Speaker 1: Hi everyone.
Speaker 2: Chuck here on a Saturday to introduce this week's select episode,
Speaker 2: a curated best of, and this is all about old
Speaker 2: Chucky Darwin. It's called How Charles Darwin Worked. He's a
Speaker 2: great person, had a lot of great ideas, and it's
Speaker 2: pretty groundbreaking stuff. So I hope you guys enjoyed listening
Speaker 2: to this one, either for the first time or all
Speaker 2: over again. Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production
Speaker 2: of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and
Speaker 3: there's Charles w Chuck Bryant. So this is stuff you
Speaker 3: should know. That's right, unless I forget. Jerry's over there.
Speaker 1: She's over there.
Speaker 3: You know, we went like five years. I went five
Speaker 3: years of this podcast with just mentioning us once in
Speaker 3: a while mentioning Jerry. But I mean, like, I can't
Speaker 3: imagine the podcast without Jerry too. Now after five years, finally,
Speaker 3: I'm like, I guess she should stay on.
Speaker 1: She's earned her place.
Speaker 3: Yeah, at least she keeps quiet.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 3: How you doing.
Speaker 1: I'm great.
Speaker 3: How are you I'm good? Yeah, I'm like low key calm,
Speaker 3: I'm fine.
Speaker 1: That's good. I'm a little smelly, which we talked about.
Speaker 3: I know, but you keep talking about it, which makes
Speaker 3: the smell worse.
Speaker 2: What is it about someone's own special sweet tang of
Speaker 2: a scent that they're.
Speaker 3: Drawn to like you're drawn to your own tang? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Man, everyone I think like secretly smells their own shoe
Speaker 2: and their own armpits when they get a little ripe.
Speaker 3: Maybe we all deep down want to mate with ourselves.
Speaker 1: Maybe so that's not true because I'm disgusted with myself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I see you looking at your armpit, eyeing
Speaker 3: it like that. I know what two on do to
Speaker 3: that thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I've slipped out twice to day just to smell them.
Speaker 3: There's a little on your notes.
Speaker 1: Gross.
Speaker 3: Uh so, Chuck, you're doing good. I'm doing good. We'll
Speaker 3: just assume Jerry's doing good. And we're all doing good
Speaker 3: because we're fairly fit. You know why we're fit, Because
Speaker 3: we're alive. We are evolving as we speak. We are
Speaker 3: part of this huge, long, natural procession of change forced
Speaker 3: by scarcity, competition, the ravages of nature, and we as
Speaker 3: humans have climbed to the top of the food pyramid
Speaker 3: of the evolutionary chain and said we own this planet.
Speaker 3: That's why we're doing good today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's one of my most favorite notions.
Speaker 3: Evolution.
Speaker 1: Yeah, natural selection.
Speaker 2: I think it's like one of the most beautiful things
Speaker 2: that we've been able to figure out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, evolution gets all the spot like. I'm a big
Speaker 3: natural selection fan myself too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, so divergence. That stuff turns me on that
Speaker 2: and your smell intellectually.
Speaker 3: So let's talk about this. You can't have evolution without
Speaker 3: natural selection again, even though evolution gets all the spotlight. Yeah,
Speaker 3: at the very least, there's no evolution on Earth without
Speaker 3: natural selection, right, And the idea of natural selection of
Speaker 3: evolution in general, the idea that God didn't create everything
Speaker 3: exactly the way we see it now is a fairly
Speaker 3: recent notion, despite how tremendously widespread it is. You know
Speaker 3: Bill Nye, the science guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, are you talking about his debate?
Speaker 3: Yeah, he got in a debate with ken Ham, just
Speaker 3: totally off the cuff, not planned at all. They just
Speaker 3: both happened to be in the same auditorium. I watched
Speaker 3: the whole thing, did you the whole two hours?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Man, I couldn't pull myself away from it.
Speaker 3: So I'm guessing that you suspect Bill Nye won the debate.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, are there winners and losers.
Speaker 3: So don't be shy. There are. Okay, there is a
Speaker 3: British religious website that pulled its its guests. Yeah, because
Speaker 3: you know, people who go to websites are called guests.
Speaker 1: But in England there and said who won?
Speaker 3: And I think ninety two percent said Bill Nye won?
Speaker 3: And the reason why is because in the comment section
Speaker 3: it was revealed that most of these people said, yeah,
Speaker 3: we believe in God, but evolution is still real and
Speaker 3: to deny evolution outright is pretty silly.
Speaker 1: I think when you say things like dragons, you might
Speaker 1: lose people.
Speaker 3: Did he say dragons? I didn't see it. Yeah, he
Speaker 3: mentioned dragons.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean that's some people. And like you said,
Speaker 2: religion and science co exist for a lot of religious folk.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, but there are some that are very literal
Speaker 2: and strict in say that you know how to explain
Speaker 2: dinosaurs while they may have been.
Speaker 3: Dragons, gotcha, And I don't. That doesn't explain anything. Then, well,
Speaker 3: I think the dragons are in the Bible. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: If I'm getting this wrong, I'm going to really get killed.
Speaker 3: We should pause you for a second. Yeah, Like the
Speaker 3: point of this episode is not to stomp on anybody's beliefs.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 3: I think science can be just as dogmatic as religion. Sure, so,
Speaker 3: like that's not what we're doing. No, Like, if you
Speaker 3: believe in creationism, to each his own, Like, we're not
Speaker 3: gonna pound our beliefs into you or you know, vice versa.
Speaker 3: I've never understood that, Like who cares? Just right, it's
Speaker 3: postuletizing either way. Yeah, you know, it's like convert to
Speaker 3: my way of thinking, yeah, or else you are just
Speaker 3: so wrong it's mind boggling. Yeah, but that's not the
Speaker 3: point of this. No. I think we should just see
Speaker 3: away with that because that's not what we're Like. There's
Speaker 3: some people who don't always listen, maybe this is their
Speaker 3: first episode. Welcome. We are not those kind of guys.
Speaker 2: No, And specifically with this episode, it's on Charles Darwin
Speaker 2: the man right and kind of what made him who
Speaker 2: he was not? And we'll tackle are we committing to
Speaker 2: go ahead and doing natural selection?
Speaker 3: I think we shall to pair with this. As a
Speaker 3: matter of fact, we'll have this one come on on
Speaker 3: a Tuesday. We'll do natural selection on a Thursday.
Speaker 1: At that, all right, I agree, let's do it.
Speaker 3: Let there be like.
Speaker 2: But Darwin was a fascinating dude though, so yeah, which
Speaker 2: his own show.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because you can't really overstate the idea that he was,
Speaker 3: As Robert Lamb puts in this fine article, I have
Speaker 3: to say one of his best. I agreed that Charles
Speaker 3: Darwin was the fulcrum by which, or on which the
Speaker 3: entire sea change from a religious worldview to a scientific
Speaker 3: worldview took place. It was on this man's shoulders.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Even though oddly enough, he wasn't the only person to
Speaker 3: come up with natural selection.
Speaker 1: No, and we'll get to that. He wasn't the first
Speaker 1: or the last.
Speaker 2: But it turns out he was the most thorough in
Speaker 2: his research.
Speaker 3: Right, and had the most social breeding.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And inbreeding.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, this is the ultimate ease.
Speaker 3: It is. So let's get started, Chuck, Let's talk about Darwin.
Speaker 3: He didn't. He wasn't born with a Bunsen burner in
Speaker 3: a flask in his hand.
Speaker 1: No, he was not.
Speaker 2: He was born, if anything, with a stethoscope in his hand.
Speaker 2: Because his father, doctor Robert Waring Darwin, had designs on
Speaker 2: little Chuck being a doctor like him, right, because he
Speaker 2: was you know, they had some dough that he was
Speaker 2: an English gentleman. They weren't poor by any means.
Speaker 3: No, Apparently his grandfather a massed of vast fortune in China,
Speaker 3: and not the country, but the porcelain.
Speaker 2: Oh really yeah, interesting, So it'd be incorrect to say
Speaker 2: he had a Chinese fortune.
Speaker 3: He had a China fortune, okay.
Speaker 2: But little Chuck was not into anatomy. He was definitely
Speaker 2: not into surgery on humans. It freaked him out. I
Speaker 2: think he was a little queasy as a person.
Speaker 3: It seems like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he was way into the natural sciences and
Speaker 2: was just fine with dissecting a frog.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, he was cool with biology. As long
Speaker 3: as you weren't human, he'd cut you, that's right.
Speaker 2: So he was sent to several schools, first when he
Speaker 2: was going to be a doctor, to the Anglican Shrewsbury School,
Speaker 2: then to Edinburgh University, and finally his dad was like,
Speaker 2: all right, you don't want to be a doctor, so
Speaker 2: the only other option for you is to be a
Speaker 2: man of religion.
Speaker 3: Yeah, parson in the country.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'm going to send you to christ College
Speaker 1: in Cambridge.
Speaker 3: Which is I mean, if you're going to go be
Speaker 3: a country parson. You could do a lot worse, agreed.
Speaker 3: You know, the fighting padres.
Speaker 1: Is that there go padres.
Speaker 2: So he was very well educated and had been exposed
Speaker 2: to all kinds of science, so he was he was
Speaker 2: a very smart guy from early on, and way into
Speaker 2: natural science, like I said, but not into the religion
Speaker 2: thing as much. He was agnostic from a pretty early age.
Speaker 3: Right, and he seemed like he was going to follow
Speaker 3: the path that his father was laying out for him,
Speaker 3: I guess it. Anyway, he was very domineering. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: Charles Darwin was a pretty great thinker, pretty all around
Speaker 3: good guy. But he also was a bit of a
Speaker 3: panting waste. It seems like, you know, he was like
Speaker 3: really really affected by stress. Site. He had a lot
Speaker 3: of psychosomatic symptoms from stress pretty much throughout his whole life.
Speaker 3: Despite that, though, he took a very brave course in life.
Speaker 3: And it started when he was twenty one and he
Speaker 3: was on his way to becoming that country parson that
Speaker 3: his father had decided he would be, and he got
Speaker 3: an invitation to go on a tour of the islands
Speaker 3: off South America from a guy named Robert Fitzroy who
Speaker 3: was twenty six years old. He was an aristocrat and
Speaker 3: he liked Darwin. He said, hey, you're good at conversations.
Speaker 3: When I get bored, I suffer abouts of depression. I'm
Speaker 3: about to go on this boat called the HIMS Beagle
Speaker 3: for god knows how long. So why don't you come
Speaker 3: along and we can chat and I won't get depressed.
Speaker 3: And Darwin said, you know what, what, let's do this.
Speaker 3: That's right, which is a that's a pretty bold move.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was for someone who was a would you say,
Speaker 2: a panty waste, Yeah, panty waste.
Speaker 1: It's sort of surprising that he was up for that
Speaker 1: kind of adventure.
Speaker 3: Yes, a milk toast. You could also call him a
Speaker 3: milk toast. Maybe we'll call him that, all right. Uh
Speaker 3: So this was an eighteen thirty one.
Speaker 2: He boarded the HMS Beagle, which I, for some reason
Speaker 2: just cracks me up.
Speaker 3: You know, our buddy Joe from Forward Thinking just adopted
Speaker 3: a dog. It's part beagle and his name's Darwin. Huh
Speaker 3: because of that association, I would imagine, Yeah, that would
Speaker 3: And Joe said he looks like Darwin head on, like
Speaker 3: bushy eyebrows.
Speaker 2: That's funny, all right. So he boarded the HMS Beagle.
Speaker 2: What'd you say, how old was he?
Speaker 1: Twenty one?
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they.
Speaker 2: Took a five year voyage around South America. The purpose
Speaker 2: for Fitzroy was to chart the waters of South America,
Speaker 2: the coastlines and that kind of thing. But Chuck was like,
Speaker 2: I'm into natural stuff and species that I don't know,
Speaker 2: So what better thing to do than spend like most
Speaker 2: of my time not on the boat but on land
Speaker 2: just researching stuff.
Speaker 3: I'm sure he got pretty good at rowing. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: from the ship too, shore back and forth. Yeah. He
Speaker 3: was basically Paul Bettany's character and master and commander.
Speaker 2: Well, which is ironic because Paul Bettany play Charles Darwin.
Speaker 2: Did he really in that movie Creation?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I never saw that, but I know what
Speaker 3: you're talking about.
Speaker 1: That's funny. You'd had no idea.
Speaker 3: Huh No, you stepped right into that one. I wonder
Speaker 3: if he recognized that.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: It's a good movie, that Creation, You should check it out.
Speaker 2: Details a lot of the struggles of his life that
Speaker 2: we're going to go over here, and mainly is about
Speaker 2: his anxieties of what he was doing in his relationship
Speaker 2: to his Christian wife.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I'll bet that was kind of a sore
Speaker 3: spot big time. We'll get to that now in a second.
Speaker 3: So okay, So they head off to South America. Yes,
Speaker 3: he's spending two thirds of the voyage. Of this five
Speaker 3: year voyage, he spends on land. One of the most
Speaker 3: famous places he visited was the Galapagos, which are still around.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that apparently was really overstated. He was only, uh,
Speaker 2: what it's still around?
Speaker 1: Is that a joke?
Speaker 3: The Galapagos they're still around?
Speaker 1: Okay. I thought I was missing on something because you
Speaker 1: looked at me like you're missing a joke.
Speaker 3: No, that's this look.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, what was that one? Is you smell?
Speaker 3: Yeah? That was my eyes of water.
Speaker 2: So the Galapagos apparently was a little overstated significance wise.
Speaker 2: He was only there for about five weeks out of
Speaker 2: the five years, and historians think it's been overstated because
Speaker 2: it was so exotic and people wanted to point to
Speaker 2: some like kind of fantastical birthplace of all these ideas.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it stuck.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean for sure, and he you know, collected
Speaker 2: all kinds of different specimens from the Galapagos, but it
Speaker 2: wasn't as big a deal.
Speaker 3: Have you ever seen the size of the turtles there are?
Speaker 3: The tortoises are the huge, dude, They're like the size
Speaker 3: of VWBO. They're enormous, crazy and apparently like they'll hang
Speaker 3: out with you.
Speaker 1: What else are they going to do? Run away slowly?
Speaker 3: Okay? Yeah, they have no choice, they have agency. They
Speaker 3: could be like I don't want to be here around you,
Speaker 3: I'm going to go this way. They just it wouldn't
Speaker 3: work very well or very quickly. Yeah, okay, so where
Speaker 3: are we? Man? We are?
Speaker 1: I was just poopooing the Galapagos. Yeah.
Speaker 2: But what he did while he was gone was he
Speaker 2: did a lot of great work and made a real
Speaker 2: name for himself and kind of came back a well
Speaker 2: known scientist.
Speaker 3: Scientist because the whole time he's making all these findings,
Speaker 3: he's finding new species of animals that like Europeans didn't
Speaker 3: even know existed, Like entire types of animals. He's sending
Speaker 3: back specimens, which means he killed a lot of animals
Speaker 3: while he was on these islands. Yeah, mailed them back
Speaker 3: to Europe, mailed back some of his findings. He's basically
Speaker 3: writing papers as he's doing this this journey, so back
Speaker 3: in the jolly Old England there basically becomes this celebrity. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and he was, you know, like before he even returned. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he was.
Speaker 2: Looking at he had the idea of natural selection, but
Speaker 2: it was, like we said, it was already out there.
Speaker 2: It was known as the Mystery of Mysteries or transmutation.
Speaker 2: And he called his his research at first the Transmutation Notebooks.
Speaker 3: So is that right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, he wasn't, you know, He's researching stuff that he
Speaker 2: had heard about.
Speaker 3: It was a working title.
Speaker 2: It was a working title actually what would later become
Speaker 2: On the Origin of the Species, of course.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And he and another guy will talk about a
Speaker 3: little bit, were also inspired. Both were inspired by Thomas Malthus,
Speaker 3: who we've talked about, who came up with the idea
Speaker 3: of caring capacity and basically introduced the idea that scarcity
Speaker 3: and competition forces adaptation and change. And then Darwin and
Speaker 3: the guy Alfred Wallace Russell or Alfred Russell Wallace both
Speaker 3: read this and said, well, wait a minute, I wonder
Speaker 3: if that adaptation and change that's forced by scarcity is
Speaker 3: what creates the change in species that we're seeing here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was definitely the book was called Essay on
Speaker 2: Principle of Population and that was like a super game
Speaker 2: changer because it really gave him like the notion that
Speaker 2: by studying any species death you can kind of study
Speaker 2: its life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it was it wasn't just biology that it
Speaker 3: gave rise to. It gave rise to economics largely. Yeah,
Speaker 3: a lot of anthropology, a lot of ecology. Like it was,
Speaker 3: like you say, a game changer.
Speaker 2: Thomas mouthis, go back and listen to our population podcast.
Speaker 3: Is that where he appears.
Speaker 2: I think he appears a few times, But that was
Speaker 2: a good one. Yeah, it's an oldie, but a goodie. So,
Speaker 2: like we said, he came back sort of a celebrity
Speaker 2: of sorts, and he came back with a lot of
Speaker 2: information and settled in at the Downhouse in Kent, and
Speaker 2: this place was he spent the next forty years there
Speaker 2: studying his property essentially, like he didn't need to go anywhere.
Speaker 2: He had plenty of nature there. Apparently there were forty
Speaker 2: different species per square meter on his property.
Speaker 1: He had ten kids and he.
Speaker 2: Used them as sort of a little laboratory experiment because
Speaker 2: three of them died. And he was fascinated with why
Speaker 2: things and people survive and some don't. So it was
Speaker 2: all sort of part of his It was just everything
Speaker 2: was part of his laboratory.
Speaker 1: Essentially.
Speaker 2: He had people sending him samples from all over the world,
Speaker 2: and there are some theories that if the postal service
Speaker 2: hadn't have been so good, he may have never been
Speaker 2: able to write Origin of the species because he relied
Speaker 2: on people sending him stuff in due time.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and also he was really big on corresponding,
Speaker 3: which to help develop his his ideas, flesh him out
Speaker 3: even further. Was he was huge on correspondence.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: He had an area on his property called the Sandwalk
Speaker 2: that he had built. It was basically just a loop
Speaker 2: path through the woods and he would just spend like
Speaker 2: countless hours just walking this path and thinking and looking
Speaker 2: at everything.
Speaker 3: Everything right, nothing escaped his eyes. One of his favorite
Speaker 3: subjects was earthworms. Remember our Earthworm podcast. Yeah, there was
Speaker 3: a quote from him in there where he said, it
Speaker 3: may be doubted whether there are many other animals which
Speaker 3: have played so important a part in the history of
Speaker 3: the world as these lowly organized creatures. So he was
Speaker 3: down with earthworms, down with earth worms and orchids very
Speaker 3: famously too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was he was active. He wasn't just looking
Speaker 1: at things.
Speaker 2: He raised orchids, He was a beekeeper, he raised pigeons, and.
Speaker 1: Like it was all just in the name of study, right.
Speaker 3: One of the things though, he married his first cousin,
Speaker 3: his wife. Yeah, and at the time they didn't really
Speaker 3: know much about the troubles with inbreeding, and he was
Speaker 3: one of the people who discovered the troubles with inbreeding,
Speaker 3: and it apparently had a really big effect on him,
Speaker 3: Like he felt kind of guilty and weird and wondered
Speaker 3: if maybe his kid's early deaths had to do with that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: which has to be kind of startling if you're the
Speaker 3: guy who discovers the problems with inbreeding and you've imbred, Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, Yeah, it's got to be a little jarring.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 2: Emma Wedgwood was his wife's maid name. And one thing
Speaker 2: that happened when he married her was he got more
Speaker 2: money because she was also in the family fortune. Right,
Speaker 2: So they were set up pretty nicely. And like I said,
Speaker 2: she was Christian and she was amazing though, like the
Speaker 2: Creation movie really like it's a great love story despite
Speaker 2: the fact that they had he was Agnostic and she
Speaker 2: was Christian. She spent her life caring for him because
Speaker 2: he was a very sickly man. Yeah, may have had
Speaker 2: some sort of viral disease. His entire life is maybe
Speaker 2: that he picked up in South America.
Speaker 3: So he wasn't a pennywys.
Speaker 1: No, he was a penny waste on top of that kid.
Speaker 2: So he was just fraught with anxiety, and she cared
Speaker 2: for him and all the kids, and her life's worry
Speaker 2: was are we going to spend eternity together in the afterlife?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was her big concern. Yeah. Which he didn't
Speaker 1: buy that stuff.
Speaker 3: No, And he was, you know, religious ish when he
Speaker 3: was younger, but as he grew older and the lord
Speaker 3: and atheist. No, the more he exposed himself to these
Speaker 3: ideas of evolution and natural selection, the less religious, the
Speaker 3: less he bought into it. And it's funny that that
Speaker 3: divide first occurred in him and then it just kind
Speaker 3: of grew out from him to create this divide throughout
Speaker 3: the world. Yeah, he was the epicenter of that. It first,
Speaker 3: that crack in the world first appeared in him. Yeah,
Speaker 3: isn't that interesting? Yeah, for sure, he's the one to
Speaker 3: blame pretty much, or he was a patient zero one
Speaker 3: of the two. So he comes back to downhouse, he
Speaker 3: gets married, settles down doubles his fortune by marrying Emma,
Speaker 3: and is experimenting with orchids, earthworms, bees, his kids, all
Speaker 3: this stuff. And he's also at the same time writing.
Speaker 3: He's expanding that notebook into what he's calling natural selection,
Speaker 3: another working title, and he is taking his sweet time
Speaker 3: with it. One of the reasons he's taking his sweet
Speaker 3: time with this is one he is being very diligent.
Speaker 3: He's making sure he's crossing all of his te's, dotting
Speaker 3: his eyes, making sure he's not looking at it wrong,
Speaker 3: making sure he's backing up everything. And the second connected
Speaker 3: reason to that first one is that he is really
Speaker 3: not looking forward to the storm yea that this is
Speaker 3: going to create when he unleashes it on the public.
Speaker 3: He was well aware of it from the beginning. Yeah,
Speaker 3: because there's a couple of things that are inherent in
Speaker 3: the theory of natural selection.
Speaker 1: I'm going to add a third reason, my friend.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, if you're studying natural selection, evolution takes a
Speaker 2: long time. Well, oh yeah, you can't study something for
Speaker 2: a week and detect changes. And like you said, he
Speaker 2: was thorough because he lived his life basically an anxiety
Speaker 2: of not being accepted by these peers, right, and like
Speaker 2: these were people, these were friends of his.
Speaker 3: So his procrastination was definitely fear driven by his peers
Speaker 3: and by society at large.
Speaker 2: And by the fact that it just takes a long
Speaker 2: time to study something like this, right right. For instance,
Speaker 2: he left an area of his lawn unmowed for twenty
Speaker 2: years just to study what would happen.
Speaker 3: And out of like that sounds like an excuse now, exactly.
Speaker 2: There, But out of like the twenty different species he studied,
Speaker 2: eleven survived and nine died away. So boom, natural selection
Speaker 2: right there, just in a portion of his lawn, right, Okay,
Speaker 2: But it took twenty years as the point.
Speaker 3: Okay, so time, fear of his peers, fear of the public.
Speaker 3: And he had good reason to fear or be anxious
Speaker 3: because the world was a much different place than it
Speaker 3: is now, and he was well aware that what he
Speaker 3: was about to unleash on society was going to create
Speaker 3: some big changes and some big problems. And we'll get
Speaker 3: into that right after this message. And so, Chuck, we're
Speaker 3: talking about Darwin. He's at his house downhouse he's working
Speaker 3: on his manuscript. He's kind of procrastinating a little bit,
Speaker 3: and because it takes time to but he knows that
Speaker 3: he's about to unleash this complete change in paradigm, a
Speaker 3: poopstorm onto the world exactly. And it's because the world
Speaker 3: was a much different place than it is today because
Speaker 3: Darwin hadn't talked about natural selection yet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean religion religious biology was biology, right, They
Speaker 2: didn't call it religious biology, that was just biology.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So he was the first one to secularize it and
Speaker 2: make it just about the science.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because before scientists thought like, well, God created this
Speaker 3: and that is our starting point. Like everything else, every
Speaker 3: other scientific explanation we have has to trace back to creation,
Speaker 3: which is kind of It can make science a little
Speaker 3: but at the same time, it leaves you open to
Speaker 3: a huge problem when somebody comes along and can fill
Speaker 3: in all these other gaps through a completely different explanation
Speaker 3: that doesn't use creationism. And that's what darn was doing
Speaker 3: with natural selection.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead, and not a fourth thing, man.
Speaker 3: You just keep them coming.
Speaker 2: There were two texts that were vital, and we talked
Speaker 2: about one of them, The mouthus principle of population.
Speaker 1: In eighteen forty four, there was a book written.
Speaker 2: Called The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and
Speaker 2: it was published anonymously for forty years. No one kne
Speaker 2: who wrote it because no one wanted to put their
Speaker 2: name on it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like that's how radical it was.
Speaker 2: And it was slammed, like it was hugely popular. It
Speaker 2: was like a phenomenon, Like everybody read it and everybody
Speaker 2: slammed it, and it came out later. It was a
Speaker 2: guy named Robert Chambers. He was a Scottish journalist. But
Speaker 2: what Darwitz scared the crow out of Darwin there was
Speaker 2: like mother, Yeah, because it was mom. It was a
Speaker 2: lot of the same same ideas as he had. So
Speaker 2: what it did was it caused him to basically rewrite
Speaker 2: his voluminous work and pare it down and armor it
Speaker 2: with sturdier armor over the next thirteen months.
Speaker 1: Smart, very smart.
Speaker 3: I mean you could say for him that that was
Speaker 3: a stroke of luck that that was published and he
Speaker 3: read it and saw what happened.
Speaker 1: Dude, total stroke of luck.
Speaker 2: He might have been laughed out of existence, Yeah, if
Speaker 2: he had have gotten there first.
Speaker 3: So he goes back, redoubles his efforts strengthens his argument. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and again he's combating not just the religious ideals of
Speaker 3: the time, but the religious ideals of science. Yeah, like
Speaker 3: most scientists at the time were deists. When deists believed
Speaker 3: that God created the universe basically like a clockmaker makes
Speaker 3: a clock, wound it up and walked away like see
Speaker 3: you later, good luck with everything, And then anything that
Speaker 3: happened as a result after that was the result of
Speaker 3: the mechinations of this clock. And there was a theory
Speaker 3: that was fairly well accepted called catastrophism, Yes, and that
Speaker 3: basically sought to account fossils, because fossils were a big
Speaker 3: sticking point. Why were there clearly extinct animals that had
Speaker 3: lived before there's fossils, we have them in our hands.
Speaker 3: Why do these kind of resemble the things that are
Speaker 3: alive today. Yes, that doesn't make any sense. Well, catastrophism
Speaker 3: which was suggested by a guy named George Cuvier, and
Speaker 3: Cuvier said that catastrophism, which.
Speaker 1: One I like the second one catastrophism.
Speaker 3: Catastrophism says that something happens volcanoes, floods, pestilence, something very
Speaker 3: biblical happens and a species dies out in an area
Speaker 3: and a new species comes in and fills it in,
Speaker 3: and maybe that species just from living in proximity, was similar.
Speaker 3: And they that that explains why some are extinct and
Speaker 3: some are now here.
Speaker 1: I would also call that coincidences.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's another way to put it. That's another pronunciation.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like super science based.
Speaker 3: Right, but this is these like these. This was a
Speaker 3: well respected scientist, and this was the prevailing thought at
Speaker 3: the time that creationism and the natural sciences went hand
Speaker 3: in hand. Creationism was the basis for it. And Darwin
Speaker 3: is about to say, you know, the basis that everybody's
Speaker 3: built science on for the last several centuries. Yeah, it's
Speaker 3: not that's that doesn't hold water. And then he went
Speaker 3: and threw up again and again apparently a lot. Yeah.
Speaker 3: When his when on the Origin of the species came
Speaker 3: out in eighteen fifty nine, he was at a spa
Speaker 3: recovering from knowledge. Yeah, so, yeah, he was off throwing up.
Speaker 1: I felt bad for the guy. Sure, he was just
Speaker 1: racked with anxiety his entire life.
Speaker 3: But imagine that. Imagine being racked with anxiety and still
Speaker 3: going through it.
Speaker 2: It's pretty impressive. It is so previous to its publication.
Speaker 2: Another important thing happened we mentioned earlier. Alfred Russell Wallace.
Speaker 2: He was a fellow Englishman and specimen collector, and he
Speaker 2: basically wrote almost exactly the same thing that Darwin had
Speaker 2: been working on, sent it to Darwin, and people urged
Speaker 2: them both to present their works at something called the
Speaker 2: lenae In Society in eighteen fifty eight. They did so
Speaker 2: together as a team. But it wasn't it didn't kind
Speaker 2: of make much of a splash at the time. It
Speaker 2: wasn't until he officially published his work that it, you know,
Speaker 2: made the splash, right.
Speaker 3: And Alfred Alfred Russell Wallace actually was the impetus for
Speaker 3: him to publish Origin of the Species. He'd been sitting
Speaker 3: there dawdling, waiting, waiting, waiting, procrastinating, not mygage long, yeah,
Speaker 3: And he got a letter from Wallace, like you said,
Speaker 3: and he realized, holy cow, Wallace has come up with
Speaker 3: the same thing. I've been working on this for thirty years.
Speaker 3: I'm not gonna forget that, forget my anxiety. I'm just
Speaker 3: publishing this puppy. And he did, and it came out
Speaker 3: in eighteen fifty nine, and he was hailed as a
Speaker 3: villain and a genius, depending on who you spoke to.
Speaker 3: And let's talk about the origin of the species and
Speaker 3: what it says and what natural selection means Chuck. First
Speaker 3: of all, the official title of the book is on
Speaker 3: the Origin of Species by means of natural selection, or
Speaker 3: the preservation of favored races in the Struggle for life. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and that's why everybody calls the original species because it's
Speaker 3: long and wordy, right, But what it basically says is
Speaker 3: that species adapt. They adapt due to population pressure. They
Speaker 3: adapt through competition with one another between species inside species
Speaker 3: that when you see like slightly different traits, individual traits
Speaker 3: are to be expected. But those individual traits can ultimately
Speaker 3: lead to a new species on a long enough time
Speaker 3: table if those traits make their increase their chance of
Speaker 3: surviving to reproduction, age and enhance their ability to reproduce.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, And if you don't, if you aren't good
Speaker 2: at that, then you go bye bye.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: And this explains why some species are extinct, why the
Speaker 3: ones that are here today are the winners. And chillingly
Speaker 3: that all of this is still going on, it's very
Speaker 3: very slow, so we can't see it happens on a
Speaker 3: glacial timescale or geologic time scale. But it's still going on.
Speaker 3: And here's proof. The thing that he doesn't come out
Speaker 3: in state. But that wasn't lost on the Victorians, especially
Speaker 3: the religious victorians. Is that inherent in that argument is
Speaker 3: that man, the king of the world, is nothing more
Speaker 3: than an animal that evolved from who knows what.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I bet I bet he fretted over that so
Speaker 2: much because he believed it. But I think there are
Speaker 2: only two mentions of man kind in the entire work,
Speaker 2: But the implications were clear, Like the public at large
Speaker 2: may not have been wise to it at first, but
Speaker 2: scientists were like, wait a minute, are you saying that
Speaker 2: we came from from apes?
Speaker 3: He's like, I'm at a spa recovering from nausea. I
Speaker 3: can't be.
Speaker 2: But yeah, he definitely skirted around coming out and saying
Speaker 2: that upfront in plain English.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it caused, like you said, a poop storm.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I guess we should say Russell Wallace was.
Speaker 2: He's been sort of lost to history as far as
Speaker 2: you know what most people know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's sad.
Speaker 2: It is sad because he was a smart guy, but
Speaker 2: he wasn't He had no standing, like Darwin did, and
Speaker 2: that's kind of one of the reasons he was forgotten
Speaker 2: to history.
Speaker 3: Right. He he was out in the field, and he
Speaker 3: was he seemed to be happiest out in the field.
Speaker 3: After this this theory was introduced, he retreated back to
Speaker 3: the Melee Peninsula. Yeah, to collect specimens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he would sell them, which kind of degraded
Speaker 2: his standing, I think.
Speaker 3: Right, just but he was using those funds to further
Speaker 3: fund more scientific exploration, you know, It's not like he
Speaker 3: was funding his opium habit or no.
Speaker 2: But the point is Darwin didn't need to sell it,
Speaker 2: so I think he was. People were like, well, this
Speaker 2: guy's collecting species and selling them.
Speaker 3: He's a merchant, right, exactly, That's exactly right. And regardless
Speaker 3: of whether Wallace Russell was a you know, a great
Speaker 3: scientist or not, it didn't matter. If you put these
Speaker 3: two men and their theories were exactly equal, but one
Speaker 3: was of higher social standing and greater wealth, Well that
Speaker 3: guy won, sure, and that was Darwin. So Darwin became
Speaker 3: the fittest he will, exactly under Victorian aristocracy rules. But
Speaker 3: he became the again, the rallying point, the fulcrumb, the
Speaker 3: center of the universe and this new debate that he
Speaker 3: unleashed between creationism and evolution that's still going on today
Speaker 3: literally not today, but a couple of weeks ago, right,
Speaker 3: so almost literally, And he didn't like that at all.
Speaker 3: So what he said was, you know what, you guys
Speaker 3: talked this over. I'm gonna go hit the spa, yeah,
Speaker 3: and do what you want with it. Right, I'm going away.
Speaker 3: I've got alan to not mow. But lucky for him,
Speaker 3: he had a lot of supporters, like right out of
Speaker 3: the gate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he had both.
Speaker 2: He had supporters scientists that I think some wanted wanted
Speaker 2: to say this stuff all along, and now that they
Speaker 2: had such a wonderful, concise and well researched piece of
Speaker 2: work to back them up, they came out of the
Speaker 2: woodwork and like, yeah, see this is great. But some
Speaker 2: people weren't. In fact, I think, oh, I can't remember
Speaker 2: the guy's name. Someone he really respected and his wife
Speaker 2: really respected basically slammed him in called it heresy, and
Speaker 2: that was really impactful. Again more anxiety, oh yeah, more
Speaker 2: throwing up.
Speaker 3: And there was a lot of name calling. There was
Speaker 3: a lot of political cartoons that were unflattering and unflattering
Speaker 3: for the Victorian age, so basically his head on a
Speaker 3: monkey or something like that.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: But while he had his detractors, he had his supporters.
Speaker 3: And there was one guy in particular named Thomas Huxley,
Speaker 3: and he was I believe the grandfather of Aljuis Huxley.
Speaker 3: Uh huh. And sometimes you'll if you see Darwin's theory mentioned,
Speaker 3: you'll see the Darwin slash Huxley theory because Huxley basically
Speaker 3: was a religious man yea. And Darwin, I think firsthand,
Speaker 3: not just through the origin of the species, but through
Speaker 3: the correspondence as well, convinced him, like no, dude, natural
Speaker 3: selection is actually right, and very ironically, just like Saul
Speaker 3: converting to Paul on the Road to Damascus, Huxley converts
Speaker 3: from a religious fervent to a natural selection fervent. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and he just takes it with religious zelotry and starts
Speaker 3: taking on anybody he can in debate, writing any article
Speaker 3: he can, and defending not just Darwin but his his
Speaker 3: theory as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And it came so much so that he came to
Speaker 3: be known as Darwin's bulldog.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And he actually coined the term agnostic. Oh really, Yeah,
Speaker 3: he was the one that coined that term to differentiate
Speaker 3: people like himself who was who were still believers in
Speaker 3: God but also fervent believers in natural selection as well.
Speaker 1: Huh yeah, that's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: So that wasn't the only thing he wrote that was
Speaker 2: his life's work, for sure. But he wrote eleven more,
Speaker 2: published eleven more times before eighteen eighty two, and then
Speaker 2: finally in nineteen seventy three, which is pretty old for
Speaker 2: someone who was in such ill health his entire life.
Speaker 1: Sure, heart attack finally got him. Yeah, very sad.
Speaker 3: It is, but he lived a good long nausea did life.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: It's a good point. So I guess we should talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about.
Speaker 2: His legacy, right, Yeah, you do that kind of work,
Speaker 2: you pass away, you're gonna have a legacy.
Speaker 3: Sure, they name a city in Australia after you. Really,
Speaker 3: I believe it's Darwin, Australia. Please, guy, don't let it
Speaker 3: be New Zealand. You want to look No, Okay, I'm
Speaker 3: feeling like a gambling man.
Speaker 1: Today, gotcha.
Speaker 2: So his influence from then on and continues to be today.
Speaker 2: Lamb calls it rightfully, so a paradigm shift in science,
Speaker 2: society and literature, Like it can't be understated. It was
Speaker 2: a game changer for kind of everything and the way
Speaker 2: things went. You're on one side or the other.
Speaker 3: It's like meo water, it changes everything. What's that You
Speaker 3: haven't seen the ad?
Speaker 1: Uh?
Speaker 3: For like the little droplets of flavoring you can add
Speaker 3: to your water.
Speaker 1: I've seen that.
Speaker 3: So you haven't seen the ad where the guys in
Speaker 3: the office talking and like as you as they cut
Speaker 3: back and forth, everything keeps changing because they're adding meal.
Speaker 3: Oh it's one of the better ads around. And you
Speaker 3: know me, I'm an ad aficionado.
Speaker 1: That's true.
Speaker 2: Well, one thing we can point to is that Herbert Spencer,
Speaker 2: he was a sociologist after Darwin, applied Darwinism to sociology
Speaker 2: in the form of social Darwinism aka survival of the
Speaker 2: fittest right, which it didn't bastardize it, but it definitely
Speaker 2: he definitely used it for his own purposes to say that,
Speaker 2: you know what, the week, we shouldn't even worry about
Speaker 2: the week. If we want to be a strong mankind,
Speaker 2: then let the weak die out.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, so this sociologist that came up with
Speaker 3: this idea of social Darwinism Herbert Spencer. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 3: very Malthusian view of humanity and nature. Yeah, because Malthus
Speaker 3: was basically saying, like, look, man, we take care of
Speaker 3: the poor and every thing, but if we do that,
Speaker 3: we're interfering with nature and we're going to end up
Speaker 3: overburdening the population because population is going to grow geometrically
Speaker 3: and we're not going to be able to support ourselves,
Speaker 3: and society's going to collapse. That was what Malthus was saying.
Speaker 3: This guy said, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's weird that Darwin was in the middle of
Speaker 2: kind of both bookended by these two two ideas, and.
Speaker 3: I think it really just you can kind of say,
Speaker 3: like it really just kind of he was lacking a
Speaker 3: bit of evil, where if he had been a little
Speaker 3: more evil, maybe he would have come up with social
Speaker 3: Darwinism himself, but he didn't. Herbert Spencer did, and it
Speaker 3: kind of took off like a rocket, this idea, like yeah,
Speaker 3: wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, we
Speaker 3: don't need to pay taxes anymore, we don't need to tithe.
Speaker 3: We can just you know, let the poor die in
Speaker 3: the streets. It's social Darwinism, survival of the fittest. We
Speaker 3: don't have to feel guilt for not taking care of
Speaker 3: these other people any longer. The survival of the fittest.
Speaker 3: They weren't meant to be, and basically they replaced God's
Speaker 3: will with nature's will.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: In the in explaining the cruelty of the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like I said, it took off. It became
Speaker 3: what we call the eugenics movement very quickly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which was the idea that the government would actually
Speaker 2: get involved in weeding out the weaker parts of society.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because you don't have to wait around for evolution
Speaker 3: to do this. We can speed it up by picking
Speaker 3: out the weakest and and exterminating them.
Speaker 2: Or at the very least letting them exterminate themselves by
Speaker 2: only breeding.
Speaker 1: You know, the the Boys from Brazil.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I finally saw half of that movie. I can't
Speaker 3: tell you how surprised I was. Surprised I was to
Speaker 3: see Steve Gutenberg.
Speaker 2: Oh Goods was one of the kids, wouldn't he He
Speaker 2: was like the first one. Yeah, yeah, God, I forgot
Speaker 2: about that.
Speaker 3: Oh wait a minute. He was one of the kids
Speaker 3: from the experiment. He was like the journalist. It's like
Speaker 3: blowing the cover off of this whole thing.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen him a long time. Yeah, I know.
Speaker 1: It's creepy though. So yeah, possibly gave.
Speaker 3: Birth to eugenics, which we should say obviously the Nazis loved,
Speaker 3: and they used that to rationalize the extermination of the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, epileptics,
Speaker 3: the mentally handicapped, the blind, everybody.
Speaker 1: Guys who smelled like me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you would have been in big trouble. But prior
Speaker 3: to the Nazis doing this, the United States, Indiana, Georgia,
Speaker 3: all sorts of other states forced sterilization on people of
Speaker 3: the similar stature, and actually Adolf Hitler, well, Germany had
Speaker 3: its own sterilization program as well, but Adolf Hitler was
Speaker 3: apparently well aware of what was going on in America
Speaker 3: and was a pretty big fan of it. And if
Speaker 3: you don't believe me, go back and listen to our episode.
Speaker 3: Is it legal to sterilize addicts?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, because it's still going on today. Yeah. So what
Speaker 3: about this deathbed recan have you ever heard that?
Speaker 1: I have? Not? True?
Speaker 3: Apparently, so he supposedly said on his deathbed basically.
Speaker 1: I take it all back.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wish I hadn't ever said this. It's not true.
Speaker 3: You know, God is God is good, God's the one.
Speaker 3: And a woman from New England named Lady Hope claimed
Speaker 3: that she was there and took this confession, and both
Speaker 3: his daughter and his son, who were both at his
Speaker 3: side while he died, said this lady was not at
Speaker 3: his deathbed. She never came to our house, right, and
Speaker 3: she had absolutely no influence on our father's way of
Speaker 3: looking or judgment or opinions at all. He never recanted
Speaker 3: to the end. He was an ardent supporter of natural selection.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a pretty good idea, though if you're a creationist, well,
Speaker 2: I mean to make up that story, like the father
Speaker 2: of evolution even changed his mind on his deathbed.
Speaker 3: If you look up today on the internet, like I think,
Speaker 3: darwin deathbed even will bring up like creationist website after
Speaker 3: creationist website. They use it to support their claims.
Speaker 1: Oh really, but it's bunk.
Speaker 3: It was debunked right afterward. Yeah, and then chuck, let
Speaker 3: me say when we're thing about social Darwinism. Okay, this idea,
Speaker 3: although in a very cold calculated sense it might make sense,
Speaker 3: it doesn't appear in humanity's history. In fact, there's evidence
Speaker 3: from up to five hundred thousand years ago of severely
Speaker 3: disabled people fossils, their fossil their remains being found where
Speaker 3: they could not possibly have lived to the age they
Speaker 3: lived to without being cared for by their community.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: So this idea that you know, in a more primitive state,
Speaker 3: we just you know, left people to die out in
Speaker 3: the weather because they couldn't keep up. Yeah, it doesn't
Speaker 3: hold water.
Speaker 1: Well, that's good to know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is very comforting that.
Speaker 1: So that means we were innately have compassion as a species.
Speaker 3: I would guess that. Yeah, that's what I like to
Speaker 3: look at it. I think it's one of the things
Speaker 3: that makes us human, agreed, but not just us. No
Speaker 3: other species have compassion to tots, So maybe we should.
Speaker 3: Why don't you play us out with a little bit
Speaker 3: of Darwin Man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the last paragraph of the origin of the species,
Speaker 2: to me, is one of the most beautiful things ever written.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna read it.
Speaker 2: It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, and he's
Speaker 2: talking about his home in.
Speaker 3: Kent, that patch of grass.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, now all of it.
Speaker 2: It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank clothed with
Speaker 2: many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes,
Speaker 2: with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through
Speaker 2: the damp earth. And to reflect that these elab sperately
Speaker 2: constructed forms, so different from each other and dependent on
Speaker 2: each other in so complex a manner, have all been
Speaker 2: produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in
Speaker 2: the largest sense, being growth, with reproduction, inheritance which is
Speaker 2: almost implied by reproduction, variability from the indirect and direct
Speaker 2: action of the external conditions of life, and from use
Speaker 2: and disuse. A ratio of increase so high is to
Speaker 2: lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence
Speaker 2: to natural selection, entailing divergence of character and the extinction
Speaker 2: of less improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature,
Speaker 2: from famine and death, the most exalted object which we
Speaker 2: are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals,
Speaker 2: directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life,
Speaker 2: with its several powers having been originally breathed into a
Speaker 2: few forms, or into one. That's where he's kind of
Speaker 2: skirting around things, And that whilst this planet has gone
Speaker 2: cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity from
Speaker 2: so simple, the beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most
Speaker 2: wonderful have been and are being evolved.
Speaker 1: Bravo, good stuff, Chuck, not me.
Speaker 3: Both of you. That was a great reading. D I
Speaker 3: felt like I was in our Halloween episode again. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: yeah it was good, Chuck. Don't think me, Chucks, I
Speaker 3: can just read you got anything else?
Speaker 1: Got nothing else?
Speaker 3: I think that was a fine way to end this one.
Speaker 3: If you want to learn more about Charles Darwin the
Speaker 3: man and his ideas, you can type Darwin into the
Speaker 3: search bar at HowStuffWorks dot com. It should bring up
Speaker 3: a whole bunch of articles, some of which we will
Speaker 3: record into podcasts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or that movie creation is really good. Or if
Speaker 2: you're into documentaries, there are tons of them. The BBC's
Speaker 2: got like a dozen.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, they love him there.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 3: Well, since I said search bar, I probably did. It's
Speaker 3: time for listener.
Speaker 1: Man before the mail. There's a quick correction.
Speaker 2: In our Kent stateisode, we said Mussolini had his brown shirts.
Speaker 3: Yeah there were the black shirts. Duh, No, Biggie, it's
Speaker 3: the presence of all color, not the presence of some colors.
Speaker 1: Brown is the new black anyway?
Speaker 3: Is that right?
Speaker 1: Orangees.
Speaker 2: All right, I'm gonna call this amputee amputee.
Speaker 3: Like ampute comma ampute.
Speaker 2: Okay, hey, guys, been listening for a couple of years
Speaker 2: now and really enjoy it. As a sixty year old
Speaker 2: woman who had to right leg amputated above the knee
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty nine due to cancer, I was especially
Speaker 2: interested in that podcast. First, I want to correct one
Speaker 2: offhand comment which you stated that being an amputee probably
Speaker 2: becomes the focus of your life, not always. In my case,
Speaker 2: being an amputee did not become the focus. In fact,
Speaker 2: occasionally friends forget that I am an amputee. Now I
Speaker 2: consider it a compliment. As you said, life is an
Speaker 2: over because a person becomes an amputee. I was married
Speaker 2: for twenty years, went to graduate school from my master's
Speaker 2: degree in counseling psychology, two wonderful grown children.
Speaker 1: I worked from the age of fourteen to fifty five.
Speaker 2: With time off for raising kids, and attended graduate school,
Speaker 2: and have been able to travel quite a bit. I've
Speaker 2: been lucky not to have experienced phano pain. I have
Speaker 2: always had and have been told by my doctors, will
Speaker 2: always have phantom feeling.
Speaker 3: Though it feels is so weird.
Speaker 2: I know it feels as though my amputated leg is
Speaker 2: present but asleep, sort of a benign, prickly feeling. The
Speaker 2: feeling quickly faded into the background, and I only notice
Speaker 2: it now when I'm thinking about it. You may be
Speaker 2: interested also to know that the artificial leg I received
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty nine was literally a wooden leg from
Speaker 2: the knee down. I am now on my fourth prosthesis prosthestid.
Speaker 3: I thought she's going to say, like an old Bessie
Speaker 3: still with me.
Speaker 2: I'm now on my fourth prosthesis and they get better
Speaker 2: and better. My current leg is very high tech and impressive.
Speaker 3: It can make coffee.
Speaker 2: That is from Denise Slatyengren awesome from Arcada Arcata, California.
Speaker 3: Nice not Arcadia, that's northern California, a rc A t A.
Speaker 3: Thanks Denise. You sound like a very well adjusted person
Speaker 3: and we appreciate you writing and calling us out on that.
Speaker 1: And I hope you still have old Betty on the
Speaker 1: shelf somewhere at.
Speaker 3: Least it's Betsy Chuck Betsy. Yeah, I would keep it,
Speaker 3: just got it carved into the side. Nice, you know. Yeah,
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Speaker 3: hearing them. We're pretty much like the central clearinghouse for
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