Was Darwin wrong? The 305th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

On this, our 305th Evolutionary Lens livestream, we discuss evolution, including major transitions from sea to land (early amphibians), and back again (e.g. whales), and the evidence. Where should we expect gaps in the fossil record, and why? How are adaptations to space and time analogous to one another? Then: lab grown pig fat is combined with plant protein and turned into meatballs that pretend to be pork. What could go wrong? Prediction: they’ll be carcinogenic. Finally: GLP-1s—e.g. Ozempic—have so many side effects. Now on people’s radar: they decrease drive and pleasure in all things, including libido.

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Mentioned in this episode:

Jim Tour, physicist, talking to Tucker Carlson about creationism: https://x.com/uncommonsince76/status/2000981781651009727

Bret’s dissertation: https://backend.production.deepblue-documents.lib.umich.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/0617b499-b8e8-4071-9a21-95f4c39f8372/content

Bacon that isn’t bacon: https://grist.org/climate-energy/this-pigs-bacon-was-delicious-but-shes-alive-and-well/

Pharma Darlings: https://naturalselections.substack.com/p/pharma-darlings

GLP-1s flatten sex drive: https://www.thecut.com/article/glp-1-weight-loss-drugs-ozempic-sex-drive-side-effects.html

Chapters

• 0:00 Evolution Week on the Interwebs
• 12:58 James Tour on Darwinism
• 22:13 Where Are the Fossils?
• 25:12 From Sea to Land and Back
• 33:24 A Fossil That Fills a Gap
• 38:41 Adapting Across Space & Time
• 49:50 Was Darwin Wrong?
• 58:09 Fossils & the Apple I
• 1:01:14 Bacon That Isn't Bacon
• 1:05:57 Is it Carcinogenic?
• 1:12:51 GLP-1 (Ozempic) Side Effects
• 1:18:36 GLP-1 & Loss of Drive

Transcript

0:00

(Upbeat Music) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast live stream number 305? Yes. Hey, did it. All right, number 305. I am Dr. Bret Weinstein. You are Dr. Heather Heying. It is downright mid-December. It is mid-December and simulcast with our live stream is your most recent appearance on Joe Rogan. On Joe Rogan. But here's the thing, I don't know how many of you know that. We're not trying to send our audience away, but just so you know. It is evolution week here on the interwebs. And if you want the full strength dose, then you need to stick around for this podcast before checking out the Joe Rogan podcast in which I cover an entirely different piece of the evolutionary puzzle. But anyway, yeah, exciting stuff. Got a locals watch party going on and all the usual stuff we could say, but really what we're gonna do first is pay our rent with three awesome sponsors right at the top here and then get into the evolutionary meat of the matter. The heart of the matter. Maybe some bacon. The evolution, the bacon is evolutionary meat. This is not as much as you might think. Okay, all right, well, oh, interesting. As long as it's kosher. I don't think there's anything kosher about the transhumanists. I agree, nor do I give a crap when, well, really ever. But the kosherness. Or the transhumanists. I do care about them. We need a new set of kosher laws that protects us from the glyphosate of the whole thing. Indeed. Yeah. So, top of the hour, sponsors. It's a red pay. I am still wrestling with the lingering effect of this fricking death flu and pneumonia that I had. So, you're gonna be two of them and I am not going to jeer. You are wrestling, but you have also just scored a two-point reversal and you are now beating this thing that has been dogging you, yes. I don't remember that. I do. I mean, usually like at the moment, I, it's been a long time since I've thought about wrestling and I did briefly, but I feel like a two-point reversal is a pretty abrupt move. Oh, that just means you've gained the upper hand from being a-- Yeah, but it sounds like it's something you'd remember as opposed to like, yeah, actually, over the last several hours, I, no, okay. We have now stretched this analogy far beyond capacity. And that's what I'm saying is I don't think it was a two-point reversal. I'm giving you two points whether you want them or not. All right, Heather, our first sponsor this week is Everyday Dose. It's Coffee Plus Benefits. That should say with benefits, right? Nope, they insisted. Oh, Coffee Plus Benefits, all right. Maybe you love coffee, but it doesn't love you. Maybe you feel bloated or have intestinal discomfort after your morning coffee. People reported that Everyday Dose lets them have their delicious coffee without the side effects. 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And Everyday Dose is offering a fantastic offer for DarkHorse listeners. Truly fantastic. Get 45% off your first subscription order of 30 sertings of, sertings, so, servings of coffee plus. You'll also receive a starter kit with over $100 and free gifts by going to everydaydose.com slash DarkHorse or entering DarkHorse at checkout. That's everydaydose.com slash DarkHorse for 45% off your first order. It's really good stuff. It is really good stuff. Absolutely. Even if my reading is-- Yes, it doesn't help with interpretation of punctuation and other things on the printed page. Here's the thing. But it doesn't pretend to. That's the thing, it doesn't have a promise. Everyday Dose does what it says it does. Why could we not-- It's awesome, it's delicious. Why could I not have been born into a language that gives you warning about the punctuation at the beginning of the sentence? Most of us use our eyes. Oh, you want Spanish with upside down bangs on the remarks. I wanna-- How do you do the internet? I mean, how many of the people improperly throwing questions at the end of every sentence are doing so because they have anxiety based on the fact that at the beginning of the sentence you don't know if that's where it's headed? Yeah, I think I suspect that some of the differences in reading between people have to do with how much you visually scan ahead as you are reading a particular thing. And if you don't scan ahead, you are caught by surprise by everything that happens. See, here's the thing. Some of us are too busy trying really hard not to fuck it up to scan ahead. There's just no bandwidth for the scanning part. So it's an anxiety filled exercise. As you're about to see-- You don't seem that anxious. I cover it well. Our second sponsor this week is CrowdHealth. CrowdHealth isn't health insurance, it's better. It's a lot better. It really is better. This time of year, health insurance companies hope that you will once again blindly sign up for another year of overpriced premiums and confusing fine print. We used to do that, not anymore. Not since finding CrowdHaul. Helping the crowd, help is what they call it. Not anymore, never again. CrowdHealth is a community of people funding each other's medical bills directly. No middlemen, no networks, no nonsense. After we left our salary jobs as college professors, we spent years buying health insurance in the marketplace. It was dysfunctional, confusing, and very expensive. As a family of four who had health insurance for emergencies only, we were paying more than 1500 bucks a month for a policy with a $17,000 annual deductible to a company that never answered their phones and had a website that didn't work. Tens of thousands of dollars paid out for no benefit whatsoever. Heather went looking for alternatives and she found CrowdHealth. We've now had two sets of great experiences with CrowdHealth when Toby broke his foot in the summer of 2024 and when Heather slipped on wet concrete and split open her scalp the following summer. Both times we went to the ER and got good but expensive treatment from the medical staff there. In both cases, CrowdHealth paid our bills with no hassle. Their app was simple and straightforward to use. And the real people who work at CrowdHealth are easy to reach, clear, and communicative. With CrowdHealth, you get healthcare for under $100 a month. You get access to a team of health bill negotiators, low cost prescription and lab testing tools, and a database of low cost, high quality doctors vetted by CrowdHealth. With CrowdHealth, you pay for little stuff out of pocket but for any event that costs more than $500, a diagnosis that requires ongoing treatment, a pregnancy, or an accident, you pay the first 500 and they pay the rest. Seriously, it's easy and affordable. It's so much better than any health insurance that we can still hardly believe it. The health insurance system is hoping you'll stay stuck in the same overpriced, over complicated mess. This year it's even more complicated because most of the ACA, that is Affordable Care Act subsidies expire which means your prices are going to be even higher. Meanwhile, CrowdHealth members have already saved $40 million in healthcare expenses because they refuse to overpay for healthcare. This open enrollment, take your power back, join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using code DarkHorse. Join CrowdHealth.com, that's join CrowdHealth.com, code DarkHorse. Important reminder, CrowdHealth is not insurance. Opt out, take your power back. This is how we win, join CrowdHealth.com. Really cannot speak too highly of CrowdHealth. Yeah. It's so good. It's really good stuff. It's so obviously the answer to one of the major problems facing Americans who are trying to be healthy and dealing with all of the corrupt institutions. Yep, it's the way to avoid the racket. Yeah, one of the rackets. Yeah, there are a lot of rackets. This is not tennis, folks, there are a lot of rackets. There are a lot of rackets in tennis. Usually two. Two. Our final sponsor this week is ARMRA colostrum, an ancient bioactive whole food. Here at DarkHorse, we have been standing for ages that we live in an age of hyper novelty. We are the most adaptable species on the planet and even we can't keep up with the rate of change. We are bathed in electromagnetic fields, artificial light, seed oils, microplastics, endocrine receptors in our air, water, food and textiles. And there are myriad other modern stressors like overcrowding and having too little control over our own choices in life. Here's something you can't control. 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Unlike most colostrums on the market, which use heat pasteurization that depletes nutrient potency, ARMRA colostrum uses an innovative process that purifies and preserves the integrity of hundreds of bioactive nutrients while removing castene and fat to guarantee the highest potency and bioavailability. The quality control is far above industry standards, including being certified to be glyphosate-free. This is increasingly a trend that people are paying attention to and for good reason. People, whether or not the products and the foods that they're, the products they're using, the foods that they're eating are glyphosate-free. So we've got two that we talked about today, everyday dose and ARMRA colostrum that are glyphosate-free. Yeah, I mean, we are discovering glyphosate sneaks into your diet, even if you're being careful, because lots of things like, for example, organic wine still have glyphosate because frankly, it's circulating in the environment at such a high level that it gets on all kinds of stuff. Yeah, it doesn't respect land borders. That is true. Yeah. People who have used ARMRA colostrum have reported clearer skin, faster and thicker hair growth and better ventral concentration. In addition, people using ARMRA colostrum have noticed a decrease in muscle soreness after exercise, better sleep and fewer sugar cravings. ARMRA colostrum is the real deal. We've worked out a special offer for the DarkHorse audience. Receive 30% off your first subscription order. Go to ARMRA.com slash DarkHorse or enter DarkHorse to get 30% off your first subscription order. Once more, that's ARMRA, A-R-M-R-A, dot com slash DarkHorse. Marvelous. So marvelous. Should we start with evolution, seeing as it's evolution week here on the interwebs? Yes. All right. So yesterday, I believe it was, Tucker Carlson put out an interview with Jim Torr who is a biologist at Rice who I know actually fairly well. You know, I have broken bread together. I quite like Jim Torr. Jim Torr is a specialist, maybe the world's greatest nanotechnology expert. He builds little machines at molecular scale and he is an exceedingly good scientist and tops in his field. In his interview with Tucker, he challenges the ability of the Darwinian explanation to account for major morphological changes in form that we see across time in the Darwinian framework. So we saw creatures and we have a description of how they are related to each other and that suggests that there were forms, intermediate forms between these major jumps and he challenges whether or not the Darwinian mechanism is capable of explaining these things. So let's start with a two minute clip from Jim on Tucker Carlson. That word is being used. Anyway, right? It's being used. All right, so you can see these small permutations but what you never see, never see or what is called body plan changes, body plan changes. And this encompasses many things but you see these genetic networks would have to change. So a body plan change would be an invertebrae, something that does not have a spine going to a vertebrae, something that has a spine, something like a worm going into something that has a spine. You never, ever see that, you never see. Now, there are hypotheses where people will see fossils and they'll say, oh, this must have been a precursor to this. They will never see the transformative thing. That is for sure and I'm not the only person that is saying that. It's not just Jim Tour, the creationist saying this. And the problem with body-- To be clear, the fossil record does not support the theory of evolution as, at least as you're defining it. Well, yes, it does not support body plan changes. There's small permutations like the ones that I have just told you but you will not see body plan changes. In any fossil record that we found. The only thing that you will see is people will hypothesize over that fossil. They'll see a fossil here and a fossil here and they'll say, oh, and then they'll see a fossil here. This must have been the transition to this. And they'll hypothesize with that. But it doesn't have to be the transition. This is strictly a hypothesis. And so we don't see that in the fossil record. Many people don't see that in the fossil record. Some people will say, we absolutely see that. The absolute people are actually becoming less and less. The problem with this, in order to have a body plan change, you have to have these genetic networks. These genetic networks are going to have to change. So the genetic networks occur very early on in life. This is the wiring that is gonna occur to run this system. You clip one wire, it is catastrophically lethal to the organism. It is lethal. Everything goes haywire. And people will say this and they're... Okay, so the reason I thought that this was worth engaging is that Jim is a very high quality thinker and he's leveling a challenge for which I don't believe the response is obvious. And I think it makes sense for us to talk a little bit as evolutionary biologists about what is going on, to what extent the claim that he is making is accurate and to the extent that it's accurate, whether or not it actually levels a serious challenge to Darwinian evolution. This would not be worth our time if he was a blowhard. Now he is, I think he would self describe himself as a creationist. He's certainly in the intelligent design realm. And he is forthrightly here, as I would expect. He's a person of very high integrity. He is acknowledging that we do see evolutionary change at a particular scale. He's acknowledging the permutations that we see in evolution and he's saying there is a place where whatever is explaining the permutation is changing is insufficient to explain what he's calling body plan changes and so I think-- And that's been a fairly, I think, standard anti-evolutionary response to evolution explains the diversity of life on Earth for a long time. Yes, we see microevolutionary changes, stuff happening at the small temporal scale, but no, we do not see microevolutionary changes. Well, I see this as one better. I think he's made a concession here that's one better than the typical challenge. We see microevolution. Microevolution, Heather and I could go on for hours about how to exactly define microevolution. But microevolution is typically conceded by absolutely everybody below the species level. Within populations. Within populations and the selection that takes place on farms with domesticated plants and animals was in fact one of the things that inspired Darwin to think about how evolution works in a natural context because everybody understood that farmers were selecting for characteristics that were good, more meat on a cow or more milk production, larger fruits, all of these things. And have you met domestic dogs? Right, I have met domestic dogs. You've seen a bulldog, you've seen a terrier, you've seen an oak wolfhound. I don't think anyone argues that those actually were placed here or that they all came from different things like that is that it's human selective forces on an ancestor. So everybody accepts the microevolution at the below species level because you'd be crazy to deny it, the evidence is everywhere and incontrovertible. Frequently people have denied evolution at the macro scale, that is to say between species. What Jim is doing here acknowledges that there is evolution of the type we see between species and he's saying, but there is a type we don't see, which is this body plan transition. I don't hear him conceding that, I acknowledge that it's possible in there, but I didn't hear that. I'm pretty sure it's there because of where he's focused. So he's talking about vertebrates going up from invertebrates. That's a major body plan transition. It's not the change in size of a raptor, change in size of a raptor would be between two species, but it leaves the body plan more or less intact. So I hear it in there and I appreciate it. And I also know the circles that he travels in. And so this is amongst the better intelligent design folks, this is commonly accepted and they frankly do take their job seriously, which is to find the flaws where our explanation really isn't good enough. And I would argue it just isn't good enough yet. I think the solution to all of this ends up being Darwinian. But in this particular case, I wanted to focus. Darwinian sensu lato, obviously Darwin didn't know a number of things. And so he had broad speculations, broad hypotheses with a lot of imprecision because they would have had to have been. So when you say Darwinian, I would tend to say evolutionary, but. Well, I say Darwinian for a particular reason, which is the folks on our side, the Darwinists tend to freak out anytime somebody challenges whether or not the explanation that we present, the one in the textbook covers the creatures that we see. Because they always don't hear the rest of the argument to figure out whether or not what's being challenged are the particulars of the way we, the story we've presented or the basic concept of whether or not this happens naturally without intervention. And so my point is, I think there's plenty wrong with our story, but if you fix it, it doesn't touch Darwin. Darwin is left intact. What Darwin said about heritable variation and selection covers all of these mechanisms. And so I just think giving him his due and pointing out that no, it's not Darwin that's under threat here. It's you people who closed the story too early, who decided to explain more than it did at an early phase. But anyway, I wanted to cover what I think the not so obvious, but very compelling answer to the pattern that Jim is pointing out here. Why don't we have those fossils? Okay, now, first of all, I wanna say that he should acknowledge that the evolution of the intelligent design argument has gone through phases where they have pointed out the absence of fossils that later show up, right? So the idea that, hey, the fossil record does not reflect a Darwinian story is partially answered by the fact that over time, it tells an ever better story. It's still incomplete, but it tells an ever better story. So I remember well, I think when we were in college, intelligent design folks were distributing leaflets that I ran into on the Penn campus, in which they mocked the idea that whales had evolved from a terrestrial ancestor, and they in fact drew little cartoons of a blue whale on the legs of a cow and it looked ridiculous. Yep, as it would. But as you and I remember, when we were in graduate school in Michigan, Phil Gingrich, the paleobiologist, paleontologist returned triumphantly from the Valley of the Whales in I think Pakistan with the fossil ends up being called Pacisetus. So I'm thinking it's Pakistan. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, actually, sorry. Just before you launch into your argument here, I just wanna maybe set it up a tiny bit more by saying that the argument that Tor is making and that others like him are making is not that the fossil record shouldn't have any gaps at all. But it's a question of representation. It's a question of statistical likelihood that the gaps appear to be not only more frequent, but in fact, absolute with regard to certain kinds of transitions and that that is notable. And so there is always in questions like this, like how would you know, like in a sort of a goodness of fit, statistical test way, we have our observed values of like, here are the fossils we've got. Well, what were the expected fossils? And of course, some of that requires inference about the exact history that you're trying to discover. So the expectation is inherently going to be circular, but also we weren't there. We don't know the ecology. We don't know what forms had. You are gonna make an argument about when we do expect more and less kinds of fossils that goes beyond that. And I think is an appropriate rejoinder, even beyond the fact that for instance, Phil Gangrich found the transitional whale form. Yep. Which now. So let's show Pacicetus here. So this was a fossil that looks strangely like the creationist renderings that were supposed to be impossible. Here you have a whale-like creature with obvious limbs for locomotion on solid ground. And then below it, we have-- No, other way, that was Pacicetus. Oh, that's Pacicetus is, so the way the story goes is the transition apparently happened in something called the Tethys Sea, which no longer exists on Earth, but was very shallow. And so you had a terrestrial ancestor that we believe was hunting prey in the shallows. And essentially the more aquatic it got, the better and more successful it was. And so you have Ambulocetus above here, Pacicetus below. And the point is in the period before these fossils existed, a very different argument unfolded because what you effectively had were a hypothesis about whale evolution that was not matched by the fossil record. Here we have the fossil record filled in. Now, this is not, it's halfway to an example of what Jim is saying doesn't exist. It's not a transition of the magnitude of becoming a vertebrate from something before, but it is, I would argue, it's like a mesotransition. It's a transition that is substantial, becoming aquatic from a terrestrial form. So it's a proof of concept. You can say, hey, the fossils aren't there and that's trying to tell you something, but then when the fossils show up, you gotta take the loss, okay? And I would just, then aside, evolutionary biologists understand there to have been several secondary returns to the sea. So tetrapods emerge onto land as vertebrates having been waiting around in shallow waters, warm, shallow nutrient-rich waters for a very long time before coming onto land and finding a space empty of other vertebrates, filled with invertebrates and plants and such. But whales being one of these now nicely established returns to the sea from a non-aquatic ancestor, others being manatees, pinnipeds, which include seals, sea lions and walruses. Also in other lineages, we have sea snakes return to the sea and there are others. And so that is a rich place to explore what would have happened and what kinds of fossils what would we like to be finding with regard to a history that we have put together that involves fully aquatic onto land and then back into the sea. Those are some interesting stories. Yes, and there are many of them for I think a reason that will be useful later in this discussion. The reason is if you imagine some creature that is either relegated to the sea or relegated to the land, there's a place at the shore where there may be something profitable, just the other side of the border. And so if you're an aquatic animal that can figure out how to feed on stuff that has washed up above the meander line, you have access to a resource that nobody else does. And so the evolutionary pull in that direction is strong. And likewise, if you are a terrestrial creature and there's something swimming around in the shallows that you could eat, but you're not quite aquatic enough, again, the evolutionary pull is strong. There's an advantage to living in transitional zones, in liminal spaces. You can't be specialized on either, but in temporal space, we also see this with regard to crepuscular animals. Neither nocturnal, neither optimized to the nocturnal environment, where maybe they have, if they're a mammal, they have a tepidum lucidum, reflective retina on the back of their eye that allows them to take in more photons, but they're also more attuned to non-site senses versus diurnal, which is highly attuned to sight and maybe less good at some of the other senses. Crepuscular organisms, of which there are many, and many carnivorens tend to hunt a lot in the hour or two, either side of dusk or dawn, are more generalist. But in fact, what they're doing is taking advantage of the fact that, why are you smirking at me? They are more generalist and they are taking advantage of the fact that the specialists whom they are hunting are living at a moment when they are not as good, because they are either nocturnal and are not as good at being cryptic in the half-light or they are diurnal, and the same thing is true and their eyes aren't working as functionally. It's a fantastic point, and it's actually a great example of the thing I say about, oftentimes, if you see a pattern in space, you can find a analog in time and vice versa. And so basically, the reason I was smirking was that basically you're talking about a temporal shore between day and night. Oh yeah, precisely. Which is really cool. Yeah, it ebbs and flows with a regular periodicity, predictable periodicity. It's short enough that every organism we're talking about lives through many of them. Yep. So the reliability is clearly something to be taken advantage of adaptively. There is a niche to be had there in the exploration of the temporal change. Love that point. All right, so we have whale fossils. We've also seen the same pattern with bird fossils. There's one old one which I'll show you, which is Archaeopteryx, which is a feathered pre-bird. And now we've had numerous discoveries, I think mostly in China, of other primitive or proto-birds. So again, this is the place where you have a form that's mysterious in the way that you see it in nature and with enough time, and frankly, I don't know how these paleo folks do it, but with time, the paleo folks do manage to go out and find things that fill in these gaps. Yeah, well, and I would say too, like I didn't know we were going here, so I didn't go back and remind myself, but there has been an active discussion in basically paleo bird community around which of the things that we associate with modern birds came first. If we can think about, well, probably their ancestors were already endothermic, which is probably required for vertebrate flight, but just because of the energy requirements. But feathers, flight, bipedality, I feel like there's another big trait there, but even if we just take feathers and flight, do feathers have to come first, or does gliding happen and occasionally you get uplift and you get powered flight even before feathers? And so these sorts of arguments are active in the communities of people, not just the neontologists like us who mostly focus on organisms that are still extant, but I'm not good at reading fossils, but there are a number of these, I think you're right, fossil finds of sort of proto birds out of China, where in some cases you see rheocuses, like you see feather imprints, and in some cases you don't, and they actually can be put together into a line. And you know, Torrey says, look, those are hypotheses. And so that's the part of the clip that you showed with-- No, I think he would concede, I think this is what he's talking about as perturbations, and that he's talking about more major things, which admittedly are not found, but I'll get to why they're not found shortly. I mean, I feel like the evolution of birds is a pretty major change. Well, yes and no. I hear in what he says, he's looking for even more major changes that are the roots of these giant clades like vertebrates. But in any case, let's look at, here's one that actually, I think you can make this case with the whales also, but one of the most amazing cases of a fossil find that fills in a hypothesized gap in the hypothesized way is tic-tac-lac. So tic-tac-lac is a transitional form between amphibians and reptiles. And this is-- No, tic-tac-lac is an early tetrapod. You're right, early tetrapod. So between sort of fishy fish, fully aquatic fish and earliest amphibians. Yeah, you're right. In any case, Neil Shubin went looking for this fossil in the most inhospitable conditions like Arctic conditions in a place where logic suggested that the transitional form might be found, and he came up with the goods, which, can you imagine searching a moon-like landscape for a particular fossil and looking at rock after rock, after rock, after rock, and then I believe the story is that they landed on this, like at the point that their expedition was effectively done, they were out of resources and going home. Anyway, do you wanna show up? Yeah, can you see my screen? No, of course not. I just pulled up a slide from a lecture I used to give on the evolution of tetrapods. Where, exactly you say Shubin is the middle author on this, but writes in Nature in 2006, "Devonian, tetrapod-like fish, "and the evolution of the tetrapod body plan." And so body plan is exactly the same phrase that Tor uses, and usually in biology, we actually use the German bowel plan, but its body plan changes, and at this point, 2006, Shubin and company found this intermediate form between already existing fossils that were known, ichthyostega, acanthostega, ticthalic, and panderechthys and eusthenopteron. So I wanna go back and correct my earlier and embarrassing error. Obviously, a transition from amphibians to reptiles is not a body plan change. It, in fact, we know a lot about it. It's the evolution of an alteration of the egg, which allows for freedom from water. So the amphibians are obligated to the water for reproduction, and an egg that can withstand drying out, the amniotic egg, is the transition. So you wouldn't do that. There are other changes, but the evolution of the amniotic egg is the major, major giant change that reptiles, including mammals, evolve that makes them fully independent of water in a way that amphibians are. Yeah, okay, so here we've got a number of cases where you had something that was, as Jim is talking about, a hypothesis. There ought to be an intermediate fossil, and it was just a hypothesis until it wasn't, and that's the beauty of a hypothesis, is that it makes a prediction, and the beauty of paleontology is that those predictions are often manifest in literally rock that has been, why is there a fossil? Because some bone got buried in the right condition that as the fossil rots away, it gets replaced with the molecules that make up a stone, and you can actually see the impression rendered in stone by geology. That's an amazing fact, and the idea that there are people who specialize on figuring out where those things are and what they mean is pretty cool. It is. Okay, so why are, first of all, the transitional fossils aren't totally absent. Tiktaalik here counts as one of the transitions that has now been filled in by paleontologists, okay? So it's not that they're totally absent. Why are they as absent as they are? Well, again, I believe that there is a not so obvious but very compelling explanation for the reason, and it has to do with the way we should infer that evolution takes place, and I will fault adaptive evolutionists for not understanding this as well as they should. They tend to look at the forms that we have and tell a story that links them together, right? So a fossil will stand in for some population of creatures that existed, but we never, we rarely talk about the population dynamics that accompany the evolutionary story of adaptive change. Very rarely do we properly tell that story, and so what I wanna point out is that by my model, it just so happens, the one that I wrote in my dissertation, you would absolutely expect most of those transitional fossils to never be found for an obvious, or obvious to me at the time, reason. And the reason is because you have to think in terms of different phases of evolution that I would argue logically must exist. So this is my own terminology. Why don't we put up a figure one from my dissertation here? So figure one here is a crude drawing that involves three phases of evolution, and my dissertation was about trade-offs, which is why the X and Y axis are labeled capacity A in the Y axis here and capacity B in the X axis here is because my point in my dissertation was about what does evolution do when it's trying to improve two characteristics that each come at an expense to the other? Turns out to be a very powerful rubric, I believe. But anyway, on this diagram, for those who are just listening, you've got a 45 degree line drawn basically between the ends of the X and Y axis. So that is what ecologists would call a perfect trade-off where the costs in one capacity come at an exactly equal, or derive at an exactly equal benefit in the other capacity. But put that aside for the moment. What I've diagrammed here is there's an oval at the bottom near the origin of the graph that says innovation. So this is my starting gun. Something has evolved that gives some new capability, and it can be anything. It can be the evolution of an image-forming eye. It can be the evolution of true flight. But whatever it is, an innovation happens. And it doesn't happen up at that line. It happens near the origin of the graph. Why? Because anybody who has built objects knows that your initial attempt, the first time you succeed at building a something or other, it downright sucks. It's really bad. It barely works, and it probably doesn't save you as much effort as it costs to make it by an order of magnitude. It may take you 10 times as much effort to build the thing as it can save you labor by using it. But in a genome space, most of those things just disappear, you never see them at all. Right. Most of them don't even make it to prototype. Right, but let's go back to the transition between the shore, either into the water or out of it. Some creature gets to the shore. There's a bunch of yummy stuff just the other side of the habitat they're comfortable in. And so the point is, what happens if you're just a little better at the aquatic stuff than the rest of your competitors? Well, the answer is you now suddenly have a very powerful advantage, right? I get more food because as terrestrial creatures go, I'm the best one once we step into the water, right? It's a tougher argument to make with the secondary return to the sea, of course, because when vertebrates come onto land, and we've written and talked about this extensively, but they are met with landscapes that are, yes, full of giant crabs and lots of invertebrate forms and lots of plants, no angiosperms just yet, I think, no flowering plants, but no vertebrate competitors at all, right? And so they're fundamentally built differently. They have different challenges and they have different skills and capacities than most of the things that they're running into on land. Whereas when you return to the sea, vertebrates having been in the sea for a long, long time and already on land for a fairly long time, you return to the sea and you're meeting some of your ancient competitors, even as you walk away from some of your most recent competitors, phylogenetically. This is a great point. So you would expect fewer transitions in that direction. Exactly. Well, or what we see, what we think we see with regard to the evolution of tetrapods is that it happens and it is so important and massive that it sticks. It sticks. You can measure, as you know, you can measure the importance of evolutionary change by, okay, well it only happened once, yeah, but it's stuck. It was so important, it's stuck, right? Or, well, there's lots of ways to get there and so you see it popping up all over the place, right? So you see it popping up all over the place, but then it can blink on and off. That is also an indication of importance, but something like endothermy, we get endothermy evolving twice in two different clades. It never blinks off, like mammals and birds, and maybe the bird endothermy goes back to, you know, birds plus dinosaurs. It evolves once and it just, you never go back to being an ectotherm. Wait, I can't resist. Yes. There is one reversal. Of endothermy? Yeah. Oh, well. Hold on. It's a perfect example of an exception that proves the rule. It's not endothermy though, it's homeothermy. Well, that's the point, is they are homeotherms, but they're not endotherms. No, they're poichlorotherms, but they're not ectotherms. They are using the heat of the substrate to maintain a body temperature. So they are ectotherms, but they are homeotherms. And so the point is, anybody still listening, the argument is this. How about the organism? It's a naked mole rat. Yes. So naked mole rats live just beneath a thoroughly sunbaked African landscape. The point is, what Heather is saying is, once you get to be warm blooded, you don't go back. The reason that this is an exception that proves the rule is having gone back did not change their ability to maintain a body temperature because it's the ground that maintains the body temperature. So anyway, to move on, if you go back to my diagram, when something happens, when something happens-- I'm gonna fight back on this one. When something happens anew, you get an innovation. The innovation is low quality to begin with, right? So here's where the rubber meets the road with respect to Jim Torr's assertion. How many individuals do we expect there to be with this low quality innovation? And the answer is very few for a very brief time. Why? Because once you know how to build a something, the ability to improve the something is suddenly visible. And selection will have a very powerful ability to take all of the things that would make this innovation better and collect them rapidly to the extent that they already have some sort of primordial variation. So the point is, you would expect almost none of those transitional forms to have walked the earth only at the point that the innovation has been refined by this purifying selection. Do we expect to see the population grow to a size? So I want you to run a thought experiment. Me? No, everyone. Imagine that human beings all died where they stand in an instant and nothing else was touched, okay? How many of us would become a fossil? And the answer is almost none. The processes that destroy dead creatures on the surface of the earth are so universal that nearly all of us would be destroyed. There would be the occasional person who, you know, died in a canoe fishing on a pond with an anoxic substrate. Silty. Right, and so maybe the birds would pick them clean and there wouldn't really be a fossil or there'd be a bone here, a bone there, but you could imagine, you know, they're fishing on a calm day and the wind kicks up in the afternoon and because they're not minding the canoe, it flips over and they're dumped in and they sink to the bottom and the oxygen deprivation allows them to be fossilized. There might, there will be some fossils. If eight billion people died suddenly, there would probably be some fossils, but it's gonna be the tiniest fraction of that eight billion. So you wouldn't expect if you then went looking for people who were around on the day that all humans suddenly keeled over, you wouldn't expect to find very many of them, right? Right, but so this is a question of representation, as I said, like statistical representation. Yep. How many of what type should we see? Your argument as you wrote into your dissertation hinges on, I think, the obvious in retrospect, now that you've pointed it out, idea that during the optimizing selection phase, things are going to be changing very, very fast. And so if evolution occurs at different rates under different conditions, which I don't think anyone argues it doesn't, aren't those conditions under which evolution is occurring very rapidly and thus changes occurring very rapidly going to be less represented in a fossil record? Of course. Yep. Like when you say it that simply, it seems obvious. And are there assumptions built into the first parts of that argument, I guess, but does evolution vary in rate? Yes. What are the conditions where you expect it to be happening fastest? Well, probably when you're in a transitional form. And therefore with regard to representation and what we expect with regard to the fossil record, shouldn't we actually expect there to be fewer of those forms in the fossil record? Right. And that is exactly the argument that I think belongs here. So one way to say it would be that the pace of evolution that is expected following a major transition is extremely rapid and that that interfaces with the number of individuals who will ever have one of these primordial forms will inherently be small because that form doesn't exist for very long and it doesn't exist over a wide landscape in that form. So if we go back to my diagram here, you've got innovation down near the origin of the graph. You have an arrow that points up at 45 degrees, basically towards two o'clock. Straightest shot to the line. Straightest shot to the line. And then what my dissertation was about primarily was-- It's the shortest shot to the line, sorry. Once you hit this 45 degree line, which represents the boundary at which you cannot simultaneously improve everything anymore, then selection starts choosing what it prioritizes in each creature and you get diversifying selection where you'll have some birds who are very agile, some birds who are highly efficient and some birds who are a compromise between them. But the point is bird enables the transition. The initial bird is like the right flyer, can barely fly. Once you have something that can barely fly, it has a distinct advantage and the improvement in flight comes rapidly. That's the line that you say is the most direct shot to the 45 degree line of trade-offs. And then once you get to that limitation, you get diversifying selection, which is a thing unto itself. So you don't expect the things down at the innovation to show up almost ever in the transition. The fact that we do have even one in the form of Tiktaalik is pretty amazing.(Laughs) Now, the second thing I would say, and really the last point here is, so far what we've effectively said is, you're right Jim, transitional fossils of a major form are extremely rare. Not consistent, but extremely rare. Extremely rare, but where you're not right Jim is to expect that they would be anything else. This is exactly what you should expect if you integrate an understanding of the population sizes that likely had those early innovations with the evolutionary trajectory that then made these innovations into highly effective things that could diversify and become many different forms. This is what you would expect. And the last thing I will say is, Jim's point here is overly reliant on fossils which are a problem for exactly this reason. There are fossils that we may never have. The fossil that explains how bats evolved from a shrew-like ancestor may not exist, not because it didn't happen, but because most bats are tropical, the ancestor was probably tropical, and bats have small bones that don't fossilize. Tropics don't fossilize things well, and bats don't have bones that lend themselves to being fossilized. And so it may be that we never get that transitional fossil, or it may be that one fell into a giant puddle of amber somewhere, a puddle of sap somewhere, and got preserved in amber, or you never know. The cool fossil could show up tomorrow, but until it does, having a hypothesis for which there's no fossil doesn't really tell you anything. What does tell us something is the fact that this is hardly the only line of evidence that suggests that these creatures are connected in this way. So the fact that we have developmental evidence, the fact that we have molecular evidence that tells a coherent story about the phylogenetic tree and increasingly coherent story over time, these are all very powerful lines of evidence that point in the same direction, and say that ultimately we will have the story right. And you know, I hope what people get from this is I am not giving my colleagues a pass for the stuff that they're not doing well. And one of the things they're not doing well is they are over claiming how much we can explain today, and how perfect a fit it is for the version of Darwinism that they instantiated in the middle of the 20th century, which has very little to do with Darwin, right? Darwin said something much more general, and in my opinion, the folks who over claimed what the new synthesis in the 20th century did will have an asterisk by their names in history, but Darwin won't have that asterisk. That what Darwin said was general enough that it will cover multiple different Darwinian mechanisms, and it will perfectly well withstand critiques like the one that Jim Torr is leveling here. But I think we are better off for the critiques. Getting ourselves to tell the story correctly and not over claim is, it is a noble pursuit, and in addition to all of Jim's other important work, his pushing us to get our story right is valuable even if he doesn't agree with it. I know you were wrapping it up, but I just wanted to go back to a point a couple of minutes ago, which is that fossils aren't our only line of evidence. That we have, of course, as you pointed out, development and we have molecules, and the genetic evidence, the molecules is fairly recent, in 50 years, call it, and much less in terms of being able to get a lot of molecular evidence with regard to differences between species. But you have anatomy as well, right? So you have anatomy, ontogeny, and fossils, all of which scientists have been looking at for a couple hundred years, in some cases, thousands of years with regard to anatomy. But the changes that you can see in all four of these domains now, anatomy, ontogeny, development, fossil record, as very indirect evidence, and the molecules, all provide some kinds of evidence in which we are inferring, it's a history, right, of relationships, of phylogeny. But when those lines of evidence are consilient with one another, then we have ever more evidence that what we are seeing is actually a pattern that is explained by common relationship, by these two things actually share, have a most recent common ancestor, and we found it here, or we don't have the fossil, but we predict that there will be one there. And so it's not that the theory of evolution is based on whether or not we can find the right fossils. Fossils is one line of evidence that we use, and only one. Yeah, and the likelihood that these things would line up across multiple domains if the overarching story wasn't right, unless you can always come up with something very un-parcemonious, like, God built all this stuff as we find it, and he gave us a bunch of evidence that would mislead us into believing he didn't. Why would he do that? I don't know, and if he did, why would we be digging to find flaws in the evolution? I mean, none of it adds up. So given that the universe is to be taken at face value, which is the premise on which science proceeds, taken from face value, a lot of different lines of evidence line up, and some of them line up in ways that are special. I mean, think about the fact Darwin didn't know anything about genes and heredity, which frankly, probably helped him because it meant he didn't say anything that was overly specific, but the idea that once you discover those genes, that they tell a concordant story that doesn't falsify what Darwin said is strong evidence that Darwin was right. There's conciliance across so many domains, and when there's not, that's super interesting. And then you can say, okay, why do we not have, why apparently did parsimony break here? Like what needs to be explained? And there are lots of people from many domains, not just from sort of intelligent design, creationist domains, who are like, oh, you're just adaptively arm waving, right? You're just coming up with stories and there's nothing behind it. But the fact is that some of the most interesting things that happen in evolutionary biology from our perspective is actually dig. Dig when you find the homoplases, the places where, oh, endothermy and four-chambered hearts, and well, let's take those two at the moment, both evolved separately or more or less, in two different clades in either birds or birds and dinosaurs or birds and dinosaurs and crocodiles over here, and also in mammals. And it allows us to run hot and fast. Like it just opens up all these opportunities and it's not the same endothermy between those two clades, but it opens up similar opportunities. So you can get there different ways. We can solve problems different ways, but sometimes when it's parsimonious, like, oh, that one problem has been solved the same way over, the same way once and it's stuck. So tetrapods began to grow out legs at first like spread out like this, that they, that need, so many changes needed to happen to come on to land. But those fins became weight-bearing legs, and we have this one, two, many design across tetrapods. And whales have lost some of them, snakes have lost all of them. The many can be five or one or more than five occasionally, depending on if you're a human or a horse or, I don't know who has more than five, among tetrapods. But those changes, it sounds like he's not objecting to, but it's the big ones, which I think your work really points to, expect different rates at different times with regard to what is happening in evolution, and therefore obviously expect fewer fossils represented from those times that didn't last as long. Yep, and actually it occurs to me, I had one other example that I think will make this clearer to people. Can you put up the picture of the Apple one? So the story goes that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were hacking away in one of their garages, and they constructed the first Apple, the Apple one, which was basically a circuit board, and I think it didn't really have a keyboard and a screen, and they took it to a computer store, I don't really know why there was a computer store before these things were common, but somehow there was some sort of, maybe it was an electronic store. Yeah, that's a glitch in the story. Yeah, maybe it was an electronic store, and they said, you know, hey, we're making this thing, you wanna buy some, and I think the guy who owned the shop was like, you know, it'd be a lot more useful if you did something like, oh, I don't know, stuck a keyboard and a screen on it. And so they went back to the drawing board, and they came up with the Apple two, so you wanna put the Apple two up here? That Apple one had a keyboard on it. Yeah, because the idea that the Steves had was, you would attach-- I thought you were saying that it didn't have-- No, you were supposed to do it yourself, and the idea that it becomes a lot more useful of an object when it comes with the keyboard already hooked up, and a proper video port, and like that, so here you have the Apple two, and the fact is, many in our audience will have seen an Apple two. I had one, that was my first computer, that's not my actual first computer, but that's the first model of computer I ever had, and it looked just like that. And so the point is, how many Apple ones were there? The answer is a handful, and the only reason that they still exist is that the story of the success of the Apple two resulted in people preserving whatever Apple ones still existed in the world. So they were sort of artificially fossilized. But the point is, how often would you expect to run into an Apple one in a thrift store versus an Apple two? And the answer is, you'd almost never run into one because they didn't get captured, they got thrown out because they weren't very useful, even though they were the roots. They were a necessary step. They were the actual root, it's frankly more important than the Apple two. So how many were there is an important question to ask when you're trying to figure out. How many were there and how long did they last? How many were there and how long did they last is a huge question because such a tiny fraction of anything ever gets fossilized. It's really the tiniest fraction of a fraction. So there have to be a lot before you're likely to catch enough of them that A, they get fossilized and then B, that then you're able to find one that did. So maybe the transitional fossils that Jim wants are out there somewhere, but the chances of them being encountered are low because the number of fossils is tiny. All right, I think we've set our piece on this front. All right. All right. No, go ahead. Is it bacon that's not bacon time? We could do bacon, let's do bacon. Let's do bacon that's not bacon. If my computer will participate. Yeah, so this isn't a major story. It came out, what we were gonna maybe talk about it last time. So it's recent, oh no, it's November, 2025. Can you see my computer at this point? Okay, cool. This pig's bacon was delicious, but she's alive and well, goes the headline. Oh God, I know where this is going. A company called Mission Barnes is cultivating pork fat in bioreactors and turning it into meatballs and other products. Honestly, they're pretty darn good. That is not me speaking, that is the journalist speaking. So let me just read a few highlighted sections and then we'll talk about it. Again, the author Matt Simon writes, "I'm eating Dawn, the Yorkshire pig, and she's quite tasty. But don't worry, she's doing perfectly fine traipsing around a sanctuary in upstate New York. Word is that she appreciates belly rubs and sunshine. I'm in San Francisco at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate Park enjoying meatballs and bacon, not made of meat in the traditional sense, but of plants mixed with cultivated pork fat. Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barnes got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids and vitamins, essentially replicating the conditions in her body." But are they? That was me, not the author."Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animal's fat. Mission Barnes can create products like sausages and salami with plants, but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami." I'm gonna read a few more sections here."Cultivated pork is the newest entrant in the effort to rethink meat." Just, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Meat does not need to be rethought. No. I mean, we don't want CAFOs. We don't want the giant, horrendous, disgusting factory farms, but meat does not need to be rethought. It's like thinking that joy needs to be rethought. Totally."For years, plant-based offerings have been mimicking burgers, chicken and fish with ever more convincing blends of proteins and fats." Convincing? I don't know."Mission Barnes is one of a handful of startups taking the next step, growing real animal fat outside the animal, then mirroring it with plants to create hybrids that look, cook and taste, more like what consumers have always eaten, easing the environmental and ethical costs of industrial livestock. The company says it's starting with pork because it's a large market and products like bacon are fat rich, but its technology is sell-agnostic." Whoa. Meaning it could create beef and chicken too. Okay, a little bit more here."Getting animal cells to grow outside of an animal though ain't easy. For one, if cells don't have anything to attach to, they die. So Mission Barnes Cultivator uses a sponge-like structure full of nooks and crannies that provides lots of surface area for the cells to grow."We have our media, which is just the nutrient solution that we give to these cells," said Sam Sharokhi, Chief Technology Officer at Mission Barnes."We're essentially recapitulating all of the environmental cues that make cells inside the body grow fat, but outside the body." Again, the claim is that it's just what the inside the body is doing, we're just doing it outside. We just got like a, it's fine. Nothing to see here, trust us. And I think one more section than I wanted to read part of. Of course, in this new frontier of food, the big question is, who exactly is this for?"Would a vegetarian or vegan eat cultured pork fat if it's divorced from the cruelty of factory farming? Would meat eaters be willing to give up the real thing for a facsimile?" Mission Barnes Market Research, Lee said,"Found that its early adopters are actually flexitarians, people who eat mostly plant-based or partake in the occasional animal product." But Lee adds, "Their first limited sale of the public in Berkeley, they included some people who called themselves vegetarians and vegans." Because they get to do whatever they want and that's it. All right. I have two predictions. One of them is so secure that, I'm not in any way worried it will not be true. Because the stuff's gonna be gross. Yes, okay. So gross. I mean, so I didn't read some of it. It's like, actually the mouth feels pretty good. It has a nice bite. You know, I never trusted the media and the media they're growing this time. I don't trust it either. I mean, they a lot, like, "Oh, it's just carbohydrate, cinnamino acids is fine. What are you doing? What are you using? Nooks and crannies in which to grow fat and to put that into plant stuff and pretend it's a meatball." All right, here's one that I am prepared to wait a long time to turn out to be right about. That's a prediction you heard it here first, folks. It's gonna be carcinogenic. Why? Because what they allied in this presentation is that they have to overcome the Hayflick limit in order to grow massive amounts of this substance. And in order to do that-- Unless they're constantly harvesting new fat. So that increases the number of animals you need by-- It's not gonna be sustainable if they're constantly harvesting new fat. So if they're using a single pool of fat to grow much, much, much, much more fat than good. Than they're gonna be using, telomerase are some sort of a trick to increase the length of telomeres and the chances that that is not going to be in the meat are-- Meat, the product. The product. Meatballs. Correct. So there's a question about A, how are they doing it? That's interesting, I'd love to know. How are they doing what? How are they overcoming the Hayflick limit? Are they dumping telomerase on it? Are they editing the genes so that telomerase is turned on? Or what do they do? It could honestly be sort of like what happened in the Jax Labs where they've got fat that does and does not last longer and the fat that lasts longer, they're just using that. Oh. Like, oh, I don't know, it's just that that's the better fat for us. And so it's inadvertent selective pressure that they are-- Yeah, but then you know what you're describing. What? You're describing growing tumors on the wall and then selling it as if it were food, which isn't any better because-- But it's tumors in nooks and crannies, so that's cuter. What do we find in tumors that we don't find in the rest of the body is we find active telomerase. So I think-- God. Folks. It's so horrifying. I am really not suicidal, nor am I planning to become suicidal. So the fact that I have this awkward insight into what their industry is probably doing hopefully will not result in the industry taking up arms. But in any case, yeah, I wouldn't touch this stuff with a barge bowl. And if I touched it with a barge bowl, I wouldn't touch it with a barge bowl, but if I made the mistake of touching with a barge bowl, I would wash the barge bowl before eating anything off of it. Usually it's not an eating implement, but-- Let's put it this way. You have to really run out of other eating implements before you start using a barge bowl. I think there's a first.(Laughing) Probably a better plan, but in any case, yeah, I think carcinogenicity is the thing to watch. That's, I did not see that coming. That's fascinating because I think you're right. Just to replay the argument, fat is not going to replicate endlessly. Either they are constantly going back to animals and pulling more fat, which means it's, the operation is not gonna scale without using a whole lot of animals, who were upstate getting sunshine and belly rubs. Or they are doing something else to evade the Hayflick limit. And it may just be this, I go, I don't know, that fat just works better, in which case they're growing tumor fat. Or they're doing something else, we don't know what it is, but they've still got fat that is, that is not where it would be if it were coming out of a pig that had lived a natural life. Yep, all right, two other points. One, even if the carcinogenicity is not the case with fat for some reason, fat is a special tissue, it's possible. Yep. Something, something. Sure. Fat will have another problem, which is that it will retain fat soluble toxins. And so the environment in which they grow this thing better be incredibly pure of those things. It's got nooks and crannies.(Both Laughing) It does have nooks and crannies in which toxins could hide. But when they get around to other types of flesh muscle, presumably, now probably-- So their argument appears to be, from a market perspective, from a doing less harm to the animal perspective, so much of the flavor rides and the fat-- that we can use entirely plant protein and only use animal fat. I don't have any interest in such a product, but even if that all could be done, if all of the problems that we have already listed and many more that we haven't didn't exist, that feels like a possibility, that the flavor does come in the fat and they can then get the mouth feel. Yeah, I mean, they have picked the animal in which this is the truest-- Oh, absolutely. And then you get from bacon fat-- Your house smells like bacon three hours later, it doesn't really smell like chicken three hours later, unless you made an error. Right. Now, the last thing I would say is, let's say that they did it some other way, as you're suggesting, they kept re-harvesting, which isn't gonna make any sense, because the hay flick limit isn't that high. But let's say that they did that. And the question is, well, exactly what problem are you solving? The only way this solves a problem is that if one animal can produce, you know, indefinitely large quantities of the product, in which case you're gonna have this issue. Any other way, I mean, A, you're gonna have animals living longer under nasty conditions where they have, you know, liposuction repeatedly, which can't be fun. So somehow, it's just off. But, spelt pigs. The, you gotta learn to read an article like that, because what it is, is a sales brochure. Oh, sure. Sales brochure disguised as journalism. Yeah. Presumably the journalist who wrote it doesn't even realize that that's what they've done. But the point is, if you wanna give a fancy gloss to this technology that emphasizes the positive sides and obscures absolutely every legitimate question that you would ask about it, it would sound like this. So, yep. Anyway, you heard it here first. Might be a decade and a half before we finally start getting an inkling that it's gonna be carcinogenic, but that is what I would expect, and I would treat it as such in the meantime. The fact that it's gross will help you. Yes. I don't know, I really wanna eat that. No, actually I don't. No, you don't. Okay, so many reasons. All the reasons don't wanna eat that. Have a garbanzo bean. Seriously, and a steak. Yeah, and a steak. Yeah. Okay, I got one other thing that I wanna talk about, but you had a... We can save it. You sure? Back Saturday? Yes, we are. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, there's an article a few weeks ago out about yet more side effects of the GLP ones, the Ozempic, which I'm just gonna call it Ozempic, even though I know there's a bunch of them, and I don't really care. I wanted to talk a little bit about it, and it turns out that when I wrote about these things, it was actually a year ago today, I published it on Natural Selections. And so I just wanted to share first a little section from this piece. Can you see my screen? Cool. Let me go back to the top. That I published in Natural Selections a year ago today, "Pharma Darlings from a Land Without Trade-offs." And I like this piece, I wrote it, but I do like it, and I recommend all of it. I'm just gonna go down and explain what I understand them to be and exactly what they're doing. So if you're interested. But let me just, this is where I describe what was understood at the time a year ago, already understood to be some of the risks."Researchers have known for some time that GLP-1RAs," Ozempic, "caused muscle loss. Concerns about loss of skeletal muscle and therefore loss of strength, resilience, ability to exercise, quality of life, have driven some research in this realm. Anecdotally, some people on these drugs, the most common of which is Ozempic, have complained of Ozempic face." This like saginess. Ozempic butt, same thing, but on the butt. And even Ozempic personality."There are widespread reports of nausea too and more limited ones of intestinal obstruction." Got all my links here so you can look these up."Gee, what could go wrong? To the problem of muscle loss though, never fear, the heroes who brought us Ozempic are working hard behind the scenes to bring us new drugs that will combat the loss of muscle caused by Ozempic. Pitched as if they care about the muscle loss that occurs after immobilizing surgeries like hip replacement, it's abundantly clear that the pharma companies have their eyes on the prize of the vast population who have jumped or might yet jump on the Ozempic bandwagon. For such people, what's one more pill to pop, especially if it comes with a sheen of precision and more magical promises?" Brand new research, this is again a year ago, finds that Ozempic doesn't just take a toll on skeletal muscle, it's not kind of cardiac muscle either. Experiments done on lab mice found that whether the mice were at a healthy weight, achieved by eating a nice standard diet of laboratory mouse chaff for 10 weeks, or were overweight, achieved with 10 weeks on a high fat, high sugar diet, their hearts and heart muscle cells shrank on Ozempic." So here's the little visual from the article that I'm citing here. Be they starting out as normal weight mice, admittedly lab mice, normal weight mice, or obese mice, when given semaglutide, Ozempic or something like it, the fat mice lost body weight, the already appropriately weighted mice did not lose body weight, but in both of their cases, their heart size shrunk and their myocyte, that's their heart muscle cell size shrunk, whether or not they lost body weight. Therefore, the authors conclude, and I think I write this here, the effect on heart size and myocyte size is due to the drug, not due to the weight loss, which is what has been claimed by Ozempic enthusiasts. In short, and here's just my summary. Could you say that one more time? I think I'm about to. In terms of what I wrote here, in short,"Put a fat mouse on Ozempic and he's gonna lose weight, but his heart and muscle cells will also shrink." Heart and heart muscle cells."Compare this to put a thin mouse on Ozempic and he will not lose weight, but his heart and heart muscle cells will nevertheless shrink." That's what you want me to repeat? Let me just finish this section. Thus, the heart and muscle cell shrinkage do not seem to be a result of the weight loss, but of Ozempic itself. To all of those hoping that this latest pharma wonder drug will be the answer you've been waiting for, it's not. We don't yet know what kind of horrors it will release on the human body, but we already have plenty of evidence that it's not safe. The people who are selling it to you don't need it to be safe, they just need plausible deniability. And I do wanna go to a new article that's just out, but you have a reaction here. Well, I have two new reactions. One of them might need to wait, but the idea that a weight loss drug is having measurable impacts on the heart, I would argue, is in and of itself invalidating, right? Of the drug being prescribed to people without extraordinary circumstances. Maybe there are extraordinary cases in which it is worth, but the answer is you know that you're messing with the fundamentals of your heart by taking this drug. Now they do, they say, they didn't see any changes in cardiac function, but how long, you know, I don't remember. It doesn't matter. I don't remember how long they looked at these mice for. Your heart cell size is going down? Heart cell size and overall heart size are both going down. So the basic point is heart side effects with unknown consequences. Yep. Again, break out your barge pole and don't even use it on this stuff. Stay farther away than you could reach it with your barge pole. Yep, yep. Okay, you had somewhere else you wanted to go. Yeah, let's take my screen off here and, okay, so just to review, these drugs are known and were known a year ago when I wrote that article with all the primary references, Ozempic and its chemical kin to cause loss of skeletal muscle, decrease in heart size and heart muscle cell size, even absent weight loss, nausea and intestinal obstruction. Obviously that's like the accepted mechanism of action of these drugs and Ozempic face and Ozempic butt and Ozempic personality, right? And now we have this. Let me just see here. In New York Magazine published, what, November 13th, 2025. Life in beige, are GLP ones worth a life devoid of pleasure? Now she starts in sort of a explosive way. So I'm just gonna scroll past the very beginning. I think the piece is worth reading, but you know, she basically, you screw like you eat and then it goes from there. So it's not the point of why we're here. So I'm gonna skip past this, but she says that the author has gone on these things and she's gone on vacation and she's really enjoyed swimming in the Mediterranean, eating good food and all this. But she gets back and she feels just fine. Weeks went by and more things started feeling just fine. A trip to the Rockaways was just fine. I published a story and felt nothing of the accomplishment. I did new pants and I realized I had no desire to buy them despite being a documented impulse shopper. I had no motivation to date. Suddenly I felt about field the same way I felt about ordering takeout on seamless. I don't know what either of those things are, but nothing sounded especially appetizing. So why bother? I bought a beige sectional. I actually literally bought a beige section, which was fitting because my brain felt swallowed in a beige blanket. Eventually I realized my new affinity for beige and appearing dead-eyed in photos had coincided with an increase in the dosage of my GLP-1. Of all the documented side effects of GLP-1, sulfur burps and other indelicate gastric distress, interesting, those aren't the main side effects, but that cute of you to imagine that burping is the worst thing it's gonna cause for you. Second order behavioral effects such as loss of libido and reduced addictive and impulsive tendencies are just starting to gain the attention of researchers. There's been even less research into personality or emotional changes. Unexpectedly, ha, unexpectedly, by altering their desire for food, some people say they've lost their desire for everything else. What's left is a long lasting state of meh, bleh, numb, flat, take it or leave it. It's something like the clinical term anhedonia, the inability to experience joy or pleasure, which is often brought on by depression or in some instances SSR rise. That's where I wanna go here, which is that I feel like so many of these drugs end up doing what SSRIs do. It's like, oh my God, the human condition, I just so out of control and sometimes it's great and sometimes it's not, let's flatten you. Let's just flatten you. So the fact that Ozimpic and its chemical kin are doing the same thing and taking not just food drive away, but sex drive and everything else, could have seen that coming and not safe. I think there's one more section I wanted to read from here. So, you know, she's said other things. So some of this is in reference to some of what's earlier in the article, but I noticed a version of this the day before I take my next dose, when the drug strength is tapered off. So she's taking this once a week. So the day before she's due to take her next dose, I'm hungrier, but food also sounds more interesting to me in general. Online shopping does too. This is the fact that she's a dedicated online shopper, makes all of her claims less interesting to me, but whatever. On Sunday mornings, I now eat a bagel and build carts on e-commerce sites. So that's apparently success. Some people I spoke to have turned this natural occurrence into an official workaround. They don't wanna go off the drug, but they need breaks from the anhedonia. They need breaks from the anhedonia. If that's not a horseman at the coming apocalypse, I don't know what it is. They need breaks from the anhedonia. So they occasionally skip a dose or two. One friend, an author, found that their GLP-1 left them unable to write. They just didn't have the same motivation they used to. They've developed a practice of skipping a dose when they need to produce work. During that week, they come back to life as do their sentences. It's made them consider the connection between hunger and ambition and productivity. Food is not the only way to satiate a voracious appetite. In a 2023 interview with Wire, this is the last thing I'll read from this piece, Jen's Jewel Holst, one of the scientists whose work led to the creation of Ozempic, predicted the current state many people are now in. That may eventually be a problem, he said, that once you've been on this for a year or two, life is so miserably boring that you can't stand it any longer and you have to go back to your old life. It would be the price to pay, he said, when you lose your appetite and also the pleasure of eating. Well, all right. I have a reaction. Let's go for it. It's sort of more general. That's okay. I'm beginning to get a sense for something. So we've talked many times about what I call the game of pharma. Mm-hmm. The game of pharma involves using intellectual property to make a huge profit by gaming the scientific system, the medical system, in order to get people to take something based on the plausible argument that it will make them better from something that is not good about their life or that it will prevent something, yada, yada, yada. But the reality of those claims is unnecessary to the game of pharma. Mm-hmm. And if a pharma company was to limit itself to only marketing things that actually worked at a tolerable risk, the number of drugs on the market would be a tiny fraction of what's there, right? Many drugs would just simply be impossible if you held them to a reasonable standard. So this vibrant industry has taken on lots of mechanisms for dispensing with questions of safety, dispensing with questions of efficacy, and the real question is, can we plausibly argue that that thing is in your interest? If so, then we just have to, you know, we can treat all of the things that should make this drug impossible to bring to market as obstacles that we can get around because we've got this vast toolkit of tricks. Right, right. Okay. So I wanna argue that I'm detecting a new trick that you would expect to evolve in an industry that is basically a racket designed to use intellectual property to bring products to market at arbitrary cost to the health of the people taking them. It involves, what do you do if you have a drug like Ozimpic that has a measurable benefit that people really want, right? People are desperate to be thinner than they are for understandable reasons. They've been made fat by sedentary lifestyles, polluted food, lack of sunshine, whatever it is, all of the contributing factors of modernity that cause-- And giant serving sizes and always being around food, so always being able to eat it. Modernity has made people fat. I mean, people, majority has made people fat, but people are also making choices that are making them fat. Of course, of course, but in any case, what do you do if you have a drug that has a plausible benefit in this regard, a measurable one? But it's got all these ridiculous side effects. Like you know that it affects the heart. Frankly, it doesn't minorly affect the heart. It doesn't elevate your heart rate. It actually shrinks the cells of your heart with unknown long-term consequences. Ooh, that's pretty rough. It has the ability to rob life of its pleasure. That definitely dampens the enthusiasm for a drug like this, right? So what do you do? Well, maybe what you do is you think-- You the pharma company? Yeah, you the pharma company playing the game. Maybe the idea is well, what we're really looking for is the maximum area under the curve. That is to say, given this particular molecule that we have rights for, the question is how do we extract the maximum amount of profit? If we brought it to market and we distributed it in a normal way, then people would take it because of course the benefit is one that people want and it would quickly start dawning on the small subset of the population that started taking it, that it was having impacts on their life that were not good. There would be a certain number of deaths traced to the heart changes, whatever it is. And the thing goes off the market. That gives you a small volume curve. What if the answer is well, let's make this thing into an absolute sensation, right? Where this thing comes on the market and people can't get to their doctor fast enough to get the injections because they've been suffering with this cognitive weight. I've seen supposedly journalistic pieces complaining that it's access to a Zempic that is now like a DEI concern. Like this is a health equity concern is that not everyone can get it when they want it. Which-- Which is, it's ingenious. It's ingenious, frankly. It's how they sold the COVID shots. It's how Facebook got to be what it was. It was limited access at first. So the idea is, okay, we're gonna create a sensation that is obsessed with the positive thing that everybody will want. The price of the thing is gonna be through the goddamn roof but people have been suffering every day they get out of bed and they're like, oh, am I still fat? So the idea of relief from that is so powerful and it doesn't matter how many thousand dollars you charge for the thing, people are gonna want it because it's degrading their lives. So the point is the hype. Well, it also locks people into the insurance racket more because I believe that insurance, many insurances are paying for it. And so once you're having this very expensive drug paid for by your racket insurance, you're less likely to look elsewhere for a more reasonable option with which to fund your healthcare. Exactly. So you get coordinated rackets that start paying for the thing, the government is gonna pay for it because it's gonna reduce the obesity epidemic. And so the point is what you're really looking for is to jack the price up so high that the hype causes people to flood your industry with profit temporarily knowing that it's not gonna last because it's only gonna be a year or two before everybody catches on that this has so many downsides. It's already been more than a couple of years. I mean, it's getting really big back a year ago when I wrote this, it was already pretty big. But I mean, I think, actually, can you see my screen? The newest thing that I saw this week is the New York Post. Okay, it's the New York Post, but whatever reporting that Ozempic is now available to your cats. Yes, now you, I thought had a even cleverer technological solution to the problem of fat cats. Well, you know, it's not patentable and it doesn't put money in anyone's pocket. Oh, okay. But yeah, literally just feed your cats those food. Obviously. Right, obviously. Obviously. And you know, as I say here, so this is a, I quote tweet at the New York Post, but as I said, this is this so perfectly encapsulates our era. My pet is a problem that I have created and can just as easily resolve, but I'd rather I'd insult injury and push a pharma solution instead of doing the mature, simple and obvious thing. And obviously there are actually complications. People have multiple cat homes and one of them eats more than everyone else or they're feeding them the wrong food and so whatever they feed them, it's making them fat. Like yes, but also it's your cat. Even cats like one of ours who still is a mouse or sometimes and supplements his diet with wild things from outside. Mostly your cat is entirely getting his food from you. It's tougher for people. Like you're also presumably not being force fed food, but you are your own arbiter of what you're putting in your mouth. With your cat, you're seriously gonna consider injecting your cat with something because you yourself can't control your impulses enough not to feed them every time they talk to you. Every time they say,"Wow, I'm really hungry." Yeah buddy, you gotta lose weight. The people who are giving ozumpit to their cats, I hope they're not parents because that is the same mistake that parents make or many modern parents are making over and over again. But he was crying, but he was throwing a fit. Yes, it's your job as a parent to ensure that that behavior does not last. And they don't necessarily stop when you fed them. So the point is-- They would eat endlessly. Right, so the point is, you can have them healthy and feel like they're not getting enough food or fat as can be and feeling like they're not getting enough food. They'll give you sad eyes regardless. Right, exactly. So you're right, it's been longer than a year, but I still think the idea of... But they're looking at new markets. What we saw during COVID was an emergency was used to get a very dangerous remedy normalized in the market to prime the pump for future mRNA shots. In this case, I think what we're seeing is a drug that should have been DOA. Let's face it, this drug is basically a constipation causing drug that reduces your appetite. Yeah, that's low peristalsis. Yeah, let's go slow down the way things move through your gut. Just keep food in your gut for longer. Right, what could possibly go wrong? So it's a-- Among other things, you're gonna end up, I think, maybe this isn't true for some reason, but you keep food for longer in your gut, you're actually gonna pull more nutrients out of the food than you would have if it passed through more quickly. And so you're actually going to get more calories potentially from food that you ate than if it actually had a normal traverse. Well, I would argue that's gonna be true. I would also argue though that, okay, weird hypothesis coming. My sense is food rots, that much I will get wide agreement on, that rottedness of the food has a curve that leaves us unaware of it for a long period of time. True. And that what you want are freshest possible foods to pass through you in the shortest reasonable time so that they get properly processed where you don't have things rotting in your gut. I wonder if the argument is different for ferment. Ferment, well, ferment-- For fiber and for ferment. Yes. For fiber, which is food for the good bacteria, which are in the ferment. Well, I guess-- Oh, I agree, I'm exempting ferment because ferment and things like cheese, where the point is these things are rotted or fermented-- Right, they're already preserved. In a careful way that has an ancient root. And so I'm not arguing for those things, but for fresh foods, you want them, as soon as you can have them, they degrade over time. And the more degraded they are, the more you suffer, I think it is likely, for the advanced state of decay that they are in as they are moving through your gut. So anyway, that is a deep out of the money prediction. I'm sure I will be ridiculed for making it, but give it enough time. And I'm thinking I may be right about that one. Yeah, I think you might be. And so, you know, I think one of the lessons, one of the takeaways from the last two little bits that we did is, you know, eat real meat that's as fresh as possible. Yeah, or preserve it well. Jerky's great. That's not rotting, it's preserved. Yeah, exactly. Something else? No. Save something for Saturday? All right, so I think we are done for today. We are actually gonna come back on Saturday and then not do a New Year's Christmas Eve episode. So we'll be here on the 20th Saturday, and then we'll be back again on New Year's Eve. Check out our awesome sponsors this week. They were Everyday Dose and Arm Raw and Crowd Health, the first two of which make edible products that are excellent and excellent for you. And Crowd Health helps you escape the diabolical nightmare that is American health insurance. Yes, absolutely. Good people as well. And check out both the Carl Benjamin episode of the DarkHorse Inside Rail. Many people, it's a little bit polarizing, but many people have really liked that discussion quite a bit. And I had a great time. I thought Carl was excellent as a guest. And check out the most recent Joe Rogan experience. Which is probably still, it started just before we started, so it's probably still. Still true. No, still streaming now. Probably still not completed. How do these things even work now? Jeez, I don't know. Anyway, check it out on Spotify or YouTube or wherever. I think you'll find it interesting, especially in light of the fact that it's Evolution Week here on the Interwebs. It is Evolution Week. Yep. I can't say Interwebs. You can't say Interwebs. Apparently I can, but I can't say Interwebs. Okay, I'll say it for you. Yeah, no, I think you did. All right, so until you see us next time and a few short days on Saturday, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside. Be well, everyone.(Gentle Music)