Why Darwin was Right: The 222nd Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 222nd 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 how we know that it is true. We discuss the different kinds of beliefs that people have—beliefs that attempt to reconcile with reality, vs beliefs that reconcile with social standing and comfort. If your beliefs put you on the outs with your friends, do you change your beliefs, ...
Yeah, that's a lot of twos and things divisible by two.
So it's not 2-2-4-2-4, it's 4-2-4-2-4.
We got two palindromes, 2-2-2 and 4-2-4-2-4.
Here?
Right here.
Two palindromes. 2-2-2 and 4-2-4-2-4. Here?
Right here.
Livestream number 2-2-2. Here 2-4.
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
All right.
You are Dr. Brett Weinstein.
off by losing as much audience as possible.
I am.
Driving them away.
Here we are at Dark Horse Livestream Evolutionary Lens.
You are Dr. Brett Weinstein.
I am.
I am Heather Hying.
And we want to start by thanking all of our supporters and locals.
We were trying to reach 2,000 by last week and we did it.
We had a few raffles to encourage drawings, to encourage people to join and either that worked or something else worked.
But those lucky winners of Zoom calls with us and a signed copy of our book and such have been notified, and we're thrilled to have all the new people here and all the old people as well.
Just a reminder to those of you who thought, what is Locals and why should I join?
That is where our community is happening.
That's where all of our Q&As are.
We're going to follow this live stream with a Q&A, but not between Brett and me, but rather between Brett and Zachary.
Elder Sun, so that's going to happen right after this on Locals Only.
We have early release of guest podcasts, access to our-- - - What's that? - - Question submissions are open for the Q&A, access to our Discord server, watch party going on during every livestream, We had a great Q&A last weekend.
All of those Q&As are available for watch anytime and lots more to come.
So please consider joining us at Locals.
You are nodding as if you have something to add.
No, no, no.
I'm just noting that all of those things are true and significant.
Yes, indeed.
So today's topics include evolution, why it's true, Why it has to be true and what's wrong with it.
Exactly.
Research on moving spike proteins between species of coronaviruses back in the year 2000, and sex-based gene expression in several species of endotherms, that's mammals and birds.
And we're going to stuff all of that into a relatively short episode this week, because I have a boat to catch.
A literal boat.
A literal boat, yes.
Figuratively catch.
Yeah, I don't.
Yeah, you're not gonna.
No, you wouldn't.
No.
Yeah.
Drive a car right onto it.
I hope that works.
It seems a little weird.
Wait till it is fully docked.
In my experience, that works so much better.
Yeah, I mean, I soon remember shows from like the 70s and early 80s where there was a lot of, like, flying cars onto boats at the last minute.
Just the good old boys.
Am I wrong?
You were not the target audience for that crap, but nonetheless... I watched a certain amount of it with my dad, which explains a certain amount of things.
Yeah, he wasn't the target audience either, but nonetheless, I can imagine, you know, flying cars is hard to look away from.
Didn't Kip the car end up flying some amount?
I feel like I kind of was the target audience for Knight Rider.
Yeah, in a way, David Hasselhoff, kind of easy on the eyes.
And Magnum PI.
Right, even easier on the eyes, arguably.
Right, no, Kit.
See, the two cards, you had the General Lee, which was good at flying.
Which I honestly never really... I didn't watch Dukes of Hazzard.
It was good at rambling on and on in my recollection.
That car did drone on.
Oh, often.
Yes.
Yes.
In a kind of affected voice.
Who gave it that voice and why?
Yeah.
Someone should have predicted Siri and be like, can I just change that to sound like an Australian dude or something?
Yeah.
No, the Indian voice for Siri is- That's what you like.
Well, it just gives you confidence that the person has carefully understood the routes available and is telling you where you should go, having looked at the traffic.
It's the right voice, believe me.
As you know, I don't use Siri, so I hear it, and you have it set to Indian male voice, and I hear it when we're navigating in unfamiliar places.
And the only reason that I have it speaking to me is that that way I don't end up Yeah, crashing or getting lost.
I think I could avoid crashing without serious help, but I would end up missing a lot of turns and ending up on the turnpike having to go to the next state to turn around.
Turnpike?
That's a local term, right?
That's an East Coast thing.
Yeah, we don't have turnpikes here.
No, and we don't want them.
No.
All right.
We're gonna move everything else to the end, except for, as always, our three ads, which are for sponsors that we have carefully chosen and we stand by.
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I'm stalling because you have to start, dude.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, here we go.
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Okay, I don't know.
I think it is, but one of us doesn't know, and that's interesting.
Okay, well, I'm curious as heck as to what an Airedale is.
It's a terrier.
It's a terrier, which is, I believe, a type of dog.
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Okay, well, enough of that.
Okay.
Shall we talk about the state of Darwinism?
Sure.
All right.
So the reason that I am thinking about this, of course, is that Darwinism has erupted into the public discussion in a way that should be heartening to us as evolutionary biologists, but it's actually a bit distressing.
This started, I believe, with Tucker Carlson's interview or discussion with Joe Rogan.
In which he said a lot of interesting things, one of which was that he believed that Darwinism had essentially failed and that science had realized that it doesn't function as a model and we'd moved on and I heard this and I thought, I don't even know what he's talking about.
And then Scott Adams On Twitter, alerted us that he also believed that the model had been falsified.
Alerted the world.
Alerted the world, yeah.
And in any case, I reached out to a number of people.
I had a conversation, a text conversation with Tucker about it.
I offered to talk to him about what's going on with Darwinism.
He was thrilled to do that.
We haven't done it yet, but at some point it will happen.
I had a chat with Joe.
Um, and I had an exchange with, uh, with Scott Adams.
Um, but anyway, the point is the, the implication here is that somehow among very intelligent, highly educated people, there is a growing sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with Darwinism.
Now, I want to just run through a number of things that I think fit together, and I think people will see how this builds up our toolkit as we've been doing forever here on Dark Horse.
There is, I think, a misunderstanding about what the job of a biologist is, or a Darwinist, and I just want to highlight this because to me it is quite glaring.
As an evolutionary biologist, I believe It is my job to find flaws in our evolutionary model.
Now, those flaws, my expectation is, will lead us to higher quality Darwinism.
If they happen to lead us to discover that Darwin had it wrong, that's fine.
I will be surprised, but that's not a reason not to go there.
But I did want people just to have a basic sense of what I think the status is, because I'm very frustrated at the state of our field.
In my opinion, it has made essentially no progress since 1976, and that that's odd.
When, as I've mentioned before, when I asked Richard Dawkins about this, when I asked Jerry Coyne about this, they gave me the same very strange answer, which is that they believed their generation had answered all the big questions and that there was just cleanup left to do, which is preposterous.
There are many big questions left.
And mostly what's happened is we've stopped talking about them.
We've gotten in the habit of not looking at the stuff we can't solve.
And when you ask people, you know, for example, about Speciation or elaborate sexual displays in various creatures.
Instead of telling you, they will tell you that we do understand.
And then instead of telling you what it is that we've come to understand, they will give you a brief tour of the work in that area.
Right so if you ask about speciation you will hear about allopatric speciation and sympatric speciation and maybe if you're talking to somebody who's really sophisticated parapatric speciation but what you will not get is an answer to where all the species came from right that's because we have largely stopped discussing it and what we do is we have a kind of Effort as a substitute for success.
So I have lots of complaints about the state of evolutionary biology on the basis that there are lots of things we can't answer and aren't making progress on as far as I can tell.
That said, I find the idea that there's some fundamental problem with Darwinism Shocking.
And that that idea would be spreading is even more shocking.
And these, you know, all of the people saying this are intelligent people who are not reaching such a conclusion lightly.
These are people who, if they believed Darwinism was intact, would gladly say so.
So what I wanted to point out was there can be a ton wrong with our model of adaptation by natural selection, which is really the thing that Darwin innovated.
There can be a ton wrong with our current understanding of it without it touching the fundamentals of Darwinism, right?
That Darwinism can be broken in its detail or it can be stalled as I've argued that it is.
And that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with what Darwin said.
Now, there's lots of little stuff in Darwin that you can quibble about.
There's some imprecision.
But in general, My argument is, Darwinism, it would be very, very difficult to discover anything that would falsify Darwinism in light of what we now know to be true.
That was not true.
Darwinism was a radical proposal when Darwin made it.
And my point is it is now very close to a tautology.
And that is not a fault of Darwin's, nor is it even really a fault, right?
What it means is that the reality in that model is so clear that the room to find a falsification is almost non-existent, rather like the earth going around the sun.
So I'm wondering what... I can come up with some of the things that you would point to as things that either humanity didn't know at the point that Darwin first published, or that he didn't know even though it was concurrent with him.
So the first example in that space being Pasteur, recognizing that life does not generate from nothingness.
Life begets life, except presumably in the very first time.
Then we have, at the turn of the last century, Mendel working on his pea plants, in which he unearthed, basically in so doing, created the field of genetics without still understanding what the molecular stuff was.
Half a century later in the 1950s, we have the discovery of the structure of DNA.
Another several decades later, we have things like molecular mechanisms of epigenetics, things like methylation and DNA tags and such.
And that's just a few.
That's four things, one of which was concurrent with Darwin, but he didn't know, and all the rest of which are downstream of him.
What if maybe that's a it's not a complete list, but maybe that's a substantial enough list, But are there other things that you were thinking of that Darwin could not have known and humanity did not know, and therefore in the mid-1800s perhaps the theory of adaptation by natural selection could have been, the hypothesis of adaptation by natural selection might yet plausibly have been falsified?
Right.
So I agree with that list.
That is really the list I would come up with, and I will point out why it has the effect on Darwinism's falsifiability.
And let's just be clear.
Darwinism is as falsifiable as anything else, in principle.
The question is, in practice, where's the room for a falsification?
What would have to be true for it to be wrong has changed radically.
Actually, one more thing I would add to that list, which doesn't actually add I may be forgetting something, but I don't think it adds a meaningful leap in empirical knowledge, but it adds synthesis.
In fact, it was called nearly 100 years ago, now 90 years ago or so, the modern synthesis, which is generated by the premier evolutionary biologists of the time, people like Dobzhansky and Maier.
No, not Maier.
He's later.
GG Simpson and such, in which they put together what Darwin understood with what Mendel had unearthed and some other new at that time ways of understanding evolution and said, ah, Darwin was right, but he was imprecise.
Here we have it.
And that still was 20 odd years before even we have the structure of DNA.
Right.
So there were, between 1859 and, to use your date, 1976, a tremendous number of advances, and of course we haven't even talked about all the advances in the 1960s and 70s, closer to the particular part of evolutionary biology where we have spent time around sex ratio theory and behavioral biology as it applies to evolutionary biology.
Perfect.
Except for one thing.
Darwin's work was concurrent with Mendel, but Darwin didn't know about it.
In fact... I don't think either... Mendel could have known about Darwin.
I don't think Mendel had put anything out there yet.
Right.
Yeah, Mendel would have known about Darwin.
I think there's some... One hears it said that Mendel's work may have been sitting on Darwin's desk, but he didn't get to it, or something like this.
But Anyway, the point is Darwin was working in isolation from what Mendel found.
What Mendel found was like the phenomenology of genetics.
He was able to, because he chose very simple traits in a very simple system, he was able to see that there was something that was not blending.
And he got lucky.
Yeah, he got very lucky and he may even have cheated in one regard.
He's calculated a ratio incorrectly and then found data that matched it, which suggests that maybe he wasn't perfect.
But nonetheless, he found evidence That basically parents were delivering some kind of information that was not just swirling into a blend that was particulate.
But he didn't know what it was.
And as you point out, the information about what it was came later, both first in the form of knowing what the chemistry of this molecule was, and then in understanding how that chemistry actually functioned to contain information that wasn't blending.
But the basic argument is like this.
What Darwin... Darwin, I think, actually benefited.
Darwin was a great scientist and he does something in Origin and elsewhere that we have lost and it is so upsetting to know that this was part of our scientific toolkit and it's been lost.
But Darwin again and again points out the stuff that worries him, the stuff he can't answer.
Why are the ants cooperating the way they're cooperating?
Right.
Stuff like this.
And he says, if I think he uses the word theory, maybe he uses the word hypothesis, but either way, he says the equivalent of if my hypothesis is unable to explain this, then it is false again and again and again.
Right?
And it turns out that there were very interesting explanations for the things he worried about.
He spotted the right issues.
None of them resulted in the falsification of adaptation by natural selection.
Nor have there been any even remotely successful attempts at falsifying adaptation by natural selection.
Right.
You can find other stuff, but that's different than falsifying that adaptation through natural selection is happening all the time and explains a great majority of biological characteristics that you could name.
What I'm going to say about how he got lucky is that because he didn't have access to any, he didn't have access to Mendel's work, he probably would have benefited from Mendel's work if he hadn't been hobbled by the understanding of how DNA explains Mendel's work.
Once you get into the molecular stuff, It is very easy to make errors, and I hope Darwin would have avoided them, but he might not have.
But he benefited from the fact that it just simply wasn't on the table.
So what he was doing was working in a very general sense.
And what he said, the fundamental, I'm going to reduce it to three characteristics, you could reduce it, you could describe the same three as four characteristics.
It's more traditional, but I think this is more intuitive.
...is that if you have these three characteristics, adaptation via natural selection will happen.
The three characteristics are reproduction, heritable variation, and differential success.
Right?
And the idea is something reproduces, the products of that reproduction are not the same, the things that make them not the same are passed from parent to offspring, and they don't work the same.
Therefore, the ones that work better will come to dominate the landscape, and the ones that work worse will disappear.
And that results in the simplest three-word definition for evolution.
Dissent with modification.
Dissent with modification.
And The ultimate point, which you as a layperson, if you're a layperson watching this, what you should take from this is it is almost impossible for that to be wrong.
Right?
We could have everything we've built on that model be wrong and it would be almost impossible for that idea to be wrong in the aggregate.
The question is, what do you do with what we have learned and what we have failed to discover that matches that model?
And my, I'm not going to exhaustively go into it here.
Frankly, it probably, it needs at least a extensive essay, if not a book to explore this stuff in detail.
But what I believe happened is that the discovery of DNA and what we insanely call the central dogma of of evolutionary biology, of molecular biology, which is that DNA describes RNA which describes protein.
Now that's true, right?
As much as anything is established, this mechanism is true.
DNA is spelled in three letter sequences that specify a particular amino acid, and then those amino acids string together into proteins.
Those proteins then fold based on their electromagnetic idiosyncrasies, and those folded up proteins do stuff.
In the simplest to understand case, a folded up protein functions like a machine that Takes objects, molecules, and causes them to be put together in such a way that they are more likely to react.
So that's an enzyme.
We call it a catalyst, which I think is true but paints the wrong picture.
But in any case, We know that there are many enzymes that are essential to life.
We know that those enzymes have a primary sequence of amino acids, that they fold up into a structure, and that that structure does something that we can identify.
It lowers the amount of energy necessary to make a reaction happen.
and that that is all downstream of selection of the kind I just described where the enzyme spellings are not all identical and those that work better outcompete those that work less well and they come the better versions of these things come to dominate the landscape and we can take that model and we can extend it to other things like You have eyes.
Originally, you had a pigment that detected light.
How does that pigment that detected light become a bunch of pigments that detect different wavelengths of light?
Slight modifications in sequence cause a pigment that's sensitive to different wavelengths.
This all falls very naturally out of classic Darwinism, following the new synthesis that fused it with our understanding of DNA.
The problem is, that is not a good fit for a lot of the things that we imagine are the result of adaptation by natural selection.
I keep pointing out, you've got a shrew-like ancestor that we know, for other reasons, evolved into the ancestor of all modern bats.
That means that its legs became wings, right?
The difference between the legs and the wings, are there chemical differences in the material that makes up the legs and the wings?
Undoubtedly.
Do they matter?
Really hard to imagine how they do, right?
It is a distribution of material question, not a chemical question.
So, the mechanism that we've understood is underlying Darwinism, this DNA sequences that produce proteins which are distinct from each other, is not a good fit for how you get a wing from a leg.
Now... We at least are still missing several pieces of information, or several mechanisms by which information could be transmitted, such that you get the kinds of transformations that you are describing.
Right.
But the fact that we're missing, that we've got a lot of black boxes, will always be true.
Oh, totally natural.
What we're trying to do with science is reduce the number of black boxes as much as possible.
100%.
We also need to recognize where they are.
Right, and this is why I'm annoyed with our colleagues, is if I say we've got a mechanism whereby chemical distinctions are created through natural selection and it doesn't appear to be a very good match for what we developmentally see as a distribution of materials in the body, they will spit at me a lot of different things that we imagine must be involved in The creation of a modern bat from an ancestral shrew-like creature.
But they don't give me any information on where the selected content, I'm trying not to reuse the word information, but where the information is stored, in what language, and how it translates into morphological form.
Am I saying they have to know those things for it to be true?
No.
But they do have to acknowledge what we don't yet know.
I was amazed, impressed, and surprised 10 years ago or so when I was teaching with a genesis developmental biologist.
I was teaching the macroevolutionary stuff and vertebrate evolution and comparative anatomy, and he was teaching genetics and development and molecular biology.
At that point, The, you know, extreme rigor among good developmental biologists had revealed how the very first axis is formed in, as two gametes have come, just after two gametes have come together, and in the very early, in, well, actually a little bit later than that, I'm forgetting all the names for the various stages, but, you know, how do you get front from back
And we actually do begin to have a sense of that now, but obviously a lot more has to happen beyond front and back.
You also need left and right.
You need a whole lot more than that.
So, you know, there was much excitement in the field not that long ago that we finally had a bead on how it is that early animals, that early in development, all animals actually begin after sperm and egg have met to begin to all animals actually begin after sperm and egg have met to begin to form a difference between head and tail, the animal So that is super basic and super amazing both.
So we just we just don't know a ton.
Well, we don't know a ton, but I specifically want to phrase the question as in what language is this information that is obviously underlying these changes stored?
Right?
In the textbook that I learned biology from, the triplet codon-to-protein mechanism was described as the Darwinian mechanism.
The language.
So mechanism and language you're using somewhat Well, let's put it this way.
It's either triplet codons or it isn't.
And if it isn't triplet codons, I want to know what language it's stored in.
And yes, I do think I have an inkling, but... Be careful.
So it is triplet codons for some things.
You are arguing that it is not triplet codons for all things evolutionary.
As I have been arguing for 20 years, I believe there is a missing layer.
It's not that it doesn't exist.
It's not that it's impossible to understand.
It's that it's implied by the certainty of Darwinian selection functioning to create adaptation and the feebleness of the protein-based mechanism for how that works.
And we talked about this one or two livestreams ago, and indeed it came up in our Q&A recently.
What might that layer be?
You have called it, and we've called it in our book, Explorer Modes.
I have borrowed from what I know to be the actual human written code By which we try to understand what the phylogenetic history of life on Earth is the heuristic layer Wherein you can't search all possible space.
There is simply not enough time in the universe So there has to there have to be some rules in what language are those rules written?
And where do those rules live for search here build here try to do this thing over here But you can't try everything always all of the time because there's simply not enough time.
So you've got two things.
So we are now talking at the layer between a Darwinian explanation and a Mendelian explanation, right?
We are now talking about the heuristic search of design space for forms that are useful, right?
And yes, Explorer Modes says Darwinism will result in creatures that search design space non-randomly because it works better.
It's a superior competitive mechanism and adaptation will cause you not to search where there's nothing to find.
Right?
So that's phenomenological.
And then there's a question of where the information that is evolving by natural selection is stored and in what language.
And again, yes, I do believe that I have an inkling of at least one such place.
But my basic point would be, Darwin didn't say anything about DNA.
Thank goodness.
Right?
He didn't know enough to say anything about DNA, which saved him from being too specific about what kind of information was varying that was heritable and being selected.
And what happened when we discovered DNA Is that the molecular mechanism underlying what is unfortunately called the central dogma, right?
The idea that DNA stores information, it goes to mRNA, and then it goes to protein.
That mechanism is so mind-blowingly cool That everybody, once we saw it, thought the race to understand how Darwinism creates critters is done.
And it ain't.
Right?
We've missed stuff because that mechanism was so cool and explained so much that we couldn't see what it didn't explain.
It was.
The term was first coined by Crick, one of the co-discoverers of the molecular structure of DNA.
Of course, he felt that this was an earth-shattering discovery.
But as is often the case with people who are both important and not, they give more credence to what they have done than is actually true.
He attributed too much generality, too much universality to the fundamental nature of Of that mechanism.
That mechanism is everything it is cracked up to be except it doesn't explain all of the stuff that we assume it must explain.
And the simple way to think about this is if it is true that you could make a bat and a shrew out of the same molecules, Then we're missing something about how the distinction arises.
And if you say, well, it's developmental and it's epigenetic, then yeah, I get it.
Epigenetics allows you to turn genes on and off.
So there's something about the timing of turning those genes on and off.
But what I want to know is where the heritable information is stored, in what language, such that Superior versions outcompete inferior versions.
When that happens, will that be a proof that Darwin didn't get it?
No.
What Darwin said still applies.
The point is, you've got heritable information that is going to be differentially successful.
Voila!
It's going to be Darwinian.
So, is there another possibility?
Kind of, maybe.
Right?
Maybe, you know, look, I don't believe we're living in a simulation, but you could say that all the stuff that you think evolved is actually inside a simulator.
Well, I would argue the simulator's purpose is then probably to see what evolves, so the fact that that wouldn't be material and it doesn't matter, or at least doesn't matter very much.
But even if the purpose, if the purpose of the simulator Was just to create an entertaining screensaver in which things seemed like they had evolved so that everything was a fiction in here Still doesn't solve you it doesn't save you from needing this mechanism, right?
Because who's did the simulating they had to come from somewhere.
So anyway, there's all that But now I wanted to get to how we got to did you have something?
Oh, I have a correction from from something I said earlier, but you go on I'll correct at the end if you want Okay, so I wanted to talk a little bit about how we got into this sorry state and what its larger implications are because I do think its larger implications are dire and go well beyond questions of Darwin's reality or fiction.
And I wanted to return to something we talked about in, I think, the last live stream.
As long-time viewers will know, I'm increasingly convinced that there is something about what a belief is, how it is held in the mind, that distinguishes humans into at least two categories.
Maybe there are a hundred categories, but there are two broad ones.
One is very, very common, and the other is very, very rare.
And I believe, I'm not arguing better or worse, but I believe that you and I are in the very rare category and it is confusing to us because we are prone to falsely project the way we believe things onto the way other people believe things, right?
And let me just say that when you wrestle with a concept like this, There is an experience which sort of trained me to do what I think.
Experiences, if I try out a concept like this, like they're two different kinds of belief, right?
I take it on in a provisional way and then I go through my daily life And either it's right and it simplifies my understanding of things I don't even expect to be related to it or it doesn't.
Maybe it even makes things more complex.
If I try to look at things through this lens they make less sense than they did when I didn't have the lens.
Then I throw out the lens.
But, if the lens makes things simpler, without robbing me of the ability to explain things I could already explain, then the answer is, well, I don't know if it's true, but it contains something that's a lot like true, and I'm going to increase the weight I'm willing to put on it.
So, here's the concept that I think is alarmingly useful.
How do you come to understand what is true?
Well, let's talk physically first.
Let's say that you're a toddler trying to understand how to move through the world.
You might come up with ideas like, you know, the creatures of the world can do the things they think they can do, and they can't do the things they don't think they can do.
And you might try that out and you might bash your head into something and you might fall off of something as you think you can fly or whatever, right?
And the point is how?
Well, when I think that way, The world hurts, and I get what I want less often, right?
So I'm not going to think that way.
My life gets worse when I think that way, so I'm going to stop thinking that way, and I'm going to replace it with something where when I think it, my life gets better.
Totally natural way to discover what's true.
And you may discover a lot of stuff that's only kind of true, but true enough, right?
Like the example I always use about Follow through when you're playing tennis or swinging a baseball bat, right?
Follow through is misunderstood by people, but it doesn't matter because what you need to know is I better plan to follow through if I want my swing to work.
And so you learn that because you swing Not planning to follow through and you don't hit the ball correctly, you know, fouls off into the stands.
And then when you do plan to follow through, it's a home run and it's like, hey, I love that they're cheering.
And so that must be true.
OK, now the problem is when we get into the land of abstractions.
And this fits very, this model fits very well with what you and I have been saying forever and what we wrote into our book about the importance of physical systems and training the mind, how the universe actually works, right?
We're telling people actually spend more time in those systems, but a lot of what matters is in systems that don't work like that, abstract systems.
Now, what if you apply the same rubric to how you figure out what's true about, um, history or climate or frankly darwinism right you're not interfacing with the world itself most of the time you're interfacing with a social world in which
It is possible, if you follow that same logic, where if things get worse when I say stuff, then they must be false.
And if things get better when I say stuff, it's probably true.
Then, well, let's suppose you existed in Darwin's world.
Well, in Darwin's world, that might not be a terrible rubric.
It's not great.
But the point is, everybody in that world, because they were gentlemen scientists who weren't doing this to put food on their table or to get tenure, right?
They were interested in being right long after they were dead.
They were not interested in being temporarily right and then disproven and who cares because their name wasn't gonna be remembered.
They were interested in immortality.
And that immortality thing caused them to hold each other's feet to the fire and this and that.
So the point is, if you said something really insightful, you know, it would cause a kind of a kerfuffle.
But then, you know, you get a phenomenon that might lead you in the right direction.
But what happens if Somebody decides that your field is about to discover something that's going to make it impossible for them to continue doing their business, right?
Their business is so dangerous to the world that it won't be allowed.
Or in the case, basically I'm arguing that there are Ideas which you're not allowed to challenge.
And if you do challenge them, your life gets worse.
And that makes it impossible to understand their status.
Climate change is one of these.
If you're a climate scientist and you discover something that has to be built into the model that happens to go in the direction of anthropogenic climate change being less significant than we thought, then your life's going to get worse if you try to say it.
So I'm not sure I'm tracking your model for two types of beliefs is the idea that when you behave a certain way, when you have a belief and it causes you to behave a certain way, if what comes back to you from the world is that sucks for you, One of the types of belief structures is, well, then that thing must not be true.
If believing that makes it suck for me, then that thing must not be true.
And that is a non-reality-based, that is an entirely socially-based and personal cost-benefit analysis-based way of assessing belief.
Yes, it is a proxy and there are environments where it will work better than other environments.
And interestingly, if you are a child with smart parents, it's a pretty good proxy, right?
If you're a child with excellent teachers, it's a pretty good proxy, right?
Because the point is those people are there to speak for the universe.
And when you get something wrong, they might say, You know, that seems right, but have you noticed this thing?
Right?
And so the point is, pursuing the... And actually, this is exactly why you were such an effective teacher.
Me?
Yeah, you.
Students really cared what you thought about their stuff.
And you were really good at giving them feedback that had an incredibly high signal-to-noise ratio.
So the point was, if they decided that when Heather thinks I'm making sense, I'm probably doing the right thing, That's a great proxy, right?
So it worked really, really well.
But in a world of cruddy teachers, you can learn absolute nonsense that way, right?
In a world of parents, most of whom had cruddy teachers, most of whom are busy with, you know, staying employed and stuff like that, they don't really have time to understand the universe in a way that they're very good proxies.
Or even, this is an aside, but if you're very busy either because you feel like you don't want to put more into it or you're just way overworked, a lot of teachers will say to the top 10, 20, whatever percent of students, you're doing great.
And I remember this from being a professor, the number of students who the first few times I would give them critical feedback said, well, no one's ever criticized my thinking before, my writing before.
So, well, I didn't say it wasn't good, but it can be better.
And what they had revealed to me and what, you know, to a person in those cases they came to understand was my teachers, who I thought were doing right by me because they saw that I was insightful, could have been pushing me harder and could have done more right by me by pushing me to go beyond what I was doing.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So I guess I'm arguing for a compound model in which the proxies are increasingly cruddy and the tendency to listen to the proxies is through the roof because people don't have expertise in something in the real world that would tell them the proxies are cruddy.
There are too many domains in which we are all being expected to assess what we end up wanting to do, what we need to think about, how to eat, how to live, all of these things.
And so almost everyone is looking to authority in some domains.
And, you know, I suspect that part of what is going on with this sort of revisionism around, well, Darwin is wrong, is there's, it feels to me like there is an increasingly loud and vocal minority of people who say, who are arguing this.
Out there in the world, and that some people's audiences, not ours, you know, we get this, but you know, we've been clear from the beginning, we're evolutionary biologists, right?
Are going to be reinforced by speaking to the part of the audience that says, we all know Darwin isn't right, right?
Yes, I mean this is complex because I think some of the people, given, I'm going to come back to why Darwinism is broken in a social sense in a second, but I do think that while there are people whose attacks on Darwinism are painfully stupid, there are some skeptics of Darwinism who are actually doing the job Darwinists are supposed to be doing.
Right, and we talked about that last week or two weeks ago.
Right, and so the point is, you know, Should you be listening to these voices?
Well, absolutely.
Right.
They have they have taken on.
Right.
That's not that's that's not who I was just referring to.
Right.
I know.
But but we have to separate them out because they exist, too.
But OK, I wanted to say one little personal thing about why I at least think that I end up in the weird category where belief is really about something other than those proxies.
This is just me sort of searching my own motivations.
I know that I have a weird relationship with people telling me I'm wrong.
Right?
I know That if I have done my homework and I have spotted something that has caused me to take up a position that is quite different from what most people believe, then I am making a long-term bet.
I'm making a bet.
That actually I know what's going on and when you see what you've got wrong that actually that's good for me Okay, now I think that's how science is supposed to be done right as I've said many times Every great idea starts as a minority of one.
If you're not comfortable being the only person who believes something, then you're ruling out the possibility that you will make a great discovery.
So I don't take it as an indication that I'm on the wrong track.
In fact, I take it as an indication that if I'm on the right track, I'm going to win big.
Now, I may not win big in my lifetime, which is unfortunate.
I don't like it that people think I'm a dummy.
But I believe I am almost Almost immune to having my belief about the way the universe works altered by what people say when I voice it.
Yep.
Now, I don't think that I am totally immune to any influence.
And that does not mean that you're immune to criticism, quite the opposite.
Absolutely.
I listen very carefully because the game I'm playing is only good when you're really, really right and hearing what, even if it's painful, hearing the stuff that people have to tell you about the brokenness of your model, the sooner you get that stuff, the sooner you get back to being right.
Yep.
What I'm not immune to is the harm that comes to me or to us for voicing beliefs.
Right.
Right.
I'm more immune than most.
I will definitely say some stuff that brings some angry vitriol back.
But, you know, There is discretion over what one says and when, right?
Are people ready to hear this?
I'm not somebody who thinks that you should say everything you believe at every moment, irrespective of whether or not it makes things worse.
No.
Right.
No, and we've spent time here before.
You know, I have said, of course we don't say everything we believe to be true, either of us, and nor should anyone.
Nor can anyone.
In part because at any given moment everyone who is not a static being who has been sucked into the Borg should be experiencing discovery in some realms where they are On the back foot, like, you know, they're not sure now.
They thought they knew something and now they're saying, oh, there's new information coming in.
I don't know.
Well, we couldn't.
And sometimes we do talk about those things here and elsewhere.
And sometimes one or the other or both of us will be actively exploring something, you know, in private, knowing that actually this is not ready yet.
I don't know enough yet to know where this might go.
And let's just, let's Spend some more time in discovery first Absolutely, there is a world of nuance around what you say and when you say it, but the idea that it should be logically It should be logically walled off from The analytical content of what you believe.
The analytical content of what you believe should be strictly responsive to evidence and logic.
And what you say when is a social phenomenon that's more complex.
And most people don't have that firewall.
Which means that a couple of things are Let's put it this way, sending us into a dark age.
The presence of that firewall is the distinction between your two types of beliefs, I think.
It's that.
That is it in a nutshell.
That is it in a nutshell.
And, you know, there's going to be lots of nuance.
There will be people who are maybe Type 1 with respect to belief in one area, but Type 2 with respect to belief in everything else.
You could be hyper-specialized.
But nonetheless, the idea that there's a bunch of people, when they say belief, what they're telling me is this is something productive.
I say things of this stripe and the world is good.
But the problem is that makes you way too sensitive to what the people who go to your cocktail party think, right?
It's very difficult for such people to recognize difficult truths.
And the problem is their cocktail party may be built around difficult truths, which means that the things that are difficult at that cocktail party are the inverse of what the What the world sees, right?
But if the point is I care about the people at this cocktail party think of me Then the point is well, are you capable of seeing it when they've got it wrong?
Can you can you play that role?
That's not a fun one.
Are you willing to give up the cocktail party?
Yeah.
Are you willing to give up the cocktail party for reality?
And you know, it's a, it's a harder job than, than people think.
But I want to cap this off by just pointing out two forces that I believe are literally, obviously a dark age is a metaphor, but we are literally headed into one.
And the reason has to do with Our abandonment of the obligations of an Enlightenment-centered academy.
And there are two things that are going on in light of the model that we've just discussed.
It should be crystal clear what their hazard is.
One of them is I can't find a hair's breadth of difference between it and indulgences.
The Catholic Church used to sell wealthy people the right to sin and not go to hell over it because the idea was a utilitarian calculation.
The good that they would do by giving the church money exceeded the harm done by the sin that they were going to do and so the church deemed this positive and this resulted in Martin Luther nailing his 90 was it 95 theses to the the door of the church Which started Protestantism But the point is indulgences the idea that there are certain things for which we should bend the rules because the financial
The good done by the financial benefit exceeds the harm done.
Well, the university system has done this, right?
It is allowing all kinds of financial influence to shape the various departments that cover important topics, right?
It is shaping medical schools, it is shaping departments that study Toxicity?
It is shaping everything where there's money at stake.
Right?
Those are indulgences.
And of course the result is that it makes society stupider.
Because those indulgences basically allow the throttling of perspectives that are uncomfortable to those who can buy them.
Right?
Obviously, we've done a lot of talking here about the content of vaccines.
At the end of the day, there is a very obvious question.
A lot of our vaccines contain aluminum.
Is it safe to inject aluminum into babies?
That's an obvious question.
That's not a, you're a crackpot if you wonder.
That's a, wait, can I see the studies that established that aluminum is safe to inject into babies and what are the limits?
Right?
That's an obvious question.
Which we are hearing very little about because we have an indulgence that has been sold to people whose business requires them to inject aluminum into babies.
And so we can't get to the end.
The answer is if it's safe, we would find that through a discussion in which there was vigorous disagreement.
Right?
So.
Among the things that we need to understand, there are two kinds of consensus.
The people who have fallen in love with the idea of settled science are portraying one of these kinds for the other.
There is science that has become settled in some way because vigorous debate has happened and it has resolved resolutely in favor of one perspective, Darwinism being such a case.
The other kind is where the wisdom is delivered to prevent the vigorous disagreement that would tell us if it was true or not.
That's what happened during COVID, right?
We were told at the beginning what the truth was so that no vigorous debate could happen.
That's how the science got settled in advance of the argument rather than as a result of the argument.
Okay.
Now the last thing I want to add is in addition to the indulgences that are sold to moneyed interests, which allow them to steer fields so that those fields don't discover anything awkward.
There's another thing that happens in the case of climate science and Darwinism.
There is a belief that certain ideas need to be protected for the greater good and therefore we will punish those who question them.
These things are being placed off limits.
Same is true for vaccines.
Same is true for vaccines, but in the vaccine case, I don't believe that this happened.
Well, it's a combination of the two.
You had a moneyed interest that decided it didn't want to talk about what the real hazards were, and then everybody left in the field.
Anybody who can live under that rubric treats vaccine safety as sacred.
Right, but out here in the sphere of talking about things, we were roundly denounced because we dared to question the sacredness of anything that is called a vaccine.
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's kind of the issue, is that it will always look sacred, but there's two different sources of sacredness.
In the case of Darwinism, I believe the atheists, the New Atheists, actually screwed this up.
That the New Atheists, in order to fend off Those who they call creationists, and I don't actually think that that is a terrible term, it has a stigma to it, but those who believe in alternatives to Darwinism come in various different flavors, but they were viewed as so dangerous that there was license to simply, you know,
Scoff them off the stage, right?
Which is fine when we're talking about young Earth creationists who are not only in violation of the most basic understanding of Darwinism, but also geology, right?
Also cosmology.
So, that tool fashioned to fend off people raising dumb concerns is now wielded against people raising smart concerns.
Guys like Steve Meyer who are raising concerns about the amount of time that is available for changes to have occurred that does not seem mathematically plausible.
Well, that's a good challenge.
But the right to get rid of it as if it was hokum still exists.
The point is that ability to shut down discussion is inherently unscientific.
It arises both naturally and as a result of moneyed interests.
And it is causing us to have an academy that doesn't discover the most obvious and glaring violations of logic sitting right in front of it.
Right?
That is an academy that cannot protect the Enlightenment values, and it is putting us in a situation where we are literally having a discussion with intelligent, educated people about whether or not Darwin was even basically right.
That's it, huh?
I had one correction from what I said earlier, which is we're now a long way afield from, but I was talking about the modern synthesis, which I understand to be sort of 1930s-ish, and put Mayer on the line.
I mentioned Dobzhansky and Simpson.
I didn't mention like Fisher and Haldane and lots of people there, a lot of important evolutionary thinkers.
And I said Mayer and I said, oh, wait, no, he's later.
No, he was very much there.
It was in the 1930s that he wrote, that he introduced the idea of adaptive landscapes to the world.
I think that was a 1932 paper?
Sometime in the 1930s.
Minor.
Adaptive landscapes is right.
Oh, it's Sewell Wright.
You're right.
But Meyer was very much working then.
He was just incredibly long-lived.
He lived like a hundred years.
So he lived beyond us being in grad school, and he was from very early on.
But yes, I was conflating both Wright and Meyer, and also Um, and forgot that he was a baby back during the modern synthesis, but an active, active baby and, uh, and still active.
Um, once we were already professors, that's just, that's, that's incredible that this field is also so young that there could be someone who was around for such a substantial fraction of it.
Yeah, that is among the things people need to remember about Darwinism.
It's not only is it about explaining the most complex stuff in the known universe, but it's also so new.
So the idea that there are major gaps in it shouldn't surprise anyone.
There's nothing wrong with that.
And I ain't complaining about the gaps.
I'm complaining about our not making eye contact with them.
There are gaps.
There are going to be black boxes, of course.
Many people, hopefully, are working on those, but not enough.
Well, actually, I came up with an analogy to describe the relationship.
Right, when I say I want to know where the information is stored and in what language, the hereditary information that is being modified, I believe by selection, lots of people want to shout me down and they will say, You know, it's as if, you know, he never learned about, you know, molecular, epigenetic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
And my feeling is, if we, if an alien spacecraft were to show up on our doorstep and it levitated, right?
And I said to somebody, okay, how does it do that?
I don't think we know.
Of course we know.
Well, what do you mean?
Well, there's this module that when you pull it out, it doesn't levitate.
And then you put it back in and it does.
This module is how it levitates.
Like, well, you didn't answer the question, right?
You pointed to the place you know it is, but you didn't tell me how it works.
And, um, again, I'm not saying we should know how it works.
This is a tough question, but what I'm, what I'm frankly angry about Is that the textbooks that we learned from swore that proteins being encoded triplet codon wise in the, in the DNA was the sum total of this story.
And there was never a, yeah, that was wrong.
We now know there's a great deal more to it.
That should have been obvious all along.
Now we're on the case.
We're going to figure out how it works.
It's like, well, we know we've been right about Darwinism all along.
It's like, no, you, you missed the scope.
Yeah, that's right.
Okay, I want to quickly get to a couple other things.
We're going to read just a tiny, I'm going to read just a tiny excerpt from this book, which Brett has mentioned, The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race by Bobby Kennedy, his latest.
I think we may begin to do a little bit from this book with some regularity, because it's dense, it's dark, it's depressing, it's damning.
It's a lot of D-words, this book.
But as with his last book, what is it called?
The Real Anthony Fauci?
When I have spot-checked some of the remarkably large number of references, they check out, right?
So, you know, this is incredibly well researched, and the claims in it that I haven't fact-checked, I imagine to be true, but only because I have fact-checked some number of them, and they are.
So, 100 pages in, so I'm going to actually read just a tiny bit from Chapter 17, which is called Enter Dr. Anthony Fauci.
But by 100 pages in, which is when this chapter is, Kennedy has established that throughout the 20th century, bioweapons development had been accelerating in many of the world's countries.
Often under the guise of life science.
And, you know, he makes good fun of the concept, the naming of these life scientists who are mostly involved in, as he says, death science.
End of life science.
End of life science and death science, who are doing vaccine development and research to defend against the promised coming plagues.
But one of the well-supported contentions in the book is that, to a startling extent, our plagues and epidemics are self-inflected wounds.
Not entirely, of course, but we have life scientists in labs to blame, often not viruses and other pathogens that evolved entirely by natural selection.
Long-time listeners and viewers will remember that early in COVID, one of the first places that we were actively disagreeing with the mainstream narrative was, that's not going to be zoonotic.
That's going to have emerged from a lab.
went through a lot of reasons and you also separately uh with a number of guests um went through um a number of the a bunch of the evidence uh for why this was very unlikely to be a naturally occurring virus um remember that anyone at that point and it's still not settled but increasingly if you ask people privately what do you think people are like yeah it's you know it's probably came from a lab right you still can't really say that in official places
but um but back in 2020 if you said that you were a conspiracy theorist uh and you got um you got laid out as a crank for saying such a thing um Wait, I want to add one thing before you go.
Yeah.
Something interesting is up on this topic.
I believe that we had closed in on a state the correct way that things get scientifically settled.
I believe that we had a vigorous debate and that we had won it.
And was it nailed to a fairly well?
Maybe not, but very close.
Hold on.
I disagree.
And I want to come back to this when I've gotten through more of the book, but there's some stuff going on at Rutgers between two of the camps that is remarkable.
And it suggests that actually, you know, the people on the, we're creating these things, whether you, the world likes it or not, side of things had never given up.
Oh, no, no, no.
Given up is not it.
There's a huge incentive to not give up.
They never gave up and they probably will never give up.
But the point is, there may be adherence to Lysenkoism out there, but it's settled.
Now, my point is, settled is supposed to actually have a consequence if you get there through vigorous debate.
And what happened is somebody decided on a surge where they were going to take something that people had reached a consensus about in a natural way, and they were going to unsettle it.
I don't think that's what happened, but let's just read a little bit from this.
Chapter 17 of, again, the Wuhan cover-up by Bobby Kennedy.
He's established that the legal immunities were provided by the Patriot Act, but the Pentagon and CIA remained reluctant to publicly engage in bioweapons development.
They may have worried that the Patriot Act loopholes would not survive judicial scrutiny.
Violations of the Geneva Protocol were capital crimes.
Following Shiro Ishii's model, they began funneling massive biodefense funding to the National Institutes of Health to do bioweapons research under the guise of vaccine development.
And of course, the NIH, as everyone came to understand early in 2020, is the umbrella funder in the U.S.
that includes the NIAID, the National Institutes for the What does it even stand for?
Infectious Allergies and Infectious Diseases, of which Fauci has been the lead for a very long time, since before AIDS.
In keeping with this strategy, Vice President Cheney moved to consolidate federal biodefense research programs, then siloed in numerous departments and agencies into a single entity within Anthony Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In essence, they made Tony Fauci the new bioweapons czar.
Dr. Fauci had fortuitously made his bones of the bioweapons set 20 months earlier.
Gain-of-Function Genesis In February 2020, long before the more innocuous term, gain-of-function, entered the popular nomenclature, Dr. Fauci inaugurated the unregulated wildcat era of dual-use science by funding a foreboding experiment by Lili Kuo and a team at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
So again, dual-use, which he hasn't defined here, is, yeah, this is good for us, we want to know, and also this is going to be useful over in bioweapons space.
In the resultant study, titled, Retargeting of Coronavirus by Substitution of the Spike Glycoprotein Ectodomain, Crossing the Host Cell Species Barrier, the researchers announced that they had removed a spike protein from a mouse coronavirus and implanted a feline coronavirus spike.
Virologists described such hybridized viruses as chimeric, after the Greek monster that was part lion, part goat, and part serpent.
So that research that Kennedy is discussing there is here.
You can show my screen.
This is again research published in the Journal of Virology in February 2000, funded by Fauci's NIAID.
called, again, Retargeting of Coronavirus by Substitution of the Spike Glycoprotein Ectodomain Crossing the Host Cell Species Barrier, and here's just a couple of brief excerpts from the abstract in the introduction.
Coronaviruses generally have a narrow host range, infecting one or just a few species.
Using targeted RNA recombination, we constructed a mutant of the coronavirus mouse hepatitis virus, MHV, in which the ectodomain of the spike glycoprotein, S, was replaced with a highly divergent ectodomain of the S protein of feline infectious peritonitis virus.
The resulting chimeric virus, designated F, MHV, acquired the ability to infect feline cells and simultaneously lost the ability to infect murine cells in tissue culture.
One more thing.
The family Coronaviridae contains the causative agents of a number of significant respiratory and enteric diseases affecting humans, other mammals, and birds.
One of the hallmarks of this family is that most of its members exhibit a very strong degree of host species specificity, the molecular basis of which is thought to reside in the particularity of the interactions of individual viruses with their corresponding host cell receptors.
Twenty years before SARS-CoV-2 shows up on the scene, and anyone who suggests that this has all the hallmarks of something that was chimerized in a lab as opposed to entirely the result of natural selection in the field, twenty years before that, Fauci funded work that first demonstrated that you could actually move the spike from one coronavirus
On to another, knowing that the coronaviridae, the family of viruses that is the coronaviruses, tend to have specifically and notably high host specificity and don't tend to be able to infect multiple species of hosts 20 years earlier.
Yeah, I will say I've read that whole book.
It's quite a painful read.
All of the stuff that you would think we would know about what we've been doing bioweapons wise is overwhelming, you know.
The history of the bioweapons program, its relationship to very significantly Japanese bioweapons research from the World War II era, is jaw-dropping.
And the number of, you know, one has the sense, few people are going to read this book, it's a tough read, it's a technical read, but it is, if you know what's in that book, This is a slam dunk.
And what we don't understand in the public is that when you look at Anthony Fauci, you're looking at a weapons guy.
Yes.
As a weapons guy, the whole story of COVID makes a great deal more sense, right?
Let's assume it was an accidental leak.
Nonetheless, what were they doing in the lab and why?
How did they end up with such a virus in the lab and why, is a question that has a very uncomfortable answer.
So anyway, I do recommend if it's your kind of read that you do pick it up.
You know, it's tough but well worth it.
But the problem is that the public, which knows nothing of this, is still confused and that's the battleground.
Anybody who read this book would be shocked at How much there is to say about the particular details of the experiments that were being run, the grant proposals that were filed, the program to which they belonged, the nature of Fauci's domain.
But in any case, yeah, it's stunning.
It's all there, right?
Most of this stuff was published and putting the pieces together and understanding what they were doing It's not as hard as people make it out to be if you have access.
So mostly we're being, a lot of smoke is being thrown up so we can't tell.
That's right.
Okay, one more quick thing, another change of topic before we go.
There's a cool paper out end of last year on sex-biased gene expression in five mammals and a bird.
Five mammals and a bird sounds like a pretty good movie.
Yeah, I've heard.
Cross-species rom-com?
Yeah, exactly.
Okay, so sex-biased gene expression just means that there are genes that are either expressed only in one or the other sex, note two, or that they are expressed in different amounts or to different degrees or manifest differently in the two sexes.
And this research has a lot of complexity and intrigue to it, but I want to focus on a couple things.
One, the language around sex differences sounds like it comes from a different era, one in which biologists were actually biologists and knew what was going on, so I want to read just a bit from the introduction to show you what it used to sound like over in biology.
And then also, there was one piece of the finding.
It's very complex, so I've simplified one of the graphics to show you guys because I thought it was particularly interesting.
If you want to show my screen here, Zach, here we have the research article.
Again, it's called Sex-Biased Gene Expression Across Mammalian Organ Development and Evolution, and that whole first page is just a long abstract.
Here we have the introduction.
In many vertebrates, sex differences are the most extreme phenotypic VARIATIONS SEEN WITHIN SPECIES Although some sexually dimorphic traits are evident to the naked eye, for instance differences in body size or plumage, many are not visible but are no less important, for instance differences in drug clearance or immune responses.
Sexually dimorphic traits are specified at different points during development through sex-specific gene expression programs.
Males and females are almost identical genetically, only differing in their sex chromosomes, X and Y in mammals, Z and W in birds.
Genes on these chromosomes, SRY in mammals and DMRT1 in birds, initiate the sex determination pathways responsible for the differentiation of the gonads into ovary or testis.
Okay, none of that is exciting.
It's basic, and yet almost nothing happening in trans ideology at the moment could possibly accept that that was true.
that reach different parts of the body and bind to their receptors on target cells.
The hormonal signals trigger gene regulatory cascades that differ between males and females, leading to differential gene expression between the sexes and the development of sexually demorphic traits.
Okay, none of that is exciting.
It's basic, and yet almost nothing happening in trans ideology at the moment could possibly accept that that was true.
Okay, so again, like I said, a lot of cool stuff in this paper, but here's just, here's a slightly simplified version from a piece of figure one, which had several parts.
So this is Figure 1E, again from this paper published in late last year, in which what you've got is you've got five species.
I don't know why they're not including the humans here, but they've got four mammals, mice, rat, rabbits, and possums, and a bird, a chicken.
And they looked at five different brain areas.
I also don't know why they are separating brain from cerebellum because the cerebellum is obviously part of the brain, but put that aside.
But five different areas of the body where genes might be expressed brain, cerebellum, heart, kidney, and liver.
And in this particular figure, figure 1E, what they're looking at is when does the differential, the sex-biased expression of the gene, turn on?
Is there always differential expression?
That's always SB, the darkest color in each of these, the black across the whole species, or the darkest color for each of these five different parts of the body.
Is there only sex-biased expression before sexual maturity of the intermediate shade of color, or is there only sex-biased expression of the gene after sexual maturity, the lightest version of the color?
And there's a whole lot in this nuttery that we are suffering through with regard to trans ideology, which suggests that the things that are different about men and women can just be switched off and it doesn't matter at all.
Look at, across all of these species, both how much variation there is.
So there are a lot of sex-biased genes in all of these animals.
I guess the numbers within each of the pie charts are the number of genes that they found that have sex-biased expression in each species.
So the chicken, for reasons that are unclear, had a lot more sex-biased genes overall.
But in each of them, there are a lot of sex-biased genes.
And it varies tremendously.
In the possum liver, which is a marsupial mammal, there are more genes that are sex biased only after sexual reproduction, only after sexual maturity comes on.
And there are none that are only before.
There are some that are dark here that are expressed in a sex-biased way throughout the entire lifespan, and some only after sexual maturity.
And then in the brain of the mouse, all of the sex-biased genes in the brain of the mouse that these researchers found experience sex-biased expression.
That is to say, males and females have expression of these genes in different ways, even when males and females have the same alleles.
Across the entire lifespan.
So this is a lot.
I know this is a lot to consider at once.
The takeaway for me is There is so much complexity, and this is not just complicated.
This is a complicated visual, but there is so much complexity in terms of under what conditions, when, and where there is going to be sex-biased expression of particular genes in each of these species that they looked at, that the idea that you can decide, you know what, I'm feeling like a guy today.
I think I'll just take some testosterone and see how it feels to be a man.
Well, no, it's not going to happen.
There is too much going on.
And this is just five systems, right?
And these are using still fairly crude molecular techniques because, again, biology is relatively new.
We can do a lot, but we can't do all that much compared to the complexity that's there.
And even with our relatively crude tools and this A really complicated graphic.
We can see how much complexity there is and how much differential expression of genes by sex there is across systems and across time within individuals.
Yeah, that's mind blowing.
I must tell you, I'm slightly concerned that the model organisms may be telling an incorrect story, but it doesn't really matter.
And I'm glad to see possum there, although I don't know what's going on with possum as model organism.
Maybe it's also being used that way.
I don't know it to be being used that way, but the other four here are.
But it doesn't really matter.
The point is, you've got differential expression across all of these tissues where you wouldn't imagine.
I mean, you know, how different is your liver function if you're male or female?
And how different does your liver function need to be if you're male or female?
Oh, well, I can't think of anything.
Therefore, there's not well, but there is.
Natural selection says yes, there is.
And B, not only that, but there's differential liver function by sex for some genes only before you hit sexual maturity, for other genes only after you hit sexual maturity, and for others across the entire lifespan.
Oh, there's a lot we don't know.
Oh, is there a lot that we don't know and we mess with it at our peril.
Yeah, we almost, we know almost none of what you would need to know and needing and knowing isn't the same thing as being able to alter it.
But it does mean that this sex transition stuff is like almost literally putting lipstick on a pig.
It's like, you know, I mean, on a boy pig.
Right, exactly.
But what I'm getting at is the point is, well, how much of the road did you travel by putting lipstick on?
Yeah.
And it's like, well, OK, how much did you do about, you know, in your inner transition, how focused were you on making your liver into a girl liver?
My doctor never mentioned that, you know?
And, you know, of course this is how it would be.
I'd be really curious to see that done with some truly wild creatures.
Yep.
But the degree to which there are genetic expression differences throughout life is shocking, but not surprising.
That's right.
All right.
That brings us to the end.
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Quick note about schedule changes.
We'll be gone next week, back the following Saturday, and then we're gonna repeat that weird schedule again.
So we're gonna be here on May 4th and 8th, and then again on May 18th and 22nd, and then be in here regularly on Sundays for a little while.
But things are getting weird, and that is my crazy bird call Indication.
Alarm.
That it's time to be buoyant.
That it is time to get off the air.
So until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
