This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com What is mutation bias and how can scientists study it? How does changing a population’s mutation bias influence its evolutionary trajectory? In this episode, we talk with Deepa Agashe , an Associate Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India. We first talk with Deepa about mutation bias and how she uses E. coli to understand it. We then focus on a 2023 PNAS paper about the fitn...
May 02, 2024•29 min
This week on Big Biology we're sharing an episode from The Naked Scientists Podcast about how humans lost their tails. Humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans do not have tails. It sets us apart from other primates, but suggests that our shared evolutionary ancestors had them. So why did we lose them, and how? Speaking with Chris Smith, from The Naked Scientists Podcast, NYU Grossman School of Medicine's Itai Yanai explains that the way this study began was literally a pain in the "tail" fo...
Apr 18, 2024•6 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com At what levels does causation happen in biology? Are metaphors useful for understanding biology? In this episode, we talk with Phil Ball , a science writer who was also an editor for the journal Nature for over 20 years. Phil has written over 25 books, but our conversation focuses on his most recent: “ How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology .” In the book, Phil covers a wide-range of topics from cell...
Apr 04, 2024•34 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com How should biologists deal with the massive amounts of population genetic data that are now routinely available? Will AIs make biologists obsolete? In this episode, we talk with Andy Kern , an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Oregon. Andy has spent much of his career applying machine learning methods in population genetics. We talk with him about the fundamental questions that population gene...
Mar 21, 2024•22 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com How should we study complex biological networks? How do cells keep time and stay in sync? What does it mean for a network to be resilient? In this episode, we talk with Rosemary Braun , Associate Professor at Northwestern University in the Department of Molecular Biosciences and a member of the NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology. Rosemary is broadly interested in learning whether “more is different” whe...
Mar 07, 2024•26 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com How do biologists strike a productive balance between descriptive natural history and manipulative experiments in the lab or field? Should we bring back species to areas where they’ve gone extinct and what values do we use to make these decisions? What is wildness and how do we cultivate it? On this episode, we talk with Harry Greene , a herpetologist and adjunct professor of Integrative Biology at the Universi...
Feb 22, 2024•31 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com What is an agent, and does an organism have to be conscious to be one? How does organismal agency affect evolution? In this episode, we talk with Samir Okasha , a Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Bristol. Samir studies fundamental philosophical questions in evolutionary biology, most notably how selection acts on various levels of biological organization. Our discussion focuses on his boo...
Feb 08, 2024•35 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com If the tape of life were replayed, how recognizable would today’s species and ecosystems be? How and why does power increase over evolutionary time? How have humans unleashed so much power, and what are the consequences of that power for life on Earth? In this episode, we talk with Geerat Vermeij , a paleoecologist and evolutionary biologist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Davis. He is a...
Jan 25, 2024•27 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com How are cephalopods like us, but also completely alien? How can they become so intelligent when they have such short lives? How do they coordinate a distributed set of brains? In this episode, we talk with Danna Staaf , a science communicator and marine biologist with a lifelong love of cephalopods. Danna earned a PhD from Stanford University studying baby squid, and she has written several cephalopod-themed bo...
Jan 11, 2024•33 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com Does biological plasticity have a cost? Are there evolutionary consequences of plasticity and of organisms acting on their environments? In this episode, we talk with Sonia Sultan , the Alan M. Dachs Professor of Science in the Department of Biology at Wesleyan University. Sonia has spent her career studying the interplay between organisms and their environment. Specifically, she studies how environmental condi...
Dec 14, 2023•34 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com How do small, founding populations establish and thrive in new places? What is biocontrol, and how is it carried out responsibly? In this episode, we talk with Ruth Hufbauer , a Professor of Applied Evolutionary Ecology at Colorado State University about the ways that organisms successfully establish new populations in new places. Ruth uses lab experiments o n Tribolium flour beetles to understand how evolution...
Dec 12, 2023•32 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com How do biologists categorize species? What’s the best and quickest way to describe millions of unknown species? On this episode, we talk with Michael Sharkey , an entomologist and taxonomist who spent much of his career at the University of Kentucky, and is now the director of the Hymenoptera Institute. Since its inception, taxonomy has relied on careful morphological analysis of specimens to delineate species....
Nov 29, 2023•30 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com How do living things exert agency in a world of strict physical and chemical laws? Do humans have free will? In this episode, we talk with Kevin Mitchell , an Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. The question of free will has been debated for decades by thinkers in physics, philosophy, psychology, and, more recently, biology. In his new book, Free Agents: How Evolution Gav...
Nov 02, 2023•32 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com How can we reconcile the evolutionary problem of cooperation? What can social amoebae tell us about the origins of multicellularity? In this episode, we talk to Joan Strassmann and David Queller , professors at Washington University in St. Louis, about the evolution of cooperation and conflict. From social insects to humans, we can find instances of individuals seemingly sacrificing fitness for the good of the ...
Oct 05, 2023•33 min
Can we predict evolutionary outcomes if we know starting conditions? Do the products of evolution in nature differ from those studied in well-controlled lab experiments? On this episode, we talk to Katie Peichel , head of the Division of Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and Andrew Hendry , professor in the Department of Biology at McGill University, Canada. Katie and Andrew are part of a massive research team working on the evolution of threespine sticklebacks as they...
Sep 21, 2023•1 hr 8 min
On this episode, we talk with Alina Chan , postdoc at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and co-author with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 . SARS-CoV-2 could have plausibly jumped into humans in Wuhan via one of two paths. The first is zoonotic transfer from wild bats to humans, possibly via an intermediate animal host. The second is some kind of lab accident: researchers working on a SARS-CoV-2-like virus accidentally became infected with it and then transmitted...
Sep 08, 2023•1 hr 25 min
Season 6 of Big Biology will kick off at the beginning of September - woohoo! Before then, we have a quick message to share: We’re looking for a new producer to join the Big Biology team! If you are a passionate team player with experience in podcast production, then please consider applying! The producer position is a part-time, remote position. Please send us an email at info@bigbiology.org to learn more. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get acc...
Aug 15, 2023•15 min
Why can some animals regrow limbs while others can’t? Will understanding regeneration in other vertebrates help us regrow arms one day? Our intern team has taken over the channel to talk about one of their favorite biology topics, limb regeneration! In the episode, Dayna and Kyle break down the mechanisms of regeneration and discuss why some animals can regrow organs and limbs, and why the evolutionary paths of other animals may have led to alternative responses to limb loss. Thanks for listenin...
Jun 29, 2023•10 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com Where does biological innovation come from? Why do some innovations wait millions of years for their spotlight? Life must constantly innovate for evolution to occur, but many forms of biological innovation often lie dormant, sometimes for millions of years. In this episode, we speak to Andreas Wagner about his recent book, Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture . Andreas is ...
Jun 15, 2023•37 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com What makes a pest? Why are some animals revered in one culture and vilified in another? How do our ways of life bring us into conflict versus companionship, and what do these interactions mean for us and them? Rats, squirrels, coyotes, pigeons...often, we view animals like these as pests. We usually don't like them, even try to get rid of them…but what makes a species a pest? On this episode, we talk with Betha...
Jun 01, 2023•25 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com What is inherency? What are the potential flaws with our understanding of biological function? On this episode, we talk with Stuart Newman , professor at New York Medical College. In his recent paper , “Inherency and agency in the origin and evolution of biological functions,” Stuart argues against the commonly held view that functions of traits necessarily arise from the process of natural selection. He instea...
May 18, 2023•37 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com What is NEON? What hopes and concerns do we have for large-scale research projects in ecology? On this episode of Big Biology, we talk about the challenges of doing…big biology! The National Ecological Observatory Network , or NEON, is a US National Science Foundation-funded project that has started collecting massive amounts of data from terrestrial and freshwater habitats across a network of sites distributed...
May 04, 2023•35 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com Big Biology celebrates its 100th episode! You’re only 100 once, and though we hope there will be many more episodes to come, we wanted to celebrate this milestone with something special. A recurring theme from many of our conversations with guests on the show has been agency. This is a BIG and oftentimes controversial topic in biology, and in this episode we try to pull together the different threads from our p...
Apr 20, 2023•46 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com On this episode, we take a break from the regular format to talk with Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher of The Night Science Podcast , a show that explores the creative side of science with guests from across the globe. Itai is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at the NYU School of Medicine, and Martin is a professor in both the Institute for Computer Science and the Departmen...
Apr 06, 2023•31 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com What is the “infinitesimal model”? How has our understanding of complex traits changed recently? On this episode, we talk with Nick Barton , an evolutionary quantitative geneticist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. Quantitative genetics has changed a lot in the past 30 years, driven by massive advances in DNA sequencing power and by new statistical and computational approaches to harnessing th...
Mar 23, 2023•33 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com What is mutation bias? How does it affect evolution? In this episode, we talk with Arlin Stoltzfus , a research fellow at the University of Maryland’s Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research . Arlin studies mutation bias – the idea that some types of mutations occur more often than others – and how these patterns can influence the evolutionary trajectories of populations. In the chat, we contrast th...
Mar 09, 2023•35 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com What are network motifs, and how and why do they matter to biological networks? On this episode, we talk with Uri Alon , systems biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, about biological networks. In the early 2000s, Uri discovered some of the fundamental characteristics of these networks and, since then, has worked to understand networks across different levels of biological organization. His work shows...
Feb 16, 2023•36 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com Why do humans look so different from one another? Why do we have different types of hair and different skin colors? And what do these traits have to do with the concept of race? On this episode, we talk with Tina Lasisi , incoming professor at the University of Michigan, about variation in human hair structure and skin color. We talk about why such variation may have evolved, and how biologists are studying it....
Jan 12, 2023•34 min
Happy holidays from the Big Biology team! As a bonus episode this week, we are sharing Art's recent interview with James Fodor on The Science of Everything podcast . Art and James discuss various topics in evolution and genetics, covering material that spans years of Big Bio conversations. Enjoy, and see you next year! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bigbiology.substack.com/subscribe...
Dec 29, 2022•1 hr 2 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit bigbiology.substack.com What’s the smallest number of genes that cells need to grow and reproduce? Is it possible to synthesize minimal genomes and insert them into cells? What do minimal genomes teach us about life? In this episode, we talk to John Glass , leader of the Synthetic Biology Group at the J. Craig Venter Institute. Over the past decade, Glass and colleagues developed techniques for manipulating and synthesizing entire bac...
Dec 15, 2022•20 min
