The Infinite Monkey Cage 100

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed-from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We the man to be hosted!

Winner, best score!

We the man to be seen!

Winner, best book!

We the man to be quality!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs.

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com

When disaster takes control of your life, ServePro helps you take it back.

ServePro shows up faster to any size disaster to make things right, starting with a single call, that's all.

Because the number one name in cleanup and restoration has the scale and the expertise to get you back up to speed quicker than you ever thought possible.

So whenever never thought this would happen actually happens, ServePro's got you.

Call 1-800-SERVPRO or visit ServePro.com today to help make it like it never even happened.

This is the BBC.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your hosts, Professor Brian Cox and Robin Ince.

And I'm Brian Cox.

Welcome to the 100th edition of the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Yet this has now been going so long, it started in 2009, a time when Brian Cox was so naive that he actually believed you could persuade people to believe things with evidence.

Well,

tragically now, he spends most of his life online just there going, no, it's got to be a sphere.

It can't be flat.

Oh, that shadows, eclipses.

No, it's not 6,000 years old.

It's at least 13.

Oh, you can't put that on the side of a bus.

People will never believe it.

So for the avoidance of doubt, this is a show where we assume our audience knows that the Earth is an oblate spheroid.

The Big Bang was a hot, dense phase in the evolution of the universe 13.8 billion years ago.

All life on Earth is related to a universal common ancestor, and you can put that on the side of a bus and they will believe you.

Right, so Brian's job in the show is to help explain the nature of the universe using theoretical and particle physics, and my job is to interrupt him every time I see the audience going, I don't understand what he's saying anymore.

I mean, I think he believes he understands what he's saying, but I'm utterly, utterly lost.

That's generally actually my problem with you.

My problem is that when when I first hear you speak, I think I'm beginning to understand this.

And then slowly it kind of drifts off into me hearing you doing an Alan Bennett monologue.

And so it starts off with him just going, as we travel through the solar system, we see the still unexplained rings of Saturn.

Mother saw the rings of Saturn the other day and

she didn't think much of it at all.

She said she preferred the ring road around the Scarborough bypass.

She once saw Roy Hood there having a ham and piccolilly sandwich in a lay-by.

I said, Mother, how do you know it was was a ham and piccolilly sandwich?

She said, I've got a good eye for relish.

I said,

I'll try to explain the universe.

She said, I haven't got time.

I didn't understand Poirot last Sunday, so I'm going to explain the universe.

And anyway, Foyle's wars on in a minute.

I've got a thing for Michael Kitchen.

So, having failed to get through 99 episodes with any single subject from dark energy to the origin of life to the immortality of strawberries, we've decided to increase the entropy of the show show by having three panels instead of one and attempting to deal with cosmology, biology, the future of humanity, and pretty much everything else in under one hour.

We've invited some of our favourite panelists, physicists, anatomists, and Shakespearean actors, to find out what we know about the universe that we didn't know when we began the series in 2009.

And to ensure that liturgical matters are not sidestepped, we will also be assisted by Theology Corner, in which we have two of our favourite clerics, the Reverend Richard Coles and the former former Dean of Guildford Cathedral, the very Reverend Victor Stock, and they will be hosted by our regular religious correspondent, Katie Brand.

Now, Katie, I know that.

In their churches, do they have a physics corner?

I just want to know

the symmetry of this or not.

Oh, yes.

The Anglican church, you don't even need to believe in God.

We're very soft on that kind of thing.

It's about the recipes first and the beliefs.

I'm sicking in Westminster

Oh,

how quickly the show changes.

I like it when Americans are angry.

It's on.

So I was going to ask you, Katie, you went to a convent school and you did end up in a point, didn't you, as a young person where you went, I don't know whether to be a nun or an astronaut.

Yes, it was difficult.

I had NASA on the phone and the Archbishop of Canterbury beating down my door, and in the end, I thought, no, I need something that will satisfy my massive ego but also allow me to be really lazy.

So I became a panel show comedian instead.

So become a vicar, actually, on the basis of that.

That's true.

Actually, there's a lot of crossover apparently psychologically between being a comedian and a vicar.

Well, do you know that?

We have a lot of crossover in the Church of England, but

the bishops don't like it.

So, for our first panel, we are joined by a cosmologist, a theoretical physicist, a python, and an actor who makes us question the very notion that new energy cannot be created in this universe.

And they are.

Yeah, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist from across the pond.

I'm based in New York City, where I serve also as director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium.

I'm Faye Dauke.

I'm a theoretical physicist, and I work at Imperial College in in London.

I'm Eric Idle.

I'm a theoretical comedian.

And I'm available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

My name is Brian Blessed.

I'm very humble.

I have great modesty.

I'm a great actor.

I've climbed every three times.

I've been to the North and the South Pole.

There's no end to my greatness, Brian.

And this is our panel!

Neil, we'll start off with you.

So in the last 10 years, what do you think has been the most remarkable discovery about our understanding of why our universe is as it is?

There are tons of discoveries, but if you had to rank them, like picking your children, top one, maybe I'd say the discovery of the Higgs boson.

I would say.

I don't know how many people are familiar with this particle, but it was long hypothesized, and there were books written about it.

In fact, one book was called The God Particle.

Just let the theology corner know.

If you were going to be a particle, this might be the particle you choose to be.

Because as other particles move through its field, it actually grants them their mass.

Now, that's a badass particle.

If you're just ranking what particles do in the universe.

Now, if you want to know how it works, I have an analogy, if I may.

And I'll do this with Brian's permission, because you work in this, Brian, right?

This is your field.

Yeah, I'm checking.

I'm checking.

You're checking.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Brian's like, hangs out at the Large Hadron Collider of CERN.

But thinking about how to get people to understand the Higgs boson, I think of a Hollywood party.

Okay?

If you are unknown,

an unknown actor, at a Hollywood party, and you enter and the bar is across the way, you could just walk there with no impedance to your progress.

You have a low party mass.

Okay?

If you are famous and you walk in, if you're a Beyoncé and you walk into a party, people crowd around you and you cannot move very quickly.

You have accreted party mass.

So the Hollywood party field granted the popular person more mass than the unpopular person.

And this is a, when you want to think about why one particle has a higher mass than another, you can think of this sort of interaction with the Higgs feel.

And there are other science comedians in the world, by the way.

One of them is Brian Mallow.

He is the origin of this next joke.

Higgs Boson walks into a church, and the priest, it's a Catholic church.

The priest said, I'm sorry, we don't allow Higgs bosons in church.

And the Higgs boson said, Excuse me, but without me, you can't have mass.

Brian Mellow on that one.

To me, that's top.

That's one of the top few of the decade.

I think in your list of descriptions of the Higgs boson, you omitted to mention that Eric has written extensively on this subject.

I did not know that, Eric.

It's a little known fact.

Would you like me to do it?

I think I would.

All right, there's a little song I wrote about the Higgs boson.

Not many people have known this, but there's the Higgs boson, and there's leptons, and there's blue ones, there's the Higgs boson, and there's positons and muons there are photons there are protons there's neutrinos positinos there are quarks and there's electrons in the Higgs boson there's neutrinos angelinos in the Higgs boson there are Sauvignons and Pinos in the Higgs boson there are bonos yoccoonos Brianinos cappuccinos both Latinos and Latinos in Higgs boson there are gluons there are mu ones in the Higgs boson there are many there are few ones in the Higgs boson there are gold ones there are blue ones there are old ones there are new ones and some we haven't got a clue on in the Higgs boat.

I have to ask you, because this is the thing, you've written some brilliant songs about science, and do you find one of the problems is that when you write jokes about anything else, they don't have to be peer-reviewed.

But because there was, I know, Neil, you were on the science march in.

Were you in Washington?

Did you go on that?

No, but I tweeted heavily while it was going on.

Because

that's how we will always remember nearly all of the great things we did.

I was very much there with Nemoticon.

But this is when we did the science march, people were coming up with chants, and then there was a guy at the front who would actually say, You can't use that one, I'm afraid, because it's a chant that misleads.

And we ended up having to have a peer-reviewed marching sign?

Yeah, we ended up with things like, What do we want?

Cats in a super position.

When do we want them until observed?

But it's an internet.

What do we want?

A time machine.

When do you want it?

It doesn't matter.

I'm sorry, there's an interjection from the theology call.

I sense that the Reverend Richard Coles has a question, so I just think it's a very important thing.

It's a really stupid question.

I mean, you look at CERN and you marvel at it, it's enormous.

What I don't understand is why is the Higgs poseal important?

So,

can I take this?

I got this.

Brian, I got this.

I'll check.

I got this.

I'm listening.

I got this.

Okay.

Sir?

Other than it's important to physics, we have no idea yet how it will be important to our lives or to civilization.

And your question was asked of the electron when it was first discovered.

It was asked of quantum physics as a branch of our understanding of the universe when it was discovered.

Yet quantum physics today is the foundation of the entire information technology revolution.

It would take decades.

But at the time, because it's a new discovery, if too many people are around saying, how does that put food on my plate?

then civilization stalls in that moment.

So,

as scientists, we have to be

content

discovering something new without regard to its relevance to civilization, because history has shown that give it some decades, civilization finds a way to tax it.

So you mean my Wi-Fi is going to work one day?

Faye, Faye, what's your big discovery of the last 10 years?

In cosmology, I would choose the direct detection of gravitational waves.

Those are ripples in the fabric of space-time predicted to exist by Einstein using general relativity over a hundred years ago.

Actually, Einstein thought that they were so difficult to detect that we would never actually directly observe them, them, even though the theory says that they must be there.

But a hundred years after the prediction, we now have the technology that enables us to build detectors that can actually measure these tiny oscillations in the structure of space and time.

They are created in the universe in

huge events like the collision of two enormous black holes to form another black hole and this creates these ripples which move outwards into the universe and travel for billions of light years, reach us, and we can measure them, detect them.

I actually cried during the press announcement

because the

experiment that detected them, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, was being planned while I was a student.

And so that whole enterprise spanned my whole career.

Many of my colleagues and friends have worked directly on it.

And it was a very moving and exciting moment.

So yeah, I burst into tears.

Was it the discovery itself or was it the possibility of observing things, as you said, like the collision of black holes, that that discovery opens up?

It was all those things.

So to feel that you're witnessing this moment in the great arc of the history of science, Not just in the past, but looking forward to the future, these gravitational waves open up a new channel of communication that we can have with the universe.

So we can now it's as if we were only we only had sight before, but now we can actually hear.

So there's just new information that we can receive from the universe in this way via gravitational waves.

So we look forward to a new era of gravitational wave astronomy.

So speaking of channels of communication to the universe, Brian,

what is your

take on these great discoveries, the observation of the collisions of black holes, the origin of mass in the universe?

How do you picture those advances in our knowledge?

Being a greenhorn, I must say that I get passionately moved by Horizon, by your own programs, and the marvelous things that are taking place now.

in the universe.

I think the Huygens-Cassini project has been staggering and moving.

And now that we've suddenly found it, the smallest of the moons,

barely the size of Britain, Enceladus, the little Cassini has found it, it's got geysers

on board that go thousands of miles into the sky, you know, like Iceland, the bigger ones, giant ones.

And this little Cassini, I watched it on television a few months ago with the whole of NASA there, and this lady from New Zealand, and gradually it did its last recording and sent its last information back.

And it got to Saturn where it would die and everyone's weeping in the studios there at NASA and it goes beep beep beep beep beep beep

and dies.

And it was the most moving thing I've ever seen

on television.

I rejoice in the fact that now we're going to have James Webb's telescope to probe deeply into your universe.

Oh, what miracles are in front of us?

Imagine what a Jules Verne H.G.

Wells would do if they had a laptop.

Can they imagine they could see Pluto?

H.G.

Wells.

Yeah, that's made you quiet.

Eric, I know your name is now on Mars, on the Curiosity Rover, but what would you like to see?

We've looked back at the last 10 years, but as Brian said, there are things he'd like to see in the next 10.

What would you like to see?

Well, I think the most important thing from a layman's point of view is the popularity of science has grown enormously over the last 10 years, thanks to programs like this.

And bringing comedy into science has been very important.

And I think that's because it's ongoing, it's happening at the moment.

And we actually haven't heard anything from God for the last 2,000 years.

With the single exception of the controversy in the Vatican about whether or not God is present in gluten-free bread for communion, which is actually a controversy that's been going on.

So that's what you'd like to have resolved?

I think we should,

yes, I think we should know.

I think he should, is he going to be in diet-free Coke or is he, you know, what relationship does God possess with Schlemming and

we should say we've actually, we should just pop over to Theology Corner to say, where is God?

I referred to myself satirically some years ago on the show as the resident theologian to try and cover up the fact that I don't know anything about science and very little about theology.

So I'm quite amazed to now have a whole corner with actual vicars.

But I was going to ask the two of you just briefly because we've said on the show before about religion being like the sort of origins and the history of human curiosity in a way and that doesn't need to be so divided that humans in the early stages looked up at the sky and said, What's that?

And because they didn't have a lot of scientific instruments or knowledge at their disposal, there was sort of some way to try and describe the universe.

But have you, Richard, for example, in your career, have you seen science and religion try and come together more recently and not be so divided?

For me, it's never been a problem at all.

I've never had the slightest feeling that kind of being a faithful Christian has in any way interfered with being genuinely curious and fascinated by science.

That's not to say we don't have form, we do have form.

And of course, you don't have to go very far, sorry, Galileo.

You don't have to go, but you don't have to go very far away to...

I'm sure that's done the trick, that apology.

But seriously, I mean, what's much more interesting to me is rather than that very polemical idea of science and religion as being kind of competitors for truth and the loyalty of people, it's much more about how they are related, in fact.

If you look at the history of the development of science, if you look at the Royal Society, for example, and the numbers of of people in the Royal Society who were there because of a certain way in which the Church and the Enlightenment had worked together, in a way Calvinism had opened up the Book of Nature, it's a much more interesting story to see in terms of continuities.

That's not to diminish the sharpness of the conflict.

And I would just like to say on the record, and I'm sure I speak for many church people here, that I have absolutely no difficulty at all with accepting that Darwin's account of how we got to where we got to is absolutely sound and completely consistent with my understanding too.

I also want to say just very quickly, Eric, at Finden's

at St Mary's Finden, we offer both gluten and gluten-free both.

I want to say something else about Stephen Hawking and his ledger stone, which we have placed over his ashes in Westminster Abbey.

We have deliberately buried Stephen Hawking

exactly adjacent to Isaac Newton.

And in Latin on Isaac Newton's ledger stone, it says his name, and then it says the mortal remains of.

The Dean of Westminster, John Hall, rather cleverly has put on Stephen Hawking's ledger stone all that is mortal of.

Because the place was packed, Brian was there,

the world of education and science knows there's something immortal about that man.

And the Abbey has put that that in stone.

Thank you very much.

Ecclesiastical corner.

Yes, I am beginning to think that attempting to do a panel in 15 minutes on what is ultimately the entire history of cosmology, but also about religious conflict versus science, may well have been more difficult than imaginary, because you told me time may not actually exist and may be a construct, and time's arrow.

But I definitely felt time's arrow over that one.

I think we did.

I've had in my ear for the last 20 bloody minutes, we need to move to the last one.

So,

even though time is may well be a fiction, we're in a block universe, everything's happening at the same time.

That's fine, but it turns out Radio 4 follows different rules.

Thank you to everybody on the panel.

We'll be returning to Theology Corner later on, and thank you for our discussion of the future and history of physics.

Thank you.

It's now time for the next panel, and throughout our 18 series, we've had an ability to stir righteous ire amongst certain Radio 4 listeners.

In fact, before we even went on air, we received I think it was 12 different complaints that said that our title was disgusting, and yet again, it was another Radio 4 show that celebrated animal cruelty.

And we wrote back to each one of those complaints and explained that an infinite monkey cage was roomy, very roomy.

I mean, arguably, I suppose the universe is an infinite cage, isn't it?

With monkeys in it.

Yep, it's Hilbert's cage.

Move the monkeys to the odd numbers.

They don't want to do it.

I don't care.

Anyway, so.

It is indeed.

Anyway,

our next panel, we're going to try and avoid an avalanche of emails and actually letters, mainly.

They love letters.

They do love.

Can we get a nice letter?

Oh, I like that.

An email, lazy.

A letter, they're angry in Dorset.

Green ink.

Always green ink.

Anyway, this is the biology panel.

panel, and to avoid any emails, let me be very precise.

We'll be looking specifically at hominin evolution as opposed to hominid evolution because we're focusing on modern humans and their immediate ancestors and excluding things like orangutans.

So now,

let's meet our panel.

And they are.

Oh, oh, sorry.

We haven't met you for

hominins are hominids as well.

Oh, but

I was going to say that.

It's a specific mistake in order to see whether the Radio 4 listeners are listening, so they will write letters.

And they need to write letters.

It's the reason for their existence.

Good.

And our panel is.

I'm Alice Roberts.

I'm an anatomist and anthropologist and professor of public engagement in science at the University of Birmingham.

I'm Sue Black, I'm Queen of the Dead, because last time I got embroiled in the entire story of Are Strawberries Dead, can I say, my life has never been the same since.

I'm an anatomist, I'm a forensic scientist, and I'm at the University of Lancaster.

I'm Dave Gorman, and in 1990, I dropped out of a math degree.

I'm Andy Hamilton, and I am the perplexed idiot on the end.

Sue,

before we go on, of course, not all strawberries are dead.

I mean the subtlety of the strawberry.

We've been there.

We've been there.

We're never going back.

It's which one.

Just remember, they will never find your body and they will never be able to identify you.

Does that bespeak to true experts?

Be afraid.

Be very afraid.

Alice,

what has been the most important discovery in biology of the last decade?

Well, if we're focusing on human evolution, there have been some amazing revelations.

Ten years ago, we knew that the species originated in Africa.

We knew that we'd spread around the globe way back in the Ice Age and the Pleistocene.

And what most of us working in the field didn't think was that we'd interbred with any other species along the way.

There were a few people suggesting that there were fossils that looked like they might be hybrids between modern humans and Neanderthals, but most of us just didn't buy it.

Then

ancient genetics happened and the ability to extract DNA out of very old bones, to sequence it, to recover whole genomes.

And in 2010, we had the publication of the Neanderthal genome, and suddenly we saw in the DNA that there was this clear evidence for interbreeding with Neanderthals.

So I'm about 2.7% Neanderthal.

You all have quite a bit of Neanderthal in you.

Everyone's got a bit of Neanderthal in them.

And then there's other species, we don't really know what they look like.

There's ones called the Denisovans, we just know them from a couple of teeth and a finger bone.

But we've got a whole genome, so they're another population.

And again, we interbred with them and they interbred with some other archaic hominins.

So we just really weren't clear about the level of shenanigans that went on in human evolution.

And now we are.

And that's a discovery that was enabled by technology essentially.

So the increasing availability and cheapness of DNA sequencing.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean it's got quicker and quicker and cheaper and cheaper to do it.

It's also about how you then stitch it back together.

So

it's about the software, it's about the statistics that are then used to reassemble a whole genome from what actually is very tiny pieces,

little stretches of DNA that can be just 100 base pairs long.

And you've got to reassemble that until you get an entire genome.

So, and it's just we're getting quicker and quicker at this, so the revelations are going to come thick and fast, I'm sure.

Did we know that different species coexisted and we just thought they hadn't interbred?

Yeah, we did, yeah.

Because that seems to me to be

proves you don't know my mate Barry.

No.

Because the minute you go, yeah, but they were all around at the same time, I'm assuming as a layperson, and they were obviously getting it on because some blokes will anything.

Well, I think the thing is that this

I tell you it's just blokes, though.

Well, no,

obviously.

But the weird thing is that this kind of came as a bit of a revelation, and I think maybe we're just all a bit prudish about human evolution, but it came as a revelation for humans.

And then, surprise, surprise, every single other species that we've looked at in this way, where we've been able to look across the whole genome and go, right, did you interbreed with anything else along the way?

They all did.

So, dogs interbred with wolves, apples, apples interbred with crab apples so badly that they're more crab apple than original apple now.

Here's the thing I don't understand about biology.

Oh, you've ruined cider, haven't you?

Is it literally apples got crabs?

Yeah.

Is it something I don't understand about biology?

One of the many things I don't understand about biology.

So I thought the definition of a species was one that a group of organisms that could not breed with other organisms.

So in what sense are Neanderthals a different species from Homo sapiens if there could be interbreeding?

Brian, I know this is going to be tricky because you're a physicist and you like to have nice, neat answers for things and equations that make everything work.

Just consistency.

Yeah.

Biology is a bit messier than that.

So we try and put things in boxes, and then consistently, what biology does is break out of those boxes.

So we can go, right, this is what a species is.

It is a group of organisms that normally interbreed with each other.

And when they try and interbreed with another species, they're going to be infertile.

And I suppose the crucial thing is normally,

yeah, kind of normally, usually that's what they do, but occasionally they can interbreed with other species and have fertile offspring.

They might have sub-fertility, so we think that's happened.

So we think that, for instance, lots of Neanderthal DNA has been cleared out of our genomes because it created some problems with fertility.

And they didn't have IVF clinics in Neanderthal times.

So

we've got all of these areas in our genome where that DNA has been cleared out.

But yeah, it's just not as simple as we used to think.

It's getting much more complex and I think a lot more exciting.

See, Brian hates that.

Brian's a, oh, the universe has got life in it.

Isn't it messy?

Is it going to be absolute zero?

Hurry up, absolute zero.

Simple equations.

Sue, I wanted to ask you about something that I was really that sounds fascinating that you know about, which is going back to Neanderthals, using DNA to make, is it organoid brains?

This again seems to be an incredible change in the possibilities with the last.

We've been able to develop within the last few years the most incredible technology that allows us to target specific areas of DNA very, very specifically and to cut them out.

So, either to delete them or to add something new.

Somebody said it was a bit like having molecular scissors with a sat-nav.

So, it's about being able to just very precisely cut the DNA and hone in to be able to do that.

If you can then take something like Neanderthal DNA, which we now can find, we can replace that gene with a Neanderthal gene.

What we're then able to do, so this is into stem cells, what they're now able to do is to grow an organoid, which is just a small pea-sized group of cells.

And it's developed into something that's almost like a mini-brain, it's like a mini neocortex, so that there are oscillating electrical signals in it.

So, what they want to do next is to see whether they can take those electrical signals, link them up to a robot, and see if we can actually get Neanderthal genes orchestrating movement in another object.

Isn't that just out of this world?

It's a strange.

Andy, you've got to admit, the Neanderthal robot paradigm that we're talking about there, that's.

It's going to be a bit of a shock for the Neanderthal, though, isn't it?

His world would not have been full of robots, would it?

I'm very excited by the.

What I love is the way this is kind of demolishing the model I grew up with, which was the model was that Homo sapiens had been this sort of cheeky chappy ducker and diver, and we had,

you know, we had out-competed the Neanderthals,

possibly by murdering them, which is textbook out-competing.

But it now looks like presumably what we're saying is that there was a kind of absorption of populations, there was a lot of interbreeding, possibly in the face of a lot of parental objection.

Your father doesn't want you going out with a Neanderthal, he says they're grunters.

But that is what we're talking about, isn't it?

And it means

there's no such thing, you know, all those people who get so angry out there about racial purity.

You know, in a way, what this is illustrating is there is no purity.

Everything's a mashup.

I'm probably fooling myselves.

They'll probably get more angry, won't they?

They'll probably go marching around saying, there are people in this country walking our streets who aren't even our species.

That's probably what will happen.

No, but I think you're right, and look because

this theme of mixing carries on until much more recent times.

So, I think we've been kind of obsessed with the idea of species differentiating and growing out like a tree, so the kind of tree of life.

And we've thought about that in terms of within species as well.

So, thinking about human populations and how they've diverged away from each other.

But what we're finding is that the history of more recently of human populations is a lot more fusion than we've thought of in the past.

So,

race is biologically meaningless.

It is completely biologically meaningless.

You can't divide up you just cannot divide up the human species in that way.

You describe a world in biology that's moved very, very quickly over the last ten years.

And if we look into the next ten years, I think some of the issues you raise I saw actually I was looking out into the audience and looking at Andy when you were talking about recreating and regrowing a part of a Neanderthal brain.

And there is something, I think, to many people unsettling about our the increase in our knowledge and capabilities in the biosciences, which you don't really see in physics.

Is that a conflict that you can?

I think it's where biology often comes into conflict, I dare I say it, with our theology corner, which is just because you can do it, should you do it.

I just really like clerical corner.

I really like a mullah fruit corner.

We're the yogurt, and occasionally we stir a little bit of that jam in.

It's lovely.

It's not a mullah fruit corner.

No, no, no, no, they're not from the church.

But

whether these two vicars ever encounter genuine creationists now and what you say to them when you meet them?

Yeah, of course.

Oh, of course we do.

I preached a sermon at Westminster Abbey recently.

We have a lot of Americans in the congregation at Westminster Abbey, which is a bit of a challenge sometimes.

And I explained about Darwin being buried there and that sort of stuff.

And I said that in the 19th century in the Church of England there was absolutely no controversy at all about honouring this man and burying him here.

And I said, I believe in some parts of the United States there's something called creationism, which I believe

is taught in some schools.

I said, it's not an alternative, it's rubbish.

Alice has been dying to say to me.

Okay,

I'm delighted that the Church of England accepts evolution as a fact, as does the Catholic Church.

But that's the church, and that doesn't filter down.

We know that there's more and more creationism amongst vicars, and there's more and more.

When you get down to a level of teachers in primary schools and C of primary schools, there's a lot of creationism.

So, even though we think it's not a problem in this country, it really is.

That's one thing.

And the next thing is that I appreciate the need to talk about science with the whole of society.

And I think that we shouldn't be talking about science as one thing and not doing it with morals and ethics in mind all the time.

Of course, all scientists should always have morals and ethics in mind.

We shouldn't be passing that over to somebody else to deal with.

To suggest that the morals doesn't happen within science, I think, is silly.

We can't operate as a society like that.

Thank you to our panel.

Thank you.

You're listening to the one hundredth episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage here on Radio Four, and wonderfully, you can also watch this special episode captured by the cameras on iPlayer throughout July or on your TV online.

And you'll be able to find out that rather than having a portrait in his attic, Brian actually merely has a Radio 4 co-host and he sucks the life force out.

We used to look the same age, Runs, didn't we?

We did.

We did.

It's even worse, actually, because you can press the red button on your TV remote control from any BBC channel at various times from Monday the 16th of July until Tuesday the 24th of July.

Various times?

Yeah, they weren't very specific.

It doesn't matter anyway, because we're living a block universe.

No such thing as the present.

It's a reference frame-specific concept.

Right, now with barely any time left, we move on to our final panel, where we deal with everything else that has been discovered in the last 10 years and everything else that might possibly be discovered in the next 10 years.

So we should be able to easily cover that.

But as you always say, Brian, time is a reference frame-specific device.

You'd be surprised, actually, how many people don't understand the difference between coordinate time and proper time.

You're certainly right.

Anyway, our panel are.

David Spiegelholter.

I'm a statistician, professor for the public understanding of risk from the University of Cambridge.

My name's Tony Ryan.

I'm a professor of polymer science, that's Plastics Brian, at the University of Sheffield and the director of the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures.

I am Richard Wiseman, Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire.

I'm Katie Brand.

You'll be amazed to hear I'm not a professor of anything, but I am an eager amateur and would like to learn.

David, we'll start with you.

Over the last 10 years, I think there's a natural thing that people do as they get older, which is to presume that the world is getting worse.

As

someone working in statistics, is that true?

Are we seeing a world that is going downhill?

It's been a great period for statistics.

It used to be a fairly low-profile profession, but now everyone's doing data science and algorithms and machine learning.

So there's so much interest in data now.

And even in this sort of post-truth world, people are more and more interested in what the great Hans Rosling calls factfulness.

And when we look at the facts, we can get some pretty good news.

In this country, life expectancy has been going up about a year and a half over the last nine years, not as fast as it used to.

We're getting happier, according to the Office of National Statistics measures, by a little bit.

Still, the most miserable time of life is between 45 and 49.

And at best, it's between 65 and 69.

So I've got something to look forward to.

But there's other good news about young people.

It is quite extraordinary.

Drug taking's down, smoking's down by about a quarter among 16 to 24s, drinking's down, less than half of 18 to 24s had a drink last week now.

And the best statistic of all, the most extraordinary one,

difficult to believe that since 2009, teenage pregnancy rate has halved in this country in that short period.

It used to be one in 30, 15 to 17 year old girls used to get pregnant every year, and now it's less than one in 60.

I feel like there might be a correlation between that and the statistic about less drinking.

Exactly.

Now,

everyone asks why, and I have done some calculations.

The correlation is 0.998

between teenage pregnancy rates and the proportion of houses without internet.

Now, I don't know if there's any reason.

I actually probably think there's a huge correlation with avocado consumption as well.

But I couldn't get hold of that data.

Just if you unpack that statistic, because I don't really understand maths very well, because I went to a convent school and I didn't do any maths till I was eight.

We just did art and Jesus.

That's it.

So I'm struggling to catch up.

But are you basically saying that the correlation is that teenagers are just spending all their time on Facebook pretending they've had sex rather than actually going out and making babies?

Yeah, I wouldn't ever say what causes what.

I only collect look at.

Was that the correlation that you that's the sort of suggestion people have said because the rise of social media, but if you look at

social media, they've just grown enormously over that same period.

But there are other slightly sillier statistics.

I was looking at baby names.

I think it's fine.

Oliver is still number one.

It was number one in 2009, it's number one now.

Although, actually, if you add up the four spellings of Mohammed, they are now top.

They've just beaten Oliver now.

And other names have come up, you know, Jackson and Ezra and Arlo have really shot up the league tables.

But there's some names that remain deeply unpopular: David, Richard, Tony, Katie's gone down in the theater,

Robin, but absolutely rock bottom is Brian.

I

changed at all.

Statistically across this show, we've kind of bucked the trend, haven't we?

Because there are two Brian.

Well, and also I blame.

That's in the past.

Now, there's a hundred kids a year given the name Brian.

It hasn't changed.

It's 100%.

I blame Eric Heidel.

Sorry?

I blame Monty Python.

I blame Life of Brian.

That's when it starts.

1979, it falls up a cliff.

It's Idol's fault.

It's his fault.

I have to admit, you really do dice with danger because when you said that about Brian, I saw Brian Blessed's face and it really went into my head.

Richard, what do we have any great change of understanding about why humans behave as they do in the last 10 years?

How much has changed in terms of human behaviour?

I think we have.

Before I get into that, though, I should say, I've actually carried out research into the effect of names on people's lives.

And so I see particularly particularly that the first letter of their surname.

So, the further down the alphabet you are, you're used to seeing the names in alphabetical order.

You're used to seeing your name come further down.

So, the further down you are, the least successful you are in life.

So, as a wiseman, I find that quite upsetting.

As a Cox, I'm doing much better.

But I might change my name to Alan Aardvark

for later on.

So, anyway, but I was focusing on changes since 2009, and allegedly, a big one is a rise in narcissism, which I actually predicted brilliantly in 2008.

But when you unpack that data, and this is one of the reasons why I love psychology, you start to realize it's a bit rocky, because again, your perception would be, oh, there's all these narcissistic teenagers out there, and they're just posting selfies and not having sex and things like that.

And you think,

is that really true?

And so you start trying to answer that question, because there's not been narcissistic surveys every year, so it's very difficult.

All you can do is really like take a snapshot now of how narcissistic teenagers are and compare them to how narcissistic people a little bit older are.

But it may be you become less narcissistic as you age, and that's why you get that kind of correlation.

So, we don't really know whether people are becoming more and more narcissistic.

My feeling is they are

Tony, from your perspective, what's the most important change we've seen over the last decade?

Well, over the hundred episodes of the infinite monkey cage,

the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has crept up and up and up.

So, in 2013 at Moana Lua, it went past 400 ppm for the first time.

In 2016, in the middle of May, it passed 400 ppm at the South Pole.

So, this is having a profound effect on us and on future generations.

And that, we're never going to go back.

So, in 1962, when I was born, it was 320 ppm, 0.03%.

Now it's 0.04%.

We're back to numbers.

But those numbers will pan out to climate change.

And climate change will mean that we have to change the way we live.

And the interesting thing for me about the next hundred episodes is how much inconvenience can we put up with.

I've been a professor of plastics for 30 years.

And now I'm a pariah.

Everyone hates me.

You know, single-use Tony.

We want to get rid of him.

Although,

I have to say, the number of bags for life I've got, I'll have to be reincarnated 400 times.

And the beautiful thing is, the biggest car in the car park has the most bags for life, right?

You know, the most eco bags are always in there.

And you have to use an eco bag 147 times to get ahead of using a fresh polyethylene carrier bag every time.

Wow.

Richard, have we found out anything?

I mean, it seems there's quite a few books coming out now which are talking about how things like social media affect us.

And I think when, you know, Tony, when you're mentioning things like climate change, it's fascinating to see some of the opinions that get picked up by people, which don't really seem to be based on any grounding and evidence.

What are we learning about how we should be approaching ideas and the tricks that our own brains appear to play with us to make us, you know, I suppose, better human beings at judging ideas?

Well, I guess what social media means is that you can spread ideas and come into contact with more ideas.

And so, before, if you've got somebody with an idiotic idea, they could shout that out and it would sort of reach a relatively small number of people.

And now, of course, you can reach many, many people.

And so, I think there's just a need, and this is what psychology does brilliantly, to be very, very skeptical and very critical.

I've always been very skeptical my whole life, even when I was seven, I only thought I was six.

That's how

far back

it goes.

I loved your pause there, by the way.

You went, no, some of them are picking up on it.

No, it was

as many as I'd hope.

It turned into a war of attrition, actually.

And they won.

So I think there's a need for skepticism.

But the other problem, I think, psychologically is there's an enormous amount of comparison going on.

People are always comparing themselves to others.

People are posting how well they're doing, how beautiful they look, or whatever.

It gets back to the narcissism.

And we know that's one of the roots of unhappiness.

So comparing yourselves to others, particularly people who've got more in whatever it is, not a great idea.

So, I just think sort of dialing back on that would be a little bit better.

Katie, we've had positive and negative discussions on this panel.

Are you an optimist or a pessimist about the next 10 years or so?

Oh, well, I'm always naturally an optimist because I'm usually drunk.

But no, I am naturally optimistic, and I'm glad to be that way, especially in the current global climate.

But I feel quite optimistic, and one of the reasons I feel optimistic, and

one of the things that's been really important for me and a lot of people over the last last few years, and I hope it continues, is the acknowledgement of the role of non-white male scientists in the progress of humanity,

the contribution of women over the years.

You know, I watched a fantastic documentary about Cassini and all of the female engineers that worked on that, and all this stuff about getting women into STEM

and all the fantastic female scientists that I have found totally inspiring and fascinating over the years that I've been able to be part of this show.

And, you know, I'm not a scientist at all.

I wasn't taught science properly at school.

As I said, I wasn't taught maths at all till I was eight.

And so I really am very ignorant and I don't have a great knowledge base, but I've learnt so much about it.

And I think, you know, there's often this argument that the sort of, oh, we had to let the great men get on with science over the years, otherwise, we wouldn't be where we are now.

But I always think, but we'd be a lot further by now if we'd pulled everyone's knowledge throughout history.

We would be, I can't begin to imagine how much further we'd be by now in terms of our progress.

So I'm really excited by the fact that all these geniuses out there throughout history that have been ignored or dismissed or oppressed might now be able to join in and bring their knowledge and their genius insights.

And we can really start to motor now and get on with it.

I'm going to take the dangerous decision of throwing over to Ecclesiastical Corner without your chaperoning.

They've worn me out, Robin.

I had to come over here for a refuge.

Robin, I do need you to know something.

They couldn't be here without plastic because their dog collars are made from PVC.

They are PVC dog collar wearers.

Oh, one use, Tony.

How do you feel now, in terms of Percy, about the future and about, you know, does the book of Revelation change now that we have different levels of optimism, pessimism, and possibilism?

I owe a a great deal to the scientists because one called Brian Cox invited me to CERN and go and have a look at this extraordinary place, which I didn't understand at all before I went and understood a great deal less after I'd been there.

But one of the reasons I accepted the invitation from Brian was that it was in Geneva and I'd never been to Geneva.

And when we got to Geneva, I discovered that there was a new museum of the history of the Reformation.

Now, can you imagine anything more boring?

Actually, it was brilliant.

And I took Brian and some other people who we were together, a group of scientists and me, to look at this museum.

And I made the point going round that without the Reformation, we wouldn't be doing particle physics.

And without the Enlightenment, we wouldn't be having this program.

So all sorts of things, though they shudder and creak, move forward.

And that's now, in some religious circles, regarded in a rather bad light.

And people say, oh, you know, that's a kind of facile optimism.

I don't believe that.

I think that there's enormous progress for good.

And I see it every day in the council of state where I live with a lot of Muslim neighbours.

And every time something awful happens in London and I feel oppressed by what's happened and a bit helpless.

I go and talk to the neighbours, and somehow

huge things for good happen, partly because they listen to programmes like this.

Victor knows how to make sure he stays in the edit.

I'm very lucky.

I was born in 1962, same year as you, and that's made me a very, very lucky person.

I was born into a world where I had a fantastic education.

My parents paid for the first part of it, but the state paid for it thereafter.

I couldn't have had a better education.

My health was very well provided for, apart from the years of HIV and AIDS.

We got through that.

Gay man.

I couldn't have picked a better time to have been a gay man.

Unimaginable positive change in that.

But I also have to say that now I look at the generation after me and I think it's hard to sustain that feeling of optimism for them that has been sustained in my life.

I think there's stuff on the horizon.

Horrible populist politics, dark things arising in East and West, huge fundamental changes in the way we organise ourselves, the economy of the world, what we do to the planet, that make me that tinge that optimism I feel about the present moment with a little bit of prudent thoughtfulness.

We should have done you the other way round.

Then it would have ended up beat.

We have run out of time pretty much now.

So we ask the audience a question.

Normally it's the studio audience, but today it's the audience at home and we ask them which scientific advance do you hope becomes reality before the 200th episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage?

And these are the answers we've received.

Yeah, I've got one from Rhys Olwin, who said a giant space hooveta clear Pluto's orbit so it can be reinstated as a planet.

Oh, Neil will be on to that one.

The Steve Greenaway says the ability to scientifically explain what went wrong with Morrissey.

This one's complete nonsense from Dave Fleming.

It says the acceptance that chemistry is the most important scientific discipline.

Yes!

Do you know what?

I wouldn't have said that when we know a chemist is about to come out shortly with matches and fire.

This one just says, this is from Al.

It says, we hope they can identify the procrastination gene.

And

then we've got

Terry Cartmail would like a cure for laziness or lightsabers.

On second thoughts, lightsabers.

Vicki says, clones of Brian that never age.

Hang

on.

I'm thinking that Brian might have already secretly done that.

It would explain so much.

Hmm, so smooth.

So that's the end of the hundredth episode and on to the next hundred.

Yeah, but it can't be a hundredth episode, can it, on Radio 4 without a cake?

But because this is an infinite monkey cage cake, obviously ours will be an incendiary cake, highly flammable and potentially toxic and probably inedible.

But we're going to try and see what we can do with that by introducing our very special cake chemist for the day, Andrea Seller, and our beautiful cake wheelers, Brian Blessed and Eric Heidel.

I've had some bloody jobs in my time.

I've nothing about you, Brian.

Yeah, there we are.

Mack a bit, back a bit.

There we go.

We should sing happy birthday, shouldn't we?

Happy birthday to you!

Happy birthday to you!

Happy birthday, dear Fidel Monkey Cage!

Happy birthday to you!

Hip-hip!

Hip-hip!

Hip-hip!

Eric, is this the highlight of your career?

I've always wanted to bring on a birthday cake for you, Brian, now you're 100.

Oh, yes, and, you know, that painting is looking a little old in your attic, I think.

I think it is.

decaying away.

Andrea,

what?

What are you going to do?

Chemistry, chemistry.

So the challenge is how to keep this flammable but edible.

Tough challenge for a chemist.

What we've got is

a small palisade of fire.

So we've got little cups here, which have got a little bit of methanol in them, and each one has some salt.

And I think what that's going to do is it's going to link

my subject, chemistry, with the universe.

By salt, I know you.

You don't really mean just salt, do you?

No,

salt in the chemical metaphorical sense.

So, I mean, amongst other things, we've got a nice British element.

We've got strontium and potassium as well.

We've got one that

is poisonous.

We've got barium.

That should be fun.

We've got a little bit of cesium.

Can you tell us where that barium is, or have you just shoved them around so we're going to have cake rooms?

Around, around.

Watch, watch.

I think we may be able to see.

Well, let's have this final episode of Monkey Case has just become.

Shall we like?

Go for it.

It's the first time I've ever seen you back off anything, Brian.

Can I just say, it's never happened before.

I move it.

This beard could go up at any moment.

You've climbed Everest without oxygen.

Why are you cowering behind the desk?

Because of games.

And here come the colours.

Yes, here we go.

Here come the colours.

We've got the yellow of the sodium.

We've got the green of the copper.

The red of strontium is starting to appear.

appear, we've got the purple of the cesium and the lilac of potassium, and finally somewhere hidden in all there is the apple green of the barium.

And that's the and that's the poisonous one, okay?

That's the poisonous one.

And notice how it's it's drifting beautifully towards the icing, which

which may actually reach its melting point.

Have you got a wedding coming soon with a groom you don't like, then book Andreas so for your top cakes.

I think we're going to give this corner to Brian because he's indestructible.

The Rasputin of Everest.

So, that brings us to an end of this show.

Thank you so much.

That is an amazing cake.

My skin on that effigy looks so smooth, and I have so much hair.

I like it.

Yeah, so thank you to all our guests.

Welcome to the new series.

We're now going to eat this severely singed and poisonous cake.

But for now, I think it's probably a final from some of us.

Goodbye.

I find quite a bit of animate confusing today.

Now, Now science is all the rage.

The Afron collider is banging away.

Trying to guess our age.

A particle here, a particle there.

In this weird phantom world, which can be anywhere.

Which might just explain why I'm losing my health.

In the infinite monkey game.

You're listening to the 100th episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage, and wonderfully, you can also watch this special episode captured by the cameras on iPlayer throughout July or on your TV online.

And you'll be able to find out that rather than having a portrait in his attic, Brian actually merely has a radio for a co-host and he sucks the life force out.

Anyway.

Ah, we used to look the same age once, didn't we?

We did.

We did.

It's even worse actually, because you can press the red button on your TV remote control from any BBC channel at various times from Monday the 16th of July until Tuesday the 24th of July.

Various times?

Yeah, they weren't very specific.

This is the BBC.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.