Science Friction: The 226th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 226th 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 a new breakthrough in plant genetics: polyploid potatoes and corn from Ohalo Genetics, which are claimed to double the harvest from individual plants. Beginning with a discussion of naturally occurring polyploidy in other species, including frogs, we analyze the discussion of Ohalo’s new produ...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast Livestream number 226.
It's 226.
It's 226 here in the end of May.
The end of May.
End of May.
The end of May.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hying.
And we are going to, we're going to confront some biology and some science today.
Yep, we sure are.
Please join us on Locals if you have not yet.
We have a watch party going on there right now and watch on Rumble or YouTube or Spotify or listen anywhere that you feel like listening.
We ought to call it a gold watch party, I think.
Why?
It just seems fancier and more expensive.
Oh, and those are two values that we definitely have.
Oh man, if this is not a fancy podcast, I don't know what is.
We're both barefoot, right?
I certainly am.
My wool socks have pills on them.
So not that fancy, at least at sock level.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, yes, please join us on Locals.
We've got lots of great stuff going on there, including access to the Discord server and all of our Q&As, and in fact, we're going to spend a lot of time talking today about a story that we first became aware of in the Q&A that we did, the private Q&A that we did this last Sunday.
Which is available to everyone.
You don't have to have watched it in real time, but it's increasingly part of how we are learning about some things that we need to know about in the world, and we hope that you feel that you need to know about as well.
Without further ado, we have, as usual, three sponsors right at the top of the hour.
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Because vegans are made of meat.
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Now, it raises a question.
So many.
What does it do with these terms that even the pros pronounce different ways?
Yeah, I don't actually know.
I haven't run into that.
Right?
I don't really know whether it's telomere or telomere.
I know I pronounce it telomere and I always have, but I've heard pros pronounce it both ways.
Another one of my favorites is we are friends with someone who did some of the most important and in-depth research in the world on a group of polyandrous birds that she calls chicanas, and almost everyone else calls them chicanas.
That's pure chicanery.
My feeling is I'm going with our friend Laura's pronunciation, even though I haven't heard anyone else pronounce it that way.
Definitely jacana.
And as evidence, I would offer that the boat by that name used by the Smithsonian in Panama is always referred to as the jacana.
I've never heard it once referred to as the jacana.
Not the hakana?
No.
No, I don't think I heard that one either.
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What?
My grandfather grew up, at least in his very early days, on a farm.
He was mostly causing trouble not farming, but nonetheless he would have gotten there.
So his family moved him to New York City when he was pretty young, right?
Do I have that right?
I think they moved... I thought it was Brooklyn.
No, no, no, no.
My grandfather lived in...
Oh, um, yeah.
What's the name of the town?
No, I can't remember.
Some town in New York that wasn't New York City, but it definitely wasn't a farm.
Yeah.
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Oh, that was the worst one ever.
Do I get a do-over?
Please.
Okay.
Moink.
Yeah.
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I believe we should clarify that in future reads.
Have you ever noticed that your clarifications are often the opposite of what you mean?
I have, I'm just saying.
Right.
That's kind of why I do them.
But nonetheless... I have also noticed that.
You have also noticed that.
And yet, here you still are.
Here I still am.
Here you still are.
Week after week, year after year, decade after decade.
So far.
Yep.
I appreciate it.
Don't understand it, but I appreciate it.
You know what?
It's because, I understand, this isn't just because of your theoretical work on trade-offs, but I understand trade-offs, unlike the people behind the research that we're going to be talking about today.
Yes, unfortunately so.
Well, I both appreciate and I'm offended by your reference to trade-offs with respect to your husband, but I get it.
I mean, yes, of course they would be No, no, no.
So, on this private Q&A this last weekend that, if you are members of the Locals community, you can go back and listen to, you actually started explaining how you actually have some character traits that make it difficult for you to live with.
You were explaining this to me, and I was looking at you going, like, I feel like if anyone knows, I know.
So, you're not shy about this?
I'm not shy about this.
You don't hide this.
No, no.
I have traits that make me hard to live with for other people and also for me.
Sure, yes.
I imagine that that is true for everyone, all of us.
That would be comforting if it weren't true for everybody, yeah.
I mean, to some degree.
I'm willing to go with that.
Yeah.
Sure, sure.
That manifests in very peculiar and particular ways in you.
And see earlier point regarding you still being here.
Right.
Exactly.
So, um, we got to, how should we, how should we start?
I can start, you can start.
Um, why don't you start?
Okay.
Um, so there is a, here, let me, let me think through how, oh, I'm not plugged in.
There are a couple new patents that have just been assigned to an outfit called Ohalo Genetics Incorporated.
One point of order as you sorry I don't mean to do this, but in looking into this this morning I believe that Assigned means the Patent Office is looking at them, but they have not been granted It's possible that's not right But they seem to be so new that it's hard to imagine they could have moved through the system fast enough And there are a couple a couple reasons to think they haven't been granted But if it turns out they have been granted we will be happy to correct that
Okay, so we do not know the answer to that, nor have we gotten a hold of the actual complete patents.
But I want to share with you, if we can get the tech to work, The abstracts for the two patents assigned to Ahalo Genetics, which has gotten a lot of attention in part because the CEO went on the podcast, All In One?
No, no, the All In podcast.
He is actually a host of the All In podcast, in addition to the CEO of Ahalo.
So he's got like a 20-minute section.
We're going to show a couple of pieces of that and talk about this, but let's first just say what, you know, what these supposed amazing breakthroughs are.
Patents assigned to a HoloGenetics Incorporated.
I'll just read the first one and then we'll sort of translate it, and the second one is very much the same.
The first one's for potatoes, the second one is for maize, corn, and they're hoping that they can expand this to lots of other plant spaces as well.
Polyploid hybrid potato breeding.
Abstract.
The present inventions relate to a breeding system for the production of polyploid potato seeds, plants, or plant parts, where cycles of meiosis, syngamy, and selection are used for interpopulation improvement of progenitor lines and sexual polyploidization occurs during hybrid production by inducing clonal gamete formation in the parents that are to be crossed.
Maybe before I continue we should just define Polyploid for the audience.
So, most people who listen to us will be familiar with the idea that our gametes, our sex cells, are haploid.
They have half of the chromosomal complement of our somatic cells, which are diploid.
Hap meaning referring to one, di referring to two.
So, all of our somatic cells have two pairs of all of our chromosomes, one maternal, one paternal in origin.
And the gametes all have a single copy and it's a mixture.
Presumably there are the occasional gametes that are entirely maternally derived or entirely paternally derived, but they're a mixture, but there's only one copy of each.
And that allows us to put two gametes together in sexual reproduction and create a new diploid being.
Well, at some point we should point out that this will become a theme in what we discuss here, but this raises a profound question because I'll just give you the basic logic here.
If you are an adult creature, that is to say you've reached sexual maturity, then if there's one thing we can be certain of, it's that your genome is coherent.
It works.
It's a pretty good genome to have gotten there.
For a female especially to divide her genome in half and then fuse it with the half genome from another individual and produce an offspring that is brand new has two problems from that female's perspective.
One is That only half the genes that, you know, so let's say that we're talking about a plant.
The female is always going to be producing the larger, more investing gamete, but the female is investing in the spreading of genes that are not hers.
Half of her effort, when she sexually reproduces, half of her effort is dedicated to her own genes, which all makes evolutionary sense.
But why is she agreeing To dedicate resources to raising a half a genome from somewhere else, especially in light of the fact that her genome we know was totally coherent and she has bypassed the opportunity to simply clone herself.
So, I know you were going to get to the second point here, but if I may just take a step back and say, so that is colloquially referred to within evolutionary biology as the two-fold cost of sex.
Why limit the offspring that you are producing to having only 50% of your genes when you could clone yourself and have each offspring If you're a female, why would you go through the hassle and the genetic cost of sexually reproducing?
but fundamental goal of evolution.
And I'll just also asterisk, you said, if you're a female, why would you go through the hassle and the genetic cost of sexually reproducing?
The reason this applies only to females and not to males is because the gametes that are produced by females are large and slow, and the gametes that are produced by males are small and fast and stripped down.
And they are so stripped down that they do not have the cellular machinery required to produce entire beings unto themselves.
So an egg is a complete cell that can make more like it.
It has all of the cytoplasm necessary.
It has the mitochondria and the ribosomes and everything, whereas a sperm basically is a haploid packet of chromosomes and a motor, and that's it.
So a Males don't exist in an asexually reproducing world.
Asexually reproducing organisms are entirely female by definition, by the ways that we define these things.
This isn't just a human construct.
This is just what is fundamental to what you need to move forward into the future.
You need not just your nuclear DNA, but you also need all of the machinery of the cell, and that's what eggs have and sperm don't.
So, this is a long-standing paradox in evolutionary biology.
It's thoroughly understood by everybody who studies this.
And another way to say it is that the existence of males itself is paradoxical.
Males exist because females, for some reason that is not yet thoroughly understood, are More interested in fusing their half genomes to other half genomes than they are to producing clones now There's a very general answer as to why so I want to point out the twofold cost of sex is the willingness of females to Invest in a half a genome that isn't theirs where they could just invest in an entire genome That is an exact copy of the one that they have
So, that's the two-fold cost of sex.
And then, in addition to that, there's the coherence question.
Yes.
Which is, if you've made it to adulthood, you know your genome makes sense, as soon as you fuse half of it to another half, you're running a risk that you don't have to run if you're a female.
You may be doing great.
You are doing great if you are in a position to be able to reproduce.
And there's a good chance that whatever half a genome you get from the guy next door combines with the half of the genome that you have produced into your offspring, and that offspring isn't as good a fit for the environment that you are in as you are.
Which means, in a stable environment, in a static environment, an environment that has not changed and does not look like it will change, It makes more evolutionary sense to asexually reproduce.
But in an environment which changes, especially one that changes in unpredictable or stochastic ways, sex, patently, is an adaptive response because when it evolves, it sticks.
Well, I want to be careful here because there's stuff we're not going to get to today, which I think answers this question much better than the answer we've been handed by generations of evolutionists who have studied this question.
A variable environment is one thing.
That's one explanation for why you might want diversity.
But there's paradoxes stacked on paradoxes here, which is to say, are you really telling me that in this generation, the difference between the generation that my offspring are going to live in and the generation that I live in, that there's enough difference in the environment to gamble on another half a genome being fused to a half a genome?
It doesn't make any sense.
So the answer that we all, I think, are comfortable with is the diversity pays in the end.
How exactly it pays is a topic for another time.
But we've got these two questions.
Why would you clone yourself?
Why would you do anything but clone yourself if you had the opportunity to clone yourself?
Which females do.
It's actually easier than to divide your genome in half.
That's an extra step that doesn't need to be there.
Um, and then, you know, why, if your genome is awesome, would you gamble on, uh, breaking it up?
Right.
And there, I mean, there are a lot, there are lots of other genetic anomalies and weirdnesses that we could talk about and probably we will another time.
But, you know, you could, you've talked about cloning and sexual reproduction.
You could also self, you could create two gametes and put them together and have an offspring that has less genetic, Diversity than you have, because if you're heterozygous at some locus, then maybe your two gametes that you put together were both the same thing, and you put them together and they make a kid that's the same instead of heterozygous like you are.
It's hard to do without the visuals.
But there's parthogenesis, as we've talked about, in a variety of forms.
Haplodiploidy among the ants, bees, and wasps, wherein females are diploid and males are haploid, and boys don't have fathers.
Lots of interesting stuff going on, but we're bringing this up because hologenetics has now Had patents assigned.
Again, we're not sure if they've actually gone all the way through.
With regard to polyploidy in both potatoes and maize and corn, what polyploidy refers to is a duplication of the entire genome in an offspring generation.
So, for instance, we have 23 pairs of chromosomes.
23 is our haploid number, 46 is our diploid number.
All of our somatic cells have 46 chromosomes which are paired up, one maternal, one maternal, 23 from mom, 23 from dad, and our gametes have our haploid, so our haploid number is 23.
If humans were to go tetraploid, say, and this has never happened so far as we know, there are no examples of any individuals viable or not where this has happened, where
By a number of possible mechanisms that are spelled out in the scientific literature, because this has happened in other species quite a lot, you ended up with, instead of the meiotic reduction to haploid germ cells, you had diploid gametes that then combined to make a 4N zygote as opposed to a 2N zygote.
You would have 46 times 2, 92 as your tetraploid number.
You'd have four copies of chromosomes in all the human cells.
And you can imagine that this might be possible, and it might cause all sorts of chaos, and there might be conditions under which it made sense, and a lot of conditions under which it did not.
So I will just say we infer that because this is extremely rare in animals, and Heather will end up talking about some of the exceptions, but this is extremely rare in animals, and I think unknown.
I think it's unknown in something like a mammal.
We infer... I believe it's unknown in both of the endothermic groups, birds and mammals.
We infer that when it happens, it's catastrophic.
So we just never see the individual in which it's happened.
And there are lots of reasons that that could be.
It could be a dosage question or something more complex.
But it's not a sustainable mechanism.
But what we know is that in plants, it actually happens semi-regularly.
We'll get there.
Let's not jump ahead here.
Defining polyploidy, which refers to the duplicating, or more than that, either octoploid organisms and more, of The chromosome number of the parent.
And so what Hologenex has done is worked to create polyploid potatoes and polyploid corn.
If you'd show my screen again, we'll just finish reading the abstract from the first of their assigned patents from May 9th of this year.
Let's see, we had gotten to... here we go.
Reciprocal recurrent selection can be used to inform selection of candidate potato lines that are either advanced to a gene editing or genetic modification system or crossed and selected to induce clonal gamete formation by arresting meiotic recombination and chromosome reduction.
Crosses of parent plants bearing clonal gametes are planned and executed based upon predicted heterotic performance at the polyploid level.
The final product is a homogeneous population of hybrid polyploid potato seed, or derivative thereof, bearing both parents' complete nuclear genomes.
In some instances, the method is used to generate seedless plants.
So that sounds like a lot of very precise and technical language, but the part that matters to us and the description of the Korn abstract is very similar at the broad brush level.
What they are doing, and the term they're using is boosted breeding, is what they're calling this.
They are creating, effectively, new potato plants that have the entire genetic complement of both of their parents.
So instead of the male potato creating haploid gametes and contributing a haploid gamete, half of his, the male potato's genetic complement to the offspring, and the mother potato producing haploid gametes and contributing half of her genetic complement to the offspring.
They've got 100% of dads and 100% of moms' genetic complements producing these tetraploid vetivoli potatoes that are 100% related to both Both parents.
And why?
Their argument is, it's better.
You're going to make more potato per plant by doing this.
And they, in the All In podcast, in which this is revealed by David Friedberg, they display plants, potato, I think is the one that they use, where they show that basically you get a much larger yield across the entire plant.
Larger, more potatoes.
They're not larger potatoes.
He's very careful about this.
Yep, but you get a bigger more vigorous plant and you get a lot more product out of it and it raises the possibility that they are going to simply start doubling yields on crops by using this technique.
That's the implication.
And we're about to start showing a few of the clips from the podcast, which is the only, as far as we know, formal presentation of what the work is so far.
Just a 20-minute, and we'll of course link to the whole 20 minutes in the show notes.
But one of the other hosts, I guess, I haven't caught on that the CEO is actually also one of the hosts.
One of the other hosts asks, OK, but what are the costs?
One of the questions that Friedberg, the CEO of Ahalo, does a feint around, doesn't address, is, well, you can't make more out of nothing.
Where's it coming from?
Won't it require more fertilizer, for instance?
And he says, honestly, I believe, well, yeah, if you're getting more yield, you're going to need more fertilizer.
So, that's one big issue that is not otherwise discussed in any discussions I've seen about this, which is that there's no free lunch.
I mean, quite literally, in this case, we're talking about there is no free lunch.
We're going to spend some time talking about what the genetic implications are, the evolutionary implications, but even if there were none, Even if they had waved their magic molecular biology wand and created plants that are now producing twice or more the yield of the plants from yesterday and there were no other effects, you are going to have to feed many more nutrients into the system in order to get that greater yield.
Well, hold on.
I want to be careful about the idea that there's no free lunch, because there are places that you could get a free lunch, even though my theoretical background is evolutionary trade-offs.
That's what I wrote my dissertation on.
And in one sense, there is simply no free lunch to be had with any, uh, almost any creature that you would encounter in the world because they have been, um, optimized.
So, uh, Thomas Sowell once said, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
I managed to say the very same thing in about a thousand times as many words, um, in my dissertation.
But anyway, well, that man has an eloquence to him.
He does really remarkable.
Um, you have to borrow, Not in this case.
Not that good.
You have to borrow from somewhere, but there are places where you could borrow from that would be effectively free.
And let me just give you... Still not actually free though.
It's not free in a technical sense, but it's free in an agricultural sense.
So let's just say, for example, that a, let's say that potato plants have a contingency plan for a drought that lasts 50 years.
They don't, but let's say that they did.
They have a mechanism for shriveling something down in the soil that can be dormant for 50 years, and then when the right conditions emerge, it brings forth a progenitor plant.
You know, it's basically been in suspended animation.
You could, as an agriculturalist, borrow from that capacity.
If you could get... If you know that you're always going to have water to add.
Right.
Right.
And you're not going to be there 50 years down the road if there's been some catastrophe.
You will have tilled up the soil many times.
So the point is you can borrow from some place.
But you're borrowing from the capacity of the plant.
Right.
From its resilience, from its ability to respond to environmental stress.
And so, you are assuming that the utter control that you, the agriculturalist human, has over the system currently, you will always continue to have.
Which means that the farmers to whom you are selling your products become entirely dependent on you, because their products that you have sold to them are now fragile.
Well, but from an agricultural perspective, my point is just, if these people have come up with a mechanism... Ohologenetics.
If ohologenetics have come up with a mechanism for doubling yields and they've borrowed from some characteristic that's irrelevant, then good on them.
Right.
I don't think that's what's happened here.
Right.
But I do not want to just say because technically you're borrowing from some capacity that the plant has that would be useful in some context that you're cheating because the point is agriculture cheats, right?
Even agriculture where you just simply till the soil to do away with competitors, you know, you're borrowing from someplace that you can afford to borrow.
Okay, so I hear that point.
I maintain my objection to it.
You're still borrowing from somewhere.
But actually, my point here with regard to no free lunch was a little bit different, which is, The soils are still the soils, and given what we have done to almost all of our soils over the last hundred years, they are largely not rich enough to produce the yields that even the same soils were producing 50 years ago and 100 years ago.
So producing—and I'm not saying that what we need isn't, I'm not saying that what we need is, but I'm not saying that what we need isn't.
greater agricultural yield per unit landmass, but that will come with the need to put more nutrients in the form of agrochemicals onto that same land.
You can't produce more potato without also adding the, you know, the plant is one thing, the plant will produce potato, but the plant will need the building blocks, which include nitrogen and phosphorus and, you know, all of the rest of the things that are in the soil or are added from, you know, the, from the agrochemicals. all of the rest of the things that are in Yes.
And we see this already before you get to, uh, Ohalo's innovation here.
We see this in the super crops that are currently grown.
These super crops are not really super crops.
They're totally inferior to their wild counterparts and they require conditions to be created for them that don't make any sense.
Totally inferior in terms of their robustness, totally inferior in terms of their ability to withstand environmental stressors, and totally inferior in terms of their nutritional value and their flavor.
Well, they're effectively, everything is compromised in favor of market parameters, you know.
So you have a crop that literally cannot grow in the wild, cannot compete against its wild counterpart.
But if you use giant machines to destroy all of the alternative plants that might be growing there, and you effectively treat the topsoil as a physical medium And you put in all of these agrochemical inputs, then you get this much larger plant because anyway, the point is you borrowed from all of the natural capacities that the plant has to protect itself to compete against competitors.
And then, you know, you've you've put in the inputs of which the product is effectively being made.
An analogy that just occurred to me, and maybe this won't work, but imagine you're a knight wearing really heavy armor.
And you can't go very fast because the armor is heavy and it restricts your movement.
And a magic fairy comes in and says, you know what?
I'm going to put a bubble around you that you can't feel.
It doesn't restrict your movement at all.
And you're going to be able to move as if you were wearing almost nothing at all.
And you'll be fine because I got my magic.
And the knight, of course, begins to be able to move through the world much more effectively, and destroys the other knights until the magic fairy dust disappears, at which point he immediately crumples over and dies.
Dependent on the magic fairy dust.
So, modern agriculture has become this nightmare, and this is seemingly likely to be a new chapter in the same.
Exactly.
So, let's show just a couple little clips.
Good.
Can we go to the first one?
Yeah.
This is from 3 minutes 55 seconds in this.
Freework, can I ask you a question?
Does that mean that the boosted one has twice the number of chromosomes as A and B?
Exactly right.
So is that like a new species then?
Yeah, so it's called... How does it survive with twice the number of chromosomes?
Yeah, it's called polyploidy.
So we actually see this happen from time to time in nature.
So we're just going to show a few of these short ones.
We do see this from time to time in nature.
Actually, given that a Hologenex is working over in plant space, he should know that we see this a lot more than from time to time in nature.
So there is this compelling paper From, this is published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, published in 2009, The Frequency of Polyploid Speciation in Vascular Plants by Wood et al.
Now they are, they are, now please, please keep the, Paper up.
They are working inherently for this kind of work from a number of theoretical assumptions and from models because the work assumes, for instance, that we have an accurate phylogenetic tree that describes accurately what the evolutionary history of speciation in plants has been.
Of course, we will never know if we've actually got the accurate tree.
We hope to get closer and closer, but we will never know for sure.
these authors are very, very clear about the limitations of the models that they are working from.
That said, they make what they understand to be a conservative estimate from the plants that they are looking at, and well, I'll read the abstract here.
Since its discovery in 1907, polyploidy has been recognized as an important phenomenon in vascular plants, and several lines of evidence include that most, if not all, plant species ultimately have a polyploid ancestry.
However, previous estimates of frequency of polyploid speciation suggest that the formation and establishment of neopolyploid species is rare.
By combining, and this is just how they did the work, I'm going to skip through that.
These frequency estimates are higher by a factor of 4 than earlier estimates and lead to a standing incidence of polyploid species within genera of 35%.
So they, again, with all the caveats about this work, hinges on the idea that their assumptions are accurate, as it does whenever you're talking about work stemming from models.
But their work suggests that 33%, more than a third of plant species, at least among the clades they're looking at, are the result of polyploidy.
They do not find So they're just the final sentence of the abstract.
Thus, the widespread occurrence of polyploid taxa appears to result from the substantial contribution of polyploid eutic later genesis, that is speciation, but not from subsequent increases in diversification rates of polyploid lines.
So they see no evidence that the polyploid species are better at radiating once they're polyploid, at speciating themselves, but that a substantial minority of extant vascular plants are actually the result of polyploid speciation.
So it's not as the CEO of Ahano Genetics says, we see this from time to time in nature.
It's It's actually extraordinarily common in some lineages of vascular plants.
Which is good news for them.
It is good news for them.
This does raise questions though.
There's a difference between what a hollow is doing, which is taking two strains and putting them together without losing any of the genetics from either.
Instead of breeding them together and creating a hybrid, they are creating an ultra hybrid.
What we see in nature, and to be honest with you, I want to know a lot more about this.
My expectation would be that you have these doubling events.
Now, plants...
Are also much more likely to produce clonal offspring.
So these doubling events can be one individual doubling its chromosomes, creating a polyploid rather than two individuals who've done it coming together, which is raises all kinds of strange questions about how polyploid individuals might be finding each other.
That's a very unlikely thing to occur.
And there's also within species, polyploid events, and from neighboring species, polyploid events, which of course, as plants always do, just throws up into the air the question of what is a species anyway, and what kind of species concept are we working with?
Right.
Now I will say that the answer to the question, I'm not sure if Friedberg was dodging the question, it sort of seemed like he was, but the answer is yes, it creates a new species, clearly.
um that is that is i think unambiguous but the question i have is when this happens in nature my assumption would be that it happens and then i don't know over what period of time but then there's an editing down yes that um one of the reasons and you know i think the whole logic is on its head here as we will get back to but
One of the things that you have to ask yourself the question is if this is just such a non-stop win, you know, if you can instantly double the yield of a particular crop, then how did nature miss this?
Especially given that in plants this is something that happens on the regular.
And that by doing so, the parent plants win and they evade the two-fold cost of sex.
This would appear, if there are no trade-offs that O'Halo has not seen or is not revealing here, this would appear to be a win both from the plant's perspective and from the agriculturalist's perspective.
So, clearly, there's something we don't know.
Right, and if you think about just what a plant is, right, it becomes obvious that there's something about this story that isn't right, right?
A plant is a highly elegant, attuned mechanism for capturing sunlight and carbon from the atmosphere and turning them into sugars and starches and making plant makers, right?
It's a von Neumann machine and it ...enjoys nothing more than discovering mechanism to capture more light and more carbon and produce more plant which it can allocate to seeds or it can allocate to roots to collect rarer nutrients or water... And meiosis is tricky!
And it feels a lot.
Get rid of that having process and like, okay, cool.
I met you.
You're great.
Let's put our stuff together and do better in the future.
If you found that polyploids in nature suddenly doubled the, you know, not only doubled the amount of roots, but doubled the amount of shoots simultaneously and the amount of fruits and tubers and whatever else they produce, then you'd say, huh, I wonder what Were they just leaving a lot of this potentially profitable sunlight and and other nutrients including carbon?
Were they leaving it on the table and why?
Right?
So the point is, no, in nature you would not expect these polyploid events to double yields because The parent plants, before they get to doubling their chromosomes, are extremely excellent at capturing the limited resources that are in their system, of which they make more plant and descendants.
Exactly.
So this is a good segue to the next clip, Zach, the one that starts at five minutes.
So this could only happen for a plant, right?
This could never happen with an animal?
It wouldn't work in animals.
It works in plants.
And one way you can think about plant genetics is all the genes are sort of like tools in a toolbox.
Wrong again.
Sorry, but it wouldn't happen in animals.
It only happens in plants.
It's possible that he has such a limited understanding of what his own business has done, that he's talking about the particular plant genetics breeding mechanism by which they've accomplished it, but polyploidy does happen in animals.
There are several vertebrate lineages that go polyploid.
Many fishes and many frogs, specifically, we've already mentioned.
I don't think that there are any known cases of either of the major endothermal ages, that is to say mammals and birds, that have gone polyploid.
But we have here a paper from 2007, Journal of Animal Ecology, Climatic Variation and the Distribution of an Amphibian Polyploid Complex.
And I'll just read the very first bit.
Oh wow, that always happens.
The very first part of the abstract here.
The establishment of polyploid populations involves the persistence and growth of the polyploid in the presence of the progenitor species.
Although there have been a number of animal polyploid species documented, relatively few inquiries have been made at the large-scale mechanisms of polyploid establishment animal groups.
Herein, we investigate the influence of regional climatic conditions on the distributional patterns of a diploid, tetraploid species pair of gray tree frogs, Hyla chrysoscelis and Hyla versicolor, in the mid-Atlantic region of eastern North America.
So there is, there is the, so what they're calling the progenitor species, the diploid species, and then they have a tetraploid that is clearly the result of a polyploid speciation event.
And we've been working what these authors have done in a big, large-scale landscape and genetic and acoustic analysis of which species are where, have tried to assess, okay, we still don't know why it happened.
And I find yet no compelling, at least within the animal polyploid literature, attempt to wrestle with like, what are the conditions under which polyploid events happen in the first place?
But what these guys are trying to figure out in this paper, Otto et al. from 2007, is under what conditions, is it adaptive?
Under what conditions does the polyploid speciation event stick?
And I think rather than work through the technical analysis, I happen to have a PowerPoint lecture that I made for Cloud.
I'm not going to show the entire lecture, and I actually never gave this lecture, but I just want to share the final slide, and you can say something before I do that, which just sort of explains the results in clear English without me having gone through all the technical stuff.
Okay, as you know, this is not a place that I have expertise, but I do have a question.
My prediction would be that where we see this in animals is likely to be, so there's wide range in frogs, for example, of how many offspring are produced by a mating.
And most frogs tend towards the huge numbers.
And there are some frogs that produce very few, including the frogs that you studied in Madagascar.
Yeah.
My bet would be that we see the ploidy events in the heavily R-selected species and not the K-selected species.
That is to say the ones that produce lots of offspring, not a few.
Am I anywhere in the ballpark here?
I do not know for sure, so I don't know at all from the fish literature.
Both fish and frogs have an interestingly high number of species that have extensive parental care, and with the parental care you expect them to be more case-selected, have fewer kids, take more care of the few kids that you have as opposed to produce, produce, produce, produce thousands and the vast majority of them will die.
I don't know the fish literature at all.
What I think I know from the polyploidy in anurans, in the frog literature, is precisely that they tend to be in the temperate zone, and the temperate zone tends to have the explosive breeding assemblages, the no parental care, the lots and lots of kids, and the parents never meet them, and most of them die.
So, heavily R-selected, as you say.
On the other hand, I don't know what the cause and effect is going on there, because as we'll see here with the results of this Otto et al.
But on the other hand, within anurans, within frogs, on the other hand, I don't know what the cause and effect is going on there.
Because as we'll see here with the results of this Otto et al. 2007 paper, the advantages of polyploidy may be about extending to the edges of the niche of the regenerator species.
As your work reveals on the latinal species gradient, the niches are so much smaller in the tropics and there are already so many species filling all the niches that there just may be less opportunity for polyploidy to be relevant, if the advantage is expanding into the zone where you weren't already doing amazingly well.
Well, I actually think that might go in the opposite direction because the number of niches in the tropics and the very finely divided species offer lots of opportunities But you'd have to compete well with whatever was already there.
And it looked well, maybe I should just show this.
So let me just say the reason that I was predicting that it would be the species that produce huge numbers of offspring is that that opens the possibility that these ploidy events are as disastrous as we expect them to be.
But if you produce a thousand offspring, you know, and the occasional ploidy event just happens to work out, Yeah.
And the point is then that one might give rise to something that you would see when you did a karyotype on a frog.
Whereas if you're producing tiny numbers of offspring, the chances that one of these things stick are very low.
If you're going to roll the dice 10,000 times, you're going to try this out.
If you're going to roll the dice twice, maybe not so much.
Right.
Or it doesn't even matter if you do or you don't try it.
The question is, are you going to see the result?
Right.
Somebody who doubled their chromosome complement and only produced two offspring, the chances that either of those are going to make it into the future are very, very low.
But at the same odds, yeah, if you produced huge numbers, you might see one that worked.
Yep.
OK, so I'm just let's show my screen.
Apologies.
This is made for, you know, Undergraduate lecture for a science class.
This is the results of this Auto Adult 2007 paper on this diploid tetraploid amphibian complex of two species of frogs that live in eastern North America.
So tetraploids, which are the triangles on the screen, tended to occupy areas of higher elevation where climatic conditions were colder, drier, and with greater annual variation.
And the diploids, which are the circles on the screen, were restricted to lower elevations that were warmer, wetter, and with less annual variation.
So they're doing well where they do well.
That sounds like a tautology, but the diploid progenitor species has as its zone of greatest competitive advantage places that are warm, wet, and stable, and the tautoploids don't compete well against them.
They do not thrive when in direct competition with the diploids.
Where they do better is at the edges of the range where the diploids were already struggling some.
So the clusters of some topic sites, that's where both species exist at the microhabitat level, not just like, oh, you got a hilltop over there and a hilltop over here and we can see each other, but they're actually intermingled.
Clusters of satopic sites have high between-year variation in breeding season precipitation and annual temperature.
And so there's basically, it's going to be a crapshoot each year, which species, the diploid, progenitor, or the tetraploid, does better in that particular year.
So, the interpretation that Otto et al.
2007 paper provide, and that I've just put into less technical terms, is that the tetraploids are more robust to harsh abiotic parameters, but less capable and interspecific, that is, competition with other species that they're closely related to, with their diploid congeners.
I've already said this, but this research doesn't provide any insight into the origin of polyploidy in the species complex, but does provide a possible mechanism for its persistence.
Again, The tetraploid doesn't do well in direct competition with its progenitor, but it does do well when facing the abiotic Darwin's hostile forces, as opposed to the biotic ones.
Yeah, and I think, you know, I don't want to drag us too far afield into the natural analog here, but one can see why this might make sense, right?
If you're at the edge of your range, you're by definition not highly capable.
You're marginal.
Right.
Inherently.
And one gamble as a marginal creature at the edge of a range is to increase the capacity to change.
In fact, one of the things that we see, let's take the example of our ability to detect different wavelengths of light.
All of the pigments that detect different wavelengths of light in our eye Are derived from the ancestral one which detects light present or absent, right?
So you've got rhodopsin and then you've got a whole family of genes that detect narrower wavelengths, different colors.
And so what's happened is the gene that allowed us to see light and dark and the gene that is still effectively what is in, you know, nocturnal creatures eyes because they sacrifice the ability to see color in favor of being able to amplify light more effectively.
That initial rhodopsin gene, because it existed in more than one copy, the copies could diverge from each other and provide a greater range of capabilities.
Right.
So that's why it's interesting to discover that we don't just have, you know, four distinct genes that came from different things and came to detect different wavelengths of light.
They're actually related to each other.
Yes.
So you might see a tetraploid at the edge of a range experimenting, you know, by buying some more genome, it gets more room for creativity to take over and evolution could produce an adjacent species that's more adapted to the next niche over.
Perfect segue to the next little segment, actually.
Awesome.
The one that starts at 8:26.
One of the other things this unlocks is creating actual seed that you can put in the ground in crops that you can't do that in today.
So potatoes, the third largest source of calories.
But the way we grow potatoes, you guys remember the movie The Martian, you chop up potatoes and you put them back in the ground.
Because the seed that comes out of a potato, which grows on the top in the flower, Every one of those seed is genetically different because of what I just showed on this chart, right?
You get half the DNA from the mother, half the DNA from the father.
So every seed has different genetics.
So there's no potato seed industry today.
And potato is like $100 billion market.
With our system, not only can we make potatoes higher yielding and make them disease resistant, What we also make is perfect seed.
So farmers can now plant seed in the ground, which saves them about 20% of revenue, takes out all the disease risk, and makes things much more affordable and easier to manage for farmers.
So it creates entirely new seed industries.
So we're going to be applying this boosted technology that we've discovered across nearly every major crop worldwide.
It'll both increase yield, but it will also have a massive impact on the ability to actually deliver seed and help farmers and make food prices lower.
The idea of perfect seed is alarming, for exactly the reasons that we've been talking about.
The world is not a static place.
The idea that it would be useful to have seeds for potatoes I see that, right?
I see that the way that we have, amazingly, that basically very much like the original Incas were planting potatoes, is, you know, on a much smaller scale related to how we're doing it today.
But the idea that perfect seed is the goal, by which he means Completely uniform.
Completely genetically uniform.
Erasing all variability.
He thinks, Freeberg, in this clip, he says, take out all disease risk.
Well, again, in a world where nothing else is evolving, sure.
But the diseases, the pathogens, will find the potatoes that you have produced that may currently have no pathogens that are particularly suited to them.
those pathogens will evolve into being very effective at going at these potatoes with their so-called perfect seeds, which are totally uniform, and you will have crops completely wiped out.
So there is a lot of discussion in agriculture about the risks of monocropping as opposed to more traditional forms of intercropping and growing with different growth forms, And of course, you can't do Swidden agriculture at scale, for a lot of reasons we've talked about before.
And you can't even do a lot of the intercropping at scale very much, and we have a lot of people to feed on this planet.
So, we're not being Pollyannas here.
We're not pretending that we're going to be able to feed absolutely everyone from backyard farms or traditional fincas.
However, You can't take out all disease risk by producing a single uniform thing.
That is what everyone is going to be planting.
Have you learned nothing from the errors of 20th century monocropping agriculture, where you get entire crops wiped out because one thing goes like, oh, those are all the same.
I'm going to invite me and all of my friends over to eat all of it all at once.
So the overarching story here is going to be that what they are doing is a Natural extension of the mistakes that we have been making throughout highly technological agriculture.
Precisely.
And there's hidden stuff here, right?
So the idea of perfect seed, I'm not sure if it's inherently any worse than what we're doing, because what I would imagine is that the potatoes that people plant in so-called traditional agriculture, which is really anything but traditional, but the potatoes they're planting are presumably done from cuttings or potatoes, but the potatoes they're planting are presumably done from cuttings or They're just going to take potatoes from a plant.
So that's not giving you any more diversity either.
You're basically just taking a potato plant and spreading it over a huge...
But the potato plants, as they currently exist, have two parents and only two parents.
And each potato plant is a different mix of those parental gametes.
But my guess is that the potatoes you order, if you're a large-scale potato farmer, those potatoes are part of some giant clone that requires those same inputs because- Not a clone.
Sorry, I think no.
I think, you know, Ohano Genetics would like us to be producing potato clones.
And this argument is precisely at the heart of why people are increasingly valuing heirloom varietals and are seed saving.
The reason to seed save is so that you don't end up with perfect seed Right, but what I'm saying is that it will look like an advantage because what you're comparing it to is feeble already, right?
At the level of how much diversity is there in your potato field, there's none because you've got a bunch of things that were identical by virtue of the fact that they're effectively cuttings from the same ancestor.
So it won't look like an increase in pesticide requirements at the level of growing these things from seed, except for a couple of places.
To the extent that people are planting potatoes in order to get potato plants, right?
So the potato, it turns out, is a perennial.
It can die back.
The above-ground stuff can die back.
It dies back to these tubers and you get new potato shoots in the spring.
What that means is that those plants can spring up very rapidly.
If you think about the beginning of the spring, there's not enough light to produce a high profit, but you're not starting from a cotyledon, the tiny little leaves that come out of the seed.
You're starting from this big store of energy that you put down last year that turns into a plant that leaps up at very rapid rate.
What that means is it is capable of shading out its annual competitors Very easily, because it is not depending on photosynthesis to do all of that growth.
So what this says, what's hidden here, is that you actually require herbicide in order to plant from seed.
Herbicide and fertilizer.
Well, herbicide and fertilizer both, right?
Because the potato came with its own.
It created the shade which acted as the competitor, as the competition, and it came with the fertilizer in the form of the potato.
Yeah, and it also came with a pesticide, which is the reason that you don't eat the eyes of potatoes, right?
So the point is all this stuff is built into this elegant potato, and what's more, if you think about, if you compare their fancy seed potato, right?
Grown from seed, this boosted seed.
If you compare it to whatever, I don't know that Monsanto sells potatoes, but let's say that they do, right?
Whatever the major supplier of potato starts is, that is the result of the huge potato growing industry.
If you compare it to that, you're going to see a lot, a lot of the harm is hidden.
But if you compare it to what happens when you plant potatoes in a traditional way, imagine the following thing.
Okay.
You've got potatoes.
They're variable because they start with sexual reproduction where two parents that are a bit different come together.
They fuse their genomes, right?
You distribute those seeds over some piece of territory, right?
Now what happens?
Well, now you get selection in amongst these things because that particular, you know, let's say it's a it's a terrorist plot in the Andes.
Yep.
Okay now you've got some idiosyncratic plot of land and you've started thousands of plants on it and some of them are absolutely terrible for that plot of land and they just don't make it and some of them are surprisingly good.
Okay now the next year you've got potatoes that were selected for your particular place on earth And they are now interbreeding.
So you get this pattern of selection where you are now growing potatoes that are basically bespoke for that piece of dirt.
This is it.
Right here.
The ones that didn't survive there?
They're bad potatoes.
No, they're not bad potatoes.
They're good for someone else.
Because selection is not universal this way.
And this is the error of eugenics, this is the error of social Darwinism, and this is the error of the arrogance of the biotech industry, right?
Oh, we're just looking for the best.
There is no best.
Best is context-dependent.
Those potatoes on that particular, you know, east-facing slope in the Andes with this much iron and that much rainfall and, you know, will not be the best potatoes maybe five miles to the south.
Or 20 feet up slope, even.
Because individual climatic and weather and soil conditions and competitor conditions are going to provide exactly the situation under which the plant itself evolves to do best or not.
And you don't end up with universal best, because there is no universal best, because it's all context.
Right.
Now, the market sees it very differently.
Of course it does.
The market is very interested in turning you into an addict, right?
So addiction, subscription.
Yes.
The point is, well, what we're going to do is we're going to sell you a seed for a plant that will give you spectacular yields if you give it these inputs, irrespective of what you're growing it on or where you're growing it.
Right.
So the point is... We don't care where you are.
We got the product for you.
We've got the product for you, whereas what's really happening here, I suspect, is that this, to the extent that O'Halo has something that actually does create something measurably better, let's say that they've got a mechanism for growing this stuff in which you actually get higher yields.
Well, what they're actually doing is they are correcting for a defect in the exact mindset that they are using to create these things, right?
In other words, it is this highly technologically intensive agriculture that rendered the potatoes we currently grow feeble.
Yeah.
And so what they are doing is they are, with new costs that we will discover soon, they are creating a temporarily freed from feebleness potato.
That's not saying that they've done, and you know, the whole phraseology here, they basically say, amazing as it sounds, that what they're doing is they're unlocking nature's potential.
They're accelerating evolution.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
You are taking a crop that has been destroyed by meddling, in which the very thing that was removed from it was its capacity to adapt.
Right?
We've substituted technology for this adaptive, self-adapting nature of these crops, which, yes, will sometimes give you a very inferior potato, but will sometimes give you a superior potato for the exact place you intend to grow potatoes.
What it doesn't do is have you on the internet searching catalogs to figure out what to order, right?
And so the point is that's galling from the point of view of industry.
It's a missed opportunity to sell you something.
The idea that you're going to be self-sufficient.
What am I?
I'm a farmer.
What do you do?
I grow potatoes.
These are the ones.
I grow them right here and I know exactly how to do it.
I know them intimately.
Right?
That is not a happy scenario from the point of view of a potential industry that would like to turn you into an addict for its seed catalog, for its fertilizers, and this and that.
That's right.
So anyway, I think that's the overarching story here.
We got a lot more.
We got more stuff to add for sure.
Yeah, go ahead.
I'm going to do the next clip.
Freeberg, when you look at a potato, how do you figure out what part of their DNA is the drought-resistant part?
Yeah.
And then how do you make sure that that's turned on?
So even if you inherit that chromosome, is there some potential interaction with the... Generally, if we can... So these are what are called markers, genetic markers.
And so there are known markers associated with known phenotypes.
A phenotype is a physical trait of a plant.
And so we know lots of markers for every crop that we grow.
Markers for disease resistance, drought resistance, markers for big plants, short plants, etc.
And so what we do is we look at the genetics of different plants that we might want to combine into the boosted system and we say these ones have these markers, these ones have these markers, let's put them together and then that'll drive the results.
So the original host, the guy who's playing the host here as opposed to the guy who's playing the guest but is also the host, asks two questions.
How can you figure out what part of the DNA is the drought-resistant part?
And the more interesting question is, how can you know that just because it's got the gene, it's going to be turned on in this plant?
The first question is, you know, molecularly at a mechanistic level, somewhat interesting, and Freeberg Kind of answers it, but he doesn't really.
He just uses a word marker, and that's just a black box, and we still don't know anything.
It's knowable.
We have that understanding.
It's not nearly as good as we think it is, but yes, there are markers.
Markers tend to, you can kind of highlight Markers.
Phenotype.
Yeah, that worked.
Cool.
But the second question, which is more interesting, which was, how can you know that just because you've got a particular allele that it will be turned on the resulting plant?
And Freeberg doesn't even attempt to answer that.
And, you know, OK, there's lots of times we've been on lots of podcasts where you get asked a multiple part question.
You don't get to everything.
But I think it's likely that in this case he's evading that question because they don't know.
Because we don't largely know.
This is an epigenetic question.
The science of epigenetics is very young.
They would have to do it empirically.
The idea that, oh, we've just created a bunch of tetraploids.
We've just created a new species by combining the full genomes of two parent plants together.
What we're going to say is that that makes bigger, better, more awesome plants.
That's it.
That's the end of the story.
What What are all of the systems that already existed in both of those parental genomes, how are they going to interact with one another, and how are they going to decide primacy?
Well, but I actually think they're better off.
Who's better off?
Uh, Ohalo.
That their whole thing is depending on the fact that epigenetics is going to solve whatever chaos they create.
Right?
That the plant is going to- You think they're relying on that?
Yeah, clearly.
Right?
They're producing a new plant that's never existed.
Sure.
And they are depending on the plant to figure out what to turn on and what to turn off in order to be coherent and work.
Right.
And to the extent that they get something- So the question, how do you know?
The honest answer would be, we don't.
We don't.
We have no idea.
We don't.
No idea.
Don't really wanna.
Don't really want to just hope the plant knows what to do.
Yeah, and you know, that's that's that's the from an evolutionary perspective.
That's the galling thing here.
Is that what you're doing?
This is This is the opposite of an elegant solution.
I'm not saying it doesn't have utility.
It's so brute force, Kluge.
Right.
It's like, you know, if you said to me, you know, honey, the sound of the grandfather clock in the hall is driving me crazy.
It's like, oh, I know how to fix that.
I take a sledgehammer.
That clock's not going to bother you anymore.
The splinter's in place.
Well, you know.
Because you're a man.
Could be.
Could be, arguably.
But anyway, the point is, this is, you know, okay, you're going to take two entire... For the record, we don't have a grandfather clock.
You're going to take two entire genomes and put them together in some way and claim that this is somehow a high-tech insight that's just going to suddenly make you're going to do better than nature by unlocking its potential?
No.
Yeah.
No, this is brute force.
Yes.
And it's not elegant, which doesn't mean that there's nothing useful here.
But, um, but the, the, you know, I even, I hate to pick on him.
Right.
Do you?
I don't.
Yeah, I do.
I mean, yeah, we hate to pick on individual people, but he's putting himself out there as the CEO of a company that's producing something that's getting a lot of play.
At the very least, he needed to know a lot more about biology before he started getting involved in this.
We've got one more clip to show, but I also wanted to show their website.
They've got their six major people.
I just want to walk through what is the established expertise, and not just the background.
I honestly don't care what degree you have.
If you say, OK, I got a degree in X, but I became super interested in the trade-offs of genetics and evolutionary systems like cool if you're if you're an autodidact great like but we don't see that in these guys we don't see it in this guy let's come back to that let's let's finish out the biology here There is definitely a, you know, as you will show, the staff here is not highly biological.
I think they're made of carbon chains.
No doubt they function in a biological way.
They probably even eat potatoes.
But I believe that part of what's going on is a complicated systems mentality being imposed on a complex system.
I believe there's also a story here, which is just unbearably about the market failure and its effect on the way we are now thinking scientifically.
Right?
So in some sense, if we think about, and this is not an area of expertise for either you or me.
There's a question about what their technology actually does.
And then there's a question about what is, um...
Plausible enough for this to catch economic fire, right?
In other words, for a lot of people, most of whom, maybe they took biology in high school, a few of them will have taken some biology in college.
You know, they, they know what a chromosome is.
They have a rough idea about genes and proteins or something, but this is not, they don't think deeply about this and they certainly don't think deeply about what
Evolution has done to the natural ancestors of the crops that we are now growing in very unnatural ways, and whether or not it's plausible that by doing some fancy laboratory stuff that you can double the yield, you know, it's one thing to make a plant that produces a whole lot more tuber at the expense of some other part that maybe you don't want, right?
Maybe farmers don't want flowering from their potatoes because they want those resources to go not into fruits, but into into the tubers.
Right.
So you could borrow from there.
But what does it mean to just say, oh, this plant's doing everything better because it's got more genes to choose from?
Yeah.
Then why didn't nature do that?
That's a that's an important question.
So you've got you've got people who are thinking complicated systems and applying it to a complex system.
And then you've got the market, which is ironically a complex system.
Mm hmm.
In which what sounds good to investors, what sounds good to consumers may have a lot more influence on how profitable this is than how accurate or useful the technology itself is.
And we have seen this a zillion times where, you know, and then this starts driving the science.
So I remember back when I was studying senescence and cancer that there was a very flashy result involving C elegans, the nematode that we use as a model system.
It's a simple animal.
And a simple modification, simple genetic modification resulted in a doubling of lifespan.
That's right.
I remember this, yeah.
And I immediately knew, not specifically what was going on, but I knew how the story was going to play out.
And it's like, okay, where'd you borrow from?
What can't that animal do?
But of course, it made a lot of sense from the people who were hovering at the, at the border between science and industry.
It made a lot of sense for them to pretend that what they just discovered was that there was a gene that you could turn off that doubled lifespan and heck, Maybe we can double our own lifespan.
Why doesn't the worm think of that?
Right, exactly.
Selection must be foolish.
Right.
Well, you have to know that selection actually opposes senescence, which then tells you, well, if it didn't do this, then there must be a cost that isn't worth paying to get that major benefit.
What is it?
It turned out that the animals in question were, I believe it was no longer famine tolerant.
Right, so you could increase their lifespan if you turned off their famine tolerance.
And the point is, there might be circumstances in which you want to do that, but you didn't suddenly discover a way to double lifespan.
You figured out how to borrow from one place to do something else.
And the problem is that the market is not necessarily interested at this level.
The market wants to know if there's going to be a massive profit to be made and it is not interested in externalities specifically Right.
It's just interested in whether or not this makes sense.
And so the I was gonna point to the background that Freeberg is using.
Well, we've got one more clip.
So you want to show the last clip?
Sure.
Ask our viewers to look at the background.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I noticed it too.
It's not just about combining traits, but it turns out when you add more genes together, biology figures out a way to create gene networks.
These are all these genes that interact with each other in ways that are not super well understood, but it makes the organism healthier and bigger and live longer.
This is like why mutts are healthier and live longer than purebred dogs, because they have more genetic diversity.
So, there's a lot of work now in what's called quantitative genomics, where you actually look at the statistics across all the genes.
You use a model, and the model predicts which two crosses you want to make out of hundreds of thousands or millions of potential crosses that the AI predicts.
Here's the two best ones to cross because you'll get this growth or this healthiness.
So, again, what could go wrong?
He's talking about hybrid vigor.
Why are mutts often hale and hearty?
Because they've got parents that are relatively distantly related.
But it's this complicated systems understanding applied to complex systems.
There isn't a point of like, well, That level of diversity is the thing.
That's what we want.
There are going to be trade-offs when you're too close and when you're too far, and under certain circumstances at every point in between.
And he's got an entirely static model, which just won't work in a world that changes, which is to say every single world possible.
So, I found it interesting that he actually mentions, I don't think he uses the term hybrid vigor, but he points to the concept.
And I want to go through, at least my understanding, I presume it's yours as well, as to why hybrid vigor is a thing, and therefore what it implies about the system to which he's analogizing it.
So, he points to a great example.
He says why a mutt that is a combination of purebred dogs does better.
Well, what happened when you made purebred dogs?
Well, the answer is you decided there was something that you wanted, right?
Maybe you wanted very tiny size.
So there are lots of very tiny dogs that were bred for things like chasing pests down into burrows and things like that.
In fact, I think this is why dachshunds have such short legs.
After rats?
Something.
But anyway, so let's say that you've got You know domesticated wolves and you're looking for something small and so you start breeding the smallest animals that you've got and sometimes that's about the genes they have and sometimes it isn't but the times you breed something that's small because its genes are just simply biased in that direction you get a small descendant and some you know there'll be a range and then you keep picking the small ones right?
Well if you keep picking for small size what happens to every other parameter?
Right, every other parameter is now effectively sacrificed for that one thing.
It's unhinged.
Right, so if you've got, you know, what are the chances that tremendously small size is going to be correlated with excellent immunity?
Well, the point is it should be arbitrarily associated with immunity.
So you are choosing small size at a cost to potentially choosing in favor of immunity, right?
Same thing will happen if you choose for dark coloration.
Same thing will happen if you choose for extremely good eyesight.
Anything that is heritable, if you're choosing for that characteristic, you're sacrificing everything else.
So now you've You've got a dog that's tiny and it has poor characteristics in every other regard, but it's excellent in that one regard, right?
And then you've got another dog that is, you know, extremely dark.
It's been selected to have a soft mouth.
All right it retrieves birds right now it's got problems too and so the point is well if you combine those two dogs if you breed them together then the point is actually you get each one out of the little cul-de-sac that you've bred it into this is hybrid vigor okay so hybrid vigor is Not like, oh, it's magic when you interbreed things, they get better.
It's like when you've made things worse by selecting for something extreme, you can erase part of what you've done in terms of harm by breeding them together so that, you know, the one with the, you know, the good immunity or the dark color and the one with the small size each don't share the same defects.
And I mean, this is the theme over and over and over again in the 21st century, at least the second half of the 20th century, and this is the second time in this episode alone that you've raised this.
The thing that they've done may well produce instantaneous improvement over the immediate predecessor, but the immediate predecessor to which we are comparing it is our own insane post-industrial creation.
And we can do better, we need to do better.
We have already produced an environment in which...
The environment's polluted, the soils are poor, the plants have little flavor and less nutritional value.
Can we start from that baseline and do a little bit better?
Could we take the adaptive landscapes model and say, you know what, this is gonna be rough, guys, but it turns out that a bunch of the advantages of the 20th century were dead ends that put us on peaks, and it's gonna be really hard to go down, but in order to get to someplace that's better,
Where we are healthier again, both individually and collectively, and in terms of the environment, we're going to need to rethink the basics on which we are building, rather than say, well, look at how crappy these things are.
Can we make that a little bit better by royally tweaking the genetics of potatoes and corn?
Temporarily, probably, yes.
And your market share is probably going to benefit.
But at what cost?
At cost to everything else and all of us.
Yeah and it is the outgrowth of this mindset you know it's it's actually you know what it is it's it's it's no liberalism and you know I say this as as a liberal who has grown a bit wiser about unintended consequences but you see some defect of a plant it's investing in some structure you don't necessarily care about or some molecule you think is a waste of energy Right?
And you think, well, I can solve that.
And you solve it.
And then, oh, lo and behold, now you've created another problem.
Oh, well, the solution to that is on, you know, it's aisle 37, shelf 3.
And to deal with the side effects of that, well, you just have to come back to aisle, sorry about the walking, but you can pick up a product there that'll deal with those symptoms.
And probably going to need someone to fix what that causes, though.
Right.
And it's the exact damn thing we see in medicine, right?
Where it's like everybody's on drugs and they're all on drugs to compensate for the side effects of the drugs that they were just given for some other thing.
And the punchline of the whole joke is that if you really have enough wealth...
Right?
If you make enough wealth selling this crap to people, then what do you do?
Well, you buy organic heirloom stuff, right?
Stuff that was grown far away from those inputs that is a whole lot more variable and interesting and nutritious and all of that stuff.
So the point is, yeah, you're feeding your family the stuff we should be doing and you're feeding everybody else's family the stuff that we really should have known better.
And, um, that's, that's parasitic.
Yes, it is.
Um, but anyway, my goodness, it's, uh, you were going to say something about the background that he's got, that free bird.
Oh yeah.
That I can't help, but, um, can you, can you just have like a, no, maybe not.
Okay.
All right.
You just put them up there on pause.
The background I take to be an idealized I can't do it.
Okay.
Who wouldn't want to spend, you know, an hour lying in that field?
That's a beautiful prairie!
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, it's absolutely beautiful.
But it's also not real.
Right.
Right?
No, it's completely fictional.
Right.
So the point is, it's a...
I'm concerned that what they've got is a real technology that will have real implications for industrial agriculture.
Those implications may even be positive.
They may have discovered something that's more useful.
It may be that the net impact is that it's less toxic or less expensive or more sustainable than the industrial bullshit agriculture that most of our potatoes are grown with currently.
I'm not arguing that they don't have something useful, but the vision that has been painted Is a utopian get everything for nothing.
The world is going to be better.
Holy crap.
What are we going to do when everybody is fed?
And right.
You know, there's no everybody is fed.
And yet the fields look like this.
Right.
The diversity in that field.
Oh, man.
You have so many wildflowers.
Gorgeous.
It is kind of making me feel a hint of hay fever.
But that's the result of biomedical screw ups, not agricultural ones, as far as I know.
So.
Anyway, I guess I wonder, A, if we were to compare the actual utility of what they've come up with, which could be negative, it could be somewhat positive, it could be very positive, but it's not going to be, hey, let's double the output of every crop.
That's preposterous.
Right.
So at what level, I guess, is this?
Sci-fi and at what level is this progress?
That's what I'd like to know and the point is we're only going to know in retrospect when we've diagnosed all of the, you know, when we're able to compare the damage done by this to the advantages it provided.
Yes.
Um, maybe just before we, um, stop, show their site and, and just walk through the, um, the bios of the six, of the six leaders.
You can show my screen here.
So, you mentioned their tagline before, Accelerating Evolution to Unlock Nature's Potential.
Um, which, you know, there are some taglines out there that are pretty grotesque, like we've mentioned before, um, is it Sherwin Williams?
Cover the Earth?
What are you guys thinking?
But this one feels pretty grotesque to me.
They're calling it boosted breeding.
There's no reference to any trade-offs at all.
It unlocks all these amazing things, combining traits that might otherwise take thousands of years.
They here are advocating for the genetically uniform true seeds that revolutionize agronomic practices, which, boy, that's not going to be how it works.
I've got some videos, you know.
Electron micrograph looking pictures that make you feel like, well, we're in good hands because the scientists are at it again.
Improving yield.
All of this.
OK.
What?
We're scientists, and we're here to help.
Boosted Potato will deliver value to every member of the value chain.
I found this particularly alarming, a little bit.
They've got farmers, which, sorry, no.
The farmers are not going to be helped here.
Packer shippers, processors, retailers, and consumers, strangely, It doesn't look the same, but under the consumers, they say, "...vastly improved cultivation processes deliver a higher-quality year-round global potato supply grown in a way that aligns with their desire to leave the planet better than they found it." So it's appealing to all of the sort of, you know, best intentions of people who like to eat potatoes, but actually secretly only want to eat French fries.
And then I just want to quickly go through the leaders.
So this is Friedberg, who we just saw.
He has a bachelor's degree in astrophysics.
That's his educational background.
More to the point, he is also CEO and founder of The Production Board, a venture foundry that builds and invests in technology businesses in food, agriculture, and life sciences.
Builds and invests in, but I see nothing in this bio at all about interest in or expertise in actual biological systems, that is to say complex systems.
Furthermore, he was the founder and CEO of The Climate Corporation, the world's leading digital agronomy software platform used by farmers across 200-plus million acres worldwide.
Monsanto acquired The Climate Corporation in 2013.
When he joined Monsanto, now Bayer, as a member of the executive leadership team.
I can't tell from that if he's still on Monsanto's board or not.
But again, nothing biological there.
We've got the CTO, Jed Ward.
This is the only guy with extensive background in, or purported interest in, actual complex systems.
He's got a bachelor's in plant sciences from the University of Arizona and a PhD in plant breeding genetics from Cornell.
And was actually a postdoc at Cornell before he moved into industry, where he has basically been, it looks like, pursuing his extremely narrow, and this is something we want to come back to, extremely narrow graduate training in plant breeding genetics.
Not molecular biology.
Often, there are departments of molecular cellular developmental biology, often genetics.
We actually both graduated from integrative biology departments.
We have PhDs in biology, even though our specialization was evolution.
But plant breeding genetics is really narrow.
Still, there's some biology.
There's some understanding of complex systems.
Yep.
Um, and you know, I, I think it's, it's too narrow.
It's of the specialties he might have, I suppose it's as relevant as anything, but I would bet you plant breeding genetics.
That is going to be an industry-fueled specialty.
And so just as, you know, you'd be hard-pressed to find people specializing in, you know, nuclear engineering who are skeptical of the safety of the technology, you're going to find that an industry-driven viewpoint is infused throughout the science and Probably not to the benefit of humanity.
Let me just quickly go back through the remaining four of the six leaders.
Karen Vossen, the CLO and CAO, is Chief Legal Officer and Chief Administrative Officer.
Spent more than 25 years building and scaling legal, public policy, finance, risk and insurance, safety, and other G&A functions.
Nothing to do, he's got a law degree and a BA in public policy studies.
No complex system, no biology there.
We've got, I'm not going to try to pronounce her last name, I will butcher it, Christy Todebush, I guess, Vice President of Products.
That sounds like that should be relevant to biology, but nope, she's got her degrees in English and Education.
and an MBA and nothing in here about actual interest in biology.
And again, I don't actually care about the degrees if the people indicate past work in or interest in what is going on at complex systems level.
And I see that not here.
Here we have the VP of Engineering at AI with a PhD in pure mathematics with a minor in philosophy and a bachelor's degree in computer science.
And, um, we heard in that last clip, Fredberg talking about the AI generated models, and I guess that's what this guy is doing here, but, um, this doesn't make me feel like they have any more expertise in trade-offs and complex systems.
For sure.
And finally, the VP of Operations, Emily Jacobson, double major in intensive psych and economics from our alma mater, UC Santa Cruz.
Surprised me a little bit.
13 years in agriculture.
Well, that sounds promising.
Served in human resources, research and development, program management, innovation, leadership roles for Driscoll's.
Driscoll's is a common thread through lots of these people.
I still don't see much, although she's sort of the next closest after the After Judd Ward to having ever thought about anything with regard to complex biology.
And they do have clearly have biologists that they've invested in who are doing the work.
And I think I don't know.
I was looking at the what I think is a patent application.
And there is a heavy concentration over in the Santa Cruz area.
I don't know what it is, but there may be some interesting story about how this came to be.
There may well be.
It's not too far from California's Central Valley, which of course produces a ton of the produce for at least the western half of the United States, and I think all of the United States at this point.
Gigaton.
Sure.
It's many, many times.
But there is some, uh, what's always missing in modern bio and biotech is a wise, synthetic view of all of the various levels of analysis.
And we watched the department, you know, we went to grad school in a biology department.
Although our degree did end up grandfathered in under the biology label, that department got divided, as they all do, right?
Gets divided into the cellular molecular people and the evolution and ecology people.
The skin in versus skin out.
Yep.
Right.
All of it facilitates, you know, industries creating a utopianism in, you know, it might be that the evolution oncology people actually have something to say about the wisdom of making certain kinds of modifications or, you know, the impact of drugs or chemical inputs to agriculture, any of these things.
But the point is they've been separated so that those fights never happen, which gives industry more power to steer us in all of these places.
Frankly, I think it's made evolutionary biology a much less interesting place than it was.
Yeah.
That, you know, even the discipline that I would argue is the best one from the point of view of seeing the bigger picture has become boring and stagnant in isolation.
And none of this is serving us.
No, it's not.
It's creating it's creating a more dangerous world in which we are more easily misled.
And the market has greater influence over what we believe to be true.
The market should have no influence over what we believe to be true.
And yet it does.
So anyway.
And I mean, hidden in what you just said, it's also true that the stuff that happens at the level of less than an organism, so-called skin and biology, there tend to be many market applications for that work.
And therefore there tends to be a lot of opportunity to make money in the private sector with that work.
And the same is not true for the skin out stuff for evolution, ecology and an organismal biology.
You know, there's money in the conservation game, but it's for the NGOs.
And it's, you know, when it's when it's appropriately applied, that money is moved to like, you know, acquiring land to preserve it as opposed to enriching, enriching individuals.
And there's no there's no patents to speak of.
Right.
So the skin out biology, the EOB, the evolution of college organismal biology folks are always the sort of, you know, country mouse showing up at, you know, at the at the party when the molecular cellular developmental biology people show up and, you know, They're the ones who get courted by, and often their PhDs go into, as we see here, biotech.
Or agricultural engineering, or whatever multiple words you want to fuse together, how can we make money off of it?
Well, the first thing you're going to have to do is ignore trade-offs.
Because if you have running through your own mental model all the time, if I mess with an evolved system, something else has got to give.
It's going to be much harder if you are a moral human being to simply say, turn that off, double that, let's go.
We're going to put a bunch of flowery language on this and say we're going to save the world and feed everyone and make the farmers happy and win, win, win, win, win.
All we had to do was something that honestly, given it's happened so many times in nature already, if it was good for the plants in question and a bunch of other systems as well, it would have happened.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If it was just simply a positive that doubled yield, it would have happened so many billion years ago.
Yeah.
All right.
Not so many billion years ago, but hundreds of millions of years ago, to be sure.
Yeah.
All right.
Shall we?
That's it.
I'm done ranting.
You're done ranting.
Okay.
Well.
Until next time.
Yeah.
We're going to do a little more ranting.
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
Okay, so next topic.
Okay.
I wanted to just visit, and I don't want to redo what other people have done, but I wanted to revisit the Terrence Howard... Revisit?
We haven't talked about this before.
I want to visit it anew, but it's been visited by so many people that I feel like it's a revisit.
So this is Terrence Howard on Joe Rogan talking about a whole new model for what science should be.
Yeah, so people have seen this.
I think what we want to do is we want to play a brief clip just so that those who haven't seen it can get a sense of what it sounded like, and then I want to talk about what to do with it.
These companies have all earned, they have multi-billion dollar companies they've built off of my patents.
Just roll through.
Sony, Microsoft, Amazon.
Hewlett Packard.
Yeah.
Keep going, keep going, keep going.
IBM, and it's still making money.
This patent has earned over seven trillion dollars.
And you didn't get a piece.
And I haven't gotten a penny of it.
When they did all of the Black Lives Matter, like Raytheon Company.
In IBM.
It still has another nine years, another eight years in which I would be making money off it.
But what they didn't know is they didn't understand how it was really supposed to work.
So they've just been taking this gun and been using it as a bat.
And if they wanted to know, I could show them how it really, really works.
But this is proof.
That my stuff is legit.
So let me ask you this before we stray away from this too much.
The concept of gravity.
So if it's all electricity that's causing these forces and it's all outside in, when the Saturn V rocket is escaping Earth's atmosphere, what is it fighting against?
What that's fighting against is the rotation.
Remember, there's a centripetal spin that's taking place with the Earth.
Right.
And there's an electrical field that's generated from that.
That centripetal spin that holds things inside, that's what it's fighting against.
That's that electric field.
And we're calling it gravity.
We're calling it gravity.
But gravity is just the effect of the electric field, and the electric field is balanced by the radiative field.
Alright, so imagine that goes on for three hours.
I can't imagine it.
I'm not going to pursue it in reality.
Well, I will say... Have you watched it?
Not all of it, but I've watched a bunch of it.
It is fascinating.
Okay.
I think it's nonsense, almost one into the other.
There are some interesting things in it, but I think it is...
In no way what it appears to be.
What do you think it appears to be?
Well, let's put it this way.
There are three possibilities.
Either this person is effectively the only scientifically insightful person because what he purports negates Across field after field what most of us take to be the set of assumptions.
He's either the only mind worth paying attention to or it's one of two other possibilities.
That's one branch of the possibility spaces.
This is the only mind because he's about to wipe everything else off the map.
The other two possibilities are he's crazy and that this is word salad, which it does sound like often.
And then the last possibility is that he's not crazy and it's a con or performance art.
Let's put it this way.
I don't want to... Within that third category there are a lot of ways that he could have, that he could have shown up.
He could be, he could be knowingly engaged in performance art or a con or something.
He could be knowingly saying things that he doesn't believe are an accurate representation of the universe.
He could be believing that these things are an accurate representation of the universe.
But they're not.
Right.
Or he could be right and the rest of us are just wrong about everything.
Right.
That's the formal possibility space, as I see it.
It's gotta be on one of those branches.
I do think, you know, people have been... Is he brilliant?
Or is he nuts?
I think he's brilliant, but I don't understand.
Well, I think he's clearly brilliant.
I don't...
Well, no, I'm saying like, this is what people are worried.
Yep.
Oh, shit.
This sounds like stuff I'm supposed to have opinions about and I don't understand what he's saying.
And sometimes when you don't understand what new people are saying in your space, that means they actually do understand.
They're just using different language or right.
So, you know, with respect that people are actually going like, oh, maybe, you know, maybe we should figure out if he knows something.
So the world sort of divided over this, you know, there are those who are like, um, this doesn't add up and it's not hard to find things in it that simply don't add up.
I mean, what he says about, What we think is gravity is centripetal acceleration.
That doesn't even make sense because, um, the centripetal acceleration, the centrifugal acceleration, which doesn't exist, the center fleeing and the centripetal would be a perpendicular to the direction that he's claiming that this force acts in.
So if I just parse the spin, Yeah, so the thing we call gravity can't be the centripetal acceleration, much less have the relationship to the electromagnetic force that he says it does.
Unless I'm a dummy and he's the only guy who knows anything.
But anyway, point is, People have divided, right?
There are those who are like, hey, give the guy a chance.
It sort of seems like he's on to not only something, but everything, right?
I think that's the Cartesian crisis setting in.
Cartesian crisis being that nobody knows what to believe.
We have to pay attention to everyone who shows up with something that sounds extraordinary.
Oh my God, then that's what you're doing all the time.
Right, right.
I would say there's no dichotomy here.
I think the person that I listened to is highly intelligent.
And I think they would have to be.
If you asked me to do what he does here, right?
He freed me completely from any obligation to reality and I'm just allowed to razzle dazzle Joe Rogan for, you know, hours.
I couldn't do it, right?
I could do something, but I couldn't do what he does.
And it's not that this is a prepared speech because Joe is asking questions.
Joe does what Joe does.
Right, exactly.
So this guy is very intelligent and he knows a lot of things from a lot of different fields.
Enough to at least, you know, he doesn't use the jargon perfectly.
He blows it in a few places, but he uses a lot of it well enough that, you know, he's sort of in the right topic area and he connects this to that in ways that are interesting.
So anyway, I think it's kind of an amazing performance.
Um, and I don't really, I don't know.
I don't, I've never been crazy.
I don't know what it would be like, but it's hard for me to imagine that somebody who was really like not in close contact with reality could pull this off.
So I sort of think it's an extended conversation.
It's a yeah, it's a wild conversation.
It's actually really worth listening to just at the human level.
Right.
But anyway, the the thing that I wanted to to get at here is, well, what are we supposed to do with this?
You've got somebody who's claiming to revolutionize everything, right?
Now, he does say, the reason I chose that particular clip is that he says that, you know, the proof that he's not just making shit up is in the patents.
Now, he does have a lot of patents.
The patent he was pointing to, though, he doesn't have.
It was abandoned, which he says.
And then he infers, or implies, to Joe that the list of companies that cite his abandoned patent application is evidence that he's legit.
Now, he quotes a number that I don't think can be right.
So, I haven't watched it, so I wasn't quite sure what you're looking at there.
Those are all, the Raytheon, Amazon, all this, are companies that have cited only the abandoned patent application, none of his actual patents?
So the patent in question is a patent for a... But there's one patent in question that all those are citing, and that one was abandoned.
Yes.
So it's just the one.
He's got a bunch of them.
Those aren't the ones he's talking about.
He's talking about, here's how we know I'm right.
I've got this one.
But then you would have to explain why, if you've got all these actual ones, why do you think that everyone citing this one, which you yourself abandoned, is proof that you're correct?
Well, I think, you know, most people don't know anything about the way the patent system works.
I know a little bit about it from having interacted with it once, and because my dad's an IP attorney.
So, the implication, if you don't know how the patent system works at all, is, well, if all of these people are citing this abandoned patent, then it must be for real.
I don't think that this is accurate as I tweeted on Twitter.
That's where one does that?
Pretty much exclusively, yes.
First of all, there's a question about why he abandoned the patent, why he didn't pursue it.
My guess would be because what he was citing wasn't patentable.
It was a patent for a mixture of virtual reality and reality, basically something that now commonly exists, augmented reality.
So then the question is, but to a layperson, it will seem like, well, if all of these You know multi-billion dollar companies are citing his abandoned patent then Presumably they treat it as real not inherently the case at all the question is one of prior art so all of these companies have their own patents and what they don't want to do is have to pay a
to use somebody else's patented technology and by pointing to this patent application it becomes they can clarify why theirs is not that Yeah, they're not infringing anybody's patent because this is... I mean, we would need to know in what way they've been cited then.
Citation isn't sufficient as evidence.
Well, let's put it this way.
There is an incentive for them to cite it even if they don't take it seriously.
It just takes this off the table as a patented technology.
What's more, he says they're nine years left on what would have been the patent had it been granted, which means this is recent and the mixture of... How old are your patents?
I thought they were 20?
It's 17.
Sure, but but anyway the point is this is not a brand new idea So my guess is he got advice that said you're not gonna get a patent here So he abandoned it and these other folks are citing it because it's good for them to have this be in the public domain because nobody's patented it so okay, but but That's not my central.
Yeah, it feels to me like I feel like I know I know where your central point is gonna be and it's it's the necessary one if you have a different one that I'm gonna make the one I thought you were gonna make okay, so my Central point would be this What he says is proof that he's for real isn't really proof of anything because of the perverse incentives over in IP space.
Now he does have a bunch of patents, which I think is the most interesting unexplored question here.
What are those patents?
How interesting projectiles, interesting stuff.
I don't know that they make any sense.
I don't know that they make more sense.
There's a question about does the patent system and you know, the patent system surely makes mistakes in both directions, like every other system.
Yes.
Some that shouldn't be accepted reject some that shouldn't be.
So it's not clear to me that just the fact that he has a lot of patents means anything.
But what are we to do with somebody who claims across domain after domain that they have seen what nobody else can see, that it solves all of the problems that other people would like to solve but can't.
When what they say appears to contravene things that we think we understand, like the periodic table, like the fundamentals of mathematics, right?
Well, I don't think we get the right to just decide that they're nuts because what they're saying is too revolutionary.
The world doesn't see it that way, therefore you're wrong.
The world's been wrong.
Yeah.
So, we can't do that.
Even if it just seems super improbable, you know, for this guy to be this intelligent in one field would be shocking enough.
Across everything from, you know, math to chemistry to biology to, you know, astrophysics.
Even more improbable.
But who knows?
Maybe somebody has such an insight at some point.
The proper way to address this is to use the toolkit that we have talked about here again and again and again, and it involves everybody cleaning up their act, right?
There is a difference between a notion, a hypothesis, and a theory, right?
Why does that matter?
Because a notion is an idea that could be true.
A hypothesis is an idea that could be true, that is testable, that makes some kind of prediction that we could then use to assess the validity of the idea.
And a theory is what happens when all of the hypotheses but one have fallen, and it becomes our presumptive understanding of the way things work.
So he most definitely does not have theories.
We don't know if he has hypotheses or notions.
If they're notions, we don't need to take him seriously as a scientist.
If he has hypotheses, we need to see the predictions, and then we can proceed with the scientific method.
We can proceed with the scientific method.
And so what I would say is the right way to treat this guy's claims are as a performance art piece, as poetry, until he shows us that his understanding predicts something that cannot be predicted, that is not predicted by any of the competing ideas.
We don't have to take it more seriously.
If it doesn't make predictions.
The onus is on him to produce predictions of his model, of his hypothesis, that are so-called risky predictions, that are counter to the predictions produced by the prevailing hypotheses, many of which are called theories because they are so fundamental to how we understand our universe, now that they couldn't be overturned.
Right.
But absent prediction, we're not in science space.
Right.
But I don't even need, you know, I know having generated many hypotheses and figured out what the predictions are.
I know you don't always have the predictions ready.
Sometimes it takes a long time to figure out what the predictions are.
But what I at least want is a track record.
Show me some things that you predicted on the basis of the way you work that were not predicted by any other mode.
Then I know, hey, I could take you seriously.
And if you say, I've got another idea.
Now the point is, oh, well, you're somebody with a track record of making predictions that are valid.
You're worth listening to.
Right.
But until we get there, we don't have anything.
And I don't know that we are or aren't there.
Joe, as far as I know, Joe didn't say, hey, do you have any predictions of any of these models?
But that is the proper way to deal with this is not a debate in which society divides over whether or not this is the way to see the universe or not.
Right.
The point is, we actually know the rules and have, you know, we've known the basics of them for thousands of years.
And it works.
This is no time to abandon that in the middle of or at the beginning of the Cartesian crisis.
And I would just point out, if you compare this to Ben Davidson's rather extraordinary model.
I had been on Dark Horse a couple weeks back What Ben says could be taken to be wild and outlandish but Ben makes predictions and it is the fact that those predictions often are manifest in ways that do not require Ben to tell you that he's been right that makes it very hard to ignore what he's saying including
He has recently put us on earthquake watch as a result of a combined gravitational effect of aligned planets.
Now that sounds far-fetched to me.
On the other hand, I've seen him do this a couple of times now where he says actually over the next week we should be looking for earthquake activity.
Now in any individual case that could be pure anecdote.
Right?
You say, oh, we should watch for big earthquakes.
There's a pretty good chance that in any week or month that you'll have such a thing.
Yeah, I'd like to see the statistical analysis.
That's what you need.
You need the statistical analysis that says that actually... Show me the background rate.
Right, show me the background rate and then we'll know how good your predictions turn out to be.
And anyway, that is simply the standard that we should be applying for these kinds of situations.
And I would say it's better Then extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Actually, we have a system that doesn't require us to decide what's extraordinary, but that system does involve the making of predictions that allow us to test ideas.
And, you know, this is no reason to lose our confidence in that system.
This is the reason to return to that system.
Very good.
Yes.
Beautiful.
All right.
So I guess to sum up both things, we are dealing with I've mentioned the Cartesian crisis several times.
Cartesian crisis is my term for our inability to know what's true and that is resulting from various things, resulting from the collapse of our institutions and the fact that propaganda is now being through systems that were once interested in truth seeking.
And it puts us in the position of having no idea what to believe.
That problem is about to get spectacularly worse as a result of the fact that it is going to be amplified by artificial intelligence that is very good at telling us things that sound plausible to us.
So those who wish to use it against reason are going to be able to employ it to put together
Evermore elaborate pieces of performance art that pretend to be science and that the real problem is that we've got is a kind of Enhanced real-time science fiction which is taking over our Mindset is going to become a tremendous threat to our ability to govern ourselves and it's something that we need to be
We need to be aware of and we need to start talking about what we're going to do about it because this isn't the last time that we are going to be handed ideas that sound incredible that we would we don't want to be dismissive of them.
That's a mistake and we do not want to be accepting of them and we have to know how to interact with them.
I guess the antidote to that enhanced science fiction is more and better science.
That's right.
More and Better Science.
We may have a title.
Good.
So, I think that brings us to the end.
The very end of the podcast.
Oh yes, here we go!
So, we've got a store, darkhorsestore.org, and here is our younger son Toby, when we were in Albuquerque with him recently, wearing his Cut That Shit Out shirt, which I think we mentioned on an earlier episode.
We were at Bandelier National Monument and climbed some of those ladders up in the Pueblo Habitations.
And a couple of women about our age were coming down and they saw his shirt and I was concerned that he was going to have offended them and they loved it.
So he's got, not everyone at his high school loves it when he wears the shirt, but people at all levels of administration, faculty and students do.
So we encourage you to go get yourself a cut that shit out shirt.
Absolutely.
Or any number of other merchandise that we've got at the store.
That shirt, we don't guarantee the content of most of our merchandise, but that shirt is likely to become more and more relevant over time to the point that we guarantee there will be no time in the foreseeable future in which people will not need to cut that shit out.
Indeed.
Now I thought you were referring with the content of the merchandise to our sun, which we are not selling on the store or anywhere else.
I mean, we'll entertain offers.
They will entertain offers.
That's more traditional in our culture.
It's from Zach, the elder son.
I should say.
What kind of offers are we getting?
I should say they will entertain offers.
They will.
Okay.
Yes.
That's better.
That's more traditional.
Yes.
In our culture.
Indeed.
Okay.
So check out the Merge Store at darkcourcestore.org.
And please come join us on Locals.
We had a preliminary conversation about this Ohana Genetics stuff in our Q&A that we just did this last weekend.
It's always great.
It's always great fun.
We do that once a month on Sundays from 11 a.m.
to 1 p.m.
Pacific, and we also do a Q&A after our regular live streams once a month.
And both of those are for Locals subscribers only.
We've also got access to our Discord and a lot of early release of guest episodes.
Lots of great stuff there, so consider joining us there.
Yes?
I would just say, and you say a lot at the end of the episodes, but if people are wondering where to find stuff, we now have a website where people can go that breaks down all of that and gives all the links to the store and Locals and everything and explains what you get in different places.
That's darkhorsepodcast.org and a calendar for upcoming streams.
Lots of useful stuff there.
Wonderful.
darkhorsepodcast.org has links to things like Brett's Patreon and My Natural Selections.
And what we don't have there are links to sponsors because they would change a lot.
But consider checking out our wonderful sponsors this week.
That was Mudwater, Listening.com, Moink.
And a reminder that we are supported by you, our audience.
We are grateful to you for your support and for your appreciation of what we're doing.
And we appreciate when you like, when you subscribe, when you share the content.
We've got clips on Twitter at, I don't know what account, but if you can look for Dark Horse Podcast clips.
Dark Horse Pod.
Dark Horse Pod, great.
And And next week we'll be back a day early on Tuesday to accommodate some travel.
But other than that, everything is looking good for the summer.
And it is late May, where we are.
You are too.
And it is beautiful out, and in that vein, I encourage you, until we see you next time, to be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
