SGU Episode 1056
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| SGU Episode 1056 |
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| October 04th 2025 |
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Fossilized skull offering insight into early human evolution and prehistoric life. |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
“The chimpanzee study taught us perhaps more than anything else to be a little humble; that we are, indeed, unique primates, we humans, but we’re simply not as different from the rest of the animal kingdom as we used to think.” |
- Jane Goodall |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro
Voice-over: You're. Listening to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, October 2nd, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.
C: Hey everybody.
S: Cara Santa Maria Audi J Novella Hey guys. And we have a special guest, Lee Mossbacher. Lee, welcome to the Skeptics Guide.
E: Thank you for having me and Lee.
S: You're joining us because you are a patron of the show and you, you just mentioned to us that you've been listening to us for 20 years. Is that really true? Well.
E: When did you start? I think it was like 2005 or 2008.
S: Or 2005. We started in two.
E: 1005 I was part of the forums for the longest time and a listener on my iPod than my iPhone so yeah, OK, cool.
S: Because we only have like 200 listeners back in two 2005.
E: Why did when when one of the Who's that noisy I think.
C: Oh, we could go back into the e-mail address. That's amazing.
J: Yeah, to make it clear, just so people that are listening know, so you have to be a patron at the $200 level or higher in order to get that. That's why we don't have that many people who actually get to do this. So, So First off, Lee, I just want to thank you for being a awesome supporter of the SGU during these dark times. No, we need, we need support because, you know, we are trying to expand our reach and we're starting new podcasts and, you know, adding in more live stream content all to in some way. He helped chip a little bit away at the amount of insanity that's going on.
S: So you may notice that Evans not here this week. That's mainly because he's his Internet is down. We tried to troubleshoot, but he had other things going on too. So it just wasn't going to work this week. But that's OK because we got Lee to take his place.
C: Oh yeah, it's a it's Yom Kippur is just starting. So yeah, you're supposed to say happy. Yeah. I don't know if Yom Kippur is a happy holiday, but.
S: Aren't all Jewish holidays not happy holidays?
C: No, no, I think that Rosh Hashanah is pretty happy.
S: OK.
C: So, but I never know which ones to say like happy this or if it's like and a good Yom Kippur to you, I'm not sure.
S: We need to talk about Jane Goodall.
C: I cannot. I mean I can't believe it. She was, what, 90? 91. Yeah, that's oh.
S: Boy, yeah, she died yesterday, October 1st. So most people here know who Jane Goodall was. She was the essentially famous for being a primatologist and she transformed, single handedly transformed our understanding of chimpanzees with an over I think 66 decades of field research living with chimpanzees, again really changing our understanding of of how human really chimpanzees are, how sophisticated their behavior is, their social structures, etcetera. And she also became a very, very spoken advocate for wildlife, for animal rights, also for mitigating climate change, etcetera. Very active right up until the end.
C: You'll know something really interesting about her that I didn't realize. So, you know, I think about Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey and like these these women naturalist scientists who spent all this time in the field doing incredible work. And I think famously, Diane Fossey was a scientist for sure, but she wasn't a scientist in the traditional sense as she wasn't like an academic scientist. Jane Goodall, She earned her PhD from Cambridge in 66. She was admitted to her PhD program in 62 but did not have an undergrad degree. But they they accepted her because she had done so much important field work already with chimps. So this was like an era of women having a hard time right getting into these programs or getting any power within these programs and just saying screw it, I'm just going to go do the work.
S: Right.
C: Which is incredible.
S: And, you know, to his credit, she had a lot of support from Louis Leakey. You know, basically he. Yeah, I think, yeah, You got her started.
C: On Yeah, I mean, and that's very often what had to happen.
S: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
C: Women had to find doors, you know, find, find someone, find help to open that door and push through it and never look back. And she obviously her body of work is incredible.
S: Yeah, yeah, I agree. Absolutely incredible. So I was reading a science fiction book about uplifting chimpanzees into sentience.
B: A la Brynn David Brynn.
S: I think I think it might have been Brynn and the chimpanzees like their expletive was Goodall like that's what they would say very.
B: Cool, my God I love it. I forgot about that. Yeah, that's. Fine. I wonder if that book holds up.
S: Nice touch.
B: Yeah.
S: OK. So Bob, you're going to start us off with? A quickie.
B: Thank you Steve.
Quickie with Bob: Giant wave moving through our galaxy (05:00)
- Astronomers discover a 'Great Wave' spreading across the Milky Way in new map of thousands of stars [1]
B: This is your quickie with Bob. I love finding quirks to the the shape of cosmological objects that that we used to think were relatively simple, right? The iconic example is the Earth. It's a sphere, right? But no, it's not. It's not just a sphere. It's an oblate spheroid. Like if you squished it so that the equator bulges out of it, right? But then beyond that, an even more accurate shape to the Earth might be described as a lumpy geoid due to those, you know, all these irregularities to the shape caused by the gravitational field differences, oceans, land masses, all that stuff. So our Galaxy is similar for years growing up, it was the Milky Way is a spiral, right? But then it became a barred spiral with a rotating bar going through the center. And the, the classic spirals of our Galaxy emerged then from from that bar. Also, if you could see gamma rays and X-rays, which would be quite cool, I think you would see and you were looking at the Milky Way, you would see massive lobes of radiation billowing above and and below the core of the Galaxy. So now I'll be I'll be talking about another twist. A Galaxy. See wide wave rippling through our Galaxy.
S: Bob, can I before you go on to that?
B: Sure, sure.
S: You could also say that our Galaxy is twisted. It's not perfectly flat.
B: Yeah, it's not it's definitely not a pizza shape as as I came across in some of some of this research. So yeah, there's even more little nuances and quirks to to the shape of our Galaxy. But the biggest new reveal about the shape of the Galaxy now is this Galaxy wide wave rippling through it. Billions of stars just bobbing essentially up and down like a Galaxy sized stadium right of a crowd doing the wave. It's kind of like what's happening at a huge scale in the Milky Way. This was discovered from the Gaia Space Telescope. Gaia mapped the motions of millions of stars to reveal this pattern. And it did this before it pulled the Steve and retired earlier this year. So it's a last interesting discovery by the Gaia Space Telescope. The reach of this phenomenon extends from 30,000 light years to 65,000 light years from our galactic center. So it's extremely widespread and we're not sure what's what causes this wave, but there are models and those models point to the Sagittarius dwarf Galaxy, which may have passed through the Milky Way multiple times hundreds of millions of years ago, creating these ripples that we're detecting now. Kind of like a huge rock being repeatedly dropped into a Galaxy wide pond. So fascinating stuff. Look it up online. This has been your rippling quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.
S: All right. Thanks, Bob Lee, Before we go on with the regular news items, tell us a little bit about yourself.
E: For sure. So I guess my, my back, I'm from Ohio. I grew up on a farm. And I would say that, you know, my early life was tumultuous. And I would say that physics and Star Trek saved my life. And it's like, yeah, I got really interested in physics and applied university, got accepted, did four years at a local university, took a break to start a company, sold that company, and then went back to get a pH D Nice. Wow. And from that and got into investing and running a hedge fund, doing some startup investments. And that's what I've been working on the last 20 years.
S: Wow. What was your PhD?
E: In specifically it was more material science, it was physics, but I studied a material system called zinc oxide and was the first to create AP type conductivity in that material. OK yeah, had a lot of applications to like solar detectors, ultraviolet lasers and things like that.
S: And tell us how the SGU contributed to. Saving your life. I'm just assuming that it did so, but.
E: You joke about that, but I would say that the SGU taught me more about scientific philosophy and critical thinking than eight years in grad school.
US#00: Wow.
S: So is that tell? Is that a good? Thing I think that's depressing. I think about American educational. School.
E: Definitely the American education.
S: System. Yeah, yeah, Obviously we talk about this all the time where it doesn't necessarily teach you critical thinking. I know. I know brilliant scientists who have these glaring blind spots in their metacognition because it's not systematically taught. Systematically taught, you know what I mean? Which is a real, I think a real lack in our education system.
C: Absolutely, and it totally depends on which program you're in which professors. You're mentor like, yeah, like mentor dependent. Totally. Some people really do get a great education in that area and some people do not. It it bums me out that very often most science degrees in the US most, not all sorry doctoral degrees are PhDs which is a doctor of philosophy and very few people actually get any philosophy training got.
E: 0 Philosophy, all of them from SGU. Wow, I don't think I heard Popper's name until 2005 or 2006.
C: Wow.
S: Yeah, it's you. You would think the the philosophy of science would be one of those one O 1 things you would learn when you start to study science. But you know, you learn biology, chemistry, physics, but not the philosophy, not how to do science or the philosophy of science. They teach it like in fifth grade, but so poorly that it doesn't really have any effect in my opinion.
C: On the general public.
S: Understanding of science.
C: I took a wonderful philosophy of natural science class in in my training, but that's because I was a psychology major and I was a philosophy minor. I think the philosophy of natural science class was offered in the philosophy department and didn't offer any science credit. And then my philosophy of psychology in the mind class was dual credit for philosophy and psychology. Like come on, natural sciences, let your students take this class, even if it's in the philosophy department and give them credit towards their degree.
S: Yeah, I agree.
News Items
Redrawing the Human Family Tree (10:52)
S: All right, I'm going to talk to you guys about redrawing the family tree of humans, which is something that happens quite frequently because you guys have heard the muddle in the middle. Have you ever heard that term?
J: No. What is that?
S: Yeah. So we, we know a pretty high resolution picture of very recent human evolution. And we've got, we've really pieced together a lot of sort of the earlier hominid evolution, but there's this this zone about a million years ago where we still don't, we just don't have a lot of specimens and we end this and there's a lot was happening too. That's is a combination of it was seems to have been a very a period of rapid diversification for which we have few fossils. And so there's just a lot we don't know about it, right. And so, but a number of years ago, a few years ago, these two fossils were discovered in China, the Yunxian 1 and Yunxian 2 fossils. These are humans, right? They're Homo whatever, and they're fairly complete, but they were in not great condition because most, you know, fossils are crushed, right? I mean, we don't find them in perfect shape in in the ground. We find them in compressed fragments.
B: Dirt and rock weigh a lot you.
S: Know they weigh a lot and they've been there for a long time. So one thing I did, I didn't. If I knew this, I'd forgot it. But what I didn't know explicitly was that there's a different types of distortion that could happen to fossils. The Yunshin 1 fossil had what's called plastic distortion, meaning that pressure over a very long period of time has actually changed the shape of the bone, which is bad, right? That's the, that's the bad very. That's like the worst kind of distortion, like you could imagine. It didn't just crush a skull fragment, it actually flattened it out because it changed over time due to the due to the pressure on it. The Yunchin 2 skull didn't have any of that plastic distortion. It had a lot of fracturing and then displacement of the fragments. That's an easier type of distortion to fix, because theoretically you could just reassemble the fragments.
B: Big puzzle. Big 3D puzzle.
S: Yes. Now the new news item is again, these skulls calls you and she and One and Two were found years ago, but paleontologists have used new technology to examine them and especially the two skull because that's again in better shape. Although they did use some information from you and she and one to fill in a couple of gaps here and there, but most of the information came from 2 and it's essentially using CT scanning and a specific technique called CT segmentation and fragment realignment. So they use a CT scan to take highly detailed X-rays of the fossil you know in its natural state, and then identify the fragments and then digitally realign them.
B: Little AI involved there.
S: I would imagine so, but it didn't explicitly say that. But at least not, not that I saw. So that allowed for a much better reconstruction than we were able, we have been able to do in the past, in the past. One thing you have to understand is like when we were just physically trying to piece together fossils and again, there may be some plastic distortion, there's a lot of fracturing, there's crushing, There's a lot of guesswork involved. You know, you more than you might think. You can make those pieces fit together in different ways. But unfortunately, when you're talking about, again, like this phase of human evolution, whether or not that skull is 1 species or another species depends upon subtle anatomy of the skull. And so just doing a regular reconstruction, paleontologists were unable to answer the question, which clade should we put this skull into? Because it all depends on how you put those pieces together. And it's a judgment call. There was no objective way to answer that question, but with this technique of ACT segmentation and fragment realignment, they were able to do such a high quality reconstruction that they could answer that question, that they could say these subtle anatomical features place the skull into this clade rather than that clade.
B: Nice.
S: Having said that, what does it tell us? So the the skull Yunxian one and two, right. They with this reconstruction, they believe that they fit into the clade Homo longi LONGI, which is a sister clade of Homo sapiens. So the the way the branching order goes is that there was a common ancestor of all of the modern Homo clades, basically Neanderthal, Longy and human that split off into Neanderthals in one one branch and then sapiens and Longy in the other branch. And then they quickly branched off from each other. And this goes back 1.2 to 1.1 million years ago when those two branchings occurred.
B: So that's kind of like, it's kind of like the common ancestor for gorillas, chimps and humans, where we, the gorillas branched off first from the common ancestor and then chimps and humans, Homo sapiens hung out together for a while and then they branched.
S: Same relationship so 1.2 ish million years ago Neanderthal split off. 1.1 to 1,000,000 years ago Longy and sapiens split off from each other. And then the Denisovans. You guys know the Denisovans? They're probably in the Longy clay the homologi. And homologi is basically Asian humans. That's they existed in Asia, which is why these skulls were found in China, right? Mm hmm.
B: OK. What was the common ancestor though between?
S: Well, we don't know. That's the muddle. That's the muddle in the middle, that we don't have that common ancestor of all three.
B: That's. Huge man, how to help him have that?
C: But that happened so much in evolution. We just had.
B: Important This Is Us.
S: But yeah, again, a lot's happening clearly very quickly. There's, you know, there's, there's probably so many sub branches that we haven't found so far. And it was happening very quickly and also in isolated small populations, almost by definition, Right. So that what this means. So I didn't answer, I didn't state a very important fact here. How old is this skull? How old do you think this skull is?
B: A billion years old? No, it's a little bit too much.
C: 400.
S: It's about 1,000,000 years. Old.
C: Oh wow.
S: Just about 1,000,000 years old. So it's pretty much right at the branching point of Homo sapiens and Homo longi and they place it in the Homo longi branch. And in fact, this skull is establishing when that branch took place, that.
C: Was a long time ago. That was a long time ago.
S: So what this means is that the Homo sapiens clade is about twice as old as we thought it was. We the prior dating was that that last split into Homo sapiens, into a clade we would call homo sapiens took place about 500,000 years ago. This new classification of this goal suggests that Nope, the Homo sapiens clade branched off 1,000,000 years ago.
C: That's. Nuts.
S: That is nuts.
B: What the?
C: Hell yeah.
B: Now what then? So we're, if we're that much, what the hell took us so long to get where we're at?
S: That's a good question, but but hang on, These are still archaic humans we're talking about. Even though they're technically Homo sapiens, they look different than we do, right? They are, yeah.
C: They are. I think we would think they were apes. No, no, if we saw them in the wild.
S: No, no, no, if you saw.
C: I think so even. Even when I see Lucy, it looks like a very human like.
S: We are so far away from Lucy.
C: Yeah, that's true because you're talking about that, that split.
S: The cliche is that the conventional wisdom among paleontologists, if you saw a Neanderthal in this in the New York subway station dressed in modern clothes, you would not marry twice. Yeah, you would not. You would not necessarily notice them. So with with these, and like with Homo sapiens and Homo longi, maybe their eyebrows were a little bit generous, their foreheads sloped back a little bit more and they had maybe a little bit more elongated occipital thing that that's what you would notice. And there's a lot of little real subtleties that only a paleontologist.
B: Could they have a sagittal Crest?
S: No, no, nothing like no, that's, that's only in the robustness branch of the Australia pithecenes. That's like a couple of that's millions of years.
B: More separate anchored what the powerful chewing the. Chewing muscles?
S: Yeah, that's only the robust Australia pithecenes, basically.
C: It looks like Australopithea sees as 3 to 2,000,000 but this is nuts that this is all already. I guess that's why I was thinking already 1,000,000 years ago. How human did they really look?
S: Yeah, you know, and that's what this is telling us, that this was 1,000,000 year old skull was very close to the branch point of the Homo sapiens clayed.
C: I guess, though, we were probably still covered in hair at that point, right?
S: No, probably.
C: You don't think so? OK.
S: You know, once we started living in groups, you know, wearing furs and stuff like that, yeah, there would have been selective pressure.
B: Pressure against.
S: It yeah, against that we don't know for sure, but I, I, I not hairy like apes or hairy not like chimpanzees or hairy, but that's one of those things that it's hard to know for sure, you know?
B: Don't we have more hair hair follicles than?
S: I think, I think it's the same, it's just how big and thick the hair.
B: Is yeah, OK.
S: So interesting. Yeah, I know I've this is, I've studied human evolution in college. I've been following it very, very closely, constantly redrawing the tree in my head with new information coming in. And this is a big change. This is a pretty big change.
J: And Steve, no DNA made it right.
S: No, not a million. I think 1,000,000 is too much. It's like we have we have Neanderthal DNA, but it's from like 4050 thousand years ago are.
C: Any of these stuck in amber? Yeah.
S: It wouldn't help doesn't that doesn't.
C: Yeah, I know it doesn't.
S: Stop the DNA detained clock. It has to.
C: Happen any of these stuck in the Jurassic Park movie?
S: So interesting. And this is not this is not the end, obviously. And even the the implications of this fossil, you know, is, will continue to be debated because, again, it's really coming down to some subtleties of anatomy and exactly how the reconstruction was made. So this is a pretty, this is the best reconstruction we have so far because we're using new technology. By the way, I have multiple news items queued up about fossils where this technique is sort of making huge impact on our ability to. Yeah, So. And one thing though, like I also was looking at a news item about, again, another specimen that's at the beginning, the branch point of snakes and lizards. So pretty much the same story, but for snakes and lizards. And again, it took 10 years. It took 10 years to do this analysis of that fossil, this CT 10 years. So this is a very detailed kind of reconstruction that we can do with the CT scanning, but it takes time. But the results are worth it, you know, because it's really transforming our understanding of some very key points in evolution.
Fig Wasps (22:54)
S: All right, let's move on. Jay, are there Wasps in my figs?
J: All right, so before I I get to get to it, I got to ask you guys a question.
S: Yeah.
J: Well, I want to ask Lee a question. Lee, can you hear me?
E: Yes.
J: OK.
C: That's the question and.
J: You're and you're sitting down, correct?
E: I am.
J: All right, now be honest. Have you ever eaten a wasp?
E: No, I don't think I have.
J: How sure could you possibly be?
E: I would say 30% sure.
J: I would like to hear from everybody. Have you ever heard first? Have you ever heard of someone saying that figs contain dead Wasps?
C: No. Is that like a no?
E: Not really.
J: Seriously.
C: Is that like a common?
J: How? About you.
B: I've ever heard of that.
E: Now I'm terrified.
C: No. OK.
B: I mean. But to be fair, eating fig figs is rare in my experience. Usually it's like fig newtons but just regular figs. It's not something that I eat often and.
S: What about figgy pudding?
ALS May Be Autoimmune (23:54)
B: No.
J: Well, you know, this is the news item. This is this. I chose this news item, guys, because a lot of people out there have heard this urban legend. Like it's something that people just say that if you're eating a fig, in order for the fig to exist, a wasp had to crawl inside the fig.
B: What?
J: And I literally am shocked that none of you have heard this. Like I've known this for a really long time because I was going to ask you whether or not you think it's true. So do you guys, would you guys believe this if somebody said to you, hey, did you know that fig you're eating like a wasp had a crawl in there to, to for the fig to exist? Do you think that's true or false?
C: I don't think I would buy that.
B: Yeah, I'm leaning towards false. I mean, unless I hear the reason. What's it? What reason could there be requiring the death of suicide of a wasp to create for a think to even exist? What's what does it need? Is it some sort of? Well, there's an Ant post parasite. Scenario. What's going on?
J: I'm glad. I'm glad in one way, because I'm going to tell you guys all about something that you, you know, First off, you didn't know about the urban legends, and second of all, you don't know any of this. And it's really cool and it's a really great example of how complicated nature actually is. So first let me explain to you what a fig is, right? So you guys would think what it's a, it's a fruit, right? So botanically speaking, it is a fruit, but it's in the usual sense, you could say that a fig is called a synconium. This is a hollow, fleshy structure packed with hundreds of tiny flowers on the inside. I bet you didn't know that about figs.
US#00: No.
J: So what looks like, you know, smooth, self-contained, you know, fruit flesh that's inside. It's really an enclosed floral chamber, which I think is just fascinating that you know, when you when you open up a fig, you know, you're like, there's the fruit and it's sweet, you know, and it, but it isn't, it isn't simply just that the design here sets the stage for essentially one of the most interesting and peculiar relationships in the natural world, with no exaggeration. So now we've got the fig wasp. So for 10s of millions of years, maybe old enough for the the creatures that Steve was describing to live during when this was a, you know, when this was first coming to be figs and fig Wasps, they Co evolved and they have a really tight relationship. So about 850 fig species exist and almost every single one of them has a matching wasp species specifically that serves as its pollinator. So the wasp, they depend on the figs for reproduction and the fig depends on the Wasps to carry pollinator from other zinconium from one zinconium to another, right? You know, essentially the same way as as other flowers need this same activity like bees do it, other insects do it. There's lots of different ways that it's carried out, but it in the fig world, a wasp really is the only thing that can do it.
C: Birds do it. Please do it even.
J: So Cara, what is this called? By the way, does anybody know what this is called?
C: Synergy.
J: It's called biological mutualism.
C: Mutualism.
J: Yep.
S: And why is it just symbiosis?
J: Because they use more complicated terms to make it sound important. This one though, this particular biological mutualism, has a really wacky twist, which is the fun part. So when a female wasp finds a receptive fig, the wasp will crawl inside through a small opening called the osteo. And it's almost as if, you know, these two things evolved to interact with each other. That little hole and that tiny little wasp. I don't know, Steve, got of the gaps. Whatever man, it's happening, you know, So one of the two things, one of two things can happen. If she enters a male fig, which is called a Capra fig, she lays her eggs in some of the flowers that are inside and then her offspring hatch. They mate and then they eventually, you know, get out and they create a new generation of female of the females that fly off and they repeat the cycle. If she enters a female fig, which are the edible kind, which this is an important delineation here, things don't go as well for the wasp in one sense. So she pollinates the internal flowers like she's crawling through the hole. Her foot, her wings, and her antennae usually gets stripped off. She gets in deep enough to pollinate the internal flowers, but she can't lay her eggs because the flower styles in the female fig are much longer than the ones in the male fig. So the female wasp has something called an ovipositor and this is a slender tube like organ. You might have seen some insects with these. They use them to insert eggs into the ovules of the of the flowers. And that's essentially like where it would put the eggs in order for it to grow if it went into a male fig. But because the the the size of the flowers inside the female fig are really long, she can't reach the right spot. So what happens is she dies inside and she leaves behind, of course, her body, but you know, no eggs or anything like that. OK, So what happens next? Because here we are with the edible figs, the female figs with a dead wasp on the inside.
S: Somebody eats the wasp.
J: So is that your guest, Steve?
S: Well, they're nice and tangy, I hear.
J: Yeah, they have a little bit of Tang to them. Anybody else have any guesses of what what happens next here?
Voice-over: To the Wasp.
J: To everything, just this whole situation you have. You have the dead female wasp in a dead and in a living edible male fig.
S: Yeah.
C: The fig probably processes the protein somehow.
J: Cara, I love you in so many ways. It's.
C: Probably, yeah. It's carnivorous until it isn't. Until we read it.
J: Everybody take note of how Smart Cara is. So the question is, if the wasp dies inside the fig, does this mean that people are actually eating insect corpses every time they bite into one? And I have to tell you, I've eaten some straight up female figs in the last few years of my life, and I have had this bouncing around in my head, like, all right, I'm sure I eat lots of insects, like, all the time. You know, it's hard to avoid in the modern world.
S: Yeah, but I don't give a fig.
Voice-over: Got to fill in that that just with the exactly.
J: All right, But this even is more complicated because if you're asking the question, do people eat wasp corpses inside of the figs that they're eating, the answer depends on the kind of fig. So here's another layer of complexity. Most of the figs you see, for example in American supermarkets, the mission fig, the kadoda, the brown Turkey, these are all parthenocarpic, which means they don't require pollination at all. These figs ripen and develop without any wasp ever entering into a tiny hole and stripping parts of its body off and dying. Right, so the majority of the figs people eat never had a wasp in them in the first place. When I read this I was very relieved. Not that it would change my life in any way, but it just made me feel good that I'm not eating Wasps of any.
C: Kind, but I pretty much only eat medjool. No, those are dates. Oh yeah, I don't know what kinds of figs I eat. When do you I?
S: Don't think I grew figs on my deck. I grew several years but they have died over last winter. I don't know why that happened, but that type of fig tree does not require pollination.
J: OK, so you had more of a, you know more of the the safe ones. Yeah, OK. So not.
S: That the other ones are unsafe? I mean, that's not what we're implying here, but it didn't require a little wasp to crawl inside and die.
J: So of course there is an exception to to that list because the Kelly Myrna figs do require pollination by a fig wasp. And in those cases it's possible that a female wasp does die inside. But there's even more detail here, and this is the part that Cara had some insight into. Figs produce a Milky latex that has proteolytic. You ever hear of that? Proteolytic enzymes, The one that we're talking about in particular is called phison. And these enzymes breakdown proteins and they don't really care about, you know, whether it's plant tissue or insect tissue. They just breakdown proteins. So when people have studied this, you know, they look at look at the fig latex and they confirm that the phison the related enzymes, they are indeed powerful enough to quote UN quote, you know, like digest the soft animal matter that's inside the fig. So even if a wasp does die inside, its body just doesn't remain intact. You know it gets by the time the fig fully ripens, you know what's left has been it's been broken down into amino acids and it's been absorbed into the surrounding flesh of the fruit.
S: Yeah, but those are WASP amino acids.
J: But still, I mean, there's a big difference between, you know, having an amino acid in your mouth and a freaking, you know, insect leg.
S: They all get turned into amino acids eventually.
C: Yeah, whether it's in your mouth or your stomach.
J: But you're not biting into a bug. And this is. This is the that is the clencher of this whole thing, Steve. That's why the people who who have heard what I have heard wanted to hear this. You are not biting into a bug of any kind unless it another one got in much later in the process, which is is unlikely. So I personally feel happy and relieved for all the fig eaters out there that they're not eating bugs.
S: So that was The upshot of this whole news item is just don't worry, you're not eating bugs when you eat figs.
C: So even if you were eating bugs, you would be fine.
J: But I want to tell you how important figs are, because outside of fig Newtons, maybe most people have no use for them. But figs are really, really important. The fig wasp relationship is some weird, odd trivia fact. And it's good. It's cool. It just demonstrates how awesome nature is. But ecologists consider figs to be pretty much like a keystone, keystone species in the tropical forest because, you know, figs can fruit year round. And because of that, they sustain birds and bats and primates, particularly during periods when other food is largely not available. So without the figs, you know, a lot of these ecosystems would just straight up collapse. And without Wasps, there would be there would apparently be no figs. So we need that relationship. The figs are important because it feeds a ton of animals and you can't have fig newtons without figs. You guys feel like you learned something.
Voice-over: Oh, sure. Yeah, great.
E: I was like 3 different confident that fig Newtons actually had figs.
Voice-over: Yeah.
E: Yeah.
J: When I said that, Leo was thinking there might not be, you know, but the one thing about Fig Newtons that you know is you're definitely crunching down on seeds in there. Yeah, because there's a little bit of that.
B: Yeah, but thanks to you, Jay, when I crunch down on that, I'm going to be thinking of wasp feet and wings and crap. Thank you.
S: For the record. But for the record, Fig Newtons are to contain figs.
B: Of course they do.
S: The filling is made of dried figs and fig paste.
C: For all of my elder millennials out there who watched Saved by the Bell growing up, you may remember the episode where Zach Morris freaks out his teacher because he serves some chocolate covered, I think, crickets. And he crunches into it and he's like, oh, it's so good and crunchy. And he goes the crunchy parts, the thorax. And that has been drilled into my head since I was a child.
S: Right. Thank you, Jay. Cara, tell us about ALS and whether it may or may not be an autoimmune disease.
C: Well, I'm going to tell you what a recent Nature article told me, and then Steve's going to tell you why you should be skeptical. Or maybe not skeptical, but take it with them with a deep breath and a grain of salt. So a recent article that was published in Nature, actually yesterday in Nature titled Autoimmune response to C9. I don't know if you're supposed to call this protein C9 ORF 72 or I think it rolls off the tongue more to say C9 ORF 72. Usually scientists do that. So we'll see Autoimmune response to C9 ORF 72 protein in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. OK, so that's I don't know most people they, they come across that title and they go, OK, I don't know what that means, so let's dig into it. So what we do know about ALS, and actually we know a lot more than what I'm about to say, is that it is a neurodegenerative disease and it's characterized by progressive loss of motor neurons. We also know that there are multiple mechanisms that appear to be at play, but the big picture is still a little bit fuzzy so.
S: One point from a minor point of clarification, it's specifically it's both upper and lower motor neurons because there are different diseases that cause just lower motor neuron loss or just upper motor neuron loss. ALS is defined clinically as it has to have both.
C: As both OK and for clarity, upper is brain to spinal cord right and lower spinal cord to to muscle.
S: It's literally A2 neuron system. There are two actual neurons.
C: Yeah. And so, you know, after, you know, years and years and years of research, we do know that there are some processes that are involved and that there are some disease mechanisms that have been identified. But we still don't know kind of the why of it all and how all these things fit together. We know that there are changes to to the structure and the dynamics of the axons in in ALS. We know that there are both apoptosis and necrosis, so program cell death and cell death due to damage or inflammation. We know that there are changes to the mitochondria in ALS. We also know that some neurotransmitters are affected, like glutamate. And we know that inflammation is a big part of the process. But according to the ALS Association's website, there's literally a sentence here that says inflammation in the central nervous system. It's called neuroinflammation. There's increasing evidence that neuroinflammation accompanies the death of motor neurons in ALS. However, evidence so far does not support that ALS is an autoimmune disease. The inflammatory process apparently is a reaction to the death of the cells and not the instigator. But this new study in in Nature is claiming that that may not be the case. And so we'll talk about whether or not that is true soon. So basically in this study, what the investigators found, they looked at, they tried to kind of chunk out the ALS patients that they looked at into two different groups, the ones who have a shorter time to death from diagnosis and the ones who have a longer survival time from diagnosis. And they want wanted to see is there something different about these two groups. They specifically looked at that protein that I mentioned before, the C9 or 72 protein, because they knew that it had been implicated in ALS. And they found that in these patients who had a quicker time to death, their CD 4 + T cells were attacking the proteins that specific protein I mentioned on their neurons in large numbers. And they found that in the group that took that had a longer survival time, they had more anti-inflammatory T cells present. So they, they called that like a protective immune response. And so in their view, I mean, we can get deeper into, you know, the, what are they called, like the epitomes, like the antigens on those cells that they were able to identify, how they attacked them, how they binded, all that good stuff, all of the inflammatory factors that kind of happened downstream as a result of that. But the big sort of take away here is that in their view, what's 1 of the main drivers? I mean, it really does feel like that's how this is positioned. One of the main drivers is an autoimmune response, so. Your body has these proteins on these neurons, right, These C9 or 72 proteins, and you have these CD4 plus type T cells in, in ALS. They're claiming that they are actively attacking those proteins on the neurons and that in a small subgroup of ALS patients, they have anti-inflammatory T cells that they produce in response to that that gives them a protective immune response that helps them live longer. That's sort of the long and short of it. But Steve, you mentioned when we were talking offline that even though this is a new finding, it's sort of fits into a long lineage of this type of research, right?
S: Yeah, Yeah. I mean, we could say we've been here before, right? And just for background, I mean, I did a little bit of ALS research earlier, not of my neuromuscular career. And you know, I've been in meetings with pretty much all like the ALS researchers in the Northeast, you know, of the US. So I got a pretty good insight into the thinking and what's going on. Just say very quickly, many, many times we find the stuff that is happening when the motor neurons are dying that potentially could be a clue to what's driving the disease and yet the treatments don't have any effect. Treatments based upon that. Researchers are very cautious. And while this may seem like a slam dunk or it may seem very promising, this is not, you know, any more promising than a dozen other things that we discovered by ALS that did not turn out to be like the answer, right? You've also mentioned that based upon this data, it appears that this mechanism is quote UN quote, driving the disease. But we have to be careful about that because, yeah, there's you could think about causes in different ways. Something might trigger or instigate A degenerative disease process or a progressive disease process. It might drive that disease process, meaning without it, it would not progress, it would not continue, or it may exacerbate that disease process. I think actually I would my reading of this that this is more likely to be an exacerbating factor than a driver.
C: So this idea of like sort of a diathesis stress that there's something genetic that tells the disease it's going to happen, and then this makes it either happen quickly or it gives the patient longer.
S: Only, only about 15% of ALS is familial, right? So we're we're, we're talking about sporadic ALS in this paper, which means.
C: That even sporadic ALS. Does it really mean not genetic? Or does it just mean not heritable?
S: Not not heritable. It doesn't mean that.
C: There could still be a.
S: Predisposition at most there's a predisposition or some people might react differently, but it but it's not a genetic disease, right? It seems to be sporadic, like there is no predictive family history at all, just strikes at random. So for and in spread again, sporadic ALS isn't one disease, it's just describing a syndrome. If your upper and lower motor neurons are dying progressively, you have ALS, whatever is causing it. So there's definitely multiple diseases thrown in here. So that's important to note as.
C: Well, and it's probably hard to know if like autoimmunity is so complex, is it like you mentioned that something happens in the body that sort of switches on an intense autoimmune cascade or something else happening the disease?
S: Could trigger the immune system, which you have a secondary autoimmune response in some people, which then exacerbates the original neurodegeneration. May predict again their survival, how quickly it progresses, but it doesn't mean that they will be fine without.
C: You know, yeah. And that's the interesting thing, I think from this study, Yes, OK. This idea of the CD 4T cells attacking this protein, that is really interesting. But that this subset of patients who had a robust protective response actually correlated very highly with patients who had a longer survival. Yeah. That's interesting, but to. Me. That's super interesting, yeah.
S: At the same time again, the the this idea that ALS or a subset of ALS might be autoimmune is decades old. Like this is not a new.
C: Idea. Yeah, yeah.
S: And even 30 years ago, I, I remember this research ongoing, you know, for example, we've studied intrathecal IVIG. You know, you use IVIG as an, a broad spectrum powerful anti-inflammatory treatment and you put it in the spinal fluid. So that's surrounding the brain and the spinal cord. And 0 effect on ALS. That doesn't mean it's not autoimmune because there's so many components of the immune system, but we can go down the line and even with the newer like really powerful anti-inflammatory anti rejection drugs, we've tried them, We usually try all of them in ALS and so far none of them have worked. Yeah, to get doesn't mean that this may give us a very specific mechanism that may be the only one that works and all other immune modulating therapies would not work. I'm not enough of a neuroimmunology specialist to know if that's the case or not. But the fact that a long line of anti-inflammatory treatments, including T cell based treatments have not worked is a is a huge note of caution here.
C: For sure, I think, I think the I guess the hope, the cautionary hope, which we see all the time as as research turns forward and is built on the backs of other research labs is that it's all about getting down to being more and more specific. It's identifying targets that maybe weren't looked at before due to outcomes of other research. And So what they're hoping for in, in this finding is that the specific inflammatory or CD 4 + T cells, which are specifically binding to the C9 or 72 proteins and these very specific anti-inflammatory CD plus CD 4 + T cells collectively may offer a new therapeutic target. And they also mentioned that, you know, in this field of neuroimmunology, this is a big field, right? And it's there are implications for autoimmune components or at least we could say immune responses in a lot of neurodegenerative diseases.
S: There's always going to be inflammation and it's never going to be a good thing. I mean, completely right. But, but is it again driving the disease or just maybe causal exacerbating it, whatever. Yeah, I think it's complicated. It's a lot of complicated stuff happening and none of it is the 'cause right?
C: Absolutely. And I think when it comes to the world of therapeutics, it's important to remember that even if we're not able to get to a root cause, even if these are, like you mentioned, syndromes that are much more complicated than like a Huntington's where we can go in and genetically modify the genes that 'cause it.
S: Which we did recently, by the way.
C: Yeah, I know. Which is amazing.
S: We kind of missed that news item in the cycle, but we basically cured Huntington's so long.
C: With CRISPR, Yeah, yeah, it's, it's amazing. Wait, can we?
J: Pause that real quick. When you say cured, like what? What is the actual thing that's happening?
C: The Huntington's is a very simple genetic disease, like we know exactly what causes it.
S: It's it's a trinucleotide repeat. Basically it's 3 base pairs that repeat over and over again, and in each generation the number of those repeats increases, and the more they increase, the the more rapidly the disease progresses, the younger it presents and the worse it.
C: Is, oh, that's interesting, right. So that's and it's a dominant.
S: Disease, it's dominant, yeah. So what they basically did was used a genetic modification to get rid of most of those repeats. And in they essentially in the patients they studied, they slowed it down to 25%. So wow, if normally you would survive for 20 years with the disease, now you would survive for 80 years, which is not a cure, but it's pretty damn close.
C: Right. There's there's a ceiling for all of us at one point, So yeah. And.
S: And especially since we can easily check for it, you know, genetically test for it, we can identify if you're going to, if you have the trinucleotide, repeat when you're young, give you this treatment. And here's the other thing. It appears to be a once in your life treatment because once you do it, the neurons don't turn over, right? You keep your neurons for life basically. So you just have to do it once.
C: So I wonder if you did it, if you did it more than once, would it do another 25%?
S: Yeah, you know, does it have return? But it's kind of it's an invasive. You know, brain.
C: Surgery to do it.
S: So, but, but what they showed was, yeah, apparently you only do it once it slows it down by 25% and there's a total game changer for Huntington.
C: Oh, completely. And, and the thing to remember, I think about Huntington's just to remind folks is that it's really rare to pass on deadly diseases that are dominant because most deadly diseases that are dominant obviously kill the person who gets them so they can't reproduce. Huntington's is weird in that it has a delayed presentation so that some people don't know until after they've, you know, produced offspring until after they've given birth. And then it's like, oh, crap. So that's why it's such a devastating disease for a lot of people because there's a lot of psychological guilt and shame and, and just really complex emotions involved. So knowing that there's a therapeutic that, I mean, basically is a cure. And that's why that's different from things like Alzheimers, Parkinson's, ALS, where these are also neurodegenerative diseases, but they appear to be more syndrome esque. There's a lot of different things going on. But let's say, let's say development, development of a therapeutic that actually counters the intense immune response does occur based on this research. Fingers crossed, right? That best case, even if that's not a cure, it could help people live a Stephen Hawking lifetime. That would be. Amazing.
S: I mean, yeah, we got excited when we slowed ALS down by 20% and people lived for three more months. Statistically, that was like, that was a disease modifying treatment. And if this could slow it down by years, that's a gate that's huge for patients with ALS. Yeah, yeah.
B: Hey, Lee, how you doing over there?
E: I'm doing great, you know. Learning a lot.
B: I was, I was. Go ahead, Lee. Continue.
E: Yeah, ALS is in the news a lot the last couple weeks because, you know, Eric Dane got diagnosed. Oh.
S: Really. Yeah, he was.
E: Named. Remix Steamy on Grey's Anatomy.
S: Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
C: How old is he? Because most people are diagnosed after 50, right? But they are younger.
E: Yeah, I think it's like 53 is more than 70.
C: Two. Oof, man. It's tough. Yeah, it's tough.
S: It's a terrible disease.
Complex Chemistry on Enceladus (51:13)
S: All right, Bob, tell us about the complex chemistry they're finding on Enceladus.
B: Yeah, this was this was a fun topic to research. All right, so re examination of Cassini data from Saturn's moon Enceladus reveals even more reason for optimism for the potential of life on that moon. This was recently published in Nature Astronomy by a multi institution team. The name of the paper was Detection of organic compounds in Freshly Ejected ice Grains from Enceladus Ocean. A quick back story course I'm lying. This is not going to be quick the. Story. The story goes back as far as 2005. I actually found an old article that I probably read back then and it sounded like the the name of this article sounded like the name of a sci-fi series. It was the fountains of Enceladus, right? Doesn't that sound like a title of a science fiction book? It describes the now famous Cassini mission. It's it's epic discovery of ice particles erupting geyser like these jets on Saturn's moon Enceladus. The Jets of water were bursting from cracks in the ice and the resulting ice grains would be, you know, shot up, you know, into space. Eventually many of them fell back onto the moon. Or they could have also left permanently becoming part of the E ring of material that that traced out Enceladus orbit actually, because if you looked in the middle of the E ring like, oh, there's Enceladus. Now, if that wasn't cool enough, the obvious implication here is what I mean, where, where is this water? Where is this coming from? There could be a hidden ocean beneath the ice supplying the water for something I found out today. They they found 101 geysers ultimately. So this isn't just one geyser 101 of these. Now that fainty icy E ring, you may you've heard about the different types of rings around Saturn. This E ring has been known about for decades. And now, you know, back then we could we could say that this ring was almost certainly coming from Enceladus and coming from these geysers. That's what it was at was proved way back in or, or shown very strongly way back in 2005. S over the over many years of the Cassini's mission, the data from the Enceladus, the geysers, and the E ring information just got increasingly compelling, especially regarding the potential for complex chemistry happening deep within the moon in that ocean. So here's some of the highlights during Cassini's tenure in the outer solar system in 2009, or at least for for Enceladus specific data in 2009, it showed that this deep ocean almost certainly had salt water. Very important. In 2015 there was evidence announced for a deep hydrothermal activity. That's where hot rock and seawater interact. You know, we've got these hydrothermal vents on the earth. So when the hot rock and seawater interact, good stuff can happen. In 2017, chemical energy was announced in in the form of molecular hydrogen that was detected in the plumes. This, this was, this is what hydrothermal vents create. It's and most importantly, this is a potential energy source for microbes, At least on Earth it is. So it's like finding whoppers coming out of this place on the Earth, like, yeah, this is a good, that's a good energy source for whatever might want to live on that stuff. And then let's see, in 2017, after Cassini was scuttled right in the clouds of Saturn, remember that one, like, OK, we're taking a dive into Saturn and the Cassini is never coming back. Scientists continued. Even after the death of Cassini, they continued to mine and analyze this huge treasure trove of data and to create new discoveries. Like, for example, they found that large organic molecules was hidden in the data they showed, you know, this showed very rich ocean chemistry. It would not life, but life friendly for sure. Life adjacent maybe, I don't know, but very interesting stuff. And then in 2023, Steve, phosphorus, that was, that was a big find. Phosphorus was found in in higher concentrations than we find it in, in Earth's oceans. And, and it's absolutely key for Earth life or life as we know it on the Earth that that was a very nice find. So, OK, so this now this is where this latest research comes in. And for these researchers, this involved a reanalysis of the young ice grain data opposed to the very, to the much more common analysis the researchers did back in the day of these old ice grains that were orbiting in the E ring. The problem there was that this, this, these E ring ice grains could be, could be orbiting for years or even centuries. And when you're in the space that long, what what happens to things that there's space weathering? There's actually a thing called space weathering and that could alter the, the, the molecules in weird, you know, not understood ways. So the the researchers wanted to remove that potential complication of the space weathering and re examine the data on fresh grains that may that may already be existing somewhere in the data. And ideally they would they would want to find these ice grains that were just recently shot straight from that ocean, from the subsurface ocean and detected almost immediately by Cassini. And that's exactly what they did in 2008. Cassini did a very rare, a very fast flyby of Enceladus right through the plume of particles. The scientists thought that their new model, the new models and their new filters and just just the raw Cassini data experience that these these scientists have, that, you know, they've gone through many years of looking at the Cassini data, examining it, studying it, testing models. So all of that experience they could now bring to bear on this new approach to to looking at these young, these fresh ice grains coming out of those geysers. And they were hoping that they could tease out obviously more details about what kind of chemistry could be happening in that, in that mysterious ocean. And that's what happened. They they focused on one specific orbit Cassini made through the plume. The orbiter was moving at about 18 kilometers a second. So it was just faster than I think it had ever done in around Enceladus. And it was only 25 kilometers above the surface, 16 miles. I mean, that thing was just skimming right over the planet essentially super low. So it examined. Ultimately they found that they were examining or Cassini was examining ice grains that were only only minutes previously were in the subsurface ocean. So within minutes they they were, they came up from the subsurface ocean and were ejected out. And then there was Cassini just 16 miles away ready, ready to detect them and figure out we know what they what you know, what it was composed of. You know, obviously there's ice, but what kind of hidden little gems might be in there that that we hadn't seen before? So, yeah, so these were the youngest and the freshest grains, ice grains ever detected that that high speed was actually an advantage because typically Cassini wasn't traveling that fast. So when so when these ice grains hit the detector at like 18 kilometers a second, essentially, right? What it did was it removed this kind of weird water fog that typically obscured the data, right? Because you had, you had a lot of these water molecules grouped together and it kind of created a fog. It just an obscuring fog that would, that could potentially mask some mask some interesting data. So it, it, it obliterated those water molecule collections and it, it kind of revealed essentially whole new organic families that would, that just popped out that these new analytical tools that they have, they could see for for the first time. So, but I mean, it's talking, we're talking about organics like, you know, you may have heard of some of these esters, ethyl groups. Most intriguing was the possibility of mixed nitrogen and oxygen bearing compounds. That sounds like very interesting detection there. It's not as as much of A slam dunk as the other as the other ones I mentioned like the esters and ethyl groups, but it was it seemed pretty fairly solid. What they found though was number smoking gun for life. Let me let me make that clear. They did not find any big hints of life at all. What they found were ingredients, you know, not organisms, but these ingredients were very compelling. This wasn't just simple chemistry that was happening there definitely a few steps up above beyond that. So ultimately what they did was to strengthen that link between the organic molecules directly to that deep ocean, right? Because remember, these are the, these are the freshest ice grains that were being ejected from that geyser. So, so they had no time for any space weather to change the molecules in some weird, weirdly unpredictable ways. So these these ice grains were directly from that ocean. And what they found was is more families of organic molecules better, you know, just clear everything was a lot clearer and and fascinating. And it just strengthened that link that there is something going on. For me, this is this is more exciting to me than those minerals that we recently talked about that they found on Mars. This is a lot more interesting to me. Here we have really good evidence of some kind of complex chemistry. Creating organic compounds right now, this is happening right now as we talk, as we record, as you listen to this happening right now in our solar system and it's this is not on Earth. In light of this data, which is I admit this is more of an incremental change. Could you guys think of a more promising location for life in our solar system right now other than Earth? I mean, there's, there's what There's Enceladus, there's Europa. Europa and Enceladus are the big are the big boys. I would put, now, I would put Enceladus over Europa, but there's also Titan and Ganymede and Colisto. They're not as strong as Europa and Enceladus, but they're also, you know, intriguing and there's some some solid hints that something could be going on. I would move Enceladus to the top position right now for sure, even over Europa. So my big hope here is that this is going to strengthen the case for the European Space Association to to mount a mission to orbit and land on Enceladus. Because they're, because I didn't, I didn't take too much of A deep dive and what they're actually doing about mounting a mission. But I think they've been at least been talking about it and been planning at planning it at high levels. But I think this could be the data they need to like, yeah, we've really got to go over there, man. There's something really cool happening with that we should need, we need to get close to. And the reason why they want it, they would want to get there is because because if you when we go back there, they could bring real chemical tool boxes to bear to examine the compounds before or this is important, they could examine them before they're smashed apart like our earlier techniques did. So I'm really hoping that we can get back there before before I'm dead and see what the hell is going on in in settle it so your fingers.
S: Saying get your ass to Enceladus.
B: Nice. Yeah.
S: So to recap, it's got liquid water, a source of energy. It's got complex organic molecules and it has the other chemical elements that are useful for life. It's all there.
B: It really is.
S: It's almost we would have to figure out why life isn't there if we don't.
B: Find Yeah, right, because that would be I'd be shocked. I just want to know. I mean that this is This is why I wish we had superheroes because I'd beg Superman, go to Enceladus right now, pick us up a sample and bring it right back later today. And that'd be great because we're because you know what it takes to get there? Millions of dollars. The stupid chemical rockets are going to take years. Booster. It's worth it. It's worth it. But you know, hey man, when you're 62, when you're 62, you want shit to happen faster.
Genius Act (1:02:43)
S: All right, all right, Lee, you're going to tell us about the Genius Act.
E: First off, maybe I talk a little bit about about what I do and then talk about the genius act. I'm in venture capital. Venture capital invests in really early stage businesses. It's considered an alternative investment class. Basically, how do companies when they first start with a pitch deck or an idea, how do they get capital to expand and grow to get revenue? Once they have revenue, how do they expand and grow into the market? You know, in, in July of 2025, the Genius Act was, was passed. It is going to take effect in January of 2027 and it allows people who aren't necessarily the richest people in the world, it allows their the managers of their retirement plans or their pension plans to divert a certain amount of capital into earlier stage businesses. And so, you know, if you have a 401K, you have an IRAA lot of listeners wouldn't classify to be able to, you know, invest in venture itself, but now you'll be able to.
S: So reading about it seems like the part of this is has to do with stable coins and cryptocurrency. What is what role is that playing?
E: Yes, so crypto and and stablecoins is a is a big part of it, but I'd say, you know, there's going to be a lot of people in the venture community that are going to try to get access to that large chunk of capital. Venture spending has been primarily dominated into AI over the past three years. And so there's a lot of, you know, businesses that are looking for that capital, a lot of investors that are trying to deploy capital into that part of the asset class. And so the, you know, many large VC firms are becoming registered investment advisors. Currently. People are trying to figure out how do I tie my VC fund into Rias that can allocate a certain percent to my to venture capital. And so, you know, I'm getting into the intersection of sort of investing and skepticism and critical thought for the first time in my life, which I know that sounds silly, but there's there's a lot of potential risk around some of the things that we're investing in from a technical feasibility, from a scientific feasibility and I think people should be concerned about.
C: It and so should we be concerned about this act like what it what do you think is going to be the downstream effect?
E: Well, I think they're going to put a lot of restrictions on the amount of capital that can be diverted from a portfolio. So probably going to be 1 to 2%. You know, the asset class as a whole performs OK. It's very illiquid. You cannot typically get an exit or get money back back for a 10 to 15 year period, which may not be appropriate for some individuals, you know, retirement horizon. So they're going to limit it a little bit. But I would say it looks like a gold rush for for venture capital and there's a lot of people trying to get access to that and really changing their business model in a way that allows them to to bring down new capital. And I'd say like, you know, you mostly think about venture capital as a bunch of billionaires putting money into these high, risky, you know, early stage startups. And it's not necessarily true. Venture capitalists don't use a lot of their own money to run these large funds and a lot of those large funds, you know, already get a ton of capital from, you know, pension fund managers and things like that. This is a whole new way to get access to four O 1 KS and Iras. And then the type of investments we're seeing, we're seeing a ton of investments in things that may have a 20 to 30 year horizon. A lot of in, you know, there's been a huge bubble in AI. A lot of us are skeptical. We think that AI is going to be great. Do we think it's going to be as great as it is, you know, presented? Probably not. And so there's a lot of hype around it. There's a lot of hype, you know, with Quantum. Do we do we really know where we are in quantum? I have my own questions. There's certain research things that has to happen, there's certain algorithmic development things that have to happen. And if you're looking at a 5 to 10 year horizon, which was traditional venture, you know, back in the 90s and early 2000s, it's, it's really questionable whether you know those, those types of investments will get a return. Because in the private markets, when you do an investment, that money is basically given to the company and it's very hard to sell those positions. There's often no buyers until the company there goes IPO or someone some large other company acquires that business. The investors don't get their money back.
C: Yeah, I mean, obviously, I'm no expert. I've actually talked a lot to another skeptical investor, Phil Ferguson, about these very topics. And like, all my money that I have control over is in index funds because I'm scared. And so for me, like, I don't know, these kinds of like investing a lot in crypto, I don't know, it scares it scares the crap out of me. And maybe I sound like I'm older than I am, but I'm at a stage in my life where I just can't afford to not get returns on, you know, my retirement.
E: Yeah. And I think, you know, fully diversified. I mean, some of the best advice I ever got was, you know, take $200 a month when you're in your early 20s, put in an index fund and just do that until you're like 45 or 50 and you'll be a multimillionaire. And I think that that's good advice. And there is some advice that most of the gains in these companies are going to be realized before they ever hit the public markets, right? So if you're in an index fund, you're in something that's public most of the time. And so there, you know, most of those gains will be will be given when it's a private company. And so you could use the same logic. But I think what we see in the industry is a lot of, you know, to get a fully diversified portfolio and venture, you have to be in, you know, 1000 or in 2000 deals maybe 500. What we see in ventures sort of these one off, I'm going to gamble here and get 1000 to 1 or 100 to 1. And it's, it's a real long shot, but that's also what, you know, brings the capital into the markets.
C: Right, right. And so the people who can afford that kind of risk are the ones who are taking it.
E: That's correct. And and you know, before this I would say that you know, there was a lot of pension fund money in venture that's you know it's a one percent, 2% allocation, but those funds are huge. They typically focus later in in sort of the growth stage, the business, but now they can focus at the earliest stages where you can have just a team with pitch deck, maybe they've got a product built.
S: So what do you think about the one of the main criticism that I've read is that this is really just a way for tech giants to make money off of crypto with less regulation.
E: Well, I've made more money in my life than anything with crypto, so I have a little bit of bias there. But it was it was more just about being interested in the technology and sort of, you know, buying and holding over a long period. But I do think that's right, tech giants, since it's almost a shell game, Let's say that you have an investor, you create a large tech company, you fill it with the board of other investors, and those investors will invest in a new company. And then they sort of advise that company to buy that startup so they get these amazing returns, you know, because they have that connection. And so the best performing funds have that sort of baked in success that they've created for themselves through, you know, years and years of that, that shell game. But you know, I, I agree there, you know, a, a lot of the projects, not vast majority of projects in crypto, you often don't know who is running them. I have a crypto project that's a sports betting project and you know, the people don't show their face on on podcasts or they won't give their name because there's that, you know, anonymous nature to to crypto. It just doesn't seem like, you know, for the stable coins, it's a little bit different, but I'm, I'm pretty skeptical if this, if this is a way to get into sort of this Ponzi scheme of, of crypto investing that that should be, you know, terrifying for everybody.
S: Yeah. And for the audience, stable coins are crypto that's tied to a currency. Is that essentially correct?
E: It can be tied to a currency. It can also be algorithmically tied OK.
C: So what makes it stable? Or is that a misnomer?
E: Well, when it's when it's tied to a currency, when they're actually, you know, purchasing Fiat and and sort of balancing the equation so that they're it's backed by Fiat, then it's a, it's a good stable coin. You might see others where it's tied to some other asset class, but there, you know, a few years ago they were just algorithmic and I don't, I didn't understand all the details, but basically they could or could not purchase a certain amount or they had the ability to purchase certain amounts and those a lot of those crashed. I was actually in Puerto Rico pitching a hedge fund at the time, a crypto hedge fund, which would have done very well, but it was one of the during one of the last crashes. And it was because some of these these algorithmic stable coins took a dive to 0.
S: Not so stable.
US#00: No.
S: All right. Thanks, Lee.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:11:39)
S: Jay, it's who's that noisy time? All right guys, last week I played this noisy. What do you think? The only thing I could say is that there appears to be a Doppler effect in there.
E: It feels like something launching.
J: Those are both good comments, Bob Lee.
E: Sounded like a jet to me.
J: Well, a lot of people guessed some type of aircraft. So a listener named Dan Lee said this week's noisy is a conveyor belt loading luggage onto an airplane as another plane takes off in the background. Dan, you are incorrect. But I, I like where you went with that. And again, you know, it's, it's a very good guess that it's an airplane sound. But his guess was correct. Matthew Morrison wrote in and said, hi, Jay, my daughter Nevada thinks the sound, this sounds like an airplane flying over a rainforest. Again, good guess. You're not in the right exact right place, but that is definitely a good guess. We have a listener named Bob. Bob, I believe this is the sound of a jet fighter taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. He goes on to describe at the beginning you can hear what sounds like a cable slapping around on some metal. I believe that is the catapult used to get the jet to the proper speed for take off. Also incorrect. I have another listener named Bob. Yeah, two Bobs. This is Bob Marshall. He said the sound is recorded in part in the Welsh valley called Mock Loop. And this is where you can sit on a peaceful mountain and watch a wide variety of military jets pass below you in the valley because apparently they do a lot of practice flying and everything. So that would be very cool. Sorry, Bob, also not correct. Another listener named Alex Freshy said. Hi, Jay. I'm going to guess this week's noisy is a hypersonic wind tunnel. The cycle time for fast wind tunnels is surprisingly quick. Thanks for all you do. Yeah, check that out, guys. A hypersonic wind tunnel. I had never thought of that before. What the hell?
B: That must. But they were impractical, did they? Can they get them hypersonic?
J: Just because you said it doesn't mean that they necessarily exist. But it is a cool guess. But that is incorrect as well. So what are we dealing with here? So in the beginning you hear what I would say is kind of like a little rumbling kind of sound and then it builds into like a very fast, what Steve described as a Doppler effect noise. In the end, guys, this is a roller coaster.
C: Oh.
J: So this one is called Falcons Flight, and it happens to be a record-breaking roller coaster that's being built at Six Flags in Kitia, Saudi Arabia.
C: Oh wow.
J: It's designed to be the tallest, fastest and longest coaster in the world when it opens. So it gets up to 155 mph and that's 250 kilometers an hour, which makes it the fastest 1 on earth.
C: That's. Terrible. Fast.
J: It has a 640 foot drop or 195 meter drop that's higher than any existing coaster. It is nearly 2.5 miles or 4 kilometers of track, which makes it the longest roller coaster. And the unique feature here is they say the ride will plunge off the side of a Cliff using the natural terrain to create extreme height and speed, which is very cool. It's going to be opening with when that new when that 6 flag apparently opens and it is currently under development. So let me play that for you again and just give you a visualization. So imagine, so imagine the roller coaster is running on the track and it comes over the lip of the Cliff and then goes straight down. And then it picks up all that speed and then it goes up a huge ramp. And that's when you hear that Doppler effect.
C: How many people are going to pass out on this thing? I wonder how many G's you push.
S: Yeah, how many G's?
C: Are you? Yeah.
S: And now that you know what it is, you could imagine what's happening when you hear the sound. That's scary.
J: It makes me think of something, right? So all my life, I thought that what I was largely hearing from a jet was the engine. And this sounds like a jet, but it's not an engine. It's, you know, OK, there's wheels of some sort on a track of some sort, right? But, you know, it also might just be the wind breaking off of the front of the coaster. It makes a jet sound that is, you know, pretty damn serious. I don't know, Bob. Would you write it?
B: I don't, I don't think so. And I can't imagine that's that's a little too. I'll go on almost any ride. That seems a little extreme. I'd have to see it and then. Probably.
S: What if I double dog there? What you do?
B: Got to do it now, Jay. For what it's worth, I confirmed that hypersonic wind tunnels do in fact exist.
J: Very cool. Thanks, Bob. Hey Lee, have you ever been drunk on a roller coaster?
E: Never.
J: Good, good, man. You don't want to do that was.
E: Less than 21 years old when I was on the roller coaster.
J: Well, you don't want to particularly be drunk on a roller coaster that sounds like a freaking jet. That's my advice to the world. I have a new noisy this week. This comes in from a listener named Paolo Siaroka. Yeah, Siaroka. Thanks, Paolo. And here's the noisy. Well, well, well. So if you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, you can e-mail me at wtn@thescepticsguide.org. Steve, as we speak, I'm planning three more SGU Private Show Pluses and Extravaganza weekends that we just like we just did in Kansas.
S: Three more LA Sydney and Christchurch, No. No.
J: No, we are talking about, we are talking about Seattle, we're talking about somewhere near Milwaukee in that region and then we are talking about New Haven, CT.
S: Those 3.
J: Yeah, not even getting to next summer.
S: Yeah, I was talking about which summer.
J: Yeah, there's going to be a lot more activity going on. Then that's the that is going to be the two conferences that we're going to be attending. First one is in Sydney, that's going to be on July 23rd and 24th and 25th. And then we're going to be attending another one, which is the following weekend that'll be in Christchurch, New Zealand. And there'll be lots of events, you know, secondary events surrounding that. I'm going to give out all the information coming soon. We are finalizing, finalizing, finalizing. You know, everything takes longer than you want, but we're there. I just got to like, you know, do the final work to, to turn on the ticket sales. It's going to happen soon. Two more quick things. If you appreciate the work that we do, you could consider becoming a patron of the SGU. You can go to patreon.com/skeptics Guide and join us on our adventure to educate the world and get rid of every single thing that irritates all of us.
S: And you know, what we haven't mentioned in a while is if you want to learn more about skepticism, you can buy both of our books, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe and The Skeptics Guide to the Future. The Skeptics Guide the Universe is basically a primer on scientific skepticism, quite a fun read. And then in The Skeptics Guide to the Future, we apply all of that to thinking about future technology. Very interesting. So, you know, those books are still highly relevant. You should not only get one, but buy one for everyone you know got them.
J: I have people asking me on all different platforms what is going on with the new podcast. So let me give you all the base information. Yes, it is called the Political Reality Podcast, and this podcast will be hosted by Steve, and it'll be hosted by Andrea Jones. Roy. Steve, what the hell is this podcast?
S: So Andrew and I have been man, we are deep in the weeds of scheduling out at least the first season of this podcast. We're going to be talking about a lot of political issues, but from a very, you know, academic and neutral point of view doesn't mean that we're not going to, you know, call it like we see it, but it's more about like the meta discussion of politics. We. It's the Andrea said like this is the civics class that everybody should have taken but didn't and but try to make it as timely and relevant and in the news as possible. She has a ton of great guests lined up, all experts in political science and different areas of politics. So basically this is if you want to have an informed opinion about something. We don't care what your opinion is, but this will help you have an informed opinion about any political issue.
C: Nice.
S: All right. Well, thank you, Jay.
Emails (1:20:42)
S: We have a quick e-mail. This one comes from Gary, and Gary writes Parrot as intelligent as a chimp. And then he links to some experiments done with a Kia. Do you guys remember the Kia KEA?
C: No. What is that? Is that a bird in New Zealand?
S: Yeah, Gary's from New Zealand. This is it's a giant parrot. Parrot of New Zealand.
J: I remember that.
S: Never seeing him on the side of the road. You know, we're driving around in New Zealand.
J: No, that was when we opened up the van door and he came running over to the van door like demanding attention and food.
S: So you guys have to watch this video and it's a series of experiments where they're trying to to determine the problem solving and predictive abilities of Kia. So the, the basic set up is there's jars that have either red or black clothesline clips, you know, like you take half of the clip, you know what I mean? Without the spring, that little piece of wood and half of them are black and half of them are, are red. If and then you have one person who picks from one jar, another person who picks from the other jar, and they're trying to see if the parrot can predict which person is more likely to have the black piece of wood. Because they pick one hand, they get the wood and then they can exchange it for a treat, but they can only exchange the black ones for treats. So you get the setup. So the the parrots want the black ones. So they do all kinds of permutations, including obviously picking it out of a jar with mostly black ones, picking it, you know, the other person picks it out of jar with mostly red ones. The parrot knows it's more likely to get a black one from the jar with mostly black ones. That's easy. But then they keep going, right? They make it, they put in a barrier. So even if the bottom half of the jar is all black, the top half isn't black. The parrot won't fall for it, right? So it's not just going for the color, It knows that it's only picking from the top. You get that. And then they, they're on some cases, the person looks at the color of the stick that they're picking and the parrot could learn which of the people doing the experiment prefer the black pieces of wood. So they can actually so, so in other words, if it's me and you Cara, and you Cara, you look and always pick a black 1 and I don't look and it's random, the parent learns that you always have the black 1. And so then it will pick you even if I'm picking from a jar with more black sticks.
C: Right. Yeah, because it's good at statistics.
S: Yeah, so. Right. So. But here's the The upshot of it is they do as well in this experimental paradigm as chimpanzees do.
C: Well, and that's that's the thing about these headlines that are like so and so as smart as so and so. It's like, how are you defining intelligence?
S: Is this very specific paradigm?
C: Yeah, they're good at this. They're better at this task than a chimpanzee, which there are all sorts of animals that are better at specific tasks than human beings. You know what I mean? It doesn't necessarily mean they're more intelligent. Or maybe they are in that one definition.
E: Yeah. I was wondering if I could borrow some of these parents for venture capital.
C: Yeah, seriously.
S: There was that study where a chimpanzee, a monkey basically chose stocks and did as well as you know, most of the the professional stock pickers. But maybe we could try it with a parent. No, but. But the important thing here, Terra, is that Bird's rule. That's the.
C: Important thing, birds are really smart.
S: Let's not lose sight of that. All right, All right, let's go on with science or fiction.
Science or Fiction (1:24:34)
Theme: Evolution
Item #1: Leglessness has evolved independently in lizards at least 25 times.[7]
Item #2: Although the precise number is debated, camera-type eyes have evolved from more primitive eyes independently in vertebrates about 4 times.[8]
Item #3: Complex multicellular life has evolved independently on Earth at least 5 times.[9]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Although the precise number is debated, camera-type eyes have evolved from more primitive eyes independently in vertebrates about 4 times. |
| Science | Leglessness has evolved independently in lizards at least 25 times. |
| Science | Complex multicellular life has evolved independently on Earth at least 5 times. |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve | win |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|---|
Evan | Complex multicellular life has evolved independently on Earth at least 5 times. |
Jay | Although the precise number is debated, camera-type eyes have evolved from more primitive eyes independently in vertebrates about 4 times. |
Bob | Complex multicellular life has evolved independently on Earth at least 5 times. |
Cara | Although the precise number is debated, camera-type eyes have evolved from more primitive eyes independently in vertebrates about 4 times. |
Voice-over: It's time for science or fiction.
S: Each week I come up with three Science News items or facts, 2 real and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics. To tell me which. One is the fake There is a theme this week. The theme is evolution. You guys ready?
J: Let's do it.
S: All right, And you'll see that there's a sub theme within evolution that'll become apparent very quickly. OK. Item number one, leglessness has evolved independently in lizards at least 25 times. Item number 2, although the precise number is debated, camera type eyes has evolved from more primitive eyes independently in vertebrates about four times. And item number three, complex multicellular life has evolved independently on Earth at least five times. OK, Lee, as our guest, you get to go first.
E: Leglessness has evolved independently in lizards at least 25 times.
S: Now, I will clarify one small thing there. Leglessness doesn't necessarily mean there's zero leg left because even snakes have leg bones and even some snakes have primitive little legs sticking out. It means that what legs they have are vestigial. They're not using them as legs.
E: Yeah, I guess. I guess like that could be true. I mean, we all know lizards hate pants so independently, I think that could that could be true. Although the precise number is debated. Camera type eyes have evolved from more primitive eyes independently in vertebrates about four times. Yeah, sure, why not? I think possibly, yeah, the one that really is setting off my antenna here. Complex multicellular life has evolved independently on Earth at least five times. I just don't know how we get the evidence for that. So I think that to me is the the fake one.
S: OK, Jay.
J: All right. Well, I might have some questions to you. Will the leglessness has evolved independently in lizards at least 25 times. I mean, that's that's interesting because you know, we're talking about millions and millions in millions of years. And would that develop independently over over a over all that time? Like I guess it would be like when you say it independently like it was it started off in one species and then another one developed it and they didn't Co evolve the whole thing.
S: Yeah, there's no common ancestor with lakelessness. It happened completely evolutionarily independently.
J: And why would is this when you say leglessness, meaning they don't have legs or they drop their legs?
S: Yeah, they don't fall off. They don't have they. They have vestigial or no legs basically.
J: OK, Roger that. With my understanding of nature and evolution, like I think that this is plausible because I am aware that that similar evolutionary traits have happened in other species that don't that don't have a relation right? So this why couldn't apply to this all that one is tentatively science. The second one is weird. I got to ask some questions. Although the precise number is debated, camera type eyes have evolved from more primitive eyes independently in vertebrates about four times. So when you say camera type eyes, what are we talking?
S: About so not compound eyes like insects.
J: Like.
S: Our Yeah, like our human eyes, Yeah.
B: Right. What lens? Retina.
S: Basic set up of like a yeah, pupil lens retina that that basic set up.
J: That would be really cool. Now here's why I'm not sure about this one, because if that happened and with all the debates that I've heard people talking about evolution and you know, about the, the fact that, you know, the, what's it called, Steve, irreducible complexity, why wouldn't someone on the evolutionary side, why wouldn't I have heard someone like bring this up like, hey man, it's happened 4 times independently from each other? Because that would be a great argument. That doesn't mean it didn't happen. It just means I have not heard that. And that would be something I would think that I would have heard at this point. So that's more of a no a fiction than a science for me. And then complex multicellular life has evolved independently on Earth at least five times that one also, you know, you think, all right, doesn't everything kind of all go back to the same thing? But I don't, I'm not so sure about that. All right. I'm going to go with the camera type as the fiction, Steve.
S: OK, Bob.
B: The lizard's leglessness, Yeah. I mean, I've seen images of of, of lizards with clearly like weird, like, oh, they got front legs, but no back legs or they're clearly vestigial. The only question here for me is 25 times seems a little bit big, but I could totally go with that, especially considering the other two here. The second one here, yeah, the camera eye. And again, absolutely in my mind, there's no question about this. But four times might seem a little bit low. Then you are focusing it on vertebrates. So that narrows that down a little bit. But sure, I could see that. And then the third one, see, this is the one that got got me. I think I agree with Lee, right? You picked you picked this complex multicellular life as the fiction. This is the one that that grabs me. I mean, it was it took how many, how long? I mean, single celled microbial life went for so long, millions and millions of years even what was it a couple of billion years potentially. And then and then all of a sudden multicellular life appeared. It took it took a long time, really long, you know, depressingly long time. I don't think we have any evidence that it that it evolved independently at all. So this is the one that viscerally grabbed me doesn't doesn't really make much sense. And even if we did know that it it happened, what would the evidence be? I think. I think all multicellular life has a common ancestor. That's fiction, I would say.
S: OK, Cara.
C: I think that what is kind of getting me on this is if leglessness has evolved at least 25 times. If if that is science, I think these other two numbers are ridiculously low, even for complex multicellular life. I do think that it always. It never ceases to amaze me when I learn about certain lineages, how many times certain things evolved over and over simply because the pressures continue to exist. So the mechanisms might change, but the pressures on on those, you know, genes to be selected for continue to exist. So if leglessness in lizards evolved at least 20 to five times is science, then I think I have to be careful about the wording here. Multicellular life has evolved independently at least five times, I think is also so science. But you said that camera type eyes have evolved for more primitive eyes independently. You did say invertebrates. That is an important caveat, but it just says about four times. I bet you it's also at least more times than that. I think it's probably a lot of times. And so I'm going to go with the camera type lenses. I don't know if it's the same reason Jay is going with it, but I think it's probably more than that.
S: All right, so let's start with the first one, since you guys all agree there. Leglessness has evolved independently in lizards at least 25 times. You all think this is science and this one is science. Yep, this is science. That's good. Lizards apparently like to be legless, and so there's two basic scenarios, they think, in which lizards evolve leglessness. 1 is burrowing, they go underground, and the other is on the surface of the ground. You're basically crawling along the top of the ground. And that does tend to result in some differences, like how long the tail is versus the thorax. But in any case, has a lot of legless lizards. The Western glass lizard, the European legless lizard, there's a lot of legless skinks and they don't just form leglessness, they also form very snake like anatomy overall. You know, they kind of adapt to the snake like whip predatory style. Not just yes.
B: Some of them you'd be like, yeah, that's a snake. Like Nope, that's not a.
S: Well, some of them have evolved as mimics, like that's their defense mechanism. Like skinks look like snakes as a defense mechanism because they are relatively defenseless. But if they, if they, if a potential predator thinks that they're a snake, they'll, they'll leave them alone. So it's not that's that adaptation might be mimicry, not functionality, if that makes sense. But there's a there's also a lot of functional convergent evolution among lizards. One piece of that is lakelessness. Now, why do you, why would I say at least 25 times in all of these items? This is the same reason why there's debate whether it's at least or about or whatever. It's because there's always at least these two points of contention. 1 is what's independent. Like how independent does independent have to be? And what do you count as the feature you're looking for? Like what counts as leglessness? What counts as independent? So for example, like how legless does the common ancestor have to be before you say it's homologous versus analogous, right? Homologous meaning derived from a of a common ancestor. Analogous means you independently evolved it, but they look the same. You know what I mean? Like if you're like, if it was like partly legless and then spawned multiple clades that were truly legless, was that really independent or were they halfway there? Does that count or not count? So anyway, there's there's no sharp demarcation line here and that's why there's this fuzziness. But the general consensus is there's at least 25 lineages where it clearly independently evolved leglessness. The number could be a lot higher depending on where you draw your line. So that one science, I guess we'll go in order. Although the precise number is debated. Camera type eyes have evolved from more primitive eyes independently in vertebrates about four times. Jay and Cara, you think this one is the fiction? Bob and Lee, you think this one is science and this one is the fiction? Yeah.
J: Right, Cara, Who did it? I. Can't believe it.
S: Let me ask you guys, how many times do you think camera type eyes have evolved in vertebrates?
C: 8.
S: J1.
C: Or maybe it's like 25? What?
S: Did you say J1? It's one the answer.
C: Is 1, so one time only one time.
S: Yes, the common ancestor of vertebrates had eyes. That's all that that takes, of course. Yeah, so.
C: So how many times did it evolve in all life? Do we know?
S: Give me a guess how. Yeah, so again, there's this. What counts as an eye? What counts as independent?
C: OK, I'm going to go with similar to the legs then like 25.
S: 40 to 60 at least, and the number might be a lot higher. So if you're looking at all of life, there's at least 40 to 60 independent times where something like an eye evolved, right? So you have camera type eyes, invertebrates and famously also in squid, right, and cephalopods, you have compound eyes and insects, you have lots of creatures have eye spots instead. So it's like, does an eye spot count? Does an eye? So most people, you know, biologists would say, yeah, if it's if it's clearly detecting light, it's an eye. You know, even if it's a proto eye or a primitive eye or whatever, it's still an eye. But again, you could nitpick about exactly where you want to draw the line there. Here's the other thing though about the independently part with eyes, which is very interesting, is that all creatures with eyes share some biochemical similarities. So it's possible that the common ancestor of like early, early, early on, like somewhere deep in the Cambrian or even the idiocarin somewhere deep in the Cambrian was a creature with the biochemical mechanism for photoreception. And then eyes evolved out of that many, many times. But those photos, proto photoreceptors were already there. The proteins were there, the genes were there. So is that truly independent? But they're counting that if you if the physical eye was in was independent, they count that as independent. But even though it might not be biochemically independent, does that make sense?
B: Yeah. I could deal with that.
S: Yeah. All right. That's why I said this one. I this one was so complicated. I had to make it to fiction because I couldn't figure out a way to make it that would be not nitpicky able. You know what I'm saying? It is. It was too many variables. That's an easy way to make something to fiction because I don't have to worry about it being true. All right, item number three, complex multicellular life has evolved independently on Earth at least five times. Bob and Lee, you think you thought this one was fiction? And this one, of course, is science. So what are the the at least five groups of multicellular life that evolved independently?
E: They they got to be the kingdoms, right?
S: So what are they? Animal Animals.
C: Plant.
S: Plants.
B: Vegetable Mineral. Fungus.
S: Fungus and that. Those are the easy ones. Now it gets hard.
C: Archaea.
S: No, those are single celled.
C: Oh wait, sorry, what were you asking specifically? Complex multi celled. Cellular. Oh, right, right. So it can't be Archaea and it can't be bacteria, right?
S: So animals, plants, fungi.
C: It's like blue, blue, blue-green algae I think is single. Close. Protists.
S: It's no not produce or single cell red algae.
C: So it is a type of algae and.
S: Brown algae. Those are the five.
B: Freaking algaes. God.
S: Damn, there's a debate about a 6th, but five? That's why I said at least five.
B: Shit.
S: Yeah, and you have to say complex multicellular life because there's a lot of simple multicellular. Life.
B: Yeah, like slime.
S: Yeah, Yeah, exactly. So the number could greatly increase if you go down that, you know, complexity spectrum to to include simple things. Again, there's all the always demarcation lines in evolution. Evolution is messy, but but this is generally accepted that these five things independently evolved complex multicellular life. Yeah, I've I that's what that item is what triggered this theme. I saw that I'm like, I don't know that everyone's going to go for that. I'm going to put that in as one of the items and then came up with the other two.
B: Good choice, Lee. Good choice. Damn it. I'm pissed off though. What the? Hell.
S: That brown algae? Always gets, yeah.
B: That stuff.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:39:56)
“The chimpanzee study taught us perhaps more than anything else to be a little humble; that we are, indeed, unique primates, we humans, but we’re simply not as different from the rest of the animal kingdom as we used to think.”
– - Jane Goodall, (description of author)
S: All right, Well, Evan's not here, so I'm going to do the quote. I actually picked this quote even before I knew Evan couldn't be here.
J: Steve, do you mind if I do it?
S: Go ahead, Jace. Jace do the quote for us the.
J: Chimpanzee study taught us, perhaps more than anything else, to be a little humble. That we are indeed unique primates, we humans, but we're simply not as different from the rest of the animal Kingdom as we used to think. Jake Goodall.
B: Oh my God.
S: It's a blast from the past.
B: That's a great.
S: I searched through a bunch of her quotes. That's my favorite. I I really like that quote because it is so true. You know, her work, Fosse's work, so many other researchers work has showed us that we are animals and every time we think there's something totally unique about us, some other animal takes us down a peg and shows that Nope, we're just an just a yes, a very interesting, but still an extension of the animal Kingdom, right?
C: Yep.
B: I agree with that.
S: All right. Hey, Lee, thanks for joining us. Did you have a good time?
E: I had an absolute blast this. Was really.
S: Good. And thank you all for joining me this week.
E: You got it, Steve.
C: Thanks, Steve.
S: And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.
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- ↑ www.livescience.com: Astronomers discover a 'Great Wave' spreading across the Milky Way in new map of thousands of stars
- ↑ www.science.org: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado9202
- ↑ www.livescience.com: Do figs really have dead wasps in them?
- ↑ neurosciencenews.com: ALS May Be an Autoimmune Disease - Neuroscience News
- ↑ phys.org: Cassini proves complex chemistry in Enceladus ocean
- ↑ en.wikipedia.org: GENIUS Act - Wikipedia
- ↑ www.livescience.com: Evolution in Action: Lizards Losing Limbs
- ↑ pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov: The evolution of phototransduction and eyes - PMC
- ↑ www.nature.com: A timetree of Fungi dated with fossils and horizontal gene transfers