Dr. Matt Ridley - Birds, Sex & Beauty - Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_812)
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 11 minutes
Words per Minute
160.38338
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Matt Ridley joins me to talk about his new book, Birds, Sex, and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea, which is Sexual Selection. We talk about the SARS pandemic in China, and why he thinks it could have been the result of a lab leak.
Transcript
00:00:01.000
Hi, everybody. This is Gatsat for the Sad Truth. It's very rare that I have not a repeat guest,
00:00:08.260
but a trepeat guest. And today I've got Dr. Matt Ridley with me for the third time,
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although it should have been the fourth time and we'll talk about it in a second.
00:00:19.660
I'm doing great. It's wonderful to be with you. And the things you're achieving are remarkable.
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Oh, you're too kind. So first let me mention the latest book, which just came out two days ago,
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I think. I'm very excited to hear about it because it's also one of my sort of scientific areas,
00:00:40.400
applying evolution, in my case, to human behavior. You're applying it to an avian species. So this
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is Birds, Sex, and Beauty, the Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea,
00:00:53.320
which is Sexual Selection. For those of you who don't know who Matt is, he's an unbelievably
00:00:57.760
prolific author. Many books. I'll only mention a few. The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist,
00:01:05.160
The Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works, and the previous book to this one,
00:01:10.260
which I'd like us to start with, and I'll explain why I'm trying to correct a wrong book with Alina
00:01:16.120
Chan titled Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, which was one of the original
00:01:24.060
references that basically argued for the lab leak theory. Matt's people had reached out to me. So
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this would probably be 2021, I think. So in the height of the COVID hysteria and censorship and so
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on. And they said, hey, Matt would love to come on your show to discuss Viral. Would you like to host
00:01:43.460
him? And of course, as you all know, I don't shy away from speaking about any issue. But then I had
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to be a, you know, a non-reckless martyr and say, look, I'm happy to host Matt, but here's what's going
00:01:57.400
to happen if I host him. The clip is going to be removed by YouTube within 15 seconds because, you know,
00:02:04.340
the settled science says that Matt is not allowed to say this. And then maybe my YouTube channel would
00:02:10.340
be shut down. So what is the point of us going through the exercise? It's going to be erased.
00:02:15.440
So I want to correct this. Let's begin with Viral. Tell us what that book was about, how your views
00:02:21.180
have evolved to be even stronger towards the lab leak theory. And then we'll get into the sexual
00:02:26.520
selection book. Take it away, Matt. Yes, because the crazy thing, Gad, is that had you had me on the
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show in 2021, I would have said, we don't know how this pandemic began. It could have been a natural
00:02:39.340
event or it could have been a lab leak. And that was the view of Alina Chan and me when we set out
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to write this book. The book is called The Search for the Origin. It's not called The Origin. It's
00:02:50.160
called, you know, how are we going to find out how this thing started? And our book devotes equal
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amounts of time to the theory that it jumped naturally into the human species in a market as
00:03:03.980
to the theory that it might have been the result of a laboratory accident in Wuhan.
00:03:08.760
But since then, and just before the book came out, there was a very important revelation
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of a document called the Diffuse Proposal, which I'll explain in a minute, which left it left
00:03:20.820
us more and more strongly convinced that the lab leak was not just possible, but probable.
00:03:27.820
And the evidence has only got stronger since the evidence for the market has got weaker.
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The Chinese authorities would love it to be the market. They initially said it was the market.
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They now say it wasn't. They say it got their own frozen lobsters from Maine or something,
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which makes no sense at all to anybody. And so, you know, just to sort of put it in perspective
00:03:53.040
here, there are 40,000 markets selling live animals in China, roughly. There is one lab
00:04:01.940
working on SARS-like beta coronaviruses from bats. It's in Wuhan. The market in Wuhan is not particularly
00:04:10.600
active in the selling of mammals. They found no infected animal in the market. You cannot sort of
00:04:18.160
stress that strongly enough. They searched and searched, and there was no infected animal in
00:04:23.580
the market. They found weasels running around and cats and dogs and raccoon dogs on sale, and yet
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none of them were infected. So, you know, in the case of SARS or MERS or NEPA or any of these other
00:04:38.360
natural zoonoses, you find an infected animal. You find a chain of human infections. You find all this
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very strong evidence as to what's happened. And in this case, what we end up with is that there is a
00:04:51.640
lab in Wuhan working on exactly the right kind of virus. I mean, so exactly that they switched
00:04:59.140
attention the year before the pandemic from SARS-like viruses to 20% different genetically SARS-like
00:05:07.180
viruses, which this one is. And they were working on, they had a plan to put a thing called a
00:05:14.240
furin cleavage site into a SARS-like virus for the very first time ever. And this virus is the only
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one out of about 800 that we've looked at, SARS-like viruses, that has a furin cleavage site in it.
00:05:28.860
So they were planning exactly the right experiment, in exactly the right place, at exactly the right
00:05:34.620
time, at exactly the wrong biosafety level. So it's, and they behaved in the most ridiculously
00:05:41.420
suspicious way after the outbreak happened. So it is absurd for anyone to pretend that this is not
00:05:50.900
a viable hypothesis that needs to be properly investigated. And remember, the purpose of these
00:05:57.120
experiments they were doing was to predict and prevent the next pandemic. So it wasn't just
00:06:05.000
research that went wrong. It was pandemic prevention research that went wrong. And that means you really
00:06:13.360
do have to re-examine your assumptions about why this kind of work is happening.
00:06:19.160
Amazing. So I just finished with, so I'm a visiting professor this year in Michigan, and I was actually
00:06:27.240
teaching a remote class from my home in Montreal. And the first assignment was for the students to
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identify an academic paper that would fall under the rubric, the unscientific rubric of forbidden
00:06:42.780
knowledge, things that you shouldn't study. And one of the students, to the point that we're talking about
00:06:49.720
here, discussed the COVID lab leak theory as forbidden knowledge, of which I mentioned, oh, I'll be speaking to the
00:06:57.520
author of the book that proposed that in a few days, which would be today. Now, he asked me, he said, well, why do you
00:07:05.260
think it was forbidden knowledge, professor? And so I proposed two possibilities, which I'd like to pause it here.
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And then you tell me if you think I'm on the right track, or maybe there are additional reasons. So I thought, well, number
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one, it wouldn't look good if, you know, Americans or the world in general found out that some American
00:07:25.020
taxpayer money was going to fund this thing. So that we got to shut that down. It's certainly a lot more
00:07:32.720
palpable to most people that it was just the naturally occurring thing. So that's number one.
00:07:37.680
Number two, if I now put on my super politically correct woke hat on, well, I don't want to say
00:07:45.520
that it originated in China, because then that might marginalize Asian Americans, and there'd be
00:07:52.420
increased attacks on them, or some variant of that sort of story. Do you think that those two factors
00:08:01.320
captured the reticence to actually support the lab leak theory? Or is there anything else that's going on?
00:08:07.680
Yeah, well, I think just as background to my answer to that, it's worth noting that the vast
00:08:13.560
majority of the public now thinks a lab leak is quite likely. People come up to me all the time
00:08:19.060
and say, you must feel vindicated. They say the same to my brilliant co-author, Alina Chan.
00:08:25.060
But the scientific establishment hasn't budged an inch. Nature magazine, science magazine, all these
00:08:31.120
ones. Alina and I, and Professor Anton van der Merwe of Oxford University have prepared,
00:08:36.980
had, I think it's now five, formal scientific papers assessing the evidence objectively with
00:08:45.940
hundreds of references to our sources and submitted them to journals. And we used to get the rejection,
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this is a conspiracy theory, it's not acceptable to publish it. We now get the response,
00:09:01.580
oh, everyone knows this stuff. It's no longer fresh enough to publish.
00:09:05.860
Can I interrupt you before you go on? Forgive me, Matt, because it's burning. Do you know,
00:09:11.680
and I think if anybody would know it would be you, of course, you know who JBS Haldane is, yes?
00:09:16.540
Okay. Do you remember the quote by JBS Haldane, which I actually include in the epigraph to my
00:09:23.900
final chapter in The Consuming Instinct, which is the red book right here, where he, I don't have the
00:09:29.800
quote in front of me, but it literally says what you just said. Scientists go through four stages of
00:09:35.760
acceptance before they accept the theory. Stage one, this is bullshit, this is nonsense. I mean,
00:09:41.320
I'm paraphrasing. Stage two, this is probably true, but a perverse point of view. Stage three,
00:09:47.560
well, this is largely true, but who cares? It's unimportant. And stage four, I always said so.
00:09:57.140
Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to look that quote up again. But anyway, to answer your question,
00:10:02.620
why the reluctance of science and nature and the Royal Society and the National Academy to even
00:10:10.680
debate this? I mean, I tried to get the Royal Society and the British Academy of Medical Sciences
00:10:18.780
to debate the topic. And I said, you don't have to ask me, just invite two people to debate it.
00:10:25.420
And they refused. They say it's too controversial a subject. Well, of course it is. That's the whole
00:10:30.580
point, you know. Anyway, so they won't do that. And why is this? And there are, I think,
00:10:37.900
the reasons you give are roughly right. One very senior British scientist said to me,
00:10:44.900
I've always said that a lab leak is likely. I think this one was, but I really hope we never find out.
00:10:53.300
And I said, what do you mean? Surely if an airplane crashed, you would never say that.
00:10:57.560
And he said, well, it's very important that we don't annoy the Chinese,
00:11:00.760
because relations are bad enough anyway. And so there's a real kowtow going on here.
00:11:07.180
I'm not sure one's allowed to use that phrase, but you know what I mean, that there is a degree of
00:11:14.040
reluctance to confront the Chinese government on this issue, because the Chinese government
00:11:22.880
underpins the finances of a lot of scientific journals and a lot of universities, among other
00:11:29.040
things. And because there is a real feeling that they might somehow take revenge. And allied to
00:11:35.960
that, and you mentioned this, you know, well, isn't it rather racist to accuse the Chinese of starting
00:11:40.840
this pandemic? Well, hang on, it was a lot more racist to go around saying it's their disgusting
00:11:46.300
habits of eating live animals and bats and things like that, that started it, isn't it? You know,
00:11:51.400
I mean, that seems to me even worse. So there's the, there's the element of not wanting to upset
00:11:57.000
China, but then there's the other element of not wanting to tarnish the reputation of science
00:12:03.940
and of virology in particular. Now, it seems to me that science has a, had a, had a dilemma here.
00:12:12.120
At the very beginning, it could have said, and in private, they did say this,
00:12:16.480
it looks like a lab leak, we'd better look into it. And that way, the damage to the repetition
00:12:23.580
of science would have remained confined to one area of virology, one very small part of virology,
00:12:30.440
the part where you swap the spike genes between bat coronaviruses that don't infect human beings,
00:12:36.760
which is a kind of unbelievably stupid thing to have been doing anyway. Instead of which they said,
00:12:43.080
no, no, this would be bad for the whole of science. Well, now it is. The, the reputation of
00:12:48.340
science has been severely damaged by this pandemic. I think you and I will agree on that, partly because
00:12:55.280
of all the lies told about the ability of the vaccine to stop transmission, whether the virus
00:13:02.280
was airborne and all these other things, you know, the, the overconfidence of some of the messaging,
00:13:07.180
but also because of this, the biggest scandal of the lot, you know, the greatest industrial accident
00:13:12.920
in the history of mankind, if that's what it was, it killed a thousand times as many people as the
00:13:19.020
Bhopal disaster in 1984. Um, uh, if that is the case, um, then the, the, you know, and, and science refuses
00:13:30.540
to examine whether it might've caused it, that is shocking. The world health organization before the
00:13:37.980
pandemic had frequently said that a lab related accident is now a strong possibility for the next
00:13:47.940
pandemic and may even be a greater possibility than a natural event. They've stopped saying that
00:13:55.560
since the pandemic, they don't like to go there. Now, you know, that is not honest. And, and, uh,
00:14:02.680
you know, I'm a fan of science. I'm a scientist. I've been a champion of science all my life. And to
00:14:08.240
have these leading scientists deliberately deceive the public, publish papers that said the opposite of
00:14:17.320
what they thought in private and, and refuse to engage with the search for an industrial accident
00:14:25.140
that killed North of 20 million people is to me just utterly shocking. So two quick points,
00:14:32.580
and then I really want to move it, move to your latest book that came out two days ago. Uh, number
00:14:37.780
one, when, when the scientists told you, uh, well, you know, we don't want to, we don't want to speak
00:14:44.560
the truth. And then they offer a consequentialist reason that speaks to the tension between what I
00:14:50.780
continuously talk about the, the tension between deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics.
00:14:57.000
And I argue certainly in the parasitic mind and in my forthcoming book and suicidal empathy,
00:15:01.960
that there are certain principles that by definition have to be deontological freedom of
00:15:07.440
speech is deontological freedom of inquiry is deontological presumption of innocence in the
00:15:13.080
judicial system has to be deontological. If you say, I believe in freedom of speech,
00:15:17.420
but, and then you give consequentialist answers, you violated it. So what these scientists are doing
00:15:23.540
is they're doing the, arguably the biggest epistemological no-no, which is they are contextualizing
00:15:29.520
truth using a consequentialist calculus. That's devastating. So number one, number two, it does
00:15:35.740
not surprise me, Matt, that the scientists refuse to alter their positions. I was, this was about a
00:15:43.280
year ago. I was invited on a British show actually by, by a British psychiatrist on his show. And at
00:15:49.640
the end of the show, he asked me a question that surprisingly no one had ever asked me on any
00:15:54.540
previous show I had been on. He asked of all the phenomena that you've studied or know about in
00:16:03.160
terms of human behavior, professor, which is the one that has shocked you the most? And then I, you know,
00:16:08.200
I was taken aback. I have to think for a minute. And I said, well, I guess since you're putting me on the
00:16:11.920
spot, probably the inability of people to change their opinions once it is anchored. And so all
00:16:20.040
you're doing and saying what you said, Matt, is exactly that, which is la la la. It doesn't matter
00:16:26.020
how much evidence Matt and Alina show me, I am not changing my position. That's a perfect
00:16:33.520
manifestation of what a non-scientist should be doing.
00:16:37.060
I think that's, that's exactly right. And the, um, uh, the, the, there's a, there's a very
00:16:44.200
interesting little subplot to this whole story, which is the, the story of how a paper called
00:16:49.380
Proximal Origin of COVID-19 came to be published in Nature Medicine. Um, it was, um, uh, commissioned
00:16:56.800
effectively by, uh, Jeremy Farrar and Anthony Fauci of the Wellcome Trust and, and NIAID, um,
00:17:03.900
in early February, 2020, uh, a group of, uh, virologists, five of them then went away to write
00:17:09.680
it. Um, the proposal was initially that they should say, well, it's maybe a lab leak, but it
00:17:14.880
looks unlikely. These five all thought it was quite likely at the time. Uh, and they ended up publishing
00:17:21.620
a paper that's, that ruled it out, that said it was implausible and that deceived me among other
00:17:25.780
people. I mean, I read that paper and thought, okay, fine. They've, they've ruled it out. Um, and I
00:17:30.260
then realized that a, it's arguments didn't stack up, but then we found the messages they sent each
00:17:35.480
other during the preparation of that paper. It came out through a congressional, um, subpenas. Um,
00:17:41.200
and even after the paper was published, they were saying, I still think it's pretty likely it did come
00:17:47.200
from a lab while they were telling us the plebs that it didn't. And I just think that the arrogance
00:17:53.760
of that is so shocking. Um, uh, but you know, so their argument by the way is, oh, we were being
00:18:00.880
good scientists. We changed our mind when we saw new evidence, but they didn't change their mind.
00:18:05.940
That's the whole point. They still thought it was a lab leak in private. They just wrote a paper saying
00:18:11.280
that the very opposite, it's truly extraordinary. In a small, well, maybe not small manifestation of
00:18:18.920
cosmic justice. One of the professors who was most hounded and censored during the COVID era,
00:18:25.040
Jay Bhattacharya, is now confirmed as the NIH director. So maybe there is a epistemological
00:18:34.100
God up there looking down on us. Well, I think, yes, Jay Bhattacharya,
00:18:39.280
Marty Makari at the FDA, um, John Ratcliffe at the CIA. These are all people who had before their
00:18:45.880
appointments come out strongly in favor of the lab leak. And Jay and I had, uh, we actually wrote
00:18:51.140
an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, which never got published, um, on some of the parallels between
00:18:55.660
his persecution and my persecution, as it were. Um, uh, uh, and I think he's, he's, uh, uh, his,
00:19:02.840
his story is extraordinary. And, you know, the persecution of him was very, very unpleasant indeed.
00:19:07.480
Yeah. Uh, and yet, and, and it was orchestrated by Francis Collins, the head of the National
00:19:12.600
Institutes of Health who says, what are we going to do to take down this guy and his, his theory?
00:19:18.120
And he now has Francis Collins job. I mean, that is this, there's a little bit of sweetness there.
00:19:23.480
There's gotta be a Hollywood movie there coming up soon. So let's, uh, let's keep our fingers crossed.
00:19:28.300
Okay. Let's jump into all things avian. By the way, I love that you wrote this book because I often tell
00:19:35.500
my wife that, I mean, birds are sort of like the, the rock stars, right? Of the animal world. I mean,
00:19:42.180
all this stuff, I mean, they are rock stars. They're unbelievable. So tell us.
00:19:50.040
Tell us why you wrote the book. I mean, much has been written about sexual selection and the
00:19:55.080
handicap principle and Zahavian signaling. We'll get into all that. What said, what made you say,
00:20:00.840
you know what? I I've got a story to tell that is unique and different from all the other stories
00:20:05.820
that have been told here. Well, um, first of all, it's actually what I did research on myself when I
00:20:13.000
was a scientist a very long time ago. So it was very much back to my roots and back to the subject
00:20:17.400
I know very well and that I'd seen develop over the years. Um, secondly, I'm a keen amateur naturalist.
00:20:23.660
I love birdwatching. And I thought if I write a book about birdwatching, then I can go birdwatching
00:20:27.960
and call it research. And so I did, I traveled around the world. I went to Arctic Norway. I went
00:20:35.120
to Papua New Guinea. I went to Australia, um, to see particular species of birds, um, doing their
00:20:40.800
sexual displays. But for me, the, the, the, the interesting topic is the question of, uh, beauty in
00:20:51.240
the animal kingdom. Darwin wrestled with this question for several years and he, he was both
00:20:58.960
troubled by it and fascinated by it. And, uh, it's kind of dropped out of view. You know, we,
00:21:07.020
we tend to think of, um, arguments about evolution as being, you know, rather dry arguments about, um,
00:21:13.620
survival, uh, survival, but actually, you know, the peacock's tail, the extravagant displays of birds
00:21:21.060
of paradise, the songs of nightingales, these things are not utilitarian, dull survival devices.
00:21:30.000
They are exuberant, flamboyant, exciting, and beautiful. We use that word about them. Um,
00:21:38.960
and Darwin had this theory, which the other thing that made me want to write the book was just
00:21:45.780
realizing just how unsuccessful Darwin was in pushing this theory in his lifetime. Uh, he was
00:21:53.980
very successful with natural selection, but he completely failed to persuade any of his colleagues
00:21:59.820
that sexual selection through choosy females, through, through mate choice, um, was why birds
00:22:08.880
had beautiful plumage, that the females had a preference for beautiful plumage. You know,
00:22:14.740
when you put it like that, it's kind of, well, why, you know, I mean, it's, it's, it's a sort of,
00:22:18.760
you can see why his, his colleagues objected. Um, and yet we now know that he was right,
00:22:24.540
both in the mechanism and in the purpose of, of, of, of how it works, but it's still quite a
00:22:31.160
controversial subject. There are, as you alluded to, uh, there are, uh, twists and turns in the
00:22:36.700
argument that, that haven't yet been settled. So I just thought it was a fascinating subject to go to
00:22:42.160
and, um, a bit of light relief after viruses, perhaps. Uh, so by the way, I, I use a lot of
00:22:50.780
sexual signaling in, I mean, in, in, in animals, in animal species in general, but in bird species
00:22:56.940
in particular, in various of my own empirical work and in some of my writing. So I'll give you an
00:23:02.000
example. Uh, uh, one of the probably papers, academic papers that has received the most
00:23:09.100
attention, both within academia and within the media was based originally on peacocking, whereby
00:23:16.160
we took the principle of peacocking, we meaning myself and one of my former graduate students.
00:23:21.220
And we wanted to demonstrate, of course, that in the human context, consumers engage in various
00:23:27.580
forms of peacocking, sex specific forms of peacocking, but we were focusing here on male
00:23:32.960
displays, human males. And so what we did is we brought people, we rented a Porsche, Matt. And I
00:23:40.100
always tell people, I say, try to get a scientific granting agency to give you money to rent a Porsche
00:23:46.660
for scientific purposes. So we rented a Porsche and we had a beaten up old car. We brought in young males
00:23:53.520
and we didn't say, imagine driving this car as you would in a psychology lab. We actually had them
00:23:59.480
drive these two cars, either in a LEC, which you're, you could certainly talk a lot more about it.
00:24:05.500
The LEC in this case being downtown Montreal on the weekend where everybody can see me driving the car
00:24:11.580
or on a semi-deserted highway, a non-LEC, we use those terms. And then the dependent measure, Matt,
00:24:17.780
was the salivary assays that we took from the participants because we wanted to check their fluctuating
00:24:27.880
levels of testosterone after these trials. Now, that entire theoretical framework was originally based,
00:24:36.460
yes, generally on sexual signaling, but I even have slides where I show a peacock. And so that's one example.
00:24:42.720
I'll give you one other example and then I'll see the floor back to you. And I think you mentioned this in the book.
00:24:47.060
The Bowerbird, I always argue, you know, he's the Picasso of the animal, or certainly the avian world, right?
00:24:55.840
He creates this bower for no other reason than to say, voila, look how artistic I am. Shouldn't you be choosing me?
00:25:03.920
So do you have other such examples? But I'm sure you probably covered those in your book, yes?
00:25:08.720
Yes. Well, the bowerbirds get a whole chapter in my book because it was a dream to go and see them.
00:25:18.560
I managed to find somebody, a brilliant guy called James Butcher in Queensland who could take me to see
00:25:25.180
five different species of bowerbird within a week and to watch them doing their thing and doing their
00:25:32.360
display. This is in Papua New Guinea? What? This is in Papua New Guinea? No, this was in Queensland.
00:25:38.900
Oh, in Australia. Okay. Did I say New Guinea? I meant Australia. Sorry. Yep. Yep.
00:25:44.400
I also went to Papua New Guinea to see the birds of paradise, but I didn't get to see some of the
00:25:48.680
bowerbirds in Papua New Guinea, but I would love to see them because some of them are even more spectacular.
00:25:53.520
And, you know, for people who haven't got their heads around this, it really is very extraordinary
00:26:00.240
that there are birds which create art installations with which to impress members of the other sex.
00:26:09.300
There's no other way of describing it. Just to give you one example, James and I watched
00:26:16.000
the bower of a great bowerbird on the outskirts of a town in Queensland.
00:26:21.540
We had to sit in a cemetery inside a little bird blind in order to watch this. And he built this
00:26:29.440
sort of tunnel of twigs and grass stems and then a platform of grass stems in the front,
00:26:36.580
then green objects, then red objects, and then white objects in the front.
00:26:42.140
Beautifully laid out. The white objects graded by size so that the small ones were near and the big
00:26:47.940
ones were far away. They were mostly man-made objects because we were in a town, so bits of
00:26:53.660
broken glass and plastic and things like that. It included a toy hand grenade and a toy tiara.
00:27:06.380
Wow. And then we concealed ourselves and watched and he trotted around and, you know, tidied up his
00:27:16.600
bower. And then a female came along and went into the bower. And he got terribly excited and did his whole
00:27:21.340
display, including showing the purple thing on the back of his head. And he then picked up a red chili
00:27:26.520
pepper and showed her this and said, look at this. Now, you know, experiments have shown that the more
00:27:35.940
coloured objects one of these birds can collect, the more chance it has of getting a mating.
00:27:42.580
Why should the females mind about this? You know, why should, why, why on earth should it matter how
00:27:49.140
many coloured objects he can collect? And that's the question to which I think there's a very
00:27:57.220
counterintuitive answer, which actually doesn't quite fit with the sort of the peacocking in the
00:28:08.120
Porsche that you're talking about. Because what I think is going on is that the female is saying
00:28:16.660
not, I want a male who is so good at collecting coloured objects that his offspring will survive
00:28:24.300
well, he'll pass on good genes for survival. I think what she's saying is, I want a male who is
00:28:32.020
so good at collecting coloured objects, because he will pass on the genes to collect coloured objects,
00:28:38.020
that it's a that it's in that sense, it's a circular argument. Or as I put it, it's seduction of the
00:28:43.420
hottest rather than survival of the fittest. Beautiful. Two points, since you mentioned Queensland,
00:28:49.580
you probably have seen the signs. We saw them in Sydney, we, this was my first sabbatical leave in
00:28:57.540
2001. And I spent five weeks in Australia, two weeks in New Zealand with my wife, we didn't have
00:29:04.860
children yet. And there were warning signs saying if you're women wearing these hair brooches, be careful,
00:29:12.460
because a lot of these display birds will come to try to steal them from your head so that they could
00:29:19.460
end up in the bowers. Have you seen those signs? I didn't see those signs. But but interestingly, in
00:29:25.300
the in Australia, the disposable plastic water bottles had blue tops, which they have in the UK,
00:29:33.360
I think as well. And they've changed that colour, because the satin bowerbirds like anything blue,
00:29:39.900
and they were finding that these, you know, the the the litter problem in the countryside,
00:29:44.140
because the birds were stealing these blue tops.
00:29:47.100
Amazing. The second point I was going to say is, and I don't know if you get into this in the book,
00:29:51.900
and my apologies, I haven't read it yet. I just kind of very quickly went through it.
00:29:55.760
There are, I mean, you know this, so I'm not explaining this to you, but I'm explaining it
00:30:00.220
for our viewers and listeners. There are sex role reversal species where for so for most species,
00:30:06.560
parental investment theory, which would sit well for all species, that the species that has to provide
00:30:13.280
the greater minimal obligatory parental investment, that's the sexual dimorphism will go, they'll be
00:30:19.040
bigger, they'll be less sexually restrained. And for most species, it is the males that provide the
00:30:25.000
lesser investment. And so we see the sexual dimorphism in the way that we expected. Now,
00:30:30.560
there are sex role reversal species where it actually is the males that provide the greater
00:30:35.980
minimal parental obligatory investment, many of which are bird species. So that's another reason to love
00:30:43.880
birds. And classic example from Australia, the cassowary bird. So take it away, Ridley. Yeah,
00:30:50.060
did you know that? No, I didn't know that was that the females are more brightly colored.
00:30:54.680
They're much bigger, much more aggressive. They keep a harem of smaller males. And usually they're
00:31:03.040
the ones who end up killing human, humans, because they've got these big claws. They're very
00:31:09.380
territorial. So every single pattern of sexual dimorphism is reversed. And for those of you who
00:31:15.020
don't know, please do a Google search on the cassowary. It's straight out of Jurassic Park. I mean,
00:31:19.660
it looks like a walking dinosaur from 100 million years ago. It's a scary bird. There's no question
00:31:27.300
about it. But I actually studied one of those role reverse birds myself as an undergraduate in the
00:31:33.200
Arctic, a bird called the red phalarope. And it's a very striking case. It's a small bird. It's a bird
00:31:41.160
that spends most of its life on the ocean, but it comes ashore in the Arctic to breed. And the females
00:31:47.480
are a brick red with a black head and a white face and a black, black patterned back. And the males
00:31:54.300
have a brown head, a patchy, much less bright pinkish breast and a brown back. And it's the males that
00:32:03.260
sit on the eggs and the females that compete for them and that display to them. And I observed a
00:32:10.160
behavior that I didn't understand. And I only understood it later when I was watching a television
00:32:14.800
program, but another role reverse bird called a jacana. And that was that when the male left the
00:32:21.280
nest, he would sometimes have to behave very aggressively to another female to prevent her
00:32:28.940
coming to his nest. And this had been observed by someone before. And they said, he's it's breaking
00:32:35.140
the pair bond with his mate. And I realized, no, it's not. It's a it's a strange female. And why does
00:32:40.220
she want to go to his nest? And why is he so aggressive towards her? And about half of the nests
00:32:47.560
that we found in this study were destroyed. And we didn't really know what destroyed them. There
00:32:52.840
weren't there was an Arctic fox one day, but it didn't come near the birds, you know, etc. I now
00:32:58.680
realize it was the females who were going around committing infanticide to try and bring the males back
00:33:04.960
into a position where they could sit on another brood of eggs. So they were they were persecuting
00:33:10.800
other males to try and get get. And this is, of course, is exactly what gorillas do and lions do,
00:33:15.580
except it's lions. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So. So sexual selection theory is is is a wonderfully
00:33:25.040
recondite subject, which gets you into all sorts of corners of the world. But above all,
00:33:31.800
and I make this point in the book, it's the fun version of evolution. You know, natural selection
00:33:41.080
is very utilitarian in the end, either you die or you survive, you know, whereas this is saying,
00:33:46.760
let's see what we can invent. Why don't we put brightly colored eye like shapes on the huge
00:33:53.280
back feathers of a peacock? How about that? You know, I mean, why? There's no rhyme or reason to
00:34:00.880
to a lot of this. And therefore, it's in a sense, very creative. What what upsets me so much. And so
00:34:06.640
now this is my 31st year as a professor, I can't believe that I'm that old. But I, you know, trying
00:34:14.240
to incorporate, as you know, going back to E.O. Wilson, who regrettably recently passed away, trying
00:34:22.200
to incorporate the exact same mechanisms that apply for every other species on Earth, other than human
00:34:29.240
beings. Suddenly, when you make the jump to human beings, you suddenly become a neo-Nazi, right?
00:34:35.640
In my case, apparently a Jewish neo-Nazi. So even today, 31 years into my career, I still get a lot
00:34:43.860
of reticence from colleagues who say, come on, evolution doesn't apply to human beings. And if
00:34:49.880
of course it applies to human beings, it applies up to the neck. Yes. Not here, right? So the opposable
00:34:56.240
thumbs can be explained using evolutionary theory. But surely you can't be some kind of imbecile,
00:35:00.960
Professor Saad, to think that the human mind, what makes us human is that we transcend our biology.
00:35:06.220
It's anyways, all the stuff you guys do in evolution, it's all unfalsifiable, just so
00:35:10.500
storytelling. And that gets me so angry, because you and I, in the last five minutes, discussed
00:35:16.580
in parental investment theory, and the pattern of sexual dimorphism across every possible species,
00:35:24.520
using one simple, elegant explanation. So the evidentiary threshold for evolution is astoundingly
00:35:32.140
higher than other scientific fields. But yet we're accused of the exact opposite. You just sit with a
00:35:38.320
cognac drink and a cigar, and you just pontificate making up bullshit, just so stories. I'm sure you face
00:35:45.820
that. Are you as upset by that reflex as I am? Yes, I completely agree with you. And I, you know,
00:35:53.640
in several of my books, I've explored the application of evolutionary principles to explaining human
00:36:00.120
history, human behavior, and met severe resistance and accusations that one is somehow being,
00:36:07.520
you know, morally wrong in doing this, which I just don't understand, because it seems to me culture
00:36:18.120
can be just as despotic and tyrannical as genes can, possibly more so. But, and I do say in my book,
00:36:27.840
this is not a book about one boring African ape, okay? This is a book about birds, and they're much more
00:36:35.460
fun, and they're more colorful, and so on. But at the end, I do have a chapter where I say, okay,
00:36:43.020
now that you appreciated the power of natural, of sexual selection, and realized with Darwin that it's
00:36:50.340
a much more powerful force than we give it credit for, how did it affect human beings? And it's very
00:36:57.160
obvious that there's all sorts of features of human behavior and anatomy that are designed to appeal to
00:37:04.200
the opposite sex rather than designed to help you survive. But is one of them the human brain?
00:37:12.220
Now, Geoffrey Miller wrote a book called The Mating Mind 25 years ago, which I think was a very good book,
00:37:17.180
and hasn't really been built on. And in my pretty well last chapter, I give the idea a run for its
00:37:27.060
money. And this is that the human brain expanded very rapidly between about 1 million and 2 million
00:37:34.640
years ago. It accelerated in its expansion. And it's a very costly organ. So there must have been
00:37:44.080
some huge benefit to having the biggest brain in the group, as it were. Was it purely survival? Did
00:37:51.700
having a bigger brain than your rivals enable you to get through a drought better or find food better?
00:38:00.180
Well, that's the default theory, maybe. But in that case, why didn't that happen to baboons or
00:38:06.940
other animals on the African savannah? So maybe we could go to another theory that actually you need
00:38:13.700
the big brain to understand society, to work out who's deceiving who and who's plotting what in your
00:38:21.680
group. We live in large groups, so we need big brains to understand that. Well, yeah, but we kind of
00:38:28.780
only lived in really large groups comparatively recently, once we had big brains already.
00:38:34.760
So that theory, yeah, it might work, but it's not necessarily very convincing.
00:38:38.800
And Geoffrey Miller says, well, hang on, look at what we use this big brain for. We don't just use
00:38:46.120
it to help us survive and solve practical problems. And we don't just use it for social things. We also
00:38:54.220
use it for wit and humor and music and song and language and showing off and all these things that
00:39:04.480
that have no conceivable practical survival purpose and not particularly convincing social
00:39:12.080
one. But they blooming well have a strong sexual purpose. You know, the whole point of singing is to
00:39:19.260
seduce, judging by the lyrics of every pop song ever written.
00:39:24.800
By the way, many rock stars will say they first became rock stars to get the girls. It's not because
00:39:31.220
I have a general musical love. It's that they knew if I hold a guitar and I start singing, the girls pay
00:39:39.100
So is it possible that both sexes, in the case of human beings, because mutual sexual
00:39:45.100
resection has been well proved, by the way, in birds as well, that both sexes were picking
00:39:51.020
large-brained individuals to mate with because they,
00:39:54.340
that that was like the peacock's tail in our species. And that what you wanted was a mate who
00:40:02.880
would give your offspring the ability to seduce other members of the species. And that was a big
00:40:09.980
brain. I don't think, I mean, we're not a polygamous species like a peacock. We're not a
00:40:15.660
lecking species, despite what you say about, you know, downtown Montreal. So, so we wouldn't expect
00:40:24.640
massive exaggeration of the kind that you get in those species. But you get, you do get sexual
00:40:31.280
selection in very monogamous species like seabirds and others. There's no question about that. So I
00:40:38.900
think it needs to be taken seriously as a hypothesis that the dramatic expansion of the brain in our
00:40:46.080
species and not in others was driven by sexual rather than natural selection. That doesn't make
00:40:53.320
it any more embarrassing as a theory or morally repugnant or anything like that. It's just a
00:40:59.340
different explanation for what might have happened. The problem Jeffrey's got and I've got and you've
00:41:07.040
got is how do we test that idea? And I can't think of a good answer. Okay, well, I'll get back to you
00:41:13.760
once I've cracked that mystery. But here's another open hypothesis that I'd like to propose. Or maybe
00:41:21.040
it's already been studied. I don't think so, though. So I often say that, say, in the human context,
00:41:28.140
mate choice is compensatory. And let me explain what I mean by that. Let's suppose that all human
00:41:35.240
females said, I will never mate with a guy who's less than six feet tall, then that would be a
00:41:42.780
non-compensatory process. Meaning that if I fall short, literally, of that standard, then I'm out of
00:41:49.820
the mating game. But if mate choice is compensatory, I can compensate for that shortcoming. I could be
00:41:59.000
very witty. I could be very good looking. I could be socially dominant, even though I'm shorter.
00:42:05.100
So then, therefore, women are choosing me based on a bundle of attributes, notwithstanding that all
00:42:12.840
other things equal, if I'm taller, it would be better. So I wonder, do you think that other species,
00:42:20.480
including bird species, would have evolved a compensatory strategy? Or it's,
00:42:27.580
you've got to have the biggest tail. It's always the biggest tail that's going to win. And no amount
00:42:33.960
of compensatory characteristics could make up that you're falling short on that trade.
00:42:40.800
Well, that's very interesting. And two things spring immediately to mind. One is that
00:42:45.180
in birds with a lot of beauty in one sex, almost every part of the plumage
00:42:55.500
is colorful. They don't just have one colorful bit on the whole. Every part of the body has to be
00:43:06.940
beautiful. And they often sing as well. So clearly, in some sense, you've got to meet
00:43:14.640
a criterion in lots of different things. So your bundle is spot on, I think.
00:43:21.800
But the bird that I particularly focus on in this book is called the black grouse. And it's a lecking
00:43:29.240
bird. And you know what that means. It means that a dozen or 20 males gather together in a small
00:43:35.920
space the size of a tennis court every morning. And it's the same space every day and every year
00:43:41.740
to fight and display and sing and try to attract females. And the females visit these markets and
00:43:52.320
stroll around unmolested, actually, and observe the displays. And then the females all choose the same
00:44:00.240
male. Now, what's going on there is very non compensatory in the sense that
00:44:09.180
the second female is not saying, well, yeah, but she's got him. I'd like this chap. He's nearly as
00:44:17.900
good. She's saying, no, I want to mate with Fred. But she's mated with Fred. Everyone else is going to
00:44:25.180
mate with Fred. Fred gets everything. I mean, literally, it's a winner take all system. And
00:44:30.840
everyone else goes home empty handed. Not quite. There's there are a few individuals that also get
00:44:35.380
matings. Now, most birds form pair bonds, monogamous pair bonds to bring up their offspring,
00:44:44.560
like we do human beings. And when they do that, they must settle for second best, obviously, you know,
00:44:54.280
because the best guy's taken most of the time, or the best girl is taken. So you have to adjust your
00:45:02.320
I'm talking about birds here. I'm not trying to be one bird has to decide, yeah, this is good enough.
00:45:10.380
Now, of course, what you can do is choose a perfectly reasonable mate as a male as a mate,
00:45:18.140
who's not great. He's not particularly good looking. He's not particularly colorful. His song is only
00:45:23.820
half good, but he's the best available. But once he's on the hook, let's have an affair with the
00:45:32.260
tennis coach down the road. And of course, birds do that all the time. I mean, this was the great
00:45:37.540
discovery of the 1990s as a result of genetic fingerprinting was that in these monogamous
00:45:42.160
species, there's an awful lot of extra pair copulation. What's the percentage? Is it like 10%
00:45:48.060
extra pairs? In some species, it's higher. I mean, I believe in one of the Australian fairy wrens,
00:45:53.480
it was found to be 40%. And it's classified as a monogamous species.
00:45:58.660
Yeah. And it is monogamous socially, you know, there is a there are two parents bringing up every
00:46:03.500
brood. But he's bringing up a lot of other people's kids. And I give the example of skylarks in my book.
00:46:11.980
And there, I think it was, I think it was over 20%. I'll have to check. But it's a surprisingly high
00:46:18.960
percentage. And, you know, when you think about human mating strategies,
00:46:24.140
the things that really matter in a long term relationship, things like kindness, and fidelity,
00:46:32.500
and, you know, just general niceness, don't matter so much in a short term relationship on the whole
00:46:41.560
to people. That's, that's a finding that's empirically replicated quite well. So the compensatory
00:46:51.340
thing is a good way of looking at it. But the sort of settling for second best versus making sure
00:47:01.660
you get the absolute best genes. And of course, one of the weird things about lecking birds is that
00:47:07.040
because in every generation, they're choosing the same male, they must have less genetic variety
00:47:14.640
than other species. And so there's no point in being so choosy. So the species that are most choosy
00:47:22.480
have least reason to be choosy. Arguably, this is known as the Leck paradox. And it's one of the
00:47:30.160
Very interesting. So another one of those potentially open hypotheses that we can hopefully
00:47:39.200
get some interesting person to collaborate with us on. It seems as though birds in their
00:47:46.080
processes of sexual selection have been selected on a greater number of modalities than other,
00:47:55.460
you know, taxa. So meaning, you've got the red capped mannequin who does a moonwalk a la Michael
00:48:03.060
Jackson, in order to attract the female. So in this case, it literally is his dancing ability.
00:48:10.680
Then you've got other cases where it's my singing ability, hence songbirds. In other cases, it's my
00:48:17.400
morphological traits, my actual plumage or whatever it is. And you know, so is it true to say
00:48:24.880
that comparing to other groupings of animals, let's say mammalian species versus avian species,
00:48:31.780
that they seem to have found a greater number of ways by which to channel the process of sexual
00:48:40.100
selection? Or is that not true? You will find as much variety of types of sexual selection in mammalian
00:48:47.660
species. No, I think you're right. Because think about it, if, if all birds cease to exist tomorrow,
00:48:56.460
the dawn chorus would fall silent. You know, the mammals contribute nothing to the early morning
00:49:03.820
song in my garden, reptiles even less. And so birds, by the way, have way more
00:49:17.180
visual perception than we do. They're greater visual acuity, but also more colour channels. They
00:49:27.280
have four colour channels, whereas we have three usually. That includes ultraviolet. They actually
00:49:34.620
see colours that we don't. So we don't know the half of what they see. And birds, but also some
00:49:42.000
fishes and other invertebrates have, are the masterpieces of both colour and song. Now, you could
00:49:53.720
argue that, and if we were a mammal, we might argue this, that, you know, there is just as much
00:50:02.600
excitement in a good smell in dogs as there is in a good colour in birds. But I don't think that's
00:50:11.360
the case. I think genuinely, the masterpieces of sexual selection are the birds. And we are a
00:50:20.540
slightly unusual mammal. Not only have we got good colour vision, which most mammals don't,
00:50:26.540
primates do, but other mammals don't. We have three colour channels, most mammals have two.
00:50:32.060
So we appreciate colours a bit like birds, but not as good as birds. But we also are fascinated by
00:50:42.040
language and song in a way that birds also are. Whales are another example, perhaps, but in the
00:50:47.920
mammals, but most other mammals, no, no good at that. So in a sense, we are honorary birds.
00:50:54.580
But maybe not as smart as the new Caledonian crow. Have you seen the stuff? I mean, I genuinely believe
00:51:03.820
that if I am pitted against one of those birds, I come out the moron in that exchange. Is that true?
00:51:13.820
Well, I'm sure you wouldn't. You're very clever, but I would.
00:51:16.460
I mean, perhaps, I know that maybe you didn't cover those guys in the book, or I'm not sure if
00:51:22.560
you did, but maybe you could talk a bit about it just from, you know, your experience with avian
00:51:27.660
species, of all the stuff that have been tested on them and how they understand, you know, folk
00:51:33.500
physics, right? They can drop something so that the water elevates, so they can, I mean, this is
00:51:38.160
unbelievable. I mean, you talk about bird brain, they're not bird, I mean, you usually use that term
00:51:43.180
in a derogatory sense. They're actually Einsteins.
00:51:47.300
Yes, I think, well, we better not get carried away. I think their brains are genuinely a lot
00:51:55.020
smaller because, well, mostly they are smaller too. But you're right. I think we've tended
00:52:00.940
to underestimate the importance. And, you know, evolution's masterpieces are the birds, not
00:52:10.040
the mammals. I think that's true. Now, the other, and sorry, just on language, if you want
00:52:16.820
to teach an animal to speak words, parrots are way ahead of chimpanzees, for example.
00:52:25.600
Dolphins are probably better, but it's not so easy to do. I forgot what I was going to say,
00:52:32.700
but I was going to say something else along those lines about birds.
00:52:35.620
It'll come back to you. What is the bird? I've seen them recently on my Instagram reel. There is a
00:52:41.980
bird that is unbelievable in its ability to produce all sorts of man-made sounds, not just language.
00:52:52.600
It's probably the lyrebird in Australia. It can imitate a chainsaw, it can imitate a child crying,
00:52:59.680
it can imitate, you know, a telephone. It's extraordinary. And I've heard it, actually.
00:53:06.340
So what is the mechanism? And maybe, I mean, this may be beyond our respective areas of expertise,
00:53:11.160
but is it a mimicry module that's being instantiated in unique ways that it's, because,
00:53:18.320
right, you and I are not going to be able to do that because somehow our mimicry, and by the way,
00:53:23.760
mimicry, you kind of get that in the human context with language acquisition, whereby if you don't
00:53:30.800
learn a second language other than your mother tongue, you know, before a certain magical age of
00:53:36.360
11, 12, 13, even though you might speak it perfectly, you'll never be able to speak it in a way that
00:53:42.700
doesn't show that you have an accent. So it's as if your mimicry module fails once you enter puberty,
00:53:49.160
but like, but, but those birds retain it forever so that they can replicate the chainsaw.
00:53:54.600
Yeah. Henry Kissinger had a German accent all his life. His younger brother, Walter, did not.
00:54:01.940
But, but yeah, no, you know, there's a bird called the sedge warbler, which lives near where I live.
00:54:08.380
It's a very small bird. It doesn't have a very big brain, but it sings a very, very rich song.
00:54:14.360
That song is actually hundreds of different African birds that it has heard in the winter mimicked.
00:54:22.680
So, you know, birds that would never come to Europe because they live in the swamps of,
00:54:27.140
of, you know, Niger or something are, are being reproduced in, in Europe, as it were.
00:54:37.200
So now the, the, the, just, just back to the point I was going to make, and then I forgot it
00:54:43.340
because it's, it's about the human's appreciation of bird beauty. Cause Darwin was fascinated by this.
00:54:49.400
He kept saying birds seem to have an appreciation of beauty a bit like us. And it's, it's quite,
00:54:58.440
you know, when you show pictures of colorful birds to people, nobody says, well, that's hideous or yuck.
00:55:06.060
They say, wow, that's lovely. Now, why should it be lovely to us? You know, I mean,
00:55:12.980
most mammals don't look beautiful to us, but most birds do. We didn't share, we haven't shared a
00:55:20.840
common ancestor since 400 million years ago. And that common ancestor was a sort of lumbering swamp
00:55:27.400
reptile, which presumably didn't sing and didn't have colors and didn't have feathers or fur. So
00:55:33.340
it's kind of puzzling that, that we should coincide in our decision of what beauty is. And my only
00:55:39.900
answer to that is that what birds tend to do when they get sexually selected for beauty
00:55:46.400
and what we tend to do when we're trying to be beautiful is produce pure tones of sound and pure
00:55:54.740
hues of color. And when you think about it, those are improbable things to produce.
00:56:01.160
It's much easier to produce a brown or a click than it is to produce a blue or a whistle.
00:56:09.420
Because, you know, you're restricting your output to one wavelength in each case. So I think that's
00:56:18.540
my theory about why we both find the same things beautiful.
00:56:22.720
Very interesting. A personal point on birds. My first pet, which I received in Lebanon as a young
00:56:31.380
child at the age of five, which we then brought to Canada when we escaped the Lebanese Civil War,
00:56:39.120
and my poor dad had to find a vet that would sign a some form so that the Canadian authorities would let
00:56:47.840
him in. She was a female. Now, we used to call her Iraqi, in Arabic, we used to call her an Iraqi eagle,
00:56:54.480
although she was the size of probably, you know, a bit smaller than a pigeon, but looked very much
00:57:00.440
like a raptor, like an eagle. And I would love to eventually, maybe you could help me actually find
00:57:05.460
what is this species name. And she was, I loved her more than anyone in my human family. And when she
00:57:13.040
passed away when I was 13, I was devastated. And thank God, that's been one of the only times that
00:57:18.480
I faced, you know, a death in my personal life. And so my first love was a female gorgeous bird by
00:57:29.200
I had a bird called Hamish, which was a collared dove. My sister and I reared it and it loved her
00:57:37.820
and it hated me. It was interesting. You know, it knew it was a, it knew the difference between the
00:57:42.880
Amazing. Can we take a few minutes just to ask a few, some, I mean, they're not personal questions,
00:57:48.760
but sort of about your career and so on, before we wrap it up. So one of the things that, of course,
00:57:54.740
I love about your work is, you know, you write for the masses and therefore your work, I think in the,
00:58:01.680
in the bio that was sent to me, well over a million copies of all your books, 31 languages,
00:58:07.320
languages translated and so on. Now that would be uncommon to achieve had you been a professor,
00:58:14.280
because then you would have been a very specialized guy. You would publish, you'd be publishing now
00:58:19.840
your 94th paper on some, and I don't mean, I'm not trying to denigrate it, but I appreciate peer
00:58:25.980
review. I mean, I'm an academic, that's fine. But in your case, for whatever reason, maybe you'll share
00:58:31.940
it with us. You decide, okay, I'm not going to go into academia. I'm going, I'm still going to be a
00:58:35.460
science communicator. I'm still going to be an author. And in your case, a very successful one,
00:58:39.760
but I'm going to use a different modality to communicate my interest in science. Now I'd like
00:58:45.960
to think that I've been successful. One of the rare professors who, yes, I began my career doing all
00:58:52.660
the peer reviewed and the testosterone assays and so on. But then later, once I can find a much bigger
00:58:59.420
platform, including, you know, having this show and going on other shows, then it becomes very
00:59:05.000
difficult to go back to peer reviewed, not because it's not as worthy, but life has limited time,
00:59:13.740
you have constraints. And I could either write my next book, which we read by 200,000 people,
00:59:18.720
or write a beautiful scientific paper that will be read by 200 people, maybe.
00:59:23.880
And so I've had 20 or 20. I'm trying to be, I'm exaggerating the importance. So did you,
00:59:33.660
as you were tracing your career early on so that you went through the bifurcation, I'm not going into
00:59:38.820
academia, were those some of the metrics that you thought of, or was it accidental that you became
00:59:43.880
the sort of the author that you are today? No, it's exactly. This is what I have wrestled with
00:59:50.720
at various stages in my career. And, you know, I did a PhD, I enjoyed doing it. But I noticed at the
00:59:58.420
end that I was enjoying writing it up. And my colleagues were hating writing it up. And I,
01:00:05.380
but I wasn't enjoying remaining focused on one thing, I kept being distracted by other things. So
01:00:11.640
I began to realize I was wide, but not deep. I was enjoyed writing in a way that quite a lot of people
01:00:19.620
didn't. And so I considered a career outside academia. And I remember a conversation with a,
01:00:29.220
you know, a tutor, he wasn't my supervisor, but he'd been my undergraduate tutor.
01:00:34.280
And I said, What do you think? And he said, Well, be careful, because there's no way back.
01:00:39.160
Once you go out into the world and become a journalist, and I think you will find it frustrating
01:00:43.120
that you're not on the front line, you're, you're commenting on what other people have discovered,
01:00:47.720
rather than discovering things yourself. And I do know that frustration, you know, there've been
01:00:54.260
times when I thought, Oh, I wish I'd kept at least part of my career in academia, so that I could have
01:01:00.140
made a genuine discovery in something and, and be taken a little more seriously, sometimes in certain
01:01:05.680
areas. But I have had a wonderful time, because I've had a license to be curious, a license to call up
01:01:15.380
professors all over the world and say, you've written an interesting paper, can I come and talk
01:01:19.360
to you about it? And that kind of thing. So as a science journalist, initially, and then as a,
01:01:23.760
as a as an author of books, I have been able to explore a much wider range of topics that I would
01:01:31.160
have done if I'd stayed in academia. And I think the kinds of ideas that I've
01:01:39.060
wrestled with are just as profound as those of genuine academics are wrestling with. I don't
01:01:50.800
myself pretend to be a, you know, world leading thinker, I'm not a philosopher, but I'm, I'm someone
01:01:56.900
who, who loves science, who loves knowledge, who loves ideas, and who loves writing about them. And the
01:02:04.340
writing about them is, is part of the fun of exploring them. I, you know, I only find out,
01:02:10.040
do you have this feeling that you only find out what you think about something when you've written
01:02:13.140
it down? I mean, so yeah, sometimes, absolutely. I mean, I'm, I'm particularly excited when oftentimes,
01:02:20.160
and this is going to sound paradoxical, when I go in with an a priori hypothesis, and then the results
01:02:26.600
come out contrary to what I had proposed. And I go, goddamn, I mean, we had developed such a gorgeous
01:02:32.420
argumentation, such a beautiful framework, to justify this hypothesis, and then we cast the die,
01:02:39.380
and oh, it didn't come out exactly. That itself is exciting. Thomas Henry Huxley said the beautiful
01:02:44.400
theory slain by an ugly fact. Exactly right, exactly right. But I mean, God, I just so admire
01:02:51.100
people like you, or Richard Dawkins, or people who have been frontline scientists, but have also
01:03:00.480
taken the trouble to communicate with the rest of us, which quite a lot of scientists don't take
01:03:07.400
the trouble to do. And I think it's really important. That's very kind of you. Look, I've
01:03:13.340
gotten, I mean, I don't know how many, thousands and thousands of emails from people who say, you know
01:03:18.720
what, I decided to go back to school and study evolutionary psychology, because I saw you talking
01:03:26.340
about it with such passion on show XYZ. I mean, that's influenced too. So I think you were being
01:03:33.680
a bit modest earlier when you said, well, I think I kind of contributed some valuable. No, I think you
01:03:38.840
probably contributed more than most. Like you, I've had many people come up to me and say, I read The Red
01:03:43.440
Queen, or I read Genome, and as a result, I decided to become a biologist or a medic or something.
01:03:48.360
And it's a terrible responsibility. You know, you've changed this person's career.
01:03:51.660
All right, let me ask you one other question. But of course, I would love to keep you for hours with
01:03:57.540
me. This is a question that I've sort of, I'm asking more often now. And it stems from the fact
01:04:03.880
that in my last, my latest book, my previous book, it was a book on happiness. And towards the end of the
01:04:10.160
book, I talk about, you know, living a life as much as possible without having any regrets, right? And so I
01:04:18.900
there refer to, in a sense, you already discussed one type of regret from your recent, from your
01:04:25.240
career where, oh, I regret that I didn't make my own unique contributions in science. So one of my
01:04:31.040
former psychology professors in my PhD, his name is Thomas Gilovich, he, I mean, he didn't pioneer the
01:04:37.240
idea, but he certainly pioneered the empirical investigation of the idea. He argued that there
01:04:41.820
are two sources of regret. There is regret due to action and regret due to inaction. So regret due to
01:04:47.980
action would be, I regret that I cheated on my wife, and now my marriage is gone. And I regret that
01:04:53.380
regret due to inaction would be, you know, I always wanted to be an ornithologist. But you know, my
01:04:59.200
parents didn't think that that's a serious career. And so I became a physician. But now I sit here at 60
01:05:04.160
years old. And I wish I could have pursued the path that I didn't take. Now, it probably doesn't
01:05:10.200
surprise you, Matt, to know that over the long term, the regret that looms most in people's psyche is
01:05:17.960
the one of the road not taken, the regret due to inaction. So if I were to turn that question to
01:05:24.860
you and say, hopefully, you've got many, many more years to live. But if I asked you right now,
01:05:30.320
go back in your life. And if you can share with us what might be the biggest regret. And let's test
01:05:35.680
the theory as to whether it's due to inaction or action. Well, I remember, I think I think my mother
01:05:43.740
saying to me, when I was young, you regret the things you don't do more than the things you do
01:05:49.420
do. So and that really rang a bell, actually, you know, if, if I, I've done things that I've,
01:05:58.240
that were a mistake, you know, that have ended up either being no fun or backfiring on me and so on.
01:06:06.380
And there are, you know, so, but but you don't on the whole dwell on them and think, I wish I'd
01:06:14.940
never done that. You know, you say, well, I learned from experience, and at least I gave it a try and
01:06:19.060
that kind of thing. Whereas the, you know, turning down the chance to go somewhere or see someone or
01:06:25.660
it, it, it lodges in the back of your head and you think, ah, why didn't I just make the effort
01:06:31.980
to do that? Um, uh, it, it, it, it's, I don't have much regret. I mean, I, the, I think I tell you
01:06:46.720
probably my most regretful decision was to, to do a PhD on bird behavior rather than on genomics.
01:06:55.660
Because I had done a lot of genomics as an undergraduate, because I, my tutor was a,
01:07:01.480
you know, and he was going on and on about what an exciting time this was, because, you know,
01:07:06.240
the genome hadn't yet been sequenced, but, you know, we were beginning to discover all these
01:07:12.160
extraordinary mechanisms inside the genome transfer. RNA was quite new and things like that,
01:07:17.460
you know, so really almost in at the beginning of the, you know, the most extraordinary episode.
01:07:25.220
And why did I go off into a topic where there were no particularly
01:07:29.520
brilliant new opportunities? It was just more of the same rather than, you know, and I think it was
01:07:38.080
mainly because I, you know, I wanted to be in the outdoors. I didn't want to be stuck in a lab and
01:07:41.620
things like that, which is not a good reason. So I, I wish I'd become a molecular biologist,
01:07:47.740
geneticist, um, for my PhD. And then goodness knows what might've happened. Now, to some extent,
01:07:53.040
I put that right, because when the human genome project got going, I suddenly had this thought
01:08:03.120
in my head, the human species is about to become the first species on planet earth to read its own
01:08:10.760
recipe in four, four billion years. I'm alive at this time. I want a ringside seat. I don't want to
01:08:19.560
let someone else have all the fun of this. I want to be there. I want to be in the room where it
01:08:25.060
happens. How do I do that? I know I'll write a book. And I wrote genome, which was at the time,
01:08:33.580
I think it's still probably my bestselling book. Um, and it, and it enabled me to be there talking to
01:08:42.660
people within the human genome project, but also people who were beginning to think about what,
01:08:47.580
what the implications of genomics would be. Um, uh, and, and it was, uh, uh, you know, so,
01:08:56.200
so I put that right, but had I done that from a base of having a PhD in genetics rather than just
01:09:02.520
evolutionary biology, I think maybe it would have been even better, but then I'd have missed out on
01:09:06.340
all the fun of being able to write about birds. I was just going to say as a means of swatching that
01:09:11.800
regret, you probably would not have written the current book, uh, had you been some boring
01:09:17.400
molecular geneticist. So thank you for making, in my view, the correct choice. Hey, Matt, can you
01:09:22.980
remind us? I don't know if you've got, I don't have a physical copy of your book. I think they sent it
01:09:27.180
to me at the university. I'm going to hold one up. Yeah. Bring one up so we can promote it. Uh,
01:09:31.860
let's do that. Yes. Yeah. I should have, should have had it in the background all along. Shouldn't
01:09:36.620
I? I'm not very good at these things. Yes. This is the black grouse. There it is. That's the black
01:09:42.860
grouse. And it's a photograph that I took of a bird on a lek a few, um, last year, I think it was all
01:09:49.920
the year before. And, uh, um, it's a closeup of these extraordinary fleshy red things on their head
01:09:56.820
and the blue color of the feathers are on the neck. Um, and its neck is very swollen because
01:10:02.360
it's producing this ruckooing sound, a sort of bubbling sound that they make when they, when
01:10:06.940
they're singing. Um, so it's a, it's a, it's a beautiful and remarkable bird and rather a rare
01:10:12.380
one and getting rarer. So all the more important to, uh, to, to, um, celebrate it. Well, so I'm glad
01:10:20.120
just as we wrap up, number one, I'm glad to have had you back on for the third time. I'm glad
01:10:24.940
that I corrected the wrong of not having brought you on for viral. That's been eating away at me.
01:10:32.480
I've been regretting that. So we've hopefully ticked that off. Uh, well, my one, my wonderful
01:10:37.860
coauthor Alina Chan was the real hero of that book. So you should have her on as well. I would love to
01:10:44.280
have her on as well. Please, uh, connect us. Thank you so much for coming back on. I look forward to
01:10:49.340
your fourth appearance on the statue. Stay on the line so we could say goodbye offline. Thank you so much
01:10:54.340
for coming on the show, Matt and best of luck with the book. Thank you, Gad. It's been very kind of