Over there on Reddit, there is a subreddit called r/evolution for the discussion of evolutionary questions and issues. There is now consideration of a rule to clarify their stance on evolutionary psychology. It’s a good one.

As you know, the moderator team has been considering the possibility of new rules to help improve things around here. And of course, we wanted to get the community’s feedback on the matter before we pulled the trigger. Please, just remember to voice your disagreements peacefully.

• Rule #X: Evolutionary Psychology. The moderation team takes the stance that evolutionary psychology is pseudoscience. Like any pseudoscience, it starts with a conclusion rather than drawing that conclusion from data; it also tends to ignore or even demonize other fields of science that already provide information about the topics it addresses; and tends to boil personal behaviors and preferences (as well as complicated sociocultural and developmental phenomena) down to a handful of terms it uses as buzzwords to craft adaptationist/bioessentialist just-so stories that are often untested, untestable, or even wildly incorrect. It’s also frequently used to justify everything from preexisting biases all the way to dehumanizing rhetoric. These posts also tend to attract a lot of baseless speculation and experts on these topics are often drowned out by negativity and downvotes, all of which is antithetical to the climate we’re trying to cultivate.
• Please note that while we discourage evolutionary psychology and pseudoscience in general, simply asking questions about the evolutionary basis for certain human behaviors or cognitive traits isn’t necessarily an issue: there are legitimate scientists in various fields (eg, anthropology, especially evolutionary anthropology, ethnography, behavioral genetics, etc), who study these topics with proper, physical data, and so there is information out there. However, if we feel that a question is better suited for other academics (eg, regular psychologists, historians, sociologists, philosophers, etc), if things start getting pseudoscientific, or if certain lines are crossed, we may choose to intervene.

More pithily, they say the “problem is that evolutionary psychology is science in the same way that Taco Bell is authentic Mexican food.” There is some polite agreement with the statement (I’m not saying anything, because I’d only provide loud impolite agreement) and some polite disagreement. The disagreeable all seem to be quoting Tooby & Cosmides, which to me is just another sign that it’s a cult. EP has existed for decades, and all you’ve got to show for it is a pair of aging, founding authorities and a swarm of lunatics and bad publications? Cut your losses. Treat EP as crackpottery.

As far as I’m concerned, the statement is fair and judicious.

Does this man look 18 to you? How about 30?

I would have guessed he was in his 40s, and would have won a kewpie doll. He’s 45. His name is Bryan Johnson. He has, however, set himself the goal of reversing aging and getting his ‘epigenetic age’ down to something absurd, by making his body the subject of an “experiment” — although it is an experiment with no controls, no comparisons of the effectiveness of various treatments, and a subjective criterion of “perfection,” which he alone defines.

As of now, Johnson claims that the experiment, which he’s dubbed Project Blueprint, is more concerned with understanding the possibilities of one body—his own—than in creating a replicable system. The journey has led to improved physical health, but the most inarguable effect thus far has been on his physical appearance. He has dropped 60 pounds, and a recent MRI scan found that Johnson was in the 99th percentile for both body fat and muscle concentration—proof, he said, of his achieving “the perfect body ratio.” The muscles everywhere from his shins up to his neck appear to almost protrude out of him, and his skin wraps tightly around his face, which is the point: Johnson puts his skin through regular and painful skin rejuvenation processes, on top of the obligatory application of numerous daily creams. After two years, he claims, his skin is that of a twenty-something and his fitness level is that of an 18-year-old; his body also now runs three degrees cooler than it used to. More than 50 of his biomarkers are also now “perfect,” he has said. He even claims he has been able to stop dying his hair as of three months ago, after making “significant progress reversing gray hair.”

Do twenty-somethings look that shiny and moist? I see a lot of them running around here, and they really don’t look like middle-aged somethings who just got back from the spa with a miracle gel filling their pores. Is running 3 degrees cooler actually a good thing, or has he just decided that it must be?

Let’s assume, charitably, that he has improved his personal health, since he does look fit. How does he do it? By throwing ridiculous amounts of money at it, of course. He’s a silicon valley dudebro!

Johnson says that he spends more money on his body than LeBron James. With this sizable budget (more than $2 million a year), he pays for the food he eats (a precise 1,977 calories a day, made up of the world’s most nutritious elements), as well as the 112 to 130 supplemental pills he takes on a daily basis, and the ultrasound machine and other medical-grade machinery he keeps on the second floor of his discrete compound in Venice, Los Angeles, where he and his team of more than 30 doctors, clinicians, and researchers analyze how the 78 organs that make up his body have responded to the latest tweaks to his diet, sleep, and movement.

Oooh, precisely 1977 calories a day…sounds specific and sciencey. Until you learn that he picked that number because that’s the year he was born, not because there’s some evidence that that’s an optimal number. It’s simply another example of the whims of the privileged rich nincompoops who infest tech culture.

Extreme as the specifics of his approach might be—this is a man who has a device that tracks his nightly erections—Johnson falls squarely in line with many of his Silicon Valley peers. In recent years, people throughout the technology sector have taken increasingly innovative—and often eccentric—approaches to their personal health and wellness in a pursuit of a longer, happier life. The industry is chock-full of people who, for example, eat five cans of sardines a day or consume nothing but coffee, water, and tea for over a week straight. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made headlines in 2019, when he announced that he fasted for 22 hours a day and often went days with nothing but water, sparking concerns that the tech sector was “rebranding eating disorders” as wellness. But it was not entirely outside of the norms of an industry that has become taken with “biohacking,” in which one approaches the body as a computer program, to be forever tweaked and optimized.

He doesn’t really care about the science. None of them do.

Existing in a state of perpetual and extreme caloric restriction makes it difficult to fit all the nutrients he needs into his diet. He believes a constant caloric deficit to be “the number one evidence-based health protocol,” though when I later asked specifically what research convinced Johnson to remain in a state of extreme caloric restriction, the only answer I got was “scientific evidence.” Levine, the Altos researcher, said that studies on caloric restriction have led to mixed results and mostly focused on animals. Experiments on mice, for example, have found that while some benefit from restriction, others do not or even experience negative effects. A new study on flatworms out just this month found “no benefits to lifespan” outside of “perfect” environments, as Levine put it.

This is an exercise in supernatural thinking. They want to live forever in youthful vigor — I don’t blame them for that, I would kinda like that myself — but in the absence of real evidence, and with the fact that they’re asking to defy the physical nature of their existence, they just have to make stuff up, or clutch at feeble signs of improvement and imagine that they can amplify that indefinitely. Here goes Bryan Johnson, dreaming that all of his obsessive hypochondria will help him reach his goal of immortality. It won’t.

He claims to have the altruistic goal of helping humanity live decades longer, of increasing the time they have to accomplish great things, which is noble of him. I wonder, though, if people would be able to achieve great things if they have to focus so intensely and with such effort and expense on their personal vanity. Is extending life span (which Johnson has not done) really worth it?

Consider the male spider. He’s small relative to the female, who is a ruthless predator with no qualms against cannibalism. Should he expend most of his effort in growth, bulking up and building his strength, trying to match the physical advantages of the female? Or should he be content with being small, fast, and agile, quickly scampering to females at the earliest possible age to take his shot?

I can tell you that my spiders have chosen the scamper strategy. If they tried to focus on body building before daring to mate, they’d find that a scamperer had been there before them. And that the female might eat them anyway.

If you prefer human analogies, imagine that Alexander the Great had stayed home in Pella, abstaining from wine, living on a spare diet of pulses, slathering his face with the richest cosmetics. He’d probably have lived to be as old as Bryan Johnson! He wouldn’t have had “the Great” slapped on his name, though.

Maybe Alexander the Vain?

I was chatting with HJ Hornbeck and Dr Sarah yesterday, and we were tinkering with ChatGPT. We asked it for some simple medical advice, of the sort you might consult WebMD for, and Dr Sarah confirmed that it was close to what she would recommend. Then we asked it a simple question of the sort I might throw out in a college classroom.

We asked, “What is junk DNA?” Uh-oh.

Junk DNA is a term used to describe the non-coding regions of the genome, which do not encode proteins. For many years, it was believed that these regions of the genome had no function and were simply “leftover” DNA that accumulated over evolutionary time. This led to the term “junk DNA” being used to describe these regions, as they were thought to be of no consequence to the organism.

However, more recent research has shown that many of these non-coding regions actually play important roles in regulating gene expression and controlling the activity of specific genes. They can act as molecular “switches” that turn genes on or off in response to different environmental signals, and they can also act as spacers that help to organize the genome into distinct functional regions.

In addition, some non-coding regions of the genome contain functional elements such as transposable elements, ribosomal DNA, and small RNA molecules, which play important roles in regulating gene expression and controlling the activity of specific genes.

In light of these findings, the term “junk DNA” is no longer used in a scientifically accurate context, and has been largely replaced by the more accurate terms “non-coding DNA” or “regulatory DNA.” These non-coding regions of the genome are now recognized as playing important roles in shaping the phenotype and evolution of organisms.

Holy crap, that is a terrible answer, from the very first sentence. It conflates junk DNA with non-coding DNA, and builds its entire argument on that premise. It then claims that the discovery of regulatory sequences undermined the concept…but regulatory sequences have never been regarded as junk, and neither have ribosomal DNA or these unspecified “small RNA molecules” (what? like tRNA or siRNA?) And now transposable elements are just assumed to be functional? Some have acquired functional roles, but most are not, which is kind of significant given that they make up around half the mammalian genome.

Then the grand conclusion is that “junk DNA” is no longer used, and has been replaced by the terms “non-coding DNA” or “regulatory DNA.” No, it has not. Those are not the same thing at all. I note that much of the answer seems to have been cribbed from the kind of thing you get in a random Google search, which is polluted with all kinds of pseudoscience, creationist sources, and general denial that our DNA could be less than perfect. For instance, even Scientific American has a trash article that concludes that evolution is too wise to waste this valuable information. Maybe ChatGPT should have exercised a little discrimination, and looked at qualified sources like Graur, and Palazzo, and Moran? Because I’d give this answer a big fat “F” and comment that apparently the author hadn’t listened in lecture or read the textbook.

Speaking of Moran, his long awaited book, What’s in Your Genome?: 90% of Your Genome Is Junk, is off to the printers, with an expected release date of 16 May. Maybe that will help ChatGPT correct its bad science. That’s a book I’m looking forward to.