The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Dr. Matt Ridley - Birds, Sex & Beauty - Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_812)

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,

00:00:14.340 although it should have been the fourth time and we'll talk about it in a second.

00:00:17.700 Welcome, Matt. How are you doing?

00:00:19.660 I'm doing great. It's wonderful to be with you. And the things you're achieving are remarkable.

00:00:25.880 Oh, you're too kind. So first let me mention the latest book, which just came out two days ago,

00:00:33.820 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

00:00:46.400 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 0.82

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

00:01:31.340 this would probably be 2021, I think. So in the height of the COVID hysteria and censorship and so

00:01:37.480 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

00:01:49.820 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

00:02:32.400 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

00:02:45.180 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

00:02:56.260 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

00:03:15.620 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.

00:03:34.780 The Chinese authorities would love it to be the market. They initially said it was the market.

00:03:41.060 They now say it wasn't. They say it got their own frozen lobsters from Maine or something,

00:03:45.600 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

00:04:31.400 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

00:04:44.820 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

00:05:21.740 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

00:06:34.260 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.

00:07:12.300 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

00:07:17.040 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,

00:08:54.060 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?

00:09:16.220 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, 1.00

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.

00:09:53.980 So that's literally what you just told me.

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 1.00

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, 0.96

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 1.00

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.

00:19:46.220 Yes. I wish I was a bird.

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 1.00

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 1.00

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, 0.98

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, 0.95

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. 1.00

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 0.97

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 0.57

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 0.90

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 0.58

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, 1.00

00:35:00.960 Professor Saad, to think that the human mind, what makes us human is that we transcend our biology. 0.99

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 0.99

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 0.98

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? 0.97

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 0.99

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 1.00

00:39:37.660 attention to me.

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 0.87

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 1.00

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 0.95

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 1.00

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 0.98

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 0.98

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 0.85

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

00:47:28.380 subjects I tackle in the book.

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? 1.00

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 0.55

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. 0.95

00:53:54.600 Yeah. Henry Kissinger had a German accent all his life. His younger brother, Walter, did not.

00:53:59.320 He sounded like an American.

00:54:00.240 Beautiful. Exactly.

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, 1.00

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

00:57:26.460 the name of Misho. So there you go.

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

00:57:41.980 sexes.

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 0.92

01:02:32.420 argumentation, such a beautiful framework, to justify this hypothesis, and then we cast the die, 0.96

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 1.00

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

01:10:59.120 you to share, to have me on the show. Cheers.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - March 27, 2025

Dr. Matt Ridley - Birds, Sex & Beauty - Charles Darwin's Strangest Idea (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_812)

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript