Something You Should Know - What Causes Coincidences & Where Did the Molecules In Your Body Come From?

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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, how did blue jeans become so fashionable and iconic all around the world? Then, coincidences. Do they happen for a reason? Are they trying to tell us something? We love the romance of coincidences. Do they happen for a reason? Are they trying to tell us something? We love the romance of coincidences, but they are bound to happen and it would almost be an amazing coincidence if you went for 10, 15, 20 years and nothing really freaky or

Starting point is 00:00:56 amazing happened to you in that time because something, somewhere is destined to happen. Also, what's the difference between laughing and crying? Not much. And what makes you you? The atoms and molecules you're made from, where did they come from? There are atoms in your body that were once in dinosaurs, in pretty well any living thing you can think of, and they've eventually ended up in your body.

Starting point is 00:01:20 It's about a 10-year cycle. Pretty well all of the atoms in your body will have replaced in the last 10 years or so. 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. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so.

Starting point is 00:01:52 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 carothers hi welcome you know it's amazing to think about how many men women boys and girls all over the world wear blue jeans every day, or some kind of jeans every day. For the most part, blue jeans are thought of as all-American,

Starting point is 00:02:30 although technically denim work clothes were worn in Europe over 200 years ago. In 1873, Levi Strauss came out with the first pair of American blue jeans. It was the copper rivets that made them unique and very durable. But how did work clothes become so fashionable? Well, jeans became fashionable because of Western movies. Now, the early movie cowboys wore a lot of fringe and frills, but in the 1930s and 40s, actors like John Wayne began wearing denim because they thought it was

Starting point is 00:03:06 more authentic, and that started a fashion trend that continues till today. By the way, the most money ever paid for a pair of blue jeans was $46,532. It was paid by the Levi Strauss Company for a pair of miner's jeans from the 1880s. And that is something you should know. We humans like to know the reason why. When something happens, we want to know how come. What caused it? For example, why do coincidences happen? Why do traffic jams occur for no apparent reason?

Starting point is 00:03:48 Why is it almost impossible to find a four-leaf clover in your front yard? And why is it so hard to get the temperature of your shower just right? Well, you are about to get some answers to these and other interesting life questions from Rob Eastaway. He's the author of the book, Why Do Buses Come in Threes? The Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life. Hi, Rob. Welcome. Thank you very much. So what is it about the number three? We hear all kinds of things that happen in threes. Why three?

Starting point is 00:04:23 I think in life, there is lots of situations of the rule of three where, I mean, comedians use it as well, actually. First time something happens, okay, you register it. When it happens a second time, you think, oh, okay, I've noticed it's happened. When it happens a third time, our brains are wired to think, right, there's a pattern here, something happening. So the third one is more significant. So when things happen in threes, generally, I think, as humans, we are curious to know what's going on. And we assume there's a cause, even if there's not necessarily a cause. Interestingly, if we talk about misfortunes in life, you know, unlucky things, oh, why do bad things always happen to me in threes? I mean,

Starting point is 00:05:05 the truth is, they don't. But we'll tend to notice them when they happen in threes, you know, so a friend might get ill, we might, you know, have some kind of scrape on the car. And then we're almost looking out for bad things to happen. And we'll really notice that third thing. And we'll reinforce this myth that bad things happen in threes. Well, there's that old thing about celebrity deaths always happen in threes but they actually don't they don't exactly we're just reinforcing a myth we've all heard and it is just this innate way of humans counting um of uh you know three is enough to be significant and to register in our brains it's probably one of the most important numbers in terms of looking for things in life. So things happening in threes

Starting point is 00:05:51 is, yeah, is intriguing. Why is it so hard to find a four-leaf clover? It's a classic thing that four-leaf clovers are the things you should be searching for. And in fact, if you look out in your yard or out in the park or whatever and are looking for flowers and count the petals or count the leaves on a daisy or whatever, there are certain numbers that seem to crop up far more often than others in leaves and petals. And a particularly common number is five, but quite often you'll see three. You might often see eight. You might see 13. And there's a connection between these numbers. And it's a sequence known as the Fibonacci sequence. And it was known about and discovered way back in the 12th, 13th century when an Italian mathematician who got nicknamed Fibonacci first published a story about it. But the pattern itself, you can recreate it by starting with the numbers 1 and 1.

Starting point is 00:06:51 You add them together. 1 and 1 makes 2. Then you take the previous two numbers. So now 1 and 2 makes 3. 2 and 3 makes 5. 3 and 5 makes 8. So you can see how I'm making each number by just adding the previous two. And you could write this out.

Starting point is 00:07:06 Five and eight is 13. Now, for very subtle reasons, these Fibonacci numbers turn out to have particular properties that make them crop up in natural growing things, in plants in particular, in petals. And it's a wonderful thing. So, you know, five tends to be the most common number of petals on a flower and the reason why it's five and not four or six is because five is a fibonacci number you're going to sort of have to take my word for it that fibonacci numbers are connected to another beautiful thing in math which is known as the golden ratio, which is a particular shape of rectangle, a particular ratios of the two sides of a particular rectangle, which has some very

Starting point is 00:07:54 lovely and elegant properties and was known about by Leonardo da Vinci. And he, I think, probably made it most famous, most popular. He experimented with it. He felt it was the source of the most beautiful shapes. He drew a famous image of a man, which was where every part of the body was in the ratio of this so-called golden ratio, which is about 1.6 something. And the reason why it's linked with nature is because it's such an efficient ratio, it's a beautiful ratio, plants make use of it to space out petals to give themselves the best chance to get as much sunlight as possible. And so four-leaf clovers then are just an anomaly. Yeah, if you found one, it's not a Fibonacci number.

Starting point is 00:08:39 So nature isn't naturally going to produce things in fours unless it does so by splitting two twos, because two is an easy number to make. And it's also a Fibonacci number. So you say that it's better to buy a lottery ticket on Friday. I've bought plenty of tickets every day of the week. They never win. So why Friday? Well, it does depend. I know lottery draws happen on different days of the week. So let's take the UK lottery, where I know that the draw happens on Saturday. The idea is not so much there's anything special about buying on Friday, but to just recognise that winning lotteries is extremely difficult. It is extremely unlikely you will win. And therefore, when

Starting point is 00:09:24 something is so unlikely, you have. And therefore, when something is so unlikely, you have to start thinking, well, look, what other things are more likely than this? And so if we go back to our original theme of buses, then not very many people in a year are knocked over by a bus, but it's got a one in two million chance or whatever happening to you over a 24 hour period. It's probably rather less than that. But the point is, there comes a point where if you buy your lottery ticket too early, then you're more likely to meet some gruesome end like being knocked over by a bus than you are to actually make it as far as picking up your winning numbers. So the tip is to wait as long as possible to buy your ticket so that at least you have a chance of, if you do win it, of celebrating and enjoying

Starting point is 00:10:12 the experience. So this has nothing to do with increasing your chances. This just has to do with surviving to celebrate. Exactly. You can't increase your chances of winning a lottery. Unless you buy lots of tickets, of course, the more tickets you buy, the more chance you have of winning. Although there is a tip for lotteries across the world, actually, one way of you won't increase your chance of winning. But if you do win, you want to win and not have to share the jackpot with lots of other people. So the idea is to pick numbers that other people don't pick. And it seems to be a curiosity of the way people are that our lucky numbers tend to be linked with things like birthdays and months of the year and so on. So there's a disproportionate number of people who pick numbers in the range 1 to 31, which is the

Starting point is 00:11:06 maximum number of days there are in a month. So if your lottery happens to include numbers that are higher than 31, then picking a smattering of numbers that are bigger than 31 is good because it's numbers that are less likely to be picked by other people. So that's the secret really. The other thing to point out with lottery numbers is, you know, some selections of lottery numbers look random. You know, if I picked 2, 8, 12, 21, 37, you might say, oh, yeah, that's good. That's nice and random. And if I picked 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, you'd think, oh, that'll never turn up. I won't pick one with such a pattern. Well, the truth is both of those selections I just gave you are equally likely to happen.

Starting point is 00:11:52 The reason why we never see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 come up is that it's millions to one against that it will. But then it's also millions to one against that whatever I said, 2, 4, 12, 31 would come up too. So there's this sort of fallacy of thinking that certain patterns are more likely than others, whereas they're all equally likely. So you can improve your chances by simply trying to not think like all other people think. One other thing I would say to that, I mentioned, oh, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 is just as likely as any other combination. There's a lot of mathematicians out there who know this and they think, I'm going to be smart because I know 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 is just as likely as anything else. So I will pick those numbers. The trouble is, if those numbers ever come up in a lottery anywhere

Starting point is 00:12:43 in the world, there will be tens of thousands of smart people out there who did the same thing. So you'll end up sharing it with all those people and not getting much money yourself. So don't try to be too clever because there's other clever folk out there who will ruin it for you. We are talking about these fascinating little life questions and why they happen. And my guest is Rob Eastaway. He's author of the book, Why Do Buses Come in Threes? The Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life. This episode is brought to you by Melissa and Doug.

Starting point is 00:13:17 Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving and arts and crafts for creative thinking. Melissa and Doug makes toys that help kids take on the world. Because the way they play today shapes who they become tomorrow. Melissa and Doug, the play is pretend, the skills are real. Look for Melissa and Doug wherever you shop for toys. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are

Starting point is 00:13:56 conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker.

Starting point is 00:14:38 Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Rob, what's the math behind why it is so hard to, like when you turn on the shower to get the temperature just right? It's either too hot and then it gets too cold. It's really hard to get it just right. The reason why this is happening, you're getting this oscillating temperature, it's never right, is to do with the way you're reacting to something that happened a few seconds ago. There's a bit of a time lag. You haven't waited until the right temperature got through the system. So hot and cold shower, over hot and over cold showers,

Starting point is 00:15:26 are part of a general phenomenon of systems and how systems behave and how we react to things. And it's a really interesting part of applied math because it explains a lot of what happens in the world. You know, we react to things thinking you start hearing that we're running low on toilet rolls because everyone's buying toilet rolls. So you go out and buy them and therefore other people start buying them. And suddenly the nation is short of toilet rolls as if there's a crisis. Well, actually, there's not a crisis. It's just we're reacting too quickly to something rather than letting the system settle down. So there's cause and effect and something that happens causes you to take another action, which happens to another

Starting point is 00:16:10 action. All this knock on effect is fascinating to model. And when you understand it, and when you step back and look at the often mathematical relationship between the way things are going up and down and so on, it can help you to take cooler and more reasoned decisions by just saying, okay, let's look at the big picture here, not just immediate things that I need to respond to straight away. Traffic jams, I find interesting. I'm not sure why. I guess because, you know, so often traffic jams happen for no reason and then the traffic clears up and it's very frustrating. Why does that happen? Who screwed this up? I imagine there's some interesting math or physics or something going on there.

Starting point is 00:16:55 It's because of a knock-on effect of you reacting to the person in front of you. You react too quickly and you put your brakes on too fast. the car behind catches up with you. And it can, in the wrong circumstances, just cause all the cars to stop. The ones at the front then start going again and they lead off. And you can watch from the air. It looks like this pulse is passing through the cars as if it knows what's going on. But actually, this is just individual humans, the way they react, causing the whole system to flow or not flow, which is why sometimes we need traffic signals to tell us what to do, to control us, to say don't try driving too fast. Because if you all try and drive too fast, ironically, you might all end up going much slower because you have a knock-on effect on each other. Well, something I've always wondered about that, I've been stuck in traffic jams, as

Starting point is 00:17:48 I'm sure everyone has, where you're kind of creeping along for a long time and there's no reason for it. There's no accident. There's no nothing. But at some point, it does just open up. And why does it open up there? What happened that all of a sudden now we can all go? There's so many things that could be causing it, but it might have been a temporary thing that caused a driver near the front of what became the jam to slow down slightly.

Starting point is 00:18:21 Bizarrely, sometimes it's seeing an accident or seeing a police car that's pulled up or whatever. People stop to look. But as soon as one person has slowed down, that pulse of slowing down is going to feed all the way back because the person at the front is now free to go again. Nothing ever physically stopped them. They just maybe slowed down a little bit. So I think very often it will be caused by one individual not driving smoothly just just slowing down for whatever reason they might have been reaching over for a coffee cup or who knows what reason the knock-on effect of that can escalate so eventually behind them some people stop but of course we can see that that guy at the front

Starting point is 00:19:00 never had anything that was actually stopping them. So we're just releasing the pressure out again at the front and it works its way back through the jam. So I want to change topics here and talk about coincidences because I think they're so interesting because everybody experiences in their life amazing coincidences. And I think it's very human to want to find an explanation. Why did that happen? What does that mean? And so what does that mean? I've had several. I think one that sticks in my mind was a time when I was with a friend and her daughter was there and I was drawing a little picture for the daughter and I drew a moon in the sky. And I was making it up as I went along. I said, oh, you can tell from the moon that the date must be August the 17th. I just completely made that up out of nowhere. I don't know why I even said it. And the mother said, I can't believe you just said that because August the 17th is our daughter's birthday and it's my birthday and it's my husband's birthday. And it was this cold shudder of how this is just amazing.

Starting point is 00:20:18 It was meant to be. And when we hear coincidences, it comes back to this cause and effect thing. We assume there was a reason why this happened, something psychic, something whatever. But actually, the thing about coincidences, they are going to happen by chance. And one way to look at coincidences is to say, look, how many opportunities are there for a coincidence to happen in a day? And you imagine, you know, I came home from work and just as I got home, I saw someone and, oh, their name was completely different from mine and their number plate, oh, was completely unrelated to mine. So lots of non-coincidences are happening all the time. We don't notice them. And, you know, they happen in the hundreds and thousands and millions over a year.

Starting point is 00:21:09 So many chances for coincidences to happen. We just don't notice the boring things where two unconnected things came together. When suddenly they're lined up, two names are the same. It's a neighbor we see when we're on holiday. You know, someone in the middle of nowhere. I wasn't expecting to see you here. We notice those and they freak us out. We love the romance of coincidences, but they are bound to happen. And it would always be an amazing coincidence if you went for 10, 15, 20 years and nothing really freaky or amazing happened to you in that time because something somewhere is destined to happen just like rolling dice and getting three sixes come up.

Starting point is 00:21:52 My favourite coincidence example, sometimes math will actually throw up examples which give coincidences more often than you'd expect. And that is what's sometimes called the birthday paradox. You imagine you're in a group of 30 people, which is about the size of a typical class at school or whatever. And you think, okay, well, I wonder what the chances are that in that group of 32 people have the same birthday. And there are 365 days in a year. So you'd think, well, 30 people out of 365, two with the same birthday, it kind of feels like a one in 10 thing. It doesn't sound like it's likely at all, because that's not many people and that's a lot of birthdays.

Starting point is 00:22:35 Now, I'm going to state to you the fact, which is extremely counterintuitive. If there are 30 people in a room, then there's a way higher than 50-50 chance. It's like a 60% chance that there will be at least two people in that room who have the same birthday. And I do this as a little stunt. If I've got a big audience, if I've got 50 or more people, I'll say, I feel an energy coming from you as a room. I think two of you got the same birthday. And I don't know who it is, but I can sense it now. And I go around the room, and it always works. And the reason why it works, you think how many different combinations there are of those 30 people. There's 29 people could be paired with Annie, and another 28 could be

Starting point is 00:23:20 paired with Bert, and so on. You add them all up, and you think, actually, there's hundreds of different possible pairs in this room. So maybe we shouldn't be so surprised if one of those pairs of all this combination do have the same birthday. So it's the law of numbers and big numbers. In the end, coincidences happen. But in the end, as a coincidence phenomenon, it's one of my favorites because it feels so surprising and you can do it as a little stunt at parties or whatever. I bet there's two people in this room who have the same birthday and you can win bets on it. It's great fun. Talk about that black and white hat game that you play, because I've been thinking about it ever since I read about it. It's really interesting. There's a little game I play where I have two volunteers come and sit facing each other on chairs in front of an audience. And I have in a bag, three hats, two of them are black hats,

Starting point is 00:24:17 and one of them is a white hat. And then come from behind each of my volunteers, so they can't see I put a hat on each of them. So they can't see what hat's on their own head, but they can see what hat is on the other person's head. And what they don't know is I put a black hat on each of their heads. So remember, there were two black hats, one white hat. And they're sitting there looking at the other person. They can see a black hat. And I say, right, I want you to put your hand up. Who will be the first of you who can predict with pure logic what

Starting point is 00:24:49 hat is on your own head? Now, this is a quite famous puzzle, but I love what happens in the real world because with most adults in the real world, what they do is they look at the other person. They think, right, they're wearing a black hat. I know there were two blacks and one white. So I'm either wearing a white or a black and I don't know which it is. And both of them think that way. And you can wait for 30 seconds, a minute, and they just sit there saying, I just don't know. But actually, what they should be able to do if they think about it a bit further is think, well, what is the other person thinking? If you go the extra step and say, let's suppose I've got a white hat on. There's only one white hat. The guy opposite is not stupid. So if they

Starting point is 00:25:36 can see a white hat, they'll put their hand up and say, I must be wearing a black hat. That has not happened. Why has that not happened? The only reason it has not happened why has that not happened the only reason it has not happened over the last 30 seconds is because i must be wearing a black hat so it should be possible to deduce that you're wearing a black hat in that game and the puzzle books say that's what happens the real life says it very rarely happens and i just find that fascinating and there's a broader principle of logic and life and statistics that I find really interesting with that game, because often we can deduce things not just all of us and we always wonder why and and now we know why. Rob Eastaway has been my guest. He's author of the book Why Do Buses Come in Threes? The Hidden Mathematics of Everyday Life and you will find a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you for coming on here Rob. Thanks Mike that's been

Starting point is 00:26:42 really fun. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Do you love Disney?

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Starting point is 00:28:09 but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. If I were to ask you, where do you come from? You'd probably say from your parents. They made you. And that's sort of right, but it's only part of the answer, according to Brian Clegg. Brian is a science writer who's written several popular science books, including What Do You Think You Are? The Science of What Makes You, You, which is what he's here to talk about. Hi, Brian. So generally when we talk about people, we talk about who we are, not what we are.

Starting point is 00:28:51 So this is kind of a, this is really kind of an interesting way to come at this, that talk about the atoms and the molecules and the cells that make up what we are. I think it's just fascinating what human beings are. You know, our brains are incredibly complex things, the most complex thing we know in the universe. And basically, you know, it's us. It's where we came from. Everybody's interested in where you come from yourself. I wanted to find stuff out for myself and hoped I could put this across. So when you ask people, you know, where do you come from? What are you made of? You know, you usually get the answers of, you know, evolution. I came from my

Starting point is 00:29:29 parents. I'm, you know, a result of the two of them. And I'm, is our general understanding of who we are close to accurate or are we way off? I don't think it's inaccurate. It's more that we just see a tiny part of the picture so that it's not just about your parents. It's not just about your family tree. But it's also the chemical elements that make you up, which came from stars. It's about how the Earth was formed billions of years ago. And pretty well all the atoms that are in your body were already there on the Earth when it formed. It's about all sorts of things that have come together to make you the unique person that you are. So since you mentioned that, you know, we come from the stars, that's a pretty provocative idea.

Starting point is 00:30:18 So explain that. Explain where, what we are, what makes us. Sure. We're made up of atoms, and those atoms have been here, as I say, for the life of the Earth. Before that, they were floating around in space, and they either came from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago when the hydrogen in the universe was first formed, or what's happened is stars are really great big factories for turning small atoms into bigger ones. And over time, these stars make the heavier atoms explode as they get old. And those atoms are sent flying across the universe and eventually came together to make first Earth. And eventually you, after those atoms have been in other plants other animals You know for instance that there are atoms in your body that were once in dinosaurs

Starting point is 00:31:10 In pretty well any living thing you can think of and they've eventually ended up in your body How how did they get there? Atoms get into us simply by us eating So we will eat stuff, we will breathe stuff in, those atoms are out there and they get incorporated into our body as we grow. Over time, all the atoms in your body pretty well will get replaced. It's about a 10-year cycle that pretty well everything in your body gets replaced. Some of it's a lot quicker, but pretty well all of the atoms in your body will have been replaced in the last 10 years or so. Well, that brings up a question that I never

Starting point is 00:31:50 have gotten a really good answer to and that I've wondered. Okay, so you say that the atoms get replaced every 10 years or so, but I've also heard people say that you slough off cells and that you're a different person every couple of months. So can you reconcile that for me? Well, bits of you are changing all the time. Some of the things that change fastest, for instance, are the red blood cells in your body. They don't last very long at all. They only last a day or two. And the skin cells, as you say, are always coming off your hair.

Starting point is 00:32:22 Other parts of your body do eventually come off. But if you look through the whole body, if you think, for instance, your bones, they're some of the things that take longest for the atoms in them to be replaced. But over time, this all happens. So the different parts are being replaced over different time scales. And how are humans unique? Are we so different than other creatures? Are we, if you're under the microscope, are we all more or less the same? In some ways we are. I mean, if you look at genetics, for instance, the gene that defines really how an animal or plant is put together, then we aren't hugely different from some of the other animals. We're only a few small percentage points different from other apes. And even with something like, say, a banana, there's maybe 50% of the genes are duplicated.

Starting point is 00:33:18 But it's not just about genetics. One of the huge things that makes us very different from the other animals is those brains I mentioned. Ours are far more complex than other animals' brains. And as far as we're aware, there aren't other animals that do many of the things with those brains that we can. So they don't create stories. They don't create technology. Yes, they might have little tools and things, use a piece of wood or something like that, but we're on a totally different scale to any other animal that we know. Is there a good understanding of what it means to be alive? You know, we're this pile of atoms

Starting point is 00:33:55 that came from dinosaurs in outer space, but so is, I imagine, so is a rock, but the rock just sits there. We're alive. So what's the difference? That is a really good question, because to be honest, exactly pinning down what life is, is something that science really hasn't entirely managed to do. So biologists will tell you that life involves various processes. So living things typically will grow, they consume things to produce energy, they give off waste, they reproduce, and all these things come together to make something that's living. But actually saying what's that spark, if you like, what the thing that makes the difference between something that's living and something that isn't living really is quite difficult to pin down one of the things that some scientists are starting to look at is the way we deal with energy that living things can effectively push themselves

Starting point is 00:34:58 away from their natural state because of the way they use energy whereas say a rock just kind of sits there and is a rock so there are differences but they're really quite difficult to pin down yeah well i imagine if anyone could pin that down i mean that would unlock a lot of mysteries to if we had some understanding of what it meant to be alive it definitely would and it's also more than that with us because we know know we're conscious, for instance, we take in the world around us. But that also is a real mystery of what consciousness is, of what it is that makes us able to have that feeling of being alive, of relating to the world around us in the way that perhaps a slug might not, for instance,

Starting point is 00:35:46 or a fly or something like that. Well, that was going to be my next question is, you know, what does it mean to think like, to be conscious? What does that even mean? But I guess that's a piece of what does it mean to be alive? That's right. But it's a very special piece. What we do know is that not everything we do is about consciousness. I don't know if you are a touch typist. I know a lot of people are where they can sit and type without looking at the keyboard. I can do that. And I can type the letter H, say, but I don't know where the letter H is on the keyboard. If you ask me, I cannot tell you where it is. I can just type it because it's not really a conscious action. Or if you you drive a car there's a lot of things you do when you're driving

Starting point is 00:36:29 that you don't actually have to think about oh i've got to push this lever i've got to turn this it just happens as you go because we push it out of our consciousness and a lot of things that we do aren't consciously controlled but there is this consciousness. There's something there Apparently some some scientists actually believe there isn't really a consciousness that it's only If you like an appearance of being conscious But I think the majority would still thought of it say there's something there and it's one of the biggest Mysteries in science still today. Well, that's part of that. I guess part of that conversation of you know, do we really have free will? Absolutely. I mean, because that makes a huge difference. Because if we don't have free will, is it really fair,

Starting point is 00:37:11 for instance, to punish somebody for something they do if they have no control over that? I think most of us would like to think there is such a thing as free will. But it is really difficult to pin down when you look at where is that coming from? Where is it happening? Where is that free will actually based? And what makes it happen? Isn't that weird, though, to think that there might be a possibility that this is all programmed out and that you really are not a participant? You're just like a chess piece. Well, that's right it goes back really all

Starting point is 00:37:46 the way back to isaac newton who had this idea of the universe being a little bit like clockwork where you know everything happens and in principle uh there's a french scientist called laplace who said uh you know if i knew everything about the way everything's put together i should be able to predict everything perfectly into the future, exactly what will happen with everything. Now, actually, modern science says it's not that simple, because quantum physics tells us that there's a lot of probability going on, that things don't just necessarily go one way or the other. It's only the chance it'll do one thing, a chance it'll do another. But even so, it's easy to think of this picture of the world where everything relates to each other

Starting point is 00:38:25 everything goes forward like clockwork and if that were the case then really you aren't controlling what happens it's just what will happen so i like to think we got free will i hope you do too yeah i do but but you also have to wonder why some things happen you know that we just it's everybody has those experiences in life that are either amazingly lucky or amazingly unlucky or you just happen to do the right thing. And you have to wonder, is it just, you know, chance, random chance that sooner or later that's going to happen? Or is there a bigger picture here? I certainly think there's there is a lot that is about luck so if you think of what makes us what we are in terms of is it our nature is it the way that we're actually made genetically or is it nurture is

Starting point is 00:39:13 it our environment then there's a lot of evidence that it is random factors in the environment that have a huge impact on the way things turn out. You can be a great writer, but never have the luck to have your book read by the right people so it gets published. You can be a great inventor and come up with a great idea, but the fact is it never gets out there in the world, or you can be extremely lucky, make a guess on the stock market,

Starting point is 00:39:41 make yourself a millionaire. And the fact is that a lot of that influence is outside random influence, influence, luck, things that will change your life and the way you develop. You know, I so often think about what you just said about you hear stories like J.K. Rowling writing Harry Potter and being turned down by all those publishers. And if she had given up, we would have never heard of Harry Potter. And I think how many times has that happened where the person did give up or they just hit a brick wall? And how many things do we never know that could have been wonderful, but we'll never know? Well, that's right. I think that's happening an awful lot because in the end, the stories we hear about are the ones where it does tear it out. Well, that's right. I think that's happening an awful lot because in the end, the stories we hear about are the ones where it does tear it out well in the end. You know, you hear about the lottery winner, not the cover of the book and sit back and take a

Starting point is 00:40:45 deep breath what's the most fascinating part of this to you uh the thing that really gets to a lot of us has to be you know our place in the universe in a way uh whether you're talking about if you have a religious view if you are thinking about you know us as being a very small thing in a very big universe and it's that kind of how we if you can find out more about what we are as an individual how we then fit into that bigger picture i guess is one picture part of it and for me the other bit is this nature versus nurture thing you know i got kids uh thinking about how much do i influence how they are as they become adults? And how much is that coming from their genes? How much is it coming from the wider

Starting point is 00:41:31 environment? So if you have kids, I guess that has to be one of the big things that it makes you think about. So Brian, when you look at human life today, I mean, how are we doing? I'm sure life is better than it used to be, but is it continuing to get better? Yeah. I mean, as you say, if you compare with, frankly, practically any period in the past, if you go back a hundred years, a couple of hundred years, most people had pretty bad lives. You know, there were people who were rich there were people who uh could afford the the kind of things we take for granted now in terms of cleanliness food and all that kind of thing but for most people it was a pretty awful life uh so it's difficult to say really and we also have to remember that we are evolving you know human beings are not exactly the same now as when they first formed about 200,000 years ago.

Starting point is 00:42:26 We are evolving. Things are changing both in us as people and in our world around us. So you certainly can't see, you know, the whole thing will never freeze. It will always be changing. Which makes you wonder, what will we be like in 200,000 years from now? It does. I think what's certainly true is the pictures, if you remember any of the old movies from the 50s, where you had sort of aliens with big bulging brains sticking out of

Starting point is 00:42:51 their heads, that kind of thing, that's not going to happen. Evolution doesn't work like that. You're not going to get a huge brain evolving. But the fact is we do change in small ways sometimes. Little things like, for instance, the fact that most of us in the West can consume milk. And that is a mutation. We are mutants. It's not just a matter of the X-Men and movies like that. We are all mutants. Every individual has a slight mutation, slight changes in their genes from their parents, from the people around them. And over time,

Starting point is 00:43:25 that does result in various changes. Again, I've got red hair. Red hair, well, I used to have. Red hair is, again, a mutation. It didn't exist at one point, but we've changed. And so there's subtle changes that come over time. But over a long time span, we can expect bigger ones. We just don't know what they'll be. well i always think of that that chart in science class of you know on the left is the monkey and then you know the next guy's a little more upright and then pretty soon six guys later there's a man standing there well what are the next six gonna look like what's that 12th guy gonna look like well the interesting thing about that is it's kind of a myth, that diagram, because it kind of shows the idea that people will get more and more evolved

Starting point is 00:44:13 in a particular way. So evolution isn't something that has an end in mind. It's not saying this is the way to better. So for example, we know that there were smaller people that were called sometimes referred to as hobbits on an island in the I think it's in Indonesia, where people actually evolved to be smaller and have smaller brains than their predecessors had. So evolution isn't always about getting bigger and better. It's fitting better into your environment. And the fact is, the way we go will be influenced by our environment and how that changes. So given that we do know what we're made of and where we came from, is there any, can you take that information and project into the future what's to come? I'm always a bit wary of future ology, this idea that you can somehow look into the future. There was a book back in, I think it was 1970,

Starting point is 00:45:13 that tried to show the way that the world was going to develop. It was really big back then. And we often get these books coming along that say, this is the way things are going. And I think that's almost impossible to predict. There are so many factors coming in there. But I do think what will happen is that we find out more, then we can also understand more what goes together to make a person the person they are. Do you think we're, in terms of understanding that, are we just barely breaking the surface or do we know a lot already and we just need to fill in a few blanks? There's an awful lot that we don't know, I think it's fair to say, because human beings,

Starting point is 00:45:59 anything living, is actually a really complicated system, a really complicated thing. My background is originally physics. And when I say to people, physics is actually much, much simpler than biology, often they say, no, that's not true. You know, physics has all that math. It's really complicated. And yes, there is quite a lot of mathematics in there. But the actual basics of physics is really, really simple. But a biological system,

Starting point is 00:46:26 a person, an animal, a plant, when you look down into the detail of what's happening in every single cell in your body, each one of them is like a huge, tiny factory that's been compressed into a tiny, tiny space. So there's all sorts of stuff going on in your cells the there's long strings of dna in there controlling what's happening there are lots of little tiny machines made of molecules that do things inside the cell that enable it to split that enable it to process energy and all that's going on inside us it's incredibly complicated what's going on there's lots more to find out on the physical side of what's in your body. But also, as I say, things like consciousness is generally described as one of the most complicated and as yet unknown things that we want to find out more about.

Starting point is 00:47:16 So there's loads to find out more about. But we are getting there. We are getting more every year. I remember hearing someone say that, you know, I think you were talking about a moment ago, these mutations that, that we never used to have people with blue eyes. And if you have blue eyes, you are related to the first guy or whoever that was woman that had blue eyes is, is that usually true? Are there were those mutations all kind of run in the family? Mostly, yeah. I mean, you can have the same mutation happening in two different places, but often you can trace that whole thing back.

Starting point is 00:47:52 And in fact, family trees work like this as well. We used to trump family trees as being, you know, a little thing. You do your genealogy. You look back a few generations. But you only have to go back, I think it's about 30 or so generations, 37, I think. And there would be more people in your family tree than have ever lived. Because if you think about it, each generation, there's twice as many people. So you've got two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents. And very quickly, that's a huge number. And the fact is,

Starting point is 00:48:22 actually, what happens is a family tree becomes a really tangled thing into the past something where everything is interlocked and it's been shown statistically that you only have to go back maybe about a thousand years or so and pretty well everybody in your area in your continent that has a living uhant. So somebody from back there who has somebody living and everybody still here will be related to that person. So it means, for instance, that everybody has royalty in their family tree. If you think it's something just the Europeans do or whatever, the fact is everybody in the world will have royalty in their family tree. Because if you go back far enough, whatever region they've originally come from,

Starting point is 00:49:06 then descendants of those royal characters will still be around today, and you will be one of them. This may be a bit of an unfair question, but since you've done all this research and you've really looked into what we are, what we're made of, how we're made, does it give you any sense of why we're made of how we're made does it give you any sense of of why we're here and and

Starting point is 00:49:28 and also like are we that unique are humans so unique or or is life on planet earth so unique that there is or isn't likely life elsewhere on other planets some people think there are very few planets in the whole universe, certainly in the galaxy, our galaxy, that have life on them because it is so unlikely that life would have come together the way it did. It's really quite difficult to start things off. As far as we're aware, in the whole four and a half billion years Earth has been here, life only started once from scratch and everything else has come from that so it's not

Starting point is 00:50:06 something that seems to happen all the time um and because of that uh it seems relatively unlikely that life would evolve on any particular planet um and so we we are probably something of a rarity and you also have to think okay can you think of a reason why there might be something so unlikely? And one obvious answer is if you do have religious belief, then that was as a result of some greater cause. But as I say, some people do think that, you know, in the end, even if something's very unlikely, the unlikely thing has to have happened for us to be here. It's something called the anthropic principle. If we weren't here, we wouldn't be able to say, oh, this is unlikely. So the unlikely thing has to have happened because we're here to see it.

Starting point is 00:50:54 Well, this is one of those conversations that really makes you think about everything. So I appreciate you coming on. My guest has been Brian Clegg. He is a science writer who's written several science books. And his latest is What Do You Think You Are? The Science of What Makes You, You. And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you for coming on, Brian.

Starting point is 00:51:19 Okay. Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it. You know, there's a fine line between laughing and crying. You can even do both of them at the same time. The late psychologist Robert R. Provine explained that laughing and crying are similar psychological reactions. Both occur during states of high emotional arousal. Both laughter and tears have some lingering effects,

Starting point is 00:51:46 and neither one can be sincerely turned on or off at will. Human tears are actually triggered by a variety of emotions, pain, sadness, and even joy. And if you can manage to laugh and cry simultaneously, you're actually getting a double dose of stress relief. Both emotional outbursts counteract the effects of cortisol and adrenaline. So go ahead, laugh till you cry,

Starting point is 00:52:13 or cry till you laugh. And that is something you should know. If you find yourself with a free moment or two and would like to do something to support this podcast, leaving us a rating and or review on whatever platform you use to listen to podcasts would be greatly appreciated. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new

Starting point is 00:52:42 thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity.

Starting point is 00:53:04 The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network.

Starting point is 00:53:33 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, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. We'll see you next time. 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,

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Something You Should Know - What Causes Coincidences & Where Did the Molecules In Your Body Come From?

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