#960 - Dr Jerry Coyne - The Spiciest Ideas Of Evolutionary Biology

30:41Congratulations. The question was that if you're geographically isolated, it's about a million, two million years until you get to the point where we had bags of time. We could have spent ages bringing the modern world around and we would have still been okay. Do we know if the offspring of homo sapiens and Neanderthals, if those two made it? Do we know if they were viable? not only with the Bible, they're fertile. And we know that because we all carry on not all of us, but most of us carry the antithyl genes. Right. I've come to say that it that are homo sapiens, sapiens, and homo sapiens, the antithylansis.

31:23I consider them the same species, although there's a big argument about it. I consider them the same species because they made it with each other. And some of the genes of those hybrids got back into to homo sapiens sapiens and we carry them around. And that is an evolutionary remnant of the fact that yes, we interbred with them. If the aerothols were still around, I have a little doubt that they would be carrying genes from homo sapiens sapiens. And an evolutionary artifact of the fact that people like to have sex. And if it looks about right, we'll probably make it work. Am I right in saying that the last remaining non -homo sapiens, species, genotype, phenotype, whatever the word is for that?

32:15Was it those pigme that really small homo? Oh, homo's homo floreseans. Yeah, in Indonesia? Is that because that was only 12 ,000 years ago, right? It's called the different species, which implies that it could not make with, and there were some of the sapiens around it too. And some of the sapiens were just answers about this bigger stuff. Very like tricky tall. Amazing, that's what they call them. I can't remember what they call them, that's human pig needs or something. They call them different species on one basis only, which is tiny. And they look different. We don't know enough about them to know if they really are a different biological species.

33:02Do you know the story of why they grew to be so small? Okay, so I'm going to get into real just so territory here, okay? But allow me to pontifficate. So the proposed mechanism, as far as I'm aware, that the homophluorenses, for easy answers. I'll let you do the technical language. I'll do the brochines. At the reason that they grew to be so small, if you look at the shape of Indonesia, very, very small islands. So you have this sort of galapagos effect thing going on where you can quite easily be segmented off from a mainland. And what it seems like is that a group of homo ancestors were separated off onto an island that had really, really sparse resources.

33:54So you kind of had this mouthhusey and knee type issue up a bound, which means that if there's not many resources, not any calories available, the people who need the fewest calories are going to be the ones that survive. But the funny thing about this story is that that effect obviously occurred across every animal. So apparently there are bones of miniaturized elephants also on this same island. So if you were able to go back 12 ,000 years ago you would see miniature versions of humans running around with tiny little spears chasing miniature versions of elephants running away with tiny little trunks.

34:34Well it is true that in general if a large species embays a distant island that's doesn't have a lot of resources, it will evolutionarily shrink. We have picked me off and sent a Mediterranean, by the way, remnants of them. I guess I could swim back then. But there are exceptions like the Galapagos Taurus, which is small in South America, it's answers to the way it got to the Galapagos. Well, the reason I probably got big is that there was actually a plethora of resources, lots of vegetation, no compares, no herbivores. So go to town big. Yeah, so you could get either bigger small but in general evolutionists tend to observe that animals they're large on the mainland they're confined to a small resource poor space tend to get smaller so but I don't know if that applies to humans.

35:29I mean I want to use the answers because we have so few specimens we don't have all skeletons or anything just a couple maybe finial bonds or something we don't really know much about them except the Excuse me, they were tiny. And they have a four size replica in this Missoria. It was so amazingly small that I had somebody photograph me standing next to her camera to about my waist. And that's an adult. So that's one of the many mysteries of email pollution. There's more to come, because specimens are already come by. Before we continue getting mobile data while traveling is still way harder than it should be.

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36:38And if you haven't activated your data plan or installed the eSim, Saley offers a full refund within 30 days. No questions asked. Right now you can get 15 % off any data plan by going to the link in the description below or heading to saly .com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom. A checkout. That's S -A -I -L -Y dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. When it comes to ethnic groups. Have you looked at why it is Asians, East Asians, Africans, Caucasians? What is the reason for the main differences that we see, either in the way that they present in the sort of shape, I don't know if that's called morphology or whatever, the shape of bodies.

37:25Do you know the adaptive explanation for why different groups became that way? Well, for some traits, yeah, we think so. I mean, the most obvious one is skin pigmentation because you can draw a map of the world and look at the average degree of pigmentation. And you can see that in the artist areas, the sunniest areas you get, darker skin,

37:54which the other side of the corner is, well, why do you get less skin when you leave better? Because you can still get my honey up less from the sun. That's because you want to get vitamin D from the sun. And you don't have to worry about, you know, the importance of getting vitamin D is more important than getting malinelmas when you're in an area where there's not so much sun. So that's the explanation. That's just one trait, though. There are many many differences between, you know, it was the shape of the hair, whether it's curly or straight eyed color. Those adaptive is a green eyes adaptive compared with brown?

38:31No idea. I mean, good. See, they, all of the people that say evolutionary scientists, they never say I don't know. Here we are, evolutionary scientists, saying I don't know. Well, it'll be a pretty pathetic scientist that never met an ignorance right here. She did, how did the answer? There's a lot of things we don't, I mean, physicists wise they're dark matter and they have to say they don't know. A strength theory right, we don't know. But there are some traits that we do know, for example, that Tibetans have a higher genetic basis to hang on to oxygen more in their hemoglobin. And clearly that's adaptive because they live in an oxygen -port environment.

39:21So that's the trait where we know. And there's probably about a dozen traits where we... But they're not the kind of things that interest people. We want to know, you know, why people have curly hair. Well, another one that's probably true is that people who live in cold climates, like the Inuits in Alaska, Canada, tend to be short, stocky. And that's a general rule in the animal kingdom because limbs and protruding parts tend to be heat heat reservoirs given off heat so you don't want to have long arms or you want to have a short stocky blighted Heat loss. So that's probably another thing for Which we think is probably During an actual selection because it's also true in other animals I mean I think it's called Alan's rule.

40:11That's what it is that as you go to call their climax to protruding parts, which include the ears of Jack Roberts. I mean, if you look at an arctic rabbit, it's ears like this. If you look at a Jack rabbit, the does are where they need to radiate. Eat. Their ears are huge. So that's an example. And that's probably a case in humans as well. But, you know, it's things like hair color, eye color. I can't remember the politically correct word for the... Oh, the son. I'm think me say his name is called the son of the Bushman. Why they're small. I'm not sure I mean they live in a hard environment But they're small and we don't know the explanation for that it would be hard to test that so I Was told the other day this maybe a just a story again.

40:59I've got my bro signs cap on the reason that Irish and Scottish and English people get rosacea So Rosacea, this sort of ruddy cheeks reddening of the face, is the next step up in Vitamin D production. So it's even, it's kind of beyond pale. So if you go from dark skinned to light skinned to slightly red skinned, it's a, suppose it I think an indication that your body is able to generate its own Vitamin D more more effectively. And this comes from Shock Horror, a place that I'm, I was born in, which is pretty dark a lot of the time. Pretty low on sunlight, a lot of cloud cover, a lot of rain, et cetera.

41:51And yeah, that was the proposed explanation for that that a friend told me about a couple of weeks ago. Well, I would look into that. It sounds a bit dubious to me because it would lead to prediction that for example the in your wet or the Siberians would all have rosacea because they're going to be in darkness for three months of the year. Yeah that's true. Well I just never heard that before. I mean my expression would be that they drink too much. No. I did my work. That's the system. It's true that people have drink a lot. They're capillaries broken in their faces. Now, I've never heard that one before.

42:36Going back to the state of academia, do you think science communicators have become too afraid of backlash to speak plainly about their subject areas and data as well? What's the state of it now? Absolutely. I mean, their self -sensorship all over the media. One example that I suppose is that, and this is in the UK, I think, that guy who was an Liverpool who drove his van into a crowd, identified in the times, I think it was in the telegraph, I call it the Tory graph. He was identified as 52 -year -old white man. But the British newspapers never give Ethnicity when they give a suspect now. Why is why is that you know even if the person's on the lamb as a big cut They're not gonna say that well.

43:31This is a black matter. This is a Hispanic matter or whatever because it's considered Racist to do that and so that's the most obvious example of how the media has been you know Has been censored self censored Also, if you read in the New York Times, you'll see that the word white is in small letters when describing summary's ethnicity and black is in the big as a capital B, which is a way of valorizing a minority group. I find that sort of inconsistent. The question and post by the way uses, I think it's either big letters to both of the small letters for both. Either way, it should be consistent.

44:16So these are just the most obvious things that stand out. I don't think that answers your question now. I think you're asking more about science than journalism or... I honestly don't mind at all. One thing that I want to bring in here, do you know what gamma bias is? No. So good. So this is Dr. John Barry from the Center for Male Psychology. So there's alpha bias, which is exaggerating our magnifying gender differences. there's beta bias, which is ignoring or minimizing gender differences. And then there's gamma bias, which is a combination of the two, but it's sexed. So if a female is in active mode and does good, then it's a celebration.

45:01If a female is in active mode, a male is in active mode and does harm, then it's perpetration. So, for instance, if you have a, if domestic violence happens against women, it's highlighted as a gender issue. If domestic violence happens against men, it's played down or completely ignored. Men make up the majority victims of suicide. The issues aren't highlighted or portrayed as gender issues. So there's the minimization of gender if men are the victims, and there's the maximization of gender if men are the perpetrators. There's the maximization of gender, if women are the successful perpetrators, if they're doing good, and there's the minimization of gender, if women are the perpetrators and they're doing harm.

45:44It's like an interesting dynamic. We call that virtue signalling. I'm like, if you do that, it stamps you as a good person basically. And there's no penalty to be in promale. I mean, sorry, there's no advantage to be in promale because you're just saying it's a success. And you don't even have to be promale. There's a penalty to telling the truth, which is the point of our paper. There's a penalty to saying that race is exist. There's especially a penalty to saying that there's only two sexes in humans. People have lost their jobs for saying that. I got where there are only two, this is a kid in probably about 15 or 16 in America.

46:28I still was just last week. He wore a shirt to school that said there are only two sexes. And he was asked to go home. They told him to pick up his father. Well, at the same school, you can wear a gay pride shirt, which is, I think, just about us. Well, first of all, there are only two sexes of the statement of biological fact. Gay pride is more of an ideological position. I'm in favor of it, but it's okay to wear a gay pride shirt. It's not okay to wear a shirt that gives a biological truth because that truth is invidious. Yeah. I was big because it implies that there's something wrong with people who feel that they're not, remember, they're natal sex.

47:15Yeah. It's just the biological fact that keep saying this over and over again. Sucks with people recognized that there were males and females years before we even identified crumpsons, every animal and every plant, the best good plant has just two sexes, the male sex and the female sex. And sometimes you have them both in one individual, but the reproductive system, still there's only two. There's one large immobile gamete, which is female, a small mobile gamete, which is male. But if you say that, you're getting big trouble. I've got was working for the, I was on the honorary board of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which is an organization with a good nation to keep religion and government separate in the United States.

48:10That's our first amendment. And they worked hard to do that. But one of their members decided that she, I guess it would be a day because this person And then Kat Grant called it, conserves herself to be of both sexes. Anyway, she wear a piece in that newsletter of that organization saying, what is a woman? That's the title of it. And she goes through all these things about, well, you can't use this and you can't use that. And in the end, what is a woman? A woman is whoever feels that she's a woman. Okay, it's just like a logical thing, not a biological thing. Well, it's like saying, I feel like I'm a horse today.

48:54So you got to call me a horse. You know, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not too far of an exaggeration. Anyway, that offended me as a biologist. I was on the on directors. And so I asked permission to rebut it. And they said, okay, you can write something. So I wrote a thing saying, this is the biological definition of sex. It doesn't have any implications for the moral or legal rights of people who feel that they're not firmly embedded in one of the two sexes, you know, they have different genres and a woman is an adult human female that produces or has the ability or the equipment to Bruce X and they published that and it disappeared within a day.

49:45They told me they took that down because they considered it offensive. That's the state of biological. It's I'm kind of torn, right? I on the show have spoken about a variety of topics pertaining to evolution, behavioral genetics, psychology, sex differences. is and I kind of like it feels a little bit like a high -wire walking, right? To sort of do, play the game appropriately to be able to get across what you mean, but to not step on too many landmines that cause you to get completely blown up. Maybe you could lose a toe, but that's an acceptable cost of war or whatever. But even I find myself, you know, when we start talking about like what is a woman, you Well, the question that often gets put against people that think gender is a social construct, they say gender is a social construct, but they push it into sex as well.

50:42And even I find myself going like, I know that it's a useful rhetorical tool. I know it might even be a useful biological teaching tool to ask this question, to sort of allow people, encourage people to arrive at this sort of non -sequitor, recursive loop thing that they're in. But I find myself going like, I really want to use that because it's sort of become so captured by a group of people who really want to use it again as a cudgel to sort of beat down and creep out what it is that they mean. They don't just mean this. They mean and what are your beliefs about marriage and what are your beliefs about reproduction and what are your beliefs?

51:25It starts to get into this kind of icky world because good arguments are very, very good. The evolution of the meme, I suppose, but this is like an academic meme or an intellectual useful meme, and it propagates. And I find myself, I'm like, well, how having this conversation in a way that is persuasive, that is accurate, that is, I don't want to say the word sensitive, but speaks to the cultural temperature in a manner that allows people to get on board without getting their defenses up to. You know, I find myself tiptoeing through this in a little bit of a way. For instance, if I ever want to talk about the issues that the facing boys and men, there's this weird social land acknowledgement that I need to do beforehand where I say, well, we must remember that women have had it, women and girls have had it bad for a long time, and I'm not minimizing the issues that are facing.

52:26We must remember that domestic violence, and what about the subjects of, I would have to do gender pay, I know, you know, but, and after I've done this thing, like, you know, I've prostrated myself. I speak the truth. Yeah, and now I'm allowed to actually say the thing that I wanted to say, And unfortunately, there's no disclaimer. You know, research peptides and stuff that people can buy on the internet it says like these are not for human use or like this website is for entertainment purposes only. Whatever, there's like one disclaimer that sits there. Unfortunately, in the world of communication on the internet, like this kind of communication, you need to do that disclaimer every single time.

53:03You're like an Australian plane coming into land that every time you land, the first thing you say, We must remember that we're here on the ground of the HBGB tribe. This was an ancestral land, but it needs to happen every single time. And I, especially around the conversation around men and boys, disparities, socioeconomic status, men and boys falling behind, suicide ,ality, domestic violence, all of this stuff, it really gets to me. Because I'm like, the fuck sake, like, if I got to do this weird rain dance, I've got to like wave sage around myself in order to I think that's what you're doing.

53:39My answer would be no, you don't have to do that All you have to do is be civil and speak the truth. I mean the whole purpose of college in America at least has stated by the America Association of Human Rights Chief Professors is to To allow people to have disagreements about Factual matters without feeling offended by them, you know So you know a long time a long time ago with one exception, I'll mention I've given up putting these disclaimers in About you know in my paper that I wrote about these things like I will put it in this camera for example I'm talking about the two sexes. I will say well just because there are two sexes doesn't mean the people that feel that they're male when they're biological female, there's something wrong with them.

54:30Okay, it's important to show that what I call the reverse naturalistic fallacy, that nature is what you want it to be, is wrong. But every time you now these as claimers are sort of buying into that mindset that yeah, you know, I have to satisfy the other side before I can speak the truth. And so I, you know, I've just given that up more or less. And the way I deal with that is just to be civil on polite and you know not heated because the whole point is to to have a difference of opinion and try to persuade the other person if you think you're right of your viewpoint so I used to do that when I would on my website I would cite in a paper like the telegraph which is I think considered right -wing and England although not as right -wing is it would be in America or they had daily news in America the equivalent of the Wall Street Journal opinion section right when and I would say well you know this comes from the Wall Street Journal of Ed's but it speaks the truth anyway and I was just flying into that mentality that you have to qualify the truth if it's sub -other wrong people.

55:43Yeah wow that's and you've called that the reverse naturalistic fallacy. The specialistic fallacy which underlies all these 60 examples that I is how you want to be. So for example, if you feel like you're a transsexual, or if you feel like you waver between the sexes, I guess gender fluid is the word for that, then it must be true that there are not two sexes. So I mean, that's an example of that. Or if you think that humans are infinitely malleable in their behavior, then you have to say that there are no such things as biological differences is between married women or it loves to be gruest because nature has to conform to your political sensibilities.

56:31That's the object. That's the reverse of the naturalist, the naturalist in fallacy, which is what is in nature is what is good. I'm just reverse that and said, what is good is what you must see in nature. That's the reason for the whole ideological erosion and up science these days, making, and it comes from personal aronsum, I think, the idea that there's a pluck rose and lindsey where we're working about this. I can't remember the terror. It was quite good. Where they pen it all on personal aronsum, and it's idea that there is no absolutely truth. There are only personal truths in different groups, and who wins is based on how much power they have.

57:15And that's sort of the, what, you know, the thing behind this view that nature conforms to what you want it to pay. If you're a scientist, you have to believe there's an external reality and you have to believe, because I mean it works. We don't have to believe that. It didn't come about because this, you know, we had an ideology that there is a good external world that we can find out about. It just happens to be that there is. And that, you know, COVID has caused by a small We're all particle and we can attack it this way and here's the NA cycle so that happens to be the truth You know, it's not a personal truth that happens to be a truth that scientists of any stripe can agree on so so you know The whole I mean this is what's happened to the whole world in the last 15 years or so is that ideology has taken over almost every discipline.

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59:24That's drinkag1 .com slash modern wisdom. I don't know how I, I don't know where my position is on this now because I got not embroiled, but I certainly got interested in this world, this slow march through the institutions, this sort of progressive overreach that I think was doing a lot of damage to a lot of academia. And that maybe reached fever a pitch in 2020, 2021, something like that. And now I don't, I don't quite know what's going on. I think when the writer in power in America, there is much less of an impetus to talk about the sort of the crazy overreaches of the left because the right feel like they've already won.

1:00:18They're kind of still inside of the tent pissing out as we would say in the UK. And I don't know whether this also that fever pitch that reached in 2020, is that a genuine pullback? Is that this March has been slowed? Is it? We've kind of realized that some of this stuff was a little bit kooky and people kind of went along with the social contagion idea thing that made them seem cool or seem trendy. And now the trend seems to have swung into the direction a little bit or whatever. Is it that this is a genuine pullback or is it that there is a smarter game of foot from the people who are trying to encroach on science with ideology where they're doing it in a much smarter way that doesn't get as many headlines.

1:01:06They're continuing to try and repurpose, repurpose maths, repurpose chemistry, repurpose biology. I'm not really too sure, but I certainly see fewer and fewer of those was crazy, woke lunatic story thing. I also think I certainly had a ton of news for T. Like how many right wing articles and stories and videos do I need to see about the excesses of wokeness? And they always seem justified, right? They always seem by the people that are trying to push back against them. This shows the overreach that we've said was always going to, so and there's this Cassandra complex. We told you about this before this is gonna go But I'm not seeing as much anymore and I wonder what that indicates Well, it could be that you know They're winning.

1:01:55I mean you're asking me to predict the future and I don't really know but I think Bill weather for that is the loss of Kamala Harris in the United States in the election She was a real virtue say mother to the point where she That's how she did. She never said anything true or anything rational or anything like that. I was not a fan of hers. I did vote Democratic, but I wasn't happy about it. And she lost. Pretty big time, you know. And at least some of that came from her rejection of the sex binary. I mean, that's you can't you can find that out by asking them the polls. So I don't think the right is winning because they're smarter.

1:02:43I think the right is winning and I don't think that the pendulum is starting to swing the other way. I think the right is winning simply because something happened to the left and it may be the death of George Floyd. I don't know. That was about five years ago. That makes that instilled us with a deep sense of guilt for being responsible for treating the right. every marginalize group very badly. And so we're hesitant to fight against this kind of wokeness because it makes us look like we're right where it's to. So when I say, I mean, I sucks as a binary, I will swear to that. You know, I mean, when you look at why and so you look at kangaroos, you don't say, well, there's a male kangaroo, there's a female kangaroo, that kangaroo looks like you gender fluid to me.

1:03:36I mean, it's only in humans that you see this kind of stuff, which gives you a clue that it has something to do with human psychology rather than biological reality. But I can't forget my question. I guess. Oh, but yeah, about where the world is going. Yeah, so for some reason, the left has been deeply imbued with a sense of guilt. And of course the marginalized groups, I mean they want that to happen because it means more stuff for them. And to some extent it's true, I mean they were treated horribly. Native Americans treated horribly. Blacks were made slaves. And you know, when I was a kid I still remember when I arrived at college, there were two men's rooms and two women's rooms in the bus station.

1:04:29I took the, and I said, well, why is that? I was from Northern Virginia. I went to Southern Virginia. And then I realized that one was for black people, and one was for white people. So they were treated badly, but I think that people realized that, and they're trying to make amends for it. The problem is they're going too far in the other direction now to valorize people that don't deserve to be valorized, work to give unwarranted advantages to members of different groups, equity, it's called, where my view is that everybody should have equal opportunity to achieve from birth, but that's almost impossible to achieve.

1:05:08I mean, imagine a United States in which every person had the same resources, had two parents, had good schools, so they all had started at the same point. I can't imagine that. It would take so much money to do that. And yet that I think is the ultimate solution. You don't solve the problem by after the groups become different in different ways, largely due to culture, by trying to make them equal by giving equal representation in groups. So I guess we've gone far off the topic now. No, not at all. I'm interested in what you've learned about human nature from engaging with critics of your work.

1:05:50Well about the reverse naturalistic policy that people really don't aren't deeply wedded to what's true about the world. I guess people you know it's always been known that's true that people like religion to me. I mean I'm an atheist I have no bones where I'm meaning that and I don't believe in God because there's no evidence for God. I've never seen anything supernatural or any sign of Divinity and yet the vast majority of the world believes in God. I think 85 % of Americans do not so many breaths Because they're more sensible like it. That's where and Religion is almost vanished since Scandinavian Iceland But that shows an example of how people will believe something is true about the universe when there's not a wet of evidence for it So I'm only now as I speak to you coming to realize that this is not just something that's unique to science or to American society since the death of George Floyd.

1:06:55The people always believe what makes them feel good, but gives them consolation. I think Karl Marx said that, where I was his famous state month, religion is the opium in the beam masses. Yeah, yeah, people, but it's because When what he meant when he said that was that He wanted He wasn't he wasn't to carry him religion of course because he was a this he was just saying that people that have a really bad In the world find their sauce and a non -existence guy like D .A .T. and it's the same, I guess that you could draw a line between that and the people who find their source who are, say, generous for it and thinking that sex is a spectrum.

1:07:43You know, people who live what makes you feel good. Unfortunately in science, we have such a thing as a critical truth which comes to knock up against what many people want to be true. So what would you say given that we're, you know, an hour deep now, we can talk about whatever we want. The only people left are the reasonable ones. What would you say is a theory that you believe in and stand behind but is currently the most publicly inflammatory or cantankerous? I've got one but I'm interested in hearing yours as well. Oh yeah but I want yours too. Well a theory or a fact? You can pick between the two.

1:08:29Well, the one that's got me in the most trouble lately is my search and that there's two sections I know more. I mean, you know, to me that's an indubitable fact because it not only is indubitable, but it's explanatory. First of all, it's universal because every animal and plant vestuoplank species has two reproductive systems. But it's not only the reason I want to tell it is not just because I'm trying to force that down the throat of people that are gendered as fork is because it's explanatory. It explains the notion of sexual selection. Why males and females behave differently. Why males compete for the attention of females, which explains so much in the animal kingdom from the larger sizes of gorillas to the tail of the peacock.

1:09:17The fact that when one sex is usually ornamented or brightly colored, it's almost always the male. I mean it was Darwin in 1871 Who raised that theory? So that's one reason why it behooves us to believe what the truth is because it's You know, I guess some people don't get this feeling of wonder when they finally realized by God But that isn't the explanation. It was certainly Darwin dead, but he was reluctant to publish it. I mean, it was in the 1830s or early 1840s when he had a natural selection, but he didn't publish it until 1859 because it was so worried about being damned for that. But you know, scientists, and we become scientists because of this sense of wonder, wonder of the truth of what really is out there in the universe and we can understand it.

1:10:13Because some people, I mean, I guess it just doesn't move some people, you know, they'd rather have their own personal truth even if there's no evidence for it because it makes them feel good. All right. Okay, let me give you, let me give you mine. Let me give you mine. So you mentioned earlier on you mentioned John Tubi. I very fortunately got to meet him at H -Pess a couple of years ago, I was the least credentialed person in the room speaking at a, speaking at a part of a symposium. And he came up after and he said some really lovely things about the show, which was super nice to meet him. And you know, it was only a few months later that he passed away.

1:10:57He's got his theory. I think it's the discinect theory of gene erosion with regards to mutational load. No, no, no. OK, so this is, this is one of those might, this is me doing a high Iraq. OK, are you ready? OK, let me do this, let me do this dance in front of you, Jerry. So all species, but we're talking about humans, accumulates mutational load as you go generation to generation. Stop me when I get the technicalities wrong, but the principle is correct. Mutations occur. Many of these mutations are junk, make the species less effective, make the next generation less effective, they're less adapted to their environment.

1:11:46And when you have heavy selection pressures, small changes in the animal are selected out if they're suboptimal, if they're not as good. You're less likely to survive and reproduce and pass on your genes. The issue in the modern world is that we have removed a lot of the selection pressures with healthcare. So there are a lot of examples. The one that's the least controversial that I can see you suffer with would be myopia or some sort of eye issue. Now, ancestral a mild blurring of the eyes, maybe you wouldn't be able to read the grains of sand on your hand. probably not that big of a deal, but as you start to push it a bit, I would guess, and even the grains of sand, I'm gonna guess it's not that adaptive.

1:12:33I'm gonna guess that over time, people who couldn't see quite as well would be less likely to survive and reproduce than people who could see well. But now we have glasses. So people who can't see particularly well have had the selection pressure on their eyesight removed to a degree, which means And some people find glasses sexy. Maybe that's even an advantage for you to wear glasses. Maybe it frames the face in a manner. Maybe it makes you seem a little bit more intellectual and academic and considered or something. But what that means is that you are accumulating a load, a genetic mutations that makes further eye degeneration more likely over time.

1:13:15And it was his belief that this occurs across everything because we have life support systems and asthma inhalers and wheelchairs and all sorts of things. And that if you remove the selection pressure, you will start to accumulate disgenic mutational load, which means that the crumbling genome, I think, as it's referred to, starts to get worse over time. And when you first proposed this, I think this was before genetic engineering was that likely. could this be fixed by some gene therapies assisted by AI and advanced technologies at some point over the next 200 years? I would guess that seems probably at least partly likely.

1:14:02You're smiling. Well, there's a many conditions like heart disease and general decryptures you get all caused by many, many genes. So you'd have to fix each one of them and you have to fix them and your mother's DNA, not in your own DNA because you can't fix, you can't edit every cell in your own body. But I think what you do is true with the caveat that a lot of the conditions like wheelchairs and stuff did not obtain early in human evolution because we never got that old to be able to show these symptoms. So that the crepto was probably built down a lot of it before right because we didn't live that long.

1:14:47So you also need to have a there is early onset to crepto in a variety of different ways right and that you know you could say people at 30 are the way that they, in 500 years' time, are the way that people at 60 would have been in 2025, let's say, something like that, because we've just got all of this technology to support them and we can continue to keep them living and so on and so forth. So unless you intervene in that regard, maybe that is, but I mean, that is, you're getting perilously close to the e -word of eugenics when you start talking about this, which is a topic. Actually, that actually gets us to probably like the, whatever, the point of no return of the black hole when it comes to talking about anything in this realm.

1:15:37Yeah, we're not even mentioning that. There's a lot of things to say about it, but I haven't studied you, Jacks, and much. Certainly in the UK, you, Jacks was always, it wasn't like the Nazis practiced. And it wasn't like in the US where people were involuntarily still like, the British just wanted to up the reproduction of the upper classes. You know, that was their front of the Jackson. You know, I don't believe certain people should be rewarded for having kids and others being lost. But what happened to Britain is different from what happened in the in the Nazis generally and what happened in the UK.

1:16:18But getting back You said, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. There's no penalty now. Pre -reproductively for mutations that can be fixed medically. Now, this of course only applies to humans because animals on other species don't have the workarounds, a fixed mutation. Well, you know, so interestingly here, one other animal group that I think you could say your observing this, although this was more to do with selective breeding would be dogs. You know you look at British bulldogs, the shortening of the nut, we're going to make them cuter, we're going to make the hind legs shorter, we're going to do the whatever.

1:16:55Look at the shape of an Alsacean over the last hundred years due to selective breeding. And you have these weird spinal problems, dashons have got progressively lower and longer, and they end up snapping their own spines because they can't support them because, oh, it's so cute, he's exactly like a hot dog. And obviously that's being done selectively, but that is a kind of Dishonored breeding in a way. Yeah, it's But it's yeah, as you said it's your official selection. Where's what you were talking about is just through to the accumulation of mutations that have no Clear penalty or the penalty can be offset somehow by by technology Yeah, but once she reached the post reproductive age, which is earlier for women that is for men I guess Frank can keep having babies till they're 80 years 90 women have to stop a man plus so Mutations that arise after that post reproductive stage carry no penalty at all Mixed them with wheelchairs and catheters and stuff like that, but you know that's supposed that we will know you're right, I was about to say something like, I was about to say post -reproductively, if this was happening, ancestrally, somebody that was a, that was a less robust would be a larger drain on resources, which would be maladaptive, but there is no mechanism for that person to be selected out of the gene pool because they are past their reproductive age.

1:18:37So there's no, it's like, it's like a line has been drawn into the future from their impact on what's happening from a genetic standpoint. Is that a fair way to put it? Yeah. I mean, the other alternative is the sort of grandparent effect that, you know, even though if you're not robust or healthy, it's the advantage of your genes to hang around and take care of your parents or your grandchildren, et cetera. So, but we don't know anything about that really, so. Jerry Koyne, ladies and gentlemen, Jerry, you're awesome. I really enjoyed today. Today's been so much fun. Where should you actually might be the most prolific blogger that I know?

1:19:18It is terrifying the amount of words that you put out on the internet. So where should people go if they want to keep up to date with your work? Yeah, so the name of the website is why evolution is true, which is the title of my first book. I'd still recommend it because I really, really like that book. I don't think I could write it again. Why evolution is true, but if you want to come to the website, you just string all those together into one word, www .yavolutionstrue .com. See, the website is very eclectic. I write about biology, but I also write about whatever. It started out as a way to publicize the book.

1:19:54The eponymous book that it's aimed at, after my agent said, well, you know, maybe do it near the shooting day. He read it also book called The Your Interfish about how we show the remnants of our fishy answers to three. And he started a website to publicize that and so my agent said, why don't you do that? So I did it and that was a monster. I discovered that I liked wearing not, and vision did us every couple of weeks I'd probably piece of evidence for evolution. Well, now I just discovered it's going to become a chronicle of my existence or my thoughts and And it's yeah, I put three or four pieces a day, Maggie and it's a big time sync But I've gotten a lot more out of it than I have putting into it Just I get feedback from readers.

1:20:41I've made friends all over the world even I've even had two views from North Korea, although I don't know Would have the air in North Korea look at my website, but um Yeah, it's a it's a good thing and I have not yet grown tired of it, too. Well, long may you continue doing it, Jerry. You're great. And we didn't even talk about why evolution's true. We need we can do it into another episode on on all of the all of the stuff around that. But for the book, you can buy the book now and then when we do the next episode, you'll be a few steps ahead and you'll understand what we're talking about. Well, thanks for having me on.

1:21:17I appreciate you. Thank you. Sure.