SIO518: Biological Definitions Do Not Do What Richard Dawkins Says They Do

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:11 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 518. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and I'm excited for today's episode. Really good one today. Dr. Eric Jaffe, friend of the show, biologist and dinosaur enthusiast, had a number of potential topics, but he mentioned one thing that seemed really interesting to me, and that is about biological definitions. You hear a lot about the biological definition of fill in the blank. And I'm guessing you filled in that blank with gender or sex, because there's a lot of really bad faith people, or maybe people who don't know any better, who try to weaponize biology or what they think biology is to use a definition to say, therefore, trans people don't exist or whatever. And I think most people who listen to the show probably don't go for that argument for many reasons. But Dr. Eric Jaffe has another really interesting reason why that isn't a valid move. It has to do with what definitions in biology even are and what they're doing. And I just thought it was so fascinating. So I'm really excited to hear about this. And after that, we're going to take some of your questions. We put on a question thread on patreon.com/seriouspod, got some fun biology questions and Eric's going to answer many of them. You wouldn't believe the freaky stuff that certain plants and animals get up to reproductive wise. I mean, it'll make you blush. All right, well, I'm excited to get to it. Thanks so much for tuning in. Please share this show if you find it useful. Word of mouth is really the only way anything grows anymore. And so it's really important. All right. We'll take a little break, which you can avoid at patreon.com/seriouspod and get that Q&A thread and the bonus goodies by pledging as little as a dollar. Thanks so mucho to our supporters and after this break we're going to be on with Dr. Eric Jaffe. Dr.

0:02:13 Thomas: Eric Jaffe, how are you doing? Oh wow, well there you go. Sounds like good news.

0:02:14 Eric: If you had asked me a couple of days ago, I would have been doing pretty terribly, but now I'm doing pretty great. So I thought my dog was going to need a $15,000 hip replacement, but luckily just physical therapy and no activity restrictions. And, you know, a couple days ago I was closing out the school year and all that, but we just closed up our grade book. So next week it's a little bit of babysitting and then it's all summer break. It does mean that this episode could get a little wonky because a lot's been going on recently, but hopefully I can land the plane here.

0:02:37 Thomas: Wow, how rare. It's nice to hear somebody's like, hey things are great. Yeah, I'm really excited for this one. We had, I mean, always so many things to talk about but you mentioned this is kind of one of your ideas. I was like, oh I love that. I feel like not enough people, if anyone, have really talked that much about this concept and I'm real excited. So I'm here for the journey. Take us where you want to take us. Right.

0:02:46 Eric: Yeah, I'm excited about this one too, because like this one's very high level, right?

0:03:06 Eric: Right. We're not going to get in the weeds the way we did kind of in our CRISPR and genetics episodes. This one is much more about how I think about information definitions and stuff as a biologist and how that's very different from how a lot of people think about both biology definitions and information and kind of how it gets weaponized by people with political agendas.

0:03:25 Thomas: It's funny because even right there, I think it kind of gives away the game in a way.

0:03:27 Eric: This is my way to push back and also to reassure you that you're not imitating the next, you know, Richard Dawkins or intellectual dark web person. I think there's a lot of places actually where we do it. And I'll talk about why in just a second. But I think the reason why it's so poignant or visceral in biology is because biology one, it's the study of us tangentially, right? We are living things just like everything else in the world. And it also layers in different levels of complexity that we've talked about before. And that allows for different contextual definitions and working definitions, depending on which kind of layers you're making in that cake of complexity. And so that kind of sets biology apart.

0:03:38 Thomas: Like there's no other field where like the lay person is manipulating definitions. I won't say no other. Yes, lay people get definitions in physics wrong or astrophysics, but it's rarely like a political movement or like a political tactic, you know? But for some reason, when it comes to, let's say gender, a whole bunch of people just think, well, here's the biological definition and therefore you're wrong or whatever. Therefore, trans people don't exist. I don't know. It feels like pretty exclusively a biology thing. I can't really think of many other places where that happens. I love a cake of complexity. Sounds

0:04:40 Eric: Part. We'll see how delicious it gets. And like to show you what I mean by I think this is actually

0:04:42 Thomas: Delicious. Let's blow out the candles on this cake of complex. Right. That's really interesting.

0:04:50 Eric: More present than we think. But I think there's a difference between knowing that definitions are contextual and kind of internalizing what that means and how you use that. And so like I want to start with some very basic stuff first, and then we'll start kind of narrowing into the more biology. One thing I was thinking of is people always tell me and I'm a teacher, so I get this all the time for my students. I'm not good at math and science. But math and science are actually very, very different fields that require very, very different types of thinking. I actually think biology in particular is more similar to history and social studies than it is literature and math. And the reason for that is that difference between deductive and inductive reasoning. In math, everything is deductive. As long as you have your axioms and your definitions sorted, you use those proscriptively to kind of force things into those axioms, right? Whereas in biology and other other inductively reasoned fields, your definitions come as a result of kind of categorizing information of observations, right? They're not proscriptive, they're descriptive. And that makes a huge difference in how you should be using definitions and why you want to define things to begin with. Yeah. We use definitions in biology to make sense of the world around us,

0:06:00 Thomas: Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. I hadn't really thought of it in those terms. I'm still thinking about it. But it is true, like in math, the one reason I'm a little bit skeptical of this idea slightly is that I just think that people mostly hate math.

0:06:05 Eric: Right? But the world around us is constantly changing. We are learning more about the world around us. And it is highly, highly contextual, especially in something as emergent as biology, because biology is really the emergence of chemistry, which is the emergence of physics, right? So we have these layers of emergence that build in context and complexity that changes the way you should think about definitions. And I would argue that's how most of the world is. We don't really take that to heart as often as we do. So this is my way of kind of using biology to show you how at least one scientist, because I don't want to say like every scientist is going to agree with what I'm about to say, but I think I'm going to be able to convince you that we really do want to think of this as how do we use definitions and what is the purpose of a definition and then use that to think about biology. Yeah, I actually think it's

0:07:06 Thomas: So it'd be weird if the thing we're doing is more math related than it is something else related. But what occurs to me, well, OK, but when it comes to, I guess, maybe when I'm talking about the people trying to use the prescriptive definitions, when it come to math,

0:07:13 Eric: The opposite. I think the one we're doing more often is the inductive reasoning. That's absolutely

0:07:25 Thomas: When it comes to something like math, those are actually really important when you're doing proofs or we're doing it like it is actually vitally important that things meet the definition exactly that you're talking about. Otherwise you've like not done your math correctly. Like you've, you've messed up. It's like, oh, if this should yield a perfect right triangle and it does, you know, and it's 89 degrees, well, you messed up, you know, as a stupid example, but it really is true. Like in math, it has to be that precise, especially math that more average people would be familiar with, you know high school proofs or, or algebra, whatever it is, it's very exact. And the definitions feel precise and not only that, but prescriptive, as you're saying, like you have to meet this definition to be a certain thing. Whereas in biology, like it's all, we're just looking around and being like, all right, I guess this is kind of, it goes in this group. And then you're like, oh, well, shit. Well, maybe it goes in that group. Actually, it could go in that group. I remember, I don't know if it was Dawkins, not a great source these days, but somebody said, and I think it's really interesting. I've probably said this before, but if every single animal was alive at the same time, how would you have any species? You know, like everyone that ever existed if you had this entirely gradual like gradient of of evolution throughout all of time you couldn't really even have species in a way right because it's like you would have every single bit along the spectrum right yeah yeah yeah really interesting yeah yeah he's not

0:08:44 Eric: Right. And before I'm going to give you a warning for anyone that wants to partake, this is definitely a puff puff pass episode because we are going to get kind of trippy with it, right? But I would argue that that's still a problem even with the existing species we have today. And here's the major difference between math and biology. In math, when you change the premises, when you change definitions, you're fundamentally changing the problem. But when you change the definitions to describe a whale, you are still left with a whale regardless of how you are defining it. And so I think that's the rub of where the difference is. Math by definition is deductive and and platonic, whereas biology is inductive and messy, just like the world around us, right? It starts from, we're trying to make sense of the conclusions that we're already observing. Whereas math, you're driving different conclusions that you don't already know from the premises. Before we get to the biology, I wanted to start with a couple of more relatable examples. Now, I am a huge NBA fan, and it's the NBA finals, the Knicks are in, go New York. But what I really want to start is a lot of people are familiar with the fact that basketball has positions. We have our point guard, our shooting guard, Our small forward, our center and our power forward. And typically they have definitions that you sort them into those categories based on the type of player. And then you have a player like LeBron James who comes around, who even though technically the role of the point guard is to run the offense, handle the ball and direct traffic, which LeBron James does 95% of the time for his teams, no one has ever called him a point guard. He has always been listed as a small forward or a power forward. Right, exactly. So then people try to say, well, the definition of point guard is actually not

0:10:22 Thomas: Not particularly small. What the hell's the difference of that? Yeah. Right.

0:10:28 Eric: What you're doing on offense is who you're defending. And if you're defending the guard of the other team, that makes you a point guard. But even that falls apart because LeBron defends all five positions. And Steph Curry, who's one of the greatest point guards of this generation, never defends the opposing ball handler. So what do we do with our definitions then if both of our best players that are quintessential of those different roles fail to meet the definition just out of hand? And yet we have no problem categorizing our positions ad hoc, right? And so what I'm going to try and argue is that definitions only work for the context that you're using them in. LeBron is a point guard at times because he does point guard things. He's a small forward at times, and you can talk about him intelligibly at any of those things and also as none of those things, but it doesn't change who LeBron James is as a basketball player. In the same way, in the Emmys, the category for comedy and drama used to just be, if you were a 30-minute show, you're a comedy. If you were an hour-long show, you're drama. That has completely fallen apart in the streaming era, and now they've changed it more to comedies are episodic by nature and dramas are serial by nature. But what do we do with a comedy like The Good Place, then? And that's because all of these definitions, once you start interacting with the messy real world, are only as good as what you're using them for. How you're doing the sorting and what the purpose of that sorting is. And, that's going to bring us to our first biological example, which is species. Species has a number of different definitions that depend, again, on the context you're working in. But, the one that most people cite that you've probably heard is that two organisms are the same species when they can successfully reproduce and have fertile offspring. But dogs and wolves are different species, and you can have a dog and a wolf breed and they will have fertile offspring, a tiger and a lion are different species. And I forget whether it's the tigon or the liger, but only one of those will have fertile offspring and so if that level of contextualization comes even to what is the the sex of the mom and the dad, how can that be a cogent theory of species when species have both male and female and both genders can interbreed? If it depends on what gender or what sex the male and the female of the tiger and the lion is for producing offspring that are capable of reproducing themselves, how can you use that as a definition of species, when it wouldn't make sense if it's a male and a female, they're the same species. But if it's a female and a male, now they're different species. And not only that, this does really short shrift to bacteria, who of course

0:12:55 Thomas: Yeah. That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. Yeah, I still don't know.

0:13:02 Eric: Reproduce asexually. So the definition of species and bacteria is, are you 70% different at a DNA level? So here we're already seeing that depending on the organism you're working in, depending on the context you're looking in, you have to be fungible with your definition of species to make sense of the world around us. A species of bacteria is not the same as a species of human, and a species of human is not necessarily even the same of two closely related species of mammal. Does that kind of make sense? Okay, so I want to start with that, that all definitions are descriptive, right? There's currently a debate right now whether two populations of orcas are or are not members of the same species, right, whether they're two closely-related species in the same genus or if they're 2 separate species entirely. But no matter which side of the coin we fall on eventually, eventually, it won't change the fact that those orcas are exactly as related as they are to each other before we even start having this debate. So that's the first point I want to work. And this gets even more ridiculous when we bring it back to the very first podcast we ever recorded, which is birds. Are birds reptiles? Exactly, right? Because reptiles and birds are two different,

0:14:10 Thomas: Yeah. I don't know what the hell those are. I have no idea, gun to my head. Don't know

0:14:13 Eric: I forget whether it's class or order, right, but birds are also dinosaurs which fall under the a reptile umbrella. So here, again, depending on whether you're talking about evolutionary history or morphological characteristics, you end up with two different definitions of what a bird is. And that's how biology works in general. We layer on these different definitions that are important for the particular study we work on, but that doesn't necessarily mean that these are universal rules that we have to follow. It gets even weirder, and this is going to answer a question from the Q&A thread when we talk about fungi. Because fungi are among the weirdest organisms. Fungi, like our mushrooms, they're not plant, they're not animal, they're not protist. And

0:14:56 Thomas: Yeah. No, but like in this conversation, like what is it exactly? It's such a weird thing. It's not a plant. Or is it? I don't know. What a bunch of freaks. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, on a philosophical level, I love this kind of discussion. Early philosophy is so fascinating. Obviously, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, all that.

0:15:07 Eric: Even more so, they can both reproduce sexually and asexually, right? They can either do budding or they can do sexual reproduction. They can either exist in a single cell or a multicellular organism, depending on the stage of their life cycle. So you can't really class them in a neat thing, nor can you really class sex as a neat thing based on that fungi. And that is the important part, right? Because even though fungi do sex, their sex looks nothing like humans, and they don't have sexes, even though they do sexual reproduction. You're absolutely right. And not

0:15:48 Thomas: So, you know, in that quote that all modern philosophy is just footnotes to Plato, not true, but also kind of true. Like, it's really interesting, but it still has this central limitation of this expectation that things are going to categorize neatly, you You know, and I know a lot of it is pointing out when the categories don't work out, but there's always the expectation that they will and they do try to reconcile that. But there's no real reason. Like I was having a reaction when you're saying how fungi work, they reproduce asexually or not and all this stuff. And it's like, I'm feeling, wow, that's so surprising. And it's like, wait, why is that surprising? What about the world would give me the idea that I even have the right to expect what that would be? You know? And it's like, I think it's because as humans, we tend to just start with what's really familiar and nearby. And oftentimes, that is stuff, broadly speaking, that's maybe a little more categorizable. And then as we get more minute, especially when you look at something like, you know, quantum physics, like stuff felt all neat with the cannonballs and the billiard balls and with all that. And it's like, we get to a point where like, wait a minute, none of this is intuitive at all. And there is a real reaction people have that's like well, that's not fair. That shouldn't, no fair. You can't have quantum physics. There's a lot of, you know like religious people who like, just don't believe in it. Cause it's like too counterintuitive to their, you know, especially when you talk about time and the fact that something can kind of exist and not exist in a super state. Like I have religious family. That's like, I just don't think that's right. I'm like, why do you not think that's right? What do you have? What right do you have? And it's just because we're forming these expectations, but just because we can form expectations based on kind of what we observe in our lives, that has no real power or bearing over the real world. Mm-hmm.

0:17:29 Eric: Only that, humans are pattern recognition machines, right, we like to see the patterns as they develop and where you have a bias towards kind of confirming those patterns. And so when things buck that pattern, we tend to try and explain them away. But one thing you got me thinking about, which is very aligned to this, is I mentioned I'm a huge NBA fan and it's the NBA Finals. People have a real kind of revulsion to the idea that an individual playoff series is not actually representative of all that much. And we probably can't actually determine who the the best of all time for things like that is, because you can't run repeated controlled experiments. A finals goes very different if a player stubs his toe, and it might be on the court, but he's playing differently at, you know, 85% proficiency for the last four games. But we always go, oh, there's no excuses, we have to win, right? There's a revulsion to accounting for that complexity and understanding that those answers fundamentally elude us. And we prefer the narratives over the actual facts. And by actual facts, I want to be very clear, I don't mean this in the Richard Dawkins sense, right? I mean, in the fact that there is a complex world that we won't make sense of, at least fully. Exactly. Where I was actually thinking you were

0:18:19 Thomas: Yeah, I hate that. It's so stupid. Yeah.

0:18:35 Thomas: Yeah, same thing happens with NHL and hockey where it's like, well, injuries, but all teams are, you know, everybody's dealing with injuries. It's like... Yeah, but it really depends on, like, who it is and what it is. It's, like... If you want to say, yes, they still need to win and it is... Some measure of the team is depth, you know? Roster depth. But it's,like... All right, but if your star player goes down, I mean, you can't really make... people like to have some expectation that you still should be able to do just as well. I don't really know where that comes from. It's funny. I think we're saying the same thing. I'm not sure.

0:19:03 Eric: Going is people still have an expectation that they will be able to get just as good results from that experiment, even though that data was poisoned, right. Well, I think you're saying that you still think they should be able To perform as well. Yes, I'm saying they also think that they are looking at meaningful data, even if they're going, Oh, well, they're playing slightly worse. And I know that, but still no excuses, everyone's injured. What they're fundamentally saying is, I know this data is flawed, and I'm still going to use it in my model of reality. It's kind of the flip side of your coin. But I would argue that's actually kind of what your Dawkins and your Rowlings do when it comes to trans people, right? I have this expectation,

0:19:13 Thomas: No. Well, I'm saying people think that. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Fair enough. I think that's, yeah, slightly different, but I get what you're saying. Yeah yeah. Sorry. Who's the other person? Oh, JK Rowling. Oh, I was in, I wasn't in scientist mode. I was like, wait, wait, do we have another scientist named Rawlings? Yeah. There probably is a transphobic scientist named Rawings. We could find him. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah, I don't know if you have any

0:19:48 Eric: JK Rowling, yeah, we probably do. There's a lot of stuff. But like their fundamental argument is is we have this clean definition of reality and things that don't fit it should be fit into those boxes the way they should without account of the fact maybe you're using the wrong working definition. Exceptions aren't the exceptions in biology. They are built into what we call biological systems, right? All of biology is built around variation. You can't explain away the variations as exceptions because they came about from those same natural processes that drive the more common morphological frequency, right? So all of this is biology. It's just biology is messy. And none of this takes away from the fact that trans people very much exist because we know that they tell us they exist and we have observations that they exist. So if your model is telling you that they are faking it, I would argue your model is oversimplified and wrong. And you should be thinking about how you're using your definitions of sexes if you are a scientist Yes. He should know better, but he falls in at least when he talks publicly. I haven't read too

0:20:57 Thomas: Dawkins quotes, but it's one thing when normies do it, but when Richard Dawkins started doing that shit, it's a disgrace. It's actually a disgrace, he should know way better. I mean, not just a little bit better. He should know massively better. Interesting. Right. Yeah.

0:21:17 Eric: Much of his primary literature, which obviously is not at all related to these issues, right? He's an ethologist that works on kind of behavioral evolution. So this is another example, and I will recognize I'm also a scientist going slightly outside my skis, but I'm coming at this from a more humble position of, I'm not sure I have the correct definition, but these are my broad principles of thinking. Where Dawkins kind of falls into that hole is you're either XX or you're XY. And if you're XX, you're a girl. And if you're XY, you're a guy, right? But that aligns the fact that there is no label XX and XY in biology. That is what humans do as we look at things from a 10,000 foot view. But the X and the Y only matter because of those genes and alleles that they house on those chromosomes, which eventually produce proteins. Any number of mutations will alter the behavior of those chromosomes and make that label meaningless. If the X chromosome isn't behaving like an X chromosome, why does it matter that they have an X chromosome in that particular situation? Not only that, even if you want to use the other definition where it's whoever produces the larger gamete, the larger sex cell is the female. Scientists work in things like cell culture all the time. When I worked in cell culture, which is just a plate of cells, you still had to account for whether your source was male or female. But at this point, there is absolutely no way that the production of sex cells has any bearing on that plate of cells that aren't sex cells, right? Those cells are never going near

0:22:45 Thomas: That's what I am too. I'm just a plate of skin cells.

0:22:46 Eric: The gonads of that organism. They are just a plate of skin cells, a plate of kidney cells that has nothing to do with sex. So maybe you want to say, well, those chromosomes are causing the differential expression of hormones, right. And we should be looking at the hormone levels instead of the size of the gametes or the composition of chromosomes. But now we're already showing that depending on what you're working on, you need to have different definitions to define your stuff, right? I absolutely agree that if you're an OBGYN, a fertility doctor, your definition of sex and gender is absolutely going to involve who produces the large cell gamete, things like that, because that has direct bearing on your stuff. But if I'm a psychologist and I'm working on the brain chemistry, I'm not sure why I care what gametogenesis is. And not only that, if you get a mutation where you don't produce gametes, right, let's say you have a mutation where you can't do meiosis properly, we still have no problem categorizing those people as male or female, and that tells you that that is not the definition we use most of the time. Because if that was the definition we were using, you would have to be agnostic about the gender or sex of those individuals that can't produce gametes. But they didn't, and yet they're

0:23:27 Thomas: Yeah. Right? Yeah. It's always like, well, what about infertile couples? Well, they, you know, they would create a certain whatever if they could, you know, it's always, like, the special pleading. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and let me just quickly, right there, just to stop, because I

0:24:05 Eric: Still able to categorize it, right? So even if you're saying they would, how do you know they would? What other criteria are you using to determine what they would produce? And that's kind of my point is every definition is tied to what you're working in. And so I kind of want to propose something that I'm not sure I heard on other podcasts. I think there's a perfectly reasonable definition of sex that doesn't involve chromosomes or gonads at all. Because we have two two major parts that have to deal with your gender or sexual identity. I will be honest,

0:24:40 Thomas: I think there's different levels of argument that people use. And I know one thing that I think a lot of people say that stands out to me is like, well, sex might be one thing, but gender is a different thing, you know, and it's like already there. It seems good enough to me. Like, I don't know if that's technically correct. So are you saying now? Wait a minute. There's even a definition of sex that is not really what people are saying. OK.

0:25:04 Eric: I want to propose a definition. But before we get there, actually, let me rewind a bit. This is a very human-centric discussion about sex, right? And that makes sense because most of the time we're talking about humans. But you can't even use like when you have the same sex chromosomes, you're a female. And when you have different sex chromosomes, you're a guy. Because if you're bird, it works in the exact opposite way.

0:25:24 Eric: Sex is really — and this is going to answer one of the great Q&A questions — sex is really just the recombination of genetic material in forming a unique organism, right?

0:25:34 Thomas: Hmm.

0:25:34 Eric: So let's say we found aliens. There is no guarantee that even if they were sexual organisms, that they would have sexual dimorphism and have male and female sexes, right. They could have three different sexes. They could have one sex. They could have people that do both sides of reproduction with only one sex organ the way a fungi would, right, because a fungi doesn't have a penis and a vagina to produce its sexual reproduction, and yet it's capable of self-fertilizing as a sexual being. All that sex means is you're not directly copying your DNA. You're doing this shuffling where you're trading pieces from your, what we call, diploid organisms, because you have two copies of each chromosome. In humans, one from the mom, one from the dad. In yeast, you would just have two copies of it. All that sex means is that you're shuffling the two, what you call, homologous chromosomes. The two versions of your chromosomes that have the same genes. And you're randomly shuffling them in ways that increase the amount of diversity. So if we were to find aliens, the way you would know they were sexual is just by looking, are they making exact copies of their DNA? Or are they make a copy of their own DNA? Are they making varied copies of your DNA and the things that will eventually form new aliens? But there is no guarantee that we would have male and female aliens. And so that's kind of my point about all of this stuff is

0:25:49 Thomas: Yeah, that makes sense. Mm hmm, hmm.

0:26:52 Eric: Everything depends on what you need it to mean for the study you're analyzing. And so here's what I would like to propose for thinking about sex. Obviously, what your gonads are producing, right, whether you have a penis or a vagina, whether you're producing sperm or eggs matters in very relevant medical context, right? But most of the time when we are talking about male and females, we are not doing it in the context of fertility. And most people wear pants or a skirt that hides their gonads as they're walking around. And yet most people have no problem sorting people into male or female. So there's clearly other definitions that we use while navigating our day-to-day life. Now that is one version because even there, you could use that to fuel bigotry by saying, look, you're saying you're a girl, but you have a deep voice. And I'm telling you right now, that means you're man, right? You can still find ways to marshal bigotry there, but I want to take one stronger definition of sex. And I'm going to try and introduce this. Let me hear your thoughts. That would just be about inclusivity and accepting people where they're at because your brain is also biological. It's formed by genes. And I actually don't think Richard Dawkins would have a problem thinking about it this way, because I'm pretty sure he's a materialistic atheist. He's kind of well known for this, right? There is no soul or disconnected consciousness separate from our

0:28:04 Thomas: Yeah. Seems rational to me. Yeah. And to your point, it's like for a different purpose,

0:28:08 Eric: Brain, which is formed by biologic processes, right. And our brain is super interesting. And it has different regions that govern different aspects of our consciousness. The same way, this is actually a random tangent that's super interesting, people that get strokes sometimes, will lose their ability not to identify their loved ones, but to still feel that feeling of love that they get from their loved one. And this almost invariably ends up with them thinking that their loved ones were body snatched by aliens. Because they understand that they are looking at someone that should be their loved one, but they feel nothing that they should rationally be feeling as they look at them and they don't have an explanation for it. So they think they're a doppelganger that was switched. That's the level of our brain in determining things like that. And it's obvious to me that we also have a region of our brain that determines our self-identity, our gender, our sex, who we are as a person. Why not just make the definition of sex that we use for things governing in society what sex or gender you identify with in your brain region? Then we're meeting people where we're at. It's still a biological definition, and it's one that we interact with much more often because outside of people you are intimate with, you are interacting with people's brains and personality way more often than you are contracting with their baby-making apparatus. So to me, that's still a biological definition. It's not being hand wavy. It's not doing anything. It's just saying the whole point of this discussion about defining sex and gender is to navigate society. It's way more important for people to have good mental health than for people to be correctly identified by their sex organs. Yeah, that's kind of my main point is we can do both things. You can acknowledge that there are definitions of things. Just be smart about what your definitions are saying. Right. I'm fine giving Richard Dawkins that

0:29:58 Thomas: For a different context. It's silly to just insist that this one kind of definition that you're probably wrong about anyway is the one that everyone is using for all times and places and contexts. Yeah, I'm not sure I follow that. So what is that 97%? Yeah. So then

0:30:12 Eric: Like the definition he uses is a correct definition of sex. It's just not the one that I would use in that situation. In the same way, when I'm growing a plate of cells, I'm not going to use the sex cell definition of sex. I'll use the chromosome definition of sex. And then even further, right, if I silence all of the Y chromosome, I'm probably going to identify those plates of cells as female, even though they have two X chromosomes, let's say I silence using these things called silencing RNAs, right? Basically, every time the Y chromosome is trying to make a protein, I shut it down before it even has a chance to make it. Those plates of cells will behave exactly like the female versions because they're no longer expressing Y. And I don't see why it would make sense to categorize those as male cells just because they have a Y chromosome. We don't do RNA-seq, which is this way of measuring RNA levels for every gene in most people's bodies, right? By definition, we don't know whether those chromosomes are working at the capacity that we think they do to group into those two principal groupings that we call male and female. Because that's really all we're doing in biology when we define something is we're looking at how things group and then drawing circles around those groups in a principal component analysis graph, and then saying, those are our two groups. But this has a couple of other fun things that I want to kind of spur people to think about as we talk about these working definitions, right? This is another really good question that we got in the Q&A thread from General Contact Unit Problem Child. We hear all the time that we share 97% of our DNA with chimps, right? But we look very, very different from chimpanzees. How is that a thing? And what do they mean by 97% similar? And that's the real key. That number comes from only when you analyze coding sequences that we share with chimpanzees, right? Only the pieces of DNA that we have a direct enough match for that we can line them up like we were talking about in that dire wolf episode, right, where we're trying to piece together things that follow the same sequences and then seeing the one or two sequences they diverge. But any gene that was duplicated, so you have a second copy of it, deleted, mutated in such a way that it's no longer able to align with the chimp, by definition gets excluded from those analysis types. And so then you're left with, by definition, very close alignment because it's to the things that you are able to line in the first place. But you could use other definitions and get different numbers of DNA similarity. That does not mean that any of those numbers are wrong. It just means that none of them are the definitive right answer. And all of them have a context that you you want to use them in. 97% is if you take all the genes that actually code for proteins that both we have a version of and chimps have a version of, right? So both of us have the protein. It's

0:33:06 Thomas: So isn't that cherry picking pretty badly? Okay.

0:33:09 Eric: Not cherry picking because it's important because those are the places that are under selective pressure. And so you can kind of quantitate the amount of difference between a human and a chimp and a human in a mouse, because those things will change in evolutionary time in very predictable ways a lot of times, right? But you can do the other analysis, right, where you go, okay, let's see what the total percentage of DNA is, right. If we just go, if you were to share everything, and I think that drops to closer to like 70% or something, that's still going to be closer than it is to mice, which is closer than It is to whales, which Is closer than It is, to trees, right ? The nested hierarchy is going to stay the same, and It will still It'll give you the answer you think, but depending on what type of evolution, what type of mutational change, what typo analysis you want to do, you're going to use different forms of that DNA grouping based on what you're trying to see, right? If I want to see how regulatory sequences change over time, I can't use the coding sequences, but I probably still have to use all the genes we have. But if I want see whether humans were under a certain selective pressure after that divergence from chimps, then I might want to see what is the level of difference in the genes that are duplicated, the genesthat are removed? How quickly were those genes under selective pressure? And did they account for humans becoming more and more human so rapidly? I think there's one famous protein that has to deal with like language acquisition and processing called I think it's DUFF21, or something like that, where humans have dozens of copies of them. And chimps only

0:34:40 Thomas: These names. Yeah, yeah.

0:34:45 Eric: Have like one to three. And they think that's a huge reason why we have that language and in cognitive processing that we have now. Now, that's not going to be the only thing, but that's something that would get picked up in the analysis we just talked about. That's 97% similar because those are all duplicated genes that would no longer map on to once we've covered one DUFF21 gene, we've already done that alignment and analysis. And each of those genes are now free to mutate in a myriad of different ways to find specialized function, like we talked about in forming a fork from a couple of knives. And so that's really what what I want people to take away from this particular episode is that when you think about definitions, you don't want to use them like a lawyer, right? A lawyer uses definitions to try and win an argument and force them to work for them. Whereas in biology and in science, you want definitions to be a passive thing that you are getting after you've already decided what you want to do. And then you get the definition later, right, you almost start with the conclusion

0:35:16 Thomas: Okay. I think I get it. Right.

0:35:46 Eric: And work back to the premise in biology a lot of time because you start with the observation and then figure out how you got there.

0:35:51 Thomas: Because you can't change that for sure.

0:35:53 Eric: Exactly, right? The orca is still an orca regardless if we call it a new species of orca. I was actually thinking if we have some extra time, did you want to do some of the Q&As? Yeah, so there's a couple of really interesting ones. Let's say we run into aliens and this is from General Contact Unit Problem Child again. Let's say we run into aliens. How will we know if aliens came from the same evolutionary lineage of us or if they were a completely separate lineage?

0:36:32 Thomas: Like if it was a panspermia type thing.

0:36:34 Eric: Exactly. And there I would go back to the genetic code. I think we've talked about this a lot, but every three letters of DNA, well, first of all, I would start there. They are going to have something that we could or could not call DNA, right? And here's what I mean by that. DNA, as we know on earth, is always A, G, C, and T with a deoxyribose sugar and a phosphate linking those nucleotide bases. But DNA is important not because of that individual specific stuff, but because of the function it does as a molecule of heredity and information storage, right? If aliens have a self-propagating molecule of hereditary storage, I think I'm fine calling that DNA or I'm fine calling that something different. It depends on how you want to talk about it. So I would say the way you would do that is you would look at first, you'd see, do they have the same basis? Because DNA can have other bases, right? RNA already uses one of those other bases, uracil. But when we work in the lab, you can actually turn DNA into what we call degenerative bases, where they cover both A and G, both C and T, right, by modifying the chemistry. Because not to belabor this point, the A, G, C, and T are labels humans add after the fact for the ease of categorization. All that matters is the structure of the chemical and how it interacts with other chemical structures. And anything within a tolerable allowance will will likely do something very similar to DNA. So the first thing I'd look at is do they have the same basis? Let's say they do have the same bases. They have A, G, C, and T. I would then ask, does AUG code for methionine? Because the whole point of the genetic code is to build amino acids

0:38:16 Thomas: What a natural question. Sorry.

0:38:23 Eric: Into proteins. And if their code recruits different amino acids, they are already different from literally every other organism on Earth. Every organism on Earth uses AUG for methionine. It's like CCC for proline. I don't remember these well enough, so I'm not going to be put on the spot. But the reason I remember AUG is because another fun fact is every single gene in every single organism on planet Earth starts with the amino acid methionine. That is always the start codon.

0:38:53 Thomas: That's interesting.

0:38:53 Eric: There is no reason for AUG to code for methionine because the structure of the thing that has both the anticodon, the thing that recognizes that AUG, and the thingthat brings the amino acid, it's the same structure, are completely decoupled. You can make modified tRNAs in the lab where AUG brings over a glycine, a proline, whatever you want it to bring, and it doesn't mess up biological life. The only reason our genetic code is shared among all organisms on Earth is because we all inherited it from the same common ancestor. So the way I would look at panspermia is just look at the genetic code. Do they code for the same amino acids? Are they using the same bases? And do the codons correspond to the correct things? And again, not to belabor this point, it depends what

0:39:38 Thomas: Interesting. So setting the panspermia thing aside, is it too human centric or earth centric to think like this? Is there some majorly different way that that stuff could have evolved? Or is it going to have to be, to our knowledge, something similar enough to DNA? I mean, it's a kind of a creative like thought exercise, I guess. But yeah, right.

0:39:59 Eric: You mean by similar, right? Because I could say similar just means it needs those base properties of being able to retain information in an auto-replicative process, right. I could picture AI robots that eventually developed the ability to self-replicate in a way that is not tied to a DNA molecule, right? We could mean DNA to mean, is it a deoxyribose sugar with a nitrogenous base connected by phosphodiester bonds? That one almost definitely there's other ways around because we had RNA before DNA and RNA also would have been capable of that self-replication, just not as well as DNA. So I would say that's the main thing. And then to answer the second Second part of that question from general contact unit problem child, we would be able to tell if they have DNA because we have a couple of different techniques. If we have a sample of it, we could extract it. First of all, we could align it to other organisms on Earth, but there's chemical properties and molecular properties of DNA, right? It's got an absorbent spectrum, emission spectrum when you shine different wavelengths of light on it. It has an x-ray diffraction pattern that we could easily see. All of those are things that we could could easily pick up once we have a sample of it. It might be a little harder to do that from far away, but we'd be able to identify living things based on the metabolism that we already know, which is why there's some suggestion that there's something funky going on in Venus, where they're seeing metabolites from things that look like microbial respiration. But that is a

0:41:26 Thomas: What does that mean?

0:41:26 Eric: Very speculative thing. This question about definitions and everything also ties into

0:41:27 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, okay. I'm not sure what those words meant, but sure. Mm.

0:41:34 Eric: Another one of General Contact Unit Problem Child's questions, and that's how do new chromosomes appear in evolution? And this builds off the previous answer because the only thing that matters is do you have competent sequences of DNA that will code for functional protein? And what happens when we get new chromosomes is during meiosis, during the generation of sex cells, right? We basically have to split apart our homologous chromosomes because you only get one from mom and one from dad. Otherwise you'd have too many chromosomes. And those things before they split apart actually tangle up with each other in this process called crossing over. Picture like pipe cleaners that you wound around each other before trying to pull them apart. Once they pull apart, oftentimes they break away pieces from each other and you end up with mix and matches of those homologous chromosomes. That's the key to sexual reproduction and why it's kind of genetic variation on steroids is that mixing and matching that happens when they get tangled up. But every once in a while, you have a complete what we call non-disjunction. Non-disjunction is when basically the entire chromosome gets pulled along to one side, and you're not left with two cells with one copy of each. You're left with one cell with zero copy and one cell with two copies, right? All that's needed for that to get locked into evolution, and this is where time and numbers do a lot of the heavy lifting. I'm going to admit that this this is very hand wavy. All you need is an instance where that happens, where an entire

0:43:11 Eric: Chromosome gets conjoined without a deleterious effect, right? Instead of causing down syndrome, it doesn't have a bad effect or it has an effect, but the environment changes in a way that now it's a good effect. And then you find another organism that has that same mutation. They have a baby and now you have a fully diploid organism just with a different number of chromosomes. Exactly. At at least eventually it will. This is where time and numbers really do the heavy lifting, right?

0:43:33 Thomas: So they have to have the same mutation, though? Oh. That seems so unlikely, but I guess, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Mm.

0:43:44 Eric: Because if you don't find another one with that same mutation, you'll have what's called aneuploidy throughout time, right, because you'll just keep kind of having that extra chromosome come along for the ride without that requisite partner to split apart in meiosis. So one of them would keep getting sorted with one extra chromosome and one less chromosome, if that makes sense.

0:44:02 Thomas: I don't totally understand it, but yeah.

0:44:02 Eric: So like picture, I've got one parent that had 37 chromosomes, one dad that had 36, one mom that had 36. I now am making my own sex cells. I line up all 36 pairs of chromosomes from mom and dad, but there's still that one extra one. Half of the gametes will have 36 chromosomes.

0:44:20 Thomas: Yeah. And so what happens?

0:44:24 Eric: Half of them will have 37 chromosomes because there's no pair for that other one to get split apart with. Does that kind of make sense? It's the equivalent of the last kid in gym class and you go, okay, we'll have one extra on our team. What happens is if it has a bad effect, that's not going to persist in evolutionary time, and it will cause deleterious things like Down syndrome.

0:44:31 Thomas: I mean, kind of, but just, yeah? Yeah. So what happens then? Right. Okay.

0:44:45 Eric: But if it doesn't have a bad effect and helps them navigate, it will stick around in the population until now you have two organisms with that particular trait. They come together with

0:44:54 Thomas: Right. And if it doesn't have a bad effect, maybe it can just hang around a sec until it finds a match.

0:44:56 Eric: That selective advantage, and now you Have an extra chromosome in this proto species. Exactly. It's kind of waiting for the right environment to select for it. That also happens in the reverse way in the way that chimps have 48 chromosomes to our 46 chromosomes, right?

0:45:06 Thomas: Yeah. Interesting. Hmm. Hmm.

0:45:17 Eric: We had a fusion, I think it's like chromosome two and chromosome 21, those or 20, it's one of the 20 chromosomes, those fuse together. And you can actually see this, because when you align chimp chromosome to the sequences, like we just talked about, right, when you try and match up the genes to chromosome two in chimps and chromosome two, and humans, they are exactly the same with an extra piece from that extra chimp chromosome, right? And if you just take the sequences from both of them, they map pretty cleanly onto that human mega chromosome. But the key here is no one really cares if you have 22 or 21 chromosomes. All that matters is are you making functional protein? And as long as you're making functional protein, you have the ability to have evolution selective against that. Another really interesting question from my favorite questioner is can different DNA sequences result in the same physical trait? Like can Shar Pei dogs and Bombay cats both have black fur, but does it result from totally different DNA pathways? And the answer is absolutely. And there's a number of ways you can think about this, but remember that the whole

0:46:23 Eric: Reason we have traits is because of proteins that code for them, right? So maybe black fur happens because you're producing more of a certain pigment that's catching and bending more light. Maybe that happens because you get a mutation where the protein is folding differently, where it's capturing more light internally. Maybe you're getting a mutation where you're overproducing that protein because of a mutation in a regulatory sequence, and now you haven't changed the protein, you just have a lot more of it. Think of this as like black to graying hair. The amount of protein you have is going to matter just as much as the folding, and those are two different types of mutations. You can also have a mutation in the gene that deposits the pigment, right? The protein that's responsible for making sure sure the pigment goes to the right place. There are multiple ways to become albino. All you need to do is disrupt pigment deposition. And then it could get even more fun because things like birds and insects a lot of times don't even use pigment themselves to get color. They use the structure of their feathers to catch and bend light. They do a biological iridescence instead of a pigmentation.

0:47:22 Thomas: Oh, is that why they say, what is it, like a blue jay isn't blue or something like that?

0:47:26 Eric: And so they will have different colors depending on the angle of sunlight even. But that's still caused by different genes causing different proteins to fold in different ways. That is almost definitely what they mean. But again, I would argue much like we've been talking about with sex, I'm not really that interested in what really is blue or not because I'm fine with either of those definitions, right? All that matters is what is the end result. Another really good question is how was genetic engineering done before CRISPR was invented? Before the generation one of what we call DNA editing technology, what you would have to do is you'd have to grow bacteria with this extra chromosomal piece of DNA called the plasmid, a little circle of DNA that produces the protein or the thing that you would want to do. And then you would basically have to introduce that DNA into the cell, tissue, or organism by different methods where they now have an extra piece of chromosome that isn't one of our 23 pairs, just a random circular bacterial DNA that is able to produce a protein that will help us change our traits. It can produce an RNA that will turn off other things. And the way you would get that into like a mouse embryo is you would do what's called electroporation, where you'd run an electric signal taking advantage of the fact that DNA is negatively charged. And you use that to kind of push it into the cells of other organisms of the organism you're trying to add. Now we did get slightly better than that in like, I believe it was the 90s, where we had these things called TALENs and zinc finger nucleases. Now, especially the zinc finger nuclease, you can always tell what an enzyme, a protein that does reactions is going to do based on its name, right? It will end in ace and the first part will do what it targets. The nuclease targets nucleotides. They're ways of cutting and editing DNA. That's actually exactly what CRISPR-Cas9 is. Cas9 is also a nuclease.

0:47:38 Thomas: Or one of those? Blue bird isn't Blue? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

0:49:22 Eric: The only major difference and the real key to why CRISPR is so much more favored and why it's so game-changing, is zinc finger nucleases and TALENs are based on the protein that recognizes DNA sequences and makes the cut, whereas CRISPR and Cas9 uses RNA sequences to recognize DNA. And that matters for three major reasons. One, it's a lot easier to order RNA from your local company than it is to produce and grow your own proteins in the lab. Two, because it's at at the same base pair level as DNA, it's speaking the same nucleic acid language instead of amino acid, you can be much more specific and it's much more cheap. And what that means is you can do a lot more iteration and a lot more replications that allow you to really, really kind of throw paint at the wall and see what sticks in a way that you can't really with zinc finger nucleases and talents. So what CRISPR is really game changing for is what we call forward genetic extremes. Basically, let's say I want to know what causes spina bifida, right? The thing I used to study. I would make a library of CRISPRs that have RNA targeting literally every single gene in an organism's genome. And because it's so cheap and easy to make, I would inject one of those into a bunch of different cells, a bunch OF different organisms, whatever you're screening, right. And then I would just look which one has the trait I'm looking for, what genes were turned off, that must be the gene that's causing this pathway. That's much harder to do with those protein-based ones because you have to grow and figure out protein sequences for each DNA and they're not the same language and it takes a lot more effort to grow proteins. It's actually one

0:51:01 Thomas: Hmm. I didn't realize it was a cost thing. It's like that's a part of the advantage of it. It. That's a good question. Yeah. Oh, wow. But I thought they were gonna cure cancer. Wow. Oh, yeah. That's

0:51:08 Eric: Of the things I loved most about the Project Hail Mary movie in terms of science is when they had all of this fancy, fancy equipment and the groundbreaking discovery they made was with cardboard box and duct tape. Sometimes you do want to do the quick and dirty because it allows you to be more creative in the moment and do a lot more things at once. And then once you validated something, you might use the more expensive one. Now, this is actually slightly different just because those more expensive and slower ones also weren't as accurate or specific as CRISPR, because again, they're speaking a different language. It would be like trying to use Google Translate to edit a book instead of just editing with the native tongue. Let's try and hit up some ones from not general contact unit problem child. Colby Buckets wanted to know, my question was, how do you think the Trump admin has impacted genetic research such as CRISPR and mRNA therapies? Were his illegal budget cuts a major blow to future medical advances? The answer is absolutely unequivocally yes. Especially the mRNA stuff, which probably won't even be most important for its viral applications. It's going to be super important for personalized genetic cancer therapy. Because if you can customize the RNA to match each person's individual mutation in cancer, you can find ways to silence and attack those individual subtypes of cancer for each individual person and do it quickly and cheaply. So that's just a huge blow to cancer research in general, as well as our ability to be ready for future pandemics. But the other major thing that the budget cuts did, and this was a deeply, deeply stupid thing, was they limited what was called overhead operating costs, right? Indirect costs in grants. And these were things basically like when I was sequencing a sample of DNA, I could try to do it in-house and do all the stuff in our own equipment.

0:52:49 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Right. Now, this was so stupid. Right. So this was the thing. The thinking was like, oh, we're

0:52:58 Eric: But then we'd have to buy our own DNA sequencer. I'd have to get really good at doing pyro sequencing, which is like basically chopping up DNA one base pair at a time or using these things that terminate the ability to elongate DNA and then going, okay, the first chain of elongation was just an A and it can't go any further than that. Then there's enough A's that are able to elongate that it picks up an A that's safe, but then stops at the next one that can't elongate. And now we've got a two two base pair sequence of A and T, right? And you keep iterating that to build the order of DNA. That's a lot of time, effort, and money in the lab. So what I would do is I would send it to our university sequencing core, where they have dedicated technicians, scientists, and equipment, where their only job is to do that. And that saves a ton of money, but that would count as an indirect cost on the grant. Not only that, the PI doesn't want to pay for the electric bill as you're running that confocal microscope in an overnight imaging experiment, right? They don't want to pay for the nitrogen gas that is keeping the animal facility stocked with the things we need for euthanasia and stuff. All of that is paid for by the university, and it's shared among the entire suite of biological researchers in a way that's really hard to aggregate or disaggregate into individual labs. So that was always just put in as, we are just going to say whatever your indirect direct costs are, we are going to cover it because that's not really a function of choices you're making. That's really just you have to function in the shared facility, right? That's not what

0:54:30 Thomas: Gonna get rid of this. Is just top heavy, you know. This is going to salaries of administrators or whatever. So there's something. So they're like, yeah, yeah, well you should have gotten them first.

0:54:39 Eric: It was doing. Don't get me wrong. There's absolutely administrative costs that probably some people getting paid too much. But that's not what those grant numbers were doing. And similar to what we've been talking about, people are just maliciously using things in the wrong context that might technically be right in some way, but doesn't actually address the thrust of what's at issue. I have a couple of questions from listener Lydia Smith that I wanted to get to very quickly. Well, I would argue we did because the main one is as a middle school, now high school teacher teaching biology, do you have students that have questions about sex versus gender? And are you permitted to engage in that discussion in your district? I am so very lucky that I've given this exact spiel to my students when they ask questions about sex and gender. They are absolutely empowered to interrogate their own identities. I had one student, obviously I'm going to keep the information private, but she was pregnant throughout the year and used our discussion on meiosis, gametogenesis, reproduction, and evolution to really ask questions specific to the journey her own growing organism was going through. And so I absolutely encourage that. And I'm so, so thankful that I have an administration team that recognizes that that is just as important as growing young adults as the actual information themselves. To answer another one of her questions, all of this messiness, all

0:55:18 Thomas: First. Yeah. Right. That's a great question. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's a Great question, yeah. Assume spherical gonads. Whoa, whoa, I do not want

0:56:15 Eric: Of this contextualization, these layers of complexity is what I love about biology compared to other sciences. There is no just ignore friction and solve this problem in biology, right? You always have to keep those layers of complexity. And for someone with ADHD like me, yeah, exactly, right? So for someone with my particular brand of hyperactive ADHD, that spinning of multiple intellectual plates at the same time is just really cool. And then beyond that, I think it just should be obvious that like cheetahs are way cooler than strontium atoms, right? You can go to a zoo and watch the product of biology. Fair, but I'm just saying like when I was in, well, what was funny is when I

0:56:55 Thomas: To start this feud on my, jeez, we're going to, I'm going to get canceled by team strontium there go my patrons animals yeah I don't know what those are either

0:57:06 Eric: Was working in the lab, I would forget that the reason I cared about biology, because I was a cellular biologist working in very molecular fields, I would have to go to a zoo every once in a while and go, oh, right, that's why I got interested in biology. It's getting all these things to come together to let the cheetah be super impressive as it runs. And then it gets really trippy because then I was studying the praxis for becoming a high school biology teacher and 90% of it I had covered and I completely forgot that I needed to know what a pistil and and stamen were, because plant biology just wasn't a thing for me, even though plants are super, super cool and super interesting. Oh, pistil and stamin are the sex organs of flowers. And germane to this discussion, they are both sexual beings and not something you can call either male or female. Some of them you can't even call hermaphroditic, because they still have two separate sex organs, and they can use them separately or together at the same time. Plants are absolutely freaky. If you want to get really weird with it, strawberries have like 16 copies of each of their DNA the same way we have two. They have these things called polyploidy and plants kind of freak me out. Plants are absolutely poly. They are the most poly organisms, actually

0:57:44 Thomas: Interesting oh wow huh wow freaks they're all freaks plants are polyamorous, nice Nice. Ooh.

0:58:22 Eric: Slime molds, which is answering Jenessa Seymour's question,, what is my favorite weird biology thing? I promise every listener, when you get off of this episode, go to YouTube and research slime molds are weird, because slime molds are these single-celled protists that work as a multicellular colony, even though they're each their own individual cellular identity. You can see where I'm going, where definitions and things are just fungible here. But they demonstrate a sort of collective intelligence way beyond the ability of a single cell. They can trailblaze, they can solve mazes. Ants are kind of the same way, where each individual ant's an idiot, but the colony is super intelligent or supra intelligent. Yeah, unfortunately we go the other way.

0:59:06 Thomas: We have that where each human is an idiot, but together we're even stupider. That's, uh... Yeah.

0:59:14 Eric: Although tongue in cheek aside, right?

0:59:14 Thomas: Yeah. Right, right, right.

0:59:16 Eric: Like there is a lot of data that shows that crowdsourcing things can often improve results because of the wisdom of crowds.

0:59:21 Thomas: Yeah. Jurassic Park.

0:59:22 Eric: One final question. Favorite science movie and most accurate science movie. It should shock no one what my favorite science movie is. It is Jurassic Park.

0:59:31 Thomas: I knew it.

0:59:31 Eric: Exactly. For the most accurate,

0:59:32 Thomas: That's a good one too. Ooh.

0:59:34 Eric: I'm going to go way off book here and I'm gonna out myself as one of those weird adults that watch cartoons. Because the best science media I've seen in the past five years is an anime called Cells at Work that was written by a former doctor and is the most accurate, specific, anthropomorphic depiction of human biomedical science that I've ever seen.

0:59:50 Thomas: Weird.

0:59:57 Eric: And now that we are in the downtime of the school year, that is what I'm going to be playing for a week straight as I babysit my kids.

1:00:03 Thomas: Wait, what? Is it just an educational thing or is it an actual like, hmm.

1:00:06 Eric: No, it's like an actual cartoon, but it's quasi-educational. It's about this red blood cell as she goes about her day, learning from a white blood cell and other types of organisms, but it deals with infection, cancer, influenza, and it does it at a level of medical accuracy that I'm frankly astounded by. Similarly, you've probably gotten this shout out from other people, all of my doctor friends say that the pit absolutely is about that life when it comes to what a hospital is actually like, and they do a very good job with their medicine. Fair.

1:00:32 Thomas: Man. I, maybe I'll watch it someday. Day. I, for dumb reasons I'll admit, I bet it's great, but I just don't like that lead actor. I just like, don't Like him personally. So I'm like, I just, I'm sure it's good. Maybe I, maybe I'll get over myself eventually and watch it. Cause I do hear it is really good. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Nice.

1:00:49 Eric: Fair. It is pretty incredible. My suggestion is to binge it when you have like time because it does it in real time. So like it really pays off kind of binge watching. Exactly. I'm really glad

1:01:04 Thomas: Well, this was so much fun. I can't pretend that I understood all of it, but I did my best, but important take home. I really loved that, uh, take a bong hit and pass it along, but not really. I I mean, it makes perfect sense. You know, when you talk about definitions, I think it's really interesting to think about the prescriptive versus descriptive and how much obviously biology is going to be descriptive. Like, it's just obvious. Like you said, you're starting with the thing you're trying to study. In math, you didn't. It's not really like that. Math, there's a lot of stuff we just created entire fields of mathematics out of nothing. We made it. And if we're making it, well, then we got to, you know, make the definitions we wanted. And it was important. It was vital to have precise definitions. Mathematically it's just not that way with biology. It's a really uh good take-home lesson I think and I am an inductive... girl? Absolutely well, Dr. Eric Chaffee, thanks so much glad that your uh dog is

1:01:50 Eric: That sunk in because that was my biggest worry is I thought I was maybe saying something that was kind of obvious, but I thought we don't really internalize what that means. And my push for everyone is to remember that we live in an inductive and descriptive world and be very very careful about how you're using definitions as you navigate reality. What is the purpose of the definition you're using and why does it make sense to use it in that situation? I am too, because this would have been a very different episode if I needed to go to the right wing grift to get some money for that surgery. Yeah. If you start seeing me on the Dark Horse podcast saying that there's only two genders, just know Bucky's going through it.

1:02:17 Thomas: Okay you'll know how eric's dog is doing based on whether or not he changes his tune oh my god yeah when are we going to start a response channel that's just like this idiot doesn't know what he's talking about because I'm I might be down yeah man we I will have to figure it out

1:02:34 Eric: Hey, it's summer break. If you ever want a debunking, I've got time. I really do think that like, and I'm totally open to doing like a Patreon bonus.

1:02:45 Thomas: On youtube though we gotta go to where it is you know I'm skeptical of that but we could try it

1:02:51 Eric: This, I think that the first time I show you a picture of a ribosome translating RNA into protein, basically everything I've been saying will make sense. Cheers. Have a great day.

1:03:03 Thomas: All right that was so much fun thanks a lot thanks for listening everybody and we'll see you next time I still don't know assume spherical gonads there go my patrons

1:03:08 Eric: This is definitely a puff puff pass episode. Are birds reptiles?