00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me Eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten in my case, underwear lessening Hunt podcast. You can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store. Nor where you stand with on X? All right? Can I call you Professor dug Emlin. That's right, it works, Okay, tell people what you do. I'm a biologist. I'm an evolutionary biologist, and I study animal weapons at University of Montana. Out there I got to take care of. Now. I'm a biologist at the University of Montana, and uh, most of my time I work on rhinoceros beetles with horns, but more generally, I'm interested in how and why animal weapons get really big, including dear teeth, saber tooths. Yeah, including all of those things. We can talk about any of them that you want to. One of the things I stumbled on a few years ago while trying to write a book was realizing that all these things that we learned about insects and about beetles applied to things like deer. And then the more I looked and the more I dug into the sort of nitty gritty of the biology, the more convinced I became that the same logic, the same rules apply to all these cases of really extreme weapons, including, to my astonishment, military technologies. Yeah, sort of day to day research is on is on rhinoceros beetles. The fact is, the concepts I study, the things I think about applied just as much to military technologies as they do to animal weapons. Okay, a couple quick things. You do you know that you know? You know my sister in law, I just figured this out two days ago. Who is now You're one of her stituents. Remember when Clinton was being impeached and and there was this debate about whether or not character matters. Yeah, she has character. I think I could have told you that Rush Limbaugh said character is above all else at the time he felt that and um, yeah, she fits that point too. You're comparing it to Russia. No, No, I'm saying that. I'm saying that there was a debate, like, Okay, there was a debate at the time in the nineties. There was like there was this debate where people were saying, um that, you know, a president does what he does and character doesn't matter. Right, It's like it's it's it's nice that they have good character, but it's not good character is not essential for the job. And so at the time, people that were voicing the opposite opinion were understandably from the opposite side of the aisle, and so they were like, oh my god, does character ever matter? Like that's character out limball, that characters above ball else. And then you know later in subsequent administrations, the people who voiced the the importance of character have dramatically shifted. But I want to get another point now, um uh, I think I told you this before. Dog the best one of the best lines in your book, isn't your Lineinstein? Quote? Yeah? What do you call it? When you put a quote it to be of a book? What doesn't ea mean later we'll look it up really quick. I should know when you die and they write something about you. Yeah, that's not that. It's not that anyway, there's a quote I don't have you have hit him with the quote, yeah, but I can't. I don't have a memories. It's like I've I've opened books with quotes. Oh you got it right, Yeah, speak of for yourself. Sam epigraph a sam longer coming to epigraph. So epigraph is before a book, and epitaph is on your teamstone after it's after you die. So epigraph is before your book. And so I know not what I it's not what he said. Let me try again. I know not with what weapons. World War three will be fought, but World War four will be fought with sticks and stones. It is good and and I guess I can speak to it for a minute about why I chose to put it at the front of the book. It felt president somehow for a book on extreme weapons. And one of the things I hinted at is that I learned along the way while writing this book that all these things that we've stumbled on as a biologist applied to military technologies. And part of the exercise of writing this book was really digging into the military literature and reading about historical arms races and the deep past, and and looking at these parallels and really trying to unpack the parallels between the animal and the military weapons. And that meant to do that right, that meant coming full forward and taking a really hard look at modern times like the Cold War and post Cold War situations and Einstein wrote that during the Cold War, very much in that mindset and speaking to the I mean, I guess the spectacular devastating capabilities of modern weapons of mass destruction, And I think his point is it doesn't really matter what the next world is, you know what the Third World War is going to be fought with, because pretty much anything they use these days is going to be so destructive that everything will be rubble, and the people that managed to stagger past that are going to be hitting each other on the head with sticks and stones because it's the only thing that will be left. There's a kind of sobering, but it is a reflection of the reality of where modern weapons of mass destruction are. There's a thirty or forty thousand one of those thirty or forty thousand year old skull from Europe that they had. It was a pretty well preserved like in tax gold they had, and they had a uh peculiar concave cracking on it. It suggested the person they pondered over it like whether it was post mortem or not, like they thought maybe just soil compacion or something had happened. Um, and then they want up they worked up some kind of technology where they can make these, uh like something that's a fact simile of human bone and fill it with what you call that stuff you shoot guns at, ballistic gel fill it with a ballistic gels. See what kind of and then yeah, and then give it various injuries and um, they determined it thirty thousand years ago he had likely been killed by someone who is left handed and facing him. That's okay, uh, okay, that's my favorite line from the book. And not just because I'm not pointing out that you didn't write it, but it's a great it's a perfect really it's a really good h you know, deal best line in the book. My favorite new word that I learned in your book, which is called animal weapons, like you get, the title gets right to it. The title is that leave you guessing? I don't know. I mean it does like blood Meridian at am. But the title doesn't tell you what the book is about. Okay, But in all fairness, animal weapons doesn't necessarily speak to the fact that half the book is about the miltee. So we struggled with titles. We are that we are animals, that is, but that might not have be the how the average person on the you know in the bookstore looking at the shelves would think about it. So okay, one more quick comment and I'm gonna have you digging on something. Um My favorite word that learned in this book is supernate. That was a new one for me too. You didn't know that word. No, I do now explain to folks. It is who can supernate and why it matters. Cats can supernate their four limbs, and it refers to the way that they can articulate and twist the way that we can with our risk too. But most other carnivores like dogs or wolves cannot. They can articulate and twist their fore limbs, and it is relevant and I talked about it in the book in the context of the evolution of the extreme canines and things like sabretooth cats and and and The idea there is that those weapons are so big. I mean, they're phenomenal for piercing and for killing really big prey, but they're also really vulnerable to breakage and snapping, and so the cats need to be able to plunge the teeth in and pull them right back out again. You can't just lock them in and hang or you'll well maybe they could. But the only way they could do that is if they can hold on to the animal and position themselves. You know, if otherwise you sink your teeth in the animal runs away, it snaps your teeth. Thought to hold onto that animal would be spidd four limbs while it's trying to run like hell away from you. Is part of how we think, or the paliontal just think these cats are able to not snap their teeth, but they it. You know, you look at the libery a tart pit fossils, they had snap teeth. My first date with my wife, did you that's a good first date. But so they snapped their teeth all the time. I mean that was definitely the big price tag of having teeth like that, well one of the price tags, because you think about like you look at a wolf, dragon elpdown. He doesn't. He can't supernate, so he has to do all with his teeth, just hanging on for dear life. But they also do it as a group. So wolves tend to hunt as a pack, and they can bring down prey by pulling on them from different sides. I think there's a debate actually about saber tooths for a long time it was assumed that they were solitary hunters, and now there's people arguing that they might have been social to you. But I don't know. Not my forte I work on beetles. But no, there's been a bunch of stuff that's come out on saber tooths. I mean, they were a real catalyst for me. We can get we can get into this and whatever. What do you want? But most of that I okay, Then I we'll come back to that. I feel like I want to start out by talking if you're comfortable with this about the white and brown mice on the white sand. Okay, because unless you think that's a bad am I messing my job up or doing my job, we can do this or whatever. Do you want? The logic that I got one that I might be able to wedge in ahead of that kind of try go for it. What I just want to know what? Maybe what like the what your definition of a weapon is? Damnit? Yanni, that's the first question and I skipped it. Look Sam, that's number one. Back me up. So this is when I struggled with when I was trying to research the book too. There isn't a simple definition. I mean if you think about it, teeth, claws, anything that you stab or claw slash with, clearly that's a weapon. You think of tusks and antlers that you lock and spar with, those are weapons. But chemical things that animals produce as a toxin to spray or inject, those are weapons of a sort. And if you start looking at military arsons and you start looking at what soldiers carry in the battle, they carry a lot more than than the firearms. They've got communication equipment. They've got camo that helps them blend with their backgrounds, they've got kevlar that protects them from certain vantages. All of that stuff could be considered part of the arsenal of an individual soldier, and so you can start to subdivide it into things that mostly function for protection and defense, things that function for attack and offense. I don't actually want to go down that path of what is a weapon, because there's a million things that could fit under that. What I will say is I focus on a particular subset of animal weapons, and those are the things that get really big and so sort of from my perspective as an evolutionary biologist, I'm constantly stumped by the fact that there are species out there with these things sticking off of them that are ridiculous. I mean, any hunter loves a good rack of antlers, and we love looking at caribou or elk, but you step back a look at them like you're an alien from another planet looking at these things for the first time. It's absurd. It's absolutely insane that these animals would have that much stuff sticking off their heads. And as a biologist, I want to make sense of that. We know it's awkward, we know it's expensive. Under what kinds of circumstances will the benefits of a weapon like that be so profound that animals with these huge weapons do better than other individuals out there with weapons that that are smaller or less extreme. And so that's my sort of thing as a biologist. Under what kinds of social or physical environments or circumstances will sort of the stars aligned so that the really big weapons win. And so so it's it comes back. I'm not giving you an easy answer to what is a weapon. There's a lot of things that qualify as a weapon, but I'm kind of hoping today we're going to focus on things that are unquestionably weapons and they're the big stuff, the tusks and the horns and the antlers and the you know, the sabretooth cat keynines. Okay, so here's here's what I want you to talk about. Here's what I wanted to get into. The white and brown mice. Okay, because you have a I'm gonna switch up. You have a page on page six. Nice to know I made its pitch six. Yeah, body, I made it always through this book, man. So on page six you have a quote where you say, whenever individuals differ and how successful they are at propagating their kind, evolution occurs. So, keeping that in mind and knowing this is something that you chose to bring up early on in your book, tell the story about the white mice and the brown mice and the white sand. And that's the reason I told that story was to try to provide sort of a really simple, intuitive, real world example to hang that logic on. So that essence of evolutionary biology people people feel threatened by it, people misunderstand that, people run with it in all kinds of crazy directions, But it is basic. It really is a simple process. It it rests on the fact that if you look at any population of anything out there, you pick your favorite species. But in this case, we'll start with old field mice. And you go out and you start looking at the individuals. You look at the mice. You're not just saying, hey, there's six or needy two of them, or you know, there's more this year than last year. You're actually looking at the mice. What you're gonna find is they're not the same. Some of them are heavier, some of them are lighter, some of them are darker. Some of them have I don't know, longer legs, bigger teeth. If you go out there as a biologist and you start measuring things, you're gonna find that there's variation that some of the mice are faster, some of them age more quickly, some of them digest things better, some of them smell better. There's tons of things about the mice that are different from each other. And and evolution is about turnover. It's how some types do about. It's winners and losers. Some types do better than others, and the ones that do better end up living when others die, and they end up reproducing when others don't. And those are the ones that end up producing offspring that carry with them these same characteristics. And if you look at that population over time, from one generation to the next generation to the next generation, you follow that, you'll find that the average characteristics shift. They get darker, they get faster, they get better. It's smelling a certain thing. Populations are all was changing as they sort of adapt to the environments around them. That's evolution. That's the process that I'm looking at. So that you learn. Mice is a really clear example. I can tell the story if you want. I gotta like, I wanna a couple of things that that brings up as a soth. So often in biology you talk to people who are looking at population like the general sense, and you're talking about looking at the individual differences. And I think a good way for people to understand that in the way that struck and I was reading your book, is it when we when we humans look at other humans, we completely gloss over. We're not like, oh, they all look the same. You're right, we are really good. You can get the differences. Well, you see, I saw a man. I'm like, that man has an extraordinarily long neck. It wasn't thirty minutes ago. I thought that because you just like you have a trained eye, so you're just like the same way you can go you can recognize a person and pick them out of hundreds of people. And so to talk about how mice we can't see it is all we see is it's MOUs nous. That's a great analogy though, because people ought to recognize that we're really good if seeing those differences in ourselves. But what you have to accept then is those kinds of differences exist in everything from you know, from plants to snails to mice. Every population out there has sort of standing genetic variation. It has differences among individuals and the traits that you might look at and measure, and sometimes those differences matter. Sometimes individuals that run faster actually do better at getting away from predators and they live longer, or you know, who knows what the traits are. In my case and today's interview case, you know, we're going to be sort of playing around with what kinds of conditions cause the individuals with the really big weapons to win to do better than the other individuals, because those are the conditions that will lead to the evolution of big weapons. But but the light and dark mice, it's a it's a simple example of a real world population that's been studied really well all the way down to people have figured out the genomes, they know the individual genes, they know the mutations to the genes that contributed to the rights. So so from a biology standpoint, it's a beautifully complete story. But it's basic. It's really simple. Mice are dark, they're brown. They usually go forage at night because there's predators that can spot them and eat them. Owls are still really good at seeing contrast in the dark, so their main predators when they're out at night or owls. And and if you're a mouse running around on dark soils and most of their habitat and you're too light, the contrast makes you stand out and you get nailed by the owls, And so owls have historically kept mouse populations pretty dark brown because any of that were too light got nailed and the ones they got cold from the population because they stood out. And then a few thousand years ago, mice colonized, They expanded their range, and they colonized the coastal sand dunes around the Gulf of you know, the Gulf in the southern United States, around the coast of Florida, and you get out onto these dunes, and all of a sudden, the dirt's not rich and dark and brown anymore. You're out on sand dunes, it's like piles of salt. I mean, some places it's really white. And so what happened is the mice are still being mice. They're doing all the same things, but now they're running around at night on white and all of a sudden, the dark mice stood out really badly, and they got hammered by the owls because they kept seeing these dark mice and nailing them. And by pure dumb luck chance, a small number of these mice carried mutations in their genome that screwed around with the pathway that makes the dark melon and pigment in the fur, and they happened, by chance, to be lighter. More of their fur was white and less of it was dark. And normally in the main areas they get hammered because they look bad, they're they're too light, they stand out. But out here on these outer fringes, those individuals did better because they were lighter in color and they were more likely to hide than the dark mice. And so out on these coastal populations. You know, owls are still being owls. They're just going for whatever they find. But in those populations, they're eating all the dark mice. And it was the ones that carried these these random genetic mutations that made them lighter. Those mice survived, they had all the kids, and then over time these mice populations got whiter and whiter, and now we have two sort of side by side areas with white mice and dark mice, and we think it was driven by selection from these predators. And so the experiment I talked about in the book was a classic. They set up in the seventies where they had captive owls. They trucked in truckloads of sand and they created arenas with white soil, like like from the coast, and then they had other arenas with dark soil, and then they just released mice and let the owls do what the owl's dead. And they showed really cleanly that on the dark soil, it's the white mice that get nailed, and on the light soil it's the dark mice that get nailed. And they were able to show that the owls were sort of to use the technical language, acting as agents of selection. They were selecting for dark or light mice on these different backgrounds. So it's a nice example of a process of winners and losers. The color of the mouse differed from mouse to mouse, and in each environment it mattered. The ones that had the right color combinations lived. The one that had the bad combination stood out, like you know, like a hunter wearing the wrong camo. You stand out, you get noticed. And in that case, because they were getting eaten, it ended up that some mice were being more successful at surviving and reproducing in each area. They passed on their inherited characteristics and the population changed over time. It evolved so that now several thousand years later, you know, a couple of thousand mouse generations later, those two populations are totally different from each other. I mean they look like different species. One's white and one's dark. And that was a very recent, sort of gradual evolutionary shift in the color example of the process. But that process is happening all the time and just about anything out there, it's on us as the scientist to figure out, Okay, what are the things that differences among individuals? What are the variations in this species that excuse me that matter? Why do they matter? Why are these ones the ones that are winning and these ones are the ones that are losing? And we can go out and sort of study the process of evolution in the wild in real populations. And again that's it's just a conceptual backdrop to turn around and then say, wider weapons, get big. What I like? What strikes me about that that quote that Steve just read and what you're saying. And I know that happened over whatever thousand generation might have even been less, but it was fast. Yeah. But you know, the po posing evolution that way, I think gives it a little bit more of an immediacy. I think to a lot of people it's it's kind of an abstraction. You know, it's something that is working on like macro population levels, but it really does come down to the individual and it can change very rapidly. I'm really glad you brought that up. Actually, if you forgive me for a digression here, I'm really glad you brought that up because I run into this in my classes. People have this antiquated notion of the evolutionary biologist as this old, white haired geezer with a big beard arguing about apes, and that's not what modern I mean truly, My major professor was a white haired GUYE. No, wasn't that. It wasn't that your dad. I'll take issue of that. It that way, But wasn't your father an evolutionary and my grandfationary biologist. It's like the family business. But coming back, father was one of the founders of the the field of animal Yeah, yeah, I broke away. I don't work on birds, I work on beatles. That was my radical Yeah, exactly, bigger sample sizes. But but back to the reality. What is an evolutionary bologist. Evolutionary biology today is incredibly relevant to things that that everybody cares about. It's not a bunch of old timers arguing about apes. It's about genomes and genetics and medicine. So huge, just a list a couple issues that matter to people every day. People on farms have to deal with the fact that they go out there and try to control pest populations on their crops by spraying pesticides, and very quickly the insect pests evolvers asistance and they stop being susceptible. That is evolution, no matter what people want to call it, it's turnover. You're killing a bunch of the pests. Some of the pests happen by chance to have variants in their genomes that allow them to detoxify the chemicals that you're spraying. Everybody else is dead. Those ones survive, they have lots of kids. All of a sudden, your pest population explodes. With all these competitions, no competition, they're all dead, right, And yet you saw suddenly you can detoxify these chemical that nobody else. That's the winner, winners and losers. They start reproducing and the population evolves fast within it. You know, most of the pesticides are obsolete within five to ten years because insect populations adapt so quickly. Herb besides, same story. You see the same thing with antibiotics. We're running into huge problems now where you go to the hospital and things that used to be standard can kill you because the antibiotics that we have available to us don't work. And again, people don't like to use the E word, but the fact is that's evolution. When you apply a dose of antibiotics, you are trying to kill a population of bacteria. And if you kill them all you win. Population goes extinct, Your infection is cured. But if there's any genetic variation among individuals within that bacteria population that allow a few of them to survive the drug. Just what you said down, If you kill all the competition, they're all dead. And the heavy Yeah they got gravy. It's awesome. There's no competition, there's all these resources. They explode, and now your population is shifted from one generation to the next, or over a couple of dozen bacterial generations yet is shifted from susceptible to resistance. And you, as a as a doctor applying a drug, have driven that. You've acted as an agent of selection, and you've driven the evolution of that population. So modern evolutionary biology is about drug design. It's about trying to figure out ways to combat antibiotic resistant disease strains. It's about public health trying to engineer mosquitoes so that they can't carry zickar denghy, and and trying to figure out how to produce these engineered mosquitoes and get them in the field to spread enough that the wild populations become resistant or it's not wet. Yes, it's a huge industry right now. Yeah, Genetically modifying mosquito. You can engineer one that can no longer carry malaria or zika or dangy, and I've had dany It sucks. I mean, if this is a big deal. If you can figure out how to make a mosquito that normally is a vector that carries the disease incapable of harboring the pathogen, You've done a lot. But you've just engineered this, you know, screwed up genetically modified mosquito. You introduced it into the wild, and it's not going to outcompete all the other normal mosquitoes. So you can spend a fortune building it in the lab, but trying to implement it in the field is a problem. And that's where evolutionary biology comes in. How figure out what kind of selective advance, you know, how can you figure out ways to to let something that is otherwise deleterious spread within a population so that it gets abundant enough that the mosquito population rit large stops being capable of sustaining the infections and involves a lot of theory, involves a lot of evolutionary biology. So that was a big tangent. But yeah, I'm glad you brought it up. Evolutionary biology is a vibrant, thriving field that's not arguing about apes. It's about molecular biology, genetics, genomics. It all comes back to the white mice, the light and dark mice turnover. When are their winners and losers? When individuals do better than other individuals and the traits that make them do better are heritable or passed on, you've got the raw material for revolution. You watch that population over time, and it's going to change. Okay, let me hear you with this one. Is it still in your circle? Um? Do we still talk? We meaning you do you guys still talk about Um, there being a difference between natural selection and sexual selections. Where I thought you're gonna go between biological evolution and cultural evolution that we can get there later. Between natural selection and sexual selection. Yeah, you do? You still view the as He's like, you think your audience is going to know what sexual selection is, step back and define it. So do it through? All right? So natural selection tends really a good way to think about it is survival. It's which are the individuals that are going to grow the fastest, are going to you know, get access to the best territories outcompete other individuals for access to food. They're going to be the most resistant pathogens, who are the healthiest animals in the population, and the ones most likely to survive a winter cold snap or to get through, you know, a reproductive season. It's all about sort of living and dying. Sexual selection is so almost like a subset it fits. It's also winners and losers, and it's it's very much an agent of selection that can cause populations to evolve, but it really focuses on reproduction. It's recognizing that even if everybody survives, they're not all going to reproduce. You have winners and losers when it comes to reproduction too, and that means that you've got individuals with traits like big antlers who are more likely to win access to the harems or to the territories, that are more likely to breed with the females and the population and transmit their genetic material to the next generation than other individuals in the population that might be more sickly, smaller antlers, not as good a condition, younger, less dominant, all those things you've got. It's it's the same raw material variation. You go out into a deer population, or an elk population measure a hundred bulls, they're not the same. Some of them are bigger than others, some of them are stronger, some are more aggressive, some of them have a lot bigger antlers than others. Those traits matter, and the weapons matter a lot. And in that case, sexual selection is the process by which you know individuals with big antlers reproduce more than individuals with small antlers. And since ultimately the currency for evolution isn't whether you live or die, it's whether you reproduce, what matters is who are the individuals in the population now that are contributing of spring their genetic material to the next generation. That's the end game. Doesn't matter if you're the healthiest, strongest animal out there, doesn't matter if you're resistant to every disease in the book and you live forever. If you fail in the game of producing offspring in a biological population of something like, it's a genetic dead end. And so the real end game is reproduction, and sexual selection is all the stuff the crazy sperm competition, battles, female choice, male competition, all the things that happen in real world animal populations that cause some animals to win and other animals to lose in the game of reproduction. Okay, man, that was a bunch of things. I want to ask you about my going off too far. You can strap me up if you need to say, help me keep help me, keep track, Johnnie. Okay, I want you to explain couple things. I want you to talk about the idea that UM the way in which differentiated land escapes. Okay, no, it's not okay, couldn't send me that on your I'm meant to ask you, did I have no idea what you mean by this? So you were talking? Okay, here we go. Okay, So I want to do differentiated landscapes. I don't know what that is. I'll tell you and I want to do I'm not using your word, I'm using my world. You'll know what I'm talking about. What you'll know what I'm talking at. Want to explain it. I'm learning differentiated landscapes and I want uh and I want you to talk about UM the different like you mentioned earlier. You could have like six bull elk right, Yeah, that the difference in size, how they can develop the difference in size of their bodies, which a're like relatively homogeneous versus the difference in size of their antlers. Yes, what does that have to do with differentiated? Two different ideas? But not explain differentiate landscapes. I'm talking to your book about what happens with an animal population where there's little pockets of good habitat or little bottlenecks like a water source, a certain food source, rather than this, rather than a landscape where all the resources are equally distributed an omnipresent, so there's no sort of like cool spot to hang out. Yes, which one of the which one of those you want to do first? Let's start with the second one, the landscape idea that was the first one. That was the first one, differentiated landscapes. I'm with Doug. I think that that one came second. Which let's start with that. So you're going to have potential for individuals, say elk, to be competing with each other over access to, say, females. So you can do beetles too, because I think I think you explain it like because there's a wound, Because actually it's a better it's a better tool for this. It's just fewer people are used to thinking about beetles the way I'm used to thinking about beetles. So in any situation, if the landscape is uniform and what I mean by that, I don't mean Kansas. There resources that the animals depend on, If they're distributed uniformly in space, then where are you going to guard? What the hell are you going to fight over? I mean I could be a bowl, and I could our beetle, and I there's my spot, and I'm going to guard that, and I stand over that, and I beat the crap out of any other beetle that comes near. And if I've got big enough weapons, and I might pay a price to have big weapons, but you know I got big weapons, and I fight, and I fight and I fight, and I'm holding that ground and nobody else. No other males get into my territory. And there's food in my territory. But you know there's food over there and food over there, and there and there and there. If the food resources are everywhere, then what have I gained? Where are the female is gonna go? They could go anywhere, they could feed on any spot on that landscape. And I spend all this money, not money, all these energetic resources and this cost of producing this weapon, and I fight and I fight, and I fight to guard my spot, but my spot isn't any more valuable than body else's spots. And there's all these other beetles out there that don't bother fighting at all, and they get just as good access to food. So what in the situation where the resources are uniform, there's no benefit to fighting to guard a territory. You don't win anything because everywhere is equally good. But when you have a landscape that's I think you meant differentiated, I would think of it as patchy, where the key resources are very rare and they're localized. They're clustered or clumped in space like a water hole you said. Or the beetles that we work on they feed on wounds on the side of a tree that ooze sap. These beetles flying and they feed on the sap like syrup on the side of the tree. In most places where these beetles live, they they've got wimpy little mouthparts. They can't drill into the trees like a woodpecker or something can. They're stuck finding a place where a branch struck the tree, or where some other animals already created a wound, and it's oozing that's a hot spot. But those things aren't everywhere. They're rare. I mean, there's only a couple of hot spots within a mile radius, say, and that's where you gotta be. That's the only place where the food is. That is not a uniform landscape. That's I guess you're saying differentiated. Good places to be in bad places to be. Now, if I'm a male and I've got a weapon, and I fight the crap out of all the opponents, and I hold my ground and I happen to be guarding the food spot, I win. I'm the only one in town that's got it. All the other males can't get it because I'm keeping them away, And where are the female is going to go? They're coming to me because I'm sitting on the only spot that's good. So when you have landscapes that are patchy and there are sort of hot spots of value interspersed with large areas that aren't very good, that's the that's the sort of physical environment that sets the stage for all this kind of stuff because it creates opportunities for winning and losing. It creates a situation where the dominant individuals can guard something that matters, and if you win those fights and you get that resource, you win because the females come to you. You're the male that meets with those females when they come in to feed. All the other males lose, Like the males in the population might get nothing because there's nowhere else to go and they're not strong enough to get it. That's sexual selection. It's competition about access in this case to a food resource. But it's a food resource that attracts all the females, so that's access to reproduction. The males that win in those fights mate with lots of females, produce lots of offspring, sire the next generation of the population, and the males that fail get nothing. That's over, they're done. So do you see less fighting in like the in the same or that's why beetles are better than elk, because it's hard for people to picture that in something like an ungulate or a deer. In insects, it happens all the time. A lot of times the food resources are so dispersed that what happens is it's not the animals that are built like tanks with big horns that win. It's the animals that are really agile and that are lightweight and have good wing ratios and store energy and they fly really far. It's the ones that can search, and so you find insects where they're really good at traveling long distances looking that the animals are so spread out and the unit the landscape is so sort of uniform, there's no obvious place to be that the ones who win are the ones that search, that can find members of the other sex the fastest. So there's some moths where the males have these antennae that are unbelievably good at detecting the smells of the females and they're out there cruising along for wind currents trying to pick up the scent. I mean, the military has looked into these things. They're the most sensitive chemo sensors known. They can actually detect individual molecules of these pheromones, and we've never come up with anything that's even within several orders of magnitude and being that sensitive to you know, a chemical that we might want to detect. But these moths are really good at it because their resources are sort of uniformly or randomly distributed, and the only way to win in that game is to be better at smelling a female, are better at finding a female than other males, and so competition plays out in a different way. They have huge antennae, they're really good at flying, they search, but they don't have weapons, they don't fight. Different kind of systems, so they fall outside of your interests. Well, they're cool systems, but yeah, I like I like the situations. You're differentiated landscapes where where there really is a hot spot that matters, and and if you can be the male that wins access to that resource, then you win in the evolutionary game because you're the one that gets access to the reproduction. You you mentioned a couple of times so far, I feel like you should pause and explain it in greater detail. Is the costs. You keep talking about the enormous cost or the expenditure of growing big horns or big teeth or big antlers. And I'm glad you bring that up because it come full circle back to the other half of the question, the fact that antlers are more variable an traits, because it actually ties into the costs. So in a system like this where imagine your differentiated landscape and you imagine your runounced speedle, and there's there's very occasionally rare wounds on the side of a tree. That's your oasis. That's like it. That's where the food is. That's where all the females are going to come flying from miles around to go feed at that spot. And if you can be the male, it wins that you win everything. And it really is winning everything. I mean, in some of these populations, a very small percentage of the males to all the reproducing, and the males lose every generation. The mails are gone dead end, they fail, and in a system like that, it really pays to win. And imagine in that case, then if I'm a beetle and I've got a bump sticking off me that allows me to reach under and flip an opponent, it's gonna be worth it no matter what that costs. If I've got that and the other males don't, I've got an edge and I'm going to win in these fights. And therefore I'm the one that's reproducing, and my kids and grandkids and great grandkids are the ones that populate the population. The beatles are going to start getting this horn or this thing sticking off their body that's used as a weapon, but over time it's sort of a relative landscape. If everybody's got horns the same size, and then another beetle comes out with an even bigger weapon and allows him to reach and flip his opponent before the other opponent can even reach him, then that mail is going to have an edge. So the weapons are gonna get bigger. And then when everybody's got weapons that big, then it's the one with the even bigger weapons that wins. And this process sort of cycles and ratchets, and the weapons get bigger and bigger and bigger, and as they get bigger, they get more expensive. I know, it seemed like I forgot your questions. You get caught in what we call an arms race, and and these things start ratcheting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and along the way they get more and more and more expensive. And so when you start looking at costs and animal weapons, we can talk about costs and military weapons too. They're very expensive, but the costs get really staggering. So so our rhinoceros beetle, the ones that we work on. A mail puts thirty percent of his body weight into a weapon. I mean I think about that weigh probably one eight that's like like that. It's like a sixty pound thing on top of my head. Be like this table glued to the top of my head. That's what these beetles are carrying around on their heads all day. That's a huge investment. It costs in terms of resource is that they need to grow that structure. Because all the material that goes into that coffee table isn't going into my heart or my lungs or my brain or anything else. I'm putting it all into the coffee table and put it into the weapon, So there's an allocation cost. Then you've got to carry this thing around everywhere you go. It's awkward and heavy, makes it harder to fly, makes it harder to run. So there's sort of production and maintenance costs that go with it. Weapons can get really expensive in the beetles. Putting a horn together for a male is so expensive that it forces these animals to shunt resources away from other things. So the beetles with the biggest horns have tiny eyes, and some of the species we studied have males where they've stunted genitalia and tiny testes, so they're really reallocating in the most absurd way to get these weapons that you talk about, the actually get a form of a form of osteoporosis studies. Yeah, because the antlers and the antlers, because they regrow them every year, they have to produce these enormous expensive structures, and they've got to grow fast. And as far as I know, antler bone is the fastest growing bone that's ever been described for any any vertebrate ever. It's it's growing at record speeds and they're pulling. They need calcium and phosphorus and all these minerals to produce the bone, and they don't get that much of that from the leaves and the things that they feed on. And so the people that have looked into this and studied have found that there's no way that these bulls and bucks can get enough from their food alone. They're growing it too fast and there's just not enough of these minerals in the food that they're eating. And that's when they figured out that they're actually siphoning these things off the other bones in their body. They're leaching calcium and phosphorus out of their ribs and their spine and their femurs and all the rest of the bones and reallocating it to the antlers. So that forces them to go through a period of osteoporosis during the rut before they have an opportunity to replenish those resources. Really bad time, because you're smacking into all these other bulls. So right when you need to fight and throw down with all these other eight hundred pound rivals, you've got brittle bones like an old person. It's it's a bad formula. And then they throw the antlers away and you gotta start. It's like you're not even recouping that loss. It's gone there, you know. Yeah, but you can imagine how that would place a premium on any individuals that were in good enough condition or had access to the best foraging spots. They might have less osteo. Again, it comes back to variation. Those bulls might pay a lower cost. They might have less osteo process than a medium or poor quality bowl that's in really crap quality territory that's also trying to produce antlers, and so it may not be equal, but yeah, they're all going through the same problem. They're all facing the same dilemma. These things are expensive and when it goes back to cost a great comparison. I think I remember this from your class back in the day. Was was that, like I think you said, for a bull elk to like a mature bull to create the antlers he needs for that year, it's a similar colore um cost as a cow birthing a calf. Yeah, good memory. This was a really clever Okay in time if I explain some of these, so point out that the Sam Longer and a very own special Sam Longer and too special Doug Ellen's class. Yes you did behavior class, University Montana. I went back in check he got today one of the one of the greatest classes I ever I ever took that. Paim say that fascinating fascinating, Well, you're just you just take it so seriously. Fun stuff, lots of lots of great video clips of animals beating the ship out of each other, imagine that elephant seals and stuff. But you bring up this point about, you know, the energetic expense of doing this and and this was a really clever set of studies and and I didn't do them. I mean this is from the literature, but these people they took advantage of the agriculture industry. So so if you have cattle and your cattle farmer, you know everything is about weight gain. I mean, you manage your you manage your heard, you manage the four the feeds that you're feeding them, the timing of things. Everything is coming down to how quickly your animals can gain at what rate they can gain weight. You want to buy them low, fatten them up, sell them high. There's a huge industry trying to understand the way that things like livestock put on and gain muscle mass and weight. And so they had actually broken this down and these really complicated models where they were looking at all nitrogen, phosphors, put all the different nutrients in paying attention to the diets. They had input bone mass, the skeletal weights, the muscle mass, the metabolic physiology, the weight, the sizes, all these parameters on these animals, and they could predict really really accurately how subtle changes to this or that piece of the diet would translate into the rate at which these animals were putting on muscle mass. And so, because people cared a lot about that, they put a ton of time and effort into parametizing these really complicated models, and they did a really good job to gribing growth and weight gain in vertebrates like that. So these biologists took the models and said, hey, let's look at moose. Let's look at something we care about. And they reset all the parameters based on the bone densities and the leg lengths and that, you know, all the height and all the weights of the of the things like moose or caribou. And turned around and said, all right, given the model now parametized for a moose, how expensive or antlers? They could burn antlers and figure out how many calories they knew what was in it. They could basically figure out what it costs in terms of nutrients and energy to make an antler and then put that into the energy budget of the animal and say how expensive is it? And that's when they were stunned there, Like I mean, they basically found I think it was two calves the male bullet. I can't amber if it was moose producing a full rack of antlers expended as much energy as it took a female to raise two calves all the way to weaning. Stunned, every nobody expected to be that expensive. But it's a clever approach. It's a neat way to do that. And then this guy great one step further and they took the Irish elk, the extinct Irish elk, which had these huge antlers, and try you know, they had to make some guesses because we don't have any living Irish elk, but they did a pretty good job setting the models for them to try to figure out just how expensive the antlers were. In they were pretty expensive. You can see why they might have gone extinct. Yeah, well, one could suggest, one could suggest. I'm not trying to say that that's why. Well, let's add the caveat, because because I think about these kinds of things, and and one of the things we may get to when we talk about arms racist today is that they cycle. There's a very predictable sequence of stages, and eventually arms racist collapse. The whole thing ends. The antlers or their weapons are so expensive that they're not worth it anymore, and they're gone. Normally in an animal when it happens, we're not arguing that they go extinct. What means is some males come along and don't bother producing the weapons, and those males win. They're not paying the price, and the weapons really aren't doing what they used to do any more, and all of a sudden, individuals that ditched the weapons are the winners, and the population loses the weapons and very quickly evolves to a state where they no longer have the big weapons. That's the normal way. The Irish elker the one exception where they really might have actually gone extinct because of the weapons. It's hard to say because we weren't there. But what they found with these models is that the antlers were so expensive that these bulls would have been sort of right on the metabolic edge, and they would have had barely enough time after the rut to recoup the energetic losses before the next cycle. And then what happened is not only were those antlers getting bigger and bigger, but they have evidence from the pollen and the foss and the climate records that the climate changed like pulling the carpet out from under these animals. All of a sudden, they went through I think it was called the Younger Dry ask. The climate changed rather abruptly, and they can tell from the pollen records that all the things that they used to feed and were gone, and they were forced to switch from herbs and things to grasses, things that were a lot less nutritious, and so it's the double It was the double punch, the expensive antlers that are sort of pushing the limit of what's possible, and then all of a sudden your food is gone and you're forced to switch to something that's really crap quality, and that combo might have been too much. So that's the reason. Some people argue that the Irish actually went extinct because of the weapons, But usually what happens is they get caught on an arms race, they get bigger and bigger and bigger, and then the whole thing collapses and they ditched the weapons and go off on another path. I never came back to you, But okay, don't do this one next here sculted now. But there's a funny story talking about with the Beatles. Where's this beetle And there's like a female that goes down in the hole and hangs out in the hole. Yeah, be he grows his big, badass horn reguards the whole. But then there's some little snaky dude with no horn who just burrows down and comes in from under beneath a little sneak attack and gets it on with the female and the and the do with the big horns is hanging out. Has no idea that it even happen. So these are these are dunge beetles that live in Panama. A lot of the dung bells have this problem. But the ones that I was looking that live down in Panama and the males have been nice, big rack of horns on their heads. So they're big tank. Well they're little beetles, but I mean the horns are big relative to the tank pair of horns on their head. And and it's important because again it depends on where we want to go with it is one of the catalysts, one of the things, one of the things that we think I think precipitates an arms race and animals that sort of aligns the last star into place. All of a sudden, the population shoots off on this trajectory of bigger and bigger and bigger weapons. Is a situation where the fight dynamics change from being something that is sort of a chaotic scramble to something that is much more consistently one on one. Something about the biology, the habitat, the structure, something about the way these animals are confronting each other changes and then all of a sudden what had been really chaotic becomes very consistent and predictable and repeatable one on one duels. And that's this thing that I learned actually from the military literature. Can spark an arms race and start the whole process. So in the dung beetles, most of the time we think of dung beetles, who you know, for those of us that actually think about dung beetles, But if you've ever been to Africa, you picture these things that they've got. The they carve these balls, they pushed the balls around on the ground. Those beetles fight all the time. They scramble. None of them have weapons never they do not have horns on those kinds of beetles. And the fights are all sort of pandemonium and scrambles, lots of animals all piling in. But there's subsets, some lineages of dung beetles where they started digging the tunnels, and you mentioned the whole and that was that, that was the behavior change, that that that rewrote the rules, because all of a sudden, the females are down in a hole, they're in a tunnel. It's a tube, and so the males plant themselves at the entrance and they guard the tunnel, and all of a sudden, it's not a scramble anymore, because you can't get attacked by ten rivals at once. It's a tube. Only one beetle can fit in the tunnel at a time, and so it's not like they consciously decided to fight duels because it's more honorable or anything like that. Suddenly they're in a tunnel, and because they're in a tube, they only ever fight one rival at a time. Boom, Just like that. It's the catalyst, as simple as that. All of a sudden, the males are fighting consistent, repeatable, pushing matches of strength, and in that kind of a fight, the bigger, stronger male wins. The mail with the weapons wins, and boom, those lineages start evolving. Horns. It could be big curved things on the thorax. It could be horns coming off the head. I mean, there's there's hundreds of configurations of these weapons. They've popped up again and again and again. Every single time these beetles switched from fighting in a scramble on the surface to fighting in a tube in a tunnel. Just like that on an arms race. They started getting weapons, and the weapons got bigger and bigger and bigger. So the ones I was studying, these males had big horns. They're guarding the tunnel. They're fighting these duels with rivals at the entrance, and that's when the little sneaky guys break the rules. The little males are never gonna win their smaller body size. They're not as strong they've got they don't even have horns, I mean little nubbins where the weapons would be, so they got no weapons. They're never gonna win a fair fight. But they don't fight fair. They break the rules, and so they act like a female. They dig their own tunnel, they mine down in there, and then they cut over and they intercept the guarded tunnel. So you're the big guy at the entrance fighting the little sneaky buggers are are basically mining their way in beneath you, getting into your tunnel, going down, finding the female, meeting with the female, sneaking out again. The big guys that the entrance are oblivious that same thing exists with salmon. Uh chinook. Salmon have an alternate life history called precocious males. Or the jack exactly, but there's one there's ones that um unlike Jack's don't even go to the ocean, so they'll they'll become sexually mature like six months. Yeah, so so they're like jack didn't go to the ocean, Well Jack's do. Jack's do go to the ocean. So so Jack's there's there's multiple life histories and and a lot of these these salmon species. So you know, you've got everything from the big forty pound males that spent four years in the ocean to the jack's that just spent one year to the precocious males that never even go out. And so they'll be sexually mature like three inches long, and they'll hiden the rocks with with like you know, to fifty pound chinook and then the hen goes to layer eggs and they I've seen videos of this actually my my my buddy John. Yeah, he'll go in and jizz on him before before the big buck can and never even know it, and he doesn't have to go to all the expense of going to the ocean and and all the dangers that after six months exactly, it takes four years opportunity. And I've also read about how that that's helpful. Um from a conservation standpoint, that that sometimes when runs get so bad, so low, as they often do in this day and age, that sometimes like if there's only the one like a couple of females who make it back to a stream to spawn, they're they're able to you know, keep the keep the line going, keep the population exactly. You know, in college you think about it too, is will be like it's like the dude who um, I can't wait to see like a dude. Of girls are like, oh he's funny, right, that's like your guy that like burrows in right exactly. He's like playing a totally different trip, you know, yeah the friend zone. Yeah, he's fun I like he's funny. It's like he's a little digger digging in. You can tell me any everybody else is all fighting, so in beatles and things like this, we call it an alternative reproductive tactic or an alternative meeting tactic. And and lots of big horn sheep they've got coursers that because when a big male is fighting and distracted in a battle, a little guys running and chase the females off in corner him. What do you call those coursers? Aren't they called coursers and big horn sheep? Well, yeah, he's got a favorite thing. Are you gonna bring up your shirkers? Johnie? I thought about him, then I started not too Yeah, anyone, I'll hit you because he's backed up as it is. But okay, he's backed up by one question. Well he's playing it safe. He's backed up by one question. But he happened with the shirts, happening with the shirkers. We just want to know dogs opinion on its opinion on shirkers. Uh, you've heard of val Geist? Yeah what was that? He's not like our uncle or anything. No, I mean that was a loaded Yeah, well he's a loaded character. I mean I never actually met him, but I've read a ton of his work because he did a lot of the early conceptual work on the evolution of crazy structures. Yeah. Yeah, that's the big problem is it was mostly ideas and not a lot of data. But you know, I mean, now and then people get it right in a surprising number of his ideas that he just threw out there and never actually backed up, a lot of those ideas are turning out to be right. Yeah, we've had this conversation a lot of times. We're a lot of researchers such as yourself. Well, we'll talk about the um you know, his practice of being like, you know, what might have happened right enough times, it's like probability at the wall. So the idea of shirkers, which were bucks or bulls that would remove themselves from the breeding game or the rut and for four or five years just hang out at the top of the hill where the grass is thick and green lush, load up and load up and load up until at the point where they were bigger body wise, there was some bigger antler wise, and they could stroll in and they could breed everybody in pass their jeans. In one season, they could own the you know, the breeding rights. So I don't know whether those animals exist because I don't study on gult populations, but it wouldn't surprise me really. So let me give you an extreme example. Wraps Like it's about so so there are fish that that go even one step further. So so they start out life as a female. Because most females are able to reproduce. The variance and reproductive success, the difference between winners and losers females is pretty small. And then it's the males where the competition is really stark, and them get nothing in a very small percentage of them get all the reproduction. And so they'll start out as females and play it safe and breed literally as females while you know the breeding is good. And then and only if they get big enough and strong enough and the alpha male gets killed and he's suddenly removed and there's a vacancy, then the sort of next biggest in line switches from female to male, takes on the male status and steps into that role. It's in a way, it's like your shirker, except that you're not just sitting there eating on the greener pastor you're actually reproducing as a female that whole time. But you only flip and take on the really risky you know, high reward high whatever you want to say, that risky strategy. If and when you're big enough to tell me again, what's pieces was that? W R A S S. It's it's a coral reef there like Napoleon rass And I was just I just saw this on the Ultimate The New Blue Planet um from from BBC, which is on Netflix. They have a really cool segment on that and and how it goes away and the body goes undergoes that incredible change and it grows that huge bump on its head and yeah changes, it's sex. Yeah, man, you know what that program needs is uh two versions, one with David and one without him. I cannot listen to that, dude. Oh my god, I could listen to that, dude. All it makes it. It makes it that I watch the high end nature documentaries really like I feel like everybody because I feel like we tried, didn't we try getting Morgan Freeman and uh, I would so much prefer that. I heard a bird show up, a bird, you know, and then like the bird joins the thing just kills me. Man. It's like, would you please just say the lines writes the lines that anyway? Anyway. Another example bull frogs or frog A lot of frog populations, not bull frogs, but like tangara frogs and chorus frogs. They sing and the call that they sing is an honest signal of the size of the male. I mean again, they're they're larynx size tracks with their bodies. The big the big bull frogs are deeper the females can tell. The females orient towards the big guys. But singing like that is dangerous. They're out there calling, calling, calling, calling, they get hammered by bats that q in on the same properties of the song and eat them all. And so when you're out there singing, it's dangerous. You're risking death. And if you're a medium quality, mediocre, puny, little male, why would you go risk death if you're not gonna win anyway, Because there's a big guy over there, and all the females are going to go over there. And so when you find these populations, you find, first of all, a lot of the smaller males shut up. They play it safe. So they are the ultimate shirkers. They sneak, they hang out quiet, acting like a female. They're not singing singing singing, they look and act like a female. They creep up to the territory is with the big stud males, and they hang out on the edges, and they try to intercept females and mate with them as they come into the big male and then and then when they get big enough, and only when they get big enough, they switch over and start calling. And you can show that you can go in and take out the big guys. Just pull him out, remove him. All of a sudden, there's this pond and the big studs are gone. The next male. It's like the males in line can figure it out, like, holy sh it, he's not there anymore. Boom, they stop sneaking and they start calling and they step into so so shirking is real. Whether it happens in dear, I don't know, but it happens in frogs. That happens in a lot of things. How are you feeling, because that's how you brought up sugars. You got shot down bad and the biologists didn't agree. He all but came over and hit up sugar. But let's come back to the one that I'm behind on. Can I do that? Well, you tell me what you're behind on. So when I'm behind on, you mentioned that, you know, body size is the same, but antlers differ a lot. And we started flirted with his topic from different angles. It comes back to the signal. It's like, what is the thing that's sort of advertising the status or the size or the quality of a male. And in the frogs we just talked about, you know, the big guys have a deeper call. They sound different. The females can tell. It's an honest signal. You can't fake it. The only way to have a low song is to be huge, and if you're a little wimpy guy, there's just nothing you can do. You're stuck. It is. It is an intrinsically honest signal because it's difficult. You can't fake it. You can't be a puny little male and just suddenly say I'm going to sing the sexy song today. If you don't have the body to do it, you can't fake it. And signals like that are more stable evolutionarily, they're less susceptible to cheaters to collapse. Those signaling systems last a long time, and females that happen to pay attention to honest signals do better. They make better decisions than females that that might be more fickle or pay attention to other things that don't matter. And over time, female preferences evolve and track in on the things that are the most expensive, the most difficult for males to do, the most honest signals that you really can't fake. And and that's a part to biology that we know a lot about for big bird displays and song bird calls, all these things. They tend to be very expensive, they tend to be almost impossible to fake. They tend to be extravagant, charismatic, obvious things that a female can see really easily from a long way away. And they tend to be super variable. So if you took ten, I don't want Let's go back to the aim. He took a whole bunch of mails and lined them up, and you looked at things like body size, they differ a little bit. You know, the little guys might be about half as big as the big guys. But you look at the ornaments or the songs or whatever the signal is that they're focusing on, and it's wildly variable. Be tenfold, twentyfold, fifty fold difference in size or quality between the puny guys and the big guys. And that's not an accident. That's sort of how these signaling systems evolved in these animals, and it makes them a really important sort of differentiator of winners and losers. Back to sexual selection, it's the males with the best calls, or the the sexiest signals, or the most charismatic colorful displays. Those are the ones that win. You can't fake it. The only way to do that is to be a rock star, and the females que in on that and they pick the rock stars. So in talking about the percentage differences, like like, imagine that you have a year and a half old white tailed deer. Okay, whatever, he's a hundred twenty pounds, he's got little spike antlers. But then that's exactly the next year the deer could be whatever pounds and how what magnitude larger. So so you're you're asking antler questions. I work on beetles. I can only get if I tooks beetles be so beetles are a little simpler in the sense that I don't have them. The age cohorts confounding things because the biggest bat bucks and bulls are also the oldest. It's not an accident and it's part of the same equation. At the end of the day, the males with the biggest antlers are also the oldest and the most dominant and in the best physiological condition. It's not a coincidence that you're boone and crockett bull has the antlers that it has that's not an accident. But age is part of that. With the beatles, it's simpler because they're all sort of the same age. That's the point I never thought of. That's a good point with insects. It's they're all the same age. They're all adults. A little teeny guy is never gonna once he comes out a metamorphosis, goes from a grub to a beetle. He's stuck. It's like a suit of armor. It's not going to change. A little guy has a little horn, and he's gonna have a little horn till the day he dies. So you take age out of the equation, but it's the same process. I never thought about how how much that kind of simplifies things, just in terms of explaining it. The biology is the same too. But say I took a hundred males line them. I showed you a box before we started today, a box with like a hundred beetles all lined up in a row. And if I took that sample and I measured body size, and I compared the smallest guy all the way to the biggest, i'd find a nice sort of even gradient from little to big, and it'd be about a twofold one and half to two fold difference. The biggest beetles probably twice as long or twice as wide as the littlest beetle. But if I look at the horns, I'm looking at about a sixtyfold difference. I mean much here, not How do I say that two times different? I'm getting confused on air. Here, it's more like a fifteen to twenty fold sorry, difference between antler size. So two fold difference embody size and a fifteen to twenty fold difference in the antler size or the horn size. So so it comes back to what you mentioned a minute ago. The antlers are more variable the horns, and these beetles are more variable. You look at tusks, you look at any of these big weapons systems, fiddler crab claws, all these kinds of weapons are big. They're expensive, and they're wildly variable from mail to mail, and that's all part of the same thing. The reason they're variable is they're expensive. The little guys can't afford it. Only the best conditioned animals can afford to produce the really big weapons. Everybody else is stuck with a compromise, and so you end up having this huge sort of spectrum from the whimps with a little tiny things to the superstar best condition studs with the massive weapons. And it's not an accident. It's not random at all. For the beatles is it's who who is best at being a grub. It has a lot to do with that has to do with access to food, but it's more complicated than that, because who gets the best food in the field. You know, in the lab, I can manipulate I give them a lot of food, and I get huge beetles with massive horns. I give them very little food. They all grow up stunted and tiny, and none of them have any big weapons at all, so I can manipulate it. But in the wild it's not an accident. Same with elk and deer, it's not a coincidence. The best dominant individuals have the best territories, and they're the ones that are able to keep everybody else away so their kids have the least amount of competition. They're the ones that are most resistant to pathogens and parasites, the healthiest, the least likely to get sick, so everything sort of lines up in their favor, and those individuals have the most resources available to them. Other individuals are forced to more peripheral habitats. They're dealing with more crowded conditions. They're stressed out because they're losing the competition for access to resources all the time. The stress interacts with their immune systems, so they're sick a lot more often. You know, they have access to less food, poor quality food, more competition, more disease, more parasites. All that stuff plays out and separates the winners from the losers. And none of it's an accident. I mean, it's it's compounding and sort of self reinforcing. But the best conditioned animals are the ones that tend to win. In the insects, it even gets into the parents behavior. The females that are the best at picking the right spots to lay their eggs, their kids hatch and they just eat what's there. But you know, there's some individuals that are in really good places and other individuals that are allowsy places, and so right from the day they're born, it's it isn't a fair world. There's winners and losers, but it's not random. Has a lot to do with the behavior of the parents. We had a guy on who deals with nutrition and ungulus. Yeah, I would love to have heard that, and I find it. And he talks about this idea that, uh, the people talk about an area having good genetics for box, right, and so there's some area grows big box because of genetics. And he refutes that and talks about nutrition being the driver and not that animals nutrition, but in some ways a deer's eventual rack, it's going to depend on both it's it's mothers in utero nutrition. Totally. We see this with people that you can take these animals, you can take these animals from places with quote shitty genetics and put them in a situation genetics and that would mean habitats that are marginal with poor quality indovice in our lingo and like hunter lingo genetics the animals. Yes, but I'm telling about what hunters talk about. Hunters will be like why you know, like why are all these big bucks coming out of Iowa right, and be like, oh, you know the ioh, they got the genetics the population. But I'm not I'm talking about how people use it. Use it like that. They're like, oh, it's got the feed and got the genetics right, and they take animals from these places that's supposedly like out of the mule here from the Black Hills, supposedly have bad genetics, So there's nothing you can do that it's gonna be small. But you take mulder from the Black Hills and move them to a place where no, you're not changing the genetics. You take males and females move into place with different nutrition, and all a sudden their giants. So in general, weapons and ornaments and all those other traits, but weapons this kind, the sexually selected weapons tend to be exquisitely sensitive to nutrition. More sense. So we did experiments in the beetles. Will will manipulate nutrition, same kind of thing I just talked about if I give them a little food or a lot of food. Body size about a twofold difference, wing size about a twofold difference, eye size about a twofold difference, horn size about a fifteen fold difference. And so same animals, same experiment, same difference in nutrition. And legs and eyes and wings and all those things are sensitive to nutrition. They're all responding, but the weapons are responding more so, weapons are exquisitely sensitive to nutrition. It doesn't mean it's not genetic because it's not an accident in the wild. It's the best quality animals that usually end up succeeding in defending the best quality nutrition and the best resources. So you get this interaction between the quality of the genetics, the genotypes of those animals, and the environments that those animals are in. But all of that comes together and is expressed in these traits, these weapons, and there you very minute, if you very nutrition, I guarantee you you're gonna have an enormous effect on antler size. So so let me follow the logic here. I want to step back because I know we've been going off on all these directions. What I've been trying to talk about is the kinds of ecological situations that can spark an arms race, that can take a population that doesn't have big weapons, that's going about its business. Something changes, and all of a sudden, from that point forward, it's the suit you know, it's the bigger, stronger males with the weapons that win. They're able to monopolize access to some kind of resource, something that gives them an edge in the way that they come into contact with females. Something changed, and all of a sudden, bigger is better, and mails with the biggest weapons win. I talked in the dung beetle example about how suddenly starting to fight over tunnels, a simple change in behavior aligns the fights so that they're not scrambles anymore, now they're duels. That change in behavior, all of a sudden, bigger is better, because in a duel, the stronger male wins, and if a mail has a longer horn and he can pry better and get rid of the opponent better with the weapon, than the mail with the longer weapon wins. And so all of a sudden, that population gets tipped into this trajectory that we're talking about as an arms race, and from that point forward, bigger is better, and so very quickly the population or cross generations is going to ratchet up to bigger and bigger weapons. So that kind of a phenomenon happens with elephant tusks, It happens with cariboo, it happens with fiddler crabs, It happens with all these animals with these crazy weapons. The particular trigger might be different, but they all fight in duels, one on one contest, and once they start on this path, the arms race plays out the same way. Every single time. And that's a point I kind of want to take a second to make. Once that button gets pushed, go that beatles on the trajectory. It's in an arms race. The weapons get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and a very very set set of things happens. As they get big, they get expensive. We talked about cost, So they get more and more expensive. What that means is fewer and fewer mails are up to the muster. Most of the males now can't pay that price because it's getting more and more and more expensive very quickly, the mails are out of the game. They just don't have the resources to produce the really big weapons, and so they're pretty much gone. Colladteral they lose. The population becomes more and more concentrated around a smaller and smaller subset of victorious males, and the benefits of these big weapons get stronger and bigger and bigger, and the whole process ratchets up. But you reach a point, a tipping point, where the winners and losers are so starkly different from each other, and so many males are getting nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, that some of them somewhere stumble on a to break the rules. They cheat, Oh I forgot one more step. So the weapons get big, they get expensive. The fact that only a few males can do it, that's what gives us that variability we were talking about. That's the point where antlers are more variable than legs or ears or body size or fiddler crab claws are more variable than body size. All of a sudden, now those weapons are so expensive that only a few Boone and Crockett quality individuals can do it. The rest of them are stuck with suboptimal versions. The variation in the traits is pronounced that tip. That means that you suddenly got a signal. You've got a thing out there that is an honest indicator of fighting ability. It's not an accident that the biggest males have the biggest they're the studs. So if I'm a mediocre male with a medium rack and I look and I size up my opponent and he's got a massive rack, do I want to escalate in that fight? No, because really he's gonna beat me. Because it's an honest signal, and that male with bigger antlers is really the better fighter. And so in these animal populations, whether it's beetles, crabs, and I mean caribou, elephants, all these systems. Once the arms races at that point, and these weapons are big, they're expensive, they're variable, they're an honest signal of fighting ability. The next step kicks in and the weapons start acting as a deterrent. There a signal you don't actually have to fight with it, because all I need to do is look at that antler and I know I'm gonna lose. And so more and more in these populations, the small guys back down. They they size each other up, they spar a little bit, they look at each other. You see these great examples of antelope sort of strutt in side by side, or fallow deer. There's beautiful pictures of these males. They run side by side and they turn on the run back there like looking at each other whose antlers are bigger. And then the smaller ones usually leave. And so you reach this point in the cycle where the weapons are big, they're expensive, they're a signal, and all of a sudden they're a deterrent. You don't even have to fight anymore because most of your competition walks away because you're the stud and you've got the weapons and it's honest, And that's the point where you start. That's where there's tons of military pair aloes. By the way, if we go there and then you reach this point where the weapons are huge, only a tiny fraction of individuals can afford it. Nobody else is even in the game. They can't even not only can they not fight, I mean they don't even bother trying to fight. And that's the point where usually somebody breaks the rules the asymmetric warfare, the guerilla equivalent. Somebody cheats and figures out a way to screw that. Man, I'm not playing by those rules anymore, the sneaky dumb It's like, I'm not going to fight with the entrance. I'm not gonna win. So they dig a side tone and find another way, and that's the beginning of the end. Once the sneakers or the cheaters start doing too well, the whole thing collapses, The weapons disappear, and the whole process starts again. That cycle. Something aligns like a star so that all of a sudden, bigger is better population starts launching onto this trajectory bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger. They get bigger, they get expensive, they become exaggerated as a signal, they become a deterrent cheaters, and aage collapse. That sort of process repeats itself over and over again, and I would argue that just about any animal you can imagine, with the exception of the saber tooth cats that has huge weapons like that, has gone through exactly that cycle. And that's the parallel with the military. Military technologies go through the same cycle. They get triggered for the same reasons. Once they get triggered, the weapons get bigger and bigger and bigger. As they get bigger, they get more and more and more expensive. As they get more and more expensive, fewer countries or nations can afford to play the game. And then you reach a point where they're a deterrent because you got the weapons and nobody else does. And then the cheaters invade and the whole thing class and along comes some guys with airplane tickets and box cutters and brings you to your knees exactly, or cyber hackers. All throughout your book, you talk, you talk about military. Yeah, sure, let me go off on that, but I wanted to throughout you but you talk about military parallels. So you get into armaments, um, the arms race, but there's one, there's one that doesn't go towards bigger, bigger, bigger, And you talk about, uh, projectile points. Can you tell everyone about? So I can't remember where it's it's it's like I'm losing myself now, Like I can't remember what example you brought up that got you to write about Clovis points and full time, I am a sucker for history. I love the past. I love the past. When I find a fossil and I realized I'm looking at something that's a snapshot from something way in the past. We just got back from taking our kids two weeks in Europe. I mean, I was blown away by POMPEII. The whole idea of walking around and looking at the mosaics in a bathroom of somebody's house from a thousand years ago. Just I mean, I get a rush. It's a palpable endorphin rush. I love that feeling. And for me growing up, I used to find arrowheads in my neighbor's tobacco field in Tennessee, and after the rains, I would go walk through these fields and just look at the slopes of the dirt at the basis of the plants. Look for the little glisten of pieces of flint or absidian that we're coming out of the dirt. And there's this feeling I don't have. Some people get it, some people don't. I don't know how to describe it. But if I pick up an arrowhead and hold it, and I'm the first person to touch that since the person that made it, and those things can be three, four or five, ten thousand years old, depending on where you are and what they are. If it's Clovis, it could be fifteen thousand years old. That's this priceless moment of touching the past. And I used to get a kick out of that from his I mean basically from when I could walk onward. I love that history. And so for me, when I had a chance to look at all these weapons, to go back and look at arrowheads and really think about what, you know, what kinds of processes, agents of selection sort of shaped the evolution of the form of these arrowheads. It was it was a fun, fun digression. But you brought it up in the context of them evolving to be smaller that rather than larger, And I think it's a really good parallel. I've tried to say it already in this interview. Most of the time animal weapons aren't big. Most animals don't have an enormous racks sticking on the top o coffee table fused to the top of their head. Most species, it's not worth it. It's too expensive, it's too awkward. Why the hell would you do something like that? And so most of the time it's not worth it. We talked today about the rare circumstances where the stars line up and all of a sudden, in one population of one species, it is worth it, and you go off on this trajectory. But the arrowheads are a really nice, clear illustration of a of a more typical situation where it's not worth it to get really big, and it illustrates the point that weapons are shaped by costs and benefits. And so with a with a projectile point, how do I where do I start? So so what I did is I picked up a literature that it looked at the so called evolution of projectile points in North America from you know, the earliest people that we think came across the Bearing Street, and these were the Clovis people, and the fulsome people's all the way through to you know, effectively that the colonization from Western Europeans and sort of the end of that era. And they have beautiful sequences of these projectile points through time, even from within the same areas. You can look sort of over time and how the technology changed the fla making patterns, the shapes, the sizes, and what they found is that the points got smaller. So if you go way back to the Clovised time period, they were using these primarily to hunt things like Columbian mammoths, and so we found that we they found the points almost always in association with mammoth kills. They were pretty confident that that was a major source of calories for these people. And if you're gonna try to puncture through the hide of something that's thick and that big, you need a big point. And there's some pretty tight physical constraints. I brought one that we can hold and look at pretty tight physical constraints on a napped stone projectile point that they have. You have to have a point that's tailored to the size of the shaft of the spear. It has to be about one and a half times the diameter of the shaft of the spear. If the points too narrow, then when it pierces the hide, it doesn't create a slit that's big enough to allow the shaft of the spear to go in, so it hits. It goes in like an inch and it stops. So longer wider blade cuts a bigger gash slice and it creates an opening that lets the shaft of the spear go into the animal. But if you make them too wide, it's brittle and they snap. So you have this sort of you know, the sort of tension between points that are too too small for your shaft of your spear and points that are too wide and they break. And the happy mediums about one and a half times, so we know the early Clovis this isn't Clovis, but they were big, big points with really thick shafted spears that they needed to puncture through the high of the mammoth. But those were very expensive points to make. It was hard to find pieces of obsidian without imperfections in it that would allow you to nap a point that was like you know, some of them were like six ten inches long, and it took a spectacular amount of skill to be able to pull that off without breaking these things. And then you had to carry the spears and the points with you everywhere you went. These were nomadic people. They're carrying everything with them everywhere they go. By some estimates, they'd moved two hundred miles in a year. You're carrying everything with you, so big spears are heavy. Is long as you're getting things like mammoths, it's worth it. The benefits of the big weapons are you can take down the huge prey feture people. It's a great thing. But the mammoths went extinct and they had to shift from mammoth to smaller species. The next one was the bison antiquois, which I think you've talked about in some of years of big bison but smaller than a mammoth, and so the shafts were overkilled. Suddenly it wasn't worth it to carry these huge, heavy spears and to make these really really hard to make points. So they started making smaller points that were better fit to the shaft sizes that they needed on the spears for the bison. And then when the bison antiquis went extinct, they shifted down again to big horn sheep into the modern American bison, and each time they shifted to smaller prey, they immediately got rid of the big stuff because it was too expensive to make, too expensive to carry, and they scaled down and got smaller and smaller until they had shaft sizes and point sizes that worked for the current prey. And then all that ended when they invented the bow and arrow, because suddenly you had a fundamentally different sort of projectile propulsion system and you could get by with really tiny points. And from that point forward, nobody wanted to carry the big stuff. It was too expensive, too heavy. They all switched to really lightweight, portable bone arrow technologies. So is that is that what you That? I got too far? But it's a nice illustration of costs and benefits that the big weapons were worth the price when the prey was really big and you could use them on bison, But when that prey was gone, it wasn't worth the price to make a big weapon, so you downsized it to something that was cheaper, and then you downsize it again it's something that was even cheaper. There's this sort of tension tug, a war between costs and benefits, and once the big prey were gone, the benefits weren't as big. So it's it ratcheted down to a smaller size. Explain your view on or not your view, but your insights how you want to put it into. Where we've looked, like in recent decades with our military, and how we imagined military might and how we would exercise military might, and where current lee Who is the sneak strategy, who's the beatle that tunnels who tunnels in and comes up through the floor? That one I can answer. So so step back a second and we okay, in time, I want to go out. Okay, so step back a second. I want to I want to make one thing clear. We've been talking about evolution of animal populations and winners and losers and sexual selection. In something like cariboo or elk, it's all about reproduction because the males that win, which presumably are the studs with the best antlers, the best condition, they win the harems, they get access to the most females. They win because they sire more offspring and they produce more of the kids in the next generation, and those kids carry the antlers because the way that the antlers are copied is through producing more elk. The winners have more kids, and the currency of success is numbers of offspring. When you talk about military weapons is different. We're not talking about who has kids, whether you have a better machine gun and more. We're not talking about reproduction they anymore. We're talking about manufactured techne But historically there's a lot of instances where it does control reproduction. There are the Middle Ages is a good one, and weapons are used. Definitely a factory production. But people find where like it seems like the male there will be a population and it will seem like there's a sudden, very radical shift and the population in the area from and you can see markers from a conquering invasion where it seems like want to go there. Yes, there seems with conquests, and there's no question that military leaders and political leaders tend, especially if you're including illegitimate offspring, to sire an awful of offspring. So reproduction. So reproduction, I'm not trying to say what you say is still the ultimate currency for success and us too. That will piss everybody off, But at the end of the day, you know, when you look a thousand generations from now, the people that are gonna be out there are going to be offspring from people that were here today. So so yes, reproduction still matters. But what I'm trying to say is, if I want to understand this arrowhead, or I want to look at airplane technology or a tank technology or missile technology, it really doesn't matter how many kids the person that designed it has or how many kids the person that flew it has. That's a separate question. So yes, military issues are associated with dying and with breeding, but we're not that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the missile or the tank or the arrowhead. And when you're talking about a weapon, or take a machine gun, you know in a K forty seven that is a thing there, there are copies made in a factory. They're cranking out a K forty seven's. The factory is making more a K for it. That's not me having kids, that's the factory making more a K forty sevens. But if I look at the population of submachine guns out there or assault rifles out there, I could go out there, just like I could say how many dark mice and white mice are out there in my population, I could say how many m sixteen. How many A K forty sevens. If I want to characterize the population of assault rifles on this planet right now, I could probably find fifty different models out there. A few of them are gonna be really rare. Some of them, like the a K forty seven, are going to be ridiculously common. I could talk about variation in the weapon out there now, and realistically that's going to change. Some models are going to get picked up and spread and they're gonna become more common, and they're gonna get adjusted and developed and get better and better over time. Others are gonna disappear. They're too clunky, they jam under you know, the sand gets in them, they don't work. Nobody wants them, they're too expensive. Nobody wants to produce them for their militaries. So the weapons are going to change over time, and it's a turnover process, winners and losers. It's exactly the same as what we're talking about with antlers or beetles, but it's not tied to reproduction. It's tied to who wants this. You know which models are being being picked up, manufactured and spreading, and which mant models are being discontinued because they suck, or they're not cost effective, or nobody wants them, and so you still have winners and losers. You can talk about the technology. It will change over time. If you look at the assault rifle, over the last fifty years, it's changed. It's better now, it's more efficient. Now. People have been playing around with it, trying to change the design. Sometimes it's by accident. Sometimes their engineers trying to make it more efficient, make the cartridges work better, make it more cost effective, make it more portable. People are tweaking it and playing around. It's still in a K forty seven, but they're playing with it to try to make it better. That's variation. That's just like mutations cropping up in a mouse population making them a little faster, a little thicker, a little lighter. You know, there's variation, and some of it sucks, it doesn't work at all, it's gone. Some of it works really well. People grab it and run with it. That's evolution. So without as a backdrop for weapons, now we can come back full circle and say, well, when would weapons particular technologies get caught up in an arms race where all of a sudden you need bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and historically there's really good sort of accounts of early weapons technologies and where this happens. So if you go back to the Romans and the Greeks and and the Syrian time periods Mediterranean, there were galleys that were these order you know, the try reams. There were these ships that were rowing soldier back and forth for many many years, like a thousand years. These ships were called penticonters. They had fifty rowers and there was nothing special about them. They just carried troops from place to place. They scrambled about on the ocean. They weren't actually weapons. They were just boats that took people along the shorelines to transport troops. For a thousand years, nothing changed. All the countries had the same basic ship. The design was pretty much indistinguishable. And then somebody invents a battering ram boom, just like that new technology. It's just it's like a beetle horn. It's a thing that sticks off the front of the boat. But oh my god, from that point forward, all the rules were written because now you could take your ship smashing into somebody else and saying k his his ship. And so overnight they went from shuttling people like a scramble to hitting another opponent ship one on one in a duel. That's that's the same trigger that works in animals. That's the spark. All of a sudden, whoever's got the fastest ship wins. Now you've got an arms race because a bigger ship, of faster ship wins in that kind of one on one encountering. Just like that, after nothing happening for a thousand years, overnight these technologies exploded. As people started making bigger and bigger and bigger ships. They started getting longer until they buckled. They started adding another row of rowers, so buyreams came along, than try reams, than five six is. They got bigger and bigger and bigger until these ships were monstrosities that were effectively useless. But the point is a change in technology caused the weapons the ships to line up one on one in a duel, exactly like the dung beetles in a tunnel. Suddenly they're facing each other one on one, and that was it. You can look at various periods throughout military history and the same kind of a process has happened. The Cold War was the most precedent and sort of alarming of those and in that case it happened at the level of nation states and political landscapes, but you effectively had the US and the USS are the superpowers that were still standing after the Second World War, going toe to toe and the scene that's a one on one duel, and that sparked an arms race that led to unbelievably appid development of missiles, aircraft, tanks, nuclear weapon everything, I mean, all the weapons technologies that we had sort of got folded into that race. And and if you want to go into that, it turns out the behavior of the nations during that time period was exactly like elk or fiddler crabs or beetles. Those two nations didn't go nuclear and all doubt full on battle. They sparred. They had little conflagrations in Afghanistan and Korea and Vietnam where they sort of pushed each other a little bit. They used conventional weapons, they didn't use the nuclear or the weapons of mass destruction. They sized each other up and then back down again. That's exactly what animals do in that kind of situation. You know what's interesting about when we think about the parallels and then the things that don't line up. Would be like with in World War Two, that the US becoming the people who developed that refers to develop the atomic bomb, would be as though, I mean, we started that war not a super power, right, but by the time we came out and we were emerging as it would be like if a giant. It wouldn't be that the hornless beetle suddenly came up. It would be like the horned beetle. The wolf with the big bad horn was like, oh and guess what else? I also have fangs. You know, it's a little bit like we we upset our, we upped our, we trumped our own action by developing the atomic weapon, and then thereby making in some in some degrees, made this man Japan this naval superpower. It made that naval might irrelevant because we had the atomic bomb. It rewrote the rules, completely changed the game. But that's again the arms races ratchet up, they escalate, so the simplest way to think of it as beatles again. And you know it got or an antelope picture. You've got seven inch horns out there, and suddenly somebody comes along with eight inch horns and they start winning. Pretty soon all their kids grandkids, great grandkids. Pretty soon everybody's got eight inch horns and that's not enough. And now somebody pops up with a nine inch horn, and and so in a sense, the sizes of these weapons ratchet and steps. But you can also have sort of fundamentally new technologies that pop up on the scene that just completely rewrite the rules. And so arms races can go in lots of directions, and usually they're additive. So you still need the first weapon, but now you need the second one too, and I need the third. You need tanks and submarines and bombers and nuclear weapons. You know, it got more and more expensive because all these things were sort of compounded. But the nuclear weapon game that was that was like a spontaneous mutation that completely rewrote the rules because incontinental and had delivered with the ship. It was like the Indianapolis. You had like deliver it to the Pacific theater in a ship. You had to have a powerful air force to get the thing a field and put it where you want it. And so you're, like you said, it's like a ratcheting up because you're relying on all these capabilities. Because really you're assessing your capabilities against to your opponent, and they're constantly trying to do better at their capability. So every time they get a new technology, then they're up. Then there ahead of you, the races on to surpass them. It really ratchets into this vicious cycle that can lead out of control. So so where a new weapons, So where we are today? That the Cold War obviously, but the technologies are still out there. And one interesting sort of twist on that system is during the Cold War, the most expensive state of the art weapons, the ones that were the equivalent of the antlers in your elk or your cariboo or the horns and my beetles, were the nuclear weapons. Though that was the new technology. That was the one that was the most sophisticated, the most difficult to to actually generate. And then you had to have all, like you said, the delivery. You had to have the infrastructure to be able to deliver that, which took all the sensor nets, that took all the guidance systems, it took the whole space race was basically a cloak and you know, a facade for developing this will technology that could deliver nuclear weapons to an opponent. And so all of that stuff had to be there. Today, we're in a very different world now. We've got stockpiles of these nuclear weapons cached away in places that I hate to think about, that are sort of rotting away and there their diamond doesn't because we produced a shipload of them during the Cold War. So there's tons of nuclear warheads out there that's not that's not that expensive. In fact, it's not that inconceivable that just about anybody could get their hands on them. Seven or I can't remember how many, seven or eight countries now maybe more. A couple more on the horizon. There are a couple more on the horizon. The the the really expensive weapons, the ones that are the equivalent of antlers now are conventional weapons. There are things like the F thirty five strike fighter and the new Jail four class aircraft carrier. These things cost billions and billions of dollars to produce, and only a very small number of nations have the technology, the sophistication, the infrastructure, the trained personnel, that all the stuff you need to produce and maintain and use these weapons. So I mean, I had a chance to is it one of our nuclear aircraft carriers? A couple of months ago. Astounding experience looking at our operations in action in the Pacific. As we cycled through, they have the F thirty five strike fighters landing on a carrier for one of the first times ever on a carrier. I got to stand like as close as I am to you and watch these things come screaming down and catch the tailhook. These technologies are incredible. A helmet on an F thirty five costs half a million dollars. Every single bomb that they put on these things as a million dollars out of the gates. I mean, we're spending billions of dollars the nuclear triad, the infrastructure that we have is is trillions of dollars a year. And and so these are the state of the art weapons now. And you asked about the sneaky beatles. What's the cheater that we have to worry about. It's cyber hackers. I mean, it seems crazy, but we're spending billions of dollars on some astoundingly good time. I mean, I got these fighters are amazing, absolutely amazing. I don't know if any of you had a chance to see them. If you know much about the F thirty five, it is a supersonic, super maneuverable stealth fighter that the helmets. The reason the helmets cost half a million dollars on these things is they're completely integrated with sensor systems so that the movements of the pilots are tracked within the within the cockpit of the plane. So any direction the pilot looks, the direction they're looking is automatically integrated with sensors that are built into the skin of the aircraft. In that direction they're tracking the pupils of the pilot. And so they've got infrared sensors, they've got all the GPS stuff, they've got this the topographic maps, everything all overlaid. It's not even like there's a screen. The old ones had a heads up display screen. It's just there. They can look straight through their legs. They're crotched down the bottom of the plane. There's it's gone. It's nothing. They see all the way to the ground because it completely integrated. They've unobstructed three and sixty degree view all the time, heat sensor, everything all sort of overlaid into an integrative picture. It's amazing. But all of these technologies depend on software, so we're spending a fortune on these incredible technologies and they you know, we're the Boone and crocket ball right now. Those are the state of the our weapons and we really are safer because of them. They're amazing. But the sneaky little beetles sort of worming away from the sidelines or the hackers because if they can get past, we can't. Pilot can't fly these things without software. You can't land these planes without software that they literally can't handle the planes without the software because the planes can too maneuvers that are fast enough that the pilot would black out from the g forces. So they have to integrate whatever the pilot does with the stick with sort of built in sensor systems that that that interpret the pilot's movement in a way that doesn't cause the plane to do something that the blacks out the pilot. So you literally can't even go old fashioned and fly these things without the software that the aircraft carry. Was awesome. I got to talk to Captain, I got to talk to the first officer, I got to talk to the master chief, the cooks, I got to talk to people running the nuclear actors. I mean I got to meet anybody and everybody. They were awesome about letting us as a civilian go in and just look what was happening. But every single step of that operation is critically dependent on software. They can't control the nuclear reactor on the ship without software. They can't navigate without software. They can't control the positions of the planes without software. They can't orchestrate the landings and the takeoffs of the planes without software. The way that they communicate with all the rest of Norad and everything is all software. So so our vulnerability the flanks that we've got exposed right now is the firewalls on our software. And they know it. I mean, I'm not teaching telling them anything. Yes, I did get a chance to go to find d C and give a talk in front of the former director of the n s A and the CIA and all these top brass from the military about sneaky dung beetles and sneaky big horn sheep and salmon, actually telling them the parallels. But you know, I'm not teaching them anything. They don't know. They they are totally aware of this and and that's the new arms race. So when I was at this conference talking to these guys, they said, yeah, yeah, we've the Chinese have buildings full of people that are trying seven to hack into our systems, and we've buildings full of people that are hacking into theirs. And the ideas each side is trying to insert code. It's not just stealing trade secrets. So they could go build their own F thirty five, that would cost them a fortune. Why go build your own jet if you can insert code that renders ours useless. So so the idea that they're called zero day attacks is if they can insert code that sits, then we can't find it because it's not doing anything. It's just sitting there. So it's harder for us to tell that it's there until you know, zero day when they need it, they turn it on and they can take over our technologies and use it against us. That's the fear. We spend all the money, we produce the technologies, they hijack those technologies and use them against us. That is the ultimate game changer sneak strategy that we gotta worry about. But the military is on it, and their argument is they have so much infiltrating all their technologies that we can damn sure shut them down too. So so the general actually said this is the new arms race. It's like we're all sort of racing each other to who can hijack and control the software or the other side. That's the new real that's that's our new Cold war crazy stuff. It's a long way from dung beetles and rhinoceros beetles, I'll tell you that. No, it's great though, man, you do a great job of bringing it all together. Thanks. Like the parts about deer, No, it's phenomenal. Is it possible to tell where you are in within an arms race in a partaylor species? Oh? I thought you mean us. It's like it's a little scary when you try to do that. That says our aircraft carriers. Had all kinds of human comparison questions coming through my head and I've passed it all. Elk kef bigger antlers or they have like very possible. Yeah, yeah, I think that arms racist. Still, well, it's hard to say so. First of all, with animal populations, you know, we talked. Sam brought up the fact that evolution can happen really fast. And when you're dealing with antibiotics applied to a population of BacT here as you're talking hours, you know, I met population is going to adapt within twenty four hours fast. Because they're head influenza. People want to know why they get to get a flu shot every single year. It's because the flu virus is evolving so fast that six months, eight months out, it's such a genetically different beast that the vaccinations we just produced don't match it anymore. And so those are situations where it's happening really fast. I mean hours to days, two weeks. You've got to stay on top of it. Elk rhinosters beetle is probably a little bit slower, still fast in the grand scheme of things, because these kinds of arms races are quicker than normal background evolution. But but we're talking decades, the hundreds of years. No, but I can flip that back getting smaller. We've got really good evidence. This will be a hot button topic for your audience, but I know some of the scientists. We have very compelling evidence that things like big horn sheep populations have been selected on by trophy hunting and have actually evolved in response to have smaller and smaller horns. So we've actually driven the evolution of smaller weapons in contemporary populations of an ungulate big horn sheep and they've got data where they stopped the trophy hunting and the horns rebounded and evolved to be really really big again. So we can see weapon evolution even on the scale of things like to you or big horn sheep happening over you know, two decades, three decades. It's not ours like flu, and it's not millennia. It's it's still pretty fast with that, you know, like a doll sheet, for instance, and most of Alaska, a doll sheep becomes legal when he develops the three sixty degree horn. If al's a doll sheet, you'd be better off. If that didn't, you're still vulnerable because of other things. But that's like the key indicator. And one that gets there fast, one that gets a full curl fast is I don't know, and I don't know how actually two. And if if there's tens of thousands of dollar sheep and a relatively light hunting pressure, so only a couple of dozen trophy animals get yanked, maybe that's not really that big an effect, and the benefits in the local populations are still going to be so great to keep going. But if you're talking about hunting pressure, where you're really taking a sizeable proportion of the top animals, then yeah, that would apply very strong selection to the males to not have that last curl. We do that with fisheries. One of the problems we have things like Atlantic cod populations is gill nets catch the big animals the small ones slipped through, so we tend to selectively harvest the older. Big fish keep growing as they get You know this better than me saying they get They keep growing as they get older. So big fish are also older fish. So we're selectively harvesting the biggest and the oldest fish on a very large scale. When you consider the scope of the Atlantic cod fisheries and the numbers of ships and the numbers of fish that they're taking, and there's really good evidence over the last thirty fifty years that the animals have both evolved to grow more slowly so they stay smaller, and they started reproducing at a smaller size and a younger age. So they're beginning to reproduce smaller than they used to because all the big guys are being pulled out. It's the small ones that stumbled on a way to reproduce early that now winning they're small enough to get through the gillnets and they're breeding. Those are the ones producing the offspring. So the populations evolving, you know, in a direction that's not so great for the fisheries industry, but it makes a lot of biological sense. We're applying selection by taking the big ones, the smaller ones start doing better, the population evolves towards a smaller size. What else you got yet, um on animal weapons? Like any like concluders, masks, like you're typing away over there. Oh, that was my question. There was about if we knew where the arms race was? Are you asked where we were in the animals? You can see in a lot of animals that the sneak tactics are already there. You study their behavior and you can find the sneaky mails or the what you call them precocious mails in the salmon and so in a way, you know you're already part way into that cycle. And by definition, if you picked it because it's got a huge weapon, it's probably already pretty far in. But but there is a fun twist there. We've known about sneaky mails for years. I mean, it's not a new aspect of animal behavior, but nobody had ever connected it to an arms race before seeing the sneaky mails as the beginning of the end, the sort of beginning of the collapse was totally new, and I got that idea from the military. And the reason is because he's saying you brought it's because it takes a long time. We can see arms races there. We see species with huge antlers. That's why I try to study these things in the first place. It's like, what the hell is happening in that beetle or this fly or that ungulate. We picked them because they've got the structures. We know something's going on, and we can infer from that that they're part way into this cycle. But we never actually get to see a collapse. But the military does. They've got really good records all the way through. They know why arms races collapse. They know why the arms raced with the Napoleon era sailing galleons collapsed. It was fire ships. Once that you know, you could set these things on fire, it was over. It was game over. They were done. We know about iron clad battleships. They know what started the arms race. They know how they got bigger and bigger and bigger. They know how nations sort of exploded in their attempts to build bigger and more of these battleships, and then they know why they became obsoleted with submarines. It was a sneaky beetle. Little beetle goes underground, minds his way into the tunnel. Submarines sneak under the surface, and they can sink even the biggest, best battleships from underwater. It's cheating that admirals hate submarines. It's an athema to them. It's dishonorable. It's like breaking the rules. It's exactly what it is, is breaking the rules. But once you've got submarines out there, you change the game and suddenly the really big battleships are obsolete. And so today it's not battleships and submarines. Well, so what we have our strike groups. We have our own submarines, and we surround our carriers now, which are the focus instead of the battleships. It's the carriers now we have to surround them with a strike group. You'll we would never send a carrier anywhere by itself. It only exists in a bubble that is created by the cruisers and the destroyers and the submarines, and the reason we need all that other stuff is because the submarines from the other side. So so the military figured out that changes in technology that broke the rules, that cheated were the things that collapsed in arms race. And they had studied it over and over again, from the ancient Mediterranean through the saline warships, the ironclad battleships, aircraft, all these systems had been worked out by military scholars and over and over again it's the sneaky, the cheaters that collapse the system. And so what was fun for me here, I'm a biologist reading all this military stuff, was to turn around and say, hey, we've got cheaters. We've known that forever. Oh they're sneak. I even found him as a grad student in my dung beetles, the sneaky mails. But putting the two pieces together and saying, wait a minute, maybe the sneakers or the collapse of the arms race in the animal systems too, that's new. We don't have a good way to test it yet because animal systems take long enough that we rarely ever get to catch it in action. So it's sort of a leap of faith at this point. It's an hypothesis that needs to be tested. But it's one of the ideas I put forward in that book, and it came from crossover between the military literature and the animal literature. And again it's it's fun, and it's only possible because these extreme weapons are so similar. The animal weapons story. Pretty much everything you could say about elk antlers or cariboo antlers you could apply verbatim to aircraft carriers or F thirty five strike fighters today. I mean, the parallels are so deep at every level that now we can go back and forth between the literatures and each side can learn from the other. Sam, what do you got? Oh, you got a good grade when you took his class. You don't, can't bring that up. Deserved a better grade? Um man? So many, so many things. One one thing I was I was curious about perusing the book, and you know, think about animal animal weapons. Um what? And you know, obviously my my mind gravitates, gravitates towards the young ulates and the antlers and everything. I was curious about non typical antler configurations and and if if that is adaptive in some way, and and I'm wondering if if perhaps that is is some form of cheating that it's a different configuration that might be able to um be defeat like that because they call it cheating because they're still paying the prosy. And I'm going to take your idea and run with it. What I would call it is variation. So again, all these populations start out with differences among individuals. Mutations pop up here and there, and if they happen to affect the way the antlers are developing, then you get a variant on the theme. The antlers a little bit different the times been. Who knows what it is, it's different. You've all seen crazy mutant antlers. Sometimes it's it's a genetic change. It's literally a heritable mutation in the genomes of these animals that affects the way they grow. And there's pretty good evidence of that. I don't know how many of you collect sheds, but probably all of you do. There's some neat places where you can show that the same bowl produces the same mutant form of the antler after year, and often you can find kids and grandkids in the same area that have the same variants. So some of these sort of defective antlers are heritable. They're they're produced somehow by something in the genome that's passed on other times. Who knows, it could be an injury to the cells or a burn or something that's not passed on. But but either way, their perturbations, their variations on the theme that's the raw material that evolution works on. I would expect most of the time they're not going to work that well. You know, thousands of millions of years of honing Antler shape and you go off in some wonkie direction and probably it's not going to function as well most of the time. But every now and then it might and all of a sudden you've got something that's better, and you might have an edge because now you've got a twist that nobody else has and that can really take off. And now your kids and grandkids and so what will happen is you'll start doing better because you've got that twist or the new time or whatever it is. And over time, across generations, if you're doing well enough, the population is going to evolve towards the point where everybody's got that new thing. And this may be the kind of process that Geist would talk about, but none of us ever get to actually see of how you go like, why why does a white tailed deer and a mule deer have, you know, antlers with the same number of times, but they branched differently. Who knows, but it might have been something like that and sistrally that sent one population off on a direction where they had a slightly different configuration than before. And so what you're talking about is the raw material that I would argue sets the stage for evolution of new shapes or new types of weapons. When we look across beetles, or you look across service, or you look across the antelope, it's really clear to us that the weapons change a lot. They don't just get big, they change in form. So there's all kinds of crazy differences and weapons, and that's sort of the big unknown mystery we're still trying to figure out. We don't have a good reason to explain why there's a thousand different kinds of beetle horns. If beetle horns are good and bigger is better, why don't they all have the same kind of horn. I can't tell you. I spent years trying to answer this stupid question. I can't tell you why two sister species of beetles have totally different shapes of horns. They're in tunnels, they're doing the same thing, they're finding the same kinds of fights. Everything else about their biology is the same. So why the hell does one of them have horns coming off the thorax and another one have a bent set of horns coming off the head. We don't know. But but but these kinds of things have to start with what you're talking about, differences, you know, those crazy variants that pop up and in some set set of circumstances and some population, it just works. Whatever it is about it, it's better and that spreads. Here's my last question for you, Um, what's the explanation of like, like, how did it come to be that starts all right there? How would it come to be? Uh, what is the advantage of losing your antlers? Or you know what I mean? Yeah, cost I think of them. I thought you man like nolutionarily, why would I get why? How? Curan warned me you might ask me that, And I was like, oh shit, I don't know the answer to that, Like how did it come to me that they like that they shed their antlers? And don't I don't know? And I quick because we've got some really good biologic here, and you were see Montana, and so I instantly as soon as I got that last night, it's like, oh my god, I don't know the answer to that. I quick wrote Mark Eva White, who's a phenomenal biologic here, really good biologists. It's like, he'll know. I don't think anybody knows. He flipped it around, he said, tell me why why Why don't you know why don't the bovids shed their antlers every year six and one half dozen of the other Why Why are you asking the question one way and not the other. But the fact is, we don't know. I did a quick search on the literature. We know a lot about the mechanisms sort of how they do it, so I could say, oh, they shed their antlers because these animals are queuing into photo period and the hormones are changing, and when the steroid hormones levels dropped, the cells sinasse and it all falls fine. We know a lot about the cellular machinery. There was a beautiful new paper that just came out in Science like last week where they sequence the genomes of like twenty servant species and they're able to look and a bunch of antelope and bovid species, and they're able to look at the cellular level of how these horns grow and figure out the genes and the pathways. A beautiful set of studies. So we know a lot about how antlers grow and about how they fall off and start regrowing again, but nobody has a clue sort of for the adaptive significance or ultimate evolutionary explanation why at some point in the past and the ancestor of the servits some idiot that shed its antlers and had to go through the whole process and grow it back again. Why those individuals did better and persisted when the other individuals don't. We don't know. Well, let me tell you how what the people are right into us like to throw out there because this comes up all I will take a step, but let me hear what they say. Um, and again you don't know, like we don't know the answer. But people like to say, like, well, I could you know imagine this right? So one is uh, you could imagine this isn't the cause of what happened. You could imagine that. It's more it's a constantly changing, in much more responsive marker of your fitness. That is a great answer. So whoever you call that one and is on the money, that's a good one. Because we talked about honest signals. So in the Beatles, I told you it's like a suit of armor. Once he emerges an adult, you're stuck. So the horn size is a really good signal of what kind of a stud you are as a grub, as a larva. But once you go through metamorphosis and you're an adult and you've got your suit of armor, that's it how you're doing right now. And so I could come out out of you know, development, with a huge horn because I'm a stud, and another guy has a little horn because he's a whimp. But two months, three months later, I could have been fighting, fighting, fighting and not eating at all. I could be starved, I could be a shell. I could be riddled with disease. I've still got a huge horn. You know, you can't tell. So over time it becomes uncoupled with the sort of instantaneous condition and dominance and status of the mail, and so redoing it each year makes a lot of sense. There's a way to keep the signal honest. The other thing is they're expensive to carry round, so you look at birds with bright colors, they get rid of them as soon as as soon as the breeding season is done, they molt all those bright feathers out. They go drab. Why stand out like a sore thought and carry all is crap around behind you when you don't have to. So the other possible argument is you only need it, you only produce it when you need it, and then you get rid of it. Oh, you know, during the rut you've got it, then you throw it away and you don't have to carry it around and going into winter when it's hard to carry it around. Yep. And and a twist on that that would be consistent with that is a study that that I got to be a peripheral part of that. Mark Heba White was also part of and and one of his students beautiful study that came out looking at the Yellowstone elk and wolf population dynamics. And they showed that the elk actually keep their antlers longer than most of the other servants. So they're not getting rid of them and being hornless or antler less all winter. They're holding onto them all the way through until March. You know, people who collect sheds know this until the end of March early April. That's when the elk shed. So then what, right, why are you carrying this thing around all winter? If you can get rid of it, why not get rid of it as soon as you're done with it? In this case, the secondary benefit of having the antlers is that it protects these bulls from wolves. And so they have a beautiful study showing that the bulls that dropped their antlers early, even just a couple of days earlier than other bulls in the population get targeted and hammered by the wolves because they can't defend themselves the same way. And so so again it comes back to costs and benefits. But here's this expensive thing, and you actually keep it all winter if you're an elk, because it helps protect you against wolves, and then you got to turn around and use it during the rut. So now we're stuck with that question of why get rid of it and grow the whole thing again? And that may be alegacy. It might have been early on that it made a lot of sense, and early on they were getting rid of the cost, and then they were regrowing it and keeping the signal honest, and then only sort of secondarily in places where the major predators with things like wolves did. Some lineages like elk secondarily essentially hold onto it for longer and longer, in which case they're stuck. It would make more sense if you could design an elk from scratch to have them hold onto the antlers like a big horn sheep would. But we're you know, that's part of evolution is you get the legacy, you get to carry over the baggage that comes with you in your genome. They're carrying with them a legacy of having to throw it away and regrow it each year. So they put it off, put it off, put it off, ditch it, turn around, and regrow it fast. And that's the best they can do. I don't know. Good questions A couple other guys through this one out where they're talking about, um, you know, they break and so it allows you to regenerate all the time instead of snapping it off and being screwed for the rest of these breaks his horn and it's gone shark teeth. Yeah, constantly, Because we're talking about like, how come nothing else We're trying to think of other stuff besides servids. Right, the develop a weapon and lose the weapon and someone's like, well, you can kind of look at just the constant replacing of teeth in a shark. Yeah, you get the same thing in insects, so nimful stage grass oppers are chewing away on leaves and the leaves are often like sandpaper, and it grinds down the edges on their mouth parts. But then they mold and they throw away the old they start with a new clean set and then they can choo choo choo choo, and there's sort of this race for time. If the plants get more and more sand in their in their leaf tissues, then they can grind down the mouth parts. And if they can grind down the grasshopper mouth parts fast enough, they starve to death before they make it to the next mold. So it's like this race. But if they make it to the mold, they got a clean set, new set of anibal sharp blades. They're at it again. So yeah, that would be an insect analogy to the shark's teeth. That's fun. That's it. Hey, this is fun. It's hot in here, but this is great. Yeah, thank you very much. And you got like so animal wait wait wait I get to plug it, don't I'm plug. I'm gonna plug this to t you up, all right, so you can plug your next one. Go for it, time, author of Animal Weapons. The Evolution of Battle is a subtitle for the book, and you got a new version? I do. I have a version of it. That's the backstory. That's sort of the adventures doing research on animal weapons and how did somebody who starts out with muddy beats boots biology and reinforced on dung beetles end up visiting an aircraft carrier or given a talk in Washington, d C. Two top brass from the military. It's sort of a why basic science is relevant and surprising ways kind of story, and it's aimed at teenagers, sort of ten to twelve, twelve to fourteen year old kids, and so it's narrative nonfiction. Is called Beatle Battles One Scientist Journey of Adventure and Discovery, and it comes out in December. Beetle Battles, beat Battles, You got kids, look for it. I think it's orange on the cover, and you love it. You love the color. I don't love the color, but I love the book. I had a literally good time getting to unpack that story, and I had a really good editor to work with me. It's fun. It's really fun telling that story. Okay, thanks you guys. Yeah, we got a couple of quick things. Ready, I'm ready. Um, do us a favor. We bring you all this free stuff the show, right, get to listen. Um, you gotta do us favorite and go subscribe to our newsletter. You need to go to www dot The Meat Eater dot com and then you'll be you'll you'll see how to sign up for the newsletter. That's really important for us. Then you can kind of track everything that's going on with articles, podcasts, recipes, all kinds of stuff like that. Yeah. Then once a week you get a newsletter. And how often, Sam, would they get to read something that you wrote about every two weeks? Yeah, we we spent a lot of time on those newsletters. Man, it's not just slapped together. That's we're trying to bring really good, high quality stuff to to everybody, and we're tinkering with it all the time to make it even better. And I think, uh, most folks you follow it really enjoy it. Yeah, So get the newsletter and that's like everything that goes on um, new products, everything that goes on our space and also we haven't asked for a long time. Do us favorite too, and go go on iTunes and click the right most star it give us a five star review. You need that, and then you can follow us on social media. Can find me um on Instagram at Stephen Ranella. You can find Yanni on there. He used to be the Latvian hunter on Instagram and now I was just ready a Yanni. Yeah. I didn't want to make it confusing to Janice Poodless and there's an underscoing there. Really, why do you confuse it? Because it was early in Instagram, I guess when I started messing around and I saw a lot of other people that seemed to like have to have that underscored for a space in their name, like yours is just all straight through right, no spaces at all, because I didn't have mine up early. But it probably happens you went to get Janis Poodless and had been taken No, so you had to do the real. That's when you do the real, Yeah, authentic go So that didn't happen to you. You just didn't underscore for the hell of it. I thought that's what you did. Yeah, Oh wait, man, try to look saying how do they find you on Instagram? Sam Longer Media, no underscores, no nothing, Doug, you mess around social media too business. I don't care. I think better of you. If you don't, I don't. I like you more. Now I have an offer, but I don't do much with it, all right, Professor Emlyn, University of Montana, my home the matter. Uh yeah, Sam suo, thank you very much for joining us. My pleasure. Okay, everyone, thanks for listening. Again. And if I said it once, I said a thousand times. Please go check out our feature length documentary about hunting in America today called Stars in the Sky. You can find it at Stars in the Sky film dot colm. It is available for streaming and download. Again, do us yourself a good turn, do us a good turn Stars in the Sky. Find it at Stars in the Sky film dot com. You can stream it, you can download it, and you can watch it again and again. Thank you,