The Science of Conspiracy: The 211th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
DarkHorse Podcast
Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying
4.6 • 5.3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2024
⏱️ 137 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this 211th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.
In this episode, we discuss Winter and seasonality, before a longer discussion of overfitting, shoe-horning, and straight-jacketing. How do models, collusion, and Occam’s Razor contribute to how we understand the world? Why are generalists better situated to interpret complexity than are specialists? Then: how good is the science behind the major paper out of The Lancet that assures us that we should not be eating red meat? Answer: not very. Finally, we discuss the orcas who were trapped in sea ice off of Japan, and what it means to be an orca (including mention of the grandmother hypothesis).
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Mentioned in this episode:
The Emperor of Scent by Chandler Burr (about Luca Turin): https://www.amazon.com/Emperor-Scent-Story-Perfume-Obsession/dp/0375759816
Willett et al 2019. Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393, 447–492: https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2818%2931788-4
Stanton 2024. Unacceptable use of substandard metrics in policy decisions which mandate large reductions in animal-source foods. Npj Science of Food 8(10): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41538-024-00249-y
Stanton et al 2022. 36-fold higher estimate of deaths attributable to red meat intake in GBD 2019: is this reliable?. The Lancet, 399(10332), pp.e23-e26.: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00311-7/fulltext
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, live stream number 211, which I believe is prime. |
| 0:12.0 | I am Dr. Brett Weinstein. you are Dr Heather Hying, and it is, if my calculations are correct, |
| 0:19.4 | past the midpoint of winter, almost no matter how you define winter. |
| 0:24.0 | I imagine you could define winter definitely but if you define it in a reasonable way |
| 0:29.3 | either taking the shoulder seasons into account or strictly going from the winter solstice to the spring |
| 0:36.3 | equinox. Yes, we are we are halfway through. We are halfway through. We are |
| 0:41.0 | now I was puzzling through this. You follow these celestial events more diligently than I do. But I was thinking about the question of initially I convinced myself the midpoint of the technical winter would be the point at which the day length |
| 0:56.1 | which is changing most rapidly but then I thought nope I don't think that's right I think it |
| 1:00.4 | changes most rapidly at the spring equinox. Is that correct? |
| 1:07.1 | Boy, I'd have to remind myself. I'm not... |
| 1:10.8 | Is the day length changing the most rapidly at the equinoxes? I think that's right, but it's possible there are little perturbations, oscillations in there such that you actually have two to rapid but no I think that's |
| 1:26.1 | I think that I think that has to be right because do we agree that it is changing |
| 1:30.4 | least rapidly at the solstices. |
| 1:32.8 | Yes. |
| 1:33.8 | But there's a question about whether or not there's, you know, just like, you know, |
| 1:37.8 | seasonality in the tropics. |
| 1:39.0 | Yeah, okay, so seasonality in the temperate zone is mostly about hot and cold but whenever you take students |
| 1:45.9 | the tropics whenever you yourself go to the tropics you're my okay so it's not really |
| 1:49.5 | so much a hot cold thing because given that day length doesn't vary very much the closer at all when you're at the equator |
| 1:56.8 | you don't expect temperature to vary very much what does vary though and what is often highly seasonal |
| 2:02.2 | even in rainforest which have you know some |
| 2:06.1 | wetness throughout the year is precipitation is rainfall you know in the higher up you go |
... |
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