Bananas, Sex, and Exploding Genitals: A Conversation with Dr. Marlene Zuk

What is behavior and how does it evolve? What can animal behavior teach us about how we behave? In this episode, we hear from Dr. Marlene Zuk, who is an evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Zuk shares her insights regarding how both genetics and environment influence behavior as well as society's tendency to project human characteristics onto animals. Dr. Zuk is a prolific author of numerous publications as well as the books  Paleofantasy, Sex on Six Legs, and Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Our best friends have a variety of names. Bailey, Sally, Shay. Without their names, they would just be four-legged canines. Once we name an animal, we humanize it. We begin to see its behavior in relation to our own. We ascribe its interactions with the world as an outcome of its environment. Without a name, it is just an animal which acts in accordance with its genetic makeup. What is behavior and how does it evolve? What can animal behavior teach us about how we behave? Welcome to Brungart Law's Lanyat, wherein we provide you a little extra perspective through conversations with individuals from all walks of life. I'm Maurice Brungart, your host. I enjoy engaging with experienced, knowledgeable, and passionate individuals for the opportunity it affords to broaden and deepen understanding of the world through their eyes. They have a story to tell, and we may discover a thing or two. The more we learn, the more likely we can become better versions of ourselves, guide others towards the same, and perhaps have a little fun along the way. Today's guest is Dr. Marlene Souk. She's an evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Souk is the author of Paleo Fantasy, Sex on Six Legs, as well as Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test. Welcome to the program, Dr. Souk.

unknown 1:16

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

So, why don't you explain to us what exactly is an evolutionary biologist and behavioral ecologist?

SPEAKER_02 1:27

I I will say that in response to the thing of what's an evolutionary biologist, um, uh a long time ago I was being interviewed by a radio station in Texas um about a book that I had written, and uh the interviewer sounded absolutely incredulous. That like he was clearly reading from a script, and he said, and you do evolutionary biology. What is that? And I felt really dumb, but I just ended up saying it was a biologist who studied evolution, which was clearly something he had not really um hadn't really uh thought a lot about or maybe even heard of. But uh anyway, so the evolutionary biology part I hope is fairly self-explanatory in that I'm a biologist interested in the process of evolution. Um and the behavioral ecologist is um a way of saying that I study animal behavior from an evolutionary perspective and of animals in their natural environment. So, as opposed to being somebody who's a psychologist who studies animals but is interested, say, in learning in white rats or something like that. So I'm interested in animal behavior as it relates to the environment of the animal, and I take an evolutionary perspective. And what that hopefully you've heard hopefully you've heard of evolutionary biology.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Uh I have. And uh what what got you into this field of study?

SPEAKER_02 2:45

Um, I've always been interested in animals. Um, it took me a long time uh to realize that being interested in animals and being a biologist had anything to do with each other because um I don't come from an academic background at all. And um uh when I started learning about stuff in school, I assumed that if I was going to be a biology major in college, that therefore I would have to be a doctor, which, you know, at one point I spent about 10 minutes as a biology major thinking that I was gonna be a doctor, and then realized very quickly that that wasn't what I was interested in, and then was dis delighted to discover that as a biologist you could actually study animals, and that was a thing you could make a living off of. Um, and so you know, I I got into it that way. Um, I mean, there were a lot of detours along the way, but but that's the basic story.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

And when you were making this discovery, did this happen because you were discovering things such as research? I asked because uh my own daughter, uh, she started off in the field of neurobiology with the idea of becoming a neurosurgeon. And then she started working in a primate lab and was doing research, and she just fell in love with that field, and now she's pursuing a much different uh field of study. Was something similar uh to your situation?

SPEAKER_02 3:58

Um, not really, because I think I decided I was interested in studying animals um uh before I knew that there was such a thing as research, although I I did have great, amazing opportunities to do research when I was an undergraduate. I was I this is actually a very timely thing to be talking about um because I was just in a symposium uh commemorating um Jane Goodall, um, who of course died very recently, and who I think was really an inspiration to a lot of um young people uh, you know, like me, especially girls, um, who looked at what Jane Goodall did, which was to, you know, go off to Africa and watch chimpanzees and study their behavior and think about animals, um, and to do that for a profession. And it was just a revelation to think that someone could do that, because I I'd had absolutely no idea. And again, it was particularly compelling, I think, um, that she was a young woman. I mean, I was I was a child at the time, but but it was uh it was just really incredible. And so a lot of it came from being exposed to you know things like that. I I wonder how many thousands and thousands of girls uh Goodall inspired uh in her lifetime of work.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

Well, I know she inspired uh my daughter because she for in one school project dressed up as Jane Goodall. Uh is that right?

SPEAKER_02 5:16

That's wonderful.

unknown 5:17

That's wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Yeah, so Jane Goodall obviously has a uh very influential legacy. Um and in your particular case, where did you end up going to school?

SPEAKER_02 5:26

I was so I grew up in Los Angeles and I was an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and now realize, and I didn't realize it at the time, that that was a very fortunate choice because the biology program there was extremely um uh organism oriented. So it wasn't largely a program in cell and molecular biology, which many of them are, but there were many, many opportunities to get outside, there were many opportunities to learn about animals. And on top of that, I was also fortunate in that I uh was part of uh what's called the College of Creative Studies, which is I always tell people, uh only entire only partially joking, that uh the College of Creative Studies is kind of like an honors college uh within the university, only instead of being for smart people, it's for weird people. Um and I think that, you know, it that's really, you know, I think the pithiest description in that um it did emphasize research, it emphasized people who were very, very passionate about what they were interested in. There were at the time, I think, seven or eight majors, physics, math, biology, um uh studio art. So you could be an artist, but you had to be a it was not art history, it was it was studio art. Um, let's see what else. Uh a handful, a handful of other uh English, um, you know, and creative writing. Um, and I learned a lot about creative writing from that and became interested in creative writing, which obviously has stayed with me as well. So the between the College of Creative Studies and um and being able to be in beautiful Santa Barbara, I think that that really helped a lot in terms of my future career goals too.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

Now, from what I remember, in your book uh Sex on Six Legs, uh you made a specific reference to growing up in Los Angeles and uh discovering and admiring and following insects. Is this what initially turned you on to become a, say, peeping Tom of the animal kingdom?

SPEAKER_02 7:21

Um sure. Um, although the emphasis on insects and being in Los Angeles, part of the point about that is that animals are everywhere, and you don't have to, you know, live in the wilderness and the back of beyond in order to see fabulous and amazing animal behavior. And insects are such a great way to introduce people, it's maybe especially kids, to the natural world. And that was certainly my introduction because you know I didn't have um, you know, anything very exciting uh in the way of you know great big megafauna in my backyard, but everybody's got insects, and I did too. So so that was a big that that was a big part of uh why I got interested. And I did uh stay interested in insects, although I've worked on other things and I don't really consider myself a professional entomologist, um, largely because um that requires a lot of more specialized training than I've had. And also a lot, though not all, of entomologists um seem to mostly want to control insects, which is a laudable goal. It's just not kind of I don't really want to spend all my time killing them.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

So well, speaking of backyards, I I can relate in a certain matter speaking. As a kid, I would love you know pursuing uh little green lizards and uh trapping them, putting them in jars in addition to wasp that would form their nest outside my window.

SPEAKER_02 8:39

But oh, where where would where was that?

SPEAKER_00 8:41

Uh that was in New Orleans. Uh so I would occasionally trap them and then I would, you know, experiment putting like little pieces of candy or honey or sugar just to see you know what they they seem to prefer. Uh they always seem drawn to candy canes.

SPEAKER_02 8:57

So but that that's I don't really think lizards I hate to tell you this, I don't really think lizards eat candy canes, but those were the wasps.

SPEAKER_00 9:05

The the lizards were eating the cockroaches and and berries. So anyway, um so how is the study of animal behavior funded?

SPEAKER_02 9:16

Um it depends what kind of animal behavior you're doing, obviously. Um my so I'm a professor, which means that I get paid by the university to do teaching and research, and my research program has largely been funded um from uh either um small sort of local sources or uh from the National Science Foundation, which funds um what's called basic research. So um the funding sources generally distinguish between what I do, um, which is basic research or sometimes called discovery research, um sometimes called blue sky research, although that is usually more in a techie sense, um, and more applied research where you might be doing work on in agriculture or medicine. Um and I'm a big proponent of doing basic research, of trying to ask questions that just say, How does the world work? Um, and it's something that I've I've really emphasized with students for a long, long time that they shouldn't feel kind of sheepish about, oh, I'm spending my time, you know, if they're working in my lab, you know, watching crickets made or something like that, because we're always answering bigger questions. We're asking big questions about the world, and no, it's not going to result in a cure for cancer or a reduction in pollution the next day. But understanding how the world works is absolutely critical to being able to address those more applied questions. And I I used to give a talk where I read a sentence uh about the crystalline structure of a particular acid molecule, um, and the last sentence of it said something about how this structure might have uh interesting implications for other things, um, but but it sounds incredibly broad and basic and everything else. And it's the last sentence of Watson and Crick's paper about the structure of DNA. And so their study was not designed so that you could do, I don't know, a paternity test of a kid and show up on a talk show, but that's what it ends up being. And so I think I'm I'm a really um passionate proponent of basic research because you don't know where it's gonna go, you don't know how useful it's gonna be, but you need to figure out how the world works before you can do anything else. Sorry, that was a bit of a soapbox, but I appreciate the opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

No, it makes perfect sense uh because again, uh I think we can get hyper-focused sometimes on, in this case, no, someone is doing a uh particular type of research, uh, and obviously it's gonna be uh uh very uh granular. And for others, it may seem like, well, how does that impact me or why should we fund this, whether taxpayer funding or through an endowment or whatnot. Uh and what you're talking about is basically the ripple effects, right? Uh absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 12:12

And and that there can't be any ripple effects unless you throw that stone into the pond to begin with. And I think a lot of people just want to focus on the ripples and they don't understand that it takes, I mean, if you really want to be bizarre about the analogy, it takes a lot of heavy lifting to get that stone in there. Um, and and when you get that stone in there, you just don't know where the ripples are gonna go. Um, and so I I get really frustrated by people who always want an immediate um payoff from uh the kind of investment we're making in basic science. I mean, having said that, I think the question of what good is this is a very, very good question. And I also don't think scientists should um ignore that the public or funding agencies or anybody else want to know. Like, well, what are you gonna do with this information? Why does this matter? Um, and I I think, you know, it's it is important to understand why it could it's potentially gonna matter. But that answer is often gonna be a 30,000 feet answer about, well, like in my case, it matters how we understand the evolution of male and female differences, because we're gonna be able to use that to understand males and females in lots and lots of different species, even though I'm studying crickets.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Uh well, you pretty much preempted uh my following question. That was about how research benefits society, so I'll kind of slightly shift. And uh, from your experience, uh how much of the funding would you say stems, say, from the government level, where it's federal funding or state level funding? Uh how much of a you know, uh proportion does that consist of?

SPEAKER_02 13:55

Proportion of what? Because so so the National Science Foundation's budget is a minuscule fraction of the overall federal budget. It's far smaller, for instance, than the National Institutes of Health, which funds medical research. Um, and you know, arguably, obviously I'm biased, you know, it seems to me that doing that basic research is, if anything, more important because you have to have that bedrock before you can go off and apply it. Um, and if you don't understand, for instance, the mechanism behind, you know, you don't want people just testing substances willy-nilly on something, you know, let's say you want to try and cure a disease. You need to understand the biology behind the disease and and how it happens. I I used to teach a class uh talking about alternative medicine and how people develop various uh ways of curing diseases. And the students were always like very uh initially were very um uh, I don't know, uh dismissive of the idea that you had to understand the mechanism behind how something worked, because they said, well, but if you know it's an herbal remedy and people have been using it for a long time and it seems to work, then why should why do we care, you know, how it works? And I said, but you have to care because if you don't understand how your physiology reacts to it, then you won't be able to say, make the cure better. You won't be able to understand why it works in some people and not others. You won't be able to understand whether there might be a different substance that works in a different way, but also is especially useful in curing that disease. And so understanding the mechanism requires understanding basic biology about, you know, the human body or about the way cells function or tissues function or something like that. And I think that that basic biology is tied up in almost every application that you can think of. Somebody had to do the groundwork, or else you couldn't have even gotten started on it. And that's true for agriculture, and it's true for um, and it's true for health, uh, and uh it's true for, you know, if you want to look at the effect of you know toxins on the environment or something. You you know, you have to understand the mode of operation, or you're never gonna get anywhere. You're just gonna be following, you're gonna be blindly following instructions. And scientists don't like blindly following instructions. We want to know why we're doing something.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

Um specific to the work that you've done over the years, the books that you've uh published, um, and tied into sort of this question, you know, the impacts on society. Uh, anecdotally, have you heard directly from members of other professions who have said, hey, I read your book, and you know, it influenced the way we did things in my organization or the way I conduct my own work, and not necessarily among the scientific community, I mean, say the legal community or the art, whatnot.

SPEAKER_02 16:49

Um, sure. I'll well, I'll give a couple of examples, one from the science, one from science and one from sort of more, you know, broader. Um, from the scientific community, a lot of my early work was um centered on um the effect of parasites on their hosts' ecology and evolution and behavior. And um I think that work helped to um fuel a kind of renaissance of interest in parasites as being really important in you know, in life in general, rather than just being weird, you know, icky um kind of you know, kind of a weird, icky subfield of uh what people were studying, that um parasites are important that I think a lot of people picked up, not just on my work, but on you know, lots of stuff that was connected with it. Uh, the idea that parasites are important in basic aspects of evolution. Um, and I I actually my second book was about that. It's called uh Riddled with Life. Um, let's see if I can remember the subtitle Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are. Um, and so the argument is that parasites have been responsible for a lot of things that we don't think about in life, like uh the evolution of sexual reproduction. Um so I think that in that sense it's had some effects, but that's not just me all by myself by long shot. That's been part of you know the way science has changed, but I'm happy to have you know played a part in it. Um from a more um uh sort of a different slant, um I think uh an interest of mine for a long time has been in um uh same-sex sexual behavior in animals, um, so which we talk about, and I use that phrase because we don't like to talk about homosexual behavior or gay animals or whatever, in part because it ends up being too hard to we don't want to make sure we don't want to attribute things to animals that we know from humans and we don't know necessarily that they happen in animals. Anyway, um I and a former postdoc of mine uh wrote a uh paper on um on the evolution of same-sex behavior in animals, and that ended up getting uh picked up on um by um a legal team that was looking at uh same-sex marriage in obviously people. Um and so that was an interesting repercussion of this because they were interested in the degree to which you could talk about that behavior being um widespread or something you would see in other species and you know that kind of thing. So, which was not certainly something we were anticipating when we when we wrote it.

SPEAKER_00 19:18

Well, we we may come back to that particular topic. Uh, out of curiosity, have you ever been asked to testify in a court proceeding?

SPEAKER_02 19:25

Uh I have not. Um I have colleagues who have, but no, I have not.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

Okay. Um tell us briefly about uh your book, Sex on Six Legs. I mean, you know, everybody likes to talk about sex, and I think it might be particularly uh of interest to the audience to discover how male honeybees' genitals explode after mating.

SPEAKER_02 19:46

Um that is always a popular one when I teach. That is always a popular one when I teach. Um so so, like I said, I started out looking at insects because they were there and it was an easy thing to do. Um but uh um I really do think insects provide such a great lens into understanding life itself, in part because insects are so incredibly diverse. Um people often, I mean, you know, we're humans and we think about humans and we think about humans as um being more interesting than any other organism, you know, and I understand why we do that, but almost anything you can think of that you think is weird in humans is commonplace in insects. And so I wanted to write the book to introduce people not just to how cool insects were, but to how they illustrate a lot of things about evolution and about life in general, that people would have said, oh no, that's not natural, that's not something animals can do. Um and so all right, you so so you really do want to hear about the honey bees? We we can we can do the honey bees in particular if if you not necessarily.

SPEAKER_00 21:00

It's just uh simply uh you know a generic example of the whole.

SPEAKER_02 21:04

And you know, I I know I'm I'm always happy to talk about honey bees.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

And when it comes to sex, I mean, from your observations of the animal kingdom and extrapolating and looking at humans, you know, are we driven by choice? Instinct? Is it both? Uh I mean I've I've I've I've I've heard people make, and I don't know if this is actually true, but humans are the only animals that you know engage in sex outside of a particular mating season. Uh I don't know how true that is. Uh I'm just more curious, based on your observations, what drives us towards that?

SPEAKER_02 21:42

Um, let's take those things one at a time. Um, so first of all, the the idea that humans are the only animals that have sex outside a mating system is not true. Okay. Um there's lots of animals that have sex outside the mating system. And um one of the things uh that impressed has impressed me for Long time is how people don't really get that sex is a bad I think people have this impression that um sex in animals is kind of like um I don't know like a 1950s sitcom where everybody's part of like a the old-fashioned Catholic Church or something where procreation is solely for reproduction and um where uh males are always dominant and females are always submissive, and it's sort of everything's in a nuclear family, and so on and so forth. And honestly, nothing could be, you know, further from the truth in that, for instance, lots and lots of animals ranging from you know insects to birds to lots of primates, even, or several primates even, um, will have sex outside of uh the so-called mating season or the reproductive, the the time of reproductive receptivity for females. Um in insects, it's particularly common because um females in most insects can store sperm for long periods of time, sometimes up to years, depending on what kind of insect you're talking about. And so the separation of mating and fertilization of the egg means that you know, so having sex doesn't really need to be um uh associated with a particular time of year or a particular uh or a particular season. And and the other thing is that in at least some animals, um sex is about, just like it is in humans, sex is about more than just you know making babies, that it has to do with um, you know, animals being pair bonded. It has to do with animals um uh, you know, like I said, exhibiting uh some other you know kind of behavior or being um uh in bonobos, which is everybody's favorite example of this, which are relatives of chimpanzees, um, they'll engage in sexual behavior sometimes when there's um uh tension or kind of conflict in the group. Um, that uh I I remember talking to a student about this at one point and trying to explain it to him and I said, um uh so you know, like it would mean that in bonobos, if you know there's two individuals that are, you know, fighting over a banana, that you know, if if it was chimpanzees, maybe one of them would hit the other one. But if it was bonobos, then you know they'd end up having sex. Um, and the reason I remember this is because the student then wanted to know, but what was but who would get the banana? And I had to point out that at that point no one really cared about the banana. Okay, I I respect your I respect your question.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

Interesting. Um Yeah, we kind of forgot what the uh ultimate uh uh object here was. Uh in the non-human world, have you or your peers documented evidence or anything akin thereto regarding consent among animals?

SPEAKER_02 24:53

Sure. Um if and again, I you you want to use this cautiously because I'm always very nervous about people who want to look at animals like they're little humans and or big humans or whatever, um, and attribute the exact same emotions or the exact same motivations to them. At the same time, um, for example, um in uh well, I in the crickets that I study, um, so the way sex works in crickets, which a lot of people surprisingly have not actually spent a lot of time thinking about, um uh males chirp to produce, you know, they produce the song that you hear outside at night in the summer, you know, that you say, oh, there's a cricket. Um, and those are the only the males that do that. The females approach the males because they can hear the song, and then um the males switch to a different kind of song. Um it's structurally different, the the two um uh uh antenate each other, which means they touch their antennae and they they ascertain that, you know, are you a male, are you female? Okay, um, you know, we could theoretically go ahead and mate. Um, and then a female can just walk away, but if she consents, if you want to use that word, then what she does is climb on top of the male and she has to orient her body in exactly the appropriate way, and the male will kind of pass her a little package of sperm. So they don't have an organ or any sort of equivalent of a penis, they just have they just extrude this little packet of sperm, and the sperm has a almost like a hand, the sperm package has like a little handle on it, and the little handle gets threaded inside the reproductive opening of the female, and then the sperm drains through that. Um, and the female has to cooperate through all of that, or none of it's gonna happen. Do you want to call that consent? I guess. Um, you know, so not none of it can happen unless the female cooperates. There are other animals where males will just sort of jump on females and um mate with them. Um, in those cases, sometimes what'll happen afterwards is that if the female um wasn't interested in that male, she'll end up ejecting his sperm or she won't use it to fertilize her eggs. Um, so there's lots and lots of really complicated stuff that can go on here that I think, you know, I I I have a good friend who um is a poet in the English department, and we talk a lot about writing and about science, you know, and how to communicate it and stuff. And she always accused, she she always says that um uh well, what she's learned from me is is that every time we end up talking, I always end up saying, well, it's really complicated. Um and so now she's learned to say, Oh, I bet it's complicated. Um and you know, it it I mean it sounds kind of facile, but uh honestly, yes, it's really complicated. A lot of times it's complicated. All animals are not alike, um, all insects are not alike, things happen differently under different circumstances. And I I sometimes feel like a lot of what I try to do in my books um and when I give talks is to give people just a little taste of how complicated it is, and that it being complicated is that's that's not a bug, that's a feature.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

Well, uh I always like to say the devil's in the details. Uh, absolutely. And I think uh even even on the simplest of topics, when you talk to people, uh just the conversation starts leading to more information and one starts to realize things are not as simple as they appear to be. And uh I think an interesting aspect of you pushing back on being very careful how we use the word consent and looking at the animal kingdom. I mean, there's a certain application of this to just between people. You know, if I from one culture, uh a Western culture, to oversimplify things, am trying to assess uh the way people are uh uh acting or operating, behaving in an Eastern culture, just again, an oversimplification. Again, I'm ascribing some of my uh tendencies, the way we do things to them, uh, and perhaps unfairly. Um obviously there's gonna be greater similarities uh in uh among humans, uh, but flipping things on its head and deviating just for a moment, um being very careful about how we're looking at the animal kingdom and using words like consent, um, when we're sort of uh imposing typical human behaviors on animals. Have you ever found observing animals that they are looking at us sort of in the same way? They're like, you know, trying to see us through the lens as they know it, as a dog, as a cricket, what have you? This might be very difficult to uh talk about, but I'm curious again, how do animals from your observation see us?

SPEAKER_02 29:54

Yeah, I I think that is difficult. And and you know, I think one of the most moving things for a lot of people who study animals is getting a sense that they're sort of reaching across that boundary to us. That was one of the most compelling things to read about, and going back to what we were talking about earlier about Jane Goodall's work, that that she genuinely felt that she and the chimpanzees that she studied had this bond where it wasn't just all one way. It wasn't just her looking at them and describing their behavior, that they were interacting with her and that they were also seeing her in, you know, the way they did. I think it's harder to do with, you know, different kinds of animals because we just assume that everybody's got the same kinds of sense organs that we have, or everybody's got the same sort of perceptual abilities. And and since we don't, you know, like I mean, even just think about your dog and how much it relies on odor cues for its life and for the way it gets around. I mean, we must seem bizarre to them because we can't detect this richness in our environment of all the different smells. Um, you know, and and I always I there's a lot of dogs in our neighborhood, I don't have a dog, but um, there's a lot of dogs in our neighborhood, and I'm always passing, you know, people walking their dogs. And and, you know, of course, the humans are walking the dog, and the dog is always stopping and trying to sniff, you know, various things along the way. And the humans vary and how patient they are with that. Um, but you know, the dogs always want to smell all the smells, and you just think they probably, you know, if you want to be anthropomorphic about it, then they probably just do not understand why we are ignoring this wealth of information out there, and we aren't even interested. How can we not be interested? And so that's just a really small example of animals that we do communicate with, you know, and we consider, like you started out saying, we consider them animals that we can really relate to pretty well, and yet there's this huge part of their world, their sensory world, that we don't we don't have a clue about.

SPEAKER_00 31:59

Hmm. Um, sex aside, uh, but obviously, you know, you know, it deals with attraction among animals. Uh, from your observations, uh, taking this a step further, like charisma, no, do you find that to be a behavioral or a physiological trait? You know, is it genetically, environmentally driven?

SPEAKER_02 32:22

Uh because it gets you tell me more about tell me more about what you mean by that. That's I've never thought about that. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

So again, we tend to think of attraction normally in these physical, romantic, you know, in these sexual uh terms. Uh, but attraction is much more than that. You know, it's what attracts us to say the leader, the manager of the group, uh, the politician or whatnot, the sports figure. Uh and those that are exuding that charisma. Uh, you know, do you do you find any analogies in the animal kingdom? You know, this ability to attract others, uh, much like you have like the so-called alpha males in a primate group or among canines or whatnot. Uh, you know, what what sets the animal up for that?

SPEAKER_02 33:12

Huh. I have to confess that A, I've never thought about it, and B, I'm gonna fall back on the it's more complicated than that.

SPEAKER_00 33:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 33:20

Well, no, in part because I think this idea for so you made reference to alpha males, um, and I think people are very interested in dominance and dominance behavior in animals. Um, and some of that is because of an unfortunate and often inaccurate emphasis on this idea of a hierarchical uh structure in a lot of animal societies. Um so a lot of animals, yes, absolutely, there are hierarchies in that there's one animal that can push another animal out of the way if there's food involved and or something like that. But in lots of animals, A, they're either not particularly social, um, or B, um the kinds of interactions that they have can't be reduced to a simple, this animal is over that animal who's over that animal, and so on and so forth. And whether you want to call an animal being dominant under one special set of circumstances charismatic or not, I'm not sure I'm ready to go there.

SPEAKER_00 34:23

That that's fine. Um and you generated a question uh uh for me, and that is uh also, do you find we tend to overemphasize or become too attentive to the alpha side among animals, and we're really overlooking the importance that betas play? And is it really that simple? Alpha and betas? I mean, I I'm sure there are much more. There's probably a bunch of sigmas and deltas and and omegas uh at that point. Um, anyway, uh in your book, Dancing Cockatoos and the Deadman Test, you had referenced a 2010 survey in the United States where in 76% of respondents believed single genes directly control specific human behaviors, and how you found this to be a misconception and that it was troubling uh in that environmental influence is generally ignored when we know genes don't single-handedly determine anything. Uh, and the problems with this is that uh in extreme cases, misconceptions in these sorts of areas can lead to acceptance of bad or even criminal behavior, such as date rate. Uh, you then further drew an analogy from research about people altering their own behavior when exposed to information about how genes play or don't play a role in their lives. Like someone reading an article about you know obesity is uh genetically driven, and you know, the experiment was set up whether they would eat cookies or not, and well, then they would eat more cookies. Whereas if what they were reading talked about obesity being behavioral or environmentally influenced, they tended not to. Uh, would you elaborate on all that?

SPEAKER_02 36:06

Sure. I mean, the the main message in the Dancing Cockatoos book was about how environmental and genetic um uh roles in behavior are inextricably intertwined. And you know, this is of course the nature-nurture controversy, and people always want to know um, well, how much of this is genetic, like like we can parse with like we can carve it out the way you know, as though we were, you know, slicing bread or something. And it's again, you know, we're getting this complicated thing that it's not just that there's a combination of genes in the environment that influence behavior, it's that their interaction is what does it. And that's different than saying they each contribute separately. And the example that I give in the book is of um uh PKU, which is phenylketinuria, um, which is a disease that um uh so if if if you if um anybody's had a baby or you know their partners who had a baby, um they take a little uh blood sample by pricking the heel of uh newborn babies, and they use that blood sample for testing for a variety of conditions, and one of them is phenylketinuria, and it has to do with it's a disorder that has to do with um the presence of a compound that can break down um an amino acid, which is uh one of the building blocks of protein in the diet. And if you don't have this enzyme, then you can't break down um phenylalanine, um, which is the uh amino acid, and then phenylalanine builds up, and it has um a whole bunch of bad effects in the body, including um intellectual disability and some other physiological um uh conditions and so forth. And so babies who have it are very severely uh very severely affected. However, if you can give them, if you can give those, so, so, okay, and and and the uh presence of the enzyme, it's determined by by the presence of a gene. And so everybody thought, okay, well, so clearly this is a quote unquote genetic disease, there's a uh you know, gene for it, um, and so forth. The thing is, if you recognize this, that's why they do the test, and you give those children a diet that um lacks phenylalanine, and you give them, you have to do some other stuff and so forth, um, they won't ever develop the condition. So it's actually environmental because it has to do entirely with their diet, one could argue. Well, and of course that's not true because the diet only matters if they have the gene. Otherwise, it doesn't matter what diet you give them. But the gene only matters depending on the dietary circumstances. And this is not a special example. Pretty much everything is like this, where the effect of the genes occurs in a particular environmental context. The environment only makes the kind of difference it does depending on the genetic context of the individual that you're talking about. And that's true for people, and it's true for animals, it's true for plants for that matter. And so just talking about, oh, to what extent do genes versus the environment contribute is is not really a very meaningful question. Um and I know that people don't like hearing this because they want to know like to what extent is aggression genetic, to what extent is sexual orientation genetic, to what extent is intelligence genetic? And you can look at genetic contributions to it. I mean, we're not, you know, scientists are not stupid, like we can figure out that it's not like you can train, you know, like if if genetics didn't have anything to do with it, you could teach a turtle to talk, you know, but obviously talking has to do with genes that you have for being a human. I mean, we're not stupid. We can figure that much out. But trying to then say, here's one gene that determines what language is in humans is never gonna work because the genes operate in a particular environment and a particular you know environment meaning within an individual. Um, and so you know, again, sorry, it's complicated.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

No, that that makes perfect sense.

SPEAKER_02 40:18

And I and I think that people are always grasping at this, and even if you say, oh, it's genes and the environment, then they want to know, but what percentage? It's it's like it's it's like everything has to add up to 100%. And so is it 40-60? Is it you know 90-10? And again, that's just not a question that's that's useful to ask.

SPEAKER_00 40:40

Well, as maybe sophomoric as it may sound in my description of it, uh, it kind of sounds as if the common human tendency to look for a boogeyman, so to say, you know, to be able to ascribe fault, uh, to always be able to point, um, to make things black or white. And I guess, and I don't know what influences this. You know, is it uh the the religions we grow up with, the political ideologies, whatnot, uh, but there's obviously this sort of tendency for us to want to ascribe everything to one simple cause. And basically what you're telling us, uh, and what I would say uh most scientists want to try to communicate, uh, and academics, it's more complicated than that. Uh and you know, you're you're not gonna get that kind of satisfaction. Uh, it's just not gonna happen. Um speaking uh about the way we see uh the animal kingdom, the way we see behaviors and whatnot, uh educate us somewhat about this ubiquitous hierarchical classification of Scala natura, the the conclusion that it's not just outdated but erroneous. The idea that, you know, at the very top of the evolutionary pyramid is the humans, and at the very bottom were the uh protozoids or whatever, uh the amoebas that were floating around long time ago.

SPEAKER_02 42:08

Um yeah, I it's a very first of all, I you know, I think your interpretation that that you just made is is not at all, you know, um I I don't know, uh amateur or whatever. You know, I think it's just spot on that you know, we just seem to have this tendency to want to divide things up. It's it's sort of like that old joke about there's two kinds of people, people who think they're two kinds of people, and people who don't think they're two kinds of people. Um but um anyway, uh but yeah, the and and I think that this div, you know, we like dividing things up, okay? I you know, I do think you know human beings do this all the time because we like making order out of chaos and we like looking at the world around us and making sense of it. And I like doing that too. So it's not like you know, this is not a thing I I think is a bad idea. But uh for many, many, many hundreds of years, um arguably actually for thousands of years, um, humans have had this idea, and I think this does stem originally from religion, um, that uh humans are at the pinnacle of what used to be creation, the pinnacle of all life. Um uh in the original version of the scalinatori, it was um that human beings were closest to the image of God, and then um uh that you know there were angels and you know various other things, and then all the other creatures could be arrayed um kind of below humans, uh depending on their similarity to uh to people and hence presumably to you know higher spiritual beings. Um and so you know you see a lot of references to the so-called evolutionary scale or the evolutionary ladder, and there's tons and tons of depictions of this. I for a while I used to collect cartoons um that showed um uh like uh it was a shoreline and there was a fish in the water, and then Crawling out of the water was sort of a four-legged, you know, amphibian, and then there'd be a reptile, and then um, like some kind of mammal. They always skip birds in those things. I don't know. Um, some kind of mammal, and then the mammals eventually, you know, there's monkeys, and then the monkeys are standing on two legs, and then eventually you end up with a person, and it's always a guy holding a spear. Um, and it's always a guy, and it's always holding, and they're always he's always holding a spear. I don't know what to deal with with that. Um and then often in the more modern renditions, there's sort of this uh implication that we've all you know gone terribly wrong because the last image is of the same guy that that was holding the spear in the previous uh uh image, um, but now he's you know hunched over a computer with you know terrible posture and looking like really worried, or else he's um uh you know, he's got a fast food bag and he's kind of paunchy and he's you know eating a burger or you know, something like that. And so, you know, the implication, and this is one of the famous uh captions is that somewhere something went terribly wrong. Um, and um so I think that image that you know, oh, well, we evolved from fish, and so we're better than fish, and um you know, amphibians are better than fish, um, but but mammals are better than amphibians, and so on and so forth, that got really ingrained um in us. And I there have been some interesting, you know, things on the history of this idea, and like I said, it does have religious roots. Um, but the problem with it is that it's it's it's just a misconception of the way that evolution actually works. Um, in that, yes, it is true that we have ancestors evolutionarily speaking that look like fish, but our ancestors are not like the goldfish that you would have swimming around in your goldfish bowl. Our ancestors are not, you know, even though people talk about sharks as being evolutionary, um, you know, uh, what is it, you know, fossil, you know, living fossils or what have you, our ancestors are not the kinds of sharks that we see swimming around today. Because all organisms evolved from common ancestors, sure, but then those ancestors branched off, and you know, the better way to think of it is not as a ladder, but as a bush. And so if time is going from the bottom to the top of the bush, the bush has all these different branches, and some of the branches didn't go anywhere, and those are lines that went extinct. Some of them branched off a lot, and at the tips of the branches are all the things that are alive today. But there's definitely a tip of a branch that's still related to those fish and is still more similar to that common ancestor. I don't like we're not more evolved than fish, we're just as evolved as fish. It's just our ancestor with fish looked more like fish. I don't know what you want to do with that, but but okay. Um, and I think that this idea that you can rank all these animals, um, and people used to do this a lot. I'm I'm interested in how people think about animal intelligence too. And they used to do this a lot, where you know, oh, and oh gosh, if you just Google like, you know, 10 smartest animals, there will be no shortage of people with very strong opinions on what number nine is, what number eight. So 10, of course, is people, um, what number nine is, what number eight is, like, do we put raccoons at number four, you know, because they have little hands, um, you know, but then octopus now, people are like, oh, all about octopus, but then you think, well, I don't know what octopus do that, you know, other animals don't do. I don't know. Um, they're just having a little moment here. And so the whole thing is is it's incredibly um subjective and also has no basis in the way evolution actually works. Um, and oh, and the whole living fossil thing is just odd because sure, there are animals that look more or less like their ancestors at more or less a distant time. Um again, what do you want to do with this? Crocodiles look a lot like ancient crocodiles. It doesn't mean that they're like not good at being crocodiles. It doesn't mean that it's like a I it just doesn't mean anything. It just means they look more like their ancestors. Like, where are you going with this? I I I always get puzzled at people who really want to want to push the whole thing, especially like I said, about the the smart thing, and they want to give these increasingly complicated tests to animals, and it's just well, for additional context for the benefit of the of the audience, it's uh you had pointed out in your book that uh as an example that well, we're not necessarily the culmination of evolution because dogs actually evolved way after humans.

SPEAKER_00 48:37

And you then also went into a description of many other animals, and that, well, if technically we're the culmination, well, nothing should have evolved after us, and that's obviously not the case. Uh and I think it really kind of turns things around. Uh and to me, I also find it's an interesting sort of critique of even uh your own scientific community that perhaps, you know, the the whole way we look at evolution needs to be perhaps reassessed.

SPEAKER_02 49:05

Uh well now wait a minute. Who do you mean who do you mean by we? I feel like the way we scientists look at evolution does not need to be reassessed. It's the way it's not popularized.

SPEAKER_00 49:16

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 49:17

Any biologist any biologist will tell you about the tree of life with all of its branches, and that you know, this does not lead to things being you know higher, or we don't talk about there being you know higher and lower forms of life. Um so so I I I I take a little bit of exception to that. And I will add to though to the business of you know recency of things evolving, that the best example, of course, is how of things that recently evolved as disease organisms. Um, you know, COVID-19 virus evolved super fast, right? It's is it like more evolved and more at the pinnacle of evolution than people? I presume not. And even if you don't want to use viruses because they do, you know, they are a special case, they need to live in other living cells. There's plenty of bacteria that are free living that evolved extremely recently. This is why we have trouble with antibiotic resistant bacteria, is that the bacteria evolved to be substantially different than they used to be. So I don't know, higher form of life? I don't think so.

SPEAKER_00 50:17

Um would you say that the the tree, the image of the tree is a proper image to use?

SPEAKER_02 50:25

Uh yeah, we talk about the tree of life all the time. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_00 50:28

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 50:29

Um although although the images are extremely complicated. Um, and uh if you Google tree of life and want an image of it, you'll you'll often get what looks like a sort of um spiral where there's lots of little branches. So so it's not so much a tree tree. There is a root, but there's like a spiral coming off of it with hundreds, if not thousands, of little branches, and it's it's difficult to depict.

SPEAKER_00 50:53

But yeah, I mean, that is kind of a better heuristic than I was just curious if perhaps like a bunch of bushes, not one bush, but a bunch of bushes might actually be an even more accurate example of evolution.

SPEAKER_02 51:07

Well, the but but the reason we use it we use the tree is that uh of course we want to emphasize that all life, you know, came from a single ancestor, you know, like all life came from a single ancestor, which is kind of mind-blowing when you think about it.

SPEAKER_00 51:18

So uh speaking of evolution, uh speak to us a bit about emotional evolution. You raised the question: if it's reasonable for other animals to have vastly different reproductive respiratory systems than people, why should we think they have the same emotions we do? Um and then I I wanted to use the example of there's been research about how not only a crow has a capacity to hold a grudge, it can also pass it laterally to its cohorts and generationally to its offspring. What are your thoughts about this?

SPEAKER_02 51:51

Yeah, um, so the the business about you know having different emotions than us is I I was trying to push back against this kind of funny notion that I think a lot of people, including some biologists, have, which is that is, and again, they're often looking just at primates or maybe at like big social carnivores or something, and they want to talk about them having emotions, and they say, Oh, you science, the rest of you scientists, you're just being heartless and uh you're being too um uh pedantic, and you think that you know no other animal you know can have human emotions, but you know, I'm positive that these uh um the late Franz Deval was a big proponent of this, uh, that you know he felt like uh other non-human primates had you know real human emotions like jealousy and love and grief and so forth. And like it's not that I don't think animals can't have something that we would call emotions, but I don't understand the push to make it seem exactly like human emotions. So, in other words, we don't get worried about the fact that you know a chimpanzee's liver functions differently than ours does, and we don't even get worried about the fact that their brain has different structures than ours does. So, assuming that emotions are a result of our bodies and our, you know, our physiology and our brains, why would we think that their emotions would be exactly the same? I think it you you tend to fall into this sort of almost supernatural belief about where, you know, about mind-body dualism and you know where the where our feelings come from and so forth. And so it seems perfectly reasonable to me to think that animals will be mentally perhaps more like people than we would have given credit. Like I'm fine with that, but but why would we think that their emotions would be exactly like ours when their physiology and anatomy isn't? Where else are those emotions gonna come from?

SPEAKER_00 53:43

Oh. You're asking the wrong person at that point. I know you're asking rhetorically.

SPEAKER_02 53:49

But but but do you but do you see what I mean there? That that you know, I it is kind of funny, and and I it's one of the reasons why I'm I'm fascinated by people being so insistent that you know their dog absolutely, you know, recognized, you know, had exactly the same reaction to you know the death of another dog than that that they would have to it, because you know, they don't know, and that's okay, and that's not denigrating dogs at all.

SPEAKER_00 54:16

No, no. Uh and obviously animals, for lack of a better word, uh, experience loss in their social community, whether it's you know another dog or it's you know the human master, so to say, uh, or like we see in elephants. Um so obviously they experience the absence of this other member of the group. Uh, but you know, I think you're raising a valid point. Is it this, are they experiencing it the way we are? Sadness. Uh, and again, that's a very difficult proposition uh to undertake. Uh, we're not saying no, we're not saying yes, is what I'm gathering here. Uh it's just this tendency to, again, impose human characteristics on onto animals.

SPEAKER_02 55:08

Um, and what that leads us to, I think, is creating these weird divisions of it's almost like we want to make a club of animals that are more like us and animals that we're not going to have in the club. And we've done this for a long time with, you know, and we often use intelligence. And so, you know, well, we think that, you know, non-human primates are really intelligent. So we've got chimpanzees and bonobos and gorillas or whatever. In in I say, you know, it's like we're we're making this big basket, you know, and and we're in the basket and they're in the basket, and dolphins, you know, everybody's really, oh yes, dolphins are almost like people because they can do all this complex stuff. Um, although I do have a friend who works on dolphins, and he says they're just like cows, it's just they're oceanic. Um, but uh in in their behavior, we can come back to that if you want. But anyway, so there's dolphins in the basket. Uh, people are into crows, like you said, crows are, you know, have become very popular and they're in pros and j's and their relatives, they're now in the basket. Octopus are having kind of a moment, so they're in the basket. And you're like, where are you again? Where are you going with this? You can you can find animals that are more or less like what we recognize in people, and then you will have made a list of animals that are more or less like people, and you're trying to say that they're more or less like people. I you know, I just don't see the point. And what it does is it does give you this very, I think, categorical thinking that that has you missing out on the scope of what a lot of animals can really do. So a lot of insects or um and spiders, for instance, with brains that are like barely visible, um, some of them not even visible, can perform incredibly complicated behaviors. And so you don't need, as I am fond of saying, you do not need a big brain to do big things. Um so where are you going with the basket? Like, why do you want to put some things in the basket and leave other things out?

SPEAKER_00 57:04

Well, I mean, I think we even make these mistakes uh among humans, the tendency to project, right, our own values on others, right? Of course, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 57:12

So, you know, and I mean you're free to decide that there are people you want to be friends, you know. Like, I'm not saying you have to i equ equivalently and uncritically accept everybody and everything. Like, we're it's it's fine to have opinions about people. I have lots of them, I'm sure you do too, but but that's different than, you know, like I said, setting up this kind of species hierarchy of things that are like us and things that are not like us, and then feeling like we've somehow gotten somewhere.

SPEAKER_00 57:39

Um deviating momentarily, I'm sure you're familiar with that study of where they took photographs of individuals and sort of different states of emotion representative of different cultures in the world to demonstrate that there are sort of commonalities and expressions of anger and happiness. Um what are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_02 58:02

So that's a very old, you know, that kind of study. Like Darwin was really interested. He wrote a whole book called The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals. Or I think I can't, that's that may not be the exact title, but it's close enough. Um, and so he was very interested in that. And he used to at dinner parties like show people um uh you know pictures of um people from different parts of the world with different you know emotions and have people guess. Um my understanding, and I'm not an expert in this, and I could I could Google it quickly, but I'm I'm not gonna bother while while we're talking. Um, my understanding is that there's been some questioning of the universality of this, that you know, for a long time it was that, oh yes, fear looks like fear, anger looks like anger. And then there's been some discussion of, you know, is that really true? Is it not? Um, and you know, again, I I I don't I I don't have any, you know, reason to think either way. But um, you know, it wouldn't surprise me. Again, living things are similar to each other. Sure, why wouldn't we show different, you know, why wouldn't we show simil similarities in the way we respond to different kinds of stimuli? Um, how good we are at detecting stuff with other, you know, in other people. I mean, we're gonna be better at it with other people than we are with other animals. But again, to go back to my don't need a big brain to do big things, um, uh bees actually can learn to recognize individual human faces. Um, so they can tell differences among individual people. Um and so, okay, like does that, you know, again, where are you going with this? Um, probably they can do it because there's been selection, you know, natural selection has produced bees that are really good at discriminating small visual differences, and they do this because they do it with flowers, because they they go out and pollinate flowers, and so being able to recognize which flowers say have greater nectar rewards is gonna be good for them. So the same skill can transfer to telling an individual person with wider set eyes from one with narrower set eyes. Okay. Again, where are you going with this? Um, I like it's it is interesting looking at other animals without thinking about ways that they have to be like people.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:13

Maybe it's just part of the human desire to want to connect.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:18

And so, so you know, because you go from that and you think, oh, that's really adorable. So, you know, like the bees in my garden can learn to recognize me and that I'm different from you know somebody else who comes into the garden.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:28

I mean, that is kind of cute, but you know, well, they might prove to be the biological tool and facial recognition and the ultimate form of surveillance.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:36

Oh God, I I I I probably I I probably think AI is gonna be a bit I I I seldom invoke AI as a as a solution to our problems, but I think in this case you'd be better off with AI than you would be with CDC as well.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:48

Shifting gears and speaking of brains, is bigger better? Is brain size a reliable measure of intelligence, or of anything else for that matter? Uh and does domestication make you dumb?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:00

Um, so people used to talk again, this is a very old idea. Uh people have been interested in brain size and its relationship to intelligence for ages. Um and the short answer is, you know, not really. I mean, obviously, um all if if you can make all else equal, then not so much overall brain size, but the size of certain brain components, if you're looking within a certain group, can be related to the ability to problem solve. If that floats your boat, that's fine. But you can't, again, have this gigantic ranking of animals with bigger brains and animals with smaller brains and say that the bigger ones are always going to be smarter than the smaller ones. Even correcting for body size is a kind of shaky way to do it because, again, it depends on the body components. My friend who worked on the dolphins and said they were like cows pointed out that yes, they do have enormous brains for their body size, uh, relative to their body size, depending on how you measure it, that some cetaceans actually have larger brains for their body size than people do. Um, but remember what cetaceans are doing with their brains. They're using them for echolocating, and that requires a lot, you know, where they're bouncing sound off of objects in the environment and interpreting the echoes that come back to sense what's out there. Um, that requires a lot of wetware, as it were, in the brain. So, okay, they need a lot of that to do echolocation. Does echolocation mean you're smart? I mean, if I was a dolphin, I would think if you couldn't echolocate, you were hopelessly stupid. But that's just because dolphins do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:40

But then bats have smaller brains than dolphins and they do echolocation.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:44

They do echolocate. Um, and so, you know, but they have, you know, and so the that's what I mean about a brain component. So, yeah, a lot of it falls apart. People have definitely looked within, say, birds and looked at the size of different parts of the brain, not just the brain as a whole. And there is a connection between the size of different parts of the brain and, for instance, um, aspects of their social behavior or aspects of their foraging behavior or something like that. Okay. I mean, I'm not saying it's not interesting, I'm just saying that this sort of weird goal of, and now we need to rank them according to people, is is the part that's perplexing to me.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:23

Speaking of echolocation and taking a certain fantastical uh uh perspective to this, is it physiologically possible for the human brain to have echolocation uh ability?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:41

Um I think that one's above my pay grade. Um, I mean, certainly you can, in a very sort of low-level sense, you know, all sound is perception of sound waves bouncing back at us. Um and so theoretically, there's no reason that we couldn't get better at it uh at you know at interpreting sounds bouncing back at us to figure out where things are. I mean, we already do this to some extent, like you can tell if you're in a crowded room, you can tell if you're in an empty room or a crowded room if you start, if you're talking, you know, you can you can tell. And some of that is because a crowded room reflects sound waves back at you differently. Um that's a far cry from what bats or um dolphins can do, though.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:28

Yes. Um, speaking of brains and what we can do with them, uh there are documented instances of animals playing, problem solving. Um do animals have intentional artistic abilities, or better stated, are animals able to intent are they able to be intentionally creative?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:49

I don't know. I mean, you know, yeah, we've all seen the things of, you know, here's a painting that the monkey did, and here's the didn't some elephant paint something?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:57

Yes, I think so, and some horse was able to do math, I think, or something.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:01

Yeah. Um, the intentionality is is a really tricky one though, because, you know, again, how do we even know whether what, you know, you can get a lot of psychologists who would argue that you don't really know what you were intending to do. You just think you knew what you were intending to do. Um, so I think it does get quite kind of complicated, and that's part of why um scientists tend to be quite careful about talking about this. Yes. We do talk about motivation sometimes, um, so that, but it's always defined operationally, so that you say, oh, an animal that engages in an activity more readily would have a higher motivation. But I'm kind of, you know, okay, so what you've just said is that what you've described is how ready it is to engage in that behavior. How does that differ from like we know what motivation is because we can feel motivated, but I it's it's really hard to tell it in another animal. Um, and you know, it's it's sort of the same thing getting back to. Earlier, I think you were asking about it's sort of the same thing as talking about instinct. That I'm very leery of using that word because it's kind of like saying that you understood something, but it's just giving it another name. So you say, Oh, you know, we have um a food-seeking instinct or, you know, a hunger instinct or whatever. What does that mean? It means we seek out food when we haven't had enough food. And you can look at the neurological basis of that, which is which has been done and which is very interesting. And like, how does an animal decide, quote unquote, when it's had enough to eat? Where does satiety come from? But that's operationally defining it, saying that it's it. There was a column in our newspaper that was somebody said, Well, how do birds know how to build the kind of nest that they build? Because you know, each kind of bird builds a different sort of nest. And the answer was kind of, well, they have an instinct that tells them how. And it's like that's a non-answer to me. It's like, well, it builds the kind of nest it does because it builds the kind of nest it does. It has an instinct to build that nest. That's not telling me anything.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:02

Um, when it comes to building, making decisions or whatnot, um, I'd wanted to ask you, you know, how do animals make decisions? But again, reflecting on the question, uh, again, I'm kind of worried about are we again projecting human uh characteristics onto animals? Uh, but do you find animals engage in a process of decision making?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:30

Oh, yeah, animals make decisions all the time. I mean, that you can operationalize. That you can say, okay, you know, I I give an animal two choices and it makes one, and so it just so it's sure it makes decisions all the time.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:44

Do you do you uh again, uh at risk of sounding uh very juvenile in the question, but you know, how much of a difference is there actually between the way we as humans make decisions and animals? Um unknown.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:02

Yeah, no. Um, I mean, it depends what you mean by the way. See, this is the scientist's answer always. It depends what you mean by how we make decisions and how they make decisions. Are there, you know, neurological pathways that lead to different parts of the brain being activated that lead to different neurons? You know, yes, of course. Is that what happens in animals? Yes, of course.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:22

Um, well, with that in mind, and uh again, some of the talks I've had with others and even before then, uh, you find a lot of literature out there when it comes to uh leadership or how you inspire your organization and this concept of decision making uh being based on the alleged primordial drive to engage in flight, fight, or freeze in response to a perceived threat that people in an organization sometimes don't want to do what the leaders are guiding them towards because it's a threat, meaning it's a change in their environment, and we are instinctually, you know, we're genetically driven to you know treat threats as a danger. But you know, it do you find this to be true that we, you know, we act out of our reptilian brain, so to say.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:17

Um, one of my favorite papers that I read um for the Dancing Cockatoos book is has the fabulous title of um uh Your Brain Is Not an Onion with a Tiny Lizard Inside. Um, and uh I thought it was just the best title ever. I actually emailed the author because I just thought it was a fabulous title. Um, and uh so the the paper was arguing against um this idea that you know we have a lizard brain and then there's kind of layers on top of it that have become modified, and that the primordial brain is, you know, has these very primitive responses and so forth. And what they point out is that first of all, there is no such thing that you could call really our lizard brain. And besides, why is everybody denigrating lizards? Lizards function perfectly well, and you don't see them flying into rages, do you? You really don't. Um, and so I don't really quite get where that's coming from. Um, and lizards don't have any more like you know, whatever behavior than anything else. Lizards function just fine doing lizard things. But um anyway, uh the idea that there's I mean, let me backtrack. Sure, there are absolutely responses that in a sense can bypass um you know more complicated uh neurological pathways, whether that means, and there is like you can physiologically characterize, as you say, you know, a fight fight or flight response, but that's been, you know, that's a generalized term for a whole basket of physiological, you know, hormonal and um, you know, other kinds of physical responses. I don't know. I I'm always leery of this, you know, oh, here's one simple trick that can show you how to respond under pressure, or the like a good leader will always do this one thing that will harness the whatever of their you know followers and so forth. Because I feel like it's often this very, very exaggerated view of something that doesn't really work in practice.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:19

Um, do you find uh, and this at this point is not a projection of a human characteristic on animals, but just like you know, we've seen among people that we'll behave completely differently as a group than we will as individuals. Do you see the same thing in the animal kingdom?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:36

Sure. I mean, I you know, I like I mean, people go so far as to point out that in social insects, um, there's a very prominent theory that says that you have what's called a superorganism. I'm putting that in quotes, um, which is that the hive or the colony acts as though it's itself an organism that's you know composed of many um, you know, the individual bees or or uh ants or whatever that are in it. Um so you know, obviously they act differently um, you know, in a group than they do as individuals. I mean, in the social insects are to the point where they're they can't really exist by themselves anyway, but you know, that's probably the most extreme example.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:19

Um What what do you think we can learn from animal behaviors, regardless of species activity, that would actually make us better decision makers or to effectively uh act as a collective?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:33

Huh. I don't know. What it I mean I could give a sort of a simple answer, which is that you know animal so one thing is that animals do not always, contrary to popular belief, that animals do not always do things that are in the moment beneficial for their own well-being, that there are plenty of examples of animals that do do things that will benefit a group, generally not at the expense of their eventual well-being, i.e. sometimes being part of a colony or part of a social group is by and large beneficial. So there's that. But I think it's really hard again to come up with these more simple, you know, like, oh, animals know that if you, you know, do something nice for somebody that you will that they will do something nice for you, which I don't know, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. So I think that kind of generalization is kind of kind of hard to kind of hard to come to come by. Um I think what animals can tell us is that there isn't one kind of animal response to things, um, because often people feel like they've risen above, you know, oh, well, we don't act like animals because we make rational decisions, or we don't act like animals because we, you know, have somehow overcome our baser natures. And I don't think there's this separate, just like I don't think there's this separation between genes and the environment, I don't think there's this separation between baser nature and another kind of nature. I mean, sure, people are different from other kinds of animals, but you know, other kinds of animals are different from each other too. And and so I I think it's not really helpful to say, oh, well, what can I do that I can apply biologically to the way I'm gonna behave that's gonna be different than the way I would behave in some other way.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:24

Um tell us a bit about your upcoming book.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:28

Uh sure. Um, so I have a book that's coming out in March of 2026 that's called Outsider Animals, and it's about those species that um we encounter in our lives, and not necessarily because we want to, but we do anyway. And sometimes we think of them as pests, sometimes they don't. I think in almost all so it's things like gulls and raccoons and um uh cockroaches and uh uh rats, um, uh cowbirds are another example of those animals, where we we run into them, um, we have lots of opinions about them, and in almost every case, we sell them short, and they're much more interesting than we've given them credit for. So I've got chapters on lots of different ones. Um, I had a great time writing it. I got to talk to a lot of interesting people. Um, and um, like I said, that one's gonna be out uh in March.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:22

Well, well, tell us a little bit about uh some of those animals that we underestimate, especially the the cockroaches. I ask, having grown up in in New Orleans, and cockroaches are a fundamental part of life down there. Uh, tell us about uh what we could uh learn from them.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:39

Um it's it's not so much, well, it's so cockroach. I I develop so I I always joke with people that cockroach the cockroach chapter was my favorite chapter, but so cockroaches are super interesting from an evolutionary perspective, but also cockroaches um are way, way more diverse than um people think by just having had them in their kitchens or their yards or whatever, um, even in a semi-tropical place like New Orleans. Um, because um I I always there's like thousands and thousands of species of cockroaches. Lots of them live blameless lives, far from humans. Um, they have no, you know, there's only a small handful that are pests. Um they a lot of them are really beautiful, they look like little jewels, they're you know, gorgeously colored. Um, and uh some of them are monogamous and they raise their babies together um in little family groups. So there's a mommy cockroach and a daddy cockroach and little baby cockroaches, which is really adorable. Um, and also um uh and so so I always tell people that they're so diverse that it would be kind of like saying that if you'd seen a chicken, then it's like, oh yeah, I know everything about birds, right? Which is not true. Um which is not true. So I I I think that people sell cockroaches short. Um and also um because some cockroaches give uh birth to live young, uh, they've been actually instrumental in um uh helping us understand some things about the evolution of pregnancy, which I think is a good place to end on because I I you know I don't want to give everything away here after all.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:15

Okay. Um as as we come towards an end here, what, if any, misconceptions would you like to address that people have of your particular field, or uh in the alternative, what would you like people to be more aware of when it comes to evolutionary biology, uh, behavioral ecology?

SPEAKER_02 1:17:39

Um, that that nature has lots of different solutions to the same problem. So all all we're all doing here on Earth, all living things, is stuff that perpetuates our genes into future generations. That's it. That's the whole point. Um, if you want to consider that a point or not. But there's so many different ways to do this that people trying to come up with, oh, this is the natural way, this is the best way, this is the way that organisms should do things, it's destined to fail because there is this incredible diversity of what well, I I talk about animals because I work on animals, uh, of what animals do. And so trying to say, oh, we should be more like the bonobos, or we should be less like the bonobos, or we should be more like, I don't know, swans that mate for life, or we should be more like um, I don't know, some kind of rodent that mates many times is just destined to fail.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:38

Well, thank you, Dr. Suk, for outlining the field of evolutionary biology. Uh, delving into these nuances of animal behaviors and how the study of SAIM can benefit us. Uh, thank you to the audience for listening. Uh thank you to uh the University of Minnesota. Uh as your host, Maurice Brungart, I welcome you to join us next again next week, and that you invite others to follow Brungart Law's Lanyat, where we provide a little extra perspective because the devil is always in the details. Dr. Suk, again, gratitude.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:10

Thanks so much. This is really fun.