Evolution, Intergenerational Trauma, and Gender with Jerry Coyne

[Music] welcome to another episode of conversations with Coleman my guest today is Jerry Coyne 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 versus 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 Coyne okay Jerry Coyne how are you fine yourself good good to have you on 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 um 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 you know 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 an error I was suffering from the residuem of a bad cold so I may be a bit hoarse but um I'm an evolutionary biologist my specialty is the Origin of Species having a new species form the problem that Darwin broached but never answered in his book I'm retiring now we're retired about seven years ago and I've gotten more involved in politics ideology of Science and more General things the usual root of a retired Professor um let's see what else did you want to know um 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 and Mary in Virginia and the very first class on the very first day of college was well as you won but it was taught by an evolutionary biologists it was extremely charismatic as him as Jack Brooks and I think he's still alive um and he just was very I mean 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 um and I needed to take genetics because in order to do Evolution properly you need synergenetics so I um asked him if he could get me into the genetics class as a sophomore which I wasn't really supposed to take clothes as a junior I took that and I became an evolutionary geneticist working with drosophila the fruit fly and then I took a course in evolution and by that time I was hooked 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 Genesis I was a junior and we have 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 bottles of flies a white eyes and red Iron flies and said well figure out what the genetic basis this is so I cross them together and the hybrids were red pure red but then you 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 could 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 flaws but you can separate them by doing process and then I further went on to test that hypothesis by localizing the tube genes that I positive were doing this they're called Brown and Cinnabar by the way but it was just such a I mean it was a flash of inspiration that and what I like about genetics is the results are so clean unlike ecology and you know um many areas of evolution where they're highly speculative genetics is a very clean Branch you get a result because genes are you know they're more or less sex things on chromosome so that's how I get into my final study which is the evolution drugs um in terms of you know creationism and religion that I can say that very shortly I our 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 hollering out about you know the perfidies of evolution and how it's false and everything and I occasionally stopped by and listened to big guy and I realized especially when I read the statistics that most Americans don't accept evolution in fact only about 20 percent of them do accepted in the form that we teach it about uh is that still true is that still true oh yeah every every year or two the Gallup organization runs a poll and that 20 percent yeah so here's the data as I remember last time the question is um how did humans come to be and the first option is humans were created ten thousand years ago in the form in which they exist today that's straight biblical creationism and about 40 percent of Americans subscribe to that that's a lot for it yeah and another 20 odd percent subscribe 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 nurse comes to create humans which regards some special this is another religiously based view theistic Evolution that's I think uh about 22 percent of Americans accept that and then the and the other alternative is humans evolve naturalistically we're just happens to be the truth as far as we know it and it's what we teach our students and only 20 of Americans subscribe to that view the rest of them don't you know have say don't know or can't answer so it's only really one in five Americans except 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 um none of the creationist organizations that I've dealt with or fought with or 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 um and that's David berlinski who identifies himself I guess is a secular Jew I think he's a secret religious person but I mean you know 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 you know the Quran um Judaism all the abrahamic religions say humans are special the special objects of God's creation and attention so that got me to write my first book which my first trade book I had written us a book on speciation for Specialists before that my first trade book was called why evolution is true um stop me if I'm bored no no no it's all it's all good I mean well started my you know any Professor knows that when you're starting a introductory class the first thing you do is read how other people teach that class and then you sort of make a gamish 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 but this is how we know gravity works but that's because most Americans already accept the existence of atoms and 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 I mean 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 yeah but give them at 80 percent of Americans are 78 five percent of them rejected I think that you need 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 for evolution and then you start looking at newer and newer textbooks and in about the 1920s where National selection began to be accepted that was the one part of Darwin's theory that was not widely accepted um 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 the one we know about of course is natural selection and Darwin in fact suggested that um and you see one of 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 Amish or the dunkers where they're inbred and they're small and that smallness means that random factors play a larger role in which genes get passed on which Chains Don't and that's one reason why we see as such a high frequency of deleterious genes and conditions in small human isolation you know the the Amish have a number of genetic diseases associated with them um Ashkenazi Jews have Tay sex disease and other diseases so genetic drift is another form of that can change Gene frequencies there are other things as well but they're trivial compared to drift and selection um 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 chemicals hump you know the horns of animals any trait that an animal has that helps it get along in its lifestyle those things can only be installed by natural selection so right yeah so 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 um yes the answer short answer is yes it was the Dover versus Kitzmiller case I think that was in 2005. but she can look it up um in which the Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania forced the students to read a book on intelligent design as an alternative Revolution 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 his six-week trial it was a big deal it's a federal court Supreme Court has never take 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 thing 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 being really almost bankrupted the school district they had to lay off teachers and cut their budget and everything and every school now knows at public schools are what we're talking about the ones that are subject to the First Amendment um now you know that they shouldn't be doing this so no it's not much of a problem anymore but I've also know 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 our ID I mean Dover could have appealed that to the Supreme Court at the time it was the liberal Supreme Court and they were uphelded design but what I'm quite worried about today is the new conservative Supreme Court we have which has shown itself willing to take all kinds of bizarre stance that they might somehow okay the teaching of creationism in some form or another idea is creationism they just don't identify the desire as God or Jesus or whatever they just say oh it's some designer we don't know anything about he she or at but it's still religious so you know it's interesting to me uh 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 um and 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 um there's been you know I've done I think more than one podcast about that issue with both proponents and and critics of it I'm curious to sort of compare these two cases like is there something we can learn from how um from how the the intelligent design debate was handled that can inform our uh 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 um that's a good question and it's not easy to 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 you 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 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 dissed somehow it failed it always will fail until the Supreme Court does it um there's no there's been no attempts to mandate the teaching Revolution because you can't mandate the teaching of evidence against evolution so the demonstrating ideology on one hand and and science on the other as a matter of fact versus Faith or politics on the other hand um so you know the only lesson I can see is that states should not mandate what facts well I mean again they can mandate what effects can we talk because they're you know some of these CR these bills say that you have to emphasize this about our history and you cannot say that indigenous people were you know badly created or stuff like that I'm like they're contentious issues but there are some factual issues in there so now 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 curriculum 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 right so um 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 grants because one thing you've discovered very quickly is 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 Muhammad or your Moses well before you get Darwin I mean as soon as you're able to speak you're most people are propagandized into the faith of their parents so most people that have cost 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 right two minutes I mean there are so many lines of everyone's Revolution the fossil record biogeography um vestigial organs Etc each one of those is a chapter in my book that it's 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 where evolution is true I would line up all the human skulls from the earliest hominin known about four to five million years ago australopithecines and just line them up in temporal order and say okay look at this now you tell me is this something shows 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 U at K to the United States and then each one of us had a program in the BBC card 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 and one of the lakes in the Grand Canyon and I had a little model of the hurricane I tried to convince them that you know how's the how are the kangaroos going to get from Mount Ararat and turkey to Australia things like that but it didn't work because religious indoctrination is so did 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 and their psychology but what really did change their minds 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 have a look at that and it's endurable I mean you see the brain face getting 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 at this point yeah or something so so um 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 uh in my view there are people you know within academic institutions in Academia on the left that would accept and happily agree with everything you've so far said um but essentially feel that evolution by natural selection has affected all of us up to the neck and then you know but has somehow managed to not affect our brains or or somehow otherwise not manage to affect our our personalities so uh they will resist very uh 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 and adaptive to a human environment that by and large includes other humans as arguably the most important part of one's environment so uh can you sort of summarize why people especially academic progressives are skeptical of evolutionary psychology and how you would persuade a skeptic yeah um I'm glad you brought that up I'm correcting the galley proofs of uh a paper that I wrote with a co-author that's coming out in the end of June until the ideological subversion of biology it's embargoed now but it takes five areas in my field Evolution and showing how ideology is you see we're in those areas 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 um oh attacks on evolutionary psychology largely come from the left they baffle any real evolutionist because why should Evolution have molded our bodies and our physiology and everything about us but it left our brains intact I mean opponents of 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 more impervious to showing the traces of selection in our ancestors is simply political it's ideological 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 and 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 bank is probably false I mean in our paper we go through a number of examples of human behaviors that that show the selection pressures that acted on us when we lived in the savannah and it only measure 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 than women are with men in other words men are prosely dead or promiscuous you might say and women are choosy and this has been shown over and over again um 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 look at Genghis Khan half the world is descendants of Genghis Khan because he was a big guy and if you look at the for example the most profligate male in history in terms of children I think it was a Moroccan Emperor who had something like two three thousand children I mean 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 every time she gave her she would have triplets there must have been some genetic normally but that difference between thousands versus 70 shows you the difference in the payoff remaining a lot of times if a woman mates twice within 24 hours she's only going to have at most one Offspring if a man made you know twice within 24 hours and the women are thoroughly he could have you know two or more offspring so this is this model this is sexual selection this molds 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 useful and have signs that they're going to be good reproducers um that's just the results of evolution you know and you can't deny it because it's true I mean yes there are gay people that so do their same sex and but yeah you know in general this is true and it's all let me mention one more thing this is not just chewing humans it's true in all animals so to try to deny that it's remarkable coincidence alone that in humans matter promiscuous and females are cheesy but that also happens to be the case and almost every species of animal in the universe it's all because of the same thing sexual assault and uh if I you'll 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 were choosier is precisely because of the same point where in that species the females happen to have to invest very little yes into so it's actually not even really a point about males and females is a point in or at least it's not inherently about that it's a point about which uh which sex has to invest more by definition biologically in a given Offspring right and whichever whichever sex has to invest more ends up being the sex that is choosier that's correct I'm glad you clarified that I mean I use males and females off him for that but there are these exceptions one of them being seahorses you probably know that the male seahorses invest more than the female sea horses in reproduction because they're the one that carry the eggs around when they made the male fertilizes the females eggs but then he carries them around in her pouch and he cannot mate again until all those eggs are hatched in other words the males get pregnant and they have a huge investment in those Offspring females on the other hand they're like males in most species they can go in and seminate another I mean not a sermonade they can go and give their eggs to another sea horse male and they could produce eggs very quickly but there are fewer males available for 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 some very investment and sure enough and see seahorses are exactly the opposite of most species in their ornamentation and most species like in birds and you know 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 bait 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 state of 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 right you know this is one reason why um sexual selection has been such a powerful Theory can you describe what sexual selection is yeah sexual selection is just a basically now well it's it's 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 selective 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 of females and so it's 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 of males being promiscuous we have on both males and females and it took him another uh 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 it 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 yeah why would why would sexual so this is just a it's an interesting question to help highlight the concept and what makes it different from natural selection or or what makes it um worthy of its own name um why would sexual selection ever cut against Natural Selection like wouldn't it make the most sense that uh the females of a species would just prefer the men that are the most fit so that their preferences would neatly align with uh 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 that's a hard question quite sure what you mean in other words let me well let me make it more like so let's say the peacock's tail makes him slower when running from a predator it does why might that still be in it why would the woman prefer them the man that's the the man that has the peacock's tail in that case because the peacock's tail signal something about that male that makes him give her more offspring than she would get by meeting 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 and they can barely fly they get wet and sudden and it's a really sad sight to see a wet male peacock person on a branch they don't they don't survive well but what they do is that they they make their bones uh you leave more genes by attracting more females to him 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 and a moose is another one although you lose some of your um 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 National 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 I mean 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 Core or the drought or anything else I mean one of them we usually think of Natural Selections as being deer to the environment yeah yeah so just just to quickly close that Loop when you say the peacock's tail might signal to the female something about the 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 with such a huge costly impractical appendage there must be something about him that is really noteworthy 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 are male that can grow a big tail obviously shows that he has genes that are good and therefore a female that picks him she's gonna her Offspring will be carrying those good chains too so she'll have male offspring attract other females and so it's it goes on around but there are other theories as well um here's another example of sexual selection that's probably not due to good genes excuse me um it's it could just be due to physical fitness which may not have anything to do with your genes um you know you can be fit by running there's all kinds of environmental modifications that can make you a fitter word if you're if you ever really do jeans but you get disease then you're not going to be a good choice for a female because a you're not gonna take care of your Offspring very well and be you could transmit that disease to 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 paying you know oranger and show that the females go for those males more why do they do that um it's not necessarily because the males have good genes it's because the more berries you eat the orange of your breast get 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 now that Fitness could be connected with cheese but it doesn't have to be there's not a perfect correlation between how orange you are and how good your jeans 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 you know for example the prairie chicken the females all get around in a circle and the males hop up and down and boom they're you know inflate their breasts well you know why do they choose the males they happen to choose the metals that jump up and down faster you can show that but why it reminds me of uh 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 to do so you know there are a number of problems that are outstanding in biology and how sexual selection works is one of them yeah so I want to talk a little bit about epigenetics which is a a field of of genetics that has gotten a lot of attention in the past five or six years and um it's basically you know it's promise is that events in my lifetime might change my gene expression um in in my gametes so that actual things that happen to me are things that I do in my lifetime might get passed on to my offspring which for a long time was viewed as uh you know this is similar to lamarchian Evolution it's really it's not how evolution in general works is 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 um the the genetic expression of my Offspring and some have taken this to be evidence that you can inherit trauma for for instance you can inherit Trauma from your ancestors essentially so do you uh pay close attention to the latest consensus on epigenetics on the on the myths and and the um the facts that this emerging field has established at this point I mean I'm not an epigenous but I do pay attention to work in so far as these people claim that this is a form of adaptive evolution that we that's completely antique darwinian 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 I think when they were 42 and The Offspring of those um people were also underweight but also traumatized and there is one generation inheritance well that's not adaptive Evolution one thing you don't want to do is inherit trauma right because now that's the pro there's two problems with epigenetics being touted as ubiquitous and being terrorists another way of evolving the first is that it's not ubiquitous um 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 bodies is generally identical but the reason that we develop a liver here and already here is because of different environments that turn on different genes in different parts of the body and though the way those genes are turned on and off in different parts is usually by epigenetics that some genes are inactivated by it's being added to them when others are activated um 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 epigenitis does but in terms of it coming from the outside to modify things yes there's evidence for that um I think since there is certain odors as 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 obviating normal darwinian 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 still working inheritance well look at the kids of weight lifters 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 you know 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 are almost all wiped out when the gametes are formed to make the Next Generation so that's the main another main reason why it cannot be a basis for 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 you know cells are epigenetically modified to be specific to their their tissues you 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 got to get rid of everything that makes them differentiate and when you start the next Generation which begins with the signal cell so most evolutionists see epigenetics is 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 but that doesn't mean that our brains got big from thinking over the history of the human species but got big because people that had bigger brains left more offspring which is straight they're winning an evolution yeah um 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 is no significant changes or evolution in the human species over the past say 500 years or maybe even a thousand years um I've heard a lot of people you know persuasively question that and point to certain examples of Rapid evolution of 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 ten thousand years there's lots of evolution that we know about this Heaven because we know what the human species was 10 20 000 years ago people crossed the Bering Strait about twenty thousand years ago from Siberia into the Americas and then spread Southward that'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 um and yeah look at all the morphological Evolution has occurred in the New World um you know 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 traits you know body shape size skin color Etc has happened in just the last 20 000 years now if you want to go to more recent times say Ten Thousand Years uh 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 Evolution malaria resistance is another one in Africa sickle cell anemia is in fact an adaptation to malaria infestation it's just it's you know I mean it's hard to think of something as bad as sickle cell anemia being an optician sickle cell anemia is having two properties of a gene that in one copy protects you against malaria unfortunately that's if you if that's the situation you're always going to get Offspring produced to get two copies of the bad Gene those are the ones that get sickle cell name and die but that's evolved you know fairly recently and it's evolved in the Mediterranean as well as in West Africa the Tibetans as I say there's cholera resistance um there's a paper in science which gives a number of examples of more recent human evolution spread around the globe not that long ago have you heard of the uh the I may be mispronouncing the but the bajau people no it's b-a-j-a-u there's some amazing videos on YouTube they're a group of C Nomads that live uh on islands close to the Philippines that are able to basically free dive equipment and hold their breath for like easily for like several minutes to fish and their spleens are different and you know 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 it would be evolved difference right I suspect it is an 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 um didn't get to that area of the world until not that long ago so that's another example um 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 follow generations of humans three or four that's all you can do in about 50 or 60 years you can actually see changes in um 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 by getting their first periods younger than they used to and that's Shack and also the women are remaining reproductive I.E attending menopause later longer than they used to and we can show that these various conditions are quarterly with the number of offspring that they leave so we can predict where the human species I'm always asked this question in our lecture where are we going are we going to become you know a species of super people are we going to get handsomer are we going to get smarter yeah and my answer is always so I just can't tell you because it takes a lot of work the Framingham art 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 or heart disease women are going to become reproductive earlier and they're going to give up reproduction later and that's where where how we know what we're going there's other all kinds of other changes going on that we don't know about we're probably becoming resistant to environmental toxins for example you know as global warming proceeds um well probably people that are more heat resistant for various reasons are going to leave more offspring and we'll 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 it's you know predicting what's going to happen is hard so there's a there's a theory uh which is put forth by people like I mean to some extent Eric Kaufman 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 they're just like is this huge disparity where religious people are having far more babies and you know pretty much everyone else isn't and even without religion just conservative people are having more babies than than secular liberal people in many societies and to the extent that politics are to some degree heritable or that the like attrition rate out of uh 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 that political leanings are horrible 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 there would be much slower than kind of revolutionary change by politic changes in politics for example you know that are not genetics the arrival of somebody like Donald Trump for example can unfortunately just you know create huge changes in uh and conservatism that have nothing to do with genetics at all and that's not that is much I mean the fact is cultural change sort of via means is much faster than genetic chains and humans now in terms of religiousness I don't I'm not sure there is a heritability for religiosity I mean I know that they've demonstrated a heritability for being a tendency to be liberal or conservative of this twin studies and other studies like I'm not sure we've demonstrated that for religiosity yeah sorry 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's a there's a feeling that the the haradi population used to be really small but their their birth rate is you know the ultra uh Orthodox their birth rate has been so high that they are now um you know 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 here already women are regardless breeders like cows or and so they pop these kids that are huge raise and that's going to change things um I think Muslims tend to favor having more children than for example Jews or Christians that's going to affect the demographics of religiously but I don't I mean being a Jew or being a Muslim or not genetic traits yeah what's genetic is that your willingness to observe 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 that's religion piggybacks on that if our parents are Christian we can I mean the trait with the highest heritability 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 how it's going to be affect your but how it's going to affect the human she and Paul I would regard that as not a question of overweening interest compared to the cultural influences that can cause like similar changes so um this is a very Hot Topic in the culture right now hot button issue how we should think about sex and gender um as as an evolutionary biologist if you look out on the landscape now we're having you know constant culture War issues about the ability to change your sex 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 their you know 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 of um a dimorphic species like humans which largely come in two flavors encountering the the desire for gender to be a spectrum and to be fluid and to identify differently than than how your biology would would dictate how do you think about this issue well first I excuse me I pointed out you said word dimorphic species which is true that a dimorphic means two forms so you already have admitted that you recognize that there are two Sexes of males and females which it happens to be the case that you know this is a hot that's another issue it's the first issue we take up in this paper the the denial of of the sexual binary in humans by ideologues and I I've been just got in a big fight with this because this guy Augustine Fuentes is a anthropologist professor at Princeton who wrote a Scientific American op-eds basically denying if there is a sexual binary and 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 biologists 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 implants that do the same thing and females are the group that are designed to produce these reproductive apparatus is designed to produce large immobile domates eggs or oval ovules and plants and that's all that's all we got there's another third sex there's no four sex sometimes you can have both sexes in the same body as in hermaphrodites I've never yet found hermaphrodite in humans going through the literature in which both male and female functions Funk work there's a case of one hermaphrodite who can produce sperm that could fertilize eggs even though we also had ove tissue for ovule spread it wasn't functional and we have another case of a hermaphrodite that got pregnant so that she functioned as woman but her reproductive male reprogram person function so hermaphrodites are not even if they're both parts were functional and and many animals there are like worms there are primaries 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 be co-occurring the same body that's you know um 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 percent point zero that's not one percent it's point zero one eight percent that's about one individual out of five thousand six hundred do not fit into the neat male female spectrum and that I mean that's as close to a binary as you could get yeah I mean I mean if I'm I'm there may be people listening to this thinking like who actually thinks this like who actually thinks that they're they're that the presence of intersex people or hermaphrodites means we're not dimorphic well I mean I took a class in college where this was taught as 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 yeah like how far do we go with with um the rare exception just uh destroying the rule that's true 99 point something percent of the time I mean it's it's clearly motivated reasoning and it's done by by people that obviously they have an ideology which is which we should talk about which is um that they they've you know people have gender dysphoria you know some number of people have gender dysphoria they want to present as uh the other sex to people they want uh to to be seen as a woman if they were born male or seen as a man if they were born a woman although increasingly there are people that want to identify as neither right they would want to be called they 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 um and so the question is what do you do right what how how what how what does such a person do in that instance how should Society see them um 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 how to deal with this phenomenon of people having a strong feeling that they are um gender dysphoric so what do you what do you uh how do you think about that issue 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 the what is natural is good or what is natural is desirable you I mean you don't do that if you start down that road then you're starting to you're gonna have to justify things like infanticide rape theft any everything that you can say in the animal kingdom so you know how we the fact that there 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 you're transphobic you want in fact Augustine Fuentes says this in his article that we went to erase this whole class of people from society that Were Somehow favoring genocide of people that don't identify as male female that's crazy I mean you know just because you 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 for through gender dysphoria it's got to be painful every teenager has you know various psychological issues and some of them presented as Senator dysphoria um so I guess my view on this which I've written about repeatedly is that people that well first of all if you're trying to there's a difference between you know being gay and being transsexual and one of them you remain a sex that you are but your sexual attraction is towards members of the same sex and the other case you are taking steps to try to resemble the other sex physically and maybe it 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 to Florida 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 some 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 is they have stalls I don't really care who's you know doing their business in the same place I've used unisex bathrooms too I mean my only caveat to that would be I think as men we would almost by definition have nothing to fear from unisex bathrooms if women do if yeah if anyone has something to fear it would be it would be women right yeah yeah I would in that way sort of Take the Lead from women more so on that on that issue at this point I mean there's 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 but the problem there of course is that what do you mean by a woman I mean the Mantra of the gender activists is that a transsexual trans Woman as a woman so they should be healthiest women's rooms um that's why these sort laws and rules of common 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 leads to manifest unfairness against biological women there's a reason why there are men's sports and women sports and that's because on average a man who goes through 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 of a male causes a development of bone density and muscles and grip strength and 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 Spike Grace Leah Thomas in swimming who's a identifies as a woman but has the reproductive system as I understand 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 um 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 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 American I don't see that as a serious problem because I don't think it's unfair to biological matter 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 Etc 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 aren't biological women who identify as men transsexual interesting that seems that that's that seems strange to me because they're 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 you know is 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 average your chances of being hurt or higher um in general I don't I mean there's a lot of sports where you're not going to get hurt like archery or you know long distance running and those kinds of every Sports dependent um in some sports I've heard that like shooting and uh hyper marathoning women um biological women are as good as biological men in competing and there you might want to change the rules That's Sports specific and that's what the Olympics as well that each sport has to make its own rules about which kinds of people are met but in general most sports involve advantages in strength um musculature and density and in those Sports I think judge I think it's fair to prevent or outlaw um transsexual women who transition after puberty to participate in other sports you know that's because it's unfair it's biological elements however it's also unfair to trans people um participate in sports which leaves us with the conundrum what do we do do we just tell them well sorry you can't compete do we tell them you can compete against the man biological man like you suggested well maybe sure we have another classification man women's men's sports women's sports and others if that's possible but it it seems somewhat stigmatizing to be competing in other league so the problem of what to do with in particular with transgender women transsexual women um is uh is one that's very hard to resolve the Olympics used to use testosterone levels as whether or not you can 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 which just throws the problem onto any number of Sports you know but in terms of just stuff like changing rooms Sports and maybe bathrooms or not rape counseling is another one and home and shelters and prisons I forgot to mention this 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're 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 you 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 you know violence and rape that should that's unfair and I don't think that should be allowed either you know they've dealt with this in the UK now um Scotland tried it but the UK overruled that so they can't do that anymore president's rig counseling a lot of women feel uncomfortable being counseled by a biological male whose 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 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 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 here illegal 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 would if somebody wants to be called a woman that's like a transgender woman I'll be happy to do that um 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 oh that's a good one one of them is you know where are we going that's not going to be answered in her lifetimes I mean we'll know hundreds of Generations how 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 another unanswered questions why is there sex in the first place if I were to butt off a copy of myself likes uh hydros do little juries grow out of my arms and legs I would leave twice as many copies of my jeans as I would if I had to copulate with a female to have an offspring which is the way it is so actually there's a cost of sex a two-fold cost which means that there's a big mystery about why organisms reproduce sexually in the first place now there are suggestions about that you know having to do with Gene recombination or putting together better combination of genes they're getting rid of bad combinations and things but we really don't know the answer to that one either so um you know 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 interests but those are the big ones I would see oh another one this doesn't really fall into the amateur of evolution but it's a problem that some people consider evolutionary 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 I don't well we know that it's probably based on RNA rather than DNA but where it Formed some people think in the hot thermal vents in the Pacific other people say there's cold thermal vents in the Atlantic that would be solubrious for this so you know we know when this happened you know it was about three billion years ago three plus but we don't know how it happened and the problem is we'll never know because we weren't there and these organisms would be soft bodied and what if if they formed today it would rapidly be eaten by something else so it may be possible someday to recreate life in the laboratory under primitive Earth conditions that will show us that it could have happened but we already know it did happen but it might give us a hint on the things that make it are favorable for the original life the problem is that's a damn hard experiment to do you know so all right Jerry Coyne thanks so much sure all right that's it for this episode of conversations with Coleman guys as always thanks for watching and feel free to tell me what you think by reviewing the podcast commenting on social media or sending me an email to check out my other social media platforms click the cards you see on screen and don't forget to like share and subscribe [Music] foreign

Channel: Coleman Hughes

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Keywords: politics, news, politicalupdates, policies, currentaffairs, political, society, highsociety, modernsociety, contemporary, intellectualproperty, debate, intellect thoughts, opinion, public intellectual, intellect, dialogue, discourse, interview, motivational, speech, answers, Coleman Hughes, talkshow, talks, ethics, intelligence, discrimination, music

Id: w3QJ-Jzbeq8

Length: 82min 41sec (4961 seconds)

Published: Sat May 27 2023