The Infinite Monkey Cage - Battle of the Sexes

Episode Date: July 18, 2016

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined on stage by Professor Sophie Scott, Professor Steve Jones and comedian Sara Pascoe. They will be tackling the age old battle of the sexes, and asking whether men really are from Mars, and women really are from Venus? Probably not, according to Brian as Venus is too hot! Moving on from the pedantry of physics, they'll be asking whether the divide between men and women is based on a fundamental difference in our genetics, in our brain function, or is it all down to our upbringing. Let the battle commence. Producer: Alexandra Feachem.

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcast. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And in a moment, you're going to be hearing me saying, hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. Because this is the longer version of the Infinite Monkey Cage. This is the podcast version, which is normally somewhere between 12 and 17 minutes

longer than that that is broadcast on Radio 4. It's got all the bits that we couldn't fit in with Brian over-explaining ideas of physics. I do object to the use of the word longer, though, because that's obviously a frame-specific statement. Yeah, we haven't got time to deal with that, because even in the longer version, we can't have a longer intro. Just let them listen! I've got an idea! Can we just have a podcast version of this intro to the podcast,

which can be longer than the intro to the podcast? Yeah, it will be available very soon. Hopefully it's started by now, but if you're still hearing this, I don't know what's going on. And then we can have a podcast, podcast, podcast version of the podcast. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. Now, it may come as some surprise to our listeners

that both Brian and I are male, despite the fact that when we walk around together, a lot of people come up to me and say, oh, you've got a lovely daughter. Today we're talking about the biological battle of the sexes with a particular focus on genetics and neuroscience. How did sex evolve and what are the evolutionary advantages that it confers? Whilst popular culture might suggest that there are differences

between the brains of men and women, is this distinction supported by science? For instance, it's a widely held belief that men are better at reading maps, whereas women are better at actually getting to the correct destination because they don't spend the whole time going, I know where I'm going! I know where I'm going! I don't think it is left!

Well, I don't know why there's a quarry here! So, for this show, Brian has been researching by reading men are from Mars and women are from Venus. I'm going to stop you there, because I didn't get very far. The author knew nothing about atmospheric physics. That's all. This show is planetary stereotyping. Venus, the goddess of love.

Sulfuric acid rain, hottest place in the solar system. Women are dissolve and melt if they came from Venus. It's inaccurate. Of course, men from Mars, their eyes would all pop out, go, like, in total recall. No. OK, they'd grow potatoes in a special tent. I've seen the film, I've done the research.

So, to sort out the differences between male and female with as few complaints on social media as possible, we have a geneticist, a neuroscientist and a comedian, and they are... I'm Steve Jones. I'm Professor of Genetics at University College London. I've wasted my career largely working on the genetics of snails. And they have an interesting sex life

because they're hermaphrodite, simultaneously male and female. And that gives them two choices. What Woody Allen called sex with somebody you really love, yourself. They can self-fertilise. Or they can cross-fertilise. Boy-girl meets girl-boy. And what you want to be under those circumstances, as we'll learn, no doubt, is the boy, because that's much cheaper.

How do they do it? They fight with their penises and one bites the penis off the other one. That's my favourite. Welcome to Radio 4. You're listening to Gardner's Question Time. Hi, my name's Sophie Scott and I'm a professor of cognitive neuroscience from University College London.

I study brains and I've come to the conclusion that your sex, whether you're male or female, is almost one of the least interesting aspects about your brain. Brilliant. Well, it's going to be a fun show, then. That's the... Good. My name's Sarah Pascoe. Patricia, middle name.

I... I don't like it. I shouldn't have said that in case my mum gets upset. I am a comedian as my job, and my preferred mating strategy is my own. I know that most people meet someone in the workplace, so I've chosen an industry which is ten to one, male to female, and just let the odds work in my favour.

And this is our panel. Steve, we'll start with you after such a promising anecdote on the removal of penises in the snail world. Why do we have a female and a male sex in the first place? Why has that evolved? That's probably the most difficult question in biology because it's obvious that males make no sense because what males do is persuade or force the opposite sex, females,

to copy their male genes. Now, why would any female want to do that when we know that a tiny difference in your individual success in copying your own genes is what drives evolution? Why allow these men, these males into it? Well, nobody really knows, but the usual explanation is that evolution is basically a battle of all against all that there are parasites diseases out there all of which are anxious to get you so if you only have one set of genes no sex no sex no exchanging and genes and shuffling the cards then you're vulnerable to any changes in parasites and disease and they'll come and get you so you've got no choice but to keep running

but what why are there only two sexes do we know that i mean you could imagine that you could share multiple copies of genes that too is very peculiar i mean if you define sexism somebody of being a different sex to you as somebody with whom you can mate successfully now if there are 100 sexes you could mate with 99 of the people in this room. What a delight that would be, OK? But nearly always there's two sexes, and that's because there's an enormous conflict between males and females in the strategy, the tactics they use when they're trying to get mates. Now, males are going for quantity rather than quality.

In men, for example, every time a man has sex, he makes enough sperm to fertilise every woman in Europe, which is a frightening thought. But there's less now. That's true. That is one of the things... I believe there was a plan to set up one man in Brussels

who was going to do the job. That was on the side of that bus. So he makes, or males make lots and lots of small sex cells. So they need to make lots

so they can compete with each other, find the females. Females can't do that because the egg has to be a certain size in order to have various forms

of nutrition in it for the early embryo. So you end up with a situation that you always end up with the smallest possible sperm and the smallest feasible egg, but it's quite big. So if there's a third sex,

then that would confuse the matter, and the smallest one would then win again. The two smallest ones would win again. So you have just two sexes. So Sarah, do you think it would be easier if we were in a... I think the clownfish, for instance, that changes its sex, doesn't it? And I think there's also various different stacking limpets

where you get a system where, is it right, it goes male, male, male, male, male, and then when you get to the bottom, you turn into a female. Would that be correct, Steve? Well, it's got a great... The stacking limpet's got a great name. Its Latin name is crepidula fornicata. That would look really good above a nightclub in Soho. And what it does, it does make a stack,

and the one at the bottom gets to be female, the next one gets to be male, the next one gets to be female. Anyway, I think we shouldn't go any further into that. This is, after all, the BBC. So with that, Sarah, do you think the idea... Is it problematic? As a human being, this race and this battle that we end up in, the battle of the sexes, male and female,

that in fact going for a system that we've just been talking about, the limpid or clownfish system, may make a happier human race. Well, I don't think you can talk about happiness in animals that aren't conscious. So the difference between us isn't that they have a different system, it's that they don't have emotions attached to it. And like, yeah, last week he was above me in the stack and this week he doesn't want to be next to me.

I don't know what it means. It's the emotions. I mean, sex is making more people. It's genetics and bacteria and we've got this whole other level going on. So actually, if we became stupider, then it wouldn't matter. I'm saying, yeah, what's the opposite of evolution? Involution?

Devolution of the prefrontal cortex is going to be ideal for our species. And I think it might be happening. Have you been watching Love Island? I know I'm on the wrong show. Have any of you been watching Love Island? Mm-hm. It's all going to be OK. I was going to say, Steve,

is it possible for us to de-evolve towards limpets? Yeah, lots of creatures have given up sex, but it never pays off, and it's a great idea for a while, but if you look at the... I mean, there are some lizards even. I mean, just us, the Pope, he knows. But, you know, there are plenty of creatures out there, plants and also some animals, even there are some lizards which are all female.

And what you find is they're out there, but if you look at the great tree of life, they're at the tips of the twigs. They don't actually, with very few exceptions, they don't generate great variety and diversity of life. They're kind of stuck in a in a one-way street so sophie we mentioned in the introduction the idea i suppose it's a an urban myth in a sense that there's such a thing as a difference between male and female brains and you mentioned actually

at the start you thought that was a unlikely to be correct well it's it's very interesting because it's a very very widely held belief and you'll see whole kinds of domains of cognitive neuroscience that will take it as a starting point, because it seems so obvious, and lots of other bits of the body look very different between men and women. I have got an A-level in biology. I can detest this. So the logic goes, well, the same would be true for brains. But in fact, all the studies that have looked for differences between male and female brains tend to find either very small effects that don't

replicate or larger scale effects that basically reflect the fact that men are somewhat bigger than women and they've got bigger brains so women's brains are scaled slightly differently so very very crudely inside the brain you've got two different sorts of matter if you cut a brain open there looks like there's two different things going on. There's grey matter and there's white matter. Grey matter is where you've got the cell bodies, and that's where, really crudely, computation happens. Stuff gets worked out there.

The computational power of the brain is in the grey matter. And then the white matter is the connections between that. And what you find is women have got proportionally more grey matter and less white matter than men. That's simply because they've got smaller brains, so you're fitting in more of the stuff you need more of, and you need less of the stuff that's connecting it. So it's an adaptation to the fact that the head is smaller.

Exactly. So essentially you're fitting the same kind of computational power into the water bottle. Is the variation between, let's say, and you just pick a male brain at random and a female brain at random, is the difference between different brains in the population larger than the difference between male and female brains? Would that not be a good differentiator, as it were?

Exactly. So lots of things mean that your brains will be different. So if I look around the room here, I can be absolutely certain there's going to be a massive amount of variation across the brains in here. I tend to think about people's brains when I look at them. Please try and get past this. And we know some of that is just like accidents of birth. So, for example, we've found people who are phoneticians, you know, they can kind of listen to you

and say which bit of Manchester you've come from and how long you've lived in London. They have got bits of their brains that are simply more complex than people who have not become phoneticians. And that seems to have been there from birth. It's a shape thing, it's not a size thing so it's not it's not some sort of response to practice like is that oh is my myth about taxi drivers having a bigger exactly remember things exactly find that so you also find in the phoneticians brain areas that correlate with

how many years they've been doing it just like the taxi drivers so the brain's huge and very plastic so some stuff you're born with most of the differences actually come through what you get to do, your experience. So actually over your lifespan, your brain changes hugely, partly because it's developing and then because of the stuff that you do. So if you really want to change the brain, teach someone to read, teach them to play a musical instrument. Or for example, you know the idea that women, you know, can't read maps and men can read maps. Well it turns out kids growing up in Tanzania in very, very featureless environments

are much, much better at spatial reasoning than kids growing up in Lancashire, because they have to be. So actually, the environment that you're in and what you're exposed to as you're growing up and throughout your whole life, that's what really gives you the brain that you end up with. And I can't look at a brain and say, that's a male brain, that's a female brain, because...

I like the fact you picked up spatial reasoning and men from Lancashire, because he's from Lancashire and can rarely find his way from the toilet to the stage. So there may well be a link there. But when you're talking about the difference between males' and females' brains, which you know needless to say far more than I do, but surely the difficulty will be for a brain scientist. We know so little about the brain full stop that you would scarcely expect any physically visible differences. There may be enormously subtle biochemical differences in there.

It is possible there are subtle biochemical differences, but they're not showing up at any of the brain scans that we're doing at the moment in terms of the anatomy of the brain or the function of the brain. So for example, if I take a group of people and I scan you all reading, I'll find your age and your strategy for reading affects how your brain reads rather than whether you're a man or a woman. That's something that's supposed to be different between men and women. Language is supposed to be different.

It's hard to deny, isn't it, that there are differences in behaviour between men and women in certain ways. The example I always give, and I can assure you that I think the figures are accurate, is that men murder at ten times the rate of women. Yeah. Now, the murder rate across the world varies by a hundred times. I think the lowest level is in Singapore

and the highest level is in Honduras. But if you go to Singapore and you go to Honduras, it turns out that the men in Singapore murder at ten times the rate of women, ditto in Honduras. Although the average woman in Honduras is fifty times more dangerous than the average man in Singapore. Now, I mean that that's the joy of being a geneticist because all you need to do

is look at the genes the Y chromosome the male chromosome in this case and look at the outcome and we well know and I'm sure you know better than I do there's an enormous gap between the gene and the outcome but it's very hard to deny that there's some effect of at least the Y chromosome on behaviour which women don't share. Well, you would think that. In my field, what you'll find people try and explain is why are there slightly more people doing maths who are men than women, and why are there slightly more chess

players who are really good who are men than women, and nobody really wants to say, by the way, for every one woman in prison there are 25 men. No one will say that's down to the brain, although you might think there might be something going on you know that's worse than engineering departments it's really it's a very very bad set of statistics this is always the problem with science it's not as sort of objective as we like to think it is and people will set out to solve problems at the moment people tend to ask questions about well why are women less good

at things rather than saying why are men really excelling at committing crimes? And would it not be, I mean, just... Would it not be you could suggest it was hormonal differences, though, for example, couldn't you? It probably is. I mean, it's foolish to deny that testosterone, which is a hormone which is very important for half this audience, I'm not quite sure which half,

affects behaviour. If you abuse testosterone, as, say, bodybuilders do, then your behaviour changes, and many, many bodybuilders who inject testosterone come to a very unpleasant end. They die in car crashes, suicide, murders, all those kind of male pastimes. So it's foolish to deny...

LAUGHTER It's foolish to deny that there are some biologically coded aspects of human behaviour. It can't be simple, though, because we know that in the brain, testosterone is aromatised into estradiol, so it's working as an oestrogen. Men have got two different routes to be affected. So it's wrong to think that testosterone is doing boy stuff and oestrogen is doing girl stuff. Oestrogens have a masochistic effect on men as well.

Just for the clarity of the eye, what was that word? So testosterone is... Aromatised. Aromatised. Into oestrogel, an oestrogen in the brain. So what does it mean by aromatised? Aromatised is an enzyme that changes it into an oestrogen. It's just... Oh God, I'm right off my patch here.

This is the enzyme that if you are a creature, and Stephen will know more about this than me, that changes sex depending on temperature, it's the enzyme that can control that. Women certainly have testosterone. That's why they grow moustaches when they're rather elderly. Oh, and when they're 35 as well.

So they're there all the time, Steve. But the point is that the roots are complex and certainly the effects that could be happening in men's brains, if there is one, is not necessarily going through testosterone and doing stuff. It's doing it in the form of an estrogen which takes effect to women. The interesting thing about prison studies is what they thought, first of all, when they found out this thing about testosterone and the Y chromosome, especially the double Y chromosome in prisoners,

they thought, oh, fantastic, we've found out why men are more violent. And then they found out that very, very successful men had exactly the same things. And actually there were always other factors, and it seems to be a mixture of childhood conditioning, critical stages, brain injuries in childhood. There's this combination, and a lot of it is very social. And the same child, if it has a cold or aggressive family,

might end up, and again, obviously economics is related, might end up in a prison. And actually the same boy with a lot of communication, a loving family environment, will end up being a very, very powerful, very important man because they're both kind of equally intelligent and things like that. So that's the thing. That's the terrible thing about dealing with something like sex or statistics

and then trying to work backwards from it. To summarise this piece of the discussion, as I understand it, there are no statistically significant structural differences that we can see between male and female brains. There's nothing showing up consistently in the scans that we do at the moment. So, you know, people might scan 20 men, 20 women,

find a difference. What you'll find is you then try and run it again, you get a different effect. It doesn't replicate because you need many, many, many more brain scans to do that. And when you do that, what you tend to find is actually the differences then are really, really small or come down to just basic overall size. You don't find, unlike the rest of the body,

you don't find whole other bits that aren't there in one sex. And of course, if something is a behaviour, you have to be asking about social conditioning and those kind of things affect, and they do affect our behaviours. So really what you're saying, Sarah, as well, is that pragmatically a lot of this doesn't really matter. It can be something that in terms of just the actual creation of this particular division, if you look at it pragmatically,

we're worrying too much about it. Yeah, I wonder why we're so fascinated with it, because actually, and I think that's the thing with the science, where they keep going back and doing these brain gender studies, we want there to be a definition, like, yeah, women do do this more than men, and men are like this. And it's so hard, isn't it, to go, like, oh, maybe people are people.

I found... To be very crude about my area, it's very often the case that people will accept quite a low bar for data in my field when it comes to sex differences. So I looked at one paper where they were looking at spatial differences between men and women, and I think they had something like eight men and seven women. There was no difference behaviourally. They were the same on the test.

And they found brain differences at quite a low statistical threshold. If I was trying to say people who speak French are different from people who speak German, and I took eight people who spoke French and seven people who spoke German and actually found they weren't different, but no-one would let me publish that paper. They'd go, yeah, that probably is right,

because, you know, men and women, that sounds kind of different. I mean, I think that's a crucial issue. I mean, it's... One of my favourite phrases from Charles Darwin is, ignorance more frequently breeds confidence than does knowledge. In other words, if you don't know what's happening, you can be totally confident. And that summarizes the history,

that summarizes the history of genetics in particular, because as everybody knows, in the early history of human genetics, dreadful, unspeakable things were done by people who knew nothing about the subject. The same was true, of course, in the early history of brain science, orful, unspeakable things were done by people who knew nothing about the subject. The same was true, of course, in the early history of brain science or at least of psychiatry. They didn't know anything. I think in genetics, we've now got this thing called the Thousand Genomes Project where we're awash with data.

We just don't know what to do with it. Genetics has turned into computer science. And yet you pour all this data into these huge computer models asking about the inheritance of height, let's say, and men are taller than women. It turns out that we can't find the genes, differences behind the inheritance of height. So I think the short answer is that life

is much, much more complicated than we used to think so 50 years ago or even 5 years ago. And I think it'll get more complicated yet. Can we talk about the genetics of sex? Maybe you could give us a quick lesson on what happens, so meiosis and those things that everybody learns at GCSE or O-level and then forgot.

Well, I didn't bring my slides with me, unfortunately. Well, yeah, I start my first year in genetics at UCL, 44 lectures of them, and I start off by saying in genetics at UCL, 44 lectures of them, and I start off by saying, I'm a geneticist, and my job is to make sex boring. And the students look at me blankly, but when it comes to lecture 44, they know exactly what I mean. And that's the case with lots and lots of sciences,

like brain science, which is tremendously technically demanding and doesn't answer questions about happiness. But meiosis is actually a word from English literature. It means making things look smaller, mitosis, vice versa. Now, meiosis is what happens when sperm and egg are made. Everybody, as we all know, has got two copies of every chromosome in each of their cells, 46. And now when sperm and egg are made, there's this system where you have one division of the DNA followed by two divisions of a cell. So you end up with a sperm with 23 chromosomes and an

egg with 23 chromosomes, and then they get together. Now that sounds simple, but in fact, it's all tremendously complicated when you look at the machinery of making sperm and egg, because you've got two copies of each of chromosome 12, let's say, and they've got two arms each, and they come in a most romantic way, and they skirt around each other, and they fiddle, and they come together like this. They stick together, and they make actually a forearm structure. And then just like our presenter's finger here, something gets cut and rejoined, cut and rejoined, and it's a bit like having

two hands of cards. And you take the two hands of cards and you reshuffle them. And that reshuffling makes a new mixture. And that's why each one of us looks a bit like our parents, but not identical to them. And that's what sex really is. Sex is recombination,

except sex is a shorter word. I have to tell you, that isn't the most... I've had sex that's been more boring than that. That was pretty racy at times. Yeah. But it's an interesting business, because... There are big differences in making sperm and egg,

rather obviously, I would say. Men never rest when they're going through making their sperm cells because every man is making sperm all the time, even Robin Innes, for example. Just to give you one example. I don't doubt it. Yeah, you stick it to him. yn gwneud sbwm yr holl amser, hyd yn oed Robin Innes, er enghraifft. Rwy'n gobeithio. Iawn, rydych chi'n ei ddynnu i. Mae wedi'i roi i mi yr holl amser. Fodd bynnag, mae'r dynion yn gwneud eu holl egau cyn eu bod wedi'u ffwro, ac maen nhw'n eu

gwneud eu cyflawni, yna maen nhw'n eu llwyddo ar gyfer cyfnodau drwy gydol eu bywydau gwerthfawr. Felly mae hynny'n golygu bod mwy o ddibysgwyr yn rhwng y sbwm sy'n gwneud dyn a'r sbwm sy'n gwneud un o'i blant, na'r ddibysgwyr sy'n gwneud eg ar gyfer divisions between the sperm that makes a man and the sperm that makes one of his children, then there are cell divisions between an egg that makes a woman and her child. Now, every time in meiosis or in cell division, you go through the job, there are more mistakes. So most mutations, or many mutations, happen in men rather than women. And women actually do a lot to repair them because women are very good at repairing broken DNA. So that's another conflict

between the two sexes which happens through meiosis. So in cells in women they're actually better at repairing errors than male cells. How, I mean even the idea that there's a why is that? I, I'm not sure

we entirely know, but you can see it, because I talked about this recombination business of cutting and splicing DNA in new arrangements. There's more of that in women than in men. Now, recombination involves cutting a bit of DNA and rejoining it in a new arrangement. And that's what DNA repair does.

Now, everybody in this room is already a very different person from what they were when this programme started. And that's not because your ideas have changed, perhaps they have, but your bodies have changed. You've had millions and millions of mutations, but nearly all of them have been put right by this repair mechanism. And women are much better at doing the repair mechanism than men.

Ah. I'll take that. I read something about testosterone weakening the immune system. It does. repair mechanism than men. I'll take that. Yes, I think we are. I read something about testosterone weakening the immune system. It does. That's another thing I've been going for hours here. But if you look at

animals rather than humans displaying, okay, red deer males, for example, roaring and doing all these ridiculous things, you look at their health. They're completely filled with parasites. They've got bugs boring into their skin. They're exhausted. Their immune system is way, way down.

And that's because testosterone suppresses the immune system quite strongly. The claim is, and this is animal behavior, so we don't really believe it. The claim is, if you can cope and be big and fierce and angry and raw and shake your antlers about, even with a lousy immune system, you must be a really good father, have good genes, and therefore are mate with you. But there's a spin on, there's a negative side of that, which is that women are considerably more at risk of autoimmune diseases, where the immune system attracts itself. And that's much commoner among women than in men, because their immune system is much more efficient.

Well, just one final thing, because you mentioned Charles Darwin as well. That burden of thinking of the deer, thinking of the exuberance, thinking of the burden of flamboyance to try and lure a mate. And I think, did Charles Darwin say that the sight of a feather in a peacock's tail made him sick? He was horrified by that. So that burden seemed to become increasingly an evolutionary disadvantage.

Well, I mean, Darwin did say that. Whenever I see a feather on a peacock's tail, it makes me feel sick. And the reason for that, and Darwin, you know, was a genius, as we know, he developed this idea of natural selection, that the reason for having, let's say, a bird having a tail or wings was to help it fly

and to get prey and to find somewhere to live but a peacock's tail doesn't help it fly it's a damn nuisance and only males have got it, but then finally he had the idea of what he calls sexual selection which is that one sex, usually the males has to invest in attracting the females and the way

it does that is with diamonds are forever a very expensive tail, what a very loud call. And in fact, oddly enough, nearly all what we see as the beauties of nature, birdsong, flower colours, that kind of stuff, these are all sexual signals. Nearly all perfumes, expensive perfumes,

are actually made by the sexual signals which are excreted around the anuses of deer, OK? And dogs sniffing. These are inhuman perfumes. So they're obviously... We have some of the remnants of these signals. Fortunately, they're just the remnants, unless you buy diamonds. They never do that angle on the perfume commercials, do they?

They never go straight from the image of attraction to the anus of a deer, and I don't know why. That seems to be a trick that's being missed. John and Jeff are saying, anus of deer. If you say it like that, anus of a deer, and I don't know why that seems to be a trick that's being missed. Anus of deer. If you say it like that, anus de deer, then maybe it did work. Sophie, I was wondering, in terms, again, of the supposed difference between male and female, where sociobiology comes into this sometimes. I was at a lecture, a series of lectures, and the first person who went on

talked about the fact that the reason that women might be attracted to pink, for instance, why pink versus blue, which of course comes up in lots of book titles as well, was that this was about picking of berries. And then I have never seen Twitter become as angry afterwards. And I know there's been a lot of it. So again, is there any purpose in that when we start to go, oh, the sociobiology, oh, well, actually pink is good because? You can always tell the story can't you

you know here we are we we give girls pink things there's a reason for it but you in fact pink's a good example because if you go back to sort of about 100 years ago pink was considered to be a better color for boys because it was a strong color and actually pale blue was appropriate for girls because it was delicate you know and we just because we don't remember we don't research these things we just look at pink dresses and go yeah that's probably as things have always been and this is probably why so and then you tell your story so you do need to take a you know probably i think one of the one of the problems with sociobiology and i don't don't doubt for a second it can't be done extremely well but if you just assume when i looked around and it looks like this probably

job done you know great let's write the paper It's very unlikely to be true, because you can tell stories all the time about everything. You know, the just-so stories are frequently attributed to aspects of sociobiology for this reason. And sometimes the reality can be just a lot more complex. So there are really interesting stories around, you know, reasons why things are as they are, but sometimes you do need to look at other cultures, look a bit at history.

So looking here now and assuming this is how it's always been is almost always wrong. You've just got to take a much wider perspective on human behaviour. So I suppose it's a wider problem in biology. Trying to link any behaviours to some physiological or biological structures is fraught with difficulty. Is there any example you can think of where we understand some component of human behaviour in terms of some kind of difference?

A difference. One thing that is a really good example is menopause. So human females go through menopause, and it's really unusual. It's really's really unusual it's really really unusual only pilot short fin pilot whales and killer whales also go through menopause everybody else including human men you hit sexual you know kind of competence and then you you continue having babies or you can do throughout the entire rest of your life because why else be alive so there's something about why humans have a life as women after a certain point when they don't seem to...

They're not encumbered by babies, but they're not dead, that is valuable to us as a community. And I think this is an example of something, again, that seems to me like a really interesting potential difference between men and women it might be really useful to know about, because we have no idea... Because it's always constructed as a negative thing thing and we mock and deride and exclude postmen and put all women from just about every aspect of our culture but sort of perhaps not

asking the question of why that would be that hasn't answered your question because we don't know there's an amazing study um in so obviously sometimes when they're trying to work out how we used to behave they look at hunter-gatherer societies and they did a study and they found out that children were more likely to survive if they had a family with a grandmother and no father than a father and no grandmother in terms of parental investment. And so it is really fascinating, and also in terms of our family groups,

and how in some ways even two caregivers isn't enough to bring up a child. You do need more people. In fact, it's noticeable that those two whale species are social whales where the adult females look after the young. And the children never leave their mothers. They stay with them their entire lives. That's in Jared Diamond, in his book, Why Sex Is Fun,

which I left out the other day, and my young son saw it and went, I can't imagine it is. What he's been told in the playground at school, it sounds quite horrible some of the so the evolutionary explanation is potentially that you you have people in the population who are no longer going to have children of their own but but are predisposed to care for children that are related that's one of those over neat biological explanations explanations. It's an interesting comparison between ourselves and our close relatives in that particular instance, and of course in many others too.

But we as humans are the only primate, or almost the only primate, that has a concealed ovulation. In other words, we don't know. Men don't know. Some men claim that they do know. At least the evidence is weak. When a female is most fertile. Whereas if you go out into gorillas and baboons and so on, they're damn sure they know.

And there will be huge fights over one female because she's about to come into fertility, and they'll ignore all the others. Now somehow we've evolved this system whereby females do not display their fertility levels over the course of the cycle. Now again, we get into the sociobiology here.

There are all kinds of nice ideas about it, which is that this means that one male must always be around his female because she might be fertile and he can fight off other males. I'm not sure that that's necessarily... I mean, another thing, thinking rather laterally to this sexual conversation, one of the big differences between ourselves and chimpanzees and so on, in a much more manifest way than our behaviour around the menstrual cycle, is that chimpanzees have enormous spikes on the penis, which we don't.

Every other primate does. It has large spikes. I'm just going to say amen to that. At least most of us don't. And why is this? Well, the standard explanation, which certainly applies in other animals, anybody who ever heard cats mating will know about this, is that this is a mechanism whereby the male forces the female to stay in cop, as we say, in copulation,

until there's been enough time passed to allow his sperm to get into the female. Now, we've given that up, okay? And if you look at the difference in size, height between men and women, that's very, very small compared to the difference in size between male and female gorillas. So I think that in our evolution, we've moved away from this evolutionary pattern

where men are brutes and women are charming creatures that knit and stay at home. We've actually converged to be much more similar to each other. If penises were spiky, I'd be at home knitting. I can't blame her. Possibly using two penises you've removed with the spiky, very effective mechanism, I would imagine.

Steve, given that we've seen that virtually every complex multicellular organism seems to have sex, with very few exceptions. That presumably means it's a very early evolutionary invention. Do we have any idea how far it goes back? It's hard to know, but I think it probably is very early. Of course, if you look at single-celled creatures like bacteria, they don't have sex in the conventional sense,

but some of them just throw DNA around like it's going out of style. I don't know why Robin was sniggering. It was the mime. It was the bacterial mime. This won't work as radio. Ironically, it may well be that the early forms of life, single cell life, and certainly before

there were cells, when it was just RNA floating, there may have been more sex. And then somehow, as you've got cells which gave you these individuals, they could be more choosy about who they had sex with. So actually, sexual behavior in itself may have acted to narrow the amount of sex that people have,

which is a terrifying thought. But then, as you described, a terrific amount of machinery today in terms of meiosis and all that stuff. Oh, yeah. So essentially, that's a replacement for the freer shuffling of genes that would have occurred very early on?

The most important response to any student question is, we don't know. And the answer, that is often the case, we don't know. And it's clearly the case, though, that in bacteria, as everybody in this room knows, only one cell in ten in your body is actually a human cell. The other 90% are bacterial cells. And your intestines are a fermenting mass

of sexual promiscuity, of bacteria which are exchanging DNA with each other, and coming up with new mixes all the time. And that's actually practically important in terms of drug resistance and the like, you know, one species can lose a bit of DNA and the other one pick it up,

and that's, in some senses, that's sex. And I wanted to ask you just one question, because you mentioned earlier about DNA, and the other woman pick it up. And that's, in some senses, that's sex. And I wanted to ask you just one question, because you mentioned earlier about parasites, and I found that a very interesting theory, that, in fact, sex is a response to parasitic infection. So could you expand on that? There's pretty good evidence that that's true. I mean, you see it in plants pretty much.

Famously, the potato was never really much used in Europe until about the time of the French Revolution or a bit before. And there's a great line in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor when Falstaff, who's an enormously fat character, persuades himself quite wrongly that he's persuaded two women to share his bed. And he comes out with a line which has baffled Shakespearean scholars for a long time.

He looks up into the sky and he says, he looks up into the firmament and he says, let the sky rain potatoes. What the hell does that mean? And what it meant was that potatoes in Shakespeare's day were thought to be aphrodisiacs. Now, I have to tell you, I've eaten lots of potatoes. I'm still waiting.

But actually, when the potato became very common in Europe in the 19th century, there was no sex. They were all the same clone, the same strain of potatoes. Then there was a change in a mold, not really a mold, but a relative of molds, which attacked every potato in Europe.

Hence the Irish potato famine. Hence the revolutions of 1848. Enormous effect. And that's a very real phenomenon. And now people force sex on potatoes. They breed them. Interestingly enough... LAUGHTER

Interestingly enough, we're in the middle of another... Oh, the bananas. Yeah, with bananas. In spite of their rather telling shape, bananas are asexual. And they're nearly all one clone, which is called the Grosvenor clone of bananas. And all over the Caribbean, all over the Far East,

bananas are going rotten. So if you want to have a banana, go to Sainsbury's before it closes this evening, because I'm sure in five years there'll be none of them. Sarah, in your research in your book, do you think that you've found... Well, again, some of these arguments about flamboyance and the differences between male and female,

do you think that you've found that, in fact, maybe the differences between human males and human females are actually lower than in a lot of the rest of the species of the world? We constantly underline these things, and, of course, there are social constructed differences. Yeah, and we look for them and we reinforce them a lot socially. So we find evidence for what we are predisposed to believe i think there were things i hadn't thought about in terms of the physical differences especially because i've always never wanted to be

told i can't do something or i'm not as good as anyone else i'm a very arrogant person and i always think i'm the best at everything so i would I think I really really minimized in my mind the differences between men and women at all like I am I think I could beat men at arm wrestling and be a premiership footballer I just don't want to be and um so don't ask me again but um when I started thinking about when people were writing things about the differences between male and female bodies and how often I guess and it's very difficult for a modern lady to consider, and I hadn't, that in terms of a hunter-gatherer society or female evolution, after starting

her menstruation, a girl or a woman would have been pregnant about once every four years on average, which means you're either lactating a child or you are pregnant with a new child, which means you're very physically vulnerable and plus you have people that you are, and it's ingrained in you to care for and want to protect, and the idea, I read one book which was really fascinating, written by a man, and he kept talking about how

because of breasts, which are a sexually selected trait, and our bodies don't need breasts to feed, to make milk for children, but that it makes it very difficult to run, and you do think, yeah, of course, I'm aware of bras and things, yeah, I wouldn't want to run around, and I'm not even big-breasted so i did have to consider lots of things that could influence us not in the pink berry way but in very when people say things that do make sense oh women are very social and we're good with people and so when you look at things like all the crimes in prisons and stuff i go yeah we couldn't fight as much as when our default isn't aggression to people who are invading or strangers our we would we would be friendly towards them and that's

where our safety lies but again that's not a proved scientific thing that's a personal bias so so we've just about run out of time um there's one last question though because we're talking about sex it seems that it's absolutely fundamental on this planet. So if you were to imagine... So how fundamental is it to complex life? If you imagine that we found a complex life on a different planet, let's say, would you imagine that sex would be a part of that life? I'd never imagine. I would think probably yes,

because, you know, it's the evolutionary race thing. It's this kind of game that once somebody starts playing it, then it's going to spread. It's like, as I said, it's like playing cards. If you always have, you're playing poker, if you have three aces and a king, and you always play three aces and a king, you're going to win nearly all the time.

But if the other person is shoveling his or her cards, one day they're going to get four races, and you're going to be finished. So I think it's inevitable. I think also it's inevitable, because once your brain gets to a certain size, it makes life quite interesting. So you probably heard the

statistic that something around 10% of adult male sheep are gay. They're completely gay. They're only interested in other male sheep. What's less commonly commented on is that another 20% of adult male sheep are asexual, another 20% are bisexual. In fact, only 50% of adult male sheep could be described as straight.

So if sheep have massively complex pansexual lives, and we've no idea how that relates to their brains, by the way, what are the implications for all animals? Maybe it's just more interesting if you can play around with this. Well done, everyone. Because both potatoes and sheep, very rarely do people go, ooh, and now... And by the way, I think the potatoes work as an aphrodisiac.

If you eat them like they do in the Beano, so you have to have a big stack of mash, but with all sausages coming out the side. And then that might be the Freudian thing. You know, we always talk about the dead strawberry, and we always think, if we ever had T-shirts, we would have a dead strawberry T-shirt. Now I'm going to have only 50% of sheep are straight.

It's a monkey cage T-shirt. One man and his dog. I'm going back to the repeats. Can you tell by the way they wear their fleece? I don't know. So, Sarah, well, what would you... We've been talking again pragmatically, so we're talking about different experiments.

Is the greatest experiment merely there are campaigns, things like Let Toys Be Toys, which is just removing as many different places where you go, here are women's magazines, now women's movies, and here's men's movies. The real experiment is a cultural experiment where you kind of remove all of that and then see what people... I guess that's it. It's once you hear about something,

like, oh, I remember when I read the study about how we talk to male and female children, quite commonly the words that were used, literally as babies were born, visitors would say that the girl's very pretty, oh, she's so sweet, she's so gorgeous, and they weren't using those words about boys. And once you hear that, you then, I've got two nieces that I try to tell

they're very brave and very clever, and that was very kind of you. And that's a tiny little thing, and I know some people find that stuff really frustrating. I'm not saying everyone has to, but we can pick ourselves up on tiny little things, I think, that might have a big influence. And, yeah, not telling boys they can't communicate and don't tell girls they're bad at science.

But now we know that that has happened, stop doing it. This is very... APPLAUSE That, by the way, was the best. That had a very powerful mmm followed by applause, which in Radio 4 speech makes it really up there with a Martin Luther King speech. So we asked our audience what they thought the biggest difference

between males and females was. So men will do anything for sex, women will do anything for chocolate. Oh, God, you're going... Oh, it's a can of worms, this one. That is a man that women don't want to have sex with. I'm sorry, my friend. This one, Perception of Reality. That's from Sue.

One is the weaker sex, driven by their emotions and prone to outbursts. The other is female. This is terrible. Is it we've descended into kind of UKIP? This is terrible. Is it we've descended into kind of UKIP? The wistful allure of Brian Cox's scientific descriptions appear to have altogether different effects depending on your gender. I don't know. I'm not so sure.

The, uh... So, thanks to our panel, who were Sarah Pascoe, Professor Sophie Scott and Professor Steve Jones. APPLAUSE And next week, we're going to be talking about Frankenstein, the history of Frankenstein, the story of Frankenstein and, indeed, the scientific relevance of Frankenstein, which is very exciting for Brian, because, as we know,

he was stitched together by Magnus Pike and Heinz Wolff in the late 70s as part of a special edition of The Great Egg Race, hence the lovely skin. So, thank you very much for listening and goodbye. Goodbye. APPLAUSE In the infinite monkey cage Without your trousers In the infinite monkey cage Till now, nice again.

Podcast, podcast, podcast version of the podcast, podcast... Brian doesn't even know that you have actually now listened to the whole of the show, and this is all he's been doing for the last 47 minutes. And it's not going to end for a while, either. It's a nested infinity of podcasts. This is my life.

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