Anecdote in Science: The 224th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 224th 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 animal behavior: the implications of an orangutan using a medicinal plant to treat a wound, and the one-off videos that we’ve all seen—of cats preventing toddlers from falling, of a beluga whale retrieving a woman’s phone. What does this say about the minds of these other organisms, and about ...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 224.
Yes, indeed.
224.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying, and there's much to discuss this week.
You have a plane to catch, and that means Zach will be manning the Q&A with me.
Yep, we're going to do a Q&A after this.
We're not we, the team Dark Earth is doing a Q&A.
The collective we.
But you and Zach, you've done this before.
It's awesome.
And that's for locals, local supporters only.
We also had a couple conversations this week with some local supporters having done a drawing for, you know, pulling a couple people from the 2,000 plus local supporters we now have.
We'll probably do things like that in the future.
That was fun.
Please join us there.
It's great.
And we start off the Q&A's also with a question from our Discord server, which is also something you get when you join us on Locals.
There's a watch party going on now, early guest episodes, a fair bit of content that's there and only there, like our Q&A's, like a lot of the work that you did from Panama with Zach.
So join us there.
And we're going to talk this week about, let's see, Orangutans?
And Other Animal Behavior.
Yes.
And The New York Times.
Oh.
And The Nation.
I remember those publications.
Yeah, yeah.
Some fondness and nostalgia.
Yeah, indeed.
But first, as always, we start with our three sponsors right at the top of the hour.
No ads throughout the rest of the show.
And let's go.
Let's go.
No doubt.
You want to live a long and prosperous life.
Yes.
But longevity isn't everything, Brett.
Wow.
Do you know something I don't?
You just made an editorial comment.
I thought I'd editorialize right back.
Well, point taken.
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Excellent.
Yes.
You wanted to start with orangutans.
As always.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Don't start with orangutans.
I find that that's a mistake because they're stronger than you would imagine.
I find them the most arcane of the great apes, and maybe that's just me, but I understand them the least.
I've spent the least time thinking about them, so great ape is a cladistic term.
It's a good group in phylogenetics, in macroevolution.
I know you know this.
Yes.
That includes the African great apes, chimps, bonobos, who are sister to one another, gorillas, orangutans, and then in order for that to be a good group you have to include us as well.
So we are technically great apes as well as monkeys and primates.
We are technical great apes.
We are also tactical great apes, and part of the reason we want to talk about orangutans is it turns out they may be kind of tactical, too.
A little more technical.
Ethnobotanical, medical, yeah.
But so, orangs are in Southeast Asia, in Indonesia and Malaysia.
They're different, differently behaviored throughout their range.
In some places, they're fairly solitary.
In other places, they're in groups.
And then there are the so-called lesser apes, also in Southeast Asia, the gibbons, which includes the acai man, which is the biggest gibbon.
And they're charismatic.
Oh my goodness.
Duetting.
Duetting monogamous, duetting gorgeous.
One of the new innovations in ape land, or if we were to use a technical term, the synapomorphy, the shared derived characteristic, one of the shared derived characteristics that happens at the level of apes and then has not been fully lost in any of the apes, but does not exist one of the shared derived characteristics that happens at the level of apes and then has not been fully lost in any of the apes, but does not exist before apes happen, is brachiation,
We have this sense, a lot of people have this sense of like, well, that's what monkeys do with jungles.
And those monkeys that do some moving through trees don't actually do this hand over hand.
They don't do the swinging motion because brachiation is something unique to apes.
It's hard to imagine orangs doing it.
We've never been there.
We've never been to the part of the world that they exist in.
But they're big.
These are big animals.
So there's a paper out this week that got reported in New York Times, various places.
So you guys may well know about it.
You can show my screen if you like.
Published in a nature property called Scientific Reports.
And I say that sometimes.
So a nature property.
This is a relatively new thing.
Nature and science as the biggest, still have the reputation for being the most important scientific journals on the planet, have spawned a bunch of smaller, slightly more niche journals.
They basically put their imprimatur on these journals, but they are not as broad and Or as prestigious.
Or as prestigious.
I was going to say that, but then, you know, there's been so much total crap in nature and science that, you know, prestige, prestige is increasingly a metric that doesn't track, that doesn't, isn't accurate.
I got a slogan for them.
Good.
Prestige on fire.
I get it.
I don't know.
If you imagine they had Prestige and they've torched it by publishing a lot of nonsense, their Prestige is on fire.
But it sounds like a positive thing.
Oh, Prestige on fire!
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
It's like the Tour de France.
It's like bike racing on steroids.
Yeah, that was a good one.
Yeah.
All right, so this paper, which came out in... I'm looking at my hard copy.
Sometime recently, I don't know if it was April or May.
Active self-treatment of a facial wound with a biologically active plant by a male Sumatran orangutan.
And we're going to talk a bit about what the nature of this evidence is as we segue into the next section, but let me just read a couple of sections from it so you guys see.
So just the most salient thing about this research is, in the final sense of the abstract, this is the first systematically documented case of active wound treatment with a plant species known to contain biologically active substances by a wild animal.
So all the pieces of that are Active application of a plant by an animal to the animal that is not a human.
And the plant also, separately, previously, is known by humans to have these bioactive properties that would make it appropriate and relevant to be doing the work that it appears to be doing in this case.
And it's been documented carefully, as opposed to, oh, I'm pretty sure I saw... oh, never mind.
Right.
And so a couple, just to, what's that?
What?
Am I wrong that there is just a simple error in the abstract?
Yes.
You see it too?
Interesting.
I was going to come back there, but you tell me what you see.
Well, what I see is it says, sorry, it's a little far away.
It says, although self-medication There is widespread evidence of such behaviors as whole leaf swallowing, bitter pitch chewing, fur rubbing in African great apes, orangutans, white-handed gibbons and several other species of monkeys in Africa, Central and South America and Madagascar.
What?
Here's my hard copy.
Yeah.
You see what I've done there?
Yeah, I see that.
I've underlined monkeys and Madagascar and written, oops.
All they needed to say was primates.
All they had to say was primates.
All they had to say was primates.
So, um, yeah, I wasn't going to start there because we're in the woods, but, and I also did not have time to create a little phylogeny to show this, but this is not biologists being nitpicky here.
This is actually a nested set issues issue, which, which Which is how it is that people like us could be like, well, what is it?
Oh, it's an ape.
Okay, then I know all the bigger nested sets that it belongs to.
And the problem with that sentence, as Brett just Here, this one that I've now got highlighted is that there are no monkeys in Madagascar.
There are monkeys in Africa, there are monkeys in Central and South America, there are no monkeys in Madagascar.
So, if you haven't thought a lot about primates and you think that us phylogenetic systematists-ish are mostly just creating categories in order to keep other people out, you might think, well, didn't you just say, like, we're great apes and it's important?
Like, who cares?
And, like, the gibbons are lesser apes, but they're still apes.
Well, you can be a member of a group and feel like, why are you still calling me a member of the bigger group?
Haven't we changed enough that you don't have to call me that anymore?
So we have made a point often to many people's irritation of saying, yeah, but we're fish, right?
Yes, whales are mammals.
Whales are mammals, but whales are also fish.
And we are fish because we were fish.
And you never can become not a member of the group that you were, no matter what it's called and no matter how much you've changed, even though you don't look like a fishy fish anymore.
There are no monkeys in Madagascar, but there are wild primates.
They're non-human primates.
The primates in Madagascar are not monkeys.
They are lemurs and lemuroids, and those branched earlier in the primate tree than monkeys evolved.
And so that group is similar to some people, you know, to an untrained eye.
They look monkeyish, they're doing monkey things, but they're not.
So they are outside of the group that they have been stuck in here.
Just to use the very clever phrasing that a student of mine came up with, I've forgotten his name actually.
I think we mentioned him in our book when we talk about this.
The way to think about this is that what Heather is calling a good group, a monophyletic group, is a collection of species that falls off the tree of life with a single cut, right?
So the point is when we say, you know, that humans are mammals, that's not an arbitrary judgment, right?
There's nothing that could happen to us evolutionarily that would cause us to move to a different branch of the tree.
We will always be on the branch of tree of the tree that is called Mammals and so anyway, this is a utterly non-arbitrary way of describing Relationships evolutionarily and the funny thing here is not only did this So that's not a sentence very deeply in the paper.
That's in the abstract.
This paper has one two, three, four five Six seven authors.
Yeah, not one of them caught that you and I both caught it inside of a single read right and None of the peer reviewers caught that?
Right?
It's an odd error, and I don't mean to cast... It's irrelevant.
And that's why I wasn't going to start here, because I think that this work is actually interesting and important and relevant.
And as we'll talk about later, you know, what is it that constitutes an observation.
What is it that constitutes evidence?
What is it that constitutes statistically viable data?
You know, not this, not when you've seen something once, but that doesn't mean that it's not relevant in your understanding of the world.
And so, you know, I was not planning to start there, but I'm...
Not surprised that you two went, what?
Why is that right there?
Yeah.
It's a lesson that if you've learned it, it's impossible to miss that.
So that does it.
Yeah.
I think, I think the content of this work is interesting, but it is also interesting that in 2024, That is apparently an issue that can be missed by, let's say there was only one peer reviewer, which is unlikely, right?
And an editor.
So it's at least nine people that get it.
Yeah.
Strange.
Okay, let's just, there's a little, there's some good stuff in here in the introduction about what previous work has shown about what orangutans are doing with regard to application of plants for medical reasons.
Among Bornean orangutans, that's Pongo pygmaeus, there are several reports proposing the intentional ingestion of specific plant species also used in ethnomedicine for their medicinally active properties.
In Sabah, Malaysia, a four to five year old severely wounded female Bornean orangutan was observed eating ginger leaves and stem.
Ginger is known as a traditional medical plant against inflammation with antibacterial, antiviral, and antifungal properties.
In seven years of observation, no other individual except two flanged males was ever observed feeding on the same ginger species at that study site.
Point of order, I did not remember actually from my own primatology background that a flanged male is... that's the point at which they come into full sexual maturity and actually this particular male I'll get back to this paragraph here in a moment.
The particular male who's been observed applying this particular plant to his face that is the subject of this paper is thought to have been born in the late 80s.
And he was first observed about 20 years later in 2008 or 2009, if memory serves.
And he was mature, but he wasn't flanged yet.
And he only became flanged in 2021.
So we have, and that was the point at which he became fully sexually mature, actually engaging in territorial disputes, actually trying to make a go of it as a, as a, as a sexual male in over 30 years old.
So very interesting that that appears to be the reproductive part of the reproductive life cycle or a potential lead part of the reproductive life cycle.
And I did not have time to chase down the references on that.
So question for you, and maybe you don't, don't know, or don't remember.
But my guess hearing that would be that this is partially responsive to the social environment and that if there's no, if he's going to get clobbered for being a sexually mature male by males who are bigger and stronger and dominating that space, then maturing into one is a negative.
It's not a positive because he can't mate and he's going to get clobbered.
So there are other cases like this, like In Calatricids, which is marmosets and tamarins, new world monkeys that are gorgeous.
Yeah, so in marmosets and tamarins, and I don't remember how many species this has been observed in, but there is a, they live in a niche that is very unproductive, which makes it forage, they forage on gums and saps and insects.
They dig around and So anyway, it's a very high-intensity, low-output type of forest.
And they're jungle.
They're Amazon basin, up through Central America, jungle monkeys.
Yep.
But basically the upshot of the story is that as like with humans, the raising of offspring is incredibly labor-intensive, which requires a couple can barely do it.
Occasionally a couple does it.
But what happens is you end up building up a troop of family members that Basically free the mother to forage full-time.
The mother is not taking care of the baby.
The troop is taking care of the baby.
The mother is foraging full-time to produce enough milk for the baby.
And the interesting thing is that there is often a subordinate female whose reproductive capacity is suppressed by that role.
So, A, I know, good, cool, relevant story.
I believe that there are other, well, I mean, even naked mole rats.
The story is often told as the mating pair are suppressing the reproductive capacity of the others, but somehow reproductive capacity is being suppressed.
Usually, I think, I think the stories that I know tend to be female reproduction being suppressed, not male.
And I don't know of phenotypic changes that occur with these, other than the internal endocrinological, physiological changes.
The development of flanges seems... I bet there's pheromonal stuff, so stuff that we can't detect.
But again, I don't know of any externally observable by, you know, the most populous great apes, which is us.
And it is usually females.
But let me make one last point before we go back to the chimps.
Did I say chimps?
The oranx.
Yes, I've read also, back when I was working on monogamy and primates, I did a lot of reading in this and it was amazing.
And you're done with that now?
I'm done with that project, yes, decades ago.
No, I thought you were... No, I'm still into monogamy as a primate, but I'm no longer studying it in the library.
Yes.
Not an interesting place to study it, honestly.
Getting rough.
But anyway, the point is, I also read multiple places that the dominant female was suppressing the reproductive capacity of the subordinate, which is essentially impossible.
Because the point is you've got some sort of communication.
I always had this image of her like sitting on others.
Because it's like there's this intimation like a chemical suppression.
So what is that then?
You have that big black box that I've seen no evidence of.
It's implausible.
You could say it's chemical and it may well be chemical but the point is if the subordinate female is reading the signal She's got a receptor.
Why does she have a receptor if it's not in her interest?
She has to be, you know, she has to be entertaining the signal.
Right, so the point is it's obvious, you know, communication happens when both parties are interested in a message being conveyed and the idea that this is, you know, this is not Harrison Bergeron where the dominant female is, you know, drowning out the
the subordinate female's ability to hear reproductive this is you know there's a there's a signal molecule maybe and there's a receptor for it so they're agreed that she should not be reproductive while in that role yeah anyway the punch line to that story i am fairly sure is that the reason that a female these females are unrelated most of the members of the troop are No, the helpers at the nest are related with the exception of the subordinate females.
that are sometimes multiple reproductive males who are in the polyandrous troops of the calatricid.
- But the helpers at the nest are unrelated? - No, the helpers at the nest are related with the exception of the subordinate females.
And the subordinate females, I believe, essentially have, they are in a game theoretic pickle.
If they decide to find a reproductive male and start a troop, They're in big trouble because it's so hard to raise offspring They're almost certain to fail at it.
So they are better waiting which is dangerous.
You might die in the meantime and never reproduce they are better off waiting and inheriting a troop and And the key is they can mate with a troop and a territory, a troop and a territory and males that they can mate with because they're not related to them.
So the point is they can inherit the whole shoot and match and they can be reproductively viable.
But the point is, it's like a human gamble where the point is better watch her food.
Because the subordinates have an interest in her disappearing sooner rather than later.
Absolutely.
So that tension exists, which is part of why those systems are so interesting.
They have so many exceptional features and, you know, it really kind of helps you see how evolution and sociality interact because all of the stuff in it makes sense.
But if you sat down, you'd never heard of these creatures and you sat down and saw all this, you'd think, what the heck is going on here?
No, and this, I think, our enthusiasm about this is, you know, it's our particular interest from long before we ever met each other.
And as soon as we started seeing these organisms in the field, it was clear that, you know, both of us could just spend years watching wild animals do their thing.
But it also, I think, is one of the surprising things to me and one of my frustrations in reading Otherwise, really intelligent analyses of human behavior by people who've never considered non-humans, which is unfortunately a large percentage of the literature, not just in psych, but from the humanities especially.
Right, like people who are trying to explain what humans are, who say things like, well of course humans do this and animals don't.
Like no, you know, dragonflies may not.
Banana slugs may not.
Cichlid fish may not.
But most of the things that you, that people end up talking about and saying like blanketly like humans versus non-human animals aren't actually true.
And it's just, it's not this hard line.
It's just not.
Yeah, in fact, here's a good one.
Chimps are our closest living relative.
Chimps have been elbows together.
Well, but that's what I was going to get at.
Okay.
So what is the mating system of chimps, right?
Well, you know, chimps are thought to be polygynous, basically.
Oh, but then a more remote version of Chimp is discovered, Bonobos, and I believe Bonobo is actually, if I remember the story correctly, somebody scrawled the word Bonobo on a crate.
It is a misspelling of a place name, which has stuck as the description of these Pygmy Chimps, and they're all Pygmy Chimps.
They're also not small, but Anyway the point is there was a fervor when we were back when we were in college there was a fervor because the sexual behavior of bonobos is famously different from common chimpanzees and so there was a lot of desire to sort of argue that well actually the real human mating system is promiscuity because look at the bonobos and are we closer to the bonobos?
The Bonobos do things via cooperation.
They have food for sex trades.
They have everything for sex trades.
They just, you know, they're always getting it on all the time.
And isn't that a better model than the super aggressive, polygynous, one male only, exclude all the other males, they're going to beat each other up in the corner model of chimps?
Like, well, they're both Equally related to us.
That's the thing, is if you take the model that we were talking about where, you know, a clade is that which falls off the tree of life when you clip it in a single place, the point is actually we can't be more closely related to one of these two species than the other.
We are equally related to the two of them because they diverged after our split.
And so the point... After our ancestors split from their ancestors, they split into two species.
Also, did we, although we only have one species left standing.
Yes.
If I remember the biology correctly, well, we split from the line that leads to both species of chimps something like six million years ago, if our evidence is correct.
And the two chimp species diverged something like two million years ago.
And I believe that what happened is that chimps and gorillas tend to live in the same places.
And gorillas died.
They died off in a location.
They went locally extinct, opening an adjacent niche.
And so bonobos evolved into it.
I hope that's... Oh, I don't know that story.
It's a very interesting evolutionary story.
But anyway, the point is this.
Everybody wants to leap to a conclusion.
Well, the biology says that we're actually polygynous.
Ha ha ha.
Right?
But no, it doesn't.
It says we're actually promiscuous.
No, it doesn't say either of those things.
What it says is that there's a hell of a lot of variation at this level.
And in all the apes, there's a lot of capacity for flexibility and culture and sociality and behavioral ability.
Right.
For whatever reason, we've talked about in our book we talk extensively about what the reason might be, but what we call species in other clades tends to look like population level differences in humans.
Two different populations of humans can be radically different in the way they inhabit a niche, in their social systems, So, the point is, you can't just say, well, what's our closest relative, and look at them and think, well, then that's a pretty good guide to what we are, because actually we're a hundred different things, and the two pieces of evidence we have from our closest branch don't agree.
And it's six million years ago.
And it's six million years ago.
A lot has changed.
That's my recollection, too.
I mean... You weren't conscious for all of it.
No, I sure wasn't.
Okay, let's just sharing some other past evidence of orangs being ethnobotanists.
In seven years of observation, no other individual except two flanged males was ever observed feeding on the same ginger species at that study site.
The researchers concluded that the juvenile may have attempted to treat itself with these plants.
Another study, which interviewed 13 traditional healers from central Kalimantan, showed that Bornean orangutans feed on the same plant parts from two plant species, Ancaria gambierroxib.
It's a ridiculous word.
R-O-X-B?
What the hell?
Sorry.
And Ternandra galliata riddle.
Okay, I don't know what's going on there.
Used by traditional healers for treating internal illness, tumors, and hemorrhage.
Additionally, they observed a female Bornean orangutan selectively choosing young leaves of Myzytia species, the pulp of Diarrhoea, and Aleximosa, and leaves of Belang-Hundebeck, Scolopia macrophylla.
This plant combination is used in ethnomedicine as a prevention against fatigue.
Despite these reports, overall, evidence of plant consumption for self-medication in orangutans is still limited.
So, I go through all of that to point out that A, traditional healing is still alive and well in the parts of Indonesia and Malaria.
I don't know.
Central Kalimantan.
That's going to be Indonesia, I think.
You said Malaria.
I said Malaria.
That's Malaysia.
Malaria's there too.
We apologize to Malaysia for that slip of the tongue.
Not to malaria at all.
So I don't know here, central Kalimantan, if we're in Malaysia or Indonesia, but healers, traditional healers are alive and well and doing their thing.
And they have disclosed to other researchers that they are using some of the same plants that they have observed orangutans using.
But that is not a systematic view by scientists who have gone to look at what the orangutans is doing.
So just one more paragraph here.
This is just images of the orangutans question.
They did not get any of him actually applying the leaf juices and the leaf to his face, but you can see this big wound on June 22nd.
So I should point out, these are not selfies.
So in animal behavior, there's still a fair amount of...
Photographing of creatures by researchers.
Yeah.
No, he did not take the selfie here.
I had one more paragraph, but my computer is not.
There we go.
This is just the end of the paper.
Taken together, chemical analyses of the properties.
So I will say there are a certain number of typos in this paper.
So I'm hoping that the thing about the monkeys in Madagascar up top, it's kind of a big one, but that it got, I don't know, got typo'd.
Something.
Taking together, chemical analyses of the properties of the Ferbaria Tinctoria and the orangutan's particular goal-oriented behavior are consistent with the hypothesis that the process of preparing and applying herbal ointments may be a form of self-medication that reduces pain, prevents inflammation, and accelerates wound healing.
Before I read the rest of that, what he did was he was observed three days after they first saw the wound on his face, big wound under his eye on his face as you saw in the pictures, carefully chewing a bunch of leaves of a plant that yes, some orangutans in the area have occasionally been seen eating.
But it's rare in their diet, and he doesn't ingest them.
He is chewing on them, and he's taking the juice and rubbing it under his eye.
And then after a bit, there's a bunch of flies on the wound, and he takes the now fully masticated leaf wad out of his mouth and pats it, tucks it onto the wound like a poultice.
And the flies are no longer there.
They can't access the wound.
And they see something similar another a few days later.
And also, they see him spending less time in active behavior while he's right after the wound happens and during the active healing part of the wound.
And this is one of the things about careful animal behavior is that if you're doing sort of time budget analysis, you can know how active was he beforehand, How active is he now?
How active is he afterwards?
And sleep and rest being actually good for wound healing, that also seems to be a behavioral modification associated with his treatment of his own wound.
Just the end of this.
The present study may thus present the first report of active wound management with a biological active substance in a great ape species and provides new insights into the existence of self-medication in our closest relatives and in the evolutionary origins of wound medication more broadly.
As forms of active wound treatment are not just a human universal, but can also be found in both African and Asian great apes, it is possible that there exists a common underlying mechanism for the recognition and application of substances with medical or functional properties to wounds, and that our last common ancestor already showed similar forms of ointment behavior.
All right, I have another disappointment with this paper.
And again, I'm not disappointed at what they seem to have discovered.
It reads as quite plausible, and anyway, and very interesting.
But okay, there are three hypotheses here, three obvious hypotheses.
They've articulated one of them.
That our common ancestor already had a self-medicating behavior and that we have inherited it together with orangs.
But given the nature of both of the species in question, that is, our species and orangs, the possibility that one of these creatures observed the other one doing it and picked it up that way, you know, the idea that, oh, that plant might, you know, if a guy with a wound is, you know, dressing it with a particular plant,
Given the intelligence of the creatures in question, not saying it happened, but it is certainly plausible that an Orang looking at a person could have picked up that information.
And it's, to my mind, even more likely that indigenous people watching apes, great apes in the forest, you know, would have noticed the dressing of a wound and would have thought maybe that stuff's good for me too in a similar situation.
So I will say, although you're right that that little paragraph at the end that I just read suggests that that's the hypothesis, they do talk about the other possibilities, and you've only spelled out one of them yet.
But the other possibilities also being just independent emergence of this healing behavior, right, being the third, in the rest of the paper, and they just don't spell it out at the very end.
But what they specifically talk about, so you and I have not been to Southeast Asia.
I do not have a good model in my head of to what degree there are still people living in pre-industrial ways in the forest where the orangs live.
If this were in the Amazon Basin, Yeah.
I could, I have some model, I've been, you know, we've been to some parts of it, have some model of what it might mean to imagine that people, that people might be co-occurring with these animals.
I don't know to what degree that's happening.
But why does that matter?
And because your, your premise hinges on they could have, they had to observe.
Yeah, but it could have been 3000 years ago.
Okay.
They do have an example in here of... I read it in hard copy, so I don't have it in the electronic form.
I think it was capuchins, actually, which are New World monkeys.
Very angry little New World monkeys.
They're nice.
I like caprichos.
So here's an example.
So not apes, but monkeys.
Active wound.
Here it is.
Active wound treatment.
has also been described in a captive capuchin monkey, captive capuchin monkey, that was observed grooming her vaginal area and four of her own wounds with a sugar-coated tool.
I don't know what sugar-coated is doing there.
However, as the authors noted, the capuchin was used to having her wounds treated with an antibacterial salve topically applied by caregivers.
So this is exactly what you're talking about.
Like, we know these are primates.
They are therefore observant problem solvers who, you know, monkey see, monkey do.
This is not just true of human monkeys, but of all the monkeys and also the lemurs.
So, you know, we have an example of something that looked like applying a salve topically, but it was in a captive situation in which that monkey had seen such behaviors admittedly with something else, you know, with some other property done to other monkeys.
So, it is recognized that there is learning that happens across species.
Now, to the third possibility, which you articulated, which is that this is independently occurring, that wouldn't be shocking either because, let's just go through the simple and surprising logic.
The forest, especially a tropical forest, is full of potential medicines.
Why?
Because all of the plants in a forest have the same problem, which is that there are lots of animals which can't make, they cannot capture the sun's energy directly.
We're therefore going to have to steal energy that's been captured by other creatures.
So all of the consumers of the forest, look at the producers of the forest, and wish to consume their leaves and so the leaves have to be defended and what has happened is that plants which are much better chemists in many ways than animals are have come up with molecules that interfere with Biological processes and they've found them all.
So the point is if you've got an, you know, an overactive organ, there's probably chemicals in the forest that will down regulate it.
If you have an underactive tissue, you can find compounds that will up regulate it.
So the point is there are medicines out there.
They're all poisons.
But then again, we say that all medicines are poisons.
Even in pharmacology, we say that.
So, the point is, given that you're an Orang living in a forest full of potential medicines, will it never have dawned on any member of your species that actually, I've got this itchy whatever on my skin and I rub this leaf on it and it feels better, right?
And they're, I mean, they're salad eaters anyway, so they're already foraging widely among leaves.
Yep.
Yeah, exactly.
And so there will, you know, you would even notice it potentially, you have a wound in your mouth, and you eat a particular leaf, and actually the wound in your mouth heals faster than the last one you had.
Or it's an analgesic.
A number of what's taught, a number of the things that are talked about in this paper, you know, there's anti- There's antibacterial, there's anti-inflammatory, there's antifungal, but there's also just anti-pain.
Right.
Like, oh, that hurts less now that I've eaten that.
So I'm not, you know, now I can sleep, which itself is healing.
Yep.
Now there is a question of, you know, presumably your pain should be pretty well regulated.
If you're feeling it, it's probably useful to feel it.
There are certainly cases for humans in which it's not the case.
And I can imagine, I mean, if, as you, the example you gave, if you've got a wound in your mouth, and it is so bad that it hurts to eat, but you need to eat in order to continue your metabolic processes in order to have the strength to get better, then you might need to, you know, be really careful with yourself and not eat sharp things, but also it would be great to relieve the pain briefly while you eat.
Yep.
But let me give you another example, which you will remember from our, uh, early, early, um, academic days in Neotropical Forest.
There is a tree called Xanthocylum setulosum, which has a most impressive kind of triangular, um, spine on the trunk.
It's a large spine with a pointy end.
Kind of looks like an aggressive nipple.
I never thought that, but okay, yeah, it looks a little bit like an aggressive nipple.
Really sharp spine at the tip.
And the natives used it as an analgesic for if they had to do something like remove a tooth that had grown infected.
So anyway, that was the story that we heard.
It was a very effective anesthetic.
And I once bumped into this tree with my knee and I swear my whole knee went numb and it was numb for a good couple of hours so it really made the point.
It didn't take very much of this stuff to have a profound impact.
I'm curious, maybe no one else will be, but usually in the forest you wear pants.
Yeah, it went right through.
So it went through your pants?
Yeah, I was wearing field pants.
Right, right, right.
But that's just, that's interesting that it was, right, it was, they, they puncture them and those are, they're aggressive nipple spines.
So, um, interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was interesting.
Um, but let's put it this way.
Really, we got to flip the question on its head.
Yeah.
Why be a smart creature?
Right.
Because there's lots of useful stuff to be done if you can figure out what the patterns mean.
And, you know, there's not a dumb ape out there.
Right.
Well, there's some individually dumb apes, but there's not a dumb ape species out there.
The idea that they would have completely missed that there were physiologically relevant aspects of different plants that were useful at different moments is very unlikely.
Yeah, and I mean, the question of, does medicinal use of plants predate the split of all of the great apes?
Because orangs split first, and then gorillas, and then humans from Pan, from the chimp species.
Is interesting at a sort of a comparative biology level.
On the other hand, I find this one, I don't care that much because it feels more likely that this sort of thing was invented over and over and over again, discovered and then refined over and over and over again in all of the species.
And what for sure pre-existed the split at the base of the great ape tree into what are now five extant species was a curiosity and a behavioral flexibility and a sociality
all and you know long childhood and generational overlap and you all of these things that we talk about all of which and theory of mind all of which allow for a you know exploratory approach to the world in which you live.
Yes and.
And the fact your point about it's likely to have been discovered over and over again also answers the question of whether it predated our split.
Because it almost has to have.
If it is, you know, occurring many, many different times, then the chances that none of those times... It depends on what we looked like.
So I don't know.
I don't have a date in my head for when we think that great apes first branched.
I don't.
For some reason, 14 million.
I really don't.
I don't know.
But it's a long time ago.
I don't have even a model in my head of what paleontologists or others might think that basal great ape looked like, what the environment it was living in was.
But it was a monkey.
It was a monkey.
So if it was a monkey and monkeys do this, I mean, frankly, even the lemurs are doing it.
So it doesn't take a ton of intellect.
I mean, you know, lemurs, they hold their own in the absence of monkeys, but they're not the sharpest tools in the drawer.
They're not the brightest primates.
No, they're not.
Very cute, though.
Yeah, they're very interesting in their own right.
But I did want to add one other thing, though, which is I wanted to connect this with, and we happen to have a prop, we have our dog Maddie here.
I wanted to connect this with dogs rolling in gross stuff, which they seem to love doing, right?
And I just wanted to point out there's an obvious interpretation of this.
I don't know that it's the right one or the only one, but if you're a hunting animal, and domestic dogs are, it's been a long time since they've branched, but 30,000 years ago they branched from wolves.
and wolves are collaborative hunters and highly intelligent and the point is well what if you're if you're a mammalian hunter really almost anything but a human You know, you're handicapped if you're a primate in this regard, but it's an olfactory game.
They track each other by scent because a living creature can't help but leave information about its presence in an environment, so they track each other by scent.
And if you're a hunter who wishes not to give away the game, well, you've got various tools at your disposal.
You can be downwind, that's helpful, but you can't always be downwind.
And one way to address the problem is to mask your scent as something else that smells very strongly, which I think accounts for the rather annoying habit of your dog smelling something really awful and deciding that it wants to bathe in it.
I have a possible prediction for you, and it might not track in terms of the timing.
I don't have a good sense of when all the breeds were developed, but I have recently been thinking about dog domestication for the upcoming issue of County Highway, which I write about wild puppies.
And the prediction-ish is that breeds that are selected to be bird dogs would be less likely to do this because birds, not being mammals, do not have nearly as much of a developed olfactory lobe.
And so you would expect that hypothesis to hold if you are hunting mammals and the mammals like you, the dog, are snout forward and maneuver your world in an olfactory fashion.
But if what you're hunting are birds who are much more visual than olfactory, have poor senses of smell, there would be less value in doing this.
Yeah, I agree with the logic, but I think it's not a strong prediction in this case for two reasons.
One, you've got ancestral wolves, which were not specialists.
Yes.
And generally not birders.
Yeah, probably not birders almost at all, maybe occasionally.
You get facultative stuff like we saw with the fox yesterday.
We'll talk about it in a minute.
Um, but so you would expect that wolves would have this behavior and then all of the the breeds which have arisen in the last 30,000 years would inherit some of it and it might be that an obligate bird dog that You would have the loss of it, but it would require a loss.
I think that's right.
I think it's going to be a loss.
That's why I said I'm not sure about the timing, how it tracks.
It may be a loss, but it might be slow and no one would be selecting, no one would be favoring the loss.
I mean, we'd all sort of rather our dogs not do this, but unless we're relying on them to hunt for us.
But the other question is, yes, It's marvelous to have a hyper-specialized hunting dog, I'm sure, if you're a hunter.
But I wonder how, A, that may be very recent where, you know, I'm a hunting duck, right?
And the point is, oh, there's a season.
And so, in general, hunters, even probably until the last hundred or so years, We're hunting whatever there was to be hunted.
And if they were hunting, if they thought they were hunting duck and they happened on a deer, they probably weren't picky about it.
So having your dog behave in a way that doesn't screw up your hunt by giving off a scent that the prey can detect is probably useful.
So, our dogs evolved from wolves, not foxes.
But foxes have proven to be domesticatable.
See mid-20th century Russian... Crazy Russian experiments.
Crazy Russian experiments.
And you get the same kind of phenotypic changes in foxes that have been selected to be nice to humans as you do in domesticated dogs, where the most interested in humans foxes get floppy ears, and they get white blazes, and they get curly tails.
Freaking adorable and remarkable that this sort of crosses species lines because foxes and wolves are not sister species.
I will point out the fact that the Russians did this which makes you feel a warm a warmness in your heart for Russians.
It has to be tempered because they also did the other experiment and created absolutely monstrous foxes through selection very rapidly.
Of course.
So, we are lucky to live in a place with a lot of foxes, and it is wild puppy season.
I've actually not seen any yet this year, which is disappointing to me, but last year we'd seen them in the end of April reliably.
But there is there are a couple of foxes that come through our property fairly regularly and the four of us were finishing dinner last night it was it was dusk it was pretty late and she comes through so we also just stood up and just looking out the window and she came in a little patio area where there was some quail lucky to have quail too I mean it's just paradise here and she it looked like she just diverted
to consider whether or not she might put a quail in her mouth if the quail was amenable.
And she wasn't...
do you have pictures of this?
I don't have last nights, but I might have...
But you have some wild puppies?
Yeah, I might.
That would be great.
So, yeah, what it looked like we saw was admittedly kind of half-assed, facultative, like, "Oh, maybe I'll hunt quail tonight" move by this beautiful red fox.
And red fox is it's fulpis.
Fulpis is the common name for all of them, even though they come in lots of different morphs that aren't red.
So you want to show that?
And here on this island, we have red and black and we have the hybrids.
They all have this white tail tip.
And this is going to be... I think it goes there.
You keep talking.
I don't know what else to say.
I was done with this story from last night.
All right.
Hey, Zach, can you show this picture?
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, so here we have a baby fox learning how to do fox stuff around the den.
You can actually see the opening to the den here where this fox has emerged in the week prior to this, I think.
So this, and you know, this is part of what I was writing about for County Highway that apparently it's going to presses tonight, so it'll be available soon.
This particular den that you showed me, you showed me on my birthday last year, so end of April, and you had seen them the day before.
So I have this in my head now, like end of April is when the kits emerge.
They've been underground in their dens with their moms for a while.
This particular den and you know these places are protected on this island you're not supposed to get too close and there are a lot of fences up and um and so far here I have seen people being respectful although there's definitely a couple spots where you know 20 photographers with giant lenses are all focused on one fox it's a little much um but this den which this mother
produced six kits uh one of whom ended up with this giant gash on their side and that healed yep and then a different one disappeared from an eagle probably from an eagle attempt to catch the kits this den and this den is also immediately adjacent looks from the surface to be contiguous with a rabbit warren It was originally a rabbit warren.
It was taken over by the foxes.
But there's rabbits that'll hang out.
There's probably a rabbit just off screen here.
Yeah.
And certainly the foxes are hunting the rabbits and they're feeding their babies rabbits.
But interesting that this den, which was so productive, worked so well last year, No foxes this year.
Nobody in it, yeah.
Nobody in it this year.
It's odd.
And there's plenty of foxes around.
Yes.
We're pretty new here.
We're beginning to get a sense of who's doing what where, but it's always fascinating to see how many things You go someplace for a season and you think, that's what this place is.
Yeah.
That's what it is.
And you go two seasons, you're like, oh, well, this is unusual.
And then it may turn out that the first year was the unusual one or the second one was, or that actually you just are living in a high variability environment in which there's lots of stochasticity and you need a lot, a lot of years of data before you can actually know what normal is.
Yeah, this has surprised me how many things that seemed like, oh, this is just what happens in April.
It's like, no, actually the patterns are much more variable than I would have expected.
Yeah, and you know, it's also possible that they used to be regular and they're becoming more stochastic.
I don't know.
Yep.
Right?
And you just you can't know if you have just started collecting your own observations.
Yeah, absolutely.
We've mentioned it before, but the disappearance of sea stars from the archipelago here, and actually from much of the west coast, Is an utterly profound change, ecologically speaking, given the role that they were playing, but it doesn't, I can't say this for sure because I haven't been embedded in the literature, but it does not seem that there was a proper baseline data because no one was expecting them to go anywhere.
It didn't seem like a very interesting thing to study to count how many of these things they were.
They were like innumerable.
Yeah.
And then they vanish so you almost can't find one anymore and the point is that's a profound change but we can't we can't really compare it to something because the data was unavailable before anybody took it.
And this this is I don't think this would help or the particular thing you're talking about but this is one of the invaluable Maybe it is measurable.
I wanted to say immeasurable, but usually ignored or misunderstood values of natural history collections, natural history collections of museums.
That as much as, you know, we used to talk about, you know, I worked with someone who, you know, was sort of understood to be a hoover of organisms.
He'd go into a place and he's just like, I'm going to collect them all.
And collect is a euphemism for I'm going to pickle them and put them in jars and save them for later so we can look at them.
And I didn't even need to say kill.
Collect is killing and preserving for later scientific use.
And it was never the work that I wanted to be a part of, but all of us are downstream of benefiting from that kind of work.
And the fact is that those museums collections, which are increasingly, we've talked about this before on Dark Horse, are increasingly being relegated to, you know, Off-site places where they're not really accessible, where if anyone wants to come use them, they have to work hard and they're not going to be in the beating heart of academic culture, such as hopefully it still exists in these places, is a huge loss.
And frankly, it also feels like it's the first or second or third of many steps to, once they're out of sight and out of mind, someone will say, What's the value anyway?
Right.
That's valuable real estate.
Let's get rid of all of those collections.
And one of the things those collections can do is actually give us longitudinal data that is a long-term temporal data on, oh, actually there was someone here in 1880 collecting birds and probably...
The people who lived there weren't too pleased with the fact that he came in and hoovered up all the birds, but now we know what was here and in approximately what densities if we have some sense of what was the effort put in.
It's not perfect.
It's not the same as walking a transect and going, I counted this many, but you can get some comparative data from museum collections and that's historical data that is irreproducible.
And it's essential if you want to figure out if you're changing something, which we now constantly are.
Right.
Yes.
All right.
So enough with the orangutans.
But I wanted to point out a couple, just in passing, as long as we're on the topic.
Zach, do you want to play the clip of, let's start with the beluga whale.
I should say I hate the name of beluga whales because it sounds like it has something to do with beluga caviar, which is actually from sturgeon.
But this is a true whale, and here we have it appearing to return the cell phone of somebody who has dropped it off a boat.
That's a beluga?
Yeah.
Belugas are toothed whales?
Yeah.
It must be.
I didn't know that.
Never thought about beluga whales before.
There you have it.
They remind me of sturgeon.
The confusion is an odd one but um but all right so there's a question we now increasingly all of us I think encounter if we're online at all we encounter rather remarkable natural history videos and there's a question about what to make of them yeah you know could be that that isn't somehow what it appears to be right but it's seems pretty likely that that
You know, the woman had clearly dropped her phone right then.
The whale appears to have decided that there was some reason, you know, could the whale have been angry that something was dropped into its habitat?
I don't know.
Could it have been trying to do a favor to the person because the whale also understands that people are some kind of intelligent species?
Probably.
You don't know what to make of it, but the point is making nothing of it is an error.
It happened.
Now, maybe in the AI era we will be less and less sure that these things actually did happen.
And in this case, we can be reasonably sure that the event happened once.
And the question is, what to do with an event like that?
I mean, you know, it doesn't mean anything fundamental, right?
There were no cell phones in evolutionary history, and so there's nothing fundamental about the interaction of belugas with cell phones, but there is some clue to the mind of a toothed whale in this clip.
Yes.
And, you know, we've seen other videos.
We see whales appearing, you know, a whale that's been tangled in a net will come to a boat seeming to want... And lead people to the whale that's tangled in the net.
Yeah, or I've seen ones with the tangled animal approaching the boat because there's some awareness that people actually can help, that they have tools that the whale doesn't have.
Is that really what it means?
Like, you caused this problem!
Yeah!
I believe this is your net.
But okay, so now let's show that other video.
This is a video I saw somewhere in the last week or two that appears to be a cat doing... Yeah, show it.
It appears to be a cat who is going to save this baby from falling down the stairs.
Cat is on the job.
Pushing the baby back.
And did I fail to send you the video of the dog saving the boy from the other dog? - Yeah.
Many people will have seen this video somewhere.
And there's another one I didn't...
There's another one that's fairly widespread of a little kid, a toddler, on a high-rise apartment balcony that is sort of interested in climbing up, and this cat keeps knocking the hands off the railing.
It's not quite as aggressive.
He doesn't end up biting his head, but he's clearly like, It looks very much like theory of mind.
I can see what you're attempting and that's not going to work out well for you and I'm going to stop it.
Right.
Now, I think in some ways what I want to surface here is the significance.
We have become very timid about anecdote.
You and I haven't because we know anecdote is important.
And the problem is anecdote is not data.
Doesn't mean it's unscientific.
In fact, it's an observation, which is the first step in the scientific method.
So, the problem is that the coup that has happened where the laboratory scientists have convinced everybody that the only thing that's really reliable, scientifically speaking, are, you know, carefully controlled experiments.
That's right.
This is nonsense.
Most of what we have learned Over the, frankly, thousands of years that we've been doing science in a formal sense, was not done in carefully controlled circumstances.
It was done in a philosophically robust way.
That's what makes it work.
It's not the fluorescent lights or the laboratory environment that does it.
But in any case, It is interesting to live in an era where observations that somebody may well have seen in the past but would not be easily conveyed to the population of planet Earth, right?
If somebody sees an orang in a forest rub a plant on a wound, Right?
They may be very convinced of what they saw, but, you know, the only way that we who don't know the person reporting it, we don't know if they're a reliable witness, right?
We don't know that they didn't ignore some context because it's a cool story.
But these little snippets of video that people capture and, you know, frankly, they fascinate everybody.
We're all interested in the idea that there are other creatures out there that have minds and those minds don't work the way ours do but you can sure in, you know, very much against Nagel's point about understanding what it is to be a bat, you can understand things about what's going on in the mind of other creatures and you'll be surprised at how similar aspects of it are and how different aspects of it are.
Yeah.
So let's take the cat, the cat question.
So let's just say you and I experienced a weird anecdote once.
I now have heard many stories like it having reported it, but we had a badass male cat.
He was a very nice creature to us, but he was kind of a brute.
He'd been on the streets for the first 10 months of his life, and he loved us, but he was not fully domesticated.
Yeah, there was a part of him that he would rebel, actually, if we tried to keep him indoors for his own safety, frankly.
We lived in a place where there were coyotes and things, and we tried to keep him in at night, but he wasn't having it.
So, anyway, that cat, we were concerned when we got two kittens.
We were very concerned that this badass male cat, especially since within cats, especially in lions, there is known infanticide where a new male will kill off the offspring of his predecessor.
So that's a reproductively brutal but understandable strategy.
So we were concerned.
We have these two kittens.
He was neutered, but yes, he was a badass neutered male.
Yeah.
So anyway, we were very cautious about introducing the kittens to Crenshaw, the badass male.
In fact, we had the kittens in a separate room and I remember the first time that we, you know, he obviously detected them and he was very interested in getting in there and we're trying to like hold him back so that we can actually see what happens when they meet.
He's gonna maul them.
Right, we thought he might maul them and he really wanted in so it reinforced our concerns.
But that's not what happened at all.
In fact, when we finally relaxed enough to let them interact, he took over mothering them.
And that was pretty clear what he was doing, that in fact he was teaching them things.
He would, you know, outside he would... Once they were old enough to go outside, yeah.
You know, lead them up a tree, then he would lead them on a chase and stay just a few steps ahead of them.
It was, it really looked like mentoring, right?
It looked like mothering, which was surprising because A, they weren't related, and B, he was a male.
And both of them were male too, and I don't know that that matters, but in fact Tesla, one of our cats who longtime viewers have seen, is one of those kittens.
Yep, one of those kittens.
Now 13.
Now 13 years old.
So anyway, the point is, okay, It's not surprising that cats have a mothering instinct.
In fact, it's dead certain that they would have to, right?
It's not easy raising kittens, especially a bunch of them, so the mothers are very good at what they do.
In mammals, the genome is shared between males and females, but for one chromosome which has very little on it.
So at a genetic level, it's not like whatever it is that turns you into a functional mother would be absent.
And in cats in particular, the The ability for female cats to develop the capacities is largely has to be written into the genome in some way.
It has to be instinctive because they don't really get an opportunity to observe it other than when it was done to them when they're kittens and don't know anything and So, anyway, the point is it's not terribly shocking that that program might exist in a male.
You would expect it to be latent.
Maybe, you know, you castrate the male and somehow that program gets activated and you might even imagine that our interaction with the ancestors of our current domesticated cats might have Dispensed with an animal that behaved in a destructive way and preserved those that could be trusted around babies that could be trusted around Small animals.
Well, there are in some cultures stories about not leaving cats alone with babies that you know The old wives tales that cats will smother babies.
Yeah, my feeling has always been the cats that smothered babies didn't last very long Right, exactly.
And so what would that do?
Would that cause a blurring?
You know, just as the Russian fox experiment suggests that domesticating causes the augmentation of certain traits in whatever species you do it to.
So anyway, all of that is to say...
That you have the mammal platform, you have a highly intelligent mammal.
That highly intelligent mammal is terrifically flexible.
You know, little cats exist in many different habitats, hunting many different things.
That requires the software to be the thing that changes in order to allow them to do it.
So, in our environment, it wouldn't be so strange if these things manifested in weird ways.
And frankly, I don't know that that cat was trying to protect that baby, but I think that's probably the leading hypothesis given what I saw.
Yeah.
Um, you know, so anyway, that tells you something very interesting that the cat, you know, if a dog did it and, you know, I wish I'd had the video where the dog saves the boy from this other aggressive dog.
The boy is being attacked and the dog understands that its job is to get between the attacking dog and the boy.
And there are lots of stories like this.
In fact, in my own family, my grandfather is said to have been saved from a bull on the farm that my father grew up on in Iowa by my father's dog.
My father's dog took on this bull and survived herself as well, but you know, saved grandpa.
Save Grandpa.
And, you know, in dogs, this is less surprising because dogs have been domesticated for three times as long as the next nearest domesticate.
30,000 years is a very long period of time for us to have been partnered with this formerly wild animal.
And cats are much less domesticated for two reasons.
One, they've been domesticated for a much shorter period of time.
And two, their level of domestication wasn't as a hunting partner.
It was as grain protector, which required them to remain wild, right?
It required them to hunt things that were threatening to the grain, like rats.
And so anyway, they're at very different places in that story.
I think there's a number of interesting hypotheses around how and why we domesticated dogs.
And I'm not sure that hunting partner primarily is the best one out there.
But related to that, I would say the distinction between dogs and cats that is inherent there is social versus solitary.
Yeah.
That solitary animals are going to be less...
Probably more importantly, your first point, domesticated for much less time, but also solitary versus social.
You would predict, therefore, also that foxes, while apparently amenable to domestication, would be less amenable than wolves, being more solitary.
Um, I think this goes to a, a, a deeper level, which is, and it sort of recovers my point about a hunting partner.
It may be that hunting partner is not a precise description, but the domestication though, partner, mature helper, right?
Helper, whether it's, you know, guarding you from being snuck up on, whether it's finding things you can't find because your olfactory sense has been diminished.
This is a partner, right?
And that partner, that's a very different role than... So basically the point is wolves have partners.
Yeah.
Right?
And so you can take over the role of, you know, partner for a dog and 30,000 years of evolution can unfold with Cats and presumably with foxes what you're effectively doing is taking the Immature period and making it permanent right you're taking over the role of mother or something and that's a very different relationship Which I think
Accounts in part for why lots of people can't stand cats who are okay with dogs Right, it's it it's not you know, the dog the cat is putting them in a role that they don't like Right.
It's not as close an analog for a friend That's interesting So some of the evidence, one of the pieces of evidence for our domesticated cats are effectively infantilized, they're pedomorphs, is that they continue to purr throughout their lives.
And wild cats that purr, and there are two, there are cats that roar, cats that purr, but of the species that purr, the purring stops at the point that mom leaves and they're on their own.
And whereas our domesticated cats continue to purr with us and at us through life.
Let me just say the bit of looking into the hypotheses around dog domestication that I looked into for this wild puppies piece for County Highway.
Darwin, and he got this from his cousin Galton, I think, was the first to propose, in a big way, basically that early humans, 30,000 years, he didn't have the number to it, but you know, a long time ago, humans are basically going and stealing puppies in order to befriend them.
And then we have all of the, for what?
For guarding with the fire, for hunting, for all these things.
Right.
And so that's the oldest known hypothesis for what it is that caused the domestication of dogs.
And you might say the co-evolution of dogs and humans.
And then there's a newcomer hypothesis that is somehow all the rage, even though everything from the archaeological to the behavioral, to the, like, all of the evidence, frankly, that I can find suggests, no, this is not right.
How Has wolves just kind of hanging out near human settlements and eating all of our leftover food that we left lying around and we were going to let these wolves who might eat us kind of hang around eating the food that we never left around?
You know, the thing is, I haven't looked at the evidence, but I kind of get it, right?
So first of all, there is that way that Maddie looks at you, you know, when you're looking at a piece of food that is just not food.
Yeah, but she's domesticated.
Right.
But the point is, there is a kind of, oh, I will totally eat that, right?
Like, it could be cheap to keep me around because I will be fueled in large measure on things that are not food.
So, you know, bone marrow.
How much do wolves weigh?
100 pounds?
Something like that.
That takes a lot of meat.
So wolves are Wolves, not domesticated dogs, but wolves are pretty much obligate carnivores, right?
Humans weren't leaving bones and marrow around.
They were cracking them open.
We were living at the borders of what we could do, and when we didn't, we made more people.
And also, these were wild animals who lived in packs and sometimes attacked people.
Why would we suddenly start letting them into our trash heaps?
That's the question.
You've got an intelligent critter, okay?
Let's say that it's not like you're feeding it.
You're supplementing its normal diet.
So imagine some scenario in which there isn't quite enough for the wolves and they notice that you're throwing out something, right?
Whether it's bones or who knows, stuff you can't eat that they can.
And you have established enough, you know, you presumably have weapons, so the dogs are not in... It's often very bad.
You have to sleep.
Right, but I don't necessarily think it's impossible that an understanding emerges, right?
We're actually better off that those dogs are there because those dogs mean nobody can sleep up on us, sneak up on us, and the dogs have an interest in being there because they're surplus stuff.
Yeah, I could see it.
I don't buy it because, for a number of reasons, but So many reasons.
We just didn't leave... We wouldn't have been leaving much food around.
And they're big, and they're fierce.
They're not dogs at this point.
They are big social hunting predators, and it's proposed as the self-domestication hypothesis.
This is how wolves ingratiated themselves with us, even though we weren't that interested.
What group of humans is not going to care that there's suddenly another species hanging out that could at any moment turn on them and attack them?
Well, I have to say, I don't think the parameters are that simple.
And I could see an agreement, a tacit agreement, emerging in which both parties recognize an advantage.
And then you could imagine a rare scenario in which, you know, a wolf who's been hanging around, maybe a wolf who's starving and does have puppies, Maybe she dies and then you get to the point of hand raising.
And once you're at the point of hand raising an animal, things change.
I mean, there's essentially no mammal you couldn't hand raise and come up with something, you know, not perfectly safe, but something where the animal would not view you as a potential prey item.
Yeah, so it's been a while since I was embedded in this, but I remember one of these authors doing a better job than I'm doing of describing why he felt that this hypothesis made no sense, and I'm not sure I found the right paper here.
Okay, I'm not sure this does it, but I've got a couple of cool little quotes here.
This is published in 2021, CERPL, in Frontiers in Veterinary Science.
Commensalism or Cross-Species Adoption?
A Critical Review of Theories of Wealth Domestication.
So he's going through some of what we've just talked about.
The Commensal Scavenger Hypothesis.
Several versions of this theory can be found in the scientific literature on dog domestication, all of which appear to originate from an imaginative fable first published in the opening chapter of Conrad Lorenz's popular book Man Meets Dog, 1953.
Here, Lorenz depicts nomadic bands of human hunter-gatherers some 50,000 years ago, whose successful hunting activities inevitably attracted the attentions of scavenging wild canids, who then began to frequent their hunting camps in search of discarded bones, offal, and so on.
After a time, the humans began to realize that while the scavenging canines were a minor nuisance, they also provided a useful shield against larger marauding predators, like saber-toothed tigers, by barking loudly when everyone was prowling the vicinity.
Now, instead of chasing the dogs away, the humans began encouraging them to remain nearby by actively provisioning them.
And so, bit by bit, the process of domestication gathered steam.
I hear from Lorenz, many years have passed, many generations.
The jackals, he thought that dogs came from jackals rather than wolves, have become tamer and bolder and now surround the camps of men in larger packs, whereas formerly they maintained concealed by day and only ventured abroad by night.
Now the strongest and cleverest among them have become diurnal and follow the men on their hunting expeditions.
And we have a history here of various pieces of evidence.
Referring to one Native American group in central Alaska, the anthropologist Nelson states that, quote, one of the pervasive themes in Koyukon ideology is a prohibition against wasting anything from nature.
If someone kills an animal and then leaves it unused and it gets to return for its meat, bad luck or illness will come as punishment.
And And this is from a place where we currently imagine wolf domestication to have been happening, where things were even closer to the bone, as it were.
Our resources were even more scarce than we imagined they often were.
So maybe we should have this conversation.
You seem I'm going to be surprised if this is clear, but I don't see any of the hypotheses we have discussed as preposterous.
And I see them as potentially related.
Right?
You get some wolf pack that's living adjacent to your territory and something happens such that puppies are motherless and That makes the leap.
But anyway.
Yeah, Zach.
Just very quickly, it seems to me that the relevant question here is just whether there's stuff from animals that the wolves can eat that we actually can't.
Because there's a difference between marrow that we don't really eat now but we can and we would have been harvesting.
And we did.
And the actual bones and the cartilage and stuff that we just would be actual waste to humans but has value.
Yep.
Because that would mean that you're I mean, anyway, that's the question.
No, I think there's two objections.
The second one, which is weaker, sort of behaviorally, why did bands of humans who were already trying to defend themselves against, you know,
The hostile forces of nature going to allow a bunch of other organisms who could be attacking them to hang around but Were there big mittens that wolves could have gotten advantage from that we were leaving and That that's the piece that I see basically no evidence for that.
We would have had to have been putting specifically putting food aside or Having begun to befriend them through taking them in as babies, using them in our relationship with them to help bring in more food.
Yep.
All right.
All right.
The last piece.
Uh, okay.
So I wanted to talk a little bit about a seeming radical shift in the public narrative that arose in the New York Times.
And I should say, uh, a.
A member of my family forwarded this piece, which caused me to look at it and my reaction was pretty negative.
You want to show the piece, Zach?
What we have here is the New York Times and the title of the piece is Thousands Believe COVID Vaccines Harmed Them.
Is Anyone Listening?
Now that sounds like it is the final The straw that broke the camel's back and finally the New York Times is going to reverse course and the gaslighting of the vaccine injured is finally over because the New York Times is calling attention to it.
That is not what this article is at all.
In fact, I'm going to argue this article isn't even bullshit because frankly, if you grew up on a farm, bullshit just isn't that terrible, right?
This is ape shit.
And what the article does is it engages with a radically different tone while selling us the exact story that persisted throughout the vaccine portion of the so-called pandemic.
Right.
Thousands believe COVID vaccines have harmed them.
That is such a crazy number, especially to show up here in the title.
Right.
Because billions were vaccinated with these things.
And so those who were in any way sophisticated were saying, well, of course, all vaccines result in a tiny amount of injury.
But it's really very small and so in any case this is no admission at all because the number is certainly in the millions.
That's one thing and I will say if you want an exhaustive exploration of this article I would recommend that you look at what Chris Martinson released.
He goes through the article and he covers Most of the highly relevant points.
And we'll post that as well.
Yeah, we will post that as well.
But I wanted to make two points that Chris doesn't make that I thought were relevant to the way we've been exploring the issue of vaccine safety and effectiveness because they belong on the record here as the New York Times attempts to regain control of a story that has been officially lost.
Right.
Everybody is aware of people who were injured.
We know multiple people who we knew from before the COVID era.
But there's a selective bias there.
I don't know that there's a selective bias in the group of people before the COVID era.
We know people who were injured who we knew in person before the COVID era who have been injured in the COVID era.
So that's a shocking fact.
Now, we may have a larger friend group than many in even before the COVID era began.
But nonetheless, it is an interesting fact that we know multiple people who clearly have vaccine injuries and knew them beforehand.
That tells you what order of magnitude we're looking at here.
Yep.
Okay, so the two points that I wanted to call attention to are one, that one of the ways that this story has been kept from attaining its
It's rightful importance is that the mechanism by which damage flows from the mRNA shots, and I will say that this article, as Chris explains in his piece, the article makes a point right in the first sentence of calling attention to the Johnson and Johnson shot, which is based on a different technology.
It's based on an adenovirus vectored DNA.
And the powers that be were going after the J&J shot from almost from the beginning.
Yeah there's a story yet to be told and I would also point that we covered more than a year ago now Christine Stable Ben's work in which she finds that the DNA-based shots actually have a non-specific beneficial effect small but a non-specific beneficial effect Very much in contrast to the mRNA shots.
Alright, the mRNA shots have multiple design defects.
The mRNA isn't mRNA.
It's a highly modified, highly stabilized molecule that is not ephemeral in the body.
It persists for a very long period of time.
In fact, we don't even know how long it persists.
But the point I wanted to make is The hypothesis, which I have explored extensively, which is that the mRNAs, which are injected in lipid nanoparticle coating, that lipid nanoparticle has no specificity in terms of what tissues, the cells of which it can enter, which means that as soon as we know that the stuff Circulates around the body in blood and lymph.
What you would predict is arbitrary destruction of tissues.
You would predict effectively arbitrary disease because what happens is The mRNA gets into whatever cells pick up the lipid nanoparticle.
It causes those cells to produce a protein that is foreign and the immune system cannot help but recognize a cell of yours that produces a foreign protein as virally infected and they then destroy it.
So you would, the argument here is that we've got a disease Which is your own immune system, CD4 cells, natural killer cells, destroying your own tissues.
What disease do you expect?
Depends what tissues are being destroyed.
Depends which cells within those tissues are being destroyed.
Depends how many different tissues have been destroyed.
So you would expect a huge number of pathologies and of course the mRNA shots do show a huge range of pathology.
If that was, you know, if that was one tissue that was getting all of the damage from the shot, we would be having a different conversation.
But because it's disguised as a basically, you know, amorphous blob of dysfunctions where, you know, two people injured by the same shot from the same lot may have, you know, dysfunction in very different tissues of the body, very different functions.
That is hiding the level of damage because the story isn't, you know, person took the shot and had this disease.
It's person took the shot and had some effect.
So it is basically by dividing the effect into all of these tiny little subcategories it is hiding it and even then what we have is an overwhelming story of pathology.
Yep.
Okay, so that's one thing.
The other thing is something This article actually, can we, you want to put the article up?
Yeah, yeah.
Scroll down to just after the picture.
OK, now I can read it from there.
So I just want to read you a few paragraphs.
In interviews and email exchanges conducted over several months, federal health officials insisted that serious side effects were extremely rare and their surveillance efforts were more than sufficient to detect patterns of adverse events.
Well, that is insane in and of itself.
OK, there was a massive safety signal in the VAERS database.
Steve Kirsch, Very much to his credit.
Kept pressing federal officials.
At what level of safety signal would you pull these shots from the market?
And he got back nothing of any merit.
So what we know, and we know from multiple lines of evidence, that the safety signal that did accumulate was being ignored.
So we have a system, that system is designed not to spot safety signals.
It saw a massive safety signal and nobody reacted to it.
So the idea that our efforts were more than sufficient is insane.
Okay, but then here's the paragraph that I wanted to focus on.
This is a quote.
Hundreds of millions of people in the United States have safely received COVID vaccines under the most intense safety monitoring in U.S.
history, end quote.
Jeff Nesbitt, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in an emailed statement.
Now, It's hard to even describe how insane that paragraph is, right?
Hundreds of millions of people in the United States have safely received COVID vaccines under the most intense safety monitoring in U.S.
history.
First of all, This was the worst case of safety monitoring in U.S.
history.
I don't think there's even a close second.
But that's the less troubling part of this statement.
The more troubling part is the absolute destruction of the meaning of the word safely.
Now, I believe you and I are responsible for sorting out the abuse of this word over the course of COVID.
And what we have been saying from very early in this process is that safe does not mean without harm.
Safe means without risk.
And it is being used to say hundreds of millions of people in the United States have safely received COVID vaccines.
Well, is that true?
I did some calculations and what I came up with is the number of people who safely received these vaccines was zero.
Why?
Because nobody knew how dangerous they were, or if they did, then they knew they were very dangerous.
So what does it mean to say hundreds of millions of people have safely received COVID vaccines?
What they're trying to say or what they intend to convey is that hundreds of millions of people seem to have endured no harm.
We don't know that they endured no harm because they may have subclinical pathologies or they may not have gone to a doctor and decided to tough it out themselves, given that the doctor was involved in inflicting the harm in the first place.
But nonetheless, I just wanted to point out, if I say That tens of thousands of people have safely jumped from incredible heights wearing a squirrel suit.
Right?
You know something's wrong.
Nobody safely jumps from an incredible height, right?
Even if most of those people do make it back to terra firma alive and well, right?
Unharmed.
Point is, it wasn't safe.
If I say that tens of millions of Americans safely drive drunk every year, No, they don't.
Right?
They may get home, they may not bump into anything, but they're not safely driving drunk.
They are driving drunk without causing harm.
Right?
So the point is, no, they were taking a massive risk doing that.
And we all know it.
Right?
People getting lucky is not a public health policy.
Right.
It's not a public health policy.
If I say that 83% of people who play Russian roulette do so safely.
Well, no.
Actually, nobody has ever played Russian Roulette safely.
Right?
Not a one.
Yep.
Right?
It doesn't matter that five and six walk away from the experience.
So, to have the New York Times conflating this intentionally to try to lead us to the Understanding, which is, again, not a change from the bullshit that they were selling us for the entire vaccine portion of the pandemic, which is that, oh, my God, there are some side effects and isn't that tragic?
But the vaccines, as the article says, have done all of this, you know, protecting of people, which they didn't.
Right.
You know, that turns out to have been a sleight of hand accomplished through what has been called the cheap trick by Norman Fenton and Martin Neal.
So, to have them doing this is clearly an exercise in trying to regain control of the story while admitting nothing but switching the tone so that people who are not paying terribly close attention believe that yes, the story has moved on and we all now know about the injuries.
But the point is, what's missing is the correct order of magnitude.
Are we talking about thousands or are we talking about millions?
Yeah.
And the author of this piece, Apoorva Mandavilli, I may be mispronouncing her name, but she's one of the most useful idiots the New York Times and the whole, you know, the whole COVID infrastructure have.
She has, as Chris Martinson says in his piece, she has been responsible for misdirection and actual misinformation consistently throughout.
And it says at the top here that she spent more than a year researching this article, talking to dozens of people.
And my feeling is, A, even if that were true, which frankly I don't believe, I don't believe.
This article is garbage.
It's appallingly bad.
And it is also timely, right?
The officials are reflecting back on how awesome they did except for these little mistakes, which is Egregious.
But this is a moving story.
You can't report a moving story over the course of a year.
And God, I'm just appalled at what is passing for journalism.
Yeah, what is passing for journalism indeed.
I also had a thought about multiple Multiple stories that are getting a revision, right?
I believe that the truth is that those of us who couldn't be shouted down and who managed to have this conversation in public forced a reckoning where they now have to get back ahead of the story because they look ridiculous.
That there is also, it is interesting to see that the repurposed drug story is getting a revision.
The new protease inhibitor drugs, molnupiravir and remdesivir, is getting a revision.
And the lab leak is getting a revision in the other direction.
And in fact, the author of this story was one of the people who dismissed Lab Leak early on and continued to.
Yeah, as Chris Martenson reminds us, for being patently racist.
Yeah, of course.
But anyway, my point would be, I think that there actually, there's a meta story here.
I think they can't fend off the vaccine injury story any longer, and so they're going to try to control the magnitude of our understanding.
And they can't really protect us from reality with respect to ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and other repurposed drugs.
That story is also beginning to break.
It is interesting that the lab leak is going in the other direction.
And the reason that I think that's interesting is because, this is speculation on my part, but if COVID is a lab leak, and the vaccines were not safe and effective.
There were drugs that were safe and effective that we weren't allowed to use, and the drugs that we were allowed to use were dangerous in their own right.
And all of those things come from the same people.
Right?
There's something very powerful about being able to say, well, person X was injured, and you could have a debate.
Was it the vaccine?
Or was it COVID?
Right?
Well, the answer is, it depends what you're analyzing.
But at one level, this is Team Fauci's fault either way.
Right?
The pathogen emerges from a lab that Fauci was fueling and the vaccine campaign emerges from the same team.
And so that, I think, is a prospect that they are trying to dodge.
They do not want an analysis that says, here are all the people who were hurt downstream of COVID, right?
Whether it's lockdowns, masks, vaccines, the pathogen itself.
Mandated closures.
Yeah.
Any of those harms all comes from the same people.
And that that means that at some level, you know, yes, it's important to figure out what the various mechanisms of action are, but not with respect to figuring out who's to blame.
So I wonder if if we're not watching, if there wasn't a whiteboard somewhere or, you know, a PowerPoint presentation that explained Here is what we're going to do to all of these stories, and we're going to create a new master narrative in which, once again, the people responsible are able to escape.
Yeah, sounds about right.
So, I just want to say something about The Nation.
Sure.
The Nation, when did we decide it was started?
1865. 1865.
Um, long-running, uninterrupted publication, um, was weekly.
I think it is now monthly somehow.
Um, we were subscribers and we stopped being subscribers a long time ago because it stopped feeling like it was doing what it was supposed to be doing.
You can show my screen here, Zach.
This is The Nation's page describing what The Nation is.
This is The Nation's About page.
Principled, progressive, the nation speaks truth to power to build a more just society.
Home to tenacious muckraking, provocative commentary, and spirited debate about politics and culture, the nation empowers readers to fight for justice and equality.
So, in that vein, I thought it might be time to check in with The Nation again.
And here's one of the things I found.
Uh-oh.
This is a cartoon from the April 2024 issue of The Nation.
What did we learn from COVID?
It's two people talking.
Of course, it's a, you know, rando middle-aged white dude playing the part of Satan and a woman of color.
Oh, can you not see?
Yeah.
Sorry.
OK.
And the woman of color is, of course, speaking the nation's muckraking truth.
He says, it's the anniversary of a great tragedy.
I know over a million Americans have died.
I mean, having to wear masks in public.
Remember how they were just overflowing into the streets?
The morgues?
The lines for toilet paper.
Thank goodness for our heroes.
The healthcare workers who risked their lives?
The people who defied ordinances and packed indoor spaces.
And years later, people are still suffering.
From long COVID?
The landlords whose office buildings are empty because people work from home.
Will I say never again?
Be unprepared for a global pandemic?
Do anything as a society to contain a disease.
Oh my goodness.
I'm actually shocked.
Yeah.
Again, I keep on thinking I've hit peak shock.
I can't be shocked anymore.
This is so many straw men packed into so much delusion, arrogance, boneheaded, dangerous wrongness, and straw manning the side of the dissidents in one little cartoon.
I guess that's what I get for checking with The Nation again.
You know, apparently the readers of The Nation and the editors of The Nation are confident that the readers of The Nation will understand that.
What happened?
Mistakes may have been made, but what happened was preparation for a global pandemic that is the only interpretation of all of those things.
And what the objections are is that society was trying to contain a disease.
That is what those of us who think that the lockdowns and the vaccines and the everything, that's what we're objecting to, that anyone was trying to contain a disease.
So this is shocking because The Nation, I mean, we used to get The Nation.
The Nation was, you know, it was in a magazine form, but it was on newsprint, right?
It was a proudly low production values endeavor.
You bought it because of the text on the page was worth reading, right?
And it, you know, it was so radical That it was, you know, if it had a consistent flaw, it was a reflexive distrust of corporations, of government, an obsession with corruption, right?
That's the publication that it was.
And the idea that something, while we were not receiving the nation anymore because it had sort of lost its way, has turned it into a megaphone for pharma?
I mean, that's what that is, right?
How could that possibly have happened at the nation?
And what does it tell us?
It tells us they've gotten, you know, it wouldn't have been worth capturing the nation.
The nation can say what it wants and most of the country will dismiss it as some Fringe so far left.
It's not worth paying attention to phenomenon and yet somehow I guess the prophets are so good In pharma that they even managed to capture the nation.
Yep Yeah, so that's I just I just wanted to show that Disappointing and surprising.
Yeah, that's pretty wild.
Yeah, and All right.
Um, we're gonna shout out to our store here.
Yeah, you got you got something to throw at us.
I think we're all open.
Yeah.
Yeah, so, in keeping, do not affirm, do not comply.
You can get this, or not, at our store, Dark Horse Store, and so many other things as well.
But there's little...
mandate compliance being required, yet there's still a handful of American universities and colleges that are requiring vaccines, including one of the schools that Toby applied to.
And, you know, it's insane.
It is.
There's no connection between reality and policy.
They're going to require this of young people, including young men, who are most likely to be harmed by these insane shots and least likely to be badly affected by the disease.
And that's where you're going to learn how to think?
At a school that does that?
I don't think so.
Not only did they never have substantial risk from this disease, but the version of this disease that is circulating is not one that should be concerning to anybody.
Would that change?
I don't know.
It would not be predicted to change in that direction, although Geert van den Bosch notwithstanding.
But nonetheless, yes, it's a crazy thing to be mandating.
Yeah, it really is.
So okay, that's at the store.
Lots of other stuff at the store as well.
We're not going to be back next Wednesday.
We're going to be back the following Saturday and then another Saturday, Wednesday 1-2 punch like we did just now.
Please join us on Locals.
We appreciate your support, all of your support, sharing and liking what we do.
But join us on Locals.
There's more good stuff there, including the Q&A that is going to follow this in about 15 minutes, where you're going to have Brett and Zachary.
Come join me in Natural Selections.
We've got Patreons.
We've got all sorts of good stuff.
But anything else to say?
No.
Nothing.
I think we're there.
No.
And happy May to everyone.
It is gorgeous.
I hope it's gorgeous where you are.
It is here.
Until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
