MSP46 Evilution [The Dark Side of Evolution]

This is a download from the FM 89.9, the Business Station. It's one Friday, my name is Jasan-Doo, Evil Lucian. Not something we often talk about here on Matt's plane, mainly because evolution has reached its peak in the form of college pops. Man, I'm not gonna let you write these introductions anymore.

If you're the peak of Evil Lucian, then we've already passed the tipping point to extinction. We tend to think of Evil Lucian in terms of improvements that tend to take thousands of years. But some organisms and animals are able to adapt and mutate much faster. Which leads us into proper Matt's plane territory today, the dark side of the process.

Which we are calling it Evil Lucian. You just made up a word for today, show, didn't you? Yes, Jeff, because we're all about the clickbait on this show. So hold tight as I give you seven reasons why Evil Lucian will kill you.

You're kidding, right? Really? Yeah, of course. But no, we are talking about Evil Lucian.

We're going to talk about the ways that Evil Lucian targets us and some of the ways in which we're starting to fight back against. You're not going to talk about the giant ants again, are you? I keep telling you that them is a 1950s beam of it's not a documentary, man. You're not spending enough time on the internet.

You're not getting it. Look at the way the local wildlife population has survived the Chernobyl disaster. Is it really so far fetched that radioactive tests after World War II resulted in giant ants that roamed the New Mexico desert and neighboring towns? You know, you've got to start thinking more clearly.

Forget this obsession with the lame stream media. Take off the blinkers. Open up your mind. I'm not hopeful about today's show.

When Charles Darwin wrote the original species, do you think he ever imagined? Well, you? Darwin was oddly interested in finches and pigeons. And as we know, my face is often recognised as kittens by facial recognition software.

But I think I am probably a fair distance away from what he imagined as a natural selection. Does unnatural selection exist? You may be a prime example, you mean? Well, as with a lot of things in life, only in Star Trek, one of the early episodes of Star Trek the next generation, I think it was season two, featured a bunch of genetically altered children whose immune systems actually altered the environment around them and caused normal human beings to rapidly age and die.

And of course, that's the easiest way for one species to conquer another, not with anything so complicated as war, but by infecting them with pathogens that they can't fight against. Still, you're not the healthiest specimen. And that's another of the weird things that we've covered on the shows before. You know, those people who are really robust and never fall ill are not necessarily the ones who live to the oldest age.

Some studies have suggested that that strength can become a weakness. Someone who is rarely sick, their immune system is not used to fighting and adapting. So when they get older and contract something, even something straightforward like flu, their immune system is unused to it and the person can die as a result. People who fall ill more regularly, they're actually much better equipped to cope with and are more likely to recover quickly from illnesses.

Does Star Trek have anything to do with today's show? More than you might think. I think it's been a while since anyone did any thinking on this show. Yeah, well, we tend to take a very animal-centric view of evolution, which is why we tend to think of it as this slow process.

But some organisms do actually evolve very rapidly, even in the animal kingdom. So think about the tolerance to pesticides that creatures ranging from rats to cockroaches to mosquitoes can build up over a few generations. And those generations in the lifespan of those animals is actually only a few months or a handful of years. So natural selection allows them to build up a tolerance or immunity?

Well, exactly. You know, you probably want a biologist or an immunologist on to explain it properly, but you know, you've only got me. As usual, if I have any of the facts for today's show wrong, please tweet us because I no longer use Twitter. So that is actually a great example of Darwinian natural selection at work.

Can we get serious? We've had Star Trek, a B-rated movie, your hatred of Twitter, and we're already halfway to the break here. Well, last week's show was very serious. So today I'm releasing the pressure valve a little bit.

You know, I'm restoring the balance. I'm preventing any kind of on-air earthquake. I'm keeping those evolutionary forces in their equilibrium. Now you're trying to claim that your waffling is a public service?

And to quote fake no more, it's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it. But I do take your point. If you have a look at the history of the 20th century, is this serious enough for you? Antibiotics brought many diseases under control.

We thought we'd eradicate diseases like polio and smallpox. We were able to bring malaria, one of the world's greatest killers, if not to heal, then at least to start pushing back against it. And now we're losing. Well, that's what nature does.

You know, as a species, humans tend to fight a battle and think that we've won the war. We forget that the planet does things on a completely different timescale. So we're active participants in creating the conditions that allows evolution or dark evolution to flourish. You know, who would have thought that changes in our social behavior would enable dark pests to proliferate?

I mean, look at headlights, for example. How have we gone from radioactive ants at the start of the show to headlights? Well, you asked me to get serious. So, you know, when I was a kid, you'd get the occasional outbreak of life at school, but there was nothing too serious.

Now, precisely the time that these insects are becoming immune or more tolerant to the chemicals that we kill them with, we are actually becoming more tactile in our environment is promoting conditions that favorable to headlights. Don't we talk about kids being more isolated and less friendly in real life? And sure, kids have always been physical with each other, but now we have a lot more shared behaviors that we didn't have before. So who would have thought that sharing headphones or huddling around a smartphone screen would turn into the equivalent of the head-loss Olympics?

You're blaming the kids here again. No, well, maybe a little bit. But we're seeing the same patterns over and over again in other parts of our ordinary lives. So our addiction to fast food and food waste, for example, is basically crack cocaine for rats.

And we build them through us and underpass us and underground real systems to help them get around. Exactly. Cheapair travel is not only broadening our minds. It's allowing bed bugs to travel across continents as well.

As for antibiotics, that's a bit like squandering the best thing that ever happened to us. So the overuse and misuse of antibiotics. In terms of the daftest things humanity has ever done has to be on par with the popularization of unicorn food. I'm assuming that there are some solutions that we're not going to spend today listening all the things that can kill us or infect us.

I mean, I can do that if that's what you want. But if you want to explore today's subject without all of the sides and these cheap one liners, you can check out an article by Michael LePage at the New Scientist called Evolution is Making a Sick. Now, one of the things that makes the whole concept of dark evolution so fascinating, rather than terrifying, is the sometimes counterintuitive methods that scientists are taking to combat it. Is that because we misunderstood what evolution is?

I think that happens a lot of the time. As LePage points out, evolution is happening all around us, all of the time, even inside us. So cancer, that most frightening of words, is an evolutionary disease. Cancer's whole modus operandi is to disguise itself as healthy cells.

This tricks the body into supplying it with the food and oxygen it needs to survive, even though that process kills us and the cancer cell in the process. It's one of the things that makes the fight against cancer so difficult. And it's why treatments like chemotherapy are actually a cocktail of substances that are unique to every single patient. There's no one size fits all solution like when you take paracetamol for a headache.

Surely nature must engineer its own success stories too? Absolutely, and I'm taking these examples directly from New Scientist 2, in case anyone thinks that I'm some kind of fabulous research biologist. Overhunting has led to some interesting developments in animal populations. So animals that are hunted for trophy horns, like elephants and some forms of wild sheep, are evolving with smaller tusks or horns.

Some of the elephants don't have tusks at all, partly because we've removed those with the genes from the large ones from the gene pool. And that in turn makes them less valuable or price-worthy to hunters, so they get hunted less. What about urban adaptation? Well, in many countries, foxes seem to be prospering in cities and pans far more than they ever did in the wild.

This is a weird one. Lizards feet are getting stickier as they adapt to urban environments and human habitats with more sheer surfaces. This one's kind of unrelated, but I found out a couple of days ago that the only thing that octopus suckers don't stick to is octopus skin, so that they don't tie themselves in knots, but it can stick to any other surface. Evolution really is cool.

Some mammals are changing their habits to become nocturnal so that they face less competition and fewer threats from humans because we sleep at night. Even some species of fish in the Atlantic are adapting to accommodate rising pollution levels, although you probably wouldn't want to eat them. But then food for us is not actually fish's primary evolutionary purpose. We'll take a short break and when we come back, the unequal fight against dark evolution continues with the fun Friday in the matter of space.

Yes, that is making me quote the lyrics to I will survive. Strangely, he has a sad look upon his face. Is this your way of telling our listeners that we can survive the dark side of evolution and you're just unhappy? I admit it, that was a cheap and cheesy thing to make you do, but it did make me weirdly very, very happy.

No, we've been playing this cat and mouse game with evolution since before we were a microbe in the Pranemodial soup because evolution works in our favor too. And the history of us giving evolution a helping hand is as long as our domestication of plants and animals. So what is really so interesting is, as I said before the break, the way that some of the solutions seem to be counterintuitive. When you say counterintuitive, what do you mean exactly?

Well, sometimes the solutions fly in the face of what has previously been accepted practice. Another of the things that we see really often on this show is that when people adopt new technology, there's a tendency to throw the old thing out and forget that it ever existed. You know, that idea that newer is better. Anyone who's interested can go back and listen to episode 38, old technology that's better than new technology, which is about this subject.

Because what we often don't consider is that the new and the old can work alongside one another and that the combination of the two can be stronger than using either old and new technology in isolation. Like the triple cocktail for HIV infections? Yeah, that was one of the first instances of scientists and doctors looking at these evolutionary principles. It's a bit like the Bintzer movement in military strategy.

You make a frontal assault and you attack the flanks at the same time. So where the virus might be able to quickly mutate to counter one threat, the three simultaneous assaults are able to kind of box that virus in. It can't mutate fast enough to break out because it's coping with three enemies and not just one. And that has radically changed the life expectancy and the quality of life of people who are HIV positive.

Is this something we're also seeing beyond medicine? Yeah, we're seeing a lot of it in agriculture as well. So Michael the page quotes the example of food crops that are genetically engineered to produce an insecticide called BT toxin that controls the pest of feed on it. And the pests quickly become tolerant to the toxin.

In the past, that has meant discontinuing the strain of insecticide and looking for something different or often just plain stronger. But when we do that, we're just trying to stay one step ahead in the evolutionary game. We're not actually looking at the underlying principles. So you go back to the insecticide you used before?

That has worked in some instances. Simply discontinuing the use of the chemical has led to the resistance to it dying out in pests in a matter of a few years across a few generations. The BT toxin solution is a little more elegant. You grow a mixture of strains of the plants, some that have the BT toxin engineered into them and some that don't.

You're growing stuff for the pest to eat. Essentially, that ensures a good mixture of pests in the gene pool. So you don't end up with a gene pool of pests that are all resistant to that particular toxin. So you're allowing the susceptibility to the toxin to remain and to actually proliferate.

It can be easy to persuade farmers to plant a portion of their crops that will be destroyed. No, it isn't. That is a major stumbling block. But that is the game that farmers have played with pests for thousands of years.

It's only in recent years that we've had this luxury of eradicating them on this kind of industrial scale. It doesn't matter if those pests are diseases or fungi, insects or mammals. They all want to prosper and propagate. Their own evolution pushes them towards survival.

So if you want to fight, you've got to fight smart. And sometimes that means changing behaviour, changing mindset and changing your approach, often all at the same time. Are we seeing the same approach in other areas of medicine? Oh, for sure.

I mentioned antibiotic resistance before the break. So Lee Cronin at the University of Glasgow is heading up one of dozens of teams that is looking into ways to reverse antibiotic resistance. Cronin's team is looking at ways of using antibiotics to make bacteria susceptible to them again. Is this one of the counterintuitive and paradoxical approaches you were talking about?

Yeah, absolutely. So when we talk about the HIV-trivical cocktail or the BT toxin, we're talking about preventing those mutations from happening here. We're talking about something slightly different. Cronin's team has developed a model where bacteria is treated with alternating antibiotics that target different aspects.

And much to their surprise, over time, the bacteria start to become vulnerable to the antibiotics again. But... Oh, I can send something crispy in the air! Yes, we've come all this way without mentioning CRISPR.

Because before I got to that, I wanted to demonstrate that there is a lot more in our evolution mastering toolkit than a frontal assault on the DNA. Because CRISPR is new technology and we are right to be wary of it, as we are hopeful, as we aren't really sure what the long-term effects of all this snipping and recoding are going to be. So we can simply snip out the bits of bacteria that have become hard into antibiotics and all is good with the world? I guess that's a dream if you're a biologist.

And it's kind of reversing evolution. And because of that fact, it's a lot harder than it sounds. So to actually get CRISPR and those modifications inside bacteria, you need to load them into a virus called a bacteria phase. Some companies are close to human clinical trials after demonstrating positive results with phages in animal tests.

I'm guessing it's not a one-size-fits-all scenario here. Yeah, I mean, when you're talking about altering things at this level, it's incredibly specific. So each of these viral phages will only target that specific strain of bacteria. Each strain will need its own phage.

And the phages don't survive in our bloodstream, so that could potentially limit their effectiveness. We may have to apply them topically, so literally spraying them onto wounds or targeting them directly to bacteria in our gut. Also, as a safety precaution, these phages are engineered so that they can't self-replicate. Otherwise, like the crew on the ship of the Star Trek, the next generation told you it was relevant.

We may find the next jump in human evolution kills off those who haven't made that leap. If reversing evolution is so hard, can't we prevent traits from occurring in the first place? Yeah, and this one is really cool. Some people are experimenting with that.

Alejandro Chavez and a team at New York's Columbia University are creating Ninja CRISPR. Your terms are Dias. It's mine, but I'm betting if they could, they'd call it the Ninja, too, but that might affect their funding. In this case, you're effectively hiding CRISPR within a genome.

Like a ninja, it just sits quietly in the shadows. When it comes across a mutation that you tell it you don't want, it springs into action and it cuts it out. Early trials in mice have been positive with the Ninja preventing resistance to the antibiotic refinpicing from developing. I like that Ninja CRISPR.

Presumably the same technique can be used beyond antibiotics and medicines. Yeah, we use microorganisms for a lot of things, especially in fermentation processes. So things like beer, food flavorings, some medicines like insulin. These mutations make the yeasts and microbes that use to produce those products burn out over time.

So the Ninja could extend their lifespan and effectiveness by ambushing and preventing those mutations. And that allows the microbes to carry on and do what they were intended to do. We're effectively limiting the mutation rate then. Well, in this instance, they're cutting out the mutation, but CRISPR could also be used to create bacteria that have lower rates of mutation.

We can also load additional functionality onto a DNA sequence so that if it does mutate, it's actually more likely to die out. So those mutated strains won't survive. Well, it will work on animals too. It's possible that we can introduce these anti-evolutionary traits into plants and pests like rats and mausies.

We can even hack the DNA so that the engineered genes are passed on to all the offspring and not just 50%, which is the norm. As I said earlier, this whole thing is kind of paradoxical and counterintuitive. While these guys are trying to prevent, slow down or remove mutations, other scientists are actually trying to speed them up. Some experimental drugs have had success against viruses that code information in RNA, viruses like flu and West Nile viruses.

They already have high mutation rates, so speeding up that process can effectively halt them. I'm not sure how scientifically accurate this analogy is, but from what I understand, it's like jumping onto a moving carousel at a fairground becomes a point where it's moving too fast for you to get a grip and you bounce off. And that's what happens with these viruses as they are in the mutation speed up. You know what, this has been surprisingly an upbeat show.

Do you want to shatter the mood now before we leave? Not really, just to reiterate what I said earlier. I could just have talked about the CRISPR stuff for the entire show, but I thought it was important to talk about the other ways that scientists are trying to stay ahead of the mutation game. And as I said, we're not really 100% sure what unleashing CRISPR into the wild might actually do.

It's a bit like those dumb algorithms you like to talk about. Yeah, exactly. Putting ninjas in your body sounds really cool, but if it leads to you prematurely aging Jean-Luc Picard, if I mix my metaphors for a second, it might not be the best solution. So there is a responsibility there that we can't overlook.

But more importantly, we have to remember that we're never going to conquer evolution because we need evolution. Stasis is not a good place to be. And we can't have good evolution without bad evolution, or rather to look at it another way, what's good for one species is often bad for another. So it's always going to be a race.

It's always going to be a balancing act. So what all of this technology does is improve our toolkit. And at the same time, it's the same as with any technological leap. We ignore and we forget our history, you know, to our own peril.

Like I said, it's surprisingly an upbeat show because it started off, you know, about seven reasons why evolution will kill you. Evolution. Yeah, evolution. Yeah, surprisingly, you will very informative towards the end.

Well, rare occasion on Maxime. Well, I had to make up for the beginning. Exactly. You can also check out culturepop.com.

It's called with a K for transcripts of the show. And of course, you can find out how you can take some of this evolution to your own company by contacting Matt on Twitter. Yeah, I am ready. 24 hours a day, 24 hours a day, you will get exactly the same response time.

BFM 89.9. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm 89.9. The Business Station.