StarTalk Radio - StarTalk Live! Evolution with Richard Dawkins (Part 2)

Episode Date: March 7, 2015

Our evolutionary journey concludes with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Bill Nye, Eugene Mirman, Jim Gaffigan and Maeve Higgins, recorded live at the Beacon Theatre in NYC. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Live from Beacon Theatre, StarTalk Radio. Live from Beacon Theatre, StarTalk Radio. So, Richard, when I was in college, my freshman year, I attended a full year course on art and design. One of the more influential courses of my life. And we spent the first month or two drawing nudes.

And that was fun, I thought. But it became clear to me immediately that the beauty of the human body is a highly overrated concept. These were like regular people coming in taking off their clothes. You can pick who you draw, you know what I mean? As I saw this, I'm thinking, if I had control of the body, I would have made some changes, evolutionarily. So can I get you to comment on the difference between how much praising we do of the human body and how much critique should go alongside it

if we were honest about ourselves? The famous cases are things like the retina being backwards. It's a historical accident, but the retinal cells, the light-sensitive cells in the vertebrate retina, but not in the octopus retina, they all point backwards. So it's as though you designed a digital camera with the pixels and the forest of wires, the photocell cells are all pointing

backwards away from the image and the wires have to run over the surface of the light-sensitive screen. With that said Richard, I'm not sure that's what Dr. Tyson was driving at. When you looked at the models there in art class, you weren't thinking those retinal cells don't want it changes could have been came in there more like he's being erudite in his example give a more basic example I'm listening to me they're facing all different direct they're bending over you know and I'm thinking they're bending over, you know, and I'm thinking, we have a human body that, between our legs,

we have an entertainment system in the middle of a sewage complex, okay? So any engineer would not have designed that. I'm certain. Plus the fuel tank, the nozzle for the fuel tank is right next to the air filter. I mean, stuff's going to go wrong. So some percentage of us choke to death. We're alive like in spite of our body's design. And there's a great video, which I highly recommend, where you autopsy a giraffe. Oh yeah. There's a nerve, which is one of the cranial nerves, and it starts in the brain, and the end organ is the larynx, the voice box. But in this nerve, it's called the recurrent laryngeal. Instead of going straight to the voice box,

it goes down into the chest, loops around one of the main arteries in the chest, and then goes straight back up again to the larynx. In a giraffe, that is a very significant... LAUGHTER ..diversion. Could you just say that again? That was just so... Because it's like the British understatement, right?

Say it again. In a giraffe. Just say you want to hear that again. No, no, I can't repeat the exact words, but only yesterday I was doing an episode. Do you know the wonderful Mr. Deity? Oh, I've seen videos. Brian Dalton. Yeah, Brian Dalton. He had me on, and I was arguing with him as God

about what a lousy job he'd done. And this question of the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe came up. And he said... The way it does. And he said in his wonderful sort of whiny voice, but you know, we had a surplus of laryngeal nerves. We didn't know what to do with it, so we had to use it.

It is a very uneconomical thing. And of course, the explanation is history. The explanation is that in the ancestors, when this nerve originally started in our fish ancestors... A vertebrate ancestor. Yes, in a fish, the end organ of this nerve is straight across. It doesn't have to go south into the chest. It goes straight.

It is the most direct route. And then as the land vertebrates developed a neck, fish don't have a neck, as the neck lengthened, the marginal cost of slightly increasing the length of the diversion was very small in every generation. We just added a tiny fraction of a millimetre to the diversion. It wasn't, as it were, a great increase in cost, whereas the cost of jumping it over the blood vessel and making it go straight to the larynx would have been probably some major embryological upheaval.

When we were dissecting... In other words, you'd have to disconnect it, reroute it, and reconnect it. So this is the great insight, is it has to work... All of our ancestors had to work at each stage. Yes, that's right. This is an amazing thing. It's a very important part. How long is the nerve in the giraffe?

You've got to see the markers. You know how long a giraffe's neck is. The larynx is right near the head. Where you should be. And we dissected this nerve. The giraffe had already died. Yeah, yeah. It had already died.

And the nerve went within an inch of the larynx. You'd think it would be so easy just to say, oh, well, any engineer would immediately have said, well, obviously that's where it goes. It goes within an inch of the larynx. It goes on and on and on and on and on, down, down, down the neck, and then round this artery, and then back, back, back,

back, back, up to where it started. And it is something that no engineer would countenance, and it would be, you just send it straight back. So the whole, the idea is, the big idea in evolution, Neil, and everybody, is it's bottom up. There's not a designer at the top that showed up and routed the giraffe larynx wire. It just had to work at every stage. You talk about a piston engine becoming a jet engine. Another example is a grocery cart you take to a fairway

market or something with two wheels Bill is now a New York resident so he is fairway fluent yes go Bill so imagine you took that and made it into a bicycle but at every stage you go to make it into a

bicycle the wheels will be here, across from each other, then they have to be end to end or in tandem. Every stage that you do has to work and reproduce cars. You can't just throw away the design and start again. It's got to...

Once you see it, you go, wow, dude. Okay, so how about this? So now, what impresses you about the human body? Okay, I'll tell you what. There are now 7.2 billion of us. Yes. So whatever it is, it works really well. I mean, I tell you what impresses me

about the body of almost any animal is how elegantly beautiful it is from the outside. If you look at a lion, a cheetah, a gazelle, these are beautiful machines. They're high speed, fast running, either predators or running away from predators. And they... Gazelles! Yeah.

I mean, they are very beautiful things and we all think they are beautiful. But if you cut them open, it's a mess. The same is true of cars and rockets and airplanes. Luke Skywalker figured this out, you know, on the ice planet. Yeah, he did. There's another nice example. I thought it was Luke. Excuse me.

Han Solo. Feel that nerd rage. Oh, my God. There's another... I was hoping guts spill all out. Yeah. Another nice example, which is a bit like the recurrent laryngeal, the tubes that connect the testes to the penis.

Uh-huh. Yeah. They don't go by the most direct route. They go up and they loop around. Mine hang down. Just that the prostate gland gets involved. Well, that's even worse. They go up and they loop around the tube that comes from the bladder.

And that, again, is a historical accident. Is that because that's where fish had their bowls? Okay, so you're cool with what animals look like on the outside, but when you cut them open, it's nasty, ugly stuff. If you look inside a car, the exhaust manifold, the tubes all kind of come out in a nice, neat row, don't they? Whereas if you look at the similar thing, the main artery leading off the heart,

it's sort of vaguely similar, but it's just not well designed. Okay, how about all this other stuff that goes on, like male pattern baldness? Where does that come from? Well, anything that tends to characterize age. The longer you've lived, the greater your chance of already having passed your genes on. And so we're all descended from an unbroken line of people who

lived long enough to reproduce. Very few of us are descended from ancestors who were very old when they reproduced. So there's no sexual selection? Not just sexual selection but any kind of selection is weaker the older you get because you've already passed the genes on. I mean if you think about a more unpleasant example like getting cancer, a gene that makes you get, because you've already passed the genes on. I mean, if you think about a more unpleasant example, like getting cancer, a gene that makes you get cancer when you're 50 has already been passed on by the time you reproduce. A gene that makes you get cancer when you're 10 has never been passed on. So the older you get, the more likely you are to be hit by lethal genes which have slipped through the net. This is part of what I was calling good enough.

You're good enough, your eyesight, my eyesight is good enough to get us this far. Basically, bald people have sex when they're 20 and no one knows they're going to be bald. Yeah. So if you don't have kids before you go bald, you never will. Baldness is very fashionable nowadays. I was going to say, ladies, help me out. Some guys rock the bald thing, right? I thought by ladies.

Those women clapping are married to bald guys. I'm sure Vin Diesel is still sexually active. So let me ask, as we go forward in time, what becomes of organs that are not, you know, vestigial organs, so your appendix perhaps, the toenail on your pinky toe, of what possible value is that ever going forward? Well, of what possible— Yet people still put toenail polish on. I've seen women with like the tiniest. People still put toenail polish on. I've seen women with the tiniest little nail

and a toenail polish on. Let me turn the question around two ways. Okay, turn it around. First of all, what's the cost of having that? Does it hold you back some way? It's why I can't be president. And if there's no cost to it, it'll just persist. Secondly... But it'll just persist. Secondly...

But it won't persist forever because you can have copying errors that don't... Do you think it would inhibit a woman's chance of hooking up if she showed up without a pinky toe? If her picture on Tinder was of her toes and she was missing a toe, I think that would be a pass. No, let's take it. I'm just thinking. No, no.

Let's take a summer day in Central Park where the women are rocking their sandals, right? And they've got their toes painted and all that stuff. And a woman shows up with no pinky. You don't think a guy would give a chin stroke and maybe veer off on that? I don't know. I think you underestimate the...

I'll underestimate it. I have tremendous respect for it. It's like the traditional science. People have done, Haldane and Stebbins and people have done mathematical calculations on this question of something being too trivial to matter. People have done, Haldane and Stebbins and people have done mathematical calculations on this question of something being too trivial to matter.

If you put into the equations of evolution an assumption that something utterly trivial like a tiny little toenail or lack of a pinky and you set a value on the selective pressure against it, you make it as low as you like. Then you calculate how many generations it would take at that low selection pressure to eliminate it. Haldane did it... JBS Haldane. It came to something like 12,000 generations

if you set it at a value so trivial that you couldn't detect it in fieldwork. 12,000 is not that many. That's right. That's the point. Stebbins did a calculation. How long would it take a species of mouse-sized animals if they were subjected to relentless pressure to get bigger? How long would it take to become as big as an elephant?

If you assume that the pressure to get bigger is so trivial that it's impossible to detect in ordinary field experiments. So you've got field biologists going around catching mice, measuring them, and it's in the noise level. They can't detect it. So Stebbins set the selection pressure at this very low level. Did he put it in the noise? He put it in the noise. And then he calculated how long it would take to become elephant-sized. And I forget the result. But the point was that it was

so fast that you wouldn't detect it on the paleontological timescale. It would look like an instantaneous change. How much would you have to scare mice to make them much bigger? Like said I, not me, but... So how long is it?

This is a fascinating point. It's why you can look in the fossil record and see a T-Rex that's this big. But there's no half a T-Rex. There's a mismatch between what field biologists can measure on the one hand, it's in the noise, and what fossil hunters can measure on the other hand. Now it probably doesn't, I mean usually there are intermediates but if

there are not then you can appeal to Stebbins' calculation. So how many generations about, if it's 12,000 for people? I think it's two. Well Is there a similar estimate for how many generations? I've forgotten the figure but I mean it's

in the tens of thousands, which is an eye blink on the geological scale. Yeah, totally. So let me end this segment with a question for you to address. Different people give different answers to this. I want your answer. Are we getting smarter or stupider? Because sometimes

I don't know. I am completely baffled by the Flynn effect. The what effect? The Flynn effect. Okay. Yes. Named after a man called Flynn.

I was going to guess that. But it was a man, not a woman. It was a man, actually. And Flynn, he's a psychologist who's been studying IQ. Now, IQ is actually standardized so that the average is 100, but he allowed for that. And he finds that over the course of the 20th century, average IQ has been going up massively. And I must say, I don't notice it. But the data seem to be there and I wish it were true.

Okay. What it may come down to is being smart may not be of that great value evolutionally. Yeah, yeah, that's where I was going to go with this. Compared to your ability to resist germs. We tell ourselves that being smart gives us an advantage, where I'm thinking if being smart gives us an advantage. Where I'm thinking, if being smart gave you an advantage, there'd be many more other what we would think of as smart animals in the tree of life. And in apocalyptic earth, we're extinct. A whole lot of other animals have rise up in our

place and no one ever accused them of being smart. So can you comment on the value of being smart with regard to evolutionary survival and natural selection? We were talking earlier about the number of times things have evolved. And, you know, eyes have evolved 40 times. Linguistic intelligence, the sort of intelligence we have where we can actually formulate philosophical thoughts, has only evolved once and didn't evolve until the world had been around for more than 4 billion years. I tweeted on this recently. Did you? Yes.

With regard to farm animals. I was just wondering if farm animals, when they're just chewing their cud, if they're contemplating the history and fate of the universe, if they have theories of the universe that they're thinking about. So then I wondered if the farm animals wondered the same about us. I'd like to think so. I've speculated on this a lot, and I've spoken

with my dog friends about it. By that I mean my friends who are dogs, not the people. What I get from them is just a couple of things, really. Food? Food. Squirrel? Food. Are you a girl dog? and what I get from them is just a couple of things really food squirrel

are you a girl dog food and I've spoken to dolphins I was in Hawaii they let you hang out with dolphins yeah do dolphins tell stories it doesn't seem like it or not good stories we build libraries and theaters

I don't know if they've even contemplated it. I'm reminded of a comic where two dolphins are swimming together, commenting on the humans up on the deck. Sure. Yeah. And one dolphin says to the other, they face each other and make noises, but it's not clear whether they're

actually communicating. I have a burning question. Oh, sure. My mother told us a story when I was younger that there was a shipwreck off of Japan and there was like only men and a baby on the raft and then one of the men was able to lactate to feed the baby. Because she said he felt, you know, like the baby was crying and then, you know, like it was like, and somehow he was like able to produce milk.

But I don't know. But like I know men have nipples. I don't know. But I don't know. The variation on that is, what's up with men's nipples? And also that man was John F. Kennedy. Men's nipples, because embryologically we start out the same. But the question of males lactating, a great biologist, John Maynard Smith, ended one of his papers with the single aphoristic question, why don't male mammals lactate?

And there are anecdotal stories of this type which I think are probably true. I believe that I could do the following experiment. I think that if you were to get some men and stimulate them with... I don't know where that finger is going to go. Are you giving a very long version of yes, it's possible? Let me start again. You could probably make males lactate by giving them hormone injections. So you do that and then you breed

from those males who need the least amount of hormone injection in order to lactate. To selectively breed. And this would wake up... And you gradually, as the generations go by, you gradually wean them off the hormone injections. And this is actually quite an instructive illustration of something called the Baldwin effect. The Baldwin effect? The Baldwin effect, yes. Will you get very angry? The idea is... The Baldwins that live in the city. Yeah, okay. Famous actors. The idea is that originally a change comes about through a non-genetic means, through, say,

learning or through, in this case, hormone injections. And that exposes genetic variation which was not otherwise visible. And so in this case, the hormone injection is exposing that certain males are a bit more likely to lactate than others, but they don't have the opportunity to do so until you get the hormone injection. so until you get the hormone injection.

And so you use the hormone injection as a way of bringing to the surface genetic variation, which was there all the time. But unexpressed. That's an interesting way to manipulate the genome. I guess we've been doing that with wolf genes from the beginning and creating the whole diversity of dogs. Getting the one that's slightly more friendly, that's not going to bite you that's a little cuter that's smaller and we go from a wolf to a pomeranian yeah right in just two weeks call now what about i'm just thinking the wolf if the wolf sees a pomeranian i'm just wondering what is the wolf thinking like that we must be completely messed up as humans to take a wolf gene and turn it into a puffball.

So, in that vein, I'm wondering, if we can manipulate genomes in this way, how real is Jurassic Park? Or, more disturbingly, how real would any eugenics movement be, given the control we now have, or the access we now have to the human genome? You're making a distinction between manipulating genes directly and doing it by selection. The way you turn a wolf into a Pomeranian is by selection. It's just the artificial equivalent of natural selection. We could do that with humans. And we could do that with humans. There's no question about that we could do it with humans. If you really wanted to breed a human equivalent of a Pomeranian, you could do it.

Kardashian joke, anyone? I'm about bringing love. But isn't that what Hitler was attempting? It is, yes. It is what Hitler was attempting. He was attempting to make these dreadful, you know, tall, blonde, blue-eyed... I'm right here. All right.

Hitler wanted to create a comic that exclusively jokes about food. It's odd if he's trying to breed blonde hair people because he had black hair last I checked. That's just an odd fact to me. So, right, there's selective breeding You could do selective breeding or you could do the other half which is the mutational part. You could induce mutation. You'd have to know a lot

more genetics than we know at present but the time will come. Nothing's in the way. No. And so, is that in our future? Should it be in our future? Should is a different question. Who decides if it will be in our future? Well, that's a political question.

It should probably be up to me. What sort of stuff would we be able to do if we genetically manipulated people? And would it be awesome or weird? Yes, I mean, if you wanted to make a brilliant musician, you might be able to do that. Oh really? Not yet. No.

At present the most you can do is... No, you wouldn't make a brilliant musician, you'd make a person who could be a brilliant musician. Exactly, yeah. But they have to want to do that. Who genetically was predisposed to jamming. They still got to practice. But notice that you don't know...

But for every musician you tried to make, you'd make a lot of baristas, right? Which is where the morality comes in. But I love coffee, so we should do it. So another question, though, is what is of the greatest value? What trait do you want to select for? And it may be that the best thing to have in 50 years is resistance to Ebola virus. That may be like actually much better than smart. If you rank what it is we can.

What's useful and what's going to be passed forward rather than blue eyes, blonde hair or whatever they have. Indeed. Glasses. That's right. Genetically engineered people with not great vision. There is genetic resistance to AIDS and I actually did a television documentary in which I went to Nairobi where... You were born in South Africa, right?

I was born in Kenya. Oh, Kenya. In Kenya. Let's see your birth certificate. As you know, AIDS is a very, very serious epidemic in Africa. And there is a population of prostitutes in Nairobi who are resistant to AIDS. And I went with this television crew. Are they immune? Yes.

Or it's easier on them? I think they're immune. They don't get HIV. They get HIV, but they don't... They don't get acquired immune... But it doesn't do anything to them. So they have HIV and it doesn't manifest as AIDS. I think that's right.

I'm not sure if that's right. I went and interviewed for television, you just interview one person. You don't do a statistical sample. And I interviewed one Nairobi prostitute and I asked her how long she'd been in that profession and she said 20 years. And I said, what about all the friends who started at the same time as you? She said, they're all dead. They all died of AIDS.

And I said, well, why do you think you didn't die? And she said, I think God must be looking after me. So I said, well, why didn't God look after all your friends? And she said, well, I can't answer that. And I tell you you this God is extremely fond of condoms Wow Wow and so what what was her feeling so like is this

group of women who work as foster are they like being studied by yes there's a Canadian team working on them and working on... Almost any verb. During this interview with a prostitute. But that's incredible that they survived.

Well, it's not incredible in the biggest of pictures. This is to say it is not unreasonable that somewhere somebody's gonna have a resistance to this virus. There's a mutation which gives you resistance and it survives. And the greatest diversity of human genes is still in Africa. Yeah. So when I look at the animal kingdom I say all right there's a newt that can regenerate its tail. And there's a snake that can see in the infrared. And I'm looking at this talent, this biological talent expressed in the genetics of animals that we don't have as humans. So if there is a common ancestor between humans and newts,

should there be some gene within us or some gene insertable to us that we can turn on and then be able to regenerate limbs first for army veterans? I do know that the genes for smelling things, which so many other mammals have, we've got most of those genes, but they're turned off. And so our ancestors must have been able to smell as well as dogs, or maybe not quite, but certainly as well as other mammals.

And we seem to have lost that ability. But the genes are still there in vestigial form. But is it because we live in cities now and it's probably best that way? No, it's not. Let's not turn him on too much in New York. Okay, I think we're genetically closer to dogs than we are to newts, I presume.

So, is it harder to find where the gene is for regenerating limbs? Is it deep in us somewhere or is that just so vestigial as to be completely lost? I'm not sure that you'd be right to call it a gene in that case. I think there's probably something deeply buried in the kind of embryology that we have the newts have which would make it but

Richard also this was the charm the amazing the potential everybody was so excited about stem cells Yes, right that if you knew what you were doing you could get stem cells to make anything. Yes. Yeah New knees. Yes. New orange. That's right. Yes, yep. New hips, new knees, new arms and so on. As I understand it, the problem is the cloning of Dolly the sheep was done mechanically. These guys got this fantastically fine pipette, and they poked it into the cell, which was from a mammary cell, and that's why they called her Dolly. I'm not joking.

And they poked the DNA into the cell and it fused and grew, right? Yeah. And so that technique, that cloning technique, would be exactly the same technique that you would use to affect any stem cell. And this caused lawmakers, at least in the U.S., to, if I may, like totally freak. And so that's why stem cell research was generally put to a halt. And let me go on to ramble that you don't want to clone yourself. Why? Imagine how funny it would be. We shouldn't clone that jacket of yours either. Imagine how funny it would be. We shouldn't clone that jacket of yours either. It's a radio show. But the jacket, some people like the jacket.

I think a lot of people. Yay! Yay! But if you were to clone yourself, then this new person that you created would be genetically identical to you, would not have the great advantage that you get with sex. And with sex, you get a new combination of genes. And it is one very good theory of why you want a new combination of genes,

is because your enemies are not lions and tigers and bears or wolves. Your enemies are germs and parasites, are Spanish flu and Ebola. In that vein, Richard, do you have friends who want to reconstruct the flu virus from 1918? Well, I'm sure that there are probably... Your answer wasn't no to that question. Not friends. There are germ warfare possibilities which are horrific and cloning the 1918, whatever it is, 1919 flu virus would be a horrible thing to do.

But we have the power to do that. Hold on, but isn't that virus still extant? By the way, this virus killed more people with 50 million, estimates vary, 50 million people,

many, many more than were killed by fighting in World War I. Yeah. In the same winter. Factor two. Yeah. Is it still out there?

That's what I'm asking. I'm not sure. I don't know that. Why would it disappear? Aren't we all descendants of people who could handle that? By handle it. Yes, I guess. Live through it.

So yeah, go ahead, make your flu, I don't care. No, most of the people that it killed already had sex and babies. It took out the top end of the age distribution. I think it took young. It also did that, but I mean... When I've been to cemeteries in Seattle, we did a show on it, and there's a lot of kids

that were killed that winter. People six, seven years old. How many people, may I ask, how many people have had a flu shot this season? How many people, may I ask, how many people have had a flu shot this season? How many people have not? Bill, when I grew up, I swam in the Hudson River. Okay. I don't need a shot to protect me from anything.

I know that sentiment. But let's say, hypothetically, everybody, there were a vaccine for Ebola. How many people would not want it because you just don't believe in vaccines, Neil? Wouldn't everybody want it? Yeah. I think everyone would want it. And whoever clapped, okay. So in similar vein, I ride the subway, I meet people, I would just assume you all got flu vaccinations.

Yeah, so you're saying, why wouldn't someone get the flu vaccine, right? Well, we wonder why people don't get vaccines. It's just like you just get so busy and... Yeah. No, but... No, that's a good reason. But it's a serious point that it's not just protecting yourself, it's protecting the herd because the whole thing about epidemiology

is that if you can get a sufficiently large number of people immunized, an epidemic won't get going. And so it is actually antisocial. I'll get a flu shot, I just haven't had a chance. So, I got a flu shot, so I'm a good guy. Yeah. Well, you're on this side of it.

Yeah. Good or bad, just, I don't know, man. But I'm sorry, he can't get the flu now, can he? Can't get this year's flu. Yeah. Unless a new one evolves, which can happen and you can get infected with that. It's like cell phones. Whenever you buy the one,

then they... So Richard, if we have control over the genetics of ourselves, of our food supply, I presume this is a good thing, but is there a downside to it? Might we be experimenting incompetently, ultimately making a mistake we would later regret? Like tomatoes that are wolves. Well, but like fish genes in tomatoes. Yeah, yeah. And I'm not kidding, so George Washington apparently, Richard, George Washington was... My ancestor, General Sir Henry Clinton, commanded British forces in the American Revolutionary War. You're proud of that? So you're bragging about him fighting in the Revolutionary War with...

You didn't say which side. Oh, which side? Everyone here at first was British. So the deal is, George Washington bred wheat, took pollen from one wheat stalk and shook it onto the eggs, the ova of another one, to try to hybridize, or he did, I guess, hybridize wheat. And we still do that. And that's intra-species, if I may say. That is within a species. But then when people take genes from a fish that is real good in cold water and put it in tomatoes to try to get the tomatoes to be real good on cold days,

that's when you're kind of crossing a line, right? Yes. So here's what, you can know what will happen to the tomato, but you can't know exactly what will happen to the ecosystem that the tomato is in. And so the famous couple of cases were this with the corn. In the U.S., US were crazy for our corn Richard We love our corn and we had the European corn borer Insect was eating the corn. Thank you

These people took the gene from a virus in the soil and put it in the gene of the corn. And when the corn borer eats the corn, the corn crystallizes and the corn borers die. They also messed around so that you could spray the corn with this crazy, super strong weed killer, Roundup. And that was great. The corn could tolerate that. But the milkweed, which lives in the same cornfield, couldn't. And so the problem there, anyone? Right, monarch butterflies. So monarch butterflies, like any butterfly, love milkweed pollen. And so when you killed all the milk, or a lot

of the milkweed, there was huge concern that you would wipe out the monarch butterfly population. Everybody likes monarch butterflies, they're so cool, they fly around and they're probably... I think we like them because they're beautiful. Yeah, that well. And delicious. And they do extraordinary things and I've watched them, they fly really, they can fly upwind. That's an example of there might be unintended consequences. Unintended consequences. So, we have huge monocultures, which we call Iowa. The corn in Iowa goes on for a long time. If you ever drive or ride your bicycle across Iowa, you will not miss it.

And if we did something to make that enormous crop not survive by accident, that could be huge trouble. Huge trouble. So the general lesson would be that if you mess around with anything you may destroy an ecosystem, but that doesn't particularly apply to putting fish genes in tomato plants. Not specifically so. That's right. That we know of. You have to be careful with anything you do.

It's not just putting genes in. But could we have a rule, okay to breed within a species, but you've got to do some super crazy diligent testing to breed between species? You should always test. Always, yeah. I'm not sure that's the right division. I mean, I'm not sure that between... What is that?

I don't know. I mean, I think that... Well, let's do it anyway. The precautionary principle where just be very, very careful whatever you do. I wouldn't make the divide between intra and inter specifically. Oh, really? Okay. My favorite line, I was told it appeared in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. I don't remember which one.

Where it postulates, what's the last sentence ever spoken on earth? It's, let's try it this way. And that gets into this verb that it should work. Is there still enough natural selection going on so that we'll be the strongest? Or will we meddle with our genes so that tomorrow natural selection is irrelevant? So, Neil, it's not being the strongest. It's fitting in the bestest. It's not being the greatest weightlifter.

It's making sure you fit in the equal. Of all the things that could affect us genetically, what is the greatest among them? Selection is still going on with us. So in what way are we evolving? Well, probably we're being selected

by viruses, by bacteria, that kind of thing. We're evolving but we're not speciating. We're probably no longer being selected to get brainier. I mean, clearly in the last two or three million years there's been selection for us to get bigger brains and to get cleverer. That's clearly happened if you look at the fossils. And so during that time it must have been the case

that the brainiest individuals survived and reproduced. In order for that still to be going on, it would be necessary that the brainiest individuals have the most children. Okay, is it the most children or the most children that survived to have children? Well, that, of course, but it's enough to point out that there's absolutely no reason to think that being clever

makes you likely to have lots of children. Quite the reverse. In fact, the film Idiocracy built the entire plot line on that very premise yeah because people who are highly educated and call themselves smart and other people would call them smart they like delay having children and then they might not have children and meanwhile others are just having the babies are just popping out and so if that tendency is heritable, then... But Martin Rees, who's more or less typifies the great and the good in British science,

he's the president of the Royal Society and all that sort of stuff, he has written a book in which he gives the human species a 50% chance of making it through this century, the 21st century. Really? Possibly going extinct after that. Yes. He's worried about massively powerful weapons falling into the hands not of vaguely responsible governments but falling into the hands of... Like New Hampshire? Well...

Well, the terrorists. Terrorists. New Hampshire. So we self-destruct. The principle of deterrence, which is the nuclear standoff, presupposes that everybody wants the world to live and go on. Now we've got people who, for religious reasons, want to die. Or quite okay with dying. Yeah.

And so if they got their hands on a biological weapon, the normal deterrence might not apply. So that's in the calculation, you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. But going forward again, the people, like you said, the genes that will go forward are the ones who have the most children. And Jim, how many kids do you have?

I have five, but I haven't talked to my wife in an hour, so... There could be more. So Jim, you earlier in this show commented on your poor eyesight. Yes. And your sun sensitive skin and your receding hairline you have the most children of any of us here

I'm good in bed very good in bed he's a generous lover I'm a generous lover yeah no I didn't plan to start my own nationality but it seemed like a good idea.

And Bill Nye, you are who any one of us would choose to be the professor on Gilligan's Island, if any one of us were caught on Gilligan's Island. Do I have agreement there? And Bill, you have how many children? I don't have any. Yeah. But I still got my eye on Mary Ann. And Bill, you have how many children? I don't have any.

Yeah. But I've still got my eye on Marianne. Marianne? I'm still thinking. Marianne from Gilligan's Island. Yes. What was the point? It was a point like, Jim, you're a moron.

You have five kids. He's the science king of the world. He has none. We're doomed? Is that the idea? Let me tell you something. All right, here, I have a question. I have a question.

I'm picking Bill. If we're going to survive on a dead island and make radios out of coconuts. I'm picking Bill. Okay? But if you just want to hook up, I'm picking Jim. You know that Gilligan's Island. What? Jim, what do you got?

Jim. You know, I do have a question for this esteemed panel. I think that the overpopulation thing is a myth. I think it's an absolute myth. Says a man with five children. Yes, I do. But, you know, it's like, convince me otherwise. I've seen information that said that you can feed everyone.

It's not population. It's delivering of food. It's corruption. You know what I mean? No, no. We weren't here saying that having five kids was bad for the environment. No, no. We're saying having five kids makes your genome more populous in the future than Bill's genome.

That's all we're saying. You're stating a fact. I'm a loser. You're feeling guilty about it. No, but that's... No, I am. You did some great genome stuff. I did some great genome stuff.

No, but I am curious because I think that there is this ongoing... I have five kids and people, occasionally friends, this ongoing, like, you know, I have five kids and people like occasionally friends and I individually, I thought, oh, you know, there is this overpopulation crisis, but I did research into it and it is a myth, isn't it? Or am I wrong? Well, it's surely true that we can go on feeding more people for a while, but not indefinitely. But isn't the population of the Earth going to reach a peak and then go back down? If everybody keeps having five kids. But wait a minute.

I'm not proposing, but wait a minute. I'm having five kids. You're having none. How many kids do you have? I don't know. How many kids? Vincent Jay. He's a traveling guy.

I mean, stand-up comic. Yeah, our average is only, yeah, it's like, what, seven kids? Maeve, how many children do you have? None that I know of. None? Yeah. No, no, a woman can't get away with that sentence.

Yes, she can. No, no, that's right. It's just unbelievable. So Richard, in a hundred years, a thousand, a million, will we recognize ourselves in that future? Or will we be so different from evolutionary drivers that we might have either more biological talent or perhaps even less? Usually, you get new species when they split, when they speciate. That's not going to happen with humans.

Wait, wait, don't tell me we get new species when they speciate. When they're isolated. I need a better speciate. No, no, no. I need a better answer than that. Populations are coming. When they split, it would be quite difficult for humans to evolve a new species unless a subset of humans was sent off to a different planet. So all interbreeding now.

Yes, we're all interbreeding now. But if we set up colonies on Mars, for example, then it would be not unexpected that they might, in quite a long time, become a separate species which could no longer interbreed with us. What if no one went to Australia for 2,000 years? Would that be easier? Yeah. I don't think that's what we should do.

I'm just throwing out an easier way to do this. Australia has already done that experiment. Yeah. But people keep flying there and hooking up. No, no. I'm saying, but kangaroos don't keep flying there, right? Oh, right. Wow.

So the animals in Australia are some of the most exotic in the world. But that takes more than 2,000 years. Okay. So would Martha's Vineyard be easier then? But is there something that we could hope for? And do you see any trend lines? You think about this all the time. We're doing other stuff while you're thinking about life.

Is there some direction that you think... No, we won't become another species, perhaps, but the environment might put pressure on ourselves where some of us emerge, others don't, and there's some talent expressed within the genome itself so that in a million years we won't recognize it. I think cultural evolution is so much more important than biological evolution now.

I mean, technology is changing so rapidly, and so that's what's really going to change. And that might include genetic engineering, genetic technology. So if we do come back in a thousand years and find ourselves different, it's more likely to have been engineered differences by human bioengineers rather than by the normal processes of evolution.

And if we become good shepherds of that legacy, there's some hope that we will be better to ourselves, to our planet, to the... Difficult to agree among ourselves as to what would constitute better. So it's reasonable along that line that, you know, we have this urge to be altruistic, apparently observed in all sorts of species to help each other out. It could be that we will select for people that have a tendency to be better stewards of the earth help each other out. It could be that we will select for people that have a tendency to be better stewards of the earth. That is reasonable. And the other thing is certain,

we are also selecting for people who think babies look cute. Yes. And it could be we're selecting for people... Even when they're not cute. I think all babies are cute. What does that mean? See? Yeah. People who don't think babies are cute. What does that mean? See? Yeah, people who don't think babies are cute don't have babies, right? That's how that is. So it could be we're selecting for people who have the resources to go to colleges

and what's it called? Advanced degrees and still have babies later in life. We could be selecting for that. Something like that, yes. Yeah. Young professionals. I want to end it here thank you all for coming