Instant Genius - The weird and wonderful science behind why humans are different

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

Humanity is beautifully diverse. Some of that diversity is visible, but hidden beneath the surface, there is also a hidden web of genetic variation that collectively tells a story about how people have adapted to their environments, sometimes in weird and wonderful ways. In this episode, we speak to Prof. Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, USA, and the author of Burn: the misunderstood science of metabolism, as well as his newest book, Adaptable: the surprising science of human diversity, which inspired this conversation. Herman tells us about how our genes can evolve over generations, how specific groups of humans have adapted to survive and thrive in different environments, and why understanding the science of diversity is so important for society as a whole. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to live. more. Hello, welcome to the Instant Genius podcast. I'm Hatti Wilmot, a trends editor at BBC Science Focus. Humanity is beautifully diverse. Some of that diversity is visible, but hidden beneath the surface, there is also a web of genetic variation that collectively tells a story about how people have adapted to their environments, sometimes in weird and wonderful ways. In this episode, we speak to

Professor Herman Ponsor, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University USA, and the author of Byrne, the misunderstood science of metabolism, as well as his newest book, Adaptable, The Surprising Science of Human Diversity, which inspired this conversation. Herman tells us about how our genes can evolve over generations, how specific groups of humans have adapted to survive and thrive in different environments, and why understanding the science of diversity is so important for society as a whole. Herman, thank you so much for joining me on this podcast today. But I'm so happy to be here. We're going to be talking about your book, Adaptable, The Surprising Science of Human Diversity. You're an evolutionary anthropologist, and I want to ask you, first of all, a very, very big question.

Why do humans adapt and change to our environments? Oh, yeah. I love that one. So, you know, imagine an organism that couldn't adapt, right? That couldn't sort of take the information or the inputs from its environment and use that to be a better version of itself, right? That would be a very unsuccessful organism. So almost all organisms are able to kind of, you know, sort of read the room, right? You know, understand what food availability looks like, understand what the disease pressures are, understand what the climate is like, and adapt both, you know, over the course of a lifetime. So as you grow up, you're sort of taking information your body is and you're adapting to that environment that you grow up in. And then, of course, also over generations over evolutionary time,

species can adapt. Yeah, that's Darwin's big insight, right, is that by taking information from the outside world and kind of using it to be a better version of yourself, you adapt. And all species do it just to do that exactly, to survive and reproduce better. Yeah, in your book, you kind of said that some of these adaptations are just random, they just kind of happen and, you know, they don't kill you off, so that's all right. And then also other times it's kind of to do with survival or because people kind of become more attractive, whatever. But also, I wanted to get into what that means, you mentioned it kind of changes over generations. What does that mean? How does that even work? There's a big word that's brought up in your book, Epigenetics, which like, if you've never

heard that before, I remember hearing that for the first time of being like, what on earth is that? Yes. Okay. So let's unpack it. So there are the kinds of changes your body makes as you grow up and you're listening to the environment. So for example, if I start eating a particular kind of diet because I'm raised here in the States and I'm getting fed with whatever their fetus here. The genes that make different enzymes are kicking on and they're learning to kind of digest that food. I'll grow to a certain size, right? If I have lots of calories available, I'll grow taller than if I had not enough calories

available. I might be obese or I might be skinny. My body's learning, listening to the environment, adapting that kind of thing. And let's be clear about it. Those are a lot of times those are genetically related changes, right? The reason that I make the enzymes to digest my food, a little gene turns on, makes that enzyme, and I digest my food. So there are genetics related to all of these biological changes.

There are also, if we zoom way out, we can think about changes that happen over many generations. And so perhaps if I have a particular enzyme that helps me digest a particular kind of food, and that food is really common in my environment, a great example of this is like lack taste persistence, the ability to digest milk as an adult. If you're able to do that as an adult, it's because you have. have ancestors that had this variant that allowed you to digest milk as an adult and it was successful and now you have it too. So there are these two kinds of ways of adapting over a lifetime and that just that involved training genes on and off but it doesn't involve them changing or over generations and

now genes really are changing because a gene that wasn't common before now is really common. But there's a third kind and you hit on it exactly. There's this kind of change that we're just now beginning to appreciate, where as I develop either in the womb or as early in my life, I will have my genes not just turned on and off, that's normal, but I might have them like, you can think of them as being flagged or marked and permanently turned on or permanently turned off. And those are epigenetic changes, that word epigenetics. And here's what's crazy about it. Those epigenetic changes can persist to my offspring. So, So there's a great example of this.

Mothers who were starved in the Netherlands during World War II, and they were pregnant. And so their babies were experiencing this womb that was, you know, of a woman who was starving. The mom was experienced that starvation. The baby's genetics changed in a way that they had these epigenetic marks put on them. It influenced the way that that baby's life went as they grew up. So now they're 60, 70 years old, and they still have those genetic changes that happened in the womb affecting them, and their kids, the grandparents of those women who were starved in the Dutch hunger winter in World War II, also carry, we think, these same epigenetic

changes. So there's sort of three levels of adaptation that we can think of over your life, over generations, and then the sort of interesting in-between thing called epigenetics that sort of does both. So interesting. And you had this really lovely sentence in your book that you said that genes are passed down over eons like sacred texts. I was like, oh, that's so lovely. How poetic.

So we kind of inherit the consequences of our parents' environments, like you said, with like the Dutch famine the hunger winter. And then we change and all of these different groups have different adaptations

to their own environments. Do you have any favorites, like wacky ways that bodies have changed to adapt to their specific environments? Yes, there are some really crazy examples out there. Here's my favorite one. There is a popular

of folks who are hunter-gatherers, but they're hunter-gatherers in the ocean. So they live in the southwest Pacific on islands there, like around the Philippines and stuff. And the name of the community is the Samah. And they spend so much time on boats in the ocean, more time than they do on land as they grow up and as they live their lives. And they forage, right, rather than sort of foraging around the forest for food, like a hunter-gatherer on land would do, they dive. So they dive without any equipment to do that. They just hold their brothers and go down and they're, you know, swimming around, walking around underneath the water to collect, you know, whatever they can to eat. And what's happened is over time, many generations,

there has been selection. There's been people who have been able to hold their breath longer, you can imagine in this community, have been able to do a better job foraging. They're able to get more calories. They're able to survive this really hard way of making a living better. They have more kids. Those kids are able to hold their breasts better too. Okay, but what's actually getting passed on to hold their breath better longer is a larger spleen, right? So you have to understand what spleen's do. Splins are this sort of reserve tank of red blood cells that carry oxygen. And when you dive, they kind of compress and they squeeze out a little bit of oxygenated red blood cells and help

you carry on longer without having to take another breath. There's been selection for a bigger spleen in these folks that spend their lives, generation after generation, at, see. And I love that example because it ties together so many things. First of all, when's the last time you thought about your spleen had it? It probably has probably been a while. Well, actually, pretty recently, because it was on the UK lover's blind. There was someone who kept talking about splenic awareness. He was always listening to his spleen rather than his gut. So I think a lot of people recently learned what their spleen was. But that's super interesting. Yeah. Well, I want to know what the spleen does for your love life. I think that might be a different adaptation. I think that's a

different question inside of. But, you know, the fact that the spleen is this reserve tank of red blood cells, I think is such an important bit of physiology to learn. And it also, it teaches us an important story about adaptation over generations. You know, when I grew up in rural Pennsylvania here, my grandparents had all these hilarious stories about why certain groups people look certain ways, right? All these really adaptive. Oh, those folks look like that because. of this history and there's all these stories. Maybe you grew up with them too. What the spleen story tells us is,

yes, there can be adaptations within communities to particularly strong selection pressures, like holding your breath when you have to forage for your food underwater. There are certain criteria we should look for before we tell this adaptationist story, right? It would have to be the kind of selection pressure that lasts many generations.

That's really consistent. It has a big effect on survival and reproduction. And there are a handful of traits like that, time like skin colors another great example of us of a trait that's locally adapted if you live in a if your ancestors are living in a place with high intensity sunlight you probably have darker skin it's a natural sunblock again the sun's been the same place for for millennia it's a localized strong adaptation at last generations so the stories you often hear about oh those folks like like this or those folks look like that and we tell those stories about these local adaptations often those are just that

They're just stories. And so I think we can kind of go overboard telling these adaptive stories. But there are these really great cases like the spleen, like skin color, that tell us so much about our history. And you also kind of touch on a darker past to this kind of science, when it used to be a pseudoscience and people used it to kind of further their racist agendas. And then it was just eugenics. If these people looked like this because of this and making bizarre inferences about what that means, about who they are. So why do you think it's actually important that we study differences between groups in terms of biology and genes? Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's important to study difference, period, because we're all different, right?

And if I go to my doctor and they've got some cookbook answer about how to treat my particular symptoms, but they're not taking my individuality into account and how humans differ, then they wouldn't be doing a good job. So most doctors are aware of this and they understand to treat the individual. and understand human variation. So understanding differences in variation is just crucial in that very practical point of medicine. It's also really critical for how we treat each other. I mean, there's so much debate today

about how we understand other cultures, other people, ourselves, you know, any individuals in our communities. Fundamentally, we're asking the question, how do we understand each other? How do I understand you? How do I understand myself and why I'm different? And if we don't get that right, yeah, if we don't really tell the evidence-based real story of how people differ, then we allow ourselves to be open to these, you know, maybe it's a racist agenda, maybe it's whatever,

these political agendas that really aren't based in the evidence. And so, man, with this book, I just thought, let's have a conversation about difference and how it really happens, right? And get away from the old stories and really understand it from the new way of thinking about diversity. Let's go back to the fun stuff though because that got very serious for a second. I want to know why some people are taller than others. That's another thing that you write a lot about in your book and I thought there was a lot of fun stuff in that section.

So could you tell me a little bit about why some people are taller than others? Well, height is the classic trait that people who study human variation love to focus on because it's not controversial, you know. Everybody kind of knows their height and nobody feels too bad about being asked. And so it also is, the classic complex traits. So biologists call these traits complex because dozens or in the case of

height, even thousands of genes, you know, the variance that you got on thousands of your genes, they all contribute in a tiny way to how tall you're likely to be and being a complex trait. The environment also matters a lot, as we know. So if you don't get nutrition growing up, if you're sick a lot, you have a lot of stress, whatever, you're not going to grow as tall as you might if you'd had, you know, a better circumstance. And so environment matters, genes matter, all these things. And it's just a lovely example of all of that in action. So I kind of unpack a lot of that in the book. There can also be fun cases where you do see local adaptation. And I think this is kind of telling. So let me tell this story. Part of what my lab does is we work in Northern Kenya with a group

called the Dostnich. And they live with their herds, right? These are pastoralist groups. They have goats and cattle and camels. And it's an incredibly hot place to live. You're right on the equator, it's hot and dry. And it's, you know, a part of East Africa that has also been, you know, traditionally that populations there have had a lot of undernutrition, malnourishment. And so there's a lot of NGO attention there to try to get, you know, people better nutrition. And so when we started this program a few years ago to understand health and nutrition in this population, we were working with an NGO there, a German NGO. We were, sorry, we weren't working with them, but we were checking in with them to ask sort of what they'd already done. And the guy who

was running the local chapter said, oh, it's horrible. Everybody is malnourished. You know, over 60% of the kids here are malnourished. And we thought, oh, my God, well, that is really scary. That's, that's terrible. But then as we kind of drove around, visited the community, got on foot and got to know people, they didn't really square with what we were seeing. Kids were running around happy, you know, families were big. People, it was not the kind of place that looked like folks were undernourished. So fast forward a couple of years, and here's what we discovered. when you have the heights and weights of a lot of kids in this community, which now we have got data for thousands of kids, what you find is they have been locally adapted to grow tall

and thin in this environment. Why is that? Well, because if it's a really hot environment, you do a better job getting rid of your heat if you're taller and thinner. So there's been adaptation for gene variants that will make you a little taller and a little thinner. And so adults and kids alike, taller and thinner than their peers and other parts of the world. The German NGO was measuring these kids and they would look at the ratio of height to weight and they'd go, oh my gosh, they're too skinny, right? Because they didn't understand or didn't even occur to them that you would have local adaptation here for height. These kids are just taller than you'd expect for their weight.

So they would give them these food supplements and you couldn't make them taller. It couldn't make them heavier. It's impossible. You're trying to, you know, it's trying to, we say you're trying to rake water uphill, you know, you just can't do it. And so it's a lovely story in my mind about local adaptation, about how if we don't understand diversity the right way, we'll get the wrong answers. And so, you know, it was well meant, well intended, these nutritional support for these kids. And I'm sure the families were happy to have it. But what they were trying to do, they were basically trying to turn these kids into, you know, some homogenous population of kids. elsewhere that we're able to grow up in their mind on schedule. But of course, they're not on the same schedule as everybody else. So I love it. And another fun thing about that is, you know, I was working with folks from Nairobi on this. We partner with local collaborators there. And it occurred to me, you know, look, if we were to take work with people in the community there,

the Dostage community and my Kenyan collaborators and the folks from the U.S. that were there, one view of this, the correct view would be like, well, in terms of height and body proportions, this Dostnich population has been adapted to be a bit different than either me or my Kenyan collaborators. So in that sense, you know, me and my Kenyan collaborator are more similar than the Dostnich folks are. On the other hand, if I look at something like skin color, the Dostnich and my Kenyan collaborators are more like than either of them are like me. And so we understand that, you know, system by system, gene by gene, that's how variation is built.

not by these big racial categories. Of course, if we take all three of us to the U.S., then I'm white and they're black. And we wouldn't understand, right, the variation within. So we would miss the story completely. So I love it for that reason. Yeah. And so height's a great example of how we can ask these questions in kind of detailed ways. Yeah, and that's also another great entrance point into the idea of BMI

and kind of measuring how healthy someone is by just measuring their weight, measuring their height, and saying, where do you fit on this? this little graph of the average population and therefore how healthy are you? Are there some populations then that have just naturally developed to be heavier? Yeah, we do see that. So there are, for example, Samoa is the classic, you know, population, but islands around that as well tend to be a bit higher BMI. That's just how they're built.

They're going to be stockier and carry more body weight. Just sort of, that's what their genes are telling them to do. You know, across the globe, we tend to see folks that are. in high heat areas be a bit taller and skinnier. People who are away from that towards the Arctic, either Arctic or Antarctic, tend to be a bit heavier and a little less tall. You know,

those are really broad brush. And anybody listening would say, oh, but I know so and so is my grandparents from Norway don't fit the bill that way or, you know, whatever. Exactly.

You're exactly right. There's a lot of variation still that doesn't get captured in that general trend. But that trend happens because of this climate influence. And I mean, many of us might be thinking, well, a lot of us are larger either in the U.S. or in Western Europe and the UK. Why is that? How have we adapted to our environments here? Yes. Then you get into the question about how our modern environments affect our BMI is today. And a lot of that story is around the obesity epidemic, right, though I think we're all familiar with.

And that's fascinating because, you know, people have been arguing back and forth, well, am I overweight? it's just genetics. I can't do anything about it. Is it the diet? Is it willpower? Right. And there's all these kind of moralistic stories who tell, well, you're just not trying hard enough. And I think a lot of that discussion isn't very helpful. What we know now is that your BMI, how heavy you are in, you know, in the modern environments that we live in in the developed world like in the UK and in the U.S. And it has a lot to do with your genetics, but it's the genetics that control your response

to food, basically. It's how you're wired, how your brain is wired, and how you respond to food. And people who have a really strong food reward response are going to have a harder time not focusing on food. And they're going to have a harder. They might struggle more to keep it out a healthy weight because the foods that we surround ourselves with, the supermarket foods that we see every day, are engineered to play on those reward systems, right?

And so the same genetics that our great grandparents had, because we have those same genetics today didn't cause hardly anybody to be obese because they didn't go to the supermarket and get bombarded with all these crazy foods. Today we still have those same genes, but now we have the foods in addition and that combination is really bad. And if you have a particular set of gene variants that make you more responsive to that food environment, then it's going to be even harder. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll. with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

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Going to a completely different track now entirely. There's another section. Your book kind of has chapters about different parts of the body and one of them was about the brain and intelligence. And one of the things you wrote there was that we don't inherit intelligence. That's purely environmental. Can you tell me why? Why don't we adapt?

Why don't we genetically adapt with our brains? Yes. Well, so I'm going to push back a little bit. We have it genetically adapted, right? So the genes that make our brain so big. Sure. Yeah. Compared to an eight, for example, those are all genetically done for sure and been adapted through evolution. But the system that we've ended up with that evolution has given us is to be born with a brain that's not cooked at all. Right? And so it's just this glob of a sponge, right? That's, I'm mixing my metaphors. Basically, you come into the world unfinished, right? You're an unwritten symphony, and you're waiting to have all of these inputs to put your

brain together, to build your brain. And so quite literally, the brain that you've got today and I've got today was put together over our whole lives, actually, but a lot of that work was done in infancy, early childhood as we're putting together the connections that are going to make us us. Why be built like that? I mean, I've got two kids, and I can tell you. you, and this won't be news to any of the parents out there, that the first couple years of having a kid, they're just these useless lumps. I mean, we love them very much, but they are impossible, you know,

and how could that be adaptive? Well, because I'm sorry, but while you're learning how to function, you're a useless lump, but that's okay. We still love them very much. But, you know, we don't just inherit our biology. We also inherit our culture and our ways of living and knowing. and that cultural inheritance has been so crucial for the last, oh, half million years of our evolution, before we're even homo sapiens, that we actually have adapted a brain that's ready to be constructed, right? Because you can't just be built with your parents' solutions, right? If you think about, you look at those nature shows and the little baby antelopes born, and as soon as he's born, he's off and running and eating, you know, he's still nursing, but maybe he can even eat grass right

after he's born. Well, yeah, if you're an antelope, life's pretty easy. You live on a flat plane and you eat grass, right? So mom's solutions to life work great for you. You don't have to learn a whole lot. You can kind of be pre-cooked when you come out. It doesn't work for us. And so that's right. So by the time you can measure something like IQ, by the time a kid is able to interact with anything and give you an IQ score, you're measuring what's been built. You're not measuring hardly anything about their genes. Now, we do know that if I can have, if you give me 100 kids that are all, you know, born under the same circumstances, same environment, and, you know, all the same upbringing, I'm likely to find, if I give them all IQ test, I might still find differences, and I can track

some of those differences, a small amount of them down to genetics, right? There are some genes associated with IQ. That's true. I don't want to disavow that or say it's not happening. Of course it is. but it's a small component and the overwhelming signal we see when we do look at something like a test score or an IQ score is how your brain's been built. Super interesting. And I love it in the book you have this example of like going to stay with this hunter-gatherer society and their sort of IQ test is where's this impala? Like you're trying to track down and hunt this animal and you have no idea what's going on

and you feel a bit silly. Yes. Yeah. So I've had a chance to work with a community called the Hazza as well, doing this work, looking at human variation in the ecology. And, you know, growing up in western Pennsylvania, it's a very rural part of America. And so we grew up hunting and fishing and, you know, even hunting deer. That's a childhood experience that I had a lot of. And tracking is part of that.

And it's part of how I grew up. So I kind of felt ready to sort of go along on a Hazah hunt. because of course they hunt and gather. These hodds are hunter-gatherers. And so a guy would shoot an Impala in this case with his bow and arrow and then you'd have to track it. And so I went on one of these tracking parties because the guy will shoot the Impala and come back to camp and get some of his buddies to help him track it. And I'm following along, trying to do my best to anticipate where we're going to go based on the tracks and the, you know, maybe a couple spots of blood or something like that that we see. And my God, every time I got it wrong. And I

I realized I am just a pretty dumb haza guy. That's my, I can't do it. My IQ, you know, the funny, other funny thing about that is growing up, you know, going through school in my culture, I did okay and I did pretty well in school. You know, like, I wasn't low IQ, but I was pretty low IQ in the Haza culture. And that's just goes to show you, they have built their brains. That's how they grew up.

Their brains are built for that. They're so good at it. And it's so smart and sophisticated and hard to do. And if you think you can just breeze in there with a, with a PhD and, you know, pretend to do the same thing, you're quickly, quickly disabused of that idea. I love it. It's just another example of how we're adapted to our environments, which I guess is what this is all about. I want to finish off by asking you once again for some fun examples of how groups have adapted to their environments, because I think that was my favorite part of that book

in this discussion of just like the weird things we didn't even realize that some bullies did. Yeah. Well, you know, there's so many fun examples. We talked about a few of them, you know, how height and weight and skin color even and spleen sizes can have, you know, be affected by our environments. Noses are a fun one, especially if like me, you're very nose forward. You know, there's been just the same way that we can understand a height as, you know, the combination of all these genes working together with our environments, anything about our bodies that grows and shapes that it all fits these same kind of rules. So there's, hundreds of genes that help shape your face. Most of them aren't under selection. It's just the variation that we see in face shape is just kind of random variation and noise. But the nose, it turns out, there seems to be a selection story there. And so if you look at people with, you know, big noses, big noses seem to have been adapted

to cold environments where the air is cold and dry. And it helps you sort of humidify the air as you breathe it in. And it helps you trap some of that water that you might otherwise live. lose as you breathe it out. Again, you know, this is personal for me because I've got a, I have a well-adapted nose for a dry, cold air. It's nice to imagine that it's good for something. You know, and folks that have sort of a broader nose that tends to be associated with warmer humid air climates. You know, there are interesting examples of immune evolution. So folks over there in the UK, you know, your ancestors pass through the

black death, and that left a mark, right? There are gene variants that have affect the way our immune systems work that are much more common now in folks whose ancestors went through that, that, you know, horrible event and survived it. They survived it in part because they might have been carrying one of these sort of more fortunate, luckier alleles that helped them survive. And now, because those are the ones who survived, their offspring, i.e., people today in the UK, who have that ancestry are carrying that gene, right? Great example of why you ought to get vaccinated, by the way, because I'm sure the folks living through the Black Death would have been very happy to have been treated for it rather than just happen to either live or die based on their

gene variants. Well, thank you so much for sharing. Super interesting talking with you today, Herman. Thank you so much for joining me. Oh, thanks for the conversation. I had a really great time. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor Herman Ponser. To discover more about the science of human diversity, you can read his latest book, Adaptable, which is out now. If you liked what you just heard,

then please consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to watch our presenters and guests speaking in person, then you can also check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com.

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