19: Bret Weinstein - The Prediction and the DISC: Difference between revisions

'''Eric:''' All right. So you were a biologist teaching at a relatively obscure college that had previously been known for social activism. And I didn't love your introduction because when you say, “Well, the students accused me of racism” that leaves sort of a weird question. Like, “Why was he accused of racism?” Let me solve the puzzle just immediately—maybe you can't do this—because that was the closest we'd seen to a Maoist takeover inside of the United States of America, ever. Like, it was a case of mass insanity, and the videos showed it to be mass insanity, and unless you had been indoctrinated to believe that Maoism of some form, Maoist re-education, was normal, the rest of the world said, “OMG, what the heck is going on at this completely insane—”. It wasn't just like one of these college craziness pieces. This is really an episode of broad institutional madness that was localized there. And I want to take it to be self-evident because it is self-evident. The video exists. And if you took the people who were trying to pretend that you were a racist in their own terms, that was sufficient to—it was like the unreliable narrator. They were, debunking themselves in the eyes of everyone who hadn't come under the spell of this particular kind of madness.  

'''Bret:''' Well, there's a little more to it in the sense that they were entirely unprepared for a white guy willing to say, “No, I'm simply not a racist”. And it just didn't occur to them that that was going to happen. And it didn't occur to them that my own students weren't going to flee to their side at the point that they leveled their accusation, because those things would have been normal in this environment. But, in my case, I grew up in a home—there were plenty of flaws in that home, as you know—but one of the places I don't think it was flawed was that it was very clear-headed about issues of inequality, race, justice. And so I, I really have the sense that these issues were really not new to me, and I had a long history at the college, lots of students of color—

'''Eric:''' And every time I try to say this is completely wrong, you miss— you don't catch the ball that's being thrown to you, which is, you're not understanding what you're up against. He doesn't take you seriously because you don't have a list of publications that speaks to who it is that you actually are, or what you've done, or where you've been, and as a result, you continue to be the good guy, who is very well spoken, very thoughtful, says very interesting things, and constantly gives away power to other people.

'''Bret:''' That would feel bad to most people, because they would feel like, “What am I doing wrong? Why does nobody else understand this point?” To you and me, that feels good. It is to know that you have achieved something, you have discovered something, and that nobody else can even recognize it, gives you some sort of sense of how far ahead you might be. The question is what to do with those things, and there, I think the question is if I went through something with— I said something intemperate to the New Atheists, and suddenly Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, Michael Shermer, Richard Dawkins, and Neil Shubin came at me all at once, not on the topic that I had caused offense– on a totally different topic. They had picked something off my YouTube channel. Jerry Coyne had claimed to have debunked it. He was wrong, but nonetheless it provided fodder for them to attack. Their point was that I didn't understand natural selection and that, to the extent I might believe I knew something that other people didn't know, the right thing to do was to submit it to a journal and go through peer review. I pointed out to them that peer review was not Richard Dawkins style, and that he in fact advanced the ball for the field, substantially, but has barely published a paper. That backed them off that course, and their tune changed to, “Well, how about a book then? That's what Dawkins did.” And to me that's a win. The idea— I'm not against peer review. I want peers to review my work, but I don't want it snuffed out in private. And so, to the extent that that little battle was the result of them underestimating me and not knowing that something was going to come back that was cogent and responsive to the world as it actually is, and having them back off their position and say, “Yes, actually a book would be a fine thing.” That was positive movement from my perspective. They underestimated me, and they had to back down. So I can't regret that too much. To me, on a different timescale, I believe I'm making progress toward a goal that you and I agree is the right one, but I'm not sure that coming at it, guns blazing is the way to go.

'''Bret:''' Who said anything about healthy? I'm, look, I'm interested in winning for a couple of reasons: One, the payload. Yeah, the insight that opens the portal to the part of biology we don't know because we've had bad Darwinian tools, and for those who heard that as an attack on Darwinism, it is not. Darwinism needs fixing, and there's nothing wrong with what Darwin contributed— it's what happened after.  

'''Eric:''' Okay. Here's what he had to say about you. “Bret Weinstein may well be the brightest graduate student I have ever known. His thesis defense involved only one of his four thesis chapters, and it alone was far more than sufficient as a thesis. I don't know anyone who knows more than Bret about not only a wide variety of topics in biological evolution, but the problems and possibilities of cultural change and the means of bringing people together and solving difficult problems. For 40 years, I held frequent, sometimes almost daily seminars with my doctoral students in evolutionary biology. While he was a student, Bret was a major element in all of those seminars. When he spoke, there was almost always respectful silence, even when he was junior to most of the people involved. Bret's thesis topics are so significant and timely, and so well treated on the lifetime patterns of humans and other species, the function and importance of telomeres and explaining lifetimes as hedges against cancer and several other important topics such as species diversity and sexual selection, that he dramatically converted, on the spot, two reluctant—” And by the way, reluctant is British understatement here— “I will say mildly and skeptically evolutionist members of the committee. I think that, despite his youthfulness, in terms of the characteristics I listed earlier, Bret is the best candidate.”

'''Eric:''' Right. So Darwin saw that there was this mimicry going on, but he couldn't put it together. He spent pages and pages not getting it. So I think it's very funny. So he predicts some things, but he can't predict something else in a very closely related system. Okay. Fast forward, Dick Alexander comes out with a crazy prediction, which I still don't fully— I mean, it's just amazing that he made it— where he says, I bet that you will find the kind of behavior we associate with wasps and bees, which is in this clade called Hymenopteran ants of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusociality eusocial] breeding patterns and organization, but in mammals that will live underground.  

'''Bret:''' What he said is, in principle, there's no reason that a eusocial animal has to be an insect. That in fact, you could get such a thing in a mammal. And then he predicted—I forget how many characteristics there were—but he named some large—  

'''Bret:''' Yeah. Well, all I want to say is, I'm not sure how clear we have the story with respect to what precedes what— it's completely plausible that the behavior precedes the evolution of the genetic system.  

'''Eric:''' Well, the reason I bring this up is that if you look at, for example, Prince Peter Kropotkin, the great anarchists theorist, he was obsessed by finding analogs in nature of preferred human structures. And so it's very simple to say, why can't we work together the way an ant colony all works together? And then there's a counter to that, which is, well, they have different chromosomal structures, and then you say, well, but yes, but that's a kind of a cheap way of achieving eusociality. There are other ways of—so through this crazy kind of investigation, we get to Dick Alexander, who, and I think you're quite correct, says there is nothing prohibiting us from finding a mammalian species that exhibits ant- and wasp-like behavior. And it would be likely to have these characteristics, it would live underground, in a—

'''Bret:''' So selection sees their late life more easily than it sees a small __?__ . (Creek?)

'''Eric:''' I just want to say something. This is a podcast. It's an unusual podcast and we can talk science and I'm thrilled, but we always have our colleagues in our minds when we're talking to a general audience and the colleagues are always in a “gotcha” mode. Well, you forgot about this. You didn't mention that. I'm even interjecting little bits because I want to make sure that you're immunized from all the bullshit that the academics… so I just want to make a general statement, which is- we can come back and get into any level of specificity that somebody wants to, if they want to take you down, I don't care. What I'd love to do is to tell the story with enough punch that people understand what happened.

'''Eric:''' Does that mean, to be a gene, it has to be protein coding? (encoding?)

'''Bret:''' Yeah, so let me say it this way. If you have a damage to a tissue- cut on your arm or something- the cells on both sides of that cut suddenly become aware that there is a problem, a gap, because they can't hear a neighbor on one side of them and their natural reaction is to start growing into the gap until they can hear a neighbor, which is the sign to stop. If you imagine that something like that is occurring in every tissue, or almost every tissue, the problem is that that means that every tissue in your body for which that story is about right, is in danger of having damage from radiation, or whatever, turn it deaf to its neighbors. A single cell that has turned deaf to its neighbors will suddenly start replicating, and if it is deaf to its neighbors, then there's no message that it's going to hear that's going to tell it to stop. So that thing, imagine any cell in your body just taking off and growing and growing and growing—

'''Bret:''' Yes, maybe even literally on occasion. But the question was- I began to wonder if there was something wrong with the idea that mice had long telomeres. Sometimes, like in Hayflick's case it turned out that a bunch of people were copying some wrong result, and so it seemed like a lot of people had seen it, but only one had. And I checked, was it true, that there was some- that everybody was parroting one study that said mice had long telomeres?  

'''Bret:''' It turns out lots of people had tested it. Mice have long telomeres like 10 times the length of human telomeres. It just didn't fit. So finally, it occurred to me that it was possible that what was going on— I discovered something in trying to figure out what they meant by “mice”. Right? There's a lot of species of mice, but all the mice that we use in the lab, with rare exception, are from one genus, and often from a particular target species.  

'''Bret:''' The [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Laboratory JAX Lab] in Bar Harbor Maine, right? They seemed to be the source of everybody's mice. And so it began to be- it was a possibility I could not shut down in my mind- that there was something about what was going on at the JAX Lab that had resulted in the mice that were being sent out to all these other labs-

'''Bret:''' Right. These are model organisms. People were just using mice because mice were a convenient mammal, but they're all coming from one place, and it began to occur to me that that one place was not just a source of mice in the sense that we might think it, it was actually a selective environment that was impacting those mice. And when I dug deeper, it turned out that the mice had all- they were descendants of a long lineage that had lived in captivity under conditions at the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Laboratory JAX Lab]. And at some point I realized that the most likely thing going on was that there was something about this environment that had wildly elongated the telomeres of these mice. And that was simultaneously an unbelievable idea, but the only one I could think of that made sense of everything I had seen. And so—

'''Eric:''' Well, it's unbelievable because the consequences, I mean, look- I have not even heard whether anyone has said, “Yeah, we did that, we screwed that up.” But it is, like, your favorite model organism for mammalian trials being screwed up by a central facility. Because also there's this weird thing where medical people very often stop taking into account evolutionary theory because they treat that as “Well, that's that class I took in college or the beginning of graduate school.”

'''Eric:''' I'm sorry, this is like as close to a ‘who dunnit’ discovery- J'accuse- the mice, you know, I remember, you were over the moon.  

'''Eric:''' By the way, that puts you at about 30. You're at the beginning of your career, and you— in this story, you've just predicted that—

'''Eric:''' Or, one of the great moments in evolutionary theory, which is— and let me just curate this, because I'm not a biologist, but I think I can more or less get this—because it's a breeding protocol that is the alteration in the evolutionary landscape for these laboratory mice, and because it's acting on a non-protein coding region, the adaptation to a change in the breeding protocol can be extremely rapid. It doesn't have to undergo some sort of completely crazy typical Darwinian story about random mutation and some of them being retained and others being rejected.  

'''Bret:''' It's even better than that. The creatures are presumably— so we haven't gotten to what the breeding protocol has to do with this— but the creatures are built in some sense to detect how dangerous their environment is, and to the extent that the level of extrinsic danger changes, their telomeres respond quickly so that they are better adapted to the environment. So, they're built to detect the environment and then what is actually a strict matter of market forces

'''Bret:''' In addition to telling me that there was something funny about mus spretus, she told me that, consistent with the hypothesis that I was conveying to her, that all mice die of cancer. She said, If you let them live long enough, and then you do the necropsy, you find cancer of one kind or another- and that was perfectly consistent because they had these wildly long telomeres and no cancer protection. That would be the prediction of the hypothesis—

'''Eric:''' That’s an extrapolation— it’s not really all mice. It's all mice that we see in the lab, which happens to be the mice that are ordered.  

'''Bret:''' Okay, so let me clear up why the breeding protocol—and I should say, that- It is the breeding protocol that is causing this? That part, I would say, is still a hypothesis. It has not been directly tested by anybody; but, what I would say is that many hypotheses were tested in the aftermath of the discovery- that lab mice have bizarrely long telomeres, and wild mice don’t- and no other hypothesis has stood up to scrutiny. So it is the last hypothesis standing and I'm all but certain that it will turn out to be true.  

'''Eric:''' So there's one aspect of aging, but that there's a far darker interpretation of what you've just said, if I'm understanding you— correct me, I’ve never taken a class in biology, but I lived this adventure with you— those tissues have, at a histological level, the level of how cells are organized, the possibility of radical histological repair.  

'''Eric:''' This is like a- I mean, I just forget how great of a—

'''Bret:''' And Debbie was an excellent coauthor, strong contributor to the paper. Anyway, we put together over the course of a year, I took a break from, effectively, my real dissertation work, and wrote a paper. Dick thought it was a fantastic paper. He was blown away by it—

'''Bret:''' Yup. It's so profound on several different levels that I'm super energized about getting this into the world. It's transformative. Dick looks at the paper, he says, “This is fantastic”. He puts me through the ringer to get it really tight. We get it tight. We send it to George Williams, the—

'''Bret:''' It’s the craziest thing, and you know, the cherry on top is that they're turning down George Williams’ recommendation? Like, how cra— do they know who he is? Like, what? Where?

'''Bret:'''In my paper, which is the natural thing to do. And she says, “we're not going to publish it. We're going to keep the information “in house.” That was her phrase. I was too young to understand what the hell she was talking about.

'''Bret:''' Not even that. It's medical testing, but it's also all of the science relative, at least, to cancer, senescence, wound healing— all of the science that is stacked on these mice that is contingent on their function relative to their tiers is all compromised. You're letting year after year of this stuff accumulate. It's malpractice at an incredible level. So, I don't know that she has turned on me, but I call her up, and I say, “Carol, we are stunned to find that our paper was turned away without review from Nature—”

'''Eric:''' No but you haven’t told this in enough—

'''Bret:''' I'm pretty sure I know, based on what they- again, I was too young to sort out really what they were saying, but they indicate that they're fans of antagonistic pleiotropy, so what happened was George Williams, having heard that it got rejected, contacted some friends of his and was like, you should really take a look at this. So I begin the process of revising it. I've shown it to Carol, she's panned it. I send the revised version to Experimental Gerentology. They send it out for review. As you know, review is blind. You don't know who your reviewers are, but you can often tell who they are. It's not as obscure—  

'''Bret:''' But I don't want to not acknowledge her, so I acknowledge her separately. Experimental Gerontology then— I am 99% sure— sends the paper to her as the reviewer. She pans it. Absolutely brutal critiques, just pages and pages and pages of them. They are not high quality critiques. I could go through every single one.  

'''Bret:''' But I didn't know what to do because she was in line for a Nobel Prize, that was well understood. I didn't want to accuse a leading light of the field of,

'''Eric:''' Okay, this is exactly why I got angry with the beginning of the podcast, you moron. No, no offense. You were in line for a Nobel Prize. You didn't- I mean- I'm sorry. There is an aspect of this about giving away your power, before you’ve even accumulated—you don't even have a PhD at this time.

'''Bret:''' I'm just saying, at the time, if you mentioned her name, people would say, “Oh yeah, her Nobel Prize is one of these years.” Right? So my point was, I was in the awkward position— I didn't understand what I was supposed to do. I didn't want to send back a review that said, “I don't know who the person is who reviewed this, but they don't understand the material, and all of their critiques suck”, because I didn't want to accuse somebody who was that powerful of not getting it.