Science: The Rebel Reboot | The 304th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
On this, our 304th Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss the mainstream media’s pivot, in which they now tentatively accept that some children have died from the mRNA Covid shots. We discuss failing trust in science, why it will not be quick to fix the institutions or to people them with honest scientists, and the rebels in the hills who are keeping the flame alive. Also, the application of the phrase “safe and effective” to products that are neither. Then: hominids have been making and co...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 304.
Yep, you heard me.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
This is Dr. Heather Haiing.
It is, I guess we're kind of on to mid-December here at this point.
We are indeed.
Swimming in an academic, no, academic, what am I saying?
An atmospheric river here in the Pacific Northwest.
We swum before in academic rivers and nearly drowned.
That's true.
And it didn't smell like the water was too fresh, frankly.
Yeah, there was a certain amount of anoxic sludge at best.
Yeah, I'm not sure that's what it was.
But in any case, we are going to talk a bit today about trust in science and where we are and where we should be.
And also, just a little bit, perhaps, if we get there, about when we started corralling fire.
You and me?
Nope.
No, okay.
Us, our lineage.
Our lineage, yes.
And how those hadrosaur dinosaurs got all of those tail injuries.
Really?
Yep.
And it wasn't from walking around backwards.
See, now that was not on the hypothesis list.
See, you got to get a complete list of hypotheses.
If you're going to figure out what's happening, you can't do it with an influx.
I'm thinking through what they actually were looking at.
Yep.
Nope.
Walking around backwards, none of the list.
And yet, you know, bipeds, why not?
Yep.
Well, the tails, really.
It's like imagining kangaroos hopping around backwards.
I have a guess.
I have a guess.
It's going to be poor eyesight.
They kept rear-ending each other because they couldn't see the taillights on the hadrosaur in front of them.
Yeah, because they were on cracks.
They didn't roam across landscapes as we imagine these pre-avian dinosaurs roaming across landscapes.
No, they were going to work, coming back.
They were commuting dinosaurs, and sometimes they just rear-ended each other.
All right.
So that's my prediction.
We'll see how that pans out.
We will.
We will indeed.
Yeah, that's seeing how it pans out is a panacea.
That's what they call that.
That's not what they call that either.
But also maybe a story about bacon that isn't bacon.
Bacon that which interferes with one of the things that we say in our house.
Which is.
Which is when you smell bacon, you say, I smell bacon.
And that can only mean one thing.
Bacon.
Right.
Yeah.
Yes.
Well, this exciting new development in technology world may put a lie to that truism.
I'm going to keep saying it.
I think you shouldn't.
I'm too old to switch that up at this point.
I think you should.
I think you should.
Okay.
Join us on locals.
As always, we've got a locals watch party going on there.
We are not going to do a Q ⁇ A today as originally planned, as I am still wrestling with this crazy, racking cough.
And hopefully I won't inflict it on you, our listeners and viewers, too much today.
But as always, right at the top of the hour, we have three awesome sponsors to tell you about.
And then no more after that.
So let us begin.
Our first sponsor this week is Caraway, which makes high-quality, non-toxic cookware and bakeware.
And I forgot, I was going to bring one of our awesome pans in and I forgot.
Oh, well, you can be assured that we have them.
They have good imaginations, especially the ones who are listening on an audio-only platform.
This is true.
Yeah, I could have not said anything.
They wouldn't have known.
They wouldn't.
Yeah, you could say, I'm holding here.
Yep.
Half the audience would spot that as a lie.
Right.
Yeah.
You think it's half?
You just made that up.
You don't know.
No, at one point it was.
All right.
I have now digressed us for no reasonable purpose.
Our first sponsor this week is Caraway, which makes high-quality, non-toxic cookware in Bakeware.
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Listeners to Dark Horse are well familiar with the myriad ways that modern life puts our health at risk.
This includes the hazards of non-stick coatings on cookware and bakeware, which is why we threw out all our Teflon cookware decades ago.
Why?
Because Teflon is toxic.
Need over 70% of cookware in the United States is made with Teflon, and 97% of Americans have toxic chemicals from non-stick cookware in their blood.
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All right, Heather, would you like to guess what our second sponsor is?
Oh, look at that.
You even have a pro.
All right.
Our second sponsor today is Masa Chips.
Masa makes delicious chips with only three simple, real whole ingredients.
They are organic nixtamalized corn, sea salt, and 100% grass-fed beef tallow.
I don't think they can read that.
Masa chips are made the way all of our food used to be made.
They're fried in 100% beef tallow.
No seed oils ever.
You can taste the difference and your body can feel the difference.
America's health is declining fast.
Chronic illnesses, obesity, autoimmune diseases have exploded.
What changed?
One thing that changed is that all the chips and fries used to be cooked in tallow, but in the 1990s, corporations, boo, switched to cheaper seed oils, which included soybean, canola, sunflower, safflower, and corn.
Seed oils are often labeled vegetable oils, as if that makes them healthy, while in fact, seed oils are linked to metabolic health issues and inflammation.
And today, seed oils make up 20% of the average American's daily calories.
Every time I read that, I am stunned.
Yeah.
Big food companies also use artificial dyes, stabilizers, and other toxins.
Masa chips, though, absolutely no seed oils, artificial dyes, or additives ever.
Beef tallow is nutrient-rich, nourishing, and makes food taste incredible.
Masa chips are crunchy and delicious, and after you eat them, you feel satisfied, satiated, and energetic.
Damn, I was headed towards an error-free ad read.
Right?
I read it.
I read it correctly, and then I screwed it up by it.
So anyway.
Forgive me.
Error correction correction.
Yes, I've now error-corrected the correction.
All right, Masa also supports American Farms and Regenerative Agriculture, choosing real food heals us and our environment, which in turn makes us even more healthy.
See?
Got it.
Try Masa chips with salsa or goat cheese or spicy pepper jam.
Smother them in beans and cheese or just eat them straight out of the bag.
They're delicious.
My favorites are their original lime flavors.
Zach surprised himself when he realized that he really loved their churro flavor.
They've also got white corn, blue corn, and cabanero flavors.
Ready to give Masa a try?
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Oh, actually, this is not true.
This is not true.
Never mind.
Order them online.
Oh, that line is not true?
Yes.
The one that you were just about to say.
Okay.
Let's not focus there.
Yeah, we're not going to be able to do it.
Order the chips online.
Order the code again.
The code is darkhorse at masachips.com slash darkhorse, of course.
Darkhorse at masachips.com?
Yeah, the code is darkhorse for 25% off.
And you do that at the location, masachips.com slash darkhorse.
See?
It's all very straightforward.
They really are delicious.
They really are delicious.
Just because we aren't as seamless in reading their ads doesn't mean they aren't fantastic.
And here's their blue corn ones.
You can rest assured that we are not seamless because we are distracted by that bag, which is very much closed and therefore frustrates the attempt to eat the chips.
Yeah.
I don't think you want to see any chips on air.
No, the crunching would overwhelm.
That's some ASMR.
That's the deep end.
You know what I'm saying?
Our final sponsor this week is the amazing CrowdHealth.
CrowdHealth isn't health insurance.
It's better.
People come up to me and talk to me about CrowdHealth all the time.
I had two requests, reminders.
What is that service again that you guys like so much?
And people who have started using it rave about it.
I haven't heard one negative thing.
That's right.
It's still open enrollment season, the time of year when health insurance companies hope that you will once again blindly sign up for their overpriced premiums and confusing fine print.
We used to do that, but not anymore.
Not since Finding CrowdHealth.
Not anymore and never again.
CrowdHealth is a community of people funding each other's medical bills directly.
No medal men, no networks, no nonsense.
After we left our salary jobs as college professors, we spent years buying health insurance in the marketplace.
It was dysfunctional, confusing, and very expensive.
As a family of four who had health insurance for emergencies only, we were paying more than $1,500 a month for a $17,000 annual deductible to a company that never answered their phones and had a website that didn't work.
It's all true.
It's all true.
Tens of thousands of dollars paid out for no benefit whatsoever.
Heather went looking for alternatives and found CrowdHealth.
We have now had two sets of great experiences with CrowdHealth when Toby broke his foot in the summer of 2024 and when Heather slipped on wet concrete and split open her scalp the following summer.
Both times we went to the ER and got good but expensive treatment from the medical staff there.
In both cases, CrowdHealth paid our bills with no issues.
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Imagine that.
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And the real people who work at CrowdHealth were easy to reach, clear, and communicative.
Let me add something here.
You know how if anyone who has ever had health insurance and not had the clinic or whatever do everything for you has dreaded the moment that they receive a bill and they're going to have to somehow engage with their insurance company, even if their insurance company has been relatively easy to deal with, just like the process, the arguments, the questions, the unclear instructions, the lack of ability to upload things.
There's always something.
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That's not everyone's experience.
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I kicked the can, not down the road, but out of the sun.
All right.
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Beautiful.
All right.
Let us start with the question of trust in science.
And I will say this segment has several different threads which are going to weave together.
Some of it will be review for people who've paid attention to Darkhorse, but I promise you that there is a very important point that when you see all of these pieces linked together, I think will become pretty obvious.
It's a prediction about where we are headed in the near future.
And it is the rare circumstance where it is a positive prediction about something that is likely to change for the better.
So let us start by talking about an article that showed up in The Atlantic in the aftermath of Vinay Prasad's memo inside of FDA acknowledging that at least 10 children had died as a result of mRNA vaccination.
A memo that we discussed on the last evolutionary lens.
Right.
So as you can imagine, that memo inside of FDA from Vinay Prasad caused a schism in the world.
There were those of us on the outside who have been talking about not only the hazards of the technology in the mRNA, but also the massive adverse event signal, all of the vaccine injured who are being actively gaslit and all of the horrors that follow from that.
So that group was heartened to hear this discussion taking place in all places within the FDA.
But of course, there was a lot of pearl clutching in other quadrants at the audacity of Vinay Prasad even mentioning the possibility that there had been deaths of children as a result of these shots.
So The Atlantic is an interesting property.
You know, we used to be regular readers of The Atlantic, and not ironically, it was a fine publication.
And it has become kind of like a reliable regime mouthpiece that puts a sophisticated gloss on rationalizations that the regime wants sophisticated people to absorb and to broadcast.
Well, and during COVID, we covered several pieces that they had.
They had a small team of, if memory serves, three, four, maybe five, all female, by chance, I presume, I don't know, health journalists who every single time they wrote anything about COVID, they got it wrong.
Yeah.
And it didn't look like they were just really bad at their jobs.
It looked like they were doing their jobs.
And giving the audience of The Atlantic what the audience of The Atlantic had come to expect, given a gullible acceptance of everything that comes across the transom claiming to be science, even when it's not.
Well, how the magic trick is done is a little, it's an interesting question.
Did these women think that they were saying true things?
Did they privately know better and felt that they were doing good by distributing noble lies?
I don't really know how it's done.
We can come back to that later when we talk about the second thread in this in the series here.
But let's read a few paragraphs so people get the sense of the tone of this Atlantic article.
Can we put it up?
Did you not send it?
Boy.
I can find it, but you're going to have to, it's going to take me a while.
All right.
Because I don't have it on my computer.
So let me set the stage then.
What the article.
Yes, that's the one.
And can you make it big enough so we can see it?
It's Heather has it should keep talking.
Oh, I thought you were about to have it.
I stopped looking for it.
I can look for it, but it's going to take me a bit.
Sorry about this, guys.
Maybe.
I can find it.
Okay, here it is.
Okay.
All right.
I will start reading the article.
The title of the article, can you scroll back?
Title of the article is, Yes, some children may have died from COVID shots.
Denial only serves the aims of anti-vaxirs by Benjamin Maser.
Okay.
Scroll down.
But we're not going to, you don't have access because you're not logged in.
Okay.
On Friday after Thanksgiving, Vinay Prasad, the FDA's top vaccine regulator, made the claim that shocked the public health establishment.
Quote, for the first time, he wrote in a leaked email to his staff, quote, the U.S. FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children, end quote.
The agency had supposedly identified at least 10 children who died from getting the COVID shots.
To say the email was poorly received by vaccine experts and physicians would be an understatement.
Prasad's claim provoked a rapid series of rebuttals and responses from 12 former FDA commissioners published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday called Prasad's memo, A Threat to Evidence-Based Vaccine Policy and Public Health Security.
That quote is pretty ominous, the idea.
When they say evidence-based, you know they're lying.
So can you see my computer, Jen?
Since I have the complete article and this one's about to gray out.
Are you able to read it?
You're going to have to do the reading.
Is that too small yet?
There you go.
Scroll up more.
Yeah.
It's all of the potential vaccine-related deaths reported to the government, presumably including those to which Prasad referred, have already been reviewed by the agency's staff, the former commissioners wrote, and, quote, different conclusions had been reached, end quote.
Elsewhere, doctors and scientists declared that absolutely no evidence links COVID-19 vaccines to death in children, and that in order to suggest otherwise, Prasad and his colleagues had engaged in, quote, an evidence manufacturing mission and, quote, a dumpster dive for shoddy data, or worse, a campaign of lying.
Okay.
So what we've got is the Atlantic reporting on accusations against Vinay Prasad that he is either searching for garbage evidence or outright lying.
The article continues.
Prasad is among the public health officials who, under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have been systematically undermining the nation's confidence in immunizations.
Prasad has not yet offered up any documentation to support his assertion, and this count of vaccine-related deaths may well turn out to be inflated.
The memo's overheated rhetoric and lengthy recitation of political grievances also raise some doubts about his claims.
Yet, okay, here's where the payload of the article starts.
Yet there is something troubling and telling in the fact that this memo has provoked people to deny even the possibility of COVID vaccine-related deaths.
The idea that mRNA-based shots have tragically killed a very small number of children is not far-fetched.
It also doesn't imply a catastrophic threat to public health, given that tens of millions of doses of vaccines have been safely given out to young people.
From the start of the coronavirus pandemic, lack of nuance has been a problem with public health messaging, and the anti-vaccine advocates have made use of this to great effect.
Now, in the moment when public health in America is under existential threat, this insistence that no evidence exists for vaccine-related deaths risks adding to the crisis.
Okay.
So what the Atlantic is doing here is a pivot.
The idea is the Atlantic is recognizing that the writing is on the wall, with Vinay Prasad presenting an analysis in which children have clearly died from these shots.
The world of respectable New York Times readers and Atlantic readers is going to have to figure out what to say.
And they are effectively sending the signal that if you keep saying nobody died, that you are actually going to be exposed, that that's a bad thing to do.
And the way to pivot is to say, in light of how many people benefited from these vaccines, of course, we should expect a small number of deaths.
That's a reasonable price to pay.
Now, this is, of course, insane.
For one thing, I want you to put yourself in the shoes of a parent who has lost a child to one of these vaccines after being told, A, that the vaccines were safe and effective, and B, when we were not risk stratifying who got these vaccines.
No healthy child should have died from these vaccines, period the end, because there is no argument for having given it to them in the first place, even if it was effective, because at the very least, this novel technology was risky, and healthy children do not die from COVID.
So there was no argument for it.
Every child who died, even if it's only three, four, five, every child who died is a needless, pointless death.
And you can hear in this article the rationalization of the public health mentality that as long as they can claim a net benefit, then they are guilty of nothing.
And in this case, they're absolutely guilty of criminal negligence at best, allowing children to die from a shot that they absolutely did not need.
Further, they're lying about what is in Prasad's memo.
Prasad in the memo describes the fact that there are many more deaths that are probably linked to the vaccines.
The 10 that are identified by Prasad here are the ones at which the death occurs so rapidly after vaccination that the connection is obvious, right?
This is an extremely conservative metric that they are using.
And so in any case, what they are expecting is that A, you won't have read and absorbed Prasad's memo, that you are going to take this report on what Prasad did as a substitute for the memo itself,
and you are going to continue to proceed from the false notion that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a crazed anti-vax madman who, for whatever reason, is advancing an ideological agenda where he's hell-bent on getting rid of vaccines, even though they're saving lives.
So if that's the cocktail party that you attend, then this article tells you how to pivot your position so that you're not going to be embarrassed by the fact that, yes, actually, kids died from these vaccines, right?
This is like an update.
Well, it's an update.
It's a change to the null hypothesis.
The null hypothesis for them being they're safe and effective, but that doesn't mean that people won't die.
And that, I mean, I object to one piece of what you said across more products than the mRNA shots, that actually safe and effective products given to people who are at risk of getting the disease or whatever it is that those safe and effective products will either prevent or treat will have risks.
Everything is going to have a risk.
And so some people who would not otherwise have died will likely die.
That is going to be the case.
Your point here is specific to these shots, especially for children who never should have gotten them in the first place.
Therefore, those deaths were completely unacceptable.
Completely unacceptable.
And yeah, I'm in no way arguing that I would expect interventions to be risk-free.
But, you know, again, this is a question of you are accepting the downside of your own argument.
I never in a million years would have said to the public, these shots are safe.
To claim they are safe is you taking on this responsibility because members of the public have a right to informed consent.
And at the point that you tell them these things are safe, you damn well better be right.
And safe means without risk.
So they decided to use the term safe and people lost their children.
And now they're saying, well, it was a small price to pay.
And even if children suffered from COVID in the same way that adults did, and there was some benefit to these shots, which isn't true, but let's say that it had been true.
You still have an individual right to look at this technology and not only think about what it is that's known about the harms, but think about what the chances are that like so many other medical interventions, 20 years down the road, we're going to discover some massive harm we didn't know about.
You get to factor that into your calculation and say, you know what?
Even if the known harms of this vaccine are less than the known benefits, I think that could turn around and I'd rather go it alone.
I'd rather face this with my immune system and not take your damn shot.
And what they did, of course, is coerce everybody into taking these shots with a false claim that it was safe.
And in any case, the idea that they get to pivot in this way and now say, well, you surely weren't expecting there'd be no deaths.
And it's like, well, you told me there weren't going to be any.
You wanted to jump in.
Oh, no, just before you move away from this article, I had one other thing from the article that I wanted to point out.
That later, much later in the piece, one of the paragraphs reads, many mainstream experts have been drawing from the same playbook that COVID skeptics used at the height of the pandemic.
Note the language.
This is just like beautifully done rhetoric.
And the rhetoric is not serving humanity, but it is beautifully done rhetoric.
I'm going to begin with this paragraph again.
Many mainstream experts have been drawing from the same playbook that COVID skeptics used at the height of the pandemic.
Five years ago, they and others asked, were thousands of American children truly getting hospitalized for COVID?
Or did they get hospitalized for some other reason and just happen to have COVID?
Now we get a similar question.
Did the teenagers who died after getting their Pfizer shots die from COVID vaccination?
Or did they just happen to die after something else, from something else after having been vaccinated?
This is diabolical and will, to those who have not been paying careful attention, seem like a totally legitimate point, especially when he uses language like playbook to suggest that when causality is claimed, sometimes causality is not justified in being claimed is not something from a playbook.
This is standard logical inference.
Either A causes B or A and B coexist, and that means very different things going forward.
So there were, and this author is specifically talking about thousands of American children getting hospitalized for COVID.
And I'm more familiar with, and we spoke more about the, I don't actually remember the numbers, but at least I think hundreds of thousands of people who were claimed, who, who, whose causes of death were said to be COVID, which when people looked into it, clearly had either terminal diseases or other conditions which were likely to kill them at some point.
And having been admitted to the hospital, were tested for the things that you were tested for, were found to have COVID because so many people had COVID at so many moments for some years there that then if you had COVID, and again, because there were some financial incentives to hospitals for deaths from COVID, you were claimed to have died from COVID rather than with COVID.
Whereas, specifically the cases that Prasad is talking about in this memo, These children who died within hours or days of COVID vaccination could much more rigorously be claimed to have died from the thing that immediately preceded their death, as opposed to from one of many things that they happened to have at the time of death.
Yeah, this is a sophisticated kind of sophistry that they are deploying here.
And, you know, your point about rhetoric, you know, by saying that it's a playbook.
Yeah, you're being strategic.
You have your own reasons.
Somehow this is about you getting ahead.
Which do you get that from?
Right, right.
So anyway, the article then goes on to make many wrong arguments that the public does not understand why they're wrong because they are derived from the literature.
So of course, you know, if you want to claim that the vaccines were on balance a good thing, then you go to your study that says that in fact they saved millions of lives.
Right.
Right.
But you don't understand that millions of lives is based on a completely preposterous model, that it's not like they went out into some set of people and looked for, you know, a difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
It's just simply a model that proceeds from unrealistic assumptions.
So just to be clear, what you just said was what you're saying is that the article, the piece of research linked in the Atlantic article that claims that tens of millions of lives were saved is research based entirely on theoretical predictions as opposed to empirical data.
Well, so I don't know that it's linked in this article, but the typical thing is to claim it saved millions of lives and it is a computer model where the assumptions built in and the number of parameters allow you to reach this number that then flatters your public health intervention rather than actually reflecting something that's been found in the real world.
And as I've said many times, a model is a valid way of generating a hypothesis.
It is not a valid way of testing a hypothesis.
And this particular bad piece of research claims to be a test.
But there are lots of other things in here too, where they say, well, okay, yes, myocarditis, we accept that myocarditis is sometimes a consequence of the shot.
But, you know, myocarditis is also caused by COVID.
And the stuff you get from COVID is way worse than the stuff you get from the shot, right?
Well, this is all a categorization error.
It's not obvious at all that COVID creates myocarditis on its own.
And so, like with so many of the things in the COVID debate, you find basically an accounting trick where people are shoved into the wrong category.
They're claimed to be unvaccinated when they really were just vaccinated and it hasn't been two weeks, right?
So shoving people into the wrong category allows you to make lots of arguments and to sound like they are based on actual evidence when they are really smoke and mirrors.
So the reason that comes up here is because the myocarditis of COVID and the myocarditis that is induced by the mRNA shots appears to be a different kind of thing.
So it's a category error.
Is that it's not obvious that there's shots, that the disease produces myocarditis at all.
So what they've done is they've created basically COVID-triggered myocarditis in order to claim that, yes, all right, we have to acknowledge that there's some myocarditis from the shots, but that's far better than getting it from the disease where there are a couple errors there.
One, it's not obvious that the disease causes it at all.
But two, guess what?
The vaccines don't prevent the disease.
So you're adding a whole second kind of myocarditis.
Even if their claim was right, it's still not an argument in favor of these shots.
There's obvious research to be done to assess this very basic question.
Yes.
which is, does anyone who is not vaccinated with the mRNA shots who gets COVID end up with myocarditis?
Right.
Absolutely.
So anyway, there are many such sleights of hand in this article, all designed to re-up your confidence that you're still on the right side of history and those anti-vaxxers are still ideologically motivated, crazy people who aren't trying to tell you something.
While, you know, and the academy is at fault for this, right?
The source of all of the garbage studies that buttress the Atlantic's perspective is an academy that is still churning this stuff out.
Now, I did want to say in passing, I believe it's Elon Musk who made a point, specifically with respect to the Atlantic, if I remember it correctly, that the Atlantic now exists to prime the AI.
That the basic point is actually most people are not listening to this voice, right?
They've moved on from COVID.
They're not paying attention to what the Atlantic says, but that the important thing is that you put enough stuff into the world that the training data that the AI learns from, when somebody queries it, is going to spit back the answer.
Oh, by the way, yes, there's a certain amount of myocarditis that comes from the shots, but the stuff you get from the disease is way worse.
kind of thing so the idea and we need to be paying attention to this because increasingly there is that's that's a hypothesis that he's promoting that depends you know that may or may not be true based on whether or not people are actually reading the atlantic which you know in terms of hard copies no one can say Just because people are getting magazines delivered to their homes doesn't mean that anything gets read.
But with regard to reads online, these things are countable.
Yes, but there's a question about, you know, if we just compare, as with something like the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party could be the winningest party ever if it just simply did the bidding of the people.
It's a totally obvious strategy.
It doesn't require them to be clever.
If they did that, they'd be unbeatable.
Which is good.
Right.
So why don't, well, why don't they do it?
Well, they don't do it because it would cut into their racket.
They can't serve their actual constituents if they're serving the people.
So they have to do the cruddy job that they're doing, which causes people to be pissed off, even though they have a much better political strategy at their fingertips anytime that they want.
In this case, the Atlantic is putting out something that gets a certain number of reads.
But the Atlantic could have a lot more reads if it told people something useful rather than just primed them for the cocktail party that they might attend, right?
Oh, I think this is a zero as a special number where we are all looking for a reliable source of insight and trailing the public's awareness of the hazard of the COVID shots is a classic.
Like people know that so many people have had the experience of somebody they know being clearly either injured by the shots or coming down with a cancer that they shouldn't have.
Yes, but, and here I find myself unusually on the side of the argument that's going to sound like I'm not sure people are up to the challenge.
In general, I think people do want, are capable of rigorous analytical thought, doing better than they're doing, being interested in receiving better information than they're receiving.
However, especially with regard to COVID, there's so many years of so much social construction and damage that have passed that I don't think that with regard to the COVID story, that maybe even a majority of people who have been getting all of their news since 2020 from mainstream media would be that interested in a correction.
it will force too much, well, as you know, as we've been calling for, as we thought was coming, as I hoped and thought was coming in like 2022, 2023, 2024, we needed a reckoning.
I don't see it happening.
Yeah, but that's not really the question.
I think this is a Harley-Davidson issue.
Is it really?
Yes, I do think it's a Harley-Davidson.
Well, in the following sense.
Harley-Davidson is a company that went through what many people describe as a kind of miracle comeback, right?
Where it started making cool motorcycles that people wanted.
And, you know, it's a prestige brand.
But the problem is that the people who want them are basically boomers, boomers of a certain ethos, and they are dwindling.
So the point is, if Harley-Davidson continues to cater to an audience that's dying off and coming to the point that it can't ride motorcycles anymore, it becomes nothing.
And the Atlantic...
I did that.
I agree.
I'm not arguing that the Atlantic can reach everybody, but I'm arguing if the Atlantic decided to actually do journalism, that the Atlantic would find a much bigger audience than the people who are still on board with the garbage narrative that's fallen apart in so many different ways.
So, you know, I can't prove that.
Yeah, I mean, I think I don't think it's true.
In part because I actually don't know exactly where you're going.
So I don't want to steal on your thunder in terms of where you're going here, but I've recently been writing about the two fairly distinct ways that Americans get science wrong.
And it does fall fairly neatly into political groups that we have on the right mostly, the science has done so much harm, it's insane.
I reject science.
And on the left, mostly, oh my goodness, isn't science the best thing since sliced bread?
I'm going to follow the science.
And that means that I can divest myself of any responsibility from thinking scientifically for myself or doing any work myself.
All I have to do is find the expert du jour who claims to be a scientist and follow that guy.
And where this falls apart with regard to the political categories is that the academics who are actually conservative leaning, the coastal elites who are conservative leaning, because there are many, the people who like to go to those cocktail parties that you like to talk about, even the ones who are supposedly on the right and who are maybe awake to problems with wokeness and awake to problems with censorship and free speech,
largely are very, very happy to take on this uninvestigated, wrong approach to science, which is actually an embrace of scientism and not an embrace of science.
And so, and when you talk to people, and I think it's especially bad among the hyper-educated who are not hyper-educated in sciences, they'll basically, you know, they'll, and I've said this before, but, you know, just like enumeracy is sort of considered a cute little thing.
Like no one at a cocktail party is going to say, yeah, I can't actually read.
Like literacy is, illiteracy is not acceptable, but enumeracy is kind of cute.
And frankly, we don't have a word for it.
But the inability to understand what science is and what's not and to track scientific arguments and to see rhetoric when it's being used as if it's science, that's just not, it doesn't even come up for these people.
So I don't think they want to be informed.
They are happy not having to think about, like, oh, that's an expert thing.
Right, right.
Let the scientists do the science thing and let them just tell me what to do and I can get on with the more important and frankly more interesting things because aren't those people kind of geeky anyway?
But that's the Harley-Davidson issue is catering to the audience that doesn't want to hear it by feeding them the stuff that they do want to hear has to be compared to who might your audience be if you said something useful.
So anyway, I do want to come back to that issue of where people are with science.
I think it's absolutely vital.
And I agree with you.
You have a vast class of people that thinks that they understand how to evaluate the quality of science based on, you know, did the person who said it have a master's degree?
Did they have a PhD or no degree at all, right?
Okay, I know how to rank those.
Okay, let's assume that we're talking.
I'm not sure the institution that they're at.
Right.
If they've got a PhD, is it a Harvard PhD or, you know, is it a University of Michigan PhD?
And the answer is you actually can't do this at all, right?
Because your institutions are so bad that you can go to all the top people at the top places and you're actually almost certain to find they don't know what they're talking about because the value of having them on board with some garbagey perspective is so high that they've been corrupted.
But all right, let's move in that direction.
This article is doing something weird.
It deploys many of the tropes that have long since been revealed by those of us in the heterodox health freedom space.
And actually you can see what the rational discussion actually looks like.
Even the rational discussion is moving on to the real stuff.
Can we put up the science article that I sent you?
So this article came to my attention just before we went on, and I have not had a chance to fully evaluate it.
But this article, which is in science translational medicine, is called Inhibition of CXCL10 and IFNY ameliorates myocarditis in preclinical models of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination.
And what this article appears to show is that the damage from the mRNA shots is coming from the immune system attacking the heart as a result of having begun the process of producing spike protein triggered by mRNA.
Now, okay, this is science translational medicine.
This is being reported as a significant finding.
How long have listeners to Dark Horse been hearing me argue that exactly this is true and that what it means, which the article also concludes, is that it isn't the COVID part of the shots.
It's the mRNA platform itself that triggers the immune system to attack your own heart cells, which creates critical vulnerabilities.
Now, they report one other thing in here, which I'm not, I think if I understand what they did correctly, they are extrapolating too much from it.
But what they seem to have shown is if you interrupt the inflammation pathway in the heart, remember myocarditis and pericarditis, itis means inflammation.
It's not a pathology.
It's a symptom of a pathology.
In this case, it's damage to your heart done by your immune system.
But if they interrupt the inflammation pathway by blocking molecules that cause inflammation, they reduce the harm to the heart.
And they interpret this as the inflammation doing the damage.
I want to check this article further, but what I think actually they're doing is they are interrupting the immune system's presence because the confusing thing about inflammation is that because we always learn about it in the context of its harm that it does to us, right?
Oh, you've got inflammation.
It's actually an adaptation.
And that, yes, it's very easy to end up with too much inflammation or a self-exacerbating cascade in which you can't rid yourself of inflammation.
There's a lot of harm that comes from it.
But why it's there is that it evolved basically as a mechanism for recruiting the appropriate cells to the tissue in order to fix them.
So if you have a virus, you get inflammation where the virus has gotten into your cells in order that the immune cells get in there and fight the virus.
How do they do it?
By killing your cells that are virally infected, which is exactly what's causing the myocarditis here.
So there's recruitment of cells that are useful, which does not happen at the same time that the body is also trying to decide how many cells to kick out.
And so there is a net influx of cells, which is inherently going to be inflammatory.
And but I mean, another obvious thing that, you know, inflammation is a lot of things.
And when we talk about something like edema, you know, swelling is also an inflammation and it's an immobilization technique.
It's, it's, you know, it's the body's cast, that if you've, you know, if you've injured your ankle and it's swollen up and you can't put weight on it, trying to reduce the inflammation so you can walk as normal is going very much against what your body is trying to do to help you stay off your feet for a few days while it does what it can to heal whatever damage you've done,
such that when it tells you, without the use of external pain meds, that you can now walk because you can now bear to walk, you are likely to not be doing as much damage as you would be in the early stages when you have reduced inflammation through exogenous means.
Yep.
The body, if given a type of insult that is something your ancestors would have experienced, the body has a really good idea how to address most of them.
And there are occasional situations where, you know, using something exogenous like an antibiotic to deal with spreading infection makes sense on a temporary basis.
But in general, the body knows what to do.
So I would argue that actually the science piece here that describes this, the attack of the immune system.
The article in Science Translational Medicine.
Right.
That, imagine that the Atlantic, you know, got hit on the head and started doing journalism and reports on this.
Because, I mean, wouldn't the people who read the Atlantic be interested to know that actually there's reason to be concerned about the mRNA platform itself?
Because we actually now have laboratory evidence that the immune system is attacking your heart as a result of these vaccinations.
I mean, that's a fascinating story.
And, you know, I mean, it's a little funny that we're finally, you know, seeing this in a top journal.
But this, it was obvious that this was a question to be asking.
I've been asking it since, I think, 2021.
So in any case, it's there to be asked.
And the idea that you've got, on the one hand, even mainstream science is now coming around to investigating what the hell is going on with this platform, right?
And the Atlantic is still like, you know, tending the cocktail party full of the people who want to tell themselves that, well, you know, some children needed to die because of that was the only way that the world was going to be saved from COVID, which is, of course, a total nonsense story and no children needed to die.
But, you know, sacrifices had to be made.
Okay, so this leads to the second piece of this puzzle, which is the collapse.
What I'm going to claim is the collapse of trust in science, the endeavor, right?
So that is to say, the product that is being produced is not reliable, and it is causing the public to get wise to the fact that just because the person who said it has a fancy degree or maybe a stethoscope around their neck, that they may not necessarily be telling them something truthful and that in fact the mistakes that they are making are potentially massively harmful.
So I started tweeting about this problem a couple days ago.
Can we go through these tweets?
So here's one.
Responsibility for the collapse of trust in science belongs to those who participated in its corruption, especially those scientists who decided to pursue higher priorities than the truth.
They have plunged us into a dark age, whether we understand that or not.
All right, let's go to the next one.
Okay, I said distrust in science didn't start with lying experts.
The lying experts evolved in response to corrupt incentives and intense selection that favored academic cowardice and a willingness to lie for a higher purpose, which produced a phony academy peddling 32 flavors of propaganda.
After I tweeted that, I think I meant 31 flavors.
Baskin Robbins is 31 flavors.
Well, the Academy is even beyond Baskin-Robbins in terms of how many flavors of propaganda they have.
Let's leave it at that.
All right.
Next one.
Okay, I had several more, but here, my brother, Eric, at some point, I think responding to me, although he didn't quote me here, says, science is not having a trustworthiness crisis.
Science is fine, 100% fine.
Science is close to the only thing that is fine.
I'm so sick of hearing about this fake crisis.
It's a strange thing for him to say.
Well, I found it really strange because not only does it appear to be from a different universe in which science is humming along great while nothing else is, but of all people to be saying it, Eric, I mean, frankly, I learned a ton from Eric about the rot in the academy.
So I know he's not unaware of it.
So anyway, I was so struck by this that I tweeted back at him.
We'll put that up here in a second.
So I tweeted back at him.
This is a truly perplexing perspective.
I'd like to understand how you arrived at it, given how carefully you think and how long you have faced and called out the corruption of the academy.
Keep going.
As I see it, for every case where a person with integrity and courage has held on within the academy, within academia, there are dozens, maybe hundreds who decided not to attend, left, or were driven out over wrongthink.
And most of the exceptions will privately admit they have been forced to regularly hold their tongues.
Keep going.
The Academy champions diversity while cultivating conformity, and the faculty has absorbed the lesson at its core.
It has become the endemic culture.
No biology department in the U.S. made a statement affirming the binary and inflexible nature of sex in humans.
No medical school challenged the atrocities done in the name of gender-affirming care.
No psychology department dissented from the spreading lunacy of the chemical imbalance model for mental illness.
No university stood up for informed consent over the obviously dangerous COVID shots.
All of these failures maimed innocent people.
And that's far from a complete list of jaw-dropping instances of anti-scientific consensus.
Your own field, I'm saying to Eric, is held hostage by an untestable intuition falsely called a theory.
I'm referring to string theory there.
Mine refuses to admit the inadequacy of allelic variation to account for morphological diversity or the obvious evolutionary explanation for racism and genocide.
Science is fine, as you say, but it lives amongst the rebels in the hills, not in the institutions built to facilitate it.
The idea that the academy is full of great people who can simply be unshackled to do the work we need done seems preposterous to me, and I would have thought to you as well.
The culture of science is actively discouraged in the academy, and it has been for generations.
The culture needs to be rebuilt by the keepers of the scientific flame.
And even if that work began in earnest today, you and I would not live long enough to see it completed.
Okay.
That I don't think is true.
That last bit.
Today's children can be encouraged again to be scientific thinkers.
Oh, yeah.
And, you know, it's 20 years before they are now making their cultural understanding, renewed cultural understanding of science.
Well, A, I'm talking to changing academia, and I expect you to be alive in 20 years.
Well, yes, but I'm saying something it's way worse than that, because who is it that is going to teach these children to think scientifically?
Well, we don't have enough of those people because what we have is a lot of scientific zombies who speak in the language of science, but don't know, don't have any relation to the philosophy of science and don't have the instinct to do it, and frankly aren't courageous enough to do it when the conclusions that it comes to are inconvenient.
So my sense is this is what I would call a three-generation problem.
It's going to take three generations to build up enough scientific culture in order to be able to distribute it at scale.
And so I don't expect to live to see that process completed.
All right, now Eric responded to me.
And I will say, Eric and I, COVID did not do good things for my relationship with Eric.
I thought this discussion was much more productive.
But anyway, can you put up his response to me?
Okay, so you heard my response, and he says, it's like this.
Science needs autonomy.
This isn't a science problem.
It's a subordination problem curable by autonomy.
All of our colleagues who stayed in the system self-censor.
All those who don't leave the system.
No one has figured out how to stay in the system with freedom.
You and I failed by leaving.
Others failed by staying.
This has nothing to do with us.
It's not a personal failure issue.
It's a 55-year attack on scientific autonomy.
You simply failed a Hobbesian choice problem, as did I, as did the people who went along with the madness.
And I am not going to make this personal.
No one stayed in the system as a loud beacon of scientific freedom, not one voice.
This isn't a personal trust issue.
Now, he does go on to flesh this out in more tweets, but nonetheless, I think Eric has come around to my perspective there.
What he is saying is compatible with what I'm saying, with the one extra piece of what I'm saying being that, yes, everybody failed and autonomy is the answer.
The key thing here is that remember what we've said here many times about what's good about culture and what's bad about it.
What's good about culture is that it can rapidly adapt in a way nothing else can.
What's bad about it is it can be lost in one generation, right?
You can be a great seafaring people with amazing outrigger canoes, and one generation fails to make an outrigger canoe, and you're back to square one.
Nobody knows how to do it anymore.
Less true in literate cultures.
Less true in literate cultures, but the difference between somebody who's read about how you make one of these things and how you actually make it is all the difference in the world.
And my point would be there are three groups of scientific thinkers.
You have two in the academy.
Eric and I both agree on this, I would say.
You've got academic zombies who are people who are going along with the conventional narrative, probably aren't aware that it's wrong, are just simply, it's a jobs program for them.
And because they talk in the language of science, they can live on in the academy happily and go home to a, you know, a roof over their heads and a nice enough car and all of that.
Okay, then there are a tiny number of what I would call tightrope walkers.
These are people who have figured out how to stay in the good graces of the institutions enough that they've hung on.
And I have a constant struggle with these people because I'm often frustrated by what they presumably must know and are unwilling to voice, but I understand why they don't, which is they're trying to stay, they're trying to hang on in the institutions.
And the third group, I would just say, are the rebels in the hills, right?
These are the people who have either left of their own accord or been driven out.
But the rebels in the hills are free to speak openly about scientific truths, but they do so and are derided as cranks and all of that.
So this takes me to the point that I said was new and important.
I want to lay it out this way.
Maybe actually, can we go and look at my tweet to Vinay Prasad in 2022 when he was promoted to full professor?
So Vinay has been a frustrating presence to me.
In many cases, Vinay has been insightful and on the right side during COVID.
He has been fairly courageous about issues surrounding vaccines.
He's been terrible on issues surrounding repurposed drugs.
He has spent lots of time in conversation with Zubin Demanya, who is by whatever mechanism, some kind of shill for the regime, and Vinay didn't call him out.
So when Vinay got promoted to full professor, I tweeted at him and I said, congratulations, Vinay.
Assuming you use the freedom as its creators intended, this could be a very, very important well beyond your institution and discipline.
May it liberate you from the calculated middle ground that, as you allude to in your SS, I don't remember what that is, was necessary to get this far.
Godspeed.
Now, he thanked me for that, so he read it.
And anyway, my point was, look, I get that you are constrained by the need to survive in your institution, but you've now gotten to the final rung.
You're free.
Don't forget what this was about.
And I've been sometimes impressed by him in the years since and often disappointed.
But here's the interesting part.
When you look at the Atlantic article that we started with, you see Vinay Prasad being derided as a politically motivated anti-scientific fabulist.
They literally say that he's been dumpster diving, which is fraud.
If you're searching for evidence for a perspective that is not the reflection of all of the evidence, then you're engaged in fraud.
And they say maybe he's just outright lying.
So here's my point.
You've got a bunch of people who did something that I think was very unlikely to work.
You've got a bunch of people who did hang on in the institutions and they held their tongues.
And, you know, you've got Jay Bhattacharya and you've got Vinay Prasad and Marty Marquet.
You've got Ratzef Levy.
You've got all of Tracy Beth Hogue.
You've got a bunch of these people who hung on in the institutions and who have been a little bit maddening to those of us outside because there were lots of truths that they should have spoken that they couldn't, right?
They are now being demonized as if they were the rebels in the hills, right?
They're being slandered.
Of course they are.
Right.
And so here's my point.
I think that's Goliath making a colossal error.
He had these people who were the best argument that the institutions were more or less okay, right?
These were people who spoke difficult truths from within the institutions.
They proved it was possible, blah, blah, blah.
And now the Atlantic is calling them liars, right?
What is that going to do to a guy like Prasad?
Prasad seeing himself demonized as a scientific liar in the Atlantic when what he's doing is actually telling a truth that actually is a life-saving one, one that might cause a parent not to choose this vaccine for their child, right?
My feeling is that has got to be galling and that the way in which it is galling is going to wake a bunch of people up who were, you know, capable of going two ways, right?
They were capable of pursuing the institution's agenda and being more truthful than their colleagues, but not fully truthful.
Or they can wake up and say, actually, you know what?
The rebels in the hills have it right.
Or this is analogous to what we went through at Evergreen.
At the point that a rowdy band of effectively paid-for pseudo-activists came and started shouting at you that you were a racist.
To many, largely it wasn't actually about you.
It was about all the other faculty who were considering pointing out that the emperor had no clothes, that the woke regime was insane, that this was antithetical to the job of a university, which is to discover for truth, not to deliver ideology.
What it did for almost everyone watching was it served to make people go, oh, I can't afford to be called a racist now, can I?
So, in fact, you go through that looking glass, you end up on the other side, you're like, oh, huh, yeah, you can call me whatever you want.
And if it's true, that sucks.
And there's a reckoning to be coming and I have no way around it.
But it turns out not a racist.
So good try.
Better luck next time.
In this case, it's a murkier, A, murkier.
And people watching who may not know all of what you just described about Prasad's history in academia as one of the people whom you refer to as a tightrope walker will see someone who is veering away from the mainstream media accepted narrative, being called a liar.
And that's going to push a certain number of people back into the shadows, just like it pushed a certain number of academics back into the shadows with regard to the woke insanity.
Yeah, but you know what?
I'll take it, actually.
The ones who are going to look at that, it is actually perfectly analogous to the woke thing.
But the basic point is at some point, you realize that there's a large group of people that can't be saved because of their cowardice.
Their cowardice is so great that even if they were on your team, they would be a liability.
It's like the person in the foxhole who's quivering.
They're like, now I have to take care of you when the enemy shoots.
I'm literally tripping over you.
Right.
So my feeling is let those people recede.
Those people are not useful.
What is useful is, I mean, remember what happened to us?
I know you're remember what happened to us with the COVID vaccines, right?
Like you and I, as we have recounted frequently, are as vaccinated as anybody.
We've got some exotic stuff.
I'm not sure we can continue to say that, but, you know, as of 2020.
As of 2020, we were.
We probably had more vaccinations than almost any other people.
We were very high in terms of our percentile score.
And the COVID thing was singular because, you know, not a at first, it doesn't even really appear to reflect on regular vaccines because it's so radically different.
And, you know, and so, okay, you know, my, my wake-up moment was they're safe and effective.
Surely you didn't just say they were safe because we both know you couldn't know that.
No matter.
You invented them yesterday.
Yeah, you couldn't know that.
If they do something bad to you after you had them and 10 years have passed, you wouldn't know.
So don't you dare tell me they're safe, right?
That was my initial like wake-up moment.
Okay, from there, it's like, oh, not only are you lying about what you know about them, but even your data says you know more about harms than you're telling us.
And then you go to the question of, well, do they work?
Oh, not only do they not work, but you didn't even bother to test whether they blocked transmission before deciding to, you know, inflict them on everybody on the basis that we all had a responsibility to each other.
So, okay, you go through that process and it's like, you know, it's layers of an onion.
You know you're lying.
And you've used the same phrase, safe and effective, that you use for, hold up, all these other products.
All these other products, right.
And so then the question is, you know, okay, well, I'm not an anti-vaxxer, but there may be some vaccines.
In fact, I've worried that there were vaccines on that list that aren't any good, you know.
Well, I mean, we've been over this road before, but I used to have to counsel my students before I took them to the neotropics about whether or not to use malaria prophylaxis, what kind of malaria prophylaxis, if they were going to do it, to get to one particular site in the Amazon that I'd like to take students to, they were absolutely required to get the yellow fever vaccine.
And then there were a bunch of other vaccines that they had an option to get.
And I had a different perspective on all of these.
And I think my position on the malaria prophylaxis has not changed.
I think it was pretty mature already then.
But my perspective on many of the vaccines has changed radically.
But even then, even at the point, excuse me, even at the point that I was telling students that in order to go on this trip, they would be required by various institutions in Ecuador to get the yellow fever vaccine, there were others that they should probably consider getting as well, but definitely not cholera.
The cholera vaccine was understood well enough that I had no trouble saying to a group of students whom I was otherwise advocating to get vaccines against tropical diseases that they might be might be exposed to, the cholera vaccine was a terrible vaccine.
And furthermore, as a first worlder traveling in even in places where cholera was endemic, if you had access to clean water, this wasn't a disease that was going to take you out.
And so there was nuance even then around some vaccines.
Yeah.
Well, nuance because, of course, you know, you and I are sophisticated enough and have enough toolkit right in this area that the idea that this is just simply, you know, there are trade-offs.
Yeah.
These things need to be justified on an individual basis.
You and I made the mistake of assuming that the safety had been tested way more than it was and that the efficacy had been proven in some sort of real world sense, which it often isn't.
But nonetheless, the gateway to wondering if the so-called anti-vaxxers might have much more of a point than we had thought was this one exceptional thing wrongly called a vaccine in which they deployed all of the tropes that they use on the regular with all of their normal stuff.
So my sense is the tightrope walkers who have now been drafted into the administration and have now been understood to be the enemy by the Atlantic and the regime for which it speaks, their radicalization.
I mean, I used to say frequently that Goliath had made a mistake in which he took every single person with integrity and capability and had caused them to gather on one team.
That was a big mistake.
I was not including the tightrope walkers who I've got to tell you, as a died-in-the-wool rebel in the hills, it is galling to watch people pay so much attention to their own academic well-being that they refuse to speak the truth or can't even see it when it's in front of them.
But this is the very rare case where those people have parachuted now into the top positions and been understood to be rebels in the hills by something so foolish it can't distinguish them, right?
No, again, or it doesn't pay Goliath to distinguish them because it would rather paint them as the dangerous rebels, anti-vaxxers, radicals, whatever it is to the people who still read the Atlantic.
Yeah, but I got to tell you the value of having somebody like Prasad, whose eyes were partially open, have his eyes forced open by the unjustified accusations when he's on perfectly solid ground.
I mean, I don't like to see anybody demonized, but let's put it this way.
If our enemy thinks of you as a friend, you got a problem.
So the fact that it has now spotted you as a threat is It's better that it happens sooner rather than later.
And so anyway, I welcome all the tightrope walkers to our encampment in the hills, such as it is.
It's good to have our team strengthened by their addition.
Is that what you got here?
That's it.
All right.
Well, let's just very briefly talk about a couple of new pieces of research that have come out.
We're going to save the bacon that's not bacon for another time.
Hold on.
Can you see my computer?
Awesome.
Amazing.
Okay.
So here we have an article in Nature, or one of the nature properties, I don't remember which, published yesterday?
Is it the 11th today?
Yeah.
Earliest evidence of making fire.
So I'm just going to read the abstract.
Fire making, and so this is actually the, this is only available online linked through Scientific American, which is how I first ran into this piece.
And so you can get the entire article if you want to read it, but you have to link through Scientific American, which is strange.
Firemaking is a uniquely human innovation that stands apart from other complex behaviors such as tool production, symbolic culture, and social communication.
Controlled fire use provided adaptive opportunities that had profound effects on human evolution.
Benefits included warmth, protection from predators, cooking, and creation of illuminated spaces that became focal points for social interaction.
Fire use developed over a million years, progressing from harvesting natural fire to maintaining and ultimately making fire.
However, determining when and how fire use evolved is challenging because natural and anthropogenic burning are hard to distinguish.
Although geochemical methods have improved interpretations of heated deposits, unequivocal evidence of deliberate fire making has remained elusive.
Here, we present evidence of fire making on a 400,000-year-old buried land surface at Barnum in the United Kingdom, where heated sediments and fire-cracked flint hand axes were found alongside two fragments of iron pyrite, a mineral used in later periods to strike sparks with flint.
Geological studies show that pyrite is locally rare, suggesting it was brought deliberately to the site for fire making.
The emergence of this technological capability provided important social and adaptive benefits, including the ability to cook food on demand, particularly meat, thereby enhancing digestibility and energy availability, which may have been crucial for hominin brain evolution.
That's a lovely little story.
What the abstract doesn't include is that before this find, archaeologists only had confidence in being able to place the control, creation, control, and maintenance of fire, of maintenance of human or hominin created fire to about 50,000 years ago.
So this research takes it back to 400,000 years, which is an eightfold increase in what we think.
Homo sapiens didn't exist at that point.
the likely the human ancestor that they invoke here is homo heidelbergensis i think i may have dropped a syllable there but um sounded good to me and um And, you know, we weren't fully human yet.
We were definitely on, you know, on the lineage that those critters were on the lineage that would become human a couple hundred thousand years later.
A couple of the things that they say here that maybe warrant additional nuance are there is evidence that humans were harvesting from natural fire like lightning strike and using fire a million years ago or so.
But being able to use fire that you find, and presumably in not particularly stable conditions when you've happened upon wildfire, and create and maintain stable and controlled fires is way different.
And the difference between we've started using fire a million years ago and it's only 50,000 years ago that we can actually create and maintain controlled fire versus a million years to 400,000 years ago is a very huge difference.
And furthermore, the idea that fire, you know, so their list of benefits of fires is pretty lovely.
Warmth, protection from predators, cooking, and creation of illuminated spaces that became focal points for social interaction.
That's the campfire that we speak so much about in Hunter-Gatherer's Guide and elsewhere.
But with regard to cooking, which they come back to at the end of the abstract, Richard Wrangham and now many others, but Richard Wrangham, primatologist, I believe he was the first to propose, but he certainly was the first to really explore deeply the hypothesis that cooking meat was one of the big transition points in human evolution.
Because meat that is not cooked not only does not have the energetic value, the resource value, the caloric and nutritional value that cooked meat does, but it also requires so much chewing.
And I did not go back and look at his data on this, but I believe that he calculates that human diets that are largely consisting of uncooked meat require 10 to 12 hours of chewing every day, which obviously gets in the way of various other things such as talking and other things.
And so his argument is not just that cooking meat, which is for which fire is necessary, benefits us nutritionally and energetically, but also socially because suddenly we have our mouths freed to do many other things with them.
Yeah, like cognitive insights.
Yes.
Yes.
Which in the absence of cooked meat are rare.
So that's why you were listening to like every third word.
You were working it up.
I could see the smirk.
Yeah, you did see the smirk.
But I could repeat everything you said.
And I agree wholeheartedly.
I think the question is, does the evidence exist to figure out how far back this technology goes?
My guess is it goes back even farther than we've found evidence.
And as archaeology is a science and an art.
And as any historical science does, it relies on both skill and luck.
And the inference inferences, good, careful inferences in archaeology, as in any other historical science, will have to be conservative.
And so the three things here, that you've got heated sediments, evidence of heated sediments, fire-cracked flint hand axes, along with iron pyrite, which is not otherwise locally found, that's the important piece that is otherwise unknown in archaeological sites that far back.
And the idea that this is the farthest back that it would have existed is unlikely.
Archaeological evidence like fossils will tend to be spotty at best.
I mean, at a trivial level, you can be certain that you will not find evidence of the very first intentionally created fire.
Nor would you know if you had.
Right.
But because you're statistically almost certain not to find the first one, you know that the one you find will have happened after by some distance.
And the question is how much after?
I wouldn't be surprised if it goes back another couple hundred thousand years.
Yeah.
And by some distance, in that case, you're using metaphorically to refer to time, but also spatially.
So if there is evidence, there's otherwise evidence.
And actually, let me see.
I think there's a map of to sorry, you can show my screen here.
Just this little map in the upper left-hand corner.
This is just in Europe with several sites ranging from Great Britain all the way to Western Spain, all the way east to Ukraine, where fire use has been recorded, but not until this one in Barnum in the UK with any evidence of controlled creation of fire.
But that ranges across all of Europe and as far back as a million years.
And you also find fire use in Africa and in the Levant for similar periods of time.
So I wanted to suggest a couple thought experiments as about all you can do here.
But one thing that is definitely worth the time is to consider the difference between an ancestor that has control of fire and one that doesn't.
Just imagine what the distinction in what this animal, how it understands itself, right?
Even just the control of fire, the ability to produce fire has all sorts of cognitive impacts in addition to the material impacts.
And the second thing is imagine, okay, you were the, you're the one, you're the hominid who figures out how to start a fire reliably, you know, so you perfect this thing and your group now has the ability to make these fires.
Now imagine the group in the next little valley over, right?
And it starts to get the sense that not only is fire something that's common in your part of the world, but that you're actually in control of it.
Yeah.
They're smelling steak all the time.
Right.
What's for dinner?
But then the question is, I spend a lot of time thinking about this for different technologies.
If you didn't have a wheel and somebody in your environment does, and they go by with a cart and a much bigger load than you can carry, well, okay, you now have some information.
The biggest piece of information you have is wheel is possible and useful.
Yes.
That just moved into possible space.
Right.
That is now possible.
And it's a lot quicker to get there from.
It's possible how the heck do you do it?
Because now I can observe the wheel and try to imagine what you did to make it.
Oh darn, octagon doesn't get me there.
It does, but it's a bumpy red.
It's a bumpy.
Well said, yes.
So anyway, so the point is, imagine your neighbor has the control of fire and you begin to figure out that they have the control of fire and now you know fire is controllable, but you don't know how to do it.
It's a pretty hard job to make a fire.
In fact, when I taught my survival course called Lights Out, I told students that anybody who could make a fire on their own with only natural materials would get full credit and an excellent evaluation without having to do anything else.
And you said this on the first day of class and people are like, oh, man.
That's the easy way, right?
Not one of them pulled it off.
Yep.
I mean, the trick is it's not that hard if you can use synthetic materials, right?
If you can have a nylon, a piece of nylon rope, you can make a bow drill that's pretty effective.
But the problem is that actually your synthetic rope is orders of magnitude stronger than anything you can manage to make from fibers that you find, you know, sitting around in the forest in the Pacific Northwest.
So you're constantly breaking your bow drill before you ever get to a spark.
Now, there's another task that you gave them, which was about carrying water.
Right?
First day, yeah.
Yeah.
So I was up on a hill with them not very far above a creek, you know, maybe 50 vertical feet above it.
And I said, you know, I think it was bring me a gallon of water with only what you've got.
And, you know, very hard.
Without using anything created in the last hundred years or so.
Right.
Very hard.
I mean, what do you do?
You cup your hands and how much water is left, you know.
So anyway, you do discover a lot of you discover the value in lots of things.
No one started peeling cedar trees and trying to make watertight vessels out of cedar bark.
No, no.
But okay, so control of fire gets had by somebody.
Somebody else now knows it's possible but doesn't know how to do it.
They can do a certain amount of observing, but that doesn't quite get you there.
I mean, we've all seen somebody use a bow drill, but I promise you it's hard.
I am quite sure that we have not all seen somebody use a bow drill.
These people all have internet access.
You don't think they've seen somebody use a bow drill?
Just because it's on the internet doesn't mean people have seen it.
Well, I'd be curious, but I've seen it enough for the rest of you.
But anyway, yes.
So those are interesting questions.
And then, you know, what does it facilitate once you figure out how to get control of it?
And what is, you know, if your neighbor has fire and you don't, at some level, they've just acquired the ability to displace you over time because they are going to be so much more, well, as Heather points out, capable of extracting nutrient from food that effectively it's like they just chewing.
Totally.
Which sounds trivial, but it's actually really not.
Yes.
And not only are they releasing more nutrition from their food, but they're also spending less to stay warm.
You know, you're releasing chemical energy that was stored in a tree rather than having to burn the food that you just ate to keep yourself at a reasonable temperature.
Yep, there's the warmth from the fire and the protection from predators obviously is helpful too with regard to having to have fewer sentries sit and watch.
Yep.
And I would also point out fire is super sexy if you have control over it and your competitor doesn't.
You know, you're in a good position relative to the dating market.
You sound like you know where you're speaking.
Well, I do know how to control fire.
So yes, I mean, I've done all right.
Excellent.
Okay, one more thing.
Yep.
Separate, we're done with fire for the moment.
Not as humans.
Okay.
Oh, good.
Good.
All right.
Yeah.
In fact, I think we'll have a fire there.
Yes.
I mean, first of all, if we're going to quit fire, controlled fire.
Can we do it in June?
Can we quit fire in June?
If we're going to quit fire, I propose we do it in June, not December.
Yeah, I'd say we could even go to April, giving us more lead time before we're going to need something to replace the fire.
That's a fair point.
We'll put on jackets and do it in April.
Yeah.
Okay.
This next story is, I don't know.
It's silly, and it's not letting me open it.
Hold on a second here.
The title.
I'm going to have you show this very briefly and then I'm going to scroll down.
I'm going to have you take this off.
Take off my screen.
published Deciphering Causes and Behaviors, a Recurrent Pattern of Tail Injuries in Hadrosaurid Dinosaurs.
So I will come back to the graphical abstract, but first I want to share so my computer is behaving badly.
I just want to share a section that is not showing itself to me now.
Why not?
Okay, the introduction.
Oh my God.
I swear it's going to let me.
Here we go.
Okay.
I want to share this introduction.
Reconstructing the lifestyle, social interactions, and behaviors of extinct animals based solely on fossilized remains is challenging, especially when the study taxa do not have any modern analogs.
However, paleopathology, the study of fossilized injuries and lesions, provides tools that can be used to help decipher dinosaur behaviors.
Injury caused by prey-predator interactions.
Since when are we calling them prey-predator interactions?
What the hell is that?
Somebody made an atrocious point about calling them predator-prey interactions.
Yeah, you put the vicious one in charge.
Yeah.
Oh, boy, I've got that was a lousy seminar.
I'm sorry.
Somehow I missed that on first read-through.
Okay, I'm going to start at the beginning of that sentence again.
Injuries caused by prey-predator interactions, intraspecific fighting, and social activity may be evident in the form of healing trauma in fossils of individuals that initially survived such events.
In particular, hadrosaurids display an elevated number of injuries compared with other dinosaur groups, especially in the neural spines of the proximomidal caudal vertebrae.
That's right, that's caudal vertebrae down in the lower back.
A number of causes have been hypothesized for these injuries, including that they are due to conspecifics accidentally stepping on the tails of their peers, perhaps when the herd was resting.
They result from intraspecific fights, or from muscular strain during locomotion or other habitual activities such as feeding and walking, or as you suggested, hopping around backwards.
Yes.
Importantly, Tenk suggested another intriguing cause, namely that the fractured neural spines of these proximomidal caudal vertebrae could occur secondary to mating.
The male mounts the female by pressing on the dorsal part of the proximal portion of the tail, resulting in a series of injuries to the associated caudal neural spines.
However, this explanation was challenged with side strikes or trampling considered as more plausible interpretations.
Critics of the mating hypothesis focused on the limited number of specimens displaying the trauma and observed that morphological similar injuries can have different ideologies.
So, in case it wasn't clear from that bit in the introduction, and the research is whatever it is, I'm not convinced by it, but I'm not convinced it's wrong either.
But they have proposed, and you could show my screen here, in this fancy graphical abstract, again in this paper just published, called Deciphering Causes and Behaviors, a Recurrent Pattern of Tail Injuries in Hadrosaurid dinosaurs.
They've got various hypotheses.
Was it due to predation, always in the same place?
Well, you might have a particular risky spot, like the Achilles heel of Hadrosaurid dinosaurs.
Stepping or sparring, they always get stepped on the same place, a locomotion strain from all that, what, bouncing around like kangaroos, or mating.
And here they have a helpful graphic to show how a clumsy male hadrosaurid, upon stepping onto a female hadrosaurid, will perhaps more often than not tend to fracture the caudal vertebrae of his unsuspecting would-be mate before reproducing with her.
That's the hypothesis most favored by this research.
I will say one more thing, which maybe, well, you might be expecting, but they might not be expecting.
This caused me, so one of the things that is hard to decipher in abusive research like this is exactly where would the mating structures have been, and therefore what kind of stance would have been required for copulation to occur.
And they refer to the likely position of the cloaca of the female.
Cloaca are the openings through which gametes, and in the case of female animals, cloaca, fertilized eggs later pass.
And in avian dinosaurs, that is to say, birds, most birds, you have no intromittent organs, nothing like a penis.
You have just two cloaca.
Males have cloaca, females have cloaca, and their copulation is affected by something called the cloaccal kiss.
And it's fairly brief, and it's just putting these two openings next to one another, and sperm moves from the male into the female without anything from the male other than his gametes actually going into the female.
And you've all probably seen it and not realized it in birds.
Yeah, it's so fast, it really doesn't look like.
One bird lands on another and kind of flutters for a second and then.
And that's it.
Yeah, usually with the one on top doing a little bit of like balance with his wings.
Well, this made me wonder, did dinosaurs have an intermittent organ?
And were they all doing the cloacial kiss?
And it seems likely that, no, they were not doing the cloaccal kiss, that because crocodiles, so dinosaurs are in a phylogenic group called the archosaurs, which includes the crocodilians, which of course includes the crocodiles, and also includes the birds.
So dinosaurs and birds are sister to one another.
The crocodilians are the outgroup of that.
And that whole group is sister to mostly other reptiles, like the lopidosaurs, the snakes and lizards.
Snakes and lizards have these hemipenis, each shared two-pronged penis, and they alternate which side they use.
But crocodilians have an internal penis that they avert during copulation, and it is inflated hydraulically with lymph rather than with blood, as is the case in mammals.
And so do some basal birds, like ostriches and ducks and geese, have a single internal penis that averts with lymph hydraulically.
So probably, given the position of dinosaurs phylogenetically between crocodilians and the basal birds, probably they too had a single internal inflatable, invertible penis.
Which I know our audience need to know today.
Yes, of course they did.
It's inflated with lymph.
Inflated with lymph.
And the word that is always used is hydraulically.
So a couple questions here.
Yeah, and I may not be able to answer them.
Okay, well, at least we'll put them on the table as questions.
Yes.
One, and actually the two are related.
Any chance that there is a bacula in hadrosaurus?
No.
Well, I mean, I think no.
Okay.
Because the internal, the internal, the single internal penis basically gets averted out.
Yeah.
It does, you know, it's not, it's, it's not external.
It's not so like the entire, the entire bacula would have to sort of like, It wouldn't make any sense because it would have begun on the inside of the body, and then it would be explunged into the universe.
Then that makes my second question better.
How confident are these people that they can distinguish male and female hadrosaurus?
This is, as far as I can tell, the biggest weakness of the research, which is that they are arguing that because of the placement of the cloaca, because of the repetition of the injury across many times and spaces, I don't know about the times, across many spaces, they would now use this to infer the sex of the hadrosaurus.
That is ridiculous and circular.
You can't do that.
No, I reject that.
That is not high-quality work.
Though, I will say, it is not the result of the corruption that our listeners...
Not at all.
No, I mean, I think they're honest about it.
Well, they say, like, I went looking for exactly that.
It's like, okay, so it's only in female hadrosaurs, right?
These, you know, caudal vertebral injuries are only in female hadrosaurs.
I'm like, yeah, well, yeah, that's what we think.
So we're now going to, you know, if we are right, we can use this to infer the sex of the individuals.
That's weak.
It's circular.
It's circular.
It's not inherently circular, I don't think.
Well, if the idea is it shows up in this hypothesis would have to become a theory before you could use this injury as a diagnosis.
Yes.
Yes.
And it doesn't sound like they're anywhere near that.
No, I don't think so.
But it's not the result of corruption because how much money could there possibly be in answering questions like this and who is supplying it, you know?
And it's beautiful.
I mean, this is another thing I've been writing about, that it is easy for those who dismiss science and who dismiss the idea that science should be publicly funded, even when science is functioning properly and none of us remember a time when that was fully true, to look at research like this and say, what the hell?
Why are my tax dollars going to pay for such things?
And I would say, as I have said over and over and over again, that apparently useless knowledge has the greatest utility of all.
That it is our curiosity, our exploratory nature, to ask questions of things that do not appear to have any plausible human use down the road that have time and time and time again proved to be of utmost utility to humans.
But even more than that, it is exactly our curiosity, our asking questions of the universe, even when those questions yield interesting truths that don't end up having any manifest effect on human health or productivity.
It is still inherently human to be asking these questions and of value to us as a species.
Well, and you never, maybe you said this, but you never know what line of useless work is going to produce fantastic things.
The point is you don't know in advance where this is going to go now.
It's hard to imagine how this one's going to turn out to be super useful.
But requiring that there is a plausible justification in terms of human utility for research is the end of science.
I agree it will cause the end of science.
And I will make a different argument.
Well, I want to make two arguments.
One, I don't buy their conclusion because it's a weird, you know, there are lots of places where evolution fails to attain a good solution, but there's a reason that it fails to attain a good solution, like that solution is in a trade-off relationship with something else.
So you get suboptimality because two things are in competition or because of a constraint, something, you know, our lungs are a weakness for us because they're blind sacks that if they fill with water, we drown.
We can't get the water out.
Gee, why does that come up?
But I will make the following.
I wonder if this is even a new argument.
There is a value.
to having the Academy have basic scientific research in which there is no obvious value in terms of some change in what we do in the Academy, precisely for the purpose of keeping a group of scientists immune from corruption.
In other words, you could imagine that the culture of how you actually do science would live better.
You know, my experience in grad school was I discovered that my field, evolutionary biology, was cleaner.
And the closer I got to medicine, where there was a lot of money at stake in these conclusions, the crazier the politics were.
That's right.
So if you imagine maybe we should study questions that are basic science questions in part to keep the culture of science alive because science is very easily corrupted anywhere where there's money at stake.
Let me just define, you're using the term basic science and it's an important one.
But to anyone who's not familiar with it, it's a term of art.
It sounds like it's the thing that you do first, the easy thing, the simple thing, the thing that once you've done, you never have to do it anymore.
And now you get to move on to the complex stuff, the human important stuff.
And that's not what we mean when we say basic science.
What basic science is, is just that, the work that is done, be it empirical or theoretical, that is done out of curiosity and inquiry without a technological, an engineering, a medical, a pharmaceutical aim.
Yeah, without an applied goal.
With no applied goal.
And that is exactly the dichotomy that is usually used in tandem with.
Is it basic research or is it applied research?
And applied research has done much good for humans too.
But applied research tends to come along with so many blind spots with regard to the complexity of the systems that are being investigated that it also causes harm.
All right.
I'm going to go one step further.
Maybe what we need if we are to prevent the Academy from becoming the clown show that it has become in our era in the next iteration is basic work in an area where we have reason to believe that the natural course of maybe technological progress will reveal answers at some point in the future so we can go check our work.
The with work like this Hadrosaur work, is how are we going to know?
Right, if these animals were still around, we could go see whether or not the breaks were in the females.
Well historical, historical research of any kind, be it historical science or or human history, always suffers from a problem of fact checking.
Right, and it's not impossible to do, but it's difficult to do.
Well, and it's not easy to to check.
But you know the idea that we can go and we can check the logic of people who hypothesized about genes, you know in, let's say, the 70s or 80s, because now the sequencing technology has become so cheap that we can sequence entire genomes and, you know, see whether or not.
Um, you know, for example, the uh hypotheses about junk Dna.
Yeah right, they turned out to be garbage, because we can now uh, detect selection.
Even where we don't know what genes are doing, we can detect that selection is acting on them, which is incompatible with them being neutral.
Um so uh anyway, I guess the idea is some of the purpose of science ought to be to keep the culture of science vital, because it is very easily lost to corruption and if some group is studying something interesting that is not applied and that we can ultimately understand what they've got right and what they've got wrong, so we can see who had the culture right, that that would be valuable in and of itself.
Basic research, because it is a celebration of the curious exploratory nature that is inherent to humankind, and basic research as an anti-corruption measure.
Yes, and actually it fits with what you know.
When you and I were teaching, we I think we were two of the few teachers who did not imagine that we were training little versions of ourselves, that we were, you know, making new evolutionary biologists.
I expected essentially nobody to go on from our classes and do evolutionary biology, so why were they studying evolution?
The answer is because it's a great training ground to make you smarter, and that's what the job of college professors is is to help you become more insightful.
So the proving ground, the product, is the enhanced quality of the cognition.
Yes, it's not the research itself.
Right?
That's right, all right um well, we are going to be back in six days, on wednesday, our usual time, our usual time and place.
Uh and date, uh and um, let's see.
Check out our sponsors this week, which were Caraway, MASA Chips and Crowdhealth.
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It's really, it's really fantastic um, and I guess, until you see us next time, be good to us until you see us next time, that's perfect.
Sorry, now it's not perfect because I interrupted you, but that's right.
You get it back.
You're acting like a hadrosaur.
Oh no, you're not going to go to HR over this, are you?
Luckily, there is no HR.
Until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
