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#960 - Dr Jerry Coyne - The Spiciest Ideas of Evolutionary Biology

Modern Wisdom

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  • Understanding Speciation and Species
    • Speciation explains why nature is “lumpy” with discrete species, not a continuous spectrum.
    • Reproductive isolation barriers maintain species separation despite continuous evolution. Transcript: Jerry A. Coyne But when I was a scientist, I call myself a superannuated scientist now. But when I was working in the lab, I worked on the problem of speciation or the origin of species, which is, of course, the title of Darwin’s 1859 book. And it’s a problem that Darwin didn’t solve. So that’s why I took it up when I was a graduate student. I think we know a lot more now. We certainly, Darwin knew almost nothing about speciation. So to call his book the origin of species is a bit of a misnomer. He should call it The Origin of Adaptations, which might be a natural selection. But in terms of species, that is the lumpiness of nature, the fact that creatures are not a spectrum, but they’re discrete, more or less discrete entities. Chris Williamson That’s a problem that Darwin didn’t solve, and that’s the problem I was working on. Right. What’s the layman’s description of speciation? Jerry A. Coyne Well, are you talking about how it happens or how I define it? Chris Williamson Give us both. Jerry A. Coyne Well, the definition is simply the speciation is the origin of a species. If you look at nature, as I said, you don’t find that it’s a continuum all the way from bacteria to humans. But that’s not a hierarchy. That’s just what people perceive as a hierarchy. It’s lumpy. So if you look at a bird out your window, you’re going to know what it is instantly. You’re not going to say, I don’t know, it looks like a half black bird and a half robin or whatever. No, they come in pretty discrete packages. And that is the problem of speciation. What on Earth would make a continuous evolutionary process give rise to entities that are absolutely discontinuous? And that’s really the problem of the origin of species. Darwin made almost no end roads on it whatsoever. Chris Williamson Why was it a difficult circle to square for him? Jerry A. Coyne Well, because in order to attack the problem with speciation, you have to know what species are. And although we say nature is lumpy and these lumps are species, that’s not really the problem. The question is, well, why do we get those lumps? And it was in about the 1930s that people realized that those lumps are kept separate by what we call reproductive isolated barriers. That is, barriers that keep the genes from one species from mixing with those that were in other species. For example, those barriers could be that the hybrids are sterile or inviolable. So even if they mate, you don’t get any intermixing, or they couldn’t like each other. I mean, like a lion and a tiger, they’ll mate in the zoo and produce things like ligers or tigelons, which they’ll have, but where they co-occur or where they used to co-occur in, (Time 0:00:10)
  • Political Divide on Evolution Acceptance
    • The right tends to deny evolution more than the left, though both sides misuse or dispute aspects of it.
    • About 71% of Americans reject fully naturalistic evolution, showing widespread resistance. Transcript: Chris Williamson Is that a fair assessment? Jerry A. Coyne Yeah, I spent a lot of my time, particularly when I was younger, arguing against creationists and creationism. And it finally resulted in me having to write a book about it called Why Evolution is True. Because when I taught my first evolution course, which was probably in about 1983, back in the Pleistocene, the first thing any professor does when he or she writes a course is to see, Well, you pick up the textbook that’s relevant to the course and you see how it’s organized and you get ideas about how to write a course. Well, when I did that for evolution, I looked at the evolution textbooks, and none of them had anything about the evidence for evolution in them. They just assumed that you assumed that evolution was true, and then you go into things like populations, genetics, and species, etc. In the textbooks of the 20s and 30s, why biologists believe evolution is true and why it is a scientific fact, as we call it, provisional, true and not just a mere speculation. Chris Williamson Is it interestingly ironic in some way that you’re pretty well known for pushing back on right-wing anti-evolution reviews. And it was funny that in the past, left-wing people used to use evolution as a cudgel to beat their right-wing foes’ cherished beliefs. And now the right uses it for the same reason against their left-wing foes to cudgel their cherished belief. In politics, it seems like, I don’t know, a fact functions as a weapon that’s laid out in the open and either side can pick it up. But you’ve got religious evolution deniers on the right and evolutionary psychology deniers on the left. You’ve got these two groups both arguing, but also sometimes, I guess, when it’s convenient, certain members of certain groups using it to hit each other over the head with. Jerry A. Coyne Yeah, I mean, there are well evolutionary psychology is really only the it’s the purview of the right when cudgels but in general if you look at right versus left at least in america and I think that’s probably true in the uk as well um far more people on the left accept evolution as a fact right there than the right. It’s almost a touchstone of ignorance. And here I’m sharing my political predilections, but it’s a touchstone of ignorance to deny that evolution is a scientific fact. And again, in science, we don’t have anything as a fact that’s beyond acceptance. We have things that are somewhat acceptable, and then we have things that are so widely accepted that you would bet your fortune on them, like the formula of water is H2O. So there’s various degrees of facthood um but in general the left accepts facthood more than right but that in general however it’s still both surprising and depressing how few americans Accept that evolution is true if you look at the latest gallup ball where they ask people just about the origin of humans. Do humans evolve? Were they created by God in the biblical manner? Or did they sort of evolve, but God tweaked the pathway here and then, maybe putting unconsciousness in a sort of rigged brain? And you find out that only about 23% of Americans accept the fully naturalistic view of evolution, the one that I teach, that it’s purely a materialistic process without any supernatural Intervention. And about 30% of Americans accept the fact that humans sort of evolved, but God had a hand in it now and then. And about 40% of Americans, by the biblical view, humans were created in seven days and haven’t changed since then. And in fact, all creatures have. And so basically about 71% of Americans reject naturalistic evolution. So this is what we’re up against. And those include, of course, both Democrats and Republicans. But the percentage is higher amongst the right. On (Time 0:04:04)
  • Evolutionary Psychology’s Scientific Growth
    • Evolutionary psychology is maturing from storytelling to a scientific field with testable predictions.
    • Testing evolutionary hypotheses on behavior remains challenging but increasingly viable. Transcript: Jerry A. Coyne Well, that’s problematic. I mean, I started off being a sort of a foe of evolutionary psychology because when it started off, there was a lot of just so stories told. People would look at a human behavior, they’d make up a reason, not the best ones. I mean, people like David Voss or Tubian Cosmetics would, you know, approach it scientifically and say, well, you know, I’m not just going to make up a story. I’m going to make up a testable story and make predictions. So to assess the field as a whole, all I can say is it’s becoming less of a storytelling field and more of a scientifically mature field in which they make predictions. So it still has its problems for example it’s not nearly as um well founded as say molecular evolutionary genetics is where you can sequence the dna and come to absolutely the conclusions That everybody can verify evolutionary psychology is the problem that if you’re trying to explain a human behavior, like, for example, this sort of step-parent effect that step-parents Tend to kill their offspring or hurt them more than a natural born parent. How do you test that? If you make up a story, well, those people left more off, the step parents that killed off or hurt or injured their step children left more offspring than those that didn’t because they Left more of their own children. Well, how do you verify that? There are predictions that you can make, however, about test stories like that. I’m not really familiar with that, but my own way to test it would be the pet theory that is if you have your own pet when you get married then you tend to treat it really good but if you marry Somebody and they’ve already have your own pet it’s the equivalent of a stepchild so my prediction which i don’t think has been tested at all is that you would treat the step pet a lot worse Than you would treat your own pet if you got married. Chris Williamson We need to ring David. David, this is your next piece of work. Put down the mating research. You don’t need to be bothered with that. Jerry A. Coyne Yeah, well, I wrote David not long ago. I’ve been on him for a long time about this, to write a paper about testable predictions of evolutionary psychology just to quiet down those people like for example pz myers the blotters Who said evolutionary psychology is not even a reputable scientific field because it is it’s taking uh it’s taking an awful lot of heat at the moment uh i think it’s very unpopular, left Chris Williamson Of center. It’s this sort of blank slate-ism, this denial of meritocracy. If you’re in a world where you can make anything of yourself, you can become whatever you want to be. And if you pick yourself up by your bootstraps, it’s the same reason that behavioral genetics is wholly unpopular. It was a great study. I don’t know whether you saw Corey Clark’s thing. She sent an email survey to pretty much all of the psychology professors in the US asking them, what are the topics that should be taught the least? What are the ones that require the most guardrails around shock, horror, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral genetics are kind of the two horsemen of the apocalypse when it comes To that. But back in the past, there was the Just So Story paper, right? There was an actual paper that was around that. And David’s grad student, William, who’s currently in his lab, they have a paper in press at American Psychologists called Evolutionary Hypotheses Attestable and Falsifiable. Jerry A. Coyne I don’t think that, but I didn’t know it would have been accepted for publication. So I was really glad to see that because it’s time that people realize that the field has reached a stage of explanatory maturity. (Time 0:08:43)
  • Ideology’s Impact on Biology
    • Both political right and left reject certain evolutionary findings because these challenge their ideological sacred cows.
    • Ideology increasingly erodes biological science, distorting fields like evolutionary psychology and sex differences. Transcript: Chris Williamson Yeah, this sort of duality of what’s going on. I’m aware maybe EP has only recently got to, how would you say, testable and falsifiability escape velocity, or the level with which you would consider it to be, you’re part of the real Sciences now. But still, there is this odd duality, this sort of symmetry going on. The right had an issue with an area of evolution because it killed one of their sacred cows. The left has an issue with an area of evolution because it’s killed one of their sacred cows as well. And yeah, it’s, I don’t know, I found that really, really interesting to think about when looking through your work. Jerry A. Coyne Yeah, that’s Luana Moroja, my Brazilian colleague, and I wrote a paper called The Ideological Erosion of Biology, in which we take six areas of our own field of evolutionary biology And show how they have been misrepresented by the mainstream media, by other scientists, by almost everybody in the interest of ideology. And one of those was that evolutionary psychology is a worthless field. And we show that, no, it makes a lot of predictions and a lot of explanations. Another one which is related to that is that men and women are different not because of any evolutionary differences in our ancestry but because of how they’re socialized that’s another Pernicious guideline yeah there is socialization but men and women are different to a large degree because of evolution. Men are more risk-taking. They’re less choosy in terms of mates. They show more sexual jealousy. I mean, there’s any number of behavioral differences between the sexes that are not only understood and predictable from evolution, but they’re seen in other species. Our closest relatives, the great apes, show many behaviors that we have. Males are larger than females, males are more warlike, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, that’s another, I mean, it’s a shame these days that ideology is infecting science so much. And it’s not just biology. It’s in physics, even math. We have, like, progressive math now. (Time 0:13:06)
  • Reality of Sex and Race Biology
    • Scientific consensus affirms two sexes due to reproductive biology despite social claims of sex as a spectrum.
    • Human races show genetic clustering matching self-identified race, disproving claims race lacks biological basis. Transcript: Jerry A. Coyne Say that are wrong, very ideologically motivated. There are more than two sexes. That sex is a spectrum and not binary. That’s one of them. The other one is that race, and this comes straight out of, I think, the American medical journal, but it could have been The Lancet, which is also way welcome, that race is a human construct Without any scientific basis whatsoever. That’s two of them. Males and females are not biologically different from one another. That’s another third misguided statement. That indigenous science, that is the so-called way of knowing of indigenous people like the Maori in New Zealand, is just as good as modern science. That’s another one. That people don’t differ from one another in any meaningful genetic ways, but the differences you see between people, not the way they look, because obviously that’s a genetic basis, But the way they behave is not a genetic basis. I can’t remember the sixth one, but that’s… Oh, wow. Chris Williamson So I didn’t know that behavioral genetics had snuck in as well. Oh, yeah. Okay, right. This really is like the sixth, I don’t know, sixth horseman of the apocalypse this time. Jerry A. Coyne Yeah, I mean, there’s whole… The way we express behavioral genetics is a term called heritability, which is basically the proportion of a given behavior across members of a population that’s due to differences In their genes. So, for example, there’s a heritability of smoking. I mean, almost every human behavior has non-zero genetic component to it. And most of the interesting ones have heard of at least about 50%. But this is explicitly denied by the very same people who deny evolutionary psychology. And for the same reason, because it implies that humans are not infinitely malleable, but are constrained by their genes. Chris Williamson Yeah, those constraints brush up against a lot of what people want to believe, I think, this sense of freedom, this sense of autonomy. And I understand. I got into evolutionary theory through Robert Wright’s book from 1993, 1992, The Moral Animal. And I read this, you know, only seven or eight years ago. And some stuff has a little, looks a little silly in retrospect, but it still holds up so well. 30 years later, that book is still fucking fantastic. I love it. And, you know, I started to see, huh, there’s reasons for my behavior. Like this isn’t just some weird personal curse of mine or blessing or whatever, but it’s adaptive. And oh, there’s a reason for, and there’s proximate and ultimate reasons for why we do things. There’s the reason that why you do it. And there’s the reason to do the thing. And there’s a difference between those two. You have sex because it feels good. The reason that you do it is so that you make babies, so that you keep… I’m like, huh, I’m kind of being puppeted by my genes. Isn’t this interesting? But yeah, to consider that race and ethnicity are social constructs without biological miscellaneous meaning and to get that published in JAMA, to have that sentence published in JAMA, I didn’t realize that race or populations and ethnic groups were now socially constructed. It’s like, did black people just spend more time in the sun? Like, where do you think that’s come from? Jerry A. Coyne Well, you know, the people that say that it’s socially constructed, I don’t think they really know what they’re saying. Because clearly there are biological differences between different human groups. Now, using the word race is what gets you in trouble because it implies, A, you’re racist, and B, the old view of race, which was promulgated by some racist biologists, which is that there Is a finite, well-demarcated number of human groups that are genetically quite distinct from one another. That’s not right. Chris Williamson So they were almost using a speciation argument with ethnic groups. Right. Jerry A. Coyne This is all of your chickens come home to roost at once. Well, but the fact is that, you know, I mean, in my paper that I talked about, there’s many, many bits of evidence that there are biological differences between human groups. Now, granted, there are in general more genetic differences within what we call a race. And I’m going to use the word race. I mean, I usually say ethnicity to avoid getting in trouble because the races are not well defined. (Time 0:21:00)
  • Human Adaptations to Environment
    • Skin pigmentation adapts to UV exposure: dark protects against melanoma, light aids vitamin D absorption.
    • Other human traits like body shape also reflect adaptations, e.g., stockier bodies in cold climates. Transcript: Chris Williamson 15% off any data plan by going to the link in the description below or heading to salee.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That’s S-A slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. When it comes to ethnic groups, have you looked at why it is Asians, East Asians, Africans, Caucasians? What is the reason for the main differences that we see, either in the way that they present, in the sort of shape, I don’t know whether that’s called morphology or whatever, the shape Of their bodies? Do you know the adaptive explanation for why different groups became that way? Jerry A. Coyne Well, for some traits, yeah, we think so. I mean, the most obvious one is skin pigmentation, because you can draw a map of the world and look at the average degree of pigmentation. And you can see that in the hottest areas of the sunniest areas you get darker skin which is probably a protection against melanoma and the the other side of the coin is well why do you get Light skin when you leave that area because you can still get melanomas from the sun that’s because you want to get vitamin d from the sun and you don’t have to worry about, you know, the Importance of getting vitamin D is more important than getting melanomas when you’re in an area where there’s not so much sun. So that’s the explanation. That’s just one trait, though. There are many, many differences between humans, the shape of the hair whether it’s curly or straight eye color um are those adaptive is a green eyes adaptive compared with brown no Chris Williamson Idea i mean good see they for all of the people that say evolutionary scientists they never say i don’t know here we are evolutionary scientists saying i don’t know we’ll be a pretty pathetic Jerry A. Coyne Scientist that never admitted ignorance when he or she did know the answer. There’s a lot of things we don’t know. I mean, physicists, why is there dark matter and dark energy? They have to say they don’t know. Is string theory right? We don’t know. But there are some traits that we do know. For example, the Tibetans have a genetic basis to hang on to oxygen more in their hemoglobin. And clearly that’s adaptive because they live in an oxygen-poor environment at high altitude. So that’s a trait where we know. And there’s probably about a dozen traits where we but they’re not the kind of things that interest people we want to know you know why people have curly hair or another one that’s probably True is that um people who live in cold climates like the inuits in alaska or canada tend to be short and stocky and that that’s a general rule in the animal kingdom because limbs and protruding Parts tend to be heat reservoirs given off heat. So you don’t want to have long arms or you want to have a short, stocky body to prevent heat loss. So that’s probably another trait for which we think is probably due to natural selection because it’s also true in other animals other animals i mean i think it’s called alan’s rule That’s what it is that as you go to colder climates the protruding parts which include the ears of jackrabbits i mean if you look at an arctic rabbit a series like this if you look at a jackrabbit In the desert where they need to radiate heat their ears are huge so that’s an example um and it’s probably a case in humans as well but you know things like hair color eye color um i can’t Remember the politically (Time 0:36:46)
  • Speak Truth with Civility
    • Open, civil discourse is essential; truth should not require disclaimers or bows to ideology.
    • Biological facts like two sexes should be stated respectfully without fear of offense. Transcript: Jerry A. Coyne What’s the state of it now? Absolutely. I mean, there’s self-censorship all over the media. One example of that, I suppose, is that, and this is in the UK, I think, guy who was in liverpool who drove his van into a crowd identified in the times i think it was in the the telegraph i Call the tory graph he was identified as a 52 year old white man but the british newspapers never give ethnicity when they give a suspect now why, why is that? You know, even if the person’s on the lam, hasn’t been caught, they’re not going to say, well, this is a black man or this is a Hispanic man or whatever, because it’s considered racist To do that. And so that’s the most obvious example of how the media has been, you know, has been censored, self-censored. Also, if you read in the New York Times, you’ll see that the word white is in small letters when describing somebody’s ethnicity, and black is in the B, as a capital B, which is a way of valorizing A minority group. I find that sort of inconsistent. The Washington Post, by the way, uses, I think it’s either big letters for both or small letters for both. Either way, it should be consistent. So these are just the most obvious things that stand out. I don’t think that answers your question, though. I think you’re asking more about science than journalism? Chris Williamson I honestly don’t mind at all. One thing that I want to bring in here, do you know what gamma bias is? No. Jerry A. Coyne So good. Chris Williamson So this is Dr. John Barry from the Center for Male Psychology. So there’s alpha bias, which is exaggerating or magnifying gender differences. There’s beta bias, is ignoring or minimizing gender differences. And then there’s gamma bias, which is a combination of the two, but it’s sexed. So if a female is in active mode and does good, then it’s a celebration. If a male is in active mode and does harm, then it’s perpetration. So for instance, if domestic violence happens against women, it’s highlighted as a gender issue. If domestic violence happens against men, it’s played down or completely ignored. Men make up the majority victims of suicide. The issues aren’t highlighted or portrayed as gender issues. So there’s the minimization of gender if men are the victims, and there’s the maximization of gender if men are the perpetrators. There’s the maximization of gender if women are the successful perpetrators, if they’re doing good, and there’s the minimization of gender if women are the perpetrators and they’re Doing harm. It’s like an interesting dynamic. Jerry A. Coyne We call that virtue signaling in America. If you do that, it stamps you as a good person, basically. And there’s no penalty to being pro-male. I mean, sorry, there’s no advantage to being pro-male because you’re just seen as a sexist. And you don’t even have to be pro-male there’s a penalty to telling the truth which is the point of our paper there’s a penalty to saying that races exist there’s especially a penalty To saying that there’s only two sexes in humans people have lost their jobs for saying that a guy wore a there are only two this is a kid in probably about 15 or 16 in American high school. It was just last week. He wore a shirt to school that said, there are only two sexes. And he was asked to go home. And they told him to pick up his father. Well, you know, at the same school, you can wear a gay pride shirt, which is, I think, just about as. Well, first of all, there are only two sexes. There’s a statement of biological fact. Gay pride is more of an ideological position. I’m in favor of it. But it’s okay to wear a gay pride shirt. It’s not okay to wear a shirt that gives a biological truth because that truth is invidious yeah i look it is because it implies that there’s something wrong with people who feel that They’re not a member of their natal sex yeah it’s just the biological fact i keep saying this over and over again sex with people recognize that there were males and females years before We even identified chromosomes. Every animal and every plant, vascular plant, has just two sexes, the male sex and the female sex. And sometimes you have them both in one individual, but the reproductive systems are still, there’s only two. There’s one, a large immobile gamete, which is female, a small immobile gamete, which is male. But if you say that, you get in big trouble. I mean, I got in big trouble because of it. I was on the honorary board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which is an organization with a good mission to keep religion and government separate in the United States. That’s our First Amendment. And they worked hard to do that. But one of their members decided that she, I guess it would be a they, because this person named Kat Grant called her, herself to be of both sexes. Anyway, she wrote a piece in that newsletter of that organization saying, what is a woman? That’s the title of it. And she goes through all these things about, well, you can’t use this and you can’t use that. And in the end, what is a woman? A woman is whoever (Time 0:42:49)
  • Comfort vs. Empirical Truth
    • People often believe comforting falsehoods rather than inconvenient truths.
    • Science’s empirical truth conflicts with personal or ideological beliefs, leading to resistance. Transcript: Chris Williamson No, not at all. I’m interested in what you’ve learned about human nature from engaging with critics of your work. Jerry A. Coyne Well, about the reverse naturalistic fallacy, that people really aren’t deeply wedded to what’s true about the world. I guess people, you know, it’s always been known that that’s true, that people like religion to me. I mean, I’m an atheist. I have no bones about admitting that. And I don’t believe in God because there’s no evidence for God. I’ve never seen anything supernatural or any sign of divinity. And yet, the vast majority of the world believes in God. I think 85% of Americans do. Not so many Brits because they’re more sensible, I guess. And religion has almost vanished in Scandinavia and Iceland. But that shows an example of how people will believe something that’s true about the universe when there’s not a wit of evidence for it. So I’m only now, as I speak to you, coming to realize that this is not just something that’s unique to science or to American society since the death of George Floyd, that people always Believe what makes them feel good, what gives them consolation. I think Karl Marx said that, right? What was his famous statement? Religion is the opium of the people. Of the masses, yeah. It’s because what he meant when he said that was that he wanted, he wasn’t touting religion, of course, because he was an atheist. He was just saying that people that have it really bad in the world find their solace in a non-existent sky deity. (Time 1:05:42)
  • The Two Sexes Fact
    • Biological sex is universal and explanatory for behaviors like sexual selection.
    • Accepting objective truth fosters scientific wonder and understanding. Transcript: Chris Williamson Oh, yeah, but I want to hear yours too. Well, a theory or a fact? You can pick. You can pick between the two. Jerry A. Coyne Well, the one that’s gotten me in the most trouble lately is my assertion that there’s two sexes and no more. I mean, you know, to me that’s an indubitable fact because it, and not only is it indubitable, but it’s explanatory. First of all, it’s universal because every animal and plant, vesicle plant species has two reproductive systems. But it’s not only. The reason I want to tout it is not just because I’m trying to force that down the throat of people that are gender dysphoric, it’s because it’s explanatory. It explains the notion of sexual selection, why males and females behave differently, why males compete for the attention of females, which explains so much in the animal kingdom From the larger sizes of gorillas to the tail of the peacock to the fact that when one’s sex is usually ornamented or brightly colored, it’s almost always the male. I mean, it was Darwin in 1871 who raised that theory so that’s one reason why it behooves us to believe what the truth is because it’s you know i guess some people don’t get this feeling Of wonder when they’ve finally realized by god that is the explanation. Now, certainly Darwin did, but he was reluctant to publish it. (Time 1:08:20)
  • Medical Advances and Genetic Load
    • Modern medicine reduces selection pressures, possibly allowing accumulation of genetic mutations.
    • Aging and late-onset conditions may increase genetic load, but intervention with gene technology is conceivable. Transcript: Chris Williamson So, all species, but we’re talking about humans, accumulate mutational load as you go generation to generation. Stop me when I get the technicalities wrong, but the principle is correct. Mutations occur. Many of these mutations are junk, make the species less effective, make the next generation less effective. They’re less adapted to their environment. And when you have heavy selection pressures, small changes in the animal are selected out if they’re suboptimal, if they’re not as good. You’re less likely to survive and reproduce and pass on your genes. The issue in the modern world is that we have removed a lot of those selection pressures with healthcare. So there are a lot of examples. The one that’s the least controversial that I can see you suffer with would be myopia or some sort of eye issue. Now, ancestrally, a mild blurring of the eyes, maybe, you know, you wouldn’t be able to read the grains of sand on your hand. Probably not that big of a deal. But as you start to push it a bit, I would guess, and even the grains of sand, I’m going to guess it’s not that adaptive. I’m going to guess that over time, people who couldn’t see quite as well would be less likely to survive and reproduce than people who could see well. But now we have glasses. So people who can’t see particularly well have had the selection pressure on their eyesight removed to a degree, which means some people find glasses sexy. Maybe it’s even an advantage for you to wear glasses. Maybe it frames the face in a manner. Maybe it makes you seem a little bit more intellectual and academic and considered or something. But what that means is that you are accumulating a load, genetic mutations that makes further eye degeneration more likely over time. And it was his belief that this occurs across everything because we have life support systems and asthma inhalers and wheelchairs and all sorts of things. And that if you remove the selection pressure, you will start to accumulate dysgenic mutational load, which means that the crumbling genome, I think as it’s referred to, starts to Get worse over time. And when he first proposed this, I think this was before genetic engineering was that likely. Could this be fixed by some gene therapies assisted by AI and advanced technologies at some point over the next 200 years? I would guess that seems probably at least partly likely. Jerry A. Coyne You’re smiling. Well, there’s many conditions like heart disease and general decrepitures you get older are caused by many many genes so you’d have to fix each one of them and you have to fix them in your Mother’s DNA not in your own DNA because you can’t fix you can’t edit every cell in your own body but I think what you say is, we do it with the truth, with the caveat that a lot of the conditions Like wheelchairs and stuff did not obtain early in human evolution because we never got that old to be able to show these symptoms. So the decrepitude was probably built in, a lot of it, because we didn’t live that long. Yeah. Chris Williamson You also to have a, there is early onset decrepitude in a variety of different ways. Right. And, and that, you know, you could say people at 30 are the way that they in 500 years time are the way that people at 60 would have been in 2025, let’s say something like that, because we, Well, we’ve just got all of this technology to support them and we can continue to keep them living and so on and so forth. Uh, so unless you intervene in that regard, uh, maybe that is, uh, but I mean, that is, you’re getting perilously close to the E word of eugenics when you start talking about this, which Is a topic actually that actually gets us to probably the point of no return of the black hole when it comes to talking about anything in this realm. Jerry A. Coyne Yeah, we didn’t even mention that. There’s a lot of things to say about it, but I haven’t studied eugenics in much. Certainly in the UK, eugenics was always, it wasn’t like the Nazis practiced. And it wasn’t like in the US where people were involuntarily sterilized. The British just wanted to up the reproduction of the upper classes. You know, that was their form of eugenics. And, you know um i don’t believe that certain people should be rewarded for having kids and others penalized but what happened in britain is different from what happened in in nasa germany And what happened in the uk but getting back to what you said yeah i think you’re absolutely right there’s no penalty now pre-reproductively for mutations that can be fixed medically Now this of of course, only applies to humans because animals and other species don’t have the workarounds to fix mutations. Chris Williamson Well, you know, so interestingly here, one other animal group that I think you could say you’re observing this, although this was more to do with selective breeding, would be dogs. You know, you look at British bulldogs, the shortening of the nose, we’re going to make them cuter. We’re going to make the hind legs shorter. We’re going to do the whatever. Like, look at the shape of an Alsatian over the last hundred years due to selective breeding. And you have these weird spinal problems. Dashuns have got progressively lower and longer, and they end up snapping their own spines because they can’t support them because, oh, it’s so cute. He’s exactly like a hot dog. And obviously that’s being done selectively, but that is a kind of dysgenic breeding in a way. Jerry A. Coyne Yeah. But as you said, it’s zero-official selection, whereas what you were talking about is just due to the accumulation of mutations that have no clear penalty. Chris Williamson Or the penalty can be offset somehow by technology. Jerry A. Coyne Yeah, but once you reach the post-reproductive age, which is earlier for women than it is for men, I guess men can keep having babies until they’re 80 or 90, but women have to stop with Menopause. So mutations that arise after that post-reproductive stage carry no penalty at all. (Time 1:11:18)