#351 - DNA Expert: New Breakaway Human Species is Evolving in Indonesia | Dr. Melissa Ilardo

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Dr. Melissa Ilardo, Ph. D is a professor of evolutionary genomics and biomedical informatics at the University of Utah. Her research explores human evolution and adaptation in populations that have previously been overlooked or excluded from biological research. Her recent work looks into a population who engages in the practice of breath-hold diving & is evolving on a unique breakaway trajectory from the rest of homo sapiens on earth. SPONSORS https://hellofresh.com/danny10fm - Get 10 Free Meals + a Free breakfast for Life! https://cell.ver.so/danny - Use code DANNY to save 15% on your first order. https://butcherbox.com/danny - Get free steak in every box for a year PLUS $20 off your first box. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS https://medicine.utah.edu/faculty/melissa-ilardo https://www.superhumanlab.org https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/science/bajau-evolution-ocean-diving.html https://www.instagram.com/superhumanscilab https://linkedin.com/in/melissa-ilardo FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Genomic evolution of Baju people (sea nomads) 15:00 - How long Baju can hold their breath for 21:19 - All-female Korean free divers (Haenyeo) 32:17 - Lost species of humans 42:44 - Humans won't survive the next 100,000 years 47:50 - Mother of humanity: The real "Eve" 59:48 - Humans are attracted to mates by pheromones 01:06:30 - Why assisted reproductive technology might be harmful to evolution 01:14:57 - Effects of the global population mixing & mating together 01:21:37 - Risks of CRISPR gene editing 01:30:37 - Lifespan & the grandmother hypothesis 01:37:18 - Evolution of un-contacted indigenous tribes 01:40:50 - What future humans will look like 01:49:08 - Intelligence is not genetic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:07Speaker 02

  So I'm interested in how modern human populations have evolved to their lifestyles or environments. And so this is, we're talking in the last like 10,000 years or less. And I got into that, I was actually, I've always been interested in evolution. I actually started with a master's in astrobiology. So I was looking at very theoretical evolution. But then I decided I wanted to actually work with humans. And so I was doing my PhD in Copenhagen in Denmark, and I was working on a totally different project. And I heard about a group of divers in Indonesia. And I thought, well, if ever there were an opportunity for evolution or natural selection to act in a modern human population, this would be the population. And so when I saw that no one had done that study yet...

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Um, I went to my supervisor and pitched it and said, can I, can I do this? And luckily I had a supervisor who was super supportive and that was the start of all of it for me.

• 2:00Danny Jones?

  How natural selection would work with these people in Indonesia who are, they lived on the water? These, these are the nomadic spear fishermen?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So they're called sea nomads.

• 2:12Danny Jones?

  Sea nomads, okay.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Traditionally, they live their whole lives on houseboats and that's changing, you know, in a kind of a contemporary context. But traditionally, they would get basically everything they needed from the sea. And they do a lot of that through breath hold diving and they're extremely good at it. So they can hold their breath for a really long time. They can move underwater with like incredible athleticism. Um, and they do this to collect uh things like sea cucumbers, they spear fish. Um, and so the idea was that diving is dangerous. And so if people have been doing this to survive for thousands of years, they may have evolved in a way that made them better at it.

• 2:51Danny Jones?

  And what is it specifically about that part of the world that um pushes them to be more of sea nomads? Like to be exploring the sea for, for food and for this kind of stuff? Like is there a sparse, is there a very uh um limited amount of resources on land there?

• 3:11Speaker 02

  I think it's actually that there are just so many resources in the water. So Indonesia, um, I mean, that whole area, you have sea nomads throughout Southeast Asia. Um, but Indonesia itself has like seventeen thousand five hundred islands. So it's just an incredible amount of coastline of these like super rich coral reefs. Um, so there's just an abundance of resources in the ocean. So it's kind of like, if it's there, why not take advantage of it? And we actually see many places in the world where there are these rich marine resources, people dive.

• 3:42Danny Jones?

  You would classify these people as like quote unquote, super humans, right?

• 3:47Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 3:47Danny Jones?

  They're they're super adapted to a certain way of life. And they have over time, I don't know how long, but have evolved to be better at long, long breath holds and swimming deep underwater to catch fish.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 4:06Danny Jones?

  And this has changed their their genome to some degree.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah. I mean, people who live at high altitude, people who eat diets rich in lipids, things like that. There's these, what we call superhuman populations all over the world. And it's just kind of the idea is most, especially medical research, focuses on disease. But that's just this really small part of the spectrum of human physiology. Because we have like disease, health, and then beyond to what we call the superhuman population. So people who are enhanced in some way.

• 4:37Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Um, and so by focusing on that end of the spectrum, first of all, there's a lot out there that hasn't been explored yet, which is really exciting. Um, it also allows us to kind of celebrate what's special about these populations rather than stigmatizing them for diseases they may have or things like that.

• 4:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Um, and it's just like a really fun way of approaching health research.

• 4:57Danny Jones?

  When it comes to these Indonesian sea hunters or these these nomadic, um, ocean people, what did you find interesting about them specifically?

• 5:08Speaker 02

  So I had heard about their diving abilities. Um, and it is truly amazing to see them in the water, um, how they move, how long they hold their breath. Um, and so we thought that maybe there was something physiologically different about them. Um, and so what I decided to measure, in part because I was a PhD student, you know, kind of a little bit on my own with this project and trying to find something that was non invasive and easy enough for me to learn how to measure. Um, so what I measured was their spleen size. Um, and so the spleen, you know, isn't the first organ you think about when you think about diving. Um, but it plays a really important role in diving, which is that it stores red blood cells. So it's kind of like this oxygen reservoir, because you have these oxygen-rich red blood cells just sitting in the spleen. And when you dive, your spleen contracts and those

• 5:51Speaker 02

  get pushed into circulation. So this increases the amount of oxygen that's circulating through your body. And so some people have called it a biological scuba tank. So you're kind of carrying around this little extra reserve of oxygen that may be able to prolong dive time or make diving safer.

• 6:08Danny Jones?

  Wow. So this activates only when you're holding your breath?

• 6:11Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah. So it's actually, you know, it to a certain extent, it also is activated when you exercise. So like horses have huge spleens, greyhounds have huge spleens. And they think that that contributes to their ability, you know, to perform at such a high level in terms of exercise. But it's much more so activated by holding your breath combined with cold water on your face.

• 6:37Danny Jones?

  Holding your breath and cold water?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah.

• 6:40Danny Jones?

  And you say it pumps out more red blood cells?

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yes, you get this like injection of red blood cells into circulation that are holding on to oxygen. So suddenly you have access to like 15% more oxygen.

• 6:55Danny Jones?

  So were there, so how did you figure out the size of their spleens?

• 6:59Speaker 02

  So I took a portable ultrasound machine. So yeah, at first I had to learn how to measure a spleen, which is actually kind of tricky with an ultrasound.

• 7:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  So I was lucky that all the other people involved in my PhD program were very willing participants because I was just having people over to my apartment to look at their spleens for practice. And then, yeah, I carried this like 40 pound machine out to a tiny village in Indonesia. You know, after doing an initial visit where we said like, here's, here's what I'm thinking of doing. What do you think? Is this something you're interested in? And people were very receptive, went back with the machine and measured a whole bunch of spleens.

• 7:34Danny Jones?

  So did you have this hypothesis before you measured? Or were you just like scanning around, trying to see what you could find? Or how did you come to the hypothesis that they might have bigger spleens?

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a number of factors. So, you know, one thing is looking at other animals that have adapted to diving. So certain species of seals that have a really long breath hold also have huge spleens. So the Weddell seal's spleen takes up half of its abdominal cavity. It's huge. And so we thought, okay, if it could increase spleen size in a seal, maybe it could increase. Size and humans too. And then it's also just kind of like grounded in basic evolutionary theory, which is that in order for evolution to act, you need to have some kind of phenotype that it can act on. That's likely to be something you can inherit. So we looked at like lung size or lung volume, but lung volume is really changeable. So that's not really likely something that you're going to inherit.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Because it changes so much, just based on, you know, how much you hold your breath. You know, like heart rate, things like this. There are a lot of different things that we could have measured. And we went with the spleen, again, in part because it's it's an easy thing to measure.

• 8:41Danny Jones?

  Right, right, just based on the size of the body. So they weren't born like this, right? Their spleens adapted over time and over breath holds after breath hold and years of diving.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  So it's actually they were born with it. Because that's an important, that was an important thing for us to distinguish. Because maybe it's just diving makes your spleen bigger, you know? And there had been some studies that kind of hinted that that might be the case. So to check that out, we took people who were diving and people who had never been diving, but had the same genetic background. So the people that I worked with, the population I worked with are called the Bajau. It's in some countries, it's pronounced Bajao. But it's one of these sea nomad groups. And if we had done this study like a hundred years earlier, it would have been impossible to tell what was environmental or genetic, because everybody would have been diving. But now, because of kind of the changes in the world, I'd say about half the population or more doesn't dive.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  So we had this really nice split in the population between people who are actively diving, so whose spleens could have been expanded by diving, and people who were Bajau but weren't diving. And so we saw the large spleens across everyone. There was no difference in spleen size, based on whether or not they'd been diving.

• 9:51Danny Jones?

  That's fascinating.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  But there was a difference when we compared them to a population that lived like 20 miles away, who had a totally different genetic background, but lived in the same environment.

• 10:00Danny Jones?

  Only 20 miles away?

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, super close.

• 10:02Danny Jones?

  Were not divers?

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Correct, yeah.

• 10:04Danny Jones?

  Wow, that's so interesting. So if you were, say you did grow up and you weren't part of their genetic background, and say I was part of the tribe that was 20 miles away, and I came, like I got adopted by one of their families or whatever. And I started diving since I was a toddler. Would my spleen be normal size or would it be huge?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  So from, based on my research, it would be normal size. However, I have seen some papers that do suggest that you can expand your spleen just by holding your breath a lot.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  You know, I, those papers, some of those papers had small sample sizes and like, I would say that ultrasounds are kind of more of an art than a science. Like, there is a certain amount of interpretation, so you have to try to blind yourself to what your hypothesis is. So I'd say jury's still out, but it seems like, based on what, everything I have seen in that population and in other diving populations, diving does not increase your spleen size. Having a genetic predisposition increases your spleen size.

• 11:00Danny Jones?

  Fascinating. How long have they been doing this, do you know?

• 11:03Speaker 02

  It's hard to say. We think thousands of years.

• 11:06Danny Jones?

  Thousands?

• 11:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the earliest kind of written documentation was, what was his name? One of the early explorers, oh, Magellan. Magellan had a chronicler who was writing about all of the things that they saw as they were exploring and describes in detail seeing, you know, sea nomads diving and living on these houseboats and things like that. But that's only like 500 years ago or something like that, maybe less. So, but we think based on like linguistic reconstruction, that they've actually been diving much longer, which makes sense because, you know, that marine environment has been there, so.

• 11:42Danny Jones?

  So from like reading ancient texts, they write, you can find like accounts of them?

• 11:47Speaker 02

  I think it's the way, I'm not a linguist, so I don't know exactly, but they, they kind of like put together when that particular language arose and when certain words related to diving are likely to have been introduced. But I don't, you know, again, outside of my specialty.

• 12:01Danny Jones?

  Very interesting.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  But based on our genetic results, we think that they started evolving this trait in the last few thousand years.

• 12:10Danny Jones?

  Okay. And even have webbed feet or any other interesting characteristics?

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Not webbed feet, but we did see in their genetics, an interesting signal in a gene related to something else that happens when you dive, which is, so, you know, your spleen contracts, but you also have this constriction of your blood vessels because... It's like your fingers, your toes don't need oxygen that badly, but your brain, your heart, your lungs, they need, you know, that oxygen-rich blood. So by making the blood vessels in your extremities smaller, your body moves that blood closer to the organs that need it the most. And so they had a gene that was different. It had been evolving. That has been previously linked to that effect, this like blood vessel constriction effect.

• 12:57Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  So we didn't measure that directly, unfortunately, but it's something we'd love to do in the future.

• 13:02Danny Jones?

  What was the water temperature? Well, I don't know what the water temperature is in Indo.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  It's warm.

• 13:05Danny Jones?

  It's pretty warm, right?

• 13:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. So yeah, it's, you know, they're not probably exposed to that much kind of hypothermia because it's like pretty thermo-neutral water. It's very pleasant swimming water. But we do see divers in cold water populations as well.

• 13:21Danny Jones?

  And they put these people, they put like their offspring, they start getting them adapted to the water pretty much right after birth, right?

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:28Danny Jones?

  And they have like, I mean, you know, it's interesting too, how you see this, this sort of resurgence of people doing water births. And like babies can go straight from the placenta, placenta, or the womb, which is amniotic fluid to like a bathtub or something like that.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. It seems like we have this really instinctual drive to hold our breath. And, you know, babies, you can, I've heard, blow in their face and put them underwater and they just hold their breath. And, you know, they know that that's what they're supposed to do. I heard from people who weren't Bajau, so I didn't confirm this with the Bajau, that they, when a baby is born, will pass the baby under a canoe traditionally. And if it makes it to the other side, you know, if it holds its breath, it's a Bajau baby. And if not, you know, but,

• 14:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  But I don't know if that's, you know, I mean, that's just what other people from outside of the community had told me, so.

• 14:21Danny Jones?

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• 15:04Danny Jones?

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• 15:49Speaker 02

  But yeah, you go to the village and there's like, all of the kids are in the water, which does make it a little bit harder to separate them into divers and non-divers, because even the non-divers, Av's children, were probably diving, you know?

• 16:00Danny Jones?

  How long can they hold their breath for?

• 16:02Speaker 02

  It's a really good question. We don't have good data to say. One diver told me, and I did not confirm this, so I have to put that caveat, that he, in his youth, could hold his breath for 13 minutes. That's about the same as the the current world record without, you know, supplemental oxygen before diving. So, you know.

• 16:22Danny Jones?

  What so what is the current world record that's been documented?

• 16:26Speaker 02

  I think without any supplemental, without breathing pure oxygen beforehand, it's around 13 minutes.

• 16:32Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:33Danny Jones?

  Oh, my god.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  And I think that's kind of just floating there, which is also very different from Bajau diving.

• 16:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  They are active. They're hunting. I mean, they're like walking on the seafloor and spearing multiple fish.

• 16:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's crazy because you see some of like the freediving champions, what they do is they put weight belts on. And when once you get to a certain atmosphere, you just start free falling with the weights.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah.

• 16:53Danny Jones?

  And then they think they dropped the weight belts or something like that. Or maybe they don't drop the weight belts. I don't know how else they would get them. I don't know how they would get them, retrieve them. But they come back up like super slow, but they're not exerting any energy at all. They have these big, long freediving fins. They're using those like slowly come up to the surface.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:10Danny Jones?

  But actually, like, having to crawl around underwater caves and caverns and try to like find fish and hunt stuff down and chase stuff like that takes a lot of energy.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. You know, the Bajau are doing all that without fins, without.

• 17:28Danny Jones?

  They don't use fins.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, no, they, there's, I mean, a lot of these communities are really impoverished. And so, you know, they don't have wetsuits, they don't have fins, they don't have, maybe they don't have weight belts. Many of the divers that I saw didn't. But like you said, once you get to that depth, you become neutrally or negatively buoyant.

• 17:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  And so it looks like, they look like hunters. I mean, they're, you know, they've got their spear gun and they're walking.

• 17:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  And waiting for a fish and then, yeah.

• 17:56Danny Jones?

  It is. So, how many cultures or or groups of people do we know of that are similar to them? That are nomadic seafaring people?

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there's seafaring and then there's the nomadic seafaring. And I would say it's harder to say.

• 18:13Danny Jones?

  I don't, maybe I said that wrong.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, that's absolutely right. I'm just saying there's like, there's, there are a lot of both. But with the nomads, it's harder to say because. Like nomadism is most threatened by like current global trends, I would say, because it's like, it's really hard to get a passport if you're a nomad, you know, countries are very reluctant to claim someone if they don't, if they kind of move across borders. So it's harder to say how many of these cultures used to be nomadic, but there are diving populations in Japan and Korea, there were diving populations in Aboriginal Australia, like Tasmania, there's diving populations throughout Southeast Asia, even into like Taiwan, there were some traditional

• 18:55Speaker 02

  diving populations. Then, you know, South America, there was, there were diving populations in Patagonia, they were very nomadic as well. Panama, there's a huge diving population. It's basically like anywhere you have, the more, you know, the more I learn about divers, the more I talk to people who work with divers, the more diving populations I find out about.

• 19:14Danny Jones?

  I mean, it is bizarre that that's not the norm for Homo sapiens. Like you would, like, just looking at the planet we live on, which is mostly water, there's not much land. You can look at one side of the planet from space and look at the Pacific Ocean and there's no land. So it's kind of crazy that we have evolved to be like these like land-only mammals and that are not very optimal, our bodies aren't optimal for like moving around in the ocean.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Right. And to an extent, we are evolved to be in the water because we all have this dive reflex, which is cool. But what's interesting is the dive reflex is actually conserved across all mammals. So if you teach mice to dive, which people have actually done in a lab setting, they have the dive reflex as well. So all mammals have this, you know, ability to be in water and hold our breaths. But yeah, it's interesting that, again, like you said, there's, you know, there's such rich resources in these marine environments. So why is it that only specific populations have kind of gone back to that?

• 20:17Danny Jones?

  The dive, so what exactly is the dive reflex?

• 20:20Speaker 02

  So this is where the spleen contraction happens. Yeah, so it's spleen contraction, vasoconstrictions, the constriction of the blood vessels, and then also a slowing of the heart rate. And so that's something that's actually trainable. So the more you dive, the more your heart rate slows when you dive. And also your resting heart rate gets lower as well. And that's been observed in like competitive breath-hold divers and traditional diving populations.

• 20:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah, because like-

• 20:48Danny Jones?

  You know, that dive reflex is interesting, but other animals that spent like, like, look at birds, like birds are, you can tell how they're adapted to dive underwater, at least water birds, water birds that hunt fish and things like that. They have those big webbed feet and they can, they have the feathers that like, push water off where they like, they can, they can fly, they can walk on the ground and they're actually like, like physically adapted for water for like, sitting on the water or swimming through the water or whatever.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:15Danny Jones?

  It's just crazy that, you know, us at least to like, at the first glance, we don't look like we're made to be in the water.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  Right, right. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. It's interesting. So if you spend a lot of time in cold water especially, but um, mostly like divers, people who have water in their ears a lot, something happens, that's called, it's called server's ear because surfers sometimes get it too, or the bones in your inner ear change shape in a way that, um, you know, is permanent and it could affect your hearing and there's, you know, it has different effects.

• 21:46Danny Jones?

  I have that. I have raging tinnitus.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 21:49Danny Jones?

  From that.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  So what's interesting is that your skeleton, people would then be able to tell, like this is someone who spent a lot of time in the water. Um, and so there's increasingly, we're seeing signs of human populations that we didn't previously think were spending a lot of time in the water, who have this. Um, and so, you know, near rivers in, uh, like certain parts of the United States, um, we're finding skeletons that, that indicate that people in those areas may have been diving in the rivers.

• 22:18Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:19Danny Jones?

  Are there any, are there any other groups of people that you have found that, um, similar to these, these sea people of Indonesia that have a, a unique way of living that has changed the way they evolve or has them, have them evolving out on like a different branch than the rest of us?

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it seems like, you know, human populations all over the world, um, are evolving in these really interesting and unique ways. So in my lab, we've also worked with a population in Korea, um, called the Hanyo. And so these are all women divers, um, diving in very cold water. And, um, what's cool is that this has been a tradition. Of having mostly or all female divers in that region for thousands of years as well. And we think that they've actually evolved in a way that makes it safer for them to dive throughout their pregnancies. Because these women not only dive throughout their whole lives, they dive often until the day they give birth. So I heard from one woman that she was diving, it was seaweed season, so she wanted to, you know, make sure she got as much seaweed as possible.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Dove until 6pm, gave birth at 8pm. So it's a very different kind of selective pressure in that case.

• 23:33Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:35Danny Jones?

  And they're in Korea, which is a lot colder of a climate.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah. In the winter, the surface temperature of the water is like 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And they were traditionally, until the 90s, they were diving in cotton. So no thermal protection, yeah.

• 23:48Danny Jones?

  Which is not, has no thermal protection at all.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Right, yeah.

• 23:52Danny Jones?

  So were they similar to the Indonesian group at all? Or are these, these are mostly females that are doing, or all females that are doing this?

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:03Danny Jones?

  And so what were the differences between those two groups?

• 24:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we saw some things that seemed to overlap, which was the main signal that we saw that we think is protecting them in pregnancy is related to blood pressure. So that could be related to this kind of vasoconstriction effect that we saw in the Indonesians. And then we also saw that they have a training effect, which is this lowered heart rate. So we did some simulated dives with them and their heart rate just plummeted. So we can simulate a dive by having people hold their breath and put their face in a bowl full of cold water. That makes your body think that you're diving. And so when they did that, you know, we could, we could watch in real time their heart rate drop. We had a woman, a woman whose heart rate dropped over 40 beats per minute in less than 15 seconds. Yeah.

• 24:52Danny Jones?

  That's crazy. Oh, this is them.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. Yep.

• 24:56Danny Jones?

  Oh, look, she caught an octopus.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:58Danny Jones?

  They use, they used, do they, do they use their bare hands or do they use spear guns or?

• 25:03Speaker 02

  They use a combination. So they have certain tools that are for getting like abalone off the rock. They have other tools that they kind of hook onto the, the bottom of the seafloor and pull themselves along as they collect conch.

• 25:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Things like that.

• 25:16Danny Jones?

  So they are a little bit more technologically advanced than the Indonesians.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Currently, yes.

• 25:21Danny Jones?

  Because they're, these, they're, do the Indonesians use masks?

• 25:25Speaker 02

  They do. Um, they, I mean, both the Henyo and the Bajo traditionally did not use masks.

• 25:32Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Because that like technology didn't exist. So.

• 25:35Danny Jones?

  Well, not thousands of years ago.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, even like a couple hundred years ago, um, they were mostly just diving with their eyes, which we're curious then if they've actually adapted in a way, um, where they can see better underwater. Um, yeah, these are the cotton diving suits.

• 25:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that doesn't do much.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, no. And they were wearing these until the nineties. And in fact, I talked to some woman who said that even when wet suits came out, when they were diving in their pregnancies, they were like, a wet suit doesn't fit over a pregnant belly. So we just went back to cotton.

• 26:03Danny Jones?

  Right. And it makes you way more buoyant.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 26:05Danny Jones?

  It's harder to get down deeper.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you can see here, these women are not wearing weight belts, um, because they were diving in cotton. So they didn't have that, you know, issue with the flotation.

• 26:14Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Now they're using weight belts because they have, you know, these thick wet suits and, um, and I think in this picture, they're probably also not wearing fins.

• 26:22Danny Jones?

  Um, did you find, and did you study their eyes at all or their vision?

• 26:27Speaker 02

  We have not yet. Um, there was a study that was done in the Mokon, which is another group of sea nomads in, uh, Thailand. Um, and that suggested that they actually have better underwater vision, um, than other people. The results of that were kind of dismissed because the same person who did that study did a follow-up study where they did, they trained people in Europe to see underwater and they could achieve the same level of underwater vision through training. But I think this is really flawed logic and it's been applied in a lot of these kinds of adaptations because it's like, just because, you know, I mean, I can train to run a marathon. That doesn't mean that I have the same genetic predisposition as someone,

• 27:09Speaker 02

  um, you know, let's say from Kenya, who has a different like limb length proportion than I do, you know? So I think this idea that. I might not be explaining it very well, but that you can train, you know, like just because someone can train to to reach a certain level doesn't mean that that makes another person not special of that. I'm not articulating it well.

• 27:31Danny Jones?

  Right. Well, they have to do like far more work.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 27:34Danny Jones?

  To achieve the same level of success as the person who can do it naturally.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I'm wondering if that's the case with vision as well, but it's not something we've been able to test yet.

• 27:42Danny Jones?

  Wow. And Steve, find a picture of the other group, the Indonesians.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Oh, I took some of those pictures.

• 27:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 27:50Speaker 02

  The one where he's holding the mask, actually. Yeah.

• 27:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's incredible.

• 27:56Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 28:00Danny Jones?

  And this guy's not even wearing a mask. Look at that guy.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So they have these kind of wooden goggles that they used until fairly recently as well. Yeah, kind of like that. And then now some people have switched to the full mask, but a lot of it's homemade. So I actually have a Bajau spear gun on my on the wall in my office. That's you can see like the, you know, the tension comes from bike inner tubes and it's all homemade. It's very cool.

• 28:31Danny Jones?

  Oh, my.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, with the goggles, I have no idea how they get a seal.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  And I don't know how they avoid like a squeeze too, because they're diving super deep. That's one thing that's a little different.

• 28:42Danny Jones?

  How did they go?

• 28:43Speaker 02

  They, we don't really know, but one researcher went to a competition with some Bajau divers and they dove to 70 meters, which is over 200 feet with just a weight belt. Yeah. And they're, they're incredible. Like their ability to dive deep is, is really.

• 28:59Danny Jones?

  I bet a lot of them like dive doing that.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Well, that's how evolution works. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, I mean, the risk of shallow water blackouts when you're diving that deep is super dangerous. Yeah.

• 29:14Danny Jones?

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• 30:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, and we actually think that the adaptation that's making their spleen, like the genetic change that's making their spleen bigger is actually increasing their thyroid hormone levels. So it's putting them into not like a hyperthyroid state, like a pathological kind of state, but just like a slightly higher than average thyroid hormone level, which we think is giving them a lot of different advantages.

• 30:59Danny Jones?

  And how so? How would that would? I'm not familiar with how that would work.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the thyroid, you know, it increases. There's kind of like a sweet spot, we think, where we think it's actually increasing the amount of red blood cells that they're producing. And so that's part of why they have this bigger reservoir, just because they have more red blood cells. And so they're kind of stored, waiting to be accessed during diving. And we think that because we actually did some studies with mice where we were able to recreate the large spleen phenotype, we say, or trait in mice. So we had these mice that we, we gave them a drug that inhibited the same gene that's different in this population. And those mice had larger spleens.

• 31:39Danny Jones?

  Wow, that's wild.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  We did not train those mice to dive, but I would be very curious to see how they did compared to other mice.

• 31:46Danny Jones?

  So if you were hypothetically, like, like total speculation, what do you, do you think that in like a couple thousand years that these people could develop like webbed feet or look even more different than we do now? Or they do here?

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, really, you know, as long as there's selection for it, as long as it's giving them an advantage or protecting them from dying younger or, you know, not being able to reproduce, then yeah, it could totally happen. Um, it also has to be a trait, um, that has to come up somehow. So there either has to be a mutation. You know, like I didn't see a single person who had webbed feet, so that it's not out there yet, um, but you certainly could have a mutation that caused that. And then maybe that person has, you know, a huge benefit and that spreads throughout the population.

• 32:33Danny Jones?

  But that takes a long time, right?

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 32:36Danny Jones?

  To get a, a positive trait to evolve.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  That's exactly it. Yeah, that's why evolution is normally so slow because most mutations are so bad that we don't even see them because they're what's called embryonic lethal. So they don't even make it into like a fully developed human because they're so bad. Um, so a lot of the kind of variation that we see that comes up in these populations is was already at some frequency in the population. So it's already there. And it's once they moved into an aquatic environment, it became beneficial. So those people were just kind of walking around. It was kind of neutral as long as they were on land. But as soon as they started diving, it became, you know, a really helpful thing to have.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  And actually, um, some humans,

• 33:20Speaker 02

  like our, our genome likes to be as frugal as possible, you know, so whatever's out there, it's going to try to use as much as it's can. But also we like to steal things from other populations. So, um, like Tibetans have adapted to high altitude and the genes that gave them that adaptation, we actually took from, um, an archaic comited. Um, so like, like Neanderthals, but they're Denisovans were kind of around the same time. So this kind of cousin lineage of humans, they had been living at altitude for a hundred thousand years or more by the time humans got there. And so humans mixed with them and kept the genes that gave them an advantage.

• 33:59Danny Jones?

  Bred with the Denisovans.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 34:01Danny Jones?

  And created and and then in turn created babies that had this gene that made them thrive in these super high altitudes.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 34:09Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 34:12Danny Jones?

  That's another curious thing is like, why, why, there's so many, there's like, what, 500 something species of primates still today?

• 34:20Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't know the number.

• 34:21Danny Jones?

  I think there's over five, I, I think I Googled it and it was like over 500 species of primates and only one species of Homo sapiens.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah.

• 34:30Danny Jones?

  How does that make sense?

• 34:31Speaker 02

  You know, we really don't know what happened because we had, you know, Neanderthals, Denisovans, humans, all were there together and, you know, we've seen in ancient DNA samples from certain areas, like first generation crosses of Neanderthals and Denisovans. So we know that there was a lot of mixture happening because, you know, what are the chances we would find that otherwise? And then, yeah, I don't know how we were the last man standing, but we took all the genetic material that we could from, from those other lineages before we wiped them out in some way.

• 35:03Danny Jones?

  Isn't it crazy, though, like how different we are?

• 35:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:06Danny Jones?

  You know, like, there's no, there's no, like, if you look at all the different primates that exist today and look at the, the modern human, there's like, there's them, then there's this giant leap, and then there's us. There's not like a gradual, I mean, a little bit, there are some people who are a little bit more ape-like. There's some people who are a lot more like evolved, but like, not really, like, there's not, there's not really any like Neanderthals, like legitimate Neanderthals or people who are halfway between primates and humans walking around today. It's like either primate or human.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 35:41Danny Jones?

  Which in like, if you just go to the primate population, there's such a wide variety.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 35:47Danny Jones?

  And I know the human genomes like, is pretty, also, uh, is, is pretty variable, like, there's a large variety in the genome, but like. Um, as far as like the species, we don't vary that much. It doesn't seem like.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. Well, because we're pretty adaptable. I mean, we're really good at making technologies that enable us to survive and

• 36:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Cold environments, hot environments, you know, around water, like we're really good at fishing. So we don't necessarily need to dive. And um, our physiology is very plastic, as we say in physiological research, like it's changeable, you know? We can go from, they're like boot camps. So you can learn to free dive and go from like a 30 second breath hold to a two minute breath hold in a week just by learning techniques or, you know, working on different things with your physiology. So maybe it's just that we're so adaptable in a physiological sense that we haven't had to adapt that much in a genetic sense. Um, because we can really take on most challenges pretty well.

• 36:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah. So what is the like, simple conventional explanation for this, for this leap from primates to humans? Like, I know, I know there's a lot that goes into it, but like,

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:59Danny Jones?

  You know, there's, there's a lot of fun theories people like to talk about that has happened a lot on podcasts. Where like people like say a monkey, like the, one day a monkey ate a mushroom, psychedelic mushroom. And that accounted for the doubling of the brain size and all this stuff and developing technology. Um, there's other ideas like panspermia, like, uh, like comet fragments that hit the earth that had like uh, alien DNA on them somehow mixed with primates and that, that accounted for the evolution. I mean, there's so many, like, you could, people like to fill the gaps with things that, that don't really, that are kind of like way out there. Like you could fill the gap with like God, you could fill the gap with aliens, you can fill the gap with psychedelics.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 37:38Danny Jones?

  But like, there's no, like, I haven't heard the conventional reasoning for it, at least not in a long time.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I tend to focus on so much more recently than that in terms of looking at humans. Um, so I'm kind of like out of Africa and later. Um, so,

• 37:54Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not sure, but I'm also like, you know, as long as it's supported by evidence that's out there and we do have really incredible, because we can reconstruct so much in terms of the genetic data that we have from present times and then kind of rewinding back in time. Um, so, you know, to the point where we can date when certain migrations happened and things like that, just based on modern DNA. So yeah, but then, you know, beyond a certain point, I guess it probably becomes more difficult because so much time has passed, but that's kind of outside of my, uh, which I know is a is a cheap answer, but outside of my area of expertise.

• 38:31Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right. Yeah, no, but it's fun to speculate on this kind of stuff.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:35Danny Jones?

  Well, do you, do you think it's possible that um our evolution has been linear? Or do you think it's possible that there was um like a reset ever in history of human evolution?

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, as far as I know, from the genetic data that we have, there's no evidence of that. Like, there's not like some weird piece of DNA that that we don't know where it came from. I mean, there is in the sense that we knew Denisovans existed before we found the first Denisovan bone. Because we said, okay, there's, there's this bit of DNA that's coming in in a certain part of the world at a higher frequency that seems to have come from like a parallel lineage to humans. So people hypothesized that there was this other lineage. And then someone found like a pinky bone in a cave. And sure enough, that matched perfectly to this piece that we had.

• 39:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  So, you know, we're really good at kind of seeing, okay, there's a piece that doesn't quite make sense, but we think this is about when it came in. And then luckily, you know, we were able to confirm that with this bone and ancient DNA, which is incredible, um, you know, leap in terms of technology. But yeah, otherwise I'm not, I'm not aware of any, any gaps that uh that is as fun as it would be to speculate in that, especially coming from like an astrobiology background. So I was thinking a lot about how different molecules could reach the earth on comets, on fragments of meteorites, things like that.

• 40:02Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah, and there's just so much history that we have no, I mean, even going back to like 2,000 years ago, like we, we, we have no clue what the hell was going on back then, you know? Like, we can look at obviously like uh, uh, like DNA stuff and like we have ancient texts and we have writing and we have, you know, paintings and stuff like that. But to actually go back and to, you know, because I always, I always wonder like, was there a time in history where uh, we were on a different evolutionary or technological trajectory than we're on now, you know, that made us like? And this is another interesting thing when it comes to um genes and genomics is like

• 40:46Danny Jones?

  intelligence like did we did we have like a a super high intellectual capacity far back into the past that was just a different type of intelligence right than what we had today because right because today like if you look at the trajectory humans are on with technology it seems like we're compensating for a lot of our our brain power and a lot of our uh intellectual power with technology and we're just developing new and new things um that people like to buy and people like to use to make tasks easier.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:22Danny Jones?

  So like I was just like like how does that affect the evolution of us where do we end up on this current trajectory with AI and all the self-driving cars and Uber Eats where do we end up in in you know fifty thousand years?

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Right. Well, one thing that you said I feel like is related to a very important point, which is that, you know, when we talk about trajectories, I feel like we have this we're so trained that evolution is is leading us in this like better brighter smarter direction like we have this image of like ape transforming to man, you know, and it's like we are the pinnacle.

• 41:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Everything's getting better all the time and that's like evolution doesn't have a direction it doesn't care it's just about being it's not about being I mean we say survival of the fittest.

• 42:08Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  It's the best fit, not the most fit. So if our environment changes in a way where being super intelligent doesn't actually help us that much, then suddenly we're not gonna be selecting for that. We're not gonna be evolving in that direction. Um. So it's really just about being the best fit to our environment.

• 42:26Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Um. So yeah, I think it's like, you know, we have this this skewed idea that of course centers us as being like the ultimate apex um of evolution, but I think that.

• 42:38Danny Jones?

  So the people who are the most adapted to their external environments.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 42:44Danny Jones?

  Are the ones that are gonna evolve.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Right. So like, you know, at the time of dinosaurs, dinosaurs were totally on top of everything. They were the perfect fit to the earth as it was at that time. Humans ancestors were just these little rodents running around at night because that was the only time we could avoid the dinosaurs. And so because of that, people think we were adapted to colder temperatures because we were going around at night. And again, these are like rodents, you know, these are very, what we would think of now as like poorly adapted or just kind of very primitive animals.

• 43:15Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Meteor hits, suddenly the whole earth is transformed into this much colder environment and now the dinosaurs are very poorly adapted. They're a bad fit to that new environment. But we, as the night dwellers who are better at handling cold temperatures, are suddenly the best fit. So despite the fact that we're these like tiny pathetic little creatures, you know, we're suddenly on top of the world from an evolutionary perspective because we are the best fit to this new environment.

• 43:44Danny Jones?

  So what do you think, what do you think happens to, what do you think human, do you think overall the appearance of human beings is going to be drastically different in like 100,000 years?

• 43:57Speaker 02

  If we make it there.

• 43:59Danny Jones?

  If we make it there.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  I mean, it's hard to say. I would say that climate change poses a very interesting threat because, you know, we're very adaptable, evolution works really well, when there's a consistent and gradual threat or, you know, I mean, I guess in the change, in the, in the case of the dinosaur extinction, maybe you just get wiped out completely. But the problem with a changing climate is that you can't be adapted both to drought and flooding. You can't be adapted both to really high temperatures and cold, you know, I mean, there's so many different factors, it's not a consistent pressure. And I shouldn't say that you can't be, but it's just much harder to find some kind of

• 44:42Speaker 02

  genetic change that makes you better at all of those things that come with a changing planet. So, so yeah, as long as change is happening slowly enough that there are some people among our population who can adapt to it and pass those genes on to the next generation, then sure, we can adapt. But if it happens too quickly and too erratically, then it becomes very hard to evolve.

• 45:05Danny Jones?

  You, when you say climate change, you mean the warming of the climate?

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Right, and like the increase in these, you know, um, uh, like outlier weather events. So like in Utah, we have been in a drought, but we also had the highest snowfall season on record um a couple of years ago. And so it's like, within the same season, essentially, we had, you know, devastating avalanches as well as, um, you know, one of the driest summers on record. Um, so it's like, it's very hard to find a physiological change that makes you fitter in both of those environments.

• 45:43Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  If that makes sense.

• 45:45Danny Jones?

  Interesting. So, so more extreme weather events in a short, shorter amounts of time.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 45:50Danny Jones?

  And um, that could like somehow bottleneck human, humanity?

• 45:56Speaker 02

  It just makes it so that, you know, when you have like, when everybody's diving, then there's a consistent selective pressure. There's one thing that everybody needs to adapt to. Um, but when there's many different pressures happening all at once, then it's just hard to, to be more likely to survive that.

• 46:15Danny Jones?

  Right. Well, but if you're in different parts of the world, wouldn't those things be consistent? Like, like in Florida, the coldest it ever gets is like 50 degrees.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 46:25Danny Jones?

  And the hottest, I mean, it gets friggin' hot. It gets like in the hundreds.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:29Danny Jones?

  And it's humid and we get hurricanes.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 46:31Danny Jones?

  And floods.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 46:33Danny Jones?

  Um, but there's never any snow. And there's, there's never any free, like it's, you know, it doesn't go below 50 degrees. There's never earthquakes.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 46:40Danny Jones?

  Um, there's, you know, it's, it's fairly consistent. I don't know if that's like that in other parts of the world. I can't speak for Utah.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 46:47Danny Jones?

  But.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, in that case, yeah, maybe the future looks, everyone looks more like Floridians.

• 46:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  But yeah, then there could definitely be a.

• 46:54Danny Jones?

  Part of the world they live in, right?

• 46:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, there could be a bottleneck for sure.

• 46:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 46:59Danny Jones?

  And wasn't there a big bottleneck? In the genome like hundred thousand years ago or something like this?

• 47:05Speaker 02

  So the out of Africa migration represents a huge bottleneck. So there's more, there's much more genetic diversity within Africa than in all of the rest of the world outside of Africa. Even though, you know, I feel like it's easy to look at populations in North America and East Asia and say, wow, they're so different. But actually, on a genetic level, in terms of single changes in the genome, we're more similar than some populations within Africa. So that's one bottleneck that happened. But then within specific subpopulations, like there was a bottleneck in the populations that moved into Greenland. So there's some very interesting genetic changes that happened in the Greenlandic Inuit because of that bottleneck.

• 47:47Danny Jones?

  And how did those bottlenecks happen?

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Oftentimes, it's founder populations. You just have a small part of the population that leaves a place or goes to a new place. Sometimes there's, you know, catastrophic events or diseases that bottleneck a population as well.

• 48:03Danny Jones?

  I had a gentleman on here about a year ago who was trying, he was, he worked on the Human Genome Project for MIT. And he was explaining to me something like that all humans on earth basically are genetic descendants of like a total of 10,000 people or something like that.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this is called the effective population size, which is just such a crazy, like you can represent, if you had 10,000 genetically unique individuals, you would represent all of the genetic diversity of the planet, which is bizarre because, you know, there's a lot of us.

• 48:36Danny Jones?

  That is crazy.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:39Danny Jones?

  That is so crazy that we're, I mean, that that's like, we're all so close, it seems like we're like really all very, a lot more closely related than we think.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:49Danny Jones?

  Coming only from 10,000.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  There's also this mitochondrial Eve that you may have heard of. So all, so you inherit your mitochondrial DNA exclusively from your mother. And we all essentially,

• 49:02Speaker 02

  if you go back far enough, come from one woman who's, who's called mitochondrial Eve.

• 49:07Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 49:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:09Danny Jones?

  Mitochondrial Eve.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. I mean, you know, it's been a while, so there's a lot of variation in terms of where we've ended up.

• 49:17Danny Jones?

  And how many mitochondrial Eves do we think there could have been?

• 49:19Speaker 02

  Just, just the one is, I mean, you know, everyone on earth, we think, as far as I know, hopefully I'm not getting this wrong, but is descended from this one mitochondrial Eve. That doesn't mean there weren't other women at that time. It's just that the descendants happened to be from this one mitochondrial Eve.

• 49:37Danny Jones?

  Mitochondrial Eve, the most recent common maternal, uh, matrilineal, I guess that's how you say it. Uh, ancestor of all living humans, meaning everyone alive today can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to her through an unbroken line of mothers. She lived in Africa approximately 150 to 200,000 years ago and was part of the larger ancestral population. Wow.

• 50:02Speaker 02

  That's amazing, right?

• 50:03Danny Jones?

  That is totally amazing.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  It's not that long ago for us to all have been related to one person.

• 50:08Danny Jones?

  When was the, um, what were those footprints that we found in the desert in like Nevada?

• 50:15Speaker 04

  Sand flats? Yeah, they were the sand flats.

• 50:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but there, there was a name for this. Um, oh God, we were, we talked, we've talked about this before. White sands, the white, the white sands fossilized footprints. How long ago were those supposed to be? And this goes back to the, um, oh, that's 23,000 years ago. Okay. And, and I guess it's speculated that, that this pushed back the,

• 50:43Danny Jones?

  Clovis first hypothesis, right?

• 50:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:47Danny Jones?

  Are you familiar with this?

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 50:48Danny Jones?

  So, so, so the idea was that, um, Homo sapiens weren't populating North America that early. And we found these footprints and this pushed it back quite a bit farther.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 51:01Danny Jones?

  Right? And they supposedly came from the Bering Strait land bridge? Is that right?

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. And there was, you know, again, of course, being a geneticist, I'm biased, but there was genetic evidence that suggested that, that some of the population of North America was happening much earlier than people thought as well. And I do think there's a certain amount of like European oriented bias against the population. Cause it's like, oh, did people really make it that far, um, that long ago? And because we think, you know, it took Europeans so long to get there that surely it would have taken other people longer to get there as well. Um, but yeah, there's, there's, I mean, there's evidence that people were in Patagonia 10,000 years ago.

• 51:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 51:40Speaker 02

  Um, yeah.

• 51:42Danny Jones?

  And there's also people who speculate, I mean, how much, how much have you talked to like people in other disciplines that look at this stuff? Like, have you talked to geologists or, or any other types of people, anthropologists?

• 51:55Speaker 02

  I talked to a lot of anthropologists, um, a lot of, you know, I try to incorporate history because I really do think that a lot of times like history and anthropology and all of these things like really inform the science. I also talk to the people themselves because oftentimes people have their own, you know, stories to tell that are, they're often.

• 52:13Danny Jones?

  They watch the cool documentaries and think they have it all figured out?

• 52:16Speaker 02

  Well, I'm saying more like, um, you know, like cultural, like oral histories that populations have about where they came from, how long they've been there, you know, their connection to a particular place. Although it's funny, I was asking the Bajau what their, you know, where they thought they came from. And I was expecting some kind of, yeah, some kind of answer like that or about, you know, like the sea gods or something. And they were like, oh, Borneo. And I was like, okay, that's very factual, but.

• 52:40Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's important to weave in all these different perspectives.

• 52:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Because a lot of times that's where some of these cool scientific hypotheses come from. Um, like there are oral histories in Aboriginal Australians, I'm actually about to speak to someone about this. That talk about a group of people that sound very much like the Bajau. Um, and so given how close those are geographically, it totally makes sense that there would have been interaction between those peoples. And so, you know, it'd be cool to, in cases like that, match potentially genetic data with, um, with oral histories and things like that.

• 53:18Danny Jones?

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• 54:03Danny Jones?

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• 54:45Danny Jones?

  Who was the gentleman, the French gentleman that we had on who was talking about? He was a, um... Is it Philippe? Philippe, yes. What was he? He was a medical examiner. And, uh, he goes, he was going back into history and examining like ancient fine art paintings and doing autopsies and examining the remains of like these ancient historical figures. And, um, he could corroborate ancient texts that go back then with, by using these paintings and taking the DNA out of these paintings.

• 55:23Danny Jones?

  There was a story how, um, the heart of one of the French kings, Louis XIII or something like this, was sold. And used to you, the person who owned it was a painter, right? Who bought the heart and allegedly this guy used

• 55:45Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 55:45Danny Jones?

  His heart as paint pigment.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 55:48Danny Jones?

  So he took the painting and he sampled all the red pigments of it. And sure enough, he found the actual heart fibers of Louis the 13th in this painting.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 55:57Danny Jones?

  And he, you know, he did a analysis on all these figures like Picasso and Napoleon and even Hitler's jaw and teeth remains. And he was also explaining that he found, um, he was talking about home, uh, Lucy.

• 56:15Danny Jones?

  The, the, the first ancient hominid. And he was saying that, do you remember what he was saying about Lucy, Steve? He was saying something about, uh, they found like teeth marks in her bones.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 56:29Danny Jones?

  Or like shark, it was like a shark teeth, shark tooth mark in her bones or something like this.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 56:34Danny Jones?

  Can you find that, Steve?

• 56:37Danny Jones?

  See if you can pull that, see if you can pull that up. I don't want to, I want to make sure I'm not messing that up. But he, what he was showing us was super interesting about, and it was apparently like some sort of, um,

• 56:50Danny Jones?

  like earth shattering revelation about Lucy that kind of changes what we thought about her.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is interesting that, um, yeah, like weaving in all these different disciplines. Like it's so important, I think, to, to get those different perspectives. Because yeah, there's only so much you can get from DNA and, and you know, samples like, um, Lucy are too old to get DNA from typically, although we're kind of, uh, extending that timeline further and further back. But yeah, it's, there's so much we can learn.

• 57:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  By putting all those pieces together.

• 57:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah, totally. And you know, even if like you look into some of the, the architecture and stuff and some of the amazing,

• 57:32Danny Jones?

  like sculptures that were made out of stone in South and Central America.

• 57:38Danny Jones?

  It's just astonishing, these like Moai heads that are the Moai heads that you have on Easter Island. And then you have some of those other big ones. There's these. These heads that are in South and Central America that depict either like an African or a Polynesian human.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 57:58Danny Jones?

  Have you seen these?

• 57:59Speaker 02

  No.

• 57:59Danny Jones?

  Steve, pull up the images that Dr. Barnhart was showing us with Luke Caverns on here of the, um, I forget the, what is, what is the name of the, of the civilization that did that? The Olmecs, the Olmec heads.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. I've seen, I've seen the Olmec heads.

• 58:18Danny Jones?

  So actually, they look very African.

• 58:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. My PhD lab, um, yeah, that's interesting, was a ancient, an ancient DNA lab. And, um, one of the projects that one of my colleagues was working on was finding genetic evidence for migration of Polynesian populations to the Americas.

• 58:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  Prior to Colombian contact or, yeah, pre-Columbian. And, um, and it was interesting because they actually at one point were using chicken DNA, um, to try to, because Polynesian chickens have a very distinct, uh, ancestry to kind of the chickens that we have in the Americas today. Um, but yeah, they were also trying to look at like human, um, DNA to show that there was contact and then people went back to the Pacific Islands, um, after visiting the Americas.

• 59:06Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. I think something got debunked with the chicken DNA. I can't remember exactly. Um, but, but yeah, it's really cool to, you know, there are, there are signatures of contact, especially when people stuck around for long enough to, to end up together, um, end up mixing, uh, that we can detect in modern human DNA.

• 59:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah. I think they did the math on these Moai heads. There, some of them are so large.

• 59:32Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 59:33Danny Jones?

  That, um, from where they quarried them, like where the stone was, where they got the stone from to make the heads, was so far away from where they were placed, they would have had to build rafts that were like four times wider than the rivers that flowed from one spot to the other to be able to float them down the rivers.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 59:56Danny Jones?

  And it's like really rugged terrain, forests and mountains. And it's like really crazy terrain.

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Danny Jones?

  Um, okay. He's an archaeologist specializing in ancient civilizations of the Americas, especially in Maya. Yeah. So it's crazy. It's just some of the stuff's just so bizarre.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14Danny Jones?

  Just doesn't add up.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, yeah. I mean, um, and from my perspective, you know, the cool thing when there are things that don't add up, like these populations that do things that seem like they shouldn't be possible, you know, we're able to often find an explanation, which is super cool, that maybe takes some of the magic away from, um, but yeah, like, I mean, there are populations around the world doing incredible things. Um, and yeah, to a large extent, that's been overlooked by a lot of the science that's been done so far.

• 1:00:46Danny Jones?

  So, so I want to talk about this, uh, this science behind how smells of, of people can attract people to each other or within humans, I think this is. There's a study that was done with humans where the certain, I guess, smell or pheromone or whatever it is that some people emit, people are, are subconsciously attracted to other people just based on, on this.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:17Danny Jones?

  And it's not necessarily like looks.

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:20Danny Jones?

  Or, or anything like that, or personality, it's smells. How did, how did this whole thing come about?

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  So it was called the smelly T-shirt study. Um, or that's at least how it's referred to. And it was, yeah, they had, I think it was all, um, they had women, like heterosexual women smelling the T-shirts of heterosexual men and they smelled them and rated the smell of the T-shirt on its attractiveness, you know, just, just based on the smell. Um, and I, I'm sure they, you know, accounted for like soaps and deodorants and things like that. Like they probably had people just wearing T-shirts and people, women reported that they were more attracted to the smell of a T-shirt if that person had a complementary immune system based on their genetics, um, than if they didn't. And so our immune systems are super diverse. It's the fastest evolving part of the genome. There's tons of changes

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  because we're constantly battling with pathogens and.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  You know, bacteria, viruses, whatever. And so there's a lot of variation in the immune system. And so if you find someone whose immune system is very different from yours, your children will have a much stronger immune system than if you find someone whose immune system is very similar to yours.

• 1:02:28Danny Jones?

  Because the children have a combo of both.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah. So it seems like we have some way of smelling that, just based on, you know, based on, yeah, what's coming out of our bodies, essentially.

• 1:02:40Danny Jones?

  So how did somebody come up with this theory to do this test?

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, maybe someone just noticed that they really loved the smell of their partner. I mean, that's, you know, like anecdotally, it's a thing, right? You like, really like how someone smells.

• 1:02:53Danny Jones?

  I mean, my wife says this about me all the time.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:55Danny Jones?

  She says she likes the way I smell in the morning.

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Danny Jones?

  What are you talking about?

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe she's smelling those jeans. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know what inspired it. But, um, but yeah, they did the study and, and people were able to smell that difference and found it attractive, which is amazing, too.

• 1:03:11Danny Jones?

  That's so crazy. Is this in animals, too?

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  I'm sure it is. Yeah, because animals also have such a stronger sense of smell and such a deeper connection to smell. You would imagine that they're doing that as well. And it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that we would have this ability, because people who can smell that in potential mates would have more children who can survive for longer.

• 1:03:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  So, so it seems reasonable that we've evolved to be able to smell our partners, sniff out the best partner for us from an immune system perspective.

• 1:03:43Danny Jones?

  Right. So, okay, on the hierarchy of attractive traits, do we know where smell is?

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  I don't know. That's a great question. Yeah, like if someone has like, you know, a $300 sports car, but their smell is just, how are you gonna rate them?

• 1:03:59Danny Jones?

  Well, look at divorce rates in America. I think that'll knock that one over in just an heartbeat. But no, but like, on like, what about like, physical appearance, though? Like, did they, did they look at this kind of stuff at all? Or like? Like communication skills or or personality traits or

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21Danny Jones?

  I don't know, eye color, anything like this?

• 1:04:23Speaker 02

  That's the thing with, you know, any study like this is like you're just looking at one variable at a time. And so as soon as you start introducing more things, it becomes so complex. Like with the work we did with the divers, you know, we did these simulated dives where we had people hold their breath, put their face in cold water and we called that diving because your body responds like you're diving. But it was like, they're not under pressure, their whole body isn't submerged in cold water, they're not active. So when we actually measured some of the same things in the ocean, all of the measurements looked different. Um, because you know, suddenly this heart rate drop wasn't there anymore because they were moving really actively in the water. Um, so it's like, you know, in in any of these studies, unfortunately, we just get this like tiny snapshot. And as soon as you start to incorporate more details, then it's like the whole thing blows up.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  And it becomes very hard to study from a scientific perspective.

• 1:05:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's so interesting. And it makes me wonder, you know, looking at the way our environment is evolving with technology, where most kids now are on an app scrolling through pictures of people.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Danny Jones?

  And that's how you're finding your mate or your whatever, depending on what your goals are.

• 1:05:30Danny Jones?

  You're not, you're not, you're not sitting in a room with them. You're just looking at a picture of them and you're basing it off of off a still photo. And not even like a, like a, like a 3D photo, just a 2D flat from one angle. You don't get to like walk around them, see what the shape of them is or or anything like that.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  Well, it could totally explain this phenomenon that I feel like we've all heard about where it's like someone sees someone on on an app. And they're like, oh yeah, they're super attractive. And then they go out and they're like, I just didn't feel the chemistry, like there's no chemistry. And it could be that, I mean, it could be that they were really bad at conversation, but it could be that your immune, you know, your body was picking up on the fact that this person is not a good potential parent to your offspring or something, you know? Um, it's interesting to think about chemistry, maybe literal chemistry. We may literally be smelling whether someone's a good match.

• 1:06:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I mean, and I imagine like, I imagine there's gotta be a an abundance of other things that you can't really put into words, right? Other than the person was like tall and handsome or whatever it is.

• 1:06:33Danny Jones?

  That, that, that, you know, not smells, not things that are obvious to our five senses, right? That there's something that's going on like,

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Danny Jones?

  You know, you talk like people have gut feelings about things all the time. Like, how do you explain that?

• 1:06:48Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, and I mean, yeah, if we can smell this one thing, you know, it's something that's easy to test for because we know how to look for particular regions of this, you know, immune system, part of your genome. So that was an easy thing to test for in the study. But there is so many other things that we could be smelling or picking up on or, you know, these things that we're observing that we're not recognizing that we're observing that are contributing to that feeling.

• 1:07:13Danny Jones?

  Hmm, okay, I want to also, I want to ask you about,

• 1:07:18Danny Jones?

  when it comes to

• 1:07:21Danny Jones?

  people who are, because I know people like, a lot of people like this. I don't know how it's changed over the decades. But when it comes to people who like have trouble conceiving, there's all these evolving technologies that are coming out that are helping people have kids, whether it's like freezing their eggs or freezing sperm, vice versa. I don't know how it all works. But there's a lot of people, a lot of which, who I know, who are my age in like their mid 30s and they can't have kids to save their lives. And they're trying everything they can to, to, to have children.

• 1:08:04Danny Jones?

  I've had people, I've had experts in, in this field explain to me that that's a bad idea. Not necessarily like from a moral perspective, but from like a evolutionary

• 1:08:18Danny Jones?

  biological perspective, because it's supposed to be the body, the, the case they made was that's like the bodies or the, the, that's evolution's way of filtering out mutations or something like this.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, I mean, you know, it's complicated.

• 1:08:32Danny Jones?

  And it's also age. I think age has a lot to do with it.

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so age is a huge factor. Um, you know, there's a reason they call like, I think it's like thirty four and up women geriatric pregnancies, which seems crazy. You know, I mean, it's like not that old.

• 1:08:45Danny Jones?

  Well, that's if they actually call them that.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I forget if it's, I think thirty four is the cutoff. At that point, you're geriatric because at that point, your risk of having some kind of, of having your child have some kind of genetic disorder is just so much higher. Um, and that's because, you know, as women, we produce all of our eggs, um, right up at the beginning. And so the longer they're in our body, the more chance there is for mutations to, to build up. Um, so that's something, you know, that's happening. It doesn't mean you can't have a healthy child, but it certainly means that your risk is higher.

• 1:09:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  We used to think that that was just women. Men also, we are finding, have more mutations as they age. So the, the chance of passing on those mutations increases as the father gets older as well. Um, so you've got, you know.

• 1:09:27Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  Ingredients going in of questionable, um, you know, the, the sell by date as we're getting close there.

• 1:09:34Danny Jones?

  I just heard Robert De Niro had a kid and he's like eighty, I think.

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  Right, right. Yeah, so there was actually some really incredible work done in Utah, um, because there are a lot of families in Utah that have, you know, seventeen kids or something like that. And so they were actually able to look at the rate of mutation over the however many years those kids were born and see which mutations were coming from the father, which were coming from the mother, and how did those rates change? And they did see a difference in the number of mutations that was inherited from the father as the father got older.

• 1:10:06Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  But then you also have this factor of like, maybe people aren't having kids, not because of any of those biological reasons, but because of, um, like forever chemicals in the water. Like that affects fertility. I think microplastics affect fertility. You know, there's all these other environmental stress affects fertility. So it's like, what's driving those individuals not to be able to conceive? Is it biological factors? Is it environmental factors?

• 1:10:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, we had Dr. Shawna Swan on here a couple of years ago, and she was explaining how, um, they've been studying, sampling, um,

• 1:10:40Danny Jones?

  The sperm count and testosterone levels of men since the 50s. And it's been going down by like 1% per year since the 50s. And she says, since like the mid 2000s, it started going down by like 2% a year.

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:10:54Danny Jones?

  And.

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  So you must be getting low.

• 1:10:56Danny Jones?

  I was like, she asked me, she's like, can you guess, uh, which areas of the country have the lowest sperm counts? And my guess was, I was gonna be like the populated cities, you know, all the, you know, cars going everywhere. You're living in a little box and you're not as healthy as you're living out like an open farmland. She goes, no, the people who live on the farms, open area, because of all of the chemicals they spray.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:21Danny Jones?

  On the crops and everything like that and the glyphosate, which was crazy to me. And, um, you know, that combined with like the microplastics that are everything, everything is plastic. Our, our, our world is designed to become, is designed to make money on things by making them cheaper, more affordable, more efficient, and plastic is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. Everything is plastic.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:50Danny Jones?

  99% of this room is made of plastic. And, um, she was explaining how that's like very, very bad for human beings. And if you want to be, if we want to propagate our species into the future, she's like, I don't know what we're gonna do, but that's not, we're, we're not going in the right direction.

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, you know, people have to resort to things like in vitro fertilization or freezing their eggs. Like you said, I mean, that circumvents, you know, some of the mutational issues that I was talking about.

• 1:12:16Danny Jones?

  Freezing the eggs?

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  If you freeze your eggs early, then they're like the fresher eggs, you know, they're not aging with you. But then, yeah, like, once you get into in vitro fertilization, then there's stuff like, how do you pick which embryo you're gonna carry forward? If you do have a successful, you know, um, if you do have. What is it? I forget exactly what they call it. But anyway, if

• 1:12:39Danny Jones?

  Like the implantation?

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah. So like, you know, then there's then you get into people are starting to filter based on genetics. And that's a whole other weird ethical debate. Yeah, exactly. So it's very complicated. That's why I have dogs only.

• 1:12:54Danny Jones?

  Oh, you choose to not have kids?

• 1:12:56Speaker 02

  I'm intentionally childless. Yeah.

• 1:12:58Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow. Dogs are dogs are awesome.

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  I love my dogs. Yeah.

• 1:13:03Danny Jones?

  Is it possible that when some people get together and try to reproduce? That sometimes nature just says no, because this is not a good mix?

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's certain certainly. And it's there's something really interesting that's happening in our world, which is that we're with globalization, we're having combinations of genes that have never happened before in the history of humans. So you know, you have people from different parts of the world who have been separated for

• 1:13:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  fifty, sixty thousand years. And so these combinations we're finding sometimes introduce, you know, diseases that have a genetic basis that we didn't know were possible.

• 1:13:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  So that's certainly a possibility. And yeah, in that way, the body just says, nope. But then also there's it brings up the possibility that maybe that some of those combinations will do some really cool things for us as humans. Because they've never been, you know, in the same individuals in the last sixty thousand years.

• 1:14:03Danny Jones?

  Let's pause real quick. I use the restroom.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05Danny Jones?

  Be back. All right, we're back, folks. Steve just found an article about how a third parent's DNA can prevent inherited diseases published just a couple of months ago, July twenty, July sixteenth, twenty twenty five. Scientists can protect children from being born with certain devastating genetic disorders by creating three parent babies, according to results of a landmark study released Wednesday.

• 1:14:28Speaker 02

  So this is, you have, you know, in the normal way, the genetic material from the mother and the father, but then you have, it's when there's a problem with the mitochondria. And so instead of getting the mitochondria from the mother, you can get the mitochondria from another person, a third parent, so that this individual will still have, you know, if you only looked at the other, you know, their normal chromosomal DNA, they would look like they're just a product of their two parents, but then their mitochondria are from this additional individual.

• 1:14:59Danny Jones?

  Wow. Would it have to be a woman?

• 1:15:02Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:15:03Danny Jones?

  Or can you get mitochondria from a man?

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can get mitochondria from anyone.

• 1:15:06Danny Jones?

  Oh, really? Wow.

• 1:15:08Speaker 02

  It's just that mitochondria usually comes in the egg, and so that's why you inherit your mitochondria from your mother.

• 1:15:15Danny Jones?

  Right. Scary.

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:19Danny Jones?

  I mean, it's, I mean, it's like, uh, just like crazy experiments we're doing on, on, on ourselves.

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, yeah, and it used to be, you know, like, thinking about genetically modifying embryos or babies or humans or things like that, you know, I would just say like, oh, we're just not there yet with the technology, but the scary thing is, we're there, you know, we can do this, but, you know, now the question is, should we, and, and what should or shouldn't we do?

• 1:15:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, I want to talk a lot, I want to go into that, I want to go into that, um, but, but first, I want to touch on something that you just said, you, you were talking about, like, now that, like, the world's becoming more globalized, people are traveling everywhere, people aren't just centered in their little tribes like we used to be. Is, you're, you're saying that that is a good thing, and that's, that's going to be a way for us to evolve stronger, or?

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  It certainly potentially could be, because, you know, in the same way that we stole genetic material from Denisovans as humans to adapt to high altitude, maybe, you know, there's genetic variation that's been evolving or neutrally evolving even, just kind of there at a low frequency in one part of the world, maybe it would be really beneficial in another part of the world, or would counteract some gene that's related to disease in another part of the world.

• 1:16:45Danny Jones?

  It would be interesting to see, like, because before, I think before we started, we were talking about, um, Copenhagen and how people from that part of the world are very fair skinned and have like light eyes, like color eyes, so they can absorb more sunlight, more melanin. And people from equatorial latitudes have very dark skin. And dark eyes as well, brown, dark brown eyes, because they don't need all that melanin.

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:17:11Danny Jones?

  They don't need all that UV light. They can have more of a shield for that. It'd be interesting to see if you got like the most dark skinned, dark eyed person from the equator and bred them with the most light eyed, fair skinned person from Norway or something like that. And see like, they might have like superhuman children, children, because they would have, they would cover all the spectrums, all the bases, right?

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  It depends on how those genes mix together. We also usually try to avoid the word bred when we're talking about people, but I get what you're saying.

• 1:17:41Danny Jones?

  Bread is not correct.

• 1:17:42Speaker 02

  You said if you bred them with a, I mean, it just has a certain connotation, maybe, yeah.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the thing is, we can't really control exactly how those genes would come together. So, you know, as, um, yeah, it would be very interesting to see.

• 1:17:58Danny Jones?

  Well, it would be so unnatural for them to meet, right? Which is weird. So like, if it would be like, how, like, in nature, it would be literally impossible for somebody from that part of the world to meet with somebody in that part of the world, natural, like, right?

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, I mean, until recently, humans just didn't cross. And I say recently from, you know, an evolutionary perspective, we just didn't cover that big of distances.

• 1:18:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:18:20Speaker 02

  And so that's why you have, you know, this amount of genetic isolation. And it's even so much so that there was a very cool study that using only genetic data from Europe, was able to basically reconstruct a map of Europe based on people's genetics. So people had been kind of geographically isolated for so long, up till now, you know, I mean, this was a recent study, that they were able to tell you almost exactly where someone was from, just based on their DNA.

• 1:18:48Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  And that's how, you know, some of these like 23andMe ancestry kind of, you know, you are X percent, you know, Italian or whatever. That's how some of that works. But, but it's just amazing that, you know, it's, it's really recent that humans have been mixing on such a global scale.

• 1:19:05Danny Jones?

  Another point to this is that if you breed too close to the gene, your own gene pool, nature will punish that, right? Then you have more of these.

• 1:19:19Danny Jones?

  These defects or these mutations, right?

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the thing is, the way that works is that, you know, we all have a certain number of potentially harmful genetic variation in our genome. And so as long as we're, we're having children with people who are different from us, you're very unlikely to have two copies of the same bad variation. But once you start, you know, having people, either having children with their cousins or even closer relatives, then you have a really high chance of having two of those dangerous copies of whatever it is together. And so that's why you have an increase in, in genetic disorders, because you're just increasing the odds of inheriting these two problematic genes dramatically.

• 1:20:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah. When did we first gain the ability to test fetuses or unborn babies for the extra chromosome, the Down syndrome?

• 1:20:18Speaker 02

  That's a really good question.

• 1:20:19Danny Jones?

  Because they used to have to do it by like sticking a needle into the belly, right?

• 1:20:23Speaker 02

  Mm hmm, amniotic, yeah.

• 1:20:24Danny Jones?

  That actually accidentally killed a lot of babies doing that.

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, um, I mean, now we know we can get it from blood, which is kind of crazy. Yeah, you just take a blood sample.

• 1:20:33Danny Jones?

  And they can tell everything. They can tell the sex, they can tell all kinds of stuff.

• 1:20:37Speaker 02

  And one cool thing about that, that I learned recently that I love is that those cells that are circulating in the mother's blood don't just disappear after the baby is born. Like they're there, they're in the mother in some way or another forever. So like every, every mother is carrying cells from every child she's had somewhere in her body. Sometimes they settle in and they become other things. But those cells are in there, which is kind of crazy.

• 1:21:04Danny Jones?

  That is really crazy.

• 1:21:07Danny Jones?

  It's also interesting how like the, the DNA, the code, your specific DNA, your specific gene, genome sequence is replicated throughout every cell in the body, right? Except for the red blood cells, is that right?

• 1:21:22Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah.

• 1:21:24Danny Jones?

  It's just so, it's just such a wild thing because like, you know, it seems like in nature, everything is this way.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, and and what's interesting there is that in a way, even though you're a single organism, you also are kind of like, you know, um, like a, an environment of organisms. Cause like all of your cells are carrying roughly the same genetic material, but they can also mutate. And so it's something called somatic changes. You have your germline changes, which are changes you inherit from your parents. And then you have changes that can happen in individual cells after you're born, like mutations. And this is kind of like what gives rise to cancer. You know, you have a mutation and then suddenly that cell starts expanding a lot more and passing on that mutation. So we have almost like mini evolution happening within your own body.

• 1:22:11Danny Jones?

  Hmm, but the mutations, like you said, happen a lot faster, right?

• 1:22:16Speaker 02

  They can, yeah.

• 1:22:17Danny Jones?

  Than like the, um, the positive changes. What would be the word for that, scientific word? Like, what's the opposite of a mutation?

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  Um, well, so mutation is just referring to the change.

• 1:22:26Danny Jones?

  Oh, it's just a change, it's not necessarily negative.

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  Exactly, it doesn't mean that, yeah, uh huh, so.

• 1:22:30Danny Jones?

  Got it.

• 1:22:31Speaker 02

  Um, it also doesn't mean it turns you into an X-Men, so.

• 1:22:36Danny Jones?

  Um, the CRISPR baby stuff.

• 1:22:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:22:39Danny Jones?

  There was the guy in China who went to jail for three years for, I think he was just trying to, um, modify using CRISPR.

• 1:22:47Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:22:47Danny Jones?

  The, the gene sequence of a baby somehow. And he was trying to like optimize the baby to not get HIV or something like that.

• 1:22:58Speaker 02

  Right, I think that's right, yeah. I can't remember the exact details, but I think it's, I mean, cause there are certain individuals who carry, um, mutations that protect them from, from contracting HIV.

• 1:23:08Danny Jones?

  Uh huh.

• 1:23:08Speaker 02

  Um, and so, yeah, I think he was trying to make those changes in an embryo to protect those, which, yeah, seems like.

• 1:23:16Danny Jones?

  And this was, this was years ago.

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 1:23:19Danny Jones?

  This was at least like five, six years ago, something like that.

• 1:23:21Speaker 02

  I can't remember exactly the timeline.

• 1:23:23Danny Jones?

  Find out what year that was, Steve. How, how, do you, do you know how fast this stuff, this CRISPR stuff is advancing?

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest things recently, like up till recently, that was an issue with CRISPR, something called off-target effects. Um, so that's, you know, there are a lot of parts of our genome that look very similar to each other.

• 1:23:40Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:40Speaker 02

  Um, and so if you try to change one part of the genome, but you mess up, you know, it might attach itself somewhere else and change the wrong part of the genome.

• 1:23:48Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

  Um.

• 1:23:50Danny Jones?

  Twenty nineteen.

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:52Danny Jones?

  Six years ago.

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so it was very risky to try to use CRISPR because it's like you're editing, but you don't know what's going to get edited. We're getting a lot better at that, so we can much more specifically target certain regions of the genome.

• 1:24:11Speaker 02

  But I forget where I started with this.

• 1:24:15Danny Jones?

  When it comes to like editing, like specific things like the HIV receptor or whatever. So it's like a, it's like using a blunt tool to do like fine precision work.

• 1:24:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, although I think we're, you know, we're sharpening the tool every day, but it's still, you know, becomes this question of what changes should or should we not make? Because even like, you know, because there's

• 1:24:41Danny Jones?

  And who gets to decide?

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah. And then there's, you know, there's a combination of like something that's already happening is selection of embryos, like which embryos you're going to implant in in vitro fertilization versus based on genetic markers versus modification of embryos, you know, like those are two different but overlapping kind of strategies for deciding what the next generation should be. But it's like, you know, we were talking about I get severe migraines and that's something that's determined largely by genetics. I would love to not have migraines, but I also don't feel like I should not exist because I get migraines. You know what I mean? Like it's not, yeah, it becomes very tricky.

• 1:25:24Danny Jones?

  Have you ever heard of the green light therapy for migraines?

• 1:25:27Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:25:28Danny Jones?

  Oh, Steve, you gotta pull up the clip of of Tom Segers. We had this guy on here recently, who he came up with this device that's a little light panel and it shines green light. And he says, he explained it in scientific way, how if you shine it on your face, it can alleviate migraines.

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:25:46Danny Jones?

  And I don't think there's been, I don't, maybe he said there was a test or a study done on this or whatever. But, um, yeah, it was, it was wild.

• 1:25:56Speaker 04

  I mean, from the podcast or he's got another video that's shorter?

• 1:25:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't necessarily want to make it like a long thing.

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  I mean, I would try anything at this point.

• 1:26:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah, fine. There's a short, there's gotta be, there's gotta be a clip of it, Steve. There's gotta be a short clip. Type in Tom Segar. Yeah, there you go, right there. Here, put the little headphones on, you'll be able to hear him explain it.

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• 1:27:18Danny Jones?

  Go before, right before he turns the light on. There you go.

• 1:27:20Speaker 06

  What's called the migraine lamp.

• 1:27:22Danny Jones?

  Migraine?

• 1:27:23Speaker 06

  It's green light therapy for headaches. So I'm going to shine this self on, I'm going to shine this on my eyes. Cause you use it like this. If you're in a therapeutic setting, you would set it on like a little cell phone stand. You'd put it in front of you. You'd close your eyes and you'd let the green light come through your closed eyelids. Nobody knows why this works, but it works. I was on Mark Bell's podcast and his producer, Andrew, he's had migraines ever since he was a kid. And so he asked me about it. The invention was kind of accidental because I had a girlfriend with migraine headaches

• 1:28:06Speaker 06

  and I was looking at red light and UV and phototherapy. And I think Google must've known that I was doing this library search. And you know, it's, hey, maybe you're going to like this one or something. Cause they watch my every move, you know?

• 1:28:18Danny Jones?

  That's odd.

• 1:28:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, right? And it was about green light and photophobia for people who suffer from migraines. When you have a migraine, most migraineurs want total darkness because the light will make their headache worse. So they shut themselves in a closet or in a dark bedroom or something. It's terrible. But at Harvard, they tested all the wavelengths of light and they found that green had a pain relieving or analgesic effect. University of Arizona picks this up and they start making devices with just green LEDs in them for migrainers to use and they get a significant reduction in the frequency and severity of migraine headaches among those people who used green light phototherapy. The mechanism-

• 1:29:03Danny Jones?

  Crazy, right?

• 1:29:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. I will absolutely try that because I have the blue light filtering glasses and they're so-so, so.

• 1:29:10Danny Jones?

  The, the red ones that filter all the blue light? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah, he gave me one of those little, uh, one of those little lamps and, uh, my wife tried it, but it didn't, it didn't work for her.

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:29:21Danny Jones?

  But I don't, I don't, I don't think she gets actual migraines.

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:29:24Danny Jones?

  She just gets a different type of headache.

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:29:26Danny Jones?

  But.

• 1:29:27Speaker 02

  I'll give it a try.

• 1:29:27Danny Jones?

  Might be worth checking it out. Um, so, uh, so, yeah, no, where were we? I was like, so what do you, what, what do you think? What do you, obviously it's a speculation, but what do you think that, um, this CRISPR gene editing stuff can lead to? Like, well, like what's the best possible outcome for something like this? Like, do you think it's gonna be like to work on, um, if somebody has like a history of cancer or heart disease, you might be able to, to prevent that in future generations?

• 1:30:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, but I think that's absolutely the best possible outcome. You know, we know, like, I feel like there's some very clear examples where we know, um, like the breast cancer genes, like BRCA, BRCA1, BRCA2, I think, that like dramatically increase your risk of cancer. If we could change those in the ways that we know are associated with less cancer, um, in an individual, that'd be great. Because right now, generally, if you have those mutations, they recommend like preventative mastectomies or things like that, that are really invasive and terrible. Um, so, you know, if they could kind of change that, wonderful. The problem is when we start getting into kind of more complicated scenarios because that's a very obvious, you know, we have this one genetic change that causes this thing.

• 1:30:45Speaker 02

  Otherwise, really anytime we're looking for something like that, we're looking at correlations. Um, and so correlations are super dangerous. In any scientific research.

• 1:30:56Danny Jones?

  Can you explain what this means?

• 1:30:57Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. So my favorite example is um ice cream sales are highly correlated with shark attacks.

• 1:31:05Danny Jones?

  Ice cream sales are highly correlated with shark attacks, okay.

• 1:31:08Speaker 02

  This is not because sharks really like ice cream. It's because people eat ice cream in the summer, people go in the ocean in the summer. And so you have this really strong correlation. Like I've seen graphs and it's like incredible where you know you have a peak in ice cream sales, you have a peak in shark attacks.

• 1:31:24Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:31:24Speaker 02

  So that's essentially what we're doing with a lot of the genetics of disease that we're looking at. So you know, if we look at um you know hypertension and we say, oh, it's really strongly correlated with this genetic variant. Maybe that's because people with that genetic variant um you know are predisposed for some other reason based on their like socioeconomic status or you know the environment that they're living in or you know, there's all these different factors that could play a role in that correlation to the point where you may be picking up on correlation with a certain ethnic background or something like that, especially in a country like the US where we have you know a lot of diversity and a lot of factors that influence the health of people from different ethnic backgrounds. Um and so in that way, it's scary to think that we could be making

• 1:32:09Speaker 02

  a change based on a correlation rather than based on a causation. Um and in that way, potentially like erasing genetic material that's related to a certain ethnic background or something like that. I mean, that's my worst case scenario fear. But in the cases where we have like a very clearly clear causal effect, where we say you make this change, this person will be less likely to get cancer. I think that would be, that would be amazing.

• 1:32:35Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. Is there, is there a way to affect lifespan, like general, general lifespan? I know there's lots of influences that can affect lifespan, obviously.

• 1:32:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:46Danny Jones?

  But like.

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  Like genetic contributors to lifespan? Yeah, so I used to always say like lifespan can't be influenced by evolution. Because you know, once you're past a certain age, like you've made it, you're the fittest. You've survived, you know, evolution doesn't care about you anymore. Because like at that point, you're not having children anymore.

• 1:33:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:33:08Speaker 02

  So you kind of are out of the equation. But there's this really cool thing called the grandmother hypothesis. That says that basically if a grandparent is involved in the life, the lives of their grandchildren, their children are able to have more children and those children live healthier lives or more likely to survive. So just by living long enough to grandparent, they're increasing the the chance that their genes get passed on. And in this way, we can pass on longevity genes.

• 1:33:41Danny Jones?

  Wow. So grandparents interacting with grandchildren can influence the grandchildren to have more kids?

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's basically like, you know, if you have kids and you're exhausted because you have no one to help you, you're like, you know what, one kid is enough, like I am good.

• 1:34:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:34:03Speaker 02

  But I say this as an auntie, not as a but um

• 1:34:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  But you know, let's say grandma and grandpa live down the road, they're helping take care of those kids. You know, your burden is eased, you're like, okay, maybe I could have another kid. Maybe I could have another couple of kids or maybe those kids are getting more attention, more, you know, they're getting all of the things that are going to enable them to survive better.

• 1:34:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:25Speaker 02

  And so in that way, you know, if you're, if you unfortunately, you're the grandparents passed away young, then those genes aren't being passed on necessarily as much as the people who live a long time and are able to

• 1:34:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:34:38Speaker 02

  play a role in their grandchildren's lives.

• 1:34:40Danny Jones?

  Because the the children aren't incentivized to have more kids because it's just so much work.

• 1:34:44Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:34:44Danny Jones?

  Such a burden. Is there Is there anything in genetics that predisposes certain women to want to have more children? Or not want to have more children?

• 1:35:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's an interesting question.

• 1:35:04Danny Jones?

  Or like, what if a woman's like, you know, I want to have 10 children, like, I don't care how stressful it is. And then, you know, someone else comes along without, you know, absent of any external influences. Just like, I'm not interested.

• 1:35:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, as someone from the ladder of those camps, I would be very curious to see if there is an influence on that. And I feel like it's probably only kind of in the generations now that we would really be able to tease that apart. Because up till now, there's been so much societal pressure to have children. But I feel like anyone who even had those thoughts is probably like, well, that's just what you do. Um, so it'd be a really cool study to see.

• 1:35:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:40Speaker 02

  I mean, evolutionarily, you would think that you'd select for the people who wanted to have more kids. Because those people would pass on their genes more. You know, like, you could say I'm an evolutionary failure because I'm not passing on my genes. Um, you know, I can influence how those genes get passed on by taking care of nieces and nephews and things like that.

• 1:36:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:01Speaker 02

  Um, but, you know, it ends with me in my, in terms of my lineage. Um, so yeah, if I had 10 kids, then the next generation of humans on this planet would have much more of my genetic material. Um, so you would think that evolution would select for women who really want to have kids.

• 1:36:17Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:19Speaker 02

  But I don't know if that study's been done.

• 1:36:20Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Yeah, another, another interesting thing, you know, going back to the dog thing. Is how, and this also ties into the CRISPR stuff, but we were basically genetically modifying our pets.

• 1:36:32Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:36:33Danny Jones?

  Right? We modify them to be cuter.

• 1:36:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:36:36Danny Jones?

  And, uh, the cutest ones are the ones that are least likely to survive.

• 1:36:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:41Danny Jones?

  And also, I was having a conversation with my neighbor this morning, funny enough, who has a really big German shepherd. And he was explaining to him how all of the, the little like tiny cute dogs are the ones that attack his German shepherd the most.

• 1:36:56Speaker 02

  That tracks.

• 1:36:57Danny Jones?

  I was like genetically, how does that make sense?

• 1:36:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:59Danny Jones?

  You would think that nature would teach the little helpless dog not to ta- attack the German shepherd who could kill it in two seconds.

• 1:37:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I, mine of my dogs weighs eight pounds. His name is Lupo, which means wolf in Italian. So he has that, he has that wolf spirit. You know, he thinks he's a big dog and sure enough, like first dog he approaches at the dog park is always the biggest dog. He's not aggressive, like he doesn't come at them, but he just has no idea how small he is and he would absolutely not survive under like, you know, it's like.

• 1:37:27Danny Jones?

  It seems like the smallest dogs are the meanest.

• 1:37:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. He's very sweet.

• 1:37:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:37:31Speaker 02

  But yeah, but it's even in just in terms of like, you know, I mean, the other day, we didn't realize our furnace was broken and it was sixty-three degrees in the house instead of sixty-seven, which is what we normally have it at. And he was shivering like crazy and that was how I knew the furnace was broken. And I'm like, dog, you would not survive out there on your own.

• 1:37:47Danny Jones?

  No.

• 1:37:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:48Danny Jones?

  No, and what, and, and we're doing that to ourselves. We're, we're domestic. If you look at, you know, what humans were ten thousand years ago compared to now, like we are basically teacup Yorkies compared to like the wolves we used to be.

• 1:38:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:02Danny Jones?

  I know, and that goes into, that goes into every, that's with everything, all of these environmental influences that aren't even, aren't even on purpose. It's just the way our society is with, with making things more convenient with microplastics and technology doing everything for us.

• 1:38:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:20Danny Jones?

  We are becoming like, you know, teacup Yorkies of Homo sapiens.

• 1:38:26Speaker 02

  Well, getting back to this, you know, best fit versus most fit, like, you know, we have this idea that to be, you know, the fittest in our modern environment, like we should be tough, we should be strong, we should be able to handle the elements, you know, like same with the dogs, but it's like actually people who, you know, are able to navigate the current environment regardless of how physically fit they are, are the people who are more likely to have more children. You know, it doesn't matter if you could survive a snowstorm, like that's probably not going to influence whether or not you have kids. And like these cute tiny dogs. You know, we want more of them because they're so cute. So, you know, they're also in that way, passing on more of their genes than the dogs that are super tough and could survive.

• 1:39:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but if there was some sort of a bottleneck event.

• 1:39:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:10Danny Jones?

  Like a supervolcano or something like that, or like a comet impact or whatever like that. The people that were, and it's crazy that right now, we can live here in North America, flying around on airplanes, recording podcasts. And simultaneously, there's people running around naked in the Amazon.

• 1:39:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:28Danny Jones?

  And if there was some sort of a cosmic event or catastrophic cataclysm that wiped out most of humanity. Those would be the ones, those people would be the people that would most likely survive.

• 1:39:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, depending on how the earth changed, you know, those of us teacup Yorkies would would go the way of the dinosaurs, you know, I mean, we would, we're not adapted to some of the potential ways that the earth could change in an event like that.

• 1:39:54Danny Jones?

  Right. Which makes me wonder, like, are those indigenous tribes, those, I mean, there's some uncontacted tribes who treat humans as like predators and they kill humans when they see them. Right? Like they have, they run around with these giant arrows and as soon as they see civilized humans, they hunt them down and try to kill them.

• 1:40:12Danny Jones?

  Um, like, I wonder how far back their lineage goes, you know, like how, because it's been, I don't know how, how would they be evolving? Would they be evolving? Like the, have you heard of North Sentinel Island?

• 1:40:26Speaker 02

  Yes. Uh huh. Yeah.

• 1:40:28Danny Jones?

  Like those people.

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

  Right, right. Yeah. I mean, you know, we don't have any genetic data from them, obviously, um, for obvious reasons.

• 1:40:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:34Speaker 02

  But also like, you know, given like some of the genocides that have occurred against indigenous populations, you can't blame them for throwing those spears or arrows or whatever. The people who are trying to contact them.

• 1:40:43Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:44Speaker 02

  But yeah, I mean, it just totally depends on their environment. Um, they're, you know, living in, I think those environments are pretty tropical. So there's pathogen rich environments. We know that people living in the Amazon have actually evolved adaptations that protect them from certain parasitic infections. So they may have adaptations like that because, you know, like you or I would go see a doctor, get a medicine. We would, our, our ability to pass on our genes would not be affected by, um, you know, parasitic infection. But if you're living in an uncontacted tribe, you know, maybe that pathogen or that parasite kills you. So that's an opportunity for that population to be evolving.

• 1:41:21Danny Jones?

  They probably think of those things as like some sort of like demonic. Demonic evil spirit or something like that. Like, I mean, just look what happened when the Spanish came to the Amazon and wiped out, you know, the, the, the Mayas and the, the Incas with all those diseases.

• 1:41:38Danny Jones?

  Ah, it's crazy.

• 1:41:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, that's.

• 1:41:40Danny Jones?

  When you mix, uh, like a technologically advanced society with a not advanced society.

• 1:41:46Speaker 02

  Well, and there's a really amazing book called fourteen ninety one that I highly recommend that basically suggests that, um, what we saw of the Americas, you know, this idea that it was like technologically advanced and not, um, was essentially because we were looking at like refugee camps because disease spread faster than colonists. And so, you know, if you have a disease that comes through and wipes out ninety percent of the population, um, you know, if that happened here and then people arrived fifty years later, a hundred years later, or something like that, it would probably look like we weren't very technologically advanced because all of the technology that we had developed would kind of fall apart as we struggled to recover from this catastrophic disease outbreak.

• 1:42:28Speaker 02

  So, yeah, the book kind of posits that the impression that a lot of the colonists who arrived in the Americas got was very skewed by the fact that most of the population had been killed by disease shortly before their arrival.

• 1:42:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:42:41Speaker 02

  It's a, it's a really good book. I highly recommend it.

• 1:42:43Danny Jones?

  It's called, it's called.

• 1:42:44Speaker 02

  Fourteen ninety one.

• 1:42:45Danny Jones?

  Fourteen ninety one. Oh, wow. That's fascinating.

• 1:42:50Danny Jones?

  Now, I, I, I mentioned to you briefly about that Mike Masters book, uh, before we started about this idea of pedomorphism, how, uh, primates, the, the offspring of primates, they look more like hu- fully grown adults today, where they have, they sit up straight and they have these like, kind of like bulbous heads that sits up straight over their shoulders and they, they look like, um, they look like normal, fully evolved humans today. But when the primates get older into full adulthood, they, they change. Their, their jaw protrudes, their head slopes back and they sort of hunch over, um, and he.

• 1:43:30Danny Jones?

  He says that this is an evolutionary thing that it looks like if you extrapolate that into the future, um, the fully grown adults in the future will look like the children of today, more like, uh, you know, a toddler of today would be look like a fully grown adult. Do you know what? Do you know anything about that? Or is that?

• 1:43:54Speaker 02

  I hadn't heard of that. It's an interesting idea. Um, the one thing that I would say is that again, coming back to this idea, you know, you said extrapolate like that's assuming that evolution is happening in this like linear direction way. And it's just like so hard to say, um, you know, it's like the thing where people say, oh, our pinky toe has been getting smaller over the past hundred thousand years. Therefore, eventually we won't have one. And it's like, well, no, as long as natural selection isn't acting against that, you know, as long as if someday it becomes really sexy to only have four toes, then the population would change in that way. But otherwise, we're just going to stay kind of how we are. Like you need natural selection to drive a change like that. Um, I mean, things can change just randomly, but usually natural selection would be required.

• 1:44:39Speaker 02

  So if there was something that was selecting for, and maybe that's part of the hypothesis, I haven't read the book.

• 1:44:46Danny Jones?

  Oh, there you go. There's an example.

• 1:44:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if, if there's something about the current state of toddlers, you know, human toddlers that becomes more advantageous in the future, then totally we could evolve to look more like them in the future. Um, but otherwise we'll probably just stay pretty much the same.

• 1:45:03Danny Jones?

  Well, it, it, it makes logical sense. If you look at technology taking over for the need for us to do like physical things, right? We don't need big muscles. Like we need like toddlers have bigger heads compared to their bodies. They would, we would use our, our heads more. We would have, we would be skinnier. We would be smaller, more frail because we would rely on technology to do this stuff. And, um,

• 1:45:31Danny Jones?

  You know, obviously, technology has been advancing since we were first able to create fire and that's changed the shape of our jaws and and things like this, the shape of our heads.

• 1:45:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:41Danny Jones?

  We don't need giant hands anymore.

• 1:45:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:43Danny Jones?

  So I think technology would probably have to have a big part of that as long as technology keeps evolving and keeps, you know, and who knows what happens when we reach some sort of like technological singularity. You know, maybe we just get wiped out, who knows?

• 1:45:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:00Danny Jones?

  But it seems like that has a lot to do with technology, changing our anthropomorphic look.

• 1:46:05Speaker 02

  I mean, you could certainly say that, like, in our current environment, maybe, you know, our heads will get bigger because it's advantageous to be smart. But then, if you look at, have you ever seen the movie Idiocracy?

• 1:46:17Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:46:19Danny Jones?

  It's been a long time. That was a good movie.

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  With one caveat, that is, in my opinion, the only accurate portrayal of evolution I've ever seen in a movie. So, you know, you have a lot of movies that talk about evolution. Most of them get it wrong. You know, like, I love the X-Men movies, but those, you know, it's, even the movie Evolution is like not an accurate portrayal of evolution. But Idiocracy starts with the idea that essentially stupid people are having more children than smart people currently. And therefore, in the future, more of those children are having more children and these, like, stupid genes are being passed on to the point where, I forget how many years into the future, everyone is really dumb. And so, an average person currently becomes a genius in the future. And it's a very funny, very silly movie.

• 1:47:05Speaker 02

  And I would say the one, the one part, my caveat to it being accurate, is that we don't, we haven't actually ever identified, like, a genetic contribution to intelligence because it's such a complicated thing to measure. But anyway, but if that were true, you know, then absolutely, you know, I mean, if, maybe if you, and maybe I shouldn't say this, but if you think about the people who are having many, many children, and think about that potentially driving the selection of our species into the future, you know, it's just hard to predict what's going to increase, you know, in frequency in the next generation.

• 1:47:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, definitely, if you think about it, you know, the people, the smartest people. Um, in universities and in labs, they aren't raising tons of kids, right? They're more focused on their, on their work and whatever they're doing.

• 1:47:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:57Danny Jones?

  It's a much more focused thing where you're, you're dedicating all of your skill and all of your time to, to mastering something or to figure, figuring out a problem.

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:48:05Danny Jones?

  Um. And that's true, you know, that is true.

• 1:48:10Speaker 02

  Is that intelligence or is that, you know, how you were raised and education and all these other things like that's a whole other debate, but yeah, it's just to say that like, I don't necessarily see a strong selective pressure driving us as a population, a human, you know, species to be smarter, have bigger heads, et cetera, you know, in the ways that we kind of think.

• 1:48:31Danny Jones?

  Well, maybe the big heads doesn't have to necessarily do with being smarter.

• 1:48:34Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, it might not. But again, like unless people with big heads are having more children or people with small heads are not having children, then there's no reason for us to move towards big heads.

• 1:48:48Danny Jones?

  And it also seems like we may evolve to be, uh,

• 1:48:53Danny Jones?

  you know, is it possible that we evolved to even being sexless in the future with AI and with genetic engineering and things like this where we're not, we're not

• 1:49:03Danny Jones?

  creating, we're not procreating the same way, like by having sex anymore. It's not this primitive thing we do anymore.

• 1:49:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:49:12Danny Jones?

  Now it's just like we use science and technology to create the perfect kid. We don't need to do it that way. That's too primitive.

• 1:49:21Speaker 02

  Well, and that's so interesting. I mean, you know, that would be like a cultural evolution that, that could totally change everything about our species because yeah, if you don't, then, then the rules of evolution as we know it don't apply anymore because you're creating that, that human, um, in a way that our species has never done in the past.

• 1:49:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And that's like another, one of the other, uh, points of Michael Masters' book is he connects it to like the, all of the worldwide depictions of these little gray aliens that people talk about and people allegedly see that are, uh, they seem to be genderless, have no sexual organs and they look like toddlers, right? And have these big eyes, like they were adapted to see, adapted to, uh, to see in the dark.

• 1:50:08Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:50:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and he and and basically he has this elaborate theory that um which is like it's out there, but it it makes sense in that realm.

• 1:50:22Danny Jones?

  That like if we were to evolve hundreds of thousands of years into the future, it's possible that we could end up looking like that. Right? And then if there was some sort of like nuclear war or some sort of cataclysm that wiped out a large swath of humanity that we could maybe if we were that far advanced, maybe we could figure out time travel, go back and select from the genetic pool back in the past and to repopulate the species in the future. That's his that's his whole hypothesis, which is wild.

• 1:50:57Speaker 02

  That's fun.

• 1:50:58Danny Jones?

  It's fun. It's super fun.

• 1:50:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, thinking about evolution in the far future and like all the ways that technology is going to be able to influence these things is is very fun.

• 1:51:07Danny Jones?

  So it's so you said that intelligence is not genetically passed on?

• 1:51:13Speaker 02

  That we have been able to identify because it's so hard. This is another one of those correlation causation things where it's like some there have been some studies and I I take issue with these studies that look at genetics paired with educational attainment. So how far you go in school? First of all, I don't think how far you go in school is a good measure of intelligence. Because I know people who dropped out of high school who were brilliant and people who have PhDs who are not so brilliant. So it's like, how does that quantify intelligence? You know, our best attempt at quantifying intelligence is the IQ test. And even that is super flawed, we know.

• 1:51:49Danny Jones?

  The IQ test is ancient, right? It's not been it's not been updated.

• 1:51:53Speaker 02

  Right, right. So it's like

• 1:51:54Danny Jones?

  It's basically pattern matching, right?

• 1:51:56Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah. So we don't even have a good way of measuring intelligence. But then even if we, you know, if we use educational attainment, not saying that we should, but the people have done this and continue to present on this at genetics conferences, which always blows my mind. And you correlate that with with genetics. You know, you could imagine in the US, there are going to be certain correlations. That are purely a legacy of some of the some of the demographic things that have happened in this country. Like, there are people who don't have an opportunity to go to school because of their ethnic background. And so you are, you may end up, like, you could end up with a study where you say, look, here's the genetic change

• 1:52:39Speaker 02

  that makes you get a PhD, but actually it's just a measure of, you know, how white you are, how affluent your family is, you know, related to your genetic ancestry, your background. And so it becomes really problematic because it's like, what exactly are we measuring if we don't even know how to measure intelligence?

• 1:52:59Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:52:59Speaker 02

  To begin with.

• 1:53:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:53:00Speaker 02

  And then there's so many conflating factors.

• 1:53:03Danny Jones?

  And intelligence isn't a monolith either. It's not one thing. Like, there's many different types of intelligence, right?

• 1:53:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 1:53:10Danny Jones?

  People can have high verbal intelligence. They can have high emotional intelligence.

• 1:53:15Speaker 02

  Just someone with an athletic intelligence. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 1:53:19Danny Jones?

  And it all just depends on on your environment. And we also, in the Western world, we equate intelligence with, like, monetary success. When, you know, if you actually look at these people who have achieved an enormous amount of wealth, they've usually done it in like one narrow lane.

• 1:53:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:53:38Danny Jones?

  That they've focused on their whole life. And then anything outside of that lane, they're like a teenager. They don't know much about anything.

• 1:53:45Speaker 02

  Right, yeah. Yeah, and I mean, you know, you take an intelligent person, they eat some lead paint from the walls of their apartment as a baby, and suddenly their IQ has dropped 15 points just from that exposure to lead. So there's like all these environmental factors that like are so hard to disentangle with anything that it's like.

• 1:54:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:54:03Speaker 02

  It's really hard. And that's where, you know, this genetic editing too, if we want to make like super intelligent babies, like.

• 1:54:10Speaker 05

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• 1:55:09Speaker 02

  We don't, we don't know what, we don't have any idea how to do that. You know, we have the technology if we knew what the gene was, but we don't, we're so far from knowing that.

• 1:55:18Danny Jones?

  And also some of like, um, some of the most iconic people in history, um, like, like Pablo Picasso or even some like musicians, they were, they thrived and they became like so well-known for what they did and they did something that was like so much more advanced than anyone else in their field. A lot of them because of, um, some sort of negative thing in their life or some sort of negative physical attribute or something that was missing. Like for example, Pablo Picasso.

• 1:56:06Danny Jones?

  Some people speculate that one of the reasons that he was so good at depicting light and depicting depicting depth in his paintings was because he could only see in 2D. He couldn't, he didn't have 3D vision.

• 1:56:18Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 1:56:18Danny Jones?

  Because his like eyes looked out. Like he had, he was like wall-eyed or whatever. So they, people speculate from all of his photos that he couldn't see that. So that made him extraordinary at depicting depth in his paintings and creating these just amazing looking paintings that no one else could do.

• 1:56:33Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:56:33Danny Jones?

  So like, you know, that's interesting too, that how people can just become outliers because of a deficiency they have.

• 1:56:41Speaker 02

  Right. And, you know, genius is so contextual, like Picasso at the time wasn't perceived by everyone as being a genius. Now, now we see him that way, but like at the time.

• 1:56:52Danny Jones?

  Hundreds of years later.

• 1:56:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like I recently, my husband's a symphony musician and they, the symphony played Rachmaninoff's first symphony. And it was so poorly received when he wrote it that he went into depression for three years and, and the symphony was lost until like the 40s because he basically threw it out.

• 1:57:09Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:57:10Speaker 02

  And so it's like, you know, that is now seen as this brilliant piece of music that was ahead of its time and, you know, really well composed. But at the time it was, people compared it to, um, I can't, I think they said like the seven circles of hell or something. They said, listening to it, the, the experience was like being in hell.

• 1:57:27Danny Jones?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:57:27Speaker 02

  So yeah, it's like, it's, it's such a hard thing to, we could never quantify it, I think.

• 1:57:33Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Wow. Well, that's fascinating. Um, Melissa, thank you so much for doing this. This has been fascinating. Is there anything else interesting that, uh, we haven't covered that you think we should talk about?

• 1:57:44Speaker 02

  Hmm. Trying to think of, I feel like we've talked, we've talked about a lot.

• 1:57:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah, we did. We covered, uh, we covered a ton.

• 1:57:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:54Danny Jones?

  Um, is, where, where can people find more of your work and, uh, uh, some of the studies that you've done or learn more about you or contact you online?

• 1:58:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. So my lab is called the Superhuman Lab. Um, so I have a website, superhumanlab.org. Um, I'm also on Instagram. Um, it's superhuman psy lab. Um, and I love getting questions, comments, messages. Um, so yeah, I'd be happy to talk to anyone.

• 1:58:15Danny Jones?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. This has been, uh, I'm gonna have to go back and listen to this like two more times. This is a lot to digest. But thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

• 1:58:23Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:58:24Danny Jones?

  All right. Goodbye, everybody.

• 1:58:26Speaker 01

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• 1:59:08Speaker 01

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