Speaker 1: This is me Eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bug bitten in my case, underwear lessening Hunt podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are
Speaker 1: the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the
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Speaker 1: where you stand with on X? All right? Can I
Speaker 1: call you Professor dug Emlin. That's right, it works, Okay,
Speaker 1: tell people what you do. I'm a biologist. I'm an
Speaker 1: evolutionary biologist, and I study animal weapons at University of Montana.
Speaker 1: Out there I got to take care of. Now. I'm
Speaker 1: a biologist at the University of Montana, and uh, most
Speaker 1: of my time I work on rhinoceros beetles with horns,
Speaker 1: but more generally, I'm interested in how and why animal
Speaker 1: weapons get really big, including dear teeth, saber tooths. Yeah,
Speaker 1: including all of those things. We can talk about any
Speaker 1: of them that you want to. One of the things
Speaker 1: I stumbled on a few years ago while trying to
Speaker 1: write a book was realizing that all these things that
Speaker 1: we learned about insects and about beetles applied to things
Speaker 1: like deer. And then the more I looked and the
Speaker 1: more I dug into the sort of nitty gritty of
Speaker 1: the biology, the more convinced I became that the same logic,
Speaker 1: the same rules apply to all these cases of really
Speaker 1: extreme weapons, including, to my astonishment, military technologies. Yeah, sort
Speaker 1: of day to day research is on is on rhinoceros beetles.
Speaker 1: The fact is, the concepts I study, the things I
Speaker 1: think about applied just as much to military technologies as
Speaker 1: they do to animal weapons. Okay, a couple quick things.
Speaker 1: You do you know that you know? You know my
Speaker 1: sister in law, I just figured this out two days ago.
Speaker 1: Who is now You're one of her stituents. Remember when
Speaker 1: Clinton was being impeached and and there was this debate
Speaker 1: about whether or not character matters. Yeah, she has character.
Speaker 1: I think I could have told you that Rush Limbaugh
Speaker 1: said character is above all else at the time he
Speaker 1: felt that and um, yeah, she fits that point too.
Speaker 1: You're comparing it to Russia. No, No, I'm saying that.
Speaker 1: I'm saying that there was a debate, like, Okay, there
Speaker 1: was a debate at the time in the nineties. There
Speaker 1: was like there was this debate where people were saying,
Speaker 1: um that, you know, a president does what he does
Speaker 1: and character doesn't matter. Right, It's like it's it's it's
Speaker 1: nice that they have good character, but it's not good
Speaker 1: character is not essential for the job. And so at
Speaker 1: the time, people that were voicing the opposite opinion were
Speaker 1: understandably from the opposite side of the aisle, and so
Speaker 1: they were like, oh my god, does character ever matter?
Speaker 1: Like that's character out limball, that characters above ball else.
Speaker 1: And then you know later in subsequent administrations, the people
Speaker 1: who voiced the the importance of character have dramatically shifted.
Speaker 1: But I want to get another point now, um uh,
Speaker 1: I think I told you this before. Dog the best
Speaker 1: one of the best lines in your book, isn't your Lineinstein? Quote? Yeah?
Speaker 1: What do you call it? When you put a quote
Speaker 1: it to be of a book? What doesn't ea mean
Speaker 1: later we'll look it up really quick. I should know
Speaker 1: when you die and they write something about you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not that. It's not that anyway, there's a quote
Speaker 1: I don't have you have hit him with the quote, yeah,
Speaker 1: but I can't. I don't have a memories. It's like
Speaker 1: I've I've opened books with quotes. Oh you got it right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: speak of for yourself. Sam epigraph a sam longer coming
Speaker 1: to epigraph. So epigraph is before a book, and epitaph
Speaker 1: is on your teamstone after it's after you die. So
Speaker 1: epigraph is before your book. And so I know not
Speaker 1: what I it's not what he said. Let me try again.
Speaker 1: I know not with what weapons. World War three will
Speaker 1: be fought, but World War four will be fought with
Speaker 1: sticks and stones. It is good and and I guess
Speaker 1: I can speak to it for a minute about why
Speaker 1: I chose to put it at the front of the book.
Speaker 1: It felt president somehow for a book on extreme weapons.
Speaker 1: And one of the things I hinted at is that
Speaker 1: I learned along the way while writing this book that
Speaker 1: all these things that we've stumbled on as a biologist
Speaker 1: applied to military technologies. And part of the exercise of
Speaker 1: writing this book was really digging into the military literature
Speaker 1: and reading about historical arms races and the deep past,
Speaker 1: and and looking at these parallels and really trying to
Speaker 1: unpack the parallels between the animal and the military weapons.
Speaker 1: And that meant to do that right, that meant coming
Speaker 1: full forward and taking a really hard look at modern
Speaker 1: times like the Cold War and post Cold War situations
Speaker 1: and Einstein wrote that during the Cold War, very much
Speaker 1: in that mindset and speaking to the I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess the spectacular devastating capabilities of modern weapons of mass destruction,
Speaker 1: And I think his point is it doesn't really matter
Speaker 1: what the next world is, you know what the Third
Speaker 1: World War is going to be fought with, because pretty
Speaker 1: much anything they use these days is going to be
Speaker 1: so destructive that everything will be rubble, and the people
Speaker 1: that managed to stagger past that are going to be
Speaker 1: hitting each other on the head with sticks and stones
Speaker 1: because it's the only thing that will be left. There's
Speaker 1: a kind of sobering, but it is a reflection of
Speaker 1: the reality of where modern weapons of mass destruction are.
Speaker 1: There's a thirty or forty thousand one of those thirty
Speaker 1: or forty thousand year old skull from Europe that they had.
Speaker 1: It was a pretty well preserved like in tax gold
Speaker 1: they had, and they had a uh peculiar concave cracking
Speaker 1: on it. It suggested the person they pondered over it
Speaker 1: like whether it was post mortem or not, like they
Speaker 1: thought maybe just soil compacion or something had happened. Um,
Speaker 1: and then they want up they worked up some kind
Speaker 1: of technology where they can make these, uh like something
Speaker 1: that's a fact simile of human bone and fill it
Speaker 1: with what you call that stuff you shoot guns at,
Speaker 1: ballistic gel fill it with a ballistic gels. See what
Speaker 1: kind of and then yeah, and then give it various
Speaker 1: injuries and um, they determined it thirty thousand years ago
Speaker 1: he had likely been killed by someone who is left
Speaker 1: handed and facing him. That's okay, uh, okay, that's my
Speaker 1: favorite line from the book. And not just because I'm
Speaker 1: not pointing out that you didn't write it, but it's
Speaker 1: a great it's a perfect really it's a really good
Speaker 1: h you know, deal best line in the book. My
Speaker 1: favorite new word that I learned in your book, which
Speaker 1: is called animal weapons, like you get, the title gets
Speaker 1: right to it. The title is that leave you guessing?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean it does like blood Meridian
Speaker 1: at am. But the title doesn't tell you what the
Speaker 1: book is about. Okay, But in all fairness, animal weapons
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily speak to the fact that half the book
Speaker 1: is about the miltee. So we struggled with titles. We
Speaker 1: are that we are animals, that is, but that might
Speaker 1: not have be the how the average person on the
Speaker 1: you know in the bookstore looking at the shelves would
Speaker 1: think about it. So okay, one more quick comment and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have you digging on something. Um My favorite
Speaker 1: word that learned in this book is supernate. That was
Speaker 1: a new one for me too. You didn't know that word. No,
Speaker 1: I do now explain to folks. It is who can
Speaker 1: supernate and why it matters. Cats can supernate their four limbs,
Speaker 1: and it refers to the way that they can articulate
Speaker 1: and twist the way that we can with our risk too.
Speaker 1: But most other carnivores like dogs or wolves cannot. They
Speaker 1: can articulate and twist their fore limbs, and it is
Speaker 1: relevant and I talked about it in the book in
Speaker 1: the context of the evolution of the extreme canines and
Speaker 1: things like sabretooth cats and and and The idea there
Speaker 1: is that those weapons are so big. I mean, they're
Speaker 1: phenomenal for piercing and for killing really big prey, but
Speaker 1: they're also really vulnerable to breakage and snapping, and so
Speaker 1: the cats need to be able to plunge the teeth
Speaker 1: in and pull them right back out again. You can't
Speaker 1: just lock them in and hang or you'll well maybe
Speaker 1: they could. But the only way they could do that
Speaker 1: is if they can hold on to the animal and
Speaker 1: position themselves. You know, if otherwise you sink your teeth
Speaker 1: in the animal runs away, it snaps your teeth. Thought
Speaker 1: to hold onto that animal would be spidd four limbs
Speaker 1: while it's trying to run like hell away from you.
Speaker 1: Is part of how we think, or the paliontal just
Speaker 1: think these cats are able to not snap their teeth,
Speaker 1: but they it. You know, you look at the libery
Speaker 1: a tart pit fossils, they had snap teeth. My first
Speaker 1: date with my wife, did you that's a good first date.
Speaker 1: But so they snapped their teeth all the time. I
Speaker 1: mean that was definitely the big price tag of having
Speaker 1: teeth like that, well one of the price tags, because
Speaker 1: you think about like you look at a wolf, dragon elpdown.
Speaker 1: He doesn't. He can't supernate, so he has to do
Speaker 1: all with his teeth, just hanging on for dear life.
Speaker 1: But they also do it as a group. So wolves
Speaker 1: tend to hunt as a pack, and they can bring
Speaker 1: down prey by pulling on them from different sides. I
Speaker 1: think there's a debate actually about saber tooths for a
Speaker 1: long time it was assumed that they were solitary hunters,
Speaker 1: and now there's people arguing that they might have been
Speaker 1: social to you. But I don't know. Not my forte
Speaker 1: I work on beetles. But no, there's been a bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff that's come out on saber tooths. I mean,
Speaker 1: they were a real catalyst for me. We can get
Speaker 1: we can get into this and whatever. What do you want?
Speaker 1: But most of that I okay, Then I we'll come
Speaker 1: back to that. I feel like I want to start
Speaker 1: out by talking if you're comfortable with this about the
Speaker 1: white and brown mice on the white sand. Okay, because
Speaker 1: unless you think that's a bad am I messing my
Speaker 1: job up or doing my job, we can do this
Speaker 1: or whatever. Do you want? The logic that I got
Speaker 1: one that I might be able to wedge in ahead
Speaker 1: of that kind of try go for it. What I
Speaker 1: just want to know what? Maybe what like the what
Speaker 1: your definition of a weapon is? Damnit? Yanni, that's the
Speaker 1: first question and I skipped it. Look Sam, that's number one.
Speaker 1: Back me up. So this is when I struggled with
Speaker 1: when I was trying to research the book too. There
Speaker 1: isn't a simple definition. I mean if you think about it, teeth, claws,
Speaker 1: anything that you stab or claw slash with, clearly that's
Speaker 1: a weapon. You think of tusks and antlers that you
Speaker 1: lock and spar with, those are weapons. But chemical things
Speaker 1: that animals produce as a toxin to spray or inject,
Speaker 1: those are weapons of a sort. And if you start
Speaker 1: looking at military arsons and you start looking at what
Speaker 1: soldiers carry in the battle, they carry a lot more
Speaker 1: than than the firearms. They've got communication equipment. They've got
Speaker 1: camo that helps them blend with their backgrounds, they've got
Speaker 1: kevlar that protects them from certain vantages. All of that
Speaker 1: stuff could be considered part of the arsenal of an
Speaker 1: individual soldier, and so you can start to subdivide it
Speaker 1: into things that mostly function for protection and defense, things
Speaker 1: that function for attack and offense. I don't actually want
Speaker 1: to go down that path of what is a weapon,
Speaker 1: because there's a million things that could fit under that.
Speaker 1: What I will say is I focus on a particular
Speaker 1: subset of animal weapons, and those are the things that
Speaker 1: get really big and so sort of from my perspective
Speaker 1: as an evolutionary biologist, I'm constantly stumped by the fact
Speaker 1: that there are species out there with these things sticking
Speaker 1: off of them that are ridiculous. I mean, any hunter
Speaker 1: loves a good rack of antlers, and we love looking
Speaker 1: at caribou or elk, but you step back a look
Speaker 1: at them like you're an alien from another planet looking
Speaker 1: at these things for the first time. It's absurd. It's
Speaker 1: absolutely insane that these animals would have that much stuff
Speaker 1: sticking off their heads. And as a biologist, I want
Speaker 1: to make sense of that. We know it's awkward, we
Speaker 1: know it's expensive. Under what kinds of circumstances will the
Speaker 1: benefits of a weapon like that be so profound that
Speaker 1: animals with these huge weapons do better than other individuals
Speaker 1: out there with weapons that that are smaller or less extreme.
Speaker 1: And so that's my sort of thing as a biologist.
Speaker 1: Under what kinds of social or physical environments or circumstances
Speaker 1: will sort of the stars aligned so that the really
Speaker 1: big weapons win. And so so it's it comes back.
Speaker 1: I'm not giving you an easy answer to what is
Speaker 1: a weapon. There's a lot of things that qualify as
Speaker 1: a weapon, but I'm kind of hoping today we're going
Speaker 1: to focus on things that are unquestionably weapons and they're
Speaker 1: the big stuff, the tusks and the horns and the
Speaker 1: antlers and the you know, the sabretooth cat keynines. Okay,
Speaker 1: so here's here's what I want you to talk about.
Speaker 1: Here's what I wanted to get into. The white and
Speaker 1: brown mice. Okay, because you have a I'm gonna switch up.
Speaker 1: You have a page on page six. Nice to know
Speaker 1: I made its pitch six. Yeah, body, I made it
Speaker 1: always through this book, man. So on page six you
Speaker 1: have a quote where you say, whenever individuals differ and
Speaker 1: how successful they are at propagating their kind, evolution occurs. So,
Speaker 1: keeping that in mind and knowing this is something that
Speaker 1: you chose to bring up early on in your book,
Speaker 1: tell the story about the white mice and the brown
Speaker 1: mice and the white sand. And that's the reason I
Speaker 1: told that story was to try to provide sort of
Speaker 1: a really simple, intuitive, real world example to hang that
Speaker 1: logic on. So that essence of evolutionary biology people people
Speaker 1: feel threatened by it, people misunderstand that, people run with
Speaker 1: it in all kinds of crazy directions, But it is basic.
Speaker 1: It really is a simple process. It it rests on
Speaker 1: the fact that if you look at any population of
Speaker 1: anything out there, you pick your favorite species. But in
Speaker 1: this case, we'll start with old field mice. And you
Speaker 1: go out and you start looking at the individuals. You
Speaker 1: look at the mice. You're not just saying, hey, there's
Speaker 1: six or needy two of them, or you know, there's
Speaker 1: more this year than last year. You're actually looking at
Speaker 1: the mice. What you're gonna find is they're not the same.
Speaker 1: Some of them are heavier, some of them are lighter,
Speaker 1: some of them are darker. Some of them have I
Speaker 1: don't know, longer legs, bigger teeth. If you go out
Speaker 1: there as a biologist and you start measuring things, you're
Speaker 1: gonna find that there's variation that some of the mice
Speaker 1: are faster, some of them age more quickly, some of
Speaker 1: them digest things better, some of them smell better. There's
Speaker 1: tons of things about the mice that are different from
Speaker 1: each other. And and evolution is about turnover. It's how
Speaker 1: some types do about. It's winners and losers. Some types
Speaker 1: do better than others, and the ones that do better
Speaker 1: end up living when others die, and they end up
Speaker 1: reproducing when others don't. And those are the ones that
Speaker 1: end up producing offspring that carry with them these same characteristics.
Speaker 1: And if you look at that population over time, from
Speaker 1: one generation to the next generation to the next generation,
Speaker 1: you follow that, you'll find that the average characteristics shift.
Speaker 1: They get darker, they get faster, they get better. It's
Speaker 1: smelling a certain thing. Populations are all was changing as
Speaker 1: they sort of adapt to the environments around them. That's evolution.
Speaker 1: That's the process that I'm looking at. So that you learn.
Speaker 1: Mice is a really clear example. I can tell the
Speaker 1: story if you want. I gotta like, I wanna a
Speaker 1: couple of things that that brings up as a soth.
Speaker 1: So often in biology you talk to people who are
Speaker 1: looking at population like the general sense, and you're talking
Speaker 1: about looking at the individual differences. And I think a
Speaker 1: good way for people to understand that in the way
Speaker 1: that struck and I was reading your book, is it
Speaker 1: when we when we humans look at other humans, we
Speaker 1: completely gloss over. We're not like, oh, they all look
Speaker 1: the same. You're right, we are really good. You can
Speaker 1: get the differences. Well, you see, I saw a man.
Speaker 1: I'm like, that man has an extraordinarily long neck. It
Speaker 1: wasn't thirty minutes ago. I thought that because you just
Speaker 1: like you have a trained eye, so you're just like
Speaker 1: the same way you can go you can recognize a
Speaker 1: person and pick them out of hundreds of people. And
Speaker 1: so to talk about how mice we can't see it
Speaker 1: is all we see is it's MOUs nous. That's a
Speaker 1: great analogy though, because people ought to recognize that we're
Speaker 1: really good if seeing those differences in ourselves. But what
Speaker 1: you have to accept then is those kinds of differences
Speaker 1: exist in everything from you know, from plants to snails
Speaker 1: to mice. Every population out there has sort of standing
Speaker 1: genetic variation. It has differences among individuals and the traits
Speaker 1: that you might look at and measure, and sometimes those
Speaker 1: differences matter. Sometimes individuals that run faster actually do better
Speaker 1: at getting away from predators and they live longer, or
Speaker 1: you know, who knows what the traits are. In my
Speaker 1: case and today's interview case, you know, we're going to
Speaker 1: be sort of playing around with what kinds of conditions
Speaker 1: cause the individuals with the really big weapons to win
Speaker 1: to do better than the other individuals, because those are
Speaker 1: the conditions that will lead to the evolution of big weapons.
Speaker 1: But but the light and dark mice, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a simple example of a real world population that's been
Speaker 1: studied really well all the way down to people have
Speaker 1: figured out the genomes, they know the individual genes, they
Speaker 1: know the mutations to the genes that contributed to the rights.
Speaker 1: So so from a biology standpoint, it's a beautifully complete story.
Speaker 1: But it's basic. It's really simple. Mice are dark, they're brown.
Speaker 1: They usually go forage at night because there's predators that
Speaker 1: can spot them and eat them. Owls are still really
Speaker 1: good at seeing contrast in the dark, so their main
Speaker 1: predators when they're out at night or owls. And and
Speaker 1: if you're a mouse running around on dark soils and
Speaker 1: most of their habitat and you're too light, the contrast
Speaker 1: makes you stand out and you get nailed by the owls,
Speaker 1: And so owls have historically kept mouse populations pretty dark
Speaker 1: brown because any of that were too light got nailed
Speaker 1: and the ones they got cold from the population because
Speaker 1: they stood out. And then a few thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: mice colonized, They expanded their range, and they colonized the
Speaker 1: coastal sand dunes around the Gulf of you know, the
Speaker 1: Gulf in the southern United States, around the coast of Florida,
Speaker 1: and you get out onto these dunes, and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, the dirt's not rich and dark and brown anymore.
Speaker 1: You're out on sand dunes, it's like piles of salt.
Speaker 1: I mean, some places it's really white. And so what
Speaker 1: happened is the mice are still being mice. They're doing
Speaker 1: all the same things, but now they're running around at
Speaker 1: night on white and all of a sudden, the dark
Speaker 1: mice stood out really badly, and they got hammered by
Speaker 1: the owls because they kept seeing these dark mice and
Speaker 1: nailing them. And by pure dumb luck chance, a small
Speaker 1: number of these mice carried mutations in their genome that
Speaker 1: screwed around with the pathway that makes the dark melon
Speaker 1: and pigment in the fur, and they happened, by chance,
Speaker 1: to be lighter. More of their fur was white and
Speaker 1: less of it was dark. And normally in the main
Speaker 1: areas they get hammered because they look bad, they're they're
Speaker 1: too light, they stand out. But out here on these
Speaker 1: outer fringes, those individuals did better because they were lighter
Speaker 1: in color and they were more likely to hide than
Speaker 1: the dark mice. And so out on these coastal populations.
Speaker 1: You know, owls are still being owls. They're just going
Speaker 1: for whatever they find. But in those populations, they're eating
Speaker 1: all the dark mice. And it was the ones that
Speaker 1: carried these these random genetic mutations that made them lighter.
Speaker 1: Those mice survived, they had all the kids, and then
Speaker 1: over time these mice populations got whiter and whiter, and
Speaker 1: now we have two sort of side by side areas
Speaker 1: with white mice and dark mice, and we think it
Speaker 1: was driven by selection from these predators. And so the
Speaker 1: experiment I talked about in the book was a classic.
Speaker 1: They set up in the seventies where they had captive owls.
Speaker 1: They trucked in truckloads of sand and they created arenas
Speaker 1: with white soil, like like from the coast, and then
Speaker 1: they had other arenas with dark soil, and then they
Speaker 1: just released mice and let the owls do what the
Speaker 1: owl's dead. And they showed really cleanly that on the
Speaker 1: dark soil, it's the white mice that get nailed, and
Speaker 1: on the light soil it's the dark mice that get nailed.
Speaker 1: And they were able to show that the owls were
Speaker 1: sort of to use the technical language, acting as agents
Speaker 1: of selection. They were selecting for dark or light mice
Speaker 1: on these different backgrounds. So it's a nice example of
Speaker 1: a process of winners and losers. The color of the
Speaker 1: mouse differed from mouse to mouse, and in each environment
Speaker 1: it mattered. The ones that had the right color combinations lived.
Speaker 1: The one that had the bad combination stood out, like
Speaker 1: you know, like a hunter wearing the wrong camo. You
Speaker 1: stand out, you get noticed. And in that case, because
Speaker 1: they were getting eaten, it ended up that some mice
Speaker 1: were being more successful at surviving and reproducing in each area.
Speaker 1: They passed on their inherited characteristics and the population changed
Speaker 1: over time. It evolved so that now several thousand years later,
Speaker 1: you know, a couple of thousand mouse generations later, those
Speaker 1: two populations are totally different from each other. I mean
Speaker 1: they look like different species. One's white and one's dark.
Speaker 1: And that was a very recent, sort of gradual evolutionary
Speaker 1: shift in the color example of the process. But that
Speaker 1: process is happening all the time and just about anything
Speaker 1: out there, it's on us as the scientist to figure out, Okay,
Speaker 1: what are the things that differences among individuals? What are
Speaker 1: the variations in this species that excuse me that matter?
Speaker 1: Why do they matter? Why are these ones the ones
Speaker 1: that are winning and these ones are the ones that
Speaker 1: are losing? And we can go out and sort of
Speaker 1: study the process of evolution in the wild in real populations.
Speaker 1: And again that's it's just a conceptual backdrop to turn
Speaker 1: around and then say, wider weapons, get big. What I like?
Speaker 1: What strikes me about that that quote that Steve just
Speaker 1: read and what you're saying. And I know that happened
Speaker 1: over whatever thousand generation might have even been less, but
Speaker 1: it was fast. Yeah. But you know, the po posing
Speaker 1: evolution that way, I think gives it a little bit
Speaker 1: more of an immediacy. I think to a lot of
Speaker 1: people it's it's kind of an abstraction. You know, it's
Speaker 1: something that is working on like macro population levels, but
Speaker 1: it really does come down to the individual and it
Speaker 1: can change very rapidly. I'm really glad you brought that up. Actually,
Speaker 1: if you forgive me for a digression here, I'm really
Speaker 1: glad you brought that up because I run into this
Speaker 1: in my classes. People have this antiquated notion of the
Speaker 1: evolutionary biologist as this old, white haired geezer with a
Speaker 1: big beard arguing about apes, and that's not what modern
Speaker 1: I mean truly, My major professor was a white haired GUYE. No,
Speaker 1: wasn't that. It wasn't that your dad. I'll take issue
Speaker 1: of that. It that way, But wasn't your father an
Speaker 1: evolutionary and my grandfationary biologist. It's like the family business.
Speaker 1: But coming back, father was one of the founders of
Speaker 1: the the field of animal Yeah, yeah, I broke away.
Speaker 1: I don't work on birds, I work on beatles. That
Speaker 1: was my radical Yeah, exactly, bigger sample sizes. But but
Speaker 1: back to the reality. What is an evolutionary bologist. Evolutionary
Speaker 1: biology today is incredibly relevant to things that that everybody
Speaker 1: cares about. It's not a bunch of old timers arguing
Speaker 1: about apes. It's about genomes and genetics and medicine. So huge,
Speaker 1: just a list a couple issues that matter to people
Speaker 1: every day. People on farms have to deal with the
Speaker 1: fact that they go out there and try to control
Speaker 1: pest populations on their crops by spraying pesticides, and very
Speaker 1: quickly the insect pests evolvers asistance and they stop being susceptible.
Speaker 1: That is evolution, no matter what people want to call it,
Speaker 1: it's turnover. You're killing a bunch of the pests. Some
Speaker 1: of the pests happen by chance to have variants in
Speaker 1: their genomes that allow them to detoxify the chemicals that
Speaker 1: you're spraying. Everybody else is dead. Those ones survive, they
Speaker 1: have lots of kids. All of a sudden, your pest
Speaker 1: population explodes. With all these competitions, no competition, they're all dead, right,
Speaker 1: And yet you saw suddenly you can detoxify these chemical
Speaker 1: that nobody else. That's the winner, winners and losers. They
Speaker 1: start reproducing and the population evolves fast within it. You know,
Speaker 1: most of the pesticides are obsolete within five to ten
Speaker 1: years because insect populations adapt so quickly. Herb besides, same story.
Speaker 1: You see the same thing with antibiotics. We're running into
Speaker 1: huge problems now where you go to the hospital and
Speaker 1: things that used to be standard can kill you because
Speaker 1: the antibiotics that we have available to us don't work.
Speaker 1: And again, people don't like to use the E word,
Speaker 1: but the fact is that's evolution. When you apply a
Speaker 1: dose of antibiotics, you are trying to kill a population
Speaker 1: of bacteria. And if you kill them all you win.
Speaker 1: Population goes extinct, Your infection is cured. But if there's
Speaker 1: any genetic variation among individuals within that bacteria population that
Speaker 1: allow a few of them to survive the drug. Just
Speaker 1: what you said down, If you kill all the competition,
Speaker 1: they're all dead. And the heavy Yeah they got gravy.
Speaker 1: It's awesome. There's no competition, there's all these resources. They explode,
Speaker 1: and now your population is shifted from one generation to
Speaker 1: the next, or over a couple of dozen bacterial generations
Speaker 1: yet is shifted from susceptible to resistance. And you, as
Speaker 1: a as a doctor applying a drug, have driven that.
Speaker 1: You've acted as an agent of selection, and you've driven
Speaker 1: the evolution of that population. So modern evolutionary biology is
Speaker 1: about drug design. It's about trying to figure out ways
Speaker 1: to combat antibiotic resistant disease strains. It's about public health
Speaker 1: trying to engineer mosquitoes so that they can't carry zickar denghy,
Speaker 1: and and trying to figure out how to produce these
Speaker 1: engineered mosquitoes and get them in the field to spread
Speaker 1: enough that the wild populations become resistant or it's not wet. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's a huge industry right now. Yeah, Genetically modifying mosquito.
Speaker 1: You can engineer one that can no longer carry malaria
Speaker 1: or zika or dangy, and I've had dany It sucks.
Speaker 1: I mean, if this is a big deal. If you
Speaker 1: can figure out how to make a mosquito that normally
Speaker 1: is a vector that carries the disease incapable of harboring
Speaker 1: the pathogen, You've done a lot. But you've just engineered this,
Speaker 1: you know, screwed up genetically modified mosquito. You introduced it
Speaker 1: into the wild, and it's not going to outcompete all
Speaker 1: the other normal mosquitoes. So you can spend a fortune
Speaker 1: building it in the lab, but trying to implement it
Speaker 1: in the field is a problem. And that's where evolutionary
Speaker 1: biology comes in. How figure out what kind of selective advance,
Speaker 1: you know, how can you figure out ways to to
Speaker 1: let something that is otherwise deleterious spread within a population
Speaker 1: so that it gets abundant enough that the mosquito population
Speaker 1: rit large stops being capable of sustaining the infections and
Speaker 1: involves a lot of theory, involves a lot of evolutionary biology.
Speaker 1: So that was a big tangent. But yeah, I'm glad
Speaker 1: you brought it up. Evolutionary biology is a vibrant, thriving
Speaker 1: field that's not arguing about apes. It's about molecular biology, genetics, genomics.
Speaker 1: It all comes back to the white mice, the light
Speaker 1: and dark mice turnover. When are their winners and losers?
Speaker 1: When individuals do better than other individuals and the traits
Speaker 1: that make them do better are heritable or passed on,
Speaker 1: you've got the raw material for revolution. You watch that
Speaker 1: population over time, and it's going to change. Okay, let
Speaker 1: me hear you with this one. Is it still in
Speaker 1: your circle? Um? Do we still talk? We meaning you
Speaker 1: do you guys still talk about Um, there being a
Speaker 1: difference between natural selection and sexual selections. Where I thought
Speaker 1: you're gonna go between biological evolution and cultural evolution that
Speaker 1: we can get there later. Between natural selection and sexual selection. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you do? You still view the as He's like, you
Speaker 1: think your audience is going to know what sexual selection is,
Speaker 1: step back and define it. So do it through? All right?
Speaker 1: So natural selection tends really a good way to think
Speaker 1: about it is survival. It's which are the individuals that
Speaker 1: are going to grow the fastest, are going to you know,
Speaker 1: get access to the best territories outcompete other individuals for
Speaker 1: access to food. They're going to be the most resistant pathogens,
Speaker 1: who are the healthiest animals in the population, and the
Speaker 1: ones most likely to survive a winter cold snap or
Speaker 1: to get through, you know, a reproductive season. It's all
Speaker 1: about sort of living and dying. Sexual selection is so
Speaker 1: almost like a subset it fits. It's also winners and losers,
Speaker 1: and it's it's very much an agent of selection that
Speaker 1: can cause populations to evolve, but it really focuses on reproduction.
Speaker 1: It's recognizing that even if everybody survives, they're not all
Speaker 1: going to reproduce. You have winners and losers when it
Speaker 1: comes to reproduction too, and that means that you've got
Speaker 1: individuals with traits like big antlers who are more likely
Speaker 1: to win access to the harems or to the territories,
Speaker 1: that are more likely to breed with the females and
Speaker 1: the population and transmit their genetic material to the next
Speaker 1: generation than other individuals in the population that might be
Speaker 1: more sickly, smaller antlers, not as good a condition, younger,
Speaker 1: less dominant, all those things you've got. It's it's the
Speaker 1: same raw material variation. You go out into a deer population,
Speaker 1: or an elk population measure a hundred bulls, they're not
Speaker 1: the same. Some of them are bigger than others, some
Speaker 1: of them are stronger, some are more aggressive, some of
Speaker 1: them have a lot bigger antlers than others. Those traits matter,
Speaker 1: and the weapons matter a lot. And in that case,
Speaker 1: sexual selection is the process by which you know individuals
Speaker 1: with big antlers reproduce more than individuals with small antlers.
Speaker 1: And since ultimately the currency for evolution isn't whether you
Speaker 1: live or die, it's whether you reproduce, what matters is
Speaker 1: who are the individuals in the population now that are
Speaker 1: contributing of spring their genetic material to the next generation.
Speaker 1: That's the end game. Doesn't matter if you're the healthiest,
Speaker 1: strongest animal out there, doesn't matter if you're resistant to
Speaker 1: every disease in the book and you live forever. If
Speaker 1: you fail in the game of producing offspring in a
Speaker 1: biological population of something like, it's a genetic dead end.
Speaker 1: And so the real end game is reproduction, and sexual
Speaker 1: selection is all the stuff the crazy sperm competition, battles,
Speaker 1: female choice, male competition, all the things that happen in
Speaker 1: real world animal populations that cause some animals to win
Speaker 1: and other animals to lose in the game of reproduction. Okay, man,
Speaker 1: that was a bunch of things. I want to ask
Speaker 1: you about my going off too far. You can strap
Speaker 1: me up if you need to say, help me keep
Speaker 1: help me, keep track, Johnnie. Okay, I want you to
Speaker 1: explain couple things. I want you to talk about the
Speaker 1: idea that UM the way in which differentiated land escapes. Okay, no,
Speaker 1: it's not okay, couldn't send me that on your I'm
Speaker 1: meant to ask you, did I have no idea what
Speaker 1: you mean by this? So you were talking? Okay, here
Speaker 1: we go. Okay, So I want to do differentiated landscapes.
Speaker 1: I don't know what that is. I'll tell you and
Speaker 1: I want to do I'm not using your word, I'm
Speaker 1: using my world. You'll know what I'm talking about. What
Speaker 1: you'll know what I'm talking at. Want to explain it.
Speaker 1: I'm learning differentiated landscapes and I want uh and I
Speaker 1: want you to talk about UM the different like you
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier. You could have like six bull elk right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that the difference in size, how they can develop the
Speaker 1: difference in size of their bodies, which a're like relatively
Speaker 1: homogeneous versus the difference in size of their antlers. Yes,
Speaker 1: what does that have to do with differentiated? Two different ideas?
Speaker 1: But not explain differentiate landscapes. I'm talking to your book
Speaker 1: about what happens with an animal population where there's little
Speaker 1: pockets of good habitat or little bottlenecks like a water source,
Speaker 1: a certain food source, rather than this, rather than a
Speaker 1: landscape where all the resources are equally distributed an omnipresent,
Speaker 1: so there's no sort of like cool spot to hang out. Yes,
Speaker 1: which one of the which one of those you want
Speaker 1: to do first? Let's start with the second one, the
Speaker 1: landscape idea that was the first one. That was the
Speaker 1: first one, differentiated landscapes. I'm with Doug. I think that
Speaker 1: that one came second. Which let's start with that. So
Speaker 1: you're going to have potential for individuals, say elk, to
Speaker 1: be competing with each other over access to, say, females.
Speaker 1: So you can do beetles too, because I think I
Speaker 1: think you explain it like because there's a wound, Because
Speaker 1: actually it's a better it's a better tool for this.
Speaker 1: It's just fewer people are used to thinking about beetles
Speaker 1: the way I'm used to thinking about beetles. So in
Speaker 1: any situation, if the landscape is uniform and what I
Speaker 1: mean by that, I don't mean Kansas. There resources that
Speaker 1: the animals depend on, If they're distributed uniformly in space,
Speaker 1: then where are you going to guard? What the hell
Speaker 1: are you going to fight over? I mean I could
Speaker 1: be a bowl, and I could our beetle, and I
Speaker 1: there's my spot, and I'm going to guard that, and
Speaker 1: I stand over that, and I beat the crap out
Speaker 1: of any other beetle that comes near. And if I've
Speaker 1: got big enough weapons, and I might pay a price
Speaker 1: to have big weapons, but you know I got big weapons,
Speaker 1: and I fight, and I fight and I fight, and
Speaker 1: I'm holding that ground and nobody else. No other males
Speaker 1: get into my territory. And there's food in my territory.
Speaker 1: But you know there's food over there and food over there,
Speaker 1: and there and there and there. If the food resources
Speaker 1: are everywhere, then what have I gained? Where are the
Speaker 1: female is gonna go? They could go anywhere, they could
Speaker 1: feed on any spot on that landscape. And I spend
Speaker 1: all this money, not money, all these energetic resources and
Speaker 1: this cost of producing this weapon, and I fight and
Speaker 1: I fight, and I fight to guard my spot, but
Speaker 1: my spot isn't any more valuable than body else's spots.
Speaker 1: And there's all these other beetles out there that don't
Speaker 1: bother fighting at all, and they get just as good
Speaker 1: access to food. So what in the situation where the
Speaker 1: resources are uniform, there's no benefit to fighting to guard
Speaker 1: a territory. You don't win anything because everywhere is equally good.
Speaker 1: But when you have a landscape that's I think you
Speaker 1: meant differentiated, I would think of it as patchy, where
Speaker 1: the key resources are very rare and they're localized. They're
Speaker 1: clustered or clumped in space like a water hole you said.
Speaker 1: Or the beetles that we work on they feed on
Speaker 1: wounds on the side of a tree that ooze sap.
Speaker 1: These beetles flying and they feed on the sap like
Speaker 1: syrup on the side of the tree. In most places
Speaker 1: where these beetles live, they they've got wimpy little mouthparts.
Speaker 1: They can't drill into the trees like a woodpecker or
Speaker 1: something can. They're stuck finding a place where a branch
Speaker 1: struck the tree, or where some other animals already created
Speaker 1: a wound, and it's oozing that's a hot spot. But
Speaker 1: those things aren't everywhere. They're rare. I mean, there's only
Speaker 1: a couple of hot spots within a mile radius, say,
Speaker 1: and that's where you gotta be. That's the only place
Speaker 1: where the food is. That is not a uniform landscape.
Speaker 1: That's I guess you're saying differentiated. Good places to be
Speaker 1: in bad places to be. Now, if I'm a male
Speaker 1: and I've got a weapon, and I fight the crap
Speaker 1: out of all the opponents, and I hold my ground
Speaker 1: and I happen to be guarding the food spot, I win.
Speaker 1: I'm the only one in town that's got it. All
Speaker 1: the other males can't get it because I'm keeping them away,
Speaker 1: And where are the female is going to go? They're
Speaker 1: coming to me because I'm sitting on the only spot
Speaker 1: that's good. So when you have landscapes that are patchy
Speaker 1: and there are sort of hot spots of value interspersed
Speaker 1: with large areas that aren't very good, that's the that's
Speaker 1: the sort of physical environment that sets the stage for
Speaker 1: all this kind of stuff because it creates opportunities for
Speaker 1: winning and losing. It creates a situation where the dominant
Speaker 1: individuals can guard something that matters, and if you win
Speaker 1: those fights and you get that resource, you win because
Speaker 1: the females come to you. You're the male that meets
Speaker 1: with those females when they come in to feed. All
Speaker 1: the other males lose, Like the males in the population
Speaker 1: might get nothing because there's nowhere else to go and
Speaker 1: they're not strong enough to get it. That's sexual selection.
Speaker 1: It's competition about access in this case to a food resource.
Speaker 1: But it's a food resource that attracts all the females,
Speaker 1: so that's access to reproduction. The males that win in
Speaker 1: those fights mate with lots of females, produce lots of offspring,
Speaker 1: sire the next generation of the population, and the males
Speaker 1: that fail get nothing. That's over, they're done. So do
Speaker 1: you see less fighting in like the in the same
Speaker 1: or that's why beetles are better than elk, because it's
Speaker 1: hard for people to picture that in something like an
Speaker 1: ungulate or a deer. In insects, it happens all the time.
Speaker 1: A lot of times the food resources are so dispersed
Speaker 1: that what happens is it's not the animals that are
Speaker 1: built like tanks with big horns that win. It's the
Speaker 1: animals that are really agile and that are lightweight and
Speaker 1: have good wing ratios and store energy and they fly
Speaker 1: really far. It's the ones that can search, and so
Speaker 1: you find insects where they're really good at traveling long
Speaker 1: distances looking that the animals are so spread out and
Speaker 1: the unit the landscape is so sort of uniform, there's
Speaker 1: no obvious place to be that the ones who win
Speaker 1: are the ones that search, that can find members of
Speaker 1: the other sex the fastest. So there's some moths where
Speaker 1: the males have these antennae that are unbelievably good at
Speaker 1: detecting the smells of the females and they're out there
Speaker 1: cruising along for wind currents trying to pick up the scent.
Speaker 1: I mean, the military has looked into these things. They're
Speaker 1: the most sensitive chemo sensors known. They can actually detect
Speaker 1: individual molecules of these pheromones, and we've never come up
Speaker 1: with anything that's even within several orders of magnitude and
Speaker 1: being that sensitive to you know, a chemical that we
Speaker 1: might want to detect. But these moths are really good
Speaker 1: at it because their resources are sort of uniformly or
Speaker 1: randomly distributed, and the only way to win in that
Speaker 1: game is to be better at smelling a female, are
Speaker 1: better at finding a female than other males, and so
Speaker 1: competition plays out in a different way. They have huge antennae,
Speaker 1: they're really good at flying, they search, but they don't
Speaker 1: have weapons, they don't fight. Different kind of systems, so
Speaker 1: they fall outside of your interests. Well, they're cool systems,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I like I like the situations. You're differentiated
Speaker 1: landscapes where where there really is a hot spot that matters,
Speaker 1: and and if you can be the male that wins
Speaker 1: access to that resource, then you win in the evolutionary
Speaker 1: game because you're the one that gets access to the reproduction.
Speaker 1: You you mentioned a couple of times so far, I
Speaker 1: feel like you should pause and explain it in greater detail.
Speaker 1: Is the costs. You keep talking about the enormous cost
Speaker 1: or the expenditure of growing big horns or big teeth
Speaker 1: or big antlers. And I'm glad you bring that up
Speaker 1: because it come full circle back to the other half
Speaker 1: of the question, the fact that antlers are more variable
Speaker 1: an traits, because it actually ties into the costs. So
Speaker 1: in a system like this where imagine your differentiated landscape
Speaker 1: and you imagine your runounced speedle, and there's there's very
Speaker 1: occasionally rare wounds on the side of a tree. That's
Speaker 1: your oasis. That's like it. That's where the food is.
Speaker 1: That's where all the females are going to come flying
Speaker 1: from miles around to go feed at that spot. And
Speaker 1: if you can be the male, it wins that you
Speaker 1: win everything. And it really is winning everything. I mean,
Speaker 1: in some of these populations, a very small percentage of
Speaker 1: the males to all the reproducing, and the males lose
Speaker 1: every generation. The mails are gone dead end, they fail,
Speaker 1: and in a system like that, it really pays to win.
Speaker 1: And imagine in that case, then if I'm a beetle
Speaker 1: and I've got a bump sticking off me that allows
Speaker 1: me to reach under and flip an opponent, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be worth it no matter what that costs. If I've
Speaker 1: got that and the other males don't, I've got an
Speaker 1: edge and I'm going to win in these fights. And
Speaker 1: therefore I'm the one that's reproducing, and my kids and
Speaker 1: grandkids and great grandkids are the ones that populate the population.
Speaker 1: The beatles are going to start getting this horn or
Speaker 1: this thing sticking off their body that's used as a weapon,
Speaker 1: but over time it's sort of a relative landscape. If
Speaker 1: everybody's got horns the same size, and then another beetle
Speaker 1: comes out with an even bigger weapon and allows him
Speaker 1: to reach and flip his opponent before the other opponent
Speaker 1: can even reach him, then that mail is going to
Speaker 1: have an edge. So the weapons are gonna get bigger.
Speaker 1: And then when everybody's got weapons that big, then it's
Speaker 1: the one with the even bigger weapons that wins. And
Speaker 1: this process sort of cycles and ratchets, and the weapons
Speaker 1: get bigger and bigger and bigger, and as they get bigger,
Speaker 1: they get more expensive. I know, it seemed like I
Speaker 1: forgot your questions. You get caught in what we call
Speaker 1: an arms race, and and these things start ratcheting bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and along
Speaker 1: the way they get more and more and more expensive.
Speaker 1: And so when you start looking at costs and animal weapons,
Speaker 1: we can talk about costs and military weapons too. They're
Speaker 1: very expensive, but the costs get really staggering. So so
Speaker 1: our rhinoceros beetle, the ones that we work on. A
Speaker 1: mail puts thirty percent of his body weight into a weapon.
Speaker 1: I mean I think about that weigh probably one eight
Speaker 1: that's like like that. It's like a sixty pound thing
Speaker 1: on top of my head. Be like this table glued
Speaker 1: to the top of my head. That's what these beetles
Speaker 1: are carrying around on their heads all day. That's a
Speaker 1: huge investment. It costs in terms of resource is that
Speaker 1: they need to grow that structure. Because all the material
Speaker 1: that goes into that coffee table isn't going into my
Speaker 1: heart or my lungs or my brain or anything else.
Speaker 1: I'm putting it all into the coffee table and put
Speaker 1: it into the weapon, So there's an allocation cost. Then
Speaker 1: you've got to carry this thing around everywhere you go.
Speaker 1: It's awkward and heavy, makes it harder to fly, makes
Speaker 1: it harder to run. So there's sort of production and
Speaker 1: maintenance costs that go with it. Weapons can get really
Speaker 1: expensive in the beetles. Putting a horn together for a
Speaker 1: male is so expensive that it forces these animals to
Speaker 1: shunt resources away from other things. So the beetles with
Speaker 1: the biggest horns have tiny eyes, and some of the
Speaker 1: species we studied have males where they've stunted genitalia and
Speaker 1: tiny testes, so they're really reallocating in the most absurd
Speaker 1: way to get these weapons that you talk about, the
Speaker 1: actually get a form of a form of osteoporosis studies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the antlers and the antlers, because they regrow them
Speaker 1: every year, they have to produce these enormous expensive structures,
Speaker 1: and they've got to grow fast. And as far as
Speaker 1: I know, antler bone is the fastest growing bone that's
Speaker 1: ever been described for any any vertebrate ever. It's it's
Speaker 1: growing at record speeds and they're pulling. They need calcium
Speaker 1: and phosphorus and all these minerals to produce the bone,
Speaker 1: and they don't get that much of that from the
Speaker 1: leaves and the things that they feed on. And so
Speaker 1: the people that have looked into this and studied have
Speaker 1: found that there's no way that these bulls and bucks
Speaker 1: can get enough from their food alone. They're growing it
Speaker 1: too fast and there's just not enough of these minerals
Speaker 1: in the food that they're eating. And that's when they
Speaker 1: figured out that they're actually siphoning these things off the
Speaker 1: other bones in their body. They're leaching calcium and phosphorus
Speaker 1: out of their ribs and their spine and their femurs
Speaker 1: and all the rest of the bones and reallocating it
Speaker 1: to the antlers. So that forces them to go through
Speaker 1: a period of osteoporosis during the rut before they have
Speaker 1: an opportunity to replenish those resources. Really bad time, because
Speaker 1: you're smacking into all these other bulls. So right when
Speaker 1: you need to fight and throw down with all these
Speaker 1: other eight hundred pound rivals, you've got brittle bones like
Speaker 1: an old person. It's it's a bad formula. And then
Speaker 1: they throw the antlers away and you gotta start. It's
Speaker 1: like you're not even recouping that loss. It's gone there,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, but you can imagine how that would
Speaker 1: place a premium on any individuals that were in good
Speaker 1: enough condition or had access to the best foraging spots.
Speaker 1: They might have less osteo. Again, it comes back to variation.
Speaker 1: Those bulls might pay a lower cost. They might have
Speaker 1: less osteo process than a medium or poor quality bowl
Speaker 1: that's in really crap quality territory that's also trying to
Speaker 1: produce antlers, and so it may not be equal, but yeah,
Speaker 1: they're all going through the same problem. They're all facing
Speaker 1: the same dilemma. These things are expensive and when it
Speaker 1: goes back to cost a great comparison. I think I
Speaker 1: remember this from your class back in the day. Was
Speaker 1: was that, like I think you said, for a bull
Speaker 1: elk to like a mature bull to create the antlers
Speaker 1: he needs for that year, it's a similar colore um
Speaker 1: cost as a cow birthing a calf. Yeah, good memory.
Speaker 1: This was a really clever Okay in time if I
Speaker 1: explain some of these, so point out that the Sam
Speaker 1: Longer and a very own special Sam Longer and too
Speaker 1: special Doug Ellen's class. Yes you did behavior class, University Montana.
Speaker 1: I went back in check he got today one of
Speaker 1: the one of the greatest classes I ever I ever
Speaker 1: took that. Paim say that fascinating fascinating, Well, you're just
Speaker 1: you just take it so seriously. Fun stuff, lots of
Speaker 1: lots of great video clips of animals beating the ship
Speaker 1: out of each other, imagine that elephant seals and stuff.
Speaker 1: But you bring up this point about, you know, the
Speaker 1: energetic expense of doing this and and this was a
Speaker 1: really clever set of studies and and I didn't do them.
Speaker 1: I mean this is from the literature, but these people
Speaker 1: they took advantage of the agriculture industry. So so if
Speaker 1: you have cattle and your cattle farmer, you know everything
Speaker 1: is about weight gain. I mean, you manage your you
Speaker 1: manage your heard, you manage the four the feeds that
Speaker 1: you're feeding them, the timing of things. Everything is coming
Speaker 1: down to how quickly your animals can gain at what
Speaker 1: rate they can gain weight. You want to buy them low,
Speaker 1: fatten them up, sell them high. There's a huge industry
Speaker 1: trying to understand the way that things like livestock put
Speaker 1: on and gain muscle mass and weight. And so they
Speaker 1: had actually broken this down and these really complicated models
Speaker 1: where they were looking at all nitrogen, phosphors, put all
Speaker 1: the different nutrients in paying attention to the diets. They
Speaker 1: had input bone mass, the skeletal weights, the muscle mass,
Speaker 1: the metabolic physiology, the weight, the sizes, all these parameters
Speaker 1: on these animals, and they could predict really really accurately
Speaker 1: how subtle changes to this or that piece of the
Speaker 1: diet would translate into the rate at which these animals
Speaker 1: were putting on muscle mass. And so, because people cared
Speaker 1: a lot about that, they put a ton of time
Speaker 1: and effort into parametizing these really complicated models, and they
Speaker 1: did a really good job to gribing growth and weight
Speaker 1: gain in vertebrates like that. So these biologists took the
Speaker 1: models and said, hey, let's look at moose. Let's look
Speaker 1: at something we care about. And they reset all the
Speaker 1: parameters based on the bone densities and the leg lengths
Speaker 1: and that, you know, all the height and all the
Speaker 1: weights of the of the things like moose or caribou.
Speaker 1: And turned around and said, all right, given the model
Speaker 1: now parametized for a moose, how expensive or antlers? They
Speaker 1: could burn antlers and figure out how many calories they
Speaker 1: knew what was in it. They could basically figure out
Speaker 1: what it costs in terms of nutrients and energy to
Speaker 1: make an antler and then put that into the energy
Speaker 1: budget of the animal and say how expensive is it?
Speaker 1: And that's when they were stunned there, Like I mean,
Speaker 1: they basically found I think it was two calves the
Speaker 1: male bullet. I can't amber if it was moose producing
Speaker 1: a full rack of antlers expended as much energy as
Speaker 1: it took a female to raise two calves all the
Speaker 1: way to weaning. Stunned, every nobody expected to be that expensive.
Speaker 1: But it's a clever approach. It's a neat way to
Speaker 1: do that. And then this guy great one step further
Speaker 1: and they took the Irish elk, the extinct Irish elk,
Speaker 1: which had these huge antlers, and try you know, they
Speaker 1: had to make some guesses because we don't have any
Speaker 1: living Irish elk, but they did a pretty good job
Speaker 1: setting the models for them to try to figure out
Speaker 1: just how expensive the antlers were. In they were pretty expensive.
Speaker 1: You can see why they might have gone extinct. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: one could suggest, one could suggest. I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: say that that's why. Well, let's add the caveat, because
Speaker 1: because I think about these kinds of things, and and
Speaker 1: one of the things we may get to when we
Speaker 1: talk about arms racist today is that they cycle. There's
Speaker 1: a very predictable sequence of stages, and eventually arms racist collapse.
Speaker 1: The whole thing ends. The antlers or their weapons are
Speaker 1: so expensive that they're not worth it anymore, and they're gone.
Speaker 1: Normally in an animal when it happens, we're not arguing
Speaker 1: that they go extinct. What means is some males come
Speaker 1: along and don't bother producing the weapons, and those males win.
Speaker 1: They're not paying the price, and the weapons really aren't
Speaker 1: doing what they used to do any more, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, individuals that ditched the weapons are the winners,
Speaker 1: and the population loses the weapons and very quickly evolves
Speaker 1: to a state where they no longer have the big weapons.
Speaker 1: That's the normal way. The Irish elker the one exception
Speaker 1: where they really might have actually gone extinct because of
Speaker 1: the weapons. It's hard to say because we weren't there.
Speaker 1: But what they found with these models is that the
Speaker 1: antlers were so expensive that these bulls would have been
Speaker 1: sort of right on the metabolic edge, and they would
Speaker 1: have had barely enough time after the rut to recoup
Speaker 1: the energetic losses before the next cycle. And then what
Speaker 1: happened is not only were those antlers getting bigger and bigger,
Speaker 1: but they have evidence from the pollen and the foss
Speaker 1: and the climate records that the climate changed like pulling
Speaker 1: the carpet out from under these animals. All of a sudden,
Speaker 1: they went through I think it was called the Younger
Speaker 1: Dry ask. The climate changed rather abruptly, and they can
Speaker 1: tell from the pollen records that all the things that
Speaker 1: they used to feed and were gone, and they were
Speaker 1: forced to switch from herbs and things to grasses, things
Speaker 1: that were a lot less nutritious, and so it's the
Speaker 1: double It was the double punch, the expensive antlers that
Speaker 1: are sort of pushing the limit of what's possible, and
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden your food is gone and
Speaker 1: you're forced to switch to something that's really crap quality,
Speaker 1: and that combo might have been too much. So that's
Speaker 1: the reason. Some people argue that the Irish actually went
Speaker 1: extinct because of the weapons, But usually what happens is
Speaker 1: they get caught on an arms race, they get bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger and bigger, and then the whole thing collapses
Speaker 1: and they ditched the weapons and go off on another path.
Speaker 1: I never came back to you, But okay, don't do
Speaker 1: this one next here sculted now. But there's a funny
Speaker 1: story talking about with the Beatles. Where's this beetle And
Speaker 1: there's like a female that goes down in the hole
Speaker 1: and hangs out in the hole. Yeah, be he grows
Speaker 1: his big, badass horn reguards the whole. But then there's
Speaker 1: some little snaky dude with no horn who just burrows
Speaker 1: down and comes in from under beneath a little sneak
Speaker 1: attack and gets it on with the female and the
Speaker 1: and the do with the big horns is hanging out.
Speaker 1: Has no idea that it even happen. So these are
Speaker 1: these are dunge beetles that live in Panama. A lot
Speaker 1: of the dung bells have this problem. But the ones
Speaker 1: that I was looking that live down in Panama and
Speaker 1: the males have been nice, big rack of horns on
Speaker 1: their heads. So they're big tank. Well they're little beetles,
Speaker 1: but I mean the horns are big relative to the
Speaker 1: tank pair of horns on their head. And and it's
Speaker 1: important because again it depends on where we want to
Speaker 1: go with it is one of the catalysts, one of
Speaker 1: the things, one of the things that we think I
Speaker 1: think precipitates an arms race and animals that sort of
Speaker 1: aligns the last star into place. All of a sudden,
Speaker 1: the population shoots off on this trajectory of bigger and
Speaker 1: bigger and bigger weapons. Is a situation where the fight
Speaker 1: dynamics change from being something that is sort of a
Speaker 1: chaotic scramble to something that is much more consistently one
Speaker 1: on one. Something about the biology, the habitat, the structure,
Speaker 1: something about the way these animals are confronting each other
Speaker 1: changes and then all of a sudden what had been
Speaker 1: really chaotic becomes very consistent and predictable and repeatable one
Speaker 1: on one duels. And that's this thing that I learned
Speaker 1: actually from the military literature. Can spark an arms race
Speaker 1: and start the whole process. So in the dung beetles,
Speaker 1: most of the time we think of dung beetles, who
Speaker 1: you know, for those of us that actually think about
Speaker 1: dung beetles, But if you've ever been to Africa, you
Speaker 1: picture these things that they've got. The they carve these balls,
Speaker 1: they pushed the balls around on the ground. Those beetles
Speaker 1: fight all the time. They scramble. None of them have
Speaker 1: weapons never they do not have horns on those kinds
Speaker 1: of beetles. And the fights are all sort of pandemonium
Speaker 1: and scrambles, lots of animals all piling in. But there's subsets,
Speaker 1: some lineages of dung beetles where they started digging the tunnels,
Speaker 1: and you mentioned the whole and that was that, that
Speaker 1: was the behavior change, that that that rewrote the rules,
Speaker 1: because all of a sudden, the females are down in
Speaker 1: a hole, they're in a tunnel. It's a tube, and
Speaker 1: so the males plant themselves at the entrance and they
Speaker 1: guard the tunnel, and all of a sudden, it's not
Speaker 1: a scramble anymore, because you can't get attacked by ten
Speaker 1: rivals at once. It's a tube. Only one beetle can
Speaker 1: fit in the tunnel at a time, and so it's
Speaker 1: not like they consciously decided to fight duels because it's
Speaker 1: more honorable or anything like that. Suddenly they're in a tunnel,
Speaker 1: and because they're in a tube, they only ever fight
Speaker 1: one rival at a time. Boom, Just like that. It's
Speaker 1: the catalyst, as simple as that. All of a sudden,
Speaker 1: the males are fighting consistent, repeatable, pushing matches of strength,
Speaker 1: and in that kind of a fight, the bigger, stronger
Speaker 1: male wins. The mail with the weapons wins, and boom,
Speaker 1: those lineages start evolving. Horns. It could be big curved
Speaker 1: things on the thorax. It could be horns coming off
Speaker 1: the head. I mean, there's there's hundreds of configurations of
Speaker 1: these weapons. They've popped up again and again and again.
Speaker 1: Every single time these beetles switched from fighting in a
Speaker 1: scramble on the surface to fighting in a tube in
Speaker 1: a tunnel. Just like that on an arms race. They
Speaker 1: started getting weapons, and the weapons got bigger and bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger. So the ones I was studying, these males
Speaker 1: had big horns. They're guarding the tunnel. They're fighting these
Speaker 1: duels with rivals at the entrance, and that's when the
Speaker 1: little sneaky guys break the rules. The little males are
Speaker 1: never gonna win their smaller body size. They're not as
Speaker 1: strong they've got they don't even have horns, I mean
Speaker 1: little nubbins where the weapons would be, so they got
Speaker 1: no weapons. They're never gonna win a fair fight. But
Speaker 1: they don't fight fair. They break the rules, and so
Speaker 1: they act like a female. They dig their own tunnel,
Speaker 1: they mine down in there, and then they cut over
Speaker 1: and they intercept the guarded tunnel. So you're the big
Speaker 1: guy at the entrance fighting the little sneaky buggers are
Speaker 1: are basically mining their way in beneath you, getting into
Speaker 1: your tunnel, going down, finding the female, meeting with the female,
Speaker 1: sneaking out again. The big guys that the entrance are
Speaker 1: oblivious that same thing exists with salmon. Uh chinook. Salmon
Speaker 1: have an alternate life history called precocious males. Or the
Speaker 1: jack exactly, but there's one there's ones that um unlike
Speaker 1: Jack's don't even go to the ocean, so they'll they'll
Speaker 1: become sexually mature like six months. Yeah, so so they're
Speaker 1: like jack didn't go to the ocean, Well Jack's do.
Speaker 1: Jack's do go to the ocean. So so Jack's there's
Speaker 1: there's multiple life histories and and a lot of these
Speaker 1: these salmon species. So you know, you've got everything from
Speaker 1: the big forty pound males that spent four years in
Speaker 1: the ocean to the jack's that just spent one year
Speaker 1: to the precocious males that never even go out. And
Speaker 1: so they'll be sexually mature like three inches long, and
Speaker 1: they'll hiden the rocks with with like you know, to
Speaker 1: fifty pound chinook and then the hen goes to layer
Speaker 1: eggs and they I've seen videos of this actually my
Speaker 1: my my buddy John. Yeah, he'll go in and jizz
Speaker 1: on him before before the big buck can and never
Speaker 1: even know it, and he doesn't have to go to
Speaker 1: all the expense of going to the ocean and and
Speaker 1: all the dangers that after six months exactly, it takes
Speaker 1: four years opportunity. And I've also read about how that
Speaker 1: that's helpful. Um from a conservation standpoint, that that sometimes
Speaker 1: when runs get so bad, so low, as they often
Speaker 1: do in this day and age, that sometimes like if
Speaker 1: there's only the one like a couple of females who
Speaker 1: make it back to a stream to spawn, they're they're
Speaker 1: able to you know, keep the keep the line going,
Speaker 1: keep the population exactly. You know, in college you think
Speaker 1: about it too, is will be like it's like the
Speaker 1: dude who um, I can't wait to see like a dude.
Speaker 1: Of girls are like, oh he's funny, right, that's like
Speaker 1: your guy that like burrows in right exactly. He's like
Speaker 1: playing a totally different trip, you know, yeah the friend zone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's fun I like he's funny. It's like he's a
Speaker 1: little digger digging in. You can tell me any everybody
Speaker 1: else is all fighting, so in beatles and things like this,
Speaker 1: we call it an alternative reproductive tactic or an alternative
Speaker 1: meeting tactic. And and lots of big horn sheep they've
Speaker 1: got coursers that because when a big male is fighting
Speaker 1: and distracted in a battle, a little guys running and
Speaker 1: chase the females off in corner him. What do you
Speaker 1: call those coursers? Aren't they called coursers and big horn sheep? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's got a favorite thing. Are you gonna bring up
Speaker 1: your shirkers? Johnie? I thought about him, then I started
Speaker 1: not too Yeah, anyone, I'll hit you because he's backed
Speaker 1: up as it is. But okay, he's backed up by
Speaker 1: one question. Well he's playing it safe. He's backed up
Speaker 1: by one question. But he happened with the shirts, happening
Speaker 1: with the shirkers. We just want to know dogs opinion
Speaker 1: on its opinion on shirkers. Uh, you've heard of val Geist?
Speaker 1: Yeah what was that? He's not like our uncle or anything. No,
Speaker 1: I mean that was a loaded Yeah, well he's a
Speaker 1: loaded character. I mean I never actually met him, but
Speaker 1: I've read a ton of his work because he did
Speaker 1: a lot of the early conceptual work on the evolution
Speaker 1: of crazy structures. Yeah. Yeah, that's the big problem is
Speaker 1: it was mostly ideas and not a lot of data.
Speaker 1: But you know, I mean, now and then people get
Speaker 1: it right in a surprising number of his ideas that
Speaker 1: he just threw out there and never actually backed up,
Speaker 1: a lot of those ideas are turning out to be right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've had this conversation a lot of times. We're a
Speaker 1: lot of researchers such as yourself. Well, we'll talk about
Speaker 1: the um you know, his practice of being like, you know,
Speaker 1: what might have happened right enough times, it's like probability
Speaker 1: at the wall. So the idea of shirkers, which were
Speaker 1: bucks or bulls that would remove themselves from the breeding
Speaker 1: game or the rut and for four or five years
Speaker 1: just hang out at the top of the hill where
Speaker 1: the grass is thick and green lush, load up and
Speaker 1: load up and load up until at the point where
Speaker 1: they were bigger body wise, there was some bigger antler wise,
Speaker 1: and they could stroll in and they could breed everybody
Speaker 1: in pass their jeans. In one season, they could own
Speaker 1: the you know, the breeding rights. So I don't know
Speaker 1: whether those animals exist because I don't study on gult populations,
Speaker 1: but it wouldn't surprise me really. So let me give
Speaker 1: you an extreme example. Wraps Like it's about so so
Speaker 1: there are fish that that go even one step further.
Speaker 1: So so they start out life as a female. Because
Speaker 1: most females are able to reproduce. The variance and reproductive success,
Speaker 1: the difference between winners and losers females is pretty small.
Speaker 1: And then it's the males where the competition is really stark,
Speaker 1: and them get nothing in a very small percentage of
Speaker 1: them get all the reproduction. And so they'll start out
Speaker 1: as females and play it safe and breed literally as
Speaker 1: females while you know the breeding is good. And then
Speaker 1: and only if they get big enough and strong enough
Speaker 1: and the alpha male gets killed and he's suddenly removed
Speaker 1: and there's a vacancy, then the sort of next biggest
Speaker 1: in line switches from female to male, takes on the
Speaker 1: male status and steps into that role. It's in a way,
Speaker 1: it's like your shirker, except that you're not just sitting
Speaker 1: there eating on the greener pastor you're actually reproducing as
Speaker 1: a female that whole time. But you only flip and
Speaker 1: take on the really risky you know, high reward high
Speaker 1: whatever you want to say, that risky strategy. If and
Speaker 1: when you're big enough to tell me again, what's pieces
Speaker 1: was that? W R A S S. It's it's a
Speaker 1: coral reef there like Napoleon rass And I was just
Speaker 1: I just saw this on the Ultimate The New Blue
Speaker 1: Planet um from from BBC, which is on Netflix. They
Speaker 1: have a really cool segment on that and and how
Speaker 1: it goes away and the body goes undergoes that incredible
Speaker 1: change and it grows that huge bump on its head
Speaker 1: and yeah changes, it's sex. Yeah, man, you know what
Speaker 1: that program needs is uh two versions, one with David
Speaker 1: and one without him. I cannot listen to that, dude.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I could listen to that, dude. All
Speaker 1: it makes it. It makes it that I watch the
Speaker 1: high end nature documentaries really like I feel like everybody
Speaker 1: because I feel like we tried, didn't we try getting
Speaker 1: Morgan Freeman and uh, I would so much prefer that.
Speaker 1: I heard a bird show up, a bird, you know,
Speaker 1: and then like the bird joins the thing just kills me. Man.
Speaker 1: It's like, would you please just say the lines writes
Speaker 1: the lines that anyway? Anyway. Another example bull frogs or
Speaker 1: frog A lot of frog populations, not bull frogs, but
Speaker 1: like tangara frogs and chorus frogs. They sing and the
Speaker 1: call that they sing is an honest signal of the
Speaker 1: size of the male. I mean again, they're they're larynx
Speaker 1: size tracks with their bodies. The big the big bull
Speaker 1: frogs are deeper the females can tell. The females orient
Speaker 1: towards the big guys. But singing like that is dangerous.
Speaker 1: They're out there calling, calling, calling, calling, they get hammered
Speaker 1: by bats that q in on the same properties of
Speaker 1: the song and eat them all. And so when you're
Speaker 1: out there singing, it's dangerous. You're risking death. And if
Speaker 1: you're a medium quality, mediocre, puny, little male, why would
Speaker 1: you go risk death if you're not gonna win anyway,
Speaker 1: Because there's a big guy over there, and all the
Speaker 1: females are going to go over there. And so when
Speaker 1: you find these populations, you find, first of all, a
Speaker 1: lot of the smaller males shut up. They play it safe.
Speaker 1: So they are the ultimate shirkers. They sneak, they hang
Speaker 1: out quiet, acting like a female. They're not singing singing singing,
Speaker 1: they look and act like a female. They creep up
Speaker 1: to the territory is with the big stud males, and
Speaker 1: they hang out on the edges, and they try to
Speaker 1: intercept females and mate with them as they come into
Speaker 1: the big male and then and then when they get
Speaker 1: big enough, and only when they get big enough, they
Speaker 1: switch over and start calling. And you can show that
Speaker 1: you can go in and take out the big guys.
Speaker 1: Just pull him out, remove him. All of a sudden,
Speaker 1: there's this pond and the big studs are gone. The
Speaker 1: next male. It's like the males in line can figure
Speaker 1: it out, like, holy sh it, he's not there anymore. Boom,
Speaker 1: they stop sneaking and they start calling and they step
Speaker 1: into so so shirking is real. Whether it happens in dear,
Speaker 1: I don't know, but it happens in frogs. That happens
Speaker 1: in a lot of things. How are you feeling, because
Speaker 1: that's how you brought up sugars. You got shot down
Speaker 1: bad and the biologists didn't agree. He all but came
Speaker 1: over and hit up sugar. But let's come back to
Speaker 1: the one that I'm behind on. Can I do that? Well,
Speaker 1: you tell me what you're behind on. So when I'm
Speaker 1: behind on, you mentioned that, you know, body size is
Speaker 1: the same, but antlers differ a lot. And we started
Speaker 1: flirted with his topic from different angles. It comes back
Speaker 1: to the signal. It's like, what is the thing that's
Speaker 1: sort of advertising the status or the size or the
Speaker 1: quality of a male. And in the frogs we just
Speaker 1: talked about, you know, the big guys have a deeper call.
Speaker 1: They sound different. The females can tell. It's an honest signal.
Speaker 1: You can't fake it. The only way to have a
Speaker 1: low song is to be huge, and if you're a
Speaker 1: little wimpy guy, there's just nothing you can do. You're stuck.
Speaker 1: It is. It is an intrinsically honest signal because it's difficult.
Speaker 1: You can't fake it. You can't be a puny little
Speaker 1: male and just suddenly say I'm going to sing the
Speaker 1: sexy song today. If you don't have the body to
Speaker 1: do it, you can't fake it. And signals like that
Speaker 1: are more stable evolutionarily, they're less susceptible to cheaters to collapse.
Speaker 1: Those signaling systems last a long time, and females that
Speaker 1: happen to pay attention to honest signals do better. They
Speaker 1: make better decisions than females that that might be more
Speaker 1: fickle or pay attention to other things that don't matter.
Speaker 1: And over time, female preferences evolve and track in on
Speaker 1: the things that are the most expensive, the most difficult
Speaker 1: for males to do, the most honest signals that you
Speaker 1: really can't fake. And and that's a part to biology
Speaker 1: that we know a lot about for big bird displays
Speaker 1: and song bird calls, all these things. They tend to
Speaker 1: be very expensive, they tend to be almost impossible to fake.
Speaker 1: They tend to be extravagant, charismatic, obvious things that a
Speaker 1: female can see really easily from a long way away.
Speaker 1: And they tend to be super variable. So if you
Speaker 1: took ten, I don't want Let's go back to the aim.
Speaker 1: He took a whole bunch of mails and lined them up,
Speaker 1: and you looked at things like body size, they differ
Speaker 1: a little bit. You know, the little guys might be
Speaker 1: about half as big as the big guys. But you
Speaker 1: look at the ornaments or the songs or whatever the
Speaker 1: signal is that they're focusing on, and it's wildly variable.
Speaker 1: Be tenfold, twentyfold, fifty fold difference in size or quality
Speaker 1: between the puny guys and the big guys. And that's
Speaker 1: not an accident. That's sort of how these signaling systems
Speaker 1: evolved in these animals, and it makes them a really
Speaker 1: important sort of differentiator of winners and losers. Back to
Speaker 1: sexual selection, it's the males with the best calls, or
Speaker 1: the the sexiest signals, or the most charismatic colorful displays.
Speaker 1: Those are the ones that win. You can't fake it.
Speaker 1: The only way to do that is to be a
Speaker 1: rock star, and the females que in on that and
Speaker 1: they pick the rock stars. So in talking about the
Speaker 1: percentage differences, like like, imagine that you have a year
Speaker 1: and a half old white tailed deer. Okay, whatever, he's
Speaker 1: a hundred twenty pounds, he's got little spike antlers. But
Speaker 1: then that's exactly the next year the deer could be
Speaker 1: whatever pounds and how what magnitude larger. So so you're
Speaker 1: you're asking antler questions. I work on beetles. I can
Speaker 1: only get if I tooks beetles be so beetles are
Speaker 1: a little simpler in the sense that I don't have them.
Speaker 1: The age cohorts confounding things because the biggest bat bucks
Speaker 1: and bulls are also the oldest. It's not an accident
Speaker 1: and it's part of the same equation. At the end
Speaker 1: of the day, the males with the biggest antlers are
Speaker 1: also the oldest and the most dominant and in the
Speaker 1: best physiological condition. It's not a coincidence that you're boone
Speaker 1: and crockett bull has the antlers that it has that's
Speaker 1: not an accident. But age is part of that. With
Speaker 1: the beatles, it's simpler because they're all sort of the
Speaker 1: same age. That's the point I never thought of. That's
Speaker 1: a good point with insects. It's they're all the same age.
Speaker 1: They're all adults. A little teeny guy is never gonna
Speaker 1: once he comes out a metamorphosis, goes from a grub
Speaker 1: to a beetle. He's stuck. It's like a suit of armor.
Speaker 1: It's not going to change. A little guy has a
Speaker 1: little horn, and he's gonna have a little horn till
Speaker 1: the day he dies. So you take age out of
Speaker 1: the equation, but it's the same process. I never thought
Speaker 1: about how how much that kind of simplifies things, just
Speaker 1: in terms of explaining it. The biology is the same too.
Speaker 1: But say I took a hundred males line them. I
Speaker 1: showed you a box before we started today, a box
Speaker 1: with like a hundred beetles all lined up in a row.
Speaker 1: And if I took that sample and I measured body size,
Speaker 1: and I compared the smallest guy all the way to
Speaker 1: the biggest, i'd find a nice sort of even gradient
Speaker 1: from little to big, and it'd be about a twofold
Speaker 1: one and half to two fold difference. The biggest beetles
Speaker 1: probably twice as long or twice as wide as the
Speaker 1: littlest beetle. But if I look at the horns, I'm
Speaker 1: looking at about a sixtyfold difference. I mean much here,
Speaker 1: not How do I say that two times different? I'm
Speaker 1: getting confused on air. Here, it's more like a fifteen
Speaker 1: to twenty fold sorry, difference between antler size. So two
Speaker 1: fold difference embody size and a fifteen to twenty fold
Speaker 1: difference in the antler size or the horn size. So
Speaker 1: so it comes back to what you mentioned a minute ago.
Speaker 1: The antlers are more variable the horns, and these beetles
Speaker 1: are more variable. You look at tusks, you look at
Speaker 1: any of these big weapons systems, fiddler crab claws, all
Speaker 1: these kinds of weapons are big. They're expensive, and they're
Speaker 1: wildly variable from mail to mail, and that's all part
Speaker 1: of the same thing. The reason they're variable is they're expensive.
Speaker 1: The little guys can't afford it. Only the best conditioned
Speaker 1: animals can afford to produce the really big weapons. Everybody
Speaker 1: else is stuck with a compromise, and so you end
Speaker 1: up having this huge sort of spectrum from the whimps
Speaker 1: with a little tiny things to the superstar best condition
Speaker 1: studs with the massive weapons. And it's not an accident.
Speaker 1: It's not random at all. For the beatles is it's
Speaker 1: who who is best at being a grub. It has
Speaker 1: a lot to do with that has to do with
Speaker 1: access to food, but it's more complicated than that, because
Speaker 1: who gets the best food in the field. You know,
Speaker 1: in the lab, I can manipulate I give them a
Speaker 1: lot of food, and I get huge beetles with massive horns.
Speaker 1: I give them very little food. They all grow up
Speaker 1: stunted and tiny, and none of them have any big
Speaker 1: weapons at all, so I can manipulate it. But in
Speaker 1: the wild it's not an accident. Same with elk and deer,
Speaker 1: it's not a coincidence. The best dominant individuals have the
Speaker 1: best territories, and they're the ones that are able to
Speaker 1: keep everybody else away so their kids have the least
Speaker 1: amount of competition. They're the ones that are most resistant
Speaker 1: to pathogens and parasites, the healthiest, the least likely to
Speaker 1: get sick, so everything sort of lines up in their favor,
Speaker 1: and those individuals have the most resources available to them.
Speaker 1: Other individuals are forced to more peripheral habitats. They're dealing
Speaker 1: with more crowded conditions. They're stressed out because they're losing
Speaker 1: the competition for access to resources all the time. The
Speaker 1: stress interacts with their immune systems, so they're sick a
Speaker 1: lot more often. You know, they have access to less food,
Speaker 1: poor quality food, more competition, more disease, more parasites. All
Speaker 1: that stuff plays out and separates the winners from the losers.
Speaker 1: And none of it's an accident. I mean, it's it's
Speaker 1: compounding and sort of self reinforcing. But the best conditioned
Speaker 1: animals are the ones that tend to win. In the insects,
Speaker 1: it even gets into the parents behavior. The females that
Speaker 1: are the best at picking the right spots to lay
Speaker 1: their eggs, their kids hatch and they just eat what's there.
Speaker 1: But you know, there's some individuals that are in really
Speaker 1: good places and other individuals that are allowsy places, and
Speaker 1: so right from the day they're born, it's it isn't
Speaker 1: a fair world. There's winners and losers, but it's not random.
Speaker 1: Has a lot to do with the behavior of the parents.
Speaker 1: We had a guy on who deals with nutrition and ungulus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would love to have heard that, and I find it.
Speaker 1: And he talks about this idea that, uh, the people
Speaker 1: talk about an area having good genetics for box, right,
Speaker 1: and so there's some area grows big box because of genetics.
Speaker 1: And he refutes that and talks about nutrition being the
Speaker 1: driver and not that animals nutrition, but in some ways
Speaker 1: a deer's eventual rack, it's going to depend on both
Speaker 1: it's it's mothers in utero nutrition. Totally. We see this
Speaker 1: with people that you can take these animals, you can
Speaker 1: take these animals from places with quote shitty genetics and
Speaker 1: put them in a situation genetics and that would mean
Speaker 1: habitats that are marginal with poor quality indovice in our
Speaker 1: lingo and like hunter lingo genetics the animals. Yes, but
Speaker 1: I'm telling about what hunters talk about. Hunters will be
Speaker 1: like why you know, like why are all these big
Speaker 1: bucks coming out of Iowa right, and be like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know the ioh, they got the genetics the population.
Speaker 1: But I'm not I'm talking about how people use it.
Speaker 1: Use it like that. They're like, oh, it's got the
Speaker 1: feed and got the genetics right, and they take animals
Speaker 1: from these places that's supposedly like out of the mule
Speaker 1: here from the Black Hills, supposedly have bad genetics, So
Speaker 1: there's nothing you can do that it's gonna be small.
Speaker 1: But you take mulder from the Black Hills and move
Speaker 1: them to a place where no, you're not changing the genetics.
Speaker 1: You take males and females move into place with different nutrition,
Speaker 1: and all a sudden their giants. So in general, weapons
Speaker 1: and ornaments and all those other traits, but weapons this kind,
Speaker 1: the sexually selected weapons tend to be exquisitely sensitive to nutrition.
Speaker 1: More sense. So we did experiments in the beetles. Will
Speaker 1: will manipulate nutrition, same kind of thing I just talked
Speaker 1: about if I give them a little food or a
Speaker 1: lot of food. Body size about a twofold difference, wing
Speaker 1: size about a twofold difference, eye size about a twofold difference,
Speaker 1: horn size about a fifteen fold difference. And so same animals,
Speaker 1: same experiment, same difference in nutrition. And legs and eyes
Speaker 1: and wings and all those things are sensitive to nutrition.
Speaker 1: They're all responding, but the weapons are responding more so,
Speaker 1: weapons are exquisitely sensitive to nutrition. It doesn't mean it's
Speaker 1: not genetic because it's not an accident in the wild.
Speaker 1: It's the best quality animals that usually end up succeeding
Speaker 1: in defending the best quality nutrition and the best resources.
Speaker 1: So you get this interaction between the quality of the genetics,
Speaker 1: the genotypes of those animals, and the environments that those
Speaker 1: animals are in. But all of that comes together and
Speaker 1: is expressed in these traits, these weapons, and there you
Speaker 1: very minute, if you very nutrition, I guarantee you you're
Speaker 1: gonna have an enormous effect on antler size. So so
Speaker 1: let me follow the logic here. I want to step
Speaker 1: back because I know we've been going off on all
Speaker 1: these directions. What I've been trying to talk about is
Speaker 1: the kinds of ecological situations that can spark an arms race,
Speaker 1: that can take a population that doesn't have big weapons,
Speaker 1: that's going about its business. Something changes, and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, from that point forward, it's the suit you know,
Speaker 1: it's the bigger, stronger males with the weapons that win.
Speaker 1: They're able to monopolize access to some kind of resource,
Speaker 1: something that gives them an edge in the way that
Speaker 1: they come into contact with females. Something changed, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, bigger is better, and mails with the
Speaker 1: biggest weapons win. I talked in the dung beetle example
Speaker 1: about how suddenly starting to fight over tunnels, a simple
Speaker 1: change in behavior aligns the fights so that they're not
Speaker 1: scrambles anymore, now they're duels. That change in behavior, all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, bigger is better, because in a duel,
Speaker 1: the stronger male wins, and if a mail has a
Speaker 1: longer horn and he can pry better and get rid
Speaker 1: of the opponent better with the weapon, than the mail
Speaker 1: with the longer weapon wins. And so all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: that population gets tipped into this trajectory that we're talking
Speaker 1: about as an arms race, and from that point forward,
Speaker 1: bigger is better, and so very quickly the population or
Speaker 1: cross generations is going to ratchet up to bigger and
Speaker 1: bigger weapons. So that kind of a phenomenon happens with
Speaker 1: elephant tusks, It happens with cariboo, it happens with fiddler crabs,
Speaker 1: It happens with all these animals with these crazy weapons.
Speaker 1: The particular trigger might be different, but they all fight
Speaker 1: in duels, one on one contest, and once they start
Speaker 1: on this path, the arms race plays out the same way.
Speaker 1: Every single time. And that's a point I kind of
Speaker 1: want to take a second to make. Once that button
Speaker 1: gets pushed, go that beatles on the trajectory. It's in
Speaker 1: an arms race. The weapons get bigger and bigger and
Speaker 1: bigger and bigger, and a very very set set of
Speaker 1: things happens. As they get big, they get expensive. We
Speaker 1: talked about cost, So they get more and more expensive.
Speaker 1: What that means is fewer and fewer mails are up
Speaker 1: to the muster. Most of the males now can't pay
Speaker 1: that price because it's getting more and more and more
Speaker 1: expensive very quickly, the mails are out of the game.
Speaker 1: They just don't have the resources to produce the really
Speaker 1: big weapons, and so they're pretty much gone. Colladteral they lose.
Speaker 1: The population becomes more and more concentrated around a smaller
Speaker 1: and smaller subset of victorious males, and the benefits of
Speaker 1: these big weapons get stronger and bigger and bigger, and
Speaker 1: the whole process ratchets up. But you reach a point,
Speaker 1: a tipping point, where the winners and losers are so
Speaker 1: starkly different from each other, and so many males are
Speaker 1: getting nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, that some of them somewhere
Speaker 1: stumble on a to break the rules. They cheat, Oh
Speaker 1: I forgot one more step. So the weapons get big,
Speaker 1: they get expensive. The fact that only a few males
Speaker 1: can do it, that's what gives us that variability we
Speaker 1: were talking about. That's the point where antlers are more
Speaker 1: variable than legs or ears or body size or fiddler
Speaker 1: crab claws are more variable than body size. All of
Speaker 1: a sudden, now those weapons are so expensive that only
Speaker 1: a few Boone and Crockett quality individuals can do it.
Speaker 1: The rest of them are stuck with suboptimal versions. The
Speaker 1: variation in the traits is pronounced that tip. That means
Speaker 1: that you suddenly got a signal. You've got a thing
Speaker 1: out there that is an honest indicator of fighting ability.
Speaker 1: It's not an accident that the biggest males have the
Speaker 1: biggest they're the studs. So if I'm a mediocre male
Speaker 1: with a medium rack and I look and I size
Speaker 1: up my opponent and he's got a massive rack, do
Speaker 1: I want to escalate in that fight? No, because really
Speaker 1: he's gonna beat me. Because it's an honest signal, and
Speaker 1: that male with bigger antlers is really the better fighter.
Speaker 1: And so in these animal populations, whether it's beetles, crabs,
Speaker 1: and I mean caribou, elephants, all these systems. Once the
Speaker 1: arms races at that point, and these weapons are big,
Speaker 1: they're expensive, they're variable, they're an honest signal of fighting ability.
Speaker 1: The next step kicks in and the weapons start acting
Speaker 1: as a deterrent. There a signal you don't actually have
Speaker 1: to fight with it, because all I need to do
Speaker 1: is look at that antler and I know I'm gonna lose.
Speaker 1: And so more and more in these populations, the small
Speaker 1: guys back down. They they size each other up, they
Speaker 1: spar a little bit, they look at each other. You
Speaker 1: see these great examples of antelope sort of strutt in
Speaker 1: side by side, or fallow deer. There's beautiful pictures of
Speaker 1: these males. They run side by side and they turn
Speaker 1: on the run back there like looking at each other
Speaker 1: whose antlers are bigger. And then the smaller ones usually leave.
Speaker 1: And so you reach this point in the cycle where
Speaker 1: the weapons are big, they're expensive, they're a signal, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden they're a deterrent. You don't even
Speaker 1: have to fight anymore because most of your competition walks
Speaker 1: away because you're the stud and you've got the weapons
Speaker 1: and it's honest, And that's the point where you start.
Speaker 1: That's where there's tons of military pair aloes. By the way,
Speaker 1: if we go there and then you reach this point
Speaker 1: where the weapons are huge, only a tiny fraction of
Speaker 1: individuals can afford it. Nobody else is even in the game.
Speaker 1: They can't even not only can they not fight, I
Speaker 1: mean they don't even bother trying to fight. And that's
Speaker 1: the point where usually somebody breaks the rules the asymmetric warfare,
Speaker 1: the guerilla equivalent. Somebody cheats and figures out a way
Speaker 1: to screw that. Man, I'm not playing by those rules anymore,
Speaker 1: the sneaky dumb It's like, I'm not going to fight
Speaker 1: with the entrance. I'm not gonna win. So they dig
Speaker 1: a side tone and find another way, and that's the
Speaker 1: beginning of the end. Once the sneakers or the cheaters
Speaker 1: start doing too well, the whole thing collapses, The weapons disappear,
Speaker 1: and the whole process starts again. That cycle. Something aligns
Speaker 1: like a star so that all of a sudden, bigger
Speaker 1: is better population starts launching onto this trajectory bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger.
Speaker 1: They get bigger, they get expensive, they become exaggerated as
Speaker 1: a signal, they become a deterrent cheaters, and aage collapse.
Speaker 1: That sort of process repeats itself over and over again,
Speaker 1: and I would argue that just about any animal you
Speaker 1: can imagine, with the exception of the saber tooth cats
Speaker 1: that has huge weapons like that, has gone through exactly
Speaker 1: that cycle. And that's the parallel with the military. Military
Speaker 1: technologies go through the same cycle. They get triggered for
Speaker 1: the same reasons. Once they get triggered, the weapons get
Speaker 1: bigger and bigger and bigger. As they get bigger, they
Speaker 1: get more and more and more expensive. As they get
Speaker 1: more and more expensive, fewer countries or nations can afford
Speaker 1: to play the game. And then you reach a point
Speaker 1: where they're a deterrent because you got the weapons and
Speaker 1: nobody else does. And then the cheaters invade and the
Speaker 1: whole thing class and along comes some guys with airplane
Speaker 1: tickets and box cutters and brings you to your knees exactly,
Speaker 1: or cyber hackers. All throughout your book, you talk, you
Speaker 1: talk about military. Yeah, sure, let me go off on that,
Speaker 1: but I wanted to throughout you but you talk about
Speaker 1: military parallels. So you get into armaments, um, the arms race,
Speaker 1: but there's one, there's one that doesn't go towards bigger, bigger, bigger,
Speaker 1: And you talk about, uh, projectile points. Can you tell
Speaker 1: everyone about? So I can't remember where it's it's it's
Speaker 1: like I'm losing myself now, Like I can't remember what
Speaker 1: example you brought up that got you to write about
Speaker 1: Clovis points and full time, I am a sucker for history.
Speaker 1: I love the past. I love the past. When I
Speaker 1: find a fossil and I realized I'm looking at something
Speaker 1: that's a snapshot from something way in the past. We
Speaker 1: just got back from taking our kids two weeks in Europe.
Speaker 1: I mean, I was blown away by POMPEII. The whole
Speaker 1: idea of walking around and looking at the mosaics in
Speaker 1: a bathroom of somebody's house from a thousand years ago.
Speaker 1: Just I mean, I get a rush. It's a palpable
Speaker 1: endorphin rush. I love that feeling. And for me growing up,
Speaker 1: I used to find arrowheads in my neighbor's tobacco field
Speaker 1: in Tennessee, and after the rains, I would go walk
Speaker 1: through these fields and just look at the slopes of
Speaker 1: the dirt at the basis of the plants. Look for
Speaker 1: the little glisten of pieces of flint or absidian that
Speaker 1: we're coming out of the dirt. And there's this feeling
Speaker 1: I don't have. Some people get it, some people don't.
Speaker 1: I don't know how to describe it. But if I
Speaker 1: pick up an arrowhead and hold it, and I'm the
Speaker 1: first person to touch that since the person that made it,
Speaker 1: and those things can be three, four or five, ten
Speaker 1: thousand years old, depending on where you are and what
Speaker 1: they are. If it's Clovis, it could be fifteen thousand
Speaker 1: years old. That's this priceless moment of touching the past.
Speaker 1: And I used to get a kick out of that
Speaker 1: from his I mean basically from when I could walk onward.
Speaker 1: I love that history. And so for me, when I
Speaker 1: had a chance to look at all these weapons, to
Speaker 1: go back and look at arrowheads and really think about what,
Speaker 1: you know, what kinds of processes, agents of selection sort
Speaker 1: of shaped the evolution of the form of these arrowheads.
Speaker 1: It was it was a fun, fun digression. But you
Speaker 1: brought it up in the context of them evolving to
Speaker 1: be smaller that rather than larger, And I think it's
Speaker 1: a really good parallel. I've tried to say it already
Speaker 1: in this interview. Most of the time animal weapons aren't big.
Speaker 1: Most animals don't have an enormous racks sticking on the
Speaker 1: top o coffee table fused to the top of their head.
Speaker 1: Most species, it's not worth it. It's too expensive, it's
Speaker 1: too awkward. Why the hell would you do something like that?
Speaker 1: And so most of the time it's not worth it.
Speaker 1: We talked today about the rare circumstances where the stars
Speaker 1: line up and all of a sudden, in one population
Speaker 1: of one species, it is worth it, and you go
Speaker 1: off on this trajectory. But the arrowheads are a really nice,
Speaker 1: clear illustration of a of a more typical situation where
Speaker 1: it's not worth it to get really big, and it
Speaker 1: illustrates the point that weapons are shaped by costs and benefits.
Speaker 1: And so with a with a projectile point, how do
Speaker 1: I where do I start? So so what I did
Speaker 1: is I picked up a literature that it looked at
Speaker 1: the so called evolution of projectile points in North America
Speaker 1: from you know, the earliest people that we think came
Speaker 1: across the Bearing Street, and these were the Clovis people,
Speaker 1: and the fulsome people's all the way through to you know,
Speaker 1: effectively that the colonization from Western Europeans and sort of
Speaker 1: the end of that era. And they have beautiful sequences
Speaker 1: of these projectile points through time, even from within the
Speaker 1: same areas. You can look sort of over time and
Speaker 1: how the technology changed the fla making patterns, the shapes,
Speaker 1: the sizes, and what they found is that the points
Speaker 1: got smaller. So if you go way back to the
Speaker 1: Clovised time period, they were using these primarily to hunt
Speaker 1: things like Columbian mammoths, and so we found that we
Speaker 1: they found the points almost always in association with mammoth kills.
Speaker 1: They were pretty confident that that was a major source
Speaker 1: of calories for these people. And if you're gonna try
Speaker 1: to puncture through the hide of something that's thick and
Speaker 1: that big, you need a big point. And there's some
Speaker 1: pretty tight physical constraints. I brought one that we can
Speaker 1: hold and look at pretty tight physical constraints on a
Speaker 1: napped stone projectile point that they have. You have to
Speaker 1: have a point that's tailored to the size of the
Speaker 1: shaft of the spear. It has to be about one
Speaker 1: and a half times the diameter of the shaft of
Speaker 1: the spear. If the points too narrow, then when it
Speaker 1: pierces the hide, it doesn't create a slit that's big
Speaker 1: enough to allow the shaft of the spear to go in,
Speaker 1: so it hits. It goes in like an inch and
Speaker 1: it stops. So longer wider blade cuts a bigger gash
Speaker 1: slice and it creates an opening that lets the shaft
Speaker 1: of the spear go into the animal. But if you
Speaker 1: make them too wide, it's brittle and they snap. So
Speaker 1: you have this sort of you know, the sort of
Speaker 1: tension between points that are too too small for your
Speaker 1: shaft of your spear and points that are too wide
Speaker 1: and they break. And the happy mediums about one and
Speaker 1: a half times, so we know the early Clovis this
Speaker 1: isn't Clovis, but they were big, big points with really
Speaker 1: thick shafted spears that they needed to puncture through the
Speaker 1: high of the mammoth. But those were very expensive points
Speaker 1: to make. It was hard to find pieces of obsidian
Speaker 1: without imperfections in it that would allow you to nap
Speaker 1: a point that was like you know, some of them
Speaker 1: were like six ten inches long, and it took a
Speaker 1: spectacular amount of skill to be able to pull that
Speaker 1: off without breaking these things. And then you had to
Speaker 1: carry the spears and the points with you everywhere you went.
Speaker 1: These were nomadic people. They're carrying everything with them everywhere
Speaker 1: they go. By some estimates, they'd moved two hundred miles
Speaker 1: in a year. You're carrying everything with you, so big
Speaker 1: spears are heavy. Is long as you're getting things like mammoths,
Speaker 1: it's worth it. The benefits of the big weapons are
Speaker 1: you can take down the huge prey feture people. It's
Speaker 1: a great thing. But the mammoths went extinct and they
Speaker 1: had to shift from mammoth to smaller species. The next
Speaker 1: one was the bison antiquois, which I think you've talked
Speaker 1: about in some of years of big bison but smaller
Speaker 1: than a mammoth, and so the shafts were overkilled. Suddenly
Speaker 1: it wasn't worth it to carry these huge, heavy spears
Speaker 1: and to make these really really hard to make points.
Speaker 1: So they started making smaller points that were better fit
Speaker 1: to the shaft sizes that they needed on the spears
Speaker 1: for the bison. And then when the bison antiquis went extinct,
Speaker 1: they shifted down again to big horn sheep into the
Speaker 1: modern American bison, and each time they shifted to smaller prey,
Speaker 1: they immediately got rid of the big stuff because it
Speaker 1: was too expensive to make, too expensive to carry, and
Speaker 1: they scaled down and got smaller and smaller until they
Speaker 1: had shaft sizes and point sizes that worked for the
Speaker 1: current prey. And then all that ended when they invented
Speaker 1: the bow and arrow, because suddenly you had a fundamentally
Speaker 1: different sort of projectile propulsion system and you could get
Speaker 1: by with really tiny points. And from that point forward,
Speaker 1: nobody wanted to carry the big stuff. It was too expensive,
Speaker 1: too heavy. They all switched to really lightweight, portable bone
Speaker 1: arrow technologies. So is that is that what you That?
Speaker 1: I got too far? But it's a nice illustration of
Speaker 1: costs and benefits that the big weapons were worth the
Speaker 1: price when the prey was really big and you could
Speaker 1: use them on bison, But when that prey was gone,
Speaker 1: it wasn't worth the price to make a big weapon,
Speaker 1: so you downsized it to something that was cheaper, and
Speaker 1: then you downsize it again it's something that was even cheaper.
Speaker 1: There's this sort of tension tug, a war between costs
Speaker 1: and benefits, and once the big prey were gone, the
Speaker 1: benefits weren't as big. So it's it ratcheted down to
Speaker 1: a smaller size. Explain your view on or not your view,
Speaker 1: but your insights how you want to put it into.
Speaker 1: Where we've looked, like in recent decades with our military,
Speaker 1: and how we imagined military might and how we would
Speaker 1: exercise military might, and where current lee Who is the
Speaker 1: sneak strategy, who's the beatle that tunnels who tunnels in
Speaker 1: and comes up through the floor? That one I can answer.
Speaker 1: So so step back a second and we okay, in time,
Speaker 1: I want to go out. Okay, so step back a second.
Speaker 1: I want to I want to make one thing clear.
Speaker 1: We've been talking about evolution of animal populations and winners
Speaker 1: and losers and sexual selection. In something like cariboo or elk,
Speaker 1: it's all about reproduction because the males that win, which
Speaker 1: presumably are the studs with the best antlers, the best condition,
Speaker 1: they win the harems, they get access to the most females.
Speaker 1: They win because they sire more offspring and they produce
Speaker 1: more of the kids in the next generation, and those
Speaker 1: kids carry the antlers because the way that the antlers
Speaker 1: are copied is through producing more elk. The winners have
Speaker 1: more kids, and the currency of success is numbers of offspring.
Speaker 1: When you talk about military weapons is different. We're not
Speaker 1: talking about who has kids, whether you have a better
Speaker 1: machine gun and more. We're not talking about reproduction they anymore.
Speaker 1: We're talking about manufactured techne But historically there's a lot
Speaker 1: of instances where it does control reproduction. There are the
Speaker 1: Middle Ages is a good one, and weapons are used.
Speaker 1: Definitely a factory production. But people find where like it
Speaker 1: seems like the male there will be a population and
Speaker 1: it will seem like there's a sudden, very radical shift
Speaker 1: and the population in the area from and you can
Speaker 1: see markers from a conquering invasion where it seems like
Speaker 1: want to go there. Yes, there seems with conquests, and
Speaker 1: there's no question that military leaders and political leaders tend,
Speaker 1: especially if you're including illegitimate offspring, to sire an awful
Speaker 1: of offspring. So reproduction. So reproduction, I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: say what you say is still the ultimate currency for
Speaker 1: success and us too. That will piss everybody off, But
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, you know, when you
Speaker 1: look a thousand generations from now, the people that are
Speaker 1: gonna be out there are going to be offspring from
Speaker 1: people that were here today. So so yes, reproduction still matters.
Speaker 1: But what I'm trying to say is, if I want
Speaker 1: to understand this arrowhead, or I want to look at
Speaker 1: airplane technology or a tank technology or missile technology, it
Speaker 1: really doesn't matter how many kids the person that designed
Speaker 1: it has or how many kids the person that flew
Speaker 1: it has. That's a separate question. So yes, military issues
Speaker 1: are associated with dying and with breeding, but we're not
Speaker 1: that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the
Speaker 1: missile or the tank or the arrowhead. And when you're
Speaker 1: talking about a weapon, or take a machine gun, you
Speaker 1: know in a K forty seven that is a thing there,
Speaker 1: there are copies made in a factory. They're cranking out
Speaker 1: a K forty seven's. The factory is making more a
Speaker 1: K for it. That's not me having kids, that's the
Speaker 1: factory making more a K forty sevens. But if I
Speaker 1: look at the population of submachine guns out there or
Speaker 1: assault rifles out there, I could go out there, just
Speaker 1: like I could say how many dark mice and white
Speaker 1: mice are out there in my population, I could say
Speaker 1: how many m sixteen. How many A K forty sevens.
Speaker 1: If I want to characterize the population of assault rifles
Speaker 1: on this planet right now, I could probably find fifty
Speaker 1: different models out there. A few of them are gonna
Speaker 1: be really rare. Some of them, like the a K
Speaker 1: forty seven, are going to be ridiculously common. I could
Speaker 1: talk about variation in the weapon out there now, and
Speaker 1: realistically that's going to change. Some models are going to
Speaker 1: get picked up and spread and they're gonna become more common,
Speaker 1: and they're gonna get adjusted and developed and get better
Speaker 1: and better over time. Others are gonna disappear. They're too clunky,
Speaker 1: they jam under you know, the sand gets in them,
Speaker 1: they don't work. Nobody wants them, they're too expensive. Nobody
Speaker 1: wants to produce them for their militaries. So the weapons
Speaker 1: are going to change over time, and it's a turnover process,
Speaker 1: winners and losers. It's exactly the same as what we're
Speaker 1: talking about with antlers or beetles, but it's not tied
Speaker 1: to reproduction. It's tied to who wants this. You know
Speaker 1: which models are being being picked up, manufactured and spreading,
Speaker 1: and which mant models are being discontinued because they suck,
Speaker 1: or they're not cost effective, or nobody wants them, and
Speaker 1: so you still have winners and losers. You can talk
Speaker 1: about the technology. It will change over time. If you
Speaker 1: look at the assault rifle, over the last fifty years,
Speaker 1: it's changed. It's better now, it's more efficient. Now. People
Speaker 1: have been playing around with it, trying to change the design.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's by accident. Sometimes their engineers trying to make
Speaker 1: it more efficient, make the cartridges work better, make it
Speaker 1: more cost effective, make it more portable. People are tweaking
Speaker 1: it and playing around. It's still in a K forty seven,
Speaker 1: but they're playing with it to try to make it better.
Speaker 1: That's variation. That's just like mutations cropping up in a
Speaker 1: mouse population making them a little faster, a little thicker,
Speaker 1: a little lighter. You know, there's variation, and some of
Speaker 1: it sucks, it doesn't work at all, it's gone. Some
Speaker 1: of it works really well. People grab it and run
Speaker 1: with it. That's evolution. So without as a backdrop for weapons,
Speaker 1: now we can come back full circle and say, well,
Speaker 1: when would weapons particular technologies get caught up in an
Speaker 1: arms race where all of a sudden you need bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger and bigger and bigger, and historically there's really
Speaker 1: good sort of accounts of early weapons technologies and where
Speaker 1: this happens. So if you go back to the Romans
Speaker 1: and the Greeks and and the Syrian time periods Mediterranean,
Speaker 1: there were galleys that were these order you know, the
Speaker 1: try reams. There were these ships that were rowing soldier
Speaker 1: back and forth for many many years, like a thousand years.
Speaker 1: These ships were called penticonters. They had fifty rowers and
Speaker 1: there was nothing special about them. They just carried troops
Speaker 1: from place to place. They scrambled about on the ocean.
Speaker 1: They weren't actually weapons. They were just boats that took
Speaker 1: people along the shorelines to transport troops. For a thousand years,
Speaker 1: nothing changed. All the countries had the same basic ship.
Speaker 1: The design was pretty much indistinguishable. And then somebody invents
Speaker 1: a battering ram boom, just like that new technology. It's
Speaker 1: just it's like a beetle horn. It's a thing that
Speaker 1: sticks off the front of the boat. But oh my god,
Speaker 1: from that point forward, all the rules were written because
Speaker 1: now you could take your ship smashing into somebody else
Speaker 1: and saying k his his ship. And so overnight they went
Speaker 1: from shuttling people like a scramble to hitting another opponent
Speaker 1: ship one on one in a duel. That's that's the
Speaker 1: same trigger that works in animals. That's the spark. All
Speaker 1: of a sudden, whoever's got the fastest ship wins. Now
Speaker 1: you've got an arms race because a bigger ship, of
Speaker 1: faster ship wins in that kind of one on one encountering.
Speaker 1: Just like that, after nothing happening for a thousand years,
Speaker 1: overnight these technologies exploded. As people started making bigger and
Speaker 1: bigger and bigger ships. They started getting longer until they buckled.
Speaker 1: They started adding another row of rowers, so buyreams came along,
Speaker 1: than try reams, than five six is. They got bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger and bigger until these ships were monstrosities that
Speaker 1: were effectively useless. But the point is a change in
Speaker 1: technology caused the weapons the ships to line up one
Speaker 1: on one in a duel, exactly like the dung beetles
Speaker 1: in a tunnel. Suddenly they're facing each other one on one,
Speaker 1: and that was it. You can look at various periods
Speaker 1: throughout military history and the same kind of a process
Speaker 1: has happened. The Cold War was the most precedent and
Speaker 1: sort of alarming of those and in that case it
Speaker 1: happened at the level of nation states and political landscapes,
Speaker 1: but you effectively had the US and the USS are
Speaker 1: the superpowers that were still standing after the Second World War,
Speaker 1: going toe to toe and the scene that's a one
Speaker 1: on one duel, and that sparked an arms race that
Speaker 1: led to unbelievably appid development of missiles, aircraft, tanks, nuclear
Speaker 1: weapon everything, I mean, all the weapons technologies that we
Speaker 1: had sort of got folded into that race. And and
Speaker 1: if you want to go into that, it turns out
Speaker 1: the behavior of the nations during that time period was
Speaker 1: exactly like elk or fiddler crabs or beetles. Those two
Speaker 1: nations didn't go nuclear and all doubt full on battle.
Speaker 1: They sparred. They had little conflagrations in Afghanistan and Korea
Speaker 1: and Vietnam where they sort of pushed each other a
Speaker 1: little bit. They used conventional weapons, they didn't use the
Speaker 1: nuclear or the weapons of mass destruction. They sized each
Speaker 1: other up and then back down again. That's exactly what
Speaker 1: animals do in that kind of situation. You know what's
Speaker 1: interesting about when we think about the parallels and then
Speaker 1: the things that don't line up. Would be like with
Speaker 1: in World War Two, that the US becoming the people
Speaker 1: who developed that refers to develop the atomic bomb, would
Speaker 1: be as though, I mean, we started that war not
Speaker 1: a super power, right, but by the time we came
Speaker 1: out and we were emerging as it would be like
Speaker 1: if a giant. It wouldn't be that the hornless beetle
Speaker 1: suddenly came up. It would be like the horned beetle.
Speaker 1: The wolf with the big bad horn was like, oh
Speaker 1: and guess what else? I also have fangs. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit like we we upset our, we
Speaker 1: upped our, we trumped our own action by developing the
Speaker 1: atomic weapon, and then thereby making in some in some degrees,
Speaker 1: made this man Japan this naval superpower. It made that
Speaker 1: naval might irrelevant because we had the atomic bomb. It
Speaker 1: rewrote the rules, completely changed the game. But that's again
Speaker 1: the arms races ratchet up, they escalate, so the simplest
Speaker 1: way to think of it as beatles again. And you
Speaker 1: know it got or an antelope picture. You've got seven
Speaker 1: inch horns out there, and suddenly somebody comes along with
Speaker 1: eight inch horns and they start winning. Pretty soon all
Speaker 1: their kids grandkids, great grandkids. Pretty soon everybody's got eight
Speaker 1: inch horns and that's not enough. And now somebody pops
Speaker 1: up with a nine inch horn, and and so in
Speaker 1: a sense, the sizes of these weapons ratchet and steps.
Speaker 1: But you can also have sort of fundamentally new technologies
Speaker 1: that pop up on the scene that just completely rewrite
Speaker 1: the rules. And so arms races can go in lots
Speaker 1: of directions, and usually they're additive. So you still need
Speaker 1: the first weapon, but now you need the second one too,
Speaker 1: and I need the third. You need tanks and submarines
Speaker 1: and bombers and nuclear weapons. You know, it got more
Speaker 1: and more expensive because all these things were sort of compounded.
Speaker 1: But the nuclear weapon game that was that was like
Speaker 1: a spontaneous mutation that completely rewrote the rules because incontinental
Speaker 1: and had delivered with the ship. It was like the Indianapolis.
Speaker 1: You had like deliver it to the Pacific theater in
Speaker 1: a ship. You had to have a powerful air force
Speaker 1: to get the thing a field and put it where
Speaker 1: you want it. And so you're, like you said, it's
Speaker 1: like a ratcheting up because you're relying on all these capabilities.
Speaker 1: Because really you're assessing your capabilities against to your opponent,
Speaker 1: and they're constantly trying to do better at their capability.
Speaker 1: So every time they get a new technology, then they're up.
Speaker 1: Then there ahead of you, the races on to surpass them.
Speaker 1: It really ratchets into this vicious cycle that can lead
Speaker 1: out of control. So so where a new weapons, So
Speaker 1: where we are today? That the Cold War obviously, but
Speaker 1: the technologies are still out there. And one interesting sort
Speaker 1: of twist on that system is during the Cold War,
Speaker 1: the most expensive state of the art weapons, the ones
Speaker 1: that were the equivalent of the antlers in your elk
Speaker 1: or your cariboo or the horns and my beetles, were
Speaker 1: the nuclear weapons. Though that was the new technology. That
Speaker 1: was the one that was the most sophisticated, the most
Speaker 1: difficult to to actually generate. And then you had to
Speaker 1: have all, like you said, the delivery. You had to
Speaker 1: have the infrastructure to be able to deliver that, which
Speaker 1: took all the sensor nets, that took all the guidance systems,
Speaker 1: it took the whole space race was basically a cloak
Speaker 1: and you know, a facade for developing this will technology
Speaker 1: that could deliver nuclear weapons to an opponent. And so
Speaker 1: all of that stuff had to be there. Today, we're
Speaker 1: in a very different world now. We've got stockpiles of
Speaker 1: these nuclear weapons cached away in places that I hate
Speaker 1: to think about, that are sort of rotting away and
Speaker 1: there their diamond doesn't because we produced a shipload of
Speaker 1: them during the Cold War. So there's tons of nuclear
Speaker 1: warheads out there that's not that's not that expensive. In fact,
Speaker 1: it's not that inconceivable that just about anybody could get
Speaker 1: their hands on them. Seven or I can't remember how many,
Speaker 1: seven or eight countries now maybe more. A couple more
Speaker 1: on the horizon. There are a couple more on the horizon.
Speaker 1: The the the really expensive weapons, the ones that are
Speaker 1: the equivalent of antlers now are conventional weapons. There are
Speaker 1: things like the F thirty five strike fighter and the
Speaker 1: new Jail four class aircraft carrier. These things cost billions
Speaker 1: and billions of dollars to produce, and only a very
Speaker 1: small number of nations have the technology, the sophistication, the infrastructure,
Speaker 1: the trained personnel, that all the stuff you need to
Speaker 1: produce and maintain and use these weapons. So I mean,
Speaker 1: I had a chance to is it one of our
Speaker 1: nuclear aircraft carriers? A couple of months ago. Astounding experience
Speaker 1: looking at our operations in action in the Pacific. As
Speaker 1: we cycled through, they have the F thirty five strike
Speaker 1: fighters landing on a carrier for one of the first
Speaker 1: times ever on a carrier. I got to stand like
Speaker 1: as close as I am to you and watch these
Speaker 1: things come screaming down and catch the tailhook. These technologies
Speaker 1: are incredible. A helmet on an F thirty five costs
Speaker 1: half a million dollars. Every single bomb that they put
Speaker 1: on these things as a million dollars out of the gates.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're spending billions of dollars the nuclear triad,
Speaker 1: the infrastructure that we have is is trillions of dollars
Speaker 1: a year. And and so these are the state of
Speaker 1: the art weapons now. And you asked about the sneaky beatles.
Speaker 1: What's the cheater that we have to worry about. It's
Speaker 1: cyber hackers. I mean, it seems crazy, but we're spending
Speaker 1: billions of dollars on some astoundingly good time. I mean,
Speaker 1: I got these fighters are amazing, absolutely amazing. I don't
Speaker 1: know if any of you had a chance to see them.
Speaker 1: If you know much about the F thirty five, it
Speaker 1: is a supersonic, super maneuverable stealth fighter that the helmets.
Speaker 1: The reason the helmets cost half a million dollars on
Speaker 1: these things is they're completely integrated with sensor systems so
Speaker 1: that the movements of the pilots are tracked within the
Speaker 1: within the cockpit of the plane. So any direction the
Speaker 1: pilot looks, the direction they're looking is automatically integrated with
Speaker 1: sensors that are built into the skin of the aircraft.
Speaker 1: In that direction they're tracking the pupils of the pilot.
Speaker 1: And so they've got infrared sensors, they've got all the
Speaker 1: GPS stuff, they've got this the topographic maps, everything all overlaid.
Speaker 1: It's not even like there's a screen. The old ones
Speaker 1: had a heads up display screen. It's just there. They
Speaker 1: can look straight through their legs. They're crotched down the
Speaker 1: bottom of the plane. There's it's gone. It's nothing. They
Speaker 1: see all the way to the ground because it completely integrated.
Speaker 1: They've unobstructed three and sixty degree view all the time,
Speaker 1: heat sensor, everything all sort of overlaid into an integrative picture.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. But all of these technologies depend on software,
Speaker 1: so we're spending a fortune on these incredible technologies and
Speaker 1: they you know, we're the Boone and crocket ball right now.
Speaker 1: Those are the state of the our weapons and we
Speaker 1: really are safer because of them. They're amazing. But the
Speaker 1: sneaky little beetles sort of worming away from the sidelines
Speaker 1: or the hackers because if they can get past, we can't.
Speaker 1: Pilot can't fly these things without software. You can't land
Speaker 1: these planes without software that they literally can't handle the
Speaker 1: planes without the software because the planes can too maneuvers
Speaker 1: that are fast enough that the pilot would black out
Speaker 1: from the g forces. So they have to integrate whatever
Speaker 1: the pilot does with the stick with sort of built
Speaker 1: in sensor systems that that that interpret the pilot's movement
Speaker 1: in a way that doesn't cause the plane to do
Speaker 1: something that the blacks out the pilot. So you literally
Speaker 1: can't even go old fashioned and fly these things without
Speaker 1: the software that the aircraft carry. Was awesome. I got
Speaker 1: to talk to Captain, I got to talk to the
Speaker 1: first officer, I got to talk to the master chief,
Speaker 1: the cooks, I got to talk to people running the
Speaker 1: nuclear actors. I mean I got to meet anybody and everybody.
Speaker 1: They were awesome about letting us as a civilian go
Speaker 1: in and just look what was happening. But every single
Speaker 1: step of that operation is critically dependent on software. They
Speaker 1: can't control the nuclear reactor on the ship without software.
Speaker 1: They can't navigate without software. They can't control the positions
Speaker 1: of the planes without software. They can't orchestrate the landings
Speaker 1: and the takeoffs of the planes without software. The way
Speaker 1: that they communicate with all the rest of Norad and
Speaker 1: everything is all software. So so our vulnerability the flanks
Speaker 1: that we've got exposed right now is the firewalls on
Speaker 1: our software. And they know it. I mean, I'm not
Speaker 1: teaching telling them anything. Yes, I did get a chance
Speaker 1: to go to find d C and give a talk
Speaker 1: in front of the former director of the n s
Speaker 1: A and the CIA and all these top brass from
Speaker 1: the military about sneaky dung beetles and sneaky big horn
Speaker 1: sheep and salmon, actually telling them the parallels. But you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not teaching them anything. They don't know. They they
Speaker 1: are totally aware of this and and that's the new
Speaker 1: arms race. So when I was at this conference talking
Speaker 1: to these guys, they said, yeah, yeah, we've the Chinese
Speaker 1: have buildings full of people that are trying seven to
Speaker 1: hack into our systems, and we've buildings full of people
Speaker 1: that are hacking into theirs. And the ideas each side
Speaker 1: is trying to insert code. It's not just stealing trade secrets.
Speaker 1: So they could go build their own F thirty five,
Speaker 1: that would cost them a fortune. Why go build your
Speaker 1: own jet if you can insert code that renders ours useless.
Speaker 1: So so the idea that they're called zero day attacks
Speaker 1: is if they can insert code that sits, then we
Speaker 1: can't find it because it's not doing anything. It's just
Speaker 1: sitting there. So it's harder for us to tell that
Speaker 1: it's there until you know, zero day when they need it,
Speaker 1: they turn it on and they can take over our
Speaker 1: technologies and use it against us. That's the fear. We
Speaker 1: spend all the money, we produce the technologies, they hijack
Speaker 1: those technologies and use them against us. That is the
Speaker 1: ultimate game changer sneak strategy that we gotta worry about.
Speaker 1: But the military is on it, and their argument is
Speaker 1: they have so much infiltrating all their technologies that we
Speaker 1: can damn sure shut them down too. So so the
Speaker 1: general actually said this is the new arms race. It's
Speaker 1: like we're all sort of racing each other to who
Speaker 1: can hijack and control the software or the other side.
Speaker 1: That's the new real that's that's our new Cold war
Speaker 1: crazy stuff. It's a long way from dung beetles and
Speaker 1: rhinoceros beetles, I'll tell you that. No, it's great though, man,
Speaker 1: you do a great job of bringing it all together. Thanks.
Speaker 1: Like the parts about deer, No, it's phenomenal. Is it
Speaker 1: possible to tell where you are in within an arms
Speaker 1: race in a partaylor species? Oh? I thought you mean us.
Speaker 1: It's like it's a little scary when you try to
Speaker 1: do that. That says our aircraft carriers. Had all kinds
Speaker 1: of human comparison questions coming through my head and I've
Speaker 1: passed it all. Elk kef bigger antlers or they have
Speaker 1: like very possible. Yeah, yeah, I think that arms racist. Still, well,
Speaker 1: it's hard to say so. First of all, with animal populations,
Speaker 1: you know, we talked. Sam brought up the fact that
Speaker 1: evolution can happen really fast. And when you're dealing with
Speaker 1: antibiotics applied to a population of BacT here as you're
Speaker 1: talking hours, you know, I met population is going to
Speaker 1: adapt within twenty four hours fast. Because they're head influenza.
Speaker 1: People want to know why they get to get a
Speaker 1: flu shot every single year. It's because the flu virus
Speaker 1: is evolving so fast that six months, eight months out,
Speaker 1: it's such a genetically different beast that the vaccinations we
Speaker 1: just produced don't match it anymore. And so those are
Speaker 1: situations where it's happening really fast. I mean hours to days,
Speaker 1: two weeks. You've got to stay on top of it.
Speaker 1: Elk rhinosters beetle is probably a little bit slower, still
Speaker 1: fast in the grand scheme of things, because these kinds
Speaker 1: of arms races are quicker than normal background evolution. But
Speaker 1: but we're talking decades, the hundreds of years. No, but
Speaker 1: I can flip that back getting smaller. We've got really
Speaker 1: good evidence. This will be a hot button topic for
Speaker 1: your audience, but I know some of the scientists. We
Speaker 1: have very compelling evidence that things like big horn sheep
Speaker 1: populations have been selected on by trophy hunting and have
Speaker 1: actually evolved in response to have smaller and smaller horns.
Speaker 1: So we've actually driven the evolution of smaller weapons in
Speaker 1: contemporary populations of an ungulate big horn sheep and they've
Speaker 1: got data where they stopped the trophy hunting and the
Speaker 1: horns rebounded and evolved to be really really big again.
Speaker 1: So we can see weapon evolution even on the scale
Speaker 1: of things like to you or big horn sheep happening
Speaker 1: over you know, two decades, three decades. It's not ours
Speaker 1: like flu, and it's not millennia. It's it's still pretty
Speaker 1: fast with that, you know, like a doll sheet, for instance,
Speaker 1: and most of Alaska, a doll sheep becomes legal when
Speaker 1: he develops the three sixty degree horn. If al's a
Speaker 1: doll sheet, you'd be better off. If that didn't, you're
Speaker 1: still vulnerable because of other things. But that's like the
Speaker 1: key indicator. And one that gets there fast, one that
Speaker 1: gets a full curl fast is I don't know, and
Speaker 1: I don't know how actually two. And if if there's
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of dollar sheep and a relatively light
Speaker 1: hunting pressure, so only a couple of dozen trophy animals
Speaker 1: get yanked, maybe that's not really that big an effect,
Speaker 1: and the benefits in the local populations are still going
Speaker 1: to be so great to keep going. But if you're
Speaker 1: talking about hunting pressure, where you're really taking a sizeable
Speaker 1: proportion of the top animals, then yeah, that would apply
Speaker 1: very strong selection to the males to not have that
Speaker 1: last curl. We do that with fisheries. One of the
Speaker 1: problems we have things like Atlantic cod populations is gill
Speaker 1: nets catch the big animals the small ones slipped through,
Speaker 1: so we tend to selectively harvest the older. Big fish
Speaker 1: keep growing as they get You know this better than
Speaker 1: me saying they get They keep growing as they get older.
Speaker 1: So big fish are also older fish. So we're selectively
Speaker 1: harvesting the biggest and the oldest fish on a very
Speaker 1: large scale. When you consider the scope of the Atlantic
Speaker 1: cod fisheries and the numbers of ships and the numbers
Speaker 1: of fish that they're taking, and there's really good evidence
Speaker 1: over the last thirty fifty years that the animals have
Speaker 1: both evolved to grow more slowly so they stay smaller,
Speaker 1: and they started reproducing at a smaller size and a
Speaker 1: younger age. So they're beginning to reproduce smaller than they
Speaker 1: used to because all the big guys are being pulled out.
Speaker 1: It's the small ones that stumbled on a way to
Speaker 1: reproduce early that now winning they're small enough to get
Speaker 1: through the gillnets and they're breeding. Those are the ones
Speaker 1: producing the offspring. So the populations evolving, you know, in
Speaker 1: a direction that's not so great for the fisheries industry,
Speaker 1: but it makes a lot of biological sense. We're applying
Speaker 1: selection by taking the big ones, the smaller ones start
Speaker 1: doing better, the population evolves towards a smaller size. What
Speaker 1: else you got yet, um on animal weapons? Like any
Speaker 1: like concluders, masks, like you're typing away over there. Oh,
Speaker 1: that was my question. There was about if we knew
Speaker 1: where the arms race was? Are you asked where we
Speaker 1: were in the animals? You can see in a lot
Speaker 1: of animals that the sneak tactics are already there. You
Speaker 1: study their behavior and you can find the sneaky mails
Speaker 1: or the what you call them precocious mails in the
Speaker 1: salmon and so in a way, you know you're already
Speaker 1: part way into that cycle. And by definition, if you
Speaker 1: picked it because it's got a huge weapon, it's probably
Speaker 1: already pretty far in. But but there is a fun
Speaker 1: twist there. We've known about sneaky mails for years. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not a new aspect of animal behavior, but nobody
Speaker 1: had ever connected it to an arms race before seeing
Speaker 1: the sneaky mails as the beginning of the end, the
Speaker 1: sort of beginning of the collapse was totally new, and
Speaker 1: I got that idea from the military. And the reason
Speaker 1: is because he's saying you brought it's because it takes
Speaker 1: a long time. We can see arms races there. We
Speaker 1: see species with huge antlers. That's why I try to
Speaker 1: study these things in the first place. It's like, what
Speaker 1: the hell is happening in that beetle or this fly
Speaker 1: or that ungulate. We picked them because they've got the structures.
Speaker 1: We know something's going on, and we can infer from
Speaker 1: that that they're part way into this cycle. But we
Speaker 1: never actually get to see a collapse. But the military does.
Speaker 1: They've got really good records all the way through. They
Speaker 1: know why arms races collapse. They know why the arms
Speaker 1: raced with the Napoleon era sailing galleons collapsed. It was
Speaker 1: fire ships. Once that you know, you could set these
Speaker 1: things on fire, it was over. It was game over.
Speaker 1: They were done. We know about iron clad battleships. They
Speaker 1: know what started the arms race. They know how they
Speaker 1: got bigger and bigger and bigger. They know how nations
Speaker 1: sort of exploded in their attempts to build bigger and
Speaker 1: more of these battleships, and then they know why they
Speaker 1: became obsoleted with submarines. It was a sneaky beetle. Little
Speaker 1: beetle goes underground, minds his way into the tunnel. Submarines
Speaker 1: sneak under the surface, and they can sink even the biggest,
Speaker 1: best battleships from underwater. It's cheating that admirals hate submarines.
Speaker 1: It's an athema to them. It's dishonorable. It's like breaking
Speaker 1: the rules. It's exactly what it is, is breaking the rules.
Speaker 1: But once you've got submarines out there, you change the
Speaker 1: game and suddenly the really big battleships are obsolete. And
Speaker 1: so today it's not battleships and submarines. Well, so what
Speaker 1: we have our strike groups. We have our own submarines,
Speaker 1: and we surround our carriers now, which are the focus
Speaker 1: instead of the battleships. It's the carriers now we have
Speaker 1: to surround them with a strike group. You'll we would
Speaker 1: never send a carrier anywhere by itself. It only exists
Speaker 1: in a bubble that is created by the cruisers and
Speaker 1: the destroyers and the submarines, and the reason we need
Speaker 1: all that other stuff is because the submarines from the
Speaker 1: other side. So so the military figured out that changes
Speaker 1: in technology that broke the rules, that cheated were the
Speaker 1: things that collapsed in arms race. And they had studied
Speaker 1: it over and over again, from the ancient Mediterranean through
Speaker 1: the saline warships, the ironclad battleships, aircraft, all these systems
Speaker 1: had been worked out by military scholars and over and
Speaker 1: over again it's the sneaky, the cheaters that collapse the system.
Speaker 1: And so what was fun for me here, I'm a
Speaker 1: biologist reading all this military stuff, was to turn around
Speaker 1: and say, hey, we've got cheaters. We've known that forever.
Speaker 1: Oh they're sneak. I even found him as a grad
Speaker 1: student in my dung beetles, the sneaky mails. But putting
Speaker 1: the two pieces together and saying, wait a minute, maybe
Speaker 1: the sneakers or the collapse of the arms race in
Speaker 1: the animal systems too, that's new. We don't have a
Speaker 1: good way to test it yet because animal systems take
Speaker 1: long enough that we rarely ever get to catch it
Speaker 1: in action. So it's sort of a leap of faith
Speaker 1: at this point. It's an hypothesis that needs to be tested.
Speaker 1: But it's one of the ideas I put forward in
Speaker 1: that book, and it came from crossover between the military
Speaker 1: literature and the animal literature. And again it's it's fun,
Speaker 1: and it's only possible because these extreme weapons are so similar.
Speaker 1: The animal weapons story. Pretty much everything you could say
Speaker 1: about elk antlers or cariboo antlers you could apply verbatim
Speaker 1: to aircraft carriers or F thirty five strike fighters today.
Speaker 1: I mean, the parallels are so deep at every level
Speaker 1: that now we can go back and forth between the
Speaker 1: literatures and each side can learn from the other. Sam,
Speaker 1: what do you got? Oh, you got a good grade
Speaker 1: when you took his class. You don't, can't bring that up.
Speaker 1: Deserved a better grade? Um man? So many, so many things.
Speaker 1: One one thing I was I was curious about perusing
Speaker 1: the book, and you know, think about animal animal weapons.
Speaker 1: Um what? And you know, obviously my my mind gravitates,
Speaker 1: gravitates towards the young ulates and the antlers and everything.
Speaker 1: I was curious about non typical antler configurations and and
Speaker 1: if if that is adaptive in some way, and and
Speaker 1: I'm wondering if if perhaps that is is some form
Speaker 1: of cheating that it's a different configuration that might be
Speaker 1: able to um be defeat like that because they call
Speaker 1: it cheating because they're still paying the prosy. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to take your idea and run with it. What
Speaker 1: I would call it is variation. So again, all these
Speaker 1: populations start out with differences among individuals. Mutations pop up
Speaker 1: here and there, and if they happen to affect the
Speaker 1: way the antlers are developing, then you get a variant
Speaker 1: on the theme. The antlers a little bit different the
Speaker 1: times been. Who knows what it is, it's different. You've
Speaker 1: all seen crazy mutant antlers. Sometimes it's it's a genetic change.
Speaker 1: It's literally a heritable mutation in the genomes of these
Speaker 1: animals that affects the way they grow. And there's pretty
Speaker 1: good evidence of that. I don't know how many of
Speaker 1: you collect sheds, but probably all of you do. There's
Speaker 1: some neat places where you can show that the same
Speaker 1: bowl produces the same mutant form of the antler after year,
Speaker 1: and often you can find kids and grandkids in the
Speaker 1: same area that have the same variants. So some of
Speaker 1: these sort of defective antlers are heritable. They're they're produced
Speaker 1: somehow by something in the genome that's passed on other times.
Speaker 1: Who knows, it could be an injury to the cells
Speaker 1: or a burn or something that's not passed on. But
Speaker 1: but either way, their perturbations, their variations on the theme
Speaker 1: that's the raw material that evolution works on. I would
Speaker 1: expect most of the time they're not going to work
Speaker 1: that well. You know, thousands of millions of years of
Speaker 1: honing Antler shape and you go off in some wonkie
Speaker 1: direction and probably it's not going to function as well
Speaker 1: most of the time. But every now and then it
Speaker 1: might and all of a sudden you've got something that's better,
Speaker 1: and you might have an edge because now you've got
Speaker 1: a twist that nobody else has and that can really
Speaker 1: take off. And now your kids and grandkids and so
Speaker 1: what will happen is you'll start doing better because you've
Speaker 1: got that twist or the new time or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: And over time, across generations, if you're doing well enough,
Speaker 1: the population is going to evolve towards the point where
Speaker 1: everybody's got that new thing. And this may be the
Speaker 1: kind of process that Geist would talk about, but none
Speaker 1: of us ever get to actually see of how you
Speaker 1: go like, why why does a white tailed deer and
Speaker 1: a mule deer have, you know, antlers with the same
Speaker 1: number of times, but they branched differently. Who knows, but
Speaker 1: it might have been something like that and sistrally that
Speaker 1: sent one population off on a direction where they had
Speaker 1: a slightly different configuration than before. And so what you're
Speaker 1: talking about is the raw material that I would argue
Speaker 1: sets the stage for evolution of new shapes or new
Speaker 1: types of weapons. When we look across beetles, or you
Speaker 1: look across service, or you look across the antelope, it's
Speaker 1: really clear to us that the weapons change a lot.
Speaker 1: They don't just get big, they change in form. So
Speaker 1: there's all kinds of crazy differences and weapons, and that's
Speaker 1: sort of the big unknown mystery we're still trying to
Speaker 1: figure out. We don't have a good reason to explain
Speaker 1: why there's a thousand different kinds of beetle horns. If
Speaker 1: beetle horns are good and bigger is better, why don't
Speaker 1: they all have the same kind of horn. I can't
Speaker 1: tell you. I spent years trying to answer this stupid question.
Speaker 1: I can't tell you why two sister species of beetles
Speaker 1: have totally different shapes of horns. They're in tunnels, they're
Speaker 1: doing the same thing, they're finding the same kinds of fights.
Speaker 1: Everything else about their biology is the same. So why
Speaker 1: the hell does one of them have horns coming off
Speaker 1: the thorax and another one have a bent set of
Speaker 1: horns coming off the head. We don't know. But but
Speaker 1: but these kinds of things have to start with what
Speaker 1: you're talking about, differences, you know, those crazy variants that
Speaker 1: pop up and in some set set of circumstances and
Speaker 1: some population, it just works. Whatever it is about it,
Speaker 1: it's better and that spreads. Here's my last question for you, Um,
Speaker 1: what's the explanation of like, like, how did it come
Speaker 1: to be that starts all right there? How would it
Speaker 1: come to be? Uh, what is the advantage of losing
Speaker 1: your antlers? Or you know what I mean? Yeah, cost
Speaker 1: I think of them. I thought you man like nolutionarily,
Speaker 1: why would I get why? How? Curan warned me you
Speaker 1: might ask me that, And I was like, oh shit,
Speaker 1: I don't know the answer to that, Like how did
Speaker 1: it come to me that they like that they shed
Speaker 1: their antlers? And don't I don't know? And I quick
Speaker 1: because we've got some really good biologic here, and you
Speaker 1: were see Montana, and so I instantly as soon as
Speaker 1: I got that last night, it's like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: I don't know the answer to that. I quick wrote
Speaker 1: Mark Eva White, who's a phenomenal biologic here, really good biologists.
Speaker 1: It's like, he'll know. I don't think anybody knows. He
Speaker 1: flipped it around, he said, tell me why why Why
Speaker 1: don't you know why don't the bovids shed their antlers
Speaker 1: every year six and one half dozen of the other
Speaker 1: Why Why are you asking the question one way and
Speaker 1: not the other. But the fact is, we don't know.
Speaker 1: I did a quick search on the literature. We know
Speaker 1: a lot about the mechanisms sort of how they do it,
Speaker 1: so I could say, oh, they shed their antlers because
Speaker 1: these animals are queuing into photo period and the hormones
Speaker 1: are changing, and when the steroid hormones levels dropped, the
Speaker 1: cells sinasse and it all falls fine. We know a
Speaker 1: lot about the cellular machinery. There was a beautiful new
Speaker 1: paper that just came out in Science like last week
Speaker 1: where they sequence the genomes of like twenty servant species
Speaker 1: and they're able to look and a bunch of antelope
Speaker 1: and bovid species, and they're able to look at the
Speaker 1: cellular level of how these horns grow and figure out
Speaker 1: the genes and the pathways. A beautiful set of studies.
Speaker 1: So we know a lot about how antlers grow and
Speaker 1: about how they fall off and start regrowing again, but
Speaker 1: nobody has a clue sort of for the adaptive significance
Speaker 1: or ultimate evolutionary explanation why at some point in the
Speaker 1: past and the ancestor of the servits some idiot that
Speaker 1: shed its antlers and had to go through the whole
Speaker 1: process and grow it back again. Why those individuals did
Speaker 1: better and persisted when the other individuals don't. We don't know. Well,
Speaker 1: let me tell you how what the people are right
Speaker 1: into us like to throw out there because this comes
Speaker 1: up all I will take a step, but let me
Speaker 1: hear what they say. Um, and again you don't know,
Speaker 1: like we don't know the answer. But people like to say, like, well,
Speaker 1: I could you know imagine this right? So one is uh,
Speaker 1: you could imagine this isn't the cause of what happened.
Speaker 1: You could imagine that. It's more it's a constantly changing,
Speaker 1: in much more responsive marker of your fitness. That is
Speaker 1: a great answer. So whoever you call that one and
Speaker 1: is on the money, that's a good one. Because we
Speaker 1: talked about honest signals. So in the Beatles, I told
Speaker 1: you it's like a suit of armor. Once he emerges
Speaker 1: an adult, you're stuck. So the horn size is a
Speaker 1: really good signal of what kind of a stud you
Speaker 1: are as a grub, as a larva. But once you
Speaker 1: go through metamorphosis and you're an adult and you've got
Speaker 1: your suit of armor, that's it how you're doing right now.
Speaker 1: And so I could come out out of you know, development,
Speaker 1: with a huge horn because I'm a stud, and another
Speaker 1: guy has a little horn because he's a whimp. But
Speaker 1: two months, three months later, I could have been fighting, fighting,
Speaker 1: fighting and not eating at all. I could be starved,
Speaker 1: I could be a shell. I could be riddled with disease.
Speaker 1: I've still got a huge horn. You know, you can't tell.
Speaker 1: So over time it becomes uncoupled with the sort of
Speaker 1: instantaneous condition and dominance and status of the mail, and
Speaker 1: so redoing it each year makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: There's a way to keep the signal honest. The other
Speaker 1: thing is they're expensive to carry round, so you look
Speaker 1: at birds with bright colors, they get rid of them
Speaker 1: as soon as as soon as the breeding season is done,
Speaker 1: they molt all those bright feathers out. They go drab.
Speaker 1: Why stand out like a sore thought and carry all
Speaker 1: is crap around behind you when you don't have to.
Speaker 1: So the other possible argument is you only need it,
Speaker 1: you only produce it when you need it, and then
Speaker 1: you get rid of it. Oh, you know, during the
Speaker 1: rut you've got it, then you throw it away and
Speaker 1: you don't have to carry it around and going into
Speaker 1: winter when it's hard to carry it around. Yep. And
Speaker 1: and a twist on that that would be consistent with
Speaker 1: that is a study that that I got to be
Speaker 1: a peripheral part of that. Mark Heba White was also
Speaker 1: part of and and one of his students beautiful study
Speaker 1: that came out looking at the Yellowstone elk and wolf
Speaker 1: population dynamics. And they showed that the elk actually keep
Speaker 1: their antlers longer than most of the other servants. So
Speaker 1: they're not getting rid of them and being hornless or
Speaker 1: antler less all winter. They're holding onto them all the
Speaker 1: way through until March. You know, people who collect sheds
Speaker 1: know this until the end of March early April. That's
Speaker 1: when the elk shed. So then what, right, why are
Speaker 1: you carrying this thing around all winter? If you can
Speaker 1: get rid of it, why not get rid of it
Speaker 1: as soon as you're done with it? In this case,
Speaker 1: the secondary benefit of having the antlers is that it
Speaker 1: protects these bulls from wolves. And so they have a
Speaker 1: beautiful study showing that the bulls that dropped their antlers early,
Speaker 1: even just a couple of days earlier than other bulls
Speaker 1: in the population get targeted and hammered by the wolves
Speaker 1: because they can't defend themselves the same way. And so
Speaker 1: so again it comes back to costs and benefits. But
Speaker 1: here's this expensive thing, and you actually keep it all
Speaker 1: winter if you're an elk, because it helps protect you
Speaker 1: against wolves, and then you got to turn around and
Speaker 1: use it during the rut. So now we're stuck with
Speaker 1: that question of why get rid of it and grow
Speaker 1: the whole thing again? And that may be alegacy. It
Speaker 1: might have been early on that it made a lot
Speaker 1: of sense, and early on they were getting rid of
Speaker 1: the cost, and then they were regrowing it and keeping
Speaker 1: the signal honest, and then only sort of secondarily in
Speaker 1: places where the major predators with things like wolves did.
Speaker 1: Some lineages like elk secondarily essentially hold onto it for
Speaker 1: longer and longer, in which case they're stuck. It would
Speaker 1: make more sense if you could design an elk from
Speaker 1: scratch to have them hold onto the antlers like a
Speaker 1: big horn sheep would. But we're you know, that's part
Speaker 1: of evolution is you get the legacy, you get to
Speaker 1: carry over the baggage that comes with you in your genome.
Speaker 1: They're carrying with them a legacy of having to throw
Speaker 1: it away and regrow it each year. So they put
Speaker 1: it off, put it off, put it off, ditch it,
Speaker 1: turn around, and regrow it fast. And that's the best
Speaker 1: they can do. I don't know. Good questions A couple
Speaker 1: other guys through this one out where they're talking about, um,
Speaker 1: you know, they break and so it allows you to
Speaker 1: regenerate all the time instead of snapping it off and
Speaker 1: being screwed for the rest of these breaks his horn
Speaker 1: and it's gone shark teeth. Yeah, constantly, Because we're talking
Speaker 1: about like, how come nothing else We're trying to think
Speaker 1: of other stuff besides servids. Right, the develop a weapon
Speaker 1: and lose the weapon and someone's like, well, you can
Speaker 1: kind of look at just the constant replacing of teeth
Speaker 1: in a shark. Yeah, you get the same thing in insects,
Speaker 1: so nimful stage grass oppers are chewing away on leaves
Speaker 1: and the leaves are often like sandpaper, and it grinds
Speaker 1: down the edges on their mouth parts. But then they
Speaker 1: mold and they throw away the old they start with
Speaker 1: a new clean set and then they can choo choo
Speaker 1: choo choo, and there's sort of this race for time.
Speaker 1: If the plants get more and more sand in their
Speaker 1: in their leaf tissues, then they can grind down the
Speaker 1: mouth parts. And if they can grind down the grasshopper
Speaker 1: mouth parts fast enough, they starve to death before they
Speaker 1: make it to the next mold. So it's like this race.
Speaker 1: But if they make it to the mold, they got
Speaker 1: a clean set, new set of anibal sharp blades. They're
Speaker 1: at it again. So yeah, that would be an insect
Speaker 1: analogy to the shark's teeth. That's fun. That's it. Hey,
Speaker 1: this is fun. It's hot in here, but this is great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you very much. And you got like so animal
Speaker 1: wait wait wait I get to plug it, don't I'm plug.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna plug this to t you up, all right,
Speaker 1: so you can plug your next one. Go for it, time,
Speaker 1: author of Animal Weapons. The Evolution of Battle is a
Speaker 1: subtitle for the book, and you got a new version?
Speaker 1: I do. I have a version of it. That's the backstory.
Speaker 1: That's sort of the adventures doing research on animal weapons
Speaker 1: and how did somebody who starts out with muddy beats
Speaker 1: boots biology and reinforced on dung beetles end up visiting
Speaker 1: an aircraft carrier or given a talk in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: Two top brass from the military. It's sort of a
Speaker 1: why basic science is relevant and surprising ways kind of story,
Speaker 1: and it's aimed at teenagers, sort of ten to twelve,
Speaker 1: twelve to fourteen year old kids, and so it's narrative nonfiction.
Speaker 1: Is called Beatle Battles One Scientist Journey of Adventure and Discovery,
Speaker 1: and it comes out in December. Beetle Battles, beat Battles,
Speaker 1: You got kids, look for it. I think it's orange
Speaker 1: on the cover, and you love it. You love the color.
Speaker 1: I don't love the color, but I love the book.
Speaker 1: I had a literally good time getting to unpack that story,
Speaker 1: and I had a really good editor to work with me.
Speaker 1: It's fun. It's really fun telling that story. Okay, thanks
Speaker 1: you guys. Yeah, we got a couple of quick things. Ready,
Speaker 1: I'm ready. Um, do us a favor. We bring you
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Speaker 1: you gotta do us favorite and go subscribe to our newsletter.
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Speaker 1: with articles, podcasts, recipes, all kinds of stuff like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then once a week you get a newsletter. And how often, Sam,
Speaker 1: would they get to read something that you wrote about
Speaker 1: every two weeks? Yeah, we we spent a lot of
Speaker 1: time on those newsletters. Man, it's not just slapped together.
Speaker 1: That's we're trying to bring really good, high quality stuff
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Speaker 1: find me um on Instagram at Stephen Ranella. You can
Speaker 1: find Yanni on there. He used to be the Latvian
Speaker 1: hunter on Instagram and now I was just ready a Yanni. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to make it confusing to Janice Poodless
Speaker 1: and there's an underscoing there. Really, why do you confuse it?
Speaker 1: Because it was early in Instagram, I guess when I
Speaker 1: started messing around and I saw a lot of other
Speaker 1: people that seemed to like have to have that underscored
Speaker 1: for a space in their name, like yours is just
Speaker 1: all straight through right, no spaces at all, because I
Speaker 1: didn't have mine up early. But it probably happens you
Speaker 1: went to get Janis Poodless and had been taken No,
Speaker 1: so you had to do the real. That's when you
Speaker 1: do the real, Yeah, authentic go So that didn't happen
Speaker 1: to you. You just didn't underscore for the hell of it.
Speaker 1: I thought that's what you did. Yeah, Oh wait, man,
Speaker 1: try to look saying how do they find you on Instagram?
Speaker 1: Sam Longer Media, no underscores, no nothing, Doug, you mess
Speaker 1: around social media too business. I don't care. I think
Speaker 1: better of you. If you don't, I don't. I like
Speaker 1: you more. Now I have an offer, but I don't
Speaker 1: do much with it, all right, Professor Emlyn, University of Montana,
Speaker 1: my home the matter. Uh yeah, Sam suo, thank you
Speaker 1: very much for joining us. My pleasure. Okay, everyone, thanks
Speaker 1: for listening. Again. And if I said it once, I
Speaker 1: said a thousand times. Please go check out our feature
Speaker 1: length documentary about hunting in America today called Stars in
Speaker 1: the Sky. You can find it at Stars in the
Speaker 1: Sky film dot colm. It is available for streaming and download. Again,
Speaker 1: do us yourself a good turn, do us a good
Speaker 1: turn Stars in the Sky. Find it at Stars in
Speaker 1: the Sky film dot com. You can stream it, you
Speaker 1: can download it, and you can watch it again and again.
Speaker 1: Thank you,