Something You Should Know - Why You Are Delusional (and Thank Goodness You Are) & The Flaws in Human Evolution

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please, read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual.

Starting point is 00:00:18 That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. Today on Something You Should Know, ever roll down the back window of your car when you're driving and get that horrible thumping noise? I'll explain why. Then we're all delusional, a little, and it's a good thing. For instance, overconfidence is a delusion. If you are moderately overconfident, not too much,

Starting point is 00:00:52 in some of these competitive situations, like a job interview, the somewhat overconfident person is given more status, even when it turns out that they're not as smart as they think they are. Also, a neat little trick to get your silverware to look like new, and the flaws in human evolution. Those flaws cause a lot of problems, like back pain, poor eyesight, and other trouble. There's this crazy thing going on where sperm counts in Western populations are just declining precipitously, cut in half in the last generation, and there's no sign of it slowing down.

Starting point is 00:01:26 All this today on Something You Should Know. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not.

Starting point is 00:01:50 With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. 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 hello welcome to something you should know this just happened to my son and i the other day when

Starting point is 00:02:21 we were in the car and he was in the back seat, and I imagine it's happened to you as well, where you open one of the back windows while the car is going relatively quickly and you get that deafening, like thumping sound in your eardrums. What is it? Well, it's commonly known as wind buffeting. It's an aerodynamic effect on incoming air clashing with the normal airflow of the car. It's worse in the back because the air has nowhere to go. With the front windows, the air has a little more room to circulate. The effect is actually worse now in newer cars because newer cars are more aerodynamically efficient. Interestingly, a lot of people think it's just their car. And while some vehicle designs are worse than others,

Starting point is 00:03:15 almost all cars have a wind buffeting threshold. And what is the solution to get rid of it? Well, you either have to just roll the window back up, or if you open another window in the car, that way the pressure inside the vehicle stabilizes and the buffeting stops, or at least minimizes. And that is something you should know. You are delusional. And while you might take offense to that statement, it's actually a good thing.

Starting point is 00:03:51 You'd have a very hard time getting through your life, or even getting through the day, without deluding yourself about yourself and the world you live in. But wait a minute, you might be saying. When I think of someone who's delusional, it's someone who is not in touch with reality. And I am in touch with reality, so how can I be delusional? Well, listen to my guest, Stuart Weiss. Stuart is a behavioral scientist, teacher, and writer who's written a lot about superstition. And his latest book is called The Uses of Delusion, Why It's Not Always Rational to Be Rational. Hi, Stuart, welcome. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me on.

Starting point is 00:04:28 Sure. So let's start with an example of what you mean by how we delude ourselves. Well, I would consider something like being overconfident, having a overly positive view of yourself or, for example, of your spouse or life partner. Those are things that I would consider simple delusions. And some of those have very, very beneficial effects for us in our lives. Are most delusions, do you think, based on how you've defined it, are most delusions that we have about ourself? Many of them are.

Starting point is 00:05:08 Many of the ones, the important ones that I think do help us are self-delusions. They're directed at how we see ourselves. But also, we need to have certain delusions about other people in order to function well. For example, the idea that your spouse is going to be the same person that you met and that you understood them to be at the beginning, for the most part, that is an important thing that we can count on it being consistent and their personality being consistent. However, there is considerable evidence, and this may come as a surprise, but there's considerable evidence that under the right circumstances, people's personalities change drastically. But no one would enter into a relationship and get married unless they believed in the consistency of that person's personality.

Starting point is 00:06:08 Well, what about people who just believe things? Well, like flat earthers. There are people who believe the earth is flat. I think they have an organization. Is believing the earth is flat a delusion or not? Well, I mean, you could consider it a delusion or just a false belief. Those kinds of beliefs are ones that I would suggest are probably not useful. It's interesting that the flat earth people don't seem to suffer too much from it. I mean, they obviously get some ridicule from people who have a more accurate view of the world.

Starting point is 00:06:45 But I wouldn't put that in the category of a delusion that has positive benefits for us. It may for them as individuals, within a social group, they may get some support that they wouldn't otherwise get, but it's not a general delusion that I would think would be useful for everyone. But the kinds of things I'm talking about are much more basic.

Starting point is 00:07:08 For example, one of the things I am concerned with is how people deal with death, you know, the death of a loved one. Some people feel, at least for a period of time, that the person is going to come back, that they're not really gone and somehow they're going to come back. You know, Joan Didion wrote an entire book called The Year of Magical Thinking in which she had that same sense of that her husband was going to come back. And, you know, not everyone would react that way. Death is a very personal thing, and people react to it quite differently. But there doesn't seem to be any harm in that belief for her and for those people who need it. So, it's a delusion, and it's serving that individual for a period of time, at least. And it is not something that really is going to make you inaccurate in your daily life in

Starting point is 00:08:07 the way that many other beliefs that people have are. Like believing that vaccines are not effective. That's not a delusion that I think we should encourage at all. So take the delusion of being overly confident in yourself. Do you come to that belief, that delusion, by choice? Or in other words, do you say, you know, confident people do better in the world, so I choose now to be overly confident in myself, and I'm going to believe that from now on? Or does it creep in some other way?

Starting point is 00:08:44 You see, that's the big question. I'm going to believe that from now on, or does it creep in some other way? Let me say, that's the big question. You've hit on one of the issues that how do you become a confident or overconfident person? And that's something that I think we have less control over. I don't think it's something you can just sort of fake it until you make it. There are overconfident people, and there are people who are always going to be more timid and less confident. But the reality is that if you are moderately overconfident, obviously, this is one of those things that can go too far. But if you are moderately overconfident, you do well in a number of situations, competitive situations, work situations, also in some dating situations, people who are overconfident

Starting point is 00:09:29 are seen to be attractive. And so, if you are moderately overconfident, not too much, it is true that if you're too overconfident and sort of brash, then people don't like you very much. But in some of these competitive situations, like a job interview or a group work setting, the somewhat overconfident person is given more status, even when it turns out that they're not as smart as they think they are. But your sense is, or from your research into this, you can't choose a delusion and embrace it and live it. It can't just be a conscious choice to now believe that I'm better looking than I am, or that I have more hair than I do. You can't just decide to delude yourself or can you? No, I think in most of these cases, you either are going to have this delusion or not. So I don't think that in most cases, these are things that you can choose.

Starting point is 00:10:36 You're right about that, that the way you respond to to illness or to the death of a loved one, those are going to be baked in by the time those things happen. And you're either going to respond that way or not. But the point of my research is to just recognize that there are some things that don't seem rational, right? I've spent much of my career trying to get people to be more rational. And what I discovered was that, well, you know, there are a couple of times when doing the rational thing really isn't best. And I kind of felt like I had to acknowledge that with a bit of humility, that although reason is the way to go in most circumstances, there are these examples where people do things that are unreasonable, and yet they're definitely better for them than the other choice.

Starting point is 00:11:30 Like believing in Santa Claus, perhaps. Well, believing in things unseen is one of the things that does benefit people. Not everyone is going to believe, right, in a religion or in superstition, which I've spent a lot of time studying as well. But the result of those beliefs is often positive. A person who engages in a superstition prior to something that is tense, a big job interview, a sports performance, that person is going to, at least in the moment, is going to feel better. It will help them deal with the tension of that moment. Whether it helps them in their performance in the job interview is a little bit more controversial. The evidence is not as strong, but clearly they feel better in the moment as they engage in that superstition. And there's good evidence that religious belief or at least religious practice makes people happier, makes them better in terms of their giving to charity, even non-religious charities.

Starting point is 00:12:42 So there are benefits to religious belief. But again, whether you end up being religious or not, or superstitious or not, it's typically factored in earlier by earlier experiences. Well, the superstition thing really fascinates me because I don't think there's a person on the planet who hasn't invoked some superstition to try to achieve something, to get a job or to win the race. If I do this, then that'll help me achieve it. And yet, if you really press them on it, they'll tell you they don't really believe that it helps, but they still do it anyway. Right. Yeah, no, that's a very good, you've hit on an interesting, one of the more interesting

Starting point is 00:13:30 things about superstition is that people are often of two minds about it and that they can rationally say, this is silly, this is not going to affect whether I do well in the job interview or in the soccer game, but I feel better if I do it. And if I don't do it, especially if it's a learned superstition that you've acquired through your family or through some other social means that you've grown up always with a lucky charm or some other kind of superstition that you've adopted, you're going to feel better if you do it, even though on some level you may recognize that it's silly. There is no real magic that will make you perform better. It's just going to happen, you know, based on your abilities. But, you know, as much as I might want to encourage people not to be superstitious and to be rational, I can't honestly

Starting point is 00:14:34 say there's a harm in most cases. And there's good evidence that it does make people feel better. So I just wanted to acknowledge that. We're talking about, well, we're talking about just how delusional we all really are. My guest is Stuart Weiss, who is a behavioral scientist and author of the book, The Uses of Delusion, Why It's Not Always Rational to Be Rational. 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.

Starting point is 00:15:32 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. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:16:12 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.

Starting point is 00:16:56 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. So, Stuart, as you were saying, it is so universal that people are superstitious to some degree that you would think it's human nature. But as I said, and as you have confirmed, people know that superstitions probably don't really do anything, and yet we do them anyway. I wonder why. As you point out, it is human nature. There's no question about it that

Starting point is 00:17:40 we want to control our environment. It has been true from the beginning of time that the world is a scary place. It's an uncertain place, and we need whatever we can to eke out a little bit more control and to be able to predict what is going to happen in the future. So, that's where superstition comes from. Large groups of people, many of them very well educated and smart people, engage in superstitions on a regular basis. And it's simply because it gives you that illusion that you have eked out some more control, that that thing you're hoping for will actually happen, and that thing you're afraid of won't. I think it's always going to be with us. It is a basic part of human nature. I wouldn't encourage people to

Starting point is 00:18:32 be superstitious at all. And I've done much to push people in the opposite direction. But it's understandable. It's completely understandable from a psychological viewpoint why people are superstitious. Well, yeah. I mean, if you, how would you get through the day? How would you get through your life if you didn't delude yourself that you're capable and confident to do that? If you just, if you went the other way and thought you were a loser and a complete failure, well, that doesn't serve you at all. True. And in fact, there's a prominent theory that the difference between people who are depressed and people who aren't depressed is that people who are depressed see themselves realistically, and that the rest of us see ourselves with a rosy colored glasses, you know, that we see ourselves

Starting point is 00:19:26 in much better shape than we really are. And we see the world more optimistically. And so the ability to sort of overpredict good things coming in the future for yourself is probably part of good mental health in general. But for the most part, it is optimism. It is the positive view of the world that gets us up in the morning, keeps us going, and keeps us happy. Well, it seems from what you're saying is that these delusions kind of come and go. I mean, the example you gave of having this delusion that someone who has died is coming back, you know, it doesn't do any real harm and it gives people some comfort. And I guess at some point it just kind of melts away, right?

Starting point is 00:20:16 Yes, I think there are a couple of different forms. It's interesting, the way people deal with the death of a loved one is very unique to them. There are many different ways to do it. And it often reflects the nature of the relationship when the person was alive. And so you do have the situation, not unlike Joan Didion, where they just need some time to deal with the situation. And this is one of the ways that they do. They believe for a time that the person, and Joan Didion is very, as you would imagine, very articulate in talking about it. She said, I knew that he was gone. I had put his ashes in the crypt and I knew that he was gone, but I still kept his shoes in the closet because I thought he

Starting point is 00:21:06 would need them when he came back. And so, you know, there's just a sense that this has been a shock for the individual. They need some time to deal with it. And apparently this is a common way for some people to deal with it. You know, counselors say, you don't challenge the person and say, hey, snap out of it. You know, you let them be where they need to be. And after a period of time, they do get over it. There are people also who believe that they have an ongoing relationship. They talk to their dead spouse. They are aware of the presence of the dead spouse. And that can go on for years in many cases. And that too is often a positive thing as long as the relationship in life was quite positive. So I don't think many people would believe that you could do that, that you could have

Starting point is 00:22:00 an ongoing relationship with someone who's dead but and certainly science doesn't support that but who are we in that situation to say that that person isn't isn't engaging in a delusion that that is helping them and i i think that's a that's part of what i wanted to acknowledge in this research about delusions but there had to have come a day where Joan Didion threw out those shoes. Yes, I believe that's true. I mean, she calls it my year of magical thinking. And so I think she took a year. He died around Christmas time. And by the following Christmas, she had sort of come around. But that seems to me to be obviously a beneficial thing for her. And despite the fact that it's technically irrational, who are we to say anything wrong about that? What about when people say or give the impression that perhaps they're, you know,

Starting point is 00:23:06 they're better looking than they really are, or they're taller than they really are? You quote somebody in the book that sent out a tweet that said, you know, every man who's 5'7 believes he's 5'9. Well, is it that he believes he's 5'9 or he just says he's 5'9", knowing he's fibbing a little bit? Or is that one of these delusions that make people feel better so that they're a little more confident and function better in the world? People feel often that they are taller, better looking, you know, smarter than they really are. And while that's in one sense humorous, what I'm suggesting is that they probably benefit. The alternative of believing that they really are 5'7 would be, you know, worse for them. But is it the case that people believe they're better looking

Starting point is 00:24:05 or that they're taller or that the, is it a case that they believe it all the time? Or is it more like Joan Didion where she, you know, you're really five, seven, but sometimes you feel like you're five. I mean, where is the blur? I think that there, I think that there are people do it quite differently. There's some people of course, who have a negative view of themselves, and that's probably not helpful. And again, as I say, how you get to be one of the good looks or that they're 5'7", but they feel in certain circumstances, and it would be a positive thing if they did, that at least their height, for example, is not a handicap, that they have many good qualities. And the classic statistic along these lines is that something like 80% of people in the U.S. believe that they're better than average drivers. And if you just think about that for a second, you realize that that's not possible, right? Not 80% of people

Starting point is 00:25:26 can't be better than average. Average is 50%. And so we just do have inflated views of ourselves. And there are undoubtedly circumstances in which that's not a good thing, because we'll be disappointed. But I think on a day-to-day basis, in terms of just like getting through your day, that a bit of overconfidence, a bit of a shine on your actual abilities and personality is good. Will keep you going, keep you trying.

Starting point is 00:26:03 And, you know, that can't be a bad thing. Well, it's odd to think that delusion plays such an important role in our lives, but as you point out, delusion and superstition are really kind of, I guess, adaptive tools that make it easier to get through the day and through your life. I've been speaking with Stuart Vise. He is a behavioral scientist and author of the book, The Uses of Delusion, Why It's Not Always Rational to Be Rational. And you'll find a link to his book in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:26:36 Thanks, Stuart. Thank you. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In 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.

Starting point is 00:26:56 Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister 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.

Starting point is 00:27:25 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.

Starting point is 00:27:42 So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. While we like to think of ourselves as the most evolved creatures on the planet, the physical human form is really not designed and built particularly well in a lot of different ways. I mean, if we're such elegant specimens, how come so many humans have back trouble, blurry vision, or dental problems? Why haven't those things evolved out of us? Well, that's what Alex Bezaridis wanted to know. Alex is a professor of biology and author of the book Evolution Gone Wrong

Starting point is 00:28:25 The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work or Don't Hi Alex, thanks for coming on Thanks for having me, I'm excited to be here So what caused you to think maybe evolution had gone wrong and to take a look at this in the first place? I teach at a little college in Idaho and so I teach a lot of anatomy and physiology and you go through all the systems of the body, obviously. And one of the ones that

Starting point is 00:28:49 always sort of got me thinking about it was when I would talk about the teeth and jaw. And I'd ask the class, how many of you, you know, how many of you have had braces? How many of you have had your wisdom teeth pulled? How many of you, you know, and we'd be a big class, like 60, 70, 80 students. And in the whole class, there'd just be a couple of students that had straight teeth that had never had any kind of correction. And I got to thinking like, boy, that seems awfully strange. Like our teeth basically don't fit in our mouths. Like what is, what's the story behind that? So that really got me thinking about it and reading about that topic a lot. And then that sort of led me down a path of, well, I wonder if there are other places in the body that don't really work as well as you think they should. And so then I started thinking about the way that so

Starting point is 00:29:27 many people require correction to their vision, the way that we're so susceptible to choking because the opening for our esophagus is right next to the opening for our trachea. That one's a uniquely human problem because there is a fail-safe built in for all other mammals of the epiglottis sort of sits up there and high in their throats and protects them. But in humans, the epiglottis and the trachea, or sorry, and the larynx, the features of the larynx, they all lowered during human evolution to allow for speech. And it took away our fail-safe for choking. And so then humans are uniquely prone to choking compared to other mammals.

Starting point is 00:30:05 Could it just be that the reason humans are prone to choking or we have trouble fitting all of our teeth in our mouth, that it's because we're a work in progress. We're still evolving. Our evolution is evolving. And one day we'll fix all these things. I think it's a good way to think of it. Like I think of us as a transitional species all the time. Um, we're a little, we're a little bit, you know, in this situation, that's kind of unique because we're the only sort of member of

Starting point is 00:30:34 our tribe that, um, survived through the, through the gauntlet. And so we're the only, you know, transitional one. And we just have, you know, you have to hope that we make it out to the other end in a couple of million years. And I do think some of these things will, I mean, teeth are shrinking, for example, teeth are a good example, like teeth, human teeth and jaws are independent structures. So the jaw has gotten a lot smaller over evolutionary time and the teeth just haven't quite caught up yet, but they are shrinking and given enough time, I think they will become a better fit in people's mouths. You meet people that don't even have 32 teeth in their mouths and didn't have to have wisdom teeth pulled. They only ever had, you know, 30 or 28 coming in. So already there are people being born with fewer numbers of teeth

Starting point is 00:31:12 and teeth are getting smaller. So that's a good example where I think given enough time, the problems might work themselves out. Other ones, I don't think, I don't know, the issues like the back, I think we're kind of going to be stuck with things like back problems. I mean, you just take a spine that was the spine of a quadruped for millions and millions and millions and millions of years and put the animal up on two feet. And I think humans are probably going to be stuck with back problems for as long as there are humans. Here's something I've always wanted to ask someone like you who knows this stuff. So humans are this evolved species, and yet the business of keeping the species going, that is, having babies, if you look back over human history, it's been a pretty risky business.

Starting point is 00:31:58 A lot of babies don't make it. A lot of mothers die in childbirth. Is that a uniquely human thing or riskier, but, but childbirth is uniquely wounding to humans. And it is, it is that way largely because of the incredible explosion of the human brain. I mean, it's tripled in size in the last few million years and it's just, it's left us at the point where finally now it sort of feels like natural selection is, is, is putting a check on the system and, and it sort of feels like natural selection is putting a check on the system and it doesn't seem like our heads can really get any bigger and still be able to be bird. Of course, then you add modern technologies and C-sections and things like that to the determinant as to what happens to us and where we go, what we become. But now, recently, we have technology. Technology can address a lot of the problems from simply putting glasses on somebody who has blurry vision to hip replacements for people who have hip problems that they used to have to suffer with. Makes me wonder, you know, a few hundred years ago, what did people do? Oh, I just think they mostly were in a lot of pain.

Starting point is 00:33:37 That's the answer to the question. I mean, they didn't live to be nearly as long. So, so, you know, when your back started bothering you when you were 30 years old, maybe you only had another decade or two to live to deal with your back pain, but I think you mostly just, just suffered through and, and now you're right. There are a lot of options, but they're going to be, they're going to be, if there are still podcasts in hundreds of years, they're going to look back on what we did for dealing with our back pain or dealing with, you know, with childbirth or things, you know, they're, they're going to look back on the methods that we use now as cruel. The one I like to bring up, because I've gone through it,

Starting point is 00:34:10 is an ACL replacement. For an ACL replacement, the two most common procedures are to either take a tendon out of your knee or one out of your hamstring and first harvest that tissue from your own body and then use it to make you a new ACL. And I guarantee there will be some day, I don't know if it'll be in my lifetime or if it'll be in the next lifetime, but it's not going to be that far down the road where that is seen as just absolutely

Starting point is 00:34:35 barbaric and crazy. They're going to look back on it like we do with bloodletting with leeches. They're going to think, my goodness, did you really open up their own body and make them donate their own anatomy to use in the surgery? I know you're more interested in some of the things that have gone wrong with human evolution, but what about some of the things that have gone right? There must be some pretty amazing things that we've evolved into. I think I am more interested in what's gone wrong, but as you read about what's gone wrong, you obviously can't help but read about what's gone right.

Starting point is 00:35:09 And one thing that jumps to mind for me are our hands. So when humans became bipedal, and there's all these different ideas about why that happened in the first place, that's a whole other discussion and question, but when we became bipedal, one of the obvious things that happens there is the freeing of the hands, and it's not that long after that

Starting point is 00:35:27 point that we start to employ those hands and put them to use and and over time our hands have changed and and become these incredibly nimble structures I didn't realize until I started reading about it how different our grip is from other great apes and other primates like we're the only ones if you take your thumb and touch it to the end of your pinky and Your ring finger in your middle finger We're the only primate that can do that and we have these really really long Thumbs and fingers that allow us to grip. I didn't realize that like if you hand a baseball bat to a chimpanzee

Starting point is 00:35:57 They can't really do much with it. Their grip is more made for swinging and and sort of grasping branches But we're the only one that can grab something and swing it with any force or pick up a ball and throw it hard. And also that same sort of evolution of the hand has given us this incredible adroitness, but not this ability to like to sew or to pick up a pencil or to type

Starting point is 00:36:21 or to do all these things that other animals can't do. So that for me, that's a place. And if I was to write the counter evolution gone, right, there would definitely have to be a chapter about the hand and how our nimble hands have, have, I think they are sort of as, as much a part of the human experience as our giant brains. What about our thumbs? We, we've all heard that, you know, having opposable thumbs has been, you know, really important. Is it really important? I think it's incredibly important.

Starting point is 00:36:49 And the human thumb is, they call it fully opposable for that idea that it's even more nimble than the opposable thumb of other primates. So, yeah, I think all these ideas that we can come up with with our brains about all these things that we can build and put together, a lot of that just isn't even possible without our hands and i think the the thumb is an absolutely integral piece of that equation what else what else because that's really interesting what else besides the hand has really helped propel us to where we are i mean the obvious other answer to that is is the brain. I mean, those to me are the two most human qualities there are, the ways that we can use our hands and our brains. I mean, when humans became bipedal, the brain was maybe like about 400 or 500 cubic centimeters

Starting point is 00:37:36 in volume. So if you just took somebody's brain and lopped it off and filled up the skull with water, that's how much water you could fit in there. And in the couple million years since then, it's been really more like four or five million years, in that amount of time, the brain has tripled in volume, tripled in volume, which is kind of hard to even wrap your head around. So that's another obvious one.

Starting point is 00:38:00 I'd have to think if there's other, most of the other places I could think of are things that have suffered. Our feet have definitely suffered in the process. Our back has suffered in the process. How have our feet suffered in the process? So you think about what feet used to be used for. Feet used to be sort of used in our relatively recent past in the way that, that hands were used. They needed to be flexible and they have all these bones. There's just gobs and gobs of bone down there in every foot that, that that made them these flexible nimble structures that we could use to grab grasp and grip in the same way hands were and then all of a sudden all right feet you're done doing that

Starting point is 00:38:32 now you just have to go pound around on the hard earth and that foot that was really really flexible and sort of best at flexibility is not good at just absorbing a pounding on the ground our feet would be a lot happier if we had stayed up in the trees. So the feet have had to be kind of retrofitted to work as this thing meant to take a beating. And they're not made to take a beating like the feet of an ungulate or an ostrich or something like that. Those are feet that are made to take a beating. And those animals can walk across all of Africa and not have a problem with it. But our feet struggle when asked to go long distances. Now, obviously, given a few million years, things, you know, the kinks work out pretty well,

Starting point is 00:39:09 like you talked about. The eye, the kinks of the eye have, I mean, have worked out pretty darn well in the last, I mean, that's been a long time to work out the kinks, right? The eye has been out of the water for 375 million years instead of just out of the, you know, the foot's only had a few million years to work out the kinks, so So we'll talk about the eye. What are the kinks in the evolution of the eye? The biggest issue I think with the eye is that it evolved in a wet environment. As a consequence, when you moved it into a dry environment, the way that the light goes back there and hits the retina, you know, is just not the same. And so the structures of the eye have had to sort of change over time to adapt to that, to being in a dry land. But when the original vertebrate eye was an eye that evolved

Starting point is 00:39:53 in the water, and you can't ever go back and start from scratch. So we will always have an eye that evolved in the water. Now, 375 million years later, it works pretty darn well on land. It works better on land than it does in the water, though it'll always be kind of a jury-rigged structure as a result. And one thing we haven't talked about at all is that we also compound a lot of these issues on ourselves with modern behaviors. So, you know, the eye is a good example. So you start with a blueprint that maybe had a few faults to begin with, but then people spend all day inside staring at a computer and that is, you know, and kids do that and that's no way to develop an eye. The eye develops best and is less likely to become myopic if kids spend a bunch of time outside and that I can naturally develop under levels of natural light. So some of these things

Starting point is 00:40:41 are issues we can help ourselves by behaving in different ways. So I want to go back to what you said a moment ago about that the eye is kind of a jerry-rigged system. I don't think I get that. What do you mean by that? So the way that light passes through air is different than the way that light passes through water. So the length of the eye in water wouldn't be appropriate for the length of the eye on land. So the first animals that crawled out of water would have had very, very blurry vision. They wouldn't have been totally blind, just like we're not totally blind when we go into water now. But they would have had very, very blurry vision. And so over time, there

Starting point is 00:41:21 had mutations popped up that improved the vision of the eye. I mean, for one thing, you had to figure out how to keep it wet, and so animals needed to have eyelids and fluids put over their eyes that they could blink to keep the eye moist because all of a sudden the eye was going to dry out, which was never, of course, an issue for animals living in the water. But how does that happen? It's not like they sit around and have a meeting and say, you know, we really need some eyelids here, so let's go get some.

Starting point is 00:41:49 So how does that happen? It's one very, very small step and one little change to a protein at a time. So you just take, you know, so you have a whole bunch of amphibians that many of whom are starting to live out of the water and and 99 out of 100 can't see worth a lick and all of those get eaten up and die and the one that happens to be a little bit different you know the the variation that is in animals is the key to all of this one that happens to be a little bit different and has just slightly better vision is the one that lives and finds a mate and passes on its slightly better vision genes to its offspring and slowly but surely over time you end up with a with an eye it's it's really hard when thinking about that to wrap my head around and

Starting point is 00:42:31 anybody's head around 400 million years i mean it's almost impossible to do it's trying to it's like trying to wrap your head around 400 billion dollars or something but given enough time very very small changes can you can accumulate to the point where you can end up with big changes and totally different structures. Are those changes, those small changes, ever big enough that you can go, oh, look at that? I think it's rare. I mean, I think in real time, I think it would be pretty unusual to be able to see something like that. I'll give you an example of a really unusual behavior in the eye that I think is really fascinating. It's not something you could see.

Starting point is 00:43:13 You'd have to put somebody through a test, but it has to do with color blindness. So there's a lot of color blindnesses on the gene for color vision. The genes for color vision are on the X chromosome, so they're sex-linked. And if you get a lousy copy of one of them as a male, you only have the one X chromosome. So males are far more likely to be colorblind. So some researchers discovered a few years ago that they kind of realized that, all right, if you take a colorblind male and then he passes that X chromosome onto his daughter, and then she also gets an X chromosome from the mother, because females have the two X chromosomes, that she potentially, instead of being colorblind,

Starting point is 00:43:50 she has the potential to have four different color vision cones that she makes, and it gives her potentially tetrachromatic color vision. So you and I both are what are called, we have trichromatic color vision. That means we produce three different types of cones in our retina for color vision. There's one that is sensitive to blue wavelengths and there's one sensitive to red and one sensitive to green. People that are colorblind are deficient in one of those, usually the red or the green ones. They're called red, green colorblind. But the daughters of colorblind men theoretically have four different types of cones in their retina for their vision.

Starting point is 00:44:29 So these researchers that sort of realized this, they brought a whole bunch of these daughters of colorblind men into their office and put them through this battery of tests. And most of them were trichromatic, just like you and I are. But there was one woman that they found where the one that was colorblind and her father was active in her, giving her four different color vision cones, meaning that she could see the, like she could see shades of color that are invisible to all other, you know, to every other human that they'd ever tested. So she was seeing the world in a completely different way than the rest of us, which is kind of hard to imagine. So think about that. I mean, this wasn't a gradual, the way I think of evolution as a little bit at a time kind of thing. This was in one person, this big change in the ability to see colors that basically none of us can see. And so if she has children potentially her children could have that ability to see those colors and and seeing those colors could eventually become part of being human yeah we think of things

Starting point is 00:45:35 like our color vision is sort of being this fixed idea but throughout evolutionary history so you know we come from animals that had were, that did have the four different types of cones. And then when primates went and became nocturnal for, or when mammals went and became nocturnal for a very long time, we lost a couple of mutations accumulated in a couple of them and we became dichromatic. So we ended up with two different types of color vision cones and then when we came back out of being nocturnal and and our ancestors came back into the light the primates sort of picked one of them one of them duplicated and picked back up and now primates have have trichromatic vision but so the point is that there's some fluidity to things like that and yeah it's not inconceivable that down the line you know the human lineage lineage could either go back to being dichromatic if we all just stop using our color

Starting point is 00:46:28 vision so much or potentially become tetrachromatic if there's enough variation out there for it. And so I assume that we're still evolving, right? We will continue to evolve because that's what living things do. Yeah, no question. The debatable point at this point is, is how fast is it happening and how much are we interrupting it with, with our ability to sort of stick band-aids on every single, on every single issue, but you can't, you can't stop the process. It just really is a question of how much influence are we having over it with our, with our ability to, to solve a lot of these problems? Because, you know, you think about the kinds of things that kept people from reproducing historically, and they basically don't anymore, right?

Starting point is 00:47:07 You can still, all these, I mean, I would be, I had my appendix out when I was 18 years old. I'd be, I wouldn't be talking to you here today if you rolled the clock back 200 or 300 years, I'd have been dead. And that's the case for a lot of people. They would have had, you know, a lot of people have had some type of event or some type of condition

Starting point is 00:47:22 that would have made it so that they wouldn't have reproduced. And well, here I am passing on my sort of my garbage appendix genes to my daughter. I've already sort of taught her where you feel pain in your abdomen if you're having a flare-up of your appendix so she knows what it feels like. When you look at human evolution and also the technology that we use to fight some of the flaws you've been talking about. Is there anything going on that is alarming? Anything that we're seeing as humans evolve that didn't see that coming or it doesn't seem like this should be going on, that kind of thing? There's this crazy thing going on that I kind of call the modern dilemma where sperm counts in Western populations are just declining precipitously.

Starting point is 00:48:09 And I feel like it's this great, huge health topic that nobody's really talking about. It hasn't quite reached the tipping point where you drop below the point where they're just going to be in masses and masses and masses of infertile people. But it's the sperm counts in Western populations and males have cut in half in the last generation, and there's no sign of it slowing down. And if that continues to happen, it's going to be this huge issue in 21st century biology. Really?

Starting point is 00:48:36 Well, and that's just more fuel for the fire, that humans evolve and change, and it's not this linear, everything's getting better all the time way. It goes wrong. Evolution goes wrong, which is kind of your point. Alex Bezerides has been my guest. He is a professor of biology at Lewis Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. And his book is called Evolution Gone Wrong, The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work or Don't.

Starting point is 00:49:06 And you'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Hey, thanks. Thanks for coming on, Alex. This was really interesting. Thanks. I really enjoyed it, and I appreciate all the work you do. Because I have a young son, I have two sons, Owen and Angelo.

Starting point is 00:49:24 Angelo, being the youngest, watches TikTok videos, and so I have been exposed to and now watch TikTok videos. And I saw this one about washing dishes that I want to share with you because I tried it. It's really easy, and it does seem to work. If you've ever noticed that your silverware comes out of the dishwasher looking a bit tarnished, not as sparkly as it once did, the next time you wash your dishes, rip off a sheet of aluminum foil, crumple it up in a ball, and just stick it in the silverware basket along with the silverware. And then just run the dishwasher, wash your dishes as usual. That's it.

Starting point is 00:50:04 What's the secret magic going on here? Well, according to Reader's Digest, the reaction is sort of an oxidation process. When the tarnished silver soaks with the water and the detergent, the chemicals in the detergent interact with the chemicals in the aluminum foil, and the process leaves your tarnished silverware looking as good as new. I tried it, and my silverware looks a lot better than it used to, and that is something you should know.

Starting point is 00:50:34 If you liked listening today, let the whole world know by leaving a rating and review. The more stars, the better. I would hope you'd give us five stars. And you can do it on most podcast platforms, including most likely the one you're listening to this on right now. I'm Micah Brothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide

Starting point is 00:51:05 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

Starting point is 00:51:30 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, this is Rob Benedict.

Starting point is 00:51:53 And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run. 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including

Starting point is 00:52:22 some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.

Something You Should Know - Why You Are Delusional (and Thank Goodness You Are) & The Flaws in Human Evolution

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.