Ologies with Alie Ward - Smologies #19: EVOLUTION with John McCormack

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

Another G-rated edit of a classic! This Smologies with Dr. John McCormack of Occidental College is all about evolution, Darwinism, birds, bacteria, natural selection and how our mutations can be our greatest strengths. Also: breaking down terms like genetic drift and Linnaean taxonomy and why Charles Darwin had to face haters under his own roof. (For the adult version, the full-length episode is linked below.)Follow John McCormack on Twitter or the Moore Lab of Zoology on InstagramFull length (not classroom-friendly) episode + tons of science links hereA donation went to: BirdNet.orgMore Smologies episodes! Other full-length episodes you may enjoy: Condorology (CONDORS), Primatology (MONKEYS & APES), Gorillaology (GORILLAS), Ornithology (BIRDS)Sponsors of OlogiesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray Morris, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaMade possible by work from Noel Dilworth, Susan Hale, Kelly R. Dwyer, Emily White, & Erin TalbertSmologies theme song by Harold Malcolm

Oh, hi. It's your friend's dad who bakes grape bread, alleyward. Hey, how did you get here? Why don't we have flippers? It's a fly, my cousin. What is life? Welcome to evolutionary biology. Also, welcome to Smologies. Smologies are episodes we put out every few weeks. They have been carved out of longer, full-length episodes to be kid-friendly and much shorter. But for the full version with adult language and facts, you can check the link in the show notes. Also, thank you to everyone at patreon.com slash allergies for supporting the show. You can join for a dollar a month and leave questions for experts. And thank you to everyone leaving reviews, which keep the show up in the charts. And I read every single one,

like this small one this week from Ganga53 who wrote soothing, inspiring, uplifting, optimism, inducing, fascinating, allergies is good for your humanity. Oh, Ganga53, that review was good for my day. I needed that. Thank you. Okay, onward. So evolutionary biology, how living things morphed into what they are now? And in this episode, you're going to pick up some sweet, sweet definitions like taxonomy and genetic drift, plus finch gossip, all about how Charles Darwin had a really wonderful but difficult but wonderful life that involved probably a lot of bad toilet experiences and what posters and news headlines get so wrong about how things evolve. So please enjoy this chat with an ornithologist from

Occidental College in Los Angeles. We essentially boil down that our mutations are our strengths and adaptability is a virtue with evolutionary biologist, John McCormick. So are you an by trade? Are you an evolutionary biologist? Yes. That's kind of where a couple 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 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 specimen collection, just naming the basic units of biodiversity. Do you remember as a kid in class

learning that, what was it, King Philip? 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, how did you memorize that? 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 comma so, which is weird. Who ends, 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. 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 Linnaean taxonomy. Even though Swedish ecologist Carl Linnaeus, he didn't really invent it. Someone else did, it was kind of already established. And so 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? Like 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 principal principally an astronomer, cosmologist. And but it was some of his books that that delve 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. And it was really there for the first time that I learned just kind of the 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 can take gene frequencies and populations. What's an example of genetic drift? How do you describe that at a cocktail party to someone who's? Well, I guess I'd point to the M&M Bowl and I'd say take a small handful of M&Ms and you end up with

three green ones instead of the full, you know, 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. And 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. 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 is 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. 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 and 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 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 marvel at. 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 jump to answering some of the broader questions. Because you know the characters in the story. Exactly, right. Do you ever look at yourself or people in your life and say,

way to go, Jayman, 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, 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. It's a matter of trial and error. All those species, millions and millions of species that are crawling around on 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 because 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. Let's debunk some flimflam. What is a myth about evolution that you feel like people hang onto other than just creationism? Right. So 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. And 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. 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, scrolled above it, which I think is

super adorable and very humble. 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 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. For more on this, you can see the recent gorilla ology episode or the classic primatology episodes. Although as of yet, we don't have those in kid-friendly smologies forms, but there are bleeped episodes and transcripts on our website at alleywar.com slash ologies extras, which will be linked in the show notes. And for every episode, we donate to a related cause. And this week, we will send it to a cause that John has supported in the past, the Ornithological Council, which supports bird science and the people who do it. So

learn more at birdnet.org. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show. Okay. And now questions from y'all. You can submit questions by becoming a patron for only 25 cents an episode at patreon.com slash ologies. So questions from y'all. 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. 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 species evolved because it wanted this. 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. Let's try to reach that pinnacle of evolution. 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. You know, 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. 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 moving on. Dustin Grohwick wants to know, what are your favorite evolutionary anachronisms? You might be talking about like 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. Yes. Like, oh, whales, you don't need that. Yeah. Why are you carrying that around? It's overpacking. Celestia wants to know, are there any species that we can see current evolving happening in order to adapt to our modern world? Viruses. Viruses are constantly evolving to humans and the flu virus that's hitting us in one flu season is going to be 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. 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 side, 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. There's 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. This is a place... People don't really realize this, but there's a huge number of California condors up there. 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. 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 and captivity and released and it eats dead things and it doesn't have a song, it just grunts sometimes. Since I was in an ornithology lab, I had one more very important scientific question. My friend, Dalyn 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 the shaved head. Yeah. 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 1-0 on Instagram or Twitter and atologies on Instagram. We're also on Twitter. Also, just to heads up, since we recorded this, we also did a whole condorology episode and I'll link that in the show notes. It's so good. So ask smart people simple questions because it's really the fastest way to fill up your brain and it's free. So to learn more about John McCormick, 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 1-0 on Instagram or Twitter or

allergies on Instagram. We're also on Twitter. I recently started posting more on TikTok at alley underscore allergies. John is also on Twitter at LA Evolving and I'll link those in the show notes. And for more Smologies episodes, you can head to alleyward.com slash Smologies, which is linked in the show notes alongside a bunch of folks who help make the show possible. We try to make this small, so we'll link them in the show notes. But big thanks to Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio and Jared Sleeper for turning this into a Smologies episode from the full length one. And if you stick around until the end of the episode, I give you a piece of advice. And this one is that arranging your clothes and rainbow order in your closet on hangers,

it makes hanging them up more fun and it looks nice when you're done. And I have hung mine like that for years because it makes laundry feel like a puzzle or a game. Okay, that's enough out of me. Until next time, Smologites, for bye. You love the Beatles.