Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
He joins Tyler to discuss why it took scientists so long to accept airborne disease transmission and more, including why 19th-century doctors thought hay fever was a neurosis, why it took so long for the WHO and CDC to acknowledge COVID-19 was airborne, whether ultraviolet lamps can save us from the next pandemic, how effective masking is, the best theory on the anthrax mailings, how the U.S. military stunted aerobiology, the chance of extraterrestrial life in our solar system, what Lee Cronin’s “assembly theory” could mean for defining life itself, the use of genetic information to inform decision-making, the strangeness of the Flynn effect, what Carl learned about politics from growing up as the son of a New Jersey congressman, and much more.
Here is an excerpt:
COWEN: Over time, how much will DNA information enter our daily lives? To give a strange example, imagine that, for a college application, you have to upload some of your DNA. Now to unimaginative people, that will sound impossible, but if you think about the equilibrium rolling itself out slowly — well, at first, students disclose their DNA, and over time, the DNA becomes used for job hiring, for marriage, in many other ways. Is this our future equilibrium, that genetic information will play this very large role, given how many qualities seem to be at least 40 percent to 60 percent inheritable, maybe more?
ZIMMER: The term that a scientist in this field would use would be heritable, not inheritable. Inheritability is a slippery thing to think about. I write a lot about that in my book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, which is about heredity in general. Heritability really is just saying, “Okay, in a certain situation, if I look at different people or different animals or different plants, how much of their variation can I connect with variation in their genome?” That’s it. Can you then use that variability to make predictions about what’s going to happen in the future? That is a totally different question in many —
COWEN: But it’s not totally different. Your whole family’s super smart. If I knew nothing about you, and I knew about the rest of your family, I’d be more inclined to let you into Yale, and that would’ve been a good decision. Again, only on average, but just basic statistics implies that.
ZIMMER: You’re very kind, but what do you mean by intelligent? I’d like to think I’m pretty good with words and that I can understand scientific concepts. I remember in college getting to a certain point with calculus and being like, “I’m done,” and then watching other people sail on.
COWEN: Look, you’re clearly very smart. The New York Times recognizes this. We all know statistics is valid. There aren’t any certainties. It sounds like you’re running away from the science. Just endorse the fact you came from a very smart family, and that means it’s quite a bit more likely that you’ll be very smart too. Eventually, the world will start using that information, would be the auxiliary hypothesis. I’m asking you, how much will it?
ZIMMER: The question that we started with was about actually uploading DNA. Then the question becomes, how much of that information about the future can you get out of DNA? I think that you just have to be incredibly cautious about jumping to conclusions about it because the genome is a wild and woolly place in there, and the genome exists in environments. Even if you see broad correlations on a population level, as a college admission person, I would certainly not feel confident just scanning someone’s DNA for information in that regard.
COWEN: Oh, that wouldn’t be all you would do, right? They do plenty of other things now. Over time, say for job hiring, we’ll have the AI evaluate your interview, the AI evaluate your DNA. It’ll be highly imperfect, but at some point, institutions will start doing it, if not in this country, somewhere else — China, Singapore, UAE, wherever. They’re not going to be so shy, right?
ZIMMER: I can certainly imagine people wanting to do that stuff regardless of the strength of the approach. Certainly, even in the early 1900s, we saw people more than willing to use ideas about inherited levels of intelligence to, for example, decide which people should be institutionalized, who should be allowed into the United States or not.
For example, Jews were considered largely to be developmentally disabled at one point, especially the Jews from Eastern Europe. We have seen that people are certainly more than eager to jump from the basic findings of DNA to all sorts of conclusions which often serve their own interests. I think we should be on guard that we not do that again.
And:
COWEN: If we take the entirety of science, you’ve written on many topics in a very useful way, science policy. Where do you think your views are furthest from the mainstream or the orthodoxy? Where do you have the weirdest take relative to other people you know and respect? I think we should just do plenty of human challenge trials. That would be an example of something you might say, but what would the answer be for you?
I very much enjoyed Carl’s latest book Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Air We Breathe.
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