 Ta-da! Ta-da! All of the buttons have been clicked. We are live, according to my software. I don't know. I guess we're here and that's a good thing. If you're here with us right now, you're going to be watching the live taping of the This Week in Science podcast. Everything that you see in the next few hours is unedited. We're not taking anything out of this, but if you want the pretty stuff, you better subscribe to the podcast because that's where the editing makes things sound better. So I hope that you are going to enjoy the liveness with us, and yes, we are live. So let's begin a show in three, two, this is twist. This week in science episode number 782 recorded on Wednesday, July 15, 2020. Why friendliness is fabulous. Hi, everyone. I'm Dr. Kiki. Welcome to This Week in Science. Tonight, we will fill your head with cancer cures, pig blood, and friendliness, but first. Disclamer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The information you're hearing from your religious business and or political leaders about the deadly viral pandemic may or may not represent the actual evidence-based understanding of scientists and medical researchers who know what the expletive they are talking about. If viruses could be preyed away, the pandemic would be over by now. If political will sticking to your guns against popular opinion could persuade a virus, the pandemic would be over by now. If pool parties getting back into the office and reopened restaurants was intimidating to the virus, the pandemic would be over by now. If we just took science seriously, if we acted a little sooner or waited at home a little bit longer before going out, the pandemic would be over by now. But instead, we may as well await the ringing of a bell and the voice from the street calling out, bring out your dead, bring out your dead. The only thing that may yet save us from the fate of death by ignorant powers that be is this week in science coming up next. Science to you everybody. Good science to you too, Justin Blair and everyone out there. Welcome to another episode of this week in science. We are back again to talk about all the science that happened this last week and maybe a little bit more because we just like to put that little extra in there because it's science, which is always extra. Okay, on the show tonight, I have stories. Well, I have gas. I have a story about gas. Pig blood. The pig blood. I brought the pig blood and we are joined by a guest tonight to discuss the benefits of being friendly. We'll be introducing Dr. Brian Hare in just a little bit here. Hello, Brian. Hi, guys. Justin, what do you have for the show tonight? I have cancer cures that work, presidential daddy issues, and unpickling your brain with pickled capers. Pickle, pickle, pickle, pick a peck of pickled. Blair, what's in the animal corner? Oh, I have lefties and righties in fish. I have by standing rats, and I have a little bit of seahorse news. I love seahorses. I'm looking forward to that one. So let's do some show here. As we jump into this week in science, I would like to remind you that you can subscribe to us on all podcast platforms. Just look for us for this week in science, and you should find us there. You can also find us on YouTube and Facebook. You can go directly to our website, twisttwis.org, to listen to episodes and see show notes. All right, let's dive into some quick science stories. Finally, cosmological agreement. It's happening. It's here. Data is in from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, the ACT. It mapped the cosmic microwave background radiation of a large portion of the night sky, and the results from its measurements agree with previous results from the European Space Agency's Planck Telescope Survey, which determined a specific measurement of the Hubble constant. The Hubble constant is a measure of how fast our universe is expanding, how fast stuff is running away from other stuff in the universe. This is great news for the validation of cosmic microwave background as a credible measurement method, but it does not solve the discrepancy between measurements that are being made using the cosmic microwave background measurement versus other methods like light from stars and stuff. And so there's this thing called the Hubble tension, which it doesn't solve. It doesn't fix that at all. It just kind of sets it more starkly as a thing that is tense and could also indicate a problem with the standard model of physics. What, Justin? You're looking cranky first. Well, yeah, it's just hard to measure things that are really far away. I mean, it's just difficult. I don't think we have to quite get to the point where we have to start over with a new model. The standard model is something wrong. It's just hard. I think this attitude, maybe this gives me some insight into your state of mind right now. Yeah, the scale of the universe is really big. It's big. It's vast and even. I think it's a long way through the corner store. I think everyone can agree on that, too. It's big. All right. Tell me about some cancer cures that actually work. Is that it? Yeah, so this is a clinical trial evaluating a sample of one. They tried out in this novel recently kind of popular immunotherapy treatment for a child with a form of muscle cancer that had spread into the bone marrow. This is getting to that point of no return. All right. Showed no detectable cancer following treatment. No detectable cancer. This was in the muscles. This was in the bone marrow and now the child is cancer free. Of course, the treatment was the chimeric antigen receptor T cell treatment. This is the CAR T that we've been talking about. These are T cells that are engineered, in this case, to target the HER2 protein on the surface of cancer cells. The trial was conducted by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and is currently or very recently in Nature Communications Journal. So this was a very high-risk child of not surviving very much longer when they initiated this trial, which is what made them a candidate for it because you don't just experiment on children. And this isn't the first time they had tried this. So in previous clinical trials, they had found that their treatment was having positive outcomes but not curing. They were reducing in a subset of patients. When they looked at it, what they decided the problem was it wasn't persisting. These new engineered T cells were going in but they weren't persisting long enough to really tackle. They were knocking down the cancer and some but they weren't quite getting the job done. What they did was kind of interesting. This new wave of it is they used a little bit of chemotherapy to basically wipe out or pretty much eliminate the existing immune cells. They knocked down the existing T cells and upped the amount of these engineered T cells that they put in. Basically it worked. So it worked and then six months later the cancer returned and they went back and did again. They repeated the trial on the same child. And at this point it's been 19 months and they are completely cancer-free still. And it's interesting. This is a quote from one of the authors, Dr. Nabil Ahmed, who is also associate professor of pediatrics and immunology at Baylor. The study shows that CAR T cells could perhaps be acting as vaccines by exposing cancer proteins to the patient's immune system with more understanding for the refinement of the designed CAR T cells could be effective against some currently incurable malignancies. Get in there. Get the body to help fight off whatever is growing that shouldn't be there. Get it to recognize it. Yeah. Yeah, it started with, I mean this is also, this is, you know, whenever people are going, oh, genetic engineering. We're going to use genetic engineering on children in the future. Yeah, the future is today and it's curing cancer. Good. It's a good thing. Let's keep doing it. Let's make it so it, let's turn it into a process that isn't only for the most, the most deathly ill. Let's turn it into a process that can work for other people to, so that people don't get to the point where they are that, that's sick. That's where, that's where we hope we can be some way. That's where the clinical trial, so there were trials before that showed it was going to be, you know, safe. They weren't having, some of the CAR-T therapies in the past did have some potential really negative effects, which is why they only have been using them on people who are deathly ill. Because in some of the earlier trial, people were dying from the treatment. Small percentage, but still enough that you wouldn't do it for somebody who is otherwise healthy, but down the road is going to get worse. But yeah, the more that they improve, you might go in and this, the treatment happens quick. It's like within 48 to 72 hours, like the reversal takes place. The timbers are, I mean, it's insanely quick. So yeah, it's done. Yeah, you can go in on the doctors on a Friday with cancer and Monday be cancer free. That's how insane the future is going to be. It's brilliant. It's not insane. It's brilliant. And it's one goal. And I want to dream of it because it's a happy, happy dream of the future. And I'm going to hold on to this. Okay, Blair, tell me about seahorses. Oh my goodness. Well, what's so famous about seahorses? What do you always think of when you think of seahorses? The two seahorses kissing and then they make a heart. Besides their little tails wrapping around. What I think about is that they're as far as we know, the only vertebrates that have male pregnancy or them and their relatives, you know, like leafy sea dragons and stuff. So what's really cool about this story is that University of Sydney found that seahorses actually have a really specific connection between them and their babies during the male pregnancy. And this is through something that is basically a placenta. They're actually transporting nutrients via placenta to their babies. It's not exactly like a human placenta. They don't have an umbilical cord. And so they need to do further work to figure out exactly how it's working. But as far as they can tell, the same way that human mothers transport nutrients, oxygen and immune modulation, they do all that in seahorses as well from the father. But it's the daddy who has the placenta. Is it, does it come from the babies like it does in mammals? We don't know. Yeah. So the question, where's it coming from? Like what hormones are going on inside seahorse fathers? Because you would assume that placenta formation, these sorts of things are pretty, pretty strongly linked to things that we consider fundamentally female. But clearly that might not be the case. Okay, so this is my question. I mean, it's fundamentally the parent who has the babies internally. Fundamentally. Can I just ask a question? Did somebody just decide which was the male and which was the female seahorse and just got it wrong? And for some reason, nobody's fixing it. Justin, if I may, one makes fern and one makes eggs. Okay, I guess that's, I guess that, I mean, that's one definition, I suppose. That is one definition. We just picked, we just picked that one and have stuck with that. Okay, that's fair enough. Yeah. I guess. We like naming things. We're human. That's just, I will give you a name and now you are named. Yes, you shall be. You know, sometimes though, we get gassy, which seems to be the last two decades, unfortunately. I'm so sorry. Driven by, driven by, driven by increases in agriculture and in natural gas, methane emissions have reached 10% a rate of increase of 10% over the past two decades. They have increased reaching 596 million tons in 2017. This is pretty much due to the increased consumption of red meat globally, especially in Africa, which was interesting to the researchers. And it's very tied to these agricultural emissions related to cattle ranching, except for in Europe, where European countries have been working very hard to reduce red meat consumption and cattle ranching. And also, they've made efforts to reduce landfill emissions. And so the Central Europe's emissions have been going down compared to everybody else's, but the rest of everybody is pretty much negating that benefit. So the thing with the methane, if I'm correct, and I probably am not, is methane does not persist in the environment as long as carbon does. However, has a, has a, Mark, wait, which is it? You can't say both. You can't say I'm right. You are correct. Okay. Does not, does not persist as long as carbon in the atmosphere. However, has a like magnetotally larger effect, like a magnified effect than carbon on the greenhouse. Right. So we heat up quicker with methane than we would on the carbon, but it won't have a 50 year cycle. It'll be much shorter. Exactly. So if we, methane sticks around for about 12 years, and with, that's very a lot shorter than carbon dioxide, but yeah, one ton of methane is the equivalent of 85 tons of carbon dioxide. So the fact that our methane emissions right now, during a time when we're trying to consider emission reductions to stop global warming, this is potentially a short term problem because it also feeds into these, these feed forward cycles where you have increases in heating that lead to the release of more methane, that lead to the release of more carbon dioxide that everything it gets. Right. Because you know, there's a tremendous amount of methane underneath the frozen tenders of Siberia and Canada. And as those melt, those release, we accelerate faster with the heating more about the, if it was just a methane problem though, like it's, it's sort of weird, but like we could like all take those steps that need to be taken and be done with global warming in 10 years. The problem with the problem with the carbon cycle is it's 50 years. So I don't even know what year it is. 1970 was 15 years ago. Is that right? 1970 is 50 years ago? No. No. I don't want to think about that. Okay. Sorry. Sorry. I know that kind of hit home too. Like this is why I paused. I'm like, wait, that's like almost how, oh God. But the global warming, the global warming we're largely experiencing now is the carbon that started in 1970. Yep. Put it in those terms. Yep. It's even longer than that, Justin. It can be up to and over 200 years. The, I mean, most of it stays about 50 years, but it can stay for hundreds of years. Right. But it's like, we had the muscle cars like thing going on. No, I guess that's more 60s, huh? Yeah. The 70s was when we got the small cars. It's more that there's carbon dioxide in our atmosphere right now from the industrial revolution. Yeah. Anything that we do right now, we're not going to see results until the end of this century, if not beyond this century. So we better get to work, everybody. Not just methane. All right. Speaking of getting to work. Pig blood. It seems to work for some cool things, but not just pig blood pigs. Apparently hooking damaged human lungs that have been taken out of people up to a swine's circulatory system, like basically going, hey, pig, let me hook this lung up to you. It can heal the lungs and those, those once damaged, damaged lungs could potentially be used for transplantation into people who need lung transplants, which might become popular and very handy. But if you, because I was like, oh, but if you remove the lungs, you can't just be like, hold on, I'll give them back to you in a bit when they're better. I see what's happening here. All right. Right. So now we are, it's very difficult to take lungs out of a donor body and keep them healthy long enough to get them into a recipient for a transplant. We have technologies that allow, that extend the life of the lungs for up to several hours, eight hours or so after they've been removed up to, and very often they end up damaged or they have gone past their shelf life and then they can't be used for transplants. But apparently hooking them up to pigs, the pig circulation fixes everything and then they could be good as new. Here you go. Can you just explain a tiny bit more what hooking them up to a pig is? I'm having trouble picturing that. I'm literally like patienting lungs outside. A little bit of tubing, a couple of syringes on either end. The blood supply of the lungs is hooked up to the circulatory system of a pig so that the blood then circulates through the lungs. It circulates back into the pig. It gets cleaned up by the pig's liver and kidneys and goes through the pig metabolism and then it goes back through the lungs again. All of the cells and the things that pig bodies and metabolisms do to keep the pigs healthy, it benefits the excised lungs. Pretty cool stuff. That's awesome. It's very awesome. Anything that we can do to increase the number of organs that are available to people for transplantation is a good thing at this point in time. If you just tuned in, this is This Week in Science. If you're interested in a twist shirt or mug or face mask, we have these things in our Zazzle store. You can head over to twist.org. Click on the Zazzle link and browse our store. Find some nice items to share your love of twists with the world and support twists at the same time. We appreciate that. Tonight, we are joined by Dr. Brian Hare. Dr. Hare is a core member of the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience, a professor in evolutionary anthropology and psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. With his wife, Vanessa Woods, he wrote The Genius of Dogs and now has written Survival of the Friendliness. The Friendliness? No, the Friendliest. Thank you for joining us tonight. It's a pleasure to be with you, Dr. Kiki and Justin and Blair and your corgi, Blair. What is your corgi's name? Sadie. What a cutie. Sadie. Hi, Sadie. She's looking right at you. You're awesome, Sadie. I've been watching her running past. Brian, let me just stop you right there. Brian, let me just stop you right there. Okay, so do you feel an undue pressure having written a book about the benefits of friendliness to be friendly all the time? Oh, oh, my wife. I thought you were going to ask about the dog book first. Oh, okay. He just went right there. Justin, if my wife was here, she could really tell you that Survival of the Friendliest, writing that book was a marriage. She is a very good science communicator and I would like to think I can do some decent science, which means that if you enjoy the book, it's despite me. She can take broccoli and turn ice cream and I just mess it up and make it something that people wouldn't want to read. So we had lots of debates and battles about how to write the book. It took us seven years to work through this marital hurdle. So she would say that I am capable of not being nice is all I'm trying to say. You're capable of it. But you seem like a fairly friendly guy. Is this why you like dogs so much as well? I mean, I guess so. I do really, really like dogs. I grew up, my best friend growing up was a dog and we went everywhere all over the neighborhood together. He went everywhere with me and I don't know, he was just my buddy and I was like any dog owner wanting to know what he thought and what went through his mind and what was it like to be a dog? Was he like me or is he totally different? And so I went to college and I found out you can do this for a living. You can like hang out with animals and try to figure out how they think and like people pay you for that. I am in. I am in. So that's what I've been after is trying to imagine and learn more about what it is to be an animal and how their minds work and that helps us understand ourselves. I think it does. So you've worked with dogs. You've worked with chimpanzees. You've worked with bonobos. Which one is which one's mind do you find the most interesting? Oh, wow. Yeah. So I've worked with a lot of different animals. I've worked with lemurs. I've worked with wolves, foxes, a whole menagerie of different primates. And I would say that I sort of gravitate to the Great Apes. I love dogs. They're absolutely my favorite. But I gravitate to the Great Apes because they just when they look at you, you just are like whoa, like that's different. And you want to know like how are you like me? I mean, are you thinking about me thinking? And so with chimpanzees after interacting with them for about 20 years and having many chimpanzee friends, if you ask me the personality of the species, what I tell you is they're kind of like the cool kid in school that you wanted to be friends with that really didn't want to hang out with you. But they were awesome. And you really wanted them to sit at your lunch table, but it wasn't going to happen. And bonobos are like the ape that is they're like the goofiest, silliest, like you're just like how do you exist? In terms of their personality, you're just like I don't know, like how did you happen? But they are absolutely you cannot help falling in love with them. Of course, they would be the kids in school that you'd be friends with. They're kind of a goofy, like lovable, you know, anybody can be friends with a bonobo kind of ape. Yeah, I can't quite relate to that. I went to a high school that didn't have any cool kids. You were just in a giant bonobo group. That's all. That's nice. I would like that. I think a lot of us, I mean, we think about being in the world and how nice would it be to exist in a society of individuals that are not as aggressive, as say chimpanzees are known for their aggression and their violence. Dogs are usually very friendly, but everybody knows, you know, they're you don't trust a dog immediately, you have to get to know them. You don't know if they're going to be a nice dog or not. You know, so how do we how do we start looking at the traits? How are you starting to look at the traits? How did you get into digging into this and the question of, you know, friendliness and the benefits of it? Well, it's it's fun to be able to say what I'm going to say on a show where you guys were talking about rocket science earlier because not all science is rocket science. And you know what, United Sciences, you can powerfully attack a question and potentially falsify an idea that you think might answer it. And so my my origin story is that I told you about my pet dog as a kid named Oreo, and I went to college and I was talking to my undergraduate advisor who is an esteemed developmental psychologist and a very famous cognitive scientist named Mike Tomasello. And he was explaining to me that between nine and 12 months, all of us, all humans have a critical moment where we begin to use gestural communication and we begin to understand that others have minds like ours and the gestures that they make are a window into their minds. So at that moment from nine to 12 months, that's when we begin thinking about the thoughts of others. And as we do that, that allows us to participate in culture and learn from others, things that other species aren't able to learn from generations past. So it really puts us on a totally different plane, even though we have this horrifically underdeveloped brain when we're born and still at nine months, you know, a terribly underdeveloped brain relative to other great apes. So he's telling me this story and I'm like, well, that's really neat. And he says, and it's completely unique that humans understand these types of gestural communication intentionally that I'm trying to tell you what I want or what I don't want. And, and, you know, not knowing any better at 19, I was like, well, I think my dog does that. And that was literally the start of my career was me saying, I think my dog does that. And, and so he, he said, well, yeah, sure, everybody's dog is calculus. And I said, no, let me tell you the story of my dog. And I play fetch and he would lose balls and I'll gesture and telling what direction the ball was, he couldn't find and he'd run off of that direction and orbit look for it. And so he could tell I was serious. And he didn't have he hadn't had a dog since he was a kid. So he thought, okay, well, let's go do some experiments. And at that moment, that's where I learned what science really is. It's not about being the one that has all the facts or being right. It was, he was so excited. When I came back and showed him the tapes of the dog, like my pet dog following gestures that I was making, he went and showed colleagues that he'd been working on theories with. And so I remember later after we did a whole series of experiments, we published, you know, a bunch of papers and one of eventually in science. And I remember I was interviewed by a reporter reports and what do we learn from this? What, what have we learned from all this research? I said, well, nothing, everybody knew that dogs followed gestures. It was a scientist who were surprised, you know, apparently they don't have dogs. So the, no, but in a more serious note, after 20 years of research studying dog psychology and trying to understand how they think about the thoughts of others, we really have very carefully and beyond my pet dog. Now we've studied thousands of dogs and we studied all sorts of different breeds and we studied exotic breeds like dingoes and dugini singing dogs. And I've studied wolves and experimentally domesticated foxes, et cetera. And the summary is that if you were to ask me which organism on this planet is most like a nine to 12 month old child as it's first starting to participate in culture. In terms of that social skill, I would tell you it's a dog. It's the domesticated dog. It is not bonobos and chimpanzees. They can run circles around dogs on most other measures of psychology or cognition. But on that one, dogs sort of have a special ability that we think is evolved as the result of domestication. Yeah, domestication is such a thing. And Justin, I was going to say if you have any questions about the Trut Fox study, Brian is the person to talk to because he's visited those foxes. So it wasn't on that though. The thing that first popped into my mind is I thought I had heard that wolves are actually quicker at reading a human gesture, like getting the clue from a human looking at where the treat is and finding it and picking up on our gestures, which then made sense like why the dog could get domesticated so easily from the wolf is because we already had somehow through similar hunting patterns or something like that. We had this some sort of shared nature of visual communication between our own groups that then translated. So in 1999, that's exactly what I thought Justin. And we actually proposed that that might be the case that the reason dogs were doing this and great apes were not is because why would a distant relative millions of years separated from humans have this skill that is critical to becoming human? And the proposal was, well, it must be something about wolves. They hunt and they have to pay attention to their quarry and read the social gestures and they have to understand each other. Maybe that's what it was. We've gone and tested a lot of wolves. And I've just completed a five-year project working in Minnesota, looking at dozens of wolves and comparing. This is one of the sad stories about our the research career. We were forced to work with lots of puppies. And so we worked with about 50 wolf puppies that were raised by people. We had to hand rear them and sleep with them. And they had to be with people at all times. It was difficult to find people to help us. Anyway, you lose sleep. And we tested dog puppies too. And this is where I'm with Justin because it sounds really fun dog puppies, but they're difficult. They don't sit. They don't stay. I mean, they're super cute and they try to get away with everything. You're like, guys, we're doing science. So they don't care. They don't care. And it did take us a while to figure out methodologically because our methods are very complicated. But it involves hiding something in one of two places. I don't know if you followed that. A little bit like, I don't know, your first fMRI or maybe, I don't know, learning how to do PCR. It's very, you know, you hide something in one of two places and then you gesture or look where it is. And the question is, can they listen to you and realize that you're trying to communicate? And the problem when you test puppies is that you have to get down so they can see you because they're small. Even the biggest puppies that we work with, because these are eight to nine-week-old puppies I'm talking about. Super cute. Just coming up. Right? Gross. So cute. Anyway, so there they are. And you're testing them. You're trying to line them up and they're going to make this choice. Be serious puppy. And what do they do? And my first idea is when I was doing my PhD, I started working with puppies and, you know, trying to take myself seriously. And first time, I like gesture. I'm like, all right, what's he going to do? This is going to be so cool. Can they do it at this young? I'm so desperate to know. Or is it something that takes a lot of experience? The dog just runs right in my face and licks me everywhere. Yeah. And I'm like, perfect. This is going to be a nightmare. So anyway, we progress. We figured out how to get puppies to be more serious about science. In fact, just yesterday, we published a paper on almost 200 puppies and on a whole series of cognitive tests that are service dogs. And one of the things that we've been able to use this, all our learnings from is to figure out how to better predict which dogs might make it through assistance dog training. And the main group we work with is in Santa Rosa, Canine Companions for Independence. So your neighbor. Very nice. And these puppies, they're smart. They're friendly. Is there, did you find doing the work between the dogs and the wolves that there was a huge difference at the age to that? Thank you. So I got so busy telling about how, I was just trying to please Justin because I could see the skepticism and I'm like, you don't even know how right you are. But anyway, the, yes, what we found is that young puppies actually perform as well as adult dogs in reading human gestures at eight weeks. And with almost no exposure to people, they can still be with their litter. They haven't gone home. They have barely interacted with people. And we compare them to wolves that we've literally been with for weeks and and pull them off mom at five days old and I've been with them for two months. And, you know, we play the same games and on the social skill test, the wolves really struggle. They're great on all the non-social stuff. So if they have to remember something or they have to have some self-control, the wolves look like dogs. But on the social interaction with humans, and it's really specific to us, they're not that interested in us and they don't listen to what we're trying to communicate. So it does seem like there's, there really is an interesting thing that's happened as a result of domestication. Yeah. So domestication is this process. How long is that? What? The wolf to dog? How long has the dog been domesticated? Like, how long have we been being buddies right now? Well, this is fun because, you know, I can be a little bit sassy about the geneticists since I'm not one. So I started, you know, I'm really interested in the impact of domestication. So people start, you know, working with mitochondrial DNA, and the original date that was handed out was 140,000 years. Dogs were domesticated 140,000 years ago, according to mitochondrial DNA. So this was a big story. And, you know, so now the estimates are, and it's still remarkable, but it sounds less extreme than 140,000 years ago. The best estimates are 15 to 25,000 years ago. And so, and that's using archaeological and genomic comparisons. And now, you know, there's genomes and so everybody is feeling more confident about these estimates. The reason that's exciting, and it's a good question, because it really, it totally alters how you think about dogs, is 15 to 25,000 years ago, not a single human population was relying on agriculture that we would recognize as, you know, planting crops and intentionally growing crops to survive on. And so that means that dogs are evolved or the population of wolves that evolved into dogs were interacting with hunter gatherers and foragers. And so the idea that they went and grabbed a bunch of wolf puppies and we're like, hey, let's make dogs. Let's feed them and walk them and pick up their poop. Hey, these guys make a lot of garbage that's actually kind of delicious. We should probably hang out with them. That's probably more like it. Yeah. Scavengers, opportunists, suddenly the Venn diagram of needs overlapped. So you guys, so I hang out with a lot of primatologists and when you hang out with primatologists, you have to talk about poop. So all, all conversations lead straight to poop. So I, is it cool to talk? I'm a parent, Blair's a zoologist. Yeah, we can talk about poop here. I scooped poop for many years. Yeah. Justin, are you cool talking about poop or? Absolutely. Okay. Okay. So, so my favorite study in the last three, four years, because Blair mentioned dogs being more reliant on, or maybe there's, humans are creating a lot of garbage as we, as we start to become more sedentary, we're living in higher densities, creates this new ecological niche. There's a new resource available. It's predictable. You can find it. It doesn't run away. A wolf population that could start taking advantage of that would be really, you know, onto something. And that's what we think happened, that wolves became attracted to this and fear of humans was replaced with actually an interest, a curiosity and an attraction. And so that type of friendliness became selected via natural selection, not humans intentionally breeding. So what does that have to do with poop? Well, often the story is always about garbage. It's that, oh, humans make garbage. Well, there's something else that humans make and poop. And so, you know, hunter gathers that modern hunter gathers have been studied. They have, they go outside their camp. They usually go, you know, 100 meters or more, they'll go to the bathroom and they leave. Well, that means that 100 meters outside a camp, you basically are leaving what is the equivalent of a wolf energy bar. And the reason I say a wolf energy bar is because there's a study from three years ago where some poor graduate students, this is incredible, some poor graduate student had to follow village dogs in Botswana and record everything they ate. And over a third of their diet was human feces. Now, over a third. Yeah. And so, yes. And so then the researchers being good researchers were like, what's in the poop? Why are they eating so much poop? And when they did the nutritional analysis of human feces in this area that the dogs were working on, it ends up that it had the protein level of chicken and it had the carbohydrate levels of your best pasta dish. So you've literally have all this cooked digested protein carbs that we don't digest because of our passage time as primates that we just leave it there for the wolves. I love this. I'm never talking about garbage again. And I'm interesting. I'm interesting. Dr. Justin's not a real Dr. Energy Bars. So that's what's in them. Wow. That's fascinating. Yeah, the problem is, you know, I just, I've thought about how to approach the dog food companies, but I just don't know. I don't know. I don't think it'll go over there. Yeah, I don't think it will. And people who are trying to feed raw food, you know, the made at home dog diet. Well, okay. In the book, 2015, there was a study of most Googled items about dogs and it was why does my dog eat poop? And so I can answer that now it's because they evolved eating poop. Yeah, I mean, most of the most of the kind of conventional wisdom has to do with, oh, it has to do with smell or hormones or like information gathering or, you know, puppies are around their mom who eat their poop to cover their tracks and all this kind of stuff. So this is a totally different angle. Yeah. And that may be true for same species poop. So if they're, if they're eating other dogs, other dogs poop, they're getting microbiome or hormonal or olfactory formation, et cetera. But when it's human poop, I think the best guess is it's just nutritional. Wow. So it's really funny because, because you're, because I'm excited about this hypothesis of dogs evolving through natural selection, I see this paper and it's all about dogs eating poop. And I'm ecstatic. And there was a moment. It explains everything. Yeah. And there was a moment I was like, what's happened to me? Who have I become? It's just who you are. It's not who you've become. It's who you are. But that sort of changed the romance of the story. It wasn't the band of hunter-gatherers and the pack of wolves working as a team to bring down the big game. No, that's not, that maybe isn't how it started. Yeah, I think that that developed. I, you know, at the end of the book, we still, we should tell the story of the MARTU hunter-gatherers in Australia. And there's a beautiful story about their relationship with Dingo's that Doug Bird and Rebecca Bird told us they're Penn State and they work with, they've worked with MARTU for decades. And they were working with MARTU and the MARTU said, they kept saying to them over years that, oh, Dingo's are like our mothers. And they just thought that was metaphorically, you know, that's nice. They like the dogs, but they, as they came to know them, they learned that young MARTU children, or sorry, when, when a lot of their friends who are adults, they said that when they were kids and their parents were out foraging, and they would come back because they were exhausted, they were kids, they'd come back to camp, and they didn't have anything, the dogs would come with them and they would regurgitate, and then the kids would cook what was regurgitated into some kind of mash, and then they would eat it and wait for the kids, I mean, for the parents to come home. And so, so they literally, the dogs fed the kids a snack. They saw babies and just wow, they fed them. Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah. And so that's a deeper relationship between humans and dogs even, I mean, in modern society of how we think of dogs now, it's like, oh, my fur baby, you know, we have these animals, these are, you know, our comfort animals or our, you know, we've got, we have dogs with us for very different reasons than we used to, and the relationship is very different. But this story strikes me as something that is, like, I mean, that is a caring relationship on both sides. The Dingo's knowing that the children needed to eat. How does that come about? I mean, come on. I mean, the dogs are reading into hunger cues of children, of human children. That is cross species communication and understanding that, that is, that is, that's amazing. Well, they just, you just, you gotta think, would you, if you came across a bunch of puppies in the wild, would you feed them? I would, but that's because I'm a person and we take cute puppies and we feed them. I mean, a little... But would you barf up your lunch for them is really good question. But that's how they feed their young. So it's all, it's the same way. Would you like some Thai food? So, so I don't want to get away from this, but something just occurred to me. So I remember reading about, and I don't know where, but it was some early camp and they were like realizing it was an agricultural village or community and they had analyzed the dog scat and found it to have, they were like, oh, the dogs were vegetarian. There was lots of vegetarian matter in it. Now I'm, now I'm questioning whether it was just the fact that they were, oh, wow. So there may not have been vegetarian dogs, but what would you call it? What is it? Scat-a-terians? Yeah, they may not... They're copropogists. Yeah, copropogists. Yeah, yeah. Copropogists. I just, because they make, because I was like, yeah, they're like, you can feed a dog on a vegetarian diet. They were the ancient agricultural societies that all the time, but now maybe that's, maybe there's a little signal. Well, there's a twist to it. Yeah. There is some truth to that though, Justin, because you all mentioned the problem of carnivory as it relates to methane production and also the raw food movement where dog food companies are really excited to get people buying raw food. And there's this myth about dog-wolf relationship and that your dog is really a wolf and it needs to eat what wolves eat. Well, just like we should eat exactly what our Paleolithic ancestors think. Yeah, us and our dog are both going after caribou sometime soon. Maybe not this weekend, but we're thinking about next weekend. We're going to go bring one down. Right, right. So it's, you know, evolution is descent with modification and often descent, the fact that we're similar to a close relative really gets played up very heavily. And there's really nice evidence that when it comes to dog's ability to digest starch and their dietary preferences and what they need to be healthy, it is, it obviously in, you know, in the VIN diagram of two circles, it overlaps significantly with wolves. But by no means do they have to have raw food or rely on carnivory, not at all. They can digest starch in a way that wolves can't. And there's some cool studies on their microbiome that support that. And is this part of that domestication process? Is the fact that they can digest these starches, does that have anything to do with the fact that they're friendlier and that they can cooperate with people and that they notice our social cues? Yeah, so what happened was when we found that wolves and dogs were different and that dogs were better at reading human gestures, we kind of were stumped. We were like, okay, well, it's probably domestication. It doesn't need a lot of exposure to humans. Wolves, it's not probably inherited from wolves because wolves are not showing much skill. They look more like chimps and bonobos. But how are we going to test that it actually was domestication? So then I had this opportunity to go to Siberia where Dmitry Belayev in 1959 started an experiment where they selected a population of foxes to be friendly towards humans. So they kept a control line that they bred randomly in how they respond to humans. But the experimental line, at seven months, if you approached and were interested in a human and you were friendly and wanted to basically be pet and jump in their lap, they would then breed you together with another fox who was equally as friendly. And so after just 10 to 20 generations, what they were able to show is that relative to that control population that they kept, there were increases in friendly behavior, and also puppy-like behavior in the adult foxes. So they maintain sort of this whiny puppy, cute begging kind of vocalization. They wag their tails at a much higher rate as adults instead of the control line that that goes away. And then the big shocker and the really exciting thing was they only selected based on friendliness and behavior. But the foxes also that were selected for friendliness started showing high frequency of floppy ears, curly tails, changes in their coat color like the white spot on the forehead of many domesticated animals. And their facial features really changed. They got shorter, more feminized faces and reduced canines. So all of this happened as an accident of the selection for friendliness. I went to Siberia. I was actually the first non-Russian to get to collect data and publish a paper with the foxes. And my advisor, Richard Rangham, and this is where I got to be wrong, basically said, you have to go test the foxes. And I was like, come on, they haven't selected for cognition. Like obviously the thing I'm interested in natural selection selects for like directly. Like you're not going to get more cognition if you don't select for it directly because I study that. That's what I study. I wouldn't study something natural selection didn't think was important. And so he was like, ah, it could be another byproduct. I'm like, there's no way. So anyway, I go to Siberia and he's totally right. And I'm totally wrong. It ends up that the experimental foxes are like dog puppies. They use human gestures very flexibly and spontaneously the same way that dog puppies do. So it allowed us to see that selecting for friendliness that creates this domestication like syndrome brings along with it an increase in social savviness. Social savviness for each other as well. I mean, were the foxes better at relating to each other domesticated than they were their wild brethren? No, it's really specific to humans. Very, very much specific to humans. The control population understand each other. They can read each other social cues. The experimental line can do that too. There's no evidence that they differ in that way. It really is specific to humans where fear of humans was replaced with interest and an attraction. And so they apply an old cognitive skill to a new social partner. And they can now solve new problems they couldn't solve before. It happens their new social partner is pretty good at solving a lot of problems they probably can't. So pretty good partnership. The cognitive flexibility, I think, is a really that's the really interesting perspective because is it now that it's the more generalizable ability to take the skills that they the skill set that they had, like you said, now be able to apply it to humans as opposed to just foxes. And does this then mean that they have that they're they're thinking their cognitive abilities then become broader because they're more flexible? Mm-hmm. Yeah, so so that's exactly the idea is that they sort of were released from a constraint of fear that was preventing them from solving or having a certain type of social interaction. They didn't have the tolerance. They didn't have the interest or the the you know, motivation to interact with humans couldn't solve problems about in the wild. It's adaptive to just run from humans. They're you know, the only problem you need to solve is get away. But you because of this artificial selection you take away that fear and underneath it is if you could replace that with attraction, all of a sudden you have this new ability to solve a whole set of problems you couldn't solve before. And we think that's a pattern that has repeated again and again in nature. And we've used that fox model and looked at all sorts of different species, including ourselves. Right. And that is the the key here, the idea of this self-domestication of humans that we at some point, I mean, is this the way that your your your work and your evidence is pointing that at some point we started choosing the friendlier partners. We started choosing the friendlier leaders. We started making friendlier tribes. And that is that what made us smarter and better at dominating the world. So we in the book, we argue, Vanessa and I argued that we're the we're the friendliest species of human to ever evolve. And in that statement, if I unpack it a little bit, there's an important new kind of revolutionary understanding of human evolution, which is it wasn't really until the last 50,000 years we were alone. There were many other humans that have big brains, were cultural, and probably were linguistic. Normally, when you'd ask a group of people in the public, oh, why are humans different from other animals? Why are we able to do it? They'd say, oh, we have big brains, we have language and culture. Well, that doesn't explain why we're the last human standing. Why are all the others, you know, if it was just big brains and language and culture, we should be extinct too, or they should still be here. No, no, no, no, no, we killed them all. Of course, because we're so aggressive. Okay. Okay. Vanessa would like that. So, so the idea I would, I would say they're still here. Like a lot of them are still here in our DNA. I mean, I'm playing devil's advocate, Justin. I know you are. I'm saying the other way. I'd say we loved them into submission that co mingled whoever the proto proto human was co mingled everyone into into joining the team. I mean, it's hard to it's hard to argue with those facts. But let me, let me tell you the angle we take on this, which is that we think that the reason we're the last, the key to our survival and why we thrive in other species when extinct is because we evolve to be the friendliest human and we have a new social category that evolves that other species do not have. So our two closest relatives, Bonobos and chimps, that I've spent a lot of time studying, they understand and can recognize those that are familiar as their group members. And those that are unfamiliar to them, they know are not in their group. Now, Bonobos have a positive response to strangers. Chimpanzees have a very negative response to strangers, but both species use familiarity and physical appearance, facial features to recognize who they know and don't. Humans do that too, but we do something in addition that changes the whole calculus of our social, of our societies or allows for society, which is we have group identity. So we have a sort of a way to recognize that complete strangers who we've never seen or met before are members of our group. And whether it's an accent or a ritual or something that somebody wears or tattoo or even a type of tool you make, instantly you realize by seeing that marker that you actually are seeing a stranger that's in your group. And no other species can do that. And as soon as you can recognize strangers that are your group members, you can network minds together, innovate much faster, share innovations across wider spaces. And not unlike the internet, internet revolutionizing innovation, it would have had the same impact. So technology takes off and we can out-compete the other humans potentially. Now, I know that this seems Pollyannish because of you already saying, we beat them because we killed them and who knows how those genes got in our species from the other species. So the argument and partly because we were coming from the self-domestication hypothesis and thinking about the cognitive architecture that humans have and the neurobiological architecture humans have that allow us to think about others' thinking that we sort of already covered originates from 9 to 12 months in those gestural communication. That neurobiology and psychology allows us to have compassionate empathy for our group mates and love those that are not our family as if they are. But that same system that allows for our unbelievable and unique friendliness, it can shut down. It can turn off and we can not apply it to all humans that we meet. And especially human groups that threaten our group or our group identity. And so that is, I think, the key of how you have this paradox of where we are the kindest and the cruelest species. And it's because the pressure was to be friendly to cooperate, innovate, and have better technology. But our social identities then set up the possibility to morally exclude those that threaten our group that we love so much. So how do we fix that? Yeah, I mean, that is at the crux, right? Yeah, exactly. Magic. It's at the crux of so many issues in modern society right now where our group identity is being used against us by propaganda, by people, yeah, just propaganda basically. And it is affecting the way that families are able to interact now. And this is, from your perspective, from the book, from the work, this has allowed us to survive for so long. It's deeply ingrained. How do we short-circuit what we've done in modern society to be able to continue to survive? So just quickly, the evidence for selection for friendliness for those of you who are reasonably skeptical of this idea. The interesting thing about domestication is because it changes morphology, we could look for fossil signatures of friendliness in the faces of extinct humans. And what we saw when we did that is that human faces over the last 100,000 years have basically become, in shorthand, more dog-like. We retain juvenile characteristics, facial features, and other signals that suggest that the same neural hormones that are being affected, the same developmental pathways that are affected in dogs or the experimental foxes, or I would argue bonobos, that same process has happened in us. So then, if this is true, that our nature is a friendly one, but that same mechanism that allows for friendliness, when it dampens, when it shuts off, and our empathy is like a spotlight that becomes more focused on the group we love, what do we do? How can we have a friendlier future? And I would say in the book, we talk about three options, sorry, four options. We reject two out of hand. One is, let's breed people to be friendly. And I mentioned that because normally people who are science-minded kind of giggle uncomfortably with that. But every talk I give on this, I get a very sincere question from an audience saying, can we just breed people to be friendlier? And of course, we dealt with that in a book, The Ugly History of Controlling Human Breeding. And we then also tried to, but not just do a history, but talk about the science of why it wouldn't work. It actually wouldn't even work anyway. Not to mention, it's morally repugnant. But wait, haven't we done that? I feel like that's what society is. I'm going back to starting with agriculture and the first civilizations and like, okay, you know what? We need to create something, call it a law because we need some rules if there's going to be 50 of us who are all trying to sleep in the same hut and it fits too. We need to start making all these. And we started, I mean, we started limiting what was, I mean, they wrote laws, which granted they're still there. Like you shouldn't kill somebody. Like that became a law at some point for the first time where people are like, really? That's going to be inconvenient. But okay, fine. I'll try. I'll try really hard. Well, okay, you just can't kill anybody. But at the same time, Justin, you get to this point where, you know, if you talk about population dynamics and the frequency distribution of certain neurotypes throughout the population, you have the super aggressive people and you have the super friendly people at opposite ends of the spectrum. And then, you know, they mix somewhere in the middle with varying levels. And if you were to start breeding only the friendly people, it's not just, oh, we made laws and people were friendlier. And so we had more nice relationships, which happened probably. But the question is, if you took only the friendly people at the friendly end of the spectrum and made them breed. So that's what happened, I think. And you're saying that's what happened, I think in Denmark. That's Denmark. Every time they came back, they would load up the ships and send them back again. So like all the pillaging and the raping and the violence, and then they ended up just staying in England. They're like, if we go back, they're just going to send us away again. It's Iceland. And then all the friendly people are in Denmark. I just think if you're breeding for friendliness, if you're breeding for friendliness at humans, that kind of, besides all of the moral stuff, there's an opportunity that you're also breeding for submission or complacency. And that could be a problem to our general society, depending on who's in charge. So it seems like I need to tell you our argument for why it wouldn't work. I just heard the voice of Vanessa saying, that's too much. That's too much. They don't want to know that. But all right, let me tell you the argument. The argument is that height, for instance, is one of the most heritable traits that has been studied. Genetic variability across individuals explains 20 to 30% of variants in humans about how tall you are. 700 to 900 genes are responsible, implicated in variability and height. So what about behavior in humans? The best estimates are that any behavioral trait is tens of thousands of genes are involved. So of the 50 or whatever we have, 50,000 we have, it's a large majority of them are going to be involved in any behavior. So behavioral systems are highly buffered. And so what would be required to do what the Fox experiment did is they only allowed, Dr. Kiki said 10%, but actually they only allowed 1%. So I'm not very good at math when it gets out to billions. But if you only allowed 1% of 7 billion people to reproduce, that's going to be pretty dramatic, number one. And then number two is you'd have to be able to identify or score friendliness. And this is DeBlair's point about, yeah, but what if friendliness is connected to other traits? It absolutely will be. And we don't even know how to characterize that phenotypically. I think I can say that right. And then there's the problem of it's so buffered genetically that selecting for it almost certainly wouldn't work. So eugenics was always failed. I mean, it was always doomed to failure. And so we're not foxes. Our behavior is much more complicated. So we rule that out. And then we rule out technology. And we say technology is part of the solution, but it's part of the problem. Because the idea is the first projectile, you know, weapon that we use, we could now hunt and we became the Adel Adel or the bow, we become these super predators and, you know, watch out saber tooth cats, whatever your big teeth, like I got this thing, boom. But the problem is now you can, you know, shoot and kill somebody from far away. So the same technology can be used for good or for evil potentially. So technology is great when people are using it for great things. So I think social problems require social solutions. And so does that's where Vanessa agrees with me. I think I'm safe to speak for. And so we kind of land on two things. You did end up coming up with these solutions together. We did. We did. Yeah, okay. I would say that she probably does agree with you on this. I'm just sorry. I'm just sorry. You would understand. I'm sorry too. You know, so anyway, so we really settle on two things. In the book, we talk about the reverse order, but first, because faster and easier is cross group friendships. So there's wonderful evidence that cross group friendships, when you have people of different identities, when they are friends, it buffers, or I should say it almost immunizes the mind against dehumanization. So when your theory of mind turns off and you're no longer seeing another human as fully human, that's dehumanization, you're no longer allowed to, you're allowed, you're no longer able to use your human unique cognition in interactions with that person. And that includes your empathy and compassion. It means suddenly become a chimpanzee. Yeah, the worst kind of chimpanzee. And so you're, I mean, in the extreme form, you're, you're viewing a group of people using the same cognition you would use for a table or a chair. And so the, so what we've seen is that when you have these cross group friendships, it really reduces the possibility of people dehumanizing each other like that. And even if one person in different groups are friends, it really affects the whole group in the network of friends that those two cross group friends have. So that's number one is how do we have more friends across different groups, whatever those are, because they're, they're definitely as a biology and neurobiology of dehumanization. But we construct our groups and our group identity. And it's super plastic. And that's one of the things that makes it very adaptive. The second thing is democracy. And people are always sort of like, man, really, come on. Yeah, I'm serious. And the reason I'm serious is because we didn't evolve to be despots. Our species lived as hunter-gatherers between 300,000 and 10,000 years ago, completely as hunter-gatherers who were more or less egalitarian. There was never, if you were one of my students, I get really upset when people talk about hunter-gatherers living in tribes, because tribes are defined as a group of people with a chief, meaning somebody who's monopolizing power and resources. Hunter-gatherers don't have chiefs. So democracy is the modern version of now you've got tens of millions of people, how do we return to a more egalitarian social structure? Given we have to have hierarchy and there's these different group identities, how can we make sure that when done right, the group out of power is never completely out of power, and that we're always humanizing our rivals? Because even though we may disagree, they're still important for our functioning society. But maybe our rivals, if we can start having that astronaut view of the earth and the view of humanity as one, our rivals start being space aliens or asteroids. We can all get behind that one. Viruses. Viruses. How about we tackle that as a group? Yeah, that would be good. Yeah. And I would have, if I could have been, I don't know, a cartoonist or something, and Vanessa and I have sort of fantasized about writing an op-ed where you write a humanized version of the virus, you know, oh, your humans are great. We've had so much fun, especially in America. We love your group identities. We love, and so you can sort of humanize them. We love you non-mask wearers. The problem is the virus is dehumanized, but I think if you humanize the virus, then now you might get the better part of the unifying force. Then you find this defender of the earth and the environment and social justice, like, oh, you're going to ban Muslims and ban Berkawang? Okay, everybody put on a mask. That's how we fix that. Oh, we're going to not take care of the climate? Guess what? Everybody stay home and don't drive anywhere, and we'll have the best environmental year that we've had in 20. Okay, over and over again. Wow, this virus is like knocking down a lot of issues that work. Well, and I work on the illegal wildlife trade. So, you know, how about not like, I don't know, eating wild animals and transmitting zoonotic disease? That would be cool. Let's start there. Let's start with that one. Yeah, speaking of wild animals and the animals that you've worked with, I mean, bonobos, we were talking before the show, and you have a chapter in your book about the uncanny valley. In studying our closest primate relatives, what has really struck you about them and their cognitive abilities and their abilities to relate? Yeah. So, I mean, bonobos are, I already sort of set them up as these sort of adorable goofballs and, you know, relative to chimpanzees they are. And I think what's remarkable is that they have a brain the third of the size of ours on this, you know, show. But they can do something that our species isn't capable of, which is there's no such thing as bonobo side. No bonobo has ever been observed to kill another bonobo. And so chimpanzees that are almost genetically identical to bonobos, they have lethal aggression at the rate of some human populations. They will raid neighboring territories. They will systematically over a decade murder all the males and then take the females and commit infanticide. And basically, you know, annex their neighbors territory. And within the group, there's an alpha male, the first thing you do and the first thing you do if you're a juvenile male and you want to work your way up the hierarchies, you start beating up your mother because it's a safe, soft target that you can practice abusing and dominating. An alpha male, when you become alpha and everyone needs to submit to you, you must indicate your submission by kissing his testicles. This is a real thing. I'm not joking. So you have to grunt like this and then you have to kiss his testicles. And if not, then you'll have his fury to deal with and his coalition partners, potentially male aggression towards females is highest when they're ovulating. Unfortunately, female chimpanzees have an honest indicator of ovulation. So imagine that there's a post-it note when you're ovulating and you have to walk around with it. Everybody knows, oh, today that person's ovulating. So chimpanzees, their swellings literally say within the, you know, five hour window that female is definitely ovulating. So she gets targeted with horrific amounts of aggression because the males are like, well, I'd rather beat her up than beat you up because she's only two thirds the size of you. And if I can intimidate her to come with me, then I don't have to deal with you. So they absolutely get coercively punished and it's pretty rough. And so this is, this is the darker side of chimpanzees. Now they are also wonderful. There's also the Jane Goodall curious George version of chimpanzees that, you know, normally is celebrated. But the amazing thing is that bonobos that share 99.9% of their genome have none of the behaviors I just described to you, none of them. Yeah. How do the, how do the male bonobos who run that society differ from, from, from their, their counterparts in the, in the chimps side? That's a leading question. Yeah. Thank you. They're, they're, they're, I try every day to be a better bonobo male. Let's put it that way. They, what we think happened is there was really strong selection against male aggression because it ends up that being an alpha is very costly. It's energetically, it's risky. It taxes the immune system. And there's beautiful data showing that alpha males really struggle to keep their tenure and to stay healthy. And there's a crash after they sort of lose that spot. So male bonobos we think have been selected to be much friendlier. And I'll, I'll, I'll go, I want to, I want to tell you one more fact that's fascinating before I tell you how they're friendlier with, besides saying none of that happens in bonobos is this is totally remarkable. It blew my mind. It blew our whole community's mind. It ends up that the most successful male alpha chimpanzee is not as successful at reproducing as the most successful bonobo male. And so basically friendliness wins. You have more babies and you have more reproductive success as a bonobo male. And why are bonobo males friendly? Bonobo males, the last thing you would do is attack your mother. They are total momless boys. They do not raid neighboring territories. They don't commit infanticide. They don't even form coalitions with each other. Never has there been a case of infanticide. And instead, if there's a problem in the group, females tend to form an alliance against any individual that tends to be juvenile male. It's a matriarchal society. Okay, so it's not, it's not Justin. It's not. It gets more interesting. It gets more interesting. So, so, so that is what has been argued a huge argument of literature. Oh, but it wasn't matriarchal because if they don't have, that's what I've always heard. Someone's got to be in charge, right? Okay, so what people say is if there's not an alpha male, it must be the females in charge, says the, you know, historically, I don't know, patriarchal society where there has to be a charge. So it ends up, we realized, wait a second, after watching a lot of interactions in bonobos at Lola y Albonobo, the sanctuary in Congo, where we work, we realized, oh my gosh, nobody's looked at the babies and their dominance rankings in the dominance hierarchies. And when we did, what we realized is bonobos are baby dominant. They are not female dominant, they are baby dominant. Babies run in the show. Babies rule. Babies rule, baby dominant. And I'll tell you the anecdote of how we figured it out is I was, and it wasn't just me, it was students and this kind of thing, talking to people who witnessed it, but I had firsthand happened to me, I was throwing some food into the bonobos because this is a sanctuary for orphans. It's actually they get captive care for their life. They, unfortunately, they're victims of the bush meat trade and we try to help the organization that helps the bonobos. And so anyway, there I am, I'm throwing food into these guys. And the food that I threw, it thuds on the ground between a little baby bonobo that probably weighed seven pounds and a fully grown 80 pound, 90 pound adult male bonobo. And as soon as the food hits the ground, he screams at the top of his lungs and runs away. And the baby bonobo walks over and picks up the food and eats it. And so why did the male just get the heck out of there? And the reason is because I personally had this where I accidentally scared a baby bonobo and the entire group comes to attack you. The entire group. And so in chimpanzees, what happens is if a chimpanzee baby is threatened, it screams same reaction, but the mom comes and that's it. Just mom. And in bonobos, everybody's coming. And so you don't mess with a baby bonobo. They're just sitting there going like, Mika, whatever we want. And we don't know why. And you're like, you guys are so spoiled. They're like, I'll scream. They're like, okay, okay. Don't scream, just don't scream. Yeah, no, that would be extremely intimidating. That is a little baby. And you know, they could just, any second, have you taken down by the entire troop. Yeah. So it's like, so they're baby dominant. So they don't fit. And the reason I say they're not matriarchal, I mean, I guess you could argue they're matriarchal because obviously the females are the guardians. And if matriarchal means that females are sort of keeping the males in check, okay, fine. But the sort of science-y way that people think about this is male dominance typically is associated with males being larger physically. And then if that, there are many species that are female dominant. So the lemurs at the Duke lemur center I work with, there are many species of lemurs that are female dominant. Hyenas are female dominant, but the females are larger than the males. And hyenas, it's very extreme because the female hyenas have male, more masculinized genitalia. And in fact, the same process happens with lemurs, where as females become dominant, larger, their genitalia become matriarchalized. My colleague here at Duke, Christine Dre, is the one who has been able to document this. So anyway, along along is that's not what happens in bonobos. So female bonobos are still smaller than male bonobos. They are, they do not fit in any typical definition female dominance. And so that's why we were like, huh, there's something else going on here. And then having interacted with them and being terrified of the babies, we were like, hey, wait a second. I think the babies are in charge. Amazing. We know that we know that a lot of these social and these social differences come from cognitive differences, cognitive differences come from neural differences. So digging into the brain. Ouch. Yeah. Yeah. No, actually, there aren't a lot of pain neurons there. So I wouldn't hurt too much. Is that what you say before you talk to somebody and do that? That's fine. Let's just dig in there. You don't feel a thing. You don't feel a thing. That's right. But what are some of the differences in the brain? Or can you see differences in the brain between chimpanzees and bonobos? I mean, human brains are bigger. But other than that, what kind of difference is there? Yes. So let me go back to Wolfdog comparisons and the Fox comparison and the process of domestication and what does selection for friendliness do to the brain? So what we have observed, and we as the royal we, like a lot of people way smarter than me, but I get to tell you about it, what folks have observed is that when you select for friendliness, it alters first and foremost the serotonergic system. You get a much more serotonergic availability, whether that's the receptors of serotonin that allow serotonin to impact your neurons, or it's just there's more of it in parts of the brain that are involved in response to threat or fight or flight. And so it ends up that we, you know, when you have high levels of serotonin, for instance in cats, they are not particularly hungry, nor are they predatory. When that level goes down and you're in the, I don't know if you're Daniel with the lions bummer, you know, you're in trouble because their predatory behavior will be expressed. So we know that serotonin is tightly linked with aggression and predation predatory behavior. So when looking at the foxes, they have five times the level of serotonin, the experimental foxes as the control line. These are very happy, I don't know, it's like being on SSRIs or ecstasy or something. And so they're, they're pretty happy foxes. And so then when looking at bonobo versus chimp brains, some really clever people like Chet Sherwood was able to, at George Washington University, was able to show that the serotonergic axon density in, you all probably on this show talk about the amygdala sometimes, it's an area of the brain that responds to frightening things or discrepant events. And it's, it's sort of the motivating engine of what might turn into aggression. And what you'd predict is that serotonin would have a bigger impact on the amygdala of the bonobo to sort of reduce their response to any kind of threat. And that's, that's what we find some nice evidence for. So it's, it seems to be the case that some of the things you would predict, and that's just one example, some of the things you would predict would be different are there. And we, and those were a priori predictions. We, we didn't find it and say, oh, look, that, you know, really, people really went in. It's not just cherry picking it out of there, right? Well, I'm not saying we never do that. But, but, but, you know, there's definitely, that's part of the science where you, you post talk realize, but this, these types of things were a priori. All right. So the serotonin is the serotonergic system in bonobos seems to be a bit more active, significantly more active than say in chimpanzees. In humans, we've got, we know we have an active serotonergic system. Yeah. So we also have our prefrontal cortex and self control. Yeah, nice. Yes. Oh, wow. Thank you. That's like a fastball over the plate there. The, uh, uh, so what a whiff it. So the, uh, human, uh, human ser... Well, okay, great. Whatever. Animals have different levels of serotonin related to their aggression. What is that? You just told me we can't do eugenics. So what does that do with humans? So, so the comparison, it's always important compared to what? And so it ends up that the, what we think is the really relevant comparison is compared to our closest extinct human relative, the intertals. And what we know is that when you have high levels of fetal serotonin, it changes, uh, your facial and, uh, skull morphology. And what is the, what is the signature of our species in the fossil record? It is having a globular head. You're welcome. You all have beautifully globular heads. Uh, it is having a globular head that shows up around 300,000 years ago. And, uh, how do you end up going from having a more football shaped, uh, or bread loaf shape, uh, skull like, uh, Homo erectus or Neanderthal has to this beautiful spherical globular skull that we get to carry around. Uh, you do that by early exposure to serotonin. And we, and we know that because, uh, my mice and rodents that are given, uh, early exposure to serotonin, their skulls before come become more globular and SSRIs were thought people were worried about the impact of SSRIs, uh, that were being, uh, or are prescribed women, uh, who might be depressed or whatever. And there is a small risk. I'm not a doctor. So ignore everything I'm saying in terms of what you should do for your own behavior. But there is a small risk, uh, that your child, if you're on SSRIs, will have a, um, a hyper globularized head, a perfectly spherical head. Yes. Yes. So, so we know that, uh, if you wanted to end up being going from Neanderthal heads to Homo sapien heads, one pathway to do that is early exposure to serotonin. You get your globular head. Um, so, uh, that, that's, that's one way we think, uh, serotonin. So the fast ball across the plate though that you dealt me was our big brains because, Mike Tomasello, you remember the early story of Oreo and the dog and he's, you know, excited about the experiments. Okay. So I'm sitting here and Richard Rangham, who really, uh, helped everything I've told you about, uh, domestication. It was together with him, my PhD advisor. Um, and we're sitting there thinking like, how are we, you know, could this really have affected human evolution? It took us 10 years to figure out how to think about it because Mike was like, that's really great about emotions and that you're selecting its aggression and you're reducing emotional reactivity. And, you know, you have a change in serotonergic system. Fine. Uh, but if bonobos are self domesticated, like they don't have art or drive cars or anything, like, I don't think it's going to have anything to do with us. Um, and so we were really puzzled literally for a decade. We're like, I don't know what we don't know what to do about that. I don't know. Um, and so, uh, finally it was the new findings about the fact, and we've already visited that, that we're not the only human until the last 50,000 years. And we realized that late in human evolution there was something that needed to be explained. But back to your question about self-control, and I'm so sorry, I totally have whiffed like four times. It's taken me way too long. If Vanessa was here, she'd be like, edit, edit, edit. Anyway, so, uh, they, so, so we have this huge, uh, brain. And there's really nice evidence to show that brain size is tightly correlated with self-control. And we were able to show this looking at 36 different species that absolute brain size or the size of your head is related to how much self-control you have. And it ends up that Bonobos chimpanzees, uh, they don't have the size brain we have. They don't have the same self-control we have. So what I think happened was late in human evolution, you already had a cultural being, a linguistic being, a being with our level of self-control. But then it was self-domesticated. And so that were, not only do we have massive human levels of self-control where it's sort of like, we already had this big break, but the engine got really small. We don't have the same level of emotional reactivity where we're going to impulsively be aggressive. Uh, we're going to have, um, uh, the same level of, um, uh, impulsive, uh, aggression or hostility, uh, that we would see in other species with less self-control. So it's sort of like we got supercharged by pairing amazing self-control with self-domestication. And here we are. Let's see if we can have that self-control moving forward. Come on, people, we can do this. You mean like wearing a mask and not going and hanging out at a pool party? Is that what you're talking about? Self-control? Yeah, we can make our ancestors proud. But on the other hand, it's been a hot summer, Blair. I mean, in Northern California, not in San Francisco. It's never warm in San Francisco. It's, it's really weird. It is really weird. It's actually so close, but it's always like 50 degrees cooler. I don't know why. Um, but yeah, it's called the ocean effect, but, but we, but where you going to, okay. Yes. So I mean, we have this, this domestication, the self-domestication. We have friendliness. We have recommendations from you. Our brains have changed. Um, yeah. I mean, do we need to change ourselves further? Do we need to, is there, is there more domestication? Do you use, do you think that there is a limit to the domestication process? I do. That's sort of why I was saying, you know, we're not going to be breeding friendly or people and domestication is a genetic process. So you're actually changing heritable components of an organism genotype that changes behavior and psychology and morphology. Um, but your question is, you know, what's the future? How do we do better? And I think the danger of what I'm suggesting to you is what I'm trying to argue is that our brains are built for friendliness, but when the friendliness mechanism turns off, we're also built for something horrendous. And it is universal. We all have it. And it's just part of our biology. And so if our institutions, if our cultural theories about how we're going to get along, do not recognize that, do not recognize that danger. We're, we are absolutely going to be committing the same errors again and again and again. And so, you know, I feel golf who studies police brutality. And Ashley Jardine is a political scientist at Duke. They've both found two the same phenomenon in a very disturbing way we cover in the book. And that is when, when groups who are dehumanizing one another, uh, when they hear that there's a disproportionate harm to the group they dehumanize, they become more supportive of that form of harm towards that other group. So let me be concrete. When, when people who do dehumanize African Americans hear the capital punishment disproportionately affects African Americans, they become more supportive, not less. When people hear that African Americans or minority populations are more susceptible to COVID-19, they become more supportive of approaches that will not slow the virus. So if you ignore this part of our psychology, then we will really struggle to humanize one another and to find ways to collectively address large scale public problems. And so I think, you know, if you want to know what's the cause of many of the challenges, whether it's global warming or the pandemic or you know, the corruption in democratic governance, it's all, much of it is the cause will be this part of our nature. And I think it'll be very important for people to consider who are in communications and who are in media and, you know, not just politics or the system building, but in the actual, you know, the transference of information from one group to another. How do you talk about things and how do you bring them up? I can take that edge of people in the media making comments. I do think that we could have a society if we just put people in a different place altogether based on similarities. Because there are people who want to be only with their race and their religion. And they're against everybody else. It's fine. Let's gather them up from all of the different countries in which they reside and all the different religions that they are and put them all together. So yes, you can go or give them the option. You're going to a place where everybody wants to be with just their kind and everybody wants to be the same religion. And that's where you're going. And then we'll just slowly pan out as we're watching their reactions of this island that they're on with people from all over the world. Because there's nothing uniquely American or anything else about racism. Every group or tribe has these elements within themselves that they share so much in common with the racist over here and the supremacist over there and the pure religionist over there, whatever it is, just put those people together and put them on an island. Do what happens. Maybe they'll make friends and come back a generation or three from now and explain to us that we're all lacking empathy. So there was a lot there to unpack, Justin. So I'm going to go to one of my talking points over here. Wait, let me just check here. All right. So actually, I think what resonated is when you were talking about racism. So racism, of course, people struggle to define it. I'm talking about academics define it. But I'm talking about people accuse each other of being racist all the time. But are we talking apple oranges here? And so I think for me, here's the most important aspect of racism. And you're talking about it that there's there's a sort of a universal existence of racism. I would say it slightly differently. I wouldn't say because I think in the United States, for instance, there's a specific history. I think in Africa, for instance, we talk about Otabinga, a hunter gatherer pygmy who was captured and put in the zoo in Europe and taunted. And we also when I was in Congo, Brazzaville in 2007, there was a report in the local newspaper about a group of pygmies. They were in the Congo, Brazzaville Zoo. They had been brought there because the government thought that they would be happier with the animals. So what I'm trying to get at is that there's a there's a core of what you were saying that I think is representative of a universal in human society, which is our psychology is the recognition of group hierarchy. So humans in seeing group identity, we can see strangers as our friends if we feel threatened. We then lose our ability to feel compassion for those groups that are threatening us. But there's also this other terrible piece where if we are constantly threatened by a group and or maybe we just feel threatened by a group, we tend to generate these group hierarchies. And so there is a lot of individual variability in the degree to which people perceive these hierarchies. There are people who are more egalitarian, and there are people who are more hierarchical. It's called the social dominance orientation. And there's a super disturbing survey you can take that we've used because you can't believe as somebody who tends to be pretty egalitarian when it comes to groups, you can't believe that people answer questions differently than you, but they do because I've surveyed them. And some of the questions are sort of like some groups are superior to others and those that are superior deserve more healthcare and more food. And you do a Likert scale one through seven, I agree or disagree. And so you go through these questions, you're like, well, you know, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, you're going to be on one side. And it's like, whoa, people, they don't. It ends up that if you have a very strong feeling of group hierarchy, these are the people that are most easily convinced to feel threatened by other groups. And they're also the people who are most likely to dehumanize and they're also the people most likely to accept punitive or violent measures against other groups. Now, here's an even more frightening part of this. It is not who you think it is. It is not that this is distributed only in, you know, sort of the hillbilly, elegy, rural, white voter in poor rural areas. It's almost exclusive to New York white women, isn't it? And what we discovered? I just watched the news and believe everything. So actually, actually, Jardina did this unbelievable study where she looked at both dehumanization and this group orientation feature. And basically every demographic in the United States, you can find a certain portion of people who are extreme. It doesn't matter if it's Democrat, Republican, rich, poor, educated, not, you do these surveys and you get back a significant portion of people. It's always a small minority, you know, five, seven, maybe 10% of people. But you get a significant portion of people who are really in this extreme. And these are the people who then when there's a threat, they have the strongest responses. But we all have this ability. So another example of us all having the problem is Noor Tiley, who is at Northwestern has done brilliant work on dehumanization. He uses this figure called the Asinaman. You all know it. It's, you know, the little monkey. And then it goes to sort of the stooped over, you know, hominid or whatever. And then there's the person and then it ends with, I don't know, a person on a computer or something. So he basically asked thousands of people across the world, tens of thousands of people across the world in different cultures. And he has this Asinaman and you're looking at it. And below it, there's a little slider with the name of a group. So, you know, Australians, Muslims, yeah, or it'll say Swedish or Latino, Blacks, Americans, whatever. And you slide the slider and indicate if each of these groups is fully human. And so the answer is this is the fastest study you've ever participated in. They're all 100% human. And so what you find is that a very large portion of people, depending on the population you're looking at, do not see other groups as fully human. The most extreme is in Hungary, the Roma, known as gypsies, are heavily dehumanized such that when they do the little slider study, the Hungarians indicate that they aren't even homo erectus. So they're like sort of not even 50% human. So that is the red warning sign of this is a population that is in grave danger of genocide, etc. And so here's the evidence that this isn't a bad apple problem. So Neuer looked at Professor Tiley, looked at using this measure. He looked at Americans and British random sample before and after the Boston bombing and before and after that British soldier was stabbed and killed. And these are perfectly wonderful Americans and British citizens. And when you asked and you had all these different groups and you asked about whether fully human, before these threatening things that threaten your identity, in this case your national identity occurred, then, you know, almost fully human mostly, you know, Muslims would be almost as human as other groups. There's a little bit of variability there, but most people were saying fully human. After these threatening events, the vast majority of people were dehumanizing to the point that is similar to what white supremacists dehumanize other races and religions every day. And so it's very frightening. We're all capable of it. And I tell a personal story in the book about the build up to the First Gulf War where I was a little kid. I don't know how old I was, but how was I 14, I think, I don't know 14, 15. And I remember and some of y'all may remember the testimony of the young girl from Kuwait and telling the story of the Iraqi soldiers who threw the babies out of the incubators. And I remember as a kid being like, Mom, Dad, what do they do? They do that. These guys are animals. Like, we got to do something. And it ends up that Bush 1, Herbert Walker, spoke about this over 15, 20 times the next week. And it was used in congressional testimony when Desert Shield was voted for. And there was only, I believe, I don't know, 30, 40% public support for an intervention. And it went to 80, 90. And years later, it was revealed that it was a PR firm. The young lady was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador. And none of it happened. And it was all a show because they knew if you want to galvanize support and you want to have our group, our national group come together, then we have to show not that the other is different, but they're not human. And so a lot of times when we're talking about us and them and people are talking about intergroup interactions, the capability of dehumanization gets left out. And that's really, really the frightening part. Yeah, it would be a lot to think about there for sure. I feel like that so many things can be solved with really simple things in common. Like, yes, there's babies being thrown out of the incubators. But you know what? Everybody there likes chicken sandwich. Yeah, those are pretty good. Yeah. You know what? You know what's a really popular drink over there? Coca Cola. Really? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. They like that too. Just saying you're actually right because so this is the positive story. I can't not tell you. Nobody's looking worse than me. So this is important thing to tell you. So they also looked at Americans and British citizens then two months after the Boston bombing and all of the dehumanization levels had gone away. So people were humanizing Muslims again. It's a very temporary thing in a normal population of humans. We have a threat. We dehumanize and we're ready to do violent things. But then I don't know, a few weeks later, you know, yeah, they're human. We, you know, we can, you know, we're able to humanize people again. So it's people who tend to be, sorry, Dr. Kiki Owl stopped there. Justin. Justin. Justin. Justin. It's really good. It's worth it. Bag of trust. It's worth it. Really late. Okay. I know. I know. And I'm so sorry. But you just made me think. You know who we need to send to go to these negotiations between countries? We need to get the least patriotic people. We need to get the least patriotic people. I don't want anybody going who thinks their country is great. I want two groups to get together and complain about what's wrong with their country. You know what? My politicians also are like, you know, my taxes, my taxes are also sick. Hey, you too, system. We have to take out loans. Really? We don't even have schools. Oh my God, that's terrible. Like, that's who you need to send. These people who are hypercritical of their own home country, they won't have peace everywhere. It's you sending it, you know, when people are both there and they both think we are right. We are right. We are right. We are right. That's war is we are right. Zachronum. So anyway. If I can just tie it back to kind of. No, no, we don't have time for four. Oh my goodness. Justin. Zip it. What I'm seeing a common thread here is we talked about how chimps have these hierarchies and they have the patriarchal society. And we were talking about hierarchy in humans and how either you personally want to be at the top or you want to be in the winningest group or whatever it is. And I think I'm seeing a common thread here in that, you know, the whole game of capitalism is to win, is to get the most, is to be the best, is to have the best stuff. It's about competition versus cooperation, right? And so I think this is, this is something I, it always comes back to capitalism for me, especially lately, but I feel like this, this is, there's something there, because if, if we weren't all competing to have the most, there might be a better opportunity to work together and to see commonality. Yeah, and, and those, the commonalities societies have more sex. They have more sex. The cooperators have more sex. It's not a bad trade-off. I think there's a study there. I'll send you a review paper, everybody. There we go. That was my best attempt. So, so, so do you, are you hoping I respond to Blair at you talking? I just, I'm, I'm cognizant of time and I don't want, I don't want, I have my wife's voice always in my, in my, should I? We're not even halfway done with the show, are we? Where's it going to be a second half? It might be a second third. No, it would be a third third. I mean, I will blabber. This would be the second third. Oh my God. Already. Brian, go ahead, please. No problem, no problem, no problem. So, I would say, I don't have a quarrel with capitalism. I really don't. I don't, I don't think survival is friendliest and I do think there's overwhelming evidence that life's most successful strategy is friendliness. If you look at flowering plants, you look at species with, you know, great microbiomes or the dogs are exhibit A, there's, there are millions all over the world and wolves that aren't able to be friendly are sadly going extinct. Bonobo males that are friendlier actually have more offspring than chimpanzee males. And I think our species and example is survival of friendliness too. So, I absolutely think that the winning strategy is friendliness. But that being said, okay, so then how do you deal with, you know, I don't know, I ran or, you know, different economic theories? Well, I think those are extreme versions of capitalism. And I think that there's plenty of evidence that when you have governments and liberal democracies that are functioning, that you can organize, you know, capitalist productivity so that there is a more egalitarian distribution from the success of the competition. And so it's not unlike what hunter-gatherers do. It ends up that lots of hunter-gatherers are more successful than other hunter-gatherers in a group at foraging. And in the Mart 2 or an extreme version, the aborigine group we've already covered, they do not eat until they get back to the group. And then they share everything with the group. And they actually don't necessarily get more food, but their reputation, of course, is enhanced. And so everybody wins from you being a winner. And there's still competition because your reputation is enhanced. And there's social insurance that when you struggle, people are going to be more likely to help you if you're a really successful hunter. But I don't think capitalism is in, at least for me, it's not in direct opposition here. It doesn't necessarily have to be thought of as a negative thing. It just potentially needs to, like you said, be worked out slightly differently so that so that more people can actually can actually exist well within the modern society that we have. Yeah, we're in the A. Oh, sorry. Just by the way, Ayn Rand was anti-war pro-gay rights and was actually like one of the themes in her work is against the corporate influence on government decision making. So anti-lobbyist. So there's a there's a thread where she's actually for individual rights and personal freedoms and preventing the government from being influenced by business and keeping it separate from government, which is a concept our current capitalism really needs. That's probably more of what we need. Yeah, I mean, thanks for humanizing Ayn Rand. So look at that. I mean, you're on your way. Humanize the table too. It's got four legs just like your dog, just like your dog. That's canonizing. Yeah, that's canonizing. That's fine. I've got to tell you the study. So they're my favorite study for students talking about humanization. And also it's sort of hopeful and kind of quirky how easily we humanize. So it ends up the switch can flip off, but it easily flips back on. And your your point about humanizing the table is a good one. So there was a study, sort of like, how hard is this going to be? Can we, you know, how do how, you know, flexible are people humanizing? So they had this carrot. And they it was a they had people in an fMRI and they were looking at, you know, the response of the prefrontal cortex and the social network, temporal parietal junction, all these different areas that are involved in social processing. And what they found was that if you began to cut the carrot, the social network did it, nothing really happened. But if you named the carrot, this is Bob the carrot. And then you show the video, all you do is say, this is Bob the carrot. And then you cut the thing, your your theory of mind network lights up. Holy crap. That's Bob. That's Bob. So yeah. So the system is is very sensitive and plastic. So yes, you could humanize your table. Fred, my table. And yeah. And so so that I do think that on capitalism government, you know, how do you have a functioning democracy? You know, great companies are friendly places where people work together and they're tolerant and they collaborate in larger groups and you can get innovation spreading quick and fast and and change to a changing environment. And I think that always gets confused with the fact that you've got two companies that are always fighting with one another. And so that's what we sort of always think about because you're the consumer, like I hope they fight because the price goes down. So so but but you know, there's there's much evidence that governments are especially liberal democracies are very good in many instances and in our own country and many eras at encouraging capitalism and also trying to increase egalitarian. Is it perfect? No. Could it be better? Yes. Are there countries that do it better than we do? Oh, I'm going to get in trouble now. You decide. But but the but but I would say here's my number one solution. If you want to know for democracy, I've got I've got a solution. I will solve this for you, Justin, you and me. We can do it. Okay. Yeah. So I actually it's it's it's it seems super silly, but I have actually lobbied since you were talking about lobbying. I have lobbied. I have gone to Washington and I've been to the heart in the Russell building and I have lobbied Congress Congress that congressional staffer sorry and senatorial staffers. I think I met a senator at some point. But mostly what you're doing when you're lobbying is you're talking to 20 year olds, because Congress when people are deriding Congress, they're actually talking to a whole bunch of well meaning warm hearted, very, very poorly paid in living in a very expensive city and kids who want democracy to work. And they bust their butts for you and me to try to make policy recommendations, whether you agree with them or not, they're doing their best. And so that's who you go meet with. And so in writing the book and thinking about democracy, it was like, Holy, this is and I had students who were, you know, staffers now in DC, and I go eat lunch with them. And sitting in the Russell heart building, you're sitting going, I just started asking them, like, do you ever have lunch with a Republican? Do you ever have a lunch with a Democrat? And they're like, why would I do that? We'll be the point of that. So here's the thing we do. Get staffers, young staffers who are the future judges, politicians, lobbyists, all the rest. We give them free lunches, as long as they have lunch with somebody from the other party. And we create cross group friendships. And we seed humanization for the next decades. And it will not fix everything. But what it prevents is the worst of human nature, which is this, where I say, oh, this population is being hurt by this. And then that makes you more supportive of the thing that hurts them. That's what it was. So I think it's a pretty small investment. Sentence of people to lunch. I've done it once. I got staffers who were Republican Democrat to go to lunch together. They became very close friends and they've even written bipartisan policies, Davis together. So it's a real thing. I think it could be done and it would be huge. Maybe that should be the next movement in Washington is, you know, take some politicians to lunch, take Democrats and Republicans to lunch. Just, you know, make it a little matchmaking thing. I like it, except for the part we used to take the politicians, because I don't think they can. Because the lobbyists have a lot of control over norms. And so if you want to go work with a lobby later when you're done, you don't want to be cavorting with the politician who might disagree with that lobby position. That's where we are now. What happens is if you can get the staffers happy and them to be putting to propose policies, then that's right. That's right. What happens is you take the staffers to lunch and they go back then and regurgitate their meal up so that the senators can eat it. Yeah, it's just like they go. It's just, it's the same. Nothing has changed. They are so similar. Full circle. Full circle. And on that note, Dr. Brian Hare, thank you so much for joining us tonight to talk about your book, The Survival of the Friendliest, not just the fittest, the friendliest. Where can people find you online to find out more information or find out more about your book? Yeah, bryanhair.net. The book is for sale anywhere books are for sale. And I'm on Twitter. I don't know if people use Twitter, but I do. I know y'all do. I'm at behairdogguy. So I don't know how memorable that is, but there you have it. So Brian Hare. Because some of our audience is just listening. Hair is H-A-R-E. Because, you know, if you're thinking like hair dog or hair of the dog, it's, but it's like a rabbit. Yeah, it's like little bunny little bunny little bunny foo foo. Yeah. And we will have, we will have these links on our website. Oh, perfect. Just go there. So if you can't remember wherever you are right now, go to our website and you'll be able to find them. Wait, what's our website? We never mentioned a website. There we go, twist.org. Thank you all so much. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been a wonderful conversation. It's super fun. Really enjoyable. Quite enjoyable. It's the longest interview we've ever done. Thank you broke the record, Brian. Sorry. I think you broke the record. Don't apologize. It was great. Vanessa is going to kill me. We'll just put it up into like three episodes. And here we are back with our continuing coverage of the show. Oh my gosh. I care about you too much now. Please don't do that. So it's up to you at this point if you would like to hang up and say good night, but we are going to actually continue with the show because we have some other science stories to talk about. Okay. Y'all are awesome. I would totally do it. It's one o'clock. I better go. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful night. Thank you so much. Okay. Justin's going to be right back. And this is when I say thank you. This is when I say thank you. Thank you for listening to This Week in Science. You are the reason that we do what we do, that we're able to do what we do and we appreciate that you are listening, that you're watching, that you're a part of our TWIST family. Really, it's wonderful. We love bringing you up to date every week on the latest science news and trying to give you a, I guess, more grounded view of what's going on in the world of science and how it connects to our politics and who we are as people as opposed to dredging up divisions. Let's follow Brian Hare and be friendly and find ways to humanize and have that great perspective moving forward, shall we? Head over to TWIST.org right now. Click on the Patreon link and choose your level of support. You can be a part of bringing more sanity and science to more people with TWIST. We thank you for your support. We really can't do it without you. All right, Blair, are you ready for the COVID update? Everything's terrible. Yeah, pretty much. No, yes. The U.S. numbers keep climbing. Deaths are going up. However, the World Health Organization suggests the public needs to be engaged in public health through individual behaviors that help others and that the government should provide strong leadership and consistent messaging. I'm feeling a little personally attacked. Well, I guess like our country is being attacked with that message. Well, but we already attacked the World Health Organization. Sit for tat there, I guess. Exactly. Touche. And now, good news is there are now three vaccines entering phase three clinical trials. Three different kinds of vaccines. What does that mean? What's phase three mean? Phase three means it is the trial to test a very large group of people and see if the vaccine really works. So that's the last phase before we're going to market? Yes. Wow. So we have three vaccines. One is dead virus. One is a viral vector. So it uses a virus that our body has that attacks cells and uses that as a way to get into cells to deliver its vaccine message to the immune system. And then the last one is an mRNA vaccine, which is the new one. There are a couple of mRNA vaccines under development. Never been used in humans before. So we don't know exactly how that's going to turn out, but they just published in New England Journal of Medicine their report of their results, very positive from the phase one clinical trials that they completed. So all of their report is finally out and people are talking about that currently. But we'll see. Phase three coming up. They're hoping to get 33,000 people to sign up to take this new mRNA vaccine. Well, thank you to all the people working tirelessly to get this thing through, and thank you to all the people who are volunteering to take that vaccine. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And if it works, so dead virus, that's pretty straightforward. That's like, okay, here's a bit of the virus, body responds. Are you going to get enough of a vaccine response? The second one, which is the viral vector, if your body has experienced that virus before, that viral vector is not going to get into your system because your immune system is going to be like, meh. So that kind of vaccine, there are pros and cons to whether or not it can actually work. The mRNA hasn't really been done theoretically and in animal studies. Yeah, it should work great. And their phase one trials looks like it should. So I don't know. It's some very interesting methods out there of looking at vaccines, and hopefully a few of them will work. And that would be amazing. We will see. Other good news on the treatment side of things, figuring out who is going to become really, really sick or will will end up in the ICUs. Researchers have been trying to figure out kind of that calling card of COVID and have reported in science this week that they think they have figured out the two basic traits that do indicate whether or not somebody is going to be really ill with SARS-CoV-2. And that is an interferon response deficiency. Interferon is a molecule, a protein in the body that interferes with infections. It's part of that immune response. And additionally, exacerbated inflammation. So if when somebody comes into the hospital, they can test for low interferon levels or whether or not the and if their inflammation is high, exacerbated, this could be something that will indicate the treatment trajectory that they need to go down. And additionally, whether or not, you know, if it's the interferon response deficiency, then maybe they can give them more interferon. It could that can indicate how they can treat as well, which is pretty cool. And then in the vein of reducing inflammation, a couple of studies came out this week that were very cool looking at a rheumatoid arthritis drug called Tosalizumab. And this drug was used fairly successfully in these trials, these studies, and they weren't actual trial trials, but they were studies looking at groups with and controlled for without the drug. And they had marked improvements. So about 50% of people on ventilation, I think it was 45% of people on ventilation were taken off of ventilation when they were given this drug. The other paper showed that for very severely ill patients, many of them it aided their survival so they didn't go down the path to death. So it was a really positive result. Yeah, that's not the path you want to go down. You want to avoid that path if at all possible. You don't want to go down that path. Yeah. Anti-inflammation of itself does have all these huge health impacts across the body. The drug company that will not be named that I'm currently working for has a rheumatoid arthritis drug that has five other things that it's used for. Yeah, there's a lot of that off-label use. Yeah. And if you look at that list, it's really kind of like, I would not have connected this is not like an arthritis, it has nothing to do with, but there's off-target or whatever uses are. We don't understand our body or how medicine works. We do, but what we find is just because our intention is to solve one problem, the tool that we create actually has other uses. Yeah, that's where it is. When we make a thing for one thing, sometimes it has something else in it that affects our body in a way we didn't expect, which still kind of means we don't understand how medicine works. Well, I don't know. It's blunt. It's having blunt tools. We haven't been able to get that fine needle point kind of result in our drugs to date. But hopefully, I mean, stuff like the mRNA vaccines, I think that's like looking at much more of a fine needle point kind of perspective than that blunt chisel. Fix it. Other interesting news published by the CDC this week, they published a report finding that the use of masks by stylists at a hair salon likely influenced the reduced transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from the infected stylists to the clients. And in the report, there were two of them, Stylist A and Stylist B. Stylist A was infected with COVID initially and worked with a mask when they were with clients, but did not use a mask in between clients because they didn't know that they were infected and then kept working after they had had their PCR test, which did come back positive after three days. In the meantime, Stylist A infected Stylist B during their breaks because they would go on break and talk and hang out without masks. But Stylist B ended up was also using masks. It was something they did at the salon. They wore masks when they were with clients and no clients, nobody at the salon that was a client was infected with the virus. So it's another indication that using masks is pretty effective. Wear a mask. Wear a mask. Wear a mask so you don't kill people. Yeah. And this study also highlights that period of time in which people are very infectious, the beginning of their infection and in which they are pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic. Stylist A at first did not realize that they were infected and didn't take care to wear a mask when not required to. And that had an effect. So there could have been other aspects where clients face away from hair Stylists. So it's not like they're facing each other and breathing on each other. So maybe that has something to do with it as well. But the mask situation is highly likely to have had a huge impact there. I wanted to answer a question this week. Try and go into it pretty briefly because I think it's important and we may try and touch on it again next week. But this letter came in from Kristen Shorma from Powell, Wyoming. And Kristen said, Dear Twists, Kiki Blair and Justin, I have two very important questions I hope you will answer. One, has anyone ever actually sent you a haiku? Yes. Oh, yeah. I get dozens each week. The problem is upon follow up. A twist haiku. Yeah, yeah. And I go, okay, so when did you come up with this haiku? Oh, well, you know, I was driving to work and I just kind of put it together. Worktime's like, okay, it's clearly when I request it's a haiku that came to you in the night. This does not qualify. And then a lot of the ones that do that are haikus that did come to people in the night are not fit to be put on the air. So it's, you know, it's just a fine, it's a very serious mental Justin. No, it's just a very specific request. And we're still waiting for one that's airable. All right, we did air one a while. There was one so far. Yes. Second question. What evidence is there regarding how infectious children are with COVID-19? I teach high school biology, so I will soon be in close contact with a lot of teenagers. I recently heard a claim that children harbor less viral load than adults, which makes them less contagious. But I am dubious about this claim, the information and there was a video linked in the email as well, which I had many issues with as a matter of fact. Kristen is a recent fan of the podcast, but you found found me Kiki several years ago when I started teaching high school biology. I show your fermentation video to my class every year. It's hard to tell if my students find it as amusing as I do, but you crack me up every time. And PS, I love your theme music and never gets old. Thank you, Kristen. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so this week, Pediatrics, a couple of pediatricians published in a Pediatrics journal, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics that kids should go to school and that kids are not as much of a transmitter of COVID-19 as adults. Now, the evidence that they report in their paper does seem to show that. However, each of the incidents where they were able to study whether or not kids were the index case for a an outbreak or other people becoming infected is very situationally based, biased. And many times schools were closing or had been closed before the opportunity for studies to take place. So we don't really have a lot of evidence at least here in the United States about how kids transmit. And we do know kids can transmit the virus. It's not like they don't. They do get it and they can transmit it. Now, kids have fewer ACE2 receptors than adults. And so this is one reason we think that they don't get infected as easily, that they may not become, they're not as likely to become infected. And so if they have fewer receptors, there's less for the virus to grab onto, and so less ways for the virus to get in. Secondarily, we don't have a lot of data on the viral load that children have or don't have. And maybe like Justin, you mentioned very softly into your microphone, there's maybe smaller lungs, maybe they don't have as much air coming out. Maybe there are reasons. They're all sorts of mechanical reasons. Exactly. But all that said, I will point to Oregon State, the state of Oregon that I live in right now. We currently, we went from having basically no child cases to currently having as many reported cases with children of COVID-19 as the other end of the spectrum of 80-year-olds. So we have increased our percentage of cases. And this could also, this could be because of the opening of summer programs and kids be mixing more freely in the U.S. than they have previously. So we are starting to see a lot more cases of children having and transmitting COVID-19 than previously. And there's this nature of inference and who's producing it. All of these things are like, we just don't know. And they may not be a significant driver of COVID-19. Other age groups may be more significant in terms of driving the spread, but we honestly do not have a lot of data. So the thing that I feel like people are not talking about related to this that is, just shows that a lot of people writing these things don't spend a lot of time around children, is that sure, they could have less virus in their system, but they could actually be way more likely to spread it because of their behavior. Because they could be not as good at washing their hands or distancing. They might touch their face more. They might pull their mask down more often or just have a harder time wearing masks. They might be more likely to put things in their mouth or lick things. These are all things that are going to affect transmission that are not just based in the biology of a smaller human. I'm going to be the adult in the room. I don't mean this room. I mean the global room, the world. I'm going to be the adult in the world for just one moment. And then I'm going to stop and probably never try it again. We know that there is a life cycle of this virus within a contagious person, within somebody who has it, and how long it can survive in the environment without us. Okay, we've been going through this now for six, seven months, three weeks. Time out. Everybody is grounded. Three weeks. Three weeks. That's what New Zealand did, right? They did a month with everybody inside. But even three weeks should be enough time to stop it completely. I don't care what the industry is, what the business is, whatever. Three weeks. That's all this would take. Why is this logistically impossible for the planet to take on a three-week timeout and just be done with it? We all have to coordinate. That's why it's... I just don't understand. Yeah, but in terms of the actual question of the viral load in children... I forgot there was a question that started. There was an actual question of the viral load. What's your question? I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Kristen. Is it Kristen? She's a Kristen? Is that right? Kristen, yeah. Okay, sorry, Kristen. But children do have a viral load, even if they're mildly symptomatic. Most often, children are mildly symptomatic. They don't have the more severe stages of the disease, but the viral load follows the basic pattern, the kinematics of other age groups, which is the largest viral load is in the beginning when kids are pre-symptomatic and only very mildly symptomatic. And that's pretty much when the peak is, is very early. But also that children... And there's a study in Seoul, Korea, coming out of Seoul, Korea, where they looked at fecal concentration for 12 weeks and were able to find viral RNA that was detectable at very high concentrations for over three weeks in only mildly symptomatic and asymptomatic children. This indicates that even kids who don't... Kids who very often don't show symptoms or don't seem to have symptoms if they're infected do shed virus and that shedding of virus can transmit the disease. So part of it has to do with how big of... How many people are mixing in your community? So what is the flow of people? How are people... Are people continuing to self-isolate? If you do have kids come into school, how is the school going to manage the situation? Yeah. But like Justin said, if we could turn things off for three weeks, we could get a handle on it and then potentially we could open things back up to be able to manage having school and being able to manage when someone is sick so that we don't have to worry about these questions anymore. And actually, I think my idea is not just... I think it might be brilliant. So hang on. So if you did this... If you can't do it tomorrow, nobody's ready. So you say August 1st. August 1st, we take three weeks off the planet. Everybody stays at home. From now to then to gather up your resources, you create a little closet full of food and water so you just don't have to leave the house for three weeks. You do it every year. You do it every year. You take... No, I'm... I'm not kidding. During the cold and blue season, just knock it out at the source. I'm not kidding. If you did that once a year globally, just take three weeks off. You're talking about Jan term? Just give everyone a Jan term. Everyone take Jan right off. It's not really going to hurt the economy because everybody's going to pre-buy that month's goods and consumables and everything else. Everybody does it. We all come out with like beards and a little bit of shaggy hair. That's three weeks. It's not even going to be that bad. You get a haircut before and nobody knows the difference. It'd probably stimulate the economy. People would buy board games and movies. They'd overbuy, too. They'd completely overbuy. They'd have a garage full of toilet paper and bottled water and then they don't have to buy it for like two years until next year and then they buy it all again. But if we just made that like a global tradition, like this is the time when we spend away from the planet and go into our caves and knock out like every communicable disease. I love it. Sounds great. I think that's a great idea. Now I need to get a, how do you get, how do you be a lot, where's Brian? How do I lobby? Where's the 20 year olds? Go talk to the 20 year olds. They don't care. I hope that addressed your question a bit, Kristen. Speaking of Brian the dog guy, Blair had a dog COVID story. Oh yeah. You know how back in the spring, everyone was like, this one dog had COVID. We think dogs can get COVID. I remember cats. I don't remember dogs. Yeah, it's not, it's not real. University of Colorado was the main home of this study, but it was actually an international collection of scientists and they looked at the study published earlier this year claiming coronavirus may jump from dogs to humans and found it to be flawed, have no direct evidence as far as conclusions and that basically was all just based on the fact that a distantly related dog coronavirus has a similar CPG content part of the coronavirus genome as SARS-CoV-2. And because this distant virus replicated in the dog's digestive tract, the conclusion was that dogs and testins were a great place for SARS-CoV to live. But that's true of all mammals. So not really a compelling argument. Ultimately, dogs are not a more plausible host than any other mammal based on current data and in fact far less than bats or pangolins. So your dog is fine. Your dog is not going to cough on you and give you COVID. Don't worry about it. Still, if you pet a stranger's dog, wash your hands before you touch your face. Again, it's too bad Brian is gone. This is delayed, but I got this from DK Jane. She says, it's shared microbiome that lets dog see human clues because they eat so much of our poop. We think we're communicating. It's just microbiome. It's just talking to her own microbiome. That's really funny. That is. If you just tuned in, you're listening to this weekend science. Want to help twist out? Leave a positive review for us on your favorite podcast platform or video watching place where twist is today. And if you're not a positive minded person, just go leave a negative review of all our competitors. Yeah. That's please don't do that. Just argue with one of the negative. We don't have any negative reviews. So never mind. No, no, you two don't. Hey, Justin, do you have a story? I got one. I think I have. I don't even know anymore. So this is a quick one. Study of the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies by San Francisco State University. They looked at this is using data from the Fullerton longitudinal study. They started tracking families and asking them all sorts of annoying questions back in 1979. And a fun thing, a correlation that came out that they saw that. This is Cody voice of Herbert Walker, not Bush, but Dana Herbert Walker. Says we see it all the time where their obnoxious leader rises to the top, but we don't know much about why tyrants, whether they be in the boardroom or in politics, wouldn't have the power they do if followers didn't support them. We often look to leaders to explain leadership, but we should actually be looking at their followers. And what they found in this correlational study is that people who had a lot of conflict in the home as youths tended to support tyrannical leadership styles as adults. So first of all, it might explain support for our current leader, which just says something terrible about the childhoods of those people who were supporting. But the president himself apparently had a clansman and apparently a pretty domineering father. Or a clansman for a father who was apparently pretty domineering over him as a child. And our president is constantly talking about his admiration for dictators globally. Maybe that explains it. Maybe that's just it. It's bad parenting that leads to tyrants in society. Well, I was having this thought, not just tyrants in society, but with respect to relationships and who we choose to date. We're talking about that self-selection or whether we can breed friendlier people by breeding just the friendly people. And we had that study that you brought last week about people not knowing really what they want. And we talked about that people just want somebody nice. They just wanted somebody friendly. You just want somebody friendly. So that's what you want. But you have parents or an environment that gave you whatever mental structure where you go for the bad guy, where you don't choose the right person for yourself. And so maybe it probably has to do with leadership styles as well. Yeah. I just thought it was funny. But I thought it was funny that they're looking at the followers and who had conflict with the parents and had overpowering or dominating parents. And then those people like sort of people who were being more tyrannical in places of power. But he immediately made me think of our own president's admiration for all. Why is a guy who made his coin or whatever in a free society with capitalism and everything else is going? Why is that person admire all of these dictators? Oh, yeah. It may be nothing. Justin, I don't think he actually made any money. He didn't. He lost all the money. He actually lost. He lost. So I feel like he's spending a lot of money. It's fine. Don't worry. It's all moot. Oh, no, there's a authoritarian's doing the run sheet. Apparently, this story didn't make it in there. Okay, I'll go find that story. I'll go find it quickly. Thank you, Fada and the chat room. Fada is, what is he doing with the links? Yeah, I don't know. He does show notes for YouTube. Publicly known. Just show notes for the YouTube. Okay, I'll fix it. Publicly known. Then he does our social media. Publicly known. Oh boy. And edit. Okay. Did you have another story, Justin? Oh, I didn't realize. Oh, no, no, I was just going to find the link to my original story but put it in the show notes. But yes, I do have another story. You're like, let me do the work right now. What was the other? Oh, you know what it is? I told about the pickled brains in the pickled cap. So this is a compound that's commonly found in pickled capers. Activates proteins required for human brain and heart activity. Wait, what? In a pretty direct way. Yeah, it may even be a- I feel like you just said a bunch of words that- It went from pickles to brain and hearts. Okay, I'll slow it down. I know it's late. How is this direct link? Tell me. Explain. A compound commonly found in pickled capers has been shown to activate proteins required for normal human brain activity and heart activity and may even lead to future therapies for the treatment of epilepsy and abnormal heart. This is the universities from University of California, Irvine. Discovered a compound named Quercetin. Commonly consumed when you eat capers. Can directly- Directly regulate proteins required for bodily processes such as heartbeat, thought, muscular contraction, and functioning of the thyroid, pancreas, and gastric gut. So what's interesting about this is just from the cursory level of like, hey, we fact a food that has a precursor that then gets broken down and built up and turned into something else that gets used in the body for is normally what you're hearing from a nutrition story. Like if you eat this, this is a building block that an enzyme, if it encounters, is going to turn into a thing that does a thing that does a thing. This is saying there's a direct action, direct stimulation to these proteins, which is pretty unique in a nutrient derived from food story. The Abbott Lab, where this was discovered, found that Quercetin, plant-derived bioflavonoid, modulates potassium ion channels and the KCNQ gene family. These channels are highly influential in human health and their dysfunction is linked to several common human diseases, including diabetes, cardiac arrhythmia, and epilepsy. Study revealed that Quercetin modulates the channels by directly regulating how they sense electrical activity in the cell, suggesting a previously unexpected mechanism for the therapeutic properties of pickled capers. That's amazing, and I'm looking further in this story and apparently we've been eating capers for about 10,000 years. Well, I haven't, they're gross. Humans have been using capers in traditional folk medicine for thousands of years. Capers have a history, which I had no idea about. No what? I've never asked for a caper pickled or otherwise on my pizza. Pizza? Or like have a caper. I don't know where do you put a caper? I mean I've never seen them. Pasta. On lox and bagel is what I've seen on. Lox and bagels, I make a nice pasta with green olives, a tomato sauce with green olives, and capers. I'm putting them on all my pizzas from now on. Apparently, however, Corsetan is not only in pickled capers. It's also in abundance in apples, honey, raspberries, onions, red grapes, cherries, citrus fruits, and green leafy vegetables. Oh great, who needs a caper? Get out of here capers, nobody asked for you. Corsetan is found. Roast peas or something? I don't know, who are you? I don't know, Justin, did you realize you were hitting a nerve with this one? I had no idea. No clue. I'm offended by their presence when they show off on something. The number one most Corsetan dense vegetable is called dock. Watercress, cilantro, radicchio, asparagus, okra, onion, serrano peppers, red leaf lettuce, kale, elderberry, cranberry, blueberry, blackberry, fig, apple. It's, wait, it's just in all plants? It's a plant. Yeah, it's in plants. In all the plants. I don't know, this particular story liked it in pickled why pickled capers? No thanks. All right, moving on from pickled capers, that was a pickled caper caper. Or was it just a pickled caper? You know, sometimes we just don't see things the same. We don't see eye to eye. And you know, you notice that, yeah, anyway, researchers really found that. Publishing out of UC Berkeley and the proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences, researchers had people look at a visual frame and look at arcs and the different length arcs and size of arcs and had people compare them and looking at the differences between different performances by different people. They found that people found the exact same arcs, you know, that measure a very specific distance to be bigger in some locations in their visual field and smaller in other locations in their visual field. And there was variation in where those locations were between people. So really what it suggests is our brain, our eyes and our brain basically perceive things in the environment and none of us are perceiving the exact same thing, but we all have to use our physical body to adapt to work with those things. And the example they give in the story is say a mug of coffee. The handle to that mug of coffee is always going to be the same size. It's always going to look the same size, but regardless of whether I'm looking at it out of my side eye, given that coffee a side eye and I'm going to go reach for it and grab it, I'm going to be able to reach for it and grab it and be able to hold onto it and get that coffee to my face hole, regardless of how, you know, I'm going to figure that out, my body's going to figure that out. And if it's the same distance, anybody's going to be able to reach out and grab that handle of coffee to be able to get that cup of coffee. So our bodies adapt for those differences in how we perceive the things in our environment, but none of us are necessarily seeing things in the same way. We may have a visual perception fingerprint that is unique to each of us. Trippy. Trippy. Well, we know we don't see color the same way. Well, I certainly don't. Yes, no, you do not. But even those of us who aren't color different, what do you have to say now? Not challenge. It's just color unique, color different, different seeing. I don't know. I'm going to get in trouble. Different seeing. Yes. Even those of us who aren't are still like with variations. Like we're a lot of times people you there's there's studies that can show that you are not even studies. There was an experiment at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. It was like this wheel chart and you would match up and you could suggest you do it with a friend and see where you match them up. And quite often you're like these two are the same and the person next to you or the person before you would match that wheel up slightly differently, like a shade differently here or there. So we perceive light differently and that creates a difference in how we perceive shade or coloration and hue. But also I kind of wonder like if there's anchoring involved in any of this. Like when you're talking about whether it's a big arc or a small arc, if there's like what was the last arc that you saw? Was it St. Louis or McDonald's? Yeah. Yeah, but we have people we're all living in our own worlds. We're all living in our own worlds. But you're the same world. Exactly. Big game of telephone. Big game. And then another my last story for the night is about the placenta. So your seahorse placenta story intrigued me earlier Blair, because in this new study researchers have determined some very, very important information about the formation of the human placenta. And in this research, which has now been published in nature, they looked at the at the level of the nucleus of the cells that go on to become the placenta compared to the cells that go on to become a baby. And at the moment of fertilization, there's division and some cells go to become the placenta and the others become the fetus. And the placental cells within the DNA, there is a twisting that happens. So the DNA starts twisting up really hard and it breaks. And so the DNA breaks out of its double stranded formation. You know, normally it's like a little twisted ladder. And but instead it gets twisted and broken into single strands. And it is the fact that it is in these single strands that make it that allow it to go on to become the placenta and also lie at the heart of potentially lie at the heart of diseases like preeclampsia or at disorders that lead to malformations of the placenta or that lead to overgrowth of the placenta or just to a very nice placenta that feeds the offspring. Yeah. So the placental growth is regulated by a sixth base of DNA called N6 methyl adenine. And this base stable stabilizes these single strands so that they stay as single strands. And there is a protein around that's called Sat B1, Sat B1. And Sat B1 is critical for the organization of chromatin. So it takes things and puts them together and makes them become double stranded, right? Chromatin, gotta wrap it up. Sat B1 wants to do that. And so when there's none of this N6 methyl adenine, the sixth base of DNA, placentas grow uncontrollably. But if these, and so they have defects. And so they now want to look into the interplay between this DNA base and also this protein and how these single strands of DNA actually function to make the, end up determining the fate of the placenta. And it's this pretty cool cellular level research that will hopefully lead to treatments that can help many more healthy babies be born. Yeah. Oh my goodness, is it time for the animal corner? Yes. We get to the animal corner. Is it time? Yes, it's time. Okay, this is this week in science. It's time for Blair's Animal Corner. With Blair. Keepers. Keepers aren't animals, Justin. So my first story, I feel like I prepped this story a month ago. It's about rats. Oh my gosh, I'm falling apart. Rats. And how they decide to help or not help a neighbor if they are in distress. It turns out that rats actually exhibit the bystander effect, which is a phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to help someone in need with other people around. This is something that was originally seen in 1964 by humans in a really sad scenario, but ultimately they showed that if you have, if there's a bunch of people around, there's kind of this moment of like, are you going to do it? Am I going to do it? Nobody's going to do it. We're not going to do it. Sort of thing. So these rats were less likely to rescue a rodent in need if they were surrounded by unhelpful bystanders, but they were more likely to take action when their fellow bystanders were willing helpers. So it's, you know, if somebody goes in there and says, you call 911, I'm going to do CPR, help me out with the compressions. And then like, people are in it, right? So it's this idea that it just really kind of feels like a herd mentality thing. But these rats definitely did it. The way that they get investigated is pretty interesting. They wanted to have this situation where there were helpful rats and unhelpful rats, and you kind of watched what this other rat in that space was doing. So they had to make unhelpful rats. So how did you do that? You don't want to anesthetize them. You don't capacitate them. So instead, they gave them a low dose of anti-anxiety drugs to basically just reduce their level of interest in helping just kind of make them kind of spacey. Yeah, exactly. So these incompetent helpers were put near a potential helper that encountered another rat that was trapped. In contrast, rats were paired then with helpers that consistently failed to release the distressed rat. And so incompetent bystander rats influenced the non-impaired bystanders. If they belonged to a strain of non-impaired bystanders, they were familiar with. So if the people who were not helping were people they knew, not going to help. They're not helping or not going to help. So this kind of, it shows that it's a little bit more complicated than just are people helping or not? I'm going to do what they're doing. It actually does, there's familiarity involved as well. But it also undermines the original thought about the bystander effect, which was that it has to do with individuals assuming that others will be responsible for taking action, which lessens their own sense of responsibility. So their thought here is because these rats are doing this in this kind of very simplistic scenario, they're not communicating with each other. So it's clearly not a situation of, are you going to save that rat or should I save that rat? And then it just kind of turns into no action at all. Instead, it looks like this is just a more broad mammalian process, or at least that's what they're claiming in this study. So I'm not sure if that's such an easy leap here. I do think that animals pick up on each other's cues. And if nobody's helping, there is kind of a moment like, am I not supposed to help? Maybe I shouldn't help. You're not helping. Maybe I shouldn't help. So yeah, there's definitely some very funny cognitive stuff happening here. It's interesting, it happens in humans and in rats. But yeah, I'm not really sure what exactly it means based on this study. Yeah, I mean, exactly. We can't look at it through the lens of our human interpretation, either. Right, right. What we know is helpful rats, test rat is helpful. Unhelpful rats, test rat is unhelpful, but especially if they know those other rats. So I mean... Well, it's very similar. I'd like to talk to Dr. Brian Hare about this study. I know, I was kind of hoping he was going to be around for this one. Why did he ever leave? You should never have left. You should have because it was one in the morning. No excuse. To piggyback on that, I think what this does tell us is if you see someone in peril in pain who needs help and no one is acting, be the person to act because if you act, then other people will jump in. Especially if they know you. Especially if they know you. But yeah, there's a paralysis that happens if nobody's doing it. Yeah. And that's ingrained in a mammalian history. So just suck it up and be the first person to help. I think that goes pretty deep in it is the fear to be out of the ordinary because the ordinary is safe. The status quo is safe. Whatever the rest of the rats are doing is what's going to help you survive. When you are the one rat in a social setting that's going to go help a rat who's in trouble, you could end up in trouble too. It's fear. It's survival. And I think that's a very interesting point and I wonder what the Trut foxes would do. Yeah. Well, and the other thing that I just realized is it could totally be a prey instinct because if a member of your group is injured, that's the one that's going to get eaten by a predator right away. If you go to a rush to aid that predator all by yourself, you will also get eaten. Right. Not a good place to. I think that's a very good point. Yeah. And if but if all of you go over there and protect the injured individual, then it's much less likely you'll all get eaten. So that might have something to do with it as well. Okay. But really I really that was just that was the appetizer. I have to get to this story about left and right handedness in fish genitalia. Okay. Okay. Wow. All right. Let's I've been I've been waiting to talk about this. So go for it. Study from the University of Constance. And it is focusing on a century old question regarding asymmetry asymmetry in genitals in internally fertilizing fishes, which, okay. So first of all, we know most fish are external fertilizers. The females release eggs, the males release sperm on top of it. But there are some fish that internally fertilize, for example, sharks. And they have a phallus like thing called a gonopod that's basically an anal fin that has transformed through evolutionary history to be a copulatory organ. And they use that to inseminate females. So those are the internally fertilizing fishes. So let's get that out of the way. Now, let's talk about the fact that their genitals are asymmetrical. So I'm about to throw something else at you. This is specifically looking at the genus anableps, which is four-eyed fishes. So four-eyed fishes. Are you about are you about to throw the asymmetrical genitalia of a four-eyed fish in my direction? I sure am. So a four-eyed fish basically has a quote unquote split eye. So it's really they have two eyes, but they have a section of it that can see above water and a section that can see below water. So it looks kind of like they have four eyes. Like they're kind of funny shaped. They're wild animals. But anyway, they're these four-eyed fish that are really two-eyed fish. They are live bears, as I said. They have internal fertilization. They give birth to fully developed offspring. They do not lay eggs. And they have this asymmetric genitalia. Both males and females, by the way, have asymmetrical genitalia. So these gonopods that I talked about before, they're asymmetric. Their tip either bends pretty drastically to the left or to the right. Some females have asymmetric overgrowth that covers their genital opening laterally. So some females can only copulate with some males. So within populations, you see males and females that are both righties and lefties. You would guess that over time, this would lead to speciation. Because if righty males and righty females are the only ones that are compatible, that would continue. And eventually you'd have your righties and you'd have your lefties. And they would be separate lineages, separate species, completely distinct. Well, in order to figure out if that was true, you would have to figure out if this is a genetically marked trait. How do you do that? You look at the genitals of mom and dad and the genitals of their babies and see if they are the same. Do left-sided males father mostly left-sided sons. So when you look, you have individuals with left or right-sided genitalias found in similar proportions within populations. So one is not dominant even if it is genetic. But they found it's probably not. There is no strong heritability in the direction of genital asymmetry in these buddies. So it seems to be 100% luck of the draw, random. Both captive and natural populations had offspring where they were asymmetric and a near equal proportion of left and right-sided genitalia. And all this happened independent of their parents. So that explains why this continues despite the fact that it kind of pigeonholes you into a specific pool of mates. But so yeah, it looks to be completely random. There is no evidence of genomic differences in them at all that they could see that could be linked to it or anything. And so therefore, they don't think there's any way that this could lead to speciation in these guys. So this is just a really bizarre situation where it appears to be just a flip of the coin. Are you going to have left-sided or right-sided genitalia? And it might narrow the dating pool, but other than that, it doesn't seem to affect their lives at all. Which of course, then you have to ask the question, why do they have those then? Which we don't know. That's next, I guess. We have to figure out what drives that, what drives the left or right-handedness. Is it genetic, but it's just a flip of the coin? Is it hormonal? Is it just like how you sat inside the mom? We have no idea how the handedness happens, but I'm guessing that's next. Randomly. It's great. I mean, when you go in, researchers go in and think, this is definitely going to be a genetic thing. This is like a sex-determined trait or something, but you know, we're going to do this study. It's going to come out this way. Nope. What is going on? Nature's just crazy. Nature's crazy like that. I wonder what does lead to it. Maybe we'll find out off to keep an eye out for the four-eyed internally fertilizing-handed genitalia having fish. You keep an eye out for the fish genitalia, Blair. You will. You know I will. We're all getting a little loopy. You've been talking about fish genitalia for, I think, 20 minutes now. What's the next story you got, Blair? I'm done. Oh. And on that note, we do have a question that I think I'm going to punt until next week if a vaccine is just dead virus. Then why is it so hard to create a COVID-19 vaccine? This is from Paul Riley. I'm going to punt it for next week because this has been a very long episode and we did answer a question earlier in the COVID section. Paul, we will answer your question next week. Thank you for your patience. Now we've made it to the end of the show. I think we've really done now three hours in. Okay. Great show, everyone. That was fun. Thank you. Thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the show and thank you for our guest Dr. Brian Hare for joining us this evening to talk about his book, The Survival of the Friendliest. It's a great conversation and you can find out more about him and the book that he's written with his wife, Vanessa Woods. And we will have a link at our website for art with our show notes. So, shout outs. Fada, thank you for your help with social media and show notes. Gord, thank you for manning the chat room. Identity, thank you for recording the show. And I would like to thank our Patreon sponsors and the Burroughs Welcome Fund for their generous support. Thank you, too. Eric Combs, William Fittest. New interfaces making me unhappy. William Finch, Ashley Schiff, Israel Melendez, Flying Out, Mark Tyrell, Chris Jones, Guillaume, Delvin Neville, John Lee, Ben Rothig, Ben Bigelow, Doug Manson, Ali Coffin, Ross Owen. Oh man, this is a wrong thing. Uh-oh. That's okay. Hold on. Hold on. So, I'm also having like the crazy problem right now. I may not be able to do my part of the run downy at the end of the show. You can't see the run down. I can't see any. No. Why not? It won't open. My Google Drive is like mad. That's mad at you. Okay, now I think I've got it. Okay, now let's read this list. I need to figure out a better way to make this into a nice list. You would like a list? Patreon? Change their interface and it doesn't make me happy. Okay, thank you, too. 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From stopping global hunger to dredging Loch Ness. I'm trying to promote more rational thought. And I'll try to answer any question you've got. So how can I ever see the changes I seek when I can only set up shop one hour a week. And science is coming your way. You better just listen to what we say. And if you learn anything. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. Science. Science. Science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. This week in science. I think I really need a gong. That would be cool. Gong. Do it live. Okay. Justin's not here. Yes, next Thursday for those people who are Patreon patrons. We are having a special Science Island hangout. If you are a Patreon patron, the information has been messaged through the Patreon to the Patreon patrons. If you have not seen the message, please check your Patreon account. Patreon patrons. We're going to have a special Science Island hangout. Did you know that we have a Science Island? It's great. It's not video. It's audio only. But it's a cool platform. And I can't wait to run around Science Island shouting at people next Thursday. Bring a beverage of your choice. I don't know. It's an island. Maybe you need a flaming... It's a Science Island, so maybe it needs to be some kind of sciencey beverage. I don't know how I'm going to be able to... That's good. Yeah, 6.30 p.m. Pacific time. July 27th, 23rd. We should have fun one hand all. We shall have fun. Or at least some conversations. We can say hello. And I'll look at the island. It'll be... It's a secret. But bring your own beverages, because identity for it was one heck of a show. That was like the longest show. Short of the Twist McGinnon. That probably is the longest show. It was great. It was wonderful. It was a great interview. I think I'm going to just cut off the last half. You should just be like... That is the secret interview that only people go to YouTube will find. Or Facebook or wherever this video is. And then maybe I will... Maybe I'll append it to the Patreon after-show RSS feed. So the Patreons will get it. Justin, you're back. We're not going to stay late. I just wanted to wait until you got back so that we could verify and confirm next Thursday, 6.30 p.m. Science Island Patreon Hangout. Okay. Yeah. Sometimes. It'll be good times. Yes. Next Thursday, 6.30 p.m. Can you do that? Okay. Yeah, sure. Yeah, sure. Awesome. I'm sorry. I can't... My... You know what? Once I close live stream, I might be able to get in. I'll put it. Don't worry about it. I'll get the link in there. But right now, for some reason, my computer is not behaving. I'm sorry. I'm having technical issues, which I'm sure you could solve if you weren't 1000 miles away. Here. So I just want to show you guys... What dog is doing? Well, I want to show you my dog, but I also want to show you the boxes in my living room. So there's my dog. Why are there those big boxes over there? Is Sadie sleeping by the boxes on the couch? Yeah. Sorry. Did you not see? There she is. She's upside down. Yeah. She's upside down on the couch. Okay. Yeah. She blends in. So those are all dresses because I haven't been able to go wedding dress shop. So I've been doing virtual dress shop. So basically I buy dresses from stores that have really good return policies. Blair? Blair? Blair? Can I just point something out? What? Okay. You just need to relax. He's not going to change his mind if you've got a dress he doesn't like on. It's going to be okay. I don't care what he thinks about the dress. Are you kidding me? You are confused. I don't know how things work. I really don't. I really don't understand. He has very little say in the matter. He's not going to see it before the day. That's right. That's true. That's true. I forget about this. Anyway. Yeah. So I've been buying dresses and it's not everyone has an off the rack body. Okay. So like that's part of it too is I feel like my measurements are not what usually comes with a off the rack dress. So it's also very difficult because like almost any dress I buy is going to require some tailoring. And so like when you go to a salon or a store they clip the thing just like they're going to do it and everything. And so I don't have that. So I bought some garment clips off the internet. Good. That works. Yeah. And so I've tried on three dresses and I have three. There's three here. I'm waiting for three more. I'm going to try on six dresses and then we'll see. Maybe I won't keep any of them. I hope you find something that you like and I mean that would be amazing. It would be wonderful. But yeah. Off the rack. No. Yeah. That rarely happens. Yeah. It's there's a very specific body type that apparently it's mine. All clothes fit me. Men are also different. I have shapes on my body that you don't have on your body that make clothes very difficult. So I actually I do have I do have an issue with shirts because I have I have the upper body frame of somebody who's like six foot four. So shirts that but also like I think they like I can almost illustrate like like sleeve length on this shirt is is right. It goes right to the wrist right. Right. Right. Right. But there's this there's this room in the shirt that I don't need for like the rest of the body part. That's the problem. I'm like a twig of a human. Yeah. Well this is where I run into trouble is because if something's going to button right here it's way too big everywhere else. So that's part of the problem. I also have a long torso Justin. I have a very short torso. Yeah. Because I have a good spine. Bodies are different. Everyone's body is different. Yep. And it's if we can all just you know and I think I think I have whatever size fits all for beauty whatever the pant sizes that is most common for men. I have because because the size that I want is always the one that's missing. Right. It's always the one that's missing like they have the one the longer leg or the the wider hip or the short like whatever it is like the one I need always missing. Yeah. See I never have problems finding shoes and especially on sale because my feet are pretty big. I'm a I'm a nine or a 10 for women which is definitely on the large side. My size is the size that everybody wears and so there is just seven. Seven and a half. There are no shoes. Everybody's already bought them. Chat room. Absolutely. We are all following me down to the river. We're all going to get reborn and baptized whatever takes place when you dunk people in the river. I don't really know. We're following me to the river. We're going hallelujah. That's exactly where you totally nailed my outfit. Here we go. I love you too. You're right on point. Absolutely. I forgot my preacher garb on tonight. Preacher garb in your globular head. So I didn't there wasn't a time because I kept interjecting too much for the whole show because this is a very fun episode. I could have said but the thing I kept thinking about like when he was talking about the globular head I was like yeah. I bet a Neanderthal thinks we look really weird because we still have eyebrows but no ridge to go along with it. You have you still have the hair there but you have no eyebrow ridge. Like there's no like like unique place that your eyebrows actually belong. You just have them sort of painted on your faces. You look weird. So all I can think about it was Neanderthals with heads shaped like loaves of bread and then you say that the rats they bred rats to have more globular spherical heads so that I just started picturing rats in human face. I picture pinky in the brain mostly the brain like the brain's got a very globular head. They didn't say that they bred the rats to have the more globular heads. He said they brought them to have more serotonin. But I went there. I wanted to paint the picture. I didn't go that far. I just imagined rats with really round heads. It's a rat. Just picture a rat and then picture instead of a rat head just a human hairless head. It's the brain in the brain. That's exactly what I get. I know Justin. Take the cartoon out of it. Think realistic. Put a realistic human head on top of a rat. Why are you making me do this right now? Why are you doing this? Oh my goodness. Oh, okay. You're obviously a little too loopy to be in public at this point. Just say good night, Blair. Good night, Blair. Say good night, Justin. Good night, Justin. Good night, Geeky. We got to get Brian back on. He's got us all goofy. I think I need to do another twist to get it. I just wasn't prepared. I got to work tomorrow. I got off work at seven o'clock yesterday. No, I don't know what day it is. Seven o'clock this morning and I slept all day. I'm not turning out, so I'm ready. I can now pick up the slack. That's so fair. I have to wake up in five hours. I know. Oh my god. Okay. Good night, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Really appreciate you sticking with us. If you stuck with us for the whole show, that's amazing. Thank you for watching it all unfold. And remember when we knew what we were talking about to the end where everything crumbled. Remember, though, if you're going to send a haiku, it has to be one that came to you in the night. It can't be a daytime haiku. Those don't count. Rules are very specific and we're not budging. Dream haikus. Okay, we will see you next week. Again, we'll be back next week. Stay safe. Stay healthy. Have a wonderful week. We will bring you the science once more and next Thursday, Patreon. Patreon Hangout. And we can always be three weeks, three weeks away from your complete reopening of society if we just take those three weeks off. Everyone, everywhere, three weeks. Three weeks off sounds amazing. Good night. Clicking the buttons now. Take care, everyone.