Evolution, Intergenerational Trauma, and Gender with Jerry Coyne

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Watch for What Was That Like on any podcast app or at whatwasthatlike.com. Thanks for watching. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you're hearing this, then you're on the public feed, which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements. You can get access to the subscriber feed by going to ColemanHues.org and becoming a supporter. This means you'll have access to episodes a week early, you'll never hear ads, and you'll get access to bonus Q&A episodes. You can also support me by liking and subscribing on YouTube and sharing the show with friends and family. As always, thank you so much for your support. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Jerry Cohen. Jerry is an evolutionary biologist and geneticist. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1978, after which he served as a professor at the University of Chicago in the Department of Ecology and Evolution for over two decades. His seminal work is on the speciation of fruit flies. He's also the author of two books, including Why Evolution is True, which is also the name of his blog, and Faith vs Fact. In this episode, we talk about the tension between evolution and the biblical origin story. Jerry goes over the basics of the theory of evolution by natural selection. We talk about sexual selection. We talk about the teaching of intelligent design in schools and how that compares to the battle over CRT in schools today. We talk about the attack on evolutionary psychology from the political left. We discuss epigenetics and the concept of intergenerational trauma. We talk about how humanity has evolved genetically in recent history. We talk about the consequences of birth rate differences between different groups of people. We talk about gender dysphoria and gender ideology. And finally, we talk about the unanswered questions that remain in the field of evolutionary biology. So without further ado, Jerry Cohen. Okay, Jerry Cohen, how are you? Fine, you're so? Good. Likewise. As I told you, I've been reading your blog, Why Evolution is True for a long time, and I've really enjoyed it. And I imagine some of my listeners will be aware of you either from that blog or from one of your two books or appearances on other podcasts. But for those who aren't familiar with you, can you tell them a little bit about who you are, how you came to study evolutionary biology, and think about evolution, the contest between faith and science, and the other topics that you write about. Well, that's a lot of stuff. I'll just start off as I told you before we went on the air, I was suffering from the residual of a bad cold. So I may be a bad horse, but I'm an evolutionary biologist. My specialty is the origin of species, how do species form the problem the Darwin approach, but never answered in his book. I'm retired now, retired about seven years ago, and I've got more involved in politics, ideology of science, and more general things. The usual route of a retired professor, let's see what else did you want to know. How did I get started in evolution as is often the case in science? It's a charismatic professor. In my case, I went to the College of William & Mary in Virginia, and the very first class on the very first day of his college was, well, I always knew one, but it was taught by an evolutionary biologist who was extremely charismatic. His name was Jack Brooks, and I think he's still alive. And he just drew you into the subject of evolution. He was a herpetologist, but he studied evolution. He described it in such an attractive way that I thought I wanted to learn more about it. And I needed to take genetics because in order to do evolution properly, he needed to learn genetics. So I asked him if he could get me into the genetics class as a sophomore, which I wasn't really supposed to take close to junior. I took that and I became an evolutionary geneticist, working with your soft little fruit fly. And then I took a course in evolution, and by the time I was taught, I mean, like most biologists, I went to college expecting to study marine biology. I think every biologist at some point in their life weighs the option of becoming a marine biologist because they picture themselves on the bow of a boat chasing whales, very romantic and stuff. But there's not many jobs from marine biologists, and most of them are not like that. And I just got sidetracked with evolutionary biology. And I can remember the moment that I became an evolutionary geneticist. I was a junior, and we had this difficult problem of trying to figure out the genetics of a character in fruit flies in which their eyes that are normally red or white. And they just gave us two flies of flies of white eyes and red eye flies and said, well, figure out what the genetic basis is. So I crossed them together and the hybrids were red, pure red, but then you could cross the hybrids amongst themselves, producing what we call an F2 generation. And I got four eye colors, not just red and white, but red, bright orange, brown and white. And I couldn't figure out, well, how do you, I mean, you start with two eye colors and you get four when you cross them. And I was thinking about this, and I remember sitting on the bleachers waiting for my swimming class and all of a sudden it came to me that there must be two genes involved in this character. One of them makes a red pigment, the other one makes a brown pigment. Together they make the reddish brown eyes of the flies, but you can separate them by doing crosses. And then I further went on to test that hypothesis by localizing the two genes that I posited were doing this. They're called brown and center bar. But it was just such a, I mean, it was a flash of inspiration. And what I like about genetics is the results are so clean. Unlike ecology and, you know, many areas of evolution were, they were highly speculative. Genetics is a very clean branch. You get a result because genes are, you know, they're more or less fixed things on chromosomes. So that's how I get into my final study, which is the evolutionary drugs. I mean, in terms of, you know, creationism and religion, I can say it very shortly. My first job was at the University of Maryland. And I taught it in a classroom that it was overlooking the plaza in front of the biology building. And almost every day on that plaza, a creationist preacher would be standing there below my class all around and out about, you know, the perfides of evolution and how it's false and everything. And I occasionally stopped by and listened to the guy. And I realized, especially when I read this statistics that most Americans don't accept evolution. In fact, only about 20% of them do, except that in the form that we teach it, about 40% of them are. Is that still true? Oh, yeah. Every year or two, the Gallup organization runs a poll. And they 20%. Yeah. And I remember the data as I remember the last time. The question is, how did humans come to be? And the first option is humans were created 10,000 years ago in the form in which they exist today. That's straight biblical creationism and about 40% of Americans subscribe to that. That's a lot for intent. And another 20% subscribed to the view that humans evolved, but God was behind the process. This is what we call theistic evolution, that there's a little new age that comes in from the divine creator. And usually the nerd comes to create humans, which regardless of special. This is another religiously based view, theistic evolution. That's, I think, about 22% of Americans accept that. And then the other alternative is humans evolved naturalistically, which just happens to be the truth, as far as we know it. And that's what we teach our students. And only 20% of Americans subscribe to that view. The rest of them don't say don't know or can't answer. So it's only really one in five Americans accept evolution in the way that it's taught in the schools and colleges, which is a pretty frightening statistic. And of course, it's all religiously based. None of the creationist organizations that I've dealt with or fought with are anything other than based on religion. I've only met one creationist in my life out of thousands that have not been motivated by religion to reject evolution. And that's David Brilensky, who identifies himself, I guess, as a secular Jew. I think he's a secret religious person. But I mean, if you look at the bottom of the whole thing, all opposition to evolution in America and most other places derives from religious belief. And that the Quran, Judaism, all the Abrahamic religions say humans are special, special objects of God's creation and attention. So that got me to write my first book, which my first trade book I'd written as a book on a speciation for specialists before that. My first trade book was called Why Evolution is True. Start me if I'm boring. No, no, no, it's all good. Well, when I started my, you know, any professor knows that when you're starting an introductory class, the first thing you do is read how other people teach that class. And then you sort of make a gumish of the various ways they do it. And I decided that because I knew these statistics that most Americans reject evolution, I needed my students to know why evolution is true. I needed to start, I mean, you don't need to start a physics class by saying, well, this is how we know atoms exist. Or this is how we know the gravity works. But that's because most Americans already accept the existence of atoms of gravity. They don't accept the existence of evolution. So I decided, okay, if I do anything in this class, if I want my students to go away with any lesson that they'll keep with them, it has to be why scientists accept evolution. And so that's, I decided to teach the first three hours on that. And when I went to all the modern evolution textbooks, and I have a lot of them in my office, there's nothing in there about them. And the evolution is so widely accepted by scientists that we don't teach evolution by beginning to tell the students, well, this is why we think evolution actually exists. People just assume that. But given that 8% of Americans are 78, 5% of them rejected, I think that you needed to tell them that. In order to actually find out what the evidence revolution is, you have to go all the way back to Darwin, 1859, to see what he proposed as evidence revolution. And then you start looking at newer and newer textbooks. And about the 1920s, when national selection began to be accepted, that was the one part of Darwin's theory that was not widely accepted until the 20th century. And about 1920, people started realizing, yeah, Darwin's probably right about national selection. They knew he was right about evolution. Everybody who had a brain accepted evolution in science by 1869. Can you just clarify the difference between evolution and natural selection? Yeah, so evolution is basically defined as genetic change in populations over time. So that's evolution in the technical definition. But there are several factors that can cause that change. The most important one, and the one we know about, of course, is natural selection. And Darwin, in fact, suggested that, it's even in the title of his book, but there are other mechanisms of evolutionary change as well. One of them is called genetic drift, in which just random passing on of different gene forms from one generation to the next can cause a change in the frequency of genes over time. An example of this would be, for example, small human isolates, like the omelette of the dunkers, where they're inbred and they're small. And that smallest means that random factors play a larger role in which genes get passed on and which genes don't. And that's one reason why we see it as such a high frequency of deleterious genes and conditions in small human isolates. The omelette have a number of genetic diseases associated with them. Ashkenazi genes have Tay-Sachs, disease, and other diseases. So genetic drift is another form that can change gene frequencies. There are other things as well, but they're trivial compared to drift and selection. So you can have evolution without selection, that's the point I'm trying to make. And we cannot assume, if we see genetic change over time, that it is due to natural selection. However, natural selection is the only evolutionary force we know of that can cause adaptive change in an organism. That is the fit between the organism and the environment that we so admire and like to study the camel's home, the horns of animals, any trait that an animal has that helps it get along in its lifetime. Those things can only be installed by natural selection. So yeah. So you know, during the Bush years, it was a big point of contention in politics that certain classrooms did not want to teach evolution. They wanted to teach so-called intelligent design. Has that battle been won in the American public school system? What's the state of that controversy? Good question. Yes. The answer to the short answer is yes. It was the Dover versus Kitzmiller case. I think that was in 2005, but she can look it up, in which the Dover area school district in Pennsylvania forced the students to read a book on intelligent design as an alternative evolution. It was called the Pandas and People, and it was produced by the Discovery Institute, which is the main headquarters of ID located in Seattle. Judge Jones and it was a six-week trial. It was a big deal. It's a federal court. Supreme Court has never taken, well, it has taken up previous cases, but in this case, it was the ID intelligent design issue at stake. And Judge Jones has issued this stinging 123-page opinion saying intelligent design was not science. And that cost the Dover area school district over a million dollars in legal fees. And so after that ruling, no school in the United States wants to touch intelligent design, because it really almost bankrupted the school district. They had to lay off teachers and cut their budget and everything. Every school now knows that public schools are what we're talking about, the ones that are subject to the First Amendment. Now you know that they shouldn't be doing this. So no, it's not much of a problem anymore, but I've also known that on this fly biology teachers, particularly in the southern part of the United States, will slip in ID or creationism. Now the Supreme Court has never ruled on ID. I mean, Dover could have appealed that to the Supreme Court at the time. It was the liberal Supreme Court and they were upheld the design. But what I'm quite worried about today is the new conservative Supreme Court that we have, which has shown itself willing to take all kinds of bizarre stands. And that they might somehow okay the teaching of creationism in some form or another. ID is creationism. They just don't identify the designer as God or Jesus or whatever. They just say, oh, it's some designer. We don't know anything about each year yet, but it's still religious. So you know- It's interesting to me to compare those debates during the 2000s about what could be taught in the classroom with debates going on today about what should be taught in the classroom. You know, today the arguments are about critical race theory and these kinds of topics. And Republican states often have passed laws trying to delineate and write down and demarcate certain ideas that cannot be taught in a classroom. And there's been, you know, I've done, I think, more than one podcast about that issue with both proponents and critics of it. I'm curious to sort of compare these two cases. Like, is there something we can learn from how the intelligent design debate was handled that can inform our principles on this issue of CRT today? Or is it just too different to compare a hard science to a kind of wishy-washy social issue like CRT and race? Yeah, that's a good question. That's not an easy answer mainly because I don't know where I come down on the issue of states telling schools what they can or cannot teach because they have illegal rights to mandate curricula as far as I know. But what's happening in, you know, Florida and everything is that people don't know anything about CRT or just like they don't know anything about evolution or trying to dictate what's supposed to be taught. On the other hand, you know, there's some sense, I think, in some of these bills. I just haven't looked at them very closely. But the difference between these ideologically-based bills and evolution is that evolution is a scientific fact. I mean, no serious scientist takes issue with it. And virtually every serious scientist thinks that it's an integral part of biology education. So, you know, although I've heard that recently, I think it was one of the upper midwestern states like Idaho or something had a bill in which evolution was going to be dished some somehow. It failed. It always will fail until the Supreme Court does it. There's been no attempts to mandate the teaching revolution because you can't mandate the teaching of evidence against evolution. So, the difference between ideology on one hand and science on the other is a matter of fact versus faith or politics on the other hand. So, the only lesson I can see is that states should not mandate what facts. Well, I mean, again, they can mandate what facts can be taught because some of these bills say they have to emphasize this about our history. And you cannot say that indigenous people were badly treated or stuff like that. And they're contentious issues, but there are some factual issues in there. So, I've stayed away from that debate because I don't know enough to weigh in on both about the politics of dictating curricula and about how they're trying to change curricula. But if they tried to mandate the teaching of something that was factually wrong, that's where science would come in and say, no, you can't do that. If you encountered someone that was skeptical of evolution, what would be your, you know, the two-minute version of why evolution is true? That's another good question. First, my first thing to do would be to figure out if they're serious. If they really want to know why evolution is true or they're just attacking me on religious grounds, because one thing you discover very quickly as an evolutionist is that people that go after you as creationists are not interested in the truth. They're already brought up, religious, they're propagandized to be religious from a very early age. You get your Jesus or your Mohammed or your Moses well before you get darled. As soon as you're able to speak, your most people are propagandized into the faith of their parents. So most people that have crossed you with a question like, you know, why do you think evolution is true? I won't deal with them unless I think that they're actually open-minded and serious. Given that, that's hard. Two minutes. I mean, there are so many lines of evidence for evolution. The fossil record biogeography, vestigial organs, et cetera, each one of those is a chapter in my book that is hard to do. But if I were to concentrate on one thing, if I were to try to convince them in just a couple of minutes, we have oceans true. I would line up all the human skulls from the earliest hominin known about four to five million years ago, ostrich of the scenes, and just line them up in temporal order and just say, okay, look at this. Now, you tell me if this doesn't show this evolution. In fact, that's what the BBC did. They had a show called, in which they flew about a dozen creationists from the UK to the United States. And then each one of us had a program in the BBC trying to convince these creationists to become evolutionists. My part was to try to convince them that the great flood didn't work. So they called us out on a boat in one of the lakes in the Grand Canyon, and I have a little model of the arc, and I try to convince them that, you know, how's the power that can gurus going to get from our era rat in Turkey to Australia, things like that. But it didn't work because religious indoctrination is so deep. If you let go of evolution, these people, for many of these people, you're letting go of your entire faith system, which the entire system that buttresses their well-being in their psychology, or really did change their monitors when they went to Berkeley. And I'm not sure who the professor was, but he just lined up all those human skulls on a desk and said, okay, I have a look at that. And it's indubitable. I mean, you see the brain case starting off really tiny, the size of a chimp, and over the, you know, five million years it gets bigger and bigger. The brow ridges, recede, the teeth get smaller, and it goes along with time very nicely. And that is what did change the mind of some of those creations. And so that's what I would try to do. It's hard to deny the fossil record or fossil intermediates. I mean, you could show them a half bird, half lizard, or half reptile, because it was thought that birds evolved from dinosaurs before we knew anything about that. And then all of a sudden we started turning up skeletons of dinosaurs with feathers, like T-Rex might have had feathers, for example. And the predictive ability to actually find missing links that were predicted but weren't known is remarkable and it's hard to convince people who are creationists, you know, that this is evidence that God did it this way or something. Here's a riddle. What's a game where no one wins? 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Indeed's hiring platform matches you with quality candidates instantly. Even better, Indeed's the only job site where you only pay for applications that meet your must have requirements. Indeed is an unbelievably powerful hiring platform, delivering four times more hires than all other job sites combined, according to talent nest. Join the more than 3 million businesses worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. Start hiring now with a $75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post at Indeed.com slash conversations. Offer is only good for a limited time. Claim your $75 credit now at Indeed.com slash conversations. That's Indeed.com slash conversations. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? You need Indeed. So we've been talking about the skepticism of evolution from the political right, from the Christian right. Let's now talk about the skepticism of evolution from the political left. In my view, there are people within academic institutions in academia on the left that would accept and happily agree with everything you've so far said, but essentially feel that evolution by natural selection has affected all of us up to the neck and then, you know, has somehow managed to not affect our brains or somehow otherwise not managed to affect our personalities. So they will resist very, very doggedly the concept of evolutionary psychology, that our psychology, just like every other feature of us is shaped by the genes that were successful in the past, an adaptive to a human environment that by and large includes other humans as arguably the most important part of one's environment. So can you sort of summarize why people, especially academic progressives are skeptical of evolutionary psychology and how you would persuade a skeptic? I'm glad you brought that up. I'm correcting the galley proofs of a paper that I wrote with a co-author that's coming out in the end of June called the ideological subversion of biology. It's in barrego now, but it takes five areas in my field of evolution and showing how ideology is, you see, where it only is, there is. And one of them is the one you just mentioned evolutionary psychology. We can talk about some of the others later if you wish, but yeah, a tax on evolutionary psychology largely come from the left. They baffle any real evolutionists because why should evolution have more of their bodies in our physiology and everything about us, but it left our brains intact? I mean, evolutionary psychology is simply the new version of sociobiology, which is, I mean, it's tentative is that the human brain was molded by natural selection in the history of our species. And it still shows some of the selection pressures that acted on our brains during that time. Well, that's no difference in saying that that same thing happened to our body. The reason people don't like that, why they think that somehow our brains are impervious to showing the traces of selection in our ancestors is simply political. They say the illogical. It comes from, I believe, the Marxist view that humans are infinitely malleable. And if somehow our brains are constricted by, and our behaviors are constricted by natural selection, then that makes us less malleable. It's part of a general attack on biological determinism that comes from the left. I'm not an expert on why that is, but the left is associated with these views of infinite malleability, no differences between people and other differences between groups, complete biological equality, and that's manifested in this attack on the brain. Nevertheless, this view that evolutionary psychology as a punk is probably false. I mean, in our paper, we go through a number of examples of human behaviors that show the selection pressures that acted on us when we lived in the savannah. And I only mention one because it's so bloody obvious to every human being that in general, not 100% true, men tend to be more desirous of having sex with women. And as many women as they can't, then women are with men. In other words, men are prophligate or promiscuous, you might say, and women are cheesy. And this has been shown over and over again. I think it's been shown in every human society that's been tested. And the reason is, of course, because men don't have a lot to lose by mating with many women, and they have a lot to gain. I mean, let it get in this con, the half the world is the descendants of getting this kind because he was a big guy. And if you look at the, for example, the most proffligate male in history in terms of children, I think it was a Moroccan emperor who had something like two, three thousand children. And then you look at the female who had the most offspring in history. It turns out to be a Russian lady from the 18th century. She had, this is unbelievable in itself, about 70 kids. The reason is that she had multiple births that every time she gave birth, she would have triplets, it must have been some genetic anomaly. But that difference between thousands versus 70 shows you the difference in the payoff to mating a lot of times. And for women mates twice within 24 hours, she's only going to have at most one offspring. If a man mates, you know, twice within 24 hours and the women are fertile, he could have, you know, two more offspring. So this is this model, this is sexual selection. This model is this very obvious difference in sexual behavior that's conditioned. So I mean, it just permeates not just American society, but all societies interested in pornography between men. The fact that women are interested in stable males who are good providers, whereas men are interested in women who are in general youthful and have signs that they're going to be good reproducers. That's just a result of evolution, you know, and you can't deny it because it's true. I mean, yes, there are gay people that are trying to do their same sex, but, you know, in general, this is true. And it's all, let me mention one more thing. This is not just true in humans, it's true in all animals. So to try to deny that it's remarkable coincidence alone that in humans, men are promiscuous and females are juicy, but that also happens to be the case in almost every species of animal in the universe. It's all because of the same thing, sexual selection. And if I, you'll know this, obviously much better than me, but I remember some people came up with counter examples of species where the females were more promiscuous and sought out more partners than the males of that species as a rebuttal to evolutionary psychology. And then it turned out that the reason females in those species were, or chooseer is precisely because of the same point where in that species, the females happen to have to invest very little into, so it's actually not even really a point about males and females is a point, or at least it's not inherently about that. It's a point about which sex has to invest more by definition biologically in a given offspring, right? And whichever sex has to invest more ends up being the sex that is chooseer. That's correct. I'm glad you clarified that. I mean, I used males and females Zophan for that, but there are these exceptions. One of them being seahorses, you probably know that. The male seahorses invest more than the female seahorses in reproduction because they're the one that carry the eggs around. When they made the male fertilizes the female's eggs, but then he carries them around in her pouch. And he cannot mate again until all those eggs are had. In other words, the males get pregnant and they have a huge investment in those offspring. Those on the other hand, they're like males in most species. They can go in and summarize it in other, I mean, not in seminary, they can go and give their eggs to another seahorse male and they can produce eggs very quickly. But there are fewer males available to hold eggs than there are females willing to produce eggs. So in that case, the male is the rare species, the one that has very investment. And sure enough, in seahorses, exactly the opposite of most species in their ornamentation. In most species, like in birds and seals and everything, males are larger. They have bright colors, they have dances, mating behaviors. They build bowers, they have ornamentations. This is all to attract the females and say mate with me, mate with me. Well in seahorses, because the males, the situation is reversed, it happens to be the females that are brightly colored and ornamented and trying to, in, you know, say to the males, mate with me, you know, let me take my eggs, take my eggs. So it's the exceptions that prove the rule there. And you know, this is one reason why sexual selection has been such a powerful theory. Can you describe what sexual selection is? Yeah, sexual selection is just a basically, it's just called a subset of natural selection. It's not something separate from natural selection. But it's a form of selection in which the environment itself has very little to do. I mean, you know, the cold weather and then, you know, the arctic makes the polar bear turn white. I mean, it's a select pressure. It gives it long fur, transparent fur to soak up the sun. In sexual selection, on the other hand, what molds characters is mate preference, usually a females. And so it's this interplay between males and females in the race to have offspring that causes traits. And in fact, this was first suggested by Darwin in 1871. In 1859, when he wrote on the origin of species, he hadn't thought yet about the effect that females being choosy would have on males. And on the fact that males bring promiscuous would have on both males and females. And it took him another 12 years to work that out. I think in 1859 around then, he said, the thought of a peacock's feather and he's referring to the males here. When I see it, makes me physically ill because he couldn't understand why males are brightly colored in females peacocks, like most female birds are fairly grab. It took him a long time to figure out. He got a wrong sort of. He said that females have an aesthetic sense. And so they like the male peacocks simply because they're beautiful. Now we have other reasons. And sexual selection is still one of the great areas of biology that we don't fully understand because we don't know why females pick males that look certain ways or do certain things. Is it because they have better genes? Why would sexual, so this is just an interesting question to help highlight the concept and what makes it different from natural selection or what makes it worthy of its own name? Why would sexual selection ever cut against natural selection? Like wouldn't it make the most sense that the females of a species would just prefer the men that are the most fit so that their preferences would neatly align with the selection pressures of the environment? In what sense would it make sense for it to cut against, right? To have like a costly or weird trait? Well, that's a hard question. I'm not quite sure what you mean. Well, let me make it more succinct. So let's say the peacock's tail makes him slower when running from a predator. Why might that still be in it? Why would the woman prefer the man that has the peacock's tail in that case? Because the peacock's tail so you don't know something about that male that makes him give her more offspring than she would get by mating with another male. Even though peacock with a bigger tail might survive less, and this is one example where natural and sexual selection within a sex is opposing. A male with a longer tail. I mean peacocks are just horrible birds, they're in terms of survival. I mean, they can barely fly. They get wet and sudden, and that's a really sad sight to see a wet male peacock perching on a branch. They don't survive well. But what they do is they make their bones, i.e. leave more genes, by attracting more females too. So although you lose some of your genes by cutting back on your survival with some of these onerous traits, growing long horns every year in a moose is another one. Although you lose some of your reproductive ability by that, you more than make up for it by attracting females. So that's the reason it works. There is a constant playoff between what we think of as natural selection, which is fit to the environment, and sexual selection, which is attractiveness to females. And they can be in opposition to one another. But still, given that natural selection is defined as differential reproduction of genes, then sexual selection is natural selection. It's just natural selection for mate choice rather than natural selection to adapt to the call or the drought or anything else. I mean, one of them, we usually think of natural selection as being dear to the environment. Yeah. So just to quickly close that loop, when you say the peacock's tail might signal to the female something about the male's fitness, what might that kind of thing be? Would it be something like, wow, like this guy can survive with such a huge, costly, impractical appendage. There must be something about him that is really noteworthy, obviously, we're anthropomorphizing peacocks here. But is that the kind of thing that it might signal? Yeah. That's one of the theories. That's called the good genes theory that our male can grow a big tail. Obviously shows that he has genes that are good. And therefore, a female picks him. Her offspring will be carrying those good genes too. So she'll have male offspring to attract other females. And so it goes on and on and on. But there are other theories as well. Here's another example of sexual selection that's probably not due to good genes. It could just be due to physical fitness, which may not have anything to do with your genes. You know, you can be fed by running. There's all kinds of environmental modifications that can make you a fitter bird. If you're, if you have really good genes, but you get diseased, then you're not going to be a good choice for a female because A, you're not going to take care of your offspring very well and B, you could transmit that disease. Your offspring. So the house finch is a good example of that. Female house finches go for males that have bright orange breasts. And you can experimentally modify their breasts by painting them orange or in show that the females go for those males more. Why do they do that? It's not necessarily because the males have good genes. It's because the more berries you eat, the orange of your breast gets because you eat orange berries. And so it's a sign to the female that that male is in good condition. He's in good shape. He's well fed. He's going to be a good partner to help you take care of your offspring. Notice, I haven't said anything about genes in that explanation. It's just basically based on fitness. That fitness could be connected with genes, but it doesn't have to be. There's not a perfect correlation between how orange you are and how good your genes are. So one of the great problems of biology that's remaining, one of the great evolutionary problems is why do females choose the traits they do? For example, the prairie chicken, the females all get around in a circle and the males hop up and down and boom, they're inflating their breasts. Why do they choose the males? They happen to choose the males that jump up and down faster. You can show that, but why? They have better... It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, which is women only want one thing and no one knows what it is. Well, that's probably true in sexual selection, except that it could be that they want more than one thing, but you still don't know what it is. So there are a number of problems that are outstanding in biology and how sexual selection works is one of them. So I want to talk a little bit about epigenetics, which is a field of genetics that has gotten a lot of attention in the past five or six years. It's basically... its promise is that events in my lifetime might change my gene expression in my gametes so that actual things that happen to me or things that I do in my lifetime might get passed on to my offspring, which for a long time was viewed as... this is similar to Lamarckian evolution. It's really... it's not how evolution in general works. I really just pass on my genes or so we thought, but the field of epigenetics has seemed to some to promise that events in my lifetime can influence perhaps the genetic expression of my offspring. And some have taken this to be evidence that you can inherit trauma, for instance, you can inherit trauma from your ancestors, essentially. So do you pay close attention to the latest consensus on epigenetics, on the myths and the facts that this emerging field has established at this point? Yeah, I mean, I'm not an epigeneticist, but I do pay attention to the literature insofar as these people claim that this is a form of adaptive evolution that's completely anti-dervorning. I mean, one thing about, I suppose, the ideological opponents to evolution that are not religiously based are that they don't like biological determinism. So this gives away for the environment to change evolutionary pathway. Unfortunately, I mean, the one example you mentioned of inheritance of trauma, you're probably referring to like the Dutch famine study where the Dutch were starved and I think the murder of 42 and the offspring of those people were also underweight but also traumatized and there is one generation inheritance of trauma. Last time adaptive evolution, one thing you didn't want to do is inherit trauma because of this mild adaptive. And that's the problem. There's two problems with epigenetics being touted as ubiquitous and being touted as another way of evolving. The first is that it's not ubiquitous. Not every evolutionary force is going to change your DNA. In fact, most of the changes of your DNA that happens epigenetically, usually by adding bits of chemicals to the DNA base pairs, you know, ACT and G, are actually programmed in the genome itself. So epigenetics plays a huge role in development, for example. And we all start off with the genetically identical cells. Every cell in our body is genetically identical. But the reason that we develop a liver here and our hair is because of different environments that turn on different genes in different parts of the body. And the way those genes are turned on and off in different parts is usually by epigenetics, that some genes are inactivated by bits being added to them and others are activated. But that's in the DNA itself. So what I'm saying is that the DNA itself is coding for epigenetics. It doesn't all come from outside the body. The DNA will say, okay, liver cell, I'm going to put a methyl group in this particular position at this time. And that makes the cell develop into a liver cell. So the DNA itself is programmed to use epigenetics as a way to affect development. This is the most important thing that epigenetics does. But in terms of it coming from the outside to modify things, yes, there's evidence for that. My big sense of every certain odors is also adapted. And there's a flower petal arrangement that has been shown to be passed on for a couple generations. But the problem with epigenetics as a way of avoiding normal derbering an evolution is that most environmental things don't change your genes, don't have any epigenetic influences, don't influence your DNA. I mean, this is, again, you said it's the American inheritance. Well, look at the kids' weight left here. Are they born with huge muscles? No, they aren't. So all this environmental stuff you do by lifting weights doesn't touch your DNA at all, and most of the things that you do are encounter in your environment don't affect your DNA at all. So that's one thing. The other thing is that epigenetic modifications almost all wiped out when the gametes are formed to make the next generation. So that's the main reason why it cannot be a basis for a permanent change in a species or a lineage. Because when DNA, when you're forming a sperm or an egg, there are mechanisms that wipe all that change out. And it has to happen because cells are epigenetically modified to be specific to their tissues. You've got to get rid of all that because you're going to produce a single cell that then has to go through that process of differentiation. So you've got to get rid of everything that makes them differentiate when you start the next generation, which begins with a single cell. So most evolutionists see epigenetics as an interesting part of biology that we didn't know a lot about 34 years ago, but they don't see it as overturning the dogma of how inheritance or evolution works. There's just no evidence for that. People will use anecdotal observations and say, well, see, trauma can be inherited. That doesn't mean that our brains got big from thinking over the history of the human species, but got big because people have bigger brains left more offspring, which is straight their wanting evolution. So for a long time, it was said that evolution has worked over very long periods of time, but not very recently in the sense that there was no significant changes or evolution in the human species over the past, say, 500 years, or maybe even a thousand years. I've heard a lot of people persuasively question that and point to certain examples of rapid evolution, evolution that's mattered over the span of the past 500 years or a thousand years, not just the past 50 or 100,000. Have we evolved in recent human history? Yeah, again, it depends on your definition of recent. I mean, if you're willing to extend it to, say, 20,000 years or 10,000 years, there's lots of evolution that we know about this happen because we know what the human species was 10, 20,000 years ago. People crossed the Bering Strait about 20,000 years ago from Siberia into the Americas and then spread southward. It's not that long ago. I mean, 20,000 years is an eye-blank in the history of the human species. Homo has been around for millions of years. And yet, look at all the morphological evolution has occurred in the new world. All the differences in the morphology of the different groups, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Incas, and their differences from the Siberians that they came from in many trades, the body shape, size, skin color, et cetera, has happened in just the last 20,000 years. Now if you want to go to more recent times, say 10,000 years, we've seen, for example, the Tibetans have evolved the ability to bind oxygen to their hemoglobin more readily. There's a big paper by this. I can't remember the name of the woman who wrote it, but giving examples of evolutionary malaria resistances in other one in Africa. Sigilsal and EMEA is in fact an adaptation to malaria infestation. It's just, it's hard to think of something as bad as Sigilsal and EMEA being an adaptation. Sigilsal and EMEA is having two copies of a gene that in one copy protects you against malaria. And unfortunately, if that's the situation, you're always going to get offspring produced, they get two copies of the bad gene. Those are the ones that get Sigilsal and EMEA and die. But that's evolved fairly recently and it's evolved in the Mediterranean as well as in West Africa. The Tibetans, as I say, there's a call of resistance, there's a paper in science which gives a number of examples of more recent human evolution. Humans spread around the globe not that long ago. Have you heard of the, I might be mispronouncing, but the Baja people? No. B-A-J-A-U. There's some amazing videos on YouTube. They're a group of sea nomads that live on islands close to the Philippines that are able to basically free dive with no equipment and hold their breath for like easily for like several minutes to fish. And their spleens are different and professional like Western divers have gone out there to study them because what they're able to do was thought to be impossible without equipment. And they can just easily do it. Yeah, my only question with that would be, is this a result of repeated diving or are they born that way? Which in which case would it be evolved difference? I suspect it isn't evolved difference. You could tell just by looking at the newborns and seeing if they have the same kinds of differences as the adults do and I suspect they do. So that of course would be a recent evolution. Humans didn't get to that area of the world until not that long ago. So that's another example. If you want, I mean, we can see evolution actually occurring in the last 100 years if you want to get really picky about it. If you look at the Framingham Heart Study in which they fall in generations of humans, three or four, that's all you can do in about 50 or 60 years. You can actually see changes in various traits that are correlated with reproductive success. So we can actually predict that yes, this is evolution going on in our species right now, but it's kind of boring evolution. What we find out is that people are more resistant to hypertension than they were before. In terms of reproduction, we know that genetically women are coming into reproductive condition, i.e. getting their first periods younger than they used to, and that's genetic. And also the women are remaining reproductive, i.e. attaining menopause later longer than they used to. And we can show that these various conditions are correlated with the number of offspring that did late. So we can predict where the human species is. I'm always asked this question in our lecture, where are we going? Are we going to become a species of super people? Are we going to get handsome, are we going to get smarter? My answer is always, I just can't tell you because it takes a lot of work. The Framingham Heart Study is a lot of work. You have to follow people for generations and follow the number of offspring they have and measure their conditions and stuff. So all I can say is that what's likely to happen is we're going to become more resistant to heart disease. Women are going to become reproductive earlier and they're going to give up reproduction later. And that's how we know what we're going. There's all kinds of other changes going on that we don't know about. We'll probably be coming in resistant to environmental toxins, for example. As global warming proceeds, people that are more heat resistant for various reasons are going to leave more offspring and will evolve in that direction. But in order to actually see that happening, evolution is slow and we're a species that has a long generation of time. So predicting what's going to happen is hard. So there's a theory which is put forth by people like, I mean, to some extent Eric Kauffman and Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins, which is when you look at differences in birth rates between very religious or conservative populations and secular populations worldwide, there just is this huge disparity where religious people are having far more babies and pretty much everyone else isn't. And even without religion, just conservative people are having more babies than secular liberal people in many societies. And to the extent that politics are to some degree heritable or that the attrition rate out of religious communities is slower than that birth rate difference that we may just be getting slowly but measurably more conservative and religious as especially in Western societies. I mean, do you put any stock in that kind of a possibility? Well, I know that political leanings are heritable to some extent. You're right about that. And if there is a huge outpouring of babies from conservatives versus liberals, yeah, that would in general be a form of evolutionary change. But of course, it would be much slower than kind of evolutionary change rate by political changes in politics. For example, you know, that are not genetic. The arrival of somebody like Donald Trump, for example, unfortunately, just create huge changes in conservatism that have nothing to do with genetics at all. And that is much, I mean, the fact is cultural change sort of via means is much faster than genetic change in humans. Now, in terms of religiousness, I'm not sure there is a heritability for religiosity. I mean, I know that they've demonstrated a heritability for being tendency to be liberal and conservative on this twin studies and other studies like that. I'm not sure we've demonstrated that for religiosity. So for example, I'm just saying if you take like a test case like Israel, where, and I know you've written about Israel to some extent, but there is a feeling that the herrady population used to be really small, but their birth rate is the ultra orthodox. Their birth rate has been so high that they are now a really significant part of the population just by birth rate trends alone. And it looks like that has had an actual influence at this point on the direction of Israeli politics. Right? Oh, yeah, I wouldn't deny that. Unfortunately, herrady women are regurgers, breeders like cows are. And so they pop these kids out of huge rates and that's going to change things. I think Muslims tend to favor having more children than for example, Jews of Christians. That's going to affect the demographics of religiosity. But I mean, being a Jew or being a Muslim or not in genetic traits, what genetic is your willingness to absorb the religion of your parents? I mean, that's adaptive for us to learn from our parents because that's how we survive in this world. We do what our parents have taught us through experience. And so that's religion piggybacks. If our parents are Christian, we can tell me the trait with the highest irritability. There's two traits in the world that have the highest irritability of any other traits. The first one is religious leaning and the second one is wealth. But neither of those really have anything to do with genetics. They have to do with cultural inheritance. You get the money that your parents leave you. You get the religion that your parents teach you. So this is a form of cultural evolution and how it's going to be affected, but how it's going to affect the human, she and poor. I would regard that as not a question of overweening interest compared to the cultural influences that can cause similar changes. This is a very hot topic in the culture right now, hot button issue, how we should think about sex and gender. As an evolutionary biologist, if you look out on the landscape now, we're having constant cultural issues about the ability to change your sex about transgender identity, gender dysphoria in minors and in adults, whether trans people should be able to use the bathroom of their choosing of the gender that they identify as or of what their chromosomes would say their sex are. And people have very heated disagreements about this. I know this is something that you think about. How do you think about this issue of a dimorphic species like humans, which largely come into flavors, encountering the desire for gender to be a spectrum and to be fluid and to identify differently than how your biology would dictate? How do you think about this issue? Well, first I point out you said we're a dimorphic species, which is true. Dymorphic means two forms. You already have admitted that you recognize that there are two sexes of males and females, which happens to be the case that this is a hot issue. It's the first issue we take up in this paper, the denial of the sexual binary in humans by ideologues. And I've just gotten a big fight with this. This guy, Augustine Fuentes is an anthropology professor at Princeton who read a scientific American op-eds basically did it on that there is a sexual binary. There's a whole lot of people that claim that sex is a social construct, something that's just artificially created by humans. It's nothing real. And they're all wrong. For years, Bios is to recognize that there's two sexes, males and females, and they're defined as males are the group. And this is just not just true humans. It's true of all animal species and most vascular plants. Males are defined as the group of animals or plants whose reproductive apparatus is designed to produce small, highly mobile gametes, sperm in animals, and there's also sperm in plants that do the same thing. And females are the group that are designed to produce, whose reproductive apparatus is designed to produce large, immobile gametes, eggs, or ovules and plants. And that's all we got. There's not a third sex, there's no fourth sex. Sometimes you can have both sexes in the same body as in her mafrodites. I've never yet found her mafrodite in humans going through the literature in which both male and female functions work. There's a case of one hermafrodite who can produce sperm that can fertilize eggs, even though he also had ov tissue for ovules but it wasn't functional. And we have another case of her mafrodite that got pregnant so that she functioned as one but male reproductive parts didn't function. So hermafrodites are not even if they're both parts were functional and in many animals there are worms that are permeated in which both parts are functional. That doesn't deny the sexual binary. There's nothing in the definition of sex that says that both sexes can't co-occur in the same body. That's, you know, so, and they're so rare in humans. I mean, the number of individuals that do not fall into clearly distinguished males and females as defined by gamete size is .018%. .0, it's not 1%. It's .018%. That's about one individual out of 5,600. Do not fit into the neat male female spectrum. And that, I mean, that's as close to a binary as you could get. One of those for biology. There may be people listening to this thinking like, who actually thinks this? Like, who actually thinks that they're that the presence of intersex people or hermafrodites means we're not dimorphic? Well, I mean, I took a class in college where this was taught as basically fact. And you know, to me, it always seemed like, well, there are babies born with six fingers, but that doesn't mean it's not true that human beings tend to have two hands with five fingers each. Right? Like, how far do we go with the rare exception just destroying the rule? That's true 99.0 something percent of the time. I mean, it's clearly motivated reasoning. And it's done by people that obviously they have an ideology, which is, which we should talk about, which is people have gender dysphoria. You know, some number of people have gender dysphoria. They want to present as the other sex to people they want to be seen as a woman if they were born male or seen as a man if they were born a woman. By the way, that admits that there was sex binary right there. Should they return transsexual means? Although increasingly, there are people that want to identify as neither, right? They want to be called they feel that they are outside of the gender binary. And this is so far as I can tell, it's just an irreducible, unanalyzable feeling, right? It's just like a brute feeling for people. And so the question is, what do you do? Right? What is such a person do in that instance? How should society see them? You know, like these are questions like we can, I think we can admit that biological sex is a binary and still we have not solved or answered every interesting question about how to deal with this phenomenon of people having a strong feeling that they are gender dysphoric. So what do you, how do you think about that? Well, you don't, I mean, the fact is you don't draw your morals from biology. That's one of the lessons of the paper we're writing. I mean, it's a clear, it's called the naturalistic fallacy that what is natural is good or what is natural is desirable. I mean, you don't do that. If you start down that road, then you're starting to, you're going to have to justify things like infanticide, rape, theft, anything, everything that you can see in the animal opinion. So, you know, how, the fact that there are, that sex is a binary in animals and we're an animal is a brute fact. Now, what do we do with that? I don't think it has much to say about the social, socio-political attitudes towards people that are transgender or transsexual. And I want to make this caveat because people often insist that if you say that you believe in a binary sex or transphobic, you want, in fact, Augustine Fuentes says this in his article that we want to erase this whole class of people from society that we're somehow favoring genocide or people that don't identify as male female. But that's crazy. I mean, you know, just because you recognize that there are males and females, that's not mean that we have to start killing people that don't identify that way. I have every sympathy in the world for people that go through gender dysphoria. It's got to be painful. Every teenager has, you know, various psychological issues and some of them present as a senator dysphoria. So I guess my view on this, which I've written about repeatedly is that people that, well, first of all, if you're trans, there's a difference between, you know, being gay and being transsexual. And one of them, you remain a sex that you are based your sexual attraction as towards members of the same sex. And the other case, you are taking steps to try to resemble the other sex physically and maybe mentally. And the biological basis for that is in the offering now, there are people who claim that you can identify possible transsexual tendencies or gender dysphoria by looking at people's brains. And I haven't looked closely enough at that literature to know whether that's the case or not. But in terms of the moral and legally quality of people, I don't see why your sexual identity should have anything to do with that except. And there are several cases you mentioned. So the bathroom case, that doesn't worry me too much because I've used unisex bathrooms so long, we have some in our department here that if they have stalls, I don't really care who's, you know, doing their business in the same place. In terms of locker room. I've used unisex bathrooms to, we might only caveat to that would be, I think, as men, we would almost by definition have nothing to fear from unisex bathrooms. For women do, yeah. If, yeah, if anyone had something to fear, it would be women, right? So I would, in that way, sort of take the lead from women more so on that issue. You may have to third point. I mean, there certainly should be bathrooms for men only and women only and unisex bathrooms. You can't, shouldn't just have unisex bathrooms. So women should be able to feel free to go into a woman on the bathroom. The problem there, of course, is that what do you mean by woman? I mean, the mantra of the gender activists is that a transsexual trans woman is a woman. So they should be able to use women's rooms. That's why these sort of laws and rules of poem. But I can see some sense in them. But it gets much more serious to me with in sports where the view that trans women are women does not lead to manifest unfairness against biological women. There's a reason why there are men's sports and women's sports. And that's because on average, a man who goes to male puberty, even if he transitions later to being a transsexual woman, will still have an athletic advantage over biological women. So that's why, you know, they're separated. But puberty over a male causes a development of bone density and muscles and grip strength in various characteristics that give them an athletic advantage. So if you were to have men and women competing against each other in a single league, it would just cause all kinds of hell. First of all, in most sports, the women would just be knocked out of contention completely. Just like the, I think a bike race yesterday or the other day was won by a transsexual woman, a woman in a spike race. Leah Thomas and Swimming, who's a, identifies as a woman, but has the reproductive system, as I understand it, of a male, has become a champion even though she was mediocre when she competed as a male. So I think it's completely unfair to allow transsexual women to compete against biological women. And that's where I draw the line in terms of treatment. Well, bathrooms, you can make a case and I could possibly agree with part of that. Certainly changing rooms, locker rooms. I mean, a woman does not feel comfortable taking her clothes off in front of a guy who identifies as a woman that has a penis. I mean, they've said that and I can respect that. So, you know, that's one of the byproducts, of course, of having trans people compete in sports. Now, in terms of transgender men competing against biological men, I don't see that as a serious problem because I don't think it's unfair to biological men athletically. A trans man is going to have gone through puberty as a woman and she's going to come off with less musculature, less bone density, et cetera. She's not going to be that competitive against biological males. On the other hand, world rugby has just outlawed trans men from competing against biological men because the women, biological women who are identified as men, trans men are more liable to get hurt because they're smaller and they're more fragile and their bones are less dense. So no women are biological women who identify as men, trans-sexual. Trans-men. That seems strange to me because there, if they want to play rugby in that league, then they're sort of signing up for the possibility of they're making that conscious choice just like an MMA fighter is going to choose to get into the ring and he doesn't care. He or she doesn't care if they get their head pounded in and that's kind of a choice we seem to allow people to make in most cases. Yeah, I guess it's just on an average, your chances of being hurt are higher. In general, I don't. I mean, then there's a lot of sports where you're not going to get hurt like a large rate or long distance running and those kinds of sports dependent. In some sports, I've heard that shooting and hypermarathoning women, biological women are as good as biological men in competing and there you might want it to change the rules. That's sports specific and that's what the Olympics says, world. They each sport has to make its own rules about which kinds of people are met. But in general, most sports involve advantages and strength, musculature and density and those sports, I think, judge, I think it's fair to prevent or outlaw transsexual women who transition after puberty to participate in those sports. No, that's because it's unfair to biological women. However, it's also unfair to trans people who won't participate in sports, which leaves us with the conundrum. What do we do? Do we just tell them, well, sorry, you can't compete. We tell them you can compete against the man, biological man, like you suggested, well, maybe. Sure, we have another classification. Men, women's men's sports, women's sports and others. That's possible, but it seems somewhat stigmatizing to be competing in other leagues. So the problem of what to do with, in particular, with transgender women, like transsexual women is one that's very hard to resolve. The Olympics used to use testosterone levels as whether or not you compete as a woman. If your tea was too high, you couldn't do it. But now they recognize that regardless of your testosterone level, you're still going to have a musculature, bone density, strength advantage that doesn't go away your whole life practically if you're a transsexual woman. And so therefore, the Olympics basically threw up its hands. They got rid of these limits and said, okay, every sport, you guys make your own rules, or just throws the problem onto any number of sports. But in terms of just stuff like changing rooms, sports, and maybe bathrooms, rape counseling is another one. And home and shelters and prisons, I forget to mention those. I don't think it's fair to put a sexual predator, for example, who is a biological male and decides to identify as a female. And you got to remember that in most of these laws, you don't have to have any medical treatment or surgery to be recognized as a woman if you're born as a man. All I have to do is say, I feel like I'm a woman. I identify as a woman. So you can take a perfectly equipped biological man and a lot of these have been convicted of sex crimes and throw them in a prison with women, but with biological women. And you get sometimes the expected result, violence and rape. That's unfair. And I don't think that should be a lot of either. You know, they've dealt with this in the UK now. I'm Scotland tried it, but the UK overruled that. So they can't do that anymore. Prisons rape counseling of water women feel uncomfortable being counseled by a biological male who's identifies as a female after they've been raped simply because they don't feel and I can see this as justified that not having had the experience of being a woman. You don't have the psychology to be able to help a woman who's traumatized in the same way as, you know, a biological woman has. So those are the few, but that's just a few exceptions. That doesn't, I mean, making these rules or guidelines does not, by any sense, erase transgender or transsexual people from society. It doesn't mean we look down on them. It's just means we're trying to strike a balance between fairness, between different groups. And this is where we come down. In terms of everything else, your legal rights, your right to housing, you know, medical care, everything else like that, I don't think that gender or sexuality should make any difference whatsoever. And I certainly, you know, if somebody wants to be called a woman, like a transgender woman, I'll be happy to do that. It's just a matter of civility and respect to me. That's pretty much exactly where I come down on the issue too. So I'll ask you one last question before I let you go. What are the most important unanswered questions in evolution? Well, that's a good one. One of them is, you know, where are we going? That's not going to be answered in a hard of a lot of times. I mean, we'll know how to do this in generations, how we've evolved. How sexual selection works is a very, I mean, there's a lot of people working on that, but we don't know on what basis females choose mates in general. We do sometimes. But why and how and what they're looking for in particular, I mean, is something that we don't know and it's hard to tell. So, I'm going to answer your question. It's why is there sex in the first place? If I were to butt off a copy of myself like a hydro's do, a little juries grow out of my arms and legs, I would leave twice as many copies of my genes as I would if I had to copy it with a female that had an offspring, which is the way it is. So actually, there's a cost of sex, a twofold cost, which means that there's a big mystery about why we're going to use and reproduce sexually in the first place. Now there are suggestions about that, having to do with gene recombination or putting together better combination of genes or getting rid of bad combination of genes, but we really don't know the answer to that one either. So, I think those are the biggest problems afflicting the field. And there's a number of more arcane problems that are not of such widespread interest, but those are the big ones I would say. Oh, another one. This doesn't really fall into the amortive evolution, but it's a problem that some people consider evolution, and it's where life came from in the first place. Where did the first living organism, the so-called last universal common ancestor, the Luca, that's the ancestor of all of us, how did that form? Was it the DNA or RNA first or was proteins first? There was a combination of them? We don't know. And that's something that we, well, we know that it's probably based on RNA rather than DNA. So, we know that it's a very important part of the process. And we know that it's a very important part of the process. And we know that it's a very important part of the process. And we know that it's a very important part of the process. And we know that it's a very important part of the process. And we know that it's a very important part of the process. And we know that it's a very important part of the process. And we know that it's a very important part of the process. It may be possible someday to recreate life in the laboratory or in a permanent earth conditions. That will show us that it could have happened, but we already know it did have a thing. But it might give us a hint on the things that make it our favorable for the original life. The problem is that's a damn hard experiment to do. You know, tell them. All right, Jerry Cohen, thanks so much. Sure. Thanks for listening to this episode of Conversations with Coleman. 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