The future of Nigerian theatre and the power of telling the Nigerian stories. Safety in the electronic payment system and the homegrown solutions. Those are the two major topics that we'll be looking at this morning on the breakfast. And of course we'll have off the press where we look at the headlines that made it to the front pages of Salafah National Dailies. A very good morning to you and thanks for joining us on the breakfast on Plus TV Africa. My name is Nyam Gul Agadji. Today is Tech Tuesday and so we'll be looking at something tech. And not that we're going to forget about every other thing that will add value to our lives. So we are going to be taking so many things to discuss this morning. And we hope that you're going to have a very wonderful time watching the program. As usual we begin with the things that really, really put our interest in the course of the last 24 hours. We call that top trending. Supreme Court reserve judgment on appeal filed by PDP and LP against Tino Buu is the first thing we're looking at. The Supreme Court has reserved judgment in the appeal by Atiku Abu Bakar and the People's Democratic Party. PDP against the September 6th judgment of the presidential election petition court, which affirmed the victory of President Bola Tino Buu in the presidential election. It also reserved judgment in the appeal by the Labor Party and dismissed the Allied People's Movement, APM. Now a seven member panel of the court led by the Justice Nyam Okoro announced this on Monday after council to parties adopted their briefs of argument and made final submission. The Supreme Court also took arguments from lawyers to parties on the motion filed by Atiku to supply fresh evidence on forged documents. Council to Atiku Abu Bakar, Chris Uche, urged the court to grant the motion and allow their appeal, grant the prayers sought and disqualify Tino Buu. And council to the respondents that is Abu Bakar Mahmood for the Independent National Electoral Commission, Ainek Wole or Lanipwek for President Tino Buu and Akin or Lujimi for the All Progressive Congress, APC urged the court to dismiss both the motion and appeal for lacking in merit. But the court rose briefly then, reconvened to hear their appeal by the Allied People's Movement, APM. The party was urged to withdraw its appeal as it did not have prayers for determination. Now the council for APM, Machu Koume, subsequently withdrew his appeal. The respondents did not object to the withdrawal and the apex court thereafter dismissed their appeal. Yesterday a lot of Nigerians were praying that the judgment in the UK should be in favor of Nigeria because we didn't have 11 billion dollars to pay. So we have this headline saying judgment declares or judge rather declares Nigeria winner of 11 billion dollar arbitration case against P&ID 13 years after failed gas processing plant deal in Calabar. This judge is in the UK and his name is Justice Robin Knowles of the commercial courts of England and Wales and he ruled in favor of or the judge ruled in favor of Nigeria in the enforcement of the 11 billion dollars arbitration award against process and industrial development that is P&ID limited. In January 2010 the P&ID signed a gas supply and processing agreement, GSPA with Nigeria to develop a processing plant in Calabar, the cross river state capital, but the deal never materialized. The company went to court seeking a 5.96 billion dollar compensation for Nigeria with arbitration proceedings against the country at the London court of international arbitration. In January 2017 the arbitration said Nigeria breached a contract and ordered the country to pay the company 6.6 billion dollars with interest starting from May 2013 before the verdict. Before the verdict the interest fixed at 7% that is 1 million Naira had 1 million dollars accumulated over 11 billion dollars. Nigeria responding filed an appeal against the enforcement of their award and the court granted this relief sought by the country in September 2020. The lawyers for Nigeria argued that there was enough evidence that the contract and the arbitration award were procured through fraudulent means and the Nigerian defense council urged the court to set the arbitration award aside as some individuals in the case were being tried for money laundering and graft. In this landmark ruling on Monday October 23 that was yesterday Justice Knowles not only agreed that arbitration awards were obtained by fraud but also that the manner that they were procured were contrary to public policy and we do hope to bring you an expert that will be X-raying this particular topic tomorrow. A gentleman of the law will be here tomorrow to talk about this case and how it was able to go the Nigerian way and many other legal matters that we may want to know about that surround this case. And we also have Naira dollar rate. The political class has to get together and realize that their country is about to die. That is according to Pat Utomi, Professor Pat Utomi who wants that the Tinnobu administration should take caution in how they run the current decline in the value of the Naira. Since the announcement of the removal of subsidy by the president of Nigeria Bola Akme Tinnobu on May 29, the Naira has lost 40% of its value in the exchange market causing more hardship for Nigerians. And as at press time the Naira was going for 1,150 Naira to 1,200 Naira to one US dollar on the black market. So Professor Utomi says if the president as well as the National Assembly do not focus on how to save the nation, Nigeria will die. And if Tinnobu does not recognize these according to Utomi, Nigeria will die. And we will end the Trump trending this morning with an unfortunate event. One person has died while four others sustained injury in a boat accident in a dough state. That accident occurred in the Geli Geli River in Ovia, Southwest local government area of a dough state. And according to the Nigerian Tribune sources in the area who spoke to journalists however claimed that about seven persons died in a boat mishap. It was gathered that the boat accident happened on Thursday October 19, 2023 when a passenger boat collided with an oil barge belonging to one of the multinational companies operating in the area. The oil barge was said to have run out of fuel and was waiting to be refueled when the oncoming passengers boat ramped into eight killing one person and injuring four others. The official record is one person died, but the unofficial record say more than one. In fact at least seven people died. It was further gathered that the boat was conveying passengers, mostly market women from the Ofunama community who were returning from the market. And following the quick response from the Marine Police of a dough state police command stationed in the area a major tragedy was averted as some of most of the victims were rescued and rescued alive. As you remember of the staff of the oil company who did not want his name to go into print confirmed the incident adding that the company was meeting on the issue. We can only say may the souls of the people that were lost in that miss have rest in peace and the families and friends of the people have the portitude to bear the loss. That's for short trending. We'll soon be going to the press to see what we can lift off the press. Right now let's take a very short break. We'll be back in a minute. Stay with us.


Today's unboxing is a fountain pen called the Diplomat Nexus fountain pen, and this is a new release from Diplomat over in Germany. You'll recognize the Diplomat Nexus packaging. It's just all in a different size but it has that standard white Diplomat box with the silver metal sleeve and then the White insert inside the box. This pin is different though. It's a much different size It's much larger because it includes additional pieces because the Nexus is a different pin We've got a different filling system, and it also comes with a full-size bottle of ink, one of your Diplomat black inks Okay, so this is the look of the pen. You do see the ink window. The center ring is solid chrome and you've got a spring metal clip You've got the branding at the top and bottom on those silver finula in the back end of the barrel You have a patented cap closing system that prevents leaks and That does have a kind of an extended section on this design That is actually pretty comfortable You have a number six stainless steel nib that's branded with the Diplomat logo This pen design was intended to be a combination of history and innovation and celebration of Diplomat's 100th anniversary and in doing so they created they combined some traditional elements of design with a couple exciting new innovations one is the anti-leaking closing system and the second is the Filling system that gives you a high ink capacity eyedropper fill system With a visible ink level Let's take a better look at it this Diplomat Nexus box packaging includes kind of some tools to help you ink your pen so it has these two inserts in the foam packaging for you to place the nib and the section and then underneath the Foam that holds your pen you'll find these pipettes and you use a pipette to go ahead and pull some ink up from any fountain pen safe bottled ink and then you know place the pipette inside the barrel of the pen and Fill your ink and you can watch it through the ink window. You want to fill it so the ink window is covered but not more and Then you go ahead and put the pen back together and you're ready to go and I mentioned earlier that this was a Patented system and it's actually patent-pending just to be clear But you activate that patent-pending ink seal system Just by simply by closing the cap But you do want to make sure that you close the cap in a way that leaves your Pin clip aligned with that ink window if you want more information visit pinch lay comm


We're hoping to raise $50 million that allows us to go beyond statewide support and even expand what we can do for more students in our state. So we have been a leader in that regard over these many years and now our state is sort of doubling down on that investment and allowing us to open a second campus in western North Carolina that will serve even more talented students from across our state. And so we're really excited for the campaign and the success thus far. Really appreciate the tremendous support that we have from our alumni, our families and our friends that are allowing us to expand opportunities and really help meet the need of North Carolinians today and well into the future. I reflect on what's been most impactful to me in my life and I always come back to science and math being the most impactful thing to me personally. It's why I invest my time and energy back into supporting the school. I'll never be able to repay what I got from the school. What I do know is that when you have an asset that's so strong you want to double down, you want to invest more in it. You know one of the great things about the school is it is a broad high school. You develop your skills, your personality, your interpersonal skills and your intellectual abilities and when you add all that up that can help you or lead you down a path to your future career, whatever that might be. Students from all over North Carolina come to NCSSM seeking new challenges and here with the wonderful support of donors and the state we are able to ignite their imaginations and stir their creativity, challenge their intellects so that they are transformed and transformed themselves into informed, empathetic, engaged, ethical citizens and leaders who are going to work very hard to make this world of ours better. It is a transformational experience and a transformational opportunity. It's an opportunity to come and learn, to be exposed to subject work but also again to people. It prepared me I think to be a better global citizen just by experiencing in a small way what it was like to live and work with people who I'd never met before but who were working together for the same mission, to get an education, to invest in our own futures and to help support in many ways our families and communities. We've with the support of Carl and Ashley Rydeen have been able to found the Rydeen program for innovation and leadership in artificial intelligence and so this is a program where we're working on helping to bring to students and teachers more information about the importance that AI is playing. We want to also build in on the front end of this the potential ethical implications that we should all be considering as AI continues to grow. Step of December is an intentional effort on the part of the school to bring students who have been traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields to come build a strong foundation, to gain exposure to topics and subjects they may not have had access to at their home high school and then also to build community among students, their peers, among the teachers at NCSSM and then among industry professionals and higher education professionals who come in to talk to the students and really motivate them to do a STEM career. The instructors here really helped me gain a larger perspective of the world and make sure that I knew that there's never just one way to do things, there's infinite. I think it's incredibly important for all alumni of NCSSM to keep in touch with this incredible community that has helped me grow personally into who I aspire to be and it nurtured my dreams and passions into something that could tangibly be studied and communicated in a way that could help me become somebody who could serve the community around me. I have students, they come up to me and say, Governor, I went to the School of Science and Mathematics, they're so proud of it and they've done so well with it and we want it to affect all of the public schools in North Carolina and help them be the best they can be. That's the way you get economic growth, that's why if you want to have a strong economy and better jobs the best thing you do is support education but you've got to support it in smart ways and the School of Science and Mathematics was one of the best ones that ever came along. One of the things we're most excited about with NCSSM coming to Morganton is the wonderful academic minds that it will bring to this community, not just in the students who are going to be brilliant but in the faculty and the way that the faculty and the students will interact with the health care system. Science, technology, engineering and math are at the crux of what we do in health care so we see the opportunity to mentor students, to help with research and to be excited as those students turn into wonderful adults that will make huge differences and improvements in our state overall. Talent exists everywhere, zip code doesn't define that but sometimes opportunity is defined and so what this school has been able to do is to bring students for the past 41 years from all over North Carolina giving them a unique STEM education that I believe is one of if not the best in the United States and from that help to not only advance public education in our state but to help our state grow and thrive.


Thank you very much for coming on a queue on the historian of the National Genomics Institute and I also helped manage the NHGRI history genomics program and this is the NHGRI history of genomics and molecular biology lecture series and the purpose of this lecture series is to invite really, really, really top-notch philosophers and historians of science, particularly of biology, of contemporary modern biology, with the purpose of getting them first more interested if they aren't already interested in genomics, also basically trying to increase engagement, collaboration, discussions between historians and philosophers of biology and the scientists and investigators whose work they are discussing and also to turn the NHGRI history genomics program into a kind of research node, research center for the study of contemporary sciences, contemporary biology genomics in particular. Hello, it's a great pleasure that I introduce the third speaker in this series who is Dr. Philippe Coulombe and Philippe is a philosopher and historian of biology, is the director of research at the Institut d'histoire et de philosophie du science at CNRS, Paris Saint-Saure-Monde. His research interests include the history of the modern synthesis, the history of human variation research and the changing understanding of genes and mechanistic explanations of biology. He also works on issues relating to the concept of organism and its role in current biology. His editor of the book series, History, Philosophy and Theory in the Life Sciences and has been funded by, among others, the France-Canada Research Fund for the Project Challenges in Evolutionary Theory, Development and Apparition, is the author or co-author of more than 40 peer-reviewed academic articles and nearly 50 book chapters. His lecture, which he is giving today, is the multi-passive legacy of the Human Genome Project a program for evolutionary biology. Philippe, the floor is yours. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much for the invitation. Actually, my research and my main competence is rather on evolutionary biology and its philosophy than on genomics. I am starting to look at things in genomics that are relevant to the questions I am generally asking on evolutionary biology. Some of the things I will say will be very tentative, especially about the role of genomics in the Human Genome Project. The context of my talk is in evolutionary biology, there has been a wide contestation of the classical evolutionary series in two decades. This contestation comes from various disciplines, evolutionary development, biology, molecular biology or ecology. And as a symptom that has been last year in nature, an interesting paper that was confronting opposed viewpoints on this question, does evolutionary theory need a rethink? And on the one hand, some people who were either from evolutionary development or biology or studying epigenetic inheritance or studying multi-level selection were saying, yes, evolutionary theory needs to be revisited and reconceived. While on the other hand, some people like Hopi-Huckstra or Dor-Dre and many others were saying, even though we know new things since the times of Meyer and Dobrzanski, we don't need to rebuild the theory. And actually, since at least two decades there has been publications and questions about should we really change our theory? So those are some of the books and papers that have been dealing with that. And the two recent ones from Baladistonia Sultan, Evolution and Development, that's mostly about plasticity, and Philosopher Denis Walsh, Organism, Agency and Evolution are trying to put forth an alternative to the modern synthesis. And actually, last November there was the Royal Society meeting devoted to precisely the current state of the evolutionary theory and the prospects of an alternative theory. The contestation doesn't really concern the fact. There is a wide agreement on a bunch of facts that are some cases of epigenetic transgenerational inheritance, the complexity of variation in general, the importance of phenotypic plasticity, the fact that there are selection at multiple levels, the role of developmental timing in evolution, the role of developmental processes in evolution, the role of neutral evolution. And at the scale of macroevolution, the role of mass extinction, the process of niche construction by which organisms are changing their environments and therefore changing the natural selection that they are undergoing, or the massive amount of lateral gene transfer in archaea and in prokaryotes. And the list is not exhaustive, but it's to give an idea about all those facts on which people agree, but they disagree on the theory. And more precisely, they agree about whether we should change the architecture of the modern theory to account for those facts highlighted in Blue Day, the facts that concern mostly are partly genetics and genomics. Some of the challengers of the classical evolutionary theory, which is the modern synthesis, so the body of theory emerging from first the synthesis of Mendelian genetic and Darwinian theory of natural evolution by natural selection. The challengers of the classical theory often say they are aiming at an extended theory of evolution, extended because it saw an extended synthesis. So it's forged on the phrase the modern synthesis that gave its name to the classical theory of evolution, and modern synthesis was the title of Huxley's book in 42. And so Gert Müller and Massimo Piliucci edited this volume, Evolution and the Extended Synthesis in 2011, which includes chapters on many of the facts that I was indicated before. And so extended because they want evolutionary theory to extend towards new facts and use new concepts to account for those facts. And the talk here will develop the idea that what's at stake here is the architecture of the theory that is aimed at by the challengers of the classical evolutionary theory. In this book Massimo Piliucci and Gert Müller, so Gert Müller is an evodivo researcher, Massimo Piliucci had been a researcher in plasticity for a long time, and they are trying to come up with a philosophical rationale of why we should change the architecture of the theory of evolution. And so it's in the introduction. I mean all the chapters are not, so they are very different and dealing with very different topics, but what have those chapters in common Müller and Piliucci say? Well, the modern synthesis was a statistical approach of the inter-generation change of trade values and early frequencies extended from micro-evolution to macro-evolution. It was a statistical approach because people who did the modern synthesis, so population geneticist Fischer and Wright and Haldane and then Dobrzanski and Mer and Simpson who extended the core views to other disciplines, they did not know the underlying mechanisms of variation and inheritance. But now that we have an understanding of the mechanistic underpinnings of the phenomena of variation and inheritance and understanding that's given in developmental and molecular biology, we should rebuild the theory accordingly. So what they say is the shift of emphasis from statistical correlation to mechanistic causation arguably represents the most critical change in evolutionary theory today. So the change of the architecture of this theory, they interpret it as a call for going from a statistical modeling of evolution to a mechanistic causal understanding of evolutionary change. So in my talk I'll try to question this claim actually. So first I'll talk about the modern synthesis and some of its challenges. Then I'll look more in detail about the role of the gene in the synthesis and then I'll address some aspect of what's been called the post-genomic turn and its relationship to the evolutionary theory and I'll develop a few epistemic aspects that I think are central in this turn. So what's the core of the modern synthesis? Even though the people from the modern synthesis were disagreeing on many, many issues. I mean Wright and Fisher were disagreeing on the role of selection and the targets of selection and the gradualism and many other things. Even though there is a core of the theory which might be summarized in this letter Huxley sent to Merah when they were preparing a volume of Centennial of Darwin that was supposed to summarize their theoretical views and Huxley said what we agree on and the message we want to convey is natural selection acting on the heritable variation provided by mutation and recombination of a Mendelian genetic constitution is the main agency of biological evolution. And by natural selection there were meaning of course you have random variation of heritable traits and those heritable traits are causally related to the differential predictions of trade bearers and that leads to change in trade frequencies and trade values in the population. So that's the way natural selection goes but of course I'll be quite quick on that. And more random variation if I refer to what Huxley was saying is provided by mutation and recombination and the fact that variation is random meaning it's not directly correlated to environmental parameters has been established or corroborated by Luria and Delbrug experiments in bacteria in the 50s and heritability is given by the fact that populations have a Mendelian genetic constitution so heredity is the subject of heredity is genes. So that's how the claims are should be cashed out more precisely which means that population genetics is at the center of the biological evolutionary theory it's the science of evolution by natural selection it shows how in Mendelian population natural selection somehow works I mean even small differences in fitness leads to fixation of alleles and changing of trade values. So population genetics is mostly statistical modeling it uses statistical concepts and in considered fitness as a probabilistic concept and models the evolutionary change in this way and the population genetics in the terms of Fisher and Wright very like Rathley said it analyzes the conditions of which the forces that acts on populations so selection, migration, mutation and drift how those forces act on population and in which conditions selection can dominate the process because selection is the most interesting to the extent that it's the only force among those that produces adaptation or design that was something Fisher or Wright or Harlein were agreeing and so those are the four causes of evolution, selection, migration, mutation and drift sometimes they are called forces and actually philosophers have been since a decade arguing whether selection and drift should be considered as forces or whether the world forces like superfluous whether you just have statistical correlations and there is a nice paper by David Dupuis, a recent paper who is analyzing how people from the modern synthesis have been saying the causes of evolution, then the forces of evolution then the factors of evolution and that those three words they were fluctuating between those three words to characterize the status of selection, mutation, migration and drift and the challenges to the modern synthesis are not at all new and actually the history of the modern synthesis to some extent is also the history of the challenges that researchers have raised against it and if I want to schematize things I would say there are issues about what is genuinely explaining evolution and then diversity of the living forms and unity of the living forms and issues about where should the explanation take place and if I want to sketch that the space of controversies I would say that there is one controversy about optimization or selection and should we start by assuming selection and the traits are here because of selection and so it's what's called the adaptationist controversies and there are various brands of adaptationism but I'm not interested in that here and the other line is the divide between whether organisms or genes is the level where the action takes place the action of selection takes place and actually all the combinations between the positions were possible within the modern synthesis so some people like Dawkins recently is the one who is both situating the action of selection at the level of genes and saying that the main force of explaining traits is selection so he's a pure adaptationist and on the other end of the lower case of the sketch Stephen Jay Gould would say well it's selection targets organisms or at higher levels species for example but not genes and you don't have only natural selection that explains traits and that's his famous critique of adaptationism in his paper about adaptationism is that you would say most of the traits in the living domain are mostly explained by natural selection so they are adaptations and it might be understood as an empirical claim about the majority of the traits or it might be understood more weekly as a methodological claim and actually that's what behavioral ecology is doing you assume that for example the foraging time of the flies is optimized by natural selection you do a model and then you predict the foraging time and you look in the field whether your data match your prediction so you first start as human adaptation and see what happens so it's methodological adaptationism and some people would say well it's mostly about genes but people like David Lynch who wrote the book about the architecture of the genome he's someone who says well it's not on... he says he's sort of paraphrasing Dabrzynski and he says well nothing in evolution makes sense except in the light of population genetics so for him genes is where the action takes place but he's not at all adaptationist he would say most of the architecture of the genome in your career in metazoan is due to drift rather than selection just to give a sketch of possible positions oh see that's the modern synthesis all that that's positions within the modern synthesis yeah yeah right absolutely so the thing is that within the the history of the modern synthesis the first answer is that for example it integrated neutralism neutral evolution yeah yeah yeah right but then the other issue actually is that there is in the classical theory there is behavioral ecology which is mostly adaptationist and population genetics which actually in population genetics you can have various outcomes depending whether drift or selection or mutation is dominating but there is nothing within population genetics that would force you to say well what's it really important is selection so there is a sort of tension within the modern synthesis between behavioral ecology which really centers on selection and population genetics which gives you like all the possible outcomes of evolution in possible world according to possible genetic make up and actually Fischer's theorem of natural selection a way to understand it was Fischer was really interested by design but then he was doing population genetics and which as such may not be directly telling you that the living domain is designed and organisms are well designed so the theorem is supposed to give you a direct link between adaptation and design on the one hand and selection in population genetics on the other hand so that's an internal tension within the synthesis so and the way to understand the history of controversies and about what's explaining so it's mostly the question about what's mostly explaining traits evolution or diversity is to think that you have like three poles of the main explainance the main things that explain it might be selection might be chance or it might be mutation or variation and so and actually the if you think of selection versus the neutral versus selectionist controversies whether a chance or selection is mostly explaining what you want to explain and that also goes on at the level of what Steve Gold was saying about the history of life in general he was saying the history of life at the level of clades or at a very large scale is mostly dominated by contingent large scale event so you would have chance you would have like selection at the level of species or organisms but chance at the level of the overall history of life if the atheroids hadn't he dears the dinos would still be there we wouldn't be there and so on so that's that and the other line of the triangle is selection versus mutations or the processes that give variation and I'll expand later on this difference and so that's something that goes on from the beginning of the century the Mendelian was saying while it's not selection that drives evolution it's rather the macro mutations and then at the times of the modern synthesis it was a ants mare and the people from the synthesis that goes against a goldsmith who had this theory of the hopeful monsters so macro mutations in the species are the variants that are not fit at all but if you have a large environmental change it would be great so and in the controversies between evodival and the modern synthesis there is also an emphasis on the mechanisms of variation it's not mutation here it's all the mechanisms of variation that might be more relevant to evolution than the modern synthesis sync so for example if you have a trait and the constraint on the variation of the straight are very severe like only a very small cluster of variants is possible actually the selection cannot do much and if the selection cannot do much what explains the straight is rather the constraint so the variation the mechanisms of variation so the challenge of the people from the evodivo is maybe development is more than just the expression of genes maybe and maybe they can directly produce adaptive phenotypes so I'll pick up that later and if you look at this controversy between selection and variation actually the philosophical issue here is that it's related to the philosophical issue about what does selection really explain so is selection explaining the arising of the traits or is it explaining the spreading of the traits because perfectly sound view would consist in saying the trait arises in one organism so there is an individual developmental process that makes a trait arise and then it may be successful or not but that the spreading of the trait not the origin of the trait so and against that actually the modern synthesis authors were enfasizing the creativity of natural selection so and they used the word which is a bit bizarre but it was more than a metaphor it was because they wanted to say that selection is more than a sieve it's more than a filter just filtering the unfit selection is cumulative selection so it is explaining complex adaptation it's taking one allele and another one each of them being slightly fitter than the other ones and by this cumulative process it makes new traits more adapted emerge that will not emerge with only the effect of mutations and variations so for them that I think one of the important thing in the modern synthesis was precisely that this opposition like variation which is the arising of the trait and selection which is spreading is not really relevant because selection is the sense of the modern synthesis is about the creation of complex adaptation by accumulation of small variations and so small effects allele basically so what Mueller and Piliucci were saying what they were saying that people from the modern synthesis are not have just statistical models but now we can have a mechanical understanding they are first rejecting this emphasis on the creativity of natural selection basically they take for granted that population genetics models are spreading of traits but not the mechanisms of how they emerge and so they say now we do know some of the mechanisms so a new synthesis is ripe and though the rest of the talk is about trying to say a few things about what post genomics is doing here in this sense of yeah sure sure sure selection itself so for example isn't it possible to say that the uterus itself is a site of selection and it is selecting against conceptuses that are whose constitution is not compatible with interior life are you trying to force development from selections on that? Development from inheritance actually so the development is the process through which the zygote goes into the becomes a reproducible adult and the claim that the modern synthesis is supposed to hold is that whatever the password from the zygote to the adult what counts is actually the number of you know like the fitness so the the offspring number in the left time of the individual so if you think in those terms whatever password from zygote to adult doesn't really provided that the number of offspring is the same doesn't impact natural selection because what counts is the number of offspring i mean that's maybe of course that's not so simple but that's the claim that at least the challenges of the modern synthesis are lending to the modern synthesis actually. This differential reproduction could have been shaped during the melt. Yeah exactly. It's just a window for manipulation and it also opens the window for change. Changes that aren't in the genes for the problem. But and actually just what I wanted to say was exactly on that so today they the fact that roughly said gene as it was considered like in the times of classical genetics up to like mono and a Jacob is has this double nature which is it's a key factor in development and so it has been formulated in terms of genetic program since the 60s and it's also the substrate of inheritance so we have them and they are the determinants in Mendelssohn's and then have been Christians genes and with age and then chance and distinguish between genotype and phenotype and it's the substrate of inheritance that concerns evolution the development stops at after one generation and oh sorry for and on those two sides have two distinct approaches. The first one about evolution. Well they say about development I inverted the slightest. It's at the individual level you decompose causal to causal factors of the process of evolution of development. So genes is a causal factor and environment is a causal factor and then you can find great environment in many of course into many layers whereas at the level of evolution from the side of evolution what's crucially important is to decompose phenotypic variance so you isolate the part of the iteration which is due to inheritance the one which is due to an environment like regarding one trait in one environment and then you of course they are like gene environment interactions variance but anyway what's important here is that the variance due to genetics and to genes and mostly variance due to additive mostly additive genetic variance is the thing that define heritability and that's interesting. And economy driven by theory or by availability of tools. By theory I think yeah but I mean when for example when Fischer was like writing forwarding the concept of heritability and additive genetic variance and the composition of the variance I mean it was his way of conceiving of how inheritance could be modeled within a in statistical terms and explain why small fitness ultimately explain why small fitness advantages can lead to evolution so why small fitness advantages can be retained generation after generations that's the key point and this is the concept to use it whereas in terms of development it's mostly yeah you have contributions to this the developmental process by environments and by genes and which are not additive and not additively interacting but the idea it's... Fischer knew how to use a scalpel. He still would have done variance component. I don't know. I mean it's very well actually I would say that all those developments are constrained by the techniques that are and that is true now and that was absolutely true then but and so while the first you know the Mendel and Johansson and the key steps in the history of the gene Fischer used the first of course the first classical Mendelian gene concept whereas the metaphor of the program and the genetic program in development that arose from the discovery of the DNA and actually we have lots of literature about the relation between those two concepts of gene but I really don't go into that and neither into the notion of information but the point is that there is no abuse translation from one to another kind of role so to the role of gene in development as a one factor in development that has to be composed as a factor and the genes are involved in the partition of the phenotypic variance it's not mostly translatable and it doesn't mean that the gene constructs everything in development for instance and reciprocally so and the consequence of that which is very clear in the literature of the modern synthesis so the Transky and Mer is that inheritance and development are distinct which historically is interesting because if you read people from the 19th century it would be the same for them like organisms develop and by developing they develop their parents and they develop into their descendants and inheritance which is focusing on traits and development which is focusing on organisms on one organism were the same in the 19th century whereas now they are very distinct and Ernst Mer for example developed it into the distinction he makes between this is very useful for us between the biology of ultimate causes and approximate causes so ultimate causes has to do with inheritance approximate causes it's the way organism function and develop and it doesn't concern the ancestral states of the population species and there is a history to be told about how this difference between development and inheritance that tied to the difference between partition variance versus compounding a kind of it's your incoming call that's okay okay okay so yeah so there's so did the so and actually when like recently someone really wants to say something to someone so yes so interestingly the modern synthesis was a synthesis between genetics and Darwinian selection evolution by natural selection whereas when people like Gilbert and Raph in a paper in like 20 years ago were among the first to say we should re-synthesize evolution and evolution theory and lever-bentale biology from the viewpoint of the medieval they call for a synthesis between precisely evolution so inheritance and development so the two natures of the gene that I was talking about so I had a small development and the fact that those two different uses of the gene natures of genes like in development or in inheritance may be traced back to two different families of meaning of the term causation so so A causes B may mean A makes a difference to B or A causes B may mean A produces B and so in the first case so you have like families of views in the philosophy of science the one which say A causes B means A makes a difference to B so it might be in terms for example of if A hadn't been there B wouldn't be there so it's a counter-factual conception you can say this in terms of probabilities and the process views are they are says that the causes are always embedded into the basic processes that define the world so each real process is defined by conservation of a quantity and so there are real processes and pseudo processes and that's very two distinct analyses of causation and I think that the difference making view correlates to the view that of the gene as something that is supposed to partition the phenotypic variants in the population whereas the process view is about what role a gene as a causal factor plays in a general process but and so the modern synthesis is tied to this epistemic heterogeneity between the causation in the sense of the gene as a unit of development and the causation in the sense of the gene as a unit of evolution and so and if you have this epistemic heterogeneity between two sense of causation you cannot make development relevant to evolution because it's two different notions of causation whereas in the extended synthesis the idea is that all the roles of the genes can be integrated into a general understanding of gene causation as a mechanism and that would bridge the gap between development and inheritance. What's some of the few things that are going on in the post-genomic term regarding especially the genes in development. I mean it's just very tentative and actually you know this like 10 times better than me but that's the kind of things that so sort I might look at it more in detail but the first move is that from the concept of gene action they use at the time of Morgan to gene networks so the initial view was that you have a gene and by some obscure ways in a given environment it contributes to give a protein and ten minutes. Okay so well and now oh sorry I read something in French I'm sorry but anyway it's the idea that we go through the well by recognizing they have like regulating and coding genes there is the idea of gene regulatory networks that have been very influential and very important here and I saw in this book so the Dalem workshop from 1891 in which many people like Davidson, Gould, Waldperth Bonner were involved so one of the first steps towards like integrating evolution and development, Davidson had a paper on so gene regulatory networks and it's clearly in the context of thinking about evolution so if we understand the genomic organization underlying this specific ontogenic regulatory pattern we could construct a theory of evolutionary invention at the DNA level and in a very recent paper that reconstruct the gene regulatory network of the skeletal maryclean genes they say so the gene regulatory network is supposed to be a total explanation of why the events of development occur and they are reusing the notion of genetic program actually they are reconstructing the network by perturbating gene expression and so they develop like several genomic programs for various stages and the functions of the development of the skeleton the skeletonic micromere and so we have like initiating specifications stabilization of the regulatory state and there are signal and repression of alternative fate but the point is that they are talking about the function of genes in the genomes but they are mostly not specific outputs they are transients because the function is depending upon at which stage of the activity of the gene regulatory networks you are looking at so the networks are very complex and what they are doing depends upon the state at which you are looking and so the complexity is such that you cannot focus on the specific causal action of a given allele and their context specific network defined effect rather than a specific causal role and the second thing that occurs in the post-genomic term even though it's more continuous process but while the modern synthesis was saying that it's mutation and recombination that gives you variation you have multiplication of kinds of variations so I switch that but so the c-value products or the g-values products are about a few genes can produce many variant transcripts and then many proteins so and then there is another shift the second one about the reverse one where many genomic networks can be actually like yell the same series of gene products of genomic expression profile so the number of genes on human genomes drops from millions to 20,000 after the completion of the human gene project and the linear DNA sequence gives rise to flexible interpretations through transplicing RNA, editing, translation and recording so have like many splice variants up to more than 3,000 so the abstract is that the gene to trade pathway is very much complicated so at the times of manual we have this idea that you go from genotype to phenotype in a many to one mapping and after the discovery of the structure of the DNA you have the idea that one DNA sequence is one gene but all those two equations are no more obvious and the genome is very flexible which gives rise to some challenges to the very notion of gene and philosophers are distinguishing very distinct ideas of gene whether it's nominal gene that doesn't sequence or the concept of gene that takes into account the splices and historically interestingly I think there was two important realizations that are quite inverse the first is the one that gave rise to the neutrality theory in population genetics where people realized when they got electrophoresis and they realized that the nucleotelic polymorphism was much higher than expected and they try to account for that in terms of neutral theory whereas in the 2000s it's like the reverse inverse phenomena the coding sequences are much less than expected and that gave rise to a criticism of the notion of gene and more to my point it implies that the variation is much more complex than mutation and recombination so that was the one which the two events that I was talking one that goes and favors explanation center of the chance and the recent increasing complexity of what is a gene that gave rise to that gave much weight to variation in evolution so I will be switching that and another point is that the genome functioning is much more extended than what used to be thought about genes so for example that in the genomic network and the gene regulatory network that's in a handbook on gene regulatory networks and they also says that the metabolites and proteins act as hidden variables there are nothing explicitly in the genes but the effect appears as edges between the observed variables so the general idea is that more weight is given to non-genomic elements to account for the dynamics of the cell basically and if we think of like pre-formationism and epigeneticism as two poles in the history of people who want to understand development so a pre-formation is that there is a form here that will be expressed and epigeneticism means there are physical processes that produce the outcome of development well the informational genes were pre-formationist clearly but what we know about the epigenetics goes into the size of epigeneticism so it fine-tunes the gene expression to set around the organismal environment but one of the lessons of what we know now is that genomes themselves are flexible and they are with all the genomic machinery that all those from various splicings and rene editing and so on they can be responding to state variation in the cell so the idea is that epigeneticism is much more than just epigenetics and Richard Burian was talking about molecular epigenetics just to describe how we know that the genome seems to function so I skipped that the two things I wanted to say the first one is that the new kinds of explanations I think so my point here is that it's not that we now we have the statistics we now know the mechanisms is that the very notion of mechanisms may be too cause going to understand what's going on here and our knowledge imply that we need new kind of explanation so I had this thing that we went from gene action to very complex gene networks exactly like in ecology we went to the notion of traffic chain to like wide traffic networks and Ulanovic who is an ecology specialist in traffic networks says something interesting he says network thinking has epistemic specificities and one of the specificity is that well the mechanism is too complex to identify all the causal role of all the nodes so what we want to do is to look at the topology and the general global topology properties and sometimes if we are looking from the topological properties we can know something about the dynamics so I think with the general regulatory networks there is something like this that goes that happens which is that topological explanations meaning inferring from topological properties of the network some consequences regarding the dynamics becomes more important and in those explanations we don't know exactly what the nodes are doing so what each gene is doing and what is its function in the same sense of its causal role in the network so I had an example about the reliability of information processing in network it's a paper by Clement Baldwin and they are showing that it's a very theoretical paper about network and they show how some topological structures of networks are more prone to robustness in terms of transmitting signals across variation and that's also a paper about Davidson and Peter from the Peter and Davidson about the regional which says that the rate of evolutionary change is tied to network topology that's the theory by Rue Allen and the fact that some very small motifs that are topological structure are highly conserved across many kinds of generator networks and so all these were going into the fact that it's not that we know more the mechanism that work is that we are using another kind of explanation that's more topological than mechanistic and the other point is that I think we are likely with the analysis we have to statistical analysis genome-wide analysis on genomes that we have to say more about the phenotypes even so that that was a paper about using whole genome sequence to predict quantitative trade phenotypes we are more able to predict phenotypes on the basis of the genome so and I think I'm almost done so the thing I wanted to say here is that even though at the level of mechanisms and causation you have traits are resulting from environment genes within environments so environment is crucially important in the projection of the phenotype in the mechanism to produce the phenotype here we may have statistical tools to from a very long sequence in high databases a very long sequence we can have tools to predict phenotype even if we don't know the causally interaction between phenotype and environment so the change here would be that we used to think about statistics in terms of we have statistical correlations and some of them are relevant important and significant and they are the ones that are about causation it might be that now we can have our best correlations with even if we don't know the causation that is underlying and we would be more predictive and actually I think that the same kind of turn is also going on in ecology but that was I just can discuss it afterwards but that was just a hint so and for me it's also the same thing is going well something also new is going on with metagenomics which is not decoupling the environment gene interactions in producing traits but decoupling genomes from species and organisms so but I'm very quick on that but and it can be very predictive to some extent so that was like the project of reconstructing the structure on the function of the global ocean microbiome by metagenomics of samples of ocean water okay so the claims here and just to summarize that the fine-graining of explanations it's not that we have a very good mechanistic science of variation and inheritance that Fisher Wright and Duprzynski didn't have it's we are fine-graining the explanation then we'll have a more complex image of what's going on and also a more diverse array of kinds of explanations so statistical topological accounts and mechanistic accounts the gene the causal roles the genes in the networks may not have identified functions either in the sense of selected effects of the genes or even in the sense of their their characteristic causal role in networks and this notion of gene itself many as many philosophers have said is not univocal and so and maybe this is the reason why we can integrate developmental biology within evolution then because we have one mod of mechanistic explanation into which we can integrate what was targeted by perpetuation genetics and the modern synthesis but because we have a variety of epistemic mods and that are that are arising now and we could think of a synthesis in terms of a synthesis between those epistemic mods okay and I stopped here because I was too long. Thank you very much. Thank you. Can I just push you on one point at the very end where you talked about statistical predictions of phenotype. And so clearly when we say we're going to predict the phenotype we would like to know can we use the information we have to say this is what the person or the fly is going to be like. When we have statistical predictions from quantitative data and GWAS data we're going to be wrong most of the time. Yeah. And so statistically on average we have an idea but I'm not sure that I would dress that up as statistically predicting a phenotype because it carries this weight I can statistically predict what your genotypes are just from looking at you would be right a lot. Those genotypes don't translate into phenotypes even though they are maybe influencing phenotype a little bit so I would just be careful about this new statistical predictions of phenotype because it implies a strength of association that may not really be there. Yeah. It is true that we can do it and we can actually mainly do it to find what genes might be associated with a phenotype even if they're really minimally associated. They actually just just wanted to but I mean you are perfectly right of course but I just wanted to talk about this paper that I've read they are contrasting their method to the GWAS methods and they are saying something like they they are saying something that they want to have an accurate prediction of quantitative trade phenotypes from the info so what they claim is something like they're going a step further to the GWAS analysis but I mean it's just a claim in this paper. The first statement would be really cool if we could do that. Yeah. I'm not sure. I'm not sure either. Their point is that they make they go further than the GWAS to do that because they capture effect of single variants that was wiped out in the GWAS method but then it's just one or two papers and they I used it because one of the if I do my parallel with ecology the thing that I think is going on is that we used to think that statistical predictions are reliable if actually there is causal relation behind that otherwise at some point they will be failing and in ecology some people are thinking that they are pushing the view of what they call predictive ecology so we don't have a theory of the mechanism that are going on who it's whom what are the the ecological characters of the species and what are the you know the generalized specialists and all the ecology of that we don't have a real theory of that we don't know the mechanisms but we might have reliable prediction for example if we have like two more degrees next year what would happen or if there is 10% of biodiversity loss what would happen we can have predictions and because even if we don't know the causes we have such a huge mass of data such a huge possibility of comparing this situation with other situations that are let's say our statistic will capture we don't know which but will capture real causal relations but we don't know which ones but we can know that we capture some real causal relations and then our collision will be reliable and our prediction will be reliable so in this case I think that what we are seeing is that we are moving away from the picture where the reliable correlations that you get from the statistics are the ones that are causal and we can attest it by seeing it pinpointing the causation to a view where actually we'll never be able to see what are the causal relations behind because they might be like a huge variety of distinct possible causal relations but that's about the same correlation that's something like this and we capture this I don't see them as major paradigms well actually that's I'm not sure I mean that's a possible interpretation of that and in the case of ecology I would say like you because I was involved in the study that actually you don't get so wide paradigmatic difference people who push for predictive ecology wants to get actually so I'm quite skeptical but that's the epistemic view that solved with this supposed change and I assume in genomics it might be the same so I have no idea if this is doing any good or not this microphone it's a placebo effect so two comments you made late one in response to Larry's question about diversity and generation of diversity and then on the structure and function of ocean microbiomes and I was particularly interested in the notion of the structure of the microbiome so my question is do you see significant implications for our approaches to systematics and taxonomy on the basis of what you're proposing here as an extended extension of the modern synthesis should we be thinking about about descent and classification in different ways as a result yeah actually let's say most of yeah I was saying there are many lines of challenges to the modern synthesis and what I was talking today was if we take this very simple distinction between patterns of evolution and processes of evolution was about what comes from the processes of evolution now what's going on here and that's exactly something people who are working on prokaryotes and the phallogen of prokaryotes are looking at is that things about the process are also very much more complex than what was expected so it's not like a nice tree but you have lateral gene transfer and it's reticulated at the level of prokaryotes at least or arches it's more as a the clear phallogenetic image is more like a net at least a bush or rather a network than a tree and that's something that I've been interested in because I'm working also with someone who is Eric Bethest who is really pushing for this view he's working on prokaryotes and their phallogeny but I think that something in metagenomics that is interesting is that it's not assuming the notions of organism or species I mean you start with the sample and you sample you sequence all the genes that are there independently of which gene belongs to whom and it means that you don't assume structures about what is an organism, what is an individual what is a species what are species genera and a tree and it's much more neutral regarding what's the pattern of evolution and so it might be that so I think I was citing this I was sorry I was so so quick but I was citing this paper for Doolittle and Zabayeva which says that metagenomics is not embedded within the view of species that is the classical systematic view I mean the units of biological organization is not assumed to be species genera and a lineage and they and this seems to be quite interesting and actually it might be the most genuine challenge today what in synthesis this I don't know whether I answer your question but can I push you on that and I'm going to give it to Adam of course so I think this is not read the paper and I kind of understand that what they're getting at is to understand the biotic system as a whole but I think metagenomics is a really awful model to deal with this right it's a tool that we use because we can and if Adam were able to do a survey of the ocean or wherever he wants to look and individually sequence the genome of every organism present by itself and also count how many of each one is present he would the problem is you can't do that economically right now and there the tool might or might not change this argument right so metagenomics we go and we scoop stuff up and we you're looking at genes in the system a gene in this organism and a gene in this organism look at them as somehow interacting without talking about the organism is the temporary artifact of when we do these things different from looking at the biotic whole and we just have this kind of weird tool that because we can because it's cool that we can use to get information that was invisible before at some point so that we understand the genomes of each of these organisms so I may be misinterpreting, I'm just reacting to the title in what I know of metagenomics which is this temporary messy tool which gives us stuff that we didn't know about you just want me to agree with you no there's nothing I agree it is currently messy and we were talking about this in the half an hour that we were discussing earlier you're missing the boundary of the cell wall that's compartmentalizing all of the biology that's happening within the cell and then seeing the interactions without recognizing that there's a boundary there but looking for pathways in a metagenome you could find a pathway and you don't know that the boundaries were there that might prevent it from happening but you saw it, it might give you a hypothesis you could go forward with but I agree entirely it's a messy view of the current state but yeah no I I'm not trying to tell you as a new way to interpret all of biology let's assume I know you're curious let's assume you find a couple of genes that say something about the way to mind the contrary but when you dig deeper you find out there an organism that was here and an organism that was here and they never beat and they never hear out and there might be 16 different spaces where this very weak connection metagenomically and when you find this you might put a lot of significance on that and you'd be wrong yeah no I perfectly agree I think that the one thing is the limits of the tool which are real and maybe overlooked and one other thing is like conceptually the fact that it's used to task that were not assumed to be part of genetics like for example in my in the ecology institute where I'm affiliated indirectly a lot of people are doing what they call environmental metagenomics so they are using it for example to metagenomic to say well you have a lake and you look at who is in the lake and then you use many other sources of information like the phylogenies you know and the systematics and it allows you to say something about the history of the lake and what's changing here is that you don't use genetics to understand how how the cell or the organism works you use it to describe something about to get informed about the history of a landscape and so that's the that's the shift that I wanted to emphasize I was looking at them as sensors exactly how it tells about what's going on it doesn't tell you the interesting thing is that there is something in the human genome project explaining why we are living the way we live so it's explaining the causes of organism development and functioning and those use of metagenomics it doesn't tell you anything about the causes it's just about describing what's there and because you know something about evolutionary history describing what has been there and so it shifts from like understanding the causes and the reasons to better describing things that are not necessarily organisms as a species or cells so yeah exactly yeah that's the point because the more you'll have your sample is from something that is structured the more your metagenomics analysis have chances to be flowed actually there's something like this because yeah I'm just going to say something quick and then we have to end it so one of the things that I would really like to see is this kind of conceptual discussion integrated with the tools and methods discussion a lot of this changes not necessarily because of the conceptual shift we have different better tools of investigating nature and I think that goes back to your point about fish are not as scalable so thank you very much well thank you


From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are live here in the broadcast booths presented by theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, co-host with Dave Vellantes. VMworld 2018, day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Our ninth year covering VMworld and the VMware ecosystem. It's great to have on theCUBE Tom Corn who's the senior vice president general manager of the security products from VMware. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thank you. We're just bantering before we came on that you are part of building app defense, one-year-old products. Yes, yeah. So you're in the nerd nation, if you will. Yes. And VMware. I say that with all due respect. I take it. I had to stand for it since the football opening day is Friday, so it would be tailgating at Stanford. But, you know, Palo Alto, VMware. Tons of technology in VMware. We covered the radio event which was first opened to the press this year. We were there. Security number one, Pat Gelsinger said on theCUBE so many times, even four years ago, he said security's a do-over. But it's more than a do-over. It's central to how the cloud and on-premises are working. Hybrid cloud validated by Andy Jassy this week with RDS on VMware, on-premises. Pretty major industry milestone there. You're in the middle of the security leading the team. What's the update for VMware? Still pumping on all cylinders? I think this is actually we're making some of the biggest strides forward in security right now. I think there is such a huge opportunity to not make the mistakes we made in the past and start with a clean slate. Do security the way it really ultimately makes sense. At the end of the day, we're really not trying to protect servers or networks or we're trying to protect data and applications. And being able to see things through, look at the infrastructure through the lens of the application, through the lens of the data and align security to that is a huge opportunity to fundamentally make cloud more secure than a traditional sort of physical environment. So I got a staff from Trend Micro just came by theCUBE today for a briefing. They said one in $6 are being spent outside the organization in buying other SaaS platforms. Cloud certainly, the shadow IT has caused that. Whether it's Dropbox, AWS instances, just stuff flying up there, opening up, potential vulnerabilities. Virtual networking is clearly a part of the architecture with virtual machines. So security is really under a lot of pressure and micro segmentation seems to be a hot topic. This is driving a lot of new value as the architecture shifts to hybrid cloud which essentially cloud operations. Infosec teams, NetOps are all working together now but it seems more confusing than ever. Can you clarify how companies are organizing around the cloud, hybrid cloud operating model in multi-cloud with security? Yeah, so first it's important to understand the central idea behind micro segmentation is to provide a mechanism to compartmentalize all the elements that compose an application, a regulatory scope so that if one thing falls, everything doesn't fall, right?  I think we live in a state of compromise, deal with it, right? And so the notion of compartmentalizing an application allows for a limited lateral movement of attacks. It also provides a policy boundary to say, I can place controls on the boundaries of an application and that boundary may not exist in the physical world but it does in the virtual world. The best analogy I came up for this is imagine you had an entire company in a skyscraper. All the employees were in that skyscraper. You could put guards in the front door of that building and the instructions for them, but who gets in and who gets out or what looks weird in the lobby? Pretty straightforward, okay? Now take the employees and spread them out into parts of floors of different buildings all over the city. Fill the building that you had with employees from lots of different companies. Now there's a bank, a TGI Fridays, a bowling alley, and an FBI. No, now tell those guards what looks weird in the lobby. Like now tell those guards who should get in. Now suddenly it's really confusing. And the ability to say I'll create a virtual skyscraper that'll put all the employees in one place, that's the idea behind microsegmentation. Tom, you talked about the cloud, the potential for the cloud to be more secure than the traditional environment. In June, John and I were at the Public Sector Summit and we heard the CIO of the CIA say, cloud on our worst day from a security standpoint is better than my client server. Because the first time I heard client server in about 10 years, but nonetheless. Yeah, that's the government. So my question for you is, in terms of, so his implication was it's already there. What has to be done to bring that level of security to that hybrid world? Yeah, so at first I would be careful with that statement. I think they're probably right for the average company, the way a cloud provider would secure the infrastructure on down, it's actually very solid. The application's your problem. The data that's running on it is your problem. And that's not quite the same thing. There's a different set of things about what can get access, how that's isolated for other things. So some of it. Let me make sure I understand that. So you're saying, okay, the infrastructure, check. Yeah. But that's not the story. What's above the operating system? My applications and how the data is flowing on that. And there's no good excuse that, well it was running on such and such, infrastructure as a service is not my problem. It's still the company's problem. Right, right. So a lot of the basic things of access control, alignment of controls, policy, those are still ultimately in the hands of the customer. Now I do agree that the opportunity is to make the simpler, less misalignment, less misconfigurations. Those are tremendous opportunities in the cloud. But there's some conventional wisdom in the industry that says, you know what, it's a fatal complaint, you're going to get hacked. So it's all about how you respond. I'm inferring from you that, no, that's not the case, that you can actually protect the data if you take an application view. Yeah. Of course, response is important. Yeah, look, there's no perfect solution. I guess maybe the best way to think of security is a risk management exercise.   Or are you investing your time, money, and capital in the things that will have the most material reduction in risk? There's a wonderful framework that Gartner came up with. I like that Neil McDonald from Gartner came up with it, which is a, he calls it the cloud workload protection framework. He stack ranked all the things you could do to protect the workload in order how much risk it gets rid of. The things at the bottom that the big risks, patching, segmentation, application control, protect the memory, encryption.  The stuff at the top, you know, antivirus running for a server inside the data center behind all these walls is marginal residual risk. So the focus of VMware in the security realm has been we can not only bake security in, so you're not adding boxes, you're not managing agents. More importantly, we're in this unique position to understand what things were supposed to be. For example, the app defense product that we launched last year you had mentioned and that we have a bunch of new stuff here, we're leveraging the hypervisor itself to understand the intention of the applications you loaded on it and then use the hypervisor to say that's all it can do, nothing else. It flips the model completely from saying, I'm going to try to find bad things too. I'm going to really understand what good is supposed to be and that's all it's allowed. So you're narrowing the scope with policy basically. 100%. I mean, so this comes up with IoT. I heard a guy saying, you know, these light bulbs that are Wi-Fi enabled have full multi-processed threads. We don't need it.  So by bounding the apps, that's what you're saying. They're using virtualization mechanisms to do that. Exactly right. We've never used it for this before but the hypervisor kernel does a bunch of pretty amazing things. It can see what's running. It can see what you provisioned in the first place. It can do that without adding an agent. It can do that in a way that can't be turned off without a lot of overhead and it can do almost anything in response. So the central idea behind app defense was, let's use it. It'll tell you what all your VMs are for. Now you have an application view that says, here's the applications in your infrastructure divided into services, divided into machines. Here's what they're supposed to be. Tell us what you want to have happen if what's running doesn't match what you intended. That's it. Well, the technology is perfectly positioned for that and Pat was mentioning NSX. Well, I want to ask that in a second about NSX. I want to put you in the spot and ask the question that comes up all the time. Two factors in security that's hard to get your arms around. One is patching, which you said, you got to patch stuff so you don't patch it, this whole surface area. Two, social engineering. Because you get human error, whether you're patched or not, did I configure the bounding proper? That's a human error. Batching, I call human error and social engineering. Those are two factors that are still prevalent in security. Your thoughts on that. No, look, you can't patch humans. So that is almost in a week and the only really thing that we can really advance there is to move increasingly to automation and do things that candidly are not, humans probably aren't the best at doing that. But you can't just automate old, unreliable processes. That just makes them faster. It doesn't necessarily make them better. And I think the key to a lot of this is again. Automating a bad process still makes it a bad process. It's just faster. It's more efficient. An efficiently bad process. Exactly, exactly right. So I think a lot of the automation and the ability to compartmentalize things and candidly a lot of the policies, whether it's for patching, et cetera. When thought of through the lens of an application as opposed to like what's our policy for patching the patient care system? How often is my patient care system unpatched? Is different than saying I've got thousands of machines and some of them are patched, some of them are not and how do I prioritize which ones I should get? It really does not only simplify things but align things to a business outcome which is really goes back to a risk management decision of business. Ransomware is a great example to your point earlier. I think you said that on off camera as well is that you don't want to attack the same treadmill of problems. So Ransomware, one guy said that in the cube here at another event said, Ransomware's easy. Just patch and back up and you're good. It sounds simple, doesn't it? It's surface area, patch it, back it up. Now sometimes there's reasons why the patch that people just don't roll out the updates to an absolute critical surter on the trading floor. Sometimes they have challenges but interesting enough yesterday we were showing we had a live, we did a live attack on stage with Petra, with a live strain of Ransomware throwing it in this machine. We showed why it worked and we were just using app defense to say, all right, let's assume you didn't patch it. App defense is going to make sure that application can't do anything you didn't intend it to do. The ransomware doesn't work and it's not because we understand what malware you had there. It's because the malware to work has to change. I'm thinking about security strategies in general for organization. Given that credential theft is still such a huge problem, are the things that you can do with analytics because you may have visibility on certain parts from the infrastructure standpoint that you can do to maybe not stop credential theft, that's bad human behavior, but to identify some anomalous behavior. What's happening with analytics and what role, if any, does VMware play? Yeah, so again, if the central theme, I suppose, is summed up is we're trying to say, here's your applications and data, what is intended? On the network with NSX, on the compute stack with app defense, Workspace One is trying to address that from a user and a device perspective. And the questions one asks for what you're discussing is, is this who they say they are? Are they on the list of invites and are they on a trusted device? And those were traditionally siloed decisions separately. And what we're saying is, it's about answering those things in concert that allow to spot the stuff that doesn't make sense. It's the ability to answer them in concert that allows you to make that less intrusive into the daily activity of the users. So the work that's happening on Workspace One Intelligence to do analytics, looking at the device and how the device is behaving, the user and how the user is, what indication, what risk do we see? This may not be the person or the risk that they're working from a device I might not trust, even if I trust who it is. Either of those might tip me off to say, you know what, I might want to limit what they have access to or this is the place I need to look at first. Again, I think that starts to clarify and put things in context. We're talking off camera about the InfoSec team and the IT team and often they're in silos and not talking to each other. What's the right regime in terms of what you see in the marketplace of best practice to approach this problem? Well, it sort of depends on the size of scope, but the InfoSec team, often led by the Chief Security Officer, often in most organizations I deal with own the Security Operations Center, security architecture and governance risk and compliance. They're mostly looking at setting overall policy and seeing when things are breaking down and reacting to it. But as you point out, there's a lot of security happening in the infrastructure teams, whether it's firewalling, segmentation, locking down the compute stack, even things like AV running by end user services teams. They're looking to set policy and things that are getting in the data path that are about locking things down and they need to collaborate. They need to, if to be effective, they have to each know the roles and operate from a single source of truth. And that's where it's breaking down. In fact, I would take it a step further. The other group that needs to be part of this conversation is the application team. And as we move to DevOps and the applications change very rapidly, it's going to be increasingly important that they collaborate and not ignore each other as silos. I want to ask you, I know we got one more question left, but I want to get out there. You mentioned adaptive segmentation is an extension of where micro segmentation is going. A lot of buzz here at VMworld on micro segmentation. What is adaptive segmentation? So it's really the next logical evolution, we've taken some of the technology we built with app defense that can figure out and map out the applications. Now that we have manifests that say what these things are for and we know the patient care system is actually all these machines and how they interact, it's basically saying, why don't we have the system program the micro segment and do it in an automated way? Now you have a micro segment that is automatically and perfectly aligned driven from the application itself. And the other beauty is the adaptive portion which says if the application changes, that's pushed down through Puppet or Chef or something is modified through patching to have the system be smart enough to see that's an update and then automatically change the actual segment and lock the network and compute down. That's what we're doing there. It's a- What's the impact of the customer? And what's the impact of that? It's simpler, they'll much faster time to actually go in. It's simpler and it's a much more accurate representation of the application. You lock things down both from lateral and direct attacks. So it's a big deal. Okay, final, final question. I always like to get the final question in here. Tom, tell us about a prediction for 2019. Next year at VMworld, we want to, what are we going to be talking about? What are going to be the security issues on the table? More of the same rinse and repeat issues. What is your prediction for 2019 and security? Well, you know what? I think security is going to get more complicated before it gets simpler. I think we're on the right path but there are so many moving parts. I think one thing, I think you're going to start to see people increasingly open to security being delivered as SaaS. Because there's too many benefits of machine learning across populations of users. I think we're going to start to see security models that are, to fool one of us, you got to fool all of us. I think those are the kind of things that are going to be the needle mover. Sounds like great service. Security is a service. The Cube is a service bringing us three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We'll be back with more on day three coverage. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more after this short break.


That's right, everybody's favorite 15-year-old TikTok and Instagram star Danny Cohn is pregnant, but for some reason, people are acting surprised about this. What is up, everybody? This is Chris from the Rewire Exile, where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, what I like to do is pull different topics from the YouTube community or pop culture or social media and try to see what lessons that we can learn from it. So if you're into that kind of stuff, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And speaking of influencers, make sure you follow me on Instagram and Twitter at the Rewired Soul. And yeah, let's talk about Danny Cohn. So last night, I was getting ready to go to bed and I did a little quick little Twitter check-in. And for some reason, Danielle Cohn was trending. So I see that she's trending and I start clicking around and seeing what it is. And then it's saying Danny Cohn is pregnant and I'm like, what the heck is going on? So Danny Cohn is an influencer who I've made a couple of videos on in the past and discussing, you know, just the social issues around this. And it's not just Danny Cohn being a young woman, you know, on the platform and the way she does things, but just children as a whole being in the spotlight and the way we kind of groom youth into wanting this kind of fame and wanting this kind of stardom. I talked about this in my K-pop video that I just made yesterday about kind of the darker side of K-pop. So anyways, Danny Cohn, she's been dating this guy, Mike I think his name is, and yeah, they're pregnant. Now, I will say this is a real quick disclaimer, like, I am still hoping that this is going to come out and it's going to be some kind of like prank, even though April Fool's was like a little over a week ago, like I'm hoping that that's the case, but it doesn't seem like it. So anyways, it looks like Danny Cohn, there was pictures of her, like they had a gender reveal party, other people were at that party. They actually did this stream right here where they talked about it as well. So we just came on here to really like explain about the pregnancy and all of that. And we have videos coming out too about everything. Then on both of their twitters, they have what looks like a due date, right, for the baby to be born, which is in August, all right? And yeah, like I'm looking through Twitter and there's quite a reaction about it. And some people have messaged me, you know, about my thoughts and everything. And yeah, like, I just want to talk about the bigger social issues around this. So the first one is obviously like the title of this video. And what I mentioned, you know, in the intro is like people are actually surprised about this. Like, like, how can we be surprised? How can we, there is an over sexualized 15 year old who has click baited the world on YouTube and, you know, because of like these kind of sexual things, like, like, I think like one of her recent videos was like our first time or something like that.  And if you go through her Instagram, you know, or even like her TikTok videos, like I don't have TikTok, so I haven't gone through that, but I've seen clips of it. Like she's a very sexualized teenager. Okay. And obviously, like we got to understand how the human mind works. Like when you get positive reinforcement, you're going to keep doing that. Right. And this is something that we've seen happen. Like when Danny Cohn, a young woman is promoting her body in a certain way. She gets a lot of followers. She gets a lot of views and all of that. Right. And when she makes these, uh, this kind of like sexual content with her boyfriend, like it gets promoted. So what's happening as a society is we are normalizing that behavior. We're normalizing it. And like, I don't know about all of you, but like there was a show on MTV. I don't know if it's still on there, but it was called Teen Mom. Basically it documented, you know, teenage mothers. And I don't know what the intention behind MTV's Teen Mom was. I don't know if the motivation was like, look, having a baby at a young age could be really rough. It could be really difficult, but I think it sent out the opposite message, which is like, look, have a baby at a young age. You can be rich and famous. Right. And if you follow the stories of like some of those teen moms, like, uh, what is it, Farrah, Farrah Abraham, like girls got some issues. You know what I mean? And, and I think there was another young woman on there named Amber. Like she's struggling with a lot of issues as well. And yeah, teen pregnancy is hard. And like, that's the thing. Like now we have Danny Cohn and like, you got to think about her primary demographic. Who is her primary demographic? Like it's not me. I'm definitely not her primary demographic, but it's young boys and young girls. Right. So, you know, I have this, this kind of internal conflict of should influencers be role models? Like, I don't think they should. But they are put in that light. Like this is just part of human nature. And there's plenty of psychological studies out there. I've done plenty of videos on that about this kind of learned behavior and what kids aspire to be and the connections that they make. So there are many kids who idolize Danny Cohn. So when she's 15 years old and getting pregnant, like that justifies other teenagers to have unsafe sex. Because like, I think as a society, we look for influencers to justify behavior that we know is unhealthy. Like, whether you want to believe that or not, it's the truth. It is the absolute truth. We follow problematic YouTubers. We follow problematic influencers. We follow problematic celebrities to try to justify our own behavior. Because that's just how we are. Like we have an internal compass, a moral compass, knowing the difference between right and wrong. But it's a lot easier to do bad, right? It's a lot easier to have unsafe sex as a teenager. It's a lot easier to act a fool, right? It's a lot easier to go with your primal instincts than it is to do healthy things, right? So when we find somebody who is rich and or famous, who is doing things that justifies what we're doing in our life, we can point to that and say, oh, well, they're doing it. They're doing it and they're successful. Even though I don't think a lot of us would vocalize that out loud because we know how silly that sounds, we use that as an internal justification. And this is the concern that we should be having. Now, I also am discussing this topic as a father, right? I'm a father to a 10 year old son. And, you know, I haven't yet got to the time where we got to have like the birds and the bees conversation at school, hasn't introduced him to sex education and things like that. But this is something that I have to be mindful of. Who is he looking at in the influencer world? Who is he idolizing, right? Like, is this a good or a bad role model? Because a lot of us, we have these screwed up value systems where we we idolize people for two reasons. Two reasons, money and popularity, right? Money and popularity. These are two things that we look at to say whether or not somebody is a good person, which is absolutely ridiculous. All right. Like how many people, how many people with fame and fortune are not good people at all? You know what I mean? Like, think about that for a second. But this is constantly seen in our society where people base somebody's like, they think somebody's morals are equivalent to the number they have, whether it's YouTube subscribers, whether it's Instagram followers, whether it's TikTok followers, whatever it is. So there are young children who are looking at Danny Cohn as a role model because of her popularity and the money she makes. These are not good things to base this off of. And this is one of the reasons why I've talked about celebrity suicides, celebrity depression, all of these other things. Like we have solid proof, we have proof, we have physical evidence that money and fame are not a foundation for happiness. Right? If that were the case, no celebrity would ever be depressed.  Celebrities wouldn't do awful things because their life would be perfect. So something that I try to do with my channel, I try to have you look at these these situations and pop culture in a different light. Like realize that popularity and money do not equal the great thing. Like I hope the best for Danny Cohn. I hope the best. But if you look at reality for what it is, a lot of people who get pregnant at that age and have a child, their life is a big unnecessary struggle. All right. And just for a lot of reasons and like I'm not I'm not saying that everybody's life is going to be terrible for a lot of people. It just causes them to grow up a lot faster. It causes them to have responsibility, but there are also other issues that come along with it and like that could be a whole another video about, you know, the social issues when it comes to, you know, finding a job, pursuing your career, the other issues that you have. But part of being a parent is also about mentorship. Right? Like part of being a parent is your responsibility to pass on your knowledge, your wisdom, the things that you have learned from down to your child. So one of the one of the concerns with teen pregnancy is you don't have that much life experience to pass that knowledge onto a child. Right?  You see what I mean? But if you want to get down to the science of it, the neurological science of it, young people don't have a fully developed brain yet either. Like the prefrontal cortex, but separates us from like wild animals or even domesticated animals like dogs and cats is our prefrontal cortex, which doesn't fully develop until your 20s. Okay. So like think about that for a second. So the decisions like, okay, Danny Cone, she has a, she has a child. Let's say she's 16 years old. I don't know when her birthday is.  All right. Studies show that the prefrontal cortex doesn't develop until your, your late 20s. So that child will be almost 10 years old and Danny Cone will still not have a fully developed brain. Yet she is parenting another human being. So these are just things that I want you to think about. But anyways, like the main concern I have is the influence that all of us have. And for all of you watching, I know I don't have a lot of teenagers who watch my videos, but you as adults, like think about that, think about who you idolize and think about the reasons why you idolize them. That's what I'm trying to do with my channel most of the time is like just having you think just a little bit harder and saying, why do I idolize this person? Is it based on like certain virtues and characteristics they have or is it based on money and popularity? You know what I mean? But anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell because I make a ton of videos and a huge, huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon. You're all amazing. And if you would like to help support the channel, click the top right there. All right. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time.


I'm Kasten Ture-Jakobsen, I'm a professor and head of the Department of Environmental Science at Aarhus University. It's a big pleasure to be asked to organize a session on Poland Alpine Microbiology at FEMS 2019 in Glasgow. So we're setting up a session which is very much looking of course into what is going on with the changing environment in the Arctic. And what we do is actually that we try to go also technologically beyond 16S. So you would see a lot of methods, you know, driven investigations that would focus on permafrost. So I would give a talk about total RNA used into the profiling of microbial communities, not only bacteria but also viruses and protist fungi at the same time. Then Tim Ulrich would continue this line and he is giving a presentation where he would go further on with permafrost and total RNA. Then Janne Jansson is going to present her work on permafrost which is total mesotranscriptomic. And then finally Alexanisio is going to give a talk on the change of the color of the Greenlandic ice cap and he called it 50 shades of brown. So I think it's going to be a really interesting session and hope to see you all in Glasgow. Thank you.