Listener Questions #31

Daniel and Kelly answer questions about how it can both be true that humans share 98.7% of their DNA with bonobos and that fraternal twins share 50% of their DNA, why black holes don't have color charges, and whether or not you could treat a fever or let it ride. 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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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:02Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Steph, and I work at UnitedHealthcare. When I think about UnitedHealthcare's members, I think of my own family. My niece was diagnosed with an ultra-rare genetic disorder. I know how hard it is for families. At UnitedHealthcare, we can make it easier.

• 1:17Speaker 03

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• 1:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  I hear so many contradictory stats about DNA. It makes my head spin. I'm 99% similar to a chimp, but only 50% similar to my fraternal twin?

• 1:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Black holes boast mass, spin, and charge so fine. Yet why not color or weak charge in their design?

• 2:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, Daniel, I think that your rhymes need to be much longer so that people have trouble remembering what the rhyme is supposed to be. Here, check out my next one. Ready? Okay.

• 2:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Ugh, I have a high fever and I'm suffering through the flu. Can I lower the fever with meds? Or is the fever helping? What should I do?

• 2:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Longer is better, Daniel, probably.

• 2:26Daniel Whiteson?

  More moaning is better also.

• 2:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Whatever questions keep you up at night, Daniel and Kelly's answers will bring your fever down and make it all right.

• 2:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. This is Listener Questions, episode number 31.

• 2:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I particularly love to answer questions from everybody out there.

• 3:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Weinersmith. I study parasites and space, and I also love answering questions, in part because it helps me figure out what I actually didn't understand, because nothing helps you understand something better than trying to explain it to someone else.

• 3:15Daniel Whiteson?

  I saw my daughter have that experience. I explained a little bit of math to her last week, and then she came home and said, hey, I explained this to all my friends at lunch, and now I really understand it.

• 3:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, nice. And also, how exciting that your daughter is explaining math to her friends at lunch. Like, that's a good sign.

• 3:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's such a fun moment to see her enjoying sharing these ideas, and also to understand how teaching something really is the best way to understand it. Classes that I've taught as a professor are the ones I understand the most deeply, and topics we've covered on the podcast are things I understand much better than I used to.

• 3:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, absolutely, same. And whenever I see my daughter getting excited and like trying to explain a concept to me or to her friends, I always back off, and I'm like, a beautiful thing is happening. Don't ruin it, Kelly, by trying to explain some extra stuff, or trying to be like, oh, now let's try to like, let's make a play about this or something. It's like, back off, because you could ruin this. You're gonna ruin this. So I always get nervous, and then I try to not ruin the beautiful thing.

• 4:20Daniel Whiteson?

  But these listener questions episodes are not just for me and Kelly to understand things by explaining them. We think that everybody else out there might also be curious about the things these listeners wrote in about. So that's why we share these questions with you, because we figure I bet somebody else out there wants to hear this answer.

• 4:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Absolutely. And let's start with Rob's question, which I'm guessing is a question that a lot of people have had. And I'm so glad that Rob went ahead and asked.

• 4:46Speaker 06

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. You guys do an extraordinary job explaining this extraordinary universe that we live in. So I'm hoping that you can explain something about genetics for me, please. The question is this, in the context of different species and how closely related one is to another, I'll read things like humans share 98.7% of DNA with bonobos, or we are 4% Neanderthal, or fraternal twins share 50% of their DNA. All of these statements seem mutually contradictory. How can we share more DNA with bonobos, which although our closest evolutionary relatives are nevertheless from a different genus than we share with

• 5:30Speaker 06

  any human, let alone a sibling or another homo species? Thanks very much.

• 5:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Dr. Nathan Lentz is a professor of biology at John Jay College, City University of New York, and the author of multiple books, including The Sexual Evolution: How 500 Million Years of Sex, Gender, and Mating Shape Modern Relationships. We chatted with Nathan about this book in our episode from February 27, 2025. Be sure to go back and check that out. We got loads of nice comments about that episode, and you should check out the book as well. Nathan has done research looking at genomes of modern humans, African apes, Denisovans, and Neanderthals, and we're thrilled that he agreed to come on the show to answer Rob's question. Welcome back, Nathan.

• 6:11Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much.

• 6:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So Rob's first question was, humans share 98.7% of DNA with bonobos. So let's unpack that first. What does that mean?

• 6:22Speaker 07

  Well, actually, I think the easier way to think about this is to think about what you share with your siblings. So the question came that, you know, there's 50% DNA from our siblings and how is that so low compared to sharing 97% with two misses? Let's start with what you share with your siblings. So that measure is actually a literal shared ancestry quantification. You literally have 50% of the DNA from the same source as your full sibling. So the reason why is you have two of every chromosome. You have chromosome number one that you got from your mother that is entirely derived from your mother and then chromosome number one from your father, entirely derived from your father. And your sibling will have the same. But interesting, this is where it gets interesting.

• 7:07Speaker 07

  They won't be the same ones, right? So because remember that your mother also had two chromosome number ones, one from her mother and one from her father, your maternal grandparents. And what she gave to you was not one or the other, but a mixture of those two. Because we break our chromosomes into chunks when we pass them on to the next generation. So you will not pass your intact chromosome number one, either one of them, to your offspring. It will be a combination of the material from the two chromosome number ones that you have. And those chunks are called segments. Chromosomes are broken up into either two, three, or four segments every time they're passed on from one generation to the next.

• 7:51Speaker 07

  So we can literally look at the segments of all of your chromosomes and the segments of all of your full siblings chromosomes and 50% roughly will be derived from the same source, literally from the same DNA. That's what we mean when we say 50% for full siblings, 25% for half siblings, 50% from parents, and so on.

• 8:12Daniel Whiteson?

  So let me clarify first. When you say 50%, what exactly is the numerator and what exactly is the denominator? Is the denominator the entire genome?

• 8:20Speaker 07

  Right. The denominator is the entire genome and the numerator would be pieces of DNA of whatever size you want. So you could look at a hundred base pairs of DNA. You could look at a thousand. You could even look at a million. And if you broke the DNA into whatever segment size you want, you would be able to derive 50% of them from one parent or the other. And in fact, actually, if we had your grandparents genomes accessible to us, we could tell exactly which chunks are which, where the chromosomes were broken. We would need your grandparents genomes to do that. But if we did that, we could actually tell exactly which chunks of, which segments of each chromosome came from which grandparent. And so on down.

• 9:02Daniel Whiteson?

  I have another question, just to clarify, make sure everybody's following along because I'm not an expert in this either. So I have two copies of every gene. One comes from my mom, one comes from my dad, but my mom had two copies. So I get either A or B version from her and either A or B version from my dad. And when you say 50%, that's an average figure, right? Because there's a randomness there.

• 9:23Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 9:24Daniel Whiteson?

  It could be that my brother and I have exactly the same genome. That's very unlikely, but 50% is the average, right?

• 9:30Speaker 07

  That's right. It's right. So is it possible to have two siblings with exactly the same genomes? Without being monozygotic twins? It is possible, but you're talking about something that is in the order of trillions to one chances, even from the same two individuals.

• 9:47Daniel Whiteson?

  It's like flipping a coin a zillion times and getting heads every time.

• 9:49Speaker 07

  Exactly, exactly. It's, I don't know exactly how many zeros zillion has, but it's an extremely large number because remember chromosome number one, you know, it's 20 million base pairs long. It can be cut anywhere along that 20. It's not like there's, it's, you know, one half or the other half. It can be cut one, two, or three times anywhere along its length. So it really does get to be this astronomically large number of combinations.

• 10:17Daniel Whiteson?

  So but 50% is an is an average and there must be a distribution around that.

• 10:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a pretty tight distribution around 50% because like I said, there's so many segments that we're talking about.

• 10:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 10:29Speaker 07

  And but thankfully, we actually have the same versions of most genes. So that's why, even though you might get some DNA from one grandparent or the other, the odds of them being importantly different, like different in any way that matters to you is actually pretty small because most of us have all the same versions of all the same genes. We actually differ very little in our genetic differences among us, which is something that we're going to talk about in a second. So if you imagine breaking these chromosomes into all of these segments, each generation, you do that backwards in time. What you will end up with, by the time you get to maybe eight or 10 generations back, you've cut the genome into such small pieces that there'll be some ancestors that you don't have any DNA from in this literal sense, because it just got chopped up so many times

• 11:14Speaker 07

  that none of their chunks actually ended up in yours. So you might have an ancestor eight or 10 generations back that you got zero DNA from. They're called genetic ghosts and they start to appear, you know, like I said, somewhere around 10 generations back. And then if you go another 10 generations back, most of your ancestors will be genetic ghosts and they don't actually give you any DNA because it is in these discrete segments.

• 11:37Daniel Whiteson?

  So the discrete segments is important because it decreases the number of options somebody has to contribute to you, right? If you have like zillions and zillions of base pairs, it's very unlikely none of them are going to come from an ancestor.

• 11:50Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 11:50Daniel Whiteson?

  But if you group them together, then there's sort of fewer rolls of the die and it's more likely that somebody gets left out.

• 11:56Speaker 07

  That's right. That's right. So if we if we keep going back, all the way back to, let's say, the first human Neanderthal hybrid. So this was an individual who had a Neanderthal mother and more likely a human mother and a Neanderthal father. We can talk about why that's more likely in a minute, but a true hybrid.

• 12:12Daniel Whiteson?

  I definitely want to hear about why that's more likely.

• 12:14Speaker 07

  Where where half of the chromosomes all came from humans and half all came from Neanderthals. Well, remember, we have very similar genomes to Neanderthals. And so the chromosomes would pair up and mix up just as if they were from the same species. And when that happens, the set, the entire Neanderthal chromosome number one keeps getting, you know, chopped up into smaller and smaller pieces. And so now in the present day, we can only detect these small stretches of DNA that come from Neanderthals. And the reason we know they come from Neanderthals is because we've sequenced the Neanderthal genome, we've sequenced ancient human genomes, and we see these stretches of little markers that we know came from Neanderthals because of the order that they're in, because they haven't been broken up yet. By the way,

• 12:59Speaker 07

  if we win another thousand generations, these pieces would probably be so broken up that we might not even be able to tell where they are. But they, right now, we're at an interesting point in human history where we can still detect that mixture. And so you have these segments.

• 13:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Hold on, that's really fascinating, because I guess it means that the number of segments determines basically how many of your ancestors can contribute, which is connected to basically how far back in time you're getting contributions. So if you go far enough back, then most of your ancestors are genetic ghosts, right?

• 13:32Speaker 07

  Most of the ancestors are genetic ghosts, and the ones that are not, they themselves are gonna have, have a complicated ancestry with Neanderthals showing up many times in their family tree. And when, when we say that the average human of European ancestry has around 3%, 2 to 3% Neanderthal DNA, it's important to remember that will be different from person to person. So my 2% Neanderthal DNA will not necessarily be the same as yours. In fact, it's unlikely to be the same. Something like 30 or 40% of the Neanderthal genome appears in human genomes scattered all around. But obviously, any one person only has a small part of that. So we can detect Neanderthal DNA almost everywhere in the genome in someone, but in any one specific

• 14:17Speaker 07

  person, you're gonna have a tiny percentage of it. But we have, we have scattered bits of it all throughout the genome. So that's what we mean when we say 2 to 3% is there are segments still intact in many of us, not all of us, that we know because of the order of the markers, they haven't been broken up yet, that they derive from Neanderthals.

• 14:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Could we talk a little bit more about what we mean about the order of the markers? Because like, I would imagine that Neanderthal and humans, we didn't diverge that long ago, or have a common ancestor that long ago. How could we tell the difference between Neanderthal and human DNA?

• 14:53Speaker 07

  It's a great question, great question. So imagine a string of Christmas lights that were all, let's say, a thousand Christmas lights long. Or let's be more realistic, a million Christmas lights long. Well, all of us will have the same color in most of the positions. So 99.9% were all, let's say, let's say that the common color is black. We all have black, so it would not be noticed. And then scattered are a few blue lights and red lights and green lights and yellow lights and whatever. Well, there are segments, say, of a red here and then a blue and then a green in a precise order that we don't necessarily see in most humans, but we know came from Neanderthals in that order, and it hasn't been broken up yet. Now, this is where things get probabilistic.

• 15:36Speaker 07

  So the law of large numbers here works in our favor. But is it possible that you could have ended up with those markers in exactly the configuration that Neanderthals had just randomly? Yes, it is possible, but that is such a small percentage that we can effectively ignore it. The much more likely scenario is that you inherited that chunk from an ancestor in your deep past, a Neanderthal ancestor in your deep past. So it's the precise order of those markers. And when they haven't yet been broken up by recombination, that shuffling process, then we can, we know that they came from Neanderthals. Now, importantly, most of these markers are actually not important, meaning they don't code for anything.

• 16:19Speaker 07

  They're in non-functional, non-coding DNA. Because most of our DNA is non-functional, non-coding, most of these markers are therefore sort of irrelevant into our physiology. But a couple of these, a couple, very few, are actually in important genes. And when that happens, that's the really fascinating. When we say that this version of this gene was not human in origin, but Neanderthal. Neanderthals gave us this version of this gene. And that's where things get really, really interesting. But it's important to remember, that's a tiny, tiny part of the overall contribution of Neanderthals to our genome. Most of it is in the junk littered with repetitive sequences and things like that.

• 17:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Here's a nitpicky question. Is it possible that there's a chunk which is identical between humans and Neanderthals and therefore indistinguishable? And that my version of that did come from a Neanderthal ancestor? We just can't tell.

• 17:13Speaker 07

  100%. That will definitely be the case because most of the Neanderthal genome is identical to the human genome.

• 17:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Right.

• 17:20Speaker 07

  And so those markers would look the same. There'd be no way to determine their origin, except if we looked from generation to generation. So if we had a grandparent and a parent and then we could piece it together.

• 17:32Daniel Whiteson?

  So when we say 4%, what is the numerator and denominator there? It's still the full genome, but the numerator is only the ones that we can distinguish between Neanderthal and human?

• 17:42Speaker 07

  That's right. It would be stretches of markers, so segments of linked markers, so markers that are still linked together, that we can definitively identify as Neanderthal in origin. So is that an underestimate of what they contribute? On average, it's probably a good estimate. On any individual, then yeah, it could be under or overcounting, right? But that's, again, law of large numbers really works in our favor. You know, it's one of these things where the odds of you winning the lottery are very low, but the odds of someone winning the lottery are very good. And that's what we look at when we talk about thousands of generations and lots of shuffling. If we look at enough people, we'll be able to see the Neanderthal DNA.

• 18:23Daniel Whiteson?

  I think this ghost ancestor thing is super fascinating. Can you estimate how far back in time most of your ancestors are ghosts by just doing like log base two of the number of segments? Is it that simple?

• 18:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I think I said it before, about 10 generations back are when the genetic ghosts start to appear. And another 10 generations from that is when the vast majority are genetic ghosts.

• 18:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Only 20 generations?

• 18:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's not that long ago. If you, the identical ancestors point, which is what we call the point at which we all share the exact same group of ancestors, is really only a few thousand years ago. So a few thousand years ago, there are humans that were the ancestors of all of us, and it was a tiny minority of the ones that were alive at that time. It's one of the things we've noticed about population genetics is that it's really uneven. There are some individuals that have billions of descendants and most individuals have zero descendants. Reproduction is just really uneven.

• 19:23Daniel Whiteson?

  So when they say that, you know, we're all descended from Genghis Khan because he had so many children, the fact that he had so many children doesn't guarantee that any of his genome is actually in us, does it?

• 19:33Speaker 07

  Right, except for the Y chromosome. Now, and I'll, and let's explain, I'll get to why the Y chromosome is a difference. But in the rest of his genome, yeah, it's very unlikely that any of us have Genghis Khan's DNA, literally inherited from him, unless you're a male in Asia, and then you have a pretty good chance of having his Y chromosome. And the reason why, the Y chromosome doesn't participate in this shuffling. The Y chromosome is inherited intact from generation to generation. The only thing that alters it is mutations, which do appear randomly. And Genghis Khan, we actually know Genghis Khan's Y chromosome with, with a great deal of certainty, because even though his body was never found, like it was, we don't have

• 20:14Speaker 07

  his remains, but we know the, a Y chromosome that originated in Mongolia and then spread through Asia around, you know, eight hundred to 1,000 years ago. And that was because, of course, the Khan, as he was called, went around his entire empire, leaving his Y chromosome everywhere he went. And then remember that his paternal grandson did the same thing, Kublai Khan did the same thing. So you have the same Y chromosome being spread all around. And remember that having ancestry from the Khan made you a high station in life. It was, it was a status symbol in a lot of these regions to have been a descendant. And so they've therefore even greater likelihood that that Y chromosome would continue its prolific behavior.

• 20:58Speaker 07

  So we actually know his Y chromosome purely through deduction, because

• 21:04Daniel Whiteson?

  That's incredible.

• 21:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, and, and probably Charles, Charles the Great Shark Charlemagne had a similar effect in Europe, and most Europeans are descended from Charlemagne.

• 21:14Daniel Whiteson?

  And is that connected to why you speculate about the paternal and maternal origin of the first human Neanderthal hybrid?

• 21:22Speaker 07

  Okay, so that's an interesting result just came out. So when two species mix, right, you'll have all the same chromosomes, all the same genes, but different versions. And what you but but that individual was it was going to be raised in one culture or the other, right? So they almost certainly would have been raised by Neanderthals if they had a Neanderthal mother and vice versa with a human mother. What we've found is some genes actually don't operate as well in the other genetic background. So we know that there's a gene that's involved in heart function that that we may very well have received from Neanderthals. But we also know that our version in an otherwise Neanderthal heart actually makes that heart perform not as well. So their cardiac capacity goes

• 22:05Speaker 07

  down. So it might very well be that some genes are not really well received by the rest of the genetic background because of some kind of interaction and then other versions. And so when Neanderthals and humans intermixed and and we call that gene flow, natural selection would have then continued and selected some versions of genes as being better in one population or the other. And there's no guarantee that it, you know, that a Neanderthal gene that works great in us would be with the opposite would be true for the human version in in their genetic background. And so what we're finding is that in these moments of hybridization, there was probably a lot of various selection that happened within those versions of genes. And both species probably benefited from

• 22:49Speaker 07

  the exchange by selecting the sort of the good variant in the way that they lived and eliminating bad variants, again, based on the way that they lived.

• 22:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  I thought there was something interesting with the mitochondrial DNA going on. Am I misremembering?

• 23:04Speaker 07

  No, so you're exactly right. So mitochondrial DNA is only inherited from the mother. So you can think of it as similar to the Y chromosome inheritance as being only from the paternal side. Mitochondria is only from the maternal, except for that all individuals have it. You know, we don't have, you know, it's not just a female only genetics, but females are the only ones that pass it on. And what we do know is that the mitochondrial genome of Neanderthals did not come into the human gene pool. So the gene pool of all modern humans is derived from a very ancient lineage of mitochondrial DNA that was not affected by the Neanderthal intergression. And so what we what we think that means is that the Neanderthal DNA that we do have

• 23:46Speaker 07

  came from males, Neanderthal males into human females and and the lineage proceeded that way. So that we absorb the genes from from from males. Now, what happened on the opposite side, we're not sure. We don't have enough genomes from Neanderthals. They seem to have their own distinct mitochondrial haplotypes, which we remember will be similar to ours because, of course, we share a common ancestor with them about 800,000 years ago. So at one point, we all had the same mitochondrial type. But when they split, they seem not to have intermixed after that. So we've had a purely human version of the mitochondrial genome that was not affected by Neanderthal interbreeding.

• 24:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Fascinating.

• 24:30Speaker 07

  Amazing.

• 24:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  We are having way too much fun, so we need to get to the last part of Rob's question. And the last part of Rob's question is, we share something like 98.7% of our DNA with bonobos. What does that mean?

• 24:43Speaker 07

  So now this, we can't do the segmental analysis at all. Because by the time you get to 7 million years ago, which is when we have the common ancestor with with the two species of chimpanzees, then the segments have all been obliterated. But the DNA is obviously still there. So we have a common ancestry, but the chunks are so small that we can't link up the markers and look for stretches. So this kind of 3% Neanderthal or 50% with your siblings, none of that would apply when we're comparing chimpanzees to humans. What we do instead is we do alignments. So we take the chromosomes and segments of chromosomes and align them. And what we do is we see how similar are the sequences. So when we can align them very well, which is most of the time,

• 25:26Speaker 07

  about 85% of our DNA lines up very, very well with chimpanzees. When we line it up, the sequence similarity is around 98.5%, meaning it will be basically identical versions. You know, 98 out of 100 base pairs will be exactly the same. That's what we mean when we say so. It's more of a genetic similarity, not necessarily strict inheritance. It's not shared inheritance, it's sequence similarity. And that's 98.5%. But that, remember, that's only within the segments that do align very well. We have another. Thirteen to fifteen percent of our genome that actually doesn't line up at all with chimpanzees

• 26:05Speaker 07

  in humans. And that's because it's it's gobbledygook, right? It's been it's been invaded by parasitic DNA, by these repetitive elements that just copy themselves. About nine percent of our genome is virus carcasses, like the remains of virus infections. So that will be different from lineage to lineage. Chimpanzees have their carcasses and we have our carcasses. So when we say that it's ninety-eight percent similarity, that's that's just similarity in the regions that we can align, which would have all the genes in them, all the important stuff. The other regions of the genome are much harder to align because they are repetitive. So they get stuttered, they get broken, they they invert, they break off and move to a different chromosome, that kind of, you know,

• 26:47Speaker 07

  we call that kind of gobbledygook, just because that DNA, in almost all cases, doesn't do anything. It's not functional. It may be transcribed a little bit, but it doesn't really do anything. And so and it's impossible to really compare because, you know, if you have, you know, two puzzles that are made of different, you know, colored pieces, they don't fit together. How similar are they? You know, it doesn't really make any sense. But in, you know, about, like I said, eighty-five to eighty-seven percent of the genomes align very, very well. And their sequence similarity is around ninety-eight and a half percent, something like that.

• 27:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  That answer was perfect. Thank you. So great.

• 27:21Speaker 07

  Thank you. Appreciate it.

• 27:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, we're going to share this question with Rob and see what he has to say.

• 27:27Speaker 06

  Thank you so much, Kelly and Daniel, and especially thank you to Nathan for that comprehensive and clear answer. I was particularly surprised by the revelation that, except for the Y chromosome, we don't just get copy A of a given chromosome from one parent and copy B from the other, but take more of a genetic buffet approach. In hindsight, I really regret only taking biology classes up to the age of fourteen, which is about the worst time for a boy to stop learning about biology. But as this is a family show, that's all I'm going to say on the matter. Thanks again, guys. Keep being extraordinary.

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• 30:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, we're back and we're answering questions from listeners. And the next comes from Abhinit in London, who has a great question about black holes.

• 30:18Speaker 11

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. I'm Abhinit from London. Thank you so much for your podcast. It's really helped me reconnect with topics I've always been curious about, but never seriously explored. I had a question about black holes. We often hear that black holes are completely described by just three things. Their mass, spin, and electric charge. But I'm curious, why not color charge or weak charge as well? I asked since Hawking radiation involves virtual particles. Wouldn't that include quark, antiquark pairs too? And if so, couldn't that give black holes some kind of a color charge? Thank you again and looking forward to your thoughts.

• 30:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, right. Oh, my gosh. Okay. Color charge. I gotta be honest, I am still kind of confused about why you all decided to give a charge color. But, you know, actually, that is a like a colorful thing you all did. I dig that. I like when you all are whimsical, like the charm quirks. That is a good name. I like it. Maybe we should start with what are color charges?

• 31:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, good. So when we talk about charge, we usually assume electric charge. And we're used to the idea of electrons having minus one and protons having plus one and all that good stuff. But we've talked on the podcast a lot of times about how charge is a more general concept. Electric charge is for the electromagnetic force, but there are other forces out there like the weak force. And it has its own charges that tell you what things pull on each other and what things push on each other, et cetera. And there's the strong nuclear force and it has charges. And those charges we call color charges because of the weird way that the strong force works. You don't just have plus and minus. You have these weird colors, red, green, and blue. But the bottom line is that some particles have some of these charges and some particles don't.

• 32:05Daniel Whiteson?

  So for example, an electron has electromagnetic charge and it has a weak charge. It has no color charge. So it doesn't feel the strong force. But a quark has all of those charges. So it feels every force. A neutrino has a weak charge, but no color charge and no electromagnetic charge. So the charge tells you which forces a particle feels.

• 32:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, got it.

• 32:29Daniel Whiteson?

  And we often talk in the podcast about what black holes can do. And black holes have this incredible ability to hide whatever is behind their event horizon. And they're featureless. There's this no hair theorem that tells you that once something goes beyond the event horizon, you can't tell anything about what's inside.

• 32:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Did you say a no hair?

• 32:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, a no hair theorem. That's exactly right.

• 32:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  What, why no hair?

• 32:53Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a way to say that black holes have no features. Like, if you have two black holes of the same mass, they are exactly identical. There's no, like, hair on them that tells you this one's different from that one. Or you drop bananas into this one and apples into that one.

• 33:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  So it could have been a no nose or a no glasses theorem, but, or whatever, but you guys-

• 33:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Or a no bonobos.

• 33:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, why, so why no hair?

• 33:19Daniel Whiteson?

  I think it's just physicists trying to be colorful and, you know, come up with ways to envision this stuff, hair being like a texture. You know, there's no amount of zooming in on the black hole you can do to learn more about it.

• 33:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  What a whimsical bunch.

• 33:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Hey, look, we're trying to take ourselves seriously over here, okay?

• 33:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I'm so sorry, so sorry.

• 33:43Daniel Whiteson?

  But you can know some things about a black hole. Like, if you drop something into a black hole, it becomes more massive, right? So you can know that there is something inside the black hole. You can't know what happened to it, or where is it on the inside? What's going on beyond the event horizon? But you can tell the difference between black holes that are big and small, right? So you can measure their mass. You can also measure their electric charge. Electric charge is conserved in the universe. If I have a black hole that's neutral, and then I drop an electron into it, that black hole now has a charge of minus one. So I can measure that about a black hole. Also, angular momentum is conserved in the universe. If I spin my black hole, then I can tell that it's spinning. It has frame dragging effects around it.

• 34:27Daniel Whiteson?

  So I can know the black hole's mass, I can know the black hole's spin, and I can know the black hole's electric charge. That is what the no harem theorem says, that you can know those three things about a black hole. And Abhineet says, hold on a second, if you have other kinds of charge, why can't you tell if you've dropped those charges into a black hole too?

• 34:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  No harem theorem?

• 34:47Daniel Whiteson?

  No hair theorem.

• 34:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, you said no, you did, yeah. I was like, wow, that is one exciting black hole. We know a lot about a black hole that's got a harem.

• 34:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I think if you have no hair, you probably also have no harem.

• 35:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, I don't know.

• 35:01Daniel Whiteson?

  But I'm not sure how things work out there.

• 35:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't, I, there's a lot I want to say about that, but this is a show that kids can listen to. So let's move on. So why can't you see the color charges, Daniel?

• 35:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. So first, let's understand why you can see anything about a black hole, right? People sometimes wonder like, well, if the electron is inside the event horizon, how do we know that it's there? Isn't that communicating information outside of the black hole? So let's be clear about what you can and can't know about the black hole. What you can't know is the internal arrangements, what's inside the event horizon. But you can know the total charge. There's a theorem in physics called Gauss's law that tells you that the total flux of all the electromagnetic fields depends on the total enclosed charge, whatever the arrangement is. And that also applies to black holes. And so you can tell if there's a charge within some volume of space

• 35:55Daniel Whiteson?

  just by measuring like, how, what is the total flux of electromagnetic fields? So what you can't know is like, what happened to that charge? Where is it inside the black hole? Did it mutate to something else with the same charge? But you can know that there is a charge. And the way to think about it is to say, that charge is now applied to the event horizon. Think of it like a membrane of charge around the event horizon. The event horizon itself has a charge. You don't know what's going on internally. That's what the black hole is keeping hidden. But the fact that the black hole itself is charged, think of as like a charge on the whole event horizon, which is accessible to you in the same way that like the event horizon's mass is, right? If you have a black hole out in space, you can feel its mass, even if you're far away.

• 36:40Daniel Whiteson?

  You feel its gravity is quite powerful, even from beyond the event horizon. In the same way that a black hole's mass can affect things beyond the event horizon, so can the black hole's charge, even if you don't know the internal configurations. Does that make sense?

• 36:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, but is this hypothetical or is this something we, we actually do? Do we actually measure the charge of black holes?

• 37:00Daniel Whiteson?

  We have never measured the charge of a black hole directly. We do have some images of black holes and their accretion discs, and those are consistent with black holes having mass and spin and charge. But we haven't directly measured the charge of a black hole by like dropping an electron near it and seeing the effect or anything.

• 37:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 37:19Daniel Whiteson?

  So in that sense, it's still theoretical.

• 37:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so we we know we can measure the electric charge. We know we can measure the mass.

• 37:26Daniel Whiteson?

  So what about a color charge, right?

• 37:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 37:27Daniel Whiteson?

  What if you take the same thought experiment and instead of dropping an electron into the black hole, you drop a quark. A quark has a color charge to it. Why doesn't that color charge spread across the membrane of the black hole?

• 37:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, why not?

• 37:40Daniel Whiteson?

  The reason is that you can't do that experiment. You can't have free quarks, right? You can have a free electron. You can hold one in your hand. It can be floating in space. It's all cool. But quarks or anything that has a color charge can't exist on its own because the color force is so powerful that when you create, for example, a quark and antiquark pair, they have this very strong force between them. If you try to pull them apart, so you get like an individual quark, then the force actually gets stronger as they get further apart. It's the opposite of like electricity or gravity. As things get further apart, they get a stronger force. More energy is now stored. It requires more energy to push them apart. It becomes crazy high energetic. So much energy is stored

• 38:23Daniel Whiteson?

  in that flux tube between them that that energy pops out into new quarks. And so the universe does not like to have quarks be that far apart. It'll create more quarks and antiquarks in between them to keep them from getting separated.

• 38:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's kind of cute.

• 38:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's amazing. That's and we see this all the time in the Large Hadron Collider. We create quarks and antiquarks. They're shooting apart at super high speed and then out of the vacuum pop additional quarks and we get these jets of particles, sprays of particles instead of individual quarks.

• 38:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  But where do they where do they come from?

• 38:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, their mass just comes from the energy, right? You have to have enough energy to push these things apart. And then that energy gets turned into mass of new quarks. So you can't do this experiment. You can't drop a free quark into a black hole because there are no free quarks. All right. So that feels a little bit like an evasion, right? I've avoided the question. What about the weak charges, right? Because you can have neutrinos. Neutrinos have a weak charge and they have no color charge. And you could have individual neutrinos out in space. So what happens if you drop a weak charge into a black hole?

• 39:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  I don't know. Why would you ask me, Daniel?

• 39:31Daniel Whiteson?

  It was a rhetorical setup for myself.

• 39:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, got it, got it. Okay.

• 39:35Daniel Whiteson?

  And so weak charge is fundamentally different from electric charge. Electric charge is conserved in the universe. There is a symmetry of the action, if you remember the episode we just did about action, that via Noether's theorem enforces conservation of electric charge absolutely in the universe, totally conserved. Weak charge does not have the same symmetry, so there is no conservation law for weak charge. So it's not like if you drop a neutrino into a black hole, it has to keep that weak charge. It can morph into something else. Also, weak charges are short-range forces. So the electromagnetic force is communicated by photons. These have infinite range. Like, if you have an electron across the universe, you can, in principle, feel that

• 40:19Daniel Whiteson?

  it's there, because electromagnetic force has an infinite range. The weak force, because it's communicated by massive bosons like the W and the Z instead of the massless photon, is a very weak-range force. And you might be wondering, like, all right, but if I drop a neutrino into a black hole, and then I'm, like, really near the black hole, couldn't I still somehow tell that there was a neutrino dropped into there, even if it's a short-range force? And here, we have to clarify exactly what the Noether theorem says. It's often said, okay, you can measure the charge, the mass, and the spin of the black hole, and that's it. But really, it says that you can only measure the mass, the charge, and the spin of a black hole from very far away and over time.

• 41:02Daniel Whiteson?

  So these are the only long-term things you can measure from very far away. Black holes can have other properties short-term. Like, for example, if two black holes merge, their event horizons are not spherical briefly, so you can tell something about the internal arrangement or the history. Eventually, it settles down into a nice symmetrical spherical shape. That's where the long hair theorem applies.

• 41:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  The long hair theorem?

• 41:31Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm gonna give this theorem like 10 different names before we're done. The long harem theorem.

• 41:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's great.

• 41:36Daniel Whiteson?

  The no hair theorem. So the no hair theorem says that for a black hole that's had chance to stabilize, the things you can measure from very far away, essentially from infinity, are mass, charge, and spin. But for a black hole that recently you dropped a neutrino into it, if you're very near it, you could tell that a neutrino got dropped into it. So that's consistent with the long hair theorem if you.

• 42:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's consistent with the mohawk theorem. Let's keep going.

• 42:09Daniel Whiteson?

  That's consistent with the no hair theorem. I'm gonna get it right once, as long as you spell it exactly what the no hair theorem says, right? Which includes those caveats that it's after the black hole has had a chance to settle and your observer is far from the black hole.

• 42:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  So Ebony was was right that you can measure the weak charge in a black hole under the right conditions.

• 42:30Daniel Whiteson?

  You can measure the weak charge of a black hole if you're near it soon enough after neutrino was dropped in. You're not guaranteed that that weak charge is gonna persist or that you can measure from far away. So that doesn't violate the Kelly's hair theorem of black holes.

• 42:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  I like mohawk. I think it should be the mohawk theorem.

• 42:49Daniel Whiteson?

  And the last part of his question was about Hawking radiation, which is often told as this story of particles and antiparticles popping out of the vacuum near the event horizon and one falling in and one not. And the one that doesn't fall in is the Hawking radiation. That is not Hawking radiation. That is a cartoon picture in popular science which does not reflect what actually happens to generate Hawking radiation. We don't know what actually happens because we don't have a theory of how gravity works for particles that would require a theory of quantum gravity. And Hawking radiation is a semi-classical approximation that says when you have an event horizon near a quantum field, there will be some radiation, but there's no accurate particle picture.

• 43:32Daniel Whiteson?

  This hand wavy story about particles and antiparticles is very misleading. Actually, Hawking is the one who came up with it. In one of his popular science books and he acknowledges that it's not accurate and maybe misleading and it's just like pervaded all of popular science and leads people astray in exactly this way. So discard if you can that picture of Hawking radiation from your mind. It won't teach you anything about what actually happens.

• 43:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  I detect a touch of frustration in your voice.

• 44:02Daniel Whiteson?

  That's the Daniel's pulling his hair out theorem.

• 44:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh yeah, I think we should call it the bad hair day theorem.

• 44:09Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, let's send that answer off to Abhijit and see if it answers his question.

• 44:14Speaker 12

  Thank you so much, Daniel Nagaly, for answering my question. The explanation really made sense. It was great to get a clearer understanding of what the no hair theorem actually says and why properties like color and weak charge can't show off of black holes in any observable way. I also really appreciated the clarification around Hawking radiation. It's always helpful to unlearn some of the pop science imagery we pick up along the way. And it definitely made me wonder what other common misconceptions are still floating around, like the one with the Higgs field, for example. Maybe that's something we'll hear more about in the future episodes. Thanks again for such a thoughtful discussion. I really enjoyed it.

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• 45:47Speaker 08

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• 46:37Speaker 08

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• 47:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, our last question of the day is from Gordon, who hopefully is over his flu by now. Let's go ahead and listen to the question.

• 47:09Speaker 14

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. As I'm recovering from the flu, I was wondering about the various symptoms and treatments we tend to use for certain incurable diseases that we can't treat directly. As I understand it, some symptoms, like a fever, are ways our immune system is trying to combat the disease. In that case, trying to kill the infection by cooking it. Of course, we find this very uncomfortable and so often try to relieve such symptoms, like trying to cool ourselves down. So my question is, how much do our attempts to relieve the various symptoms actually hinder our body's natural mechanisms for fighting the diseases? Would we be better off in the long run just bearing with the discomfort and allowing it to fully run its course? Or even possibly amplifying the effects if it could be done safely? Thank you so much. Love the podcast.

• 47:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Ooh, this is so fun because I also have this question. I'm often wondering if the Tylenol or Advil I'm taking to lower my fever is making me feel better at the expense of my body's ability to fight this infection. So Kelly, who is not a doctor, give me some medical advice.

• 48:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thank you for reminding everybody that I'm not a medical doctor.

• 48:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  But yes, okay, first I want to clarify that fevers are different than hyperthermia, which is heat stroke. So when you have heat stroke, you should always try to lower your body temperature. But fevers are actually this evolutionarily ancient strategy for fighting infections. And so there's this field called evolutionary medicine, where people study the way our bodies respond to infection by looking at the way, you know, other bodies have responded to infection over evolutionary history. So it turns out that birds and other mammals will get fevers when they're sick. And animals like lizards and insects, when they get infections, will generate fevers by sitting under the sun. So these are animals that are, you know, what we'd call ectotherms.

• 48:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  They can't generate their own body heat. And so in order to raise their body temperature, they need to do things like lay on warm rocks under the sun to raise their body temperatures. And the idea here is that pathogens don't do as well under high temperatures. And so they are raising their body temperatures to try to kill the pathogens.

• 49:14Daniel Whiteson?

  So why are pathogens more sensitive to temperature than our cells?

• 49:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  So there's a couple of different hypotheses for what's happening here. So one idea is that our immune cells work better at higher temperatures. And so there have been some studies showing that certain immune cells, like phagocytes, so these are cells that essentially engulf pathogens and like eat them, do better work under high temperatures. And so those cells would just be better at their jobs when your body is hotter. And then the other idea is that rapidly dividing pathogens are more likely to die or have trouble dividing. And the cells that they might infect would be more likely to die when those temperatures are high. And while you don't want your own cells to be dying,

• 50:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  if those cells are infected by a virus, you might be willing to sacrifice them. To your high temperature if it kills the pathogens as well. And so those are the two of the current hypotheses for why high temperatures are worse for pathogens than they are for you. And to be clear, the idea isn't that the high fevers don't harm you at all. The idea is that the high fevers are worse for the pathogens than they are for you.

• 50:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Because they're pretty bad for me. I mean, I am miserable when I have a fever. You're like achy and in general, just feeling icky everywhere.

• 50:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I get that. There have been some studies where they found that people who mount high fevers tend to recover quickly and for certain kinds of diseases are less likely to die if they mount a high fever. The problem is those are observational studies. And an observational study might just be telling you that somebody who mounts a high fever, just in general, has a body that's doing a better job at like going all out attacking an invader. There have also been some experimental studies where they've done things like randomly picked individuals who come into the ER to put in a bed that's meant to cool their whole body down. And some of those studies have had to be shut down because it was clear that cooling

• 51:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  people's bodies down was not helping and that the fevers seemed to be part of the way that, you know, the body was proactively responding to an infection. So there is some good experimental evidence that fevers are part of how our body is proactively responding. And so evolutionary medicine folks would say, you know, bodies of all types have been doing this for millions of years as our way of responding to infection. You know, let's go ahead and, and believe that in a lot of cases, this is good. But it is worth noting that, again, this strategy is accepting that it is also bad for the host, but it's hopefully going to be worse for the pathogen.

• 51:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  But when you, for example, are pregnant or when you are very elderly, this becomes a riskier strategy because you are compromised in a variety of ways. And so this risky strategy might not play out in your favor under these conditions. And in general, you know, you should go to a doctor if you are feeling particularly crummy.

• 52:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Fevers are terrifying also. Our son Silas had a shockingly high fever recently due to an infection. And as a parent, you're like, oh my God, that number terrifies me.

• 52:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And so when you get a shockingly high fever and you're worried, you should always call a doctor or bring your kiddo into the hospital. You should probably call the doctor first. But I was going through a bunch of websites like the Texas Children's Hospital and stuff like that, looking to see at what point should you start giving your kiddo medication for bringing their fever down?

• 52:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 52:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the advice is much different than what I remember the advice being that my mom got. Because when my brother got a high fever when he was a kid, they dumped him in a container of ice water.

• 52:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 52:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  To bring his fever down. And he was miserable.

• 53:02Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 53:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I remember a big concern was febrile seizures, which are very scary to watch. But apparently, based on these websites from children's hospitals that I was reading, one, quite often, giving kiddos medication to bring the fevers down won't necessarily reduce the risk of getting that kind of seizure.

• 53:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 53:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  And two, those seizures don't seem to, in most cases, be associated with long-term neurological outcomes.

• 53:28Daniel Whiteson?

  So you're just supposed to let them happen?

• 53:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Again, you should always call your doctor if your kiddo has a high fever and go with their advice. But, but yes, I, and, and they're more likely to happen in kids that are six and younger. So like, you know, call your doctor. Call your doctor.

• 53:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, it sounds like you're saying that the fever is not just a byproduct of your immune system at work, but actually part of its tactics, and that by reducing your fever, you may be suppressing or inhibiting your immune response. I've always thought that reducing your fever helps you sleep better and rest, and that would actually be helpful in recovery. What is your non-medical advice opinion about that?

• 54:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. So in the Wiener Smith household, I ask my kiddos, like, hey, if you really feel like you can't sleep and you're going to be absolutely miserable all night, I will give you medication. But I think you will feel better sooner if you can let the fever run its course and just try to sleep best you can.

• 54:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 54:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  But for example, my autistic kiddo clearly kind of suffers at night when he's got a high fever and is, you know, not really sure what's going on in a lot of cases. And I will give him medication to reduce his fever if I think he will.

• 54:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 54:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  If he'll feel better. And, you know, if I ever thought that he was feeling particularly bad, I'd take him to the doctor. But I don't take fever-reducing meds when I can avoid it.

• 54:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm.

• 54:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. And so Gordon also wanted to know if there are any other symptoms of sickness that we should be not treating.

• 54:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 54:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Because maybe they're helping in some way.

• 54:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Should we be like cracking open our wounds to let the blood flow or anything else?

• 55:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, that seems ridiculous. In a lot of cases, it's really hard to test this kind of stuff. And so I don't know that we have clear answers to too many other things. I think fever, we've got a pretty good handle on the fact that a lot of ti- Oh, oh, real quick fun medical history fact. So syphilis, not going to go into too many details about where you get that disease from. Suffice it to say, this is a bacterial disease that is very unpleasant. And in the era before antibiotics, it could cause neurological issues when you couldn't get rid of it.

• 55:39Daniel Whiteson?

  You can probably avoid syphilis if you follow the no harem theorem.

• 55:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right, that's right. This used to be treated by giving people malaria, which gives people very high fevers because in some percent of the cases, the very high fever would kill the bacteria that causes syphilis. And then we could treat people with the medication for malaria. And then you wouldn't have malaria or have syphilis anymore. And someone got the Nobel Prize for that. And then the next year, penicillin was discovered and penicillin is way better than malaria. So that became the standard treatment. Anyway, so we have used fever as a way to treat disease in the past because it is helpful.

• 56:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Another medical history note, Katrina was telling me that the first trial of penicillin only worked in three out of five cases. Like two out of the five patients died. And so, you know, preliminary studies, like be careful with your conclusions. It's a good thing we weren't like, oh, penicillin, nah, not really that effective. Let's move on.

• 56:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Holy cow, that's wow. Yeah, you gotta be careful with small sample sizes and it's amazing. We are in the position we're in now. So there are some other hypotheses for other sickness behaviors. For example, why do you have reduced appetite when you're sick? There is a hypothesis that actually the pathogens that are infecting you need nutrients and energy as well. And the food that you've just eaten is a more easily accessible source of nutrients and energy than the food that you've already stored, for example, in like fat in your body. And so by eating less, you're sort of starving the pathogens more than you're starving yourself. I'm not necessarily sure that I buy that. And I really love an excuse to have wonton soup.

• 57:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  When I'm sick, but but that is a hypothesis that people are floating.

• 57:29Daniel Whiteson?

  That flies in the face of like generations of chicken soup based knowledge also.

• 57:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  It does. It does. You know, it's an interesting way to think about things.

• 57:36Daniel Whiteson?

  This is Kelly's no soup theorem for treating fevers.

• 57:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, I I don't know. It's in my family. We buy everybody ice cream. We don't. We don't. We don't go that route. Okay. And then the last one, there's this idea that, you know, in a recent episode, we talked about kin selection and the idea that some behaviors are meant to like increase the fitness of your family members. And so there's a hypothesis that sickness behavior where essentially you withdraw and you isolate yourself is meant to protect your family from getting sick. And I really feel like I don't necessarily buy that because I feel like when you're sick, your family is the one who like comes in to take care of you and like you're way less likely to get your community sick and way more likely to get your family sick.

• 58:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 58:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so, yeah, I don't know that kin selection really helps explain that one so well.

• 58:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, when I'm sick, I tend to be miserable and moan a lot. And that makes everybody else around me miserable, too. And I'm wondering, is that helping me get better? Is complaining actually part of the healing process? Or is that just part of being me?

• 58:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think from a kin selection standpoint, you should keep complaining so that your family stays away from you and you don't get them sick. I think that's adaptive. Keep doing it.

• 58:47Daniel Whiteson?

  There you go.

• 58:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Moaning and groaning has reasons, people.

• 58:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's good.

• 58:55Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So Kelly is squashing the no moaning and groaning theorem.

• 58:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, Dan, Daniel can complain as much as he wants. Maybe that's why men are such babies when they're sick. It's, you know, to protect the women. No, I don't.

• 59:06Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. Yes, exactly. It's altruistic, actually.

• 59:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no. Yeah, no, I don't like where that's going.

• 59:15Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Well, before we digress into dangerous topics, let's send this answer to Gordon and hear if we have answered his question.

• 59:22Speaker 14

  Wow. Thanks for looking into this and answering my question. Well, it confirmed my suspicion about the potential benefits of not resisting a fever. I had no idea we shared this particular immune response with such a diverse range of animals, even as distantly related as the ectotherms. I find the idea of using one disease to treat another somewhat ironic, given the one being used just happens to be one of the deadliest in human history. But then I'm reminded we actually have a long history of using different diseases, parasites, and infections against each other for medical purposes, which is probably a whole topic on its own. Anyway, thanks for answering my questions.

• 59:52Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Thank you very much, everybody who sends in your question, who shares their curiosity with us and with a wider community of listeners. If you would like to chat with everybody about questions on your mind, you can always send your questions to us to [email protected]. Or if you'd like to chat with the community of listeners, join the Discord. You can find the link on our website, www.danielandkelly.org. Come and chat with us.

• 1:00:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Thanks for listening. Have a good one.

• 1:00:24Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 1:00:29Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 1:00:35Kelly Weinersmith?

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

• 1:00:42Daniel Whiteson?

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

• 1:00:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 1:00:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

• 1:01:02Speaker 15

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• 1:01:30Speaker 16

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• 1:02:09Speaker 17

  What's that?

• 1:02:09Speaker 15

  My fresh detector.

• 1:02:11Speaker 17

  Uh, your what?

• 1:02:12Speaker 15

  There it is.

• 1:02:13Speaker 17

  What is it detecting?

• 1:02:15Speaker 15

  Fresh produce, fresh meat.

• 1:02:17Speaker 17

  Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 1:02:23Speaker 15

  Apparently, we celebrate.

• 1:02:25Speaker 18

  At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.

• 1:02:36Speaker 08

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:03:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.