Evolutionary Biology (DARWINISM) with John McCormack

Hi, it's your eccentric but quiet neighbor Ali Ward. Hey, how did you get here? Why don't we have flippers? He is a fly, my cousin?

What is life?

Welcome to Evolutionary Biology. Now this is a special episode because frankly, I thought it was lost to extinction. I

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Okay, evolutionary biology, in this episode you're gonna pick up some sweetest definitions like taxonomy, what is it, epigenetics, genetic drift, bilogyny, what is all this mouth salad? And you'll learn about some crowd sourced cancer fixers, some super erotic whales, some finch gossip relationship goals, and about how Charles Darwin had a wonderful but super shitty but also wonderful life that involved probably a lot of bad toilet experiences and a

Is a virtue.

Meet evolutionary biologist John McCormick.

Okay, no, that works.

So are you and by trade, are you an evolutionary biologist?

Yes, that's kind of wear a couple of different hats. I'd say evolutionary biologist is probab Probably the broadest one. Sometimes I consider myself an ornithologist as well, I should hope so as the curator of a bird collection.

So do you would you say that you have like genus and species on the brain a lot?

Oh, yeah, h yeah, all the time, because that's a lot of what we do here with a with a specimen collection, just you know, naming the basic units of biodiversity.

Do you remember as a kid in class learning the like, what was it, King Philip?

What is the Yeah?

What is it again?

Well, I can't remember it.

Let's talk taxonomy, which is how science organizes things. So you may have learned that plants and fungi and animals are classified into domain, kingdom, class, order, family, genus, and species. And you're like, wow, Alli, that is amazing. How did you memorize that you were a genius? And I know that's what you're thinking now. The mnemonic device is clutch here. I never remember the new device for this. I remember we learned one. I think it was like, dear King

We sometimes represent evolution as the ever branching ramifications of some original trunk, each branch pruned and clipped by natural selection.

Sagan has an eight minute animated video that essentially details the journey from a single celled animal to a poll up on the seafloor, to humans, jowless fishy ancestors, to an amphibian to a shrew, to primates to apes, branching off into bipedal creatures with big brains. The poke stuff and will eventually invent things like game shows and salad spinners human beanks. I added that last part because I'm writing this in bed. Honestly, evolution and humanity are kind

What have I even done with my day?

Anyway? What is it about the linean system of taxonomy that you dig well?

I've always been an organizer and a list maker, and so it always appealed to me. You know, when I found out about it, it was a lot of taxonomy. Is lists an organization?

I like that in your regular life, your day to day life, are you as organized as you are as a scientist, or is your house just like a disaster and you're not sure, like you don't have a Christmas list?

Isn't ready?

Like yeah, well, unfortunately, that's kind of the plight I think of the academic is to be extremely busy and wearing a lot of hats. And I'm certainly not as organized as I would like to be.

It's a difficult admission for you.

A little bit.

Yeah, you know, I guess I'm still i'd say fairly organized about my things. But yeah, in terms of just general life and scheduling and things like that, it's a bit of the disaster you might expect from an academic.

And so tell me a little bit about when you first kind of grasped the concept of evolution. When did you start to realize, okay, mutations are responsible for a lot of these different appearances and behavior and capabilities of animals. Like when did you start to get excited about evolution?

I think it was when I was doing some of those early readings in high school. You know, I know there are other people that have spoken at more length about evolution than Carl Sagan, who was principally an astronomer or cosmologist, and but it was some of his books, the delve Moore into evolutionary ideas that got me into it.

From there, John studied at University of Arizona and he took class by doctor Nancy Moran, who I looked her up. She is a badass and a MacArthur fellow. She researches the gut biome of aphids.

And it was really there for the first time that I learned just kind of the basic framework of evolution and its processes mutation, natural selection, and then some things I'd never heard of, like genetic drift, which is the sort of random way that evolution can can take gene frequencies and populations, and that there were whole aspects of it I hadn't heard of. That was pretty exciting too.

What's an example of genetic drift? How do you describe that at a cocktail party to someone who's half a glass of chardonnay.

In Well, I guess I'd point to the eminem bowl and I'd say.

Uh, okay, so see that eminem bowl. Genetic drift is when.

You take a small handful of Eminem's and you end up with three green ones instead of the full, you know, rainbow of colors. That's genetic drift, and that's what can happen in populations. Sometimes generation to generation, you don't always get a random draw of the genes that are out there. Sometimes you get a very non representative draw, and that can have a big influence on evolution.

And I.

Kind of like the idea that there's that sort of chance element in there too, as well as kind of the more what we call deterministic or kind of the more predictable outcomes of natural selection.

Are there any movies or TV shows about evolution that you either really like or they really annoy you, Like, that's not evolution.

That's a great question. You know.

Gatica comes to mind as one that's actually a fairly interesting and informed movie with evolutionary ideas. It's been long enough since I've seen it that I can't really tell you that much, but you know, the ideas of what can happen with genetic engineering and kind of our more consumer based eugenics that we have now are kind of, you know, enhancing our genes because we want to, and some of the outcomes pretty interesting.

How do you I did talk about Gatica in the Paleontology episode about how I always really respected that they only used at GC no at gc whatever to make the name right, that's pretty dope. How do you feel about crisper and gene editing?

On the one hand, it's incredibly exciting. I mean, I think people tend to focus in on the aspects of it that involve genetic engineering and humans, and that is one avenue that obviously a lot of caution needs to be taken. But there's so many other applications of crisper technology just to the study of evolution that it's really quite exciting. I mean, the possibilities for experimental evolution are vast and that's great.

So what is it about birds that make them prime for studying evolutionary biology?

Why birds? Well, people freaking love birds.

There have been a lot of them observed, described, collected, so there's a good base of knowledge there as opposed to like slime molds, which nobody goes to hunt down and marvel at. Probably a few people do, and I hope they're friends with each other. But anyway, birds and.

The starting place for a lot of that is what is the evolutionary tree of relationships? Just knowing who is related to whom is an important starting point and if you don't have that then that's kind of your first step. And so with birds, they've been worked out well enough that that first step is kind of already completed and you can sort of jump to answering some of the the broader questions.

Because you know the characters in the storyct exactly right. Let's take a quick Darwin detour. Who was he? Why should you care? I'm gonna run this down as quick as I can for you. So. Charles Robert Darwin was born in England in the early eighteen hundreds. His father was a super rich doctor, and Darwin tried to go to medical school.

But he hated it. He hated it.

He was also the grandson of prominent abolitionists, which is school. And he loved nature and geology. He loved collecting beetles. God, he loved it. His dad was like, kiddo, you're a loser, and Darwin's like, Dad, can I just go on this boat, the HMS Beagle and travel the world and I'll write about it?

Will you please finance it? Rich dad?

And his dad reluctantly agreed, but at one point said to him, you're married for this quote. You care for nothing but shooting dogs and rat catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family. But haha, jokes on you, Pop, He wasn't a disgrace to his

He decided to make this.

Family affair into a family affair, and he had.

Several babies with his cousin.

Back to the Beagle, Charles Darwin did a bunch of writing, kind of like travel blogging, but with more dysentery and smeared ink, and his diaries were made into a popular book, The Voyage of the Beagle. It was on these travels that he started to come up with a theory of evolution, but it took him years of tankering and rewriting an illness which may or may not have been shagas disease

What are these bills?

Ah? They must be adapted for different food sources on each little, tiny island climate. So he theorized, were you really inspired by Darwin's finches? Was that a big deal for you at some point where the kind of evolution natural selection and birds and specialization of beaks and colors? Did that inspire you a lot?

Absolutely?

Because you know, it's just it's such a great because it's kind of the complete package in terms of evolution happening on a short timescale that humans can observe. It's happening in sort of a contained environment that you can wrap your mind around. Right this island where Peter and Rosemary Grant studied the finches. You know, you could walk around it in an hour.

I did not know who Peter and Rosemary Grant were. Oh man, oh god, oh man. Okay, if you've been in morning since Branjelina split, have I got a couple for you?

Boy? Howdy?

What sexy motherfuckers? Now? Born In nineteen thirty six, this British evolutionary biologist couple went to Daphne Major, Galapagos island and they've been studying the finches there since nineteen seventy three. They lived together on a remote island half the year and our Princeton professors the other half.

Who are these.

Sensual lovers, Well, they met when Rosemary was lecturing in embryology and genetics. Peter was still a zoology grad student and her teaching assistant. But they've been married like fifty six years and they've been capturing, tagging, tracking these finches in the Galapagos, and they've been able to show that natural selection can be observed within even a couple of years. Darwin thought this took eons before you could see natural selection.

There were maybe you know, a thousand or a couple thousand inches on the island. They could catch them all and have them color banded, and so it's kind of one of those you know, it's almost evolution and a test tube, but the test tube is nature, and then the other aspect about it is just kind of, you know, the romance of field work in a far away island.

I imagine, less margaritaes. That's more like bugs in your clothes, that's right.

And scorching hot sun. But that story, I just think it's so inspirational and it's so easy to grasp, and so that's why I make it a point. Just last week, I have an entire class, two classes in fact, where I walk through the Darwin's Finch exam with my students and my evolution class and kind of give them the whole story.

How do you feel about people going to the Galapagos as tourists. Does it piss you off?

No, it doesn't, you know, And I've actually been there myself as a tourist. Any situation where people are out there enjoying nature and to see people making such a long trip at such expense to see nature firsthand and to see the work of evolution, that makes me happy. Now, sure, once you get there, there's always cases that you can look at that make you grumpy. You know, the person with the camera right in the face of the you know,

I once went to an island in Thailand and I saw a tourist tipping back a pepsi into the mouth of a monkey, and I had a hard time with that.

I was like, we shouldn't We should all go home.

It's like, this shouldn't be happening.

There's plenty of ways that you can observe humans interacting stupidly with nature, and right now, with social media, you know, we could just do nothing but watch humans interacting stupidly with nature. And so I mean, it's a concern. Right, it's a problem and people need to be educated. But again, I think, taking a slightly more optimistic sort of broad viewpoint, I'm glad that people are jazzed up about nature.

Right. Do you ever look at yourself or people in your life and say, way to go, j man. I am the result of a bunch of evolution.

It is a pretty marvelous thing when you think about it. I tend to not focus so much on humans as the pinnacle of evolution.

Ouch.

Yes, okay, reminder, humans not the pinnacle of evolution. You have a point, and I like.

To look at other situations and marvel over the millions of years of evolution that produce some remarkable radiation of birds, for example. But when you stop to think about it, everything that's alive today is the survivor of essentially three point seven billion years of evolution. All those species, millions and millions of species that are crawling around on this very thin crust of the earth are the products of

Even if you do nothing but play World of Warcraft and eat from a barrel of cheese puffs, you're still a.

Winner, right, You are the product of winners. You got here because your ancestors won the evolutionary game. Now what you choose to do with all that winning is another question.

That's a very diplomatic way of saying, don't just play World of Warcraft cheese puffs? Very diplomatic.

I'm not into telling people what to do with their lives. But at the end of the day, is about fitness and is about offspring, and so you know, eaten Cheetos in your basement is maybe not going to get you to the finish line.

There.

You never know, You never know, you never know, Okay, disclaimer.

I know nothing about World of Warcraft or how good of a life you can have playing video games in a basement, but I decided to look into it, and this did cause me to stumble upon a cracked article about farming gold, which seems like some sort of earned token you can sell to another player.

One guy does this seventy two.

Hours a week and makes about twenty five thousand dollars a year, and he also lives off pizza and Monster Energy drinks.

So it's possible.

It is possible you can make a living playing World of Warcraft, and then you can put gold farmer on your business card. Oh what's on John's business card? Is it ornithologist or evolutionary biologist?

I think I tend to describe myself as an evolutionary biology just who studies birds. But you know I'm an ornithologist as well.

Own it?

Yeah, maybe I should own it.

I should, And besides, you can be both. I'm sitting I'm sitting next to your business cards and it doesn't even say anologist of any kind. It just says director and Curator of the More Lab of Zoology.

You gotta throw some you gotta throw some title on these.

Well, Ali, I gotta bring you in for pr.

Come on, let me life code like zoologist, ornithologists, evolutionary biologists?

Come on?

Uh?

What is?

Let's let's debunk some flimflam. What is a myth about evolution that you feel like people hang on to other than just creationism?

Right? So, I think one of the great myths is embodied in that classic symbol of evolution where you see sort of the chimpanzee evolving through something that looks like a Neanderthal into modern humans.

This linear illustration of primates up to modern humans is called the Road to Homo Sapiens. It's also been called the March of Progress, and it was published in nineteen sixty five in a time life science volume. You've totally

Although it's even used by people who are pro evolution, I think it kind of leaves people with a misimpression of how evolution actually operates, because you know, chimpanzees and humans are each other's closest relatives, and you know, humans didn't evolve from chimpanzees. We evolved from some common ancestor that we shared with chimpanzees, and so that that depiction of evolution is kind of you know, following a linear pattern.

Right?

And again it's embodied in in that symbol that that's not true. We didn't evolve from apes. Gorillas and chimpanzees and us all evolved from a common ancestor that was neither an ape, nor a chimpanzee or a human, but something else.

Maybe that was just a personal branding question for him, because you did make his mark on the world by grunting, right. I feel like he grunts the lies like shoot, maybe I had to rethink this.

Well, see he's got good pr people. Maybe he does.

I saw that and I was like, hell and sit down, just go away. I do have some questions from listeners, and I don't know if they're going to be easy questions. You can you can say pass on any of these, but Before we take questions from you, our beloved listeners, we're going to take a quick break for sponsors of the show. Sponsors.

Why sponsors?

You know what they do? They help us give money to different charities every week. So if you want to know where Ologies gives our money, you can go to Aliyward dot com and look for the tab Ologies gives back. There's like one hundred and fifty different charities that we've given to already, with more every single week. So if you need a place to go, donate a little bit

Things like that.

A lot of the examples of evolution you see written about in the popular press kind of fall into this trap of portraying evolution as though it responds to needs, and sometimes this is just loose shorthand.

I have heard that people get like a science teacher tell me she hates when when she hears like, oh, this species evolved because it wanted this, or you know what I mean, like a evolved, yeah, out of need instead of out of kind of chance.

But exactly, yeah, and so right. The recent example was birds that have evolved to feed off of bird feeders in Great Britain. So birds have evolved longer bills to feed off of bird feeders was kind of the headline that you saw, and it kind of gives this impression of evolution that it responds to needs. The birds sort of thought to themselves, Look, you know, I really need a longer bill here, and so let's go for that, you know, let's try to reach that pinnacle of evolution.

Differential survival and reproduction just being fancy talk for little variances and genes mean good mutations which help a plant or a bird or a snail thrive and mate in its particular environment. Boom, natural selection. You know.

The way I would say it would be much longer, it would be something along the lines of birds with longer bills were able to feed more effectively from bird feeders and thereby produce more offspring, which led the population as a whole to have longer bills. Now you can understand why a headline writer isn't going to go there, why I don't have a job as a headline.

Writer breaking news.

Birds on the longer bills were able to feed more from bird feeders and thereby produce more offspring, which is what the population as a whole having longer bills.

It's very wordy.

But I think there are ways to depict the evolutionary process in headlines in kind of a more effective way.

Right right, A little bit less sensationalist. How do you feel about Lamarckian theory of acquired genetics that people maybe still kind of believe in it. French biologist Jean Baptiste Lamark, by the way, had a theory of acquired genetics such that offspring would take on the characteristics their parents adopted

Oh, I'm a big believer that Lamark, you know, has been overly villa. I mean, the fact was, Lamar's theory was the first kind of full and coherent theory of evolution that evolved involved a mechanism for how it occurred. No one had really done that before. And so even if he was wrong, he got people talking and he got people thinking, and he got people like Darwin thinking about why he was wrong, and that moved things forward. So yeah, I'm a big fan of Lamark. He did

What about epigenetics, how do you feel about it right, So this is so funny, and my students will laugh when they hear that question, because it just yesterday I went on a long, unannounced rant about epigenetics.

You know, it's the term.

Is misapplied these days quite a lot, especially in media accounts. I understand it's a buzzword.

Super quick primer, So epigenetics is kind of a buzzword these days. Essentially, it refers to when your gene expressions change, not the DNA or the genetic code itself, but just the expression of it changes. So John says it really applies to specific cases where DNA can be silenced by the addition of molecules to something called the histones. Histones are proteins that make up the structure that DNA gets wound around.

So those molecules can attach and effectively silent certain silence certain parts of the genome. And in some cases it seems that those silencers can be passed down from parents to offspring, and in some cases also that silencing can happen during the lifetime of an organism in response to

So your genes might already be saying, like, hey, turn these things on, turn those guys off, like they might already be on top of it, might be part of the code.

So but then there's all sorts of ways that people use epigenetics that was already folded into what we know about Darwinian evolution.

So Darwin was already hipped to it.

I don't know if Darwin was hip to it, but certainly those people that in the modern synthesis. You know, Darwin didn't know the genetic mechanism of how heredity happened, but after Mendel showed us the genetic component, and then after that was sort of incorporated with Darwin's views and natural selection.

More listener questions ready, Yeah, okay, I hope these aren't too insane.

Chasing.

Katie wants to know. I don't even understand this question. I'm just going to read it. If he works in sequence alignment. I want to know what is the most significant discovery arisen from resolving anomalies in human DNA. I just reread this question again, like seventeen times. I still don't understand it. I looked it up and it seems to involve finding matching sequences within DNA to point to one common ancestor. Does that make sense?

I think the question is is about how we take multiple sequences from multiple individuals and know that we're looking at the same piece of DNA across individuals. So that's sequence alignment is a very important part of building a tree of evolutionary relationships from DNA data. A lot of times you get pieces of DNA from very different species, and evolution has taken them in such different directions that you almost don't recognize that those pieces of DNA are related.

To one another.

Ah, and so it is quite challenging to sort of align it all together and know you're looking at sort of the same base or the same chunk of DNA or the same gene across different species. We have had new computational tools come online that have really vastly improved our ability to do that by I. It used to be you got these chunks of DNA and then you would just look at them on a computer and sort of move them around by I.

And that sounds terrible.

It sounds terrible, but actually it's a pretty darn good way of doing it. As it turns out, we've had new computational tools that come online that have allowed us to sort of align DNA across hold genomes in a way that it would take years to do by I. So you can get most of it close to correct.

How they should be aligned to each.

Other, like citizen science projects.

And yeah, exactly.

So I looked into this, and there's a game called Filo Phylo. It's put out by the McGill Center for Bioinformatics, and it kind of resembles a linear like brightly colored Tetris with blocks that you try to slide around until they match each other. Each block represents nucleotide sequences of different phylogenetic taxa, so I sucked at first, but I didn't care because it features like jazzy piano background music,

You might be talking about, like structures like holdovers, evolutionary holdovers.

That don't have a Oh okay, so that.

Don't have a use anymore. I mean the hip bones, the tiny hip bones of modern whale are a great evolutionary anachronism because they really.

Speak to the.

Fact that special creation. If you believe that each species is created perfect for its particular niche on Earth, why would modern whales have tiny hip bones unless there's something in their evolutionary past that points to the fact that they were once land animals.

I've never known that. That makes me want to go look at whales eletants now, like, oh, whales, you don't need that.

Yeah, why are you carrying that ad?

It's overpacking? So whales quick aside, I have to Okay, we all know whales.

They live in the sea.

Okay, whales started in the sea, and then they lived on land as freakish, hairy walking whales, and then they slipped back into the sea like your drunk friend on spring break who disappears from playing cards against Humanity to go sit in the hot tub and nursa corona alone. So, wales, you're in the sea. Why do you have hip bones? You don't need them. I looked it up, and whale hips may not be a hiccup of some ancestral relic, so the explanation may in fact be much more as

Viruses, Oh, viruses are constantly evolving to humans. And the flu virus that's hitting us in one flu season is going to be you know, yesterday's news. Next year, there's going to be a flu virus two point zero, And that's evolution that you can see over the course of generations, just a couple of years. Even another great example is

Do you ever worry about humans interference with evolution? Chigile, Since you study birds, do you ever worry like, ugh, we're cutting down so many trees, what are we doing to the birds? Or do you feel like, well, evolution is evolution and that's another thing to adapt to.

I guess I like to see evolution kind of proceeding through its natural course, sort of unfettered to the extent possible by humans. But that's not to say. You know, we live here in Los Angeles, and you can't turn a blind eye to the fact that we've got a big city here and it's not going anywhere. And so if you're going to be studying urban wildlife, you're going to be studying evolution altered by humans.

You know.

I'm not against that either. I think there's a lot of interesting things that we can study about evolution in human altered landscapes.

It's a good attitude to have that you're not because part of me, as if I were an evolutionary biologist, would spend some time under the couch crying about how we've messed up everything. And right, you've got a better attitude than I do.

Well, I mean, and it's probably because I've gone through all the stages, right, I mean, I've been there where I've learned about all the amazing biodiversity on the Hawaiian Islands that we've lost by introducing mosquitoes and all kinds of other things, and so I've kind of gone through the despair and the stages of grief.

Yeah, listen to the pantatology episode.

That's right, that's right.

And at some point you've just you know, especially if you're you're teaching the next generation, you just you've got to be a little optimistic.

Right, that's good. That's responsible of your pilot. Stig wants to know, what do you say when some ass face rants evolution is just a theory?

Well, yeah, evolution is just a theory. Well, you'd like to think that you approach that person by telling them and sort of informing them what a theory is in science.

You know, it's.

An idea that's backed up by a lot of facts.

Sickburn. Right, Just a reminder that the scientific method does not place theory in the bumbling beginnings of an experiment. Rather, theory is the product of a tested hypothesis. So it goes roughly, you got a question, you come up with a hypothesis, experiment analysis. Finally you come to the theory or a conclusion, so you can think of it like Queen Hildegarde eats, aple, turnovers, question, hypothesis, experiment analysis, theory, something or something filthy er if you want.

I don't know.

I'm just trying to help you, guys, just trying to help. But yes, theory of evolution isn't just a hair brained theory.

Honestly, I've never encountered that, like face to face someone telling the evolution is just a theory.

Good.

I've encountered other misconceptions of evolution, like the if we evolve from apes, why are they're still apes? Or if we evolve from monkeys, why are they're still monkeys? And actually, in that case, I've found you know, that kind of a question I think speaks more to two people's just you know, haven't been exposed to ideas. I've gotten that question earnestly from people, and I found that if you just sit down, you know, with a cocktail napkin, and you sketch it out for them and you say, look,

So their trolls kind of I imagine. I think it's a little.

Troll like, don't don't feed the trolls.

Yeah, this is my own theory. Tell me what you think about this. Okay, When I think about cars, I always get kind of caught up on the taxonomy of them because I do feel like like make and model is very genus and species right, and then over years the same species can maybe evolve and maybe they all have certain common ancestors. Maybe there's like an evolution like

I think what it sounds like. And what I think you've clued into there is the fact that in a lot of human created structures we can see sort of a history of how they've been designed, and so you know, evolution is not something that's just confined to the biological world.

But need is ultimately the designer, right, I mean it's based on how well it adapts to the environment. Like I feel like hummers kind of went extinct because the environment no longer had a cheap gas or that kind of ostentatious displays of wealth. But so do you think about that ever, about how things kind of work themselves out based on what resources are available.

Yeah, And you know, this kind of gets into two theories that sort of compare the marketplace to evolutionary ideas. I think there's something to be said for that. And you know, sometimes that's called evonomics. You know, there's branches of economics that sort of focus on evolutionary ideas. I'm not an expert on those, but I think there is some credence to the idea that you know, products sometimes, you know, they're selected for or against, and sometimes the

That's a very good point.

I tried to look into this further and I found a website called economics, which touts itself as the next evolution of economics. And I can't quite vouch for it, because I clicked around and I found an article titled is there anything that working less doesn't solve?

But I only read.

First few paragraphs because I had to get back to work, because whale sex facts don't research themselves. Speaking of work, now, what is your least favorite thing about your job or at time in the field that was awful or something that you just is like, maybe not the highlight?

And then I'll ask you your favorite.

Well, and on a good note, even the worst field experience is always better than answering emails. And I'm sorry for those people. You know, I will get to your email sometime soon, I promise.

You know. The fact is, and this goes.

For a lot of jobs, but I think it's especially true of field biologists. We got into this job because we love to study animals in nature, and I still get a lot of wonderful opportunities to do that. Don't get me, You're wrong, But they never tell you that you end up spending you know, a good thirty percent of your time sitting at your desk answering emails or filling out forms. And so yeah, those are the worst

Right, or having a stomach parasite in a jungle preferable to email.

Yes, absolutely, absolutely.

Now, what has been your favorite moment, say, out in the field on an expedition, Like, have you ever had a moment where it's just like.

H The moments when you can take people out to an incredible field site, people who are either just getting excited about science and biology or birds, and you can take them to a place that you've been to that's just way out there and is just incredible. Those are the moments I live for. So we got a chance to do that recently when we went up into the mountains of northern Baja. There's a mountain range called the Sierra San Pedro Martyr and it has basically been untouched

I mean it was It's spectacular.

Oh, super quick.

Condor is a type of vulture and it's inky, black and huge, and it was on the brink of death but as being bred in captivity and released and it eats dead things and it doesn't have a song, It just grunts sometimes. And since I was in an ornithology lab, I had one more very important scientific question from someone who happens to be having a birthday this week.

My friend Dyalen.

Rodriguez has a question about condors. She wants to know are they the most goth of all the births.

I don't know, because I think I mean they're pretty goth, I mean with that with the shaved head, yeah, sort of, the you know, and especially a lot of vultures kind of have the grays and the black hues to their feathers. But I mean, does it get more goth than a vampire finch?

I suppose not.

And that's one of the Darwin's finches their main food source. They fly and they peck the backs of the these poor boobies birds called boobies until they draw blood and then they eat the blood. So I don't know. Yeah, condors are goth, but hard to compete with the vampire finch.

The only way to do it is have a dance off. Someone's got to play bowhouse. They've got to have a dance off. All right, well, you have a new goal in terms of evolutionary biology. Thank you for entertaining these questions.

Absolutely.

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