We make split second decisions about others – someone is male or female, black or white, us or them. But sometimes the degrees of separation are incredibly few. A mere handful of genes determine skin color, for example.
Find out why race is almost non-existent from a biological perspective, and how the snippet of DNA that is the Y chromosome came to separate male from female.
Plus, why we’re wired to categorize. And, a groundbreaking court case proposes to erase the dividing line between species: lawyers argue to grant personhood status to our chimpanzee cousins.
Guests:
David Page – Biologist and geneticist, at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stephen Stearns – Evolutionary biologist, Yale University
John Dovidio – Social psychologist at Yale University
Steven M. Wise – Lawyer, Nonhuman Rights Project
Descripción en español
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What's the Difference? | Big Picture Science podcast - Listen or read transcript on Metacast
