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Episode 102: Relationships, Time in Womb, Free Will, Evo Psych of Bad Teeth
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good evening everybody it's Nate G along with dr. Lyle here with the beat your genes podcast dr. Lyle how are you doing this fine evening today Edie all as well fantastic okay so today we've got a couple of questions we're going to just knock out and see how many we can get to so dear dr. Lyle in an earlier episode you touched upon the subject that aside from genetics a significant part of our personality can be attributed to our time in the womb has there been much research in this field and has it yielded anything significant like the mother's diet mood exercise or lack thereof position or anything else imaginable yielding reproducible results or is it just too chaotic to predict as of yet could this stage of development be tinkered with to yield the traits that parents desire in the future it's interesting I think that obviously we we know that if the if the mother's health is in pretty brutal shape if she's you know addicted some powerful narcotics or something like that then we we can see evidence of that trouble often in other words it statistically increases the likelihood of that kind of problems but in terms of when I say that a significant party or personality can be attributed to your time in the womb the that is let's kind of back up to what it is that that I would mean by that and what we suspect is true and that is what we're trying to figure out is the fact that monozygotic twins correlate about 0.6 in personality and yet there it went but with their IQ correlates about I don't know 0.8 or 0.85 in other words it's a whole notch higher so what what we think is true just looking at breeding of fruit flies in a bottle is that even though you can you look at genetically you know ideal genetics even very slight perturbation in the environment in early development push things around in essentially a random fashion and so I don't believe that there's going to be a lot that's going to be yielded from from working on this under which you're not going to make a kid more conscientious or less conscientious or more outgoing or less outgoing certainly now I'm not going to I'm not going to help you rule out the possibility that the research may indicate that there are substances that could make a significant difference in personality but of course it would be all weird to do this because you'd be gambling in a major way so for example we know that 50 years ago there was some horrendous situation where women pregnant women were given some kind of hormone I can't remember what it was and it essentially testosterone eyes females in development and when this happened what we found was the following and I cannot put my finger on on who published this and when this was I just I remember the results from from studying this in grad school the is I recall somebody's got to pull this up and then we're going to find out that I wasn't quite as good as student as we think but this is uh this is my memory of that study and that is that they had a about three dozen females and in the following turned out to be the case that about a third of these females wound up homosexual a third of them wound up bisexual and a third of them wound up heterosexual but the heterosexuals were all actually very athletic and I an hyper sexual for females so what this told us we believe is that if you testosterone eyes fetus you're going to wind up with more and more male characteristics of which what you're watching is you're watching the the female mating search image starts drifting over towards being attracted to females and it drifts far enough and that's what you wind up with a drifts in the middle you wind up with a little of each and if it doesn't drift enough you still wind up you wind up with a female mating search image ie a heterosexual female but you wind up with a very sexualized one ie highly testosterone eyes so this is so now question is let's suppose you have you know you have a baby boy gosh you know I'm kind of a wimp and my wife's kind of a wimp and so maybe we want our kid be tough so maybe we're going to you know inject her with testosterone or something and we're going to make we're going to try to make this fetus tougher I think that this I mean I could see this in the next hundred years people monkeying with some of these things and essentially trying to push some of these parameters around but I think it's pretty pretty psycho too to do it how much would change and what the problems would result etcetera etcetera you know I think it's trouble so anyway the answer to the person's question I don't I don't think other than there's no way to like Baby Einstein your way to a kid with great social skills and intelligence and it's anything under the Sun greater confidence no no your personality is going to be essentially more or less determined by the genetic code and the the random variation that is taking place between monozygotic twins is a naturally occurring situation where variation is just going to come in and if that variation is going to be highly diversified in random so there's not going to be a thread that we're going to be able to pinpoint on one environmental variable when those environmental variables are sort of naturally occurring variations if you do something different like shoot the person full of testosterone or shoot them full of estrogen that is not a naturally occurring random variation and so now you could have potentially a fairly profound influence on on the fetus but I don't think that that's smart okay yes a question for you is do you believe that throughout human evolution have we changed personnel have we evolved to be essentially a little bit more conscientious or a little I mean I'm assuming we've become more intelligent but are there certain characteristics that have you know tended to sway a certain way yes certainly I mean you can certainly see that intelligence has been heavily selected for the last two million years because you could see this in the larger and ever larger size of the bread so that is certainly the case now that probably stopped about three three hundred thousand years ago or so so we're probably not much smarter in terms of sheer IQ on average than people that were living quite a long time ago the now the other thing though is that certainly going to be the case is that that we have become nicer so we have we are much more cooperative and pleasant than we would have been you know five hundred thousand years ago we are you can see this in the fact that the skeletons are much thinner particularly skulls this is indicative of essentially a species that has domesticated itself they through through trade processes largely what's happened is that people figured out that it's a lot smarter to trade with the guy that can make Fish Hooks and it is to bash them over the head and take his stuff and so this is this species has slowly inexorably domesticated itself to the point where essentially you these people can now live in these huge cities and people you know people going to have stuff that you want but you don't just try to take it in other words most people have a pretty good feel for other people's private property and to treat people at a friendly matter people that they don't even know and so that is that's definitely not consistent with what you're going to see in the other great apes and so this is uh yeah we have we have become you know quote human and part of the part of that major part of that is a greater degree of agree ability mm-hmm yes do you believe that openness and new experience has increased because we you know because of our intelligence so we can take more risks I actually think that the openness issue also has to do a thread so if you think about how valuable it would be to expand your roaming range if it turns out that you would run into people that would have specialized knowledge that you had didn't have and so the way I see this happening and I've got a really good friend of mine named Henry who's who might be listening who's really smart and he's uh he's a paleontologist he may object to this so he'll he'll write me an email tomorrow and tell me where I'm wrong and so that's all fair but this is this is how it is that that that I think is likely to be the case that people what what happened was is that people as they got friendlier they're also going to get more open the because if you're if your species is becoming less brutal unless must I'm just going to take your stuff then what's going to happen is it's going to pay to travel further and further from home in fact the longer distance you go but there's a good chance you're going to run into people that know things that you don't know and that you have knowledge that they don't have and so as a result of that the efficiencies of trade are going to be increasingly profitable so you can imagine think about these things a good way to think about human evolution and evolution of any animal and the psychologies of any animal is going to be to think about it as a just a computer program so you can imagine a little think of them as little automatons don't think about you know anything else so if you have a little otamatone that one of the little automatons gets smart enough and has an a memory function that it and it has opposable thumbs and you know fine motor skills and it's fingers and this thing starts to get the idea that it's a good idea to trade and incidentally this was probably driven in my in my judgment by man women pair-bonding that that would have started about two million years ago at the dawn of fire so that's a different story and people can read Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham and and see what they think of that I think it's a pretty darn good argument the but the point is is that trade processes have clearly evolved in humans so you're going to see that even two-year-old humans will spontaneously start communicating with each other with an empathy as they watch what the other kid like and that they try to optimize their trading you know the blue cards for the red cards or the little blue toys for the red toys and I've got more red Sun I want I'll give you five of these and you give me three of those and that's a good thing and so they can both see that by exchanging we can both be better off but it's the same amount of resources now no other creature on her you know before ever since ever do anything like this and so this this kind of pleasantness rather than saying hey I like those blue ones I'm just going to take them because I'm bigger than you if you if you don't do that and there would be reasons why you might not do that because as these things get get increasingly sophisticated and have language that you can have you can have coos where three-week males can just take on the big man and kill them so there's all kinds of reasons why it is that you a lot of little factors come into play here that you where you wind up with a species that is that is willing to trade willing to be friendly and now if that's true that it's willing to go further from home and in fact it's motivated to go further from home so you can imagine that there's an algorithm in there that is being sorted out by the genetic code and it's going to be different all over the globe depending upon population densities the and how much innovation is taking place how varied the landscapes are therefore driving innovation who knows all the factors that could be involved here but you can start to think of the otamatone is going to now start having an ideal rubbing range instead of it being you know 1.6 miles suddenly it becomes 2 cent point 6 miles and then it becomes six point six miles and then it becomes twelve point four miles okay then it becomes 25 point eight miles you're like oh okay so all we're seeing here is the score keeping in being taken by the genetic code into which organism winds up being more effective in terms of reproducing DNA is that the one that only goes one point two miles from home or is it the one that goes 25 miles from home and I think we can clearly see it's the one that went 25 miles from home and the reason why I'm going to say that is because one of the most important I would say important work could be one of the most striking characteristics of human beings is their love of travel they are absolutely fascinated with travel and I do not mean that if they live in Birmingham they want to go to Myrtle Beach they want to go exotic different different language quote different cultures they want to see different landscapes they want to see things different and the reason why is this is an inherent curiosity they can where people can sniff that there may be prophets in here associated with survival and reproduction and so as a result that openness that says let's cross that river and you know what let's cross one more river and what let's just roam a while and roam a little further so you can see that as you would as you're thinking Nate it's not only as the intelligence Rises the rising intelligence gives gives rice the possibility of greater and greater innovation but those greater and greater innovations are not happening on a genetic level they're happening on an experimental level with different human beings in different groups of humans in different habitats and so it's going to turn out that those experimentations and the the ability to pass on that information both linguistically and through example and have people with memories good enough to actually remember several sequential steps in what it takes to get a job done this is the evolution of culture and so but in order to get cultural evolution this is what the anthropologist myths you have to have a tremendous amount of instincts that wind up being engineered by evolution and in order for that to happen so this was a step by step process that took place over the last couple of million years now my friend Henry he's now going to be the great authority that ID Trump everybody with every argument with the as he was pointing out that that it looks like probably somewhere around three or four hundred thousand years ago is when we really started to capture what it looks like to be a modern human and the the very subtle linguistic skills the trading the negotiating the empathy all these kinds of things as he argues would hit what we call runaway in other words it's so genetically is full to get more resources out of exchange processes than to push and shove and intimidate your way that pretty soon only the people that have that characteristic that they're willing to trade are the genes that are on the planet wouldn't take long at all and pretty soon the ones that are so gullible that they get that they're not very smart and they get out negotiated because they can't tell the difference between you know 6040 deal and a 50/50 deal then those are get swept to the side so what's happening is you're winding up with you know sophisticated reasonably Pleasant but appropriately defensive for their interests humans that understand the value of trade and have a wanderlust that that drives them to seek out new human beings new groups and new territories as essentially they don't even know why they're doing it they're desiring to learn and they what's happening is that they are essentially getting benefits of increased efficiency for every every muscle twitch that they have all that's going on here ultimately is the conservation of energy and and so it now lands all the way you know that that very simple fixed set of principles that it's more beneficial to trade than it is to learn everything yourself and that you need to be affable and pleasant you have to be reasonable but you can't be a pushover and you need to have a curiosity ie and openness to novelty and willing to take those risks to move out of your territory and move into New Territories etc all of those things wind up being the principles that eventually land you in the modern environment which is a swirling cauldron of innovation and trade all literally it takes into account the entire world so so you get to see now these stunning efficiencies that are essentially an app asymptotic you know explosion as to what now finally will take place with these with these few fixed instincts that will probably under heavy selection pressure in just the last few hundred thousand years amazing I was reading a paper on the core it was correlating explaining the correlation between the intelligence and openness and you just explained why I mean that was the connection I was looking for we actually we had a caller on hold but I guess I hung up so of color you know I don't know if that's Henry or not we had a collar around a hurry to come back we'll take you the number six five seven three eight three zero seven five one fascinating okay so we're going to turn the ship a little bit and ask this next question dear dr. Lisle I'm in a long-distance relationship and a girl told me that with this girl and she told me she had slept with someone else in her city but my nervous system didn't freak out and I wanted to keep my options open for casual mating in my city am ia jealousy outlier or would this be considered average given the modern long-distance environment what personality traits might be at play here oh this is a very interesting question and there's so many different perspectives to look at this question from the the personality traits are definitely involved here so there's there's a lot to be considered there there are other things to be considered as well which is that the two individuals are a relationship even though conceptually I describe relationships as either paraben or casual mating strategy but the truth is of course that's just a convenient dichotomy for the purposes of of clarity of concept the truth is just relationships run a range they run a range from the most casual of all casuals ie you got her drunk at the bar and got her to your hotel block oh okay okay we've got that situation all the way to hell death do us apart you know Val so this is and along the way there's a considerable rancher now the I would argue that that impair bond relationships where people really feel like they have skin the cat like this is really important to them I will argue that it would be unusual for people to be blase about about their partners having sex with other people now Chris Ryan our friend who sexathon would roll his eyes and say you know what kind of bogus talk is this look at the bonobos bla bla but the truth is is that the worldwide evidence on humans would support this as well does evolutionary logic that is presented by David buss and the evolution and desire so the males because males prevision offspring it is going to be the case that males are going to to experience sexual jealousy in relationships where they would attend intend or are intending to stick around indefinitely now this doesn't mean that males consciously know that sex causes pregnancy and it doesn't mean that they know that there's going to be children resulting and it doesn't mean that they're planning and thinking about helping those children none of that needs to be true these are blind and conscious programs that would have been favored by evolution and so evolution says if you're really into the girl you don't want other people sleeping with her okay so that so that so I'm immediately struck by the fact that that in this situation this this you know these people like each other and they're in they're in a relationship but it's long distance but she she says she slept with somebody else and he not only didn't freak out he's thinking hey well then that means that it's I've got a Hall Pass them apparently and so this would and the fact that he didn't have a jealousy reaction normally I would argue that that means that he's just not that into her so this means on a range if we had a let's suppose we had a a range of flavors where zero commitment would be casual mating I mean the ultimate casual mating the super short term and up to a hundred which would be you feel 100% committed long-term that's what it feels like in your nervous system no matter what it looks like five years from now and then to date and let's say eighty percent is where you're when you're talking it over with your best friends and your parents would say well this is serious you know this is getting serious that this relationship sounds like it might be 65 okay so that that may be what's going on now to to play devil's advocate with this interpretation it could be the case that it's more than that but these two people have found each other in a way that the two of them are both unusually open to experience and that there's sort of free spirit free loving hippies in in some psychological fashion no matter what it is that they do for a living and in that case it is quite possible that they could be pretty blasé about it but I would argue that that I don't think so other words I think that that's going to be a fairly a typical situation even in people that are extremely open and easy you know as easygoing as you might imagine about about their partners being with other people they there are usually jealousy chips that fire and they're usually you know is usually it's a conflicted dynamic so it doesn't look like most people can escape this evolutionary heritage that we have about caring about what our partners are doing and if we don't care it's probably because we are not in that sort of 80 plus range for feeling like that this is a a great long-term parable deal and so immediately my thought comes to cuckoldry it does a male who engages in cuckoldry is he not as into his woman is his pair bondwoman as someone who does not that's a good question I have a feeling that we're looking at something a little bit different in that situation what's probably happening is that we've got a bit of an outlier psychologically in terms of sort of thrill-seeking openness etc so people that that do this kind of play making in the world where there were the males are aware that their wives are sleeping with other people and they give them a pass on this and and let's say in principle that they are very attracted to their wives of their mates and they find it extremely exciting that their mates are sleeping with other people the that is what's happening there is that we are activating a feverish egg defense that stone age males evolved in order to reduce the odds that they would that they would wind up giving basically giving resources to another man's child what happens is is that they're designed by nature if they have evidence that their pair bonded mate is sleeping with somebody else they manufacture and ejaculate far more sperm into their spouse in other words they are therein sexually feverish apparently the difference is quite remarkable it was reported by bus and the evolution of desire that it was something on the order of a normal ejaculate is 200 million and when men were had cues that there might have slept with somebody else while they were away the amount of ejaculate was about 500 million so this is evidence of an involved mechanism incidentally apparently if they had had sex with somebody else the day the night before they got home their amount of ejaculate in that somebody else would be 200 million in other words they they did not have the extra fever even with a novel partner but when it came to going back to their pair of aand they would dramatically manufacture and ejaculate more sperm this appears to be a design feature of the human male that is designed by nature to pair bond and invest in offspring and so I invest in offspring when it considers the para bond partner to be of high quality and so this in other words they're not going to feel that way towards people for whom they don't feel that they're high-quality in other words casual mating strategy partners but for pair bond quality partners yet the jealousy mechanism can be acutely activated and that activation can probably be there is some bitterness involved and there can be some some feelings of threat and anxiety but in addition there can be a curious and exhilarating sexual fever that is associated with this and so that that is a sort of thrill seeking psychological edgy play that a few percentage of people get into but it's it's not something that a lot of people that's not a fire a lot of people actually are comfortable getting close to mm-hmm and my okay my thoughts go on the complete other side to where you have the the typical you know Joe cool who's engaging in plenty of casual mating strategy but then gets a gets jealous of his casual mating partners when they try to sleep with other males but I realized these are outliers so they really you know they don't have as much to do with the main concept but I'm just curious yeah I mean I think that what we're going to see is that the jealousy mechanisms are really normal processes these are not some derivative of modern cultural evolution these are deep mechanisms that have evolved over evolutionary time that's why you see them all over even in hunter-gatherer societies so this is characteristic of the species the fact that that any given pair of people under certain circumstances might not be having a lot of this I think speaks to two things which were brought up here one could be that there that the people themselves are a bit unusual so they're a little bit on the lacs side there the other thing could be that their relationship is actually not that important to one or both and so as a result of that that would dial down the stakes considerably tastic well we have a caller on hold here so thanks let's see what we got color what's your name and where are you calling from as well cuz the show hello already there caller going once caller going twice and you're gone good we'll move on alright so dear dr. Lyle how much control do we really have over our lives how much of our behavior is instinctual and stone-age driven how much is driven by consciousness I hear a quote often an ounce of behaviors worth a pound of words is this true hmm that's four about that quote and I think they're probably talking about reputations and relationships I think that that's where that quote comes from in other words a little bit of improved behaviors worth an awful lot more than a pound of promises so that's a different issue then then the question that the person is asking about so let's let's look at I'll try to describe my thinking in this area court how much control do we really have over our lives I'm not sure what it means by we the the I don't believe that we have free will I don't think that that's actually possible it doesn't make any sense to me now somehow it makes sense to some very smart other philosophers philosophers are aware of evolutionary psychology like Daniel Dennett so there's there's people that would disagree with me but since this is my podcast I get to sort of say what it is I think okay the I look at I actually look at life forms as machines and so that doesn't mean that I don't that I don't love some of these creatures that their flesh and blood and they've got fur they've got beautiful blue eyes and of course you can become oxytocin based mechanisms of attachment etc but it's a machine that feels for goodness sakes and the feelings are or the the endpoint or the currency by which we get paid off for how effective our behavior is or how lucky and so that doesn't mean that the life isn't worth living and that feelings are and we're pursuing etc etc but the question is how much control the quote we have and this is how I see the the process of human life and and what we're up to here that I don't believe you have free will but what you have is curiosity and curiosity is a is a natural chip that is inside the organisms of animals and animals have a an idealized roving range for their behavior in other words if you're a little cockroach there it may be 15 square yards as far as you ought to be moving around and trying to map that thing out you've only got a brain so big to map out an environment with enough detail and enough memory capability to remember features of that environment and use those that knowledge of that map later when you're being pursued by a cat or you're looking for water or food or anything else under the Sun so if you have a bigger brain then the roaming range is going to be bigger in the amount of detail that you can seek out and remember about the environment is going to be greater and greater the that curiosity should be calibrated to how profitable it is to seek new information so if you're a chimpanzee because you don't trade with other chimpanzees other chimpanzees are dangerous territorial etc so you shouldn't be that curious about going into other territories because it's just nothing but trouble and it's unlikely that the variance is in the environment are going to be so much better over there in terms of food and water and predators than where you are right now so the average chimpanzee doesn't have any curiosity about their environment they have a varying range that they that they defend and they live in their whole lives and they couldn't care less about going five miles away and checking out anything else but you're a human and you do so you see humans are unbelievably curious just watch the programming inside of a three-year-old child particularly a smart one why why why why why never ends okay my friend dr. Alan Goldhamer when his son was about three or four years old kept askin why and Alan actually did something interesting I've never known a parent to do this Alan decided as an experiment that he would simply continue to answer gaara's questions as long as he would answer and answer them as intelligently and clearly as he could and he wanted to know how long it would take to satisfy the kid they were there for over two hours so Alan just continued to answer until finally gar had been fed enough information then he wanted to do something else this was a remarkable observation and he called me up and he said it's genetic so there was clearly we were looking at something very interesting which is human curiosity now human curiosity will lead in principle to a better understanding of the environment and a better understanding the environment leads to more efficient behavior at obtaining the resources that are that are needed for survival and reproduction so this this got encoded through the evolutionary history of the species now it's going to turn out what's going to happen is that this same curiosity if you I'm going to use a word from behaviorism now which does doesn't mean that they don't have good things to say but their insights are limited the curiosities can be either reinforced or not reinforced so you're going to find that if it turns out that you live in an environment where when you keep tripping over new information it is it is often the case that you find that your understanding is improved and that your behavior is more effective okay in that case the system is going to say this is really worth being curious this is really worth continued to push the bounds and invest energy in mapping out this this data store much more you know completely and so this is and as a the brain gets better and better information about about it the nature of its situation then it can make better and better decisions which can lead to either more genes or more happiness or both depending upon how you're trying to optimize the situation so just like human improvements in public health that can help malaria and smallpox and you know collar and everything else under the Sun and how we can invent seatbelts you know I can remember time in 1960s where there was considerable debate about whether seatbelts were worth having and people say yes but what if I'm trapped in the car and so on fire and can't get the seat belt open etc so it took a while for there to be data that would come in to show that oh no actually with enough crashes enough evidence we started to find out the seat belts were really very much worthwhile and then we figured out wait a second shoulder harnesses are a lot better than seat belts a lot of our listeners won't know this but seat belts used to only go around your waist they didn't have them on the shoulder and so the so then they figured out headrests okay and how how to set them so that if you had whiplash if you got whiplash your head would bang into the headrest and that would potentially save you considerably they didn't have that in old cars so if you look at old cars they don't have headrests and it did seatbelts if they've got them or single seat belts around your waist now what am I saying here curiosity and evidence is leading to better and better and better and better decisions and so as you as you see this what's happening is that that brain is becoming more effective at life and the same thing can happen at the level of everything else in your life whether it's romance whether it's child raising whether it's finances essentially pursuit of happiness itself so when you ask the question how much control do we really have over our lives I'm not exactly sure what that means your your brain though as you as you are aiming your brain is improving as you get more information a new information new and better information is going to be the source of human improvement and so the even knowing that literally and understanding that conceptually literally can help drive the program to say oh my goodness that's correct I need to get more information now somebody on the outside or some other philosopher might say well gee Doug what the hell do you call that if it's not free well ok and I will say no I don't think it is in other words if yep the the new information store like this podcast or I don't know how I found freedom run free world by Harry Brown or how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie or whatever a book that somebody picks up or awaken the giant within by Tony Robbins whatever book that somebody picks up or lecture or advice from somebody or newspaper article or who knows or a conversation with a friend so when they pick up some information that they see as valuable that they believe it's going to help them be more effective and then of course if events prove that it's more effective then what's going to happen is that will reinforce the machines statistical likelihood of expending more in energy on seeking information out from sources like that one or sources identical development and so this is why for example when I read The Selfish Gene I was not near done with Richard Dawkins three weeks later I had from the first day I picked up the selfish chain three weeks later I had completed not only The Selfish Shane but the blind watchmaker and and there I sat for many years and I didn't read any more written the third book called the extended phenotype and I had started it but it was too and so I waited four years before I picked that book up and then I when I read it I read it with the determination of a grad student that said okay I'm going to take notes and I'm going to grind through this thing because I really want to know what this man knows and the reason why expended that energy is because he had proven to me in his previous work that he knew so much more than I did and that I was improving my ability to make decisions be more effective by having been exposed to his thinking and then when I read the extended phenotype which was one of the most difficult reading chores I've ever done if not the most difficult it was well worth doing and I was extremely satisfied with my increased understanding and it laid a good foundation for being able to read things further so the point is is that the hopefully that this this long-winded explanation of how it is that I think about things well after all people have been talking about free well for thousands of years so if I spent five ten minutes on this it's fair enough but if you think about again think about the human being in it and its brain and its body as a machine and in one of the footnotes in The Selfish Gene when he made the comment about a machine and and then in a footnote he said I think he said something like people objected to to the characterization of a human as a machine and he said he said dear reader what on earth you think you are like what else are you of course you're a machine look at you you're an exquisitely designed machine with a singular purpose which was the reproduction of DNA and so of course your metal operations are just as mechanical as the muscle contractions that lead to anything that you do and so the machine is an extraordinary one it has the ability to learn new information store it and it can actually influence and the actions of the machine I don't believe that that's free well I believe that's learning and that's that's a different thing so if it get it pays to actually trip over people that have really good information now the question is how do you tell who has the good information well you can listen to them you can listen to their logic what you actually watch people doing is you watch a very simple actually simple-minded fashion of how the machine works which is imitation so people are are much more likely to listen to what justin bieber has to say about success than me okay of course all right so that would make that would make sense so there there was going to be a lot of algorithms in there that are quick and dirty form it decision making but this machine is sophisticated and complex enough that some of the some of these brands can put together extraordinary long chains of causality and do so accurately and they can do incredible things so the Justin Bieber's of the world that's what his name is I think that's right that kid and his ilk may sing some cool songs but they'll never put them put a person on them in and so we're going to find that as we're watching the that people do have the ability to to sort out learn pay attention to variances in in human knowledge and human ability and to to to learn from people who actually have a lot of information specialized information in a given domain Wow well there's at least two people listening me and Henry I'm sure so Henry hung up a long time ago that was enough for him all right all right there's a lot all of it out to a couple callers on hold so let's say who we can look at white collar collar where are you from what's your name hello oh yes hello yeah do you hear me yes we can area what's your name okay it's great I'm Alex calling from the plane Alex and away Nia yeah all right yeah there what can we what can we do for you a big fan of the show thank you very much and I have a real question I was thinking maybe for a week what is the pollution of reason for having a bad teeth like I'm going to a dentist every year like six times and I'm thinking about that and how it could be possible that that there is evolutional reason for having that year you say the it doesn't say that person like eats like a lot of sugar and what do you think that for a while okay alright Alex thanks thanks for calling all the way from Lithuania and we will now answer the question is the evolutionary reason for bad teeth the the truth is is several things there's a few feet things to think about here the the first of all is we are not sure you've got bad teeth you just may have bad habits okay so the you probably do so the diet that you eat is probably quite inconsistent with the evolutionary history of our species so let me tell you about what that food would have looked like that food wouldn't have been pulverized there wouldn't have been anything that resembles flour so there wouldn't be tiny tiny little particles of carbohydrate that we could stick between your teeth like powdered sugar can and so there wouldn't be well there might be actually once in a long while our ancestors might have gotten into some honey but if you actually ever eat whole natural plant food you'll find something interesting and that is that your teeth will remain slick they won't feel the way that your teeth feel when you've been eating a conventional diet so if you eat a pizza pizza the the pulverized grain in there the powder will actually wind up in between your teeth and crevices that will not be true if what you're eating is whole natural food so the that's that's a number one so your bad teeth in terms of any cavities and things like that it's my understanding is is that when they dig up skulls in Africa they typically find the teeth to be awfully good and the teeth started deteriorating in terms of our excavations of teeth yet here in the last few thousand years so when you started to get processed food is when you started to get problems with teeth the you also had an additional problem not just with teeth rotting out from having food that was pulverized and therefore not therefore sticking to the teeth in ways that it's not supposed to but it's also going to be the case that that when it comes to crowding the jaw and meeting braces that looks to be a derivative of the food being artificially softened by being pulverized as well so when when children are early in development they have to in a natural setting they're having to chew really hard the food is not softened and so a great amount of the food is being quenched and through the crunching of that dude think about crunching a carrot or trunk crunch and celery crunching some my god might even be trying to crack some nuts open with your teeth there's a stress on the jaw and potentially even tearing flesh although my vegetarian friends would like to believe that but it was true we are omnivores the the crunching stresses the jaw and that leads to the jaw getting larger and making it able for all the teeth to fit in so of course my parents didn't know anything about this neither did anybody else so I I ate a lot of processed foods and as a result my jaw was too small and people were crowded they had to pull out a couple of teeth put braces on me so I got halfway decent teeth now but it isn't that it isn't the jaw the incredibly square handsome jaw that I junetta cailli should have had so many read there you go there you go Alex but that that's the story your teeth are probably not genetically bad it's it's probably a a feature of the diet that you're eating and you did ayat you know your your diet could be biochemically pretty decent in other words you might be doing okay by yourself in terms of your health that the pulverization of the food you know into - fine fine grain flours etc and sugars those things are problematic okay thank you yep you got a second question all right I wrote about this about same thing it's very fast it's good go right let's go right into your second one yeah it doesn't doesn't that piece should like show that like person in the Stone Age like ate like a desert food like with sugar and things like that don't you think don't you think like there was maybe some sort of a good thing when you have like a bad teeth sorry about that it's not a good thing to have bad teeth so get some good dentistry don't eat as much crap and know there was no Stone Age when for having bad teeth the turns out that even today and hunter-gatherer societies to get themselves into occasionally trouble and wind up with some - tooth problems it turns out that the smell of rotting teeth winds up being is you know is a non-trivial deterrent for mating so no no profits for bad teeth get you know get your dental floss I think that helps I'm not sure brush your teeth eat less crap get some good dentistry and then go out there and and play with this good at cards in your hand as you can alright thank you for mastic Alex Alex thank you very much for the call all the way from Lithuania all right we got one last call or dr. Lyle and we'll wrap that up for it all right there we go caller what from who quit wait a second what's your name hello hello color taller ending with two five one nine all right well going once all are going to us and they're out of here dr. bilac that is the end of the show doctor laughs thank you so much next week we're going to go go over the last parts of the questions about the personality traits of the alpha males and then more about that thank you very much wonderful show as always thank you pleasure Nate and I'll talk to you soon
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