Biologists From The United States

"[T]he boundaries of the evolutionary environment do not stop at the market's edge."

"[T]he veterinary deworming drug has become the new hydroxychloroquine in that it is being promoted as a highly effective treatment against COVID-19—and by many of the same people... despite evidence that is, at best very weak and at worst completely negative. Unfortunately, with the publication of two new and biased reviews, the "HCQ vibe" about ivermectin is stronger than ever. ...I concede that it is possible that has clinically relevant antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2. Based on current evidence, however, it seems unlikely that it does, when considerations are taken into account. As I routinely used to say when discussing hydroxychloroquine, I’d be happy to change my mind if compelling scientific evidence for ivermectin were published. It’s just that neither of these reviews qualify, nor do any of the clinical trials I’ve seen thus far. That’s why I agree that ivermectin shouldn’t be used to treat COVID-19 outside of the context of a well-designed clinical trial with a strong scientific rationale. Certainly, the conspiracy mongering by Bret Weinstein, , and their fans are not leading me to reconsider that opinion."

"[T]here's something about the way we are... vaccinating... who we are vaccinating, what dangers we are pretending don't exist, that suggests that to some set of people, vaccinating... is a good in and of itself. That that is the objective of the exercise, not herd immunity."

"I... struggle to find language that is strong enough for the horror of vaccinating children in this case, because children suffer a greater risk of long-term effects... this is earlier in their development, therefore it impacts systems that are still forming. They tolerate COVID well, and so the benefit to them is very small, and so the only argument for doing this is that they may cryptically be carrying more COVID than we think, and therefore they may be integral to the way virus spreads to the population. But if that's the reason that we're inoculating children... we were doing it to protect old, infirm people who are the most likely to succumb... What society puts children in danger, robs children of life, to save old infirm people. That's upside-down."

"In the U.S. we have above 5,000 unexpected deaths that seem in time to be associated with vaccination... I've seen estimates of 25,000 dead in the U.S. ...[Y]ou can make the argument ...the necessity of immunizing the population to drive the SARS-CoV-2 to extinction is such that it's an acceptable number, but... If that was really your point that... many more will die if we don't do this... you would not be inoculating people who had had COVID-19, which is a large population. There is no reason to expose those people to danger. Their risk of adverse events in the case that they have them, is greater. So there's no reason that we would be allowing those people to face the risk of death if this was really about an acceptable number deaths arising out of this... set of vaccines."

"[T]here is something very significant in this question of the hubris involved in imagining that you're going to improve the discussion by censoring... [T]he majority of concepts at the fringe are nonsense... but the heterodoxy at the fringe, which is indistinguishable at the beginning from the nonsense ideas, is the key to progress. So if you decide... the fringe is 99% garbage, let's just get rid of it. ...Yeah, but that 1% ... is the key. ...Eric makes an excellent point about the distinction between ideas and personal attacks, ... [T]here's no value in allowing people to destroy each other's lives, even if there's a technical legal defense for it. Now, how you draw that line, I don't know... Yes, people should be free to traffic in bad ideas, and they should be free to expose that the ideas are bad, and hopefully that process results in better ideas winning out."

"[My] work... looked at the fact that shortening was being looked at by two different groups... by people interested in counteracting the aging process, and... in exactly the opposite fashion, by people who were interested in tumorigenesis in cancer. ...Tumors ...always had active, that's the enzyme that lengthens our telomeres. So those folks were interested in bringing about a halt in the lengthening of telomeres... to counteract cancer, and the folks that were studying the process were interested in lengthening telomeres... to generate greater repair capacity. ...[M]y point was evolutionarily speaking this looks like a pleiotropic effect, that the genes which create the tendency of the cells to be limited in their capacity to replace themselves, are providing a benefit in youth... that we are largely free of tumors and cancer at the inevitable late life cost that we grow feeble and inefficient, and eventually die. ...[T]hat matches a very old hypothesis in evolutionary theory by somebody I was fortunate enough to know, George Williams..."

"Human beings... we are not a blank slate, but we are the blankest slate that nature has ever devised. ...It's where our flexibility comes from. ...We are robots in which ...a large fraction of the ...behavioral capacity has been off-loaded to the software layer which gets written and re-written over evolutionary time. That means, effectively, that... the important part of what we are is housed in the cultural... and the conscious layer, and not in the hardware, or a hard coding way. That layer is prone to make errors... [C]hildren make absurd errors all the time... That's part of the process... It is also true that as you look across a field of people discussing things, a lot of what is said is pure nonsense, it's garbage. But the tendency of garbage to emerge and even to spread in the short term, does not say that over the long term, what sticks is not the valuable ideas. So there is a high tendency for novelty to be created in the cultural space, but there's also a high tendency for it to go extinct. ...Things are being created, they're being destroyed, and... obviously, we've seen totalitarianism arise many times, and it's very destructive each time it does. So it's not like... freedom to come up with any idea you want hasn't produced a whole lot of carnage. But the question is, over time, does it produce more open, fairer, more decent societies, and I believe that it does. I can't prove it, but that does seem to be the pattern. ...I don't know how strongly I believe that it will work, but I will say, I haven't heard a better idea."

"[I]mmovable objects are vanishingly rare in an academic context... If you're going to do it on the faculty side, you really need to have tenure, and in order to get tenure a lot of the things that you have to do train you not to be an immovable object. So there are very few immovable objects on college campuses, and that's a problem."

"I stood up for three reasons. One... I felt an obligation to do it... it was the right thing to do. Two... manipulative bullies... Three, I thought that I was positioned to endure and repel the accusation that I absolutely knew was going to come back. Why did I think I was well positioned? ...I had tenure. I was well liked by students of every description, who knew me very well... and knew that I was not a bigot. I thought that would protect me. My own personal history was also completely inconsistent with the claim that I am a racist. ...I was wrong."

"[F]ree speech is the wrong framework to be thinking about this, and... it has very little to do with college campuses. ...What happened at Evergreen that caused it to become a national story was that an unstoppable force met an immovable object. ...I was the immovable object ...for the moment, let's just chalk that up to a personality defect."

"The thing that allowed me to endure the challenge of the phony equity and inclusion forces was that they were unable to keep the story in-house. ...Sam Harris, my brother , and Joe Rogan ...took the video that the protestors themselves had posted and amplified it, and broadcast it. ...[T]here is a principle that applies to institutions like colleges and universities... It is PV = nRT... the ... they turned up the heat and they added pressure, and that caused the vessel to explode, and when it did, my story became public, and survival became a possibility, because outside eyes... in reviewing it, the answer became obvious. I was not a racist. Something else was going on."

"Something is seriously and dangerously amiss. At this moment in history, the center does not hold. and political corruption have rendered government ineffective, predatory and often cruelly indifferent to the suffering of American citizens. is a natural result."

"If the next generation of people to take over the West does not know how to think, western civilization will come apart and it will be replaced in the way that civilizations before it have been. ...What we face is a very dire problem."

"As a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, I find myself at the vanguard of an emerging non-ideological, non-partisan movement. Along with and the (FIRE), we are fighting to restore and respect for competing perspectives."

"Humans are exquisitely sensitive, for very good evolutionary reasons... to being excluded from a group. ...[T]hat's effectively fatal for a hunter-gatherer, so... we very naturally act in our own self-protection by doing whatever is necessary to rejoin. ...[Y]ou exist in a very large population. If you take up the habit—the rationality community... coined a term for this called steelmanning (the IDW has borrowed it)... [Y]ou do your best to present the argument, of those that disagree with you, so well that they recognize you as having done it right. ...If you do it out of habit, certain people will reject you. They're doing you a favor. They're telling you to seek higher quality people... [S]ome of the things that are hard in life will cost you friends, but the quality of your friend group will be upgraded by the process. It's very painful... but if you'll just trust that this process will result in people... that you want to find yourself around when things get really serious, then you'll be glad you've done it."

"[T]he third point... What is taking place is actually a threat to the Republic... in one of two ways. The first possible failure mode is that some sort of a Maoist takeover could escape the colleges and universities and... it could take over the West... I find this unlikely... but what I do find very frightening is the possibility that the self-censorship is going to cause colleges and universities to fail in their mission to educate people how to think about difficult issues."

"The electorate is starved for honest debate and for the good governance that follows from it. My advice to this body is to put the nation and its core values ahead of partisanship and join us in the center to end this cultish power-grab, and return us to a forward path as a nation."

"[W]e need to rethink the way we keep track of behavior in the marketplace. We need full cost accounting... every cost that is generated by an activity in the market needs to show up in the balance sheet, whether that is borrowing from future generations, whether that is putting the population at risk. ...They need to be included in the price of the product or otherwise returned to those who decided to initiate the action. If we did that, the amount of activity would drop... to exactly those behaviors that are actually beneficial to society, leaving out all of those externalities that are generating so much profit with our current system."

"We need to place a firewall that is impermeable between the marketplace and the regulatory apparatus."

"As far as the academy is concerned, these ideas are a direct threat to the ability of the academy to continue to teach. Because what we saw here, at Evergreen, was the descendants of critical theory challenged the right of students and faculty to engage in science. They actually confronted us as if science was just another mechanism of wielding power. And if they do that, if that happens across the country, collages and universities will not be the place where science happens. And science will continue, it will have to reformulate itself outside the collage and university system. And when it does that the justification for a collage and university system vanishes. Who's gonna send their kid to a collage that doesn't have science at its core? So anyway, I think this is actually a threat to the academy as a whole."

"[O]ne can now advance... policies, and almost certainly succeed... if they are properly draped in weaponized terminology. "Equity", for example, has taken on special properties. If a person opposes an "equity" proposal, those advancing the proposal are secure in asserting that their opponent is motivated by opposition to racial equity itself: In other words, that they are racist. ...[O]ne’s right to speak is now dictated by adherence to an ascendant orthodoxy in which one’s race, gender and sexual orientation are paramount."

"[T]here are two types of systems... One type... the costs of sustaining the system go to the benevolent. That system will inevitably evolve toward ruthlessness and instability. The converse system... where the costs of maintaining the society go to the ruthless evolves towards benevolence and stability. Whenever policy is in question, we should ask ourselves, "Does the policy lead in the direction of the one type or the other."

"Is there a free speech crisis on college campuses? ...What is occurring on college campuses is about power and control—speech is impeded as a last resort, used when people fail to self-censor in response to a threat of crippling stigma and the destruction of their capacity to earn. These tools are being used to unhook the values that bind us together as a nation—equal protection under the law, the presumption of innocence, a free marketplace of ideas, the concept that people should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Yes, even that core tenet of the civil rights movement is being dismantled."

"[I]n sectors of our economy where there is not a lot of room for utility-increasing innovations, we see an evolution towards ruthlessness... and that has interacted with... the central flaw in... our global system, with the U.S. at its head. What we have... are loops... Wealth that is made in the market is capable of increasing one's power over regulation. Power over regulation allows increased opportunity to make money in the market. This is a positive feedback loop. That should scare any engineer of biologist because positive feedback loops that are not bounded by some negative feedback force are unstable. They detonate. They explode."

"In the case that... what is good for the company is somewhat different than what is good for society, the ruthless corporation has the greatest advantage... because it can do anything it wants, and the corporation that is bound by what's good for society can't do anything. The corporation that tries to balance these concerns finds that it competes best with the ruthless corporation the more ruthless it becomes, and the outcome is predictable."

"[T]his feedback loop has re-engineered our system cryptically and turned it into an engine for the concentration of wealth and power. ...It has installed amongst an unelected group of very powerful and wealthy people effective power over any attempt to change from the status quo."

"[T]he personal responsibility vortex... sucks good people in... [W]e should redirect any effort that we are tempted to spend on personal responsibility, towards collective action... that can restructure the s that surround the market so that we... have a chance of altering the behavior."

"The agents in the market are responding to opportunities that we have left open. It makes no more sense to be angry at them... than it does to be angry at the mosquito for sucking your blood. ...[Y]ou have to close down the opportunity."

"Strategies evolve within markets and their larger regulatory context."

"[A]ll of our environmental problems look like... somebody making a profit for degrading what belongs to the rest of us. ...[T]his behavior should not be allowed within a marketplace. We are fracturing the world. We are liquidating it, we are draining it, we are denuding it, we are over-exploiting it. It is apparent to anyone... The idea that this should not be allowed is transparent."

"We have to ask ourselves, what fraction of the economic activity that surrounds us is profitable only by virtue of the fact that those who make the money are externalizing the cost to somebody else. If we were to eliminate such behaviors, we would... reduce the amount of activity by a lot... but we would reduce it by exactly the fraction of activities that shouldn't have existed in the first place."

"Weaponized "equity" is a means to an unacceptable and dangerous end, and it is already spreading from college campuses to other institutions... The emergence of this mentality, and this style of argument, at the highest levels of the tech sector and the press should alarm us greatly. The courts will not be far behind."

"There is still insufficient integration of the many different strains of systems theory and systems tools."

"We concluded then that it was more reasonable to expect a hierarchy of partial theories than to expect one overarching general theory."

"The overall field of systems science is still in formation."

"Three unique and still timely aspects of Miller's text Living Systems were his citation of 173 specific ‘cross-level’ hypotheses, his unification of a vast number of phenomena from the biomedical sciences to the social sciences using a consistent taxonomy of seven hierarchical levels and 20 subsystems, and his consistent effort to make systems hypotheses more testable."

"There is a need to make general systems theory more user friendly."

"We want to know what genes the human embryo needs to become a healthy baby."

"An embryo formed by artificial insemination and genetic manipulation will not become a baby"

"This is important because abortion and infertility are very common, but we do not know them well."

"I get excited by the fact that we can always learn something new every day. Science is about freedom, and what excites me is that I have the freedom to work on the things I want to work on, which is incredible."

"I was drawn to oceanography by just this kind of challenge. To me it represents the perfect intersection of science, technology and the unknown, the spark for so many breakthrough discoveries about life on our planet."

"We need to make decisions that make us less consumptive and reduce our reliance on nitrogen. It's like a carbon footprint. But you can reduce your nitrogen footprint. I do it by not eating much meat -- I still like a little every now and then -- not using corn oil, driving a car that I can put nonethanol gas in and get better gas mileage. Just things like that that can make a difference. So I'm challenging, not just you, but I challenge a lot of people, especially in the Midwest -- think about how you're treating your land and how you can make a difference. So my steps are very small steps. To change the type of agriculture in the US is going to be many big steps. And it's going to take political and social will for that to happen. But we can do it. I strongly believe we can translate the science, bridge it to policy and make a difference in our environment. We all want a clean environment."

"What we need to think about perhaps for Mission Blue is increasing the biologging capacity. How is it that we can actually take this type of activity elsewhere? And then finally -- to basically get the message home -- maybe use live links from animals such as blue whales and white sharks. Make killer apps, if you will. A lot of people are excited when sharks actually went under the Golden Gate Bridge. Let's connect the public to this activity right on their iPhone. That way we do away with a few internet myths. So we can save the bluefin tuna. We can save the white shark. We have the science and technology. Hope is here. Yes we can. We need just to apply this capacity further in the oceans."

"We have to remember that everything we do is a choice. We have a choice to make more sustainable decisions in the long term, whether it’s how much plastic we use or how much meat we eat – all these things will have an impact on our planet. If we can eat more sustainably, live more sustainably, we’ll have a lower carbon footprint on an individual level. Little things matter – people just need to be reminded of that."

"His ability to communicate what's going on inspired me, he's my hero."

"The Shark Attack File offers us an opportunity to not only, I suppose, help humanity at some level by trying to reduce the opportunities for shark and humans to get together and therefore saving some grief among humans, but equally importantly, it allows us to put it into perspective: shark attacks as a phenomenon are a fairly uncommon event. By contrast, our decimation of sharks and ray populations is going on largely unabated. It gives us a bully pulpit to talk about the real concern of the shark in the scientific world, which is the fate of the sharks."

"The thing we really need to fix is ourselves. It's not about the fish; it's not about the pollution; it's not about the climate change. It's about us and our greed and our need for growth and our inability to imagine a world that is different from the selfish world we live in today. So the question is: Will we respond to this or not? I would say that the future of life and the dignity of human beings depends on our doing that."

"I had jars in my bedroom, much to the chagrin of my mother, you couldn't throw away a mayonnaise jar in my house. That was a specimen jar."