Speaker 1: Welcome to Creature, future production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Speaker 1: your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology
Speaker 1: and evolutionary biology, and today on the show Math Okay,
Speaker 1: don't run away. I promise that even those of you
Speaker 1: have let's say, complicated relationship with math. The animals were
Speaker 1: about to talk about will show how absolutely incredibly fascinating
Speaker 1: math can be. From mathematical b sex to baby animals
Speaker 1: who are cute little calculators, to the way that math
Speaker 1: can produce some of the most beautiful living works of
Speaker 1: art in the natural kingdom. These word problems are no
Speaker 1: problem at all. Discover this and more as we answer
Speaker 1: to the angel question should you let your chickens count
Speaker 1: before or after they've patched? Joining me today is astrophysicist
Speaker 1: and co host of the podcast Daniel and Jorge Explain
Speaker 1: the Universe Daniel Whiteson. Welcome back, Daniel, Hello, thank you
Speaker 1: very much for having me on. I am happy to
Speaker 1: be described as an astro physicist because I like to
Speaker 1: throw my mind out there into the cosmos of the universe,
Speaker 1: and I'm also a deep lover of mathematics. When I
Speaker 1: hear math, I don't run screaming, I go tell me more. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that. You know, sometimes some of us, not
Speaker 1: naming any names, not pointing any fingers, have a complicated
Speaker 1: history with math. It's like, you know, it doesn't seem like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is probably not all that interesting because it's a
Speaker 1: bunch of numbers and a teacher getting mad at me
Speaker 1: for not putting them together in the right way on
Speaker 1: a piece of paper. But it can be really really interesting.
Speaker 1: And even for people who don't have a big background
Speaker 1: in math, like you don't. It's you know, obviously some
Speaker 1: parts of math, especially like the more theoretical you get,
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty sort of a dense labyrinth. But when
Speaker 1: you're kind of looking at the big picture applications of
Speaker 1: what it can describe and do, like that's accessible to
Speaker 1: everyone and it can be really interesting. Yeah. And in
Speaker 1: the end, it's the language of the universe, you know,
Speaker 1: it's not just the way that we like write physics
Speaker 1: down and do our theories. We think math is actually
Speaker 1: like fundamental. We think it controls the way things happen.
Speaker 1: So I love when we find things in physics or
Speaker 1: in biology or in economics that like revealed the underlying
Speaker 1: mathematics because it shows us like sort of the source
Speaker 1: code of the universe, like how things are really working
Speaker 1: deep down exactly. It puts the fun and fundamental it does.
Speaker 1: And so that's why it's so frustrating to me when
Speaker 1: I see my kids like developing an aversion to math,
Speaker 1: you know, because I'm like, come on, math is fund
Speaker 1: isn't it? And they're like, maybe math worksheets aren't fun.
Speaker 1: You know, that's a good point, that's true. But maybe
Speaker 1: you can just take them out to a field and
Speaker 1: point out some bees and say like, look, they're doing math,
Speaker 1: and you can too. So there is a big paradox
Speaker 1: in evolutionary biology, which is that you have a moles
Speaker 1: who seem to sometimes behave altruistically and even go as
Speaker 1: far as to be you social, so you sociality is
Speaker 1: a social structure that is found in bees, ants, termites,
Speaker 1: naked mole rats, where and mostly non breeding. Colony works
Speaker 1: for the good of the queen and for their fellow
Speaker 1: members of the colony. So it's this very it's seemingly
Speaker 1: extremely altruistic, right, you're all working for the good of
Speaker 1: the queen, for the good of the colony without worrying
Speaker 1: about reproducing yourself. But this is a big problem because
Speaker 1: evolution seems like it should always reward genetic selfishness. So
Speaker 1: if if you can pass on your genes through trickery, thieving,
Speaker 1: selfishness or whatever, that should just count. Like mother Nature
Speaker 1: is not going to judge you. If you get your
Speaker 1: genes passed on, that's good enough for her. There's this
Speaker 1: famous Gary Larson cartoon that shows like a bunch of
Speaker 1: limbings going off a cliff, which is a myth, by
Speaker 1: the way, they don't you that, but still in this cartoon,
Speaker 1: one of the limmings has a little inner tube and
Speaker 1: it's kind of like mugging for the camera, looking very
Speaker 1: smug because it's the one limbing that's going to survive
Speaker 1: this jump off the cliff. And actually this cartoon was
Speaker 1: used in some of my evolutionary biology classes in college
Speaker 1: to demonstrate like, well, if you have this one liming
Speaker 1: doing this thing like cheating with this inner tube, all
Speaker 1: of the limings should develop this trait soon enough, because
Speaker 1: that's that's going to be the types of genes that survive.
Speaker 1: Like the limmings who were the inner tube and survived
Speaker 1: the jump off the cliff should all develop that trait
Speaker 1: because again, like if you survive, those genes are the
Speaker 1: ones that are going to win out. So I have
Speaker 1: so many questions already. First of all, you social. Is
Speaker 1: that like the letter you and social or the word
Speaker 1: you or like you know, E W E social, it's
Speaker 1: eu and then social. So it sounds a little bit European,
Speaker 1: but I'm sure it has another explanation for it. But
Speaker 1: my real question is that is selfishness really necessary? Like
Speaker 1: do most species actually maximize selfishness? I mean, why can't
Speaker 1: the species get forward by being all nice to each
Speaker 1: other and just like enjoying life, Like why don't they
Speaker 1: maximize the joy of sunshine and you know, a drop
Speaker 1: of water on the leaf and something. Doesn't that make
Speaker 1: people happy and and make for like happier and more
Speaker 1: successful children. Why is it all about selfishness? Well, you know,
Speaker 1: it's actually true that it turns out. I mean, we
Speaker 1: can just look around and see that. No, it's not
Speaker 1: true that all animals maximize selfishness. We can look at humans.
Speaker 1: I mean, sure we like to say, oh, humans are selfish,
Speaker 1: but when you really look at human society, we've only
Speaker 1: gotten this far by working together. And you know, of course,
Speaker 1: like there's all sorts of problems with society. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to get into any of those because that's probably
Speaker 1: different podcasts. But when it comes down to it, we
Speaker 1: are a cooperative species. We do work together in order
Speaker 1: to enhance our survival, and it's somewhat easy to see
Speaker 1: how this works out in our favor. Like we are
Speaker 1: not the toughest roughest animal. We could not win in
Speaker 1: a fight one on one versus a bear, but when
Speaker 1: we're in a group, we do pretty well. And we
Speaker 1: all benefit from being in this group because if we
Speaker 1: are within the group and then we survive, we get
Speaker 1: to pass on our genes and our children who will
Speaker 1: have that same sort of cooperative framework. They're born sort
Speaker 1: of with the capability of having that cooperativeness and empathy,
Speaker 1: and then they're raised in the group. So it's sort
Speaker 1: of this interaction between genetic selection and also social selection,
Speaker 1: right like when you when you raise your child in
Speaker 1: a group, they learn the customs of the group and
Speaker 1: they learn how to interact with people. So we can
Speaker 1: see how through natural selection, kindness and cooperation can actually
Speaker 1: be beneficial to a species. Um But there's this whole
Speaker 1: other problem when it comes to bees, ants, and termites,
Speaker 1: because they're not just a cooperative society like humans are,
Speaker 1: or humans should be. Maybe I should say individual humans
Speaker 1: have offspring. It's not just the king and queen of
Speaker 1: human society that have offspring. We're all able to have offspring,
Speaker 1: and it all benefits us to have a community that's
Speaker 1: that's safe and bountiful for our offspring. So working to other,
Speaker 1: working together helps us all kind of pass on our
Speaker 1: genes collectively. Um, but with these with bees, ants, termites,
Speaker 1: and these other you social animals, the individuals in the
Speaker 1: colony do not reproduce. So you have your hive of bees,
Speaker 1: your colony of ants. All of the workers are females,
Speaker 1: The queen is female. The workers do not reproduce, generally speaking,
Speaker 1: and so it seems like, well, that shouldn't work out
Speaker 1: like that. It should only select for the ants that
Speaker 1: are selfish enough to want to reproduce, or you know,
Speaker 1: I'm saying selfish and sort of a more evolutionary biology terms,
Speaker 1: not that there's like a little ant going like ha ha,
Speaker 1: I'm going to reproduce, screw the colony, but it really
Speaker 1: should like favor that kind of sneakery. And trickery, it
Speaker 1: seems like, because it's like, well, how else would these
Speaker 1: altruistic genes get passed on? Right, why do they still
Speaker 1: exist if they're not getting propagated to the next generation
Speaker 1: exactly exactly, So this is a seeming paradox in order
Speaker 1: to get to the bottom of this. I mean, there
Speaker 1: is a hot debate about this in the evolutionary biology community.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's still going on to this day.
Speaker 1: Like I just read this like scathing research paper about like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: these guys are all wrong about this, and we can
Speaker 1: prove it. It's one of the more controversial topics in
Speaker 1: evolutionary biology because it is such a fundamental thing that
Speaker 1: we have to figure out in order to fully understand
Speaker 1: how natural selection works. Well, why can't evolutionary biologists cooperate
Speaker 1: when their research about cooperation? Right, there's like selfishness in
Speaker 1: the research about cultruism. That's ironic. They've got it. What
Speaker 1: Jeff Goldblum in the Fly his problem was he didn't
Speaker 1: like put a bee in the other end of the transporter,
Speaker 1: so he turned half be because then he would actually
Speaker 1: be really productive and really cooperatively working on papers together
Speaker 1: in a hive of researchers. So there are a few
Speaker 1: theories that I think you have to understand all of
Speaker 1: them to actually get the full picture of how this works.
Speaker 1: And we've talked about bees and ants on the show before,
Speaker 1: and I've kind of discussed some of these things in
Speaker 1: less detail in terms of like how the math behind
Speaker 1: this works. But right now we're going to get really
Speaker 1: deep into it. To get a full understanding about the
Speaker 1: math of bees and answer termites and so on and
Speaker 1: so forth. I've never been more ready. That is probably
Speaker 1: not going to be the only b pun we do
Speaker 1: to folks, so strap in. So first let's talk about
Speaker 1: the kin selection theory. So this is one of the
Speaker 1: few theories that helps explain how a bee colony could exist.
Speaker 1: And this actually doesn't apply to the one group of
Speaker 1: mammals who are used social naked mole rats, which we'll
Speaker 1: get into a little later. We'll discuss in more detail
Speaker 1: in just a little bit, but let's just focus on bees, ants, termites.
Speaker 1: These groups of insects that have a colony of worker females.
Speaker 1: None of them reproduce, just the queen reproduces, and somehow
Speaker 1: this remains a stable system. So the so the workers
Speaker 1: are all female, like the males are not doing any work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: basically the males don't do much. They kind of sit
Speaker 1: around eating until they can go off and mate. And
Speaker 1: if they don't go off and mate, they actually get
Speaker 1: kicked out of the colony for being you know, layabouts
Speaker 1: too lazy to mate. Wow, that's quite I know, all right,
Speaker 1: you think that just getting to eat food all your
Speaker 1: life and then going off and mate would be a
Speaker 1: pretty good life. But uh yeah, I mean the the
Speaker 1: only function males really do. I think that sometimes bees
Speaker 1: will cluster together and vibrate together to increase the temperature
Speaker 1: of the colony and cold weather, and I think males
Speaker 1: will actually engage in that as well. But other than that,
Speaker 1: they just kind of hang it around and wait until
Speaker 1: they can go and reproduce. Basically, any bee you see
Speaker 1: going from flower to flower collecting nectar is like chance,
Speaker 1: it's going to be a female. So you got like
Speaker 1: women at the top because the queen is in charge,
Speaker 1: You've got women doing all the work, and the males
Speaker 1: are really just around to make more women. Right, it's
Speaker 1: a very matriarchal society. Congratulations, men, you can finally feel
Speaker 1: like you are you are being discriminated against in b society.
Speaker 1: They're being held down by the honey ceiling. So, as
Speaker 1: we've discussed before on the show, bees, ants and termites
Speaker 1: are what's called haploid diploid. So haploid simply means one
Speaker 1: set of chromosomes, whereas diploid means two sets of chromosomes.
Speaker 1: So we humans and most other sex having animals are
Speaker 1: actually diploid. So we get one full set of chromosomes
Speaker 1: from our father and one full set of chromosomes from
Speaker 1: our mother, and we take all that, we scrumble it up,
Speaker 1: and that becomes us. So that's why we're mostly x
Speaker 1: X or x Y for example, exactly exactly, and of course,
Speaker 1: like there are exceptions to this, like there are times
Speaker 1: when like there are children who will have xx y
Speaker 1: or like these things, but that on average, most people
Speaker 1: get one set of chromosomes from their father and one
Speaker 1: set of chromosomes from their mother. Haploid diploid is a
Speaker 1: combination of haploidy where you get only one set of
Speaker 1: chromosomes and diploid e. So this is the way it
Speaker 1: works in these insects that are haploid diploids. So female
Speaker 1: offspring hatch from fertilized eggs and get a set of
Speaker 1: chromosomes from their mother and from their father like a human,
Speaker 1: but male offspring hatch from unfertilized eggs, and they will
Speaker 1: only receive one set of chromosomes from their mother, the queen.
Speaker 1: So this means that sisters share about seventy five percent
Speaker 1: of their genes with each other when their father is
Speaker 1: the same. And so this is kind of like a
Speaker 1: little bit of a jump in mauth, Like, wait, how
Speaker 1: does that work? Because in humans, Uh, it's kind of
Speaker 1: varies how much we're related to our siblings. On average,
Speaker 1: it's a statistical average of about fifty pc you're going
Speaker 1: to be related to your sibling. Uh. And it's the
Speaker 1: reason it varies, The reason we're not just like always
Speaker 1: related to a sibling is that we are getting a
Speaker 1: random grab bag of gene from each parent through the
Speaker 1: process of biosis. It's somewhat randomized recombination of genes when
Speaker 1: our parents create their gammets. So we're getting this kind
Speaker 1: of like grab bag of stuff, and then we'll probably
Speaker 1: share a lot of those genes with our siblings. Um,
Speaker 1: but it's somewhat randomized. So Statistically speaking, we've got about
Speaker 1: a fifty percent chance of sharing those genes from our
Speaker 1: parents with our sibling. But there's a range there, right,
Speaker 1: Like principle, it's possible to have no genes in common
Speaker 1: with your brother if you just got like, exactly the
Speaker 1: opposite version of every gene from each parent. Yes, it's
Speaker 1: theoretically possible. Yes, it's theoretically possible for that to happen. Uh,
Speaker 1: you can see like that's sometimes siblings look very similar,
Speaker 1: sometimes they don't look related at all, So you can
Speaker 1: and that actually, even looking similar or not related at
Speaker 1: all doesn't necessarily mean that you're not genetically similar. You
Speaker 1: could share more genes with someone who you don't look
Speaker 1: at like, a sibling that you don't look like, then
Speaker 1: you do with the sibling that you do look like.
Speaker 1: It just depends on whether you happen to share some
Speaker 1: of the genes that code for like eye color or
Speaker 1: hair color. People always tell me I look like Matt mconackey,
Speaker 1: but we're not related at all. I'm pretty sure that
Speaker 1: wasn't a joke, right, No, that was a serious laugh.
Speaker 1: It's it's just how stunningly similar to Matthew McConaughey, you like,
Speaker 1: all right, all right, all right, yeah, so right, so
Speaker 1: with our sibling, your sister or your brother or your
Speaker 1: whoever you're about related statistically, you could be less or
Speaker 1: more depending on which sort of grab bag of jeans
Speaker 1: you got from your parents when you were a little
Speaker 1: when you're a little egg in a sperm, and then
Speaker 1: those combined and then you then there you're you. Uh.
Speaker 1: With bees, it's seventy that's way more. It's not always
Speaker 1: exactly seventy five percent, but on average, that's how related
Speaker 1: they are to their sisters, uh so much more than humans.
Speaker 1: So hold onto your butts. This is where we're gonna
Speaker 1: do some pretty simple I would say math, but it
Speaker 1: can get a little confusing. I definitely failed some of
Speaker 1: these quizzes in college because I like get sort of
Speaker 1: confused with percentages. But it's easier to do when you're
Speaker 1: looking at a diagram that somebody made using Pokemon bees.
Speaker 1: So I will include that in the show notes. Someone
Speaker 1: made this diagram. I think it's Comby and then like
Speaker 1: Cambies evolutions. Um, I don't know what the names of
Speaker 1: those are, but it's a great diagram. So basically the
Speaker 1: queen gives of her jeans to her daughter, and the
Speaker 1: father gives one of his genes to his daughter. How
Speaker 1: does that work? Well, if you remember earlier what we
Speaker 1: were talking about is that males results from unfertilized eggs.
Speaker 1: They are haploid. They only get one set of chromosomes
Speaker 1: from their mother, so they only have one set of
Speaker 1: chromosomes they can get of to an offspring. So when
Speaker 1: they are mating with the queen, while the queen has
Speaker 1: two sets of chromosomes and she can give you of
Speaker 1: whatever chromosomes she has, the male only has one set,
Speaker 1: so he just gives you that that's all he's got
Speaker 1: for you. So this means that at least half of
Speaker 1: the daughter's genes are going to be shared with her
Speaker 1: sister's genes at a minimum, because she gets they both
Speaker 1: got like a of their genes from their father if
Speaker 1: they share their father, So the other half of her
Speaker 1: genes that she gets from her mother that's a little
Speaker 1: more randomized, So she'll share about half of that amount
Speaker 1: of genes with any given sister. So that means that
Speaker 1: of like her total chromosomal amount, like she'll of her
Speaker 1: mother's chromosomes, she has about a chance of sharing that
Speaker 1: with another sister because it's half of a half. It's
Speaker 1: so let's see if I get this math right. So
Speaker 1: you're saying that all the female sisters they have the
Speaker 1: same gene from their father, because the father only has one,
Speaker 1: so they all have exactly the same one. They're like
Speaker 1: identical twins. But the other one, the one they get
Speaker 1: from their mom. They have one of their mom's genes,
Speaker 1: so they might share it or they might not. Right,
Speaker 1: basically similar ish, I mean, it's a little it's a
Speaker 1: little more complicated because it's sets of chromosomes and when
Speaker 1: when the mother is actually creating her egg it goes
Speaker 1: through this process of miosis where there's some randomization, so
Speaker 1: females can actually share more or less related nous through
Speaker 1: their mother, whereas like they're getting I think basically of
Speaker 1: their father's genes, because the father really doesn't have, uh
Speaker 1: that the amount of genes to play around with that
Speaker 1: the the mother does because he only gets like one
Speaker 1: set of chromosomes and that's all he is. And when
Speaker 1: she makes eggs, like eggs are either female or male, right,
Speaker 1: even though they have only one of her genes, So
Speaker 1: the male eggs do they always get the same gene
Speaker 1: from her or do they get one or the other.
Speaker 1: They get I think a randomized gene from her, so
Speaker 1: they are unfertilized, so it's only getting its mother's genes.
Speaker 1: But I think it's still goes through the process of myosis.
Speaker 1: So the male offspring is still getting some randomized genes
Speaker 1: from its mother, but it's all that's all it's getting.
Speaker 1: It's getting nothing from the father because it's unfertilized. So
Speaker 1: the eggs all have one gene and then the male
Speaker 1: comes along and when he fertilizes, it gives it the
Speaker 1: other one to make it female. But the male eggs
Speaker 1: never get fertilized, so they just stay one gene and
Speaker 1: stay male. I mean, I would just say, like instead
Speaker 1: of saying one gene, one set of chromosomes, because like
Speaker 1: there's many genes within a set of chromosomes. But yeah,
Speaker 1: just like one set of chromosomes that it gets from
Speaker 1: its mother, not add percent of its mother's chromosomes, because
Speaker 1: its mother has more chromosomes than the male even needs.
Speaker 1: So she that's going through that process of myosis, such
Speaker 1: that the male offspring is getting, um, what is it?
Speaker 1: I think the male is roughly related to its mother.
Speaker 1: Let me just double check on that. Sorry. See, this
Speaker 1: is why I fail these quizzes in college. It's complicated.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, it really is. I mean it doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like it should be right because you're dealing with
Speaker 1: very simple percentages like a D. But then as you
Speaker 1: get like a longer line of bees and you're trying
Speaker 1: to figure out like how much of this be is
Speaker 1: related to that be, it actually adds up to be
Speaker 1: quite complicated. So the queen will share on average about
Speaker 1: half of her jeans with her you know, she will
Speaker 1: definitely share half of her jeans with her son. Weirdly,
Speaker 1: the male be will share a hundred percent of his
Speaker 1: jeans with his mother because he's like a hundred percent
Speaker 1: of his genes is his mother's genes. But for her,
Speaker 1: she's only half related to him because she's only giving
Speaker 1: half of her jeans to him. Uh. It creates some
Speaker 1: really really weird scenarios to where well, mothers and sons
Speaker 1: always have complicated relationships. Well bees, male bees can only
Speaker 1: have daughters, they can't have sons, but they can have
Speaker 1: grandsons because again, like you have, uh, when the queen
Speaker 1: is laying eggs and she mates. Let's let's call him
Speaker 1: Jerry is her mate. You can't even really call him
Speaker 1: the king because he just dies after mating. He has
Speaker 1: no yeah, exactly, it's got he's got no like uh
Speaker 1: power in the royal society. So like one time they
Speaker 1: mate and explode. No wonder the wonder these men know what, mate?
Speaker 1: I understand, I do what now? So so the queen
Speaker 1: mates with Jerry, and Jerry dies, and the the only
Speaker 1: eggs that the queen is going to use Jerry's DNA
Speaker 1: for our female because the unfertilized eggs do not use
Speaker 1: any of Jerry's DNA, and those are the Queen's sons.
Speaker 1: But Jerry can still have a grandson because one of
Speaker 1: his daughters could grow up to become a new queen.
Speaker 1: And if she mates, she can have a son, and
Speaker 1: through the process of miosis, some of her father's genes
Speaker 1: that she's scrumbling up to go into her son. Uh
Speaker 1: could could like that then will make that son Jerry's grandson.
Speaker 1: But he can't have any sons, so he has got
Speaker 1: a skip a generation before he's got a got a grandson,
Speaker 1: which doesn't really matter to him. Because he's dead anyway,
Speaker 1: And so most of the queen's children to have no offspring. Right,
Speaker 1: only if she springs to have a female child which
Speaker 1: becomes a queen. Well, it's not even too randomized in
Speaker 1: terms of female offspring becoming queens. That only happens if
Speaker 1: they feed them royal jelly, right, And so yes, most
Speaker 1: of the female offspring will not have uh any offspring.
Speaker 1: And the way that this happens, one proposed way is
Speaker 1: that because um, because they're more related to their sisters
Speaker 1: than they are to like, potentially their own offspring even um,
Speaker 1: then it doesn't make sense for them to have to
Speaker 1: sneak around and try to have their own offspring when
Speaker 1: they're they share so many genes with their sisters that
Speaker 1: whatever altruistic gene they have, if they ensure the success
Speaker 1: of their colony and one of their sisters ends up
Speaker 1: being one of the new queens, it's like that increases
Speaker 1: the chance of all of these genes that they share
Speaker 1: of getting passed onto the next generation. So usually you
Speaker 1: think about the next generation and like, I'm trying to
Speaker 1: lift up the next generation and support the ones that
Speaker 1: have my genes so they can probably go forward, sort
Speaker 1: of down the evolutionary tree. But here these people will
Speaker 1: never but here these beans will never have any offspring.
Speaker 1: But you're saying that they're related to their mom them
Speaker 1: into their siblings, and so they still have a sort
Speaker 1: of genetic interest in their mother's success even if they're
Speaker 1: not going to have any kids themselves. It's not really
Speaker 1: that individually they have any interest in it. It's that
Speaker 1: it's whether or not the genes that they have, uh,
Speaker 1: are the same genes that get passed onto the new
Speaker 1: generation and code for the same behavior. So it's like
Speaker 1: they're like, they're these bees have no plans. They're not
Speaker 1: thinking like, well, if I help out my sister, maybe
Speaker 1: she'll have a she'll become queen and have a son.
Speaker 1: There's not like neither the bee nor the genes inside
Speaker 1: the bee can plan ahead like that or think like that.
Speaker 1: It's really like, say you have it's about the statistical
Speaker 1: probability that the genes that they have and they share
Speaker 1: that codes for the same youth social behavior ends up
Speaker 1: getting passed on to the next generation. So it's it's
Speaker 1: it's counterintuitive because we really think about sort of intention
Speaker 1: with things like like a kind of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I want to give my children a good life. I
Speaker 1: want to you know, pass on sort of like good
Speaker 1: qualities to my children, like kindness and happiness and things.
Speaker 1: But you know, in terms of natural selection, especially when
Speaker 1: you're looking at something like a B, it's not a
Speaker 1: conscious decision of I'm trying to pass this on. It's
Speaker 1: it's like, if those genes get passed on, you did it,
Speaker 1: You won, And those behaviors that got passed on through
Speaker 1: those genes are going to be replicated over and over
Speaker 1: throughout the generations. Yeah, and it's even deeper than that, right,
Speaker 1: because you're saying that that behavior caring for your kids,
Speaker 1: loving your kids is really just a product of evolutionary
Speaker 1: pressure that folks that ended up feeling things for their
Speaker 1: kids are the ones that took care of them and
Speaker 1: then propagating their own genes. It is. It is, And
Speaker 1: I know that for some people that may like feel like,
Speaker 1: oh man, well then we don't have free will, and
Speaker 1: it's it's meaningless, and it's like everything in human society
Speaker 1: is basically a product of evolution, but we have this
Speaker 1: kind of unique ability to have some fun with it
Speaker 1: and to kind of have some decision, like if you know,
Speaker 1: as evidenced by the fact that people adopt children and
Speaker 1: love them as as you know their children because they
Speaker 1: are their children, and that has no like, you know,
Speaker 1: genetic motivation. It's just because we have developed this empathy
Speaker 1: and this kindness towards other humans where we realize, like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, a family can be anything that we want
Speaker 1: it to be. So, if anything, we're kind of like
Speaker 1: giving the middle finger to Mother Nature and saying like, hey,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be nice whether you want it or not. Right,
Speaker 1: and not every behavior is perfectly sculpted by evolution. Right,
Speaker 1: It's like, if something develops and it's useful for propping
Speaker 1: any of your genes, it might also have other effects
Speaker 1: which aren't harmful, like adopting children and also loving them
Speaker 1: exactly because we live in a society, as the Joker
Speaker 1: likes to say, but I also like to say it,
Speaker 1: because through our society we can actually achieve much more
Speaker 1: in terms of like propping each other up and helping
Speaker 1: each other survive in a way that takes off a
Speaker 1: lot of the selective pressures from us and allows us
Speaker 1: to be kinder and and have more freedom in terms
Speaker 1: of what we choose to do with our behaviors, which
Speaker 1: I think is really lovely. Unfortunately not the case for
Speaker 1: bees and and ants and and uh also naked molerats.
Speaker 1: And so this is where I get into part two
Speaker 1: of the explanation of what is going on. So unfortunately,
Speaker 1: kin selection is not the sort of tidy explanation that
Speaker 1: we would hope for where it's like, okay, so just
Speaker 1: like statistically speaking, like you know, they share their genes
Speaker 1: with their sisters, and that would would be able to
Speaker 1: allow them to like, you know, those genes to survive.
Speaker 1: It's it's not enough of an explanation potentially. And we
Speaker 1: see this because of the pesky naked molerat, which is
Speaker 1: a mammal uh, a little cutie that looks um sort
Speaker 1: of like you took a hamster and shaved it, uh
Speaker 1: and uh put it underground. Don't do that anybody from
Speaker 1: They're wrinkly, they're flesh colored, you know, they look slightly phallic.
Speaker 1: But they're really interesting animals. So uh. They are diploid
Speaker 1: like humans, like most other sex having animals, like all
Speaker 1: other mammals. Uh, they you know, get a pair of
Speaker 1: a set of genes from their mother and from their father.
Speaker 1: All of them there's none of this like weird genetic
Speaker 1: shenanigans going on for these naked mole rats like there
Speaker 1: is for bees and ants and so on. But naked
Speaker 1: mole rats have a youth social society, which shouldn't make sense,
Speaker 1: but somehow it works out. So they have one reproducing
Speaker 1: dominant queen and subservient worker females who do not reproduce,
Speaker 1: just like bees and ant colonies, and and they kind
Speaker 1: of act in a way that's very similar to bee colonies,
Speaker 1: where you have the queen kind of passing on orders
Speaker 1: and bullying her underlings. So this brings us to another
Speaker 1: force that may help create youth social societies, and that's
Speaker 1: brutal tyranny, so, or, perhaps more gently put the manipulation
Speaker 1: on the part of the queens. So both use social
Speaker 1: insects and naked molerat queens use both chemical and behavioral
Speaker 1: manipulation to force their colony into compliance. So you social
Speaker 1: insects use pheromones often that will suppress other females ability
Speaker 1: to reproduce. So they have these pheromone signals that will
Speaker 1: actively suppress female reproduction in their offspring. But we're talking
Speaker 1: about bees now bees using SMA because I thought that
Speaker 1: the female bees couldn't reproduce because they're not queens and
Speaker 1: they needed the royal jelly to be a queen. But
Speaker 1: you're saying that even without the royal jelly they could
Speaker 1: somehow reproduce. Sometimes they can sneakily reproduce. While the pheromones
Speaker 1: do suppress their reproduct of hormones. If you've got to
Speaker 1: be that maybe is not getting as exposed to that.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they do sneakily reproduce even if they're not queens,
Speaker 1: and that is met with the punishment of having their
Speaker 1: eggs eaten by the queen. So the queen will go
Speaker 1: around eating eggs that she finds that are not her own.
Speaker 1: So it is an extra safety measure to make sure
Speaker 1: nobody's reproducing but the queen. Uh. And even in terms
Speaker 1: of like once a queen hatches, right, and if she
Speaker 1: has other sisters that are being developed into queens by
Speaker 1: being fed this royal jelly, she will kill them to
Speaker 1: make sure that she's the only queen. Uh. There are
Speaker 1: very few instances where a colony can have two queens
Speaker 1: at once. That doesn't typically happen. Um. So like once
Speaker 1: the old queen dies and her pheromones are gone. UH.
Speaker 1: This signals like the bees to start creating, just feeding
Speaker 1: royal jelly hither and thither, to like create new queens
Speaker 1: and to start reproducing until a new queen will emerge
Speaker 1: and reproduce for the rest of the colony. But naked
Speaker 1: mole rats now, there was some research done to see
Speaker 1: whether they use pheromones to UH for the queen to
Speaker 1: enforce her monarchy. That research a little it's a little shaky.
Speaker 1: They're not really sure whether or not. There there was
Speaker 1: like some evidence that pointed towards maybe some pheromones excreted
Speaker 1: in the queen's urine that may have some impact, but
Speaker 1: there have been other studies that were like showing that
Speaker 1: maybe it doesn't have as much as an effect. What
Speaker 1: we do know is that she will physically bully them,
Speaker 1: like any female that is disobedient or you know, is
Speaker 1: trying to shirk her work or or go off to
Speaker 1: mate somewhere, Like we'll get bullied and shoved around and
Speaker 1: sat on by the queen UH to Like basically this
Speaker 1: and this physical dominance displays UH seems to inhibit the
Speaker 1: females reproductive hormones by basically constant bullying makes them less
Speaker 1: likely to reproduce actually inhibit yes, inhibits the reproductive hormones,
Speaker 1: um so, and can somebody else take over? And maybe
Speaker 1: it's just like physical dominance. Can you get like a
Speaker 1: really tough muscley one of these things that's born and
Speaker 1: eventually take over and be the new queen? Yeah, but generally, interestingly,
Speaker 1: it seems like that is often passed, like the daughters
Speaker 1: of the queen, Like, uh, it's usually I think it
Speaker 1: happens like when the queen is older and like if
Speaker 1: she's like kind of losing losing her head or her edge,
Speaker 1: like one, yeah, one of these daughters will take over
Speaker 1: the colony. And sometimes, and this is what's interesting and
Speaker 1: this seems to happen more often in these colonies than
Speaker 1: with the colonies, is that like the female members, the
Speaker 1: ones that are sort of being bullied, these workers will
Speaker 1: try to sneak off and start there like reproduce and
Speaker 1: start their own colony essentially, and they can manage to
Speaker 1: do that. So it's sort of this like release valve
Speaker 1: of like of these workers sneaking off starting their new colonies,
Speaker 1: Which makes a lot of sense because in this in
Speaker 1: this kind of you social situation. It really is sort
Speaker 1: of just however you can manage, uh, manage it. So
Speaker 1: like the queen is using kind of brute force to
Speaker 1: make sure that she's got a lot of support for
Speaker 1: her offspring. But other females, if they can get away
Speaker 1: with going off in and reproducing, they will, and bees
Speaker 1: in theory probably would too. It's just like in the
Speaker 1: b society, it's probably a lot more iron clad than
Speaker 1: these naked molerat societies in terms of preventing that from happening.
Speaker 1: And what are the men doing in these naked molerat societies?
Speaker 1: So they also like not doing any work. I think
Speaker 1: that's a good question. I think they might do more
Speaker 1: work than than the than in bees. So like there
Speaker 1: is like brute force being used both in the naked
Speaker 1: molerat society and in bees and ants and these you
Speaker 1: social insects. Uh So, so that's another part of it.
Speaker 1: I think that adds onto like the kin selection. So
Speaker 1: if the kin selection is not enough, like you also
Speaker 1: have this behavior where you're basically having a tyranny which
Speaker 1: can propagate. We know in human society tyranny's can continue
Speaker 1: on for generations even if it's not to the benefit
Speaker 1: of individuals. But um, but in this case, it's like
Speaker 1: it's helped even more out by the fact that genetically speaking,
Speaker 1: UH they do like they do share a lot of genes,
Speaker 1: even even the naked moleras, even though it's not the
Speaker 1: same as with U. With the uh bees, like they
Speaker 1: are often sisters and related to their mother in some way.
Speaker 1: But then the next theory, the last theory we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about, is the multi level selection theory, which
Speaker 1: is basically that evolutionary selective pressures acts on all levels
Speaker 1: of life, from genetic to cellular to an individual organism
Speaker 1: to a group of organisms. So the analogy used as
Speaker 1: like a Russian nesting doll, where it's like inside like
Speaker 1: that little the tiniest Russian nesting doll, Like that's on
Speaker 1: the genetic level, your genes uh will will often compete
Speaker 1: and will uh you know, like there're selective pressures happening
Speaker 1: directly on the genes at the genetic level. And then
Speaker 1: you have evolutionary selection pressures acting on your cells individual
Speaker 1: like cells can compete and interact in interesting ways, which
Speaker 1: are actually going to talk about a little bit more later.
Speaker 1: And then you have the individual organism the organism made
Speaker 1: up of all these cells, made up of all these genes,
Speaker 1: and then you have pressures acting on the organism itself,
Speaker 1: like cheetah has to go fast to catch its prey.
Speaker 1: You know, a bird flies so that it can like
Speaker 1: eat insects and escape predators. So you have that the
Speaker 1: organism itself, like this collective of genes and of cells,
Speaker 1: has evolutionary pressures acting on it. And then the bigger
Speaker 1: step is that a group of organisms has selective pressures
Speaker 1: acting on it, Like you have, say, um, a group
Speaker 1: of like lemurs fighting with another group of lemurs over resources,
Speaker 1: Like you'll have selective pressures fighting at the group level
Speaker 1: and as well as on the individual level, as well
Speaker 1: as on the cellular level, as well as on the
Speaker 1: genetic levels. So that's why it's that Russian nesting doll
Speaker 1: um and so kind of like a over probably oversimplified
Speaker 1: way to look at it. Like in practices, like you know,
Speaker 1: sperm will compete to reach the egg, right, so like this,
Speaker 1: these cells, the fastest ones to reach the egg will
Speaker 1: end up being the ones that survive. Individuals will compete
Speaker 1: with other individuals or with their environment in order to
Speaker 1: reach food. And then groups will compete with each other
Speaker 1: in order to secure resources for their own groups. So
Speaker 1: the way that EO. Wilson, who's the famous ant man
Speaker 1: or maybe I should say entomologists, kind of uses this
Speaker 1: as a way to explain how altruism and these other
Speaker 1: these other seemingly paradoxical behavior just conform. So he says,
Speaker 1: quote in a group, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but
Speaker 1: groups of altruistic individuals beat groups of selfish individuals. So
Speaker 1: you know, this can make sense for humans. Like if
Speaker 1: we have a group of altruistic individuals, uh, you know
Speaker 1: that are all working together, and then we have like Jerry.
Speaker 1: I don't know why I'm piling on Jerry today, but
Speaker 1: you know Jerry over there, who's like being selfish and
Speaker 1: not cooperative, Like the group of people who are all
Speaker 1: being cooperative and kind can end up beating you know, Jerry,
Speaker 1: Like who's over there just like you know, you know,
Speaker 1: pounding a stone against a rock and screaming angrily and
Speaker 1: you know, not picking up his trash. A whole hunting
Speaker 1: party can take down a mammoth, and that can feed
Speaker 1: him through the winter because Jerry's not going to make
Speaker 1: that kind of kill on his own right, right, if
Speaker 1: Jerry is just spending all his time like trolling people
Speaker 1: on Twitter, like he's not gonna get a mammoth. But
Speaker 1: there must be multi levels within the levels, Like if
Speaker 1: you're an altruistic group and you're all helping each other,
Speaker 1: still you prefer to support the folks who like have
Speaker 1: more genes um connected with you, right, Like you're gonna
Speaker 1: help your kids more than other people's kids. And there
Speaker 1: must be like nuances there also, yes, yeah, exactly, So
Speaker 1: you know, these kinds of like each of these theories.
Speaker 1: In my opinion, while there's a lot of fighting going on,
Speaker 1: you know, in terms of like really figuring out, and
Speaker 1: when I say fighting, it's often like good natured like
Speaker 1: actually trying to get to the truth of things. It's
Speaker 1: not just like a biologists being petty, although there's probably
Speaker 1: some of that, uh you know, it's I think that
Speaker 1: all of these theories kind of interlocked in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways. So like you have you can say, have
Speaker 1: like a flock of birds, right that like works together
Speaker 1: as a flock, but individual birds really do want to reproduce,
Speaker 1: and within that like often like offspring of birds will
Speaker 1: stay around with their parents and help raise uh, their
Speaker 1: younger siblings, not only because it like is beneficial because
Speaker 1: the share genes with their siblings, but it also helps
Speaker 1: them trained to become parents. So in that example, you
Speaker 1: have all of these layers of sort of like selection
Speaker 1: where you have the flock doing better all you know,
Speaker 1: sticking together, and then you have the offspring helping raise
Speaker 1: the new generation of offspring that they are related to. UM.
Speaker 1: But they are also selfishly getting a benefit from helping
Speaker 1: to raise their younger siblings because it trains them how
Speaker 1: to better raise their own offspring. So that's you know,
Speaker 1: the individual need to reproduce as well being shown there.
Speaker 1: So it's really interesting and I think that like when
Speaker 1: you simplify things to like it's just kin selection or something,
Speaker 1: you do get uh, some complications that really can't be
Speaker 1: explained unless you are using all of these other different
Speaker 1: theories and and nuance like you said, to try to
Speaker 1: explain it. Well, it's complicated. I can see why biologists
Speaker 1: gets sort of heated about it. Are you saying that
Speaker 1: they're all playing nicely? There's no really like scathing papers
Speaker 1: being written back and forth, But oh no, there are
Speaker 1: there are There are some like in a way. It's
Speaker 1: like I'm almost scared to talk about it because it's
Speaker 1: like I don't want to like come down on the
Speaker 1: incorrect side or something, because like I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: necessarily an expert on on things like kin selection and
Speaker 1: and multi layer multi level selection. So I don't want
Speaker 1: to get something wrong and like start getting like, you know,
Speaker 1: knocks on my door in the middle of the night
Speaker 1: from angry biologists. Well, you know, there's another level there also,
Speaker 1: because there must be like academic structures where people tend
Speaker 1: to support their students who believe in their theory and
Speaker 1: probably their theory of evolution right against the other academic
Speaker 1: biologists who are promoting their students to become professors, um,
Speaker 1: and so there must be the competition between those groups.
Speaker 1: You have, you have kin selection of your your research assistance.
Speaker 1: I get it. Be society may be based at least
Speaker 1: partially on math. But can these themselves do math? A
Speaker 1: recent study done at r M i T in Australia
Speaker 1: suggests that you can train a bee to do basic
Speaker 1: addition and subtraction. So say you're a bee in this study,
Speaker 1: you would enter into a maze where you're shown a
Speaker 1: group of blue shapes, let's say three blue squares. Then
Speaker 1: you'll enter a second room in the maze with two
Speaker 1: holes above whole A is four blue squares above whole
Speaker 1: B is two blue squares. The correct answer is A.
Speaker 1: You were supposed to add one blue square to the
Speaker 1: total for the correct solution. Of course, you don't know
Speaker 1: this initially because the researchers don't speak B, so you
Speaker 1: have to do trial and error, either getting a reward
Speaker 1: of tasty sugar or nasty quinine to help you figure
Speaker 1: out the correct solution. But then you're presented with a
Speaker 1: maze in which there are yellow squares instead of blue.
Speaker 1: This time you have to subtract to get the correct solution.
Speaker 1: In the first room, you see three yellow squares, and
Speaker 1: you can go to the food behind the door labeled
Speaker 1: with either two yellow squares or the door labeled with
Speaker 1: four yellow squares. The correct answer this time is two
Speaker 1: yellow squares, and again you're either rewarded with good food
Speaker 1: or punished with yucky food for the correct incorrect answers. Well, congratulations,
Speaker 1: because if you're a B, you'll figure it out kind of.
Speaker 1: After a few hours of training, these were able to
Speaker 1: pick the correct solutions, doing basic edition and subtractions well
Speaker 1: at least significantly better than chance. They probably only got
Speaker 1: like a B minus on their report cards. When we return,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about more animals who can do math.
Speaker 1: Clever Hans was a famous German horse in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen hundreds who purportedly could count and do math. He
Speaker 1: could stomp his foot the correct number of times when
Speaker 1: faced with a math problem. Unfortunately, it turns out that
Speaker 1: Hans was no math is, but rather a body language expert.
Speaker 1: He could only get the math problem right if his
Speaker 1: owner knew the answer, and if he could see his
Speaker 1: owner indicating there was some subtle facial expression or posture.
Speaker 1: His owner would probably unconsciously exhibit when Hans was on
Speaker 1: the right number of hoof stumps. I'm pretty sure this
Speaker 1: still means Hans deserves that title of clever. But can
Speaker 1: other animals really do complex math problems? So what do
Speaker 1: you think? You think animals can do a math? I
Speaker 1: think humans struggle with maths. But yeah, I think if
Speaker 1: we think mathematically, and you know, human brains are similar
Speaker 1: to human brains are similar to animal brains, I imagine
Speaker 1: there must be some level of math that they can do.
Speaker 1: It must be continuum of ability rather than it's solely
Speaker 1: a human facility. Yeah, I mean, like we don't have
Speaker 1: we don't have like an orangutan with a little like
Speaker 1: a motorboard hat and like smoke a pipe with a
Speaker 1: chalkboard doing like mathematics with like banana symbols. But pretty close,
Speaker 1: actually pretty close maybe minus the pipe. Uh. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven, Duke University made macaque monkeys and college
Speaker 1: students take a math test, which I think if I
Speaker 1: was a college student, I would be very nervous to
Speaker 1: be outperformed by a monkey. I would be is. I
Speaker 1: would just be like beside myself hoping that I performed better,
Speaker 1: and I probably wouldn't. So they were shown dots on
Speaker 1: the screen instead of numbers, because it's kind of unfair
Speaker 1: to expect a maccaque monkey to know what a number is,
Speaker 1: like they don't know. Um. The humans were told that
Speaker 1: they would be shown one set of dots and then another,
Speaker 1: and then they could select from a range of choices,
Speaker 1: and the correct choice would be adding the first set
Speaker 1: of dots to the second set of dots. So like
Speaker 1: say you're shown two dots and then you're shown one dot,
Speaker 1: and then you have like you're on the final screen,
Speaker 1: you're shown like three dots, seven dots, four dots. The
Speaker 1: correct answer is three dots because you've added two to
Speaker 1: one dots. We can't talk to monkeys and explain the
Speaker 1: rules to them, not yet anyways. We can't also brible
Speaker 1: them with class credits. So they had to figure out
Speaker 1: another way to teach these monkeys to try to make
Speaker 1: do this math. So they would get treats in exchange
Speaker 1: for selecting the right answers. And it's interesting to me
Speaker 1: what they're measuring, Like, they must be measuring the ability
Speaker 1: of the monkeys to generalize. So they show them a
Speaker 1: bunch of patterns, reward them when they're correct, and then
Speaker 1: do they show them a math problem they haven't seen
Speaker 1: before and seeing if they do it better than random chance? Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: So they don't want to just train them to do
Speaker 1: the same types of math problems over and over again,
Speaker 1: so they are introducing novel math problems and training the
Speaker 1: macaques that they do want to get the math correct.
Speaker 1: So they found that not only were the macaques good
Speaker 1: at doing the math, they did almost as well as
Speaker 1: the college students. So I think that we should be
Speaker 1: giving the maccas a degree and asking what the college
Speaker 1: students they've been up to clearly not studying. No, But
Speaker 1: I mean it makes sense because as humans we don't
Speaker 1: necessarily do We're not at least taught to do math
Speaker 1: in terms of looking at groups of dots and then
Speaker 1: trying to add them and just visually doing the math
Speaker 1: really quickly. We have this symbolic system which really works
Speaker 1: out well. We have incredible brains that are so good
Speaker 1: at like nesting concepts that it really cuts out a
Speaker 1: lot of this like uncertainty and having to make this
Speaker 1: really quick calculation of like how many dots are there,
Speaker 1: because we can just we have the number five, and
Speaker 1: we can store all that information within this concept of
Speaker 1: five and then learn, you know, uh, five minus two
Speaker 1: is three I'm pretty sure, and so like. But with
Speaker 1: the macaques, they don't have that symbolic uh representation that
Speaker 1: they can fall back. So it's actually not too surprising
Speaker 1: to me that they're good at just seeing a number
Speaker 1: of dots and kind of getting like what that quantity is.
Speaker 1: If anything, I would say that it I would think
Speaker 1: that sometimes animals might even be better at that than
Speaker 1: humans because they have to rely on that much more,
Speaker 1: whereas humans we have symbolic thinking that we can use
Speaker 1: that animals don't always seem to be able to demonstrate.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating to imagine what's going on inside the monkey's brain,
Speaker 1: you know, has it developed some basic mathematics as it
Speaker 1: found some like tricky work around to find the solution
Speaker 1: of these problems? Or is any workaround? Is any solution
Speaker 1: of these problems then defined as mathematics. I can imagine
Speaker 1: the monkey sees the first group and then the second group,
Speaker 1: and it solves the problem by saying, oh, I want
Speaker 1: the third group to be both of them. It's not
Speaker 1: like actually coming up with the concept of the larger numbers,
Speaker 1: just like recognizing that these two things emerged. I'll argue,
Speaker 1: right exactly, and it's it maybe is partially just like
Speaker 1: combining these two visuals in their head and thinking about
Speaker 1: what that combined visual looks like. And some some more
Speaker 1: evidence that this is sort of a math sense rather
Speaker 1: than actual like human type math is that well, what's
Speaker 1: interesting is both students and macaques struggled when the ratio
Speaker 1: of like the the math was like really close. So basically,
Speaker 1: if you have a similar of dots relative to the total.
Speaker 1: So like when they had to choose between like eleven
Speaker 1: and twelve dots, because you have a lot of dots
Speaker 1: and then they're only off by one versus having to
Speaker 1: choose between five and seven dots, or even like, uh,
Speaker 1: five and six is easier to differentiate between than like
Speaker 1: twelve and thirteen, because like, once you get more dots,
Speaker 1: it's like, even though they're both, both of those sets
Speaker 1: of solutions are only off by one. It's harder to
Speaker 1: see that with the larger proportion of dots than like
Speaker 1: you see five, you see six, it's a little a
Speaker 1: bit easier to see the difference there. Absolutely, I know
Speaker 1: that just from like writing exams that you've got to
Speaker 1: put potential answers that are pretty similar to really figure
Speaker 1: out if the students have any idea how to do
Speaker 1: it or they're just guessing exactly. Yeah. I wonder how
Speaker 1: the monkeys feel when they see like none of the
Speaker 1: above as an option. They're like, oh, man, that's that's fair.
Speaker 1: That's when they start throwing poop. The students too, to
Speaker 1: be fair, and so can the monkeys do more than
Speaker 1: just add to the test. Other math concepts like subtraction
Speaker 1: or multiplication? What can they do? Can they do integration? No?
Speaker 1: I don't think they can do integration. I haven't seen
Speaker 1: anything that suggests they can do multiplication. I think the
Speaker 1: most is it seems like simple addition, subtraction, and counting
Speaker 1: are sort of the things that uh primates seem to
Speaker 1: be able to do. Um. But you know, you might think, like, okay,
Speaker 1: that makes sense, right, they're really close to us evolutionarily,
Speaker 1: like it would make sense that's sort like our basic
Speaker 1: animal cousins can do math. Um. But surely, like really
Speaker 1: a stupid animal couldn't do math, like a chicken, Like
Speaker 1: they're not very bright. But actually there's evidence that chickens
Speaker 1: can count. And not only can they count, they can
Speaker 1: do it at a very young age, so they can
Speaker 1: count themselves before they've hatched. But ump, bump, that's my
Speaker 1: that's my chicken joke of the day. I've fulfilled my
Speaker 1: chicken joke of the day. Quota, So right after they've hatched,
Speaker 1: about three day old chickens are able to understand basic
Speaker 1: amounts and basic summation. Uh So these baby chickens are
Speaker 1: presented with a game of Peek a boo or I
Speaker 1: guess pekaboo. Okay, that was my second chicken joke. I
Speaker 1: promise I'm done with chicken jokes. Um. The the way
Speaker 1: that the study was done is based on the fact
Speaker 1: that baby chickens seem to like more stuff than less stuff,
Speaker 1: which is weird. They don't actually know why. Like you
Speaker 1: have some objects, like a group of objects, they will
Speaker 1: walk over to the bigger pile of objects, and they
Speaker 1: will to the smaller pile of objects. And it's not
Speaker 1: really clear why they prefer more stuff. I guess they
Speaker 1: just like to live extravagantly. They're greedy little chickens. They
Speaker 1: don't believe in tidying up, right. They're not these clean freaks. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: they they like yeah, like they are like more stuff,
Speaker 1: give me more stuff. It's a little scary if you
Speaker 1: think about it. There are so many chickens in the world.
Speaker 1: So if they decide that they can demand more and
Speaker 1: get more stuff, and they rise up against us. Um.
Speaker 1: So they these baby chickens are shown these two opaque
Speaker 1: screens where the researchers drop these little balls behind uh
Speaker 1: and so like when they're dropping the ball, they can
Speaker 1: see the ball, but once it falls behind the screen,
Speaker 1: they can't see anymore. Um, so when like they dropped
Speaker 1: one ball behind screen A and three balls behind screen
Speaker 1: B and release the baby chicken, the baby chicken goes
Speaker 1: towards screen BE because it's like, ah, yeah, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: get more balls, gonna get some balls. Us just really
Speaker 1: excited about collecting little toys. It can both conceptualize and
Speaker 1: remember basic amounts. That is really exciting in event itself.
Speaker 1: But then the researchers got more tricky with it. So
Speaker 1: they dropped like some balls behind screen A and then
Speaker 1: drop some balls behind screen B. But then they moved
Speaker 1: some of the balls from screen B back to screen A,
Speaker 1: so that now there are actually more behind screen A
Speaker 1: than screen B, whereas originally when they had first dropped it,
Speaker 1: there was a higher amount behind screen B. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so this chickens. The little chicks can't see behind the screen,
Speaker 1: but they can see the researchers hands moving things. So
Speaker 1: like so say like they drop um, like one ball
Speaker 1: behind screen A and then dropped four balls behind screen B.
Speaker 1: Then they pick up one ball from behind screen BE
Speaker 1: lifted up so the chicken see that ball, and then
Speaker 1: move it behind screen A, pick up another ball, move
Speaker 1: it behind screen A. Now, so the chicks have seen
Speaker 1: that they've just moved two balls behind screen B over
Speaker 1: to screen A. So now they should prefer screen A
Speaker 1: because now it's actually had more balls than screen B.
Speaker 1: But that would require them to understand that they're removing
Speaker 1: quantities from screen B adding it to screen A, and
Speaker 1: remember that screen A now has more balls. And they
Speaker 1: do They figure that out like about eight of the time,
Speaker 1: which is a really high success rate. Uh So, yeah,
Speaker 1: so a little baby chicks can do very simple math.
Speaker 1: Uh so, yeah, sign them up for Harvard. Little baby
Speaker 1: chicks are definitely better at math than little baby humans. Well,
Speaker 1: there have been research studies done on human infants as well.
Speaker 1: Uh And one of the problems actually with testing infants
Speaker 1: is they don't seem to have this weird preference for
Speaker 1: more objects that baby chicks have. So, like you put
Speaker 1: a baby like in front of some objects, uh like
Speaker 1: a young enough baby like even something with like candy,
Speaker 1: they're not necessarily going to just like crawl towards a
Speaker 1: pile with more candy or something when they're super young,
Speaker 1: because they don't have a concept of like, you know,
Speaker 1: I need to get that more candy that's only for
Speaker 1: older children. So for really young children, our best way
Speaker 1: of measuring their interest is something is I gaze, because
Speaker 1: the longer they stare at something, the more interested or
Speaker 1: surprised they are by something. They seem to like novelty.
Speaker 1: So that's one thing we've established, is they'll stare at
Speaker 1: something that is new or surprising to them. And so like,
Speaker 1: basically when researchers show them the same kind of test
Speaker 1: that they do with the chicks, except that they will
Speaker 1: do like impossible math problems. So they'll put like one
Speaker 1: ball behind a screen, two balls behind another screen, move
Speaker 1: one of the balls back to screen one. So they
Speaker 1: would expect when you lift up the screens, screen A
Speaker 1: has two balls, screen B has one ball. But then
Speaker 1: if you lift the screens and like screen A still
Speaker 1: has like one ball and screen B has like three balls,
Speaker 1: they stare and they're confused. They don't understand what's going on.
Speaker 1: It seems to be like, like that's our best measure
Speaker 1: that we can get that they can understand this math
Speaker 1: because they're like staring at it longer. It's pretty tough,
Speaker 1: I guess to do experiments with infants and so like,
Speaker 1: kudos to anybody who figures out how to do these experiments.
Speaker 1: But I'm always skeptical that we're like really understanding what's
Speaker 1: going on inside these infants based on like, you know,
Speaker 1: where their eyes are pointing. I get that it's the
Speaker 1: best we can do. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's
Speaker 1: actually telling us what the infants are doing, right, right,
Speaker 1: that something totally different is going on. It is it's
Speaker 1: a significant problem, right, Like for the baby chick experiment, right,
Speaker 1: Like we have of this weird innate thing that the
Speaker 1: chicks do, which is we want more stuff, give us
Speaker 1: more things. We're going to Vegas. Like these chicks, uh
Speaker 1: are ambitious little money makers. So like we can easily
Speaker 1: see that what preference the chick has for the most
Speaker 1: the most stuff. Babies don't act that way. We can't
Speaker 1: like get a baby to do what we want necessarily
Speaker 1: in an experiment. So yeah, the the eye gaze is
Speaker 1: the best metric that we often have for really young infants.
Speaker 1: But it's certainly something that it's like definitely up to interpretation,
Speaker 1: like what that means, Like does that really mean they
Speaker 1: think it's a wrong answer? Um, you know, like it's
Speaker 1: it at least into like the I think most we
Speaker 1: can say is that it indicates when we compare eye gaze, right, like,
Speaker 1: if they spend less time gazing at something than something else,
Speaker 1: it indicates they see the difference between the two things, right,
Speaker 1: that there's a difference in there, like something different is
Speaker 1: happening in their brain when they look at the thing
Speaker 1: that they're staring at longer versus the thing they're not
Speaker 1: staring at as much. Whether that means they like get
Speaker 1: that it's a wrong answer, It's hard to say whether
Speaker 1: or not that's true, but it seems to indicate that
Speaker 1: it's like the best indication that we have that they're
Speaker 1: like not expecting that, which is interesting because we also
Speaker 1: see that with physics problems, like they see they seem
Speaker 1: to have sort of this innate understanding of conservation of momentum.
Speaker 1: Like you have a tiny ball hit a big ball,
Speaker 1: and the big ball goes flying off. They stare at
Speaker 1: that longer than an appropriate response from the big ball,
Speaker 1: which seems to indicate maybe it's unexpected to them. Babies
Speaker 1: can do physics. You're saying, exactly, see it, Daniel, Even
Speaker 1: a baby could do your job. Sometimes I feel like
Speaker 1: an infant when I gaze at the wonder of the universe.
Speaker 1: I know lions wouldn't strike you as such, but they're
Speaker 1: secretly nerds. Lionesses can tell the size of a competing
Speaker 1: pride based on the number of simultaneous roars. In a study,
Speaker 1: researchers found that with a great degree of accuracy, lionesses
Speaker 1: could figure out whether a recording of lions featured fewer
Speaker 1: or more potential rivals than their own group, and they
Speaker 1: chose to either run towards the speakers for a fight
Speaker 1: or to retreat based on whether or not they since
Speaker 1: there were more lions or fewer. Wolves too, are able
Speaker 1: to distinguish between larger numbers of treats versus smaller numbers
Speaker 1: of treats and choose a can of treats accordingly. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: in a research setting, it seems like dogs failed this test,
Speaker 1: meaning that in our domestication of dogs we may have
Speaker 1: bred the ability to do math out of them. So sorry, spot,
Speaker 1: but speaking of spots, when we return, we're going to
Speaker 1: find out the math behind animal spots. While spots and stripes,
Speaker 1: like the code of a leopard or tiger, may appear
Speaker 1: flashy and attention grabbing to us, out of context in
Speaker 1: their natural environment. These clever markings help them blend into
Speaker 1: their surroundings, and it depends on the time of day
Speaker 1: to Leopards hunt at night in dark, tree dense areas,
Speaker 1: so those spots help them blend into the shadowy modeled
Speaker 1: moonlit forests, and a tiger stripes helps it hunt in
Speaker 1: tall grass where the shadows and patterns of the grass
Speaker 1: help it blend effortlessly into its environment. And while being
Speaker 1: orange looks flashy to us, to its main prey who
Speaker 1: have more limited color vision, the tigers can become practically invisible.
Speaker 1: So Daniel, I think it's relatively well known, like hey,
Speaker 1: you know, like spots and stripes serve this uh evil
Speaker 1: utionary function right for like camouflage mimicry. Uh. It can
Speaker 1: even be more complex things like in zebras sort of
Speaker 1: this illusion this barber Pole effect where when you get
Speaker 1: a group of zebras, it's hard to tell which way
Speaker 1: the stripes are going, which makes it hard for predators
Speaker 1: to figure out the direction that the hurt is moving.
Speaker 1: But the question is not like why they have these
Speaker 1: stripes in terms of like why there are evolutionary pressures,
Speaker 1: but like how their bodies can even form stripes, Like,
Speaker 1: how could that even happen? Like why would there um
Speaker 1: pegman or melanin producing cells ever arrange themselves in that
Speaker 1: way even by chance? Right, because you have to create
Speaker 1: the organism out of the cells, and so the cells
Speaker 1: have to like organize themselves in such a way to
Speaker 1: make these macroscopic effects from the microscopic cells. That's pretty
Speaker 1: fascinating exactly right. As you probably know through physics, like
Speaker 1: when you have sort of a great number of things, right,
Speaker 1: like you have a randomization of things over great numbers,
Speaker 1: it has this diffusion effect of kind of smoothing things out,
Speaker 1: so like for for spots and stripes, it's a little
Speaker 1: bit surprising because you would think that, like if you
Speaker 1: have random movement of like pigment cells, you wouldn't get
Speaker 1: organized patterns out of that. You would get some kind
Speaker 1: of diffuse pattern. And this has been a question for
Speaker 1: quite a while. In fact, Alan Turing was on the
Speaker 1: case way back in nineteen fifty two. Of the many
Speaker 1: things that he did, this was one of the problems
Speaker 1: he was interested in, which is fascinating. I never knew
Speaker 1: this about Turing. He accomplished so many things, so his
Speaker 1: paper The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis looked at basically these
Speaker 1: sort of mathematical models of how stripes and spots could
Speaker 1: occur in animal skin for scales doesn't matter, just he
Speaker 1: was looking at whether the random movement and into her
Speaker 1: action of proteins, uh that my code from element or
Speaker 1: pegment could produce these patterns. And basically he was able
Speaker 1: to show mathematically that you could have situations in which
Speaker 1: random movements of protein through tissue could actually result in
Speaker 1: an organized pattern. And it was this extremely advanced bit
Speaker 1: of math and evolutionary theory for the time. It's kind
Speaker 1: of incredible he was able to come up with this.
Speaker 1: Of course, the issue though, which turn didn't necessarily factor
Speaker 1: into his paper, which to be fair, I think the
Speaker 1: paper was more of a mathematical exploration. It wasn't literally
Speaker 1: trying to figure out, say, like how a zebra gets
Speaker 1: it stripes. It doesn't take into account the fact that
Speaker 1: cells don't move in an entirely random way. They are
Speaker 1: actually like I know that we don't think of cells
Speaker 1: as having autonomy, but they do, like they actually move
Speaker 1: in um like purposeful ways. They do in a way
Speaker 1: and although they don't necessarily they don't have brains. They
Speaker 1: don't have nerves because of course, like our nerves and
Speaker 1: our brains are made out of cells, and even a
Speaker 1: single neuron is itself a cell, but they do have
Speaker 1: chemical reactions that happen throughout the cell that will cause
Speaker 1: it to move in certain ways and act in certain ways.
Speaker 1: So when you trigger chemical reaction, I mean, that's how
Speaker 1: our brains work, you know, we have chemical reaction that
Speaker 1: creates the synaptic firing um. So that so basically you
Speaker 1: can have a cell move in what seems like a
Speaker 1: very purposeful and almost cognizant way, but it's simply through
Speaker 1: chemical reactions happening throughout the cell. And of course you
Speaker 1: scale that up to a whole organism, then the organism
Speaker 1: really does have this kind of like purposeful thinking and movement,
Speaker 1: which kind of ties back into what we're talking about,
Speaker 1: you know, earlier on in the episode, where you have
Speaker 1: like cells on the cellular level acting in a certain way,
Speaker 1: having evolution pressures on them individually, and then you scale
Speaker 1: that up and the organism made out of cells also
Speaker 1: has evolutionary pressures on it, and you actually see this
Speaker 1: happening rather beautifully in these studies of zebra fish. So,
Speaker 1: zebra fish are these cute little fish. If you've ever
Speaker 1: owned an aquarium or been to a pet store, you've
Speaker 1: probably seen them. They have these blue and white horizontal stripes.
Speaker 1: They're very pretty, really cute little fish. I've had a
Speaker 1: few throughout my aquarium owning days. But the research done
Speaker 1: on them is amazing, Like the amount of information we're
Speaker 1: getting out of these tiny fish is mind blowing. So
Speaker 1: Professor Shigero Kondo's lab of Osaka University found something incredibly
Speaker 1: cool when it comes to zebra fish is color creating cells.
Speaker 1: So zebra fish have light color cells called xanthophores and
Speaker 1: dark color cells called melanophores, and these cells interact in
Speaker 1: a beautiful and incredible way, almost like a ballet. So
Speaker 1: the light cells have tendrils that they used to navigate
Speaker 1: and since their environment. When these tendrils touch a dark cell,
Speaker 1: the dark cell will run away from the light cell
Speaker 1: because there's a chemical reaction that occurs in the dark
Speaker 1: cell that is triggered by the light cells tendril that
Speaker 1: causes the cell to move away from that direction. But
Speaker 1: the light cell meanwhile gets the chemical signal to actually
Speaker 1: move in the direction of the dark cell that is
Speaker 1: now moving away from the light cell. And so this
Speaker 1: reaction it's almost like magnets, right, like when you have
Speaker 1: a opposite polarity magnets or same polarity magnets, sorry, like
Speaker 1: and you push the same polarity against the same polarity,
Speaker 1: it will push it away. Uh you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: like that, but with these cells. Uh, and like where
Speaker 1: one cell is chase literally chasing the other through this
Speaker 1: this chemical reaction. And so what you get is like
Speaker 1: this battel a of these dark and light cells and
Speaker 1: as they're chasing each other. Uh. In the zebra fishes development,
Speaker 1: it will create uh, this kind of straight line. It's
Speaker 1: like these these bluish lines that run horizontal across its body.
Speaker 1: And so it'll create this these stacked lines of stripes.
Speaker 1: So you see this like incredible way in which like
Speaker 1: the cell's autonomy, like the way that the cells actually
Speaker 1: move has this huge impact on animal patterns. So the
Speaker 1: cells themselves, they're not just like autonomous making up their
Speaker 1: own minds, and they're not just random you're saying, they're
Speaker 1: sort of sensitive to their environment and they queue off
Speaker 1: of effects and that can create these larger scale patterns
Speaker 1: exactly how a kid goes to sort of like how
Speaker 1: a kid goes to lunch and elementary school and ends
Speaker 1: up sitting like at a table of other girls or
Speaker 1: at a table of other boys, and then you end
Speaker 1: up with like a girl table and a boy table
Speaker 1: because they're queuing off what everybody else right, right, yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: or in this case, like chasing each other around, or
Speaker 1: like you know in Star Wars you have like the
Speaker 1: light side chasing the dark side all the time or something.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's not a good Star Wars reference. I'm not sure. Uh,
Speaker 1: but you know this, you know you would think then, okay,
Speaker 1: so Alan Turing got it all wrong. It's actually through
Speaker 1: these like chemical reactions and these cells that actually make
Speaker 1: them behave in these specific ways. But that research was
Speaker 1: not for nothing. In fact, mathematical biologist Dr Thomas Woolley
Speaker 1: is combining Turing's theory and the modern research on zebra
Speaker 1: fish into a new mathematical framework that aims to describe
Speaker 1: all sorts of natural patterns, from stripes to spots, even
Speaker 1: two tiny hexagons that these cells form that can create
Speaker 1: these very complicated patterns. Because if you look at animals
Speaker 1: like from fish too, octopuses to uh two tigers, and
Speaker 1: to to like like the the awful lot. You have
Speaker 1: so many different interesting patterns. It's not just stripes and spots.
Speaker 1: It's like these rosebud patterns and leopards and like all
Speaker 1: sorts of beautiful interesting patterns and fish. It's it's really
Speaker 1: interesting to me that we're slowly starting to be able
Speaker 1: to find mathematical models that interact with our understanding of
Speaker 1: how the cells work, and combining those to be able
Speaker 1: to describe like how you know, say, like a puffer
Speaker 1: fish's skin ends up being this beautiful canvas of patterns.
Speaker 1: This is something which I think is really beautiful that
Speaker 1: you see all over science. Actually, this emergent phenomena. We
Speaker 1: have rules, it's sort of the lower level to govern
Speaker 1: how really small things interact, and then you get these
Speaker 1: incredibly complex, sometimes beautiful effects at a larger scale which
Speaker 1: can be sort of simple to describe in their own
Speaker 1: level of mathematics. You know, in physics we have like
Speaker 1: tiny particles which come together to make atoms, which make
Speaker 1: all sorts of different kinds of materials which can come
Speaker 1: together to make chemistry and life and all sorts of
Speaker 1: amazing stuff. So I love seeing sort of signs done
Speaker 1: at these different levels and seeing the connections between them.
Speaker 1: That's really fascinating. Yeah, it's I also just love the
Speaker 1: fact that you have this little tiny fish that my
Speaker 1: memory of the zebra fish is like my first experience
Speaker 1: owning fish, Like it came in this little tiny fish
Speaker 1: bowl and like with this neon colored pebbles and it's like,
Speaker 1: here's your little bag of fish food and you feed
Speaker 1: it that, and then I like did some online research
Speaker 1: and it's like, you shouldn't have this fish in this
Speaker 1: tiny little thing, So then I got a bigger aquarium
Speaker 1: to put it in, this like tiny cute fish. But
Speaker 1: even in this single fish who just loved munching on
Speaker 1: the little little flakes that I gave it, Uh, there
Speaker 1: is so much to learn about the way that it
Speaker 1: sells are interacting and how the math of how these
Speaker 1: stripes form that um it maybe decades before we even
Speaker 1: fully understand how the zebra fishes stripes form, so like,
Speaker 1: there are so many biological and mathematical mysteries just in
Speaker 1: this single teeny tiny fish that it's like when you
Speaker 1: think about all of the life on Earth that would
Speaker 1: have this apply to them. It's kind of gives me
Speaker 1: a little bit of a headache, but in a good way.
Speaker 1: We might have to recruit an army of maccaque monkeys
Speaker 1: and clare chickens to help us with his research. Al Right,
Speaker 1: baby chickens and maccaques, we got, we got some serious
Speaker 1: numbers to crunch. Stop stop throwing that poo, and you
Speaker 1: stop packing on the floor. Well, it's funny you talk
Speaker 1: about zebra fish because I had friends in grad school
Speaker 1: who are biologists, and they always had to go into
Speaker 1: the lab at four am to feed the zebrafish. And
Speaker 1: so I know that zebrafish are like a common thing
Speaker 1: in research. But when I was a kid, we had
Speaker 1: little fish with neon stripes on them, but we called
Speaker 1: them neon fish. Is that the same thing? No, there
Speaker 1: are there's the neon tetra. I actually have some of
Speaker 1: those right now in my fish tank. Those are a
Speaker 1: different fish. I wonder if they get along or if
Speaker 1: they argue about whose bright Well that's I have actually
Speaker 1: had to both of them at the same time, and
Speaker 1: mine there was a little bit of chasing, like generally speaking,
Speaker 1: like fish can do a little bit of tail chasing
Speaker 1: and nipping um that sort of normal behaviors between like
Speaker 1: even within the same species. Like if you get guppies,
Speaker 1: they're going to be constantly chasing each other. That's how
Speaker 1: they bully each other. So we have fish bullying and
Speaker 1: naked mule red bully bullying, naked mule rat bulling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: animals are all bullies. No, that's not the message of
Speaker 1: this this episode. The message is that it's altruism. Matth
Speaker 1: is cool and math explains kindness exactly. Matthew is love, right,
Speaker 1: matthe is love exactly. Well, on that note, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for joining me today. Daniel, Um, how about
Speaker 1: you tell the people where they can find you, because
Speaker 1: I have a feeling they would really be interested in
Speaker 1: the stuff that you do. Well, thanks very much for
Speaker 1: having me on. Always super fascinated to learn about any
Speaker 1: aspect of science and unraveled mysteries of any part of
Speaker 1: the universe. But normally I'm a particle physicist at UC Irvine,
Speaker 1: but I'm also the co host of a different podcast
Speaker 1: called Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, where we talk
Speaker 1: about black holes and neutron stars and tiny particles. In
Speaker 1: the beginning of the universe and the end of the
Speaker 1: universe and all the zebra fish in between. I like
Speaker 1: to think that some star systems are just a bunch
Speaker 1: of zebra fish swimming out in space in an infinite universe.
Speaker 1: Everything happened, so there is a fish star somewhere out there.
Speaker 1: Of course, there's got to be a fish shaped galaxy
Speaker 1: somewhere out there. I wonder if stars bully each other. Oh,
Speaker 1: I mean, they do seem to chase each other right. Sometimes.
Speaker 1: You can find the show on the internet at Creature
Speaker 1: feature Pot on Instagram, at Creature feet Pot on Twitter.
Speaker 1: That's f F E T. That is something very different.
Speaker 1: You can also send me an email with your questions, comments,
Speaker 1: pictures of your cute animals, pictures of your zebra fish
Speaker 1: at Creature feature Pot at gmail dot com. And thank
Speaker 1: you so much for listening. If you leave or rating
Speaker 1: in review, I read all of the reviews and they
Speaker 1: make me happy and they really help out the podcast,
Speaker 1: so I do appreciate that. Uh and thanks to the
Speaker 1: Space Classics for their super awesome song x Alumina. Creature
Speaker 1: features a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
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Speaker 1: See you next Wednesday.