Speaker 1: Hi, it's your eccentric but quiet neighbor Ali Ward. Hey,
Speaker 1: how did you get here? Why don't we have flippers?
Speaker 1: He is a fly, my cousin?
Speaker 2: What is life?
Speaker 1: Welcome to Evolutionary Biology. Now this is a special episode
Speaker 1: because frankly, I thought it was lost to extinction. I
Speaker 1: thought it was plum deed. I recorded it with an
Speaker 1: evolutionary biologist who works at the same lab at Occidental
Speaker 1: College as our ornithologist from a few episodes back so
Speaker 1: late last year, before I had better microphones or necessarily
Speaker 1: a good interview rhythm down, I visited with this evolutionary
Speaker 1: biologist and before the tape rolled, we talked about birds
Speaker 1: and our upcoming holiday plans, and then we sat down
Speaker 1: to chat about natural selection. And then I lost the
Speaker 1: file for like a lot of months, and I found
Speaker 1: it on a drive recently, and oh, oh so exciting.
Speaker 1: It was like encountering a Dodo bird in a PF
Speaker 1: Chinks parking lot. I was estatic. Another thing that's exciting.
Speaker 1: Your support. Thank you to everyone funding the production of
Speaker 1: this podcast on Patreon dot com slash ologies. It's run
Speaker 1: completely independently, and your pledges for as Lila as twenty
Speaker 1: five cents an episode. Totally keep it going. I'm able
Speaker 1: to pay an amazing editor What's Up Steven to cut
Speaker 1: it all up and put it back together. You can
Speaker 1: also support just by getting some sweet sweet Ologies merch.
Speaker 1: Get a shirt for twenty bucks on ologiesmerch dot com
Speaker 1: in whatever color you want. Or you can support for free,
Speaker 1: no money, just by telling a friend. Or you can
Speaker 1: tweet about it or subscribe on iTunes.
Speaker 2: Are you subscribed?
Speaker 1: Go check? Sometimes Apple just unsubscribes me from things. And
Speaker 1: it also helps so much to rate or to leave
Speaker 1: a review for the podcast. This week, Ologies was number
Speaker 1: twenty in science podcasts on iTunes. Sure we had some
Speaker 1: ghost podcasts to beat, but number twenty is thrilling as
Speaker 1: hell for an indie podcasts. So I creep all your reviews.
Speaker 1: I read them all. I read every single one of them.
Speaker 1: This one was really kind. Big zo Zoo says, you
Speaker 1: are the podcast I'd want to buy a drink for
Speaker 1: in a classy bar. The music is low, the mood
Speaker 1: is right. I buy you the top shelf beverage of
Speaker 1: your choice, and then you delight me with the most
Speaker 1: interesting facts my brain could possibly absorb with gin. Thanks
Speaker 1: for rocking mapod socks on the rocks. Well, you're welcome,
Speaker 1: Big Zazoo. I'm trying to think what drink I would
Speaker 1: order top shelf at a classy bar, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: do they have wine spritzers?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Okay, evolutionary biology, in this episode you're gonna pick up
Speaker 1: some sweetest definitions like taxonomy, what is it, epigenetics, genetic drift, bilogyny,
Speaker 1: what is all this mouth salad? And you'll learn about
Speaker 1: some crowd sourced cancer fixers, some super erotic whales, some
Speaker 1: finch gossip relationship goals, and about how Charles Darwin had
Speaker 1: a wonderful but super shitty but also wonderful life that
Speaker 1: involved probably a lot of bad toilet experiences and a
Speaker 1: lust for a family member who was it. So please
Speaker 1: enjoy this chat that essentially boils down to our mutations
Speaker 1: are our strengths and adaptability.
Speaker 2: Is a virtue.
Speaker 1: Meet evolutionary biologist John McCormick.
Speaker 2: Okay, no, that works.
Speaker 1: So are you and by trade, are you an evolutionary biologist?
Speaker 4: Yes, that's kind of wear a couple of different hats.
Speaker 4: I'd say evolutionary biologist is probab Probably the broadest one.
Speaker 4: Sometimes I consider myself an ornithologist as well, I should
Speaker 4: hope so as the curator of a bird collection.
Speaker 1: So do you would you say that you have like
Speaker 1: genus and species on the brain a lot?
Speaker 4: Oh, yeah, h yeah, all the time, because that's a
Speaker 4: lot of what we do here with a with a
Speaker 4: specimen collection, just you know, naming the basic units of biodiversity.
Speaker 1: Do you remember as a kid in class learning the like,
Speaker 1: what was it, King Philip?
Speaker 5: What is the Yeah?
Speaker 1: What is it again?
Speaker 5: Well, I can't remember it.
Speaker 1: Let's talk taxonomy, which is how science organizes things. So
Speaker 1: you may have learned that plants and fungi and animals
Speaker 1: are classified into domain, kingdom, class, order, family, genus, and species.
Speaker 1: And you're like, wow, Alli, that is amazing. How did
Speaker 1: you memorize that you were a genius? And I know
Speaker 1: that's what you're thinking now. The mnemonic device is clutch here.
Speaker 1: I never remember the new device for this. I remember
Speaker 1: we learned one. I think it was like, dear King
Speaker 1: Philip came over from Germany. Comma, So, which is weird?
Speaker 1: Who ends? What's the so about? What's the rest of
Speaker 1: the story? Anyway, I never remembered it. Dear King Philip
Speaker 1: came over for grape soda is another way to remember kingdom, class, order, family, genus, species.
Speaker 1: Another alternative you could use is dickish Ken poured coffee
Speaker 1: on Fran's good shirt, fuck off Ken, or dang kinky
Speaker 1: people come over for group sex, which is apparently what
Speaker 1: some biology teachers use. They're like, they know marketing, they
Speaker 1: know how to get your attention. Don't kick people coming
Speaker 1: from Goldman Sachs is another alternative, depending on how your
Speaker 1: thoughts about it. So calling an organism or a specimen
Speaker 1: by its genus and species, it's kind of like saying
Speaker 1: your last name first. But it's what we call linean taxonomy.
Speaker 1: Even though Swedish ecologist Carl Linius he didn't really invent it.
Speaker 1: Someone else did. It was kind of already established. So
Speaker 1: John wasn't busy learning Carl Lineus pneumonic memory devices in
Speaker 1: high school, but he was down with a different Carl,
Speaker 1: Carl Sagan, who, despite being an astronomer and a cosmologist,
Speaker 1: he wrote about evolution.
Speaker 2: We sometimes represent evolution as the ever branching ramifications of
Speaker 2: some original trunk, each branch pruned and clipped by natural selection.
Speaker 1: Sagan has an eight minute animated video that essentially details
Speaker 1: the journey from a single celled animal to a poll
Speaker 1: up on the seafloor, to humans, jowless fishy ancestors, to
Speaker 1: an amphibian to a shrew, to primates to apes, branching
Speaker 1: off into bipedal creatures with big brains. The poke stuff
Speaker 1: and will eventually invent things like game shows and salad
Speaker 1: spinners human beanks. I added that last part because I'm
Speaker 1: writing this in bed. Honestly, evolution and humanity are kind
Speaker 1: of freaking me out. It's like nothing matters, but everything matters,
Speaker 1: everything changes. We're all mutable. How did I get here?
Speaker 1: Think of all the people that had to mate in
Speaker 1: order for me to be alive? Right now?
Speaker 2: What have I even done with my day?
Speaker 1: Anyway? What is it about the linean system of taxonomy
Speaker 1: that you dig well?
Speaker 4: I've always been an organizer and a list maker, and
Speaker 4: so it always appealed to me. You know, when I
Speaker 4: found out about it, it was a lot of taxonomy.
Speaker 4: Is lists an organization?
Speaker 1: I like that in your regular life, your day to
Speaker 1: day life, are you as organized as you are as
Speaker 1: a scientist, or is your house just like a disaster
Speaker 1: and you're not sure, like you don't have a Christmas list?
Speaker 2: Isn't ready?
Speaker 4: Like yeah, well, unfortunately, that's kind of the plight I
Speaker 4: think of the academic is to be extremely busy and
Speaker 4: wearing a lot of hats. And I'm certainly not as
Speaker 4: organized as I would like to be.
Speaker 2: It's a difficult admission for you.
Speaker 5: A little bit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, I guess I'm still i'd say fairly
Speaker 4: organized about my things. But yeah, in terms of just
Speaker 4: general life and scheduling and things like that, it's a
Speaker 4: bit of the disaster you might expect from an academic.
Speaker 1: And so tell me a little bit about when you
Speaker 1: first kind of grasped the concept of evolution. When did
Speaker 1: you start to realize, okay, mutations are responsible for a
Speaker 1: lot of these different appearances and behavior and capabilities of animals.
Speaker 1: Like when did you start to get excited about evolution?
Speaker 4: I think it was when I was doing some of
Speaker 4: those early readings in high school. You know, I know
Speaker 4: there are other people that have spoken at more length
Speaker 4: about evolution than Carl Sagan, who was principally an astronomer
Speaker 4: or cosmologist, and but it was some of his books,
Speaker 4: the delve Moore into evolutionary ideas that got me into it.
Speaker 1: From there, John studied at University of Arizona and he
Speaker 1: took class by doctor Nancy Moran, who I looked her up.
Speaker 1: She is a badass and a MacArthur fellow. She researches
Speaker 1: the gut biome of aphids.
Speaker 4: And it was really there for the first time that
Speaker 4: I learned just kind of the basic framework of evolution
Speaker 4: and its processes mutation, natural selection, and then some things
Speaker 4: I'd never heard of, like genetic drift, which is the
Speaker 4: sort of random way that evolution can can take gene
Speaker 4: frequencies and populations, and that there were whole aspects of
Speaker 4: it I hadn't heard of. That was pretty exciting too.
Speaker 1: What's an example of genetic drift? How do you describe
Speaker 1: that at a cocktail party to someone who's half a
Speaker 1: glass of chardonnay.
Speaker 4: In Well, I guess I'd point to the eminem bowl
Speaker 4: and I'd say.
Speaker 1: Uh, okay, so see that eminem bowl. Genetic drift is when.
Speaker 4: You take a small handful of Eminem's and you end
Speaker 4: up with three green ones instead of the full, you know,
Speaker 4: rainbow of colors. That's genetic drift, and that's what can
Speaker 4: happen in populations. Sometimes generation to generation, you don't always
Speaker 4: get a random draw of the genes that are out there.
Speaker 4: Sometimes you get a very non representative draw, and that
Speaker 4: can have a big influence on evolution.
Speaker 1: And I.
Speaker 4: Kind of like the idea that there's that sort of
Speaker 4: chance element in there too, as well as kind of
Speaker 4: the more what we call deterministic or kind of the
Speaker 4: more predictable outcomes of natural selection.
Speaker 1: Are there any movies or TV shows about evolution that
Speaker 1: you either really like or they really annoy you, Like,
Speaker 1: that's not evolution.
Speaker 5: That's a great question. You know.
Speaker 4: Gatica comes to mind as one that's actually a fairly
Speaker 4: interesting and informed movie with evolutionary ideas. It's been long
Speaker 4: enough since I've seen it that I can't really tell
Speaker 4: you that much, but you know, the ideas of what
Speaker 4: can happen with genetic engineering and kind of our more
Speaker 4: consumer based eugenics that we have now are kind of,
Speaker 4: you know, enhancing our genes because we want to, and
Speaker 4: some of the outcomes pretty interesting.
Speaker 1: How do you I did talk about Gatica in the
Speaker 1: Paleontology episode about how I always really respected that they
Speaker 1: only used at GC no at gc whatever to make
Speaker 1: the name right, that's pretty dope. How do you feel
Speaker 1: about crisper and gene editing?
Speaker 4: On the one hand, it's incredibly exciting. I mean, I
Speaker 4: think people tend to focus in on the aspects of
Speaker 4: it that involve genetic engineering and humans, and that is
Speaker 4: one avenue that obviously a lot of caution needs to
Speaker 4: be taken. But there's so many other applications of crisper
Speaker 4: technology just to the study of evolution that it's really
Speaker 4: quite exciting. I mean, the possibilities for experimental evolution are
Speaker 4: vast and that's great.
Speaker 1: So what is it about birds that make them prime
Speaker 1: for studying evolutionary biology?
Speaker 2: Why birds? Well, people freaking love birds.
Speaker 1: There have been a lot of them observed, described, collected,
Speaker 1: so there's a good base of knowledge there as opposed
Speaker 1: to like slime molds, which nobody goes to hunt down
Speaker 1: and marvel at. Probably a few people do, and I
Speaker 1: hope they're friends with each other. But anyway, birds and.
Speaker 4: The starting place for a lot of that is what
Speaker 4: is the evolutionary tree of relationships? Just knowing who is
Speaker 4: related to whom is an important starting point and if
Speaker 4: you don't have that then that's kind of your first step.
Speaker 4: And so with birds, they've been worked out well enough
Speaker 4: that that first step is kind of already completed and
Speaker 4: you can sort of jump to answering some of the
Speaker 4: the broader questions.
Speaker 1: Because you know the characters in the storyct exactly right.
Speaker 1: Let's take a quick Darwin detour. Who was he? Why
Speaker 1: should you care? I'm gonna run this down as quick
Speaker 1: as I can for you. So. Charles Robert Darwin was
Speaker 1: born in England in the early eighteen hundreds. His father
Speaker 1: was a super rich doctor, and Darwin tried to go
Speaker 1: to medical school.
Speaker 2: But he hated it. He hated it.
Speaker 1: He was also the grandson of prominent abolitionists, which is school.
Speaker 1: And he loved nature and geology. He loved collecting beetles. God,
Speaker 1: he loved it. His dad was like, kiddo, you're a loser,
Speaker 1: and Darwin's like, Dad, can I just go on this boat,
Speaker 1: the HMS Beagle and travel the world and I'll write
Speaker 1: about it?
Speaker 2: Will you please finance it? Rich dad?
Speaker 1: And his dad reluctantly agreed, but at one point said
Speaker 1: to him, you're married for this quote. You care for
Speaker 1: nothing but shooting dogs and rat catching, and you will
Speaker 1: be a disgrace to yourself and all your family. But haha,
Speaker 1: jokes on you, Pop, He wasn't a disgrace to his
Speaker 1: whole family. Chris Charles Darwin married his cousin. Oh yeah. Apparently,
Speaker 1: when he was considering taking on a cousin bride, he
Speaker 1: was so accustomed to filling notebooks with thoughts on various
Speaker 1: specimens and animal breeding and stuff that he scrawled out
Speaker 1: a page with one column headed Mary and another not Mary. Now.
Speaker 1: Advantages of marriage included quote constant companion and friend in
Speaker 1: old age better than a dog. Anyhow, Well, I don't
Speaker 1: know if I agree with that. Cons were less money
Speaker 1: for books and terrible loss of time. So constant companion,
Speaker 1: friend and old age better than a dog, or less
Speaker 1: money for books and a terrible loss of time. Hm hm.
Speaker 2: He decided to make this.
Speaker 1: Family affair into a family affair, and he had.
Speaker 2: Several babies with his cousin.
Speaker 1: Back to the Beagle, Charles Darwin did a bunch of writing,
Speaker 1: kind of like travel blogging, but with more dysentery and
Speaker 1: smeared ink, and his diaries were made into a popular book,
Speaker 1: The Voyage of the Beagle. It was on these travels
Speaker 1: that he started to come up with a theory of evolution,
Speaker 1: but it took him years of tankering and rewriting an
Speaker 1: illness which may or may not have been shagas disease
Speaker 1: from a parasite on something called an assassin bug. And
Speaker 1: he was also a little thwarted by I think procrastination.
Speaker 1: But finally he published his on the Origin of species
Speaker 1: his book in eighteen fifty nine. It was a huge deal.
Speaker 1: He also kind of published it alongside a contemporary of his,
Speaker 1: Alfred Wallace. Now Alfred Wallace never heard of him before
Speaker 1: I started researching this episode. He was working on a
Speaker 1: super similar theory, but he had a harder and more
Speaker 1: impoverished life than Darwin. Like Wallace's ship full of work
Speaker 1: sank to the ocean floor. He was a drift at
Speaker 1: sea on a lifeboat, Alfred Wallace, who no one ended
Speaker 1: up caring about. But back to Darwin on the beagle trip,
Speaker 1: so Darwin stopped for supplies in the Galapagos Islands off
Speaker 1: the coasts of South America, and he noticed that different
Speaker 1: animals on different islands had slightly different features. For example,
Speaker 1: all those finches, why do they have different beak shapes?
Speaker 1: They got crushing bills, they got probing bills, they got
Speaker 1: grasping bills.
Speaker 2: What are these bills?
Speaker 1: Ah? They must be adapted for different food sources on
Speaker 1: each little, tiny island climate. So he theorized, were you
Speaker 1: really inspired by Darwin's finches? Was that a big deal
Speaker 1: for you at some point where the kind of evolution
Speaker 1: natural selection and birds and specialization of beaks and colors?
Speaker 1: Did that inspire you a lot?
Speaker 5: Absolutely?
Speaker 4: Because you know, it's just it's such a great because
Speaker 4: it's kind of the complete package in terms of evolution
Speaker 4: happening on a short timescale that humans can observe. It's
Speaker 4: happening in sort of a contained environment that you can
Speaker 4: wrap your mind around. Right this island where Peter and
Speaker 4: Rosemary Grant studied the finches. You know, you could walk
Speaker 4: around it in an hour.
Speaker 1: I did not know who Peter and Rosemary Grant were.
Speaker 1: Oh man, oh god, oh man. Okay, if you've been
Speaker 1: in morning since Branjelina split, have I got a couple
Speaker 1: for you?
Speaker 2: Boy? Howdy?
Speaker 1: What sexy motherfuckers? Now? Born In nineteen thirty six, this
Speaker 1: British evolutionary biologist couple went to Daphne Major, Galapagos island
Speaker 1: and they've been studying the finches there since nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 1: They lived together on a remote island half the year
Speaker 1: and our Princeton professors the other half.
Speaker 2: Who are these.
Speaker 1: Sensual lovers, Well, they met when Rosemary was lecturing in
Speaker 1: embryology and genetics. Peter was still a zoology grad student
Speaker 1: and her teaching assistant. But they've been married like fifty
Speaker 1: six years and they've been capturing, tagging, tracking these finches
Speaker 1: in the Galapagos, and they've been able to show that
Speaker 1: natural selection can be observed within even a couple of years.
Speaker 1: Darwin thought this took eons before you could see natural selection.
Speaker 1: They're like, nope, check this out. We figured it out.
Speaker 1: It can happen super quick. And yes, Rosemary and Peter
Speaker 1: Grant did produce offspring, two daughters, one of whom I
Speaker 1: just found and followed it on Instagram. I think she
Speaker 1: studies psychology and is into making cakes. Have I mentioned
Speaker 1: I'm creepy. I just I just want to be friends.
Speaker 1: I just want to be friends. Okay, So back to
Speaker 1: the finches, and.
Speaker 4: There were maybe you know, a thousand or a couple
Speaker 4: thousand inches on the island. They could catch them all
Speaker 4: and have them color banded, and so it's kind of
Speaker 4: one of those you know, it's almost evolution and a
Speaker 4: test tube, but the test tube is nature, and then
Speaker 4: the other aspect about it is just kind of, you know,
Speaker 4: the romance of field work in a far away island.
Speaker 4: There's a great book called The Beak of the Finch
Speaker 4: that sort of follows the grants and their graduate students
Speaker 4: on this this decade long chase for uncovering evolution, and
Speaker 4: that was really inspiring for me because it kind of
Speaker 4: it dispelled some of the some of the myths of
Speaker 4: field work, like you know, it's all fun and hanging
Speaker 4: out on the beach. It's a lot of hard work.
Speaker 1: I imagine, less margaritaes. That's more like bugs in your clothes,
Speaker 1: that's right.
Speaker 4: And scorching hot sun. But that story, I just think
Speaker 4: it's so inspirational and it's so easy to grasp, and
Speaker 4: so that's why I make it a point. Just last week,
Speaker 4: I have an entire class, two classes in fact, where
Speaker 4: I walk through the Darwin's Finch exam with my students
Speaker 4: and my evolution class and kind of give them the
Speaker 4: whole story.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about people going to the Galapagos
Speaker 1: as tourists. Does it piss you off?
Speaker 4: No, it doesn't, you know, And I've actually been there
Speaker 4: myself as a tourist. Any situation where people are out
Speaker 4: there enjoying nature and to see people making such a
Speaker 4: long trip at such expense to see nature firsthand and
Speaker 4: to see the work of evolution, that makes me happy. Now, sure,
Speaker 4: once you get there, there's always cases that you can
Speaker 4: look at that make you grumpy. You know, the person
Speaker 4: with the camera right in the face of the you know,
Speaker 4: the seal. But I try to take a broader picture,
Speaker 4: and I think of how great it is that people
Speaker 4: can get so excited about biodiversity.
Speaker 1: I once went to an island in Thailand and I
Speaker 1: saw a tourist tipping back a pepsi into the mouth
Speaker 1: of a monkey, and I had a hard time with that.
Speaker 2: I was like, we shouldn't We should all go home.
Speaker 1: It's like, this shouldn't be happening.
Speaker 4: There's plenty of ways that you can observe humans interacting
Speaker 4: stupidly with nature, and right now, with social media, you know,
Speaker 4: we could just do nothing but watch humans interacting stupidly
Speaker 4: with nature. And so I mean, it's a concern. Right,
Speaker 4: it's a problem and people need to be educated. But again,
Speaker 4: I think, taking a slightly more optimistic sort of broad viewpoint,
Speaker 4: I'm glad that people are jazzed up about nature.
Speaker 1: Right. Do you ever look at yourself or people in
Speaker 1: your life and say, way to go, j man. I
Speaker 1: am the result of a bunch of evolution.
Speaker 4: It is a pretty marvelous thing when you think about it.
Speaker 4: I tend to not focus so much on humans as
Speaker 4: the pinnacle of evolution.
Speaker 2: Ouch.
Speaker 1: Yes, okay, reminder, humans not the pinnacle of evolution. You
Speaker 1: have a point, and I like.
Speaker 4: To look at other situations and marvel over the millions
Speaker 4: of years of evolution that produce some remarkable radiation of birds,
Speaker 4: for example. But when you stop to think about it,
Speaker 4: everything that's alive today is the survivor of essentially three
Speaker 4: point seven billion years of evolution. All those species, millions
Speaker 4: and millions of species that are crawling around on this
Speaker 4: very thin crust of the earth are the products of
Speaker 4: that three point seven billion years of evolution. And it's
Speaker 4: a remarkable thing, you know, in each one, even from
Speaker 4: a bacteria to a human, has evolved just as much
Speaker 4: through just as much time. I think It's easy to
Speaker 4: think about certain species alive today as being more evolved
Speaker 4: than others because maybe they have a few more adaptations
Speaker 4: or they look more complex. But at the end of
Speaker 4: the day, that bacterium and that human were all the
Speaker 4: products of three point seven billion years of evolution.
Speaker 1: Even if you do nothing but play World of Warcraft
Speaker 1: and eat from a barrel of cheese puffs, you're still a.
Speaker 4: Winner, right, You are the product of winners. You got
Speaker 4: here because your ancestors won the evolutionary game. Now what
Speaker 4: you choose to do with all that winning is another question.
Speaker 1: That's a very diplomatic way of saying, don't just play
Speaker 1: World of Warcraft cheese puffs? Very diplomatic.
Speaker 4: I'm not into telling people what to do with their lives.
Speaker 4: But at the end of the day, is about fitness
Speaker 4: and is about offspring, and so you know, eaten Cheetos
Speaker 4: in your basement is maybe not going to get you
Speaker 4: to the finish line.
Speaker 5: There.
Speaker 2: You never know, You never know, you never know, Okay, disclaimer.
Speaker 1: I know nothing about World of Warcraft or how good
Speaker 1: of a life you can have playing video games in
Speaker 1: a basement, but I decided to look into it, and
Speaker 1: this did cause me to stumble upon a cracked article
Speaker 1: about farming gold, which seems like some sort of earned
Speaker 1: token you can sell to another player.
Speaker 2: One guy does this seventy two.
Speaker 1: Hours a week and makes about twenty five thousand dollars
Speaker 1: a year, and he also lives off pizza and Monster
Speaker 1: Energy drinks.
Speaker 2: So it's possible.
Speaker 1: It is possible you can make a living playing World
Speaker 1: of Warcraft, and then you can put gold farmer on
Speaker 1: your business card. Oh what's on John's business card? Is
Speaker 1: it ornithologist or evolutionary biologist?
Speaker 4: I think I tend to describe myself as an evolutionary
Speaker 4: biology just who studies birds. But you know I'm an
Speaker 4: ornithologist as well.
Speaker 1: Own it?
Speaker 5: Yeah, maybe I should own it.
Speaker 1: I should, And besides, you can be both. I'm sitting
Speaker 1: I'm sitting next to your business cards and it doesn't
Speaker 1: even say anologist of any kind. It just says director
Speaker 1: and Curator of the More Lab of Zoology.
Speaker 2: You gotta throw some you gotta throw some title on these.
Speaker 5: Well, Ali, I gotta bring you in for pr.
Speaker 1: Come on, let me life code like zoologist, ornithologists, evolutionary biologists?
Speaker 2: Come on?
Speaker 1: Uh?
Speaker 2: What is?
Speaker 1: Let's let's debunk some flimflam. What is a myth about
Speaker 1: evolution that you feel like people hang on to other
Speaker 1: than just creationism?
Speaker 4: Right? So, I think one of the great myths is
Speaker 4: embodied in that classic symbol of evolution where you see
Speaker 4: sort of the chimpanzee evolving through something that looks like
Speaker 4: a Neanderthal into modern humans.
Speaker 1: This linear illustration of primates up to modern humans is
Speaker 1: called the Road to Homo Sapiens. It's also been called
Speaker 1: the March of Progress, and it was published in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty five in a time life science volume. You've totally
Speaker 1: seen it. It has silhouettes of gibbons and then chimps
Speaker 1: and apes all kind of marching in a line up
Speaker 1: until you get to these like tanned, muscular Neanderthals, and
Speaker 1: it's like it's such a good psychological test and trying
Speaker 1: to figure out how far back in species it becomes
Speaker 1: inappropriate to wanna smash Like some of them look like
Speaker 1: shaggy haired rock climber boys with good butts who just
Speaker 1: need a shower, and you're like, shoot, these are cave people.
Speaker 1: Check yourself, girl, Okay, So there are so many parodies
Speaker 1: of this illustration. I'm sure that if you see it,
Speaker 1: you almost expect to see the devolving into Homer Simpson
Speaker 1: or a Martian or something now rather than this linear evolution.
Speaker 1: Evolution looks more like a tree, as they call it,
Speaker 1: a tree of life, where one thicker branch represents a
Speaker 1: common ancestor and then new species kind of branch outward.
Speaker 1: So that's called phylogeny. And Darwin sketched it in one
Speaker 1: of his leagal era notebooks with the words I think
Speaker 1: scrawled above it, which I think is super adorable and
Speaker 1: very humble. I have a friend who has this tattoo
Speaker 1: of this Darwinian tree of life sketch, and I hope
Speaker 1: Darwin's stodgy father would be proud. Okay, back to that
Speaker 1: road to Homo sapiens linear evolution illustration and how that's
Speaker 1: not really how things happen.
Speaker 4: Although it's even used by people who are pro evolution,
Speaker 4: I think it kind of leaves people with a misimpression
Speaker 4: of how evolution actually operates, because you know, chimpanzees and
Speaker 4: humans are each other's closest relatives, and you know, humans
Speaker 4: didn't evolve from chimpanzees. We evolved from some common ancestor
Speaker 4: that we shared with chimpanzees, and so that that depiction
Speaker 4: of evolution is kind of you know, following a linear pattern.
Speaker 4: It belies the true branching history of evolution that's underneath.
Speaker 4: And one of the most common questions you get, and
Speaker 4: you know, just recently on Twitter, Tim Allen of all people,
Speaker 4: was going to weigh in on evolution and ask the
Speaker 4: question you get a lot, which is if humans evolved
Speaker 4: from apes, why are there still apes?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 4: And again it's embodied in in that symbol that that's
Speaker 4: not true. We didn't evolve from apes. Gorillas and chimpanzees
Speaker 4: and us all evolved from a common ancestor that was
Speaker 4: neither an ape, nor a chimpanzee or a human, but
Speaker 4: something else.
Speaker 1: Maybe that was just a personal branding question for him,
Speaker 1: because you did make his mark on the world by grunting, right.
Speaker 1: I feel like he grunts the lies like shoot, maybe
Speaker 1: I had to rethink this.
Speaker 5: Well, see he's got good pr people. Maybe he does.
Speaker 1: I saw that and I was like, hell and sit down,
Speaker 1: just go away. I do have some questions from listeners,
Speaker 1: and I don't know if they're going to be easy questions.
Speaker 1: You can you can say pass on any of these,
Speaker 1: but Before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners,
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of
Speaker 1: the show. Sponsors.
Speaker 2: Why sponsors?
Speaker 1: You know what they do? They help us give money
Speaker 1: to different charities every week. So if you want to
Speaker 1: know where Ologies gives our money, you can go to
Speaker 1: Aliyward dot com and look for the tab Ologies gives back.
Speaker 1: There's like one hundred and fifty different charities that we've
Speaker 1: given to already, with more every single week. So if
Speaker 1: you need a place to go, donate a little bit
Speaker 1: of money but you're not sure where to go. Those
Speaker 1: are all pick biologists who work in those fields, and
Speaker 1: this ad break allows us to give a ton of
Speaker 1: money to them. So thanks for listening and thank sponsors. Okay,
Speaker 1: your questions. Doctor Tigenwall wants to know what are the
Speaker 1: best ways to differentiate bad post talk evo bio claims
Speaker 1: from actual science. Example, banana's evolved to be eaten by
Speaker 1: humans because we have hands.
Speaker 2: Things like that.
Speaker 4: A lot of the examples of evolution you see written
Speaker 4: about in the popular press kind of fall into this
Speaker 4: trap of portraying evolution as though it responds to needs,
Speaker 4: and sometimes this is just loose shorthand.
Speaker 1: I have heard that people get like a science teacher
Speaker 1: tell me she hates when when she hears like, oh,
Speaker 1: this species evolved because it wanted this, or you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, like a evolved, yeah, out of need
Speaker 1: instead of out of kind of chance.
Speaker 4: But exactly, yeah, and so right. The recent example was
Speaker 4: birds that have evolved to feed off of bird feeders
Speaker 4: in Great Britain. So birds have evolved longer bills to
Speaker 4: feed off of bird feeders was kind of the headline
Speaker 4: that you saw, and it kind of gives this impression
Speaker 4: of evolution that it responds to needs. The birds sort
Speaker 4: of thought to themselves, Look, you know, I really need
Speaker 4: a longer bill here, and so let's go for that,
Speaker 4: you know, let's try to reach that pinnacle of evolution.
Speaker 4: And it again, underlying that is the true evolutionary mechanism,
Speaker 4: which is differential survival and reproduction.
Speaker 1: Differential survival and reproduction just being fancy talk for little
Speaker 1: variances and genes mean good mutations which help a plant
Speaker 1: or a bird or a snail thrive and mate in
Speaker 1: its particular environment. Boom, natural selection. You know.
Speaker 4: The way I would say it would be much longer,
Speaker 4: it would be something along the lines of birds with
Speaker 4: longer bills were able to feed more effectively from bird
Speaker 4: feeders and thereby produce more offspring, which led the population
Speaker 4: as a whole to have longer bills. Now you can
Speaker 4: understand why a headline writer isn't going to go there,
Speaker 4: why I don't have a job as a headline.
Speaker 2: Writer breaking news.
Speaker 1: Birds on the longer bills were able to feed more
Speaker 1: from bird feeders and thereby produce more offspring, which is
Speaker 1: what the population as a whole having longer bills.
Speaker 2: It's very wordy.
Speaker 4: But I think there are ways to depict the evolutionary
Speaker 4: process in headlines in kind of a more effective way.
Speaker 1: Right right, A little bit less sensationalist. How do you
Speaker 1: feel about Lamarckian theory of acquired genetics that people maybe
Speaker 1: still kind of believe in it. French biologist Jean Baptiste Lamark,
Speaker 1: by the way, had a theory of acquired genetics such
Speaker 1: that offspring would take on the characteristics their parents adopted
Speaker 1: in their life. Like, Okay, if a giraffe slowly stretched
Speaker 1: its neck ever further to try to get leaves, then
Speaker 1: its babies would have a little bit longer necks, depending
Speaker 1: on the giraffe's effort, or if your mom was a
Speaker 1: competitive bodybuilder and you were just destined to be ripped.
Speaker 1: It turns out not so much. Lamarcky and genetics predated
Speaker 1: Darwin's theory of evolution, and once Darwin came on the scene,
Speaker 1: people were like, uh, yeah, by Lamark a revoir? No no,
Speaker 1: So how does John feel about Lamarck? And also, did
Speaker 1: did Lamark get a to get the shafts or are
Speaker 1: you like he should have never been kind of known?
Speaker 4: Oh, I'm a big believer that Lamark, you know, has
Speaker 4: been overly villa. I mean, the fact was, Lamar's theory
Speaker 4: was the first kind of full and coherent theory of
Speaker 4: evolution that evolved involved a mechanism for how it occurred.
Speaker 4: No one had really done that before. And so even
Speaker 4: if he was wrong, he got people talking and he
Speaker 4: got people thinking, and he got people like Darwin thinking
Speaker 4: about why he was wrong, and that moved things forward.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I'm a big fan of Lamark. He did
Speaker 4: a lot of things right. He just happened to be
Speaker 4: wrong about how traits changed and how they were passed
Speaker 4: down through the generations.
Speaker 3: What about epigenetics, how do you feel about it right,
Speaker 3: So this is so funny, and my students will laugh
Speaker 3: when they hear that question, because it just yesterday I
Speaker 3: went on a long, unannounced rant about epigenetics.
Speaker 5: You know, it's the term.
Speaker 4: Is misapplied these days quite a lot, especially in media accounts.
Speaker 4: I understand it's a buzzword.
Speaker 1: Super quick primer, So epigenetics is kind of a buzzword
Speaker 1: these days. Essentially, it refers to when your gene expressions change,
Speaker 1: not the DNA or the genetic code itself, but just
Speaker 1: the expression of it changes. So John says it really
Speaker 1: applies to specific cases where DNA can be silenced by
Speaker 1: the addition of molecules to something called the histones. Histones
Speaker 1: are proteins that make up the structure that DNA gets
Speaker 1: wound around.
Speaker 4: So those molecules can attach and effectively silent certain silence
Speaker 4: certain parts of the genome. And in some cases it
Speaker 4: seems that those silencers can be passed down from parents
Speaker 4: to offspring, and in some cases also that silencing can
Speaker 4: happen during the lifetime of an organism in response to
Speaker 4: its environment. So it's at least theoretically possible, and I
Speaker 4: think it's been shown in maybe just a few cases
Speaker 4: where this sort of silencing occurs in the lifetime of
Speaker 4: an organism and then gets passed down to its offspring.
Speaker 4: So it is possible that it's a contributor to evolution,
Speaker 4: and in a sense it's a Lamarckian right. So Lamarck's
Speaker 4: theory of acquired characteristics was the idea that traits picked
Speaker 4: up during your lifetime you can pass down, and so
Speaker 4: epigenetics in the narrow sense sort of adheres to that idea.
Speaker 4: How often has that actually contributed to evolution? And also,
Speaker 4: is this not something that, at the end of the day,
Speaker 4: is found in the genetic code. So the silencing and
Speaker 4: turning off and on of these genes at the hiss
Speaker 4: Stone level might itself be encoded in the genes, got it?
Speaker 1: So your genes might already be saying, like, hey, turn
Speaker 1: these things on, turn those guys off, like they might
Speaker 1: already be on top of it, might be part of
Speaker 1: the code.
Speaker 4: So but then there's all sorts of ways that people
Speaker 4: use epigenetics that was already folded into what we know
Speaker 4: about Darwinian evolution.
Speaker 1: So Darwin was already hipped to it.
Speaker 4: I don't know if Darwin was hip to it, but
Speaker 4: certainly those people that in the modern synthesis. You know,
Speaker 4: Darwin didn't know the genetic mechanism of how heredity happened,
Speaker 4: but after Mendel showed us the genetic component, and then
Speaker 4: after that was sort of incorporated with Darwin's views and
Speaker 4: natural selection.
Speaker 1: More listener questions ready, Yeah, okay, I hope these aren't
Speaker 1: too insane.
Speaker 2: Chasing.
Speaker 1: Katie wants to know. I don't even understand this question.
Speaker 1: I'm just going to read it. If he works in
Speaker 1: sequence alignment. I want to know what is the most
Speaker 1: significant discovery arisen from resolving anomalies in human DNA. I
Speaker 1: just reread this question again, like seventeen times. I still
Speaker 1: don't understand it. I looked it up and it seems
Speaker 1: to involve finding matching sequences within DNA to point to
Speaker 1: one common ancestor. Does that make sense?
Speaker 4: I think the question is is about how we take
Speaker 4: multiple sequences from multiple individuals and know that we're looking
Speaker 4: at the same piece of DNA across individuals. So that's
Speaker 4: sequence alignment is a very important part of building a
Speaker 4: tree of evolutionary relationships from DNA data. A lot of
Speaker 4: times you get pieces of DNA from very different species,
Speaker 4: and evolution has taken them in such different directions that
Speaker 4: you almost don't recognize that those pieces of DNA are related.
Speaker 5: To one another.
Speaker 4: Ah, and so it is quite challenging to sort of
Speaker 4: align it all together and know you're looking at sort
Speaker 4: of the same base or the same chunk of DNA
Speaker 4: or the same gene across different species. We have had
Speaker 4: new computational tools come online that have really vastly improved
Speaker 4: our ability to do that by I. It used to
Speaker 4: be you got these chunks of DNA and then you
Speaker 4: would just look at them on a computer and sort
Speaker 4: of move them around by I.
Speaker 1: And that sounds terrible.
Speaker 4: It sounds terrible, but actually it's a pretty darn good
Speaker 4: way of doing it. As it turns out, we've had
Speaker 4: new computational tools that come online that have allowed us
Speaker 4: to sort of align DNA across hold genomes in a
Speaker 4: way that it would take years to do by I.
Speaker 4: So you can get most of it close to correct.
Speaker 4: But then it turns out those really really tough spots
Speaker 4: to align are actually almost best done by I. Wow,
Speaker 4: a computer really hasn't figured out how to effectively do that,
Speaker 4: and in some cases people have used crowdsourcing to do it,
Speaker 4: so they've put these really complicated chunks of DNA online
Speaker 4: and then people can go on like a little game
Speaker 4: and sort of move the bases around and kind of
Speaker 4: come up with the best explanation for.
Speaker 5: How they should be aligned to each.
Speaker 1: Other, like citizen science projects.
Speaker 5: And yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So I looked into this, and there's a game called
Speaker 1: Filo Phylo. It's put out by the McGill Center for Bioinformatics,
Speaker 1: and it kind of resembles a linear like brightly colored
Speaker 1: Tetris with blocks that you try to slide around until
Speaker 1: they match each other. Each block represents nucleotide sequences of
Speaker 1: different phylogenetic taxa, so I sucked at first, but I
Speaker 1: didn't care because it features like jazzy piano background music,
Speaker 1: which is hell sweet. And then you can also select
Speaker 1: which disease you'd like to help cut by matching nucleotide
Speaker 1: sequences of different phylogenetic taxa. So you can click on
Speaker 1: the menu like infectious diseases, blood diseases, heart and muscle diseases.
Speaker 1: It's really it's quite an impressive menu. I chose Brain
Speaker 1: and nervous system disease, which had kind of a powerful
Speaker 1: effect because as you're playing, it'll kind of hit you
Speaker 1: that maybe you're helping researchers find out more about, say
Speaker 1: my mom's disease, multiple sclerosis. Maybe by playing this video game,
Speaker 1: I'm helping out. So I looked at a video and
Speaker 1: an earlier version of Filo used a graphic in the
Speaker 1: lower corner to represent your score, and it was silhouettes
Speaker 1: from the Road to Homo Sapiens aka the March of
Speaker 1: Progress illustration we talked about earlier, So it looks like
Speaker 1: they've since changed that, which is good because having these
Speaker 1: chromagnet hotties in the corner super distracting. Just kidding. So
Speaker 1: if you need a break from gold farming on World
Speaker 1: of Warcraft, you might want to hop over to Filo
Speaker 1: and just play a couple of rounds. Full disclosure, I
Speaker 1: did eat Cheetos like yesterday, so no judgment on that.
Speaker 1: Life Moving on, Dustin Growick wants to know what are
Speaker 1: your favorite evolutionary anachronisms.
Speaker 4: You might be talking about, like structures like holdovers, evolutionary holdovers.
Speaker 5: That don't have a Oh okay, so that.
Speaker 4: Don't have a use anymore. I mean the hip bones,
Speaker 4: the tiny hip bones of modern whale are a great
Speaker 4: evolutionary anachronism because they really.
Speaker 5: Speak to the.
Speaker 4: Fact that special creation. If you believe that each species
Speaker 4: is created perfect for its particular niche on Earth, why
Speaker 4: would modern whales have tiny hip bones unless there's something
Speaker 4: in their evolutionary past that points to the fact that
Speaker 4: they were once land animals.
Speaker 1: I've never known that. That makes me want to go
Speaker 1: look at whales eletants now, like, oh, whales, you don't
Speaker 1: need that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, why are you carrying that ad?
Speaker 1: It's overpacking? So whales quick aside, I have to Okay,
Speaker 1: we all know whales.
Speaker 2: They live in the sea.
Speaker 1: Okay, whales started in the sea, and then they lived
Speaker 1: on land as freakish, hairy walking whales, and then they
Speaker 1: slipped back into the sea like your drunk friend on
Speaker 1: spring break who disappears from playing cards against Humanity to
Speaker 1: go sit in the hot tub and nursa corona alone. So, wales,
Speaker 1: you're in the sea. Why do you have hip bones?
Speaker 1: You don't need them. I looked it up, and whale
Speaker 1: hips may not be a hiccup of some ancestral relic,
Speaker 1: so the explanation may in fact be much more as
Speaker 1: one National Geographic article puts it erotic. That's right. Whales
Speaker 1: be thrust in. They need those hip bones for boners.
Speaker 1: And because lady whales like sweet moves, maybe, and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of competition out there, so sexual selection whales
Speaker 1: grinding like two tractor trailer mac trucks made out of
Speaker 1: wet blue leather. Just slow, bone in it out, Gotta
Speaker 1: love love. Celestia wants to know are there any species
Speaker 1: that we can see current evolving happening in order to
Speaker 1: adapt to our modern world?
Speaker 4: Viruses, Oh, viruses are constantly evolving to humans. And the
Speaker 4: flu virus that's hitting us in one flu season is
Speaker 4: going to be you know, yesterday's news. Next year, there's
Speaker 4: going to be a flu virus two point zero, And
Speaker 4: that's evolution that you can see over the course of generations,
Speaker 4: just a couple of years. Even another great example is
Speaker 4: antibiotic resistance. That's another scary one, and sometimes people don't
Speaker 4: necessarily file that under evolution, but they should because it's
Speaker 4: a direct result of natural selection pressures that we are
Speaker 4: placing on bacteria through our overuse of antibiotics. The reason
Speaker 4: we're getting these superbugs is because of evolution.
Speaker 1: Do you ever worry about humans interference with evolution? Chigile,
Speaker 1: Since you study birds, do you ever worry like, ugh,
Speaker 1: we're cutting down so many trees, what are we doing
Speaker 1: to the birds? Or do you feel like, well, evolution
Speaker 1: is evolution and that's another thing to adapt to.
Speaker 4: I guess I like to see evolution kind of proceeding
Speaker 4: through its natural course, sort of unfettered to the extent
Speaker 4: possible by humans. But that's not to say. You know,
Speaker 4: we live here in Los Angeles, and you can't turn
Speaker 4: a blind eye to the fact that we've got a
Speaker 4: big city here and it's not going anywhere. And so
Speaker 4: if you're going to be studying urban wildlife, you're going
Speaker 4: to be studying evolution altered by humans.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 4: I'm not against that either. I think there's a lot
Speaker 4: of interesting things that we can study about evolution in
Speaker 4: human altered landscapes.
Speaker 1: It's a good attitude to have that you're not because
Speaker 1: part of me, as if I were an evolutionary biologist,
Speaker 1: would spend some time under the couch crying about how
Speaker 1: we've messed up everything. And right, you've got a better
Speaker 1: attitude than I do.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, and it's probably because I've gone through
Speaker 4: all the stages, right, I mean, I've been there where
Speaker 4: I've learned about all the amazing biodiversity on the Hawaiian
Speaker 4: Islands that we've lost by introducing mosquitoes and all kinds
Speaker 4: of other things, and so I've kind of gone through
Speaker 4: the despair and the stages of grief.
Speaker 2: Yeah, listen to the pantatology episode.
Speaker 5: That's right, that's right.
Speaker 4: And at some point you've just you know, especially if
Speaker 4: you're you're teaching the next generation, you just you've got
Speaker 4: to be a little optimistic.
Speaker 1: Right, that's good. That's responsible of your pilot. Stig wants
Speaker 1: to know, what do you say when some ass face
Speaker 1: rants evolution is just a theory?
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, evolution is just a theory. Well, you'd like
Speaker 4: to think that you approach that person by telling them
Speaker 4: and sort of informing them what a theory is in science.
Speaker 5: You know, it's.
Speaker 4: An idea that's backed up by a lot of facts.
Speaker 1: Sickburn. Right, Just a reminder that the scientific method does
Speaker 1: not place theory in the bumbling beginnings of an experiment. Rather,
Speaker 1: theory is the product of a tested hypothesis. So it
Speaker 1: goes roughly, you got a question, you come up with
Speaker 1: a hypothesis, experiment analysis. Finally you come to the theory
Speaker 1: or a conclusion, so you can think of it like
Speaker 1: Queen Hildegarde eats, aple, turnovers, question, hypothesis, experiment analysis, theory,
Speaker 1: something or something filthy er if you want.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to help you, guys, just trying to help.
Speaker 1: But yes, theory of evolution isn't just a hair brained theory.
Speaker 4: Honestly, I've never encountered that, like face to face someone
Speaker 4: telling the evolution is just a theory.
Speaker 1: Good.
Speaker 4: I've encountered other misconceptions of evolution, like the if we
Speaker 4: evolve from apes, why are they're still apes? Or if
Speaker 4: we evolve from monkeys, why are they're still monkeys? And actually,
Speaker 4: in that case, I've found you know, that kind of
Speaker 4: a question I think speaks more to two people's just
Speaker 4: you know, haven't been exposed to ideas. I've gotten that
Speaker 4: question earnestly from people, and I found that if you
Speaker 4: just sit down, you know, with a cocktail napkin, and
Speaker 4: you sketch it out for them and you say, look,
Speaker 4: evolution is not linear. It proceeds through branching, and we're
Speaker 4: related through ancestors. I've found that that has changed some minds,
Speaker 4: and some of my students have actually come back to
Speaker 4: tell me that they've found that that changed minds too.
Speaker 4: Someone who's coming at you with evolution is just a theory,
Speaker 4: you know. I found that those people are usually just
Speaker 4: kind of more entrenched and in ideologies and unlikely to
Speaker 4: change their minds.
Speaker 1: So their trolls kind of I imagine. I think it's
Speaker 1: a little.
Speaker 5: Troll like, don't don't feed the trolls.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is my own theory. Tell me what you
Speaker 1: think about this. Okay, When I think about cars, I
Speaker 1: always get kind of caught up on the taxonomy of
Speaker 1: them because I do feel like like make and model
Speaker 1: is very genus and species right, and then over years
Speaker 1: the same species can maybe evolve and maybe they all
Speaker 1: have certain common ancestors. Maybe there's like an evolution like
Speaker 1: divergent evolution. Is it do you think that we created
Speaker 1: our automotive system with kind of headlights in the front,
Speaker 1: engine in the front, exhaust in the back, four wheels,
Speaker 1: quadruped to model animals at all? Or is that Does
Speaker 1: it just sound like I smoked much weed, which I don't.
Speaker 4: I think what it sounds like. And what I think
Speaker 4: you've clued into there is the fact that in a
Speaker 4: lot of human created structures we can see sort of
Speaker 4: a history of how they've been designed, and so you know,
Speaker 4: evolution is not something that's just confined to the biological world.
Speaker 4: People use evolutionary theories to study language because there's all
Speaker 4: sorts of quirky ways that languages evolve through some of
Speaker 4: the same processes of selection and random ways like drift,
Speaker 4: and we can reconstruct histories of how the things we
Speaker 4: see now are related to one another. You can do
Speaker 4: the same thing with shoes, with cars, with candy bars.
Speaker 4: And what it's saying is not so much about whether
Speaker 4: there's a designer behind it as there is with a car,
Speaker 4: or the lack of a designer in the case of
Speaker 4: the biological world. What it's saying is things usually evolve
Speaker 4: through a history and through having ancestors, and anytime something
Speaker 4: goes through time like that, it sort of leaves a
Speaker 4: record of evidence of who shares a more recent common ancestor,
Speaker 4: And so you can see that in cars, you can
Speaker 4: see that in shoes. It's just in that case humans
Speaker 4: are the designer.
Speaker 1: But need is ultimately the designer, right, I mean it's
Speaker 1: based on how well it adapts to the environment. Like
Speaker 1: I feel like hummers kind of went extinct because the
Speaker 1: environment no longer had a cheap gas or that kind
Speaker 1: of ostentatious displays of wealth. But so do you think
Speaker 1: about that ever, about how things kind of work themselves
Speaker 1: out based on what resources are available.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And you know, this kind of gets into two
Speaker 4: theories that sort of compare the marketplace to evolutionary ideas.
Speaker 4: I think there's something to be said for that. And
Speaker 4: you know, sometimes that's called evonomics. You know, there's branches
Speaker 4: of economics that sort of focus on evolutionary ideas. I'm
Speaker 4: not an expert on those, but I think there is
Speaker 4: some credence to the idea that you know, products sometimes,
Speaker 4: you know, they're selected for or against, and sometimes the
Speaker 4: ones that don't get selected die out. Now, sometimes the
Speaker 4: ones that are terrible products continued to be perpetuated.
Speaker 2: That's a very good point.
Speaker 1: I tried to look into this further and I found
Speaker 1: a website called economics, which touts itself as the next
Speaker 1: evolution of economics. And I can't quite vouch for it,
Speaker 1: because I clicked around and I found an article titled
Speaker 1: is there anything that working less doesn't solve?
Speaker 2: But I only read.
Speaker 1: First few paragraphs because I had to get back to work,
Speaker 1: because whale sex facts don't research themselves. Speaking of work, now,
Speaker 1: what is your least favorite thing about your job or
Speaker 1: at time in the field that was awful or something
Speaker 1: that you just is like, maybe not the highlight?
Speaker 2: And then I'll ask you your favorite.
Speaker 4: Well, and on a good note, even the worst field
Speaker 4: experience is always better than answering emails. And I'm sorry
Speaker 4: for those people. You know, I will get to your
Speaker 4: email sometime soon, I promise.
Speaker 5: You know. The fact is, and this goes.
Speaker 4: For a lot of jobs, but I think it's especially
Speaker 4: true of field biologists. We got into this job because
Speaker 4: we love to study animals in nature, and I still
Speaker 4: get a lot of wonderful opportunities to do that. Don't
Speaker 4: get me, You're wrong, But they never tell you that
Speaker 4: you end up spending you know, a good thirty percent
Speaker 4: of your time sitting at your desk answering emails or
Speaker 4: filling out forms. And so yeah, those are the worst
Speaker 4: aspects of my job. Not that I don't enjoy communicating
Speaker 4: with people, but boy, i'd rather be you know, talking
Speaker 4: over a beer than answering in an email.
Speaker 1: Right, or having a stomach parasite in a jungle preferable
Speaker 1: to email.
Speaker 5: Yes, absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 1: Now, what has been your favorite moment, say, out in
Speaker 1: the field on an expedition, Like, have you ever had
Speaker 1: a moment where it's just like.
Speaker 4: H The moments when you can take people out to
Speaker 4: an incredible field site, people who are either just getting
Speaker 4: excited about science and biology or birds, and you can
Speaker 4: take them to a place that you've been to that's
Speaker 4: just way out there and is just incredible. Those are
Speaker 4: the moments I live for. So we got a chance
Speaker 4: to do that recently when we went up into the
Speaker 4: mountains of northern Baja. There's a mountain range called the
Speaker 4: Sierra San Pedro Martyr and it has basically been untouched
Speaker 4: by human habitation anyways, in modern times. There's still cattle
Speaker 4: that they run up there, but nobody really lives up there,
Speaker 4: and you almost don't see any place like that in
Speaker 4: the United States. So this is a place people don't
Speaker 4: really realize this, but there's a huge number of California
Speaker 4: condors up there, and so we had the opportunity to
Speaker 4: go up there and just taking some of the expedition
Speaker 4: members and a student from Occidental College and giving them
Speaker 4: the opportunity to see this place and see these condors
Speaker 4: up close.
Speaker 5: I mean it was It's spectacular.
Speaker 2: Oh, super quick.
Speaker 1: Condor is a type of vulture and it's inky, black
Speaker 1: and huge, and it was on the brink of death
Speaker 1: but as being bred in captivity and released and it
Speaker 1: eats dead things and it doesn't have a song, It
Speaker 1: just grunts sometimes. And since I was in an ornithology lab,
Speaker 1: I had one more very important scientific question from someone
Speaker 1: who happens to be having a birthday this week.
Speaker 2: My friend Dyalen.
Speaker 1: Rodriguez has a question about condors. She wants to know
Speaker 1: are they the most goth of all the births.
Speaker 4: I don't know, because I think I mean they're pretty goth,
Speaker 4: I mean with that with the shaved head, yeah, sort of,
Speaker 4: the you know, and especially a lot of vultures kind
Speaker 4: of have the grays and the black hues to their feathers.
Speaker 4: But I mean, does it get more goth than a
Speaker 4: vampire finch?
Speaker 1: I suppose not.
Speaker 4: And that's one of the Darwin's finches their main food source.
Speaker 4: They fly and they peck the backs of the these
Speaker 4: poor boobies birds called boobies until they draw blood and
Speaker 4: then they eat the blood. So I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 4: condors are goth, but hard to compete with the vampire finch.
Speaker 1: The only way to do it is have a dance off.
Speaker 1: Someone's got to play bowhouse. They've got to have a
Speaker 1: dance off. All right, well, you have a new goal
Speaker 1: in terms of evolutionary biology. Thank you for entertaining these questions.
Speaker 5: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: To learn more about John McCormick's work, you can follow
Speaker 1: on Instagram at m l Z Birds, which is the
Speaker 1: account for the more Lab of Zoology at Occidental College.
Speaker 1: You can follow me at Ali Ward with one O
Speaker 1: on Instagram or Twitter and at Ologies on Instagram. We're
Speaker 1: also on Twitter, and to rock a sweet ology shirt
Speaker 1: or a pin or a canvas tote, you can head
Speaker 1: two Ologies merch dot com. And thank you Bonnie Dutch
Speaker 1: and Shannon Feltis for all of your help with that.
Speaker 1: Thanks as always to Stephen Ray Morris for piecing this
Speaker 1: together from an insanely highlighted transcript, and thank you Aaron
Speaker 1: Talbert and Hannahlippo for adminting the Ologies podcast Facebook group,
Speaker 1: which is full of a bunch of really high quality,
Speaker 1: awesome people. Special thanks this week to ologite Alex Anderson
Speaker 1: and any listeners who weighed in on gender and identity
Speaker 1: matters following last week's gynecology episode. I learned so much
Speaker 1: and I loved hearing what you all had to say
Speaker 1: and what your experiences were. Alex was super cool, and
Speaker 1: we jumped on the phone and chatted about it for
Speaker 1: a while, and I included a new intro at the
Speaker 1: very tip top of that episode in case you want
Speaker 1: to go back and listen you might learn some more stuff.
Speaker 1: And thanks especially to all patrons who fund the podcast
Speaker 1: so I can pay Steven and buy equipment and pay
Speaker 1: for hosting and buy memory cards and batteries and stupid
Speaker 1: stuff that's also fun. You can join the Patreon party
Speaker 1: at patreon dot com slash ologies, and that also lets
Speaker 1: you know what episodes are coming up, so you could
Speaker 1: submit questions to the ologists, and I try to ask
Speaker 1: them all. I sometimes don't get through all of them.
Speaker 1: Just keep asking. The theme music was written and performed
Speaker 1: by Nick Thorburn of the band Islands, and there are
Speaker 1: always more links about the episode up at Aliward dot
Speaker 1: com slash ologies, So if you want more research, just
Speaker 1: head there and as always you go. I tell a
Speaker 1: secret at the end of the episode as a thanks
Speaker 1: for sticking through the credits. In today's secret, It's another
Speaker 1: snack secret. I was going through my laundry and at
Speaker 1: the bottom of my laundry I found a purse I
Speaker 1: haven't used in a while, and I looked in it.
Speaker 1: There was one piece of like a chocolate coin iconic
Speaker 1: a gut in my purse and I was like, oh sweet,
Speaker 1: And there was some lint on some of it, but
Speaker 1: I peeled that off and I ate it. I ate
Speaker 1: it so what it was in there, people have eaten
Speaker 1: a lot worse things. And I thought, man, it's April now,
Speaker 1: that had to be from Hanagah. That must have been
Speaker 1: in December. And then I was like, oh well, But
Speaker 1: then I realized, y'all, it was just from February. When
Speaker 1: I went up to Portland. I just remembered that I
Speaker 1: got a chocolate cover coin up there from the dinner
Speaker 1: with Cole and Perry and Shannon felt as in Body Dutch.
Speaker 1: It was still in my purse, and I was really
Speaker 1: proud of myself that the chocolate that I ate was
Speaker 1: only a month and a half fault instead of being
Speaker 1: three or four months old. But sometimes you find chocolate
Speaker 1: in your apartment, you gotta eat it. So what, still alive? Guys,
Speaker 1: still alive. Not going anywhere quite yet anyway, Bye Bye,
Speaker 1: Pacaderman College. Hommeiology, crypto zoology, lithology, Yeah, minology, meteorology, fatology, anthology, ceiology, filology,