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Oh hi, it's your friend's dad who bakes greape bread Ali ward, Hey, how did you get here? Why don't we have flippers? Is a fly? My cousin?
What is life?
Welcome to Evolutionary Biology. Also welcome to ssmologies. Smologies are episodes we put out every few weeks. They have been carved out of longer full length episodes to be a kid friendly and much shorter. But for the full version with adult language and facts, you can check the link in the show notes. Also, thank you to everyone at patreon dot com slash ologies for supporting the show. You can join for a dollar a month and leave questions
for experts. And thank you to everyone leaving reviews which keep the show up in the charts. And I read every single one, like this small one this week from Gonga fifty three, who wrote soothing, inspiring, uplifting, optimism inducing, fascinating Ologies is good for your humanity. Oh gong Go fifty three, that review was good for my day. I needed that. Thank you. Okay, onward, So evolutionary biology how
living things morphed into what they are now. And in this episode you're going to pick up some sweet sweet definitions like taxonomy and genetic drift. Plus Finch gossip all about how Charles Darwin had a really wonderful but difficult but wonderful life that involved probably a lot of bad toilet experiences. And what posters and news headlines get so wrong about how things evolve? So please enjoy this chat
with an ornithologist from Occidental College in Los Angeles. We essentially boil down that our mutations are our strengths and adaptability is a virtue. With evolutionary biologist John mccormicklogious.
Pology, alogymologyology.
So are you and by trade are you a lutionary biologist?
Yes, that's kind of war a couple of different hats. I'd say evolutionary biologist is 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, rah, 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, how did you memorize that? Now the mnemonic device is clutch here. I never remember the mnemonic device for this. I remember we learned one. I think it was like, dear King Philip came over from Germany? Comma so, which is weird? Who ends? What's the so about?
What's the restless story? Anyway? I never remembered it. Dear King Philip came over for grape soda is another way to remember kingdom, class, order, family, genus, species. So calling an organism or a specimen by its genus and species, it's kind of like saying your last name first. But it's what we call Lenaean taxonomy. Even though Swedish ecologist Carlinius he didn't really invent it. Someone else did. It
was kind of already established. 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. I know there are other people that have spoken at more length about evolution than Carl Sagan, who was principally an astronomer cosmologist, but it was some of his books that delve Moore into evolutionary ideas that got me into it.
From there, John studied at University of Arizona and he took an evolution class by doctor Nancy Moran.
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 take gene frequencies and populations.
What's an example of genetic drift? How do you describe that at a cocktail party to someone.
Who's well, I guess I'd point to the eminem bowl and I'd say, 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 liked 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.
Let's take a quick Darwin detour. Who was he? Why should you care? I'm going to 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 at He hated it. He was also the grandson of prominent abolitionists, which is cool, and he loved nature in 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 a fun nothing but shooting dogs and rat catching, and you will be
a disgrace to yourself and all your family. But ha, jokes on you, pop. 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 Shagga's disease from a parasite on something called an assassin bug, and he was also a little thwarted by I think procrastination. But finally he published his on the Origin of Species his book in eighteen fifty nine. It was a huge deal. He also kind of published it alongside a contemporary of his, Alfred Wallace. Now Alfred Wallace never heard of him before
I started researching this episode. He was working on a super similar theory, but he had a harder and more impoverished life than Darwin, like Wallace's ship full of work sank to the ocean floor. He was a drift at sea on a lifeboate Alfred Wallace, who no one ended up caring about. But back to Darwin on the Beagle trip. So Darwin stopped for supplies in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of South America, and he noticed that different
animals on different islands had slightly different features. For example, all those finches, why do they have different beak shapes? They got crushing bills, they got probing bills, they got grasping bills. What are these bills? Ah, they must be adapted for different food sources on each little tiny island climate. 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 marble 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 broader questions.
Because you know the characters in the story exactly exactly right. Look at yourself or people in your life and say, wait 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, 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.
It's a matter of trial and erra.
All those species, millions and millions of species that are crawling around on this very thin crust of the earth are the products of that three point seven billion years of evolution and it's it's a remarkable thing, you know, in each one, even from a bacteria to a human, has evolved just as much through just as much time. I think it's easy to think about certain species alive today as being more evolved than others, because maybe they have a few more adaptations or they look more complex.
But at the end of the day, that bacterium and that human were all the products of three point seven billion years of evolution.
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 at a time life science volume. You've totally seen it. It has silhouettes of gibbons and then chimps and apes all kind of marching in a line up
until you get to these like tanned muscular neanderthals. Now rather than this linear evolution, evolution looks more like a tree, as they call it, a tree of life, where one thicker branch represents a common ancestor and then new species kind of branch outward. So that's called phylogeny. And Darwin sketched it in one of his Beagle era notebooks with the words I think scrawled above it, which I think
is super adorable and very humble. Okay, back to that road to Homo sapiens linear evolution illustration and how that's not how things happen.
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, it belies the true branching history of evolution that's underneath. And one of the most common questions you get is if humans evolve from apes, Why are there still apes?
Right?
And again it's it's embodied in that symbol. 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, nor a human, but something else.
For more on this, you can see the recent gorilla Ology episode or the classic Primatology episodes, although as of yet we don't have those in kid friendly Smologies forms, but there are bleeped episodes and transcripts on our website at aliware dot com slash Ologies extras, which will be
linked in the show notes. And for every episode we donate to a related cause, and this week we will send it to a cause that John has supported in the past, the Ornithological Council, which supports bird science and the people who do it so learn more at birdnet dot org. And that donation was made possible by sponsors of the show.
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Express, Okay, and now questions from y'all. You can submit questions by becoming a patron for only twenty five cents an episode at patrion dot com slash ologies So questions from y'all. I do have some questions from listeners, and I don't know if they're going to be easy questions. You can say pass on any of these Doctor Tigenwall wants to know what are the best ways to differentiate
bad post talk evo bio claims from actual science. Example, bananas evolved to be eaten by humans because we have hands.
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 she hears like, oh, this species evolved because.
It wanted this 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 let's go for that, you know, let's try to reach that
pinnacle of evolution. We have the bill plate again. Underlying that is the true evolutionary mechanism, which is differential survival and reproduction.
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 on along the lines of birds with longer bills were able to feed more effectively from bird feeders and thereby produce more offs 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 with the longer bills we're able to feed morely from burn feeders in there five produce more offspring, which would the population as a whole having longer bills. It's very wordy. Moving on, Dustin Growick wants to know what are your favorite evolutionary anachronisms.
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 whale skeletons. Yeah, like, oh, whales, you don't need that.
Yeah, why are you carrying that around?
It's overpacking. Celestia wants to know are there any species that we can see current evolving happening in order to adapt to our modern world?
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
antibiotic resistance. That's another scary one, and sometimes people don't necessarily file that under evolution, but they should because it's a direct result of natural selection pressures that we are placing on bacteria through our overuse of antibiotics. The reason we're getting these superbugs is because of evolution.
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 side 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 by
human habitation anyways. In modern times. There's still cattle that they run up there, but nobody really lives up there, and you almost don't see any place like that in
the United States. So this is a place people don't really realize this, but there's a huge number of California condors up there, and so we had the opportunity to go up there and just taking some of the expedition members and a student from Occidental College and giving them the opportunity to see this place and see these condors up close. 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 its 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. My friend Dylan Rodriguez has a question about condors. She wants to know are they the most goth of.
All the birds? I don't know, because I think, I mean, they're pretty goth. I mean that with the shaved head.
Yeah. Thank you for entertaining these questions.
Absolutely wow.
To learn more about John McCormick's work, you can follow on Instagram at m l z Birds, which is the account for the more Lab of Zoology at Occidental College. You can follow me at Ali Ward with one O on Instagram or Twitter and at ologies on Instagram. We're also on Twitter. Also, just a heads up, since we recorded this, we also did a whole Condurology episode and
I'll link that in the show notes. It's so good, so ask smart people simple questions because it's really the fastest way to fill up your brain and it's free. So to learn learn more about John McCormick, you can follow on Instagram at mL z birds, which is the account for the more Lab of Zoology at Occidental College. You can follow me at ali Ward with one L on Instagram or Twitter or ologies on Instagram. We're also on Twitter. I recently started posting more on TikTok at
ali Underscore Ologies. John is also on Twitter at la Evolving, and I'll link those in the show notes. And for more Smologies episodes, you can head to aliwar dot com slash Smologies, which is linked in the show notes. Alongside a bunch of folks who help make the show possible. We try to make this small, so we'll link them in the show notes. But big thanks to Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio and Jared Sleeper for turning this into
a Smologies episode from the full length one. And if you stick around until the end of the episode, I give you a piece of advice, and this one is that arranging your clothes in rainbow order in your closet on hangers. It makes hanging them up more fun and it looks nice when you're done. And I have hung mind like that for years because it makes laundry feel like a puzzle or a game. Okay, that's enough out of me until next time. Smologites, Bye bye Soldiers, spl.
Clity, Sologilagies.
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Quality and value you can trust. At MNS you can update your home, your wardrobe and theirs with quality you can count on. There's the ultimate twelve euro les Bras, the softest ever kid sweats from six euro fifty, luxurious Egyptian cotton towels from eight euro twenty five, and so much more. Value you can trust only at MNS shop in store or at Marksspencer dot I.
E get value you can't argue with at Tesco with their amazing club card prices. Serve up something special with our finest meal deal for two stirring one main, two sides and dessert for only sixteen euro Like succulent board, be approved firishined a strip loin steaks with pepper, corn butter, or Delicious Firish chicken Parmeshama served with creamy potato grottam and her mix of rainbow root vegetables, and enjoy Goozillionaire or Saltier caramel cheesecake. Can't argue with that shop in
store or online. Tesco Every Little Helps available at most stores. Prices very in express