Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying analyze the catastrophic collapse of India's vulture population following the patent expiry of diclofenac, which caused mass deaths and increased human mortality by 4.7% due to unchecked disease vectors. They extend this evolutionary lens to African elephant poisoning and marine ecosystems, illustrating how market forces and policy failures disrupt complex interdependencies. Ultimately, they critique Washington state's "blue team governance," arguing that misapplying group selection theory to justify progressive taxes destabilizes local economies and ignores the intricate feedback loops essential for public health and biodiversity. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Words That Mislead Outsiders00:07:15
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
It is number 323.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Hyang.
We've been traveling and therefore this is our first broadcast in some time, but it's going to be a fascinating one.
I think so.
And coming back to Washington as we did last night, it was amazing how crisp the air was.
We were in various places in the southeast.
Florida, North Carolina, New Orleans.
In fact, in North Carolina, you had a conversation intended to be and has become public with Jonathan Pajot and our good friend Jordan Hall.
And West North Carolina was extraordinary.
But especially in those other two places I just mentioned, in Florida and New Orleans, beautiful though they are, there is so much stuff in the air, so much water in the air that you don't really realize that you're looking through a little bit of a haze and you come back. to Washington and things feel just crystal clear.
It's like a film has been taken away from the eyes.
Yeah, it's amazing how different it is to just look around.
That conversation, I should just say, I thought it was going to frustrate lots of people in the audience.
It frustrated a few, but by and large, people have really loved the conversation and I would recommend people check it out, especially if you want to know if God is more than just a story.
Well, and I think I have not listened to the conversation that you had, but the six of us, the three of you and I and Vanessa and Marty, Jordan's and Jonathan's wives, all spent some time together around the time of that conversation.
And I think in advance, my sense was that you and Jonathan were actively frustrating one another, not intentionally so, but that you were just, and this was Jordan's point, just constantly talking past one another.
And I don't think that you are doing that anymore, that you are doing quite the opposite of frustrating one another at this point.
No, I think.
It is not surprising that we were frustrating each other because both of us are very careful in our zone of understanding.
And when you do quality work in a specific zone like that, it is necessary that you sharpen the terminology so that you know exactly what you mean by this word and by that word.
And most people forget that they've done this.
And even those of us who don't forget that we've done this know that it takes some time. to teach the other person what you mean by these words and to come to some agreement on a glossary of terms that you're going to use in order to even be productive.
So anyway, I felt like we got there very quickly.
And there's always a trade-off.
And we've talked about this before, that you can have jargon which is created for the purpose.
You can have terms of art which are maybe created for the purpose and a little bit more honorable than jargon.
But often terms of art or other kinds of words that are used in very specific ways sound like words that you know.
And so the trade-off is, do you create a whole new vocabulary when you're trying to understand a topic and thus ensure that anyone coming in from the outside will take you for someone who can't be understood or doesn't want to be understood or the activation energy to get in is just too high?
Or do you use words that sound familiar and thus take the very real risk and practically the guarantee that you will be misunderstood, at least at first?
Yes.
In fact, the word jargon is one I've had to define very precisely.
Jargon is the unnecessary use of technical verbiage to block people out of understanding that is so common, and terms of art are the honorable versions, and you will hear people often refer to jargon in their own work because that's not how it is generally used.
I think the term has lost its precision.
Yes, but I i'm making a different point, which is that using words that are not familiar has one cost.
Assume, for instance, that it's all in good faith.
Using words that are, you know, almost guaranteed to not be familiar to outsiders has the cost of making a certain number of outsiders just say, well, you know, not for me, therefore not looking there.
But using words that will be familiar to outsiders, but which you are using in a specific way, basically guarantees that there will be misunderstandings, at least at first.
Yes.
And if you, so there is a trade-off.
It's closely related to what you're pointing to between your precision in what you say and your understandability.
So the terms that are sharpened may be necessary to make a point very precisely.
And people sometimes get frustrated at me that I won't just say the thing I'm trying to say.
I'm not avoiding saying it.
I'm trying to be so precise that it doesn't then come back to haunt me later when somebody says, but you said, and then I can't very well say, well, yes, but I was trying to speak generally so people knew what I was talking about.
This is related to the difference that we have talked about at length in the past between observation and interpretation of what you saw, which is an absolutely critical skill in animal behavior, but really in understanding any kind of system in which you might be observing something for which there are you know, verifiable physical facts.
And separately, there is meaning behind why the thing happened.
And the interpretation of the meaning is almost always so tightly combined with what you think you saw that that's the only thing that gets remembered, which is why misunderstandings happen so often.
But you said, like, no, I didn't.
If you all remember, I said this, like, oh, you're just being pedantic.
Nope, that's not pedantic.
If what I'm trying to tell you is that I was being precise then so that I could recover what it is that I actually meant as opposed to all the various things that other people might think I meant.
So I mean, I do think in the end, you know, there's a fundamental, I think, difference in how you and Jonathan and how, you know, we and our friends in that quadrant understand the world, what it is that we believe explains a lot of what we see around us.
But that does not mean that we dislike each other, that we find each other's worldviews insane or reprehensible.
or that when we do not understand one another, it is because we refuse to or we cannot.
There is the possibility for miscommunication that is good faith and the resolution of that between almost anyone.
Yes.
People will recognize in their own relationships that when you have a disagreement with somebody, you will often find that the disagreement is because the person recorded what they understood you to mean rather than what you said.
And that's fine if the two things are very closely related, but if something is said in an ambiguous way, or the person heard it based on some precondition in their own mind, it leads to all sorts of disagreement.
Fresh Olive Oil Benefits00:06:09
But you're right.
First of all, where we disagree with our friends, if they're right, we should want to know.
Of course.
It's a benefit to having people that you disagree with in your life that you can learn from them.
Yes.
So we're going to talk about some interesting topics.
I will tell you, we're going to start with some biology.
But even if biology is not your thing, I think you'll be fascinated by the connections here and what they say generally about the world that we live in.
All right.
Should we get to our sponsors?
Let's do it.
Near the top of the hour, you're up.
Entire continent.
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You took the prop that I brought for you.
Yes, I did.
Oh.
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And I will tell you, when.
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We're not going to end up going with this.
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All right.
All right.
Now you can remove the problem.
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Olive oil is a succulent, delicious food that, like pretty much all fats, is best when it's fresh.
The fresher the better.
Olives are actually a fruit, making olive oil a kind of fruit juice, which sounds weird, but I don't recommend swing in a whole glass like you would maybe a glass of passion fruit juice, for instance.
I have thought about it.
Have you?
I have thought about it.
You've only thought about it.
Yeah.
It might help with the pollen that is all over the place at the moment.
It might help smooth out some of the rough edges.
Okay.
Olives are a fruit, making olive oil a kind of fruit juice.
And like all fruit juices, olive oil is at its peak of flavor.
I'm not going to be able to read today, apparently.
No, no, you got that.
Like all fruit juices, olive oil is at its peak of flavor and nutritional potency when it's fresh pressed.
But most supermarket olive oils sit on the shelf for months or even years, growing stale, dull, flavorless, even rancid.
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Nasal Spray for Health00:03:11
There's no commitment to buy anything now or ever.
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That's getfreshdarkhorse.com for a free bottle and pay just $1 in shipping.
I don't understand how anybody passes up that deal.
It's actually, they've put aside a limited quantity of these bottles and you can get one for almost nothing.
And why wouldn't you?
Why are you there?
And it also tells you something about everything else they do because they are banking on the fact that having tried it, you are very likely to want more.
Yeah, but no obligation.
If somehow you decide you don't, you don't have to.
Yep.
Fantastic stuff.
Our last sponsor this week is Clear.
Clear is a nasal spray that supports respiratory health.
It's widely available online and in stores, and both it and the company that makes it are fantastic.
It's Clear.
That's X-L-E-A-R, but it's pronounced Clear.
Throughout history, improvements in sanitation and hygiene have had huge impacts on human longevity and quality of life.
more so than traditional medical advances.
For instance, when doctors started to wash their hands between handling cadavers and helping women give birth, the rate of maternal deaths went way down.
Breathing polluted air and drinking tainted water have hugely negative effects on human health.
Clean up the air and water, and people get healthier.
Nasal hygiene often gets overlooked, but consider that the majority of bacteria and viruses that make us sick enter through our mouth and nose.
It has become a cultural norm to wash our hands in order to help stop the spread of disease from person to person, but it's rare that we get sick through our hands.
Rather, we get sick through our mouth.
the nose.
So shouldn't we be using something that we know blocks bacterial and viral adhesion in the nose?
Enter Clear.
Clear is a nasal spray that contains xylitol, or chylitol if you want to continue with the pronunciation of X. I've never heard of chylitol, but it sounds interesting.
Xylitol with an X, like a clear, it's with an X, is a five-carbon sugar alcohol.
Our bodies naturally contain five-carbon sugars, mostly in the form of ribose and deoxyribose, which are the backbone sugars in RNA and DNA.
Xylitol is known to reduce how sticky bacteria and viruses are to our tissues.
In the presence of xylitol, bacteria and viruses, including strep, SARS-CoV-2 and RSV, don't adhere to our airways as well, which helps our body's natural defense mechanisms easily flush them away.
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If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you listened to Brett's conversation with Nathan Jones, founder of Clear, on the Inside Rail in November of 2024, or to Brett's conversation with Nate's father, Lon Jones, osteopath and inventor of Clear, on how xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses in May of last year.
We recommend those conversations and we highly recommend Clear as a daily habit and prophylactic against respiratory illnesses.
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I have to tell you, every time I get on an airplane having used Clear and I look at people with their masks, which sadly do not work, I think, you know, Here it is, the thing that you can do that actually does help, and it's invisible.
It's not a signal to anybody.
Vulture Evolution Evidence00:14:59
They don't know you've done it.
But I just feel so much less likely to contract anything from the person coughing next to me.
Yeah.
No, I don't think since we've been using it, either of us have gotten sick from a plane.
Yep.
And the first time I got COVID in February of 2020, I feel quite confident that it was precisely from a plane ride out of LA, where we now know.
SARS-CoV-2 was circulating before anyone official was admitting it.
Yeah, yeah, that's a sad story.
Yeah, yeah, that's, we've done that.
Been there, done that.
Done that story.
Don't want to do it again.
Yeah, indeed.
Vultures?
Yeah, let's talk about vultures.
Let's start with vultures.
Not a topic most people think they're that interested in, but wow, is this fascinating.
Yeah.
So, right, what does it evoke for you?
Vultures.
You think big, smelly, ugly birds.
Right, they're a metaphor for uh, taking advantage for swooping in for a meal before it's quite ready to be eaten.
Uh, you know for for, for hanging out waiting for the death to happen.
Because they, unlike pretty much anything else in the animal world, are obligate um, carrion eaters, they don't hunt, they don't kill, although they will sometimes start to eat as as an animal is dying.
Uh, they circle high.
And then, you know so, when you, when you see the, the vulture circling which, of course, is a metaphor also for uh, what people do when they are coming in for, you know, usually when we use it metaphorically, we think of them coming in for a kill.
And vultures, I said, don't actually do the kill.
But vultures are always looking for opportunity and they're grisly because of what they're doing.
They're associated with death because what they're doing is eating the freshly dead.
Yeah, in fact, the naked head of vultures is because they're sticking their heads into carcasses and not getting carcass all over you is a benefit.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You might even call it an adaptation.
You might.
If we're ready, you know, as a term of art, it's a fair one.
Yeah, indeed.
But one of the interesting things about vultures, and we are going to get to a particular story that we were just made aware of this week and that is based on some what looks like very sound biological research.
But one of the interesting things about vultures is that the habit that we've just described of being obligate carrion eaters is an ecological niche.
not a single evolutionary lineage.
So before I say more about what I mean by that, I will say that this is true of some other things as well.
So the poison frogs that I worked on in Madagascar are amazingly similar to the dark poison frogs in the New World that many people will have heard of.
And up so that for a long time, biologists thought, oh, those must be the same.
They have too many things in common for them not to have evolved from a single ancestor that had all those things.
Well, nope.
Turns out they are highly convergent.
And convergence is one of the really most remarkable things on this planet in the universe.
In fact, I would argue it is one of very few. pieces of evidence that actually allows us to understand why creatures are the way they are.
That until nature has repeated itself, you don't know, you know, for example, there's only one evolution of feathers, right?
Birds have feathers.
We don't, we still have an active debate about what feathers evolved for.
We know many things that they contribute, but but it's not just flight.
There's other things that feathers do.
And we don't have a clear fossil record of when in the order of feathers and flight and endothermy they evolved.
And we don't have a convergence.
If we had three or four groups that had evolved feathers, we could say, all right, what is it that's common to the ancestors that first had these things?
So yes, convergence is a spectacular kind of evidence when trying to understand why creatures are the way they are, not just who they're related to.
But I would also point out, in light of the religious conversation that we have been involved in, that one, you know, so my point to religious folks recently has been, I got to tell you, The evidence for evolution.
Is better than you think and that searching for flaws in the Darwinian, searching for flaws in the story that we tell about Darwinism, is all too easy.
Darwinists are not doing a great job of filling in the holes of what they've got, but in terms of what Darwin himself said, which we will actually get back to later in in the podcast, it's an incredibly robust hypothesis with a spectacular level of evidence and the hypothesis being evolution evolution by natural selection exactly.
And if you believe ah, it's a fairy tale told by scientists who are behaving in their own religious way, you have to ask yourself the question.
So my argument to religious folks has been, look, if there's a God, a creator God, that creator God used evolution to make the creatures from one end to the other.
And I think it stands to reason that he made, he used this process because it would produce creatures he wouldn't think to produce, that he is surprised by the biota himself.
If it were otherwise, if this god were a designer, well, why make multiple different evolutions of vultures?
Why not have one group of vultures and just distribute them on every continent where you have them instead of having multiple different clades, which tell a very clear story, which is you have animals, large animals, dying everywhere.
They represent a huge bundle of resource when they die.
So if you don't have vultures, something will evolve to fill that niche.
It will end up with a naked head because it is better not to have a head covered in feathers.
So, anyway, the multiple evolutions is interesting in that discussion as well, I think.
It's fascinating, of course.
So, maybe I'll skip.
You just took a bunch of the pieces of the story I was going to tell.
So, I think I'll skip through and just say another example before we talk about the evidence or what we currently believe to be true about how many times vultures have actually evolved, like the vulture thing, is mangroves is another example.
And We've just been in some mangroves, kayaking in mangroves.
We have spent time in mangroves in various places in the past.
They're extraordinary.
Obviously, these saltwater adapted plants that have aerial roots and manage to stabilize themselves in relatively unstable soils and specifically are able to deal with a high salt load, which most plants cannot do.
That seems like a very particular set of adaptations that probably only happened once and then spread.
Well, no, because there's a whole lot of coastline in the world.
And spreading across vast oceans or across land masses, if your trick is dealing with saltwater as a plant, is not going to be as easy.
as having individuals' lineages of plants in various places in the world actually come up with a similar solution in various places.
So we've got poison frogs, and we've got mangroves, and we've got vultures.
And of course, there's many, many, many other examples, but those are three sort of charismatic and obvious ones.
So sometimes ecologists will say there are no empty niches.
And that's obviously not true.
But what they really mean is that if you have an empty niche and you have time, then something will evolve to fill that niche.
And this is the perfect example you've got.
coastline in which you have the ability to do what plants do, to turn sunlight and CO2 into sugar and cellulose.
And so, you know, if the answer is, well, plants can't handle salt water and they can't deal with the unstable sandy soils, then that's an obvious opportunity for something that can figure out those two puzzles.
Exactly.
So vultures occur in the old world, which is the language including Europe, Asia, and Africa, and Australia, and also in the New World, which is the Americas.
And the evolution of New World vultures and Old World vultures has for a fairly long time at this point been understood to be distinct.
New World vultures like turkey vultures, which have a particularly good sense of olfaction, of smell, especially for birds, which in general we don't think of as being very good in the smell department, are a wholly separate evolution of this vulture niche.
you know, vulture suite of adaptations from the old world vultures.
But, and I didn't know this before looking into this today, it seems there's considerable evidence.
And of course, what we say in evolutionary biology is history happened once.
There is a true history.
But our ability to know what that true history is, is contingent on the evidence.
And we may never know for sure.
So at the moment, our understanding, our understanding within evolutionary biology of the evolution of vultureness, of things that we call vultures, is that it happened at least three times.
and that there are at least two different evolutions of vulture habit in the old world as well.
Again, suggesting that this is a niche, that taking on carrion, that being able to actually digest bone and rotting flesh and making a living out of it is so valuable that that has evolved multiple, at least three times on this planet.
It has evolved at least three times, and when it evolves, it looks pretty similar for reasons, because the job is what it is.
It has the same obstacles, you know, when a, you know A rhinoceros dies in Africa and an elk dies in North America.
Right.
The point is the basic process by which that huge bundle of resource gets recovered is pretty similar.
So it drives the evolution.
And, you know, your poison frogs are the perfect example where, yeah, the poison frogs you studied in Madagascar are so similar in so many different regards that they were repeatedly mistaken.
For being close relatives to the New World version until molecular evidence finally said, no, there's no way that that could be true.
Actually, it doesn't matter that their calls sound like they look alike.
They've literally got the same lipophilic alkaloids that are the toxin that they release in their skin, which turns out to be due to a similar dietary component of ants and mites from which they synthesize these very complicated neurotoxins.
Right.
And the process that you were studying, you know, the laying of eggs.
The evolution of parental care and the intense territoriality and the mother's laying unfertilized eggs for her already existing tadpoles to eat.
and parents doing different jobs.
You've got biparental care in many of these species and both of these very different clades in which fathers defend their young against intruders and mothers come back every now and again and feed their kids.
Both of these things are happening across these, as it turns out, very, very unrelated clades.
Now, they're both frogs and all life on Earth is related, but there are many other frogs.
the dark poison frogs of the New World and the poison frogs of Madagascar that are more closely related to those guys than either of them are to each other.
All life on Earth is related, which I am repeatedly tickled when I realize that in one of Darwin's most famous passages, in fact, his most famous passage, it is evident that he was uncertain of that.
He suspected it but did not know.
So anyway, we'll come back to that later.
Yeah.
So actually, it occurs to me as we're talking here about convergence, which is a topic that actually, we could just talk about that only all the time.
All the time.
We would not have much of an audience, but it's a lot of what we do when we're alone.
Tree.
Yes.
Tree is another example.
And probably most people haven't considered whether or not trees are all related to a single source tree and all trees emerge from that single original tree.
But in fact, the habit as a plant of being able to grow tall and above your competition with a woody stem and the plumbing associated with it has evolved many, many, many times in many, many, many different habitats as well.
And so this is sort of taking an even broader view, like within plants, within angiosperms.
Is there anything that we would, I guess tree ferns, I guess the tree habit happens even before flowering plants happen.
And it's a reaching for the sun.
It's a reaching to get closer to the life force that is the sun.
and outcompete your competitors.
And that is, at one level, a very simple adaptation, a very simple goal.
And tree ferns and, say, maples and oaks, which are not that closely related to each other, but more closely related to one another than either are to ferns, have done it in different ways.
Like the mechanism by which they've achieved it are different.
But in both cases, what they've achieved is tall and strong and getting the light.
Whereas if they had stuck on the forest floor, they might not.
Yeah, that one fascinates me because that one actually can flip back and forth.
Yes.
You know, growing a big, tall trunk is not something you do if you evolve into a niche where it isn't required to overtop your competitors or if you decide to dispense with it because you're going to become a vine and climb other trees and use their trunks to get up to the light.
So anyway, it's one of these characters that it's not just like a tree has evolved multiple times.
It's like it can go on and off within a clade.
Like eyes.
Yeah, well, like, no, it doesn't.
And so, I mean, this, again, like we're getting more into our home territory, but farther afield of what we're trying to talk about here.
What does it say if you have a trait, call it vulturiness or poison frogness or mangroveness, a series, a complex of traits that evolve multiple times and in those organisms which have evolved it, it sticks?
Ah, it must be extraordinarily valuable and important.
Oh, and if it's a trait that has evolved a few times or maybe even not very many times, but it sometimes blinks on and off, well, that doesn't sound very important.
Conservation of Scavengers00:15:50
Eyes.
tree.
Those are very, very important, but that doesn't mean that there aren't conditions in which, for instance, cavefish, where the presence of eyes gives you no value and does come with the cost of having holes in your head that you can be stuck with and you can impale yourself and be at greater risk.
And so you have repeated evolutions of blind cavefish from eyed, that is to say, visually capable ancestors, even though eyes demonstrably have benefit for those who can use them.
Another one that points toward my interpretation of what the heck was God thinking if there was a creator God.
If you were going to design animals, you would design them either with or without eyes, depending upon whether they needed them.
But what has really happened here is that evolution has found that from the point of view of long-term persistence, having the ability to turn them off when they are just a cost and turn them back on when they become valuable because your population has moved back into the light.
That is, that's a secondary adaptation.
The, the switchability seems like, like in the case of eyes with the blind kayfish.
Uh, the best analogy that i've seen, that is a match for what we think is going on, is, it's like a toggle.
Yeah, it really is like an on-off switch, which is extraordinary uh, whereas, you know, tree habit is uh, it's it's more labile uh, it's more of a continuum.
Uh, there are, you know, there's plenty of stuff.
If you've, if you've ever spent time in a forest, not so much in the Pacific Northwest, but in subtropical and tropical forests and even, like you know, maple oak forests of the upper Midwest, you have an overstory and several layers of understory.
And so it's not just that you can be flat as a plant or tall.
There's lots of different ways to be.
And the move between tree and other kinds of plant habit is repeated and demonstrates a move into either different climate conditions, different geography, different periods in Earth's history.
Yes.
And while we have been talking about that vultures somewhere have been gorging themselves on innards.
Inards, yes.
And outards, but a lot of innards.
Yeah.
Okay, you know what?
So this, we're going to be, we wanted to talk about vultures because we saw a little story on Twitter that I wasn't sure was true.
And so I went looking for the original sources.
And one source, and it turns out to be true, but rather than share that tweet, although we'll put it in the show notes, I want, to share some excerpts from the main piece of research that is being cited in this tweet that we found.
So we've got a 2024 paper by authors Frank and Sudarshan called The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse, Evidence from the Decline of Vultures in India.
The abstract being, scientific evidence has documented that we are undergoing a mass extinction of species caused by human activity.
However, Allocating conservation resources is difficult due to scarce evidence on damages from losing individual species.
This paper studies the collapse of vultures in India, triggered by the expiry of a patent on a painkiller.
These results suggest the functional extinction of vultures, efficient scavengers who remove carcasses from the environment, increased human mortality by over 4% because of a large negative shock to sanitation.
We quantify damages at $69.4 billion per year.
These results suggest high returns to conserving keystone species such as vultures.
Now I'm going to share several pieces from this paper.
It's a very long paper.
And the abstract is not as good as the rest of the paper.
The abstract reads, and you and I will be familiar with this as a typical sort of we're embedded in ecology, we're embedded in conservation biology.
First, we have to prove how dire the situation is and how much only ecologists can be the one to come to the rescue because we're going to be the ones to understand what's going on.
And the rest of the paper really doesn't read that way.
You don't need actually to, in order to appreciate this story and recognize, you know, welcome to complex systems, that that's where we are.
You don't need to be thinking, I don't think, in terms of the mass extinction of species that is in fact happening all over the planet.
because what is happening in this case is due to a very specific, as they say in the abstract, the expiration of a patent on a painkiller.
So expiration of a patent on a painkiller, a 4% increase in mortality of humans and tens of billions of dollars lost.
So that's the reason that this story caused you and me both to stop in our tracks is we understand that these things can happen, but it's rare that you really see the connections that will take something of you know, I don't care if you're not interested in biology.
Something happened in a market that affected something in biology that then had an impact on a huge number of families who lost somebody and tens of billions of dollars evaporated.
That's amazing power.
And to have the goods on it is pretty fascinating.
That's amazing.
And one of the places this does come back to the kind of language that we used to be embedded in is this idea of charismatic megafauna.
That the conservation organizations like World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International and such, some of which I have been involved with because Madagascar has sort of divvied up its big areas under the domain of one or the other of the big conservation organizations, of course, try to get people interested by putting the charismatic megafauna, the cute, fuzzy organisms in front of you and saying, these things are at risk.
And if they started trying to pitch their conservation efforts with vultures, it would be a much harder sell.
right?
It would be a much harder sell.
And unfortunately, that's where they are, is trying to sell the idea that these things matter.
And this story is important in part because this is megafauna.
These are big, visible animals.
When you say vulture to someone, everyone has an idea of what it means, but no one thinks they're charismatic.
I mean, they actually are full of charisma, but almost everyone kind of thinks they're gross because they have this ability to destroy tissue in a way that is a little terrifying and a little grotesque.
I also just in passing, I want to point out, you and I have had productive discussions before.
We have a slight disagreement over this, but I've tried to make the point that if you want to conserve the world, which I think is actually our top obligation to return, to deliver to the next generation a world that is no worse and maybe better than the one that we inherited and that we are falling down on that obligation, but that in order to do that, the best way to do it is to prioritize human well-being in the broad sense,
to realize that future generations have the right to live in a world with orcas and rhinoceroses and all of those things.
But you don't want to get in the way if it turns out that there is a net benefit to humans to exterminating Anopheles mosquitoes because it reduces the malaria burden.
I'm not saying that that would be the net effect.
But if you found that that was the net effect of that, you don't want to start saying, well, the Anopheles mosquito has a right to exist.
Smallpox has a right to exist, right?
So this story does a very good job of pointing out why, if your point is, look, we are about, human well-being indefinitely into the future.
Why you have to be very careful with things like patents.
Really?
Patents have an impact on human well-being in some general sense.
It's a magnitude worth considering.
Well, apparently they do.
And, you know, and it goes right through vultures who you wouldn't, you know, as you point out, the NGOs aren't going to be focused on vultures because it's not a winning pitch.
Well, they might be behind the scenes.
You know, my experience working with some of them when I was, I mean, The poison frogs are not big, but they are charismatic.
Very.
But the fact is that they were helping fund research of all sorts of things.
But the little or the subtle or the perceived as gross organisms are not going to make the cover of the mailings.
Yeah, and I'm not saying that they're not interested in preserving habitats really where it's at for all of these things.
But preserving habitat requires, well, it requires an understanding of what it is that threatens it, which we will get to.
And it also requires you to have a pitch for the public, which does inevitably involve, you know, pandas and elephants and bulls.
Yeah, all the famous creatures.
Yep.
All right.
So that's the abstract from this piece.
And the next page here is, I'm just going to wait for that to come up before I put it up.
Yep.
So the next, the introduction begins with a quote from Charles Darwin, which is disgusting.
That was his observation of a vulture off the deck of the Beagle in 1835.
That was his sense of what was what.
was going on there.
We, again the authors of this 2024 paper, write, we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in the history of the planet, likely induced by human activity.
Since 1900, 477 vertebrate species have become globally extinct in the wild, at a rate about 100 times higher than the background level estimated between the five previous mass extinctions.
Local extinctions, where a species disappears from a wild in a part of the world, are even more common.
Well before local extinction, severely deteriorated wildlife populations may no longer be capable of filling their role in the ecosystem. resulting in what ecologists refer to as functional extinctions.
And they're giving us that background in part because vultures are not fully extinct in India, but their numbers have declined so radically that they are not doing what they used to do.
So I am not, I'm just, I've put together some excerpts here.
This is not in, I'm alighting a lot of the paper because it's a long paper.
Vultures as ecosystem sanitizers.
Now, I've never heard an organism described as a sanitizer before, but I think it's apt.
The ecological and epidemiological dynamics of scavengers, pathogens, and infectious diseases help explain the causal link between diminishing vulture populations and human health.
While some animal species will feed on carrion if available, for vultures it is the only source of food.
As a result, vultures have evolved as very efficient scavengers.
High stomach acidity, up to 100 times more acidic than the stomach of humans, reflects one of the key adaptations that allows vultures to safely consume carrion, and also results in most bacteria not surviving their digestive system.
Vultures are uniquely effective at reducing a carcass to its bones, and can consume the carrion of an entire cow within 40 minutes.
Other scavenging species such as dogs and rats not only leave the flesh behind and therefore do not solve the sanitation problem, but also transmit various diseases, including rabies.
Recent experimental evidence confirms that vultures do not have a good functional replacement in the ecosystem.
Yeah, the acidity point is really interesting, especially in light of the fact I think most people don't really realize what stomach acid does.
In part, it breaks down things that need to be broken down chemically because you haven't chewed them well enough to access the materials in them.
But another thing it does is it ensures that if what you're eating isn't perfectly clean, which it often isn't.
I mean, even if you are, you know, sitting in a cafe and a fly lands on your food and the fly was somewhere disgusting a moment before, you're going to eat it and the likelihood is you're not going to get sick.
Why?
Because it goes directly into this extremely hostile environment where a pathogen is likely to perish.
So, you know, in that context, think about A, the lousy medical advice people have been given with respect to things that diminish the production of stomach acid.
Told that.
You know this is the cause of acid reflux, and so we're tinkering with the level of acidity of stomachs and uh, we're not measuring the consequences of doing that.
Now we live in a world that has been sanitized for us.
You know, health departments and all make that a less of a serious consideration, but nonetheless you're meddling in a complex system and you have no idea how much of what you experience is the result of indirect effects in in that context.
Yeah, we're making ourselves soft and fragile, and vultures are anything but soft and fragile, but what we've done there, inadvertently, to be fair, is gotten rid of the vultures.
So the sudden population collapse of Indian vultures, again from this 2024 paper.
Vultures were once a ubiquitous site across India with a population that may have exceeded 50 million birds.
In the course of a few years, in the second half of the 1990s, the number of Indian vultures in the wild fell by over 95%.
Today, the three species that made up the bulk of the population are all critically endangered with a few thousand birds left in the wild.
from 50 million, maybe an estimate, to a few thousand.
Extraordinary.
The decline of vultures in India is the fastest of a bird species in recorded history and the largest in magnitude since the extinction of the passenger pigeon in the United States.
Wow.
Yeah.
Here a little later in the paper, they say the cause of vultures' death was initially mysterious.
It was only in 2004 that research showed that several species of vultures would develop kidney failure and die within weeks of digesting carrion that had even small residues of the chemical declovinac.
I don't know how to pronounce that.
I think Diclofenac is right.
Diclofenac.
This discovery was a surprise because Diclofenac was and still is a common painkiller, harmless to human beings and widely prescribed for people across the world.
Indeed, the drug itself is decades old, even at the time, first introduced in 1973 by Siba Geigi, now Novartis.
It has since become the most widely used non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug in the world and is prescribed as a painkiller for many conditions.
What changed in the early 1990s was that for the first time the veterinary use of diclofenac became feasible and economically viable because of the entry of cheap generic brands made by Indian companies.
These generics accompanied the expiry of a patent long held by the pharmaceutical company Novartis.
Once farmers began treating their cattle with diclofenac, the carcasses of their livestock retained trace amounts of the drug, becoming deadly to vultures.
As vultures died out, the scavenging services that Eco speak.
I don't love it.
Yeah, me either.
I never loved that language, but the scavenging services they provided disappeared too, and carrion were left out in the open for long periods of time.
So again, with 50 million vultures in the skies of India, when a cow died, very quickly would be found and taken care of by the vultures, win for the vultures and win for everything else that was around and would potentially be harmed by the rotting of a carcass.
Ecologists have argued that this may have led to an increase in the population of rats and feral dogs, which are a major source of rabies in India.
Rotting carcasses can also transmit pathogens and diseases, such as anthrax, to other scavengers.
In addition, these pathogens can enter water sources either when people dump carcasses in rivers or because of erosion by surface runoff.
Poisoned Birds Cause Suffering00:07:35
These cascading effects imply that the decline of vultures may have resulted in an extraordinarily large negative sanitation shock to human populations.
And this is the last direct excerpt that I'll read from this paper.
I'm eliding a lot of their analysis because it's, again, a long paper.
Conclusions.
In this paper, We provide evidence on the public health implications of the decline of vultures in India.
Using a difference in differences strategy, we compare districts with habitats highly suitable for vultures to those that are unsuitable both before and after the onset of diclofenac use.
We find that districts that were affected by the disappearance of vultures, those with highly suitable habitats, saw an increase in human all-cause death rates of at least 4.7%, averaged over 2000 to 2005.
And then just a footnote in their conclusion, beyond mortality, losing vultures may also have other costs we do not measure.
On the health side, this includes increased morbidity.
Vultures also provide other important services.
India's tanning industry once relied on quick removal of carrion by vultures, and the Parsi community in India has burial rituals that require vultures to consume the body.
That last point is a particularly interesting one, too, because the way they've written it, it sounds like if you care about cultures, if you're interested in the diversity of human experience and ways of understanding the world around the world, then you will care about this, and if you don't, you probably don't.
But I would say, you know, burial rituals around the world are remarkable and diverse and adaptations, all of them.
And the burial rituals that the Parsi have created over, I guess, I'm guessing thousands of years, involve the consumption of bodies by vultures, which when the vultures are gone, those bodies are now a health risk.
And I don't know, but the prediction would be badly affecting the health. of the people who are living in communities where once they didn't have to worry about what to do with their dead.
Yeah.
Now, you see here an interesting use of all-cause mortality, which our viewers will be well familiar with because it's how we have detected so much harm likely due to COVID vaccinations, that you just see an elevated rate of death.
And what's more, the fact that all-cause mortality has remained elevated is a particularly Frightening pattern because presumably the people who die early are the most vulnerable.
And as the population is selected in favor of those who are not vulnerable, you should expect all-cause mortality to drop below normal, the so-called pull-forward effect.
And the fact that we don't suggest we have a very potent hazard in our midst.
But in this case, you can see an indirect effect, not even really of the existence of this drug, but about economic viability of the drug for animals.
It was kept to humans before this because uh, it was expensive, because it was under patent and at the point that it got expired, you have generic versions of the drug and it's enough to kill off these vultures.
And did you say it was 500 000?
What was the estimated number of human deaths?
Remember it?
Um, in any case, it was almost five percent elevated.
Yeah, excess mortality, now that we have that number uh, but you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and not just deaths.
This isn't, you know, right increase in morbidity, of course, Because being around the things that will live in carcasses, the things that will live and thrive in carcasses have health risks that may not kill you, but may shorten your life or decrease the quality of your life while you are alive.
Right.
Also, the deaths that do happen, many of them are perfectly horrible.
I don't know that there's a worse way to go than rabies, right?
Losing your mind, terrible suffering.
It's just an awful way to go.
And so, you know, reducing the suffering of livestock with a cheap drug that then causes the massive suffering of humans through a somewhat convoluted chain of cause and effect is stunning.
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, so this original post that we saw, and you can put this up on the screen now if you like, from a guy named Anish Munka describes exactly what I've said here in the first part of the tweet, which I assessed.
And I did assess the second part of what he argues too, but I don't have as much of a deep dive.
So I'm just going to read what he says.
Africa is running the same experiment with different chemicals.
A January 2024 study in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution went through 42 species of African birds of prey and found 88% of them shrinking, with vultures and eagles falling fastest.
The poison this time is carborforan, a farm pesticide poachers smear on dead elephants and lions.
The point, so this is different, the point here is actually to kill the vultures that circle overhead because circling vultures show rangers where the poaching happened.
Three poisoned elephants killed 537 vultures in a single 2019 incident in Botswana.
I did fact check that that is absolutely true.
In May 2025, one poisoned elephant in Kruger National Park killed 123 more in a morning.
And then it goes, it wraps up with the same arguments that we've just made.
So we have two, in some ways, very different situations.
The inadvertent use of a pat, of a poison, of a drug that is apparently safe in humans, who knows really, totally deadly in vultures.
Now vultures are being exposed to it because it came out of patent and is being used in the cattle that the vultures feast on in India.
Vultures dying, people dying, tremendous loss of wealth as well, not because anyone was intentionally trying to kill vultures.
But we've got a similar story happening in Africa because people are trying to kill vultures, because some people are poaching animals and don't want anyone to find out.
Right.
And this also has this weird economic twist to it because why are they poaching animals?
They're poaching animals for luxury goods.
Yes.
Right for ivory and for, you know, skins.
For for elite?
Yeah, for for ingredients, for ingredients for Chinese medicine.
Um so anyway, you've got these luxury goods that are resulting in presumably, Africans dying yes, horrible deaths, as a result of the same destruction of vultures, in this case intentionally being poisoned.
Um so the welcome to complex systems message here is like blinking bright red that you a an intervention.
You know, The artificially elevated price of a luxury good is resulting in the deaths of people thousands of miles away due to diseases that you would never think of.
This has something to do with ivory being sold, you know, in some black market somewhere, but it does.
That's right.
But there's also this just sort of.
Did you have more on the vulture story?
There is also a.
Darwin's Naturalist Marvels00:02:46
Just a general pattern of these kinds of connections.
And when we started talking about this vulture story, I realized that actually this is one of the things that Darwin had marveled at.
As he had begun to unpack the story of natural selection and how it creates adaptation, he had begun to realize how interconnected all of these things were.
And he remarked on it several times in The Origin of Species.
And I wanted to read that.
I mean, for one thing, if you've never actually read Darwin, and he's just a figure in an encyclopedia to you, you won't realize how different he was from what modern scientists sound like.
He wrote in a way that you would not be allowed to write now.
Well, he was a naturalist.
And naturalists aren't seen in polite company with scientists mostly anymore.
And I certainly consider myself a naturalist.
In most ecosystems, not a very good one at all.
But as much as a scientist, they aren't exactly the same thing.
But being interested in observing what is true is the first step in science.
It is not all of science, but it is absolutely the first step.
Darwin was absolutely completely embedded in a naturalist perspective.
Yeah, he was a dyed-in-the-wool naturalist.
But even naturalists don't speak this way.
They aspire now to speak in a way that sounds more clinical.
But this, of course, is true across every domain.
This is why the social sciences try to sound like hard sciences, why history and everything.
Has been sold, this bill of goods about the reductionist, scientistic as opposed to scientific data-driven, number-driven way that some highly clinical applied research does sound like.
That's the only way you can sound if you're going to be taken seriously.
Well, of course, naturalists are doing that as well right, and it's such a terrible mistake because frankly, you know, all of the real greats had this sort of joy in what they were thinking about, candor and how they were comprehending it, and for us to have tried to reduce, to make it sound like this is not an imaginative process at all is uh, you know well, Dawkins has this thing, I forget where he presented it, but he,
he argues that Darwin's theory of natural selection is the greatest theory anyone ever had, and his basis for that is the equation, the value of a theory is that which it explains over that which it assumes, and Darwin's the winner in that, in that regard.
Um, so the point is, well, if you've ruled out working the way Darwin did, you've probably made a mistake, Right?
Cascading Ecological Effects00:16:01
Because it was so fruitful.
But anyway, let me read to you from.
I'm going to start on.
And this is from the actual first edition of The Origin of Species.
Darwin got kind of backed off his game a little bit by pushback, largely from religious folks.
And so the later editions are less good.
The first one is really the slam dunk.
So I went and dug up the first version.
And I'm going to read from page 71 here.
Darwin says, Are the checks and relations between organic beings which have to struggle together in the same country.
And he just means the same location.
I will give only a single instance which, though a simple one, has interested me.
In Staffordshire, on the estate of a relation where I had ample means of investigation, there was a large and extremely barren heath that had never been touched by the hand of man.
But several hundred acres of exactly the same nature had been enclosed twenty five years previously and planted with Scotch fir.
The change in the native vegetation of the planted part of the heath was most remarkable, more than is generally seen in passing from one quite different soil to another.
So he's saying the distinction, if you just have this fir planted, is much greater than you would see if you just traveled across the land and saw that different soil types had different diversity.
Not only the proportional numbers of the heath plants were wholly changed, but 12 species of plants, not counting grasses and kerises, flourished in the plantations which could not be found on the heath.
The effect on the insects must have been still greater, for six insectivorous birds were very common in the plantations, which were not to be seen in the heath, and the heath was frequented by two or three distinct insectivorous birds.
Here we see how potent has been the effect of the introduction of a single tree, nothing whatever else having been done, with the exception that the land had been enclosed, so that cattle could not enter.
But how important an element the enclosure is, I plainly saw near Farnham and Surrey.
Here, there are extensive heaths with few clumps of scotch firs in the distant hilltops.
Within the last 10 years, large species have been enclosed and self sown firs are now springing up in the multitudes.
So, what he's saying there is he saw the change in the bird species as a result of the insect species, as a result of the planting of the firs, as a result of the ability to have them grow because the cattle were excluded.
But he went to someplace else and he discovered that the firs grow themselves when.
Cattle are not there.
You don't have to plant them.
So, his basic point is.
And you don't need a fence.
You just need no cattle.
You need no cattle.
And he established that the reason that the furs are not to be found where there is no enclosure is that the cattle, that he found the seedlings and he just didn't find any mature trees because the cattle were grazing them to death.
So, anyway, he spots this thing.
And, you know, he's struck by it.
And the next one is even better.
This is from page 73.
He says, from experiments which I have tried, I have found that the visits of bees, if not indispensable, are at least highly beneficial to the fertilization of our clovers.
But humblebees, I wonder if humblebee is how it was said.
Does that really say humblebee?
I think it says bumblebee.
I don't think so, because that's a B and that's an H.
No, you're right.
Okay.
It says humblebees.
Yeah, it says humblebees.
So maybe humblebees, maybe we call them bumblebees, but they were originally called humblebees.
I'm not sure.
But he says, humblebees alone.
Humblebees alone visit the common red clover as other bees cannot reach the nectar.
Hence, I have very little doubt that if the whole genus of humblebees became extinct or very rare, very rare or wholly.
In England.
Yeah, you're right.
That's the first line.
Extinct or very rare in England, the hearties and red clover would become very rare or wholly disappear.
The number of humblebees in any district depends in great degree on the number of field mice, which destroy their combs and nests.
And Mr. H. Newman, who has long attended to the habits of humblebees, believes that, quote, more than two thirds of them are thus destroyed over all England.
Now, the number of mice, and this is, he has now ended the quote.
Now, the number of mice is largely dependent, as everyone knows, on the number of cats.
And Mr. Newman says, quote, Near villages and small towns, I have found the nests of humble bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice, end quote.
This is Darwin again.
Hence, it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district, he says with an exclamation mark.
I love it.
Did he like cats?
Was Darwin a cat guy?
I think he did.
I feel like he must.
He wouldn't have written that in that way.
It sounds very generous to cats in a way that at least now people who are ambivalent or dislike cats are very eager to point out that cats are a menace because they eat things that we like.
Right.
Actually, this is a great counterpoint to that argument.
Yes.
All right.
So now I'm just going to conclude this little Darwin piece with the most famous paragraph of his, which is the last paragraph of The Origin of Species, which is marvelous if you've never.
That's page 71 again.
I'll end up with page 71 again.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, check this out.
He says It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing in the bushes and various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
These laws.
Taken in the largest sense, being growth with reproduction, inheritance, which is mostly implied by reproduction, variability from the indirect and direct action of external conditions of life, and from use and disuse, a ratio of increase so high as to lead to a struggle for life.
What he means there is that creatures produce enough offspring that there's not enough to go around.
And as a consequence of natural selection, entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less improved forms.
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are now capable of conceiving, namely the production of higher animals, directly follows.
There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one, and that whilst this planet has gone cycling according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved.
So, I do note that last sentence.
He says that this.
power exists in, it was breathed into one, several or one original form, indicating that he's not sure how many trees of life there are.
We now know because we have molecular evidence that allows us to see it.
But I always find it interesting that he left open the possibility that there was more than one tree of life.
But nonetheless, would you agree?
Because he had a precision of that, that naturalism has a reputation of being kind of vague and hand-wavy, just like thinking about adaptation does.
But you can be poetic and see beauty and see grandeur and endless forms most beautiful and wonderful and also be precise such that when you go back, you know, he doesn't want to have been shamed and told he was wrong about everything because he insisted that there was one when there were in fact many or that he insisted that there were many when in fact there were one.
So he leaves open possibilities when he doesn't have an intuition or knowledge about what is right.
And that is actually how we should all be behaving, whether or not we think of ourselves as scientists or not.
And I will also point out.
That he is writing in a context that we have trouble recovering.
So you and I talk about 1859 as the year everything happened.
It was the year of the Carrington event.
It was the year of the Pig War here on San Juan's.
It was the year of the publication of The Origin of Species.
But it was also the year of the publication of Pasteur's work on life coming from other life.
And the relevance of that here is that before Pasteur did his work, People had the experience of leaving yogurt or fruit out on the counter and suddenly life erupted.
And they were not certain that it was not new life emerging.
And so it took his careful work.
There's this famous experiment he did where he took, I think it was broth, and he put, he sterilized it, what we would now call pasteurized it, by heating it so that there could be nothing living in it.
And he left it sitting on the counter.
And in one of the he had two similar glass devices, one of which had effectively a sink trap.
If you ever look below your sink, you've got that U shape.
That U shape is supposed to trap water so that nothing from your sewer makes it back into your house, right?
The same shape in a toilet.
Right, exactly.
So that U shape, he had one apparatus with the U shape blocking anything from getting into the broth.
And then the other one, he literally broke it off.
Right.
So that the device was identical, except for the fact that it had exposure to the air.
And wouldn't you know it, life emerged in the one that was exposed to the air and it didn't emerge in the other, proving that life comes from other life.
So Darwin was not working with the benefit of certainty of that.
He didn't know.
I think even at the point of publication, I think he probably didn't know about Pasteur's result.
And so to be working in that context, you know, he's making a grand.
You know, decades he?
He published late in the process of his own understanding, right?
So at the very least uh, he didn't know that for the vast majority of time during which he was developing his, his theory of evolution right, nobody knew it.
For for the majority of that time, and I will just point out, Darwin basically was motivated to publish because Wallace happened on the same idea and wrote to him and he realized oh, my goodness, Wallace is gonna take the brass right, this young upstart, this young upstart.
But then also my favorite part of the story is that in the origin of species, He argues for the Royal Society to take care of Wallace.
He acknowledges that Wallace has the idea also, and he says this person is deserving of basically being protected for the rest of his life and being recognized.
That's in the origin of species.
Yeah.
Isn't that amazing?
Yeah, it's stunning.
It's exactly the kind of thing you would not see in the modern environment, much to our detriment.
Okay, so that's the little Darwin piece that is connected.
So Darwin spots these.
Connections between species and the fact that you have these cascading effects.
And I just wanted to provide another modern example, which I think makes the point also.
This one does not have human life and limb at stake, but it's pretty darn interesting.
And so anyway, I'm not going to read this whole paper.
Well, I have read it, but I'm not going to read it to you all.
But what it's about is about the effect of, well, a series of things.
The most important of them has to do with what happens when killer whales start eating sea otters.
And so anyway, here I'll read.
This is 1998, and it's published in Science, and it's Estes et al.
So here's the abstract.
It says After nearly a century of recovering from overhunting, sea otter populations are in abrupt decline over large areas of western Alaska.
Increased killer whale predation is the likely cause of these declines.
Elevated sea urchin density and the consequent deforestation of kelp beds in the near shore community demonstrate that the otter's keystone role has been reduced or eliminated.
This chain of interactions was probably initiated by anthropogenic changes in the offshore oceanic ecosystem.
So the paper's very good.
They basically have to go through a lot of indirect evidence to establish that the decline in the otters is actually the result of hunting by killer whales, which do not typically hunt sea otters.
And what they speculate is that the reason that the killer whales have shifted in the direction of hunting otters, which are frankly pretty small for a killer whale, so wouldn't ordinarily be worth it.
They're fast and smart, too.
Seems like a Real challenge.
Yeah, it's challenging and it's not a huge reward.
And of course, that's the reason that these otters are in spectacular decline, is to the extent that the killer whales are feeding on them.
You know, one sea otter is just a snack.
And so, anyway, they're having a profound effect.
And the question is, well, why did the killer whales switch to the sea otters?
And the answer Can I interrupt?
Is this a picture you took in Alaska?
Yes, that is a picture I took in Alaska.
You and I were in a kayak, which accounts for the marvelous.
The vantage point.
Vantage point right down at eye level.
This is one I took on shore at Elkhorn Slough in California, where there's a marvelous population of otters.
That's Alaska again.
But in any case, the reason that they conclude that the killer whales have likely shifted to sea otters has to do with the decline, the radical decline, in the presence of.
Stellar sea lions and harbor seals which feed on fish.
And so it is actually.
They trace it to, at least in part, the massive growth in the fisheries.
Which point of order?
Yes, stellar sea lions are big.
Yes, orcas hunt stellar sea lions.
Apparently wow, apparently they do.
Oh, this is a video I took, also from kayak, of a stellar sea lion here in the San Juans doing something very bizarre.
Couldn't figure out what he was up to.
Semaphore, I think.
Yeah, actually, Jacob and I were out on kayaks.
I think this is in February, actually, a weird time to be out on kayaks.
But yeah, so that gigantic and fragile.
Jacob Shockey, our friend and former student who works with beavers.
And has been a dark horse guest, yes.
So anyway, again, what you have is you have something like the harvest of salmon mostly impacting some native marine mammals, the harbor seals and the stellar sea lions,
which are then starving the orcas, which are, of course, super resourceful and capable of coming up with a contingency plan, which in this case is sea otters, resulting in the devastation of the sea otters, which results in an explosion.
Unexpected Drug Damage00:05:42
in sea urchins, which results in the devastation of the kelp beds.
And, you know, that's a pretty long chain.
But once again, it's kind of what you expect because it's the way nature works.
As Darwin was pointing out.
Anyway, so I guess the point is, A, welcome to complex systems.
B, be very careful about intervening because when you intervene, you have no idea whether, you know, you're generic veterinary medicine is going to result in, you know, hundreds of thousands of people dying of rabies, but that's a possibility through a mechanism you couldn't possibly have predicted in advance.
And be careful of shallow understandings.
Your pain med that's apparently harmless in humans, and, you know, I remain to be convinced that any of this is completely harmless in anyone, but the idea that these drugs have wildly different effects on other organisms is something that, you know, dog owners are aware of.
Right that there's some.
There's some common substances that are very dangerous for dogs that most humans would have around and they have to be very careful not to give to their dogs.
Well gosh, humans and dogs are pretty similar.
It's surprising that they should have such different challenges than we do.
And so there's a lot of other things in the in that we are sharing the planet with that are going to have very different sensitivities and, of course, we know this because it's the basis for pesticides and insecticides and herbicides.
Right, we know that we can, we think entirely challenge say, grasses or cicadas, and not in any way challenge ourselves, except that we do, right?
You know, glyphosate doesn't turn out to be just bad for everyone else.
It's not good for us either.
So the simplicity of our analyses is part of what is getting in the way here.
It's a welcome to complex systems issue.
It's a boy do we have hubris issue.
Like, oh, vultures.
Okay, I guess they do a job, but they're kind of gross.
Wouldn't dogs and rats do the same job?
Be careful what you wish for.
Dogs and rats do not do the same job.
They don't do it nearly as well, and they bring diseases.
that vultures do not.
Because the vultures are built for it because of a very long history of doing that job.
This is a case where the specialist nature of vultures is part of what makes them, well, so special, in fact.
It's part of what makes them absolutely irreplaceable because none of the other things that would be doing their jobs are only doing that job.
Yes, they are like safe recyclers of the materials in these dead animals.
I would point out your point about the painkiller, which is thought to be safe, but you have your doubts.
This is another one of these same issues because A, all of the NSAIDs turn out to do what we think is heart damage, but what I think is actually body-wide damage that just gets understood in the heart first.
We've seen that pattern very clearly with things like Vioxx.
But why have these things been brought to the market?
Well, Longtime viewers will know the story about the elongation of mouse telomeres resulting in test animals that we use for drug safety testing who have an incredible capacity to replace damaged tissue, so much so that they may actually live longer if you give them a poison because it functions as a chemotherapy against the tumors that all domestic mice have.
But I will remind people of the beginning of that story.
Why do the mice have the long telomeres?
Well, it is the only hypothesis standing.
My hypothesis is that it is the result of a breeding protocol in the colonies where we produce these mice designed to reduce the cost of making them, right?
This is a cost saving measure that causes the breeding colonies to only breed young animals, which causes the late life effects to disappear from the selective environment in the colony, which then causes the mice not to be a good measure of how toxic a drug is.
which then results in a drug coming onto the market that does damage to the body that we didn't anticipate because it didn't show up in our safety tests.
So it's another one of these cascades.
And what we mean when we say welcome to complex systems is you cannot intervene in a complex system and predict the outcome with precision.
You will have unintended consequences every time.
That's the only guaranteed fact about intervening in a complex system.
And if you don't anticipate that, you're going to be constantly injuring yourself, which is A, it's so much the important question of this moment where we are making a massive intervention into the complex system that is our civilization with, yeah, a lot of stories about what might happen, but really the answer is nobody knows.
There are certain things that seem very likely, but nobody knows where we're headed now because the intervention is so, so big and the complex system is so elaborate.
that the cascading effects, you know, we'll never even, even after the fact, we'll be debating what happened.
All right, with that, I thought there was one last piece we should add to this puzzle, which has to do with something we've been talking about here on Dark Horse several times, which is the lunacy of the blue team governance of the state.
Group Selection Dynamics00:04:12
Let me just say, we've been away from the state for a while.
We were talking before we left several weeks in a row about some of the craziness that is happening in Washington state.
And I think we will come back next week with some more specifics.
There's just new things keep coming to light about the nuttery and the constant requests for funds and the constant misallocation that is being generous of the funds that are being demanded of the taxpayers in greater and greater abundance in the state of Washington.
But within the state of Washington is the very large city of Seattle.
The very large city of Seattle, which has just elected a new mayor who it is not a completely unknown fact that she is the daughter of David Sloan Wilson, something that I would not have even thought to wonder about, but you called my attention to it.
And so who's an evolutionary biologist?
He is an evolutionary biologist.
I will say I know him slightly.
We have not met in person, but we've had several conversations.
I actually quite like David Sloan Wilson.
And I think there's an.
an element of his work that is exceptionally good.
But he's most famous for his revival of a concept called group selection based on the idea that altruism pays in a much more general sense than evolutionary biologists typically believe.
And in that context, it is fascinating that his daughter has become the mayor of Seattle and seems to have picked up the same misunderstanding, Which is now being manifest in policy.
Now, this may not be fair, but you know how um, using a bad understanding of evolution to justify eugenics became known as scientific racism.
This is like scientific socialism.
Yeah, you're right, you're using a, let me think, a mistaken understanding of evolution and how things work to justify policies that are batshit crazy.
All right, so i'm gonna spend three minutes and explain what the connection is, because people are bound to find this a little mysterious.
Once upon a time, there was an idea in evolutionary biology called group selection, most famously associated with a biologist named Wynn Edwards.
The idea was, the idea starts out with a correct observation.
The correct observation is that if you take two groups, let's say that they're people, you take two groups of people that are similar, but for one characteristic.
One of the groups is altruistic within the group with the other members and the other group is fractious and fights within the members, and you put them in competition.
The group that is altruistic, in which everybody collaborates and doesn't think about their own, take that group out.
Competes the fractious group every time.
That much is true.
But the idea that, therefore, we should expect to see altruism break out, that groups that are being altruistic should be favored everywhere, and so it should be a very common observation, that was debunked—I hate using that word—but that was debunked by a group of very insightful biologists in the mid-20th century, mid-to-late-20th century, including Bill Hamilton, Bob Trivers.
All— all the greats participated, George Williams and their argument was, yes, a group of altruists outcompetes a group of selfish individuals, but the problem is the individual within the group of altruists who is at greatest advantage is the selfish individual, that a cheater who takes advantage of the altruism of the other members of his group, but does not contribute by being altruistic himself, is the most successful within the group of altruists.
So every group of altruists is torn apart by basically cheaters, right?
It's a collective action.
Millionaire Tax Base Issues00:08:26
Sound familiar?
Yeah, right.
Sounds like humans.
Sounds like life on Earth.
It sounds like life on Earth, and it is exactly the misunderstanding of socialists who expect this.
we all pull together and come out ahead ideology to work.
And it doesn't because in the end, the mistake is always the same.
Socialism and communism punish those who are productive and reward those who are lazy.
And that is unstable.
It is exactly this misunderstanding that undergirds socialism and communism.
And it is interesting to watch the academic version of this misunderstanding flow down a lineage.
Aha, ha.
to the now mayor of Seattle, who is apparently confused in this very way.
So here, let's take a look at this brief clip of her recently.
And before we go to the clip, let me just say, she is the mayor of Seattle.
She is not in charge of tax policy in the state.
She is simply responding to what has been done by other people in her party.
So we cannot hold her responsible for the bad policy.
So, right, as we've talked about on Dark Horse before, the so-called millionaire's tax has just been passed by the state legislature and signed by Governor Ferguson.
which is something 20-something attempt to pass an income tax in the state of Washington over and over and over again overturned by the voters.
This time not overturnable due to more sleights of hand and ridiculous, nefarious behavior by the lawmakers.
So now, for the first time, Washington state has an income tax.
Oh, but it only affects people making a million dollars or more.
Oh, it's not people.
It's couples making a million dollars or more.
Oh, let's immediately consider whether or not we should drop that to $125,000 or more.
And everyone grants that just because this is currently a tax restricted to the wealthy does not in any way suggest that it will continue to be restricted to the wealthy.
All right.
In fact, the game theory is going to require it to be extended for reasons that we'll talk about here in a second.
But let's hear from Katie Wilson.
I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are like super overblown.
And if, you know, the ones that leave, like, bye.
So first of all, she does the thing where it's like, the thing you're saying isn't true.
And also, if it is, it's great.
Yeah.
Like she has both of those positions at the same time.
Also, she doesn't quite do it.
I thought the first time I heard that, that she did that crazy millennial vocal fry thing, like, bye, which is, you know, very, very aggravating to everyone who doesn't do that.
And it does seem like she's sort of just appealing to exactly.
Well, gosh, I can't even think of all the people who have pointed out that financially, upwardly mobile, highly educated single women, childless single women, are looking to the state to take care of them, absent something else in their life that will.
And so there's an appeal here to those who would use vocal fry to affect social change.
Yes.
Well, and the audience's reaction there was fascinating to me because initially they realized that she said something that isn't good.
Like she's like, oh, millionaires are leaving.
Bye.
And the audience is like, huh?
And then they're like, okay, we're going to get on board with this.
And they start, you know, they slowly arrive at hooting and clapping.
And, you know, so, okay, on the one hand, you think the state should be, you know, taking care of you.
And on the other hand, you're like sneering at the so called millionaires as they walk out the door.
And that is how the spiral is going to go because you're driving out the people who, you know, who are taxable, who have money to, I want to say to offer, who have money to steal.
And there's not going to, you know, you're going to have to start dropping the number, the amount of income a person has to make before you start taking their money from them.
Right.
Because there is not going to be enough of a tax base.
You know, and gone.
Right.
But I mean, that's just it.
It's like the game theory is very clear.
On the one hand, she says, oh, they're not going to leave.
Well, they already are leaving.
There's a freaking glut of houses on the market.
They're leaving because they can and because you've made it clear that you're going to enter into the spiral.
So there's actually now a kind of race to get out of the state before they start, you know.
Well, and that's, you know, we are going to talk more about Washington, including next week.
But I will say that.
The objection here is not actually to the idea of an income tax, right?
Let's talk about Idaho.
Idaho has a stable, flat income tax.
I think it's, I may be right, it's like 5.2 or 5.3% at this point.
It was 5.7% or so percent.
And they realized they had more money than they needed.
And so they dropped it a little bit because it's not the state's purview to take money that they don't need from people who have earned that money.
And that is that doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
The fact is, in Washington state, the goalposts are moving constantly, and they're pretending they're not even playing a game.
New estate tax, new capital gains tax, new income tax, changing property taxes that are hard to interpret, changing business taxes, different kinds of sin taxes.
The landscape is impossible to predict.
You'd know they're not on your team, no matter who you are, actually.
Some people may think that the legislators are on your team, but they're clearly not.
And it's completely impossible to just be like, okay, you know what?
I live in a place with great services.
No.
I live in a place with some services and I know what I'm going to have to pay so I can plan.
I can try to grow my business.
I can try to put away a nest egg in order to buy a house, in order to save for retirement, for my kids' college.
You can't in a landscape where clearly the people who are making policy are going to just make things up differently every year they come back into session.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it has become an obvious scam.
The fact is the incredibly high tax burden and the incredibly cruddy services have to be viewed at the same time.
This is, you know, what you're looking at with politicians who, you know, whatever they say, no matter how crazy it is, the farther left it, it, this is my right, but it's their left, arguably.
The farther left the thing that is said, the louder the cheers, right?
Well, okay, now you know, in order to fleece you, all you have to do is disguise it as a compassionate policy and people will feel obligated to cheer for it.
And this is what you get.
You get a state that is signing its own death warrant, right?
It is creating, you know, Starbucks is apparently considering a move to Tennessee.
Starbucks, which is.
They have opened up offices in Tennessee, have hired, I think I heard something like 2,000 people.
They still claim they're not leaving Washington, but a lot of people don't believe them.
Yeah.
I mean, let's put it this way.
They're moving some large fraction of their operations out of the state of Washington.
Boeing already did it.
Amazon already did it.
We're driving out the major employers.
with punitive taxation.
Bye.
Bye.
Yeah, exactly.
And the point is, what do you think is going to happen next?
Either the state's going to collapse because it's not going to tax the people who remain, or it's going to tax the people who remain.
Neither of those are any good.
It's going to be both.
Well, right.
It'll be both.
And the jaw-dropping frauds and incompetence will continue to be continued.
Yeah.
Meddle in Complex Systems00:00:47
All right.
So be careful when you meddle in complex systems.
Yeah, there's the message for today.
Yes.
And for always.
And for always.
Yep.
And for always.
And yeah, maybe that's it.
All right.
Maybe check out our awesome sponsors who do a really good job of not meddling with complex systems.
They make great products.
And I think this week it was all products and services.
We had fresh pressed olive oil club.
We had Ladybird cereals.
And clear.
And clear to prevent you from getting sick.
Indeed.
All good stuff.
Yep.
So we'll be back next Wednesday at the usual time and day where we have not been for a little bit.
And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.