The Infinite Monkey Cage USA Tour: Chicago

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Hello, I'm Robin Ince.

And I'm Brian Cox.

And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio.

Enjoy it.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome for the first time live in Chicago the Infinite Monkey Cage with Mr.

Robin Ince and Professor Brian Cox.

Hello!

We are very, this is the first time that we've done this show in Chicago.

We're very excited to be here.

And it's brilliant as well because one of our guests, who I won't say who, said that when they were saying to their girlfriend that they were going to do this show, she went,

and he went, it's quite good, it's on the radio in Britain and stuff and a podcast in the US.

It's with Robin Eats,

and Brian Cox.

And she went, really?

He's the one that's always smiling.

We are going to be talking today about the importance of the fossil record.

We're going to be talking about the new cutting-edge ideas within evolution, new theories, new ideas.

Indeed, what is the title of today's show, Professor Grancock?

It's Fossil Records and Other Archaeological Hits.

And so, please welcome our panel, who are Paul Serrino, Julia Sweeney, Peter Sagal, and Jerry Coyne.

We will give a little bit of the background of the people on this panel, though I'm sure you know them all anyway.

Paul Serino has been described as the Indiana Jones of paleontology,

which

mixing digging for fossils with battling the last remnants of the Third Reich.

And

his fossil discoveries include the Eoraptor and the Super Croc, not its current scientific name.

Julia Sweeney spent four seasons on in the cast of Saturday Live.

She'd appeared in Third Rock from the Sun, Pulp Fiction, Stuart Little, and been a consultant on sex in the city and desperate housewives, Robin's two favourite shows.

Peter Sagal is the host of National Public Radio's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, the author of the book of Vice, Naughty Things and How to Do Them, and finally, the first guest we have on who was directly involved in the film Dirty Dancing 2 Havana Knights,

which I didn't believe because I know the kind of thing that you do on National Public Radio, and we've now double-checked.

You really were involved.

We have been waiting for that for so long.

Yes.

And Jerry Coyne is an evolutionary biologist.

Yeah, like that ever happened.

And

come on, Jerry, explain the eye.

That's too difficult to exist, isn't it?

What you say that I'm related to East?

It's just some kind of theory, isn't it?

Oh, it's a load of old nonsense.

I can't believe that you made that up.

It's 6,000 years, isn't it?

Couldn't happen in that kind of time.

If anyone really believes that in the audience, then read a book, huh?

Could read Jerry's actually.

Is it a book called Why Evolution Is True?

And this is our panel.

People just don't like being reminded that they're related to yeast.

I don't know why.

So, the um Paul, actually, before we get started, this is one thing that I wanted to get clear before we actually record the show, which is I have a seven-year-old son, and my trouble is that I have you know that bit where you just know how out of fashion and out of step you are, where I keep bringing up dinosaurs, which it turns out no longer actually appeared to exist.

So, you end up with that kind of the brontosaurus, dad.

Yeah, come on, catch up.

So, can you just fill me on what dinosaurs I can no longer mention to my seven-year-old son?

You know, we sort of like to look at the tree of life as entire branches.

So we think they do exist still in the birds flying around us, but we call them birds.

So, I mean, they really do still exist.

They're descendants.

in every way, shape, and form.

I mean, their biology, their genes,

they really are still with us.

I mean, in fact, they're still swamping us.

They're beating mammals out species-wise.

Well, what about the actual,

you know, the Brontosaurus, that was the pin-up dinosaur in 1976.

Oh, yeah.

And then it turns out it was kind of an amalgam of a few different digs, possibly.

So those actual specific dinosaurs, which have been moved on to new...

So you've never made a mistake?

Oh, and I've met.

No.

I make them on more than a daily basis.

I have learnt nothing over 46 years.

But he didn't build a model of his mistake in natural history museums across the world.

Sit him down and rearrange him.

I think, you know, in fairness,

you work with fragments of time, and paleontologists have made a tremendous...

Actually, in the last 200 years, we have sketched out the history of life.

And you have some bumps in the way because you don't have the whole picture.

You have bits and pieces of it.

You put it together.

But we have

an incredible majesty of tapestry of life.

So what I would say is that a sauropod, the animal you're talking about, is the most successful, bar non, small at one end, small at the other end, big in the middle, four legs, the most successful plant-eating animal ever to exist on the face of the earth.

That kind of animal existed for 200 million years in that form.

A cow has been around for about maybe in the form of a cow, a couple million.

So it's a very successful animal, but it did get pinched out.

Yeah,

they left us.

Well, Jerry, we're going to be talking a lot about the theory of evolution.

And I thought just by way of introduction, if you could give us the one minute,

maybe two minutes, the two minute summary of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection to set the scene.

I like to think of it as having five parts.

Everybody thinks it's just evolution, but there's actually five parts to the theory.

The first is that evolution occurred.

That's genetic change in populations.

Second of all, that it was gradual, that it didn't happen instantaneously.

It takes hundreds and thousands of years to affect substantial change in plants plants or animals.

And it's populations that change, not individuals in evolution.

Part three is that besides change in a single lineage, there's splitting of lineages, which we call speciation, which over time ramifies into this branching tree of life, which is now bush of life with probably 7 million existing species and many, many more dead species.

Going back, part number four is if you trace those branches back, you'll eventually find nodes or limbs where they intersect with each other.

That's just the reverse side of number three.

So, the reverse side of splitting is common ancestry.

As Robin said, we're related to every other species that lives now and lived in the past.

And part number five is that the change, the evolutionary change that's resulted in the exquisite and admirable fit of organisms to their environment, the camel's hump, the thorns of the cactus, the wings of the feathers of the birds, as a result of the process called natural selection.

The so-called survival of the fitness.

Didn't you leave out Jesus?

I wondered how long it would take.

I put out a tweet when I was doing this.

I said, I'm so proud to be doing Infinite Monkey Cage representing my fellow young earth creationists.

And I got a good day of panic out of Jerry Coyne.

He was on his blog.

He says, I don't know.

He said this.

Could this be true?

I guess it's possible, but he went to Harvard.

That must be, maybe Harvard sucks now.

I don't know.

I enjoyed it.

I did some frantic Wikipedia getting for that three out.

Julie, I was going to ask you, why do you think that this level of controversy, when we think of all the science, you know, no one says, you know, the Higgs field, I won't have my child taught about the Higgs field or the Higgs field.

You've got to teach the controversy about the Higgs boson.

And yet with evolution, this...

There are other theories of electroweak symmetry breaking, present them all.

I don't know.

I guess I think that evolution, I think that we're these animals that exist in communities that tell stories and we make sense of the world by telling stories and the fact of evolution makes us so vulnerable and so out of control and I think that is just too much for many human psychology to take in who have to rely on a community which is strengthened by rituals, which is reinforced by religion.

I think that just upsets that so much.

But is it about, I mean, you know, I've got close relatives who I consider to be far worse than chimpanzees, bonobos.

You know, if I had a choice between hanging around with some bonobos and

but this idea of relatives groom you the uh

their long tentacled hands they don't come they're thetans you see

do you know what bonobos are famous for as well uh well i know some of the things they're famous for but do remember we're broadcast at four thirty in the i'm just wondering why you want to hang around with them rather than your relatives what was i was explaining this in in in the green room beforehand that bonobos are known for uh kind of being sexually they they've they've replaced replaced you know a lot of bickering.

Sometimes, rather than bickering, they just go, Oh, let's not just bicker, let's just have sex.

But they also have, as far as I recently read, they're the only ape with a very specific fashion sense, where if they find a dead rat or a lizard, they will place it on their heads and then parade around each other, going, It's all the rage, you know.

And I think that's so that it's my fashion sense, obviously, that lures me towards the bonobos, as you can see.

But no, I wondered: is there something in that?

is is the the idea you know we think of charlton essent get your head hands off me you dirty ape you know this idea of this this what why are people repulsed some people by this idea of being linked to you know that grand history of of the ape i think it's because we have this illusion that we have self-control and that we're controlling ourselves and actually that isn't true and we we don't assign free will to animals we can see that they're more instinct and how they behave and we don't like to think of ourselves that way i I think that's a very, very deeply upsetting thing.

I mean in a word for me,

it's ego.

Okay, it's anthropocentrism.

We can't see ourselves in the fabric of history of life.

We separate ourselves.

We are at the top.

When you look at evolution, we desperately want to see a Victorian logic in it, that we are the ultimate end product if we're going to accept it in the first place.

And we're looking for signals that look like the signals that we're making because obviously this is the pinnacle of evolution and you know to realize that you are a tiny tiny branch almost a branch that almost went extinct we wouldn't have been sending out signals had there just been

not the lifeline of a bottleneck or two to allow humanity to expand across the globe I mean we wouldn't be here and I think that is truly at the heart of it I mean it's at the heart of religious cosmology that puts us in the center of things.

And we're constantly, even in dinosaurs, we reconstructed dinosaurs in our own image, the way they stood, not like birds.

I mean, it's a constant thing in science to take ourselves out of the center.

So the standard kind of the Jurassic Park vision of a T-Rex then,

so that's not perhaps quite right?

No, I think Jurassic, we've come a long way, but you go back to the way that T-Rex was mounted in museums until very recently.

It didn't look like a bird.

I didn't know that.

It looked like a human or a kangaroo or something that we find familiar, which is basically us.

I went to the National History Museum in New York for the first time in 20, 30 years.

And in the intervening time, while I was away, they changed the T-Rex.

He used to be, he used to stand there like Godzilla with his tail on the ground.

And now he's, as you say, sort of canted forward like the dinosaur in Jurassic Park.

And I was a little miffed.

Because he's sort of more noble, right?

I mean, you know, my imaginary friend Tyrannosaurus when I was a small child, who liked me.

It was very sad because he tried to lean down and try to pet my head and he couldn't because he's anxious.

But now he's sort of this weird sort of symmetrical predator and I didn't care for it.

But Paul, so this is primarily a show about complex life.

It's about fossils.

So life began four billion years ago.

When do we see the first

fossils, the first evidence of complexity?

Well, you know, like there's a whole series of complex chemical reactions.

Even that leaves a fossil record.

And so the earliest sediments, about 3.8 billion years ago, people are studying these to try to look for those chemical reactions.

Then we find sort of shadows of the first cells.

They don't have nuclei, but you can sort of see in chert complex quart crystals.

You can sort of see these traces of these first cells.

And so we do have a fossil record that goes pretty much back to the, almost to the origin of life, but you know,

it's sort of a shadow of what was going on.

We have pieces of it.

And these are the stromatolites and these stromatolites.

Stromatolites are even later.

Stromatites are, that's really solid evidence.

You can go and see them alive today in Australia, and you can see something very similar dating back, you know, back to the...

I've read about these sort of multiple billion year form of life that still exists.

How did it last so long without change?

Here in America, that only happens if you're on NPR.

Simply put, no, it's one of Jerry's points.

Jerry pointed out that evolution is not just change over time.

It's diversification, it's branching.

And you have this incredible branching, and if you look at, if you put humans at one end, you can put any species you want at one end, let's just put humans at one end, it's way out.

And not all this other stuff disappeared.

Some of it's with us today.

I mean, yes, a lot of people think that evolution is a law in the sense that things have to evolve, but that's nowhere in the theory of evolution.

If you live in an environment, as these stromatolites probably do, high, salty water, and natural selection is constant over billions of years, then there's no reason to change.

I have relatives in Spokane, Washington.

They have not changed at all.

If it totally works for them, their whole worldview, there's no reason to change.

Jerry, when do we see the first evidence of what we might refer to as complex life?

So we're talking now with stromatolite single-celled things in the oceans.

As you said, maybe not much.

Yeah, well it depends on what you mean by complex.

And Paul can correct me.

Well, multicellular.

Well, we see the first true cells about 1.5 billion years ago.

So I think multicellular organisms would be roughly a billion years, is that?

Yeah, it's sort of sort of agglomerations of cells.

It's sort of like a half-life to the major steps, you know, to get a a a cell.

It took about half of the time to today from the origin of life.

To get a nucleus inside the cell, about half of that time.

It's it's accelerating to get those nucleated cells to work together into a multicellular organ about half that time.

to get this explosion of life about half of that time.

It's almost like it's accelerating.

So, just to map this out, we've got four billion years ago, probably the origin of life, some kind of chemical reactions.

About two billion years ago, you start seeing cells,

about a billion, you start seeing the cell nucleus or something maybe around there.

Yeah.

And then 500 million years ago or so,

complexity.

A bit more than that, yeah.

When did sex start?

That's what I want to know.

It's a good question, isn't it?

Why does it end?

In about three hours.

Speak for yourself.

Jerry, it's a good question.

The origin of sex.

Jerry, come on.

It's one of the great evolutionary stuff.

I mean, we have fossil evidence of sexually reproducing single-celled organisms, I think,

about a billion years ago.

I mean, it wasn't fun or anything, as Peter was referring to.

A billion years ago, that's when the nucleus found itself.

But it may be worth defining what...

I mean, it sounds like a ridiculous question, but it may be worth defining what sex is.

It's basically combining your genes with that of another individual to produce a third individual.

So it's the process of what we call meiosis or cell division.

So what happens when you form sperm and eggs and then join them?

And there's like a, so that's the sort of formal definition of that.

Let me try.

Brian,

when a phytoplankton and another love each other very much.

I think we're talking about the rest of the world.

Actually, it would have to be post-phytoplankton, right?

It would be like...

I mean, I actually read, because I read about this stuff.

I'm very much like Robin, as I know, just enough to prove that I don't know anything.

Although I can pronounce coelacanth.

You did?

Wow, that's good.

Thank you very much.

I have read that nobody really knows why sex evolved and why it has been so persistent across all of the world.

That's true.

This is one of the biggest mysteries of evolution.

Why sex?

I mean, if I were to butt off little Jerry's...

without having to mix my genes with those of a female, I could produce twice as many copies of my genes.

And they wouldn't be a big variety.

It doesn't, but see, that doesn't, a variety isn't that important in this sort of issue.

So there's a two-fold cost of combining your genes with somebody else, and there's no known benefit that can make up for the fact that you lose half of your genes on the panoply of evolution by having sex.

And nobody really understands why we do this.

I mean, there's lots of theories, you know.

We're trying to keep.

No, that's exactly what my ex-wife said.

So, Robin, you asked me what are the mysteries of evolution.

That's one of the biggest ones.

Nobody has come close to a convincing explanation of why any animal has sex at all.

I'm still throwing, but just the way that you went, if I could bud off Little Jerry, and then

I could see that David Cronenberg movie, and then I could kind of also see that those kind of down times in the lab, you think, I'll just return to that budding off experiment.

We were also talking about the speed of evolutionary change.

Now, in your TED talk, Paul, you talked about the fact that the speed of change in dinosaurs was, is it right, ten times slower than mammals?

Would that be right, in terms of the maximum size, for instance, of dinosaurs took 10 times longer than the maximizing

of mammals?

And I'm intrigued by

what the reasons are, or presumed reasons so far of that.

Yeah,

I posited that.

I believe it's true.

It's never actually been thoroughly tested.

since I posited that in science.

But basically, when you just look at the size, that's the easiest thing to measure.

Yeah.

It takes 10 times as long for this animal group to reach its maximum body size.

Mammals appear on the scene when dinosaurs went extinct.

Of course, they were around before, but mammals as we know them today exploded on the scene and reached the size of blue whales and elephants, the largest carnivores and herbivores within a handful of million years.

And you could look at other things too.

The diversity of things we call orders of mammals.

They were all there to 10 million years.

Dinosaurs, no.

You've got, I mean, birds evolved halfway through after 50 million years.

So that's a real big body size

and body form change.

So it's almost like, this is what actually attracted me to study dinosaurs.

It's not that they're lovable, like Barney.

But they're...

Why did you look at me?

I know, you said, you're the

dinosaur friend in childhood.

He tortured me about Barney on an earlier stage.

I think you've taken the role of the functive trivia on the corner there.

I understand what your role is here.

Go on.

It's just that they're so different than the next group that took over in our body size range land.

And that brings me back to the very opening question as to why we don't hear intelligent life.

If you think,

and we are so inclined to think egotistically, that we are obviously so much the center of attention, the center of the universe, that somewhere else we have to have evolved again.

It's almost like your Shakespeare and the monkey question.

Then,

you know, it makes rational sense that

we're just going to hear tomorrow from these human things.

And of course, every science show has something that looks sort of like a human when you get to the Klingons and beyond.

And in fact, we are the improbable end species of some incredible contingent history that is, in fact, four billion years long.

That's an idea.

That raises the question,

if the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out probably by a meteorite strike 60 million years ago or so,

could you have imagined, is there something in the body plan of dinosaurs that was

a dead end in terms of intelligence?

Is it possible to speculate

how that could have unfolded?

Of course, we don't know.

Yeah, well, we do know what would have happened if they didn't go extinct, because they actually didn't go extinct.

There's nine, 10,000 species of birds with us today, and actually many of them, this is actually a really interesting question you're asking.

So

they actually have enlarged the brain, very much like

mammals and primates in particular.

They developed a voice box called the syrinx.

There are some people in my department studying the linguistics of these dinosaurs.

They actually have dialects, some of them, indigo buntings, and so on.

And they actually walk on two legs.

They're bipedal.

They're really intelligent.

So, why haven't they developed?

They're on the edge.

Some of them use tools.

They're on the edge of being

human, if you will, in some of these characteristics.

And what do they do?

They're just happy being into Go Buntings.

And they didn't develop civilizations.

They could have taken over if we didn't keep distracting them with crackers.

They're plotting

their revolution from their cages, and we say, want a cracker, and they go, woo!

And that's it.

All of the thoughts fly the way.

That's true of quite a few humans if we just replace cracker with with television.

That's true.

But is there any particular difference?

Let's go back to the first, the hominin in evolution in Africa.

So you get Australopithecus, an upright chimpanzee, essentially, about four million years ago.

Is there a great deal of intellectual difference between one of our earliest ancestors, or upright ancestors, and a crow or an intelligent bird?

Do we know about the relative levels of intelligence?

I think that's a real difficult thing to measure.

Exactly what you mean by intelligence.

So they've tried to actually work up lots of experimental science over this crows in particular particularly sharp they've tried to they they've they've got various levels of of logic in solving problems from these flying dinosaurs that are actually quite sophisticated you know you have something inside a contraption you have to really work out a logical scheme to go and get this thing and they are capable of doing it so the question is why did it stop at just being a crow and not something more.

That's one question.

Another question, you realize that, as Jerry said, when you're doing something successful, you don't necessarily need to evolve.

And everything doesn't evolve.

You know, is a human condition actually...

You give four billion years and you're going to get a human?

In fact, that's where the dinosaur world is so interesting to me as a scientist.

Because you don't have anything that looks like a gorilla in a tree.

You don't have anything that looks like a wallaby or a wolverine digging.

You don't have anything that looks like a sea cow.

They barely touch the water.

They had the world at their feet for three times as long as mammals.

And you don't see these niches, as it were, filled necessarily by evolution.

Well as we know, brain material is expensive.

That's one of these theories that you don't need to be smarter if getting smarter actually causes you to reduce your reproductive success.

And building brain material requires a lot of food and a lot of metabolism.

I had a skunk once, which is an anecdote related to that, a pet skunk.

and it was really dim.

I mean,

it was like a

scale of skunk intelligence.

Not on the scale of any intelligence.

All I could do was find food and sit in my lap and find a slitter box.

I loved it, but I took it to the vet once, and I, you know, the vet was examining it, and I said, well, you know, I really like this animal, but, you know, Lord, is he dumb?

And the vet fixed me with this withering glance and said, dumb?

He's perfectly adapted to being a skunk.

And yes, I couldn't do what the skunk was doing.

Well, we've skipped over an important question in this etiquette.

Why did you acquire a skunk for a pet?

I'm a biologist.

I don't know if I need to say anything more about that.

You're going to piss it off.

No, they're dissented.

Oh, I don't know.

But they don't know that.

They still try to squirt you.

And that's how I became, that's how I have learned to avoid being squirted in the wild.

You're also a great fruit fly aficionado.

Yes.

Sarah Palin's favorites.

What is it about biologists and fruit flies?

You know why we use them so much?

If I first had said I missed I wasn't introduced as the Indiana Jones of fruit flies.

We can put it in later.

Fruit flies are

the complex organisms Sinoquinon for genetics for a number of reasons.

The main one is that they breed very quickly.

So I can go from one adult fly through the egg, through the larva, which people call maggots, to another adult in about 10 days.

So in a year, I could have 30 generations.

So you can do all kinds of experiments with them.

They require little tending.

I've managed to rear flies on wonderbread in the laboratory, just wonderbread and water, in response to some of my hippie friends that said that the bread was deadly.

And because of that, it was just an accident that they became adopted as a genetic organism.

Somebody discovered that they breed well in the lab and they have a short generation time.

And then everything mushroom from that.

We studied their genes, we studied their chromosomes.

They have these cool chromosomes that are banded so you can actually look along the chromosome and see where the rearrangements occur.

And from that they became the basis of complex organismal genetics.

So all genetics basically, well Mendel started in peas of course, but the major things that we know about genetics, like the genes from different organisms recombine, that they're arrayed on chromosomes in a linear array.

That was all discovered about the turn of the 20th century by in fruit flies, by Thomas Hunt Morgan.

And he won the Nobel Prize for that work.

And I suppose it's a very beautiful example of the fact that all life is extremely similar genetically, that you can learn about all life from the fruit fruit fly.

How similar?

You get these numbers banded around saying I'm

98% the same as a chimpanzee, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So how similar am I to a fruit fly?

Again, I would not want to answer that question.

I mean, even the 98% similarity to chimpanzee number is bogus because it's based on the number of gene differences instead of the number of DNA sequence differences.

So,

I mean, I don't even know the percentage of some.

I'm going to say something.

Yeah.

In the UK, you get overdubbed and you become really authoritative.

27%.

Are you sure, Jerry?

Anything that I say is going to be held against me by creationists in the future.

You've already burnt that bridge.

Yeah, I know, but no, no.

I mean, as a scientist, I don't want to venture a guess.

Peter,

what's interesting, I think, because

for a UK-based audience, if you're listening to this on the BBC,

the war,

the fear, almost, as Jerry expressed it, of a scientist making one small error, perhaps a grammatical error almost, in what they're speaking about.

And then you've got this bunch of people, these creationists who jump there.

In the US, that is a far bigger issue than it is in the UK.

I think it's because we speak with flat vowels and that makes us dumb.

One of the things that uh I'm actually very interested in is uh conspiracy theories, which is a way of thinking in which you can deny that something is obviously true is true, and you substitute your own judgment for it, and you have to come up with a reason why that's the case.

And there are conspiracy theories of all kinds of things.

In fact, you joked earlier, Brian, about like no one sits around and argues about electromagnetic forces or something.

Actually, they do.

There are people who spend all day trying to disprove Einstein's theory of relativity.

They're online.

They're saying it can't be true because it bothers them somehow.

Maybe because it's not, I don't know, easily comprehensible or because they want to go fly to Alpha Centauri and they're sad that they can't.

I certainly fit in that category.

Why, though, is creationism and denial of evolution that conspiracy theory that all these people, you guys, are conspiring to advance Darwinism for your own benefit.

Why is that so prevalent?

And I actually think it relates to the phenomenon of alien cattle mutilation.

I don't know if you guys even remember this, but back in the day in the 80s, 70s, alien cattle mutilation was a thing.

People were like, what happened to these cows?

And who mutilated them?

Was it aliens?

Was it the government?

There was even a bad movie made about it at one point.

And a journalist named, I think it was Paul Hitt for Harper's went and investigated the phenomenon.

And he did two things.

First of all, he went out with some farmers, and they actually talked to some biologists and they observed a dead cow that had died of whatever cows die of.

And they watched as it naturally decomposed and there were some parasites and some insects that created basically geometrical holes in its carcass that looked like somebody had done it on purpose.

Okay, so they discovered what caused this phenomenon.

Then she found, or rather he found, that there was one woman who basically sold books, lectures, tapes about alien cattle mutilation to a credulous audience and made about $60,000 a year.

And he said, that $60,000 a year explains alien cattle mutilation.

My point is, is that in addition to everything that everybody said earlier about why divine creation is so compelling and why we don't want to admit to ourselves that we're just animals and that we've evolved more or less at random, I know it's not random, but without a guiding force,

is is that you can make a lot of money, I think,

selling that myth to a certain part of the population that wants to hear it.

There is a creation museum, I believe, in Kentucky where you can go, I'm sure you know about this, God bless America, you can go and you can see a model of a dinosaur with a saddle on it.

Yeah, but

Peter, that works only because, as you said, people want to hear it.

So why do people want to hear it?

I think that there's something that's that's fundamental about the human condition, which is to wonder.

We wonder about things.

And the wonder of a scientist, like Jerry about his Josafa, is that there's always going to be a tomorrow, and your students are going to discover things, and there's no end to it.

Now, some people find that basic human condition, which is to wonder, that separates us.

as sentient beings from everything else, about drifting continents and things that we can't touch.

And this is absolutely uniquely human.

Some people find that basic idea frightening.

They want to know a specific answer to wonder about something and not know is not just, it's not a good thing.

They want a very defined world for their mores, for their cosmology, where they came from, where they're going, where they're going after death.

And I think this is a, maybe you can cast it in a positive light.

It's not necessarily a negative thing.

But this is what what I think fundamentally drives people to

cosmologies, to religion, to

not wanting a science that wonders.

And a science that consistently changes, I suppose, with the future.

Well, some of it does.

I mean, I'd like to dispel the myth that science is completely up for grabs, because there are some things like DNA being a double-stranded molecule, the formula of water being H2O, that you and I know are not going to change.

We bet our fortunes on that over the next hundred thousand years that that's

I mean in physics, which is often seen as this the most reductionist and precise of sciences in some ways, that we have no theories

other than perhaps, perhaps the so-called second law of thermodynamics that says that things tend to disorder.

But apart from that, we know that general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravitation, is not complete.

We're sure that needs modifying.

We know that quantum theory is not complete, and we're fairly sure that we need to have some kind of quantum theory of gravity.

So we know that there are essentially no theories that we would say are absolutely right.

Would you say though that

the framework of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, that framework must be right in the way that the second law of thermodynamics, it's the central dogma of biology, I suppose.

How convinced are you that the second law of thermodynamics can never ever be overturned?

I'm very, very convinced.

Yeah, well, maybe, let me say I'm a little less convinced, although I'm still highly convinced that evolution is true, but there are still, I mean, like all theories, there's still potential observations that could overturn it.

For example,

if you found

Jurassic rabbit.

Yeah, that's the JBS Haldane, the paleontologist said, a Precambrian rabbit that would do it.

But if you find an organism with a feature that's only useful to members of another species, like a tiger that could only suckle warthogs, for example.

I mean, evolution can't do stuff like that.

It does things for the good of the individual, not for helping another species.

So, you know, I would bet my life,

although I don't know what I have bet in return, but I would bet my fortune certainly on the fact that evolution is true and that we won't see any major revisions in the next century.

But it's possible.

On the other hand,

I would maintain that an absolute truth is that the formula of water is H2O, and that's not going to change.

I'm so excited by your laboratory now.

Half the time you're trying to create these things that bud off you, now you're working on tiger-suckling warthogs.

This is cutting-edge science.

This is if I don't see one of those walking along the lake tomorrow, I'm going to be very annoyed.

Skiing across there, you probably made some kind of wide pause for it as well.

There's a very interesting thing that you said that you touched on, though.

The warthog and the tiger, yeah, it's suckling.

It's brilliant.

Throwing a bonobo as well.

Whoa, that's a a film, that's gonna be 50 shades of grey.

But it adjusts it to what you both were saying, both Paul and Jerry, you're explaining the mindset of the scientists and the fact, as you said, that there's a sense of wonder and a delight at the unknown.

And I wondered, as you said, you could imagine, you could just imagine one day, although it's extremely unlikely, that you'd see the thing that showed that there is significantly more to life on Earth than just evolution.

Would you be delighted about that?

Would you think that

because I would in physics, as a physicist, if someone showed me tomorrow that actually Einstein's theory of general relativity was absolutely, absolutely flat wrong,

I would be elated with that knowledge.

How much of your career have you invested in Einstein's theory of relativity?

Well, no, but

would you be elated at the parallel?

Well, see, that puts one on a bind because I've spent my whole life teaching the theory of evolution.

Somebody comes along and makes an observation that shows it's wrong.

Yeah, I'd say, wow, I'd be thrilled.

But then I'd realize, Jesus, I've wasted 50 years.

That's what people who are religious feel.

They've invested so much of their lives into this belief system.

It's very upsetting to think about it.

I'm not saying that I would deny the truth.

I'm just saying that I would feel some ambiguous feelings if my life's work had been overturned.

Observation is interesting there, because often I find as a...

as a scientist, you see, I don't really understand the thought process that would be

anti-science or anti-apart of science or anti-I absolutely get it.

I think it's so far apart.

I think religion has been so useful to people.

It's been so useful to the history of our evolution as a species.

Like it's absolutely an adaptive thing.

Like coming together, you know, if you're running into battle against another tribe and you think that you're going to live after you die, that is a highly successful worldview to have.

I mean, and there was much longer period of time where we were doing that than when we were understanding the basics of science or how to find out things were true.

I don't even think it's about,

from my perspective,

and I'm an atheist and I accept a scientific worldview, but I'm very sympathetic to people who are religious because I don't think it's even about science to them.

I think even the people who write to us and tell us we're going to burn in hell is a very tiny group of people.

Most people are just trying to get through their lives, and the religion is making them have a community.

It's often associated with their ethnic group.

It redefines who they are.

They create a community.

It creates an insurance policy when things go wrong.

It gives them an ideology, a reason to run and run into battle and get killed, or to put your life on the line.

It's absolutely fantastic for that.

And so sometimes I think that scientists don't give religion enough respect for getting us so far.

Now, it's wrong.

I mean,

it's not right.

But it is,

I think, I like to think of religion in the best sense as sort of a beautiful kind of art that humans came up with to deal with answers they couldn't understand and to create a community that is always, that's how we evolved in community with each other.

And it really helps with that.

And it's just obvious that it helps with that.

Well, Julie, could I ask you then, do you think, if suppose humans hadn't invented religion and they lived their lives in a humanistic way from the very beginning, and things they didn't understand, like lightning, they just say, well, I don't understand that.

Do you think that we'd be much worse off now if it hadn't happened?

Because that's what the argument you're making, basically.

That's a really good question.

I mean, obviously, I wish that was the truth.

I wish that people said, Yeah, I don't really know why there's lightning, and we'll have to wait until we develop a science so that we understand why there's a lot of things.

You're imagining an ancient tribesman somewhere in the Paleolithic saying, Ask your mother.

Isn't it true, though, that I have read that

every human society ever discovered by anthropologists has a religion, that it is a universal human trait.

So much so that some people think that it is an evolved trait to be religiously credulous.

Any questions?

Well, you know, I think that

it's as natural to wonder as to postulate an explanation.

And so if that explanation takes a scientific form, that's one way.

If it takes more of a story,

That's another, a cosmology of sorts.

And the variety

is quite extreme and the variety that we're talking about in contention with the theory of evolution is one very very particular one and as you say it's it's really amplified by by Protestant fundamentalists more than their

their percentage and and and and numbers would would I think justify in the United States but

you know for me the other thing that's difficult about people for people to understand about evolution or accept about evolution is that most of it is an it is an historical process.

And so where Jerry can actually observe aspects of evolution in his lab, most of what we're talking about that bothers people is on a time course that we can't experience in our lifetime.

We have to, but leaves a big trail.

Jerry talked about the hierarchy that we, the legacy that evolution has left when you go and look at the genes, you find group within group within group.

But it's still an historical process.

We can't actually experience

it.

I think the sheer time scales,

understanding what it means to say 100 million years or a billion years, do you think that's the half of the problem?

That's part of the themes.

When you look at it from a historical point of view, we talk about the theory of history, you can talk about a chronology, which is simply this happened, there was a Cambrian explosion, then we saw some dinosaurs, and then you can get at some of the other things that the theory of evolution actually posits, like natural selection.

That's why it happened.

Why did the Romans beat these other people?

Why did they attack them?

Other than we found their weapons and they were there.

And so what we try and do is we try and separate the chronology and we say dinosaurs happen here, here, here, and then we muse about the more complex things, which is why.

Now, the fact that this happened and that you have

lots of evidence for evolution is so monstrously huge.

And then when you find, find,

you won't find a rabbit.

But what you will find is this in evolution.

If evolution occurred, as Jerry said, perfectly, a change occurred.

It was recorded, preferably in a fossil, and then another change occurred, and it was recorded, and another change occurred.

But what happens, it's more interesting than that, sometimes the changes reverse, and sometimes they evolve in parallel.

And so we used to have a tail.

We still do.

It's very short.

Usually it doesn't stick out.

But we had lots of evidence that we had a tail and now it's gone and so that's what we call a reversal so if it was absolutely perfect

it would be laid out for people to see a little bit better but it's also an history it's it's like it's like someone discussing why what happened in in in in to to to the Greeks and Helena and all all this other stuff.

It's an historical process that we can't actually observe directly.

And you're going to have lots of different opinions.

Just a quick question.

Talking about common ancestors, so if we trace back, how far would I have to go back to meet my,

for me to have a common ancestor with the dinosaurs?

Where would that be?

Well the common ancestor with the dinosaurs,

that would be way back into the Paleozoic, probably about 400 million years ago.

And, you know,

everything would have had, you know, tetrapod would have had four legs, committed four legs, it would have had a limited number of digits.

And

it would have a head, it would have a tail,

it would have the basics of an egg.

We would call this an amniote.

It's got a lot of basic features.

All the animals that lay eggs, and including us, that have placentas, have a lot of common genes.

That's what it would look like.

It would be back in the Paleozoic.

I'm trying to imagine a tetrapod with your hair, Brian.

I actually want to say something in defense of American stupidity, which I make my living making fun of.

And maybe this goes to your question earlier, is like, why is fighting evolution and denying it and being aggressively creationist such a big thing here?

We remember that American culture or society was founded by the Puritans, who you guys threw out

because they were so obnoxiously wrong.

I think they left in a huff.

They did.

Well, yeah.

And their attitude was, to hell with you.

We are so certain of our opinions that we are going to travel this ocean in these little rickety wooden boats and starve to death just so we have the right to be wrong.

And I mean, they were right, but there's something about the American character and experience which is you have the right to,

if I'm sitting here with my society and you all think I'm an idiot, I have the right to go over there and find like-minded idiots and set up my own town.

Here in the Midwest, there are many places, like New Harmony, Indiana, which were set up as utopian communities for these people from the East Coast at this time in the early 19th century, who felt that, I mean, the Mormons, of course, are really the last,

obviously the most successful remnant of this.

They were supposed to be in St.

Louis and Missouri before they got kicked out of there.

That said,

we believe something profoundly different, and you tell us we're wrong, well, we think you're wrong, and we're going to go over there and get away from you.

And that freedom to be profoundly stupid is

really an important part of the American creed.

It's why we beat you.

Well,

on the suckling tigers, I've got no idea why people have issues with evolutionary biology.

We are going to end this is the first time that we've ever recorded it in Chicago.

I hope you've enjoyed it.

I'm very pleased that we had such a great panel answering a really diverse selection of questions.

So please come out a big round of applause for Paul Torino, Julia Sweeney, Peter Sagal, Jerry Coyne.

Thank you very much for listening.

We hope to see you again in Chicago for Branch College today.

Good night today.

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.

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