The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Infinite Monkey Cage USA Tour: Chicago

Episode Date: July 20, 2015

Fossil Records and other Archaeological Hits.Brian Cox and Robin Ince take to the stage in Chicago, Illinois, to discuss fossil records and evolution. They are joined on stage by host of NPR's "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" Peter Sagal, comedian and Saturday Night Live alumnus Julia Sweeney, palaeontologist Paul Sereno and evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne.

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Hello, I'm Robert Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome for the first time live in Chicago, the Infinite Monkey Cage with Mr. Robin Ince and Professor Brian Cox. Hello. We are very... This is the first time that we've done this show in Chicago. We're very excited to be here. And it's brilliant as well because one of our guests, who I won't say who, said that when they were saying to their girlfriend that they were going to do this show,

she went, ugh. And he went, it's quite good. it's on the radio in Britain and stuff, and a podcast in the US, and it's with Robin, and it's ugh. And Brian Cox, and she went, really? He's the one that's always smiling. We are going to be talking today about the importance of the fossil record. We're going to be talking about the new cutting-edge ideas within evolution, new theories, new ideas.

Indeed, what is the title of today's show, Professor Brown-Cox? It's Fossil Records and Other Archaeological Hits. And so, please welcome our panel, who are Paul Serino, Julia Sweeney, Peter Sagal, and Jerry Coyne. We will give a little bit of the background of the people on this panel. I'm sure you know them all. Anyway, Paul Serino has been described as the Indiana Jones of paleontology. Mixing digging for fossils with battling the last remnants of the Third Reich. And his fossil discoveries include the Eoraptor and the Super Croc,

not its current scientific name. Julia Sweeney spent four seasons in the cast of Saturday Night Live. She'd appeared in Third Rock from the Sun, Pulp Fiction, Stuart Little, and been a consultant on Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives, Robin's two favourite shows. Peter Sagal is the host of National Public Radio's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, the author of the book of Vice, Naughty Things and How to Do Them, and finally the first guest we have on who was directly involved in the film Dirty Dancing 2, Havana Nights.

Which I didn't believe, because I know the kind of thing you do on National Public Radio, and we've now double-checked you really were involved. We've been waiting for thated you really were involved. We've been waiting for that for so long. Yes. And Jerry Coyne is an evolutionary biologist. Yeah, like that ever happened.

And come on, Jerry, explain the I. That's too difficult to exist, isn't it? What are you saying that I'm related to East? It's just some kind of theory, isn't it? Oh, it's a load of old nonsense. I can't believe that you made that up. It's 6,000 years, isn't it? Couldn't happen in that kind of time. If anyone really believes

that in the audience, then read a book, eh? Could read Jerry's, actually. He's got a book called Why Evolution is True. And this is our panel. People just don't like being reminded that they're related to yeast. I don't know why. So, Paul, actually, before we get started,

this is one thing that I wanted to get clear before we actually record the show, which is I have a seven-year-old son, and my trouble is that I have... You know that bit where you just know how out of fashion and out of step you are, where I keep bringing up dinosaurs, which it turns out no longer actually appear to exist. So you end up with that kind of, the brontosaurus, dad. Yeah, come on, catch up. So can you just fill me in on what dinosaurs I can no longer mention to my seven-year-old son? You know, we sort of like to look at the tree of life as entire branches. So we think they do exist still

in the birds flying around us, but we call them birds. So, I mean, they really do still exist. They're descendants in every way, shape, and form. I mean, their biology, their genes, they really are still with us. I mean, in fact, they're still swamping us.

They're beating mammals out species-wise. But what about the actual, the ones that, you know about the Brontosaurus? That was the pin-up dinosaur in 1976. And then it turns out it was kind of an amalgam of a few different digs, possibly. So those actual specific dinosaurs which have been moved on to new... So you've never made a mistake? Oh, no. I make them on more than a daily basis.

I have learned nothing over 46 years. But he didn't build a model of his mistake in natural history museums across the world. And then had to take them down and rearrange them. I think, in fairness, you work with fragments of time. And paleontologists have made a... Actually, in the last 200 years, we have sketched out the history of life. And you have some bumps in the way because you don't have the whole picture. You have bits and pieces of it.

You put it together. But we have an incredible majesty of tapestry of life. What I would say is that a sauropod, the animal you're talking about, is the most successful, bar none, small at one end, small at the other end, big in the middle, four legs, the most successful plant-eating animal ever to exist on the face of Earth. That kind of animal existed for 200 million years in that form. A cow has been around for about maybe, in the form of a cow, a couple million.

So it's a very successful animal, but it did get pinched out. Yeah, they left us. Well, Jerry, we're going to be talking a lot about the theory of evolution, and I thought just by way of introduction, if you could give us the one minute, maybe two minutes, the two minute summary of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection to set the scene. I like to think of it as having five parts. Everybody thinks it's just evolution,

but there's actually five parts to the theory. The first is that evolution occurred. That's genetic change in populations. Second of all, that it was gradual, that it didn't happen instantaneously. It takes hundreds of thousands of years to affect substantial change in plants or animals. And it's populations that change, not individuals in evolution.

Part three is that besides change in a single lineage, there's splitting of lineages, which we call speciation, which over time ramifies into this branching tree of life, which is now bush of life, with probably 7 million existing species and many, many more dead species. Going back, part number four is if you trace those branches back, you'll eventually find nodes or limbs

where they intersect with each other. That's just the reverse side of number three. So the reverse side of splitting is common ancestry. As Robin said, we're related to every other species that lives now and lived in the past. And part number five is that the evolutionary change that's resulted in the exquisite and admirable fit of organisms to their environment,

the camel's hump, the thorns of the cactus, the wings of the feathers of the birds, is a result of the process called natural selection, the so-called survival of the fittest. Students should leave out Jesus. And finally... I wondered how long it would take. I put out a tweet when I was doing this. I said I'm so proud to be doing Infinite Monkey Cage

representing my fellow young Earth creationists. I got a good day of panic out of Jerry Coyne. He said, I don't know if this is true. I guess it's possible, but he went to Harvard. That must be, maybe Harvard sucks now. I don't know. I enjoyed it. Could this be true? I guess it's possible, but he went to Harvard. That must be... Maybe Harvard sucks now. I don't know. I enjoyed it. I did some frantic Wikipedia.

Do you know, I was going to ask you, why do you think this level of controversy, when we think of all the... No one says, you know, the Higgs field. I won't have my child taught about the Higgs field. You've got to teach the controversy about the Higgs boson. And yet, with evolution...

There are other theories of electroweak symmetry breaking. Present them all. I don't know. I guess I think that evolution... I think that we're these animals that exist in communities that tell stories, and we make sense of the world by telling stories. And the fact of evolution makes us so vulnerable and so out of control.

And I think that is just too much for many human psychology to take in, who have to rely on a community which is strengthened by rituals, which is reinforced by religion. I think that just upsets that so much. But is it about, I mean, you know, I've got close relatives who I consider to be far worse than chimpanzees, bonobos. You know, if I had a choice between hanging around with some bonobos and... I do relatives groom you.

They're long, tentacled hands. They don't come, they're thetans, you see. Do you know what bonobos are famous for as well? Well, I know some of the things they're famous for, but do remember we're broadcast at 4.30. I'm just wondering why you want to hang around with them rather than your relatives. I was explaining this in the green room beforehand,

that bonobos are known for kind of being... Sexually, they've replaced a lot of bickering. Sometimes, rather than bickering, they just go, oh, let's not just bicker, let's just have sex. But they also have, as far as I recently read, they only ate with a very specific fashion sense where if they find a dead

rat or a lizard, they will place it on their heads and then parade around each other going, it's all the rage, you know. And I think that's so that it's my fashion sense, obviously,. And I think that's, so that, it's my fashion sense, obviously, that lures me towards the bonobos, as you can see. But no, I wondered, is there something

in that, is there, you know, we think of Charlton Heston, get your hands off me, you dirty ape. You know, this idea of this, why are people repulsed, some people, by this idea of being linked to, you know, that grand history of the ape. I think it's because we have this illusion that we have self-control and that we're controlling ourselves.

And actually, that isn't true. And we don't assign free will to animals. We can see that they're more instinct and how they behave. And we don't like to think of ourselves that way. I think that's a very, very deeply upsetting thing. I mean, in a word for me, it's ego. Okay, it's anthropocentrism. We can't see ourselves in the fabric of history of life.

We separate ourselves. We are at the top. When you look at evolution, we desperately want to see a Victorian logic in it that we are the ultimate end product if we're going to accept it in the first place. And we're looking for signals that look like the signals that we're making

because obviously this is the pinnacle of evolution. And to realize that you're a tiny, tiny branch, a branch that almost went extinct, we wouldn't have been sending out signals had there just been not the lifeline of a bottleneck or two to allow humanity to expand across the globe. I mean, we wouldn't be here. And I think that is truly at the heart of it.

I mean, it's at the heart of religious cosmology that puts us in the center of things. And we're constantly, even in dinosaurs, we've reconstructed dinosaurs in our own image, the way they stood, not like birds. I mean, it's a constant thing in science to take ourselves out of the science. So the standards, kind of the Jurassic Park vision of a T-Rex,

then that's not perhaps quite right. No, I think Jurassic, we've come a long way, but you go back to the way that T-Rex was mounted in museums until very recently. It didn't look like a bird. It looked like a human or a kangaroo or something that we find familiar, which is basically us.

I went to the National History Museum in New York for the first time in 20, 30 years. And in the intervening time, while I was away, they changed the T-Rex. He used to stand there like Godzilla with his tail on the ground and now he's, as you say, sort of canted forward like the dinosaur in Jurassic Park

and I was a little miffed. Because he's sort of more noble, right? I mean, you know, my imaginary friend Tyrannosaur when I was a small child, who liked me. It was very sad because he tried to lean down and try to pet my head, and he couldn't. But now he's sort of this weird, sort of symmetrical predator, and I didn't care for it. Paul, so this is primarily a show about complex life. It's about fossils.

So life began four billion years ago. When do we see the first fossils, the first evidence of complex life? Well, you know, like there's a whole series of complex chemical reactions. Even that leaves a fossil record. And so the earliest sediments, about 3.8 billion years ago, people are studying these to try to look for those chemical reactions. Then we find sort of shadows of the first cells. They don't have nuclei, but you can sort of see in chert,

complex quart crystals, you can sort of see these traces of these first cells. And so we do have a fossil record that goes pretty much back to the, almost to the origin of life, but, you know, it's sort of a shadow of what was going on. We have pieces of it. And these are the stromatolites. Stromatolites are even later. That's really

solid evidence. You can go and see them alive today in Australia and you can see something very similar dating back... I've read about these. There's a sort of multiple billion year form of life that still exists. Yeah. How did it last so long without change? Here in America, that only

happens if you're on NPR. Simply put, it's one of Jerry's points. Jerry pointed out that evolution is not just change over time. It's diversification. It's branching. And you have this incredible branching. And if you put humans at one end, you can put any species you want at one end. Let's put humans at one end.

It's way out. And not all this other stuff disappeared. Some of it's with us today. I mean, yes, a lot of people think that evolution is a law in the sense that things have to evolve. But that's nowhere in the theory of evolution. If you live in an environment, as these stromatolites probably do, high salty water,

and natural selection is constant over billions of years then there's no reason to change i have relatives in spokane washington they have not changed at all totally works for them their whole worldview there's no reason to change jerry when when do we see the first evidence of what we might refer to as complex life so we're talking there with single-celled things in the oceans. As you said, maybe not much. It depends on what you mean by complex.

Paul can correct me. Well, multicellular. We see the first true cells about 1.5 billion years ago. So I think multicellular organisms would be roughly a billion years. Is that agglomerations of cells? it's sort of like a half-life to the major steps you know to get a a cell it took about half of the time to

today from the origin of life to get a nucleus inside the cell about half of that time it's accelerating to get those nucleated cells to work together into a multicellular organ about half that time to get this explosion of life about half of that time, it's almost like it's accelerating. So just to map this out, we've got 4 billion years ago, probably the origin of life, some kind of chemical reactions. About 2 billion years ago, you start seeing cells. About a billion, you start seeing cell nucleus

or something maybe around there. And then 500 million years ago or so, complex organ. A bit more than that. When did sex start? That's what I want to know. It's a good question, isn't it? Why does it end? In about three hours. Jerry, it's a good question. The origin of sex.

It's one of the great evolutionary steps. We have fossil evidence of sexually reproducing single-celled organisms, I think about a billion years ago. I mean, it wasn't fun or anything, as Peter was referring to. A billion years ago, that's when the nucleus got in the cell. But it may be worth defining what... I mean, it sounds like a ridiculous question, but it may be worth defining what sex is.

It's basically combining your genes with that of another individual to produce a third individual. So it's the process of what we call meiosis or cell division. It's what happens when you form sperm and eggs and then you join them in the zygote. So that's the sort of formal definition of sex.

Let me try. Brian, when a when a phytoplankton and another love each other very much I think we're talking actually it would be post phytoplankton right it would be like I mean I've actually read because I read about this stuff I'm very much like

Robin as I know just enough to prove that I don't know anything although I can't pronounce coelacanth wow that's good I have read that nobody really knows why sex evolved and why it has been so persistent across all forms of life. That's true. This is one of the biggest mysteries of evolution, why sex.

If I were to butt off little Jerrys without having to mix my genes with those of a female, I could produce twice as many copies of my genes. But they wouldn't be a big variety. But see, a variety isn't that important in this sort of issue. So there's a two-fold cost of combining your genes with somebody else. And there's no known benefit that can make

up for the fact that you lose half of your genes on the panoply of evolution by having sex. And nobody really understands why we do this. I mean, there's lots of theories. You know, that's exactly what my ex-wife said. So, Robin, you asked me what are the mysteries of evolution. That's one of the biggest ones.

Nobody has come close to a convincing explanation of why any animal has sex at all. I'm still thrown, but just the way that you went, if I could bud off Little Jerry's, and then I could see that David Cronenberg movie, and then I could kind of also see that those kind of down times in the lab, you think, I'll just return to that budding off experiment. We were also talking about the speed of evolutionary change.

Now, in your TED Talk, Paul, you talked about the fact that the speed of change in dinosaurs was, is it right, ten times slower than mammals? Would that be right, that in terms of the maximum size, for instance, of dinosaurs took ten times longer than the maximizing of mammals? And I'm intrigued by the kind of, what the reasons are, or presumed reasons

so far of that. Yeah, I posited that. I believe it's true. It's never actually been thoroughly tested since I posited that. I believe it's true. It's never actually been thoroughly tested since I posited that in science. But basically, when you just look at the size, that's the easiest thing to measure. Yeah, it takes 10 times as long for this animal group to reach its maximum body size. Mammals appear on the scene when dinosaurs went extinct. Of course, they were around before, but mammals as we know them today

exploded on the scene and reached the size of blue whales and elephants, the largest carnivores and herbivores, within a handful of million years. And you could look at other things too. The diversity of things we call orders of mammals. They were all there for 10 million years. Dinosaurs, no. You've got, I mean, birds evolved halfway through after 50 million years. So that's a real big body size and body form change.

So it's almost like, this is what actually attracted me to study dinosaurs. It's not that they're lovable, like Barney. Why did you look at me? I know, you mentioned Barney. You're the only one that had the dinosaur friend in childhood. He tortured me about Barney on an earlier stage. I think you've taken the role of the fount of trivia on the corner there. I understand what my role is here. Go on.

It's just that they're so different than the next group that took over in our body size range land. And that brings me back to the very opening question as to why we don't hear intelligent life if you think and we are so inclined to think egotistically that we are obviously so much the center of attention the center of the universe that somewhere else we have to have evolved again it's almost like your Shakespeare and the monkey question then. Then it makes rational sense that we're just going to hear tomorrow from these human things.

And of course every science show has something that looks sort of like a human when you get to the Klingons and beyond. And in fact, we are the improbable end species of some incredible contingent history that is in fact four billion years long. That's an idea. That raises the question, if the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out probably by a meteorite strike 60 million years ago or so, could you have imagined, is there something in the body plan of dinosaurs

that was a dead end in terms of intelligence? Is it possible to speculate how that could have unfolded? Of course, we don't know. Yeah, well, we do know what would have happened if they didn't go extinct, because they actually didn't go extinct. There's 9,000, 10,000 species of birds with us today, and actually many of them, this is actually a really interesting question you're asking. So they actually have enlarged the brain, very much like mammals and primates in particular. They developed a voice box called the syrinx. There are some people in my department studying the linguistics of these dinosaurs. They actually have dialects, some of them, indigo buntings and so on. And they actually walk on two legs.

and so on. And they actually walk on two legs. They're bipedal. They're really intelligent. So why haven't they developed? They're on the edge. Some of them use tools. They're on the edge of being human, if you will, in some of these characteristics.

And what do they do? They're just happy being able to go up on things. And they didn't develop civilizations. They could have taken over if we didn't keep distracting them with crackers. They're plotting their revolution from their cages and we say, want a cracker? And they go, whoop, and that's it.

All of the thoughts fly out of their mind. That's true of quite a few humans if we just replace cracker with television. That's true. Is there any particular difference? Let's go back to the first, the hominin evolution in Africa. So you get Australopithecus, an upright chimpanzee, essentially, about four million years ago.

Is there a great deal of intellectual difference between one of our earliest ancestors, our upright ancestors, and a crow or an intelligent bird? Do we know about the relative levels of intelligence? I think that's a real difficult thing to measure, exactly what you mean by intelligence. So they've tried to actually work up lots of experimental science over this. Crows, in particular, are particularly sharp.

They've got various levels of logic in solving problems from these flying dinosaurs that are actually quite sophisticated. You have something inside a contraption, you have to really work out a logical scheme to go and get this thing, and they are capable of doing it. So the question is, why did it stop at just being a crow and not something more?

That's one question. Another question, you realize that, as Jerry said, when you're doing something successful You don't necessarily need to evolve and everything doesn't evolve you know is is a human condition actually You you give four billion years, and you're going to get a human in Fact that's where the dinosaur world is so interesting to me as a scientist because you don't have anything that looks like a gorilla In a tree you don't have anything that looks like a gorilla in a tree you don't have anything that looks like a wallaby or or a wolverine digging you don't have anything that looks like a sea cow they barely touch the water they had the world at their feet

for three times as long as mammals and you don't see these niches as it were filled necessarily by evolution well as we know brain material is expensive. That's one of these theories, that you don't need to be smarter if getting smarter actually causes you to reduce your reproductive success. And building brain material requires a lot of food and a lot of metabolism. I had a skunk once, which is an anecdote related to that, a pet skunk. And it was really dim. I mean, it was like a...

On the scale of skunk intelligence? No, on the scale of any intelligence. All I could do was find food and sit on my lap and find a slitter box. I loved it, but I took it to the vet once and the vet was examining it and I said, I really like this animal, but

Lord, is he dumb? And the vet fixed me with this withering glance and said, dumb? He's perfectly adapted to being a skunk. And he is. I couldn't do what the skunk did. We've skipped over an important question in this anecdote. Why did you acquire a skunk for a pet? I'm a biologist. I don't know if I need to say anything more.

You could never piss it off. No, they're desensitized. Oh, okay. Oh, I didn't know. But they don say anything more. You could never piss it off. No, they're dissented. Oh, okay. Oh, I didn't know. But they don't know that. They still try to squirt you, and that's how I became, that's how I have learned to avoid being squirted in the wild. Jerry, for you, you're also a great fruit fly aficionado.

Sarah Palin's favorites. What is it about biologists and fruit flies? You mean why we use them so much? If I first had said a myth that wasn't introduced is the Indiana Jones of fruit flies. We can put it in later. Fruit flies are the complex organism for genetics for a number of reasons. The main one is that they breed very quickly. So I can go from one, an adult

fly, through the egg, through the larva, which people call maggots, to another adult in about 10 days. So in a year, I could have 30 generations. So you can do all kinds of experiments with them. They require little tending. I've managed to rear flies on Wonder Bread in the laboratory, just Wonder Bread and water, in response to some of my hippie friends that said that the bread was deadly. And because of that, it was just an accident that they became adopted as a genetic organism. Somebody discovered that they breed well in the lab,

and they have a short generation time. And then everything mushroomed from that. We studied their genes. We studied their chromosomes. They have these cool chromosomes that are banded, so you can actually look along the chromosome and see where the rearrangements occur. And from that, they became the basis

of complex organismal genetics. So all genetics, basically, well Mendel started in peas, of course. But the major things that we know about genetics, genetics. So all genetics basically, well Mendel started in peas of course, but the major things that we know about genetics, like the genes from different organisms recombine that they're arrayed on chromosomes in a linear array, that was all discovered about the turn of the 20th century by, in fruit flies, by Thomas Hunt Morgan, and he won the Nobel Prize for that work.

And I suppose it's a very beautiful example of the fact that all life is extremely similar genetically, that you can learn about all life from the fruit fly. How similar? You get these numbers banded around saying I'm 98% the same as a chimpanzee, so how similar am I to a fruit fly? Again, I would not want to answer that question. I mean, even the 98% similarity to chimpanzee number is bogus because it's based on the number of gene differences instead

of the number of DNA sequence differences. So, I mean, I don't even know the percentage of similarity. Just say something. In the UK, you get overdubbed and you become really authoritative. 27%. Are you sure, Jerry?

Anything that I say is going to be held against me by creationists in the future. You've already burnt that bridge. As a scientist, I don't want to venture a guess. What's interesting, I think, because for a UK

based audience who'd be listening to this on the BBC, the war, the kind of fear, almost, as Gerry expressed it, of a scientist making one small error, perhaps a grammatical error, almost, in what they're speaking about. And then you've got this bunch of people, these creationists who jump there.

In the US, that is a far bigger issue than it is in the UK. I think it's because we speak with flat vowels and that makes us dumb. Can you perhaps set it into context? One of the things that I think it's because we speak with flat vowels and that makes us dumb. No, actually... One of the things that I'm actually very interested in is conspiracy theories, which is a way of thinking in which you can deny

that something is obviously true is true and you substitute your own judgment for it and you have to come up with a reason why that's the case. And there are conspiracy theories of all kinds of things. In fact, you joked earlier, Brian, about, like, no one sits around and argues about electromagnetic forces or something. Actually, they do. There are people who spend all

day trying to disprove Einstein's theory of relativity. They're online. They're saying it can't be true, because it bothers them somehow. Maybe because it's not, I don't know, easily comprehensible, or because they want to go fly to Alpha Centauri and they're sad that they can't. I

certainly fit in that category. Why, though, is creationism and denial of evolution, that conspiracy theory, that all these people, you guys, are conspiring to advance Darwinism for your own benefit? Why is that so prevalent? And I actually think it relates

to the phenomenon of alien cattle mutilation. I don't know if you guys even remember this, but back in the day in the 80s, 70s, alien cattle mutilation was a thing. People were like, what happened to these cows? And who mutilated them? Was it aliens? Was it the government? There was even a bad movie made about it at one point.

And a journalist named, I think it was Paul Hitt, for Harper's, went and investigated the phenomenon. And he did two things. First of all, he went out with some farmers, and they actually talked to some biologists, and they observed a dead cow that had died, ah, of whatever cows die of, and they watched as it naturally decomposed,

and there were some parasites and some insects that created basically geometrical holes in its carcass that looked like somebody had done it on purpose. Okay, so they discovered what caused this phenomenon. Then she found, or rather he found, that there was one woman who basically sold books, lectures, tapes about alien cattle mutilation

to a credulous audience and made about $60,000 a year. And he said that $60,000 a year explains alien cattle mutilation. My point is that in addition to everything that everybody said earlier about why divine creation is so compelling and why we don't want to admit to ourselves that we're just animals and that we've evolved more or less at random. I know it's not random.

But without a guiding force is that you can make a lot of money, I think, selling that myth to a certain part of the population that wants to hear it. There is a creation museum, I believe in Kentucky, where you can go, I'm sure you know about this, God bless America, you can go and you can see a model of a dinosaur with a saddle on it.

Yeah, but Peter, that works only because, as you said, people want to hear it. So why do people want to hear it? I think that there's something that's fundamental about the human condition, which is to wonder. We wonder about things. And the wonder of a scientist like Jerry about his Drosophila is that there's always going to be a tomorrow, and your students are going to discover things, and there's no end to

it. Now, some people find that basic human condition, which is to wonder, that separates us as sentient beings from everything else, about drifting continents and things that we can't touch. And this is absolutely uniquely human. Some people find that basic idea frightening. They want to know a specific answer to wonder about something and not know is not a good thing. They want a very defined world for their mores, for their cosmology, where they came from, where they're going, where they're going after death.

And I think maybe you could cast it in a positive light. It's not necessarily a negative thing. But this is what I think fundamentally drives people to cosmologies, to religion, to not wanting a science that wonders. And the science that consistently changes, I suppose. Well, some of it does. I mean, I'd like to dispel the myth that science is completely up for grabs, because there are some things like DNA being a double-stranded molecule, the formula of water being H2O, that you and I know are not going to change.

We bet our fortunes on that over the next 100,000 years that that's not going to change. I mean, in physics, which is often seen as the most reductionist and precise of sciences in some ways, the most reductionist and precise of sciences in some ways, that we have no theories other than perhaps, perhaps, the so-called second law of thermodynamics that says that things tend to disorder. But apart from that, we know that general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravitation, is not complete. We're sure that needs modifying.

We know that quantum theory is not complete, and we're fairly sure that we need to have some kind of quantum theory of gravity. So we know that there theory is not complete, and we're fairly sure that we need to have some kind of quantum theory of gravity. So we know that there are essentially no theories that we would say are absolutely right. Would you say, though, that the framework of Darwin's theory, evolution by natural selection, that framework must be right in the way that the second law of thermodynamics, it's the central dogma of biology, I suppose.

Well, how convinced are you that the second law of thermodynamics can never, ever be overturned? I'm very, very convinced. Yeah, well, maybe let me say I'm a little less convinced, although I'm still highly convinced that evolution is true, but there are still, I mean, like all theories, there's still potential observations that could overturn it. For example, yeah, if you found... Like all theories, there's still potential observations that could overturn it.

For example, if you found... Jurassic rabbit. Yeah, that's the JBS holiday in the paleontologist set. A pre-Cambrian rabbit, that would do it. If you find an organism with a feature that's only useful to members of another species, like a tiger that could only suckle warthogs, for example. I mean, evolution can't do stuff like that. It does things for the good of the individual, not for helping another species. So, you know, I would bet my life, although I don't already have bet in return, but I've bet my fortune certainly on the fact that evolution is true and that we won't see

any major revisions in the next century, but it's possible. On the other hand, I will maintain that an absolute truth is that the formula of water is H2O and that's not going to change. I'm so excited by your laboratory now. Half the time you're trying to create these things that bud off you, now you're working on tiger-suckling

warthogs. This is cutting-edge science. This is... If I don't see one of those walking along the lake tomorrow, I'm going to be very annoyed. Skiing across there, you probably made some kind of white horse for it as well. There's a very interesting thing that you said there,

you touched on though. The warthog and the tiger, yeah, it's suckling. It's brilliant. Throw in a bonobo as well. Whoa, that's a film. That's going to be 50 Shades of Grey. But I guess, to what you both were saying, both Paul and Gerry, you're explaining the mindset of the scientist and the fact, as you said,

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

Would you be delighted about that? Would you think that... Because I would, as a physicist, if someone showed me tomorrow that actually Einstein's theory of general relativity was absolutely, absolutely flat wrong, I

would be elated with that knowledge. How much of your career have you invested in Einstein's theory of relative relativity? Would would be elated with that knowledge. How much of your career have you invested in Einstein's theory of relativity? Would you be elated at the paradigm shift? It puts one on a bind because I've spent my whole life teaching the theory of evolution. Somebody comes along and makes an observation that shows it's wrong. Yeah, I'd say, wow, I'd be thrilled. But then I'd realize, Jesus, I've wasted 50 years of my life. But that's what people who are religious feel. They've invested so much of their lives into this belief system.

It's very upsetting to think. I'm not saying that I would deny the truth. I'm just saying that I would feel some ambiguous feelings if my life's work had been overturned. The observation is interesting there, because often I find as a scientist, I don't really understand the thought process that would be anti-science or anti-a part of science or anti-fact in a sense.

I absolutely get it. I think it's so far apart. I think religion has been so useful to people. It's been so useful to the history of our evolution as a species, like, it's absolutely an adaptive thing, like coming together, you know, if you're running into battle against another tribe and you think that you're going to live after you die, that is a highly successful worldview to have. I mean, and there was much longer period of time where we were doing that than when we were understanding the basics of science or how to find out things were true. I don't even think it's about, from my perspective, and I'm an atheist and I accept a scientific worldview, but I'm very sympathetic to people who are religious because I don't think it's even about

science to them. I think even the people who write to us and tell us we're going to burn in hell is a very tiny group of people. Most people are just trying to get through their lives, and the religion is making them have a community. It's often associated with their ethnic group. It redefines who they are. They create a community. It creates an insurance policy when things go wrong. It gives them an ideology, a reason to run and run into battle and get killed, or to put your life on the line. It's absolutely fantastic for that. And so sometimes I think that scientists don't give religion enough respect for getting us so far. Now, it's wrong.

I mean, it's not right. But it is, I think, I like to think of religion in the best sense as sort of a beautiful kind of art that humans came up with to deal with answers they couldn't understand and to create a community that is always, that's how we evolved, in community with each other. And it really helps with that. And it's just obvious that it helps with that. Well, Julie, could I ask you then, if suppose humans had an invented religion and they lived their lives in a humanistic way from the very beginning and things they didn't understand like lightning, they just say, well, I don't understand that. Do you think that we'd be much worse off now if that hadn't happened? Because that's what the argument you're making, basically. That's a really good question. I mean, obviously I wish that was the truth. I wish that people said, yeah, I don't really know why there's lightning. And we'll have to wait until we develop a science so that we understand why there is.

I'm just imagining an ancient tribe somewhere in the Paleolithic saying, ask your mother. Isn't it true, though, that I have read that every human society ever discovered by anthropologists has a religion, that it is a universal human trait, so much so that some people think that it is an evolved trait to be religiously credulous. Any questions? I think that it's as natural to wonder as to postulate

an explanation. If that explanation takes a scientific form, that's one way. If it takes more of a story, that's another, a cosmology of sorts. And the variety is quite extreme. And the variety that we're talking about in contention with the theory of evolution is one very particular one. And as you say, it's really amplified by Protestant fundamentalists more than their

percentage and numbers would, I think, justify in the United States. But, you know, for me, the other thing that's difficult for people to understand about evolution or accept about evolution is that most of it is an historical process. And so where Jerry can actually observe aspects of evolution in his lab, most of what we're talking about that bothers people is on a time course that we can't experience in our lifetime. We have to, but leaves a big trail.

Jerry talked about the hierarchy that we, the legacy that evolution has left. When you go and look at the genes, you find group within group within group. But it's still an historical process. We can't actually experience it in real time. So you think that the sheer timescales, understanding what it means to say 100 million years or a billion years,

do you think that's the part of the problem? That's part of it. When you look at it from an historical point of view, we talk about the theory of history. You can talk about a chronology, which is simply this happened, there was a Cambrian explosion, then we saw some dinosaurs,

and then you can get at some of the other things that the theory of evolution actually posits, like natural selection. That's why it happened. Why did the Romans beat these other people? Why did they attack them? Other than we found their weapons and they were there. And so what we try and do is we try and separate the chronology and we say dinosaurs happened here, here, here. And then we muse about the more complex things, which is why. Now, the fact that this happened and that you have lots of evidence for evolution

is so monstrously huge and then when you find you won't find a rabbit but what you will find is this in evolution if evolution occurred as Jerry said perfectly a change occurred it was recorded preferably in a fossil and then another change occurred and it was recorded and another change occurred, it was recorded, preferably in a fossil, and then another change occurred, and it was recorded, and another change occurred. But what happens that's more interesting than that, sometimes the changes reverse, and sometimes they evolve in parallel. And so we used to have a tail, we still do,

it's very short, usually it doesn't stick out, but we had lots of evidence that we had a tail, and now it's gone. And so that's what we call a reversal so if it was absolutely perfect it would be laid out for people to see a little bit better but it's also in a story it's it's like it's like someone discussing why what happened in in to the Greeks and Helena and all this other stuff, it's an historical process that we can't actually observe directly. And you're going to have lots of different opinions.

Just a quick question. If we're talking about common ancestors, so if we trace back, how far would I have to go back to meet my, for me to have a common ancestor with the dinosaurs? Where would that be? A common ancestor with the dinosaurs? Where would that be? The common ancestor with the dinosaurs? That would be way back into the Paleozoic, probably about 400 million years ago. Everything would have had, Tetrapod would have had four legs, committed four legs. It would have had a limited number of digits.

It would have a head. It would have a tail. It would have the basics of an egg. We would call this an amniote. It's got a lot of basic features. All the animals that lay eggs, including us that have placentas, have a lot of common genes. That's what it would look like. It would be back in the Paleozoic.

I'm trying to imagine a tetrapod with your hair, Brian. I actually want to say something in defense of American stupidity, which I make my living making fun of. And maybe this goes to your question earlier, like why is fighting evolution and denying it and being aggressively creationist such a big thing here? We remember that American culture or society was founded by the Puritans, who you guys threw out because they were so obnoxiously wrong.

I think they laughed in a hoof. They did. Well, yeah. And their attitude was, to hell with you. We are so certain of our opinions that we are going to travel this ocean in these little rickety wooden boats and starve to death just so we have the right to be wrong. And we, I mean, they were right, but there's something about the American character and experience, which is you have the right to, if I'm sitting here with my society and you all think I'm an idiot, I have the right to go over there and find like-minded idiots and set up my own town. Here in the Midwest, there are many places, like New Harmony, Indiana,

which were set up as utopian communities for these people from the East Coast at this time in the early 19th century who felt that, I mean, the Mormons, of course, are really the last and obviously the most successful remnant of this. They were supposed to be in Missouri before they got kicked out of there.

That said, we believe something profoundly different and you tell us we're wrong, well we think you're wrong and we're going to go over there and get away from you. And that freedom to be profoundly stupid is really an important part of the American creed. It's why

we beat you. Well, on the suckling tigers, I've got no idea why people have issues with evolutionary biology. We are going to end. This is the first time we've ever recorded it in Chicago. I hope you've enjoyed it.

I'm very pleased that we had such a great panel answering a really diverse selection of questions. So please come here and big round of applause for Paul Torino, Julia Sweeney, Peter Sagal, Jerry Coyne. Thank you very much for listening. We hope to see you again

in Chicago. Good night. Good night. Till now, nice again. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long.

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