#351 - Top DNA Expert: New Breakaway Species of Human is Evolving in Indonesia | Dr. Melissa Ilardo

Summary

Podcast Summary: Danny Jones Podcast #351

Episode Title: Top DNA Expert: New Breakaway Species of Human is Evolving in Indonesia | Dr. Melissa Ilardo
Host: Danny Jones | QCODE
Guest: Dr. Melissa Ilardo
Date: November 24, 2025

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Overview

In this episode, Danny Jones speaks with Dr. Melissa Ilardo, a leading geneticist specializing in human adaptation and evolution. The discussion revolves around human populations that have developed extraordinary adaptations—so-called “superhuman” traits—to survive and thrive in extreme environments. The conversation centers on Dr. Ilardo’s pioneering research on the Bajau, a group of sea nomads in Indonesia with remarkable diving abilities and genetic adaptations that may represent a new branch of human evolution. The podcast further delves into broader themes of human evolution, genetics, technology’s impact on our biology, and the ethical frontiers of human genomic manipulation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dr. Ilardo’s Route to Human Evolution Research

• Start in Astrobiology: Dr. Ilardo began with a master’s in astrobiology but transitioned to working with humans to study real-world evolutionary processes ([01:07]).
• Indonesia Dive Population: She became intrigued by the Bajau (“sea nomads”) after learning about their diving proficiency and proposed a study to investigate possible human evolution in action ([01:07]–[02:01]).

2. The Bajau: Sea Nomads as a Case Study of Human Adaptation

• Bajau Lifestyle: Traditionally live on houseboats, extract resources from the ocean via deep breath-hold diving—some reportedly up to 13 minutes, rivaling world records ([02:10], [16:02]).
• Environmental Pressures: Indonesian seas are resource-rich, encouraging aquatic lifestyles ([03:11]).

3. Genetic & Physiological Adaptations

• Spleen Size as an Adaptation:
  • Spleen stores oxygen-rich red blood cells; contracts during breath-hold diving for an “oxygen boost” ([05:08]–[06:44]).
  • Bajau have genetically larger spleens regardless of diving activity, indicating a heritable trait, not a training effect ([08:50]–[10:04]).
  • "Based on my research, it would be normal size. However... diving does not increase your spleen size. Having a genetic predisposition increases your spleen size." – Dr. Melissa Ilardo ([10:21]).
• Gene Linked to Blood Vessel Constriction:
  • Bajau show selection in genes controlling peripheral vasoconstriction, channeling blood to vital organs during apnea ([12:16]).
• Thyroid Hormone Link:
  • Genetic variant in Bajau increases thyroid hormone, boosting red blood cell production and spleen size ([30:36], [31:02]).
  • Mouse studies confirmed spleen enlargement by modulating the same gene ([31:39]).
• Comparisons to Other Populations:
  • Similar adaptations observed in Korean Haenyeo women divers—lower heart rates, possible pregnancy protections, and traits for cold-water diving ([22:41]–[24:51]).

4. Broader Perspectives on Human Evolution

• Human Plasticity: Humans adapt through technology and physiological flexibility ("plasticity"), possibly reducing our need for dramatic genetic change ([36:03]–[36:47]).
• Directional vs. Environmental Selection:
  • Evolution isn’t linear or “progress-based”—fitness is about best environmental fit ([41:37], [42:26]).
  • "That’s like evolution doesn’t have a direction, it doesn’t care. It’s just about being... the best fit to our environment." – Dr. Ilardo ([41:37]).

5. Human Genetic Diversity & Bottlenecks

• Effective Population Size: Genetic diversity outside Africa is a subset, evidence of severe bottlenecks when humans left Africa; all living humans can trace genetics back to as few as ~10,000 individuals and a single “Mitochondrial Eve” ([48:21]–[49:37]).
• Migrations and Resets: Genetic adaptations often arise where small populations with unique traits split off; genetic mixing now occurring at unprecedented scales due to globalization ([76:19]).

6. Evolution in the Tech & CRISPR Era

• CRISPR and Designer Babies:
  • Technology now allows targeted genetic engineering (e.g., eliminating disease mutations), but raises ethical concerns, especially when based on correlation instead of causation ([83:22], [90:53]).
  • "We have the technology if we knew what the gene was, but we don’t, we’re so far from knowing it." – Dr. Ilardo ([114:24]).
• The Danger of Misapplied Genetics & Correlations:
  • Risks of erasing diversity or misattributing causation when selecting or editing genes—e.g., confusing socioeconomic status with genetic markers for intelligence ([90:41]–[92:21]).
• Potential Future of Sex and Reproduction:
  • Speculation on a future of “sexless” human reproduction, technological interventions in conception, and questions on how cultural evolution will impact biological evolution ([109:04]).

7. Fun and Fascinating Detours

• Smell & Mate Selection:
  • Dr. Ilardo discusses the “smelly T-shirt study” showing women prefer scents from men with genetically complementary immune systems ([61:25]).
• Dogs & Human Domestication:
  • Humans are ‘domesticating’ themselves through technology and environmental convenience, drawing a parallel with the teacup Yorkie vs. the wolf ([97:33]–[98:05]).
• Migraine Genetics & Light Therapy:
  • Brief exploration of migraine treatment with green light therapy as an example of environmental (not genetic) solutions ([85:28]–[89:13]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Bajau’s Adaptation:

  “What I measured was their spleen size... it stores red blood cells. So it’s kind of like this oxygen reservoir... some people have called it a biological scuba tank.”
  — Dr. Ilardo ([05:08]–[06:08])

• On Genetic vs. Training Effects:

  “Based on everything I have seen in that population and in other diving populations... diving does not increase your spleen size. Having a genetic predisposition increases your spleen size.”
  — Dr. Ilardo ([10:21])

• On Human Evolution’s Directionality:

  “Evolution doesn’t have a direction, it doesn’t care... we have this image of ape transforming to man... but evolution doesn’t care about better, only fit.”
  — Dr. Ilardo ([41:37]–[42:38])

• On Modern Genetic Engineering:

  “The scary thing is we’re there, you know, we can do this. But now the question is, should we, and what should or shouldn’t we do?”
  — Dr. Ilardo ([75:28])

• On Revolutions in Human Diversity:

  “In the same way that we stole genetic material from Denisovans... maybe there’s genetic variation in one part of the world that’s been neutrally evolving that would be really beneficial in another part.”
  — Dr. Ilardo ([76:19])

• On Human Self-Domestication:

  “If you look at what humans were 10,000 years ago compared to now, we are basically teacup Yorkies compared to the wolves we used to be.”
  — Danny ([97:33])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction to Dr. Ilardo & Indonesian Divers – [01:07]–[02:52]
• Bajau Diving Lifestyle & Evolutionary Pressures – [02:52]–[04:58]
• Spleen Size Adaptation Discovery – [05:08]–[07:45]
• Disentangling Genes vs. Environment – [08:50]–[10:21]
• Records of Breath-Hold Ability – [16:02]–[16:44]
• Comparisons to Other Sea Nomad Cultures (Haenyeo, Moken, etc.) – [22:41]–[25:16]
• How Plastic is Human Physiology? – [36:03]–[36:47]
• Effective Population Size & Mitochondrial Eve – [48:21]–[49:37]
• Human Genetic Bottlenecks & Globalization – [76:19]–[79:23]
• On the Ethics and Risks of CRISPR – [83:22]–[92:21]
• Mate Selection and the Smelly T-shirt Study – [61:17]–[63:44]
• Dogs as an Analogy for Human Self-Domestication – [97:33]–[98:52]
• Speculations on Future Human Evolution (AI, Reproductive Technology, “Gray Aliens”) – [108:33]–[110:43]

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Additional Topics

• Oral Histories & Anthropology: Matching genetic signals with indigenous oral histories—e.g., possible ancient links between Bajau and Aboriginal Australians ([52:12]).
• Migraine & Green Light Therapy: Novel, non-genetic interventions for genetically predisposed conditions ([85:28]).
• IQ, Intelligence, and Genetics: No clear “intelligence gene”; educational attainment is a poor stand-in ([110:53]–[113:54]).

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Conclusion & Where to Find Dr. Ilardo

Dr. Ilardo’s lab is known as the Superhuman Lab (superhumanlab.org), also on Instagram (superhumanscilab). She welcomes questions from listeners ([117:16]).

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Tuned In

This conversation is a deep-dive into real-world human evolution, exploring how the edges of our species adapt to meet extraordinary challenges, and what those stories reveal about the past, present, and possible future of Homo sapiens. Dr. Ilardo’s research demonstrates evolution is ongoing, often invisible, and sometimes discoverable only through the unique intersections of genetics, anthropology, and cultural history. The episode is lively, accessible, and full of surprising facts that challenge notions about what it means to be human in a rapidly changing world.

Transcript

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

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[Danny]

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[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

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[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So I'm interested in how modern human populations have evolved to their lifestyles or environments. And so this is, we're talking in the last like 10,000 years or less. And I got into that. I was actually, I've always been interested in evolution. I actually started with a master's in astrobiology. So I was looking at very theoretical evolution. But then I decided I wanted to actually work with humans. And so I was doing my PhD in Copenhagen in Denmark, and I was working on a totally different project and I heard about a group of divers in Indonesia and I thought, well, if ever there were an opportunity for evolution or natural selection to act in a modern human population, this would be the population. And so when I saw that no one had done that study yet, I went to my supervisor and pitched it and said, can I, can I do this? And luckily I had a supervisor who was super supportive. And that was the start of all of it for me.

[Danny]

How natural selection would work with these people in Indonesia, who are they live on the water? These, these are the, you know, nomadic spear fishermen.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So they're called co Mads. Traditionally they live their whole lives on houseboats. And that's changing, you know, in a kind of a contemporary context. But traditionally they would get basically everything they needed from the sea. And they do a lot of that through breath hold diving. And they're extremely good at it. So they can hold their breath for a really long time. They can move underwater with incredible athleticism. And they do this to collect things like sea cucumbers. They spear fish. And so the idea was that diving is dangerous. And so if people have been doing this to survive for thousands of years, they may have evolved in a way that made them better at it.

[Danny]

And what is it specifically about that part of the world that pushes them to be more of Senomats like to be exploring the sea for, for food and for this kind of stuff. Like, is there a sparse, is there a very limited amount of resources on land there?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I think it's actually that there's just so many resources in the water. So Indonesia, I mean that whole area, you have seen nomads throughout Southeast Asia, but Indonesia itself has like than 500 islands. So it's just an incredible amount of coastline of these like super rich coral reefs. So there's just an abundance of resources in the ocean. So it's kind of like if it's there, why not take advantage of it? And we actually see many places in the world where there are these rich marine resources. People dive.

[Danny]

You would classify these people as like quote, unquote, superhumans, right? Because they're, they're super adapted to a certain way of life and they have, over time, I don't know how long, but have evolved to be better at long, long breath holds and swimming deep underwater to catch fish. And this has changed their, their genome to some degree.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Exactly, yeah. I mean, people who live at high altitude, people who eat diets rich in lipids, things like that, there's these what we call superhuman populations all over the world. And it's just kind of the idea is most especially medical research focuses on disease, but that's just this really small part of the spectrum of human physiology because we have like disease health and then beyond to what we call the superhuman population. So people who are enhanced in some way. And so by focusing on that end of the spectrum, first of all, there's a lot out there that hasn't been explored yet, which is really exciting. It also allows us to kind of celebrate what's special about these populations rather than stigmatizing them for diseases they may have or things like that. And it's just like a really fun way of approaching health research when it.

[Danny]

Comes to these Indonesian sea hunters or these nomadic ocean people. What did you find interesting about them specifically?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So I had heard about their diving abilities, and it is truly amazing to see them in the water, how they move, how long they hold their breath. And so we thought that maybe there was something physiologically different about them. And so what I decided to measure in part because I was a PhD student, kind of a little bit on my own with this project and trying to find something that was non invasive and easy enough for me to learn how to measure. So what I measured was their spleen size. And so the spleen isn't the first organ you think about when you think about diving, but it plays a really important role in diving, which is that it stores red blood cells. So it's kind of like this oxygen reservoir because you have these oxygen rich red blood cells just sitting in the spleen. And, and when you dive, your spleen contracts and those get pushed into circulation. So this increases the amount of oxygen that's circulating through your body. Um, and so some people have called it a biological scuba tank. So you're kind of carrying around this little extra reserve of oxygen that may be able to prolong dive time or make diving safer.

[Danny]

Wow. So this activates only when you're holding your breath?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

That's right, yeah. So it's actually, you know, it to a certain extent. It also is activated when you exercise. So like horses have huge spleens, greyhounds have huge spleens. And they think that that contributes to their ability, you know, to perform at such a high level in terms of exercise. But it's much more so activated by holding your breath combined with cold water on your face.

[Danny]

Holding your breath and cold water.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

That's right, yeah.

[Danny]

And you say it pumps out more red blood cells.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yes. You get this like injection of red blood cells into circulation that are holding onto oxygen. So suddenly you have access to like 15% more oxygen.

[Danny]

So were there. So how did you figure out the size of their spleens?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So I took a portable ultrasound machine. So yeah, at first I had to learn how to measure a spleen, which is actually kind of tricky with an ultrasound. Right. So I was lucky that all the other people involved in my PhD program were very willing participants because I was just having people over to my apartment to look at their spleens for practice. And then, yeah, I carried this like, for 40 pound machine out to a tiny village in Indonesia, you know, after doing an initial visit where we said, like, here's, here's what I'm thinking of doing. What do you think? Is this something you're interested in? And people were very receptive, went back with the machine and measured a whole bunch of spleens.

[Danny]

So did you have this hypothesis before you measured or were you just like scanning around, trying to see what you could find? Or how did you come, come to the, to the hypothesis that they might have bigger Spleens?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, it was a number of factors. So, you know, one thing is looking at other animals that have adapted to. To diving. So certain species of seals that have a really long breath hold also have huge spleens. So the Weddell seal's spleen takes up half of its abdominal cavity. It's huge. And so we thought, okay, if it could increase spleen size in a seal, maybe it could increase spleen size in humans too. And then it's also just kind of like, grounded in basic evolutionary theory, which is that in order for evolution to act, you need to have some kind of phenotype that it can act on that's likely to be something you can inherit. So we looked at like lung size or lung volume, but lung volume is really changeable, so that's not really likely something that you're going to inherit because it changes so much just based on, you know, how much you hold your breath, you know, like heart rate, things like this. There are a lot of different things that we could have measured. And we went with the spleen again, in part because it's an easy thing to measure.

[Danny]

Right, right. Just based on the size of the. So they weren't born like this. Right. Their spleens adapted over time and over breath hold after breath hold and years of diving.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So it's actually they were born with it because that's an important. That was an important thing for us to distinguish because maybe it's just diving makes your spleen bigger, you know, and there had been some studies that kind of hinted that that might be the case. So to check that out, we took people who were diving and people who had never been diving but had the same genetic background. So the people that I, with the population I worked with are called the Bajau. In some countries it's pronounced Bajau, but it's one of these xenomad groups. If we had done this study like 100 years earlier, it would have been impossible to tell what was environmental or genetic because everybody would have been diving. But now, because of kind of the changes in the world, I'd say about half the population or more doesn't dive. So we had this really nice split in the population between people who are actively diving, so whose spleens could have been expanded by diving, and people who were Bajau but weren't diving. And so we saw the large spleens across everyone. There was no difference in spleen size based on whether or not they'd been diving.

[Danny]

That's fascinating.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

But there was a difference when we compared them to a population that lived, like, 20 miles away who had a totally different genetic background but lived in.

[Danny]

The Same environment only 20 miles away.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. Super close.

[Danny]

Weren't divers?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Correct? Yeah.

[Danny]

Wow, that's so interesting. So if you were. Say you did grow up and you weren't part of their genetic background and say I was part of the tribe that was 20 miles away and I came, like, I got adopted by one of their families or whatever, and I started diving Since I was a toddler, would my spleen be normal size or would it be huge?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So from. Based on my research, it would be normal size. However, I have seen some papers that do suggest that you can expand your spleen just by holding your breath a lot. You know, I. Those papers. Some of those papers had small sample sizes. And, like, I would say that ultrasounds are kind of more of an art than a science. Like, there is a certain amount of interpretation, so you have to try to blind yourself to what your hypothesis is. So I would say jury's still out, but it seems like, based on what, everything I have seen in that population and in other diving populations. Diving does not increase your spleen size. Having a genetic predisposition increases your spleen size.

[Danny]

Fascinating. How long have they been doing this, do you know?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

It's hard to say. We think thousands of years. There was thousands, yeah. So the earliest kind of written documentation was. What was his name? One of the early explorers. Oh, Magellan. Magellan had a chronicler who was writing about all of the things that they saw as they were exploring and describes in detail seeing Ceno Mads diving and living on these houseboats and things like that. But that's only like 500 years ago or something like that. Maybe less so. But we think, based on, like, linguistic reconstruction, that they've actually been diving much longer, which makes sense because, you know, that marine environment has been there. So.

[Danny]

So from, like, reading ancient texts they write, you can find, like, accounts of them.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I think it's the way. I'm not a linguist, so I don't know exactly, but they. They kind of, like, put together when that particular language arose and when certain words related to diving are likely to have been introduced. But I don't. You know, again, outside of my.

[Danny]

Very interesting.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

But based on our genetic results, we think that they started evolving this trait in the last few thousand years.

[Danny]

Okay. Any of them have webbed feet or any other interesting characteristics?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Not webbed feet, but we did see in their genetics an interesting signal in a gene related to something else that happens when you dive, which Is so, you know, your spleen contracts, but you also have this constriction of your blood vessels because like your fingers, your toes don't need oxygen that badly. But your brain, your heart, your lungs, they need that oxygen rich blood. So by making the blood vessels in your extremities smaller, your body moves that blood closer to the organs that need it the most. And so they had a gene that was different, it had been evolving that has been previously linked to that effect, this like blood vessel constriction effect.

[Danny]

Interesting.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So we didn't measure that directly unfortunately, but it's something we'd love to do in the future because.

[Danny]

What was the water temperature? Well, I don't know what the water temperature is in Indo. It's pretty warm, right? Yeah.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So yeah, it's, you know, they're not probably exposed to that much kind of hypothermia because it's like pretty thermo neutral water. It's very pleasant swimming water. But we do see divers in cold water populations as well.

[Danny]

And they put these people, they put like their offspring, they start getting them adapted to the water pretty much right after birth, right?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And they have like, I mean, you know, it's interesting too how you see this sort of resurgence of people doing water births. And like babies can go straight from the placenta. Placenta or the womb, which is amniotic fluid to like a bathtub or something like that.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. It seems like we have this really instinctual drive to hold our breath. And you know, babies, you can, I've heard, blow in their face and put them underwater and they just hold their breath and you know, they know that that's what they're supposed to do. I heard from people who weren't bajo, so I didn't confirm this with the bajo that they, when a baby is born, will pass the baby under a canoe traditionally. And if it makes it to the other side, you know, if it holds its breath, it's a bajo baby. And if not, you know, but.

[Danny]

Right.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

But I don't know if that's, you know, I mean that's just what other people from outside of the community had told me, so.

[Danny]

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[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

But yeah, you go to the village and there's like all of the kids are in the water. Which does make it a little bit harder to separate them into divers and non divers because even the non divers, abs children were probably diving.

[Danny]

You know, how long can hold their breath for?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

It's a really good question. We don't have good data to say. One diver told me and I did not confirm this. I have to, you know, put that caveat that he in his youth could hold his breath for 13 minutes. That's about the same as the, the current world record without, you know, supplemental oxygen before diving.

[Danny]

So, you know what, so what is the current world record? That's been doc, that's been actually documented.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I think without any supplemental, without breathing pure oxygen Beforehand, it's around 13 minutes.

[Danny]

Wow.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. And I think that's kind of just floating there, which is also very different from bajo diving. Like they are active, they're hunting. I mean, they're like walking on the sea floor and spearing multiple fish.

[Danny]

Yeah, that's crazy because you see some of like the free diving champions, what they do is they put weight belts on and when, once you get to a certain atmosphere, you just start free falling with the weight.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And then they think they drop the weight belts or something. Like that. Or maybe they don't drop the weight belts. I don't know how else they would get on. I don't know how they would get them, retrieve them. But they. They come back up, like, super slow, but they're not exerting any energy at all. They have these big, long freediving fins, are using those, like, slowly come up to the surface. Yeah, but actually, like, having to crawl around underwater caves and caverns and try to, like, find fish and hunt stuff down and chase stuff like that takes a lot of energy.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing. You know, the Baja are doing all that without fins. Without. They don't use that. Oh, yeah, no, they. There's. I mean, a lot of these communities are really impoverished. And so, you know, they don't have wetsuits, they don't have fins, they don't have. Maybe they don't have weight belts. Many of the divers that I saw didn't. But like you said, once you get to that depth, you become neutrally or negatively buoyant.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

And so it looks like they look like hunters. I mean, they're, you know, they've got their spear gun and they're walking.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

And waiting for a fish. And then it is.

[Danny]

So how many cultures or groups of people do we know of that are similar to them, that are nomadic, seafaring people?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, so there's seafaring and then there's the nomadic seafaring. And I would say it's harder to say.

[Danny]

Maybe I said that wrong.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

No, no, no, no, that's absolutely right. I'm just saying there are a lot of both. But with the nomads, it's harder to say because nomadism is most threatened by current global trends. I would say because it's like, it's really hard to get a passport if you're a nomad. You know, countries are very reluctant to claim someone. If they don't, they kind of move across borders. So it's harder to say how many of these cultures used to be nomadic. But there are diving populations in Japan and Korea. There were diving populations in aboriginal Australia, like Tasmania. There's diving populations throughout Southeast Asia, even into, like, Taiwan. There were some traditional diving populations. Then, you know, South America, there was. There were diving populations in Patagonia, they were very nomadic as well. Panama, there's a huge diving population. It's basically like anywhere you have. The more, you know, the more I learn about divers, the more I talk to people who work with divers, the more diving populations I find out about.

[Danny]

I Mean, it is bizarre that that's not the norm for Homo sapiens. Like you would like just looking at the planet we live on, right. Which is mostly water, there's not much land.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

You can look at one side of the planet from space and look at the Pacific Ocean and there's no land.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right.

[Danny]

So it's kind of crazy that we have evolved to be like these like land only mammals and that are not very optimal. Our bodies aren't optimal for like moving around in the ocean.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right. And to extent we are evolved to be in the water because we all have this dive reflex, which is cool. But what's interesting is the dive reflex is actually conserved across all mammals. So if you teach mice to dive, which people have actually done in a lab setting, they have the dive reflex as well. So all mammals have this ability to be in water and hold our breaths. But yeah, it's interesting that again, like you said, there's such rich resources in these marine environments. So why is it that only specific populations have kind of gone back to that?

[Danny]

The dive. So what exactly is the dive reflex?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So this is where the spleen contraction. That's the spleen contraction. So it's spleen contraction, vasoconstriction. So the constriction of the blood vessels and then also a slowing of the heart rate. And so that's something that's actually trainable. So the more you dive, the more your heart rate slows when you dive.

[Danny]

Right.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

And also your resting heart rate gets lower as well. And that's been observed in competitive breath hold divers and traditional diving populations.

[Danny]

Yeah, because like, you know, that die reflex is interesting. But other animals that spent like, like, look at birds, like birds are. You can tell how they're adapted to dive underwater at least water birds, water birds that hunt fish and things like that, they have this big webbed feet and they can, they have the feathers that like push water off where they like, they can, they can fly, they can walk on the ground and they're actually like like physically adapted for water for like, like sitting on the water or swimming through the water or whatever. Yeah, it's just crazy that you know us at least to like at the first glance. We don't look like we're made to.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Be in the water. Right, right. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. It's interesting. So if you spend a lot of time in cold water especially, but mostly like divers, people who have water in their ears, a lot, something happens that's called, it's called surfer's ear because surfers sometimes get it, too. Or the bones in your inner ear change shape in a way that, you know, is permanent and it could affect your hearing. And there's, you know, it has different effects.

[Danny]

I have that. I have raging tinnitus.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Okay.

[Danny]

From that.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So what's interesting is that your skeleton people would then be able to tell, like, this is someone who spent a lot of time in the water. And so there's increasingly, we're seeing signs of human populations that we didn't previously think were spending a lot of time in the water who have this. And so, you know, near rivers in, like, certain parts of the United States, we're finding skeletons that. That indicate that people in those areas may have been diving in the rivers.

[Danny]

No way.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Are there any. Are there any other groups of people that you have found that similar to these. These sea people of Indonesia that have a unique way of living that has changed the way they evolve or has them. Have them evolved. Evolving out on, like, a different branch than the rest of us?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, it seems like, you know, human populations all over the world are evolving in these really interesting and unique ways. So in my lab, we've also worked with a population in Korea called the Haenyeo. And so these are all women divers diving in very cold water. And what's cool is that this has been a tradition of having mostly or all female divers in that region for thousands of years as well. And we think that they've actually evolved in a way that makes it safer for them to dive throughout their pregnancies, because these women not only dive throughout their whole lives, they dive often until the day they give birth. So I heard from one woman that she was diving. It was seaweed season, so she wanted to make sure she got as much seaweed as possible. Dove until 6pm, gave birth at 8pm so it's a very different kind of selective pressure in that case. Wow. Yeah.

[Danny]

And they. And they're in Korea, which is a lot colder of a climate.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

That's right. Yeah. In the winter, the surface temperature of the water is like 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And they were traditionally, until the 90s, they were diving in cotton. So no thermal protection. Yeah.

[Danny]

Has no thermal protection at all.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right. Yeah.

[Danny]

So were they similar to the Indonesian group at all, or are these. These are mostly females that are doing. Or all females that are doing this.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right.

[Danny]

And so what were the differences between those two groups?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, so we saw some things that seemed to overlap, which was the main signal that we saw that we think is protecting them in pregnancy is related to blood pressure. So that could be related to this kind of vasoconstriction effect that we saw in the Indonesians. And then we also saw that they have a training effect, which is this lowered heart rate. So we did some simulated dives with them, and their heart rate just plummeted. So we can simulate a dive by having people hold their breath and put their face in a bowl full of cold water. That makes your body think that you're diving. And so when they did that, we could watch in real time their heart rate drop. We had woman whose heart rate dropped over 40 beats per minute in less than 15 seconds.

[Danny]

Yeah, that's crazy. Oh, this is them.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Oh, yes. Yep.

[Danny]

Oh, look, she caught an octopus. Did they use their bare hands or.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

They use spear guns or they use a combination. So they have certain tools that are for getting, like, abalone off the rock. They have other tools that they kind of hook onto the bottom of the sea floor and pull themselves along as they collect concrete, things like that.

[Danny]

So they are a little bit more technologically advanced than the Indonesians currently. Yes, because the Indonesians use masks.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

They do. I mean, both the Haenyeo and the Bajau traditionally did not use masks because that, like, technology didn't exist.

[Danny]

Well, not thousands of years ago.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. Even like a couple hundred years ago, they were mostly just diving with their eyes, which we're curious then, if they've actually adapted in a way where they can see better underwater. These are the cotton diving suits.

[Danny]

Yeah. That doesn't do much.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, no. And they were wearing these until the 90s. And, in fact, I talked to some woman who said that even when wetsuits came out when they were diving in their pregnancies, they're like a wetsuit doesn't fit over a pregnant belly. So we just went back to cotton.

[Danny]

Right. And it makes you way more buoyant. It's harder to get down deeper.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. So you can see here, these women are not wearing weight belts because they were diving in cotton. So they didn't have that, you know, issue with the flotation. Now they're using weight belts because they have, you know, these thick wetsuits. And I think in this picture, they're probably also not wearing fins.

[Danny]

Did you find. And did you study their eyes at all or their vision?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

We have not yet. There was a study that was done in the Moken, which is another group of Ceno mads in Thailand, and that suggested that they actually have better underwater vision than other people. The results of that were kind of dismissed because the same person who did that study did a follow up study where they trained people in Europe to see underwater and they could achieve the same level of underwater vision through training. But I think this is really flawed logic and it's been applied in a lot of these kinds of adaptations because it's like, just because, you know, I mean, I can train to run a marathon, that doesn't mean that I have the same genetic predisposition as someone, you know, let's say, from Kenya, who has a different, like limb length proportion than I do, you know. So I think this idea that I might not be explaining it very well, but that you can train, you know, like, just because someone can train to reach a certain level doesn't mean that that makes another person not special. Of that I'm not articulating it well.

[Danny]

Right. Well, they have to do like far more work.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, exactly.

[Danny]

To achieve the same level of success as the person who can do it naturally.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. So I'm wondering if that's the case with vision as well. But it's not something we've been able to test yet.

[Danny]

Wow. Steve, find a picture of the other group, the Indonesians. Oh, wow. Oh, really?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

The one where he's holding the mask? Actually, yeah.

[Danny]

Oh, that's incredible. Oh, wow. And this guy's not even wearing a mask. Look at that guy.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, yeah. So they have these kind of wooden goggles that they used until fairly recently as well. Yeah, kind of like that. And then now some people have switched to the full mask, but a lot of it's homemade. So I actually have a bajo spear gun on my, on the wall in my office. That's. You can see like the, you know, the tension comes from bike inner tubes and it's all homemade. It's very cool.

[Danny]

Oh, my.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. With the goggles, I have no idea how they get a seal. And I don't know how they avoid like a squeeze too, because they're diving super deep. That's one thing. That's a little.

[Danny]

How do you feel they go?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

They. We don't really know, but one researcher went to a competition with some bajo divers and they dove to 70 meters, which is over 200ft with just a weight belt. Yeah, I mean, they're, they're incredible. Like, their ability to dive deep is, is really.

[Danny]

I bet a lot of them like dive doing that.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Because that's how evolution works. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, it's. I mean, the risk of shallow water blackouts when you're diving that deep is super dangerous. Yeah.

[Danny]

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[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, yeah. And we actually think that the adaptation that's making their spleen like the genetic change that's making their spleen bigger is actually increasing their thyroid hormone levels. So it's putting them into not like a hyperthyroid state, like a, you know, pathological kind of state, but just like a slightly higher than average thyroid hormone level, which we think is giving them a lot of different advantages.

[Danny]

How so how would that would. I'm not familiar with how that would work.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, so the thyroid, you know, it increases. There's kind of like a sweet spot we think, where we think it's actually increasing the amount of red blood cells that they're producing. And so that's part of why they have this bigger reservoir. It's just because they have more red blood cells. And so they're kind of stored, waiting to be accessed during diving. And we think that because we actually did some studies with mice where we were able to recreate the large spleen phenotype we say, or trait in mice. So we had these mice that we. We gave them a drug that inhibited the same gene that's different in this population. And those mice had larger spleens.

[Danny]

Wow, that's wild.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

We did not train those mice to dive, but I would be very curious to see how they did compared to other mice.

[Danny]

So if you were hypothetically, like, total speculation, what do you. Do you think that in a couple thousand years that these people could develop webbed feet or look even more different than we do now or they do here?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. I mean, really, you know, as long as there's selection for it, as long as it's giving them an advantage or protecting them from dying younger or, you know, not being able to reproduce, then, yeah, it could totally happen. It also has to be a trait that has to come up somehow. So there either has to be a mutation. You know, like, I didn't see a single person who had webbed feet, so that it's not out there yet. But you certainly could have a mutation that caused that, and then maybe that person has, you know, a huge benefit, and that spreads throughout the population.

[Danny]

But that takes a long time.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Exactly.

[Danny]

To get a positive trait to evolve.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

That's exactly it. Yeah. That's why evolution is normally so slow, because most mutations are so bad that we don't even see them because they're what's called embryonic lethal. So they don't even make it into, like, a fully developed human because they're so bad. So a lot of the kind of variation that we see that comes up in these populations was already at some frequency in the population. So it's already there. And it's. Once they moved into an aquatic environment, it became beneficial. So those people were just kind of walking around. It was kind of neutral as long as they were on land. But as soon as they started diving, it became a really helpful thing to have. And actually, some humans, our genome likes to be as frugal as possible. So whatever's out there that's going to try to use as much as it can, but also we like to steal things from other populations. So like Tibetans have adapted to high altitude, and the genes that gave them that adaptation we actually took from an archaic hominid. So like Neanderthals, but they're Denisovans, were kind of around the same time. So this kind of cousin lineage of humans, they had been living at altitude for a hundred thousand years or more by the time humans got there. And so humans mixed with them and kept the genes that gave them an.

[Danny]

Advantage Bred with the Denisovans.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Exactly.

[Danny]

And created. And, and then in turn created babies that had this gene that made them thrive in these super high altitudes. Wow.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Exactly.

[Danny]

That's another curious thing is like, why, why there's so many. There's like what, 500 something species of primates still today?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I don't know the number.

[Danny]

I think there's over five. I think I googled it and it was like over 500 species of primates and only one species of homo sapien.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

How does that make sense?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

You know, we really don't know what happened because we had, you know, Neanderthals, Denisovans, humans, all were there together. And you know, we've seen in ancient DNA samples from certain areas, like first generation crosses of Neanderthals and Denisovans, so we know that there was a lot of mixture happening because, you know, what are the chances we would find that otherwise? And then. Yeah, I don't know how we are the last man standing, but we took all the genetic material that we could from, from those other lineages before we wiped them out in some way.

[Danny]

Isn't it crazy though, like, how different we are? Yeah, you know, like there's no, there's no. Like if you look at all the different primates that exist today and look at the, the modern human, there's like, there's them, then there's this giant leap and then there's us. There's not like a gradual, I mean a little bit. There are some people who are a little bit more ape. Like there's some people who are a lot more like evolved, but like not really. Like there's not, there's not really any like Neanderthals, really legitimate Neanderthals or people who are halfway between prim mates and humans walking around today, it's like either primate or human, which in like if you just go to the primate population, there's such a wide variety and I know the human genomes like, is pretty, also is pretty veritable. Like there's a large variety in the genome but like as far as, like the species, we don't vary that much. It doesn't seem like.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right, yeah, well, because we're pretty adaptable. I mean we're really good at making technologies that enable us to survive and.

[Danny]

Right.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Cold environments, hot environments, you know, around water. Like we're really good at fishing, so we don't necessarily need to dive. And our physiology is very plastic, as we say in physiological research. Like it's changeable. You know, we can go from they're like boot camps or you can learn to free dive and go from like a 30 second breath hold to a 2 minute breath hold in a week just by learning techniques or you know, working on different things with your physiology. So maybe it's just that we're so adaptable in a physiological sense that we haven't had to adapt that much in a genetic, genetic sense because we can really take on most challenges pretty well.

[Danny]

Yeah. So what is the like, simple, conventional explanation for this, for this leap from primates to humans, like in it. I know, I know there's a lot that goes into it, but like, yeah, you know, there's a lot of fun theories people like to talk about that happen a lot on podcasts where like people like say a monkey, like one day a monkey ate a mushroom, psychedelic mushroom, and that accounted for the doubling of the brain size and all this stuff and developing technology. There's other ideas like panspermia, like, like comet fragments that hit the earth that had like alien DNA on them somehow mixed with primates and that, that accounted for the evolution. I mean there's so many like you could. People like to fill the gaps with things they. That don't really. That are kind of like way out there. Like you could fill the gap with like, God, you could fill the gap with aliens, you can fill the gap with psychedelics. But like, there's no, like, I haven't heard the conventional reasoning for it, at least not in a long time.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, I mean I tend to focus on so much more recently than that in terms of looking at humans. So I'm kind of like out of Africa and later. So. Yeah, I'm not sure. But I'm also like, you know, as long as it's supported by evidence that's out there. And we do have really incredible. Because we can reconstruct so much in terms of the genetic data that we have from present times and then kind of rewinding back in time so, you know, to the point where we can date when certain migrations happened and things like that just based on modern DNA. So. Yeah, but then, you know, beyond a certain point, I guess it probably becomes more difficult because so much time has passed. But that's kind of outside of my. Which I know is a, is a cheap answer, but outside my area of expertise.

[Danny]

Right, right, right. Yeah. No, but it's fun to speculate on this kind of stuff.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

Do you think it's possible that, that our evolution has been linear or do you think it's possible that there Was like a reset ever in history of human evolution.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. As far as I know from the genetic data that we have, there's no evidence of that. Like, there's not like some weird piece of DNA that, that we don't know where it came from. I mean, there is in the sense that we knew Denisovans existed before we found the first Denisovan bone because we said, okay, there's this bit of DNA that's coming in in a certain part of the world at a higher frequency that seems to have come from like, a parallel lineage to humans. So people hypothesized that there was this other lineage, and then someone found like a pinky bone in a cave, and sure enough, that matched perfectly to this piece that we had.

[Danny]

Right.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So. So we're really good at kind of seeing, okay, there's a piece that doesn't quite make sense, but we think this is about when it came in. And then luckily we were able to confirm that with this bone and ancient DNA, which is an incredible leap in terms of technology. But, yeah, otherwise I'm not aware of any gaps that. As fun as it would be to speculate in that, especially coming from an astrobiology background, I was thinking a lot about how different molecules could reach the Earth on comets, on fragments of meteorites, things like that.

[Danny]

Yeah. And there's just so much history that we have. No, I mean, even going back to like 2, 000 years ago, like, we, we, we have no clue what the hell was going on back then. You know, like, we can look at obviously, like, like, DNA stuff and like, we have ancient texts and we have writing and we have, you know, know, paintings and stuff like that. But to actually go back and to, you know, because I always wonder, like, was there a time in history where we were on a different evolutionary or technological trajectory than we're on now? You know, that made us like. And this is another interesting thing when it comes to genes and genomics is like, intelligence. Like, did we, did we have like a, a super high intellectual capacity far back into the past that was just a different type of intelligence. Right. Than what we had today. Because.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right.

[Danny]

Because today, like, if you look at the trajectory humans are on with technology, it seems like we're compensating for a lot of our, our brain power and a lot of our intellectual power with technology. And we're just developing new and new things that people like to buy and people like to use to make tasks easier.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

So, like, I was just like, like, how does that affect the evolution of Us, where do we end up on this current trajectory with AI and all the self driving cars and Uber eats? Where do we end up in, you know, 50,000 years?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right. Well, one thing that you said, I feel like is related to a very important point, which is that, you know, when we talk about trajectories, I feel like we have this, this we're so trained that evolution is, is leading us in this like better, brighter, smarter direction. Like we have this image of like ape transforming to man, you know, and it's like we are the pinnacle, right. Everything's getting better all the time. And that's like evolution doesn't have a direction, it doesn't care. It's just about being. It's not about being. I mean, we say survival of the fittest, it's the best fit, not the most fit. So if our environment changes in a way where being super intelligent doesn't actually help us that much, then suddenly we're not gonna be selecting for that, we're not gonna be evolving in that direction. So it's really just about being the best fit to our environment.

[Danny]

Interesting.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So yeah, I think it's like we have this skewed idea that of course centers us as being the ultimate apex of evolution, but I think.

[Danny]

So the people who are the most adapted to their external environments.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Are the ones that are going to evolve.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right. So like, you know, at the time of dinosaurs, dinosaurs were totally on top of everything. They were the perfect fit to the earth as it was at that time. Humans ancestors were just these little rodents running around at night because that was the only time we could avoid the dinosaurs. And so because of that, people think we were adapted to colder temperatures because we were going around at night. And again, these are like, like rodents. You know, these are very what we would think of now as like poorly adapted or just kind of very primitive animals.

[Danny]

Right, right.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Meteor hits. Suddenly the whole Earth is transformed into this much colder environment. And now the dinosaurs are very poorly adapted. They're a bad fit to that new environment. But we as the night dwellers, who are better at handling cold temperatures, are suddenly the best fit. So despite the fact that we're these like tiny, pathetic little creatures, you know, we're suddenly on top of the world from an evolutionary perspective because we are the best fit to this new environment.

[Danny]

So what do you think, what do you think happens to, what do you think, human? Do you think overall the appearance of human beings is going to be drastically different in like 100,000 years?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

If we make it there, if we make it there. I mean, what would stop us from making. I would say that climate change poses a very interesting threat because we're very adaptable. Evolution works really well when there is a consistent and gradual threat. Or, I mean, I guess in the case of the dinosaur extinction, maybe you just get wiped out completely. But the problem with a changing climate is that you can't be adapted both to drought and flooding. You can't be adapted both to really high temperatures and cold. I mean, there's so many different factors. It's not a consistent pressure, and I shouldn't say that you can't be, but it's just much harder to find some kind of genetic change that makes you better at all of those things that come with a changing planet. So, yeah, as long as change is happening slowly enough that there are some people among our population who can adapt to it and pass those genes on to the next generation, then sure, we can adapt. But if it happens too quickly and too erratically, then it becomes very hard to evolve.

[Danny]

When you say climate change, you mean the warming of the climate, Right?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

And like, the increase in these, you know, like, outlier weather events. So like in Utah, we have been in a drought, but we also had the highest snowfall season on record a couple years ago. And so it's like within the same season, essentially, we had, you know, devastating avalanches as well as, you know, one of the driest summers on record. So it's like, it's very hard to find a physiological change that makes you fitter in both of those environments, if that makes sense.

[Danny]

Interesting. So. So more extreme weather events in a short, shorter amounts of time. And that could, like, somehow bottleneck human humanity.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

It just makes it so that, you know, when you have, like, when everybody's diving, then there's a consistent selective pressure. There's one thing that everybody needs to adapt to. But when there's many different pressures happening all at once, then it's just hard to. To be more likely to survive that.

[Danny]

Right. Well, but if you're in different parts of the world, wouldn't those things be consistent? Like, like in Florida, the coldest it ever gets is like 50 degrees and the hottest. I mean, it gets freaking hot. It gets, like, in the hundreds.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And it's humid and we get hurricanes and floods, but there's never any snow. So maybe there's never any fruit. Like it's, you know, it doesn't go below 50 degrees. There's never earthquakes. There's, you know, it's, it's fairly consistent. I don't Know if that's like that in other parts of the world, I can't speak for Utah, but.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

But yeah, yeah, I mean, in that case, yeah, maybe the future looks. Everyone looks more like Floridians, but yeah, then there could definitely be whatever part.

[Danny]

Of the world they live in, right?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, there could be a bottleneck for sure.

[Danny]

Yeah. And wasn't there a big bottleneck in the genome like 100,000 years ago or something like this?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So the out of Africa migration represents a huge bottleneck. So there's more. There's much more genetic diversity within Africa than in all of the rest of the world outside of Africa. Even though I feel like it's easy to look at populations in North America and East Asia and say, wow, they're so different. But actually on a genetic level, in terms of single changes in the genome were more similar than some populations within Africa. So that's one bottleneck that happened. But then within specific subpopulations, there was a bottleneck in the populations that moved into Greenland. So there's some very interesting genetic changes that happened in the Greenlandic Inuit because of that bottleneck.

[Danny]

And how do those bottlenecks happen?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Oftentimes it's founder populations. You just have a small part of the population that leaves a place or goes to a new place. Sometimes there's, you know, catastrophic events or diseases that bottleneck a population as well.

[Danny]

I had a gentleman on here about a year ago who was trying. He was a. He worked on the Human Genome Project for mit and he was explaining to me something like that all humans on Earth basically are genetic descendants of like a total of 10,000 people or something like that.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. So this is called the effective population size, which is just such a crazy. Like you can represent. If you had 10,000 genetically unique individuals, you would represent all of the genetic diversity of the planet, which is bizarre because, you know, there's a lot of us.

[Danny]

That is crazy. Yeah, that is so crazy that we're. I mean, that. That's like we're all so close. It seems like we're like really all very a lot clo. More closely related than we think.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, exactly.

[Danny]

Coming only from 10,000.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

There's also this Mitochondrial Eve that you may have heard of. So all. So you inherit your mitochondrial DNA exclusively from your mother. And we all essentially, if you go back far enough, come from one woman who's. Who's called Mitochondrial Eve.

[Danny]

Really? Yeah, Mitochondrial Eve.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I mean, you know, it's been a while. So there's a lot of variation in terms of where we've ended up.

[Danny]

And how many mitochondrial Eves do we think there could have been?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Just, just the one is, I mean, you know, everyone on Earth, we think, as far as I know, hopefully I'm not getting this wrong, but is descended from this one mitochondrial Eve. That doesn't mean there weren't other women at that time. It's just that the descendants happen to be from this one mitochondrial Eve.

[Danny]

Mitochondrial Eve. The most recent common maternal matrilineal. I guess that's how you say it, ancestor of all living humans, meaning everyone alive today can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to her through an unbroken line of mothers. She lived in Africa approximately 150 to 200,000 years ago and was part of the larger ancestral population.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Wow, that's amazing, right?

[Danny]

That is totally amazing.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

It's not that long ago for us to all have been related to one person.

[Danny]

When was the. What were those footprints that we found in the desert in like, Nevada? Sand flats. Yeah, they were the sand flats. Yeah. But there, there was a name for this. Oh, God. We talked, we've talked about this before. White Sands. The white, the White sands. Fossilized footprints. How long ago were those supposed to be? And this goes back to the. Oh, that's 23,000 years ago. Okay. And I guess it's speculated that, that this pushed back the Clovis first hypothesis. Right, right. Are you familiar with this?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yes.

[Danny]

So, so, so the idea was that Homo sapiens weren't populating North America that, that early. And then we found these footprints and this pushed it back quite a bit farther.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right, right.

[Danny]

And they supposedly came from the Bering Strait land bridge, is that right?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. And there was, you know, again, of course, being a geneticist, I'm biased, but there was genetic evidence that suggested that, that some of the population of North America was happening much earlier than people thought as well. And I do think there's a certain amount of like European oriented bias against the population because it's like, oh, did people really make it that far that long ago? And because we think, you know, it took Europeans so long to get there that surely it would have taken other people longer to get there as well. But yeah, there's, there's, I mean, there's evidence that people were in Patagonia 10,000 years ago. So. Yeah.

[Danny]

And there's also people who speculate. I mean, how much, how much have you talked to like, people in other disciplines that look at this stuff? Like, have you talked to geologists or, or any other types of people? Anthropologists?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I talked to a lot of Anthropologists, a lot of, you know, I try to incorporate history because I really do think that a lot of times, like history and anthropology and all these things like really inform the science. I also talk to the people themselves because oftentimes people have their own, you know, stories to tell that are, they're.

[Danny]

Often they watch cool documentaries and things. They have it all figured out.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Well, I'm saying more like, you know, like cultural, like oral histories that populations have about where they came from, how long they've been there, you know, their connection to a particular place. Although it's funny, I was asking the Bajo what their, you know, where they thought they came from. And I was expecting some kind of. Yeah, some kind of answer like that. Or about, you know, like the sea gods or something. And they were like, oh, Borneo. And I was like, okay, that's very factual, but interesting. Yeah, I think it's important to weave in all these different perspectives.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Because a lot of times that's where some of these cool scientific hypotheses come from. Like there are oral histories in Aboriginal Australians. I'm actually about to speak to someone about this that talk about a group of people that sound very much like the Bajo. And so given how close those are geographically, it totally makes sense that there would have been interaction between those peoples. And so it'd be cool to, in cases like that, match potentially genetic data with, with oral histories and things like that.

[Danny]

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[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Okay.

[Danny]

So he took the painting and he sampled all the red pigments of it and sure enough, he found the actual heart fibers of Louis XIII in this painting.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Wow.

[Danny]

And he, you know, he did analysis on all these figures like Picasso and Napoleon and even Hitler's jaw and te teeth remains. And he was also explaining that he found. He was talking about home, Lucy, the, the first ancient hominid. And he was saying that. Do you remember what he was saying about Lucy, Steve? He was saying something about they found like teeth marks in her bones.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Okay.

[Danny]

Or like shark. It was like a shark. Te shark tooth mark in her bones or something like this. Okay, can you find that, Steve? See if you can pull that, See if you can pull that up. I don't want to, I want to make sure I'm not messing that up. But he, what he was showing us was super interesting about and it was apparently like some sort of like earth shattering revelation about Lucy that kind of changes what we thought about her.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, it is interesting this. Yeah, like weaving in all these different disciplines. Like it's so important to, to get those different perspectives because yeah, there's only. So you can get from DNA and you know, samples like Lucy are too old to get DNA from typically, although we're kind of extending that timeline further and further back. But yeah, it's there's so much we can learn.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

By putting all those pieces together.

[Danny]

Yeah, totally. And, you know, even if, like, you look into some of the architecture and stuff and some of the amazing, like, sculptures that were made out of stone in south and Central America, it's just astonishing. These, like, Moai heads that are the Moai heads that you have on Easter island, and then you have some of those other big ones. There's these. These heads that are in south and Central America that depict either like, an African or a Polynesian human. Have you seen these?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

No.

[Danny]

Steve, pull up the images that Dr. Barnhart art was showing us with Luke Caverns on here of the. I forget the. What is. What is the name of the. Of the civilization that did that? The Olmecs. The Olmec heads.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I've. Yeah, I've seen the Olmec heads.

[Danny]

So they look very African.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. My PhD lab. Yeah, that's interesting. Was a ancient. Ancient DNA lab. And one of the projects that one of my colleagues was working on was finding genetic evidence for migration of Polynesian populations to the Americas prior to Colombian contact or. Yeah, pre Columbian. And it was interesting because they actually, at one point were using chicken DNA to try to. Because Polynesian chickens have a very distinct ancestry to kind of the chickens that we have in the Americas today. But, yeah, they were also trying to look at, like, human DNA to show that there was contact. And then people went back to the Pacific Islands after visiting the Americas.

[Danny]

Really?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I think something got debunked with the chicken DNA. I can't remember exactly, but, yeah, it's really cool to. You know, there are signatures of contact, especially when people stuck around for long enough to end up together, end up mixing, that we can detect in modern human DNA.

[Danny]

Yeah. I think they did the math on these Moai heads. Some of them are so large that from where they quarried them, like, where the stone was. Where they got the stone from to make the heads was so far away from where they were placed, they would have had to build rafts that were like, four times wider than the rivers that flowed from one spot to the other to be able to float them down the rivers.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Okay.

[Danny]

And it's like really rugged terrain, forest and mountains, and it's like. Like really crazy terrain.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Okay. He's an archaeologist specializing in ancient civilizations of the Americas, especially in Maya. Yeah, so it was crazy. It's just some of this stuff's just so bizarre.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Just doesn't add up.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. Yeah. And. Yeah, I mean, and from my perspective, you know, the Cool thing when there are things that don't add up, like these populations that do things that seem like they shouldn't be possible. You know, we're able to often find an explanation which is super cool, that maybe take some of the magic away from. But yeah, like, I mean, there are populations around the world doing incredible things. And yeah, to a large extent that's been overlooked by a lot of the science that's been done so far.

[Danny]

So I want to talk about this science behind how smells of. Of people can attract people to each other or within humans. I think this is. There's a study that was done with humans where the certain, I guess, smell or pheromone or whatever it is that some people emit, people are. Are subconsciously attracted to other people just based on. On this.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right.

[Danny]

And it's not necessarily like looks, right.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Or.

[Danny]

Or anything like that or personality. It smells. How did. How did this whole thing come about? About.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So it's called the smelly T shirt study, or that's at least how it's referred to. And it was. Yeah, they had. I think it was all. They had women, like heterosexual women smelling the T shirts of heterosexual men. And they smelled them and rated the smell of the T shirt on its attractiveness, you know, just, just based on the smell. And I. I'm sure they, you know, accounted for like soaps and deodorants and things like that. Like, they probably had people just wearing T shirts and people. So women reported that they were more attracted to the smell of a T shirt if that person had a complementary immune system based on their genetics than if they didn't. And so our immune systems are super diverse. It's the fastest evolving part of the genome. There's tons of changes because we're constantly battling with pathogens and bacteria, viruses, whatever. And so there's a lot of variation in the immune system. And so if you find someone whose immune system is very different from yours, your children will have a much stronger immune system than if you find someone whose immune system is very similar to yours. Those are.

[Danny]

The children have a combo of both.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Exactly. Yeah. So it seems like we have some way of smelling that just based on, you know, based on. Yeah, what's coming out of our bodies, essentially.

[Danny]

So how did somebody come up with this theory to do this test?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I don't know. I mean, maybe someone just noticed that they really loved the smell of their partner. I mean, they. And that's, you know, like anecdotally, it's a thing, right? You like, really like how Someone smells.

[Danny]

I mean, my wife says this about me all the time.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

She says she likes the way I smell in the morning.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

What are you talking about?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, I mean, she's smelling those jeans. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know what inspired it, but, yeah, they did the study and people were able to smell that difference and found it attractive, which is amazing too.

[Danny]

That's so crazy. Is this in animals too?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I'm sure it is, yeah. Because animals also have such a stronger sense of smell and such a deeper connection to smell. You would imagine that they're doing that as well. And it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that we would have this ability because people who can smell that in potential mates would have more children who can survive for longer.

[Danny]

Right.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So it seems reasonable that we've evolved to be able to smell our partners, sniff out the best partner for us from an immune system perspective.

[Danny]

Right. So, okay, on the hierarchy of attractive active traits, do we know where smell is?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Oh, I don't know. That's a great question. Yeah. Like, if someone has, like, you know, 300 sports car, but their smell is just. How are you gonna rate them? I'm sure.

[Danny]

Look at divorce rates in America. I think that'll knock that one over.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Heartbeat. But no but, like, on, like, what about, like, physical appearance, though? Like, like, did they. Did they look at this kind of stuff at all or, like, like communication skills or personality traits or.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Danny]

Eye color, anything like this.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

That's the thing with, you know, any study. Like this is like you're just looking at one variable at a time. And so as soon as you start introducing more things, it becomes so complex. Like with the work we did with the divers, you know, we did these simulated dives where we had people hold their breath, put their face in cold water, and we called that diving because your body responds like you're diving. But it was like they're not under pressure. Their whole body isn't submerged in cold water. They're not active. So when we actually measured some of the same things in the ocean, all of the measurements look different because, you know, suddenly this heart rate drop wasn't there anymore because they were moving really actively in the water. So it's like, you know, in any of these studies, unfortunately, we just get this, like, tiny snapshot. As soon as you start to incorporate more details, then it's like the whole thing blows up and it becomes very hard to study from a scientific perspective.

[Danny]

Yeah, that's so interesting. And it makes me wonder, you know, Looking at the way our environment is evolving with technology. Where most kids now are on an app, scrolling through pictures of people.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And that's how you're finding your mate or your whatever, depending on what your goals are. You're not. You're not. You're not sitting in a room with them. You're just looking at a picture of them and you're basing it off. Off a still photo. Not even like a. Like a. Like a 3D photo. Just a 2D flat from one angle. You don't get to, like, walk around them.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

The shape of them is. Or anything like that.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

When it could totally explain this phenomenon that I feel like we've all heard about where it's like someone sees someone on. On an app and they're like, oh, yeah, they're super attractive. And then they go out and they're like, I just didn't feel the chemistry. Like, there was no chemistry. And it could be that. I mean, it could be that they were really bad at conversation, but it could be that your immune, you know, your body was picking up on the fact that this person is not a good potential parent to your offspring or something. You know, it's interesting to think about chemistry, maybe literal chemistry. We may literally be smelling whether someone's a good match.

[Danny]

Yeah. I mean, and I imagine, like, I imagine there's gotta be an abundance of other things that you can't really put into words.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right.

[Danny]

Other than the person was, like, tall and handsome or whatever it is that. That. That, you know, not smells, not things that are obvious to our five senses. Right. That there's something that's going on. Like, you know, how you talk. Like people have gut feelings about things all the time. Like, how do you explain that?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right. Yeah. And I mean. Yeah, if we can smell this one thing, you know, it's something that's easy to test for because we know how to look for particular regions of the. This, you know, immune system part of your genome. So that was an easy thing to test for in the study. But there's so many other things that we could be smelling or picking up on or, you know, these things that we're observing that we're not recognizing that we're observing that are contributing to that feeling.

[Danny]

Okay. I want to also, I want to ask you about when it comes to people who are. Because I know people, like a lot of people like this. I don't know how it's changed over the decades, but when it comes to people who, like, have trouble conceiving, there's all these evolving technologies that are coming out that are helping people have kids, whether it's like, freezing their eggs or freezing sperm, vice versa. I don't know how it all works, but there's a lot of people, a lot of which who I know, who are my age in, like, their mid-30s, and they can't have kids to save their lives, and they're trying everything they can to. To. To have children. I've had people, I've had experts in. In this field explain to me that that's a bad idea. Not necessarily, like, from a moral perspective, but from, like, a evolutionary biological perspective, because it's supposed to be the body. And the case they made was that's like the bodies or the. The. That's evolution's way of filtering out mutations or something like this.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's complicated.

[Danny]

And it's also age. I think age has a lot to do with it.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. So age is a huge factor. You know, there's a reason they call, like. I think it's like 34 and up women geriatric pregnancies, which seems crazy. You know, I mean, it's like, not that.

[Danny]

Oh, that's what they actually call them.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

That. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I forget if It's. I think 34 is the cutoff at that point, you're a geriatric because at that point, your risk of having some kind of. Having your child have some kind of genetic disorder is just so much higher. That's because, you know, as women reproduce all of our eggs right up at the beginning. And so the longer they're in our body, the more chance there is for mutations to build up. So that's something, you know, that's happening. It doesn't mean you can't have a healthy child, but it certainly means that your risk is higher. We used to think that that was just women. Men also, we are finding, have. Have more mutations as they age. So the chance of passing on those mutations increases as the father gets older as well. So you've got, you know, interesting ingredients going in of questionable, you know, the. Sell by date as we're getting close there.

[Danny]

I just heard Robert De Niro had a kid, and he's like, 80, I think, right?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. So there was actually some really incredible work done in Utah because there are a lot of families in Utah that have. Have 17 kids or something like that. And so they were actually able to look at the rate of mutation over the however many years those kids were born and see which mutations were coming from the father. Which were coming from the mother. And how did those rates change? And they did see a difference in the number of mutations that was inherited from the father as the father got older. But then you also have this factor of, like, maybe people aren't having kids. Kids, not because of any of those biological reasons, but because of, like, forever chemicals in the water. Like, that affects fertility. I think micro plastics affect fertility. You know, there's all these other environmental stress affects fertility. So it's like, what's driving those individuals not to be able to conceive? Is it biological factors? Is it environmental factors?

[Danny]

Yeah. Well, we had Dr. Shauna Swan on here a couple years ago, and she was explaining how they've been studying, sampling the sperm count and the testosterone levels of men since the 50s. And it's been going down by like 1% per year since the 50s. And she says since like the mid 2000s, it started going down by like 2% a year.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Okay, and we must be getting low.

[Danny]

I was like. She asked me, she's like, can you guess which areas of the country. Country have the lowest sperm counts? And my guess was I was going to be like, the populated cities, you know, all the, you know, cars going everywhere. You're living in a little box, and you're not as healthy as you're living out, like an open farmland. She goes, no, the people who live on the farms, Open area because of all of the chemicals they spray right on the crops and everything like that, and the glyphosate, which was crazy to me, and, you know, that combined with like, the microplastics that are everything, everything is plastic. Our, Our. Our world is designed to become. Is designed to make money on things by making them cheaper, more affordable, more efficient. And plastic is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. Everything's plastic.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

99 of this room is made of plastic. And she was explaining how that's like, like very, very bad for human beings. And if you want to be. If we want to propagate our species into the future, she's like, I don't know what we're going to do, but that's not. We're. We're not going in the right direction.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, you know, people have to resort to things like in vitro fertilization or freezing their eggs, like you said. I mean, that circumvents, you know, some of the mutational issues that I was.

[Danny]

Talking about freezing the eggs.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

If you freeze your eggs early, then they're like the fresher eggs, you know, they're not aging with you. But then, yeah, like once you get into in vitro fertilization, then there's stuff like how do you pick which embryo you're going to carry forward if you do have a successful, you know, if you do have. What is it? Is it. I forget exactly what they call it. But anyway, if one.

[Danny]

Implantation.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yes. Yeah. So like, you know, then there's. Then you get into. People are starting to filter based on genetics, and that's a whole other weird ethical designer babies. Yeah, exactly. So it's very complicated. That's why I have dogs only.

[Danny]

Oh, you choose. You choose to not have dogs?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I'm intentionally childless. Yeah.

[Danny]

Really?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Oh, wow. Dogs. Dogs are awesome.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I love my dogs. Yeah.

[Danny]

Is it possible that when some people get together and try to reproduce, that sometimes nature just says no, because this is not a good mix?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, that's different, certainly. And there's something really interesting that's happening in our world, which is that with globalization, we're having combinations of genes that have never happened before in the history of humans. So you have people from different parts of the world who have been separated for 50, 60,000 years. And so these combinations we're finding sometimes introduce diseases that have a genetic basis that we didn't know were possible. So that's certainly a possibility. And yeah, in that way, the body just says nope. But then also there's. It brings up the possibility that maybe that some of those combinations will do some really cool things for us as humans because they've never been, you know, in the same individuals in the last 60,000 years.

[Danny]

Let's pause real quick. I can use the restroom.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Be back. All right. We're back, folks. Steve just found an article about how a third parent's DNA can prevent inherited diseases. Published just a couple months ago. July 20. July 16, 2025. Scientists can protect children from being born with certain devastating genetic disorders by creating three parent babies, according to results of a landmark study released Wednesday.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So this is, you have, you know, in the normal way, the genetic material from the mother and the father, but then you have. Have. It's when there's a problem with the mitochondria. And so instead of getting the mitochondria from the mother, you can get the mitochondria from another person, a third parent, so that this individual will still have, you know, if you only looked at the other, the, you know, their normal chromosomal DNA, they would look like they're just a product of their two parents. But then their mitochondria are from this additional individual wow.

[Danny]

Would it have to be a woman? Can you get mitochondria from a man?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, you can get mitochondria from anyone.

[Danny]

Oh really? Wow.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

It's just that mitochondria usually comes in the egg and so that's why you inherit your mitochondria from your mother.

[Danny]

Right. Scary. Yeah, I mean, it's, I mean it's like just like crazy experiments we're doing on, on, on ourselves.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, well, yeah, and it used to be, you know, like thinking about genetically modifying embryos or babies or humans or things like that. You know, I would just say like, oh, we're just not there yet with the technology. But the scary thing is we're there, you know, we can do this. But, you know, now the question is, should we, and what should or shouldn't we do?

[Danny]

Yeah, well, I want to talk a lot. I want to go into that. I want to go into that. But, but first I want to touch on something that you just said. You, you were talking about like, now that like the world's becoming more globalized, people are traveling everywhere, people aren't just centered in their little tribes like we used to be. Is you're saying that that is a good thing and that's, that's going to be a way for us to evolve.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Stronger or it certainly potentially could be because, you know, in the same way that we stole genetic material from Denisovans as humans to adapt to high altitude, maybe, you know, there's genetic variation that's been evolving or neutrally evolving even just kind of there at a low frequency in one part of the world, maybe would be really beneficial in another part of the world or would counteract some gene that's related to disease in another part of the world. World.

[Danny]

It would be interesting to see like, because before, I think before we started we were talking about Copenhagen and how people from that part of the world are very fair skinned and have like light eyes, light color eyes, so they can absorb more sunlight, more melanin. And people from equatorial latitudes have very dark skin and dark eyes as well. Brown, dark brown eyes. Because they don't need all that melanin.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

They don't need all that UV light. They can have more of a shield for that. It'd be interesting to see if you got like the most dark skinned, dark eyed person from the equator and bred them with the most light eyed, fair skinned person from Norway or something like that. And see like they might have like superhuman CH children because they would have, they would cover all the spectrums, all the bases. Right.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

It depends on how those genes mix together. We also usually try to avoid the word bread when we're talking about people. But I get what you're saying.

[Danny]

Bread is not correct.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Is that if you bred them with. I mean, it just has a certain maybe. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the thing is, we can't really control exactly how those genes would come together. So, you know, as. Yeah, it would be very interesting to see.

[Danny]

Well, it would be so unnatural for them to meet. Right. Which is weird. So, like, if it would be, like, in nature, it would be literally impossible for somebody from that part of the world to meet with somebody in that part of the world naturally, right?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. I mean, until recently, humans just didn't cross. And I say recently from an evolutionary perspective, we just didn't cover that big of distances. And so that's why you have this amount of genetic isolation. And it's even so much so that there was a very cool study that using only genetic data from Europe. Europe was able to basically reconstruct a map of Europe based on people's genetics. So people had been kind of geographically isolated for so long up till now, you know, I mean, this was a recent study that they were able to tell you almost exactly where someone was from just based on their DNA. Wow. And that's how, you know, some of these, like 23andMe ancestry kind of, you know, you are X percent, you know, Italian or whatever. That's how some of that works. But it's just amazing that, you know, it's really recent that humans have been mixing on such a global scale.

[Danny]

Another point to this is that if you breed too close to the gene, your own gene pool, nature will punish that. Right. Then you have more of these defects or these mutations, Right?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. So the thing is, the way that works is that. That, you know, we all have a certain number of potentially harmful genetic variation in our genome. And so as long as we're. We're having children with people who are different from us, you're very unlikely to have two copies of the same bad variation. But once you start, you know, having people either having children with their cousins or even closer relatives, then you have a really high chance of having two of those dangerous copies, Copies of whatever it is, together. And so that's why you have an increase in genetic disorders, because you're just increasing the odds of inheriting these two problematic genes dramatically.

[Danny]

Yeah. When did we first gain the ability to test fetuses or unborn babies for the extra chromosome, the down syndrome?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

That's a really good question.

[Danny]

Because they used to have to do it by, like, sticking a needle into the belly. Right. That actually accidentally killed a lot of babies doing that.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, it's. I mean, now we know we can get it from blood, which is kind of crazy. Yeah. You just take a blood sample and.

[Danny]

They can tell everything. They can tell the sex, they can tell all kinds of stuff.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

And one cool thing about that that I learned recently that I love is that those cells that are circulating in the mother's blood don't just disappear after the baby is born. Like, they're there. They're in the mother in some way or another forever. So, like, every mar. Every mother is carrying cells from every child she's had somewhere in her body. Sometimes they settle in and they become other things, but those cells are in there, which is kind of crazy.

[Danny]

That is really crazy. It's also interesting how, like, the. The. The DNA, the code, your specific DNA, your specific gene genome sequence is replicated throughout every cell in the body. Right. Except for the red blood cells. Is that right?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

That's right. Yeah.

[Danny]

It's just so. It's just such a. A wild thing because, like, you know, it seems like in nature everything is this way.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. And. And what's interesting there is that in a way, even though you're a single organism, you also are kind of like.

[Danny]

Like.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

An environment of organisms because all of your cells are carrying roughly the same genetic material, but they can also mutate. And so it's something called somatic changes. You have your germline changes, which are changes you inherit from your parents. And then you have changes that can happen in individual cells after you're born. It's like mutations. And this is kind of like what gives rise to cancer. You have a mutation, and then suddenly that cell starts expanding a lot more and passing on that mutation. So we have. Have almost like mini evolution happening within your own body.

[Danny]

But the mutations, like you said, happen a lot faster, Right?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

They can.

[Danny]

Than like the. The positive changes. What would be the word for that scientific word? Like, what's the opposite of a mutation?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Well, so mutation is just referring to the change.

[Danny]

Oh, it's just a change. It's not necessarily negative.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Exactly. It doesn't mean that. Yeah. Uhhuh. So got. Also doesn't mean it turns you into an X Men. So.

[Danny]

The crisper baby stuff.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yes.

[Danny]

There was the guy in China who went to jail for three years for. I think he was just trying to modify, using crispr, the. The gene sequence of a baby somehow. And he was trying to like, optimize the baby to not get HIV or.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Something like that, right? I think that's right. Yeah. I can't remember the exact details, but I think it's. I mean, because there are certain individuals who carry mutations that protect them from. From contracting hiv. And so, yeah, I think he was trying to make those changes in an embryo to protect those which. Yeah, seems like.

[Danny]

And this was, this was years ago. This was at least like five, six years ago, something like that.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I can't remember.

[Danny]

Find out what year that was. Steve, do you. Do you know how fast this stuff, this CRISPR stuff is advancing?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest things, things recently, like up till recently that was an issue with CRISPR is something called off target effects. So that's, you know, there are a lot of parts of our genome that look very similar to each other. And so if you try to change one part of the genome but you mess up, you know, it might attach itself somewhere else and change the wrong part of the genome.

[Danny]

20, 19.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, six years ago. Yeah. So it was very risky to try to use crispr because it's like you're editing, but you don't know what's going to get edited. We're getting a lot better at that. So we can much more specifically target certain regions of the genome. But I forget where I started with this CRISPR when it comes to like.

[Danny]

Like editing like specific things like the HIV receptor or whatever.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

It's like a, A. It's like using a blunt tool to do like fine precision work.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. Although I think we're, you know, we're sharpening the tool every day, but it still, you know, becomes this question of what changes should or should we not make? Because even like, you know, and who gets to decide. Exactly. Yeah. And then there's, you know, there's a combination of like, something that's already happening is selection of embryos, like which embryos you're going to implant in in vitro fertilization versus based on genetic markers versus modification of embryos. You know, like, those are two different but overlapping kind of strategies for deciding what the next generation should be. But it's like, you know, we were talking about. I get severe migraines, and that's something that's determined largely by genetics. I would love to not have migraines, but I also don't feel like I, I should not exist because I get migraines. You know what I mean? Like, it's not. Yeah, it becomes very tricky.

[Danny]

Have you ever heard of the green light therapy? For migraines?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

No.

[Danny]

Oh, Steve, you got to pull up the clip of. Of Tom Seer. We had this guy on here recently who, he came up with this device that's a little light panel and it shines green light. And he says, he explained it in scientific way how if you shine it on your face, it can alleviate migraines.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Okay.

[Danny]

And I don't think there's been. I don't. Maybe he said there was a test or a study done on this or whatever. But yeah, it was. It was wild. I mean, from the podcast. Or he's got another video that's shorter. Yeah, I don't. I don't necessarily want to make it like a long thing.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I mean, I would try anything at this point.

[Danny]

So there's a short. There's got to be. There's got to be a clip of it. Steve, there's got to be a short clip. Clip. Type in Tom Seeger. Yeah, there you go, right there.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Here.

[Danny]

Oh, cool. Put the little headphones on. You'll be able to hear him explain it.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast. Smart move. Being financially savvy. Smart move. Another smart move. Having State Farm help you create a competitive price. When you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good number neighbor. State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts, and savings and eligibility vary by state. Extra value meals are back.

[Danny]

That means 10 tender juicy McNuggets and medium fries and a drink are just $8 only at McDonald's for a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery, go before. Right before it turns the light on. There you go.

[Steve]

What's called the migraine lamp.

[Danny]

Migraine.

[Steve]

This green light therapy for headaches. So I'm going to shine this self on. I'm going to shine this on my eyes. Because you use it like this. If you're in a therapeutic setting, you would set it on like a little cell phone stand. You'd put it in front of you, you'd close your eyes and you let the green light come through your closed eyelids. Nobody knows why this works, but it works. I was on Mark Bell's podcast and his producer, Andrew, he's had migraines ever since he was a kid, and so he asked me about it. The invention was kind of accidental because I had a girlfriend with migraine headaches And I was looking at red light and UV and phototherapy. And I think Google must have known that I was doing this library search. And you know, it's, hey, maybe you're gonna like this one or something because they watch my every move, you know.

[Danny]

That's odd.

[Steve]

Yeah, right? And it was about green light and photophobia for people who suffer from migraines. When you have a migraine, most migrainers want total darkness because the light will make their headache worse. So they shut themselves in a closet or in a dark bedroom or something. It's terrible. But at Harvard, they tested all the wavelengths of light and they found that green had a pain relieving or analgesic effect. University of Arizona picks this up and they start making devices with just green LEDs in them for migrainers to use. And they get a significant reduction in the frequency and severity of migraine headaches. Among those people who used green light phototherapy, the mechanism.

[Danny]

Crazy, right?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, I will absolutely try that because I have the blue light filtering glasses and they're so, so, so the, the.

[Danny]

Red ones that filter all the blue light. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He gave me one of those little, one of those little lamps and my wife tried it, but it didn't, it didn't work for her.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Okay.

[Danny]

But I don't, I don't, I don't think she gets actual migraines. She just gets a different type of headache.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Okay. But I'll give it a try.

[Danny]

Might be worth checking it out. So, so, yeah, no, where were we? I was like. So, so what do you, what, what do you think? What do you. Obviously it's a speculation, but what do you think that this CRISPR gene editing stuff can lead to? Like what, like, what's the best possible outcome for something like this? Like, do you think it's going to be like, to work on if somebody has like a history of cancer or heart disease, you might be able to prevent that in future generations?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, I mean, but I think that's absolutely the best possible outcome. You know, we know, like, I feel like there's some very clear examples where we know like the breast cancer genes, like BRCA1, BRCA2. I think that like dramatically increase your risk of cancer. If we could change those in the ways that we know are associated with less cancer in an individual, that would be great. Because right now, generally if you have those mutations, they recommend like preventative mastectomies or things like that that are really invasive and terrible. So, you know, if they could, could kind of Change that. Wonderful. The problem is when we start getting into kind of more complicated scenarios, because that's a very obvious. You know, we have this one genetic change that causes this thing. Otherwise, really, anytime we're looking for something like that, we're looking at correlations. And so correlations are super dangerous in any scientific research.

[Danny]

Can you explain what this means?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yes, absolutely. So. So my favorite example is ice cream sales are highly correlated with shark attacks.

[Danny]

Ice cream sales are highly correlated with shark attacks.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

This is not because sharks really like ice cream. It's because people eat ice cream in the summer. People go in the ocean in the summer. And so you have this really strong correlation. Like, I've seen graphs, and it's like incredible, where you have a peak in ice cream sales, you have a peak in shark attacks. So that's essentially what we're doing with a lot of the genetics of disease that we're looking at. So if we look at hypertension and we say, oh, it's really strongly correlated with this genetic variant, maybe that's because people with that genetic variant are predisposed for some other reason based on their socioeconomic status or the environment that they're living in. Or there's all these different factors that could play a role in the. That correlation to the point where you may be picking up on correlation with a certain ethnic background or something like that. Especially in a country like the US where we have, you know, a lot of diversity and a lot of factors that influence the health of people from different ethnic backgrounds. And so in that way, it's scary to think that we could be making a change based on a correlation rather than based on a causation. And in that way, potentially, like erasing genetic material that's related to a certain ethnic background or something like that. I mean, that's my worst case scenario, fear. But in the cases where we have like a very clear, clear causal effect, where we say, you make this change, this person will be less likely to get cancer, I think that would be. That would be amazing.

[Danny]

Is there. Is there a way to affect lifespan? Like general. General lifespan? I know there's lots of influences that can affect lifespan. Obviously.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, but like, like, like genetic contributors to lifespan. Yeah. So I used to always say, like, lifespan can't be influenced by evolution because, you know, once you're past a certain age, like, you've made it, you're the fittest, you've survived. You know, evolution doesn't care about you anymore because, like, at that point, you're not having children anymore.

[Danny]

Right.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So you kind of are out of the equation. But there's this really cool thing called the grandmother hypothesis that says that basically, if a grandparent is involved in the lives of their grandchildren, their children are able to have more children, and those children live healthier lives, are more likely to survive. So just by living long enough to grandparent, they're increasing the chance that their genes get passed on. And in this way, we can pass on longevity Genesis. Wow.

[Danny]

So grandparents interacting with grandchildren can influence the grandchildren to have more kids.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. It's basically like, you know, if you have kids and you're exhausted because you have no one to help you, you're like, you know what? One kid is enough. Like, I am good.

[Danny]

Right.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I say this as an auntie, not as a mom, but.

[Danny]

Right.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

But, you know, know, let's say grandma and grandpa live down the road. They're helping take care of those kids. You know, your burden is eased. You're like, okay, maybe I could have another kid. Maybe I could have another couple kids. Or maybe those kids are getting more attention, more. You know, they're getting all of the things that are going to enable them to survive better.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

And so in that way, you know, if you're. If you. Unfortunately, the grandparents passed away young, then those genes aren't being passed on necessarily as much as. As the people who live a long time and are able to play a role in their grandchildren's lives because the.

[Danny]

Children aren't incentivized to have more kids because it's just so much work.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Exactly.

[Danny]

Such a burden. Is there anything in genetics that predisposes certain women to want to have more children or not want to have more children?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, it's an. That's an interesting question.

[Danny]

Or like, what if a. What if a woman's like, you know, I want to have 10 children, like, I don't care how stressful it is. And then, you know, someone else comes along without, you know, absent of any external influences, just like, I'm not interested.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, as someone from the latter of those camps, I would be very curious to see if there is an influence on that. And I feel like it's probably only kind of in the generations now that we would really be able to tease that apart, because up till now, there's been so much societal pressure to have children that I feel like anyone who even had those thoughts is probably like, well, that's just what you do. So it'd be a really cool study to see. I mean, evolutionarily, you would think that it would. You'd select for the people who wanted to have more kids because those people would pass on their genes more. You know, like, you could say I'm an evolutionary failure because I'm not passing on my genes. You know, I can influence how those genes get passed on by taking care of nieces and nephews and things like that.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

But it ends with me in terms of my lineage. So, yeah, if I had 10 kids, then the next generation of humans on this planet would have much more of my genetic material. So you would think that evolution would select for women who really want to have kids, but I don't know if that study's been done.

[Danny]

Right, right. Yeah. Another interesting thing going back to the dog thing, is how. And this also ties into the crispr stuff, but we're basically genetically modifying our pets. Oh, yeah, right. We. We. We modify them to be cuter.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yes.

[Danny]

And the cutest ones are the ones that are least likely to survive.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And also, I was having a conversation with my neighbor this morning, funny enough, who has a really big German shepherd, and he was explaining to him how all of the. The little, like, tiny, cute dogs are the ones that attack his German shepherd the most.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

That traps.

[Danny]

I was like, genetically, how does that make sense? Like, you would think that nature would teach the little helpless dog not to attack the German shepherd, who could kill it in two seconds.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. So mine of my dogs weighs eight pounds. His name is Lupo, which means wolf in Italian. So he has that. He has that wolf spirit. You know, he thinks he's a big dog. And sure enough, like, first dog he approaches at the dog park is always the biggest dog. He's not aggressive. Like, he doesn't come at them, but he just has no idea how small he is. And he would absolutely not survive under.

[Danny]

Like, you know, it's like, it seems like the smallest dogs are the meanest.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. Yeah. He's very sweet. Right. But. Yeah, but it's even in just in terms of, like, you know, I mean, the other day, we didn't realize our furnace was broken and it was 63 degrees in the house instead of 67, which is what we normally have it at. And he was shivering like crazy. And that was how I knew the furnace was broken. And I'm like, dog, you would not survive out there on your own.

[Danny]

No.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

No. And. And. And we're doing that to ourselves. We're. We're domestic. If you look at, you know, what humans were 10,000 years ago compared to now, like, we are basically Teacup Yorkies compared to, like, the wolves we used to be.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, yeah, I know that.

[Danny]

And that goes into that with. Goes into every. That's with everything. All of these environmental influences that aren't even. Aren't even on purpose. It's just the way our society is with. With making things more convenient with microplastics and technology doing everything for us.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

We are becoming like, you know, teacup Yorkies of Homo sapiens.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Well, getting back to this, you know, best fit versus most fit. Like, you know, we have this idea that to be, you know, the fittest in our modern environment, like, we should be tough, we should be strong, we should be able to handle the elements. You know, like, same with the dogs. But it's like, actually people who, you know, are able to navigate the current environment regardless of how physically fit they are, are the people who are more likely to have more children. You know, it doesn't matter if you could survive a snowstorm. Like, that's probably not going to influence whether or not you have kids. And, like, these cute, tiny dogs, you know, we want more of them because they're so cute. So, you know, they're also, in that way, passing on more of their genes than the dogs that are super tough and. And could survive.

[Danny]

Yeah, but if there was some sort of a. A bottleneck event.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Like a super volcano or something like that, or like a. Like a comet impact or whatever like that. The. The people that were. And it's crazy that, that right now we can live here in North America flying around on airplanes, recording podcasts, and simultaneously, there's people running around naked in the Amazon.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

And if there was some sort of a cosm, cosmic event or catastrophic cataclysm that wiped out most of humanity, those would be the ones. Those people would be the people that would most likely survive.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. I mean, depending on how the Earth changed, you know, those of us teacup Yorkies would. Would go the way of the dinosaurs. You know, I mean, we would. We're not that adapted to some of the potential ways that the Earth could change in an event like that.

[Danny]

Right. Which makes me wonder, like, are those indigenous tribes those. I mean, there's some uncontacted tribes who treat humans as, like, predators, and they kill humans when they see them.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right.

[Danny]

Like, they run around with these giant arrows, and as soon as they see the civilized humans, they hunt them down and try to kill them. Like, I wonder how far back their lineage goes, you know, like, how. Because it's been. I don't know. How. How would they be evolving. Would they be evolving like the. Have you heard of North Sentinel Island?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yes. Huh. Yeah.

[Danny]

Like those people.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right, right, Yeah. I mean, you know, we don't have any genetic data from them, obviously, for obvious reasons. But also like, you know, given like some of the genocides that have occurred against indigenous populations, you can't blame them for throwing those spears or arrows or whatever, the people who are trying to contact them.

[Danny]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

But yeah, I mean, it just totally depends on their environment, environment they're, you know, living in. I think those environments are pretty tropical. So there's pathogen rich environments. We know that people living in the Amazon have actually evolved adaptations that protect them from certain parasitic infections. So they may have adaptations like that because, you know, like you or I would go see a doctor, get a medicine, we would. Our. Our ability to pass on our genes would not be affected by, you know, a parasitic infection. But if you're living in an uncontacted tribe, you know, maybe that pathogen or that parasite kills you. So that's an opportunity for that population to be evolving.

[Danny]

They probably think of those things as like some sort of like demonic. Demonic evil spirit or something like that. Like, I mean, just look what happened when the Spanish came to the Amazon and wiped out, you know, the Mayas and the Incas with all those diseases. Oh, it's crazy.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, I mean, you know, that's when.

[Danny]

You mix like a technologically advanced society with a not advanced society.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Well, and there's a really amazing book called 1491 that I highly recommend, that basically suggests that what we saw of the Americas, you know, this idea that it was like technologically advanced and not Was essentially because we were looking at like refugee camps, because disease spread faster than colonists. And so, you know, if you have a disease that comes through and wipes out 90% of the population, you know, if that happened here and then people arrived 50 years later, 100 years later or something like that, it would probably look like we weren't very technologically advanced because all of the technology that we had developed would kind of fall apart as we struggled to recover from this catastrophic disease outbreak. So, yeah, the book kind of posits that, that the impression that a lot of the colonists who arrived in the Americas got was very skewed by the fact that most of the population had been killed by disease shortly before their arrival.

[Danny]

Oh, wow.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

It's a really good book. I highly recommend it.

[Danny]

It's called, it's called 1491. 1491. Oh, wow, that's fascinating. Now, I mentioned to you briefly about that Mike Masters book before we started about this idea of pedomorphism, how primates, the, the offspring of primates, they look more like fully grown adults today where they have, they sit up straight and they have these like, kind of like bulbous heads that sits up straight over their shoulders and they, they look like, they look like normal fully evolved humans today. But when the primates get older, into full adulthood, they, they change, they're, they're, their jaw protrudes, their head slopes back and they sort of hunch over and he, he says that this is an evolutionary thing, that it looks like if you extrapolate that into the future, the fully grown adults in the future will look like the children of today. More like, you know, a toddler of today would be, look like a fully grown adult. Do you know what, do you know anything about that or is that.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I hadn't heard of that. It's an interesting idea. The one thing that I would say is that again, coming back to this idea, you know, you said extrapolate, like that's assuming that evolution is happening in this like linear directional way. And it's just like so hard to say. You know, it's like the thing where people say, oh, our pinky toe has been getting smaller over the past hundred thousand years, therefore eventually we won't have one. And it's like, well, no, as long as natural selection isn't acting against that, you know, as long as if someday it becomes really sexy to only have four toe, four toes, then the population would change in that way. But otherwise we're just going to stay kind of how we are. Like you need natural selection to drive a change like that. I mean, things can change just randomly, but usually natural selection would be required. So if there was something that was selecting for. And maybe that's part of the hypothesis. I haven't read the book.

[Danny]

Oh, there you go. There's an example.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. So if there's something about the current state of toddlers, human toddlers, that becomes more advantageous in the future, then totally we could evolve to look more like them in the future. But otherwise we'll probably just stay pretty much the same.

[Danny]

Well, it makes logical sense. If you look at technology taking over for the need for us to do physical things, right. We don't need big muscles like we need. Like toddlers have bigger heads compared to their bodies. They would, we would use our, our heads more. We would have, we would be skinnier, we would be smaller, more frail because we would rely on technology to do this stuff. And, you know, obviously technology has been advancing since we were first able to create fire, and that's changed the shape of our jaws and. And things like this. The shape of our heads.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

We don't need giant hands anymore.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

So I think technology would probably have to have a big part of that. As long as technology keeps evolving and keeps, you know, and who knows what happens when we really. When we reach some sort of, like, technological singularity? You know, maybe we just get wiped out.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Who knows?

[Danny]

Yeah, but it seems like that has a lot to do with technology changing, changing our anthropomorphic look.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

I mean, you could certainly say that. Like. Like in our current environment, maybe, you know, our heads will get bigger because it's advantageous to be smart. But then if you look at. Have you ever seen the movie Idiocracy?

[Danny]

Yes. Okay, so that's been a long time. That's a good movie.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

With one caveat that is, in my opinion, the only accurate portrayal of evolution I've ever seen in a movie. So, you know, you have a lot of movies that talk about evolution. Most of them get it wrong. You know, like, I love the X Men movies, but those, you know, it's. Even the movie Evolution is like, not an accurate portrayal of evolution. But Idiocracy starts with the idea that essentially stupid people are having more children than smart people currently. And therefore, in the future, more of those children are having more children, and these, like, stupid genes are being passed on to the point where I forget how many years into the future everyone is really dumb. And so an average person currently becomes a genius in the future. And it's a very funny, very silly movie. And I would say the one part, my caveat to it being accurate is that we haven't actually ever identified a genetic contribution to intelligence because it's such a complicated thing to measure. But anyway. But if that were true, then absolutely. And maybe I shouldn't say that. But if you think about the people who are having many, many children and think about that potentially driving the selection of our species into the future, you know, it's just hard to predict what's going to increase, you know, in frequency in the next generation.

[Danny]

Yeah. Well, definitely, if you think about it, you know, the people, the smartest people in universities and in labs, they aren't raising tons of kids. Right. They're more focused on their. On their work and whatever they're doing. And it's a much more focused thing where you're dead. You're dedicating all of your skill and all of your time to mastering something or to figuring out a problem. That's true. That is true.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Is that intelligence or is that how you were raised and education and all these other things? That's a whole other debate. But, yeah, it's just to say that I don't necessarily see a strong selective pressure driving us as a population, a human species, to be smarter, have bigger heads, et cetera, in the ways that we kind of think, well, maybe the.

[Danny]

Big heads doesn't have to necessarily do with being smarter.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right? Yeah, it might not. But again, unless people with big heads are having more children or people with small heads are not having children, then there's no reason for us to move towards big heads.

[Danny]

And it also seems like we may evolve to be. You know, is it possible that we evolve to even being sexless in the future with AI and with genetic engineering and things like this, where we're not. We're not creating, we're not procreating the same way, like, by having sex anymore? It's not this primitive thing we do anymore. Right now it's just like we use science and technology to create the perfect kid. We don't need to do it that way.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

That's too primitive. Well, that's so interesting. I mean, you know, that would be like a cultural evolution that. That could totally change everything about our species, because. Yeah, if you don't, then. Then the rules of evolution as we know it don't apply anymore because you're creating that. That human. Them in a way that our species has never done in the past.

[Danny]

Yeah. And that's like another one of. Another points of Michael Master's book is he connects it to, like, the. All of the worldwide depictions of these little gray aliens that people talk about and people allegedly see that are. They seem to be genderless, have no sexual organs, and they look like toddlers. Right. And have these big eyes like they were adapted to see. Adapted to. To see in the dark. Yeah. And he. And. And basically he has this elaborate theory that. Which is like, it's out there, but it. It makes sense in that realm that, like, if we were to evolve hundreds of thousands of years into the future, it's. Pos. Is it possible that we could end up looking like this? That. Right. And then if there was some sort of, like, nuclear war or some sort of cataclysm that wiped out a large swath of humanity, that we could maybe, if we were that far advanced, maybe we could figure out time travel, go back and select G from the genetic pool back in the Past and to repopulate the species in the future. That's his, that's his whole hypothesis, which is why Wild.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

That's fun.

[Danny]

It's fun. It's super fun.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thinking about evolution in the far future and like, all the ways that technology is going to be able to influence these things is, Is very fun.

[Danny]

So it's. So you said that intelligence is not genetically passed on, that we have been.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Able to identify because it's so hard. This is another one of those correlation causation things where it's like, sometimes there have been some studies and I, I take issue with these studies that look at, at genetics paired with educational attainment. So how far you go in school, first of all, I don't think how far you go in school is a good measure of intelligence because I know people who dropped out of high school who were brilliant and people who have PhDs who are not so brilliant, you know, so it's like, how does that quantify intelligence? You know, our best attempt at quantifying intelligence is the IQ test, and even that is super flawed.

[Danny]

We know the IQ test is ancient, Right. It's not been. Yeah, it's not been updated.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right, right. So it's like, it's basically pattern matching.

[Danny]

Right.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

It's like finding patterns. Yeah. So we don't even have a good way of measuring intelligence. But then even if we, you know, if we use educational attainment, not saying that we should, but that people have done this and continue to present on this at genetics conferences, which always blows my mind. And you correlate that with, with genetics. You know, you could imagine in the US There are going to be certain correlations that are purely a legacy of some of the, some of the demographic things that have happened in this country. Like there are people who don't have an opportunity to go to school because of their ethnic background. And so you are, you may end up like, you could end up with a study where you say, look, here's the genetic change that makes you get a PhD. But actually it's just a measure of, you know, how white you are or how affluent your family is, is related to your genetic ancestry, your background. And so it becomes really problematic because it's like, what exactly are we measuring if we don't even know how to measure intelligence to begin with? And then there's so many conflating factors.

[Danny]

And intelligence isn't a monolith either. It's not one thing. There's many different types of intelligence. Right?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Absolutely. Yeah.

[Danny]

People can have high verbal Intelligence, they can have high emotional intelligence to someone with an identity.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Intelligence. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

[Danny]

And it all just depends on, on your environment. And we also, in the western world, we equate intelligence with like monetary success. When, you know, if you actually look at these people who have achieved an enormous amount of wealth, they've usually done it in like one narrow lane, right. That they've focused on their whole life and then anything outside of that lane, lane, they're like a teenager, they don't know much about anything.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right? Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, you take an intelligent person, they eat some lead paint from the walls of their apartment as a baby and suddenly their IQ has dropped 15 points just from that exposure to lead. So there's like all these environmental factors that like, are so hard to disentangle with anything that it's like. Right, it's really hard. And that's where, you know, this genetic editing too. If we want to make like super intelligent babies.

[Danny]

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[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

We don't, we don't know, we don't have any idea how to do that. You know, we have the technology if we knew what the gene was, but we don't, we're so far from knowing it.

[Danny]

And also some of, like some of the most iconic people in history, like Pablo Picasso or even some like musicians, they, they were, they thrived and they became like so well known for what they did. And they did something that was like so much more advanced than anyone else in their field. A lot of them because of some sort of negative thing in their life or some sort of negative physical attribute or something that was missing. Like for example, Pablo Picasso.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

So.

[Danny]

Some people speculate that one of the reasons that he was so good at depicting light and depicting, depicting depth in his paintings was because he could only see in 2D. He could, he didn't have 3D vision. Interesting because his like, eyes looked out like he had, he was like walleyed or whatever. So they, people speculate from all of his photos that he couldn't see that. So that made him extraordinary at depicting depth in his paintings and creating these just amazing looking paintings that no one else could do. So, like, you know, that's interesting too, how people can just become outliers because of a deficiency they have.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Right. And, you know, genius is so contextual. Like, Picasso at the time wasn't perceived by everyone as being a genius. Now we see him that way only.

[Danny]

At the time, hundreds of years later.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah, yeah. Like, I recently. My husband's a symphony musician and the symphony played Rachmaninoff's first symphony, and it was so poorly received when he wrote it that he went into a depression for three years. And the symphony was lost until like the 40s because he basically threw it out. And so it's like, you know, that is now seen as this brilliant piece of music that was ahead of its time and really well composed. But at the time, it was. People compared it to, I think they said, like the seven circles of hell or something. They said listening to it, the experience was like being in a. Of a hell. So, yeah, it's like, it's. It's such a hard thing to. We could never quantify it, I think.

[Danny]

Wow. Well, that's fascinating. Melissa, thank you so much for doing this. This has been fascinating. Is there anything else interesting that we haven't covered that you think we should talk about?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Trying to think of. I feel like we've talked about a lot.

[Danny]

Yeah, we did. We covered. We covered a ton.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Is it. Where can people find more of your work and some of the studies that you've done or learn more about you or contact you?

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Yeah. So my lab is called the Superhuman Lab. So I have a website, superhuman lab.org. i'm also on Instagram. It's Superhumansci Lab. And I love getting questions, comments, messages. So, yeah, I'd be happy to talk to anyone.

[Danny]

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. This has been. I'm gonna have to go back and listen to this, like, two more times. This was a lot to digest, but thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

[Dr. Melissa Ilardo]

Thank you.

[Danny]

All right, goodbye, everybody.