Something You Should Know - The Benefits of Being Delusional & Our Evolution Challenges-SYSK Choice

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know. Ever been driving your car with the back window rolled down and you hear that horrible thumping noise? I'll tell you what that's all about. Then we're all delusional, at least a little, and it's a good thing. For instance, overconfidence is a delusion. If you are moderately overconfident, not too much, in some of these competitive situations, like a job interview, the somewhat overconfident person is given more status. Even when it turns out they're not as smart as they think they are. Also, a neat little trick to get your silverware to look like new.

Starting point is 00:01:08 And the flaws in human evolution. Those flaws cause a lot of problems like back pain, poor eyesight, and other trouble. There's this crazy thing going on where sperm counts in Western populations are just declining precipitously, cut in half in the last generation, and there's no sign of it slowing down. All this today on Something You Should Know. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert, as trains can pass at any time on the tracks.

Starting point is 00:01:44 Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. Something you should know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hello, welcome to Something You Should Know. This just happened to my son and I the other day when we were in the car and he was in the back seat. And I imagine it's happened to you as well, where you open one of the back windows while

Starting point is 00:02:26 the car is going relatively quickly, and you get that deafening, like thumping sound in your eardrums. What is it? Well, it's commonly known as wind buffeting. It's an aerodynamic effect on incoming air clashing with the normal airflow of the car. It's worse in the back because the air has nowhere to go. With the front windows, the air has a little more room to circulate. The effect is actually worse now in newer cars because newer cars are more aerodynamically efficient. Interestingly, a lot of people think it's just their car. And while some vehicle designs are worse than others, almost all cars have a wind buffeting threshold. And what is the solution to get rid of it? Well, you either have to just roll the window back up, or if you open another

Starting point is 00:03:21 window in the car, that way the pressure inside the vehicle stabilizes and the buffeting stops or at least minimizes. And that is something you should know. You are delusional. And while you might take offense to that statement, it's actually a good thing. You'd have a very hard time getting through your life or even getting through the day without deluding yourself about yourself and the world you live in. But wait a minute, you might be saying, when I think of someone who's delusional, it's someone who is not in touch with reality. And I am in touch with reality, so how can I be delusional? Well, listen to my guest, Stuart Vise. Stuart is a behavioral scientist, teacher, and writer who's written a lot about

Starting point is 00:04:12 superstition, and his latest book is called The Uses of Delusion, Why It's Not Always Rational to be Rational. Hi, Stuart, welcome. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me on. Sure. So let's start with an example of what you mean by how we delude ourselves. Well, I would consider something like being overconfident, having a overly positive view of yourself or, for example, of your spouse or life partner. Those are things that I would consider simple delusions. And some of those have very, very beneficial effects for us in our lives. Are most delusions, do you think, based on how you've defined it, are most delusions that we have about ourself? Many of them are.

Starting point is 00:05:04 Many of the ones, the important ones that I think do help us are self-delusions. They're directed at how we see ourselves. But also, we need to have certain delusions about other people in order to function well. For example, the idea that your spouse is going to be the same person that you met and that you understood them to be at the beginning, for the most part, that is an important thing that we can count on it being consistent and their personality being consistent. However, there is considerable evidence, and this may come as a surprise, but there's considerable evidence that under the right circumstances, people's personalities change drastically. But no one would enter into a relationship and get married unless

Starting point is 00:05:57 they believed in the consistency of that person's personality. Well, what about people who just believe things? Well, like flat earthers, there are people who believe the earth is flat. I think they have an organization. Is believing the earth is flat a delusion or not? Well, I mean, you could consider it a delusion or just a false belief. Those kinds of beliefs are ones that I would suggest are probably not useful. It's interesting that the flat earth people don't seem to suffer too much from it. I mean, they obviously get some ridicule from people who have a more accurate view of the world. But I wouldn't put that in the category of a delusion that has positive benefits for us. It may for them, as individuals, you know, as within a social group, they may get some

Starting point is 00:06:54 support that they wouldn't otherwise get. But it's not a general delusion that I would think would be useful for everyone. But the kinds of things I'm talking about are much more basic. For example, one of the things I am concerned with is how people deal with death, you know, the death of a loved one. Some people feel, at least for a period of time, that the person is going to come back, that they're not really gone and somehow they're going to come back. You know, Joan Didion wrote an entire book called The Year of Magical Thinking in which she had that same sense of that her husband was going to come back. And, you know, not everyone would react that way. Death is a very personal thing and people react to it quite differently, but there doesn't seem to be any harm in that

Starting point is 00:07:45 belief for her and for those people who need it. So it's a delusion and it's serving that individual for a period of time at least. And it is not something that really is going to make you inaccurate in your daily life in the way that many other beliefs that people have are, like believing that vaccines are not effective. That's not a delusion that I think we should encourage at all. So take the delusion of being overly confident in yourself. Do you come to that belief, that delusion by choice? Or in other words, do you say, you know, confident people do better in the world, so I choose now to be overly

Starting point is 00:08:33 confident in myself, and I'm going to believe that from now on? Or does it creep in some other way? Let me say, that's the big question. You've hit on one of the issues that how do you become a confident or overconfident person? And that's something that I think we have less control over. I don't think it's something you can just sort of fake it until you make it. There are overconfident people and there are people who are always going to be more timid and less confident. But the reality is, is that if you are moderately overconfident, obviously, this is one of those things that can go too far. But if you are moderately overconfident, you do well in a number of situations, competitive situations, work situations, also in some dating situations, people who are overconfident are seen to be

Starting point is 00:09:28 attractive. And so, if you are moderately overconfident, not too much, it is true that if you're too overconfident and sort of brash, then people don't like you very much. But in some of these competitive situations, like a job interview or a group work setting, the somewhat overconfident person is given more status, even when it turns out that they're not as smart as they think they are. But your sense is, or from your research into this, you can't choose a delusion and embrace it and live it. It can't just be a conscious choice to now believe that I'm better looking than I am, or that I have more hair than I do, or, you know, just, you can't just decide to delude yourself, or can you?

Starting point is 00:10:21 No, I think in most of these cases, you either are going to have this delusion or not. So I don't think that in most cases, these are things that you can choose. You're right about that, that the way you respond to illness or to the death of a loved one, those are going to be baked in by the time those things happen, and you're either going to respond that way or not. But the point of my research is to just recognize that there are some things that don't seem rational, right? I've spent much of my career trying to get people to be more rational. And what I discovered was that, well, you know, there are a couple of times when doing the rational thing really isn't best. And what I discovered was that, well, you know, there are a couple of times

Starting point is 00:11:05 when doing the rational thing really isn't best. And I kind of felt like I had to acknowledge that with a bit of humility that although reason is the way to go in most circumstances, there are these examples where people do things that are unreasonable, and yet they're definitely better for them than the other choice. Like believing in Santa Claus, perhaps. Well, believing in things unseen is one of the things that does benefit people. Not everyone is going to believe, right, in a religion or in superstition, which I've spent a lot of time studying as well. But the result of those beliefs is often positive. A person who engages in a superstition prior to something that is tense, a big job interview, a sports performance, that person is going to, at least in the moment,

Starting point is 00:12:06 is going to feel better. It will help them deal with the tension of that moment. Whether it helps them in their performance in the job interview is a little bit more controversial. The evidence is not as strong, but clearly they feel better in the moment as they engage in that superstition. And there's good evidence that religious belief, or at least religious practice, makes people happier, makes them better in terms of their giving to charity, even non-religious charities. So there are benefits to religious belief. But again, you know, whether you end up being religious or not or superstitious or not, it's typically factored in earlier by earlier experiences. Well, the superstition thing really fascinates me because I don't think there's a person on the planet who hasn't invoked some superstition to try to achieve something, to get a job or to win the race. You know, if I do this, then that'll help me achieve it.

Starting point is 00:13:14 And yet, if you really press them on it, they'll tell you they don't really believe that it helps, but they still do it anyway. Right. Yeah, no, that's a very good, you've hit on an interesting, one of the more interesting things about superstition is that people are often of two minds about it and that they can rationally say, this is silly, this is not going to affect whether I do well in the job interview or in the soccer game, but I feel better if I do it. And if I don't do it, especially if it's a learned superstition that you've acquired

Starting point is 00:13:51 through your family or through some other social means that you've grown up always with a lucky charm or some other kind of superstition that you've adopted, you're going to feel better if you do it, even though on some level you may recognize that it's silly. There is no real magic that will make you perform better. It's just going to happen based on your abilities. But as much as I might want to encourage people not to be superstitious and to be rational, I can't honestly say there's a harm in most cases. And there's good evidence that it does make people feel better. So I just wanted to acknowledge that. We're talking about, well, we're talking about just how delusional we all really are.

Starting point is 00:14:46 My guest is Stuart Vise, who is a behavioral scientist and author of the book, The Uses of Delusion, Why It's Not Always Rational to Be Rational. From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances.

Starting point is 00:15:09 Shop now, in-store, or online at bestbuy.ca. Exclusions apply. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine and snacks and free fast streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit FlyPorter.com and actually enjoy economy. So, Stuart, as you were saying, it is so universal that people are superstitious to some degree that you would think it's human nature.

Starting point is 00:16:03 But as I said, and as you have confirmed, people know that superstitions probably don't really do anything. And yet we do them anyway. I wonder why. As you point out, it is human nature. There's no question about it that we want to control our environment. It has been true from the beginning of time that the world is a scary place. It's an uncertain place, and we need whatever we can to eke out a little bit more control and to be able to predict what is going to happen in the future. And so that's where superstition comes from. Large groups of people, many of them very well educated and smart people, engage in superstitions on a regular basis. And it's simply because it gives you that illusion that you have eked out some more control, that that thing you're hoping for will actually happen, and that thing you're afraid of won't. I think it's always going to be with us. It is a basic

Starting point is 00:16:59 part of human nature. I wouldn't encourage people to be superstitious at all. And I've done much to push people in the opposite direction, but it's understandable. It's completely understandable from a psychological viewpoint why people are superstitious. Well, yeah. I mean, if you, how would you get through the day? How would you get through your life if you didn't delude yourself that you're capable and confident to do that, if you just, if you went the other way and thought you were a loser and a complete failure, well,

Starting point is 00:17:33 that doesn't serve you at all. True. And in fact, there's a prominent theory that, that the difference between people who are depressed and people who aren't depressed is that people who are depressed and people who aren't depressed is that people who are depressed see themselves realistically and that the rest of us see ourselves with a rosy colored glasses, you know, that we see ourselves in much better shape than

Starting point is 00:17:59 we really are. And we see the world more optimistically. And so the ability to sort of overpredict good things coming in the future for yourself is probably part of good mental health in general. But for the most part, it is optimism. It is the positive view of the world that gets us up in the morning, keeps us going, and keeps us happy. Well, it seems from what you're saying is that these delusions kind of come and go. I mean, the example you gave of having this delusion that someone who has died is coming back, you know, it doesn't do any real harm and it gives people some comfort. And I guess at some point it just kind of melts away, right?

Starting point is 00:18:46 Yes, I think there are a couple of different forms. It's interesting, the way people deal with the death of a loved one is very unique to them. There are many different ways to do it. And it often reflects the nature of the relationship when the person was alive. And so you do have the situation, not unlike Joan Didion, where they just need some time to deal with the situation. And this is one of the ways that they do. They believe for a time that the person, and Joan Didion is very, as you would imagine, very articulate in talking about it. She said, I knew that he was gone. I had put his ashes in the crypt and I knew that he was gone, but I still kept his shoes in the closet because I thought he would need them when he came back. And so, there's just a

Starting point is 00:19:42 sense that this has been a shock for the individual. They need some time to deal with it. And apparently, this is a common way for some people to deal with it. You know, counselors say, you don't challenge the person and say, hey, snap out of it. You know, you let them be where they need to be. And after a period of time, they do get over it. There are people also who believe that they have an ongoing relationship. They talk to their dead spouse. They are aware of the presence of the dead spouse. And that can go on for years in many cases. And that too is often a positive thing as long as the relationship in life was quite positive. So, I don't think many people would believe that you could do that, that you could have

Starting point is 00:20:31 an ongoing relationship with someone who's dead, and certainly science doesn't support that. But who are we in that situation to say that that person isn't engaging in a delusion that is helping them. And I think that's part of what I wanted to acknowledge in this research about delusions. But there had to have come a day where Joan Didion threw out those shoes. Yes, I believe that's true. I mean, she calls it my year of magical thinking. And so I think she took a year. He died around Christmas time. And by the following Christmas, she had sort of come around. But that, you know, that seems to me to be, you know, obviously a beneficial thing for her. And despite the fact that it's technically irrational,

Starting point is 00:21:27 who are we to say anything wrong about that? What about when people say or give the impression that perhaps they're better looking than they really are, or they're taller than they really are? You quote somebody in the book that sent out a tweet that said, you know, every man who's 5'7 believes he's 5'9. Well, is it that he believes he's 5'9 or he just says he's 5'9 knowing he's fibbing a little bit? Or is that one of these delusions that make people feel better so that they're a little more confident and function better in the world. People feel often that they are taller, better looking, smarter than they really are. And while that's in one sense humorous,

Starting point is 00:22:23 what I'm suggesting is that they probably benefit. The alternative of believing that they really are 5'7 would be worse for them. But is it the case that people believe they're better looking or that they're taller? Is it a case that they believe it all the time? Or is it more like Joan Didion where you know you're really 5'7", but sometimes you feel like you're 5'9"? I mean, where is the blur? I think that people do it quite differently. There's some people, of course, who have a negative view of themselves, and that's probably not helpful. And again, as I say, how you get to be one of the negative people versus the positive is a question that I'm not prepared to answer. And I believe that there often is, again,

Starting point is 00:23:14 that double consciousness, that they know that they're of average good looks or that they're 5'7", but they feel in certain circumstances, and it would be a positive thing if they did, that at least their height, for example, is not a handicap, that they have many good qualities. And the classic statistic along these lines is that something like 80% of people in the U.S. believe that they're better than average drivers. And if you just think about that for a second, you realize that that's not possible, right? 80% of people can't be better than average. Average is 50%. And so we just do have inflated views of ourselves. And there are undoubtedly circumstances in which that's not a good thing because we'll be disappointed. That a bit of overconfidence, a bit of a shine on your actual abilities and personality is good. Will keep you going, keep you trying. And, you know, that can't be a bad thing.

Starting point is 00:24:37 Well, it's odd to think that delusion plays such an important role in our lives. But as you point out, delusion and superstition are really kind of, I guess, adaptive tools that make it easier to get through the day and through your life. I've been speaking with Stuart Vise. He is a behavioral scientist and author of the book, The Uses of Delusion, Why It's Not Always Rational to Be Rational. And you'll find a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Stuart. Thank you. This episode is brought to you by Melissa and Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving and arts and crafts for creative thinking.

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Starting point is 00:25:43 and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHELP.com. While we like to think of ourselves as the most evolved creatures on the planet, the physical human form is really not designed and built particularly well

Starting point is 00:26:18 in a lot of different ways. I mean, if we're such elegant specimens, how come so many humans have back trouble, blurry vision, or dental problems? Why haven't those things evolved out of us? Well, that's what Alex Bezaridis wanted to know. Alex is a professor of biology and author of the book Evolution Gone Wrong, The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work or Don't. Hi, Alex. thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. So what caused you to think maybe evolution had gone wrong and to take a look at this in the first place?

Starting point is 00:26:55 I teach at a little college in Idaho and so I teach a lot of anatomy and physiology and you go through all the systems of the body obviously. And one of the ones that always sort of got me thinking about it was when I would talk about the teeth and jaw. And I'd ask the class, how many of you have had braces? How many of you have had your wisdom teeth pulled? How many of you, you know, and it'd be a big class, like 60, 70, 80 students. And in the whole class, there'd just be a couple of students that had straight teeth that had never had any kind of correction.

Starting point is 00:27:21 And I got to thinking like, boy, that seems awfully strange. Like our teeth basically don't fit in our mouths. Like what is, what's the story behind that? So that really got me thinking about it and reading about that topic a lot. And then that sort of led me down a path of, well, I wonder if there are other places in the body that don't really work as well as you think they should. And so then I started thinking about the way that so many people require correction to their vision, the way that we're so susceptible to choking because the opening for our esophagus is right next to the opening for our trachea. That one's a uniquely human problem because there is a fail safe built in for all other mammals of the epiglottis sort of sits up there and high in

Starting point is 00:28:00 their throats and protects them. But in humans, the epiglottis and the trachea, or sorry, and the larynx, the features of the larynx, they all lowered during human evolution to allow for speech. And it took away our failsafe for choking. And so then humans are uniquely prone to choking compared to other mammals. Could it just be that the reason humans are prone to choking, or we have trouble fitting all of our teeth in our mouth, that it's because we're a work in progress. We're still evolving. Our evolution is evolving. And one day we'll fix all these things.

Starting point is 00:28:38 I think it's a good way to think of it. Like, I think of us as a transitional species all the time. We're a little bit, you know, in this situation that's kind of unique because we're the only sort of member of our tribe that survived through the gauntlet. So we're the only, you know, transitional one. And we just have, you know, you have to hope that we make it out to the other end in a couple million years. And I do think some of these things will, I mean, teeth are shrinking, for example. Teeth are a good example. Like teeth, human teeth and jaws are independent structures. So the jaw has gotten a lot smaller over evolutionary time and the teeth just haven't quite caught up yet, but they are shrinking and

Starting point is 00:29:13 given enough time, I think they will become a better fit in people's mouths. You meet people that don't even have 32 teeth in their mouths and didn't have to have wisdom teeth pulled. They only ever had, you know, 30 or 28 coming in. So already there are people being born with fewer numbers of teeth and teeth are getting smaller. So that's a good example where I think given enough time, the problems might work themselves out. Other ones I don't think, I don't know, the issues like the back, I think we're kind of going to be stuck with things like back problems.

Starting point is 00:29:41 I mean you just take a spine that was the spine of a quadruped for millions and millions and millions and millions of years and put the animal up on two feet. And I think, I think humans are probably going to be stuck with back problems for as long as there are humans. Here's something I've always wanted to ask someone like you who, who knows this stuff. So humans are this evolved species and yet the business of keeping the species going, that is, having babies, if you look back over human history, it's been a pretty risky business. A lot of babies don't make it. A lot of mothers die in childbirth. Is that a uniquely human thing, or is that across all species that childbirth is pretty risky?

Starting point is 00:30:25 Not to the degree that humans do. Childbirth is uniquely risky for humans. Now, certainly once you bring the kid out into the world, other animals have many other issues to deal with that humans don't. So obviously the first period of life for other animals can be much, much riskier. But childbirth is uniquely wounding to humans. And it is that way largely because of the incredible explosion of the human brain. I mean, it's tripled in size in the last few million years

Starting point is 00:30:51 and it's just, it's left us at the point where finally now it sort of feels like natural selection is putting a check on the system and it doesn't seem like our heads can really get any much, any bigger and still be able to be bird. Of course, you know, then you add modern technologies and C-sections and things like that to the mix. And that continues to push evolution in directions that we never could have predicted. Well, when you look back at virtually all of human history, evolution has been the determinant as to what happens to us and where we go, what we become.

Starting point is 00:31:26 But now, recently, we have technology. Technology can address a lot of the problems from simply, you know, putting glasses on somebody who has blurry vision to, you know, hip replacements for people who have hip problems that they used to have to suffer with. It makes me wonder, you know, a few hundred years ago, what did people do? Oh, I just think they mostly were in a lot of pain. That's the answer to the question. I mean, they didn't live to be nearly as long. So, you know, when your back started bothering you when you were 30 years old, maybe you only had another decade or two to live to deal with your back pain. But I think you mostly just suffered through. And

Starting point is 00:32:05 now you're right. There are a lot of options, but they're going to be, if there are still podcasts in hundreds of years, they're going to look back on what we did for dealing with our back pain or dealing with, you know, with childbirth or things, you know, they're going to look back on the methods that we use now as cruel. The one I like to bring up is, because I've gone through it, is an ACL replacement. For an ACL replacement, the two most common procedures are to either take a tendon out of your knee or one out of your hamstring and first harvest that tissue from your own body and then use it to make you a new ACL. And I guarantee there will be someday, I don't know if it'll be

Starting point is 00:32:43 in my lifetime or if it'll be in the next lifetime, but it's not going to be that far down the road where that is seen as just absolutely barbaric and crazy. They're going to look back on it like we do with bloodletting with leeches. They're going to think, my goodness, did you really open up their own body and make them donate their own anatomy to use in the surgery. I know you're more interested in some of the things that have gone wrong with human evolution, but what about some of the things that have gone right? There must be some pretty amazing things that we've evolved into. I think I am more interested in what's gone wrong, but as you read about what's gone wrong, you obviously can't help but read about what's gone right. And one thing that jumps to mind for me are our hands. So when humans became bipedal, and there's all these different ideas about why that happened in the first place, that's a whole other discussion and

Starting point is 00:33:34 question. But when we became bipedal, one of the obvious things that happens there is the freeing of the hands. And it's not that long after that point that we start to employ those hands and put them to use. And over time, our hands have changed and become these incredibly nimble structures. I didn't realize until I started reading about it how different our grip is from other great apes and other primates. Like we're the only ones, if you take your thumb and touch it to the end of your pinky and your ring finger and your middle finger, we're the only primate that can do that. And we have these really, really long thumbs and fingers that allow us to grip. I didn't realize that if you hand a baseball bat to a chimpanzee, they can't really do much with it. Their grip is more made for swinging and sort of grasping branches.

Starting point is 00:34:17 But we're the only one that can grab something and swing it with any force or pick up a ball and throw it hard. And also that same sort of evolution of the hand has given us this incredible adroitness, this ability to sew or to pick up a pencil or to type or to do all these things that other animals can't do. So that for me, that's a place. And if I was to write the counter evolution gone right, there would definitely have to be a chapter about the hand and how our nimble hands have, I think they are sort of as much a part of the human experience as our giant brains. What about our thumbs? We've all heard that, you know, having opposable thumbs has been, you know, really important. Is it really important?

Starting point is 00:35:01 I think it's incredibly important. And the human thumb is, they call it fully opposable, sort of that for that idea that it's even more nimble than the opposable thumb of other primates. So yeah, I think, I mean, all these ideas that we can come up with, with our brains about all these things that we can build and put together. And a lot of that just isn't even possible without our hands. And I think the thumb is an absolutely integral piece of that just isn't even possible without our hands and i think the the thumb is an absolutely integral piece of that equation what else what else because that's really interesting what else besides the hand has really helped propel us to where we are i mean the obvious other answer to that is is the brain i mean those to me to me are the two most human qualities there are the ways that we can use our hands and our brains i mean mean, when humans became bipedal, the brain was maybe like about four or five hundred cubic centimeters

Starting point is 00:35:50 in volume. So if you just, you know, took somebody's brain and lopped it off and filled up the skull with water, that's how much water you could fit in there. And in the couple million years since then, it's been really more like four or five million years in that in that amount of time the brain has tripled in volume tripled in volume which is kind of hard to even wrap your head around so that's that's another obvious one i'd have to think there's other most of the other places i could think of are things that have suffered our feet have definitely suffered in the process our back has suffered in the process how have our feet suffered in the process. Our back has suffered in the process. How have our feet suffered in the process? So you think about what feet used to be used for. Feet used to be sort of used in our relatively recent past in the way that hands were used. They needed to be flexible and they have all these bones. There's just gobs and gobs of bones down there in every foot that made them these flexible,

Starting point is 00:36:39 nimble structures that we could use to grasp and grip in the same way hands were. And then all of a sudden, all right, feet, you're done doing that. Now you just have to go pound around on the hard earth. And that foot that was really, really flexible and sort of best at flexibility is not good at just absorbing a pounding on the ground. Our feet would be a lot happier if we had stayed up in the trees. So the feet have had to be kind of retrofitted to work as this thing meant to take a beating. And they're not made to take a beating like the feet of an ungulate or an ostrich or something like that. Those are feet that are made to take

Starting point is 00:37:11 a beating and those animals can walk across all of Africa and not have a problem with it. But our feet struggle when, when asked to go long distances. Now, obviously given a few million years things, you know, the kinks work out pretty well. Like you talked about the eye, the kinks of the eye of, of, I mean, have worked out pretty darn well in the last, I mean, that we've, that's been a long time to work out the kinks, right? The eye has been out of the water for 375 million years instead of just out of the, you know, the foots only had a few million years to work out the kinks. So we'll talk about the eye. What are the kinks in the evolution of the eye? The biggest issue I think with the eye

Starting point is 00:37:45 is that it evolved in a wet environment. As a consequence, when you moved it into a dry environment, the way that the light goes back there and hits the retina, you know, is just not the same. And so the structures of the eye have had to sort of change over time to adapt to that, to being on in a dry land. But when you, when,. But when the original vertebrate eye was an eye that evolved in the water, and you can't ever go back and start from scratch. So we will always have an eye that evolved in the water. Now, 375 million years later, it works pretty darn well on land. It works better on land than it does in the water, though it'll always be kind of a jury-rigged structure as a result. And one thing we haven't

Starting point is 00:38:25 talked about at all is that we also compound a lot of these issues on ourselves with modern behaviors. So, you know, with the eye as a good example. So you start with a blueprint that maybe had a few faults to begin with, but then people spend all day inside staring at a computer and that is, you know, and kids do that and that's no way to develop an eye the the eye develops best and is less likely to become myopic if kids spend a bunch of time outside and and i can naturally develop under levels of natural light so some of these things are are issues we can help ourselves by behaving in different ways so i want to i want to go back to what you said a moment ago about that the eye is kind of a jerry-rigged system. I don't think I get that.

Starting point is 00:39:07 What do you mean by that? So the way that light passes through air is different than the way that light passes through water. So the length of the eye in water wouldn't be appropriate for the length of the eye on land. So the first animals that crawled out of water would have had very, very blurry vision. They wouldn't have been totally blind, just like we're not totally blind when we go into water now. But they would have had very, very blurry vision. And so over time, there were mutations popped up that improved the vision of the eye. I mean, for one thing, you had to figure out how to keep it wet. And so animals needed to have eyelids and fluids put over their eyes that they could blink to keep the eye moist because all of a sudden the eye was going to dry out, which is never, of course, an issue for animals living in the water. But how does that happen?

Starting point is 00:39:57 It's not like they sit around and have a meeting and say, you know, we really need some eyelids here, so let's go get some. So how does that happen it's it's it's one very very small step and one little change to a protein at a time so you just take you know so you have a whole bunch of amphibians that many of whom are starting to live out of the water and and 99 out of 100 can't see worth a lick and all of those get eaten up and die and the one that happens to be a little bit different you know the the variation that is in animals is the key to all of this one that happens to be a little bit different and has just slightly better vision is the one that lives and finds a mate and passes on its slightly better vision genes to its offspring and slowly but

Starting point is 00:40:38 surely over time you end up with a with an eye it's it's really hard when thinking about that to wrap my head around and anybody's head around 400 million years. I mean, it's almost impossible to do is trying to it's like trying to wrap your head around 400 billion dollars or something. But given enough time, very, very small changes can can accumulate to the point where you can end up with with big changes and and and totally different structures. Are those changes, those small changes ever big enough that you can go, Oh, look at that. I think it's rare. I mean, I think in real time, I think it'd be, it would be pretty unusual to be able to, to see something like that. I,

Starting point is 00:41:19 I'll give you an example of a really unusual behavior in the, in the eye that I think is really fascinating. It's not something you could see. You'd have to put somebody through a test, but it has to do with colorblindness. So there's a lot of, you know, colorblindness is on the gene for color vision. The genes for color vision are on the X chromosome. So they're sex linked. And if you get a lousy copy of one of them, as a male, you only have the one X chromosome. So males are far more likely to be colorblind. So some researchers discovered a few years ago that they kind of realized that, all right, if you take a colorblind male and then he passes that X chromosome onto his daughter,

Starting point is 00:41:56 and then she also gets an X chromosome from the mother, because females have the two X chromosomes, that she potentially, instead of being colorblind, she has the potential to have four different color vision cones that she makes. And it gives her potentially tetrachromatic color vision. So you and I both are what are called, we have trichromatic color vision. That means we produce three different types of cones in our retina for color vision. There's one that is sensitive to blue wavelengths, and there's one that's sensitive to red and one that's sensitive to green. People that are colorblind are deficient in one of those, usually either the red or the green ones,

Starting point is 00:42:32 so they're called red-green colorblind. But the daughters of colorblind men theoretically have four different types of cones in their retina for their vision. And so they brought it to these researchers that sort of realized this. They brought a whole bunch of these daughters of colorblind men into their office and put them through this battery of tests. And most of them were trichromatic, just like you and I are. But there was one woman that they found where the one that was colorblind and her father was active in her, giving her four different color vision cones, meaning that she could see the, like, she could see shades of color that are invisible to all other, you know, to every other human that

Starting point is 00:43:11 they'd ever tested. So she was seeing the world in a completely different way than the rest of us, which is kind of hard to imagine. So think about that. I mean, this wasn't a gradual, the way I think of evolution as a little bit at a time kind of thing. This was in one person, this big change in the ability to see colors that basically none of us can see. And so if she has children, potentially her children could have that ability to see those colors and, and seeing those colors could eventually become part of being human. Yeah. We think of things like our color vision as sort of being this fixed idea, but throughout evolutionary history. So, you know, we come from animals that

Starting point is 00:43:55 had, that were, that did have the four different types of, of cones. And then when primates went and became nocturnal for, or when, when, uh, when mammals went and became nocturnal for a very long time, we lost a couple of mutations accumulated in a couple of them and we became dichromatic. So we ended up with, with two different types of color vision cones. And then when we came back out of being nocturnal and, and our ancestors came back into the light, the primates sort of picked one of them, one of them duplicated and picked back up and now primates have, have trichromatic vision. But so the point is that there's some fluidity to things like that.

Starting point is 00:44:35 And yeah, it's not inconceivable that down the line, you know, the human lineage could, could either go back to being dichromatic if we all just stop using our color vision so much, or potentially become tetrachromatic if there's enough variation out there for it. And so I assume that we're still evolving, right? We will continue to evolve because that's what living things do. Yeah, no question. The debatable point at this point is how fast is it happening and how much are we interrupting it with our ability to sort of stick band-aids on every single issue? But you can't stop the process. It just really is a question of how much influence are we having over it with our ability to solve a lot of these problems?

Starting point is 00:45:17 Because you think about the kinds of things that kept people from reproducing historically, and they basically don't anymore, right? You can still – I mean, I would be – I had my appendix out when i was 18 years old i'd be i wouldn't be talking to you here today if if if you rolled the clock back two or three hundred years i'd have been dead and that's the case for a lot of people they would have had you know a lot of people have have had some type of event or some type of condition that would have made it so that they wouldn't have reproduced and well here i am passing on my sort of my garbage appendix genes to my to my to my daughter i've already sort of taught her where to where where you feel pain in your abdomen if you're having a flare-up of your appendix so

Starting point is 00:45:51 she knows what it feels like when you look at human evolution and also the technology that we use to fight some of the flaws you've been talking about Is there anything going on that is alarming? Anything that we're seeing as humans evolve that didn't see that coming or it doesn't seem like this should be going on, that kind of thing? There's this crazy thing going on that I kind of call the modern dilemma where sperm counts in Western populations are just declining precipitously. And I feel like it's this great huge health topic that nobody's really talking about it hasn't quite reached the tipping point where um you drop below the point where we where they're just going to be a

Starting point is 00:46:34 masses and masses and masses of infertile people but it's it's the sperm counts in western populations and males have have cut in half in the last generation and there's no sign of it slowing down and if that continues to happen it's going to be this huge issue in 21st century biology. Really? Well, and that's just more fuel for the fire that, you know, humans evolve and change, and it's not this linear, everything's getting better all the time way. It goes wrong. Evolution goes wrong, which is kind of your point. Alex Bezzarides has been my guest. He is a professor of biology at Lewis Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho,

Starting point is 00:47:13 and his book is called Evolution Gone Wrong, The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work or Don't. And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Hey, thanks. Thanks for coming on, Alex. This was really interesting. Thanks. I really enjoyed it. And I appreciate all the work you do. Because I have a young son, I have two sons, Owen and Angelo. Angelo being the youngest, watches TikTok videos. And so I have been exposed to and now watch TikTok videos. And I saw this one about washing dishes that I want to share with you because I tried it. It's really easy and it does seem to work. If you've ever noticed that your silverware comes out of the dishwasher looking a bit tarnished, not as sparkly as it once did,

Starting point is 00:48:02 the next time you wash your dishes, rip off a sheet of aluminum foil, crumple it up in a ball, and just stick it in a silverware basket along with the silverware. And then just run the dishwasher, wash your dishes as usual. That's it. What's the secret magic going on here?

Starting point is 00:48:21 Well, according to Reader's Digest, the reaction is sort of an oxidation process. When the tarnished silver soaks with the water and the detergent, the chemicals in the detergent interact with the chemicals in the aluminum foil, and the process leaves your tarnished silverware looking as good as new. I tried it, and my silverware looks a lot better than it used to. And that is something you should know. If you liked listening today, let the whole world know by leaving a rating and review.

Starting point is 00:48:55 The more stars, the better. I would hope you'd give us five stars. And you can do it on most podcast platforms, including most likely the one you're listening to this on right now. I'm Micah Brothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial.

Starting point is 00:49:19 And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle,

Starting point is 00:49:49 what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures? You got this. No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true? Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying.

Starting point is 00:50:01 I'm so sorry. You win that one. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning,

Starting point is 00:50:24 a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride.

Starting point is 00:50:40 Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty and positivity join me and an all-star cast of actors including Liam Neeson Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth among many others in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast

Starting point is 00:50:55 to the Go Kid Go Network by listening today look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts

Something You Should Know - The Benefits of Being Delusional & Our Evolution Challenges-SYSK Choice

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