Can we have your liver? The 286th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we discuss organ donation, and parenting in the animal world. Organ donation: how can we modify incentives so that people who need organs have a good chance of getting them, but people with healthy organs are never sent to an early death because their organs are valuable? Then: a natural history primer on parental care and feeding ecology of some local mammals and birds. What can be learned from observing the successful parenting of both barn swallows and red foxes? ***** Our sponsors...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 286.
I actually forgot.
Oh, okay.
I think it's 286.
You know, you can sort of take it as a 286-style episode, if that's the actual number.
Great.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
We're so ready.
We are ready.
We were ready, but then we forgot the most basic things.
Yes.
I am still Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You were still Dr. Heather Hying.
We are going to be discussing a very heavy topic up front.
We're going to be discussing organ donation and the various ins and outs of that.
And then we're going to be discussing an amazing topic with all kinds of depth, philosophical and otherwise.
I don't think you need to be watching in order to enjoy it.
We're going to describe everything that we're going to show, but it's going to come with a lot of pictures and video that we've taken of various animals raising their offspring in the wild.
And anyway, so if the heavy topic up front is going to bring you down, the second part should give you a lot of more pleasant things to think about.
Although you could imagine, you could frame what we've seen with regard to the animals raising their children.
There is kind of an organ donation happening there too, in which one of the sets of young'uns end up eating the organs of the other sets of young'uns.
Yes, that is one of several connections that I think we will end up drawing between the two topics.
Yeah.
But yeah, some just amazing natural history through, as always, an evolutionary lens.
We'll be talking about in the second part of the show today.
We, as always, have a watch party going on at Locals.
Please consider joining us there.
We appreciate your support there.
And it's good times over at Locals.
And without further ado, let us get to paying the rent with our three awesome sponsors right up at the top.
And I believe you are starting today.
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All right.
Well, as I mentioned at the top, this first topic is kind of heavy.
Some will have seen it in the New York Times, and we will get to the New York Times article that caused us to start thinking about this again.
But I would tell you that there are a number of things downstream on this topic that we will get to that I think will make the uncomfortableness of thinking about this topic worthwhile if you stick around.
There's some philosophical implications and some other good stuff.
So grab a seat and let's talk about the organ donation problem.
Let's start by maybe having you read from this article that emerged in the New York Times.
And yes, I know a lot of us don't trust the New York Times, but this article seemed to be reasonably well researched.
And anyway, it looked like journalism to me.
Okay, so you want, okay, you want to show my screen.
This is the New York Times published, sorry, I'm going to scroll for a second, published July 21st.
So that's, wait, is that, that's today.
You were talking about this yesterday.
Must have been published in print today.
Yeah.
It was online yesterday or something.
Fair enough.
So published within hours of us talking about it is this New York Times article titled, A Push for More Organ Transplants is Putting Donors at Risk.
People across the United States have endured rushed or premature attempts to remove their organs.
Some were gasping, crying, or showing other signs of life.
Last spring, at a small...
Sorry.
Last spring at a small Alabama...
I'm going to...
Last spring, at a small Alabama hospital, a team of transplant surgeons prepared to cut into Misty Hawkins.
The clock was ticking.
Her organs wouldn't be usable for much longer.
Days earlier, she had been a vibrant 42-year-old with a playful sense of humor and a love for the Thunder Beach motorcycle rally.
But after Ms. Hawkins choked while eating and fell into a coma, her mother decided to take her off life support and donate her organs.
She was removed from a ventilator and, after 103 minutes, declared dead.
A surgeon made an incision in her chest and sawed through her breastbone.
That's when the doctors discovered her heart was beating.
She appeared to be breathing.
They were slicing into Ms. Hawkins while she was alive.
Across the United States, an intricate system of hospitals, doctors, and non-profit donation coordinators carries out tens of thousands of life-saving transplants each year.
At every step, it relies on carefully calibrated protocols to protect both donors and recipients.
But in recent years, as the system has pushed to increase transplants, a growing number of patients have endured premature or bungled attempts to retrieve their organs.
Though Ms. Hawkins' case is an extreme example of what can go wrong, a New York Times examination revealed a pattern of rush decision-making that has prioritized the need for more organs over the safety of potential donors.
In New Mexico, a woman was subjected to days of preparation for donation, even after her family said that she seemed to be regaining consciousness, which she eventually did.
In Florida, a man cried and bent on his breathing tube, but was still withdrawn from life support.
In West Virginia, doctors were appalled when coordinators asked a paralyzed man coming off sedatives in an operating room for consent to remove his organs.
Stories like these have emerged as the transplant system has increasingly turned to a type of organ removal called donation after circulatory death.
It accounted for a third of all donations last year, about 20,000 organs, triple the number from five years earlier.
Most donated organs in the United States come from people who are brain dead, an irreversible state, and are kept on machines only to maintain their organs.
Okay, pause there.
Yeah.
I want to point out, of the faults I find in this article, which are not terrible and many, this is one.
If you dig on the concept of brain death, you will also find that that is a murky concept, and that there's plenty to fear about that standard.
This article introduced me, and I assume you, to the idea of circulatory death as some wholly other standard for determining when one can harvest organs.
And it, the New York Times points out, is a judgment call.
So that's important.
Yeah, it is important.
And I would say this is just another example of categories being real even when boundaries are fuzzy.
And this is so often the case in biology that the example that we have both used and that I have written about is the distinction between a mountain and a valley having no clear demarcation does not render the concept of either mountain or valley invalid.
It just means that we don't know exactly when we've left one and entered another.
And the same can be true for life and death.
The fact that both the beginning and the end of life have boundaries that we try to draw very clearly, but the biology of it, the reality of it, resists such clear, hard boundaries, does not render the concept of life or death any less real.
Well, I was going to take a slightly different tack on that point.
And I was going to liken this to the case, people will have heard me say, that speciation is a good concept, but species is a bad concept, that genetic is a good concept, but gene is a bad concept, because when you try to get to the precise definition, these things fall apart.
And the case of death is actually one step stranger.
And I was wrestling with it.
Why is this both like that and different?
And the answer is that the term death defines two things.
It defines a state of being dead and a process of dying.
And the problem is that the process of dying is like the process of moving from the mountain into the valley, and there's no exact moment at which you go from one to the other, nor should there be.
There doesn't need to be.
It's not inherent to the geology of anything.
Nor required for the concepts.
Right.
And so in this case, you know, I'm quite confident that Ben Franklin is dead.
Right.
Right?
He's dead.
There's no ambiguity.
There's not a judgment call there.
Ben Franklin is gone.
But was there some period at which reasonable doctors could disagree over the state of Ben Franklin?
There may well have been.
And that, the problem that we have the sense of like, well, everybody knows that there's a binary difference between being alive and being dead, because once, you know, you're truly alive, you know, walking around talking, nobody just disagrees that you're alive.
And once you're, you know, you haven't moved for months and creatures are picking your carcass clean, then the point is, well, that's clearly you're dead.
So we think of it in these binary terms and we don't understand that just like speciation, there's a process that happens there in which it wasn't built to match our ability to define it.
That was unnecessary, meaningless.
Well, I think this is very much like speciation and that it's a temporal process and that time inherently sometimes creates hard boundaries.
Like something, you know, before that thing happened and after that thing happened, we all have moments in our lives around which we sort of frame our memories because they were so foundational for us.
But the more we drill in on the precision of the moment, like what was the moment, for a lot of things, it's actually hard to find the moment.
And that doesn't make the larger scale analysis any less robust, but it does mean that you can't continue the same analysis infinitely in a fractal way.
Yep.
I also think it points to the likely adaptive nature of a lot of the rituals surrounding death that come from many cultures.
So let's take, you know, the classic Irish wake.
Why would you take your chum down to the bar and lay him out on the table and drink around him?
Have a good time around him.
Right.
Do the stuff that is most likely to rouse him.
Right.
Might wake him up.
There's, you know, in every culture except modernity, I would say, there is an awful lot of contact with the just departed.
You know, there is staying with the body.
The body lies in state for, you know, a day or more as the family gathers.
And I think this does multiple things that one, you know, the difference between somebody dying and you know doctors saying well you know they're gone and then they're whisked away and the point is well this isn't any different than they walked out the door in the morning and went to work or they went on did I imagine that I must have imagined it I hope I imagined it right so the closure thing has to get past the idea that the person is just sleeping or just away and watching them absolutely not move the body
grow cold, the body grows stiff, which is unambiguous.
You know, all of these things are a natural process that allows the body to trigger over into this other state and, you know, accepting a death.
And so there's, you know, the idea that what we now have is, well, we need to know the instant you're dead.
And so we literally have an idea, you know, it's medically encoded, you know, declared dead at, you know, a particular minute.
Yeah.
And, you know, that just so happens as technology has moved on and has allowed organ donation that has allowed us to say, well, that was the minute he was dead.
I guess everything that happens thereafter is happening to an object.
Is of no concern to him because he is gone.
Right.
And so that the whole thing was predicated on the idea that death was a something that had a particular instant of, you know, an instant in which it was unambiguous.
And, you know, there are certainly going to be cases, right?
If you, you know, if you're decapitated in a horrible car accident, something falls off a truck, then presumably the period of time in which there's any ambiguity about your life is very short.
And the utter irreversibility of the process that's happened is clear.
But in many other cases, the body, you know, it doesn't, it isn't one organ that shuts down in different ways.
And it can be clear that it's irreversible for a time while not having completed yet as well.
Well, let's put it this way.
It can be clear that it's irreversible in many cases and leave many other cases in which we're tempted to say.
Of course.
I was not claiming that all cases are irreversible.
Right.
But it can be true that a body is failing in a way that is irreversible.
And yet, and yet it is not yet done.
Totally.
And the thing that's really happened here is the technology of medicine.
In nature, let's say that you were in the process of dying from, let's say it's dehydration.
The point is the process that brought you to dying of dehydration tends not to alleviate.
And so you get a positive feedback where the likelihood of you coming back from whatever state of dehydratedness you're in gets less and less over time.
So nature tends to finish you off if you have come very close to this border.
So it becomes a process that in general does not reverse.
There's a difference between that and our ability to leave you at knows how many thousands of dollars a day on a machine that can keep your blood flowing.
And, you know, you know, have you seen anything from the brain?
No, I haven't.
Have you, you know, it's like, well, how good are your instruments?
You know, how much do you know about what it means for a brain to be alive that you can detect when it is irreversibly not jumpstartable?
So all of these things raise profound questions.
And what we're going to find out in this article is that there's an industry that depends on us knowing that moment as early as possible because it, for reasonable reasons, wants to deliver fresh organs that actually work.
So that creates, that builds the exact conflict that will create horror stories.
Yes, it does.
Yeah.
Maybe time to continue on from where we were.
Sure.
Circulated organs in the United States come from people who are brain dead, an irreversible state.
We just discussed the error in that statement.
And are kept on machines only to maintain their organs.
Hold on a second.
Circulatory death donation is different.
These patients are on a life support, often in a coma.
Their prognoses are more of a medical judgment call.
They are alive with some brain activity, but doctors have determined that they are near death and won't recover.
If relatives agree to donation, doctors withdraw life support and wait for the patient's heart to stop.
This has to happen within an hour or two for the organs to be considered viable.
After the person is declared dead, surgeons go in.
The Times found that some organ procurement organizations, the non-profits in each state that have federal contracts to coordinate transplants, are aggressively pursuing circulatory death donors and pushing families and doctors toward surgery.
Hospitals are responsible for patients up to the moment of death, but some are allowing procurement organizations to influence treatment decisions.
55 medical workers in 19 states told the Times they had witnessed at least one disturbing case of donation after circulatory death.
Workers in several states said they had seen coordinators persuading hospital clinicians to administer morphine, propofol, and other drugs to hasten the death of potential donors.
I think these types of problems are happening much more than we know, said Dr. Wade Smith, a longtime neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who frequently evaluates potential donors in a study donation after circulatory death.
A recent federal investigation, prompted by the case of a Kentucky man whose organs were pursued even as he shook his head and drew his knees to his chest, found that the state's procurement organization had ignored signs of increasing consciousness in 73 potential donors.
In interviews with health care workers, as well as a review of internal records, audio recordings, and text messages, the Times confirmed 12 additional cases in nine states that troubled medical workers or were being investigated.
Most of these patients ultimately died, so it is impossible to know what they experienced.
Doctors expressed worry that some patients might have recovered if given more time on life support.
Other patients may have felt pain or emotional distress in the last hours of their lives.
The questions have taken on greater urgency as this type of donation has grown rapidly in the last five years, driven in part by federal pressure on procurement organizations to increase transplants.
At the same time, the government has largely lost their own trust in the past.
allowed the transplant system to police itself okay that's strange that struck me as odd when i read this um why is there federal pressure on procurement organizations to increase transplants why does why does the federal government uh have an opinion about this?
I don't know, but you can certainly imagine, imagine that you're a complicated systems thinker facing this complex system.
And the idea is you can imagine being troubled by the number of people who die waiting for an organ who could be saved.
And, you know, a good person who just didn't understand the complexity surrounding death or was in denial about it would decide, let's streamline this process of procuring organs.
It'll save lots of lives.
I'll get to feel good about myself.
You know, those kinds of motivations.
Right, but the organizations are private.
Yes, but the federal government's built of people who will have the same kinds of thoughts.
I just don't get what their jurisdiction is.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.
It's a good question.
I wanted to point out two other things, though.
One is one of the other faults I would take with this article is they report that 55 people had disturbing stories of at least one case of organ donation that they found.
55 medical professionals.
55 medical professionals.
Out of how many?
Right?
If that's 55 out of 55, that tells you one thing.
If it's 55 out of 5,000, that tells you something different.
And by not telling us the size of the pool that they talked to or how they found these people, it's just, you know.
Yeah.
My guess, really knowing nothing here is that they solicited stories from people who had stories via some network.
Right.
Such that there was no pool.
It's not that they talked to 500 people and 10% of them had troubling stories.
People came forward to them, often presumably on the condition of anonymity, to say, yes, I sussed.
Right.
But even they even need to tell us that.
So we have some idea.
You know, did they go to a discussion list of 5,000 medical professionals and presumably some of the people who had stories didn't come forward?
And, you know, we need to be able to judge that.
55 is a very difficult number to grapple with.
But I also wanted to just point out the there's something hard to grapple with about the actually the depth of the significance of even a single error of this kind where the person in question experiences horrifying final moments.
Just imagine for yourself that you've succumbed to something and your last moments are you unanesthetized, having your organs removed by some surgeon focused on saving someone else's life with your parts.
Like even one such story is the stuff of nightmares.
And the idea that this is now being systematically risked over the course of an entire industry is terrifying.
Yes, it is.
And it also, I will come back to this at a later point, but this also potentially denies people a right to the natural process of death, which I'm convinced we don't understand.
And again, I think we, even evolutionists, tend to think, well, at the point that you're unrecoverable, selection hasn't really done anything with the process because you have no way of enhancing your own fitness, which is not true.
But nonetheless, the sheer horror of even one error is unthinkable.
And the idea that there is some statistical rate of error makes it absolutely ghastly.
And the idea that these people have been harboring these stories, certainly this is being discussed somewhere.
And the New York Times is, you know, okay, they're catching up to the fact that there's something to talk about.
Kudos to them for highlighting the issue.
But they're late to the party.
And, you know, this is not a small matter.
You know, not only did some of these people potentially have a right to live more life that they would have been able to access if somebody had not been in a rush to get their organs, but the manner of your death is profoundly important.
And I just want to add, this is going to sound strange.
I'm borrowing from an odd place, but we have found ourselves in several instances, I think three instances, having to put an animal of ours down.
And in each case, I have had a confrontation with the veterinarian, which I did not enjoy.
The confrontation was I wanted the veterinarian to check a second time and make sure that their damn drugs had done their job because the idea, you know, this animal is my friend.
And the idea of it waking up thinking, you know, in its last moments, finding itself in a bag with other cadavers, thinking that I've abandoned it, you know, is so unthinkably awful, even if the fate of the animal is sealed at that point.
And in each case, the doctor has looked at me like, are you questioning my skills?
And my feeling is, yes, I'm questioning you're a human, right?
Right.
You're fallible.
And in this case, an error is so inconceivably awful to me that I want you to do what you think is perfectly redundant.
Even a second check doesn't tell me for sure that you know what you think you know.
You know, did you run yourself through a check?
Have you looked at animals who are hovering near death and made sure that in every single case you never make an error detecting a heartbeat?
Is that a test you ran on yourself?
I bet not, Doc, right?
So, you know, yes, there's this arrogance, right?
You have the power over life and death.
You have a technology that you think is totally reliable.
And, you know, this is long before COVID taught me and us how fallible these people really are.
But god damn it, you know, this is not supposed to be in your hands.
You at least need to approach what you do have at your disposal with a certain amount of humility about how good you are at it, how good anyone could be at it, the quality of your tools.
I mean, think about the damn stethoscope in your hand, right?
You've got a little like drum-like membrane on the end of a tube stuck into your ears dock, and you think you know for sure what you're hearing?
I don't think so, right?
So anyway, there's lots of room for ambiguity, and there's no room for error in this case.
And that would all be true if there were no value to your organs, if nobody had figured out how to transplant anything.
But of course, as soon as you have that incentive to get healthy organs, that is to push the instant at which death is declared earlier so the organs are fresher and more likely to work and therefore more valuable to people who are profiting in that industry, of course you're going to have a horror show.
There's no avoiding it.
Yeah.
And I think I'm reminded of another animal we had, all of which reiterates your point that manner of death matters.
Manner of death matters for the individual who is dying, human or otherwise, and especially in humans for the people who are left behind.
So we had another cat, Crenshaw, who was dying.
We could tell he was dying, and we had made the difficult decision to take him in.
And I believe it was the morning of the day on which we had an appointment.
It was afternoon.
It was like two hours before the appointment.
He crawled into my lap, and it was clear what was happening.
And we were all home, and the boys were young.
And he died on my lap with all of us there with him.
And it was hard, but it was so much better for everyone.
It was so much better for everyone that it happened that way.
And we just, we know that it is preferable to die surrounded by the people you love and in a place of comfort.
And so it is already unfortunate if you are having to die in a hospital.
Everyone should understand that, including the people who have chosen to work there and to help the people who are patients there and sometimes end up dying there.
And of course, the loved ones who are confronted with having to make the final decision, you know, of course, doctors will have worked into their pattern,
you know, a sense of they will have purged any sense of ambiguity they may harbor in their own minds because you don't want to approach somebody and say, what would you think about the organs of your loved one being donated if you're harboring doubts?
You want to say, well, this is a terrible thing, a terrible tragedy, but some small bit of good can come from it.
But the point is, no, you're messing with a complex system.
This is the process of death.
And you're dealing with multiple organ systems and your artificial cartoon certainty just has no damn place.
And maybe this is the moment to say that one of the other reasons that this article struck me is that many years ago, I had thought about this process actually triggered by something in the New York Times.
And I had been moved enough and frustrated enough to actually go through the process of writing a letter to the Times and getting it published.
And anyway, I think you'll be interested to see that letter.
It's very short, so maybe we should bring it up.
This was in 2003.
This was in 2003.
It says, to the editor regarding a lyrical gift by Maureen Dowd.
And I should say Maureen Dowd's column was essentially a report of a case in which somebody's life had been saved by organ donation and what a marvelous thing it had been and the connection to the people who had allowed their loved one's organ to be donated and a plea to make yourself an organ donor.
Don't be selfish, right?
And this frustrated me because I realized that when I first became a driver, of course, you get your driver's license and they say, do you want to be an organ donor?
And the answer was, of course, why wouldn't I?
And years later, I had stopped being an organ donor.
And so I had been through the thought process a little bit of why that was.
I hadn't become more selfish, but I had become wiser about the brokenness of systems.
And so in any case, here I'll continue to read the letter.
Most of us would like nothing better than for our organs to save other people when we die, yet many elect not to register as donors.
Why?
Because doctors are human, and in allocating scarce time and resources, it would be remarkable if they were never affected by the knowledge that a particular death might save five or more other lives.
Organ donors get little benefit for facing that uncertainty, and though the risk is presumably small, the negative consequences for an unlikely donor, for an unlucky donor, is potentially profound.
But the trickle of organs could easily be turned to a flood.
Eliminate the danger of conflicted medical interest by moving donor status out of one's wallet and into a controlled access database.
Then give priority to individuals seeking to receive an organ based on their history as registered donors.
It would surely be an effective incentive, and what could be more fair?
It's signed, Brett Weinstein, and then it says that the writer is a professor of biology at the Evergreen State College.
So that was back in 2003, more than 20 years ago.
Let me just say there's, I remember the letter, of course.
The one part of it that at first I didn't understand is moving the status out of one's wallet into a controlled access database.
You're not talking about any kind of financial or anything there.
You're just talking about actually having your donor status on your driver's license or in a separate card that you carry around, as opposed to it being out of view from both you and any medical professional who would like to check.
I don't want the EMT or the doctors to have any idea that I'm an Oregon donor until after they've decided there's no hope.
At which point I'm fine with it.
I'm fine with it if they've done that job well, but I don't want them perversely incentivized because is it even conceivable that a doctor faced with a patient that they can't save and they feel is very likely to die might give up sooner if they thought, well, some good will come of this and the sooner the better, right?
Of course it's going to create this problem.
And, you know, I saw it more than 20 years ago.
What's more, what frustrated me about that letter, I did get some correspondence back from it, from some private organizations that had created private schemes to do exactly what I was talking about.
Didn't know they existed.
But the idea was you join some organization and then you're being willing to donate your organs to others in the organization gives you priority on their organs.
It makes perfect sense.
So you've got federal pressure.
But the success of such a scheme is going to be density dependent.
It's going to be more successful the more people are part of it.
So if you have 40 different schemes in the country, it's going to be much less effective than if you had all of those people in one.
Right.
So what we've got now, according to the New York Times, is federal pressure to get more organs, resulting in living people being butchered by doctors while in a potentially recoverable state, in a state in which they can potentially feel it and maybe even understand something, right?
When there's another way to do this that A, creates a huge likely increase in the availability of organs, because the point is, if you know, do you want to be an organ donor?
Well, that answer is very different if you know that you might need an organ someday and you want access to it.
And the way you get access is to become an organ donor.
And you can put aside your fears because your doctor and your EMT aren't going to know that you're an organ donor until it's too late to do anything for you.
So my overarching sense reading this New York Times article is good governance is difficult, but it is not nearly as hard as they are making it look.
That every one of these damn things is the result of conflicts of interest taking obvious solutions like the one that I sent to the New York Times 20 years ago and frankly.
And which apparently people had actually already seen and acted on.
Right.
They had already built their private systems.
But of course, a private system is no way to do that for the reason that you point out.
You want as many people in the system as possible.
So anyway, I find the whole thing maddening.
Do we want solutions?
Here's a good one.
What's the argument against it?
Right?
Does it hurt anything?
I can't see that it does.
Does it potentially save people from being butchered by doctors in their last moments or being robbed of life they would otherwise have lived?
It would save a lot of them, right?
I still want much better safeguards than the ones we apparently have.
But if I could see it 20 years ago and I could say it in the New York Times and it wasn't like, hey, that's a pretty good idea.
Let's see if we can make that happen.
It's like, you know, it's nothing.
It just so.
Well, and it's, I mean, it's, it's a, it's an unfortunately common trajectory, right?
There was, and I don't, I don't remember the Marine Dowd piece, but as you described it, it was, you know, heartfelt, tear-jerking, look at the success and value of transplants now that we have the technology and know how to do transplants and presented as a story without trade-offs at some level, right?
Very Pollyanna, very like, you know, how could anyone choose not to be potentially contributing to such a story if you end up unfortunately dying unexpectedly?
How could you not?
And I suspect, I remember this moment.
I was pregnant at the time, so I probably don't remember it that well.
But I suspect that you read it as a, like, that's great, but you need, you need, the New York Times needs to recognize that there are incentives here that aren't being described and that you're going to send people down a road that will be dangerous.
And here we are in the New York Times 22 years later with an article that exactly reveals the tension and the cruelty that is going to be inherent in a system without requiring that anyone individually actually be acting cruelly.
I'm not saying that some people aren't, but this doesn't require that any people be monsters or evil or any of that.
It doesn't require that at all.
It does not require that at all.
And I agree with you.
I think there will be some monsters in this system, but they don't need to be there.
The incentives alone are enough to do it.
I also want to point out that the comparison, maybe if I'd thought we were going to go here, I would have brought up the Maureen Dowd article, but there is a distinction.
Ever since you and I first came to public attention, there's been a lot of curiosity about like, what the hell are you doing still identifying as a liberal?
Don't you get it?
And my feeling from the beginning has been, I don't think you understand the history of liberalism.
Yes, there is this mind-numbing, do-gooder, virtue-signaling version of it.
Sanctimony.
Yes, sanctimonious version of liberalism.
But I come from a tradition, and you come from a tradition of hard-headed liberals.
And the point is, hard-headed liberalism is about how do you actually change things so that the outcomes are better, right?
The founding fathers of this country were hard-headed liberals.
We now think of them as classic conservatives, but they were radicals, actually.
But they were systems thinkers.
And the question is, well, how are we going to deal with the problems that come from bad people gaining power in the system?
Okay, we're going to engineer a system with three branches that are each going to check and balance each other, right?
These were systems thinkers, and that was not in conflict with their desire to make people freer and happier and better off.
And they weren't trying to break things that did work.
They just saw that a lot of what they were coming from didn't work.
And so, you know, it was an approach to change that wasn't a burn it all down approach.
It was a, oh my God, that system has failed radically.
But there are presumably still pieces that work.
And I think the conflict or the contrast between Dowd's piece, which is like about shaming you into joining the group of organ donors so that you can then talk about it.
Oh, I'm an organ donor and you can virtue signal over it.
And the, hey, Maureen, let's talk about why I'm not an organ donor anymore, right?
Let's talk about whether or not I'm being selfish.
Is that what happened?
I became more selfish, you know, after my first driver's license?
Or did I wise up to something?
You know, if you were really interested in more people getting organs so that more lives could continue, then the answer is a systems answer.
It's not a virtue signaling answer.
But which thing wins out?
People love the Maureen Doubt version where it's like, you know, oh, I heard this, you know, tragic story and that's why I'm an organ donor and you should be too, rather than a, you know, I'm actually afraid of doctors because they have a power over life and death that is almost unthinkably important and their fallibility is a problem.
And there is a solution to this, but you have to understand the game theory.
So anyway, I want to make a pitch.
If, you know, I would, if I had to write my letter today, it would be a lot more pointed, right?
Because we now know when I wrote that letter, I didn't have a body of literature and discussion in the modern online environment of all of the horror stories.
So I was sort of guessing that there were horror stories and didn't know whether anyone, in fact, even knew those horror stories, you know, people, you know, getting butchered by doctors, maybe, you know, maybe only very occasionally is it ever even acknowledged or understood by the people who are doing it.
Now it's like, oh yeah, this happens a lot.
Yeah.
Hey, the New York Times found 55 people who each had a horror story.
So, you know, I would make the letter more pointed.
But short of that, the New York Times in 2025 is talking about the problem of how to get enough organs and the impact that that has on a system that gets to decide when you're alive and when you're dead and doesn't even notice that it published an answer to that question.
That is, at least if there's a problem with the solution I proposed, I'd like to know what it is.
Nobody's told me what it is in more than 20 years of it being out there.
So anyway, it's hard, but it isn't this hard.
Things are solvable.
And, you know, it's not even expensive solution.
And, you know, I would love to be an organ donor and, you know, imagine that my death might not be in vain if something terrible happens.
So, you know, let's get over the virtue signaling part so we can get to the, hey, how do we approach the system so that it actually spits out outcomes that we like more often and gets rid of the, you know, absolutely nightmarish horror stories that we are now coming to discover are apparently a regular feature of medicine.
Well, I mean, there is a tension between sort of game theoretic thinking and the cocktail parties that you like to invoke.
You know, what happens at the cocktail parties is what drives behavior in most people, as opposed to carefully thinking about a topic that isn't in their purview normally, and why would they imagine that they are expert on this?
And I think maybe it therefore also ties into our usual criticism of reliance on expertise and experts, that expertise is real, and many people with expertise don't have the appropriate credentials, and so are not listened to even when they should be.
And many people with the appropriate credentials do not have the expertise that their credentials would seem to suggest that they have.
And so when you see people wielding their authority on the basis of you need to trust me because I have earned these degrees or I have these accolades and you haven't heard anything intelligent out of their mouths, then you in fact should not be trusting them.
And what we are saying is not don't trust people with the appropriate credentials.
It is don't assume that the credentials actually got them to the position with regard to wisdom and knowledge that it would be lovely if we lived in a world in which that were the case.
It would be lovely if there were a simple proxy for, okay, in this domain, what indicator, what's the proxy for this person is going to know what they're talking about.
And therefore, whenever I have a question over in this domain, I can look to what they have said and pretty much put my vote with them.
And that could be used across all of these domains.
I can't think of a single domain where there is such a proxy that is reliable because every single one of these degree programs and otherwise accrediting bodies has become corrupted by perverse incentives and other insanity.
Right.
And if you want to solve that problem, there is one answer.
It is a proper feedback mechanism, right?
When you screw up as a physician and somebody who is not dead faces an organ retrieval process, that needs to come back to haunt you in an extreme form.
And the industry that is pushing people, you know, administering propofol to people to hasten death because, you know, we need the organs, if it comes back to haunt people sufficiently, then they will take on the interests of this person at the end of their life so that that person will not face ghouls who are seeking their organs and indifferent to their well-being.
Now, I want to make two last points.
You may have some other stuff, but I want to make two last points.
One of the things that I thought was important in reading this story here in 2025 is that, you know, sometimes I say certain stories diagnose the system.
That they, you know, COVID allowed us to see the system as a whole.
It allowed us to see the failure of journalism, of universities, of medical schools, of allopathic medicine, of government.
Education.
Education.
Across the board.
We saw the whole thing.
This story isn't as broad, but nonetheless, it does let you understand a certain phenomenon.
There's a point at which you become indifferent to some population, right?
If you are in the organ transplant business and you feel good because you're supplying organs that allow people to either live lives that would otherwise end or live better than they would otherwise be able to, you're making money doing that job and you're telling yourself you're a good person because you're getting organs to people who can still use them when somebody else wasn't going to be able to use them anymore.
Then you very easily fall into indifference to those who hover at the very edge of death.
And that process, once a person has become indifferent to some other person or set of people, absolutely horrifying things follow.
And I would point out, just so that people don't get the sense, well, that's not me, most of us have a relationship with factory farming that is somewhere in this neighborhood.
I will say you and I are not indifferent to factory farming.
We are both very troubled by it, but we don't spend a lot of time trying to end it because there are other priorities in the world.
And so mostly what we do is don't think about it, right?
We talk about it every so often, but it's horrifying what happens.
We try not to eat meat that is from animals that were factory farmed, although we are not perfect about that.
It's hard to be perfect about it if you dine out or go over to somebody else's house.
So in any case, the point is we aren't totally indifferent, but we are indifferent enough that this absolutely despicable, cruel practice happens on our watch, and we have erected some firewall sufficient to let us not be preoccupied by it all the time.
That happens with people as well.
And the problem is when that happens with people, you may end up facing a surgeon with an itchy trigger finger going after your organs.
You can end up facing a foreign government dropping bombs on you that has stopped caring about you as a human being.
You can end up in a deaf camp.
The point is, indifference is the gateway that allows all kinds of horrifying things to unfold.
And this story where we can be shocked by the fact that, wait a second, this is happening to people effectively at random.
You die in some situation where your organs might still remain useful and suddenly you're facing the indifference of some industry that you barely know exists.
That it is a story that diagnoses a system.
If you don't have a feedback that forces people to take on the interests of those who they would not otherwise care very much about, then they won't take them on.
And those people can face absolutely horrifying things as a result.
That was one point.
And my last point is comedy is very important.
It is not surprising to find that Monty Python nailed this one too.
If you think back to that sketch, I guess it's in the meaning of life in which they come to the door and can we have your liver?
But I'm still using it.
And anyway, they end up extracting the guy's liver, though he's alive.
And the answer is, well, you're not going to be after we're done with you.
When that was made 40 years ago or whatever it would be, it was over the top, like effectively slapstick comedy.
But it is now reality, right?
Just as, you know, Loretta, you know, Stan wanting to be Loretta turned out to be reality with respect to the trans activist madness, this idea of...
Right.
Predictive science fiction.
So My point is comedy is important.
They could actually see that you didn't have to flip very many switches to end up in this unthinkable place.
And we are, you know, four-fifths of the way to the world that they are describing and probably in many places are exactly in that world.
You know, if you're in China and you're part of the elite and you need an organ and, you know, they'll take it from a Uyghur, presumably.
So there are places in the world where this undoubtedly happens.
You know, are people, are elites in the West able to source these organs?
I wouldn't be shocked.
So anyway, pay attention to comedy.
It's funny for a reason, and that's to alert you to things that are closer than you think.
And it's part of why it was so alarming that the woke movement went after comedy, that it started canceling comics and a lot of comics said, I won't go to college campuses anymore, which in turn meant that college students were less able to hear comedic takes on modern events and so became more sullen and insular as a result as well.
So the cutting off of both comics at the knees and lines of comedy to various populations is a sign of a maybe not-so-creeping authoritarianism.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's a reason that they're humorless.
And it's both because if you're dim-witted enough to be a foot soldier in certain movements, then you don't have the mental capacity for humor.
But it's also because humor is the thing that allows us to reveal the absurdity of many of these belief systems.
So, you know, I don't know what happens when AI becomes good at this.
I think it's going to be the last thing to fall, but it can't be that far off, and then we're in big trouble.
Yeah.
All right.
Can we talk about birds?
Yeah, let's talk about things that are more fun, like birds, for example.
Good.
Okay, let me start with a little preamble.
Okay.
So barn swallows are one of several species of swallows in North America.
They are very common here in the United States.
And right now, at this point in the United States, there is only one location where they still roost on natural structures.
We call them barn swallows.
Obviously, they didn't come with that name.
Their scientific name is Herundo Rustica.
But we call them barn swallows because humans mostly see them on barns under eaves and like under bridges and such and under such structures.
But on the Channel Islands off the coast of California, they actually still make nests on natural structures.
That is the only place where they are known at this point to still roost, to still make nests on natural structures.
I did not know that.
And that is a remarkable fact.
And, you know, I was struggling as you first introduced.
I was struggling to predict where that would be.
And I did not get to the right answer.
But you having said it, it makes perfect sense.
It would be an island.
Yeah.
An offshore island close enough such that they didn't have a hard time getting there.
But an island that is not permanently inhabited by humans.
Right.
I have actually, we should go to the Channel Islands.
You've been saying that for a long time somehow, despite having grown up in Southern California.
Have you been?
No.
Yeah.
So I've never been either.
I don't think you can stay there overnight.
I don't think there's anything there.
There may be like a ranger kiosk or something, but given that there are lots of barn swallows in neighboring Santa Barbara, Carpenteria or whatever is exactly closest to the Channel Islands, they go there.
They maybe find the kiosk and they build nests there and then they go to the structures that they would normally go to.
But otherwise, in the rest of the United States and the rest of North America, they are building on eaves and barns and such.
What I would love to know is before, I assume it's European structures that have caused them to no longer be found in their original niche.
But maybe it's not.
Let's say I'd love to know what their ecology was and how common they were before humans were in North America.
Because there's an, you know, if they were capable of living in the wild, the fact that they live very well on the sides of human structures doesn't, it doesn't explain why they're not in the wild anymore.
Right.
So what I'd love to know is what happened.
Is it that barn swallows are vastly more common than they once were because actually humans carry with them this element of their niche that's very rare and maybe not found in nature anymore?
I will say that there are a number of species, as far as I'm aware, most of them are plants that are no longer found in nature and are only found in certain cultures' gardens and things like that.
But this animal example is interesting.
Yeah, it is.
So on May 17th of this year, I began seeing a pair.
Burn swallows tend to be pair bonded, which means they're monogamously, in this case, both, I don't know how they choose the site, but they're building a nest together and brooding the eggs and then feeding the chicks together and then helping them fledge together.
A story that we saw from beginning to end from Eve, from inside her house.
They positioned a nest where we could see it under one of our eaves from our living room.
And it was on May 17th of this year that I first saw this nest being built.
So those first three videos, Jen, that I sent you, you can show now.
And I'm just going to read a tiny bit from this wonderful, wonderful book called Avian Architecture, How Birds Design, Engineer, and Build.
And there's a section on, there's a chapter on mud nests, which swallows build several kinds of nests.
And you can show the video now while I'm reading this.
And so What you'll see, actually I will start reading in a minute, but this is one of the parents, and they're pretty monomorphic, meaning it's not easy for non-experts to tell males from females.
So I don't know if this is the future father or the future mother, but they come with mud in their mouths, and you could see there's already some mud there, and try to affix it to whatever structure they're trying to build it on.
And I had already been watching for a while, and actually they started on the opposite side of this pole we're looking at, and it just didn't take at all.
Like they spent hours trying to get the beginnings of this nest going, and it wasn't working.
So Peter Goodfellow in Avian Architecture, in his chapter on mud nests, writes, Not content with a house of straw, the potters of the avian world have evolved to build solid and durable architecture in which mud is the dominant material.
Quote, according to the theory that men acquired their first notions of architecture from birds, we are told that Doxius, the inventor of clay houses, took the hint from swallows.
This was recorded in Pliny the Elder's famous Natural History of 77 to 79, Common Era.
So a few paragraphs later in the same future parent flying in, presumably with mud in its beak, and they did not communicate well, and so they both drove each other off.
We've all been there.
But it's beginning to take shape.
Okay, you can't really see that yet, but believe me when I tell you that this is going to be the future site of this nest.
So, like a potter, the nest builder faces two problems.
Air trapped between successive loads and mud drying too soon, both of which can cause weaknesses in the structure.
To address this, mud builders vibrate their heads when applying a new beak full of mud, which distributes moisture and molds the new load onto and into the drier surface.
In order to avoid the collapse of the heavy nest from the wall, birds pause between bouts of building to allow for the mud to dry and harden.
This work can be seen in a nest's banded appearance.
Once dry, mud is extremely durable and additional plant materials are added for strength.
So we watched this nest be built over just a couple of days.
I did not record, unfortunately, when it finished, but I think it was just two days later.
So I think it took three days to build between May 17th and May 19th.
I know for sure that there were adults hanging out in the nest before our children came home on May 23rd.
And presumably here we're guessing, as soon as the nest was built, pretty much, the mother-to-be was ready.
She had been brooding and she laid eggs that birds are fertilized right before the laying, which enhances certainty of paternity, which is part of why monogamy is so common in birds.
Something like, gosh, it's like 90% of birds.
85, I think.
85% of birds, of which there are eight species, 11,000, so many more than mammals.
Yes.
Yeah, actually, maybe more than 10,000 species of birds.
Something like 85% of them are monogamous.
And this is facilitated by fathers actually being able to be fairly certain that they are the parents of the offspring that they are raising, like say in mammals.
Just to complete the logic, if in species where males can't be very sure that they are the parents, then selection does not favor the evolution of monogamy because so many males get cuckolded.
So you have the evolution of strategies like mate guarding.
Right.
Very careful guarding, guarding, which can take forms that we do not like, but that are understandable from an evolutionary perspective, in which males who are potential future fathers guard their females, women and humans, very carefully to ensure that there is no cheating and that the child that is born nine months later is in fact theirs.
So I did want to point out in passing your description.
Was that Pliny the Elder?
Yes.
In translation, presumably.
The I don't know if anybody's made this connection, but it's effectively 3D printing.
Right?
This is.
I mean, it's just, it's architecture.
It's building.
Yeah, but you can call it the most modern thing, but.
Yes, but I won't belabor the point, but if you've seen any of these amazing videos of the 3D printing of houses where the material is basically some form of concrete, Yeah.
You've got a big robot arm that knows where it is and comes down and lays another layer of concrete and builds up a wall.
I very, very like this, and a lot of the same considerations, I'm sure, are implied by it, which I think is kind of cool because...
So I have seen, I think maybe the one video that I have seen of 3D printed structures is of a bridge.
And that's intriguing because you're having to cantilever something out, at least in the case of what I saw.
And so you are working against gravity and having to think about not just the materials that you're using, but how they will change over time, as it described in the sections I just read.
And as any potter, as I am, as I have been in the past, has wrestled with, how does mud change, how does clay change or mud change as it moves from thoroughly wet to thoroughly dry?
And in this case, obviously, they're not firing these nests, but they become very durable once dry and hard.
And we've got several, you know, we don't clean these off our structure.
So we've got several years-old barn swallow nests on our house, which have remained quite intact through, you know, and they build them in protected spaces.
So they're not facing the windshield of the continent like other parts of the house are, but they are extremely durable despite not having been exposed to any sort of firing as in a kiln.
I'm going to come back a little later to the different kinds of animals, different classes of animals and different kinds of animals that we've been watching.
But I wanted to point out that already in this story, one of the things that I think you and I enjoy about watching these animals that we don't know very much about do things.
And, you know, we have a very good toolkit for thinking about animal behavior, but we don't know, you know, we didn't study barn swallows or any other swallows.
And so we get to learn from nature, but it also just raises so many questions that you know you won't know the answer to.
Like in this case, you're watching these two animals collecting mud from somewhere.
We could probably figure out where, and putting it on the structure in this very particular way.
How did they learn to do that?
A very strong probability is that most of what they know about how to do it came to them through the egg.
That is to say, it's encoded in their genome.
Because if you're a young'un in a nest, you don't observe the building of that nest.
So the most you could do is observe something about the structure you're in, but probably it's too early in their lives for them to even correctly do that.
So just like the multi-generational migration pattern of monarchs, those monarchs can't have learned it.
It's impossible.
Their great-grandparents are the last ones to have done a particular part of the migration in some cases.
So it has to be encoded in the genes.
It has to be encoded in the genes in some ways.
But many of you will know that I studied tent-making bats for my dissertation.
And the same question is there.
The babies that are raised in these tents are not there for the building of them.
And then they go on to build them, at least the males do.
And so the question is, how do they learn the particular structures, which sometimes vary within a species based on the location?
Can they infer it by looking at tents made by other bats?
You know, in the case of these swallows, can they infer anything by looking at nests that have been properly constructed?
And then there's the other question of, and because this is a bird, there's every possibility that there is trial and error and that they refine the technique by doing exactly what you would do.
You try it.
It doesn't quite work this way.
You happen to get a better result that way.
You try to figure out what you did differently and you build.
And so that they become more expert at it, which then, you know, this becomes a part of the storehouse of knowledge that makes a particular barn swallow a good mate, right?
That they've got good nest building technique.
They can do it efficiently.
They know where to build the nest.
That obviously matters a great deal.
So anyway, there's all of this stuff about like, well, the fact of what they do that we can say raises all kinds of questions about how that could possibly be transmitted from one generation to the next.
Anyway, a fascinating set of questions.
Indeed.
So let's show the next video from June 29th.
I think it's video four, which is the nest has long since been built.
I remember it began to be built on May 17th and was finished just a couple of days later.
The eggs were laid.
Now, June 29th, you can't see clearly here, but we had long since counted clearly five chicks in the nest.
There's five chicks in the nest.
You can see here the sort of the bands of the nest, the dried grass that has been incorporated into the nest build that is making it stronger.
It's like rebar.
It's like rebar, yeah.
And then there's for a while on the left side of the nest, there are these mature feathers, I think, sort of stuck up to the side behind which one chick often seemed to be trying to show himself.
So here they are, or that was the video's over, now we're looking at it still, waiting for food on June 29th.
So they had already begun to be fed by the parents.
And let's go to the next one.
So hold on, I just wanna point out, especially for those who are just listening, they seem to be born with beaks that are Lipstick.
Just absolutely gigantic for their tiny, And at the point that they are visible over the wall, their beaks are still way too big for their heads, which, you know.
Well, for baby birds, these guys are attractive.
Baby birds in general are just so, so ugly.
But these guys are good.
But these guys are pretty good, and they've got these like white lipstick beaks.
So that was June 29th.
They were already being fed by parents.
This video doesn't happen to have any of that, but let's check out July 6th.
About a week later, they're a week bigger.
They're now bulging out of the nest, and you can see that there are five here.
And you're going to start getting visits from, boy, I thought there were visits from parents right at the beginning of this video.
But hopefully they show up soon.
So yeah.
So here, let's just say a few things about what one observes at this point.
The visits are very, very, So.
So it looks like two got fed in that one, in that visit.
One or two.
And then here's a second visit, presumably the other parent, because it was too fast for another feeding.
Yeah, and if you're counting left to right, one through five, the first visit seemed to have gotten one and two fed, and the second visit got number four fed.
And so there does seem to be some variation in who gets fed.
And not a ton of jostling, rather of repositioning, it seems.
I mean, we can't tell them apart.
But one thing that I don't have video of, and I probably wouldn't have shown it anyway, but is that the birds turn around, the chicks turn around in the nest and point their butts out the edge of the nest to poop.
Yep.
And then they turn themselves back around, which once they're this big in a tiny nest is hard, but they work their way in.
Yep.
It's a really cool behavior.
And I will say, you know, we've had the delightful experience of having nests under a window or near a window twice before this.
Yeah, once was robins and the other was Stellar's Jays.
In the Robins case, how does the problem of the nest filling up with poop get addressed?
Well, the babies poop and the parents literally eat it and fly off.
So it's a coprophagey system.
In this case, they poop over the side and they don't think about it.
We think about it.
Yeah.
We clean it off.
We have our stuff.
But anyway, so cool.
Yeah, so that was July 6th.
Big birds that at that point, both of us were thinking, like, it's got to be any day now.
It's got to be any day.
And then on July 10th, on July 10th, I woke up fairly early, although the sun had already been up for a while.
It was a little before six, and looked, and there was only one bird.
There was only one bird left in the nest.
And he was sort of on the edge of the nest, looking like he was going to fly.
And then I saw two on the ground on the deck.
And so after much more, after not much more transpired, I went and got you.
And we proceeded to watch for several hours as the fledging, you know, the initial flights for four of the birds from the nest had happened before we had gotten up that morning.
But we saw a ton.
Yeah, we saw a ton.
Oh, so here you have some video of two of the baby birds sitting on the deck.
And one of the things, this works differently in different species, but the fledging process where the animals are out of the nest and they really have to, And he's trying to, or he or she's demonstrating something about light and the babies presumably know what they have to do at some level.
But one of the reasons that we wanted to talk about this is actually the various species that we've been watching, I don't know how to say it other than there are profound philosophical implications.
If you take your human expectations of the world and you impose it or you try to map it onto these parents, these parents have been spending the better part of eight weeks, was it?
Yeah, almost two months.
So almost two months full time creating a structure in which to raise babies, producing five babies, feeding those babies till they are all almost equal in size.
Brooding the eggs before they were hatched.
Yeah, taking turns sitting on the eggs.
I think taking turns sitting on the eggs.
But all of that investment and the production of five surviving chicks, right?
Like, you know, more than twice the mass of the original parents has been, you know, and, you know, the offspring are getting 10% of the value of the food or something.
So the amount of forage.
Why do you say that?
No, it's just typical.
Okay.
They're getting 10% that they can incorporate.
The return on the food is something like 10%.
So you're talking about warm-blooded creatures.
You're talking about a huge volume of insects that these parents have collected.
And, you know, the most amazing aerobatics that are happening.
I mean, we watch this too.
The swallows are flying around and nailing insects and flying into the nest, which ain't easy either, right?
It's not an easy approach.
So all of that investment.
And then you get to fledging time.
You've got five essentially full-grown, flight-capable babies.
And what do they do?
They drop out of the nest and sit around on the ground trying to figure out how to do the damn thing.
Right.
And so did you have some video?
Yeah, we've got some video.
that day?
Yeah.
Do you want to show some of the There's some video.
I think anything that Brett sent you of this follows will be appropriate.
So here's the one remaining chick sitting in the nest, being fed by the parent.
And let's see what else we've got.
Oh, so that's the five.
You can only see four of them there.
Oh, there's five there.
So that's going to be the earlier.
earlier before fledging so you don't have to bother with the picture of the there's a picture of three animals That was a good one.
So among the questions that all of this raises, how do the parents know who needs to be fed more?
How do they prevent competition?
You know, the one strongest chick from always being the one to receive it.
The parents are presumably keeping track.
Yeah, over the weeks that we could see the chicks in the nest being fed, we kept thinking, okay, there's one guy in the back who's never getting fed.
He's just going to die.
He's going to get kicked out.
You know, like it's, there's no way they're taking all five of these to fledging.
And they did.
Yep.
All five of them to fledging.
And then what happened is very instructive.
And I want to just say there is a ironclad piece of logic that helps you reverse engineer the behavior and understand the behavior of any sexually reproducing creature.
And sexually reproducing creatures, because populations tend to grow until they reach the state of carrying capacity where the habitat can't support anymore, any population that's smaller than it could be grows until it isn't smaller.
the point that it's hit carrying capacity, it hovers around that number.
And that means...
The carrying capacity can change and the population can go up or down.
But in general, a population tends to be hovering around carrying capacity, which means that the average number of individuals, no matter what kind of creature you're talking about, is an average number of individuals that make it to reproduction from any individual will be two.
If you're sexually reproducing.
If you are sexually reproducing.
Because your offspring have about, have exactly half of your genome, and you are likely at carrying capacity to replace yourself once.
And that once comes in the form of two offspring if you are sexually reproducing.
So that means that for animals like this, in a lifetime, which might be several reproductive seasons, they may, you know, this nest, I assume, had more successful fledglings than an average nest.
Five seems like a lot.
But anyway, the point is, let's say, you know, the average is three and they get three years to do this.
Only two of those are likely to make it.
The rest of them will encounter some fatal obstacle to reproduction.
And of course, these are averages.
So you expect that there may be extraordinary swallows who through luck or selection end up having more.
But that has to exist in tandem with their being unlucky.
Right.
So and this is the key to understanding why evolution is so effective, is that there will be individuals who happen to have all the right stuff.
They know where to put the nest, you know, not only for the nest to stick to the wall, but for the babies to have a safe place to fledge, for the babies to be able to figure out how to feed.
So there's a lot that goes into what seems like luck, but isn't, and it differs between individuals.
So, you know, to the extent that there's stuff to be conveyed by parent to offspring, the ones that are better at knowing what needs to be conveyed and knowing how to convey it, all of these things are advantages.
So yes, it won't be that for every pair, it will be two.
It's that there will be some very successful ones.
Most of them will be unsuccessful, but the average is two.
And so what we saw here was five fledglings, four of which we know the immediate fates of, and one of them is a mystery.
I think, can we step away from swallows for a moment and talk about the fox family that we watched separately?
Sure.
Just for a moment, because it's interesting that, not right on our land, but close enough that they visit a lot, there was a mated pair of foxes.
And with the foxes, they're big, they're charismatic, they're mammals, we can tell them apart.
And so we've actually, we've named them.
So we have Vera, the mother, and cinnamon, who is an unusually colored cinnamon-colored fox, the father, we think, who, a little ways away from us, had five kits.
And this was, we first started seeing them in early May, in early May, and they were, and that was, we don't know when they were born.
They were born underground in dens, in a den.
But we started to see them poking their heads above ground in early May.
And at this point, the kits are still a little smaller than their parents, and they're fluffier, and they're just perfect looking.
But from a distance, it's hard to tell the difference.
Like, these are fully fledged foxes at this point.
And at least four and maybe five of those fox kits are still alive and doing well.
And we haven't distinguished, like I can tell a couple of the fox kits from one another, but I haven't fully distinguished all of them.
It's a little tougher.
There's one with some unique like white cheek bars.
But Vera and Cinnamon as the parents, we still see around.
And so this is actually a different fox, but this is Oscar.
This is Oscar.
Brett is named Oscar.
He's in a slight, just a little bit farther away, but in a reliable place on a rock that's going to be a little bit different.
He stopped going.
And this is actually one of the patterns with the foxes, is that they will adopt a little habit for a few days, and then they'll move on to something else.
So anyway, Oscar liked this rock, which sat in the sun in a place that he could watch things happen, but he was almost invisible to those he was watching.
But anyway.
But I've seen Vera with Kits trailing her in the last couple of days.
And I often see Cinnamon, the dad, hanging out with Kits.
In fact, maybe later we'll show some of the amazing story that Zach saw driving in and then took me out to one day, where they had a small raccoon carcass, and they were trying to get into it.
And it was on the side of the road, a kit, and Cinnamon was standing there sort of guarding.
And finally, Cinnamon was like, okay, we got to take this someplace safer and picked it up and trotted down the road with the kit following him, nipping at the raccoon carcass and took it off into the bushes.
They finally broke into it.
So both parents are still parenting.
And there are, again, I say at least four, and maybe all five of those kits are still alive.
Back to July 10th, the day of the fledging of the swallows.
So you got five swallows.
Ultimately, they all left the nest.
They ended up down on the deck level.
And we locked our cats in.
Yeah, we locked our cats in so that they wouldn't take them out.
They probably would have taken them all out.
So that was probably bad judgment on the swallow's part, except that we were paying attention.
But what happened, you want to show the video of Cinnamon the Fox?
So unfortunately, I didn't, I saw the incident, but it happened too quickly for me to catch it on video.
Cinnamon happened by while one of the swallows was standing on the deck, and he lunged for it without the slightest hesitation, got it.
Here he is consuming.
And you see adults, probably the parents, dive bombing.
Dive bombing.
Absolutely.
They are dive bombing.
There's nothing they can do at this point.
Oh, I know they're dive bombing.
I'm saying presumably the parents.
Yeah, I'm sure of it.
So anyway, Cinnamon is now looking for an escape because he doesn't want to confront the adults there.
But, okay, so you had one consumed by Cinnamon the Fox.
You had another who worked his way onto a bench of ours and fell into a shoe that was on our deck, a water shoe.
And I carefully went out and I removed him from the shoe and I put him on back up on the bench where I thought he'd be less likely to get picked off.
And he never recovered from his fall into that shoe.
I was very careful with him.
I don't think I hurt him, but I think something about the fall into the shoe or maybe he broke a wing or something, but he sort of expired in front of me.
Then another one we had reason to think had been picked off by a fox and two of them made it to flew off.
One of them, one of them, I watched it fly off and it flew off with a parent in tow.
So it and the parent flew off and they flew off over the water.
And oh my goodness, from first flight, they are already doing it.
Yeah, they've already got it.
Right.
It's not like the first steps of even a horse or giraffe, which are extremely capable very quickly, but they still have early tottering steps.
But you can't do that if you're flying.
You're either flying or you're not.
But they're already swooping.
Yeah.
It's stunning.
So again, that has to be just built in.
And presumably the basics of the program of how to find insects on the wing and successfully hunt them is built in, right?
That's not something a parent can, you know, it can show you a little bit, but mostly it has to be built in for it to start working right away.
And so the final punchline to the story is that Heather was paying very close attention.
The nest had been empty.
It had been quiet.
And the next day, there was a very brief, maybe it was five or 10 minutes, where one of the chicks returned and one of the parents was there feeding it.
Yeah.
And so at this point, even though they're now volent, you might think, how can you tell it's a chick, it's a parent?
The chicks still have that white lipstick mouth.
And if they're close enough, you can tell differences.
Their tail feathers don't look quite the same yet, but the white lipstick mouth is something the adults don't have at all.
So it was a chick in that nest being fed by an adult, presumably a parent.
Yeah.
So the result of all of this is now think about this in human terms.
You had two parents who'd invested eight solid weeks in this most important project.
They had five offspring that they had raised to the point that they could potentially be on their own.
Of those five, three of them were dead within hours of leaving the nest.
Two of them made it to an important flight, and one of them is known to have returned.
So my guess is one of them made it to whatever the initial stage of learning to feed itself, which it will do for the rest of the summer before.
Right.
So you think flying is hard.
Right.
How about hawking, being a hawking insectivore, like catching things that are also flying on the wing, chasing them down and getting them into your mouth?
It's extraordinarily difficult.
Right.
But the worst phase, I mean, it's obvious to us, you know, how terrifying that your life cycle requires these animals that have been protected by this nest where nothing can reach them.
I mean, a raccoon might have been able to if it had known.
And anyway, the raccoon is a different story.
But the foxes certainly couldn't.
Foxes can't climb.
So they were pretty safe up there.
But the point is there's this one period where it's like you go from this very safe place to the stupidest possible place you could be at the moment is, you know, on our deck, you know, down at ground level where there are constantly foxes back and forth.
Yeah, we have foxes in our yard at this time of year, at least three different foxes, at least once a day.
So, you know, but okay, from the point of view of this pair of swallows, they did an amazing job.
Yeah, they did.
But the same day that they succeeded, that they got one of their offspring flying, hunting on its own, nearly independent, they lost four others.
And there's just something profound about the fact that, no, that is success for this animal.
That's actually probably beating the average substantially.
And I would compare it.
I would say that, you know, there are creatures that look more like us in this regard.
And I, you know, Jen, you want to show the picture of the orca.
This is not our picture.
This is a famous picture from a recent incident.
So we have killer whales up here, and there is a mother who is known to have had two calves in different years that died on her watch, unknown why, I think.
And she has essentially swum around pushing the carcass ahead of her.
She carried them around for a long time.
Right.
And so orcas are much more like us in the sense of, you know, it's not that you produce five offspring and, you know, hope that one survives.
It's many years go by between the production of any offspring.
And so, you know, in this case, we see evidence of grief.
We see evidence of not being willing to give up on a calf because who knows what miracle might happen.
And that is much more reminiscent of the human case.
And then, you know, and then we do have the case of these foxes, which are, I think, closer to the swallow situation, where they produce a litter of kits and, you know, it might have four or five animals in it.
And presumably most years, none of them make it.
And, you know, that also, to me, raises philosophical questions.
I mean, for one thing, what, you know, we spend all this time watching these kits.
They're absolutely irresistible and we learn a ton.
You know, they're very relatable.
They totally look you in the eye, as you saw in that picture of Oscar.
Yeah, in a way that most wild mammals won't.
Like a raccoon won't look you in the eye.
And if he does, you know, you've got an interaction with you.
They look at you briefly or with terror.
The foxes sometimes look at you with curiosity.
But, you know, okay.
So what, you know, you and I have had to get used to the idea that these foxes who it's hard not to name them and come to know them and appreciate them and root for them and all of that, you know, that most of them are just going to die and, you know, we're going to be aware of it.
It happens.
It happens in and around our place.
And the, you know, well, what do we think about, you know, when they're first born, you know, we sometimes joke that it's like, oh, thank goodness I'm a fox.
Like what a great thing to be born as because they're just like fumbling and, you know, chasing each other and it looks like nonstop fun.
You know, well, what do you make of, you know, an animal that, you know, gets, I don't know, a couple of months of being a fox puppy and doesn't make it like, was that, is that a tragedy?
I don't know.
I mean, it's almost, it's a gift, you know, do you get to be a fox puppy and yes, it ends too soon and you don't reproduce and that's evolutionarily a dead end, but you were a fox puppy.
You got to be a fox puppy in the summer on San Juan Island.
Beats being a banana slug.
It sure does.
It sure does.
But I mean, of course this raises, it raises all sorts of questions because, you know, you point out orcas versus foxes versus say, you know, mice, which are even farther towards, you know, the, the, the framework that we use in evolution biology is towards the R selected end of things, having more kids than possibly could survive and ending up on average across a lifetime with two that did survive to, to reproduce themselves.
Within a clade, things can be highly variable.
And I, of course, think of the frogs where most people, when they think of frogs at all, imagine, you know, going past some pond in the spring in North America, if you're, if you're in North America and just, if you go past within, you know, in, in some particular two week period, depending on where you are, it's predictable when it's going to be.
And that, that pond is just so loud at night for a couple of weeks that you can't hear yourself think.
And that's the, that's the sound of frogs, um, of males trying to attract females and trying to get the other males away.
And those species that do that, that have what are called explosive breeding assemblages, because it really is explosive in both time and space.
They're there and then they're not.
And what they leave behind are tens of thousands of eggs.
Like some, some, in some species, actually a single female can put out tens of thousands of eggs in a breeding season.
And how many of those are likely to survive?
Well, if she has a lifespan of four years and it's likely to breed in three of those years, maybe none, maybe none at all.
And yet, and yet there's also in frogs, and it's more rare for sure, uh, the evolution of parental care.
Like in the frogs that, that, that I studied that I, I thought there was going to be something interesting there.
And it proved that there was, uh, wherein not only, um, are there only, um, it's a single egg late at a time.
And so you can, you can predict simply based on clutch size or litter size, you know, the smaller, the litter size, the more likely the parents are to invest in those offspring, as opposed to have it be sort of a scattershot, you know, the crapshoot.
Like, oh, if I'm, if I'm having 10 at a time, a hundred, a thousand, 10,000 at a time, I can't, I can't, there's no time to think about them all, to come to recognize them, to give them names, to give them individual care.
It's a, you know, I lay them and forget.
Whereas if you lay a single egg, there's a, and especially if you lay a single egg, as, as did the frogs that I worked on, the Mantella, uh, Levagata in Madagascar, in a place that doesn't change.
And so you can always know where, what, where it is, uh, then both the father for a time and the mother in a different way can offer parental care.
And so increase the chances of that single egg hatching out and becoming a tadpole and that single tadpole developing into a frog itself.
Because in, in, and so, you know, what are the conditions that drive you as a frog to either invest mightily in a few offspring and work hard for their individual survival or do what most frogs do and, uh, you
know, come together in the spring, uh, in vast numbers and just lay a huge number of eggs and admit if you're female, and I mean, a huge amount of sperm if you're male and, you know, walk away, hop away, swim away at, at the end of that and never think about it again.
Right.
And there's presumably not a lot of thought regardless, but they never see their kids.
They don't even meet them.
They don't even meet the zygotes.
They barely even are there at the point that the eggs are fertilized by the sperm because they've got external fertilization.
But within that same clade, there are animals that, that care mightily and care does not suggest the kind of consciousness that we have around caregiving, but give so much parental care that without it, all of their children would die.
And with it, many of their children don't.
Yeah.
It's symmetrical on the level of, uh, of tending, um, without any of the cognitive stuff and without, as far as we know, any of the transmission of anything cultural.
So I actually wanted to use this.
There's no teaching.
Yeah.
I wanted to use this to actually, um, tease apart a couple of concepts, um, and then offer one thing that I think might be new, this being the closest thing we've got to a classroom.
Um, so in general, as Heather's pointing out, the more are selected that a creature is, that is to say, the more it produces huge numbers of offspring that get very little care for each one, whether that care is, you know, molecular care loaded into the egg, the fewer eggs you have, the bigger they can be.
Um, or it's taking care of eggs.
Um, the more you produce, the less care each one gets.
And so you've got species that produce a huge number and, um, almost all of them are fated to fail very quickly and others that produce very few us and orcas in which they get a tremendous amount of care and typically those that invest a ton in tiny numbers of offspring also tend to be those in which much is passed on that isn't in the egg the parent also does a lot of teaching and the usual suspects.
The frogs that Heather studied are an exception to this, where they take intense care of a tiny number of offspring, but presumably don't teach them because they're frogs and it hasn't evolved.
You know, the second mode of the transmission of information hasn't evolved.
So it's all got to be built in in the egg, which is, frankly, a total miracle if you really grasp that.
This is an animal that knows how to lay an egg, you know, in a pool, in a broken piece of bamboo in the forest, and then lure other individuals.
Or so, you know, the male lures the female to lay the egg in an appropriate puddle, and not every puddle is appropriate.
And then he can lure other females to lay eggs that get consumed.
So anyway, that's an amazing program that apparently is written in four letters in DNA.
Like, that's amazing that that is even true.
So that's bonus, of course.
The mother comes back and feeds her babies unfertilized eggs, as you know.
Right.
But all of those things, both the mother's behavior and the male's behavior, inducing other females to lay eggs, all of those things are somehow built in.
How could that be written in gene language is a really interesting question.
So the frogs break the rule.
In general, you've got creatures that produce small numbers of offspring also tend to be the usual suspects, as Heather says, that tend to transmit lots of information.
Otherwise, and we tend to relate to those creatures.
The usual suspects being long-lived with generational overlap, long childhoods.
But we have, you know, kinds of being, just like that's rather than name.
Yeah, so wolves and corvids, which include crows and ravens, toothed whales, primates, parrots, I feel like elephants.
Yep.
You said corvids.
Yeah.
So you've got, you know, let's say on the far end of one, you've got something like insects, and the far end of the other, you've got something like orcas.
And then you have some intermediate space where you have a small number of individual species that have characteristics of learning, but don't have culture, right?
They do some learning on their own.
You know, there's some lizards, for example, where the parents don't have the opportunity to teach, but the animals have some plasticity in the way they behave.
Presumably they acquire it by trial and error, and then they get smarter as time goes on.
But here's the thing that I think as we're watching.
So you and I tend to focus on the birds and mammals in our environment.
We resonate with them better, and it's sort of easier to track them.
It's hard to know when you're looking at a dragonfly.
You know, you see it in whatever state you see it, but it's very hard to have watched an individual dragonfly grow up or anything.
So here's the interesting part.
These, let's say it's the foxes.
When we say that something is a species, in this case, it's red foxes.
That's the species.
Even the black ones are red foxes.
A species is like the flip side of a coin.
The other side of the coin is the niche, right?
The niche and the species are a match for each other.
And the point is you can have red foxes in a place that meets all the needs of red foxes.
If it meets all the needs of red foxes and foxes have gotten there, then there will be red foxes and there will be a stable population that will inhabit that niche.
For most creatures who produce lots of offspring with very little care and no cultural transmission, that's all there is.
There's the species niche and then individuals will fill the carrying capacity in that niche.
With birds and mammals, there is something else.
And I would call it the individual niche.
So imagine that you are a fox kid born here and you've got, you know, four litter mates.
So now, you know, at first, your parent is feeding you stuff that they're collecting.
And in fact, we're watching the parents, even though this is the good times, this is the middle of the summer when the prey is the most plentiful.
The parents are kind of starving because they've got...
Yeah, they're thin.
They've got all of these offspring.
And, you know, the evolutionary game is to get the offspring stable and send them into the world.
And so the parents are paying this cost that they can't quite recoup at the moment.
The babies, the kits, who are now almost fully grown, now they have a different job, which is effectively they get weaned, not from milk in this case, which happened a long time ago, but they get weaned from whatever they're being fed.
And they have to now figure out a pattern of behavior, a pattern of movement across the land, the actual idiosyncratic patch of land that they happen to have been born near.
They have to find a place where there's enough little games they can play that spits out enough calories and nutrients for them to continue being a fox, right?
That is not an easy puzzle to solve.
They are built to become very good at it, which does not guarantee their success.
In fact, we know for sure most of them won't succeed.
They can't because the population won't explode.
So most of them will fail at this.
But the basic point is you hang out in some place.
Maybe Oscar with his little rock that he was sitting on, you know, was discovering that that wasn't a particularly plentiful place for which to watch for, you know, something to move in the grass that he could then pursue.
And so he'll stop investing in that rock and he'll start investing in some other patch of territory where his hearing allows him to hear something in the grass over there.
So anyway, for the elite amongst these creatures, the ones that have the maximum amount of flexibility and the maximum amount of parental teaching, and the teaching can come in all kinds of different ways.
Like how much does an offspring learn from the pattern of prey brought by the parent?
In other words, do you develop a taste for mom's home cooking?
And it's like, you know, oh, I'm going to eat deer mice.
Mom keeps bringing me deer mice.
That means even if deer mice are, you know, trickier for me to figure out, I should focus on that because apparently they're plentiful enough that my mom was bringing them all the time, right?
So it might be that you develop a kind of nostalgia for what your mom was bringing you, or it may be that you go hunt something your mom didn't know how to hunt.
Yeah.
Or you're hunting something that your mom didn't hunt just because actually prey abundance is seasonal.
And so maybe deer mouse, deer mice were abundant at the point that you weren't yet hunting your own food and your mother was, your parents were bringing it to you.
But at the point that you are off trying to hunt your own food, the deer mice, for whatever reason, have become less available and now it's gophers.
Totally.
And you can imagine, you know, how this sets you up for some sort of a tragic failure, too.
Imagine you're born and the year you're born into is anomalously biased in favor of one creature that is typically rare, but in that particular year is more abundant.
And so you get good at hunting it.
You invest in hunting it.
And then it turns out that during a normal year, that skill doesn't pay back, right?
And so, you know, what motivates you to change starvation.
That's what starvation is.
It's a motivator to change what you're doing so that you will stop starving.
And anyway, my point is each of those individuals has a niche that never gets recorded in the literature, right?
We might get as close as saying that that animal has a home range, right, or a territory.
If it defends it, it would be a territory.
If it just ranges over the same patch of territory, we'd call it a home range.
But the point is, we may describe that, right?
That patch of territory, which will have a place that is sheltered enough, but how good is the shelter?
How well does your shelter protect you from cold weather so that you spend down the calories that you've collected slower than you would if you were in a better protected location?
So, you know, each individual figures out how to solve all of the problems that are necessary to sustain life.
The few that do it well enough that year in and year out, they're still, you know, more than breaking even get to reproduce.
But they have an individual niche, and it is the exact mirror of the niche of a species that we would typically describe.
Individual niches are a thing in those creatures where behavior is highly variable, and it is especially a thing in creatures where parents teach how to be an X, a Y, or a Z to their offspring.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I don't, there doesn't seem to be a sex-based rule for dispersal in red foxes.
And it does seem like we are particularly rich in red foxes right now.
And so while I don't look forward to the likely ugly end of some of the stories of the foxes that we have been watching, I am interested, very interested to see what happens as the conditions inevitably get worse once fall and then winter come.
You know, do Vera and Cinnamon, who may well be pair bonded and mate again next year, start to defend the lands where they have been hunting successfully against their own kits?
Well, this is almost required because the offspring, as they develop a niche, are inherently going to develop it too close for comfort.
They will start out actually within the territory of their parents.
So, you know, this is the tragic thing is that parents ultimately drive the kids off because that's in the kids' interest that it happen, but it's also potentially fatal.
Yo, prey is limited and limiting.
But I don't actually, I so far don't see evidence of territoriality in these foxes.
And so you made the distinction clearly, but just to repeat, a territory is a bounded piece of space which you defend against others of your own kind, usually sometimes of other kinds too.
If you're a hummingbird, you defend it against everything.
And the home range, just everything has a home range.
Everything can be described as having a home range, which simply describes that space in which you, that is all of the space where you ever go.
So for many humans, a home range might be closing in on the entire planet, for instance.
But at a more useful level, you might describe the home range as the space that you take up in a typical month, say, for instance.
And so the home ranges of not just Vera and Cinnamon, the mated pair that produced five kits, at least four of which are still alive, and those four or five kits that are still alive, all appear to be more or less the same.
They're certainly largely overlapping at this point.
And so I see no evidence of territoriality, which is to say defensiveness over the boundary of a piece of the land that you run around in.
And there are other foxes too.
There are foxes that we don't recognize as one of those six or seven that we see as well.
And they all at the moment are getting along.
On the other hand, it's July.
Yeah.
And there is as much available now as there ever will be to eat for a fox.
And, you know, we've seen during the winters, you know, animals that look a bit desperate, you know, in places that aren't likely to be productive.
So, you know, that's a feature of the habitat for sure.
I mean, and really of every habitat.
It's going to drive the animals to change things up.
We've talked about this before, but the answer is not to provision them.
That's not the answer.
That doesn't teach them anything useful about how to be a fox, and it doesn't help the problem at all.
So we saw a fox the other day carrying a hot dog.
Yeah.
And it'd clearly been given a hot dog.
That's just not good stewardship of the land, and it's not good for the foxes.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Maybe is there more that you wanted to say?
I think we're good for this week.
All right.
Yeah.
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