The Power of Adaptability with Herman Pontzer

What’s the science of what makes humans special? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly explore how we evolved to be different from eachother, what's up with Neanderthal DNA, and humanity's superpower with evolutionary anthropologist, Herman Pontzer.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, I feel like I more deeply understand who I am in this world.

• 0:05Gary O'Reilly?

  It's the way it goes.

• 0:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As a biological entity.

• 0:08Chuck Nice?

  I feel like I more deeply understand Neanderthal sex.

• 0:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some perspectives on the origin of who and what we are, coming up on special edition.

• 0:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Special Edition. Today, we're going to be talking about the human condition that is centerline to what StarTalk Special Edition is all about. And of course, if it's special edition, it means we've got Gary O'Reilly.

• 0:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey Neil.

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Gary.

• 0:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Yep.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Former soccer pro.

• 0:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course, Chuck Nice, like Chuck E. Baby.

• 1:01Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's happening?

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gary, tell me about the human condition and what's going to happen today.

• 1:06Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, um, I suppose in many ways, this is the specialist edition because we are talking about the science behind the things that make us different. That make us special. And that's, as a species, makes us adaptable.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what makes us special, I mean, which makes our species special?

• 1:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Among all species of life on Earth.

• 1:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm. I mean, humans have survived and thrived in just about every location, every climate on Earth. Well, so far that is, that things are changing. This adaptability has seen the human form take many different body shapes, sizes, blood types, and skin colors. Yet, with all this uniqueness, we are 99.9% similar in our DNA.

• 1:51Chuck Nice?

  999.

• 1:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Nine, yes.

• 1:54Chuck Nice?

  Yes, it's even, even more than 99.9, but go ahead.

• 1:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, now seems like a good time to understand a little more about the diversity and our diversity and adaptability through the lens of evolution and biology. So if you would introduce our guest.

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will. This is an old friend of mine.

• 2:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 2:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who left town some years ago before COVID. We hadn't heard back from him.

• 2:17Chuck Nice?

  Well, maybe it wasn't as good a friend as you thought.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm thinking it, you're saying it. Professor Herman Pontzer, welcome back to StarTalk, dude.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Hey, thanks for having me back.

• 2:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the last time you were here was like, early COVID. EC.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  EC.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  EC, early COVID. And all I remember is that you talked about zebra testicles. That's all I remember.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  It left a, left an impression. That's good. That's good.

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll have to dig that one up out of the archives. So right now, you're a professor of evolutionary anthropology.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 2:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that. That's great. Ooh, ooh. And global health at the Duke University's Global Health Institute. You got your work cut out for you, too. I can tell you that right now.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a strange time to be in academia and public health. There's a funny intersection at the moment.

• 3:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. Okay. And you're a recognized researcher in human energetics. I love it. Human energetics and of course, evolution, which is fundamental to that. Author of a 2022 book, Burn. And in 2025, Adaptable. How your unique body really works and why biology unites us.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Ooh, cool.

• 3:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Penguin Random House.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting title. Yeah. So let me just say, you left town and you didn't tell me you left town. Cause you used to be right here. Were you at NYU? Where were you?

• 3:43Speaker 03

  I was at Hunter College in the grad center and um.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here in New York City.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. And coming over across town to hang out at the AM and H occasionally. With some of our mutual friends.

• 3:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're here in my office now at, at AM and H. American Museum of Natural History for those who just tuned in. So can we think of our adaptability? As some kind of superpower distinguishing us from all other?

• 4:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Animals on earth. Cause I've thought long and hard. What is special about we can't fly, we don't run fast.

• 4:18Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Almost everything that would kill us in the wild is because the other creature is better at it than we are. So to think of our adaptability as a unique feature of being human, I gotta hear more from you on that.

• 4:32Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, what are we, what are we doing here seeing as though we're, every other animal is better at something than we are.

• 4:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 4:40Chuck Nice?

  What, how did we get here?

• 4:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They got sharper teeth.

• 4:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They got better.

• 4:44Chuck Nice?

  They run faster, they can take to the skies, they can swim, they can breathe water. Like, what the hell, like.

• 4:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Breathe water.

• 4:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. In the pantheon of superheroes, like.

• 4:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We suck.

• 4:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, we're the, we're the superhero that can, we're the shifters, you know, the, the, the change, the, the shape shifters, right? We, uh, we can be successful anywhere on the planet because we've got this crazy kind of dual inheritance that we talk about. We have all these cultural hair, things that we inherit from generation to generation about how to survive in different environments. We've got this body that's very, we, we might be generalists in a lot of ways, right? We're good at a lot of different things. Maybe we're not as good at sprinting as some animals, as good at climbing, but we can kind of do it all fairly well. And we end up getting everywhere across the entire planet. Think of another species, I don't know if you could.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  That's been as successful in as many climates.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, Herman, the bacteria in your gut are traveling with you.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're as.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  That's really the mitochondria in our cells.

• 5:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As the humans are. Right.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This was smart bacteria, they knew what, what.

• 5:49Chuck Nice?

  Who, who to bet on.

• 5:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who to bet.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I wanted to call the book Protein Robot because I like to think of us as like these kind of damp RVs. Trundling along the earth, right? With all of our microbiome onboard, like passengers with us.

• 6:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damp RV, damn.

• 6:05Chuck Nice?

  That sounds hard to clean.

• 6:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 6:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm, I'm not rating that Uber ride. But you say in, in the subtitle of your book, why our biology unites us? So where, where does that, what are we to make of that subtitle?

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so I don't know of any other species that has a sort of adaptability range that we do, right? Everything from the ways that we learn how to make a living growing up, because we have these different cultures that help us adapt to different environments, to our physical characteristics that are a little bit different across the globe in different ways, often as a sort of local adaptation to different contexts. Skin colors are a great example of that. Body proportions are another example of that. And so, we are, all of us, expressions of this sort of shared, common, superpower that our species has, right? That adaptability is actually the expression of this, you know, the diversity is the expression of the adaptability. And so, you know, I think, rather than thinking about it as dividing us, it actually is showing our common origins in a way.

• 7:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm just gonna let you know, you keep talking about diversity, and some people are gonna come after you, buddy.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I mean, I wanted to write this book, when I was writing this book, okay, it was 2022, 2023, and I thought, well, maybe this whole discussion about, you know, maybe the sort of universe-wide discussion about diversity and all those debates are gonna be passe by the time the book's out. And it turns out, no, we're still very much talking about all this stuff. And so, I'm glad we did, I'm glad it came out when it did. I think, you know, the goal is to have it be this sort of common ground, you know, I want people to understand how the bodies work, why we're all different, how diversity happens, and have it be a kind of common ground that we can talk about these kind of big, often polarizing ideas and discussions with a common, you know, a common set of facts, common evidence base.

• 7:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have your work cut out ahead of you, because everything you're saying that unites us, our culture uses to divide us. So, you got some work cut out to you to change the definition of diversity in that way. Just letting you know.

• 8:12Gary O'Reilly?

  So, Herman, is there such a thing as a textbook average human? And what are the dangers if we start to perpetuate such a thought process?

• 8:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, so, no, there's not, right?

• 8:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Arithmetically, there has to be an average. So your question should have asked, is there a normal person?

• 8:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, what's normal?

• 8:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, exactly, that's a different thing. You, because there's always an average, you can always take an average, but it's

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Oh, but here's, so here's what I would say about that, Neil.

• 8:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  To push back a little, is, uh, and to agree with Gary, which I'm not sure if that's a good idea yet or not.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't have permission to agree with Gary and disagree with me.

• 8:51Gary O'Reilly?

  We'll say, we've still got a way to go.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, my introduction to human diversity, well, began in undergraduate in my coursework, but my actual physical hands-on introduction to this was dissecting a human, right?

• 9:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, you did that?

• 9:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, we were in medical school, uh, I, I didn't, I didn't go to medical school, but I took the medical school gross anatomy class at Harvard. And so it was me and 50 aspiring doctors, you know, disassembling a person, uh, on these big dissection tables. And every day you show up and you get your tools out of a little case and you start taking a person apart. And, you know, three months and 180 pounds of human later, you've seen everything. I know a couple guys in Staten Island who do that for different reasons.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, but do they pay attention to the nuanced differences? That's what I want to know. But what you finally, you know, what you learn very quickly, and the reason, you know, you might think like, why do we bother doing this? It's kind of an old fashioned way to do science or to learn medicine. But the reason you do it is that you immediately learn that, you know, that the branching of arteries through your torso as it, as it comes out from your aorta and starts to feed all your organs. That set of branch, that pattern of branching is not the same for everybody. And in fact, you know, often you find a branching pattern in the person that you're dissecting that doesn't match any of the variants shown in your dissecting text, right? And that the nerves are the same way. And, you know, and that's just the stuff you can see with your naked eyes, right?

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Our diversity is down to the core. And so I would say, if you think about, if you think about like a parts list for humans, right? Maybe it's, I'd be curious to think about this, but maybe it's 30,000 different parts that all kind of come together into your, to make you I would bet that just in the same way that there's like never been a perfect March Madness bracket. There is no human that all the pieces match a textbook dissector. Piece for piece because you might be right. You might be that, you know, similar to the dissector on 99% of them. But there's 1% where you differ. It'll be a different 1% that I differ, etc., etc.

• 10:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the mathematical way to say what you just did is whatever average you might obtain, it's not useful because the variance is so high on that average.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 11:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because think about it, I mean, right? You can say an average and you look for someone who matches the average and no one does. Because everyone is scattered around to the left and right of the average on the chart. So, okay, I'm with you on that.

• 11:18Chuck Nice?

  How should that inform us on a sociological level?

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, you know, once you start to appreciate how diversity, what it looks like, that it's sort of multi-dimensional, it's not just, you know, for example, skin color in this country is historically used to divide us right into into different categories. And if you're black or you're white, you're thought about you're in this category or that category. If you really understand human diversity, you realize that there are sort of subtle differences across all these different modalities, you know, in terms of the way our cardiovascular systems work, digestive systems, skin, of course, sure, nervous systems, all of it. There aren't sort of neat categories that we can box people into. And I think it forces us to kind of

• 12:04Speaker 03

  to see diversity the way that it is, which is, again, the sort of individualized expression of these common forces. Right? So it's a, it's a, an expression of our humanness, right? Rather than, oh, you're in this box and I'm in this box and we can kind of caricature it and pretend that we know something about you just because we put you in this particular box. That's not actually how the body works or how diversity works.

• 12:26Chuck Nice?

  So to that point, I read a pretty cool paper. Out of, uh, I forget which part of Harvard, but was the basis for the predicate, there's no such thing as race. And that race is a completely manufactured construct. And it was based on what you just said, that which is, there's no box in which you can put enough people to say, this is what white is, or this is what black is. Uh, but the thing that I didn't really understand was how the scientists from Korea had more

• 13:06Chuck Nice?

  in common with one of the scientists from the Netherlands than one of the other scientists from the Netherlands on a biological level. Like that was part of it, yeah.

• 13:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 13:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  So, I mean, it depends on what they're measuring, whether they're measuring genetic differences or that kind of thing, but take this, here's a kind of toy example, but it's a real biological phenomenon, blood types. Okay? ABO blood type, or I don't know if you know if you're type A or type B or type O, whatever it is. All of us in this four, the four of us sitting here might have all the same blood type. Right? Maybe we're all type A. And that would mean that we have the same genetic variant. And in that way, in that particular locus, that gene, we're all more similar to each other than other people who have type B blood. All right? So in that measure, we're all a group and we're all different from somebody else. We go by skin color, the amount of melanin in our skin, right? Well, there's differences in that, right?

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Who has more melanin, who doesn't have as much melanin? Um, and that might break us down differently.

• 14:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's an unlimited number of boxes that you could...

• 14:12Speaker 03

  Exactly. And not only that, but there aren't even hard edges on the boxes, because if you look at something like skin color, in this country, we often put people into sort of black or white, but of course, skin color is everything in between too. Right? So especially if you look globally, there's no, you know, you get everything pretty dark because you have a lot of melanin in your skin, too very light because you have very little, and there's everything in between. So there's no hard edge where you say, okay, now I stopped this category and I'm into that category.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course, President Obama could have legitimately been declared as a white person. President because he's exactly half white. But by his European mother.

• 14:46Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 14:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right?

• 14:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 14:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But instead, we call them a black president.

• 14:50Chuck Nice?

  Because of the social norms in America.

• 14:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly half black.

• 14:52Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 14:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right?

• 14:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 14:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I, in, in one of my books, I forgot which, he, imagine him running for president in an African country.

• 15:00Chuck Nice?

  As the white guy.

• 15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As the white guy.

• 15:02Chuck Nice?

  That's hilarious.

• 15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no.

• 15:03Chuck Nice?

  Yes. That is so funny. Yeah.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  I mean, historically, it's even crazier. Like, there were people who, you know, groups who now we consider as sort of obviously white in the US. People from, you know, Ireland, people from Italy, who in late 1800s would have been considered black.

• 15:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, they weren't white until the powers that be that are, because it's a socially constructed power move to make these groups. Until the powers that be decided that they were in the, in the white group, that they became white.

• 15:32Chuck Nice?

  Until they felt outnumbered.

• 15:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:35Chuck Nice?

  They're like, we, we need some help. Hey, how do you guys like to be white?

• 15:49Speaker 04

  I'm Brian Futterman, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 16:02Gary O'Reilly?

  So, Hermann, if we look at the latitudes here on Earth, how have humans adapted? In terms of their biology to survive at these different latitudes?

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a, so that brings up an important point to start with, which is that a lot of the variation that we see in head shape, size, all the different physical characteristics we see, this is, all the rage in the late 1800s was how long versus how wide your head was.

• 16:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  If you're dolichocephalic or brachiocephalic or all these things.

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember that.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  So, almost all of those kind of variations are just noise and slosh and genetic mutation that's tolerated because there's no strong selection to, to, to get rid of it. Right? So, a lot of the variation that we see, the superficial variation, a lot of that is just sort of tolerated noise. Now that said, there are cases where you have a strong enough selection pressure. That's that's localized and strong enough and and long lasting for generations and generations. That you get local adaptation to a particular circumstance, a particular pressure. So latitude is a great one. So.

• 17:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have to clarify something here. Correct me if I'm wrong, Herman. When you say adaptation, you mean those who don't have the variation die. So they don't propagate their genes. So no organism adapts. You're talking about the ensemble.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Species.

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Statistics of a generation where only some that happen to have the variation. Walk through the proscenium into this next world where they can survive better.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just add to that, that you can, one way to to sort of lose that game is to die. The other way to lose that game is to not have any kids.

• 17:46Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  Or not have as many as your neighbor.

• 17:48Chuck Nice?

  Send your DNA into the future.

• 17:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, gotcha. Okay, pick it up. Sorry.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  So latitude is a great example of a pressure that's stable over time. Uh, you know, the earth has been spinning on the same, you know, the equator has been the equator for a long, long time. And it's been hotter the equator for a long, long time and colder towards the poles. And so that heat differential, for example, has shaped body shape, size and proportions. We see uh populations near the equator that are on average, tend to be taller, thinner. People, populations near the poles tend to be a bit stockier and heavier. And that's because you want to get rid of heat if you're in a hot environment at the equator all the time. You want to hold on to your heat if you are towards the poles.

• 18:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the physics of that, I think we have an explainer on it.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 18:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where if you are rounder.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 18:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are better insulated against losing heat because how are you going to lose heat? Through your skin.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  Through your skin.

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Basically.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  So the more round you are.

• 18:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and and if you ever see a pigeon in the winter.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 18:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They puff up. They're very round.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Or cats.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that too.

• 18:51Chuck Nice?

  Cats do the same thing.

• 18:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:53Chuck Nice?

  They make themselves round.

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Big, round.

• 18:55Chuck Nice?

  When they're cold.

• 18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we do that too. We'll, we'll bring our arms in.

• 18:57Gary O'Reilly?

  The fur and the feathers come up and they trap a layer of air.

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that helps too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also try to round themselves. Whereas in the, in the summer, the cat is all. Esplorable on the pavement.

• 19:09Chuck Nice?

  That's so true, like, and it's so funny, when you look at lions, they lay stretched.

• 19:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 19:15Chuck Nice?

  But when your cat is cold, and they're very similar, they wrap up.

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:20Chuck Nice?

  So, okay.

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I just want to make sure that the listener got the physics of what you just implied there.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 19:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I got it. So there's a fun field story there, a piece of my research that kind of touched on this in a way I wasn't expecting. We do research in northern Kenya. There's a population there, they're called the Dasnich. They live with their goats and camels and cattle. It's a pastoralist group. They're like the Maasai. You might have been more, they're more, you know, you might have heard of the Maasai. It's a similar kind of population. And we started work there in 2017, and we were talking to one of the NGOs, charities that had set up shop in this little village called Ilaret. It's this German charity. We're talking to the head of the charity, and because we wanted to get a sort of health and nutrition research project started. We thought we should talk to people who have been doing health and nutrition sort of outreach.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  And he said, oh, it's terrible. It's terrible here. Everybody, all the kids, you know, 70% of the kids are malnourished here. And we thought, oh, my gosh, that is really, that is terrible. And so we kind of thought about that and kept that in our minds. And as we're kind of visiting that village and the surrounding villages, it doesn't square, though, with what we're seeing, because these kids don't look malnourished. These kids are running around, happy, laughing. You know, families are big, people look healthy. And so we thought, if they say that they're malnourished, then that's important to know, but that seems, you know, counterintuitive based on just interacting with this population. Fast forward a couple of years, we've got ourselves a big data set on thousands of children

• 20:52Speaker 03

  who've been measured from the day they're born, every few months, to the time they're five or six years old. And what you can see, when you look at these kids' heights and weights, is that they're born around the same size as all the other kids on, in the world. And then they start to, their weight starts to fall off a little bit, but their height goes, grows fast. Right? So they're, by the time they're three, four years old, kids in this population are taller than three or four-year-olds in most of the rest of the world, because they have been adapted, that population has been adapted to be tall and thin. And so this German charity was looking at the ratio of weight, which was the same as everywhere else, maybe a little bit low, to height, which was tall because they were adapted to be tall.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  That ratio looked bad. It made them look malnourished, too thin, too light for their height. They're just skinny, but they're built, they're, they're actually, they are built to be skinny.

• 21:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So once again, there's a European bias brought into Africa to pass judgment on who's there.

• 21:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, yeah, that'll be us.

• 21:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So had the Kenyan anthropologists gone to Germany, they would say, y'all some fat ass folk.

• 22:00Chuck Nice?

  Right. Too much brat. Too many brats, guys. Gotta cut back.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, but, uh, I mean, and it's, you know, it even goes further because the, you know, the Nairobi, folks from Nairobi who I was working with, those folks from Nairobi aren't part of that ethnic group. They don't share that same, you know, to the same extent, that same kind of tall, thin body build.

• 22:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  And so I'm actually more similar to my Nairobi colleagues, even though our skin colors are different on that dimension than either of us are to this northern Kenyan population that's tall and thin, right? So like the whole, to, to, to even begin by using the kind of American racial categorization to try to make sense of what's going on there, you're sunk from the beginning.

• 22:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's folly.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:41Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. Isn't there an example of adaptability with people in the Andes? And then across in the Himalayas, they're living at a similar altitude, but one of them will suffer altitude sickness, one of them won't. Why?

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's up with that?

• 22:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 22:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. So people, humans have gone into the high altitude parts of the world. Three big examples of this, the Ethiopian plateau and those populations aren't well studied. So we don't know a whole lot about that physiology. The Himalaya, right? Tibet, Nepal, and that's been well studied. We know a lot about that. And the Andes in South America, and these are all independent evolutionary forays into high altitude. And the problem is you don't have any oxygen up there. The air is still 21% oxygen, but the air pressure is so low that there just aren't as many molecules of oxygen available for you to get into your bloodstream. And so everybody's oxygen starved at these, uh, high, high altitudes.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  And so there've been independent evolutionary changes, adaptations to this same, uh, this, this real challenge of getting enough oxygen in.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  The Himalayas, there is an allele that helps determine how much red blood cells you make. So, okay, let me back up. Red blood cells are the cell that carries oxygen. You need that. And they have a tough job at altitude because there isn't enough oxygen to go around. And so what most people do, uh, and most populations do at altitude, you make a lot more red blood cells. Your body responds to the oxygen debt by making more red blood cells. And that's good for a while, but it makes your blood thicker and can lead to altitude sickness. And we still see a lot of altitude sickness in the Andes, for example. They haven't kind of, their bodies haven't figured out how to, to deal with that. In the Himalaya, they don't have this issue of altitude sickness. Why not?

• 24:28Speaker 03

  Because of the allele that, uh, has been, gone to fixation is completely the norm, the norm genetic variant in the Himalaya that helps them deal with oxygen debt without overproducing red blood cells. They produce enough to get, to keep the oxygen going, but not overproduce it and get sick. They also have bigger lungs. They have a bigger spleen, which is this reserve blood, uh, red blood cell tank that we all carry around. So there's a whole bunch of adaptations that go to, to try to get enough oxygen in.

• 24:57Gary O'Reilly?

  So where do the Neanderthals fit into that particular scenario in the Himalayas?

• 25:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I wondered if you wanted to go there, so.

• 25:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Let's do it.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Let's do it.

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Call them out.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  So the first thing you have to understand is that humans historically have slept with anything that they encounter.

• 25:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Don't look at me and say that.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  And so humans, right? Homo sapiens, we evolved in Africa about 300,000 years ago. And as we sort of become so successful, so adaptable, our superpower at full display, we get into Europe, we interact with Neanderthals there. What do we do? We admix with them, to use the sterile scientific term, and we have children. And, um, and we can still see the genetic evidence of that today.

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But a quick question, I have to slip in there. You said 300,000 years ago, we come out of Africa, get into Europe and admix with the Neanderthal. Implies Neanderthals either left Africa earlier or evolved as Neanderthal in Europe.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, we know from DNA testing that pure Africans have zero Neanderthal DNA. So there must have been some deep European origins of the Neanderthal. Is that correct?

• 26:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. Whether it's deeply in Europe or sort of into the Near East is much debated. But yeah, it's outside of Africa. So, you know, humans and Neanderthals, of course, have a common ancestor about 600,000 years ago. Those two branches go their separate ways. Ours in Africa, theirs in the Near East and Europe. And at some point, they become what we would consider to be the Neanderthal gene pool. And when our branch comes back in and intersects them again, we have these matings and this admixture.

• 26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so we are fertile with each other because we have the same common ancestor.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  That's right. And it's such a recent one.

• 26:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Down from the line. And an interesting fact that I discovered in my own work for Starry Messenger, that book, was we grew up with the archetype of this stupid backward Neanderthal.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:05Chuck Nice?

  They're the caveman that knows nothing.

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like that never, that never, you know, stopped dragging its knuckles.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then we find out that black Africans have no Neanderthal blood, yet there's admixtures in current European white people.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  Not just Europeans, by the way.

• 27:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And only then did papers, research papers, start saying how creative and inventive the Neanderthals were. There was a complete shift in the early 1990s. Herman, am I right here? Herman, talk to me, Herman.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's one retelling. I think that's pretty, that's fair to the history of what happened there. I think there was already a reimagining of what Neanderthals were like before that.

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not that I saw. Even Gary Larson was full in on the backward Neanderthal.

• 27:51Chuck Nice?

  Not to mention the Geico guys.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  I would say that populations outside of Africa all have a little bit of Neanderthal in them because as we kind of get out of Africa into the Near East and those intermate, those matings happen, those genes kind of get washed to every population that's kind of downstream with that, right? So Asians, Native Americans will all have a little bit of Neanderthal in them left over from that kind of crossing event that happens in the Near East and Europe.

• 28:20Chuck Nice?

  That makes sense because it's, you know, those were the crossroads. All those areas outside of Africa were actually the crossroads for travel, for human travel. So it kind of makes sense, yeah.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  So there's this great example of another kind of discovery from ancient genome. By the way, all of this is mind blowing stuff. It is, it is from DNA that we've gotten out of fossils, right? Which is sort of, that's, that's

• 28:44Chuck Nice?

  Very Jurassic Park.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  Completely, completely. And we've discovered a whole new species of human ancestor, or human relative, I should say, that's Neanderthal-like in Asia called the Denisovans.

• 28:59Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I've heard about that.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I heard about that. I didn't know anything about that. But so the Denisovans, were they contemporary with the Neanderthal?

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. Kind of Denisovans go one way, humans and Neanderthals the other way. And then Neanderthals and humans split a little bit later. So they're even a kind of more distant relative of us, in a way.

• 29:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just, I'd like, because I'd like it knowing, what's the etymology of Neanderthal? And the etymology of Denisovans?

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Denisovans. So Neanderthals are so named because those initial fossils found in the Neander Valley, and in German, valley is tall. So it's Neanderthal. And that's why it's Neanderthal and not Neanderthal, because T-H-A-L is tall in German. That's if you want to get pedantic.

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is America. We pronounce it how we want.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  That's right. That's right. That's fair. And then, uh, Don't encourage him.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  And then, um, and then Denisovans are found that the site is, the original site is Denisova. It's a Denisova cave in, uh, in Siberia somewhere, I believe.

• 30:04Chuck Nice?

  Hmm, okay.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they had just a couple of finger bones. And those aren't really diagnostic, you can't figure out what species it is just from the bone, from the morphology, the shape of the bones. But they drilled into it, got the DNA out and go, holy, this is a whole other group. This isn't Neanderthals and it's not Homo sapiens, it's something else.

• 30:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  And that was the discovery that there is this, you know, unappreciated species that we didn't even know about.

• 30:29Chuck Nice?

  So they got the DNA from the bone marrow?

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Any of your bone, uh, material will have cells in it. So yeah, that's not just a marrow, but any of it.

• 30:36Chuck Nice?

  I, I, why does DNA last that long? It's a pretty delicate molecule, isn't it?

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, it doesn't last kind of fully intact. So your DNA, if you stretch it, if you took all the DNA in your body and you stretched it out, you'd be dead. That's the first thing you should know.

• 30:49Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  But second of all, uh, it would get to like the moon and back or something like that. All your DNA stretched out. Then we discovered that not only is there this other species of human relative, but there's evidence of mating with them as well.

• 31:03Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  So it wasn't just Neanderthals.

• 31:05Chuck Nice?

  Damn.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  It was also Denisovans. And then you find out that this, this gene variant that has been so key to the success of Himalayan groups. Where did it come from? It came from Denisovans.

• 31:18Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  So, you know, so there were these mating events with Denisovans. That gene variant ends up in the human gene pool sloshed around, doesn't give you any advantage at, at sea level, you know? Only when those populations begin to go up at high altitude does it turn out, oh, by the way, that variant's actually really good at high altitude. And then it becomes the, the variant that everybody has because of the selective process of, you know, reproduction and survival.

• 31:45Chuck Nice?

  So let me ask you this, just for the sake of people being able to visualize what we're talking about.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:52Chuck Nice?

  Because it seems like you're talking about different species. But what I'd like is if you were to take pictures of our DNA and superimpose them, what would that look like and how alike or different would we be? Yeah, so between us and the recent ancestors. So Denisovans, Neanderthals, Homo sapiens, and then you take those pictures, you kind of superimpose them, what would it look like?

• 32:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is exactly what we do when we get the genetics to begin with, to try to make sense of it. The best way to picture it is like a tree, right? So imagine a tree where all the branches are very hard and clustered very tightly around the crown. That is the entirety of the human species over here. And then there's a branch that comes off real low and ends up over here somewhere. That's the Neanderthal branch. And then it's like you discovered, oh, my gosh, I didn't look closely enough. There's a branch that's even lower and goes out even a bit further. And that's the Denisovan branch.

• 32:54Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  Right? And so if you were to overlay the A's, T's, C's and G's of the genome on top of each other, you'd find they're very, very similar. All of those individuals, you have to really compare them at thousands and thousands of base pairs to sort of see that clustering, just because all mammals are pretty similar. All primates are real similar.

• 33:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  You know? And so all these human ancestors and relatives are real similar too.

• 33:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take me back to when we went from grunts to articulate speech.

• 33:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, that's a, that's an amazing.

• 33:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's up with that?

• 33:28Speaker 03

  That's very hard to know for sure.

• 33:36Gary O'Reilly?

  You got Morgan Freeman on me. What happened for us to have grunt versus speech?

• 33:44Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Oh, so the anatomy of that's pretty well known. The anatomy of the vocal tract, for example, has changed, which allows us to have this sort of two compartment vocal tract, right? So your larynx is down here real low.

• 33:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  And that gives you a vertical component to sort of shape the frequencies that come out of, out of your lungs as you make noise. And then you have this horizontal component from your mouth and, and those get shaped differently and give you all the A, E, I, O, U sounds. So we know the anatomy of speech very well. When that evolved.

• 34:15Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Right? That is really hard to know for sure. And in fact, I don't think anybody knows for sure.

• 34:21Chuck Nice?

  Well, we know, we know it had to be at least when Homo sapiens made it with Neanderthals. Because somebody had to say, hey, girl, what's happening? Bring your fine ass on over to this cave right here. Let me holler at you.

• 34:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you Chuck for reenacting.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  It's like we were there.

• 34:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Almost like we were there, yeah.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  They say time travel's not possible, but I don't know. Okay, so.

• 34:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, wait, so but I heard that our ability to form sounds, as you articulately described, the two dimensionality, the frequency and volume and texture of the of our vocalizations, that this was a genetic defect, if you will, from whatever was going on in the grunting community. There was some genetic alteration that changed it.

• 35:17Chuck Nice?

  So wait, this is, we all share this mutation?

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a mutation.

• 35:21Chuck Nice?

  It's a mutation. So everybody else was like, and then somebody was just like, oh dear, you're so gauche. My god.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 35:31Chuck Nice?

  What is it? I mean, seriously, is this how we're going to communicate?

• 35:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we don't want to think of speech as a as a mutation. We want to think of it as a as an adaptation.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe there's no difference.

• 35:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we wanted to be a we wanted to be a feature, not a bug.

• 35:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A feature, exactly.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  So all adaptations start off as mutations. Oh, ah, there's another t-shirt. So, you know, natural selection is the survival of the fittest, but mutation is the arrival of the fittest.

• 36:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh, Metro. Yo, that is dope.

• 36:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 36:07Chuck Nice?

  Another t-shirt.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  We're in the mode.

• 36:10Chuck Nice?

  The arrival of the fittest.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  You need variation, you need mutations for natural selection to go, oh, yep, that's the one that's going to work here, and that one's not, right? If there's no variation, if there's no mutation, there's no way for natural selection to happen.

• 36:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Let's look at this situation of adaption of our environment.

• 36:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Adaptation.

• 36:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, the adaptation.

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you said adaption, that's not a word.

• 36:52Gary O'Reilly?

  I did, I know, I'm making them up as I go along.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're embarrassing your fellow Brits.

• 36:54Gary O'Reilly?

  It's our bloody language, but use it as we wish.

• 37:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're sitting next to me, you are not uttering adaption.

• 37:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh man, I'll see you after class, sir.

• 37:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go.

• 37:09Gary O'Reilly?

  So, our adaption

• 37:14Gary O'Reilly?

  is being forced to speed up because of the environments we're being pushed into. Out of rural farming, into town cities, and cities in particular.

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At a rapid rate, that is.

• 37:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, as a rapid rate. But are we now being mismatched? Are we being confronted with circumstances that, you know what? This body is avowed for this environment, not that environment?

• 37:34Chuck Nice?

  I think the proof is already evident that we are mismatched. And I think it's more not the... I'm sorry, Herman, I'm answering the question.

• 37:43Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, no, so Herman's got an answer for this.

• 37:44Chuck Nice?

  I do this sometimes. But I think it's more not the circumstance, but technology and the circumstance together.

• 37:52Gary O'Reilly?

  So, for instance, in disease. We have diseases now which are chronic and major. But how long ago were they not, Herman?

• 38:01Speaker 03

  Oh, that's, yeah, so the populations I live with, hunter-gatherer groups and even farming groups that I work with today, they are heart disease free, diabetes free. So the things that we're gonna die from, they're protected against. And of course, the flip side is the things that we're protected against because of antibiotics and vaccines, that kind of stuff, really gets them. Um, but you know, these lifestyle diseases were only an issue in the last couple hundred years.

• 38:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Herman, if they're an isolated community.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That means there are no outside

• 38:31Speaker 03

  Influences?

• 38:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, viruses, bacteria, other ailments that could hit, influence them, until they meet someone from the outside.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  Such as yourself.

• 38:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  How many indigenous people have you killed?

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  That's a lovely question, Neil. I really appreciate you bringing that up.

• 38:54Gary O'Reilly?

  See, at least he's blamed you and not the British. Because normally I am go to for that.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  Blaming you guys. It's time to blame somebody else. Yeah, but you know, so that but that question raises the point that I think people get wrong all the time, which is people think that there that any human population is ever isolated. That's never the case. Right? I mean, there are always interactions. There's always gene flow and people flow and migration and movement. So there are no isolated groups anymore. Even these groups that we work with who are hunting and gathering or farming, it isn't that they don't interact with people who aren't. It's just that they like to keep their their their old ways. They're basically the Pennsylvania Dutch of Africa. No, that's exactly it, actually. That's exactly what it's like. They they live in a world that they interact with people all the time and but they prefer to keep their own culture. So you raise this issue about accelerated adaptation.

• 39:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 39:41Speaker 03

  It's the brain, man, because we have our brains are born unfinished, right? We learn, we've created this entire cultural inheritance that we each inherit and learn, you know, it takes you 15, 20 years to learn it all. So you could be a proper adult, a functioning adult. And so we have all this, and that cultural evolution can happen much faster than our biological evolution can. So we have this sort of these two parallel tracks happening all the time. It's really fun thing about humans.

• 40:11Gary O'Reilly?

  There was a study done in comparison on back in the day when there were bus drivers and conductors on board. And the health of the driver as opposed to the conductor, even though they go to the same place, they travel together all the time.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  They breathe the same air.

• 40:29Gary O'Reilly?

  They breathe the same air. They see the same people. One is sedentary, the other is obviously mobile, stamping tickets and checking up and down on the on the levels of the bus. These are situations now that we have not really been evolved to have a sedentary lifestyle. You talk about the hunter gatherers in Africa. So what are the overall health implications for modern health now that we're finding ourselves mismatched with?

• 40:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was a seminal study in the 1950s showing that the drivers who sat all day ended up getting heart attacks at a kind of scary rate.

• 41:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  Their buddies who were walking up and down the aisles didn't, had healthy hearts. And so that was one of the early clues that physical activity, daily physical activity, is absolutely essential for keeping your heart healthy. Well, why is that? Well, because we've evolved for hundreds of thousands of years into an active lifestyle. That's the way our bodies are built. That's the sort of the lifestyle our bodies expect.

• 41:30Gary O'Reilly?

  So you've got paleo diets. There's no way we're going back to a paleolithic lifestyle.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  No.

• 41:36Gary O'Reilly?

  So what's our answer here?

• 41:38Speaker 03

  The London Busted is a great example, right? Because you have the benefits of activity without having to, you know, cosplay as a Neanderthal or something like that. It's an example of how you can have physical activity in your daily life. You know, you guys are New Yorkers. You guys walk around the city and get lots of physical activity.

• 41:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We meet our step minimum every day.

• 41:59Chuck Nice?

  Right. And it's not just the steps. The last study that came out about New Yorkers who tend to be thinner than most other places in the country. It's the pace at which New Yorkers walk as well. New Yorkers tend to walk much faster than any other place. So the two together, the fact that they walk everywhere and they walk briskly is what makes them.

• 42:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're in a hurry even when we don't need to be.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  There's a lovely study from the 70s by this husband and wife team. They looked at the average walking pace of people down sidewalks and how big the city was. They went all over the world to do this. And the bigger, more denser your city is, the faster you walk.

• 42:35Chuck Nice?

  Oh, cool. Okay, that makes sense.

• 42:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Herman, the history of anthropology as applied properly or improperly on our species or on our populations, in almost every case, led to some legislation, some laws related to those conclusions, be it to justify slavery, be it to limit immigration. So is there a policy implication that your work would bring to the front that is either progressive or regressive in the history of this exercise?

• 43:14Speaker 03

  I think it does have big societal sort of implications, right? When we think about how the body works and we have a fluency in how our different systems work, we use that fluency with how our bodies work to understand diversity. I think that absolutely it's going to. And what it's going to do is it's going to inform how we move ahead from, you know, the really old school ways of thinking about the body. We're very genetic determinist, right? We move into the 1900s and even recent times and it's very environmental. You know, it's all nurture and the nurture nature debate. And I think we're moving to a third period here where we're in a personalized era, right?

• 43:55Speaker 03

  Whether it's personalized genetics or it's personalized ways of thinking about my health, right? And if we

• 44:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Personalized diet even perhaps.

• 44:03Speaker 03

  Personalized diet. And if we leave that discussion just purely to the influencers or purely to, you know, the political class that doesn't have any fluency in how the body works or these sort of old school ideas about these sort of caricatures about our diversity, we're going to be in real trouble. So I think that the book does kind of help inform those big discussions we're having right now. Look, whether it's IQ, whether it's sex and gender, whether it's health and vaccines, whether it's, you know, all of these issues that are right, you know, in front of us today, they all fundamentally rest on how we understand how our bodies work and how our bodies work differently. And so, you know, the book isn't trying to get anybody to, you know, I'm not trying to make anybody think like I think,

• 44:46Speaker 03

  but what I do want to have is people, a common evidence base for us to have those discussions, a fluency that we can have these discussions usefully and meaningfully. So I think there are societal implications. I think the way that they shake out are going to be, hopefully make things better for everybody.

• 45:02Chuck Nice?

  And because of that, I'm cutting your funding. That's it. You no longer have a dime.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would laugh harder if it was.

• 45:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd say if it wasn't so true. If it weren't so tragic and true. So Herman, thank you for returning to StarTalk.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 45:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh, we miss you.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  This was a fun conversation, guys. Thanks.

• 45:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We miss you. You have a unique combination of expertise that deeply informs what we care about here on StarTalk Special Edition. So that means we want to sort of have access to you further going forward.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Hey, I'm always happy to be your evolutionary anthropologist on a call. I'm here.

• 45:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody should have ice ahead. Yeah. Now you say it, I want one. Dude, delight to speak to you. Thanks for enlightening us yet again.

• 45:53Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 45:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. And of course, we're all going to look for your book, Adaptable: How Your Unique Body Really Works and Why Biology Unites Us.

• 46:04Speaker 03

  All right.

• 46:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The word unite is something we need today. So thank you for being a part of that conversation. This has been StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, as a way to keep looking up.