StarTalk Live! Evolution with Richard Dawkins (Part 2)

Our evolutionary journey concludes with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Bill Nye, Eugene Mirman, Jim Gaffigan and Maeve Higgins, recorded live at the Beacon Theatre in NYC.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Live from Beacon Theater, StarTalk 3.

• 0:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Richard, when I was in college, my freshman year, I attended a full-year course on art and design. One of the more influential courses of my life. And we spent the first month or two drawing nudes. And that was fun, I thought. But it became clear to me immediately that the beauty of the human body is a highly overrated concept.

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These were like regular people coming in, taking off their clothes.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  You can pick who you draw, you know what I mean?

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As I saw this, I'm thinking, if I had control of the body, I would have made some changes. Evolutionarily. So can I get you to comment on the difference between how much praising we do of the human body and how much critique should go alongside it if we were honest about ourselves?

• 1:23Speaker 02

  The famous cases are things like the retina being backwards. It's a historical accident. But the retinal cells, the light-sensitive cells in the vertebrate retina, but not in the octopus retina, they all point backwards. So it's as though you designed a digital camera with the pixels and the forest of wires. The photocells are all pointing backwards, away from the image. And the wires have to run over the surface of the light-sensitive screen.

• 1:53Bill Nye?

  With that said, Richard, I'm not sure that's what Dr. Tyson was driving at. When you looked at the models there in art class, you weren't thinking, "Those retinal cells..."

• 2:06Bill Nye?

  Doggone it!

• 2:09Bill Nye?

  Changes could have been made. Why aren't they more like octopus?

• 2:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's being erudite in his example.

• 2:14Bill Nye?

  It's cool.

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I could give a more basic example. I'm looking at this. Because they're facing all different directions. They're bending over, you know. And I'm thinking.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  I'm not sure this was an art class.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have a human body. That where between our legs, we have an entertainment system in the middle of a sewage complex. Okay? So, any engineer would not have designed that.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm certain.

• 2:43Bill Nye?

  Plus, the fuel tank, the nozzle for the fuel tank is right next to the air filter. I mean, stuff's going to go wrong.

• 2:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, some percentage of us choke to death. We're alive, like, in spite of our body's design.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's a great video, which I highly recommend, where you autopsy a giraffe.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. There's a nerve, which is one of the cranial nerves, and it starts in the brain. And the end organ is the larynx, the voice box. But in this nerve, it's called the recurrent laryngeal. Instead of going straight to the voice box, it goes down into the chest, loops around one of the main arteries in the chest, and then goes straight back up again to the larynx. In a giraffe, that is a very significant

• 3:29Speaker 02

  diversion.

• 3:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could you just say that again? That would just sound... Because it's like the British understatement, right? Say it again. In a giraffe, just so you want to hear that again.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  No, no, I can't repeat the exact words, but only yesterday, I was doing an episode. Do you know the wonderful Mr. Deity?

• 3:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've seen videos. Brian Dalton.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, Brian Dalton. He had me on, and I was arguing with him as God about what a lousy job he'd done. And this question of the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe came up.

• 4:03Bill Nye?

  The way it does.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  And he said in his wonderful, sort of whiny voice, "But, you know, we had a surplus of laryngeal nerves. We didn't know what to do with it, so we had to use it."

• 4:15Speaker 02

  It is a very uneconomical thing, and of course the explanation is history. The explanation is that in the ancestors, when this nerve originally started in our fish ancestors...

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A vertebrate ancestor.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Yes, in a fish. The end organ of this nerve is straight across. It doesn't have to go south into the chest, it goes straight. It is the most direct route. And then as the land vertebrates developed a neck, fish don't have a neck, as the neck lengthened, the marginal cost of slightly increasing the length of the diversion was very small in every generation. It just added a tiny fraction of a millimeter to the diversion. It wasn't, as it were, a great increase in cost. Whereas the cost of jumping it over the blood vessels and making it go straight to the larynx would have been probably some major embryological upheaval.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  When we were dissecting...

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In other words, you'd have to disconnect it, reroute it, and reconnect it.

• 5:17Bill Nye?

  So this is a great insight, is it has to work... All of our ancestors had to work at each stage.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right.

• 5:24Bill Nye?

  This is just amazing thing.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  It's a very important point.

• 5:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how long is the nerve in the giraffe? I mean, you gotta see this all the time.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  You know how long a giraffe's neck is. I mean, the larynx is right near the head.

• 5:35Bill Nye?

  Where you should be.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  And we dissected this nerve, and it goes...

• 5:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The giraffe had already died, let me just clarify.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It had already died. And the nerve went within an inch of the larynx. And you'd think it would be so easy just to say, oh, well, I mean, any engineer would immediately have said, well, obviously that's where it goes. It goes within an inch of the larynx, it goes on and on and on and on and on, down, down, down the neck, and then round this artery, and then back, back, back, back, back, up to where it started. And it is something that no engineer would countenance, and it would be you to send it straight back, which is what...

• 6:19Bill Nye?

  So the whole, the ideas, the big idea in evolution, Neil and everybody, is it's bottom up. It is not, there's not a designer at the top that showed up and routed the giraffe larynx wire. It just had to work at every stage. You had, talk about piston engine becoming a-

• 6:39Speaker 02

  A jet engine, yeah.

• 6:40Bill Nye?

  Jet engine. And, and I'd like, another example is, you know, a grocery cart you take to a fairway market or something with two wheels.

• 6:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill is now a New York resident, so...

• 6:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He is fairway fluent. Yes, go Bill.

• 6:58Bill Nye?

  So imagine you took that and made it into a bicycle, but every, at every stage you go to make it into a bicycle, the wheels will be here, across from each other, then they have to be end to end or in tandem. Every stage that you do has to work and reproduce cars.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  You can't just throw away, you can't throw away the design and start again. It's got to, it's got to-

• 7:19Bill Nye?

  It is really, once you see it, you go, wow, dude.

• 7:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so how about this, so now, what, what impresses you about the human body?

• 7:28Bill Nye?

  Okay, okay, I'll tell you what, Neil, there are now, there are now 7.2 billion of us.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 7:36Bill Nye?

  So whatever it is, it works really well.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  I mean, I tell you what, I mean, what, what impresses me about the, the body of almost any animal is how elegantly beautiful it is from the outside. If you look at a lion, a cheetah, a gazelle, these are beautiful machines. They're high speed, fast running, either predators or running away from predators, and they-

• 7:58Eugene Mirman?

  Gazelles, ah!

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they, they are very beautiful things, and we all think they are beautiful, but if you cut them open, it's a mess.

• 8:09Bill Nye?

  The same is true of cars and rockets and airplanes.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Luke Skywalker figured this out, you know, on the ice planet.

• 8:17Bill Nye?

  Yeah, he did.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  There's another nice example.

• 8:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought it was Luke. Excuse me. Han Solo.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Feel that nerd rage? Oh my god.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  There's another...

• 8:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cut's open and guts spill all out.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and another nice example, which is a bit like the recurrent laryngial, the tubes that connect the testes to the penis.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 8:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  They don't go by the most direct route. They go up and they loop around...

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Mine hang down.

• 9:03Bill Nye?

  Just that the prostate gland gets involved, like what's going on?

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Well, that's even worse, but they go up and they loop around the tube that comes from the bladder. And that's again, it's a historical accident.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Is that because that's where fish had their balls?

• 9:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you're cool with what animals look like on the outside, but when you cut them open, it's nasty, ugly stuff.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  If you look at inside a car, the exhaust manifold, the tubes all kind of cut in a nice neat row, don't they? Whereas if you look at the similar thing, the main artery leading off the heart, it's sort of, it's vaguely similar, but it's just not well-designed.

• 9:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, how about all this other stuff that goes on, like male pattern baldness? Where does that come from?

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Well, anything that tends to characterize age. The longer you've lived, the greater your chance of already having passed your genes on. And so, we're all descended from an unbroken line of people who lived long enough to reproduce. Very few of us are descended from ancestors who were very old when they reproduced.

• 10:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's no sexual selection?

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Not just sexual selection, but any kind of selection is weaker the older you get, because you've already passed the genes on. I mean, if you think about a more unpleasant example, like getting cancer. A gene that makes you get cancer when you're 50 has already been passed on by the time you reproduce. A gene that makes you get cancer when you're 10 has never been passed on.

• 10:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it would lead a very short life.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  So the older you get, the more likely you are to be hit by lethal genes which have slipped through the net.

• 10:48Bill Nye?

  This is part of what I was calling "good enough." You're good enough. Your eyesight, my eyesight, is good enough to get us this far.

• 10:55Eugene Mirman?

  Basically bald people have sex when they're 20 and no one knows they're gonna be bald.

• 11:00Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  So if you don't have kids before you go bald, you never will.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Baldness is very fashionable nowadays.

• 11:11Bill Nye?

  I was gonna say, ladies, help me out. Some guys rock the bald thing, right?

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  I thought by ladies. Those women clapping are married to bald guys.

• 11:21Eugene Mirman?

  I'm sure Vin Diesel is still sexually active.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me ask. As we go forward in time, what becomes of organs that are not, you know, vestigial organs? So your appendix perhaps? The toenail on your pinky toe. Of what possible value is that ever going forward?

• 11:42Bill Nye?

  Well, of what possible...

• 11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, people still put toenail polish on. I've seen women with like the tiniest little nail and a toenail polish on.

• 11:49Bill Nye?

  Let me turn the question around two ways.

• 11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, turn it around.

• 11:52Bill Nye?

  First of all, what's the cost of having that? Does it hold you back some way?

• 11:58Eugene Mirman?

  It's why I can't be president.

• 12:02Bill Nye?

  And if there's no cost to it, it'll just persist? Secondly...

• 12:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it won't persist forever because you can have copying errors that don't...

• 12:10Bill Nye?

  Do you think it would inhibit a woman's chance of hooking up if she showed up without a pinky toe?

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If her picture on Tinder was of her toes and she was missing a toe? I think that would be a pass on that one.

• 12:26Bill Nye?

  No, let's take it.

• 12:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just thinking.

• 12:29Bill Nye?

  No, no. Let's take a summer day in Central Park, where the women are rocking their sandals, right? And they've got their toes painted and all that stuff. And a woman shows up with no pinky. You don't think a guy would give a chin stroke and maybe veer off on that?

• 12:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  I think you underestimate the, um...

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Although I will underestimate my tremendous respect for it.

• 12:57Eugene Mirman?

  It's like the day in and day out.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  People have done, Haldane and Stebbins and people have done mathematical calculations on this question of something being too trivial to matter. If you put into the equations of evolution an assumption that something utterly trivial like a tiny little toenail or lack of a pinky, and you set a value on the selective pressure against it, you make it as low as you like, and then you calculate how many generations it would take at that low selection pressure to eliminate it, and Haldane did it, and J.B.S. Haldane. J.B.S. Haldane, and it came to something like 12,000 generations if you set it at a value so trivial that you couldn't detect it in fieldwork.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  12,000's not that many. That's right. Ah, ah. That's the point. Stebbins did a calculation, how long would it take a species of mouse-sized animals if they were subjected to relentless pressure to get bigger? How long would it take to become as big as an elephant? If you assume that the pressure to get bigger is so trivial that it's impossible to detect in ordinary field experiments. So you've got field biologists going around catching mice, measuring them, and it's in the noise level. They can't detect it. So Stebbins set the selection pressure at this very low level. Did he put it in the noise? That he put it in the noise, and then he calculated how long it would take

• 14:27Speaker 02

  to become elephant-sized, and I forget the result, but the point was that it was so fast that you wouldn't detect it on the paleontological timescales. It would look like an instantaneous change.

• 14:40Eugene Mirman?

  How much would you have to scare mice to make them much bigger? Like said I, not me, but, uh...

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:46Eugene Mirman?

  Like, so how long is it?

• 14:47Speaker 02

  No, this is a fascinating point.

• 14:49Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  So it's why you can look in the fossil record and see a T. rex that's this big. Exactly. But there's no half a T. rex. Exactly. Right. There's a mismatch between what field biologists can measure on the one hand, it's in the noise, and what fossil hunters can measure on the other hand. And now, it probably doesn't mean, usually there are intermediaries, but if there are not, then you can appeal to Stebbins's calculation.

• 15:11Eugene Mirman?

  So how many generations about, if it's 12,000 for people? I think it's two.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Well...

• 15:18Eugene Mirman?

  Is there a similar estimate for how many generations?

• 15:21Speaker 02

  I've forgotten the figure, but I mean, it's in the tens of thousands, which is which is an eye blink on the geological test.

• 15:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, totally. So, let me end this segment with a question for you to address. Different people give different answers to this, I want your answer. Are we getting smarter or stupider? Because sometimes, I don't know.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  I am completely baffled by the Flynn effect.

• 15:46Eugene Mirman?

  The what effect?

• 15:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Flynn effect.

• 15:48Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Named after a man called Flynn.

• 15:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was gonna guess that, yeah.

• 15:52Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it was a man, not a woman.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  It was a man, actually, yeah. And Flynn, he's a psychologist who's been studying IQ. Now, IQ is actually standardized so that the average is 100, but he allowed for that. And he finds that over the course of the 20th century, average IQ has been going up massively. And I must say, I don't notice it.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  But the data seem to be there, and I wish it were true.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 16:30Bill Nye?

  What it may come down to is being smart may not be of that great value.

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's where I was gonna go with this.

• 16:36Bill Nye?

  Compared to your ability to resist germs.

• 16:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we tell ourselves that being smart gives us an advantage. Where I'm thinking, if being smart gave you an advantage, there'd be many more other, what we would think of as smart animals in the tree of life.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in apocalyptic earth, we're extinct, a whole lot of other animals rise up in our place, and no one ever accused them of being smart. So, can you comment on the value of being smart with regard to evolutionary survival and natural selection?

• 17:06Speaker 02

  We were talking earlier about the number of times things have evolved, and you know, eyes have evolved 40 times. Linguistic intelligence, the sort of intelligence we have where we can actually formulate philosophical thoughts, has only evolved once, and didn't evolve until the world had been around for more than 4 billion years.

• 17:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I tweeted on this recently.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Did you, yes?

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, with regard to farm animals. I was just wondering if farm animals, when they're just chewing their cud, if they're contemplating the history and fate of the universe? If they have theories of the universe that they're thinking about. So, then I wondered if the farm animals...

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know where that finger is gonna go.

• 20:15Eugene Mirman?

  Are you giving a very long version of "Yes, it's possible"?

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Let me start again. You could probably make males lactate by giving them hormone injections. So you do that, and then you breed from those males who need the least amount of hormone injection in order to lactate.

• 20:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To selectively breed.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  And gradually, as the generations go by, you gradually wean them off the hormone injections. And this is actually quite an instructive illustration of something called the Baldwin Effect.

• 20:46Speaker 05

  The Baldwin Effect?

• 20:47Speaker 02

  Baldwin Effect, yes.

• 20:48Eugene Mirman?

  Where you get very angry?

• 20:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are Baldwins that live in the city.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 20:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Famous actors.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  The idea is that originally, a change comes about through a non-genetic means, through, say, learning, or through, in this case, hormone injections. And that exposes genetic variation which was not otherwise visible. And so in this case, the hormone injection is exposing that certain males are a bit more likely to lactate than others. But they don't have the opportunity to do so until you get the hormone injection. And so you use the hormone injection as a way of bringing to the surface genetic variation which was there all the time.

• 21:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But unexpressed. That's an interesting way to manipulate the genome. I guess we've been doing that with wolf genes from the beginning, and creating the whole diversity of dogs. Getting the one that's slightly more friendly, that's not gonna bite you, that's a little cuter, that's smaller. And we go from a wolf to a Pomeranian, right?

• 21:50Eugene Mirman?

  In just two weeks.

• 21:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Call now. What about... I'm just thinking, the wolf sees a Pomeranian, I'm just wondering, what is the wolf thinking? Like, that we must be completely messed up as humans to take a wolf gene and turn it into... A puffball. So, so, in that vein, I'm wondering, if we can manipulate genomes in this way, how real is Jurassic Park? Or, more disturbingly, how real would any eugenics movement be? Given the control we now have, or the access we now have to the human genome?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  You're making a distinction between manipulating genes directly and doing it by selection. The way you turn a wolf into a Pomeranian is by selection. It's just the artificial equivalent of natural selection.

• 22:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We could do that with humans.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  And we could do that with humans. There's no question about that we could do it with humans. If you really wanted to breed a human equivalent of a Pomeranian, you could do it.

• 22:52Bill Nye?

  Kardashian joke, anyone?

• 22:55Speaker 01

  I'm about bringing love.

• 22:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But isn't that what Hitler was attempting?

• 22:58Speaker 02

  It is, yes. It is what Hitler was attempting. He was attempting to make these dreadful, you know, tall, blonde, blue-eyed...

• 23:05Speaker 01

  I'm right here, alright?

• 23:17Eugene Mirman?

  Hitler wanted to create a comic that exclusively jokes about food.

• 23:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's odd if he's trying to breed blond-haired people because he had black hair, last I checked. That's just an odd fact to me. So, right, there's selective breeding.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  You could do selective breeding, or you could do the other half, which is the mutational part. You could induce mutation. You'd have to know a lot more genetics than we know at present, but the time will come.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nothing's in the way.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  No.

• 23:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, and so, is that in our future? Should it be in our future?

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Should is a different question from is it?

• 23:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who decides if it will be in our future?

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Well, that's a political question.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  It should probably be up to me.

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Want to be the...

• 23:54Eugene Mirman?

  What sort of stuff would we be able to do if we genetically manipulated people? And would it be, like, awesome, or weird?

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, if you wanted to make a brilliant musician, you might be able to do that.

• 24:06Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, really?

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Not yet. At present, the most you can do is...

• 24:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you wouldn't make a brilliant musician. You'd make a person who could be a brilliant musician.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah.

• 24:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they have to want to do that.

• 24:16Eugene Mirman?

  Who genetically was pretty exposed to jamming.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  They're still got to practice, yes.

• 24:20Bill Nye?

  But notice that you don't know...

• 24:21Speaker 01

  But for every musician you tried to make, you'd make a lot of baristas, right?

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Which is where the morality comes in. But I love coffee, so we should do it.

• 24:41Bill Nye?

  So another question, though, is what is of the greatest value? What trait do you want to select for? And it may be that the best thing to have in 50 years is resistance to Ebola virus.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:53Bill Nye?

  That may be like actually much better than smart-

• 24:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you rank what it is we can-

• 24:58Bill Nye?

  What's useful and what's gonna be passed forward. Rather than blue eyes, blonde hair, or whatever the heck, glasses.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yes. Genetically engineered people, well, not great.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  There is genetic resistance to AIDS. And I actually did a television documentary in which I went to Nairobi, where-

• 25:17Bill Nye?

  You were born in South Africa, right?

• 25:18Speaker 02

  I was born in Kenya, yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Let's see your birth certificate.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  As you know, AIDS is a very, very serious epidemic in Africa. And there is a population of prostitutes in Nairobi who are resistant to AIDS. And I went with this television-

• 25:47Bill Nye?

  Are they immune?

• 25:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 25:49Bill Nye?

  Or it's easier on them?

• 25:51Speaker 02

  I think they're immune.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  They don't get HIV.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  They get HIV, but they don't-

• 25:57Bill Nye?

  They don't get acquired immunity.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  But it doesn't do anything to them.

• 26:00Bill Nye?

  So have HIV and it doesn't manifest as AIDS?

• 26:02Speaker 02

  I think that's right.

• 26:03Bill Nye?

  That's what you're saying, okay.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  I'm not sure if that's right, but I went and interviewed- For television, you just interview one person. You don't do a statistical sample. And I interviewed one Nairobi prostitute. And I asked her how long she'd been in that profession, and she said 20 years. And I said, "What about all the friends who started at the same time as you?" She said, "They're all dead. They all died of AIDS." And I said, "Well, why do you think you didn't die?" And she said, "I think God must be looking after me." So I said, "Well, why didn't God look after all your friends?"

• 26:39Speaker 02

  And she said, "Well, I can't answer that. And I'll tell you this: God is extremely fond of condoms."

• 26:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 26:51Speaker 05

  Wow. And so, what was her feeling? So like, is this group of women who work as prostitutes, are they like being studied by?

• 27:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:00Speaker 05

  How did they figure it out, sort of first place?

• 27:03Speaker 02

  There's a Canadian team working on them, and working on the...

• 27:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Almost any verb.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  During this interview with a prostitute.

• 27:17Speaker 05

  But that's incredible, that they've survived.

• 27:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's not incredible in the biggest of pictures. This is to say it is not unreasonable that somewhere, somebody's gonna have a resistance to this virus.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  There's a mutation which gives you resistance, and it survives.

• 27:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the greatest diversity of human genes is still in Africa.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, when I look at the animal kingdom, I say, "All right, there's a newt that can regenerate its tail, and there's a snake that can see in the infrared." And I'm looking at this talent, this biological talent, expressed in the genetics of animals that we don't have as humans. So, if there is a common ancestor between humans and newts, should there be some gene within us, or some gene insertable to us, that we can turn on and then be able to regenerate limbs, first for army veterans?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  I do know that the genes for smelling things, which so many other mammals have, we've got most of those genes, but they're turned off. And so, our ancestors must have been able to smell as well as dogs, or maybe not quite, but certainly as well as other mammals. And we seem to have lost that ability. But the genes are still there in vestigial form.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  But is it because we live in cities now and it's probably best that way?

• 28:41Speaker 02

  No, it's not.

• 28:44Eugene Mirman?

  Let's not turn him on too much in New York.

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I think we are genetically closer to dogs than we are to newts, I presume.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it harder to find where the gene is for regenerating limbs? Is it deep in us somewhere, or is that just so vestigial as to be completely lost?

• 29:00Speaker 02

  I'm not sure that you'd be right to call it a gene in that case. I think there's probably something deeply buried in the kind of embryology that we have, the newts have, which would make it difficult.

• 29:12Bill Nye?

  But, Richard, also, I mean, this was the charm, the amazing, the potential. Everybody was so excited about stem cells.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:19Bill Nye?

  Right, that if you knew what you were doing, you could get stem cells to make anything.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Yes, yep, well, maybe.

• 29:25Bill Nye?

  New hips, new knees, new arms and so on.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Actually, that's right, yes.

• 29:28Bill Nye?

  As I understand it, the problem is, the cloning of Dolly the sheep was done mechanically. These guys got this fantastically fine pipette, and they poked it into the cell, which was from a mammary cell, and that's why they called her Dolly. I'm not joking. And they poked the DNA into the cell, and it fused and grew, right?

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:52Bill Nye?

  And so that technique, that cloning technique, would be exactly the same technique that you would use to affect any stem cell. And this caused lawmakers, at least in the US, to, if I may, like, totally freak.

• 30:08Bill Nye?

  And so, that's why stem cell research was generally put to a halt. And let me go on to ramble, that you don't want to clone yourself.

• 30:18Eugene Mirman?

  Why?

• 30:19Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Eugene Mirman?

  Imagine how fun it would be?

• 30:22Speaker 01

  We shouldn't clone that jacket of yours either, but...

• 30:28Bill Nye?

  It's a radio show.

• 30:34Bill Nye?

  But the jacket, some people like the jacket.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people. Yay!

• 30:42Bill Nye?

  But if you were to clone yourself, then this new person that you created would be genetically identical to you, would not have the great advantage that you get with sex. And with sex, you get a new combination of genes. And it is one very good theory of why you want a new combination of genes is because your enemies are not lions and tigers and bears or wolves. Your enemies are germs and parasites, are Spanish flu and Ebola.

• 31:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In that vein, Richard, do you have friends who want to reconstruct the flu virus from 1918?

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Well, I'm sure that there are probably-

• 31:18Bill Nye?

  Your answer wasn't no to that question.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Not friends. There are germ warfare possibilities, which are horrific. And cloning the 1918, whatever it is, 1919 flu virus would be a horrible thing to do.

• 31:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we have the power to do that.

• 31:33Bill Nye?

  Hold on, but isn't that virus still extant?

• 31:35Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 31:35Bill Nye?

  By the way, this virus killed more people with 50 million, estimates vary, 50 million people, many, many more than were killed by fighting in World War I.

• 31:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 31:45Bill Nye?

  In the same winter.

• 31:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Factor two.

• 31:47Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Is it still out there?

• 31:49Bill Nye?

  That's remarkable.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  I'm not sure. I don't know that.

• 31:52Bill Nye?

  Why would it disappear? Aren't we all descendants of people who could handle that? By handle it, I mean-

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Yes, I guess that-

• 31:58Bill Nye?

  Live through it.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  So you go ahead and make your flu. I don't care.

• 32:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, most of the people that it killed already had sex and babies. It took out the top end of the age distribution.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  I think it took young, I think it-

• 32:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It also did that, but I mean-

• 32:12Bill Nye?

  When I've been to cemeteries in Seattle, we did a show on it, and there's a lot of kids that were killed that winter, people six, seven years old. How many people, may I ask, how many people have had a flu shot this season? How many people, how many people have not?

• 32:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neil, when I grew up, I swam in the Hudson River.

• 32:35Bill Nye?

  Okay.

• 32:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So-

• 32:37Bill Nye?

  Okay, I got you.

• 32:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't need a shot to protect me from anything.

• 32:40Bill Nye?

  I know that sentiment, but let's say hypothetically, everybody, there were a vaccine for Ebola. How many people would not want it because you just don't believe in vaccines, Neil? Wouldn't everybody want it?

• 32:54Speaker 01

  I think everyone would want it. And whoever classed it, okay.

• 32:57Bill Nye?

  So in a similar vein, I ride the subway, I meet people, I would just assume you all got flu vaccinations.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you're saying, why wouldn't someone get the flu vaccine, right?

• 33:07Bill Nye?

  Well, we wonder why people don't get vaccines.

• 33:09Speaker 05

  It's just like, you just get so busy and...

• 33:15Speaker 02

  No, but it's a...

• 33:15Bill Nye?

  No, that's a good reason.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  But it's a serious point, that it's not just protecting yourself, it's protecting the herd. Because, the whole thing about epidemiology is that if you can get a sufficiently large number of people immunized, an epidemic won't get going. And so it is actually antisocial.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  I'll get a flu shot, I just haven't had it yet. So, I got a flu shot, so I'm a good guy.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:41Bill Nye?

  Well, you're on this side of it.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:44Bill Nye?

  Good or bad, just, I don't know, man.

• 33:46Speaker 05

  But, I'm sorry, he can't get the flu now, can he?

• 33:49Bill Nye?

  Can't get this year's flu.

• 33:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:52Bill Nye?

  Unless a new one evolves.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Which they do very quickly.

• 33:55Bill Nye?

  Which can happen, and you can get infected with that.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  It's like cell phones, whenever you buy the one, then they...

• 34:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Richard, if we have control over the genetics of ourselves, of our food supply, I presume this is a good thing, but is there a downside to it? Might we be experimenting incompetently, ultimately making a mistake we would later regret?

• 34:39Eugene Mirman?

  Like tomatoes that are wolves.

• 34:42Bill Nye?

  Well, yeah, but like, like fish genes in tomatoes.

• 34:46Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 34:47Bill Nye?

  And I'm not kidding, so, George Washington, apparently, uh, Richard, George Washington was, uh...

• 34:56Eugene Mirman?

  You're not gonna like it when you hear the story.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  My ancestor, General Sir Henry Clinton, commanded British forces in the American Revolutionary War.

• 35:08Bill Nye?

  And you're proud of that?

• 35:11Speaker 01

  So, you're bragging about him fighting in the Revolutionary War?

• 35:14Eugene Mirman?

  You didn't say which side.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Oh, which side?

• 35:17Eugene Mirman?

  Everyone here at first was British.

• 35:19Bill Nye?

  So, so the deal is, George Washington bred wheat. Took pollen from one wheat stalk and shook it onto the eggs, the ova of another one, to try to hybridize, or he did, I guess, hybridize wheat. And we still do that. And that's intra-species, if I may say, that is within a species. But then, when people take genes from a fish that is real good in cold water, and put it in tomatoes to try to get the tomatoes to be real good on cold days, that's when you're kind of crossing a line, right?

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:51Bill Nye?

  So here's what, you can know what'll happen to the tomato, but you can't know exactly what'll happen to the ecosystem that the tomato is in. And so the famous couple of cases for this with the corn. In the US, we're crazy for our corn, Richard, we love our corn. And we had the European corn boar insect was eating the corn, "Thank you."

• 36:18Bill Nye?

  And these guys took, these people took the gene from a virus in the soil and put it in the gene of the corn. And when the corn boar eats the corn, the corn crystallizes and the corn boars die.

• 36:34Bill Nye?

  They also messed around so that you could spray the corn with this crazy, super-strong weed killer, Roundup. And that was great, the corn could tolerate that, but the milkweed, which lives in the same cornfield, couldn't. And so the problem there, anyone? Right, monarch butterflies. So monarch butterflies, like any butterfly, love milkweed pollen. And so when you killed all the mil-, or a lot of the milkweed, there was huge concern that you would wipe out the monarch butterfly population. Everybody likes monarch butterflies, they're so cool, they fly around. And they're probably

• 37:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think you like them because they're beautiful.

• 37:11Bill Nye?

  Yeah, that way.

• 37:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they live in

• 37:14Bill Nye?

  And they do extraordinary things and I've watched them, they fly really, they can fly upwind.

• 37:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an example of there might be unintended

• 37:23Bill Nye?

  Unintended consequences, so we have huge monocultures, which we call Iowa. The corn in Iowa goes on for a long time. If you ever drive or ride your bicycle across Iowa, you will not miss it.

• 37:36Bill Nye?

  And if we did something to make that enormous crop not survive by accident, that could be huge trouble, huge trouble.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  So the general lesson would be that if you mess around with anything, you may destroy an ecosystem. But that doesn't particularly apply to putting fish genes in tomato plants.

• 37:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not specifically so, that's right.

• 37:55Bill Nye?

  That we know of.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  You have to be careful with anything you do. It's not just putting genes.

• 38:00Bill Nye?

  But what could we have a rule, okay to breed within a species, but you gotta do some super crazy diligent testing to breed between species.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Should always test, always, yeah.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  I'm not sure that's the right division. I mean, I'm not sure that between

• 38:15Bill Nye?

  What is it?

• 38:15Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, I think that

• 38:17Bill Nye?

  Well, let's do it anyway.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  The precautionary principle where just be very, very careful whatever you do. I wouldn't make the divide between intra and interspecifically.

• 38:26Bill Nye?

  Oh, really? Okay.

• 38:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Favorite line, I was told it appeared in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, I don't remember which one, where it postulates, what's the last sentence ever spoken on Earth? It's, "Let's try it this way."

• 38:44Bill Nye?

  And that gets into this verb that "it should work."

• 38:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there still enough natural selection going on so that we'll be the strongest? Or will we meddle with our genes so that tomorrow, natural selection's irrelevant?

• 38:58Bill Nye?

  So, Neil, it's not being the strongest, it's fitting in the bestest. It's not being the greatest weightlifter. It's making sure you fit in.

• 39:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm talking about forces here. What is the... Of all the things that could affect us genetically, what is the greatest among them?

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Selection is still going on with us.

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what way are we evolving?

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Well, probably we're being selected by viruses, by bacteria, that kind of thing.

• 39:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're evolving, but we're not speculating.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  We're probably no longer being selected to get brainier. I mean, clearly, in the last two or three million years, there's been selection for us to get bigger brains and to get cleverer. That's clearly happened, if you look at the fossils. And so during that time, it must have been the case that the brainiest individuals survived and reproduced. In order for that still to be going on, it would be necessary that the brainiest individuals have the most children.

• 39:52Bill Nye?

  Okay, is it the most children or the most children that survive to have children?

• 39:56Speaker 02

  Well, that, of course. But it's enough to point out that there's absolutely no reason to think that being clever makes you likely to have lots of children. Quite the reverse.

• 40:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The film Idiocracy built their entire plotline on that very premise.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because people who are highly educated and call themselves smart, and other people who call them smart, they like delay having children, and then they might not have children. And meanwhile, others are just having babies. The babies are just popping out. And so if that tendency is heritable, then...

• 40:27Speaker 02

  But Martin Rees, who's more or less typifies the great and the good in British science. He's a president of the Royal Society and all that sort of stuff. He has written a book in which he gives the human species a 50% chance of making it through this century, the 21st century.

• 40:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, possibly going extinct that day.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Yes. He's worried about massively powerful weapons falling into the hands, not of vaguely responsible governments, but falling into the hands of...

• 40:52Eugene Mirman?

  Like New Hampshire?

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Well, terrorists. Terrorists.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Go ahead, I'm sure.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'd self-destruct.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  The principle of deterrence, which is the nuclear standoff, presupposes that everybody wants the world to live and go on. Now we've got people who, for religious reasons, want to die.

• 41:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, or quite okay with dying, right?

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so if they got their hands on a biological weapon, the normal deterrence might not apply.

• 41:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's in the calculation, you're saying?

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But going forward, again, the people, like you said, the genes that will go for are the ones who have the most children. And Jim, how many kids do you have?

• 41:30Speaker 01

  I have five, but I haven't talked to my wife in an hour, so...

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Could be more.

• 41:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jim, you earlier in this show commented on your poor eyesight.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your sun-sensitive skin.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your receding hairline.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have the most children of any of us here.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  I'm good in bed. He's also... Very good in bed. He's a generous lover. I'm a generous lover. Yeah, no, I didn't plan to start my own nationality, but...

• 42:07Speaker 01

  It seemed like a good idea.

• 42:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Bill Nye, you are who any one of us would choose to be the professor on Gilligan's Island if any one of us were caught on Gilligan's Island. Do I have agreement there?

• 42:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Bill, you have how many children?

• 42:26Bill Nye?

  I don't have any.

• 42:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 42:27Bill Nye?

  But I've still got my eye on Mary Ann.

• 42:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mary Ann?

• 42:31Bill Nye?

  I'm still thinking.

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island, yes.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  So what was the point?

• 42:41Speaker 01

  I mean, was the point like, "Jim, you're a moron. You have five kids. He's the science king of the world. He has none. We're doomed, is that the idea?"

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Let me tell you something.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Alright, here, I have a question, I have a question.

• 43:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm picking Bill. If we're gonna survive on a desert island and make radios out of coconuts, I'm picking Bill.

• 43:07Eugene Mirman?

  But if you just wanna hook up.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  You know that Gilligan's Island.

• 43:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, Jim, what do you got?

• 43:15Speaker 01

  You know, I do have a question for this esteemed panel. I think that the overpopulation thing is a myth. I think it's an absolute myth.

• 43:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Says the man with five children.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Yes, I do. But, you know, it's like, convince me otherwise. I've seen information that said that you can feed everyone. It's not population, it's delivering of food, it's corruption. You know what I mean?

• 43:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, we weren't here saying that having five kids was bad for the environment. We're saying having five kids makes your genome more populous in the future than Bill's genome. That's all we're saying. You're stating a fact. You're feeling guilty about it.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  No, but, no, but that's. No, I am.

• 43:55Eugene Mirman?

  You did some great genome stuff.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  I did some great genome stuff. No, but I am curious, because I think that there is this ongoing, like, you know, I have five kids, and people, like, occasionally friends, and I, individually, I thought, oh, you know, there is this overpopulation crisis, but I did research into it, and it is a myth, isn't it? Or am I wrong?

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Well, it's surely true that we can go on feeding more people for a while, but not indefinitely.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  But isn't the population of the earth gonna reach a peak and then go back down? If everybody keeps having five kids. But wait a minute, there's. I'm not proposing, but wait a minute. I'm having five kids, you're having none, how many kids do you have?

• 44:37Eugene Mirman?

  I don't know.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  How many kids?

• 44:42Speaker 01

  He's a traveling guy. I mean, stand-up comic.

• 44:46Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, our average is only, yeah, it's like, what, seven kids?

• 44:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maeve, how many children do you have? None that I know of. None?

• 44:52Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, a woman can't get away with that sentence.

• 44:56Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, she can. She's unbelievable.

• 45:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Richard? In a hundred years, a thousand, a million, will we recognize ourselves in that future? Or will we be so different from evolutionary drivers that we might have either more biological talent or perhaps even less?

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Usually, you get new species when they split, when they speciate. And that's not going to happen with humans.

• 45:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, don't tell me we get new species when they speciate.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, no. When their eyes...

• 45:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I need a better answer than that.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  When populations are come off. When they split, it would be quite difficult for humans to evolve a new species unless a subset of humans was sent off to a different planet or something.

• 45:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're all interbreeding now?

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Yes, we're all interbreeding now. But if we set up colonies on Mars, for example, then it would be not unexpected that they might, in quite a long time, become a separate species which could no longer interbreed with us.

• 45:54Eugene Mirman?

  What if no one went to Australia for 2,000 years? Would that be easier?

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:59Eugene Mirman?

  All right, I don't think that's what we should do. Just throwing out an easier way to do this.

• 46:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Australia has already done that experiment.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:06Eugene Mirman?

  No, but people keep flying there and hooking up.

• 46:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I'm saying, but kangaroos don't keep flying there, right?

• 46:12Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, right, wow.

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The animals in Australia are some of the most exotic in the world.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  But that takes more than 2,000 years.

• 46:18Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, so would Martha's Vineyard be easier, then?

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But is there something that we can hope for? And do you see any trend lines? You think about this all the time. We're doing other stuff. Well, you're thinking about life. Is there some direction that you think... No, we won't become another species, perhaps. But the environment might put pressure on ourselves where some of us emerge, others don't. And there's some talent expressed within the genome itself so that in a million years, we won't recognize.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  I think cultural evolution is so much more important than biological evolution now. I mean, technology is changing so rapidly. And so that's what's really going to change. And that might include genetic engineering, genetic technology. So if we do come back in 1,000 years and find ourselves different, it's more likely to have been engineered differences by human bioengineers rather than by the normal processes of evolution.

• 47:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if we become good shepherds of that legacy, there's some hope that we will be better. To ourselves, to our planet, to the...

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Difficult to agree among ourselves as to what would constitute better.

• 47:32Bill Nye?

  So it's reasonable along that line that, you know, we have this urge to be altruistic, apparently observed in all sorts of species to help each other out. It could be that we will select for people that have a tendency to be better stewards of the earth. That is reasonable.

• 47:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And another thing is certain, we are also selecting for people who think babies look cute.

• 47:55Bill Nye?

  Yes, and it could be we're selecting for people...

• 47:58Eugene Mirman?

  Even when they're not cute.

• 48:02Speaker 05

  I think all babies are cute. What does that mean?

• 48:05Bill Nye?

  See?

• 48:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, people who don't think babies are cute don't have babies, right? That's how that is.

• 48:10Bill Nye?

  So it could be we're selecting for people who have the resources to go to colleges and, what's it called, advanced degrees and still have babies later in life. We could be selecting for that.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Something like that, yes.

• 48:23Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, young professionals.

• 48:25Bill Nye?

  I want to end it here. Thank you all for coming. Star Trek Radio.