Something You Should Know - Where Your Deep Desires Comes From & How Evolution Shaped You

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

Here is a problem about spaghetti that has stumped some of the brightest minds in science, including Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman: Hold one strand of spaghetti at each end and try to break it into two pieces. You will find that it is impossible. There now appears to be an explanation thanks to some very high-speed cameras. Listen and I will tell you what it is. https://www.thenakedscientists.com/get-naked/experiments/snapping-spaghetti You want things. I want things. We all want things. That is what human desire is all about. Have you ever stopped to wonder why you desire those particular things? For an explanation of human desire, we turn to Luke Burgis. He is an entrepreneur and a philosopher and he has written a book about desire titled, Wanting (https://amzn.to/3fPJyR9). Listen as he offers insight into what triggers all of our desires – big and small. If we evolved from apes, why are there still apes? That’s one of many questions people ponder about evolution. Perhaps you’ve also wondered if humans are still evolving, or have we stopped? Can we predict how evolution will change the world? These are just some of the questions I tackle with Marlene Zuk. She is an evolutionary biologist and author of the book Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live (https://amzn.to/3uUyd6H). Listen and you will have a better understanding of how we evolved to be who we are. When a child gets hurt, what you do and say in response is critical. And it isn’t only because the correct response can soothe the child and alleviate their stress, it can also affect the way the child recovers from an injury. Listen to hear the science of this important phenomenon. Source: Judith Acosta author of Verbal First Aid (https://amzn.to/3fScUhV) PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Indeed is offering SYSK listeners a $75 Sponsored Job Credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING NerdWallet lets you compare top travel credit cards side-by-side to maximize your spending! Compare & find smarter credit cards, savings accounts, & more https://NerdWallet.com TurboTax Experts make all your moves count — filing with 100% accuracy and getting your max refund, guaranteed! See guarantee details at https://TurboTax.com/Guarantees Luckily for those of us who live with the symptoms of allergies, we can Live Claritin Clear with Claritin-D! eBay Motors has 122 million parts for your #1 ride-or-die, to make sure it stays running smoothly. Keep your ride alive at https://eBayMotors.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know is all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future.

Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, hold a dry piece of spaghetti at each end and break it in two. It can't be done and I'll explain why. Then, human desire. Why is it you want the things you want? Humans mimic what other people want, not just with material things, but with all kinds of abstract objects of desire. Things like majors that we choose in college, brands, even our very identity.

It is keeping up with the Joneses, but it goes deeper than that. Also, how you talk to a child when they're hurt really matters. And understanding human evolution. How are we evolving and is evolution going the way it's supposed to be going? There is no supposed to be going human evolution. How are we evolving, and is evolution going the way it's supposed to be going? There is no supposed to be going in evolution. We weren't heading toward anything. It's not like all going toward a goal that we've now lost sight of. There is no goal. All this today on Something You Should Know.

People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. 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. 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 there. Welcome to Something You Should Know, where we start today with a science experiment that could also be a good way to win a bar bet. Here's what you do. You dare someone to hold a strand of spaghetti at both ends and bend it and break it into two pieces. And when they try, it never works. It's impossible, well, almost impossible to do. This has been a mystery that has baffled scientists for a long time. It is almost impossible to break it into two pieces because it usually breaks into three or four or five pieces. Surprisingly, this has challenged some of the best minds in physics for decades, including Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman. Recently, some French physicists using high-speed cameras

and a lot of math and computers have worked out exactly why this is. Basically, when you bend the spaghetti, it breaks. And after the first break, the spaghetti snaps back to straighten out. And the force of straightening it out breaks it again on the way back to becoming straight. It happens so fast, it seems like it's breaking in multiple places at the same time, but it's not. That's the simple explanation. In reality, it's a little more complicated, and depending on where and when it breaks in the first place, the subsequent breaks can change.

But it's almost a sure bet that it will not break into just two pieces. And that is something you should know. Think for a moment about the power of desire. I mean, you want things. All humans want things. And if you didn't want things, you wouldn't have much of a reason to get up in the morning or go to work or do anything else. Desire drives us all. And we all have our own personal desires. Maybe you want a certain kind of car or a house or a specific job or clothes that you want to get.

Or you want to get married, you want to have kids. You want a lot of things. So why do you want those things? Why do you want what you want? Well, you're about to find out from my guest, Luke Burgess. Luke is an entrepreneur and philosopher, and he's author of the book, Wanting. Hi, Luke. Welcome. Thanks for coming on Something You Should Know. Hi Mike, good to be here.

So what's the quick answer, if there is one, why we humans want certain things over other things? Why we want what we want? Humans mimic what other people want. We imitate the desires of other people. And when somebody else wants something, it imbues that object of their desire with a special value for us. Because we're such social creatures, we're constantly looking to our fellow humans for cues about what is desirable. So is that just keeping up with the Joneses? That's certainly part of it. It is keeping up with the Joneses, but it goes deeper than that. Because if we're taking our

fellow humans as models of our own desire, it means that our desires can fundamentally lead us into rivalry. So it's not just keeping up with them, but we actually come to think of ourselves as rivals to other people, usually without knowing it. And this usually happens at a pre-conscious or subconscious level, not just with material things like jobs and the Joneses, cars and possessions, but with all kinds of abstract objects of desire. Things like, you know, the majors that we choose in college, brands, even our very identity is sort of shaped in relationship to other people. But as opposed to what? Because if we didn't have other people and we didn't get those cues from other people, we would choose differently or we wouldn't choose at all or we

wouldn't care or what? Well, this is as opposed to the romantic notion of desire. And the romantic lie or the romantic notion of desire is that, you know, I, Luke Burgess, because I'm a rational creature, I choose the objects of my desire through these purely rational means. So, for instance, when I was in undergrad, in college, that I chose to work on Wall Street because it paid the best, paid the most of any job, which seems like a rational reason to choose that career path. But at the same time, it's more than just a rational reason. It was a highly mimetic desire of mine because it's also the career that all of my classmates wanted to pursue. So we don't often take into account that social influence and we tend to hyper rationalize why we're pursuing the things that we're pursuing, not realizing, you know, the influence that others have had in shaping our very desires.

What about those people though, who seem to march to a different drummer? You know, every high school class has one or more of those people where most people go off and get married and have a job and have kids. But then there's always those few that, you know, go live on a mountaintop. So they didn't do what you're talking about so they have some other motivation certain people are more important to us than others you know we choose models of desire usually unconsciously and they're not all created equal so if there was a person who chose to pursue a very different path one reason may be that they happened to find a model of desire outside the fishbowl that we were all in, just to continue with the example of my

undergrad college experience. They may have had some transcendent model, somebody else that had meditated on a mountain before. They certainly weren't the first person to ever do that. So this is not to say that all human behavior is you know contagious and and memetic there are very various degrees of it but people have very different models of desire and you know I had some classmates whose models were very different than mine some of them had amalgamations of you know different people that had influenced them throughout their lives. So knowing this knowing that our desires are fueled by others, does

knowing it help you not do it? And then if you don't do it, if you don't allow yourself or you push back on those desires that are being driven by other people, well then what drives your new desires? Something has to drive them. Knowing it helps you be more intentional about choosing the models and not just having them chosen for you by the culture, by companies that are advertising to you. So you can't transcend, at least according to Rene Girard, who first named memetic desire in the late 1950s. The idea is not that you can transcend this. We're sort of mimetic by nature, by virtue of being human. We can't be completely anti-mimetic and just escape from this.

But we can be more intentional about who we're influenced by, right, and just knowing who's shaping our desires. And there is such a thing as what I call a thick desires. And these are the ones that have been built up kind of like solid rock formations over time, probably near the beginning of our life that, you know, are formed more of a core part of our identity and who we are, as opposed to the thin ones, the thin desires are the ones that come and go on a daily basis, even an hourly basis.

Social media peddles them to us all the time. And we can find ourselves with whiplash wanting one thing today, another thing tomorrow, or year by year, we're constantly switching jobs and not really understanding those forces that are acting on us. Do we have, though, some inherent desires that are acting on us do we have though some inherent desires that are us and and my example that i'm thinking of is say a baby a baby you know like when my son was an infant he had little little toys strapped to his his stroller and he liked the bee and it wasn't because somebody else liked bees. He was an infant.

He had no knowledge of that. But he really liked that bee. And that was just his desire. There are certainly objective qualities of things that are attractive to us. There's objective beauty. There are certain colors. We know that human attraction, there's a physiological basis for it. Pheromones are involved. There's all kinds of reasons why we have certain desires. But it's not limited only to the material sphere alone, to those objective qualities. And there can be cases when a baby, a child is attracted to something because it's bright and shiny. It's a bright and shiny

object. At the same time, it's sort of a both and here. At the same time, if you turn a bunch of toddlers loose in a room full of toys, one of them may pick up one object and have a certain level of fascination with it. You will also see the other children begin to be interested in sort of whatever the one little boy or little girl is holding up and expressing this deep interest in. So I think we can say that both things are involved. We are memetic but there are also certain reasons why you know we're attracted to certain people and to certain objects. You often hear people talk about they go into careers and then

decide that's not the career for them. And maybe like your undergraduate class, they went into a career because everybody else, it seemed like the thing to do. And then they realize once they get there that that's not for them. And so then how do you then define what is for you? Do you just look to some other role model and say, well, you know, I don't like what Bob did. I tried that. That didn't work. So let's see what Fred's up to. And I'll go do what Fred does. Or can you be much more introspective and say, well, what do I want to do?

I think we can learn a lot about our sense of identity and ourself by doing some serious introspection and in particular looking into our past and asking ourselves, you know, what was it that I've done in my life? You know, go back as early as you can go until, you know, little league baseball, fifth grade science class, whatever it is, and say, what are those things that I've done, those actions that I've undertaken that, you know, where I was in a state of flow, I kind of lost track of time and achieving whatever that action was brought me this deep sense of satisfaction. And if you can bubble up a few of those stories, three, four, five, begin to see if there's a pattern there, a pattern to your kind of core motivational

drive, because you're getting at some essence, something that has seemed to be with you for your whole life. And it's one way to kind of discern, you know, the thin desires from the thick. You mentioned that this theory of mimetic desire came from René Girard. Can you talk a little bit about him and how this came about? Rene Girard was a French social theorist who came to the U.S. shortly after World War II. He originally was at the University of Indiana, was at Johns Hopkins, and he eventually landed at Stanford, where he was for many years, and had some very famous students, the most famous of whom was probably Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal. So Girard taught there.

His background was in history, but his initial discovery of mimetic desire actually came from classic literature. He was sort of forced to teach a class on literature and was reading a lot of these books for the first time and noticed the way that the characters wanted things in the novels. And he saw that, in fact, they didn't just want anything spontaneously. And Girard triangulated that. He saw it in literature. Then he studied history, which is what his degree was in. And he realized that imitation goes far deeper than anybody had realized. Aristotle had said almost 2,500 years ago

that humans are the most imitative creatures in the world. Girard's discovery was that this imitation goes all the way down to the level of desire. Well, this is interesting because it seems like what you're saying is that people only desire things or mostly desire things because other people desire things, but it seems like people desire things because they really want them, not because other people want them. Anyway, I'm talking with Luke Burgess, and the name of his book is Wanting. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a 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 Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot.

Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. In a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. 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, Luke, what about when the desire to do something is driven maybe initially because somebody else has it, you want to imitate them. Like say a kid who watches a basketball player, an NBA player, and says, boy, I'd like to be like him. I'd like to do that. And then he tries playing basketball and he's really good at it.

And so the desire to continue with it isn't because somebody else has it. It's because he's really good at it. He enjoys it. That's a different, seems to me anyway, that's a different kind of desire. Absolutely. The initial decision to even try that, at one point in my life, I thought that I would be a professional basketball player too, but I'm 5'9", and I can't jump very high, and I've got a terrible jump shot. Other than that, though. Other than that, I sure had the desire as a young kid, you know, playing basketball growing up and in junior high. And then I realized very quickly that I am five, nine, and I'm probably not going to grow a whole lot more. So yes, you know,

we take those, these objective qualities and skill sets into account. And it certainly affected my desire as I became a little bit more of a realist. This is a very easy example with basketball, because we're talking about some, you know, some physical traits that make it much easier to make it to the NBA. It gets a lot trickier when we're talking about abstract things like career ambition and professional prestige and things like this. I mean, there are some things that you can be very, very good at. You know, just to give you an example, I'm pretty good with numbers and pretty good at math. And therefore, I did well in the world of corporate finance and on Wall Street. So, you know, by my

skill set that was telling me to keep pursuing that path, right, there was nothing that was going to quelch my desire. And, you know, my mimetic desire was raging. You know, I saw, you know, people, you know, getting bigger and bigger bonuses the longer that they stayed, measuring myself according to them. But I was totally miserable in that career. And it wasn't until I saw somebody that I respected who was a couple of years ahead of me in the investment banking kind of gauntlet and process leave and, you know, basically move to a farm in the Midwest and just decided he was going to live an incredibly different life. And it affected me tremendously. And I had to take stock, say, okay, Luke, you're, you are good at this, but that doesn't necessarily mean that this desire has is authentic or that it's going to lead you to, to ultimate fulfillment.

So what is an authentic desire? If our desires are driven by what other people want or have, then how do we figure out what our own authentic desire is? So authentic sort of, you know, comes comes from authorship, right? The word authorship. And we can be more or less authors of our desire, but probably not the only authors. So you're absolutely right. Our desires are sort of formed as part of this social process, but we can have more or less self-possession, more or less intentionality, more or less authorship over which ones we feed and which ones we starve. Just even being able to identify them is a good start. So I believe that human beings are fundamentally relational creatures. The self is relational. You can't understand who I am without understanding the relationships that I have in my life. I'm the

son of Leonida Burgess and the husband of Claire. So we're relational creatures. Our self is constituted partly through relationships. And the same is true of our desires. The idea of a hundred percent authentic desire, it's kind of like saying, well, what does it mean to be a hundred percent authentic person? Like as if, as if I just sort of constructed my, myself and my identity from a blank slate. And that's, that's really not the way that it works. We're always in relationship and working that out in a, in a dialogue, quite frankly, with other people. Yeah. Well, I've always thought it was interesting that, you know, most people, the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree that I've heard statistics that,

you know, people end up usually doing about as well as their parents adjusted for inflation and all that, that the examples it's very important, you know, to surround yourself with with the kinds of social media, where, you know, it may have been, I grew up in a small little town in West Michigan, where, you know, I, my models were kind of the kids that went to my high school, and we didn't have social media. Now, you know, I'm surrounded by billions of them 24 hours a day. So, you know, what does that mean, in terms of, you know, this idea of social proximity, and the way that people are influencing us. It seems to me that everything has changed in the last 10 or 15 years. Well, and it seems that when you look at your desires, it seems a lot of people now desire what celebrities desire because they can see celebrities, you know, the housewives of Beverly Hills in Atlanta, They can see it on social media. They can see it isn't just

the people around you like it used to be. It's everybody. And you can see how royalty lives and think, geez, I kind of like that. Yeah. And the it's why it's important to kind of put some barriers or boundaries up in our life, really. You know, what are we going to pay attention to? There's a lot of noise and we can't pay attention to everything. One of the tricky things with reality TV and social media and celebrity is that it seems to be that the lines are sort of being blurred now some of the biggest celebrities are people that seem the most like us not like otherworldly people that you know are billionaires that are featured on TV shows they're people that you know are taking home videos with their camera and putting them on YouTube and when we see them getting, you know, millions

of followers, it has a slightly different effect on us than seeing, you know, the Kardashians, for instance, who seem to kind of, you know, inhabit this other world that is kind of hard for us to relate to. But when we feel like we can deeply relate to other people on social media, it has almost a power of attraction over us in terms of our desires because we have more in common with them. And we can in some sense relate to them and compare ourselves to them even more. We can say, hey, that could be me. Desire is always looking into the future. It isn't about having, it's about wanting. So because everybody knows that like if you desire and you obsess about getting that new car and then you finally get it, well, within a month or so, it's not so exciting anymore.

And so you go on to desire something else. And it's that state of desire which can really never be satisfied. Yeah, so all desire has some element of transcendence to it. You know, it's always pushing us forward into the next thing. And when there's no desire, there's really no life. You know, we're dead. You know, desire is that thing that constantly propels us forward to transcend whatever circumstances that we find

ourselves in. So there is almost a religious dimension or a spiritual dimension to desire. There's some aspect or some quality of being that we seek, that we're constantly looking for. And desire is a mysterious and a beautiful thing. You know, we'll probably sort of never understand desire fully in this life, but it is always pushing us forward to the next thing. Yeah. See, that's what's so amazing to me about this is when you stop and think about it, desire is this really incredible, powerful force in all of humanity. It drives all of us to do the next thing. And it's really great to explore and understand it better

since it is such a powerful force. Luke Burgess has been my guest, and the name of his book is Wanting. You'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for coming on, Luke. I enjoyed the conversation. Thanks so much, Mike, for having me on. It's been a pleasure, and I really enjoyed the conversation. And Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice.

Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast,

Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. 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. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, 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. Who you are, how you look, how tall or short you are, it's all partly the result of evolution. Populations evolve. People, animals, fish, everything is evolving all the time. And interestingly, there's a lot of confusion about how evolution works. Some people believe we've stopped evolving.

Others believe that our modern world has interfered with where evolution was going and could have disastrous consequences. But Marlene Zuck disagrees. Marlene is an evolutionary biologist and author of the book Paleofantasy, What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live. And she's here to talk about how evolution works and how you are the result. Hi Marlene, welcome. Thanks for having me.

So why is it important to talk about evolution? Evolution is going on, and it goes on the way it goes on, so why talk about it? I'm an evolutionary biologist, which means that I study how evolution affects lots of things, mostly, in my case, animal behavior, but I'm also really interested in the way people think evolution affects their own lives. And people sometimes talk about evolution in a way that is not necessarily all that accurate. So one of the things I think is interesting to talk about is that everything that's alive right now is just as evolved or just as highly evolved as everything else that's alive right now.

So you don't really have more evolved species, which of course we always think is people, and less evolved species, whether you want to call that a worm or a crocodile or anything else. So when you say the idea that all these species are just as evolved, that's a question I think a lot of people have is, so we've evolved from apes, gorillas, whatever, but not all of them because they're still apes and gorillas. So here's the deal. We evolved from an ancestor that we share in common with modern-day gorillas and chimpanzees and bonobos and so forth. That ancestor looked like both of us but was not either one of us. So we did not evolve from gorillas.

Gorillas did not evolve from us. Instead, both of us had an ancestor, however many hundreds of thousands of years back, that looked like both of us. And both chimpanzees and gorillas and people have evolved since the split from that ancestor. And so that's really, you know, and that's why, you know, like the common creationist thing of like, well, if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? And, you know, because we didn't evolve from monkeys as we know monkeys today, us and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor that's a primate. So human beings

are still evolving, just like, you know, fish are still evolving, or gorillas are still evolving, or anything else. And how are we evolving? How do you know we're still evolving? Oh, lots of ways. So, okay, brief refresher course. What I mean by we're still evolving is that the kinds of genes we have in populations are changing. And you can look at that by understanding how stuff has changed genetically over time. And we can show that populations have changed in lots of ways over time. One of my favorite examples is looking at how human beings can now easily digest milk because, of course, we're mammals, and mammals, while they drink milk from their mothers as infants, usually lose the ability to digest milk at weaning. And so it's not just that they stop, it's that they can't digest it anymore because they lack an enzyme that allows them to break down the sugar in milk. So they don't have

lactase, which allows you to break down lactose, which is the sugar that's in milk. Human beings, or at least a proportion of them, still have that enzyme and can, you know, I had milk in my coffee just this morning. Why can I do that? Because of evolution. And what happened was that anywhere from 5 to 10,000 years ago, there were herding peoples who kept cattle and they kept them for hides and for meat, not for milk, but if they could use the milk, and if there was a genetic variant in the population that could digest the milk, because there's genetic variation for everything, you know, what you can eat, how tall you are, if there was somebody who could do that, then that somebody was able to get a food source,, anthropologists speculate, a source of uncontaminated fluid that nobody else could, and that gave them an advantage. So they had more kids than the people

that couldn't digest the milk, and their kids inherited that variation that allowed them to break down milk, and so there you go. That meant that the population contained people with different genes than it had generations before. And what it's led to is about 40% of people on earth can digest dairy. And we've evolved from our ancestors. So if you say, oh, no, no, it's not natural to have dairy products because other mammals don't have it. Well, sure, other mammals don't have it, but we've evolved and we've changed. And so that's just one small example, but it's a good one because it's really well understood and we know a lot about the genes that have changed. And so we hear a lot about how the way we live our life is not how we evolved to be,

that we sit around when we evolved to move and that kind of thing. Is that a fair statement? Well, yes and no. So in a sense, sure, if you put people on a couch and feed them, you know, cheese puffs and soda, then that's really not how their bodies work best, and their bodies don't work best that way because we didn't evolve with cheese puffs and soda. So in a sense it's true. But at the same time, there wasn't any magical point in our history where we could go, oh, phew, you know, we've now stopped evolving and we've reached the pinnacle and we're done.

And that gets back to my earlier point that, you know, evolution is continuous and it's always happening because you don't ever get to a point where you say, oh, well, that was fun, but it's over now and we can go on and, you know, like binge on Netflix. It's just not how it works. And so does it work in the sense that we evolve to get better or we just evolve to adapt to what we've got? The latter. So better, of course, is a value judgment, and you know, like you could say,

oh, well, it's better now than it was before we lacked the gene to digest milk, but that's only true if you, you know, need to digest milk. I mean, for people who can't digest milk, are they better than people who can or worse? I mean, it only makes sense in the context of the environment you're in. So if you're in an environment where you need to drink milk in order to survive, then yeah, it's better to be able to digest lactose. But if you're not, then it kind of doesn't matter.

But are we evolving to be better specimens, healthier mentally, physically, or do, again, do we just evolve because of what's in front of us? The latter, again, because what does better specimen mean? So doing better only means, you know, it's all about how many offspring you leave. And under some circumstances, you might leave more. Under some circumstances, you know, it's all about how many offspring you leave, and under some circumstances you might leave more, under some circumstances you might leave less. Yeah, right. But, well, there's potentially some objective milestones like, you know, we now live longer than we used to, that's probably a good thing, and that's better than not. Well, we think it's a good thing, but there's lots of organisms that don't live as long,

and then there's other organisms that live longer. Are they better than us, or are we just better than any organism we don't live as long as? No, no, I'm not comparing us to other animals, other creatures. We don't evolve with other creatures. We evolve from who we used to be. And so what I'm asking is, are we getting better in the sense of, for example, we walk on two feet. We didn't always walk on two feet. And now that we do walk on two feet, a lot of people have back problems and things. Are we, is evolution in the process of fixing that so the back problems go away at some point? And if that is the case,

then I think you could make the case that then evolution is making us better. That's a really good point, because everything's in the process of evolving, and we think that, oh, you know, being bipedal means that, you know, as you say, we have back pain, or, you know, it's difficult for women to give birth, or whatever, but everything in evolution has trade-offs. And you could look at lots of other animals and, okay, let's take guppies, okay, you know, the little aquarium fish. So a guppy can either have lots of fairly small babies, which is really good because having lots of babies from an evolutionary standpoint is awesome,

or it can have fewer babies, but if it has fewer babies, then they're bigger. Well, bigger babies is also good because if they're bigger, then they're less likely to get eaten by a predator in the stream that they're in, you know, out in nature, not in your aquarium. So how did guppy baby size evolve? Well, it evolved as a trade-off. So depending on the circumstances that you're in, if you're in a stream where there's lots of predators, you're likely to have fewer larger babies. And so how fast does evolution work? I mean, how much time has to pass before you start to say, oh, look, look at that.

That's changed. Really fast. It can happen, you know, again, if we're taking as a definition kind of the school book one of changes in the genes that make up a population, not an individual, but a population. So individuals don't evolve, but populations do, then it can happen very quickly. It can happen because, you know, some individuals are having different numbers of kids than other individuals. It's been demonstrated that, and there have been a lot of really cool studies of this in humans, where you can look at changes in things like height and weight and the proportions of them in the space of maybe 40 years.

Well, that's it. Because I remember asking someone, if you go back to the 1800s, the 1700s, people were substantially shorter on average. And you can tell that by going into houses that are still around from back then and the doorways are pretty low. But now we're taller. Is that evolution, or is that just because we have better diets, or what? Well, so it's both, absolutely. And that's actually another really good thing to think about, because, of course, all characteristics, whether they're physical or behavioral or anything else, get input from the genes and input from the environment. And it's really hard to say, okay, the change in height,

which is a really good one to look at, is just due to changes in diet, even though we know that diet affects how tall you grow, absolutely. But we also know that how tall you grow is affected by your genes because tall parents on average have tall children and short parents have short children. But take kids of short parents and you can feed them a lot and they're still not going to get to be as tall on average as the kids of tall parents because it's both and it has to be. And so I'm willing to suggest that since the 1800s, there's been, I mean, it depends on whether people who were shorter had an advantage or

people who were taller had an advantage. There's some suggestion that people who are taller have an advantage and they might, you know, have had more kids. And so if they have more kids, then that means that genes associated with being tall are more common in the population. But it also doesn't negate that having a better diet increases your growth. We tend to think of evolution, or I tend to think of evolution as a primarily physical thing. But what about mentally? Do we evolve mentally? Or do we just change because we get smarter and we understand things better? Well, as somebody who works on behavior, you know, I think behavior evolves the same way that other things do.

And we know that, I mean, again, think about other animals. So other animals behave in certain ways. Of course, that has something to do with their genes. It also has something to do with their environment. Otherwise, you know, all animals would behave the same and you could sit down with your dog and have a heart-to-heart discussion about, you know, politics or, you know, the way they like their food or when they do and don't want to go out for a walk. And obviously you can't do that, for which I suppose we can all be grateful. But the point is that their behaviors evolved just like their bodies

and, you know, everything else has evolved. So has ours. Our brains have evolved and our brains are physical and our brains and our nervous systems have a lot to do with our behavior, right? So I've actually gotten really interested recently in the way people often want to set behavior apart as like, oh, but that's just only affected by, at least in people, like, oh, it's just affected by culture. And so, you know, it doesn't matter in terms of the biology, but it has to matter in terms of

biology because behavior is a manifestation of our nervous systems and our genes and our environment. And so is our, you know, liver size or any other characteristic. But somehow we're more kind of weirded out by it when it's our behavior. I wonder too, if because we are so intelligent compared to, you know, an oak tree, does that cause lots of other problems like mental illness and things like that, that other species don't have because they're not smart enough to figure that out. Ooh, the question of whether other species have mental illnesses is a really hot topic and also something I'm kind of interested in.

So there's a great quote from a book called Animal Madness, the author of which I can't remember at the moment, in which the author says, I'm paraphrasing here, that, you know, anybody with a mind could be reasonably expected to lose it from time to time. So that, I suppose, puns on the question of whether you think other animals have minds, but certainly other animals can behave in ways that seem like they're mentally dysfunctional. Whether you could qualify it as, you know, exactly the kind of mental illnesses that people have is not clear. Dogs, for example, are well known for having a number of behavioral slash mental disorders. There's one that's been intensively studied called canine compulsive disorder, and it's related to obsessive compulsive disorder in humans. We don't call it

obsessive in dogs because obsessive implies that you know what's going on in somebody's mind, like that they're thinking repetitively about something and we don't know what dogs are thinking. But in dogs, like in people, the disorder consists of normal behaviors that are done too much. So with dogs, they'll like lick their flanks over and over and over again, or they'll turn in circles and turn in circles and turn in circles repetitively. And of course, in humans, they'll do things like check to see whether the door is locked, or they'll straighten papers, or they'll wash their hands over and over and over again. So there's a lot of similarities. Does that mean that they're experiencing exactly what humans are?

We're not sure, but clearly it suggests that humans don't have a monopoly on dysfunctions that have to do with behavior. When we do things as humans because we can, does it affect evolution? And I guess an example of this might be, okay, so we invented shoes. So is that going to affect how rough and tough our feet develop? Because they don't need to be rough and tough like they used to be because we have shoes. So first of all, there isn't any like ideal environment for your feet to evolve in. It's always evolving in some environment. But maybe a better example is eyesight. Lots of people, including me, I don't know, maybe you, wear corrective lenses of some kind. And, you know, back in the old days, probably, you know, we would have been eaten by a saber-toothed tiger because we couldn't see it coming. And now there's lots

more variation in how well our eyes work simply because there's no selection against it. So people with bad eyesight can survive and reproduce, whereas back in the day they probably couldn't. So yeah, there's this constant back and forth between how we respond to our environment and then how evolution occurs. But that's true for lots of other organisms as well. It's not just with people, but people are certainly a really good example of it.

Is there any reason to think that as humans, because of our intelligence, we do things that have either sped up or slowed down evolution, or does evolution just march on? No, the rate of evolution is super interesting to people, and lots of people are studying it. So yes, it's very possible that we're doing things that speed up the rate of evolution. Just having a really big population, which humans have,

whether you could attribute that to our intelligence or not is an interesting question, but just having a big population means that there's lots more genetic variation out there for evolution to act on. There's lots of things that humans do. And also, of course, we modify our environment in tons and tons of ways. The shoes is a good example. A bigger example, of course, is healthcare. An even bigger example might be contraception. So we control our reproduction in a way that no other organism on Earth does.

So where does this all go? Do we ever stop evolving? It seems like that can't possibly be true. I don't see how we could stop evolving, because all evolution requires is for there to be individuals that differ in their characteristics, and some of those characteristics end up being passed on more than others. So I don't see how you could put a stop to that unless you, I mean, we have put a stop to it a little bit by tightly controlling breeding, not in people, obviously, but like in

our domestic animals. So, you know, we can do that sort of, but it's a big thing to try and do, and it won't happen in nature. But what about, as you pointed out, eyesight is a good example of, it doesn't matter now, because we can correct your eyesight, so people with bad eyesight aren't dying off, and we can control for certain diseases that would have killed people in the past that now doesn't. So I guess you could say we're artificially keeping people alive, and how does that affect evolution? Oh, yeah, absolutely. We are totally changing the trajectory that evolution would have taken if we didn't change the environment we're living in.

I mean, that's absolutely true. Whether one could say for certain, oh, it would have gone this way or that way or the other way, I don't think anybody's prepared to say. But I think the other point is it's not like we've taken something. People sometimes act like we were going along this particular foreordained path and then something happened, whether you want to call it the Industrial Revolution, whether you want to call it the onset of agriculture, whether you want to, I don't know what you want to call it, like the invention of computers, whatever you want to talk about.

And then, oh my God, we all kind of fell from grace, and now we're going somewhere we're not supposed to be going. There is no supposed to be going in evolution. We weren't heading toward anything. It's not like all going toward a goal that we've now lost sight of. There is no goal. Yeah, it just goes the way it goes as fast as it goes. And it's interesting to get an understanding of how that all works. Marlene Zuck has been my guest.

She's an evolutionary biologist, and the name of her book is Paleofantasy, What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Marlene. All right. Thanks a lot. When children get hurt, you as the grown-up have to be careful how you react. For example, if a child falls and cuts themselves, you don't want to say, Oh my God, look at all that blood. Oh no.

Because when kids get hurt, they check to see how others react to what just happened. Then they react depending on what they see. So it's better to stay calm and comforting because your kids will defer to your reaction. If you get mad and say something like, I told you not to climb on that tree, well, that really doesn't help the situation one little bit. But there is more to it than just keeping a child calm and reassured.

If your child sees you get all excited, they get excited, which can release adrenaline, which can make bleeding worse and aggravate other symptoms. The calmer you remain, the calmer your child will be. And that's always a good thing. In fact, in the study, kids who were reassured and kept calm actually did better throughout the treatment process of going to the hospital, and they recovered quicker from their injuries. And that is something you

should know. I need your review. If you haven't left one, well, even if you have left one, if it's been a while, leave another one. On Apple Podcasts, you can leave a review of this podcast, and I would appreciate it. 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 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. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth an unlikely partnership to catch the killer,

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