The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 5: Our Reptilian Overlords

Mike Isaacson: Is Barack Obama a lizard?

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Nazi SS UFOs
Lizards wearing human clothes
Hinduism’s secret codes
These are nazi lies

Race and IQ are in genes
Warfare keeps the nation clean
Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine
These are nazi lies

Hollow earth, white genocide
Muslim’s rampant femicide
Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde
Hiter lived and no Jews died

Army, navy, and the cops
Secret service, special ops
They protect us, not sweatshops
These are nazi lies

Mike: Thanks for joining us for what will probably be the weirdest episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast so far. As we all know, nazis lie about a lot of things. A lot of things. Plenty of these things are obvious: the biology of race, the history of civilization, the gravity of the Holocaust. But LIZARDS? Lizards. Today we are joined by evolutionary herpetologist Laurie Vitt to talk about lizards and why it’s extremely unlikely that humanity is ruled by a race of reptilian aliens. Dr. Vitt has his PhD from Arizona State University and is the George Lynn Cross Research Professor Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma. With Eric Pianka, he is the coauthor of Lizards: Windows to the Evolution of Diversity. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Vitt.

Laurie Vitt: You're welcome.

Mike: Okay. So before we get into the Nazi lies, I wanna talk about you and your research. How did you get into herpetology, and what has studying reptiles taught you about life on Earth?

Laurie: Well, I spent the first 11 years of my life in Billings, Montana, of all places. It's kind of a neat area in that it has a set of cliffs that go along the kind of the north side of the Yellowstone River valley, and the cliffs have lots of rocks and so on. It also has lots of rattlesnakes, bullsnakes, a few lizards, a few other things. And when I was a little kid, I grew up out in the country. And I spent my time hiking around turning rocks over and seeing what I could find, and I was bringing home snakes, frogs, turtles, scorpions, centipedes and almost anything you can imagine. And I even caught my first prairie rattlesnake when I was nine years old, and I kept it for more than a year.

So I was fascinated by virtually every animal I came in contact with, and I wanted to know everything I could about them. And unfortunately, most animal species have never really been thoroughly studied. When I discovered that, I thought, "Gee, this is something that might be pretty fun to do." Since I was interested in reptiles, mostly lizards and snakes, it turns out lizards are really good models for doing any kinds of biological studies. And the reasons for that include the following: they're usually common; it's relatively easy to get permits to work with them; they do almost anything that any other organism does; they're often easy to capture; they're easy to measure; it's easy to take a blood sample to get gene sequences from, and so on. And so the kind of key thing that studying lizards taught me is that ecological traits of individual species can only be understood in the evolutionary perspective.

Now we know a lot about the evolutionary history and evolutionary relationships of lizards, so they're really good models for anything that one wants to do and put in an evolutionary framework. Put a lot more simply, why do animals do what they do?

Mike: So do you have a favorite reptile? [Laurie laughs]

Laurie: That's an interesting question. I like all of them. And just to give you an idea of how many all of them is, there are now 6,972 lizard species that have been described, and there are 3,879 snake species, and there are 201 species of things called amphisbaenians. All of these form one evolutionary group. When we think about lizards, most people think the lizard, and they have no idea what the diversity is like. The neat thing is that when you look at an evolutionary tree of lizards, snakes, and amphisbaenians, these other two groups actually radiate from within the group of things that we typically call lizard. In other words, snakes and amphisbaenians really are lizards. So that's kind of a neat little lizard fact. So I don't have a favorite reptile, I like almost all of them.

Mike: Yeah. When I was reading your book, I came across in the beginning it seemed like there's a little bit of a rivalry between those who study snakes and those who study lizards.

Laurie: Yeah, there is a little bit. But we're all good friends. [Laurie and Mike laugh] And so the rivalry really has more to do with just trying to do different kinds of studies with either snakes or lizards. I suspect that's where the kind of rivalry sort of comes from. But, yeah, there is a little bit. But we're all really good friends. [Mike laughs] And that's true throughout the world, by the way.

Mike: Okay. So now let's get into the Nazi lies. This one is popularized by former soccer player David Icke. According to Icke, the world is governed by a race of shape-shifting lizard aliens who feed off human fear and confusion. He claims that all world religions misidentified these technologically advanced creatures as gods and that insight into the lizard alien conspiracy can be gleaned from ancient religious texts. He also interprets the movie The Matrix as a factual account of how human energy from fear and confusion is harvested by these lizard people for sustenance.

So let's start small. Lizards are ectothermic or cold-blooded and can't produce their own body heat. How do lizards navigate this biological fact and why might that make maintaining a human facade difficult? 

Laurie: Lizards on this planet are either active during the day or active at night depending on which group of lizards. For example, the family Gekkonidae, which is most of the geckos, most gecko species are nocturnal. Not all of them, but most of them are. And lizards that are active during the day gain heat by basking either in direct sunlight or by pressing their body against something warm like a rock. The pet trade even sells what they call hot rocks which are fake rocks with a plug-in heating element. And these allow people to keep diurnal lizards in captivity. Some lizards like geckos are nocturnal, and they're limited in distribution to warm deserts in the tropics.

If a human were not able to produce their own heat, they did have to bask in the morning to get warm enough to operate during the day or they'd have to live in tropics or warm deserts and be active at night. The other thing is while inactive, whether it's a diurnal lizard at night or a nocturnal lizard in the daytime, they would be vulnerable. These creatures would be vulnerable just like inactive lizards are. Moreover, we'd be able to spot them really easily in cold days because they'd be out basking and trying to get warm.

Mike: Okay. So as far as I'm aware, I've never heard of or seen Barack Obama basking. I guess maybe when he goes to his vacation home in Hawaii but not so much when he's in, say, Moscow.

Okay. So Icke also makes the claims these lizard creatures are super intelligent from a human perspective. What do we know about lizard cognitions that might make this claim unlikely?

Laurie: Well, we actually know quite a bit about lizard cognition. And there are no lizards that are anywhere near as intelligent as humans. And I'm going to come back to the word intelligence in a minute because it's a human-made word, but I don't know why anyone would ever expect that a hybrid of a lizard and human would be more intelligent than human. That makes no sense. So you have humans, and then you have something that's much less intelligent, and you supposedly cross them and you end up with a new thing that's more intelligent? That doesn't make any sense.

Lizards are capable of learning simple things like where food is and what they might have to do to get the food. To give you an example, half an hour ago I was sitting out on my deck with a straw and some mealworms. And I was shooting mealworms to some whiptail lizards that live in my yard, and they learned pretty quickly that the food is coming from me. And so they approached closer and closer, but these are basic survival kinds of things. And these are things that all organisms do. And they have nothing to do with understanding, for example, mathematical proofs or playing a musical instrument or creating art. Only humans do these things.

But there are some things that lizards do that are really astounding, and they have nothing to do with intelligence as we know it. For example, many lizards can lose and regenerate tails. We can't even regenerate more than fingertips. Many lizards have highly developed chemosensory systems involving the tongue and specialized neurosensory organs in the mouth. They use chemical cues to discriminate prey, identify their own species, and determine whether another individual is of them sex and even sexually receptive, all based on chemical cues alone.

So intelligence is something we define in the context of our own behaviors. And consequently, it doesn't apply very well when talking about any animal species. Could a dog, a lizard, a frog, a snake, a cow score well in an IQ test or even take one for that matter? So this whole notion, it's so absurd that all I can do is laugh. It's just completely out in space.

Mike: Out in space. [laughs] What's the smartest thing that you've seen a lizard do?

Laurie: I haven't seen this, but a friend of mine trained lizards to turn his lights on in his bedroom. And he did it using food and some other sorts of things, but he was able to teach it a real simple task. The most that I've been able to do is I've got one lizard out in the yard here that the other day he came out. I blew him a mealworm, and he ate it. And then I blew him another mealworm, and he ate it. This is a lizard that I hadn't seen since last year. And he was about 25 feet from me. And then all of a sudden, he looked at me. I was sitting in a chair, and he looked at me. And then he ran right up to me, ran up my pantleg and stopped right up on my thigh, which is where I was holding a container full of mealworms, and so I just tipped the container a little bit, and he chowed down on a bunch of the mealworms. So lizards do have memories for some things and particularly food, of course. But that's true of a lot of reptiles.

Turtles, for example, seem to have really good memories. I've had turtles in a pond that I had in Oklahoma that would recognize me after every winter. And so I'd go out in the yard. I fed them to start with. Then I'd go out in the yard, and they'd all migrate right to where I was on the shoreline. And they would do that first day they came out after spending the winter in the mud, and that went on for several years. Turtles learn that kind of stuff, but that's about it.

The other thing about it is if you think about most of the things that humans do, the reason we can do most of these things is because we have opposable thumbs and we can hold on to things. A vast majority of lizards can't hold on to anything with their feet. And so even when a male mates with a female, they have no real way to hold on. And so what they do is they bite the skin of the female while they're copulating with it. Hands alone really have given humans the ability to do a lot of stuff that most animals would never be able to do.

Mike: Speaking of biting, have you ever been bitten by a lizard? [Laurie laughs]

Laurie: I've been bitten by so many lizards, you wouldn't believe it. [Mike laughs] I've been bitten by a lot of them. I've never been bitten by Gila monsters which are venomous or some of these big varanid lizards that also seem to have sort of a venom. But I've been bitten by a lot of lizards. I've had some break the skin. I've had worse bites from turtles. Lizard bites usually aren't too bad, but some of them are fairly painful. And if they're really big lizards, they could do damage with a bite. And with big lizards I've always been really careful so that I don't get bitten. And I'm the same way with snakes. I've been collecting venomous snakes in the field since I was nine years old, and I've never been bitten by one. But I've been bitten by hundreds of non venomous snakes because I'm not as careful with non venomous snakes because I know they aren't going to do anything.

Mike: At least not do anything yet deadly. [Laurie laughs]

Laurie: Right. [laughs]

Mike: Okay. The last point I wanted to discuss is the issue of breeding. Icke claims that thousands of years ago these lizard aliens bred with humans to create a race of lizard alien demigods. Is this genetically and physiologically possible?

Laurie: In a word, no. And I'll tell you why. Genetics, first of all, mammals and lizards, we're mammals. Mammals and lizards have been separated for at least 200 million years. Lizard chromosomes vary between 20 and 40. Human chromosomes, we have 46 chromosomes. There are some other animals that have 46. There's a thing called a nilgai which is an African deer-like animal. It has 46. There's a Hawaiian amphipod. It's a little thing like a shrimp that also has 46. And chromosome number really doesn't tell us much about intelligence, but they do tell us a lot about whether animals can interbreed or not. There are other organisms that have more chromosomes than we do. Tobacco has 48, potatoes have 48, water buffaloes have 48, orangutans have 48, gorillas have 48. This is why we can't interbreed with orangutans or gorillas. Striped skunks have 50. A platypus has 52, sheep have 54, red king crab has 208. So chromosomes don't tell us anything about intelligence.

And so how could a lizard with at most 40 chromosomes possibly breed with a human with 46? The reason this is so ridiculous is because you can't get paired chromosomes during meiosis, which is the process by which we go from a diploid to a haploid cell for sperm and eggs. And you would end up with a haploid at 23 in a human, and you'd end up with a haploid of 48 in something with 48 or 24 in something with 48 chromosomes. So that just plain wouldn't work. You could not get the base pairs on a chromosome strand to line up during fertilization.

And then the other point, mammals and lizards had been separated for so long, but his argument rests on lizard aliens arriving here from somewhere else. If the lizard aliens arrived and did this, we would have to make the ridiculous assumptions that first, lizards as we know them, had evolved somewhere else which we know is not true. And two, that these aliens could get here. Now, how could an alien lizard that has feet like lizards and no opposable thumb construct some sort of a rocket ship to get here?

A third reason is that they had to have only arrived about 300,000 years ago or less because that's how long humans have been here, at least Homo sapiens. And unlike other organisms, what are the remnants of their arrival? Where are the spaceships? And if you think about chromosome numbers, going back to that, why not sheep-human hybrids? At least they have the same number of chromosomes. That would be more likely than a human-lizard chromosome.

I suspect that he would argue because lizard aliens were not real lizards they could do anything. Well, I can make up anything I want to make up, but that doesn't mean it's true. And this is typical of conspiracy theorists. They make up any set of facts that fit their theory because they fabricate stories to falsify and connect known facts.

Mike: Okay. And what about the physiology of reproduction?

Laurie: As you said earlier, mammals are warm blooded. We call this homeothermy, and we also call it endothermy. And endothermy means that we produce our own body heat which requires most of the energy that we actually take in. And the advantage to that for mammals is that we can operate at a peak level 24 hours a day because our body temperature's really high.

Well, with lizards with ectothermy, that is receiving their heat from the external environment, when it gets cold, they can barely move. And one of the things I often do in the winter is I go out and I route through things, and I find lizards and snakes that are so cold they can't move, and then I bring them in and warm them up and photograph them. And a lot of times I'll bring reptiles in and put them in the fridge to cool them down so that I can get them to sit still. So temperature is really a huge issue for these, and that's probably the biggest kind of physiological trait.

But some other things that kind of don't make sense, how did these lizard aliens survive such a long trip without food necessary to operate? Eating enough food to actually maintain operative temperatures? How did they respond to millions of bacteria, viruses, and other parasites for which they have no evolutionary history? If you think about some of the things that happened with Native Americans and have happened with native cultures in other parts of the world, modern man goes in and they bring with them diseases that those groups have never experienced. And so everybody gets sick, and a lot of people die.

Well, if something came to this planet from somewhere else and it had any semblance of a physiology like us or like lizards, the first thing that’d happen is bacteria, viruses, and other parasites would invade them like crazy. And they wouldn't have defenses because they didn't share an evolutionary history with all of those things.

And so that whole notion, it's so ridiculous. [laughs] I can't stop from laughing. It's just really hard to believe that anybody could even say something like this. And I often wonder if these people really do believe what they rant or if they're just trying to get attention.

Mike: Yeah, I don't know. He's been at it for a long time.

Laurie: Yeah. Well, it's amazing the things that are carried through history for a long time that can never be verified. Think of all the religions throughout the world. None of them can verify that their so-called god exists yet people follow these groups for thousands of years.

Mike: Okay. Well, Dr. Vitt, thank you so much for entertaining the absurd line of questioning that I've presented today and teaching us about lizards. You can read more about lizards and their incredible diversity in his book Lizards: Windows to the Evolution of Diversity co-authored with Eric Pianka out of University of California Press. Thank you again for coming on The Nazi Lies Podcast.

Laurie: You're welcome.

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