the whole point of what we're talking about here.
That's where we're going.
Okay, but even it's one thing to liquidate your collection and send it elsewhere.
It's another thing to just move it to another building where it's like, oh, the cost is You know, that you have to travel this far to go see it.
And so, you know, that's not a big cost.
But the point is, the hidden cost is immense.
So... Yeah, and I would say, I mean, actually, while we were there, there was... All right, we had an audio issue.
Sorry about that, guys.
Hopefully everyone can hear us.
Yeah.
So when we started in grad school there, and we weren't first at the UMMZ, University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, but we both ended up based there, I remember off of the atrium on the second floor, there was this sweet library.
And there were also each of the individual divisions, so like the insect division, which obviously you were based in because it's a long story, but then, you know, the herb division, the herpetology division where I was based, there's mammal division, orthology division.
Was there a mollusc division?
Yes, of course there was a mollusc.
And there was an arachnid division or no?
The arachnids were strangely with either the molluscs or the fish.
Doesn't matter.
They were not systematically in the right place.
Yes, they were not systematically arranged.
Yeah, which is odd in a museum, but I mean, herpetology is also not a cladistic organization of organisms.
It's reptiles and amphibians, and you've got birds over here and mammals over here.
You're out of the weeds.
I'm out of the weeds?
Yeah, you need to get back to the weeds.
I need to get back into the weeds, which is the herbarium?
Yes, we're talking about plants, so yeah.
What I was going to say about, you know, when, did that library, was that library in the main part of the museum there the whole time we were there?
Did it get moved?
Oh, I don't think it was gone.
I think it was still there.
Maybe there was talk of it going, and I remember feeling like, I don't think I can really justify being upset about this because I understand that, again, real estate is precious, but being able to go and walk in the stacks right there next to where you're doing your work, and this will come up again later in this discussion,
You have a greater chance than the giant library across campus of running into your colleagues who are thinking about similar things and asking similar questions and with whom you might discuss, oh, actually I'm looking for this issue of Oikos.
It seems to be wrong.
Oh, yeah, that's my office.
Or, you know, oh, I'm looking for this issue because, oh, you're looking for this article.
This is what I'm also thinking about from a different perspective.
You just have, again, serendipity being much greater.
When you have the resources that are valuable right there where everyone has constant access to them.
And the thing that is different here, going to be hard for people to grapple with who haven't been part of a natural history collections, is even in this era when people are increasingly saying, oh, I don't read books anymore.
Everyone understands the value of a library.
But why do collections, why do natural history collections have value at all?
So I wanted to elaborate on the library point, because you can actually quantify the seemingly tiny difference, and it turns out to be huge, when the issue is the quality of the library that you have local access to.
When we were at Evergreen, you will all remember we were at Evergreen, we had a cruddy library, which is not surprising because it's a small school, but we had Interlibrary Loan that connected us to anything we wanted from UW, which has a fantastic library.
How different is it that you just simply, instead of walking over to the stacks and finding the thing you need, have to file a little card and then it shows up?
The answer is Materially, it's massively different, and the reason is because the way library research works.
Let's suppose you've got a hunch about a hypothesis, and you're going to start chasing it down.
So you need to find a source that is relevant to being able to test your hypothesis, and very often that source is not going to be sufficient.
You're going to find something in its bibliography that you didn't know existed, And you're going to need to look at that.
And you may go through 3 or 4 or 5 or 10 of these steps before you find the thing in question.
Now, if you're sitting there at UW, and you can go through that sequence in an afternoon, you may be leaps and bounds ahead of where you would be.
Whereas if you're sitting at Evergreen trying to chase down the same thing using the same sources, having to, oh, now that I've seen this one, I know the one I really need is that one, go through that, you could take a month to get the same distance.
And so the-- It's a handicap for being a generalist.
Right.
Well, and that's the thing is most people don't detect this because, as we learned, if you were a serious scientist at a place like Evergreen, you subscribe to the three or four journals that were relevant to your discipline, and therefore you had a private access.
But a generalist, which is in... really, it's the most interesting thing to do because it allows you to pool insights from different disciplines and discover important things, that job...
Is virtually impossible.
You certainly can't compete with somebody who's sitting at a place like UW because they're able to do in an afternoon what it will take you a month to do by interlibrary loan.
And so it seems like a tiny difference, but the difference in the end is gigantic.
It's actually huge, and I will say that I learned this at the right hand of the great Bob Trivers.
You and I both worked for him as research assistants in very different capacities, you in the field and me back home on campus, mostly doing, mostly being his runner between the library and back before everything was electronic.
So this was in the early 90s, And, you know, I remember afternoons where, you know, I'd be like, okay, I'm your assistant for five hours now.
What do you have for me to do?
And, you know, he'd be reading a piece, go, oh, like, here's the two articles from here.
You'd like underline them in the rough cited, you know, go get them.
And I'd go find them and photocopy them and bring them back.
And he'd quickly scan and be like, okay, I need these two.
And, you know, watching the trail branch and sometimes reticulate, but mostly kind of veer off, oh, that was a dead end, come back to the, you know, base, let's go off here, was extraordinary.
And to see, you know, to see someone who, you know, most extraordinary evolutionary biologist, and Such a generalist.
So interested in everything that might impinge on the question at hand, which meant that, you know, there are no lanes, right?
You don't stay in your lane when you're actually trying to understand what is true.
And boy, did Bob never stay in any lane.
And so I was, you know, I was pulling stuff.
We're like, I don't know enough chemistry to read this.
But, you know, the closer it got to, you know, what I was learning from what we were both learning from him, Evolutionary biology, behavioral physiology, anatomy and such, like, oh, I can make sense of this.
And I, you know, my training was I would start, you know, as I was photocopying where there was downtime, like, I'm going to see if I can figure out where he where he's going to go next.
And like hone my instinct as to like, what's interesting here?
What thing might actually grab his attention that he then goes to?
And, you know, now, anyone you don't He wouldn't need me as an assistant now, because you do that electronically.
On the other hand, you can't do that if you're associated with a library that doesn't have that access, and that it takes, you know, if it's for me, I'd go, and you know, 20 minutes later, I'd come back.
And that may have felt like a long time to him, probably not, because no one had the electronic access then.
But with interlibrary loan, it's like, oh, three days to seven.
And then maybe that was the wrong paper, and I need to put it like, you can't develop your thinking very effectively that way.
So, and I would always tell my students in classes where I was having them do rigorous library research, which is most of them, You're going to want to go up to Seattle for, you know, a couple of days throughout the semester and just, you know, park yourself and, you know, do the research there.
Like, have your brain on and be there because you can't really do this kind of generative, you know, oscillating between generative ideas and analysis of what this result means in service of which of these ideas with a delay of three to seven days between every thought.
Alright, one last point before we get back to the plants.
The difference between a well-resourced institution and a more poorly researched institution is huge.
The handicap that puts on people who are not at the top places cannot possibly be overestimated.
It's a very important competitive handicap.
And I would also point out that it is evidence it is a civilization is paying a huge price for this that it doesn't know about because it assumes, oh, the people at the top places will produce all the best stuff.
And the answer is, yeah, there are two reasons.
Yeah, maybe the top places.
have their pick of who to hire, but also the people who end up at the other places have, even if they are the same quality or better as people, they have this obstacle they have to overcome in order to do the proper work.
So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is...
Incidentally, that has been well recognized for developing world countries.
That's something that activists have been talking about with regard to the difference between developed world versus developing world researchers from these places for years.
But very much the same two-tier system exists, as you say, between basically R1 institutions and Yeah, they do it comparatively right.
But they don't do it right, right.
Actually, California's got this right.
In California, you can be at any podunk two-year community college and you have access to Berkeley's library.
And that's just not the case in Washington.
It's not the case in a lot of states.
Yeah, they do it comparatively right.
But they don't do it right right.
Because this is the inheritance of a human being.
There's actually no reason that just because you're not at a UC that you shouldn't be able to access this information.
And so, yes, there is some question about how it is that people are going to be paid to produce things of value, and that does involve structures like publishers who pay blah blah blah.
But the system has become absurd and predatory where it actually Gates access to research that was funded publicly there's no reason that the facts after they've been discovered should not be accessible to everybody and so this is a problem that civilization because technology allows it could democratize access to all the information and then it should be
For anybody to innovate, not just the people at the top institutions that have the subscriptions and not just people in the UC system or whatever.
Well, my example was it's not just the UC system.
It's all the California schools.
But, you know, and Sci-Hub is democratizing this, but it's not legal, right?
So increasingly you can get almost everything.
You know, there's been a paper I've wanted to talk about here for a while, And I keep on, like, it's just all I can see is the abstract.
I'm not going to talk about it if I can only see the abstract.
And I'm also not willing to pay the 70 bucks or whatever for one paper.
The absolutely predatory price that is charged.
So I'm waiting for it to show up somewhere that I can get it.
So the gatekeeping is a profiteering and handicapping mechanism that is technologically completely solvable, but we don't solve it because we pretend it's not really an obstacle to progress.
Excuse me.
So, libraries will be more familiar to almost everyone than will be natural history collections, which again are either herbaria or museums and zoology.
But what's the value?
Why do we care?
We could spend hours, days, weeks, months talking about it and we'll go through just a few things, but then there's something surprising at the end, sort of a an indirect value of having these things close at hand that I think will not be obvious to almost anyone and almost certainly not to people like the Dean at Duke who has decided, you know what, we just can't afford this.
You know, we, the University, cannot afford this.
It's going to take, I think she says, here, let's go to this article, Zach.
This is reported in Science this week.
A tragic mistake.
Decision to close Duke University's herbarium triggers furor.
Century-old institution boasts many unique specimens and is considered a, quote, poster child for modern curation.
Interesting, there's no original source on this.
It's going to be closing the next two or three years, and Duke says the herbarium, home to 825,000 specimens, has become too expensive to maintain.
The collection, quote, is currently housed in outdated facilities that will require significant funds and years of displacement to upgrade.
Susan Alberts, Duke's Dean of Natural Sciences, wrote in an email to Science, so that's not a public record.
There's no way to see what else is said here.
Although Alberts recognizes the value of the collection and its role in helping Duke earn a top reputation in biological sciences, quote, it's in the best interest of both Duke and the herbarium to find a new home or homes for these collections.
She wrote in a letter to relevant faculty earlier this week.
And then there's a whole bunch of good people who are saying, wow, what the hell?
This is actually huge.
And then just to go to the end of this.
Yeah, the very last paragraph in the same piece, what is happening at Duke, if you would show my screen, Zach.
What is happening at Duke is another big lesson to be learned, says Jun Wen, a plant taxonomist and biodiversity scientist at NMNH and president of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists.
The plant systematics and the biodiversity science community must be strategic about promoting natural history collections under barrier.
And oh, it was actually the previous sentence in the previous paragraph as well.
A 2020 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine emphasized the need for the collections to develop long-term plans for financial sustainability and a robust physical infrastructure in order to survive.
So the idea that collections need themselves to have the plans for long-term financial sustainability in order to justify themselves, else they are going to be on the chopping block, is perfectly reflective of what is happening in academia writ large.
This is the end of the liberal arts and sciences.
The liberal arts and sciences, which were an absolute keystone of the kind of open inquiry that the United States engaged in, like the model of the university that came into being in the early 20th century in the United States, which was a radical change from what was going on with the Germanic model that we had first had our universities based on.
um was one of open-ended inquiry in which it was not sage on the stage I'm going to impart my wisdom into your brain because we already know everything and everything there is nothing new under the sun no we actually we Americans largely came to understand in the early 20th century that we don't know everything That there are things about which we have been wrong in the past, and therefore there are things about which we are wrong now.
And that means that asking questions when there is no obvious market reason to do so is inherently not just a human value, but a public good.
And so that public good that is the liberal arts and sciences, of which the natural history collections are an obvious manifestation, is being It's not being decimated.
It's being like, what's 90% in Latin?
I don't know.
Nominated.
It's being obliterated by these bottom line fiscal decisions that say, you know what?
It's just too expensive.
What's the ROI on that?
What's the ROI on herbaria?
Right?
So the fact is that if you've got 825,000 specimens that have been collected for over 100 years, what you have is a manifestation of the biodiversity that has existed in a place over time.
You can see how that biodiversity has changed.
You can see how species vary both within a time and place and across time and across space.
You can come in and do measurements.
You can collect data to address hypotheses that have not been imagined yet in a way that you could not do if those collections did not exist.
What will those hypotheses result in?
I don't know.
Will that yield anything practical?
I don't know.
It shouldn't matter.
It shouldn't matter because that's what humans do.
We innovate and we create and we engage in scientific hypothesis testing in service of I wonder.
I wonder if it's true.
And sometimes you end up with things that have practical utility for human beings.
But you never end up with that if you didn't start with the I wonder stage.
So we start making decisions that say, you know what?
You're not paying.
You're not paying the bills.
We have other uses for that space.
We're going to send all these specimens off somewhere else where apparently they care about them more.
Well, guess what?
All those other institutions that are having these specimens shipped off to them are going to start making the same decisions.
And that's going to be the end of being able to do a lot of work, the likes of which much of 20th and 21st century good biology, organismal biology, is based on.
So do we know everything?
Are we completely correct?
If so, cool!
We can just get rid of it all.
We already know everything, and we're there, and we can just tell you what we know, and then you can tell the next generation what they know, and we're set.
Everyone knows that's not where we are.
So I want to put it in the context, it only occurs to me hearing you talk about it, but I think this is a manifestation of the zero as a special number principle in the other direction.
And what I would say is, okay, we've now got one social media platform that may be an exception to the censorship, and it is arguably forcing other social media platforms to adjust.
That's the way zero as a special number works.
But universities, what would a university that was an exception to the degrading change in mindset be?
What would it have to look like in order to constitute a departure from zero?
And the answer is, it would have to have a commitment to basic science, and I'm cautious about the term liberal arts because it's been hijacked, but Basic science and liberal arts education, where the idea is, hey, what do we do here?
Oh, we educate the mind, right?
What do we study?
Oh, we study how things actually are.
What's the return on investment for studying how things actually are?
Well, it depends how you measure.
It's massive if you look across the aggregate, but do we look at every grant application and say, well, how is that gonna pay for itself?
We don't.
We say, hey, there's an enzyme whose purpose we can't understand, right?
Let's study it. - Let's try to understand it. - Right, and the point is, civilization is the technological outgrowth of that exploration that couldn't justify itself, right?
It produces benefits, but if you have to know that a benefit is coming before you can engage in a kind of inquiry, then you're hobbled, and this is the destruction of that, in so many ways, right?
Natural history collections are downhill from natural history itself.
Natural history is how the great minds came to understand the biology that we now understand.
They looked at stuff, and as Isaac Asimov said, you know, it wasn't eureka, it was that's funny.
That's funny.
What's going on there, right?
And so anyway, let's put it this way.
I don't think we have an exception to the collapse of the university system.
I think what's going on at Harvard is a symptom of that breakdown It's the place where we finally get to talk about it.
But Harvard isn't an exception anymore, and no place else is an exception, and we're awaiting an exception that embraces science and the liberal arts.
Okay.
You had the perfect segue for me, but now you've gone past it.
I will go back.
Yeah, okay, go back.
Where was it?
It was talking about the value of natural history more generally.
So Steve Herman, another great, he was an ornithologist at Evergreen, who I was actually nominally hired to replace, as happens in many academic positions.
And if you want to show my screen here, Zach, he wrote the year that I was hired.
Actually, this is a 2002 paper.
He wrote this invited paper for the Journal of Wildlife Management, which is funny because, as you will see from the quote I'm going to share, he was not into management.
This is called Wildlife Biology and Natural History, Time for a Reunion.
And in this, among other things, he defends natural history collections that he built basically with... who was the botanist whom we never met at Evergreen?
But he and his colleague at Evergreen, who was the botanist, built the collections at Evergreen, of which I was a curator for many years.
They were small, but they were mighty.
They were actually really, really – they were a lot better than our library was, right?
And Steve was careful and rigorous, and he He held no truck with fools or with hubris.
And this is not exactly on topic with regard to the value of natural history museums, but I've just screenshotted a bit from far down in this paper, which I'll link the paper in the show notes.
Here we have Steve Herman on the... Oh, before I go here, I'll say that Steve Herman retired not too long after I showed up in 2002.
Again, because it was sort of a... I was being hired into his position-ish.
And unfortunately, he died in 2020, and we talked about him a bit in that first wave of COVID, although he had been sick and he was old, but the world no longer has him.
So here is Steve Herman on the disconnect between management and natural history.
Managers have to manage.
I have always been very selective about asking local resource managers to talk to my classes on field trips.
At best, this can be a useful way to introduce students to the wildlife field and to familiarize them with local problems and solutions.
At worst, one risks letting some proselytizer natter on forever about his or her favorite weed problem and how he or she is going to solve it with pesticides, or how the unit is starved for personnel and funding, etc.
In the absence of careful preparation, students must take uniforms and assertiveness for authority and science.
My favorite sentence in here.
Another reason I resist these encounters is that it is a lazy way to teach.
Wildlife programs commonly use this technique.
The professor gets a free pass, and the refuge manager, for example, gets a free audience of young, impressionable students who want eventually to work in a similar role.
The status quo is served and strengthened.
And wildlife programs are places where training often substitutes for education.
So, this fits perfectly with our analysis of what the value of natural history museums is, both museums of zoology and herbaria, and also the value of fieldwork itself.
Fieldwork is far noisier.
than lab work.
And there are questions that you can't ask in the field, just as there are questions that you can't ask in the lab.
And field scientists and lab scientists will tend to have different personalities.
There's a sorting thing that happens, and mostly those of us who have done most of our work in the field would not be well suited to a life in the lab, and vice versa.
Although lab scientists like to imagine that field scientists are just on vacation all the time, which of course if that were true, why didn't you choose that yourself?
And I think it is, in part, the rise of not just the bean counters, but also of the reductionist, tech-heavy, need-to-get-more-grants type of science that looks at things like natural history collections and says, what value is that?
What do we need that for?
Isn't that old school?
Aren't we done looking at actual organisms?
Aren't we better than that?
Don't we use tools to either go really, really small or really, really big or really, really close or really, really far away?
Isn't the human scale of sensory understanding of the universe really passe?
No, it's not.
And it's still the best way that we have to understand most things that do exist at our scales.
And we are risking getting rid of not just a tradition, that has been very important to human understanding, but specimens that may actually, and here I'll go practical for a moment, but may end up having in them some of the things that will answer questions like, how do I treat this disease?
And I don't want to defend herbaria on the basis of Actually, within your 825,000 plant species, you may have in there somewhere a molecule that could be the cure for something that people have been trying to cure for a long time, but that's also true.
And it's as if no one has thought of this.
Yeah, and I have the sad sense, as I did when Michigan shipped its collections off to the hinterlands, that At the point that you have to make these arguments out loud, it's clear that something fundamental has been lost from the discussion, right?
At the point that you have to defend natural history and collections and library access and all of these things, it's like its own... it's like sophistry that doesn't have to speak, right?
What is the value of that collection?
Oh my god, how could I... if you're asking that question, You probably don't have the capacity to understand the answer, right?
And I don't know what we do in the face of such things.
I've got one more anecdote relevant to this, which I think you will remember.
When we were at UC Santa Cruz, having worked with Bob Travers for a couple of years by then, and looking to apply for grad school in evolution and ecology at some EEB or EEOB, evolution, ecology, and organismal biology department somewhere.
He said, and I specifically was very interested in animal behavior, and he said, you want to go to a place with a great museum, with a world-class museum.
And I said to him, somewhat cheekily, but Bob, you know, dead animals don't behave.
You know, why would I care about there being a museum there?
I want to look at, you know, what animals actually do.
And his answer stayed with me.
And it's something I used to tell my own students too, when they were looking at grad schools.
Not just for all the reasons that we have just described, like the first order reasons that museums, including herbaria, of value, but they are crossroads of intellectual action.
Those collections exist because they have in them so many species, so many specimens, that people will come from all over the world and spend a few days or a couple weeks or even a few months at the benches in the public spaces in those collections taking measurements.
Um, and asking questions of those collections that have not been asked before.
And often, they will be doing that on a tour of, okay, I'm gonna, you know, I'll be at Duke, and then I'll be at Michigan, I'll be at Harvard, and I'll be at Berkeley, I'll go to the big, big museums, and I'm gonna collect these data, and then, and then I'm gonna spend, you know, the two years, um, compiling and analyzing the data and figuring out if my hypothesis was true.
What that means is that if you're a student or a faculty at one of these museums, you have so many people coming through all the time.
And a lot of what they're doing is this sort of rote data collection, and they have time to talk and to think.
And so no matter how great the institution you're at, and in general, the great collections are at already great institutions, But you effectively get an even greater, even larger institution with even greater intellectual capacity in it if you have a museum there because you have so many more people coming through all the time with whom you can share ideas.
And those ideas can be well formalized and advanced by them because it's why they traveled, you know, across the state, country, or world to get to you.
Or they can be things that occur to them as they're sitting there.
And like with libraries, one of the things about a museum, about the collections, the behind-the-scenes, non-public collections, is you walk down the aisles and you're like, oh, check those chameleons out.
I hadn't seen that shape in common between those two species before, for instance.
Yeah, actually, it's funny because Bob, not only did he recommend going to someplace with a great collection for that amazing reason, which isn't fundamentally about the collection, but has a tremendous impact on your own Breadth of thought but he also says you should not consider getting a job anywhere that doesn't have undergraduates because they will Ask you questions that where you won't be interfacing with the undergraduate specifically, right?
Which is also a great piece of advice But I wanted to just so that we've got two things on the list you need to have contact with undergraduates because they're not yet trained not to ask certain questions and they will cause you to think things because The questions that they don't know they're not supposed to ask are often excellent questions.
Collections bring in people from far and wide.
I would say the other thing that you lose when you're not at a major university is you lose access to the collection of People at the tops of their fields who come through to give a talk.
And this is especially useful if you are a generalist, because you can go to the talks that aren't actually in your local discipline.
That's not going away though.
Well, right.
I mean, to the degree that the quality of thinking is going down, and therefore the talks that come through are going down, but that's not on the chopping block, because across every field people understand the value of hearing other people's ideas in a formal setting.
Well, so I think people often don't go to the really far-flung stuff, because it's often a waste of time if you don't even understand what's being said, and my guess is the quality of what comes through is going down as the system gets less good at thinking.
But anyway, I'm just putting on the list.
So we've got high-quality library that allows you to make huge progress in a day, collections that bring people through who need to see the physical stuff, and there aren't very many collections.
seminars of people across, frankly, the entire university if you can make use of it, and undergrads who you are required to teach, right?
PIs not teaching very much because they've got graduate assistants to do the job for them.
That's bad for those people's thinking.
All of those are hidden values that we tend to underrate.
Indeed.
But anyway, yeah, it's sad what we've lost.
It is.
And I mean, it sounds like there's a great hue and cry in objection to the decision by the Dean at Duke to get rid of the herbarium within a couple years.
But, you know, let this add to that.
We are adding to that hue and cry that these natural history collections are far more important than you know, and some of that value cannot be quantified.
And some of that is actually the point.
Yep.
All right, well, excellent.
It's sad to hear that the same bad style of thinking has apparently banished this collection, but not terribly surprising.
I think we should put off the other discussion until our next... We're not going to be polite to each other?
We will be polite in the meantime.
Oh, okay.
Yes, in the meantime, as should all of you.
Actually, yeah, be polite regardless.
All right, so we will hold off on talking about politeness and things downstream thereof until next week.
And that discussion is a barn burner.
It sounds boring and stupid, but I promise it will be the opposite.
No, I mean, I think you're looking at the clock going like, oh, we've already been at it a while, and you've got things to do.
Yeah, and it's a... It's a big discussion.
It's a big discussion, yep.
All right, so we will start off next week and we'll be back at our usual time next week on Wednesday at 11 30 a.m pacific, but let's just finish up here with a few more Things to say.
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