The Exchange | Sean B Carroll & Seth MacFarlane

i'm not going to do an introduction that includes all of your many accolades because that would take us a very long time but there are some claims to fame that we will say and that you are a member of the national academy of sciences which is one of the highest honors in american science so it's a pretty big deal and so we do want to mention that and as i say we do claim you as a as a funder um and i claim you as the person who showed me how to play pool i still i'm not very good at it but you actually showed me how to play pool so thank you for that um and seth it's interesting that a couple of people not more than a couple of people kept uh sort of pinging us in our facebook feed and some of our other social media feeds and saying well great you have seth weird why great but why um and and i think people are unaware of the fact that you were actually uh part of the genesis of the science and entertainment exchange that you were in janet and jerry zucker's living room in those very early meetings in 2007 2008 when we were talking about creating this thing that we now have all these years later and that your love of science goes way back um and that you were the host of our launch event for example uh we were there with you when the sagan papers um which you were instrumental in having donated to the library of congress that we were there with you when you hosted the breakthrough prize that your love of science has been um something that's been well known to us but maybe not to others so we're very glad that you're back on our stage and that you're here so thank you both of you for being here also seth thanks for serving on our board we appreciate you the science and entertainment exchange is the way that i met uh neil degrasse tyson and and and hence cosmos happened well we're very proud of both of you and the our affiliation to you but now rick and i are gonna get out of here so jesse and and dempsey take us away and we'll let you two do the rest that's great and and seth my appreciation uh you hosted an event about 10 years ago that's how we first met and uh i'm just a lot older then you're just i'm creative i remember i remember discovering that that scientists are not necessarily the best audience for schtick well i don't know i think i think you opened up with something saying that you were at least encouraged that the president of the national academy of sciences enjoyed a good fart joke and i i think that's always true yeah it's i mean it's still science it's right it is it is i'm there's going to be a paper on that i'm sure sometime soon so what do you want to talk about today oh oh that's right this is a conversation now we we can talk about your your your book what's what's uh what's the uh the the premise of the book is it's it's chance it's fate it's accidental happenings in a cosmic sense yeah um that's a pretty broad canvas it is i think it's still an underappreciated aspect of life it's kind of why i wrote the book was that i don't think that the average person realizes especially how much science has learned about random events that have had a huge impact on life on earth on our species and how much chance plays a role in our natural lives every day and really from conception when you hear people say everything happens for a reason do you just kind of like wince a little bit yeah well i do i do hints um i i understand it but i'd like them to uh open up the possibility that not everything happens for a reason and that changes much more diplomatic than i usually am but yeah yeah well that's maybe the balance that we're going to have here you don't need to be diplomatic you're uh you're an entertainer um but you're in the book so this is perhaps why this conversation is happening too is that i open the book with a story about you so what i tried to do in this book was pair stories about sort of events going on in life on the planet etc with things at a little more individual personal level that really underscore how much chance influences our lives and you have a hell of a story to tell if you're willing to tell it and maybe we start on september 10th 2001. yeah i mean i i was booked on the first plane that uh that hit the world trade center was american airlines flight 11. and i missed it by probably about 10 minutes for for two reasons one um i was i was drinking the night before and was relatively hungover which at the time was was maybe not such a chance encounter i'm more more a regular encounter but i uh but i also had a travel agent who um mercifully uh screwed up the departure time and wrote um 8 15 when in fact the flight left at 7 45 and so i was i was late and uh you know in in subsequent interviews i've been asked about it a number of times and and i've i've joked that i'm always the most disappointing person with that particular story to talk to because i do think it was a chance happening coincidences do happen um i've missed a lot of flights i had been late to a lot of flights this was just the latest in in a pattern of tardiness so in that sense it wasn't all that unusual for me it's just this this flight happened to be one that i most certainly you know did not want to be on so it it was um it wasn't that unusual for me to for me to not show up on time and um the other way to look at it is look every flight that takes off i would assume just about every flight that takes off anywhere in this country and around the world at any time somebody's late probably somebody misses it for one reason or another um i don't know what the odds are um i'm just a cartoonist but i i would guess that it's not that uncommon and so it's it's it's it's it's thanks to chance that it's me as as as much as anyone else so i guess that's sort of the way i look at it well i learned there was another facet to this which was that mark wahlberg was at one point also booked on that flight but made alternate plans yeah and years later 11 years later i think you teamed up with mark wahlberg and made ted some who think that everything happens for a reason might think that you missed that flight and he missed that flight so that our lives would be enriched by a trash-talking teddy bear but that requires the belief that god has an investment in the ted franchise which i think is i think is is probably not likely [Laughter] well um the reason i opened with that story is because that 30-minute interval i thought about another day in history but 66 million years ago when everyone's familiar with this story that an asteroid struck the earth about 66 million years ago but in the 40 years that geologists and ecologists and all sorts of scientists have been working on this we've come to understand more and more just how unusual that impact was and of course how great its influence was on the fate of life on earth and the gist of it is this is that this asteroid that struck the yucatan it was quite a detective story one of the great discoveries of the 20th century by walter and louis alvarez and quite a radical proposition at the time but now we've got kind of all the smoking crater and all that sort of evidence we understand it the extinction boundary and the impact boundary and the rock record are absolutely coincident actually my little piece of show and tell today is i brought a little piece of rock from a texas riverbed that is a mixture of ejecta from the impact and uh tsunami wash because the tsunamis came across the gulf of mexico at about 150 to 300 feet high and those deposits are visible in texas 66 million years later so pretty well but you're showing your objective to the world that's right exactly but here's the deal though seth with the earth turning at a thousand miles per hour had that asteroid which had probably been circulating the solar system for four billion years had it entered 30 minutes sooner and landed in the atlantic probably no mass extinction 30 minutes later no mass extinction because the rocket lucas does an asteroid impact have to hit land in order for it to create that kind of destruction if it that's news to me if it lands in the ocean it's well it's it's actually the right kind of it's actually the right kind of rock because the rock in the yucatan which was continental shelf so it was hitting ocean and and rock and exposed rock but the uh the rock contained a certain mixture of sulfate and carbonates and when that's vaporized into the plume right that's the stew that was a mixture for mass extinction acidification of the oceans and the reflection of sunlight back so that the earth goes dark and probably for 10 to 30 years shuts down photosynthesis and food chains collapse etc so and geologists estimate that only about 1 to 13 of the earth's surface has the right combination of rocks that if hit would cause a mass extinction wow and that's the largest impact we know of in the last 500 million years and as you know that took out not only the dinosaurs took out three quarters of all species and immediately after and you can see this in the fossil record beautiful story told in science magazine last year out of colorado that mammals which had been around for about 100 million years but they were small many were nocturnal they took off and when they when the dinosaurs were gone they they became larger in a short period of time than they had ever been became the largest animals on land and in the seas and of course the branch of mammals primates arose gave rise to us so had that asteroid arrived 30 minutes soon or 30 minutes later you and i aren't having this conversation there's no ted and there's no ted two yeah yeah i'll be all because of chance all because of chance now now is there is there an upcoming uh an upcoming event i know neil has talked in the past about apothis the the the asteroid that we're going to have kind of a close call with around is it 2036 is that right yeah there's i mean ever since this well as this appreciation that asteroids were important part of our history and perhaps our future you know nasa and others have gotten into this uh process of trying to analyze the risk of asteroids and spot them before they come but you know you keep reading about asteroids we only see a few days before they get here close yeah yeah and it's something called the keyhole right if it goes through the keyhole then we got to worry if it misses the keyhole then we can relax for another at least another week or two another week or two for sure but i mean there's probably been maybe 10 or 15 asteroids in the 66 million years since that certainly called caused regional disruptions that they were a kilometer or two wide um the chesapeake bay which i'm near today was formed by an asteroid so they're all right pardon me there's one in siberia oh yeah yeah yeah so huge so big impacts but not with the global not with the global result so uh your story and the asteroid story as you can see they're they're they're exactly the same um parable i guess i would say 30 minutes either way exactly the same the the the the the emergence of the human race and the emergence of the ted films and a million ways to die in the west though that's the same level of result for both that's the way i see it man at least that's the way i told it how i put it that way oh look it's an awkward silence no no no i'm just gonna see you know i look i i know who the comedian is here so i'm just i'm just a great guy right i good because i don't know who the comedian is um so is this do you deal with things like it's interesting because i living in l.a i there's a lot of of uh people who buy into things like astrology and i i don't have enough breath for the number of of disagreements that i have with people who buy into this sort of thing and try to explain to them look it's it's things really are a lot more chaotic than you think they are it's like we are as carl sagan said significance junkies yeah we attach significance to certain things and we conveniently ignore the eight million times that those elements didn't line up um that kind of thing do you go into that that whole uh bit of nonsense well i'm aware of it i i what i was really doing in the book was try to bring you know fresh scientific discoveries to the four different levels yeah and and give people empirical evidence that we understand that long ago far-off events have set in a chain of dominoes that that you know leads to you know us being here right another story i tell in the book is about a collision a long time ago that had a dramatic effect on the earth's climate so right now or for the last two million years humans and our ancestors have been living in the ice ages that's a really weird time this first one in 300 million years and geologists understanding of this is is it's connected to well one of the things that first had to happen was the glaciation of the antarctic and you say well you know how did that all happen well it turns out that um right after the asteroid and for millions of years afterwards the earth was probably ice free pole to pull um co2 levels were much higher than today it was you know a lush um much warmer planet and but eventually over time co2 levels came down average temperatures came down and one way that co2 gets pulled out of the atmosphere is by the weathering of rocks and what's been discovered is that one of the big catalysts for dropping co2 levels was when the indian subcontinent slammed into asia and built the himalaya okay so we got to parse this apart a little bit and say well why does this all matter okay so reason why it matters is that that subcontinent 40 million years ago was below the equator down by madagascar and this little subcontinent moved a lot faster through tectonics then other continents and slammed into asia and that started the glaciation of the antarctic and essentially got us to the precipice of the ice ages okay who cares well the reason is is a lot of paleoanthropologists think that the ice ages have a big influence on human evolution that we're one of the mammals that could adapt to this because we with our evolving larger brains tool use etc could create our own habitats so you start thinking about why are we humans here you say well you know let's talk about the tectonics of the indian subcontinent 40 million years ago and slamming into the himalaya and this is you know this is something we you know we couldn't have talked about the asteroid 50 years ago we couldn't have talked about these tectonics 50 years ago so as we plumber's history more and more we understand the course of life has been buffeted by these accidents you know at various scales that have you know set life in different directions well yeah i mean it's it's uh i i i know that uh carl and anne used to talk about the fact that um there's there's a certain uh sequence of of chance events that have led us and our fellow mammals uh and reptiles and fish and uh and uh birds and you know to to share certain qualities that that um uh you probably wouldn't see elsewhere one of the one of the hollywood tropes that we're all guilty of is is aliens that all look like they have eyes they have a nose they have a mouth but how unlikely it is that that really would be the case yeah that would see something that would look completely different were we to discover life on other planets because it's it's this particular chain of random events that unfolded in sequence to make this exact version of a lifelong um and uh yeah i mean that's a piece of it that i did not know that's that's uh yeah so i try to try to share some of that and and i think for people to get an idea that these things are still to be discovered in other words this is not like you know old textbook science this is still a you know uh evolving science to understand that we're still getting a sense in history of of how much is due to chance and at the other end almost all of biology has been uncovering the role of chance and this is you know real personal for all of us right yeah and were you another the tiktaalik rose was that you that was my buddy neil shubin that night both of us but then again uh you know a key moment when life comes on land right exactly yeah i have a sculpture in the house that's uh that of the you know the little guy with he's got the fins and he's got the nose but no legs you have one of the very very important casts of of tests as a as a gesture from from neil who's also a great friend of the of the entertainment exchange but maybe one thing to uh to throw in making this a little more personal is um you know more towards the per charge the individual end so i think everyone on earth would agree there will never be another seth macfarlane but there's kind of a little more truth to that not we're not you know not just talent and creativity i'm talking genetics seth so we'll play a little pop quiz hopefully nobody's giving you a cheat sheet so of your parents nothing how many genetically unique children could your parents have had uh an an an infinite number right it almost gets there the easy the first number is my mother but you know it's like very tough yeah when uh when i was born at 10 pounds five ounces my mom stopped at four so yeah um provided that she could she could handle it yes probably an infant yeah so with 23 chromosomes from dad and 23 chromosomes from mom uh the number right now it's math now you got the wrong guy i'm like a right brain guy that's that's all right it we can just work out that's about eight million different combinations from dad and eight million plus from mom and it turns out that's 70 trillion yeah start repeating marlins well i'm off by a lot i'm off by a lot well here's what makes it infinite and you'll enjoy this because that's really just the sorting of chromosomes there's other genetic mechanisms at work and every one of those mcfarlands would be carrying 20 or 30 new mutations that were not in mom or dad and different from each other and that's what makes the number just explode even even higher but it's kind of a 70 trillion would be you you before you really start repeating duplicate copies and then you add unique mutations so right it's true that every one of them would need my prescription could well be depends exactly on your parents genetics but no two fertilized human eggs will ever be the same because of this so we we truly are you know unique little snowflakes you know so no two wings no yes exactly fighting a one-act play with that title i'm looking forward to it so yeah so those events you know uh i mean i figure you know you're you're you can handle this but i mean i'm really talking about events that go on in all of our parents gonads yeah and i don't know if that's ever been a subject for a family guy but um it actually has actually i think we we had a uh we had an episode where stewie uh was in a it was a sort of a fantastic voyage kind of thing where he was in a little sperm ship and he was out to uh prevent his baby brother from being born uh so he was in fact in his father's gonads so we're yeah not not too far off from what you're describing there you go so you've it's it's an opportunity you've already visited but if it has to do with gonads family guys probably better you know i kind of suspected so you know this is about the science and entertainment exchange seth and i want to turn a little bit because um this is all about how i think from the scientists point of view it's like well how can we get more science and entertainment but i'm also going to come at this from the viewpoint of how can scientists understand a little bit more of the power yeah of entertainment and you've you know you've not you've shown us how this works in in so many different ways but one thing that in writing this book that i discovered i thought about all my favorite comedians and don't blush but yes you but pals of yours like sarah silverman and bill maher and ricky gervais and louis black and eddie izzard and not a not a polarizing figure in the bunch but yeah no no no but look you all have something in common which is um you all are very much on the record of not thinking that everything in life you know has a reason but that the world is driven by chance and not only that you you express that in your work and i was you know and it seems like it might be a little bit dangerous to go there but nonetheless all of you and your art go there and i wanted to just probe why you go there i because you know look it's it's again not to quote uh carl again but you know i i i prefer the unpleasant truth uh to my dearest of illusions which i'm probably butchering but that's kind of look i i think just because there is um a a greater likelihood that we are here because of chance and that events unfold as they do because of chance um than if there was some uh supernatural intervention it doesn't give license to be an anarchist they're still we are here so there is still a responsibility to uh you know forget about how we got here we're here and there's a responsibility to make the most of our civilization and our culture and the future of our species i i don't think i don't think um i think oftentimes you that the people who believe in in in or rather acknowledge the likelihood of um of random chance uh in things like evolution there's a tendency to think that we we we just don't care what happens what we do it's it's regardless of how we got here we're here let's make the best of it and and you know you still do have to have a moral code and you have to be responsible and you have to um recognize that your well-being is directly tied to the well-being of the world around you and as paul wellstone said we all do better when we all do better which i which i i borrowed for the orville um but uh yeah it's it's i don't think it's dangerous at all i think when you when you um you know come out of your intellectual adolescence and acknowledge that this is the case you're starting fresh and and you're starting a little a little uh wiser uh and a little more prepared to um uh contributes to the advancement of the species in a number of ways as far as the the science and entertainment exchange is concerned um it's you know for for people who are watching who don't have a sense of of what they said you know you've explained it well at the beginning but yeah i mean there's there's there's a responsibility a lot of people do get their science from entertainment a lot of people do get their science from television and film you watch a medical procedural and you just assume that the writers have done their homework and a lot of times they haven't a lot of times they're just kind of pulling stuff out of their asses and so there is a a mutual benefit here there's a benefit to writers and directors and producers that their work is more honest and more legitimate and just sounds smarter and there's a benefit to the scientific community that obviously the more educated people are the more correct their science is no matter where they get it the better off we all are vaccines being a good example i mean vaccine vaccine hesitancy is a huge problem i get a flu shot every year i don't even think twice about it i just got my flu shot and and i feel i feel more protected than i did before um i i know a lot of people i don't have enough fingers to count people who just won't do it and no matter how many arguments and reasons and and and facts that i present you just can't get through them and and that's a big problem because it's and i mean that's basic science immunization is is uh it's it's a gift i mean it's it's it's one of the greatest achievements in medical history and and if we can't get everyone on board with that you know we got problems so that's why i think this organization is is uh it continues to be extremely necessary in in this climate well in the beginning of your answer in quoting sagan you hit something that for me i mean i just have to confess my i don't know naivete or just stupidity that that you know when i watch your work or you know mama monty python you know like so many people know where i'm a monty python fan i love stand up etc they're making me laugh but i actually asked eric idle the question i just asked you why do all of you you know bring this and he said quote comedy is telling the truth it's the emperor's new clothes everything is on the table and then i started you know scouring interviews with all of you and it's this just kept coming up and i don't know i'm curious of one of your were you a kurt vonnegut fan in your early days yeah you know to some degree to some degree i i i felt the the need to educate myself somewhat because my father looks just like him but i yeah i'm i'm not i'm not a i'm i'm less versed than i should be but you know slaughterhouse five and time quake and you know certain of his of his uh of his books i'm familiar with yeah so you know as early as 1959 you know he's really talking about sort of chance chance existence and he said about humor he said i'll give you this one too he said the telling of jokes is an art of its own and it always rises from some emotional threat the best jokes are dangerous because they are in some way truthful i kept hearing this about truth and thinking of you know artists like yourself as truth-tellers that that's what you're doing through your art i just sorry it just had not that's why everyone's always mad at dave chappelle because he's he's getting laughs because because he's telling the truth telling the truth yeah yeah so i mean you do it in a variety of ways obviously you know i would say not that i'm a formal critic but i mean satire you know satire is heavy in family guy but maybe allegory more so in the orville and so do you want to just talk a little bit about you know when you get an idea and you're like i wanna maybe you don't wanna tell us where your ideas are coming from and what what you use these outlets for but nonetheless it seems apparent that you have things to say to to me the balance is always um the entertainment value has to be there if if you're just on a soapbox you're not doing your job as an entertainer screw it just quit your job become a politician run for office um so there always there always has to be a sense of storytelling there and family guy in the orville do it in very different ways family guy does it in a more cynical um uh nihilistic sort of way and the orville does it in in more of a hopeful uh um blueprint kind of waves gives you an idea of of what we could achieve if we do things right rather than being a cautionary tale of what what's bound to happen if we continue on our current path so it was something like the orville look it's a classic sci-fi mechanism that you take an issue you couch it in a fictional world so it doesn't feel like you're preaching to your audience and then you make the point that you want to make from a writing standpoint that's great fun and uh not only is it is it a great source an endless source of uh creative inspiration but it also makes you feel like you're you're doing some good um in in a way that might actually make a difference uh i mean look when i was a kid watching shows like star trek like it mattered that those phasers were unstunned unless they had to be on kill that i that was i was you know 10 years old and that resonated with me and that's that's kind of a power you know to this day if i find a spider in my house i can't kill i gotta catch it and put it outside i can't i can't kill things um and you know i think part of that can be traced back to this this blueprint of a morality code uh of that series that said no you don't you don't kill unless you have to and um and so that's that's that's the power of that medium and i think uh it's been a little lost honestly in in recent years i think i think hollywood's gotten a little caught up in the dystopia of it all and who can scare us the most and who can freak us out the most and and uh as a medium uh or as a genre rather the fun of it is is more in the inspirational value as opposed to the anyone can anyone can depress you but it takes a lot more work to uh to give you hope that's that's beautiful and and the role of humor right i mean that makes the truth go down more easily doesn't it it does it does in many cases yeah yeah and and that's i mean look like george carlin's another great example i mean great truth teller um very ahead of his time and and uh was always making a point was never just about the jokes so so you've got science fiction and cartoons and songs you know so you think maybe scientists have something to learn about how to make a point well very good question i that's that's uh you could probably have a whole seminar on that and and still not get to them the bottom of it i do think that um the number of science communicators that we have out there in the world uh spreading that message of critical thought uh is is essential i mean obviously carl was uh was was you know the the king obviously neil's doing that you're doing your part bill nye um there are people out there who are who are really making an effort i think we can always use more of them and and i think um when they come along the the power that they have to inspire people is is worth its weight in gold i mean uh you know the fact that the show like cosmos was on network television fox of all places uh and made the kind of impact that it did and and uh propelled neil obviously was already fairly well known but propelled him to a different level is is the more that the better um inspiring hugely insane i mean when i talk to i mean look even even dealing with our our return to the oroville and trying to figure out how to get back to work even talking with our epidemiological team is fascinating in and of itself i mean it's something i i would be interested to do even if we weren't trying to get production off the ground it's just interesting to talk to scientists and you know look i think that's why you you see most of america uh enamored with dr fauci and and less so with with trump thank god is that there's a there's he has something to say he has something to say yeah so there's a there's a i'm gonna do another vonnegut quote because i just want to attribute it properly but he mentioned sort of shakespeare style which was shakespeare knew after a lot of heavy stuff to you know bring in a clown or false staff or whatever to sort of lighten things up and i was thinking with you know we scientists you know what do we usually bring after the heavy stuff is more heavy stuff yeah and then we sort of think that if you could only know what what is in our heads everything would be okay and it's kind of all head no heart you know not a lot of emotion not a lot of humor but i see a lot of scientists making the effort a lot of scientists now are making the effort i mean you you see videos of seminars and you know there is a but you can't be good at everything it's it's i mean if you're if you're a great astrophysicist or if you're a great epidemiologist you're a great biologist you're a great uh great chemist you're you're um uh that's that's that's enough like to expect someone to also be a great communicator and a great performer is it's rare it's rare to have those two things uh coincide i mean you know look there may be something to creating some sort of a you know an improv class for scientists so that more of them can hone those aspects of their personalities but yeah i think it's more collaboration with storytellers so i've i've had the privilege for the last 10 years to work with a lot of filmmakers seth and in documentary and when that craft of story of visual storytelling comes together with you know solid and clear science yeah um some great stuff comes about and uh it's the collaboration with artists who can tell stories with you know great visuals great music who also know how to draw you know kind of the inner soul out of people through interview and and and so i think you know that's it's i think collaboration is the way you know we all we all can't be um that multitasking i don't know for sure i'm getting a little signal as you may be as well seth that uh there's a lot of folks tuning in would like to ask some questions i think you know i think we all should get our catchers mit be ready to feel really quick are you are you uh leading that off i'm ready for the objective yeah i think i'm here you guys can hear me okay yeah okay great so uh sean quick quick question for you um that was asked uh several times in different ways what advice do you have for young scientists who may or may not be able to get into a lab this year uh what should they be doing with their careers now and sort of maybe career advice generally well i think if you're between you know programs you're like between degrees um you know i hope obviously you have some place where you can be you know safe and and think um it's it's a time to you know catch up on your reading and and certainly also to get out into nature one of the few things we can do is get out into nature and i you know for me and for many of my colleagues that's really inspiring but a lot of folks who are in labs are already in programs right now this has been a really tough year i mean this is you know putting their careers on hold my own lab is running at about 25 occupancy um so that just really decelerates um discovery so you know i'm an optimist i suppose i'll say this on the record i'm an optimist that the vaccines are coming and um that you know by summer of 2021 i'm hoping that you know movement and all that is is more possible and people can get back into into science and i hope that maybe this whole experience of the world being paralyzed for a year might mean that we'll put a value back on science if i'm on my soapbox for a second seth you know dismantling the epa the fda and the cdc is not making america great so there's a lot of rebuilding to do yep couldn't couldn't agree more couldn't agree more so seth one question i thought was interesting popped up in the feed um how do you write or deal with random chance in a narrative when stories have structures and reasons that's a that's an excellent question whoever asked that um you it's it's a it's a goldilocks zone to use an astronomic term um you try to uh you try to construct stories that have a shape um obviously in fiction things happen that don't happen in real life and and there's a patent particularly to episodic television that uh requires a story to be wrapped up in a way that it doesn't necessarily do in in in actuality um you just try to be responsible as far as how things unfold um you know you don't say oh it's this happened because a ghost intervened or this this happened because of divine guidance um you do try to to at least be responsible as far as the at least with this kind of at least with the show like family guy in the orgo i can't speak for shows that deal with the supernatural but uh for the way we write we we never try to give ourselves any kind of a freebie um with regard to how we wrap up a story we do try to stay responsible uh but it's it's a good question i mean it's it's um sometimes to entertain people it requires uh things to be structured in a way that doesn't feel so random so you there's no short answer it would be a case-by-case thing in in each film or episode of television you have to kind of look at the story and say are we being are do we feel good about our names being on this do we feel like we're being truthful with how this unfolds so sean sort of the other side of the same coin a little bit can can you speak to any examples in science you might think of of ways in which chance and certain just you know happenstance contributed to uh human knowledge maybe in a lab or a mistake that turned out to be a major discovery yeah i actually tell one of the stories in the book and it's it's vital um so when watson and crick were working on the structure of dna watson copied the structure of the bases on a chemical textbook and they were wrong and that was actually a block to figuring out the double helix and when somebody in the lab who just happened to be knowledgeable about base chemistry luck cam is in cambridge england and straightens them out watson is able to figure out the base pairing rules and solves the double helix then here's the deal the fact that he went down the wrong road because these bases exist in two alternative forms and he was trying to make models with the very low abundance rare form he realized that because of this process that chemicals can do called tautomerization or these switching of chemical forms that in the other form it would pair with different bases and thought wow maybe that's the basis of mutation in dna is a little shape shift in this dna base took 60 years but biochemist has figured it out that's actually the case so you know i hope that i hope that's a good story that fits the the question which is um discovery often has to do with you know immediately who's around and who contributes to the thought and the light bulb goes on or not depending on who's there and the story of the double helix was very much that because all sorts of other people held key clues but just couldn't see it and and watson probably got the the couple of extra sparks that not only got that but then you know put us on the path to understanding the the root cause of mutation and really understanding that mutation is a feature not a bug in dna it has to do with the intrinsic properties that give dna the properties dna has we kind of think a mutation is like something bad or something wrong happening when it's really sort of built in so seth you you deal with a lot of science both on orville but also on family guy and i'm i'm wondering when you when you have a scientific topic that you want to explore what are some ways you approach that research you know how how do you comment different scientific topics we um well on on family guy oftentimes it's picking up the phone and calling the science entertainment exchange i've i've called neil uh a number of times about uh physics issues that pop up now and then with a show like the orville we have for starters we have um you know andre bormanes who's our science consultant on that show who's with us every day um he'll either answer a question or he'll go do the research and and talk to scientists and and i kind of you know there's a whole there's a whole writing entity that's responsible for that on that show because you are dealing with things in many cases that are fictitious but you want to at least create the sense that the premise was arrived at through through the uh uh through through a scientific road as opposed to one that we're just making up um but it it really just depends i mean we we do we do on both shows try to be as accurate as we can i haven't worked at family guy i've been written on family guy uh in a while so i can't speak to to the past 10 years or so but certainly on uh prior to that and certainly on the orville um we we do try to to make sure that even the most outrageous premise has some basis in something that is knowable now uh even if we're taking it to the to the most absurdist hypothetical place uh it does have to start um it does have to start in a place of reality it can't start somewhere supernatural or uh yeah or in such and what do you think what do you think sort of first influenced you to write about science was there is there like a teacher or a moment or some piece of media that that got you interested it was i mean look i got into it through science fiction the sci-fi shows that i watched as a kid which i guess speaks to the power of storytelling um fascinated me and i i i was interested i became interested in space travel because i was watching shows about fictional characters in space and and uh you know that led me to things like cosmos and and uh and i learned that some of the things that we're doing in in reality are just as exciting for today as the the as the fictitious stories that i'm watching in television and uh so that that was that was really the that was really my first introduction was the fake stuff and then i got to the real stuff and and i i i don't know that i was a particularly uh exceptional science student but i was definitely into i remember always being interested i might my test scores were never as good as i would have liked them to be but i i remember never being bored in science class it was it was always something something interesting going on uh and the older i got i it at the very least it inspired me to continue to try and educate myself and to learn on my own and to keep up with current science one of the things we had to do in grade school i'm just now remembering this in science class and i don't know if this was a this is a common thing every week we had to do uh you know we had our science textbooks but every week we had to do a current science report um we had to put down the textbook put down the the you know the the stuff that's decades centuries old in some cases and go to the library pick up a magazine pick up a newspaper and do a report based on something that is current and that is that is now developing in science and i always you know that that's something that i think uh was a nice balance that that uh kept us that reminded us that this is not a static enterprise that it's always evolving it's always unfolding and and you know so i to this day i try to keep up as much as my tiny brain will allow um so sean i think this actually might end up being our last question but um i'm going to give you the same question kind of in reverse you know what first got you interested in pursuing a career as a scientist and then as a scientist what got you interested in making movies well career as a scientist probably pretty easy and i think for biologists is a pretty common story which is you know i just like uh critters you know i discovered what was out there in the woods and frogs and snakes and salamanders and all that kind of stuff and i was just critters starring scott grimes really something exactly that um and uh and not in movies were far far away you know i i would i watched uh wild kingdom in black and white you know growing up that was that was my trigger if star trek or something like that was cess trigger for me it was it was wild kingdom if you remember marlon perkins and jim fowler going around the world and usually jim getting chased or bitten by something um so no one i just i went into biology and i think you know if i could share anything and i try to do this everywhere i go that i wish somebody told me when i was much younger that as scientists storytelling is critical it's it's how we talk to each other it's how we talk to non-scientists it's about how we teach and you know story narrative that connects cause and effect it connects events over time that has characters in it that has emotions so you understand people's passions and motivations etc i mean science itself is a great story it's it lends itself to narrative right people are on quests they have surprises they have disappointments and sometimes the things they find out are absolutely astonishing and i think you know when you have real you know astonishing discoveries i think you know science can really thrill our culture and so i think what got me motivated into movies or starting with books was to try to tell some of those stories because i think science has an important place in our culture obviously seth does too and we need to tell these stories we need to inspire people and and and show people how science can help move the world forward i mean i there's an argument to be made that it's that it's really the only thing that truly moves the world forward i mean there there there are stylistic changes in politics there are stylistic changes in art and music but you know in many cases the the relative ingredients are the same sciences i don't think there's anything that propels us forward the way that science does i mean you you look at the the how many tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of years that our species has existed in some form and and been relatively unchanged and then only in the past what 400 years when the scientific method emerged all of a sudden at lightning speed we're talking to each other over this zoom in just a few hundred years and and and that's because of science that was the one change so i you know i i would i would say there's there's no more potent force in our culture and and and no greater power that we have to to to control our our evolution and our destiny as a species of destiny is the wrong word um to control our trajectory if i can just embellish that just a minute too because you know i think a lot of people think the purpose of science is technology and of course vaccines and zoom and everything is all that great but it also has had a fundamental effect on rethinking our our place in the world and our place in the universe and this is where uh it's been a little harder you know that that science has moved so quickly that uh to adapt to what this new information is about the role of chance and how we got here um that requires some rethink of some long-held traditional beliefs and that's you know that's much tougher much slower process so we you know we know that the public's going to embrace the technology but the the philosophy maybe the philosophical implications of science are a little harder to thank you jesus for my iphone [Laughter] thank you both for taking the time

Channel: Sean B Carroll

Views: 4,949

Rating: 4.9304347 out of 5

Keywords: Sean Carroll, biology, science, dna, evolution, lecture, lesson, book, developmental biology, evodevo, evolutionary developmental biology, genetics, molecular biology, chance, statistics, natural selection, mutation, genes, extinction, dinosaurs, fish, religion, faith, stand-up, stand-up comedy, comedy, comedians, Eric idle, Kurt Vonnegut, Vonnegut, Seth MacFarlane, The Science & Entertainment Exchange, National Academy of Sciences, The Exchange

Id: a6lo4Kxy3gI

Length: 49min 9sec (2949 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020