to the organizers for inviting me. I've really enjoyed all the talks and I'm really looking forward to the remaining two days. Yeah, the title is quite a mouthful but I'll explain what I mean shortly. I'll start by a brief summary of in general what I'm interested in, kind of my research group. Broadly speaking my research program is that a physicist was fascinated by the unintuitive microscopic world, except much like my colleagues in string theory, except for me microscopic world stops at bacteria. And like many people here in the audience, I'm interested in things like large an ecology, ecosystems with a large number of species or resources, and as such I'm kind of part of this community. I count myself as part of this broad community of people with shared interests, many of whom are actually here. But then also, I'm like many of us as well, I'm interested in this interplay between ecology and evolution and in fact, one way to interpret the title of the workshop, I suppose in terms of limits of community assembly, I interpreted as what are the limits to our ability to predict community assembly, what are the factors limiting our models and for sure, our understanding of evolution is one of those factors, such as ecology of players that are evolving and co-evolving, how do ecosystems evolve? Or in fact, we are not even that well, don't understand even that well, what role evolution actually plays in given ecosystems? So when I was listening to Leonardo's talk, I couldn't help but noticing at first on the slides of factors shaping microbial communities that there were multiple factors there, but not evolution actually wasn't one of them. And then of course, I waited a few slides and she blew our minds by this last latest preprint that they posted. So evolution was very much part of the story as well. But yeah, so this interplay is something I'm quite interested in. And even simpler situation than the full feedback loop between ecology and evolution, just evolution and a changing environment, which is kind of before we complete the feedback, environment can change because of the organisms that evolve, but even if you don't complete that loop and just think about evolution and changing environments, there's surprising variety of problems that we have a lot to understand about. So yeah, and all of this is kind of under the broader umbrella theme of what are the right course grain variables in these situations? And of course, there's the conversations of function versus composition, and I heard some beautiful work on that front already. And my personal kind of pet topic is to what extent, you know, the familiar language of species is the right language for some of these questions. But anyway, so that's that's kind of the broad themes. But lately, so lately, I was actually my work on large an ecology in collaboration with Raymond Monason, for example, that dates a few years back. And lately, I've been mostly interested in evolutionary questions. So what am I doing in this workshop? Well, even in evolutionary contexts, the sort of ecological motivation is never too far because I'm really interested in microbes and ecology, high diversity ecology is always kind of a persistent interest. So as an example, here's a recent story that I worked on with some colleagues at Stanford, Shaman Kachur and Daniel Fisher. And on the face of it, it was entirely an evolutionary question, which is, you know, evolution is constrained by performance tradeoffs, but performance tradeoffs themselves can evolve. And, you know, can we have some null model for this interaction? And what are some general expectations? So we have a paper on that. Also kind of describing this model for multi environment evolution, which is different from kind of officials geometric model and incorporates some ability of organisms to respond to their environment. And this kind of cute statistical physics the way I'm describing this just as an example that, okay, nominally, there's no ecology here. But secretly, this is kind of essentially MacArthur resource competition model, even though it's not in the paper. But, you know, MacArthur's resource competition has this interesting feature that the dynamics of individual species, optimize this global function, these dynamics have a lappin of function. It's something that I always found intriguing to think about. And of course, you know, maybe it's tempting to interpret that as some sort of community fitness. But of course, you can do that. And of course, in general, ecosystem dynamics don't optimize anything. But, you know, you could then take that model and basically reinterpret it as a model for an organism and its fitness kind of replacing species abundances by expression coefficients. And then you get a cool model for studying evolution, which is essentially ecologically inspired. So this was just as an example of ecological motivation kind of percolating into a different context. And what I want to tell you today is another example of something kind of similar. So this is joint work with Stefan Landmann and Caroline Holmes. We also just posted this pre-print a few weeks ago. It's very fresh. Now, in this story, again, there actually won't be any ecology and not even any evolution. So on the face of it, it'll be a question about some physiology of bacteria. But I'll ask you to bear with me through this story that I'll tell you about. There'll be a lot of ecology in this workshop. So, you know, let me tell you about something entirely different. And then I'll argue that there's actually, I'll then map this onto an ecological narrative. So the story is published is completely a physiology of bacteria kind of question. But I hope to convince you in the end that there is a, sorry, I'm trying to, my screen has so many zoom windows on top of each other that I can hardly see my own slides. But okay, whatever. Okay, yeah. So for the portion of the story where, like a purely physiological, I'll sort of change the color scheme to remind you that we're not yet in ecology and are thinking about a completely different question. And then I'll map back to ecology. So the question I will ask for the next 10 minutes or so, I tried to prepare not too many slides. So I'm counting on questions in the middle, or I'll end way too soon. The question we asked is, can bacteria learn the fluctuation structure of their environments? And I will explain what I mean by that. So if I live in a fluctuating environment, the adaptations that I might have involve not only reaction, but also prediction of the future state of the environment. So for example, you know, if I see this, I'm not, I don't wait until I get soaked. I grab an umbrella. And we are not the only ones who do this. Basically, all living systems make predictions about their environments effectively. Any predictable pattern in environment and environmental change can be exploited to improve fitness. So my, a few favorite examples of mine, and there, of course, many more, you know, quite obviously there's circadian clocks. So both plants and algae have reorganized their metabolism in preparation for the sun that's about to rise. And when it does, they're already ready to go. There's also what's called anticipatory behavior in microorganisms. My favorite example is, so E. coli, its life cycle takes it through the mammalian gut. And then they're out in the soil until yet eaten by another mammal and the cycle repeats. So there's work showing that if you expose an E. coli to a warmer temperature, it starts activating pathways that prepare it to anaerobic environment. And what's happening kind of the interpretation is that if it gets into the mouth, it's preparing for the gut environment, right? And this association can be broken in a few days evolution in the lab, where you fluctuate oxygen availability and temperature independently, you get strains that do not have that association, right? So it is a learned association. And in fact, these kind of learning these statistical features of your environment can be beneficial even if the environment doesn't change in a sort of regular predictable way, but is entirely probabilistic. So, and a good example of that is the sort of bed hedging idea. So if I, for example, if I'm in a bacterium and I live in an environment with when with some probability I might see an antibiotic, the optimal strategy, and I could adopt a persister phenotype that doesn't grow but would be resistant, the sort of optimal strategy with what probability I should be doing that depends on the sort of statistics of the environment. Okay, so all of these we know all these examples, basically there's this kind of old metaphor that evolution can learn any features of the environment. And for all we know basically any statistical feature of the environment could plausibly be learned by an evolving organism through this sort of trial and error, right? But so I'm saying can learn the statistical structure of environment, but only the kind of structures that change slower than evolutionary timescale. So, you know, the 24 hour cycle has been going on forever and ever. And so long enough for evolution to be able to learn it. But what if there are regularities in your environments that change faster than evolutionary timescale? Now, how, you know, how relevant is this question? Are there regularities in the environments that change faster than evolutionary timescales? Well, yes, of course, there are. Basically, for example, entire ecology operates in this regime, right? Who's around you changes on an ecological timescale. And the statistics of your environment thus are also changing on that timescale. So that's the theoretical question we wanted to ask in this project, which does remind you at this point is just a kind of theoretical question of, you know, what is possible for bacteria to learn about their environments? Fully within the scale of one organism, nothing ecological about this just yet, except the context, like sort of this ability would probably be most useful in an eco evolutionary context where your environment keeps changing because of eco evolutionary feedbacks or just ecological feedbacks. Okay. And so, so let me describe to you the, you know, being theorists, we made a sort of toy version of this question. So let me describe this toy version of the question to you. And then I'll pause to see if there are questions. So to model the situation where an organism lives in an environment that has some structured fluctuations, let me consider the following problem. Let's say that a cell like a bacterium has some internal quantities that I'll call P that ideally would be matched to a fluctuating external quantities, which I'll call D. So D is my environment. And P is something internal that I'm trying to match to that environment. Why P and D? Well, for example, you can think of it in some sort of metabolic analogy, where the internal you have production of amino acids, for example, right, and your environment imposes certain demand right now for all those amino acids. And ideally, you want to produce, you know, as much as needed, but not more, not less. And your environment fluctuates. So now fluctuation of the environment is encoded in this fluctuation of D. And I wanted to fluctuate in some structured way. What's the simplest way to have some structured fluctuations? Well, let's say that it's undergoing a random walk with parameters. So this is kind of a matrix of restoring force. This is a noise term. And intuitively, you know, D kind of fluctuates around filling out an ellipse, you can think of it this way. You know, in physics terms, it's random walk and a quadratic potential in intuitive terms, I have this quantity that's fluctuating around, and some directions are more likely than others, right? I rarely observe my D here. I more frequently observe my D there. And so the problem that my organism is facing, the structure of the fluctuations is encoded in this ellipse, essentially, and the strength of fluctuations. So both how the ellipse is oriented and how big it is. And the organism is trying to match P to D. And so I have a little animation describing this. So, you know, you can't react instantaneously. So you're kind of lagging behind a little bit. But your environment is, that's the sort of the blue dot here with a black trace. I meant to make it blue, but it's black. Sorry about that. And the organism is trying to do something. And maybe it could be doing what this green dot there is doing. And the question is, well, how well can I do that? And the beauty of formulating the problem in this simple way is that we actually know in the simple context what would be the optimal thing to do. And basically, kind of, you know, we know the math. So we know what the if instead of a bacterium, I had a supercomputer. Here's how it would solve this problem. From observations of the past, it would learn the statistics, M and gamma. And then it would adjust its strategy to effectively predict which changes in environment are more likely than others. And that would improve its ability to track the system. And I will postulate that basically the ability to track the average deviation is my fitness. And so that's what, you know, an organism would be trying to do. So we know how to do this with fancy mathematics. But of course, the question is, could a bacterium do something remotely like this? And the claim is that actually simple regulatory architecture can solve this task. It's effectively doing both steps here. In fact, it can do it near optimally. You can show that. But most importantly, it's a simple architecture and it's very simple to what bacteria already are, you know, the kind of networks they already know to possess. And that's why it's not a silly thing to imagine bacteria might actually be doing. So for example, you know, this is kind of intended as a proof of principle that, you know, say bacteria in our guts, could they be responding or learning not just the sort of diets that humans as a species have had for, you know, thousands of years, but also learn from recent experiences, sort of correlations and nutrients availabilities that they've experienced in the recent past while being maybe in this individual. And I don't know if real bacteria necessarily do it. This is just a proof of principle that I'll show you that in principle, kind of theoretically they could. So that's the formulation of this physiological question. Let me end. I claim that there is a simple structure that solves this. I will show you this in a second. But first, let me see if there are questions. So I don't see. Yes, there is a question in the chat by Aditya who says, does the dimensionality of P and D affect how difficult the learning processes? What is the appropriate choice for this dimension? Yes. So very good. I will consider first a one dimensional case that just simpler to sort of intuitive the picture. And the two dimensional case, which is basically contains all of the structure that the problem could have because in two dimensional case, you have both variances and correlations. And then in principle, the same structure would work in higher dimensions. But for biological sort of relevance, it seems like one D and two D cases are probably all you need. I hope I answered this question. But if sorry, so if the vector is representing, for example, production of amino acids, couldn't that be like many more than two dimensions? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But like so, you know, so in principle, environment is very high dimensional. But say, you know, this as a kind of learning mechanism that I'll describe to you, a given organism might, you know, in its habitat, like these two nutrients might be sometimes correlated and sometimes not. And it might, I might care to know to, you know, adjust my strategy for that. But, you know, I don't necessarily need to be such a universal learner that if anything would suddenly be correlated with something else, I would notice, right? For a given bacteria, maybe there are only two dimensions that are sometimes correlated, sometimes not. And I might care. But like I said, the same idea will work in any dimensions is just for me personally, it seems like low dimensional examples are probably the most likely places.  Okay. And it'll how I'll explain in a second, you know, what the solution is and how it works. And you can judge for yourself to what extent it's like biologically plausible. And I see there's another question about, oh, this is a very good question. What does it mean exactly that statistical structure changes slower than evolutionary timescale? So what in this formulation of the problem, you'll see that the fluctuations of D are very fast, and it's just bouncing around, right? But it's bouncing around with a certain preferred direction like this that's determined by the ellipse. And I'm saying that maybe, you know, I'm an organism that I'm an environment for a while, where these two resources are correlated, right? And then at some point, I'm in a different, I like my environment changes and now they're not. So that's what I call correlation structure that changed, right? And it may change. So my ellipse here, two days like this, and maybe in a month, it will be a different one. And a month is too fast for me to learn this by evolution. But I'm saying that there's a physiological mechanism for learning this. And yes, eta in my equation is a vector, very good point. Sorry about that. Okay, let me explain to you how this works, what the solution is. And then also, what's the relevance for ecology? So for now, we're still in the suspended disbelief state of I'm telling you something entirely unrelated to ecology. Okay, so the solution is actually a small modification on top of what all material already do, which is, let's forget the fancy version for a second of math of learning statistics of fluctuations and instead just say, you know, matching production to demand is something that bacteria do all the time. If I need a certain amount of some say metabolite, I'm using it up at some rate, and I want to make sure that I produce about the right amount to produce it about the same rate. How would I do that? There's a standard sort of solution that bacteria use throughout very common, which is I can place. Yeah, so by the way, I will, I won't have time to go into detail. So I'll assume that metabolite dynamics are fast. So I'll just exit just be a routine, but it doesn't really matter. The solution is let me place production under control of some regulator. And let me have the accumulation of the metabolite in my intracellar concentration of X, repress that regulator. And this is the equations. Now this, if my demand for X suddenly drops, X starts accumulating and turns off the production, right? It's a very robust mechanism and it's used throughout in kind of bacterial microbial regulation called end product inhibition. Now what I'm claiming is that if you take this architecture and you add three ingredients, you get a system that can actually learn fluctuation statistics and use that information productively to actually adjust its behavior appropriately in the scenario that I described to you. And these three ingredients are an excess of regulators. So here you would have one regulator dedicated to each metabolite, so in my conditions one or two. Let's say that we have an excess of regulators and I'll require that these regulators have self activation and some nonlinearity in how they're regulated by metabolites. So basically, and again, these are the equations, but in terms of kind of a picture, if instead of just one repressive loop here, I add these auto activation arrows and I also add, here I have two metabolites, but three regulators with some crosstalk between them. And for nonlinearity here, these equations I chose the simplest form of nonlinearity, but we can show that basically a broad class of nonlinearity will work. So I have very limited time, so I won't explain to you in detail like these equations. Let me just show you that it works and provide you an intuition for why it works. And then I'll have the time for the last couple slides to map this back to ecology and tell you what the ecological analogy would be. So, yeah, so the claim is that this system will match any static demand, but it will also learn statistics of fluctuations. So let's first discuss 1D case. In a 1D case, you have, I have just, my demand is just one quantity, D of T, some fluctuating quantity. The only thing that can change the statistics is its variance. So it was fluctuating a little bit and then it's fluctuating a lot and I claim that my system can learn that and respond to that. There's some, okay. And the claim is that faced with larger fluctuations, the system will notice this and become more responsive and be able to follow these fluctuations better. Now, how does it work? So I said that I need an excess of regulators and an excess, if I only have one dimension, I only have, I can basically have an activator and a repressor. That's the only way to have more regulators than, than one. So basically, this is kind of known as paradoxical regulation. It's kind of like I'm driving a car and I'm pressing, you know, to achieve a given speed, I can use the brake pedal and the accelerator pedal simultaneously. So I can just play, you know, press the accelerator and get the right speed, or I can really jam the brakes, but accelerate even stronger and still go at the same speed in this, what seems like a silly way to do that. But, so here the production that I need to match the demand is just the difference between my accelerator and my brake. But now I have an extra degree of freedom, which is I could press both of them more strongly. And the advantage of that is that the mean production still matches the mean demand, but I can change it quicker if I need to. And that's what will happen. So if I expose my system, and these are some simulation results of the architecture that I showed you, I showed to like increase variation of the variance of my signal. I'm kind of in an environment that fluctuates a little bit, then more than more than more. The system learns environment structure by upregulating both brake and accelerator together, which makes it more responsive, and it can track the fluctuations better, which I show here in this plot. So in blue, that's the sort of simple end product inhibition scheme, which doesn't have the other one. And as my environment fluctuates more and more, I perform worse and worse. Whereas if I can become more responsive, I can maintain the same level of performance. Okay. And in a two-dimensional case, it's kind of slightly more interesting because now I have two things that can be correlated with each other, right? And that's sort of intuitive that if I as a bacterium knew which direction of de-flatuation is more common than others, I should be able to track this environment better. And this is indeed what happens. So in this case, so what I'll do is I'll show, expose my system to like, I'll change this angle alpha. What is the direction of the preferred correlation? And as a readout, I'll ask which direction is my system most responsive to? So mathematically, there's the response matrix that has eigenvectors. And I'll ask whether the dominant response direction aligns to the dominant deviation in the environment. And in fact, like for system behaving optimally, it would have to respond quicker to the direction that's the preferred direction. And indeed, this is exactly what happens. So if you squint, there are actually two lines here. In dashed line, that's the sort of true statistics of the environment. And in black solid line, that's the responsiveness of the system, which tracks the input. Okay. And now we're getting to the important part. So if I look at the activities of regulators at this time, it seems something very strange. Like one of them goes up, the other one goes down, and actually understanding why this precise regulator is now active, it's not a trivial mapping. But it becomes clear when we look at the responsiveness of the system as a whole. Okay. So that's my little physiology story. That's how it is in this paper that's out there. And as a little bonus for something that appeals for theorists, possibly, we can show that the performance of this little architecture is actually near optimal in the sense of control theory. Okay. So it's a simple architecture, but it performs as almost as well as a, you know, supercomputer could in this situation, which is kind of surprising. But more importantly, for biological relevance, this behavior, I described to you these three ingredients that are required. And you can get that with minimal modification of circuits that bacteria are known to have. For example, things like two components signaling, which is how bacteria sense the world. This mechanism of becoming more responsive when required is very easy to implement as one additional interaction arrow in that standard regulatory architecture, which is something we are quite excited about. And we're talking to some biology colleagues to see, you know, where would it be plausible to look for something, some behavior like this would be kind of cool if something predicted by theory were actually relevant for real organisms and could explain why we have these superfluous regulators that sometimes are observed. Okay. This is the little physiology story. And I hope I'm still okay on time. I only have two slides left to tell you what, how does this map? My claim is that it maps onto, naturally maps onto an ecological narrative. And this part is not yet published, but we're basically working this out right now and planning to write this up soon. So I showed you some equations. This is a graphical way of representing these equations, a system that with these interactions between metabolites regulators and synthesis of those metabolites can learn a fluctuating structure of the environment. And the three ingredients that I said were required were self activation of regulators, which is some regulatory link in the logic of the network, some nonlinearity and an excess of regulators. Okay. So the self activation of regulators, that's the statement that this a mu dot here is proportional to a mu.  A mu is the activity of the regulator here. It takes a little bit of work to implement that in a genetic regulatory network, but there is a context where this kind of dynamics are actually extremely natural. And that is precisely, sorry, and that's precisely the ecological situation. So the ecological narrative where this maps to is the interaction between resources and species in a standard resource competition model. And the three ingredients that here I said, let's add them, we get them for free in an ecological setting. So self activation of regulators is just the natural replicator dynamics of species. The nonlinearity in activation or repression, which here we had to sort of put in by hand, that's the natural nonlinearity of, you know, this is response species growth rate as a function of food availability. Well, if food is available, I grow, but if I'm hungry, I don't necessarily die the faster the more food deficit I experience.  And finally, the excess of regulators that I required here for this learning to happen is just the same statement as I have a diverse pool of species, where the number of possible species exceeds the number of resources. And actually, why was it required here in this case, basically these extra degrees of freedom were required to implement memory in the system. And so the analog here would be that I have some slow modes in my ecosystem from something like approximate neutrality in the sense that, yeah, in the sense that there are slow modes of dynamics. So these are the ecological dynamics of resource competition model that look very similar up to a couple tweaks that were, you know, that's why the published story is yet in this case, and where the ecological narrative will get there. So what is this, what do these results translate to if I recast them in language of community assembly? And that's kind of why I'm excited to tell you about this work and see what you guys think. And so this is a reminder of what happened in this physiology language. I had a bacterium which I exposed to environment the fluctuated and structured way. And if I looked at the regulators, regulators respond to changes in, so here these are epochs where I change the dominant direction I rotate alpha. So these were regulator concentrations. This was my regulatory state of the cell. Then I changed how environment fluctuates. My cell, like all the regulators changed in their abundance. And it was hard to understand this picture. But from the standpoint of the responsiveness of the system as a whole, this was very clear what was going on. The angle of dominant responsiveness was tracking the angle of the dominant fluctuation in the ecosystem. And because it was not an evolutionary model, because I had a notion of performance and sort of fitness, I could show that this ability to learn actually improved performance of the system. The system could use the information it learned to perform better. Now, when I map it into an ecological context of community assembly, what does the same model mean in the context of resource competition? Well, in resource competition, there's no such thing as perform better, because once again, ecosystem is not unless in those remarkable conditions like associated to a host, such as Leonora's system, which is also why I really like those host-associated communities where function of the ecosystem is a well-defined thing. Here, in principle, it is not. And so there's no notion of performing better or worse. So it's not in the picture. But this part remains. And so in the ecological language, what happened is that when exposed to a fluctuating environment, if I ask, now, these are not regulator activities, but species abundances. And if I ask, why was this species successful in this epoch? What is it about, at this point, my environment was somewhere here? What is it about that environment that I observe right now that made this species successful? And the answer is nothing. It is not what the environment is right now that led to the species being successful. It is how the fluctuation structure of this environment was structured that made, that promoted this particular configuration of assembled species. And understanding the mapping in this toy model from environment structure to successive species is actually quite non-trivial. You'll have to trust me on that. It's not just that this regulator is somehow the best aligned to this angle. That's not true. It's a more complicated thing. But there's a community-level functional feature that is actually more predictable, that is easier to predict in this case, that the community as a whole, like this assembled state, is the one where the community happened to be most responsive in precise the direction where the environment was fluctuated. So, this goes back to this question of what are the right variables for predicting what is predictable about community assembly. And I kind of like these toy scenarios where some functional community-level property is easier to predict than details of composition. I also collaborated with Alvaro on some projects kind of of a similar spirit in terms of functional composition being more reproducible. I also have fewer theory paper on something similar. So, I'm broadly interested in these connections. And I'm sure that in ecological context the fact that the way environment fluctuates shapes the community is not a new thought. I'm sure there's a literature on this that I'm not particularly familiar with necessarily. So, I know I'd be grateful for any pointers of how to put this properly into context. But to conclude what I hoped to deliver today is I told you a story which is basically a story of physiology where I argued that a simple generalization over regulatory motif that bacteria are known to have can have this cool behavior. It is able to learn the structure of environment fluctuations and can act upon this information. It can sort of store and retrieve memory in this very simple form that is biochemically plausible with these three key ingredients. But I also for the purposes of this workshop wanted to map this onto the psychological narrative which is that that generates, which at this point I'll frame as a hypothesis, that if I'm thinking about a resource competition type model interaction between resources and species. I presented to you a toy model of community assembly which has this kind of interesting quirk where the species success depends not just on what the environment is but on this extra structure which is the sort of ensemble of likely well of experience fluctuations in the past and therefore likely fluctuations in the future. And it was a situation where some functional community level property was easier to predict than composition maybe in a slightly more subtle way than representation of functional pathways is more conserved than details of composition but in the sense of the dynamics of the system as a whole are sort of predictably shaped by the dynamics of the environment the system is experiencing. Which in this case comes for free from resource competition the laws of resource competition. Which yeah so I emphasize this is a toy model and of course in real life there's much more than community than resource competition that matters and I'm not claiming that you know this is how we will we can now predict things about ecosystems in general but it is a cute toy model that I'm sort of looking forward to discussion see what people think and as a result therefore in this story the statistics of environment fluctuations are sort of seen as an extra force shaping community assembly and determining success of the species. Okay and these are the people who did the work and other people in my group and acknowledgments. Thank you. Okay thanks a lot so there was a hand raised a few minutes ago so I don't know otherwise is there any any any question? I thought I thought Armoni Agat had his hand. I had my hand up I answered my question thank you. Okay but I actually you know come to think of it would you say something like depending on the trait of interest that you're tracking would tracking would look different something like more of a plastic trait would I guess allude to a different kind of memory if that makes sense. Yeah no I like this question it is it is not what I don't know how to directly link it to the sort of little narrative I described in sort of this parallel with this kind of regulatory network situation but in general I am very interested in like phenotypic plasticity as I'm not sure phenotypic plasticity is quite the right word phenotypic plasticity is usually used in the sense of different time scales like developmental time scale right if I my tree that grows at different temperature what's the value of the trait but on top of that shorter time scale responses that you know organisms respond to their environments right which I'm for example very interested in how that affects evolutionary conclusions withdraw we draw there's a lot of models that sort of assume the genotype is the same as phenotype but recently it's a kind of under rise this question of given that organisms can be flexible in their phenotype does the buffer evolutionary change does that I can see a selective sweep versus coexistence with a more plastic trait yes so once you map if I so like I said we just posted this a couple weeks ago as a narrative of just pure kind of physiology of a cell oh bacteria could in principle learn once you map it into a ecological narrative there are other forces that suddenly become you know very relevant to consider how would this thing behave in the face of yeah for example like a more plastic and that's actually okay that would have been probably a shorter response to what extent real bacteria say I'm like in a similarity context I'm like one situation where as an external variable that I might wish to track internally is something like a somatic pressure right and which is the correct strategy is that that I'm trying to match my pressure to the external pressure very well or I just develop the ability to be more tolerant of larger variations in the pressure right and I sort of phrase this question in a theorist way as if you know the goal was the first to track best right and of course ecologically the other solution is perfectly reasonable and maybe more uh more natural yeah one more question if that's okay much you said there's a one of the time periods there was a dominance of a certain abundance and if I heard you correctly you said it's not because of the the fluctuation at the moment it's because of the fluctuation structure do you mean that that's some kind of steady state such that we've already the population's already learned the structure or that I just didn't understand why the abundance doesn't correlate to some kind of fitness advantage in that time period yeah so fitness advantage is uh for in an ecological context like if I'm at an equilibrium that everybody's fitness is kind of the same uh but let me say the following so what I meant is there is a simple intuition which is kind of very ecological actually like if I have a specialist in resource a and a specialist in resource b and somebody who you know consumes a and b at the same time right I could imagine that I could cook up a model where if my availability of resources in my environment fluctuates along the dimension of every time like you know nutrients come in apples they fall in the ground and then apple has both nutrient a and nutrient b so the supply of a and b is all when they come they're always correlated with each other you could imagine that that might create you know I could write a model where then the generalist that right likes just that stoichiometry is somehow event like it's it's more advantageous uh to consume nutrients in that stoichiometry right in that sense this might well then promote the organism the species that's most aligned with how nutrients are supplied in the environment what I was what I meant by my comment there is that it's not just that so it's not just that you know the the better you your metabolic strategies align to how the environment fluctuates that promotes you because there of course ripple effects through the community right and as a whole uh like the sort of most extent way of putting what is promoted it's kind of the responsiveness of the system of the ecosystem in this case like if once a niche becomes available if it gets filled the quickest right and species abundances adjust to get you in that situation where it's filled the quickest in this toy model right it still has very much this feeling of a global optimization problem which is very special ecologically right so I'm not proposing that necessarily as a principle for understanding ecosystems I'm just saying that this is a scenario where if I look at the species and say what about this environment made the species successful that question in terms of you know the topic of the workshop limits to predicting assembly of communities in this case knowing the environment was not enough you need to know how it fluctuated in the past and that fluctuation structure could be a factor determining who survives which possibly for ecologists is like something that we all know since forever uh or maybe not so that's you know why I'm excited to just hear your guys thoughts thank you Jacopo did you freeze oh he cannot answer if he did it looks like he may have uh there are Mikael did you see there are some comments by Leonora and then by Martina there is Jacopo back yeah I just my computer crashed so okay uh well I think that there is uh we have time for one last question there is a hand raised by Shin Sun yes uh hi great talk I'm just curious about the cost of learning processes that you mentioned maybe my question was covered already but I was curious um how do you consider the cost while the microbes are learning the fluctuation because it seems very expensive to produce a lot of stuff and is it possible that the cost is so high that at some point they try to uh instead of learning but try to forget what they have learned uh when when the fluctuation see like the frequency changes or something like that mm-hmm great question and also before I answer that I saw that their question in the chat uh from Leonora and Martina I copied like chat is a small window I copied them out so I can read them properly and then I'll find a way to reply to them they seem more complicated than I can just address in a second um for this question well so I mean it's easy to put this in the model and say there's some cost of expression of all the proteins and you know do some balance analysis of costs and benefits we didn't really go there because it was sort of a proof of like the question was a question of principle is this something that we could you know if I can't if I can't think of any mechanism for a bacterium to learn you know whether its environment was fluctuating a lot or not recently right if I can't think how it could even be possible I wouldn't do that experiment right now if I know it's possible I could do the analysis of costs and benefits and say in what environments that might be useful I'm not and it's easier to put in a model as a cost of expression I'm not actually sure to what extent it's biologically that um constraining because bacteria you know spend their budget is a complicated thing um to what extent the cost of an extra protein is really metabolically a burden uh and there are actually experimental examples where there's a in fact a two component signaling system with an auto regulatory link precisely of the type we're sort of describing here theoretically um which basically serves as a phenotypic memory of a signal that recently experienced you know you respond to it in a certain way but then with a protein that's very long lived and you keep it around so that in next time you experience it you sort of already more prepared to respond which is kind of a a little bit of similar to the mechanism I just described the difference is that what I described is that you can use the same architecture that people actually known experimentally kind of exists and works to respond not just to the signal mean which basically like oh how frequently in the past that I experienced the signal but even subtler signatures such as you know which direction of fluctuation around that mean was I experienced it and is that too much of a theorist game I don't know but you know humans have diets that change in different ways if it provides a fitness advantage bacteria would make use of it right and so um yeah so that's the same and so in a way we actually know real systems that have such auto regulatory interactions and then keep this system expressed kind of you might say unnecessarily and thus paying the cost also paying the cost of the space of the membrane which is possibly actually more important than the cost of just expression of proteins but we know that real bacteria do that and so presumably it's not too much of a burden so that's my justification but excellent question and we did not do any you know cost benefit analysis here thank you great so I think we are quite out of time so unfortunately we don't have much time left for having a discussion and I think we can sort of all the speakers we are they're gonna be with us in the next days with some I mean they have also some constraints but I think there will be time to continue the discussion so with that I'd like to thank all the speakers again for their talk and all the participants for the very next discussion and we'll meet again tomorrow at the 3 p.m. Italian time for another session and a poster session that will follow so thank you very much see you tomorrow thanks bye


1213. You are on WOZO radio 103.9 lbfm right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Our guests today are George Brown, the two and a half, formerly from Brooklyn, and the John Richards. Are you in London? I know you're in England. Are you in London? I'm on the coast south of London about 50 miles due south. Okay, well that's a lot of geography. I'm sure Americans will get some citations in the future to figure out what that means. Digital free thought radio hours to talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences, and conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstitions. If you think you're the only non-believer in your town, well you're just not. You're in Knoxville in the middle of the Bible Belt. We have a group of over a thousand of us, so surely you've got quite a few in your town. We'll talk more about our group after the mid-show break. Wombat, what's our topic today? Our atheist, better Christians than Christians, which I think is very interesting. So I think before we go into a topic, I want to do a quick roundtable. John Richards, I love all that water you're drinking. We should give you a medal for it. We'll call it a water medal. This is not water. That's so scary when he says it. It's water. It's water. That's right. You've got it. It's water, lad. It's water. You just drink it. That's it. All right. Anyway, John Richards, how have you been? Everything's fine here. Thank you. And I've got even more schemes that I can get going. Atheists with schemes? That's not a thing that you ever heard the two intent together. We have no schemes. We have no schemes. Very good. Larry Richards, how have you been, my friend? Larry Richards? I'm sorry. Larry Rhodes. Like I said, I just got my glasses, but they're still a little dirty. What's going on? Yeah. No, I'm fine. Just working. I've worked day to day nowadays at home, from home. I'm a data analyst. Yeah. Are you enjoying that grind again? Yeah, pretty much. It's like the perfect job. I set up my computer. I work on anti-money laundering issues and nobody bothers me. Nice. Nice. Like the perfect job. Okay. So, and that and playing games, computer games, I'm still right in the middle of a skyrim and thoroughly enjoying it on the Quest 2. Help me out now. Let's see how deep in the rabbit hole we can get real quick. What's your race in Skyrim? I'm an elf, a dark elf.  Okay. Male or female, if I can quickly ask? Oh, male. I'm a mage, fire mage. And what's the major quest that you've completed? Are you completing all of them or are you like specifically choosing, I'm going to be the one to get to, I'm a level 21, almost a 22. Man, I'm wanting to get to the, oh, the vampire, so I also can become a vampire. You want to become a vampire? Yeah, always very powerful. And if I can do that, then I'll be able to handle pretty much any battle. Listen, I can tell you right now in Skyrim, they make no proclivities about subjugating you to one class of the air. You can be a werewolf and a vampire and a werewolf and a magician and a hero. I look forward to all of that. You can do anything you want. It's crazy. Very immersive game. Yeah, it is. George Brown, we're going to get to you too, but I just saw, so we can also introduce the show, but I just saw Dred Pirate Higgs. Dred, are you here? Yeah, can you hear me? Yes. Dred, how have you been, my friend? Oh, I've been doing well. Very good. I'm actually working, I'm working right now, so I'm sitting in my car. Do you have time for a quick invocation? Yeah, absolutely. You bet. Let's rock one out real quick. Shall we do it now? Yeah. Yeah, ramen. All right. Ramen. Our noodley lord, who art in a colander, al dente be thy noodles, thy blood be run, thy sauce be yum with meat as it is with vegetables. Give us this day our garlic bread and forgive us our cussing as we forgive those who cuss against us and lead us not into into key to ism but deliver us some carbs for thine are the meatballs and the sauces and the grog whenever and ever. Ramen. Because the noodley lord have any biases against zucchini noodles because they're actually pretty darn good. No, no biases against zucchini. All things are good under creation. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Wonderful. Yeah. All right, George Brown, how you doing? How you doing? Well, every time you ask me that question, I cannot remember. So as a lead into today's topic, I will tell a little tiny story. My neighbor who attends the mothership of all the Baptist churches here in this town, of which there are 167 official Baptist churches and then another 37 unofficial Baptist churches and then the ones that I call the baptoid churches, you know, the spinoffs. It's where they dip their kids in orange juice, right? So she was talking with me and she said, she was talking about heaven and hell and I made a face. I just made a face. I allowed that.  I mean, it's just, it's, it's out of my orbit. And then her response to that was, do you hate Jesus? Which, to which I was just totally incredulous. I mean, I just, what is this? What planet am I on? You know, so out of that came this question. Are we atheists better Christians than the Christians? And there came, there's where my topic came from. How about we round table it? I know we all have some interesting points of views on this. Are atheists better Christians than Christians? I'm going to throw this up to Dredd.  Well, you know, I really love the question. It's very provocative, but I think it's important right out of the gate to define what we mean by Christians. So that we establish a standard by which we can measure up. That's a very dread like answer. Why don't you define for you what it means? Well, I don't know. I guess there's the idea of doing good in the world and loving all people and all that kind of stuff is probably a very, you know, sort of nebulous way of tracking what Christian, you know, what a Christian ideally is. But, you know, as an individual, I wouldn't say that I'm a Christian because I certainly don't love everyone just because I certainly don't turn the other cheek at every occasion just because. Right.  Right. So what does it mean to you? Like, if you don't know, that's totally fine. But like, in your opinion, based on the definition that you have for Christian, just for you, just for you, do you think as a as a post-sopharian, as a humanist, you closely, more closely aligned with your ideals and practice than a Christian by your definition? Well, I would, I would believe so. And I think that's partly because post-sopharians are self-defined. Interesting. So, you know, a bit more objective. Okay. Yeah. Larry, not Richard Rhodes, open quotation point, doubt or five closed quotation point. Now, I can see it clearly, my friend. Listen, Larry, what do you think are atheist, better Christians than Christians? Well, to me, Christians are, as Christians do. And that's the problem. Most of the Christians that we see. The famous guy with suspenders also said in a movie. Anyway, for example, the KKK is a Christian organization. Right. Christians claim to practice unconditional love for their fellow man. But when it comes right down to it, we find that many, and I'm not saying all, but quite a few of the most vocal public Christians that we encounter, like politicians, preachers, et cetera, who wear their Christianity on their sleeve, turn out to be more homophobic or racist or sexist. And it's, I'd like to say that, no, we're not more Christian than them. And I'm proud of that. However, if we're talking about the claims of Christianity, unconditional love for a fellow man, I think we come closer to the mark than they do. Okay. Very well said. I can't even top that. John Richards, your thoughts on this are atheists, better Christians than Christians. Well, the guys who've already spoken are absolutely right. First of all, we don't know what is meant by being Christian. Right. There's so many different flavors of Christianity. And some of them are quite weird. I mean, there's Christian scientists who do not permit medication. Right. They think prayer does the job. And so, very often they die from preventable diseases. So true. Yeah. So I don't want to be better than that in the sense of, you know, more, more weird. More so. You know, indeed. And so what a lot of Christians do is they cherry pick the things that are nice, that they would like to aspire to. Right. And then my thought is, whether you don't own that, all these virtues are part of being human. We've evolved to be empathic towards each other and to treat each other in the way that we would like to be treated. It's very simple to see that, because if we were inclined to kill each other from birth, we wouldn't have societies that were as they are today, like we'd fall apart. So by virtue of the fact that we are social and we do tend to be nice to each other, we're able to have this right now. Indeed. So in that respect, I think that atheists are very likely to be at least equal or better than Christians, if that's the yardstick that we're choosing to measure by. That's our metric. But then another aspect of it is business. You see, Christianity seems to me to be a business. And some Christians, some sort of proclaimed Christians are very good at it. I mean, I'm thinking of the televangelists. I'm thinking of the prosperity gospelists, you know, they make themselves fortunes and they buy another personal jet aircraft whenever they need. Some of them have got four. There was one who died recently. I think he's Nigerian but spent a lot of time in the US and he's got four personal private jets. So if being a Christian means being a good businessman, I'm afraid I'm not to it. Nice. So, Dred, you had your hand up. Yeah. Well, I was going to say in one respect, I think atheists are better than Christians in that we have a greater capacity to be humble. Humility, of course, is something that Christians claim to be. But of course, that is, you know, definitionally impossible because if you're under the wing of an omnipotent being that you can hardly be humble about it. So that's, I think, is an important behavior that atheists, I think, tend to be a little better at. Dred, I think I see what you're saying, like the good works of atheists are done at a virtue of like the community and just sense of well-being of the environment that they're in, not because they're trying to appease a God who they think has their side and purview. Exactly. Following up on what Dred Parich has said, I have a confession to make, which is that I used to be an egotist, but now I'm perfect. All right, John and Richard. That's what I was going to pick up on, because... See, if you were drinking the water and getting your water medals, you would have been a lot better with your water medals. That's all I'm saying. Well, I just wanted to say to Dred that obviously he's talking in general terms about being humble because a person who proclaims himself as being humble isn't humble. Right, right, yes, of course. No, listen, I thought about that even. I know it's weird to call yourself humble because it seems like contradictory, but there are a lot of things you can call yourself that wouldn't fall into the purview of humility, right? Like you can say, I'm the best, I'm the strongest, I'm the smartest, but to recognize that you are humble is valid, I think. And it's just a question of, are you practicing it? You can say whatever you want and you can recognize, hey, I actually have some pretty good humility here. I can make fun of myself, I can make good jokes, but am I behaving humble? And that is, so call yourself humble if you are humble, but behave so as well because that's what's the true distinction. Yeah, and it's about exercising humility. So not being humble as an end goal or as a thing, but as an exercise, as a practice. Right, I also feel like there is an aspect of personal accountability that comes with Christianity, where the idea is if I simply do the game plan that God gives me, I don't have to hold myself accountable to other people. So if I fault someone, I can praise my God or apologize to my God. I don't have to apologize to them. If I need to serve time in charity or a volunteer shelter, I can just give money to the church or pray to my God and ask him to take care of it for me. Like there are a lot of scenarios where by agency of piecing to the supernatural, you get the same feeling that you are helping out your community, but you're actually doing nothing because all the prayers in the world won't fill coffers of a charity organization. All the prayers in the world won't make sick people healthy again. In fact, prayer, as Larry would easily point out, can actually put more pressure on someone who's being prayed for to get healthy and actually make them get more sick over time. That study was a very good demonstration of that. Yeah, it was classic by MIT. So I would also say this. In the virtue of, do I feel like I'm a better Christian than Christians? Yeah, it does depend on the definition. But I also have the same confidence that I don't think Christians own any of the good virtues that they espouse or claim to have. And even if they did, I feel like it's so tainted by the fact that they have this unquestionably un-moral God, you know, controlling all of those virtues that I wouldn't even want to appease that being right following his rulings. So I am proud in my sense to not be a Christian, and I'm proud to be a worse Christian than Christians. And I'll also throw this out too. I think today Christians are worse Christians than Christians, particularly like 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 100 years ago. Because as we become more of an interconnected society, we realize that people are different, which is not something that Christianity was ever particularly suited well for. We understand that people have different means that there's different ways of communication, that empathy needs to exist, that tolerance compromises. All of these things are valuable things in a healthy society. And this dogmatic standpoint of us versus them doesn't evolve to the standard that we're living at now. And because of that, the Christians that we have now, if even if you look in the congregations are well integrated, they have females on the staff, they sometimes support at Pride parades, Larry and I were at one and there was like group parading in front of us and we're like, what the hell are these guys doing here?  At least they're citing the holy books, but like you have them on both sides now. If any Christians today are worse Christians now than they ever have been. I think it's for the better, honestly. I think if we can all become worse Christians, the world will benefit from it. That's mine. If I may add something, I've been reading Jean-Paul Sartre's Being in Nothingness and one thing that I found entirely enlightening was the idea that there are no narratives in life. We as humans are natural storytellers and are compelled to tell stories and hear stories and that gives essentially meaning to our lives. But in the live game, like in the living life, there is no story. It's just one thing happens after another, after another, after another. Christians, however, believe that they do have the end already figured out. They've essentially constructed a narrative and that is the guide for their life. The conclusion of their life is already determined and so that they don't live life authentically in accordance with what Jean-Paul was saying and that it's acting in bad faith. It's pretending to be something in order to achieve the conclusion you've already come up with for your life as opposed to living authentically, which is being. I've just found this just completely fascinating. Larry, what was your thoughts on it? You mentioned a little while ago that the motivation is a great teller, tell on these things. Like you mentioned, they do good to a grand dyes God, not necessarily for doing good per se, but there's also the fear of punishment, avoiding hell, doing good in order to appease the God and avoid hell. And one thing I'd like to point out is that when they do that, it's not morality, it's obedience. Morality is something quite different. It's knowing the best thing to do for a particular situation and it's something that you carry within you. It's something that you determine at the time that a crisis arises, not just following a list of rules. The equivalent of it is if you shine, if you go into a really bad apartment, I've been, I've lived in bad apartments too, but if you shine a flashlight in the kitchen and the cockroaches skitter away, they're avoiding punishment. That is not morality. That's animals trying to avoid trouble. And when a Christian does something, only because they have a fear of going to hell or they fear of suffering the wrath of God, that is no different than shining a flashlight on a cockroach and watching it skitter out. It's not morality. It's obedience or it's just actions through fear. It's reactionary. Yeah. And morality, in fact, is not a codified set of rules of how you're not supposed to steal or think about someone else's wife or steal things or whatever you want to call, or steal someone else's land who's of a different religion because they're the dirty people. It's a system of ethics. It's a system of what do we want as a society? What are morals that we can set up to get those things that we want? And let's look at this rule set and change it as needed and as necessary until we have a more optimized way to get these things that we want. It's a very thoughtful and very nuanced system. And it's not as easy as just saying, hey, don't hit people. It's like, don't hit people because you don't want to get hit. And I think it benefits everybody if we don't get hit. Some thought behind it. And we can do all these things so automatically that we take it for granted. But it's really, really important that we realize that it's a nuanced, systematic approach to learning how to treat other people well. And that's it. John Locke and the social contract really help solidify that in many respects is that it is to our mutual benefit that we curtail our passions, our desires, our wants in the interest that we all become better for it. You know what I mean? It's like the tyranny of the common or the tragedy of a common. You can't keep putting more cows on the common field because if everyone does that, well, you have a lot of cows in no field. And this is where I think it went very badly in the Canada protests there, the trucker convoy and all that kind of stuff, where everyone's declaring the right freedom and that's what Canada stands for and blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's blockade. But their very actions and activities were doing the things that they were protesting against. They were blocking other people's freedoms. They were harming, injuring the economy and all in the interest of proclaiming their freedom to have a free economy and to protest, which is, you know, very, very contradictory, very self-defeating, right? Very self-defeating. Yeah, I'd just like to go up on what he was saying about don't do the things that you want to do. Don't do the things that make you feel good if it harms other people. Right, right. Because there's no reason not to do the things that you want to do, the things that make you feel good, the things you enjoy if they're not harming your society or anybody else. Now to say, I'm not going to do this thing because it harms or offends an invisible deity or an invisible person that's sitting off to the side and may or may not exist, that's no grounds to curtail your own enjoyment of life. Right, right. Like not eating pig. Right, right.  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or even asexual, who cares? I want to eat my bacon, man. You know, fornicating as it were. Yeah, yeah. Fornication offends God. Well, if there's no God, there's no offense. So bizarre that he has a stance on that of all things. Like what else are you going to do in the desert, right? Exactly. I mean, why are you telling people that? It's such a double standard because a man can do it. But where do you go to the desert for if it's not to fornicate, right? Right, like why would you do that? And bacon, what is this religion guys? What are we doing here? I want to throw this out too. Just a fine point on the point that Larry was making. It's not just doing things that benefit us the most. It's also reducing harm, but more importantly, needless harm, right? Because doctors can make incisions and that's harmful to an extent. But the overall benefit is that you'll get more health from the work that they do. But it's the needless harm. It's just people stabbing people with scalpels on the sidewalk. Like you wouldn't want that, right?  Like whatever we can do to reduce needless harm is like the true benefit of a of a optimal society, right? And there might be people who do workouts where their muscles get bigger and they're tearing the muscle fibers, they want to do that. And they have a purpose for it. But don't don't go out and like rip people's arms off. Like that's needless. We don't do it. We can do whatever we can reduce it. I also want to. Oh, sorry, go ahead. Go on, Dred. No, I was just going to say that, you know, getting back to our original topic about atheists being better than Christians is that our justifications for our behaviors are more considered. We don't just rely on what a book tells us or what our religious leaders tell us is a good idea for doing such and such. Right. We have to think about these things as atheists or as pastafarians. And and that brings it closer to us as being responsible for the outcomes of our actions and our thoughts and our behaviors.  And I'm almost going to say that as a weird blanket statement. I feel very weird. Though in pastafarian hell where the bear is stale and the strippers have STDs, we would like to avoid that. We try to, you know, modify our behaviors for the good stuff. George, what's up? Well, I'm, you know, John and I were raised as atheists and I almost don't feel qualified to say very much in this conversation because unlike the rest of you, I was not brought up Christian. It's like I'm two degrees removed because I come out of a Jewish heritage and was raised atheist. So I'm just enjoying sitting here and listening to you guys who have the direct experience, you know, who were indoctrinated from an early age. But George, I would counter that you in your lifetime have encountered Christians who have made it clear what they believe and why they behave the way they do. So it's not like you're raised in a vacuum. That's correct. That's correct. And I have been just, you know, like wondering at it almost in disbelief a lot of the time. Like I just don't get it. So, I mean, the one thing that keeps on coming to me, which is something I've mentioned here before is the, I guess the word is hypocrisy, you know, when people are telling me Jesus's love and, you know, I'm seeing all this suspicion and hatred and the tolerance and racism and, you know, all this hatred that comes out of these people against people who are different than them. I just get it, you know, but I do get it because I've been doing a lot of armchair psychology study and I've, you know, come across some very interesting things that pertain to the prevailing culture around me where I live. Before you live. Well, we'll get back to the hour. Let's see if we can get back to this topic right after a break. Please stay tuned here for the second half of the digital free thought radio hour on WOZO radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm doubter five and we're on WOZO radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's take a moment to talk about the atheist society of Knoxville. ASK was founded in 2002, so we're in our 20th year. We have over a thousand members and we have weekly in-person meetings in Knoxville's Old City at Barley's Tap Room in Pizzeria. Look for us inside at the high top tables in the center of the establishment and on a pretty day you can find us out on the deck or split between the two. We're usually the loudest and happiest group there. We also have Tuesday evening Zoom meetups. If you'd like to join us there, email us at askanatheist at Knoxvilleatheist.org or let's chat SE at gmail.com for the link to join us. You'll also find us on Facebook meetup.com or Knoxvilleatheist.org, which is our website. Or just Google Knoxvilleatheist and you'll find us. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and look for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Right. Mom, where are we? So just some quick listener comments. I love Avatar says, I love FSM. I imagine that stands for flying spaghetti monster. Thank you again for all the comments. We also have I got a lot of comments on some older SE videos that I'm trying to like filter them out just a little bit. As an atheist, I also love the show. Great solid production values. I remember when you guys were only on Winnet. Thank you. And then Matthew T also says helpful video. I appreciate the discussion. Thank you guys so much for all your comments. Feel free to leave more and we'll go right back into the topic. John Richards, we left you with some hanging points. What's up? Well, a lot has gone under the water and gone under the bridge. Water has gone under the bridge. Water on the bridge. Got it. You've been raising a lot of topics that I want to react to. So I don't know where to start really, but I'm not going to let the fact that I wasn't indoctrinated stop me from commenting. I've got opinions. So often when I when I have on the rare occasions when I have visited the church or seen on TV, some worshipers in a mosque, for example, I felt it's very similar for me to going to the zoo. You know, I'm I'm looking at the behavior of these people. Oh, that's bizarre. You you think of it at the zoo because you were not you weren't raised at this. I see it as the Twilight Zone because I was like that was me just a few years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't envy you that time. Yeah. So a couple of other things Ukraine was mentioned. And of course, Patriarch Kirill, who is the leader of the Russian branch of the Russian Orthodox Church, he has characterized the war as a holy war, effectively, because it's purging gay pride events, which he is going on in in Ukraine. And so it's against homosexual sin. This is what the Russian Putin's war is is doing. It's saving us from homosexual sin. Yeah, it's very bizarre. Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing is that we started out by saying we don't know what being Christian is. So it's difficult to decide whether we are better Christians than Christians are. But let's take an example. If being Christian means following the commandments, you know, that's a reasonable assumption. They're rubbish anyway. I mean, the first five of them are just about glorifying the religion. We don't get 350 aren't that good either. They're pretty bad across the board. I'm sure I could construct a better list of commandments and they'll probably only be three. And that might make me a better Christian than a Christian. I have no idea what that means. The thing is that nothing is absolute. You can't say that it's always and forever wrong to do any action, because of course, it always depends on the circumstances. And so all actions are contingent rather than necessary or essential. And so you've got to take into account each individual incident and make a judgment based on that rather than some blanket rule. I love it. Cool. I want to also throw out something on comment from the first half of the show with John Paul Satter, referring to there is no narrative. And there's a Nietzsche like interpretation of saying, well, life is meaningless. There's no purpose or there's no mean. I don't think there's another interpretation of what Satter was saying. And I think it's more true. It's that his point is dogma is not substantial. And the fact that it exists is a demonstration that anybody can make it. Therefore, you have the freedom to make your own rules. You can write your own story. For those who believe in a pre-prescribed dogma, they are faulting an innate ability that they have. And the consequences of that is obedience with the grandeur of morality and self-thought and critical thinking. It's like, no, you foresoaked your best talent, something that you uniquely are capable of doing. And that is building a narrative because there is no narrative for you. Anyway, John, John Richards, what do you think? I want to come back on the Sartre thing as well, because the trouble with the statements that there is no narrative is looking back, there is an appearance of there having been a narrative. Because everything has developed from very simple beginnings, whether you're looking at the cosmos or biology, the evolution of the diversity of life. But what there isn't is a plan going forward. Although looking back, there appears to be a narrative historically. It wasn't intended. It just happened. And then looking forward, we have no idea where the journey is going. This is where, again, referring to Sartre's in nature, essence precedes existence. Whereas in humans, existence precedes essence. So that means we are essentially free. That is how our freedom is derived, is that we exist before our essence. And our essence determines the directions in which, in the choices that we make. Right. George? I'd just like to make a little comment about the difference between John's upbringing and my upbringing. We are both raised atheists, but John's country has an official religion. My country does not have an official religion, not only that, but I come from New York City, which was founded for money. It was a it was a commercial colony of Holland. I forget the Dutch East India Company, or some Dutch West India Company, whatever. The famous governor of New York, in fact, Peter Stuyvesant, was simply a middle level corporate manager. And when the British and the Dutch decided to trade some territories, he just went off to some other colony and managed that. So, New York just has continued that way. There is no official religion in New York City. It simply has more Catholics than anything else. So we have a different context, you and I, John. Yeah, we do. But I'd like to make a difference between theory and practice. We have theoretically an established church. In practice, no, we don't. Right, right. I know. And that's such an interesting thing because the most extreme countries in Europe that I can think of, the most Catholic in the past, let's say, I'm going to fantasize that these would be France and Italy. And I left out somebody, I can't remember who it is, have gone, they've flipped in the opposite direction, I think. So they have an official religion in a way. But like you said, John, it's like the action on the ground is exactly the opposite. And we're here in the United States, meanwhile, we're stuck with the worst of it. Let's go to Larry. Yes, I was just going to say that whether you were raised in the Christian religion or not, because of Christian outreach, which is a lot and perpetually ongoing, few of us are untouched by it. They are incorporated in many laws, both local and federal, which we have to obey. Yes. And I was going to, yeah, essentially expound on that is that while, you know, no one would openly declare in Canada, like you don't hear often anyone say that that Canada has a state religion, it is a de facto state religion. And because, you know, the laws, you know, religiosity to a certain extent is ensconced in the laws of the land. That's certainly something that Pastor Varian struggle against when they're just dealing with people that essentially are either in print or bigoted towards non sort of traditional religious ideas or organizations, you know, if you walk to, so say I were to walk into the driver's licensing bureau with a turbine. Let's say that happened. Yeah. Okay. Say that happened. Say that happened next week when I go to get my picture taken with a turbine. What do you think is going to happen? And this is all based on, yep, it's going to be based on the color of my skin or my ethnic origin. And they'll say, well, we don't believe you. Well, prove it. You know, that will be my claim because that's how frustrated I've been getting with all this. Right. Right. There you operate on some sort of litmus test that determines whether or not you genuinely hold a religious claim. Exactly. Exactly. And that's why I say, you know, that's why I make the claim that, you know, despite, you know, there being no overt claim that the Canada has a state religion, we do have a de facto state religion. You at least have the prejudices, which in a sense is what a lot of religions are in a set. It's a set of prejudices. John. Exactly. Yeah. Well, Larry mentioned outreach. And the latest example of that, you know, at the moment we've got millions, literally millions of people, refugees leaving Ukraine and going over the border into Poland. What happens? They get met by Christian American Christian missionaries proclaiming that you've got to adopt. You've got to access cockroaches, right? You've got to love Jesus and then your life will be better. Yeah, almost. Oh my gosh, that makes me it's almost like crack dealers hanging out outside of a rehab center and watching people walk out with the completion certificate being like, listen, I got a deal for you. Listen, I'll give you the first one's free. Yeah. And these are mothers with their babies in their arms whose home has just been bombed. Right. Right. And no context whatsoever, aside from just and for their sake, they're not even doing it for the refugee. They're doing it so they can win points with St. Peter, whoever is letting people in at the Golden Gates. And then they may be, hey, I did save those refugees and they go back home. They, you know, they're sure they're either their selfies or the religious selfies, which is them praying to God, being like, look at all this good stuff I did for you. It's really exactly. I didn't want to bring this up. So, George, I think you had the best comment. Sorry, George, I have opinions, John. John, I think you had the best comment, but you also brought up the idea of Christianity sort of being like a zoo for people who've not been indoctrinated growing up. And I brought up the contrast where if you had grown up, it's like an episode of the Twilight Zone, an episode being where you go to the zoo, you see an elephant, you know, you're not an elephant. You're there to just see some elephants. Great. You see a giraffe. Great. Then you see you at 20, right? And maybe it's everybody else looking at you and they're like, oh, look at him. He's praying and you're like, oh, everybody's looking at me. That's kind of bizarre. And maybe that person doesn't look exactly like you. Maybe they have a different name, but you see it and you see yourself in it. And then you go to another scene where it's, you're giving out money to the church or you're arguing with people and you have a Jesus, I love Jesus kit land yard around your chain and you're getting very passionate about why certain cartoons shouldn't be on TV because they're not good for kids because they espouse, you know, virtues that shouldn't be part of it.  I feel really uncomfortable about this. That's what life is like sometimes for people who've had the trauma of being indoctrinated free themselves from it and have to live in a world where it's like I easily could be you if I didn't ask myself a series of questions and was honest with myself. And it's a struggle to lose that fear and it's a struggle to learn how to think critically. It's not easy, but oftentimes the things that are convenient for you aren't the best for you or have your best interests. And I find a deep convenience with Christianity and religion as a whole. What's happened like what's happened ties, you've escaped your animal that's gone out of the zoo. I don't feel like I escaped. Now I feel like I finally got back to my natural habitat. I feel like someone went to Africa pulled out a zebra and dropped them off in the middle of New York to put like on a platform. And he and he learned how to dance and juggle on a beach balloon. And then finally figured out his way Madagascar style or Madagascar two because that's one way to go back to Africa. It goes back to the wild. He's like, Oh my gosh, guys, I never want to see a clown again. So if it's any consolation, I won't be coming back to go put you in your zoo. Yeah, so well, yeah, I was just wondering, do we do a better job at simply laughing at ourselves? And is there some good that we get out of it? I think so. I think so. I think there again, there again, it's humility, right? Right. Humility is being able to sort of chocolate yourself and not take yourself so seriously. Exactly. A lot of past for atheism in America has realized you were wrong about something. And I think that's a huge aspect to it. Yeah. And so I think that is a humility component. It is humility and practice, right? Yeah, I'm voting for that. And again, you can call yourself humble. There's nothing wrong with it. It's something you demonstrate with practice and you can you can just put a label on it. I did want to I wanted to mention a weird point about our own about our Moscow dictator and in chief. There is in fact a war on religious bias. There is a war from his perspective on gender policies. And I think recently, I think this was as early as last Friday. Putin was in a press conference where he was saying, you know, though other countries of the world have tried to cancel Russia, just like JK Rowling was canceled for her views that she espoused on Twitter. And then JK Rowling was like, I don't need a Russian dictator to say I'm on his side. Let me let me clear this out. And so, right, right, John, not to put you on the spot, but I was a resident UK. Are you familiar with that story? It doesn't ring a big bell. Okay, okay. I thought it was a funny thing in two aspects. One, that JK Rowling is like, geez, I really do need to change my opinions on this or things trying to be like, yeah, and she's with us. Yeah, it's come to me now. She's been very badly treated by the work crowd. And she's amused, I think, that now they're trying to push her into the same category as Putin. And then the second thing is gender politics being a thing that would be uttered by a person who's at war with another country as a justified reason. Straight-faced, justified reason to actually in date is like, well, they have gender policies that I don't agree with. And that's why we're launching these hypersonic missiles at their residencies and schools and hospitals and suburb in areas.  I mean, it's, it's just craziness, isn't it? I mean, he would just say things and just expect people to believe them. And Putin's just taking, taking his form and carrying it on, it seems like. Right, right, right. Well, I think they're both, they're both two P's in the same pod. Yeah, I would agree, for sure. But it's an interesting phenomenon, Dredd Pirate. I think, you know, I've wondered about this for a long time, is that why a man can tell something which is such an obvious lie, and then everybody just believes it. I'm puzzled by this. Yes, absolutely. I also want to throw this out, too. If you had three, let's keep it simple.  Yes, right. And we could say to ourselves, that's probably not a guy who really even understands the religious tendencies or the intricacies of that book. And it's actually a horrible, you know, in terms of treating other people, person as well as policies as well. But then you also have Biden, who very, very ardently does believe in Catholicism.  And so this is a guy who genuinely does believe in that God, yet when he's in a capacity where he's basically an authoritarian or a position of power, is amenable to the idea that he's overseeing a very diverse population and making efforts to support policies that basically reduce needless harm and not just advance his own. Whereas with Trump, it's almost the exact opposite. A guy who doesn't believe in that book, a guy who a lot of Christians would say in some cases, isn't Christian, right? But yet is actually doing some meaningful harm to minority groups, people who don't have as much privilege as him, and lasting damage to the point where you see mobs of people rushing through the Capitol building, killing police officers. Is Biden a better Christian than the Pope? Interesting. What can you handle that maybe later, but that's a good question. Dred, what would you think? Well, I was just thinking that Biden is a better politician than Trump is, right? Trump was more concerned with his ideas, his thoughts, his beliefs. And didn't really care about what other people thought. And so conducted himself in such a way as if this is what I want, this is what I want. I don't care what you have to say about it. Just go away and leave me alone because I'm going to do it. Biden has clearly a set of core beliefs, but must be amenable because he's a politician. In order to be a successful politician, he must amend or be amenable to the interests and the desires of the body politic, right? And if we looked at that, which one's behaving more godly? Because Trump very much has the idea of my way or the highway. And if not, I'm going to mow you down. And that is very much the Christian God's modus of upper Andi throughout the entirety of the Bible. Whereas God never supplicates to the idea of what his disciples or his followers want. And that is exactly what Biden's doing. And we can see the benefit of it compared to an absolute dogmatic, crazy authoritarian. And then the worst case is on that, on that, I say Trump is a better Christian. Can I just clear something up here? Did Trump really hold the Bible upside down? It's some pictures. Yeah, give me the images. It wasn't a photo shot. No, it's unfortunate. Well, you know what that means? Holding the cross upside down. He's the Antichrist. There's always a narrative. There's always a sneak at the narrative. We're getting closer to the bottom or getting ready to wrap up the show. George, did you have final thoughts? Do you feel like your questions on whether atheists are better Christians than Christians have been properly discussed? I'm not sure, but I haven't. I have enjoyed the interplay between you guys very much. It was a riveting conversation. John Richards, where can we find your stuff at? We thought productions channel and I've now got a producer. It's Swedish Steve who's come on board and it is performing fantastically. So it means I can focus on my guest and have a decent conversation without having to try to do multitasking. I can tell you doing one-man video production and interviewing is actually very complicated. The fact that someone's handling it on their own just makes things so much more interesting for you to stay focused. Could you imagine a Flatenight TV, the guy who's doing the interviews with Shirley Starran and stuff, is flipping the switches on the cameras at the same time too? Yes. It's very good to have someone just manage that for you. That's what you have to try to do. But I'd like to flag up the fact that I'm starting a new show next week, which is Global Atheist News Review. So unlike Global Atheist News itself, which is meant to be impartial, not to have any opinions, but just to report facts, this show, this follow-up show will have opinionated people, a panel of people, who will give their reactions to the items that were in the news that week. Oh, get me on that. That's where I want to be. I want to get on that too. Thank you. It'll go out live at British Time, half past six in the evening. So work that out on a Sunday. Work that out to whatever it is where you live in your time zones. So you also may consider this as a third scheme, John Richards. I follow a deaf news channel on YouTube. My mom's hard of hearing.  I can see like, oh, these are the things that they're talking about. Those things that care about these are their, you know, people, their topics of choice. But they also have a follow-up show called deaf being, which is BSL isn't the same as ASL. So unfortunately, I can't understand exactly what you're saying. But deaf being is like the follow-up show.  They put it up on YouTube shorts. And it's a great way to just stay reminded that there's great content. You've given me the idea of getting a signer into Joe. So if you can put me in touch with, let's start with American sign language, somebody who will come on the show, just muted, but to do the necessary translation for the deaf. Interesting. The gesticulations. Yes, interesting. There's a service that'll do that for you. Anyway, Larry, we are running out of time. Sorry, Larry. This conversation after the show. Anybody else have final words before we go? Yeah, yeah. Just my stuff is on YouTube, on my channel, MindPirate, M-I-N-D-P-Y-R-A-T-E. As much as possible, I tried to stream this live on Sundays at, which is now seven AM. Thank goodness. It looks like the daylight saving time thing is coming to an end. We shouldn't have it next year. So I'm looking forward to that. So check me out if you like my stuff. If you like my stuff, click and subscribe. Thank you. Cool. Larry, take us out. Okay, my content can be found at digitalfreethought.com. Be sure to click on the blog button for a radio show, archives, atheist songs, many articles on the subject. My YouTube channel can be found by searching for Doubter Five or Larry Rhodes. And of course, my book is available on Amazon, Atheism, What's It All About. Thank you for joining us on the digital Freethought Radio Hour. If you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe.  Right. The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life, and we'll see you next week. Say bye, everybody. Bye, man. Bye.


So now we're going to talk about using something called Windows Explorer, and if you're on a Macintosh This is actually known as Finder, but it does roughly the same thing So as you can see we're on my desktop and if I want to access my Windows Explorer I have a few different ways I can do that The first one is you might notice you have a little folder icon right here on your task bar And if I click on that that'll take me to it But what happens if you don't that's actually where the start menu can come into play I Click on that start menu you can see I get a Slu of the files and programs that I use very commonly or have recently used I don't see Windows Explorer here. So what can I do? Well, this is actually where we can get into my all programs Inside my all programs I have access to all of the programs on my computer that are currently installed that have been put into my start menu Such as GIMP or Audacity, which I use to you know record these videos But if I want to go into Windows Explorer, I want to explore One of the more underrated Underappreciated folders known as accessories Inside accessories you have a lot of programs that are already Installed on your computer by default when you install your Windows operating system such as the calculator If you didn't know you had a calculator on your computer. Guess what you have a calculator on your computer But let's take a look at something else Let's take a look at some of those other ones for example notepad you want to jot down a quick little note That's exactly what this does. I don't need Windows Explorer. I don't need Microsoft Word to do that. I can actually use something like notepad But the one I want to focus in on right now is that Windows Explorer again if I click on this That's going to pull up this man behind the curtain application This program that actually lets me peer into sort of sort of the inner workings of my computer and Right now we're in something known as my library which allows me to just store some of my user files for example Let's double-click on my pictures Now you probably have something very similar to what I have here Every Windows 7 application actually comes with these sample pictures These are actually used to help us learn how to use Windows if we double-click on them Guess what you get to see you get the chrysanthemum in the desert and my fate personal favorite The cute koala. He sucked you look at him. You know those things are crazy though so Let's take a look at another one. Well, how do I go to another one of those folders or see some of the other sample files? Well, let's say for example, you can see on the left hand side of the screen. I have my navigation pane Now my navigation pane allows me just like that on a website to go to different points on My computer, so let's go to music for example Again, this allows me you can see I have my iTunes on here But we all probably have this sample music folder and if we double-click in there, guess what? We actually have a few songs of ourselves, so let's click on one. Let's click on kalimba That's kind of my favorite one that I have to show for you guys What'll happen is? Oh, yeah Okay, that was scared. So you can see we have a slew of these things But let's actually dig a little deeper. Those are known as user files or data files But let's actually take a look at some of the more system files that programs that run our computer So if we look at here on the navigation side, I want to click on computer This is going to give me access to all the storage devices Currently hooked up to my computer. For example, you see local disc. That's actually where my hard drive is Now, why does it start with C? Well, that's actually because A and B are reserved for floppy Discat drives. I know those sound very old and archaic But remember the computer still has to have that and so by default That's actually why we start with the C drive if you're on a Mac or Linux machine You're gonna notice you don't have letter drives. That's because Macs and Linux's don't do that They actually have something called it the root directory and then you can see we have My DVD burner or my flash drive, which I store all of my files Now if I double click on say for example local drive or local disc That's actually going to take me to The Windows version of the root directory. This is where all of my files reside somewhere in here For example, let's dig a little deeper You might have this program files x86 you should actually now. Why does it say x86? This is actually a throwback to the olden days when we had a 32-bit processor Most computers don't have 32 bits now But a lot of programs are still built off of that basis of using 32 bits. It's kind of crazy That's actually why we have these two, but let's double click on program files x86 This is actually going to show you all of the programs currently installed on your computer It's almost a more in-depth version than the start menu and you can see we have a slew of these You might not have all the same ones. You might not have something like audacity, but I'm pretty certain you probably have something like Microsoft Office. Let's double click on that Again we're seeing what are known as folders and folders just reside Allow us to have more in-depth Look, so not everything's in one spot It allows us to have a little bit more organization and for example if we double click now on office 15 You might be seeing office 14 or one of the other versions, but if we click on the folder that starts with office You can actually see as we scroll downward. This is where all of my Files for all of Microsoft Office reside. So if you really wanted to copy things, this is where it is This is where all those things are so if we take a look I've already sorted mine, but if I want to just look at my programs just look at the programs I can click on this type button and that'll actually sort Everything in alphabetical order by its type. You can see all of these have something called application Now if we look some of these actually make a little sense I know some of them are a little confusing, but Excel.exe we're going to be using Microsoft Excel in our module 3. What happens if we double click on it? Oh, hey, look at that. That's actually where Microsoft Excel is residing on my computer It's not just a single button If we scroll down a little further you can see that we get some crazy like oh my goodness these things look weird These are known as application extensions. These are They're not these are those system files. I was talking about a little earlier. I don't want to delete these I don't want to mess with these because these help run my computer run my programs such as AudioSearch LTS. I don't know what it does, but that name sounds a little important audio search probably a little bit important so Take a look at these things maybe go into your windows folder. What's inside there? Well, you might notice up here I have this address bar and if I click on local disk it lets me go even To back to the root directory. Maybe double click on windows and see what's in there for yourself