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Month: January 2025

477: What’s the difference between domestication and GMO?

P&C drink and review a “special lager,” then discuss the domestication of plants and animals, and how that differs from genetically modified food.

Dogs were domesticated about 18,000 years ago. Plants were domesticated about 10,000 years ago. Goats, sheep, and chickens might have been domesticated about 8,000 years ago. The farm animals we have today are very different from the original stock they were taken from.

Domestication raises some interesting questions, like what characteristics make an animal domesticatable? E.g., why do we have domestic horses but not domestic zebras?

It’s not just animals. Most of the food we eat has been modified from its wild origin. The apples, carrots, corn and such that we eat are very different from the wild plants they came from. The same applies on the animal side to sheep, cows, pigs, goats, and such.

If these plants and animals were modified from their “natural” state, why is this different from genetically modified organisms?

The boys discuss domestication and how it has affected human history.

476: Why can’t we marry our cousins?

The boys drink and review a light dopplebock from Schlaffly then discuss the cultural relevance of cousin marriage.

The England parliament has recently started debating whether to prohibit cousin marriage, which P&C thought was already against the law. Apparently not — not in England, and not in all the states.

The increase in Muslims in England has made this a big issue. In Pakistan, up to 60 percent of marriages are to first cousins.

In England, while British Pakistanis accounted for 3.4 percent of all births, they had 30 percent of all children with recessive disorders. It’s become a public health issue, but it’s also a “sensitive issue.”

The larger issue with cousin marriages is the difference between clan-based societies — where affiliations are based on family relations — and western societies — where affiliations are based on other factors.

Banning cousin marriages in the west created high-trust societies that were not based on family relationships. By contrast, many dysfunctional countries are dysfunctional precisely because they only trust people in their families.

Having said all that, there’s been a lot of cousin (and even sibling) marriage among the political elite. What’s up with that?

The boys discuss the implications of these connections and how they affect societal customs.

475: Historical juxtapositions and amusing coincidences from history

P&C drink and review a piney IPA, then discuss strange juxtapositions in history.

Did you know …

  • George Washington didn’t know about dinosaurs.
  • Sharks are older than trees.
  • The 10th president of the U.S. has a grandson who is alive today.
  • Woolly mammoths were still alive while the Egyptians were building the pyramids.
  • The Oregon Trail was first used the same year the fax machine was invented.
  • The University of Oxford is older than the Aztec Empire.
  • The guillotine was still France’s official method of execution when Star Wars debuted.
  • The Roman Empire fell only 40 years before Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas.
  • The Great Pyramid was older to the Romans than the Romans are to us.

And more …

Join us for this fun review of strange coincidences and connections in history.

474: Population decline? Is that the new threat to humanity?

The boys drink and review an English Mild from Schaffly, then discuss different approaches to population.

Pigweed starts the show with the startling facts about population and how rapidly we got from 1 billion to 8 billion so quickly — with no apparent signs of stopping.

Malthus raised the concern that population can increase geometrically, but food production increases arithmetically, and predicted widespread starvation.

In fact, food production skyrocketed, so the problem has been averted for now.

Paul Erlich has been riding a similar issue for decades even though all his predictions turned out false as well. We didn’t poison everything, the air is cleaner, and there has not been widespread disease and famine.

The reality is more complicated. Population growth is not only slowing, but in many areas it’s negative. The most recent trends indicate that population will level off in about 2050.

Even if population only levels off, that still creates problems. The ratio between young and old would change dramatically, and the geniuses who invented our social support systems assumed an ever-growing population, where young people outnumbered old people.

However, population might not only level off, but may decline. Rapidly.

We have no economic or social models for that.

Who welcomes this decline and who is worried about it? What are their motives?

[Note: the content moderation bastards at YouTube deleted this video from their platform, so I’ve posted it on Rumble.]