Science Friday - Pizza Science, Remembering E.O. Wilson And Richard Leakey. Jan 7 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

How A Former Microsoft Exec Mastered The Perfect Slice—Using Science Who doesn’t love pizza? It’s a magical combination of sauce, cheese, crust, and maybe even a topping or two. Depending on where you eat it, the ratio of sauce and cheese and toppings changes: Neapolitan, NY Style, and Chicago Deep Dish each have a slightly different recipe. And different methods of baking impart their signature flavor on the end result—whether that’s coal, wood, or gas-fired ovens. Nearly every country in the world has some type of variation on the classic. Author Nathan Myhrvold visited over 250 pizzerias all over the world to appreciate their differences. Then he made over 12,000 pizzas, using physics and chemistry to tweak each one slightly. Myhrvold and his co-author, chef Francisco Migoya wrote all about the gourmand experiment in a three-volume, 35-pound set of beautifully illustrated and painstakingly researched books. Ira talks with Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO at Microsoft, founder of Intellectual Ventures and Modernist Cuisine about his discoveries and his most recent book, Modernist Pizza. E.O. Wilson’s Indelible Mark On Ecology Ecologist and ant biologist Edward O. Wilson (often called E. O. Wilson) died December 26, at the age of 92. Though he was known for his study of ants and their social behavior, his impact extended much further—from sociobiology, the study of the influence of genetics on behavior, to the way science was taught and understood. His writing twice won the Pulitzer Prize. Wilson appeared on Science Friday many times. In this short remembrance of Wilson, Ira replays selections from past conversations with the scientist, recorded between 2006 and 2013.   The Fossil—And Family—Records Of Richard Leakey Paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey died on January 2 at the age of 77. The Kenyan conservationist and fossil hunter was the son of paleoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey, who helped redefine the early parts of the human family tree. Richard was part of the team that discovered ‘Turkana Boy,’ a Homo erectus skeleton—one of the most complete early hominin skeletons ever found. In later years, he was the director of the National Museum of Kenya, the head of the Kenya Wildlife Service, helped found a political party, and led the Kenyan Civil Service in the midst of an anti-corruption campaign. In this edited interview from 2011, Leakey describes his work in the field, his famous fossil-hunting lineage, and his desire to convince skeptics of the reality of human evolution.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. If you're like me, you've had enough rich foods for the holidays, and your attention has turned back to one of our most beloved foods, pizza. After all, who doesn't love pizza? That magical combination of sauce, cheese crust may be a topping or two. And depending on where you eat it, the ratio of sauce and cheese and topping changes also. There's Neapolitan, New York style, Chicago Deep Dish, and nearly every country in the world has some type of of variation on the classic. The way they bake it, two, coal, wood, gas-fired ovens, all impart their signature flavors. You know how I know this?

Because Nathan Mirvald visited over 250 pizzerias all over the world to appreciate the differences and then made over 12,000 pizzas, tweaking each one slightly, relying on the physics and chemistry of cooking. And then he and his team wanted to stretch the limits of pizza. And they wrote all about it in a three-volume 35-pound set of beautifully illustrated, painstakingly researched books. Nathan Mirvald is the former CTO at Microsoft, founder of intellectual ventures and modernist cuisine. He co-authored this most recent book, Modernist Pizza, with Chef Francisco Magoya.

He joins us now from Bellevue, Washington. Nice to have you back. Well, nice to be back. I'm just wondering how many anti-acid tablets it takes to go through 12,000 pizzas. A lot of the book is devoted to busting pizza myths. And one of the biggest ones is that the type of water used to make the dough makes a huge difference. How did you go about testing and possibly disproving that hypothesis? Well, there's sort of two approaches we took.

One was I call the reductionist approach. And we said, is there anything in the water that would affect the crust? And the most delicate part of the crust that people usually point to is the yeast. So we made bread and we made yeast concoctions from every kind of city water, from bottled water to distilled water. And finally, water from my swimming pool. Really? And it turns out the yeast doesn't care. The yeast really doesn't care.

Even the swimming pool water, it puffed up beautifully. Now, I don't recommend swimming pool water. It has a taste to it, and you should never use water to make dough that has a bad taste. You know, in some parts of the country where there's well water contaminated with hydrogen sulfide, the water can literally smell like rotten eggs. Well, I wouldn't use that. And in order to test out your recipes, you use something called the triangle test. You try three slices of pizza at a time. Two of them are the same and one is different.

Why does this method work so well? Well, it's very easy to fool yourself. Okay. This is the same reason that we do double-blind studies when they look at drug efficacy. So the idea is there's three slices of pizza. Two are from the identical pizza. One is different. So the first question is, can you tell which one?

different. Now, if it was a gross difference in cooking time or something, it might be kind of obvious. So it doesn't work as well then. But when you're making small changes, what we discover is lots of times people can't tell which one is different. And if you can't tell which one is different, I really don't care which one you think is best. Okay? Yeah, I get it. You know, you were talking about the water, and let's get into the chemistry of this a bit, because even though the type of water might not make a huge difference, the amount of water and the recipe does, doesn't it? Yeah, the amount of water is what a baker will call the hydration percentage. They talk about the percentage of water mass relative to flour mass. So if you make a pizza as low as 50% hydration,

that means you've got one part water to two parts flour. You get a really dry, hard, and kind of unappealing pizza. Yet there are some places in the country that use that country and world. Meanwhile, as you raise the amount of water, that changes the texture of the dough. You get large bubbles. You get just a very different feel to the crust. And so that is one of the important variables. The next one was probably fat.

What fat percentage do you put in? In Naples, they would say none. They put no oil or fat of any kind into their dough. We found that if you put a tiny amount, 1%, which is you're not going to notice by taste in a triangle test, But that 1% actually makes the crust significantly higher volume. It means it puffs up better. That's probably because it effectively lubricates the process of the bubbles forming.

Interesting. Interesting. How does the sauce keep the center of the pizza from rising? You spend quite a bit of time talking about that. This sort of shows our approach. You know, I was looking at a pizza that had just been served to me. It had a nice puffy rim. It was probably an inch, inch and a half high.

And then the center of the pizza, the crust was super thin. Now, I'd watch that pizza being made, and the dough was dead flat. There was no difference in the height of the dough between the center and the edge. So, well, okay, how could that be? So we talked to Pizzolos, that's the Italian term for a pizza chef. And the dominant theory were heard as well, it must be the weight of the sauce. We tested that by weighing our sauce and then putting the equal amount of sand on a pizza in place of the sauce. And it puffed right up.

Didn't stop it at all. So we put a piece of sheet metal there that was the same weight. We even put one that was several times the weight of the sauce, always pushed up. What we eventually realized is that it's a piece of. because sauce is wet. Now, we all know water boils at 212 degrees. And water soaks up a huge, huge amount of heat when it boils. That's why steam engines work. So when you put your pizza into an oven, which is typically 600 degrees Fahrenheit, 800 degrees Fahrenheit, extremely hot, you might say, oh, well, that's the temperature of the oven, but guess what? All that area covered by sauce,

as long as that sauce has got a drop of water in it, that area is going to be only 212 degrees. Ha, you know, that might explain something else, that when you try to separate the slices, sometimes the toppings come off and below is this white, may I say mushy dough? Is that the reason? You say that's called the gel layer? If you have a thin crust pizza, usually that gel layer is not objectionable. However, in a lot of thicker crust pizzas, you get a problem. New York City, if you order a what's called a Sicilian or a square pizza,

you get a pizza where they've used the same dough as their thin crust, in the same oven at the same temperature, because it's a bother to have two ovens. And the trouble is that then you get a very large layer of this goo in there, which is uncooked dough. And I think most people don't even realize it. But once you do realize it, you say, God, that's kind of unpleasant.

Isn't there a way you can cook the damn dough? The same thing happens in Chicago, which the deep dish pizzas, particularly the variation of deep dish called a stuffed pizza. So there they put a second layer of dough on top of your fillings. and then they put sauce on top of that. Well, the sauce on top guarantees that that layer basically never cooks all the way. And so you get this gooey stringy thing that I think most patrons believe is cheese,

but in fact it's uncooked dough. Wow. And how can you prevent that? If you still want your deep dish, what do you do? You parake the crust. So the crust of a deep dish pizza is not going to get done fully if you isn't exposed to the air in the oven, just straight up. So you can bake the pizza with just the crust in there. And generally you should put something else in to displace where the thing would be, something called pie weights.

So you put in a piece of aluminum foil or parchment in these pie weights. and you par bake it, which means you bake the crust most of the way, then you take it out and you can put all your fillings in and bake it the rest of the way. Or freeze it in that parake condition. It's very convenient. And it's funny because in Chicago, the idea that you would par bake a pizza crust is viewed as negative. And places will proudly tell you, or at least it told me,

we never barbake. I'd say, what the hell? Get out of here. Get out of my picture. Underbaked dough. No, I know you've developed several what you call frankencheeses, hybrids of mozzarella, other cheeses like blue cheese, parmesan, goat cheese. How did you make them melt better?

Because they don't like to melt that much. Well, this started when I was in a store that sold cheese curds. Sometimes you can buy the curds of cheese. cheese, which is a stage early in the cheese making process, is not totally finished. And the ones that I saw for sale were cheddar curds. And I'd learned how to make mozzarella. And part of mozzarella you make curds also.

So what if I just substitute the cheddar curds? Will it work? The answer was with some modification of the recipe, it would. With other cheeses like blue cheese, you have to use cheese after the curd process, because blue cheese is infected by mold, and that happens later in the process. And there, the problem is blue cheese, although it can taste good, some people say it's an acquired taste, but it's one I've acquired. Yeah, me too. It doesn't melt well.

So then you have to mix it in with another melting cheese, and it helps to add a little bit of something called an emulsification salt. Sodium citrate is one of those. And it's a perfectly natural ingredient. And it acts to help stabilize the emulsion. Remember, milk is an emulsion, cream is an emulsion. And when you turn that milk or cream into cheese and then melt it, the emotion generally breaks. And you get this separate layers of oil.

And then the cheese that's left is usually kind of hard and stringy and isn't that pleasant. Well, it turns out that adding this emulsification salt does wonders for it. Wow. It also helps if you're making a white pizza. There's a cell of it's called white where they use a sauce that's a cheese sauce. Well, again, if you melt that much cheese to make a cheese sauce, it would all separate and be kind of gross. So people make a what's called a bechamel sauce in French. there's an Italian equivalent,

it's got a lot of flour in it. And that flour helps bind the cheese so it does separate, but it also dulls the flavor of the cheese. So the cheese bechamel only tastes a little cheesy. Yeah. So we made one that has no flour and it tastes really cheesy.

Let's talk about the difference in baking pizzas in different kinds of ovens because sometimes you will see that they advertise outside the building. We have a coal-fired or a wood-fired oven, not just the gas-fired. Do they all bake up the same way? Or are there advantages to one over the other? Well, so I like to use the analogy

that a gas pizza oven is like a bicycle and a wood-burning oven is like a unicycle. A unicycle will get you where you want to go, like a bicycle will, but it requires a lot more skill. Now, in the U.S., if you see woodburning pizza, a woodburning oven for pizza, a lot of folks think, oh, well, they're using something hard. They must really care and they must be really good at it. And if they are good at it, it makes a great pizza. But a woodburning oven, even with an expert, doesn't make a better pizza than a gas oven. and if the person is not an expert, well, then you're much better off with gas or an electric pizza oven.

And this is total heresy, of course, to the people in Naples, but they're experts. And in Naples, being a Pizolo is a highly thought of job. In the United States, the person who's actually watching your pizza in the oven is probably getting minimum wage. And as a result, they really don't have the time and experience to put into this as a profession, and they may not be that good at it. They could be. Yeah. Yeah. But what about we folks at home who want to optimize our ovens to make a better pizza? What are your suggestions there? So the first thing is there's kinds of ovens that work perfectly well at home. Generally, those turn out to be the thicker crust pizzas.

As you get towards the, so the next level would be a New York style pizza. And in New York style pizza, you can make a reasonable facsimile at home. It helps a lot if you have something that will hold the heat and really cook to the bottom and the crust. The traditional thing is something called a pizza stone that you put into your oven.

The trouble is stone, doesn't release heat very quickly. And that's counterproductive in this. So we prefer to say it's all to pizza steel, which is like a quarter inch piece of aluminum or steel plate or a big cast iron skillet will work. Great. And you get those, the instructions in the book,

but you get those hot and then you put the dough down on it and it gives a very reasonable facsimile. There's also gotten to be some home pizza ovens that are on the market. Some are gas and really should be used outdoors. Some are electric and can be used indoors. And those will do a pretty good job. Nathan, I have to ask you a question that's like asking which child do you prefer. When you finished all your samplings and creating pizzas,

did this change your preference for the type of pizza you like or thought? thought you liked, or do you have one that has stayed through all the way? Well, yeah, I grew up in the United States, and my first pizza was a chain pizza from shakies in L.A. And chain pizzas, particularly in that era, were really based on a New York style. And so that's the piece I grew up on. But a lot of people in this world never move beyond the pizza that grew up on. Now, me, I say, hey, you should be adventurousome and you should try other pizzas because, like, I did not grow up on sushi, but it turns out I like it.

And so if I only focus what I grew up on, it's kind of limiting. You know, if you give a kid a glass of tonic water or a habier and a pepper, they'll think you poison them. Right. Yet adults learn to like things that are very spicy or bitter or otherwise challenging. Anyway, I have a much greater appreciation for styles of pizza. Some I didn't even know existed at the time. So I've broadened my pizza preferences.

There's still some pizzas I don't like because I think they have some cooking flaws in them, like the pizzas that have raw dough in the crust. I don't cut much slack for that. Yeah, yeah. Well, we could go on talking all day. We've run out of time, Nathan. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today. Well, thank you.

It's been a pleasure, and everybody go out and enjoy some great pizza. Absolutely. Nathan Mirvald, former CTO at Microsoft. He co-authored his most recent book, Modernist Pizza, with Chef Francisco Magogia. If you love pizza, this collection of, volumes is what you're going to want to have. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to look back on the life of biologist E.O. Wilson, who passed away this holiday season. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flito. Death did not take a holiday this holiday season.

The world of science lost several leading names, including ecologist Thomas Lovejoy, one of the fathers of the idea of biodiversity. He died on Christmas Day at the age of 80. His His work in conservation biology led to his founding of the Amazon Biodiversity Center, fighting for the preservation of species and habitats there. Our condolences to his friends and family. Also, Edward O. Wilson, you know him better just as E.O. Wilson, who was known for studying ants, but expanded his biological horizons to so much more. He visited with us many times on Science Friday over the years, like this time in 2013,

where he talked about his youth. I became like so many kids fascinated by insects when I was about nine years old. And I, you know, I was just saying, every kid has a bug period. I never grew out of mine, and thank heavens I didn't. I usually spend a lot of time alone. We traveled a lot. I was an only child. And very soon I had, with the opportunity to get into interesting wild places in the deep south primarily,

I had the opportunity to observe and actually hunt at different levels, from insects to butterflies, to snakes, to new kinds of flowers and so on. And it was just a continuous adventure for me. And that is how I developed as a scientist. I was so totally engaged in this, doing it at a more complex and maybe more sophisticated level. by the time I got to undergraduate studies that I never thought of ever doing anything else. That childhood interest in bugs

led to his iconic research into ant behavior. Ants are the premier predators of little arthropods. They are the premier soil turners around the world. They are the cemetery squads that remove most of small dead animals. and what most people don't realize about ants is how extraordinarily abundant they are. They make up, we know from just particularly one major count made in the Amazon, but this appears to be the case worldwide.

Over half, maybe as much as two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects, that's how dominant they are. Social life pays off once it's attained, and as a result, if we took away all the ants, then we'd all be in trouble. Understanding the sociology of ants led Wilson to consider where people fit in the Earth's ecosystem. What do you say to people who say, well, look, it's natural to, you know, for species, get wiped out all the time. The world has grown up over billions of years with species come, species go, animals die off, they don't die off. What's so different about this now?

Thank you for setting me up there. or at least setting up a very important point because this probably is a single most common objection I get in talking with people of all kinds and different professions and so on about conservation. They say, why I care about it? Don't worry evolution, if we believe in evolution, and always has replaced the lost diversity. And that is true. It's true that some 99% of species maybe more have disappeared. in the course of history of life on earth, but that covers, mind you, hundreds of millions of years.

And the figure that keep in mind is not that 99% figure, but it is the rate of turnover and the rate of extinction and the rate of birth of new species. And that is both of both those figures. Extinction and birth outside of the human, the period of human activity was by fossil evidence mainly, about one species, extinct per million species per year, being replaced by one species being born per million

species per year. That's a very slow turnover. Now, I think virtually all students who work on this whole issue of biodiversity and extinction rates and so on agree that most conservatively, that rate has increased due to our influence by order of 100 times and very likely a thousand times, and if not yet, only order of a thousand times soon to be there, with the potential of going faster and faster as we wipe out more and more entire ecosystems. So you can now put that in terms of your bank account in which there may be a very slow turnover. You've got a very low interest rate, but then you only make a rare withdrawal to replace

what you put in. Now increase your withdrawal a hundred or a thousand times, while a number. while reducing your income because we're reducing the birth rate of species by removing their cradles. When I took Ecology 101 in college in the 60s, the professor threw out one question. I have yet to actually answer myself. I'm going to ask you this question because I've never fully answered it. And he said, every animal, every plant, whatever, has a niche in the ecosystem and the environment. What is the human role in the environment?

What is our niche? It seems now to destroy everything else. What happened, Darry? I give you my perception of this, what I would have answered. Maybe I couldn't have answered it when you were in college, but I think I'd give a reasonable answer now. The human niche, the thing that our brains were built for, was to live primarily on the African-Savana,

as highly social primates, even more so than our closest cousins among the monkeys and apes. And to be vegetarian in part, but also more than other species closely related to us, including most of those monkeys and apes, to be turning to meat. We're beginning to get to be good predators. We're probably also scavengers. So we're likely dealing with, oh, 10% or more of our calories coming in that way. So that's our niche. Open terrain, scattered trees, copses, and so on.

And that's where we fitted in. And it was all we could do, those ancient hominids of which, you know, they're probably more than a few hundred thousand in a given time, maybe even less in periods of time. they fit in very well and they weren't really upsetting any of the balance of anything. But then somehow, somewhere, which is all a matter of dispute among the evolutionary biologists and the anthropologist. We began this runaway development of the cerebrum intelligence technology. And pretty soon, without losing our appetite, you know, for meat and for breeding and producing,

more of ourselves and the ability to turn a large part of the natural world that was not Savannah into Savannah, we call it farms and yards and lawns. Soon we are sweeping over the world and we're simply trying to make the whole world our niche. And that in a nutshell is the problem. We neglected almost all of those other species which have been keeping things in harmony in balance for us. And we're doing it in a way that we're taking away their services. We're taking away the many opportunities that understanding these species offer us. And we are generally messing up big time. Generally messing up big time. Some tough love. I asked Wilson about the sixth mass extinction we are in and what future generations have to look forward to. We've had five

before it that humanity had nothing to do with, which stretched out over the last 450 million years, roughly at intervals, although it's not periodic, of 100 million years. And each one of those has dropped biodiversity to a level that took somewhere between 5 and 10 million years for evolution to restore. We're not that far along yet, but we are definitely in the early stages of it. And you say that humanity must make a decision and make it now, right now. Conserve Earth's natural heritage or let future generations adjust to a biologically impoverished world. Yeah, one that I would propose to call the aremozoic. We're in the Cinozoic, you know, which followed now, which followed the Mesozoic, the age of reptiles or dinosaurs,

and the age of mammals sometimes called a Cinozoic, if we wipe out as many serious, projections have it, without abatement of the current human activities that are removing ecosystems and extinguishing species, if we continue to the end of the century, we could have lost or have right on the edge of losing about half of the known species of plants and animals. Wilson had done a lot of thinking, not only about ant societies, but about how we can understand ourselves. So you believe we're at a sort of a turning point then for our society and our evolution? Not necessarily. I think what we are is at a turning point in the sense of having one much better knowledge of where we came from. I think we need to be teaching that

and investigating it is just part of routine education. And second, what are we and why from that's history and from all we know of how our brain works and the like, what we are. And then we're going to be in a situation. Of course, we are at the turning point, and we are right on the edge of, we're in the early stage of technoscientific revolution, where we are becoming essentially a global community in constant and minute communication. That'll change the arena somewhat, but it's not going to change our human nature or our ability to deal with our problems without a lot of calculation and without a lot of background knowledge. But your research and your ideas are saying that if we want to stay a successful large

community, we have to think altruistically, all of us together. That's correct. And that's what your research with ants and your research with people has shown that if we evolve toward altruism, we'll stay successful. That means we have to get all the different parts of the world working. If there is truly, you know, we're now through social communities combining a lot of different various parts of the world into a larger colony, bigger nest. Oh, don't use that metaphor. Nest is wrong.

I know what you mean, but we don't want to become ants, surely. We want to be as fractious and quarrelsome and uncertain and dithering from now on. but we just want to do it with more wisdom and making better decisions. But basically, again, as I say, I think the time has come to put together and to put as part of education what a host of scientists ranging in their separate interests all the way from molecular genetics through to the social sciences, actually, to take what they have. putting together with increasing clarity and make that basic to our understanding of ourselves. We're not teaching anything like that now, even teaching it with critiques.

So I hope to see that change, and I hope soon. If you're just joining us, we're revisiting some of our conversations with the late biologist E.O. Wilson, who died December 26th. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Because Wilson is so revered as a scientist, I talked with him about what it takes to be a good one. A passion, commitment to a subject, excitement over adventure, an entrepreneurial spirit. All these are more important than a very high IQ. And you say there that the mensa-level people really don't make good scientists.

Well, I realize this is one of the statements that has not proved controversial. Even my slight downplay of advanced mathematical fluency has not proved controversial. I've gotten a large number of responses on that and almost, well, they're overwhelmingly favorable. But the one on Max, I call it optimum brightness. I present it as just a conjecture. But I got it from the principle that I grew. gradually evolved, knowing a lot of very successful scientists, and from my own experience, the following principle. The ideal scientist is bright enough to see what needs to be done,

but not so bright. He gets bored doing it. And I've discovered as time goes on, that some of the most successful scientists in America, the most innovative, have IQs in the low 120s. And this began, this got me to start

thinking about what happens to all these folks up in the 160, 170 IQ range

that we hear about. So the Grenjecture says, well, it's too easy for them. And then

that brings me to the illusion you made to scientists or that I've made, the ideal

scientists thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper. It's the poetic aspects of science that seldom gets talked about. But I've always felt that scientists fantasize and dream and bring up metaphor and fantastic images as much as any poet, anyone in the creative scientists, art, the creative art.

And the difference is that at some point, the scientists have to relate the dreams to the real world, and that's when you enter the bookkeeper's period. Unfortunately, it's a bookkeeper period, which leads sometimes to months or years of hard work that too many prospective scientists and students interested in science see rather than the creative period. Yeah, yeah. You do mention in part of your book about the part of creativity is to do sort of the back of the napkin sort of experiment.

You just have an idea. You're not going to even make notes about it. You're not going to keep track of it. You're just going to try something. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, Ira. I didn't use the expression, but I'm in it. And that's the value of dirty experiments. The image doing good science, that is the popular, the public image, is the scientists conducting careful experiment after careful experiment, taking abundant notes, time of day, every condition used in making an advance into a subject.

But the best way to do it is to make discoveries is to make short, imperfect experiments, Don't worry about taking notes in most cases, but just try things out. Shove nature around a little bit. Disturb an organism, disturb a small system, and find out to see if anything happens. And if it does, you might be on the edge of an important breakthrough, and then you sit down and devise experiments and take notes. Those thoughts from the late E.O. Wilson, biologist and Pulitzer Prize author who died December 26th, at the age of 92. Condolences to friends and family.

Dr. Wilson allowed us to visit his office and take a special tour of his desk. Yes, it's up on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash Wilson, recorded back in 2012. When we come back, another life remembered, the late paleontologist Richard Leakey. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. This week, Kenyan paleoanthropologist and conservationist Richard Lleke, Leakey died at the age of 77. He was the son of iconic paleontologists Mary and Lewis. Rather than just reading an obituary, I wanted to let Dr. Leakey describe some of his life and work for himself. This is from an interview with Science Friday from 2011. If you're ever even remotely interested in anthropology and human origins, chances are you've

heard about the name Leakey, a dynasty of fossil hunters in East Africa, of whom my next guest is a member. His father and his mother, Louis and Mary Leakey, contributed volumes to our understanding of human evolution with the fossils they uncovered at the Olduvai Gorge, along with Mary Leakey's later discovery of a long trail of footprints left by a bipedal hominids three and a half million years ago in Tanzania. My next guest added to the human family tree with many finds of his own, including the nearly complete skeleton of Turcana Boy, a homo erectus youth. He also has served as the head of the Kenya Wildlife Service in his time there, sparing many elephants and rhinos from being poached for their ivory. And he spent a fair amount of time in Kenyan

politics, too. So he's sort of led three different lives. And he's here with us to talk about it. Richard Leakey is founder of the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya, where he lives. He's a professor at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York. And he's here in our New York studios. It's my pleasure to welcome you to Science Friday. Thank you very much. Thank you for being here. What does it mean to be Aliki? It's a difficult question to answer. I think there's an awful lot of privilege associated with it, but like anyone who is known, it carries a certain weight with it. And one has to be careful what one says and where one goes and what one does once you get that sort of notoriety. But it does carry a lot of privilege, and it's great fun, particularly earlier on in life, to be recognized.

I'll bet. Tell us what it's like to be out there. there. One of the things we try to ask scientists is to describe for our audience, what's it like to do what they do? What's it like to be out there looking for fossils? Well, I think, like in any branch of science, much of what you do is drudgery. Much of it isn't exciting. Much of it is based on one's own conviction that with time you're going to get the answer that you're looking for. And so they're not really very very. many days when you feel you're wasting your time, you just feel frustrated that you haven't got what you're looking for.

Many of the fossils that I have been associated with finding, been found in very remote parts of Kenya, very desolate, hot, dry desert areas. I've built up a personal love for the desert and fascination, but looking for human fossils is only part of the story. They're usually part of an extinct fauna when there were fossils. of other creatures that lived in the same environments. It's really like visiting a new zoo every day you go out. You find things that you haven't seen before.

You're intellectually peaked practically throughout the day. And so there's nothing in a day that doesn't give you some form of satisfaction, even though it may be tough. But it's an enormously privileged activity to go out and look for things that if you find them may change the course of understanding of humanity. It must be, you say it gives you satisfaction, but it must be incredibly frustrating knowing it could take you years. Took your father decades to find what he was looking for, and then your mom found it. Well, I think frustration is the wrong word.

I mean, I think I have been very fortunate in my career in that when I went up to Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, it turned out to be there were so many fossils that one really had very little of the difficulties that my parents experienced. 40 years later, they're far fewer fossils to be found because they've largely been collected. But there are very specific questions. And over the last five years, my wife, me and daughter have been focusing on very specific things they're looking for. And they've zeroed into particular time bands represented in the geology. And they have spent days and days looking specifically for fossils in a particular time zone. They have been rewarded.

They have found them. But that is a much more diligent task than simply the expiration that I was privileged to have fun doing. And what are they looking for at this moment? Well, the last few years they've been looking for the origin of Homo and trying to find out what more complete specimens would have looked like that relate to the homo habilis story that my parents worked on at Aldevi. and maybe look into the whole question of the ancestry of Homo and whether Homo habilis, which comes before Homo erectus, really is distinctive from some of the things that have been called Homo habilis, whether or not. It all gets very technical, but one of the problems with paleoanthropology is that although there's a remarkable story, much of the story is still represented by frustratingly fragmentary evidence. and so more has to be found to tie up a few loose ends, but it's so much further along than it used to be even 20 years ago.

So when you find a fossil, what do you see in these old bones that can tell you whether or not something was our ancestor? Well, I guess it's harder today in America where you use paper cups and paper plates, but if you think of your grandparents' cutlery and crockery, crockery. If you break up a series of plates of different kinds and different sources and you mix up with the dirt and you've studied plates and crockery, when you pick something up, you can say, ah, this is the edge of a plate that was probably used for soup and this is a plate that was probably used for dessert and this was a piece of a plate that was probably a serving plate just from

its shape, thickness and design. If you're familiar with anatomy and you're familiar with, you're familiar with the anatomy of fossils that have been found previously, it's relatively easy to categorize what you're finding quite quickly into a broad set of characters. Then clearly, you have the problems if you haven't found enough of the specimen, what it actually compares to, but you can look on the specimen and see if it's got any evidence of being recently broken. You then determine whether to excavate, whether to screen the area, and you can gradually build up a picture. It's like when we found the Turkana boy, I didn't find it, but Kamoya, one of my assistants, discovered a little piece of skull, and it was clearly a little piece of a homonid skull,

but whether it was going to lead to anything, I didn't know. But in these cases, you always look further, and within a few days we had found enough of the skull to know that the front of the skull was represented with a fragment, the back of the skull was represented with the fragment, and so presumably the middle of the skull was too. So we had to then start a much more extensive excavation, and we started to find bits of ribs. Well, skull and ribs mean there's probably something connecting them, and it was then we found that we had an almost complete skeleton,

but that took three months to uncover. Yeah. Are you down there with a little toothbrush and a pick? I was then, yes. It was enormously exciting because every day, practically, for the first six weeks, we were finding things that had never been seen before by modern humans, and we were the first to see them and realized that we had things in our hands that were going to answer questions that people have been worrying about for years.

So then you must keep these very secret when you find these spots, I would imagine. You don't want somebody else coming by saying. No, no, no, no, no, no, one doesn't suffer from that. It's no problem at all. No, no. No, no. People can work anyway in Kenya if they get the right permits. But if you've got you there all day, you're eager to go back the next day to keep digging up something.

Well, these are pretty remote areas. I mean, the worry is sometimes when you preserve a bone with a preservative. In the night, a hyena will come along and like the taste of the glue and chew it. You hate it when that happens. Well, worse than hate, yes. Much worse than hate. Does it happen often? We never lost a human fossil, but we've lost some wonderful other creatures, fossils,

that have been left overnight to dry from the hardener. And in the morning, there's just been a crumpled wreck when a hyena has chewed on it to get what it thought might be good tasting. after three million years it chews up a skeleton. Yeah, you've exposed it for him and he's taken it away. Very irritating. Talking with Richard Leakey,

I know that you've had a few scientific feuds in your life, and notably with Donald Johantson over the discovery, who discovered Lucy, you don't think Lucy was an ancestor. Would I be summing that up correctly? You don't think that Lucy was ancestral to Homo?

Well, we had a big sort of discussion, to put it in. Frank exchange of views as the same one. Yes, back in the mid-70s. And I felt then that the story was probably a little more complex than was being presented. I confess that I was largely acting on hunch. We had a few fossils, but they were not particularly convincing. And we disagreed and chose to disagree over what this represented. But I think over the last 25, 30 years, so much more material has come in that the picture is much clearer. It's perhaps fortunate that over the last 30 years, I have been focusing more on conservation and more on politics,

and I haven't kept abreast of some of the discoveries. But certainly at three million years, there is more than one candidate for homo ancestry, and I think that's probably the best way to leave it at the moment. Yeah, you know, a lot of people who are creationists and do not believe in human evolution, they'd like to say that, oh, no human is descended from a monkey or an ape or a chimpanzee. And that's exactly correct, isn't it?

It's not that we were descendants from them, but there's a common ancestry. Well, indeed. And I think if we were very fair, which humans aren't, and one did, had the classification of primates done by a non-primate, there would be six great apes, not five. because we are just an ape. We just happen to be a more intelligent one and did the classification ourselves. And I think this added to the whole idea

that God created us in his image makes changing our image very difficult for people intellectually. And I think that's really what it's about. And I'm quite sure had Charles Darwin not suggested that we too had evolved, evolution would have been perfectly acceptable to everybody. But it wasn't thus and all the evidence today, and there's abundant evidence and very clear evidence, is that we have evolved. And if you go back far enough, our ancestors don't look anything like we do today.

But people didn't like the idea that the world wasn't the center of the universe. People didn't like the idea that the world wasn't flat. Given time and evidence, people learn to accept these things if they're true. And I think there's no question of the truth of human evolution. at all. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. You're listening to an interview from 2011 with the late paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, who died this week at the age of 77. Let's go to Anne and Adrian Michigan. Hi, Ann. Hey, Ira. How are you? Hey there. Good. I just want to say hello to Richard. Richard, it's Anne C. Sherman. Hi, Anne, how are you? You used to work with my mother,

and you worked with me, and you were there when Takarna Boy was found. That's right. And I also worked for years with Mary, of course. Indeed. Well, nice to hear from you. See, we bring people together on this. Thank you, Ira. Send me a note. What's that? Send me a note so I know where you are.

And I want to embarrass Richard. And I want you to tell me a really good story about him that no one knows. Well, let's see. According to his mother, I saved his life once. I was studying to become a nurse at the time and was working and visiting Turkana. He was very, very ill. and couldn't keep anything down. And I had some codeine tablets,

and I gave him a couple of those, and before too long, you were feeling better, weren't you? Well, I didn't know you. My mother told you. I told you that she saved my life, and I'm forever grateful, and you know that. She said, I'll never complain again. But maybe we should leave storytelling there.

All right. Well, thank you, I. Thank you, thanks for calling. We never know who's going to call in on this show. Well, that's a pleasure. Tell us a little bit of your change of career, why you left the fossil hunting business, if I call it a business and went on to other things. Well, I was running a museum, a natural history museum. Fossil hunting was a part-time activity. The museum had grown into a bit of a bureaucracy.

I had about 600 staff. I was tending meeting after meeting with government of shores, spending half my life raising money for things that were perhaps important, but didn't seem that important at the time in this. the sort of run of important things in Kenya, and I was probably a little bored, and I thought it would be more fun to look for something else to do, and the president of Kenya offered me the chance to create a new wildlife organization and take over the management of wildlife conservation in Kenya, which at the time was in very bad shape, and I thought that would be a good challenge, and so I took it on. And how long did you do that for? I did that for an initial four and a half years, and then I fell out with the government and the president over matters concerning corruption and the unwillingness to help me deal with corruption that was affecting what I was doing.

And so I decided to go into opposition politics and fight corruption, and I formed a new political party in opposition to the government, ended up in parliament, and got reasonably bored with that after a while. We have a scientist who we follow, who started as science and went into Congress, and he said the difference between science and Congress is that in science, facts mean everything and illusion being nothing and in politics is just the opposite. I think that's very fair. And then I went from that to head the Kenya government civil service and secretary of the cabinet. And there it's a good cross between science and politics. And you're very selective of what you want to believe and what you don't.

and facts don't play that much value in your judgments. Do you find more scientists in politics over there in Kenya? Very few. But there are very few scientists in Africa. Science education has been sadly neglected for far too long. Is that your next mission to help science education? Yes, it is. And that's why I have this strong association with Stony Brook

and why we develop the Takana Basin Institute through Stony Brook to try and develop the opportunities for science education, particularly in paleoanthropology and geology and related science. In the few minutes we have left, I want to give you my blank check question I give to scientists sometimes, and they start drooling early when I mention that, and that is, if you had all the money in the world and all the resources, what would you do? What question would you like to answer, and how would you go about spending that money to find it? Well, funnily enough, I think this conversation has pointed to an area that I think is now absolutely critical. I think for a long time, we in paleoanthropology have tried to persuade people of our evolution,

and we've started at the wrong end. We've been looking for the oldest fossils, which are least like us, and people have had an easy time discounting them and say, no, that's an ape. I think we need to turn it around and start with us and look at the genetic story, look now at the language story, and then look at the fossil story. And you will find fossils at 30, 40,000 years that are identical to the skeletons of the two of us sitting here and everybody listening to us. You then go back in time, and I think if we'd start, started that way at the beginning, we would have got a lot further with dealing with acceptance

of human evolution. I personally believe that if we could accept human evolution and evolution, science would be much more acceptable. And I think the only way out of the mess this species is in today is for science to get greater currency value in the world. And I think a lot of biological natural science has been discounted because of the fear of evolution. evolution is nothing to be afraid of.

And if we could get a lot of money and a lot of attention and look at the last 100,000 years, which I think we can do now, I think we could clear this up once and for all, and it's late, but there's still time. Dr. Richard Leakey, paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician who died January 2nd at the age of 77

are condolences to his friends and loved ones. And that's about all the time we have for today. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.