I Don't Know About That - Anatomy

Episode Date: January 26, 2021

In this episode, the team discusses the human anatomy with biological anthropologist, author, broadcaster, and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at University of Birmingham, Professor Alice Roberts.Go to www.Alice-Roberts.co.uk to learn more and buy her books, including "Tamed: 10 Species that Changed Our World", "The Little Book of Humanism", and her upcoming book titled "Ancestors" to be released this May.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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promo code IDK. The letter A. The songs move too quickly. The letter A. The songs move too quickly. The letter Q. Are they all the letters in the alphabet? Maybe. Is there a way to find out on the Jimmy Jeffery Show? I don't know.

It was my worst one. The song did a different thing. It was a new thing. Was that a sneaky message from Q or something? Look, Q's there. What he does is he tries to help us out. If you don't want to be fucking helped out, you want babies to have their adrenal glands eaten,

then shame on you. Shame on you. Now, sure, Q hasn't come through with any of these things that said would happen. There was going to be a big, all of them were going to be arrested one day, Anyone knew? Now, sure, Q hasn't come through with any of these things that said would happen. Right. There was going to be a big, all of them were going to be arrested one day, and that day came and went, and they went, okay, well, we have to have it. I wonder who was the person who invented Q, who was just sitting there going, and whether they're sitting at home going, he's just got a bit out of hand.

Just having a bit of a laugh on the internet. That's what I hope it is, not just a crazy person on the other side. What, do you think Q's real? No, but it could be a guy who thinks he's actually predicting stuff. We did a thing on conspiracy theories. I interviewed some people on the Jim Jefferies show about Q, and somebody wrote to me recently and went, I've just lost all respect for you.

Don't you understand that Q's trying to save the world? Like I was just trying to let it melt to the fucking ground because I wasn't queuing up. That's when they lost respect for you, by the way. Yeah, yeah. And they're just like, oh, I've had it with this person. Up until now, I was right on board with everything you said. And then you don't trust the Q.

What have we got for us this week, Jack? Comment World. Comment World, it's Comment World. Jack, don't proofread in Comment World. Comment World, insults are hurled. Whether at Forest or that other girl. And jibble shit on you if you're getting to me let's all play nice let's keep it pc comment world comment world five stars only in comment world

and they figured out our system that song was made by kyle mocha spelled m-o-u-c-h-a you can go check out his youtube channel kaya kyle mocha won't shut up uh yeah remix other music charl mocha i ordered a kyle mocha the other day yeah brandy i'm gonna start us off with some compliments to make us feel good first one uh it's with music signs uh music signs you mean inverted commas do you call them music signs no are you like music notes half notes half notes but they're emojis oh so you meant to sing this comment yeah okay okay the best part of waking up jim jeffries in your cup from folgers yep the folgers ad yeah yeah yeah i was in the cup i guess they watch was in the cup.

I guess they watch it in the morning. Yeah. That was, that was your comment that you found. Okay. Well, it's a nice one. It is a nice one. Yeah.

Yeah. Best part of waking up is Jim's left your house with a small note. Uh, one person says most other podcasts get a bit hacky or samey samey after listening week in week out, but this format keeps it fresh, keeps it fresh, Keeps it fresh. Different topic all the time.

Put it in the cup. And you know what's good about the podcast? I'm speaking to the people who aren't listening. You know what's wrong with you? You're not listening. Listen to the podcast. Do you want to know why? Because it's a different topic each week.

You know what's good about that? We'll never run out of topics. They might get weaker and weaker as we get along. As you get into like year seven. They're going to get oddly more specific. We're going to have to do it. When we're in year 10 and we're just like this, I guess there wasn't always doorknobs, was there?

They used to just push doors, didn't they? There weren't even doors. This is a five-star review. Starts off, I love this. Nearly every episode, I end up buying a new book. Not going to lie, I have a low-key crush on Erin Brockovich now. Jim, I can't wait to see you again on your next tour. I have a bit of a crush on Erin as well.

Yeah, she's gorgeous. I have a bit of a thing. She's my grandmother of choice, Erin Brockovich. I don't mean that in a Erin as well. Yeah, she's gorgeous. I have a bit of thing. She's my grandmother of choice, Erin Brockovich. I don't mean that in a nasty way. What about Heidi, though? You liked Heidi, too. Oh, Heidi was sexy as well. Heidi, what to expect when you're expecting?

Yeah, she was... There's a lot of grandmothers I'm into now. I don't know if they like being called grandmothers. What do you mean? What do you mean to call them? Women. They are grandmas. Yeah, I know. Grandmothers. It do you mean? What do you mean to call them? Women. They are grandmas. Yeah, I know. Grandmothers. It's a category I hadn't gone into.

I feel like, though, once you're a grandma, but you're still super hot, you like being called grandma because then it makes you feel hotter. I think they like to say, I'm a grandma. And then they're just like, what? What the fuck? I thought you were 12. Yeah, what the fuck? And then they proudly say, I had a kid at 12, and my kid had a kid at 12.

Boom. Do the maths It continues Kelly your cheekbones Are on point Forrest You fox Why are you hiding That sexy hair

Same reason I hide my hair It doesn't look It doesn't look good With earphones On top When you put the Headphones in front

It pushes all around And it's not It's not a good thing earphones on top. When you put the headphones in front, it pushes all around, and it's not a good thing. Although I've got to say, Luis's hair, he's been doing the blonde tints, and he's got a little tuft coming out the front at the moment, which is very alluring. Just look at him. He just looks like if you were to paint someone, you'd be like, he's a rascal with a heart of gold.

He is. And then it ends with, Jack, you're the best part of the show. Thank you. Sounds like you wrote that comment. Thank you. By the way, thank you for buying our guest books, because we always do like to promote our guests. So if you do buy stuff from them, that makes it nice for them, you know,

for them coming on the show. And then also buy, you know, the stuff from our ads, but also subscribe to our. Tell your friends. That's what I was going to say. Tell your friends if you like the podcast. The podcast, our ratings are going up. I'm going to be honest with you.

We want them higher. And if we do get higher when COVID's out, if they get to a certain number, I know the number in my head I need them to get to, and we're not far off. We'll start doing live shows of the podcast. We'll come to a town near you. We'll do a podcast where we'll have a specialist sitting on stage

with us when COVID's over. So in 10 years. But no, please tell your friends. Doorknobs, you say. Doorknobs. Tell your friends. Window treatments. And also our Instagram, IDCATcat what is it idcat podcast i

never remember the handle for instagram idcat podcasts and if you really like it there's patreon so patreon.com slash idcat all right can you listen to the patreon thing people listen to yeah all right good for them um as with all compliments there are some suggestions we receive um i'm gonna read this one exactly how lou bob wrote it uh jim jeffrey do something interesting like put on a fighter fighter jet pilot on the show stop showing boring stuff yeah we should well Well, my son, my nephew is about to be like an Apache helicopter pilot or some shit. He's learning how to do that. And so we'll have him on.

He'll go, yeah, yeah, we did. Yeah, that's what happened. Yeah, it goes up and it comes back down. So what happens? You fly. Yeah, you bloody fly it around, shoot a few things. There's a thing about these things where you go, when you go do something interesting like a fighter jet pilot,

you're not going to be sitting in a fighter jet plane. To me that doesn't seem nearly as interesting as the things that affect my life daily. You reckon this guy's going to be sitting at home going, mock what? Woo, baby. We'll just have sound effects. Yeah, yeah.

You must enjoy this. Forrest, Forrest, I'm going to have to bail out. Baby! We'll just have sound effects. First, first, I'm going to have to bail out. I just spat on my microphone. Got to bail again at 12 o'clock. No! Goose. There you go. That guy ought to go, that was fun. Yeah.

See, I was right on your podcast. This relates back to what we said in another podcast uh there actually is another country where coca-cola is outsold it's peru and the number one there is called coca-cola coca-cola coca-cola it's got an amazing bubble gum slash lemongrassy flavor and i'm sure it's easily found in la i guess they felt it was all right to name their cola after the Inca since they're all dead. That's what I always think. Whenever I'm eating Thai food and they've got a lot of lemongrass,

I go, this is missing something. Bubble gum. It's got a lovely bubble gum lemongrass flavor. There's a Peruvian restaurant I eat at that I always get an Inca cola there. Peruvian food's very good. Shout out. All right.

Shout out to Peru. Bit of an ads man. Peruvian food, very good. I put it in my top 10 foods. I will now list them. Starting at 10, Peruvian. Nah, it's higher. What's your number one? What's your number one food, folks?

What's your number one when you go, all-time cuisine? Can't just be like hamburgers. Cuisine. It's either Mexican or Japanese. I'm not sure. Japanese has really come up. Thai. Thai's a big one. Italian?

No, Italian's not. Italian's up there for me. I like Italian, but it's probably like six, seven down there. I like it, but I don't think about it all the time. I think about tacos and sushi a lot. That's what I think about. He does think about sushi a lot. Sometimes when you see Forrest sleeping and he's twitching a little bit,

he's dreaming of sushi. He's like, raw, raw fish. He's dreaming again. Let him rest. This is another review we got, but there aren't any stars, so they didn't rate us yet from Plaid Nation.

Read Disney. I write Disney fan fiction, so I'm writing this there aren't any stars so they didn't rate us yet from plaid nation read disney i write disney fan fiction so i'm writing this before listening to it just preparing for the possibility that you all suck how does he know this episode's coming no it's already out that's the disney episode that makes more sense why write a write a review that's not a review before you and he writes disney fan? He writes Disney fan fiction. Or she. Is this stuff where it's like, and then Ariel started going down on Jasmine? Is it that type of stuff?

Probably. It's going to be some shit I'm going to have to read on the Patreon. Yeah. Do that. Send that in. Send in some Disney porn. Yeah. Yeah.

Disney fan fiction. And then the beast fucked Ariel's porthole. I'm sure she has a porthole. It's a porthole. Someone said... A whole new hole. Someone said Kelly is by far the smartest person in this group. Yeah, I agree with that.

Oh, I don't think that's true at all. I agree that you're the savviest. Forrest is the most educated. And I'm me. And I have a computer. Yeah. Yeah, and I'd be Jack jack and i'm a moron i'm a mega moron i surprise myself how stupid i am every time

uh this is a compliment to forest he says uh forest looking like he paid the toll to get swole a muscle emoji either that or he's wearing his little brother's t-shirt jk get it gotta hustle for your muscle okay thoughts eat a lot of food that guy sounds like a white kid who works at walmart who upsets a few different nationalities along the way by the way he talks. Yeah. I know the type. Tiger King. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Did you see that?

Did you see that was the big thing that Trump pardoned over 100 people? Trump was just pardoning like friends of his. Little Wayne. Just like, yeah, I'm going to pardon. What did Little Wayne get pardoned for? I don't know. He had some new charge and he pardoned him. Yeah.

Yeah. What's going on? Anyway, the Tiger King didn't get pardoned for? I don't know. He had some new charge. What's going on? Anyway, the Tiger King didn't get pardoned. They had a limo waiting for him. He thought he was ready to go. I don't know why he thought Trump would like the Tiger King. I think Carole Baskin is doing what Trump

passes me. I'm going to fucking kill that bitch Carole Baskin. Fucking Trump. And now he's just like, Biden's a good fella, isn't he? Come on, Biden. Pardon me. Pardon me, Biden.

Lil Wayne had a charge in a gun possession case, but he celebrates his pardon with a new song, Ain't Got Time. That's nice. Good for him. Yeah. Someone commented, Empty hope board. TBH laughed up my coffee and then felt sorry for him. Someone commented, empty hope board.

TBH laughed up my coffee and then felt sorry for Jack. Yeah, as it goes. Well, sign Mrs. Hackett. I did a joke the other day. There was something that they were filling out a form. Can I say the joke, Jack, about Wendy? Oh, yeah. So it was your brother.

Your brother was filling out something for Jack, and I was the joke, Jack, about Wendy? Oh, yeah, yeah. So it was your brother. Your brother was filling out something for Jack, and I was driving along, and he needed to know Jack's mother's name to fill his form in. And, like, you know when you send a text to someone, you write a joke that's a bit off colour, and then they don't respond? Okay. Because he goes, what's Jack's mother's name? And I go, Wendy.

At least that was the name she gave me in the morning, right? That was the big joke, implying that I'd had sex's Jack's mother's name? And I go, Wendy. At least that was the name she gave me in the morning. That was the big joke, implying that I'd had sex with Jack's mother. And then nothing came back. No, Scott responds, got it. Yeah, thanks, got it. It's like, now is not the time for jokes. And I'm like, oh, man, I'm the worst. I can guarantee he wasn't offended by that.

No, I know he wasn't. I think there was just urgency in the information. Just getting the information to get me signed up for my COVID vaccine. I had this plumber come out to fix the order system, right? And so he goes, can you text me your address, your name, the type of unit that you're having, the serial number. So I text him all the stuff. And I text him, and then I went, can you text me?

Because it came green. You know those idiots that don't have iPhones? Yeah. Those people who have the green text, and you never know what happens to the text. Yeah. It never says delivered, and you're like, I don't know. Because it was just a bad number. What's going on here?

Yeah, did they block you? This stupid, weird text that's gone green. Anyway, so I sent him, and it was a green text that's gone green. Anyway, so I sent him and it was a green text and then I went and so I sent a second text and I go, can you please text me back to tell me that you've received this? Because it was for the booking, you know, the next day. And the guy texts back this.

No. So you can't text me back or you didn't receive this? Yeah, or you can't or this isn't the right number. It turned out it was the wrong number. I was chatting for a while. Yeah.

This is the last one for today. Someone tweeted at Forrest going, you lot laughing at Jack and not with him, frankly, makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. It verges on bullying. Hashtag Team Jack. Thanks, Gretchy. Yeah, her original email went like,

you teasing that loser. Yeah, there's a lot of words redacted here. I hate when people do it. They go, it's verging on bullying. What a load of rubbish. It's bullying. Call it what it is. Yeah, written with Diane Happy with it.

Guess I haven't been doing it good enough. Or as you said, one person retweeted it. Somebody retweeted it and somebody liked it. I think it was the same person. Maybe it was like a week later. So I guess that hashtag got out there. It'll be the best if the bullying gets significantly worse because of that email. We're like verging on bullying.

I'll tell you something about Jack. He's at once got a thin skin and too much confidence. Shut up. Jack, are we bullying you? I don't know. I don't know. I'll ask you again. Are we bullying you?

He can't hear you. His head's in a toilet. No, sir. Answer right now or you're going to get the old knuckle sandwich. Pull that underwear from outside your crack He wedgie yourself And answer me honestly Imagine if that's what we did to him

When he came in we wedgied him I think I was too young for the wedgie I think the wedgie became popular in society Just about a year after I finished school It was about 1993 Where the wedgie became like a thing, right? Sounds like a good episode. Yeah. Oh, the wedgie.

If you're a specialist in wedgies, if you can get us some maybe a police report where they said you bullied too much. My brother Grant, when we lived in Canada, got a ton of wedgies. Atomic wedgies. Was he a jet fighter pilot, though? Yeah. Canada, got a ton of wedgies. Atomic wedgies.

Was he a jet fighter pilot, though? Yeah. Okay, well, then we got him. Wait, did he actually get an atomic wedgie where the underwear got put on his head? Yeah, they would pull so hard that it would just rip the underwear. He used to pre-rip his underwear before school so that it was easier. And then they also, at one point, tied him to the flagpole. They also tied him to a skateboard and sent him down a hill.

What the fuck? Yeah. Canada was like a rough couple of years. Jesus. Where were you living? Like an hour outside of Toronto. The Canadians? Yeah.

The friendly people? I got bullied so badly. That's one of the good ideas. Can you say those again so I can do this to Jack? They're coming down the stairs on a skateboard. Last time I bring a skateboard to work. Okay, we're the friendliest, most polite people in the world. Let's give this filler an atomic wedge.

Yeah. Now that we're hockey teams. I got bullied. So like I had a USA ski team jacket. I was a swimmer and I got it for Christmas. Why did you wear that? And I got it for Christmas and it was like a parka. It was a really warm jacket.

So for after swim team practice, when your hair is wet and all that stuff, and I got out of practice and the jacket was just lying in a puddle of water. I just got bullied for being American. Right. But do you know that was put in a puddle of water or maybe an ice sculpture was wearing it for a while? Maybe there was somebody that needed to walk across the puddle and then they threw it down to be a gentleman.

I hadn't thought about the ice sculpture wearing my jacket. That is a good point. So many possibilities. Just jumped to bullying. Yeah, you just jumped to Canadian bullying. Fucking Canadian bullying. Something that's never been documented before. Hey, hey, don't give her any maple syrup, eh?

Tell her we've all run out. All right. That's it, right, Jack? Time to read some ads? Ad time. Okay. Is there something interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals?

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All right. Now please welcome to the show our guest, Alice Roberts. G'day, Alice Roberts. How are you? I'm very well. Thank you. How are you? I'm very good.

I love having British guests on. I'm a bit of thank you, how are you? I'm very good, I love having British guests on I'm a bit of an Anglophile I'm married to one of your lot A woman and a British person Yeah, I'm married to an English girl I'm an Anglophile Although I don't like calling myself anything that ends in the word file Yeah

It's just slippery slope It's a little dodgy Slippery slope It is, it is. And also it means then what about the rest of them? Yeah, no, I like your digestive biscuits. I enjoy a bit of Marks and Spencers. I have a wonderful time over there.

I like drizzly weather. So I'm hoping. Oh, don't. Don't. It's just been drizzling from about October, I think. It's just been It's been drizzling From about October I think It's just been dire And last night

It went We've been drizzling And then It was absolutely Biblical last night It was torrential But that's good That's fun

A bit of reason To crack out the umbrella Because the The drizzle The drizzle You can't really do anything With you Like

I've got a I've got a goodish coat. Anyway, so I'm hoping that your specialty is English things, but I'm going to look in your room and I'm going to judge a book by its cover. All right, here we go. Yes, no. Yes, no. Yes, no.

Yes, no. Judging a book by its cover. Wow. That was really good, Jim, and I messed it up still. I was getting into something. Alice, we have a little jingle there, and we still haven't figured out how to get into it right, and Jim did it perfectly, and I still blew it.

In the distance. Okay. All right. So you've got the human skull behind you. Is your expertise in the field of anatomy? Oh! That's it. Wow.

What? Yeah, that's it. That's fine. Where's the, where's the, bam, ba-ba-ba-bam. Celebrate. It's the first time ever. Wow. That was pretty good.

Wow. I mean, I guess the skull really worked. No, but there was also, I thought I saw the word extinct or something in the background. I thought maybe, or exoskeleton. Yeah, human anatomy. That's what we're talking about. Very good, Jim.

All right. Spos-un. But this isn't any old skull. That's not any old skull? It's a bit weird, isn't it? Whose is it? That's her twin sister's. Whose skull is that? Is it someone's? My skull. It's not your skull. Your skull's her twin sister. Whose skull is that?

Is it someone's? My skull. It's not your skull. Your skull's in your skull. Wait. It's my actual skull. Oh, it's a replica of your skull. So I was pretty close with twin. I'm on fire. Yeah. It's so weird. So I had an MRI scan

done, a very, very detailed high resolution MRI scan of my head and they 3D printed my skull. Wow. That's sweet. That's actually really cool. I've always thought that when I die, I was thinking, because you know how people give their body parts, and everyone wants to give their skulls to the Shakespearean productions

so they can go, you know, to be or not to be. Wait, people really give their skulls? Yeah, people give their skulls. To community theatre? Yeah, to community theatre and to be. Wait, people really give their skulls? Yeah, people give their skulls. To like community theatre? Yeah, to community theatre and like Shakespeare. I don't think they do. I don't think they do. I hear a lot of people do this.

He said everybody's trying to give their skulls to Shakespeare. I'm telling you, those Shakespearean companies, they get too many skulls. They're like this, enough skulls. We don't want any more skulls. Don't donate your skulls. So over here in the UK, we have this thing called the human tissue act, which I think it probably expressly forbids people eating their skulls.

Not the Shakespeare companies, though. Tell me, check that out. Can you donate your skull to Shakespearean people? I've heard that a lot. We've got researchers on it. I was thinking I might give my skull just like to like, I don't know, the London Comedy Store or something and just have it just like as an ashtray, just turn it upside down.

Oh, that's good, in the eye sockets? Yeah, yeah, something like that. I don't want it respected. I don't want it like in a glass case or like maybe with the liquor or something like that, but maybe the head of a mop or something, just useful. Yeah. I like that or something like that. But maybe the head of a mop or something. Just useful. Yeah. I like that.

I like that. I want the Damien Hirst treatment. I want my skull encrusted with diamonds. Yeah, the diamond encrusted one. Was that a Shirofti Criskels or the actual diamonds? I think they were real diamonds, weren't they? I don't know. I think they were.

I love that. It doesn't look like you're allowed to give it away. You can give it to him. You can give him. Oh, wait. It doesn't look like you're allowed to give it away. You can give it to – Oh, wait, that's in England and Wales. So that's what she – Alice was just talking about. I don't know about the U.S. I think Jack's looking for it. You're allowed to give your body to medical schools.

To medical schools. You can be a condom. And this is the Shakespeare school of medicine. I'm telling you. I'm telling you. They learn medicine and they do. You go see a real Shakespearean

like play and if they have written on the posters with real skulls that's like when you know I remember okay because there's a thing in Britain

we'll get onto anatomy in just a second there's a thing in Britain that you people you people Americans don't know about called pantomimes and it's this tradition

that sort of happens at Christmas and it might be you're doing Jack and the Beanstalk or whatever and then they have old soap stars, you know, like some soap operas or some reality,

old boy band members and they all go performing and then the men dress up as women, which today maybe you're not allowed to. I don't know. A punter is not everywhere. No, no, no. It's purely a British thing. And so even in Australia, they don't understand that he's behind you. Oh, no, you did.

Oh, yes, you did. You can't do those gags with Americans. They don't know what you're going on about. I've already checked out of this conversation. I'm already like, come on. I don't even know what's happening. The point is I can always judge a pan of mine by the stars they have. They go, oh, that person used to be on EastEnders.

That person used to be on Hollyoaks and that type of stuff. And then when you see a poster that goes with real dwarfs and they're doing Snow White, you know, oh, that's a high-end production. They've brought in actual dwarfs and not just kids. I've got to see that. Anyway. I found something about the Shakespeare skull. Oh, good.

Shakespeare skulls. There was a famous pianist named Andrzej Tchaikovsky, and he died in 1982 and gave his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and apparently his skull upstaged all the actors, so they had to stop using it. Wow. He's very famous. Maybe I should give that one.

Yeah, you should give that one. You need that one. No, I'm not giving that one. It's mine. I own Michael Hutchins' one. It's still all crushed up from the belt. No. Jesus.

No, no. I'm Australian. I'm Australian. I'm allowed to say that. He was masturbating. I don't know about that. That's a good segue. Let me give our guest a proper introduction.

Alice Roberts. Alice is a medical doctor, so maybe I should say Dr. Roberts. I don't know what you prefer. And a university lecturer and professor of public engagement with science at the university of birmingham since 2012 she has written books about the human anatomy physiology evolution archaeology and history uh and some of these books include the incredible unlikeness i'm sorry the complete human body the incredible human journey tamed

10 species that changed our world and the incredible unlikeliness of being you can oh she's holding them all there we go oh yeah tamed yeah

you can find all of these books on her website Alice Roberts oh this is a new one oh well that one's good it's like a vertigo the little book of

human wait it's kind of reflective humanism humanism there we go. Yes! And her website is alice-roberts.co.uk.

We'll have links to that one. So please go. If you're interested in any of these books, go buy them. So what can I teach Alice right now? Ask me a question. Well, before we start that, Alice, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be in this field?

Yeah, basically, it's all by mistake. So I should have been a surgeon. That's kind of what I set out to do. That's funny. Surgeon was my fallback job myself. Completely by mistake. I was supposed to be an astronaut. Like, what do you mean?

Like, it's pretty impressive. You're supposed to be a surgeon. Carry on. I decided at age 11 I was going to be a astronaut. Like, what do you mean? Like, it's pretty impressive you're supposed to be a surgeon. Carry on. I decided at age 11 I was going to be a surgeon and that was that. And I kind of pursued it all the way through medical school out the other side. You know, it was starting off as a junior doctor. Then my eyes set on surgery.

And then I got completely sidetracked into academia. So I ended up as a university lecturer. I think because I loved the teaching. I did a six-month job teaching, which is a kind of regular thing to do for trainee surgeons because it helps you brush up your anatomy. So teaching anatomy in the dissection room. So spending all day in the dissection room, dissecting bodies, teaching, all of that. And then I kind of just stayed for, it was meant to be six months, and I stayed for 11

years. So I kind of had to admit to myself that I probably wasn't going to be six months on stage for 11 years so I kind of I kind of um had to had to admit to myself that I probably wasn't going to be a surgeon at that point and I'd kind of just there's still time yeah you can you can still be a surgeon don't say I it's a side hustle side hustle surgery I haven't ruled out myself being one no the trouble is I mean I think I think it goes back um to a level physics so when did A-level physics, I found out that I was extremely good at taking things apart. Like we had to take apart a toaster and I identified all of the parts inside this toaster, but I never managed to put it back together again.

And so I think it's probably a really good idea that I ended up as an anatomist and not a surgeon because I'm extremely good at taking bodies apart. You know, that's my superpower. I'm very, very good at dissecting bodies into very tiny pieces. That would be a good Tinder bio. I'm extremely good at taking bodies apart. Hey, we fixed your heart. Here's some extra parts.

I didn't know what to do with those. I was like, where does that go? They wouldn't fit back in. Yeah. Okay, so here's what we're going to do. We're going to ask Jim everything he knows about human anatomy is what we're going to talk about, anatomy. And it's a very broad subject,

so I'm going to help him along with some questions. I know everybody at home, we're not going to cover everything. I'm tired of people writing in, you didn't cover, we're not going to get to everything with human anatomy today. We're going to get to the basics. The leg bones connected to the... So at the end of this, Alice, you're going to grade Jim on his accuracy,

zero through 10, 10 being best. Kelly's going to grade him on confidence. I'm going to grade him on et cetera. We'll tally the scores. 21 through 30, you're a bonehead. 11 through 20, cadaver. Zero through 10, skeleton. I'm going to be really harsh as well because, you know,

my medical students are doing their exams at the moment, so there has to be parity here. No, no, no, no. Sure, I should be measured the same way as a medical student. Not only am I not taking the course, I wasn't smart enough to get into the course, and now I'm meant to be just as good as them on completing the course. Make sure you put your name

at the top of the test. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, please be harsh because a lot of times our guests are very nice to Jim and we don't like it when they're nice to him. What is anatomy

or what is human anatomy? It's the different body parts. That's it? Yeah, yeah. It's all the different parts of your anatomy. Okay. When did humans start studying anatomy and like how did they learn about it uh that would have been korag the caveman

korag's back yeah and he would have been like this oh leg how do you know how to say leg yeah he was the first person to name it okay before. Before that, they were wobbly bits off your middle bit. And how did they, like, learn about it? What did they do? What would have happened is there would have been something with Da Vinci when he did that thing. When Leonardo da Vinci did the Anatomy of Man, that guy that was standing there like he was on a crucifix type of thing,

and then he would have started doing all that stuff, all the measurements where he was going a crucifix type of thing. And then he would have started doing all that stuff, all the measurements where he was going, you know, that measurement that your wrist to your elbow is the size of your foot and stuff like that, and your span is as high as your thing and sort of maybe the more scientific way of saying how we should all be put together. Okay. What is a dissection?

A dissection is when you cut something in half and you look at it from a halfway. So the classic one is, you know, when they dissect the brain, they can cut into it and then you can see like, oh, we have problems here, maybe from smoking or a stroke or whatever, and you can dissect it. The best dissection, like one that's like not actually when you, because I always saw in American movies, you're all fucking dissecting frogs all the time. There was all – I know that happened in E.T.,

but this is what I thought of Americans. All you kids were sitting in class and then one day someone brings in a frog and you all start getting your scalpels out and cutting into it and then you're throwing frogs at each other. That's what I thought happened. Never in Australia were we given a bloody, here's a wombat, kids, go to town. That never happened.

Nobody brought in the frog. They had specially- I know, I know, I know. We dissected them. The school had a bucket of frogs, and they're like, all right. We never got given that. Okay. That never happened.

I did not like dissecting the frog. I dissected a lamprey. Yeah, we were just never given dead animals in Australia. that never happened. I did not like dissecting the frog. I dissected a lamprey. Yeah, we were never just never given dead animals in Australia. There was never a reason the school thought give them a dead animal. That's because you guys don't understand freedom. What is a vivid section?

A vivid section is when... A vivid section is when you do it really graphically. I also think the best... what was the other one, the one that I said cut in half, that was the dissection. So when you did like we're learning about sex and they gave you that side on view of the one testicle

and the thing going that way, that was like what a dissection sort of looks like. But you can dissect the thing, cut into it. Like I said, the one testicle and the thing going that way. That was like what a dissection sort of looks like. But you can dissect the thing, cut into it. Like I said, the one testicle and the thing going that way as if it's not. What is that? The penis. Oh, okay.

And so they dissect things and they cut in half so they see how it works. The vivisection, okay, so I'm going to say dissection is when you cut it in half. A vivisection is when you go sideways like that. Sideways. Yeah. One of them is horizontal okay one of them is

horizontal one of them is vertical okay i'm going to talk about different systems and ask you a few questions about each what is the skeletal system the skeletal system is your uh skeleton okay and it's the system of how it works yeah jim likes to answer questions with the uh with the word and the definition they don't name these things like this for no reason. Okay. What is it made of? What's the skeletal system? Made of bone.

Bones. There we go. How many bones in the human body? I've heard, I've been given this number before. 274. Okay. What's the largest? Well, for me or for you?

It's not a bone. I'm going to go the largest bone, what, in length or mass and weight? Because if it's mass and weight, I'm going to say it's the human skull would be the largest one. But, you know, like your forearm or your shin bone, which is connected to the foot bone and the leg bone, your shin bone would be longer than that of the head, but I would say pound for pound, your skull is the heaviest and biggest.

What's the smallest bone? There'd be one in your foot. A big one in your foot. No, there'd be a little tiny one in your foot that goes between your clavicle and your davicle. Okay. Clavicle's right up here. What is the difference between cartilage and bone?

Cartilage, it's a little known fact for us that sharks are only made of cartilage. They don't have any bone in them. It's not a little known fact, actually. Bonus hint. But, okay, so cartilage is in between your joints

for the most part, and it's sort of the shock absorbers of the human body to make everything sort of move so it doesn't rub bone on bone so that you can sort of have things, joints rub against each other. Okay, so I'm not going to even ask you what the muscular system is because I know you're going to tell me it's muscles. No, it's all the muscles that join together.

How many muscles do we have? Oh, many, many muscles. Okay, moving on. Well, I don't know. Can you grow new ones? Because I reckon everyone has all of them. It's just whether they're shit or not. So let me count mine.

My six-pack? No, hang on. I would say there'd be muscles, I would say there'd be three times as many muscles as we have bones. Because you'd have to have four times as many because you have to have the muscles around each bone to make things flex and move and stuff like that. Okay. Do you know what the strongest muscle is in your body? The brain, the human brain.

Oh, for lifting? Or for lifting things? Strongest. The strongest, like, you know, that has the most strength, pounds per square inch maybe. I would say your thighs. Thighs. Thigh muscle. For lifting things. Strongest, like, you know, that has the most strength, pounds per square inch maybe or like can lift, yeah, whatever you want to say. I would say your thighs. Thighs, thigh muscle.

One of your thigh muscles. Do you know what a tendon is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's someone that lives in your apartment. You'd play your record. Yeah, very strong. No, a tendon is like a little bit of like, it's like stretchy. It's like it's like stretchy it's like a muscle but it's like a stretchy bit attendant it's like when they get tommy john surgery they cut a tendon

out of your ass to put it in your elbow so i think like attendant is like when you can tear a tendon you know they're no good but they're things that help flex and stretch and stuff yeah what's the largest organ uh the largest organ in the human body is your skin damn yeah you know what system your skin is part of uh your skeletal muscular system both our systems yeah it's working in conjunction it's a bone muscle all right i'm gonna ask you a bunch of questions here about different systems we'll kind of go through them uh so let's see respiratory system name some components the lungs anything else clavicle what about the davico no there'd be the lungs there'd be the um esophagus uh-huh uh there'd be the throat tube

um there'd be the dangly punching bag at the back of your throat. That probably gets involved. Do you know the difference between a pharynx and a larynx? Oh, a larynx and, okay, your larynx, I've had that is where you get laryngitis, is where your vocal cords are, and I've had nodules and I've had swollen larynx before. Pharynx. So pharynx is, I don't know what a pharynx, I've never heard of pharynx, but I know what your larynx before. Pharynx. So pharynx is, I don't know what a pharynx,

I've never heard of pharynx, but I know what your larynx is. Okay. Digestive system. We just talked about this on another podcast. Can you name anything from the digestive system? The intestine. The lower colon. I've gone creepy.

Yeah, so it's every, and it goes to about six meters you know it's six meters long six meters long what does your gallbladder do um i don't know i don't know i feel like it just gets in the way i feel i feel like gold i feel like gallbladder prostate and spleen can all fuck off I don't know gold bladder, prostate and spleen can fuck off I don't know if anyone's

ever gone oh thank god my spleen's in good nick you know like my mate was in a car accident and they removed his spleen and he's much healthier than me

he's spleenless and no one's he's never gone oh I can't do it I don't have a spleen can't get on this roller coaster I don't have a spleen. Can't get on this roller coaster. I don't have a spleen. No, he's fine.

You don't need the spleen. So you should get rid of your spleen. The spleen is meant to help other organs, but who gives a fuck? My organs are fine on their own. Yeah, because you can live with like one kidney and stuff like that. It's, you know, there's a few bad design faults, like the idea of the throat and the wind. You talk about this.

Yeah, two-hole system. I'll get into that. You have a flap. That's no good. We shouldn't breathe any out of the same hole. I'm all for it. You catch things. Dolphins, whales, better system.

There's nothing worse than you having a drink and something's gone down your windpipe and it's like you know that you've got a painful thing coming in about four seconds, and you keep drinking in the regular hole going, fuck, I'm going to cough and look like a idiot. That's a bad system. I agree with you. And I'm going to have to go, I just went down the wrong way. That's a bad system.

I also think babies coming out of a vagina, too small. Is it a vagina? Submarine hatch door. I'll tell you another one, Alice. I'll tell you another one. The. I'll tell you another one. The vagina wrongly located on the human body shouldn't be there. It should be up near the shoulder, right, far away. It shouldn't be right next to the arsehole, I'll tell you that much.

The two of them don't get along and they infect each other on the regular. On the regular. You spoon a lady, your dick gets a bit near her arse, and then you go to put it in the vagina, and she's just like, oh, well, that's my month ruined. And you're like, what did I do? I was just laying here. Those things should be very separate.

Okay. Let's talk about cardiovascular system. Cardiovascular, that's got to do with your heart, and that's pumping blood throughout your body. That's the cardiovascular. It's arteries and veins. Yeah, what's a vein? What does a vein do? A vein carries blood to other parts of your body. That's the calorie. That's arteries and veins. Yeah, what's a vein? What does a vein do?

A vein carries blood to other parts of the body. An artery, okay, basically. One goes to the heart and one goes away from the heart. Oh, I'll go the artery. Because if you cut an artery, your blood starts pumping out. So I say arteries go away from the blood. But I always thought that arteries were like your highways and your freeways and veins were just like your side streets.

Surface streets. Yeah, yeah. And like you cut an artery, it's like, oh, no, you've ruined the 101. Vein, no problem. No, vein is bad. You don't want to cut a vein, but it's not as bad as cutting an artery. And what about capillaries? Capillaries are little things that we're back in the day. Is there alleys? You pinch your cheeks and you can what about capillaries? Capillaries are little things that back in the day... Was there alleys?

You pinch your cheeks and if you can make your capillaries because real women, this is back in Jane Austen's day, this isn't me, this isn't me that's saying this. Real women pinch, whores use rouge. That was the big one for the day. This, your country

said that, Alice. Don't look all shocked at me. Like in Jane Austen, they used to pinch and pinch so that the capillaries would break, where I and many relatives of my family have done that just through alcohol, the old-fashioned way of ruining a capillary. We have so many things there. So I'm going to ask a few more questions, and then we can kind of go over stuff together

so we're not just going to announce. I think I'm doing better and worse than I thought I'd do. It's a little bit of both. We'll get to how long, how long do you think all the blood vessels are in the human body? Like if you, if you stretched all of them, I stretched all of them together.

Oh, I reckon that would be 20 meters, 20 meters. Okay. Do you know what the lymphatic system does um it's it's the system that's that's that's certain about everything that was the whole thing yeah it's like it's like i'm lymphatic about this what's the what's the emphatic system do that uh is it got to do with lymph nodes and stuff like that?

These little things? Lymph what? Yeah. Lymph noids. No, no, no. Nodes? Lymph nodes. Yeah, the noid was the thing from Domino's Pizza that I don't know if you even had in Australia.

No, I've seen references to him in TV shows. Okay. But the lymph nodes. Avoid the noid. They can become cancerous. There's a lot of them under your ears and stuff like that and around your neck. Everything can become cancerous, just so you know. Yeah, underneath your neck and all that type of stuff.

Okay, let's move on. Let me ask a couple more questions. The lymph nodes, they just can't get enough nodes. We can't get to everything, so I'm going to jump here, and then we'll get Alice. Give her Alice or Dr. Roberts, so I'm not being jump here and then we'll get, we'll get Alice. Alice or Dr. Roberts or just, so I'm not being rude. It's Professor Roberts actually,

but, oh yeah. Professor Roberts. Yeah, Professor. I'd say Professor. I'm going to call you Professor Roberts.

Sorry. But you can call me Alice. Professor Alice. Can I call you Professor Alice? No, just Alice. I'm like Professor Alice, though.

Okay, Jim, how many- If I was called Professor, I would not be. My children would be calling me Professor. What is a plane in reference to a body? It's higher up. What do you mean? What do you mean a plane? Like body planes.

Do you understand? Do you know anything about that? No, not really. Okay. I've met some people with some pretty plane bodies. One last question. How many body cavities can you name? All right.

All day. All day. Do I need the technical term or the slang? Whatever you think. The pee hole? Wait, the pee hole? Yeah, the urethra. Okay.

Urethra. It. Urethra. It's like the antifa. Urethra Franklin. Antifa for urine. And that's on the men. The women obviously have the vaginal hole, plus they have the little hole that they pee out of called pee hole. These are holes.

Yeah, all holes. Orifices, yeah. Yeah. Not really a cavity. I was talking about cavities. Oh, cavities? No, we'll do all the holes first. Not even one of the questions.

You've got your arsehole. You've got your two nose holes. Yeah, what are those? Nose holes. Yeah, nose holes, nostrils, nostrils. And then you've got your ear holes, ear holes. It's two ear holes, two nose holes, an arsehole, a pee hole, a vaginal hole. That's all your – oh, your mouth hole.

Pie hole. That's a big one, your mouth hole, that's a good one. Got the pie hole. That's all the one. Now, what was your question? All right. I'll tell you, I might know cavities. Professor Roberts.

When they do a cavity search, they search the holes. I think it's the same thing. That's true. You know what I mean? Like, that's what they're saying. We're going to do a cavity search, they search the holes. I think it's the same thing. That's true. You know what I mean? That's what they're saying. We're going to do a cavity search. They search the holes. I think a cavity is a hole.

I think you're trying to fool me. Have you ever heard the term chest cavity? Okay, but when they go, you've got a cavity, what are they talking about? When the dentist is in there. Yeah, no, it's a hole. It's a hole. Not a hole. Professor Roberts, on a scale of zero to ten, ten being the best, how did Jim do on his knowledge of human anatomy?

Oh, do you know, it's so hard to grade him because I would have said that there's really good knowledge there of broad concepts, but somewhat lacking in detail. I think probably five. Oh, yeah, that's all right. Okay. Not bad. I never said I knew much about yeah. Okay. Not bad. I never said I knew much about the human anatomy.

I'm pretty happy with that. So you asked what is anatomy, and you said different parts, and it kind of is, but I suppose, strictly speaking, the word anatomia means cutting up. Oh, okay. Well, we have to grade them on two other things here that don't really matter before we get to that. I think I'm going to give them a six on confidence.

Six on confidence. I'm going to give you a minus two on et cetera, your skeleton. Because I like saying that word. So anatomy, what does it mean? You just said what anatomy, what does it mean then? It means cutting up. So the tame bit means cutting and ana means apart. So it means cutting apart.

So it literally is kind of dividing up the human body. But you said, I mean, it is cutting the body into parts. You're right, really. When did it start? You said cavemen. I wouldn't use the term cavemen, but I would certainly say paleolithic. But is that not appropriate anymore? You can't call them cavemen?

Do they get offended? It's kind of, it's difficult. I find it difficult because it wasn't just men. And also because they didn't live in caves, so it kind of doesn't really work on any level. You're telling me there wasn't one? One of them would have lived in a cave. That's where their bloody paintings are.

They just go there to do art? Yeah, yeah. They may have gone in there occasionally, and occasionally they hung out in there and had hearths in there, but they were mostly living in tents. So they're tent people. They're not cavemen. But, but I would say, yes, anatomy goes back to prehistory.

I've just done a radio series about this because I'm a broadcaster as well. So I've just done a history of anatomy radio series. And we started back in prehistory talking about the fact that there's lots of evidence of bodies being taken apart. We're not quite sure why. Just for fun. There's a really weird, well weird well yeah there's a really weird skull from cheddar just down the road from me cheddar gorge which has got a load of caves in it which there's quite a lot of bones in those caves and um certainly some of the human bones have been smashed up and look as though they've been cannibalized but one of the skulls they've kind of taken the skull and they've just

bashed off the bottom of it and then they're just just left with the cranium, so the domed bit. And then they've chipped it very carefully around the edge. So they think they've made it into a bowl. I mean, I don't know what it was. A kind of nice little fruit bowl. You know, maybe a cup to drink. Yeah, like a fruit. You'd only hold one orange, wouldn't you?

Some grapes. Grapes would be good in there. Yeah, you could get grapes. Strawberries. I tell you, it'd be good for a few Maltesers. You in there. Yeah, you could get grapes. Strawberries. I'd tell you it'd be good for a few Maltesers. You could fill a bowl of Maltesers. Some hard candy, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, Skittles all day.

That's what they were doing. I don't know if they had Skittles in the Paleolithic. And then you said, what did you say? Oh, yeah, proper scientific anatomy. Really, we start with aristotle in the fourth century bce you said leonardo da vinci he's one of the best anatomists of all time so you know you get extra marks for him i mean he was just awesome and his drawings of the human body which never got published so he was he was drawing the human body in the late 15th into the

16th century in private notebooks which got got published centuries later. And you look at his, what he was doing. I've actually got a little, my, yeah, my coaster. You know, everything is a bit themed in this house. My coaster is a little bit of Leonardo da Vinci. That's one of his drawings. Wow. Yeah. He was amazing.

A naked lady. And that's, and they didn't get published. Why? Because back then, I remember reading a book on Michelangelo and he would secretly dissect or like look at human bodies, too, to learn. And but that was illegal, I guess. Right. Or is that. No, it was legal. So this is there was a there was a moratorium on human dissection since Herophilus in Alexandria in Egypt in the fourth century, fourth into the third century B.C. And then you couldn't do it for more than a thousand years and then in the renaissance they started doing it again and and that was basically because

they had medical schools and they they recognized that in order to teach doctors you had to do anatomy um so yeah so people were artists were dissecting um and learning about the body and using that for uh the basis of their paintings, but also they were famous anatomists during the Renaissance as well and famous surgeons. Can I ask you a personal question? Well, this is a personal work question. What do you most enjoy cutting into? A, big, fat men.

Okay, like men, women, children? I don't know. What is your favourite thing to cut into? Live cats. Yeah, where you go, ooh, we've got one of them coming in. Well, actually, so going back to the original ambition to be a surgeon, I wanted to be a paediatric surgeon, so I wanted to be a children's surgeon because I loved the craft of the surgery and the beautiful

detail of it. And also the fact that children recover so quickly from surgery. And it was just such a lovely thing to do, you know, to operate on a child. And then they would, you know, they'd come in so ill and you'd operate on them. And then they would be, you know, amazingly almost back to normal the next day, to the extent that I was saying, you know, amazingly almost back to normal the next day to the extent that I was saying, you know, stay in bed, you're going to rip the stitches out if you start jumping on the bed, stop jumping on the bed. But in terms of the dissection room, you basically don't want to be dissecting fat people. You just end up, you know, you don't, you're not particularly interested. Fat isn't interesting. It's just not interesting. It's

just like yellow custard and you're just cutting through slightly thicker custard to get what you're eating. No, no. The next fat person I see, I'm going to walk up to them and go, you're not interesting. So dissecting. It's mean. It's mean, I know. So you're like a nice, lean, women or men,

is there a difference in skin, like to cut into it? Is there a different texture or am I just being an idiot saying this? No, just obviously different bits and bobs in the requisite places. So a lot of similarities. I mean, it's very difficult to, the other thing, the other specialism of mine is human bones. So I help archaeologists out with looking at bones from archaeological sites and that kind of thing.

And it's very hard for most of the bones of the body to tell any difference between men and women. We have the best bet of sexing a skeleton, of telling whether somebody was male or female, looking at the pelvis, obviously, for obvious reasons already mentioned, that there's got to be the potential for a baby to get out through a female pelvis, so it tends to be wider. And then the other bone which tends to be sexually dimorphic,

we say, is the skull. And that is just generally because men tend to be chunkier and more muscled. And anywhere where you've got muscle attachments, like things like this little prong behind the ear on my skull, which is called the mastoid process. That's much larger in a male compared to the female. And also men have these great big, I've got a very smooth back of my head. Oh, you have a lovely skull. It's nice, isn't it? It's a beautiful skull.

It doesn't look lumpy or anything. Smooth. Lovely. Not flat on the top. You couldn't put a beer on top of that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty flat. But men often have a great big prong of bone sticking out there.

If you see the back of a man's head and if he shaved his head, you can see it sticking out really, really prominently. It's called the external occipital protuberance. I do like all the words in there. This is something with anatomy that's like do you like name things femurs and all this type of stuff that's the only one i could think of right what's what's wrong with just calling it leg bone your upper leg your lower leg why why the technical names because they're all just named after the people who discovered them or discovered them they or discovered them some of it is um but we're trying to get away from those which i think is sad in a way it's just that um the the eponymous names say things like the crypts of libicune in the intestine or the islets

of langerhans in the pancreas that's fine but different people different countries had um fantastic anatomists and say you'll find that the french have their own name for these various parts because they had fantastic French anatomists who were discovering them around the same time. Oh, the French are being difficult and not naming it the same as everyone else. When did that ever come along? I've heard that the English, they have a different name for the zumpy dump. They call it the skull. No, I'm not going to call it that.

But most of it goes back to the early anatomists in ancient Greece, and they were obviously naming their things with Greek names. And so those Greek names then come through into Latin. And so most of anatomy is actually Latin. Some of it's Latinized Greek, but it's mostly Latin. So it is, you know, femur just means thigh bone in Latin. That's all it means um so it's it's just that's when it was first named and the name is stuck but it actually works really well it

works really well to have a have an international language of anatomy for medicine because that's why that makes sense that we're all calling it femur so so even in japan they're calling it a femur yeah all right right yeah okay well i didn it a femur. Yeah. Oh, right, right. Okay, well, I didn't know that. I didn't know that. I thought they might have had a different word for femur. That's why when you always say that in America they don't use the metric system, I used the metric system when I used

to be a biologist because you have to use the metric system because everybody uses Celsius and metric system in the science community. The metric system is better, isn't it? Much better. I think so, yeah. Yeah, it is better, isn't it? It's much better. I think so. Yeah, it is better. Zero is freezing.

One hundred is boiling. Perfect. Except in England. Bloody perfect. In England, you guys use miles, right? Yeah, they still use miles in England. Oh, we do. We do.

Well, we kind of use a mixture, actually. It's really confusing. Which is also because it's such a small place. They're like, oh, it's 40 miles away. Oh, the next town is 40 miles. And you're like, oh. You're here. You're like oh it's 40 miles away oh the next town is 40 miles and you're like oh you're like you're almost home like here it's like am i going to disneyland well we're going to another town oh god i have to go from liverpool to manchester i won't be back for hours, love.

So dissection versus vivisection? Well, dissection is just dissection or dissection, however you say it. It is just cutting up again. So I think you got mixed up with bisection. Bisecting things is kind of cutting things in half. And vivisection is... I'm a dissexual. Just like people who are dead.

No. Okay, I'll stop with that. I'll stop. Okay, so there's... There's going to be some rumours after this episode. Vivisection is cutting up living people. So I suppose surgeons are vivisectionists in a way, but then they put them back together.

I've dated a few of them. Some of the early anatomists were vivisectionists, we think. So Herophilus and Alexandria was getting hold of prisoners and kind of cutting them up alive. So surgeons are vivisectionists, and people who do autopsies are dissectionists? Yeah. I mean, they're pathologists, yeah, because they're looking for pathology.

You're just going to gloss over the fact that you said people used to cut open like living criminals? You're fine with that? For sure. Well, what crime did they do? Stole an apple. Well, you pay the crime, you cut the time. Okay. time okay well all right we'll just keep going um so skeletal system jim said it was the bones 274 bones in the human body biggest

bone was the skull cartilage so far yeah like how do you do there in that section uh pretty good i mean the skeletal system is the skeleton so yeah yeah that pretty straightforward um it's it's bone and cartilage um so cartilage is included because cartilage is um kind of this structural fabric of of the body as well and there are bits like the the front of your rib cage the ribs stop being bony um as you come around to the front and then and then the end of them is completely made of cartilage which is um useful because it makes the rib cage flexible. You couldn't do CPR if there weren't costal cartilages. That's the thing.

They always fill in with the plastic on the one, the skeleton. In your office, do you just have a skeleton? Please tell me you do. I always love when I see one of them, like a full skeleton. No, I do. I have got a, I mean, this is my home office, but I have actually got a real skull in a box down there, which is a skull I make.

Well, I'm making all my lectures into videos at the moment because we can't do live lectures for students. So I'm here at home endlessly making anatomy videos. But yeah, so that's all I've got at home at the moment is a skull. But in my old office, I used to have all sorts of bits of various humans dotted around the place, a couple but in um in my old office i used to have um all sorts of bits of various humans dotted around the place you know a couple of arm bones under the desk mummified hand on a shelf do you um do you okay are you a fan of the tv show dexter

no not really no there's lots of it's a lot of anatomy in it yeah well he's a serial killer who's actually one of those cops that's a blood spatter he's a serial killer who's actually one of those cops. He's a blood spatter. Yeah, he's a blood spatter. Oh, no. I did, yeah, I did watch a couple of episodes of it. Yeah.

It was quite, yeah, it was quite anatomically correct. Yeah. I thought you were going to ask her bones. There's a show called Bones. No, I don't know what Bones is.

I've never watched Bones. Yeah, yeah. I thought it was inappropriate to have a small child in there. It was, anyways. What's the largest bone? Well, it depends how you're measuring it, as Jim said.

So he's quite right about that. So in terms of volume, I suppose you would say the skull. And probably in terms of weight, I think that's quite interesting. I'm not sure. The femur is definitely the longest bone in the body, because that's about half a meter long. And also it's pretty heavy. So it's going to be quite similar. I don't tend to go around weighing bones. It's not one of those things. I don't go around counting them either. I mean,

it's that kind of classic pub quiz question of how many bones have you got in your body? Well, everybody's got a slightly different number. What? Because some people have extra little bones in various tendons. Some of us will have various bones in our skull fused. So is that one bone or two bones? So it is a very, very difficult question to answer. Do we know what the smallest bone is then or no? Yeah, definitely. And it is in the ear.

It's an ear bone? The drum thing. Is it the drum thing? Yeah. So going from the back of your eardrum there's a sequence of three tiny little bones called ossicles which just means tiny bones um and they're the incus the malleus and the stapes and of all of them the stapes is the tiniest and it's it's absolutely minute it's a couple of millimeters across teeny tiny little bone stirrup shaped is i know you said it's a different number is that can you give us a ballpark within like 50 of bones like was that close with 270 something or is it close yeah quite close it gets somewhere between 200 and 230 um that's gonna be the kind of range they tell you when

you're a kid there was like i remember it was like 206 they would tell me when i was young and then but that does make sense we were saying yeah it's never gonna be the exact yeah if you use i feel like i'm carrying way more bones than the regular person just knocking away even when i lose weight people are always surprised by how much i weigh i think i'm a lot of bone so is that the same thing with muscles then we don't know how many muscles and there's just a lot of variation in the human body. So, you know, we have 12 pairs of ribs as a standard, but some people have extra ribs down in the lumbar region

and some people have extra little ribs up in their neck as well. So, you know, it's all kind of quite variable. What the fuck is that? No, it's pretty easy. Like a snake. You've got lower ribs? Neck ribs. Who's got neck ribs?

I once broke a rib. It was the worst. I was living in London and I was working as a bartender or something like that. I'd drunken too much. I'd passed out on a couch and then a couple of guys decided to wrestle and then while I was asleep, a guy just fell into my rib cage, bang, when I was laying on a couch or pushed over by another, like, bang, cracked my rib.

And I was so drunk and I walked back and I was like, oh, man, my fucking ribs hurt. And then like one of them just sort of popped out, like the skin pushed right out. Oh, God. Oh, no. Out of the skin? No, it didn't pop out of the skin.

Just like you could see it protruding. Like a big lump protruding. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I pushed it back. I went, fuck, and popped it back in. I was like, oh, man. I had to work at the bar the next day. And there's no cast they can give you for that.

All you do is you bandage it up, try to keep it tight until they fuse together again. And it's a fucking nightmare. Yeah, rib injuries are horrible. My ribs are almost always dislocated and it's so painful because even just breathing is so painful, but there's nothing you can do really. Yeah, no, you just keep putting them together.

Yeah, it's really painful. And if you get a cough, where do you go? Oh, God. I've had a crack to it. Ow, ow. I've had a fractured skull. I had my head bashed into a table and I fractured my skull in between my eyeballs because they said that was the softest part of the human skull.

So even if you get hit on the other side of your head, the fracture will happen there between your eyes, above your nose. For the most part. It's a very paper-thin bone there. Yeah. In fact, it's called the lamina papillacea. It's part of the ethmoid bone between your eyeballs, and it is absolutely paper-thin.

And how did you break your coccyx? I was dancing on a table in London and fell off the table. That's our professor's role in England. All your professors are like stephen hawking maybe you know stephen hawking's probably not a good like you're like sitting in their chairs not hurting themselves in perfect condition now they all there's always people partying i'm i broke my my coccyx when i i broke it on water jumping off of a very high structure, landing perfectly on the water,

which could be at that height is almost like concrete at that point. And I just broke the tip. And I never worked for the circus again. And I didn't, at the, at the time we had been drinking and I didn't even know. And I just, it was like at night and I went to bed and I woke up and I couldn't move.

I felt like I was paralyzed. I was like, God, and I was yelling at my friends with hangovers, help me out of bed! It's so painful. So painful. And again, it's one of those things that you can't really, you know, you just have to use your brain today.

They give you that donut. They give you an inflatable donut. I was in high school and they're like, just sit on this. I was like, nope, not bringing that to high school. I'm not going to sit on an inflatable donut. What's that bit at the end of your hand there, that just bone there? Yeah. On your hand?

Yeah, that's a little bone. My one here on one hand is very loose, and I can move it from side to side with my thumb. On the other hand, I can't, but I can actually shift that bone back and forth. Yeah, you should be able to shift it a little bit, not too much though, because it should be quite firmly bound down by ligaments. This thing's rolling around on me.

It is a bone in a tendon. So it's a bone in a tendon of flexicarpial narus, which comes up on that side of your wrist. And so it's a little P-shaped bone and it's called the P-shaped bone, the pisiform bone, which means P-shaped actually. And then it's attached by ligaments into the other bones of the wrist. So it shouldn't really move around too much. It does on this hand and it does on my left hand

and it does on my right hand. And for all you people who are sitting here, I'm naked right now. If you're listening to this podcast, I'm standing naked showing all my bones in all their glory. He's completely naked. Fine specimen, Fine specimen. Fine specimen. If you look at my stomach, Alice would call it not interesting.

So is there a ballpark in how many muscles we have? No, she said 230. And again, muscles are even harder, than bones because bones are generally elements which kind of come apart from each other quite easily. Muscles are not, really. So as you're dissecting the human body, some muscles will come apart. It's like, you know, what do you do with quadriceps?

Is quadriceps four muscles or one muscle? I would say four quad. But then it's got one insertion into the, into the tibia. It's really tricky. Um, deltoid, which looks like a kind of fairly consistent block of muscle over the shoulder, but when you dissect it, you find that it's all separate leaves all coming together. So all kinds of fibers coming together. So it looks like actually a whole cluster of muscles that have merged together. So I think it's a nonsensical question. Sorry about that. Okay. Um, well well is the strongest muscle a nonsensical question or do we have that well i

think again you're probably i mean gluteus maximus is um the biggest muscle in the body and extremely strong so your big bum muscle gluteus maximus gluteus maximus so when you're when you're sitting down and when you go to stand up you've obviously got to raise all your body weight off the ground. And you do that by extending your hip and it's gluteus maximus that's doing that. Son of the back muscle, father of the thigh muscle. And I will have my revenge in this life or the next. I am the arse. I feel like I get all my strength to stand up by groaning every time.

I'm like, ugh. Turned into that person. At what age, just I'm asking you for someone else, at what age do you start rocking back and forth to get off the sofa? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I know. It's terrible, isn't it? I get momentum.

The only thing about getting older and kind of having all these kind of aches and pains is that as an anatomist, I take some small satisfaction out of knowing what I've done. So I tore a calf muscle a couple of years ago and I was like, it went pop. And I was like, oh, medial head of gastrocnemius. And then the other day I went for a run and I came back and I was like, oh, I've got really painful hip. And I was going, oh, that must be tensor fascia lata. Oh, you must do that all day with people.

Do you ever have arguments with people and go, there's something wrong in your cranium. You deserve a kick in the gluteus maximus. My mom was an occupational therapist and she took a lot of anatomy and she would do that same thing. She'd always, like, identify what I'd be like on my shoulder. I'm like, all right, Mom, I don't need to know the exact names. I'm just going to – look, I live in America.

My health care has run out because of, you know, we haven't been working because the TV industry hasn't been open. So this podcast is the only way I get medical help. So I've got arthritis, right right and it's been on set and i wake up and my hands sort of clawed over like that and then i gotta do like i gotta do finger sort of crunches like that what can you explain what arthritis is like the people just tell me i have it but i don't quite know what it is and is that a type of thing to do with it? No, I did my PhD in arthritis at the shoulder joint,

but unfortunately I did it in medieval skeletons. I have psoriatic, they tell me, psoriatic. Oh, do they? Yeah. So that is, it's a type of arthritis that's not osteoarthritis. So it's a little bit like rheumatoid arthritis, but it's not rheumatoid arthritis either but I mean arthritis the arthro bit just means joint and the itis bit means inflammation

so it basically means a pathology of the joints and inflammation of the joints and the most common one is is osteoarthritis and everybody gets osteoarthritis as you get older it's kind of almost inevitable you can kind of stave it off by keeping fit and making sure that you've got good muscles. Other options? Other options. I don't know. Looks like you're screwed. No, because I've got psoriatic arthritis.

It has to do with psoriasis and the skin and that working into the joints. And I get psoriasis, so it's like, what are you going to do? It is linked to psoriasis, yeah. And they said it was in my blood and I've had it my whole life and it's just now it's coming. But there's probably things I could do to avoid it. Yeah, like she said, keeping fit, eating well.

For another day! Eating well, keeping fit. But it is, I mean, a lot of it is about these kind of design flaws in the human body, which I was quite interested that you picked up on because I'm kind of obsessed with this and and when um i have i'm battles with creationists online and i kind of point out to them how badly badly put together the human body is and that if you were a divine being you wouldn't design it the way it is it's badly designed i mean it is you know you were talking about the female vagina and the anus being too close together.

For the male vagina, I don't differentiate. It's just, and, you know, and also that whole kind of sharing of tubes, which I must say is a bit rich coming from a man, because, you know, you have whole tubes that are used for both your reproductive system and your urinary system. Yeah, but that doesn't bother me. That's just one less thing to clean. But the breathing eating is a bad system.

The breathing and eating are the same. Oh, it's terrible. So I did a program for the BBC a few years ago where one of the directors of the Science Museum in London said, you know, you've always said how the human body is so badly designed. I want to challenge you to redesign it. So we did a program for BBCbc4 uh called i think it was called perfect body or in the end it ended up being called uh can science make my body perfect

they always change the titles of things just before it goes to goes on air and i was like can science make my body perfect sounds like it's some kind of uh i don't know uh kind of uh classic in the end they just called it wheel of fortune but actually what we did i worked with a fantastic artist a couple of fantastic artists and we and we 3d scanned my body i didn't realize we're going to start with my body to begin with but we 3d scanned my body and then completely redesigned it so i had kind of like ostrich legs which are good for running um i i talked to i talked to the producers about what i wanted to do about female reproductive system because i said it is just ridiculous it's ridiculous that you know we are these apes that have um you know we come from it

we come from a family of of mammals that actually has it quite easy as far as childbirth is concerned most of the other apes are pretty much sorted as far as childbirth is concerned. Most of the other apes are pretty much sorted as far as childbirth is concerned. And then we've developed these ridiculously huge heads and our babies have ridiculously huge heads. And then trying, you know, the baby's head is pretty much 10 centimeters in diameter and the pelvic outlet is 10 centimeters and just a little bit bigger,

just a little bit bigger. And it's just like, that's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous thing. Wouldn't it be good to go to an egg system where we sit on the eggs yeah yeah or so so when i talked to the producers about it they said well you know what do you want to fix there maybe make the pelvis slightly wider and the you know say that the baby's head would be slightly smaller and i said no go radical go marsupial i mean they've got it sorted pouches you want a pouch so exciting yeah you give birth to something the size of a jelly bean.

Yeah. And then you stick it in a pouch. I mean, it's just brilliant. Stick it in a pouch and then it would just duck its head up. You'd have the pouch in your stomach, would you? Yeah, I think so. And, you know, you wouldn't need a sling then. You know, you keep on carrying the baby around in it.

Because you wouldn't need the belly button because we'd cease to be having umbilical cords. So that would just be all pouch area. That would be all pouch. Yeah, and you wouldn't have boobs either, say my redesigned me. Oh, that's not bloody changed things too much. You're onto something good with a pouch. I was thinking about sitting in a woman's pouch and then ducking my head up

and sucking on her titty and then going back into the pouch again. No, no. The teats are down there in the pouch. Oh, no, I don't want that. But what about the breathing? It was so weird. The finished sculpture was so completely freaky and they kind of unveiled it for me at the Science Museum.

We'd also got bigger eyes and I had these pointy ears, slightly kind of directional ears and everything. But apart from that, there was this kind of spooky similarity to me. And my husband was there at the Science Museum the night it was unveiled and the producer went up to him afterwards and said, oh, you know, it's going to this exhibition in the Science Museum and after that we'll send it home to you. And my husband was like, I never want to see it again.

Never. He didn't like the Austrian lyrics on you? He didn't like the Austrian? No, no, no. Oh, golly. I would go more of a kangaroo system. If you're going to have the pouch, I would have a jumping rather than a running thing.

I think it would be good if you're in a bar and you have kangaroo legs and you jump up over to a woman, bounce, bounce, bounce, and you go, how are you doing? Can I look in your pouch? No, lovely system. And a blowhole. We need a blowhole. Well, Forrest is obsessed with giving blowholes

because he doesn't like the ear, throat hole, but isn't there a danger you could get dust in it or something? What you need is like a blowhole with like a bit of mesh over it or something. Yeah. A filter system. Wear a mask. You need that stuff that goes over the top of your speakers.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's really tricky though because I've thought about that because the whole kind of idea that you basically put food in this hole and then air goes in this hole and then the two passages cross over. And that is what the pharynx is. So the pharynx is the passageway that goes down behind the larynx and then turns into the esophagus.

And the esophagus is the tube, part of the digestive system that connects to your stomach. So the conundrum I was trying to work out with an ENT surgeon friend of mine was how to separate those two tubes. And we kind of got some way, you know, just kind of sketching it and working it out. And then he went, hang on a minute, hang on a minute. What about the liter of mucus that's coming up from your lungs every day? And'm like oh because the lungs have got this self-cleaning mechanism which is quite clever so they produce mucus and then there are little tiny cells with um tiny little hairs on them that waft mucus up to the back of your

throat and you're constantly swallowing the mucus that's come out up out of your lungs so if you separated the digestive system the respiratory system there would be like this, you know, liter of mucus just coming out. Right. Well, you'd have to make another hole there if you made the pipes different. Another hole. Yeah, you see? Oh, it's like a sponge. Or the penis could triple up.

Oh, God. My solution is you don't even eat with your mouth. You eat rectally. So you just shove everything up your butt, and then everything gets absorbed that way, and you poop it back out the butt. People would eat less. Obesity problems.

Would you have taste buds in your butt, though? No, you don't even want it. Just shove it up there. Don't be silly, Alex. It wouldn't be silly, Alex. Taste buds. Dinner dates would be so awkward. Oh, no, dinner dates would be more fun.

I think you could get to sex a lot faster. Here comes the airplane. You're so romantic. He fed me my hot dogs. If you were laying on your back shoving food up your ass, I think she's probably up for it. Let's see here. We were doing the veins and the arteries. Oh, yeah, cardiovascular system.

Veins and arteries. Yeah, stretchy bits at the end of muscles. Respiratory system was all pretty good. The dangly bit at the back of your, the punching bag at the back of your throat is the uvula. Sorry to hear about the nodules I've written there. She takes good notes i've had them i've had them twice i had a 10 i had nodules back in the day when you couldn't speak for like a month afterwards and now they do it very like they do it with like a laser i think now the second time i had them but the first time

they cut them off with just a scalpel they shoved up my nose and ran down oh yeah yeah they put a camera up your nose and they put it down as a little thing inside the tube and yeah and then the tube they just had to scrape them off and you had to wait for them to heal back up and oh golly i couldn't i couldn't i could it's when i decided to become a stand-up comedian i couldn't talk forever and i was watching a bit of stand-up comedy and i thought to myself i think i might do that. There you go. So, yeah, I mean, cardiovascular system, you're right. Totally spot on.

And also, what's impressive is that you worked it out from first principles. So rather than having to learn things by rote, you worked out that, you know, if you cut an artery, it spurs blood out, so it must be carrying blood away from the heart. So, yeah, good. Good deductive reasoning. Capillaries are teeny tiny things. Yeah, really good. Good deductive reasoning. Capillaries are teeny tiny things. Yeah.

Really good. Yeah. So I like these questions where we ask how long everything is, but we're not going to know this either. How many, if you put all the blood vessels, how long?

He said 20 meters. Is that another one where you're going to tell me? It's always different. I have no idea. And I also don't know anybody who would have actually done that. Those guys that dissected the criminals. know anybody who would have actually done that. The intestines.

Those guys that dissected the criminals. I figured they would stretch them all out. The intestines are two metres, though, right? I got that right? Six metres. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they are long, and also they're very variable from person to person.

So you have a longer section of small intestine. I'm not quite sure what the lower colon is. That was an interesting one. There's an ascending colon, a transverse colon. This is a running theme on the show. The lower colon is the bit of my colon that hangs outside my asshole. He says we don't need a spleen. He said we don't need a spleen, prostate, gallbladder.

You can live without a spleen, but you have to be on antibiotics for life because the spleen is actually quite an important part of your immune system. What about the gallbladder? It's kind of useful. The gallbladder, you can definitely live without because all the gallbladder does is store bile. So bile is like washing up liquid, and it emulsifies fats in your intestines.

So it starts to break fat down and your liver makes the bile and it just makes it all the time. It's just constantly making bile and then it stores it in the gallbladder. And when you have a meal, the gallbladder empties itself into the duodenum and that starts to break the fat down. So you can live without it. You just have to be careful not to have big fatty meals. Would you say the gallbladder is the most useless of all the uh of the organs the gallbladder or which is it's all context

dependent isn't it i mean there's a lot of your organs that you aren't using at the moment sitting there appendix that's a shit one right that one's no good appendix is pretty rubbish i mean it is again part of the immune system and we think it's quite important early on. Brain is just, yeah, a big fatty lump of tissue, and it can be trained. Is the heart overrated? Well, Aristotle used to think the heart was just a, he thought that basically, he was, well, actually, no, the other way around. Aristotle thought the brain was overrated.

He thought that the heart was the most important organ and that's probably where thinking happened and emotions happened. Because, I mean, it's quite sensible if you think about it, because, you know, if you're excited about something, your heart beats faster. And so there was this idea for a long time that the heart was where your thoughts and your emotions lay. And Aristotle then thought the brain was just a radiator. Does that come from people going, I'm going to listen to my heart.

I have to follow my heart. And then they actually did think that your heart could think. Is that where that is? I think so. So I think culturally it's probably there in ancient literature, this idea that the heart is where your emotions come from, certainly. Didn't they used to think that the brain was like a radiator, like a pump?

Yeah, that's what you just said. Oh, they did say that? Oh, I should have listened. Literally said it 30 seconds ago. The lymphatics. That's brilliant. You've learned it very quickly. I can't believe Jim got the lymphatic system correct.

He said it's very emphatic. What did you say? Yeah. Pretty sure of itself. That's the system that's certain about things. And lymph noids can become cancers. Noids. I like that. Yeah. The lymph system is a really weird one. It's like a, it's basically an ally of the cardiovascular system. So it, it drains there's a lot of a lot of fluid that comes out of blood vessels um into the spaces between cells and then the lymphatic system drains that fluid um and eventually drains it back into veins so it starts off with tiny tiny little

um little lymph vessels that gradually get bigger and bigger and bigger and then there's a um a really big one that just um back into veins around the shoulder. But also the lymph nodes are kind of part of that as well. So as this tissue fluid is being drained from various parts of your body, it's passing through lymph nodes, which are stacked full of white blood cells who are constantly on the alert for any signs of infection. So it's a kind of way of just checking that there's nothing coming into the nothing coming into the body untoward. Okay. I've just got to say something that I've just realized. I've realized that the thing in the, in the bottom left-hand corner is now a microphone. I thought that was a larger,

like air conditioning unit that was in the background. And I was like, I was like, wow, she's really got a big setup there or some, that she'd paid for, like this big thing. And then I'm like, oh, it's the microphone and it's closer. The little purple things actually do look a little bit like a Thighmaster if you put them in between your thighs and squeeze them. Like, look, you see that? Oh, yeah. Okay, now that I've seen a hand go up to it, I know what's happened here.

Yeah, he comes. go up to it i know what's happened here um okay and i think oh the cavities versus the holes cavities are holes right cavities are holes oh i don't know i wouldn't include all of those holes as cavities i don't think um i they're they're kind of yeah they are holes, canals, exits and entry points. But there are cavities which are kind of sealed off and separate within the body. So, yeah, it's a chest cavity. Within the chest cavity, you've got things like the pleural cavity, which is this kind of bag around the lungs, which lubricates the movements of the lungs. You've got another bag like that around the heart.

So kind of, you know, the space inside it's actually really small. It's like a kind of envelope that's then folded around the heart. So the space inside it's actually really small. It's like a kind of envelope that's then folded around the heart because the heart moves a lot as it's pumping. And then around the intestines as well, you've got the peritoneal cavity, which is, this is another design flaw. So the peritoneal cavity is completely sealed off from the outside world in a man, but it's not in a woman. So the peritoneal cavity, if you go up the vagina through the uterus along the oviducts, you get out into the peritoneal cavity, which is a really bad design flaw because it means that infections can track out of the female reproductive organs into the abdominal cavity. Female water skiers have big problems with that because of

the amount of water that's being pushed up all the time. Really? And also it means that you can have ectopic pregnancies. So, I mean, that is one of the most bizarre design flaws of the body, that the egg is ovulated out of the ovary and it has to be picked up by the oviduct to start traveling down the oviduct and then to get fertilized by sperm coming up the other way if it's a lucky egg um but it can go back the other

way and then go and implant in the abdominal cavity and you just go why aren't the ovaries inside the oviduct why aren't they sealed inside the oviduct and you're preaching to the choir it's a quirk of evolution i think because there are some fish that have their ovaries sealed inside their oviducts i'll tell you, I feel like the human body really needs to, like, I don't like pointless things. Like there's a wart that comes up on my thumb that I've tried to get cut out a thousand times and it's just there and they're like, well, try to freeze it.

I'm going, it's not free. This thing's going to outlast religion, right? It's been on me, right? And it's like, so what cysts? I get cysts under my earlobes. Is there any benefit to these things? Skin tags. Skin tags, cysts, or moles and cold sores.

Any benefit to these things just apart from being irritants? Well, a lot of these things are to do with infections, to do with viral infections. So, you know, the viruses are having a nice time. So I suppose as far as the viruses are concerned you're just there you know you're just their ecosystem right um but yeah there's there's there's a lot of things that are just yeah you just think oh it'd be better if it wasn't there i mean the the nerve that supplies the larynx is one that always gets made that is just ridiculous there's this the nerve that actually supplies the

muscles that supply that that produce our voice um voice goes down into the chest and then runs back on itself. So it comes off a parent nerve high up in the neck, and then it runs all the way down your neck, all the way down to the chest, loops underneath the arch of the aorta on the left and underneath the subclavian artery on the right, and then comes all the way back up again to innervate the larynx. And it's a real pain if you you've got surgeons doing thyroid surgery you have to be very careful um to avoid the recurrent laryngeal nerve so it's called recurrent because it runs back on itself it recurs on itself and you just go it's ridiculous why isn't the nerve just coming straight from here and going straight to the larynx and it's kind of because it gets stuck underneath his artery

when you're an embryo your heart's right up here, stuck underneath your chin. And the nerves grow out and they grow underneath his arteries and they do grow straight out in the embryo. And then when the heart descends down, it all gets kind of dragged down. There you go. It should be able to rewire itself, surely. So the things that I've taken away from this podcast is we're rubbish

bad design no it's brilliant most of the time and what was interesting about doing that um body uh program for bbc4 was that every time we tried to you know every time we kind of identified something and went right that's rubbish let's fix it We then created a knock-on problem. So it's really complicated. There's all these different systems that have to work together. And if you start tweaking one, then you find that there's a knock-on problem somewhere else. And not only that, of course, you've got a body that had to work as an embryo too. So it had to work in utero where you're not even breathing air you're getting oxygen coming in through a completely different route into the body via veins into the heart and it's got to be able to switch over at the moment of birth to being an air breathing animal so some of the problems that we've got

are because of our kind of life history i suppose and then some of them are just bits of baggage from evolution and they're really difficult to write out do you know much about the anatomy of other animals or is just is humans just your expertise humans is my main expertise but when i was teaching at bristol university we taught medical students and veterinary students in the same department and so i got roped into teaching on the vet course as well so that was that was really weird for me as a human anatomist and And it's amazing how similar other animals are. And obviously, the more closely related ones. So I've dissected chimpanzees more recently, and they're incredibly similar, down to exactly the same muscles in the arms, exactly the same nerves innervating them,

all of that kind of thing. But even dissecting things like dogs and pigs, it's very, very similar indeed. And then obviously, the further you go away in the family tree of life on the planet, the more different the atmosphere is. What animal do you reckon is the best put together? There you go. Oh, that's a really good question. Because you were saying earlier that monkeys could give birth a lot easier than we can.

Yeah, yeah. I think amongst the mammals, the marsupials have got it. I mean, I wish humans had evolved from marsupials. I think that would have been brilliant. We're not. Oh, no, we're not. No, no, no. Of course.

We're primates. And I know the manatee, but I always remember this because we used to do necropsies on manatees in my previous job. I was a biologist. Don't worry. We weren't just doing that. Okay, what was that? I. Don't worry. We weren't just doing that. That's okay. What was that joke? I'll tell a story in a second.

And their bones, though, because they had to buoyancy compensate in the water, their bones, they didn't have any bone marrow. I think almost all their bones. And so they were really dense. But they're also brittle, which makes them very susceptible to getting hit by boats. And that's why when they get hit by boats, they die die a lot so that's all i know about manatee it's it's it's funny that like yeah like like forrest was a marine biologist he's really intelligent the other day i was having my hot water system um fixed uh it wasn't giving me hot water and so the

the plumber came out and he opened it up and we're standing there with our masks in the garage looking at the open hot water. He was about to tell me, you see this fan here or something, right? I was going, okay, right? And he looked at me and honestly asked me this question, do you have a background in engineering or science? And I'm like, I thought I might lie for a second. I was going to go, sure, because I thought that might cut some money off. Because if I say no, then he's going to, he just rubbed his hands together like,

well, you're missing a flugelbinder up here in the top corner. Yeah. Okay. So this is a part of the show, Dinner Party Facts, where we ask our guests to give our listeners and viewers some interesting or little known facts or just anything in that realm and uh i think you have some of those right professor robert yeah i mean the recurrent laryngeal nerve is one of them actually but we've already done that but another one um that we've kind of touched on is the ear hole. So the ear hole, which is the external auditory meatus, if you're an anatomist,

is inherited from one of your fishy ancestors, because obviously, if you go back far enough in time, about 500 million years ago, then your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandma was a fish. And fish don't have ears. I don't know if you've noticed that fish don't have ears. Fish don't have if you've noticed that fish don't have ears. Uh, fish don't have ears. Um, they, they detect vibrations in water through a completely different system. So, um, when animals started moving onto the land, uh, when we get the first tetrapods emerging, they basically had to cobble together something that would allow them to detect sound waves in air. And when I say they had to do it, you know, it's just happening through mutations. That's how evolution works.

But what turned into the external Orchidumiatus was actually an original gill slit. So your external Orchidumiatus is the remnant of a gill slit in a very, very ancient fishy ancestor. And not only that, other bits of the gills then get recycled into all sorts of other things too.

So you obviously have to invent lungs. So you have to have an outpatching of the gut, which is why the larynx is attached to the pharynx. And we have this association between those two tubes and the annoyance of food going down the wrong way sometimes. And the cartilage that supports the airway is cartilage that in your ancient fishy ancestors would have been cartilages supporting gills um so the the larynx cartilage and the muscles that i'm using to talk to you with now are muscles that in your ancient fishy ancestors would have

opened and changed in fishy wow yeah great great, great, great, great, great, great. I didn't know that. That's funny because my actual grandmother does smell like a fish. Proof. Awesome. Okay, well, like I said earlier, please go to alice-roberts.co.uk. It's her website, and you can check out all of her books on there. The Complete Human Body, The Incredible Human Journey, Tamed, Ten Species That Changed Our World,

The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being. The new book that I did not mention in the notes here. I'm sorry, what is it again? Ancestors, out in May. So all about a prehistory of Britain through burials. all about a prehistory of Britain through burials. Yeah, and you can find her on Twitter, at TheAliceRoberts.

And the first, the pinned tweet you have here is your BBC Radio 4 series that you just mentioned before too, that I'm sure you want people to listen to as well. Can you listen to that on podcast as well, or is it just like for people in America? I think it's just going out at the moment on BBC Radio 4, but I'm sure it will be available as a podcast, yeah. Okay, great. We'll watch you out to that on podcast as well, or is it just for people in America? I think it's just going out at the moment on BBC Radio 4, but I'm sure it will be available as a podcast, yeah. Okay, great. We'll watch you out for that.

Yeah, please. I mean, like I said at the beginning, we could talk for years about this. We're just rushing the service. Oh, I think I learned everything. I think I'm ready to start lecturing. Well, great. It's not like at a top university.

Community college? No, not like the University of Phoenix. Like an actual university that's in Phoenix. Shakespeare Community Theater. Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right, if you're ever in an alleyway, ladies and gentlemen, a homeless person comes up to you and goes,

you know, there's only 230 pounds in the human body. Okay, well, I don't know about that. It's all different, you see. We have cartilage. And you just ramble on. Hey, everybody. Jason Ellis here from the Jason Ellis Show podcast, reminding you that my podcast,

new episodes every Wednesday, downloadable where all podcasts are available. Come see my friends, Michael and Kevin, as we talk to you about what's awesome, what sucks, fitness, fighting, parenting, life, spin kicks, LGBTQ community, how to defend yourself against a shark if it attacks you out of nowhere,

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