 The title of this talk is going to be the Timbergen Legacy and Ancestral Health. Why Medicine Needs the Ultimate Level of Analysis. And I'll just talk a little bit about who Nico Timbergen was. He was a Dutchman born in 1907, lived until 1988. Can everyone hear me okay? Is this good? Okay. He went to Leiden University, which is I think where Dan Party went at some point. It was his alma mater. He became a professor of biology at Oxford University. And he pioneered, he and a handful of other people, really pioneered the field called ethology, which is sort of a British branch of animal behavior science that really sort of laid the foundation for what we now know as animal behavior or behavioral ecology. So amazingly he was the joint recipient of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with Carl von Frisch and Conrad Lorenz. He pioneered the use of photography and later video and field work, which he laid the foundations for really the idea that we could like make nature documentary and that photography could be used to collect data in wild populations of animals. And he developed the concepts of what's called a supernormal stimulus or supernormal stimuli and then physiological traps and as well as this four questions approach, all of which I'm going to talk about. I'm going to talk about supernormal stimuli and physiological traps briefly. I mentioned those last year and George Diggs, if you've ever gone to any of George Diggs presentations in the past at AHS, he's talked about those a lot. And these are concepts I think we in the ancestral health community could start using more, maybe employing and starting seeing how these things that were originally these concepts, these conceptual tools originally developed in animal behavior and evolutionary biology could be used to help us get a better grasp and describe better what some of the phenomena are that we identify. So these are a couple of books either written or co-authored, authored or co-authored by Nico Timbergen or written about him. Those two on the right there, Timbergen's legacy and Nico's nature are like biographies or academic edited volumes based on his work. So before I talk about the four questions analysis, I'll mention briefly again, you know, one of the most interesting concepts that he developed was the idea of a super or normal stimulus which happens when the intensity, duration, or frequency of a stimulus is greater than that that would occur in nature. And so thus inducing the organism to respond in like an abnormally intense manner. So the volume in a sense of a stimulus is greater than it would have ever occurred throughout the species evolutionary history. So the species never had to evolve sort of a breaking mechanism and so it just responds in an out of control fashion to the loudness or the intensity of this signal. And that can happen in the modern world often as you can imagine. I'll talk about that more in a second. But then sometimes often in association with the super normal stimuli, you can get what Nico Timbergen called physiological traps which happened when an organism makes a series of maladaptive choices despite the availability of better options based on novel often super normal stimuli. Sometimes there's a whole literature I've discovered recently that talk about this the same process, but it sometimes may be called ecological or evolutionary or sensory traps. I've seen the term OVA position traps for talking about how insects can erroneously OVA posit their eggs onto like solar panels or windows and things. So, you know, but this is the same concept of a trap. This the mechanism this is not Timbergen's work directly but it's sort of in from his intellectual descendants. This came out in a paper a couple years ago by Robertson Bruce Robertson and Chalfoon. If you notice, you know the horizontal axis there the fitness value of resources resources resource normally throughout evolutionary history that would, you know, the preference that an organism would would evolve to have in response to given some object in the environment would be, you know, positively correlated with its fitness payoff, typical fitness payoff, right? A big chunk of food is going to be way more attractive. It's going to cause the organism to have way more preference than a small chunk of food or a, you know, an immediate sex partner is going to be for a high level of preference as opposed to one very distant or not present, right? So that's what normally happens. There's a, you know, preference increases with the value of the resource. Well, in modern environments or novel environments, you can get a decoupling from that such that if you see the upper left hand quadrant there, the maladaptive evolutionary trap region, that's where the, for whatever reason, the organism responds in a way that the preference is still high. But if you look down on the horizontal axis, the fitness value is very low. Alternatively, you know, on the bottom right hand quadrant there, you could have like an area in which you have a maladaptive situation where there are undervalued resources. So that, you know, the, you have low, low preference for something. But if you were to prefer that, that entity or that thing, it would in fact carry a lot of adaptive value. And so I want, I would like for people in the ancestral health community to start thinking about ways that this might help us understand better what's going on in the modern environment. You can imagine a lot of the hyper-palatable foods that people talk about. You know, it's like there's somewhere on that left side like an evolutionary trap or those creating evolutionary traps where you have like high preference for Oreo cookies, right? But the fitness value, the nutritional value is very low. Same way with pornography or drug use even. It's a way to think about evolutionary novel stimuli like that. And likewise, the bottom right hand corner there, I'm thinking, one of the examples I could think of there might be exercise. Exercise has a high fitness value. But in the modern world where our lives are so comfortable, we're not forced to exercise. We undervalue it. So we have very low preference for exercise just intrinsically. And so if we're freed from the necessity to exercise, we don't value it as much as its fitness value is actually worth. Okay? So that's a basic concept. But really this is getting on to the main crux of my talk here. The four questions model. Basically, Tim Bergen based on some ideas from Julian Huxley and Conrad Lorenz and people like that. Tim Bergen sort of wrote this paper in 1963 on aims and methods of ethology. And this kind of allowed both the field of ethology to sort of gel into a theoretically more or less complete science. And it also gave us the four questions model, which I think is very useful. The four questions involved in Michael Roses here, he pointed out that this is actually very similar to the four causes of Aristotle. And so people have noted that Tim Bergen may have essentially plagiarized a bit from Aristotle. I don't know. That would get us into a different topic. But it is similar. But in any case, so if you look at this diagram here, you have on the left hand side there like you have two levels of what are called proximate level explanations. Like the mechanistic and the developmental. And these proximate questions like our questions about how, how something works, how the red blood cell works, right? Or how the auditory system works, right? And then on the right hand side, you have the ultimate questions. The questions of like what are the survival, what's the survival value of a biological system? What is it doing for the organism at that moment? And then also like the evolutionary history or the phylogenetic history of a trait. This is like, why is it that an organism has red blood cells? Like, you know, what's it doing? Like, why do they have it? Why do they have it at this moment? What are they doing now? And how does that relate to the evolutionary history or the ultimate like Darwinian endeavors there? So these are questions about like how versus why? Well, in 2013, Bateson and Leyland wrote a paper sort of after the 50 year anniversary of Tim Bergen's famous paper. And it's called the Tim Bergen's Four Questions in Appreciation and an Update. This came out in the Journal of Trends of Evolution and Ecology 2013. And they point out that we, one system that we know kind of a pretty fair amount about all four of these levels. In, is the example of birdsong. Like, why do birds sing? How and why is it that birds sing? Well, we know the mechanistic levels. The mechanism is the level of analysis involving the physiological, anatomical and neurological sort of mechanistic details involved. You know, we know that birds sing because their throats, their lungs and their mouth parts, their gadgets are working in such and such way, all driven by nerve signals and hormonal status. You know, gene expression pathways, et cetera. Right? You know, so that's what happens at the approximate level. We know sort of a little bit about the development, like how it occurs in the ontogeny of the individual baby bird that's growing up. This is the level of analysis involving, you know, the activation of genes after zygote formation, you know, during embryological development or over the course of an individual's lifespan. For instance, sometimes birds learn how to produce better songs based on hearing other conspecifics and their environment sing. And this graph here is sort of showing the acoustic properties of a chefinch bird song produced normally. Like, this is the wild chefinch. This is how the upper graph there shows you how the, what the acoustic properties would look like of a, you know, a normally developed chefinch bird song. And then the lower one shows the acoustic properties of a chefinch reared in isolation that did not hear, you know, its conspecific sing. And so it developed bird song, but it differs. You could think of that as sort of like an environmental mutation in a way. Like, chefinches evolved to always hear birds sing. But so it never had to evolve a way of, say, producing song in the absence of bird song because almost every chefinch that's ever been born throughout evolutionary history could do so in the presence of other, you know, like a learning environment. So that, but, you know, you get weird experimenters that lock them up in cages and, you know, they develop a little bit abnormally. That can be thought of as an environmental mutation to use a term that Lida Cosmides came up with. Getting on to the ultimate another, the current utility survival value. This is the level of analysis involving the adaptive function. What is the adaptive function to the organism? You know, like, what is this Darwinian function in a way that, for instance, birds sing because it advertises their location, status, their health, their territoriality, et cetera. It serves the both to ward off rivals and attract mates. Like, that's the current utility. And of course, it may, this is an area, I'll just mention this briefly, an ancestral health. We might want to always keep in mind, like, what was the, just because a trait is manifest nowadays, it may not be serving the same utility in the modern environment that it did in the ancestral environment. So that's how one way that mismatch might manifest itself at that level. And then finally, like phylogeny, like, why does a bird sing? Well, it's, you know, it's, it could sing because it came from a clade of, like, nearby neighboring species that, you know, it's neighboring species on a, and it's like evolutionary family tree or such that they, you know, it inherited it from their ancestors. And their ancestors have just passed it alone. There's been no selection pressure to take it out. So that it's not that any of these levels are wrong. In fact, this is, this is a lot of confusion when people in, I think, all across the biological sciences, not just in medicine and health. But I've noticed this with, even within in my own, my own department at the university, when I talk, I'm talking to somebody in the cellular and molecular biology part of the department. You know, we're talking about the, the ultimate, like, like, you know, evolutionary explanations. The two sides are talking past each other. And this is just even more exasperated when, when those of us try to talk to baby people who are experts in cell biology or their medical doctors really involved in cutting edge research at some, some specific proximate level question. You know, it's like the two sides are talking past each other. It's not that anybody is wrong, really. It's just that really a, no one, very few people realize that a complete biological explanation for any entity, whether they be a red blood cell or a complex bird song or something. It really, you need all four of these levels, both levels of proximate and both levels of ultimate. Okay. So let's, let's step back a second and look at a concrete example. Okay. Let's look at an example of a mismatch effect happening in nature. Some of you, I mean, I've heard about the sea turtle example, a number of hands, probably the people that have been bombarded with this example. So sea turtle hatchlings, you know, evolve to use moonlight as a navigational aid to get off the beach and into the water. Right. The first mission that a sea turtle hatchling has in its life is to get the hell off the beach because bad things can happen to it on the beach. It can dive dehydration. It can get eaten by raccoons or sea birds. You know, it has flippers. It's not designed to live on land. It needs to get off the beach. Okay. Well, for millions of years, you know, moonlight was the only source of light that would have been present in its environment that could have been used as like a navigational cue to help the hatchlings get out of the nest. The first challenge of life is to find, okay, which way is the water? Which way do I go? For millions of years, the moonlight reflecting off the ocean would have been a statistically recurrent feature of the environment. Every environment in what's been called the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. It would have been a statistically reliable cue that their genes could hone in on. And so they evolved that as their main navigational cue. Well, you can imagine what happens now with artificial environments, right? Humans merely 100 years ago, pretty much. And a lot of coastal environments, especially around Florida, which is where about 90% of all sea turtles in the continental United States hatch. There's a lot of beach lights. Well, you know, those beach lights emit light from the blue portion of the spectrum, much like the moonlight. So the turtles, you know, never evolved ways of filtering out that environmental noise now, right? That light pollution, right? So they oftentimes wander around on the beach and die of dehydration and exhaustion or exposure or predation, right? This is a problem. This is a major conservation problem in biology. Well, again, it turns out that they suspected that it was actually not just the light in general. This is what the sea turtle conservancy did. They suspected that maybe it's not just the light in general, but it's the light from the blue portion of the spectrum that's most sensitive to the sea turtle, the baby sea turtles. So what the sea turtle conservancy have done, they've done some heroic efforts really at changing the spectral properties of the light. The lighting that's coming from beach houses and parking lights. What you see on the left hand side, that's what the external, nocturnal lighting was out, looked like before they changed the light bulbs. And there on the right is after the light changes were put into place. People can still have their beach houses, but you know, this is kind of a biohack, right? It's pretty clever. Then parties can appreciate this kind of thing, right? It's in the back there. So they were able to drive the hatchlings, the number of hatchlings getting caught in these extremely strange traps down to zero. I saw this data. You can watch a nice little four minute video about this if you follow that link to the sea turtle conservancy YouTube channel. They talked about how they were able to actually successfully fix this problem through this biohack, right? So this is the sort of a thought experiment. Okay, based on what we've seen thus far in the Timbergen four levels. Okay, imagine if you were given the task, if you were a conservation biologist, and you were given the task of solving this problem, this conservation biology problem with the turtles. But except you were limited in that you had all the tools of cellular and molecular biology, but none of the tools from ecology, evolution, or behavior. You've got to really imagine what it's like to not have those tools in your intellectual toolkit. But you're perhaps a Nobel Prize winning cellular or molecular biologist. So you have just approximate level tools at hand, but none of the ultimate level. What would this really look like? I mean, I'm thinking this may be a bit of a reductio auto absurdum argument, but it looks like you might get lost in a sort of a confusing morass of cellular and molecular biology. Patterns of gene expression, signaling pathways, neurophysiology, variation among individuals in terms of how rapidly they desiccate or dry out on the beach. You might spend all your time and money developing pharmaceutical treatments for the effects of prolonged periods on the beach. Instead of trying to figure out why the sea turtles are getting disoriented, you might spend money and time putting together papers that show this particular drug is effective in this population of sea turtles versus that one. I mean, that would be the sort of thing you could very well do. You might literally spend decades looking for the solution to this problem and never really get to the root cause, which is evolutionary mismatch. And it involves having the tools that are available when you know ecology, evolution, and behavior. And they are essentially the tools of the ultimate why level questions in Tim Berger's framework there. This is what you would get stuck doing. And you would write all your papers about a subset of this complex morass of reactions. These metabolic pathways and signaling pathways and gene expressions and transcriptomics and such. I mean, it's not that these things don't exist. They obviously are very real. They are entities in the universe. These are processes that are really happening. But it's just making it exceedingly complex and it's really not the place to perhaps be looking. This sounds kind of radical and perhaps it is because the Incentral Health model is trying to get at using all four tools that are made possible by Tim Berger's framework. They are both the ultimate questions and the approximate level. And that's one of the things that first got me into the Incentral Health scene. I noticed that people were talking about the nitty-gritty details about biochemistry, but then they would also try to tie it back to what was happening. What these bits of clockwork in the cell were trying to ultimately do for the organism in the Incentral environment. And that's what was very impressive to me. And so this is why I think this is an awesome organization. And really I want to mention this briefly. We're right across the street from the Salk Institute for Biological Science. I checked their web page the other day. And they write there on their front page the tout there, the fact that they're using cellular and molecular biology to get some of the problems that we talk about. Alzheimer's, top two diabetes, top one diabetes, Parkinson's disease. And I don't know. It's a beautiful location. That's what their campus looks like right across the street from us, looking out of the Pacific Ocean. It's beautiful. I don't know. But I would say that we, people were pioneers like Terry Walls and Dale Bredesen, what they've done for their pathologies, you could make the argument that they've, in a few brief years, I've been able to rock it past what the Salk Institute has been able to do, really. And actually getting cures are effective treatments for reversing a lot of these pathologies. So that is pretty much it. I would like to acknowledge briefly, first of all, everybody I know here at this conference, you're all my good friends and I've, we all experienced the magic when we come here and talking to our fellow tribespeople. I want to thank especially Aaron Blaisdell, Tess Fowler and Michael Rose for direct support in being able to come here. And also my professor, my advisor, David Sloan Wilson, my doctoral advisor at Bigampton, he is all about Tim Bergen for questions. And he has probably single-handedly introduced these concepts to more young minds than almost anybody out there now. And I would like to thank him especially. And also useful conversations I've had over the past year with Ken Ford from the IHMC in Florida. So I am about five minutes ahead of time. So that'll give us plenty of time for questions if anybody has anything. So please folks, I do come up and ask some questions. I have a few questions myself, but we'll save them if you guys have some. Thank you. Wonderful paper. I really appreciate that kind of theoretical underpinning work. I wonder, given the examples that you raised about bird song, which I find absolutely intriguing as well, whether you have any thoughts about sexual selection and whether there's a place for sexual selection as part of the theoretical underpinnings that we can use in the ancestral health movement. You said sexual selection. Yeah. Yeah. Like evolution by natural versus sexual selection. Yeah. We'll look at the ultimate level there on the graph. You know, the survival value, I think it would, it would sort of be, it would be subsumed under under there. Evolution is talking about how really survival is not the ultimate goal of evolution, but it's ultimately reproduction. So survival is only valuable insofar as it's tributary to reproduction. So really I would, what do you think that the sexual selection would, which should fall under under that it would be like a special case of survival. Right. Survival and reproduction. Yeah. I guess I'm thinking about whether, whether there couldn't be sort of an enhanced sense of what we have of ancestral health if we start thinking more about cultural exuberance and the kind of aspects of human life ways across long time and across cultures that really are a product maybe of the selection, the sexual selection rather than the more adaptive levels. If that makes sense. Yeah, I think so. I'd like to talk to you more about that and get some ideas. Hey, man. Are you aware of any applications of Tim Bergen's ideas or models to sort of like predictive, like if you change the ecology in some system, how will the organism adapt? I think, are you saying like, has anyone ever like predicted what the approximate level effects would be based on changes at the ultimate level? Is that one? I think about that a lot actually. And I'm struggling to find examples that really should be the big challenge for us. Because God knows there's money and time going into big research. Rivers of money are flowing into the biomedical establishment to study the things at the approximate level. I think really the challenge for us would be to say, we predict these effects will happen at the approximate scale based on tweaking some of these ultimate level more abstract forces at play. I think people are starting to do that basically with like for instance, like even a simple paleo diet, like randomized clinical trial. I mean, I would predict for instance, and I think people here have probably done some of those studies, like I would predict that inflammatory markers would go down. Oftentimes the cholesterol, ACL, LDL, ratio will flip, right? These things have, you know, we could predict that that would happen. Is that what you're asking kind of? Yeah, but to generalize that, you know, you have lots of data on like the bird song and everything. Can you like predict how the bird song would change based on how the ecosystem changes, for example? Yeah, I'll have to think about that in those terms. One way I have thought about, one person that I've seen it do it, I've seen do that in a medically relevant context is Paul Ewald, one of the co-founders of Darwinian Medicine. He talks about how change in the environment in terms of how easily an evolving pathogen can get transmitted to new host is going to change how it acts on the individual host, how aggressive or virulent that it is based on changes at the ultimate level. So I think that that would be, yeah. Hi, Andrew. Hey, Brett. So it struck me when you showed the picture of all the metabolic pathways that somebody had done the work of putting it all in one place. I wonder if you know if anyone, yeah, that one, has done something like enumerated, made an attempt at enumerating all of the evolutionary mismatches currently we're experiencing in modern life. And then you could almost see creating a checklist and saying, okay, well, I'm definitely mismatched here. I'm letting artificial light hit my eyeballs at midnight or something like that. I'm not eating right. I'm not paying attention to my circadian rhythms. Some grading mechanism. Maybe Dan Parties tried to do something, or maybe there's some practitioners who try to give people a heuristic. But it could be valuable. Yeah, wouldn't that be great though, for real? If we can have, like, the arrows going through this, like, you know, here's what's changing at this level, at this stage, at this stage, at this step, exactly what's happening, you know, at each one. That's what would be, that's where I see the future of ancestral health is the merging of, like, people really doing, living up to Tim Bergen's dream of having complete four question answers to all these phenomena, you know. Right, and then personally we all could look at this checklist and probably we would learn some areas that were out of whack and didn't even know that that was happening kind of thing. Oh, yeah. I mean, none of us are experts. Very few people can master all four things. I mean, you can spend a whole lifetime, people do spend whole lifetimes just looking at one small subset of, say, development or cellular and molecular biology. Just, you know, it's easy to get, it's hard to see all four. Yeah, okay. You know, it's the same time. But wait, I'll say this briefly. One advantage of having that Tim Bergen, the ultimate evolutionary perspective is it would allow you to pick out which particular proximate level mechanisms are. The sea turtle conservancy, the conservation biologists there were able to say, let's not look, we don't have to look at every step in this process. We can predict, ah, I bet it's the damn blue, not just the light, nocturnal lighting coming from the beach houses, but it's perhaps just the blue portion of the spectrum. So we can just filter out that blue blight pollution in their environment and have the effect. We can biohack that part. So that's the advantage, really, is that it's not, it helps us find a way out of the wilderness of all these proximate levels, cellular and molecular biology questions, hopefully. Thank you. It points the direction. It gives us like a compass. Yeah, I taught. Great talk, and my point, my question really follows on what you just said about using the two levels to work together. In fact, I think some of the best talks and papers use an interaction, you know, between those two levels. And we've even seen here in this conference, for example, I think Ron Rosdale's talk on MTOR was looking at it both at a mechanistic proximate level and an evolutionary level, and I think Amber's talk on uric acid was the same thing. This very, very specific metabolic product, she was looking at it in terms of impact and how migratory birds, you know, might evolve. So I think the best talks actually incorporate both and the proximate feeds to the ultimate and the ultimate feeds to the proximate. Yeah, I hope one day that I'm as good as they are, and I know as much about the proximate level stuff as I do. I tend to do better. I understand arguments from evolutionary theory more. I'm more curious about that. But I know enough of the proximate level to know that the people who can combine those two, the ultimate and proximate, are really doing the Lord's work there. So, thank you, Evan. Thanks, Brett. That was amazing. Could you put that slide back up of proximate and ultimate? That was so, yeah. In my field, and Mike Mu and Scott Solomon's dentists that are here and physicians. How many physicians are here? A couple. Good. One of the problems that we have, and I think I really see a solution, a help coming from you, in that Randy Nessie, who is the physician who developed the whole concept of, with George C. Williams, an evolutionary biologist of evolutionary medicine, the first conference that he was speaking at to a medical group was, he got up there and introduced the whole theory. And then as he's leaving the podium, he's passing Stephen J. Gould, who was invited as an evolutionary biologist to talk. And Gould said, nice talk, Randy, but they didn't understand a goddamn word of it. And it's really true. Everybody here, well, I'm so looking forward to talking to people this afternoon because you guys get it. I don't have to spend the first part of my lecture, and that's what Nessie learned. He has to spend almost half a lecture laying down the basics for medical students and physicians and dentists. Are you ever asked to speak at medical conferences or dental conferences? Because what you have there, what is the proximate cause of a disease? Bacteria entering, fever entering the blood, but what's the fever mechanism ultimate? You will be so valuable to medicine and dentistry, Brett. And I'm just wondering, is that something that interests you at all, or have you been asked yet to do this? No, I'm flattered. You would say that. Hopefully, if and when I make better progress by getting my PhD, you know, toward the completion stages, hopefully that will start to happen. You mentioned, did you mention fever? Fever, fever mechanism. I would like to just mention that. Look at that. Fever would be something that would be studied maybe at the proximate scale. They know that, oh, this gene turns on and it creates this signaling pathway that then upregulates some gadget in the body. So let's just give for centuries now. People, doctors have said, okay, well, my patient's suffering, he or she feels bad, they're running a fever, let's do something to reduce that fever. Well, they never, literally never ask, well, maybe there's a survival value. Maybe the fever is there to do something. Yes, it makes the patient hurt, but there are some things more important in life than to be free of pain at every given second, like getting over an infectious pathogen. And if that pain and fever is going to make you chill out and lay down and curl up and burn the pathogen out, which is what apparently there's a function and an ultimate survival value to the fever. The fever is an adaptation. It's an involved response to the pathogen. But even that concept is not well-known even among many medical doctors. Yeah, fevers make us miserable, but it makes life impossible for the pathogen. Yeah, so that's the explanation. You know, Randy Nessie has talked a lot about medical, I mean, he's just trying to get some of these basic ideas introduced into medical school because it's not, because they had to study so much detail in cellular and molecular biology. It's hard for them to even see the value of the evolution approach, right? So I think the Timbergen framework is saying and either or it's like this will allow you to understand better what's going on at the approximate levels and why those approximate level things are happening in the first place. What's up, Dan? What's up, Brett? I want to say congratulations on doing an excellent talk today and to say that it's been fun to watch your journey and you serve as a really excellent champion to the ideals that holds all of this together. Thank you. That's very, very flattering coming from you there, my friend. Thank you. And to your point, I just wanted to make a couple of comments, but I think one thing that we see when we don't have a more complete perspective of all the factors that are affecting our health is that we will over-index on one of them, like exercise. So if you don't achieve all of the health that you'd like, well, then I better just exercise more, which could lead to a different type of mismatch. So having a checkbox is an excellent idea and undoubtedly we will discover more ways in which we are increasingly accelerating our mismatch in time. 15, 20 years ago, we didn't know much about how light affects circadian rhythms and all the ways that affects the body and same with the microbiome. And so now those are being included as a part of health models and what will we know in 10 or 15 years from now? But I think the more that we can try to establish a more evolutionarily natural pattern across every way that we can conceive, we're going to get better results than trying to squeeze blood out of an orange through one of those tools, if you will. So good point on that. I wanted to sort of reiterate it and agree. And I did have another point that I'm forgetting, so I'll have to share it with you afterwards. Hey, can I ask you a quick question? Sure. You just completed your PhD in a pretty hardcore science. Do you think for you, understanding, having at least one eye toward the ultimate level, the evolutionary kind of framework, has it helped you be able to sort through some of the tedium that you see in a lot of scientific studies? Would you say it's been useful in helping you kind of develop a framework to make sense of it all a little bit better? Yeah, outside of it, outside of my specific field, it's harder for sleep. I mean, more so with circadian biology, for sure. Circadian biology? But the way that I... This was the other comment that I was going to make, that health, of course, is very confusing and rightfully so, but it seems incredibly confusing where the more you learn, if those are all individual pieces that are not tied together in any way, then it feels like every time you learn something else of value, it's like, gosh, that's one more thing that I'm going to forget. But if all of those points feed up to a North Star, which is to live more naturally, then every time you learn something new, it reinforces the idea versus just add complexity to this thing that overall feels overwhelming. So I think having that perspective, I've always liked the idea of mashing up sort of modern-day science, the proximate and the ultimate, but I couldn't agree more. You could absolutely get lost in the proximate and I think we're going to develop AI systems and stuff to sort of establish truths, get more evidence for it, and I think we should, but having that ultimate view can really make your efficient, your research efforts more efficient. Yeah. I hope so. I think so. Yeah. It should be a part of every research project. Just look back in history and say, what's that? It should be a part of every paper. It should be part of every paper. Right on. Thanks, Brett. We're just about at 41 minutes, so... Yeah, I was going to add, I completely agree, so I just fairly recently graduated from medical school and feel lucky to be in this community where you can have a different lens and to blend the ultimate and proximate causes. And I think we get so bogged down in the proximate level that there's like no space for even thinking about things evolutionarily. And you could eliminate some of these proximate lectures that we would have and just insert one little lecture with some ultimate explanation. Read their book and you start to look at things differently. You can have a completely different lens. And I think that would be a wonderful area to start to partner up and having individuals like yourself and us in the medical profession to try to get into these schools and just get one lecture to give people a completely different conceptual framework to look at systems. And so I definitely, I completely agree. We got to figure out maybe that something we champion in this society is getting into those areas because I think it could do a lot of good when you get to folks at that level and start thinking about things differently. And as you were saying too, it's not about our way versus their way. It's about really blending it and seeing how you can look at things. Yeah. It's about having a complete framework to explain something. Yeah. Yeah. Hi, Stephanie. Hi. I just wanted to say that, thank you. Awesome. Everything. And to this last train of thought that everybody's asking, Josh Turknitz talk a little later on is how to win at Angry Birds. And I think he also like, he's dividing it into like source level and game level stuff and has a nice diagram of a bunch of things that could go on a checklist like this. So I would recommend like for everybody that wants to keep following on that same track. I think his talk would be a really of interest along the same thought process that's later this afternoon. Yeah. How to win at Angry Birds. How to win at Angry Birds. Okay. It's funny and fun and it's great. And it covers this like looking at, he calls I think what would be proximate here. He calls source level and ultimate he calls game level and like how to look at these things in a way that's really understandable because it's like about Angry Birds. Yeah. Yeah. We're talking about sort of a concrete versus abstract distinction too. So I'm still thinking about all that. I guess we're out of time. Thank you all for coming and being here. Thank you.