Contested Development: The 215th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 215th 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 the CDC’s new super simple recommendations on respiratory viruses, and learn from the CDC that treatment can be prevention. While the CDC never mentions vitamin D in these new guidelines, a new meta-analysis finds that vitamin D supplementation is protective against bad Covid outcomes, especia...
Hey folks, welcome to the 215th Dark Horse Podcast livestream.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Hying.
You went into deep mode there for a while.
Did I go into deep mode?
Yes, you did.
Barry White, is that the guy?
Maybe.
Yeah, I think so.
Yeah.
I think so.
I didn't mean to do that.
I just thought I'd change it up a little bit.
Yeah, it was good.
You know.
It's good.
We are hurtling towards spring and might as well spend a little bit of time in the base before we get there.
Do you know how close to spring we are?
Did you actually calculate, or did you do one of your famous half-assed calculations?
Oh, no, this was a half-assed one.
But we are five-sixths of the way through winter, even though it is snowing, so winter has a few things to say about it.
There's just not that many days, right?
No, I couldn't do it precisely.
Why not?
Well, why not?
Because the ebb and flow of weather means it makes no difference.
It's all very rough anyway.
No, but this, as long as we're here, this is part of what is so confusing to people.
This is how people who don't normally think in numbers get confused by the world.
When people put numbers on things that are actually kind of a, like, I don't know, it's something like five-sixths.
Well, five-sixths sounds very precise.
And in this case, the stakes are zero, right?
There are no stakes here.
I could go for a stake.
Yeah.
But frankly, the constant pushing of numbers that aren't really numbers or that weren't calculated with any care at people who don't really think in numbers have been assured by their bad math education in elementary school that they're incompetent at math or math phobic or whatever the constant pushing of numbers that aren't really numbers or that weren't calculated with any care Helps keep people under the thumb of the authoritarian garbageman.
Yeah, but I'm going to push back a little bit because this is a question of significant digits.
And the fact is, first of all, the solstices and equinoxes, equini, equinoxes, equids, whatever they are.
They're not.
They're not equids.
They might be horsemen.
Yes, of the… this summer's not really an apocalypse, but in any case, the point is, one-sixth is not a very precise number, and the thing that we're calculating isn't very precise either, because the fact that it lands on a particular date doesn't… One-sixth is incredibly precise.
No.
It's a fraction.
Yes, but it's not... Boy, I'm trying to come up with a highly precise version of said fraction, and I'm not going to do it because I will embarrass myself trying to do math at the chalkboard, which has never been a strength for me.
Always, math requires a quiet bit of solitude.
But anyway, the point being, one-sixth is about right.
And it's about right in the same vein as, you know, the spring equinox being on the 20th of March.
I'm not saying it is on the 20th of March, but the 20th of March is not, you know... It's actually on the 19th this year.
It's on the 19th.
There you go.
Usually the 21st.
It's on the 19th this year.
Yeah.
Well, I had calculated it at the 20th.
But really, you know, you have an approximate number of days between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and it comes out to approximately three months of 30 days apiece.
And we are two weeks from the end of that period.
It seems to me exactly the lesson of significant digits.
No, but so, I mean, this is not the place to start, but fractions imply precision.
And a half, like a half, like no one assumes that you are being precise, even though a half is a very precise number.
As soon as you're going into the more arcane fractions, you use a fraction and the precision is more and more implied, because it is actually there.
And so it's actually a step out of numeracy to go like, yeah, I kind of meant five, six in this kind of like rough way.
It's actually a supremely precise... I don't think so.
You say we're three quarters of the way there.
Right.
And so, you know, half and quarter, and indeed all of the halvings or doublings of the denominator, continue to feel a little bit more precise, but there's still things that you can kind of do in your head.
And once you're in, you know, a third kind of two, but...
You know, we're in maybe semantic space, but I do object.
I do feel like, you know, because I did teach statistics, because I did teach some math as part of what I was doing when I was a professor, seeing the kinds of fear and acknowledged incompetence that many students came in the door with, with regard to math,
I feel certain that some of what that was about was just having numbers thrown at them all the time, and they'd never been allowed to sit down with them and go, okay, what does this actually mean, and where is the place for numbers?
It's calculable how far we are actually through winter, and if you're actually assuming three months of 30 days each, you're assuming a 360-day year.
So you've short shrifted the year by five days.
All right, well, I'm not the first person to do that.
It was a long time before we had that calculated down to the actual day.
But in any case, I guess if you are the sort of person who finds a sixth a compelling rendition at this scale, given the vicissitudes of weather.
I did point out it was snowing today.
Then it's about, you know, one more sixth to go.
And if you were the kind of person who finds that like nails on a chalkboard, then you can either calculate it yourself and find out how close to a sixth it is, or you could not bother and then you just don't know.
But anyway, somewhere in this neighborhood of time, it is something like a sixth.
It's coming up.
We've got a little less than two weeks before spring starts.
If I may add very quickly, it seems like a perfectly relevant fraction here because it's almost exactly half a month and so it's a very understandable unit of measurement for a season.
But a month is not 28 days.
But it's all very close.
It all averages out pretty closely.
There are 13 weeks in a season, not 12.
Right?
Because there's 52 weeks in a year.
And there's 13 weeks in, therefore, in a quarter of a year, which is a season.
And we got about two weeks to go, a little less.
But I hate to do this to the audience, but you will remember.
Eons ago, I don't remember how long ago it was, we had a conversation which I thought was very productive, which is why the heck is the year divided into quarters given that it is presumably hurtling more rapidly at perigee than apogee, and therefore you would expect the day length to be equal at a point not exactly one quarter of the way from the
Not exactly on the equinox as calculated by the calendar.
And somebody wrote in and they answered the question and they said, actually, that's true, but that the degree of imprecision is very tiny and therefore it ended up being close enough.
And so that does suggest an imprecision in the calculation itself.
I have been looking at the app that I've got that does sunrise and first light and sunset and last light times.
And you can look into the future, you can look in the past, you can do it wherever you want to be on the planet.
And it is interesting to note there that the equinox both here, the coming equinox in 13 days, both here and other places where I've looked at it, does not show sunrise, you know, It is also true that light spreads into darkness, not the other way around.
And so, the day length will always be greater than 12 hours on the equinox, because even if sunrise and sunset are exactly 12 hours apart, you will have light on either sides of those things.
But even if you allow for that and look at just sunrise and sunset times, it is not on the equinox anywhere that I have found, at least this year, that it is precisely 12 hours apart.
There you go.
Interesting.
Yeah.
All right.
Interesting for us, and I don't know anybody else.
Oh, I doubt it.
I think we just lost, you know, maybe a sixth of our audience.
Two-thirteenths of our audience?
A sixth?
Something in there?
I have a feeling I know who we're talking about.
I think we are better off without them.
That's not helpful, I don't think.
Okay, today we're going to talk about some more nonsense from the CDC, some utterly unsurprising research on vitamin D, the new arbiters of intellectual progress, and genetic drift.
Obviously.
Yes.
All those things.
We're not going to do a Q&A today, but we'll have one next week on locals, only on locals.
We've got lots of good stuff for our local supporters there.
Please consider joining us there.
We've got a watch party going on right now.
Early guest episodes of Dark Horse.
Lots of, you know, all the Q&As are there.
Brett's doing AMAs there.
We've got great content from January when Brett and Zach were down the Darien Gap and in the canal.
Panama Way.
Down Panama Way.
It's the way you say that.
What did I say?
I don't know, down in the Darien, something like that, which is also true.
I did say Panama.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But down Panama way.
Is that how you say that?
No.
Carinatown.
Yeah.
Lots here and there you can find just sort of endless pedantry.
Well, sure.
All right.
I mean, you know, I'm sure people have their limit, but everybody needs some.
Yeah, yeah.
And, of course, you can access our Discord server there, where they have things like book clubs and karaoke and happy hour and lots of great stuff.
So, even though we've already bored you with discussion of fractions and significant digits and such... Significant digits, man.
How many podcasts do you get a discussion about that?
Right up front, like as if we're trying to kill off our audience.
But now, before we get into the actual meat of the episode, We do have three sponsors, as always, at the top of the hour.
And as always, we want to just tell you that we are very choosy about who we accept as sponsors on the podcast, and we either vet any products or services directly, or if, as in the case of the first ad this week, we don't have a reason to need it, we won't accept it unless we know someone who does, who we trust, and who we can ask to try it and to give us an honest assessment.
So, if you hear us reading ads here, you know that we actually vouch for these products.
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These glasses have paint on them.
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You're giving me a look.
Departing from the script.
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And for those of you who were antagonized by the first part of this show so far, if you have MD hearing aids, you can always just turn them off.
I suppose that's a point.
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I feel like I should have a mammal vocalization ready for the end of that at each time.
A cow?
Unfortunately, moo and oink are already taken care of, so... Sheep, maybe?
Ooh, that's a tough one.
I figured out sheep.
I'm loathe to do it because I would screw it up, probably, but I did after many, many years of not being able to do it.
We did a little audit of our audience recently, and it turns out there are no sheep among them.
No sheep.
That does not surprise me.
So you're not going to offend any sheep?
No, I'm going to embarrass myself by screwing it up.
I would need a little quiet time to practice.
But if there's no sheep in the audience, how do they know?
I mean, they think you sound wrong, but they're not sheep themselves.
That's how.
Yeah.
Next time.
Yeah.
Well, our final, yeah, okay, so mammal vocalizations.
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Everyone can bark, though.
You're not going to bark, are you?
I am not going to bark.
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Yeah.
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I caught him in there again this week.
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And here we are.
And here we be, and my computer has gone to sleep, of course.
We're going to start by being so thrilled that the CDC has decided to make things simpler.
Fabulous.
What could possibly go wrong?
What could possibly go wrong?
So here is an email.
This is, Zach, this is the URL version of an email that I received yesterday morning, because I'm still signed up for the CDC's newsletter that they started early in COVID.
As at the end of this little segment here, I will show you something that I recently received from the Oregon Health Authority, which I also signed up for.
Early in COVID.
They continue to be full of information that Americans perhaps should know, although the information that I take from these documents is not necessarily what the writers of the documents were intending.
So, from this March 5th email, we have CDC updates and simplifies respiratory virus recommendations.
Well, that does seem like good news, doesn't it?
And so, by respiratory virus, they are talking about COVID-19, flu, and RSV.
We talked a lot about RSV last week.
And so it reads, last week CDC released updated recommendations for how people can protect themselves and their communities from respiratory viruses.
The new guidance brings a unified approach to addressing risks from a range of common respiratory viral illnesses, such as, again, COVID-19, flu, and RSV.
And it goes on to say, you know, other things that we No.
It claims that we have more tools than ever to combat flu, COVID-19 and RSV, which that almost sounds like maybe they're actually recognizing that there are a lot of things that people like us have been talking about almost from the beginning that they too could be doing for people.
Maybe?
You hopeful?
Well, no.
I mean, of course not.
But, you know, more tools than ever.
More tools than ever.
In light of the nature of the tools, that seems like no news whatsoever.
Right.
Because, you know, it doesn't say that the tools are any good.
It does not.
And, of course, you would tend to add tools.
And what would it mean to lose a tool that you did have?
So... Yeah, more tools than ever is a generic non-statement.
Yes.
Yes.
And really the thing that struck me here was Simplify.
Updates and simplifies recommendations.
Well, let's see what happens.
The only other thing in this email was vaccine effectiveness of updated 2023-2024 COVID-19 vaccines in a CDC report.
So published by them, they find that these vaccines are awesome, which is not surprising because that has been their position all along, even when in direct contradiction to the actual research that was coming out.
Even, you know, the picture that they have chosen involves a woman grabbing her chest but smiling so that we know... No, she's laughing.
She's not having a heart attack.
Well, that's my point, is that we know from her facial expression that she is not having a heart attack, which is good.
It's a relief in light of what they're thinking.
Okay, yes.
Okay, so let's see what happens.
Let's see what these simplified recommendations actually provide.
So this is what happens when you click through on, here's how the CDC is simplifying things.
Well, this doesn't look simple at all, frankly.
This is long and ridiculous.
Respiratory virus guidance.
They go through, again, the boilerplate about respiratory viruses responsible for millions of illnesses and thousands of hospitalizations and deaths in the United States.
And again, they mention the three big bad viruses of the moment, according to the CDC, COVID-19, flu, and RSV.
Although even they are recognizing that here in the Northern Hemisphere, we're basically out of the RSV season, and the flu season is coming to an end, and COVID numbers are dropping as well.
So, CDC's respiratory virus guidance.
Man, that's a lot of stuff.
This doesn't look simple to me.
Let us, um, let us go in here and see what happens.
Prevention strategies.
Uh, oh, actually this is, uh, we're gonna go back here.
Immunizations.
This is a core strategy.
So by simple, I think what they mean is they've put either core or additional strategy banners on each of their recommendations.
And this way you know if it's a core strategy, this is what you should definitely be doing.
Take your beautiful, healthy young daughter and get her a jab.
That's what you should be doing.
Okay.
Do they explain why that would be a good thing?
No, but steps you can take include talking with a health care provider, reviewing the vaccine schedule, visiting vaccines.gov to locate vaccines near you, learn about how the vaccine recommendations are made, and talk to your friends and family about the benefits of getting vaccinated.
Okay, so this is a core strategy.
Let's see.
Hygiene, also a core strategy.
Well, that actually makes sense.
Wash your hands.
Core strategy.
Okay?
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Yes?
Um, no, I'm okay with it.
Okay.
You know, the problem is that we have a lot of holdover stuff for COVID from back before we understood the mode of transmission.
Right.
Not fomites.
Yeah.
Right.
The basic point was this was a, you know, it was a moral good to stand away from people and wash your hands.
Right.
Well, we're getting there.
So, you know, that's physical distancing, right?
So, you know, to what degree are respiratory viruses actually reduced when people have good hand-washing hygiene?
I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, let's put it this way.
As long as this is a general recommendation, it's a good one.
Well, it's a general recommendation for respiratory virus prevention.
So, you know, it's not actually clear that it's exactly right.
Now, here.
Steps for cleaner air.
Also a core strategy.
They want you opening windows.
Look at that!
They want you opening windows and you also could move activities outdoors where airflow is best.
Wow!
Check it out!
Check it out!
The CDC just told their audience, just like we do every week, to get outside!
To get outside.
And we extensively covered this in the midst of being accused of spreading misinformation.
We extensively covered what we call the functional volume of a space and how to increase it to decrease the likelihood of contracting SARS-CoV-2, and getting outside.
The multiple benefits of getting outside a space with an infinite volume, where COVID at least does not transmit, and other things happen.
I mean, they have exactly that effective volume argument here under how it works.
Some germs spread in the air between people.
Well, yes.
If it's a respiratory virus, yes.
Right?
This happens more easily in indoor crowded spaces with poor airflow.
There it is.
And yes, we've talked about this over and over and over again.
I've got several pieces of natural selections speaking to this.
point as well.
So that is their final core strategy.
It's the only one that I think is actually spot on with regard to reducing the likelihood that you're going to end up with a respiratory virus, although I have nothing against hygiene within reason, right?
And, you know, we've talked here, we've talked in our book about the so-called hygiene hypothesis, which posits that some of the increased numbers of allergies, for instance, in children in the weird world in the U.S.
in particular, that have been a result of the craze for keeping things so bacteria and other pathogen free that developing babies and toddlers' immune systems have no ability to start to recognize things because they've never been exposed to them, so that when they are finally exposed to them, they get sicker than they would have if they had lived in a home or been allowed to crawl around outside and explore things in all of its messy complexity.
I would love to see the contribution of the hygiene hypothesis compared in a rigorous fashion to the contribution of adjuvants and other chemicals that irritate the immune system during development.
Yes, that would be, that would be, that would be important.
Yep.
For sure.
Okay, next up here in the respiratory guidance from the CDC, preventing spread when you're sick.
Well, this, oh, this is actually, this is new since I was here earlier.
Preventing spread when you're sick, core strategy again.
They want you to not hang out with other people when you've actually got symptoms.
This seems like something everyone knew until COVID somehow, but okay.
Well, I want to, I have always been troubled by the fact that there is not good guidance on what the general rule ought to be, and it is not built into our economy.
So lots of people, especially people who are hovering closer to the edge of insecurity, financially speaking.
Hourly workers, unsalaried workers without sick leave.
Right, are incentivized to go to work, they're caught between a rock and a hard place and presumably there's an awful lot of spreading of disease and who knows how much cost to the economy and certainly cost of quality of life and, you know, given that these things all do damage, there's going to be costs also to longevity, just from the number of times you get sick that you don't need to because the economy forces people to go to work with pathogens.
So, I mean, we all probably remember the very strange and always shifting recommendations that the CDC was putting out sort of mid-COVID, and no one was sure about what they were supposed to do.
And this does look a little simpler, except kind of.
All these examples, and basically the story is, What they are recommending is after the last moment that you have any indication, be it fever or other symptoms, from a disease, wait 24 hours and then you can start resuming your activities.
Now, is 24 hours actually a magic number?
Probably not.
Any more than six feet was actually a magical number with which to distance yourself from people.
in stores.
And, you know, there's still footprints laid down in stores in some places, but, you know, a reminder, and actually it's useful, like a reminder of the insanity.
And on escalators where it's perfectly insane because the air that you're breathing out remains as the person on the escalator behind you moves into the cloud of whatever you exhaled.
No, and actually, I mean, this is not current CDC madness, but not only were there footprints on floors in stores, but there were several places where you had to walk in the same direction as everyone else, which is exactly the wrong thing to do if you don't want to be inhaling what which is exactly the wrong thing to do if you don't want to be You should let there be chaos and let people walk in whatever way they want to walk.
But I remember actually having to do this at a farmer's market.
And I never went back.
I was like, I'm done.
I feel sorry for these farmers, but this is ridiculous.
Yeah, it was somehow a giant game of Simon Says to see who the good people were.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So OK, so we've got preventing spread of your sick.
Masks, it's an additional strategy.
You should really do what they say, even though they do not point to any evidence that they work.
We've been through this before.
Physical distancing.
I'm going through all of these just to point out that this doesn't seem all that simple.
This is the simplifying CDC strategies for avoiding respiratory viruses, and there's a whole lot here that doesn't seem very simple.
But let me just go down one more and find...
Oh, actually, I'm going to go back up here.
I'm going to go back up here and find... where'd it go?
Here.
The Respiratory Virus Guidance, which is where all the simplicity is.
Scroll down and get to Treatment as Prevention.
I feel like whoever wrote this doesn't know what these words mean.
Treatment and prevention are not the same thing.
Treatment as prevention.
Treatment, they say, is a core prevention strategy to lower risk from respiratory viruses.
Now, getting less sick once exposed is a good outcome compared to getting more sick once exposed, but neither of those things is prevention.
Once exposed, there's no prevention.
So this is a very strange, like, frankly, this word's overused, but it's a very Orwellian use of language.
Like, this seems like it's paving the way to destroy the word, either treatment or prevention, just as the word, you know, vaccine was destroyed by calling the mRNA products vaccines.
Well, I'm curious about what's under that link, and you're going to tell us.
Here it is.
I wonder, it seems to me... That's the recommendation right there.
Fake yellow pills.
Well, sure.
I mean, you know, right off the tree.
But the idea, you can imagine that pharma would, you know, pharma is healthy when people are sick.
Yep.
So the ancient medical wisdom that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is an argument against, depending on pharma.
It's an argument for preventing disease.
The idea here may be to break that association and basically blur the distinction and say, look, health comes from pharma.
Where else would it come from?
Yeah.
Which is obviously nonsense.
Well, I mean, there is a concept that would be relevant there, which is prophylaxis.
Yeah.
Right?
And frankly, vaccine is a form of prophylaxis.
Effective vaccine is a form of prophylaxis, just like there are drugs like the chloroquines and the quinine family that are effective prophylaxis against some species of malaria.
And frankly, as we will learn here shortly, and as we've been talking about for years now, having sufficient circulating levels of vitamin D is Extraordinarily good prophylaxis against a wide variety of diseases, including respiratory viruses.
And so, you know, ooh, maybe those are here.
No such luck.
Treatment of respiratory viruses.
What to know?
Treatment is a core prevention strategy to lower risk from respiratory viruses.
Again, no, that's not what those words mean.
Core prevention strategies are important steps you can take to protect yourself and others from respiratory viruses.
This is just It's gobbledygook.
There's no there there.
The recommendation for those just listening is literally a hand holding two pills.
This is a core strategy.
A hand holding two pills.
And then I could read all of this, but there's literally no information here.
Treatment.
Seek health care right away for testing and or treatment.
Okay, what's the treatment?
Treatments for flu can, treatments for COVID and flu can lessen symptoms and shorten the time you're sick.
Okay, but what are they?
Like on and on and on.
Know the treatment options.
And you know, none of this stuff is any specifics.
Okay, so maybe they're trying to protect themselves from having to go in and change every time the treatment options change.
So if I say, I'm going to click on know the treatment options for flu and COVID before you get sick, what does the CDC think the treatment options for COVID are at the moment?
This was updated in January 18th of this year.
Again, a lot of really generic things.
And then finally, we get to their three, three recommended possible treatments.
And again, they're saying prevention and treatment are the same thing.
They are three pharmaceutical products.
All of which are antivirals, and none of which should be a person's preferred treatment or prophylaxis.
So I'm having trouble reading.
It's pexlovid?
It's pexlovid, remdesivir, and molnupiravir.
And molnupiravir.
So it's the fancy, new, patented... It's the three horrifying drugs that, no, this is not what you should be doing.
Right?
You should go to the FLCCC site and look at their protocols.
There are a number of doctors, excellent doctors, that have protocols at this point.
If your particular doctor has a protocol that works, I was just talking to a doctor a couple of weeks ago who said, you know what?
What we were doing, he said, I prescribed ivermectin a few times, but it didn't turn out to enhance efficacy Because the drug cocktail that I was giving them, which was just a few other simple things and included steroids and zinc and D and one other thing I can't remember, he said, I had 100% success with that.
And so I didn't want to give them more than they needed.
And so I dropped the ivermectin, not because it was causing a problem, but because it was unnecessary in the particular population for which he was treating COVID patients.
So, depending on where you are, what your particular risk factors are, what your community has, you know, what strain your community has, if you have a good doctor, your good local doctor may well have better advice than what is on the FLCCC site.
But the FLCCC site is a far better place to go than what the CDC is recommending as three treatment options.
Completely reckless that they would recommend these things.
These things are disruptors of fundamental biological processes, which might have negative effects on these pathogens, but they will have negative effects on many other bodily processes as well.
Yeah, I mean, it's like chemo, right?
Like, can we kill the cancer before we kill you?
Well, can we kill the virus before we kill you?
Hope so, but how about, given that there are lots of other options, lots of other treatment options, don't go that route.
Don't go the high toxicity route.
And, but, you know, the comparison between, oh, they just forgot to mention vitamin D, the unpatentable, nearly universally enhancing of resistance to pathogenic disease,
They forgot to mention that and they they tell you that These treatments are prevention and That you should take them if you get sick, even though the risks are obviously Through the roof.
It's so simple So I mean remember remember that this is what the CD the CDC starts by saying we're simplifying things Just go here and you'll know what to do Well, okay I don't really believe that that site is designed to be read by somebody who's looking to have a simplified rubric.
It is designed so that the simplified rubric undergirds the essence of the recommendation, which is Well, but I think there's a psychological thing going on too.
Don't prevent with something like vitamin D and do treat when you get sick with these things.
Well, but I think there's a psychological thing going on, too.
It further destabilizes people's sense that they can figure things out for themselves.
This is simple.
This is simple.
The CDC has made simple recommendations.
The CDC has made simple recommendations.
Why aren't you following it?
Why aren't you following it?
You're not dumb, are you?
You're not dumb, are you?
Well, listen, your doctor has internalized these simplified recommendations and just listen to her or him because he's got it.
Well, listen, your doctor has internalized these simplified recommendations and just listen to her or him because he's got it, right?
Right.
So if you aren't willing to spend time on this really simplified set of rubrics from the CDC with regard to how to avoid respiratory viruses this respiratory virus season, then just take it from us.
He's wearing a lab coat.
You know he's right.
Otherwise, he wouldn't have been given the lab coat, right?
So, you know, it feels like it's a psychological game.
I think that's what I was saying.
It is a psychological game.
Now the question, I've always wondered why we don't always ask when we look at an advertisement, who's the target audience?
The target audience is not always the one that you would imagine, right?
So to take an example, back when Victoria's Secret used sexy models to sell their lingerie, There was an argument to be made that the target audience was men and that women watching men react to those models then transfer the lesson on to them.
At that time, they also sent hard copies of catalogs to people's homes.
It wasn't the women who were spending time flipping through those catalogs.
It was softcore porn, basically.
But the point is that I don't know whether or not that set of web pages Was designed with citizens in mind?
They claim it was because they have at the bottom of each page, here are different, supposedly, you know, just as simple guidelines for health care providers.
Right.
But my sense is I mean, I don't know why I trust their claim about anything, given many of the things they claim.
Right.
But the point is, look, let's suppose that you are a doctor or a nurse and you are reading through the CDC's stuff to figure out what you're allowed to say, what you're not allowed to say.
Oh, a simplified rubric.
And then you see all of this stuff that, you know, you know that you're going to be able to talk to your patients about, you know, the importance of frequent hand-washing and it's going to have very little effect because people don't want A new assignment, they think they washed their hands already, whatever it is.
So the point is, the simplified thing comes down to, well, what will people do?
Oh, you prescribe that for them, they'll take it, right?
So anyway, I wonder if the point is, that's the setup and the punchline, right?
The punchline is, don't worry about prevention, just take these treatments, which just so happen to be under patent and highly profitable.
Exactly.
So, you mentioned vitamin D, and that was exactly going to be my penultimate point here.
Here we have a systematic review published in the journal Nutrients, published this week, titled, Preventive Vitamin D Supplementation and Risk for COVID-19 Infection, a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.
I've got some dog fur up my nose.
I wonder what the treatment for that would be?
I think the prevention would be not letting the dog in the room before we do a podcast.
But that doesn't sound like that'll profit Big Pharma, so maybe not.
Maybe there's a drug for this.
Okay, from the abstract of this, of this, just this new pay-wise.
Well, I think I figured it out.
And in fact, Pharma is all over this.
This is about the dog fur on the nose problem?
Yeah, pretty much, because think about it this way.
If you're a dude... Which I'm not.
I would like to point out I'm not.
Right, right.
No, I'm just saying hypothetically.
If you're a dude who is, you know, insufficiently hair suit on the top of your head, right?
Pharma's gotcha, right?
They've got Rogaine or whatever the current thing is for people who have that issue.
You're gonna harvest rogue dog fur from people's noses?
No, no, no.
Well, that's at least business.
You are not good at marketing.
I was thinking, instead of Roe gain, Roe loss.
You give it to your dog.
Now, Pharma, they're all about giving stuff to your dog.
Causes the dog to become hairless.
Then you don't get that during a podcast.
Can you imagine what a Labrador would look like hairless?
How sad.
It would be sad.
It would be really sad.
It would be cleaner.
The sad look on their face would make more sense if they were hairless.
Yes, exactly.
Alright, we digressed as a result of my terrible pharmaceutical notion.
Yeah, row loss.
Okay.
So here, yes, this systematic review published this week, looking at the question of whether, well, you know, this is an unfortunately phrased sentence from the abstract that I have highlighted here.
The aim of the systematic review and meta-analysis is to demonstrate that Preventive vitamin D supplementation can play a protective role in the incidence of COVID-19 mortality and admission to intensive care units, ICUs.
So, I don't like the framing.
It's verificationist rather than falsificationist.
They went in with a hypothesis that they were really, really, really trying to prove, and that's not what you're supposed to do.
On the other hand, if they did not ignore research that they could tell before plugging it into their meta-analysis was going to come up with a different result, then that shouldn't have made a difference.
That's what the method should do.
Sure enough, there's a lot of stuff throughout here, but Here we go again.
The objective of this current meta-analysis is to examine whether the administration of vitamin D for any purpose prior to the onset of COVID-19 disease could yield a beneficial outcome in terms of prevalence, complications, and mortality.
That's interesting because there have been some mostly half-assed studies looking at whether or not vitamin treatment of COVID with vitamin D would reduce the intensity or the duration of the disease.
And like with the ivermectin studies, like with so many of these studies, generally the drug is given too little too late, at which point often if people are very sick, they're no longer sick from active viral infection, they're sick from secondary infections and runaway processes in the body, right?
So, this is interesting because they only include in this meta-analysis studies in which people's reactions to COVID are looked at depending on whether or not they already had been supplemented with vitamin D for other reasons before.
Sure enough, it's a long, long piece.
I guess there's nothing else I have highlighted here that's particularly relevant until the very end.
Nonetheless, the data appear to demonstrate a protective effect of vitamin D, especially in populations with a high incidence of vitamin D deficiency or insufficiency, and if health care workers are involved in the study design, presumably demonstrating higher adherence to vitamin D supplementation during the pandemic.
Just a couple of little technical details.
Vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency are terms of art that people who think about vitamin D disagree on, right?
How much vitamin D you should have on board.
If you ask the FDA versus if you ask Linda Benskin, who wrote an excellent review early in COVID that I wrote about and then you had on Dark Horse, You're going to get very different numbers and basically the doctors who are finding that and the people who are finding that when they supplement with vitamin D in so-called flu season, don't get sick, are looking to have much higher levels of vitamin D in them than what the FDA recommends.
These terms are technical terms, vitamin D deficiency versus vitamin D insufficiency, but what is the right, what is the best number to have is still a matter of debate.
It's a matter of debate, but one of the things that I learned from Dr. Benskin when she was on Dark Horse was, I think so too, was that the body, so when you take biology, you at some point learn that you don't need to worry too much about taking too much
Water-soluble vitamins like vitamin C, because the body can excrete them easily, so if you take too much, your body will equalize it, but you do have to worry about it with fat-soluble vitamins.
It's wasteful, but it's not harmful.
Right.
Fat-soluble vitamins, be careful.
Like A, right?
Like A. And in fact, there is a condition called hypervitaminosis A, which causes terrible things like the soles of your feet to fall off and... Oh, God!
Well, there's a famous I believe it's an Antarctic explorer.
No, it's going to be Arctic.
It's Arctic because polar bears.
Were the soles of his feet eaten by polar bears or was he eaten by polar bears?
Did they leave the soles of his feet behind?
I believe the culprit was polar bear liver.
It's been a long time since I learned this chapter.
But anyway, the point was... He ate a polar bear liver, livers being famously high in vitamin A, and then the soles of his feet fell off.
Yeah.
Which seemed like karma.
Yeah.
Boy do I hope the facts of that story are right and it's not the paint fumes talking.
But in any case, the point is we get this lesson, fat-soluble vitamins, beware about overdosing.
Turns out that that is overrated, that A is actually exceptional, and D in particular has a mechanism in which the body can disassemble extra D. So the idea of, well, how much is optimal?
You basically want to go towards the limit of what the body sets as the amount of circulating vitamin D, which is a hell of a lot higher than what most of us who dwell in the tempered zones and spend a lot of our time indoors have on board, creating a vulnerability to disease that we don't understand. creating a vulnerability to disease that we don't understand.
In fact, he may not have coined the formulation, or maybe he did, but the first place I learned about this was before I knew who Ryan Cole was, I saw a very persuasive speech he gave in which he said, there is no flu and cold season, there's vitamin D deficiency there is no flu and cold season, there's vitamin D deficiency And something clicked.
Now that may be slightly overstated.
Yeah.
But the point is, why is there a flu in cold season?
And it has to do with the fact that you have a vulnerable population, and so the R0 can be over 1, and you get to a circulating pathogen, which suggests a slam-dunk preventive measure.
The beauty of it is that the side effects are positive, right?
We can debate all day about how effective vitamin D is at preventing COVID, but even if it turned out it was disappointing, it prevents many other diseases, and it does not have negative consequences, and you're deficient anyway.
So the point is, This is not a magical take this pill and we will improve your health.
The point is your health is actually compromised by something we did beforehand, which was move indoors and move to northern climes where you can't make vitamin D during the winter.
And so supplementation is actually just restoring a kind of health that you have cryptically lost.
It makes a tremendous amount of sense.
And the risk of overdose is virtually nil.
That's right.
Yeah, and since the four of us have been supplementing with D in the winters for the last three winters, we've had almost no illness.
Yep, very little.
And yeah, like that.
One more thing here before we move on, which is that the Oregon Health Authority, which a long time viewers and listeners will recognize as a source that I have spoken about for a while.
Mid-pandemic, they had things like pictures of actual cowboys out completely alone in the middle of nowhere on horseback wearing masks.
Like, a single guy wearing a mask, and I'm keeping people safe!
God, you're lucky people!
And you mean masks, not Yeah, this is no Frito Bandito stuff going on here.
I was thinking Idaho Silver, but yeah.
Yeah, and it wasn't a raccoon.
Right.
Yeah.
No, it was insane.
So, Oregon Health Authority, which has been as gung-ho about the mainstream dangerous advice as anything, Reports in this issue that came out, this is two weeks ago, February 22nd.
In this issue, they've got a bunch of stuff that's really continuing in their usual thing.
COVID-19 update, methamphetamine use on the rise in Oregon.
Oh, did you hear that Oregon rolled back?
I can't remember what number it is, but a couple of years ago, we still lived there.
We, not us, but Oregon voted to decriminalize all the drugs, and of course, Portland became even worse than it was, and that's been rolled back.
That is no longer the law of the land in Oregon, so that's good news.
But the Q&A here, this is what I'm interested in.
They always have a question or two from readers, and in the Q&A this week, they have, mesamphetamines, health notes, Q&A answers your questions.
The first question, where can I get a non-mRNA COVID-19 vaccine?
Heavens, why would you want a non-mRNA-based vaccine?
And then I live in Newburgh and they answer the question.
They offer the question to us.
Someone wrote in.
Presumably for a long time, a lot of people have been wondering just that because some people are quite awake to the risks and the lack of benefit of the mRNA technology that has been shoved down everyone's throats as if they were vaccines for a very long time now.
And this is the first intimation that I have seen in the Oregon Health Authority newsletter that suggests that someone there is interested in actually coming into the modern era and going, you know, maybe people don't want this product.
Maybe we should give them some other opportunities.
And, you know, I don't, I don't want their other opportunities either.
I don't want the other products.
They're looking for non-mRNA Novavax they've got.
And that's it.
It's all Novavax.
I didn't even look at the answer because, you know, I'm not looking.
I don't live there even if I were, but I'm not looking.
Is J&J off the market entirely?
I don't know.
Yeah, so I'm a little surprised that's not here.
I know it's not available as a booster.
Yeah.
So, you know, I don't know.
But I include that just as a sort of a benchmark of where We're the various governing bodies that are effectively telling people what other people think are allowing to be let into the newsletters at this point.
The CDC is keeping the same ridiculous line they always have.
But here we have the Organ Health Authority, just a little glimmers of, oh gosh, maybe all that bit where we destroyed people's lives and livelihoods and families and health and sometimes actual lives by mandating these new gene therapies.
It wasn't such a good idea after all.
Yeah, people are catching on and so the health authorities have to acknowledge this.
At some point they have to and here's the first time I've seen it.
Yep.
Yeah, it's wild.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
Change topic.
Yeah.
So I wanted to call attention to something and, you know, the impetus to discuss this is I had Johnny Hudson and Michael Bryant on Dark Horse.
Some of you will have seen that episode.
If you haven't seen it, I suggest you check it out.
Who the heck is Johnny Hudson and who the heck are Johnny Hudson and Michael Bryant?
Well, Johnny Hudson is a newly minted Ph.D.
in Holocaust studies, and Michael Bryant is a well-established expert in the field.
I was Johnny's Ph.D.
advisor.
He's now graduated with his Ph.D.
Michael Bryant sat on his committee as one of his dissertation readers.
What I wanted to point out, though, is that the fact of Johnny's dissertation was actually initially spurred because Johnny was
Thinking there might be something evolutionary about genocide and the Holocaust in particular and he was looking for the body of literature that would tell him how to think about it in this way and the body of literature did not exist and he was
Thinking he would give up on that style of reasoning until he saw my episode of Joe Rogan's podcast with Jordan Peterson, in which we actually gathered to discuss the evolutionary implications for the Holocaust and genocide in general.
So I don't remember what year that was.
It's going to be some years ago.
Yeah, many years ago.
Do we know when that was, Zach?
Yeah.
It was episode 1006.
Some of you will have seen a strange mashup from that episode in which somebody has recut it to make it sound like Jordan and I are actually fans of the Nazis, which neither of us are.
Shocking, really.
It is shocking, right.
But in any case, if you watch the actual episode... Six years ago.
Six years ago, yeah.
So... 2018.
2018.
But anyway, the point I wanted to make is this.
Our institutions are crumbling.
They now reluctantly admit things after the public already knows that they're going on.
And, you know, this dysfunction has been true across the Academy for a long time.
We encountered it, you know, you and I both had good experiences.
With excellent advisors, but we also saw an awful lot of dysfunction and stagnation in other parts of our department and other parts of the Academy.
Yes, we did.
Some folks who have followed us long enough will have perhaps seen the interaction.
The entire thing was not captured on video, but there is a substantial piece of my interaction with Richard Dawkins captured in 2018 in Chicago.
2018 in Chicago.
And what we have is two disciplines.
You have Holocaust and perpetrator studies on the one hand, evolutionary biology on the Both are reluctant to look at the interface between these two questions, which is strange.
The more you think about things like genocide, the more it becomes obvious that there is a question to be asked about people replacing each other and thereby experiencing a kind of evolutionary success as a result of this behavior.
Do you want to just give a shout out to the naturalistic fallacy here in case there are any newcomers who mistake what you are saying for enthusiasm for the Third Reich?
Absolutely.
Yes, and I will say that this was something that we did cover on the podcast itself.
And I would imagine that we covered it with Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan as well.
But anyway, the point is the naturalistic fallacy is that just because something is a certain way doesn't mean that it ought to be that way.
And in fact, More to the point, the fact that something is an evolutionary strategy does not say that it is the only strategy.
And I would give the example, rape is an obvious evolutionary strategy for spreading genes.
Laws against rape are also an evolutionary strategy and presumably the one that we all want to see flourish.
It would be wonderful if we organized things in such a way that rape was taken off the table.
And genocide is very much like this, but we say never again, and yet we do not, we steadfastly avoid looking at the question from an evolutionary perspective.
No, the institutions don't want to do this.
If you want to see what that sounds like from the evolutionary perspective, my interaction with Richard Dawkins, where he More or less scolded me for suggesting that there might be something down this road, said he didn't think there was something down this road and didn't want us looking into it.
Well, that's the institutional layer.
What has happened is outside of the institutions, the very thing that needs to happen is happening.
So podcasts are not the right place to be having that discussion, but they can stand in for the institutions if the institutions are going to refuse to do their job.
And so I think it's important.
A, you know, Joe Rogan takes a lot of flack.
And here his podcast results in a student who, I didn't know anything about him, discovering that there was someone thinking in an evolutionary way who was on the same wavelength.
He reached out to me.
I became his advisor.
We now have a PhD whose expertise is the evolutionary analysis of the Holocaust.
I taught him to think evolutionarily.
He taught me about features of the Holocaust.
I had no idea And Michael Bryant, who was on his committee, who was initially concerned, as all of us are going down this road, what will we find?
Is it going to be useful in preventing genocide?
Is it possible?
Is it going to be dangerous?
Right, could it be dangerous?
He finds himself persuaded that this is actually an important way to look at this puzzle.
My god, he sounds like an actual intellectual!
He is.
He's a great guy.
I was thrilled to meet him in this process.
But anyway, the institutions fail.
But the point is, outside of the institutions, the impulse to actually follow the evidence where it leads and to do the intellectual work exists in all sorts of places, including Joe Rogan's podcast.
So that's pretty cool.
I think it's an excellent proof of concept about the importance of these venues for a free exchange of ideas.
Yeah.
I mean, it used to be assumed that this is what college is for.
This is what grad school is for.
You go there and you find the great diversity of thinkers and thoughts.
And to the degree that the great thinkers and thoughts have occurred outside of the walls of the academy, they have been brought in.
They are at least represented inside.
But increasingly, that's not the case.
And so you've demonstrated the capacity of a podcast with a giant audience, Joe Rogans, to actually bring together two people who could make something emergent out of some work that otherwise was not going to see the light of day.
Yeah, to do serious work that ends up back in the Academy.
So it's, you know, it's like everything else, you know, the Academy is now being pushed into doing the work it should be doing by external, independent voices, which, you know, that's pretty fascinating.
Of course, What you alluded to earlier, the fact that we expect college to contain this sort of courageous exploration of intellectual territory, is now overtaken by petty tyrants who, you know, including, you know, mobs of students who dictate what lessons are teachable.
And the problem is, because You need to explore this with sufficient depth to see why understanding something like the Holocaust or genocide in general as an evolutionary phenomenon is likely key to preventing these things in the future.
Right?
If we pretend my initial investigation of this when I was an undergraduate Which is what I discussed on Joe's program that Johnny heard.
But my initial concern was that the story that we were given about Hitler as a madman was feeble.
That it did not explain the terrifying success of the Nazis in taking over territory, spreading their ideology, and that we needed a better explanation that did not force us to say, well, that was just madness.
Because the thing is, madness tends to be totally maladaptive, right?
It's not a way of succeeding.
And so if you treat it that way, you don't worry about it properly.
That is a dangerous misdiagnosis if it's a misdiagnosis.
Right.
And much of the law, the law that forbids us to do things, is about those things being rational and therefore driving the cost of them up so that they become irrational.
So if you start out with the assumption that Hitler is some irrational nutcase, then the point is, well, that's a Jeffrey Dahmer phenomenon.
And, you know, it's the stuff of horror movies, but it's not something we have to worry about because it's not the product of some process.
Whereas, if evolution creates this impulse, then you have to take the same approach to it that you would take to anything else that is rational and terrible.
You have to drive up the cost so that it becomes irrational to attempt it.
And you see some excellent thinking that is a-evolutionary but not anti-evolutionary mid-20th century after the Holocaust from, is it Hannah Arendt with the banality of evil, right?
That the banality of evil does not suggest that it is evolutionary, but it does suggest that it is ubiquitous.
And then we have Solzhenitsyn with, and I will get the exact phrase wrong, but The line between good and evil does not lie in civilizations, but within the heart of every man.
It runs through the heart of every man, yeah.
Ultimately, what I would expect would come out of this is a A reconciling of various schools of thought that have demonstrated something important.
So we also have things like the Milgram Experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Ash Experiment, all of these investigations into the psychology that goes into conformity and obedience.
You've got Hannah Arendt, and her analysis, I think, does contain a lot of truth.
I don't think it's a top-level truth, but I think the point is, how did so many people find themselves embedded in this genocidal machine?
There is a lot to be said about her discovery.
And so anyway, ultimately what you want, and this was one of Johnny's arguments is it's just odd.
There are so many disciplines which are understood to be relevant to Holocaust studies, but it's just a conspicuous absence that evolutionary biology isn't even on the list, right?
Like literally there are lists of disciplines that have something to say and evolutionary biology doesn't show up, right?
So anyway, it is time that we do this and, you know, odd that it has to come from outside.
Well, it is of course true, and this actually may segue nicely to where you're going next.
We have seen, since we were ourselves undergraduates and began delving formally into evolutionary biology, how skeptically, and that's a nice word for it, people in even obviously adjacent fields Take evolutionary explanations.
The farther afield you are from something that is obviously evolutionary, the easier it is for people not just to ignore it, but to actively dismiss it, as if speaking in evolutionary terms is itself a sexist or racist or bigoted or whatever mistake you have in your head, misunderstanding you have in your head about what it is.
You can just slap that label on it and go, yeah, we don't need to go there.
And, you know, for decades now, we have been shocked by how limited the progress in many fields is, health and medicine being an obvious one, because they have not embraced the basic, obvious, but no less complex for that fact, that we are obviously evolved beings.
And if you have an evolutionary understanding of what that means, you will get a lot farther in figuring out How to allow us to live healthier, more prosperous, longer lives.
Yeah, actually that is a perfect segue to the next thing I wanted to discuss.
But I want to start in a spot.
There is a way in which evolutionary biology is excluded from the most shocking places, places where it's clearly highly relevant and human life, limb, quality of life, longevity, hang in the balance and so its absence is extremely costly.
But I want to go back to what I think is the reason for its, the initial reason for its exclusion, and then talk about what has transpired since.
In the early days, as people who studied Darwin will know, Darwin didn't know anything about genes.
He could detect that there was some mode of inheritance, there was some kind of information that was contained that was moved in an adaptive way by natural selection, but he didn't know where the information was housed.
It happened that Mendel was a contemporary of Darwin's and that Darwin didn't know that, that he didn't know what Mendel's work was.
In fact, I think the story is that it was on his desk and he just didn't get to it.
So Mendel obviously didn't know about DNA, but he did detect this particulate inheritance And had Darwin had access to it, he would have had a deeper clue into what the nature of the information that was evolving was.
But anyway, the point is, back in the early days, As soon as you understood Natural Selection, all right?
You have Natural Selection published Origin of Species, 1859.
As we've talked about, 1859 is a big year for some reason.
Same year that Louis Pasteur publishes his famous proof that life comes from other life.
I find it amazing that Darwin's work actually didn't have the benefit of that insight.
Mm-hmm.
So, you know, it used to be that people thought life may be spontaneously generated if you left yogurt or an orange out on your counter.
Life might start anew on each, you know, piece of unprotected food.
The idea that it's microbes moving from one place to another and that life did not just spring up on that orange all of a sudden changes the dynamics and it explains why you need an incredibly powerful explanation like, Like Darwin's.
But anyway, the point is, in the early days, evolutionary biologists had a lot to talk about, right?
Because you could see how animals were built, and you could start asking the question why they were built in this way, and you could start addressing it phenomenologically with this power tool that had just been handed to them.
But they had very little ability to talk about The microscopic or developmental details of all of that, right?
Now, it's not that they were unaware that those things had to exist, but they had the basic sense of like, well, we've got so much to do, speaking in an adaptive way about all of these, you know, morphology and behavior and all of this stuff that was readily observable, That they didn't, there was no drive to wonder deeply about, you know, the, you know, tiny microscopic mechanisms, because it was just, it was pointless, there was too much else to do.
So they got used to not thinking in a mechanistic way.
And that means that as the mechanistic capacity grew over in cellular and molecular biology and developmental biology, The interface with evolution wasn't really there.
In other words, you had a bunch of people who began to detect how to delve into cells and understand them.
And so the mechanistic people and the evolution people grew up in parallel without a reason to interface until fairly late.
When it becomes possible to start matching up the details of the Darwinian story with all of the stuff that the mechanistic folks had been looking at.
And so anyway, my point is there's, this is called historical contingency, right?
And actually we talk about historical contingency in the development, the evolutionary development of a particular clade of creatures, right?
What is, you know, the implications of what Ancestor you came from says a lot about how you're constructed, not because it's the best way to be constructed, but because you had to get from that initial point to where you end up.
Well, this also happens in the development of thought, and so these two ways of looking at biology grew up separately, and at the point that it began to be the right moment for them to interface, There's a territoriality about it.
There's an inability to talk across disciplinary lines because they've got separate terminology.
Sometimes it's overlapping and conflicting.
So anyway, I think there is initially a reason that is not deeply troubling that these things are studied independently.
And what becomes troubling, and what I was troubled by in graduate school, was that we did know enough to talk about the mechanistic stuff in evolutionary terms, and it still wasn't happening at a level that was satisfying.
Mostly, to the extent that the mechanistic folks were thinking in evolutionary terms at all, they would throw evolutionary explanations at things that they had discovered, often preposterous explanations, that if they were talking to people who were expert in evolutionary thinking, they would have quickly been leveled up and they would realize that those things weren't of the nature that they had imagined.
So, anyway, point is, now we get to the place where we start treating stuff, right?
And the degree to which psychology, ophthalmology, medicine, dentistry, and orthodontics exist
Outside of any contact with real evolutionary dynamics has profound implications and what dawned on me, sorry to be long-winded about this, but what dawned on me that I think we need to probably generate a name for so we can start thinking about it is
that many of these disciplines, like let's take orthodontics, orthodontics is predicated on a belief in some mysterious force that has produced genes that cause your teeth not to align during development.
And so we have a practice that allows us to leverage certain facts, the tendons that hold your teeth in place, which allow your teeth to move through your jaws if they're dragged by forces that we put externally on them.
The point is bad genes are the reason for malocclusion, and we've learned a lot about how to fix malocclusion, and what's the relevance of Darwin, right?
It was just, you know, something caused the bad genes that produced this problem.
That's nonsense.
It can't be bad genes, because for one thing, bad genes would not spread through a population.
And what's more, if they did spread through a population, they would spread painfully slowly, right?
If a bad gene sprung up in an individual, and for some reason selection didn't eliminate it, right, that individual on average would tend to produce Now, you jump in any time you want.
the idea that we have the spreading problem of malocclusion is just fundamentally inconsistent with a genetic explanation.
Now, you jump in anytime you want.
When you and I were in grad school, we used to spend a lot of time with our evolutionary fellows, the other folks in grad school with us and our professors, laughing about the school of thought that viewed drift as this very laughing about the school of thought that viewed drift as this very powerful evolutionary
Drift is the change in gene frequency that is not the result of selection or mutation or migration.
It is the random movement of some gene to a state of more commonness or less commonness.
And the fact is, almost all evolutionary change is the result of drift.
But it can't account for very much.
It's not a powerful force.
Can I just restate that?
Yeah, please.
That was clear and accurate, but especially without visuals, it perhaps bears repeating.
That within populations, microevolutionary change can happen via, you know, four or five, depending on how you count, mechanisms.
And mutation, and this is how is it that allele frequencies of genes change within populations?
So if you start out with a population of blue-eyed, half blue-eyed and half brown-eyed mice, And in a hundred years, 75% of them are brown-eyed and 25% of them are blue-eyed.
20% of them are blue-eyed and 5% of them are green-eyed.
What happened?
What are the mechanisms that would explain those changes in allele frequency that then are reflected in the phenotypes?
And you have, you know, roughly speaking, you have mutation, as you say, which is the only way that new alleles are created.
It's just the creation of new genetic possibilities.
So that's the beginning of the green eyes in my fictional explanation.
There is flow, gene flow, which is migration into or out of population.
So if you had that population of 100 mice, there's another population over the river, and a couple of those mice learned how to build a raft, and they came over, and maybe it was them who had the green eyes.
Maybe it wasn't mutation.
Maybe it wasn't a novel genetic variant that brought the green eyes in, but it was Guys from across the river with green eyes who came over.
That's Flo.
There is drift, which is the random element, which is not because of choices they were making, not because they were better or worse at standing in a particular place at a particular time or they had intimations about the flood coming.
By chance, a bunch of the blue-eyed mice were at river's edge when a hundred-year flood came and wiped out a higher percentage of blue-eyed mice than brown-eyed mice.
That's going to change the ratios of brown-eyed to blue-eyed mice in the population.
And then finally, selection.
Our favorite, and should be yours too, I think that the first line of my dissertation, or maybe it's the last, is this is perhaps the most powerful force in the universe.
That selection is that which builds complexity.
And so, if the brown-eyed mice actually, if brown-eyedness in these mice actually is correlated, is co-evolved with some ability to detect tremors in the earth that ends up speaking truth about whether or not water is rushing towards you, and it was because they had some sense of impending doom that all the brown-eyed mice went to the highlands and it was more blue-eyed than brown-eyed mice that got wiped out,
That wasn't due to drift, that was due to selection.
Both, that the blue-eyed mice were more likely to die and that the brown-eyed mice were less likely to die.
Drift is all over the place, all the time.
Accidents happen and there is no rhyme or reason.
to why deaths happen, right?
But drift doesn't build complexity.
And so this is where you're going, right?
The drift is everywhere, but it cannot explain the complexity that we see. - So the example I used to use is now, you'll have to be of a certain age for this to actually resonate, but it used to be if you turned your television to a station that was not a station, that what you saw was snow, what we call snow, which is static.
Black and white.
Yeah.
Now that is what drift looks like, right?
Now in theory, the black and white dots on a television could make any picture that a television can show.
But you could sit in front of a television experiencing snow and never see anything as complex as a stick figure.
You could sit there your whole life and you'd never see anything as complex as a stick figure.
So this is what Heather's saying, that the force that generates complexity is selection of one kind or another.
So, the point is, you've got orthodontists doing orthodontia, and yes, they've learned an awful lot about how to move teeth around, but their whole discipline is predicated on a fiction, and it's unfortunately a self-serving fiction.
It's self-serving in the sense that if you stare at this from an evolutionary perspective, You see, well, malocclusion, the failure of the teeth to meet correctly in the jaws, has spread across the population from being unnecessary most of the time to being necessary in a large fraction of kids.
That suggests that the explanation is not the spreading of a gene which could not possibly have moved across the population at that rate and therefore the culprit is going to be an environmental exposure that takes a genetically well-endowed person and causes their teeth not to meet in their jaw.
And we know a lot more about this than we once did because Mike Mew and his father John Mew have done the research, and they based their research on Weston Price, who also delved deeply here.
Who, in part, went and looked at people who live pre-industrial lifestyles.
And also, I believe Weston Price did, although it wasn't him, certainly others have looked at museum specimens of human beings throughout time.
And basically, it is in the industrial age, under industrial diets, that we have these malformed jaws and teeth and a...
You know, an epidemic of malocclusion.
And this was not the case before.
We have this idea in our heads like, oh, I guess everyone just always had these wonky teeth and they're ugly.
And it's like, no, no, no.
People were beautiful.
People were beautiful.
And then we changed things.
And now we are having to correct for the ugliness that we have ourselves created.
And actually, I would point people to the book 1491, which has a section in which it... Is this C. Charles Mann?
C. Charles Mann.
The book has a section in which he talks about how Europeans, including Darwin actually, viewed the native population of the New World.
And there was definitely some racist garbage.
They definitely had a pervasive sense of the Indians being Culturally inferior.
But the important point is that Mann correctly suggests that Europeans understood the Indians to be beautiful and well-constructed, and that essentially the thought was they were in need of civilizing, not that there was anything primitive about them biologically.
In fact, quite the opposite.
And if I remember the book correctly, He also points out that the Indians regarded the Europeans as a little bit disgusting.
Disgusting, unhygienic, smelly.
Right.
You know, a European would do something dumb like blow their nose in a piece of cloth and then stick it in their pocket, you know, whereas, you know, any self-respecting Indian would know you shoot a snot rocket and, you know, the snot is not something you have to deal with later in the day.
Let me get to the point of order.
I don't know why I transmuted those.
It's Charles C. Mann.
The C is not first.
Anyway, the author of the book, 1491.
Yes.
Okay, but anyway, point is, it doesn't make any sense for orthodontia to be necessary because of a bad gene that spread.
For one thing, selection would tend to oppose the spread of such a gene, but okay, maybe we moderns make it so it doesn't affect anybody's ultimate reproduction.
So in theory, it could drift, but drift doesn't You can't carry a gene across a population at this rate.
It's incapable of it.
It just simply is.
So you could say, well, who cares, right?
Okay, so they've got some little garbagey thing in their model.
Well, here's why you should care.
Because if it's a developmental encounter, it's something about modern life that is causing the teeth not to meet.
And by the way, malocclusion itself as a diagnosis is sweeping the majority of the problem onto the rug.
The teeth not meeting is a symptom of something.
It's a symptom of your skull not being the right shape, which has profound implications on things as wide-ranging as sleep apnea, and attention deficit disorder, allergies, susceptibility to pathogens.
Right, and so the point is, look, we've got a problem here, and your teeth not meeting is the indication that the thing went wrong for you.
But it's not the pathology itself.
The pathology itself is this collapsed airway problem.
One solution to which is give your babies hunks of raw meat to chew on.
Yeah.
Not things that they could rip off and choke on, but get their jaw muscles working.
Give them chewy stuff and the kid is wired to chew on the chewy stuff.
And yeah, that may be a little gross, but you know, the point is it's way better than needing orthodontia or paying for orthodontia or having to endure orthodontia.
But anyway, so here's the problem.
If you accept a garbage evolutionary explanation like something about bad genes spreading across a population, well then, we're going to need orthodontists into perpetuity, and what's more, we're going to need more and more of them, and we're going to need and fancy new appliances and new technologies and all of that.
Whereas if you spot that this is actually the result of the fact that we're doing something wrong, quite analogous to us moving indoors and using electric light and suddenly becoming vitamin D deficient and immune compromised by it.
If you still forget insane.
And insane.
But if you discovered that this entire discipline was necessary because of a developmental problem that could be easily remedied by giving a child something that mirrors what their ancestors would have eaten as children, well then the whole discipline is going to vanish.
You're going to need very few orthodontists for those tiny number of cases in which something still goes wrong even though the developmental environment is fixed.
So, it's self-serving.
But the point is, okay, that's orthodontia, right?
This is an easy one to map there because Mike Mu has done so much of the heavy lifting, and his stuff is really good.
If you look at his comparison to other species, dogs for example, you know, dogs are terrifically variable in their shape and yet their developmental program is perfectly capable of putting their teeth where they belong.
Because no one's feeding baby food to dogs.
Right.
No one imagines that they can't deal with actual chewing and learning how not to aspirate stuff.
Right.
But it demonstrates that even when you do something really wonky to an animal, like create some, you know, take a wolf and you take it, you know, so that you get chihuahua.
Bulldog is an exception, right?
Bulldogs often have weird, weird jaw stuff.
I'm not an expert enough to know whether that's come out.
They haven't looked ridiculous.
They do look ridiculous.
They have a crazy underbite thing going on.
Yeah.
But of course now with social media filters, that's much less of a problem for bulldogs.
That's true.
On the internet.
Where nobody knows they're a bulldog.
Right, right.
But point is, okay, in orthodontia, in malocclusion, we understand.
Same story as waiting to be told for ophthalmology.
We can begin to detect hints of this same nonsense in Now, suddenly, we realize that the idea of chemical imbalances being the basis of mental illness never made a whit of sense, which also alludes to some sort of luck of the draw, bad genes.
Oh, it just so happens that, you know, you've got, you know, too little serotonin, so you need a reuptake inhibitor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
That was never true.
Diagnoses feel empowering is part of why that works.
Diagnoses feel empowering.
They also free us from responsibility or our error.
Yeah, it's simultaneously empowering and freeing and disempowering, honestly.
It takes away agency and it gives a directionality to like, oh, all I have to do is correct the chemical imbalance.
Yeah, it's a chemical imbalance.
I thought I was going nuts.
Well, you were going nuts, but you were going nuts for reasons that were other than a genetic imbalance that was set in motion when you were a zygote, right?
So anyway, we have the same dysfunction across numerous disciplines.
All of which, including medicine itself, right?
Medicine itself, which treats a lot of pathology, not as developmental disorders, but just sort of luck of the draw, which implies genes.
Oh, you're allergic to ragweed, you know?
Oh, well, You know, we better do something about that.
Have, you know, this antihistamine.
I was like, well, doctor, why am I allergic to ragweed?
Is that the result of something that happened to me when I was a child?
And can I not do that to my children?
Right?
So, point is, drift doesn't explain much of anything.
Many disciplines are founded on a false and obviously false idea that drift explains pathology across many different types of dysfunction.
And in each case, were we to level up the relevant discipline with high quality evolutionary thinking, Then we could focus on the development of these pathologies in people who have yet to suffer from them.
If you really are interested in human health, if you really want people to be mentally healthy, to be physically healthy, to be capable of living their lives without having to augment their vision or anything else, then the question is, what is causing all this pathology?
And development is way underrated.
So, anyway, that's my point.
Now, I don't know what the name of this false reliance on a garbage-y, drift-based, gene-based explanation for pathology is.
We're still in need of that term.
But nonetheless, we should be figuring out what that term is, and we should be able to point at these disciplines and say, actually, the thing you should be studying is how to prevent this from happening.
You know, yes, please, fix the jaws of people who already suffer from this, but let's not make any more of them.
Yeah, and I think maybe you said it in that final bit there, but what you are pointing out is that without mostly people knowing that this is what they're doing, people are assuming that drift is ubiquitous and selection is not, and the default assumption should actually be that when you see complexity, it's selection that explains that.
And when you see rapid decay of one's functional systems, you should certainly not assume that that is a genetically based change.
And actually, if I can connect it back to our last topic, because I think there is an important piece of relevance here.
Let's talk about, you know, genocide's tougher, although I believe it is truly analogous in a deep way to rape.
It's like population level rape.
But if we talk about rape as a pathology, a behavioral pathology, then the question is, well, this is an awkward conversation, obviously, but many men are incapable of rape because you have to be turned on.
So even though all human men are presumably downstream of rape events, we are all descendants of as therefore are all human women all human women right yeah women are presumably carriers of the genetic potential men are uh equipped to be sufferers of that that's not Sufferers is the wrong term, but the point is... Perpetrators.
They are perpetrators, potentially, but many men become incapable of being perpetrators because their developmental environment takes this off the table by making rape disgusting.
So that is obviously the right way to deal with rape as a pathology.
Yes, it's one thing to drive the cost up so rapists think twice, but it is far better to raise your sons so that they view this as a turnoff.
Yeah, and if you do that it becomes an impossibility right and the point is okay with rape we can Describe this because there are many men walking around today who are just simply incapable of this because it's not a turn-on, right?
Well, okay.
What's the analog then for genocide?
How do we take genocide off the table in an analogous way?
How do we do the more complete job for rape because obviously lots of men are remain capable of it and it's still a scourge today Yeah.
But with respect to genocide, we haven't even done as good a job taking it off the table.
And I believe the same thing is possible, which is exactly why you would want an evolutionary analysis, because it would give you potentially the tools to do that job properly, finally.
Nice.
Well, that was going to be a great place to end, but I just wanted to finish on teeth again.
Of course.
Yeah.
If you would show my screen, Zach.
This week in Natural Selections, I wrote about brains, mammals, and the brains of mammals, characters from deep history.
It's not creative at all.
It's a meander through some phylogenetic changes in our deep history.
And because you were talking about teeth, I thought I'd just share one Paragraph here.
Mammals, which that is not, are insulated with fur or hair, we have an excellent sense of smell, and we have fantastic hearing.
Our middle ears contain bones, the malleus, hammer, incus, anvil, and stapes, stirrup, which were part of the jaws of our ancestors.
Those bones have moved over time, dramatically changing shape, position, and function, and whereas earlier vertebrates had multiple bones in their lower jaws, We have just one, our strong and sturdy mandible.
We have, stay with me here, teeth set in sockets and attached to the jaw via ligaments rather than fused directly to the bone.
This arrangement allows us to have tremendous bite force.
Other than us, the only other critters that have teeth like ours are crocodiles and their closest relatives.
Unlike crocodiles, though, which sport mouths full of similarly pointy, piercing teeth, we are heterodont.
We have different teeth.
And our incisors, canines, premolars, and molars are best for different things.
It thus makes no sense to wonder, are incisors better than canines?
The question must include mention of what job you are hoping to accomplish.
So, When you came home from the orthodontist, no, when you came home from the dentist, having long ago had orthodontic work that has left you with travails in adulthood, and started talking about the ligaments that are attaching our teeth to our jaws, both you and I were surprised.
And I had been teaching comparative anatomy for years.
It had never occurred to me.
It had never occurred to either of us, right?
As it turns out, as opposed to just adhere to the bone with some kind of cementum or something, like some hard thing, there's a lot of different ways to describe how teeth are in the jaws.
We, like crocodiles, like crocodilians, and no one else, are thecodont.
We have these teeth set in sockets as opposed to adhere to one side with an L-shape.
But we also have this, and I've forgotten the word I didn't include in this piece, but this ligamental attachment.
Which turns out to be, without that, orthodontia wouldn't be possible.
Right.
Right?
So, some orthodontia, a little bit, you know, those headgear things, oh my God, they do change the shape of the jaw a little bit, but mostly, they're changing where the teeth are in the jaw, and that's by just pulling on those ligaments, putting pressure on those ligaments and moving them around a bit in the jaw.
And just anecdotally, I will say, you had orthodontia early and fast.
And it ended up moving your teeth so fast that your roots were short and then you ended up with dental problems later.
It shortened my roots, which resulted in five teeth being compromised way earlier in life than you would expect.
Yeah, and I've never had any problem with my teeth, including no orthodontia.
And when I was recently at the dentist and they did x-rays because I didn't think to stop them, she was having a hard time getting the right image.
We've all had dental x-rays, like sometimes, especially those really horrible side wing ones.
You just want them to be over and she had to redo one or two of them.
I was like, what is the problem?
She said, well, I just can't get all of your teeth on the image.
Your roots are so long.
And immediately I said, well, I never had orthodontia.
I'll bet my roots are just what they should be.
I'll bet almost everyone you see here has had orthodontia and that shortened their roots.
I don't know.
That's an anecdote.
No, I think this is likely.
If I can just add one more detail of the story.
The reason that orthodontia is possible is because the teeth are adjusting their own position in a normal healthy job.
That is to say your teeth but there's a reason that your teeth aren't ever you know pressing against each other Right?
And that's because to the extent that your teeth are pressing against each other, they move the other direction.
They adjust their position.
So as your face shape changes over a lifetime, your teeth are in a position to move.
And orthodontists are borrowing from this capability to move your teeth long distances, which they shouldn't have to do.
But anyway, when I first heard that, I was like, why do I not know the story of teeth?
Right?
This is a fundamental piece of insight about the way teeth work.
Yes.
And I just felt dumb for not getting it.
Much the same way with the eye.
I didn't really understand, you know, they say, oh, you've got astigmatism, you know, your eye is misshapen.
Well, okay, but your eye, the shape of your eye is not some blueprint from God handed down through your genes.
The shape of your eye is downstream of muscles that are adjusting the thing.
And so, presumably, the point is you need feedback.
Right?
If your eye is misshapen, then you don't see very well, and your muscles can learn to reshape your eye, which in part explains why I was told...
as a young person, that my eyes were misshapen and that my eyesight was bad, and I absolutely refused to do any of the things I was told to do, and my eyes fixed themselves, right?
So how much are we robbing ourselves by not allowing the feedback mechanism to fix the thing that isn't quite refined yet, right?
How much of the distortion in the first place was the result that I was, you know, an ape dragged inside and living indoors, which I was, you know, no ape is...
Chained to the wall.
Chained, well, that...
That didn't actually happen, but nonetheless...
But you were an ape.
I was an ape living indoors, which is not where most apes live.
Nope.
Well, it is now, but that's strictly demographic.
Nonetheless, historically, apes have not done much living indoors, but yet we did, And it has had effects on our eyes because it changes the distance of things and the reading.
So anyway, the idea that you've got all of these mechanisms that take something that's imprecise and refine it by feedback and that we are so treatment happy that we disrupt that feedback process.
This is just a dumb error and we will eventually look back on it and think, what the hell did we do?
Should we be so lucky to look back on it?
Yeah.
All right.
Before we go into the outro, Zach is just going to show our store.
So here we are at darkhorsestore.org where you can get things like Goliath gear.
And that's that's our that's our highlighted gear this week.
Jake's micro pizza for those irritating situations where you are asked to put on a mask, but you don't have to if you're eating.
So get your micro pizza.
Get your micro pizza on.
Yeah.
So check out our store, darkhorsestore.org.
Lots of shirts and bags and totes and hoodies and bags and totes, the same thing.
Oh, and decals, right?
We got die cut decals.
I've been hearing requests for that sort of thing.
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