Dr. Melissa Ilardo reveals the Bajo of Indonesia are evolving a new human species, possessing genetically larger spleens and specialized vasoconstriction for deep diving rather than learned traits. While rapid climate change hinders adaptation compared to stable environments, historical bottlenecks trace all humans to roughly 10,000 ancestors and Mitochondrial Eve. The discussion warns against erasing ethnic genetic data through flawed correlations, critiques the risks of CRISPR and designer babies, and speculates that future technology might drive pedomorphic evolution toward toddler-like beings, challenging our understanding of natural selection. [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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Spleen Size and Diving Adaptation00:11:57
So, I'm interested in how modern human populations have evolved to their lifestyles or environments.
And so, this is, we're talking in the last like 10,000 years or less.
And I got into that.
I was actually, I've always been interested in evolution.
I actually started with a master's in astrobiology.
So, I was looking at very theoretical evolution.
But then I decided I wanted to actually work with humans.
And so, I was doing my PhD in Copenhagen in Denmark.
And I was working on a totally different project, and I heard about a group of divers in Indonesia.
And I thought, well, if ever there were an opportunity for evolution or natural selection to act in a modern human population, this would be the population.
And so when I saw that no one had done that study yet, I went to my supervisor and pitched it and said, can I do this?
And luckily, I had a supervisor who was super supportive, and that was the start of all of it for me.
How natural selection works.
Would work with these people in Indonesia who are, they lived on the water.
These are the nomadic spear fishermen.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So they're called sea nomads.
Sea nomads, okay.
Traditionally, they live their whole lives on houseboats.
And that's changing, you know, in a kind of a contemporary context.
But traditionally, they would get basically everything they needed from the sea.
And they do a lot of that through breath hold diving.
And they're extremely good at it.
So they can hold their breath for a really long time.
They can move underwater with like incredible athleticism.
And they do this to collect.
Things like sea cucumbers, they spear fish.
And so the idea was that diving is dangerous.
And so if people have been doing this to survive for thousands of years, they may have evolved in a way that made them better at it.
And what is it specifically about that part of the world that pushes them to be more of sea nomads, like to be exploring the sea for food and for this kind of stuff?
Is there a sparse, is there a very limited? Amount of resources on land there?
I think it's actually that there are just so many resources in the water.
So, Indonesia, I mean, that whole area, you have sea nomads throughout Southeast Asia.
But Indonesia itself has like 17,500 islands.
So, it's just an incredible amount of coastline of these like super rich coral reefs.
So, there's just an abundance of resources in the ocean.
So, it's kind of like if it's there, why not take advantage of it?
And we actually see many places in the world where there are these rich marine resources.
People dive.
You would classify these people as like quote unquote superhumans, right?
That's it.
Because they're super adapted to a certain way of life.
And they have, over time, I don't know how long, but have evolved to be better at long, long breath holds and swimming deep underwater to catch fish.
And this has changed their genome to some degree.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, people who live at high altitude, people who eat.
Diets rich in lipids, things like that.
There's these, what we call superhuman populations all over the world.
And it's just kind of the idea is most, especially medical research, focuses on disease.
But that's just this really small part of the spectrum of human physiology, because we have like disease, health, and then beyond to what we call the superhuman population.
So people who are enhanced in some way.
And so by focusing on that end of the spectrum, first of all, there's a lot out there that hasn't been explored yet, which is really exciting.
It also allows us to kind of celebrate what's special about these populations rather than stigmatizing them for diseases they may have or things like that.
Right.
And it's just like a really fun way of approaching health research.
When it comes to these Indonesian sea hunters or these nomadic ocean people, what did you find interesting about them specifically?
So, I had heard about their diving abilities, and it is truly amazing to see them in the water, how they move, how long they hold their breath.
And so, we thought that maybe there was something physiologically different about them.
And so, what I decided to measure, in part because I was a PhD student, You know, kind of a little bit on my own with this project and trying to find something that was non invasive and easy enough for me to learn how to measure.
So, what I measured was their spleen size.
And so, the spleen, you know, isn't the first organ you think about when you think about diving, but it plays a really important role in diving, which is that it stores red blood cells.
So, it's kind of like this oxygen reservoir because you have these oxygen rich red blood cells just sitting in the spleen.
And when you dive, your spleen contracts and those get pushed into circulation.
So, this increases the amount of oxygen that's circulating through your body.
And so, some people have called it a biological scuba tank.
So, you're kind of carrying around this little extra reserve of oxygen that may be able to prolong dive time or make diving safer.
Wow.
So, this activates only when you're holding your breath?
That's right.
Yeah.
So, it's actually, you know, to a certain extent, it also is activated when you exercise.
So, like horses have huge spleens, greyhounds have huge spleens, and they think that that contributes to their ability, you know, to perform at such a high level in terms of exercise.
But it's much more so activated by holding your breath combined with cold water on your face.
Holding your breath and cold water.
That's right, yeah.
And you say it pumps out more red blood cells?
Yes, you get this injection of red blood cells into circulation that are holding on to oxygen.
So suddenly you have access to 15% more oxygen.
So, how did you figure out the size of their spleens?
Portable ultrasound machine.
So, yeah, at first I had to learn how to measure a spleen, which is actually kind of tricky with an ultrasound.
So, I was lucky that all the other people involved in my PhD program were very willing participants because I was just having people over to my apartment to look at their spleens for practice.
And then, yeah, I carried this like 40 pound machine out to a tiny village in Indonesia.
You know, after doing an initial visit where we said, like, here's what I'm thinking of doing.
What do you think?
Is this something you're interested in?
And people were very receptive.
Went back with the machine and measured a whole bunch of spleens.
So, did you have this hypothesis before you measured, or were you just like scanning around trying to see what you could find?
Or how did you come to the hypothesis that they might have bigger spleens?
Yeah, it was a number of factors.
So, you know, one thing is looking at other animals that have adapted to diving.
So, certain species of seals that have a really long breath hold also have huge spleens.
So, the Waddell seal's spleen takes up half of its abdominal cavity, it's huge.
And so, we thought, okay, if it could increase spleen size, In a seal, maybe it could increase spleen size in humans too.
And then it's also just kind of like grounded in basic evolutionary theory, which is that in order for evolution to act, you need to have some kind of phenotype that it can act on that's likely to be something you can inherit.
So we looked at like lung size or lung volume, but lung volume is really changeable.
So that's not really likely something that you're going to inherit because it changes so much just based on how much you hold your breath.
You know, like heart rate, things like this.
There are a lot of different things that we could have measured, and we went with the spleen.
Again, in part because it's an easy thing to measure.
Right, right.
Just based on the size of the body.
So they weren't born like this, right?
Their spleens adapted over time and over breath holds after breath hold and years of diving.
So, it's actually they were born with it because that's an important thing for us to distinguish because maybe it's just diving makes your spleen bigger, you know?
And there had been some studies that kind of hinted that that might be the case.
So, to check that out, we took people who were diving and people who had never been diving but had the same genetic background.
So, the people that I worked with, the population I worked with, are called the Bajo.
It's in some countries it's pronounced Bajau, but it's one of these sea nomad groups.
And if we had done this study like 100 years earlier, it would have been impossible to tell.
What was environmental or genetic because everybody would have been diving.
But now, because of kind of the changes in the world, I'd say about half the population or more doesn't dive.
So we had this really nice split in the population between people who are actively diving, so whose spleens could have been expanded by diving, and people who were Bajo but weren't diving.
And so we saw the large spleens across everyone.
Wow.
There was no difference in spleen size based on whether or not they'd been diving.
That's fascinating.
But there was a difference when we compared them to a population that lived like 20 miles away.
Who had a totally different genetic background but lived in the same environment?
Only 20 miles away?
Yeah, super close.
Weren't not divers?
Correct, yeah.
Wow, that's so interesting.
So, if you were, say, you did grow up and you weren't part of their genetic background, and say I was part of the tribe that was 20 miles away, and I came, like, I got adopted by one of their families or whatever, and I started diving since I was a toddler, would my spleen be normal size or would it be huge?
So, based on my research, it would be normal size.
However, I have seen some papers that do suggest that you can expand your spleen just by holding your breath a lot.
You know, some of those papers had small sample sizes.
And, like, I would say that ultrasounds are kind of more of an art than a science.
Like, there is a certain amount of interpretation.
So, you have to try to blind yourself to what your hypothesis is.
So, I'd say jury's still out.
But it seems like, based on everything I've seen in that population and in other diving populations, diving does not increase your spleen size.
Having a genetic predisposition increases your spleen size.
Fascinating.
How long have they been doing this?
Do you know?
It's hard to say.
We think thousands of years.
Thousands.
Yeah.
So the earliest kind of written documentation was what was his name?
One of the early explorers, Magellan.
Magellan had a chronicler who was writing about all of the things that they saw as they were exploring and describes in detail seeing sea nomads diving and living on these houseboats and things like that.
But that's only like 500 years ago or something like that, maybe less.
So But we think, based on linguistic reconstruction, that they've actually been diving much longer, which makes sense because that marine environment has been there.
So, from reading ancient texts, you can find accounts of them?
I think it's the way I'm not a linguist, so I don't know exactly, but they kind of put together when that particular language arose and when certain words related to diving are likely to have been introduced.
But again, outside of my specialty.
Very interesting.
But based on our genetic results, we think that.
They started evolving this trait in the last few thousand years.
Okay.
Any of them have webbed feet or any other interesting characteristics?
Not webbed feet, but we did see in their genetics an interesting signal in a gene related to something else that happens when you dive, which is so, you know, your spleen contracts, but you also have this constriction of your blood vessels because, like, your fingers, your toes don't need oxygen that badly, but your brain, your heart, your lungs, they need.
You know, that oxygen rich blood.
So, by making the blood vessels in your extremities smaller, your body moves that blood closer to the organs that need it the most.
And so they had a gene that was different.
It had been evolving that has been previously linked to that effect, this like blood vessel constriction effect.
Interesting.
So we didn't measure that directly, unfortunately, but it's something we'd love to do in the future because it's.
What was the water temperature?
Well, I don't know what the water temperature is in Indo.
Blood Vessel Constriction Genetics00:03:28
It's pretty warm, right?
Yeah.
So, yeah, it's, you know, they're not probably exposed to that much kind of hypothermia because it's like pretty thermal neutral water.
It's very pleasant swimming water.
Yeah.
But we do see divers in cold water populations as well.
And they put these people, they put like their offspring, they start getting them adapted to the water pretty much right after birth, right?
Yeah.
And they have like, I mean, you know, it's interesting too how you see this sort of resurgence of people doing water births and like babies can go straight from the placenta or the womb, which is amniotic fluid, to like a bathtub or something like that.
Yeah.
It seems like we have this really instinctual drive to hold our breath.
And, you know, babies, you can.
I've heard blowing their face and put them underwater and they just hold their breath and you know they know that that's what they're supposed to do.
I heard from people who weren't Bajo, so I didn't confirm this with the Bajo that they, when a baby is born, will pass the baby under a canoe traditionally.
Um, and if it makes it to the other side, you know, if it holds its breath, it's a Bajo baby.
Um, and if not, you know, but right, but I don't know if that's you know, I mean, that's just what other people from outside of the community had told me.
So, right, right, right, wow, that's that's Crazy.
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But yeah, you go to the village and there's like all of the kids are in the water, which does make it a little bit harder to separate them into divers and non divers because even the non divers, Av's children, were probably diving.
How long can they hold their breath for?
It's a really good question.
We don't have good data to say.
One diver told me, and I did not confirm this, so I have to put that caveat, that he in his youth could hold his breath for 13 minutes.
That's about the same as the current world record without supplemental oxygen before diving.
So, what is the current world record that's been actually documented?
I think without any supplemental, without breathing pure oxygen beforehand, it's around 13 minutes.
Wow.
Yeah.
Breath Holding Records Revealed00:15:13
And I think that's kind of just floating there, which is also very different from Bajo diving.
They are active, they're hunting.
I mean, they're like walking on the seafloor and spearing multiple fish.
Yeah, that's crazy because you see some of the free diving champions.
What they do is they put weight belts on.
And once you get to a certain atmosphere, you just start free falling with the weight.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And then they think they drop the weight belts or something like that.
Or maybe they don't drop the weight belts.
I don't know how else they would get them.
I don't know how they would get them, retrieve them.
But they come back up super slow, but they're not exerting any energy at all.
They have these big, long free diving fins.
They're using those to slowly come up to the surface.
Yeah.
But actually, having to crawl around.
Underwater caves and caverns, and try to like find fish and hunt stuff down and chase stuff.
Like, that takes a lot of energy, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, um, yeah, it's amazing.
You know, the Baja are doing all that without fins, without sometimes without weight.
Oh, yeah, no, they there's, I mean, a lot of these communities are really impoverished, and so you know, they don't have wetsuits, they don't have fins, they don't have maybe they don't have weight belts.
Um, many of the divers that I saw didn't, but like you said, once you get to that depth, you become neutrally or negatively buoyant, yeah, and so.
It looks like they look like hunters.
I mean, they're, you know, they've got their spear gun and they're walking and waiting for a fish.
And then, yeah.
It is.
So, how many cultures or groups of people do we know of that are similar to them that are nomadic seafaring people?
Yeah.
So, there's seafaring and then there's the nomadic seafaring.
And I would say it's harder to say.
I don't, maybe I said that wrong.
No, no, no.
No, that's absolutely right.
I'm just saying there's like, there are a lot of both.
But with the nomads, it's harder to say because.
Like, nomadism is most threatened by current global trends, I would say, because it's really hard to get a passport if you're a nomad.
You know, countries are very reluctant to claim someone if they don't, if they kind of move across borders.
So it's harder to say how many of these cultures used to be nomadic, but there are diving populations in Japan and Korea.
There were diving populations in Aboriginal Australia, like Tasmania.
There's diving populations throughout Southeast Asia, even into like Taiwan.
There were some traditional diving populations.
Then, you know, South America, there were diving populations in Patagonia.
They were very nomadic as well.
Panama, there's a huge diving population.
It's basically like anywhere you have.
The more, you know, the more I learn about divers, the more I talk to people who work with divers, the more diving populations I find out about.
I mean, it is bizarre that that's not the norm for Homo sapiens.
Like, you would, like, just looking at the planet we live on, right?
Mostly water.
There's not much land.
You can look at one side of the planet from space and look at the Pacific Ocean and there's no land.
So it's kind of crazy that we have evolved to be like these land only mammals and that are not very optimal.
Our bodies aren't optimal for moving around in the ocean.
Right.
And to an extent, we are evolved to be in the water because we all have this dive reflex, which is cool.
But what's interesting is the dive reflex is actually conserved across all mammals.
So if you teach mice to dive, which people have actually done in a lab setting, They have the dive reflex as well.
So, all mammals have this ability to be in water and hold our breaths.
But, yeah, it's interesting that, again, like you said, there's such rich resources in these marine environments.
So, why is it that only specific populations have kind of gone back to that?
The dive.
So, what exactly is the dive reflex?
So, this is where the spleen contraction.
That's the spleen contraction.
Yeah, so it's spleen contraction, vasoconstriction, so the constriction of the blood vessels, and then also a slowing of the heart rate.
And so, that's something that's actually trainable.
So, the more you dive, The more your heart rate slows when you dive.
Right.
And also your resting heart rate gets lower as well.
Right.
And that's been observed in like competitive breath hole divers and traditional diving populations.
Yeah, because like, you know, that dive reflex is interesting, but other animals that spent, like, look at birds.
Like, birds are, you can tell how they're adapted to dive underwater, at least water birds, water birds that hunt fish and things like that.
They have those big webbed feet and they can, they have the feathers that like push water off where they like, they can, they can fly, they can walk on the ground and they're actually like, like physically adapted for water, for like sitting on the water or swimming through the water or whatever.
Yeah.
It's just crazy that, you know, us at least to like at the first glance, we don't look like we're made to be in the water.
Right, right.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
So, if you spend a lot of time in cold water, especially, but mostly like divers, people who have water in their ears a lot, something happens.
It's called surfer's ear because surfers sometimes get it too, where the bones in your inner ear change shape in a way that, you know, is permanent and it could affect your hearing.
And there's, you know, It has different effects.
I have that.
I have raging tinnitus.
Okay.
From that.
So, what's interesting is that your skeleton, people would then be able to tell, like, this is someone who spent a lot of time in the water.
And so, there's increasingly, we're seeing signs of human populations that we didn't previously think were spending a lot of time in the water who have this.
And so, you know, near rivers in like certain parts of the United States, we're finding skeletons that indicate that people in those areas may have been.
Diving in the rivers.
No way.
Yeah.
Are there any other groups of people that you have found that, similar to these sea people of Indonesia, that have a unique way of living that has changed the way they evolve or has them evolving out on like a different branch than the rest of us?
Yeah.
It seems like, you know, human populations all over the world are evolving in these really interesting and unique ways.
So, In my lab, we've also worked with a population in Korea called the Henyo.
And so these are all women divers diving in very cold water.
And what's cool is that this has been a tradition of having mostly or all female divers in that region for thousands of years as well.
And we think that they've actually evolved in a way that makes it safer for them to dive throughout their pregnancies.
Because these women not only dive throughout their whole lives, they dive often until the day they give birth.
So, I heard from one woman that she was diving.
It was seaweed season, so she wanted to make sure she got as much seaweed as possible.
Dove until 6 p.m., gave birth at 8 p.m.
Wow.
So, it's a very different kind of selective pressure in that case.
Wow.
Yeah.
And they're in Korea, which is a lot colder of a climate.
That's right.
Yeah.
In the winter, the surface temperature of the water is like 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
And they were traditionally, until the 90s, diving in cotton.
So, no thermal protection.
Yeah.
Which is not, has no thermal protection at all.
Right.
Yeah.
So, were they similar to the Indonesian group at all?
Or are these mostly females that are doing, or all females that are doing this?
Right.
And so, what were the differences between those two groups?
Yeah.
So, we saw some things that seemed to overlap, which was the main signal that we saw that we think is protecting them in pregnancy is related to blood pressure.
So, that could be related to this kind of vasoconstriction effect that we saw in the Indonesians.
And then we also saw that they have a training effect, which is this lowered heart rate.
So we did some simulated dives with them, and their heart rate just plummeted.
So, we can simulate a dive by having people hold their breath and put their face in a bowl full of cold water that makes your body think that you're diving.
And so, when they did that, you know, we could watch in real time their heart rate drop.
We had one woman whose heart rate dropped over 40 beats per minute in less than 15 seconds.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
Oh, this is them.
Oh, yes.
Yep.
Oh, look, she caught an octopus.
Yeah.
They used, did they use their bare hands or they use spear guns or?
They use a combination.
So they have certain tools that are for getting like abalone off the rock.
They have other tools that they kind of hook onto the bottom of the seafloor and pull themselves along as they collect concrete and things like that.
So they are a little bit more technologically advanced than the Indonesians?
Currently, yes.
Because they're, these, they're, did the Indonesians use masks?
They do.
They, I mean, both the Henyo and the Bajo traditionally did not use masks.
Oh, really?
Technology didn't exist.
Right.
Well, not thousands of years ago.
Yeah.
Even like a couple hundred years ago, they were mostly just diving with their eyes, which we're curious then if they've actually adapted in a way where they can see better underwater.
Wow.
Yeah.
These are the cotton diving suits.
Yeah.
That doesn't do much.
Yeah.
No.
And they were wearing these until the 90s.
And in fact, I talked to some woman who said that even when wetsuits came out, when they were diving in their pregnancies, they were like, a wetsuit doesn't fit over a pregnant belly.
So we just went back to cotton.
Right.
And it makes you way more.
It's harder to get down deeper.
Yeah.
So you can see here, these women are not wearing weight belts because they were diving in cotton.
So they didn't have that issue with the flotation.
Now they're using weight belts because they have these thick wetsuits.
And I think in this picture, they're probably also not wearing fins.
Did you find and did you study their eyes at all or their vision?
We have not yet.
There was a study that was done in the Mokan, which is another group of sea nomads in Thailand.
And that suggested that they actually have better underwater vision than other people.
The results of that were kind of dismissed because the same person who did that study did a follow up study where they trained people in Europe to see underwater and they could achieve the same level of underwater vision through training.
But I think this is really flawed logic and it's been applied in a lot of these kinds of adaptations because it's like just because, you know, I mean, I can train to run a marathon, that doesn't mean that I have the same genetic predisposition as someone.
Um, you know, let's say from Kenya who has a different like limb length proportion than I do, you know.
So I think this idea that I might not be explaining it very well, but that you can train, you know, like just because someone can train to reach a certain level doesn't mean that that makes another person not special.
Of that, I'm not articulating it well, right?
Well, they have to do like far more work, yeah, exactly, to achieve the same level of success as the person who can do it naturally, yeah.
So I'm wondering if that's the case with vision as well, but it's not something we've been able to test yet, wow.
And Steve, find a picture of the other group, the Indonesians.
Oh, wow.
I'll show you some of those pictures.
Oh, really?
The one where he's holding the mask, actually.
Yeah.
Oh, that's incredible.
Oh, wow.
And this guy's not even wearing a mask.
Look at that guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they have these kind of wooden goggles that they used until fairly recently as well.
Yeah, kind of like that.
Some people have switched to the full mask, but a lot of it's homemade.
So I actually have a Bajo spear gun on the wall in my office.
You can see the tension comes from bike inner tubes, and it's all homemade.
It's very cool.
Oh my.
Yeah, with the goggles, I have no idea how they get a seal.
And I don't know how they avoid like a squeeze, too, because they're diving super deep.
That's one thing that's a little bit harder.
How deep do they go?
We don't really know, but one researcher went to a competition with some Bajo divers and they dove to 70 meters, which is over 200 feet, with just a weight belt.
Yeah, I mean, they're incredible.
Like their ability to dive deep is really.
Like dive doing that because that's how evolution works.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, I mean, the risk of shallow water blackouts when you're diving that deep is super dangerous.
Yeah.
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So that's like their natural selection is who can survive diving this deep in the ocean.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we actually think that.
The adaptation that's making their spleen, like the genetic change that's making their spleen bigger, is actually increasing their thyroid hormone levels.
So it's putting them into not like a hyperthyroid state, like a pathological kind of state, but just like a slightly higher than average thyroid hormone level, which we think is giving them a lot of different advantages.
How so?
How would that work?
I'm not familiar with how that would work.
Yeah.
So the thyroid, you know, it increases, there's kind of like a sweet spot, we think, where we think it's actually increasing the amount of red blood cells that they're producing.
And so that's Part of why they have this bigger reservoir is just because they have more red blood cells.
And so they're kind of stored, waiting to be accessed during diving.
And we think that because we actually did some studies with mice where we were able to recreate the large spleen phenotype, we say, or trait in mice.
So we had these mice that we gave them a drug that inhibited the same gene that's different in this population.
And those mice had larger spleens.
Wow, that's wild.
We did not train those mice to dive, but I would be very curious to see how they did compared to other mice.
Neanderthal Evolutionary Traits00:15:09
If you were hypothetical, like, like, like total speculation, what do you think that in like a couple thousand years that these people could develop like webbed feet or look even more different than we do now or they do here?
Yeah, I mean, really, you know, as long as there's selection for it, as long as it's giving them an advantage or protecting them from dying younger or, you know, not being able to reproduce, then yeah, it could totally happen.
It also has to be a trait that has to come up somehow.
So there either has to be a mutation, you know, like I didn't see a single.
Person who had webbed feet.
So that it's not out there yet, but you certainly could have a mutation that caused that.
And then maybe that person has a huge benefit, and that spreads throughout the population.
But that takes a long time, right?
Exactly.
To get a positive trait to evolve.
That's exactly it.
Yeah, that's why evolution is normally so slow because most mutations are so bad that we don't even see them because they're what's called embryonic lethal.
So they don't even make it into a fully developed human because they're so bad.
So a lot of the kind of variation that we see that comes up in these populations was already at some frequency in the population.
So it's already there.
And it's once they moved into an aquatic environment, it became beneficial.
So those people were just kind of walking around.
It was kind of neutral as long as they were on land.
But as soon as they started diving, it became a really helpful thing to have.
Wow.
And actually, some humans, like our genome likes to be as frugal as possible, you know, so whatever's out there, it's going to try to use as much as it can.
But also, we like to steal things from other populations.
So, like Tibetans have adapted to high altitude, and the genes that gave them that adaptation.
We actually took from an archaic hominid.
So, like Neanderthals, but their Denisovans were kind of around the same time.
So, this kind of cousin lineage of humans, they had been living at altitude for 100,000 years or more by the time humans got there.
And so, humans mixed with them and kept the genes that gave them an advantage.
And then, in turn, created babies that had this gene that made them thrive in these super high altitudes.
Wow.
Exactly.
Wow.
That's another curious thing is like why there's so many, there's like what, 500 something species of primates still today?
I don't know the number.
I think there's over five.
I think I Googled it and it was like over 500 species of primates and only one species of Homo sapien.
Yeah.
How does that make sense?
You know, we really don't know what happened because we had, you know, Neanderthals, Denisovans, humans all were there together.
And, you know, we've seen in, Ancient DNA samples from certain areas, like first generation crosses of Neanderthals and Denisovans.
So we know that there was a lot of mixture happening because, you know, what are the chances we would find that otherwise?
And then, yeah, I don't know how we're the last man standing, but we took all the genetic material that we could from those other lineages before we wiped them out in some way.
Isn't it crazy, though?
Like how different we are.
Yeah.
You know, like there's no, like if you look at all the different primates that exist today and look at the, The modern human, there's like, there's them, then there's this giant leap, and then there's us.
There's not like a gradual, I mean, a little bit.
There are some people who are a little bit more ape like.
There's some people who are a lot more like evolved, but like not really.
Like, there's not really any like Neanderthals, like legitimate Neanderthals or people who are halfway between primates and humans walking around today.
It's like either primate or human.
Which, in like, if you just go to the primate population, there's such a wide variety.
Mm hmm.
And I know the human genome is pretty veritable.
There's a large variety in the genome, but as far as the species, we don't vary that much.
It doesn't seem like.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, because we're pretty adaptable.
I mean, we're really good at making technologies that enable us to survive in cold environments, hot environments, around water.
We're really good at fishing, so we don't necessarily need to dive, and our physiology is very adaptable.
Plastic, as we say in physiological research, like it's changeable.
You know, we can go from, they're like boot camps, or you can learn to freedive and go from like a 30 second breath hold to a two minute breath hold in a week just by learning techniques or, you know, working on different things with your physiology.
So maybe it's just that we're so adaptable in a physiological sense that we haven't had to adapt that much in a genetic sense because we can really take on most challenges pretty well.
Yeah.
So, what is the like simple conventional explanation for this?
For this leap from primates to humans.
Like, I know there's a lot that goes into it, but like, you know, there's a lot of fun theories people like to talk about that happen a lot on podcasts where people like say, one day a monkey ate a mushroom, psychedelic mushroom, and that accounted for the doubling of the brain size and all this stuff and developing technology.
There's other ideas like panspermia, like comet fragments that hit the earth that had like alien DNA on them somehow mixed with primates.
That accounted for the evolution.
I mean, there's so many, like, You could, people like to fill the gaps with things they don't really, that are kind of like way out there.
Like you could fill the gap with like God, you could fill the gap with aliens, you can fill the gap with psychedelics.
But like there's no, like I haven't heard the conventional reasoning for it, at least not in a long time.
Yeah.
I mean, I tend to focus on so much more recently than that in terms of looking at humans.
So I'm kind of like out of Africa and later.
So yeah, I'm not sure.
But I'm also like, you know, As long as it's supported by evidence that's out there, and we do have really incredible data because we can reconstruct so much in terms of the genetic data that we have from present times and then kind of rewinding back in time.
So, you know, to the point where we can date when certain migrations happened and things like that just based on modern DNA.
So, yeah, but then, you know, beyond a certain point, I guess it probably becomes more difficult because so much time has passed.
But that's kind of outside of my.
Which I know is a cheap answer, but outside of my area of expertise.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
No, but it's fun to speculate on this time of time.
Yeah, yeah.
Do you think it's possible that our evolution has been linear?
Or do you think it's possible that there was like a reset ever in history of human evolution?
Yeah.
As far as I know from the genetic data that we have, there's no evidence of that.
Like, there's not like some weird piece of DNA that.
That we don't know where it came from.
I mean, there is in the sense that we knew Denisovans existed before we found the first Denisovan bone because we said, okay, there's this bit of DNA that's coming in in a certain part of the world at a higher frequency that seems to have come from like a parallel lineage to humans.
So people hypothesized that there was this other lineage.
And then someone found like a pinky bone in a cave.
And sure enough, that matched perfectly to this piece that we had.
Right.
So, you know, we're really good at kind of.
Seeing, okay, there's a piece that doesn't quite make sense, but we think this is about when it came in.
And then luckily, you know, we were able to confirm that with this bone and ancient DNA, which is an incredible, you know, leap in terms of technology.
But yeah, otherwise, I'm not aware of any gaps that is as fun as it would be to speculate on that, especially coming from like an astrobiology background.
So I was thinking a lot about how different molecules could reach the Earth on comets, on fragments of meteorites, things like that.
Yeah.
And there's just so much history that we have no, I mean, even going back to like 2000 years ago, like we, we, we have no clue what the hell was going on back then, you know?
Like we can look at obviously like, uh, like DNA stuff and like we have ancient texts and we have writing and we have, you know, paintings and stuff like that.
But to actually go back and to, you know, cause I always, I always wonder, like, was there a time in history where, uh, we were on a different, Evolutionary or technological trajectory than we're on now, you know, that made us like.
And this is another interesting thing when it comes to genes and genomics is like intelligence.
Like, did we have like a super high intellectual capacity far back into the past that was just a different type of intelligence, right, than what we have today?
Because, right, because today, like, if you look at the trajectory humans are on with technology, it seems like we're compensating.
For a lot of our brain power and a lot of our intellectual power with technology.
And we're just developing new and new things that people like to buy and people like to use to make tasks easier.
Yeah.
So, like, I was just like, how does that affect the evolution of us?
Where do we end up on this current trajectory with AI and all the self driving cars and Uber Eats?
Where do we end up in 50,000 years?
Right.
Well, one thing that you said I feel like is related to a very important point, which is that, you know, when we talk about trajectories, I feel like we have this, we're so trained that evolution is leading us in this like better, brighter, smarter direction.
Like we have this image of like ape transforming to man, you know, and it's like we are the pinnacle.
Right.
Everything's getting better all the time.
And that's like evolution doesn't have a direction, it doesn't care.
It's just about being, it's not about being, I mean, you know, we say survival of the fittest.
Mm hmm.
It's the best fit, not the most fit.
So, if our environment changes in a way where being super intelligent doesn't actually help us that much, then suddenly we're not going to be selecting for that.
We're not going to be evolving in that direction.
So, it's really just about being the best fit to our environment.
Interesting.
So, yeah, I think it's like, you know, we have this skewed idea that, of course, centers us as being like the ultimate apex of evolution.
But I think that.
So, the people who are the most adapted to their external environments.
Yeah.
Are the ones that are going to evolve, right?
So, like, you know, at the time of dinosaurs, dinosaurs were totally on top of everything, they were the perfect fit to the earth as it was at that time.
Humans' ancestors were just these little rodents running around at night because that was the only time we could avoid the dinosaurs.
Um, and so because of that, people think we were adapted to colder temperatures because we were going around at night.
And again, these are like rodents, you know, these are very what we would think of now as like poorly adapted or just kind of very primitive animals, right?
Meteor hits, suddenly the whole Earth is transformed into this much colder environment.
And now the dinosaurs are very poorly adapted.
They're a bad fit to that new environment.
But we, as the night dwellers who are better at handling cold temperatures, are suddenly the best fit.
So despite the fact that we're these like tiny, pathetic little creatures, you know, we're suddenly on top of the world from an evolutionary perspective because we are the best fit to this new environment.
So, what do you think happens to what do you think humans do?
Overall, the appearance of human beings is going to be drastically different in like 100,000 years.
If we make it there.
If we make it there.
It's hard to say.
I would say that climate change poses a very interesting threat because, you know, we're very adaptable.
Evolution works really well when there's a consistent and gradual threat.
Or, you know, I mean, I guess in the case of the dinosaur extinction, maybe you just get wiped out completely.
But the problem with a changing climate is that you can't be adapted both to drought and flooding.
You can't be adapted both to really high temperatures.
And cold.
You know, I mean, there's so many different factors.
It's not a consistent pressure.
And I shouldn't say that you can't be, but it's just much harder to find some kind of genetic change that makes you better at all of those things that come with a changing planet.
So, yeah, as long as change is happening slowly enough that there are some people among our population who can adapt to it and pass those genes on to the next generation, then sure, we can adapt.
But if it happens too quickly and too erratically, then it becomes very hard to evolve.
When you say climate change, you mean the warming of the climate?
Right.
And like the increase in these, you know, like outlier weather events.
So, like in Utah, we have been in a drought, but we also had the highest snowfall season on record a couple years ago.
And so, it's like within the same season, essentially, we had, you know, devastating avalanches as well as, you know, one of the driest summers on record.
So, it's like it's very hard to find.
A physiological change that makes you fitter in both of those environments, if that makes sense.
Interesting.
So, more extreme weather events in a shorter amount of time, and that could like somehow bottleneck humanity?
It just makes it so that, you know, when you have like when everybody's diving, then there's a consistent selective pressure.
There's one thing that everybody needs to adapt to.
But when there's many different pressures happening all at once, then it's just hard to be.
More likely to survive that.
Right.
Well, but if you're in different parts of the world, wouldn't those things be consistent?
Like in Florida, the coldest it ever gets is like 50 degrees.
And the hottest, I mean, it gets freaking hot.
It gets like in the hundreds and it's humid and we get hurricanes and floods.
But there's never any snow.
And there's never any free.
Like it's, you know, it doesn't go below 50 degrees.
There's never earthquakes.
There's, you know, it's fairly consistent.
I don't know if that's like that in other parts of the world.
I can't speak for Utah.
Mm hmm.
But yeah, yeah, I mean, in that case, yeah, maybe the future looks everyone looks more like Floridians, but yeah, then there could definitely be a bottleneck.
But whatever part of the world they live in, right?
Mitochondrial Eve Origins00:06:23
Yeah, there could be a bottleneck for sure.
Yeah, and wasn't there a big bottleneck in the genome like 100,000 years ago or something like this?
So, the out of Africa migration represents a huge bottleneck.
So, there's more, there's much more genetic diversity within Africa than in all of the rest of the world outside of Africa, even though you know, I feel like.
It's easy to look at populations in North America and East Asia and say, wow, they're so different.
But actually, on a genetic level, in terms of single changes in the genome, we're more similar than some populations within Africa.
So that's one bottleneck that happened.
But then within specific subpopulations, like there was a bottleneck in the populations that moved into Greenland.
So there's some very interesting genetic changes that happened in the Greenlandic Inuit because of that bottleneck.
And how did those bottlenecks happen?
Oftentimes, it's founder populations.
You just have a small part of the population that leaves a place or goes to a new place.
Sometimes there's, you know, catastrophic events or diseases that bottleneck a population as well.
I had a gentleman on here about a year ago who was trying, he was a, he worked on the Human Genome Project for MIT.
And he was explaining to me something like that all humans on earth basically are genetic descendants of like a total of 10,000 people or something like that.
Yeah.
So this is called the effective population size, which is just such a crazy, like you can represent, if you had 10,000, Genetically unique individuals, you would represent all of the genetic diversity of the planet, which is bizarre because you know, there's a lot of us that is crazy.
Yeah, that is so crazy that we're, I mean, that's like we're all so close.
It seems like we're like really all very a lot more closely related than we think.
Yeah, exactly.
Coming only from 10,000.
There's also this mitochondrial Eve that you may have heard of.
So, all so you inherit your mitochondrial DNA exclusively from your mother, um, and we all essentially.
If you go back far enough, come from one woman who's called mitochondrial Eve.
Really?
Yeah.
Mitochondrial Eve.
I mean, you know, it's been a while, so there's a lot of variation in terms of where we've ended up.
And how many mitochondrial Eves do we think there could have been?
Just the one.
I mean, you know, everyone on earth, we think, as far as I know, hopefully I'm not getting this wrong, but is descended from this one mitochondrial Eve.
That doesn't mean there weren't other women at that time, it's just that the descendants happen to be from this one.
Mitochondrial Eve.
Mitochondrial Eve, the most recent common maternal, uh, matrilineal, I guess that's how you say it, uh, ancestor of all living humans, meaning everyone alive today can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to her through an unbroken line of mothers.
She lived in Africa approximately 150 to 200,000 years ago and was part of the larger ancestral population.
Wow.
That's amazing, right?
That is totally amazing.
It's not that long ago for us to all have been related to one person.
When was the, what were those footprints that we found in the desert in like Nevada?
Sand flats?
Yeah, they were the sand flats.
Yeah, but there was a name for this.
Oh, God.
We've talked about this before.
White sands, the white sands fossilized footprints.
How long ago were those supposed to be?
And this goes back to the, oh, that's 23,000 years ago.
Okay.
And I guess it's speculated that this pushed back the, Clovis first hypothesis, right?
Right.
Are you familiar with this?
Yes.
So the idea was that Homo sapiens weren't populating North America that early.
And we found these footprints and this pushed it back quite a bit farther.
Right.
And they supposedly came from the Bering Strait land bridge.
Is that right?
Yeah.
And there was, you know, again, of course, being a geneticist, I'm biased, but there was genetic evidence that suggested that.
That some of the population of North America was happening much earlier than people thought as well.
And I do think there's a certain amount of like European oriented bias against the population because it's like, oh, did people really make it that far that long ago?
And because we think, you know, it took Europeans so long to get there that surely it would have taken other people longer to get there as well.
But yeah, there's evidence that people were in Patagonia 10,000 years ago.
So yeah.
And there's also people who speculate.
I mean, how much have you talked to like, People in other disciplines that look at this stuff.
Like, have you talked to geologists or any other types of people, anthropologists?
I talked to a lot of anthropologists.
A lot of, you know, I try to incorporate history because I really do think that a lot of times, like, history and anthropology and all these things, like, really inform the science.
I also talk to the people themselves because oftentimes people have their own, you know, stories to tell that are often.
They watch cool documentaries and think they have it all figured out.
Well, I'm saying more like, you know, like, Cultural, like oral histories that populations have about where they came from, how long they've been there, you know, their connection to a particular place.
Although it's funny, I was asking the Bajo what their, you know, where they thought they came from, and I was expecting some kind of, yeah, some kind of answer like that, or about, you know, like the sea gods or something.
And they were like, oh, Borneo.
And I was like, okay, that's very factual, but interesting.
Yeah, I think it's important to weave in all these different perspectives.
Yeah.
Because a lot of times that's where some of these cool scientific hypotheses come from.
Like, there are oral histories in Aboriginal Australians.
I'm actually about to speak to someone about this that talk about a group of people that sound very much like the Bajo.
And so, given how close those are geographically, it totally makes sense that there would have been interaction between those peoples.
And so, you know, it'd be cool to, in cases like that, match potentially genetic data with oral histories and things like that.
Yeah.
Polynesian DNA Signatures00:07:13
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Now back to the show.
Who was the gentleman, the French gentleman that we had on who was talking about?
He was a.
Is it Philippe?
Philippe.
Yes.
What was he?
He was a medical examiner.
And he was going back into history and examining like ancient fine art.
Paintings and doing autopsies and examining the remains of like these ancient historical figures.
And he could corroborate ancient texts that go back then with by using these paintings and taking the DNA out of these paintings.
There was a story how the heart of one of the French kings, Louis XIII or something like this, was sold.
And used to, the person who owned it was a painter, right?
Who bought the heart.
And allegedly, this guy used his heart as paint pigment.
So he took the painting and he sampled all the red pigments of it.
And sure enough, he found the actual heart fibers of Louis XIII in this painting.
Wow.
And he, you know, he did analysis on all these figures like Picasso and Napoleon and even Hitler's jaw and teeth remains.
And he was also explaining that he found, he was talking about Lucy, the first ancient hominid.
And he was saying that.
Do you remember what he was saying about Lucy, Steve?
He was saying something about they found like teeth marks in her bones.
Okay.
Or like shark.
It was like a shark tooth mark in her bones or something like this.
Okay.
Can you find that, Steve?
See if you can pull that up.
See if you can pull that up.
I don't want to make sure I'm not messing that up.
But what he was showing us was super interesting.
And it was apparently like some sort of like earth shattering.
Revelation about Lucy that kind of changes what we thought about her.
Yeah, it is interesting this.
Yeah, like weaving in all these different disciplines.
Like it's so important to get those different perspectives because, yeah, there's only so much you can get from DNA.
And, you know, samples like Lucy are too old to get DNA from typically, although we're kind of extending that timeline further and further back.
But yeah, there's so much we can learn by putting all those pieces together.
Yeah, totally.
And, you know, even if like you look into some of the architecture and stuff and some of the amazing, like sculptures that were made out of stone in South and Central America, it's just astonishing.
These like Moai heads that are the Moai heads that you have on Easter Island, and then you have some of those other big ones.
There's these heads that are in South and Central America that depict.
Either like an African or a Polynesian human.
Have you seen these?
No.
Steve, pull up the images that Dr. Barnhart was showing us with Luke Caverns on here of the, I forget what is the name of the civilization that did that?
The Olmecs, the Olmec heads.
Yeah, I've seen the Olmec heads.
They look very African.
Yeah.
My PhD lab, Yeah, that's interesting.
It was an ancient DNA lab.
And one of the projects that one of my colleagues was working on was finding genetic evidence for migration of Polynesian populations to the Americas prior to Colombian contact, or yeah, pre Colombian.
And it was interesting because they actually, at one point, were using chicken DNA to try to, because Polynesian chickens have a very distinct ancestry to kind of the chickens that we have in the Americas today.
But yeah, they were also trying to look at like human DNA to show that there was contact.
And then people went back to the Pacific Islands after visiting the Americas.
Really?
I think something got debunked with the chicken DNA.
I can't remember exactly.
But yeah, it's really cool to, you know, there are signatures of contact, especially when people stuck around for long enough to end up together, end up mixing, that we can detect in modern human DNA.
Yeah.
I think they did the math on these moai heads.
Some of them are so large that from where they quarried them, like where the stone was, where they got the stone from to make the heads, was so far away from where they were placed, they would have had to build rafts that were like four times wider than the rivers that flowed from one spot to the other to be able to float them down the rivers.
And it's like really rugged terrain, forests and mountains, and it's like really crazy terrain.
Yeah.
Okay, he's an archaeologist specializing in ancient civilizations of the Americas, especially in Maya.
Yeah, so it's crazy.
It's just some of the stuff's just so bizarre.
Yeah.
Just doesn't add up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And yeah.
I mean, and from my perspective, you know, the cool thing when there are things that don't add up, like these populations that do things that seem like they shouldn't be possible, you know, we're able to often find an explanation, which is super cool.
Smell and Immune System Links00:11:33
Right.
That maybe takes some of the magic away from.
But, yeah, like, I mean, there are populations around the world doing incredible things.
And, yeah, to a large extent, that's been overlooked by a lot of the science that's been done so far.
So, I want to talk about this science behind how smells of people can attract people to each other, or within humans, I think this is.
There's a study that was done with humans where, The certain, I guess, smell or pheromone or whatever it is that some people emit, people are subconsciously attracted to other people just based on this.
Right.
And it's not necessarily like looks or anything like that or personality, it's smells.
How did this whole thing come about?
So it's called the smelly t shirt study, or that's at least how it's referred to.
And it was, yeah, they had, I think it was all, they had women, like heterosexual women, smelling the t shirts of heterosexual men.
And they smelled them and rated the smell of the t shirt on its attractiveness, you know, just based on the smell.
And I'm sure they, you know, accounted for like soaps and deodorants and things like that.
Like they probably had people just wearing t shirts.
And people, women reported that they were more attracted to the smell of a t shirt if that person had a complementary immune system based on their genetics than if they didn't.
And so our immune systems are super diverse.
It's the fastest evolving part of the genome.
There's tons of changes because we're constantly battling with.
Pathogens and bacteria, viruses, whatever.
And so there's a lot of variation in the immune system.
And so if you find someone whose immune system is very different from yours, your children will have a much stronger immune system than if you find someone whose immune system is very similar to yours.
Because the children have a combo of both.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So it seems like we have some way of smelling that just based on what's coming out of our bodies, essentially.
So, how did somebody come up with this theory to do this test?
I don't know.
I mean, maybe someone just noticed that they really loved the smell of their partner.
I mean, that's, you know, like anecdotally, it's a thing, right?
You like really like how someone smells.
I mean, my wife says this about me all the time.
Yeah.
She says she likes the way I smell in the morning.
Yeah.
What are you talking about?
Yeah, maybe she's smelling those jeans.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I don't know what inspired it, but yeah, they did the study and people were able to smell that difference and found it attractive, which is amazing too.
That's so crazy.
Is this in animals too?
I'm sure it is.
Yeah, because animals also have such a stronger sense of smell.
Such a deeper connection to smell, you would imagine that they're doing that as well.
And it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that we would have this ability because people who can smell that in potential mates would have more children who can survive for longer.
Right.
So it seems reasonable that we've evolved to be able to smell our partners, sniff out the best partner for us from an immune system perspective.
Right.
So, okay, on the hierarchy of attractive traits, do we know where smell is?
Oh, I don't know.
That's a great question.
Yeah.
Like if someone has like, You know, a $300 sports car, but the smell is just, uh, how are you going to rate them?
I'm sure someone's going to get divorced in America.
I think that'll knock that one over in a heartbeat.
Um, but no, but like, on like, what about like physical appearance though?
Like, I'm like, did they look at this kind of stuff at all or like, uh, like communication skills or personality traits or, yeah, I don't know, eye color, anything like this?
That's the thing with it.
You know, any study like this is like you're just looking at.
One variable at a time.
And so, as soon as you start introducing more things, it becomes so complex.
Like with the work we did with the divers, you know, we did these simulated dives where we had people hold their breath, put their face in cold water, and we called that diving because your body responds like you're diving.
But it was like they're not under pressure.
Their whole body isn't submerged in cold water.
They're not active.
So, when we actually measured some of the same things in the ocean, all of the measurements looked different because, you know, suddenly this heart rate drop wasn't there anymore because they were moving really actively in the water.
So, it's like, You know, in any of these studies, unfortunately, we just get this like tiny snapshot.
As soon as you start to incorporate more details, then it's like the whole thing blows up and it becomes very hard to study from a scientific perspective.
Yeah, that's so interesting.
And it makes me wonder, you know, looking at the way our environment is involving with technology, where most kids now are on an app scrolling through pictures of people.
Yeah.
And that's how you're finding your mate or your whatever, depending on what your goals are.
You're not sitting in a room with them.
You're just looking at a picture of them and you're basing it off a still photo.
Not even like a 3D photo, just a 2D flat from one angle.
You don't get to walk around them, see what the shape of them is, or anything like that.
Well, and it could totally explain this phenomenon that I feel like we've all heard about where it's like someone sees someone on an app and they're like, oh, yeah, they're super attractive.
And then they go out and they're like, I just didn't feel the chemistry.
Like there was no chemistry.
And it could be that, I mean, it could be that they were really bad at conversation, but it could be that your body was picking up on the fact that this person is not a good person.
Potential parent to your offspring, or something, you know.
It's interesting to think about chemistry, maybe literal chemistry.
We may literally be smelling whether someone's a good match.
Yeah.
I mean, and I imagine, like, I imagine there's got to be an abundance of other things that you can't really put into words, right?
Other than the person was like tall and handsome or whatever it is.
That, that, that, you know.
Not smells, not things that are obvious to our five senses, right?
That there's something that's going on.
Like, you know, you talk like people have gut feelings about things all the time.
Like, how do you explain that?
Right.
Yeah.
And I mean, yeah, if we can smell this one thing, you know, it's something that's easy to test for because we know how to look for particular regions of this, you know, immune system part of your genome.
So that was an easy thing to test for in the study.
But there's so many other things that we could be smelling or picking up on or, you know, These things that we're observing that we're not recognizing that we're observing that are contributing to that feeling.
Okay.
I want to also ask you about when it comes to people who are, because I know people like, a lot of people like this.
I don't know how it's changed over the decades, but when it comes to people who like have trouble conceiving, there's all these evolving technologies that are coming out that are helping people have kids, whether it's like freezing their eggs or freezing sperm, vice versa.
I don't know how it all works, but there's a lot of people.
A lot of which, who I know who are my age in like their mid 30s and they can't have kids to save their lives.
And they're trying everything they can to have children.
I've had people, I've had experts in this field explain to me that that's a bad idea.
Not necessarily like from a moral perspective, but from like an evolutionary biological perspective.
Because it's supposed to be the body, the case they made was that's like, The body's or the, that's evolution's way of filtering out mutations or something like this.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it's complicated.
And it's also age.
I think age has a lot to do with it.
Yeah.
So age is a huge factor.
You know, there's a reason they call like, I think it's like 34 and up women geriatric pregnancies, which seems crazy.
You know, I mean, it's like not that much.
Oh, that's what they actually call them that.
Yeah.
I forget if it's, I think 34 is the cutoff at that point you're geriatric because at that point your risk.
Of having some kind of, of having your child have some kind of genetic disorder is just so much higher.
And that's because, you know, as women reproduce all of our eggs right up at the beginning.
And so the longer they're in our body, the more chance there is for mutations to build up.
So that's something, you know, that's happening.
It doesn't mean you can't have a healthy child, but it certainly means that your risk is higher.
We used to think that that was just women.
Men also, we are finding, have more mutations as they age.
So the chance of passing on those mutations increases as the father gets older as well.
So, you've got, you know, interesting ingredients going in of questionable, you know, the sell by date is we're getting close there.
I was getting close.
Robert De Niro had a kid and he's like 80, I think.
Right, right.
Yeah.
So, there was actually some really incredible work done in Utah because there are a lot of families in Utah that have, you know, 17 kids or something like that.
And so, they were actually able to look at the rate of mutation over the however many years those kids were born and see which mutations were coming from the father, which were coming.
From the mother, and how did those rates change?
And they did see a difference in the number of mutations that was inherited from the father as the father got older.
But then you also have this factor of like maybe people aren't having kids, not because of any of those biological reasons, but because of like forever chemicals in the water, like that affects fertility.
I think microplastics affect fertility.
You know, there's all these other environmental stress affects fertility.
So it's like what's driving those individuals not to be able to conceive?
Is it biological factors?
Is it environmental factors?
Yeah, well, we had Dr. Shauna Swan on here a couple years ago, and she was explaining how they've been studying, sampling the sperm count and the testosterone levels of men since the 50s.
And it's been going down by like 1% per year since the 50s.
And she says since like the mid 2000s, it started going down by like 2% a year.
Okay.
So you must be getting low.
I was like, she asked me, she's like, can you guess which areas of the country have the lowest sperm counts?
Uh huh.
And my guess was I was going to be like the populated cities, you know, all the cars going everywhere.
You're living in a little box and you're not as healthy as you're living out like an open farmland.
She goes, No, the people who live on the farms, open area, because of all of the chemicals they spray on the crops and everything like that, and the glyphosate, which was crazy to me.
And, you know, that combined with like the microplastics that are everything, everything is plastic.
Our world is designed to become, is designed to make money on things by making them.
Cheaper, more affordable, more efficient, and plastic is ubiquitous.
It's everywhere.
Everything's plastic.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
99% of this room is made of plastic.
And she was explaining how that's like very, very bad for human beings.
And if you want to be, if we want to propagate our species into the future, she's like, I don't know what we're going to do, but that's not, we're not going in the right direction.
In Vitro Fertilization Ethics00:12:33
Yeah.
And then, you know, people have to resort to things like in vitro fertilization or freezing their eggs, like you said.
I mean, that circumvents, you know, some of the mutational issues that are.
I was talking about freezing the eggs.
If you freeze your eggs early, then they're like the fresher eggs.
You know, they're not aging with you.
But then, yeah, like once you get into in vitro fertilization, then there's stuff like how do you pick which embryo you're going to carry forward if you do have a successful, you know, if you do have what is it?
I forget exactly what they call it.
But anyway, if one implantation or something?
Yeah.
So, like, you know, then there's, then you get into people are starting to filter based on genetics, and that's a whole other weird ethical thing.
Designer babies.
Yeah, exactly.
So it's very complicated.
That's why I have dogs only.
Oh, you choose to not have children.
Yes, I am intentionally childless.
Really?
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Dogs are awesome.
I love my dogs.
Yeah.
Is it possible that when some people get together and try to reproduce, that sometimes nature just says no because this is not a good mix?
Yeah, that's different.
Certainly.
And there's something really interesting that's happening in our world, which is that.
We're with globalization, we're having combinations of genes that have never happened before in the history of humans.
So, you know, you have people from different parts of the world who have been separated for 50, 60,000 years.
And so, these combinations we're finding sometimes introduce, you know, diseases that have a genetic basis that we didn't know were possible.
Right.
So, that's certainly a possibility.
And yeah, in that way, the body just says, nope.
But then also, there's it brings up the possibility that maybe some of those combinations will do some really Cool things for us as humans because they've never been in the same individuals in the last 60,000 years.
Hmm.
Let's pause real quick.
I can use the restroom.
Yeah.
We'll be right back.
All right.
We're back, folks.
Steve just found an article about how a third parent's DNA can prevent inherited diseases, published just a couple of months ago, July 16th, 2025.
Scientists can protect children from being born with certain devastating genetic disorders by creating three parent babies, according to results of a landmark study released Wednesday.
So, this is, you have, you know, in the normal way, the genetic material from the mother and the father, but then you have, it's when there's a problem with the mitochondria.
And so, instead of getting the mitochondria from the mother, you can get the mitochondria from another person, a third parent, so that this individual will still have, you know, if you only looked at the other, you know, their normal chromosomal DNA, they would look like they're just a product of their two parents, but then their mitochondria are from this additional individual.
Wow.
Would it have to be a woman?
Can you get mitochondria from a man?
Yeah, you can get mitochondria from anyone.
Oh, really?
Wow.
It's just that mitochondria usually comes in the egg.
And so that's why you inherit your mitochondria from your mother.
Right.
Scary.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like crazy experiments we're doing on ourselves.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
And it used to be, you know, like thinking about genetically modifying embryos or babies or humans or things like that.
You know, I would just say, like, oh, we're just not there yet with the technology.
But the scary thing is, we're there.
You know, we can do this.
But now the question is, should we and what should or shouldn't we do?
Yeah.
Well, I want to talk a lot.
I want to go into that.
I want to go into that.
But first, I want to touch on something that you just said.
You were talking about now that the world is becoming more globalized, people are traveling everywhere, people aren't just centered in their little tribes like we used to be.
You're saying that that is.
A good thing, and that's going to be a way for us to evolve stronger?
It certainly potentially could be because, you know, in the same way that we stole genetic material from Denisovans as humans to adapt to high altitude, maybe, you know, there's genetic variation that's been evolving or neutrally evolving, even just kind of there at a low frequency in one part of the world.
Maybe it would be really beneficial in another part of the world or would counteract some gene that's related to disease in another part of the world.
It would be interesting to see, like, because I think before we started, we were talking about Copenhagen and how people from that part of the world are very fair skinned and have light eyes, like color eyes.
So they can absorb more sunlight, more melanin.
And people from equatorial latitudes have very dark skin and dark eyes as well, dark brown eyes, because they don't need all that melanin.
They don't need all that UV light.
They can have more of a shield for that.
It'd be interesting to see if you got like the most dark skinned, dark eyed person from the equator and bred them with the most light eyed, fair skinned person from Norway or something like that and see like they might have like superhuman children because they would have they would cover all the spectrums, all the bases, right?
It depends on how those genes mix together.
We also usually try to avoid the word bread when we're talking about people, but I get what you're saying.
No, bread is not correct.
Even if you bred them with, I mean, it just has a certain hesitation, maybe.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing is, we can't really.
Control exactly how those genes would come together.
So, you know, as, yeah, it would be very interesting to see.
Well, it would be so unnatural for them to meet, right?
Which is weird.
So, like, if it would be like in nature, it would be literally impossible for somebody from that part of the world to meet with somebody in that part of the world naturally, like, right?
Yeah.
I mean, until recently, humans just didn't cross.
And I say recently from, you know, an evolutionary perspective.
We just didn't cover that big of distances.
Right.
And so that's why you have.
You know, this amount of genetic isolation.
And it's even so much so that there was a very cool study that using only genetic data from Europe was able to basically reconstruct a map of Europe based on people's genetics.
So people had been kind of geographically isolated for so long up till now.
I mean, this was a recent study that they were able to tell you almost exactly where someone was from just based on their DNA.
Wow.
And that's how, you know, some of these like 23andMe ancestry kind of, you know, you are X percent.
You know, Italian or whatever.
That's how some of that works.
But it's just amazing that, you know, it's really recent that humans have been mixing on such a global scale.
Another point to this is that if you breed too close to the gene, your own gene pool, nature will punish that, right?
Then you have more of these defects or these mutations, right?
Yeah.
So the thing is, the way that works is that, you know, we all have a certain number of potentially harmful.
Genetic variation in our genome.
And so, as long as we're having children with people who are different from us, you're very unlikely to have two copies of the same bad variation.
But once you start having people either having children with their cousins or even closer relatives, then you have a really high chance of having two of those dangerous copies of whatever it is together.
And so, that's why you have an increase in genetic disorders.
Because you're just increasing the odds of inheriting these two problematic genes dramatically.
Yeah.
When did we first gain the ability to test fetuses or unborn babies for the extra chromosome, the Down syndrome?
That's a really good question.
Because they used to have to do it by like sticking a needle into the belly, right?
And that actually accidentally killed a lot of babies doing that.
Yeah.
I mean, now.
We know we can get it from blood, which is kind of crazy.
Yeah, you just take a blood sample.
And they can tell everything.
They can tell the sex.
They can tell all kinds of stuff.
And one cool thing about that that I learned recently that I love is that those cells that are circulating in the mother's blood don't just disappear after the baby is born.
Like they're there, they're in the mother in some way or another forever.
So, like every mother is carrying cells from every child she's had somewhere in her body.
Sometimes they settle in and they become other things, but those cells are in there, which is kind of crazy.
That is really crazy.
It's also interesting how, like, the DNA, the code, your specific DNA, your specific gene, genome sequence is replicated throughout every cell in the body, right?
Except for the red blood cells.
Is that right?
That's right.
Yeah.
It's just such a wild thing because, like, you know, it seems like in nature everything is this way.
Yeah.
And what's interesting there is that, In a way, even though you're a single organism, you also are kind of like, you know, like an environment of organisms.
Because, like, all of your cells are carrying roughly the same genetic material, but they can also mutate.
And so, it's something called somatic changes.
You have your germline changes, which are changes you inherit from your parents.
And then you have changes that can happen in individual cells after you're born.
It's like mutations.
And this is kind of like what gives rise to cancer.
You know, you have a mutation, and then suddenly that cell starts expanding a lot more and passing on that mutation.
So, we have Almost like mini evolution happening within your own body.
But the mutations, like you said, happen a lot faster, right?
They can, yeah.
Than like the positive changes.
What would be the word for that, the scientific word?
Like, what's the opposite of a mutation?
Well, so mutation is just referring to the change.
Oh, it's just a change.
It's not necessarily negative.
Exactly.
It doesn't mean that.
Yeah.
Uh huh.
So, got it.
It also doesn't mean it turns you into an X-Men.
So, not a lot.
The CRISPR baby stuff.
Yes.
There was the guy in China who went to jail for three years for, I think he was just trying to modify using CRISPR the gene sequence of a baby somehow.
And he was trying to like optimize the baby to not get HIV or something like that.
Right.
I think that's right.
Yeah.
I can't remember the exact details, but I think it's, I mean, because there are certain individuals who carry mutations that protect them from contracting HIV.
And so, yeah, I think he was trying to make those changes in an embryo to protect those, which, yeah, seems like.
And this was years ago.
This was at least like five, six years ago, something like that.
I can't remember exactly.
Find out what year that was, Steve.
Do you know how fast this stuff, this CRISPR stuff, is advancing?
Yeah.
I mean, one of the biggest things recently, like up till recently, that was an issue with CRISPR is something called off target effects.
So that's, you know, there are a lot of parts of our genome that look very similar to each other.
And so if you try to change one part of the genome, but you mess up, you know, it might attach itself somewhere else and change the wrong part of the genome.
2019.
Yeah.
Six years ago.
Yeah.
So it was very.
Risky to try to use CRISPR because it's like you're editing, but you don't know what's going to get edited.
We're getting a lot better at that.
So we can much more specifically target certain regions of the genome.
But I forget where I started with this.
CRISPR, exactly.
When it comes to editing specific things like the HIV receptor or whatever.
Yeah.
It's like using a blunt tool to do fine precision work.
Yeah, although I think we're sharpening the tool every day, but it still becomes this question of what changes should or should we not make?
Green Light Therapy for Headaches00:04:00
Because even like, you know, it makes sense.
And who gets to decide?
Exactly, yeah.
And then there's a combination of like something that's already happening selection of embryos, like which embryos you're going to implant in vitro fertilization versus based on genetic markers versus modification of embryos.
You know, like those are two different.
But overlapping kind of strategies for deciding what the next generation should be.
But it's like, you know, we were talking about I get severe migraines, and that's something that's determined largely by genetics.
I would love to not have migraines, but I also don't feel like I should not exist because I get migraines.
You know what I mean?
Like it's not, yeah, it becomes very tricky.
Have you ever heard of the green light therapy for migraines?
No.
Oh, Steve, you got to pull up the clip of Tom Seager.
We had this guy on here recently who, uh, He came up with this device that's a little light panel and it shines green light.
And he says he explained it in a scientific way how if you shine it on your face, it can alleviate migraines.
Okay.
And I don't think there's been, I don't, maybe he said there was a test or a study done on this or whatever.
But yeah, it was, it was wild.
I mean, from the podcast or he's got another video that's shorter.
Yeah, I don't, I don't necessarily want to make it like a long thing.
I mean, I would try anything at this point.
Yeah, there's a short clip of it, Steve.
There's got to be a short clip.
Type in Tom Seeger.
Yeah, there you go, right there.
Here.
Oh, cool.
Put the little headphones on.
You'll be able to hear him explain it.
Go right before he turns the light on.
There you go.
What's called the migraine lamp?
Migraine?
It's green light therapy for headaches.
So I'm going to shine this on my eyes because you use it like this.
If you're in a therapeutic setting, you would set it on like a little cell phone stand, you'd put it in front of you.
You'd close your eyes and you let the green light come through your closed eyelids.
Nobody knows why this works, but it works.
I was on Mark Bell's podcast and his producer, Andrew.
He's had migraines ever since he was a kid.
And so he asked me about it.
The invention was kind of accidental because I had a girlfriend with migraine headaches and I was looking at red light and UV and phototherapy.
And I think Google must have known that I was doing this library search.
And, you know, it's, hey, maybe you're going to like this one or something because they watch my every move, you know?
That's odd.
Yeah, right.
And it was about green light.
And photophobia for people who suffer from migraines.
When you have a migraine, most migranters want total darkness because the light will make their headache worse.
So they shut themselves in a closet or in a dark bedroom or something.
It's terrible.
But at Harvard, they tested all the wavelengths of light and they found that green had a pain relieving or analgesic effect.
University of Arizona picks this up and they start making devices with just green LEDs in them for migrainers to use.
And they get a significant effect.
Significant reduction in the frequency and severity of migraine headaches among those people who used green light phototherapy.
The mechanism.
Crazy, right?
Yeah.
I will absolutely try that because I have the blue light filtering glasses and they're so so.
The red ones that filter all the blue light.
Yeah, He gave me one of those little lamps and my wife tried it, but it didn't work for her.
Okay.
But I don't think she gets actual migraines.
She just gets a different type of headache.
Okay.
But.
I'll give it a try.
Might be worth checking it out.
So, yeah, no, where were we?
I was like, so what do you think?
Dog Genes and Lifespan Changes00:15:17
What do you, obviously, it's a speculation, but what do you think that this CRISPR gene editing stuff can lead to?
Like, what's the best possible outcome for something like this?
Like, do you think it's going to be like to work on if somebody has like a history of cancer or heart disease, you might be able to?
Prevent that in future generations?
Yeah, I mean, but I think that's absolutely the best possible outcome.
You know, we know, like, I feel like there are some very clear examples where we know, like, the breast cancer genes, like BRCA1, BRCA2, I think, that like dramatically increase your risk of cancer.
If we could change those in the ways that we know are associated with less cancer in an individual, that would be great.
Because right now, generally, if you have those mutations, they recommend like preventative mastectomies or things like that, that are really invasive and terrible.
So, you know, if they could kind of change that.
Wonderful.
The problem is when we start getting into kind of more complicated scenarios because that's a very obvious thing.
You know, we have this one genetic change that causes this thing.
Otherwise, really, anytime we're looking for something like that, we're looking at correlations.
And so, correlations are super dangerous in any scientific research.
Can you explain what this means?
Yes, absolutely.
So, my favorite example is ice cream sales are highly correlated with shark attacks.
Ice cream sales are highly correlated with shark attacks.
Yes.
Okay.
This is not because sharks really like ice cream.
It's because people eat ice cream in the summer, people go in the ocean in the summer.
And so you have this really strong correlation.
Like I've seen graphs, and it's like incredible where you have a peak in ice cream sales, you have a peak in shark attacks.
Okay.
So that's essentially what we're doing with a lot of the genetics of disease that we're looking at.
So, you know, if we look at, you know, hypertension and we say, oh, it's really strongly correlated with this genetic variant, maybe that's because.
People with that genetic variant are predisposed for some other reason based on their socioeconomic status or the environment that they're living in.
You know, there's all these different factors that could play a role in that correlation to the point where you may be picking up on correlation with a certain ethnic background or something like that, especially in a country like the US, where we have, you know, a lot of diversity and a lot of factors that influence the health of people from different ethnic backgrounds.
And so, in that way, it's scary to think that we could be making a change based on a correlation rather than based on a causation.
And in that way, potentially like erasing.
Genetic material that's related to a certain ethnic background or something like that.
I mean, that's my worst case scenario fear.
But in the cases where we have like a very clear causal effect, where we say you make this change, this person will be less likely to get cancer, I think that would be amazing.
Is there a way to affect lifespan, like general lifespan?
I know there's lots of influences that can affect lifespan, obviously.
Yeah.
But like genetic contributors to lifespan?
Yeah.
So I used to always say, like, Lifespan can't be influenced by evolution because, you know, once you're past a certain age, like you've made it, you're the fittest, you've survived, you know, evolution doesn't care about you anymore because, like, at that point, you're not having children anymore.
Right.
So you kind of are out of the equation.
But there's this really cool thing called the grandmother hypothesis that says that basically, if a grandparent is involved in the lives of their grandchildren, their children are able to have more children.
And those children live healthier lives and are more likely to survive.
So, just by living long enough to grandparent, they're increasing the chance that their genes get passed on.
And in this way, we can pass on longevity genes.
Wow.
So, grandparents interacting with grandchildren can influence the grandchildren to have more kids.
Yeah.
It's basically like, you know, if you have kids, And you're exhausted because you have no one to help you, you're like, you know what?
One kid is enough.
Like, I am good.
Right.
I say this as an auntie, not as a mom.
But, you know, let's say grandma and grandpa live down the road.
They're helping take care of those kids.
You know, your burden is eased.
You're like, okay, maybe I could have another kid.
Maybe I could have another couple kids.
Or maybe those kids are getting more attention, more, you know, they're getting all of the things that are going to enable them to survive better.
Yeah.
And so, in that way, you know, if you're, if you unfortunately, you're, The grandparents passed away young, then those genes aren't being passed on necessarily as much as the people who live a long time and are able to play a role in their grandchildren's lives.
Because the children aren't incentivized to have more kids because it's just so much work.
Exactly.
It's so much of a burden.
Is there anything in genetics that predisposes certain women to want to have more children or not want to have more children?
Yeah, that's an interesting question.
Or, like, what if a woman's like, you know, I want to have 10 children, like, I don't care how stressful it is.
And then, you know, someone else comes along without, you know, absent of any external influences, just like, I'm not interested.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, as someone from the latter of those camps, I would be very curious to see if there is an influence on that.
And I feel like it's probably only kind of in the generations now that we would really be able to tease that apart because up till now, there's been so much societal pressure to have children.
But I feel like anyone who even had those thoughts is probably like, well, that's just what you do.
So it would be a really cool study to see.
Yeah.
I mean, evolutionarily, you would think that you'd select for the people who wanted to have more kids because those people would pass on their genes more.
You could say I'm an evolutionary failure because I'm not passing on my genes.
I can influence how those genes get passed on by taking care of nieces and nephews and things like that.
But it ends with me in terms of my lineage.
So, yeah, if I had 10 kids, then the next generation of humans on this planet would have much more of my genetic material.
So, you would think that evolution would select for women who really want to have kids.
But I don't know if that study's been done.
Right, right.
Yeah, another interesting thing, you know, going back to the dog thing, is how, and this also ties into the CRISPR stuff, but we're basically genetically modifying our pets.
Oh, yeah.
Right?
We modify them to be cuter.
Yes.
And the cutest ones are the ones that are least likely to survive.
Yeah.
And also, I was having a conversation with my neighbor this morning, funny enough, who has a really big German shepherd.
And he was explaining to him how all of the little, like, tiny, cute dogs are the ones that attack his German Shepherd the most.
That tracks.
I was like, genetically, how does that make sense?
Like, you would think that nature would teach the little, helpless dog not to attack the German Shepherd who could kill it in two seconds.
Yeah.
So, one of my dogs weighs eight pounds.
His name is Lupo, which means wolf in Italian.
So, he has that wolf spirit.
You know, he thinks he's a big dog.
And sure enough, like, first.
Dog he approaches at the dog park is always the biggest dog.
He's not aggressive, like, he doesn't come at them, but he just has no idea how small he is.
And he would absolutely not survive under, like, you know, it's like.
It seemed like the smallest dogs are the meanest.
Yeah, yeah.
He's very sweet.
Right.
But yeah, but it's even just in terms of, like, you know, I mean, the other day we didn't realize our furnace was broken and it was 63 degrees in the house instead of 67, which is what we normally have it at.
And he was shivering like crazy.
And that was how I knew the furnace was broken.
And I'm like, dog, you would not survive out there on your own.
No.
Yeah.
No.
And we're doing that to ourselves.
We're, we're, Domestic, if you look at what humans were 10,000 years ago compared to now, we are basically teacup Yorkies compared to the wolves we used to be.
Yeah, yeah.
And that goes into everything.
That's with everything.
All of these environmental influences that aren't even on purpose.
It's just the way our society is with making things more convenient with microplastics and technology, doing everything for us.
We are becoming like.
You know, teacup Yorkies of Homo sapiens.
Well, getting back to this, you know, best fit versus most fit, like, you know, we have this idea that to be, you know, the fittest in our modern environment, like, we should be tough, we should be strong, we should be able to handle the elements, you know, like, same with the dogs, but it's like, actually, people who, you know, are able to navigate the current environment, regardless of how physically fit they are, are the people who are more likely to have more children.
You know, it doesn't matter if you could survive a snowstorm, like, that's probably not going to influence whether or not you have kids.
And, like, these cute, tiny dogs.
You know, we want more of them because they're so cute.
So, you know, they're also in that way passing on more of their genes than the dogs that are super tough and could survive.
Yeah.
But if there was some sort of a bottleneck event, like a super volcano or something like that, or like a comet impact or whatever like that, the people that were, and it's crazy that right now we can live here in North America flying around on airplanes recording podcasts and simultaneously there's people running around naked in the Amazon.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And if there was some sort of a cosmic.
Cosmic event or catastrophic cataclysm that wiped out most of humanity, those would be the ones, those people would be the people that would most likely survive.
Yeah, I mean, depending on how the earth changed, you know, those of us teacup Yorkies would go the way of the dinosaurs, you know.
I mean, we're not adapted to some of the potential ways that the earth could change in an event like that.
Right.
Which makes me wonder are those indigenous tribes, those, I mean, there's some uncontacted tribes who treat humans as like predators and they kill humans when they see them, right?
Like, they run around with these giant arrows and as soon as they see the civilized humans, they hunt them down and try to kill them.
Like, I wonder how far back their lineage goes, you know, like how, because it's been, I don't know how, how would they be evolving?
Would they be evolving?
Like, have you heard of North Sentinel Island?
Yes.
Uh huh.
Yeah.
Like those people.
Right, right.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, we don't have any genetic data from them, obviously, for obvious reasons.
But also, like, you know, given like some of the genocides that have occurred against indigenous populations, you can't blame them for throwing those spears or arrows or whatever at the people who are trying to contact them.
Oh, yeah.
But yeah, I mean, it just totally depends on their environment.
They're, you know, Living in, I think those environments are pretty tropical.
So there's pathogen rich environments.
We know that people living in the Amazon have actually evolved adaptations that protect them from certain parasitic infections.
So they may have adaptations like that because, you know, like you or I would go see a doctor, get a medicine.
We would, our ability to pass on our genes would not be affected by, you know, a parasitic infection.
But if you're living in an uncontacted tribe, you know, maybe that pathogen or that parasite kills you.
So that's an opportunity for that population to be evolving.
They probably think of those things as like some sort of like demonic, demonic evil spirit or something like that.
Like, I mean, just look what happened when the Spanish came to the Amazon and wiped out, you know, the Mayas and the Incas with all those diseases.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, that's when you mix like a technologically advanced society with a not advanced society.
Well, and there's a really amazing book called 1491 that I highly recommend that basically suggests that.
What we saw of the Americas, you know, this idea that it was like technologically advanced and not, was essentially because we were looking at like refugee camps because disease spread faster than colonists.
And so, you know, if you have a disease that comes through and wipes out 90% of the population, you know, if that happened here and then people arrived 50 years later, 100 years later, or something like that, it would probably look like we weren't very technologically advanced because all of the technology that we had developed would kind of fall apart as we struggled to recover from this catastrophic disease outbreak.
So, yeah, the book kind of posits that the impression that a lot of the colonists who arrived in the Americas got was very skewed by the fact that most of the population had been killed by disease shortly before their arrival.
Oh, wow.
It's a really good book.
I highly recommend it.
It's called 1491.
Oh, wow.
That's fascinating.
Now, I mentioned to you briefly about that Mike Masters book before we started about this idea of pedomorphism, how primates, the offspring of primates, They look more like fully grown adults today, where they have, they sit up straight and they have these like kind of like bulbous heads that sit up straight over their shoulders and they, they look like, um, they look like normal, fully evolved humans today.
But when the primates get older into full adulthood, they change.
Their jaw protrudes, their head slopes back, and they sort of hunch over.
And he says that this is an evolutionary thing, it looks like if you extrapolate that into the future, the fully grown adults in the future will look like the children of today, more like a toddler of today would look like a fully grown adult.
Do you know anything about that?
Or is that.
I hadn't heard of that.
It's an interesting idea.
The one thing that I would say is that, again, coming back to this idea, you know, you said extrapolate, like that's assuming that evolution is happening in this like linear direction way.
Right.
And it's just like so hard to say, you know, it's like the thing where people say, oh, our pinky toe has been getting smaller over the past 100,000 years.
Therefore, eventually we won't have one.
And it's like, well, no, as long as natural selection isn't acting against that, you know, as long as if someday it becomes really sexy to only have four toes.
Four toes, then the population would change in that way.
But otherwise, we're just going to stay kind of how we are.
Like, you need natural selection to drive a change like that.
I mean, things can change just randomly, but usually natural selection would be required.
So, if there was something that was selecting for, and maybe that's part of the hypothesis, I haven't read the book.
Oh, there you go.
There's an example.
Yeah.
So, if there's something about the current state of toddlers, you know, human toddlers that becomes more advantageous in the future, then totally we could evolve.
Future Human Evolution Predictions00:05:34
To look more like them in the future.
But otherwise, we'll probably just stay pretty much the same.
Well, it makes logical sense if you look at technology taking over for the need for us to do like physical things, right?
We don't need big muscles.
Like, we need like toddlers have bigger heads compared to their bodies.
They would use our heads more.
We would be skinnier.
We would be smaller, more frail because we would rely on technology to do this stuff.
And, um, You know, obviously, technology has been advancing since we were first able to create fire, and that's changed the shape of our jaws and things like this, the shape of our heads.
Yeah.
We don't need giant hands anymore.
Yeah.
So I think technology would probably have to have a big part of that as long as technology keeps evolving and keeps, you know, and who knows what happens when we really reach some sort of like technological singularity.
You know, maybe we just get wiped out.
Who knows?
Yeah.
But it seems like that has a lot to do with technology, changing our anthropomorphic look.
I mean, you could certainly say that, like, in our current environment, maybe, you know, our heads will get bigger because it's advantageous to be smart.
But then, if you look at, have you ever seen the movie Idiocracy?
Yes.
Okay.
So that's been a long time.
That's a good movie.
With one caveat that is, in my opinion, the only accurate portrayal of evolution I've ever seen in a movie.
So, you know, you have a lot of movies that talk about evolution, most of them get it wrong.
You know, like, I love the X Men movies, but those, you know, it's, Even the movie Evolution is like not an accurate portrayal of evolution.
But Idiocracy starts with the idea that essentially stupid people are having more children than smart people currently.
And therefore, in the future, more of those children are having more children.
And these like stupid genes are being passed on to the point where I forget how many years into the future, everyone is really dumb.
And so, an average person currently becomes a genius in the future.
And it's a very funny, very silly movie.
And I would say the one part, my caveat to it being accurate, is that we don't.
We haven't actually ever identified like a genetic contribution to intelligence because it's such a complicated thing to measure.
Right.
But anyway, but if that were true, then absolutely.
I mean, maybe if you, and maybe I shouldn't say this, but if you think about the people who are having many, many children and think about that potentially driving the selection of our species into the future, it's just hard to predict what's going to increase in frequency in the next generation.
Yeah.
Well, definitely, if you think about it, the people, the smartest people in universities and in labs, they aren't.
Raising tons of kids, right?
They're more focused on their work and whatever they're doing.
And it's a much more focused thing where you're dedicating all of your skill and all of your time to mastering something or to figuring out a problem.
That's true.
That is true.
Is that intelligence or is that how you were raised and education and all these other things?
That's a whole other debate.
But yeah, it's just to say that I don't necessarily see a strong selective pressure driving us as a population, a human population.
Species to be smarter, have bigger heads, et cetera, you know, in the ways that we kind of think.
Well, maybe the big heads doesn't have to necessarily do with being smarter.
Right.
Yeah, it might not.
But again, like, unless people with big heads are having more children or people with small heads are not having children, then there's no reason for us to move towards big heads.
And it also seems like we may evolve to be, you know, is it possible that we evolve to even being sexless?
In the future, with AI and with genetic engineering and things like this, where we're not creating, we're not procreating the same way, like by having sex anymore.
It's not this primitive thing we do anymore.
Now it's just like we use science and technology to create the perfect kid.
We don't need to do it that way.
That's too primitive.
Well, and that's so interesting.
I mean, you know, that would be like a cultural evolution that could totally change.
Everything about our species because, yeah, if you don't, then the rules of evolution as we know it don't apply anymore because you're creating that human in a way that our species has never done in the past.
Yeah.
And that's like another one of the points of Michael Masters' book is he connects it to like the worldwide depictions of these little gray aliens that people talk about and people allegedly see that are.
They seem to be genderless, have no sexual organs, and they look like toddlers, right?
And have these big eyes, like they were adapted to see in the dark.
Yeah, and basically he has this elaborate theory that, which is like, it's out there, but it makes sense in that realm that like if we were to evolve hundreds of thousands of years into the future, is it possible that we could end up looking like that?
Picasso as an Intelligence Outlier00:05:19
Right.
And then, if there was some sort of like nuclear war or some sort of cataclysm that wiped out a large swath of humanity, that we could maybe, if we were that far advanced, maybe we could figure out time travel, go back and select from the genetic pool back in the past and to repopulate the species in the future.
That's his whole hypothesis, which is wild.
That's fun.
It's super fun.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thinking about evolution in the far future.
And, like, all the ways that technology is going to be able to influence these things is very fun.
So, you said that intelligence is not genetically passed on?
That we have been able to identify because it's so hard.
This is another one of those correlation causation things where it's like, there have been some studies, and I take issue with these studies that look at genetics paired with educational attainment.
So, how far you go in school.
First of all, I don't think how far you go in school is a good measure of intelligence because I know people who dropped out of high school who were brilliant and people who have PhDs who are not so brilliant.
So, it's like, how does that?
Quantify intelligence.
You know, our best attempt at quantifying intelligence is the IQ test.
And even that is super flawed, we know.
The IQ test is ancient, right?
It's not been updated.
Right, right.
So it's like.
It's basically pattern matching, right?
It's like finding patterns.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we don't even have a good way of measuring intelligence.
But then even if we, you know, if we use educational attainment, not saying that we should, but that people have done this and continue to present on this at genetics conferences, which always blows my mind, and you correlate that with.
With genetics, you know, you could imagine in the US, there are going to be certain correlations that are purely a legacy of some of the demographic things that have happened in this country.
Like, there are people who don't have an opportunity to go to school because of their ethnic background.
And so you may end up, like, you could end up with a study where you say, look, here's the genetic change that makes you get a PhD, but actually it's just a measure of, you know, how white you are or how affluent your family is, you know, related to your genetic.
Your background.
And so it becomes really problematic because it's like, what exactly are we measuring if we don't even know how to measure intelligence to begin with?
And then there's so many conflating factors.
And intelligence isn't a monolith either.
It's not one thing.
Like there are many different types of intelligence, right?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
People can have high verbal intelligence, they can have high emotional intelligence.
Does someone with an identity intelligence?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
And it all just depends on your environment.
And we also.
In the Western world, we equate intelligence with like monetary success.
When you know, if you actually look at these people who have achieved an enormous amount of wealth, they've usually done it in like one narrow lane, right?
That they've focused on their whole life, and then anything outside of that lane, they're like a teenager, they don't know much about anything, right?
Yeah, yeah, and I mean, you know, you take an intelligent person, they eat some lead paint from the walls of their apartment as a baby, and suddenly their IQ has dropped.
15 points just from that exposure to lead.
So there's like all these environmental factors that are so hard to disentangle with anything that it's like, right, it's really hard.
And that's where, you know, this genetic editing, too, if we want to make like super intelligent babies, like we don't, we don't know what, we don't have any idea how to do that.
You know, we have the technology if we knew what the gene was, but we don't, we're so far from knowing.
And also, some of like, some of the most iconic.
People in history, like Pablo Picasso, or even some musicians, they thrived and they became so well known for what they did, and they did something that was so much more advanced than anyone else in their field.
A lot of them, because of some sort of negative.
Or some sort of negative physical attribute or something that was missing.
Like, for example, Pablo Picasso.
Some people speculate that one of the reasons that he was so good at depicting light and depicting depth in his paintings was because he could only see in 2D.
He didn't have 3D vision because his eyes looked out.
He was wall eyed or whatever.
People speculate from all of his photos that he couldn't see that.
That made him extraordinary at depicting depth in his paintings and creating these amazing looking paintings that no one else could do.
You know, that's interesting too, that how people can just become outliers because of a deficiency they have.
Right.
And, you know, genius is so contextual.
Like, Picasso at the time wasn't perceived by everyone as being a genius.
Now we see him that way.
Superhuman Lab Resources00:01:33
But, like, at the time, hundreds of years later.
Yeah.
Like, I recently, my husband's a symphony musician, and the symphony played Rachmaninoff's first symphony.
And it was so poorly received when he wrote it that he went into a depression for three years.
And the symphony was lost until, like, the 40s because he basically threw it out.
And so it's like, you know, that is now seen as this brilliant piece of music that was ahead of its time and, you know, really well composed.
But at the time, it was people who compared it to, I can't, I think they said like the seven circles of hell or something.
They said listening to it, the experience was like being in hell.
So yeah, it's like, it's such a hard thing to, we could never quantify it, I think.
Wow.
Well, that's fascinating.
Melissa, thank you so much for doing this.
Fascinating.
Is there anything else interesting that we haven't covered that you think we should talk about?
I'm trying to think of.
I feel like we've talked about a lot.
Yeah, we did.
We covered a ton.
Yeah.
Where can people find more of your work and some of the studies that you've done or learn more about you or contact you?
Yeah.
So my lab is called the Superhuman Lab.
So I have a website, superhumanlab.org.
I'm also on Instagram.
It's superhumansci lab.
And I love.
Getting questions, comments, messages.
So, yeah, I'd be happy to talk to anyone.
Fantastic.
Well, thank you so much.
This has been, I'm going to have to go back and listen to this like two more times.