Rethinking Human Uniqueness | Forrest Valkai

In this episode of Curiosity Theory, Dr. Dakotah Tyler and Justin Shaifer sit down with biologist Forrest Valkai, also known as the Renegade Science Teacher, to explore evolution, intelligence, and what it really means to be human.

They discuss how evolution shapes life on Earth, from whales evolving from land mammals to humans’ place within the broader tree of life. The conversation challenges the idea that humans are uniquely special, exploring intelligence, communication, and behavior across species.

They also dive into science communication, misinformation, and how we actually measure learning in the modern content landscape, along with deeper questions about culture, biology, and meaning.

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Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler and Justin Shaifer

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The things that make humans special are differences in degree. If you want to separate humans by anything, you can almost certainly find another animal that doesn't make similar. And the only way you can separate it is to say you can do it better or really just mold.

SPEAKER_02 0:16

I remember the first time I learned that whales weren't fit their mammals. Well, they actually used to be on land.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Anytime you answer a question in science, you come up with two or three more questions. And the faster you can start doing that, the faster you're gonna be just fiery with curiosity.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Hey everybody, what's going on? Welcome back to Curiosity Theory. It's your co-hostess with the most is Justin Schaefer, also known as Mr. Fascinate. Joined here with my main man Dr.

SPEAKER_02 0:51

Dakota Tyler, astrophysicist and science communicator. Fascinating episode in store for you today. We have our guest, Forrest. Hello. Here he is, right here. Uh today we're gonna be talking about what it means to be a person, like what it means to be a human, getting into some very cool evolutionary biology, talk about some abiogenesis, how did life start? Um, am I missing anything?

SPEAKER_00 1:18

I think that pretty much sums it up. Pretty much covers it. We're gonna nerd out, as we always do. Tap in with us right now.

SPEAKER_02 1:25

You're like way into biology and and evo-bio, which is one of my probably my top my number two science behind astronomy and astrophysics. Hell yeah. And I'm just like fascinated by the evolutionary biology explanations. Like, um, you know, you see an animal like a whale. And I remember the first time I learned that whales weren't fish, they're mammals. Yeah, yeah. And then it's like, okay, like why are they mammals? Like, how does this happen? And then you can start to piece together all these things. Like, well, they breathe air. Well, why are they breathing air? Because they live in the water. What a pain to have to come up to the surface all the time. And it's like, oh, well, they actually used to be on land, and that's the way evolution works. Yeah, you can't convert your lungs into gills. Yeah, you just you keep your lungs.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

And yet, weirdly enough, swim bladders are converted lungs. Lungs evolve for swim bladders or derived from lungs. So some fish develop lungs, and then some of those fish use the lungs to be better fish. Because fuck you, is why, you know.

SPEAKER_02 2:25

Wait, so some fish develop lungs and then breathe oxygen through it like the air, or just filter through the lungs.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Well, what we're talking about in the course of evolution, like like you know, we have you know lungs evolving, and then some of the fish kept those lungs, but used them for something else. They modified those lungs into what we use to swim what swim bladders today. So they have this gas bladder that keeps their buoyancy.

unknown 2:46

Right.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

And even further than that, you know, you use your lungs to puff up on air, and then you you vibrate these, you know, uh uh vocal folds here in your neck to make sound. Some fish also will rhythmically like pulse vibrations through their swim bladders to make sounds in the water and have auditory communication that way.

SPEAKER_02 3:03

That's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

And it's like they're speaking, you know what I mean? It's weird. And then you think about it cladistically, and strictly speaking, we in whales are kind of fish too, because you can't evolve out of a clade. It's just not the way you would use the word fish, and it's like, what does that mean? It gets real fun real fast. It's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 3:18

Uh yeah. So we are technically, taxonomically, we are lobe finned fish.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Sarka sarcopterygians is the word, yeah. Uh which is so good. Lobe finned fish is is that's the standard human way to say that. Uh-uh, sarcopterygian is the Greek way, uh, is the the name of the clade, and it's so much worse because it literally means flesh wings, uh, and it's just disgusting sounding. Uh, but yeah, yeah, we are lobe finned fish as are all tetrapods, and that includes early cetaceans, which then evolved back into the water. So whales aren't fish, but they kind of are in the same way birds are, and what does that mean?

SPEAKER_02 3:56

Yeah, yeah, which is uh which is like a mind blow. Yeah, right, because like if somebody said that mammals or uh whales were a fish, you'd be like, actually, no, they're mammals, they're not fish, but then mammals are fish.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

But mammals, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 4:08

So if fish is a thing, yeah, then mammals are fish.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

It's really weird, and and it's it's that way so many times in evolution. Because, like, for example, humans, right? Anything in the genus Homo is a human, right? So if I were to say to you, humans evolved around 2.6-ish million years ago, totally right. But also, if I were to say humans evolve around three to two to three hundred thousand years ago, that's when Homo sapiens came. And that's the way any normal person today would use that word. So that's also correct. So it it's you can say both of these things that are so very different at the same time, and it both are true. And what does that mean?

SPEAKER_02 4:40

And yeah, nah, it's uh it's so cool. And one of the things that I get um really, really fascinated with is this idea. So you brought up the genus Homo, and um, you know, it kind of makes sense to me why you know, early early humans that you look around and it's like pretty much every animal we can think of has various species. But with humans, you know, it doesn't, we don't not anymore. Right now, yeah, uh, but you know, humans over the past few thousand years didn't know that like a hundred thousand years ago there was like several different types of humans, and um, you know, when you realize that it starts to make a lot more sense, right? Yeah, yeah, that people are just branching off and then over time evolving to be a little bit different. We've talked on this show quite a bit about homofloresiensis, which is one of my favorite examples.

SPEAKER_01 5:35

So cool.

SPEAKER_02 5:36

Where you see this island dwarfism and island gigantism, which uh insular dwarfism or the island roll, oftentimes it's called. And it's like for for any given animal, you know, if it's a large animal and it's gonna survive, typically they'll evolve to be smaller. Sometimes smaller animals can evolve to be larger because the predators are getting smaller, um, and they themselves may not have that uh like huge resource requirements, so you get like giant rats on islands and that sort of thing. And then people, you know, there was there were people that evolved to be very small, and it's it's crazy to think about different species of human that were different than us, but still human. Yeah. And I wonder, like, you know, what would the world look like had multiple species have made it, you know? And that perhaps that's something that happens like on other planets where this sort of intelligence that we have evolves, where there are like multiple species that are more or less at the same level. It's fascinating to think about.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

It is cool because like at the end of the day, it's hard to separate that too much from the world that we're in now. Because like, take for example with Neandertals, right? Neanderthals went extinct like if uh 60 to 40-ish a thousand years ago. Um, but it's not like they just disappeared. We we interbred with them. We we you know just mated with them until they we absorbed them into our population, right? And so, what would it look like if Neanderthals were around today? Look at, you know, somewhere around 3% of European population and you're in the DNA anyway. That's what it looks like. You know what I mean? Uh same thing with like Homo erectus, you know, went extinct about 100,000 years ago, but like their the upper end of their brain case size was within the range of the lower end of ours. Um, they didn't have a forehead, so it would have just been like, you know, like eyebrows blur straight back there. Um they would have looked maybe a little different, but put on a hat, yo, and that's it's gonna be fine. And like honestly, there probably wouldn't be that much of a difference in terms of ability, appearance, anything like that. So it is weird to think about. And and uh it tells a really cool story of like just how adaptable not only our species is, but like our entire genus. What makes us special is our ability to be so strange and to fit into all these different niches. Like Homo erectus is one of my favorite human species. They were the first ones to control fire, first ones to build boats, first ones to uh to do uh cooking, um, first ones to learn that you can sharpen both sides of a rock. Very exciting.

SPEAKER_02 8:03

Uh longest span as well, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:06

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1.8 million years all the way up to about 100,000 years. And they're also the first ones to leave Africa and colonize all across Eurasia and meet the the folks on Floresienta. You know what I mean? Like that they're just so amazingly widespread. And the only thing that separates us really is we have a little bit of a bigger brain, we're a little bit taller, you know, slightly more modern facial features, like really functionally not that different. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

Yeah. We were uh talking to a neuroscientist who also has an evolutionary biology background in a previous episode. And we were talking about cetaceans and their demonstrations of intelligence and some of the markers of how successful they are in terms of uh having brains that don't succumb to a lot of the same uh issues that ours do. Like having um like dementia, right? Um, like these cetaceans can live for up to 200 years and not even experience any of the things that cognitive decline. Yeah, the neuro to the neurodegenerative disorders that that we experience. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:10

And also, also, I remember she uh she mentioned that it's also hard to get a hold of an old whale's brain.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

I imagine so.

SPEAKER_02 9:19

Because it has to like wash up somewhere, yeah, and somewhere that not and she said that she was she like gets alerts around the world when this happens, and they try to like get in contact with researchers that are there, maybe they can like get a sample or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Right. But yeah, I know it's crazy. It was fascinating stuff, but I was bringing that up because you know, we think about this notion of this adaptive intelligence that you know we describe as a hallmark of hopo Homo sapiens and our ability to just continue to survive and thrive in different environments. There are other species that demonstrate other forms of intelligence that you know might supersede ours in by many modalities. You know, uh we talk about this a lot, like a species' ability to persist throughout millennia, right? Like ants collective intelligence is extremely high if we measure it by that standard.

SPEAKER_02 10:06

Yeah, it's the only ants have been around a hundred million years. Quite a while.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

That old quote, I forgot who said it, like if you if you judge a fish by its ability to ride a bicycle or climb a tree, it'll think it's stupid its whole life. And it's like, yeah, that's that's one thing that I get asked all the time. You know, people are like, well, where did our intelligence come from? Or why are humans the one that's so special and everything? And I think that talk about like the different species of humans, and then that talk about like different types of intelligence and different expressions of and even taking it down to things like communication or anything like that. You come to realize that the things that make humans special are differences in degree, not differences of type. You know what I mean? Yeah, we're the only animals that speak. Okay, we're the only animals that speak like us. There are other primates, even like Diana monkeys. They not only have different alarm calls for different predators, like here's the alarm call for a thing on the ground, here's an alarm call for an eagle in the sky, here's whatever. They also have prefixes and suffixes for like, did I see this or did Jerry tell me? And I'm telling you, you know what I mean? That's they have syntax, they have context, they have all these different things. And like, if you want to separate humans by anything, you can almost certainly find another animal that does something similar. And the only way you can separate is to say you do it better or really just more, you know, and that's kind of weird.

SPEAKER_02 11:21

Yeah, I remember the the vermits, is that what they're called? Ver uh vervets. Vervitts, these uh these might so they um I got a few decades ago, they started like recording the sounds that they made, and they were able to deduce that they were doing these calls that were associated with yeah, something on the ground that's a predator or something in the air that's a predator. And um, you know, they could play it back. And one call would get the monkeys to look up, you know, in case there was a uh an eagle or something, and then the other call would get them to go run up into the tree because it meant that there was a jaguar or a puma or something around. And they also observed some monkeys that were talking to like monkeys who they didn't know, uh giving fake calls. Like maybe if they found a piece of fruit or something like that, and they would give them like the fake call that there's a leopard around, and then they would like scurry away, and then the monkey would go get it. And it's like, how is that not a very human thing?

SPEAKER_01 12:20

Yeah, lying. It's it that that's wild. And like it's it's so complex. There was this one really cool study that I remember where like they would play the sound of a baby vervet crying, uh, and they would record it from the group, you know, they would record it as a baby crying, and then they would play that sound, and the mother of the baby would look at the speaker, and all the other ones would look at the mother. Like, what are you gonna go get your kid? Because they know who's who, like they have such community, and yeah, lying behavior is a whole thing. And that's one of the cool things, like, communication is so freaking wild, dude. Because it's it's one of those things in biology, like most things in biology, that's deceptively difficult to even define in the first place, much less talk about, you know. And uh one of my favorite ways, one of my textbooks described it was like it's it's communication that's like beneficial for both the signaler and the receiver. Okay, so then insults and lies aren't technically communication, scientifically speaking. That doesn't make any sense, you know? It's it's so tricky to actually pin down.

SPEAKER_02 13:12

Like trying to define life. Yes, right? Yes. Where it's like no matter what definition you use, I can name something that seems like it's alive that doesn't fit into that. Um, you can also name things that we would mostly agree are not alive that may fit into it. Yep. Um, and I think that that's very fascinating from an from an astrobiology perspective. There's this book that I uh read called Life as No One Knows It Um by this astro, she's an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

Are you okay?

SPEAKER_02 13:45

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um and it's sh so she's in this book, she's arguing that we need to like we need to focus on redefining what we think of when we think of life. That we're, you know, we're like very far down this one branch of things that are living, of like what life can can do, and that we sort of pigeonhole ourselves a little bit by starting there with like our understanding of you know our biological definition of life. And one way that I thought was really fascinating that she um described that you could think about explaining something that life does, like one of the ways that you could like assess the the physics of it all, this sort of um I can't define it, but I know it when I see it, sort of thing.

SPEAKER_01 14:33

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:34

Is uh when things they don't violate the laws of physics, but they violate what would happen naturally if there wasn't the presence of a thing that's living. And one example of that is is anti-acretion. So we know that like with gravity and angular momentum conservation, like planets form, and you may see like comets come and accrete onto a planet or a star or whatever. But on a planet with life, you may see something else. You may see um, you know, like the assembly of some metallic structures like a satellite get launched into space, which is not violating any laws of physics, but would never happen if there wasn't life on that planet, yeah. And then thinking about like what types of things can life do that would never happen if life wasn't there, yeah. Which is a weird way to define something because you kind of use it in the definition, but I thought that it was it was compelling and that it was interesting.

SPEAKER_01 15:33

No, it's that's definitely cool. And and uh at the end of the day, like you know, using the thing in the definition, yeah, I get that sucks, but like there's the the whole uh and there is a really cool fancy word for that, and I can't remember it off the top of my head.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

Not the three-body problem.

SPEAKER_01 15:46

No, no, it's a philosophical thing, and and it's the uh the idea that like literally any belief, any system that you're eventually boils down to either a circular thing or uh uh something dogmatic.

SPEAKER_02 15:58

Yeah, one of the one of the really cool applications for AI, you know, you just mentioned AI, was is um trying to like build large language models for the communic dolphin or whale communication. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which there are a couple of companies that are trying to do that, and I guess researchers that are trying to do that, just such a cool thing to imagine that one day like Dr. Doolittle-esque people may exist. Like there may be researchers that could communicate in some way with whales, and I just think that that would be that would be insane.

SPEAKER_03 16:30

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:30

Because I've always suspected or or wondered, I've always wondered, you know, orcas, sperm whales, blue whales, how would we know if they were smarter than us? Like, how could we ever figure that out, right? Like they don't have thumbs, so they can't do the types of things that we can do. But that doesn't mean that we're smarter than them, right? Just because we have a bit more dexterity and we're lucky because we have like fire and they can't use fire, and we can do electricity, and like we can write books, and they can't do those things, but like a raw brain power argument, they easily could be like beyond us, whatever that means.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

They can't write books and everything, take it up with Socrates, who thought that books were terrible. So, like, you know what I mean? At the end of the day, it's it's whatever. No, I and by the way, it was called a trilemma. I quickly Googled the word into a trilemma, phenomenal word, right? Yeah, as you have this this trilemma, and it's I forgot who the guy like Agrippa or Agrippa or something like that. That any belief ultimately, no matter what definition you're using, no matter what what system of thinking you're ultimately, inevitably, if you go back and back and back, you either have an infinite regression problem, a circular reasoning problem, or a dogmatic problem, something that can't be questioned.

SPEAKER_03 17:40

Um interesting.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

And so like you can criticize anything that way. The the question is, is it functional? That's why, you know, for for scientists, like it's it's that's what matters to me is is this thing producing reliable results? And are the results producing uh uh novel, testable predictions? You know what I mean? Like those are concepts that are way more interesting to me. Um and so if you talk about, you know, what do we call life, what do we call intelligence, what do we call consciousness, what do we call blah, blah, blah, that's an anthropological issue, not really a definition issue. It's it's it's what are you doing to make sense of this in your head and how are you accommodating other ways of thinking, other modalities of communication, other uh ways of existence? And I imagine, yeah, I uh not to sound too woo-woo, but like I imagine when we get that Dr. Doolittle AI tech, we're gonna have a very similar problem as when we started taking anthropology out of literally Victorian men going out into communities and and like telling, you know, you man, how do you run this village? And they're like, Well, she she does. And like, don't be stupid. How do you run this village? And then, you know, and they would destroy anything that went against their you know preconceived notions of sexuality, of gender, of hierarchy, of you know, all these things. And I imagine we'll have a very similar problem if we really want to learn, you know, here's this species, chimpanzees that have all manner of incredibly human quote quote behaviors. And here's this species, you know, dolphins that have all manner of uh uh very recognizable traits and in what we could call some sort of intelligence. And here's all these different types of communication, all these different types of emotion, grief, love, companionship, compassion, empathy, all these exceedingly familiar human things we see all over the animal kingdom. When we start learning how to actually put that into reality and to factor that into uh get our point, I think it'll be another example, as is so often the case in biology, of knocking humans down off the pedestal again and seeing that we're really not different.

SPEAKER_02 19:42

Science is almost like a constant reiteration of knocking ourselves down, yeah, right? It's like, oh, you know, they called the earth uh Terra is dirt. They didn't know it was a planet, they didn't know what planets were, but they didn't think the earth was one. And it's like, no, it's just one of all these planets, and then the sun is literally just another star, and then there's literally other galaxies.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

You want to think there's an intellectual humility imposed upon you when you decide to embark on the field of study science. And I think it's something that the general public often misinterprets about how the scientific method works, because a lot of times their experience with a scientist is someone that was maybe either condescending toward them or didn't speak with enough woo conviction because they didn't have the degree of certainty necessary to be convincing with the type of rhetorical devices that work on the general.

SPEAKER_02 20:37

There's a lot of hedging that's required.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

Yeah, no, that that's so important because like when you talk to when when scientists are speaking amongst themselves, especially, but even you know, if we're speaking to the public, there's everything is like, well, except for and unless, and I'm pretty sure, and somebody knows this better than me, but I think it was this, and like very, very like you said, humility. Meanwhile, you you know turn on whatever you know, anti-seed oil, you know, MLM thing. It's like, no, it's proven that this is the thing. And like that's one thing I I've taught, uh, I've taught my own students a bunch of times, and like some of my like undergrad textbooks like mention that like it be wary of anybody who says they know something because there's a it's possible that they do, but like it's a good chance they don't. And when you're talking about like you know, the that that condescension and everything, I feel like that's still that's the image that people have of science. Is they they think that it's supposed to be like the Big Bang. You're either this, you know, is that the show, the Big Bang. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That you're this emotionless, robotic, awkward, strange, totally standoffish. You you can't have a human connection. Yeah, no show. No social skills. No social skill. You're just an asshole to everybody. And and if you're not an old white man in a long white coat with a long white beard and a tall white tower, you're just, you know, you're just some jerk on the on the street corner selling pencils from a cup, and I shouldn't take you seriously. Meanwhile, This idiot with an affiliate code and some cool supplement pills, that person knows what's up. You know, like that they said it really, really strongly. Yeah, now it's definitely an issue with like the the public perception of science and the public perception of scientists as well. That is really, really needs to be fixed. And I'm happy to be a part of you and me. Like it's like if we're getting this out here to like help people understand that, like, no, scientists look like everybody, they act like everybody.

SPEAKER_02 22:26

And it's something that you can understand. Yes. Like the the uh the communication that happens where somebody is describing something using jargon that you don't know about, like that's intentional because you can't I can describe you know what happens inside of a star, uh, like in a way that you don't know if you've not read these definitions in a textbook. And I can be technically correct, and you could be like, wow, like this guy knows a lot. But if you don't understand what I'm saying, and what I'm saying is really not that complicated. Like, there's a couple things that are happening, and they can be described in a way that I think anybody can understand, which on some level is the like overall good that I think science does, or at least can do, ideally, right? Is advance things and advance the like the the floor of knowledge of the average person. Um, that you know, the world is not it, it's mysterious, but it's knowable. Yeah, like we can uncover these things.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

That's why science communication is so incredibly important. Why it's why it is my dream job and why I'm so happy to do it. Because, like, like you said, I you can say a bunch of jargon and everything like that, but like the question is did I impress you or did I teach you something? You know what I mean? What's the actual goal here? You know, right? If I'm gonna sit here and talk about some fancy stuff and I use that jargon, what have I actually accomplished? I've stroked my own ego, you know, as opposed to can you break this down in a way that, like you said, is accessible and like actually changes somebody's life. Yeah, that's what got me into science. Like I started to see that this isn't just and science and science communication. It this isn't just something that is a neat fun fact. This actually changes the way someone will see themselves to say this uh they change the way they see the world around them, the people around them, their place in society, what society means in the first place. Right. Like that's so much more powerful than like, okay, well, what's the powerhouse of the cell? You know, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:10

All right. So let me ask you all both this. I think this is a really interesting question for both of you as scientists that communicate science. So, you know, how do you measure the efficacy and retention of the viewership of the type of educational materials you create? Because, you know, what I think about a lot of times is some of my earliest and most inspirational science communicators that I used to watch on YouTube, I would watch their videos and I would be riveted and impressed by their command of the English language, their ability to articulate complex concepts. And then a day later, if someone was like, hey, what did they talk about in this like hour-long explainer video about this concept? I couldn't really recount exactly what it was. DNA was in there somewhere. Right. And it's like, you know, a lot of the platforms that you know that we you know are on these days, you know, YouTube, TikTok, you know, Instagram, they don't necessarily, and we we've we talked about this as well, they don't necessarily incentivize one, the teaching of factual information as at all as education, but two, the retention of the information that's taught. So like how do you even know that that's what you're doing? You know? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:17

So there's the do you want to go first? You want me to? Yeah, please. Okay. So uh one of my favorite okay, so I one of the ways that that that like the my research is in in learning a memory right now. And one of the ways that I had these terms described to me or defined for me that I really liked was that memory is just like the internalization, the encoding of information, right? And that's sure. And then learning is defined as having those events and encoded into your memory and then changing your behavior as a result. And that's not a way that any average person would use these terms, but I love thinking about that way because that is to me a better metric. If I can teach you a fun fact about your body or about your evolutionary history, whatever, like, okay, you have memorized some facts, nido bandido, great. But real learning means it is changing how you behave, how you are as a person, how you see, like I just said a minute ago, the world around you and your place in it. And so the way that I can gauge that is, you know, uh it's it's ultimately going to come down to the comment section. And when I see people who say something a little bit beyond just like, never do that. Neat, thanks. You know what I mean? It's they kind of have that mind blow moment. And it's like, oh, so like when you say like humans are all a family, you mean it way more than I mean it. You know what I mean? Like that's very different. And, you know, or I just I I can't look at a butterfly the same way anymore since I learned this word, you know what I mean? Things like that. That matters a lot more to me, and especially considering what you talked about there was so important. Um platforms, especially like TikTok, Instagram, misinformation will always perform better than actual information because it causes an argument where actual experts come in and correct it, and that's more engagement, and then it gets in the algorithm more, you know? Uh having that be an actual metric rather than just views alone is a lot of a better indication for me that like I'm not just, you know, saying nonsense into the void. This is actually something that is helping people like change who they are as a person and change how they're gonna behave later on, and maybe better than anything else, uh, be able to filter out the next time they see misinformation, the next time some idiot tells them to inject bleach into their blood to cure COVID, they will now know why that's so stupid rather than just saying, I don't know if that's right, you know, they'll have an explanation.

SPEAKER_02 27:42

Which kills viruses, I think, right?

SPEAKER_01 27:44

Yeah, usually, yeah. But what does kill mean anyway? Because viruses aren't even alive, so who cares? It's it's just whatever.

SPEAKER_02 27:50

Yeah. No, um, what you said, and the it is weird on short form because it's like, you know, I'm not sending out a quiz to people to see like, you know, what they got today in the lesson. You should do it. Um, and like a comment section is a good place to go. And oftentimes there will be people who ask like the natural next question, the next scientific question from what we talked about. And they're like, hmm, well, if such and such is this, does that mean that blank is possible? And it's like, that's actually a great question. And maybe that's something that we that a scientist asked at one point and went out and studied and figured out, or maybe that's like at the forefront. Like, yes, like this is the yeah, that's the aha moment here, right? Because it's like every discovery leads to more questions, right? And that always happens. It's almost never the case where you find the bottom of the rabbit hole for anything, yeah. Right. It it almost never happens. But to your point, it's like these the short form algorithms, the recommendation algorithms, they don't necessarily incentivize um factual information or even what is required as an educator to make sure that something sticks.

SPEAKER_03 29:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:07

Because I remember studying, you know, I have um I got my for my masters, I had two years of grad classes. And I remember how much I studied, and it was never like my experience scrolling through TikTok. It was never anything like that at all.

SPEAKER_01 29:22

I was gonna say, what are you paying for?

SPEAKER_02 29:24

Right? And that's I think that that's important because you know, on some level, I don't know if it's a super fair question um or maybe expectation to think that significant like deep learning will happen. I think more so on the short form stuff. I think on the long form it's it's possible. Long form podcasts, long uh YouTube videos where you really do deep dives, and there's people who are really curious about going a step further. Uh things like books, you know, that sort of thing, essays. So I think that it's it's a hard thing to measure, and I I guess personally don't believe that the short like what what short form is now is not a um is not a great avenue for this type of deep learning.

SPEAKER_01 30:18

Not for deep learning. I think you're right. Like it's it's uh I'm never gonna expect anybody to do like literature review on a short form video, but like big concepts that are unfortunately publicly controversial, that I feel like it's really good at. Definitely.

SPEAKER_02 30:31

Well, because this is where everybody is getting all of their information.

SPEAKER_01 30:34

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's it's good and bad, I should say. Because like this, the the same reason why these ideas are controversial in the first place is the reason why you're able to tackle them somewhat on short form content. So like talk about like anti-vax creationism, um, um, anti-LGBT, race realism, pick your favorite pseudoscience, you know what I mean? Um, those kinds of things are kind of more ingrained in in the public psyche. The Overton window is fixated on this. And so as science communicators, we can make, I think, good progress there. At the very least, just showing how little experts take these topics seriously, you know, and kind of giving like a vibe check for it. And then when people come across those things in the future, they might be then more interested to go do that deep learning and actually go pick up a textbook and pick us. So yeah, I think there's there's definitely value, but you are right. Like to get like real, even bachelor's level um comprehension and like actual engagement, that's a rare thing. Yeah, more often than not, it is just like a blast of fun facts, and you really hope it helps someone change their perception. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 31:38

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. It's like little nudges, like you kind of and yeah, like a little bit of exposure, and then you know, hopefully someone wants to click a link or learn more, or extrapolate a conclusion that they develop a hypothesis around.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

Or better yet, liking, commenting, subscribing. That's what matters most. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:57

The mark of a learned brain. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, man. Um so we recently had a little interview with, or not a little interview, it was a big interview, with um Ryan Gosling for this movie that he started in Project Hail Mary. Fame science book.

SPEAKER_01 32:21

Fame scientist Ryan Gosling, yes, of course.

SPEAKER_02 32:24

Well, he played his one right on. Oh god, it's all good. Um and in the movie, you know, he has this ex this encounter with, and I don't know if you've read the book.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

I have not. I have no idea what you're talking about. Okay, I'm just here for the ride. But Andy Weir, you familiar with Andy Weir, the author. Okay, The Martian? Okay, yes. I've heard of the thing. Yeah, Andy Weir is the author of The Martian. It's kind of a similar survivalist narrative. Um, so I mean, I can kind of give a high-level synopsis. So uh in Project Hail Mary, uh, it's kind of a few years into the future, they discover an alien species called astrophages that essentially eat stars. And so they have colonized our local star, our sun, and they're dimming the light from our sun slowly but surely in a way that's cooling off the temperature on planet Earth. Okay. And they've done some searching on star systems that are nearby, and they found that this is happening, this dimming is happening across many different star systems. And so they wanna, except for one specific star. Uh, and so they want to send humans on basically a one-way trip to identify why this one star is not dimming when all of its neighbors are being consumed by what presumably astrophages, right? Uh so they send uh this reluctant uh in the in the movie, uh, you know, without too much plot plot spoiling, uh they send a reluctant person on a trip, um, and then they have to figure out a few things. We're gonna have to spoil a little bit of the plot though.

SPEAKER_02 33:52

Uh it sounds like you already have.

SPEAKER_00 33:54

Uh I mean, I feel like I have I feel like this is like trailer level stuff, but this is I'll say more stuff that's also in the trailer. So um the uh the teacher who has a molecular biology background um encounters an alien who is also trying to solve the same problem for his species that or their species. I don't know how they choose to identify their rocks, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:16

So I don't think they have uh classic sexual dimorphism. Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 34:20

Not 100% sure about that. But I don't know who they have. We wouldn't want to make that assumption. I don't know. But Rocky um is an engineer, and so you know, they have to find ways to understand each other, collaborate. And one of the most interesting parts about Rocky, uh, and we talked about this with Ryan and his character, uh, is that Rocky is not a bipedal humanoid alien that we see depicted in a lot of sci-fi, sci-fi. All the time. You know, and one of the things that we talk about on Curiosity Theory a lot is that you know, a lot of these aliens that we see in pop culture or in movies, maybe maybe reptilian or humanoid, bipedal, human features, they just look like a person with a costume. Most of the time they actually are people wearing costumes on camera. And because of the way that Hollywood depicts it, they like they basically think people can't find something that isn't human enough relatable. You know, like they can't, we can't fall in love with something that we can't anthropomorphize.

SPEAKER_02 35:15

And so But I think genuinely a lot of people that imagine aliens genuinely imagine that they're bipedal and use arguments like, well, they need to have hands so they can do things and they'll have a brain like we do. And it's very much an uh yeah, like a human-centric thing. So from the media perspective, obviously, yeah, totally agree with you. It's like if I want my care, you know, the audience to care about the characters, if it looks kind of human, that'll that'll help. But I actually genuinely think that a lot of people think that an intelligent alien would be would be some sort of humanoid figure from like a convergent argument, which I disagree with personally. Probably because of what they've seen in media. That yeah, that too.

SPEAKER_01 35:55

That too. There's a lot of things that shape that. There's this old this is a uh I I don't remember who wrote this or when they wrote this. So this is as good as useless, is what I'm saying. Like it's I remember reading great preference.

SPEAKER_02 36:07

I just remember ignore the next 40 seconds of what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_01 36:11

I remember reading this thing a long time ago of this dude back in like the whatever 1800s or something. They were talking about Jupiter and they had seen Jupiter and they they're talking about how it looks like really cloudy. And so the guy's saying, like, okay, well, there's severe weather patterns on Jupiter, uh, which means there's strong winds on Jupiter, which means there must be sailing on Jupiter, which means if if we know nothing else about Jupiter, we know they grow hemp there. So they can make rope for their sailboats, and like that's that kind of thing. And like that's that's exactly what you make me think about here is like you you have to be able to see yourself in this thing. And that also kind of goes back to that what that anthropological problem of like what type of people are writing these stories, yeah, and what is their cultural background and what is both interesting and scary to them. You know what I mean? If if they're a type of person who um associates themselves or prides themselves on being a part of a particularly colonizing class or type of person, they're probably gonna be more interested in that like bipedal, big-brained, uh uh super technologically advanced. The scariest thing to them is that is the idea that there's a something that's gonna outclass them, be able to uh uh fight them off, or even worse, that they're insignificant and that they're not important at all. Meanwhile, if you have somebody who's from a more individualistic society uh who's used to more communal thinking, who's used to you know not being so interested in conquest and conquering and all these things, that alien's gonna be so very different. And like the the idea of something very weird and very profound is a lot easier to achieve in a mind like that, maybe. I don't know, it's just it's fascinating to think about like what alien even means and what qualifies as truly alien to different people from different backgrounds and different cultures, and it's ah it's wild. Yeah, yeah. Um I go on a tangent about that for a very long time.

SPEAKER_00 37:58

We we do this all the time, man.

SPEAKER_02 38:00

I agree with you. Yeah, I uh I always wonder what the because you know, you think about we what when you talk about yeah, alien, right? What do a lot of times people individually get, they're like they have these biases that's literally coming from their culture, of course, their culture, like what we learn, right? And so you know, having that having a person from just the different parts of the world, you know, may imagine a scary alien or an encounter in a very particular way. And I I almost wonder if it matters what biases a a person has when it comes to like accurately imagining what aliens may be like. And I think that a reason um you know, the reason this comes to mind is that you know, we so we evolved from like these more simple mammals. Um, and most people I think are aware that the mammals uh really like took over the the niches when uh the dinosaurs went extinct, which is like 65 million years ago. But mammals had been around for like a hundred million years at that point. Quite a bit, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:10

Right? So it wasn't like the dinosaurs were gone and then the then it was the mammal's turn. It was like the mammals were there actually, I think shortly, and you may know this better than me, shortly after the dinosaurs first show up, yeah. Mammals actually first show up.

SPEAKER_01 39:24

You get like uh uh early, early mammal, you put me on the spot here. I'm pretty sure around 220 million years ago is where we get the first mammal-y things, um, and then the split where we have placentals and and marsupials and whatnot, that's around 120-ish million years ago in there. Um it it and uh someone's gonna correct me in the comments, I'm sure, but I'm those numbers are vague, but somewhere in there if I remember right. And uh yeah, we we've been here for quite some time and we survived the the KT extinction for reasons. Um and like I don't know, I just it it resonates to me because we've done this, we don't even have to look to aliens to know how to answer this question. Because like when Europeans first came to Australia or North America, like there were hu other humans living there, and they did not even recognize them as humans because of the way they lived. And like they would write about like they they're they're not doing agriculture the same way we do, they're not farming the way that we do, they don't have this concept of dominion over the land that we do, and therefore they're not even really human. They're this this land is is uh uh tier uh terra nullis or whatever the hell the word is, you know, this is this is no man's land, you know? It it belongs to no one because there are no people here, because people is defined not by a species, but by behaviors, by cultures, whatever. And this is of course way before you know uh Jane Goodall's time, where we are still calling ourselves the only toolmakers and whatnot, you know? And we talked a minute ago about knocking humans off their pedestal over and over. That's one of those times. It took a long ass time for it to happen, but like seeing other cultures as human was a major stepping stone. And then we go into like chimpanzees, you know, and we're like, man is the toolmaker, and then, and of course, only man, uh, and then we see you know these chimps doing it, and then Leaky famously says, Okay, we either need to redefine tool or redefine human or accept that chimpanzees are human, you know, what are we doing, you know? Yeah, and so like to see like we we can look at our own speech uh the the history of our own species now and see how we might perceive whatever alien thing, not even just like what is life, it's it's it's what is intelligence, what is consciousness, what is civilization, what does it mean to be a thing? Uh, how far does ethnocentrism extend past your own species, even? Um, yeah. And that's really interesting because like, think about it. So there's this big debate. One of the coolest things about anthropology is that like we have so many flipping fossils of like human ancestors that it's there's major debates about like where to even categorize different human species and whether certain human species even exist or whether they should be lumped in with other ones. Our homo rudolfensis, just different homo habilists. You know, what's going on with that? And like latter Australopithecines, too. Evidence of tool making there. We have some tools, you know, the thing like Lemequi and whatnot that goes back well before Homo habilis. So is this actually Australopithecus africanus or is this Astrolipithecus or is this Homo Africanus? You know what I mean? Or or and how far does that go back? And if we're talking about, you know, differences with like chimpanzees and whatnot, the differences between like different like species of elephants and stuff and the difference between mice and rats, bigger genetic difference than the difference between humans and chimpanzees, and you know what I mean? Yeah. And so, like, if you were to call this instead of pan-troglodytes, if you were to call these things homotroglodytes and accept that chimpanzees were a different species of human, would you treat them differently? Would you treat yourself differently? That should keep you up at night. And so now looking at other aliens like other things on other planets, and you're wondering, okay, well, yeah, I can accept them as a lie, but do I accept this as a civilization or do I accept them as technologically advanced because they don't have some knowledge? Like, what does literally any of that mean in the first place? And it makes you question your assumptions not just about like what these things are, but about how you know anything about anything, and that's weird as all shit, dude. Yeah, love that.

SPEAKER_02 43:10

It's uh what you said reminded me, great rant, by the way.

SPEAKER_01 43:13

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 43:14

What you said reminded me of one of my favorite books, which is maybe a little dated now, because I think it came out in the in the 90s, uh, called The Third Chimpanzee. Yes, uh Jared Diamond. Jared Diamond, yeah. Um and what I really, as an anthropologist, love his book, love his books, his his work. Very, very interesting. And in the book, he kind of starts out arguing that it's sort of what you said. You know, if you remove yourself from the experience of being a human and knowing that you're superior to all the other animals and that you're smarter than all the other animals, in fact, that you're not even really an animal, you're like a kind of a different thing. Uh and imagine that you were an alien researcher that showed up to the earth and were taking a true objective look. You could categorize humans as a third chimpanzee. Um, be the other two being um ch the chimpanzees that we're all familiar with, and then uh bonobos, which are themselves our two closest um ancestors, right?

SPEAKER_01 44:18

Uh cousins.

SPEAKER_02 44:18

Cousins. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, my bad. Cousins. I think that we share a common ancestor with them that's like eight million years ago, something like that.

SPEAKER_01 44:26

Seven to nine, yeah, in there. And it's probably like there's evidence. Well, one of my friends is convinced that it's uh psychoanthropists, is is probably the the answer to like who knows? But yeah, seven to nine million years ago, you have a common ancestor with them, and then yeah, you have uh chimps and bonobos who are equally closely related to us because they split after that sport.

SPEAKER_02 44:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And um, yeah, and it's like, and even when you see our cultures and our behavior, right? A lot of places have very patriarchal cultures. Some societies have more matriarchal cultures, but it seems like the dominant one is like patriarchal, and people will even invoke this like naturalist explanation that, well, this is the night the nature of humans, like that they're that masculine is more powerful or something, ignoring all the examples in nature when that's not the case. Like uh all the animals where the female is actually calling all the shots or is way larger, and the male is basically like a sperm bank.

SPEAKER_01 45:19

Yep, including some primates, right?

SPEAKER_02 45:21

And then if you look at chimps, like you said, our closest um cousins, the male or the um the African, I guess they're both in Africa. What are the normal chimps called? Not the bonobos, just the other ones.

SPEAKER_01 45:35

Yeah, you just call you just calling chimpanzees, yeah. Okay, the chimps bonobos used to be called dwarf chimpanzees, they're not anymore, they're a totally different thing now. Right.

SPEAKER_02 45:42

So the bonobos, equally related to us, are uh more matriarchal and they're like not aggressively violent towards each other. They solve conflict through like having sex with each other and being collaborative. Uh, but the chimps are different, they are patriarchal and they are like more aggressive and they solve their conflicts by like beating each other up or you know, doing these displays of like aggression. They have war.

SPEAKER_01 46:09

Yeah, they have actual like actual war where they'll have this group and that group, and they will have pre-planned, pre-meditated murder, assassinations, like strategy.

SPEAKER_02 46:18

Like, you ever seen Chimp Empire uh on Netflix?

SPEAKER_01 46:21

I think so, yes. I haven't seen that.

SPEAKER_02 46:23

Uh they basically entail this sort of thing in the code. They follow a couple troops in the Congo, yeah. Uh, and there's like a big troop and a smaller troop, and there was a mutiny at some point from the bigger group, which caused them to split off into the smaller group. And then even in Chimps, not bon bonobos, bonobos, which do uh which are more matriarchal and you know, I guess friendly with each other in a sense, and um, there was like a lot of egalitarian behavior from the smaller troop, because there was like 10 or 11 of them, and like the males and females were both kind of doing everything together equally. Um, and then the larger troop, which had like 40 or 50, was dominated in this very like patriarchal structure. And it was just it was just cool to see even chimps be that adaptive, yeah. Right? That there's not this, there isn't this like law that's written into our DNA of how people are supposed to be. So much of that is like socially conditioned. So much that when you look out in nature, you can't point to anywhere that's exactly what you want to see, right? You can't there are no there is like no law of nature that holds when it comes to you know the uh like man, woman, women have to be this way, men have to be this way. And that should kind of make sense, right? Like a successful species should be ultra adaptable uh and be able to kind of like fit into any niche, which is one of our specialties as as humans. But I just think it's cool. Um, you know, based off of what you said, it's like, yeah, an alien researcher could easily categorize bonobos, chimps, and humans as, you know, cousins in the same the same little group.

SPEAKER_01 48:04

Three important things. Number one, you just described the topic of my first masters. Second of all, uh I actually read it right before you came over. My thesis? No, I'm just kidding. No, God, not wish that on my worst enemy. Yeah, no, what what you described is is the the there's there's different hypotheses of like human evolution as where we get you know hominin-specific adaptations. And there's the the habitat-specific hypotheses, which are just basic neo-Darwinian evolution, the habitat looked like this, so we did that, and now it just happens to work for everything. And then there's the variability variability hypothesis, which is the idea that we are the ultimate generalists and that our adaptive strategy has been to be hyper-adaptive and to fit into just whatever we have to do, and that's why we're so successful. And that was what my my research was in for that. Um, second thing is you also just demonstrated a major argument for uh gender being distinct from sex and non-binary, which is a major thing in anthropology in the past uh especially 100 years, where we're talking about, okay, well, if gender is synonymous with sex and tied into it and has some innate biological factor in here, why is it so variable across cultures and across time, including our own culture across time, all around the world throughout history? Yeah. That doesn't make any sense. Chromosomes haven't changed in that time. You know, what is that? The third and most importantly, um, this is also something that we see even in other primate species. Uh uh Robert Sapolski, uh near endocrinologist at Stanford, um, uh he famously had did his research on olive baboons in Kenya, I think. Uh, and he observed this one troop uh that was typical everyday olive baboons. You know, they had males up at the top are really dominant and they're a terror to everybody below them. And they have the subordinate males that are like kind of the wimpy guys that like do grooming and things, and then you have the females in the very bottom of the hierarchy. Um, and uh one day this troop goes foraging for food at a tourist lodge, and the tourist lodge has just thrown out a bunch of meat that had been contaminated with tuberculosis. So they have this dumpster full of raw meat, and the baboons find it, they start eating it. Guess who gets to eat the meat first? It's the big dominant super alpha males, right? And so overnight, this troupe just there's this horrible death where like the troop size is reduced like 50%, and uh all the that is left is the females and the subordinate males. The troop is now more female than male. The males that are left are the ones that have spent a lot of time grooming and doing social behaviors, and any average biology undergrad is gonna say, okay, so now the strongest of the males that are left will be the big strong alpha was one, right? And it'll move up the ladder. Nope. They are totally egalitarian. Cortisol and stress hormones, everything just plummet in this group. They spend all their time hanging out and just being, you know, peace and love and chill. The best thing that could have ever happened to them. It's it's amazing. All these assholes died off. All the alphas died, and everybody was just fine. And what these baboons do is when they reach sexual maturity, the males will leave their home troop and go join another troop. And so, as these other young brash males, newly sexually mature males come in, being all dominant, everything, they'd be knocked down a few pegs by these guys. And within six months, they'd fully assimilated into this new lifestyle and they were just chill, peace, love hippies like everybody else. And this culture lasts for like two decades until you have total turnover of everybody, and then it starts to fizzle out. And so, like, my whole, like, my whole job as a science communicator, the thing that I'm trying like hell to get people to understand is like if a bunch of stinking baboons can eat some fetid meat and change their instincts overnight and completely revamp their society, then maybe like humans with the best understanding of science that any uh any species has ever had, as far as we know, maybe we can make life better on purpose, you know, and not let the situation that we currently have of the super dominant alpha bros with all the money and resources bully everybody and boss everybody around while everybody else struggles for food. Maybe we can do that, you know? That'd be pretty tight. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:09

That is a that's a fascinating story. Had not heard that does not surprise me at all. Um, does not surprise me at all. That's so cool.

SPEAKER_00 52:18

Yeah, that's profound, man. Uh the idea that sociocultural changes can apply to different species of primates and kind of yeah, just make waves throughout history. It again knocks us down another pig. Yeah. Seems like that might be the theme of this episode.

SPEAKER_02 52:32

We're not special, there's just a lot of us. Yeah. Yeah. And the um a lot of us. I guess it's like, you know, at this point, and uh to some extent, I think I I have a bit of uh uh like empathy for people who do believe that things are like a certain way when it comes to let's for when for example when it comes to gender stereotypes, right? Um, because we are told and have been told, and our parents and their parents and their parents and their parents have been told for so long that there are these innate things that are more masculine or more feminine, and um we've been told it's been reinforced to the point that it does seem like it's biological, right? Where you where you in your mind you you have like emotions that are associated with these things. Uh but it's like a hell of a it's sort of like a hell of a brainwashing, yeah, right. Which to some extent is like what culture is. Yeah, right. Like culture is like something that you learn. And I think that it's interesting to think about culture as a you know, as an evolutionary utility, right? Like developing uh trust and honor in a culture, like having a sense of honor is like you can see why that's so beneficial for a culture because the people in the culture are like maybe not going to be stabbing each other in the back as much. Um, or like even shame, like that you would be, for example, that you would be shamed for being dishonorable. Uh, then it's like okay, that may produce a culture where people are treat each other more honorably. I feel like in America, in the United States, we are we're like rapidly losing shame. Honor doesn't seem to be as much of a thing anymore. It's kind of like visibility is really big, like exposure, uh which I hate. No, because it's like the the the credible sources are like just the loudest sources, right? So somebody that gets on and is yeah, spreading like anti-back stuff or whatever, or pick your like red pill ideology. Um, it's like just who's loud. Yeah. Oh, well, that must be true. Like that must be uh a source of authority, which is very unfortunate.

SPEAKER_01 54:47

There's also something to be said for simplicity, you know, like that you you when you listen to the the Andrew Tates and the Jordan Petersons and the the uh Matt Walsh's and the Ben Shapiro's of the world, and other it's it's very, very simple, very cut and dry. Just like, well, obviously, this is the way it is, you know, you're gonna act this way because you're a man and you should do these. And and this culture is just better because it's just it has these things that you recognize, and that's better, right? And it's like, and all these things are just so watered down. Good gravy. I'm destroying your furniture. I'm trying not to. It happens. Okay, oh my glob, dude. I'm so I'm gonna buy you a new chair as a gift. But there's uh, but yeah, it's it's all this is super watered down and parochial and very ethnocentric and very just simple-minded. And that sells to uneducated people who feel very alone, you know. It sells to people, and I'm gonna I know I'm gonna get hate for the oh, Jeff thing, everybody's who's listening to people is uneducated, right? It's that this sells to people who feel like the world is against them and they're they're adrift in this sea of nuance and weirdness, and they have to fight to be themselves and they need so badly to be special. Meanwhile, all the scientists are out here being like, hey, you're not special, and I'm not special, and nothing's special. And what does special even mean? And actually, it's really complicated and weird. And if you want to sit down and think about it really hard for like three years, maybe you'll start to have a cool thought about it. But as for right now, you're kind of just here, bro. And like, that doesn't mean anything. Nothing means anything. And it's that's a very scary way to think when you're used to the way that we are taught to think in the United States, especially. We are in a uh ridiculously individualistic and self-important society. Um, and it's so much that that the majority of people don't realize, for lack of a better word, the indoctrination that they're exposed to. The the weirdly heteronormative and cis-focused and white-focused and male-focused way that every single thing is set up all the time. It just becomes so normal that it makes these folks start to see equality as oppression. Um, and it's like, oh, every TV show has to have a black person or a gay person in it. Yeah, because those people exist, don't they? Weird, right? Kind of strange that you haven't thought about that. Wouldn't it be weird if you had no cishet white people at all in any show? Wouldn't that feel strange? That's how everybody else has felt for a very long time. Start to think, you know, and but that's empathy and that's hard. So yeah, dude, it's it's frustrating. And you're right, it's the loud people that get the microphone the most and that get the most views, and it's because they're easy to listen to and that it's not hard to think about what they're saying because what they're saying isn't really worth thinking about. And good gravy that appeals to a lot of lost, lonely, young, usually men who then become violent adults.

SPEAKER_02 57:42

Yeah. Well, you know, there's a lot of uh emerging research about the importance of meaning, yeah, having meaning, and like how that uh correlates to reported happiness, which itself is like a weird thing and a weird thing to even track and try to try to quantify reported happiness. Like, what is how do you how do you how do we measure that between you, between us three here? Levels of reported happiness. But um, and you know, I think that that's also from an evolutionary perspective something interesting to think about that meaning is important because scientifically, you know, we can we can sort of like say, like, yeah, well, you know, there's not really that that much that is special about you individually, right? Like we're very we're 98% identical to chimps, we're 99. like nine percent identical to each other, right? It's it's a very, very small difference, and um, you know, we're quite similar, I think, to like to all other mammals, right? And even to fish, and there's like this one planet, and there's a hundred billion stars, and there's probably lots of other planets that are relatively similar to Earth, and then there then there's like trillions of galaxies, and so you almost learn from science that yeah, the meaning that you're taught about isn't really real, but again, emerging research that meaning is very important, and so it makes sense to me why people look for it in some way, and I feel like I have a lot of meaning in my life, but I also hold this I like have this this stuff that I know is meaningful, but I also think I realize that the the very concept of meaning is like this evolved trait that I need, and it's like this story that I have to trick myself into thinking that isn't probably real, like objectively real. But I don't think that that bothers me personally, like you know, knowing that I have beliefs that are unscientific and knowing that they're probably not real, like believing we took talked about this recently, like believing you can do anything, like you know you can't, you can't do anything, right? You can't accomplish any goal, but you believe that you can't not with that attitude you can't, right? Um, but there's a lot of a lot of those um like non-scientific beliefs. And I wonder, like, do you for you what are some of those? Because you're right, it's like the deep inherent thing, like it wasn't that you know, at least as far as as far as I believe, there wasn't like a creator that made all this for you, and that's the meaning, that you live right so you can go to heaven and do the things in the Ten Commandments or the Bible or whatever. Uh, and that there is like you can't you can't tell me what the meaning is, right? I have to find it for me, like it's something that I desire, but you can't tell me what it is. I wonder like what are the things for you, like what gives you meaning, or like what is what holds that place in your life?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:36

There's a very big difference between saying nothing matters and saying nothing matters while smiling. You know what I mean? Because like that's for me, like it's I I I'm an atheist and I'm a nihilist, and I'm I'm yeah, I and it's purely from a uh science nihilism for me is a scientific stance. It's like the universe is way too big and and there's way too much stuff going on for me to pretend like anything is objectively, not not not like anything, but like anything that I think is important is objectively real, right? There's no such thing as morality on on Mars because there's nothing living on Mars. You know what I mean? You need conscious agents for that to exist, as far as we know. As far as we know, pick a different planet, uh Neptune, right? Nothing living on Neptune, damn sure. And so there's no morality there. And so, like, there's there's no reason to say that our moral morality is an objectively real thing. It is an evolved trait, and we can ground it in objective reality. We can talk about you know, biomedical sciences and human flourishing and all these things. Great. Um, not gonna get you out of that same trilemma we mentioned earlier. And it certainly doesn't mean anything on a planet where you are either the only living thing or there is no living thing. Um, and it's the same thing with everything else: compassion, joy, love, justice, all these things. You can be very pessimistic about it and say that they're just illusions to deal with the horrible reality of nothingness. You can be more optimistic about it and say they're just happy ways to make society work and and they are functional, and then you know, like we said earlier, functionality is is the key. Uh, I try to take a more scientific approach to it and say that like there there's the evolved side of all of that. And also, like at the end of the day, I have I know I'm not the only thinking person in the room, and I know that because I I don't think that anything is equal, uh more important than anything else, that I have no reason to put myself on any kind of a pedestal. Uh, if every single thing on this planet were to die in agony today, it means absolutely nothing to the Andromeda Galaxy or anything that lives there, nothing changes. So I guess the best I can do is the best I can do. And try not to be a dick while I'm doing it. You know what I mean? And try to make I try to use my little bit of time on this planet to make everybody else's little bit of time on this planet just a little bit better. Um, at the end of the day, in this country, average lifespan is like what, 77? If you're really lucky, maybe like up into the 80s. My grandma was she died early, she was only 92. Uh, but uh like it's go as far as you want. At the end of the day, I don't have a lot of time left, and that's assuming that I don't get hit by a bus driving home after this show.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:23

So, like, I'm gonna make the best of the time that I've got, I'm gonna enjoy what I have, I'm gonna love the people around me, I'm gonna achieve as many of my dreams as possible, I'm gonna pull out all the stops, and most importantly, I'm gonna make sure that other people are better off because I was here. Because in the same way that bees must go along about their business making honey and and wolves must go about their business hunting deer and all these things. I must go about my business of being fucking strange and trying to make the world a little bit better. That's just what I'm here for. As if there was anything such as a purpose, that's the one that I've decided for myself.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:56

Yeah. And um, you know, that thanks for sharing. That was that was great. And I also I wonder, you know, you say that you decided this for yourself, but that does sound awfully close to what like a DNA-fueled being would say about their species that like I want to make things better for for people, for other people, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:18

And it's like that are you indoctrinated by big human?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:23

That's what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:24

It's like the it's like a the it makes sense, right? It's like um it makes sense from a an evolutionary perspective that that is like how you feel. You could call it inclusive.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:36

You could call it inclusive fitness, and you would be correct, yeah. And so, like, yeah, that that's and and even then, like, I can apply that to saying, Oh, I want to take care of other animals and all these things. And I do draw a lot of motivation from you said that like you loathe animals.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:48

I mean, why'd you say it like that?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:50

It was like I've never met one that was cool, I guess, including us. But no, I just I I yeah, you can extend that to wherever you want. And I do I draw a lot of inspiration as a biologist from Indigenous ontologies, especially growing up here in Oklahoma, you know. Um, you kind of want to give that personhood back to nature in a lot of ways and not see us as so special in anthropology, that was a big thing for me as well, um, to have some language to that kind of almost animistic view of uh life around you. Um but like at the end of the day, it I if you, in my opinion, if you apply that kind of cosmic nihilism that comes with a good understanding of science with some manner of like ancient stoicism, not the new Jim Bro stoicism of like, you know, I'm I'm never gonna cry because that's for women, you know, and and and I I don't understand what evolutionary psychology is, but I'm pretty sure it means that I can sleep with anybody I want. But like if you can get that kind of like ancient stoicism. Marcus Aurelius. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and and and Seneca, those are some of my favorite philosophers. And like this idea that like you can't control what's going on in the world around you very much, but you can control how you react to it and you can control your participation, and and the idea that Um one of my favorite philosophical thoughts is that uh true morality and ethics, like these are practices, they're skills, they're habits. It's a muscle you have to work out. It's not just you don't just be good, you have to go practice being good and earn being good. Um I feel like if you approach life that way, uh purpose, uh for lack of a better word, isn't really a concern for me. It's just I'm doing I I hate the word supposed to, but like I I I'm doing what uh all that I can, which is to be the best person I can be, um, as best as I understand that, and to try to to improve things for everybody else. And especially from like a bioanthropological perspective of seeing humans as your family. Like uh we if you think about this, these really, really cool experiments from uh social psychologists back in the 70s, I want to say, uh Henry Teifel. Um, and he was studying uh intergroup discrimination. And so what he would do is he would put these people, uh, he'd take random people, you know, and put them in a room together, and he would have them do like some something to separate them into groups. Do you like this painting or not? You go over here, you go over here. Um, how many dots are on the screen? Okay, you overestimated, you underestimated. Toss of a coin in front of your stupid face, whatever it is, you know what I mean? You separate these people and then you'd have them do these little social experiments and games and stuff. And he found that it was, in his own words, like like uncomfortably easy to trigger hateful behaviors in these people where they would screw over the other people, even at expense to themselves, just to make sure those people didn't win. People they never met, people they knew like totally arbitrary, separated from them, but they're sitting over there, and that means they're bad. And if I don't hurt them, they're gonna hurt me first. So I got to do this and this. And so, like, it's super, super easy to draw tribal lines around each other. We are a very tribalistic species. Um, it's very, very easy to to have this us versus them mentality and all these things. But when you're scientifically literate, especially in biology, especially in anthropology, as I said earlier, you you start to realize that like we're all a family isn't just a phrase. And if you can take just for a second those feelings that you have towards your immediate family and try to expand that to the entire human species, it's shocking how quickly and how profoundly it changes the way you treat the most distant stranger and how much more difficult it is to be tricked into withholding compassion. And so back to your question, like yeah, you could you could say that it's an evol uh evolution evolutionary thing, you could say it's an a some sort of inclusive fitness, you could say that it's culturally motivated. These are all valid criticisms of everything I'm saying. Um I wasn't criticizing. No, no, but but it is important to point out that I'm not speaking some gospel here, I'm just some asshole. Uh, but like it's if in my opinion, it is a scientifically minded perspective to be able to say, like, I'm just some dude, and you're just some dude, and you're just some dude, and everybody else is just some dude, you especially. Uh, and uh it's we don't have a job, we don't have a purpose, we don't have a reason, nothing matters, and that's not a bad thing. That means we have the opportunity now to do whatever the hell we want, and and to try to make this world into something that's worth living in. And I know that I don't want to live in a crappy place full of anger and pain, and that means that probably nobody else does either. And so I'm gonna use the talents that I have and the skills that I have and the passions that I have and and try to find the intersection between those things and whatever it seems humanity needs the most right now. And as long as I'm living right there, I think that I'm doing, for lack of a better word, my job, my purpose, you know, whatever that may be. Um and also, you know, fuck any religion that says otherwise.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:51

Yeah, it's the that's deep, man. That's deep. I also feel like my I do describe it as a purpose, like the reason that I'm here, like my job um as this, you know, unit of you know, animal or whatever that has had these unique experiences and does have unique DNA, you know, similar as it is to everybody else in the in the room. And it does feel like that for me, my job is to fulfill whatever uniqueness I have. Yeah. And like that's like why I'm here in the universe, and like the the good that I can do can sort of only really be done by me because nobody else like literally has my DNA there, right? So it's like it's different for everybody, and then that is yeah, it yeah, with the the science that I've learned and whatever I believed growing up and how that's been deconstructed. This is like what gives me meaning overall. I'm curious how you feel about free will based on everything that you that you said.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:55

Oh you don't know if you have strong opinions on that one? Not really, yeah. I I like the the it's funny to say I have no choice but to have free will, but like I mentioned Robert Sabolski earlier, he makes strong arguments that it doesn't exist. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:08

And I think determined uh a great book I read.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:12

And like I I do love the the perspective that like you know, if if we're being real, real tick, you know, finicky about it, anything that I any action that I take right now, I can trace it back to the immediate neurons that were firing that that were involved in that. And then I can walk it a little bit further back to the stimulus that was in the and then I can walk it back to did I eat lunch today? What was my blood sugar looking like? And then I can walk it back even further. Like, what kind of stress have I had this week? What's my hormonal balance looking like in this moment that's it's caused? And then I can walk it back to what's the past 10 years of my life? How's my career doing? How's my marriage doing? How's my my family life doing? Go back to my childhood. What kind of was I raised around? Go back to my parents' childhood, what culture were they raised in to give me, was like an honor thing? Was it like a more you know kind of casual thing? Were they hit as a child? Was I hit as a child? Go back further and further to what region were my ancestors settling in where they a hunter-gatherer society is gonna have a totally different perspective and honor system than like a pastoralist society, going back all the way to the dawn of humans, going back all the way to the dawn of mammals, going back to the dawn of the universe, you know? And you can play that game. And I think that's a really, really cool perspective in the day-to-day. And I also think that, you know, excluding the possibility of original thought, you are exposed to different ideas and people around you every day, and how much you're paying attention definitely varies into that. You mentioned your own unique DNA, it's also your own unique life experiences because twins can turn out to be completely different people, um, uh, depending on what they go through. And so, like, like there's that involved as well. And so, if you're paying attention and trying to take in more information, that gives you more tools in your toolbox to violate the supposedly determined situation that you were in in the first place. And maybe making the decision to add more tools to your toolbox is a deterministic thing too. So at the end of the day, there's really good arguments for it and against it, and I don't give a damn. It's just not for me, it's not my area of expertise, and it's I don't like the philosophy of it. It's just it gets too jargony too fast. Maybe I'll be interested in it someday. But as for right now, I know that I'm here and I'm gonna do the best that I can. And if it means that I never had a choice in the matter anyway, fine. I won't know, and that's okay. I I don't know. I I don't have a good answer for this.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:24

I feel like that was a pretty good answer. To be honest, that was like very thorough.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:29

It was a thorough way to say that I have nothing compelling to say about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:33

But yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, you've you've clearly thought about it. Yeah, and some people should feel strongly one way or another. I think that it's that it's interesting, and um, yeah, I think personally, yeah, for the reasons that you explained, there's a lot of like deterministic things going on, but I feel like I can make better decisions in my life, yeah. Which is kind of what people usually mean when they say you know, you have free will. So it's another one of those things where it's like I think it's like an unscientific belief of mine.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:59

It's like the chicken or the egg kind of thing. You know, like did was I predetermined to make these good decisions, or did I make these good decisions as freely? And it's like what it does that even really mean, and especially if you put it in an evolutionary perspective, it gets very strange very fast.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:14

I guess like yeah, all of our free will can just be attributed to Luca.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:18

Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, you can do it. And Luca also had ancestors, right? Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:23

So he goes so it goes back to the case. It goes first as far as you want. And like that's the you can take it all the way back to the beginning of the universe, and then you can ask a cosmologist what laws of physics, right? Yeah, yeah, because it got I I have a couple of friends that are physicists, one of whom is uh says the same usual things that I would say about the Big Bang is the beginning of time and spaces, we know it. Another one who says, actually, there's these other models that maybe the universe is eternal and the Big Bang was just kind of a thing. And you know what? And so like, I don't know, it's not my area, but like you can take it back as far as you want, and it gets real weird, and um, it it's very neat to think about. And the people who think about it are awesome people, and I think they they can continue doing that, and I hope they tell me something really neat someday. I feel the same way about it. I feel about like computer science and geology. It's like I don't even know enough about this to make start telling you what my opinion might be. I just think it's neat and you guys have fun with it. I'm gonna talk about humans some more now. Like that's all I'm gonna do.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:16

Yeah, I mean, okay, this isn't directly human related, but I'm just curious if you have a take on panspermia.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:22

I don't like it as a well, because like it doesn't, it's just best case scenario, you're kicking the can down the road. Let's define it. Okay, this is so so so either abiogenesis happens here on earth, life gets started here on earth, non-living matter becomes living matter here on earth, or panspermia, life is seated here either accidentally, or like microbes in a comet or whatever like that, and then they start doing stuff here, or some alien civilization poops whatever here into where you know the they're driving by in their RV, they release a septic tank, some worm lands here on Earth and then it becomes us, right? Whatever. All you're doing is kicking the can down the road and saying, okay, well then, well, how did life start over there then? And like that, it's I'm more interested in abiogenesis as a concept, and I think there's more than enough evidence that it's very possible here, especially considering the fact, if nothing else, um and for here, abiogenesis in general, uh we know that the building blocks that make the thing for fuck okay, four major malcomolics make life proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, nucleic acids. The thing that makes those four building blocks, all of them self-assemble on their own. Um, and we know that not only because we find them here on Earth, but because we find them in space all the time, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:16:32

Uh asteroid Binu, we like took a scoop of it. Everything needed basically to get life started is on the comets, and asteroids are still floating around.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:42

Exactly. And so we know that stuff's out there, we know that it's happening. Um, creationists like to bring up the issue of chirality and things like that. There is a left-handed bias amongst amino acids that we find out in space. We don't have an abiotic way of doing this in on Earth, but clearly nature does. Whatever. Like blah, blah, blah.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:59

Well, the you didn't know that God was left-handed. Right. It turns out, yeah. It's clear evidence.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:03

Yeah, sure. Uh but like the thing that that gets me is like for here on Earth, the reason why I'm I'm convinced that you know here on Earth makes sense is because we have the Hadian period, right? We have the great heavy, late heavy bombardment and all this stuff.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:17

With like the first few hundred million years, yes, it's a long of the solar system.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:22

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, like, for the first about a billion years of our planet's history, life is not possible. It's a molten hellscape. Almost as soon as liquid water is possible, like within like a couple like a couple hundred million years, we have life. Life on this planet, at the most conservative estimate, at the like the the the most recent possible, 3.8 billion years, right? That's almost immediate in geological time, right? So, like for me, it's it's somehow less parsimonious to say after the late heavy bombardment, we then had another thing that hit us, and that's where as soon as it was possible. As soon as it was possible, rather than saying, yeah, as soon as it was possible for life to form, it did. Rather than as soon as it was like possible for life to take, that's when it happened to land. However, it's also reasonable to say that, you know, because life using my argument against me, you know, because it is so easy for life to get started here on Earth, it could get started in these, you know, comets and asteroids and whatever that are still hitting our planet, comets and meteorites and whatnot that are still hitting this planet to this day. And so panspermia isn't that rare of a thing to happen here. It's possibly even still happening now, but for the same reason we don't see a biogenesis today, because for life to get started, it would have to have a super nutrient-rich new environment. If something lands here today that could be early life, it's going to be gobbled up by bacteria immediately. You know? And so, like, it you can make the same argument against me, but like I just think it's more parsimonious to do it that way. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:56

Yeah, one that does work though is uh if you you you know if you think about this earliest moment that life could be maintained, whether it was delivered or you know, starts uh from abiogenesis, that time window happened on Mars, we think first before Earth, because it cooled off a little bit quicker, basically just because it's smaller and um it had more of an atmosphere back then, it lost it because it because it's smaller and couldn't retain it. And so you could imagine abiogenesis happening on Mars first and then being delivered to Earth through panspermia. Uh, and that I think that that would work, but then you know the abiogenesis would just have been something that had happened on Mars.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:39

Exactly. That's what I'm saying. Like, even like I've heard that too, the we're all Martians hypothesis, and like, yeah, that's tight. I would love for that to be true. That's real freaking neat. But like at the end of the day, abiogenesis still has to happen somewhere. Yeah, no, you know, and and I think that's there was one idea that was kicked out, and I I don't remember enough about the argument to make it effectively, but like you'll get the vibes. It's like, you know, for life to get started on this planet, you know, we have to have the right temperature and the right pressure and the right blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there must be a time, theoretically speaking, that like after the Big Bang, the entire universe would have been that right temperature, right? And so maybe the idea is that the thing that makes life possible, whatever the thing is, you know, in this in this scenario, is equally perfectly distributed across the entire universe as it expands and it's just waiting for the right conditions to turn on. You know what I mean? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:31

Well, the time when the universe was that temperature, nothing heavier than helium existed. Right. So you could not have created like this, the the chemicals needed. The building box couldn't exist because all that there was was basically hydrogen, helium, a little bit of lithium, and then like different isotopes of those.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:50

Okay. Well, I heard this on like I think it was like Kirzkastart or whatever the the Kirk. Kirzka. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I can never say it right because I don't I don't try. Uh, but like uh, but yeah, no, it's I I love the idea. I love that it doesn't make sense more. That's funny. But like I love the concept too.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:06

Yeah, no, very cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:08

Yeah, no, I mean I think it's it's fascinating that there is this perhaps dormant, hibernating, crestless-like state of life that exists distributed, maybe not evenly throughout the universe, awaiting for the ideal conditions. I think it's yeah, conceptually it's it's it's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:26

It's really cool. The fact that it isn't true and it's that easy to say it's not true, is very funny to me, though.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:32

Well, you could imagine that this stuff is created like in a create, it's just created like when a solar system is formed, right? And so it is everywhere, and like all of these systems that form will have comets and asteroids that um inevitably get flung out of the system. And so you could think that there, I mean, we had a comet recently that entered our solar system, didn't hit anything, and the overwhelmingly the overwhelming likelihood is that that stuff wouldn't run into a planet if it got close to it, right? The the likelihood is that it would just kind of like skate past whatever star and get flung somewhere else. Uh, but yeah, that that is another interesting hypothesis.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:15

Yeah. Yeah, and then yeah, maybe that our interstellar visitor was uh an alien missile. Also that missed.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:21

Yeah, but it was a close shot if they were sufficiently far away.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:25

The one with the Hawaiian name, I don't remember off the top of my head.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:27

The the Amoamua?

SPEAKER_01 1:22:29

Yeah, yeah, the pillow.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:29

No, the new one.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:30

Oh, there's another one flipped, dude.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:32

Uh well, three eye atlas. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:35

You heard about that, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:22:36

No, no. I'm very stupid. I know clocking that, I think it was 180,000 kilometers per hour. Like moving through our solar system.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:45

I don't remember the speed. It was crazy.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:47

Yeah, it was basically because of this phenomenon relative velocity. Yeah, yeah. Where you have, you know, solar system or sorry, you have yeah, solar systems in galaxies that are orbiting the galaxy at different speeds, and then an object gets ejected from that solar system at a different speed and then enters ours, which is also moving around the galaxy at a different speed. And so it it starts to move way faster relative to the speed internally in our solar system. It's like the Doppler effect because they're moving towards each other.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:17

It could be any, it could be, yeah, it's sort of just like a relative uh velocity, right? Like you had one star system that's moving 50 kilometers per second this way, and then ours, yeah, is moving 25 this way. Uh so if something gets ejected out of this one and then enters ours, we see it having this speed that nothing in our solar system has, and it looks and it is alien, it could, you know, it comes from elsewhere, but it's really just like okay, it just started with you know, velocity is a vector, and it just was kind of pointed in a different direction. But there was, yeah, there was so the reason, yeah, I was not trying to be like, oh what, you don't know this? Everybody knows this, yeah, was that there's so many um like conspiracy theories that it come out recently where it was like this thing is alien, and then you know, Avi Loeb, who is this astronomer uh at Harvard, and he's always talking about aliens and claiming that um, you know, such and such could be aliens, and it was this cool, yeah, it was an interstellar comet that seemed quite quite weird. You know, it came in at um an interesting angle, is moving super fast, and then it did exactly what you would expect a comet to do. Got bright when it got close to the sun, uh gravitational assist, and then slingshotted out of the solar system. So radical exactly what you would expect. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:36

That's so cool. Yeah, I I don't keep up to date on too many things, unfortunately. I I'm kind of all over the place. Like I had no idea, and I'm gonna go look this up when I get home and be excited.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:44

Yeah, uh, three eye atlas. Three eye atlas, got it cool. Got some cool, cool pictures of it. Definitely some. They did a cool uh couple cool studies. You know, what they wanted to do was learn about the system that it came from, right? Because that's what we can do with comets in our own solar system um through doing spectroscopy, just looking at how the light is reflected um or absorbed uh coming from the sun off the comet, you can get an idea of like what the early solar system was like, right? Because they're kind of like leftover remnants. Um, and they tried to do that with this interstellar comet, but it turned out that the surface basically had this like galactic uh or this interstellar baking. Because it was in interstellar space, it was like getting bombarded, it was getting cooked. Uh, and there's like a layer of stuff that makes it hard to determine, you know, what the um original composition was. So we we were unable to be like, oh, what was that solar system like when it first formed, which is pretty unfortunate because it's like, how are you gonna study the comets of another solar system? If it enters your solar system, maybe you can get a good look at it, but you know, we we really couldn't in that sense.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:56

Yeah, maybe somebody will have that critique about Voyager one or Voyager 2 one day, and it just becomes so cooked by radiation it's unrecognizable. We've talked about that.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:04

So the yeah, like the Voyager probes, you know, we've sent things outside of our solar system, and it is possible that in billions of years, possible that it like enters another system. Probably won't happen, but you know, it could. And you know, any advanced astronomical civilization and on a planet in that system would see an alien comet, an alien craft um that was sent by us, which I think is crazy to think about. But I also don't think that there's um many uh technologically advanced uh civilizations in the galaxy.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:43

It's always weird because like I that's that whole like the the the um firm paradox, right? Um and like I wonder about that because like maybe there are technologically advanced, but even if we were if we were to say there is one and they're trying to communicate with us, what are the factors here? They have to wait for the right time when we have evolved to the point where we could build the you know the receivers and all these things, which has been hundred thousand years and we only recently did it in the past couple of decades, you know what I mean? So have to be evolved to this point, and we have to have done it, and we have to have it turned on, and we have to be looking in the right direction, and we have to care, uh, and we have to be able to interpret it. If they find that map on your arm there, they have to be able to figure that out. You know what I mean? Like that's that's weird. And so, and then they have to bother with doing all that stuff back to us and however many years that's gonna be, assuming there isn't a political issue that they can't get it funded, like today we're cutting funding for all the scientists. So, like maybe we get an alien transmission today and it's been a billion years in the making, it's this landmark moment, and frickin' Trump is is in office and we can't do anything about it. You know what I mean? So, like there's so many factors that like I don't even entertain whether or not there are intelligent species out there. It doesn't matter. The timing and the and the everything, those are the major. Problems for me, about like why we haven't made contact or why we maybe never will. Like it's so many, so many variables.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:08

Yeah, man. This is this is fascinating stuff. Cloud, where are we at with time? Make sure that we're good. Oh, okay. So yeah, we're we're we're getting close to wrapping things up. Uh so yeah, I'll just we'll cut this part, but no, no, leave it in. So, Forrest, one of the things that we always like to ask our guests uh as we're getting close to wrapping things up here is what is one question that you wish you would have asked yourself sooner?

SPEAKER_01 1:28:38

That's interesting. I think I think one thing that like is is a major is something we've touched on a lot today, and something that that really defines the way that I think about a lot of science is just like what is a person. Um because like if you really, really narrow it down, it's a surprisingly difficult question to answer, you know? And there's expand on that a little bit? Yeah, well, we talked about like you know, it's it's difficult to define humanity in the first place, you know, uh whether we're talking about a genus or a species. The so many fossil eviden fossils, so much artifacts, like all these things make it difficult to draw lines between our species and our genus and other genera, and like all these different things that kind of make it tricky to know what we're doing. The things that make us unique and special are differences of degree, not usually differences of kind, as I mentioned earlier as well. And so, like, there's all these things that set us apart there, and then also even within our species, like it you don't realize until you get old enough to start questioning the dualisms and the ethnocentrisms that have been pushed upon you, and and the way that you've been taught to think about what culture really is and what you really are in your world around you, and like thinking about all those things, and then also comparing yourself to other extremely diverse taxa and comparing those to non-living things and that dualism of what's the difference between culture and nature, and what's the difference between life and non-life, and what's the difference between this planet and any other planet, and like if you really start digging into it, you kind of get to that that realization that we mentioned earlier about how you know at the end of the day none of this is special, um, and that's kind of special, and that that makes you wonder, and that makes you excited, and that makes you want to go explore more. There, there may be a time for maybe about a week where it makes you just want to lay on the floor and cry. But when you're done with that, it makes the world very interesting and it makes the whole universe very interesting, and it it gets you out of your own way in terms of asking really, really, really big questions. And you said something that was really good a minute ago. The fact that anytime you answer a question in science, you come up with two or three more questions. And the faster you can start doing that, the faster you're gonna be able to be stumped. And the faster you're stumped, the faster you're gonna be just fiery with curiosity, and the more mistakes you're gonna make, and the more stupid things you're gonna start to wonder. And when you start wondering about stupid things, you don't have to be so worried about the ego of making sure that you're doing thinking right and doing science right, because it's all just whatever anyway. Uh, and then you can start, you know, exploring the true frontiers of human imagination. And that's where the coolest people in the world have done some of the coolest things in the world. That's where we got like uh our our concepts of of going back all the way to like Eratosthenes, figuring out the earth is round over 2,000 years ago. Many many years ago. Oh, he didn't figure out the earth was round, pardon me. No, Aristotle's already figured out. He figured out the circumference of the earth, and he got it down to like within 1% of what it really is using just some geometry and a stick. Uh, and it takes you all the way to the history of your field from you know, I'm picking an arbitrary point here where uh we we know we're the center of the the universe and everything's uh rolls around us, and then Copernicus is like, hey, surprise, that's not true. And then Brache comes along and is like, here's this, you know, all these orbits of stars and planets and everything, and we have no idea what any of this means. Then Copernicus comes along and is like, yo, it's ovals, y'all. Everything's ovals, and Copernicus was wrong, and then uh Newton comes along, it's like, surprise, idiot is not ovals, it's conic sections, and also here's calculus, and then uh your his models of of of uh classical mechanics work until they don't, and we're like, hey, like Uranus isn't behaving the way it's supposed to, and then what do we do with that, right? And then we we were like, well, maybe if we just do the math backwards, then surprise, it's Neptune's there, and then Mercury also doesn't work, but we don't get to fix that until Einstein comes along, and then we have relativity, which works exactly the same way, but with really big gravity too. And then you get from Einstein all the way up into like Bohr and Schrdinger, where it's like, now we don't even know what atoms really look like because actually it's just fuzzy diagrams of probability. And now the fundamentals of everything that we thought we knew about everything is different. And every single part of all of that, and you can do the same thing with biology, flip dude, the history of fossils back in the day when when uh Steno, same guy who came up with like laws of uh superpositioning and everything, that the foundations of geology today had these tongue stones, these triangular rocks, he's like, yo, I think these are sharks' teeth, guys. And they're like, Where's the sharks then, Steno, idiot? And he's like, I'm telling you, y'all. And then you go on further and further until finally, like uh Cuvier comes up with the concept of extinction for the first time. And that blows everybody's mind because that violates the great chain of being, right? And and then you get into Darwin showing like how natural selection actually is a thing and how you know and that even the concept that that modern life is derived from ancient life wasn't entirely new for him, but he made it really special, right? And so over and over and over, we have these situations where like we throw away everything we know about life, we throw away everything we know about the entire universe because the truth matters, and it takes strange weirdos who are willing to think crazy things to get there. And a great place to start with that from a biologist's perspective is just wondering what the hell you even are. And if you can break that down, you can break down what humans are and what people are and what culture is and what anything is and why you're even here in the first place, and just get out of your own way with that. You can start asking those weird questions faster and stop caring so much about the weird answers, insofar as like being scared of them. You lean into them. And that is a question that if I had answered, or if I had asked myself much, much earlier, if I had known I had been allowed to ask even much, much earlier, I would have been studying earlier and I'd probably be done with my PhD already. Bravo.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:39

I don't think anyone's ever improved a TED Talk in response. Excellent.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:43

And uh just want to give you your kudos on the history of astronomy. Nailed it. Hell yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:49

I mean, you nailed it, you nailed it in a language that my my gu my host could understand. You know what I mean? That was excellent.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:55

Yeah, that's like a lost art, man. That's like uh you're almost like one of those ancient philosophers that used to come and give these like two-hour speeches, and you just got all the facts down, man.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:05

I'm just stoked to hell. I'm stoked to be here, and I want to share that with everybody, and that's our job.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:11

Well, I certainly have appreciated. We both do. Certainly appreciated having you on for us. This has been absolutely riveting. Could listen to you talk all day, man. We gotta have you back here. Gotta have you back at some point.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:21

Uh, you want to tell folks where they can find you?

SPEAKER_01 1:35:23

Yeah, uh, find me on them internets at valkailabs.com. Uh, I'm on YouTube, I'm unfortunately on TikTok. Uh, and uh I think I have an Instagram. You can find me there. If you like science, atheism, and general weirdness, you'll like my pages.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:36

Okay, everybody. And as we always like to say, stay curious. Peace. Peace.