September 29, 2025 • 60 mins
Margaret talks to Katie Goldin about the anarchist prince who laid the foundations for understanding cooperation in the wild.
https://thebiologist.rsb.org.uk/biologist-features/who-was-peter-kropothkin
https://trise.org/2018/01/04/kropotkin-and-climate-change/
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/allan-antliff-memorializing-kropotkin
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch07c.htm
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/the-history-of-evolutionary-thought/1800s/uniformitarianism-charles-lyell/
https://summitborn.com/discovery-of-the-ice-age/
https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2024/11/18/gradualism-10/
https://strangescience.net/lyell.htm
https://medium.com/science-spectrum/how-darwin-discovered-invented-evolution-4d99aadf5656
https://psyche.co/ideas/kropotkin-the-radical-aristocrat-who-put-kindness-on-a-scientific-footing
https://www.marxists.org/subject/science/essays/kropotkin.htm
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You're
a weekly reminder that when bad things are happening, there's
people trying to do good things. And this week, one
of the people trying to do good things, probably I
assume is Katie Golden. Who's my guest. Hi, how are you? Hi?
Speaker 3 (00:22):
I I try to do good stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
You have to do at least three good things before
you're allowed on this show.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
My proudest thing that I do that's good is when
my dog does a little peepee. I have a water
bottle and I live in a very like uh, it's
all cobblestones and pavement and stuff. There's not a lot
of grass. So when she does peepy on the cobblestones,
I like wash it with the water. So, you know,
(00:48):
because just like so that I'm doing a little cleaning
up after my Obviously I also clean up her poopoos.
That's a given, but yeah, just rinse make the cobblestones
like a little bit cleaner after my dog does her
little pissies on it.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
I think that just based on the cobblestones thing that
people might infer that you don't live in America.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Yeah, so I do live in Italy. I'm not Italian
at all. I speak the language like a drunk toddler.
So yeah, but I live in a live in Turin Terino.
It's a northern Italian city. It's very nice. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Well, you also are the host of the podcast Creature Feature,
which is all about animals and science. Is that right?
Speaker 3 (01:34):
That's right?
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
I when I was in school, I studied a psychology
and evolutionary biology, and I always loved animals and I
really enjoyed talking about their behavior, cool stuff and evolutionary biology.
I feel like I try to push against both overly
(01:58):
humanizing animals and not doing it enough where it's like, ah,
they're robots with no feelings, so kind of fine, kind
of a you know, are commonalities with them without making
it too much about people, too egocentrically human.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
I feel like even like dealing with a dog, you're like, ah,
the dog is doing the following thing, and I recognize it.
But then sometimes you're like, the dog is smiling and
you're like, no, that dog's having a panic.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Attack, right exactly, Yes, yes, looks very friendly. Yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
A lot of times animals will be smiling at you,
and that's not necessarily a good sign, especially even our
close primate relatives. You don't necessarily want to see that.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I can think of some people that I don't want
smiling at me.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
That's a good point.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Okay. I have a question that's unrelated to the topic
of this episode. I read in an episode that I
did with Sophia as a guest about dogs. There's no
reason you need to know the answer to this. I read,
I'll try that the reason that dogs have white selera
the whites of their eyes is a coevolution everything with humans,
(03:01):
so that we can hunt together because we can see
where the other is looking. Have you heard this.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
I don't know if I've heard this specifically, but I
do know that so they do have more of the
whites of their eyes showing than wolves, but there is
a little bit. So wolves also have a little bit
of the whites of their eyes showing, and it can
be instructive actually for so other dogs other wolves. There's
(03:28):
this sort of expression with dogs wolves called whale eye
where their head is down you can see the whites
of their eyes and you can kind of see their
iris sort of up floating at the top, and it
looks super cute. But it's actually a warning that they're
really stressed and they might snap at you. So there's
(03:49):
some So there's some communication with dogs and wolves and eyes.
But yeah, I mean there's definitely been a lot of
coevolution with dogs and humans. The fact that there's like
more of the whites of their eyes showing could definitely
be a communication thing between humans and dogs. They've certainly
learned how to follow our eyesight read our expressions a
(04:12):
lot better than wolves do. There's a lot of studies
comparing like wolf puppies raised by humans and dogs, and
the dogs just like really collaborate with us a lot more.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
That makes sense to me. When I was more of
a street kid, there was always going to be someone
around who claimed that their dog was part wolf. Yeah
that's usually not the case, but usually it told you
something about the person who had the dog, which is
that you should avoid the person who has the dogs.
The dog itself might may or may not be fine,
but the person is probably to be avoided. This is
(04:47):
a thing that I have learned.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Yeah, So, like wolves are really really really big. I
think people underestimate how huge they are. So like if
someone's saying, like, oh, I've got a wolf and it's
like the size of a husky. Probably not like, uh,
you know, maybe it's possible that it has some small
(05:09):
amount of wolf many generations back or something. But for
true like half wolf half dog type situations, they're really big.
And they're also not very good pets because there's a
reason we bread out a lot of the wolf traits
in dogs because they're uh, they don't like to you know, necessarily.
(05:31):
It's not it's not always a balto situation. It's they're
often going to be like, but I could eat your
face though that's the thing you're telling me no to
the poopies in the house, But I could also eat
your face.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
See, this is how I feel with like every large animal.
Is why I'm bad at riding horses is that horses
do not think they're in charge of me. But I
don't understand why they don't think they're in charge of
me because they're much larger than me. And so okay,
this is completely besides the point.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
I went with you very much on horses, by the way,
Like I'm afraid of them because they're so powerful.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Yeah, and I'm afraid that they'll discover their power, much
like the working class. This is going to be related
to today's time. So I thought this would be a
good excuse to tell a story about animals and science
that I have wanted to tell since I first started
the show. I'm excited, but since it's this particular show,
it's a story about animals and science, but it's also
(06:25):
going to include revolutionaries and prison escape and how animals,
including humans, appear to be just as hardwired for cooperation
as we are for competition. And I know that you
actually studied evolutionary biology in school, so I have this
terrifying fear I'm going to tell you a story you've
already heard, but I don't know, and I am hoping
to at least, if nothing else, you can fill in
(06:47):
some cracks in my own research.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Honestly, so much stuff happens that, like, I barely remember
what happened last week, so even if I learned it,
I've probably forgotten it. So fair enough, happy to hear it.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
He's the best.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Person I know that went to Harvard.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Fair Enough, I don't.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
I remember nothing from you.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Definitely led with what you studied and not where you studied,
and that's well of you.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
I replaced it all with memes, but I still have
the degree, so it all worked out well in the end.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
This week, I'm going to tell the story about Prince
Peter Kerpotkin and the scientific discovery of the concept of
mutual aid and how it factors into evolutionary theory.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Oh this is I have not heard this before, so
I'm excited.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Excellent. That's that was going to be my next question.
But that answers that the real basic argument that I'm
going to make can be summed up like this. Charles
Darwin was like, survival of the fittest produces evolution, and
a bunch of people took that and ran with it
and were like, on one side, oh, this justifies us
all being dicks to each other, and also capitalism and
(07:56):
nature's a war of one against all. And on the
other side you had people saying, this is why we
need strong government and civilization and these very strong control systems,
because we're all animals underneath and we need to completely
suppress that nature. Then a scientist came along, a literal
anarchist prince. He was a Russian prince like a member
(08:16):
of the nobility, as well as the founder of anarchist
communism as a political ideology, and this guy spent year
studying animals while being a geologist, but everyone just kind
of confused all of the disciplines at the time, and
he was like, he actually went out, we'll get to this, okay,
I'm trying to do a quick version. So he was like, sure,
(08:37):
competition is part of evolutionary biology, but honestly, what's amazing
is just how much animals cooperate with each other. In fact,
he would go so far as to say mutual aid
is a factor in evolution, which is the title of
his nineteen oh two book, Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution.
(08:57):
And some people agreed with him at the time, especially
people who liked as politics, but modern science tends to
agree with him. Is what I have discovered in my reading.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
That's what I gotsis now that's exciting. This is, I think,
for every really rough example you can get from evolutionary
biology where it's like, man, this is a messed up system.
Fish eating their own offspring, you know, your babies bursting
out of you and sucking the juices from your limbs.
(09:31):
There's also lovely stories about cooperative communes like bats having
essentially like you know, social safety nets for each other. Like,
so you see this a lot with the bad example.
It's really cute because it's vampire bats have a really
really fast metabolism, okay, and so they will die if
(09:53):
they can't feed regularly enough, like acause they're vampires. Well, yes,
so they do drink blood. They usually get a blood
meal from livestock, uh some feet on birds. But because
it's such a rapid yes, exactly, there, they are basically
(10:14):
Victorian waves. If they don't eat enough, they will they
will perish, but they, uh, they make friends with each other,
and they have these like close relationships. So they will
actually share blood meals with each other if someone's like
missed one, which make sure that they survive and so
and it's like mutually beneficial because like usually you'll find
(10:35):
like if one shares blood meals with one like, the
other will remember that and then share in the future.
And they form these really uh sweet little collaborative I mean,
they're they're vomiting blood at each other, but yeah, really sweet.
It's really nice.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Yeah. I've seen a lot of terrible horror romance novels,
book movies that are basically this, just with human empires.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
So exactly vomiting blood.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Yeah, that's the I mean, that's kind of the core
of Kroppawkin's argument, and a lot of you know, stuff
starting in the sixties and seventies starts looking at this
a lot more seriously too. But before we can talk
about evolution, we have to talk about context, because I
love talking about context. We have to start by talking
(11:19):
about geology, which I did not expect when I started
seeing this particular research topic, because the history of evolution
starts with geology, which is neat. For a long ass time,
people even learned people in the West tended to view
nature as essentially static, like God made the everything. It's
(11:39):
just been there. That mountain's been there since God made it. Whatever, right,
the weather has more or less always been the same
since the creation of the earth. The rivers are there,
the mountains are there, everything is already there. Obviously, a
literal interpretation of the Bible influences this, right, But then science.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
You see, like, I'm I'm not a big Bible skullar,
but it was like it was supposed to be done
in a few days, which would not leave a lot
of room for staggering your animals.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Yeah, you're not like changing a lot of stuff slowly
if you're yeah, if you're just making it in a
couple of days.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I remember once I had this nun aunt and I
was a little kid, and I was like, not into religion,
and I asked my nun aunt. I was like, yeah,
but what about evolution, and like because she taught science,
and so she taught evolution in school and I was like,
what about creation versus evolution? She's like, that's just not
worth worrying about. I love that Ellen. So science was
(12:40):
pretty quickly like, all right, there's clearly some changes that
have happened to nature over time. You know, fossils and
things were a big part of that. So in the
late seventeen hundreds, in the early eighteen hundreds, Western science
was into this idea called catastrophism, which was like, yeah,
nature changes, but really quickly. It happens in big catastrophes
(13:03):
like Noah's flood in that history book. We all read
the Bible, and as far as I can tell, the
flood was like the big geological event in the Western mind,
and so everything they were like, people are like, well,
how come earthquakes now? Don't do that? And they were like, ah,
earthquakes were bigger back then, was the theory then. But
even beyond that, people were like mountains spring up overnight,
(13:24):
valleys are caused by fuck off big floods. Everything happens
in big catastrophes. And then you've got an early geologist,
a Scottish guy named James Hutton, who was like, yeah,
but what actually, if the earth is old as fucking shit,
changes slowly And I have no idea if he cussed
this much. I haven't actually read his work.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
I've only read, of course he did.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
That's my theory. Yeah, exactly right, And I kind of
want to introduce a bad boy of science early on,
because we're gonna have some like shitty dudes for a
minute before we get to the other bad boy at
the end of the story. Right, So we.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Got a sandwich. It's a shit sandwich, but they are
really nice.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
I know, exactly, And I don't know enough about this man.
I just know that the man who comes after him
as a racist. But oops, yeah, and who knows Howton might
have been to I don't fucking know. And he's like, actually,
earth old as fuck, things might change slowly. Another guy
who's on the same terrible island as Hotton, but in
the south of it. An English guy named Charles Lyle.
(14:22):
He comes along. He's the shit in the shit sandwich
only as a person.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
Actually he's got he's also got two first names, so
that kind.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Of You know, what's funny is that I often complain
about people on the show who have two first names,
or people whose like name is like Chris Christopherson or
so whatever. You know.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Yeah, it's not. It's not a hard and fast rule.
There are plenty of decent people with two first names.
But a pattern emerges.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, uh huh yeah, causation, correlation, who knows right exactly?
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Yeah, not nominative determinalism or whatever.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah. So charge Arles Lyle came along and he built
up a whole big theory about this gradual change stuff,
and he called it uniformitarianism, the most annoying word I
had to type over and over again this week. And
uniformatarianism is the idea that this process of change has
been uniform across all time. It is the opposite of catastrophism.
(15:23):
And it's basically like everything is big, boring, slow motion change.
And he he did a lot of important geologies that
I think he's this is the guy I think has
seen as the father of geology. Rocks are cut by
the slow trickle of rain, Mountains rise slowly up because
of pressure and magma. And you know, we've learned since
(15:47):
that it's both of these things. It is both gradual
and catastrophic change. Gradual change does most of the big stuff,
but we do see massive floods and asteroid strikes and
volcanic eruptions and shit.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
That this is really interesting because I certainly am not
I have not studied geology much, but like the this
is very similar to a lot of arguments in evolutionary biology,
where it's like do changes happen really gradually? Like do
you have really small evolutionary changes that like like basically
(16:18):
you have something with a like a fish and then
it's little fins very slowly turned into legs. Or do
you have a fish and then you have this like
Bonker's mutation that suddenly gives it joints and it's running
around after a couple of generations.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yeah, and it's like fuck, yeah, I get so many babies,
I have fucking joints, right, yeah, exactly, No, totally, Actually,
I mean, do you know where modern evolutionary biology is
on that stuff.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
It's similar to the geology thing, where you do have
sometimes larger leaps in evolution, but like foundationally, a lot
of the stuff is, you know, slower, less dramatic mutations,
because a dramatic mutation usually just kills you. Yeah, so
the little ones are the ones that can kind of
(17:04):
sneak up on you. But sometimes you do have to
have like a dramatic mutation where, especially like when it
comes to limbs, you can have pretty huge changes with
like just tweaking a little gene and then you suddenly
lose a limb or gain a limb, lose a finger,
gain finger. So you can actually have pretty rapid changes
(17:26):
sometimes that end up working out well. But it's definitely
it's definitely a mix, and there's still a lot of
debate about how important each one is.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yeah, I know that. Like when I read anti evolution stuff,
it's like what about eyeballs, And I'm like, man, I
don't know, it seems possible to me.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Yeah, it's it's definitely possible. If you They argue that
you don't have like a you can't track the development
of the eye, but you can't. Actually you can see
all the steps from the really simple eyes to the
more complexes surprise me at all. Yeah, it's actually it's
actually all there.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Yeah. I love when the gotchas are just based on
those never having read anything love.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
I love those websites. So there's one that has like
a picture of a guy that just has like he
has like a bunch of penises and nipples and like fingers,
and it's like, this is what evolution would say, because
you just have all these extra stuff, and it's like,
I mean, that'd be great, but yeah, no it doesn't.
It's it's yeah, it's like, you know, it's a very
(18:27):
simple concept. You can pass on your genetic material. That
genetic material gets passed on. It's it's kind of like
a it's a bit of a circular kind of thing
where it's like if you pass it on, then it
is passed on, right, and then that's it. That's all
it is.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yeah. No, I just I love when their gotchas are nonsensical.
And one of the things I found while researching this
is a lot of what Christians were and weren't against
has changed. But we're gonna get to that when we
get to the climate change section. Exciting, and a bunch
of these early scientists were a Christian at least or
at least Deists of some variety, and they didn't see
(19:03):
what they were describing as anti religious. I think people
tend to project the modern right wing Christian war on
science backwards into history more than it deserves. Although there
was tension between rationalism and religion and all this shit,
a fuck ton of these scientists were coming from a
like I am proving that God loves us because of
evolution or whatever. We'll get to the evolution part later.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Yeah, because there was already I thought, even before Darwin,
there were already sort of like ideas in Christianity of
a god that just kind of set things in motion
and then stands back. Is like all right, an I said,
is giant Rube Goldberg machine of people and animals and stuff.
And so that just like kind of fit in really
nicely with evolutionary biologists going like, yeah, he like set
(19:45):
things in motion and then everything else is science.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Yeah, Like my aunt was right, if you want to
believe in God about it, you could just be like,
I don't know, man, it's fine, yeah, just don't worry
about it. And yeah, people were like, isn't it great
that God provides all these complex natural systems that work
together to make life flourish. Lyle is not really a
cool people. He was an asshole white dude. He relied
(20:08):
heavily on his wife to do the art for his
geological studies, but then refused to let women into his classes.
He was a racist who visited the United States and said, wow,
you're right, you all should really ban all the abolitionist
books because otherwise the slave owners might die. Yeah, which
I have a different opinion. Oh, actually, I agree the
(20:29):
abolitionist books might lead to the slave owner's death, but
that's not a problem for my point of view. It's
a well feature not Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
I mean it's like if you've set up a system
where you have people who you've enslaved, and you're like, oh,
but if I don't free them, they might want to
free themselves violently. It's like, yeah, man, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
But what if there was an answer there? You almost
sit on it.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah, you almost got there.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yeah. So Lyle not my favorite person in history. Charles
Darwin was a uniformitarianist. He went ahead and applied this
more broadly to after his origin of the species thing,
which we'll get to later. But in eighteen eighty one,
Charles Darwin published a book I think this is his
last book. It had the fascinating and timeless title The
(21:18):
Formation of Vegetable Mold through the Action of Worms.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
Yeah, that's my favorite one of his.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
And basically this is the argument that soil comes about gradually.
Top soil has all been shipped out on by worms,
or to quote him directly, quote although the conclusion may
appear at first startling, it will be difficult to deny
the probability that every particle of earth forming the bed
from which the turf and old pastureland springs has been
passed through the intestines of worms.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
M Yeah, and go ahead, oh no, I mean it's
more or less true. Maybe not just all earthworms, but yeah,
like the trit divars are generally making the top soil
it in the ocean to a lot of animals making
the sand and this various substrate where it's usually usually
(22:07):
a two black animal like a worm, but it can
be another to try to war and they're just like
breaking down. You know, a tree falls down to try
to wars break it down. Now you've got more soil.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
This is my new favorite word. I've never heard this
word before, but I immediately know what it means, because yes,
it's amazing.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
It's a little guy that eats dead stuff.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
That was me when I was a street kid. I
ate a lot of hit out of the trash all
the time to try to No, that's too long to
fit on your knuckles. Never mind. But do you know
what isn't to trite us?
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Well, I mean no, no, I don't.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
No, I don't either. But there's a bunch of ads
that may or may not be trash. Here they are
and for bec I for one, enjoyed all of those
products and services that supported this show. And how Yeah,
(23:09):
and so in the nineteenth century, all the sciences were
more interlinked than they are today. This is a sort
of my hypothesis, not my hypothesis. I've read people talk
about this, but I haven't actually read a study that
says this is how we know that they're like this.
But you have a lot of these and it's not
for great reasons. It's because science was done by these
like gentlemen and scientist explorer type dudes.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Right, they would like they would have like clubs and
they'd go and they'd smoke nasty cigars and drink nasty
shit and like talk about whether hom or erectus was
a thing.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Yeah, totally so. Because of this conflation of all the sciences,
or rather not conflation, but they hadn't split off as
much yet, natural science and political science were directly related
in folk's minds. And a lot of these guys are liberals,
the original liberals. In fact, uniformitarianism presents some ideas that
(24:08):
are both deeply radical and deeply liberal by today's meaning
of the words. I would say the more liberal part
is that they're really into gradualism. Some of these folks
are also total revolutionarism. We're going to get to some
of those two. But some of them are like, well,
rather than having a French Revolution, we should just slowly
make society better. But the radical part of this that
I had never really given credit to, of gradualism as
(24:31):
a scientific idea applied to human society is that rather
than hand power to the great man of history, like,
rather than being like, oh, Napoleon should get a bunch
of power. That's a good idea, right. Gradualism had this
idea that we can all be those worms and slowly
make the world better through the hard work of living
(24:52):
our lives and improving things where we can. And there's
a quote about this from a classic novel of the
era that I haven't read yet called March And which
is written by George Elliot, who's actually a woman named
Mary Ann Evans who's friends of Darwin. But I like
this quote. The growing good of the world is partly
dependent on unhistoric acts. And I like it because, like
(25:15):
I would expect these scientists to be all about the
great man of history, right, because history thinks they're the
great men of history, right right. They think Charles Darwin
is the man who discovered how everything works, right, But theoretically,
actually some of them kind of weren't about the I mean,
(25:36):
I'm sure they were all about their own egos and
stuff too, but like theoretically on a political level, they
weren't about that.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Right, And that's kind of a mot that's also like
a modern U. There are different ways to regard history,
Like modern historians do disagree on this as well. The
idea of like you have the like like the big
men essentially change, right exactly the big things that change it,
versus like how much of it is like some guy
(26:05):
you know, making a big change, like either an inventor
or a warlord or a king or whatever making these
big changes, and how much of it is sort of
a you know, inevitable thing because obviously, like you'll have
things like you know, Einstein will make all these discoveries
and it you know, does cause a lot of these
(26:26):
paradigm shifts. But there's a competing idea which is like, well,
once you build up enough of sort of background stuff,
it's not you will get an Einstein inevitably who will
make these discoveries. So it's like kind of like you
can swap out these these guys. And then there's like
I'm not a historian, but I think there's like various
(26:47):
different ways to kind of like where some sometimes it's
like mixing, Like yeah, like you have these pretty big
actors and yeah they do change the timing and the
course of events, but you also they are not the
only ones rousing these changes.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
No, totally. And actually I mean it gets into this
like gradualism versus catastrophism thing, right, and it's just like
it's both and it's more gradualism. It's more the slowly
we build new ideas and then we have breakthroughs, and
the same with history and politics, like you know, we
you have revolt after revolt and then one of them sticks,
(27:25):
you know, right, and so people are like, ah, the
random person who's in charge of that one revolt or
the person that we've decided was in charge of that revolt,
you know. And some of the thing is just like
lazy writing, where it's like, you know, easier to pick
one name and stick to it.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Man, have you ever tried to read like a Russian
book or a Polish book and then like remember all
the names?
Speaker 2 (27:45):
It's hard, No, it's true, it's very hard. Yeah, Tolstoy's
got to come into this story later, honestly, and yeah, yeah,
he's in everything. I know. There's even a tuberculosis that
I don't include.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
Start.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
There's a couple things that come up over and over
again in this show.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
We ever did, if we ever did, like a live
show of this, that would have to be part of
the drinking.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Game, yeah, absolutely, or just literally pass out Bengo cards, yeah,
and then give prizes to people who like, yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Do you mentioned tuberculos a lot?
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (28:19):
Yeah, I know, sky.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah, so now my favorite tangent in the entire research
I did this week. Did you know that belief in
man made climate change is thousands of years older in
the Western tradition than belief in naturally occurring climate change?
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Wow? No, I did not know that.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
It never would have occurred to me, right, But if
you had that for thousands of years. The Western thinkers
tended to assume that everything was the static thing, but
they could see the impact of their own actions, right,
And so going back to the ancient Greeks, they would
sit around and be like, oh shit, if you cut
down all the trees, the lake might dry up. And
if the lake dries up, it's going to get colder
(29:02):
around here. So they were aware of climate change, but
it was man made, and people understood how desertification happens.
If you cut down all the trees, you go from
forest to desert. Which is funny because there's still people
who were like, no, you just regrow them. And I'm like, yeah,
did you strip away all of the top soil And
they're like well yeah, you know, like did you remove
(29:22):
all of the biomass from the region, Because eventually you
don't get a forest anymore. You can cut down a
forest and replant it. Like two or three times, depending
on the soil. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Also, like it's funny because it's like you remove all
the trees and then it's like and then you replace
them all at once. It's like, yeah, well, where do
you think that, like the new tree its come for
the trees is from the other plants and trees that
were there that you got rid of all of them
all at once.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, So desertification people were looking around and being like, oh,
all these like civilizations were like things have changed in
human history, right, right, And so it's funny that modern
conservatives are the ones who deny human impact on climate. Well,
funny would be the right word if they weren't in
power and doing all kinds of terrible things.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
So it's also weird because this isn't like again, I'm
I was not raised with like any religion, so I'm
kind of talking out of my butt, But I thought
like a big part of Christianity was like you were
like God gives you the world and you're like the
stewards of the world. So like, if stuff is going awry,
such as animals going extinct, that's kind of on man
(30:34):
because we were supposed to be stewarding the world. I'm
not saying like I'm not necessarily endorsing this idea, but
that I thought that was the Christian idea. Is that
like you're the caretakers of the earth and all the
little animals and so on.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
Yeah, I know, that's exactly it. And that's now, that
was actually what I was going to Congratulations, that was it,
Like humans are the ones with agents, see in this viewpoint, right,
and so it should be the conservative position used to
believe in man made climate change and not the natural
climate change, and now we have, well, not the reverse.
(31:12):
I think anyone who actually understands climate science understands that yes,
they're natural ebbs and flows and also man make climate
changes what's happening right now.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
And they feed into one another as well. So like
you have man made events that can cause a cascading effect,
and then you have you know, then like you'll have
natural like an example that would be you know, melt,
like if you have melt of a lot of the
perma frost, have a natural yeah, yeah, exactly, you'll have
(31:42):
a natural sort of release of methane from these things,
and something that may have eventually happened somewhat for certain things,
but then it creates a snowball effect. So yeah, it's
really it's a it's a complex thing, but it's the
there's not any really any debate among climate scientists that
(32:07):
this is a massive change that is caused by peoples.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Yeah. Even the founding fathers of the fucking United States
of America were writing about how clearcutting and colonialism were
affecting the climate. Libs, I know, I know. It was
just funny because I like one of the famous things
on the show that is that I actually don't like them. Yeah,
but they were aware of the impact that they were having,
and people believed in their power to change shit. And
(32:34):
these ideas found their way into political science too, because
politics are actually deeply woven through everything we do, despite
how hard modern Western society likes to pretend that everything
is a distinct field. And Frederick Engels of Marx and Engels,
who for full transparency, also not a huge fan of
but whatever he wrote about how humans impact nature, but
nature otherwise stays still. So this is like impacting all
(32:57):
of the science, is my point. He wrote, quote, there
is devilishly little left of nature as it was in
Germany at the time when the Germanic peoples immigrated into it.
The Earth's surface, climate, vegetation, fauna, and the human beings
themselves have infinitely changed, and all this owing to human activity,
while the changes of nature and Germany which have occurred
(33:18):
in this period of time without human interference are incalculably small.
And now he's this is wrong, right, This is an
incorrect assessment. Telling someone that their science is wrong in
the nineteen hundreds in the eighteen hundreds is like not
a whatever, everyone is wrong, you know, right, But there's
this argument happening about climate change and whether it's happening
(33:41):
on a human scale or not. Right, And angles actually
wrote this after and he wrote in eighteen eighty three,
which is after in the eighteen seventies Kripacken and other
people were proving that natural climate change was happening on
a timescale observable by us. But people understood man made
climate change. Well, what they didn't understand was that nature
(34:02):
changes on its own without us. Right to go back
to geology, So you have this. Everything has always been
the same vibe. Even the gradualists are like, this happens
so slow, it doesn't really affect us. As best as
I can tell, And then you have this Swiss naturalist
named Jean Louis Rudolph Augussi's and he shows up on
(34:24):
the scene and he mostly studies fossil fish, and in
eighteen thirty seven he's like, okay, but what if there
was a fucking ice age? And this was like a
real bold assertion, right, I really want to know whenever,
I'm like, and then science discovered this, I'm like, I
want to know what people in like Asia and Africa
(34:44):
and stuff like knew about this stuff, Like I want
to know, you know, whenever. Like literally, later in the story,
someone's going to discover plateaus as a geological thing, you know,
And I'm like, other people had to already know about
this shit. But yeah, Europeans figured out the ice age.
And he says glaciers carved out the valleys and people
(35:06):
are like, aren't you just a guy who studies fossil
fish And he's like, no, no, no, hear me out glaciers.
Better explain Also why there's like giant bowlders all over
the Alps and shit, And people are like, huh, well,
the farmer told me that a giant put it there,
But I see the glacier argument, I see where you're
coming from, and he studies a fun ton of glaciers. Lyle,
(35:27):
the uniform of the guy was like, no fucking way
could there have been ice covering Britain. But a legion
of geologists went out and tested things, and they're like, yeah,
there was an ice age, and they all thought it
had to be about fifty thousand years ago. Specifically, they
thought it had to happen before people. Obviously there were.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
People, right, but like, yeah, the idea being, how could
we have possibly survived an ice age?
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (35:58):
And also I think still this fundamental belief that like,
obviously while we were around, nothing could have changed. Interesting,
Like they're kind of clinging to this. Everyone's going to
start dropping that over the next couple decades. Even Lyle
is eventually going to come around to it. I don't
know how he changes on the race issue or not.
I couldn't find any updates. But and so, like people
(36:22):
are like the world has been the same as long
as people have been around. Don't get me wrong. Okay,
that's the geological context. Now evolution. I'm not going to
get as deep into the evolution thing. I'm not going
to tell you about Darwin going on a boat or whatever,
because that.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
Ate a lot of rare species.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
Yeah, fucking of course he did.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Oh my god, he was. He was a freak, like
he liked to take Like I think that there's this
this concept of him as like this like kindly old
grandfather of evolution, because that's we have the photo of him,
and he's old and the photo, but he was like,
you know, he was not that old when he was
on the boat going to you know, the glap ghosts
(37:06):
and like he's just like sweet a bunch of animals
to try.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
I wish one of them had killed him. I mean whatever. Actually,
actually I actually don't come out of this haiding Darwin.
I come out of this aiding most of the people
who interpreted his ideas immediately after his death.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
Just because he ate a few tortoises that he found
doesn't mean he's a bad guy.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Yeah, who amongst us? I mean I wouldn't, but most
people would probably been like.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Come to their own bulls, it says, if they're asking
us to eat them, like, look, it's in its own little.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Packaging proof of intelligent design. Right. So Darwin was really
into Lile the uniformitarianist. Darwin once said quote, I always
feel as if my books came half out of Lyle's brains.
And so this is why when I was saying that
evolution comes out of geology, it's because Darwin comes out
(38:04):
of the founder of geology as a science, right, and
this whole like catastrophism, gradualism, et cetera, like what happens
with rocks. People are like, oh, what about species.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
It's also there's a very intimate relationship between fossil records
in terms of evolution and geology, and also in terms
of evolution and geology, because like, if you have geological changes,
that has a direct impact on the evolutionary course of animals.
So it's all very yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Yeah, no, it makes sense. Like Lyle, the way that
he was proving gradualism with volcanoes is that he was
looking at the amount of oysters were in between the layers,
and he was like, clearly this didn't happen all at once.
There are so many oysters here. Those oyster beds are
so deep, you know. But Lyele wasn't actually excited at
(38:52):
first about Darwin being really inspired by him. It took
until the tenth edition of his own book about geology
for him to accept that evolution was probably real. Lyle's
prior theory to quota write up from Strange Science dot
Net was quote. For much of his life, Lyle maintained
a steady state view of the Earth and its inhabitants,
(39:12):
arguing that as one species went extinct, another appeared. This
was partly because of his belief in a long standing
deep division between humans and animals, in which mankind's superiority
to animals was moral, not physical.
Speaker 3 (39:27):
How where would like My question for him would be like,
if a species like it goes extene, like, how does
the other one just spawn? Is it sort of you're
playing call of duty? And then like, yeah, I think,
oh this species died spawn writed another species.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
It's I honestly think so. I mean because Lyle is
fairly religious, right I see, Okay, And so he kind
of is like, ah, and then the magic thing snaps
its fingers, you know, right, got it? I think that's
my best understanding. But I think what's really I'm really
interested in this idea that he was like, people were
really caught up. The thing that was hard for people
(40:06):
to leave behind was this idea that what separates us
from the animals. Isn't like as people want that to
be a real black and white distinction, you know, especially
if you want to have a Western viewpoint and like
you're the master of every other thing. And obviously this
is going to play into race science and real sketchy ways.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Yeah, So he basically had a theological disagreement with the
idea of evolution, and he would not be the only one,
but he also it was a scientist, and he came
around when presented with enough evidence over enough decades where
he finally got over his shit. He even came around
to believe in the ice age too, but in terms
of species differentiation or like the way that animals change.
(40:52):
People believed in man made climate change but not natural
climate change. It was kind of like that for evolution too,
because people had done what was the name of the
monk who did the like flowers with mindel Yeah, I
remember this vaguely from seventh grade science.
Speaker 3 (41:09):
And Mendelian genetics with the peapods and all that.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Business people were aware that humans could change animals and plants, right,
they would look at dogs and be like, we clearly
did that.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Yeah, we did a number on a lot of sophisticated
in him.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yeah, I think people tended to believe that you couldn't
make new species through human changes, but like they certainly
believe that you could change within the species, right. But
Darwin was like, no, natural selection exists, and it makes
new species. So like saying natural selection rather than man
(41:46):
made selection was the big thing, much like saying natural
climate change is real. Do you know that there was this?
I'm actually curious. I only learned about this one at
the like eleventh hour. While I was researching this. There
was this predecessor to Darwin, Robert Chambers, who wrote anonymously,
who wrote a book called Vestiges of the Human Nature
of Creation or the Natural History of Creation.
Speaker 3 (42:07):
This sounds like something I would have learned and forgot
about completely fair enough.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
In eighteen forty four, this anonymous person wrote a book.
I think he was afraid of the backlash you would
get because it went against well again, he was also
a religious person, I think, but right still, he wrote
this book and it was speculation. Darwin went into some science,
right yeah, And Robert Chambers was like, I got an idea,
(42:34):
and his idea was like basically right, he drew out
trees of like branching off animals and shit right. Yeah,
and it was an international bestseller, Vestiges of the Natural
History of Creation And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking,
eighteen forty four book about the evolution. I wonder if
it was racist, And the answer to that is yes,
(42:55):
it was very racist. The white European is the pinnacle
of transi utation, which is what he was calling evolution. Okay,
this racist home laid the foundation for the public being
willing to consider evolution because it did the work of saying, like, hey,
you can still have a God and evolution. And that's
fine because there actually had been people even before him
(43:17):
who had been like, we think evolution, but they had
been more atheists. So he's one day, I'm gonna fully
under in order to understand Western history, I feel like,
actually have to understand the way that like theology and
science do and don't relate. You know.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
Yeah, theology. It's interesting because like early theology, when you
kind of like think about the origins of religion, it's
a very early kind of crack at science right where
you're explaining you're trying to explain the world through observation.
(43:54):
It's not necessarily this it's not the same as science, right,
because you're missing a lot of the experimentation part. Maybe
there's like some of it, right, Like you pray and
then something good happens. You're like, that's empirical evidence. I
prayed something good happened, right, so like you but you
have it's like it is a it is a proto
sort of. It's similar to science in the sense that
(44:16):
it is a way that people are trying to explain
the world around them. Yeah, but the problem, the problem
is like the the evidence and the scientific method not
being there.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah. Do you know what science can't explain?
Speaker 3 (44:34):
Bees?
Speaker 2 (44:35):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (44:35):
They're two there. According to the B movie, we can't.
Science has never explained how bees can fly because they're
too fat for their little wings. I mean, that's not
true at all, But the B movie did say that
at the beginning.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Well, I was going to say, the products and services
of this show that were divinely chosen, divinely appointed.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
Amen, right, Alilujah sponsored by B movie.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Yeah, that's right. So earlier I was saying I don't
have that much against Darwin. I'm a little bit I'm
gonna contradict that here. I'm gonna be mean to Darwin
for a minute. Because Darwin comes along and he's like,
(45:26):
all right, we're gonna take this idea, this evolution idea
that someone else called transmutation. We're gonna take this idea
and make a real mean And maybe I'm being unfair here,
and maybe I'm reading bias sources, but one of the
sources is his fucking diary. H Darwin started up by
applying a political science idea to the natural sciences rather
than the other way around. And that part surprised me, right,
(45:46):
because you have all of these moments of like scientists
will be like, ah, yes, because of Darwin and evolution,
we're going to apply this to political science. Darwin started
with a political science idea In eighteen thirty eight. Darwin
wrote in his diet quote, I happened to read for
amusement Malthus on population. Malthus is the guy who was like,
(46:08):
there's not enough food around, so we just let poor
people die. So the Malthusian is the right of order.
It comes from him and being well prepared to appreciate
the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on. It at
once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would
tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. Here,
(46:30):
then I had at last got a theory by which
to work. So he went out and studied nature and
ate turtles in their turtle bulls, and he discovered survival
of the fittest. While his ideas weren't quite as cutthroat
as people represent them in the media, at least as
I understand, he tended to emphasize combat and battle and
(46:50):
direct and violent competition, either in his examples or in
the metaphors that he used in his big book on
the Origin of Species by nowatural selection or the preservation
of favored races and the struggle for survival. I do
miss nineteenth century title conventions. I have to admit. I'm
glad we no longer say preservation of the favored races,
(47:13):
but I heeds to talk about animals here. Yeah, he
wrote quote one general law leading to the advancement of
all organic beings, namely multiply vary, let the strongest live
and the weakest die. And so there's a again an
oversimplification you can have where you're like, ah, yes, this
(47:35):
means we should all be fucking terrible to each other
or whatever, which isn't actually I believe what Darwin was saying.
Speaker 3 (47:41):
No, I mean it was so he really emphasized the
the kind of like competitive brutal nature of natural selection,
because one of the main things is that dying and
not reproducing are a major part of explaining natural selection, right,
(48:04):
so like if you don't pass on your genes, then
that's like an evolutionary dead end versus passing them on,
and that's like that whole Like getting that point across
and discover finding evidence of it is kind of like
an easier first step, right, versus sort of saying like well, yeah,
(48:26):
but it's not like you have a lot of other
interesting factors like if you were if Darwin not that
this was necessarily on its radar, but like talking about
like well, actually with a lot of bird species, they're
so pretty because like the females are just like they
like it, and it's not necessarily fitness, it's not necessarily survival.
It's just like this like weird preference that gets out
(48:47):
of control, and now you have a bird of paradise
with a giant tail that's really pretty and extravagant. It's
like I think that finding finding evidence of those things
is I think a lot harder, and it's probably harder
for people to kind of digest that versus like, yeah,
(49:08):
like if you have two big horned sheep and they
like smack each other in the head, one of them dies,
doesn't reproduce, the other one lives because it's got a
thicker skull. Right, that's evolution, baby, you know. I think
it's just it's like we're very we really like sort
of I mean we're all we're all kind of like
sports brained in a way, right, Like we like those
(49:30):
ideas are compelling, they're exciting, And it also doesn't necessarily
acknowledge like some autonomy on the part of actual organisms, right,
which I think is another thing that probably was a
little bit of a struggle too. I mean today it's
still there's still a lot of like assumption that an
animal would not have any kind of like quote unquote
(49:53):
say or autonomy in terms of selecting itself, if that
makes sense, except that we do actually see evidence that
there's like some self like self selection, not not that
the animal is planning its evolutionary course, but just that
it's like, I like that I like to see this
in Yeah, that bird's pretty yeah, totally, exactly exactly, yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:15):
No, totally and like and I think it's like much
like with the catastrophism to gradualism, it's going to be
like a yes and right. I think that when we
when we start talking about cooperation, we start talking about
mutual aid in a bit, it's not going to be
saying like, no, the competitive thing isn't real, right, It's
basically saying like, this is over over emphasized.
Speaker 3 (50:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (50:40):
And one of the odd by products of the way
that Darwin chose to write about this, which I actually
again it makes some sense that this is how Darwin
wrote about it. One of the odd by products is
that some of the early resistance was on a moral
level rather than a scientific level. You have a friend
of the pod Tolstoy, for example. It was a Christian
animist novelist. I told you, I promised you told Stoy,
(51:05):
and he talked about how we worried about belief and
evolution would degrade people's moral character. And he's wrong about this, right,
But like he believes that if we start talking about evolution,
especially around this like competitive war of one against all things,
it would degrade people's moral character. Because they would become
less caring and see this world built on competition, and
this is and once again you get this irony to
(51:27):
how the pro capitalist right wing Christians are the ones
who deny evolution these days when they like, I don't
know it. It fucks with me. It's just a really
interesting how everything's wrong right.
Speaker 3 (51:38):
Because like, man, I feel like I keep talking about
Christianity despite that being about as far from my knowledge
base as possible. But yeah, like my understanding of like
there's a lot of ideas in Christianity about like charity
and taking care of the poor and like the weak, right,
(51:58):
like the idea being like we are good Christians because
we don't just let h you know, children on the
streets die like that that makes us good Christians, which
is and then you, like, to Tolstoy's credit, like there
were some kind of dark movements that emerged both from
and concurrently with these these ideas and evolution, like social Darwinism, eugenics.
(52:25):
So it's like, obviously, as someone who is big on
evolutionary biology, I do not think those are inevitable philosophical
outcomes of looking at evolution being like great like cause
otherwise be like look that frog eats its kids, we
should do that, right. It's a dumb it's a dumb
moral argument.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
Totally and once again very the next paragraph I wrote
is about how people take Darwin's theories and they're like, fuck, yeah,
we could be mean as hell. And what's called social Darwinism,
which is not Darwin wasn't a social Darwinist, right No.
But then in contrast to social Darwinism.
Speaker 3 (53:04):
Which is maybe we should just say, like we should
probably say really quickly what it is. It's like the
idea that I don't know that there's like good the best,
like survival of the fittest, but in terms of people
in a short time scale, where it's like that, that's
essentially it, right, Like, and also there's a lot of
weird science cy Schmayan see stuff that's not real real
(53:27):
science that came out of it, like phrenology, like you
can look at a guy's face and the Talli's a criminal.
You know, a lot of stupid, stupid stuff totally.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
It It really did set off a lot of nonsense.
Now there was a lot of nonsense before it that
it replaced.
Speaker 3 (53:43):
Right, But you can't not like, you can't not do
science and because like some stupid people are going to
use the science to like justify being bad people totally.
Speaker 2 (53:56):
Then there's this guy who gets called Darwin's bulldog because
he is the man's fiercest defender, Thomas Henry Huxley. He
saw this struggle for survival that Darwin talked about and
called it literally gladiatorial. He really emphasized the like combat
violent nature of the bloody war nature.
Speaker 3 (54:16):
Yes, we love yeah and football.
Speaker 2 (54:23):
And he was not a social Darwinist, he was anything
but it. He believed that society, the goal of society
then is to protect us from our own animal nature.
He wrote that basically the quote chief end of social
organization was to mitigate or abolish the war of one
against all. We had to protect ourselves from our animal nature.
(54:46):
And this is still a very popular idea across the
political spectrum.
Speaker 3 (54:51):
Yeah, there's two. There's two. Like big, I think naturalism
arguments that I very much disagree with and I think
are uh aren't really accurate both or I disagree with
both morally and from a scientific perspective. One is like
if it's natural, it's good, right, which is very easy
to disprove right. The other is that like we our
(55:12):
society protects us from our horrible nature, right, which I
also disagree with, uh, looking into evolutionary history and anthropology
and things like that, I don't think that's really well
scientifically or morally based, but you know, it's it's these
are these two ideas. If I had to pick between them,
(55:33):
obviously it'd be the one where like, yeah, we should
do a society to prevent ourselves from being horrible, horrible monkeys.
But like, I also don't think we have been in
our revolutionary history that noddy of monkeys for a while totally.
Speaker 2 (55:49):
And this is good because the subject of this week,
which is not going to we're not going to get
to until next episode, because that's the way my brain works,
as we do one episode of context and one episode
about the meat of the subject. Is the guy who
makes the argument that you're making. He is the guy
who says, like, you're both wrong. This is obvious, here's
my data, you know.
Speaker 3 (56:10):
Right, Yeah, we're only we're only a little bit of
a bunch of naughty monkeys. We're not monsters.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
Right, totally exactly, And so yeah, this is you have
this setup, this is how things are. And then someone
comes around and says, not only do you all misunderstand geology,
but you also misunderstand what being fit in the animal
kingdom really means. Mutual aid is in fact a major
factor in evolution. Someone comes along like Prince Peter Kropotkin,
(56:36):
or to quote my favorite T shirt about this guy,
the anarchist formerly known as Prince because he doesn't he
doesn't stay a prince very long. He ends up prison at.
Speaker 3 (56:45):
I was gonna like, I was gonna do some stupid
joke when you were like an anarchist prince of like, well,
that's an oxymoron, how it is? He knew it, but
by I get it, Yeah, I get it.
Speaker 2 (56:57):
We don't control how we're born famously, Yeah you know.
Speaker 3 (57:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (57:01):
And about this man and his study of glaciers and
more interesting things than that. Actually I really like his
study of glaciers. We're going to get to on Wednesday,
but first, if people want to hear more of you
talking about animals and which ones are tasty? Is there
a podcast they can listen to?
Speaker 3 (57:22):
Yes, absolutely, a creature feature. It's an iHeart radio podcast.
It is a bunch of fun conversations I have with
people talking about evolutionary biology. Animal behavior. I really like
to make it not like it's for anyone who's interested
(57:45):
in animal behavior in evolutionary biology. You don't need to
have a degree in biology to understand it. And it's yeah,
I think it's it's really fun to look at animal
behavior and evolution in terms of like we can really
relate to it. It's okay to kind of to a
(58:08):
certain extent as humans relate to animals. I think it's
normal and natural. And sometimes there's a lot of pushback
because it's like, well, it's not scientific to empathize with
an ant doing something, But I think it's a really
useful lens with which we view the world. And so
we talk about just really really interesting animal behaviors and
(58:29):
kind of try to try to like think about how
all of these things in evolutionary biology are not really
that alien from our experience while also being very distinct. So, yeah,
if you're enjoying this conversation, I think you would enjoy
the show. And if I talk about a lot of
specific examples of cool, weird animals on the show.
Speaker 2 (58:52):
Hell yeah. And if you like podcasts, which do you
probably do because you made it this far into this podcast,
you should also check out the other Coolzone Media podcasts
because they are good. And I've been listening to it
could Happen here, especially Executive Whatever. I actually don't know
the name of the show that I listened to all
the time, thank you. I listened to it every Friday,
and I get confused about the name because the first
(59:14):
thing that happens in it is that Robert makes a
joke about the name, and it makes me incapable of
remembering the actual name. But it shows up in that
it could happen here feed And so you could check
it out there. And I don't know, SOPHI, you got
anything you want to plug? You did it great. Well.
Take care of each other. Cooperation is a factor in evolution.
Speaker 3 (59:36):
Always. Always, if you have a neighbor in need, vomit
blood into their mouth.
Speaker 2 (59:40):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (59:42):
Community care.
Speaker 2 (59:44):
Yeah, all right, hi everyone.
Speaker 1 (59:50):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
Or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (01:00:09):
M
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You're
a weekly reminder that when bad things are happening, there's
people trying to do good things. And this week, one
of the people trying to do good things, probably I
assume is Katie Golden. Who's my guest. Hi, how are you? Hi?
Speaker 3 (00:22):
I I try to do good stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
You have to do at least three good things before
you're allowed on this show.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
My proudest thing that I do that's good is when
my dog does a little peepee. I have a water
bottle and I live in a very like uh, it's
all cobblestones and pavement and stuff. There's not a lot
of grass. So when she does peepy on the cobblestones,
I like wash it with the water. So, you know,
(00:48):
because just like so that I'm doing a little cleaning
up after my Obviously I also clean up her poopoos.
That's a given, but yeah, just rinse make the cobblestones
like a little bit cleaner after my dog does her
little pissies on it.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
I think that just based on the cobblestones thing that
people might infer that you don't live in America.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Yeah, so I do live in Italy. I'm not Italian
at all. I speak the language like a drunk toddler.
So yeah, but I live in a live in Turin Terino.
It's a northern Italian city. It's very nice. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Well, you also are the host of the podcast Creature Feature,
which is all about animals and science. Is that right?
Speaker 3 (01:34):
That's right?
Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
I when I was in school, I studied a psychology
and evolutionary biology, and I always loved animals and I
really enjoyed talking about their behavior, cool stuff and evolutionary biology.
I feel like I try to push against both overly
(01:58):
humanizing animals and not doing it enough where it's like, ah,
they're robots with no feelings, so kind of fine, kind
of a you know, are commonalities with them without making
it too much about people, too egocentrically human.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
I feel like even like dealing with a dog, you're like, ah,
the dog is doing the following thing, and I recognize it.
But then sometimes you're like, the dog is smiling and
you're like, no, that dog's having a panic.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Attack, right exactly, Yes, yes, looks very friendly. Yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
A lot of times animals will be smiling at you,
and that's not necessarily a good sign, especially even our
close primate relatives. You don't necessarily want to see that.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I can think of some people that I don't want
smiling at me.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
That's a good point.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Okay. I have a question that's unrelated to the topic
of this episode. I read in an episode that I
did with Sophia as a guest about dogs. There's no
reason you need to know the answer to this. I read,
I'll try that the reason that dogs have white selera
the whites of their eyes is a coevolution everything with humans,
(03:01):
so that we can hunt together because we can see
where the other is looking. Have you heard this.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
I don't know if I've heard this specifically, but I
do know that so they do have more of the
whites of their eyes showing than wolves, but there is
a little bit. So wolves also have a little bit
of the whites of their eyes showing, and it can
be instructive actually for so other dogs other wolves. There's
(03:28):
this sort of expression with dogs wolves called whale eye
where their head is down you can see the whites
of their eyes and you can kind of see their
iris sort of up floating at the top, and it
looks super cute. But it's actually a warning that they're
really stressed and they might snap at you. So there's
(03:49):
some So there's some communication with dogs and wolves and eyes.
But yeah, I mean there's definitely been a lot of
coevolution with dogs and humans. The fact that there's like
more of the whites of their eyes showing could definitely
be a communication thing between humans and dogs. They've certainly
learned how to follow our eyesight read our expressions a
(04:12):
lot better than wolves do. There's a lot of studies
comparing like wolf puppies raised by humans and dogs, and
the dogs just like really collaborate with us a lot more.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
That makes sense to me. When I was more of
a street kid, there was always going to be someone
around who claimed that their dog was part wolf. Yeah
that's usually not the case, but usually it told you
something about the person who had the dog, which is
that you should avoid the person who has the dogs.
The dog itself might may or may not be fine,
but the person is probably to be avoided. This is
(04:47):
a thing that I have learned.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Yeah, So, like wolves are really really really big. I
think people underestimate how huge they are. So like if
someone's saying, like, oh, I've got a wolf and it's
like the size of a husky. Probably not like, uh,
you know, maybe it's possible that it has some small
(05:09):
amount of wolf many generations back or something. But for
true like half wolf half dog type situations, they're really big.
And they're also not very good pets because there's a
reason we bread out a lot of the wolf traits
in dogs because they're uh, they don't like to you know, necessarily.
(05:31):
It's not it's not always a balto situation. It's they're
often going to be like, but I could eat your
face though that's the thing you're telling me no to
the poopies in the house, But I could also eat
your face.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
See, this is how I feel with like every large animal.
Is why I'm bad at riding horses is that horses
do not think they're in charge of me. But I
don't understand why they don't think they're in charge of
me because they're much larger than me. And so okay,
this is completely besides the point.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
I went with you very much on horses, by the way,
Like I'm afraid of them because they're so powerful.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Yeah, and I'm afraid that they'll discover their power, much
like the working class. This is going to be related
to today's time. So I thought this would be a
good excuse to tell a story about animals and science
that I have wanted to tell since I first started
the show. I'm excited, but since it's this particular show,
it's a story about animals and science, but it's also
(06:25):
going to include revolutionaries and prison escape and how animals,
including humans, appear to be just as hardwired for cooperation
as we are for competition. And I know that you
actually studied evolutionary biology in school, so I have this
terrifying fear I'm going to tell you a story you've
already heard, but I don't know, and I am hoping
to at least, if nothing else, you can fill in
(06:47):
some cracks in my own research.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Honestly, so much stuff happens that, like, I barely remember
what happened last week, so even if I learned it,
I've probably forgotten it. So fair enough, happy to hear it.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
He's the best.
Speaker 3 (07:00):
Person I know that went to Harvard.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Fair Enough, I don't.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
I remember nothing from you.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Definitely led with what you studied and not where you studied,
and that's well of you.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
I replaced it all with memes, but I still have
the degree, so it all worked out well in the end.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
This week, I'm going to tell the story about Prince
Peter Kerpotkin and the scientific discovery of the concept of
mutual aid and how it factors into evolutionary theory.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
Oh this is I have not heard this before, so
I'm excited.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
Excellent. That's that was going to be my next question.
But that answers that the real basic argument that I'm
going to make can be summed up like this. Charles
Darwin was like, survival of the fittest produces evolution, and
a bunch of people took that and ran with it
and were like, on one side, oh, this justifies us
all being dicks to each other, and also capitalism and
(07:56):
nature's a war of one against all. And on the
other side you had people saying, this is why we
need strong government and civilization and these very strong control systems,
because we're all animals underneath and we need to completely
suppress that nature. Then a scientist came along, a literal
anarchist prince. He was a Russian prince like a member
(08:16):
of the nobility, as well as the founder of anarchist
communism as a political ideology, and this guy spent year
studying animals while being a geologist, but everyone just kind
of confused all of the disciplines at the time, and
he was like, he actually went out, we'll get to this, okay,
I'm trying to do a quick version. So he was like, sure,
(08:37):
competition is part of evolutionary biology, but honestly, what's amazing
is just how much animals cooperate with each other. In fact,
he would go so far as to say mutual aid
is a factor in evolution, which is the title of
his nineteen oh two book, Mutual Aid a Factor in Evolution.
(08:57):
And some people agreed with him at the time, especially
people who liked as politics, but modern science tends to
agree with him. Is what I have discovered in my reading.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
That's what I gotsis now that's exciting. This is, I think,
for every really rough example you can get from evolutionary
biology where it's like, man, this is a messed up system.
Fish eating their own offspring, you know, your babies bursting
out of you and sucking the juices from your limbs.
(09:31):
There's also lovely stories about cooperative communes like bats having
essentially like you know, social safety nets for each other. Like,
so you see this a lot with the bad example.
It's really cute because it's vampire bats have a really
really fast metabolism, okay, and so they will die if
(09:53):
they can't feed regularly enough, like acause they're vampires. Well, yes,
so they do drink blood. They usually get a blood
meal from livestock, uh some feet on birds. But because
it's such a rapid yes, exactly, there, they are basically
(10:14):
Victorian waves. If they don't eat enough, they will they
will perish, but they, uh, they make friends with each other,
and they have these like close relationships. So they will
actually share blood meals with each other if someone's like
missed one, which make sure that they survive and so
and it's like mutually beneficial because like usually you'll find
(10:35):
like if one shares blood meals with one like, the
other will remember that and then share in the future.
And they form these really uh sweet little collaborative I mean,
they're they're vomiting blood at each other, but yeah, really sweet.
It's really nice.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Yeah. I've seen a lot of terrible horror romance novels,
book movies that are basically this, just with human empires.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
So exactly vomiting blood.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Yeah, that's the I mean, that's kind of the core
of Kroppawkin's argument, and a lot of you know, stuff
starting in the sixties and seventies starts looking at this
a lot more seriously too. But before we can talk
about evolution, we have to talk about context, because I
love talking about context. We have to start by talking
(11:19):
about geology, which I did not expect when I started
seeing this particular research topic, because the history of evolution
starts with geology, which is neat. For a long ass time,
people even learned people in the West tended to view
nature as essentially static, like God made the everything. It's
(11:39):
just been there. That mountain's been there since God made it. Whatever, right,
the weather has more or less always been the same
since the creation of the earth. The rivers are there,
the mountains are there, everything is already there. Obviously, a
literal interpretation of the Bible influences this, right, But then science.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
You see, like, I'm I'm not a big Bible skullar,
but it was like it was supposed to be done
in a few days, which would not leave a lot
of room for staggering your animals.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
Yeah, you're not like changing a lot of stuff slowly
if you're yeah, if you're just making it in a
couple of days.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I remember once I had this nun aunt and I
was a little kid, and I was like, not into religion,
and I asked my nun aunt. I was like, yeah,
but what about evolution, and like because she taught science,
and so she taught evolution in school and I was like,
what about creation versus evolution? She's like, that's just not
worth worrying about. I love that Ellen. So science was
(12:40):
pretty quickly like, all right, there's clearly some changes that
have happened to nature over time. You know, fossils and
things were a big part of that. So in the
late seventeen hundreds, in the early eighteen hundreds, Western science
was into this idea called catastrophism, which was like, yeah,
nature changes, but really quickly. It happens in big catastrophes
(13:03):
like Noah's flood in that history book. We all read
the Bible, and as far as I can tell, the
flood was like the big geological event in the Western mind,
and so everything they were like, people are like, well,
how come earthquakes now? Don't do that? And they were like, ah,
earthquakes were bigger back then, was the theory then. But
even beyond that, people were like mountains spring up overnight,
(13:24):
valleys are caused by fuck off big floods. Everything happens
in big catastrophes. And then you've got an early geologist,
a Scottish guy named James Hutton, who was like, yeah,
but what actually, if the earth is old as fucking shit,
changes slowly And I have no idea if he cussed
this much. I haven't actually read his work.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
I've only read, of course he did.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
That's my theory. Yeah, exactly right, And I kind of
want to introduce a bad boy of science early on,
because we're gonna have some like shitty dudes for a
minute before we get to the other bad boy at
the end of the story. Right, So we.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Got a sandwich. It's a shit sandwich, but they are
really nice.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
I know, exactly, And I don't know enough about this man.
I just know that the man who comes after him
as a racist. But oops, yeah, and who knows Howton might
have been to I don't fucking know. And he's like, actually,
earth old as fuck, things might change slowly. Another guy
who's on the same terrible island as Hotton, but in
the south of it. An English guy named Charles Lyle.
(14:22):
He comes along. He's the shit in the shit sandwich
only as a person.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
Actually he's got he's also got two first names, so
that kind.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Of You know, what's funny is that I often complain
about people on the show who have two first names,
or people whose like name is like Chris Christopherson or
so whatever. You know.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Yeah, it's not. It's not a hard and fast rule.
There are plenty of decent people with two first names.
But a pattern emerges.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, uh huh yeah, causation, correlation, who knows right exactly?
Speaker 3 (14:54):
Yeah, not nominative determinalism or whatever.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah. So charge Arles Lyle came along and he built
up a whole big theory about this gradual change stuff,
and he called it uniformitarianism, the most annoying word I
had to type over and over again this week. And
uniformatarianism is the idea that this process of change has
been uniform across all time. It is the opposite of catastrophism.
(15:23):
And it's basically like everything is big, boring, slow motion change.
And he he did a lot of important geologies that
I think he's this is the guy I think has
seen as the father of geology. Rocks are cut by
the slow trickle of rain, Mountains rise slowly up because
of pressure and magma. And you know, we've learned since
(15:47):
that it's both of these things. It is both gradual
and catastrophic change. Gradual change does most of the big stuff,
but we do see massive floods and asteroid strikes and
volcanic eruptions and shit.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
That this is really interesting because I certainly am not
I have not studied geology much, but like the this
is very similar to a lot of arguments in evolutionary biology,
where it's like do changes happen really gradually? Like do
you have really small evolutionary changes that like like basically
(16:18):
you have something with a like a fish and then
it's little fins very slowly turned into legs. Or do
you have a fish and then you have this like
Bonker's mutation that suddenly gives it joints and it's running
around after a couple of generations.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Yeah, and it's like fuck, yeah, I get so many babies,
I have fucking joints, right, yeah, exactly, No, totally, Actually,
I mean, do you know where modern evolutionary biology is
on that stuff.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
It's similar to the geology thing, where you do have
sometimes larger leaps in evolution, but like foundationally, a lot
of the stuff is, you know, slower, less dramatic mutations,
because a dramatic mutation usually just kills you. Yeah, so
the little ones are the ones that can kind of
(17:04):
sneak up on you. But sometimes you do have to
have like a dramatic mutation where, especially like when it
comes to limbs, you can have pretty huge changes with
like just tweaking a little gene and then you suddenly
lose a limb or gain a limb, lose a finger,
gain finger. So you can actually have pretty rapid changes
(17:26):
sometimes that end up working out well. But it's definitely
it's definitely a mix, and there's still a lot of
debate about how important each one is.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yeah, I know that. Like when I read anti evolution stuff,
it's like what about eyeballs, And I'm like, man, I
don't know, it seems possible to me.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
Yeah, it's it's definitely possible. If you They argue that
you don't have like a you can't track the development
of the eye, but you can't. Actually you can see
all the steps from the really simple eyes to the
more complexes surprise me at all. Yeah, it's actually it's
actually all there.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Yeah. I love when the gotchas are just based on
those never having read anything love.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
I love those websites. So there's one that has like
a picture of a guy that just has like he
has like a bunch of penises and nipples and like fingers,
and it's like, this is what evolution would say, because
you just have all these extra stuff, and it's like,
I mean, that'd be great, but yeah, no it doesn't.
It's it's yeah, it's like, you know, it's a very
(18:27):
simple concept. You can pass on your genetic material. That
genetic material gets passed on. It's it's kind of like
a it's a bit of a circular kind of thing
where it's like if you pass it on, then it
is passed on, right, and then that's it. That's all
it is.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Yeah. No, I just I love when their gotchas are nonsensical.
And one of the things I found while researching this
is a lot of what Christians were and weren't against
has changed. But we're gonna get to that when we
get to the climate change section. Exciting, and a bunch
of these early scientists were a Christian at least or
at least Deists of some variety, and they didn't see
(19:03):
what they were describing as anti religious. I think people
tend to project the modern right wing Christian war on
science backwards into history more than it deserves. Although there
was tension between rationalism and religion and all this shit,
a fuck ton of these scientists were coming from a
like I am proving that God loves us because of
evolution or whatever. We'll get to the evolution part later.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
Yeah, because there was already I thought, even before Darwin,
there were already sort of like ideas in Christianity of
a god that just kind of set things in motion
and then stands back. Is like all right, an I said,
is giant Rube Goldberg machine of people and animals and stuff.
And so that just like kind of fit in really
nicely with evolutionary biologists going like, yeah, he like set
(19:45):
things in motion and then everything else is science.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Yeah, Like my aunt was right, if you want to
believe in God about it, you could just be like,
I don't know, man, it's fine, yeah, just don't worry
about it. And yeah, people were like, isn't it great
that God provides all these complex natural systems that work
together to make life flourish. Lyle is not really a
cool people. He was an asshole white dude. He relied
(20:08):
heavily on his wife to do the art for his
geological studies, but then refused to let women into his classes.
He was a racist who visited the United States and said, wow,
you're right, you all should really ban all the abolitionist
books because otherwise the slave owners might die. Yeah, which
I have a different opinion. Oh, actually, I agree the
(20:29):
abolitionist books might lead to the slave owner's death, but
that's not a problem for my point of view. It's
a well feature not Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
I mean it's like if you've set up a system
where you have people who you've enslaved, and you're like, oh,
but if I don't free them, they might want to
free themselves violently. It's like, yeah, man, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
But what if there was an answer there? You almost
sit on it.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah, you almost got there.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
Yeah. So Lyle not my favorite person in history. Charles
Darwin was a uniformitarianist. He went ahead and applied this
more broadly to after his origin of the species thing,
which we'll get to later. But in eighteen eighty one,
Charles Darwin published a book I think this is his
last book. It had the fascinating and timeless title The
(21:18):
Formation of Vegetable Mold through the Action of Worms.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
Yeah, that's my favorite one of his.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
And basically this is the argument that soil comes about gradually.
Top soil has all been shipped out on by worms,
or to quote him directly, quote although the conclusion may
appear at first startling, it will be difficult to deny
the probability that every particle of earth forming the bed
from which the turf and old pastureland springs has been
passed through the intestines of worms.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
M Yeah, and go ahead, oh no, I mean it's
more or less true. Maybe not just all earthworms, but yeah,
like the trit divars are generally making the top soil
it in the ocean to a lot of animals making
the sand and this various substrate where it's usually usually
(22:07):
a two black animal like a worm, but it can
be another to try to war and they're just like
breaking down. You know, a tree falls down to try
to wars break it down. Now you've got more soil.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
This is my new favorite word. I've never heard this
word before, but I immediately know what it means, because yes,
it's amazing.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
It's a little guy that eats dead stuff.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
That was me when I was a street kid. I
ate a lot of hit out of the trash all
the time to try to No, that's too long to
fit on your knuckles. Never mind. But do you know
what isn't to trite us?
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Well, I mean no, no, I don't.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
No, I don't either. But there's a bunch of ads
that may or may not be trash. Here they are
and for bec I for one, enjoyed all of those
products and services that supported this show. And how Yeah,
(23:09):
and so in the nineteenth century, all the sciences were
more interlinked than they are today. This is a sort
of my hypothesis, not my hypothesis. I've read people talk
about this, but I haven't actually read a study that
says this is how we know that they're like this.
But you have a lot of these and it's not
for great reasons. It's because science was done by these
like gentlemen and scientist explorer type dudes.
Speaker 3 (23:31):
Right, they would like they would have like clubs and
they'd go and they'd smoke nasty cigars and drink nasty
shit and like talk about whether hom or erectus was
a thing.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Yeah, totally so. Because of this conflation of all the sciences,
or rather not conflation, but they hadn't split off as
much yet, natural science and political science were directly related
in folk's minds. And a lot of these guys are liberals,
the original liberals. In fact, uniformitarianism presents some ideas that
(24:08):
are both deeply radical and deeply liberal by today's meaning
of the words. I would say the more liberal part
is that they're really into gradualism. Some of these folks
are also total revolutionarism. We're going to get to some
of those two. But some of them are like, well,
rather than having a French Revolution, we should just slowly
make society better. But the radical part of this that
I had never really given credit to, of gradualism as
(24:31):
a scientific idea applied to human society is that rather
than hand power to the great man of history, like,
rather than being like, oh, Napoleon should get a bunch
of power. That's a good idea, right. Gradualism had this
idea that we can all be those worms and slowly
make the world better through the hard work of living
(24:52):
our lives and improving things where we can. And there's
a quote about this from a classic novel of the
era that I haven't read yet called March And which
is written by George Elliot, who's actually a woman named
Mary Ann Evans who's friends of Darwin. But I like
this quote. The growing good of the world is partly
dependent on unhistoric acts. And I like it because, like
(25:15):
I would expect these scientists to be all about the
great man of history, right, because history thinks they're the
great men of history, right right. They think Charles Darwin
is the man who discovered how everything works, right, But theoretically,
actually some of them kind of weren't about the I mean,
(25:36):
I'm sure they were all about their own egos and
stuff too, but like theoretically on a political level, they
weren't about that.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Right, And that's kind of a mot that's also like
a modern U. There are different ways to regard history,
Like modern historians do disagree on this as well. The
idea of like you have the like like the big
men essentially change, right exactly the big things that change it,
versus like how much of it is like some guy
(26:05):
you know, making a big change, like either an inventor
or a warlord or a king or whatever making these
big changes, and how much of it is sort of
a you know, inevitable thing because obviously, like you'll have
things like you know, Einstein will make all these discoveries
and it you know, does cause a lot of these
(26:26):
paradigm shifts. But there's a competing idea which is like, well,
once you build up enough of sort of background stuff,
it's not you will get an Einstein inevitably who will
make these discoveries. So it's like kind of like you
can swap out these these guys. And then there's like
I'm not a historian, but I think there's like various
(26:47):
different ways to kind of like where some sometimes it's
like mixing, Like yeah, like you have these pretty big
actors and yeah they do change the timing and the
course of events, but you also they are not the
only ones rousing these changes.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
No, totally. And actually I mean it gets into this
like gradualism versus catastrophism thing, right, and it's just like
it's both and it's more gradualism. It's more the slowly
we build new ideas and then we have breakthroughs, and
the same with history and politics, like you know, we
you have revolt after revolt and then one of them sticks,
(27:25):
you know, right, and so people are like, ah, the
random person who's in charge of that one revolt or
the person that we've decided was in charge of that revolt,
you know. And some of the thing is just like
lazy writing, where it's like, you know, easier to pick
one name and stick to it.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Man, have you ever tried to read like a Russian
book or a Polish book and then like remember all
the names?
Speaker 2 (27:45):
It's hard, No, it's true, it's very hard. Yeah, Tolstoy's
got to come into this story later, honestly, and yeah, yeah,
he's in everything. I know. There's even a tuberculosis that
I don't include.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
Start.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
There's a couple things that come up over and over
again in this show.
Speaker 1 (28:03):
We ever did, if we ever did, like a live
show of this, that would have to be part of
the drinking.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
Game, yeah, absolutely, or just literally pass out Bengo cards, yeah,
and then give prizes to people who like, yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
Do you mentioned tuberculos a lot?
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (28:19):
Yeah, I know, sky.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah, so now my favorite tangent in the entire research
I did this week. Did you know that belief in
man made climate change is thousands of years older in
the Western tradition than belief in naturally occurring climate change?
Speaker 3 (28:39):
Wow? No, I did not know that.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
It never would have occurred to me, right, But if
you had that for thousands of years. The Western thinkers
tended to assume that everything was the static thing, but
they could see the impact of their own actions, right,
And so going back to the ancient Greeks, they would
sit around and be like, oh shit, if you cut
down all the trees, the lake might dry up. And
if the lake dries up, it's going to get colder
(29:02):
around here. So they were aware of climate change, but
it was man made, and people understood how desertification happens.
If you cut down all the trees, you go from
forest to desert. Which is funny because there's still people
who were like, no, you just regrow them. And I'm like, yeah,
did you strip away all of the top soil And
they're like well yeah, you know, like did you remove
(29:22):
all of the biomass from the region, Because eventually you
don't get a forest anymore. You can cut down a
forest and replant it. Like two or three times, depending
on the soil. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Also, like it's funny because it's like you remove all
the trees and then it's like and then you replace
them all at once. It's like, yeah, well, where do
you think that, like the new tree its come for
the trees is from the other plants and trees that
were there that you got rid of all of them
all at once.
Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, So desertification people were looking around and being like, oh,
all these like civilizations were like things have changed in
human history, right, right, And so it's funny that modern
conservatives are the ones who deny human impact on climate. Well,
funny would be the right word if they weren't in
power and doing all kinds of terrible things.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
So it's also weird because this isn't like again, I'm
I was not raised with like any religion, so I'm
kind of talking out of my butt, But I thought
like a big part of Christianity was like you were
like God gives you the world and you're like the
stewards of the world. So like, if stuff is going awry,
such as animals going extinct, that's kind of on man
(30:34):
because we were supposed to be stewarding the world. I'm
not saying like I'm not necessarily endorsing this idea, but
that I thought that was the Christian idea. Is that
like you're the caretakers of the earth and all the
little animals and so on.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
Yeah, I know, that's exactly it. And that's now, that
was actually what I was going to Congratulations, that was it,
Like humans are the ones with agents, see in this viewpoint, right,
and so it should be the conservative position used to
believe in man made climate change and not the natural
climate change, and now we have, well, not the reverse.
(31:12):
I think anyone who actually understands climate science understands that yes,
they're natural ebbs and flows and also man make climate
changes what's happening right now.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
And they feed into one another as well. So like
you have man made events that can cause a cascading effect,
and then you have you know, then like you'll have
natural like an example that would be you know, melt,
like if you have melt of a lot of the
perma frost, have a natural yeah, yeah, exactly, you'll have
(31:42):
a natural sort of release of methane from these things,
and something that may have eventually happened somewhat for certain things,
but then it creates a snowball effect. So yeah, it's
really it's a it's a complex thing, but it's the
there's not any really any debate among climate scientists that
(32:07):
this is a massive change that is caused by peoples.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Yeah. Even the founding fathers of the fucking United States
of America were writing about how clearcutting and colonialism were
affecting the climate. Libs, I know, I know. It was
just funny because I like one of the famous things
on the show that is that I actually don't like them. Yeah,
but they were aware of the impact that they were having,
and people believed in their power to change shit. And
(32:34):
these ideas found their way into political science too, because
politics are actually deeply woven through everything we do, despite
how hard modern Western society likes to pretend that everything
is a distinct field. And Frederick Engels of Marx and Engels,
who for full transparency, also not a huge fan of
but whatever he wrote about how humans impact nature, but
nature otherwise stays still. So this is like impacting all
(32:57):
of the science, is my point. He wrote, quote, there
is devilishly little left of nature as it was in
Germany at the time when the Germanic peoples immigrated into it.
The Earth's surface, climate, vegetation, fauna, and the human beings
themselves have infinitely changed, and all this owing to human activity,
while the changes of nature and Germany which have occurred
(33:18):
in this period of time without human interference are incalculably small.
And now he's this is wrong, right, This is an
incorrect assessment. Telling someone that their science is wrong in
the nineteen hundreds in the eighteen hundreds is like not
a whatever, everyone is wrong, you know, right, But there's
this argument happening about climate change and whether it's happening
(33:41):
on a human scale or not. Right, And angles actually
wrote this after and he wrote in eighteen eighty three,
which is after in the eighteen seventies Kripacken and other
people were proving that natural climate change was happening on
a timescale observable by us. But people understood man made
climate change. Well, what they didn't understand was that nature
(34:02):
changes on its own without us. Right to go back
to geology, So you have this. Everything has always been
the same vibe. Even the gradualists are like, this happens
so slow, it doesn't really affect us. As best as
I can tell, And then you have this Swiss naturalist
named Jean Louis Rudolph Augussi's and he shows up on
(34:24):
the scene and he mostly studies fossil fish, and in
eighteen thirty seven he's like, okay, but what if there
was a fucking ice age? And this was like a
real bold assertion, right, I really want to know whenever,
I'm like, and then science discovered this, I'm like, I
want to know what people in like Asia and Africa
(34:44):
and stuff like knew about this stuff, Like I want
to know, you know, whenever. Like literally, later in the story,
someone's going to discover plateaus as a geological thing, you know,
And I'm like, other people had to already know about
this shit. But yeah, Europeans figured out the ice age.
And he says glaciers carved out the valleys and people
(35:06):
are like, aren't you just a guy who studies fossil
fish And he's like, no, no, no, hear me out glaciers.
Better explain Also why there's like giant bowlders all over
the Alps and shit, And people are like, huh, well,
the farmer told me that a giant put it there,
But I see the glacier argument, I see where you're
coming from, and he studies a fun ton of glaciers. Lyle,
(35:27):
the uniform of the guy was like, no fucking way
could there have been ice covering Britain. But a legion
of geologists went out and tested things, and they're like, yeah,
there was an ice age, and they all thought it
had to be about fifty thousand years ago. Specifically, they
thought it had to happen before people. Obviously there were.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
People, right, but like, yeah, the idea being, how could
we have possibly survived an ice age?
Speaker 1 (35:58):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (35:58):
And also I think still this fundamental belief that like,
obviously while we were around, nothing could have changed. Interesting,
Like they're kind of clinging to this. Everyone's going to
start dropping that over the next couple decades. Even Lyle
is eventually going to come around to it. I don't
know how he changes on the race issue or not.
I couldn't find any updates. But and so, like people
(36:22):
are like the world has been the same as long
as people have been around. Don't get me wrong. Okay,
that's the geological context. Now evolution. I'm not going to
get as deep into the evolution thing. I'm not going
to tell you about Darwin going on a boat or whatever,
because that.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
Ate a lot of rare species.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
Yeah, fucking of course he did.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Oh my god, he was. He was a freak, like
he liked to take Like I think that there's this
this concept of him as like this like kindly old
grandfather of evolution, because that's we have the photo of him,
and he's old and the photo, but he was like,
you know, he was not that old when he was
on the boat going to you know, the glap ghosts
(37:06):
and like he's just like sweet a bunch of animals
to try.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
I wish one of them had killed him. I mean whatever. Actually,
actually I actually don't come out of this haiding Darwin.
I come out of this aiding most of the people
who interpreted his ideas immediately after his death.
Speaker 3 (37:23):
Just because he ate a few tortoises that he found
doesn't mean he's a bad guy.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
Yeah, who amongst us? I mean I wouldn't, but most
people would probably been like.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Come to their own bulls, it says, if they're asking
us to eat them, like, look, it's in its own little.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Packaging proof of intelligent design. Right. So Darwin was really
into Lile the uniformitarianist. Darwin once said quote, I always
feel as if my books came half out of Lyle's brains.
And so this is why when I was saying that
evolution comes out of geology, it's because Darwin comes out
(38:04):
of the founder of geology as a science, right, and
this whole like catastrophism, gradualism, et cetera, like what happens
with rocks. People are like, oh, what about species.
Speaker 3 (38:14):
It's also there's a very intimate relationship between fossil records
in terms of evolution and geology, and also in terms
of evolution and geology, because like, if you have geological changes,
that has a direct impact on the evolutionary course of animals.
So it's all very yeah.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
Yeah, no, it makes sense. Like Lyle, the way that
he was proving gradualism with volcanoes is that he was
looking at the amount of oysters were in between the layers,
and he was like, clearly this didn't happen all at once.
There are so many oysters here. Those oyster beds are
so deep, you know. But Lyele wasn't actually excited at
(38:52):
first about Darwin being really inspired by him. It took
until the tenth edition of his own book about geology
for him to accept that evolution was probably real. Lyle's
prior theory to quota write up from Strange Science dot
Net was quote. For much of his life, Lyle maintained
a steady state view of the Earth and its inhabitants,
(39:12):
arguing that as one species went extinct, another appeared. This
was partly because of his belief in a long standing
deep division between humans and animals, in which mankind's superiority
to animals was moral, not physical.
Speaker 3 (39:27):
How where would like My question for him would be like,
if a species like it goes extene, like, how does
the other one just spawn? Is it sort of you're
playing call of duty? And then like, yeah, I think,
oh this species died spawn writed another species.
Speaker 2 (39:45):
It's I honestly think so. I mean because Lyle is
fairly religious, right I see, Okay, And so he kind
of is like, ah, and then the magic thing snaps
its fingers, you know, right, got it? I think that's
my best understanding. But I think what's really I'm really
interested in this idea that he was like, people were
really caught up. The thing that was hard for people
(40:06):
to leave behind was this idea that what separates us
from the animals. Isn't like as people want that to
be a real black and white distinction, you know, especially
if you want to have a Western viewpoint and like
you're the master of every other thing. And obviously this
is going to play into race science and real sketchy ways.
Speaker 3 (40:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
Yeah, So he basically had a theological disagreement with the
idea of evolution, and he would not be the only one,
but he also it was a scientist, and he came
around when presented with enough evidence over enough decades where
he finally got over his shit. He even came around
to believe in the ice age too, but in terms
of species differentiation or like the way that animals change.
(40:52):
People believed in man made climate change but not natural
climate change. It was kind of like that for evolution too,
because people had done what was the name of the
monk who did the like flowers with mindel Yeah, I
remember this vaguely from seventh grade science.
Speaker 3 (41:09):
And Mendelian genetics with the peapods and all that.
Speaker 2 (41:12):
Business people were aware that humans could change animals and plants, right,
they would look at dogs and be like, we clearly
did that.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Yeah, we did a number on a lot of sophisticated
in him.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yeah, I think people tended to believe that you couldn't
make new species through human changes, but like they certainly
believe that you could change within the species, right. But
Darwin was like, no, natural selection exists, and it makes
new species. So like saying natural selection rather than man
(41:46):
made selection was the big thing, much like saying natural
climate change is real. Do you know that there was this?
I'm actually curious. I only learned about this one at
the like eleventh hour. While I was researching this. There
was this predecessor to Darwin, Robert Chambers, who wrote anonymously,
who wrote a book called Vestiges of the Human Nature
of Creation or the Natural History of Creation.
Speaker 3 (42:07):
This sounds like something I would have learned and forgot
about completely fair enough.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
In eighteen forty four, this anonymous person wrote a book.
I think he was afraid of the backlash you would
get because it went against well again, he was also
a religious person, I think, but right still, he wrote
this book and it was speculation. Darwin went into some science,
right yeah, And Robert Chambers was like, I got an idea,
(42:34):
and his idea was like basically right, he drew out
trees of like branching off animals and shit right. Yeah,
and it was an international bestseller, Vestiges of the Natural
History of Creation And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking,
eighteen forty four book about the evolution. I wonder if
it was racist, And the answer to that is yes,
(42:55):
it was very racist. The white European is the pinnacle
of transi utation, which is what he was calling evolution. Okay,
this racist home laid the foundation for the public being
willing to consider evolution because it did the work of saying, like, hey,
you can still have a God and evolution. And that's
fine because there actually had been people even before him
(43:17):
who had been like, we think evolution, but they had
been more atheists. So he's one day, I'm gonna fully
under in order to understand Western history, I feel like,
actually have to understand the way that like theology and
science do and don't relate. You know.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
Yeah, theology. It's interesting because like early theology, when you
kind of like think about the origins of religion, it's
a very early kind of crack at science right where
you're explaining you're trying to explain the world through observation.
(43:54):
It's not necessarily this it's not the same as science, right,
because you're missing a lot of the experimentation part. Maybe
there's like some of it, right, Like you pray and
then something good happens. You're like, that's empirical evidence. I
prayed something good happened, right, so like you but you
have it's like it is a it is a proto
sort of. It's similar to science in the sense that
(44:16):
it is a way that people are trying to explain
the world around them. Yeah, but the problem, the problem
is like the the evidence and the scientific method not
being there.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah. Do you know what science can't explain?
Speaker 3 (44:34):
Bees?
Speaker 2 (44:35):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (44:35):
They're two there. According to the B movie, we can't.
Science has never explained how bees can fly because they're
too fat for their little wings. I mean, that's not
true at all, But the B movie did say that
at the beginning.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Well, I was going to say, the products and services
of this show that were divinely chosen, divinely appointed.
Speaker 3 (45:00):
Amen, right, Alilujah sponsored by B movie.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Yeah, that's right. So earlier I was saying I don't
have that much against Darwin. I'm a little bit I'm
gonna contradict that here. I'm gonna be mean to Darwin
for a minute. Because Darwin comes along and he's like,
(45:26):
all right, we're gonna take this idea, this evolution idea
that someone else called transmutation. We're gonna take this idea
and make a real mean And maybe I'm being unfair here,
and maybe I'm reading bias sources, but one of the
sources is his fucking diary. H Darwin started up by
applying a political science idea to the natural sciences rather
than the other way around. And that part surprised me, right,
(45:46):
because you have all of these moments of like scientists
will be like, ah, yes, because of Darwin and evolution,
we're going to apply this to political science. Darwin started
with a political science idea In eighteen thirty eight. Darwin
wrote in his diet quote, I happened to read for
amusement Malthus on population. Malthus is the guy who was like,
(46:08):
there's not enough food around, so we just let poor
people die. So the Malthusian is the right of order.
It comes from him and being well prepared to appreciate
the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on. It at
once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would
tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. Here,
(46:30):
then I had at last got a theory by which
to work. So he went out and studied nature and
ate turtles in their turtle bulls, and he discovered survival
of the fittest. While his ideas weren't quite as cutthroat
as people represent them in the media, at least as
I understand, he tended to emphasize combat and battle and
(46:50):
direct and violent competition, either in his examples or in
the metaphors that he used in his big book on
the Origin of Species by nowatural selection or the preservation
of favored races and the struggle for survival. I do
miss nineteenth century title conventions. I have to admit. I'm
glad we no longer say preservation of the favored races,
(47:13):
but I heeds to talk about animals here. Yeah, he
wrote quote one general law leading to the advancement of
all organic beings, namely multiply vary, let the strongest live
and the weakest die. And so there's a again an
oversimplification you can have where you're like, ah, yes, this
(47:35):
means we should all be fucking terrible to each other
or whatever, which isn't actually I believe what Darwin was saying.
Speaker 3 (47:41):
No, I mean it was so he really emphasized the
the kind of like competitive brutal nature of natural selection,
because one of the main things is that dying and
not reproducing are a major part of explaining natural selection, right,
(48:04):
so like if you don't pass on your genes, then
that's like an evolutionary dead end versus passing them on,
and that's like that whole Like getting that point across
and discover finding evidence of it is kind of like
an easier first step, right, versus sort of saying like well, yeah,
(48:26):
but it's not like you have a lot of other
interesting factors like if you were if Darwin not that
this was necessarily on its radar, but like talking about
like well, actually with a lot of bird species, they're
so pretty because like the females are just like they
like it, and it's not necessarily fitness, it's not necessarily survival.
It's just like this like weird preference that gets out
(48:47):
of control, and now you have a bird of paradise
with a giant tail that's really pretty and extravagant. It's
like I think that finding finding evidence of those things
is I think a lot harder, and it's probably harder
for people to kind of digest that versus like, yeah,
(49:08):
like if you have two big horned sheep and they
like smack each other in the head, one of them dies,
doesn't reproduce, the other one lives because it's got a
thicker skull. Right, that's evolution, baby, you know. I think
it's just it's like we're very we really like sort
of I mean we're all we're all kind of like
sports brained in a way, right, Like we like those
(49:30):
ideas are compelling, they're exciting, And it also doesn't necessarily
acknowledge like some autonomy on the part of actual organisms, right,
which I think is another thing that probably was a
little bit of a struggle too. I mean today it's
still there's still a lot of like assumption that an
animal would not have any kind of like quote unquote
(49:53):
say or autonomy in terms of selecting itself, if that
makes sense, except that we do actually see evidence that
there's like some self like self selection, not not that
the animal is planning its evolutionary course, but just that
it's like, I like that I like to see this
in Yeah, that bird's pretty yeah, totally, exactly exactly, yeah.
Speaker 2 (50:15):
No, totally and like and I think it's like much
like with the catastrophism to gradualism, it's going to be
like a yes and right. I think that when we
when we start talking about cooperation, we start talking about
mutual aid in a bit, it's not going to be
saying like, no, the competitive thing isn't real, right, It's
basically saying like, this is over over emphasized.
Speaker 3 (50:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (50:40):
And one of the odd by products of the way
that Darwin chose to write about this, which I actually
again it makes some sense that this is how Darwin
wrote about it. One of the odd by products is
that some of the early resistance was on a moral
level rather than a scientific level. You have a friend
of the pod Tolstoy, for example. It was a Christian
animist novelist. I told you, I promised you told Stoy,
(51:05):
and he talked about how we worried about belief and
evolution would degrade people's moral character. And he's wrong about this, right,
But like he believes that if we start talking about evolution,
especially around this like competitive war of one against all things,
it would degrade people's moral character. Because they would become
less caring and see this world built on competition, and
this is and once again you get this irony to
(51:27):
how the pro capitalist right wing Christians are the ones
who deny evolution these days when they like, I don't
know it. It fucks with me. It's just a really
interesting how everything's wrong right.
Speaker 3 (51:38):
Because like, man, I feel like I keep talking about
Christianity despite that being about as far from my knowledge
base as possible. But yeah, like my understanding of like
there's a lot of ideas in Christianity about like charity
and taking care of the poor and like the weak, right,
(51:58):
like the idea being like we are good Christians because
we don't just let h you know, children on the
streets die like that that makes us good Christians, which
is and then you, like, to Tolstoy's credit, like there
were some kind of dark movements that emerged both from
and concurrently with these these ideas and evolution, like social Darwinism, eugenics.
(52:25):
So it's like, obviously, as someone who is big on
evolutionary biology, I do not think those are inevitable philosophical
outcomes of looking at evolution being like great like cause
otherwise be like look that frog eats its kids, we
should do that, right. It's a dumb it's a dumb
moral argument.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
Totally and once again very the next paragraph I wrote
is about how people take Darwin's theories and they're like, fuck, yeah,
we could be mean as hell. And what's called social Darwinism,
which is not Darwin wasn't a social Darwinist, right No.
But then in contrast to social Darwinism.
Speaker 3 (53:04):
Which is maybe we should just say, like we should
probably say really quickly what it is. It's like the
idea that I don't know that there's like good the best,
like survival of the fittest, but in terms of people
in a short time scale, where it's like that, that's
essentially it, right, Like, and also there's a lot of
weird science cy Schmayan see stuff that's not real real
(53:27):
science that came out of it, like phrenology, like you
can look at a guy's face and the Talli's a criminal.
You know, a lot of stupid, stupid stuff totally.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
It It really did set off a lot of nonsense.
Now there was a lot of nonsense before it that
it replaced.
Speaker 3 (53:43):
Right, But you can't not like, you can't not do
science and because like some stupid people are going to
use the science to like justify being bad people totally.
Speaker 2 (53:56):
Then there's this guy who gets called Darwin's bulldog because
he is the man's fiercest defender, Thomas Henry Huxley. He
saw this struggle for survival that Darwin talked about and
called it literally gladiatorial. He really emphasized the like combat
violent nature of the bloody war nature.
Speaker 3 (54:16):
Yes, we love yeah and football.
Speaker 2 (54:23):
And he was not a social Darwinist, he was anything
but it. He believed that society, the goal of society
then is to protect us from our own animal nature.
He wrote that basically the quote chief end of social
organization was to mitigate or abolish the war of one
against all. We had to protect ourselves from our animal nature.
(54:46):
And this is still a very popular idea across the
political spectrum.
Speaker 3 (54:51):
Yeah, there's two. There's two. Like big, I think naturalism
arguments that I very much disagree with and I think
are uh aren't really accurate both or I disagree with
both morally and from a scientific perspective. One is like
if it's natural, it's good, right, which is very easy
to disprove right. The other is that like we our
(55:12):
society protects us from our horrible nature, right, which I
also disagree with, uh, looking into evolutionary history and anthropology
and things like that, I don't think that's really well
scientifically or morally based, but you know, it's it's these
are these two ideas. If I had to pick between them,
(55:33):
obviously it'd be the one where like, yeah, we should
do a society to prevent ourselves from being horrible, horrible monkeys.
But like, I also don't think we have been in
our revolutionary history that noddy of monkeys for a while totally.
Speaker 2 (55:49):
And this is good because the subject of this week,
which is not going to we're not going to get
to until next episode, because that's the way my brain works,
as we do one episode of context and one episode
about the meat of the subject. Is the guy who
makes the argument that you're making. He is the guy
who says, like, you're both wrong. This is obvious, here's
my data, you know.
Speaker 3 (56:10):
Right, Yeah, we're only we're only a little bit of
a bunch of naughty monkeys. We're not monsters.
Speaker 2 (56:16):
Right, totally exactly, And so yeah, this is you have
this setup, this is how things are. And then someone
comes around and says, not only do you all misunderstand geology,
but you also misunderstand what being fit in the animal
kingdom really means. Mutual aid is in fact a major
factor in evolution. Someone comes along like Prince Peter Kropotkin,
(56:36):
or to quote my favorite T shirt about this guy,
the anarchist formerly known as Prince because he doesn't he
doesn't stay a prince very long. He ends up prison at.
Speaker 3 (56:45):
I was gonna like, I was gonna do some stupid
joke when you were like an anarchist prince of like, well,
that's an oxymoron, how it is? He knew it, but
by I get it, Yeah, I get it.
Speaker 2 (56:57):
We don't control how we're born famously, Yeah you know.
Speaker 3 (57:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (57:01):
And about this man and his study of glaciers and
more interesting things than that. Actually I really like his
study of glaciers. We're going to get to on Wednesday,
but first, if people want to hear more of you
talking about animals and which ones are tasty? Is there
a podcast they can listen to?
Speaker 3 (57:22):
Yes, absolutely, a creature feature. It's an iHeart radio podcast.
It is a bunch of fun conversations I have with
people talking about evolutionary biology. Animal behavior. I really like
to make it not like it's for anyone who's interested
(57:45):
in animal behavior in evolutionary biology. You don't need to
have a degree in biology to understand it. And it's yeah,
I think it's it's really fun to look at animal
behavior and evolution in terms of like we can really
relate to it. It's okay to kind of to a
(58:08):
certain extent as humans relate to animals. I think it's
normal and natural. And sometimes there's a lot of pushback
because it's like, well, it's not scientific to empathize with
an ant doing something, But I think it's a really
useful lens with which we view the world. And so
we talk about just really really interesting animal behaviors and
(58:29):
kind of try to try to like think about how
all of these things in evolutionary biology are not really
that alien from our experience while also being very distinct. So, yeah,
if you're enjoying this conversation, I think you would enjoy
the show. And if I talk about a lot of
specific examples of cool, weird animals on the show.
Speaker 2 (58:52):
Hell yeah. And if you like podcasts, which do you
probably do because you made it this far into this podcast,
you should also check out the other Coolzone Media podcasts
because they are good. And I've been listening to it
could Happen here, especially Executive Whatever. I actually don't know
the name of the show that I listened to all
the time, thank you. I listened to it every Friday,
and I get confused about the name because the first
(59:14):
thing that happens in it is that Robert makes a
joke about the name, and it makes me incapable of
remembering the actual name. But it shows up in that
it could happen here feed And so you could check
it out there. And I don't know, SOPHI, you got
anything you want to plug? You did it great. Well.
Take care of each other. Cooperation is a factor in evolution.
Speaker 3 (59:36):
Always. Always, if you have a neighbor in need, vomit
blood into their mouth.
Speaker 2 (59:40):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (59:42):
Community care.
Speaker 2 (59:44):
Yeah, all right, hi everyone.
Speaker 1 (59:50):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
Or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3 (01:00:09):
M
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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