The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 18: Human Biodiversity

The Nazi Lies Podcast

Mike Isaacson: Encouraging inbreeding won’t get you very far.

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Mike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. I am joined by Uppsala University professor of animal conservation biology, Jacob Höglund. He is literally the perfect person to talk to about today’s Nazi lie: human biodiversity. He has a book from Oxford University Press called Evolutionary Conservation Genetics, which is the thing that Nazis obsess about. The book is great because it doesn’t get lost in the weeds with too much theory, it has tons of examples, and totally unintentionally, it absolutely demolishes the Nazi case for racial segregation and ethnic cleansing. I’m sure this is not at all where you expected to be interviewed for this book. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Höglund.

Jacob Höglund: Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here.

Mike: All right. So obviously, you were not intending to write a book to dispel Nazi lies writing a book about the genetics of extinction and conservation. So talk a little about what inspired you to write this book and what you learned along the way.

Jacob: Yeah, you're right. It's a completely different context, but the background is basically that the earth is facing a major biodiversity crisis. Biodiversity is defined as three basic levels; ecosystems, species, and genes. And I focus on genetic diversity. I'm concerned about loss of genetic diversity, and that's why I wrote the book.

Mike: Alright. By page two, you’re already undermining the core of Nazi racial theory by asserting that diversity, both genetic and demographic, is important for avoiding extinction. Before we get into why that is, talk a little about what diversity means in this context, because the human biodiversity crowd might be like, “Well, I believe we need diversity too.” But what they mean is a humanity segregated by race. So, what do we mean by that diversity here?

Jacob: Actually, in biology it means completely opposite. It's a bit complicated, but fragmentation-- So basically biodiversity loss or habitat loss, leads to smaller populations that become separated in a sense.

Imagine that you have a large population which is connected, and then human action causes land loss and changing land use and all that sort of stuff. So populations that once were big and connected now become small and fragmented.

And these small and fragmented populations tend to lose genetic variation through a process called genetic drift. Genetic drift is basically the random loss of genetic variants. This is what conservation genetics is trying to understand and to counteract.

Mike: Okay. You talk a bit about segregation and its evolutionary consequences in your book. Obviously, you don’t mean to refer to race here, but for practical purposes the effect of segregation would be genetically the same for humans. Talk about what happens to species with segregated populations.

Jacob: Yeah. We biologists don't talk about segregated populations; we talk about fragmented populations. So it's a small distinction, right? But as I tried to explain before, when you have fragmentation because of this process called genetic drift, you lose genetic diversity. Genetic diversity is sometimes also called heterozygosity when geneticists talk to one another.

Mike: What does heterozygosity mean exactly? How is it defined?

Jacob: It's again, a bit technical and complicated. But many organisms like plants and animals, the ones we are most familiar with, they are what we call diploid. And what a diploid is, it means that basically, these organisms have one genome from mom and one genome from dad. So it means that on every position in the genome, there would be one variant inherited from mom and one from dad. And when they are different, the two positions are different. That's called an heterozygous site. And when they're the same, so when Mom and Dad had the same variant, that's called a homozygous site. And the more sites that are heterozygous, the more diverse the genome is.

Mike: Right. So it's kind of like having enough genes in the gene pool to make sure that– Okay, so now let's talk about why genetic diversity is important. Why do we want heterozygosity?

Jacob: We want diversity in the populations because if we have– One way I can explain this is that, you know, in our homes many people keep good-to-have boxes; you save nuts and bolts and nails and whatever-- you put them in this box that you find is good to have in the future. Because if you face a problem in your home and you want to repair something, it's good to have different kinds of nuts and bolts and nails and whatever tools. And the more tools you have, the more problems in the future you can solve.

So it's the same with a biological population, if there are lots of variants in the population it means that this population will be able to adapt to future changes in the environment. And if the population has lost most of genetic variation, it means that they're sort of stuck to the circumstances that they're facing right now.

Do you follow the analogy? Diversity is good because then you have more options to change when the circumstances change. And one thing that we know for sure is that life on earth is always evolving, it's always changing. Nothing stays the same. So having a lot of variance means that a species or population can adapt to future changes.

Mike: Alright. So now, one thing that I think is pertinent in this discussion is the notion of inbreeding, which you talk about in your book. First, how is inbreeding defined by evolutionary biologists?

Jacob: Inbreeding is caused by something that we call the non-random mating, for example between close relatives. Mating between close relatives leads to increased homozygosity, that is the loss of genetic diversity. That's why in this context that it's good to have lots of genetic variation, inbreeding is bad because it leads to exaggerated loss of genetic variation and genetic variants. That's why we want to avoid inbreeding.

But there's also another problem and that is that inbreeding might also lead to fixation of bad genetic variants. Because we had this diploid thing that, you know, you had genetic variants inherited from mom and dad. And if you have inbreeding, it might be that both mom and dad have a bad variant at the zygous site. And such site might become fixed in offspring, so the offspring ends up with a bad variant at the zygous site.

And that leads to something called inbreeding depression. I think, Mike, that's your next question. That's what you're leading to.

Mike: Yeah let’s talk about inbreeding depression.

Jacob: Yeah. So, inbreeding depression is the loss of fitness or what we call viability due to expression of these deleterious variants. That might lead to the organism being less able to cope. It might lead to disease, genetic diseases might be expressed, or it might lead to other malfunctions in the organism.

Mike: And how does genetic mutation play a role in this story?

Jacob: It's because most mutations, the vast majority of mutations, mutations induce changes to the genome, and a set of new variants that pops up because of the biochemical changes in the DNA structure, basically. And most of these variants, the vast majority of them are actually bad for the organism. There are a few that are what we call neutral, they don't make a change so they might stay in the population. And a small minority might actually even be good, and they are sort of favored in the population. But most mutations are selected against and lost from the population. But they might-- because we have this fact that most organisms are diploid–some of these bad mutations might linger in the population because they are masked by a good variant at the zygous site.

Mike: How does that mutation story fit into the inbreeding story?

Jacob: If you have bad mutations, both inherited from both mom and dad, then these bad mutations may become expressed at the phenotypic level. If you're heterozygous at such site, it might suffice to have one good unit variant that would mask the phenotypic effects of the bad one. But if you have inbreeding, these bad mutations become expressed because there's no masking effect. Do you follow?

Mike: Yeah. Basically, the idea is that because you're breeding with the same small pool, basically those variants don't end up breeding themselves out through evolutionary adaptation. Right?

Jacob: Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of related to what we've discussed previously that, in small populations, these bad alleles might become fixed. And that leads to poor effects. That's why conservation biologists are concerned about inbreeding and the inbreeding depression.

Mike: One thing you include at the tail end of the inbreeding chapter is a short section on rescue effects, so measures taken to rescue subpopulations on the path to extinction due to inbreeding depression. So, what do those measures look like? And how effective are they?

Jacob: Yeah, what conservation biologists are aiming at is to try to counteract this fragmentation process that I talked about by creating corridors between fragmented populations to increase gene flow between populations. And in some cases when making corridors and promoting natural dispersal, it might actually be-- well, I shouldn't say possible, but sometimes it might be necessary to translocate individuals between populations to increase the gene flow over the migration between populations to keep up the genetic variation in these fragmented populations.

Mike: Okay. So basically the idea is that if you can find populations elsewhere, you can hopefully repopulate an area by basically connecting those areas with these corridors.

Jacob: Exactly.

Mike: Okay. So besides executing plans to racially segregate the population, how else does human action bear upon genetic diversity in the ecosystem?

Jacob: The big problem with human action is that we are too many, basically. And the fact that we are so many means that we use up the Earth's resources at the expense of other organisms. And we're transforming, we're changing the land use, so we're making agricultural land, and we're cutting down forests, and we're polluting lakes and streams and whatever. We're basically taking over the life space of the other organisms for the benefit of our own species. This might actually bite us in the end after a while because when we have transformed all natural habitats, it's going to be a very difficult Earth to live on.

Mike: Let’s talk about invasive species, because I’m sure Nazis are VERY interested in applying this logic to immigration. So, what makes a species invasive? How would you define invasive species?

Jacob: A species may become invasive if it's translocated or accidentally being moved to an environment where it does not face any natural enemies, and the population might grow unchecked because there is no predators, there's no disease keeping the population numbers under control. That's why it's called invasive. It grows unchecked, basically.

Mike: Okay. I guess, let's dive more into that. What's the problem with unchecked growth?

Jacob: It might be that an invasive species might knock out species that are native to an area, and may disturb ecosystems by changing the food webs and a lot of other problems.

Mike: Okay. Can we talk about some examples of that? Do you have any?

Jacob: Of invasive species?

Mike: Yeah.

Jacob: Oh, yeah. It depends on where you are, but in my country here in Sweden, there are lots of plants that have been brought in because of agriculture that takes over and might suppress the growth of the native species.

There are also organisms that come with shipping. You know, when the ballast water is released– So there might be a ship from Japan and they have loaded ballast water in Japan, they have accidentally brought Japanese oysters, which is a different species for European oysters, to the coastal areas of Sweden. And then they release these Japanese oysters and these Japanese oysters grow a bit faster and become a bit bigger than European oysters, and they sort of take over the living space of the European oysters.

In these contexts there are lots of sort of accidents that might happen, and it's very much depending on the context of what happens. Most of these accidental removals of organisms from one area to another, they don't become invasive. It's only a few translocated species that do become invasive. Under what circumstances they become invasive or not is a bit hard to understand still, we don't really know what makes a species invasive.

Mike: With this idea of invasion, this logic or this-- I don't know what to call it. I don't want to make it sound minimal by calling it a theory, but I mean, it's basically a theory-- it works only at the species level, it's not something that works intraspecies, right? It's not something that works with different phenotypes or anything like that.

Jacob: No, no, no. As you say, it's at the level of species, not on replacing populations. I mean, first of all species, might come as a surprise, but it's a concept which is not– There are lots of different– Biologists differ in what they call a species. We, biologists, are not at all– we don't all agree on what we think is a species.

And when it comes to other biological entities like subspecies, we have an even lesser agreement on what we mean as subspecies. And when it comes to concepts like race, race is not at all defined by biologists at all. It's a social construct thing, basically.

So it matters what we mean by a species or not, but invasiveness when you sort of talk about a particular role with this like humans, it's out of context completely. It doesn't have any bearing at all.

Mike: Now in certain instances, conservation geneticists are interested in preserving specific genotypes. What do these programs of genetic conservation typically look like? Because these are not the selective breeding programs imagined by Nazis, right?

Jacob: Yeah. But it's not at all. I mean, preserving certain genotypes comes in the context of something that we call local adaptation. Local adaptation means that certain populations might be adapted to the local circumstances. In such cases, it means that by introducing something which is adapted to something else might actually lead to problems of the population that is aimed to be rescued.

So this is called outbreeding depression: that we might introduce alien or not-so-well-adapted genetic variants into a population that may jeopardize that population's ability to work. The local variants may become swamped by something that comes from another population.

Mike: Right. And this idea of outbreeding depression is this idea that if you bring this genetic material in without concern for the history of local adaptation, right? Then you basically undo evolution, basically.

Jacob: In some cases, that may lead to the undesirable effects that we lose these local variants. So this continuum of inbreeding and outbreeding, in most cases most people think that what the big problem is loss of genetic diversity and that we should increase genetic diversity by aiding translocations and counteract biodiversity or habitat loss. But in very special circumstances, we might need to think about how we should perform these translocations.

Mike: Okay. You talk a great deal about MHC genes (and a little bit of a few other categories of genes) and their interest to conservation geneticists. Why are MHC genes and these other genes you list, why are they of interest to conservation geneticists but probably not the genetic markers that are subject to ancestry tests?

Jacob: Yeah. So this, again, goes back to this thing that I said. Most mutations are bad and there are some that are neutral, so there are some genetic variants that doesn't really matter whether or not we have different variants or not. But in some cases, there are genetic variants that are beneficial to the organism. And MHC genes especially in this circumstance, because MHC genes are involved in disease resistance. So they are involved in the immune defense of vertebrates, basically.

And because of their link to disease resistance, they are an obvious target for conservation biologists because we want populations that are able to resist diseases. That's why there has been a lot of focus on MHC genes.

Another reason is that because of this link to disaster resistance, MHC loci or MHC genes are known to be the part of the genomes of vertebrates that are the most diverse. So there has been a natural selection for diversity in MHC genes. So it's the part of the genome that is the most diverse part of the genome, which also makes it interesting to understand. It's a bit complicated to study, but it makes it interesting to understand how diversity is related to disease resistance and so on. It goes back to this analogy of the toolbox like I said. The more disease-resistant genes you have, the more viruses and bacteria and other disease agents you're able to combat basically.

Mike: Okay. So, I guess, bringing this back to kind of where I think you were hoping to go with the book, what can people who are not biologists do to help with environmental conservation efforts?

Jacob: Yeah. I think it's a really, really important area to understand and it's a big problem for humanity, the biodiversity losses. So what I encourage people to do is engage, read, educate yourselves, partake in citizen science, and in the end promote biodiversity. So that's more education and counteract habitat destruction and the fact that we are sometimes for greedy reasons, just destroying our nature. We should cherish and try to keep natural habitats as much as possible.

Mike: Okay. Well, Dr. Höglund, thank you so much for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast to undermine the theory of human biodiversity. The book, again, is Evolutionary Conservation Genetics out from Oxford University Press. Thanks again.

Jacob: Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Hope my contribution makes a difference.

Mike: You missed reading Evolutionary Conservation Genetics with us in The Nazi Lies Book Club but there are still plenty more books to read by our upcoming guests. Join the Discord server where we host the book club meetings by subscribing on Patreon at patreon.com/Nazilies. For show updates and general mayhem, follow us on Twitter @NaziLies and Facebook at facebook.com/TheNSLiesPod.

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