Ologies with Alie Ward - Evolutionary Biology (DARWINISM) with John McCormack

Episode Date: April 10, 2018

Celebrate your lucky mutations with an episode about natural selection, agonizing boat trips, redemption stories, olde timey inter-family marriages, how much money you can make playing videos games, finch beaks, whether or not cave men are kinda hot and how to live on a small island with your soulmate. Evolutionary biologist and the director of the Moore Lab of Zoology, John McCormack, chats about all things evolution and gives Alie a new appreciation for how genetic blips can be hidden strengths.Moore Lab of ZoologyFollow John's work @MLZbirds on Twitter and InstagramMore episode sources & linksSupport Ologies on Patreon for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray MorrisMusic by Nick Thorburn

Hi, it's your eccentric but quiet neighbor, Allie Ward. Hey, how did you get here? Why, why don't we have flippers? He's a fly, my cousin! What is life? Welcome to evolutionary biology. Now, this is a special episode because, frankly, I thought it was lost to extinction. I thought it was plum deed. I recorded it with an evolutionary biologist who works at the same lab at Occidental College

for Ornithologist from a few episodes back. So late last year, before I had better microphones or necessarily a good interview rhythm down, I visited with this evolutionary biologist. And before the tape rolled, we talked about birds and our upcoming holiday plans. And then we sat down to chat about natural selection. And then I lost the file for like a lot of months. And I found it on a drive recently and oh! Oh, so exciting! It was like encountering a dodo bird in a P.F. Chang's parking lot.

I was ecstatic! Another thing that's exciting? Your support. Thank you to everyone funding the production of this podcast on patreon.com slash oligies. It's run completely independently and your pledges for as little as 25 cents an episode, totally keep it going. I'm able to pay an amazing editor, what's up Steven, to cut it all up and put it back together. You can also support just by getting some sweet, sweet oligies merch. Get a shirt for 20 bucks on oligiesmerch.com in whatever color you want.

Or you can support for free. No money. Just by telling a friend or you can tweet about it or subscribe on iTunes. Are you subscribed? Go check. Sometimes Apple just unsubscribes me from things. And it also helps so much to rate or to leave a review for the podcast. Last week, oligies was number 20 in science podcasts on iTunes. Sure, we had some ghost podcasts to beat, but number 20 is thrilling as hell for an indie podcast. So I creep all your reviews. I read them all.

I read every single one of them. This one was really kind. Big Zozoo says, You are the podcast I'd want to buy a drink for in a classy bar. The music is low. The mood is right. I buy you the top shelf beverage of your choice. And then you delight me with the most interesting facts my brain could possibly absorb with gin. Thanks for rocking my pot socks on the rocks. Well, you're welcome, Big Zozoo.

I'm trying to think what drink I would order a top shelf at a classy bar. And I'm like, do they have wine spritzers? No, I don't know. Okay, evolutionary biology. In this episode, you're going to pick up some sweet ass definitions like taxonomy. What is it? Epigenetics, genetic drift, phylogeny. What is all this mouth salad?

And you'll learn about some crowdsourced cancer fixers, some super erotic whales, some Finch gossip, relationship goals, and about how Charles Darwin had a wonderful, but super shitty, but also wonderful life that involved probably a lot of bad toilet experiences and a lust for a family member. Who was it? So please enjoy this chat that essentially boils down to our mutations are our strengths and adaptability is a virtue. Meet evolutionary biologist John McCormick.

Okay. No, that works. So are you by trade? Are you an evolutionary biologist? Yes. That's kind of where a couple of different hats. I'd say evolutionary biologist is probably the broadest one. Sometimes I consider myself an ornithologist as well.

I should hope so as the curator of a bird collection. So would you say that you have like genus and species on the brain? A lot. Oh, yeah. Yeah. All the time. Because that's a lot of what we do here with a with a specimen collection. I'll just, you know, naming the basic units of biodiversity.

Do you remember as a kid in in class learning that like, what was it King Philip? What is the? Yeah. What is it again? Well, I can't remember it. Let's talk taxonomy, which is how science organizes things. So you may have learned that plants and fungi and animals are classified into domain, kingdom, class, order, family, genus and species.

And you're like, wow, Ali, that is amazing. How did you memorize that? You were a genius. And I know that's what you're thinking. Now the mnemonic device is clutch here. I never remembered the mnemonic device for this. I remember we learned one. I think it was like Dear King Philip came over from Germany.

Which is weird. Who ends it? What's the so about? What's the rest of the story? Anyway, I never remembered it. Dear King Philip came over for grape soda is another way to remember kingdom, class, order, family, genus, species. Another alternative you could use is dickish Ken poured coffee on Fran's good shirt.

Fuck off, Ken. Or dang, kinky people come over for group sex. Which is apparently what some biology teachers use. They're like, they know marketing. They know how to get your attention. Don't kick people coming from Goldman Sachs is another alternative, depending on how your thoughts about it. So calling an organism or a specimen by its genus and species,

it's kind of like saying your last name first, but it's what we call linean taxonomy. Even though Swedish ecologist Carl Linnaeus, he didn't really invent it. Someone else did. It was kind of already established. So John wasn't busy learning Carl Linnaeus pneumonic memory devices in high school, but he was down with a different Carl, Carl Sagan,

who despite being an astronomer and a cosmologist, he wrote about evolution. We sometimes represent evolution as the ever branching ramifications of some original trunk, each branch pruned and clipped by natural selection. Sagan has an eight-minute animated video that essentially details the journey from a single-celled animal to a polyp on the sea floor,

to humans' jawless, fishy ancestors, to an amphibian, to a shrew, to primates, to apes branching off into bipedal creatures with big brains that poke stuff and will eventually invent things like game shows and salad spinners. Human beings. I added that last part because I'm writing this in bed. Honestly, evolution and humanity are kind of freaking me out.

It's like nothing matters, but everything matters. Everything changes. We're all mutable. How did I get here? Think of all the people that had to mate in order for me to be alive right now. What have I even done with my day? Anyway, what is it about the Linnaeus system of taxonomy that you dig?

Well, I've always been an organizer and a list maker, and so it always appealed to me when I found out about it. A lot of taxonomy is lists, an organization. I like that. In your regular life, your day-to-day life, are you as organized as you are as a scientist, or is your house just a good disaster and you're not sure you don't have a Christmas list isn't ready?

Yeah. Well, unfortunately, that's kind of the plight, I think, of the academic is to be extremely busy and wearing a lot of hats, and I'm certainly not as organized as I would like to be. It was a difficult admission for you. Are you like always? A little bit, yeah.

I guess I'm still, I'd say, fairly organized about my things, but yeah, in terms of just general life and scheduling and things like that, it's a bit of the disaster you might expect from an academic. Tell me a little bit about when you first kind of grasped the concept of evolution. When did you start to realize, okay, mutations are responsible for a lot of these different

appearances and behavior and capabilities of animals? When did you start to get excited about evolution? I think it was when I was doing some of those early readings in high school. I know there are other people that have spoken at more length about evolution than Carl Sagan, who was principally an astronomer, cosmologist, but it was some of his books that delved more

into evolutionary ideas that got me into it. From there, John studied at University of Arizona, and he took an evolution class by Dr. Nancy Moran, who I looked her up. She is a badass and a MacArthur fellow. She researches the gut biome of aphids. It was really there for the first time that I learned just kind of the basic framework of evolution

and its processes, mutation, natural selection, and then some things I'd never heard of like genetic drift, which is the sort of random way that evolution can take gene frequencies and populations and that there were whole aspects of it I hadn't heard of. That was pretty exciting too. What's an example of genetic drift? How do you describe that at a cocktail party

to someone who's half a glass of Chardonnay in? Well, I guess I'd point to the M&M Bowl and I'd say... Okay, so see that M&M Bowl. Genetic drift is when you take... A small handful of M&Ms and you end up with three green ones instead of the full rainbow colors. That's genetic drift, and that's what can happen in populations sometimes, generation to generation,

you don't always get a random draw of the genes that are out there. Sometimes you get a very non-representative draw and that can have a big influence on evolution. I kind of like the idea that there's that sort of chance element in there too as well as kind of the more what we call deterministic or kind of the more predictable outcomes of natural selection. Are there any movies or TV shows about evolution that you either really like or that really annoy you?

Or are you like, that's not evolution? That's a great question. You know, Gattaca comes to mind as one that's actually a fairly interesting and informed movie with evolutionary ideas. It's been long enough since I've seen it that I can't really tell you that much, but the ideas of what can happen with genetic engineering and kind of our more consumer-based eugenics that we have now are kind of enhancing our genes because we want to

and some of the outcomes, pretty interesting. How do you, I did talk about Gattaca in the paleontology episode about how I always really respected that they only used ATGC, no, ATGC, whatever, to make the name Gattaca. That's pretty dope. How do you feel about CRISPR and gene editing? On the one hand, it's incredibly exciting. I mean, I think people tend to focus in on the aspects of it

that involve genetic engineering and humans, and that is one avenue that obviously a lot of caution needs to be taken. But there's so many other applications of CRISPR technology just to the study of evolution that it's really quite exciting. I mean, the possibilities for experimental evolution are vast, and that's great. So what is it about birds that make them prime for studying evolutionary biology? Why birds?

Well, people freaking love birds. There have been a lot of them observed, described, collected. So there's a good base of knowledge there as opposed to like slime molds, which nobody goes to hunt down a marvelette. Probably a few people do, and I hope they're friends with each other. But anyway, birds. And the starting place for a lot of that is what is the evolutionary tree of relationships, just knowing who is related to whom is an important starting point.

And if you don't have that, then that's kind of your first step. And so with birds, they've been worked out well enough that that first step is kind of already completed, and you can sort of jump to answering some of the broader questions. Because you know the characters in the story. Exactly, right. Let's take a quick Darwin detour. Who was he? Why should you care?

I'm going to run this down as quick as I can for you. So Charles Robert Darwin was born in England in the early 1800s. His father was a super rich doctor, and Darwin tried to go to medical school, but he hated that. He hated that. He was also the grandson of prominent abolitionists, which is cool, and he loved nature and geology. He loved collecting beetles.

God, he loved it. His dad was like, kiddo, you're a loser. And Darwin was like, dad, can I just go on this boat, the HMS Beagle, and travel the world, and I'll write about it. Will you please finance it? Rich dad and his dad reluctantly agreed. But at one point said to him, you're ready for this? Quote, you care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat catching,

and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family. But, haha, jokes on you, Pop. He wasn't a disgrace to his whole family. Because Charles Darwin married his cousin. Oh, yeah. Apparently, when he was considering taking on a cousin bride, he was so accustomed to filling notebooks with thoughts on various specimens and animal breeding and stuff that he scrawled out a page

with one column headed Mary and another not Mary. Now, advantages of marriage included, quote, constant companion and friend in old age, better than a dog anyhow. Well, I don't know if I grew that. Cons were less money for books and terrible loss of time. So, constant companion, friend in old age, better than a dog, or less money for books and a terrible loss of time.

He decided to make this family affair into a family affair, and he had several babies with his cousin. Back to the Beagle. Charles Darwin did a bunch of writing, kind of like travel blogging, but with more dysentery and smeared ink. And his diaries were made into a popular book, The Voyage of the Beagle. It was on these travels that he started to come up with a theory of evolution,

but it took him years of tinkering and rewriting an illness which may or may not have been Shaggis disease from a parasite on something called an assassin bug. And he was also a little thwarted by, I think, procrastination. But finally, he published his On the Origin of Species, his book in 1859. It was a huge deal. He also kind of published it alongside a contemporary of his Alfred Wallace.

Now, Alfred Wallace never heard of him before I started researching this episode. He was working on a super similar theory, but he had a harder and more impoverished life than Darwin. Like Wallace's ship full of work, sank to the ocean floor, he was adrift at sea on a lifeboat. Alfred Wallace, who no one ended up caring about, but back to Darwin on the Beagle trip.

So Darwin stopped for supplies in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of South America and he noticed that different animals on different islands had slightly different features. For example, all those finches. Why do they have different beak shapes? They got crushing bills, they got probing bills, they got grasping bills. What are these bills? Ah, they must be adapted for different food sources on each little tiny island climate.

So he theorized. Were you really inspired by Darwin's finches? Was that a big deal for you at some point where the kind of evolution natural selection and birds and specialization of beaks and colors. Did that inspire you a lot? Absolutely, because it's such a great story because it's kind of the complete package in terms of evolution happening on a short time scale that humans can observe. It's happening in sort of a contained environment that you can wrap your mind around, right?

This island where Peter and Rosemary Grant studied the finches. You know, you could walk around it in an hour. I did not know who Peter and Rosemary Grant were. Oh man, oh god, oh man. Okay, if you've been in mourning since Brangelina split, have I got a couple for you? Boy, howdy. What sexy motherfuckers. Now born in 1936, this British evolutionary biologist couple went to Daphne Major,

Galapagos Island, and they've been studying the finches there since 1973. They lived together on a remote island half the year and are Princeton professors the other half. Who are these sensual lovers? Well, they met when Rosemary was lecturing in embryology and genetics. Peter was still a zoology grad student and her teaching assistant, but they've been married like 56 years and they've been capturing, tagging, tracking these finches in the Galapagos and they've been able to show that natural selection can be observed within even a couple of years.

Darwin thought this took eons before you could see natural selection. They're like, nope, check this out. We figured it out. It can happen super quick. And yes, Rosemary and Peter Grant did produce offspring, two daughters, one of whom I just found and followed on Instagram. I think she studies psychology and is into making cakes. Have I mentioned them creepy?

I just want to be friends. I just want to be friends. Okay, so back to the finches. And there were maybe a thousand or a couple thousand finches on the island. They could catch them all and have them color banded. And so it's kind of one of those, it's almost evolution in a test tube, but the test tube is nature. And then the other aspect about it is just kind of the romance of field work in a faraway island.

There's a great book called The Beak of the Finch that sort of follows the grants and their graduate students on this decade-long chase for uncovering evolution. And that was really inspiring for me because it kind of, it dispelled some of the myths of field work. Like, you know, it's all fun and hanging out on the beach. It's a lot of hard work. I imagine less margaritas, more like bugs in your clothes. That's right, and scorching hot sun.

But that story, I just think it's so inspirational and it's so easy to grasp. And so that's why I make it a point. Just last week, I have an entire class, two classes in fact, where I walk through the Darwin's Finch example with my students and my evolution class and kind of give them the whole story. How do you feel about people going to the Galapagos as tourists? Does it piss you off? No, it doesn't, you know.

And I've actually been there myself as a tourist, any situation where people are out there enjoying nature and to see people making such a long trip at such expense and to see nature firsthand and to see the work of evolution, that makes me happy. Now sure, once you get there, there's always cases that you can look at that make you grumpy, you know, the person with the camera right in the face of the, you know, the seal.

But I try to take a broader picture and think about how great it is that people can get so excited about biodiversity. I once went to an island in Thailand and I saw a tourist tipping back a Pepsi into the mouth of a monkey and I had a hard time with that. I was like, we shouldn't, we should all go home. It's like, this shouldn't be happening. There's plenty of ways that you can observe humans interacting stupidly with nature

and now with social media, you know, we could just do nothing but watch humans interacting stupidly with nature. And so, I mean, it's a concern, right? It's a problem and people need to be educated. But again, I think taking a slightly more optimistic sort of broad viewpoint, I'm glad that people are jazzed up about nature. Right. Do you ever look at yourself or people in your life and say,

way to go, J-Man, I am the result of a bunch of evolution. It is a pretty marvelous thing when you think about it. I tend to not focus so much on humans as the pinnacle of evolution. Ouch. Yes. Okay. Reminder, humans, not the pinnacle of evolution, you have a point. And I like to look at other situations and marvel over the millions of years

of evolution that produce some remarkable radiation of birds, for example. But when you stop to think about it, everything that's alive today is the survivor of essentially 3.7 billion years of evolution. All those species, millions and millions of species that are crawling around in this very thin crust of the earth are the products of that 3.7 billion years of evolution. And it's a remarkable thing. And in each one, even from a bacteria to a human, has evolved just as much through just as much time. I think it's easy to think about certain species alive today as being more evolved than others

and maybe they have a few more adaptations or they look more complex. But at the end of the day, that bacterium and that human were all the products of 3.7 billion years of evolution. Even if you do nothing but play World Warcraft and eat from a barrel of cheese puffs, you're still a winner, right? You are the product of winners. You got here because your ancestors won the evolutionary game. Now, what you choose to do with all that winning is another question. That's a very diplomatic way of saying, don't just play World Warcraft and eat cheese puffs. Very diplomatic.

I'm not into telling people what to do with their lives. At the end of the day, evolution is about fitness and is about offspring. And so eating Cheetos in your basement is maybe not going to get you to the finish line there. You never know. You never know though. You never know. You never know. Okay, disclaimer.

I know nothing about World of Warcraft or how good of a life you can have playing video games in a basement. But I decided to look into it. And this did cause me to stumble upon a cracked article about farming gold, which seems like some sort of earned token you can sell to another player. One guy does this 72 hours a week and makes about $25,000 a year. And he also lives off pizza and monster energy drinks. So it's possible. It is possible you can make a living playing World of Warcraft.

And then you can put gold farmer on your business card. Oh, what's on John's business card? Is it ornithologist or evolutionary biologist? I think I tend to describe myself as an evolutionary biologist who studies birds. But you know, I'm an ornithologist as well. Own it. Yeah. Maybe I should own it.

Maybe I should own it. And besides, you can be both. I'm sitting next to your business card. And it doesn't even say anologist of any kind. And it says director and curator of the more lab of zoology. You got to throw some titles on these. Well, Ali, I got to bring you in for PR. Come on.

Let me be your life coach. Like zoologist or zologist evolutionary biologist. Come on. What is let's debunk some flim flam. What is a myth about evolution that you feel like people hang on to other than just creationism? Right. I think one of the great myths is embodied in that classic symbol of evolution where you see sort of the chimpanzee evolving through something that looks like a Neanderthal into

modern humans. This linear illustration of primates up to modern humans is called the road to homo sapiens. It's also been called the march of progress. It was published in 1965 in a time life science volume. You've totally seen it. It has silhouettes of gibbons and then chimps and apes all kind of marching in a line up until you get to these like tanned muscular Neanderthals. And it's like it's such a good psychological test and trying to figure out how far back

in species it becomes inappropriate to want to smash. Like some of them look like shaggy haired rock climber boys with good butts who just need a shower and you're like shoot. These are cave people. Check yourself girl. Okay. So there are so many parodies of this illustration. I'm sure that if you see it you almost expect to see the devolving into Homer Simpson or

a Martian or something. Now rather than this linear evolution, evolution looks more like a tree as they call it a tree of life where one thicker branch represents a common ancestor and then new species kind of branch outward. So that's called phylogeny and Darwin sketched it in one of his Beagle era notebooks with the words I think scrawled above it, which I think is super adorable and very humble. I have a friend who has this tattoo of this Darwinian tree of life sketch and I hope Darwin's stodgy father would be proud.

Okay. Back to that road to Homo sapiens linear evolution illustration and how that's not really how things happen. Although it's even used by people who are pro evolution, I think it kind of leaves people with a misimpression of how evolution actually operates because chimpanzees and humans are each other's closest relatives and humans didn't evolve from chimpanzees. We evolved from some common ancestor that we shared with chimpanzees and so that depiction of evolution is kind of following a linear pattern.

It belies the true branching history of evolution that's underneath and one of the most common questions you get and just recently on Twitter, Tim Allen of all people is going to weigh in on evolution and ask the question you get a lot, which is if humans evolve from apes, why are there still apes? And again, it's embodied in that symbol that's not true. We didn't evolve from apes, gorillas and chimpanzees and us all evolved from a common ancestor that was neither an ape nor a chimpanzee nor a human, but something else. Maybe that was just a personal branding question for him because he did make his mark on the

world by grunting. Right? I feel like he grunted a lot. He's like, shoot, maybe I had to rethink this. Well, see, he's got good PR people, maybe. He does. I saw that and I was like, Tim Allen, sit down. Just go away.

I do have some questions from listeners and I don't know if they're going to be easy questions. You can say pass on any of these. But before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors? Why sponsors? You know what they do?

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So thanks for listening and thanks sponsors. Okay. Your questions. Dr. Tegan-Wall wants to know, what are the best ways to differentiate bad post-hoc evo-bio claims from actual science? Example, bananas evolved to be eaten by humans because we have hands. Things like that. A lot of the examples of evolution you see written about in the popular press kind of

fall into this trap of portraying evolution as though it responds to needs and sometimes this is just loose shorthand. I have heard that people get like a science teacher tell me she hates when she hears like oh this bee she's evolved because it wanted this or you know what I mean like a evolved out of need instead of out of kind of chance, but- Exactly. Yeah. And so, right.

The recent example was birds that have evolved to feed off of bird feeders in Great Britain. So birds have evolved longer bills to feed off of bird feeders was kind of the headline that you saw. And it kind of gives this impression of evolution that it responds to needs. The birds sort of thought to themselves look I really need a longer bill here and so let's go for that. You know, let's try to reach that pinnacle of evolution. And it, again, underlying that is the true evolutionary mechanism which is differential

survival and reproduction. Differential survival and reproduction just being fancy talk for little variances in genes mean good mutations which help a plant or a bird or a snail thrive and mate in its particular environment. Boom. Natural selection. The way I would say it would be much longer. It would be something along the lines of birds with longer bills were able to feed more effectively

from bird feeders and thereby produce more offspring which led the population as a whole to have longer bills. Now, you can understand why a headline writer isn't going to go there and why I don't have a job as a headline writer. Breaking news, birds with longer bills were able to feed more effectively from bird feeders and thereby produce more offspring which led to the population as a whole having longer bills. It's very wordy.

But I think there are ways to depict the evolutionary process in headlines in kind of a more effective way. Right. Right. A little bit less sensationalist. How do you feel about Lamarckian theory of acquired genetics that people may be still kind of believe in it? French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, by the way, had a theory of acquired genetics

such that offspring would take on the characteristics their parents adopted in their life. Like okay, if a giraffe slowly stretched its neck ever further to try to get leaves then its babies would have a little bit longer necks depending on the giraffe's effort. Or if your mom was a competitive bodybuilder and you were just destined to be ripped. Turns out, not so much. Lamarckian genetics predated Darwin's theory of evolution and once Darwin came on the scene people were like, uh, yeah, bi-Lamarck, au revoir, no, no. So how does John feel about Lamarck?

And also, did Lamarck get the shaft or are you like, he should have never been kind of known? Oh, I'm a big believer that Lamarck has been overly vilified. I mean, the fact was Lamarck's theory was the first kind of full and coherent theory of evolution that involved a mechanism for how it occurred. No one had really done that before. And so even if he was wrong, he got people talking and he got people thinking and he got people like Darwin thinking about why he was wrong and that moved things forward.

So yeah, I'm a big fan of Lamarck. He did a lot of things right. He just happened to be wrong about how traits changed and how they were passed down through the generations. What about epigenetics? How do you feel about it? Right. This is so funny and my students will laugh when they hear that question because just

yesterday I went on a long unannounced rant about epigenetics. The term is misapplied these days quite a lot, especially in media accounts. I understand it's a buzzword. Super quick primer. So epigenetics is kind of a buzzword these days. Basically it refers to when your gene expressions change. Not the DNA or the genetic code itself, but just the expression of it changes. So John says it really applies to specific cases where DNA can be silenced by the addition

of molecules to something called the histones. Histones are proteins that make up the structure that DNA gets wound around. So those molecules can attach and effectively silence certain parts of the genome. In some cases it seems that those silencers can be passed down from parents to offspring. In some cases also that silencing can happen during the lifetime of an organism in response to its environment. So it's at least theoretically possible and I think it's been shown in maybe just a few cases where this sort of silencing occurs in the lifetime of an organism and then gets

passed down to its offspring. So it is possible that it's a contributor to evolution and in a sense it's a Lamarckian. So Lamarck's theory of acquired characteristics was the idea that traits picked up during your lifetime you can pass down and so epigenetics in the narrow sense sort of adheres to that idea. How often has that actually contributed to evolution? And also is this not something that at the end of the day is found in the genetic code? So the silencing and turning off and on of these genes at the histone level might itself

be encoded in the genes. So your genes might already be saying like hey turn these things on turn those guys off like they might already be on top of it might be part of the code. So but then there's all sorts of ways that people use epigenetics that was already folded into what we know about Darwinian evolution. So Darwin was already hip to it. I don't know if Darwin was hip to it but certainly those people that in the modern synthesis you know Darwin didn't know the genetic mechanism of how heredity happened.

But after Mendel showed us the genetic component and then after that was sort of incorporated with Darwin's views and natural selection. More listener questions. You ready? Yeah. Okay. I hope these aren't too insane. Chasing Katie wants to know, I don't even understand this question I'm just going to

read it. It works in sequence alignment. I want to know what is the most significant discovery arisen from resolving anomalies in human DNA. I just reread this question again like 17 times I still don't understand it. I looked it up and it seems to involve finding matching sequences within DNA to point to one common ancestor. Does that make sense?

I think the question is about how we take multiple sequences from multiple individuals and know that we're looking at the same piece of DNA across individuals. So that's sequence alignment is a very important part of building a tree of evolutionary relationships from DNA data. A lot of times you get pieces of DNA from very different species and evolution has taken them in such different directions that you almost don't recognize that those pieces of DNA are related to one another. And so it becomes quite challenging to sort of align it all together and know you're looking

at sort of the same base or the same chunk of DNA or the same gene across different species. We have had new computational tools come online that have really vastly improved our ability to do that by eye. It used to be you got these chunks of DNA and then you would just look at them on a computer and sort of move them around by eye. That sounds terrible. It sounds terrible but actually it's a pretty darn good way of doing it as it turns out. We've had new computational tools that come online that have allowed us to sort of align

DNA across whole genomes in a way that it would take years to do by eye. So you can get most of it close to correct. But then it turns out those really, really tough spots to align are actually almost best done by eye. Wow. A computer really hasn't figured out how to effectively do that. And in some cases people have used crowdsourcing to do it. So they've put these really complicated chunks of DNA online and then people can go on like

a little game and sort of move the bases around and kind of come up with the best explanation for how they should be aligned to each other. Like citizen science projects and ... Yeah, exactly. So I looked into this and there's a game called Philo P-H-Y-L-O. It's put out by the McGill Center for Bioinformatics and it kind of resembles a linear, like brightly colored Tetris with blocks that you try to slide around until they match each other. Each block represents nucleotide sequences of different phylogenetic taxa.

So I sucked at first, but I didn't care because it features like jazzy piano background music, which is hella sweet. And then you can also select which disease you'd like to help cure by matching nucleotide sequences of different phylogenetic taxa. So you can click on the menu like infectious diseases, blood diseases, heart and muscle diseases. Really, it's quite an impressive menu. I chose brain and nervous system disease, which had kind of a powerful effect because

as you're playing, it'll kind of hit you that maybe you're helping researchers find out more about, say, my mom's disease, multiple sclerosis. Maybe by playing this video game, I'm helping out. So I looked at a video and an earlier version of Philo used a graphic in the lower corner to represent your score. And it was silhouette from the road to Homo sapiens, aka the March of Progress illustration we talked about earlier. So it looks like they've since changed that, which is good because having these chromagnon

hotties in the corner, super distracting. So if you need a break from gold farming on World of Warcraft, you might want to hop over to Philo and just play a couple rounds. No disclosure. I did eat Cheetos like yesterday, so no judgment on that life. Moving on. Dustin Grohwick wants to know, what are your favorite evolutionary anachronisms? You might be talking about structures, like holdovers, evolutionary holdovers that don't

have a use anymore. I mean, the hip bones, the tiny hip bones of modern whale are a great evolutionary anachronism because they really speak to the fact that special creation, if you believe that each species is created perfect for its particular niche on earth, why would modern whales have tiny hip bones unless there's something in their evolutionary past that points to the fact that they were once land animals. I've never known that. That makes me want to go look at whale skeletons now, like, oh, whales, you don't need that.

Yeah. Why are you carrying that around? Yeah, it's overpacking. So whales, quick aside, I have to, okay, we all know whales, they live in the sea, okay. Whales started in the sea and then they lived on land as freakish, hairy walking whales and then they slipped back into the sea like your drunk friend on spring break who disappears from playing cards against humanity to go sit in the hot tub and nurse a corona alone. So whales, you're in the sea, why do you have hip bones?

You don't need them. I looked it up and whale hips may not be a hiccup of some ancestral relic. So the explanation may in fact be much more as one National Geographic article puts it erotic. That's right, whales be thrust in. They need those hip bones for boners and because lady whales like sweet moves, maybe. And there's a lot of competition out there. So sexual selection, whale grinding, like two tractor trailer mack trucks made out of

wet blue leather, just slow boning it out. Got a love love. Celestia wants to know, are there any species that we can see current evolving happening in order to adapt to our modern world? Oh, viruses are constantly evolving to humans and the flu virus that's hitting us in one flu season is going to be, you know, yesterday's news next year, there's going to be a flu virus 2.0. And that's evolution that you can see over the course of generations, just a couple years

even. Another great example is antibiotic resistance. That's another scary one and sometimes people don't necessarily file that under evolution, but they should because it's a direct result of natural selection pressures that we are placing on bacteria through our overuse of antibiotics. The reason we're getting these superbugs is because of evolution. Do you ever worry about humans interference with evolution, particularly since you study birds?

Do you ever worry like, ugh, we're cutting down so many trees, what are we doing to the birds? Or do you feel like, well, evolution is evolution and that's another thing to adapt to. I guess I like to see evolution kind of proceeding through its natural course sort of unfettered to the extent possible by humans. But that's not to say, you know, we live here in Los Angeles and you can't turn a blind eye to the fact that we've got a big city here and it's not going anywhere. And so if you're going to be studying urban wildlife, you're going to be studying evolution

altered by humans. You know, I'm not against that either. I think there's a lot of interesting things that we can study about evolution in human altered landscapes. It's a good attitude to have that you're not because part of me, if I were an evolutionary biologist would spend some time under the couch crying about how we've messed up everything and we've got a better attitude than I do. Well, I mean, and it's probably because I've gone through all the stages, right?

I mean, I've been there where I've learned about all the amazing biodiversity on the Hawaiian islands that we've lost by introducing mosquitoes and all kinds of other things. And so I've kind of gone through the despair. Through the stages of grief. Yeah. Listen to the phanatology episode. That's right. You're coming through it.

That's right. You know, especially if you're teaching the next generation, you've got to be a little optimistic. Right. That's good. That's responsible of you. Pilot Stig wants to know, what do you say when some ass face rants, evolution is just a theory?

Well, yeah, evolution is just a theory. Well, you'd like to think that you approach that person by telling them and sort of informing them what a theory is in science, you know, it's an idea that's backed up by a lot of facts. Burn. Sick burn. Right. Just a reminder that the scientific method does not place theory in the bumbling beginnings

of an experiment. Rather, theory is the product of a tested hypothesis. So it goes roughly, you get a question, you come up with a hypothesis, experiment, analysis, finally, you come to the theory or a conclusion. So you can think of it like Queen Hildegard eats apple turnovers, question, hypothesis, experiment, analysis theory, something or you can, something filthier if you want. I don't know. I'm just trying to help you guys.

Just trying to help. Yes. The theory of evolution isn't just a harebrained theory. Honestly, I've never encountered that like face to face someone telling me evolution is just a theory. Oh, that's good. I've encountered other misconceptions of evolution like if we evolved from apes, why are there still apes?

Or if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? And actually in that case, I've found that kind of a question I think speaks more to people's just haven't been exposed to ideas. I've gotten that question earnestly from people. And I found that if you just sit down with a cocktail napkin and you sketch it out for them and you say, look, evolution is not linear. It proceeds through branching and we're related through ancestors. I found that that has changed some minds.

And some of my students have actually come back to tell me that they found that that changed minds too. Someone who's coming at you with evolution is just a theory. I found those people are usually just kind of more entrenched in ideologies and unlikely to change their minds. So they're trolls kind of, I imagine, I think it's a little troll. Don't feed the trolls. This is my own theory.

Tell me what you think about this. Okay. When I think about cars, I always get kind of caught up on the taxonomy of them because I do feel like make and model is very genus and species. And then over years, the same species can maybe evolve and maybe they all have certain common ancestors and maybe there's an evolution, divergent evolution. Do you think that we created our automotive system with kind of headlights in the front, evolution in the front, exhaust in the back, four wheels, quadruped to model animals at

all? Or does it just sound like I smoked much weed, which I don't? I think what it sounds like and what I think you've clued into there is the fact that in a lot of human created structures, we can see sort of a history of how they've been designed. And so, you know, evolution is not something that's just confined to the biological world. People use evolutionary theories to study language because there's all sorts of quirky ways that languages evolve through some of the same processes of selection and random

ways like drift. And we can reconstruct histories of how the things we see now are related to one another. You can do the same thing with shoes, with cars, with candy bars. And what it's saying is not so much about whether there's a designer behind it as there is with a car or the lack of a designer in the case of the biological world. What it's saying is things usually evolve through a history and through having ancestors. And anytime something goes through time like that, it sort of leaves a record of evidence of who shares a more recent common ancestor.

And so, you can see that in cars. You can see that in shoes. It's just in that case, humans are the designer. What need is ultimately the designer, right? I mean, it's based on how well it adapts to the environment. Like, I feel like Hummers kind of went extinct because the environment no longer had like cheap gas or that kind of ostentatious displays of wealth. But so, do you think about that ever about how things kind of work themselves out based

on what resources are available? Yeah. And this kind of gets into theories that sort of compare the marketplace to evolutionary ideas. I think there's something to be said for that and sometimes that's called evonomics. There's branches of economics that sort of focus on evolutionary ideas. I'm not an expert on those. But I think there is some credence to the idea that products sometimes they're selected

for or against and sometimes the ones that don't get selected die out. Now, sometimes the ones that are terrible products continued to be perpetuated on us. That's a very good point. I tried to look into this further and I found a website called Evonomics, which touts itself as the next evolution of economics. And I can't quite vouch for it because I clicked around and I found an article titled, is there anything that working less doesn't solve? But I only read the first few paragraphs because I had to get back to work because whale sex

facts don't research themselves. Speaking of work. Now, what is your least favorite thing about your job or a time in the field that was awful or something that you just is like, maybe not the highlight and then I'll ask you your favorite. Well, and on a good note, even the worst field experience is always better than answering emails and I'm sorry for those people. You know, I will get to your email sometime soon.

I promise, you know, the fact is, and this goes for a lot of jobs, but I think it's especially true of field biologists. We got into this job because we love to study animals in nature and I still get a lot of wonderful opportunities to do that. Don't get me wrong, but they never tell you that you end up spending, you know, a good 30% of your time sitting at your desk answering emails or filling out forms. And so, yeah, those are the worst aspects of my job. Not that I don't enjoy communicating with people, but boy, I'd rather be, you know,

talking over a beer than answering in an email. Right. Or having a stomach parasite in a jungle preferable to email. Yes. Absolutely. Now, what has been your favorite moment, say, out in the field on an expedition? Like, have you ever had a moment where it's just like... The moments when you can take people out to an incredible field site, people who are either

just getting excited about science and biology or birds, and you can take them to a place that you've been to that's just way out there and is just incredible. Those are the moments I live for. So we got a chance to do that recently when we went up into the mountains of Northern Baja. There's a mountain range called the Sierra San Pedro Martir. And it has basically been untouched by human habitation anyways in modern times. They're still cattle that they run up there, but nobody really lives up there. And you almost don't see any place like that in the United States.

So this is a place, people don't really realize this, but there's a huge number of California condors up there. And so we had the opportunity to go up there and just taking some of the expedition members and a student from Occidental College and giving them the opportunity to see this place and see these condors up close. I mean, it was it's spectacular. Oh, super quick. Condor is a type of vulture and it's inky, black and huge.

And it was on the brink of death, but it's being bred in captivity and released and it eats dead things and it doesn't have a song. It just grunts sometimes. And since I was in an ornithology lab, I had one more very important scientific question from someone who happens to be having a birthday this week. My friend, Dalen Rodriguez, has a question about condors. She wants to know, are they the most goth of all the birds? I don't know, because I think, I mean, they're pretty goth.

I mean, with that, with the shaved head, sort of the, you know, and especially a lot of vultures kind of have the, the grays and then the black hues to their feathers. Right. But, I mean, does it get more goth than a vampire finch? I suppose not. And that's one of the Darwin's finches. Their main food source, they fly and they, they peck the backs of these, these poor boobies, birds called boobies, until they draw blood and then they, they eat the blood.

So I don't know. Yeah, condors are goth, but hard to compete with the vampire finch. The only way to do it is have a dance-off. Someone's got to play Bauhaus. They've got to have a dance-off. All right. Well, you have a new goal in terms of evolutionary biology. Thank you for entertaining these questions.

Yeah, absolutely. To learn more about John McCormick's work, you can follow on Instagram at mlzbirds, which is the account for the more lab of zoology at Occidental College. You can follow me at alleyward with one on Instagram or Twitter and at oligies on Instagram. We're also on Twitter and to rock a sweet oligies shirt or a pin or a canvas tote, you can head to oligiesmerch.com. And thank you, Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis for all of your help with that.

Thanks as always to Stephen Ray Morris for piecing this together from an insanely highlighted transcript. And thank you, Aaron Talmert and Hannah Lipo for adminning the oligies podcast Facebook group, which is full of a bunch of really high quality, awesome people. Special thanks this week to oligite Alex Anderson and any listeners who wait in on gender and identity matters. Following last week's gynecology episode, I learned so much and I loved hearing what you all had to say and what your experiences were.

Alex was super cool and we jumped on the phone and chatted about it for a while. And I included a new intro at the very tippy top of that episode. In case you want to go back and listen, you might learn some more stuff. And thanks especially to all patrons who fund the podcast so I can pay Stephen and buy equipment and pay for hosting and buy memory cards and batteries and stupid stuff. That's also fun. You can join the Patreon party at patreon.com slash oligies and that also lets you know what episodes are coming up so you could submit questions to the

oligists and I try to ask them all. I sometimes don't get through all of them, but just keep asking. The theme music was written and performed by Nick Thorburn of the Bann Islands and there are always more links about the episode up at alleywar.com slash oligies. So if you want more research, just head there. And as always, you guys, I tell a secret at the end of the episode as a thanks for sticking through the credits and today's secret.

It's another snack secret. I was going through my laundry and at the bottom of my laundry, I found a purse. I haven't used in a while and I looked in it. There was one piece of like a chocolate coin, iconic a gout in my purse and I was like, oh, sweet. And there was some lint on some of it, but I peeled that off and I ate it. I ate it. So what?

It was in there. People have eaten a lot worse things and I thought, man, it's April now that had to be from Hanukkah. That must have been in December. And then I was like, oh, well, but then I realized, y'all, it was just from February when I went up to Portland. I just remembered that I got a chocolate cover coin up there from the dinner with Cole and Perry and Shannon felt as in body Dutch.

It was still in my purse and I was really proud of myself that the chocolate that I ate was only a month and a half old instead of mine. Instead of being three or four months old. But sometimes you find chocolate in your apartment. You got to eat it. So what? Still alive, guys. Still alive.

Not going anywhere quite yet. Anyway, um, bye bye. Yeah.