The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Infinite Monkey's Guide To… Love

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

Love is in the air(waves) as Brian and Robin trawl through the Monkey Cage archive. From using maths to find a boyfriend or girlfriend, to why birds and bees have far more exciting sex lives than you might imagine, this week’s episode is all about passion.Number crunching might not sound sexy but mathematician Hannah Fry tells Robin Ince and Brian Cox why research shows it pays to be proactive when you’re searching for a partner, even when that means risking total humiliation. But when it comes to the world's most extraordinary mating rituals the best place to look is… in the garden. Female bees go on a special nuptial flight, where they’re impregnated by males mid-air, and we hear how cockerels are surprisingly picky when it comes to which chicken they choose to cosy up with.New episodes will be released on Wednesdays. If you’re in the UK, listen to the full series on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3K3JzyFProducer: Marijke Peters Executive Producer: Alexandra FeachemEpisodes featured: Series 13: Maths of Love and Sex Series 17: The Secret Life of Birds Series 27: Bees v Wasps Series 17: How Animals Behave

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. You're about to listen to an episode of The Infinite Monkey's Guide To. Episodes will be released on Wednesdays wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, you can listen to new episodes first on bbc sounds for those old enough to remember renting videos in the days before all films and art and everything else lived in a cloud that we're talking to a radio 4 audience here because everybody remembers renting

videos who's listening no no no but this is also podcast and you sometimes get people in their 30s listening to that okay that'd be dvds. Yeah. Anyway, you will recall that your chosen film will be prefaced by a Radio 1 DJ in the days when Radio 1 DJs were considered the highest form of moral authority. Yeah, we'll gloss over that. But anyway, that DJ was, of course, Simon Bates, who would warn you of the possible contents of your VHS,

and it might include scenes of a graphic nature and sexual swear words. So today we've been told to give you a similar warning. This episode has been given the Lord Reith red triangle, which means it will contain references to penises. Anyway, I'm Robin Ince.

Is that the penis reference? Well done. I taught him everything he knows but he's run wild now. It's a disaster. Who are you, anyway? You haven't said who you are yet. No, I'm Brian Cox. I've got no idea why this episode should have any references to genitalia,

because it is the infinite monkey's guide to love. Well, it's fairly obvious, isn't it? That's not love. Oh. Yeah, I've told you that before. I refer you to the moral authority of the Radio One DJ. Listen, all love begins with mathematics. Now

there speaks a true physicist. Yeah. So let's begin with mathematician Hannah Fry and comedian Paul Foot back in Series 13's episode on the maths of love and sex. Warning. The next sequence may well contain equations. There is a lovely piece of mathematics

called the stable marriage problem. And essentially, you're at a party and you have to imagine that there is a group of boys and girls who are trying to target each other. So each person at this party has an ordered list in their head of who they'd most like to date. And if you allow it to play out in a very boy-meets-girl way, you can follow that through with a mathematical proof

and show that every single time, every person will end up finding a partner. But you can also prove that if the boys are the ones who do the approaching, they will always, always, always end up much better off than the girls will. And the thing is, that sort of goes against what a lot of people's strategy is when they're at a party, because to risk humiliating rejection by going up to people and, you know, seeing if they like you, it doesn't seem like a particularly comfortable thing to do. But the thing is, by doing that, what you're doing is you're starting at the top of your list, and you're

working your way down. Whereas if you do the opposite, what you're doing is you're starting at the top of your list and you're working your way down. Whereas if you do the opposite, if you allow people to come to you, then you essentially end up with the least bad person who will approach you. So that, I think, is my first tip, then, is to be proactive. Math says be proactive. So to define by better off, you mean that essentially we're forming an ordered list of attractiveness, essentially. Exactly. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And you're saying that by being proactive in approaching number one and then approaching number two,

you'll get higher up your own list. Exactly. It's following something called the Gale-Shapely algorithm, that process of boy approaches girl, girl decides whether she likes boy and rejects him if she doesn't and accepts him if she does. But how do you know which ones are up for it? And also, wouldn't you be better off sleeping with all of them,

seeing which is the best one and then choosing? That is another strategy, yes. Scientists have been trying for a very long time to really capture the essence of what it is that makes somebody beautiful. And there are a few different things that sort of work, and one of them is symmetry, which is that people tend to prefer images of people with naturally symmetrical faces.

But the thing about beauty is that every time that there's a rule, there's sort of a counter rule, if you like, because while that works wonderfully for pictures of people's faces, when it comes to moving images, so videos or people in the flesh, actually people tend to prefer asymmetry because it's seen as much more authentic. Can I ask, what about if you have a symmetrical face but both sides are ugly?

I mean, it's less than ideal. It's less than ideal. Steve Batchel has no fear when it comes to the deadliest 60 animals in the world. In fact, he believes the most terrifying thing he's ever done was not a face-off with the Taipan snake, but the terror of the tango when he was a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing.

Would you ever do Strictly Come Dancing? Was that the face-off like, you know, John Travolta and Nicolas Cage face off? No, he didn't swap his face with that of a snake. They tried it, there just wasn't enough. It meant that the snake had a very heavy face and Steve just had little eyes on the end of his

nose. This has got nothing to do with the next clip. Oh, that's a pity. I've really been wasting everyone's valuable time there. Yeah, because here is Steve with ornithologist Tim Birkhead and Casey brand discussing the mating rituals of a parrot warning the following clip contains deviant dunnock behavior actually the majority of birds don't have a penis in fact they just have a cloaca and most mating is what's called cloacal kissing where the two cloaca come together can be very very, and there isn't this

extraordinary elongated penis that you get in the Argentinian lake duck. But one of the most incredible things is that some of the birds that we see in our gardens all the time, that appear to be the most common, the least sort of interesting of all, have the most extraordinary sex lives. And one of those would be the dunnock a bird which is is a real common garden visitor here in the uk and is an absolute deviant i mean they they come up to the mating season he's so deviant but he's just enjoying life you know it's not judged that's fair well except for the fact that coming up to to breeding the males uh testes swell to about eight percent of its body weight which would kind of be like me having

testes the size of a sack of potatoes. And then they will mate 30 plus times every single day. I noticed that laugh there come from people. People just remember some of the trousers you wore in Strictly Come Dancing, seeing if there were any clues as to what time of year. No, I think you're fine.

With multiple different partners. There are some birds that their nests have been examined, and 98% of those nests contain eggs from different parents. And birds that may appear to be monogamous actually are really sneaky and a bit dodgy. Female birds, don't they? They try and keep three or four males guessing as to who might be the parent. Lots do.

We studied a bird called the Vasa parrot, which is probably the world's ugliest bird. It's a very big black parrot. Its main claim to fame is that the male has what we call the cloacal protuberance. The parrot's about 18 inches long, and this structure is about the size of a tennis ball.

A colleague of mine who was the curator of birds at Chester Zoo phoned me up one day and he said I think you ought to come over here and have a look at our vasa parrots they're mating at the moment and as Steve has said most copulating birds it takes about two seconds these vasa parrots were stuck together for half an hour and the male inserts this structure into the female and actually forms what's called a copulatory tie just as in dogs and they just sit side by side he's presumably whispering sweet nothing's in her ear and she's eating jaffa cake have i given too much away

i opened the book a bit too wide there i think and we we thought you know this okay this is fantastic my guess is that this must be something to do with sperm competition nobody knew anything about vasa parrots in the wild we went to madagascar did a study and sure enough it is the most remarkable avian mating system for females own the nest it's a hole in a tree she comes out sits on the top of another tree and sings not many female birds sing She sings and males fall out of the sky to form a queue to copulate with her. And lots of them copulate with her.

And then when we did the DNA fingerprinting on the chicks, every egg has got a different dad. Right, that's the birds. Now the bees. One thing that we've learned from all these series... Well, I hope you've learned more than one thing. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've learned another thing too. I just wasn't going to talk about that. I was just going to talk, I hope you've learnt more than one thing. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've learnt another thing too.

I just wasn't going to talk about that. I was just going to talk about the one thing, but not the other thing. What's the second thing? I'm not going to tell you the other thing. We might save that for another episode. All right. Well, have you learnt something about physics?

Yeah. Mainly what I've learnt is my limitations. But the one thing I was going to mention this time was just how grotesque many animals' lives are and none i don't think more so than you remember this bee behavior you're about to hear i remember this vividly yeah you could feel the frizzle of shock going across that live audience as they heard because a mating ritual is like a mid-air don't don't give it away. Don't give it away. The next clip may well contain sexual swear words and exploding

mid-air genitalia. Here discussing bee behaviour are comedian Catherine Bohart and ecologist Dave Coulson. Honeybees are interestingly different because the queens live for many years and the colony survives the winter and that's why they make honey, because there aren't any

flowers in the winter, so they'd all starve to death so they they make kilos and kilos of honey at the end of the summer so that they can all sit tight in their nest through the winter and they've got something to eat the more interesting differences is when it comes to the sex but we can come back to that if you've got something more pressing that sounded a bit creepier i mean i was gonna talk about sex but if there's something more pressing it's quite the gauntlet it's like you got something sexier than sex catherine no i was just gonna ask if there's a republican option but um but no please let's talk about the sex in the monarchy it's just quite weird so the bumblebees are less exciting. So they, the young queens, they just mate with one male. And he squirts in this kind of sticky gloop

so that she can't mate again, called a mating plug. You're going to be very quiet because this show goes out at 7.30pm. Honeybees have a completely different system where the queen, the young queen who hasn't mated, she goes on what's called a nuptial flight and she flies around releasing a pheromone that attracts the drones, the males. And they mate in mid-air so the males will jostle for position around her and the first one will grab hold of her

and mate with her. And they have this bizarre explosive mechanism that blasts sperm into the queen and it ruptures the male's genitalia and they fall off and he then falls to the ground dead. You can actually hear the explosion. It's like a little clap. Why are you listening? That's private, Dave. They don't do it very privately. They're doing it flying.

Anyway, and then the next male jumps on and he has to pull away the bits of the previous male's... LAUGHTER And then he explodes and that goes on and on until about 20 of them are lying dead on the ground. And then she decides she's had enough and that's it for her mating for life. You'd think there probably would be enough.

And she stores that sperm. There's something like 1.7 million sperm she stores enough to basically produce 2,000 babies a day for the next seven years. Who would name that a nuptial flight? There's no romance to it at all, Dave. Well, maybe from a bee's perspective there is. I guess they have a different idea of romance to us. One thing you learn as a physicist is to look on the bright side so next

time you go on a disastrous date find solace in the fact that on your way home you realize your genitals didn't explode unless they did obviously yeah unless they did because i mean you've told me before in the the laws of physics that ultimately everything might happen you know someone not necessarily out there who can hear us in this universe, but there's someone in a universe who has now just returned from a date and gone, do you know what? I wish I'd been in this universe. This is the worst possible universe for physicists. Yeah.

Yeah. Great big hole in me blinking trousers as well. It's ridiculous. Was that the sound effect? There we go. You've given away far too many truths about yourself there with the quite a small pop. I see you deliberately made sure it was a bigger pop this time. Freud's hands on your shoulders at that point.

Which, of course, brings us straight away to pandas there. A great segue. Obviously, it brings us the panda pop, the new panda pop that you've created. So while some scientists, especially panda specialists, are always trying to encourage their case studies to have sex for research, some have gone to great lengths to prevent them from having sex. Yeah, poor frogs. If they're not being slowly heated in a pan of water to prove something that actually isn't true.

It isn't true, is it? If you keep the lid on, it sounds like someone was cheating. But if you take the lid off, apparently a frog will eventually go, this is too hot, and leave. If there are any young people watching who want to be a scientist, then try that experiment at home. Do not try that experiment at home. Zoologist Lucy Cook told us about an interesting experiment involving frogs and pants. Frogs and pants? I don't remember that one. Yeah.

Well, I'll find out now, won't I? Lucy, frogs and underpants, question mark? Yeah, well, trying to solve some of the great mysteries. I mean, a lot of the really big mysteries have been resolved now. And one of those was the mystery of fertilisation. So a lot of animals, just just burst into life spontaneously then once they got microscopes and properly started slicing animals up and looking inside they realized that there were these things called eggs and it looked like these the males produced produced something as well but there was a big sort of debate over whether it was eggs or

whether it was sperm that developed into the adult. Nobody really thought that it was the two things coming together. And the man that proved that it wasn't either or, but it was a bit of both, was a fantastically creative mind called Lazaro Spallanzani, who sounds like a James Bond bad guy. He was obsessed with frog sex, and he'd watch frogs and go, what is going on?

And he sliced open females and and and without them being gripped because for those that don't know uh frog sex the male hangs on very hard to the female uh in a sort of um piggyback type style but the male sperm is sort of invisible in the water so it was not really clear what the male was doing, but he sort of thought the male must be doing something because when he sliced females open and tried to incubate the eggs, they turned into a mushy mess. But when the male did his funny piggyback ride,

the eggs turned into tadpoles. So the logical thing to do was to craft bespoke underpants for the male frogs as a sort of all-body prophylactic that would catch whatever it was that the males were emitting. Fantastically, he tried various different materials. They tried pig's bladder, I think, and it turned out it was very nice and snug. It was good, stretchy, fitted well, like sort of a Spanx-type arrangement. Nothing getting out, but unfortunately,

it got all sort of mushy in the water. And then he settled on wax taffeta, which was much better because it didn't get destroyed by the water. But the frogs would jump out of the underpants, which was very frustrating. So in the end, he put braces on them. And finally, why did the chicken cross the road? Go on, go on.

To get away from the voracious rooster, by the sound of things. Well, that's actually... I'm sorry. I've done a joke style very much as what you've always asked for, because you say the problem with jokes is they go into a world of fantasy and lose the factual evidence which makes the world so wonderful your joke is why did the chicken cross the road to get away from the voracious rooster yeah it's not funny it's just true there's a voracious well look if you listen to tim burkhead here he is again talking through which birds are not as bird-brained as we used to think.

In fact, bird-brained is just a silly thing to say. The guillemot that I've studied for 45 years used to be called the foolish guillemot. And that's because when they're faced with a predator, be it a raven or a gull or a human being, they sit tight on their egg or chick because that's their strategy that works for ravens and gulls, but it doesn't work for humans. But for humans it was easy because you could just go and pick them up and either kill the bird or take the egg. But they're anything but stupid.

In fact, there's probably no bird that's really stupid. Oh, chickens are stupid. No, chickens are incredibly stupid. How would they manage to cross roads if they were so stupid? Let me give you an example of how smart chickens are. We did some experiments and we were interested in the mating behaviour, of course. And I discovered that if you very gently held a hen in your fingers and lay on the ground and pointed the hen's bottom towards the cockerel,

he would go, whoa, fantastic, and jump on her and mate with her. And then we fitted the female with a kind of chastity belt that we could collect the sperm, which is the kind of stuff that biologists do. And we wanted to know how many sperm a cockerel could transfer to a female. And so what we did was we put the female behind our back and the cockerel would wander around.

We'd put her out again and he'd come and mate and we'd collect the sperm and count them. And then after a bit, we swapped the hen. So it was a different hen. And he suddenly just started transferring many, many more sperm. And we did it again and again. And then we noticed what he did was every time, before he mated, he had a quick look at her face.

And they'd go, oh, it's you, love. I'm not going to bother. If we gave him a new one, he had a quick look at her face and they go, oh, it's you, love. I'm not going to bother. If you gave him a new one, he goes, whoa. And we did it time and time again. They are super smart. Wow. Playboy chicken. I'm just radically

rethinking what I think of as smart behaviour now in relation to the pub on a Friday night. Only two episodes in and already we've covered love and murder. So, after love and murder, where can we go? Gardening. Yeah, of course. Don't look under the rockery. All the episodes we took clips from are available on BBC Sounds

and you can find all the details of those in the programme description for this show. In the Infinite Monkey Cage Till now nice again. On This Cultural Life from BBC Radio 4, leading artists and performers reveal their creative inspirations. I saw something that was so beyond what I was being taught at school.

Discuss their best known work. I do get messages all the time saying this is our life The Handmaid's Tale is already here and reflect on their own cultural lives Rock stars need to be simply drawn They can't be too complex Join me, John Wilson, and my guests including Nick Cave

Stephen Fry, Margaret Atwood, Florence Pugh, Paul McCartney and Whoopi Goldberg I always knew I was going to be a character actor. I never thought I was going to be a famous movie person. This Cultural Life. Listen on BBC Sounds.