Annie Jacobsen
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
They're catching up with us.
Okay, so here's an interesting anecdote.
In 1975, there was this famous defense official who went from being a hawk to being like, we cannot have so many nuclear weapons.
His name was Paul Warnke.
And he wrote what was then a famous article in Foreign Policy Magazine called, Apes on a Treadmill.
His idea that the nuclear arms race was apes on a treadmill, that we and the Russians were just slavish, you know, like essentially ignorant beasts just slaving away on this treadmill trying to win, not even realizing there is no winner.
And, you know, it was a famous article.
Everybody wrote about it and, I mean, spoke about it in, you know, D.C.
and then it disappeared.
Well, the anecdote comes from recently a group of scientists wanted to try to answer the question that we're talking about, like, how did…
Apes go from bipedal or how did we – from knuckle walking to being bipedal.
We still don't know why.
And they were trying to figure out if it had to do with energy consumption.
So they outfitted apes.
They put them on a treadmill.