Latest / Zero Shot Podcast DEMO / Diving into Human Evolution: Adaptations and Ethics

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Diving into Human Evolution: Adaptations and Ethics · Zero Shot Podcast DEMO

• 0:00
  speakers: In this episode, we explore the fascinating evolution of modern human populations, particularly focusing on how unique lifestyles, such as those of sea nomads, shape our biology and adaptation. We delve into the complexities of human evolution, fertility, and the ethical implications of genetic engineering.
• 0:21
  Interviewee: So I'm interested in how modern human populations have evolved to their lifestyles or environments.
• 0:28
  And so this is we're talking in the last like 10 ,000 years or less.
• 0:32
  And I got into that.
• 0:33
  I was actually I've always been interested in evolution.
• 0:35
  I actually started with a master's in astrobiology.
• 0:38
  So I was looking at very theoretical evolution.
• 0:41
  But then I decided I wanted to actually work with humans.
• 0:44
  And so I was doing my Ph .D.
• 0:45
  in Copenhagen in Denmark.
• 0:47
  And I was working on a totally different project.
• 0:49
  And I heard about a group of divers in Indonesia.
• 0:53
  And I thought, well, if ever there were an opportunity for evolution or natural selection to act in a modern human population, this would
• 1:01
  be the population.
• 1:02
  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 can I do this?
• 1:10
  And luckily, I had a supervisor who was super supportive.
• 1:12
  And that was the start of all of it for me.
• 1:17
  speakers: How natural selection would work with these people in Indonesia who are they lived on the water?
• 1:23
  These are the nomadic spear fishermen.
• 1:26
  Yeah, exactly.
• 1:27
  Yeah.
• 1:27
  So they're called sea nomads.
• 1:31
  Traditionally, they live their whole lives on houseboats.
• 1:34
  And that's changing, you know, in a kind of a contemporary context.
• 1:36
  But traditionally, they would get basically everything they needed from the sea.
• 1:41
  And they do a lot of that through breath hold diving.
• 1:43
  And they're extremely good at it.
• 1:45
  So they can hold their breath for a really long time.
• 1:47
  They can move underwater with like incredible athleticism.
• 1:52
  And they do this to collect things like sea cucumbers.
• 1:56
  They spear fish.
• 1:58
  And so the idea was that diving is dangerous.
• 2:01
  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.
• 2:09
  And what is it specifically about that part of the world that pushes them to be more of sea nomads,
• 2:17
  like to be exploring the sea for food and for this kind of stuff?
• 2:21
  Is there a very limited amount of resources on land there?
• 2:29
  I think it's actually that there are just so many resources in the water.
• 2:33
  So Indonesia, I mean, that whole area, you have sea nomads throughout Southeast Asia.
• 2:38
  But Indonesia itself has like 17 ,500 islands.
• 2:42
  So it's just an incredible amount of coastline of these like super rich coral reefs.
• 2:47
  So there's just an abundance of resources in the ocean.
• 2:51
  So it's kind of like if it's there, why not take advantage of it?
• 2:54
  And we actually see many places in the world where there are these rich marine resources people's dive.
• 3:01
  You would classify these people as like, quote unquote, superhumans, right?
• 3:05
  Because they're super adapted to a certain way of life.
• 3:11
  And they have over time, I don't know how long, but have evolved to be better at long,
• 3:19
  long breath holds and swimming deep underwater to catch fish.
• 3:23
  And this has changed their their genome to some degree.
• 3:28
  Exactly.
• 3:28
  Yeah.
• 3:29
  I mean, people who live at high altitude, people who eat diets rich in lipids, things like that.
• 3:34
  There's these what we call superhuman populations all over the world.
• 3:39
  And it's just kind of the idea is most, especially medical research, focuses on disease.
• 3:44
  But that's just this really small part of the spectrum of human physiology.
• 3:48
  Because we have like disease, health and then beyond to what we call the superhuman population.
• 3:53
  So people who are enhanced in some way.
• 3:58
  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.
• 4:04
  It also allows us to kind of celebrate what's special about these populations rather than stigmatizing them for diseases they may have or
• 4:12
  things like that.
• 4:15
  And it's just like a really fun way of approaching health research.
• 4:18
  When it comes to these Indonesian sea hunters or these these nomadic ocean people, what
• 4:26
  did you find interesting about them specifically?
• 4:29
  So I had heard about their diving abilities.
• 4:32
  And it is truly amazing to see them in the water, how they move, how long they hold their breath.
• 4:39
  Interviewer: And so we thought that maybe there was something physiologically different about them.
• 4:44
  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
• 4:51
  -invasive and easy enough for me to learn how to measure.
• 4:58
  Interviewee: Wow.
• 4:59
  So this activates only when you're holding your breath?
• 5:02
  That's right.
• 5:02
  Yeah.
• 5:02
  So it's actually, you know, to a certain extent, it also is activated when you exercise.
• 5:08
  So like horses have huge spleens, greyhounds have huge spleens, and they think that that contributes to their ability,
• 5:15
  you know, to perform at such a high level in terms of exercise.
• 5:19
  But it's much more so activated by holding your breath combined with cold water on your face.
• 5:26
  speakers: The use of portable ultrasound machines allowed for non-invasive measurement of spleen size among the Bajo population.
• 5:34
  Interviewee: Holding your breath and cold water.
• 5:36
  That's right.
• 5:37
  Yeah.
• 5:38
  And you say it pumps out more red blood cells?
• 5:41
  Mm -hmm.
• 5:41
  Yes.
• 5:42
  So you get this like injection of red blood cells into circulation that are holding on to oxygen.
• 5:48
  So suddenly you have access to like 15 % more oxygen.
• 5:52
  So were there, so how did you figure out the size of their spleens?
• 5:57
  So I took a portable ultrasound machine.
• 5:59
  So yeah, at first I had to learn how to measure spleen, which is actually kind of tricky with an ultrasound.
• 6:03
  Right.
• 6:04
  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
• 6:12
  spleens for practice.
• 6:14
  And then, yeah, I carried this like 40 -pound machine out to a tiny village in Indonesia.
• 6:20
  You know, after doing an initial visit where we said like, here's what I'm thinking of doing.
• 6:24
  What do you think?
• 6:25
  Is this something you're interested in?
• 6:26
  And people were very receptive.
• 6:28
  Went back with the machine and measured a whole bunch of spleens.
• 6:32
  So did you have this hypothesis before you measured or were you just like scanning around trying to see what you could find?
• 6:38
  Or how did you come to the hypothesis that they might have bigger spleens?
• 6:42
  Yeah, it was a number of factors.
• 6:44
  So, you know, one thing is looking at other animals that have adapted to diving.
• 6:50
  So certain species of seals that have a really long breath hold also have huge spleens.
• 6:55
  So the Waddell seal's spleen takes up half of its abdominal cavity.
• 6:59
  It's huge.
• 7:00
  And so we thought, okay, if it could increase spleen size in a seal, maybe it could increase spleen size in humans too.
• 7:09
  Interviewer: 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
• 7:16
  phenotype that it can act on that's likely to be something you can inherit.
• 7:21
  So we looked at like lung size or lung volume, but lung volume is really changeable.
• 7:28
  speakers: you know, like heart rate, things like this.
• 7:29
  There are a lot of different things that we could have measured.
• 7:31
  And we went with the spleen again in part because it's an easy thing to measure.
• 7:35
  Right, right.
• 7:36
  Just based on the size of the body.
• 7:37
  So they weren't born like this, right?
• 7:39
  Their spleens adapted over time and over breath holds after breath hold and years of diving.
• 7:44
  So it's actually they were born with it because that's an important, that was an important thing for us to distinguish because maybe it's just diving makes your spleen bigger, you know.
• 7:52
  And there had been some studies that kind of hinted that that might be the case.
• 7:57
  Interviewer: So to check that out, we took people who were diving and people who had never been diving but had the same genetic background.
• 8:04
  So the people that I worked with, the population I worked with are called the Bajo.
• 8:08
  It's in some countries it's pronounced Bajo, but it's one of these sea nomad groups.
• 8:13
  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
• 8:21
  would have been diving.
• 8:22
  But now because of kind of the changes in the world, I'd say about half the population or more doesn't dive.
• 8:29
  So we had this really nice split in the population between people who were actively diving, so whose spleens could have been expanded by diving, and
• 8:37
  people who were Bajo but weren't diving.
• 8:40
  And so we saw the large spleens across everyone.
• 8:43
  Wow.
• 8:43
  There was no difference in spleen size based on whether or not they'd been diving.
• 8:48
  speakers: That's fascinating.
• 8:49
  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
• 8:57
  environment.
• 8:57
  Only 20 miles away.
• 8:58
  Yeah, super close.
• 8:59
  Not divers.
• 9:00
  Correct.
• 9:01
  Yeah.
• 9:01
  Wow.
• 9:01
  That's so interesting.
• 9:02
  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
• 9:10
  got adopted by one of their families or whatever.
• 9:13
  And I started diving since I was a toddler.
• 9:15
  Would my spleen be normal size or would it be huge?
• 9:18
  So based on my research, it would be normal size.
• 9:21
  However, I have seen some papers that do suggest that you can expand your spleen just by holding your breath a lot.
• 9:29
  You know, some of those papers had small sample sizes.
• 9:33
  Right.
• 9:33
  And like I would say that ultrasounds are kind of more of an art than a science.
• 9:37
  Like there is a certain amount of interpretation.
• 9:39
  So you have to try to blind yourself to what your hypothesis is.
• 9:43
  So I'd say jury's still out.
• 9:45
  But it seems like based on what everything I have seen in that population and in other diving populations, diving does not increase your spleen size.
• 9:53
  Having a genetic predisposition increases your spleen size.
• 9:57
  Fascinating.
• 9:58
  How long have they been doing this?
• 9:59
  Do you know?
• 9:59
  It's hard to say.
• 10:01
  We think thousands of years.
• 10:03
  There was.
• 10:04
  Yeah.
• 10:04
  So the earliest kind of written documentation was.
• 10:10
  What was his name?
• 10:12
  One of the early explorers.
• 10:13
  Oh, Magellan.
• 10:14
  Magellan had a chronicler who was writing about all of the things that they saw as they were exploring and describes in detail seeing, you know,
• 10:22
  sea nomads diving and living on these houseboats and things like that.
• 10:26
  But that's only like 500 years ago or something like that, maybe less.
• 10:30
  So but we think based on like linguistic reconstruction that they've actually been diving much longer, which makes sense because, you know, that marine environment has been
• 10:38
  there.
• 10:39
  So.
• 10:39
  So from like reading ancient texts, they write up.
• 10:42
  You can find like accounts of them.
• 10:44
  I think it's the way I'm not a linguist, so I don't know exactly.
• 10:47
  But they they kind of like put together when that particular language arose and when certain words related to diving are likely to have been
• 10:55
  introduced.
• 10:56
  But I don't you know, again, outside of my specialty.
• 10:58
  Very interesting.
• 11:00
  But based on our genetic results, we think that they started evolving this trait in the last few thousand years.
• 11:07
  OK.
• 11:08
  Any of them have webbed feet or any other interesting characteristics?
• 11:12
  Not webbed feet.
• 11:13
  But we did see in their genetics an interesting signal in a gene related to something else that happens when you dive, which is
• 11:21
  so, you know, your spleen contracts.
• 11:23
  We also have this constriction of your blood vessels because like your fingers, your toes don't need oxygen that badly.
• 11:31
  But your brain, your heart, your lungs, they need, you know, that oxygen rich blood.
• 11:35
  So by making the blood vessels in your extremities smaller, your body moves that blood closer to the organs that need it the
• 11:43
  most.
• 11:44
  And so they had a gene that was different.
• 11:46
  It had been evolving that has been previously linked to that effect.
• 11:52
  This like blood vessel constriction effect.
• 11:54
  Interesting.
• 11:55
  So we didn't measure that directly, unfortunately.
• 11:57
  But it's something we'd love to do in the future.
• 11:59
  What was the water temperature?
• 12:00
  Well, I don't know what the water temperature is in Indo.
• 12:02
  It's warm.
• 12:02
  It's pretty warm, right?
• 12:03
  Yeah.
• 12:04
  So, yeah, it's, you know, they're not probably exposed to that much kind of hypothermia because it's like pretty thermoneutral water.
• 12:11
  It's very pleasant swimming water.
• 12:13
  Yeah.
• 12:14
  But we do see divers in cold water populations as well.
• 12:18
  And they put these people, they put like their offspring, they start getting them adapted to the water pretty much right after birth, right?
• 12:25
  Yeah.
• 12:25
  And they have like, I mean, you know, it's interesting too how you see this sort of resurgence of
• 12:33
  people doing water births.
• 12:35
  And like babies can go straight from the placenta or the womb, which is amniotic fluid to like a
• 12:43
  bathtub or something like that.
• 12:44
  Yeah.
• 12:45
  It seems like we have this really instinctual drive to hold our breath.
• 12:49
  And, you know, babies you can, I've heard, blow in their face and put them underwater and they just hold their breath.
• 12:54
  And, you know, they know that that's what they're supposed to do.
• 12:57
  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
• 13:05
  canoe traditionally.
• 13:06
  And if it makes it to the other side, you know, if it holds its breath, it's a Bajo baby.
• 13:11
  And if not, you know, 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.
• 13:18
  Right, right, right.
• 13:19
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• 13:21
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  life.
• 14:46
  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
• 14:54
  non -divers, Av's children, were probably diving.
• 14:57
  How long can they hold their breath for?
• 15:02
  When you say climate change, you mean the warming of the climate?
• 15:06
  Right.
• 15:07
  And like the increase in these, you know, like outlier weather events.
• 15:12
  So like in Utah, we have been in a drought, but we also had the highest snowfall season on
• 15:20
  record a couple years ago.
• 15:21
  And so it's like within the same season, essentially, we had, you know, devastating avalanches as well as,
• 15:29
  you know, one of the driest summers on record.
• 15:32
  So it's like, it's very hard to find a physiological change that makes you fitter in both of those environments,
• 15:40
  if that makes sense.
• 15:42
  Interesting.
• 15:43
  So, so more extreme weather events in a short, shorter amounts of time.
• 15:47
  And that could like somehow bottleneck human humanity.
• 15:52
  It just makes it so that, you know, when you have like when everybody's diving, then there's a consistent selective pressure.
• 16:00
  There's one thing that everybody needs to adapt to.
• 16:03
  But when there's many different pressures happening all at once, then it's just hard to, to be more likely to survive that.
• 16:12
  Right.
• 16:13
  Well, but if you're in different parts of the world, wouldn't those things be consistent?
• 16:18
  Like, like in Florida, the coldest it ever gets is like 50 degrees.
• 16:22
  And the hottest, I mean, it gets freaking hot.
• 16:24
  It gets like in the hundreds and it's humid and we get hurricanes and floods.
• 16:30
  But there's never any snow.
• 16:31
  And there's never any free, like it's, you know, it doesn't go below 50 degrees.
• 16:35
  There's never earthquakes.
• 16:38
  There's, you know, it's, it's fairly consistent.
• 16:40
  I don't know if it's like that in other parts of the world.
• 16:42
  I can't speak for Utah.
• 16:44
  But yeah.
• 16:45
  Yeah.
• 16:45
  I mean, in that case, yeah, maybe the future looks, everyone looks more like Floridians.
• 16:49
  But yeah, then there could definitely be.
• 16:51
  Or whatever part of the world they live in, right?
• 16:53
  Yeah.
• 16:53
  There could be a bottleneck for sure.
• 16:55
  Yeah.
• 16:56
  And wasn't there a big bottleneck in the genome like 100 ,000 years ago or something like this?
• 17:02
  So the out of Africa migration represents a huge bottleneck.
• 17:07
  So there's more, there's much more genetic diversity within Africa than in all of the rest of the world outside of Africa.
• 17:14
  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.
• 17:21
  But actually on a genetic level, in terms of single changes in the genome, we're more similar than some populations within Africa.
• 17:28
  So that's one bottleneck that happened.
• 17:30
  But then within specific subpopulations, like there was a bottleneck in the populations that moved into Greenland.
• 17:37
  So there's some very interesting genetic changes that happened in the Greenlandic Inuit because of that bottleneck.
• 17:44
  And how do those bottlenecks happen?
• 17:46
  Oftentimes it's founder populations.
• 17:48
  You just have a small part of the population that leaves a place or goes to a new place.
• 17:54
  Sometimes there's, you know, catastrophic events or diseases that bottleneck a population as well.
• 17:59
  I had a gentleman on here about a year ago who was trying, he was, he worked on the Human Genome Project
• 18:07
  for MIT.
• 18:08
  And he was explaining to me something like that all humans on Earth basically are genetic descendants of like a total of 10
• 18:16
  ,000 people or something like that.
• 18:18
  Yeah.
• 18:18
  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,
• 18:26
  you would represent all of the genetic diversity of the planet, which is bizarre because, you know, there's a lot of us.
• 18:33
  That is crazy.
• 18:34
  Yeah.
• 18:35
  That is so crazy that we're, I mean, that's like, we're all so close.
• 18:40
  It seems like we're like really all very, a lot more closely related than we think.
• 18:45
  Yeah, exactly.
• 18:46
  Coming only from 10 ,000.
• 18:47
  There's also this mitochondrial Eve that you may have heard of.
• 18:50
  So all, so you inherit your mitochondrial DNA exclusively from your mother.
• 18:54
  Right.
• 18:55
  And we all essentially, if you go back far enough, come from one woman who's, who's called
• 19:02
  mitochondrial Eve.
• 19:04
  Really?
• 19:05
  Yeah.
• 19:07
  Mitochondrial Eve.
• 19:08
  Mm -hmm.
• 19:09
  I mean, you know, it's been a while.
• 19:10
  So there's a lot of variation in terms of where we've ended up.
• 19:13
  And how many mitochondrial Eves do we think there could have been?
• 19:16
  Just, just the one.
• 19:18
  Oh, just one.
• 19:18
  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.
• 19:26
  That doesn't mean there weren't other women at that time.
• 19:28
  It's just that the descendants happened to be from this one mitochondrial Eve.
• 19:33
  Mitochondrial Eve, the most recent common maternal, matrilineal, I guess that's how you say it,
• 19:42
  ancestor of all living humans, meaning everyone alive today can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to her through an unbroken line of mothers.
• 19:50
  She lived in Africa approximately 150 to 200 ,000 years ago and was part of the larger ancestral population.
• 19:57
  Wow.
• 19:58
  That's amazing, right?
• 19:59
  That is totally amazing.
• 20:01
  It's not that long ago for us to all have been related to one person.
• 20:05
  When was the, what were those footprints that we found in the desert in like Nevada?
• 20:12
  Sand flats?
• 20:13
  Yeah, they were the sand flats.
• 20:15
  Yeah, but there was a name for this.
• 20:19
  Oh God, we've talked about this before.
• 20:22
  White sands.
• 20:23
  The white sands fossilized footprints.
• 20:26
  How long ago were those supposed to be?
• 20:27
  And this goes back to the, oh, that's 23 ,000 years ago.
• 20:33
  Okay.
• 20:33
  And I guess it's speculated that this pushed back the Clovis first
• 20:41
  hypothesis, right?
• 20:43
  Right.
• 20:43
  Are you familiar with this?
• 20:44
  Yes.
• 20:44
  So the idea was that homo sapiens weren't populating North
• 20:52
  America that early.
• 20:54
  And then we found these footprints and this pushed it back quite a bit farther.
• 20:58
  Right.
• 20:58
  Right.
• 20:58
  And they supposedly came from the Bering Strait land bridge.
• 21:01
  Is that right?
• 21:02
  Yeah.
• 21:03
  And there was, you know, again, of course, being a geneticist, I'm biased, but there was genetic evidence that suggested that some of the population
• 21:11
  of North America was happening much earlier than people thought as well.
• 21:14
  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
• 21:22
  it that far that long ago?
• 21:24
  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.
• 21:31
  But yeah, there's, I mean, there's evidence that people were in Patagonia 10 ,000 years ago.
• 21:36
  Right.
• 21:37
  Yeah.
• 21:39
  And there's also people who speculate.
• 21:40
  I mean, how much, how much have you talked to like people in other disciplines that look at this stuff?
• 21:45
  Like, have you talked to geologists or, or any other types of people, anthropologists?
• 21:51
  I talk to a lot of anthropologists.
• 21:53
  Yeah.
• 21:53
  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 of these things like really
• 22:01
  inform the science.
• 22:02
  I also talk to the people themselves because oftentimes people have their own, you know, stories to tell that they're often.
• 22:10
  They watch cool documentaries and think they have it all figured out.
• 22:14
  I'd say more like, you know, like cultural, like oral histories that populations have about where they came from, how long they've been there,
• 22:22
  you know, their connection to a particular place.
• 22:24
  Although it's funny, I was asking the Bajo what they're, 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
• 22:32
  sea gods or something.
• 22:33
  And they were like, oh, Borneo.
• 22:34
  And he was like, okay, that's very factual.
• 22:36
  But yeah, I think it's important to weave in all these different perspectives.
• 22:41
  Yeah.
• 22:42
  Because a lot of times that's where some of these cool scientific hypotheses come from.
• 22:48
  Like there are oral histories in Aboriginal Australians.
• 22:52
  I'm actually about to speak to someone about this, that talk about a group of people that sound very much like the Bajo.
• 22:58
  And so given how close those are geographically, it totally makes sense that there would have been interaction between those peoples.
• 23:05
  And so, you know, it'd be cool to, in cases like that, match potentially genetic data with oral
• 23:13
  histories and things like that.
• 23:14
  Yeah.
• 23:15
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• 24:40
  Now back to the show.
• 24:41
  Who was the gentleman, the French gentleman that we had on who was talking about?
• 24:46
  He was a - Is it Philippe?
• 24:48
  Philippe, yes.
• 24:50
  What was he?
• 24:50
  He was a medical examiner.
• 24:53
  And he was going back into history and examining ancient fine art paintings
• 25:00
  and doing autopsies and examining the remains of these ancient historical
• 25:08
  figures.
• 25:08
  And he could corroborate ancient texts that go back then with by using
• 25:16
  these paintings and taking the DNA out of these paintings.
• 25:20
  There was a story how the heart of one of the French kings,
• 25:28
  Louis XIII or something like this, was sold and used to - The person who owned it
• 25:36
  was a painter, right?
• 25:37
  Who bought the heart.
• 25:39
  And allegedly this guy used his heart as paint pigment.
• 25:44
  Okay.
• 25:45
  So he took the painting and he sampled all the red pigments of it.
• 25:48
  And sure enough, he found the actual heart fibers of Louis XIII in this painting.
• 25:53
  Wow.
• 25:53
  And he did analysis on all these figures like Picasso and Napoleon and even
• 26:00
  Hitler's jaw and teeth remains.
• 26:03
  And he was also explaining that he found - He was talking about Lucy, the
• 26:11
  first ancient hominid.
• 26:14
  And he was saying that - Do you remember what he was saying about Lucy, Steve?
• 26:18
  He was saying something about they found like teeth marks in her bones.
• 26:25
  Okay.
• 26:25
  Or like shark - It was like a shark tooth mark in her bones or something like this.
• 26:30
  Okay.
• 26:30
  Can you find that, Steve?
• 26:34
  See if you can pull that up.
• 26:35
  See if you can pull that up.
• 26:36
  I want to make sure I'm not messing that up.
• 26:38
  But what he was showing us was super interesting about - And it was apparently like some sort of
• 26:43
  like earth -shattering revelation about Lucy that kind of changes what we thought about
• 26:51
  her.
• 26:52
  Yeah.
• 26:53
  It is interesting this - Yeah, like weaving in all these different disciplines.
• 26:58
  Like it's so important - Yeah.
• 26:59
  I think to get those different perspectives.
• 27:02
  Mm -hmm.
• 27:02
  Because yeah, there's only so much you can get from DNA.
• 27:04
  And, you know, samples like Lucy are too old to get DNA from typically, although we're kind of
• 27:11
  extending that timeline further and further back.
• 27:15
  But yeah, there's so much we can learn - Yeah.
• 27:18
  By putting all those pieces together.
• 27:20
  Yeah, totally.
• 27:21
  And, you know, even if like you look into some of the architecture and stuff and some of the amazing
• 27:27
  like sculptures that were made out of stone in South and Central America.
• 27:33
  Mm -hmm.
• 27:33
  Mm -hmm.
• 27:35
  It's just astonishing.
• 27:36
  These like Moai heads that are the Moai heads that you have on Easter Island.
• 27:40
  Mm -hmm.
• 27:40
  And then you have some of those other big ones.
• 27:43
  There's these heads that are in South and Central America that depict either
• 27:50
  like an African or a Polynesian human.
• 27:54
  Mm -hmm.
• 27:54
  Have you seen these?
• 27:55
  No, but - Steve, pull up the images that Dr.
• 27:58
  Barnhart was showing us with Luke Caverns on here.
• 28:02
  Is there a name of the, I forget the, what is the name of the civilization that did that?
• 28:10
  The Olmecs.
• 28:11
  Mm -hmm.
• 28:11
  The Olmec heads.
• 28:12
  Mm -hmm.
• 28:13
  I've seen the Olmec heads.
• 28:15
  So I actually - They look very African.
• 28:17
  Yeah.
• 28:17
  My PhD lab.
• 28:20
  Yeah, that's interesting.
• 28:22
  Was an ancient DNA lab.
• 28:32
  Interviewer: Mm -hmm.
• 28:34
  And it was interesting because they actually at one point were using chicken DNA to try to because Polynesian chickens have a very
• 28:42
  distinct ancestry to kind of the chickens that we have in the Americas today.
• 28:49
  But yeah, they were also trying to look at like human DNA to show that there was contact.
• 28:54
  And then people went back to the Pacific Islands after visiting the Americas.
• 28:59
  Really?
• 29:00
  Mm -hmm.
• 29:00
  I think something got debunked with the chicken DNA.
• 29:03
  I can't remember exactly.
• 29:04
  But yeah, it's really cool to, you know, there are signatures of contact, especially when people stuck around
• 29:11
  for long enough to end up together, end up mixing, that we can detect in modern human DNA.
• 29:19
  Yeah.
• 29:20
  I think they did the math on these Moai heads.
• 29:23
  Some of them are so large that from where they quarried them, like where the
• 29:31
  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
• 29:39
  build rafts that were like four times wider than the rivers that flowed from one spot to the other
• 29:47
  to be able to float them down the river.
• 29:49
  Okay.
• 29:49
  And it's like really rugged terrain, forest and mountains.
• 29:52
  And it's like really crazy terrain.
• 29:55
  Yeah.
• 29:56
  Okay.
• 29:57
  He's an archaeologist specializing in ancient civilizations of the Americas, especially in Maya.
• 30:03
  Yeah.
• 30:03
  So it was crazy.
• 30:04
  It's just some of the stuff is just so bizarre.
• 30:06
  Yeah.
• 30:07
  Just doesn't add up.
• 30:08
  Yeah.
• 30:09
  Yeah.
• 30:10
  And yeah.
• 30:11
  Yeah.
• 30:12
  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
• 30:20
  shouldn't be possible, you know, we're able to often find an explanation, which is super cool.
• 30:25
  Right.
• 30:25
  Maybe take some of the magic away from it.
• 30:28
  But yeah, like, I mean, there are populations around the world doing incredible things.
• 30:33
  And yeah, to a large extent, that's been overlooked by a lot of the science that's been done so far.
• 30:38
  So I want to talk about this
• 30:43
  science behind how smells of
• 30:50
  people can attract people to each other or within humans, I think this is.
• 30:55
  There's a study that was done with humans where the certain, I guess, smell or pheromone or whatever it is that some
• 31:03
  people emit.
• 31:04
  People are subconsciously attracted to other people just based on this.
• 31:10
  Right.
• 31:10
  And it's not necessarily like looks.
• 31:12
  Right.
• 31:12
  Or anything like that or personality.
• 31:15
  It smells.
• 31:16
  How did this whole thing come about?
• 31:18
  So it's called the smelly t -shirt study.
• 31:20
  Okay.
• 31:20
  Or that's at least how it's referred to.
• 31:22
  And it was, yeah, they had, I think it was all, they had women, like heterosexual women smelling the t -shirts of heterosexual men.
• 31:30
  And they smelled them and rated the smell of the t -shirt on its attractiveness, you know, just based on the smell.
• 31:37
  And I'm sure they, you know, accounted for like soaps and deodorants and things like that.
• 31:41
  Like we probably had people just wearing t -shirts.
• 31:43
  And people, women reported that they were more attracted to the smell of a t -shirt if that person had a complementary
• 31:51
  immune system based on their genetics than if they didn't.
• 31:56
  And so our immune systems are super diverse.
• 31:58
  It's the fastest evolving part of the genome.
• 32:01
  There's tons of changes because we're constantly battling with pathogens and, you know, bacteria, viruses, whatever.
• 32:07
  And so there's a lot of variation in the immune system.
• 32:11
  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
• 32:18
  whose immune system is very similar to yours.
• 32:20
  Because the children will have a combo of both.
• 32:22
  Exactly.
• 32:22
  Yeah.
• 32:23
  So it seems like we have some way of smelling that just based on, you know, based on,
• 32:30
  yeah, what's coming out of our bodies, essentially.
• 32:33
  So how did somebody come up with this theory to do this test?
• 32:37
  I don't know.
• 32:38
  I mean, maybe someone just noticed that they really loved the smell of their partner.
• 32:41
  I mean, that's, you know, like anecdotally, it's a thing, right?
• 32:43
  You like really like how someone smells.
• 32:46
  I mean, my wife says this about me all the time.
• 32:48
  Yeah.
• 32:48
  She says she likes the way I smell in the morning.
• 32:50
  Yeah.
• 32:50
  What are you talking about?
• 32:52
  Yeah, maybe she's smelling those genes.
• 32:53
  Yeah.
• 32:55
  So, yeah, I don't know what inspired it.
• 32:57
  But, yeah, they did the study and people were able to smell that difference and found it attractive, which is amazing, too.
• 33:04
  It's so crazy.
• 33:05
  Is this in animals, too?
• 33:07
  I'm sure it is.
• 33:08
  Yeah, because animals also have such a stronger sense of smell and such a deeper connection to smell.
• 33:14
  You would imagine that they're doing that as well.
• 33:16
  And it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that we would have this ability.
• 33:19
  Because people who can smell that in potential mates would have more children who can survive for longer.
• 33:27
  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
• 33:35
  system perspective.
• 33:36
  Right.
• 33:37
  Okay.
• 33:37
  So, okay.
• 33:38
  On the hierarchy of attractive traits, do we know where smell is?
• 33:43
  Oh, I don't know.
• 33:44
  That's a great question.
• 33:45
  Yeah.
• 33:45
  Like, if someone has, like, you know, a $300 sports car, but their smell is just a – how are you going to rate them?
• 33:52
  I'm sure someone's in the setting.
• 33:52
  Well, look at the worst rates in America.
• 33:53
  Yeah, yeah.
• 33:54
  Thank you.
• 33:54
  That'll knock that one over.
• 33:56
  Yeah, yeah.
• 33:56
  It's an heartbeat.
• 33:58
  But no, but, like, what about, like, physical appearance, though?
• 34:02
  Like, did they look at this kind of stuff at all?
• 34:05
  Or, like, communication skills or personality traits or
• 34:13
  – Yeah.
• 34:14
  I don't know, eye color, anything like this?
• 34:16
  That's the thing with, you know, any study like this is, like, you're just looking at one variable at a time.
• 34:21
  Yeah.
• 34:21
  And so as soon as you start introducing more things, it becomes so complex.
• 34:25
  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.
• 34:32
  Because your body responds like you're diving.
• 34:34
  But it was, like, they're not under pressure.
• 34:36
  Their whole body isn't submerged in cold water.
• 34:39
  They're not active.
• 34:39
  So when we actually measured some of the same things in the ocean, all of the measurements look different.
• 34:46
  Because, you know, suddenly this heart rate drop wasn't there anymore because they were moving really actively in the water.
• 34:52
  So it's, like, you know, in any of these studies, unfortunately, we just get this, like, tiny snapshot.
• 34:57
  Right.
• 34:57
  And 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.
• 35:04
  Yeah, that's so interesting.
• 35:05
  And it makes me wonder, you know, looking at the way our environment is evolving with technology where most kids now
• 35:12
  are on an app scrolling through pictures of people.
• 35:16
  Yeah.
• 35:17
  And that's how you're finding your mate or your whatever, depending on what your goals are.
• 35:23
  You're not sitting in a room with them.
• 35:25
  Right.
• 35:25
  You're just looking at a picture of them.
• 35:27
  And you're basing it off a still photo.
• 35:29
  And not even, like, a 3D photo, just a 2D flat from one angle.
• 35:34
  You don't get to, like, walk around them, see what the shape of them is or anything like that.
• 35:39
  Well, and I 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.
• 35:45
  And then they go out and they're, like, I just didn't feel the chemistry.
• 35:48
  Like, there's no chemistry.
• 35:49
  And it could be that, I mean, it could be that they were really bad at conversation.
• 35:51
  But it could be that your immune, you know, your body was picking up on the fact that this person is not a good potential parent to your offspring or something.
• 35:59
  You know, it's interesting to think about chemistry, maybe literal chemistry.
• 36:04
  You may literally be smelling whether someone's a good match.
• 36:08
  I mean, I imagine, like, I imagine there's got to be an abundance of other things that
• 36:15
  you can't really put into words, right?
• 36:18
  Other than the person was, like, tall and handsome or whatever it is.
• 36:25
  That, you know, not smells, not things that are obvious to
• 36:33
  our five senses, right?
• 36:35
  That's something that's going on.
• 36:37
  Like, you know, you talk, like, people have gut feelings about things all the time.
• 36:40
  Like, how do you explain that?
• 36:41
  Right.
• 36:41
  Yeah.
• 36:42
  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
• 36:50
  this, you know, immune system part of your genome.
• 36:53
  So that was an easy thing to test for in this study.
• 36:56
  But there is 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
• 37:03
  that are contributing to that feeling.
• 37:07
  Okay.
• 37:07
  I want to also, I want to ask you about when it comes to people who are, because I know
• 37:15
  people like, a lot of people like this.
• 37:16
  I don't know how it's changed over the decades.
• 37:21
  But when it comes to people who, like, have trouble conceiving, there's all these
• 37:29
  evolving technologies that are coming out that are helping people have kids.
• 37:34
  Whether it's, like, freezing their eggs or freezing sperm, vice versa.
• 37:39
  I don't know how it all works.
• 37:40
  But there's a lot of people, a lot of which who I know, who are my age in, like, their mid -30s, and
• 37:48
  they can't have kids to save their lives.
• 37:50
  And they're trying everything they can to have children.
• 37:56
  I've had people, I've had experts in this field explain to me that that's a bad idea.
• 38:05
  Not necessarily, like, from a moral perspective, but from, like, an evolutionary biological perspective.
• 38:11
  Because it's supposed to be the body, and the case they made was that's, like, the body's, or the, that's evolution's way of filtering out
• 38:19
  mutations or something like this.
• 38:22
  Yeah.
• 38:23
  I mean, you know, it's complicated.
• 38:24
  And it's also age.
• 38:25
  I think age has a lot to do with it.
• 38:27
  Yeah.
• 38:29
  So age is a huge factor.
• 38:31
  You know, there's a reason they call, like, I think it's, like, 34 and up women geriatric pregnancies, which seems crazy.
• 38:37
  You know, I mean, it's, like, not that.
• 38:38
  Oh, that's the thing.
• 38:39
  Actually call them that.
• 38:39
  Yeah.
• 38:40
  Yeah, yeah.
• 38:40
  I forget if it's, I think 34 is the cutoff at that point you're geriatric.
• 38:44
  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.
• 38:51
  And that's because, you know, as women, we produce all of our eggs right up at the beginning.
• 38:57
  And so the longer they're in our body, the more chance there is for mutations to build up.
• 39:01
  So that's something, you know, that's happening.
• 39:04
  It doesn't mean you can't have a healthy child.
• 39:06
  But it certainly means that your risk is higher.
• 39:07
  Right.
• 39:08
  We used to think that that was just women.
• 39:09
  Men also, we are finding, have more mutations as they age.
• 39:13
  So the chance of passing on those mutations increases as the father gets older as well.
• 39:21
  So you've got, you know.
• 39:22
  Interesting.
• 39:23
  Ingredients going in of questionable, you know, the sell -by date as we're getting close there.
• 39:29
  As you're getting older.
• 39:30
  I said Robert De Niro had a kid and he's like 80.
• 39:33
  Right, right.
• 39:34
  Yeah.
• 39:34
  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
• 39:42
  like that.
• 39:42
  And so they were actually able to look at the rate of mutation over the however many years those kids were born and
• 39:50
  see which mutations were coming from the father, which were coming from the mother.
• 39:54
  And how did those rates change?
• 39:55
  And they did see a difference in the number of mutations that was inherited from the father as the father got older.
• 40:01
  Interesting.
• 40:03
  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
• 40:11
  chemicals in the water.
• 40:13
  Like that affects fertility.
• 40:14
  I think microplastics affect fertility.
• 40:16
  You know, there's all these other environmental stress affects fertility.
• 40:19
  So it's like what's driving those individuals not to be able to conceive?
• 40:24
  Is it biological factors?
• 40:25
  Is it environmental factors?
• 40:29
  Yeah, well, we had Dr.
• 40:30
  Shauna Swan on here a couple years ago and she was explaining how they've been studying, sampling the
• 40:38
  sperm count and the testosterone levels of men since the 50s.
• 40:43
  And it's been going down by like 1 % per year since the 50s.
• 40:46
  And she says since like the mid -2000s, it started going down by like 2 % a year.
• 40:51
  Okay.
• 40:51
  So we must be getting low.
• 40:53
  So I was like, she asked me, she's like, can you guess which areas of the country have the
• 41:00
  lowest sperm counts?
• 41:02
  And my guess was I was going to be like the populated cities, you know, all the, you know, cars going everywhere.
• 41:07
  You're living in a little box and you're not as healthy as you're living out like an open farmland.
• 41:12
  She goes, no, the people who live on the farms, open area because of all of the chemicals they spray.
• 41:18
  Right.
• 41:18
  On the crops and everything like that and the glyphosate, which was crazy to me.
• 41:25
  And, you know, that combined with like the microplastics that are everything, everything is plastic.
• 41:31
  Our world is designed to become, is designed to make money on things by
• 41:38
  making them cheaper, more affordable, more efficient.
• 41:42
  And plastic is ubiquitous.
• 41:45
  It's everywhere.
• 41:45
  Everything is plastic.
• 41:46
  Yeah, yeah.
• 41:48
  99 % of this room is made of plastic.
• 41:51
  And she was explaining how that's like very, very bad for human beings.
• 41:55
  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, we're not going in the right direction.
• 42:03
  Yeah.
• 42:04
  Yeah.
• 42:04
  Yeah.
• 42:06
  then, you know, people have to resort to things like in vitro fertilization or freezing their eggs, like you said.
• 42:11
  I mean, that circumvents, you know, some of the mutational issues that I was talking about.
• 42:15
  Freezing the eggs.
• 42:16
  If you freeze your eggs early, then they're like the fresher eggs, you know, they're not aging with you.
• 42:21
  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?
• 42:29
  If you do have a successful, you know, if you do have, what is it?
• 42:35
  I forget exactly what they call it.
• 42:37
  But anyway, if one plantation.
• 42:39
  Yeah.
• 42:39
  So like, you know, then there's, then you get into people are starting to filter based on genetics.
• 42:44
  And that's a whole other weird ethical.
• 42:46
  Designer babies.
• 42:47
  Yes, exactly.
• 42:49
  So it's very complicated.
• 42:54
  speakers: Yeah.
• 42:56
  Well, I want to talk a lot.
• 42:57
  I want to go into that.
• 42:58
  I want to go into that.
• 43:00
  But first, I want to touch on something that you just said.
• 43:03
  You were talking about like now that like the world is becoming more globalized.
• 43:08
  People are traveling everywhere.
• 43:10
  People aren't just centered in their little tribes like we used to be.
• 43:17
  You're saying that that is a good thing.
• 43:21
  And that's going to be a way for us to evolve stronger or?
• 43:26
  It certainly potentially could be because, you know, in the same way that we stole genetic material from Denisovans as humans to adapt
• 43:34
  to high altitude.
• 43:35
  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
• 43:43
  world.
• 43:44
  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.
• 43:51
  It would be interesting to see like because I think before we started, we were talking about Copenhagen and how people
• 43:59
  from that part of the world are very fair skinned and have like light eyes, like color eyes.
• 44:04
  So they can absorb more sunlight, more melanin.
• 44:07
  And people from equatorial latitudes have very dark skin and dark eyes as well, dark brown eyes because
• 44:15
  they don't need all that melanin.
• 44:17
  Right.
• 44:17
  They don't need all that UV light.
• 44:19
  They can have more of a shield for that.
• 44:22
  It'd be interesting to see if you got like the most dark skin, dark eyed person from the equator and bred them with the most light
• 44:30
  eyed, fair skin person from Norway or something like that.
• 44:33
  And see like they might have like superhuman children because they would have they would cover all the spectrums, all the bases.
• 44:40
  Right.
• 44:41
  It depends on how those genes mix together.
• 44:43
  We also usually try to avoid the word bread when we're talking about people.
• 44:46
  But I get what you're saying.
• 44:48
  Bread is not correct.
• 44:48
  Bread is not correct.
• 44:50
  I mean, it just has a certain location maybe.
• 44:54
  I mean, the thing is, we can't really control exactly how those genes would come together.
• 44:59
  So, you know, as yeah, it would be very interesting to see.
• 45:04
  Well, it would be so unnatural for them to meet.
• 45:06
  Right.
• 45:07
  Which is weird.
• 45:08
  So like if it would be like in nature, it would be literally impossible for somebody from that part of the world to
• 45:16
  meet with somebody in that part of the world.
• 45:17
  Natural.
• 45:18
  Like, right.
• 45:18
  I mean, yeah, I mean, until recently, humans just didn't cross.
• 45:21
  Yeah.
• 45:21
  And I say recently from, you know, an evolutionary perspective.
• 45:24
  We just didn't cover that big of distances.
• 45:26
  Right.
• 45:27
  And so that's why you have, you know, this amount of genetic isolation.
• 45:30
  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
• 45:38
  reconstruct a map of Europe based on people's genetics.
• 45:49
  Oh, wow.
• 45:50
  And so that's a good point.
• 45:51
  And so that's a good point to this is that if you breed too close to the gene, your own gene pool, nature will punish
• 45:58
  that.
• 45:59
  Right.
• 46:00
  Mm -hmm.
• 46:00
  Then you have more of these defects or these mutations.
• 46:07
  Right.
• 46:07
  Right.
• 46:07
  Yeah.
• 46:08
  Yeah.
• 46:08
  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.
• 46:17
  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
• 46:25
  bad variation.
• 46:27
  But once you start, you know, having people either having children with their cousins or even closer relatives, then you have a really high chance of having two
• 46:35
  of those dangerous copies of whatever it is together.
• 46:38
  Right.
• 46:38
  And so that's why you have an increase in genetic disorders because you're just increasing the odds of inheriting these
• 46:46
  two problematic genes dramatically.
• 46:49
  Yeah.
• 46:50
  When did we first gain the ability to test fetuses or unborn babies
• 46:58
  for the extra chromosome, the Down syndrome test?
• 47:03
  That's a really good question.
• 47:04
  Because they used to have to do it by like sticking a needle into the belly, right?
• 47:08
  Mm -hmm.
• 47:08
  And that actually accidentally killed a lot of babies doing that.
• 47:12
  Yeah.
• 47:12
  It's, I mean, now we know we can get it from blood, which is kind of crazy.
• 47:17
  Yeah.
• 47:17
  You just take a blood sample.
• 47:18
  And they can tell everything.
• 47:19
  Right.
• 47:19
  They can tell the sex.
• 47:20
  Right.
• 47:20
  They can tell all kinds of stuff.
• 47:22
  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
• 47:30
  disappear after the baby is born.
• 47:32
  Like they're in the mother in some way or another forever.
• 47:37
  So like every mother is carrying cells from every child she's had somewhere in her body.
• 47:44
  Sometimes they settle in and they become other things.
• 47:46
  Wow.
• 47:47
  But those cells are in there, which is kind of crazy.
• 47:49
  That is really crazy.
• 47:51
  It's also interesting how like the DNA, the code, your specific DNA, your specific
• 47:59
  gene, genome sequence is replicated throughout every cell in the body.
• 48:05
  Right.
• 48:05
  Except for the red blood cells.
• 48:07
  Is that right?
• 48:07
  That's right.
• 48:07
  Yeah.
• 48:08
  Uh -huh.
• 48:09
  It's just so, it's just such a wild thing because like, you know, it seems like in nature, everything is this way.
• 48:17
  Yeah.
• 48:17
  Yeah.
• 48:18
  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,
• 48:25
  like an environment of organisms.
• 48:28
  Because like all of your cells are carrying roughly the same genetic material, but they can also mutate.
• 48:33
  And so it's something called somatic changes.
• 48:35
  You have your germline changes, which are changes you inherit from your parents.
• 48:38
  And then you have changes that can happen in individual cells after you're born.
• 48:42
  It's like mutations.
• 48:43
  And this is kind of like what gives rise to cancer.
• 48:45
  You know, you have a mutation and then suddenly that cell starts expanding a lot more and passing on that mutation.
• 48:52
  So we have almost like mini evolution happening within your own body.
• 48:57
  But the mutations, like you said, happen a lot faster, right?
• 49:01
  They can, yeah.
• 49:02
  Than like the positive changes.
• 49:04
  Right.
• 49:05
  What would be the word for that, scientific word?
• 49:06
  Like what's the opposite of a mutation?
• 49:09
  Well, so mutation is just referring to the change.
• 49:11
  Oh, it's just a change.
• 49:12
  It's not necessarily negative.
• 49:13
  It doesn't mean.
• 49:14
  Okay.
• 49:14
  Uh -huh.
• 49:15
  So.
• 49:15
  Got it.
• 49:16
  It also doesn't mean it turns you into an X -Men.
• 49:19
  So.
• 49:22
  The CRISPR baby stuff.
• 49:23
  Yes.
• 49:24
  There was the guy in China who went to jail for three years for, I think he was just trying to modify using CRISPR.
• 49:33
  The gene sequence of a baby somehow.
• 49:38
  And he was trying to like optimize the baby to not get HIV or something like that.
• 49:43
  Right.
• 49:43
  I think that's right.
• 49:44
  Yeah.
• 49:44
  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
• 49:52
  HIV.
• 49:53
  Uh -huh.
• 49:54
  And so, yeah, I think he was trying to make those changes in an embryo to protect those, which, yeah, seems like.
• 50:01
  And this was, this was years ago.
• 50:03
  I think so.
• 50:04
  This was at least like five, six years ago, something like that.
• 50:06
  I can't remember exactly the time.
• 50:07
  Find out what year that was, Steve.
• 50:09
  Do you, do you know how fast this stuff, this CRISPR stuff is advancing?
• 50:14
  Yeah.
• 50:14
  I mean, one of the biggest things recently, like up till recently, that was an issue with CRISPR is something called off target effects.
• 50:21
  So that's, you know, there are a lot of parts of our genome that look very similar to each other.
• 50:25
  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.
• 50:33
  Mm -hmm.
• 50:35
  2019.
• 50:36
  Yeah.
• 50:37
  Six years ago.
• 50:38
  Yeah.
• 50:39
  So, 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
• 50:47
  edited.
• 50:48
  We're getting a lot better at that.
• 50:50
  So we can much more specifically target certain regions of the genome.
• 50:56
  But I forget where I started with this.
• 51:00
  CRISPR.
• 51:00
  When it comes to like editing, like specific things like the HIV receptor.
• 51:07
  Yeah.
• 51:07
  So it's like a, it's like using a blunt tool to do like fine precision work.
• 51:13
  Yeah.
• 51:13
  Although I think we're, you know, we're sharpening the tool every day, but it's still, you know, becomes this question of what changes
• 51:21
  should or should we not make?
• 51:23
  Like, because even like, you know, because there's.
• 51:26
  And who gets to decide.
• 51:27
  Exactly.
• 51:27
  Yeah.
• 51:29
  And then there's, you know, there's a combination of like something that's already happening is selection of embryos.
• 51:35
  Like which embryos you're going to implant in in vitro fertilization versus based on genetic markers versus
• 51:42
  modification of embryos.
• 51:45
  You know, like those are two different but overlapping kind of strategies for deciding what the next generation should be.
• 51:53
  But
• 51:54
  it's like, you know, we were talking about, I get severe migraines and that's something that's determined largely by genetics.
• 52:00
  I would love to not have migraines, but I also don't feel like I should not exist because I get migraines.
• 52:07
  You know what I mean?
• 52:07
  Like it's not.
• 52:09
  Yeah.
• 52:09
  It becomes very tricky.
• 52:10
  Have you ever heard of the green light therapy for migraines?
• 52:13
  No.
• 52:14
  Oh, Steve, you got to pull up the clip of Tom Seger.
• 52:17
  We had this guy on here recently who he came up with this device that's a little light panel and it shines green light.
• 52:24
  And he says he explained it in a scientific way.
• 52:27
  How if you shine it on your face, it can alleviate migraines.
• 52:31
  OK.
• 52:32
  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.
• 52:38
  But yeah, it was it was wild.
• 52:41
  I mean, from the podcast or he's got another video that's shorter.
• 52:45
  Yeah.
• 52:46
  I don't I don't necessarily want to make it like a long thing.
• 52:50
  I mean, I would try anything at this point.
• 52:52
  Yeah.
• 52:52
  There's a short.
• 52:53
  There's got to be there's got to be a clip of it, Steve.
• 52:55
  There's got to be a short clip.
• 52:56
  Type in Tom Seger.
• 52:57
  Yeah, there you go.
• 52:58
  Right there.
• 52:58
  Here.
• 52:58
  Oh, cool.
• 52:59
  Put the little headphones on.
• 53:00
  You'll be able to hear him explain it.
• 53:03
  Go before right before I turn the light on.
• 53:05
  There you go.
• 53:06
  What's called the migraine lamp?
• 53:08
  My green.
• 53:09
  It's green light therapy for headaches.
• 53:12
  So I'm going to shine this self on.
• 53:14
  I'm going to shine this on my eyes because you use it like this.
• 53:18
  If you're in a therapeutic setting, you would set it on like a little cell phone stand.
• 53:23
  You'd put it in front of you.
• 53:25
  You'd close your eyes and you let the green light come through your closed eyelids.
• 53:31
  Nobody knows why this works, but it works.
• 53:35
  I was on Mark Bell's podcast and his producer, Andrew, he's had migraines ever since he was a kid.
• 53:43
  And so he asked me about it.
• 53:45
  The invention was kind of accidental because I had a girlfriend with migraine headaches and I was looking at red light and
• 53:53
  UV and phototherapy.
• 53:55
  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
• 54:03
  every move, you know?
• 54:04
  That's odd.
• 54:04
  Yeah, right?
• 54:05
  And it was about green light and photophobia for people who suffer from migraines.
• 54:11
  When you have a migraine, most migraineurs want total darkness because the light will make their headache worse.
• 54:18
  So they shut themselves in a closet or in a dark bedroom or something.
• 54:22
  It's terrible.
• 54:22
  But at Harvard, they tested all the wavelengths of light and they found that green had a pain relieving or analgesic effect.
• 54:30
  University of Arizona picks this up and they start making devices with just green LEDs in them for migraineurs to use.
• 54:38
  And they get a significant reduction in the frequency and severity of migraine headaches among those people who
• 54:46
  used green light phototherapy.
• 54:48
  Crazy, right?
• 54:49
  Yeah.
• 54:50
  I will absolutely try that because I have the blue light filtering glasses and they're so -so.
• 54:55
  The red ones that filter all the blue light?
• 54:58
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 54:58
  Yeah.
• 54:59
  Yeah.
• 54:59
  Yeah.
• 55:00
  Yeah, he gave me one of those little lamps and my wife tried it, but it didn't work for her.
• 55:06
  Okay.
• 55:07
  But I don't think she gets actual migraines.
• 55:10
  Okay.
• 55:10
  She just gets a different type of headache.
• 55:11
  Okay.
• 55:12
  But.
• 55:12
  I'll give it a try.
• 55:13
  Might be worth checking it out.
• 55:19
  So, yeah, no.
• 55:20
  Where were we?
• 55:20
  I was like, so what do you think?
• 55:25
  What do you, obviously it's a speculation, but what do you think that this CRISPR gene editing stuff can lead to?
• 55:33
  Like, what's the best possible outcome for something like this?
• 55:36
  Like, do you think it's going to be like to work on if somebody has like a history of cancer or heart
• 55:44
  disease, you might be able to prevent that in future generations?
• 55:47
  Yeah.
• 55:48
  I mean, but I think that's absolutely the best possible outcome.
• 55:50
  You know, we know, like, I feel like there's some very clear examples where we know, like the breast cancer genes, like BRCA1,
• 55:58
  BRCA2, I think, that like dramatically increase your risk of cancer.
• 56:02
  If we could change those in the ways that we know are associated with less cancer in an individual, that would be great.
• 56:09
  Because right now, generally, if you have those mutations, they recommend like preventative mastectomies or things like that that are really invasive and terrible.
• 56:17
  So, you know, if they could kind of change that, wonderful.
• 56:22
  The problem is when we start getting into kind of more complicated scenarios because that's a very obvious, you know, we have this one genetic change that
• 56:30
  causes this thing.
• 56:31
  Otherwise, really, anytime we're looking for something like that, we're looking at correlations.
• 56:36
  And so correlations are super dangerous in any scientific research.
• 56:42
  Can you explain what this means?
• 56:43
  Yes, absolutely.
• 56:44
  So my favorite example is ice cream sales are highly correlated with shark attacks.
• 56:50
  Ice cream sales are highly correlated with shark attacks.
• 56:53
  Okay.
• 56:53
  This is not because sharks really like ice cream.
• 56:56
  It's because people eat ice cream in the summer.
• 56:59
  People go in the ocean in the summer.
• 57:01
  And so you have this really strong correlation.
• 57:04
  Like I've seen graphs and it's like incredible.
• 57:06
  Wow.
• 57:06
  You have a peak in ice cream sales.
• 57:08
  You have a peak in shark attacks.
• 57:09
  Okay.
• 57:10
  So that's essentially what we're doing with a lot of the genetics of disease that we're looking at.
• 57:15
  So, you know, if we look at, you know, hypertension and we say, oh, it's really strongly correlated with this genetic variant.
• 57:21
  Maybe that's because people with that genetic variant, you know, are predisposed for some other reason based on their like
• 57:29
  socioeconomic status or, you know, the environment that they're living in.
• 57:33
  Or, 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
• 57:41
  background or something like that, especially in a country like the U .S.
• 57:43
  where we have, you know, a lot of diversity and a lot of factors that influence the health of people from different ethnic backgrounds.
• 57:51
  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.
• 57:59
  And in that way, potentially like erasing genetic material that's related to a certain ethnic background or something like that.
• 58:07
  I mean, that's my worst case scenario fear.
• 58:09
  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
• 58:17
  likely to get cancer.
• 58:18
  I think that would be that would be amazing.
• 58:22
  Is there is there a way to affect lifespan like general general lifespan?
• 58:28
  I know there's lots of influences that can affect lifespan, obviously.
• 58:31
  Yeah.
• 58:31
  But like.
• 58:32
  Like genetic contributors.
• 58:34
  Yes.
• 58:34
  Lifespan.
• 58:35
  Yeah.
• 58:35
  So I used to always say like lifespan can't be influenced by evolution because, you know, once you're past a
• 58:43
  certain age, like you've made it.
• 58:45
  You're the fittest.
• 58:46
  You've survived.
• 58:47
  You know, evolution doesn't care about you anymore because like at that point, you're not having children anymore.
• 58:53
  Right.
• 58:53
  So you kind of are out of the equation.
• 58:57
  Interviewer: there's this really cool thing called the grandmother hypothesis that says that basically if a grandparent is
• 59:04
  involved in the life, the lives of their grandchildren, their children are able to have more children.
• 59:10
  And those children live healthier lives are more likely to survive.
• 59:15
  So just by living long enough to grandparent, they're increasing the chance that their genes get passed
• 59:23
  on.
• 59:23
  And in this way, we can pass on longevity genes.
• 59:28
  speakers: Wow.
• 59:30
  So grandparents interacting with grandchildren can influence the grandchildren to
• 59:37
  have more kids.
• 59:39
  Yeah.
• 59:40
  Yeah.
• 59:40
  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?
• 59:46
  One kid is enough.
• 59:47
  Like I am good.
• 59:49
  Right.
• 59:50
  I say this as an auntie, not as a mom.
• 59:53
  But, you know, let's say grandma and grandpa live down the road.
• 59:56
  They're helping take care of those kids.
• 59:58
  You know, your burden is eased.
• 1:00:00
  You're like, OK, maybe I could have another kid.
• 1:00:02
  Maybe I could have another couple of kids.
• 1:00:03
  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.
• 1:00:11
  Yeah.
• 1:00:12
  And so in that way, you know, if you're if you unfortunately you're the grandparents passed away young, then those
• 1:00:20
  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.
• 1:00:27
  Because the children aren't incentivized to have more kids because it's just so much work.
• 1:00:31
  Exactly.
• 1:00:31
  It's so much such a burden.
• 1:00:32
  Mm -hmm.
• 1:00:32
  Is there is there anything in genetics
• 1:00:39
  that predisposes certain women to want to have more children
• 1:00:47
  or not want to have more children?
• 1:00:50
  Yeah, that's an interesting question.
• 1:00:52
  Or like what if a what if a woman's like, you know, I want to have 10 children like I don't care how stressful it is.
• 1:00:57
  And then, you know, someone else comes along without, you know, absent of any external influences, just like I'm not interested.
• 1:01:05
  Yeah.
• 1:01:05
  Yeah.
• 1:01:06
  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.
• 1:01:12
  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 to now there's been so much societal pressure
• 1:01:19
  to have children.
• 1:01:27
  Modern environmental challenges, such as climate change, pose risks to human evolution and fertility. What does that contrast reveal?
• 1:01:38
  Interviewee: Mm -hmm.
• 1:01:40
  But, you know, it ends with me in terms of my lineage.
• 1:01:45
  Mm -hmm.
• 1:01:45
  So, yeah, if I had 10 kids, then the next generation of humans on this planet would have much more of my genetic material.
• 1:01:52
  So you would think that evolution would select for women who really want to have kids.
• 1:01:56
  Mm -hmm.
• 1:01:57
  But I don't know if that study's been done.
• 1:01:59
  Right, right.
• 1:02:00
  Yeah.
• 1:02:00
  Another interesting thing, you know, going back to the dog thing is how, and this also ties into the CRISPR stuff, but we're
• 1:02:08
  basically genetically modifying our pets.
• 1:02:11
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:02:12
  Right?
• 1:02:12
  We modify them to be cuter.
• 1:02:15
  Yes.
• 1:02:15
  And the cutest ones are the ones that are least likely to survive.
• 1:02:19
  Yeah.
• 1:02:19
  And also I was having a conversation with my neighbor this morning, funny enough, who has a really big German shepherd.
• 1:02:26
  And he was explaining to him how all of the little, like, tiny, cute dogs are the ones that attack
• 1:02:33
  his German shepherd the most.
• 1:02:35
  That tracks.
• 1:02:36
  I was like, genetically, how does that make sense?
• 1:02:38
  Yeah.
• 1:02:38
  You would think that nature would teach the little helpless dog not to attack the German shepherd who could kill it in two seconds.
• 1:02:45
  Yeah.
• 1:02:45
  So one of my dogs weighs eight pounds.
• 1:02:48
  His name is Lupo, which means wolf in Italian.
• 1:02:50
  So he has that wolf spirit.
• 1:02:53
  You know, he thinks he's a big dog.
• 1:02:54
  And sure enough, like, first dog he approaches at the dog park is always the biggest dog.
• 1:02:59
  He's not aggressive.
• 1:03:00
  Like, he doesn't come at them.
• 1:03:01
  Yeah.
• 1:03:01
  But he just has no idea how small he is.
• 1:03:03
  And he would absolutely not survive under, like, I mean, you know, it's like.
• 1:03:06
  It seems like the smallest dogs are the meanest.
• 1:03:08
  Yeah.
• 1:03:08
  Yeah.
• 1:03:09
  He's very sweet.
• 1:03:10
  Right.
• 1:03:10
  But yeah.
• 1:03:11
  But it's even in 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
• 1:03:18
  normally have it at.
• 1:03:19
  And he was shivering like crazy.
• 1:03:21
  And that was how I knew the furnace was broken.
• 1:03:23
  And I'm like, dog, you would not survive out there on your own.
• 1:03:26
  Yeah.
• 1:03:27
  No.
• 1:03:28
  And we're doing that to ourselves.
• 1:03:30
  We're domestic.
• 1:03:31
  If you look at, you know, what humans were 10 ,000 years ago compared to now, like we are basically teacup Yorkies compared to like the
• 1:03:39
  wolves we used to be.
• 1:03:40
  Yeah.
• 1:03:40
  Yeah.
• 1:03:41
  I know.
• 1:03:41
  And that goes into that goes into every that's with everything.
• 1:03:44
  All of these environmental influences that aren't even aren't even on purpose.
• 1:03:49
  It's just the way our society is with with making things more convenient with microplastics and
• 1:03:56
  technology doing everything for us.
• 1:03:58
  Yeah.
• 1:03:59
  We are becoming like, you know, teacup Yorkies of homo sapiens.
• 1:04:05
  Well, getting back to this, you know, best fit versus most fit.
• 1:04:09
  Like, you know, we have this idea that to be, you know, the fittest in our modern environment, like we should be tough.
• 1:04:14
  We should be strong.
• 1:04:15
  We should be able to handle the elements, you know, like same with the dogs.
• 1:04:18
  But it's like actually people who, you know, are able to navigate the current environment regardless of how physically fit they
• 1:04:26
  are, are the people who are more likely to have more children.
• 1:04:28
  You know, it doesn't matter if you could survive a snowstorm.
• 1:04:30
  Like that's probably not going to influence whether or not you have kids.
• 1:04:33
  And like these cute tiny dogs, you know, we want more of them because they're so cute.
• 1:04:38
  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.
• 1:04:45
  Yeah.
• 1:04:45
  But if there was some sort of a bottleneck event.
• 1:04:49
  Yeah.
• 1:04:49
  Like a super volcano.
• 1:04:50
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:04:51
  Or something like that.
• 1:04:52
  Or like a comet impact or whatever like that.
• 1:04:55
  The people that were in this crazy that right now we can live here in North America flying around on airplanes, recording
• 1:05:02
  podcasts.
• 1:05:03
  And simultaneously there's people running around naked in the Amazon.
• 1:05:06
  Yeah.
• 1:05:07
  Yeah.
• 1:05:07
  And if there was some sort of a cosmic event or a catastrophic cataclysm that wiped out most of humanity, those would be
• 1:05:15
  the ones, those people would be the people that would most likely survive.
• 1:05:18
  Yeah.
• 1:05:19
  I mean, depending on how the earth changed, you know, those of us teacup Yorkies would go the way of the dinosaurs.
• 1:05:27
  You know, I mean, we're not adapted to some of the potential ways that the earth could change in an event like that.
• 1:05:32
  Right.
• 1:05:33
  Which makes me wonder, like, are those indigenous tribes, those, I mean, there's some uncontacted tribes who treat humans
• 1:05:40
  as like predators and they kill humans when they see them.
• 1:05:44
  Right.
• 1:05:45
  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.
• 1:05:51
  Like, I wonder how far back their lineage goes, you know, like how because it's been I don't know how
• 1:05:59
  how would they be evolving?
• 1:06:01
  Would they be evolving?
• 1:06:03
  Like, have you heard of North Sentinel Island?
• 1:06:05
  Yes.
• 1:06:06
  Uh -huh.
• 1:06:06
  Yeah.
• 1:06:07
  Like those people.
• 1:06:07
  Right.
• 1:06:08
  Right.
• 1:06:08
  Yeah.
• 1:06:09
  I mean, you know, we don't have any genetic data from them, obviously, for obvious reasons.
• 1:06:12
  Yeah.
• 1:06:13
  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.
• 1:06:20
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:06:21
  The people who are trying to contact them.
• 1:06:22
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:06:23
  But yeah, I mean, it just totally depends on their environment.
• 1:06:25
  They're, you know, living in I think those environments are pretty tropical.
• 1:06:29
  So there's pathogen rich environments.
• 1:06:31
  We know that people living in the Amazon have actually evolved adaptations that protect them from certain parasitic infections.
• 1:06:38
  Mm -hmm.
• 1:06:38
  So they may have adaptations like that because, you know, like you or I would go see a doctor, get a medicine.
• 1:06:44
  We would, our ability to pass on our genes would not be affected by, you know, parasitic infection.
• 1:06:50
  But if you're living in an uncontacted tribe, you know, maybe that pathogen or that parasite kills you.
• 1:06:56
  So that's an opportunity for that population to be evolving.
• 1:06:59
  Yeah, they probably think of those things as like some sort of like demonic, demonic evil spirit or something like that.
• 1:07:06
  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
• 1:07:14
  diseases.
• 1:07:15
  Mm -hmm.
• 1:07:17
  Oh, it's crazy.
• 1:07:18
  Yeah, I mean, you know, that's.
• 1:07:19
  When you mix like a technologically advanced society with a not advanced society.
• 1:07:25
  Well, and there's a really amazing book called 1491 that I highly recommend that basically suggests that what we saw
• 1:07:32
  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
• 1:07:40
  disease spread faster than colonists.
• 1:07:44
  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
• 1:07:52
  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
• 1:07:59
  that we had developed would kind of fall apart as we struggled to recover from this catastrophic disease outbreak.
• 1:08:06
  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
• 1:08:14
  fact that most of the population had been killed by disease shortly before their arrival.
• 1:08:19
  Oh, wow.
• 1:08:20
  It's a really good book.
• 1:08:21
  I highly recommend it.
• 1:08:22
  It's called.
• 1:08:22
  It's called.
• 1:08:23
  1491.
• 1:08:24
  1491.
• 1:08:25
  Oh, wow.
• 1:08:25
  That's fascinating.
• 1:08:28
  Now, I mentioned to you briefly about that Mike Masters book before we started about this idea of.
• 1:08:35
  Peto morphism, how primates, the offspring of primates, they look more like
• 1:08:43
  fully grown adults today where they have, they sit up straight and they have these like kind of like bulbous heads that sits up straight over their shoulders and they,
• 1:08:50
  they look like.
• 1:08:53
  They look like normal, fully evolved humans today, but when the primates get older into full adulthood, they change
• 1:09:01
  their, their jaw protrudes, their head slopes back.
• 1:09:04
  And they sort of hunch over.
• 1:09:06
  And he, he says that this is an evolutionary thing that it looks like
• 1:09:13
  if you extrapolate that into the future, the fully grown adults in the
• 1:09:21
  future will look like the children of today.
• 1:09:25
  More like, you know, a toddler of today would be, look like a fully grown adult.
• 1:09:31
  Do you know what, do you know anything about that?
• 1:09:32
  Or is that.
• 1:09:33
  I hadn't heard of that.
• 1:09:34
  It's an interesting idea.
• 1:09:35
  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
• 1:09:43
  linear direction.
• 1:09:44
  Right.
• 1:09:45
  Right.
• 1:09:45
  Right.
• 1:09:45
  It's just like so hard to say.
• 1:09:48
  You know, it's like the thing where people say, oh, our pinky toe has been getting smaller over the past hundred thousand years.
• 1:09:54
  Therefore, eventually we won't have one.
• 1:09:55
  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,
• 1:10:03
  four toes, then the population would change in that way.
• 1:10:06
  But otherwise, we're just going to stay kind of how we are.
• 1:10:09
  Like you need natural selection to drive a change like that.
• 1:10:13
  I mean, things can change just randomly, but usually natural selection would be required.
• 1:10:17
  So if there was something that was selecting for, and maybe that's part of the hypothesis.
• 1:10:23
  I haven't read the book.
• 1:10:25
  Oh, there you go.
• 1:10:25
  There's an example.
• 1:10:26
  Yeah.
• 1:10:26
  So if there's something about the current state of toddlers, you know, human toddlers that becomes more
• 1:10:34
  advantageous in the future, then totally we could evolve.
• 1:10:36
  To look more like them in the future.
• 1:10:39
  But otherwise, we'll probably just stay pretty much the same.
• 1:10:42
  Well, it makes logical sense if you look at technology taking over for the need for us to do like
• 1:10:50
  physical things.
• 1:10:51
  Right.
• 1:10:51
  We don't need big muscles like we need like toddlers have bigger heads compared to their bodies.
• 1:10:58
  They would use our heads more.
• 1:11:00
  We would have we would be skinnier.
• 1:11:01
  We would be smaller, more frail because we would rely on technology to do this stuff.
• 1:11:09
  And, you know, obviously technology has been advancing since we were first able to create fire.
• 1:11:14
  And that's changed the shape of our jaws and and things like this.
• 1:11:17
  The shape of our heads.
• 1:11:18
  Yeah.
• 1:11:19
  We don't need giant hands anymore.
• 1:11:21
  Yeah.
• 1:11:22
  So I think technology would probably have to have a big part of that as long as technology keeps evolving and keeps,
• 1:11:30
  you know, and who knows what happens when we really when we reach some sort of like technological singularity.
• 1:11:35
  Mm hmm.
• 1:11:36
  You know, maybe we just get wiped out.
• 1:11:37
  Yeah.
• 1:11:38
  Yeah.
• 1:11:38
  But it seems like that has a lot to do with technology.
• 1:11:41
  Yeah.
• 1:11:42
  Changing our anthropomorphic look.
• 1:11:44
  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.
• 1:11:52
  But then if you look at have you ever seen the movie Idiocracy?
• 1:11:56
  Yes.
• 1:11:57
  OK.
• 1:11:57
  So that's been a long time.
• 1:11:59
  That's a good movie.
• 1:11:59
  With one caveat.
• 1:12:00
  That is, in my opinion, the only accurate portrayal of evolution I've ever seen in a movie.
• 1:12:06
  So, you know, you have a lot of movies that talk about evolution.
• 1:12:09
  Most of them get it wrong.
• 1:12:10
  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.
• 1:12:18
  But Idiocracy starts with the idea that essentially stupid people are having more children than smart people currently.
• 1:12:25
  And therefore, in the future, more of those children are having more children.
• 1:12:30
  And these, like, stupid genes are being passed on to the point where I forget how many years into the future.
• 1:12:35
  Everyone is really dumb.
• 1:12:37
  And so an average person currently becomes a genius in the future.
• 1:12:40
  And it's a very funny, very silly movie.
• 1:12:44
  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
• 1:12:52
  intelligence.
• 1:12:52
  Because it's such a complicated thing to measure.
• 1:12:56
  Right.
• 1:12:56
  But anyway, but if that were true, you know, then absolutely, you know, I mean, maybe if you, and maybe I shouldn't say that, but if you think about the people who are having many, many children.
• 1:13:05
  And think about that potentially driving the selection of our species into the future.
• 1:13:10
  You know, it's just hard to predict what's going to increase, you know, in frequency in the next
• 1:13:18
  generation.
• 1:13:19
  Yeah.
• 1:13:19
  Well, definitely, if you think about it, you know, the people, the smartest people in universities and
• 1:13:27
  labs, they aren't raising tons of kids, right?
• 1:13:31
  They're more focused on their work and whatever they're doing.
• 1:13:34
  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
• 1:13:42
  figuring out a problem.
• 1:13:46
  That's true.
• 1:13:47
  You know, that is true.
• 1:13:48
  Is that intelligence or is that, you know, how you were raised and education and all these other things?
• 1:13:54
  Like, that's a whole other debate.
• 1:13:55
  But yeah, it's just to say that, like, I don't necessarily see a strong selective pressure driving us as a population,
• 1:14:02
  a human, you know, species to be smarter, have bigger heads, etc.
• 1:14:07
  You know, in the ways that we kind of think.
• 1:14:09
  Well, maybe the big heads doesn't have to necessarily do with being smarter.
• 1:14:13
  Yeah, it might not.
• 1:14:15
  But again, like, unless people with big heads are having more children or people with small heads are not having children, then there's
• 1:14:23
  no reason for us to move towards big heads.
• 1:14:26
  And it also seems like we may evolve to be, you know, is it possible that we evolve to even being
• 1:14:34
  sexless in the future with AI and with genetic engineering and things like this?
• 1:14:38
  Where we're not creating, we're not procreating the same way.
• 1:14:46
  We're like by having sex anymore.
• 1:14:48
  It's not this primitive thing we do anymore.
• 1:14:50
  Right.
• 1:14:50
  Now it's just like we use science and technology to create the perfect kid.
• 1:14:57
  We don't need to do it that way.
• 1:14:58
  That's too primitive.
• 1:14:59
  Well, and that's so interesting.
• 1:15:00
  I mean, you know, that would be like a cultural evolution that could totally change everything about our species.
• 1:15:06
  Because, yeah, if you don't, then the rules of evolution as we know it don't apply anymore.
• 1:15:12
  Because you're creating that human in a way that our species has never done in the
• 1:15:20
  past.
• 1:15:21
  Yeah.
• 1:15:22
  And that's like another, one of the other points of Michael Master's book is he connects it to like all of the worldwide depictions
• 1:15:30
  of these little gray aliens that people talk about.
• 1:15:33
  And people allegedly see that are, they seem to be genderless, have no sexual organs, and they look like toddlers.
• 1:15:41
  Right.
• 1:15:41
  And they have these big eyes.
• 1:15:42
  Like they were adapted to see, adapted to, to see in the dark.
• 1:15:49
  Yeah.
• 1:15:50
  And he, and, and basically he has this elaborate theory that, which is like, it's out there, but it, it makes sense
• 1:15:58
  in that realm.
• 1:16:00
  That like, if we were to evolve hundreds of thousands of years into the future, it's possible, is it possible that we could
• 1:16:08
  end up looking like that?
• 1:16:10
  Right.
• 1:16:11
  And then, um, if there was some sort of like nuclear war or some sort of cataclysm that wiped out, um,
• 1:16:18
  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
• 1:16:26
  select G from the genetic pool back in the past.
• 1:16:30
  And to repopulate the species in the future.
• 1:16:33
  Mm -hmm.
• 1:16:33
  That's his, that's his whole hypothesis, which is wild.
• 1:16:36
  That's fun.
• 1:16:37
  It's fun.
• 1:16:37
  It's super fun.
• 1:16:38
  Yeah.
• 1:16:38
  Yeah.
• 1:16:39
  Yeah.
• 1:16:39
  Thinking about evolution in the far future and like all the ways that technology is going to be able to influence these things is, is very fun.
• 1:16:46
  So it's, so you said that intelligence is not genetically passed on?
• 1:16:52
  That we have been able to identify because it's so hard.
• 1:16:55
  This is another one of those correlation causation things where it's like, um, some, there have been some studies and I, I take issue with these
• 1:17:03
  studies that look at genetics paired with, um, educational attainment.
• 1:17:08
  So how far you go in school?
• 1:17:10
  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
• 1:17:17
  have PhDs who are not so brilliant.
• 1:17:19
  You know, so it's like, how does that quantify intelligence, you know, our best attempt at quantifying intelligence is IQ test.
• 1:17:26
  And even that is super flawed.
• 1:17:28
  We know.
• 1:17:28
  Yeah.
• 1:17:28
  IQ test is ancient, right?
• 1:17:30
  It's not been, it's not been updated.
• 1:17:32
  Right.
• 1:17:32
  Right.
• 1:17:32
  So it's like, we don't.
• 1:17:33
  It's basically pattern matching, right?
• 1:17:34
  It's like finding patterns.
• 1:17:36
  So we don't even have a good way of measuring intelligence.
• 1:17:41
  speakers: But then even if we, you know, if we use educational attainment, not saying that we should, but the people have done this and continue to present on this at
• 1:17:49
  genetics conferences, which always blows my mind.
• 1:17:51
  Um, and you correlate that with, with genetics, you know, you could imagine in the U S there are
• 1:17:59
  going to be certain correlations that are purely a legacy of some of the, some of the demographic things that have happened in this country.
• 1:18:07
  Um, like there are people who don't have an opportunity to go to school, um, because of their ethnic background.
• 1:18:12
  And so you are, you may end up like you could end up with a study where you say, look, here's the genetic change that makes you
• 1:18:20
  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
• 1:18:27
  ancestry, your background.
• 1:18:29
  Um, and so it becomes really problematic because it's like, what exactly are we measuring if we don't even know how to measure
• 1:18:37
  intelligence, um, right to begin with.
• 1:18:40
  Right.
• 1:18:40
  And then there's so many conflating factors.
• 1:18:44
  And intelligence isn't a monolith either.
• 1:18:46
  It's not one thing.
• 1:18:47
  Like there's many different types of intelligence, right?
• 1:18:50
  Absolutely.
• 1:18:50
  Yeah.
• 1:18:50
  People can have high verbal intelligence.
• 1:18:52
  They can have high emotional intelligence.
• 1:18:54
  Um, does someone with an identity intelligence.
• 1:18:58
  Yeah.
• 1:18:58
  Um, and it all just depends on, on your environment.
• 1:19:01
  And we also in the Western world, we equate intelligence with like monetary
• 1:19:08
  success.
• 1:19:09
  Mm -hmm.
• 1:19:10
  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
• 1:19:18
  lane.
• 1:19:19
  Right.
• 1:19:19
  That they've focused on their whole life.
• 1:19:20
  And then anything outside of that lane, they're like a teenager.
• 1:19:24
  Yeah.
• 1:19:24
  They don't know much about anything.
• 1:19:26
  Right.
• 1:19:26
  Yeah.
• 1:19:26
  Yeah.
• 1:19:27
  Yeah.
• 1:19:27
  And I mean, you know, you take an intelligent person, they eat some lead paint from the walls of their apartment as a baby.
• 1:19:33
  And suddenly their IQ has dropped 15 points just from that exposure to lead.
• 1:19:37
  So there's like all these environmental factors that like are so hard to disentangle with anything that it's like.
• 1:19:43
  Right.
• 1:19:43
  Right.
• 1:19:43
  It's really hard.
• 1:19:45
  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 that, we don't have any idea how to do
• 1:19:52
  that.
• 1:19:53
  You know, we have the technology if we knew what the gene was, but we don't, we're so far from knowing that.
• 1:19:58
  And also some of like, some of the most iconic people in
• 1:20:06
  history, like Pablo Picasso or even some like musicians, they
• 1:20:13
  were, they thrived and they became like so well
• 1:20:21
  known for what they did.
• 1:20:22
  And they did something that was like so much more advanced than anyone else in their field.
• 1:20:28
  A lot of them because of some sort of negative thing in their
• 1:20:36
  life or some sort of negative physical attribute or something that was missing.
• 1:20:41
  Like for example, Pablo Picasso, some people speculate that one of the reasons that he was so
• 1:20:49
  good at depicting light and depicting depth in his paintings was because he could only see in 2D.
• 1:20:56
  He could, he didn't have 3D vision because his like eyes looked out.
• 1:21:00
  Like he had, it was like wall eyed or whatever.
• 1:21:02
  So they, people speculate from all of his photos that he couldn't see that.
• 1:21:04
  So that made him extraordinary at depicting depth in his paintings and creating these just amazing looking paintings that
• 1:21:12
  no one else could do.
• 1:21:14
  So like, you know, that's interesting too, that how people can just become outliers because of a deficiency they have.
• 1:21:21
  Right.
• 1:21:23
  And, you know, genius is so contextual.
• 1:21:26
  Like Picasso at the time wasn't perceived by everyone as being a genius.
• 1:21:30
  Now, now we see him that way at the time.
• 1:21:33
  Hundreds of years later.
• 1:21:34
  Yeah.
• 1:21:34
  Like I recently, my husband's a symphony musician and they, the symphony played Rachmaninoff's first symphony.
• 1:21:40
  And it was so poorly received when he wrote it that he went into depression for three years and, and the symphony was lost until like the forties because
• 1:21:48
  he basically threw it out.
• 1:21:49
  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.
• 1:21:57
  But at the time it was people compared it to, I can't, I think they said like the seven circles of hell or something.
• 1:22:03
  They said listening to it, the experience was like being in hell.
• 1:22:08
  So yeah, it's like, it's, it's such a hard thing to, we could never quantify it, I think.
• 1:22:15
  Wow.
• 1:22:15
  Well, that's fascinating.
• 1:22:17
  Melissa, thank you so much for doing this.
• 1:22:19
  This has been fascinating.
• 1:22:20
  Is there anything else interesting that we haven't covered that you think we should talk about?
• 1:22:27
  Trying to think of, I feel like we've talked, we haven't, we've talked about a lot.
• 1:22:31
  Yeah, we covered, we covered a ton.
• 1:22:34
  Yeah.
• 1:22:35
  Is it, where, 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?
• 1:22:41
  Yeah.
• 1:22:42
  So my lab is called the superhuman lab.
• 1:22:44
  So I have a website, superhumanlab .org.
• 1:22:47
  I'm also on Instagram.
• 1:22:49
  It's superhumanpsilab.
• 1:22:51
  And I love getting questions, comments, messages.
• 1:22:54
  So yeah, I'd be happy to talk to anyone.
• 1:22:56
  Fantastic.
• 1:22:57
  Well, thank you so much.
• 1:22:57
  This has been, I'm going to have to go back and listen to this like two more times.
• 1:23:01
  This is a lot to digest, but thank you so much for your time.
• 1:23:03
  I really appreciate it.
• 1:23:04
  Thank you.
• 1:23:05
  All right.
• 1:23:05
  Goodbye, everybody.