Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Land. I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: You know Joe. I've I've long held a fascination with
Speaker 1: underground transit system. Yeah, I like him too, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean there are a totally unique space they are, and
Speaker 1: it's you know, and it's one of those things that
Speaker 1: I grew up in a more of a rural environment
Speaker 1: and later in my life moved into urban environments where
Speaker 1: I actually have and have had access to these various
Speaker 1: underground train systems and have traveled to places, you know,
Speaker 1: such as such as New York and London where they
Speaker 1: have the most famous examples of the underground transit system.
Speaker 1: But no matter where I am in that timeline, they're
Speaker 1: always just as fascinating to me, whether there's something that
Speaker 1: I only see in a horror movie or something that
Speaker 1: is a part of my day to day life just
Speaker 1: getting to and on work. They are such a unique
Speaker 1: environment and such a cool thing. I'm the same way.
Speaker 1: I'm kind of fascinated with them when I so, I
Speaker 1: made it this far in my life without ever going
Speaker 1: to New York until this past year. I went to
Speaker 1: New York for the first time, and when I came back,
Speaker 1: like the main thing I wanted to talk to everybody
Speaker 1: about was the subway. I know. I was like, it's amazing.
Speaker 1: There's stations everywhere you you know, just just around the corner,
Speaker 1: you can go right in get to wherever you're going.
Speaker 1: It's it's like, this is how a city should work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's also one of those cases where you grow
Speaker 1: up watching all these movies. It's such as such a
Speaker 1: location a fitting location for not only you know, horror
Speaker 1: and monsters and mutants and chuds, but but also just
Speaker 1: intrigued like interesting characters going places, and they do so
Speaker 1: by traversing the underworld. Who's that woman in the overcoat
Speaker 1: with the collar up at the other end of the station?
Speaker 1: Did she just look at me? What's going on? Am
Speaker 1: I being followed? But yeah, I like that you mentioned
Speaker 1: the chud's because that is another aspect of what's great
Speaker 1: about subway systems generally any underground transportation. Are there other
Speaker 1: underground ground I said that, as if there's like underground
Speaker 1: buses or canals. I'm not sure if there are, but yeah,
Speaker 1: so the the underground trains, the tunnels, the tube, all
Speaker 1: this stuff. When you go down into these spaces, it
Speaker 1: is that you're literally entering a sub world where there
Speaker 1: is a whole infrastructure. There's like a city under the city,
Speaker 1: and in many of the big stations, there are things
Speaker 1: in the stations underneath the city. Right, it's not just
Speaker 1: like the train comes by, but there's like little shops
Speaker 1: and encounters and stuff like that. Um, and it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's this whole other world that's divorced from the sun.
Speaker 1: It's separated by this solid barrier, and it's this alien
Speaker 1: environment where it seems like unnatural things could happen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a true underworld. And we mis cycles around the
Speaker 1: world for for ages have have had tails of underworlds
Speaker 1: and uh and people that live underground, races that live underground,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't until relatively modern times that we made
Speaker 1: that truly possible. And they still have the mythic allure
Speaker 1: that they had, you know, back when they were just
Speaker 1: a dream. So is that what we're gonna be talking
Speaker 1: about today morelocks? Well in a sense because uh, because
Speaker 1: we are going to be taught, because we are going
Speaker 1: to bring this back around to science. We are going
Speaker 1: to talk about the the about the question what if
Speaker 1: a species becomes trapped in the underworld, what happens over time?
Speaker 1: Can it become a different species altogether? Can it become
Speaker 1: a subspecies? And we have one very interesting example of
Speaker 1: that current. All right, Well, one of the ways we
Speaker 1: know you can create a new species or a new
Speaker 1: subspecies is to significantly alter the environment in which you live,
Speaker 1: right And so this is, I guess, is why we're
Speaker 1: emphasizing this this alien world quality to the you know
Speaker 1: there are a natural underground systems. Yeah, indeed, and it's
Speaker 1: it's something that again we continue to read into it.
Speaker 1: We create these worlds and then when we stand back,
Speaker 1: when we say, wow, these are this is really strange
Speaker 1: what we've done here with this completely artificial environment underground.
Speaker 1: And countless writers and dreamers filmmakers have have taken that
Speaker 1: and explored that territory. Two examples that come to mind
Speaker 1: or Robert Barbara Johnson's a short story Far Below, which
Speaker 1: is about ghouls in the tunnels beneath us, beneath New
Speaker 1: York City. But when is that written? That was like
Speaker 1: a weird tale, like a classic weird tales story. I
Speaker 1: can't remember the publication date off hand, but it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, classic twentieth century marriagery weird fiction. Yeah. Cool.
Speaker 1: So that's a great one if anyone wants to check
Speaker 1: that out. And then if anyone out there, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure a lot of you are fans of Neil Gaiman's work, um,
Speaker 1: he has explored this as well, the idea that the
Speaker 1: the London Underground specifically is a gateway to a mystical
Speaker 1: fairy world. Yeah, why wouldn't it be? Yeah, And uh,
Speaker 1: you know a lot of this spills over into reality
Speaker 1: too and interesting ways. Uh you know. The author of
Speaker 1: Peter Ackroyd has is a wonderful book about London titled
Speaker 1: London a Biography, and he points out several different, just
Speaker 1: really weird, fascinating facts about the London Underground. Um. This
Speaker 1: is one of my favorite quotes that I always think
Speaker 1: about when I think about the Tube. He says, it
Speaker 1: is a strange city beneath the ground, perhaps best exemplified
Speaker 1: by worn man hole covers which, instead of reading self locking,
Speaker 1: spell out elf king, which is great. I just I
Speaker 1: can't shake that image of like looking down here's this
Speaker 1: man made portal into the underworld, and it says elf
Speaker 1: king like it literally, you know, names the it spells
Speaker 1: out the dominion of of this ancient fairy lord that's
Speaker 1: surely ruling over everything down below. I thought of just
Speaker 1: one more reason why subway tunnels are so intriguing. It's
Speaker 1: because you travel through them, but you don't get to
Speaker 1: explore them. You can't go on foot. Yeah, all you
Speaker 1: can do is look out. That's one of the things
Speaker 1: I love about traveling by underground train is you look
Speaker 1: out and inevitably there's like a forking tunnel, or there's
Speaker 1: some sort of strange door or work area, or wait,
Speaker 1: what's that? Yeah, what is that? Uh, that's that space
Speaker 1: off to the left here. And then you read about
Speaker 1: things such as ghost stations, of which there are several
Speaker 1: in in London, there are a few in New York.
Speaker 1: And what is that? It's a station that just isn't
Speaker 1: used anymore, just an empty station. Uh. And these occur
Speaker 1: with any train system also above the ground. But just
Speaker 1: the idea of going through this old place occupied now
Speaker 1: only by ghosts and maybe fading posters. It's just it's
Speaker 1: just so rich. Or maybe some insect more locks, that's true.
Speaker 1: That's true. We'll get to that now. One film in
Speaker 1: particular that comes to mind on this topic is a
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two film by the name of Death Line,
Speaker 1: and in the US it came out under the title
Speaker 1: Raw Meat. And it's it's an interesting film. It's a
Speaker 1: it's about a family of cannibals descended from Victorian railway
Speaker 1: workers who wind up buried alive in the tunnels beneath London.
Speaker 1: And uh. And I know that sounds incredible, but believe
Speaker 1: it or not, the best part of the film, or
Speaker 1: at least as far as I'm concerned, is that Donald
Speaker 1: Pleasants is in it. And he plays instead of playing
Speaker 1: like a stuffy academic or some sort of nefarious egghead
Speaker 1: as he was wont to do. Uh, he plays a
Speaker 1: blue collar police inspector named Inspector Calhoun. I don't believe you.
Speaker 1: You know, you've got to check it out, he pleasant says.
Speaker 1: Blue collar. Like he goes and gets a pint of
Speaker 1: beer at the pub. There's like is I recall there's
Speaker 1: an extended sequence in which he and his friend go
Speaker 1: and get a get a beer at at the pub,
Speaker 1: and it seems to go on for a very long time,
Speaker 1: and I don't remember how it connects really to the
Speaker 1: plot of the film, but at the time it felt
Speaker 1: it felt as if the director was saying, Hey, this,
Speaker 1: this guy is more interesting than all this cannibal stuff.
Speaker 1: Let's just follow him for a while and then we'll
Speaker 1: come back to the to the to the weird cannibal dude.
Speaker 1: But with that voice back keep and now that pint
Speaker 1: of ale. How that he didn't he didn't talk like.
Speaker 1: That's one of the wonderful things about this. It's this, uh,
Speaker 1: this more lively pleasants, more lively than than pretty much
Speaker 1: any anything else I've seen him in. Okay, but he's
Speaker 1: not an underground cannibal. No, he's just the police inspector.
Speaker 1: All right, So where did the underground cannibals come in? Well,
Speaker 1: it's the Victorian workers, the guys, the people who got
Speaker 1: trapped underground. They have turned into a different subspecies of
Speaker 1: human down there, and essentially they look like caveman, so
Speaker 1: they haven't gotten full the descent here and turned into
Speaker 1: more ghoulish characters. But there's basically one of these guys left.
Speaker 1: He's the shaggy caveman of a dude, and he just
Speaker 1: goes about um kind of oozing from sores and growling
Speaker 1: and screaming and then attacking people and eating people. So
Speaker 1: if this is from Victorian times, obviously this would not
Speaker 1: be an enough time or enough generations to produce a
Speaker 1: true human subspecies adapted to underground tunnels to produce cannibalistic morlocks.
Speaker 1: Since Victorian times to the nineteen seventies, what would you
Speaker 1: have had a few generations? Yeah, And into the movie's credit, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't look like alien monsters. They look like shaggy humans,
Speaker 1: or the one that we see looks like a shaggy human.
Speaker 1: And uh, yeah, he goes about causing all this chaos.
Speaker 1: And it's a fair warning. It's a disturbingly violent film
Speaker 1: at times. It's a bit icky to watch. So you're
Speaker 1: not necessarily saying go out and watch it. Not necessarily,
Speaker 1: I mean, go go watch the trailer and if you
Speaker 1: can see a scene with pleasants in it, and if
Speaker 1: you know dark, violent, seventies hard is your thing, then
Speaker 1: do check it out. But but I bring it up
Speaker 1: because this ties directly into the real world science we're
Speaker 1: talking about today. The question you have a creature is
Speaker 1: locked away buried in the tubes beneath London, and it
Speaker 1: has time to undergo generation after generation of of change
Speaker 1: and adaptation. Can it become a different species? Can it
Speaker 1: become a subspecies? What happens when the dark underworld gets
Speaker 1: to do its work on natural world creatures? All right,
Speaker 1: well we should take a quick break and when we
Speaker 1: come back we will discuss the London Underground Mosquito. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back. So the London Underground Mosquito is going to
Speaker 1: be what we're talking about today. You can probably guess
Speaker 1: from the name that it lives in the London underground.
Speaker 1: So what's the deal with the London underground Robert? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I suppose we should just back up a few steps
Speaker 1: and just talk about the tube itself, the environment and
Speaker 1: which it dwells. Indeed, this is uh, this was the
Speaker 1: world's first underground railway, opening in eighteen sixty three. Man,
Speaker 1: that's early. Yeah, I would not have believed that it's
Speaker 1: a It's grown and expanded significantly ever since then. And
Speaker 1: so today you've got to eleven lines collected and they
Speaker 1: collectively handle about four point eight million passengers a day
Speaker 1: through two hundred seventy stations and two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: miles or four dred kilometers of track. Now, despite the name,
Speaker 1: it's worth keeping in mind that only fort of that
Speaker 1: is actually underground. There's plenty, plenty of plenty of track
Speaker 1: that goes above ground. But still that's a lot of
Speaker 1: underground track. Okay, So the London underground mosquito, that's the
Speaker 1: London underground part mosquito part. Okay, Yeah, let's talk about
Speaker 1: mosquitoes for a second. So what are they? Are they?
Speaker 1: That's some kind of elephant I can't remember. Well, it's
Speaker 1: interesting because the mosquito. We all know what the mosquito is.
Speaker 1: We all have a very close relationship with it. It is,
Speaker 1: or at least we have a very close relationship with
Speaker 1: a few types of mosquito. And that's key because the
Speaker 1: world is currently home to some thirty five hundred named
Speaker 1: species of mosquitoes, and of those thirty five hundred, only
Speaker 1: two hundred or so actually bother humans. But you know,
Speaker 1: we're kind of irresistible, right, like the mosquito. We thrive
Speaker 1: with these throughout most of the world, and we offer
Speaker 1: large expanses of relatively hairless skin, all of it coursing
Speaker 1: with delicious blood. Oh man, you don't usually think about
Speaker 1: hair as being such a protective mechanism against parasitism like that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean, like, if you're a mosquito and
Speaker 1: you come up against something really hairy, that's almost like
Speaker 1: trying to get through barbed wire. And we're we're large
Speaker 1: organisms compared to you know, most organisms. We're we're large,
Speaker 1: relatively hairless, and we're everywhere, and so the mosquitoes everywhere.
Speaker 1: Now the most common genera here are going to be
Speaker 1: the awful ease Kulicks and the eighties mosquitoes. Now, mosquitoes
Speaker 1: obviously are accomplished flyers, and anyone who's ever tried to
Speaker 1: kill a mosquito can testify this. I had a as
Speaker 1: a tangent here when I was recently um in Barbados.
Speaker 1: I we largely didn't encounter mosquitoes at all, but we had,
Speaker 1: you know, the Zico virus in our minds that we
Speaker 1: were always on the lookout. And I was trapped in
Speaker 1: the room by myself at one point with one mosquito
Speaker 1: and it seems like it took forever for me to
Speaker 1: to kill it. I finally had to do that trick
Speaker 1: where you're like, all right, I'm gonna let you land
Speaker 1: on me. I'm gonna let I'm gonna I'm gonna let
Speaker 1: you feed or almost feed on me, and and I'll
Speaker 1: do it to protect my family from from me. I'll
Speaker 1: offer myself up as a sacrifice and then I will
Speaker 1: kill you. But that's that's often the only way you
Speaker 1: can get them. They're so surprisingly h skilled at at
Speaker 1: getting out of the way of our our slaps and snacks. Well,
Speaker 1: thanks for exposing me to Zeke and now Robert, that's
Speaker 1: all right. I was not infected, so maybe I killed it.
Speaker 1: It was one of you know, it was not infected itself. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, you do hear about how these mosquito species
Speaker 1: can traverse these long distances that you wouldn't expect In
Speaker 1: one of the things we were reading today, it was
Speaker 1: an exerpt from a book by a biologist named David Resnick,
Speaker 1: who will get into more detail about later, but he
Speaker 1: mentioned is the fact that you know, it used to
Speaker 1: be that Hawaii didn't have mosquitoes that would bite humans.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they got imported, not on purpose, I think,
Speaker 1: wouldn't that be a great thing. No, No, But they're
Speaker 1: like a lot of species. They they have a tremendous
Speaker 1: ability to hitch rides on human transports, so they've managed
Speaker 1: to invade whole new continents, uh, such as the invasive
Speaker 1: yellow fever carrying eighties at jip Di that you find
Speaker 1: in South America, which has been quite a problem. Um.
Speaker 1: They also the cool thing to keep in mind about
Speaker 1: mosquitoes is they benefit from an incredibly fast reproductive cycle. Now,
Speaker 1: this is going to be important once we start talking
Speaker 1: about the rates of evolution. That's right, Yeah, just how
Speaker 1: because for the rate of evolution to to really be visible,
Speaker 1: you have to have short periods, you have short lifespans
Speaker 1: and fast reproduction cycle. And uh yeah, indeed that's the
Speaker 1: case here. All they need is the tiniest bit of
Speaker 1: standing water, uh, you know, abandoned swimming pools, bird baths
Speaker 1: are great, but they'll also do just fine with a
Speaker 1: at bowl, even a candy wrapper, a small puddle, or
Speaker 1: even just a damp spot in the earth. They go
Speaker 1: through four stages, adults, water, surface eggs, subsurface larvae. They
Speaker 1: breathe through a kind of snorkele that pokes up through
Speaker 1: the surface of the water, and a pupa stage. Now
Speaker 1: they've been around roughly one million years. Isn't that great
Speaker 1: to think about? Well, actually, it's not all that unusual
Speaker 1: because we've all seen Jurassic Park. But had we not,
Speaker 1: wouldn't it be fascinating to think about these little insects
Speaker 1: biting dinosaurs? Yeah? You had just to think that this
Speaker 1: this is something that uh, they've been so good at
Speaker 1: for so long, and they're gonna they're not going away. Uh.
Speaker 1: The oldest evidence we have for blood feeding mosquitoes comes
Speaker 1: from a fossil that's known as proto mosquito, and this
Speaker 1: is from the Triassic period about two million years ago,
Speaker 1: so there were no flowering plants. So the elongated probiscus
Speaker 1: is thought to have functioned like modern mosquitoes, you know,
Speaker 1: for the drinking of blood. Oh you mean, so it's
Speaker 1: like sin. There weren't plants, It didn't it couldn't be
Speaker 1: like a hummingbird sticking its nose into something. If it's
Speaker 1: sticking its nose into something, it was probably something that
Speaker 1: had blood in it, right, that's the that's the theory.
Speaker 1: Now you'll find mosquitoes now and every continent except Antarctica.
Speaker 1: They thrive, and even our most exhaustive steps to eradicate
Speaker 1: them often only work in the short term because again
Speaker 1: they they're just so adapted, moving into new environments taking
Speaker 1: advantage of the smallest quantities of water. Okay, so we've
Speaker 1: got the two things there, the London underground the mosquito.
Speaker 1: Let's let's make these great tastes taste nasty together. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: first of all, let's talk about the surface mosquito before
Speaker 1: we talk about the you know, subsurface variant. All right,
Speaker 1: So the species we're talking about is Coolex pipians and
Speaker 1: according to biologist David Resnick, who I'll cite more deeply,
Speaker 1: especially towards the end of this episode, uh pippians is
Speaker 1: the single most widespread mosquito in the world. It's all
Speaker 1: over the place. It is a disease vector known to
Speaker 1: spread Westnile virus as well as some forms of encephalitis
Speaker 1: and meningitis. And it mates in these big swarms that
Speaker 1: take place out in open areas, and then it deposits
Speaker 1: its fertilized eggs in the form of a floating raft
Speaker 1: of eggs on still water. Resinic rather elegantly, I think
Speaker 1: lists quote untended bird baths, forgotten buckets in the backyard,
Speaker 1: discarded automobile tires, clogged, rain gutters, or wherever else. Fetid, stagnant,
Speaker 1: water accumulates. I love that. One of my favorite words
Speaker 1: is fetted. That's really good. Now, once these rafts of
Speaker 1: eggs start to hatch, they turn into, as you mentioned
Speaker 1: in the general mosquito life cycle earlier, the water dwelling
Speaker 1: larva stage. And these larva eat these eat small things
Speaker 1: that live in the water, you know, eat microbes for sustenance.
Speaker 1: And then about ten days into the larval stage and
Speaker 1: they come out of the water as adults begin feeding
Speaker 1: and being the breeding process. So the females seek out
Speaker 1: a blood meal, which in wholes pipians almost always comes
Speaker 1: from a bird. Why well, because bird blood is good stuff.
Speaker 1: Don't be a food snob at the cool ex Pippians.
Speaker 1: After you've got a blood meal from a bird, you've
Speaker 1: got enough nutrition to invest in forming some eggs. And
Speaker 1: this is important because it goes blood meal then eggs.
Speaker 1: You need the blood in order to make the eggs. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then once you've got the eggs, you can start
Speaker 1: the whole process over again with a mating swarm or
Speaker 1: what I think should be called a swargy. I like
Speaker 1: that swargy and it is it is worth noting the
Speaker 1: whole male female mosquito thing here, right, because the females
Speaker 1: are the ones that that feed on blood. The males
Speaker 1: do not. And you're one, what are the males that
Speaker 1: if they don't eat blood, well, they depend they feed
Speaker 1: on flowers and plants, many many, A beautiful swamp orchid
Speaker 1: depends on mosquitoes for the pollination, so that the blood
Speaker 1: is directly tied to the reproductive cycle of the female. Right.
Speaker 1: So now in London there appears to be a totally
Speaker 1: normal form of this species found on the surface doing
Speaker 1: all the normal stuff, feeding on birds, getting the blood
Speaker 1: meal before reproducing, and that's standard Koulex pippions pippions, But
Speaker 1: they're also appears to be a subterranean variant of this
Speaker 1: species in the London underground, that's right. And londoners uh
Speaker 1: supposedly first discovered them during the blitz of World War two.
Speaker 1: So German bombers terrorized the night skies and and roughly
Speaker 1: one roughly one hundred and eighty thousand people sheltered in
Speaker 1: the tunnels, just as they had during World War One.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine that It's like you're you're fleeing bombing
Speaker 1: of your city, and the last thing you want is
Speaker 1: to be swarmed with mosquitoes in the dark, I know.
Speaker 1: And that's what happened. They had to contend with not
Speaker 1: only some mosquitoes, but apparently lies and ticks. Uh. And
Speaker 1: everyone knows about rats in the subways and sewers to
Speaker 1: go back to my perhaps h you know, childish and
Speaker 1: enthusiasm for underground transportation. I always get a little excited
Speaker 1: when I see a subway rat, even though I know
Speaker 1: you're not supposed to see one, and it's bad, it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's an infectious road and and all that.
Speaker 1: But I still get excited because it's like, it's it's
Speaker 1: like seeing a unicorn. I don't know what. So, I
Speaker 1: don't like to see a rat in my house, but
Speaker 1: when I see a rat scamper across the marta tracks like.
Speaker 1: I love that feeling of seeing it dart out from
Speaker 1: cover and go to somewhere else, I'm like, yeah, go buddy.
Speaker 1: It's like that scene in in the Last Unicorn. You
Speaker 1: remember at the beginning where the the old man and
Speaker 1: the younger hunter glimpse the unicorn in the distance and
Speaker 1: the the old man like takes the man the kid
Speaker 1: aside and says, you've seen something special today. There are
Speaker 1: not many of them left in the world, you know.
Speaker 1: It's that's how I feel about the subway rat. Now.
Speaker 1: So you say, people notice these mosquitoes in the underground
Speaker 1: in World War two? But is that when they were
Speaker 1: first there or were they there before? Then the mosquitoes
Speaker 1: are the people the mosquitoes? Okay, because it is because
Speaker 1: again I I do want to point out that world
Speaker 1: War One you saw similar to the tune of a
Speaker 1: third of a million Londoners going down there. And there's
Speaker 1: a wonderful quote here that I ran across from from
Speaker 1: Ackroyd's book. But he points out that Philip Ziegler in
Speaker 1: the book London at War related that quote. One of
Speaker 1: the principal fears of the authorities is that a deep
Speaker 1: shelter mentality might grow up and result in paralysis of
Speaker 1: the will among those who succumbed to it. It was
Speaker 1: also suggested that the underground Londoners would grow hysterical with
Speaker 1: fear and would never surface to perform their duties. So
Speaker 1: they were actually afraid of something sort of like the
Speaker 1: raw meat scenario, like death line that that people would
Speaker 1: go down there to take shelter and that they would
Speaker 1: just not be able to come back up. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I think this it's important to note in looking at
Speaker 1: a film like like Death Line. Uh. And it feeds
Speaker 1: into just sort of the the industrial age paranoia of
Speaker 1: of of of the English and and really modern Western life,
Speaker 1: the idea that we're we're changing our world through this
Speaker 1: industrial movement, our cities are becoming these inhuman places, and
Speaker 1: like the underground tunnel and the idea of cowering down
Speaker 1: there and you know, protecting yourselves from from these bombings. Uh,
Speaker 1: it becomes a perfect symbol of that. Well, it is
Speaker 1: something we're thinking about because in a biological sense, our
Speaker 1: environments really do define us. They shape our very biology.
Speaker 1: You know, the way your hands are, the way your
Speaker 1: eyes work, the way your teeth are, and the way
Speaker 1: your brain defines your behavior, that's all shaped by the
Speaker 1: environment your ancestors come from. You know, it's what genetic
Speaker 1: options the environment had to work with and then molding
Speaker 1: that to survive and reproduce best in it. So your
Speaker 1: environment does define you. I think that's not something to
Speaker 1: just be laughed off as paranoia. No, no, Um, and
Speaker 1: you know they're they're also all these wonderful tales, you know,
Speaker 1: many probably folkloric in nature, about people known as firm
Speaker 1: ers or rakes or flushers. These were people who clean
Speaker 1: sewage tunnel blocks, as well as tashers, who are hunters
Speaker 1: of valuables in the sewers and tunnels underneath London. These
Speaker 1: are some great UH British isms, tash ers firmers. So
Speaker 1: their tales of like tashas and firmers uh becoming lost
Speaker 1: in this subworld maze and eventually they either fall dead
Speaker 1: from exhaustion and they grow so weak that a swarm
Speaker 1: of rats just eats them alive. So anyway, the humans
Speaker 1: had been going down unbeneath London for some time. They
Speaker 1: had created this additional mythos and this UH and these
Speaker 1: various expressions of their fear regarding the underworld, and indeed
Speaker 1: the mosquitoes had been down there for some time too.
Speaker 1: Based on the research we're looking at, it seems that
Speaker 1: there it's thought that you had different points when mosquitoes
Speaker 1: were introduced to this underground though world, and then they
Speaker 1: become trapped down there. But since they're that they have
Speaker 1: what they need down there they managed to survive because
Speaker 1: there are rats, there are humans. It's where the humans go.
Speaker 1: You almost have this captive uh ever, changing food supply, right,
Speaker 1: So this does make us wondered, I mean, should we
Speaker 1: should start to think about You've got these mosquitoes that
Speaker 1: live underground, you've got the mosquitoes that live above ground.
Speaker 1: They appear to both be some form of cool expipians.
Speaker 1: But are the ones underground actually a different animal? Now
Speaker 1: that is an excellent question, and after one more quick break,
Speaker 1: we shall explore it. So after the war, no one
Speaker 1: forgot about the tunnels for sure, but yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: there was a lot else to to worry about. Uh,
Speaker 1: people kind of forgot about the mosquitoes down in the tubes.
Speaker 1: You didn't see a lot of attention really surrounding them. Occasionally,
Speaker 1: you know, there would be workers who who would you know,
Speaker 1: want to wind up with mosquito bites, and they reported
Speaker 1: and certainly, you know, people who were going down on
Speaker 1: a regular basis might have noticed them. But for the
Speaker 1: most part, nobody really gave them much attention. And then
Speaker 1: about fifty years after the close of World War Two,
Speaker 1: you had Katherine Burn come around. Now she was a
Speaker 1: doctoral student at the time, and she decided to investigate.
Speaker 1: So she collected mosquitoes from seven different subterranean sites, and
Speaker 1: in all there were something like twenty sites covering outdoor, indoor,
Speaker 1: and subterranean locations around London. And then the researchers reared
Speaker 1: the captured mosquitoes. They attempted cross breeding, cross breeding between
Speaker 1: mosquitoes and mosquitoes, not between mosquitoes and humans, just to
Speaker 1: go and get that out of the way. Um. And
Speaker 1: they they found that the kulicks pippians in the underground
Speaker 1: behaved rather differently from those that lived on the surface.
Speaker 1: So for example, uh, surface uh pippians only drank the
Speaker 1: blood of birds. But this uh, this new subspecies, this
Speaker 1: Skulis Pippians molestus, they call it. This one drank and blunt. Now,
Speaker 1: I gotta make it worse than that, because to to
Speaker 1: really excite your used needles, squick, they feed primarily on
Speaker 1: humans and rats, So because what else you're gonna feed
Speaker 1: on down there? Yeah, So if you're down in the
Speaker 1: tube in London and you feel an itch on your neck,
Speaker 1: it's possible that the last thing that sharp little probosis
Speaker 1: went into before your skin might have been another person,
Speaker 1: or it might have been the belly of one member
Speaker 1: of a huge cockney rat and that was a wonderful image.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's always one of the concerns with the
Speaker 1: parasitic organism, like who else has it been feeding on?
Speaker 1: And what else has it been feeding on? Right? Uh
Speaker 1: so yeah, so there there was a resulting paper here right,
Speaker 1: published in the journal Heredity in nine It was Burns
Speaker 1: paper with Richard Nickel, and it was called Kool Expipians
Speaker 1: in London Underground Tunnels differentiation between surface and subterranean populations.
Speaker 1: All right, so let's talk about some of these differences
Speaker 1: that we see. So, uh, the core that the core
Speaker 1: differences of course, so we already mentioned that the mosquitoes
Speaker 1: are are consuming primarily the blood of rats and humans
Speaker 1: because that is west down there, mammal blood. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: the other things to keep in mind is that this
Speaker 1: the molestus mosquitoes. They don't need as much space anymore
Speaker 1: because they are living in confined tubes, and that is
Speaker 1: that that has an impact on how they reproduce because
Speaker 1: they're not they're then not depending on these big you know,
Speaker 1: what do you what do you call them swargies? These uh,
Speaker 1: big open air, open space swarming mating swarms. Yeah, these
Speaker 1: are these big mating swarms are not occurring in the underworld.
Speaker 1: They are and instead going with you know, a smaller
Speaker 1: scale reproductive breeding then scheduled venue if you will. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And on top of that, they are they are largely
Speaker 1: protected from colder weather, so they forego winter hibernation. And
Speaker 1: interestingly enough, they don't need that blood meal necessarily to
Speaker 1: lay their eggs. Now, this is to say that to
Speaker 1: get tentantical on the blood stuff. This means that they
Speaker 1: are autogeneous. They do not require a blood meal in
Speaker 1: order to lay eggs. Where he mentioned how the male
Speaker 1: and female mosquitoes consume nectar and plant juices, the females
Speaker 1: and the species just need that blood meal to energize
Speaker 1: their egg production right now, part of the reproductive cycle. Right.
Speaker 1: And if you look at mosquitoes around the world, all
Speaker 1: the different species, some do require that blood meal, some don't,
Speaker 1: and some merely benefit from it, which is to say,
Speaker 1: they can produce eggs without the blood meal. But if
Speaker 1: they get the blood meal, they're gonna it's gonna be
Speaker 1: that you know, much stronger of an egg production. So
Speaker 1: in short, it appeared that the mosquitoes adapted to the underworld,
Speaker 1: they became so distinct even that they could no longer
Speaker 1: breed or would no longer breed with their surface dwell
Speaker 1: and kin different and this is because different mating behaviors,
Speaker 1: different reproductive behavior. No mating swarms, just individual lovers finding
Speaker 1: each other in the the subway tunnels. Well, I guess
Speaker 1: this leads us to the question. Obviously we've had since
Speaker 1: the beginning of the London Underground some form of divergent
Speaker 1: evolution going on here. But but does this count as
Speaker 1: a different species? That's sort of the question, especially a
Speaker 1: lay person might want to ask, well, is it really
Speaker 1: a different animal? Now? Uh? Is it a speciation event? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Because I think one of the big questions to consider is,
Speaker 1: you know, to what extent are they biologically and or
Speaker 1: behaviorally unable to breed with the surface world mosquitoes of
Speaker 1: their species? So these would this would be sort of
Speaker 1: the standard definition of a species division right now. Of course,
Speaker 1: that this is bearing in mind that distinct but closely
Speaker 1: related species can sometimes technically breed to produce hybrid offspring,
Speaker 1: though sometimes they're infertile or otherwise compromised. Right, So I
Speaker 1: think now is a good time to, uh take a
Speaker 1: look at a chapter from a book by the biologist
Speaker 1: David Resnick, who I mentioned earlier. And this book is
Speaker 1: called The Origin, Then and Now, An Interpretive guy to
Speaker 1: the Origin of Species that was published by Princeton University
Speaker 1: Press in two thousand eleven. And in a chapter on
Speaker 1: in this book, Resident discusses the specific example of the
Speaker 1: London London underground mosquito and whether or not it is
Speaker 1: speciation and what what this means for the concept of speciation.
Speaker 1: Uh So, a central question in biology. How long does
Speaker 1: it take for evolution to form a new species? How
Speaker 1: long should you have to wait? Obviously this could depend
Speaker 1: on a lot of different factors. Right, You've got different
Speaker 1: mutation rates, maybe um if mutations are sort of providing
Speaker 1: the changes that lead to new new body forms and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, You've got different selection pressures, you've got
Speaker 1: different rates of reproduction. You're probably more likely to see
Speaker 1: faster revolution in organisms that produce more generations in a
Speaker 1: short period of time, like we're mentioning earlier, like bacteria
Speaker 1: or even like in sects like fruit flies and stuff,
Speaker 1: very quick turnover. I mean, that's why something why fruit fly.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons fruit flies are used so much
Speaker 1: in research because you can you can watch this occur,
Speaker 1: and certainly when you find examples of evolution and action,
Speaker 1: so called evolution and action, that's what you're looking at
Speaker 1: species that have those really really tight turnaround in reproduction.
Speaker 1: But another thing that often leads to UH speciation, at
Speaker 1: least as far as we think, is having highly specific
Speaker 1: different selection pressures, putting a group in isolation and then
Speaker 1: making it uh very hard for that group to live
Speaker 1: except by one or two ways, and this tends to
Speaker 1: force adaptation to those new ways of life, which produces
Speaker 1: it creates kind of a narrow adaptive bottleneck through which
Speaker 1: genes have to pass. So um Resnick says in his
Speaker 1: book that he's not certain that these mosquitoes in the
Speaker 1: London under London Underground constitute a different species, but he
Speaker 1: argues that if they're not a distinct species, they're definitely
Speaker 1: on the way. In the quote, they have moved far
Speaker 1: down the path toward forming a reproductively isolated network of populations,
Speaker 1: which is the currently accepted definition of species. So that's
Speaker 1: going to what we said a minute ago, reproductive isolation.
Speaker 1: What what we generally think of as a species is
Speaker 1: breeds with with its own kind, doesn't breed with others.
Speaker 1: So let's review what we've said so far and add
Speaker 1: a few more things about our observations about the difference
Speaker 1: between standard cool ex Pippians and then the ones down
Speaker 1: in the tube. So, like we said, uh, surface cool
Speaker 1: ex pippians mate in these swarms and open areas. The
Speaker 1: subterranean ones made in close cramped conditions. Um. You mentioned
Speaker 1: the winter hibernation. That's an interesting one because the surface
Speaker 1: pippians have what's known as a seasonal dia pause because
Speaker 1: come on, I mean, they live all the way up
Speaker 1: in Britain. Cold winter is not a good place for mosquitoes,
Speaker 1: so it gets really cold up there during the cold
Speaker 1: weather months. Pippians stop mating, they build up a store
Speaker 1: of fat reserves, and they essentially hunker down to wait
Speaker 1: out the cold weather. Um, subterranean Pippians they don't have
Speaker 1: winter to deal with. It's, you know, pretty much the
Speaker 1: same climate year round down there in the tubes, fairly warm,
Speaker 1: so they don't have this seasonal diapause anymore. They stay
Speaker 1: active all year, they stay breeding all year. They just
Speaker 1: keep going. They're like a fine wine in a wine
Speaker 1: cellar hermetically sealed and just kept it a constant aging aging,
Speaker 1: acquiring finesse um by fighting rat kings, and then beautiful
Speaker 1: red liquid as well. Yeah, so another one. We mentioned
Speaker 1: this before. Surface pippians feed almost exclusively on bird blood, right.
Speaker 1: The subterranean pippians don't have access to many birds for
Speaker 1: obvious reasons. Though this didn't make me think when we
Speaker 1: were talking about it earlier that it would be really
Speaker 1: cool to have a speciation event producing subterranean birds, like
Speaker 1: like albino subterranean vultures that only live in I don't know,
Speaker 1: subway tunnels or caves or some other'd be great. I
Speaker 1: guess the like the closest thing that comes to mind
Speaker 1: would be some I guess something like a kiwi. You
Speaker 1: know that's kind of like a ground dwelling like semi
Speaker 1: burrowing bird. They burrow. I didn't know that kiwi's uh
Speaker 1: if I remember correctly, uh and u Qwi experts can
Speaker 1: can correct me in this. They do. They do some
Speaker 1: sort of burrowing. Yeah, I mean not like full blown,
Speaker 1: you know, tremmors burrowing, but they'll they dig around like
Speaker 1: they live very close to the soil. Well, what I
Speaker 1: want is bone white vultures with red eyes living exclusively
Speaker 1: in caves. I could see it and see it happening.
Speaker 1: I mean, I I look finally back on these. Uh,
Speaker 1: these are these different flightless prehistoric birds. So I like
Speaker 1: the idea of them returning in a subworld environment. Okay,
Speaker 1: back to the pippians. So surface pippians, as we mentioned before,
Speaker 1: also remember they get a blood meal before they produce
Speaker 1: their eggs. You gotta get some blood then you lay
Speaker 1: your eggs. The subterranean ones they can easily skip the
Speaker 1: meal if necessary. Uh. The question would be why why
Speaker 1: can they do that? Well, down in the tunnels there
Speaker 1: is plenty to eat in the form of water based
Speaker 1: microbial life that the larva consume in their larval stage.
Speaker 1: The blood is more scarce, So if you can get
Speaker 1: through your life cycle on on that, that's a good thing.
Speaker 1: Now back to burn and nichols In as you mentioned. So,
Speaker 1: so we said earlier that there are other subterranean mosquitoes
Speaker 1: elsewhere in the world, right did we mention that? I
Speaker 1: think we did. Um, the ones in the London underground
Speaker 1: are not the only ones where where mosquitoes are dwelling
Speaker 1: in some kind of underground space. But how can we
Speaker 1: tell whether these mosquitoes in London, in the London underground
Speaker 1: are a subterranean mosquitoes imported from somewhere else in the world,
Speaker 1: You know how, because we've already discussed how how how
Speaker 1: skilled they are at adapting to new new environments traveling
Speaker 1: with humans, or are they surface missque autos from London
Speaker 1: that moved underground and began to change. And this is
Speaker 1: where the genetic testing you alluded to earlier comes in.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned the mosquitoes collected from different sites throughout
Speaker 1: the underground and throughout the surface. They got mosquitoes from
Speaker 1: seven sites throughout the underground network and then twelve different
Speaker 1: sites above the surface like gardens and ponds, And what
Speaker 1: they wanted to look for was genetic variation at twenty
Speaker 1: different loci within the genes, to see if the genes
Speaker 1: of the underground mosquitoes matched the genes of the above
Speaker 1: ground ones, or if they've got these unique allele's um
Speaker 1: that would that would be matching to uh underground mosquitoes
Speaker 1: from other places around the world. And what they found
Speaker 1: was that the underground mosquitoes in London did not have
Speaker 1: these unique alleles that were common to underground mosquitoes from
Speaker 1: other places. They had the same alleles as their above
Speaker 1: ground cousins in London. Another thing they found interestingly underground
Speaker 1: miss guitos. Uh, maybe this isn't the correct term scientifically,
Speaker 1: but they're kind of inbred. Like, well, that would make sense,
Speaker 1: and then that comes back to death line, like this
Speaker 1: is kind of a an inbred, uneducated creature that's so
Speaker 1: walking around, right, So there's relative homogeneity in the genes
Speaker 1: of the underground population compared to the surface. The ones
Speaker 1: on the surface have a lot more genetic diversity because
Speaker 1: they have a lot more different breeding options. The ones underground,
Speaker 1: we're sort of like, I don't know, you might think
Speaker 1: of them as like insect Baldwin brothers, you know, a
Speaker 1: little bit of variation between them, but not as much
Speaker 1: variation as you'd find within the general population. Um. So
Speaker 1: this is also what you'd expect if you had a
Speaker 1: small population of original mosquitoes that moved into the underground
Speaker 1: and began breeding with each other and had just been
Speaker 1: breeding with each other in their descendants ever since. So
Speaker 1: what's the conclusion here, Well, it looks like a small
Speaker 1: handful of colonists. Mosquitoes from the surface made this plunge
Speaker 1: into the darkness sometime in the past, maybe very far back,
Speaker 1: maybe when the tunnels were first being dug um, and
Speaker 1: they managed to survive long and uh long enough and
Speaker 1: to reproduce enough for the environment to begin to shape
Speaker 1: their biology. But then again, as we mentioned, is it
Speaker 1: a different species. This would really come down to the
Speaker 1: aspects of reproductive isolation. If they can't interbreed, we probably
Speaker 1: think it is uh, it is a different species. And
Speaker 1: specifically it's if they can't interbreed producing viable offspring down
Speaker 1: multiple generations, because some things might be able to interbreed
Speaker 1: and produce an offspring that itself can't breed, right Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is where we get into the various sterile
Speaker 1: hybrids that we see with other species. Right. So, what
Speaker 1: Burne and Nichols found was that the underground mosquitoes could
Speaker 1: interbreed with one another and produce fertile offspring, but every
Speaker 1: time they tried to make a female underground mosquito with
Speaker 1: a group of males from the surface, no eggs were produced.
Speaker 1: Underground females can mate successfully with underground males, but not
Speaker 1: usually with surface males um so Resinic points out another
Speaker 1: really interesting thing from their research, which is how Burne
Speaker 1: and Nichols also found evidence of mosquito colonists pushing the
Speaker 1: boundaries of habitat tolerance in both directions, and so, for example,
Speaker 1: at the Oval station in the other ground, they found
Speaker 1: surface mosquitoes were trying to survive under the surface in
Speaker 1: a flooded tunnel at the bottom of an open shaft.
Speaker 1: They were trying to live underground, but they still these
Speaker 1: surface mosquitoes trying to live underground still needed a blood
Speaker 1: meal to produce eggs, and they couldn't breed with the
Speaker 1: underground mosquitoes. Meanwhile, a colony of underground mosquitoes was discovered
Speaker 1: biting humans in houses in southeast London. So they were
Speaker 1: trying to migrate up and live on the surface, but
Speaker 1: they were genetically similar to the underground mosquitoes, and unfortunately
Speaker 1: for them, they don't know how to do this winter diapause,
Speaker 1: you know, the seasonal diapause. They can't hunker down for
Speaker 1: the cold weather, so when it comes along it will
Speaker 1: smite them. Huh. See. Now this is an idea that
Speaker 1: doesn't explored enough in our various weird fictions. Not the
Speaker 1: idea that there's some sort of an underground humanoid species,
Speaker 1: but the idea that the underground humanoid species then comes
Speaker 1: up and maybe tries, you know, they try to get jobs,
Speaker 1: they can't adapt, They move into a flat and they
Speaker 1: just feel horribly because of course they're they're cannibalistic monsters. Well,
Speaker 1: they'll they will be used to a very constant environmental
Speaker 1: condition to you know, climate control essentially. You know, caves
Speaker 1: are sort of climate controlled. When they come up to
Speaker 1: the surface summer and winter, it's gonna be awful. They're
Speaker 1: gonna be like, what is this water pouring out of
Speaker 1: my armpits? I hate it? Uh you know, I guess
Speaker 1: in a way, it's kind of the vampire myth as
Speaker 1: we often encounter. It is kind of a play on
Speaker 1: this because you think of you think of old Count
Speaker 1: Dracula coming over to London imported like a mosquito and
Speaker 1: then the hold of a ship um very limited in
Speaker 1: what he can do outside during the day. Uh So,
Speaker 1: so maybe it has been explored, uh you know, to
Speaker 1: add nauseum already. Uh So the authors of the original study,
Speaker 1: they were careful not actually to get drawn into a
Speaker 1: big argument about whether the two populations are technically different
Speaker 1: species or not, but they were more focused on the
Speaker 1: process of speciation rather than trying to arbitrate the dividing line.
Speaker 1: But even if these two mosquitoes are not now separate species,
Speaker 1: they're clearly on the way there. So Resonic points out
Speaker 1: that this provides an example of reproductive isolation in many
Speaker 1: fewer generations than Darwin would have expected. And that's kind
Speaker 1: of interesting, right. You know. Darwin thought, well, you need
Speaker 1: maybe x many different generations to really produce a different species.
Speaker 1: But if we're almost there or already there with these mosquitoes,
Speaker 1: doesn't doesn't take nearly as long as Darwin would have guessed.
Speaker 1: But then again, keep in mind that these are mosquitoes,
Speaker 1: very fast reproduct of cycle, you know, their insects. The
Speaker 1: same thing doesn't necessarily apply to oak trees or rhinoceros,
Speaker 1: is alright, So if if reproductive isolation does happen is fast,
Speaker 1: why well. Resinnick has a couple of hypotheses in his
Speaker 1: chapter that I think are interesting. One of them is
Speaker 1: the idea of disruptive selection. Uh. And the way he
Speaker 1: explains this is that the survival requirements for the two
Speaker 1: environments above ground and below ground are so different that
Speaker 1: if you were to successfully make a surface pippions with
Speaker 1: an underground pippions, it's offspring would very likely have fatal
Speaker 1: deficiencies for either environment. What, you know, the traits you'd
Speaker 1: get from your mom would make you unable to live
Speaker 1: in dad's world. Where the traits you'd get from your
Speaker 1: dad would make you unable to live in your mom's world. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so if it's on the surface, cold weather might
Speaker 1: kill it. If it's in the other ground, it doesn't
Speaker 1: know how to hunt the right food, It can't put
Speaker 1: off the blood yell that it you know, we'll have
Speaker 1: a hard time finding or something like that. And this
Speaker 1: prevents a kind of back interaction with the general population
Speaker 1: of the underground mosquitoes and enforces genetic isolation. But another
Speaker 1: way to possibly explain it would be changes in reproductive behavior.
Speaker 1: So what if these two populations have diverged in a
Speaker 1: way that specifically selected breeding behaviors that are incompatible. Uh.
Speaker 1: Think of the open area swarming versus the confined space
Speaker 1: breeding is just one example. They simply don't get down
Speaker 1: with the way the other population tends to mate. So
Speaker 1: mating doesn't happen reinforcing reproductive isolation, and as far as
Speaker 1: I know, either of those are live options, or it
Speaker 1: could be a combination. So something to keep in mind here.
Speaker 1: As a Burn points out in the paper quote, the
Speaker 1: differences between Pippins and Molestus forms seem to change from
Speaker 1: place to place within the range of the species. The
Speaker 1: ostensibly clear cut distinction between the Molestas and Pippians forms
Speaker 1: in northern Europe is not so apparent in the northern
Speaker 1: Mediterranean area and may disappear in some populations further south. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that makes sense because think about it. For example,
Speaker 1: one major difference between the London surface and the London
Speaker 1: underground is the presence or absence of this cold weather
Speaker 1: diapause if there are If there are similar above and
Speaker 1: below ground populations and consistently warm climates, they're just less
Speaker 1: likely to have this difference, right, because the surface mosquitoes
Speaker 1: don't need to become dormant for cold weather in a
Speaker 1: place where there is no cold weather. Yes, that's a
Speaker 1: good point. So Resinic discusses a few other interesting takeaways
Speaker 1: in this chapter. One is to simply cast a sort
Speaker 1: of doubt on the total relevance of distinctions between species. Like,
Speaker 1: on one hand, it's very scientifically useful to have labels
Speaker 1: for things that are alike in order to separate them
Speaker 1: from things that they are unlike. Uh. And and really
Speaker 1: that very notion is at the core of what science is,
Speaker 1: right categorization of Miller things with one another. But it's
Speaker 1: also true that these boundaries are kind of porous and
Speaker 1: that the concept of a species does not actually operate
Speaker 1: in reality. And reality there are things. There are genes,
Speaker 1: their chromosomes, their phenotypic traits, there are environments. A species
Speaker 1: is more kind of a concept, and Resinic writes, quote,
Speaker 1: species in nature should be thought of as fluid mosaics
Speaker 1: of populations that are becoming locally adapted uh, sometimes with
Speaker 1: the aid of similar adaptations attained by long extinct populations
Speaker 1: that adapted to similar environments. So a couple of interesting
Speaker 1: things there. One is this idea of species just being
Speaker 1: many individuals with genes that are always in flux. Things
Speaker 1: are coming and going. It's not a standard, totally defined
Speaker 1: thing with boundaries. It's just a family of resemblances. And
Speaker 1: then the other thing is that the last part about
Speaker 1: Miller adaptations attained from long extinct populations. One thing that
Speaker 1: often appears to happen in cases of reproductive isolation is
Speaker 1: that some rare gene in the general population that doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to do much or provide much advantage, suddenly becomes
Speaker 1: useful in a specific environment and it becomes selected four,
Speaker 1: and it gets pumped up and becomes more prevalent and
Speaker 1: comes to define the new population. And it's very possible
Speaker 1: that this gene was something that was useful to an
Speaker 1: ancestor of this current population. So it's like that you
Speaker 1: can adapt by pulling antiques out of the past when
Speaker 1: they suddenly become useful again, you might need that blunderbuss,
Speaker 1: not now, but sometime in the future. Yeah. Indeed, I
Speaker 1: mean we we see this in various experiments where they're
Speaker 1: like they switched the epogenetic switch to say, um, you know,
Speaker 1: make chickens a little more like dinosaurs again. Yeah, some
Speaker 1: tweaking some one aspect of their anatomy because that option
Speaker 1: is still They're like that, like the options in a
Speaker 1: video game shouldn't need to be turned on. Um. And
Speaker 1: hopefully I didn't anthropomorphizes evolution too much. For some of
Speaker 1: our listeners, there. Oh, we just got a complaint about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well you know sometimes, but that was also from somebody
Speaker 1: who didn't believe in evolution, So okay, they saically they
Speaker 1: didn't think we went far enough. All right. Well, on
Speaker 1: that note, we actually asked you did we go too far?
Speaker 1: Did we not go far enough? But more importantly, I'd
Speaker 1: love to hear from anybody who you know, shares our
Speaker 1: love for underground transit systems. I'd love to hear from
Speaker 1: anyone who's ever been bitten by a London underground mosquito. Yeah,
Speaker 1: did you feel the proboscis? Yeah, of the mollst us
Speaker 1: or you know. It would be great if anyone's listening
Speaker 1: to this podcast on the train in the London underground,
Speaker 1: if they are bitten by a mosquito during this podcast.
Speaker 1: I think that would be a pretty magical moment as well.
Speaker 1: This mach al right. Well, on that note, hey, if
Speaker 1: you want to check out more information on this topic,
Speaker 1: go to the landing page for this episode at stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot Com. Should be up there,
Speaker 1: nice and bright on the banner, and you also find
Speaker 1: all the links out to our various social media accounts
Speaker 1: such as Facebook, Tumbler, Instagram, and Twitter, and hey, if
Speaker 1: you are a Twitter user, take part in this whole
Speaker 1: tripod that initiative used the hashtag tripod with hy to
Speaker 1: just suggest your favorite podcast, the podcast that that that
Speaker 1: to your life with a little joy as you traverse
Speaker 1: the subway and deal with rats and mosquitoes or what
Speaker 1: have you. For my own part, I'm a big fan
Speaker 1: of Ideas with Paul Kennedy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a
Speaker 1: wonderful Canadian radio show podcast fixed for a number of
Speaker 1: tremendous uh philosophical, scientific, artistic, historic topics. It varies from
Speaker 1: week to week. Well, why don't you tell us what
Speaker 1: podcast you out there like? So if you want to
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