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[00:00:00.480 --> 00:00:03.360] They say that home is where the heart is.
[00:00:03.360 --> 00:00:08.960] Maybe that's why so many fall in love with Big Pine Key and Florida's Lower Keys.
[00:00:08.960 --> 00:00:20.000] With epic ocean views, unspoiled wilderness, sandy beaches, abundant wildlife, RV resorts, and Stock Island's rustic charm.
[00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:23.680] Florida's lower keys don't skip a beep.
[00:00:23.680 --> 00:00:29.440] For more about the lower keys, visit fla keys.com/slash lower keys.
[00:00:36.800 --> 00:00:44.240] It is Thursday, the 15th of May, 2025, and you're listening to Skeptics with a K, the podcast for science, reason, and critical thinking.
[00:00:44.240 --> 00:00:55.360] Skeptics with a K is produced by Skeptic Media in association with the Merseyside Skeptic Society, a non-profit organization for the promotion of scientific skepticism on Merseyside, around the UK and internationally.
[00:00:55.360 --> 00:00:56.640] I'm your host, Mike Hall.
[00:00:56.640 --> 00:00:58.000] With me today is Marsh.
[00:00:58.000 --> 00:00:58.560] Hello.
[00:00:58.560 --> 00:00:59.440] And Alice.
[00:00:59.440 --> 00:01:00.160] Hello.
[00:01:00.480 --> 00:01:05.840] So I was woken in the night by Lana aggressively kind of like, Mike, fucking wake up, Mike.
[00:01:06.160 --> 00:01:07.360] And I said, what, what, what?
[00:01:07.360 --> 00:01:10.080] And she said, there's something beeping.
[00:01:10.080 --> 00:01:10.480] Okay.
[00:01:10.480 --> 00:01:13.040] I was like, the fuck, what's something beeping?
[00:01:13.040 --> 00:01:15.360] And so I listened around and said, there's nothing beeping.
[00:01:15.360 --> 00:01:16.080] What are you talking about?
[00:01:16.080 --> 00:01:16.880] I can't hear anything.
[00:01:17.360 --> 00:01:18.720] Nothing is beeping.
[00:01:18.720 --> 00:01:20.480] And then she said, no, there was a beep.
[00:01:20.480 --> 00:01:21.600] I definitely heard a beep.
[00:01:21.600 --> 00:01:23.280] And I said, it'll be the dishwasher.
[00:01:23.280 --> 00:01:24.640] We just had a new kitchen fitted.
[00:01:24.720 --> 00:01:25.520] Got a new kitchen.
[00:01:25.520 --> 00:01:26.720] We've got that sorted now.
[00:01:26.720 --> 00:01:27.440] That's brilliant.
[00:01:27.440 --> 00:01:32.000] We've got a dishwasher with a new kitchen, which I'm very excited about because I'm usually the one who does the fucking dish to dry.
[00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:34.160] Now I just need to put stuff in the dishwasher.
[00:01:34.160 --> 00:01:34.720] So much easier.
[00:01:34.960 --> 00:01:36.080] Yeah, it is much easier.
[00:01:36.080 --> 00:01:37.200] And I thought, it beeps.
[00:01:37.200 --> 00:01:38.720] You know, we put it on when we went to bed.
[00:01:38.720 --> 00:01:41.760] It's just beeped in the small hours and it's an unexpected noise.
[00:01:41.760 --> 00:01:42.720] So that's woken.
[00:01:42.800 --> 00:01:45.920] But then I heard the beep and it wasn't the dishwasher beep.
[00:01:45.920 --> 00:01:46.320] Okay.
[00:01:46.320 --> 00:01:48.560] And I was like, okay, what's the smoke alarm on the blink?
[00:01:48.720 --> 00:01:49.680] Battery's going up.
[00:01:49.680 --> 00:01:50.400] That was the next thing.
[00:01:50.800 --> 00:01:51.520] Smoke alarm.
[00:01:51.520 --> 00:01:53.040] Of course, it's the smoke alarm going off.
[00:01:53.360 --> 00:01:54.960] That's what the problem is.
[00:01:54.960 --> 00:01:58.080] But it wasn't regular in the way that a smoke alarm beep is.
[00:01:58.080 --> 00:02:07.400] Smoke alarm beep is, you know, you get that pip, and then maybe 45 seconds later, 60 seconds later, you'll get another pip out of it, right?
[00:02:07.400 --> 00:02:10.040] But also, all of our smoke alarms are mains wired.
[00:02:10.040 --> 00:02:10.520] Oh, okay.
[00:02:10.600 --> 00:02:11.720] We don't have battery ones.
[00:02:11.720 --> 00:02:12.120] Okay.
[00:02:12.440 --> 00:02:14.440] And so then I heard the peep.
[00:02:14.440 --> 00:02:15.640] I heard the noise as well.
[00:02:15.720 --> 00:02:19.480] Wasn't a noise I recognized, but also there was a flash when it came with it.
[00:02:19.480 --> 00:02:25.960] I saw it just through the, you know, above the door, you've got like the glass panels you get above a door sometimes to let light in.
[00:02:25.960 --> 00:02:27.480] I saw through that a flash.
[00:02:27.480 --> 00:02:29.240] I was like, what the fuck in the hell is that?
[00:02:29.240 --> 00:02:36.520] So I got up and I went out into the house to find the lights in the house are flickering on and off.
[00:02:36.520 --> 00:02:38.600] The fridge is flickering and flashing.
[00:02:38.600 --> 00:02:39.720] It's the fridge that's beeping.
[00:02:39.720 --> 00:02:41.160] That's going to beep.
[00:02:41.160 --> 00:02:42.280] The oven is turning on.
[00:02:42.440 --> 00:02:43.800] It's got a real poltergeist situation here.
[00:02:44.760 --> 00:02:46.120] There's a poltergeist in the house.
[00:02:46.200 --> 00:02:47.080] The fucking hell.
[00:02:47.240 --> 00:02:49.880] Turns out was a there was a power cut.
[00:02:50.120 --> 00:02:51.720] But the power hadn't cut cut.
[00:02:51.720 --> 00:02:53.000] It was like coming in and out.
[00:02:53.320 --> 00:02:54.440] Oh, like a brownout.
[00:02:54.440 --> 00:02:54.680] Yeah.
[00:02:54.920 --> 00:02:55.800] Like a personal brownout.
[00:02:56.040 --> 00:03:00.280] A brownout that's like because it normally just dims for a bit and then comes back up.
[00:03:00.280 --> 00:03:00.680] Like it does.
[00:03:00.840 --> 00:03:02.040] I've never had a brownout.
[00:03:02.040 --> 00:03:02.680] But it was.
[00:03:02.680 --> 00:03:05.800] So a brownout typically, you would get a low power.
[00:03:06.520 --> 00:03:07.320] Oh, okay.
[00:03:07.320 --> 00:03:10.680] But this was on and off and going and not going.
[00:03:10.680 --> 00:03:13.880] And I went out into the street and the street lights were off.
[00:03:13.880 --> 00:03:18.280] But the flats that were across the way, they've got all security lights outside and they're fucking going.
[00:03:18.280 --> 00:03:20.280] So the street looks like a fucking rave.
[00:03:20.600 --> 00:03:21.880] And it's the whole street.
[00:03:22.120 --> 00:03:25.720] Have you been hit by Madrid?
[00:03:26.360 --> 00:03:31.080] The next door neighbor's burglar alarm is going off because a lot of burglar alarms go off when you cut the power, right?
[00:03:31.400 --> 00:03:33.720] And so the whole street is just fucking chaos.
[00:03:33.720 --> 00:03:37.160] And like it's the best poltergeist you've ever seen in the world, right?
[00:03:37.480 --> 00:03:40.680] And I thought, this can't be good for the electronics in the house.
[00:03:41.000 --> 00:03:42.840] This is going on and off and on and off.
[00:03:42.840 --> 00:03:46.640] So I just threw the main switch on the breaker box and said, I'd rather just have it off for now.
[00:03:46.880 --> 00:03:48.320] Yeah, have everything off.
[00:03:48.640 --> 00:03:49.840] And so, yeah, it was a power cut.
[00:03:44.840 --> 00:03:55.600] So Lana, four o'clock in the morning, is phoning the power company saying, We've got a power cut.
[00:03:55.600 --> 00:03:57.680] And they said it's going to be several hours.
[00:03:57.680 --> 00:03:58.480] It's going to be four hours.
[00:03:58.560 --> 00:04:01.200] Our SLA is four hours to get it fixed.
[00:04:01.520 --> 00:04:03.360] So that'll be at half past eight in the morning.
[00:04:03.360 --> 00:04:04.400] It'll be fixed by then.
[00:04:04.400 --> 00:04:06.640] Come half past eight, it wasn't fucking fixed.
[00:04:06.880 --> 00:04:13.680] And we're thinking, all right, we need to get up and have some breakfast, except we've got an induction stove, so we can't have any breakfast.
[00:04:14.400 --> 00:04:15.840] The fridge is defrosting.
[00:04:15.840 --> 00:04:16.160] Never mind.
[00:04:16.160 --> 00:04:16.960] I'll pop the kettle on.
[00:04:16.960 --> 00:04:18.160] Oh, can't pop the kettle on.
[00:04:18.160 --> 00:04:19.680] Well, we could do some hot water on the stove.
[00:04:19.680 --> 00:04:20.960] No, we can't do that.
[00:04:20.960 --> 00:04:21.680] Okay, never mind.
[00:04:21.680 --> 00:04:22.800] I'll go and get a shower.
[00:04:22.960 --> 00:04:24.080] Oh, no, I can't do that.
[00:04:24.080 --> 00:04:27.840] Which is not because it's a gas boiler, but it's a combi boiler.
[00:04:27.840 --> 00:04:34.160] It's sparked by a you know, the pilot light had gone out, so it needs to be switched on by electricity.
[00:04:34.160 --> 00:04:35.120] And it's like this.
[00:04:35.520 --> 00:04:40.960] I didn't realize I showered in electricity, but apparently everything in my life involves electricity.
[00:04:41.120 --> 00:04:44.560] Do you think I told you six months more go get solar panels?
[00:04:44.560 --> 00:04:46.800] You'd have been to your neighbours.
[00:04:46.800 --> 00:04:48.960] At 8:30 in the morning, it was a sunny day.
[00:04:49.520 --> 00:04:50.960] You could have been showering in sunshine.
[00:04:51.840 --> 00:04:53.680] Cooking your bacon in sunshine.
[00:04:53.680 --> 00:04:54.880] No, fuck all.
[00:04:55.040 --> 00:04:59.040] So eventually it didn't come back until half past three the following day.
[00:04:59.040 --> 00:05:00.720] It was for us.
[00:05:00.720 --> 00:05:01.120] It was at work.
[00:05:02.160 --> 00:05:04.960] No, it was a Sunday.
[00:05:05.280 --> 00:05:06.480] So it wasn't too bad.
[00:05:06.480 --> 00:05:08.640] We ended up, you know, we went out and go out to eat, yeah.
[00:05:08.800 --> 00:05:10.640] Had breakfast out instead and things like that.
[00:05:10.640 --> 00:05:14.480] Which is fine if you can afford to do that, but obviously not because everybody can do that.
[00:05:14.480 --> 00:05:15.760] Those kind of outages are really annoying.
[00:05:15.760 --> 00:05:18.000] I had an outage on my internet and it went out.
[00:05:18.000 --> 00:05:21.360] I was due to record an episode of No Rogan at 3 p.m.
[00:05:21.520 --> 00:05:23.920] It went out at about 2:15.
[00:05:24.000 --> 00:05:24.880] I was like, oh, fuck.
[00:05:24.960 --> 00:05:26.160] And I've done loads of prep for this.
[00:05:26.160 --> 00:05:29.960] Yeah, I'm gone away, so I need to get loads of kind of get the show well ahead of time.
[00:05:29.960 --> 00:05:31.480] So I was like, I was very annoyed.
[00:05:31.480 --> 00:05:32.440] The internet wasn't working out.
[00:05:32.600 --> 00:05:33.240] You were insufferable.
[00:05:33.400 --> 00:05:34.680] I was insufferable, is what I was saying.
[00:05:29.520 --> 00:05:36.440] I was like, oh, the worst possible time.
[00:05:29.680 --> 00:05:37.080] So I thought, okay.
[00:05:37.400 --> 00:05:38.600] How could you tell?
[00:05:38.600 --> 00:05:39.720] Well, this is the thing, you see.
[00:05:40.040 --> 00:05:41.720] I'm a very generous person, Mike.
[00:05:43.400 --> 00:05:44.680] You can come and record at mine.
[00:05:44.680 --> 00:05:45.320] It's fine.
[00:05:45.720 --> 00:05:48.120] I'll let you have my desk and my microphone.
[00:05:48.120 --> 00:05:51.240] I'll go and sit on the sofa in the living room and I can work from there.
[00:05:51.240 --> 00:05:54.200] I've not got any big meetings this afternoon, so you can just use my setup.
[00:05:54.440 --> 00:05:55.400] Very, very generous of you.
[00:05:55.400 --> 00:05:57.560] So I brought my laptop around.
[00:05:57.880 --> 00:05:59.080] The laptop doesn't have a good camera on it.
[00:05:59.160 --> 00:06:00.440] We record for YouTube these days.
[00:06:00.520 --> 00:06:04.200] So I used my old iPhone as a proxy camera, sort of a software.
[00:06:04.520 --> 00:06:06.200] So I tried to set my laptop up with that.
[00:06:06.200 --> 00:06:09.000] And you've got to install iTunes to make your camera work.
[00:06:09.080 --> 00:06:10.680] Oh, fuck, I had to download iTunes.
[00:06:10.680 --> 00:06:11.880] Couldn't download iTunes.
[00:06:11.880 --> 00:06:12.520] Didn't have internet.
[00:06:12.600 --> 00:06:16.840] Got to my neighbor's Wi-Fi to download interload iTunes to get the camera.
[00:06:16.920 --> 00:06:17.640] Got that all working.
[00:06:17.640 --> 00:06:18.680] Went around Alice's.
[00:06:18.680 --> 00:06:20.600] You had the same microphone as me, which is fine.
[00:06:20.600 --> 00:06:25.720] I brought the little sort of grabby arm, the adjustable grabby arm that my iPhone hangs off.
[00:06:25.720 --> 00:06:34.840] I set it up in the side of your cupboard, plugged my laptop in, went to the website where we record everything, and my laptop could not handle that.
[00:06:34.840 --> 00:06:36.600] And I spoke to Cecil for about six minutes.
[00:06:36.760 --> 00:06:39.080] He was like, yeah, should we just record this tomorrow?
[00:06:39.080 --> 00:06:41.240] Because this will not work.
[00:06:45.960 --> 00:06:49.560] Do either of you follow an account called Bad Medical Takes?
[00:06:49.560 --> 00:06:49.960] Yes.
[00:06:49.960 --> 00:06:50.200] Yes.
[00:06:51.400 --> 00:06:52.760] I don't know that I actually follow them.
[00:06:52.760 --> 00:06:57.400] I think it just appears in my feed quite often because lots of other people retweet it or like it.
[00:06:57.560 --> 00:06:58.600] No, that's the kind of thing you'd like.
[00:06:58.760 --> 00:07:00.280] Yeah, I don't need to follow anything anymore.
[00:07:00.280 --> 00:07:02.600] It just like appears in my algorithm.
[00:07:02.600 --> 00:07:09.720] So it's an account which finds people talking absolute bollocks about something medical, and then they highlight it for other people.
[00:07:09.720 --> 00:07:10.920] Too much hilarity.
[00:07:10.920 --> 00:07:15.520] Yeah, sometimes it can be a bit like for people who are right.
[00:07:14.600 --> 00:07:22.080] It can be a bit mean and exactly yeah to kind of point and laugh at people saying that I'm generally not very keen on these days.
[00:07:22.400 --> 00:07:35.040] But it's also quite useful in highlighting absurd medical misunderstandings, especially from people in power when it's highlighting people in positions of power exhibiting severe medical misunderstandings.
[00:07:35.040 --> 00:07:37.760] That's maybe where it's more useful than just ordinary folks.
[00:07:37.760 --> 00:07:42.160] Although it's a useful barometer of where ordinary folks think things are as well.
[00:07:42.160 --> 00:07:48.800] Recent messages that they posted included one where somebody points out that homosexuality is unlikely to be genetic.
[00:07:48.800 --> 00:07:59.120] The statistics show that it has low heritability and low twin concordance, by which they mean in identical twins, there's only a 25% chance that if one twin is gay, the other is also gay.
[00:07:59.120 --> 00:08:04.720] And so therefore it is unlikely to be genetic, they conclude, which doesn't seem like a bad medical take in and of itself.
[00:08:04.720 --> 00:08:06.640] It probably isn't genetic.
[00:08:06.640 --> 00:08:10.960] And so they then further conclude that the most likely explanation is therefore a pathogen.
[00:08:10.960 --> 00:08:11.520] Right.
[00:08:11.520 --> 00:08:12.320] Oh my God.
[00:08:12.560 --> 00:08:16.560] I knew when you said, oh, not genetic, that it's going to be, they're going to make some bold conclusion here.
[00:08:17.040 --> 00:08:20.320] They're going to say it's nature rather than nature.
[00:08:21.040 --> 00:08:23.200] No, but it probably is nurture.
[00:08:23.360 --> 00:08:30.240] In that situation, it's as much there's a strong nurture element if you have identical twins and only one of them is gay.
[00:08:30.240 --> 00:08:31.360] There's a nurture element there.
[00:08:31.360 --> 00:08:32.720] It's not a fucking pathogen, though.
[00:08:33.120 --> 00:08:34.560] That's a different thing.
[00:08:34.560 --> 00:08:43.920] Another recent post they highlighted claimed that the Pope died from the COVID vaccine because three years ago he did a video where he said you should get vaccinated and he was plenty healthy back then.
[00:08:43.920 --> 00:08:44.480] That is fair.
[00:08:44.480 --> 00:08:46.880] COVID vaccine victims, R-I-P-L, Papa.
[00:08:45.320 --> 00:08:50.480] He said it doesn't mean just because he said it does not mean he had had the vaccine.
[00:08:50.480 --> 00:08:53.520] I advise people to do things that I don't do all the time.
[00:08:54.160 --> 00:08:55.280] I bet he had.
[00:08:55.280 --> 00:08:59.600] The thing is, next time there's an anti-vax protest in town, they're going to have those little pictures of the people who died for the vaccine.
[00:08:59.600 --> 00:09:01.320] It's going to be poor Francis.
[00:09:01.560 --> 00:09:02.040] Oh, my God.
[00:09:02.040 --> 00:09:03.400] It is, isn't it?
[00:08:59.840 --> 00:09:04.360] Oh, dear.
[00:09:04.520 --> 00:09:08.040] Also, Alice in Pope is Raging Hypocrite shock.
[00:09:08.040 --> 00:09:11.640] That's the most controversial thing we've ever said on this show.
[00:09:11.640 --> 00:09:14.520] The head of the Catholic Church is a steaming grey hypocrite.
[00:09:15.800 --> 00:09:20.680] Of course, they have also posted about the recent press conference from Robert Kennedy, who is the U.S.
[00:09:20.760 --> 00:09:35.320] Director of Health and Human Services, where he made a deeply wrong-headed pledge to cure autism, arguing that what a tragedy it is that autistic children will never have a job or pay taxes because apparently you're only worth a human life if you can earn money.
[00:09:35.320 --> 00:09:39.400] I also pointed out, Noah did a great piece for us on this for the skeptic.
[00:09:39.400 --> 00:09:42.200] Yes, a terrific rant about this on the skeptic.
[00:09:42.200 --> 00:09:48.200] But I also pointed out that when I was an autistic child, I didn't have a job or earn money or pay taxes.
[00:09:48.440 --> 00:09:48.760] That is true.
[00:09:48.760 --> 00:09:49.080] That is true.
[00:09:49.240 --> 00:09:50.360] Did you write poetry, though?
[00:09:50.360 --> 00:09:50.680] I did.
[00:09:50.920 --> 00:09:52.680] Well, I might have done a little bit of poetry.
[00:09:52.680 --> 00:09:53.400] That's true.
[00:09:53.640 --> 00:09:57.080] But I did wait until I was an autistic adult before I did any of those things.
[00:09:57.480 --> 00:10:00.200] I had a job, but I did not pay taxes.
[00:10:01.480 --> 00:10:03.960] Okay, we slammed the Pope and tax evasion.
[00:10:03.960 --> 00:10:08.200] Alice is throwing the controversies out there.
[00:10:08.520 --> 00:10:13.400] To be fair, I was paid like £3.50 an hour when I was 15 as a waitress.
[00:10:13.960 --> 00:10:15.640] It was not good.
[00:10:15.960 --> 00:10:18.120] But those claims aren't the ones that I want to address today.
[00:10:18.120 --> 00:10:27.320] Instead, I want to look at another claim which has been highlighted by bad medical takes recently a couple of times, and it appears to be increasingly popular within the ranks of the alt-right.
[00:10:27.320 --> 00:10:29.640] And that is the phenomenon of telegyny.
[00:10:29.640 --> 00:10:30.360] Telegyny.
[00:10:30.360 --> 00:10:30.680] Okay.
[00:10:30.680 --> 00:10:31.080] Telegyny.
[00:10:31.520 --> 00:10:32.920] Something to do with telomeres.
[00:10:33.080 --> 00:10:34.440] What telegyny is?
[00:10:34.440 --> 00:10:34.840] It is not.
[00:10:34.840 --> 00:10:36.040] It is not telemyers.
[00:10:36.520 --> 00:10:37.720] I will give you that.
[00:10:37.720 --> 00:10:41.480] It might be pronounced telegyny, but I think it's telegyny.
[00:10:41.480 --> 00:10:43.480] No, I have no idea what this is.
[00:10:43.480 --> 00:10:46.400] I feel like it's going to be something about heritability.
[00:10:46.480 --> 00:10:47.680] Something to do with heritability.
[00:10:44.760 --> 00:10:49.840] We're in the heritability space, yeah.
[00:10:50.080 --> 00:10:57.680] Because, like, progeny like telepathic DNA, heritability, or something in that kind of space.
[00:10:57.920 --> 00:11:00.080] Okay, this is from bad medical takes.
[00:11:00.080 --> 00:11:01.520] Many people don't know.
[00:11:01.520 --> 00:11:02.880] I say this is from bad medical takes.
[00:11:02.880 --> 00:11:04.400] Bad medical takes didn't say this.
[00:11:04.400 --> 00:11:06.160] They tweeted somebody else saying it yesterday.
[00:11:06.240 --> 00:11:06.800] Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
[00:11:07.200 --> 00:11:08.320] So this is a wrong header.
[00:11:10.720 --> 00:11:11.600] I found this.
[00:11:11.600 --> 00:11:12.080] Yeah.
[00:11:12.400 --> 00:11:18.560] Many people don't know that the DNA from past sex partners lingers in the female's body for the rest of her life.
[00:11:18.720 --> 00:11:20.320] Yeah, I thought that's where you were going to go.
[00:11:20.480 --> 00:11:22.240] I pieced it together just before you said it.
[00:11:22.560 --> 00:11:23.200] I've seen this.
[00:11:23.200 --> 00:11:24.480] I've seen this a lot.
[00:11:24.480 --> 00:11:27.120] I've intended to cover it on the show before and not got around to it.
[00:11:27.120 --> 00:11:29.200] So I'm glad we're going to talk about it.
[00:11:29.200 --> 00:11:32.960] There's thousands of different gene pools embedded in her.
[00:11:33.280 --> 00:11:38.160] If that man wanted a child of his own, even then, it wouldn't truly be his.
[00:11:38.160 --> 00:11:38.560] Oh my God.
[00:11:38.800 --> 00:11:43.600] Because it'd be like stitching together like a Frankenstein.
[00:11:43.760 --> 00:11:44.720] Franken baby.
[00:11:45.600 --> 00:11:55.280] Another account, also highlighted by Bad Medical Takes, they put it this way: bro, that baby is probably 65% his child if he did the DNA test.
[00:11:55.280 --> 00:11:58.800] She literally got pumped and dumped by so many dudes.
[00:11:58.800 --> 00:12:04.480] It is a known fact that women can store a very small amount of DNA from previous partners.
[00:12:04.480 --> 00:12:09.440] That's why DNA tests always say 98% or 95%.
[00:12:09.440 --> 00:12:13.040] Only virgins get 99.9% for the father.
[00:12:13.360 --> 00:12:14.880] Why do they get 99.9%?
[00:12:15.680 --> 00:12:17.440] Why do the virgins get 99.9%?
[00:12:17.440 --> 00:12:19.520] That's still suggesting there's a one in 10,000.
[00:12:19.600 --> 00:12:20.800] But that's not what the percent means.
[00:12:20.960 --> 00:12:22.160] No, I know it isn't one in a thousand.
[00:12:22.160 --> 00:12:22.640] Sorry.
[00:12:22.640 --> 00:12:23.200] Of course it doesn't.
[00:12:23.200 --> 00:12:23.760] Of course it isn't.
[00:12:23.760 --> 00:12:27.600] But in their mind, in their worldview, there's still a one in a thousand chance.
[00:12:27.680 --> 00:12:28.800] It's 95% yours.
[00:12:28.800 --> 00:12:30.360] No, it's a 95% chance.
[00:12:30.360 --> 00:12:31.160] Do you know what it is?
[00:12:29.920 --> 00:12:35.080] It's because they're probably all Christians and they believe there's such a thing as a virgin birth.
[00:12:35.320 --> 00:12:42.280] So they're like, okay, I mean, yeah, 999, but like, there's a one in a thousand chance that there was no man involved.
[00:12:42.280 --> 00:12:49.480] So telegyny is constructed from two words, tele, meaning far, as in telegraph, telephone, telepath, television, etc.
[00:12:49.800 --> 00:12:57.800] And johnny, meaning offspring, kind of like progeny, as Alice says, although technically one's Greek and one's Latin.
[00:12:58.200 --> 00:13:01.480] Progeny's from the Greek and telegyny's from the Latin, or vice versa.
[00:13:02.200 --> 00:13:04.040] It doesn't fucking matter which way around it is.
[00:13:04.040 --> 00:13:06.680] But you get the idea, it's remote offspring, right?
[00:13:06.680 --> 00:13:07.320] Remote offspring.
[00:13:07.480 --> 00:13:08.040] Remote offspring.
[00:13:08.200 --> 00:13:09.080] Kids from afar.
[00:13:09.080 --> 00:13:12.120] Not to be confused with how Elon Musk is raising his kids.
[00:13:13.960 --> 00:13:20.840] The idea of telegyny is apparently quite old, having been mentioned by Aristotle, according to Wikipedia.
[00:13:20.840 --> 00:13:25.400] Although I can't actually find a citation for Aristotle ever having mentioned this at all.
[00:13:25.800 --> 00:13:27.160] Wikipedia cites it.
[00:13:27.160 --> 00:13:29.720] Lots of people say, oh, it goes back to Aristotle.
[00:13:29.720 --> 00:13:41.960] The citation on Wikipedia is an article from the International Business Times, which itself credits Aristotle, but they're not pointing at a primary source, which they're not meant to in Wikipedia, but they're meant to report on reporting.
[00:13:41.960 --> 00:13:42.440] Yes.
[00:13:42.440 --> 00:13:45.560] But there is no primary source that I can find of Aristotle having said this.
[00:13:45.560 --> 00:13:52.520] Maybe it's in there somewhere, but I've not been able to find this idea that offspring could inherit traits from a mother's previous sexual partner.
[00:13:52.520 --> 00:13:55.880] Maybe Aristotle was all about that, but I can't fucking find it.
[00:13:56.200 --> 00:14:11.560] What did occur to me, though, when I was trying to find what was the earliest example of telegyny being referenced in culture was that if it was genuinely a popular and ancient idea, you would find it throughout mythology.
[00:14:11.560 --> 00:14:16.320] But I can't really find any concrete examples of it existing in mythology.
[00:14:16.640 --> 00:14:33.920] There are some tellings of the Minotaur story that suggest that Passifae, who was the Minotaur's mother, who birthed the Minotaur by fucking a bull, in some versions of that story, Passifae is corrupted by that experience, and her later offspring with a human father also have bull attributes.
[00:14:33.920 --> 00:14:34.640] They're a bit bullish.
[00:14:34.960 --> 00:14:36.480] But it's not in the original version.
[00:14:36.480 --> 00:14:42.480] It's only in some later versions, which might come after telegyny has become a thing, right?
[00:14:42.480 --> 00:14:54.080] So the relative absence of this idea from mythology, which is otherwise replete with stories of people's sexual exploits, suggests that maybe this isn't actually as widespread and ancient an idea as people think it is.
[00:14:54.080 --> 00:14:54.320] Yeah.
[00:14:54.320 --> 00:14:56.080] Obviously, that's not a slam-dunk argument.
[00:14:56.080 --> 00:14:56.480] No.
[00:14:56.480 --> 00:14:59.760] But it's kind of, you would expect it to be there and it's not on that weird.
[00:14:59.760 --> 00:15:04.400] And it's probably also not the bit of this idea you spent the most time debunking bullshit.
[00:15:04.400 --> 00:15:06.000] Yeah, it turns out it wasn't Aristotle.
[00:15:09.360 --> 00:15:20.240] So telegyny really took off in the 19th century after George Douglas, who was the 16th Earl of Morton, noticed something strange about his horse.
[00:15:20.560 --> 00:15:28.560] So he had an Arabian chestnut mare that he bred with a quagger, which is a zebra-like animal that's now extinct.
[00:15:28.720 --> 00:15:31.040] That feels like that's not your word to use.
[00:15:32.400 --> 00:15:37.360] It feels like the extinct zebra-like animals could call each other that, but you're not allowed to call them that.
[00:15:37.360 --> 00:15:41.520] So, and the offspring inherited the distinctive stripes of the quagga.
[00:15:41.520 --> 00:15:47.040] So the offspring of the Arabian chestnut mare bred with a quagger had kind of quaggery stripes.
[00:15:47.040 --> 00:15:56.240] However, when Lord Morton later bred the same mare with a purebred horse, the offspring from that mating still was stripey.
[00:15:56.560 --> 00:16:06.200] And so he thought, oh, apparently the earlier mating with the quagga somehow still modified the phenotype of the later offspring of the Arabian mare.
[00:15:59.920 --> 00:16:06.360] Okay.
[00:16:06.600 --> 00:16:10.600] And how often do spontaneous slight striping mutations happen in horses?
[00:16:10.600 --> 00:16:11.160] Exactly.
[00:16:11.160 --> 00:16:11.800] Yeah.
[00:16:12.680 --> 00:16:15.800] I don't need to answer that question because I avoid horses as much as I can.
[00:16:16.120 --> 00:16:20.440] Also, Darwin mentions Morton's mare in one of his books.
[00:16:20.440 --> 00:16:27.560] It's not on the origin of species, but one of his other books, Darwin mentions this as because when Darwin was writing, we hadn't figured out genetics yet.
[00:16:27.720 --> 00:16:30.040] So he was speculating on could it be this, could it be this?
[00:16:30.040 --> 00:16:32.600] And that was one of the things he talked about.
[00:16:32.920 --> 00:16:42.360] Towards the end of the 19th century, an American doctor called Austin Flint wrote a textbook called A Textbook of Human Physiology, getting in there with the early titles.
[00:16:42.360 --> 00:16:45.400] You can't call it a textbook of human physiology now because that's gone, right?
[00:16:45.400 --> 00:16:47.640] So we have to use strange names.
[00:16:47.640 --> 00:16:51.480] It's what they talk about when they say science is all about the low-hanging food cause first.
[00:16:51.720 --> 00:16:52.840] That's true of the titles as well.
[00:16:53.080 --> 00:16:53.480] Nature.
[00:16:53.480 --> 00:16:55.400] Nature's an old journal.
[00:16:55.400 --> 00:16:56.680] It's called science.
[00:16:56.680 --> 00:17:03.720] They're like, oh, well, now I've got to work quite hard to find a journal title because some nobeds already taken science.
[00:17:03.720 --> 00:17:06.520] Although I like the Lancet as an argument.
[00:17:06.520 --> 00:17:12.520] It puts me in mind of the kind of an estate agent called Brick or a coffee shop called Bean.
[00:17:12.520 --> 00:17:14.840] Having a journal called Lancet is...
[00:17:15.000 --> 00:17:15.880] That works for me.
[00:17:15.880 --> 00:17:17.400] Actually, that's quite good.
[00:17:17.400 --> 00:17:36.600] So anyway, in a textbook of human physiology, Austin Flint wrote, if pure-blooded mares or bitches had once been covered by an inferior male, in subsequent fecundations, which apparently is a word that means the formation of a zygote is what this means.
[00:17:36.600 --> 00:17:47.920] Subsequent fecundations, the young are likely to partake of the characteristic of the first male, even if they be afterwards bred with a male of unimpeachable pedigree.
[00:17:48.560 --> 00:17:50.320] Well, what's pedigree got to do?
[00:17:50.320 --> 00:17:54.080] Like, that's irrelevant to the point that they're making, surely.
[00:17:54.080 --> 00:17:56.560] Well, pedigree is a genetic term at that point, though, isn't it?
[00:17:56.560 --> 00:18:01.040] Around the genetic lineage of an animal being traceable far enough back that it's a pure bread.
[00:18:01.200 --> 00:18:17.520] Yes, but he also said if he if she'd mated with an infamous pedigree is in a sense a value judgment, like when you're breeding, not the worst value judgment we're getting by the end of this paragraph.
[00:18:17.520 --> 00:18:20.560] He goes on to say this is well known to breeders of animals.
[00:18:20.560 --> 00:18:23.920] The same influence is observed in a human subject.
[00:18:23.920 --> 00:18:28.720] A woman may have, by a second husband, children who resemble a former husband.
[00:18:29.040 --> 00:18:37.840] And this is particularly for possibly two reasons, only one of which were she already had those kids before she got married again.
[00:18:38.160 --> 00:18:42.960] And this is particularly well marked in certain instances by the colour of the hair and the eyes.
[00:18:42.960 --> 00:18:50.160] What the mechanism of the influence of the first conception is, it is impossible to say, but the fact is uncontestable.
[00:18:50.480 --> 00:19:06.240] And of course, because this is late 19th century America, he then goes on to talk about how white women who have sex with black men and go on to have children with white men, the children will present with, quote, some of the unmistakable peculiarities of the earlier partner.
[00:19:06.240 --> 00:19:10.640] Although he says this with slightly more racially charged language than I just used.
[00:19:10.640 --> 00:19:11.040] Yeah.
[00:19:11.360 --> 00:19:25.840] This does sound like it's just a couple who've got together after she's already pregnant, who don't want the world to know that he's raising someone else's child, so they found any justification for it, and now it's in a fucking zone.
[00:19:26.240 --> 00:19:33.720] Yeah, like these, there are far easier and more parsimonious explanations to this, and that is she was having an affair, mate.
[00:19:33.720 --> 00:19:34.920] Yeah, she was already pregnant.
[00:19:29.920 --> 00:19:36.120] Yeah, you were the affair.
[00:19:37.160 --> 00:19:37.800] Exactly.
[00:19:37.800 --> 00:19:40.920] Or when it comes to eye colour, yeah, that just happens sometimes.
[00:19:41.960 --> 00:19:43.800] You know, how to generation.
[00:19:43.800 --> 00:19:44.680] Exactly.
[00:19:44.680 --> 00:19:56.440] It's also something that was picked up on by the Nazis, of course, who argued that white women who had sex with non-Aryan men were permanently tainted and could no longer produce genetically pure offspring.
[00:19:56.440 --> 00:20:06.680] Although it is unclear how much the top brass in Nazi Germany really believed in the scientific validity of telegyny or whether they were simply co-opting the idea to support propaganda.
[00:20:06.680 --> 00:20:10.600] Just looking for excuses, which is an idea that we'll come back to.
[00:20:10.920 --> 00:20:21.800] So telegyny more or less falls to bits in the 20th century with the discovery of genetics and the understanding of chromosomes and genetic material and how it's contributed by the egg and the sperm and etc etc etc.
[00:20:21.800 --> 00:20:31.800] There is no mechanism that we are aware of which would allow previous sexual partners to genetically influence later offspring, which there's just no way that we know of that that can happen.
[00:20:32.120 --> 00:20:42.120] In hindsight, the apparently incontestable cases of telegyny referenced by Austin Flint or Lord Morton's mare could probably be explained by confirmation bias.
[00:20:42.600 --> 00:20:49.480] So some horses, for example, have recessive alleles for striping, which might explain why the later foals had stripes.
[00:20:49.480 --> 00:20:54.600] There's also no photographs of Lord Morton's mare, so we don't know how prominent these stripes are.
[00:20:54.600 --> 00:21:00.440] When you say a quagger and it's like a zebra, we're assuming fucking black and white solid stripes.
[00:21:00.440 --> 00:21:03.880] It could have been just brown and a slightly different brown.
[00:21:03.880 --> 00:21:04.240] You know, you know.
[00:21:04.240 --> 00:21:06.280] We don't know how like a black leopard.
[00:21:06.280 --> 00:21:09.640] Indeed, yeah, we don't even know how extreme these kind of things could be.
[00:21:09.640 --> 00:21:12.440] So, confirmation bias could be doing an awful lot of work here.
[00:21:12.440 --> 00:21:13.480] That is a quagger.
[00:21:13.480 --> 00:21:21.120] Ah, um, yeah, and quagga, it looks a bit like those giraffe things, yeah.
[00:21:21.200 --> 00:21:28.800] I can only remember those because at Chester Zoo, they're an enclosure called the Secret World of the Akapi, and it makes it seem way more mysterious and magical.
[00:21:28.960 --> 00:21:37.200] It's quite a mysterious enclosure, though, because it's all dark and they say they like to hide quite a lot, they're just shy, it's not like they're fucking spiders.
[00:21:37.440 --> 00:21:40.480] Oh, the secret, mysterious world of the Akapi.
[00:21:40.800 --> 00:21:48.000] But for listeners, and you can Google and have a look at a picture of a quagger, they're extinct now, but you know, we've got like taxidermied ones and there's some photographs and stuff.
[00:21:48.000 --> 00:21:54.320] But they're not as stripey as a zebra, they've got a kind of stripey head and then a largely horsey body.
[00:21:54.560 --> 00:21:56.080] We're back in the big territory, right?
[00:21:57.120 --> 00:22:02.400] They're striped at the front and solid at the back, they're more brown than black and white.
[00:22:02.720 --> 00:22:08.160] So, by the end of the 20th century, telegeny is largely considered to be a pseudoscience.
[00:22:08.160 --> 00:22:11.520] However, it has seen something of a revival in the last few years.
[00:22:11.520 --> 00:22:20.160] With some people suggesting that telegeny, although it's not compatible with what we understand about inheritance, there could be other epigenetic factors that do have an influence.
[00:22:20.160 --> 00:22:28.880] I was going to say before that when you were like, There's absolutely no way this can happen, I was going to talk about epigenetics, and I was like, No, that's me stretching too far to be too fair to the woos.
[00:22:28.880 --> 00:22:29.520] No, there is.
[00:22:29.520 --> 00:22:36.640] So, in 2014, there was a letter published in the Journal of Ecology Letters, which looked at a particular species of fly.
[00:22:36.960 --> 00:22:44.080] So, for this study, the researchers manipulated the diet of some of the male flies to produce two classes of male.
[00:22:44.080 --> 00:22:54.320] So, those are fed a nutrient-rich diet at the larval stage would pupate into quite large flies, and those with a nutrient-poor diet would pupate into smaller flies.
[00:22:54.320 --> 00:23:10.600] Okay, they then found that if they mated a large fly with a female, and then later a small fly with the same female, the second set of offspring would have larger bodies like the first male, not the smaller bodies like the second male.
[00:23:10.600 --> 00:23:11.480] Okay.
[00:23:11.800 --> 00:23:17.240] And this effect was not seen if the flies were just mated to the smaller fly initially.
[00:23:17.240 --> 00:23:24.120] So you had to have been mated to a large fly first, and then your offspring, even with a smaller fly, would be larger.
[00:23:24.120 --> 00:23:25.080] Okay.
[00:23:25.400 --> 00:23:32.600] Now, clearly, this is not a genetic factor, not least because the large flies got that way through diet, not through gene editing.
[00:23:32.600 --> 00:23:39.240] But there does seem to be something here that seems to be mediated by semen because the effect was only seen when the females mated with the large flies.
[00:23:39.240 --> 00:23:44.520] Just being in the room with them, for example, which was another control they did, didn't cause the issue.
[00:23:44.840 --> 00:23:53.800] The researchers suggested that something about the quality of the seminal fluid of the first fly influences the development of the eggs in the female.
[00:23:53.800 --> 00:24:01.080] So something like the sperm indicates to the female fly that times are plenty and so we can afford to be developmentally different.
[00:24:01.080 --> 00:24:07.640] So do flies generate eggs, female flies generate eggs, rather than have a store of eggs that they release over time there?
[00:24:07.640 --> 00:24:08.440] I believe that is the case.
[00:24:08.760 --> 00:24:14.600] Okay, because this because therefore this would not translate to humans where you're born with all the eggs you're going to use.
[00:24:14.760 --> 00:24:15.000] Indeed.
[00:24:15.000 --> 00:24:19.480] And also, this mechanism is very, very specific to this specific fly.
[00:24:19.480 --> 00:24:19.880] Okay.
[00:24:19.880 --> 00:24:23.720] It is not something that is generally applicable across the animal kingdom.
[00:24:23.720 --> 00:24:28.680] And there's no evidence of this happening in human beings at all, or indeed any mammal at all.
[00:24:28.680 --> 00:24:32.600] And just to check those bad medical ticks, were they about this species of family?
[00:24:32.680 --> 00:24:33.400] I don't think they were.
[00:24:33.400 --> 00:24:33.800] No, I'm just saying.
[00:24:33.920 --> 00:24:38.040] Was the profile picture of the guy on Twitter who was saying that's 65% yours, mate.
[00:24:38.040 --> 00:24:39.560] Was the profile picture a fly?
[00:24:39.560 --> 00:24:40.360] It was not a fly.
[00:24:40.920 --> 00:24:41.720] It was not a fly.
[00:24:41.720 --> 00:24:41.960] No.
[00:24:42.200 --> 00:24:47.280] Although they do point at the fly study as evidence to say telegyny is a thing.
[00:24:47.920 --> 00:24:55.600] So even though to claim that telegyny happens in any mammal at all, right now is pseudoscience.
[00:24:55.600 --> 00:24:58.960] To the best understanding that we have, it is pseudoscience end of story.
[00:24:58.960 --> 00:25:13.760] Nevertheless, it's become a very popular notion within the manosphere, with many commentators asserting that it has been scientifically proving and pointing at things like the fly study to assert this and then using that as justification to assert control over women's sexuality.
[00:25:13.760 --> 00:25:16.800] Yes, and not just the sexuality of female flies.
[00:25:16.800 --> 00:25:17.200] No.
[00:25:17.200 --> 00:25:21.360] Because if they wanted to fuck a female fly, go for it if you want.
[00:25:21.360 --> 00:25:24.960] If you could figure out how young manosphere, guys, you are very welcome.
[00:25:25.120 --> 00:25:27.680] There's loads of them as well, which means the incel issue is going to be way.
[00:25:27.920 --> 00:25:29.520] And flies have very low standards.
[00:25:29.520 --> 00:25:30.720] They hang around shit all the time.
[00:25:30.720 --> 00:25:32.160] They'll be very used to those guys.
[00:25:32.320 --> 00:25:32.720] That's true.
[00:25:32.720 --> 00:25:33.840] That's true.
[00:25:33.840 --> 00:25:40.080] The obsession with a woman's body count, as they refer to it these days, is not really a new thing.
[00:25:40.080 --> 00:25:44.960] But the use of pseudoscience to try and give it a veneer of credibility does seem to be something that's on the rise.
[00:25:44.960 --> 00:25:46.080] This is the irritating thing.
[00:25:46.080 --> 00:25:49.520] It's like you're either anti-science or you're pro-science.
[00:25:49.520 --> 00:25:55.760] You can't have this fucking, I'm anti-science, but I'm going to cherry-pick the bits of science that I think justify my position.
[00:25:56.080 --> 00:26:02.080] And it seems to be especially prevalent within the manosphere, but also in the alt-right and Christian right as well.
[00:26:02.560 --> 00:26:04.320] They're all basically the same thing at the minute.
[00:26:04.560 --> 00:26:04.880] Yeah, they are.
[00:26:04.960 --> 00:26:13.920] It's terrifying how much all of that is just becoming this spiraling fucking tumblewheel that's growing out of control.
[00:26:13.920 --> 00:26:14.640] Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:14.640 --> 00:26:20.160] Does anyone remember that really ghastly ham sandwich meme about Taylor Swift from a few years ago?
[00:26:20.640 --> 00:26:21.360] Did you see that one?
[00:26:21.600 --> 00:26:23.760] That's how disposable these ideas think about.
[00:26:23.920 --> 00:26:30.040] If what you're going to say is what I think you're going to say, I am glad I fucking missed that because that's repugnant.
[00:26:29.760 --> 00:26:30.840] It definitely is.
[00:26:31.160 --> 00:26:37.960] So, an evangelical Christian blogger called Jennifer Mayers posted an image to Twitter of two ham sandwiches.
[00:26:37.960 --> 00:26:44.200] And one ham sandwich was very neat and tidy, and the other one had all of the ham hanging out of it.
[00:26:44.200 --> 00:26:49.400] And she posted this with a comment saying, My daughter represents the one on the right, and Taylor Swift represents the one on the right.
[00:26:49.560 --> 00:26:50.600] Well, that's either one.
[00:26:50.680 --> 00:26:52.120] You're talking about your daughter.
[00:26:52.200 --> 00:26:54.600] Don't know why she's posting memes about her daughter's vagina.
[00:26:54.600 --> 00:26:55.480] I've got no idea.
[00:26:55.480 --> 00:27:00.360] Also, if you saw a ham sandwich without the ham spilling out, that's a much tastier looking sandwich.
[00:27:00.360 --> 00:27:03.000] It looks like, oh, God, look how much meaty that looks delicious.
[00:27:03.000 --> 00:27:05.560] It looks kind of because you don't want it to be all like neat and trimmed and stuff.
[00:27:05.560 --> 00:27:06.520] That's going to be like one of those one sandwiches.
[00:27:06.840 --> 00:27:07.800] You've got half a slice of ham.
[00:27:08.120 --> 00:27:09.320] Yeah, exactly.
[00:27:09.640 --> 00:27:14.360] But the intent of the post was very clear, quite aside from making memes about your daughter's vagina.
[00:27:14.360 --> 00:27:15.400] I don't know why you would be doing that.
[00:27:15.800 --> 00:27:22.280] Like, this woman, in order to preserve the dignity of her daughter, is making thousands of people online picture her daughter's vagina.
[00:27:22.840 --> 00:27:23.880] Vulva, yeah.
[00:27:24.520 --> 00:27:25.880] So, and you're quite right.
[00:27:25.880 --> 00:27:29.480] She repeatedly used the word vagina when it is obviously about a vulva.
[00:27:29.480 --> 00:27:30.920] But the intent of the post was clear.
[00:27:30.920 --> 00:27:34.600] It was to shame Taylor Swift for the perception that she has had many sexual partners.
[00:27:34.600 --> 00:27:35.640] I don't know if that's the case or not.
[00:27:36.360 --> 00:27:43.400] Has fucking nothing to do with, presumably, what she's saying is that she's got bigger labia, which has nothing to do with that.
[00:27:43.400 --> 00:27:43.800] Exactly, yeah.
[00:27:44.040 --> 00:27:45.960] No anatomical changes have anything to do with that.
[00:27:46.200 --> 00:27:52.360] Somehow, that having many sexual partners changes the size of your inner labia, which has never made sense to me as a claim.
[00:27:52.680 --> 00:28:01.240] But it is also a worryingly prevalent view that being fucked by 50 different guys is materially different to being fucked by one guy 50 times.
[00:28:01.480 --> 00:28:02.000] Yes, it is.
[00:28:01.960 --> 00:28:04.240] Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
[00:28:05.160 --> 00:28:14.680] Well, but you see, it's just telling because if they think that you can be stretched out and they're saying that I'm not stretching you out, then you know they're telling something about themselves.
[00:28:15.360 --> 00:28:27.120] And the use of the discredited pseudoscience of telegyny is just another attempt to try and prop up this same claim with the fundamental goal of exerting control over the sexual agency of women.
[00:28:27.120 --> 00:28:34.160] In this case, telegyny leans into one of the underpinning reasons for this, which is the desire for paternal certainty.
[00:28:34.480 --> 00:28:46.240] That's not the only reason why men try to assert control over women's sexuality, but it is a reason why men try to assert control over women's sexuality is so they know that the kid is theirs fundamentally.
[00:28:46.240 --> 00:28:54.800] This desire to ensure that the time and resources spent raising offspring are spent raising offspring and perpetuating your family line, right?
[00:28:55.120 --> 00:29:00.960] As someone who's never going to have kids, I can't get my head around caring that much about making sure your family line continues.
[00:29:00.960 --> 00:29:08.080] Like, genuinely, there's not a part of my brain that goes, oh no, it would be really important that my specific family line continues.
[00:29:08.080 --> 00:29:10.320] It'd be a real tragedy to the world if that stops.
[00:29:10.320 --> 00:29:11.440] Yeah, like it just my brain doesn't matter.
[00:29:12.080 --> 00:29:13.440] I don't get that either.
[00:29:13.440 --> 00:29:34.560] But I think the other side of it is just that it's quite sad because it's like, okay, you're either in a relationship where you trust your partner, or you care about your partner and family life enough that if you had a child through any other means, you would happily raise that child, or you just don't.
[00:29:34.560 --> 00:29:38.800] And if you're in a relationship where you can't trust your partner, that's really quite sad.
[00:29:39.120 --> 00:29:46.720] Whether it's whoever's fault it is, whether it's because you're just not capable of trusting or you have some instability in your relationship that makes it hard.
[00:29:46.720 --> 00:29:51.440] But our society is still very much set up to support this model, right?
[00:29:51.440 --> 00:30:11.400] Even to the extent that you can use a paternity test to disclaim responsibility for a child and refuse to spend your resources on raising a child that isn't yours, and the state will support you in that, or the reverse, where a paternity test can be used to enforce that you use your resources to raise a child, and the state will enforce that you do.
[00:30:11.400 --> 00:30:13.160] The state will support that as well.
[00:30:13.160 --> 00:30:18.280] So, we're still very culturally bound up in this idea around paternal certainty.
[00:30:18.280 --> 00:30:27.400] And prior to the creation of the paternity test, the only way that you could be sure that any children are yours was to marry a virgin who has never had sex with anybody else.
[00:30:27.400 --> 00:30:29.880] That was the only way you could do it before we invented paternity tests.
[00:30:30.120 --> 00:30:40.440] And also, to be clear, that is not a way to be sure that any kids are yours because, A, you can't be sure that anybody's a virgin because there's no test for that because that kind of stuff is pseudoscientific and bullshit.
[00:30:40.760 --> 00:30:43.320] You're taking everybody's word for everything all the time.
[00:30:43.320 --> 00:30:51.320] And B, just because someone is a virgin, just because anybody is a virgin when they meet someone else doesn't mean they stop having a sexuality.
[00:30:51.400 --> 00:30:53.720] It's impossible to have sex with another human being.
[00:30:53.880 --> 00:30:55.080] That's men and women.
[00:30:55.080 --> 00:31:00.360] And telegyny is just the latest way for men to try and coerce and control women's sexual agency.
[00:31:00.360 --> 00:31:04.680] And they're doing it by persuading other men that promiscuous women should be avoided.
[00:31:04.680 --> 00:31:11.320] Because even if that kid is yours, it still isn't yours yours because she's had sex with other people before you.
[00:31:11.320 --> 00:31:16.440] Oh, and that kind of underlying connotation that you only own her if you got there first.
[00:31:17.160 --> 00:31:18.840] Yeah, absolutely fucking stupid.
[00:31:18.840 --> 00:31:37.080] And in a modern culture of serial dating and situationships where it has become the norm in many cases for women to have many sexual partners before then finding a partner they want to have children with, telegyny serves to escalate and assert that she must have had few or no sexual partners before you.
[00:31:37.080 --> 00:31:41.720] Because even if she is monogamous with you now, that is still not good enough anymore.
[00:31:41.720 --> 00:31:43.000] So that is true.
[00:31:43.000 --> 00:31:59.760] In a way, there is a Darwinian effect here in terms of selective pressure that anybody who cares about that so much is going to find it very hard to find anybody, A, who fits the criteria that they require, and B, who is also interested in them.
[00:31:59.760 --> 00:32:02.880] And they might just select themselves out of the gene pool.
[00:32:02.880 --> 00:32:04.880] Well, they are, aren't they?
[00:32:04.880 --> 00:32:06.000] That's the issue.
[00:32:06.240 --> 00:32:10.080] Increasingly, women are choosing to stay single rather than to be with those guys.
[00:32:10.080 --> 00:32:12.480] Or at the very least, go with a guy who isn't like that.
[00:32:12.960 --> 00:32:15.280] The selective pressure is way against you, buddy.
[00:32:15.280 --> 00:32:24.080] But there will be women who see this, especially young women, who see this and take this on board and internalize this and think that that's the way that they have to behave.
[00:32:25.520 --> 00:32:45.520] Especially when the whole social media cycle at the minute is being really ramped up towards traditional purity, like clean beauty, clean diet, clean everything, that like feeding into that purity culture is just constantly there in every part of your life, not just in your sexual part of your life.
[00:32:45.520 --> 00:32:57.920] Yeah, and also it will feed into men who, young men who will take this message on board and will use this as an excuse to be incredibly shitty and potentially even violent towards the women who don't make the standards.
[00:32:57.920 --> 00:33:00.480] So yeah, when I was being glib about it, it was just being glib.
[00:33:00.800 --> 00:33:02.000] It's incredibly shit.
[00:33:02.320 --> 00:33:03.520] Glib on this show?
[00:33:04.080 --> 00:33:05.600] Who's ever heard the like?
[00:33:05.920 --> 00:33:13.200] Last year, there was a paper published in the Journal of Medical and Clinical Nursing, which was titled Telegyny and Family Values.
[00:33:13.200 --> 00:33:24.000] The abstract for this paper starts: My acquaintance from college married her fellow citizen, which is an unusual turn of phrase, which should become clear later as to why that is.
[00:33:24.000 --> 00:33:29.920] My acquaintance from college married her fellow citizen, and after a few years, she gave birth to a healthy and beautiful baby.
[00:33:30.760 --> 00:33:33.400] She had no sexual adventures in her marriage.
[00:33:33.400 --> 00:33:34.840] The poor fucker.
[00:33:35.800 --> 00:33:37.000] Oh, Christ.
[00:33:37.000 --> 00:33:41.720] But by which I assume he is meaning an affair rather than like a quest.
[00:33:42.600 --> 00:33:45.320] She could slay a dragon essentially.
[00:33:46.120 --> 00:33:57.480] She had no sexual adventures in her marriage, but the baby was black, even though the husband was fair-skinned, which later led to many disagreements, divorces, and the breakup of the family.
[00:33:57.480 --> 00:33:59.800] I'm not sure how divorces is plural there.
[00:34:00.360 --> 00:34:01.320] That's a hell of a breakup.
[00:34:01.560 --> 00:34:05.560] Unless he accused a particular black man of being the craft.
[00:34:05.720 --> 00:34:08.280] Possibly destroyed that marriage.
[00:34:08.280 --> 00:34:16.360] Or unless they sought couples counseling and that went so badly that their therapist had a cry to the conference and divorced their partner.
[00:34:17.000 --> 00:34:18.120] I'm terrible at relationships.
[00:34:18.120 --> 00:34:19.480] I can't do it anymore.
[00:34:19.480 --> 00:34:23.080] They might have got divorced and then reconciled and they got divorced again.
[00:34:24.120 --> 00:34:25.160] That could have happened too.
[00:34:25.160 --> 00:34:26.520] I think Eminem did that.
[00:34:26.520 --> 00:34:38.120] Anyway, so the paper then proceeds to claim that telegyny is well established within animal breeding communities, including a completely inaccurate retelling of the Lord Morton's horse story.
[00:34:38.120 --> 00:34:42.440] This paper is very, very short, and I could probably read the whole thing out, but I'm not going to.
[00:34:42.440 --> 00:34:44.600] So I'll just give you some highlights.
[00:34:44.600 --> 00:34:48.360] So these are some highlights from this paper from the Journal of Clinical.
[00:34:48.360 --> 00:34:49.080] What is it?
[00:34:49.080 --> 00:34:51.800] The Journal of Medical and Clinical Nursing.
[00:34:52.120 --> 00:35:06.600] Telegyny in humans has been scientifically confirmed after many years of extensive physiological, anthropological, sociological, and statistical research and experiments by mostly Russian impartial scientists.
[00:35:07.880 --> 00:35:09.880] That's a weird addition to throw in there.
[00:35:12.120 --> 00:35:22.720] In practice, this means that a woman who has not even become pregnant carries within her egg cells in the DNA sequences of all her previous sexual partners.
[00:35:23.040 --> 00:35:27.920] It has been known that a partner's genes can be woven into a woman's genetic system.
[00:35:27.920 --> 00:35:29.520] That's not how eggs work.
[00:35:29.840 --> 00:35:31.200] It's not.
[00:35:32.800 --> 00:35:45.920] It is clear that the great significance given to virginity, honesty, and fidelity in practically all cultures, nations, and religions, with only a few exceptions, has a solid genetic basis.
[00:35:46.240 --> 00:35:48.400] I love that, but with only a few exceptions.
[00:35:48.400 --> 00:35:53.920] This is an absolute right across humanity, which is why it's so important, apart from the places where it is.
[00:35:55.600 --> 00:36:02.640] The seventh commandment of God's moral law reads: thou shalt not commit adultery.
[00:36:02.640 --> 00:36:12.560] Official science is silent about telegyny, so as not to challenge the previous sexual revolutions, which rake in huge amounts of money.
[00:36:12.560 --> 00:36:17.760] Our children are perishing by imitating sick authorities and their lies.
[00:36:18.160 --> 00:36:19.120] This is in a journal.
[00:36:19.440 --> 00:36:20.080] Wow.
[00:36:20.400 --> 00:36:23.600] Sexual revolutions that rake in lots of money.
[00:36:23.600 --> 00:36:24.000] Yeah.
[00:36:24.320 --> 00:36:26.560] Who's spending money on my guess?
[00:36:26.560 --> 00:36:33.760] And this is a stretch to try and find the most charitable interpretation: is they're talking about the sale of the contraceptive pill.
[00:36:33.760 --> 00:36:36.000] Oh, that would be my guess.
[00:36:36.000 --> 00:36:39.760] Because that was the major revolution in women taking agency of their own sexuality.
[00:36:40.080 --> 00:36:41.760] Yeah, I thought they were talking sexoids.
[00:36:41.840 --> 00:36:44.720] I thought this was like big deal talking.
[00:36:44.720 --> 00:36:47.600] Monogamous people take the contraceptive pill.
[00:36:48.400 --> 00:36:49.120] Yeah.
[00:36:49.440 --> 00:36:54.720] Only a return to God and traditional values are a true path to the future.
[00:36:54.720 --> 00:36:55.840] Science.
[00:36:55.840 --> 00:37:02.760] So you may have gotten a hint as to where this paper came from, given the casual reference to how telegraphy has been proven by impartial Russians.
[00:36:59.920 --> 00:37:02.920] Yeah.
[00:37:04.520 --> 00:37:10.120] The sole author of this study lists their affiliated institution as the University of Serbia.
[00:37:10.120 --> 00:37:19.640] Perhaps not surprising when telegeny is being pressed by alt-right, conservative Christian and Manosphere influencers, all of which aligns well with Russian foreign policy.
[00:37:19.640 --> 00:37:20.600] Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:21.240 --> 00:37:26.680] The references for this paper, incidentally, are four YouTube videos and the Bible.
[00:37:26.680 --> 00:37:27.720] Fuck me.
[00:37:27.720 --> 00:37:32.520] It's literally, they've got square brackets, five, close square brackets, Exodus.
[00:37:32.520 --> 00:37:36.680] It's literally what they've got in the references on this paper.
[00:37:37.320 --> 00:37:38.840] So, so far, though.
[00:37:43.320 --> 00:37:52.440] So far, however, I've been largely engaging with the telegeny argument on its own terms, pointing out that it lacks credible scientific support, at least in mammals.
[00:37:52.440 --> 00:37:55.160] But I would actually go further than that.
[00:37:55.160 --> 00:38:04.440] Because even if it is true, even if every sexual partner a woman has leaves some epigenetic imprint that affects future offspring, who gives a fucking person?
[00:38:04.600 --> 00:38:05.320] Who the fuck cares?
[00:38:05.640 --> 00:38:06.760] That sounds optimal, though.
[00:38:06.760 --> 00:38:07.720] I mean, it doesn't work that way.
[00:38:08.200 --> 00:38:08.920] But it would be way better.
[00:38:09.960 --> 00:38:11.480] Genetic diversity is good.
[00:38:12.520 --> 00:38:13.960] But doesn't fucking matter.
[00:38:13.960 --> 00:38:15.480] It's not the Middle Ages.
[00:38:15.480 --> 00:38:23.480] We're surrounded by people raising adopted children or stepchildren or donor-conceived children and loving them all the same.
[00:38:23.480 --> 00:38:25.320] DNA is not what makes you a parent.
[00:38:25.320 --> 00:38:27.240] Responsibility is what makes you a parent.
[00:38:27.240 --> 00:38:28.760] Affection is what makes you a parent.
[00:38:28.760 --> 00:38:37.640] So even if there is some weird trace of a past partner lurking in your child's genome, why would that negate your ability to love and raise them?
[00:38:41.800 --> 00:38:47.280] So, for skeptics and the pub online, there is an exciting talk that you want to talk about coming up, Alice.
[00:38:47.440 --> 00:38:56.640] We haven't done a SIPPO plug in ages, but I am-I mean, I'm partly plugging it because I'm hosting it, but I'm hosting it because I think it's going to be a great talk.
[00:38:56.800 --> 00:39:08.000] Cass Peters is going to be talk giving a talk titled The Cane Only Works If You Use It, and it's talking about kind of disability mobility devices and support and how we can actually all right.
[00:39:08.000 --> 00:39:11.200] I thought it was about corporal punishment, not about corporate punishment.
[00:39:11.680 --> 00:39:12.800] Bring back the birch.
[00:39:12.800 --> 00:39:15.440] That's uh, that's the disposition of SIPPOL.
[00:39:15.600 --> 00:39:18.720] I think in school, if you just wave the cane, it'll settle the pupils down.
[00:39:19.280 --> 00:39:24.080] You don't even have to use it when it comes to mobility aids.
[00:39:24.080 --> 00:39:30.480] They're more useful if you actually use them, especially as especially they can be empowering if you use them.
[00:39:30.480 --> 00:39:34.000] So, I think it'll be a really interesting talk that is next week.
[00:39:34.000 --> 00:39:34.320] Next week.
[00:39:34.480 --> 00:39:36.320] 22nd of May.
[00:39:36.320 --> 00:39:38.400] So, that's going out on the 22nd of May.
[00:39:38.400 --> 00:39:40.560] Is that from seven o'clock or is it 7:30?
[00:39:40.560 --> 00:39:41.920] I can never remember with SIPPO.
[00:39:42.080 --> 00:39:43.200] I think it's 7:30.
[00:39:44.480 --> 00:39:45.440] I thought it was 7.
[00:39:45.440 --> 00:39:46.400] I thought it was 7.
[00:39:46.400 --> 00:39:54.080] Well, you can have a look, but listeners will be able to find out for themselves at sitp.online, where you'll be able to find details about that talk.
[00:39:54.080 --> 00:39:54.960] You'll be able to watch it.
[00:39:54.960 --> 00:39:59.040] It'll be live streamed on Twitch, and it'll be available on YouTube afterwards.
[00:39:59.040 --> 00:40:03.520] But before that, this evening, we have a talk for Liverpool Skeptics and the Pub.
[00:40:03.520 --> 00:40:15.840] So, that's going to be happening in the CASA on Hope Street, and that is going to be Professor Helen Stolford from the University of Liverpool, who is like an international expert in the rights of children going through asylum.
[00:40:15.840 --> 00:40:25.000] And she'll be talking about the inherent violence of the asylum process, particularly for unaccompanied minors, which I think could be really, really interesting.
[00:40:25.000 --> 00:40:43.800] About especially looking at the way the political climate is, the amount of misunderstanding, misinformation, disinformation, abject nonsense that gets propaganda that gets spread around refugees and asylum, and the idea that people come here for an easy life and get handed everything.
[00:40:43.800 --> 00:40:58.760] She actually works extensively in these areas and knows exactly how much, how difficult it is, how much, as she talks about it being physical, but also emotional and mental violence is put upon these kids who've already left a place that's incredibly hard for them.
[00:40:58.760 --> 00:41:00.600] So, yeah, I think that'd be a really, really interesting talk.
[00:41:00.680 --> 00:41:05.320] I think she's essentially looking at what we can actually do, what would actually solve some of these problems.
[00:41:05.320 --> 00:41:07.400] So, yeah, it should be a really interesting one.
[00:41:07.400 --> 00:41:10.200] And one last thing that we need to plug is, of course, QED.
[00:41:10.200 --> 00:41:13.000] So, tickets for QED are on sale right now.
[00:41:13.000 --> 00:41:16.200] You can find them at QEDcon.org, £179.
[00:41:16.200 --> 00:41:19.160] Guess you'd whole weekend without added extras.
[00:41:19.160 --> 00:41:21.400] You can come along and take part in QED.
[00:41:21.400 --> 00:41:22.280] That's going to be a fantastic time.
[00:41:22.360 --> 00:41:23.000] The final evidence.
[00:41:23.480 --> 00:41:24.200] Final QED.
[00:41:24.200 --> 00:41:28.600] So, if you've wanted to be coming to, if you wanted to come to QED and you've never been before, this is the one to come to.
[00:41:28.680 --> 00:41:30.040] This is the one to come to, absolutely.
[00:41:30.360 --> 00:41:34.920] In the past, and you thought that was great, I should do it again, but I can't this time do it again.
[00:41:35.320 --> 00:41:38.360] This time, this is the last one you'll be coming to as a proper QED.
[00:41:38.360 --> 00:41:39.320] Definitely do it again.
[00:41:39.480 --> 00:41:44.840] Speakers for that include Naomi Ryan, Annie Kelly, Anna Poshaiski, yourself, Marsh.
[00:41:44.840 --> 00:41:45.240] Yes.
[00:41:45.240 --> 00:41:47.480] And it's going to be MC'd by Robin Ince.
[00:41:47.800 --> 00:41:54.120] You can find information about all of those speakers and maybe some extra ones, we don't know yet, at qedcon.org.
[00:41:54.440 --> 00:41:58.840] And one last thing for us to plug as well is, of course, our Patreon.
[00:41:58.840 --> 00:42:08.040] So if you enjoy the show, if you like what we do and you want to support the show and our ability to continue to do it, you can throw us some money at patreon.com forward slash skeptics with a K.
[00:42:08.040 --> 00:42:09.320] There's no minimum amount.
[00:42:09.640 --> 00:42:12.120] I think it's like a pound, which is just the smallest we could set it to.
[00:42:12.240 --> 00:42:16.400] We'd say like a pound a month, which works out as like 20p an episode.
[00:42:14.920 --> 00:42:22.000] If you want to give us more than that, you're heavily encouraged, but not mandated to do that.
[00:42:22.320 --> 00:42:24.160] But we do appreciate that.
[00:42:24.160 --> 00:42:26.880] We spend a lot of time on the show doing quite a lot of research.
[00:42:26.880 --> 00:42:39.200] Mike went away and found a paper by a Russian Christian pretending to be a scientist because he saw something on Blue Sky from someone tweeting something mad.
[00:42:39.200 --> 00:42:41.680] So, you know, we put the time and the effort in.
[00:42:41.680 --> 00:42:42.640] So yeah, it was a hell of a good time.
[00:42:42.640 --> 00:42:42.640] It's a good time.
[00:42:44.240 --> 00:42:45.760] Especially in the middle of the power cut.
[00:42:46.800 --> 00:42:49.200] This was on a laptop on my 5G data.
[00:42:49.440 --> 00:42:51.680] Let's research this before the battery runs out.
[00:42:51.680 --> 00:42:58.480] So we spend about, you know, it takes me about between five and six hours to write a Skeptics with a K story, something like that.
[00:42:58.480 --> 00:43:06.800] So it's kind of, if you're interested, you've been listening for a long time, you can throw some money our way to our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash skeptics with a K.
[00:43:06.800 --> 00:43:15.280] And if you like the work of the Merseyside Skeptic Society, you will still get a free show, an advertising free show, if you subscribe to their Patreon at patreon.com forward slash Merseyskeptics.
[00:43:15.280 --> 00:43:15.840] Fantastic.
[00:43:15.840 --> 00:43:18.080] Aside from that, then I think that is all we have time for.
[00:43:18.080 --> 00:43:18.640] I think so.
[00:43:18.640 --> 00:43:21.200] All that remains then is for me to thank Marsh for coming on today.
[00:43:21.200 --> 00:43:21.680] Cheers.
[00:43:21.680 --> 00:43:22.640] Thank you to Alice.
[00:43:22.640 --> 00:43:23.040] Thank you.
[00:43:23.040 --> 00:43:25.760] We have been Skeptics with a K, and we will see you next time.
[00:43:25.760 --> 00:43:26.560] Bye now.
[00:43:26.560 --> 00:43:27.440] Bye.
[00:43:32.240 --> 00:43:37.360] Skeptics with a K is produced by Skeptic Media in association with the Merseyside Skeptic Society.
[00:43:37.360 --> 00:43:46.560] For questions or comments, email podcast at skepticswithakay.org and you can find out more about Merseyside Skeptics at merseyside skeptics.org.uk.

Prompt 2: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 3: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 4: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Full Transcript

[00:00:00.480 --> 00:00:03.360] They say that home is where the heart is.
[00:00:03.360 --> 00:00:08.960] Maybe that's why so many fall in love with Big Pine Key and Florida's Lower Keys.
[00:00:08.960 --> 00:00:20.000] With epic ocean views, unspoiled wilderness, sandy beaches, abundant wildlife, RV resorts, and Stock Island's rustic charm.
[00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:23.680] Florida's lower keys don't skip a beep.
[00:00:23.680 --> 00:00:29.440] For more about the lower keys, visit fla keys.com/slash lower keys.
[00:00:36.800 --> 00:00:44.240] It is Thursday, the 15th of May, 2025, and you're listening to Skeptics with a K, the podcast for science, reason, and critical thinking.
[00:00:44.240 --> 00:00:55.360] Skeptics with a K is produced by Skeptic Media in association with the Merseyside Skeptic Society, a non-profit organization for the promotion of scientific skepticism on Merseyside, around the UK and internationally.
[00:00:55.360 --> 00:00:56.640] I'm your host, Mike Hall.
[00:00:56.640 --> 00:00:58.000] With me today is Marsh.
[00:00:58.000 --> 00:00:58.560] Hello.
[00:00:58.560 --> 00:00:59.440] And Alice.
[00:00:59.440 --> 00:01:00.160] Hello.
[00:01:00.480 --> 00:01:05.840] So I was woken in the night by Lana aggressively kind of like, Mike, fucking wake up, Mike.
[00:01:06.160 --> 00:01:07.360] And I said, what, what, what?
[00:01:07.360 --> 00:01:10.080] And she said, there's something beeping.
[00:01:10.080 --> 00:01:10.480] Okay.
[00:01:10.480 --> 00:01:13.040] I was like, the fuck, what's something beeping?
[00:01:13.040 --> 00:01:15.360] And so I listened around and said, there's nothing beeping.
[00:01:15.360 --> 00:01:16.080] What are you talking about?
[00:01:16.080 --> 00:01:16.880] I can't hear anything.
[00:01:17.360 --> 00:01:18.720] Nothing is beeping.
[00:01:18.720 --> 00:01:20.480] And then she said, no, there was a beep.
[00:01:20.480 --> 00:01:21.600] I definitely heard a beep.
[00:01:21.600 --> 00:01:23.280] And I said, it'll be the dishwasher.
[00:01:23.280 --> 00:01:24.640] We just had a new kitchen fitted.
[00:01:24.720 --> 00:01:25.520] Got a new kitchen.
[00:01:25.520 --> 00:01:26.720] We've got that sorted now.
[00:01:26.720 --> 00:01:27.440] That's brilliant.
[00:01:27.440 --> 00:01:32.000] We've got a dishwasher with a new kitchen, which I'm very excited about because I'm usually the one who does the fucking dish to dry.
[00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:34.160] Now I just need to put stuff in the dishwasher.
[00:01:34.160 --> 00:01:34.720] So much easier.
[00:01:34.960 --> 00:01:36.080] Yeah, it is much easier.
[00:01:36.080 --> 00:01:37.200] And I thought, it beeps.
[00:01:37.200 --> 00:01:38.720] You know, we put it on when we went to bed.
[00:01:38.720 --> 00:01:41.760] It's just beeped in the small hours and it's an unexpected noise.
[00:01:41.760 --> 00:01:42.720] So that's woken.
[00:01:42.800 --> 00:01:45.920] But then I heard the beep and it wasn't the dishwasher beep.
[00:01:45.920 --> 00:01:46.320] Okay.
[00:01:46.320 --> 00:01:48.560] And I was like, okay, what's the smoke alarm on the blink?
[00:01:48.720 --> 00:01:49.680] Battery's going up.
[00:01:49.680 --> 00:01:50.400] That was the next thing.
[00:01:50.800 --> 00:01:51.520] Smoke alarm.
[00:01:51.520 --> 00:01:53.040] Of course, it's the smoke alarm going off.
[00:01:53.360 --> 00:01:54.960] That's what the problem is.
[00:01:54.960 --> 00:01:58.080] But it wasn't regular in the way that a smoke alarm beep is.
[00:01:58.080 --> 00:02:07.400] Smoke alarm beep is, you know, you get that pip, and then maybe 45 seconds later, 60 seconds later, you'll get another pip out of it, right?
[00:02:07.400 --> 00:02:10.040] But also, all of our smoke alarms are mains wired.
[00:02:10.040 --> 00:02:10.520] Oh, okay.
[00:02:10.600 --> 00:02:11.720] We don't have battery ones.
[00:02:11.720 --> 00:02:12.120] Okay.
[00:02:12.440 --> 00:02:14.440] And so then I heard the peep.
[00:02:14.440 --> 00:02:15.640] I heard the noise as well.
[00:02:15.720 --> 00:02:19.480] Wasn't a noise I recognized, but also there was a flash when it came with it.
[00:02:19.480 --> 00:02:25.960] I saw it just through the, you know, above the door, you've got like the glass panels you get above a door sometimes to let light in.
[00:02:25.960 --> 00:02:27.480] I saw through that a flash.
[00:02:27.480 --> 00:02:29.240] I was like, what the fuck in the hell is that?
[00:02:29.240 --> 00:02:36.520] So I got up and I went out into the house to find the lights in the house are flickering on and off.
[00:02:36.520 --> 00:02:38.600] The fridge is flickering and flashing.
[00:02:38.600 --> 00:02:39.720] It's the fridge that's beeping.
[00:02:39.720 --> 00:02:41.160] That's going to beep.
[00:02:41.160 --> 00:02:42.280] The oven is turning on.
[00:02:42.440 --> 00:02:43.800] It's got a real poltergeist situation here.
[00:02:44.760 --> 00:02:46.120] There's a poltergeist in the house.
[00:02:46.200 --> 00:02:47.080] The fucking hell.
[00:02:47.240 --> 00:02:49.880] Turns out was a there was a power cut.
[00:02:50.120 --> 00:02:51.720] But the power hadn't cut cut.
[00:02:51.720 --> 00:02:53.000] It was like coming in and out.
[00:02:53.320 --> 00:02:54.440] Oh, like a brownout.
[00:02:54.440 --> 00:02:54.680] Yeah.
[00:02:54.920 --> 00:02:55.800] Like a personal brownout.
[00:02:56.040 --> 00:03:00.280] A brownout that's like because it normally just dims for a bit and then comes back up.
[00:03:00.280 --> 00:03:00.680] Like it does.
[00:03:00.840 --> 00:03:02.040] I've never had a brownout.
[00:03:02.040 --> 00:03:02.680] But it was.
[00:03:02.680 --> 00:03:05.800] So a brownout typically, you would get a low power.
[00:03:06.520 --> 00:03:07.320] Oh, okay.
[00:03:07.320 --> 00:03:10.680] But this was on and off and going and not going.
[00:03:10.680 --> 00:03:13.880] And I went out into the street and the street lights were off.
[00:03:13.880 --> 00:03:18.280] But the flats that were across the way, they've got all security lights outside and they're fucking going.
[00:03:18.280 --> 00:03:20.280] So the street looks like a fucking rave.
[00:03:20.600 --> 00:03:21.880] And it's the whole street.
[00:03:22.120 --> 00:03:25.720] Have you been hit by Madrid?
[00:03:26.360 --> 00:03:31.080] The next door neighbor's burglar alarm is going off because a lot of burglar alarms go off when you cut the power, right?
[00:03:31.400 --> 00:03:33.720] And so the whole street is just fucking chaos.
[00:03:33.720 --> 00:03:37.160] And like it's the best poltergeist you've ever seen in the world, right?
[00:03:37.480 --> 00:03:40.680] And I thought, this can't be good for the electronics in the house.
[00:03:41.000 --> 00:03:42.840] This is going on and off and on and off.
[00:03:42.840 --> 00:03:46.640] So I just threw the main switch on the breaker box and said, I'd rather just have it off for now.
[00:03:46.880 --> 00:03:48.320] Yeah, have everything off.
[00:03:48.640 --> 00:03:49.840] And so, yeah, it was a power cut.
[00:03:44.840 --> 00:03:55.600] So Lana, four o'clock in the morning, is phoning the power company saying, We've got a power cut.
[00:03:55.600 --> 00:03:57.680] And they said it's going to be several hours.
[00:03:57.680 --> 00:03:58.480] It's going to be four hours.
[00:03:58.560 --> 00:04:01.200] Our SLA is four hours to get it fixed.
[00:04:01.520 --> 00:04:03.360] So that'll be at half past eight in the morning.
[00:04:03.360 --> 00:04:04.400] It'll be fixed by then.
[00:04:04.400 --> 00:04:06.640] Come half past eight, it wasn't fucking fixed.
[00:04:06.880 --> 00:04:13.680] And we're thinking, all right, we need to get up and have some breakfast, except we've got an induction stove, so we can't have any breakfast.
[00:04:14.400 --> 00:04:15.840] The fridge is defrosting.
[00:04:15.840 --> 00:04:16.160] Never mind.
[00:04:16.160 --> 00:04:16.960] I'll pop the kettle on.
[00:04:16.960 --> 00:04:18.160] Oh, can't pop the kettle on.
[00:04:18.160 --> 00:04:19.680] Well, we could do some hot water on the stove.
[00:04:19.680 --> 00:04:20.960] No, we can't do that.
[00:04:20.960 --> 00:04:21.680] Okay, never mind.
[00:04:21.680 --> 00:04:22.800] I'll go and get a shower.
[00:04:22.960 --> 00:04:24.080] Oh, no, I can't do that.
[00:04:24.080 --> 00:04:27.840] Which is not because it's a gas boiler, but it's a combi boiler.
[00:04:27.840 --> 00:04:34.160] It's sparked by a you know, the pilot light had gone out, so it needs to be switched on by electricity.
[00:04:34.160 --> 00:04:35.120] And it's like this.
[00:04:35.520 --> 00:04:40.960] I didn't realize I showered in electricity, but apparently everything in my life involves electricity.
[00:04:41.120 --> 00:04:44.560] Do you think I told you six months more go get solar panels?
[00:04:44.560 --> 00:04:46.800] You'd have been to your neighbours.
[00:04:46.800 --> 00:04:48.960] At 8:30 in the morning, it was a sunny day.
[00:04:49.520 --> 00:04:50.960] You could have been showering in sunshine.
[00:04:51.840 --> 00:04:53.680] Cooking your bacon in sunshine.
[00:04:53.680 --> 00:04:54.880] No, fuck all.
[00:04:55.040 --> 00:04:59.040] So eventually it didn't come back until half past three the following day.
[00:04:59.040 --> 00:05:00.720] It was for us.
[00:05:00.720 --> 00:05:01.120] It was at work.
[00:05:02.160 --> 00:05:04.960] No, it was a Sunday.
[00:05:05.280 --> 00:05:06.480] So it wasn't too bad.
[00:05:06.480 --> 00:05:08.640] We ended up, you know, we went out and go out to eat, yeah.
[00:05:08.800 --> 00:05:10.640] Had breakfast out instead and things like that.
[00:05:10.640 --> 00:05:14.480] Which is fine if you can afford to do that, but obviously not because everybody can do that.
[00:05:14.480 --> 00:05:15.760] Those kind of outages are really annoying.
[00:05:15.760 --> 00:05:18.000] I had an outage on my internet and it went out.
[00:05:18.000 --> 00:05:21.360] I was due to record an episode of No Rogan at 3 p.m.
[00:05:21.520 --> 00:05:23.920] It went out at about 2:15.
[00:05:24.000 --> 00:05:24.880] I was like, oh, fuck.
[00:05:24.960 --> 00:05:26.160] And I've done loads of prep for this.
[00:05:26.160 --> 00:05:29.960] Yeah, I'm gone away, so I need to get loads of kind of get the show well ahead of time.
[00:05:29.960 --> 00:05:31.480] So I was like, I was very annoyed.
[00:05:31.480 --> 00:05:32.440] The internet wasn't working out.
[00:05:32.600 --> 00:05:33.240] You were insufferable.
[00:05:33.400 --> 00:05:34.680] I was insufferable, is what I was saying.
[00:05:29.520 --> 00:05:36.440] I was like, oh, the worst possible time.
[00:05:29.680 --> 00:05:37.080] So I thought, okay.
[00:05:37.400 --> 00:05:38.600] How could you tell?
[00:05:38.600 --> 00:05:39.720] Well, this is the thing, you see.
[00:05:40.040 --> 00:05:41.720] I'm a very generous person, Mike.
[00:05:43.400 --> 00:05:44.680] You can come and record at mine.
[00:05:44.680 --> 00:05:45.320] It's fine.
[00:05:45.720 --> 00:05:48.120] I'll let you have my desk and my microphone.
[00:05:48.120 --> 00:05:51.240] I'll go and sit on the sofa in the living room and I can work from there.
[00:05:51.240 --> 00:05:54.200] I've not got any big meetings this afternoon, so you can just use my setup.
[00:05:54.440 --> 00:05:55.400] Very, very generous of you.
[00:05:55.400 --> 00:05:57.560] So I brought my laptop around.
[00:05:57.880 --> 00:05:59.080] The laptop doesn't have a good camera on it.
[00:05:59.160 --> 00:06:00.440] We record for YouTube these days.
[00:06:00.520 --> 00:06:04.200] So I used my old iPhone as a proxy camera, sort of a software.
[00:06:04.520 --> 00:06:06.200] So I tried to set my laptop up with that.
[00:06:06.200 --> 00:06:09.000] And you've got to install iTunes to make your camera work.
[00:06:09.080 --> 00:06:10.680] Oh, fuck, I had to download iTunes.
[00:06:10.680 --> 00:06:11.880] Couldn't download iTunes.
[00:06:11.880 --> 00:06:12.520] Didn't have internet.
[00:06:12.600 --> 00:06:16.840] Got to my neighbor's Wi-Fi to download interload iTunes to get the camera.
[00:06:16.920 --> 00:06:17.640] Got that all working.
[00:06:17.640 --> 00:06:18.680] Went around Alice's.
[00:06:18.680 --> 00:06:20.600] You had the same microphone as me, which is fine.
[00:06:20.600 --> 00:06:25.720] I brought the little sort of grabby arm, the adjustable grabby arm that my iPhone hangs off.
[00:06:25.720 --> 00:06:34.840] I set it up in the side of your cupboard, plugged my laptop in, went to the website where we record everything, and my laptop could not handle that.
[00:06:34.840 --> 00:06:36.600] And I spoke to Cecil for about six minutes.
[00:06:36.760 --> 00:06:39.080] He was like, yeah, should we just record this tomorrow?
[00:06:39.080 --> 00:06:41.240] Because this will not work.
[00:06:45.960 --> 00:06:49.560] Do either of you follow an account called Bad Medical Takes?
[00:06:49.560 --> 00:06:49.960] Yes.
[00:06:49.960 --> 00:06:50.200] Yes.
[00:06:51.400 --> 00:06:52.760] I don't know that I actually follow them.
[00:06:52.760 --> 00:06:57.400] I think it just appears in my feed quite often because lots of other people retweet it or like it.
[00:06:57.560 --> 00:06:58.600] No, that's the kind of thing you'd like.
[00:06:58.760 --> 00:07:00.280] Yeah, I don't need to follow anything anymore.
[00:07:00.280 --> 00:07:02.600] It just like appears in my algorithm.
[00:07:02.600 --> 00:07:09.720] So it's an account which finds people talking absolute bollocks about something medical, and then they highlight it for other people.
[00:07:09.720 --> 00:07:10.920] Too much hilarity.
[00:07:10.920 --> 00:07:15.520] Yeah, sometimes it can be a bit like for people who are right.
[00:07:14.600 --> 00:07:22.080] It can be a bit mean and exactly yeah to kind of point and laugh at people saying that I'm generally not very keen on these days.
[00:07:22.400 --> 00:07:35.040] But it's also quite useful in highlighting absurd medical misunderstandings, especially from people in power when it's highlighting people in positions of power exhibiting severe medical misunderstandings.
[00:07:35.040 --> 00:07:37.760] That's maybe where it's more useful than just ordinary folks.
[00:07:37.760 --> 00:07:42.160] Although it's a useful barometer of where ordinary folks think things are as well.
[00:07:42.160 --> 00:07:48.800] Recent messages that they posted included one where somebody points out that homosexuality is unlikely to be genetic.
[00:07:48.800 --> 00:07:59.120] The statistics show that it has low heritability and low twin concordance, by which they mean in identical twins, there's only a 25% chance that if one twin is gay, the other is also gay.
[00:07:59.120 --> 00:08:04.720] And so therefore it is unlikely to be genetic, they conclude, which doesn't seem like a bad medical take in and of itself.
[00:08:04.720 --> 00:08:06.640] It probably isn't genetic.
[00:08:06.640 --> 00:08:10.960] And so they then further conclude that the most likely explanation is therefore a pathogen.
[00:08:10.960 --> 00:08:11.520] Right.
[00:08:11.520 --> 00:08:12.320] Oh my God.
[00:08:12.560 --> 00:08:16.560] I knew when you said, oh, not genetic, that it's going to be, they're going to make some bold conclusion here.
[00:08:17.040 --> 00:08:20.320] They're going to say it's nature rather than nature.
[00:08:21.040 --> 00:08:23.200] No, but it probably is nurture.
[00:08:23.360 --> 00:08:30.240] In that situation, it's as much there's a strong nurture element if you have identical twins and only one of them is gay.
[00:08:30.240 --> 00:08:31.360] There's a nurture element there.
[00:08:31.360 --> 00:08:32.720] It's not a fucking pathogen, though.
[00:08:33.120 --> 00:08:34.560] That's a different thing.
[00:08:34.560 --> 00:08:43.920] Another recent post they highlighted claimed that the Pope died from the COVID vaccine because three years ago he did a video where he said you should get vaccinated and he was plenty healthy back then.
[00:08:43.920 --> 00:08:44.480] That is fair.
[00:08:44.480 --> 00:08:46.880] COVID vaccine victims, R-I-P-L, Papa.
[00:08:45.320 --> 00:08:50.480] He said it doesn't mean just because he said it does not mean he had had the vaccine.
[00:08:50.480 --> 00:08:53.520] I advise people to do things that I don't do all the time.
[00:08:54.160 --> 00:08:55.280] I bet he had.
[00:08:55.280 --> 00:08:59.600] The thing is, next time there's an anti-vax protest in town, they're going to have those little pictures of the people who died for the vaccine.
[00:08:59.600 --> 00:09:01.320] It's going to be poor Francis.
[00:09:01.560 --> 00:09:02.040] Oh, my God.
[00:09:02.040 --> 00:09:03.400] It is, isn't it?
[00:08:59.840 --> 00:09:04.360] Oh, dear.
[00:09:04.520 --> 00:09:08.040] Also, Alice in Pope is Raging Hypocrite shock.
[00:09:08.040 --> 00:09:11.640] That's the most controversial thing we've ever said on this show.
[00:09:11.640 --> 00:09:14.520] The head of the Catholic Church is a steaming grey hypocrite.
[00:09:15.800 --> 00:09:20.680] Of course, they have also posted about the recent press conference from Robert Kennedy, who is the U.S.
[00:09:20.760 --> 00:09:35.320] Director of Health and Human Services, where he made a deeply wrong-headed pledge to cure autism, arguing that what a tragedy it is that autistic children will never have a job or pay taxes because apparently you're only worth a human life if you can earn money.
[00:09:35.320 --> 00:09:39.400] I also pointed out, Noah did a great piece for us on this for the skeptic.
[00:09:39.400 --> 00:09:42.200] Yes, a terrific rant about this on the skeptic.
[00:09:42.200 --> 00:09:48.200] But I also pointed out that when I was an autistic child, I didn't have a job or earn money or pay taxes.
[00:09:48.440 --> 00:09:48.760] That is true.
[00:09:48.760 --> 00:09:49.080] That is true.
[00:09:49.240 --> 00:09:50.360] Did you write poetry, though?
[00:09:50.360 --> 00:09:50.680] I did.
[00:09:50.920 --> 00:09:52.680] Well, I might have done a little bit of poetry.
[00:09:52.680 --> 00:09:53.400] That's true.
[00:09:53.640 --> 00:09:57.080] But I did wait until I was an autistic adult before I did any of those things.
[00:09:57.480 --> 00:10:00.200] I had a job, but I did not pay taxes.
[00:10:01.480 --> 00:10:03.960] Okay, we slammed the Pope and tax evasion.
[00:10:03.960 --> 00:10:08.200] Alice is throwing the controversies out there.
[00:10:08.520 --> 00:10:13.400] To be fair, I was paid like £3.50 an hour when I was 15 as a waitress.
[00:10:13.960 --> 00:10:15.640] It was not good.
[00:10:15.960 --> 00:10:18.120] But those claims aren't the ones that I want to address today.
[00:10:18.120 --> 00:10:27.320] Instead, I want to look at another claim which has been highlighted by bad medical takes recently a couple of times, and it appears to be increasingly popular within the ranks of the alt-right.
[00:10:27.320 --> 00:10:29.640] And that is the phenomenon of telegyny.
[00:10:29.640 --> 00:10:30.360] Telegyny.
[00:10:30.360 --> 00:10:30.680] Okay.
[00:10:30.680 --> 00:10:31.080] Telegyny.
[00:10:31.520 --> 00:10:32.920] Something to do with telomeres.
[00:10:33.080 --> 00:10:34.440] What telegyny is?
[00:10:34.440 --> 00:10:34.840] It is not.
[00:10:34.840 --> 00:10:36.040] It is not telemyers.
[00:10:36.520 --> 00:10:37.720] I will give you that.
[00:10:37.720 --> 00:10:41.480] It might be pronounced telegyny, but I think it's telegyny.
[00:10:41.480 --> 00:10:43.480] No, I have no idea what this is.
[00:10:43.480 --> 00:10:46.400] I feel like it's going to be something about heritability.
[00:10:46.480 --> 00:10:47.680] Something to do with heritability.
[00:10:44.760 --> 00:10:49.840] We're in the heritability space, yeah.
[00:10:50.080 --> 00:10:57.680] Because, like, progeny like telepathic DNA, heritability, or something in that kind of space.
[00:10:57.920 --> 00:11:00.080] Okay, this is from bad medical takes.
[00:11:00.080 --> 00:11:01.520] Many people don't know.
[00:11:01.520 --> 00:11:02.880] I say this is from bad medical takes.
[00:11:02.880 --> 00:11:04.400] Bad medical takes didn't say this.
[00:11:04.400 --> 00:11:06.160] They tweeted somebody else saying it yesterday.
[00:11:06.240 --> 00:11:06.800] Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
[00:11:07.200 --> 00:11:08.320] So this is a wrong header.
[00:11:10.720 --> 00:11:11.600] I found this.
[00:11:11.600 --> 00:11:12.080] Yeah.
[00:11:12.400 --> 00:11:18.560] Many people don't know that the DNA from past sex partners lingers in the female's body for the rest of her life.
[00:11:18.720 --> 00:11:20.320] Yeah, I thought that's where you were going to go.
[00:11:20.480 --> 00:11:22.240] I pieced it together just before you said it.
[00:11:22.560 --> 00:11:23.200] I've seen this.
[00:11:23.200 --> 00:11:24.480] I've seen this a lot.
[00:11:24.480 --> 00:11:27.120] I've intended to cover it on the show before and not got around to it.
[00:11:27.120 --> 00:11:29.200] So I'm glad we're going to talk about it.
[00:11:29.200 --> 00:11:32.960] There's thousands of different gene pools embedded in her.
[00:11:33.280 --> 00:11:38.160] If that man wanted a child of his own, even then, it wouldn't truly be his.
[00:11:38.160 --> 00:11:38.560] Oh my God.
[00:11:38.800 --> 00:11:43.600] Because it'd be like stitching together like a Frankenstein.
[00:11:43.760 --> 00:11:44.720] Franken baby.
[00:11:45.600 --> 00:11:55.280] Another account, also highlighted by Bad Medical Takes, they put it this way: bro, that baby is probably 65% his child if he did the DNA test.
[00:11:55.280 --> 00:11:58.800] She literally got pumped and dumped by so many dudes.
[00:11:58.800 --> 00:12:04.480] It is a known fact that women can store a very small amount of DNA from previous partners.
[00:12:04.480 --> 00:12:09.440] That's why DNA tests always say 98% or 95%.
[00:12:09.440 --> 00:12:13.040] Only virgins get 99.9% for the father.
[00:12:13.360 --> 00:12:14.880] Why do they get 99.9%?
[00:12:15.680 --> 00:12:17.440] Why do the virgins get 99.9%?
[00:12:17.440 --> 00:12:19.520] That's still suggesting there's a one in 10,000.
[00:12:19.600 --> 00:12:20.800] But that's not what the percent means.
[00:12:20.960 --> 00:12:22.160] No, I know it isn't one in a thousand.
[00:12:22.160 --> 00:12:22.640] Sorry.
[00:12:22.640 --> 00:12:23.200] Of course it doesn't.
[00:12:23.200 --> 00:12:23.760] Of course it isn't.
[00:12:23.760 --> 00:12:27.600] But in their mind, in their worldview, there's still a one in a thousand chance.
[00:12:27.680 --> 00:12:28.800] It's 95% yours.
[00:12:28.800 --> 00:12:30.360] No, it's a 95% chance.
[00:12:30.360 --> 00:12:31.160] Do you know what it is?
[00:12:29.920 --> 00:12:35.080] It's because they're probably all Christians and they believe there's such a thing as a virgin birth.
[00:12:35.320 --> 00:12:42.280] So they're like, okay, I mean, yeah, 999, but like, there's a one in a thousand chance that there was no man involved.
[00:12:42.280 --> 00:12:49.480] So telegyny is constructed from two words, tele, meaning far, as in telegraph, telephone, telepath, television, etc.
[00:12:49.800 --> 00:12:57.800] And johnny, meaning offspring, kind of like progeny, as Alice says, although technically one's Greek and one's Latin.
[00:12:58.200 --> 00:13:01.480] Progeny's from the Greek and telegyny's from the Latin, or vice versa.
[00:13:02.200 --> 00:13:04.040] It doesn't fucking matter which way around it is.
[00:13:04.040 --> 00:13:06.680] But you get the idea, it's remote offspring, right?
[00:13:06.680 --> 00:13:07.320] Remote offspring.
[00:13:07.480 --> 00:13:08.040] Remote offspring.
[00:13:08.200 --> 00:13:09.080] Kids from afar.
[00:13:09.080 --> 00:13:12.120] Not to be confused with how Elon Musk is raising his kids.
[00:13:13.960 --> 00:13:20.840] The idea of telegyny is apparently quite old, having been mentioned by Aristotle, according to Wikipedia.
[00:13:20.840 --> 00:13:25.400] Although I can't actually find a citation for Aristotle ever having mentioned this at all.
[00:13:25.800 --> 00:13:27.160] Wikipedia cites it.
[00:13:27.160 --> 00:13:29.720] Lots of people say, oh, it goes back to Aristotle.
[00:13:29.720 --> 00:13:41.960] The citation on Wikipedia is an article from the International Business Times, which itself credits Aristotle, but they're not pointing at a primary source, which they're not meant to in Wikipedia, but they're meant to report on reporting.
[00:13:41.960 --> 00:13:42.440] Yes.
[00:13:42.440 --> 00:13:45.560] But there is no primary source that I can find of Aristotle having said this.
[00:13:45.560 --> 00:13:52.520] Maybe it's in there somewhere, but I've not been able to find this idea that offspring could inherit traits from a mother's previous sexual partner.
[00:13:52.520 --> 00:13:55.880] Maybe Aristotle was all about that, but I can't fucking find it.
[00:13:56.200 --> 00:14:11.560] What did occur to me, though, when I was trying to find what was the earliest example of telegyny being referenced in culture was that if it was genuinely a popular and ancient idea, you would find it throughout mythology.
[00:14:11.560 --> 00:14:16.320] But I can't really find any concrete examples of it existing in mythology.
[00:14:16.640 --> 00:14:33.920] There are some tellings of the Minotaur story that suggest that Passifae, who was the Minotaur's mother, who birthed the Minotaur by fucking a bull, in some versions of that story, Passifae is corrupted by that experience, and her later offspring with a human father also have bull attributes.
[00:14:33.920 --> 00:14:34.640] They're a bit bullish.
[00:14:34.960 --> 00:14:36.480] But it's not in the original version.
[00:14:36.480 --> 00:14:42.480] It's only in some later versions, which might come after telegyny has become a thing, right?
[00:14:42.480 --> 00:14:54.080] So the relative absence of this idea from mythology, which is otherwise replete with stories of people's sexual exploits, suggests that maybe this isn't actually as widespread and ancient an idea as people think it is.
[00:14:54.080 --> 00:14:54.320] Yeah.
[00:14:54.320 --> 00:14:56.080] Obviously, that's not a slam-dunk argument.
[00:14:56.080 --> 00:14:56.480] No.
[00:14:56.480 --> 00:14:59.760] But it's kind of, you would expect it to be there and it's not on that weird.
[00:14:59.760 --> 00:15:04.400] And it's probably also not the bit of this idea you spent the most time debunking bullshit.
[00:15:04.400 --> 00:15:06.000] Yeah, it turns out it wasn't Aristotle.
[00:15:09.360 --> 00:15:20.240] So telegyny really took off in the 19th century after George Douglas, who was the 16th Earl of Morton, noticed something strange about his horse.
[00:15:20.560 --> 00:15:28.560] So he had an Arabian chestnut mare that he bred with a quagger, which is a zebra-like animal that's now extinct.
[00:15:28.720 --> 00:15:31.040] That feels like that's not your word to use.
[00:15:32.400 --> 00:15:37.360] It feels like the extinct zebra-like animals could call each other that, but you're not allowed to call them that.
[00:15:37.360 --> 00:15:41.520] So, and the offspring inherited the distinctive stripes of the quagga.
[00:15:41.520 --> 00:15:47.040] So the offspring of the Arabian chestnut mare bred with a quagger had kind of quaggery stripes.
[00:15:47.040 --> 00:15:56.240] However, when Lord Morton later bred the same mare with a purebred horse, the offspring from that mating still was stripey.
[00:15:56.560 --> 00:16:06.200] And so he thought, oh, apparently the earlier mating with the quagga somehow still modified the phenotype of the later offspring of the Arabian mare.
[00:15:59.920 --> 00:16:06.360] Okay.
[00:16:06.600 --> 00:16:10.600] And how often do spontaneous slight striping mutations happen in horses?
[00:16:10.600 --> 00:16:11.160] Exactly.
[00:16:11.160 --> 00:16:11.800] Yeah.
[00:16:12.680 --> 00:16:15.800] I don't need to answer that question because I avoid horses as much as I can.
[00:16:16.120 --> 00:16:20.440] Also, Darwin mentions Morton's mare in one of his books.
[00:16:20.440 --> 00:16:27.560] It's not on the origin of species, but one of his other books, Darwin mentions this as because when Darwin was writing, we hadn't figured out genetics yet.
[00:16:27.720 --> 00:16:30.040] So he was speculating on could it be this, could it be this?
[00:16:30.040 --> 00:16:32.600] And that was one of the things he talked about.
[00:16:32.920 --> 00:16:42.360] Towards the end of the 19th century, an American doctor called Austin Flint wrote a textbook called A Textbook of Human Physiology, getting in there with the early titles.
[00:16:42.360 --> 00:16:45.400] You can't call it a textbook of human physiology now because that's gone, right?
[00:16:45.400 --> 00:16:47.640] So we have to use strange names.
[00:16:47.640 --> 00:16:51.480] It's what they talk about when they say science is all about the low-hanging food cause first.
[00:16:51.720 --> 00:16:52.840] That's true of the titles as well.
[00:16:53.080 --> 00:16:53.480] Nature.
[00:16:53.480 --> 00:16:55.400] Nature's an old journal.
[00:16:55.400 --> 00:16:56.680] It's called science.
[00:16:56.680 --> 00:17:03.720] They're like, oh, well, now I've got to work quite hard to find a journal title because some nobeds already taken science.
[00:17:03.720 --> 00:17:06.520] Although I like the Lancet as an argument.
[00:17:06.520 --> 00:17:12.520] It puts me in mind of the kind of an estate agent called Brick or a coffee shop called Bean.
[00:17:12.520 --> 00:17:14.840] Having a journal called Lancet is...
[00:17:15.000 --> 00:17:15.880] That works for me.
[00:17:15.880 --> 00:17:17.400] Actually, that's quite good.
[00:17:17.400 --> 00:17:36.600] So anyway, in a textbook of human physiology, Austin Flint wrote, if pure-blooded mares or bitches had once been covered by an inferior male, in subsequent fecundations, which apparently is a word that means the formation of a zygote is what this means.
[00:17:36.600 --> 00:17:47.920] Subsequent fecundations, the young are likely to partake of the characteristic of the first male, even if they be afterwards bred with a male of unimpeachable pedigree.
[00:17:48.560 --> 00:17:50.320] Well, what's pedigree got to do?
[00:17:50.320 --> 00:17:54.080] Like, that's irrelevant to the point that they're making, surely.
[00:17:54.080 --> 00:17:56.560] Well, pedigree is a genetic term at that point, though, isn't it?
[00:17:56.560 --> 00:18:01.040] Around the genetic lineage of an animal being traceable far enough back that it's a pure bread.
[00:18:01.200 --> 00:18:17.520] Yes, but he also said if he if she'd mated with an infamous pedigree is in a sense a value judgment, like when you're breeding, not the worst value judgment we're getting by the end of this paragraph.
[00:18:17.520 --> 00:18:20.560] He goes on to say this is well known to breeders of animals.
[00:18:20.560 --> 00:18:23.920] The same influence is observed in a human subject.
[00:18:23.920 --> 00:18:28.720] A woman may have, by a second husband, children who resemble a former husband.
[00:18:29.040 --> 00:18:37.840] And this is particularly for possibly two reasons, only one of which were she already had those kids before she got married again.
[00:18:38.160 --> 00:18:42.960] And this is particularly well marked in certain instances by the colour of the hair and the eyes.
[00:18:42.960 --> 00:18:50.160] What the mechanism of the influence of the first conception is, it is impossible to say, but the fact is uncontestable.
[00:18:50.480 --> 00:19:06.240] And of course, because this is late 19th century America, he then goes on to talk about how white women who have sex with black men and go on to have children with white men, the children will present with, quote, some of the unmistakable peculiarities of the earlier partner.
[00:19:06.240 --> 00:19:10.640] Although he says this with slightly more racially charged language than I just used.
[00:19:10.640 --> 00:19:11.040] Yeah.
[00:19:11.360 --> 00:19:25.840] This does sound like it's just a couple who've got together after she's already pregnant, who don't want the world to know that he's raising someone else's child, so they found any justification for it, and now it's in a fucking zone.
[00:19:26.240 --> 00:19:33.720] Yeah, like these, there are far easier and more parsimonious explanations to this, and that is she was having an affair, mate.
[00:19:33.720 --> 00:19:34.920] Yeah, she was already pregnant.
[00:19:29.920 --> 00:19:36.120] Yeah, you were the affair.
[00:19:37.160 --> 00:19:37.800] Exactly.
[00:19:37.800 --> 00:19:40.920] Or when it comes to eye colour, yeah, that just happens sometimes.
[00:19:41.960 --> 00:19:43.800] You know, how to generation.
[00:19:43.800 --> 00:19:44.680] Exactly.
[00:19:44.680 --> 00:19:56.440] It's also something that was picked up on by the Nazis, of course, who argued that white women who had sex with non-Aryan men were permanently tainted and could no longer produce genetically pure offspring.
[00:19:56.440 --> 00:20:06.680] Although it is unclear how much the top brass in Nazi Germany really believed in the scientific validity of telegyny or whether they were simply co-opting the idea to support propaganda.
[00:20:06.680 --> 00:20:10.600] Just looking for excuses, which is an idea that we'll come back to.
[00:20:10.920 --> 00:20:21.800] So telegyny more or less falls to bits in the 20th century with the discovery of genetics and the understanding of chromosomes and genetic material and how it's contributed by the egg and the sperm and etc etc etc.
[00:20:21.800 --> 00:20:31.800] There is no mechanism that we are aware of which would allow previous sexual partners to genetically influence later offspring, which there's just no way that we know of that that can happen.
[00:20:32.120 --> 00:20:42.120] In hindsight, the apparently incontestable cases of telegyny referenced by Austin Flint or Lord Morton's mare could probably be explained by confirmation bias.
[00:20:42.600 --> 00:20:49.480] So some horses, for example, have recessive alleles for striping, which might explain why the later foals had stripes.
[00:20:49.480 --> 00:20:54.600] There's also no photographs of Lord Morton's mare, so we don't know how prominent these stripes are.
[00:20:54.600 --> 00:21:00.440] When you say a quagger and it's like a zebra, we're assuming fucking black and white solid stripes.
[00:21:00.440 --> 00:21:03.880] It could have been just brown and a slightly different brown.
[00:21:03.880 --> 00:21:04.240] You know, you know.
[00:21:04.240 --> 00:21:06.280] We don't know how like a black leopard.
[00:21:06.280 --> 00:21:09.640] Indeed, yeah, we don't even know how extreme these kind of things could be.
[00:21:09.640 --> 00:21:12.440] So, confirmation bias could be doing an awful lot of work here.
[00:21:12.440 --> 00:21:13.480] That is a quagger.
[00:21:13.480 --> 00:21:21.120] Ah, um, yeah, and quagga, it looks a bit like those giraffe things, yeah.
[00:21:21.200 --> 00:21:28.800] I can only remember those because at Chester Zoo, they're an enclosure called the Secret World of the Akapi, and it makes it seem way more mysterious and magical.
[00:21:28.960 --> 00:21:37.200] It's quite a mysterious enclosure, though, because it's all dark and they say they like to hide quite a lot, they're just shy, it's not like they're fucking spiders.
[00:21:37.440 --> 00:21:40.480] Oh, the secret, mysterious world of the Akapi.
[00:21:40.800 --> 00:21:48.000] But for listeners, and you can Google and have a look at a picture of a quagger, they're extinct now, but you know, we've got like taxidermied ones and there's some photographs and stuff.
[00:21:48.000 --> 00:21:54.320] But they're not as stripey as a zebra, they've got a kind of stripey head and then a largely horsey body.
[00:21:54.560 --> 00:21:56.080] We're back in the big territory, right?
[00:21:57.120 --> 00:22:02.400] They're striped at the front and solid at the back, they're more brown than black and white.
[00:22:02.720 --> 00:22:08.160] So, by the end of the 20th century, telegeny is largely considered to be a pseudoscience.
[00:22:08.160 --> 00:22:11.520] However, it has seen something of a revival in the last few years.
[00:22:11.520 --> 00:22:20.160] With some people suggesting that telegeny, although it's not compatible with what we understand about inheritance, there could be other epigenetic factors that do have an influence.
[00:22:20.160 --> 00:22:28.880] I was going to say before that when you were like, There's absolutely no way this can happen, I was going to talk about epigenetics, and I was like, No, that's me stretching too far to be too fair to the woos.
[00:22:28.880 --> 00:22:29.520] No, there is.
[00:22:29.520 --> 00:22:36.640] So, in 2014, there was a letter published in the Journal of Ecology Letters, which looked at a particular species of fly.
[00:22:36.960 --> 00:22:44.080] So, for this study, the researchers manipulated the diet of some of the male flies to produce two classes of male.
[00:22:44.080 --> 00:22:54.320] So, those are fed a nutrient-rich diet at the larval stage would pupate into quite large flies, and those with a nutrient-poor diet would pupate into smaller flies.
[00:22:54.320 --> 00:23:10.600] Okay, they then found that if they mated a large fly with a female, and then later a small fly with the same female, the second set of offspring would have larger bodies like the first male, not the smaller bodies like the second male.
[00:23:10.600 --> 00:23:11.480] Okay.
[00:23:11.800 --> 00:23:17.240] And this effect was not seen if the flies were just mated to the smaller fly initially.
[00:23:17.240 --> 00:23:24.120] So you had to have been mated to a large fly first, and then your offspring, even with a smaller fly, would be larger.
[00:23:24.120 --> 00:23:25.080] Okay.
[00:23:25.400 --> 00:23:32.600] Now, clearly, this is not a genetic factor, not least because the large flies got that way through diet, not through gene editing.
[00:23:32.600 --> 00:23:39.240] But there does seem to be something here that seems to be mediated by semen because the effect was only seen when the females mated with the large flies.
[00:23:39.240 --> 00:23:44.520] Just being in the room with them, for example, which was another control they did, didn't cause the issue.
[00:23:44.840 --> 00:23:53.800] The researchers suggested that something about the quality of the seminal fluid of the first fly influences the development of the eggs in the female.
[00:23:53.800 --> 00:24:01.080] So something like the sperm indicates to the female fly that times are plenty and so we can afford to be developmentally different.
[00:24:01.080 --> 00:24:07.640] So do flies generate eggs, female flies generate eggs, rather than have a store of eggs that they release over time there?
[00:24:07.640 --> 00:24:08.440] I believe that is the case.
[00:24:08.760 --> 00:24:14.600] Okay, because this because therefore this would not translate to humans where you're born with all the eggs you're going to use.
[00:24:14.760 --> 00:24:15.000] Indeed.
[00:24:15.000 --> 00:24:19.480] And also, this mechanism is very, very specific to this specific fly.
[00:24:19.480 --> 00:24:19.880] Okay.
[00:24:19.880 --> 00:24:23.720] It is not something that is generally applicable across the animal kingdom.
[00:24:23.720 --> 00:24:28.680] And there's no evidence of this happening in human beings at all, or indeed any mammal at all.
[00:24:28.680 --> 00:24:32.600] And just to check those bad medical ticks, were they about this species of family?
[00:24:32.680 --> 00:24:33.400] I don't think they were.
[00:24:33.400 --> 00:24:33.800] No, I'm just saying.
[00:24:33.920 --> 00:24:38.040] Was the profile picture of the guy on Twitter who was saying that's 65% yours, mate.
[00:24:38.040 --> 00:24:39.560] Was the profile picture a fly?
[00:24:39.560 --> 00:24:40.360] It was not a fly.
[00:24:40.920 --> 00:24:41.720] It was not a fly.
[00:24:41.720 --> 00:24:41.960] No.
[00:24:42.200 --> 00:24:47.280] Although they do point at the fly study as evidence to say telegyny is a thing.
[00:24:47.920 --> 00:24:55.600] So even though to claim that telegyny happens in any mammal at all, right now is pseudoscience.
[00:24:55.600 --> 00:24:58.960] To the best understanding that we have, it is pseudoscience end of story.
[00:24:58.960 --> 00:25:13.760] Nevertheless, it's become a very popular notion within the manosphere, with many commentators asserting that it has been scientifically proving and pointing at things like the fly study to assert this and then using that as justification to assert control over women's sexuality.
[00:25:13.760 --> 00:25:16.800] Yes, and not just the sexuality of female flies.
[00:25:16.800 --> 00:25:17.200] No.
[00:25:17.200 --> 00:25:21.360] Because if they wanted to fuck a female fly, go for it if you want.
[00:25:21.360 --> 00:25:24.960] If you could figure out how young manosphere, guys, you are very welcome.
[00:25:25.120 --> 00:25:27.680] There's loads of them as well, which means the incel issue is going to be way.
[00:25:27.920 --> 00:25:29.520] And flies have very low standards.
[00:25:29.520 --> 00:25:30.720] They hang around shit all the time.
[00:25:30.720 --> 00:25:32.160] They'll be very used to those guys.
[00:25:32.320 --> 00:25:32.720] That's true.
[00:25:32.720 --> 00:25:33.840] That's true.
[00:25:33.840 --> 00:25:40.080] The obsession with a woman's body count, as they refer to it these days, is not really a new thing.
[00:25:40.080 --> 00:25:44.960] But the use of pseudoscience to try and give it a veneer of credibility does seem to be something that's on the rise.
[00:25:44.960 --> 00:25:46.080] This is the irritating thing.
[00:25:46.080 --> 00:25:49.520] It's like you're either anti-science or you're pro-science.
[00:25:49.520 --> 00:25:55.760] You can't have this fucking, I'm anti-science, but I'm going to cherry-pick the bits of science that I think justify my position.
[00:25:56.080 --> 00:26:02.080] And it seems to be especially prevalent within the manosphere, but also in the alt-right and Christian right as well.
[00:26:02.560 --> 00:26:04.320] They're all basically the same thing at the minute.
[00:26:04.560 --> 00:26:04.880] Yeah, they are.
[00:26:04.960 --> 00:26:13.920] It's terrifying how much all of that is just becoming this spiraling fucking tumblewheel that's growing out of control.
[00:26:13.920 --> 00:26:14.640] Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:14.640 --> 00:26:20.160] Does anyone remember that really ghastly ham sandwich meme about Taylor Swift from a few years ago?
[00:26:20.640 --> 00:26:21.360] Did you see that one?
[00:26:21.600 --> 00:26:23.760] That's how disposable these ideas think about.
[00:26:23.920 --> 00:26:30.040] If what you're going to say is what I think you're going to say, I am glad I fucking missed that because that's repugnant.
[00:26:29.760 --> 00:26:30.840] It definitely is.
[00:26:31.160 --> 00:26:37.960] So, an evangelical Christian blogger called Jennifer Mayers posted an image to Twitter of two ham sandwiches.
[00:26:37.960 --> 00:26:44.200] And one ham sandwich was very neat and tidy, and the other one had all of the ham hanging out of it.
[00:26:44.200 --> 00:26:49.400] And she posted this with a comment saying, My daughter represents the one on the right, and Taylor Swift represents the one on the right.
[00:26:49.560 --> 00:26:50.600] Well, that's either one.
[00:26:50.680 --> 00:26:52.120] You're talking about your daughter.
[00:26:52.200 --> 00:26:54.600] Don't know why she's posting memes about her daughter's vagina.
[00:26:54.600 --> 00:26:55.480] I've got no idea.
[00:26:55.480 --> 00:27:00.360] Also, if you saw a ham sandwich without the ham spilling out, that's a much tastier looking sandwich.
[00:27:00.360 --> 00:27:03.000] It looks like, oh, God, look how much meaty that looks delicious.
[00:27:03.000 --> 00:27:05.560] It looks kind of because you don't want it to be all like neat and trimmed and stuff.
[00:27:05.560 --> 00:27:06.520] That's going to be like one of those one sandwiches.
[00:27:06.840 --> 00:27:07.800] You've got half a slice of ham.
[00:27:08.120 --> 00:27:09.320] Yeah, exactly.
[00:27:09.640 --> 00:27:14.360] But the intent of the post was very clear, quite aside from making memes about your daughter's vagina.
[00:27:14.360 --> 00:27:15.400] I don't know why you would be doing that.
[00:27:15.800 --> 00:27:22.280] Like, this woman, in order to preserve the dignity of her daughter, is making thousands of people online picture her daughter's vagina.
[00:27:22.840 --> 00:27:23.880] Vulva, yeah.
[00:27:24.520 --> 00:27:25.880] So, and you're quite right.
[00:27:25.880 --> 00:27:29.480] She repeatedly used the word vagina when it is obviously about a vulva.
[00:27:29.480 --> 00:27:30.920] But the intent of the post was clear.
[00:27:30.920 --> 00:27:34.600] It was to shame Taylor Swift for the perception that she has had many sexual partners.
[00:27:34.600 --> 00:27:35.640] I don't know if that's the case or not.
[00:27:36.360 --> 00:27:43.400] Has fucking nothing to do with, presumably, what she's saying is that she's got bigger labia, which has nothing to do with that.
[00:27:43.400 --> 00:27:43.800] Exactly, yeah.
[00:27:44.040 --> 00:27:45.960] No anatomical changes have anything to do with that.
[00:27:46.200 --> 00:27:52.360] Somehow, that having many sexual partners changes the size of your inner labia, which has never made sense to me as a claim.
[00:27:52.680 --> 00:28:01.240] But it is also a worryingly prevalent view that being fucked by 50 different guys is materially different to being fucked by one guy 50 times.
[00:28:01.480 --> 00:28:02.000] Yes, it is.
[00:28:01.960 --> 00:28:04.240] Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
[00:28:05.160 --> 00:28:14.680] Well, but you see, it's just telling because if they think that you can be stretched out and they're saying that I'm not stretching you out, then you know they're telling something about themselves.
[00:28:15.360 --> 00:28:27.120] And the use of the discredited pseudoscience of telegyny is just another attempt to try and prop up this same claim with the fundamental goal of exerting control over the sexual agency of women.
[00:28:27.120 --> 00:28:34.160] In this case, telegyny leans into one of the underpinning reasons for this, which is the desire for paternal certainty.
[00:28:34.480 --> 00:28:46.240] That's not the only reason why men try to assert control over women's sexuality, but it is a reason why men try to assert control over women's sexuality is so they know that the kid is theirs fundamentally.
[00:28:46.240 --> 00:28:54.800] This desire to ensure that the time and resources spent raising offspring are spent raising offspring and perpetuating your family line, right?
[00:28:55.120 --> 00:29:00.960] As someone who's never going to have kids, I can't get my head around caring that much about making sure your family line continues.
[00:29:00.960 --> 00:29:08.080] Like, genuinely, there's not a part of my brain that goes, oh no, it would be really important that my specific family line continues.
[00:29:08.080 --> 00:29:10.320] It'd be a real tragedy to the world if that stops.
[00:29:10.320 --> 00:29:11.440] Yeah, like it just my brain doesn't matter.
[00:29:12.080 --> 00:29:13.440] I don't get that either.
[00:29:13.440 --> 00:29:34.560] But I think the other side of it is just that it's quite sad because it's like, okay, you're either in a relationship where you trust your partner, or you care about your partner and family life enough that if you had a child through any other means, you would happily raise that child, or you just don't.
[00:29:34.560 --> 00:29:38.800] And if you're in a relationship where you can't trust your partner, that's really quite sad.
[00:29:39.120 --> 00:29:46.720] Whether it's whoever's fault it is, whether it's because you're just not capable of trusting or you have some instability in your relationship that makes it hard.
[00:29:46.720 --> 00:29:51.440] But our society is still very much set up to support this model, right?
[00:29:51.440 --> 00:30:11.400] Even to the extent that you can use a paternity test to disclaim responsibility for a child and refuse to spend your resources on raising a child that isn't yours, and the state will support you in that, or the reverse, where a paternity test can be used to enforce that you use your resources to raise a child, and the state will enforce that you do.
[00:30:11.400 --> 00:30:13.160] The state will support that as well.
[00:30:13.160 --> 00:30:18.280] So, we're still very culturally bound up in this idea around paternal certainty.
[00:30:18.280 --> 00:30:27.400] And prior to the creation of the paternity test, the only way that you could be sure that any children are yours was to marry a virgin who has never had sex with anybody else.
[00:30:27.400 --> 00:30:29.880] That was the only way you could do it before we invented paternity tests.
[00:30:30.120 --> 00:30:40.440] And also, to be clear, that is not a way to be sure that any kids are yours because, A, you can't be sure that anybody's a virgin because there's no test for that because that kind of stuff is pseudoscientific and bullshit.
[00:30:40.760 --> 00:30:43.320] You're taking everybody's word for everything all the time.
[00:30:43.320 --> 00:30:51.320] And B, just because someone is a virgin, just because anybody is a virgin when they meet someone else doesn't mean they stop having a sexuality.
[00:30:51.400 --> 00:30:53.720] It's impossible to have sex with another human being.
[00:30:53.880 --> 00:30:55.080] That's men and women.
[00:30:55.080 --> 00:31:00.360] And telegyny is just the latest way for men to try and coerce and control women's sexual agency.
[00:31:00.360 --> 00:31:04.680] And they're doing it by persuading other men that promiscuous women should be avoided.
[00:31:04.680 --> 00:31:11.320] Because even if that kid is yours, it still isn't yours yours because she's had sex with other people before you.
[00:31:11.320 --> 00:31:16.440] Oh, and that kind of underlying connotation that you only own her if you got there first.
[00:31:17.160 --> 00:31:18.840] Yeah, absolutely fucking stupid.
[00:31:18.840 --> 00:31:37.080] And in a modern culture of serial dating and situationships where it has become the norm in many cases for women to have many sexual partners before then finding a partner they want to have children with, telegyny serves to escalate and assert that she must have had few or no sexual partners before you.
[00:31:37.080 --> 00:31:41.720] Because even if she is monogamous with you now, that is still not good enough anymore.
[00:31:41.720 --> 00:31:43.000] So that is true.
[00:31:43.000 --> 00:31:59.760] In a way, there is a Darwinian effect here in terms of selective pressure that anybody who cares about that so much is going to find it very hard to find anybody, A, who fits the criteria that they require, and B, who is also interested in them.
[00:31:59.760 --> 00:32:02.880] And they might just select themselves out of the gene pool.
[00:32:02.880 --> 00:32:04.880] Well, they are, aren't they?
[00:32:04.880 --> 00:32:06.000] That's the issue.
[00:32:06.240 --> 00:32:10.080] Increasingly, women are choosing to stay single rather than to be with those guys.
[00:32:10.080 --> 00:32:12.480] Or at the very least, go with a guy who isn't like that.
[00:32:12.960 --> 00:32:15.280] The selective pressure is way against you, buddy.
[00:32:15.280 --> 00:32:24.080] But there will be women who see this, especially young women, who see this and take this on board and internalize this and think that that's the way that they have to behave.
[00:32:25.520 --> 00:32:45.520] Especially when the whole social media cycle at the minute is being really ramped up towards traditional purity, like clean beauty, clean diet, clean everything, that like feeding into that purity culture is just constantly there in every part of your life, not just in your sexual part of your life.
[00:32:45.520 --> 00:32:57.920] Yeah, and also it will feed into men who, young men who will take this message on board and will use this as an excuse to be incredibly shitty and potentially even violent towards the women who don't make the standards.
[00:32:57.920 --> 00:33:00.480] So yeah, when I was being glib about it, it was just being glib.
[00:33:00.800 --> 00:33:02.000] It's incredibly shit.
[00:33:02.320 --> 00:33:03.520] Glib on this show?
[00:33:04.080 --> 00:33:05.600] Who's ever heard the like?
[00:33:05.920 --> 00:33:13.200] Last year, there was a paper published in the Journal of Medical and Clinical Nursing, which was titled Telegyny and Family Values.
[00:33:13.200 --> 00:33:24.000] The abstract for this paper starts: My acquaintance from college married her fellow citizen, which is an unusual turn of phrase, which should become clear later as to why that is.
[00:33:24.000 --> 00:33:29.920] My acquaintance from college married her fellow citizen, and after a few years, she gave birth to a healthy and beautiful baby.
[00:33:30.760 --> 00:33:33.400] She had no sexual adventures in her marriage.
[00:33:33.400 --> 00:33:34.840] The poor fucker.
[00:33:35.800 --> 00:33:37.000] Oh, Christ.
[00:33:37.000 --> 00:33:41.720] But by which I assume he is meaning an affair rather than like a quest.
[00:33:42.600 --> 00:33:45.320] She could slay a dragon essentially.
[00:33:46.120 --> 00:33:57.480] She had no sexual adventures in her marriage, but the baby was black, even though the husband was fair-skinned, which later led to many disagreements, divorces, and the breakup of the family.
[00:33:57.480 --> 00:33:59.800] I'm not sure how divorces is plural there.
[00:34:00.360 --> 00:34:01.320] That's a hell of a breakup.
[00:34:01.560 --> 00:34:05.560] Unless he accused a particular black man of being the craft.
[00:34:05.720 --> 00:34:08.280] Possibly destroyed that marriage.
[00:34:08.280 --> 00:34:16.360] Or unless they sought couples counseling and that went so badly that their therapist had a cry to the conference and divorced their partner.
[00:34:17.000 --> 00:34:18.120] I'm terrible at relationships.
[00:34:18.120 --> 00:34:19.480] I can't do it anymore.
[00:34:19.480 --> 00:34:23.080] They might have got divorced and then reconciled and they got divorced again.
[00:34:24.120 --> 00:34:25.160] That could have happened too.
[00:34:25.160 --> 00:34:26.520] I think Eminem did that.
[00:34:26.520 --> 00:34:38.120] Anyway, so the paper then proceeds to claim that telegyny is well established within animal breeding communities, including a completely inaccurate retelling of the Lord Morton's horse story.
[00:34:38.120 --> 00:34:42.440] This paper is very, very short, and I could probably read the whole thing out, but I'm not going to.
[00:34:42.440 --> 00:34:44.600] So I'll just give you some highlights.
[00:34:44.600 --> 00:34:48.360] So these are some highlights from this paper from the Journal of Clinical.
[00:34:48.360 --> 00:34:49.080] What is it?
[00:34:49.080 --> 00:34:51.800] The Journal of Medical and Clinical Nursing.
[00:34:52.120 --> 00:35:06.600] Telegyny in humans has been scientifically confirmed after many years of extensive physiological, anthropological, sociological, and statistical research and experiments by mostly Russian impartial scientists.
[00:35:07.880 --> 00:35:09.880] That's a weird addition to throw in there.
[00:35:12.120 --> 00:35:22.720] In practice, this means that a woman who has not even become pregnant carries within her egg cells in the DNA sequences of all her previous sexual partners.
[00:35:23.040 --> 00:35:27.920] It has been known that a partner's genes can be woven into a woman's genetic system.
[00:35:27.920 --> 00:35:29.520] That's not how eggs work.
[00:35:29.840 --> 00:35:31.200] It's not.
[00:35:32.800 --> 00:35:45.920] It is clear that the great significance given to virginity, honesty, and fidelity in practically all cultures, nations, and religions, with only a few exceptions, has a solid genetic basis.
[00:35:46.240 --> 00:35:48.400] I love that, but with only a few exceptions.
[00:35:48.400 --> 00:35:53.920] This is an absolute right across humanity, which is why it's so important, apart from the places where it is.
[00:35:55.600 --> 00:36:02.640] The seventh commandment of God's moral law reads: thou shalt not commit adultery.
[00:36:02.640 --> 00:36:12.560] Official science is silent about telegyny, so as not to challenge the previous sexual revolutions, which rake in huge amounts of money.
[00:36:12.560 --> 00:36:17.760] Our children are perishing by imitating sick authorities and their lies.
[00:36:18.160 --> 00:36:19.120] This is in a journal.
[00:36:19.440 --> 00:36:20.080] Wow.
[00:36:20.400 --> 00:36:23.600] Sexual revolutions that rake in lots of money.
[00:36:23.600 --> 00:36:24.000] Yeah.
[00:36:24.320 --> 00:36:26.560] Who's spending money on my guess?
[00:36:26.560 --> 00:36:33.760] And this is a stretch to try and find the most charitable interpretation: is they're talking about the sale of the contraceptive pill.
[00:36:33.760 --> 00:36:36.000] Oh, that would be my guess.
[00:36:36.000 --> 00:36:39.760] Because that was the major revolution in women taking agency of their own sexuality.
[00:36:40.080 --> 00:36:41.760] Yeah, I thought they were talking sexoids.
[00:36:41.840 --> 00:36:44.720] I thought this was like big deal talking.
[00:36:44.720 --> 00:36:47.600] Monogamous people take the contraceptive pill.
[00:36:48.400 --> 00:36:49.120] Yeah.
[00:36:49.440 --> 00:36:54.720] Only a return to God and traditional values are a true path to the future.
[00:36:54.720 --> 00:36:55.840] Science.
[00:36:55.840 --> 00:37:02.760] So you may have gotten a hint as to where this paper came from, given the casual reference to how telegraphy has been proven by impartial Russians.
[00:36:59.920 --> 00:37:02.920] Yeah.
[00:37:04.520 --> 00:37:10.120] The sole author of this study lists their affiliated institution as the University of Serbia.
[00:37:10.120 --> 00:37:19.640] Perhaps not surprising when telegeny is being pressed by alt-right, conservative Christian and Manosphere influencers, all of which aligns well with Russian foreign policy.
[00:37:19.640 --> 00:37:20.600] Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:21.240 --> 00:37:26.680] The references for this paper, incidentally, are four YouTube videos and the Bible.
[00:37:26.680 --> 00:37:27.720] Fuck me.
[00:37:27.720 --> 00:37:32.520] It's literally, they've got square brackets, five, close square brackets, Exodus.
[00:37:32.520 --> 00:37:36.680] It's literally what they've got in the references on this paper.
[00:37:37.320 --> 00:37:38.840] So, so far, though.
[00:37:43.320 --> 00:37:52.440] So far, however, I've been largely engaging with the telegeny argument on its own terms, pointing out that it lacks credible scientific support, at least in mammals.
[00:37:52.440 --> 00:37:55.160] But I would actually go further than that.
[00:37:55.160 --> 00:38:04.440] Because even if it is true, even if every sexual partner a woman has leaves some epigenetic imprint that affects future offspring, who gives a fucking person?
[00:38:04.600 --> 00:38:05.320] Who the fuck cares?
[00:38:05.640 --> 00:38:06.760] That sounds optimal, though.
[00:38:06.760 --> 00:38:07.720] I mean, it doesn't work that way.
[00:38:08.200 --> 00:38:08.920] But it would be way better.
[00:38:09.960 --> 00:38:11.480] Genetic diversity is good.
[00:38:12.520 --> 00:38:13.960] But doesn't fucking matter.
[00:38:13.960 --> 00:38:15.480] It's not the Middle Ages.
[00:38:15.480 --> 00:38:23.480] We're surrounded by people raising adopted children or stepchildren or donor-conceived children and loving them all the same.
[00:38:23.480 --> 00:38:25.320] DNA is not what makes you a parent.
[00:38:25.320 --> 00:38:27.240] Responsibility is what makes you a parent.
[00:38:27.240 --> 00:38:28.760] Affection is what makes you a parent.
[00:38:28.760 --> 00:38:37.640] So even if there is some weird trace of a past partner lurking in your child's genome, why would that negate your ability to love and raise them?
[00:38:41.800 --> 00:38:47.280] So, for skeptics and the pub online, there is an exciting talk that you want to talk about coming up, Alice.
[00:38:47.440 --> 00:38:56.640] We haven't done a SIPPO plug in ages, but I am-I mean, I'm partly plugging it because I'm hosting it, but I'm hosting it because I think it's going to be a great talk.
[00:38:56.800 --> 00:39:08.000] Cass Peters is going to be talk giving a talk titled The Cane Only Works If You Use It, and it's talking about kind of disability mobility devices and support and how we can actually all right.
[00:39:08.000 --> 00:39:11.200] I thought it was about corporal punishment, not about corporate punishment.
[00:39:11.680 --> 00:39:12.800] Bring back the birch.
[00:39:12.800 --> 00:39:15.440] That's uh, that's the disposition of SIPPOL.
[00:39:15.600 --> 00:39:18.720] I think in school, if you just wave the cane, it'll settle the pupils down.
[00:39:19.280 --> 00:39:24.080] You don't even have to use it when it comes to mobility aids.
[00:39:24.080 --> 00:39:30.480] They're more useful if you actually use them, especially as especially they can be empowering if you use them.
[00:39:30.480 --> 00:39:34.000] So, I think it'll be a really interesting talk that is next week.
[00:39:34.000 --> 00:39:34.320] Next week.
[00:39:34.480 --> 00:39:36.320] 22nd of May.
[00:39:36.320 --> 00:39:38.400] So, that's going out on the 22nd of May.
[00:39:38.400 --> 00:39:40.560] Is that from seven o'clock or is it 7:30?
[00:39:40.560 --> 00:39:41.920] I can never remember with SIPPO.
[00:39:42.080 --> 00:39:43.200] I think it's 7:30.
[00:39:44.480 --> 00:39:45.440] I thought it was 7.
[00:39:45.440 --> 00:39:46.400] I thought it was 7.
[00:39:46.400 --> 00:39:54.080] Well, you can have a look, but listeners will be able to find out for themselves at sitp.online, where you'll be able to find details about that talk.
[00:39:54.080 --> 00:39:54.960] You'll be able to watch it.
[00:39:54.960 --> 00:39:59.040] It'll be live streamed on Twitch, and it'll be available on YouTube afterwards.
[00:39:59.040 --> 00:40:03.520] But before that, this evening, we have a talk for Liverpool Skeptics and the Pub.
[00:40:03.520 --> 00:40:15.840] So, that's going to be happening in the CASA on Hope Street, and that is going to be Professor Helen Stolford from the University of Liverpool, who is like an international expert in the rights of children going through asylum.
[00:40:15.840 --> 00:40:25.000] And she'll be talking about the inherent violence of the asylum process, particularly for unaccompanied minors, which I think could be really, really interesting.
[00:40:25.000 --> 00:40:43.800] About especially looking at the way the political climate is, the amount of misunderstanding, misinformation, disinformation, abject nonsense that gets propaganda that gets spread around refugees and asylum, and the idea that people come here for an easy life and get handed everything.
[00:40:43.800 --> 00:40:58.760] She actually works extensively in these areas and knows exactly how much, how difficult it is, how much, as she talks about it being physical, but also emotional and mental violence is put upon these kids who've already left a place that's incredibly hard for them.
[00:40:58.760 --> 00:41:00.600] So, yeah, I think that'd be a really, really interesting talk.
[00:41:00.680 --> 00:41:05.320] I think she's essentially looking at what we can actually do, what would actually solve some of these problems.
[00:41:05.320 --> 00:41:07.400] So, yeah, it should be a really interesting one.
[00:41:07.400 --> 00:41:10.200] And one last thing that we need to plug is, of course, QED.
[00:41:10.200 --> 00:41:13.000] So, tickets for QED are on sale right now.
[00:41:13.000 --> 00:41:16.200] You can find them at QEDcon.org, £179.
[00:41:16.200 --> 00:41:19.160] Guess you'd whole weekend without added extras.
[00:41:19.160 --> 00:41:21.400] You can come along and take part in QED.
[00:41:21.400 --> 00:41:22.280] That's going to be a fantastic time.
[00:41:22.360 --> 00:41:23.000] The final evidence.
[00:41:23.480 --> 00:41:24.200] Final QED.
[00:41:24.200 --> 00:41:28.600] So, if you've wanted to be coming to, if you wanted to come to QED and you've never been before, this is the one to come to.
[00:41:28.680 --> 00:41:30.040] This is the one to come to, absolutely.
[00:41:30.360 --> 00:41:34.920] In the past, and you thought that was great, I should do it again, but I can't this time do it again.
[00:41:35.320 --> 00:41:38.360] This time, this is the last one you'll be coming to as a proper QED.
[00:41:38.360 --> 00:41:39.320] Definitely do it again.
[00:41:39.480 --> 00:41:44.840] Speakers for that include Naomi Ryan, Annie Kelly, Anna Poshaiski, yourself, Marsh.
[00:41:44.840 --> 00:41:45.240] Yes.
[00:41:45.240 --> 00:41:47.480] And it's going to be MC'd by Robin Ince.
[00:41:47.800 --> 00:41:54.120] You can find information about all of those speakers and maybe some extra ones, we don't know yet, at qedcon.org.
[00:41:54.440 --> 00:41:58.840] And one last thing for us to plug as well is, of course, our Patreon.
[00:41:58.840 --> 00:42:08.040] So if you enjoy the show, if you like what we do and you want to support the show and our ability to continue to do it, you can throw us some money at patreon.com forward slash skeptics with a K.
[00:42:08.040 --> 00:42:09.320] There's no minimum amount.
[00:42:09.640 --> 00:42:12.120] I think it's like a pound, which is just the smallest we could set it to.
[00:42:12.240 --> 00:42:16.400] We'd say like a pound a month, which works out as like 20p an episode.
[00:42:14.920 --> 00:42:22.000] If you want to give us more than that, you're heavily encouraged, but not mandated to do that.
[00:42:22.320 --> 00:42:24.160] But we do appreciate that.
[00:42:24.160 --> 00:42:26.880] We spend a lot of time on the show doing quite a lot of research.
[00:42:26.880 --> 00:42:39.200] Mike went away and found a paper by a Russian Christian pretending to be a scientist because he saw something on Blue Sky from someone tweeting something mad.
[00:42:39.200 --> 00:42:41.680] So, you know, we put the time and the effort in.
[00:42:41.680 --> 00:42:42.640] So yeah, it was a hell of a good time.
[00:42:42.640 --> 00:42:42.640] It's a good time.
[00:42:44.240 --> 00:42:45.760] Especially in the middle of the power cut.
[00:42:46.800 --> 00:42:49.200] This was on a laptop on my 5G data.
[00:42:49.440 --> 00:42:51.680] Let's research this before the battery runs out.
[00:42:51.680 --> 00:42:58.480] So we spend about, you know, it takes me about between five and six hours to write a Skeptics with a K story, something like that.
[00:42:58.480 --> 00:43:06.800] So it's kind of, if you're interested, you've been listening for a long time, you can throw some money our way to our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash skeptics with a K.
[00:43:06.800 --> 00:43:15.280] And if you like the work of the Merseyside Skeptic Society, you will still get a free show, an advertising free show, if you subscribe to their Patreon at patreon.com forward slash Merseyskeptics.
[00:43:15.280 --> 00:43:15.840] Fantastic.
[00:43:15.840 --> 00:43:18.080] Aside from that, then I think that is all we have time for.
[00:43:18.080 --> 00:43:18.640] I think so.
[00:43:18.640 --> 00:43:21.200] All that remains then is for me to thank Marsh for coming on today.
[00:43:21.200 --> 00:43:21.680] Cheers.
[00:43:21.680 --> 00:43:22.640] Thank you to Alice.
[00:43:22.640 --> 00:43:23.040] Thank you.
[00:43:23.040 --> 00:43:25.760] We have been Skeptics with a K, and we will see you next time.
[00:43:25.760 --> 00:43:26.560] Bye now.
[00:43:26.560 --> 00:43:27.440] Bye.
[00:43:32.240 --> 00:43:37.360] Skeptics with a K is produced by Skeptic Media in association with the Merseyside Skeptic Society.
[00:43:37.360 --> 00:43:46.560] For questions or comments, email podcast at skepticswithakay.org and you can find out more about Merseyside Skeptics at merseyside skeptics.org.uk.