Original Syndrome: The 218th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 218th 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 plants, a lot, in service of understanding what a “syndrome” is, and why it matters. This is not mere semantics, but if you feel that it is, focus on the tropical forests instead! There are plenty of bats to go around. What can you predict about the pollinators of flowers that are bright and s...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 200.
Is it 18?
It is.
218.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein, you are Dr. Heather Hying.
History is hurtling along.
It doesn't feel like history when it's happening, but then it becomes that very quickly thereafter.
We have a rather shocking new situation.
Bobby Kennedy has named Nicole Shanahan as his VP pick.
And this creates an interesting predicament because she is not well known.
Which means that we have a long shot who has now named a wild card.
That's an interesting move for him to have made, but I would say it is made even more interesting by the fact that he is running against two non-starters.
So I think the long shot is a shoe-in.
That was a lot of metaphors.
It was a lot of metaphors.
That's quite right.
But I think we need them all.
All the metaphors, not all the non-starters.
All those metaphors I think are necessary to describe this.
I didn't tell you, but I had a literal rude awakening this morning.
I awakened to a text message from a phone number that is not known to me.
And it said simply, get a haircut with an emoji with a picture of like a white guy getting a haircut from a barber who is not rendered in the emoji.
But in any case, I found that spooky.
So you joke, but really everyone, including you, should turn off your notifications.
Well, that's certainly true.
From my perspective, especially you.
Especially me.
Well, but the thing is, whoever this was, was right.
And you didn't.
I did get an emergency haircut.
So that's right, Dark Horse audience.
You too can send Brett anonymous text messages and have him follow through.
That's the message for today.
Well, I actually, I, I, uh, I've been trying to puzzle through.
I asked the person who they were and they didn't say anything, but I suspect, um, I suspect that my father has an extra phone number I don't know about and that he didn't realize where he was texting from.
And that's, that explains it.
But, um.
Are you serious?
Yes.
You actually got a text message?
Yes.
And I was just traveling, and the area code was an LA number.
So I repeat, I thought that the entire story was facetious, and you were kind of outing yourself as someone who lets all things into your phone at all times and doesn't turn off your notifications, but no, the story wasn't facetious.
No, it was a literal, a literal rude awakening.
When I heard this, I assumed that you had scheduled a haircut and this was your barber reminding you as they all do over text.
No, it's one of those, it's one of those nagging things where you don't know.
I mean, I heard you talking about this actually somewhere in the last couple of weeks where your hair goes from a phase where you're comfortable with it to a phase where you feel like you need a haircut.
And then it will come back into some new phase where you can manage it.
And I wasn't sure whether it was going to do that.
And at some point it just, Yeah, no, it is a... to rudely non-plagiarize Jane Austen is a truth non... Austen?
It's a truth non-universally acknowledged that haircuts start off bad.
There's a middle period during which it's fine and then it gets it gets kind of bad again and then you get a haircut and then it gets good again right as you're plummeting towards the haircut.
Right as you're yeah you're even driving it.
I don't think that's Jane Austen.
I think that was Steve Austen.
Who's Steve Austin?
I'm not sure, but I think Steve Austin is either the actor who played the six million dollar man or it was the name of his mild-mannered cover story.
It's going to be interesting.
Well, I don't know.
We'll find out.
Yeah.
So here we are.
Livestream number 218.
Please join us on Rumble, but especially join us at Locals.
We're trying to build community there, and we'd really love you to support us over at Locals.
There's a watch party going on now.
We've got We've got guest episodes that are there and only there.
We do Q&As.
We're doing another Q&A this Sunday at 11 a.m.
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That is not what I was expecting.
Wow.
This is a flyer from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Hey, strengthen science for our society!
This is good.
So I was going to get to the ads, but among my ads, I put this here for possible later discussion.
I actually, I do support AAS, the American Advancement Association for Science or whatever.
No, I got those A's wrong, but because we need to subscribe to science so that I can see all of the important science-y stuff that's going on in science.
But here we have Dear Dr. Hying.
A quick scan of recent news and polling data reinforces that respect for scientific information continues to be on the decline, while myths and disinformation are gaining steam.
At least they didn't say that.
That is our chief science people right there explaining to us why we just need to trust them and give them more money.
I think we should found the AARS.
What's that?
That is the American Association for the Revival of Science.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Wow.
This is a, this is a dumpster fire.
By taking action together, we can keep science at the forefront of our decision-making as a nation.
We can bridge gaps between experts who advance knowledge, journalists who spread knowledge, and policymakers who act on knowledge.
If only the knowledge were knowledge.
Oh wait, we can elevate a diverse range of perspectives and power an inclusive future.
Our and inclusive future, but notice they did use an image of DNA.
Well, sure, because that's super science-y.
Look at that.
It's right over there.
I think the thing is, though, that's something that we have learned through science that's probably even actually true.
Yeah.
So that's good.
The shape of the molecule, it is our main informational molecule.
I mean, that is downright chemical.
Freaking rad.
Yeah, man, those were the glory days.
At the very least, these aren't.
Well, true.
All right, let's get to our sponsors.
Why don't we do that?
Three of them right at the top of the hour, sort of.
There'd be any left at this point.
Yeah, so this week we have Fast-Growing Trees, Mudwater, and American Hartford Gold, a more diverse lot of sponsors I can hardly imagine.
Yeah, but those three, they actually go together.
Do tell.
I was hoping just to leave an implicit peek.
Of course you were.
Fast-Growing Trees, Mudwater, and Mud water sounds like it could be related to fast-growing trees, but it's not.
Well, no.
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Or an orchard, in this case.
An orchard would be a good thing to have.
You need some time, though.
Well, let's put it this way.
The longer you wait, the less likely it is you'll have enough, so might as well get to it and get some treats.
Oh, definitely.
Just because you don't think you have enough time doesn't mean you shouldn't start now.
Right.
And the mud water, the proper tending of one's health is paramount in times of crisis, as is protecting your... Assets.
Assets.
Through a diversification of said assets, including ones that are physical in nature and therefore harder to commandeer and repossess.
Beautiful.
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Thank you.
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All right.
We're just developing the theme.
That's right.
Yep.
So, we don't choose the order.
Our amazing ad broker chooses the order, but I think if we were developing a theme, we might have put these in a slightly different order today.
But this was fate.
You're going to make this, apparently.
Ipso facto.
Sponsor fate.
Our second sponsor this week is Mudwater, which makes truly delicious products.
We are thrilled to have them back.
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I hope that was the right number of ones.
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Or text Dark Horse to 998899.
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I hope that was the right number of ones.
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Or text Dark Horse to 998899.
You're looking at me like maybe I got the wrong number of ones in there.
It's three ones.
I'm not.
Okay.
All right.
Just reading over your shoulder.
I'm just, I'm thrown by that text message I got from who knows who, probably my dad.
Turn off your notifications.
I just did.
Leave them on for the people in your favorites, please.
and turn them off for the rest of the world all right i mean you know point taken haircut accomplished yes but it wouldn't have waken him up wake weakened wakened him up woken him up woken him up all right so here's the thing it was a literal um all right again thrown second time in one day But, uh, it was a literal rude awakening.
It was literally rude telling somebody to get a haircut without even telling them who you are.
But I had awakened already and then looked at my phone to see what time it was, saw that there was a text message.
So it did not, in fact, awaken me.
I think that means it wasn't a rude awakening then.
It was literally rude, figurative awakening.
Shall we move on?
Yes.
Yes.
There's some stuff I want to talk about if we get to it, but I think some big stuff you want to start with.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
So I'm realizing, Where we are and what role we're playing in the universe.
This is something I think is a matter of discussion between you and me as we Have moved on years ago now from the classroom where it was very obvious what we were doing and how it was working because we had constant feedback from the people that we were teaching and In moving into other roles where you you do get feedback, but the feedback isn't coming back to you minute by minute it comes in fits and starts and
You have to sort of deduce what effect you're having and alter what you're doing in order to increase the utility of it.
And I think we are discovering that one of the roles that we are playing is building a toolkit for what we have now started calling the Cartesian crisis.
And the Cartesian crisis is a state in which All of the things that you thought you knew for sure are less and less certain.
Where the processes that produce knowledge, let's say, have become unreliable.
The entities that report the highest quality thinking are corrupted.
And so you're left Struggling to figure out what to believe, and that's a very frightening state to be in.
It's not a desirable state.
And so the question is, well, what are you going to confront that state with?
And the answer is, well, you know, let's say you found yourself Let's say that somebody had dumped hallucinogens in the water supply and everybody was suddenly out of their minds because there was a chemical interfering with their ability to perceive like normal.
Well, you wouldn't be hopeless.
You would want to start figuring out how you operate in an environment where your perceptions are not accurate.
You can do it.
You know, actually, the movie A Beautiful Mind, about the mathematician Nash, is a story about a guy who discovered that he had schizophrenia, had a brilliant mind, But had schizophrenia and learned how to distinguish between his unreliable perceptions and reality such that he could operate.
He was smart enough to be able to function in an environment where his perceptions were very low quality.
And in some sense we're in that boat.
And so I think that you and I are sort of developing or building out that toolkit and Labeling things as we come to understand them, describing how to, how to operate in such an environment.
And we know that in part that this is working because certain things come back to us.
People who meet us mention some of these things and not others.
And we know that the ones that they mention are things that have gotten through and maybe the ones that we never hear, uh, need a little reframing or rethinking.
So anyway, that's, that's where I am is building out that toolkit.
Um, did you have something you wanted to add?
Oh, I just, uh, apropos our conversation earlier this morning, uh, I said to you, I feel at this point like any paper that I read, I need to do some due diligence and make sure the authors are real people.
Like it's, it's at that level of, uh, chaos and, and we just can't take anything for granted.
It's not, you know, in part, I think this is why people are more, ever more, people have always been, but people are ever more driven to want to just trust the authorities.
This isn't my domain.
I can't think this through for myself.
I don't have enough information.
Just find the talking head that makes the most sense and believe them.
And that can work if you have actually vetted that person by being extraordinarily skeptical early on.
Right.
And checking in repeatedly because people who were reliable become unreliable.
But when you're talking about the, you know, the written word, scientific papers, especially once you're into things like social media, the chances that you're not even dealing with real people, this might not even be work that was generated by a human being, is ever more difficult to this might not even be work that was generated by a And therefore more and more people are just throwing their hands up in the air and saying, I know I can't.
Therefore, I'm just going to, you know, pick a course, make a decision about who to listen to.
And sorry, you're not going to be able to veer me from that path because it's not worth it, because you are offering no alternative.
Yeah, we've never needed experts more and had less reliable access to them.
And it's not that experts don't exist, but you cannot use any of the proxies that you would ordinarily use to identify them.
Really, the only thing that works is a track record.
So, you know, that is the Cartesian crisis.
Okay, somebody dumps hallucinogens in your water, you've got to figure out how you're going to operate and not harm yourself in that context.
If you find yourself in a hall of mirrors, right, the rules for moving in a hall of mirrors are not the same rules that exist under normal circumstances.
You're going to have to realize that just because you see a reflection of yourself in one direction doesn't mean that's not the direction to move.
So you're gonna have to start figuring out, you know, where there's a barrier, where there's a passage, Don't you think it's cruel to put those two scenarios right next to each other?
Yes, that was ill-conceived.
Really unfortunate.
Yes.
You're now hallucinating in a hall of mirrors.
That's not good.
I mean, that is what it feels like sometimes, but that's terror right there.
Yeah, that's not good.
It's better than a hall of phones, but... Nope.
You can ignore the phones.
Turn off your notifications.
Ignore the phones.
Maybe you could turn off the mirrors.
Walk around blindly and hope you don't break anything.
Right.
Yep.
Well, okay, so we've got some hyper confusing situation.
The question is very much one of protecting yourself from all manner of threats, right?
Figuring out what to put in your mouth has become complicated, right?
Because things that taste like food and smell like food may contain ingredients that have impacts that you won't be able to match up with the, you know, if the impact is delayed or food stuff is throughout your diet, you may not be able to detect the fact that your health gets worse when you eat this thing because it's always there.
So figuring out how that toolkit works is crucial.
And one of the things that I know is really the central, the central piece of that toolkit is personal science.
We tend to think of science as an endeavor, something that is done collectively, and that's great when it works.
But when that layer is failing, the ability to deploy The philosophy of science in your own life, informally, so that you have some way of building up a model of, yes, this set of things is reliable, and when I try to rely on this set of things, I get less healthy, or I get more confused, or I run into more trouble with the people that I care about.
So, the ability to use that same philosophical structure to navigate confusing times is utterly essential.
In our book, I think we called a version of this the Laboratory of the Self.
Yep.
But Laboratory of the Self actually is a slightly different concept.
The Laboratory of the Self is how to study your own experience of the world rather than how to test the immediate world around you with scientific tools.
So they're related, but they're not identical.
All right, so in that process of building out this toolkit, I have started to hone in on a concept that I now know we don't do enough thinking about.
And I don't want people to leap to conclusions.
I'm just going to start exploring this so people can Get a sense of it, and then we will put it to use later.
But the concept, and mind you, the concept is generally, it generally goes by a name, which is syndrome.
But that's not always the name we apply to it.
You could also sometimes call it a complex, or there may be other terms.
Let's talk about what a syndrome is and then I'm going to run us through some examples so people can kind of get an idea for it.
And then I'm going to point out why this very useful concept is actually also a source of great confusion.
So a syndrome is a set of things.
I'll start here.
And this is something I've said that has, I think it's bothered you before it bothers some other people, but I'm pretty sure it works if you, if you, uh, pressure test it.
When we study scientifically, we are inherently studying patterns.
That's really all you can study.
There are patterns of many different kinds.
Um, and all of the different ways in which we approach them are really about elucidating those patterns.
so that we can extrapolate from them.
Right?
We study a particular version of something so we can get an idea of how the universe functions in some context.
And then we use that to extrapolate to other contexts where we don't have as good information.
You think that has disturbed me?
I think I have said something very concrete about the only thing you can study is patterns.
That, that, That sounds like a statement that might, that seems too didactic.
But no, the general statement, I mean, I'm literally like, that sounds like a chapter in the book I'm writing now.
So like, yes.
Okay.
So maybe I'm stating it too cleanly, although I would love to have examples that actually exceed what I'm saying, because the reason I'm saying it so cleanly is that I'm pretty sure actually If you draw those concepts carefully, there's nothing that escapes them.
So it is, you know, anytime we can be very clear about something like that, because there aren't exceptions, it's worth doing.
And if there are exceptions, I'd like to figure out what they are so we can build out the toolkit in that way.
But for the moment, let's just say in general, We study patterns and the purpose of studying patterns is so that we can extrapolate in an accurate way.
That is where we get the power of science is the extrapolation from the patterns we've studied and come to understand.
So a syndrome is a set of characteristics that co-occur for a reason that you may or may not know.
And so places that we see syndromes, people will be familiar with the use of that term medically.
Let's use the case of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
You and I remember back when we were in high school that the world suddenly became aware that there was this disease.
And it became focused on figuring out what was causing it.
And there was really no understanding at that point as to whether or not it was an infectious agent or a behavior that was spreading.
It was understood to be afflicting gay men.
And so there was this search for causal agent, and that search included questions of behavior.
It included questions of consumer products like lubricants that gay men might be using during sex.
What could possibly be causing this dysfunction?
And ultimately, HIV was the agent identified, the human immunodeficiency virus.
And, but the point is AIDS was a syndrome before it was the consequence of an identified contagious element.
And that's a natural way for us to come to grips with something.
You recognize a pattern.
You know, before there was anything named as AIDS, there were doctors that were seeing patients for a range of pathologies.
And somehow doctors, presumably at the water cooler, were saying, you know, it's funny.
I haven't seen a case of Kaposi's sarcoma, you know, before in my career.
And yet I've seen three this month.
What is that?
And somebody else says, well, you know, yes, I've seen it also.
And I've seen it in patients who are exhibiting a susceptibility to respiratory disease or something.
I don't know what the patterns exactly would have been, but But doctors noticing an odd pattern of pathology would have come to understand that there was a group of things that they were seeing together and that that implied a force they couldn't see.
It was like when an astronomer detects that a orbiting body is behaving in a way that is not predicted and it implies a gravitational force from some other body that has not yet been discovered, right?
It's that sort of thing.
So syndrome is the indication that there is something to find.
Now I want to know if I can borrow the cable to let me show some... Don't put up the screen yet till I manage to wake up my computer here.
It has a syndrome that involves not doing anything that I want it to do.
Unplug it and see.
Yeah.
Okay, hold on.
Sorry, folks.
Technical difficulties.
All right.
So, yeah, now you can put up my screen.
So I wanted to talk about a place where the concept of syndrome is extremely useful, and in my opinion, a place where we know a great deal about the underlying meaning.
So there's something called a flowering syndrome.
A flowering syndrome is a set of characteristics of flowers that imply a type of pollinator and the nice thing about this is that It's sort of the shallow end of the pool.
Once you get the idea of what is going on, it's very easy to see how it applies and to extrapolate.
So the idea is plants need to... plants that are going to sexually reproduce.
Do so by getting pollen from one individual to another.
Now sometimes they can pollinate within an individual, but let's just say a plant that is trying to get pollen from one individual to another has to solve that problem in one way or another.
The original way that this was solved was pollen blowing on the wind, right?
So pollen blowing on the wind When it comes from a flower, it tends to produce something that isn't very showy because there's no reason to invest in something fancy.
The investment comes in the form of lots and lots of pollen because the pollen is not targeted.
So a lot of it has to blow on the wind for some of it to end up in the right place.
So a wind-pollinated plant... And the egg, wherever all the pollen, much of the pollen lands, ends up being choosy.
And so there is investment in the choice.
In the choice, right.
You can recognize, and this is not one, I don't have these in the proper order, but you can recognize a wind-pollinated plant because it tends to produce a lot of pollen.
It tends to have a flower that is not very conspicuous.
And in not very conspicuous, it's not conspicuous across many channels.
Like grasses, including grains.
Wheat.
Imagine a wheat field, or here you go, it's some kind of grass.
Here's a grass.
And this is actually comparatively fancy for a grass.
It is.
But you basically have these big brushy structures that... Yeah, actually I'm not sure that this is wind pollinated, this one.
I believe it is, but in any case, not a highly showy flower, not a smelly flower.
But if we go back to this, here we've got a bee.
Now, things that function like bees, let's say general diurnal insects.
A flower that works to attract something like bees tends to be showy.
Why?
Because bees are able to navigate visually and in this case this is a picture of mine.
That's a gigantic flower and I knew that a bee or some other interesting insect was going to fly towards it because it was putting up this massive advertisement to attract the bees.
What else is true of a bee pollinated or an insect pollinated diurnal flower?
Well, tends to smell good.
Happens that insects have a good sense, a good olfactory sense, and that their perceptual apparatus perceives things that we perceive as pleasant, as attractive.
Now why that is, is a question and it's not true for all things that have a scent that attract creatures.
But diurnal insect pollinated tends to be showy, which means not only a big structure but also a colorful structure.
Insects see color and it tends to have a scent which is pleasant to us and it doesn't... Depending on the insect.
Depending on the insect, we'll get there.
And it doesn't produce huge quantities of pollen, and the pollen grains themselves tend to be larger because they don't have to travel on the wind.
So if a wind-pollinated plant made huge pollen grains, those pollen grains would fall out of the air readily.
They tend to be small, blow on the wind, fragile.
Insect-pollinated, they can be larger.
In some cases, large packets of pollen get glued to insects, etc.
OK, now here is a plant pollinated by an insect pollinator that is diurnal.
It is colorful and it does smell, but it smells horrifying.
This is a plant that smells like carrion.
Now, what is this syndrome?
So it's conspicuous, it's smelly, but the smell is horrifying to people and there's no reward offered in this case.
This is pollinated by flies and the flies in this case are tricked into entering the flower where they are dusted in pollen and they fly off and they get tricked by some other flower somewhere else in the forest and they transport the pollen this way.
Just to be clear, they're tricked by the smell of the flower into imagining that there is a rotting flesh which they eat.
Yeah, well they lay their eggs on it.
So they're not getting nutrients, they're looking for a place... They may eat too.
Yeah, I think there's some of the flies a big group, right?
The dipterids are huge.
So I'm not actually sure about the particular ecology of the flies that go after these carrion flowers.
This is going to be Southeast Asia, probably.
But they go thinking that the thing that usually emits that smell is there, and they're going to do whatever it is that they do there, either lay their eggs or eat or both.
They don't find it, they leave, but not before the plant manages to coat them in pollen.
And then they make the same error if the plant has its way on a different plant.
Presumably if this is working as you are describing it, these are Monoecious flowers, meaning they have both male and female parts on the same plant, and a fly that is now coated in pollen goes into another flower that smells the same and perhaps drops some of that pollen onto for the eggs of the plant to decide what to do with.
Yep, and I would point out that the, for those of you who are watching and not just listening, that the, this is a giant flower, in fact I think it is the largest true flower on earth, but the petals of this flower look A bit like what you would expect a rotting carcass to look like.
If the fleshy part of a carcass was exposed to the air and things were growing on it, you would get these white patches on this red.
It's a very grisly looking flower and it smells totally horrifying, which of course is a good fit for flies that are trying to produce offspring.
Okay, now here we have... Can you make it any bigger?
There we go.
Here we have a Glossophagene bat.
This is a New World plant visiting bat feeding on nectar from a nocturnal flower.
Now the syndrome for a flower that is pollinated by New World Bats is that it is not colorful because these animals are flying around at night.
Now they can see but they're using echolocation and color.
Nocturnal creatures, even the ones that can see pretty well, they give up color perception in favor of light amplification.
There's no point in having a colorful flower if you're attracting a nocturnal pollinator.
Well, and even those of us with good color perception, there's a moment at dusk when the color turns off.
Anyone who's thought to watch for that moment has either noticed the moment or realized a second or five minutes later, oh, yeah, I have no color anymore.
The cones just aren't firing below certain photon levels.
Right, and the point is if you're going to sacrifice that, if you're going to be active during the night, then you don't want to waste all of the space in the retina with the color perceiving apparatus, which isn't getting you any value.
You can trade that for light amplification.
You can cover more of the retina with rods that detect light.
So anyway, nocturnally pollinated flowers that are pollinated by bats are going to be... they tend to be white, which is ideal from the point of view of what light amplification is being done.
They do have a smell.
These animals are terrifically sensitive, but the smell is not pleasant in the way that a bee-pollinated flower is.
Now, it's not horrifying the way a fly-pollinated flower is.
It's slightly musty.
It's like after Halloween when somebody leaves a pumpkin too long on the step.
It's just, you know, it doesn't smell like something you would want to eat, but it also doesn't smell terrible.
Yeah, New World bat-pollinated flowers tend to smell like they're already always a little past their prime.
Yeah, they smell a little past their prime and apparently the bats feel very differently about it.
So, and, and that is probably, you know, the, the fact that we humans really like the smell of the stuff that the, that bees like, that could well be that we have developed a sense, you know, obviously bees were pollinating flowers long before our clade was doing anything, right?
I mean, One of the most interesting hypotheses for the evolution of angiosperms, the flowering plants, actually has to do with co-evolution with primates.
Okay, but even so, we're talking... Early, early primacy, long before the K-T boundary, like, you know, back into deep history when there wasn't a lot going on.
You're talking about pre-monkey primates, prosimian.
Oh yeah, yeah.
Okay, so anyway, the point is it is quite possible that we have developed A sense that finds the perfume of insect pollinated flowers pleasant because it is actually a proxy for something useful to us.
I don't know that, but you know, there's a lot of work on why do we find, you know, that particular valley so beautiful, right?
You know, and the point is, well, maybe it's that you see a lot of proxies for this as a productive place to exist.
There's a beautiful stream.
Plants are blooming.
It suggests a fertile soil, you know.
It suggests fertility.
It suggests productivity in the botanical sense of the term.
I could grow things that I could eat there.
Or things are already growing there that I could eat, even easier.
That I could find, right.
It's going to be a lively place.
There'll be ways to make a living here.
So it could be like that.
It could be that the fact, you know, that there's nothing inherent about the smell of a bat.
There's something here, and this is not going to be where you're going, but I don't think you'll find it easy to get back where you're going.
nothing inherent about the smell of the bee pollinated stuff that is positive, but that we have latched onto this because it has a meaning to us that we're not yet aware of.
There's something here, and this is not going to be where you're going, but I don't think it'll find it easy to get back where you're going.
Bat pollinated flowers tend to be on species that are also bat distributed fruits, whereas insect pollinated flowers tend to create fruits that are distributed by something else, in part because insects are not good whereas insect pollinated flowers tend to create fruits that are distributed by something
And so it may be that, you know, there's plenty of specifically bee-pollinated flowers that those plants then produce fruits that we love, that are actually primate, you know, like have primates in their sites in terms of what they would like to disperse those fruits.
So that, that may be part of what's going on that if the, you know, if the flower that's being pollinated by a bat is then going to produce a fruit that's going to be distributed by bats, that plant has an interest in, has an interest in appealing mostly to those bats and less so to the primates in the area.
Well, I'm less sure of that pattern than you are, but I'm not sure.
No, I'm not sure of it.
I think that it feels like... I know that there are some species that are both bat-pollinated and bat-distributed, and I can't think of any species that are bee-pollinated and bee-distributed.
Um, the various primate distributed fruits that I can think of, I think are all insect pollinated.
So that's, those are just, I don't know how general it is, but I definitely have those pieces of evidence.
Okay, interesting.
Well, I will point out that there's one... I was not sure whether I was going to talk about the syndromes of bat morphology, but there is one interesting thing about the New World plant pollinating bats, all of which are in the family Phyllostomidae, which is the leaf-nosed bats.
Now, the interesting thing is The bats that do the pollinating have a nose leaf, even though pollinating does not require one.
Now the reason that they do is because they all eat a certain amount of fruit.
So it is pot and they one of the fascinating things about these bats is at least the glossophagene bats there's a there's caroline bats which specialize on piper which is the black pepper family which is a whole a whole different It's a whole different relationship.
But Piper, not only are they both the flowers are pollinated by and the fruits are distributed by bats, but they even look alike.
They're just like they're these long slender, is it like flowers look like this and the fruits like this or the other way around?
Yeah, it's just kind of a different orientation, but it's the same look.
You wouldn't spot it as a fruit if you didn't know that it was.
It actually does have a very pleasant smell to it.
I'm not as sure about the pollination, but in any case, let's stick with the Glossophagean bats.
This is a Glossophagean bat.
It's a classic New World plant pollinating bat.
They tend to have very long snouts.
They definitely have long tongues.
Which you can see in this picture.
Yep.
We're not showing the picture anymore.
And they have a nose leaf, which is confusing because the nose leaves, it turns out, and I won't run you all through this wonderful mystery, but there's a whole family of bats with nose leaves in the New World, and then there's two other families that have something nose leaf-like in the Old World, separately evolved.
The two in the Old World are closely related, so they probably have a shared nose leaf ancestor.
In the new world and in the old world the nose leaf has the same meaning.
It's evolved at least twice and the meaning is that if you're an echolocating bat and you carry stuff as you're flying you can't echolocate out your mouth because whatever you're carrying blocks it so it would blind you.
It's like wearing a blindfold.
So they echolocate out their noses and the nose leaf has something to do with aiming the sound energy so that it works.
So the question then is why will a nectarivorous bat, that is a nectar eater, why does it need a nose leaf?
It's not carrying anything.
It's the exception in that family.
A fruit eater, yes.
An animal that carries, a katydid, yes.
An animal that carries bats, lizards, frogs.
Frogs.
Yep.
All those things do.
And in the same family are vampires who drink blood and have lost their nose leaf.
Fits the pattern.
Um, but the glossophageans have their nose leaf.
Why?
Because they're not obligate nectarivorous bats.
They also eat fruit.
So anyway, that fits.
I don't know whether the pattern that you think you've spotted is right, but because the glossophagean bats Trap line, exactly as the hummingbirds that behave like the glossophagean bats do.
Trap line meaning on any given night they are going to tend to repeat until things change, which they do.
I go to flower A, flower B, flower C, flower D, flower E. They don't tend to go, well, as long as I hit them all, it'll be fine.
I'll go C, E, D, B, A. Like, no, you're going to go A, B, C, D, E, A, B, C, D, E. Effectively, in part, giving time for the flowers to replenish before they go back for more.
Right.
Which is a fascinating game because the plants play the bats.
This relationship is a tense one.
What the plant does not want is a bat that stays at one flower and drinks all night because that bat does not take the pollen where it needs to go.
It defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.
So the plants, while collaborators with the bats, modulate the bat's behavior.
They force them to move on and the bats optimize the pattern and they fly to the known places where there's a plant to feed from.
Nobody gulps for bats.
Right.
A sip everywhere.
A sip everywhere.
And so anyway, this means that if you study these animals, you can position yourself somewhere and you can rely on the animal coming back just the same way it works with hummingbirds.
And there's an even more interesting pattern.
I have a photo I think we've shown before.
I don't have it here, but the one picture of a bat pollinating a flower that I've ever managed to capture.
Is this a Merlin Tuttle photo that we're showing?
Probably.
I don't know whose photo this is.
That's not my photo.
But anyway, the plant that I set up on to capture the one photo that I've got of a bat pollinating a flower is a Marcia vine, and the Marcia vine matures one flower per night.
It matures right at dusk, and then it drops, it dies, and One sloughs off and then the next one matures the next night.
So the plant is basically a reliable source of food, not a plant that can be totally dependent on for all needs.
And of course this drives the traplining behavior.
But anyway, if these animals trapline, which they do, and they are traveling to plants that they pollinate, then they will also know where to find the fruit if in fact it is a
Well, in the case, I have no idea if this is true for marchia, the vine that you were just talking about, but if, you know, it's got 30 flowers on it, by the time a bat gets to its night 20 and it's flower 20, flower 1 through 5 may have become fruit already.
So a bat who arrives, perhaps, I have no idea if it's the same species that would go after the fruit and the flowers.
It's driving, the Markia is driving the return visit, not just for pollination potentially, but potentially for dispersalism.
Which would be a terrifically economical thing.
Again, I don't have any idea whether that's true for Markia, but it would be a terrifically economical thing to do because what it does is it reduces the cost of having to advertise to get a distributor to find the fruit.
So anyway, that would be... Or you know I got good stuff!
Right.
You know exactly where to go.
You've been coming here for night after night, so here's the fruit.
It's another creature I have not yet managed to capture.
Is this a sphinx?
Yeah.
Is it a hawk moth?
This is a hawk moth or a sphinx moth.
They are nocturnal.
They are not like most other moths.
These are, these guys are often mistaken for birds.
They fly in a bird-like way.
They can hover and they're very interesting creatures.
And they're big bodied.
They're big-bodied.
They're almost all nocturnal.
Their flowers are white for the same reason that the bat flowers are white.
There's no reason to use pigments to attract a nocturnal, visually oriented pollinator.
They have a smell.
It's much closer.
In fact, using color would be both expensive for the flower and expensive in terms of it being harder to find because it's less reflective.
It would be cost in two different ways.
It's counterproductive.
Yeah.
Totally.
And so these guys smell.
These flowers smell.
They smell pleasant, not musty.
They are white and physically showy, but unpigmented.
So that's what the syndrome predicts.
Do you notice that morning glory?
I have forgotten what this flower is.
Um, okay.
Now here we have, this is my photo.
Um, this is a hummingbird and this hummingbird is pollinating a flower or it's at least feeding from a flower in somebody's garden.
So this is not a native flower, but nonetheless.
Where is this Ecuador?
This is Colombia.
High in the Andes, where hummingbird diversity is extremely high, interestingly enough, more so than in the lowlands.
Okay, so this is a hummingbird flower.
Hummingbirds are visually highly attuned.
They see color and they're excellent pollinators.
Pollen grains can be big because this animal can carry a ton of stuff without blinking an eye.
No one presumably has asked the birds how they feel about it.
But this flower, or hummingbird flowers, don't smell.
Why don't they smell?
Because birds have a poor sense of smell.
Now there are exceptions.
Carrion-feeding birds have a good sense of smell.
But the two groups of vultures are very much the exceptions.
A couple of other clades maybe, but in general birds don't.
Right, so, okay, this is exactly what you would expect.
A showy, colorful, smellless flower, and it's being pollinated by the hummingbird that you would expect.
And then somehow...
Somehow I don't have the last photo.
I was going to show a reason for an exception to the rule.
Somehow it's not in this folder the way I was hoping it would be.
But I have another photo of a different hummingbird in another place in Colombia.
And it is feeding from a flower that does have a smell, but what it is doing is it is feeding through a hole in the base of the flower.
It's actually evading, it's stealing nectar from a flower that is actually supposed to be bee pollinated.
And so these, the syndromes... I wonder what those beaks are for?
Yeah, well... Thievery.
Right.
I mean, you know, this is a relationship in which the plant doesn't especially care about the bird, and the bird doesn't care about the plant.
They're each involved in an exchange, and they're each getting something of value.
But to the extent that one of the parties can cheat, they will, which is why the plants regulate the production of nectar in order to force the animals to move on.
And the animals will steal nectar if it's cheaper to do so than do it the way that actually gets them coated in pollen.
And it all kind of makes sense.
But anyway, what's the point here?
The point is, this is an elegant story.
The idea that there is something called a flowering syndrome.
And that it allows you to actually walk into a forest that you don't know and to look at a particular flower and take a pretty darn good guess at what kind of animal, if it is an animal at all, that pollinates the thing.
That is a powerful demonstration.
You could just simply have recognized that, you know, the white flowers tend to have a smell, right?
And you could not understand that they were being pollinated by a nocturnal ant.
You could not understand who those animals were and what their perceptual apparatus was.
But once you have both the syndrome, that is, what are the characteristics that tend to go together, then you can actually say, well, then each place that I find a flower and I list its characteristics, that's a hypothesis about what kind of animal I should expect to see pollinating.
in terms of their habit and their perceptual apparatus, which is to say diurnal versus nocturnal, and color sensing or not, and smelling or not.
Yep, so this is a demonstration of the power of syndrome.
You start with the observation of the pattern of characteristics that travel together, and then you deduce the explanation that drove the evolution of these groupings.
And I know you're talking about syndrome because you're going somewhere here, but this is what Field science does.
This is what pattern recognition in science in general is and does, and what we all should be doing, whether or not we think of ourselves as scientists or not, as we walk around the world trying to make sense of the things that we are observing.
And to do that, we need to actually observe, as much as possible, what is, as opposed to what we think it is.
And, you know, remove the bias, remove the assumptions that we are making as much as possible from what we are seeing, so that we can see the thing, rather than see what we already believe the thing is going to be.
Yep.
Helixacropia.
Yeah.
Helixacropia.
All right.
You can put my screen back up.
So let's talk about a different case.
And unfortunately, you know, to my way of thinking, the flowering syndromes is one of the greatest demonstrations of the power of this because we have so many different kinds of pollinators.
So we can actually say, Oh, there's a whole, you know, there's a whole matrix we could draw that intersects the perceptual capacity of each of these creatures with the characteristics on the plant side.
And it makes a very complete and compelling story.
And it's bigger than that, as you started with, you know, what about those flowers that don't look like flowers to people who haven't thought about what a flower is?
That are not showy, and that if you get your microscope out, you discover that it's got tinier pollen yet, and oh, okay, that's going to need to use the wind.
And there is no reason to try to attract... there's no communication happening between that plant and would-be pollinators.
Therefore, the flowers are dropped.
Yep, which actually and not smelly, which actually brings me to something else.
I would try to call up on the fly.
Oh, hold on a second.
There is an exception that I have never understood in this realm of it's just something I have filed on a back burner because I don't know what it means.
and I'm going to show it to you.
I can't add context here because I don't know what we're talking about yet.
We're talking about Scotch broom.
All right.
So this is.
Full screen.
I go to view.
It doesn't, it doesn't really matter.
I'll show you.
Yep.
Okay, so this is a plant called Scotch Broom and the reason that Scotch Broom does not fit with the pattern is that it is an invasive here in the Pacific Northwest.
It is Supposedly the cause of some relatively serious allergies for those of us who suffer from allergies to pollen, which typically would not go with a showy flower.
Because showy flowers tend to be for animal pollinators, which means that the pollen grains are larger and therefore don't blow very well in the wind.
And those flowers, the flowers who have animal pollinators, do not want to release the pollen into the winds.
They keep them stuck down until they're released onto the pollinators.
At least that is the goal.
And certainly some will be released, but to the degree that you've got, you know, at the moment there's just pollen all over everything here, all over every car.
And, you know, you can know if you walk out and you find your car covered in pollen that that pollen, by and large, the vast majority of that pollen was from a plant that did not intend for an insect to come and take its pollen away.
Yep.
That is an abundance of pollen, a lightness of pollen, a sort of freeness of pollen that is That is functional in a wind-pollinated system.
And so scotch broom, you're saying, tends to trigger people's allergies here.
I don't know if it does in Scotland, where it's originally from.
Yeah.
Supposedly it does.
Now, I've never understood the answer to this.
I've asked lots of people.
I've never gotten a useful answer to why scotch broom does this.
So it's possible that scotch broom doesn't trigger people's allergies and that it blooms at the same time as something that does.
And so people have misunderstood it.
It's possible it's pollinated in two different ways.
I don't know what's going on.
It's also possible as an invasive that it is changing its strategy because its actual pollinator isn't here.
Actually, that's a great hypothesis.
I love that hypothesis.
And actually, it fits with one other thing, which is dandelion.
So let's see if I can... So dandelions... Pretty sure everyone knows what a dandelion looks like.
Yeah, but now that we've had this little discussion.
And I've got to be careful because there's another plant that looks like dandelion, but isn't.
And I'm not tremendously awesome at spotting the distinctions.
I think this is true dandelion.
But you want to put this up?
So here's the problem with dandelion.
I love how you say it.
What?
Dandelion.
Like, oh, dandelion?
Is that how adults... No, no, no.
I just... That's how I say it.
Okay.
Well, here we have dandelion.
And the thing about dandelion is I've ruined it.
I'll never say it that way again.
Dandelion has a marvelous, marvelous adaptation.
It's just so gorgeous.
Once you hear it, you'll know it had to exist.
Dandelion is an apomyctic plant.
And what that means is that it makes a seed without undergoing sex.
It's not a true seed.
It's a dispersal element that functions like a seed, but it is produced through cloning.
I think they're not clones.
I think they're actually selfing.
Nope.
I think they're clones, but admittedly... Both of them exist in plant world.
I thought dandelions were not cloning, were selfing, but it's one of the two.
In any case, it doesn't really matter because the point is, well, this is a plant that doesn't need a pollinator.
Whether it's cloning itself and making a phony seed or it's making a seed through self-fertilization, it's not the result of an animal transmitting pollen over some distance.
So why is it wasting all of that effort on that showy bloom?
That's the question.
And I think, I don't know, but the hypothesis that I have advanced is that, well, A, when you move into an apomectic mode and you're not sexually reproducing, Then the opportunity to do away with the cost of the showy bloom is reduced because you don't have the variation that would come from sexual reproduction.
It's also possible, and I think likely, that sometimes it needs it.
That there's a certain amount of outcrossing that is likely to happen.
The reason that this is a great adaptation, though, I'll just point out.
is that it solves the problem that presumably has dogged many creatures throughout evolutionary history which is what happens when you need to sexually reproduce but you end up in a habitat that you can exploit and you're alone right that is a terrible waste from an evolutionary perspective not to be able to move into a habitat and take it over just because you happen to arrive alone.
So a plant that can spread by wind-dispersed seed and do so without having to mate with another individual has an advantage.
All right.
Let me find the next thing I wanted to show, though.
Sorry for the downtime, folks.
I, uh, not perfect at this.
All right.
Um, okay.
This is part of another interesting syndrome that I think is worth exploring.
So in the neotropics, that is, um, the tropics of the Americas, there are two primary Successional trees.
Tree genera.
One of them is Cecropia, which is on the screen now, and the other is Okroma.
So, I think you need to define your terms.
Yep.
So, let's give you a little... Tropical forests are very poorly understood, but the following thing is understood and is pretty well established.
It is essentially impossible
For a tree to grow from the forest floor from a tropical forest floor to the canopy with with its with mature canopy above it that the chances the amount of light that falls on the forest floor is so low by the time the canopy trees have sucked up all the light that hits them that a seedling that sprouts on the forest floor is doomed but for the possibility that a gap will open up in the canopy.
And gaps open up in the canopy a lot because the soils in the tropics are poor for reasons my argument is that they're poor because the competitors sitting on them are so good at sucking the nutrients out of the soil that the nutrients don't exist in the soil in large
numbers there in the plants but for whatever reason the soils tend to be poor the trees tend to be poorly rooted because investing in roots costs them in terms of investing in light collection for example um there's just not much to gather from deeper down in the soils well specifically the trees tend to be more shallowly rooted because most of the
biomass with the nutrients in them is coming actually from from above ground and so the roots that are shallow are better able to receive the stuff that is coming in the form of leaf fall and insect fall and draw some such yeah or another way to say that is because competition is so fierce things don't stay long enough to end up deep in the soil Whatever is available gets scavenged by the creatures that are there.
So shallowly rooted trees are more likely to fall over in a storm?
Shallowly rooted trees are more likely to fall over because competition is so intense and lots of plants have dispensed with having trunks and function as vines.
The trees tend to be connected together so when one falls it tends to take down several others.
So anyway there's a dynamic in which you have mature canopy But regularly gaps open up and they can be very substantial and they've got their whole other group of organisms that live in them.
Now when that happens, when a light gap opens, there are some plants that are opportunistically capable of taking advantage of it.
And there are many of them, but there are two tree genera that do it in the Neotropics.
So that's all true, but you still haven't defined the term that you used, which is succession.
So succession just refers to the tendency of a forest not to look the same over time because conditions change.
So, early on you're going to get light-hungry, fast-growing trees that can reach for the sky fast, but won't have had that much ability to put a lot of resources into what they are, and so they will live fast, die young, fall over quickly.
And so you have light woods like Okroma, not this one, Okroma, which you mentioned, which is known to most of us as Balsa.
And then Cecropia.
Those are the two primary early successional species in neotropical forests.
They live fast, they die young, they reach for the light, they grow fast, but they're not very sturdy.
All right.
Now I want to add two things.
One, there is a magic thing about succession, which is you will learn a lot about complex systems from this fact.
If you're going to be great at something, you're going to do so at the expense of being great at anything else.
Which means that if you are a creature that is built for the moment when a piece of forest is open because it's a light gap, you are going to create a scenario in which you're not great.
The primary successional creatures create a situation in which they are not dominant, which opens the door to all of the later stages of succession.
They move into niches in which they are perfectly adapted, and in succeeding in those niches, they create niches for which they are less well adapted, and so get succeeded, hence succession, by organisms, different plants, which are now adapted to the new niche that has been created by the previous successional species.
Exactly.
And so that is interesting because it means that you can actually, you know, again, we don't know very much about tropical forests, but one thing we do know in any tropical forest on earth is what is the typical sequence.
You know, when something opens up in the forest, what tends to arrive first?
What tends to arrive second?
What does the mature forest tend to look like?
This is something that we can identify because we know the basic process Even if most people wouldn't describe it in terms of the trade-off, you move into a habitat where you're best and you create a habitat where you're not, that's counterintuitive.
But the fact that we see this regular pattern is well understood.
So, Zecropia is one of these primary successional genera, as far as trees go.
And the other one, as you mentioned, is Okroma, which is Balsa.
What I wanted to point to... Do you want me to show this?
Oh yeah, will you show this?
Sorry.
So here is Cecropia.
This is a very classic Cecropia leaf, and I believe you can see some Cecropia fruits dangling there in the center.
They look like these long structures, almost like bean pods.
They're not.
Now, Cecropia fruits are mammal dispersed.
In fact, bats, I can't say for every Cecropia species, there are many, but bats like Cecropia fruits.
I've tried them.
Not super yummy, but you can, you know, there's a sweetness to them.
They're, you can get that it's food, right?
It's not, it's not one of these things that's really unfood-like.
But anyway, what I wanted to point to was, why am I not able?
You're on screw, Brett.
You're, you're, What I wanted to point to was, oh, here we go.
Okay, you can put my screen back up.
What I wanted to point to was that you have what seems like an explanation for the characteristics that should carry over between species.
In the case of balsa, balsa is famously light wood, right?
There's a reason that people use it when they're making model airplanes or model rockets, and that's because you have the characteristics of wood, you can carve any shape into it you want, But the wood is very, very light.
Why is the wood very light?
Because the tree is taking the material with which you could make wood and it is spacing it out.
It's almost foam-like in its consistency.
So it's taking the same number of molecules and making it filling a larger volume with them, which makes for a Very, very light wood.
And you would think, once you've discovered this about balsa, oh, I get it.
Primary successional tree.
What is its primary concern?
Well, it has a very short opportunity to get the jump on its competitors, to stay in the light by growing tall quickly.
And if you make, if you pack the molecules that you can produce By extracting nutrients from the soil and light from the sun and carbon from the atmosphere.
If you pack them very densely, well, then you can't grow very fast.
So the way of getting, the way of staying ahead of your competition is to pack them very lightly, like foam, right?
And you'd think, okay, well, then that's going to be true of Cecropia.
But it isn't.
You would think, well then why, you know, Cecropia, if you take a machete to it, it'll hurt your elbow.
It's a very difficult, dense wood.
So like Okrama, like Balsa, Cecropia is early successional.
It has this live fast, die young strategy, but how that strategy manifests is very different.
Right.
And so it is an exception that proves the rule.
Is it's wood light?
No.
But what if we talk about the density of the trunk?
Well, then it is.
It's about distribution of molecules as opposed to number.
Well, yeah, it's a density question, but it's more local.
It's like alpha density versus beta density.
It's like, why does a metal ship float?
And the answer, you know, metal is too heavy.
It should sink.
But if you take the ship as a whole, the density of the ship is below that of water and it floats.
And so in this case, what you have is a plant that takes advantage of the same property that allows the tubes of a bicycle, which are hollow and thin-walled, to be strong.
It's a geometrical distribution of material that leaves a big hollow space but the material itself has a great strength to weight ratio.
So So what we're looking at here is a close-up of a trunk of Cecropia, is that right?
This is a trunk of Cecropia, and those rings that you see on the trunk of Cecropia actually define chambers.
If you were to slice this tree down the middle, you would find chamber after chamber that were empty.
It's like bamboo.
Yeah, it's like bamboo.
It's more closely stacked, like the layers are shorter than most bamboo.
Right.
It's like bamboo, and for exactly the same reason.
Bamboo... But a totally separate evolution.
Bamboo is a grass.
Bamboo is a grass.
And this is an angiosperm.
This is a... I mean, bamboo is also an angiosperm.
This is a dicot, right?
Cecropia is, I think.
Yes.
The chambers in this case... So, oh, another point is that the syndrome of primary successional tree involves a comparatively low production of secondary compounds that protect leaves.
Because, again, anything spent for longevity is going to come at the cost of rapid growth, and the rapid growth is the key to winning in competition if you're one of these creatures.
So in this case, the hollow chambers in the Cecropia are actually inhabited By a genus of ant that then protects the tree as its home.
And it will actually sting anybody who harasses the tree.
It will protect the canopy from herbivores.
A little bit like Acacias, which you've talked about here before.
Yep.
Okay, now Acroma is exceptional.
So this is Acroma, this is now Balsa.
Acroma legopus is the species you and I are most familiar with.
Legopus is actually a reference to lagomorphs and the reason it's a reference to lagomorphs is because the tail is fluffy like a cotton tail.
Lagomorphs being rabbits and bunnies.
Yep, and so anyway, what is that about?
It's about the fact that the seed of the balsa tree is a wind-dispersed thing and actually many of the fibers that humans, I don't think we use Okrama, but many of the fibers that humans have woven into fabrics, actually those fibers are not the stalks so much, there are exceptions, but in general the fibers are fibers associated with the seeds that facilitate their blowing on the wind.
Are there, besides cotton, which is the obvious thing that comes to mind, are there others?
Yes, there are.
Oh, flax maybe?
Linen?
Linen maybe?
It all escapes my mind at the moment, so I couldn't have raised it.
That'll teach me.
Okay, and here is a balsa.
This is not the most impressive balsa I've ever seen, but anyway, you can get the idea.
All right, so this is a syndrome.
Primary successional.
You have to know how to apply the syndrome, right?
You're expecting something.
If you expect light wood, you'll be befuddled by Cecropia.
If you expect light density, you know, low density of the trunks, you will nail it.
You'll understand that this is actually a rapidly growing primary successional tree and that the syndrome is limited.
You know, the balsa is wind dispersed.
The Cecropia is mammal dispersed, so that's not a part of the syndrome.
So anyway, syndrome is a concept you have to use carefully, and you've got to know when nature is telling you you haven't really understood the syndrome yet, so you can modify it.
Okay, and then one last one that I wanted to explore a little bit.
Has to do...
What?
Yeah, you could vamp or something.
Oh, what?
Yeah.
Okay, so what I wanted to talk about was aposomatic coloration.
Aposomatic coloration.
I've got pictures of these guys, man.
You do, and you no doubt have better ones.
But absolutely.
Aposematic coloration is a pattern that we biologists have noticed.
It basically applies, and it doesn't have to be animals, but when a creature is potential prey, but it has a defense mechanism, It may not be cryptic.
In fact, it very often is conspicuous.
And so a predatory creature noticing the conspicuousness of a potential prey item may deduce from it that it is not worth the effort.
And in this case, what we have is a poison dart frog, which is something Heather has studied.
These guys have bright coloration.
It's actually a large clade of creatures with different bright coloration.
Am I right that there are a couple of not conspicuous dendromitids?
Yeah, the entire giant basal genus within the family is pretty inconspicuously colored and they've got just one of the like four, five, six, eight alkaloid classes of poisons that make these guys toxic.
Um, you don't happen to have a Mantella picture handy, do you?
Yeah, sure.
All right.
So Heather's going to bring up a picture of a Mantellian frog, which was her study organism.
But of course I won't be able to do it at the same time that you're showing a picture because you've got the magic.
Well, this is going to be... You know what?
I've got all sorts of them here.
I don't know.
Something awesome.
This one's tattooed.
Okay.
Nice.
Okay.
Okay.
All right.
Okay.
Can you see it Zach?
Okay.
So.
That's frog D4.
That's D4.
The famous.
This is one of the most famous Mantellian frogs ever.
Oh man.
Yeah.
C3 was also the one though.
Oh.
I nicknamed him Caesar.
All right.
So, um, the point here is that you've got a general phenomenon, aposematic coloration, but, uh, and you feel free to interrupt me or you can jump in and you can tell the story.
Uh, what I'm going to talk about is the similarity between Dendrobates and Mantella.
You would be better placed to do this.
Oh.
Really?
We're going here?
In service of the idea of syndromes.
Okay.
So, uh, yeah, I was, I did not know we were going here at all.
Um, most frogs aren't poisonous, right?
Uh, most frogs aren't brightly colored, but most frogs are also nocturnal.
And there are a few places in the world where frogs have come to be diurnal.
And once they are diurnal, they are at greater risk of being attacked by predators.
Because frogs, believe it or not, tend to be very delicious.
I've actually never had one myself, but they are a favored prey item of just about everyone who can get their hands on them.
And so once you are awake in the day, and gosh, I was not prepared for this, Brett.
I don't remember to what degree we have the ordering down of whether or not they started to become toxic as they were becoming diurnal.
So I don't, I I don't remember the ordering there.
Well, this actually is just fine, because what you've got is a syndrome, a true syndrome of characteristics that go together.
You've got...
Okay, so if we're just telling...
I was trying to tell the evolutionary story, but if the syndrome is, "Oh, you've got frogs that are brightly colored, and it turns out they've got toxins, and they're diurnal." I guess I don't know what you're trying to do, so I'm sorry.
You've got clade frogs in which most of the creatures are nocturnal.
Yeah.
Most of the members of the clade are cryptic.
Visually cryptic.
They're very loud.
The males tend to be very loud.
They tend to be loud when breeding.
They're visually cryptic.
Frogs tend to produce large numbers of offspring about whom they don't care.
uh individually and what you have is two clades in which you have exception after exception and the thing that is so powerful about this story is that the exceptions are so similar that taxonomists mistook
I mean, there was, you tell me if I'm wrong, but there was morphological evidence for people who were paying attention at the finest level of detail that suggested they actually might not be closely related.
And then the molecular evidence slam dunks it.
And it's like, actually these two groups have evolved the same weird collection of characteristics that are exceptional for their parent group.
And so similarly that you could easily mistake one for the other.
Right, and early naturalists and taxonomists indeed put them in the same group, thought that they were closely related, and that actually contributed to a biogeographical understanding of our world, which is they had a Gondwanan distribution.
They were both.
So the poison dart frogs, of which you showed the famous blue jeans frog, are limited to the New World Tropics, the Neotropics, South America, and Central America, and the Mantellines, Mantella in particular, are limited to Madagascar, and Madagascar and South America, and there's none in Africa, right?
And so the Gaudouan distribution would have suggested very ancient origins if this was a single origin.
And, you know, if we could do fossil cores in Antarctica, we should be able to find evidence of them, but no, right?
The evidence is strong that even though these guys have not just diurnality and poisons and bright colors, the poisons are the There are these lipophilic alkaloids that cause sensory neurological failure in organisms that ingest them.
And the poisons are generated from the same building blocks, dietary building blocks, because both of these frogs, both these clasic frogs, eat ants and mites from which they create these alkaloids.
And they both breed not in these giant pools of water where they can't keep track of their kids and so therefore don't try to, but they breed in these restricted little phytotelmata, these little pools of water on plants like bromeliads in the neotropics or bamboo or the buttresses of trees. these little pools of water on plants like bromeliads in And then they end up taking care of their kids in remarkably similar ways, as I have talked about along a lot.
Yes.
Stop doing that.
Anyway, this is a testament, I think.
It's the best version I know of that It illustrates the power of some hidden force in nature to create the repetition of a pattern.
And in this case, it is so compelling and goes so deep.
I mean, not only is the chemistry of the toxin in these conspicuous poisonous frogs the same, but their call even sounds the same for reasons I've never understood, right?
It's this...
Right.
Why is the pattern so similar if they really didn't get all of those characteristics from a shared ancestor?
And I think, you know, it's one of these wonderful cases where we don't really know.
It's going to sound like it's coming out of left field, but I actually just this week began to republish Antipode, which is my first book, which is about my research and life in Madagascar on natural selections, to give me basically a block of time to focus on writing a new book.
So these stories do get explored in Antipode, so check it out in Natural Selections.
Great.
Actually, yeah, that's synergy right there, folks.
Okay, so Now to get back to the original point.
And we are not going to complete this discussion today.
We're building out the toolkit.
But the point is, syndromes are an incredibly powerful starting point for comprehending There are forces in the world about which you know little or nothing, right?
Recognizing the syndromes is like job one, because what you're really saying is, hey, there's a pattern.
And patterns can be ones of similarity.
They can also be ones of dissimilarity.
I'm also fond of the logic of flowering phenology, in which if you have, let's say, a forest full of plants, And you have, if you think about the calendar and when things flower, if everything flowers at once, they're all competing for the same pollinators.
How many pollinators are there?
Well, there will be fewer because the pollinators will starve to death in the months when there's nothing.
And what this process tends to do is it tends to drive the flowering times apart across the year so that if there's a gap in the calendar, then it is targeted by a plant Which gets an advantage by producing the only flower that's available at that moment.
At least within syndrome, you know, to tie it together.
Like, there's no reason for a plant that is bat-pollinated and a plant that is bee-pollinated not to flower at the same time.
Right.
Unless they have similar germination times and are distributed by the same animal, in which case they should separate out their phenologies as well.
Yep.
So anyway, you've got patterns.
You've got patterns of similarity.
You've got patterns of dissimilarity.
They have underlying explanations.
You may know them.
You may not know them.
The punchline to this story is I suspect we are going to discover that just in the same way that we on Dark Horse have talked a lot about the importance of separating out hypotheses from theories, Because they have a different status and you should treat them differently.
It's not a linguistic flourish.
They mean very different things.
One is, you know, a theory started as a hypothesis and it matured into a theory when every competing hypothesis has failed, has been falsified, and it has withstood test.
Which doesn't mean it can't be falsified tomorrow.
But That is what it means.
It's a very different status.
The problem is we have two kinds of syndromes.
We have syndromes where we have got a mature explanation of the underlying pattern and we have syndromes where all we have is the collection.
And the problem is if you go into something like medicine and you talk about a patient having a syndrome And it comes to be treated as if you have described the pathology itself rather than a cluster of symptoms.
It takes on a status that it does not deserve.
And the very nature of complex systems is that we have to be careful not to extrapolate ourselves into confidence in ideas that aren't true on the basis of some kind of induction where, yes, we've seen a lot of things that have those characteristics,
And, you know, to take a simple example, if you've got a complex physiological property of a creature and it is disrupted at stage 7, so all of the stages after 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 are all broken because stage 7 was disrupted, well then you will have a set of symptoms that come from that, right?
Nothing says that only one thing disrupts stage 7.
So anything that disrupts stage 7 will produce that same cluster of symptoms.
And if something disrupts stage 8, it will overlap all of the symptoms except the ones that happen between 7 and 8.
So one has to deploy the power tool of syndrome with great caution so as not to over extrapolate or pretend to know something that you don't.
So if I may interpret, you've imagined a hypothetical organism that has 12 developmental stages, and something has interfered at stage 7 such that all the things that should have happened in 8 through 12 have not happened.
It is not parsimonious to assume that there are multiple things that happen at Stage 7, which is why we tend to look for one thing and see, OK, is that the thing that happened?
Oh, it's not.
OK, let's see if there's another thing.
Sometimes multiple things will happen, but all else being equal, it's more likely to be one thing than multiple things that happen at the same place at the same time.
However, it's almost like a corollary.
It's like it's coming into the same question from another side.
You're saying, The Law of Parsimony does not say that multiple things cannot, in theory, happen at Stage 7.
In fact, of course, multiple things can, in theory, happen at Stage 7.
It's just unlikely that for a particular individual, at a particular moment in time, multiple things happened right then and there.
Multiple things can happen at Stage 7.
But anything that happens at Stage 7 may manifest with the same series of symptoms.
And we call all of those things, which may have a multiplicity of causes, the same syndrome, because that's all we can see.
That's all that's downstream.
Yep.
And I would, I would say, I'm really, in some sense, rephrasing what you've just said, but... I think I was just rephrasing what you had just said.
Well, this is awesome.
We can keep doing this all day.
Terrible.
Neither of us wants to do this.
Okay, go on.
The sciences matured in an order.
It's a rough order, but they've matured in an order.
My contention is that they have matured Fastest where we are dealing with simple systems.
Simple systems does not mean easy to understand.
Physics is hard to understand when you get especially to the fancy end of it.
But it doesn't mean that the underlying stuff isn't dead simple.
It's just counterintuitive, right?
So where things are simple, You know, a single double slit experiment tells you an awful lot, because you've controlled out all of the variables and something really weird happens, and we still don't exactly know why, but the point is what happens is not ambiguous.
Easily demonstrated.
The farther you get along the continuum to complexity, the worse things get.
The more you should expect multiple things to look alike, like dendrobatids and menthelenes, and not to be alike, or to be alike for some reason you haven't spotted yet.
And therefore, I think maybe the greatest sin in modernity, where we are trying to be rigorous about science, is the application of intuitions from complicated systems onto complex systems.
The problem is complex systems have very special properties.
Your car is a complicated system, right?
It may be beyond your ability to understand how it works, but if you tell me that your car doesn't start, I can give you some tests that will narrow it down to the component that has failed, right?
If you can charge the battery and it runs for a time and then leaves you stranded on the road, then it's probably your alternator.
Your battery seems to work, it can be charged, your car can run off the battery, but it's not generating power with which to keep the battery charged and to Cause the spark plugs to fire, right?
Whereas if you can jump start your car and it runs for good and then you turn off the key and try to turn it back on and it doesn't work, then it's your battery.
And if you can pop start it, but you can't start it with a key and it continues to run, then your starter motor is bad.
I mean, the point is, It is a system with obligations to pattern that is readily knowable.
You can fully understand a car even if one individual might not be able to.
The system is completely understandable.
Complex systems are different, and because syndrome both describes the case in which we have no idea why these things go together, but they do, we know that, and hey, here are some things that go together, and here's the underlying reason why we are in trouble.
And so what I'm going to suggest, and I don't really have the terminology that I would apply to it, but what I'm going to suggest is that what we really need is two different terms, right?
We need syndrome A, which is a cluster of things that go together for reasons unknown, and syndrome B, which is an explained cluster of characteristics or symptoms.
And pretending that we have the second thing when what we really have is the first thing, or when there are multiple explanations competing, and some school of thought wins out, and it wants to claim that it has established a causal relationship that it doesn't have any right to claim, and it wants to claim that it has established a causal That's where we get into trouble, right?
Leaping to the idea that we have nailed a complex system down in the same way you can nail down a complicated system.
All right.
All right.
Do you want to talk about Panama?
Yeah, I'll do it briefly.
And part because it's very hard to find a good source that nails down all of the pieces.
But what I wanted to point out is that there has been since Zach and I traveled to Panama, since we talked about it here, since I talked about it on Tucker Carlson's program and Jill Rogan's program and elsewhere.
I guess also Jordan Peterson's, which is just out.
Something has changed in Panama.
The San Vicente migrant camp, which is the camp that was overwhelmingly Chinese, was distinct in that it was isolated from Panamanian settlements and that it was also more tightly controlled with respect to our access to it.
That camp has had the following two things happen.
It has had some kind of a riot That resulted in a fire in which the records of migrants were apparently destroyed.
That's one thing.
And the other thing is it has now been closed.
Now my understanding, and again it's hard to find a good source, my understanding from people on the ground is that it has been permanently closed, that it might be reopened if the Panamanians can find funding to do so.
But It is not obvious to me why it couldn't require all that much funding given what it was built out of.
It was built out of containers.
So the question is have they decided to close it because scrutiny of this camp has caused it not to be worth keeping open and Anyway, I just wanted to enter it into the record, and I wanted to point out that it is interesting.
It is not like we brought that camp to light.
That camp has been described by Michael Yan and others for a very long period of time.
Secretary Mayorkas himself traveled there and did a press conference from the camp, so it was well known.
But scrutiny by the public May have changed the stakes.
I know that it changed the willingness of the NGOs that were so proudly putting up, you know, billboards and maps facilitating migration.
They have stopped doing that.
So, in any case, I don't know what to make of it, but I do think that Much as with the first segment that we've done today, this is a case where we need to figure out what the proper toolkit is, because things like scrutiny brought by members of the public who decide to go see for themselves and talk about what they've seen, Maybe having an important implication.
Now that also creates a hazard.
Obviously, if we are successfully bringing enough attention to things that are embarrassing, that it is causing people to change course, then that probably won't make them very happy.
I don't know, maybe this is a long way of saying I am not the least bit suicidal.
I feel good.
And anyway, let's keep exposing that which embarrasses the frighteningly powerful.
Excellent.
In that vein, we will wait until next week to discuss Moto-normativity, which should not be important to The Powerful, but got some attention this week with the Substack principled bicycling.
And it's really ridiculous.
Truly, truly ridiculous.
I was going to make a joke, but it sounds like my joke was going to traffic in exactly the meaning.
I'm sure it did.
I'm sure it would.
But I think we'll save that for next week.
So you guys can... Moto-normativity.
Moto-normativity.
I may bike in just for that.
Yeah, well, yeah.
I think we'll save that, because although you were able to find some connections between our three sponsors this week, I'm not sure what the connections will be between Syndromes, the closing of the San Vicente camp in Panama, and Moto Normandy.
So we're gonna stop there.
We're gonna leave it there.
All right.
Did you have the store?
Yeah, there we go.
So you can find Do Not Affirm, Do Not Comply merchandise at darkhorsestore.org and lots of other great stuff as well.
That, of course, is in reference to not affirming gender identity claims, especially among the young, but really maybe getting down to it, not affirming any of that gender ideology nonsense at all, and not complying with illegal or immoral orders or mandates.
So, do not affirm, do not comply, what?
Why are you giving me the squint look?
Well, I'm stuck, because is modonormativity a gender?
Oh, probably.
Sure.
Okay.
Okay.
That's a relief.
I think they are.
And is it formally immune under the kink-shaming ban?
Well, I don't think that Congress actually pushed through the kink-shaming ban, although they did want to.
I bet they did.
I don't know.
Now we're just making shit up.
Yep.
Okay.
We have a private Q&A this Sunday at Locals at 11am.
Please come join us there.
You can ask questions right now there, and lots of other good stuff at Locals.
Please join us there.
Again, if you want to know more about Madagascar or frogs, I am republishing chapter by chapter Antipode, which is my first book published in 2001.
on Natural Selections, naturalselections.substack.com starting this week.
And check out our sponsors once again.
They were Fast Growing Trees, Mudwater, and American Heart for Gold.
And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
