Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 180: Teeth, Horns, and Claws

Transcript

Ep. 180: Teeth, Horns, and Claws · The MeatEater Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: This is me Eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: bug bitten in my case, underwear lessening Hunt podcast. You
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: where you stand with on X? All right? Can I
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: call you Professor dug Emlin. That's right, it works, Okay,
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: tell people what you do. I'm a biologist. I'm an
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: evolutionary biologist, and I study animal weapons at University of Montana.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Out there I got to take care of. Now. I'm
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: a biologist at the University of Montana, and uh, most
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: of my time I work on rhinoceros beetles with horns,
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: but more generally, I'm interested in how and why animal
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: weapons get really big, including dear teeth, saber tooths. Yeah,
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: including all of those things. We can talk about any
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: of them that you want to. One of the things
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: I stumbled on a few years ago while trying to
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: write a book was realizing that all these things that
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: we learned about insects and about beetles applied to things
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: like deer. And then the more I looked and the
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: more I dug into the sort of nitty gritty of
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: the biology, the more convinced I became that the same logic,
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: the same rules apply to all these cases of really
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: extreme weapons, including, to my astonishment, military technologies. Yeah, sort
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: of day to day research is on is on rhinoceros beetles.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: The fact is, the concepts I study, the things I
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: think about applied just as much to military technologies as
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: they do to animal weapons. Okay, a couple quick things.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: You do you know that you know? You know my
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: sister in law, I just figured this out two days ago.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: Who is now You're one of her stituents. Remember when
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: Clinton was being impeached and and there was this debate
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: about whether or not character matters. Yeah, she has character.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: I think I could have told you that Rush Limbaugh
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: said character is above all else at the time he
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: felt that and um, yeah, she fits that point too.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: You're comparing it to Russia. No, No, I'm saying that.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: I'm saying that there was a debate, like, Okay, there
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: was a debate at the time in the nineties. There
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: was like there was this debate where people were saying,
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: um that, you know, a president does what he does
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: and character doesn't matter. Right, It's like it's it's it's
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: nice that they have good character, but it's not good
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: character is not essential for the job. And so at
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: the time, people that were voicing the opposite opinion were
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: understandably from the opposite side of the aisle, and so
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: they were like, oh my god, does character ever matter?
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: Like that's character out limball, that characters above ball else.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: And then you know later in subsequent administrations, the people
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: who voiced the the importance of character have dramatically shifted.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: But I want to get another point now, um uh,
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: I think I told you this before. Dog the best
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: one of the best lines in your book, isn't your Lineinstein? Quote? Yeah?
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: What do you call it? When you put a quote
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: it to be of a book? What doesn't ea mean
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: later we'll look it up really quick. I should know
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: when you die and they write something about you. Yeah,
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: that's not that. It's not that anyway, there's a quote
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: I don't have you have hit him with the quote, yeah,
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: but I can't. I don't have a memories. It's like
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: I've I've opened books with quotes. Oh you got it right, Yeah,
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: speak of for yourself. Sam epigraph a sam longer coming
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: to epigraph. So epigraph is before a book, and epitaph
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: is on your teamstone after it's after you die. So
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: epigraph is before your book. And so I know not
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: what I it's not what he said. Let me try again.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: I know not with what weapons. World War three will
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: be fought, but World War four will be fought with
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: sticks and stones. It is good and and I guess
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: I can speak to it for a minute about why
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: I chose to put it at the front of the book.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: It felt president somehow for a book on extreme weapons.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: And one of the things I hinted at is that
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: I learned along the way while writing this book that
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: all these things that we've stumbled on as a biologist
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: applied to military technologies. And part of the exercise of
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: writing this book was really digging into the military literature
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: and reading about historical arms races and the deep past,
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: and and looking at these parallels and really trying to
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: unpack the parallels between the animal and the military weapons.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: And that meant to do that right, that meant coming
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: full forward and taking a really hard look at modern
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: times like the Cold War and post Cold War situations
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: and Einstein wrote that during the Cold War, very much
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: in that mindset and speaking to the I mean, I
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: guess the spectacular devastating capabilities of modern weapons of mass destruction,
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: And I think his point is it doesn't really matter
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: what the next world is, you know what the Third
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: World War is going to be fought with, because pretty
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: much anything they use these days is going to be
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: so destructive that everything will be rubble, and the people
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: that managed to stagger past that are going to be
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: hitting each other on the head with sticks and stones
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: because it's the only thing that will be left. There's
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: a kind of sobering, but it is a reflection of
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: the reality of where modern weapons of mass destruction are.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: There's a thirty or forty thousand one of those thirty
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: or forty thousand year old skull from Europe that they had.
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: It was a pretty well preserved like in tax gold
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: they had, and they had a uh peculiar concave cracking
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: on it. It suggested the person they pondered over it
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: like whether it was post mortem or not, like they
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: thought maybe just soil compacion or something had happened. Um,
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: and then they want up they worked up some kind
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: of technology where they can make these, uh like something
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: that's a fact simile of human bone and fill it
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: with what you call that stuff you shoot guns at,
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: ballistic gel fill it with a ballistic gels. See what
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: kind of and then yeah, and then give it various
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: injuries and um, they determined it thirty thousand years ago
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: he had likely been killed by someone who is left
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: handed and facing him. That's okay, uh, okay, that's my
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: favorite line from the book. And not just because I'm
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: not pointing out that you didn't write it, but it's
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: a great it's a perfect really it's a really good
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: h you know, deal best line in the book. My
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: favorite new word that I learned in your book, which
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: is called animal weapons, like you get, the title gets
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: right to it. The title is that leave you guessing?
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean it does like blood Meridian
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: at am. But the title doesn't tell you what the
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: book is about. Okay, But in all fairness, animal weapons
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily speak to the fact that half the book
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: is about the miltee. So we struggled with titles. We
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: are that we are animals, that is, but that might
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: not have be the how the average person on the
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: you know in the bookstore looking at the shelves would
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: think about it. So okay, one more quick comment and
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna have you digging on something. Um My favorite
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: word that learned in this book is supernate. That was
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: a new one for me too. You didn't know that word. No,
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: I do now explain to folks. It is who can
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: supernate and why it matters. Cats can supernate their four limbs,
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: and it refers to the way that they can articulate
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: and twist the way that we can with our risk too.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: But most other carnivores like dogs or wolves cannot. They
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: can articulate and twist their fore limbs, and it is
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: relevant and I talked about it in the book in
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: the context of the evolution of the extreme canines and
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: things like sabretooth cats and and and The idea there
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: is that those weapons are so big. I mean, they're
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: phenomenal for piercing and for killing really big prey, but
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: they're also really vulnerable to breakage and snapping, and so
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: the cats need to be able to plunge the teeth
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: in and pull them right back out again. You can't
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: just lock them in and hang or you'll well maybe
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: they could. But the only way they could do that
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: is if they can hold on to the animal and
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: position themselves. You know, if otherwise you sink your teeth
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: in the animal runs away, it snaps your teeth. Thought
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: to hold onto that animal would be spidd four limbs
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: while it's trying to run like hell away from you.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: Is part of how we think, or the paliontal just
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: think these cats are able to not snap their teeth,
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: but they it. You know, you look at the libery
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: a tart pit fossils, they had snap teeth. My first
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: date with my wife, did you that's a good first date.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: But so they snapped their teeth all the time. I
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: mean that was definitely the big price tag of having
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: teeth like that, well one of the price tags, because
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: you think about like you look at a wolf, dragon elpdown.
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: He doesn't. He can't supernate, so he has to do
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: all with his teeth, just hanging on for dear life.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: But they also do it as a group. So wolves
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: tend to hunt as a pack, and they can bring
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: down prey by pulling on them from different sides. I
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: think there's a debate actually about saber tooths for a
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: long time it was assumed that they were solitary hunters,
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: and now there's people arguing that they might have been
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: social to you. But I don't know. Not my forte
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: I work on beetles. But no, there's been a bunch
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: of stuff that's come out on saber tooths. I mean,
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: they were a real catalyst for me. We can get
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: we can get into this and whatever. What do you want?
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: But most of that I okay, Then I we'll come
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: back to that. I feel like I want to start
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: out by talking if you're comfortable with this about the
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: white and brown mice on the white sand. Okay, because
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: unless you think that's a bad am I messing my
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: job up or doing my job, we can do this
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: or whatever. Do you want? The logic that I got
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: one that I might be able to wedge in ahead
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: of that kind of try go for it. What I
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: just want to know what? Maybe what like the what
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: your definition of a weapon is? Damnit? Yanni, that's the
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: first question and I skipped it. Look Sam, that's number one.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: Back me up. So this is when I struggled with
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: when I was trying to research the book too. There
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: isn't a simple definition. I mean if you think about it, teeth, claws,
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: anything that you stab or claw slash with, clearly that's
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: a weapon. You think of tusks and antlers that you
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: lock and spar with, those are weapons. But chemical things
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: that animals produce as a toxin to spray or inject,
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: those are weapons of a sort. And if you start
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: looking at military arsons and you start looking at what
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: soldiers carry in the battle, they carry a lot more
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: than than the firearms. They've got communication equipment. They've got
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: camo that helps them blend with their backgrounds, they've got
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: kevlar that protects them from certain vantages. All of that
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: stuff could be considered part of the arsenal of an
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: individual soldier, and so you can start to subdivide it
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: into things that mostly function for protection and defense, things
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: that function for attack and offense. I don't actually want
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: to go down that path of what is a weapon,
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: because there's a million things that could fit under that.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: What I will say is I focus on a particular
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: subset of animal weapons, and those are the things that
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: get really big and so sort of from my perspective
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: as an evolutionary biologist, I'm constantly stumped by the fact
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: that there are species out there with these things sticking
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: off of them that are ridiculous. I mean, any hunter
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: loves a good rack of antlers, and we love looking
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: at caribou or elk, but you step back a look
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: at them like you're an alien from another planet looking
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: at these things for the first time. It's absurd. It's
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: absolutely insane that these animals would have that much stuff
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: sticking off their heads. And as a biologist, I want
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: to make sense of that. We know it's awkward, we
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: know it's expensive. Under what kinds of circumstances will the
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: benefits of a weapon like that be so profound that
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: animals with these huge weapons do better than other individuals
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: out there with weapons that that are smaller or less extreme.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: And so that's my sort of thing as a biologist.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: Under what kinds of social or physical environments or circumstances
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: will sort of the stars aligned so that the really
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: big weapons win. And so so it's it comes back.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: I'm not giving you an easy answer to what is
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: a weapon. There's a lot of things that qualify as
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: a weapon, but I'm kind of hoping today we're going
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: to focus on things that are unquestionably weapons and they're
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: the big stuff, the tusks and the horns and the
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: antlers and the you know, the sabretooth cat keynines. Okay,
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: so here's here's what I want you to talk about.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: Here's what I wanted to get into. The white and
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: brown mice. Okay, because you have a I'm gonna switch up.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: You have a page on page six. Nice to know
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: I made its pitch six. Yeah, body, I made it
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: always through this book, man. So on page six you
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: have a quote where you say, whenever individuals differ and
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: how successful they are at propagating their kind, evolution occurs. So,
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: keeping that in mind and knowing this is something that
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: you chose to bring up early on in your book,
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: tell the story about the white mice and the brown
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: mice and the white sand. And that's the reason I
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: told that story was to try to provide sort of
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: a really simple, intuitive, real world example to hang that
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: logic on. So that essence of evolutionary biology people people
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: feel threatened by it, people misunderstand that, people run with
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: it in all kinds of crazy directions, But it is basic.
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: It really is a simple process. It it rests on
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: the fact that if you look at any population of
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: anything out there, you pick your favorite species. But in
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: this case, we'll start with old field mice. And you
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: go out and you start looking at the individuals. You
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: look at the mice. You're not just saying, hey, there's
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: six or needy two of them, or you know, there's
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: more this year than last year. You're actually looking at
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: the mice. What you're gonna find is they're not the same.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: Some of them are heavier, some of them are lighter,
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: some of them are darker. Some of them have I
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: don't know, longer legs, bigger teeth. If you go out
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: there as a biologist and you start measuring things, you're
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: gonna find that there's variation that some of the mice
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: are faster, some of them age more quickly, some of
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: them digest things better, some of them smell better. There's
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: tons of things about the mice that are different from
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: each other. And and evolution is about turnover. It's how
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: some types do about. It's winners and losers. Some types
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: do better than others, and the ones that do better
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: end up living when others die, and they end up
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: reproducing when others don't. And those are the ones that
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: end up producing offspring that carry with them these same characteristics.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: And if you look at that population over time, from
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: one generation to the next generation to the next generation,
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: you follow that, you'll find that the average characteristics shift.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: They get darker, they get faster, they get better. It's
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: smelling a certain thing. Populations are all was changing as
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: they sort of adapt to the environments around them. That's evolution.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: That's the process that I'm looking at. So that you learn.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: Mice is a really clear example. I can tell the
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: story if you want. I gotta like, I wanna a
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: couple of things that that brings up as a soth.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: So often in biology you talk to people who are
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: looking at population like the general sense, and you're talking
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: about looking at the individual differences. And I think a
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: good way for people to understand that in the way
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: that struck and I was reading your book, is it
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: when we when we humans look at other humans, we
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: completely gloss over. We're not like, oh, they all look
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: the same. You're right, we are really good. You can
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: get the differences. Well, you see, I saw a man.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: I'm like, that man has an extraordinarily long neck. It
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: wasn't thirty minutes ago. I thought that because you just
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: like you have a trained eye, so you're just like
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: the same way you can go you can recognize a
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: person and pick them out of hundreds of people. And
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: so to talk about how mice we can't see it
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: is all we see is it's MOUs nous. That's a
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: great analogy though, because people ought to recognize that we're
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: really good if seeing those differences in ourselves. But what
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: you have to accept then is those kinds of differences
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: exist in everything from you know, from plants to snails
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: to mice. Every population out there has sort of standing
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: genetic variation. It has differences among individuals and the traits
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: that you might look at and measure, and sometimes those
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: differences matter. Sometimes individuals that run faster actually do better
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: at getting away from predators and they live longer, or
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: you know, who knows what the traits are. In my
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: case and today's interview case, you know, we're going to
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: be sort of playing around with what kinds of conditions
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: cause the individuals with the really big weapons to win
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: to do better than the other individuals, because those are
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: the conditions that will lead to the evolution of big weapons.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: But but the light and dark mice, it's a it's
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: a simple example of a real world population that's been
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: studied really well all the way down to people have
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: figured out the genomes, they know the individual genes, they
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: know the mutations to the genes that contributed to the rights.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: So so from a biology standpoint, it's a beautifully complete story.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: But it's basic. It's really simple. Mice are dark, they're brown.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: They usually go forage at night because there's predators that
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: can spot them and eat them. Owls are still really
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: good at seeing contrast in the dark, so their main
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: predators when they're out at night or owls. And and
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: if you're a mouse running around on dark soils and
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: most of their habitat and you're too light, the contrast
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: makes you stand out and you get nailed by the owls,
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: And so owls have historically kept mouse populations pretty dark
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: brown because any of that were too light got nailed
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: and the ones they got cold from the population because
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: they stood out. And then a few thousand years ago,
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: mice colonized, They expanded their range, and they colonized the
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: coastal sand dunes around the Gulf of you know, the
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: Gulf in the southern United States, around the coast of Florida,
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: and you get out onto these dunes, and all of
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: a sudden, the dirt's not rich and dark and brown anymore.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: You're out on sand dunes, it's like piles of salt.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: I mean, some places it's really white. And so what
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: happened is the mice are still being mice. They're doing
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: all the same things, but now they're running around at
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: night on white and all of a sudden, the dark
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: mice stood out really badly, and they got hammered by
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: the owls because they kept seeing these dark mice and
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: nailing them. And by pure dumb luck chance, a small
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: number of these mice carried mutations in their genome that
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: screwed around with the pathway that makes the dark melon
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: and pigment in the fur, and they happened, by chance,
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: to be lighter. More of their fur was white and
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: less of it was dark. And normally in the main
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: areas they get hammered because they look bad, they're they're
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: too light, they stand out. But out here on these
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: outer fringes, those individuals did better because they were lighter
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: in color and they were more likely to hide than
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: the dark mice. And so out on these coastal populations.
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: You know, owls are still being owls. They're just going
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: for whatever they find. But in those populations, they're eating
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: all the dark mice. And it was the ones that
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: carried these these random genetic mutations that made them lighter.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: Those mice survived, they had all the kids, and then
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: over time these mice populations got whiter and whiter, and
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: now we have two sort of side by side areas
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: with white mice and dark mice, and we think it
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: was driven by selection from these predators. And so the
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: experiment I talked about in the book was a classic.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: They set up in the seventies where they had captive owls.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: They trucked in truckloads of sand and they created arenas
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: with white soil, like like from the coast, and then
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: they had other arenas with dark soil, and then they
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: just released mice and let the owls do what the
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: owl's dead. And they showed really cleanly that on the
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: dark soil, it's the white mice that get nailed, and
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: on the light soil it's the dark mice that get nailed.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: And they were able to show that the owls were
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: sort of to use the technical language, acting as agents
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: of selection. They were selecting for dark or light mice
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: on these different backgrounds. So it's a nice example of
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: a process of winners and losers. The color of the
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: mouse differed from mouse to mouse, and in each environment
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: it mattered. The ones that had the right color combinations lived.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: The one that had the bad combination stood out, like
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: you know, like a hunter wearing the wrong camo. You
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: stand out, you get noticed. And in that case, because
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: they were getting eaten, it ended up that some mice
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: were being more successful at surviving and reproducing in each area.
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: They passed on their inherited characteristics and the population changed
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: over time. It evolved so that now several thousand years later,
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: you know, a couple of thousand mouse generations later, those
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: two populations are totally different from each other. I mean
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: they look like different species. One's white and one's dark.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: And that was a very recent, sort of gradual evolutionary
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: shift in the color example of the process. But that
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: process is happening all the time and just about anything
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: out there, it's on us as the scientist to figure out, Okay,
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: what are the things that differences among individuals? What are
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: the variations in this species that excuse me that matter?
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: Why do they matter? Why are these ones the ones
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: that are winning and these ones are the ones that
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: are losing? And we can go out and sort of
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: study the process of evolution in the wild in real populations.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: And again that's it's just a conceptual backdrop to turn
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: around and then say, wider weapons, get big. What I like?
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: What strikes me about that that quote that Steve just
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: read and what you're saying. And I know that happened
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: over whatever thousand generation might have even been less, but
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: it was fast. Yeah. But you know, the po posing
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: evolution that way, I think gives it a little bit
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: more of an immediacy. I think to a lot of
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: people it's it's kind of an abstraction. You know, it's
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: something that is working on like macro population levels, but
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: it really does come down to the individual and it
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: can change very rapidly. I'm really glad you brought that up. Actually,
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: if you forgive me for a digression here, I'm really
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: glad you brought that up because I run into this
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: in my classes. People have this antiquated notion of the
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: evolutionary biologist as this old, white haired geezer with a
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: big beard arguing about apes, and that's not what modern
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: I mean truly, My major professor was a white haired GUYE. No,
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: wasn't that. It wasn't that your dad. I'll take issue
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: of that. It that way, But wasn't your father an
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: evolutionary and my grandfationary biologist. It's like the family business.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: But coming back, father was one of the founders of
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: the the field of animal Yeah, yeah, I broke away.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: I don't work on birds, I work on beatles. That
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: was my radical Yeah, exactly, bigger sample sizes. But but
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: back to the reality. What is an evolutionary bologist. Evolutionary
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: biology today is incredibly relevant to things that that everybody
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: cares about. It's not a bunch of old timers arguing
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: about apes. It's about genomes and genetics and medicine. So huge,
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: just a list a couple issues that matter to people
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: every day. People on farms have to deal with the
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: fact that they go out there and try to control
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: pest populations on their crops by spraying pesticides, and very
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: quickly the insect pests evolvers asistance and they stop being susceptible.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: That is evolution, no matter what people want to call it,
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: it's turnover. You're killing a bunch of the pests. Some
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: of the pests happen by chance to have variants in
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: their genomes that allow them to detoxify the chemicals that
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: you're spraying. Everybody else is dead. Those ones survive, they
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: have lots of kids. All of a sudden, your pest
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: population explodes. With all these competitions, no competition, they're all dead, right,
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: And yet you saw suddenly you can detoxify these chemical
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: that nobody else. That's the winner, winners and losers. They
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: start reproducing and the population evolves fast within it. You know,
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: most of the pesticides are obsolete within five to ten
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: years because insect populations adapt so quickly. Herb besides, same story.
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: You see the same thing with antibiotics. We're running into
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: huge problems now where you go to the hospital and
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: things that used to be standard can kill you because
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: the antibiotics that we have available to us don't work.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: And again, people don't like to use the E word,
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: but the fact is that's evolution. When you apply a
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: dose of antibiotics, you are trying to kill a population
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: of bacteria. And if you kill them all you win.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: Population goes extinct, Your infection is cured. But if there's
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: any genetic variation among individuals within that bacteria population that
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: allow a few of them to survive the drug. Just
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: what you said down, If you kill all the competition,
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: they're all dead. And the heavy Yeah they got gravy.
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: It's awesome. There's no competition, there's all these resources. They explode,
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: and now your population is shifted from one generation to
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: the next, or over a couple of dozen bacterial generations
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: yet is shifted from susceptible to resistance. And you, as
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: a as a doctor applying a drug, have driven that.
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: You've acted as an agent of selection, and you've driven
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: the evolution of that population. So modern evolutionary biology is
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: about drug design. It's about trying to figure out ways
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: to combat antibiotic resistant disease strains. It's about public health
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: trying to engineer mosquitoes so that they can't carry zickar denghy,
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: and and trying to figure out how to produce these
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: engineered mosquitoes and get them in the field to spread
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: enough that the wild populations become resistant or it's not wet. Yes,
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: it's a huge industry right now. Yeah, Genetically modifying mosquito.
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: You can engineer one that can no longer carry malaria
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: or zika or dangy, and I've had dany It sucks.
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, if this is a big deal. If you
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: can figure out how to make a mosquito that normally
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: is a vector that carries the disease incapable of harboring
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: the pathogen, You've done a lot. But you've just engineered this,
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: you know, screwed up genetically modified mosquito. You introduced it
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: into the wild, and it's not going to outcompete all
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: the other normal mosquitoes. So you can spend a fortune
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: building it in the lab, but trying to implement it
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: in the field is a problem. And that's where evolutionary
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: biology comes in. How figure out what kind of selective advance,
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: you know, how can you figure out ways to to
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: let something that is otherwise deleterious spread within a population
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: so that it gets abundant enough that the mosquito population
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: rit large stops being capable of sustaining the infections and
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: involves a lot of theory, involves a lot of evolutionary biology.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: So that was a big tangent. But yeah, I'm glad
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: you brought it up. Evolutionary biology is a vibrant, thriving
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: field that's not arguing about apes. It's about molecular biology, genetics, genomics.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: It all comes back to the white mice, the light
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: and dark mice turnover. When are their winners and losers?
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: When individuals do better than other individuals and the traits
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: that make them do better are heritable or passed on,
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: you've got the raw material for revolution. You watch that
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: population over time, and it's going to change. Okay, let
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: me hear you with this one. Is it still in
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: your circle? Um? Do we still talk? We meaning you
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: do you guys still talk about Um, there being a
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: difference between natural selection and sexual selections. Where I thought
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: you're gonna go between biological evolution and cultural evolution that
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: we can get there later. Between natural selection and sexual selection. Yeah,
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: you do? You still view the as He's like, you
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: think your audience is going to know what sexual selection is,
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: step back and define it. So do it through? All right?
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: So natural selection tends really a good way to think
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: about it is survival. It's which are the individuals that
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: are going to grow the fastest, are going to you know,
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: get access to the best territories outcompete other individuals for
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: access to food. They're going to be the most resistant pathogens,
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: who are the healthiest animals in the population, and the
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: ones most likely to survive a winter cold snap or
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: to get through, you know, a reproductive season. It's all
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: about sort of living and dying. Sexual selection is so
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: almost like a subset it fits. It's also winners and losers,
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: and it's it's very much an agent of selection that
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: can cause populations to evolve, but it really focuses on reproduction.
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: It's recognizing that even if everybody survives, they're not all
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: going to reproduce. You have winners and losers when it
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: comes to reproduction too, and that means that you've got
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: individuals with traits like big antlers who are more likely
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: to win access to the harems or to the territories,
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: that are more likely to breed with the females and
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: the population and transmit their genetic material to the next
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: generation than other individuals in the population that might be
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: more sickly, smaller antlers, not as good a condition, younger,
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: less dominant, all those things you've got. It's it's the
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: same raw material variation. You go out into a deer population,
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: or an elk population measure a hundred bulls, they're not
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: the same. Some of them are bigger than others, some
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: of them are stronger, some are more aggressive, some of
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: them have a lot bigger antlers than others. Those traits matter,
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: and the weapons matter a lot. And in that case,
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: sexual selection is the process by which you know individuals
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: with big antlers reproduce more than individuals with small antlers.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: And since ultimately the currency for evolution isn't whether you
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: live or die, it's whether you reproduce, what matters is
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: who are the individuals in the population now that are
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: contributing of spring their genetic material to the next generation.
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: That's the end game. Doesn't matter if you're the healthiest,
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: strongest animal out there, doesn't matter if you're resistant to
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: every disease in the book and you live forever. If
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: you fail in the game of producing offspring in a
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: biological population of something like, it's a genetic dead end.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: And so the real end game is reproduction, and sexual
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: selection is all the stuff the crazy sperm competition, battles,
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: female choice, male competition, all the things that happen in
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: real world animal populations that cause some animals to win
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: and other animals to lose in the game of reproduction. Okay, man,
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: that was a bunch of things. I want to ask
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: you about my going off too far. You can strap
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: me up if you need to say, help me keep
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: help me, keep track, Johnnie. Okay, I want you to
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: explain couple things. I want you to talk about the
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: idea that UM the way in which differentiated land escapes. Okay, no,
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: it's not okay, couldn't send me that on your I'm
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: meant to ask you, did I have no idea what
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: you mean by this? So you were talking? Okay, here
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: we go. Okay, So I want to do differentiated landscapes.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: I don't know what that is. I'll tell you and
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: I want to do I'm not using your word, I'm
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: using my world. You'll know what I'm talking about. What
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: you'll know what I'm talking at. Want to explain it.
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: I'm learning differentiated landscapes and I want uh and I
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: want you to talk about UM the different like you
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: mentioned earlier. You could have like six bull elk right, Yeah,
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: that the difference in size, how they can develop the
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: difference in size of their bodies, which a're like relatively
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: homogeneous versus the difference in size of their antlers. Yes,
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: what does that have to do with differentiated? Two different ideas?
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: But not explain differentiate landscapes. I'm talking to your book
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: about what happens with an animal population where there's little
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: pockets of good habitat or little bottlenecks like a water source,
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: a certain food source, rather than this, rather than a
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: landscape where all the resources are equally distributed an omnipresent,
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: so there's no sort of like cool spot to hang out. Yes,
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: which one of the which one of those you want
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: to do first? Let's start with the second one, the
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: landscape idea that was the first one. That was the
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: first one, differentiated landscapes. I'm with Doug. I think that
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: that one came second. Which let's start with that. So
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: you're going to have potential for individuals, say elk, to
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: be competing with each other over access to, say, females.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: So you can do beetles too, because I think I
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: think you explain it like because there's a wound, Because
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: actually it's a better it's a better tool for this.
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: It's just fewer people are used to thinking about beetles
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: the way I'm used to thinking about beetles. So in
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: any situation, if the landscape is uniform and what I
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: mean by that, I don't mean Kansas. There resources that
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: the animals depend on, If they're distributed uniformly in space,
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: then where are you going to guard? What the hell
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: are you going to fight over? I mean I could
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: be a bowl, and I could our beetle, and I
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: there's my spot, and I'm going to guard that, and
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: I stand over that, and I beat the crap out
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: of any other beetle that comes near. And if I've
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: got big enough weapons, and I might pay a price
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: to have big weapons, but you know I got big weapons,
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: and I fight, and I fight and I fight, and
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: I'm holding that ground and nobody else. No other males
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: get into my territory. And there's food in my territory.
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: But you know there's food over there and food over there,
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: and there and there and there. If the food resources
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: are everywhere, then what have I gained? Where are the
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: female is gonna go? They could go anywhere, they could
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: feed on any spot on that landscape. And I spend
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: all this money, not money, all these energetic resources and
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: this cost of producing this weapon, and I fight and
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: I fight, and I fight to guard my spot, but
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: my spot isn't any more valuable than body else's spots.
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: And there's all these other beetles out there that don't
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: bother fighting at all, and they get just as good
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: access to food. So what in the situation where the
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: resources are uniform, there's no benefit to fighting to guard
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: a territory. You don't win anything because everywhere is equally good.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: But when you have a landscape that's I think you
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: meant differentiated, I would think of it as patchy, where
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: the key resources are very rare and they're localized. They're
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: clustered or clumped in space like a water hole you said.
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: Or the beetles that we work on they feed on
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: wounds on the side of a tree that ooze sap.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: These beetles flying and they feed on the sap like
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: syrup on the side of the tree. In most places
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: where these beetles live, they they've got wimpy little mouthparts.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: They can't drill into the trees like a woodpecker or
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: something can. They're stuck finding a place where a branch
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: struck the tree, or where some other animals already created
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: a wound, and it's oozing that's a hot spot. But
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: those things aren't everywhere. They're rare. I mean, there's only
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: a couple of hot spots within a mile radius, say,
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: and that's where you gotta be. That's the only place
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: where the food is. That is not a uniform landscape.
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: That's I guess you're saying differentiated. Good places to be
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: in bad places to be. Now, if I'm a male
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: and I've got a weapon, and I fight the crap
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: out of all the opponents, and I hold my ground
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: and I happen to be guarding the food spot, I win.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: I'm the only one in town that's got it. All
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: the other males can't get it because I'm keeping them away,
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: And where are the female is going to go? They're
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: coming to me because I'm sitting on the only spot
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: that's good. So when you have landscapes that are patchy
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: and there are sort of hot spots of value interspersed
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: with large areas that aren't very good, that's the that's
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: the sort of physical environment that sets the stage for
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: all this kind of stuff because it creates opportunities for
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: winning and losing. It creates a situation where the dominant
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: individuals can guard something that matters, and if you win
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: those fights and you get that resource, you win because
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: the females come to you. You're the male that meets
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: with those females when they come in to feed. All
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: the other males lose, Like the males in the population
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: might get nothing because there's nowhere else to go and
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: they're not strong enough to get it. That's sexual selection.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: It's competition about access in this case to a food resource.
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: But it's a food resource that attracts all the females,
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: so that's access to reproduction. The males that win in
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: those fights mate with lots of females, produce lots of offspring,
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: sire the next generation of the population, and the males
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: that fail get nothing. That's over, they're done. So do
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: you see less fighting in like the in the same
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: or that's why beetles are better than elk, because it's
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: hard for people to picture that in something like an
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: ungulate or a deer. In insects, it happens all the time.
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: A lot of times the food resources are so dispersed
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: that what happens is it's not the animals that are
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: built like tanks with big horns that win. It's the
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: animals that are really agile and that are lightweight and
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: have good wing ratios and store energy and they fly
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: really far. It's the ones that can search, and so
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: you find insects where they're really good at traveling long
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: distances looking that the animals are so spread out and
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: the unit the landscape is so sort of uniform, there's
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: no obvious place to be that the ones who win
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: are the ones that search, that can find members of
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: the other sex the fastest. So there's some moths where
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: the males have these antennae that are unbelievably good at
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: detecting the smells of the females and they're out there
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: cruising along for wind currents trying to pick up the scent.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: I mean, the military has looked into these things. They're
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: the most sensitive chemo sensors known. They can actually detect
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: individual molecules of these pheromones, and we've never come up
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: with anything that's even within several orders of magnitude and
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: being that sensitive to you know, a chemical that we
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: might want to detect. But these moths are really good
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: at it because their resources are sort of uniformly or
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: randomly distributed, and the only way to win in that
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: game is to be better at smelling a female, are
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: better at finding a female than other males, and so
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: competition plays out in a different way. They have huge antennae,
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: they're really good at flying, they search, but they don't
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: have weapons, they don't fight. Different kind of systems, so
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: they fall outside of your interests. Well, they're cool systems,
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: but yeah, I like I like the situations. You're differentiated
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: landscapes where where there really is a hot spot that matters,
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: and and if you can be the male that wins
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: access to that resource, then you win in the evolutionary
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: game because you're the one that gets access to the reproduction.
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: You you mentioned a couple of times so far, I
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: feel like you should pause and explain it in greater detail.
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: Is the costs. You keep talking about the enormous cost
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: or the expenditure of growing big horns or big teeth
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: or big antlers. And I'm glad you bring that up
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: because it come full circle back to the other half
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: of the question, the fact that antlers are more variable
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: an traits, because it actually ties into the costs. So
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: in a system like this where imagine your differentiated landscape
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: and you imagine your runounced speedle, and there's there's very
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: occasionally rare wounds on the side of a tree. That's
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: your oasis. That's like it. That's where the food is.
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: That's where all the females are going to come flying
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: from miles around to go feed at that spot. And
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: if you can be the male, it wins that you
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: win everything. And it really is winning everything. I mean,
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: in some of these populations, a very small percentage of
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: the males to all the reproducing, and the males lose
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: every generation. The mails are gone dead end, they fail,
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: and in a system like that, it really pays to win.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: And imagine in that case, then if I'm a beetle
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: and I've got a bump sticking off me that allows
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: me to reach under and flip an opponent, it's gonna
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: be worth it no matter what that costs. If I've
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: got that and the other males don't, I've got an
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: edge and I'm going to win in these fights. And
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: therefore I'm the one that's reproducing, and my kids and
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: grandkids and great grandkids are the ones that populate the population.
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: The beatles are going to start getting this horn or
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: this thing sticking off their body that's used as a weapon,
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: but over time it's sort of a relative landscape. If
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: everybody's got horns the same size, and then another beetle
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: comes out with an even bigger weapon and allows him
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: to reach and flip his opponent before the other opponent
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: can even reach him, then that mail is going to
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: have an edge. So the weapons are gonna get bigger.
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: And then when everybody's got weapons that big, then it's
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: the one with the even bigger weapons that wins. And
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: this process sort of cycles and ratchets, and the weapons
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: get bigger and bigger and bigger, and as they get bigger,
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: they get more expensive. I know, it seemed like I
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: forgot your questions. You get caught in what we call
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: an arms race, and and these things start ratcheting bigger
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and along
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: the way they get more and more and more expensive.
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: And so when you start looking at costs and animal weapons,
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: we can talk about costs and military weapons too. They're
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: very expensive, but the costs get really staggering. So so
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: our rhinoceros beetle, the ones that we work on. A
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: mail puts thirty percent of his body weight into a weapon.
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: I mean I think about that weigh probably one eight
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: that's like like that. It's like a sixty pound thing
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: on top of my head. Be like this table glued
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: to the top of my head. That's what these beetles
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: are carrying around on their heads all day. That's a
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: huge investment. It costs in terms of resource is that
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: they need to grow that structure. Because all the material
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: that goes into that coffee table isn't going into my
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: heart or my lungs or my brain or anything else.
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: I'm putting it all into the coffee table and put
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: it into the weapon, So there's an allocation cost. Then
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: you've got to carry this thing around everywhere you go.
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: It's awkward and heavy, makes it harder to fly, makes
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: it harder to run. So there's sort of production and
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: maintenance costs that go with it. Weapons can get really
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: expensive in the beetles. Putting a horn together for a
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: male is so expensive that it forces these animals to
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: shunt resources away from other things. So the beetles with
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: the biggest horns have tiny eyes, and some of the
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: species we studied have males where they've stunted genitalia and
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: tiny testes, so they're really reallocating in the most absurd
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: way to get these weapons that you talk about, the
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: actually get a form of a form of osteoporosis studies. Yeah,
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: because the antlers and the antlers, because they regrow them
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: every year, they have to produce these enormous expensive structures,
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: and they've got to grow fast. And as far as
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: I know, antler bone is the fastest growing bone that's
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: ever been described for any any vertebrate ever. It's it's
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: growing at record speeds and they're pulling. They need calcium
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: and phosphorus and all these minerals to produce the bone,
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: and they don't get that much of that from the
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: leaves and the things that they feed on. And so
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: the people that have looked into this and studied have
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: found that there's no way that these bulls and bucks
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: can get enough from their food alone. They're growing it
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: too fast and there's just not enough of these minerals
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: in the food that they're eating. And that's when they
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: figured out that they're actually siphoning these things off the
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: other bones in their body. They're leaching calcium and phosphorus
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: out of their ribs and their spine and their femurs
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: and all the rest of the bones and reallocating it
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: to the antlers. So that forces them to go through
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: a period of osteoporosis during the rut before they have
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: an opportunity to replenish those resources. Really bad time, because
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: you're smacking into all these other bulls. So right when
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: you need to fight and throw down with all these
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: other eight hundred pound rivals, you've got brittle bones like
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: an old person. It's it's a bad formula. And then
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: they throw the antlers away and you gotta start. It's
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: like you're not even recouping that loss. It's gone there,
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, but you can imagine how that would
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: place a premium on any individuals that were in good
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: enough condition or had access to the best foraging spots.
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: They might have less osteo. Again, it comes back to variation.
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: Those bulls might pay a lower cost. They might have
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: less osteo process than a medium or poor quality bowl
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: that's in really crap quality territory that's also trying to
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: produce antlers, and so it may not be equal, but yeah,
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: they're all going through the same problem. They're all facing
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: the same dilemma. These things are expensive and when it
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: goes back to cost a great comparison. I think I
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: remember this from your class back in the day. Was
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: was that, like I think you said, for a bull
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: elk to like a mature bull to create the antlers
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: he needs for that year, it's a similar colore um
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: cost as a cow birthing a calf. Yeah, good memory.
• 43:06
  Speaker 1: This was a really clever Okay in time if I
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: explain some of these, so point out that the Sam
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: Longer and a very own special Sam Longer and too
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: special Doug Ellen's class. Yes you did behavior class, University Montana.
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: I went back in check he got today one of
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: the one of the greatest classes I ever I ever
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: took that. Paim say that fascinating fascinating, Well, you're just
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: you just take it so seriously. Fun stuff, lots of
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: lots of great video clips of animals beating the ship
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: out of each other, imagine that elephant seals and stuff.
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: But you bring up this point about, you know, the
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: energetic expense of doing this and and this was a
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: really clever set of studies and and I didn't do them.
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: I mean this is from the literature, but these people
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: they took advantage of the agriculture industry. So so if
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: you have cattle and your cattle farmer, you know everything
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: is about weight gain. I mean, you manage your you
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: manage your heard, you manage the four the feeds that
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: you're feeding them, the timing of things. Everything is coming
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: down to how quickly your animals can gain at what
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: rate they can gain weight. You want to buy them low,
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: fatten them up, sell them high. There's a huge industry
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: trying to understand the way that things like livestock put
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: on and gain muscle mass and weight. And so they
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: had actually broken this down and these really complicated models
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: where they were looking at all nitrogen, phosphors, put all
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: the different nutrients in paying attention to the diets. They
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: had input bone mass, the skeletal weights, the muscle mass,
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: the metabolic physiology, the weight, the sizes, all these parameters
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: on these animals, and they could predict really really accurately
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: how subtle changes to this or that piece of the
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: diet would translate into the rate at which these animals
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: were putting on muscle mass. And so, because people cared
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: a lot about that, they put a ton of time
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: and effort into parametizing these really complicated models, and they
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: did a really good job to gribing growth and weight
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: gain in vertebrates like that. So these biologists took the
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: models and said, hey, let's look at moose. Let's look
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: at something we care about. And they reset all the
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: parameters based on the bone densities and the leg lengths
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: and that, you know, all the height and all the
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: weights of the of the things like moose or caribou.
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: And turned around and said, all right, given the model
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: now parametized for a moose, how expensive or antlers? They
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: could burn antlers and figure out how many calories they
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: knew what was in it. They could basically figure out
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: what it costs in terms of nutrients and energy to
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: make an antler and then put that into the energy
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: budget of the animal and say how expensive is it?
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: And that's when they were stunned there, Like I mean,
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: they basically found I think it was two calves the
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: male bullet. I can't amber if it was moose producing
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: a full rack of antlers expended as much energy as
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: it took a female to raise two calves all the
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: way to weaning. Stunned, every nobody expected to be that expensive.
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: But it's a clever approach. It's a neat way to
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: do that. And then this guy great one step further
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: and they took the Irish elk, the extinct Irish elk,
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: which had these huge antlers, and try you know, they
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: had to make some guesses because we don't have any
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: living Irish elk, but they did a pretty good job
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: setting the models for them to try to figure out
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: just how expensive the antlers were. In they were pretty expensive.
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: You can see why they might have gone extinct. Yeah, well,
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: one could suggest, one could suggest. I'm not trying to
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: say that that's why. Well, let's add the caveat, because
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: because I think about these kinds of things, and and
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: one of the things we may get to when we
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: talk about arms racist today is that they cycle. There's
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: a very predictable sequence of stages, and eventually arms racist collapse.
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: The whole thing ends. The antlers or their weapons are
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: so expensive that they're not worth it anymore, and they're gone.
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: Normally in an animal when it happens, we're not arguing
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: that they go extinct. What means is some males come
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: along and don't bother producing the weapons, and those males win.
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: They're not paying the price, and the weapons really aren't
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: doing what they used to do any more, and all
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: of a sudden, individuals that ditched the weapons are the winners,
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: and the population loses the weapons and very quickly evolves
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: to a state where they no longer have the big weapons.
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: That's the normal way. The Irish elker the one exception
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: where they really might have actually gone extinct because of
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: the weapons. It's hard to say because we weren't there.
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: But what they found with these models is that the
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: antlers were so expensive that these bulls would have been
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: sort of right on the metabolic edge, and they would
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: have had barely enough time after the rut to recoup
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: the energetic losses before the next cycle. And then what
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: happened is not only were those antlers getting bigger and bigger,
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: but they have evidence from the pollen and the foss
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: and the climate records that the climate changed like pulling
• 47:40
  Speaker 1: the carpet out from under these animals. All of a sudden,
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: they went through I think it was called the Younger
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: Dry ask. The climate changed rather abruptly, and they can
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: tell from the pollen records that all the things that
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: they used to feed and were gone, and they were
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: forced to switch from herbs and things to grasses, things
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: that were a lot less nutritious, and so it's the
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: double It was the double punch, the expensive antlers that
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: are sort of pushing the limit of what's possible, and
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: then all of a sudden your food is gone and
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: you're forced to switch to something that's really crap quality,
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: and that combo might have been too much. So that's
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: the reason. Some people argue that the Irish actually went
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: extinct because of the weapons, But usually what happens is
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: they get caught on an arms race, they get bigger
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: and bigger and bigger, and then the whole thing collapses
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: and they ditched the weapons and go off on another path.
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: I never came back to you, But okay, don't do
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: this one next here sculted now. But there's a funny
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: story talking about with the Beatles. Where's this beetle And
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: there's like a female that goes down in the hole
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: and hangs out in the hole. Yeah, be he grows
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: his big, badass horn reguards the whole. But then there's
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: some little snaky dude with no horn who just burrows
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: down and comes in from under beneath a little sneak
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: attack and gets it on with the female and the
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: and the do with the big horns is hanging out.
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: Has no idea that it even happen. So these are
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: these are dunge beetles that live in Panama. A lot
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: of the dung bells have this problem. But the ones
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: that I was looking that live down in Panama and
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: the males have been nice, big rack of horns on
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: their heads. So they're big tank. Well they're little beetles,
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: but I mean the horns are big relative to the
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: tank pair of horns on their head. And and it's
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: important because again it depends on where we want to
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: go with it is one of the catalysts, one of
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: the things, one of the things that we think I
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: think precipitates an arms race and animals that sort of
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: aligns the last star into place. All of a sudden,
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: the population shoots off on this trajectory of bigger and
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: bigger and bigger weapons. Is a situation where the fight
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: dynamics change from being something that is sort of a
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: chaotic scramble to something that is much more consistently one
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: on one. Something about the biology, the habitat, the structure,
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: something about the way these animals are confronting each other
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: changes and then all of a sudden what had been
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: really chaotic becomes very consistent and predictable and repeatable one
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: on one duels. And that's this thing that I learned
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: actually from the military literature. Can spark an arms race
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: and start the whole process. So in the dung beetles,
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: most of the time we think of dung beetles, who
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: you know, for those of us that actually think about
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: dung beetles, But if you've ever been to Africa, you
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: picture these things that they've got. The they carve these balls,
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: they pushed the balls around on the ground. Those beetles
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: fight all the time. They scramble. None of them have
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: weapons never they do not have horns on those kinds
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: of beetles. And the fights are all sort of pandemonium
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: and scrambles, lots of animals all piling in. But there's subsets,
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: some lineages of dung beetles where they started digging the tunnels,
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: and you mentioned the whole and that was that, that
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: was the behavior change, that that that rewrote the rules,
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: because all of a sudden, the females are down in
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: a hole, they're in a tunnel. It's a tube, and
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: so the males plant themselves at the entrance and they
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: guard the tunnel, and all of a sudden, it's not
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: a scramble anymore, because you can't get attacked by ten
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: rivals at once. It's a tube. Only one beetle can
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: fit in the tunnel at a time, and so it's
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: not like they consciously decided to fight duels because it's
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: more honorable or anything like that. Suddenly they're in a tunnel,
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: and because they're in a tube, they only ever fight
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: one rival at a time. Boom, Just like that. It's
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: the catalyst, as simple as that. All of a sudden,
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: the males are fighting consistent, repeatable, pushing matches of strength,
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: and in that kind of a fight, the bigger, stronger
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: male wins. The mail with the weapons wins, and boom,
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: those lineages start evolving. Horns. It could be big curved
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: things on the thorax. It could be horns coming off
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: the head. I mean, there's there's hundreds of configurations of
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: these weapons. They've popped up again and again and again.
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: Every single time these beetles switched from fighting in a
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: scramble on the surface to fighting in a tube in
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: a tunnel. Just like that on an arms race. They
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: started getting weapons, and the weapons got bigger and bigger
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: and bigger. So the ones I was studying, these males
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: had big horns. They're guarding the tunnel. They're fighting these
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: duels with rivals at the entrance, and that's when the
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: little sneaky guys break the rules. The little males are
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: never gonna win their smaller body size. They're not as
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: strong they've got they don't even have horns, I mean
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: little nubbins where the weapons would be, so they got
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: no weapons. They're never gonna win a fair fight. But
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: they don't fight fair. They break the rules, and so
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: they act like a female. They dig their own tunnel,
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: they mine down in there, and then they cut over
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: and they intercept the guarded tunnel. So you're the big
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: guy at the entrance fighting the little sneaky buggers are
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: are basically mining their way in beneath you, getting into
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: your tunnel, going down, finding the female, meeting with the female,
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: sneaking out again. The big guys that the entrance are
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: oblivious that same thing exists with salmon. Uh chinook. Salmon
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: have an alternate life history called precocious males. Or the
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: jack exactly, but there's one there's ones that um unlike
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: Jack's don't even go to the ocean, so they'll they'll
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: become sexually mature like six months. Yeah, so so they're
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: like jack didn't go to the ocean, Well Jack's do.
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: Jack's do go to the ocean. So so Jack's there's
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: there's multiple life histories and and a lot of these
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: these salmon species. So you know, you've got everything from
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: the big forty pound males that spent four years in
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: the ocean to the jack's that just spent one year
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: to the precocious males that never even go out. And
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: so they'll be sexually mature like three inches long, and
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: they'll hiden the rocks with with like you know, to
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: fifty pound chinook and then the hen goes to layer
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: eggs and they I've seen videos of this actually my
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: my my buddy John. Yeah, he'll go in and jizz
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: on him before before the big buck can and never
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: even know it, and he doesn't have to go to
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: all the expense of going to the ocean and and
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: all the dangers that after six months exactly, it takes
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: four years opportunity. And I've also read about how that
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: that's helpful. Um from a conservation standpoint, that that sometimes
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: when runs get so bad, so low, as they often
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: do in this day and age, that sometimes like if
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: there's only the one like a couple of females who
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: make it back to a stream to spawn, they're they're
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: able to you know, keep the keep the line going,
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: keep the population exactly. You know, in college you think
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: about it too, is will be like it's like the
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: dude who um, I can't wait to see like a dude.
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: Of girls are like, oh he's funny, right, that's like
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: your guy that like burrows in right exactly. He's like
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: playing a totally different trip, you know, yeah the friend zone. Yeah,
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: he's fun I like he's funny. It's like he's a
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: little digger digging in. You can tell me any everybody
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: else is all fighting, so in beatles and things like this,
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: we call it an alternative reproductive tactic or an alternative
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: meeting tactic. And and lots of big horn sheep they've
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: got coursers that because when a big male is fighting
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: and distracted in a battle, a little guys running and
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: chase the females off in corner him. What do you
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: call those coursers? Aren't they called coursers and big horn sheep? Well, yeah,
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: he's got a favorite thing. Are you gonna bring up
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: your shirkers? Johnie? I thought about him, then I started
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: not too Yeah, anyone, I'll hit you because he's backed
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: up as it is. But okay, he's backed up by
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: one question. Well he's playing it safe. He's backed up
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: by one question. But he happened with the shirts, happening
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: with the shirkers. We just want to know dogs opinion
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: on its opinion on shirkers. Uh, you've heard of val Geist?
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah what was that? He's not like our uncle or anything. No,
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: I mean that was a loaded Yeah, well he's a
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: loaded character. I mean I never actually met him, but
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: I've read a ton of his work because he did
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: a lot of the early conceptual work on the evolution
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: of crazy structures. Yeah. Yeah, that's the big problem is
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: it was mostly ideas and not a lot of data.
• 55:30
  Speaker 1: But you know, I mean, now and then people get
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: it right in a surprising number of his ideas that
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: he just threw out there and never actually backed up,
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: a lot of those ideas are turning out to be right. Yeah,
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: we've had this conversation a lot of times. We're a
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: lot of researchers such as yourself. Well, we'll talk about
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: the um you know, his practice of being like, you know,
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: what might have happened right enough times, it's like probability
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: at the wall. So the idea of shirkers, which were
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: bucks or bulls that would remove themselves from the breeding
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: game or the rut and for four or five years
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: just hang out at the top of the hill where
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: the grass is thick and green lush, load up and
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: load up and load up until at the point where
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: they were bigger body wise, there was some bigger antler wise,
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: and they could stroll in and they could breed everybody
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: in pass their jeans. In one season, they could own
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: the you know, the breeding rights. So I don't know
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: whether those animals exist because I don't study on gult populations,
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: but it wouldn't surprise me really. So let me give
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: you an extreme example. Wraps Like it's about so so
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: there are fish that that go even one step further.
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: So so they start out life as a female. Because
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: most females are able to reproduce. The variance and reproductive success,
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: the difference between winners and losers females is pretty small.
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: And then it's the males where the competition is really stark,
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: and them get nothing in a very small percentage of
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: them get all the reproduction. And so they'll start out
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: as females and play it safe and breed literally as
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: females while you know the breeding is good. And then
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: and only if they get big enough and strong enough
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: and the alpha male gets killed and he's suddenly removed
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: and there's a vacancy, then the sort of next biggest
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: in line switches from female to male, takes on the
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: male status and steps into that role. It's in a way,
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: it's like your shirker, except that you're not just sitting
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: there eating on the greener pastor you're actually reproducing as
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: a female that whole time. But you only flip and
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: take on the really risky you know, high reward high
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: whatever you want to say, that risky strategy. If and
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: when you're big enough to tell me again, what's pieces
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: was that? W R A S S. It's it's a
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: coral reef there like Napoleon rass And I was just
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: I just saw this on the Ultimate The New Blue
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: Planet um from from BBC, which is on Netflix. They
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: have a really cool segment on that and and how
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: it goes away and the body goes undergoes that incredible
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: change and it grows that huge bump on its head
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: and yeah changes, it's sex. Yeah, man, you know what
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: that program needs is uh two versions, one with David
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: and one without him. I cannot listen to that, dude.
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: Oh my god, I could listen to that, dude. All
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: it makes it. It makes it that I watch the
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: high end nature documentaries really like I feel like everybody
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: because I feel like we tried, didn't we try getting
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: Morgan Freeman and uh, I would so much prefer that.
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: I heard a bird show up, a bird, you know,
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: and then like the bird joins the thing just kills me. Man.
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: It's like, would you please just say the lines writes
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: the lines that anyway? Anyway. Another example bull frogs or
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: frog A lot of frog populations, not bull frogs, but
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: like tangara frogs and chorus frogs. They sing and the
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: call that they sing is an honest signal of the
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: size of the male. I mean again, they're they're larynx
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: size tracks with their bodies. The big the big bull
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: frogs are deeper the females can tell. The females orient
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: towards the big guys. But singing like that is dangerous.
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: They're out there calling, calling, calling, calling, they get hammered
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: by bats that q in on the same properties of
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: the song and eat them all. And so when you're
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: out there singing, it's dangerous. You're risking death. And if
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: you're a medium quality, mediocre, puny, little male, why would
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: you go risk death if you're not gonna win anyway,
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: Because there's a big guy over there, and all the
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: females are going to go over there. And so when
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: you find these populations, you find, first of all, a
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: lot of the smaller males shut up. They play it safe.
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: So they are the ultimate shirkers. They sneak, they hang
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: out quiet, acting like a female. They're not singing singing singing,
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: they look and act like a female. They creep up
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: to the territory is with the big stud males, and
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: they hang out on the edges, and they try to
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: intercept females and mate with them as they come into
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: the big male and then and then when they get
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: big enough, and only when they get big enough, they
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: switch over and start calling. And you can show that
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: you can go in and take out the big guys.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: Just pull him out, remove him. All of a sudden,
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: there's this pond and the big studs are gone. The
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: next male. It's like the males in line can figure
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: it out, like, holy sh it, he's not there anymore. Boom,
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: they stop sneaking and they start calling and they step
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: into so so shirking is real. Whether it happens in dear,
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: I don't know, but it happens in frogs. That happens
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: in a lot of things. How are you feeling, because
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: that's how you brought up sugars. You got shot down
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: bad and the biologists didn't agree. He all but came
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: over and hit up sugar. But let's come back to
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: the one that I'm behind on. Can I do that? Well,
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: you tell me what you're behind on. So when I'm
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: behind on, you mentioned that, you know, body size is
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: the same, but antlers differ a lot. And we started
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: flirted with his topic from different angles. It comes back
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: to the signal. It's like, what is the thing that's
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: sort of advertising the status or the size or the
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: quality of a male. And in the frogs we just
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: talked about, you know, the big guys have a deeper call.
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: They sound different. The females can tell. It's an honest signal.
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: You can't fake it. The only way to have a
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: low song is to be huge, and if you're a
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: little wimpy guy, there's just nothing you can do. You're stuck.
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: It is. It is an intrinsically honest signal because it's difficult.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: You can't fake it. You can't be a puny little
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: male and just suddenly say I'm going to sing the
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: sexy song today. If you don't have the body to
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: do it, you can't fake it. And signals like that
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: are more stable evolutionarily, they're less susceptible to cheaters to collapse.
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: Those signaling systems last a long time, and females that
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: happen to pay attention to honest signals do better. They
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: make better decisions than females that that might be more
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: fickle or pay attention to other things that don't matter.
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: And over time, female preferences evolve and track in on
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: the things that are the most expensive, the most difficult
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: for males to do, the most honest signals that you
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: really can't fake. And and that's a part to biology
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: that we know a lot about for big bird displays
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: and song bird calls, all these things. They tend to
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: be very expensive, they tend to be almost impossible to fake.
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: They tend to be extravagant, charismatic, obvious things that a
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: female can see really easily from a long way away.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: And they tend to be super variable. So if you
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: took ten, I don't want Let's go back to the aim.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: He took a whole bunch of mails and lined them up,
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: and you looked at things like body size, they differ
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: a little bit. You know, the little guys might be
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: about half as big as the big guys. But you
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: look at the ornaments or the songs or whatever the
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: signal is that they're focusing on, and it's wildly variable.
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: Be tenfold, twentyfold, fifty fold difference in size or quality
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: between the puny guys and the big guys. And that's
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: not an accident. That's sort of how these signaling systems
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: evolved in these animals, and it makes them a really
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: important sort of differentiator of winners and losers. Back to
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: sexual selection, it's the males with the best calls, or
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: the the sexiest signals, or the most charismatic colorful displays.
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: Those are the ones that win. You can't fake it.
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: The only way to do that is to be a
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: rock star, and the females que in on that and
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: they pick the rock stars. So in talking about the
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: percentage differences, like like, imagine that you have a year
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: and a half old white tailed deer. Okay, whatever, he's
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: a hundred twenty pounds, he's got little spike antlers. But
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: then that's exactly the next year the deer could be
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: whatever pounds and how what magnitude larger. So so you're
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: you're asking antler questions. I work on beetles. I can
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: only get if I tooks beetles be so beetles are
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: a little simpler in the sense that I don't have them.
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: The age cohorts confounding things because the biggest bat bucks
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 1: and bulls are also the oldest. It's not an accident
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: and it's part of the same equation. At the end
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: of the day, the males with the biggest antlers are
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: also the oldest and the most dominant and in the
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 1: best physiological condition. It's not a coincidence that you're boone
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: and crockett bull has the antlers that it has that's
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: not an accident. But age is part of that. With
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: the beatles, it's simpler because they're all sort of the
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: same age. That's the point I never thought of. That's
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: a good point with insects. It's they're all the same age.
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: They're all adults. A little teeny guy is never gonna
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: once he comes out a metamorphosis, goes from a grub
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: to a beetle. He's stuck. It's like a suit of armor.
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: It's not going to change. A little guy has a
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: little horn, and he's gonna have a little horn till
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: the day he dies. So you take age out of
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: the equation, but it's the same process. I never thought
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: about how how much that kind of simplifies things, just
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: in terms of explaining it. The biology is the same too.
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: But say I took a hundred males line them. I
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: showed you a box before we started today, a box
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: with like a hundred beetles all lined up in a row.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: And if I took that sample and I measured body size,
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: and I compared the smallest guy all the way to
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: the biggest, i'd find a nice sort of even gradient
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: from little to big, and it'd be about a twofold
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: one and half to two fold difference. The biggest beetles
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: probably twice as long or twice as wide as the
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: littlest beetle. But if I look at the horns, I'm
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: looking at about a sixtyfold difference. I mean much here,
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: not How do I say that two times different? I'm
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: getting confused on air. Here, it's more like a fifteen
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: to twenty fold sorry, difference between antler size. So two
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: fold difference embody size and a fifteen to twenty fold
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: difference in the antler size or the horn size. So
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: so it comes back to what you mentioned a minute ago.
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: The antlers are more variable the horns, and these beetles
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: are more variable. You look at tusks, you look at
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: any of these big weapons systems, fiddler crab claws, all
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: these kinds of weapons are big. They're expensive, and they're
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: wildly variable from mail to mail, and that's all part
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: of the same thing. The reason they're variable is they're expensive.
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: The little guys can't afford it. Only the best conditioned
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: animals can afford to produce the really big weapons. Everybody
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: else is stuck with a compromise, and so you end
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: up having this huge sort of spectrum from the whimps
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 1: with a little tiny things to the superstar best condition
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: studs with the massive weapons. And it's not an accident.
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: It's not random at all. For the beatles is it's
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: who who is best at being a grub. It has
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: a lot to do with that has to do with
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: access to food, but it's more complicated than that, because
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: who gets the best food in the field. You know,
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: in the lab, I can manipulate I give them a
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: lot of food, and I get huge beetles with massive horns.
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: I give them very little food. They all grow up
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: stunted and tiny, and none of them have any big
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: weapons at all, so I can manipulate it. But in
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 1: the wild it's not an accident. Same with elk and deer,
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: it's not a coincidence. The best dominant individuals have the
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: best territories, and they're the ones that are able to
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: keep everybody else away so their kids have the least
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: amount of competition. They're the ones that are most resistant
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: to pathogens and parasites, the healthiest, the least likely to
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: get sick, so everything sort of lines up in their favor,
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: and those individuals have the most resources available to them.
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: Other individuals are forced to more peripheral habitats. They're dealing
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: with more crowded conditions. They're stressed out because they're losing
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: the competition for access to resources all the time. The
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: stress interacts with their immune systems, so they're sick a
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: lot more often. You know, they have access to less food,
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: poor quality food, more competition, more disease, more parasites. All
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: that stuff plays out and separates the winners from the losers.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: And none of it's an accident. I mean, it's it's
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: compounding and sort of self reinforcing. But the best conditioned
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: animals are the ones that tend to win. In the insects,
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: it even gets into the parents behavior. The females that
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 1: are the best at picking the right spots to lay
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: their eggs, their kids hatch and they just eat what's there.
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: But you know, there's some individuals that are in really
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: good places and other individuals that are allowsy places, and
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: so right from the day they're born, it's it isn't
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: a fair world. There's winners and losers, but it's not random.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: Has a lot to do with the behavior of the parents.
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: We had a guy on who deals with nutrition and ungulus. Yeah,
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: I would love to have heard that, and I find it.
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: And he talks about this idea that, uh, the people
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: talk about an area having good genetics for box, right,
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 1: and so there's some area grows big box because of genetics.
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: And he refutes that and talks about nutrition being the
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: driver and not that animals nutrition, but in some ways
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: a deer's eventual rack, it's going to depend on both
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: it's it's mothers in utero nutrition. Totally. We see this
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: with people that you can take these animals, you can
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: take these animals from places with quote shitty genetics and
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: put them in a situation genetics and that would mean
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: habitats that are marginal with poor quality indovice in our
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: lingo and like hunter lingo genetics the animals. Yes, but
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: I'm telling about what hunters talk about. Hunters will be
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: like why you know, like why are all these big
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: bucks coming out of Iowa right, and be like, oh,
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: you know the ioh, they got the genetics the population.
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: But I'm not I'm talking about how people use it.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: Use it like that. They're like, oh, it's got the
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: feed and got the genetics right, and they take animals
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: from these places that's supposedly like out of the mule
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: here from the Black Hills, supposedly have bad genetics, So
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: there's nothing you can do that it's gonna be small.
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: But you take mulder from the Black Hills and move
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: them to a place where no, you're not changing the genetics.
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: You take males and females move into place with different nutrition,
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: and all a sudden their giants. So in general, weapons
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: and ornaments and all those other traits, but weapons this kind,
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: the sexually selected weapons tend to be exquisitely sensitive to nutrition.
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: More sense. So we did experiments in the beetles. Will
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: will manipulate nutrition, same kind of thing I just talked
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: about if I give them a little food or a
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: lot of food. Body size about a twofold difference, wing
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: size about a twofold difference, eye size about a twofold difference,
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: horn size about a fifteen fold difference. And so same animals,
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: same experiment, same difference in nutrition. And legs and eyes
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: and wings and all those things are sensitive to nutrition.
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: They're all responding, but the weapons are responding more so,
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: weapons are exquisitely sensitive to nutrition. It doesn't mean it's
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: not genetic because it's not an accident in the wild.
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: It's the best quality animals that usually end up succeeding
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: in defending the best quality nutrition and the best resources.
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: So you get this interaction between the quality of the genetics,
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: the genotypes of those animals, and the environments that those
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: animals are in. But all of that comes together and
• 1:10:17
  Speaker 1: is expressed in these traits, these weapons, and there you
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: very minute, if you very nutrition, I guarantee you you're
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: gonna have an enormous effect on antler size. So so
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: let me follow the logic here. I want to step
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: back because I know we've been going off on all
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: these directions. What I've been trying to talk about is
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: the kinds of ecological situations that can spark an arms race,
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: that can take a population that doesn't have big weapons,
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: that's going about its business. Something changes, and all of
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: a sudden, from that point forward, it's the suit you know,
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: it's the bigger, stronger males with the weapons that win.
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: They're able to monopolize access to some kind of resource,
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: something that gives them an edge in the way that
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: they come into contact with females. Something changed, and all
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: of a sudden, bigger is better, and mails with the
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: biggest weapons win. I talked in the dung beetle example
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: about how suddenly starting to fight over tunnels, a simple
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: change in behavior aligns the fights so that they're not
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: scrambles anymore, now they're duels. That change in behavior, all
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: of a sudden, bigger is better, because in a duel,
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: the stronger male wins, and if a mail has a
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: longer horn and he can pry better and get rid
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: of the opponent better with the weapon, than the mail
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: with the longer weapon wins. And so all of a sudden,
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: that population gets tipped into this trajectory that we're talking
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 1: about as an arms race, and from that point forward,
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: bigger is better, and so very quickly the population or
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: cross generations is going to ratchet up to bigger and
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: bigger weapons. So that kind of a phenomenon happens with
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: elephant tusks, It happens with cariboo, it happens with fiddler crabs,
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: It happens with all these animals with these crazy weapons.
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: The particular trigger might be different, but they all fight
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: in duels, one on one contest, and once they start
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: on this path, the arms race plays out the same way.
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: Every single time. And that's a point I kind of
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: want to take a second to make. Once that button
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: gets pushed, go that beatles on the trajectory. It's in
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: an arms race. The weapons get bigger and bigger and
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: bigger and bigger, and a very very set set of
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: things happens. As they get big, they get expensive. We
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: talked about cost, So they get more and more expensive.
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: What that means is fewer and fewer mails are up
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: to the muster. Most of the males now can't pay
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: that price because it's getting more and more and more
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: expensive very quickly, the mails are out of the game.
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: They just don't have the resources to produce the really
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: big weapons, and so they're pretty much gone. Colladteral they lose.
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: The population becomes more and more concentrated around a smaller
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: and smaller subset of victorious males, and the benefits of
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: these big weapons get stronger and bigger and bigger, and
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: the whole process ratchets up. But you reach a point,
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: a tipping point, where the winners and losers are so
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: starkly different from each other, and so many males are
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: getting nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, that some of them somewhere
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: stumble on a to break the rules. They cheat, Oh
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: I forgot one more step. So the weapons get big,
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: they get expensive. The fact that only a few males
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: can do it, that's what gives us that variability we
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: were talking about. That's the point where antlers are more
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: variable than legs or ears or body size or fiddler
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: crab claws are more variable than body size. All of
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: a sudden, now those weapons are so expensive that only
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: a few Boone and Crockett quality individuals can do it.
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: The rest of them are stuck with suboptimal versions. The
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: variation in the traits is pronounced that tip. That means
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: that you suddenly got a signal. You've got a thing
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: out there that is an honest indicator of fighting ability.
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: It's not an accident that the biggest males have the
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: biggest they're the studs. So if I'm a mediocre male
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: with a medium rack and I look and I size
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: up my opponent and he's got a massive rack, do
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: I want to escalate in that fight? No, because really
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: he's gonna beat me. Because it's an honest signal, and
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: that male with bigger antlers is really the better fighter.
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: And so in these animal populations, whether it's beetles, crabs,
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: and I mean caribou, elephants, all these systems. Once the
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: arms races at that point, and these weapons are big,
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: they're expensive, they're variable, they're an honest signal of fighting ability.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: The next step kicks in and the weapons start acting
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: as a deterrent. There a signal you don't actually have
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: to fight with it, because all I need to do
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: is look at that antler and I know I'm gonna lose.
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: And so more and more in these populations, the small
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: guys back down. They they size each other up, they
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: spar a little bit, they look at each other. You
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: see these great examples of antelope sort of strutt in
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: side by side, or fallow deer. There's beautiful pictures of
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: these males. They run side by side and they turn
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: on the run back there like looking at each other
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: whose antlers are bigger. And then the smaller ones usually leave.
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: And so you reach this point in the cycle where
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: the weapons are big, they're expensive, they're a signal, and
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: all of a sudden they're a deterrent. You don't even
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: have to fight anymore because most of your competition walks
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: away because you're the stud and you've got the weapons
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 1: and it's honest, And that's the point where you start.
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: That's where there's tons of military pair aloes. By the way,
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: if we go there and then you reach this point
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: where the weapons are huge, only a tiny fraction of
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: individuals can afford it. Nobody else is even in the game.
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: They can't even not only can they not fight, I
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: mean they don't even bother trying to fight. And that's
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: the point where usually somebody breaks the rules the asymmetric warfare,
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: the guerilla equivalent. Somebody cheats and figures out a way
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: to screw that. Man, I'm not playing by those rules anymore,
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: the sneaky dumb It's like, I'm not going to fight
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: with the entrance. I'm not gonna win. So they dig
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: a side tone and find another way, and that's the
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: beginning of the end. Once the sneakers or the cheaters
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: start doing too well, the whole thing collapses, The weapons disappear,
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: and the whole process starts again. That cycle. Something aligns
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: like a star so that all of a sudden, bigger
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 1: is better population starts launching onto this trajectory bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger.
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: They get bigger, they get expensive, they become exaggerated as
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: a signal, they become a deterrent cheaters, and aage collapse.
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: That sort of process repeats itself over and over again,
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: and I would argue that just about any animal you
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: can imagine, with the exception of the saber tooth cats
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: that has huge weapons like that, has gone through exactly
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: that cycle. And that's the parallel with the military. Military
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: technologies go through the same cycle. They get triggered for
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: the same reasons. Once they get triggered, the weapons get
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: bigger and bigger and bigger. As they get bigger, they
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: get more and more and more expensive. As they get
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: more and more expensive, fewer countries or nations can afford
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: to play the game. And then you reach a point
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: where they're a deterrent because you got the weapons and
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: nobody else does. And then the cheaters invade and the
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: whole thing class and along comes some guys with airplane
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: tickets and box cutters and brings you to your knees exactly,
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: or cyber hackers. All throughout your book, you talk, you
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: talk about military. Yeah, sure, let me go off on that,
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: but I wanted to throughout you but you talk about
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: military parallels. So you get into armaments, um, the arms race,
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: but there's one, there's one that doesn't go towards bigger, bigger, bigger,
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: And you talk about, uh, projectile points. Can you tell
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: everyone about? So I can't remember where it's it's it's
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: like I'm losing myself now, Like I can't remember what
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: example you brought up that got you to write about
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: Clovis points and full time, I am a sucker for history.
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: I love the past. I love the past. When I
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: find a fossil and I realized I'm looking at something
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: that's a snapshot from something way in the past. We
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: just got back from taking our kids two weeks in Europe.
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: I mean, I was blown away by POMPEII. The whole
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: idea of walking around and looking at the mosaics in
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: a bathroom of somebody's house from a thousand years ago.
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: Just I mean, I get a rush. It's a palpable
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 1: endorphin rush. I love that feeling. And for me growing up,
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: I used to find arrowheads in my neighbor's tobacco field
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: in Tennessee, and after the rains, I would go walk
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: through these fields and just look at the slopes of
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: the dirt at the basis of the plants. Look for
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: the little glisten of pieces of flint or absidian that
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: we're coming out of the dirt. And there's this feeling
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: I don't have. Some people get it, some people don't.
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: I don't know how to describe it. But if I
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: pick up an arrowhead and hold it, and I'm the
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: first person to touch that since the person that made it,
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: and those things can be three, four or five, ten
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: thousand years old, depending on where you are and what
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: they are. If it's Clovis, it could be fifteen thousand
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: years old. That's this priceless moment of touching the past.
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: And I used to get a kick out of that
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: from his I mean basically from when I could walk onward.
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: I love that history. And so for me, when I
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 1: had a chance to look at all these weapons, to
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: go back and look at arrowheads and really think about what,
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: you know, what kinds of processes, agents of selection sort
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: of shaped the evolution of the form of these arrowheads.
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: It was it was a fun, fun digression. But you
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: brought it up in the context of them evolving to
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: be smaller that rather than larger, And I think it's
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: a really good parallel. I've tried to say it already
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: in this interview. Most of the time animal weapons aren't big.
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: Most animals don't have an enormous racks sticking on the
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: top o coffee table fused to the top of their head.
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: Most species, it's not worth it. It's too expensive, it's
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: too awkward. Why the hell would you do something like that?
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: And so most of the time it's not worth it.
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: We talked today about the rare circumstances where the stars
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: line up and all of a sudden, in one population
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: of one species, it is worth it, and you go
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: off on this trajectory. But the arrowheads are a really nice,
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: clear illustration of a of a more typical situation where
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 1: it's not worth it to get really big, and it
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: illustrates the point that weapons are shaped by costs and benefits.
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: And so with a with a projectile point, how do
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 1: I where do I start? So so what I did
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: is I picked up a literature that it looked at
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: the so called evolution of projectile points in North America
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: from you know, the earliest people that we think came
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: across the Bearing Street, and these were the Clovis people,
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: and the fulsome people's all the way through to you know,
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: effectively that the colonization from Western Europeans and sort of
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: the end of that era. And they have beautiful sequences
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: of these projectile points through time, even from within the
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: same areas. You can look sort of over time and
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: how the technology changed the fla making patterns, the shapes,
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: the sizes, and what they found is that the points
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: got smaller. So if you go way back to the
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: Clovised time period, they were using these primarily to hunt
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: things like Columbian mammoths, and so we found that we
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: they found the points almost always in association with mammoth kills.
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: They were pretty confident that that was a major source
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: of calories for these people. And if you're gonna try
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: to puncture through the hide of something that's thick and
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: that big, you need a big point. And there's some
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: pretty tight physical constraints. I brought one that we can
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: hold and look at pretty tight physical constraints on a
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 1: napped stone projectile point that they have. You have to
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: have a point that's tailored to the size of the
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 1: shaft of the spear. It has to be about one
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: and a half times the diameter of the shaft of
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: the spear. If the points too narrow, then when it
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: pierces the hide, it doesn't create a slit that's big
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: enough to allow the shaft of the spear to go in,
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 1: so it hits. It goes in like an inch and
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 1: it stops. So longer wider blade cuts a bigger gash
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: slice and it creates an opening that lets the shaft
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: of the spear go into the animal. But if you
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: make them too wide, it's brittle and they snap. So
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: you have this sort of you know, the sort of
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: tension between points that are too too small for your
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: shaft of your spear and points that are too wide
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: and they break. And the happy mediums about one and
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: a half times, so we know the early Clovis this
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: isn't Clovis, but they were big, big points with really
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: thick shafted spears that they needed to puncture through the
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: high of the mammoth. But those were very expensive points
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: to make. It was hard to find pieces of obsidian
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: without imperfections in it that would allow you to nap
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: a point that was like you know, some of them
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: were like six ten inches long, and it took a
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: spectacular amount of skill to be able to pull that
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: off without breaking these things. And then you had to
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: carry the spears and the points with you everywhere you went.
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 1: These were nomadic people. They're carrying everything with them everywhere
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: they go. By some estimates, they'd moved two hundred miles
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 1: in a year. You're carrying everything with you, so big
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: spears are heavy. Is long as you're getting things like mammoths,
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: it's worth it. The benefits of the big weapons are
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: you can take down the huge prey feture people. It's
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: a great thing. But the mammoths went extinct and they
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: had to shift from mammoth to smaller species. The next
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: one was the bison antiquois, which I think you've talked
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: about in some of years of big bison but smaller
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 1: than a mammoth, and so the shafts were overkilled. Suddenly
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: it wasn't worth it to carry these huge, heavy spears
• 1:22:23
  Speaker 1: and to make these really really hard to make points.
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: So they started making smaller points that were better fit
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: to the shaft sizes that they needed on the spears
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: for the bison. And then when the bison antiquis went extinct,
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 1: they shifted down again to big horn sheep into the
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: modern American bison, and each time they shifted to smaller prey,
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: they immediately got rid of the big stuff because it
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: was too expensive to make, too expensive to carry, and
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: they scaled down and got smaller and smaller until they
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: had shaft sizes and point sizes that worked for the
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: current prey. And then all that ended when they invented
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: the bow and arrow, because suddenly you had a fundamentally
• 1:22:56
  Speaker 1: different sort of projectile propulsion system and you could get
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: by with really tiny points. And from that point forward,
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: nobody wanted to carry the big stuff. It was too expensive,
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: too heavy. They all switched to really lightweight, portable bone
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: arrow technologies. So is that is that what you That?
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: I got too far? But it's a nice illustration of
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: costs and benefits that the big weapons were worth the
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: price when the prey was really big and you could
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: use them on bison, But when that prey was gone,
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: it wasn't worth the price to make a big weapon,
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: so you downsized it to something that was cheaper, and
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: then you downsize it again it's something that was even cheaper.
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: There's this sort of tension tug, a war between costs
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: and benefits, and once the big prey were gone, the
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: benefits weren't as big. So it's it ratcheted down to
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: a smaller size. Explain your view on or not your view,
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: but your insights how you want to put it into.
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: Where we've looked, like in recent decades with our military,
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: and how we imagined military might and how we would
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: exercise military might, and where current lee Who is the
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: sneak strategy, who's the beatle that tunnels who tunnels in
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: and comes up through the floor? That one I can answer.
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: So so step back a second and we okay, in time,
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: I want to go out. Okay, so step back a second.
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: I want to I want to make one thing clear.
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: We've been talking about evolution of animal populations and winners
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: and losers and sexual selection. In something like cariboo or elk,
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: it's all about reproduction because the males that win, which
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: presumably are the studs with the best antlers, the best condition,
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 1: they win the harems, they get access to the most females.
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: They win because they sire more offspring and they produce
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: more of the kids in the next generation, and those
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: kids carry the antlers because the way that the antlers
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: are copied is through producing more elk. The winners have
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: more kids, and the currency of success is numbers of offspring.
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: When you talk about military weapons is different. We're not
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: talking about who has kids, whether you have a better
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: machine gun and more. We're not talking about reproduction they anymore.
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: We're talking about manufactured techne But historically there's a lot
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 1: of instances where it does control reproduction. There are the
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: Middle Ages is a good one, and weapons are used.
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: Definitely a factory production. But people find where like it
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: seems like the male there will be a population and
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: it will seem like there's a sudden, very radical shift
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: and the population in the area from and you can
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: see markers from a conquering invasion where it seems like
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: want to go there. Yes, there seems with conquests, and
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: there's no question that military leaders and political leaders tend,
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: especially if you're including illegitimate offspring, to sire an awful
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: of offspring. So reproduction. So reproduction, I'm not trying to
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: say what you say is still the ultimate currency for
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: success and us too. That will piss everybody off, But
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: at the end of the day, you know, when you
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: look a thousand generations from now, the people that are
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 1: gonna be out there are going to be offspring from
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: people that were here today. So so yes, reproduction still matters.
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 1: But what I'm trying to say is, if I want
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: to understand this arrowhead, or I want to look at
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: airplane technology or a tank technology or missile technology, it
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: really doesn't matter how many kids the person that designed
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: it has or how many kids the person that flew
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: it has. That's a separate question. So yes, military issues
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: are associated with dying and with breeding, but we're not
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: missile or the tank or the arrowhead. And when you're
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: talking about a weapon, or take a machine gun, you
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: know in a K forty seven that is a thing there,
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: there are copies made in a factory. They're cranking out
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: a K forty seven's. The factory is making more a
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: K for it. That's not me having kids, that's the
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: factory making more a K forty sevens. But if I
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: look at the population of submachine guns out there or
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: assault rifles out there, I could go out there, just
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 1: like I could say how many dark mice and white
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: mice are out there in my population, I could say
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: how many m sixteen. How many A K forty sevens.
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: If I want to characterize the population of assault rifles
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: on this planet right now, I could probably find fifty
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: different models out there. A few of them are gonna
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: be really rare. Some of them, like the a K
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: forty seven, are going to be ridiculously common. I could
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: talk about variation in the weapon out there now, and
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: realistically that's going to change. Some models are going to
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: get picked up and spread and they're gonna become more common,
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: and they're gonna get adjusted and developed and get better
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: and better over time. Others are gonna disappear. They're too clunky,
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: they jam under you know, the sand gets in them,
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: they don't work. Nobody wants them, they're too expensive. Nobody
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: wants to produce them for their militaries. So the weapons
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: are going to change over time, and it's a turnover process,
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: winners and losers. It's exactly the same as what we're
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: talking about with antlers or beetles, but it's not tied
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: to reproduction. It's tied to who wants this. You know
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: which models are being being picked up, manufactured and spreading,
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: and which mant models are being discontinued because they suck,
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: or they're not cost effective, or nobody wants them, and
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 1: so you still have winners and losers. You can talk
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: about the technology. It will change over time. If you
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: look at the assault rifle, over the last fifty years,
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: it's changed. It's better now, it's more efficient. Now. People
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: have been playing around with it, trying to change the design.
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: Sometimes it's by accident. Sometimes their engineers trying to make
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: it more efficient, make the cartridges work better, make it
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: more cost effective, make it more portable. People are tweaking
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: it and playing around. It's still in a K forty seven,
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: but they're playing with it to try to make it better.
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: That's variation. That's just like mutations cropping up in a
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 1: mouse population making them a little faster, a little thicker,
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: a little lighter. You know, there's variation, and some of
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: it sucks, it doesn't work at all, it's gone. Some
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: of it works really well. People grab it and run
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: with it. That's evolution. So without as a backdrop for weapons,
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: now we can come back full circle and say, well,
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: when would weapons particular technologies get caught up in an
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: arms race where all of a sudden you need bigger
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: and bigger and bigger and bigger, and historically there's really
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: good sort of accounts of early weapons technologies and where
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: this happens. So if you go back to the Romans
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: and the Greeks and and the Syrian time periods Mediterranean,
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 1: there were galleys that were these order you know, the
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: try reams. There were these ships that were rowing soldier
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: back and forth for many many years, like a thousand years.
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: These ships were called penticonters. They had fifty rowers and
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: there was nothing special about them. They just carried troops
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: from place to place. They scrambled about on the ocean.
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 1: They weren't actually weapons. They were just boats that took
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: people along the shorelines to transport troops. For a thousand years,
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: nothing changed. All the countries had the same basic ship.
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: The design was pretty much indistinguishable. And then somebody invents
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: a battering ram boom, just like that new technology. It's
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: just it's like a beetle horn. It's a thing that
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: sticks off the front of the boat. But oh my god,
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: from that point forward, all the rules were written because
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: now you could take your ship smashing into somebody else
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: and saying k his his ship. And so overnight they went
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: from shuttling people like a scramble to hitting another opponent
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 1: ship one on one in a duel. That's that's the
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: same trigger that works in animals. That's the spark. All
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 1: of a sudden, whoever's got the fastest ship wins. Now
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: you've got an arms race because a bigger ship, of
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: faster ship wins in that kind of one on one encountering.
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: Just like that, after nothing happening for a thousand years,
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: overnight these technologies exploded. As people started making bigger and
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: bigger and bigger ships. They started getting longer until they buckled.
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: They started adding another row of rowers, so buyreams came along,
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: than try reams, than five six is. They got bigger
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: and bigger and bigger until these ships were monstrosities that
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: were effectively useless. But the point is a change in
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: technology caused the weapons the ships to line up one
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: on one in a duel, exactly like the dung beetles
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: in a tunnel. Suddenly they're facing each other one on one,
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: and that was it. You can look at various periods
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: throughout military history and the same kind of a process
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: has happened. The Cold War was the most precedent and
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: sort of alarming of those and in that case it
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: happened at the level of nation states and political landscapes,
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: but you effectively had the US and the USS are
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: the superpowers that were still standing after the Second World War,
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: going toe to toe and the scene that's a one
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: on one duel, and that sparked an arms race that
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: led to unbelievably appid development of missiles, aircraft, tanks, nuclear
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: weapon everything, I mean, all the weapons technologies that we
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: had sort of got folded into that race. And and
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 1: if you want to go into that, it turns out
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: the behavior of the nations during that time period was
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: exactly like elk or fiddler crabs or beetles. Those two
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 1: nations didn't go nuclear and all doubt full on battle.
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: They sparred. They had little conflagrations in Afghanistan and Korea
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: and Vietnam where they sort of pushed each other a
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: little bit. They used conventional weapons, they didn't use the
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: nuclear or the weapons of mass destruction. They sized each
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 1: other up and then back down again. That's exactly what
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: animals do in that kind of situation. You know what's
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: interesting about when we think about the parallels and then
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: the things that don't line up. Would be like with
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: in World War Two, that the US becoming the people
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: who developed that refers to develop the atomic bomb, would
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: be as though, I mean, we started that war not
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: a super power, right, but by the time we came
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: out and we were emerging as it would be like
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: if a giant. It wouldn't be that the hornless beetle
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: suddenly came up. It would be like the horned beetle.
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: The wolf with the big bad horn was like, oh
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 1: and guess what else? I also have fangs. You know,
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: it's a little bit like we we upset our, we
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: upped our, we trumped our own action by developing the
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: atomic weapon, and then thereby making in some in some degrees,
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: made this man Japan this naval superpower. It made that
• 1:32:36
  Speaker 1: naval might irrelevant because we had the atomic bomb. It
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: rewrote the rules, completely changed the game. But that's again
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: the arms races ratchet up, they escalate, so the simplest
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: way to think of it as beatles again. And you
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: know it got or an antelope picture. You've got seven
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: inch horns out there, and suddenly somebody comes along with
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: eight inch horns and they start winning. Pretty soon all
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: their kids grandkids, great grandkids. Pretty soon everybody's got eight
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: inch horns and that's not enough. And now somebody pops
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 1: up with a nine inch horn, and and so in
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: a sense, the sizes of these weapons ratchet and steps.
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 1: But you can also have sort of fundamentally new technologies
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: that pop up on the scene that just completely rewrite
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 1: the rules. And so arms races can go in lots
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: of directions, and usually they're additive. So you still need
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: the first weapon, but now you need the second one too,
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: and I need the third. You need tanks and submarines
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 1: and bombers and nuclear weapons. You know, it got more
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: and more expensive because all these things were sort of compounded.
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: But the nuclear weapon game that was that was like
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: a spontaneous mutation that completely rewrote the rules because incontinental
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: and had delivered with the ship. It was like the Indianapolis.
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: You had like deliver it to the Pacific theater in
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 1: a ship. You had to have a powerful air force
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 1: to get the thing a field and put it where
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: you want it. And so you're, like you said, it's
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: like a ratcheting up because you're relying on all these capabilities.
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: Because really you're assessing your capabilities against to your opponent,
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: and they're constantly trying to do better at their capability.
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: So every time they get a new technology, then they're up.
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: Then there ahead of you, the races on to surpass them.
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 1: It really ratchets into this vicious cycle that can lead
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: out of control. So so where a new weapons, So
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: where we are today? That the Cold War obviously, but
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: the technologies are still out there. And one interesting sort
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: of twist on that system is during the Cold War,
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: the most expensive state of the art weapons, the ones
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: that were the equivalent of the antlers in your elk
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: or your cariboo or the horns and my beetles, were
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: the nuclear weapons. Though that was the new technology. That
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: was the one that was the most sophisticated, the most
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: difficult to to actually generate. And then you had to
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: have all, like you said, the delivery. You had to
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: have the infrastructure to be able to deliver that, which
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: took all the sensor nets, that took all the guidance systems,
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: it took the whole space race was basically a cloak
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: and you know, a facade for developing this will technology
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: that could deliver nuclear weapons to an opponent. And so
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: all of that stuff had to be there. Today, we're
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: in a very different world now. We've got stockpiles of
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: these nuclear weapons cached away in places that I hate
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: to think about, that are sort of rotting away and
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 1: there their diamond doesn't because we produced a shipload of
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: them during the Cold War. So there's tons of nuclear
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: warheads out there that's not that's not that expensive. In fact,
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: it's not that inconceivable that just about anybody could get
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: their hands on them. Seven or I can't remember how many,
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 1: seven or eight countries now maybe more. A couple more
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: on the horizon. There are a couple more on the horizon.
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: The the the really expensive weapons, the ones that are
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: the equivalent of antlers now are conventional weapons. There are
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: things like the F thirty five strike fighter and the
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: new Jail four class aircraft carrier. These things cost billions
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: and billions of dollars to produce, and only a very
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 1: small number of nations have the technology, the sophistication, the infrastructure,
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: the trained personnel, that all the stuff you need to
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 1: produce and maintain and use these weapons. So I mean,
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: I had a chance to is it one of our
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 1: nuclear aircraft carriers? A couple of months ago. Astounding experience
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: looking at our operations in action in the Pacific. As
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 1: we cycled through, they have the F thirty five strike
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: fighters landing on a carrier for one of the first
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: times ever on a carrier. I got to stand like
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: as close as I am to you and watch these
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: things come screaming down and catch the tailhook. These technologies
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: are incredible. A helmet on an F thirty five costs
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: half a million dollars. Every single bomb that they put
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 1: on these things as a million dollars out of the gates.
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 1: I mean, we're spending billions of dollars the nuclear triad,
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 1: the infrastructure that we have is is trillions of dollars
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 1: a year. And and so these are the state of
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: the art weapons now. And you asked about the sneaky beatles.
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 1: What's the cheater that we have to worry about. It's
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 1: cyber hackers. I mean, it seems crazy, but we're spending
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: billions of dollars on some astoundingly good time. I mean,
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 1: I got these fighters are amazing, absolutely amazing. I don't
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: know if any of you had a chance to see them.
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: If you know much about the F thirty five, it
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: is a supersonic, super maneuverable stealth fighter that the helmets.
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: The reason the helmets cost half a million dollars on
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: these things is they're completely integrated with sensor systems so
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: that the movements of the pilots are tracked within the
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: within the cockpit of the plane. So any direction the
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: pilot looks, the direction they're looking is automatically integrated with
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: sensors that are built into the skin of the aircraft.
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: In that direction they're tracking the pupils of the pilot.
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: And so they've got infrared sensors, they've got all the
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: GPS stuff, they've got this the topographic maps, everything all overlaid.
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: It's not even like there's a screen. The old ones
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: had a heads up display screen. It's just there. They
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: can look straight through their legs. They're crotched down the
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: bottom of the plane. There's it's gone. It's nothing. They
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: see all the way to the ground because it completely integrated.
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 1: They've unobstructed three and sixty degree view all the time,
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 1: heat sensor, everything all sort of overlaid into an integrative picture.
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: It's amazing. But all of these technologies depend on software,
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 1: so we're spending a fortune on these incredible technologies and
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: they you know, we're the Boone and crocket ball right now.
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 1: Those are the state of the our weapons and we
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: really are safer because of them. They're amazing. But the
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: sneaky little beetles sort of worming away from the sidelines
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 1: or the hackers because if they can get past, we can't.
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: Pilot can't fly these things without software. You can't land
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 1: these planes without software that they literally can't handle the
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: planes without the software because the planes can too maneuvers
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: that are fast enough that the pilot would black out
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 1: from the g forces. So they have to integrate whatever
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: the pilot does with the stick with sort of built
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: in sensor systems that that that interpret the pilot's movement
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: in a way that doesn't cause the plane to do
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: something that the blacks out the pilot. So you literally
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: can't even go old fashioned and fly these things without
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 1: the software that the aircraft carry. Was awesome. I got
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: to talk to Captain, I got to talk to the
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: first officer, I got to talk to the master chief,
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: the cooks, I got to talk to people running the
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: nuclear actors. I mean I got to meet anybody and everybody.
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: They were awesome about letting us as a civilian go
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 1: in and just look what was happening. But every single
• 1:39:02
  Speaker 1: step of that operation is critically dependent on software. They
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: can't control the nuclear reactor on the ship without software.
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: They can't navigate without software. They can't control the positions
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: of the planes without software. They can't orchestrate the landings
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 1: and the takeoffs of the planes without software. The way
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 1: that they communicate with all the rest of Norad and
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 1: everything is all software. So so our vulnerability the flanks
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 1: that we've got exposed right now is the firewalls on
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: our software. And they know it. I mean, I'm not
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: teaching telling them anything. Yes, I did get a chance
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: to go to find d C and give a talk
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: in front of the former director of the n s
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 1: A and the CIA and all these top brass from
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 1: the military about sneaky dung beetles and sneaky big horn
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 1: sheep and salmon, actually telling them the parallels. But you know,
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: I'm not teaching them anything. They don't know. They they
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 1: are totally aware of this and and that's the new
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: arms race. So when I was at this conference talking
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: to these guys, they said, yeah, yeah, we've the Chinese
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: have buildings full of people that are trying seven to
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: hack into our systems, and we've buildings full of people
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: that are hacking into theirs. And the ideas each side
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: is trying to insert code. It's not just stealing trade secrets.
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: So they could go build their own F thirty five,
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 1: that would cost them a fortune. Why go build your
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 1: own jet if you can insert code that renders ours useless.
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: So so the idea that they're called zero day attacks
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: is if they can insert code that sits, then we
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: can't find it because it's not doing anything. It's just
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 1: sitting there. So it's harder for us to tell that
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: it's there until you know, zero day when they need it,
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 1: they turn it on and they can take over our
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 1: technologies and use it against us. That's the fear. We
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: spend all the money, we produce the technologies, they hijack
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 1: those technologies and use them against us. That is the
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: ultimate game changer sneak strategy that we gotta worry about.
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: But the military is on it, and their argument is
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: they have so much infiltrating all their technologies that we
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: can damn sure shut them down too. So so the
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: general actually said this is the new arms race. It's
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 1: like we're all sort of racing each other to who
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: can hijack and control the software or the other side.
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 1: That's the new real that's that's our new Cold war
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 1: crazy stuff. It's a long way from dung beetles and
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 1: rhinoceros beetles, I'll tell you that. No, it's great though, man,
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 1: you do a great job of bringing it all together. Thanks.
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 1: Like the parts about deer, No, it's phenomenal. Is it
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: possible to tell where you are in within an arms
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: race in a partaylor species? Oh? I thought you mean us.
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 1: It's like it's a little scary when you try to
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: do that. That says our aircraft carriers. Had all kinds
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 1: of human comparison questions coming through my head and I've
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: passed it all. Elk kef bigger antlers or they have
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: like very possible. Yeah, yeah, I think that arms racist. Still, well,
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: it's hard to say so. First of all, with animal populations,
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 1: you know, we talked. Sam brought up the fact that
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: evolution can happen really fast. And when you're dealing with
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: antibiotics applied to a population of BacT here as you're
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 1: talking hours, you know, I met population is going to
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: adapt within twenty four hours fast. Because they're head influenza.
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 1: People want to know why they get to get a
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 1: flu shot every single year. It's because the flu virus
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 1: is evolving so fast that six months, eight months out,
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: it's such a genetically different beast that the vaccinations we
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: just produced don't match it anymore. And so those are
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: situations where it's happening really fast. I mean hours to days,
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: two weeks. You've got to stay on top of it.
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 1: Elk rhinosters beetle is probably a little bit slower, still
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 1: fast in the grand scheme of things, because these kinds
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: of arms races are quicker than normal background evolution. But
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 1: but we're talking decades, the hundreds of years. No, but
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 1: I can flip that back getting smaller. We've got really
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 1: good evidence. This will be a hot button topic for
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: your audience, but I know some of the scientists. We
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 1: have very compelling evidence that things like big horn sheep
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: populations have been selected on by trophy hunting and have
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 1: actually evolved in response to have smaller and smaller horns.
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 1: So we've actually driven the evolution of smaller weapons in
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: contemporary populations of an ungulate big horn sheep and they've
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 1: got data where they stopped the trophy hunting and the
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 1: horns rebounded and evolved to be really really big again.
• 1:43:04
  Speaker 1: So we can see weapon evolution even on the scale
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 1: of things like to you or big horn sheep happening
• 1:43:09
  Speaker 1: over you know, two decades, three decades. It's not ours
• 1:43:13
  Speaker 1: like flu, and it's not millennia. It's it's still pretty
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 1: fast with that, you know, like a doll sheet, for instance,
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 1: and most of Alaska, a doll sheep becomes legal when
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 1: he develops the three sixty degree horn. If al's a
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: doll sheet, you'd be better off. If that didn't, you're
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: still vulnerable because of other things. But that's like the
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 1: key indicator. And one that gets there fast, one that
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 1: gets a full curl fast is I don't know, and
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 1: I don't know how actually two. And if if there's
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 1: tens of thousands of dollar sheep and a relatively light
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 1: hunting pressure, so only a couple of dozen trophy animals
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 1: get yanked, maybe that's not really that big an effect,
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: and the benefits in the local populations are still going
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 1: to be so great to keep going. But if you're
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 1: talking about hunting pressure, where you're really taking a sizeable
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: proportion of the top animals, then yeah, that would apply
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: very strong selection to the males to not have that
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: last curl. We do that with fisheries. One of the
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 1: problems we have things like Atlantic cod populations is gill
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: nets catch the big animals the small ones slipped through,
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: so we tend to selectively harvest the older. Big fish
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 1: keep growing as they get You know this better than
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: me saying they get They keep growing as they get older.
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: So big fish are also older fish. So we're selectively
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 1: harvesting the biggest and the oldest fish on a very
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: large scale. When you consider the scope of the Atlantic
• 1:44:36
  Speaker 1: cod fisheries and the numbers of ships and the numbers
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 1: of fish that they're taking, and there's really good evidence
• 1:44:41
  Speaker 1: over the last thirty fifty years that the animals have
• 1:44:45
  Speaker 1: both evolved to grow more slowly so they stay smaller,
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 1: and they started reproducing at a smaller size and a
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 1: younger age. So they're beginning to reproduce smaller than they
• 1:44:54
  Speaker 1: used to because all the big guys are being pulled out.
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 1: It's the small ones that stumbled on a way to
• 1:44:59
  Speaker 1: reproduce early that now winning they're small enough to get
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: through the gillnets and they're breeding. Those are the ones
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: producing the offspring. So the populations evolving, you know, in
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 1: a direction that's not so great for the fisheries industry,
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 1: but it makes a lot of biological sense. We're applying
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: selection by taking the big ones, the smaller ones start
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: doing better, the population evolves towards a smaller size. What
• 1:45:18
  Speaker 1: else you got yet, um on animal weapons? Like any
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 1: like concluders, masks, like you're typing away over there. Oh,
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 1: that was my question. There was about if we knew
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 1: where the arms race was? Are you asked where we
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 1: were in the animals? You can see in a lot
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: of animals that the sneak tactics are already there. You
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 1: study their behavior and you can find the sneaky mails
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: or the what you call them precocious mails in the
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: salmon and so in a way, you know you're already
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: part way into that cycle. And by definition, if you
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: picked it because it's got a huge weapon, it's probably
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: already pretty far in. But but there is a fun
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: twist there. We've known about sneaky mails for years. I mean,
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: it's not a new aspect of animal behavior, but nobody
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: had ever connected it to an arms race before seeing
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: the sneaky mails as the beginning of the end, the
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 1: sort of beginning of the collapse was totally new, and
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 1: I got that idea from the military. And the reason
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: is because he's saying you brought it's because it takes
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 1: a long time. We can see arms races there. We
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: see species with huge antlers. That's why I try to
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: study these things in the first place. It's like, what
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 1: the hell is happening in that beetle or this fly
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: or that ungulate. We picked them because they've got the structures.
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: We know something's going on, and we can infer from
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: that that they're part way into this cycle. But we
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: never actually get to see a collapse. But the military does.
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: They've got really good records all the way through. They
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: know why arms races collapse. They know why the arms
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: raced with the Napoleon era sailing galleons collapsed. It was
• 1:46:50
  Speaker 1: fire ships. Once that you know, you could set these
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: things on fire, it was over. It was game over.
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: They were done. We know about iron clad battleships. They
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: know what started the arms race. They know how they
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 1: got bigger and bigger and bigger. They know how nations
• 1:47:03
  Speaker 1: sort of exploded in their attempts to build bigger and
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: more of these battleships, and then they know why they
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: became obsoleted with submarines. It was a sneaky beetle. Little
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 1: beetle goes underground, minds his way into the tunnel. Submarines
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: sneak under the surface, and they can sink even the biggest,
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 1: best battleships from underwater. It's cheating that admirals hate submarines.
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 1: It's an athema to them. It's dishonorable. It's like breaking
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: the rules. It's exactly what it is, is breaking the rules.
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 1: But once you've got submarines out there, you change the
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 1: game and suddenly the really big battleships are obsolete. And
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 1: so today it's not battleships and submarines. Well, so what
• 1:47:37
  Speaker 1: we have our strike groups. We have our own submarines,
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: and we surround our carriers now, which are the focus
• 1:47:43
  Speaker 1: instead of the battleships. It's the carriers now we have
• 1:47:46
  Speaker 1: to surround them with a strike group. You'll we would
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 1: never send a carrier anywhere by itself. It only exists
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: in a bubble that is created by the cruisers and
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 1: the destroyers and the submarines, and the reason we need
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: all that other stuff is because the submarines from the
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 1: other side. So so the military figured out that changes
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 1: in technology that broke the rules, that cheated were the
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: things that collapsed in arms race. And they had studied
• 1:48:10
  Speaker 1: it over and over again, from the ancient Mediterranean through
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: the saline warships, the ironclad battleships, aircraft, all these systems
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: had been worked out by military scholars and over and
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: over again it's the sneaky, the cheaters that collapse the system.
• 1:48:22
  Speaker 1: And so what was fun for me here, I'm a
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 1: biologist reading all this military stuff, was to turn around
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 1: and say, hey, we've got cheaters. We've known that forever.
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: Oh they're sneak. I even found him as a grad
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: student in my dung beetles, the sneaky mails. But putting
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: the two pieces together and saying, wait a minute, maybe
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 1: the sneakers or the collapse of the arms race in
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: the animal systems too, that's new. We don't have a
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 1: good way to test it yet because animal systems take
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: long enough that we rarely ever get to catch it
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 1: in action. So it's sort of a leap of faith
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 1: at this point. It's an hypothesis that needs to be tested.
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 1: But it's one of the ideas I put forward in
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: that book, and it came from crossover between the military
• 1:48:57
  Speaker 1: literature and the animal literature. And again it's it's fun,
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 1: and it's only possible because these extreme weapons are so similar.
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 1: The animal weapons story. Pretty much everything you could say
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 1: about elk antlers or cariboo antlers you could apply verbatim
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: to aircraft carriers or F thirty five strike fighters today.
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: I mean, the parallels are so deep at every level
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 1: that now we can go back and forth between the
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 1: literatures and each side can learn from the other. Sam,
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: what do you got? Oh, you got a good grade
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: when you took his class. You don't, can't bring that up.
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 1: Deserved a better grade? Um man? So many, so many things.
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: One one thing I was I was curious about perusing
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 1: the book, and you know, think about animal animal weapons.
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: Um what? And you know, obviously my my mind gravitates,
• 1:49:48
  Speaker 1: gravitates towards the young ulates and the antlers and everything.
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 1: I was curious about non typical antler configurations and and
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: if if that is adaptive in some way, and and
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: I'm wondering if if perhaps that is is some form
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: of cheating that it's a different configuration that might be
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: able to um be defeat like that because they call
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: it cheating because they're still paying the prosy. And I'm
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 1: going to take your idea and run with it. What
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: I would call it is variation. So again, all these
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 1: populations start out with differences among individuals. Mutations pop up
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 1: here and there, and if they happen to affect the
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 1: way the antlers are developing, then you get a variant
• 1:50:36
  Speaker 1: on the theme. The antlers a little bit different the
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: times been. Who knows what it is, it's different. You've
• 1:50:40
  Speaker 1: all seen crazy mutant antlers. Sometimes it's it's a genetic change.
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: It's literally a heritable mutation in the genomes of these
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: animals that affects the way they grow. And there's pretty
• 1:50:50
  Speaker 1: good evidence of that. I don't know how many of
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: you collect sheds, but probably all of you do. There's
• 1:50:54
  Speaker 1: some neat places where you can show that the same
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 1: bowl produces the same mutant form of the antler after year,
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 1: and often you can find kids and grandkids in the
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 1: same area that have the same variants. So some of
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: these sort of defective antlers are heritable. They're they're produced
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 1: somehow by something in the genome that's passed on other times.
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: Who knows, it could be an injury to the cells
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 1: or a burn or something that's not passed on. But
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 1: but either way, their perturbations, their variations on the theme
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: that's the raw material that evolution works on. I would
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: expect most of the time they're not going to work
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 1: that well. You know, thousands of millions of years of
• 1:51:28
  Speaker 1: honing Antler shape and you go off in some wonkie
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 1: direction and probably it's not going to function as well
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 1: most of the time. But every now and then it
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 1: might and all of a sudden you've got something that's better,
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 1: and you might have an edge because now you've got
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 1: a twist that nobody else has and that can really
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 1: take off. And now your kids and grandkids and so
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: what will happen is you'll start doing better because you've
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: got that twist or the new time or whatever it is.
• 1:51:53
  Speaker 1: And over time, across generations, if you're doing well enough,
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 1: the population is going to evolve towards the point where
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 1: everybody's got that new thing. And this may be the
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 1: kind of process that Geist would talk about, but none
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: of us ever get to actually see of how you
• 1:52:07
  Speaker 1: go like, why why does a white tailed deer and
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 1: a mule deer have, you know, antlers with the same
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: number of times, but they branched differently. Who knows, but
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: it might have been something like that and sistrally that
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 1: sent one population off on a direction where they had
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 1: a slightly different configuration than before. And so what you're
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: talking about is the raw material that I would argue
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 1: sets the stage for evolution of new shapes or new
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 1: types of weapons. When we look across beetles, or you
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 1: look across service, or you look across the antelope, it's
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: really clear to us that the weapons change a lot.
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 1: They don't just get big, they change in form. So
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 1: there's all kinds of crazy differences and weapons, and that's
• 1:52:42
  Speaker 1: sort of the big unknown mystery we're still trying to
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 1: figure out. We don't have a good reason to explain
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 1: why there's a thousand different kinds of beetle horns. If
• 1:52:49
  Speaker 1: beetle horns are good and bigger is better, why don't
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 1: they all have the same kind of horn. I can't
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 1: tell you. I spent years trying to answer this stupid question.
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: I can't tell you why two sister species of beetles
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 1: have totally different shapes of horns. They're in tunnels, they're
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: doing the same thing, they're finding the same kinds of fights.
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 1: Everything else about their biology is the same. So why
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: the hell does one of them have horns coming off
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 1: the thorax and another one have a bent set of
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 1: horns coming off the head. We don't know. But but
• 1:53:14
  Speaker 1: but these kinds of things have to start with what
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 1: you're talking about, differences, you know, those crazy variants that
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: pop up and in some set set of circumstances and
• 1:53:23
  Speaker 1: some population, it just works. Whatever it is about it,
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 1: it's better and that spreads. Here's my last question for you, Um,
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 1: what's the explanation of like, like, how did it come
• 1:53:36
  Speaker 1: to be that starts all right there? How would it
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 1: come to be? Uh, what is the advantage of losing
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 1: your antlers? Or you know what I mean? Yeah, cost
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 1: I think of them. I thought you man like nolutionarily,
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 1: why would I get why? How? Curan warned me you
• 1:54:00
  Speaker 1: might ask me that, And I was like, oh shit,
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: I don't know the answer to that, Like how did
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 1: it come to me that they like that they shed
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 1: their antlers? And don't I don't know? And I quick
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: because we've got some really good biologic here, and you
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: were see Montana, and so I instantly as soon as
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 1: I got that last night, it's like, oh my god,
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: I don't know the answer to that. I quick wrote
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 1: Mark Eva White, who's a phenomenal biologic here, really good biologists.
• 1:54:21
  Speaker 1: It's like, he'll know. I don't think anybody knows. He
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 1: flipped it around, he said, tell me why why Why
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 1: don't you know why don't the bovids shed their antlers
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 1: every year six and one half dozen of the other
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: Why Why are you asking the question one way and
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 1: not the other. But the fact is, we don't know.
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 1: I did a quick search on the literature. We know
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 1: a lot about the mechanisms sort of how they do it,
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 1: so I could say, oh, they shed their antlers because
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 1: these animals are queuing into photo period and the hormones
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 1: are changing, and when the steroid hormones levels dropped, the
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: cells sinasse and it all falls fine. We know a
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: lot about the cellular machinery. There was a beautiful new
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 1: paper that just came out in Science like last week
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: where they sequence the genomes of like twenty servant species
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 1: and they're able to look and a bunch of antelope
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 1: and bovid species, and they're able to look at the
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 1: cellular level of how these horns grow and figure out
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: the genes and the pathways. A beautiful set of studies.
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 1: So we know a lot about how antlers grow and
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 1: about how they fall off and start regrowing again, but
• 1:55:21
  Speaker 1: nobody has a clue sort of for the adaptive significance
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 1: or ultimate evolutionary explanation why at some point in the
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 1: past and the ancestor of the servits some idiot that
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: shed its antlers and had to go through the whole
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 1: process and grow it back again. Why those individuals did
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 1: better and persisted when the other individuals don't. We don't know. Well,
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 1: let me tell you how what the people are right
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 1: into us like to throw out there because this comes
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: up all I will take a step, but let me
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: hear what they say. Um, and again you don't know,
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 1: like we don't know the answer. But people like to say, like, well,
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 1: I could you know imagine this right? So one is uh,
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 1: you could imagine this isn't the cause of what happened.
• 1:55:59
  Speaker 1: You could imagine that. It's more it's a constantly changing,
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 1: in much more responsive marker of your fitness. That is
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 1: a great answer. So whoever you call that one and
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: is on the money, that's a good one. Because we
• 1:56:12
  Speaker 1: talked about honest signals. So in the Beatles, I told
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 1: you it's like a suit of armor. Once he emerges
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 1: an adult, you're stuck. So the horn size is a
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 1: really good signal of what kind of a stud you
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 1: are as a grub, as a larva. But once you
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 1: go through metamorphosis and you're an adult and you've got
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 1: your suit of armor, that's it how you're doing right now.
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 1: And so I could come out out of you know, development,
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: with a huge horn because I'm a stud, and another
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: guy has a little horn because he's a whimp. But
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 1: two months, three months later, I could have been fighting, fighting,
• 1:56:41
  Speaker 1: fighting and not eating at all. I could be starved,
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 1: I could be a shell. I could be riddled with disease.
• 1:56:46
  Speaker 1: I've still got a huge horn. You know, you can't tell.
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 1: So over time it becomes uncoupled with the sort of
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 1: instantaneous condition and dominance and status of the mail, and
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: so redoing it each year makes a lot of sense.
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: There's a way to keep the signal honest. The other
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 1: thing is they're expensive to carry round, so you look
• 1:57:01
  Speaker 1: at birds with bright colors, they get rid of them
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 1: as soon as as soon as the breeding season is done,
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 1: they molt all those bright feathers out. They go drab.
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 1: Why stand out like a sore thought and carry all
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: is crap around behind you when you don't have to.
• 1:57:14
  Speaker 1: So the other possible argument is you only need it,
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 1: you only produce it when you need it, and then
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: you get rid of it. Oh, you know, during the
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 1: rut you've got it, then you throw it away and
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 1: you don't have to carry it around and going into
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: winter when it's hard to carry it around. Yep. And
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 1: and a twist on that that would be consistent with
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 1: that is a study that that I got to be
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: a peripheral part of that. Mark Heba White was also
• 1:57:35
  Speaker 1: part of and and one of his students beautiful study
• 1:57:38
  Speaker 1: that came out looking at the Yellowstone elk and wolf
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 1: population dynamics. And they showed that the elk actually keep
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 1: their antlers longer than most of the other servants. So
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 1: they're not getting rid of them and being hornless or
• 1:57:52
  Speaker 1: antler less all winter. They're holding onto them all the
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 1: way through until March. You know, people who collect sheds
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 1: know this until the end of March early April. That's
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 1: when the elk shed. So then what, right, why are
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 1: you carrying this thing around all winter? If you can
• 1:58:04
  Speaker 1: get rid of it, why not get rid of it
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 1: as soon as you're done with it? In this case,
• 1:58:07
  Speaker 1: the secondary benefit of having the antlers is that it
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 1: protects these bulls from wolves. And so they have a
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: beautiful study showing that the bulls that dropped their antlers early,
• 1:58:16
  Speaker 1: even just a couple of days earlier than other bulls
• 1:58:19
  Speaker 1: in the population get targeted and hammered by the wolves
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 1: because they can't defend themselves the same way. And so
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 1: so again it comes back to costs and benefits. But
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 1: here's this expensive thing, and you actually keep it all
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 1: winter if you're an elk, because it helps protect you
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 1: against wolves, and then you got to turn around and
• 1:58:35
  Speaker 1: use it during the rut. So now we're stuck with
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 1: that question of why get rid of it and grow
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 1: the whole thing again? And that may be alegacy. It
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 1: might have been early on that it made a lot
• 1:58:44
  Speaker 1: of sense, and early on they were getting rid of
• 1:58:45
  Speaker 1: the cost, and then they were regrowing it and keeping
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 1: the signal honest, and then only sort of secondarily in
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: places where the major predators with things like wolves did.
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 1: Some lineages like elk secondarily essentially hold onto it for
• 1:58:58
  Speaker 1: longer and longer, in which case they're stuck. It would
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 1: make more sense if you could design an elk from
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 1: scratch to have them hold onto the antlers like a
• 1:59:04
  Speaker 1: big horn sheep would. But we're you know, that's part
• 1:59:07
  Speaker 1: of evolution is you get the legacy, you get to
• 1:59:09
  Speaker 1: carry over the baggage that comes with you in your genome.
• 1:59:12
  Speaker 1: They're carrying with them a legacy of having to throw
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: it away and regrow it each year. So they put
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 1: it off, put it off, put it off, ditch it,
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 1: turn around, and regrow it fast. And that's the best
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 1: they can do. I don't know. Good questions A couple
• 1:59:23
  Speaker 1: other guys through this one out where they're talking about, um,
• 1:59:28
  Speaker 1: you know, they break and so it allows you to
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 1: regenerate all the time instead of snapping it off and
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 1: being screwed for the rest of these breaks his horn
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 1: and it's gone shark teeth. Yeah, constantly, Because we're talking
• 1:59:43
  Speaker 1: about like, how come nothing else We're trying to think
• 1:59:45
  Speaker 1: of other stuff besides servids. Right, the develop a weapon
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 1: and lose the weapon and someone's like, well, you can
• 1:59:53
  Speaker 1: kind of look at just the constant replacing of teeth
• 1:59:56
  Speaker 1: in a shark. Yeah, you get the same thing in insects,
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 1: so nimful stage grass oppers are chewing away on leaves
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: and the leaves are often like sandpaper, and it grinds
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 1: down the edges on their mouth parts. But then they
• 2:00:05
  Speaker 1: mold and they throw away the old they start with
• 2:00:08
  Speaker 1: a new clean set and then they can choo choo
• 2:00:09
  Speaker 1: choo choo, and there's sort of this race for time.
• 2:00:11
  Speaker 1: If the plants get more and more sand in their
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: in their leaf tissues, then they can grind down the
• 2:00:16
  Speaker 1: mouth parts. And if they can grind down the grasshopper
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 1: mouth parts fast enough, they starve to death before they
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 1: make it to the next mold. So it's like this race.
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: But if they make it to the mold, they got
• 2:00:25
  Speaker 1: a clean set, new set of anibal sharp blades. They're
• 2:00:28
  Speaker 1: at it again. So yeah, that would be an insect
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 1: analogy to the shark's teeth. That's fun. That's it. Hey,
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 1: this is fun. It's hot in here, but this is great. Yeah,
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 1: thank you very much. And you got like so animal
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 1: wait wait wait I get to plug it, don't I'm plug.
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna plug this to t you up, all right,
• 2:00:45
  Speaker 1: so you can plug your next one. Go for it, time,
• 2:00:50
  Speaker 1: author of Animal Weapons. The Evolution of Battle is a
• 2:00:53
  Speaker 1: subtitle for the book, and you got a new version?
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 1: I do. I have a version of it. That's the backstory.
• 2:00:59
  Speaker 1: That's sort of the adventures doing research on animal weapons
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 1: and how did somebody who starts out with muddy beats
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 1: boots biology and reinforced on dung beetles end up visiting
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 1: an aircraft carrier or given a talk in Washington, d C.
• 2:01:12
  Speaker 1: Two top brass from the military. It's sort of a
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 1: why basic science is relevant and surprising ways kind of story,
• 2:01:19
  Speaker 1: and it's aimed at teenagers, sort of ten to twelve,
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 1: twelve to fourteen year old kids, and so it's narrative nonfiction.
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 1: Is called Beatle Battles One Scientist Journey of Adventure and Discovery,
• 2:01:30
  Speaker 1: and it comes out in December. Beetle Battles, beat Battles,
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 1: You got kids, look for it. I think it's orange
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 1: on the cover, and you love it. You love the color.
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 1: I don't love the color, but I love the book.
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: I had a literally good time getting to unpack that story,
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 1: and I had a really good editor to work with me.
• 2:01:46
  Speaker 1: It's fun. It's really fun telling that story. Okay, thanks
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 1: you guys. Yeah, we got a couple of quick things. Ready,
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 1: I'm ready. Um, do us a favor. We bring you
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: all this free stuff the show, right, get to listen. Um,
• 2:02:05
  Speaker 1: you gotta do us favorite and go subscribe to our newsletter.
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 1: You need to go to www dot The Meat Eater
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 1: dot com and then you'll be you'll you'll see how
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 1: to sign up for the newsletter. That's really important for us.
• 2:02:20
  Speaker 1: Then you can kind of track everything that's going on
• 2:02:22
  Speaker 1: with articles, podcasts, recipes, all kinds of stuff like that. Yeah.
• 2:02:26
  Speaker 1: Then once a week you get a newsletter. And how often, Sam,
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 1: would they get to read something that you wrote about
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: every two weeks? Yeah, we we spent a lot of
• 2:02:37
  Speaker 1: time on those newsletters. Man, it's not just slapped together.
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 1: That's we're trying to bring really good, high quality stuff
• 2:02:43
  Speaker 1: to to everybody, and we're tinkering with it all the
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 1: time to make it even better. And I think, uh,
• 2:02:48
  Speaker 1: most folks you follow it really enjoy it. Yeah, So
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 1: get the newsletter and that's like everything that goes on um,
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 1: new products, everything that goes on our space and also
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 1: we haven't asked for a long time. Do us favorite too,
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 1: and go go on iTunes and click the right most
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 1: star it give us a five star review. You need that,
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: and then you can follow us on social media. Can
• 2:03:07
  Speaker 1: find me um on Instagram at Stephen Ranella. You can
• 2:03:11
  Speaker 1: find Yanni on there. He used to be the Latvian
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: hunter on Instagram and now I was just ready a Yanni. Yeah.
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: I didn't want to make it confusing to Janice Poodless
• 2:03:24
  Speaker 1: and there's an underscoing there. Really, why do you confuse it?
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 1: Because it was early in Instagram, I guess when I
• 2:03:31
  Speaker 1: started messing around and I saw a lot of other
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: people that seemed to like have to have that underscored
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: for a space in their name, like yours is just
• 2:03:39
  Speaker 1: all straight through right, no spaces at all, because I
• 2:03:41
  Speaker 1: didn't have mine up early. But it probably happens you
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 1: went to get Janis Poodless and had been taken No,
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 1: so you had to do the real. That's when you
• 2:03:48
  Speaker 1: do the real, Yeah, authentic go So that didn't happen
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 1: to you. You just didn't underscore for the hell of it.
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 1: I thought that's what you did. Yeah, Oh wait, man,
• 2:04:00
  Speaker 1: try to look saying how do they find you on Instagram?
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 1: Sam Longer Media, no underscores, no nothing, Doug, you mess
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 1: around social media too business. I don't care. I think
• 2:04:14
  Speaker 1: better of you. If you don't, I don't. I like
• 2:04:17
  Speaker 1: you more. Now I have an offer, but I don't
• 2:04:20
  Speaker 1: do much with it, all right, Professor Emlyn, University of Montana,
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 1: my home the matter. Uh yeah, Sam suo, thank you
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: very much for joining us. My pleasure. Okay, everyone, thanks
• 2:04:45
  Speaker 1: for listening. Again. And if I said it once, I
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: said a thousand times. Please go check out our feature
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 1: length documentary about hunting in America today called Stars in
• 2:04:55
  Speaker 1: the Sky. You can find it at Stars in the
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 1: Sky film dot colm. It is available for streaming and download. Again,
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 1: do us yourself a good turn, do us a good
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: turn Stars in the Sky. Find it at Stars in
• 2:05:10
  Speaker 1: the Sky film dot com. You can stream it, you
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 1: can download it, and you can watch it again and again.
• 2:05:17
  Speaker 1: Thank you,