B (2:01)

You are wrestling. But you have also just scored a two point reversal and you are now beating this thing that has been dogging you. Yes.

A (2:11)

I don't remember that.

B (2:13)

I do.

A (2:14)

I mean, usually, like, at the moment, I, I, I, it's been a long time since I thought about wrestling, and I did briefly. But I feel like a two point reversal is a pretty abrupt move.

B (2:25)

Oh, it just means you've gained the upper hand from being.

A (2:28)

Yeah, but it sounds like it's, it's a, like it's something you'd remember as opposed to like. Yeah, actually over the last several hours. Okay.

B (2:35)

All right. We have now stretched this analogy far beyond.

A (2:38)

And that's what I'm saying is that I don't think it was a Two point reversal.

B (2:42)

I'm giving you two points whether you want them or not. All right, Heather. Our first sponsor this week is Everyday Dose. It's coffee plus benefits. That should say with benefits. Nope. Right? Nope. Nope.

A (2:53)

They insisted.

B (2:53)

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A (3:47)

I think so.

B (3:48)

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A (5:32)

It's really good stuff.

B (5:33)

It is really good stuff. Absolutely. Even if my reading is yes, it.

A (5:39)

Doesn'T help with interpretation of punctuation and other things on the printed page.

B (5:43)

Here's the thing.

A (5:44)

But it doesn't pretend to. That's the thing. It doesn't over promise. Everyday dose does what it says it does.

B (5:48)

Why could we not?

A (5:49)

It's delicious.

B (5:50)

Why could I not have been born into a language that gives you warning about the punctuation at the beginning of the sentence?

A (5:55)

Most of us use our eyes. Oh, you want Spanish with upside down bangs And I want it. Yeah.

B (6:02)

How do you do the intonation? I mean, how many of the people improperly throwing questions at the end of every sentence are doing so because they have anxiety based on the fact that at the beginning of the sentence you don't know if that's where it's headed?

A (6:14)

Yeah, I think. I think. I suspect that some of the differences in reading between people have to do with how much you visually scan ahead as you are reading a particular thing. And if you don't. If you don't scan ahead, you are caught by surprise by everything that happens.

B (6:32)

See, here's the thing. Some of us are too busy trying really hard not to it up to scan ahead. There's just no bandwidth for the scanning part. So it's a. It's an anxiety fil exercise. As you're about to seem that anxious, I cover it well. Our second sponsor this week is crowd health. Crowd health isn't health insurance. It's better this time.

A (6:54)

Better.

B (6:55)

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A (9:23)

Join CrowdHealth.com really cannot speak too highly of crowdhouse. Yeah, it's so good.

B (9:31)

It's really good stuff.

A (9:32)

It's so obviously the answer to one of the major problems facing Americans who are trying to be healthy and. And dealing with all of the corrupt institutions.

B (9:47)

Yep, it's the way to avoid the racket.

A (9:49)

Yeah, one of the rackets.

B (9:51)

Yeah, there are a lot of rackets. It's. This is not tennis, folks. There are a lot of rackets.

A (9:55)

There are a lot of rackets in tennis.

B (9:57)

Usually two. Two.

A (10:00)

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B (11:54)

Yeah, I mean we are discovering glyphosate sneaks into your, your diet even if you're being careful because lots of things like for example, organic wines still have glyphosate because frankly it's circulating in the environment at such a high level that it gets on all kinds of stuff.

A (12:08)

Yeah, it doesn't respect Land borders.

B (12:10)

That is true.

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B (12:46)

Marvelous.

A (12:48)

So marvelous.

B (12:49)

Should we start with, with evolution, seeing as it's evolution week here on the interwebs.

A (12:57)

Yes.

B (12:57)

All right. So yesterday, I believe it was Tucker Carlson put out an interview with Jim Tor, who is a biologist at Rice, who I know actually fairly well. You know, I have broken bread together. I quite like Jim Tor. Jim Tor is a specialist, maybe the world's greatest nanotechnology expert. He builds little machines at molecular scale and he is an exceedingly good scientist and tops in his field. In his interview with Tucker, he challenges the ability of the Darwinian explanation to account for major morphological changes in form that we see across time in the Darwinian framework. So we creatures and we have a description of how they are related to each other and that suggests that there were forms, intermediate forms between these major jumps. And he challenges whether or not the Darwinian mechanism is capable of explaining these things. So let's start with a two minute clip from Jim on Tucker Carlson.

C (14:20)

That word is being used anyway, right? It's being used. All right. So, so you can see these small permutations. But what you never see, never see are what is called body plan changes. Body plan changes. And this encompasses many things. But you see, these genetic networks would have to change. So a body plan change would be an invertebrae, something that does not have a spine going to a vertebrae, something that has a spine, something like a worm going into something that has a spine. You never ever see that you never see. Now there are hypotheses where people will see fossils and they'll say, oh, this must have been a precursor to this. They will never see the transformative thing. That is for sure. And I'm not the only person that is saying that. It's not just Jim Tour the creationist saying this. And the problem with body, to be.

B (15:16)

Clear, the fossil record does not support the theory of evolution as at least as you're defining it.

C (15:21)

Well, yes, it does not support Body plan changes. There are small permutations like the ones that I have just told you. But you will not see body plan.

B (15:29)

Changes in any fossil record that we found.

C (15:32)

The only thing that you will see is people will hypothesize over that fossil. They'll see a fossil here and a fossil here and they'll say, oh, and then they'll see a fossil here. This must have been the transition to this and they'll hypothesize with that. But it doesn't have to be the transition. This is strictly a hypothesis. And so we don't see that in the fossil record. Many people don't see that in the fossil record. Some people will say we absolutely see that the absolute people are actually becoming less and less. The problem with this, in order to have a body plan change, you have to have these genetic networks. These genetic networks are going to have to change. So the genetic networks occur very early on in life. This is the wiring that is going to occur to run this system. You clip one wire, it is catastrophically lethal to the organism. It is lethal. Everything goes haywire and people will say this and they're.

B (16:34)

Okay. So the reason I thought that this was worth engaging is that Jim is a very high quality thinker and he's leveling a challenge for which I don't believe the response is obvious. And I think it makes sense for us to talk a little bit as evolutionary biologists about what is going on, to what extent the claim that he is making is accurate and to the extent that it's accurate, whether or not it actually levels a serious challenge to Darwinian evolution. This would not be worth our time if he was a blowhard. Now he is, I think he would self describe himself as a creationist. He's certainly in the intelligent design realm and he is forthrightly here as I would expect. He's a person of very high integrity. He is acknowledging that we do see evolutionary change at a particular scale. He's acknowledging the, the permutations that we see in evolution. And he's saying there is a place where whatever is explaining the permutations changing is insufficient to explain what he's calling body plan changes. And so I think, and that's, and.

A (17:52)

That'S been a fairly, I think standard, a evolutionary or anti evolutionary response to evolution explains the diversity of life on Earth for a long time. Yes, we see micro evolutionary changes, stuff happening at the small temporal scale, but no, we do not see micro evolutionary changes.

B (18:14)

Well, I see this as one better. I think he's made A concession here. That's one better than the typical challenge. Okay, we see micro evolution, Micro evolution. And, you know, Heather and I could go on for hours about how to exactly define micro evolution, but micro evolution is typically conceded by absolutely everybody below the species level. Right.

A (18:35)

So within populations.

B (18:36)

Within populations. And, you know, the selection that takes place on farms with domesticated plants and animals was in fact one of the things that inspired Darwin to think about how evolution works in a natural context, because everybody understood that farmers were selecting for characteristics that were good. You know, more meat on a cow or more milk production, larger fruits, all of these things.

A (19:01)

And have you met domestic dogs?

B (19:03)

Right, I have. I have met domestic dogs.

A (19:05)

You've seen a bulldog, you've seen a terrier, you've seen a wolfhound, you know, these. I don't think anyone argues that those actually were placed here or that they all came from different things like that, is that it's human selective forces on an ancestor.

B (19:19)

So everybody accepts the micro evolution at the below species level because you'd be crazy to deny it. The evidence is everywhere and incontrovertible. Frequently people have denied evolution at the macro scale, that is to say, between species. What Jim is doing here acknowledges that there is evolution of the type we see between species. And he's saying, but there is a type we don't see, which is this body plan transitions.

A (19:48)

Right. I don't hear him conceding that, acknowledge that it's possible in there, but I didn't hear that.

B (19:54)

I'm pretty sure it's there because of where he's. Where he's focused, you know, so he's talking about vertebrates showing up from invertebrates. That's a major body plan transition. It's not the, you know, change in size of a raptor. Right. Change in size of a raptor would be between two species, but it leaves the body plan more or less intact. So I hear it in there and I, and I appreciate it. And I also know the circles that he travels in. And so this is amongst the better intelligent design folks. This is commonly accepted. And they frankly do take their job seriously, which is to find the flaws where our explanation really isn't good enough. And I would argue it just isn't good enough yet. I think the solution to all of this ends up being Darwinian. But in this particular case, I wanted.

A (20:47)

To focus Darwinian sensu latto, not, you know, obviously Darwin didn't know a number of things, and so he made. He had broad speculations, broad hypotheses with a Lot of imprecision because there would have had to have been.

B (21:02)

Right.

A (21:02)

So when you say Darwinian, I like, I would tend to say devolutionary, but.

B (21:07)

Well, I say Darwinian for a particular reason, which is the folks on our side, the Darwinists, tend to freak out anytime somebody challenges whether or not the explanation that we present, the one in the textbook, covers the creatures that we see because they always don't hear the rest of the argument to figure out whether or not what's being challenged are the particulars of the. The way we. The story we've presented, or the basic concept of whether or not this happened naturally without intervention. And so my point is, I think there's plenty wrong with our story, but if you fix it, it doesn't touch Darwin. Darwin is left intact. What Darwin said about heritable variation and selection covers all of these mechanisms. And so I just think giving him his due and pointing out that, no, it's not Darwin that's under threat here, it's you people who close the story too early, who decided it explained more than it did at an early phase. But anyway, I wanted to cover what I think the not so obvious but very compelling answer to the pattern that Jim is pointing out here. Why don't we have those fossils? Okay, now, first of all, I want to say that he should acknowledge that the evolution of the Intelligent Design argument has gone through phases where they have pointed out the absence of fossils that later show up. Right. So the idea that, hey, the fossil record does not reflect a Darwinian story is partially answered by the fact that over time, it tells an ever better story. It's still incomplete, but it tells an ever better story. So I remember, well, the, you know, I think when we were in college, Intelligent design folks were distributing leaflets that I ran into on, on the Penn campus in which they mocked the idea that whales had evolved from a terrestrial ancestor. And they in fact drew little cartoons of, you know, a blue whale on the legs of a cow. And it looked ridiculous, as it would but work, as you and I remember when we were in graduate school in Michigan, Phil Gingrich, the paleo biologist. Paleontologist, paleontologist, returned triumphantly from the valley of the whales. And I think Pakistan, with the fossil.

A (23:45)

Ends up being called Pakasita. So I'm thinking it's Pakistan.

B (23:47)

Yeah. So, anyway, actually, but sorry, just before.

A (23:51)

You launch into your argument here, I just want to maybe set it up a tiny bit more by saying that the argument that Tor is making and that others like him are making is not that the fossil record shouldn't have any gaps at all. But it's a question of representation, it's a question of statistical likelihood that the gaps appear to be not only more frequent but in fact absolute with regard to certain kinds of transitions. And that that is notable. And so it's is always in questions like this, like, how would you know? Like in a sort of a goodness of fit statistical test way, we have our observed values of like here are the fossils we've got. Well, what were the expected fossils? And of course some of that requires inference about the exact history that you're trying to discover. So the expectation is inherently going to be circular. But also we weren't there. We don't know the ecology, we don't know what forms had. You are going to make an argument about when we do expect more and less kinds of fossils that goes beyond that. And I think is, isn't is an appropriate rejoinder, even beyond the fact that for instance, Phil Gingrich found the transitional whale form.

B (25:12)

Yep.

A (25:13)

Which now.

B (25:14)

So let's show Pakicetus here. So this was a fossil that looks strangely like the creationist renderings that were supposed to be impossible. Here you have a whale like creature with obvious limbs for locomotion on solid ground. And then below it we have no other way.

A (25:38)

That was Pakicetus.

B (25:39)

Oh, that's. Pakicetus is. So the, the way the story goes is the transition apparently happened in something called the Tethys Sea, which no longer exists on Earth but was very shallow. And so you had a terrestrial ancestor that we believe was hunting prey in the shallows. And essentially the more aquatic it got, the better, more successful it was. And so you have Ambulocetus above here, Pachycetus below. And the point is, in the period before these fossils existed, a very different argument unfolded because what you effectively had were a hypothesis about whale evolution that was not matched by the fossil record. Here we have the fossil record filled in. Now this is not whale. Yeah. It's halfway to an example of what Jim is saying doesn't exist. This is a, it's not a transition of the magnitude of becoming a vertebrate from something before, but it is, I would argue, a, it's like a meso transition. It's a transition that is substantial, becoming aquatic from a terrestrial form. So it's a proof of concept. You can say, hey, the fossils aren't there and that's trying to tell you something. But then when the fossils show up, you got to take the loss. Okay.

A (26:53)

And I would just Aside, evolutionary biologists understand there to have been several secondary returns to the sea. So, you know, tetrapods emerge onto land as vertebrates, having been waiting around in shallow waters, warm, shallow nutrient rich waters for a very long time before coming on to land and finding a space, you know, empty of other vertebrates, filled with invertebrates and plants and such. But whales being one of these now nicely established, returns to the sea from a non aquatic ancestor. Others being manatees, pinnipeds, which includes seals, sea lions and walruses. Also in other lineages we have, like sea snakes, return to the sea and there are others. And so that is a rich place to explore. Like what what would have happened and what kinds of fossils, what would we like to be finding with regard to a history that we have put together that involves fully aquatic onto land and then back into the sea? Those are some interesting stories.

B (28:04)

Yes, and there are many of them for I think a reason that will be useful later in this discussion. The reason is if you imagine some creature that is either relegated to the sea or relegated to the land, there's a place at the shore where there may be something profitable just the other side of the border. And so if you're an aquatic animal that can figure out how to feed on stuff that has washed up above the meander line, you have access to a resource that nobody else does. And so the evolutionary pull in that direction is strong. And likewise, if you are a terrestrial creature and there's something swimming around in the shallows that you could eat, but you're not quite aquatic enough, again, the evolutionary pull is strong.

A (28:48)

There's an advantage to living in transitional zones and liminal spaces. You can't be specialized on either. But in temporal space we also see this with regard to crepuscular animals, neither nocturnal, neither optimized to the nocturnal environment, where maybe they have, if they're a mammal, they have a tapetum lucidum reflective retina on the back of their eye that allows them to take in more photons. But they're also more attuned to non sight senses versus diurnal, which is highly attuned to sight and maybe less good at some of the other senses. Crepuscular organisms, of which there are many and many carnivorans, tend to hunt a lot in the hour or two either side of dusk or dawn, are more generalist, but in fact what they're doing is taking advantage of the fact that. Why are you smirking at me? They are more generalist and they are taking advantage of the Fact that the specialists whom they are hunting are living at a moment when they are not as good because they are either nocturnal and are not as good at being cryptic in the half light, or they are diurnal. And the same thing is true. And their eyes aren't working as functionally.

B (30:02)

It's a fantastic point, and it's actually a great example of the thing I say about oftentimes, if you see a pattern in space, you can find a analog in time and vice versa. And so basically the reason I was smirking was that basically you're talking about a temporal shore between day and night.

A (30:23)

Precisely.

B (30:23)

Which is really cool.

A (30:25)

It ebbs and flows with a regular periodicity, predictable periodicity. It's short enough that every organism we're talking about lives through many of them.

B (30:34)

Yep.

A (30:35)

So the reliability is, is clearly something to be taken advantage of adaptively. There is, there is a niche to be had there in the exploration of the temporal change.

B (30:44)

Love that point. All right, so we have whale fossil. We've also seen the same pattern with bird fossils. There's, you know, one old one which I'll show you, which is Archaeopteryx, which is a feathered pre bird. And now we've had numerous discoveries, I think mostly in China, of other, other primitive or proto birds. So again, this is a place where you have a form that's mysterious in the way that you see it, nature. And with enough time, and frankly, I don't know how these paleo folks do it, but with time, the paleo folks do manage to go out and find things that fill in these gaps.

A (31:26)

Yeah, well, and I would say too, like, I didn't, I didn't know we were going here, so I didn't go back and remind myself. But there has been an active discussion in basically paleo bird community around which of the things that we associate with modern birds came first. If we can think about. Well, probably their ancestors were already endothermic, which is probably required for vertebrate flight, but just because of the energy requirements. But, you know, feathers, flight, bipedality, I feel like there's another big trait there. But even if we just take feathers in flight, you know, does. Do feathers have to come first? Or is there. Or does, you know, does gliding happen? And occasionally you get uplift and you get powered flight even before feathers. And so these sorts of arguments are active in the communities of people, not just the neontologists like us, who mostly focus on organisms that are still extant. I'm not good at reading fossils, but there are a Number of these. And I think you're right. Fossil finds of sort of proto birds out of China, where in some cases you see rachis, like, you see feather imprints and in some cases you, you don't. And they actually can be put together into a line. And, you know, Torres says, look, those are hypotheses. And so that, that's the, that's the part of the clip that you showed with.

B (32:57)

No, I think you would, I think he would concede. I think this is what he's talking about as perturbations and that he's talking about more major things which admittedly are not found, but I'll get to why they're not found shortly.

A (33:11)

I mean, I feel like the evolution of birds is a pretty major change.

B (33:14)

Well, yes and no. I hear in what he says he's looking for even more major changes that are, you know, the roots of these, you know, giant clades like vertebrates. But in any case, let's look at. Here's one that actually, I think you can make this case with the, with the whales also. But one of the most amazing cases of a fossil find that fills in a hypothesized gap in the hypothesized way is Tiktaalik. So Tiktaalik is a transitional form between amphibians and reptiles. And this is.

A (33:53)

No, Tiktaalik is an early tetrapod.

B (33:57)

You're right. Early tetrapod.

A (33:59)

So between sort of fishy fish, fully aquatic fish, and earliest amphibians.

B (34:04)

Yeah, you're right. In any case, Neil Shubin went looking for this fossil in the most inhospitable conditions, like Arctic conditions, in a place where logic suggested that the transitional form might be found. And he came up with the goods which. Can you imagine searching a moon like landscape for a particular fossil and looking at rock after rock after rock after rock? And then I believe the story is that they landed on this, like at the point that their expedition was effectively done. They were out of resources and going home.

A (34:43)

Yeah.

B (34:44)

Anyway, do you want to show up?

A (34:46)

Yeah. Can you, can you see my screen? No, of course not. I just pulled up a slide from a lecture I used to give on the evolution of tetrapods.

B (35:01)

Yep.

A (35:03)

Where exactly you say Shubin is the middle author on this, but writes in nature in 2006, Devonian tetrapod, like fish and the evolution of the tetrapod body plan. And so body plan is exactly the same phrase that Tor uses. And usually in biology we actually use the German bow plan, but it's body Plan changes. And at this point, 2006, Shubin & Co. Found this intermediate form between already existing fossils that were known. Ichthyostega, Acanthostega, Tiktaalik and Panderiches, and.

B (35:41)

Eustonopteron. So I want to go back and correct my earlier embarrassing error. Obviously, a transition from amphibians to reptiles is not a body plan. Change it. In fact, we know a lot about it. It's the evolution of an alteration of the egg which allows for freed water. So the amphibians are obligated to the water for reproduction. And an egg that can withstand drying out, the amniotic egg is the transition. So.

A (36:07)

You. There are other changes. But the. But the evolution of the amniotic egg is the major, major, giant change that reptiles, including mammals, evolve that makes them fully independent of water in a way that amphibians.

B (36:22)

Are. Yep. Okay, so here we've got a number of cases where you had something that was, as Jim is talking about, a hypothesis. There ought to be an intermediate fossil. And it was just a hypothesis until it wasn't. And that's the beauty of a hypothesis, is that it makes a prediction. And the beauty of paleontology is that those predictions are often manifest in, literally, rock that has been, you know, why is there a fossil? Because some bone got buried in the right condition, that as the fossil rots away, it gets replaced with the molecules that make up a stone. And you can actually see the impression rendered in stone by geology. Like, that's an amazing fact. And the idea that there are people who specialize on figuring out where those things are and what they mean is pretty.

A (37:08)

Cool. It.

B (37:08)

Is. Okay, so why are. First of all, the transitional fossils aren't totally absent. Tiktaalik here counts as one of the transitions that has now been filled in by paleontologists. Okay, so it's not that they're totally absent. Why are they as absent as they are? Well, again, I believe that there is a not so obvious but very compelling explanation for the reason. And it has to do with the way we should infer that evolution takes place. And I will fault adaptive evolutionists for not understanding this as well as they should. They tend to look at the forms that we have and tell a story that links them together. Right. So a fossil will stand in for some population of creatures that existed. But we never, rarely talk about the population dynamics that accompany the evolutionary story of adaptive change. Very rarely do we properly tell that story. And so what I want to point out is that by my model, it just so happens the one that I wrote in my dissertation. You would absolutely expect most of those transitional fossils to never be found for an obvious, or obvious to me at the time reason. And the reason is because you have to think in terms of different phases of evolution that I would argue logically must exist. So this is my own terminology. Why don't we put up figure one from my dissertation? So figure one here is a crude drawing that involves three phases of evolution. And my dissertation was about trade offs, which is why the X and Y axis are labeled capacity A in the Y axis here and capacity B in the X axis here. Is because my point in my dissertation was about what does evolution do when it's trying to improve two characteristics that each come at an expense to the other? Turns out to be a very powerful rubric, I believe. But anyway, on this diagram, for those who are just listening, you've got a 45 degree line drawn basically between the ends of the X and Y axis. So that is what ecologists would call a perfect trade off, where the costs in one capacity come at an exactly equal or derive at an exactly equal benefit in the other capacity. But put that aside for the moment. What I've diagrammed here is there's an oval at the bottom near the origin of the graph that says innovation. So this is my starting gun. Something has evolved that gives some new capability and it can be anything. It can be the evolution of an image forming eye, it can be the evolution of true flight. But whatever it is, an innovation happens and it doesn't happen up at that line. It happens near the origin of the graph. Why? Because anybody who has built objects knows that your initial attempt, the first time you succeed at building a something or other, it downright sucks. It's really bad. It barely works. And it probably doesn't save you as much effort as it put as it costs to make it by an order of magnitude. It may take you 10 times as much effort to build the thing as it can save you labor by using.

A (40:40)

It. But, and in genome space, most of those things just disappear. You never see them at all, right? Most, most, most of them don't even make it to.

B (40:46)

Prototype. Right. But let's go back to the transition between the shore, either into the water or out of it. Some creature gets to the shore, there's a bunch of yummy stuff just the other side of the habitat they're comfortable in. And so the point is, what happens if you're just a little better at the aquatic stuff than the rest of the your competitors? Well, the Answer is, you now suddenly have a very powerful advantage. Right. I get more food because as terrestrial creatures go, I'm the best one once we step into the water.

A (41:18)

Right. It's a tougher argument to make with the secondary return to the sea, of course, because when vertebrates come onto land, they. And we've written and talked about this extensively, but they are met with landscapes that are, yes, full of giant crabs and lots of invertebrate forms and lots of plants. No angiosperms just yet, I think. No flowering plants, but no vertebrate competitors at all. And so they're fundamentally built differently. They have different challenges and they have different skills and capacities than most of the things that they're running into on land. Whereas when you return to the sea, vertebrates, having been in the sea for a long, long time and already on land for a fairly long time, you return to the sea and you're meeting some of your ancient competitors, even as you walk away from some of your most recent.

B (42:03)

Competitors. Phylogenetically, this is a great point. So you would expect fewer transitions in that direction.

A (42:08)

Exactly. Well, you know, or what we see, what we think we see with regard to the evolution of tetrapods, is that it happens and it is so important and massive that it sticks. So. Right. So you, you know, you can measure, as, you know, you know, you can measure the importance of evolutionary change by, you know, okay, well, it only happened once. Yeah, but you. It stuck. It was so important. It stuck. Right. Or. Well, there's lots of ways to get there. And so you see it popping up all over the place. Right. So you see it popping up all over the place, but then it can blink on and off. That is also an indication of importance. But something like, you know, endothermy, we get endothermy evolving twice in two different clades. It never blinks off. Like mammals and birds. And maybe the bird endothermy goes back to, you know, birds plus dinosaurs. It evolves once and it just. You never go back to being an ectotherm.

B (42:59)

And. Wait, I can't resist. Yes, there is one reversal of endothermy.

A (43:05)

Yeah. Oh, well, hold.

B (43:07)

On. It's a perfect example of an exception that proves the.

A (43:11)

Rule. It's not endothermy, though, it's.

B (43:13)

Homeothermy. Well, that's the point is they are homeotherms, but they are not.

A (43:17)

Endotherms. No, they're poikilotherms, but they're not.

B (43:20)

Ectotherms. They are using the heat of the substrate to Maintain a body temperature. So they are ectotherms, but they are homeotherms. And so the point is anybody still listening? The argument is this, except how about the organism? It's a naked mole.

A (43:39)

Rat.

B (43:40)

Yes. So naked mole rats live just beneath a thoroughly sun baked African landscape. And the point is, what Heather is saying is once you get to be warm blooded, you don't go back. The reason that this is an exception that proves the rule is having gone back did not change their ability to maintain a body temperature because it's the ground that maintains the body temperature. So anyway, to move on, if you go back to my diagram, when something happens, when something happens back on this one, when something happens anew, you get an innovation. The innovation is low quality to begin with, right? So here's where the rubber meets the road with respect to Jim Tours assertion. How many individuals do we expect there to be with this low quality innovation? And the answer is very few for a very brief time. Why? Because once you know how to build a something, the ability to improve the something is suddenly visible. And selection will have a very powerful ability to take all of the things that would make this innov better and collect them rapidly to the extent that they already have some sort of primordial variation. So the point is you would expect almost none of those transitional forms to have walked the earth. Only at the point that the innovation has been refined by this purifying selection do we expect to see the population grow to a size. So I want you to run a thought.

A (45:20)

Experiment.

B (45:22)

Me? No. Everyone imagine that human beings all died where they stand in an instant and nothing else was touched. Okay? How many of us would become a fossil? The answer is almost none. The processes that destroy dead creatures on the surface of the earth are so universal that nearly all of us would be destroyed it. There would be the occasional person who, you know, died in a canoe fishing on a pond with an anoxic.

A (46:02)

Substrate. Silty.

B (46:03)

Right? And so maybe the birds would pick them clean and there wouldn't really be a fossil or there'd be a bone here, a bone there. But you could imagine, you know, they're fishing on a calm day and the wind kicks up in the afternoon, and because they're not minding the canoe, it flips over and they're dumped in and they sink to the bottom and the oxygen deprivation allows them to be fossilized. There will be some fossils. If 8 billion people died suddenly, there would probably be some fossils. But it's going to be the tiniest fraction of that 8 billion so you wouldn't expect, if you then went looking for people who were around on the day that all humans suddenly keeled over, you wouldn't expect to find very many of.

A (46:43)

Them. Right, right. But, so this is a question of representation, as I said, like statistical representation. How many of what type? Your argument, as you wrote into your dissertation, hinges on, I think, the obvious in retrospect, now that you've pointed it out, idea that during that optimizing selection phase, things are going to be changing very, very fast. And so if evolution occurs at different rates under different conditions, which I don't think anyone argues it doesn't, aren't those conditions under which evolution is occurring very rapidly, and thus change is occurring very rapidly going to be less represented in a fossil record? Of course, when you say it that simply, it seems obvious. And are there assumptions built into the first parts of that argument? I guess. But does evolution vary in rate? Yes. What are the conditions where you expect it to be happening fastest? Well, probably when you're in a transitional form. And therefore, with regard to representation and what we expect with regard to the fossil record, shouldn't we actually expect there to be fewer, fewer of those forms in the fossil.

B (47:58)

Record? Right. And that is exactly the argument that, that I think belongs here. So one way to say it would be that the pace of evolution that is expected following a major transition is extremely rapid, and that that interfaces with the number of individuals who will ever have, have one of these primordial forms will inherently be small because that form doesn't exist for very long and it doesn't exist over a wide landscape in that form. So if we go back to my diagram here, you've got innovation. Down near the origin of the graph, you have an arrow that points up at 45 degrees, you know, basically towards 2.

A (48:40)

O'. Clock. The straight A shot to the.

B (48:42)

Line, straighter shot to the line. And then what my dissertation was about primarily was the shortest shot to the.

A (48:48)

Line.

B (48:48)

Sorry. Once you hit this 45 degree line, which represents the boundary at which you cannot simultaneously improve everything anymore, then selection starts, choosing what it, what it prioritizes in each creature. And you get diversifying selection, where you have some birds who are very agile, some birds who are highly efficient, and some birds who are a compromise between them. But the point is bird enables the transition. The initial bird is like the right flyer, can barely fly. Once you have something that can barely fly, it has a distinct advantage and the improvement in flight comes rapidly. That's the line that you say is the close, the most Direct shot to the 45 degree line of trade offs. And then once you get to that limitation, you get diversifying selection, which is a thing unto itself. So you don't expect the things down at the innovation to show up almost ever in the transition. The fact that we do have even one in the form of Tiktaalik is pretty amazing. Now the second thing I would say, and really the last point here is, so, so far what we've effectively said is, you write, Jim, transitional fossils of a major form are extremely rare.

A (50:06)

Not existent, but extremely.

B (50:08)

Rare. Extremely rare. But where you're not right, Tim, is to expect that they would be anything else. This is exactly what you should expect. If you integrate an understanding of the population sizes that likely had those early innovations with the evolutionary trajectory that then made these innovations into highly effective things that could diversify and become many different forms. Right. This is what you would expect. And the last thing, last thing I will say is Jim's point here is overly reliant on fossils, which are a problem for exactly this reason. There are fossils that we may never have. Right. The fossil that explains how bats evolved from a shrew like ancestor may not exist, not because it didn't happen, but because most bats are tropical, the ancestor was probably tropical. And bats have small bones that don't fossilize. Tropics don't, don't fossilize things well, and bats don't have bones that lend themselves to being fossilized. And so it may be that we never get that transitional fossil, or it may be that one fell into a giant puddle of amber somewhere, puddle of SAP somewhere, and got preserved in amber. Or, you know, you never know, the cool fossil could show up tomorrow, but until it does, having a hypothesis for which there's no fossil doesn't really tell you anything. What does tell us something is the fact that this is hardly the only line of evidence that suggests that these creatures are connected in this.

A (51:32)

Way.

B (51:33)

Right? Right. So the fact that we have developmental evidence, the fact that we have molecular evidence that tells a coherent story about the phylogenetic tree, an increasingly coherent story over time, these are all very powerful lines of evidence that point in the same direction and say that ultimately we will have the story. Right? And you know, I hope, I hope what people get from this is I am not giving my colleagues a pass for the stuff that they're not doing well. And one of the things they're not doing well is they are over claiming how much we can explain today and how perfect a fit it is for the version of Darwinism that They instantiated in the middle of the 20th century, which has very little to do with Darwin. Darwin, right. Darwin said something much more general. And in my opinion, the folks who overclaimed what the new synthesis in the 20th century did will have an asterisk by their names in history. But Darwin won't have that asterisk. That what Darwin said was general enough that it will cover multiple different Darwinian mechanisms, and it will perfectly well withstand critic critiques like the one that Jim Tor is leveling here. But I think we are better off for the critiques. Getting ourselves to tell this story correctly and not over claim it is a noble pursuit. And in addition to all of Jim's other important work, his pushing us to get our story right is valuable, even if he doesn't agree with.

A (53:08)

It. I know you were wrapping it up, but I just wanted to go back to a point you made a couple minutes ago, which is that fossils aren't our only line of evidence that we have. Of course, as you point out, development, and we have molecules and, you know, the genetic evidence, the molecules is Fairly recent in 50 years, call it. And much less in terms of being able to get a lot of molecular evidence with regard to differences between species. But you have anatomy as well, right? So you have anatomy, ontogeny, and fossils, all of which we, you know, scientists have been looking at for a couple hundred years, in some cases thousands of years with regard to anatomy. But the changes that you can see in all four of these domains now, anatomy, ontogeny, development, fossil record as very indirect evidence, and the molecules all provide some kinds of evidence in which we are inferring. It's this history of relationships, of phylogeny. But when those lines of evidence are consilient with one another, then we have ever more evidence that what we are seeing is actually a pattern that is explained by common relationship, by, you know, these two things actually share, you know, have a most recent common ancestor and we found it here, or we don't have the fossil, but we predict that there will be one there. And so, you know, it's not. It's not that the theory of evolution is based on whether or not we can find the right fossil fossils. Fossils is one line of evidence that we use and only.

B (54:41)

One. Yeah. And the likelihood that these things would line up across multiple domains if the overarching story wasn't right. Unless, you know, you can always come up with something very unparsimonious, like God built all this stuff as we find it, and he gave us a bunch of evidence that would mislead us into believing he did not. Why would he do that? I don't know. And if he did, why would we be digging to find flaws in the evolution? I mean, none of it adds up. So given that the universe is to be taken at face value, which is the premise on which science proceeds, taken from face value, a lot of different lines of evidence line up and some of them line up in ways that are special. I mean, think about the fact Darwin didn't know anything about genes and heredity, which frankly probably helped him because it meant he didn't say anything that was overly specific. But the idea that once you discover those genes that they tell a concordant story that doesn't falsify what Darwin said is strong evidence that Darwin was.

A (55:54)

Right. There's consilience across so many domains and when there's not, that's super interesting. And then you can say, okay, why do we not have, why apparently did parsimony break here? What needs to be explained? And there are lots of people from many domains, not just from intelligent design, creationist domains who are like, oh, you're just adaptively arm waving, you're just coming up with stories and there's nothing behind it. But the fact is that some of the most interesting things, things that happen in evolutionary biology from our perspective is actually dig, dig when you find the homoplasies, the places where, oh, endothermy and four chambered hearts and well, let's take those two for a moment. Both evolved separately or more or less in two different clades in either birds or birds and dinosaurs, or birds and dinosaurs and crocodiles over here and also in mammals. And it allows us to run hot and fast. Like it just opens up all these opportunities and it's not the same endothermy between those two clades, but it opens up similar opportunities. So you can get there different ways. We can solve problems different ways. But sometimes when it's parsimonious like oh, that one problem has been solved the same way once and it's stuck. So you know, tetrapods began to grow out legs at first like spread out like this that they, that needed, you know, so many changes needed to happen to come onto land. But those, those fins became weight bearing legs. And we have this, you know, one too many design across tetrapods. And you know, whales have lost some of them, snakes have lost all of them. They're ex, you know, the many can be five or one or you know, more than five occasionally depending on if you're a human or A horse or. I don't know who has more than five tetrapods. But, you know, those changes. It sounds like he's not objecting to. But. And, but it's. It's the big ones, which I think your work really points to expect different rates at different times with regard to what is happening in evolution, and therefore, obviously expect fewer fossils represented from those times that didn't last as.

B (58:09)

Long. Yep. And actually, it occurs to me I had one other example that I think will make this clearer to people. Can you put up the picture of the Apple one? So the story goes that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were hacking away in one of their garages and they constructed the first Apple, the Apple one, which was basically a circuit board. And I think it didn't really have a keyboard and a screen, and they took it to a computer store. I don't really know why there was a computer store before these things were common, but somehow there was some sort of. Maybe it was an electronic.

A (58:48)

Store. Yeah, that's a glitch in the.

B (58:50)

Story. Yeah, maybe it was an electronic store. And they said, you know, hey, we're making this thing. You. You want to buy some? And I think the guy who owned the shop was like, you know, it'd be a lot more useful if you did something like, oh, I don't know, stuck a keyboard and a screen on it. And so they went back to the drawing board and they came up with the Apple ii. So you want to put the Apple II up here so that Apple.

A (59:15)

One had a keyboard in.

B (59:16)

It. Yeah, because the idea that the Steves had was you would attach.

A (59:21)

It. I thought you were saying that it didn't.

B (59:23)

Have. No, you were supposed to do it yourself. And the idea that it becomes a lot more useful of an object when it comes with the keyboard already hooked up and a proper video port and like that. So here you have the Apple ii. And the fact is, is many in our audience will have seen an Apple ii. I had one. I had that. That was my first computer. That's not my actual first computer, but that's the first model of computer I ever had. And it looked just like that. And so the point is, how many Apple ones were there? The answer is a handful. And the only reason that they still exist is that the story of the success of the Apple II resulted in people preserving whatever Apple ones still existed in the world. So they were sort of artificially fossilized. But the point is, how often would you expect to run into an Apple one in a thrift store versus an Apple ii. And the answer is, you'd almost never run into one because they didn't get captured. They got thrown out because they weren't very useful. Even though they.

A (60:27)

Were. They were a necessary.

B (60:29)

Step. They were the actual route. It's frankly more important than the Apple 2. So how many were there is an important question to ask when you're.

A (60:39)

Trying to figure out were there and how long did they.

B (60:41)

Last? How long, how many were there and how long did they last is a huge question because such a tiny fraction of anything ever gets fossilized, right? It's really the tiniest fraction of a fraction. So there have to be a lot before you're likely to catch enough of them that, A, they get fossilized, and then, B, that then you're able to find one that did. Right. So maybe that the transitional fossils that Jim wants are out there somewhere, but the chances of them being encountered are low because the number of fossils is tiny. All right, I think we've said our piece on. On this.

A (61:15)

Front. All.

B (61:15)

Right. All.

A (61:16)

Right. Is.

B (61:17)

It. No, go.

A (61:18)

Ahead. Is it bacon? That's not bacon.

B (61:20)

Time. We could do bacon. Let's do.

A (61:21)

Bacon. Let's do bacon. That's not bacon. Yeah. If my computer will participate. Yeah. So this isn't a major story. It came out. What? We were going to maybe talk about it last time. So it's recent? Oh, no, it's November 20, 2025. Can you see my computer at this point? Okay, cool. This pig's bacon was delicious, but she's alive and well goes the.

B (61:51)

Headline. Oh, God. I know where this is.

A (61:53)

Going. A company called Mission Barnes is cultivating pork fat and bioreactors and turning it into meatballs and other products. Honestly, they're pretty darn good. That is not me speaking. That is the journalist speaking. So let me just read a few highlighted sections, and then, you know, we'll talk about it again. The author, Matt Simon, writes, I'm eating dawn the Yorkshire pig, and she's quite tasty. But don't worry, she's doing perfectly fine, traipsing around a sanctuary in upstate New York, York. Word is that she appreciates belly rubs and sunshine. I'm in San Francisco at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate park, enjoying meatballs and bacon, not made of meat in the traditional sense, but of plants mixed with cultivated pork fat. Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barnes got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino Acids and vitamins, essentially replicating the conditions in her body. But are they? That was me, not the author. Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animal's fat. Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami with plants, but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami. A few more sections here. Cultivated pork is the newest entrant in the effort to rethink meat.

B (63:05)

Just. Yeah, yeah.

A (63:07)

Yeah. Meat does not need to be rethought. No, I mean, I mean, we don't want CAFOs, we don't like, we don't want the giant, horrendous, disgusting factory farms, but meat does not need to be.

B (63:20)

Rethought. It's like thinking that joy needs to be.

A (63:23)

Rethought. Totally. For years, plant based offerings have been mimicking burgers, chicken and fish with ever more convincing blends of proteins and fats. Convincing? I don't know. Mission Barns is one of a handful of startups taking the next step. Growing real animal fat outside the animal, then marrying it with plants to create hybrids that look, cook and taste more like what consumers have always eaten, easing the environmental and ethical costs of industrial livestock. The company says it's starting with pork because it's a large market and products like bacon are fat rich. But its technology is cell.

B (63:56)

Agnostic.

A (63:57)

Whoa. Meaning it could create beef and chicken too. Okay, a little bit more here. Getting animal cells to grow outside of an animal though, ain't easy. For one, if cells don't have anything to attach to, they die. So Mission Barnes Cultivator uses a sponge like structure full of nooks and crannies that provides lots of surface area for the cells to grow. We have our media, which is just the nutrient solution that we give to these cells, said Sam Sharrocki, chief technology officer at Mission Barnes. We're essentially recapitulating all of the environmental cues that make cells inside the body grow fat, but outside the body. Again, the claim said it's just what the inside the body is doing. We're just doing it outside. We just got like a. It's fine, fine. Nothing to see here. Trust us. And I think one more section that I wanted to read part of. Of course. In this new frontier of food, the big question is, who exactly is this for? Would a vegetarian or vegan eat cultured pork fat? If it's divorced from the cruelty of factory farming, Would meat eaters be willing to give up the real thing for a facsimile? No, Mission Barnes market research Lee said found that its early adopters are actually flexitarian people who eat mostly plant based, but partake in the occasional animal product. But Lee adds that their first limited sale to the public in Berkeley included some people who call themselves vegetarians and vegans because they're, they get to do whatever they want. And that's, that's, that's.

B (65:20)

It. All right, I have two predictions. One of them is so secure that I'm not in any way worried it will not be true, which is that this stuff's going to be.

A (65:35)

Gross.

B (65:36)

Yes. Yes.

A (65:37)

Okay. So gross. I mean, so I didn't read some of it. It's like, actually the mouth feels pretty good and it's like, it has a nice, like.

B (65:41)

Bite. You know, I never trusted the media and the media, they're growing this on, I don't trust it.

A (65:48)

Either. I mean they like, oh, it's just carbohydrates and amino acids is fine. Like what are you doing? What are you using nooks and crannies in which to grow fat and to put that into plant stuff and pretend it's a.

B (65:59)

Meatball. All right, here's one that I am prepared to wait a long time to turn out to be right.

A (66:05)

About.

B (66:05)

Okay. It's a prediction. You heard it here first, folks. It's going to be.

A (66:10)

Carcinogenic.

B (66:11)

Why? Because what they allied in this presentation is that they have to overcome the hay flick limit in order to grow massive amounts of this substance. And in order to do that.

A (66:26)

Unless they, they're constantly harvesting new new.

B (66:30)

Fat. So then that increases the number of animals you.

A (66:34)

Need. Yeah, it's not going to be sustainable if they're constantly harvesting new fat. So if they're using a single pull of fat to, to grow much, much, much, much more fat, then good.

B (66:48)

Then they're going to be using telomerase or some sort of a trick to increase the length of telomeres and the chances that that is not going to be in the.

A (66:56)

Meat. Meat. Are meat the.

B (66:59)

Product. The.

A (67:00)

Product.

B (67:00)

Meatballs. Correct. So there's a question about a. How are they doing it? That's interesting. I'd love to.

A (67:07)

Know. Well, how are they doing.

B (67:09)

What? How are they overcoming the hay flick limit? Are they dumping telomerase on it? Are they editing the genes so that telomerase is turned on or what are they.

A (67:19)

Doing? It could, could honestly be sort of like what happened in the jacks labs where, you know, they've got that fat that does and does not last longer. And the fat that lasts longer, they're just using.

B (67:28)

That. Oh.

A (67:30)

Like. Oh, I don't know. It's just that that's the better fat for us. And so it's inadvertent selective pressure that they.

B (67:34)

Are. Yeah. But then, you know what you're describing, what you're. You're describing growing tumors on the wall and then selling it as if it were food, which isn't any better.

A (67:44)

Because. But it's tumors and nooks and crannies, so that's.

B (67:46)

Cuter. What do we find in tumors that we don't find in the rest of the body is we find active telomerase. So I.

A (67:56)

Think, folks, it's so.

B (68:00)

Horrifying. I am really not suicidal, nor am I planning to become suicidal. So the fact that I have this awkward insight into what their industry is probably doing hopefully will not result in the industry taking up arms against me. But in any case, yeah, I wouldn't touch this stuff with a barge pole. And if I touched it with a barge pole, I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. But if I made the mistake of touching it with a barge pole, I would wash the barge pole before eating anything off of.

A (68:30)

It. I usually. It's not a eating implement, but.

B (68:34)

Let'S put it this way. You have to really run out of other eating implements before you start using a barge.

A (68:39)

Pole. Fingers.

B (68:40)

First. Probably a better plan. But in any case, yeah, I think carcinogenicity is the thing to.

A (68:46)

Watch. That's. That's. F. I did not see that coming. That's. That's fascinating because I think. I think you're right. Just to. Just to replay the argument. Fat is not going to replicate endlessly either. They are constantly going back to animals and pulling more fat, which means it's. It's. It's. It's. The operation is not going to.

B (69:05)

Scale.

A (69:05)

Yep. Without using a whole lot of animals, you know, who were upstate getting, you know, sunshine and belly rubs, or they are doing something else to evade the Hayflick limit. And it may just be this, like, oh, I don't know, that fat just works better. In which case they're growing tumor fat. Yep. Or they're doing something else. We don't know what it is, but they've still got fat. That is. That is. Is not where it would be if it were coming out of a pig that had lived a natural.

B (69:33)

Life. Yep. All right, two other points. One, even if the carcinogenicity is not the case with fat for some reason, and fat is a special tissue, it's possible something. Something fat will have another problem. Which is that it will retain fat soluble toxins. And so the environment in which they grow this thing better be incredibly pure of those.

A (69:55)

Things. Nooks and.

B (69:57)

Crannies. It does have nooks and crannies in which toxins could hide. But when they get around to other types of flesh muscle, presumably now probably so.

A (70:11)

They'Re. So their, their argument appears to be from a market perspective, from a. Doing less harm to the animal perspective. So much of the flavor rides in the.

B (70:21)

Fat.

A (70:21)

Yeah. That we can use entirely plant protein and only use animal fat. I don't, I don't have any interest in such a product. But even if, you know, if, if that all could be done, if all of the problems that we have already listed and many more that we haven't didn't exist, that feels, you know, like a possibility that like the flavor does come in the fat and they can then get the mouth.

B (70:45)

Feel. Yeah. I mean they have, they have picked the animal in which. This is the.

A (70:48)

Truest. Oh.

B (70:49)

Absolutely. You're going to get from, you know, bacon.

A (70:52)

Fat. Your house smells like bacon three hours later. It doesn't really smell like chicken three hours later. Unless you made an.

B (70:57)

Error. Right. Now the last thing I would say is let's say that they did it some other way as you're suggesting they kept re harvesting, which isn't going to make any sense because the hay flick limit isn't that high. But let's say that they did.

A (71:10)

That.

B (71:10)

Yeah. Then the question is, well, exactly what problem are you solving? The only way this solves a problem is that if one animal can produce, you know, indefinitely large quantities of the.

A (71:21)

Product.

B (71:22)

Right. In which case you're going to have this issue. Any other way. I mean, a, you're going to have animals living longer under nasty conditions where they have, you know, liposuction repeatedly, which can't be fun. So somehow this, this just, it's just off and.

A (71:41)

The. But svelte.

B (71:43)

Pigs, the. You gotta learn to read an article like that because what it is is a sales brochure. Oh sure, sales brochure. Just disguised as journalism. Yeah. Presumably the journalist who wrote it doesn't even realize that that's what they've done. But the point is, if you want to.

A (72:02)

Give. I bet that's.

B (72:03)

Right. A fancy gloss to this technology that emphasizes the positive sides and obscures Absolutely. Every legitimate question that you would ask about would sound like this. So. Yep. Anyway, you heard it here first. Might be a decade and a half before we finally start getting an inkling that it's going to be carcinogenic, but that is what I would expect and I would treat it as such. In the meantime, the fact that. That it's gross will help.

A (72:31)

You. Yes. I don't know. I really want to eat that. No, actually I.

B (72:35)

Don'T. No, you.

A (72:35)

Don'T. So many reasons. All the reasons. Don't want to eat.

B (72:38)

That. Have a garbanzo.

A (72:39)

Bean. Seriously. And a.

B (72:41)

Steak. Yeah, and a.

A (72:42)

Steak. Yeah. Okay. I got one other thing that I want to talk about, but you had a. You had.

B (72:48)

A. We can, we can. We can save.

A (72:50)

It. You.

B (72:50)

Sure? Back.

A (72:51)

Saturday. Yes, we.

B (72:53)

Are.

A (72:53)

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There's a article a few weeks ago out about yet more side effects of the GLP1s, the OzEMPIC, which I'm just going to call it Ozempic, even though I know there's a bunch of them and I don't really care. I wanted to talk a little bit about it and it turns out that when I wrote about these things, it was actually a year ago today. I published it on Natural Selections. And so I just wanted to share first a little section from this piece. Can you see my screen? Cool. Let me go back to the top that I publish in Natural Selections a year ago today. Pharma darlings from a land without trade offs. And I like this piece. I wrote it, but I do like it and I recommend all of it. I'm just going to go down and explain what I understand them to be and exactly what they're doing. So if you're interested. But let me just. This is where I describe what was understood at the time a year ago, already understood to be some of the risks. Researchers have known for some time that GLP1ras ozempic cause muscle loss. Concerns about loss of skeletal muscle and therefore loss of strength, resilience, ability to exercise, quality of life have driven some research in this realm. Anecdotally, some people on these drugs, the most common of which is Ozempic, have complained of Ozempic face. Ozempic butt, butt, same thing, but on the butt and even Ozempic personality. There are widespread reports of nausea too, and more limited ones of intestinal obstruction. Got all my links here, so you can. You can look these up. Gee, what could go wrong to the problem of muscle loss though? Never fear, the heroes who brought us Ozempic are working hard behind the scenes to bring us new drugs that will combat the loss of muscle caused by Ozempic. Pitched as if they care about the muscle loss that occurs after immobilizing surgeries like hip replacement. It's abundantly clear that the pharma companies have their eyes on the prize of the vast population who have jumped or might, might yet jump on the Ozempic bandwagon for such people. What's one more pill to pop? Especially if it comes with a sheen of precision and more magical promises. Brand new research, this is again a year ago, finds that Ozempic doesn't just take a toll on skeletal muscle, it's not kind to cardiac muscle either. Experiments done on lab mice found that whether the mice were at a healthy weight achieved by eating a nice standard diet of laboratory mouse chow for 10 weeks, or were overweight achieved with 10 weeks on a high fat, high sugar diet, their hearts and heart muscle cells shrank on ozone. So here's the little visual from the article that I'm citing here. Be they starting out as normal weight mice, admittedly lab mice, normal weight mice or obese mice, when given semaglutide, zempic or something like it, the fat mice lost body weight. The already appropriately weighted mice did not lose body weight. But in both of their cases, their heart size shrunk and their myocyte, that's their heart muscle cell s shrunk whether or not they lost body weight. Therefore, the authors conclude, and I think I write this here, the effect on heart size and myocyte size is due to the drug, not due to the weight loss, which is what has been claimed by Ozempic enthusiasts. In short, and here's just my.

B (76:10)

Summary. Could you say that one more.

A (76:12)

Time? I. I think I'm about to. Okay, in terms of what I wrote here, in short, put a fat mouse on Ozempic and he's going to lose weight weight, but his heart and muscle cells will also shrink. Heart and heart muscle cells. Compare this to put a thin mouse on Ozempic and he will not lose weight, but his heart and heart muscle cells will nevertheless shrink. That's what you want me to repeat? Let me just finish this section. Thus, the heart and muscle cell shrinkage do not seem to be a result of the weight loss, but of the Ozempic itself. To all of those hoping that this latest pharma wonder drug will be the answer you've been waiting for, it's not. We don't yet know what kind of horrors it will release on the human body, but we already have plenty of evidence that it's not safe. The people who are selling it to you don't need it to be safe. They just need plausible deniability and I do want to go to a new article that's just out. But you have a reaction.

B (77:00)

Here. Well, I have two new reactions. One of them might need to wait. But the. The idea that a weight loss drug is having measurable impacts on the heart, I would argue is in and of itself invalidating. Right.

A (77:23)

You. Of the drug being prescribed to people without extraordinary.

C (77:27)

Circumstances.

B (77:27)

Right. Maybe there are extraordinary cases in which it is worth. But the answer is, you know that you're messing with the fundamentals of your heart by taking this.

A (77:36)

Drug. Now they do the. They. They say they didn't see any changes in cardiac function. But how long? You know, I don't remember. I don't remember how long they looked at these mice.

B (77:45)

For. Your heart cell size is going.

A (77:48)

Down. Heart cell size and overall heart size both going.

B (77:50)

Down. Basic point is heart side effects with unknown.

A (77:54)

Consequences.

B (77:55)

Yep. Again, break out your barge pole and don't even use it on this stuff. Stay. Stay farther away than you could reach it with your barge.

A (78:02)

Pole.

B (78:02)

Yeah. Yep. Okay. You had somewhere else you wanted to.

A (78:06)

Go? Yeah, let's take my. My screen off here and. Okay, so just to review. These drugs are known and were known a year ago when I wrote that article with all the primary references. Ozempic and its chemical can. To cause loss of skeletal muscle, decrease in heart size and heart muscle cell size, even absent weight loss, nausea, and intestinal obstruction. Obviously that's like the, like the mechanism, the accepted mechanism of action of these drugs. And Ozempic face and Ozempic butt and Ozempic.

C (78:39)

Personality.

A (78:40)

Right. And now we have. And now we have this. Let me just see here in New York magazine published what November 13, 2025. Life in beige. Are GLP1s worth a life devoid of pleasure? Now, she starts in sort of a explosive way, so I'm just going to scroll past the very beginning. I think the piece is worth reading. But she basically, you screw like you eat and then it goes from there. So it's not the point of why we're here, so I'm going to skip past this. But she says that the author has gone on these things and she's gone on vacation and she's really enjoyed swimming in the Mediterranean, eating good food and all this. But she gets back and she feels just fine. Weeks went by and more things started feeling just fine. A trip to the Rockaways was just fine. I published a story and felt nothing of the accomplishment. I needed new pants, and I realized I had no desire to buy them despite being a documented impulse shop proper. I had no motivation to date. Suddenly I felt about field the same way I felt about ordering takeout on Seamless. I don't know what either of those things are, but nothing sounded especially appetizing, so why bother? I bought a beige sectional like she literally bought a beige section. Which was fitting because my brain felt swallowed in a beige blanket. Eventually I realized my new affinity for beige and appearing dead eyed in photos had coincided with an increase in the dosage of my GLP one Of all the documented side effects of GLP one sulfur burps and other indelicate gastric dysfunctional stress. Interesting. Those aren't the main side effects, but you know that. Cute of you to imagine that burping is the worst thing it's going to cause for you. Second order behavioral effects such as loss of libido and reduced addictive and impulsive tendencies are just starting to gain the attention of researchers. There's been even less research into personality or emotional changes. Unexpectedly. Unexpectedly. By altering their desire for food, some people say they've lost their desire for everything else. What's left is a long lasting state of meh bleh, numb, flat, take it or leave it. It's something like the clinical term anhedonia, the inability to experience joy or pleasure, which is often brought on by depression or in some instances SSRIs. And I mean that's where I want to go here, which is that I feel like so many of these drugs end up doing what SSRIs do. It's like oh my God, the human condition is just so out of control and sometimes it's great and sometimes it's not. Let's flatten you. Let's just flatten you. So the fact that Ozempic and its chemical kin are doing the same thing and taking not just food drive away, but sex drive and everything else else could have seen that coming. And not safe. I think there's one more section I wanted to read from here. Yeah, so you know she's said other things. So some of this is in reference to some of what's earlier in the article. But I noticed a version of this the day before I take my next dose when the drug strength is tapered off. So she's taking this once a week. So the day before she's due to take her next dose I'm hungrier. But food also sounds more interesting to me in general. Online shopping does too. The fact that she's a dedicated online shopper makes all of her claims less interesting to me. But whatever. On Sunday mornings I now eat a bagel and build carts on e commerce sites. So that's apparently success. Some people I spoke to have turned this natural occurrence into an official workaround. They don't want to go off the drug, but they need breaks from the anhedonia. They need breaks from the anhedonia. If that's not a horseman of the coming apocalypse, I don't know what is. They need breaks from the anhedonia, so they occasionally skip a dose or two. One friend, an author, found that their GLP1 left them unable to write. They just didn't have the same motivation they used to. They've developed a practice of skipping a dose when they need to produce work. During that week, they come back to life, as do their sentences. It's made them consider the connection between hunger and ambition and productivity. Food is not the only way to satiate a voracious Appetite. In a 2023 interview with Wire, and this is the last thing I'll read from this piece, Jens Jule Holst, one of the scientists whose work led to the creation of Ozempic, predicted the current state many people are now in that may eventually be a problem. He said that once you've been on this for a year or two, life is so miserably boring that you can't stand it any longer and you have to go back to your old life. It would be the price to pay, he said, when you lose your appetite and also the pleasure of.

B (82:51)

Eating. Well. All right, I have a reaction. It's sort of more.

A (83:01)

General. That's.

B (83:02)

Okay. I'm beginning to get a sense for something. So we have talked many times about what I call the game of pharma. The game of pharma involves using intellectual property to make a huge profit by gaming the scientific system, the medical system, in order to get people to take something based on the plausible argument that it will make them better from something that is not good about their life, or that it will prevent something, yada yada yada. But the reality of those claims is unnecessary to the game of pharma. And if a pharma company was to limit itself to only marketing things that actually worked at a tolerable risk, the number of drugs on the market would be a tiny fraction of what's there, right? Many drugs would just simply be impossible if you held them to a reasonable standard. So this vibrant industry has taken on lots of mechanisms for dispensing with questions of safety, dispensing with questions of efficacy. And the real question is, can we plausibly argue that that thing is in your interest. If so, then we just have to, you know, we can treat all of the things that should make this drug impossible to bring to market as obstacles that get around because we've got this vast toolkit of.

A (84:19)

Tricks. Right.

B (84:20)

Right. Okay. So I want to argue that I'm detecting a new trick that you would expect to evolve in an industry that is basically a racket designed to use intellectual property to bring products to market at arbitrary cost of the health of the people taking them. It involves what do you do if you have a drug like Ozemp topic that has a measurable benefit that people really want? Right. People are desperate to be thinner than they are for understandable reasons. They've been made fat by sedentary lifestyles, polluted food, lack of sunshine, whatever it is, all of the contributing factors of modernity that.

A (85:03)

Cause. And giant serving sizes and always being around food, so always being able to.

B (85:07)

Eat. Modernity has made people.

A (85:09)

Fat. I mean people, people, majority has made people fat. And. But people are also making choices that are making them.

B (85:15)

Fat. Of course, of course. But in any case, what do you do if you have a drug that has a plausible benefit in this regard, a measurable one, but it's got all these ridiculous side effects like, you know, that it affects the heart. It frankly, you know, doesn't minorly affect the heart, it doesn't elevate your heart rate, it actually shrinks the cells of your heart with unknown long term consequences. That's pretty rough. It has the ability to rob life of its pleasure. That definitely dampens the enthusiasm for a drug like this. Right. So what do you do? Well, maybe what you do is.

A (85:59)

You think you the pharma.

B (86:02)

Company. Yeah, you the pharma company. Playing, playing the game. Maybe the idea is, well, what we're really looking for is the maximum area under the curve. That is to say, given this particular molecule that we have rights for. The question is how do we extract the maximum amount of profit? If we brought it to market and we distributed it in a normal way, then people would take it because of course, the benefit is one that people want. And it would quickly start dawning on the small subset of the population that started taking it that it was having impacts on their life that were not good. There would be a certain number of, you know, deaths traced to the heart changes, whatever it is, and the thing goes off the market that gives you a small volume curve. What if the answer is, well, let's make this thing into an absolute.

A (86:57)

Sensation? Right.

B (86:59)

Right. Where this thing comes on the market and people can't get to their doctor fast enough to get the injections because they've been suffering with this cognitive.

A (87:07)

Weight. Oh, I've. I've seen. I've seen supposedly journalistic pieces complaining that it's access to Ozempic that is now like a DEI concern. And like this. This is. This is a health equity concern, is that not everyone can get it when they want.

B (87:19)

It.

A (87:20)

Which. Which is an. It's. It's.

B (87:21)

Ingenious. It's ingenious, frankly. It's how they sold the COVID shots. It's how Facebook got to be. What it was was limited access at the.

A (87:29)

First.

B (87:29)

Yep. So the idea is, okay, we're going to create a sensation that is obsessed with the positive thing that everybody will want. The price of the thing is going to be through the goddamn roof. But people have been suffering every day. They get out of bed and they're like, oh, am I still fat? You know, so the idea of relief from that is so powerful that it doesn't matter how many thousand dollars you charge, you know, for the thing. People are going to want it because it's degrading their lives. So the point is the.

A (87:58)

Hype. Well, it also locks people into the insurance racket more because I believe that insurance, Many insurances are paying for it. And so once you're having this very expensive drug paid for by your bracket insurance, you're less likely to look elsewhere for a more reasonable option with which to fund your health.

B (88:18)

Care. Exactly. So. So you get coordinated rackets that start paying for the thing. The government is going to pay for it because it's going to reduce the obesity epidemic. And so the point is, what you're really looking for is to jack the price up so high that the hype causes people to flood your industry with profit temporarily, knowing that it's not going to last because it's only going to be a year or two before everybody catches on that this has so many.

A (88:48)

Downsides. It's already been worse than. It's already been more than a couple years. I mean, it was getting really big back a year ago when I. When I wrote this. It was already pretty big. But, I mean, I think. Actually, can you see my screen? You know, the newest thing that I saw this week is the New York Post. Okay, it's the New York Post, but whatever. Reporting that Ozempic is now available to your.

B (89:08)

Cats. Yes. Now you, I thought, had a even cleverer technological solution to the problem of fat.

A (89:15)

Cats. Cats. Well, you know, it's not patentable and it doesn't put money in anyone's.

B (89:21)

Pocket. Oh.

A (89:22)

Okay. Yeah. Literally just feed your cats less food.

B (89:28)

Obviously. Right.

A (89:29)

Obviously. Obviously. And you know, as I say here, so this is a, you know, I quote tweeted the New York Post, but as I said, this is, this so perfectly encapsulates our era. My pet is a problem that I have created and can just as easily resolve, but I'd rather add insult injury and push a pharma solution instead of doing the mature, simple and obvious thing. And obviously there are actually complications. People have multiple cat homes and one of them eats more than everyone else. Or, or, or you know, they're feeding them the wrong food. And so whatever they feed them, it's making them fat. Like. Yes. But also it's your cat. Even cats like one of ours, who still is a mouser sometimes and, and you know, and supplements his diet with wild things from outside. Mostly your cat is entirely getting his food from you. It's tougher for people. Like, you're also presumably not being force fed food, but you are your own arbiter of what you're putting in your mouth with your cat. You're seriously going to consider injecting your cat with something because you yourself can't control your impulses enough not to feed them. Every time they talk to you, every time they say, now I'm really hungry, like, yeah, buddy, you gotta lose weight. The people who are giving Ozempic to their cats, I hope they're not parents because that is the same mistake that parents make or many modern parents are making over and over and over again. But he was crying, but he was throwing a fit. Yes. It's your job as a parent to ensure that that behavior does not.

B (90:59)

Last. And they don't necessarily stop when you fed them. So the point is.

A (91:05)

You. They would eat.

C (91:06)

Endlessly.

B (91:07)

Right. So the point is, you know, you can have them healthy and feel like they're not getting enough food or fat as can be and feeling like they're not getting enough food give you sad eyes regardless. Right, exactly. So you're right. It's been longer than a year. But I still think the idea.

A (91:24)

Of, you know, but, but, but they're looking at new.

B (91:27)

Markets. What we saw, what we saw during COVID was an emergency. Was used, used to get a very dangerous remedy normalized in the market to prime the pump for future MRNA shots. Right. In this case, I think what we're seeing is a drug that should have been doa. Right? I mean, yes. Let's face it, this drug is basically a constipation causing drug that reduces your.

A (91:54)

Appetite. Like when slow.

B (91:56)

Peristalsis. Yeah, yeah, let's slow down the way things move through your.

A (92:00)

Gut. Just keep food in your gut for longer.

B (92:02)

Right. What could possibly go wrong? So it's a, it's among other.

A (92:07)

Things you're going to end up, I think like, you know, maybe this isn't true for some reason, but you keep food for longer in your gut, you're actually going to pour, pull more nutrients out of the food than you would have if it passed through more quickly. And so you're actually going to get more calories potentially from food that you ate than if it actually had a normal.

B (92:24)

Traverse. Well, I would argue that's going to be true. I would also argue though that and okay, weird hypothesis coming. My sense is food rots. That much I will get wide agreement on that. Rottenness of the food has a curve that leaves us sort of unaware of it for a long period of.

A (92:50)

Time. Time.

B (92:51)

True. And that what you want are freshest possible foods to pass through you in the shortest reasonable time so that they get properly processed where you don't have things rotting in your.

A (93:04)

Gut. I wonder if the argument is different for.

B (93:07)

Ferment.

A (93:08)

Ferment? Well, ferment for fiber and for ferment. Yes, fiber, which is food for the, for the good bacteria which are in the ferment. Well, I.

B (93:16)

Guess. Oh, I agree. I'm exempting ferment because ferment and things like cheese, where the point is these things are rotted or.

A (93:26)

Fermented.

B (93:27)

Right. They're already preserved in a careful way. That has an ancient root. And so I'm not arguing for those things, but for fresh foods, you want them as soon as you can have them, they degrade over time and the more degraded they are, the more you suffer. I think it is likely for the, the advanced state of decay that they are in as they are moving through your gut. So anyway, that is a deep out, out of the money prediction. I'm sure I will be ridiculed for making it, but given enough time and I'm thinking I may be right about that.

A (94:03)

One. Yeah, I think you might be. And so, you know, I think one of the lessons, one of the takeaways from the last two little bits that we did is, you know, eat real meat that's as fresh as possible. Yeah. Or preserve it well. Yep, jerky's great. That's not, that's not rotting, it's.

B (94:19)

Preserved. Yep.

A (94:20)

Exactly. Something else no, save, save, save something for Saturday. All right, so I think we are done for today. We are actually going to come back on Saturday and then not do a New Year's Christmas Eve Eve episode. So we'll be here on the 20th Saturday and then we'll be back again on. On New Year's Eve. Check out our awesome sponsors this week. They were Everyday Dose and Armor and Crowd Health, the first two of which make edible products that are, are excellent and excellent for you. And crowd health help. Excuse me, Crowd Health helps you escape the diabolical nightmare that is American health.

B (95:03)

Insurance. Yes, absolutely. Good people as well. And check out, yes, both the Carl Benjamin episode of the Dark Horse Inside Rail. Many people. It's a little bit polarizing, but many people have really liked that discussion quite a bit. And I had a great time. I thought Carl was excellent as a guest. And check out, check out the most recent Joe Rogan experience, which is probably.

A (95:33)

Still. It's. It started just before we started, so it's probably still.

B (95:38)

Still. Still.

A (95:38)

True. Yeah, no, still streaming now. Probably still not.

B (95:42)

Completed. Is that how these things even work now? Geez, I don't know. Anyway, check it out on Spotify or YouTube or wherever. It's. I think you'll find it interesting, especially in light of the fact that it's Evolution week here on the.

A (95:56)

Interwebs. It is Evolution.

B (95:59)

Week.

A (95:59)

Yep. I can't say.

B (96:00)

Interwebs. You can't say.

A (96:01)

Interwebs. Apparently I can, but I can't say.

B (96:04)

Interwebs. Okay, I'll say. I'll say it for.

A (96:07)

You. Yeah, no, I think, I think, I think you did. All right. So until you see us next time in a few short days on Saturday, be good to the ones you love. Eat good food and get.

B (96:18)

Outside. Be well.

A (96:19)

Everyone.