Infinite Monkey Cage and a Cobb/Coynecidence

July 20, 2015 • 11:07 am

by Matthew Cobb

Jerry’s appearance on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Infinite Monkey Cage has just been broadcast. You can listen to it, anywhere in the world, by going here (NB this is the podcast version, so is a bit longer than the broadcast version – 46 minutes! And you can download it as an MP3, to keep). Lots of interesting stuff about the nature of scientific theories, and how Jerry would react if evolution were shown NOT to be true (he doesn’t mention having to change the title of this website…)

And while we’re about it, David Lamb tw**ted me this picture of my book Life’s Greatest Secret, which he came across in NYC. Thanks to the foibles of the alphabet, I am in good company!

https://twitter.com/DavidLamb93/status/623136458052870144

 

32 thoughts on “Infinite Monkey Cage and a Cobb/Coynecidence”

  1. I just listened to the radio broadcast and will listen to the podcast later. A few thoughts –
    This was the most “sciency” of the three US shows so far. Both Paul Sereno and Jerry did a real good job of explaining the science to a lay audience.
    While not as bad as Bill Nye, Peter Sagal was a drag on the show as he tried to bring it to himself rather than be a guest. He seemed to have prepared two lengthy stories and got them both in. While his ideas on conspiracy theories were fine, his lengthy explanation brought the show to a halt. TIMC could have used better editing.
    Jerry’s evolutionary debunker would be a tiger (not lion) nursing warthogs. I believe it was originally reported as a lion. Jerry also said that came up in a discussion with Julia Sweeney but none of the Sweeney part was in the radio broadcast. I hope it will be in the podcast.

    San Francisco is next. There are six episodes in Season 12 of TIMC. I assume there is plenty of material from the four US stops to put together two more shows. So we may be hearing from Jerry again. I believe that all six episodes in this series will be US based material.

    1. Good to hear. I very much liked the LA podcast, so am looking forward to listening to the Chicago one tonight.

  3. “and how Jerry would react if evolution were shown NOT to be true (he doesn’t mention having to change the title of this website…)”

    Why Evolution Was Thought True
    WEWTT

    1. A more interesting scenario would be to have something occur that apparently discredited evolution and then some irrefutable explanation of the anomaly would occur vindicating evolution even more powerfully.

      This would enable a website name change to
      Why Evolution Is Still Solid
      or
      WEISS
      the German 1st person present for “know” the verb used for knowing facts (not “kenne” for acquaintance with a person or place), as in “Ich weiß Evolution ist wahr”.
      (Admittedly, it is spelled properly with the double S symbol ß, not two Anglo s letters.)

      (“WEIT” is an old Dutch word for wheat.)

    2. How about: “Why Evolution Is Approximately True.”

      Because at this point I think we’re into NM/QM territory with it: even if, like NM, it turns out to be fundamentally wrong, it will still be used, like NM, as an accurate approximate model in many cases. Or put another way: whatever replaces it will predict the same things as evolution in most cases.

  4. It seemed that Sweeney really wanted to make the excuse, if you will, for the religious and why they do what they do. Seemed a little bending over backward to me. Glad Jerry finally asked why don’t they just wonder? She hadn’t thought of it.

    By the way, speaking of books…just read the Harper Lee book, Go set a Watchman, and would certainly recommend it. Apparently some were upset with the racism or shocked might be the term. Actually, that is what makes the book and in the end, makes it a great story.

    1. Was really annoyed by Sweeney giving all those unsubstantiated claims about the positive values of Religion, just going ahead and equating anything good and moral and social with being religious and saying that’s why religion is pretty neat, sounded like some accommodationist Templeton funded rant more suitable for David Sloan Wilson to go on about.

      She did the same thing in a discussion with Dawkins in Minnesota I believe (youtube:Julia Sweeney in conversation with Richard Dawkins, June 2015 Rochester Minnesota (1h44mins)) and there too she went on and very little was challenged.
      Does she get a free pass because she’s not an expert?

      1. Funny, I took her comments as a backhanded compliment at best. She was pretty clearly saying it’s fundamentally untrue, but pointing out that it can be a social tool. This is no more “complimentary” of religion than Marx’s comment that its an opiate for the masses or Seneca’s quote “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”

        It seems impossible to me for atheists to reject this if, at the same time, they want to lay the blame for things like the crusades at the feet of religion. Surely if we are going to say that religion caused the crusades, we must admit/accept that Sweeney is right in that religion can be used by social groups to motivate behavior such as a soldier putting his life at risk for some larger group or an abstract cause. They are two sides of the same coin; if religion motivates such actions, that’s why its to blame for them. If it can’t do the things Sweeney says it can do, then it can’t be to blame for them either.

  7. Really enjoyed this show, Jerry and Paul were fantastic. It was the perfect background listening for chugging through a bunch of 454 data.

    Also, I picked up Life’s Greatest Secret the other day and am absolutely loving it so far!

  9. Matthew,
    In the August issue of Scientific American, your new book was one of four highlighted new releases in the “Recommended (books)” column! I’m looking forward to reading it on my Kindle.

  10. My favorite episode so far of this series. PCC was great of course, so was Paul Sereno (someone I was unfamiliar with).

    When can we expect a hoard of Jerry Coynes when he starts budding?

  12. I don’t want to steal thunder from the Cobb/Coyne bookshelf, but I’ve just begun another great “C” from 2013:
    Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize. It’s by biologist Sean B. Carroll, and it’s about Jacques Monod ( of Jacob/Monod fame) and Albert Camus. Glowing blurbs by Quammen, Zimmer, Shubin, Krauss, and the other, physicist, Sean M. Carroll. Highly recommended!

    2. I was intrigued by the title to the left in the photo, “The Boy Who Played With Fusion”, so I looked it up on Amazon UK. There is only one review (5 star), with this interesting quote: “As a non-scientist I skimmed some of this stuff but it will be of interest to anyone who would like to know how nuclear fission [sic] can be created on a tabletop.” I’m sure there are many scientists who would like to know how to create fission or fusion on a tabletop.

      1. That’s probably referring to a Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor, a device that does, indeed, cause hydrogen fusion and is something that can be built by an enterprising high school student for a science fair.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor

        It must be noted that it consumes far more energy than it produces. Aside from studying the physics involved and the sheer coolness, its main practical utility is as a neutron source.

        b&

  14. If any of all y’all want to know what Jerry’s like in person, just listen to this podcast. Any time during the trip the conversation turned to Evolution and / or biology — as it naturally often did — he had the same clear, careful, patient, and passionate responses for us as he did on the radio.

    Best of all? So did everybody else I was with…Kelly with painting, Ken with meteorology, Mike with astronomy and the local wildlife, Karen with quilting, Brian at Lowell with more astronomy…it was like a condensed intensive multidisciplinary college-level science workshop that went on for days….

    b&

  15. Very much enjoyed your comments on the podcast, Jerry. I do have a question (or maybe light criticism?) for you regarding your tiger-suckling-pigs example. Which is that I can sort of imagine the evolution of such a trait. After all, we humans keep and feed livestock. An organ on a predator that solely fed a prey animal is certainly a weird thought, but if that predator earlier evolved some sort of livestock keeping behavior, then a later mutation which allowed it to keep its livestock healthy (until eating age) might have a positive value for the predator.

    I won’t pretend I can come up with a fully worked-out scenario for how such a trait could evolve, but maybe here is a skeleton outline:

    1. Predator evolves territorialism – i.e., keeping other predators away from herds it deems in its territory.

    2. Predator evolves cooperative hunting – i.e., herding behavior

    3. Predator evolves preference for certain prey subgroups that don’t include young prey animals. Such as big beefy males or older animals. Frankly, this could be a weak spot in my scenario, as I’m not sure what immediate evolutionary advantage there would be to *not* eating young prey animals. But maybe this evolves as a Gouldian ‘spandrel,’ for example the fact that many baby mammals look, smell, or sound similar leading to an avoidance of eating things that look/smell/sound like the predator’s own young.

    4. This preference leads to predator and some of the prey animals living in relatively close proximity (the Eagle-Gull pics spring to mind), because the prey animals that evolve to ignore the non-dangerous predators have an advantage over those that don’t. At this point we have something like recognizable livestock-keeping: the predator lives among the prey, herds it, keeps other predators away from it, and culls only certain members of the herd.

    5. At some point a cross-species suckling happens. That prey grows up to have many kids because it isn’t predated upon by its “mother” predator. Both prey ‘daughter’ and predator ‘mother’ pass on their ‘acceptance of the other’ behavior to their biological offspring. Maybe not genetically at first, but behaviorally. I admit this is another weak link in my chain.

    6. Over time, the suckling becomes more common.

    7. The predator first evolves teats that are more effective for its prey species, then from those evolves teats that are only effective or strongly adapted for its prey animal, eventually becoming useless for its own young.

    It seems crazy I know, but so does the fact that pilot fish will clean a shark’s teeth for them. Anyway…thoughts?

    1. An organ on a predator that solely fed a prey animal is certainly a weird thought, but if that predator earlier evolved some sort of livestock keeping behavior, then a later mutation which allowed it to keep its livestock healthy (until eating age) might have a positive value for the predator.

      Interesting thought…and the first thing that leapt to my mind was ants and aphids.

      Jerry, I’d love your take on this.

      b&

      1. I’m still trying to think through how to make such an adaptation of benefit to both animals rather than one or the other; to get the situation to be symbiotic rather than parasitical. I’m not sure I’ve done that yet but I would welcome suggestions or scenario variations that do it better.

        I think the hard parts are the evolution of (i) selective prey-taking that doesn’t include young, which would benefit the predator in comparison to other predators that aren’t so selective, and (ii) how you get the extremely rare (AFAIK unheard of outside of human intervention) cross-species live baby suckling to stick as a behavioral trait. I think everything else is actually relatively easy to imagine. For instance, those last few stages aren’t really hard to fathom given that we have loads of examples of plants evolving nectars/fruits to be eaten by animals. Its how you get that symbiosis started in the first place that’s the toughie.

  16. I just listened and have a couple of comments:

    1) Jerry seemed open to to possibility that Darwinian evolution could turn out to be wrong and said that would bum him out because he’d spent his career on it.
    Then Brian Cox said something like “we know relativity is wrong” …

    Relativity is wrong in the sense that it isn’t complete, and wouldn’t that be the case with evolution, too? Jerry will not have wasted his career, there’s virtually no chance that the theory of evolution by natural selection is wrong like Christianity is wrong. I wish this distinction had been made – neither will be found to have been wrong, only incomplete.

    2) When Jerry responded to Julia Sweeny’s comments about how religion has helped humans, I wish that, in addition to what he said, he’d said that although it’s common for people to see the good in religion, as Sweeny did, that there’s a huge load of bad in it (e.g. we may destroy ourselves because religious people don’t buy science – global warming isn’t real etc.), and that acting based on what can be determined to be true and real is obviously best.

    3) I don’t understand the “we don’t know why sex was invented” position. Is that because we can’t *prove* why it’s good? It seems like sex has obvious benefits – and I know Jerry said “we have ideas about it,” but why is the official line: We don’t know. ?

    1. Jerry seemed open to to possibility that Darwinian evolution could turn out to be wrong and said that would bum him out because he’d spent his career on it.

      At this point, the only way that Evolution could be worng (aside from the sense in which Newton is “worng” insofar as it’s incomplete and breaks at extreme scales) would be because we’ve all been duped by an incomprehensibly massive conspiracy theory — we’re stuck in the Matrix, aliens have been invisibly tweaking life on Earth, that sort of thing. And that would, for me, at least, indeed be a massively frustrating let-down, to discover we’ve been lied to and deceived on such a scale. (And, incidentally, all religious claims, if demonstrated true, would also fall into this category.)

      3) I don’t understand the “we don’t know why sex was invented” position. Is that because we can’t *prove* why it’s good?

      No. As Jerry described, sex is very costly, so much so that it at least seems like the cost should outweigh the benefits we know about. That means that there’s got to be some sort of benefit we don’t yet know about or understand, or that we’re overestimating the actual cost. Or both — but, regardless, we really don’t understand it yet.

      b&

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