 So how do I want it? Is that is that on now? Yeah, it's on right now. Okay. If I speak we should be able to hear something. Okay. Okay. So can you hear me back there? And I can always speak louder too for people in the room. Okay, we're gonna take that off mute. Whoa. Hello. Hello. There we go. Good afternoon everyone. Can everyone hear me alright? Good. Welcome to the Dan and Carol Barack Presidential Distinguished Lecture Series. I'd like to thank the Barack family and the president's office for supporting this lecture and the University of Vermont Department of Biology and Rubenstein School of Natural Resources for sponsoring it. My name is Bill Ardren. I'm a senior scientist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Lake Champlain Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office. I also have the good fortune to be an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Biology here at the University of Vermont. And today I have the pleasure of introducing Fred Allendorf. He's been a mentor, colleague, and friend that I've had the good fortune to know for over 20 years. Fred is considered a forerunner in the field of conservation genetics and recently has even been called the grandfather of the field. Fred's research has applied principles of ecology, natural resource management, genetics, economics, religion, philosophy, and other disciplines to the maintenance of biological diversity throughout the world. Some of Dr. Allendorf's titles and honors include Regent Professor Emeritus at the University of Montana and being awarded the 2015 Molecular Ecology Prize by the Journal Molecular Ecology for being one of the founders of the field of conservation genetics. He's a two-time Fulbright scholar. He's co-authored a seminal book titled Conservation and the Genetics of Populations. He's published over 250 articles focused on a wide range of taxa including fish, mammals, and plants. And he is also a AAAS fellow and past president of the American Genetics Association. Since the 1990s, Fred has taught a course linking Buddhist teachings and conservation biology. And today, he will be presenting to us in a talk titled Deep Evolution, When Did Your Life Begin? Please join me in welcoming Fred Allendorf. Thank you, Bill. I want to thank Bill for inviting me and hosting me while we're here. My wife and I had a wonderful time with everybody here. As Bill said, I've known him for 20 years since he was a grad student at the University of Minnesota. So today, this is a little bit out of my comfort zone talking about this kind of thing. But I do enjoy thinking about these kinds of issues, trying to think about how evolution influences many things in being a human. But I don't think I've ever used the word economics in any of my papers, Bill. But maybe I did, but I don't remember. So, I should have put this slide up there. So this is thanking Bill. So this is Bill when he worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service out west working on Montana bull trout. So Bill's a good friend of my daughter who went to grad school with Bill. So Bill's a really good friend. And so this is what I feel much more comfortable about talking about how we apply the principles of population genetics to problems in conservation. So I, and to me, it's always easier to talk about biology, because I'm usually fairly confident that I know what I'm talking about. Although Gary may not agree with that all the time, but usually I feel confident. But talking about this topic is a little bit, as I said, out of my comfort zone. So these are sort of my credentials in thinking about applying Zen into areas of ecology or evolution. So the first paper was published in 1997. And I want to thank Gary Methy, who's sitting here, who is the editor of conservation biology at that time, allowed me to publish this paper in conservation biology. And since I've published a couple of other papers dealing with this thinking about the same topic. And as Bill said, I can't see if that's okay, I taught a course environmental studies, our environmental studies program for about seven years. That was called ecology and Buddhism. Never liked that title, but I couldn't come up with a better title. And then I was also a layperson ordained in Thich Nhat Hanh's order of interbeing back in the 1990s. And I haven't been officially associated with Thich Nhat Hanh or the order since then. But it certainly was influential with my understanding of Zen practice. So and this is really an important slide. So this was a slide that was taken last month with my wife and I in the Trang, Vietnam. So this is a Buddha that was built, a Buddhist statue was built in the early 1970s in Vietnam. And when I was 19 years old, I was in Vietnam. And I remember driving past this in a truck in the street looking up and seeing the statue. And somehow I was sort of just drawn to it. And I've always remembered it since then. And eventually I found a picture of it somewhere in a book about Vietnam. And I've always really felt a strong connection because I really think that somewhere that was something that drew me to Buddha's practice. And then last month, as I said, my wife and I were in Vietnam exactly 50 years later. And we went back and found that that booze statue. So this is really an important moment for my wife and I. Anything else you want to say? So I guess this is my overarching philosophy why I thought about these issues a lot. So the Dalai Lama captured this, that spirituality and science are different but complementary ways of the same goal of seeking the truth. And obviously I've devoted my whole life to science. But I think also that there are aspects of Zen practice, Zen spirituality that are really helpful in seeing things more clearly. So this is a book by David Barish, a behavioral biologist at the University of Washington. And if anybody's interested, David does a really wonderful job of going through the Buddhist scriptures and making connections to much in the Buddhist scriptures to biology. This is really a wonderful book. So to begin after all that. So the Buddha, one of the reasons that Buddhism as a spiritual practice appeals to me is that the Buddha claimed only to be human. So he didn't claim any kind of divine inspiration. And in the Klamasutra, which is really popular with scientists, the Buddha said that you should only accept his teachings if they agree with reason, common sense, and are found to benefit you, to lead, to benefit in happiness after they are experienced. So in a sense, the Buddha said that his teaching should be empirically tested and you should follow them only if they seem to work for you. And by work that means bring you greater benefit and happiness and clarity about the world. And this is a picture of a whale in the Klamma Park in Maui. I just liked it because of the sign. There seem to be Klamas all over. There's a Klamya River and Klamma River in the state of Washington also. I'm not sure where that word comes from. So I like to say, you know, so what attracts you to Buddhism? I often say, well, the Buddha was an evolutionary ecologist. So one of his primary, two primary teachings were emptiness, that everything is empty of a separate self and everything is connected. And I think of that as the same thing as what ecology teaches us. And the second major teaching was impermanence, that everything is changing. And I think of this as an evolution of a biologist. I see this as evolution. So there's a lot of books out there that talk about Buddhism and ecology. But when it comes right down to it, I really don't know much about ecology. And I know a lot about genetics. I know a lot about evolution, but I certainly am not an ecologist. And so when I sat down to work in this talk, it became clear to me that I really wasn't talking about ecology and evolution, but I was talking, excuse me, ecology and Buddhism was in by talking about evolution. And when I started to develop this, I gave this talk at the University of Montana as a practice talk a couple months ago, because I was so nervous about talking about this topic. It became clear to me that what I am going to talk about really does relate to evolutionary genetics. So I'm going to talk about natural selection. I'm going to talk about genetic drift. And I'm going to talk about the process of mutation. And these are the three of the more, three of the four major processes that evolutionary biology study. The other one is gene flow. And I won't be talking about gene flow, but we are going to talk about selection, genetic drift, and mutation. And there's three major points that I would like you to take home from this. So one is perception. I try to convince you that the way we see the world, even though we may not be aware of it, has been shaped by natural selection. So that is the natural selection point. Serendipity, the role of chance and evolution, how a lot of the things that take place in evolution have nothing to do with natural selection or other processes. It's just simply chance. And finally, human nature, that both sort of the best in humans, the altruistic behavior and the selfish behavior that we see in ourselves and others, both can be understood as the products of evolution and natural selection. So probably everybody here sort of is in co-on. So as it says, it's a paradox used to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning, to provoke enlightenment. So we can't, certainly I know I'm this way. I can't think my way through problems rationally very often, very often just allowing that problem to sit inside me and work on it at a deeper level is really a much more powerful way to try to understand things. And co-ons are related to this way of understanding things. And so one co-on that I think most people have heard of is what did your face look like before your parents were born? Of course, there's no literal answer to this, but the evolutionary answer is this. So this is what most of your, the face of most of your ancestors look like. And evolutionary trees, if we go back to the beginning of evolution somewhere about four billion years ago. So we're out there in that little circle called animals. So humans represent this really tiny little branch on the entire evolutionary tree. And one of the interesting things about that little branch is those animals and plants that we share it with, but bonobos and chimps. So we split off our evolutionary lineage split from them about four million years, four million years ago. And as we saw that whole tree is about four billion years. So everybody in this room, we've shared 99.9% of our evolutionary history with bonobos and chimpanzees. So one of the things I think is different about science and Zen is the difference between knowing something intellectually and knowing something at a deeper level through our own experience. So you may know that a pan is very hot. Somebody may tell you that it's hot, but when you actually grab that pan, you know it in a different way than you do just knowing it intellectually. And I think we can see this kind of behavior in our children all the time. You can tell your kids something, but until they experience themselves, it really may not change their behavior or their understanding. So the title of my talk is When Did Your Life Begin? And so what I'd like to do is do a little guided meditation for the next few minutes or so trying to get at this question of when did your life begin? And so this is a co-on. So this guided meditation comes from an experience of mine about 20 years ago when I was backpacking and I got up early in the morning because I liked to do and had a cup of coffee and I started meditating, thinking about this co-on and being an evolutionary geneticist. I took it through evolutionary, looking at evolutionary lineages and at times I would actually see the DNA molecules going back in time. So what I'd like to do today is the next six minutes or so, lead us on a guided meditation. So I have a bell here. So we're going to deal with this co-on of when did your life begin? And I have four passages that I'm going to read. So I will begin by ringing the bell three times and that shall allow us to try to relax and calm. I like to think of meditation as sort of you see a pond with a lot of things in the pond and just sitting quietly, the things in the pond settle out and the water becomes clear. So obviously we can't do, I know Gary said he was coming here to be enlightened. I don't think we can do that in six minutes. But just sitting quietly for six minutes can feel really good. And so I'll ring the bell three times and then in tick-naught Han talk, I will wake up the bell by hitting the bell like this. Then I'll read the passage and I'll then ask you to contemplate that passage. And then after about a minute or so I will ring the bell again and that will signify the end of contemplating that passage and we'll move on to the next passage. So if everybody would just like to sit with their feet flat on the floor, try to sit quietly, have to use my iPhone to time it. When did your life begin? Go back to your birth. When convention says your life began, however you existed in your mother's womb for many months before the egg and sperm that united to create your genome existed before they united. Your mother's egg divided to determine which genes she would pass on to you while she was still a fetus inside her mother, your grandmother. Contemplate your parents and your four grandparents. Who were they? How did they live? Continue looking deeper. Your ancestors double each generation. Two parents, four grandparents, eight grand parents, and so on. Go back 1,000 years, some 40 generations. 1,000 years ago you had a trillion ancestors. The genes in every cell of your body today were then shared among those ancestors around the globe. Europe, Asia, America, Africa. Who were they? How did they live? One billion years ago you have now been joined in your ancestral journey by all living species that we recognize in our daily lives. You were the wolf, the bear, the whale, the salmon, the pine tree. Your ancestors are simple cells, single organisms living in the waters of the primitive earth. Who were they? How did they live? The last step in our journey, four billion years ago, there are no signs of life here. The stream of ancestors that you have been following has ended in a series of complex chemical reactions in which non-living elements are becoming the simplest of possible living organisms. Contemplate the beginning of your life. So I was really surprised when I thought about just how many ancestors we have if we go back just a few generations. A trillion ancestors just 1,000 years ago, but the number of our ancestors double each generation. So if we go back 40 generations, about a thousand years, we had a trillion ancestors. So obviously many of those ancestors had to occur many times in our pedigree. So there weren't a trillion people, there were only a couple hundred million people alive on the planet a thousand years ago. But if we think about the genes that we carry, so each of our diploid, we get two, one set, one genome for mother and one for her father, so all together we only have about six billion base pairs. So most of these individuals didn't contribute any genes to us today. So what that means is that there is a lot of room for natural selection. For those genes associated with greater reproductive success to become more frequent in genes which are not associated with greater reproductive success to disappear. And there's a paper published last year where they did using modern genetic techniques. They looked at the whole human genome, they looked at and they looked back over the last 2,000 years and they said, can we find genes in our genome which have been under strong selection for 2,000 years. And it's really interesting, they found three that stood out, one is lactase. So that's the gene that produces the enzyme that allows us to drink milk and digest lactose in the milk. MHC which is the major histocompatibility complex which is important for disease resistance. And finally blonde hair and blue eyes in Europeans. And so these three are related, we think about it, these three make sense. So eating, digesting milk, disease resistance and sex are the three things that have been under strongest selection based upon looking at the genome. And I have a slide later, a cartoon slide which it's almost amazing how quickly, how well this fits that cartoon. So there has been strong selection just within, so people sometimes think that somehow human evolution has stopped but human evolution is going on all the time and there's evidence that it has occurred very strong in the last 1,000 or 2,000 years. So going back to this idea that we're all connected, so Einstein said this much better than I can, that a human being is part of the whole called by us the universe limited a part, our part is limited in time and space. He experiences himself or she experiences herself. His thoughts and feelings are something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. And I think probably most people in this room have felt this on their own. And I would like to argue that it's even more profound, this separation is more profound than Einstein talked about, because our view of the world around us, our view of this universe, is perceived by an evolut, by a lens which has been crafted by evolution. So we think our senses are objective and we're seeing things in the world the way they are, but actually what we're seeing, the way we see things has been shaped by evolution. And this is my favorite example of that. So Dubjansky won the science medal from LBJ somewhere back in the 1960s and he made the famous quote that nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution. And my favorite example of the way that evolution has shaped our view of the world is why does human feces smell like shit? So human feces smells pretty bad, but if you think about it, there's nothing intrinsic in the feces that smells bad, dogs, some insects like to eat it, so it must smell good to them. So why does the human feces smell so bad to us? Any ideas? Disease avoidance. So if you're a baby or a young child and you start playing around with a pile of shit, you're likely, well not about likely, but you're increasing the probability that you're going to touch some pathogen and become sick and die. So those humans that avoided shit had greater probability of survival and the way evolution shaped that behavior in us is by making shits really smell bad. And so our interpretation of the world around us is based upon senses that have evolved. These senses are not neutral windows, but rather they've evolved to interpret the world in a way that increases our chances of surviving and reproducing. So fear of heights, I mean there's nothing objectively scary about heights, but some people have a great fear of heights and again that's because you put yourself in a position where you can fall from a great height, you increase the probability that you're not going to survive and pass on your genes. Fear of snakes, some people have a great fear of snakes. Other people, this is for my daughter Kira, has great fear of spiders. And I think the one that most people have thought about is sex. So I think it's clear why sex is so enjoyable to us in that to pass on our genes we have to participate in sex. And in my view, the Buddhist teaching, the one thing that he got wrong was sex. And I think that's was because of how powerful sex is because of this evolution, because of the action of evolution that individuals who didn't participate in sex didn't pass their genes on. So I think we've all heard about the middle way that the Buddha taught that there's two extremes and a life addicted to indulgence or sense pleasures is unworthy, unprofitable, but also on the other hand the addiction to self-mortification to deny yourself to all these pleasures is painful, unworthy, and unprofitable. So he taught a middle way between having too much and having too little, except when it came to sex. And sex, monastics, monks, and nuns were not supposed to participate in sex at all because it was so powerful, it was something that would interfere with them, their behavior, and their enlightenment. So I wish the Buddha had dealt with sex in a more skillful way. So my summary is that Dobzhinsky was right, but it's not only in biology, I think nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution. And this is the most depressing slide that I'm going to show. So this was a study done 10 or 11 years ago looking at public acceptance of evolution, asking the question, human beings, as we know them, develop from earlier species of animals. So they went to 34 countries and the US came 33 out of 34. There's only one country worse than the US and that was Turkey. And today, look at this slide, I think, and we were surprised that Trump is now president. You would have predicted it. The Dalai Lama, this is one of his many quotes that science proves a belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. However, Dalai Lama also said, from the Buddhist perspective, the idea of these mutations, so the idea of random mutations occur, and then they're acted upon by natural selection, is deeply unsatisfying for theory of reports to explain the origin of life. So I never, I still don't really understand where this view comes from the Dalai Lama, why the fact that their mutations are random was so disturbing to him from a Buddhist perspective, and it came across the book called The Origin of Human Nature, a Zen Buddhist Look at Evolution, and where, and these are quotes from this book, stating that, and the same thing that Dalai Lama said, but in more detail, the driving force behind our winning evolution is spontaneous random mutations and words like spontaneous and random or anathema to the Buddhist notion of strict cycle of causation, every cycle must have a cause, that's the law of karma. So some Buddhists believe that somehow random mutations as a part of evolution is breaking the law of karma, and rather chance of mutation or alone cannot account for evolution, at least some of these changes must have been created. And this comes from this book also, and I don't really understand what is meant by created, but it's obviously there's something beyond just random changes in DNA bringing about the things that we see through acting on by natural selection. So even though the Dalai Lama said that we would have to accept science, at least in this one area, some Buddhists have difficulty accepting evolution. And it's interesting because this idea of randomness, so in evolutionary genetics, what we call the things that are affected by chance, we call genetic drift, and I love lateral love, but I like this quote from the Bible that the race isn't always to the swift, nor the battle is strong, for time and chance happened to us all. And it's interesting because this conflict between the idea of chance and Buddhism is also a conflict within evolution, so one of the biggest controversies in my career as an evolutionary biologist is some people have rejected the idea that random mutations in genetic drift are an important force in evolution because they believe that natural selection is bringing about most of the evolutionary change that we see. So the same disagreement between the Dalai Lama and evolution has also occurred within evolutionary biologists. People not wanting to accept the fact that chance makes a big difference in our life, but in my experience, chance is pretty important. There can be pretty random things happening in your life that can completely change everything in your life. And so think about this in a population genetics perspective. So I think this super mutation comes along and it doubles the fitness of individuals that carry it. You think, well, certainly natural selection is going to increase the frequency of that allele. However, since we each carry one allele from our mother and one from our father, there's only a 50-50 chance that we're going to pass on that super allele to our children. And even if we have two children, there's a good chance just statistically that we're not going to pass this gene on. So a new gene that a new mutation that comes about, there's a good chance that that's going to be lost strictly by chance and what we call genetic drift. So when you pass on your genes, it's just like flipping a coin. And even if you have that extra child, so you have three children, if you flip the coin three times, there's 0.125 chance that one of those alleles, that a particular allele is not going to be passed on. So even a super mutation, and then when we consider multiple generations, when it's very rare, most mutations are lost whether or not they increase our fitness. So I don't think we can deny that chance plays a big role in evolution. And the third thing I'd like to talk about after the idea that evolution influences the way we see things or experience the world and understanding the importance of chance and evolution. So this is a cartoon I came across, which I've used several times, but I really like it because of the three genes that we talked about, and I didn't make this up. Milk digestion, eat, disease resistance, survive, and reproduce sex. So those things have been under strong selection for a long time. So this is a continuation of the Einstein quote that I used gave before. So this delusion is the kind of prison for our consciousness, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for the few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion and to embrace all living creatures in the whole of nature and its beauty. And this is another part of evolution that the Dalai Lama has had problems with, that the inability or unwillingness to fully engage the question of altruism is perhaps the most important drawback of Darwinian evolutionary theory. And I really don't, I think Dalai Lama wouldn't have said this if they really understood what has been going on in evolutionary biology because there are many theories, explanations for altruism, how they could have evolved by natural selection. I'm just going to give one of them. Yeah, I love that picture. I'm just going to give one of them. And so how does natural selection really work? So natural selection, there's genetic variation. Individuals are different. Some individuals are more survive longer or have more children. And this variability is inherited. There are genes associated with these differences. And so that those genes associated with greater survival or reproductive success will increase in frequency the next generation. So at a minimum, that's what we mean by natural selection. So you can imagine that if there are genes associated with selfish behavior or aggressive behavior, they could be beneficial individuals that are more aggressive or more, yeah, or may have increased or individual fitness and those genes could increase in frequency. So you can understand how selfish behavior would evolve by natural selection. But also natural selection operates on other levels or other groups, other units as well. So humans have lived in groups throughout human history, whatever you want to call them, tribes. And these tribes, some tribes are more successful than others. So in New Zealand, there's the Maori and the Maori. The Maori disappeared. The Maori were very successful. So some tribes disappear. If there are genetic differences and some tribes are more successful at spreading. So if there are differences between groups, that genetic differences that explain this differential extinction are spread, then those characteristics of tribes associated with lower extinction rates or greater rate of spread will increase in frequency. And so being altruist and helping other individuals in your own group can be very advantageous for the group. So group selection is one explanation for the evolution of altruism. So I think, and there are other examples also in the evolutionary literature about how altruistic behavior can evolve. And so we have this in thinking about human nature. So we have both individual selection and group selection operating against one another under some conditions that we would expect selfish genes to increase in frequency and other conditions we would expect altruistic genes or non-selfish behavior to increase in frequency. So I said at the beginning, there's three things I wanted you to remember from this. So one is perception, how our view of the world has been shaped by natural selection, to recognizing that in evolution, as in other aspects of life, chance alone, chance is very important in determining outcomes. And finally, that human nature that both selfish behavior and altruistic behavior, you can understand how they can be products of evolution and natural selection. So I'd be happy to answer any questions that people have. Thanks. So thank you very much, Fred. I've been told that I'll be moderating the questions that folks have. And before we start the question answer, I want to just let everybody know that there's going to be a reception right outside after the Q&A. That'll go on for about 10 or 15 minutes, the Q&A, and then a reception immediately following right out in the fireplace lounge right outside here. So if you don't have a chance to get to a question right now, Dr. Alan Dorf would be out in the hallway. But if you raise your hand, I'll be happy to pass the microphone back to start off the questions. Thank you. This was really very interesting. What are your thoughts about trauma? There's been some articles recently about like Holocaust trauma and how it, how ancestors and the kind of trauma they experience is then manifested in their offspring. That's a really good question for a number of different reasons. One is it is a good question. The other is it shows some of the difficulties of getting science to people in the general public. So there was a paper published that said that and it got a lot of press. But then other scientists went back and looked at their sample size, looked at their experimental design, and came to the conclusion that it was not a valid study. And so it may be a still a valid hypothesis, but that study was shown not to be valid and did not show what the authors claimed it did. In genetics, this is called epigenetics, that somehow your environment, things that you experience in your environment can be passed on to your children. And certainly there are examples of epigenetics, but that was one that has been shown, that hasn't been shown to be true. So I have a question about altruistic behavior and the future of our planet and how can we see forward, I can understand that we can be altruistic in our own groups, but can we be that way for the future for people that we don't see or does that make sense? Well, I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but I think it is difficult to be altruistic as Einstein said. It's easy to be altruistic for people that we know or family and friends, but it's much harder to be altruistic and selfless when it comes to people that we don't even know. But I'm not sure how that fits into the idea of our planet. Well, to take care to make decisions now to benefit our future generations. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. Somebody else could answer that probably much better than I could. What are your thoughts about the evolutionary basis of religion? I just came back from two weeks, just yesterday, two weeks in India with an amazing diversity of religion. I've always been interested in why religion is not universal, but there are so many different religions. And is there a common basis related to religion as it's expressed in different religions that is based in evolution? So I knew I was saving the slide for when somebody asked me a question like this. So these are one of those questions that I thought about it, but I really don't have any special insight into it. But it does seem that religion is universal, how that religion is manifested is different. But even if you look at most major religions, a lot of the major fundamental beliefs are similar to one another. But I don't know how that relates to evolution per se. I think it relates more to just having the intellectual capability that humans do in trying to understand the world as the way it is. I don't know, do you have any? Yeah, yes. Yes, yeah. But I don't know how that relates. So then you're saying that religion is a manifestation of that, getting people to behave and act in a cooperative altruistic way. So you argue those groups, so I'm thinking I'm making this up as I go now, but those groups that had some religious beliefs that people did act altruistically were more successful than others. Yeah, so that. Hi. So in your talk, you gave several examples of situations that you identified as unpleasant for evolutionary reasons, such as standing on a cliff or the odor of feces. And I was surprised by that because I could easily associate those with just cultural mores and societal effects. So how do you tease those out in those cases? Well, I would guess that people in all cultures think that shit doesn't smell very good. But people have done studies with babies that haven't been influenced by their culture, young babies, and have them crawl out over glass where there's a big drop off and show that there is an intrinsic fear of heights. And I thought we are going to go somewhere else. So I talked about the fear of snakes and it's clear that some people, like Bill's brother-in-law, really love snakes. And so they don't have a fear of snakes. And so E.O. Wilson in Biophilia talks about there's different ways that that danger can be manifested in our behavior. So one is to be afraid of something to avoid it, but the other is to be really aware of it and deal with it in another way. And so that's what E.O. Wilson says about those. There's a lot of herpetologists that really are fascinated by snakes and some people have thought that might. That's another way that you can deal with that fear of snakes if you're really aware of the danger and understand snakes. In an early slide there was what seemed to me like a jump between selection for blonde hair and blue eyes to sex. I don't get that connection. Well, some people think that blondes with blue eyes are more attractive. And so that's one example of possible sexual selection. So gentlemen prefer blondes. And so in some northern European cultures, very often individuals with blue eyes and blonde hair are perceived as being more sexually attractive. And you could argue all that's the trouble of evolution. There's no simple answers. We could argue that living in northern Europe having blonde hair was also advantageous because you didn't really get a lot of sun. And so that being fair skin could also have other advantages. But I think one of the main reasons why people have thought that blue eyes and blonde hair has been selected for is because of sexual selection. Yeah, I agree. It's the trouble of everything in evolution. It's simple explanations. You can often find problems with the simple explanations. But I do think that certainly I think the evidence is that eye color and hair color are under sexual selection. And so sexual selection is a form of natural selection so that individuals who are more attractive to people individually opposite sex are more successful at having children in their genes increase in frequency. But you could come up with other explanations for for blonde hair and blue eyes. Blue eyes it's harder. I mean, I can understand blonde hair, but what would be the explanation of why blue eye color would be under strong selection? So they looked at the whole genome, they found three genes, and one was associated with the blue eye color. So what would be the explanation of why blue eye color would be under selection other than sexual selection? There may be explanations, but none of them jumped into my head. Yeah. Yeah, so pleiotropy. So genes do have other effects. And that's a good a good so maybe has nothing to do with blue eyes at all. It's that that some other that gene that it brings about blue eye color could affect something else we're not aware of. Yeah, that's that's certainly possible. And that's always a problem in evolution trying to get at what's actually being selected. I didn't have this question until you mentioned the snakes and the spiders, and that some people really like snakes and spiders, I do, for instance, I have no fear of the snakes or spiders. And I think maybe that could be to your advantage in that most snakes and spiders are harmless. And so if you persevered in gathering food or hunting that great hunting ground, even though it's got a lot of snakes, that not having the fear of the thing could also be advantageous to your continuation of your genes, because so many things that people are afraid of aren't it's not valid statistically. Yeah, and it's also as people have said here depends on when the culture or depends on the environment. So there are Carl snakes have that warning colorization the the banding around them. And it's been shown again that young babies in humans that live in that environment have this intrinsic fear of that that banding pattern where they're not afraid of other snakes. I think they want to record it though. I'll use the mic. Have you found the scientific community receptive to the integration of Zen ideas into scientific methodology? How has that been received in your professional life? Yeah, I know a lot of my I think I have a lot of scientific friends who share that same attraction to Zen. And the people that think it's really a dumb idea, I guess don't tell me that. So my date is pretty biased, but I've gotten a positive response to and I have at some meetings tried to have group get together and talk about some of these issues and often it really does attract a lot of students. And when I taught ecology and Buddhism at the University of Montana, usually about half of my students were from the sciences and about half of them were from environmental studies or the humanities or philosophy. Any more questions for Fred? Thanks for your talk. You talked about the role of evolution in shaping our perceptions. And I think enlightenment is understood as a way of in some ways changing those deep ways that we perceive the world. I'm wondering if you've thought it all about the role of enlightenment and changing those perceptions and how that might play into evolutionary forces. So Jack Hornfield, a well-known Buddhist writer in the U.S. has a book I think that addresses that is called After the Ecstasy the Laundry. So it's not that once we become the light and everything, our whole life completely changes. I think we still have to deal with those things that we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. But it is interesting. And my own experience with Buddhist teachers is, and this is sort of discouraging, very many of the most respected Buddhist teachers in the U.S. also have deeply flawed behavior. So it's not clear that people that we look upon as being enlightened, some of them exhibit deeply flawed behavior. Whether it comes to money or sex, it seems like they haven't gotten beyond that delusion of the way they see the world. I'm not sure exactly how to how to word it or if it's even that clear for me. But I'm really interested in your perspective on how it would be, thinking how important is it for us to take responsibility for whatever is happening to us and then how important is that and then is it helpful to think of things as random chance and as cause and effect? I want to ask my wife to answer that question. I think she's thought, we're about this than I have. I'm not sure. So accepting responsibility and accepting responsibility and how, whether accepting responsibility is helpful or unhelpful? So I guess do you think that a Western perspective that everything is by chance is actually a way of deflecting responsibility for what's happening? Well, I certainly didn't say that everything is by chance, but I think as in our life or an evolution, chance plays an important role and I think we can't ignore the fact that things happen to us not because of our behavior. Sometimes things happen to us strictly by chance. So I'm not sure. I don't think I'm answering your question, but Bill's going to move on. So maybe we can talk about it after if you'd like. Hi. You mentioned that many of your colleagues in the scientific community share you're interested in like Zen and Buddhist teachings, but I was curious is if you think that's the most like prominent or most popular religion in the scientific community, or if there's another and why? Well, I think if we look at people that were drawn to a religion as an adult versus being raised in a religion, so then they maintain that religion as part of their life, I think there is an attraction to Zen and Buddhism because as a scientist, because it was just based on the Buddha's personal experience. It wasn't based on some kind of divine. So nobody came down and gave the Buddha a bunch of books that he could read with magic glasses, which I think is really difficult for scientists to accept, but I do have really good friends that are Mormons too. But I think as I said, for people that are drawn to some spiritual path as an adult, I think there are real good reasons why Zen is one that we're drawn to, because it's based on it's not based on some kind of divine answer and it's just based on personal experience. So the Buddha and becoming becoming enlightened just sat down and really thought about the situation that we're all in as humans and what we could do in our behavior that would make it so that we didn't suffer as much in our life. And so to me, that quote I used in the very beginning from the Dalai Lama, I think that there is I think a good explanation of why it is attractive to scientists, but not just scientists, but I think especially to scientists. Hi. I'm curious on your thoughts of nature versus nurture, how much of who we are is based on our genetics versus how much is molded through our environment and how we kind of grow up? Well, you know, the answer is it's both. And I don't think we can ignore either one. And but one thing I will say is even if something is very strongly genetic, doesn't mean that we can't change it. So some things, there are certain clinical problems which are completely determined because you have certain enzymes you inherited from your parents. And if you didn't, if you ate certain foods like phenylalanine, you drank diopepsine with phenylalanine, you would have serious metabolic problems. So that and that's completely genetic. It's completely nature. However, if you don't eat meat or reduce the amount of phenylalanine that you take in your diet, you can completely cure it. So it's I think it's it is a real dichotomy. There is nature and nurture, but they're not necessarily completely incompatible. Things that are completely determined by our genetics can still be modified by our behavior. Well, please join me in thanking Dr. Ellendorf and join us in the hallway. Thank you very much.