Normalizing Normativity: The 219th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 219th 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 evolution and intelligent design, and why the failures of institutions and institutional science during Covid are causing people to question everything that science has concluded. We also discuss motonormativity—aka car brain—both steel manning it as a concept, and critiquing the research that...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream pop quiz.
What number live stream is it?
Oh, I know.
Do you?
Of course I know.
I mean, it's my job to know.
It is your job to know.
It's 219. 219.
Okay, well then that makes it very unlikely that the last one was 219, as I had recalled it.
So this is the 219th live stream of the Dark Horse Podcast.
You continue to be Dr. Heather Hying.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
And, you know, reality is a ridiculous place, but it beats the alternatives.
Yes, indeed.
219, not prime.
Not prime.
Semi-prime, I believe.
Remember what that means?
Uh, it has, uh, two factors beyond, uh, itself and one.
Uh, maybe that's not right.
We will be corrected.
Um, anyway, it does have two factors, I believe, beyond.
Beyond.
Besides itself.
Whether that makes it semi-prime or not.
Right.
Exactly.
Three, uh, and 73.
Three and 73.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I did not see 73 coming, but of course, three.
Sure.
It had to have a pair, didn't it?
Um, all right.
Well, So come join us on Rumble and please consider supporting us on Locals.
We've got the watch party going on there right now.
We did a fun Q&A there this weekend.
We may actually put a couple little things.
We got so many good questions.
We only got through less than half of them.
It's pretty rad.
I have to say it's also kind of a bargain, right?
Yeah.
It's a very good space and it doesn't take that much to be there.
And anyway, I think everybody who participates digs it.
Yeah.
Including us.
So anyway.
So this week here, not there, but here, oh wow, I have to have it to my computer, we're going to be talking about motor normativity and cephalopods and intelligent design.
So, motonormativity, I'm imagining, is when the robots take over and they start treating us as lesser.
Yes, precisely.
Okay.
No, absolutely wrong.
Well, I, okay, I look forward to finding out what the hell that means because it's frightening just as you say it.
It's a ridiculous word.
Yes.
It's a ridiculous word.
Reified in the most ridiculous way, but I don't actually find the idea behind it as absurd as the awesome people who brought this to my attention, actually.
OK, so we are actually going to be coming to you next time, this Saturday on April 6th, because we are not going to be able to do so next Wednesday.
And also this Saturday and Sunday, you have your Patreon conversations, which are always a lot of fun.
So we've got lots of ways to To come find us, and just a few more things at Local.
So we've got guest episodes there, and two monthly Q&As, and the zebra is mostly right here, and now hiding somewhat less behind our faux forest.
Let's see... A real plant, but it...
But it's not a forest.
Yeah, true.
Yeah, it's a real plant, but it's a faux forest.
So the last thing we'll do before we get into the content this week is our ads.
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We did it.
That's the ads.
That part of the show.
Yep.
All right.
Pay the rent.
Wow.
It's a good thing.
Yeah.
Because, I mean, although it's spring, it's a better time to be thrown out of your place.
It's still not a good time.
It's never a good time.
It's never a good time.
It's never a good time to lose your home.
Yep.
That's true.
We're not actually at any risk of that.
No.
But, uh, yeah.
What am I going to say?
I don't know.
Other people are?
I don't know.
Yes.
It won't be true.
Where should we start?
Should we start with... I want to leave cephalopods till the end.
Leave cephalopods till the end.
Well, we could start... Just a little new thing on cephalopods.
We could start with the trials and tribulations of Darwinism.
What do you think?
If you like.
All right.
So, our attention was called by a friend and then... Your attention.
My attention.
This is not my story.
Sorry.
I barely know what you're gonna talk about.
All right.
Just give me cover here.
Like, I don't... Yeah.
Okay.
Trouble I'm about to get in is all mine.
Okay, so my attention was called by a friend and then by Twitter algorithms, and maybe not surprising that a friend and Twitter algorithms have pointed us in the same direction, to an exchange, which I guess, yeah, you know what?
Zach will show it.
Okay.
I'm not really so focused on the exchange, but I do think it's emblematic of a transition that we are all going to be confronted with.
So an account I do not know says, does anyone else feel compelled to revisit the debate around Darwin and intelligent design after seeing in real time just how authoritarian scientific consensus can be?
Now, my friend Joseph Freeman, who is an excellent doctor, fellow COVID dissident, also a member of the Florida Public Health Integrity Committee, responds.
Nope.
Theory of natural selection is pretty solid, holding up for more than 100 years.
Recent authoritarian, quote, science, end quote, The initial poster then responds, I found this pretty convincing, and he posts a link to an article that I had not read.
was wrong and harmed more than it helped and was based on a combination of fear and faith and authority rather than science the initial poster then responds i found this pretty convincing and he posts a link to an article that i had not read it's a review of a book the author of the article is david galartner the The author of the book he is reviewing is Stephen Myers.
I know both of these gentlemen and I quite like them.
These guys are both skeptics of Darwin.
The article that Glartner has written This is not a new article.
It's pre-COVID, in fact, or pre-COVID crisis.
The article actually sheds some light on the difference of opinion between these two men.
So Stephen Myers is a committed Devotee, I would say, to the idea that intelligent design is a more compelling explanation for biological diversity than Darwinism.
Galartner is not necessarily a believer that intelligent design is an answer to the question, but he believes that Darwinism has We've shown a failure to account for observable phenomena that is sufficient for us to abandon it where it is not an explanatory theory.
Now, my interest in this, I of course disagree with both of these guys, and I have told them as much.
I believe these guys both have scientific integrity.
They're motivated by slightly different things, but anyway, I believe that This is an excellent test case of the growing Cartesian crisis and what it is doing to our ability to reason.
So what I see is a theory that you and I know well, suddenly facing the increasing credibility of challenges to it that I believe are valid challenges.
I don't believe they trump Darwinism.
I believe Darwinism can answer these challenges, but we're not doing it.
And the reason that we are not doing it, I believe, shows us so many of the features of the Cartesian crisis and what we're in for if we don't correct it immediately.
that it's a cautionary tale of sorts.
So I wanted to talk a little bit about just some of the contributing factors and how they're elucidated by this puzzle.
And the contributing factors, to be clear, that you're elucidating are to the question of why there are more seemingly legitimate challenges to the theory of natural selection or why there is not a considerable rebuttal.
Great question.
I see two things, okay?
There's a sort of scientific failure, and then there is what state is the public left in, right?
The sophisticated public that cares what's true, faced with a set of arguments that probably few of them are able to fully follow.
Most people in the public, even sophisticated, well-educated people who may have studied Darwinism for a time in the biology class somewhere, Most of those people are not in a position to say one way or the other whether the Cambrian Explosion is a real challenge to Darwin or it's an answerable challenge where we don't have the details but it's not a reason to worry about the hypothesis.
So both of the things that I asked you are more about the arcane nature of academic discourse, about what is true, which seems to me a different domain than where the Cartesian crisis is taking place.
Yep, that's why I say there are two.
So there's one, what's the state of the public with respect to a theory that
Most sophisticated members of the public would say that they are believers in but they probably couldn't defend and the other one is the professional status of Darwinism which I believe to be the root cause here of Both conundrums so I will remind people Briefly of a story that I have told occasionally before it it looms large for me Because it was the moment at which I saw clearly
How we ended up in such a bad spot.
I was in, you and I were in Chicago together.
I was there to talk to Richard Dawkins on stage, which has been partially but not entirely captured on video.
So I wish the whole thing had been captured.
But anyway, there's a big chunk of it.
People can go check it out if they want.
But in any case, The morning before my meeting with Dawkins on stage, you and I had breakfast with Jerry Coyne.
And I asked Jerry Coyne a question that I then went on to ask Richard Dawkins on stage.
Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins were not talking at that point.
So I know that the fact that they both gave me the same answer was not the result.
It's not a single data point.
It's two data points.
And the data point was so ridiculous that it struck me as like a symptom of a disease.
I asked them why there had been no substantial progress theoretically.
What was the last major breakthrough in evolutionary biology?
Now there have been breakthroughs in the hybrid discipline evolution of development, evo-devo, that have largely resulted from the fact that we can now peer more deeply into developmental biology than we could 30-40 years ago, and that has kicked loose a bunch of progress that is at the interface between mechanism and phenomenology, but
As far as I can tell, the last major development in evolutionary biology in the traditional sense was 1976.
Ironically enough, it's Dawkins who in his, what I would call, synthetic work, The Selfish Gene, makes a couple of kinds of significant breakthroughs, but he seems to misunderstand them.
So in any case, If we take as an assumption, and neither of these guys challenged my argument that there hadn't been a major breakthrough since 76, they both seem to accept that.
When I asked them why there hadn't been a major breakthrough, they both told me that it was because their generation had solved all of the big puzzles and had basically left a cleanup operation that didn't...
Result in people making themselves famous in the way that Dawkins has become famous That basically the the field was a was solved now I know because I once believed that was true when I was a college student and Later came to understand that actually what it really happened was we had stopped talking about all of the big questions that that evolutionary biology had not yet answered all of the paradoxes that left on the table and
Including big things like, where did all the species come from?
Why do females put males in so many species to challenges that then cause them to burden their male offspring with elaborate displays that are not helpful?
Things like that.
So I knew that there were lots of challenges that had not been addressed by that generation, but these two guys, leading lights of that generation, seemed to think it was solved.
And my point now, if I can return to the present, is that that belief that the field had reached a level of sophistication, that effectively it was finished, is the sound of scientists claiming that science is settled.
And when scientists do this, when they take stuff off the table with respect to it being challengeable, They then create an increasing pattern of fragility.
So my claim is going to be that when you and I were in college and graduate school, intelligent design is not something we gave almost a second thought to ever.
It was too preposterous.
When I encountered people like Stephen Myers, who were not Bony scientists, right?
Pretending to do the work.
They were actually very good at what they did.
And I believe Stephen Myers is motivated by a religious motivation.
But we don't generally ask the question when somebody takes up science, you know, what are you really in it for?
Are you in it for the fame?
We don't, that's not a legitimate challenge to somebody's work.
And the fact is Stephen Myers is very good at what he does.
He may be motivated by the thought that at the end of the search, he's going to find Jesus.
But In terms of the quality of his arguments and I was very impressed when I met him it's love for biology His love for creatures the weirder the better he likes them right so that looked very familiar to me and it also became obvious to me in interacting with Stephen Myers and many of his high quality colleagues and
That they're actually motivated, for whatever reason, to do the job that we are supposed to be motivated to do inside of biology.
They're looking for cracks in the theory, things that we haven't yet explained, and they're looking for those things for their own reasons, but the point is we're supposed to be figuring out what parts of the stories we tell ourselves aren't true, because that's how we get smarter over time.
All scientists are supposed to provide their own loyal opposition at some level, and scientific fields increasingly, you're arguing, have abandoned that.
And so just as it's useful for liberals to have conservatives around on college campuses, it makes them smarter, and their absence is making them dumber, that the field of evolutionary biology, absent real critique, is allowing it to stagnate.
A hundred percent.
And I know I have my own motivations.
Maybe I'm not fully aware of them.
Maybe I am.
But I know that as an honorable scientist, I am motivated to find things about Darwinism where the story is wrong.
And my belief is that what will come out of that is more and better Darwinism.
Right?
I don't see any reason to doubt Darwinism.
In fact, I'm going to make an argument that that's preposterous in its own right.
But my Going to avoid those questions?
No, I'm gonna- anytime you raise a real question where we haven't got it answered, my feeling is, hey, there's something to do.
That sounds like fun, right?
That's why I became what I, in my own mind, think of as a big game hunter.
It sounds like fun.
Presumably unless you have grants hinging on a different outcome, or you have an entire career behind you hinging on a different outcome.
Yes, or yeah, you've written books that are, you know, your legacy, and you realize that things in them aren't Quite right.
Or you don't allow yourself to realize that because the illusion is too important to you that you did better than you did.
And mind you, I am not, I will take Coyne to task.
And I will take Coyne to task for a reason.
I am not taking Dawkins to task for what he accomplished.
What he accomplished was profound and important and it was a stage in the process.
I'm angry at him for embracing it as if it was a more complete answer than it was and for failing to recognize the parts of it that are wrong.
But I think he did, you know, in 1976, he did very, very well.
And so anyway, I think that's great.
And he made his contribution.
And I think he's kind of wrecking it now by, you know, what these guys did was they failed to mint their own replacements.
And what an honorable scientist does, what our mentors did, was they produced people who they knew would Exceed them if they did their job correctly.
That's the very nature of this job is that you create your own replacements and hopefully, you know, I mean in fact we used to talk in graduate school when we thought about you know that process of mentoring and and Apprenticing and all of that
Um we used to recognize that there were two jobs and oftentimes there was a trade-off between mentors who were really good at producing scientific high quality scientific thinkers and mentors who were really good at Nailing the processes that were being described.
And sometimes people would, you know, who were thinking about going to graduate school, they'd be very excited about somebody's work.
Should I go work with that person?
And we would say, look, you should talk to that person's graduate students and find out whether they're good at the other job.
Because if they're not good at mentoring, then the fact that they're very good at thinking is maybe not so useful to you.
Right?
You should find somebody who's good at producing their own replacement.
And so anyway, I'm annoyed at that generation for not producing their own replacements properly, and for lying to themselves about why they didn't.
That next generation wasn't necessary because they had done so well, and that sounds like a lot of bullshit to me, and it sounded like a lot of bullshit to me when both Dawkins and Coyne offered that as some sort of an explanation for a phenomenon that isn't even true, that all the big questions were answered, which they obviously aren't.
So, anyway, back to the puzzle.
If you decide that Darwinism is more complete as a body of work than it is, and you decide that your challengers aren't entitled to a hearing because they're motivated by the wrong stuff, Then you do two things.
One, you artificially stunt the growth of your field and you create a more vibrant realm where your competitors have a better field to play in because you've left a lot of Holes in the theory ready to be identified, which I think is what's going on.
The better intelligent design folks are finding real questions raised by Darwinism, and the Darwinists are, instead of answering those questions, they're deciding it's not worthy of their time.
And that is, it is putting us on a collision course.
So I'm not familiar with most of the arguments that are coming out of the new intelligent design movement.
It hasn't felt like it was my obligation to be familiar with them.
Perhaps what you're arguing is it is our responsibility.
But the main thing that I see in just the Glertner review of the Myers book that was pointed to in that Twitter thread that's published in the Clearview of Books in 2019 is an argument.
Well, there's a molecular argument, but with regard to the fossil record, the fossil record is incomplete and that the whole thing is statistically very unlikely.
which do sound like arguments that, of course, in evolution of biology we hear all the time.
And I guess I wonder, Paleontology and what we sometimes call in biology Neontology, people who study extant forms as opposed to extinct forms, do inherently operate by different means and with different methods because historical science is inherently one-off and does not exactly repeat itself, just like history does not exactly repeat itself.
And so because the methods and means aren't exactly the same, and paleontology is not what I was doing, not what you were doing, I can't speak directly to it, but The holiness, the gaps in the fossil record.
Better.
I don't know how to make the counter argument because the argument seems to be, this is improbable.
And I think evolutionary biologists aren't claiming that it's not improbable.
It's just there's a lot, a lot, a lot of time involved.
No, let's let's divide some arguments.
First of all, the improbability argument, I believe, is more at the molecular level.
Okay, so the point is, okay, so it's the gaps in the fossil record and the improbability of, you know, 150 string sequences, each of which could be or Yeah, the math can go a lot of different ways, but lots and lots of possibilities with only a few possibilities that are actually functional.
What are the chances that you end up with functional?
Right, so you've got these two arguments.
You've got a functional protein is so far from a soup of amino acids that it's very improbable that selection can even bootstrap something new that's useful enough for the process of Darwinism to take over.
That's one thing.
Then there's this Cambrian explosion thing, which stands in for the gappiness of the fossil record.
It's sort of the ultimate case of a gap that's inexplicable, seemingly.
And it has the utility of Darwin worried about it himself.
So it's like, oh, this is something Darwin figured was going to be filled in by future work, and we're still kind of scratching our heads over it.
Now, here's the reason that I think it is important to take this sort of stuff seriously.
And let me go back to one thing.
In my opinion, I am basically on the team of anybody who is forthrightly looking for elements of our evolutionary theory that are not complete.
Looking for paradoxes, right?
That's the team.
And that team should include people who expect Darwinism to meet the challenge and those who expect it not to.
The reason that something like the Cambrian Explosion and its failure to be answered by standard Darwinism is important is that, in my opinion, it does point directly to the most important element of Darwinism which has yet to be discovered, which is something that I call Explorer Modes, something that, interestingly, Dawkins has mocked me for.
And so, okay, now you've got an interesting question, which is, Am I going to turn out to be right that we are looking at Darwinism 10.0 and that Darwinism has figured out ways to enhance the capacity of Darwinian processes, right, which I feel is a slam dunk, but I'm open to that battle and I expect that if we pursue that question what we're going to find is, oh,
There's a layer of Darwinism we didn't get, and it's going to turn out that the intelligent design folks are going to be wrong, but they will have played a very noble and important role in the process of us getting smarter.
And look, I think Steve and my At the end of the day, I don't think he's going to surrender to the idea that there's no God at the end of this process, but if we find a layer of Darwinism that hasn't been spotted that answers his question, I think he's going to be delighted with it the same way he's delighted by the prospect of seeing whale sharks, right?
So anyway, that's all how the process is supposed to work.
What it's not supposed to work is we're supposed to say Darwinism is settled science, the Cambrian explosion is not a question, yada yada yada.
So, you've got, every time we find one of these things that's legitimate, it's going to point to something that will be very worth its while for us to discover, and any time we shut down the question, unless the question really isn't a question, we're going to hobble our own capacity to see further and understand better.
Cambrian explosion and the gappiness of the fossil record.
I don't believe that's going to turn out to be a major challenge.
I believe that's going to be a combination of phenomena that we already do know about and you're going to be able to see why you would expect the fossil record to look like that even if Darwin is right as understood.
The improbability of proteins question.
I believe you're going to have another layer that there's going to be a mechanism by which Kind of like a heuristic mechanism.
Right.
Just like in trying to decipher the most parsimonious evolutionary tree from a character set, where you can't expect the computer to search through every single possibility because there is not enough time in the universe.
But it starts being constrained, constraining itself based on things that seem most likely.
And might it miss something real?
Maybe.
But a heuristic layer somewhere in the mutation space.
Precisely.
And I believe this was implied, and I said so at the time.
I can't remember whether it was Twitter or we discussed it, but there was a surprise breakthrough in the prediction of protein folding that was done by a computer algorithm.
And what I said at the time was that it implies an evolutionary heuristic that makes that Far more tractable problem than we understood.
So it's exactly that.
Every time you look at one of these things that causes the people who doubt Darwinism to get excited, you're actually looking at an opportunity to upgrade Darwinism.
And here's a place too, I mean just like I just did, where we can look and see what computers have done and imagine that probably evolution could have done it as well.
Right, and that done, you know, just the same way a lot of chemical reactions are reversible, the point is you find a way that the problem is more tractable intellectually than you think, it may be biologically more tractable than you think too, right?
That those two things are mirrors of each other.
Right, and you know, as Dawkins himself has famously said, failure of imagination is not an argument.
Is not an argument, exactly, exactly.
So, overarchingly, I believe that the intelligent design folks do have one slam dunk argument.
It doesn't point to an intelligent designer, in fact it points to Darwinism, but the waiting time problem where they say, look, What you've got is a mathematical claim about the ability of selection to find superior forms at a rate that will generate the stuff that we all agree is the product of it.
Right?
Not enough time.
The mechanism you've put on the table is too feeble to do it in the amount of time you claim it has happened in.
Slam dunk.
And my point is actually, it is a slam dunk.
But it doesn't point to the failure of that process.
It points to our misunderstanding about the capacity of that process based on properties of it that we haven't found.
And yes, cards on the table.
I do think I know where to look, but that's, that is what science sounds like, right?
That process is not enough to explain it.
Well, maybe that process is more powerful than you think for reasons you don't know, or maybe that process isn't the right one.
Let's go.
That sounds like.
Or maybe that piece is necessary but insufficient to explaining what we see.
Right, right.
Now, the last thing I wanted to say is you get a lot of broken intellectualism around Darwinism.
Part of that broken intellectualism comes from the people who think that they are, you know, not only Darwin's heirs, which they are, but his final heirs that they've gotten to the last chapter.
They have created a culture of settled science, which anytime you hear that science is settled, look, I agree that the earth goes around the sun and I'm really not expecting that to be upended.
But I am open to it.
And there are just, you know, if this is a simulation, there is no earth going around a sun.
So anyway, I'm open to it.
But the point is, when you do that, when you get to some point where you start violating the scientific rules because you don't think it is worth, you don't think challenges could possibly be worth looking into, Right?
When you hard code that in, you create a fragility that ultimately results in collapse.
That results in something dark age like, and maybe it's like ice ages, you get little ones and big ones, but you create that condition.
And so I just wanted to point out the analogy that I see between what you and I said about diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is that, you know, the bridges will not collapse right away, but they will ultimately.
They will collapse ultimately because the legacy functional system that built the bridges and designed them, you know, will stop monitoring the cracks in them and they will ultimately fall down and you'll scratch your head over what happened and, you know, the doors will blow off of the airplanes and the blah blah blah blah blah.
DEI will eventually...
Degrade the system so that the legacy competence will wear out and the things that should never fail will fail all the time.
This same thing is happening in the case of evolutionary biology for no good reason.
This does not have to happen there.
We need to start talking to the extent that there are still graduate students Entering the field, who are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and looking for something useful to do, they need to be presented with the paradoxes that we haven't answered yet.
Right?
We don't know the answer to this question, but isn't it cool?
And they have to have the same reaction that we had often.
Like, you can't... We don't understand that yet?
Really?
Let's sit down and talk about that one because I have a feeling, you know, you have to feel like you might be clever enough to answer one of those things to have any chance of doing it.
So anyway, that's sort of the end of my rant, but isn't it interesting that we are allowing a theory so robust that it's effectively, it's like just next door to a tautology.
Even the intelligent design people admit that, and it's actually in this Glartner article, of course, because Glartner's a high-quality thinker.
You want to put up that screenshot?
Well, we'll see.
Yeah, there's no reason to doubt that Darwin successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances.
Changes to fur density or wing style or beak shape.
Yet there are many reasons to doubt whether He can answer the hard questions and explain the big picture.
Not the fine-tuning of existing species, but the emergence of new ones.
The origin of species is exactly what Darwin cannot explain.
So, this is classic.
Every quality thinker would have to admit this because we can actually see microevolution.
We can see it in the lab, we can see it in the barnyard, we can see it in nature if we try.
And there was, I mean, when we were in grad school in the 90s, there was still an active debate about whether or not the mechanisms of micro and macro evolution were fundamentally different from one another.
Yep.
And this always struck both of us as a strange argument to be having.
That the ways that change will manifest will be different at scale, for sure.
But the idea that the small things don't segue into the large things seems itself like a conclusion that you have to arrive at by faith.
Well, actually, now that you mention it, revisiting decades later, I think I see it.
If we take the question of speciation, Oh, and let me just say, so the micro and the macro, for those who don't know, in the terms micro and macroevolution, refer not to size, but to time.
So it's small timescales versus large timescales.
So On the Origin of Species, which is the title of Darwin's book, for which he has been taken to task since he wrote it, because Gleitner and Myers are certainly not the first people to say, look, you've explained all the little stuff just fine, but you have not explained the big changes, which amount to where do species come from.
Yeah.
Or cladogenesis.
That's speciation.
Right.
Now, here's the thing I think I see anew.
The thing about Darwin and microevolution is, given allopatric speciation, given two populations that were one that get separated by something, if you have individuals from a population go over a mountain range that's very inhospitable and land in a similar valley on the other side, and then you give them enough time changing in isolation, even if the two valleys that they're in are identical at a selective level, which they never would be, but even if they were identical,
There will eventually be enough change accumulated that they will not recognize each other or not be physically able to mate.
So the point is that is robust.
Microevolution, given sufficient time, will produce species, right?
However, so, is microevolution different from speciation?
Doesn't have to be.
You just need enough time.
On the other hand, The thing that got me interested in latitudinal diversity gradient and all was all of the stuff that isn't explained by the mechanism that Darwin did name.
The allopatric mechanism is robust, it does work, but it is not capable of explaining most of the species we have in the places that we have them.
For example, the Amazon is not divided up by mountain ranges.
At best, it's divided up by rivers.
Rivers are not a barrier to the flight of flying insects, they're not a barrier to the flight of birds, and yet these things are both wildly diverse in the Amazon.
So, the point is, that's not going to be explained by allopatric speciation, and standard Darwinism hasn't done it.
Yes, I do think I know where the answer is.
But the point is, in that case, I would argue that the process that creates that speciation is not a simple extrapolation from microevolution.
I did not say simple extrapolation.
I said that the mechanisms of microevolution play into what happens at macroevolution.
And what you are saying, and I agree with this, is that they are not necessarily sufficient to explain it, but that they are necessary.
Oh, of course.
Of course, they are absolutely necessary.
I'm just arguing that allopatric and sympatric speciation or parapatric speciation are filed differently based on how we find them.
And the question is, one of them, I would argue, is a natural extrapolation from microevolution with nothing more necessary and the others aren't.
And that's the place to look because, of course, there's a process and it doesn't have a name and we need to find it.
Alright, I think I'm done with my evolutionary rant and the punchline of it was beware this process that causes us to shut down those who would raise challenges to whatever we believe in because what we eventually do is condemn ourselves to a dark age we don't need to go into.
And the intellectual bridges collapse.
The intellectual bridges collapse, exactly.
All right.
On a lighter note.
Okay.
Mostly.
Well, mononormativity.
Yes.
Okay, so I will say, hat tip to Principled Bicycling, which Substack published a scathing takedown of the concept of monodermativity.
I will post, I will link to his post.
I don't agree with the entire post, as you'll see, but much of it and the article that they pointed us two, the readers two, is extraordinary.
But first, let's talk about what the thing is.
Modonormativity is a term given by researcher Ian Walker to what is colloquially known as car brain.
So that is the idea that driving has become so normal, so background in our lives that we take for granted the risks that accompany driving, accept them without thinking, and often don't look for alternatives.
Okay.
We're going to spend a lot of time critiquing this idea in various ways, but first I'd like to steel man it.
Basically because it's been widely mocked And apparently was predicted by James Lindsay as a way that critical theory can be employed to go after the most banal things.
And so the fact that he predicted it, and then it shows up in the research literature.
I don't think that it is inherently.
I will say that the term itself is ridiculous.
It's based on a pathetic misunderstanding of biology.
That is, it borrows from Heteronormativity.
Heteronormativity being this from Wikipedia.
Heteronormativity is the concept that heterosexuality is the preferred or normal sexual orientation.
Heteronormativity creates and upholds a social hierarchy based on sexual orientation with the practice and belief that heterosexuality is deemed as the societal norm.
So there's one word in there, preferred, which is not like all the rest.
But the idea that heterosexuality is the normal sexual orientation, or that it's the societal norm, yeah, because we're sexually reproducing organisms, it would have to be.
Of course it is.
So That's a ridiculous critique.
And now that we have heteronormativity being wielded as this weapon against people who would say that if you're not interested in flying that flag and letting everyone believe what they want to believe about reality, then you are suffering from some sort of I don't know, cis-heteronormative patriarchal construct.
You break out the boogeyman this early in the discussion?
So the term is ridiculous.
And frankly, their use, the researchers' use of the term in which they say, and I'll quote them here shortly, in which they say they called it mononormativity as an homage to heteronormativity.
That brings some of their thinking into question right away.
But let me just try a few other possible ones.
Actually, first, do people who live in a car-centric society accept the risks and burdens of living in that society more than people before or outside of such a society?
Well, of course they do.
Of course we do, right?
And is it possible that we therefore have become blind to some of these risks?
Yeah.
I mean, how could we not, really, right?
So, let's try out the concept using that same silly linguistic convention with a few other modern things.
How about pharma-normativity?
I think we're living in a pharma-normative landscape.
100%.
The idea that pharmaceutical fixes have become so normal, so background in our lives, that we take for granted the risks that accompany taking drugs, accept them without thinking, and often don't look for alternatives.
How about FDA-normativity?
The idea that the FDA has got our back and has figured it all out has become so normal, so background in our lives, that we take for granted the risks that accompany following their advice, like their food pyramids, accept that advice without thinking, and often don't look for alternatives, like, you know, eating real food.
Light spectrum normativity.
The idea that the lighting industry has got our backs and has figured it all out has become so normal, so background in our lives that we take for granted the risks that accompany buying their products, accept them without thinking, and often don't look for alternatives.
So we can play this game with a lot of things in modernity and see that it actually Make sense, right?
Like, the linguistic convention is silly, but, you know, when we have created something that is so far from what our ancestors did that there's a good chance that even if it itself is not dangerous to us, what it has replaced, or what it's Its prevalence has meant that we are doing less of something we once used to do, has created some health problems, some mental problems, all sorts of problems.
I mean, this is exactly what we talk about with regard to hyper-novelty in Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
So I think the idea of moto-normativity, the idea that actually cars have become so prevalent for so many of us that we think with this kind of car brain, is not inherently a dumb idea.
No, I think it's actually quite a right idea.
I think the terminology, as you as you point out, is the wrong stuff.
And we talked somewhere in the last couple weeks on a previous live stream about the confusion, which I think I took to be possibly intentional, of the term normative.
That using normativity here is a problem because normativity is actually an allusion to a moral judgment.
Normativity is the philosophically the study of right and wrong and so when somebody says heteronormative I don't know where the etymology of normal distribution versus normativity there is, because the normal distribution is not pretending to make more claim.
Right, exactly, which is part of my concern about it, is that the average person who hears heteronormativity Right, exactly.
thinks that what's being claimed is how normal it is.
The philosophical implication of normativity itself is how right it is.
And in that conflation is the naturalistic fallacy.
Right.
Exactly.
Yes.
And you see that in the Wikipedia entry that I read to you.
Right.
So my proposal would be, this is actually, for those of us who would like to fix it, who would like to make language do what it's supposed to do, which is to clarify things, might opt instead for the idea of heteronormalization.
The fact that pharma's judgment has been normalized, when that's actually a shocking thing to do, right?
What are the chances that pharma improves your health?
Well, A, the incentives don't match it, and B, it's really hard to intervene in a complex system and make it better if it's working.
So pharma normalization, not heteronormalization here.
Did I say hetero?
Yeah, right.
So anyway, my point is to normalize the idea that cars have been normalized in a way that would be shocking to a pre-automotive ancestor.
That's a very real concern and I think it's an it's absolutely a concern.
Something I actually find, although I think conservatives have, they're having their moment in the sun because a lot of the stuff that we've destroyed over their objections is now turning out to have been important for reasons of Chesterton's fence.
Yep.
But one of the places that conservatives fall down, in my opinion, is they do tend to view things like cities upgrading their infrastructure for cyclists as an absurd boiling over of liberal values.
And the answer is no.
Actually, this is we should be encouraging as many people to cycle to work as can be safely done for their own health.
Yes.
And, but.
I will not remember it.
And Principled Bicycling, I believe, is one of the sites that I ended up reading a lot of and in discussion with after I posted a few months ago about my own near-miss on a bike.
And so just, you know, you and I have been biking for decades.
We bike a lot.
We've biked under a lot of conditions.
We both, you know, off-trail On road, in traffic, on rural roads, like lots and lots of things.
And I think, you know, we, we prefer a bit of a shoulder at least, right?
On a road.
But there is good, there are good compelling arguments for the push to create the illusion of safety for beginner and intermediate bicyclists actually puts them at more risk.
because because they behave as if now the vehicles are suddenly going to miraculously know what to do with them and they won't.
Of course.
But what I'm saying is an actual investment, you know, rails to trails kinds of investment where you're not interacting with cars at all.
That's not a city thing.
OK, maybe I should take city out of it.
But but the point is.
I believe we have seen the same kind of failure of comprehension that surrounds the entire environmental movement as seen through conservative eyes.
They've seen such abuse of climate change that their sense is, I am not listening to environmentalists anymore.
I mean, it's the same thing you were talking about in the last segment with regard to, you know, you believe that you are seeing an uptick in people questioning, you know, everything within science.
And this is exactly what, you know, Freeman responded with.
It's like, no, just because So many people revealed themselves as wearing the lab coat of science without having any idea what it is doesn't mean that every conclusion that science has come to is wrong.
Right.
And in fact, most... It's that same, like, knee-jerk, like, well, if a liberal is saying it, then it must be wrong.
It's like, no, can we all, like, settle down, you know, settle down our lizard brains and try to think things through, as opposed to looking for an immediate, well, if you say that, then I say this.
It's not helpful.
Right, and it's also a... it is a surrender of something, right?
Conservatives who view the impulse to cycle as some sort of a liberal thing that is causing road space to be reallocated to somebody who's less deserving, right?
It's totally getting it wrong.
Why are you surrendering the bicycle to liberals, right?
It's a marvelous invention that will make you healthier and happier and live longer and you know to the extent that you think that you know the normalization of Fatness is, you know, overtaking civilization.
Well, it's a great way to combine your passion for a fit, healthy lifestyle.
And, you know, so thumb your nose at the liberals who are, you know, you know, fighting fat phobia or whatever they think they're doing.
Right, so don't surrender that.
And environmentalism, right?
We know a number of conservatives who are passionate about the outdoors and they're just as troubled as we are about the destruction of environments and the loss of species and all of this because they know that this is a beautiful planet irrespective of what you think created it.
So don't surrender those arguments just because the people who happen to be You know, championing bike lanes or, you know, doing it for cynical reasons.
Right.
So anyway, normalization rather than normativity, I think, would be a useful way to fix this.
Well, it would fix the term.
We just did, I think, a decent job of discussing a little bit about why the concept itself may make sense.
The idea of Carbrain.
Yeah.
Yes, actually.
And, you know, you and I also have been in the relatively unusual position as Westerners, as weird People who grew up in a car-centric city in LA, but have then lived for months at a time in places where there were no vehicles at all.
And so you can begin to see your relationship with speed and with risk changing, especially when you come back into a place with vehicles again.
So just mostly the remote places in Madagascar where I've been, but also on BCI where I think there are no vehicles or almost no vehicles.
No vehicles.
But at least there you're seeing the giant cargo ships on the Panama Canal and you're going into Panama City.
So you weren't as removed, right?
For sure.
But on Nosy Mangabey in Madagascar, for months at a time, like, okay, there's nothing here that has an internal combustion engine.
And moving back into that space really does reveal to you some of how your brain has changed.
Let me say that all of that said, the research in which this concept is named, which is not, the paper is paywalled and not yet available on Sci-Hub, but that principle bicycling piece provides a.
A preprint.
And it is, this research, is a dumpster fire.
It is exactly as much of a ridiculous show as you might expect.
So here we are.
You can show my screen here.
Motor normativity, how social norms hide a major public health hazard.
We're just going to read the, so I think at this point it has been published in the International Journal of Environment and Health, but again I can't get access to that paper.
So I'll read just the abstract and just one paragraph a little farther down.
Decisions about motor transport by individuals and policymakers show unconscious biases due to cultural assumptions about the role of private cars, a phenomenon we term motor normativity.
To explore this claim, a national sample of 2,157 UK adults rated at random a set of statements about driving.
People shouldn't drive in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe in the car fumes.
Or a parallel set of statements with keywords changed to shift context.
People shouldn't smoke in highly populated areas where other people have to breathe in the cigarette fumes.
Such context changes could radically alter responses.
75% of people agreed with people shouldn't smoke, but only 17% agreed with people shouldn't drive.
Oh my god.
Let's discuss how these biases systematically distort medical and policy decisions and give recommendations for how public policy and health professionals might begin to recognize and address these unconscious biases in their work.
There's a lot more, but yeah, go on.
Well, I mean, you're obviously going to have spotted many of the things I will have spotted that's absurd about that methodology, but let's just dive in a little, shall we?
First of all, People, being, you know, pretty intelligent for objects, are able to recognize that the distinction between the health hazard posed by cars, which are usually driven outdoors, and the health hazard posed by cigarettes, which are often smoked indoors, in other words, the two things are not
Comparable.
The moral consideration is not even comparable because... That's a bigger one.
Because there are plenty of places where smokers aren't allowed to smoke outdoors except in a little spot, right?
Right.
But it's the moral and the functional.
Well, that's what I was going to say.
It's the moral thing.
- That's what I was gonna say. - On the moral thing.
- Is, you know, the term, you know, if I say I was driving to work, I can't say I was smoking to work.
So the point is, there is a positive reason to drive, which is to go someplace that something good needs to be done.
Maybe I'm, you know, driving to the park to spend time with my child, you know, throwing a frisbee.
Well, but what if you're driving to buy cigarettes?
Wow.
Yeah.
Yes.
Exactly.
You probably should not drive around other people when you're driving to buy cigarettes.
Driving to buy cigarettes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But it's so not comparable.
It's so not comparable, right?
And there's five of these in the methods.
And I think, I don't know that we need to go through all of them, but Not all of them are quite that obvious and ridiculous, but that is literally the one that they put into their abstract.
That's the one they're really proud of, because that's the one with the biggest difference between the two supposedly equivalent things, which is therefore a demonstration that people have internalized the mononormativity.
Well, that comparison does demonstrate one thing.
Which is the people who came up with it don't understand science because their objective in such a thing ought to be to control for all factors but one.
Right.
Right.
There are lots of studies in which you can check people's attitude.
You know, if you rephrase estate tax, right, as a death tax, you're describing the same entity and people's attitudes change, which tells you that there's a cognitive defect because you're describing the same product.
Here, they have failed to control for five or six highly relevant distinctions and therefore have not done any science, but they presumably get a pat on the head from whoever is patting them on the head and giving them a fish.
I don't know.
I hope they have fish.
I mean, I don't want them to starve, probably.
I'm agnostic about whether or not their starvation would be a good thing.
Okay, put my screen back on here just so people can see.
So that was just the abstract that we read.
And the second paragraph, I'm not gonna... No, I'm gonna actually read this.
Okay.
I'm gonna read the first two paragraphs.
Here in the United Kingdom, like in many societies around the world, we are in the midst of environmental degradation and no fewer than three parallel health epidemics thanks to the easy hypermobility afforded by private motor vehicles.
We have an epidemic of collisions.
An epidemic of collisions.
Wow.
I don't think these people know what epidemic means.
We have an epidemic of collisions with 1,752 deaths and 25,945 serious injuries in 2019, the last year before the COVID pandemic.
We have an epidemic of physical inactivity.
Again, with the word choices.
Responsible for 22-23% of coronary heart disease, 16-70% of colon cancer, 15% of diabetes, 12-13% of strokes, 11% of breast cancer.
Those are numbers from the World Health Organization, so they must be true.
Despite 24% of car trips being under 2 miles and so mostly amenable to walking or cycling.
And we have an epidemic of pollution, with vehicle exhaust fumes causing cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.
At such levels, the estimates have put the UK air pollution death toll at 40,000 per year.
Even a future switch to electric vehicles would address only one of these three epidemics.
It is clear we must acknowledge a simple fact.
Transport issues are not just environmental issues, they are also inherently public health issues.
Now there, right there, you see that once it's a public health issue, then the World Health Organization can step in, and they've got this neat thing coming down the pike.
Maybe not anymore, but it was supposed to be ratified in May, in which once it's a public health issue, maybe it can be a pandemic.
They're calling these things epidemics.
Like, you just have a lot of messing with language here that's going to allow, what, the World Health Organization potentially to declare motor normativity a pandemic, and off we go.
Okay, so I want to point something out.
They obviously don't understand anything about what an actual epidemic would be, but one of the three things they label actually might arguably be one, right?
Because the epidemic of physical inactivity might actually be contagious.
Right.
It could be spreading and growing and it could be afflicting a large fraction of the population and it could be doing so on the basis that people are picking up that inactivity because video games have caught on or.
Okay.
So like following from the work of people like Nicholas Christakis, where the social networks, you know, fat people are more like friends, people who are friends with fat people are more likely to get fat.
Right.
That sort of thing.
I mean, and you know, so let's put it this way.
I don't love the use of the term epidemic because epidemic has a connotation of a pathogen, like a physical pathogen that has a countervailing interest, and a behavioral change is not a perfect fit for that.
Right.
A pathogen with a countervailing interest is biotic.
Right.
It's a Darwin's hostile force that is biotic and therefore can respond Right.
The toolkit it drags in as to what might work to deal with this is only partially relevant if you're not talking about a pathogen.
On the other hand, if somebody is trying to induce you to eat seed oils and they, for example, create a phony heart Health Society and that Heart Health Society goes around declaring seed oils healthy and it causes it.
Butter the enemy.
It causes the public to accept this and people to shame each other for not having margarine or, you know, whatever they do, right?
Then that could spread in an epidemic like fashion.
Yeah.
And the countervailing force might be the seed oil industry.
And so anyway, it drags in more of the toolkit that would be relevant.
But you should, you know, language needs to work in order for us to Right.
govern ourselves at all well and to abuse a term like epidemic, especially when other people are polishing their toolkit for anything they can call an epidemic, being a justification for their authoritarian garbage.
You know, it's the last term we should allow to fall.
We should be very careful about policing that one because we know that there are some diabolical forces who are looking to abuse it.
Yes.
Okay.
Next paragraph, Zach.
Is society's ability to tackle any public health or sustainability issue appropriately will depend on people at all levels, from policy makers to medical practitioners to the general public, being able to judge the situation rationally and objectively.
Overestimating or underestimating the seriousness of an issue can lead to panic or complacency, respectively.
We suggest that, in the specific context of individual motor transport, we have a cultural inability to think objectively and dispassionately.
This arises because of shared, largely unconscious assumptions about how travel is and must continue to be primarily a car-based activity.
We label this phenomenon "mononomerativity." Now, before I continue with that paragraph, let me just re-read that last sentence, but again with pharmonomerativity instead of mononomerativity.
No, one back.
Overestimating or underestimating the seriousness of an issue can lead to panic or complacency, respectively.
We suggest that in the specific context of health, we have a cultural inability to think objectively and dispassionately.
This arises because of shared, largely unconscious assumptions about what health is, how health is and must continue to be primarily a pharmaceutical-based activity.
We label this phenomenon pharma-normativity.
It works perfectly.
All right.
This term has chosen to draw parallels with other problematic cultural expectations such as heteronormativity.
So this is just, we've talked about this already, but let me show you their words.
In heteronormativity, majority heterosexual people automatically, but inappropriately, assume all other people fit their own categories and thereby fail to accommodate the needs of minority groups.
Again, this is stuffing a lot into this.
Really?
People who understand that heterosexuality inherently is the norm because that's how you're here assume that everyone else is like them?
Not many heterosexuals I know.
This is exactly where that conflation though between the moral and the statistical is relevant because if you imagine some pointy intellectuals who are aware that normativity is a moral consideration They may be on board with challenging heteronormativity because they may believe that there's something wrong with homosexuality, right?
But no exactly you need you need this conflation in order to get people on board, right?
You get you get the intellectuals on board by having them pull their high-minded stuff But the point is most people understand this as a statistical question Okay, but just let me finish this paragraph, because it's exactly to your point.
In heteronormativity, majority heterosexual people automatically but inappropriately assume all other people fit their own categories and thereby fail to accommodate the needs of minority groups.
For instance, a school that specifically asks for mother's name and father's name fails to accommodate same-sex couples.
No, it doesn't.
In extreme cases, such normalities can lead to minority groups being obliged to live according to the practices of the majority, even when this goes against their will.
And so here you also have, in its infancy, the trans madness, right?
Like against their will.
Well, is an individual's will the only thing that matters, or does reality actually matter too?
Because, now, if we change this from talking about heterosexuality versus homosexuality, and change it instead to cisgendered versus transgendered, which is to say, you're actually what you are, or you're something that you're not, but because you say you aren't, you're going to insist on the entire world playing into your fantasies, well, actually, no, we get to stick with team reality.
Like, we're not obliged to play into your fantasies.
So, being obliged to live according to the practices of the majority, even when this goes against their will, Like, that language in a paper, which is, like, potentially was supposed to be about explaining that actually we do think differently when we have expectations of having cars and being in car-centric spaces, does no service to their cause.
They're just, they're sinking their ship.
Well, it is causing me to have what I'm going to call fractal vertigo, right?
where the abuse of the term that causes a conflation between a moral evaluation and a statistical evaluation is emblematic of exactly the status of this paper, which is attempting to engage in world fixing That's not science.
Science is about figuring out what's true.
And you might make a conclusion based on what's true that has implications for what we ought to be doing or not doing.
But the point is, this is an activist paper.
It's not science.
And it is trafficking in the modality of science because it gets power from doing so without living up to the obligations of being descriptive of the universe rather than And so, of course, you lose what could be part of your core audience.
People who will say, well, yeah, actually, I do think that cars have become central in how we think.
And they may even, you know, driving a lot probably does change even neurological structures.
And maybe that's something we should be thinking about.
But not if these people are the ones leading the cause.
Yeah.
Not if this is the research.
And it does result in exactly the Fed-upness is about as good as I can do, but the fed-upness that we were describing in the first segment where it's like nothing.
Right.
Except nothing from you people.
Right.
On the other hand, I want one more.
Go ahead.
Go on.
There's just a lot more.
Okay, I just wanted to add one other point.
The idea that there is something in this space that is actually worthy of investigation, if you had somebody up to the challenge, is emblematic of the following thing, which I believe you and I will both resonate with.
We are not moto-normalized, right?
We like our bikes plenty, and we prefer to bike around, but in the winter... Well, actually, this is going to be my final point here.
Well, I was just going to argue that in the winter, right, you get out of the, it's just too cold for week after week to go the longer distances.
And we do get in the mindset that when you do have a warm day, that would ordinarily in the summer have triggered you to think, oh yeah, I'm getting on my bike.
It's like, oh, it just seems like it's too much work.
Right?
So anyway, my point is that the fact that heteronormalization, or heteronormalization, modonormalization might exist as a general phenomenon, that it also would describe a seasonal phenomenon is emblematic that it might actually be a real thing worthy of thinking about.
Yeah, so I do want to, that is several steps down, that sort of thing I want to talk about, but I also, when I first ran into this, I thought, is the entire idea crap, or is it just?
And we're like, motor neurativity, what the hell?
Or is it just that actually, increasingly, you know, what I thought it was going to be about was increasing numbers of accidents and people being clueless.
And part of what I am arriving at is I'm just seeing this, like, just self-centeredness and a failure to engage in theory of mind between all the players on the roads.
So we'll get there at the end here.
But first, let me just Read a few more things from the article.
It's really long.
You don't have to show my screen here because I've just got excerpts here.
This is more about their methods.
Remember, they had that one where they asked people about driving versus smoking and whether or not you should be more concerned.
No, that's not what they did.
They had different people exposed to one question or the other and asked them whether or not they thought it was Problem.
They had five different sets of these, where they had like a driving example and then a different example, and the others weren't always smoking.
In fact, they weren't ever smoking except for that one because they were for different questions.
So here's another one.
Drivers defined as... Sorry, I set that up kind of wrong.
Drivers defined as people who drove a motor vehicle once a month or more responded similarly to non-drivers on all questions, except it's okay for a delivery driver to bend a few rules.
Hold on, take me off screen here for a moment, Zach.
Brett, if you want to talk a little bit.
I gotta find this because I didn't have all of it.
It's not helpful.
Yeah, no, it's not helpful.
I don't know why my screen cut off.
and cut off the, it cut off the phrase.
And so I don't have it all in my notes like I was supposed to.
And now Acrobat can't find it.
This is what happens when you simulate live television without a network.
OK, here we go.
OK, so, um.
The comparable questions, one about drivers and one about non-drivers in this case was, it's okay for a delivery driver to bend a few health and safety rules in order to keep their business profitable, versus it's okay for a chef to bend a few health and safety rules in order to keep their business profitable.
And so for all of these, for all five of them, there was no difference.
So they not only gave each of these questions to one, but not They gave a motor transport question to one person, but didn't give the non-motor transport form to the same person.
They also had both drivers and non-drivers, and they mixed those up.
For all of these motor transport questions versus non-motor transport questions, there was no difference in how drivers versus non-drivers responded, which is interesting, because supposedly this is about normalizing I would have thought that motor normativity has some of its actual reality in that driving changes our brains.
But no, they seem to be arguing that being around cars and having the expectation of cars in society is the problem.
So, for none of these questions was the drivers versus the non-drivers response different, except for this one.
The it's okay for a delivery driver to bend a few health and safety rules versus it's okay for a chef to bend a few health and safety rules.
And here, the difference was the drivers were the ones who were like, oh, no, no, no, no.
Delivery drivers can't do that.
And non-drivers weren't as adamant about that.
Can I have my screen back so I can see my notes?
Non-drivers didn't care as much about that.
8.4% of drivers thought it was okay for a delivery driver to bend a few rules, whereas 17.2% of non-drivers said it's okay for a delivery driver to bend a few rules.
And that suggests, and this is going to go the opposite of what these researchers would want, that if you're going to live in a car-centric society, you probably should know how to drive.
Right, like if twice the number of people who don't drive than who do drive think it's kind of okay for delivery drivers to bend rules, that suggests that they're missing something key about what driving is, what the risks are, and that actually fits with where we'll get to shortly about, you know, the theory of mind and what we're actually seeing on the roads now with regard to accidents and such.
One more.
My guess is that comparison, it actually matters a lot where you live.
And so I would imagine they did not do a great job of seeking.
Yeah, it's all I mean, it's all UK and I think it's not London, but but I don't.
But if you live in a city where it was not built with cars in mind and it's been adapted to cars, The amount of violating the normal rules, now I think the rules for drivers of such vehicles are amended so that you can, for example, have a moving van sitting in a lane of traffic.
I believe those rules are included because it has to be.
There's no way to move out of a house on a street where there's no place to put a moving van Right.
Except to have it violate a rule.
Right.
So you make another rule, I guess.
But anyway, I guess.
Well, I mean, there's also the difference between moving violations and non-moving violations, like breaking rules.
What kind of rules are we talking about breaking?
Yeah, true, but I guess I assumed what they were talking is the delivery driver puts their vehicle someplace for 30 seconds while they run.
That's interesting.
I assumed the opposite.
I assumed we were talking about moving violations.
Oh, geez.
Yeah, so who knows?
Yeah, who knows?
It's a bad question.
So, okay, what turns out what happened is all my highlights have been disappeared from this document, so I'm sort of scrambling here.
Here's another highlighted, here's another excerpt.
Would we teach children that it is their responsibility to dress properly to protect themselves from sex abusers?
As we currently teach them, it is their responsibility to protect themselves from dangerous drivers?
So, believe it or not, their answer to that is obviously not.
That would be insane.
I have been correct about this and losing this argument for so many decades that the fact of dressing so as to reduce the chances of being assaulted is not the same thing as blaming victims.
And here it is.
I mean, it is it is staggering that they have that phrase in here.
And, you know, every young woman actually knows this.
Actually 100% knows this.
And if you're assaulted, that doesn't mean you were asking for it.
But it does mean that walking around in your life, you have responsibility to do everything you can to keep yourself safe.
It doesn't mean walking around in a burlap sack, but be aware of your surroundings and... Would we teach children that it is their responsibility to dress properly to protect themselves from sex abusers?
As we currently teach them, it is their responsibility to protect themselves from dangerous drivers.
In exactly the same way, yes.
If you get hit by a car, it's not your fault.
If you were walking in the street and you get hit by a car, the car still shouldn't have hit you, but you shouldn't have been walking in the street.
So a couple things I want to say on this topic.
One, I can't remember where I said it, but six years ago, seven years ago, I pointed out that a woman should be able to walk through a city slathered in oil and not be assaulted.
But anybody who thinks about the question will understand that that would be a stupid thing to do, right?
So those two things coexist, right?
It's not justification for an assault, but obviously it increases the chances of one.
Second thing is there's a dumb conflation between an activity that is understood by simple-minded people to be your obligation for the good of the universe and doing the very same thing for much more concrete values, right?
Should you bike to save the planet?
No, for reasons I make very clear in the Personal Responsibility Vortex talk that I once gave.
Should you bike?
Yes, it's very good for you, right?
You should not be doing it to save the planet because saving the planet is your motivation.
You have far better ways to spend the time and effort.
But recognizing that it's good for you is not incorrect.
It's obvious.
And so doing it for you, same thing applies With the case of, you know, should we be encouraging people to wear reasonable clothing to reduce the chances of a sexual assault?
That sounds like this is your obligation to wear clothing for society.
No.
It's good for you to wear clothing that reduces the chances of a sexual assault.
Right?
That's just straightforward.
It's self-interest that should be driving you to do that.
And for children who aren't in a position necessarily to understand that, it's our obligation to make the lesson clear so that they do grow up into people who do understand it.
And it's that conflation that I think makes it a hard sell.
It makes things that are transparently obvious a hard sell.
To use a modern psych term, it's external locus of control, and everything about your life can be had from the outside.
You have no agency, you have no self-sufficiency, you have no ability to actually make decisions for yourself that affect what you do.
You are reliant on the state, you are dependent on it, and therefore you will work tirelessly to make it exactly as you want it to be.
So this model will produce better workers, probably, but given that there are a whole lot of us out here who aren't interested in it, it's not going to work.
So, final excerpt at the end of the paper.
Again, this is this pre-print.
Just as it was only through recognizing shared unconscious prejudices Let me try again.
This is the very end of the paper, so we're no longer in data space.
This is the last two paragraphs.
Just as it was only through recognizing shared unconscious prejudices that the UK's Metropolitan Police began to address its problem with institutional racism, national-level institutions, perhaps above all the government and the medical profession, need to address what our colleague Charles Musselwhite once termed the institutional carism underpinning their own thinking.
Progress will start to be apparent when car adverts carry, please use responsibly warnings, like adverts for alcohol or gambling, and when pedestrian crossings are redesigned so that walkers no longer need to stop and ask permission to cross a road on which inactive and polluting motorists are automatically given priority.
Have these people never been in a car?
I mean, seriously.
Sorry.
The extent to which these suggestions currently sound outlandish is an index of mononormativity.
Mine isn't even internalized.
I've got externalized mononormativity.
Apparently.
Revealing the extent to which our society is failing to apply objective and dispassionate risk analyses.
You don't say.
I don't think they know what objective means, either.
Our specific call to government and medical professionals is to begin A, auditing all decisions from the viewpoint of a person who does not drive, and B, incorporating the harms from motoring, particularly physical inactivity and pollution, into day-to-day practice.
Addressing A will involve, amongst other things, viewing decision panels that include no active travel commuters with the same suspicion we are beginning to apply to all male or all white decision panels.
Good.
Join the progressive stack.
It might also involve seeking systematically to recast all transport decisions into non-transport parallels, like we did in our survey, which was awesome.
Not.
To ensure the underlying principles are viewed objectively.
Addressing B, that was, um...
What was B?
I don't remember.
I can't find it.
Oh, incorporating the harms from motoring into day-to-day practice.
Addressing B will include treating inactivity arising from over-reliance on the car as a medical problem, somewhat akin to prescription drug addiction, wherein patients similarly cause themselves long-term harm through their overuse of a helpful agent.
Lobbying for reductions in traffic toxin and noise emissions, and scrutinizing patients' transport behaviors with the care currently given to arguably less harmful lifestyle choices like alcohol and tobacco use.
Alright, this paper is a total procession wreck.
I say that because train wreck would be motor normative.
So it's a procession wreck where a bunch of people walking... What's a procession?
Oh, did I spell it incorrectly?
No, I don't know.
I just, I heard the wrong vowel or something.
Yeah.
No, it, um, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's, uh, it's remarkable.
So, um, They're obviously making this top-down socialist style argument.
All the pieces of the DEI and the progressive stack, and all of these things that we've been talking about for years and that we saw in real time at Evergreen in 2015 through 2017, is right there.
through 2017 is right there like it's it's all in here but this argument they think that the way to change people's behavior is by taking away what they have right like Like that's going to change people's behavior.
In this case, it's cars.
So I am reminded of Nassim Taleb's observation of the dictatorship of the small minority, which is in his book, Skin on the Game.
And as he says, quote, once an intransigent minority reaches a tiny percentage of the total population, the majority of the population will naturally succumb to their preferences.
And this is how these nascent socialist movements take over.
This is how Black Lives Matter happened.
This is how Me Too happened.
This is how DEI happened.
And this is what they're hoping to make happen with mononormativity, right?
That is right.
So all of that said, I want to get back to I don't remember what you said earlier that I said I wanted to go back to, but, um, we drive, we bicycle, we walk.
Like, uh, we do all of those things.
And, you know, most, most people don't because most people don't bike.
Right?
Um, everyone walks.
Basically everyone walks.
If you call it walking.
Sorry.
Humans are bipedal, even though not all of us have two legs, right?
So everyone walks.
I'm going to go with everyone walks.
Um, a smaller number of people drive and actually I don't know worldwide, but in the U S anyway, um, you know, walkers, drivers, bicyclists, and that's not in completely nested set.
Obviously some bikers don't drive and some, and, um, But I think the numbers are going to be the smallest for the, for the bicyclists.
My experience, my experience, I won't speak for you, but in all 3 domains suggests that we have.
Not so much this epidemic of mononormativity with their epidemics of collisions, physical inactivity, and pollution, which at least I'm not convinced by the physical inactivity one, although I hear you, but certainly collisions and pollution are not epidemics, right?
Rather, and I said this already earlier, I think we have increasingly It's not an epidemic, so I don't know what word to use, but a widespread problem with self-centeredness and failure to engage in theory of mind.
So because everyone walks, and nearly everyone has walked along a busy road, and so knows what it is to be a pedestrian when there are cars around.
And nearly everyone drives, but most people have not biked, at least not much.
And if they have, if they've biked just a little bit, often they will have been on some of these like lovely like rails or trails or something like far removed from cars or with like a barrier between the cars and the roads.
Um, so we should expect that there's going to be the least theory of mind available to people, um, for bicyclists.
Um, that drivers and pedestrians, it matters less for pedestrians because bikers can generally do more damage to a biker than the other way around, but drivers generally don't know what to do with a biker.
Add to that, of course, that many bicyclists are incompetent or disrespectful and don't behave in a rational and predictable manner, don't follow the rules of the road, and you have big problems.
So even drivers who bike don't necessarily know what to do with a bicyclist because you don't know if the bicyclist knows what they're doing.
But especially drivers who don't bike, they often have Just they either don't try, or they have no idea what it is to be a biker on a road with, you know, someone going past you at 50 miles an hour.
And, you know, the idea that, you know, maybe, you know, pulling into the other lane, if it's free and clear, and if it's not free and clear, slowing down, you can, you know, you could, you're going to make those eight seconds up somewhere else, slowing down, and then doing that after the oncoming traffic passes is a better approach for the bicyclist.
Um, but all of that is actually sort of, we've been experiencing that forever, but increasingly what I find when I'm driving is, um, people will walk out in front of me.
At dusk even.
Sometimes at night.
Sometimes without looking.
With no lights.
And they just have decided, just like these monodormativity people would have them have decided, they've just decided they have the right of way.
And it's a bit like a woman deciding to dress in highly seductive clothing and reduce her ability to defend herself by tottering along in high heels, alone late at night in some street with a bunch of bars in it, alone late at night in some street with a bunch of Like, that's not smart behavior.
Even though you should be able to do that, that doesn't mean that it's going to result in the best outcome for you.
And in the case of a road, I will just actively disagree with the mononormativity people and say, you know, actually, I like roads that are safe for everyone, but it is not safe for a person to walk into a road without looking.
That makes no sense.
You shouldn't walk anywhere without looking.
Right?
So, hold on.
If a pedestrian who does that gets struck by a car, it's going to be understood to be the driver's fault because the driver had greater potential for force, right?
Even if the driver was doing everything right.
Recently, I think Zach and I were walking alone at night back to our house from town And it's, you know, it's not a busy road, and the speed limit is low, and there's usually not that much traffic there at all.
And whenever I know that I'm walking at night, I carry a headlamp.
And I didn't have one.
And there were actually a couple of cars out, so I turned the flashlight on my phone on and just had it behind me so that cars coming from behind could see that we were there.
And I also looked.
And these cars, two-way car, slowed down, pulled around us.
Because they could not only see that we were there, but that we were aware of them.
And I'm not saying that if they're not aware of you as a pedestrian that the cars want to hit you, but what are you supposed to do?
So, what is happening?
Have you noticed this?
The number of people who are Who are not just the center of their universe, but the only things in their universe.
And they walk out in front of traffic, including in the dark, without having anything well lit on them, including a light or reflective anything, and just assume it's going to be okay, is remarkable.
And I'm actually amazed that we're not hearing about more and more deaths from these things.
I think you have a couple of competing forces.
One, you have distractions, you know, the chances... it used to be that you took a walk and you were taking a walk.
You might be lost in thought at worst, but you're not lost in your phone.
Yeah.
People lost in their phone are obviously in some sort of hybrid space and so even if they don't have their phone, you know, the fact that five seconds ago they were looking at a text and they're thinking about their response to it makes them more oblivious.
It's true.
There's increasing remoteness from physical realms that people have any important connection to.
So there's sense, you know, I've always troubled by, and when our kids were a little, you know, people who don't They know a car is coming, they know that they are out of the lane of traffic, and they don't even look at the car that's approaching to see whether that person might be drifting out of their lane.
And it's like, you're trusting that that car is not distracted itself, and it's like, I can't imagine why you would do that.
You look at the car, and you make sure that it's doing what you think it's doing.
Pay attention!
Right.
On the other side, you have increasing automation that actually works that is resulting in people being reinforced in their obliviousness because, you know, for example, backup cameras in cars have gotten excellent, except for the one in my vehicle, but other people's backup cameras are really good.
I was driving the truck the other day.
It's not so bad.
Try it tonight.
No, thank you.
Catastrophic.
It's catastrophic because the vehicle assumes that you can use the backup camera.
You can't see very well.
I also had Maddie on the truck so she was helping.
Well that is, yeah, see?
Yeah.
Yeah, I see you weren't working alone.
But anyway, other people's backup cameras work.
That makes it much less likely that somebody, you know, we used to all understand that there was a space behind the car in which you couldn't see something like a child or a dog and so we were very careful Backing up and now it's like, oh, there's some system that takes care of it and what's more the car beeps at you if it detects something back there.
And so people's obliviousness is not resulting in them having close calls that would alert them to the fact that they were doing something dumb because as long as those systems work, I guess it is slightly less dumb than it once was.
But anyway... In the narrow moment.
Right.
Right?
Like in the narrow... I mean, it's like, we write about this in Hunter Gatherer's Guide, like, you know, do you...
Do you allow the high school trip into the backcountry to happen and the risks that that entails and have the potential for someone to walk off a cliff and die?
Well, that personal tragedy that will affect not just that child's family, but the entire school will likely result in, and that school's lawyers will result in,
Um, them curtailing and curtailing and curtailing the experiences in the future so that you end up with a society-wide tragedy that has no individually recognizable victims, but in which everyone is less prepared for physical interaction of any sort, including risk and adventure, which is part of what makes life so amazing.
So that litigious instinct that causes institutions to curtail activities so nothing can possibly happen on their watch is effectively externalizing a failure to manage risk.
You are taking the failure to manage risk and instead of running the risk that that failure will cause the death of somebody on your watch, You're proliferating it into society and the point is lots of people die from the fact that nobody bothered to expose them to enough risk that they develop the skill.
That's exactly it.
It's an externalization and just like many externalizations, it becomes untraceable and the perpetrators go unpunished and the victims are walking around like zombies and we're surrounded by them all the time.
And what's more, the people who make those decisions.
I have no idea that somebody did die as a result of what they did.
Maybe more people died as a result of what they did, but it was in a confused form.
Yes, yes they did.
They certainly lived more decrepit and less awesome lives.
Right, but even at the level of just, you know, I know I invoke it more than those around me would like, but the What Could Go Wrong subreddit Yes, you do.
Yes, I do.
But I do so for a reason, because being a longtime devotee of the What Could Go Wrong subreddit, I know a lot about what could go wrong.
And there, you know... No, dude, you know a lot about what could go wrong, in part, because you have actually lived.
No, no.
But I know things, look, the number of wheels that escape vehicles on the highway and clobber or nearly clobber somebody walking down a sidewalk where they're not even thinking about the highway is surprisingly high.
You know what you should never do?
Do not have a flaming drink.
Right?
The number of people who light their hair on fire with a flaming drink is shocking.
So it's fine if you're bald?
It's certainly better if you're bald.
Shave your eyebrows.
Right.
But, boy, is there a lot of that.
Going to places where people are drifting their vehicles.
Wow, is that a terrible idea.
But anyway, the point is, the What Could Go Wrong subreddit, it's a little bit like the comparison between a doctor who sees a range of patients and a pathologist who sees a huge number of samples.
You get a much broader sense of where the patterns are.
What is a one-off crazy... You're not comparing Ryan Cole to the What Could Go Wrong subreddit, are you?
He is like the living embodiment of what could go metabolically wrong.
He's not the embodiment.
His cognitive model tells us a lot about what can go wrong.
He's very healthy.
Oh yes, and awesome in so many ways.
But anyway, my point was simply that that subreddit gives you an ability to see these patterns in a statistically valid, not statistically valid, but a statistically insightful way.
You see enough of them that the weird patterns that you would think never happen actually do show up.
And I've forgotten exactly where I was headed with that.
As always happens when you invoke the What Could Go Wrong subreddit.
It's just such a powerful tool for not experiencing these things perfectly yourself.
Yeah.
I have no idea.
Right.
I never do when you start talking about looking around.
If you are ever hit by a wheel that has escaped a truck on the highway and clobbered you while you were walking down a relatively calm sidewalk somewhere.
So I once was the source of one of those wheels, but it was a bicycle wheel.
That was a whole different.
Yeah.
But I had to go chase it down the driveway, down the highway.
Down the highway.
Yes.
Yeah.
Failure to bolt the wheel on.
Oh, absolutely.
And it wasn't my bike.
It was our friend Eric's bike.
That could go wrong.
Yeah.
I was very apologetic.
I was like, just hold on a minute.
I'm going to go.
I may have lost part of your bike on the highway.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
The last thing that I wrote here is that we have increasingly a society of people who think like five-year-olds that have been protected from all risk and informed that it's, you know, it's the state that's going to do everything for you and all you have to do is sit back and what?
Like, what for?
What do you want?
Like, who wants this?
Well, but, oh, this is something I wanted to say.
Unfortunately, I think that paper is emblematic of a form.
And the idea is something wants rights it is not entitled to for reasons that only it knows.
Something wants the right to create rules.
It wants to put us into 15-minute cities and it has justifications for doing so that aren't right.
But anyway, it's after 15-minute cities for some reason.
Yep.
It wants us eating bugs, 15-minute cities, whatever it is.
And the point is, hey, you want to boost to your career in some sleepy academic something or other?
Yeah.
What we need are papers that take some freedom enhancing activity that humans do and finger wags at it in a pseudo-scientific fashion that we can then reference.
And the fact is, Nobody but Heather Hying is going to read the paper anyway, right?
Principal Bicycling did.
Okay.
So, you know, Heather Hying and a few other people who didn't get the memo are going to actually read the paper and discover how tragically awful it is.
Um, but the real point of the paper is the title and maybe the abstract so that it can be invoked in whatever, uh, you know, symposium is held in whatever authoritarian structure wants to do the regulating.
And they can say, did you know that we've actually, uh, discovered that there's, uh, an epidemic of freedom and that, uh, it needs regulation because.
This is epidemic of freedom, which is the newest cognitive bias.
It is the newest cognitive bias and it is exactly analogous to racism of an institutional form that has been well studied and we've all come to understand the this, that, and the other that requires us to, let's face it, you're going to have to eat the bugs.
At first they will come with some sauce and then eventually we will declare sauce problematic and you won't even get that.
You might get some seed oils on the side.
Oh, for sure.
Insects dipped in seed oils.
Perfect.
Yes.
Slippery and crunchy.
Okay.
The oldest known animal sex chromosome has been found in octopuses.
Wait, that suggests that the oldest chromosome was found in more than one octopus.
Uh, so it's not like that.
It's not, it's not the oldest individual chromosome.
Oh, okay.
Good.
Um, so, uh, let me see.
Yeah.
The research paper is, um, pretty dense.
So it's, it's just a preprint.
I will post it.
Um, but let's just look at the lay article here.
Um, Oldest known animal sex chromosome evolved in octopuses 380 million years ago.
Results reveal for the first time how some cephalopods determine sex.
And I don't have a lot to say about this except that this about 380 million years and they've got a range it's like 40 million through 400 and something million is when they think these sex chromosomes must definitely have first shown up, which is as early as we know sex chromosomes to be an animal.
Sex chromosomes being one of the ways that sex can be determined, right?
So you have, you know, some turtles and lizards and such who Have environmental sex determination, in which the temperature in which they develop affects what sex they become.
But obviously mammals and separate evolution birds and some insects and some various other animals have sex chromosomes.
But here we have Sex chromosomes in octopus, the oldest ones that we know, and that's just really cool.
I will say, however, that this is nature news.
The research was not originally published in Nature.
Here we have a news article in Nature about this, and it includes this sentence.
In many animals, including most mammals and some insects, sex chromosomes determine whether an individual becomes male or female.
Whoa.
That is a spectacular admission on the part of nature.
No, it's a spectacular error!
In many animals, including most mammals.
Most mammals?
Which mammals don't have sex chromosomes?
I think that this is, this is cover for the trans.
No, no, no, no, no.
Wait a minute.
I agree with you that that is technically wrong because, um.
Echidnas and platypus.
Echidnas and platypi.
Sex chromosomes, they just have more cop, more, more of them.
They have sex chromosomes that are so confusing that they don't fit into the XY distinction.
They're not XY.
I agree, I agree, I agree with you.
This doesn't say anything about XY.
Yeah, in the next sentence.
Yes, but this sentence, this sentence doesn't say anything about it.
Well wait, but the next sentence says, in, I haven't read it before, in humans, females... In humans, females usually have two XX chromosomes and males typically have one X and one Y, but that's whatever, like...
Actually always, but the idea is that in this really cool new research that finds that, probably, and it gets highly technical, I'll post the original research, that these sex chromosomes are found in these extant octopi that, given the various species that they're found in, And our estimations of how long ago the various species branched, that this clade has had sex chromosomes for closing on 400 million years.
Very, very cool.
In an article about that, they are saying something wishy-washy about whether or not all mammals have sex chromosomes.
Yes, we do.
There's just no exceptions there.
Yeah, you're right.
There's just no exceptions.
You're right.
I will say the absence of birds from that sentence is interesting.
It doesn't, I mean, and some frogs do too.
There's a lot of things that actually have genetic sex determination.
Yeah.
And the one that we know most about is mammals, because we're mammals.
And then, you know, the author picked one other group, whatever.
I agree.
It's not complete, doesn't pretend to be complete, but most mammals is an error.
Yeah, but it should be all mammals and birds and some insects.
No, I disagree.
I think that's pedantic because, you know, there are a lot of things missing from that list.
It doesn't pretend to be complete.
Agreed.
All right.
Well, let's get back to the biology here, though.
Yeah.
Important, in my opinion, that this example, and it sounds like it's a standard ZW system.
Is that right?
So looking at a Z to Z6.
Yeah, males always had two copies of chromosome 17, whereas females had one copy.
So it looks like females are heterogametic and males are homogametic, so it's like birds rather than like mammals.
Birds and lepidopterans.
They're calling it a ZW system, which I think actually they should probably pick a different letter because it's clearly separately evolved, although I guess probably... They're actually calling it ZO here.
I don't know why.
Because there's one versus two rather than...
Here's the point.
Yes, it should be like Z naught.
What we've got is, let's just take several examples that we know are distinct.
We've got the mammal, chromosomal sex determination.
Bird, chromosomal sex determination.
Lepidopteran, there are others in insects, but Lepidopteran being a clear one.
Cephalopods, now.
There's some frogs.
Some frogs.
So let's say there are at least five.
And I think there's some other herps.
I think there's a lot more than that, but there's at least five.
Yeah, let's make it safe.
At least five.
These are all separately evolved.
Yes.
So they are not synonymous with the evolution of sex.
Presumably these are creatures that had sex determination of some kind that became chromosomal in each of these cases.
Right.
That is fascinating.
Now, we have said, we said on Rogan when we were on the first time, that sex is a feature.
It is a discovery that Darwinism makes again and again because it makes so much sense, right?
That you get the evolution of two strategies.
Those strategies are definable enough that we can recognize Female behavior in plants as easily as we can recognize it in animals.
I wouldn't say it that way because it's not an again and again and again situation precisely because it is so valuable that it is so sticky that once it evolves it doesn't go away.
So sex may have evolved in a few lineages but it hasn't evolved like it's not evolving all the time because it doesn't need to because unlike things like legs which are also super functional they actually disappear.
I think these are both right.
It's so important and fundamental that it tends to stick once it's happened, and it has evolved multiple times.
But it's not all, it's a few times.
Fair enough.
The point is still the same one.
It's a fundamental, and sex determination is a mechanism by which it can be accomplished.
By far not the only one.
No, I mean, sex needs to be determined.
Sex determination isn't a mechanism.
Didn't I say chromosomal?
Okay.
Chromosomal or genetic sex determination is a mechanism of sex determination that evolves multiple times in widely distributed species.
So selection has sex determination and then it repeatedly discovers that, hey, here's a way to accomplish it.
Here's a mechanism of inheritance that will produce a spectrum of offspring or a collection of offspring that has these two categories that are defined in this way that is, um, uh, is resistant to making errors.
And while this obviously wasn't what was going on with birds, it will seem to be necessary.
Genetic sex determination By chromosomes.
We call it genetic sex determination.
It's really chromosomal sex determination.
But GSD, genetic sex determination, would seem to be a necessary precursor to viviparity in an endotherm.
That's a lot of words here.
So mammals and separately birds evolved endothermy by which we make our own heat and we also are homeotherms.
We maintain a constant temperature.
We all know this, right?
You know that you usually run about 98.6 degrees and when you have a fever that's an elevated temperature and that's unusual.
And some of us have slightly different set points, but we have a set point, right?
And this is true for all mammals, it's also separately true for all birds, separate evolution.
But for homeotherms, individuals that maintain a constant temperature, which is almost always facilitated by being endotherms, for homeotherms who are viviparous, meaning that we carry our children inside of us for a while and then give live birth, how would environmental sex determination work?
Given that environmental sex determination is usually done by the temperature of the surroundings at some critical period during development, if the body of the mother is where the baby is being carried and the body of the mother is a constant temperature, you would have all one sex of child.
So this is one of these fun places where you can say, actually, GSD, genetic sex determination, had to have come first before the viviparity of mammals.
And indeed, you know, there's this weird, what happens between monotremes and the therians and the marsupials and the eutherians?
Well, but actually, doesn't that argue against your, what I acknowledge was a correct point about the echidnas and platypus?
Because what it does suggest is that the chromosomal sex determination that characterizes all the eutherian mammals, Is evolving concordantly with the vivid parody.
And so what I wonder, and I was wondering this actually before you put that awesome point on the table.
Is if what we don't have is the only example I'm aware of, and probably people who specialize this are aware of many other examples where we have actually caught the moment of evolution of the elegant system that we call chromosomal sex determination, where we have, what was the precursor?
It's whatever's going on in a platypus.
And we have the final system, which is whatever's going on in the four to 5,000 extant mammal species that have standard XY chromosomal sex determination.
And so the question is, what is that earlier system and what problem is it solving exactly?
I've always wondered what it's about.
It's very strange.
So basically they've got, I can't, it's different between the species, but it's like eight or nine pairs of sex chromosomes.
Each of the few species of monotremes, the echidnas and the duck-billed platypus, and what we haven't said yet, but they lay eggs.
They're mammals.
They produce milk.
They don't actually have nipples, but they produce milk, and they have fur, and they're endothermic, but they lay eggs.
So those eggs could have been privy to an environmental sex determination model, but they're not.
The chromosomal sex determination is already on board, and then that paved the way for the possibility of FIFA parity.
And I will just add another point to the matrix here, which is that we know that chromosomal sex determination isn't inherently about escaping, is not inherently about viviparity because birds lay eggs.
So I think that the causal linkage is you need genetic sex determination.
If you were a homeotherm, you need genetic sex determination before you can be viviparous.
But having genetic sex determination doesn't mean that you go towards viviparity.
I agree, although I wonder if your larger point, which I think is awesome, about temperature regulation negating the utility of environmental sex determination, at least as far as temperature goes, but birds incubating eggs may create the same barrier without the viviparity.
Same barrier?
Yeah, well the same that environmental sex determination doesn't work in a regulated nest of where the test the the egg temperature is regulated by parents sitting on eggs.
That's kind of halfway between internal gestation and environmentally exposed.
Yeah and as always in these That's always in these discussions, which most of our audience will never have been involved in before, but this raises the question of dinosaurs.
Like, what were they doing?
Were dinosaurs endotherms?
Maybe.
Were they homeotherms?
If endotherms, yes.
So we're back to the endotherm question.
Given that birds, which are dinosaurs' direct descendants, are endotherms, it's certainly plausible that dinosaurs were, but we don't know.
Were they viviparous?
No.
They were oviparous.
They had eggs, for sure.
Did they have genetic sex determination?
Don't know.
No idea, right?
Can't tell.
Which also raises the question of bush turkeys.
Obviously.
Obviously.
Now the question it raises is bush turkeys, I'm not an ornithologist, I know that bush turkeys are one of a tiny number of species of birds in which parents walk away after laying eggs.
So they've reverted to... Bad parents.
Yeah, bad parents.
Well, there are lots of parents that are bad parents amongst birds, like brood parasites, like a cuckoo who lays an egg in somebody else's nest and walks away, but they walk away.
They basically put their kids in daycare.
Works for them.
Yeah.
They get someone else to pay for them, they don't have to come back and pay daycare.
Makes perfect sense.
I'm not recommending it for you, but if you're a cuckoo... Yeah, I'm not.
There are a lot of people who will tell you I am, but they're wrong.
In any case, the bush turkeys have, I'd be curious, I would bet against, probably they retain the same chromosomal sex determination as all the other birds because they are a reversion to a It's a big valley to go into.
Oh yeah.
Undo sex, genetic sex determination.
I'm not expecting it, but if the next thing that happened is you read a paper on bush turkeys and it turned out there was something weird about their sex determination, like imagine that they've gone from a ZW system to a Z naught system, right?
That would be interesting, that there was some anomaly there that matched your point about So I understand why, because the parents just walk away and therefore there's no incubation apparently.
And, um, well they, but, but I don't understand why.
I understand why that might open up the possibility, but I don't see any selective reason towards that.
I agree.
I agree.
It's a long shot, but what they do is they bury their eggs in basically a compost heap where you have temperature variation.
It's turtle-like.
Yes.
Very turtle-like.
That's why I raised the question.
Yep.
Yep.
Very cool.
All right.
Well, um, I feel like, uh, we didn't cover enough diversity of ground today.
No, we certainly didn't, but it was a narrow episode.
Okay.
Okay.
Um, maybe, maybe that's it.
Yeah.
Maybe, maybe that is it.
So, um, yeah.
OK, you're going to put this on.
I am?
Yeah.
All right.
I don't think I look good in a white hat.
Oh, OK.
So can you can we see it?
So this is this is from our merch store.
Cut that shit out.
It's a little it's just a little bright in here.
Yeah, there we go.
Excuse me.
This actually looks fantastic.
Yeah, it's a really, it's a really, really good hat.
The font really sells it.
Yeah.
No, that was, that was Zach's doing.
That's, that's excellent.
Uh, so, um, you can get that at, um, our store, Dark Horse Store.
What is it called?
Wild Horse.
Why do I never like, why does it disappear every time?
DarkHorseStore.org.
Um, yeah, please, please go, go check out that and other awesome.
And, and wear it in a context where it's relevant.
Yeah.
Don't wear it with people who don't, who aren't, who shouldn't cut any shit out at all.
Wear it amongst, yeah, exactly.
Wear it amongst the, uh, the moto-normativity skeptics.
Yes.
Wait, the skeptics?
Of moto-normativity.
You think the skeptics are... I think they wrote that paper.
The skeptics?
Of modonormativity.
Weren't they accusing modonormativity of being... No, they believe in it.
No, they believe it exists and they believe in that.
It's not skeptic.
Critics.
Critics.
It's different.
Okay, fair enough.
Cut that shit out.
Alright.
All right.
Please come join us on Locals.
We've got so many benefits, and we're really trying to grow the channel.
We did two things there this week.
We actually talked about that Crazy Hooberman article in New York Magazine, and we did a Q&A where we talked about all sorts of great stuff.
The color spectrum, sex, parenting.
And until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
