StarTalk Live! Evolution with Richard Dawkins (Part 1)

Science and rationality take the stage when Neil deGrasse Tyson welcomes Richard Dawkins and Bill Nye to NYC’s Beacon Theater to discuss evolution, with help from comics Eugene Mirman, Jim Gaffigan and Maeve Higgins.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Eugene Mirman?

  Welcome to StarTalk Live. It is my incredibly great pleasure to bring out for you the host, director of the Hayden Planetarium, ladies and gentlemen, Neil deGrasse Tyson!

• 0:48Eugene Mirman?

  All right, it is my great pleasure to bring out two comics. The first of which, she is here from Ireland. She's super funny. Ladies and gentlemen, Maeve Higgins!

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Thank you, Eugene. Hi!

• 1:03Eugene Mirman?

  It is also my pleasure to bring out an incredible comedian. Ladies and gentlemen, Jim Gaffigan!

• 1:08Speaker 03

  Thank you, thank you, thank you!

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugene, you didn't mention that Jim Gaffigan has an album called Mr. Universe. That's right. So, do have a seat. I want to bring out a friend. I've known him for about 12 years. And he's a tireless defender of how we all got here. Give a warm New York welcome to Richard Dawkins!

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will note, Richard did arrive with very British-looking leather shoes. But we had access to moon shoes to put on his feet. More on that later in the show. So, Richard, thank you for donning some moon shoes for us. And tonight, we'll be talking about how humans got here, how life got here, all the spectrum of life we find in the biodiversity of the world. And a good friend of mine has also written a book on that, and I said, "You gotta come join us for the show." The one, the only, Bill Nye!

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's get this party started. Richard, you've had an extraordinary career. You're retired now. You were professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford for many years, a post funded by Charles Simone. He was one of the Microsoft billionaires, if I remember correctly. But he felt deeply that more people needed to know about science. And I just want to applaud your tireless effort to try to get the world to think rationally about this world. And so, thank you. Thank you.

• 3:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I suppose with his earnings over the years, he could have bought an island and moved there, but instead, he... That's not true. Oh, not true. A small island, then. He founded the Richard... A rock. Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason, which occupies a lot of his work of late. So, let's get started here. Evolution, we all learn it in our biology class. And you've written on evolution eloquently in many books. My first exposure to you was with The Blind Watchmaker, but that's just one of many books you've written. So I'm just wondering if you could highlight, just for a couple of minutes, just what evolution is. I know it took Darwin many books to do this, but I know you can do it in two minutes.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  It's why we all exist, it's why all living things exist.

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, there we go.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  It is an astonishing fact that on this planet, the laws of physics got channeled through this remarkable process, Darwin's Evolution by Natural Selection, to produce objects like us, and like kangaroos, and like wombats, and like oak trees, which are, while never actually disobeying the laws of physics, they do remarkable things. They walk, they run, they have sex, they think, they swim, they fly.

• 4:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They have sex?

• 4:45Speaker 04

  And they have sex.

• 4:46Eugene Mirman?

  They listen to jazz?

• 4:52Speaker 04

  And for many centuries, it seemed obvious to everybody that because living things look as though they've been designed, that must mean that they were designed. And it took till as late as the middle of the 19th century, until two geniuses, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, realized what was really going on, which is a purely natural process, an utterly natural process, gave rise to this magnificent complexity, this beauty, and this illusion of design. It works by very, very slow change from generation to generation. It depends upon there being, Darwin wanted to put it like this, but it depends upon there being something like genes, something where you have information.

• 5:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He didn't have that vocabulary.

• 5:35Speaker 04

  He didn't have that vocabulary, but we now understand that what happens is that there is highly accurate, high-fidelity information, really like a computer language, which is copied from generation to generation, and within each generation, programmed the development of the body in which it sits. And therefore, the fate of the program is bound up in the fate of the body in which it sits. It's driving around in a vehicle, which is you and me, and a dog, and a rhinoceros. It's driving around in the vehicle.

• 6:08Eugene Mirman?

  Are you gonna stop with those examples? There's no more?

• 6:11Bill Nye?

  Well, and you don't, you probably want to leave out my old boss. I was never sure about him.

• 6:17Speaker 04

  It doesn't matter what the vehicle is, it can fly, it can swim, all of them are doing the same thing. They're preserving and propagating the instructions that gave rise to them. And as the generations go by, the ones that survive to reproduce, the genes pass on the instructions for making them. And so we are, all of us, descended, by all of us, I mean every living creature, descended from an unbroken line of successful ancestors. Millions and billions of animals died without ever reproducing. Not a single one of your ancestors failed to achieve at least one heterosexual copulation.

• 6:56Bill Nye?

  Troubling as that sounds, because it includes your parents.

• 7:06Speaker 04

  And had at least one child. We have the genes of an unbroken succession of successful ancestors. And it was those genes that made them successful. And that's why birds are so good at flying, fish are so good at swimming, hedgehogs are so good at whatever hedgehogs do, moles are so good at digging, etc.

• 7:24Eugene Mirman?

  Gambling. Hedgehogs are famous for their gambling.

• 7:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So getting back to how we might have all learned evolution in our biology class.

• 7:33Bill Nye?

  And by the way, Dr. Tyson, did everybody learn evolution in biology class?

• 7:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, sorry. You have independent evidence to suggest something different. We'll get back to that. So, I'm just curious, we learned evolution as reproduction, variation, and the product, and it gets carried on. We learned to reject Lamarckianism on the assumption that you can't acquire properties that you then pass genetically. But over the years, we've learned more nuances in the simplified idea of Darwinian evolution. You know, I've heard terms like epigenetics, there are these terms that involve the modification of the genome. After it's already been established that you perhaps could then pass on. What is going on with Darwin now?

• 8:15Speaker 04

  The big change came with the introduction of genetics into the evolutionary story. Darwin had no concept of genetics.

• 8:22Bill Nye?

  You guys, just stop and think. This guy, or these two guys, came up with this theory that is the basis of life. And they didn't know what DNA was. They had no idea. Wallace and Darwin, I mean, maybe they had an idea, but they did not have X-ray evidence. It's really an extraordinary convergence.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  Darwin's ideas of genetics were actually completely wrong. What he did have was that there's something that is passed on from generation to generation.

• 8:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With variation.

• 8:47Speaker 04

  With variation, that's all he needed. Then Mendel came along, roughly the same time, but Darwin didn't know about it, and showed that genetics was digital. Again, one wouldn't have called it digital in those days, but you either get a gene or you don't get a gene. Genes don't blend, they don't mix. Every one of your genes came from one of your parents, from one of your four grandparents, from one of your eight great-grandparents, etc. They don't blend, they don't mix, they just pass unchanged through the generations. All that changes is the frequencies of them. Some of them survive, some of them don't survive. And that was the great insight of the 1930s. The neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s. People like Ronald Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane.

• 9:30Speaker 04

  They changed evolution into a genetic view whereby what happens is that as the generations go by, some genes become more frequent in the gene pool. You could literally think of the gene pool as like a bag of balls being stirred about.

• 9:45Eugene Mirman?

  Like a McDonald's playpen.

• 9:46Bill Nye?

  And Haldane is the guy that said, "If there is a God, he must have been..."

• 9:51Speaker 04

  I'd have an inordinate fondness for Beatles.

• 9:55Bill Nye?

  Because there's a lot of Beatles. A lot of different kinds of Beatles.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  Haldane also had a nice one. A lady said in an audience such as this, "I simply don't believe that there's been enough time to go from a single-celled ancestor to people like us." And Haldane said, "Madam, you did it yourself, and it only took you nine months."

• 10:23Bill Nye?

  Plus a few minutes.

• 10:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What role does the environment have on our genes?

• 10:34Speaker 04

  The main role the environment has is in providing the selection pressure on which genes survive and which don't.

• 10:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it doesn't alter the genes that we would pass on?

• 10:45Speaker 04

  The genes that we pass on are altered by the environment in a selective sense. If you're asking, "Does the environment cause mutation? Does the environment cause genes to change?"

• 10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's clear.

• 10:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, it does, but not in a very biologically interesting way. Things like cosmic rays cause genes to change.

• 11:04Bill Nye?

  That's pretty interesting.

• 11:06Eugene Mirman?

  Cosmic rays?

• 11:07Speaker 04

  I said biologically.

• 11:08Eugene Mirman?

  Astraphysical cosmic rays? Are you saying the Fantastic Four is possible?

• 11:15Bill Nye?

  Richard, let me just add, correct me. The thing is, species make more copies of themselves than can survive in an environment. And that's what leads to trouble.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  This was the big point Darwin made, that there's overproduction, and therefore there's competition. And a minority of individuals usually are the ones that give rise to the next generation. And that minority are the minority that have the genes that it takes to be good at it. It's only a statistical effect, it's not an absolute thing.

• 11:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but about epigenetics, we did a show on that for Nova Science Now. It was new to me, just a few years ago. It would not have been new to the biological community. I'm just curious, when I learn about it, and where your genes can actually be altered from what you were born with, and then you would then pass them on to a next generation. Is that true? Did I misunderstand that?

• 12:05Speaker 04

  Uh, no.

• 12:07Bill Nye?

  No, or no, you didn't misunderstand?

• 12:09Speaker 06

  This is different from those Travelling Pants movies, right?

• 12:17Speaker 06

  Because I did two of them.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  I think, is it like, if you're like, an Irish girl, and you wish you had like, olive skin, so you put on fake tan, and then your kid has olive skin?

• 12:31Speaker 02

  And then she's like, the sexiest one, and then she gets to...

• 12:37Bill Nye?

  She gets to what? Is there video?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  She gets to do it.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  I'm just asking.

• 12:44Bill Nye?

  There's all these...

• 12:45Speaker 02

  For a friend.

• 12:46Speaker 06

  If there's genes, why do I have so many recessive genes?

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Aw, Jim!

• 12:52Speaker 06

  Balding, eyesight, pale sexy skin.

• 12:58Bill Nye?

  So, one of the remarkable insights in evolution, and I write about it in my book,

• 13:06Bill Nye?

  is you only have to be good enough.

• 13:13Bill Nye?

  I'm not just talking about you.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  He does have to.

• 13:16Bill Nye?

  Talking about all of us.

• 13:17Speaker 06

  You know, I made me out of shape, but I can still kick his ass.

• 13:22Bill Nye?

  All of us, you just have to be good enough. Like, if you were gonna design somebody from the top down, you'd probably make some changes, yeah? I mean, the exhaust pipe and the plumbing, there's some issues.

• 13:35Bill Nye?

  But in evolution, you just have to be good enough to make it to the next generation.

• 13:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, but don't forget, you're competing with others, and so that "good enough" one, I think, is a bit overdone. You're competing with hundreds of others, and if you're just good enough, some of us are going to be a bit better.

• 13:52Eugene Mirman?

  So why don't I have wings?

• 13:54Speaker 04

  Well, that's a very good-

• 13:54Eugene Mirman?

  And it would definitely make me better.

• 13:57Speaker 04

  That's a very good question.

• 13:59Speaker 06

  I mean, the one thing I do know so far is that I'm the smartest person on this panel.

• 14:06Speaker 06

  Right? I mean, that's pretty obvious.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Because you're wearing glasses.

• 14:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's the glasses.

• 14:16Eugene Mirman?

  But why don't people have wings, considering everyone wants wings?

• 14:19Speaker 04

  It's an excellent question, why don't people have wings? They wouldn't be better off with wings. Wings can get in the way. A queen ant has wings, and she flies and gets mated, and then she digs a hole and starts the nest. The first thing she does is bite her own wings off.

• 14:34Eugene Mirman?

  Oh.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  Because they get in the way. You don't need wings. Worker ants don't have wings. Ants only grow wings in order to fly, to get mated.

• 14:41Eugene Mirman?

  So I wouldn't want ant wings, but what about regular, like, pretty bird wings?

• 14:46Bill Nye?

  Well, I'll take this one, Richard.

• 14:51Eugene Mirman?

  Yes Neil?

• 14:52Speaker 06

  So, you dig us out of this one?

• 14:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I'll save you on this one Richard. So, I ventured a guess, that...

• 15:00Bill Nye?

  Hold it, hold it! You're gonna, you're gonna take over with "I venture a guess"?

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I got this one. That, if you had wings, you would either be dead, or have more successful sex.

• 15:17Eugene Mirman?

  The latter is sort of one of the reasons I'm curious.

• 15:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so...

• 15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the point is-

• 15:23Eugene Mirman?

  I would definitely hide them.

• 15:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The act of having a feature doesn't always mean you'll be better at reproducing. Just because it would be fun to fly around. You're flying around while other people are not flying around having sex. Their genes get passed on.

• 15:35Speaker 06

  Are you guys saying the wings are the thing holding you back from getting laid?

• 15:41Eugene Mirman?

  I'm saying if I had wings, yeah, I would definitely-

• 15:43Speaker 06

  I think there's some other issues.

• 15:46Eugene Mirman?

  Alright.

• 15:47Speaker 04

  Okay, well let me answer your question. Is there was a science fiction movie in which a man of our size had wings? Bird-sized wings?

• 15:55Eugene Mirman?

  I'm, I'm curious.

• 15:56Speaker 04

  He couldn't get off the ground.

• 15:58Eugene Mirman?

  We'll call it X-Men.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  You've got to be fairy-sized. I mean, little fairies, they could have wings. You could have fairies!

• 16:06Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, why couldn't a person-

• 16:08Speaker 04

  Okay, Jorkins believes in fairies, right.

• 16:11Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, that was-

• 16:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Richard, she got you on that.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:14Eugene Mirman?

  Well, why couldn't you just have enormous wings that were fairy-sized in proportion?

• 16:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You would then need enormous chest muscles.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  You wouldn't have big enough chest muscles.

• 16:21Speaker 06

  How do you explain those Victoria's swimsuit models? They're wearing wings, aren't they?

• 16:28Bill Nye?

  Never tried to explain it, I just sort of accepted them.

• 16:35Bill Nye?

  No, but he's talking about if you, and a bird, and the queen ant are made of roughly the same material, we are constrained by the same laws of physics.

• 16:46Eugene Mirman?

  Right. No, no, I understand now why it'd be very different.

• 16:48Bill Nye?

  You were just joking.

• 16:49Eugene Mirman?

  No, no, I could have tiny wings, but they would be ineffective.

• 16:52Bill Nye?

  But you noted if-

• 16:53Eugene Mirman?

  That's what I've gained.

• 16:54Bill Nye?

  But, would you be able to-

• 16:56Eugene Mirman?

  People will hook up with me still, yeah.

• 16:57Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:59Eugene Mirman?

  He's an man with tiny wings, it's weird enough.

• 17:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Eugene, it's a deep law of physics, actually.

• 17:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the bigger you get,

• 17:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the higher is the ratio of your mass to your surface area. Okay? And, your surface area is what air goes across in order to give you lift. So as you get bigger, you require that much more surface area for you to attain lift. And, so, for you, at your weight... No, no, sorry!

• 17:33Eugene Mirman?

  He means it in general. We would all have the same difficulty in flying, I understand. Not because of my tummy.

• 17:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the American Museum of Natural History, we have collections of birds. Well, before I get to the bird collection, I'm feeling like dinosaur femurs and this sort of thing. And they're all heavy, long bones of other large creatures. And then they show me the femur of a penguin, a bird. Even though it doesn't fly, it felt like it was made of styrofoam. So, the very architecture of birds is lighter than any of the rest of us.

• 18:08Eugene Mirman?

  What about pterodactyls?

• 18:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know.

• 18:10Speaker 04

  They're light too.

• 18:12Eugene Mirman?

  They're very light?

• 18:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:13Bill Nye?

  So you can go...

• 18:14Eugene Mirman?

  That can't even be a pterodactyl!

• 18:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill!

• 18:16Bill Nye?

  Also, what's cool is go to the Air and Space Museum, Washington DC, and you can see the gossamer condor and the gossamer albatross, which they flew across the English Channel. A guy just like you, pedaling a bicycle. He was a world-class athlete of some sort, but the wings are in eighty feet across.

• 18:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Bill Nye?

  And they're made of super lightweight stuff, and that guy was just barely able to do it.

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Whereas something like a tiny insect, hardly needs any wings at all, it just more or less floats.

• 18:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so they have much more surface area relative to their body.

• 18:47Speaker 06

  That's why those Victoria's Swim seat ladies are so thin.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's got the one-track mind.

• 18:54Bill Nye?

  He's not alone.

• 19:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Evolution, people accuse it of being random, but it's not really random. It's something in the variation pool survives and that's selected for by the environment. I get that correct. Okay.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  It's kind of the opposite of random. It's opposite of random.

• 19:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the opposite of random. So, in that, we have convergent evolution, which has always intrigued me. Where the capacity for sight, eyesight, has independently developed in the tree of life. And yet has enabled different species to see just fine. That's an extraordinary fact.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  It is. Sight, eyes of one sort or another, have evolved several dozen times independently. And often have exactly the same design. I mean, the vertebrate eye, which is a camera eye, and the mollusk eyes, especially squid and octopus eyes, are very, very similar indeed. What do you mean by a camera eye? With a lens that focuses a real inverted image on a retina. As opposed to a compound eye, say, or a parabolic reflector eye, which some mollusks have.

• 20:16Speaker 06

  What kind do people have?

• 20:18Speaker 04

  We have a camera eye.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Camera eye?

• 20:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 06

  A camera eye. And then what's the other eye, what's like a common thing that has that?

• 20:24Speaker 04

  Well, a compound eye is a thing that insects have and shrimps have and things, where you have a great big hemisphere and lots of little tubes pointing out all over the hemisphere in different directions. And so each tube is looking at a different part of the visual field.

• 20:39Speaker 06

  It sounds fairly erotic. I think I have that. I have that.

• 20:43Speaker 04

  Insofar as there's an image at all, it's not an inverted image. Because that tube is looking up there, that tube's looking down there. Whereas in our eyes, that light there is focused on the bottom of my retina and that there is focused on the top of my retina. So, a camera eye has an inverted image. It's a mildly interesting philosophical question, why we see the world the right way up. But I think there were some experiments by a man called Stratton, who actually wore glasses that turned the world upside down. And it took him a few months to get used to it. And then when he took the glasses off, he couldn't see anymore. Brilliant!

• 21:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hence the expression, "Don't try this at home." Or how about this, "Don't try this while you're driving a cab."

• 21:26Speaker 04

  Neil, you're quite right. I mean, eyes have evolved independently many, many times. But convergent evolution tends to mean that animals that are not related look very alike because they're doing the same thing. Things like woodlice and pill millipedes, which look exactly the same. When one's a millipede and one's a crustacean, but they look the same.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Yet they get so offended when you mix them up at parties.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  They're all the same to me, I'm sorry.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  Well, yeah.

• 21:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, of course, knowing the genome of these things gives you the identity that would otherwise be confused if you just saw their external, just what they look like.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  Yes, I mean, if you saw a dolphin superficially, you might think it was a fish. But actually, you don't need the genome to know it's not a fish. I mean, it bears its young, it suckles them, and that kind of thing. So it's quite clear that dolphins are mammals. But they are very convergent on, say, tarpons, fast swimming fish in the surface of water.

• 22:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what I wonder, I just back up for a quick second here. If we say that evolution's anything but random, yet you publish a book called "The Blind Watchmaker", what do you expect people to think by reading that title, other than the whole thing is random?

• 22:40Speaker 04

  Okay, very important difference between "blind" as in not foreseeing. A watchmaker knows what he's making. He's making a watch, he knows what it's for, it's for a purpose. Every cog, every spring, every screw, every rivet is designed for a purpose. The blind watchmaker, natural selection, has absolutely no foresight at all. It's not random, but it's not foresightful. It blindly follows the path of survival.

• 23:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whatever that takes.

• 23:08Eugene Mirman?

  So he's not trying to end up with a beaver, but he ended up with a beaver?

• 23:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:12Eugene Mirman?

  As the example of how a beaver came to be.

• 23:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so if I combine these forces, everything you know, this formidable knowledge of life on Earth, and how it got here, and how it speciated, or the forces that drive the speciation. In my field, we invest a fair amount of our intellectual capital thinking about what aliens might look like. To the point where we have to actually constrain the question to say we're looking for life as we know it. Because life as we know it requires liquid water, and a certain temperature range, and certain conditions. So then we design our experiments and our spacewalks to kinda hang with that. So what I wonder is, if we have convergent evolution, might other aliens on other planets have limbs and sight?

• 23:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And can we judge what they might look like based on your body of knowledge of the biology of life?

• 24:06Speaker 04

  One of the things you can do is to ask the question of life on this planet, how many times has it evolved? In the case of eyes, it's about forty times. In the case of, say, echolocation, the thing bats do when they use echoes to find their way around, that's only evolved four times. In bats, dolphins, well, tooth whales, and two families of birds. So I'd put more money on eyes evolving than on echolanging evolving. Stings, hypodermic injection of poison, has evolved about twelve times. I think it's a profoundly interesting question. I think we should be speculating more about what life would be like. Never mind about eyes, I mean, would it have to be based on carbon? I suspect it would.

• 24:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would suspect that as well.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  I think only carbon has the necessary...

• 24:53Speaker 02

  I have, like, very big eyes and a tiny mouth, and I used to get bullied that I looked like an alien. And my comeback was, but there's no such thing, no offence. But I was like, there's no such thing, you know, like, how do you know? And they were like, the X-Files, you know?

• 25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they cited as evidence for why you look like an alien, the aliens they've seen on fictional television shows.

• 25:16Speaker 06

  Let's stop saying "they", it was me, alright?

• 25:20Speaker 06

  I was trying to pick her up, it didn't work. Ooh, you look like an alien! Why do so many aliens in movies look like seafood?

• 25:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 25:32Bill Nye?

  That's actually not a bad question.

• 25:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The aliens also have bigger heads compared with their bodies. They're baby proportions. So, we're trying to get this esteemed man to comment on the thought process of Hollywood.

• 25:44Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 25:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know if this is not what you studied.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  I'd like to know what you picture if you do think of maybe...

• 25:52Speaker 04

  I would...

• 25:57Bill Nye?

  Could we say that most living things on Earth are in the ocean? So if you're gonna create an alien, maybe you start with the ocean?

• 26:04Speaker 04

  I would rather say things like, "Does there have to be something equivalent of DNA?" And I think that there does.

• 26:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And information encoding.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  Information encoding which has to be very high fidelity. It's gotta be extremely accurate. So, I would bet that it won't be DNA itself. That would be too improbable. And if it was DNA, it certainly wouldn't have the same DNA code, which is highly improbable. But there would be something like DNA. It might not even be a one-dimensional code, which is what DNA is. It might be a two-dimensional matrix.

• 26:33Eugene Mirman?

  What would it mean for it to be two-dimensional?

• 26:35Speaker 04

  A sheet of...

• 26:36Eugene Mirman?

  Sure, but what would it mean for then the creature that had two-dimensional DNA?

• 26:40Speaker 04

  That might not matter. I mean, that would all be going on in miniature.

• 26:43Eugene Mirman?

  Like huge pants?

• 26:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 26:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very flat. Could you tell me? I've seen this word "neotony." What is that?

• 26:50Speaker 04

  Oh, right. That's when juvenile characters are retained into reproductive adulthood. The classic example is the axolotl, which is a salamander, except that it's not a salamander. It's a tadpole. So, it's an adult and it reproduces in the tadpole form. And Julian Huxley did a brilliant experiment. He took some axolotls and injected them with Xeroxing. And he turned them into salamanders, which had never been seen before.

• 27:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This sounds diabolical.

• 27:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 27:19Bill Nye?

  And by the way, how much do you need? Like, an injection every day? Once?

• 27:23Speaker 04

  I can't remember. But what's interesting is that his brother, Aldous Huxley...

• 27:27Eugene Mirman?

  He did the same thing, turned him into a salamander?

• 27:29Speaker 04

  Almost, almost.

• 27:32Eugene Mirman?

  One shot in the neck!

• 27:34Speaker 04

  It had been already recognised that we humans are a neotinous species. We're juvenile apes. We're apes that have retained juvenile characters into adulthood. If you look at a juvenile chimpanzee, it looks much more human than an adult. So Aldous Huxley speculated that if you could somehow prolong human life, and he had a fictional character, the Duke of somebody or other, who lived to be 300 years old, and turned into a gorilla. Because that was the analogue of his brother Julian's experiment with injecting axolotls with Xeroxing.

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is what your professional ancestors have been thinking about?

• 28:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 28:13Bill Nye?

  Neotony, by the way, has the word neo in it, which means new. So it's like, the new thing stays new. The baby stays new.

• 28:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My name is Neo.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Richard, let me ask you, evolution is an understanding of how life speciates, and how it can grow or reduce in complexity depending on the needs of the survival of the organism. But at some point, we must presume, we went from non-life to life. So does evolution say anything about that, or any of your professional community? Where do you go there?

• 28:45Speaker 04

  We know the key step that had to be taken, which was the origin of what you could call the first gene. It wouldn't have been DNA, but it would have been something self-replicating. There's got to be accurate copying. So there had to be some kind of a chemical accident which produced the first self-copying molecule. And it had to be self-copying in an interesting way, that was possible for there to be mistakes which were also copied, and therefore competition between the different types.

• 29:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Slightly different.

• 29:15Bill Nye?

  Let me ask you, how analogous is this primordial copying to crystals? Crystals and growth?

• 29:21Speaker 04

  Crystals are a pretty good model for it. In fact, Graham Cairn Smith had an actual theory of the origin of life, that it started with inorganic crystals, and flaws in the crystal, because a crystal grows by atoms...

• 29:34Speaker 04

  Joining on to existing atoms on the crystal. And if you get a flaw in the crystal, then it's replicated throughout the rest of the growth of that part of the crystal.

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the Andromeda strain, the bug that came from space was crystalline.

• 29:47Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 29:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correctly.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  And it was able to keep its chemicals separate, which of course it still does. In a way, DNA is a crystal, because it makes copies of itself.

• 29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's behaving in that way.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  It's behaving, but it's an information-rich crystal. That had to be the first step. It could have been a very, very improbable step. It could have been so unlikely that it only happened once in the universe. And that's not impossible. Oh, that's so troubling. No, no, it's not. It really isn't. Since we don't know what's in the rest of the universe, if it did only happen once, if there is only one planet in the universe where this singular event happened, then it has to be this planet. That's brilliant. No, but I hope it makes you feel special. Well, I don't believe that, but it is an interesting thought.

• 30:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's my argument against that. Okay. If going from non-life to life was so hard, it wouldn't have taken just a few couple of hundred million years on Earth for that to have happened. Here is the timeline of Earth. And at the beginning of Earth, we were like heavily bombarded by leftovers in the solar system, so it's not fair to start the clock there. Let the surface cool a little bit so that complex molecules have some chance of forming. So you subtract off half a billion years. That's about how long our models show that we've been bombarded. Within two or three hundred million years, life appeared.

• 31:05Speaker 04

  That's a very good argument, and that's one of the reasons why I don't believe what I've just said. It's an interesting thought. We can't rule out that possibility, because anthropically, we have to be on the one planet. And what that would mean, if anybody out there wants to believe that we are alone in the universe, what that means is that the origin of life on this planet was a stupefyingly improbable event, and therefore we're wasting our time speculating about it, because we're not looking for a plausible theory. We're looking for a highly implausible theory. Which is another of the reasons why I don't actually believe that. But there are people who do believe that we are unique in the universe. They want to believe it, and they do believe we're unique in the universe.

• 31:50Speaker 04

  All I'm saying is that it follows from that, that the origin of life is so improbable. That chemists are wasting their time trying to speculate about how it happened.

• 31:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because in science, we look for generalized ways that things happen.

• 32:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you can generalize how life formed, but it only happened once in the whole universe, you're barking up the wrong.

• 32:08Bill Nye?

  With that said, let us keep in mind, we landed Philly on asteroid CP67.

• 32:18Bill Nye?

  And asteroids here on Earth show up loaded with amino acids.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  Wonderful. This is one of the great things, the famous Miller-Urey experiment, where he managed to get lifelike molecules in his.

• 32:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Complex organic chemistry.

• 32:33Speaker 04

  It wasn't necessary. They're turning up all the time in asteroids. And so, the raw materials for making life are all over the universe. I mean, that's a very, very salient, encouraging.

• 32:43Eugene Mirman?

  The building blocks of life are all over in asteroids?

• 32:45Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 32:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:47Eugene Mirman?

  Great. I didn't know. Thank you.

• 32:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Earth is being spoon-fed these ingredients?

• 32:54Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 32:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the time?

• 32:55Speaker 04

  All the time.

• 32:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It just means that we are made of some of the most common ingredients in the universe. Another argument in favor of whatever we became, why think it wouldn't happen that way also?

• 33:06Bill Nye?

  I did this, may I ask if you guys heard about this, I did this debate in Kentucky.

• 33:15Bill Nye?

  And on their website, they point out that in the Urey-Miller experiment, they only got 0.001% amino acids or something. If I may, just a minute, that you got any complex molecules is infinitely more than zero. And so, get your head in the game. Like, for crying out loud, if you add four and a half billion years, some stuff can go down. That's all I'm saying.

• 33:42Bill Nye?

  But that fundamental, that inability to grasp sort of that enormous idea of, like, dude, dude.

• 33:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Richard, what's your favorite Hollywood alien?

• 33:55Speaker 04

  I don't have one, but I can tell you what my wife's Lala says when she's asked, as a Doctor Who girl.

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, your wife is a Hovian?

• 34:06Speaker 04

  She played Doctor Who's glamorous companion.

• 34:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't, why didn't I know this?

• 34:13Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 34:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, you are by marriage related to not just Hovian fans, but people who are actually in Doctor Who?

• 34:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 34:28Speaker 04

  She was the companion to one of the Doctor Who's, who was Tom Baker.

• 34:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 34:34Speaker 04

  And whom she actually briefly married.

• 34:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh-oh, okay.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  Let's dig into this.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  Does her current husband know about this?

• 34:48Speaker 04

  The question that Neil has just posed to me of my favorite science fiction, Alien, she goes to Doctor Who conventions, and the commonest question she gets is, "What's your favorite Doctor Who monster?" Because they have monsters. And her answer always is Tom Baker.

• 35:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A bit about our special guest's sneakers. They're actually manufactured by General Electric. As bizarre as that sounds, General Electric actually did research back in the 60s and produced rubber and plastic products that the Apollo astronauts took to the moon that could survive very high temperature ranges and still retain their flexibility and their integrity. And since we're not going to the moon anymore, what else might they have done with this? And they decided they'd just make sneakers. And so, these are basically moon shoes that were done by our esteemed guests. So, I'm just sad that rather than say, "Oh, our latest astronauts reported back from Mars",

• 36:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't get to say that, I get to say we're wearing shoes made of extra ingredients invented in the 60s.

• 36:18Bill Nye?

  Doctor Tyson, you're wearing leather shoes. That goes back somewhat more than 50 years.

• 36:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I'm just saying that cows never went to the moon. Alright, so in spite of the fairy tale, that material went to the moon.

• 36:32Eugene Mirman?

  But cows can't have dreams and goals.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Maybe that's what they're saying the whole time. Moon.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  I'm actually blushing. I'm blushing, I'm so sorry.

• 36:57Eugene Mirman?

  That was brilliant.

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Moon. Moon. I will never hear a cow the same again.

• 37:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I want to talk about human evolution, because we care about humans. But if we took how we got to humans. So, we went from non-life to life, in some way that is not yet fully understood, but the plausibility is there. Then we went from single-celled to multi-cell life.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 37:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a big gap in time, from the time we had single-celled ancestors, right?

• 37:31Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 37:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that must have been hard. It sounds like it was easier to go from non-life to life than from single-cell life to multi-cell life. Because we spent more time as single-celled ancestors than we did as not-life at all.

• 37:43Speaker 04

  I'm not sure about that, I mean...

• 37:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I am sure about it.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  Multi-cellular life is another of those things that's evolved convergently. I mean, they're multicellular bacteria, and there are several different kinds of multicellular protozoa.

• 37:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lot of years went by between the first life and the Cambrian explosion of life, where...

• 38:01Bill Nye?

  Cambrian explosion isn't the only multicellular organism.

• 38:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but isn't that when you first got sight and limbs and locomotion?

• 38:08Speaker 04

  Well, but that's different from multicellular.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 38:10Bill Nye?

  And they had hard shells, that's why we're able to... that's part of why we're able to find them.

• 38:15Speaker 04

  I mean, nobody really knows why the Cambrian explosion happened, there are lots of...

• 38:18Bill Nye?

  And you guys, the explosion took 220 million years. My uncle was a geologist, he worked for DuPont Diamond, he blew stuff up all day. It's a lot quicker than 220 million years.

• 38:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wrong adjective, I guess. Okay, so...

• 38:33Bill Nye?

  Well, but I mean, they use the word explosion, and everybody's charmed by it, but I just like to remind people, it was a long old thing.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  The Cambrian explosion's overrated as well, you're quite right.

• 38:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Overrated?

• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fill that to the trial of bites. So, let's get on to humans here. We astrophysicists conveniently sent an asteroid this way to get rid of T-Rex, so that our mammalian ancestors wouldn't have to keep running underfoot, avoiding being Odurs. Then we have primates. There's a branch of the tree of life that we call primates, I guess.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that correct?

• 39:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we're in that branch with our primate relatives. Is that a fair?

• 39:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Characterization? Okay. So, the fossil record shows that we have very close ancestors that we called Neanderthal.

• 39:17Speaker 04

  Well, they're not ancestors.

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, sorry, sorry.

• 39:19Speaker 04

  Cousins.

• 39:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cousins.

• 39:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they're no Neanderthal today.

• 39:23Speaker 04

  No.

• 39:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, did our ancestors?

• 39:25Speaker 04

  Well.

• 39:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eat them? Or cross-breed with them? Or is there any reason why they're not here and we're here?

• 39:32Speaker 04

  We did cross-breed with them. There's genetic evidence, and modern genetics is very good now at reconstructing history in fascinating ways. And it's clear that a significant, not a large, but a significant proportion of the genome of Europeans, not Africans, but Europeans, has some Neanderthal admixture.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, when I was in high school, definitely, there was this one guy.

• 39:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You felt a Neanderthal?

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think he definitely was a Neanderthal.

• 40:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so who was cross-breeding with the Neanderthal?

• 40:07Speaker 04

  The Homo sapiens who were around at the time.

• 40:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do we have a word for them?

• 40:11Speaker 04

  They're sometimes called... Party animal? Well...

• 40:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Party animal. And venturer.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  Just call them sapiens.

• 40:17Bill Nye?

  Same, just like us.

• 40:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, they were just like us, yeah.

• 40:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, we cross-bred? Did we breed them out of existence?

• 40:25Speaker 04

  No, I think they died out and possibly we killed them, or outcompeted them. But there was a certain amount of cross-breeding.

• 40:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and that's evidenced in the genome?

• 40:34Speaker 04

  Exactly. That's the only evidence.

• 40:36Bill Nye?

  Richard, let me ask you this. So, compared the size of the brain of a Neanderthal with his overall or her overall body weight, compared with our size of brain and our overall body weight?

• 40:46Speaker 04

  Slightly larger.

• 40:47Bill Nye?

  Who's slightly larger?

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Neanderthal.

• 40:49Bill Nye?

  They had more brain for their body than we do.

• 40:51Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 40:52Bill Nye?

  Yet we kicked their empanages.

• 40:54Speaker 04

  Well, brain size is very variable anyway. Well, yeah. All our brains are different sizes and it doesn't correlate well with... Ability. Ability.

• 41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, what leaves me curious is that we would interbreed with Neanderthal. When I'm thinking they might have just been all rounded up and killed. I mean, we'd do that with our own species.

• 41:14Speaker 04

  Surely.

• 41:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Surely we would do that with a competing species.

• 41:17Speaker 04

  Sounds highly plausible, yes.

• 41:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, I'd hate to say that, but why would we treat another species competing with us better than we treat each other competing with us?

• 41:25Speaker 04

  Quite.

• 41:25Eugene Mirman?

  We definitely treated Neanderthals not great, right? Because they're all dead.

• 41:32Speaker 06

  They're gods.

• 41:33Eugene Mirman?

  They're gods. And we might have first had sex with them and you're wondering why...

• 41:37Speaker 06

  Maybe we had sex with them and then we killed them.

• 41:39Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. That's probably what happened.

• 41:42Speaker 06

  I hope we didn't have sex with them and killed them at the same time.

• 41:46Speaker 04

  I mean, nobody knows.

• 41:46Eugene Mirman?

  Early man was not polite.

• 41:48Speaker 04

  Let me ask you this: is it possible disease took him out? Yes, nobody knows. We're speculating in a vacuum here. We don't know.

• 41:56Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, so they could have just had a cold, all of them. Which at the time might have been terrible.

• 42:01Speaker 04

  Most species that have ever existed have gone extinct and it's not an unusual thing.

• 42:05Eugene Mirman?

  So it's not necessarily our fault?

• 42:06Speaker 04

  No.

• 42:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so...

• 42:08Speaker 04

  Don't feel bad about that.

• 42:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In any case, Neanderthal and we have a common ancestor at some point in the primate tree.

• 42:16Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 42:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and that's true for us and any other primate.

• 42:20Speaker 04

  And any other animal or plant or bacterium.

• 42:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and so I once had this conversation with you that I want to recreate here. All humans are fertile with one another generally, okay? Unless you have some deformity. So, we can reproduce with anyone who has ever been human. But at some point, there's a branching of the tree where some other branch of primates went into another direction. Let's say the chimpanzees. So we can't mate with chimpanzees, but both we and chimpanzees ought to be able to mate with the species that is at the vertex of that split, is that correct?

• 42:56Speaker 04

  Yes, it might not be that far back, but what you could certainly say is that there exists an extinct animal that we could mate with, which could mate with that one, which could mate with that one, which could mate with the vertex, which could mate with that one, which could mate with that one. I mean, I once illustrated this with a thought experiment. You would do one of these human chains, and you hold the hand of your mother, who holds the hand of her mother, who holds the hand of her mother. And as you pass along the line of this enormously long line of creatures holding each other's hand, you eventually come to the common ancestor with chimpanzees, and who stands there with, holding in one hand, her descendant who becomes human, and holding in her other hand, her descendant who becomes chimpanzee.

• 43:40Speaker 04

  And then you go all the way down the chimpanzees. There is a continuous line connecting us to chimpanzees, up towards the vertex, and then back down again. And if you walked along the line, at no point would you be able to say this individual is of a different species from that. They're all of exactly the same species as the next one in the chain. Every creature ever born is a member of the same species as its parents and its children. But yet, if you have a sufficiently large number of generations, you then come to a point where you can no longer interbreed. It wouldn't be a sudden change, it would be a gradual loss of fertility.

• 44:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the woman at the vertex, she could then go back and extend her hand backwards?

• 44:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you could go back to rodents?

• 44:24Speaker 04

  And to jellyfish.

• 44:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jellyfish, oak trees?

• 44:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Because I was thinking it sounded like a really awkward threesome, but when you put it that way, it sounds totally fine.

• 44:34Speaker 04

  It is actually, it's a very arresting thought, but it's more or less inescapable.

• 44:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, the Human Genome Project, that's, I guess, is it completed?

• 44:42Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 44:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so in there is Neanderthal, is chimpanzee. In there, it ought to be that which we still have in common with other life forms on Earth, correct?

• 44:52Speaker 04

  Exactly, yes.

• 44:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what's to stop you or your peeps from just going in there and just creating Neanderthal in the lab? And have them walk out the back door?

• 45:03Speaker 04

  Well, actually, Neanderthals is a particular case because the genome is now being worked on by Svante Parbo and his colleagues, and they will get the Neanderthal genome. And so it would be possible to make, clone one.

• 45:16Eugene Mirman?

  Could we create a Neanderthal in a lab?

• 45:18Speaker 04

  Yes, probably.

• 45:19Eugene Mirman?

  Why haven't we?

• 45:20Speaker 04

  Oh, not yet.

• 45:21Eugene Mirman?

  I mean, other than morality?

• 45:24Speaker 04

  We have the genome, and I'm conjecturing with reasonable confidence that the embryological technology will exist before this century is out, when you could recreate it. Whoa. And would people do it just for curiosity? A lot of people would think it was highly unethical to do it. I don't really see that myself. I mean, it's an interesting question.

• 45:43Bill Nye?

  Can I ask you about this idea?

• 45:45Eugene Mirman?

  Of course, it's unethical.

• 45:46Bill Nye?

  This idea that your model, and I love your model, like from The Ancestor's Tale kind of thing, where one person's holding this hand, the threesome.

• 45:56Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 45:57Bill Nye?

  But in the case, I'm fascinated by the mosquitoes in the London Underground.

• 46:01Speaker 04

  Yes, yeah.

• 46:02Bill Nye?

  So this is where a new species is becoming right before our eyes, and I say becoming because there's, I'm asking you to speak to this, there's a spectrum, right? Like, certain of them can mate with the ones upstairs, and certain of them cannot.

• 46:17Speaker 04

  The London Underground Tube Railway is a peculiar ecology for mosquitoes. There are plenty of puddles of water and things down there, they can breed, and so they are breeding a separate species of mosquito before our very eyes. They never come out and cross the street with other? Well, I don't know that.

• 46:34Eugene Mirman?

  Well, they don't have the card. You have to have the card to exit.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  The MetroCard, yeah. The London Underground's only been in existence since the 19th century, and so it's a fast process.

• 46:48Bill Nye?

  So this process, my understanding, was accelerated by World War II, where humans went under-

• 46:54Speaker 04

  They went underground to use them as air raid shelters.

• 46:56Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 46:57Speaker 04

  That's right, yes.

• 46:58Bill Nye?

  And so the mosquitoes who lived down there had their food come walk down to them every night. Why bother going upstairs?

• 47:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:05Bill Nye?

  Why get a MetroCard?

• 47:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 47:07Bill Nye?

  Just stay here, you know, light a cigarette, and just wait for the humans.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  What are the differences between those mosquitoes and regular ones?

• 47:14Speaker 04

  I can't remember what the difference is.

• 47:16Bill Nye?

  Well, they just can't breed, or most of them can't breed them.

• 47:19Speaker 04

  There probably are anatomical differences as well, I can't remember.

• 47:21Bill Nye?

  I've often wondered if they're not better at hunting in the dark and so on.

• 47:24Speaker 04

  Something like that.

• 47:25Bill Nye?

  But in other words, we've seen it in a human lifetime, a new species of insect come into being. So you make predictions with theories and here it happens.

• 47:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're gonna end segment one. We are live at the Beacon Theater, New York City.