 40 here. I just saw the latest Tucker Carlson really scary stuff. Did you know that Joe Biden is a wannabe dictator? I was listening to Dennis Prager the other day. He says that America's now a police state because they indicted Donald Trump. My God, we're living in a police state. You're wondering 40. Could it happen here? Could Nazi Germany happen here? Could we turn into Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union? Well, may you ask, could it happen here? I saw Dennis Prager's column a couple of months back. It is happening here. So there's a wannabe dictator in the White House. But seriously, that doesn't matter much because what's going to determine the course of international relations, what's going to determine the course of American domestic politics is structure, not personalities. It doesn't really matter that much. Who's president of the United States? The structure of the American government is going to run things whether it's Joe Biden or Donald Trump as the chief executive. It's really not going to matter that much, whether it's Biden or Trump. Now, I love politics. I follow politics really closely. I spend $200 a month subscribing to various newspapers. I spend hours a day reading newspapers and magazines like The Atlantic and The New Republic and New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, The Times of London, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Financial Times of The Wall Street Journal. You name it, I subscribe to it because I love this stuff, but I'm not going to stand here and pretend that it's going to have this profound effect on your life. It's not. But 99% of people in America, 99% of the time, it's not going to matter whether it's Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or Vivek Ramaswamy, who's America's chief executive for people in Great Britain. It's 99% of the time for 99% of people. It's not going to matter much whether it's Rishi Sunak or the leader of the Labor Party. All right. What about World War III, pending World War III in Europe? Okay. I don't believe that we would be facing the potential of World War III in a nuclear exchange with Russia in Europe if Donald Trump had won the 2020 election. So that's the 1%, 5% of the time where I think it may have made a difference. I don't think Russia would have invaded Ukraine if Donald Trump had been president. But Donald Trump is elected president in 2024. I don't think he has much of a chance of solving this thing. I don't think it's going to matter who is elected president of the United States. We are going to be stuck with a hellacious situation in and around Ukraine for many years to come, no matter who's elected president of Ukraine, who's elected president of Germany, who leads Russia. If Putin drops dead tonight, Russia is incentivized by the tragic nature of great power politics to be in the situation that they're in, which is essentially to annex those parts of Ukraine where the majority of people are Russian speakers. Why would a great power not want to build up a buffer against competing powers? Because in life, you do not know other people's intentions. Like, I don't know what I'm going to say next. I don't fully know what I'm going to do next. You don't know what you're going to say or do next. And so in a chaotic and arctic world where we're all stuck essentially in an iron cage together, and you can't predict how other people are going to react, the best way to make provision for your own survival is to try to be as strong as possible. And what determines strength is structure, not personality, not charm, not charisma. It's structure. So whether it's that good-looking left-wing Puerto Rican congresswoman from New York, what's her name? What's that Sheila's name? Or Hillary Clinton? Or Gavin Newsom? Or, I don't know, who are the other Democratic contenders for president? Or Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Mike Pence? It could make up to a 5% difference to the power and performance of the United States, right? Up to about a 5%. But for most people most of the time, it's not really going to make much of a difference in your real life. So we talk about it for fun. We talk about it for intellectual stimulation. We talk about it to reason things out socially to test out ideas against each other. Iron strengthens iron, so too does one man strengthen another. But there's another one to be dictator I want to talk about. And that's the one to be dictator in my pants. But I figured if I put that in the title, nobody would watch the one to be dictator in my pants. But everybody wants to rule the world. AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, right? If it was she or Donald Trump as president, it would make about a 5% difference for the power and might of the United States. But probably that would be about it. 10% at the outside. And I'm no fan of AOC. I'm right wing. I've only voted Republican. I will only vote Republican in my lifetime. But I still want to stand in reality. But as tears for fears put it back in 1985, everybody wants to rule the world. So why do we not need to fear that want to be dictator in the White House because of structure, right? Other people are incentivized to throw their weight around. Do you think bureaucrats want to be bossed by Joe Biden? Do you think other Democrats want to be bossed by Joe Biden? Joe Biden is a bumbling 80-year-old man, all right? And he's got staff who've got their own agenda. So I don't think we need to fear the bumbling want to be dictator in the White House. Bro, you don't need to fear the want to be dictator in my pants because of structure, right? If that want to be dictator got out of control, like I'd get slapped down. I'd be humiliated and embarrassed. And yeah, you know, in my fantasy life, you know, I would sit on the throne and, you know, women would line up to worship the want to be dictator in my pants. But that's never going to happen. Now, oh man, I just met this Sheila today. And like, I'm an old-fashioned 19th century Victorian gentleman. Like all I would want to do with this Sheila is just, you know, very 19th century Victorian make-out. Like wouldn't even need to be any tongue. I just wanted to say her name and just hear her say my name and just like a little nibble on the lips. So I could just chase kisses and nothing more than chase kisses. And I would be happy. But that's not going to lead anywhere, right? Is that going to be, you know, a satisfying, you know, long-term relationship? God, the choices I make, right? I'd be better off. No, I'm not a century Victorian gentleman. I don't even need to French kiss her. Right? I'd be happy with just a little, you know, nibble on the lips and have her say my name. Right? I'd be happy there and I get back to studying Torah. But when it comes to making sound decisions in matters of love and arrows, you know, that power does not really derive in me. So you don't need to fear the dictator in my pants. And we probably don't need to fear the dictator in your pants because of the structure of the societies that we live in. If that dictator in your pants starts getting out of control, you're going to get slapped down, humiliated, embarrassed. Your social status is going to drop and your opportunity to let that, you know, dictator in your pants out for a rumble is going to be severely constrained. And so too with Joe Biden or the head of Chase Banking or the head of the Federal Reserve, right? We live in a structure, guys. We live in a society where everybody is trying to insert themselves, right? Where the stronger take trying to take all they can and the weaker enduring what they must. But in the final analysis, it's the structure that determines the world around us. It's the structure that determines the state of the economy around us. It's the structure that determines war and peace. It's the structure that determines thriving versus surviving, right? Personality makes about five percent of a difference. So no Adolf Hitler, there would have been no Holocaust. So yeah, there can be some significant difference due to personality, but that really only about five percent of things. But anyway, haven't tuned into Tucker Carlson. So let's get to here. Tucker Carlson on the way. Hey, it's Tucker Carlson. On Tuesday afternoon, the Biden administration had Donald Trump arrested. It was a pretty big news story you may have seen it. Just before 9 p.m. that night as part of its coverage, Fox News ran two live video feeds next to one another. On the right, Donald Trump addressed his supporters in New Jersey. On the left, Joe Biden spoke at an event for the Secretary General of NATO in Washington. Beneath those videos at the bottom of the screen, Fox's banner read this way, quote, want to be dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested. Those words are up for less than 30 seconds, but the effect was immediate. Inside Fox, the women who run the network panicked. First, they scolded the producer who put the banner on the screen. Less than 24 hours after that, he resigned. He'd been at Fox for more than a decade. He was considered one of the most capable people in the building. He offered to stay for the customary two weeks, but Fox told him to clear out his desk and leave immediately. Then the company issued a public apology for the 27 second long want to be dictator line, quote. The Chiron was taken down immediately. Fox's PR department said, and then added ominously. It was, quote, addressed. That was all true, but it was not enough to save Fox News from the ensuing scandal. For a time in the rest of the media, Fox's assessment of Donald Trump's arrest seem to overshadow Trump's arrest itself. Suggesting that Biden is a dictator, declared the Washington Post, quote, crossed the line. Alexander Vindman agreed strongly. Vindman is the perennial MSNBC guest and full-time Ukraine promoter you may remember from Russia gate. On Twitter, he demanded that the Pentagon pull Fox News from all military bases. It is, quote, absolutely unacceptable for American forces network to carry programming that directly, spuriously attacks the commander-in-chief of American armed forces. Vindman wrote. In other words, Joe Biden must ban all criticism of himself because that's what non-dictators do. John Cusack went further still. For the crime of calling Biden a dictator, Fox should be shut down, wrote the 80s era movie star, quote, the government has to take away their broadcasting license and so on. It was all over the internet. Democrats were very, very angry. But why were they angry? If the banner on Fox was false, why the hysteria? Lies don't seem to bother anyone anymore. If some cable news producer had called Joe Biden a genius or accused him of being secretly Sudanese, would anyone be yelling about it? Would Fox News have apologized for it? Probably not. But calling Joe Biden a wannabe dictator, that stung. So you've got to wonder if you're being honest with yourself, is Joe Biden a wannabe dictator? That question came up yesterday at the White House briefing. Here's how it went. So look, there are probably about 787 million things that I can say about this that was wrong about what we saw last night, but I don't think I'm going to get into it. I think I just commented. Oh, no comment necessary. Of course, Joe Biden's not a wannabe dictator. Just because he's trying to put the other candidate in prison for the rest of his life for a crime he himself committed doesn't mean he has a totalitarian impulse. Come on. All right. There's no evidence that Joe Biden is behind the indictments against Donald Trump, right? They would have taken place if some other Democrat had been president. That's absurd. It takes a lot more than jailing your political rivals to earn the title wannabe dictator. That's the consensus in Washington tonight. And in some ways, for once, the consensus may be right. It is not a small thing to be a wannabe dictator. It's quite a process. There are a lot of steps. First off, there is the money. The one thing that all dictators have in common is they enrich themselves and their families. Okay. So I enjoy Tucker Carlson. And sometimes I think he's wise and profound just as often. I think he is a demagogue and irresponsible. So there's a terrific essay here by a philosopher Michael Hummer on website fakenews.subsac.com. Tucker Carlson, the hilarious demagogue. I think that's a terrific description of Tucker. I mean, that's how he, that's how he rolls, right? He is funny. I mean, he, he's really good at what he does, right? Here's a clip on how he was completely wrong about. And I just, it's unfortunate that we don't see that. And there's also just the dumbing down of the American electorate, you know, people don't understand civics. They don't understand politics. They don't understand how things work. Did you hear that? Have you internalized it? Have you brought it deep inside? Let it marinate a little bit. People who don't like Kamala Harris are sexist, obviously, because like Admiral Rachel Levine, she identifies as a woman too. They're also racist because Kamala Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican college professor, duh. And by the way, they're also stupid by definition. They know nothing about civics or American politics. It's the dumbing down of America. Unlike Kamala Harris, you don't, quote, understand how things work. So the takeaway is Kamala Harris isn't unpopular because she's a bad person. She's unpopular because you're a bad person. You're the problem. Your racism is hurting Kamala Harris's political career. Damn you, bigot. And then we realize. So he is really entertaining. He is fun to watch. As how's this for mind bending? Joy Reid was talking about us. And then we broke down and shed the bitter tears of self-awareness. And our journey of education began. We wanted to know more. So we found an interview that Joy Reid recently did with a black supremacist website called The Root, a website that's now a permanent fixture in our favorites tab. Reid is the child of well-educated African immigrants grew up in a white neighborhood in Denver and went to Harvard. So naturally she's got a gut level understanding of the historic black experience in America. The way you do when you're from Denver and went to Harvard, you just feel it. It's just part of you. The way it's part of Kamala Harris after growing up in Montreal. As Joy Reid put it, quote, Kamala is just a regular sister in the same way people would always say that Michelle Obama is like your sister if your cousin became first lady. Kamala Harris is like if your cousin became vice president of the United States. I think she doesn't get to show that person. Okay. So what makes Tucker so successful is that he is entertaining. He is funny. And he's got this great look of confusion. That's just fun. All right. He's just fun. So not necessarily terribly accurate, careful, responsible, but he's got this wonderful stare of confusion. He's about the most entertaining pundit. He's just as entertaining for people on the right as John Stuart is for the left. And he's not just entertaining. He's not just funny, but he's good. He's very good at calling out the left. So probably the great majority of Democrats are moderate liberals. They're not extremists. Many of them probably fed up with the work takeover of their party. And so even many Democrats enjoy when Tucker Carlson, you know, goes after the worksters. Now, Tucker's not terribly accurate. All right. He's not terribly careful with the facts. I mean, pushing the UFO stories talks about, you know, Kat Nunn's, you know, just in the final analysis, Tucker is a world-class demagogue, right? His messages are expertly calculated to provoke political outrage. Now that's good when he's directing outrage at real outrages, but much of the time, at least as often as he's directing outrage at real outrages, that Tucker's Carlson's outrage is groundless. Often his main reason for saying that something is occurring is that it would be outrageous if it were like his outrage resonates with his audience. People enjoy being outraged at their political opponents. So they don't really pause to think about how credible it is. So here's Tucker on China, taking charge of our energy grid, guys, the chikoms. Oh man, that link no longer exists. Damn, Fox News, they've taken away, they've taken away many of Tucker's links. All right. Now, here's a serious thinker, a serious journalist, a great journalist, Nicholas Wade, the longtime science writer for the New York Times, who wrote dozens of stories in the New York Times on how race matters, right? Here he is talking to Andrew Sullivan back in February this year. Wuhan had been doing up until that point. We have evidence that just before the outbreak or a few months before the real panic began to happen, Wuhan had already worried about its own security protocol and had done a top-to-bottom review of it. So, I mean, the circumstantial evidence at this point is overwhelming. Certainly reading your book has moved me. I mean, I don't really want to have an opinion either which way has moved me to that. I want to, and by asking you, is that you are, you've had this extraordinary career as a science writer and not a boring science writer because you forever, I don't know, a provocation is what you do for living in some ways. The biggest provocation, I think, or the one that resonates with me, is a sense of, you're saying we must better understand genetics in the nature of human society, who we are, where we're going, and we have kind of forgotten that. Now, when you say that, people immediately jump at you and say, you're a eugenicist because they have no idea what the meaning of the word eugenicist is. But it strikes me that since we've decoded the human genome, among the most fascinating aspects of increased human knowledge has been our genetic origins, whether it be my spinning into a cup and finding I'm even whiter than I thought I was, or how we have understood exactly, for example, how human beings first started wearing clothes. Are you optimistic? I mean, obviously, we've also seen and witnessed scientific breakthroughs of extraordinary character. Are you more optimistic or pessimistic about the future? Well, perhaps I could stop by saying that I've never intended to provoke and didn't do so with my... Oh, come on. Come on. ...on human races. Absolutely. Bloody Lutely, yes. I was... We're not supposed to talk about that book. I was just... I once talked about that book on my blog and half the staff nearly worked out. It's true. But so why is genetics so stigmatized? I mean, it's kind of both seen as vital, but also kind of stigmatized. Well, I think the root problem there is that the left has always been against the idea of human nature, because if you're going to mold socialist man to your liking, you have to be able to make whatever changes you like. I mean, Marx and Engels wanted to abolish the family, and you can see the same in today's woke crowd who want to insist that gender is so fluid that it's scarcely matters if you're a man or... Okay, these are some great and important points, so let me replay this. Because the left has always been against the idea of human nature, because if you're going to mold socialist man to your liking, you have to be able to make whatever changes you like. I mean, Marx and Engels wanted to abolish the family, and you can see the same in today's woke crowd who want to insist that gender is so fluid that it's scarcely matters if you're a man or a woman. And all this is obscure and it's nonsense, but nonetheless, it has a firm hold on people's imagination, and of course, it extends to race. So the left says that there's no biological basis to race, nor to gender. None of this makes any sense, and yet the professoriate will tell us this with a straight face, and that is because their position is so obscurantist and counterfactual, it becomes a matter of ideology and therefore engenders great dispute. It's also true, is it not, that the Holocaust itself, because it was based upon a racial classification, essentially, rightly stigmatized the human tendency to group people to racism, to demonize or otherwise refer to them, and that memory, that inherited memory of that terrible event. And also, for example, in the United States, the living memory of segregation and slavery makes these genetic questions seem too problematic, too close to what people think of as, quote, unquote, race science or biological sex, they also put in quote, quote marks. They're afraid of this being taken by the wrong people for the wrong ends, and that's legitimate. Yes, it is, of course. And I think they're putting the blame on the wrong, on the wrong part of the equation. It's not, it's not the biological facts that should be so much of a fault that we try to raise them. It's our behavior as human beings, which has many deep evil root going as far as genocide. It's in our nature to kill and, of course, exterminate our enemy, and we see this sort of resurfacing throughout history in horrific ways, but that is the, that is the root of the problem. It's not the fact that evolution has played upon human generation, human variation to inevitably create slightly different variations on the human theme throughout the world, which we can call races. Yeah, or we can call them something else. There are all kinds of euphemisms in the scientific literature, all of which are now used. Yeah, so all things being equal, it's better to be direct, you know, explicit, use plain language, but frequently all things aren't equal. So if you need to, if it's in your own self-interest, all right, then use euphemisms instead of talking about race. Talking about population clusters. I mean, this has been thoroughly said, race itself is this kind of has and can be entirely social construction placed upon people irrelevant to their biology. That is, that's not what you're defending. What you're defending is the possibility of clusters of human population that have stayed in the same area for a long time and different, will over time evolve differently than clusters of people who are in the same tier of time in another part of the world who are responding to different environmental challenges. It seems pretty straightforward. I mean, it seems the fact that we have 23 Amishos, it's true. It's obviously true. Now the question is, are these differences meaningful? Are they irrelevant? Are they subtle to this extent that it really doesn't make much difference? Or are they so big as to as to really affect our entire analysis of history and the world? I mean, you, yeah, my I guess what these differences are so big, so significant that they have to be the basis for any wise useful analysis of how the world works, right? The understanding of population clusters, right? That different groups have different gifts. It's not a magic key, but it's basically the beginning of wisdom for much of social and group analysis. I, my own view of this is basically this, that that humans want the world to be the way they want it to be. And sometimes. So again, unfortunately, we have the guy who doesn't know as much blathering on when we could be listing, you know, Andrew Sullivan, right? He's no expert on population clusters. We could be listening to the guy who actually knows something Nicholas Wade, but unfortunately, Andrew has to blather on here. The fact that just not good. Don't really fit that. And therefore we select the facts that we want to support and we demonize the motives of people who select facts we don't particularly like. Well, it's fine for you to describe the issue terms of clusters. And that's perfectly accurate scientifically. But as a science writer, I like to use words that people understand. So people understand the word race. They don't understand cluster unless you spend 10 paragraphs talking about what you mean by cluster. So Nicholas, you could explain anything in two paragraphs because you have I just, I just, I just find not triggering necessarily racial panic with the use of careful calculated use of scientific terminology. The only thing I want to ask you is that you've been an advocate of the fact that evolution may be occurring faster than we have historically understood that we are a more flexible species than we thought we were that we can change in a relatively short amount of time as opposed to glacially over the eons. What puts the evidence for that? Okay, let me answer that question along with the earlier one about your belief that I intend to provoke. So I don't intend to provoke. I see myself as just having done my duty as a science writer because it was my job at the times for several years when the genome project was first starting to cover the genome. So I wrote about how you sequence the genome, how you do this, that and the other, how you look for genes affecting health. But one of the things I came across was that lots of this information inevitably concerned the differences among human groups as we spread out across the globe, i.e. race, but I found as soon as I tried to probe into this that a sudden silence descended or something scientists would not talk about, they would put their data out there, they would not discuss it. So if you're a journalist, you know, always looking for a book to write, this subject sort of landed on my doorstep. So I wrote, I wrote my book to explain what genomics tells us about the structure of race. I'm very proud of it. You can't, you can't find this anywhere else because scientists are petrified to write about it. And, and having said what races sound typically, I then felt it was also my duty to answer the question you just raised of so what, what does it mean, what is the significance of the fact that that we exist in the form of several, several races. So the second half of my book, which I clearly labeled as speculative, I tried to figure out what it might mean. And I think I gave reasonable answers. I think you did too. However, most of the reviews just simply refuse to see that you would explicitly said the whole last two thirds of the book is speculation. In fact, you've specifically divided the book between two halves, one what we know and one what we don't know, but which you could possibly infer. And that's what I mean by provocation. Nicholas, I mean, it's, you could have just left it at the, this is what we know, but, but of course you couldn't, you couldn't, but maybe it's just, maybe it's just your curiosity. I find it fascinating. I'm just fascinating to understand why Japanese people might be different in some ways than the Scottish. I just, I don't know. It's very interesting to me. It doesn't have a moral aspect to it in my view at all. It just has a descriptive understanding of who we are and where we came from. And beyond that, you may explain why Scottish society is different from Japanese society. And that in turn may explain many things about Scottish and Japanese history. So we have this whole fascinating panorama that's laid out before us, except that, because of the cowardice and the ideological distortion of our present academic community. No one will discuss it. Are they interested in the truth? No way. They're interested in their careers and not having, and not being shot down or cancelled for fear of making something cautious about race or genetics. And so we're in this paradoxical position of having more knowledge available to us potentially at any time in history and a larger number of scientists beavering away, researching all this at the public expense. And yet nothing is being said about it. It's really quite extraordinary. I find it so. The fear, I think, is that people will start inferring that all human differences about genetics. Whereas, of course, that's not true. That the culture and genes interact upon each other over generations. In other words, that when you say, for example, Scottish and Japanese people, we could infer something about their histories and societies from their genetics. Not all of it, sure, surely. I mean, a lot of it is entirely socialized, environmentally rooted, a whole variety of different factors. Of course, it's overwhelmingly culture. But all out. Let me just reinforce that for our list is overwhelmingly culture doesn't mean that there are nothing, there is nothing biological genetic going on underneath. Of course. Yeah, but what what creates culture? Right. Culture is the product of genes and environment. Because everything human is, we have these giant brains, we create worlds for ourselves in a way that no one else, no other species. Well, maybe a couple of you, but so to say that we have to take this into account means that what I want to see is an integration of these different ways of analysis and integration of cultural, economic, environmental and genetic influences and how human behavior, it changes always different or around around the world or even even within one's own country. Oh, yes, that would be great. I mean, first of all, we have to purify our universities, get rid of every department of inclusivity or whatever they're called and and free academics to pursue knowledge instead of safe careers. That's a pretty solid point to end on, Nicholas, not provocative at all. You don't provoke. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. Okay, Edward Dutton did a recent video. Human evolution has accelerated. Why are they hiding this? Hello and welcome to a quick pint. Now today I would like to disavow some of you of an idea which a lot of you have, which is that evolution happens very slowly. Evolution happens very, very slowly. So slowly, in fact, that it almost doesn't really matter. It's a very common idea that that evolution happened in the distant past. We humans became evolved to, let's say, the savannah. That is our evolutionary match. That's where we're supposed to be. That's what we're evolved to. And after that, we created culture. And since then, there is cultural evolution, which is ultimately distantly underpinned by evolution. It's on a very long leash from evolution, but it's cultural evolution that's all important. And we haven't really changed that much at all since the savannah, apart from a few unimportant superficial things that apparently are superficial, such as eye color or whatever. But otherwise, we basically evolved from the savannah. Well, one dramatic example of rapid evolutionary change is that until about 700 years ago, Jews were not known for being particularly bright. So this phenomenon of outside disproportionate Jewish intelligence is a product of only the last 700 years and only of Ashkenazi Jews. Mizrahi Jews and Sephardic Jews are not more intelligent than Europeans, for example. So there was an explosion in numbers of Ashkenazi Jews and in their average IQs just in the last few hundred years. And when I talk about intelligence being in decline, this must be for environmental reasons. It has to be because it can't be for genetic reasons because genetic changes happen so slowly. So how could it possibly be that our loss of 15 IQ points based on reaction time data between 1880 and the year 2000 is to do with genetics? It just can't be because it's just so slow. Evolution happens at a glacial pace. It doesn't. It happens quite quickly. And people who say that it happens quite slowly, it seems to me either have an agenda or they just don't understand how evolution works. This idea that we are no longer revolving, that we are biologically adapted to the savannah, is patent nonsense. And in that regard, I want to draw your attention to a new article in Aporia magazine by Peter Frost, who is a Canadian anthropologist, which explains that human evolution did not slow down, it accelerated. And he makes his case by presenting the data from two rather interesting papers, one by John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, because what you're able to do is you're able to track down SNPs, that is single nucleotide polymorphisms, in other words, versions of a gene, and you are able to track the speed at which they have appeared on the human genome and the speed at which their presence has increased on the human genome across time. So what he finds, this Hawks sky, is that genome changes accelerated 100 fold, i.e. the speed of evolution sped up 100 fold after we left the savannah and became farmers, and indeed started building towns and things like that. The speed of evolution sped up 100 fold. So this is obviously wrong to say that we are simply biologically adapted to savannah, and it's obviously wrong to say that all of our evolution took place in the distant past, and then more recently it's just been cultural evolution, not true. Evolution massively sped up and continued at that speed for a very long time, once we left the savannah, which is showing you that evolutionary changes can occur very quickly, because different versions of a gene can spread through the population very quickly, when there are lots of people together competing, for example, in towns or whatever. He showed that the first pace of evolution continued in Europe until maybe something like 5,000 years ago. Now by 5,000 years ago, this is about 3,000 BC, we have cities, we have towns, we've moved all the way to the North Pole, we are modern people, definitely not adapted to the savannah, but yet evolution is still continuing at this incredibly fast pace, and although it may have slowed down a bit since, perhaps for various reasons, it's still likely to be going on at a relatively fast pace. So these people that say, oh, evolution is not happening, it's all culture, this is palpably wrong. And I should emphasise that this study drew up on many different groups as well, it didn't just draw up on Europeans, it drew up on all different kinds of ethnic groups, so that it could show how this was happening, and the differences in speed of evolution within the different groups. Now the second paper was by Libidinsky and colleagues from the Free University of Amsterdam, again it showed that there were a number of points in human history where there were major changes in the speed of evolution, and one of these in which evolution rapidly sped up, in which these genetic changes rapidly sped up, was the period between about 280,000 BC and 1,700 years ago, and during that period there were enormous changes for evolution for genetic reasons in our vision, in our mental functions, and in our nutrient absorption. Now his study was mostly based on Europeans. Okay, so human beings as we see them today, right, have really only been around for 100,000 to 200,000 years, as opposed to ants, which have been around for 20 million, you know, 50 million years, and human beings have evolved dramatically in the last 10,000 years. Ashkenazi Jews, all right, the highest IQ sub-population, all right, they just had an absolute explosion in intelligence, and therefore in influence just in the last few hundred years. So yeah, evolution is accelerating, it's happening all around us. Finding that, based simply or substantially on a European sample. So I hope this illustrates this idea, this old idea that I receive again and again and again, which is that evolution happens very slowly, and so it doesn't, you can't talk of the effects of genetic changes in the population across 100 years. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to a quick pipe. Now moving on from our Salamarin video the other day, I would like to talk to you today about something which a number of you ask me about, and fortunately it's something that I've actually published an entire encyclopedia article about in the journal in the Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, and that is the issue of fallatio or oral sex or playing the pink oboe. What is the evolution, the evolutionary dynamics of oral sex? Now fallatio is defined as the oral stimulation of the penis towards orgasm. It derives of course from the Latin word for latus, meaning to suck, and it is a common form of foreplay and also a sexual end in itself. The fact that it has been documented among animals, in ancient societies, and among contemporary small-scale societies would of course imply that it has some evolutionary purpose. Flying foxes are known to engage in fallatio. Sex lasts longer between fruit bats if the male is first fallated. The Indian Karma Sutra written in the 1st century AD exports of fallatio in some detail. The author believed it was practised by promiscuous women and that it was richly unclean and those that engage in it should be shunned, but nevertheless he does talk about it. Homosexual fallatio is depicted on the Greek attic red figure, Kylix, which is dated about 510 BC. So I've been watching this Australian TV show, Mr. In Between and there's a guy there, talks about how he doesn't want daughters. They're like, why, why don't you want a daughter? The guy says, well they're going to grow up and one day they're going to suck a cock and I just don't want a daughter. Homosexual fallatio among assorted tribal groups. The initiation, right of passage of the Sambir of Papua New Guinea, involves prepubescent boys between 7 and 10 daily fallating older males and swallowing their semen because of the belief that they can only obtain their own semen this way. So fallatio can be found in all kinds of society. Now a number of studies have looked at the benefits of fallatio. The first benefit is that oral sex makes fertilisation more likely. According to one study, fallatio related foreplay increases the degree to which the penis is lubricated and increases the size of the erection, increases the length of sexual intercourse, heightens the secretion from the pituitary gland. All of these factors that the study argues increase the likelihood of successful fertilisation. Secondly, the same study found that the saliva may reduce the risk of passing on certain sexually transmitted diseases to the mother, so it ensures a healthier mother and healthier offspring. Our third research has shown that women regularly swallow her partner's semen, so not just fallatin but actually swallow the semen. Her immune system becomes used to it and this makes it more likely that the mother's immune system will accept the proteins in the father's semen and it's been found that many miscarriages or preterm births occur because the mother's immune system treats these proteins in the fetus as foreign, you know, enemy bodies. Yeah, so please widely share this Edward Dutton video because many women are not nearly as enthusiastic about performing fallatio as they should be. And indeed it has been found that 82% of women without preeclampsia, which is a condition marked by high blood pressure in pregnancy, during which women can need to miscarriages and preterm births and whatever, 82% regularly practiced fallatio on their partner, but only 44% of women with preeclampsia regularly practice fallatio and swallow, I should emphasize, on their on their partner. So fallatio ensures that you are more likely to get and swallowing, ensures that you are more likely to get pregnant by that particular man, that you are more likely to have offspring by that particular man. And so in that sense it can be regarded as a K strategic thing. There's no point wasting time on fallatio if you're just having sex for the sake of it and with lots of men and hoping that sperm selection will do the rest. If you want to get pregnant by that particular man, then of course swallowing his semen is going to help. So it seems to me that if a couple go to a doctor and they say, well, we've been trying to have a child for a year with no success, one of the first things a doctor should say was, is we'll have you've been felating him. And if you say, if she doesn't know, then we're obviously what she needs to do. Now, fallatio appears to be involved in part, as I say then, because it is associated with fertility and health. Once they've proposed an other idea, as well as infertility, infertility protection, so women may wish to fillate their partners in order to try and work out subtle signs that they've been sleeping around. Okay. Edward Dutton tackling the big issues. All right. Back to Nicholas Wade's interview from February 10, talking here with Andrew. Family, that has this little insert. So that raises a real problem as to how it got in Paris, far more of some of the people know how to get back on the cliff. And he looked at the current about modern knowledge about viruses, which I must say I hadn't kept up on. I was just amazed to see how much we now understand about how viruses work. And he looked at the coronavirus. I should give a technical note for your readers who care about these things. Most viruses are made of DNA, but some of them have RNA as their background, the close chemical relative of DNA. So coronaviruses are RNA viruses, but you can manipulate them by converting the RNA into DNA, which people know how to manipulate. And RNA is very difficult. So Dagen's article showed you that the coronavirus had a very important part, which is called its spike protein. And in the middle of SARS-CoV-2, in the middle of its spike protein, there's a tiny little insert of just 12 RNA units. And this insert is very special because firstly, it makes the virus far more infective than it otherwise would be. And secondly, there is no other virus in its viral family that has this little insert. So that raises a real problem as to how it got it. None of the other SARS viruses, SARS-1 or any of the coronaviruses, have in their DNA this little inserted RNA strip that seems to make it super contagious for humans. That's correct. We also make it super contagious for other animals and who might be subject to the virus? I think that's the case. And the spike protein determines what species the coronavirus could be. So out of everyone who talks about the lab leak hypothesis, I find Nicholas Wade the most compelling. It doesn't mean he's the expert, right? There are all sorts of expert virologists who say absolutely not. This was not from the lab leak. But just from my position, I particularly enjoy Nicholas Wade's work in this area. Can attack, but within any given species, having this little insert, it's called the fear in cleavage site, make it far more infective. So we do not have evidence of viruses before this one having this specific adaptation that specifically makes it much more communicable between humans. That's right. You can see the same adaptation in different viruses, often on different places in the genome. But among the Sarbeco viruses, that's the family to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs. There is no other instance of a fear in cleavage site. How do fear in cleavage sites happen? I know these are technical matters, but they're kind of fascinating. Because presumably, if SARS-2 had evolved from an animal, it would have a much more complicated and messy content of its DNA. Or is it the simplicity and smoothness of this virus that draws attention? Well, viruses have lots of very clever tricks, which they develop over the course of even. And the chat says he's not saying anything new, bro. People were saying all this two years ago. Yeah, but the way he says it is special. The way, the clear way that he explains things is unique to Nicholas Wade. Pollution, because they evolve and multiply so fast, they explore the possible evolutionary space. So, fear in cleavage sites are found in many different kinds of viruses. I don't know if they were evolved independently or not, or whether they were shared. But it's just one of the many tricks. Look, so life hasn't exactly worked out as any of us expected. Who knew the world would shut down for many months during 2020 due to COVID? You've got your dreams, I've got my dreams. I'm 57 years of age. I mean, I expected at age 57 to essentially be retired, to be sitting in my rocking chair with my wife in her rocking chair, surrounded by our children, surrounded by our grandchildren. And I just imagined that we'd all be sitting there together and enjoying each other's company, enjoying traditional family values, and enjoying the energetic fisting of each other. And in a classy way, though, all right? We'd all just be sitting around energetically fisting each other. I don't know. Have you ever run into like risk problems from like too much fisting? That's the real reason I took up the Flexbar because I was always like, spraining and straining my wrist from all the energetic fisting I was doing. You've heard about the five live languages, right? Well, I think we need a new edition of that book. There's six love languages, so that you know, fisting for some people is their love language. Like for some people, there's a deep hole in their soul that can only be filled with with fisting. Now, there are, there are vulgar ways you can do fisting, but there's there are also 19th century Victorian forms of fisting, which is what I would, you know, imagine that we'd be doing. So I think if anyone just happened to be walking by, seeing us all fisting each other, they'd say something like, oh, it's the aristocrats. Next in the virus is a repertoire. What they think about virus is sharing information. It's a process called recombination when two viruses will infect the same cell and they get reassembled using bits and pieces of the wrong virus. Recombination can only happen between viruses that belong to the same family because viruses belong to a different family, two incompatible. So that's why if you're trying to explain that SARS-CoV-2 evolved naturally, you have a big problem in explaining how it acquired its fear and cleavage site, given that none of its relatives have one. Right, because it would have to pick it up from somewhere else, originally, in order to produce it. And presumably also other coronaviruses, you would have found this particular coronavirus. Let's say it came through a wet market, as one of the reasonable theories is, you would presumably find somewhere else where the animals originated. You might be able to find some aspects and some elements of the coronavirus there. It's traveling and then finding humans. So what have we found about the origins of the COVID-19 virus before it pops up in Wuhan? Well, that's a good question because the answer is we have found nothing. And that's very surprising because by analogy with the two previous coronavirus epidemics, one was caused by SARS-1 and the other by a virus called MERS. In both these cases, we can trace their movement through the environment. We can see the virus evolve as it, since in the case of SARS-1, it jumped from bats probably to civets. And you can see it making sort of like 20 evolutionary mutations as it made this adaptation. And then another 10, before it infected humans and another 10 before it became a really infected lethal virus. So people expected to find the same for SARS-2, at least those who assumed it was a natural virus. And yet there's nothing there. Each month passes. There's nothing to show any environmental existence of SARS-2. We don't have any infected animals. We have no human serology suggesting infection with SARS-2. There's no trail of fingerprints such as you would expect to find if it had a reason to naturally. It just pops up by magic in Wuhan. Exactly. This is the point that John Stuart made that suddenly a new virus pops up. From animals or is it from a lab? Well, it just so happens that the lab which is examining bat coronaviruses is in Wuhan. Amazing, isn't it? What a coincidence. Well, at some level, the coincidence is so blinding. It's really hard to ignore. But it struck me that the most important point that you made, at least one of the most important points, was the level of security around this Wuhan lab that was dealing with very potentially dangerous coronaviruses and manipulating them. In fact, a lab designed to try and figure out future vaccines by teasing out genetic evolutions in particular viruses. And you have to normally do that at a very high level of security because, obviously, these things are very dangerous. And the evidence is they did not use that high-end level of security. Could you spell that out for us? Oh, well, yes, they were certainly doing all these experiments in a security level that was far, far too low. It's a little more complicated than that in that the designated levels are set by an international committee of virologists. Now that the highest level of security is called a BSL4 lab. And you have to put on these funny spacemen suits and do everything in negative air pressure and work on the safety. And the trouble is everything takes four times as long to an ordinary lab. So virologists hate using these labs. So the committee that sets the standards for working with these viruses set them all far too low. So it said you could work with, if you're working with SARS-1 or MERS, you must use BSL3. But if you're working with anything else, any other coronavirus, it's okay to use BSL2. So BSL2 is about the level of safety security you're getting in your dentist's office. Basically, you just sort of a biopsy warning sign on the door and then suck your pipettes, very minimal precautions. And this is- Don't suck your pipettes. It's a good possible God against germs in the laboratory. Stop sucking on your pipettes. But anyway, sorry, go on. Well, this is the level at which they were doing this very dangerous research. Did they not understand that this was that dangerous? Well, obviously not all they wouldn't have used them. And the fact that the chief American expert on coronaviruses did- That's all his research at BSL3 because he knows it's dangerous and he thinks those precautions are necessary. The Chinese did not follow his good example. They did some of their very most dangerous work at BSL3, but most of it was at BSL2. Also given the frequent history of lab escapes that you know, it's about two or three a year, including the SARS-1 virus that escaped four times from the Beijing Institute of Virology, given that lab escapes always happen at some level. It's hardly surprising that SARS-CoV-2, if it was in fact generated in the Wuhan Institute, got indeed have escaped. It happens, you said three or four times a year that some lab somewhere that is experimenting with really dangerous viruses have a leak of some kind? It's three or four times a year for viruses of all kinds. Those are just the instance we know about. Obviously, most of these instance are covered up. Are there any mechanisms by which the United States or the West in general could try and figure this out? Or is it so obviously against the Chinese government's interest to let anybody see this, that we're really up against a brick wall? Your book is essentially, it's a little book by the way, it's very clear and concise and you also buy it on Amazon. That's what the US could do. Yeah, what can the US do in those circumstances? You're negatively inferred. You're saying we don't know this and we normally do. We do know this and that's dangerous. It's all inferential. It's like an extremely elaborate piece of circumstantial evidence that the likelihood that this is a lab leak seems higher, considerably higher actually than it being something that came out of the wild as it were. It is considerably higher and there's one piece of evidence that's come to light since I wrote my book which is pretty much clinching I would say and that is a grant proposal that's been surfaced which was written by the Wuhan Institute by scientists and their American colleagues to the Defense Department and in this grant proposal they said we are going to take the Thurian cleavage site and we will insert it into a range of viruses. So in other words this is exactly the kind of experiment to the very last detail that could have generated SARS-32. Now in fact this proposal was too gamey even for the Defense Department which turned them down so we don't know that they in fact did the experiment but it's very common in science to when you apply for a grant you often sort of do much of the research beforehand to make sure it'll work and if you don't get the grant then you get money from someplace else as the Wuhan Institute was certainly able to do. So the fact that they were thinking along these precise lines of designing a coronavirus almost identical to SARS- CoV-2 if not SARS-CoV-2 itself shows you pretty much what the lay of the land is in my view. Now what we can do about it now because this issue has been so idiotically polarized between left and right with the Democrats saying it's a natural virus and Republicans were inclined to say it escaped from a lab actually nothing has happened for the last several years but now the Republicans have control of of at least the house there are several inquiries that are getting underway which I assume will subpoena every possible document from the NIH and from its cutout which was the something called the EcoHealth Alliance of New York the NIH sent its money via EcoHealth probably because it didn't track too much I'm scrutiny that way so these two organizations particularly EcoHealth which was the official funder the direct funder of the Wuhan Institute should surely have records of what exactly was being done with its money and we may find from those records what was done and I think more evidence of the cover-up that was clearly instituted by Anthony Fauci the head of NIAID and Francis Collins the head of NIAID's parent agency. Why would they do that I mean presumably what this would mean I guess I'm asking my answer my own question what this would mean is the United States government spent some taxpayers money that found its way towards the the might have found its way it didn't actually because the defense department turned it down but through EcoHealth it could find its way to Wuhan and the American taxpayer may actually have been supporting the research that may have actually led to the leak of the COVID-19 virus. Yes that's right the NIH money definitely did flow a lot of it over a period of I think at least seven years to the Wuhan Institute and it was supporting this research for the purpose as you mentioned earlier of trying to get a jump ahead of nature and see what viruses might become epidemics and develop countermeasures before they they did so that that definitely happened. Well why why Collins and Fauci would want to cover it up well you know I think their interests are fairly clear and firstly the virus came from research which they funded either directly or indirectly and secondly it's an enormous blow to the whole field of virology which they were trying to promote by allowing what's called gain of function research and thirdly it seems to me it's an enormous black eye for science as a whole that this particular group of scientists I'm referring to virologists behaved so irresponsibly and in fact so atypically compared to other groups of scientists who when they've come across dangerous techniques have been very public very open about it and taken deliberate steps to minimize the risk Fauci and Collins failed to do that they kept everything under their control they didn't allow any public debate there was some debate among virologists and they embarked us over a period of about 10 years when this first started they embarked us on this gain of function experimentation with viruses for for what they thought was a greater good but it seems in fact of let's do total catastrophe. The greater good would be of course that you would figure out vaccines in advance for particular viruses that you would you would engineer in the lab that that would take the form of any slightly evolved virus that could then be more infectious to humans so in fact you have to create a lethal virus in order to figure out how you would vaccinate against it so there's something inherently risky in that yes tell me gain of function this is a people have heard this term gain of function research can you break that down for us is it about getting more of your money's worth from studying viruses I mean because you're able to like get them you know you're thinking forward ahead a few curves of these things oh why is it called gain of function well it's just a very bland euphemism for making for souping up a virus and making making it more dangerous than it is in nature. Oh so souping up a virus this will be a much more accurate description. Viral experimentation that would sound gain of function research again whatever the way English language is sometimes deployed to completely disguise what it's trying to say well here's another question what you would imagine that this would be an incredibly important story the origins of a virus that shut down the world devastated lives killed millions and yet I can't remember the last time I read a piece in any of the major newspapers explaining where this came from or why we still don't know where it came from except this total constant reassurance that of course it didn't happen that way and this happens in other what would be what's their best argument for this being a naturally occurring virus. Well the best argument is simply that that many epidemics do start in a natural way by an animal virus spinning over into humans so so that's perfectly possible but very plausible but that is the only argument in the case of SARS-CoV-2 in favor of natural emergence of course there's and as we've said before there's none of the supporting evidence for that route which you would expect and yet there could be we just haven't discovered it the Chinese haven't presumably there are vast search parties now going through China trying to figure out the origins of this virus sorry that was maybe true sarcastic but no no there have been indeed the Chinese have tested 80 000 animals really they've found nothing including no no infected animal in this in this wet market where the virus certainly went through an expansion but always certainly did not originate so in other words that the wet market could have played a role in evolving as far as a little bit but that it's highly unlikely the virus could spring up sui sponte as it were out of a wet market of dead animals yeah the virus would need to have been brought into the wet market right all this wet market discussion comes out of the fact that this is what happened with SARS-1 SARS-1 somehow from a bat infected severe such a being sold in these wet markets so people are going for natural emergence of tried very hard to sort of develop a similar chain for SARS-CoV-2 the trouble is it doesn't exist no there's not a single infected animal found by the Chinese in the wet market even though they had every incentive to do so and the other sorry the other coronaviruses have they all have we found an origin in the animal species for all of them or some of them still out for considerations but we know SARS-1 we have an animal source for MERS MERS the MERS virus of course it's a very obscure disease though it's extremely lethal so the reservoir animal for that is camels so we know we know before that it must have been bats because this coronaviruses has a bat-like structure but how or where it got from camel center from bats to camels is unknown but if I could jump back to something you raised earlier just why don't you read about this in the natural in the natural sure go ahead yeah it seems to me there's been an enormous institutional failure among the media in general but particularly with science writers and this is the biggest science story of the decade if not for the last 50 years so you would think every science writer would be jumping on it yet almost none none of them had at least none of the science writers on the organized major media have done so and I think part of the problem is that much of their life is simply conveying the wisdom of scientists to the unwashed masses they it's reporting on an edge case for cancer or advances in this that or the other so they slip into the rut of being basically unpaid PR agents for the for the scientific community and newspapers like to publish this stuff it's sort of good news of setting the usual fare of massacres and murders but but the the science writers have kind of forgotten that it's not that job just to report advances it's their job also to look at things that scientists don't want them to look at to look at the structure of the scientific community height it's money height we spend some of it how fraud and deceit the continued high levels in science when they should be none of that do they do and because of this mindset I think that's one of the reasons why they have failed in their duty to the public so badly in this particular case it sort of comes down to Trump again it seems to me because Trump was the one of course more of the zillion different things he said about this all of which are mutually contradictory at all in general but when he says it's China he's a China virus and everybody with a college degree in America winces and their eyes roll back in the back of their heads and they identify this as xenophobia as a sort of racism and much more concerned about the possibility that calling it a China virus is going to lead to hate crimes and they are that this totalitarian regime has accidentally created a lethal toxin for half from the entire planet because they can't give Trump any credit if they were to if they were to say this is a legitimate avenue of inquiry it would mean that Trump was not wrong about everything but every now and again the man actually did get things right I think as Trump's statements are definitely what helped when he started the polarisation of this issue which is seriously terribly unfortunate it should be a factual matter as to how the virus arose but it seems to me such a such a juvenile attitude that obviously has prevailed in newsrooms that whatever Trump said is wrong I mean couldn't they sort of step their level that game at one level and say it doesn't matter what Trump said one way or the other let's look at the facts and decide for ourselves no one that's the story of the American media the last five years I'm afraid it's just not that curious and it's more engaged in protecting certain elements of conventional wisdom than it is in actually challenging them hard I mean I'm to be honest when I read I this is not a subject that is really interesting to me until quite recently I sort of okay great discussion there with Andrew Sullivan and Nicholas Wade Nicholas Wade long time science writer for the New York Times okay