Listener Questions #21 featuring Cat Bohannan

Daniel and Kelly are joined by Cat Bohannan, who answers questions about whether we can shorten gestation, superhuman feats of strength, and whether viruses are ever good for us. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:33Speaker 01

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• 1:02Speaker 02

  My name is Jessa. One of the things I love the most about working for United Healthcare is that everybody matters. Every moment matters. There's a person behind every problem. I care because it's what I was put on this earth to do.

• 1:18Speaker 03

  I'm Ben, and I work at United Healthcare. I am just one piece of a larger puzzle, but every piece matters. It's more than just work. We want to make the healthcare system better for everyone. I care because I want to make a difference. That's what committed to care means to me.

• 1:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Hey, everyone. I've got a new fun physics book out now. It's called Do Aliens Speak Physics? And I think it's a lot of fun. But don't take my word for it. Here's what Blake Crouch, famous author and smart guy, said. "Do Aliens Speak Physics is a charming, thoughtful meditation on the common language of the universe, a book which asks important questions about the fundamental nature, not just of our existence, but of reality itself." So go out and pick up a copy of Do Aliens Speak Physics. I think you'll enjoy it.

• 2:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  This pregnancy thing is just the pits. Is there anything we can do to speed it up a bit?

• 2:21Daniel Whiteson?

  When we're under great stress, can we really lift a car? Or is that an urban legend that's gone a bit too far?

• 2:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Bacteria can be beneficial, as I've come to understand. But what about viruses? Do they ever lend a helping hand?

• 2:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Whatever questions keep you up at night.

• 2:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or sometimes beyond the intellectual grasp of Daniel and Kelly. So on today's show, Dr. Capo Hanon joins us to answer questions that stumped well, Kelly in particular.

• 2:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe. Plus friends.

• 2:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Plus friends. And note, this friend studies reproduction and sex. And so you should decide ahead of time if that's appropriate for young children. Thanks.

• 3:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I don't know the answer to every single physics question you might imagine.

• 3:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space. And wow, y'all ask me a lot of biology questions that I do not know the answer to. And I was on a road trip with my friend Capo Hanon. We were driving through Wales. We did this show together called Moms on Mars, where we talk about how difficult reproduction on Earth is and how it would be even more complicated on Mars. And it's not a great idea to rush into that. And I mentioned that I have this new podcast and I have these amazing listeners who send me a bunch of questions that I don't know the answer to, even though they're about biology. And Cat was like, dude, I'll come on and answer them. And I was like, sweet. So we decided to do that.

• 4:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, it's incredible to me how broad biology is as a field. I mean, even physics, like in my department, we have people who do particle physics and condensed matter physics and plasma physics. The fields feel totally different, but like we have 16 different biology departments here on campus, you know, like the breadth of stuff from like ecology to microbiology to medical stuff is just really astounding. I don't know why y'all even call each other biologists.

• 4:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, it's super different. Yeah, I was at a university that had, you know, immunology, ecology, nematology, botany, and it's, they are all very different. And I'm very flattered that the listeners think that I can handle any biology question, but I do every once in a while, and by every once in a while, I mean quite often, need to lean on a friend who's an expert.

• 4:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm. And I've thoroughly enjoyed hearing about all these biology questions. I'm so glad folks out there are curious, not just about the physical universe and cosmology and particles, but how all this gunky stuff inside of us works. We can go on doing its meat machine for so many years. It's amazing to me as well. And of course, I'm interested in biology. I hear about it at home, but it's wonderful to also get to dig into it on the podcast. So send us your questions about physics, about biology, about all the gunky stuff inside of you. Write to us to [email protected]. We will answer your questions or do a little bit of research or put it here on the podcast to joke about.

• 5:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  To joke about and try to answer.

• 5:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, yes, and also answer, yes.

• 5:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, we try to get answers one way or another to nearly every question, although there are a couple that are just way too far out of our wheelhouses and we have to throw up our hands and say, I'm so sorry.

• 5:41Daniel Whiteson?

  But I think that gives us credibility because, you know, sometimes you don't know the answer and you should say you don't know when you don't know. That's one of the joys of working at the forefront of knowledge is you just get to throw up your hands sometimes and say, nobody knows. We don't know. It's one of the mysteries.

• 5:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right, or it depends, which is my favorite, or we have no idea. That's right.

• 5:59Daniel Whiteson?

  There you go.

• 6:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  But Kat has an idea and so Kat will be answering the questions today. So let's go ahead and bring Kat on the show. On today's show, we have my good friend Kat Bohannan, who completed her PhD in 2022 at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition. Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution is her first book. It's a New York Times bestseller and was listed for the Royal Society Prize, the Orwell Prize, and the Women's Prize in 2023. She lives in the US with her partner and her two semi-feral children, and those are her words, not mine. I'm sure they're lovely. Welcome to the show, Kat.

• 6:38Speaker 06

  Hey, folks.

• 6:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks for being here and for helping us answer these amazing questions.

• 6:42Speaker 06

  I'll do it. I can. Questions are great.

• 6:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. Yeah. So we've been getting a lot of questions about the human body. And the first person I think of when I think, "How does some part of my body work?", is I should ask Kat. And so we're passing these questions to you.

• 6:56Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 6:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  So let's go ahead and listen to our first question.

• 7:00Speaker 07

  Hello, extraordinaries. I'm Andrea from Italy, a big fan of the podcast and your books. Here with me is my wife with some questions for you, probably more in Calais ballpark.

• 7:11Speaker 08

  Hello there, Alessandra here. My question for you is, what determines the length of pregnancies in humans and other species? Is it correct to assume it's a function of the needed number of cells? That said, have there been studies on how to shorten gestation? If so, how would that be technologically achieved? And lastly, what social implications would arise as a consequence of shortened gestation in humans? Do you think it can affect the current birth rate or other aspects of our social structure?

• 7:43Speaker 06

  Ooh, so that is a meaty question, full of many questions inside that little package of question.

• 7:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Matriska doll.

• 7:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Do you think this is somebody who just went through a pregnancy and wished it was shorter? She was like, "Oh, my gosh, how can I end this sooner?"

• 7:56Speaker 06

  I mean, that's one of those things NEOB will tell you, that by the time you get to your third trimester, gestating people are ready. They're like, "You know what?" I'm freaking good. Yeah. Let's, let's do this thing. In fact, the only thing that could probably push any reasonable person over that totally reasonable fear of the process of giving birth is the idea of continuing to be pregnant as an alternative. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah.

• 8:24Daniel Whiteson?

  So you don't think anybody was like, hmm, this has been cozy. I could use another 40 weeks of this.

• 8:29Speaker 06

  Oh. Well, human beings are a little cray, so I'm never going to say no one.

• 8:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 8:36Speaker 06

  You know what I mean? There are some people, some unicorns, who like, love the knocked up state and are like, I want more of this. I want more of this. I think most of us, it's a mixed bag. There are bits we like, bits we don't like. It's very complicated. But most of us by that third trimester, if we make it there are like, yeah, get this thing out of me now. I was done. This is a Ridley Scott scenario. Get this thing out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the short answer to have there been studies to shorten gestation is yeah, and we're already doing it, but not on the development side, on the like, can we do it outside the body side? Right?

• 9:19Speaker 06

  And that's a slightly easier thing to rig. Right? So for example, literally all IVF, as we currently do it, shortens the process by which, you know, a thing that becomes a human later is in the body at the front end, because we are fertilizing that egg outside of that pelvis. We are doing it in a different way. We are doing it, sometimes it's a tube. I think nowadays it's a P-tradition, then two. It's complicated, depends on the lab, there's a history of it, there's a lot I don't know. But yeah, basically, so like a blastocyst, a five or six day blastocyst, which is kind of a basketball of cells. So at that stage of development, which isn't yet gestation, gestation technically is when it starts burrowing into your body, into your uterus, right?

• 10:04Speaker 06

  That's your start of pregnancy. So this is just cells doing crazy stuff, making a hollow basketball. That thing is not in your pelvis until it gets transferred in. Right? So that's already shortening. What's going on in your body? The other end gets more complicated. Very late-stage premies, basically. Now, there's a lot of development around improving a NICU by creating a more womb-like environment, right? So you can think of the whole NICU as shortening gestation, even though the gestating person probably didn't want to. Thank you. Those are premies, right? But now, we're trying to improve it because like the way we do it now is damaging to the lungs. Those lungs are, you know, often not quite ready to breathe air. They're still developing.

• 10:48Speaker 06

  So we're working on having that be a more fluid environment. There's a thing called a bio-bag that can mimic more of that liquid environment. It's not out there. You're not going to find it in a hospital, but those are labs developing that stuff. But that whole middle bit, which is basically when that placenta attaches on up until very late-stage pregnancy, we don't have that yet. We don't have a way to have a mammalian pregnancy like happen without a uterus and without a body that's hosting that uterus, right? So that's like the counterintuitive way of thinking, how can we shorten gestation? The way they're really hoping, which is speed up, is a lot crazier and actually unpacks

• 11:32Speaker 06

  a whole bag of worms that we don't know in biology, which is really interesting. Like, why the hell do fetal cells multiply so rapidly? And then, for some reason, once you achieve a certain kind of body organization, certain body plan, some of those tissues start slowing down their replication cycle and some of them stay fast, you know? Like, when you're building a body, which, again, is actually not just making cells, but also having them migrate, right, to different areas in that developing embryonic body? You know, there's just a whole city infrastructure going on in there, right? And it's going really fast. It's going really, really fast. And then, some parts of it slow down.

• 12:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, I couldn't build a baby faster than that, for sure. It would take me a lot longer. So this is pretty impressively quick, right?

• 12:19Speaker 06

  I mean, technically, we could attach a placenta to like your abdominal wall, but you probably don't want to do that. You probably, that's not like on your bingo card for 2025. I mean, I know there's been a lot that's been surprising this year, you know, like at the NIH, but not, not like knocking you off, Dan.

• 12:43Speaker 06

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 12:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, put this in context for us, like, are humans, do they have a longer gestation period than other great apes, for example?

• 12:51Speaker 06

  They do.

• 12:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Are human babies more developed or less developed than like chimpanzee babies when they're born?

• 12:57Speaker 06

  See, I think that's also a really good way of framing it because like when you get born as a mammal is not like this set thing, like you are so ready for the world or so unready for the world. Like when mice are born, they're pretty fetal, but you know, we call them pinkies, you know, they have no hair yet, their eyes aren't open, their ears aren't unrolled, like even to poop, the mother mouse needs to lick along the abdomen to like stimulate, you know, them to pee and they will actually die of not defecating and peeing if they don't get that stimulation in those early

• 13:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 13:31Speaker 06

  phases of being out. So is that really developed? Is that really being born?

• 13:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:36Speaker 06

  Right? And that's that interesting thing, like all mammalian species have a different level of um development or readiness.

• 13:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:42Speaker 06

  You know, for existence outside that body, which is really interesting. And so human bodies, when we're born, a lot of people make a lot of hay out of the fact that we're pretty freaking useless. We can't hold up our heads, like we are just barely able to exist compared to say a chimpanzee or a gorilla or many other primates, right?

• 14:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  But I didn't have to lick Ada's belly so she could poop. So that's pretty, that's pretty great. I'm calling that a win. Sorry, go ahead.

• 14:10Speaker 06

  No, no, that is really great, but you trying to make sure she didn't snap her stupid neck was definitely like a thing that other

• 14:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 14:19Speaker 06

  monkey moms don't have to do, right? So we are a needy baby species. We are a like gotta do more to keep this thing alive species for sure. And Holly Dunsworth did the most famous research on this. So for a long time, we thought human babies were born because our heads are stupidly large and our vag is really not that large. It's actually not the vag that can, you know, stretch or tear. Don't think about that too hard, but like the actual pelvic inlet, the bone opening, you know, where the babies come out at the bottom. Is small compared to how big a thing we got to push out. So we thought that was the obstetric dilemma. We thought that was why we were born, when we were born. But Holly Dunsworth did some really great research saying, actually, this is a metabolic

• 15:04Speaker 06

  threshold. Actually, it's more like, how much longer can you gestate this super greedy, metabolically costly fetus before your local resources are not sufficient? In other words, it's actually an ecological concept, right? When are mammals born? It's like, how much longer, in our case, can this body continue to literally bear the load of this resource haul, right? Before it's like, oh, no, we got to switch to lactation. You need to get the hell out of here. This is not, this is not cool.

• 15:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is it calories or is it space? Like, are they pressing on your lungs and your heart? Or is it both?

• 15:46Speaker 06

  I did not enjoy how difficult it was to breathe in late-term pregnancy.

• 15:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  Same.

• 15:52Speaker 06

  You know, I wasn't cool with like, how literally my diaphragm was compressed outward by this new mass growing. Not, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, not fun. But, so, yeah, that's not great. But no, it's actually, it's calories in general, just load. Now, metabolic load is going to be a cost that isn't simply how many calories transferred, but also, what are the resources you need to continue to exist gestating while bearing this thing that also requires resources? So that's not simply you transferring resources. It's also, how much does it cost for you to carry this thing around? How much does it cost for you to care to have a heart that's still working, pumping this much blood, et cetera? So that's like a whole, it's a complicated, sweetest stuff. But that's the general idea.

• 16:36Speaker 06

  We give birth when basically it's too costly to continue doing this thing, you know? And that was Dunsworth's great insight, that it's not about the head size, although head size also sucks.

• 16:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I remember when my kids were born, feeling like, wow, this baby was better suited inside the womb because, you know, you didn't have to worry about it crying. It was fed automatically. You know, the whole diaper thing, like, it just felt like it was so much easier. Also, of course, it wasn't inside me. There's that.

• 17:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's an important insight. Yeah.

• 17:10Speaker 06

  Really significant bell just went off there. Yeah. Thank you for acknowledging that. Hello. I heard that. No, for sure. I mean, technically, that mother was having to like, eat and drink and go to the bathroom a lot. So I wouldn't say it was automatic. It's just that you didn't have to think about feeding it. And you didn't have to think about dealing with its cellular waste, like, how often and where is it peeing? You know, my first child had a had a penis. My son definitely peed, not just on me, but greatly upward. I definitely, my face was peed on, taking care of that thing. Oh, yeah. My daughter did not have that. It was fascinating. I was like, oh, it could be like this. This is better.

• 17:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  So, so the listener wanted to know if the length of pregnancy is a function of the number of cells. But it feels like what we've said is maybe number of cells matters, but it's also how developed the baby needs to be before it's ready to enter the world, which depends on like, the evolutionary history of the animal. Would, does that sound fair?

• 18:16Speaker 06

  I think, I think that sounds fair. I mean, elephant gestation takes a long time to build a big freaking body like that. That is true. And it's very rare for elephant twins, almost never.

• 18:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, interesting.

• 18:28Speaker 06

  Both the metabolic load of that thing, and also, it's an elephant.

• 18:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Speaker 06

  And it's in you. So even if you're an elephant, you're growing an elephant. Oh, God. You know, so that's, that's a thing. So, yeah. So that newborn size, just sheer size, is definitely, definitely a factor. But, you know, even as adults, our cells are replicating at very different rates. What their cell cycle, like, how long do you go through that early cell phase into when does it finish out? The lining of your intestines can finish a cycle in like, I think, 10 hours or something like that. You know, whereas your liver can take like, a year. I'm pretty sure it's the hepatocyte. It can take like a long time.

• 19:13Speaker 06

  And then, of course, the most famous case of the longest cells to complete their cycle is our freaking eggs. Right? So like Kelly, when you were inside your mom, well, the the tissue and the fetus then that became you. And you were developing those nascent follicles in your in your little baby ovaries, right? Those things reach a certain stage and then just stop, just hang out, just pause. Some of them for as many as 40 years or more. Right? Whereas the rest of your cells are definitely not doing that. So actually, one of the big mysteries in biology is what is regulating all of that? How does that work? What are the switches? What are the inhibitions?

• 19:54Speaker 06

  Genetically and otherwise that and what what changes that later on? Because actually, that's one of those things in cancer. You get a lot of cells that then say a liver tumor that originates in the liver, right? How do you take a cell that has a really long turn over time and have it start multiplying rapidly? Right? What's what's controlling that? If we can actually figure that out, oh, we can keep a lot more people healthy.

• 20:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, say more about that because say we understood what is regulating this. Isn't that downstream of something else which is regulating it? Isn't the whole thing some complex Rube Goldberg machine? It's not like if we understood, oh, it's this level of hormone, you could just like give somebody more and it would happen faster. Or take it away and make things slower. Isn't it a enormously complex device that we have almost no hope of being able to like manipulate to our ends?

• 20:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel finds biology frustrating.

• 20:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, it's not just a particle.

• 20:48Speaker 06

  I was just about to say, you seem to just be describing biology.

• 20:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Ding ding ding.

• 20:55Speaker 06

  These are complex systems interacting complexly. That's what what where is. Okay. Yeah, it's nice. It's nice in physics that you can just like get your foil from Costco and build your experiment. But we have to have things make babies. Okay?

• 21:11Daniel Whiteson?

  You just described all of physics. That's amazing. Wow.

• 21:15Daniel Whiteson?

  From Costco, that's my entire budget. Yes.

• 21:17Speaker 06

  That sounds nice. Well, unless you're actually trying to build CERN. You know, there are, there are, there are different levels of cost and experiments. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, man. Um, so I think I, I completely agree with you that there isn't going to be one smoking gun for what regulates all this stuff. And like in oncology, there's definitely a case that some cancers are, what you're describing with the hormones is environmentally triggered cellular pattern changes, right? Where like, if you get your more estrogen and you have a kind of breast cancer that is especially responsive to estrogen, then you want to down regulate that to keep the cancer at bay if you're a survivor, right? There are many kinds like that. That's also true of, you know, prostate and testicular cancer,

• 22:00Speaker 06

  that you want to down regulate certain androgens so that you don't end up with more of that, that cancer profile, right? So that's manipulating the environment of those cells. And there's a lot of stuff that changes your replication rate that doesn't have to do with that. But, you know, like, one of the things that we're starting to think about in aging science is, okay, what does resource availability do to cell replication? We know, for example, in diabetic patients, that they have a higher risk profile for a number of different kinds of cancers. And the thought is, is that many cell types are responding to that higher level of local sugar, basically. You know, that that is changing what the cells are doing, almost as if like in, in an ecological problem,

• 22:45Speaker 06

  there's more resources so we can make more babies, you know, that we can, we can replicate those cells faster. Right? So really thinking about the body as a bunch of different local environments is surprisingly useful. But again, is that thing where like, can we speed up gestation? Well, the first thing you think of is like, so are we just going to turn all fetuses into cancer? Just a whole lot of? Cancer, because that's probably what you're proposing to try to speed up a basic body plan without knowing what the hell you're doing.

• 23:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm guessing that's not what she had in mind, but it's a good way of highlighting.

• 23:18Speaker 06

  No, she wasn't thinking a lot of cancer. She was just like, make me less pregnant for less time.

• 23:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. It's a good way of highlighting the complexity, I think.

• 23:27Daniel Whiteson?

  But let's say that somehow you could, right? Somehow you figured this out and you could have a baby in six weeks instead of, you know, 40 weeks.

• 23:35Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 23:35Daniel Whiteson?

  What do you think that would do to the social structure and, you know, the decisions people are making about having babies? We've heard on the podcast recently about how, you know, birth rates are dropping worldwide.

• 23:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, birth rates are dropping around mostly wealthy or mostly white women, but we could get into that debate another time. Um, actually, our global population continues to grow and it's fine. Okay. So now that I've done that PSA, I'll just quickly say that like, we're definitely thinking about a matrix scenario now. We're talking about external wombs. A human body would not be able to supply, you know, the, the resources necessary without dying to create a whole human body in six weeks in a uterus. Besides just having that uterus grow to sufficient size, remember that normally it's the size of a freaking adult fist and we're now making it a basketball. So that's a thing that takes time.

• 24:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 24:31Speaker 06

  It's also simply, again, that metabolic load. How do you transfer sufficient resources and stay alive? That's the mammalian conundrum, right? Yeah. So, so, okay. So external womb would be a major thing. And as soon as you have that, then the social implications are absolutely massive, right? That now there is no individual body that needs to bear, you know, the burdens and the blessings, but mostly burdens of making bodies inside of it, right? That actually changes a lot about what it is to be a person with a uterus. That changes a lot about things that we assume are simply part and parcel of being female, which could be both really cool and really weird.

• 25:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So let's go ahead and we're going to share this answer with the listener and see what she had to say.

• 25:21Speaker 08

  Thank you so much for your answers, Kat. Let me clarify that I'm not currently pregnant or have been pregnant. The reason for my question was rather my interest for social policies and how science can shape them. As a matter of fact, I found especially interesting your insight on how an external uterus would disrupt our traditional understanding of gender roles. That is definitely something to think about.

• 25:45Speaker 09

  I, on the other hand, found very interesting the idea of birth as a metabolic necessity. That explains how some newborn animals can instantly run while others can't even stand. Thank you all, and keep up the good work. Bye-bye.

• 26:41Speaker 10

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• 28:10Speaker 13

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel.

• 28:28Speaker 14

  Man, I'm a Black and Mexican kid from San Pedro. And I grew up in Inglewood as well. I never liked to be boxed in. Both of my parents colored outside of the line. I mean, even them being together at the time in L.A. was just not typical. And so I think that has always been a part of my DNA. There's a defiant something in me that feels like what we get to do with what we're given that's greater than us is to maybe connect people to ideas that they wouldn't naturally, you know, connect to. That's really me. I'm just kind of like defiant with love, though.

• 29:04Speaker 13

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 29:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, and we're back. And we are on to our second question with Cap O'Hannon. And so let's go ahead and hear the listener question.

• 29:31Speaker 15

  Hi, Danielle and Kelly. I was recently with a group of friends playing a superhero RPG, and a question was posed that I'm hoping you can help us out with. Can humans really lift a great deal of weight in times of great stress? I've heard that humans have restrictors on their muscles. Otherwise, they'd hurt themselves with how much they can really do. I've also heard the story of a mother lifting a car off of her trapped children. Are either of these things really true? Would an ordinary, non-body-built human be able to lift a car a foot or so off the ground if they really needed to? If so, what happens in our bodies to make such a thing possible? If not, where do you think stories like restrictors and super-strength moms come from? Thanks in advance.

• 30:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Can we start with just what happens when you have an acute stress experience? So like, something stresses you out. Let's say not stresses you out enough that you need to try to lift up a car. What does our body do there? And then maybe we can move to, can you lift up a car if you're stressed enough?

• 30:22Speaker 06

  Well, first, I think one of the things that's really great about these accounts, which have to do with like, removing normal limitations on muscular use and things like that, you know, during periods of intense adrenaline, intense stress. What it's often called in the literature, I looked this up, is hysterical strength.

• 30:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa!

• 30:43Speaker 06

  Which is amazing.

• 30:45Speaker 16

  That is hysterical.

• 30:46Speaker 06

  Which is amazing. That's amazing to me, knowing anything about the history of feminism and the term hysterical. That's amazing to me, just picturing these people just losing their minds. I love all of that, you know? And there are these accounts of people like lifting cars off of trapped, you know, teenagers and toddlers and things like that. And again, the listener was right to say, we're talking like one wheel. You know, if you're thinking basic physics, those other wheels are still on the ground. You are a temporary jack on one corner there. So you're not lifting the whole car, you're lifting a certain amount. What you're really doing is a deadlift. And so you, as an untrained person, are not doing a deadlift that somehow is better than like, the world record keeper of deadlifters. Right?

• 31:31Speaker 06

  That's not, it doesn't matter how much adrenaline you got, babe. That's not a thing. What's interesting about it to me is like, okay, yeah, like Kelly says, something happens in your body, you get that adrenaline going, and two things are happening. One, a lot more blood is rushing to your muscles, all of your muscles really, but especially the ones you're trying to activate. Your heart rate's accelerating and what have you. That's a thing that's happening. And a lot of, you know, in that blood, you're getting a lot of sugar transfer, a lot of energy transfer, so not just local, but also body-wide energies going to the thing you're trying to do. But what's really interesting about this moment is that you're actually affecting your brain that much more than the local muscles.

• 32:13Speaker 06

  We used to think that the brain was kind of not really involved in these caps on your strength, because remember, when you're using a muscle, you don't want to use all your strength to lift your coffee cup. It may feel like that at 6:00 a.m., but it's not that at all, right? You don't want to blow out your back for reasons by ridiculously lifting your coffee cup. You're just going to use what you need, right? But if you're trying to lift a car to save a life, or save your own life, this thing that happens with people who are trying to escape war areas, and you hear stories of soldiers, or even mothers with children, walking for days with no food or water, going up into the hills, surviving extreme temperatures, you know, that normally we wouldn't really

• 32:57Speaker 06

  be able to do. And what's happening there is that your body is willing to damage itself to save its life, or willing to damage itself to save another's life. That's what's really up. And that's actually a brain thing. That's a brain thing more than your heart rate thing. And so what your brain is doing, it is ignoring more of those pain signals. And that's a thing. So you literally experience less pain during this period of crisis, right? Because if you're not noticing the pain, that literally means you're experiencing less pain. What is pain? It's a thing happening in your brain, right? So actually, a lot of studies have been done that really, during these moments of intense

• 33:37Speaker 06

  fight or flight, intense stress, your brain is down-regulating its response to normal pain response. And there is an account of a dude who lifted a corner of a car off an adolescent, who later found out that his teeth really hurt because while gripping his... You know, clenching his jaw, he managed to crack eight of his teeth.

• 33:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 33:58Speaker 06

  While he was lifting, right? So that, talk about a no pain response. Talk about like, I am using the limits of my body to save this person's life. But what I think is really smart about what you said there, Dan, is, is it's not just, you know, this account of what's the heart doing? It's not just what the brain is doing. It's also how we understand these experiences after the fact, whether we go through them or someone else does. Because these are the stories we tell. These are the incredible weird stories that don't line up with our normal experiences of our bodies or other people's bodies or human capability. You know what I mean? Which is situated in our lives, which is culturally situated. You know what I mean?

• 34:42Speaker 06

  Like, for example, Dan and Kelly's incredible universe exists in a culture of doubt where a lot of times, you know, it isn't that the spirit world is literally imbuing you with extra strength and that's why, right? You know, and there are cultures now and cultures in the past that do have that model that don't find these moments so as extraordinary maybe as we do. Because we don't have as much of an explanatory frame for something that feels hard to understand, understandably hard, because it's rare, right? And, and some cultures do have that explanatory frame and then don't find such moments as novel.

• 35:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I never thought of it that way.

• 35:25Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, so there's one culture, for example, I'm not remembering the name because I am not an anthropologist, but there is one culture that tends to give birth alone. This is hunter gatherer community. Very rare in the human species. We do not normally give birth alone, but this, they, they like go out in the grass. They go out in the fields and they, they do that. Now, it's not that they're not prepared. Let's make it clear. Their whole childhood has stories of how to do it. And so they have their own knowledge and there are people who help in certain cases. You know what I mean? Anyway, but they have a frame where to get through the pain of it, they are calling down strength from the universe effectively. So their experience of contractions is this deeply different thing where they are experiencing

• 36:09Speaker 06

  the pain as a calling down of strength, which is good for them.

• 36:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  No.

• 36:14Speaker 06

  I did not have that. I just had your basic fear of death.

• 36:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'd rather have the epidural, really.

• 36:20Speaker 06

  I had that too. I had that too, but it actually didn't work as well. But I still am grateful for the portion that did work.

• 36:27Daniel Whiteson?

  So the way to think about this is that your body has certain capabilities and certain limits, which are just physical, like there's no way I'm lifting a boulder.

• 36:35Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 36:35Daniel Whiteson?

  But there's also warning signs your body sends you when you're starting to damage yourself. And those typically limit what you're actually going to do. But in moments of great stress, essentially it ignores those and you're willing to do stuff that damages yourself or cracks your teeth, depletes crucial resources to survive the moment.

• 36:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:53Daniel Whiteson?

  But that's a subconscious thing, right? It's not like

• 36:55Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 36:55Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm saying, Daniel, I'm going to turn off these pain regulators because I think it's a good idea. It makes it sound like there's some sort of strategizing or some thought process there. But if it's subconscious, there must be some mechanism there. Do we understand how that works at all?

• 37:09Speaker 06

  Do we understand how pain works in the brain? Oh, kinda, kinda. We've made great strides. I will say that it's, you know, it's been studied that there are a number of pro athletes of various types who are known to have effectively higher pain tolerances than the average population. So the most famous pain tolerance thing is shoving your hand in a thing of ice water. Cause we all, you can't think your way out of it. It's your hand lowering temperature. And it's one of the best ways to gauge what is your basic pain tolerance here? What's your nociceptid? Like what, what do you do? And many of these athletes do indeed have,

• 37:51Speaker 06

  start to feel a lot of pain later and respond to it and feel that urge to take it out later. So part of what may enable some of those extreme athletic things isn't simply training, but also kind of being wired differently.

• 38:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  So how do you differentiate between I put my hand in and for some person it starts to hurt immediately and for some people it takes five minutes to hurt and it hurts both of us at the same time, but I am just better at handling pain for longer? Like, are those two different things?

• 38:24Speaker 06

  I think that that's a thing that we all wanna do with the idea of pain. We want it to be about the virtue of endurance, you know? We want it to be about like, you're more badass because you just deal with it, right? But that actually doesn't allow for bodily difference. Actually, there are a lot of bodies that are just sending a more muted or blunted or delayed pain signal. And that's not because they're badass. It's just that it's a different body. Yeah. But then there is a kind of mindfulness training. There is a thing that a lot of people with chronic pain have to do, which is training your brain to ignore certain pain signals more so that your life becomes more tolerable, which can in fact make things slightly less painful. It doesn't truly remove certain kinds of pain,

• 39:09Speaker 06

  but it can make it more bearable, right? So there are different tiers of awareness of pain. As far as the ice water, though, I mean, there is a moment that everyone, except for those rare people who have that genetic condition where they don't feel pain, need to take their damn hand out. They just can't, they can't bear it anymore. It's very, very rare to be able to bear it through. This is not a like badassery, you know, thing. It's one of those basic tests of pain.

• 39:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, my son is an athlete and I've learned just by watching him train and push, how much of racing, he's a runner, is mental.

• 39:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 39:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Do I think I can go faster? And also, how long am I willing to sustain this feeling of pain?

• 39:50Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 39:50Daniel Whiteson?

  And one of the best examples is he was telling me that after the first person ran a four-minute mile, then like a bunch of other people did it. And it was just sort of this mental barrier. People thought, well, that's just impossible. There's no way I could accomplish that. But then after somebody did, they're like, oh, turns out he can do it. I can probably do it too. I'm just gonna go do it.

• 40:07Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 40:08Daniel Whiteson?

  It's incredible how much of athletic performance is just believing you can do it.

• 40:11Speaker 06

  Did any of them get hurt after that?

• 40:13Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm sure they were all in pain. But there's no amount of believing I can do it that's gonna make me run a four-minute mile.

• 40:19Speaker 06

  Same. No, that's right. And that's because, well, we're all sliding towards death. We're not young anymore. There's just that true thing about aging, but also maybe you're slightly less susceptible to peer pressure. Yeah. Which hopefully is also an aging thing. Yeah. Yeah.

• 40:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, well, let's go ahead and see if our listener has any follow-up questions.

• 40:44Speaker 15

  Hi, Danielle and Kelly and Kat. Thank you all for answering my question about humans gaining momentary superpowers or not. It makes way more sense that our brains just tune out the pain rather than us turning into a 1% version of a very angry green Marvel Comics man. I did sort of have a tangential question sparked by what was said. I've heard that people that can give birth have something that allows them or enables them to forget the pain of childbirth. I know conceptually that there is a lot of pain involved because I will never give birth. Is it kind of similar to the man that cracked eight of his teeth? Are both brains tuning out the pain? Or is there a different mechanism at play for people that can give birth versus people that can't? P.S. I've listened to the audiobook for Eve and I absolutely loved it, so thank you, Kat, for writing that.

• 41:29Speaker 15

  Cheers.

• 41:30Speaker 06

  Hey, thanks for the follow-up question and so glad you liked Eve. Okay, so your question has two parts. First, do people who give birth really forget the pain of childbirth and not just like on Instagram or completely lying about it? And two, if they do, is the mechanism similar to that guy who didn't notice he was cracking his teeth when he was lifting the corner of a car or something because of adrenaline? Okay, so first, it's totally not true that we all forget the pain of giving birth, though thankfully, we do forget the pain of being born, which doesn't actually sound very fun at all, so I'm down with that. In fact, we forget much of the first five years of our lives. It's called childhood amnesia. We basically all get it.

• 42:13Speaker 06

  It seems to have to do with childhood brain development. And that's totally why you should stop feeling guilty about that time you yelled at your toddlers in public because they're not going to remember any of this. Most studies show that as long as you're not actually abusing them, a lot of that parenting crap comes out in the wash. Okay, so forgetting pain. Pain is actually one of those things that doesn't get perfectly encoded in memory. We remember the many side effects of pain, like starting to sweat, like having a hard time moving or breathing fast or whatever. And we can kind of describe pain, like when your doctor says, was it a stabby pain or a grinding dull pain? But your brain doesn't seem to usually encode totally specific impressions of the pain

• 42:58Speaker 06

  itself in long-term memory. It's like we save the gist of pain. It's not like remembering the face of a loved one. That's a long way of saying we forget a lot of pain all the time. Do mothers forget the pain of trying to squeeze a bony watermelon out of her vag? She might say she does. She might have been experiencing such total pain delirium, which is a thing, kind of like the guy who cracked his teeth. She's trying to achieve a goal and her focus on that goal overrides her focus on the pain her body is experiencing to achieve that goal. And attention is a big memory driver, right? So if you're literally not paying attention to the pain in the moment, you're less likely

• 43:43Speaker 06

  to remember it happening later. But women who experience birth trauma, which is a shocking number of people, are more likely to go on and develop secondary tokophobia. That's fear of giving birth. For, I don't know, the obvious reasons you tear yourself open to get another body out of your body and it's a little traumatic, more so for some people than others. So like, they're remembering those painful, terrifying features of that experience really, really well. Too well, well enough that therapy becomes useful or even necessary to go on having a fulfilling life, much less try to do such a thing again. Right? So I suspect it's a mixed bag of some people who

• 44:26Speaker 06

  usefully glide over the pain of that moment, usually in part because they value the outcome. Hey, look, I made a baby. And luckily, they have brains that are able to basically downplay the sense memory of what it took to make said baby, which not all people have. And the ability to do that is by no means a measure of how much they value the resulting baby. It's just that brains are organs. And just like everybody's heart is a bit different, ask any cardiologist, everybody's brain is also a little bit different.

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• 47:09Speaker 13

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Ledge. How does music actually enter your mind?

• 47:32Speaker 18

  I'm not sure why or how the music comes to me. But I think people who love music and write music, our brains are just filled with music. Like, we have listened to so much music, we've been a part of so much music. I think of the story that I want to tell, the mood that I want to create with the music, start playing chords, see where they lead me.

• 47:53Speaker 13

  Sometimes, I'm just not even thinking about music, right? And I hear this little thing, and I go, oh, that could be this.

• 48:03Speaker 18

  You know, you just have to be ready for when the inspiration hits.

• 48:06Speaker 13

  It comes. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 48:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, we are back with our third question. Let's go ahead and listen.

• 48:32Speaker 19

  If I understand it correctly, there is a hypothesis that the mitochondria in our cells came from one cell enveloping another, which formed a symbiosis that was mutually beneficial to both. This is mind blowing in and of itself. However, I believe that I have heard something similar about viruses. So my question is this, have there been any positive or symbiotic benefits resulting from viral infections?

• 48:59Speaker 06

  Uh, depends how you feel about mammalian pregnancy, actually. On theme for this show.

• 49:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 49:06Speaker 06

  Um, because it does seem that, so it's a really weird thing that you can have an embryo implant in your uterine wall. Actually, we, we take that for granted, but actually that's very similar to how a cancer metastases attaches to different tissue. Normally, local tissue strongly rejects and calls in the immune system when a cell that shouldn't be there is there. And cell that shouldn't be there might be, doesn't contain all your genetic material, like an embryo, or it might be like, what is this liver cell doing in this intestine? Or vice versa, right? You know, there's a local community kind of thing that says you belong here or you don't. So actually really weird that we're even capable of it. And it does seem that it may be because we got a cold,

• 49:49Speaker 06

  like ancient little rat-like things got a cold and started attaching interiorly. And that's part of how that seems to work where some genes are effectively switched off that permit implantation that seems to be strongly tied to what we think was a viral infection. So, cool, cheers, um, that we did that. I'd still prefer to lay eggs, but there you go. There you go.

• 50:13Daniel Whiteson?

  So I think you're suggesting that viruses can infect you and transfer their DNA

• 50:18Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 50:18Daniel Whiteson?

  into our cells and we essentially adopt that and that's part of being human, that a significant fraction of our DNA actually is viral.

• 50:25Speaker 06

  I don't know what would count as significant fraction and I don't know that we really know how much of our DNA was or wasn't sourced from a virus because we're talking really ancient time, which we're looking at basic cell mechanics, like be kind of hard to say what was or wasn't originally, you know what I mean? Especially since the listener was thinking about that really ancient case of mitochondria getting in there. So I don't know that we know. I will say though, that certainly our cells are being infected by viruses all the time. Whether or not they make it into that germ line, whether they become a basic part of our body plan, you know, in our eggs or in our sperm is a bigger threshold usually.

• 51:08Speaker 06

  Like a huge number of your cells, dear listener, are presently infected with viruses, some of which may well be passed on in that local tissue, some of which will be totally annihilated by the immune system, right? Like that's just a constant state of being. You're so infected all the time with bacteria and viruses and many other things, depending where you live in the world, right? But whether or not your kids then are going to change some feature of their body plan because of that legacy is, is a higher bar. Now, there is interesting stuff because there's another thing. So that's like an inherited thing. So that pregnancy thing is an inherited, maybe we'll call it beneficial, legacy in mammals, right?

• 51:50Speaker 06

  But there is an across the lifetime thing that happens when you're infected with viruses that sometimes is beneficial. So this is a really interesting case. So first of all, you are definitely infected with a number of different herpes viruses. That's just for sure, for sure, true. There are so many of them and you are definitely carrying. So we all got the herp. Enjoy that. That's right. Yeah, we do.

• 52:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Makes us feel closer to you.

• 52:16Speaker 06

  You know, we're so bonded.

• 52:19Speaker 06

  Depends where you got it. Certainly, the one that causes cold sores, like over 90% of the human population has it at this point. So cheers. Yeah, and herpes viruses are tricky because a lot of, I think, all of them, but at least a lot of them, if I'm remembering it right, again, not virologists, but what I know, they infect your nerve tissue and your immune system tries not to attack your nerve tissue for all the reasons. Your nerve cells are a thing that your immune system is like, should I attack this, like your brain and/or your spine or and/or, you know, probably not unless you have a big autoimmune thing. So it's a good place for a virus to hang out and go dormant, which is what herpes viruses generally do. So there's this one

• 52:58Speaker 06

  CMV, cytomegalovirus. Lot of people, majority of the population have it, okay? And when you're old, it seems to be associated with a number of not great things, like people who are, you know, seropositive, like you can test for it in the blood, you have antibodies to it. You know, you're gonna have, you're more likely to have certain kind of heart problems and other things. But interestingly, when you are young and healthy, like in your late teens and in your twenties, it improves your response to influenza. Huh. So if you're infected with CMV, this is a really amazing paper, you are gonna have a better response to your flu vaccine, you're gonna have a better response to getting

• 53:39Speaker 06

  infected with the flu more broadly. Weirdly, CMV seems to do it. And it's not like all herpes viruses do it, like the Epstein-Barr virus, that's another herpes virus, and it doesn't have that effect. So it really seems to be, and we have no idea why, specifically immunomodulating that body while you're young and healthy and, interestingly to a lot of biologists, when you're probably making babies. Because when you're old, you're kind of probably done with the baby-making thing. And so if it sucks for you in old age, well, oh, well, you know. Like evolutionarily speaking, right? But it's boosting you. It's boosting you. It's making you survive things like flu better when you're young and healthy.

• 54:22Speaker 06

  Cytomygelovirus also sucks when you're a baby. Like, it can make you really sick if you're a very young infant. So new infections at that age actually do very bad things. It can cause meningitis and blah, blah, blah. Basically, it's just the sweet spot. Like specifically, it's, it's okay to have it when you're already mostly adult and/or young adult. Like, right, right there.

• 54:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sweet spot.

• 54:46Speaker 06

  But not so much before, not so much later.

• 54:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Too bad you can't just get rid of it.

• 54:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  So we actually get a lot of questions from the listeners. I think we've had three or four different times where we've had this question. Like, why does our immune system get worse when we get older? Like, why is a virus that was maybe good initially, bad later on? Like, we've seen so many new things as we get old. Like, we've seen a bunch of viruses, a bunch of bacteria infections. Why doesn't that make our immune system stronger as we get older?

• 55:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Wiser, yeah, with a deeper library.

• 55:17Speaker 06

  So many things, so many different metaphors we could layer on this thing. I think probably the short answer is it's just harder to do everything as a body as entropy kicks in, whether that's your immune system or other things, right? So like, we shouldn't give a special category to the immune system just because, right? What do I mean by that, though? So like, we know, for example, that when you're younger, you're better at suppressing a latent herpes infection from having an outbreak, you know? And when you get older, you get less good at that. Shingles is a really good example of this. You are far more likely to develop shingles, which is, again, a latent infection that then runs rampant when you're older than when you're younger.

• 56:01Speaker 06

  So that's that immune system failing to tamp down on that virally infected cell going nuts and, and spreading that around, right? And I think, I think some of it is just cells get worse at replicating themselves, you know, as they go further along in their... Many replicated lifespan. You know, when you look in a mirror at one of those fun houses and like, there's a bunch of mirrors and it makes that infinity mirror effect. So you have an infinite number of views. But like, you start looking not great if you really look back at the like, far distant, you know, like, there's, there's image loss, if you like, there's, there's info loss is what it really is. And cells have info loss over time, too. Basically, they get less good at correcting

• 56:45Speaker 06

  for errors. The more they've been replicating over a body's lifespan. And as far as we know, the immune system does that, too. But to speak to Dan's instinct here, as he already mentioned, it's probably pretty complex. That's actually a pretty simplistic explanation for why aging sucks for all cells throughout the body. And actually, it's probably a lot of different things.

• 57:06Daniel Whiteson?

  That's super fascinating. I've always been curious about this story of mitochondria coming from the outside and then getting sort of incorporated. You're telling me that's a real story?

• 57:14Speaker 06

  Well, it's as real as science is able to make it real without a time machine. But yeah, like, there is this idea that once upon a time, there were cells, like, the cells have a lot of different organelles in them. Cells are full of stuff. You've probably seen a diagram, right?

• 57:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 57:29Speaker 06

  Okay. Well, mitochondria are the energy powerhouses of your cell, basically. And they're their own little independent organelle. Interestingly, they have their own DNA, mDNA, your mitochondrial DNA, which is separate from the DNA in the nucleus. So that's your first clue that something's up. Because not all the organelles in your cell have their own DNA. You know, it's sort of like, hmm, what's up there? Why do you got your own, hmm, right? So that's part of it. But also, it seems generally that once upon a time, either a cell tried to eat another, you know, being in the soup of ancient world, and/or actually, the mitochondria tried to infect, you know, proto bacteria,

• 58:12Speaker 06

  like, we're not really sure, a cell, and then failed to die and/or eat the cell it was trying to eat. We don't know which direction. We don't know who was eating who here, is the point. But somehow, one, one dude, one cellular dude, ended up inside of the envelope, the cellular envelope, the membrane of another one, and somehow didn't die. And zombie-like, that became a mutual relationship. Right? And over time, it became a basic part of how basically all cells go about their cellular lives, right? That so effectively your mitochondria and your cells are replicating

• 58:53Speaker 06

  in an interesting way when each cell goes through the process of replicating itself, right? Hence, the separate lineages of DNA.

• 59:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 59:03Speaker 06

  Now, one of the really cool things about this is that also means that this is yet another reason why sperm don't do a lot. So, well, sorry, sorry. You know, that nearly all of your mitochondrial DNA is coming from your mom. That's coming from the egg, right? And that's why eggs are so huge and sperms are like a tiny little like, you know, Twitter feed, a tiny little node of information with a tail, you know, that just somehow has to get there. Because when a sperm, you know, decapitates itself, basically, drops off its tail and goes inside the egg, you know, it is then eaten, it's eaten by

• 59:44Speaker 06

  the egg, basically. And then, you know, hence babies, yay, the miracle of life. But usually the egg just completely destroys all the mitochondria from that sperm. It's like, nope, nope, nope, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, you out, right? But we now know, because unfortunately, some people have issues with their mitochondria that gives them certain kinds of infertility or developmental problems. There are disorders that can come with mitochondria, basically, that every now and again, sperm mitochondrial information actually do manage to escape the death spree that is going inside of an egg.

• 1:00:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 1:00:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because this is an IVF thing, right? The idea is like, well, can you simply get rid of the mitochondria from the sperm or what have you, or from the egg, and then just replace it? And we solve all of our mitochondrial disorders thereby? Wouldn't that be awesome?

• 1:00:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Speaker 06

  It would be, if only it were a perfect system that it's never the case that the sperm mitochondria actually make their way in. So, again, biology, sloppy, super sloppy.

• 1:00:49Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a delicious mess.

• 1:00:50Speaker 06

  I don't know if it's delicious. I always find it kind of chalky.

• 1:00:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:58Speaker 06

  Go ahead.

• 1:00:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  So when the sperm mitochondria stick around, what is the problem? Is it just that they're interfering with each other? Or the sperm mitochondria is deficient in some way? Like, do we know what causes the problem there?

• 1:01:09Speaker 06

  I don't think it's the case that sperm mitochondria are just so janky that let's just not. Although I'm amused by that idea, that somehow they're just like the worst option. No, I think it's actually that they've set up their mitochondrial system in that egg. The "they" that is the collective, which is an egg, and its many organelles. You know, and they just don't want to like, throw some new shit in the mix, as it were. So that's the general theory, that basically it's controlling for error to not have that be. And this is part of how you trace the so-called mitochondrial Eve. You're actually tracing the mitochondrial inheritance over many generations to say, who is the last being? From whence most of our mitochondria come from?

• 1:01:54Speaker 19

  Incredible.

• 1:01:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, well, let's see if we answered Petri's question.

• 1:01:57Speaker 19

  Thank you, Kelly and Daniel, for choosing to answer my question on the show. And thank you especially to Dr. Bohenson for your wonderful answer. I realize that this is an incredibly difficult question that goes way back into deep time. And ideas of what is beneficial versus not beneficial certainly get muddled quite quickly. But your answer was fascinating and enlightening. I also appreciate that you took the time to address the other question of mitochondrial DNA. That is something that's intriguing for me and I'm sure for many of the other listeners. So once again, that was a great answer. Thank you so much.

• 1:02:42Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 1:02:47Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 1:02:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 1:03:00Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 1:03:06Kelly Weinersmith?

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• 1:03:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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