Welcome to you stuff you should know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry, puzzling us as always with their jibber jabber, Wait jars. That was funny. Should we say what happened? No? No? I used to be leieve it mysterious al right, like whether Jerry exists or not? Oh, she exists. You know a lot of people out there and not convinced. Yeah. Still even though she's we've shown pictures of her with her face blurred, could be a workaday actress. She's appeared at scores of live events and met people in person, same actress but with like a gig. And she even spoke on our Guatemala episodes. That was Stanley Kubrick's doing. How are you sir? Good? Good? I'm excited about this one. This is Nieto. Are you a Kins selection? I thought it was you know me, like any you bring up the name Charles Darwin and you just see my face light up. Yeah, so you know that? Um that How Stuff Works trivia event that you and longer hosted. You guys had some hard questions, but one that my team got right. It was a sixth part question, yes, and there was a couple of tough ones in there, but it was Charles Darwin or Chuck D from Public Enemy Charles D or Chuck D. And then we named off five or six things. I think it was six, and it was basically, who was it Charles D or Chuck D? Yeah, like, who's the peskytarian? You don't know? Well we did. It was Chuck D who married his first cousin, Charles Darwin. That one I definitely knew, because I remember Darwin was kind of anxious as he was learning about evolution and natural selection in genetics that he had married his first cousin. He started to get kind of worried about his kid. Yeah, he said, should I marry her? And then he said it was Jennifer Connelly. She's beautiful. Where did you pull that one from? Well? She played Darwin's wife in the Darwin movie. Oh, well that makes a lot more sense. Had I known that, I would have been like, great reference. Sorry, man, he's like, I gotta marry her? Did you see her? And uh? Who played Darwin? Paul Bettanya, Well, he was her husband already were they married. I don't know if they are not anymore, but they were for a while. Okay, whatever became of him, he was great and he's around good. Nobody's treading the bowlds. Oh yeah, I'll but he is too. It sounds like something do Uh. I didn't even get to say that Jennifer Connelly movie. I was gonna say proof. Nah, let's just move on. What was it? I can't think of the name of it. The Darren Aronofsky. Uh oh, Requiem for a Dream Yeah. Yeah, it's like I gotta marry here. Did you see her in recrect for a dream Man? That was a That was a crazy movie, great movie, but not for the faint of heart. No, no, so Chuck. We've got a whole evolution suite going on here, and this contributes to evolution natural selection. We've covered Charles Darwin, the man himself, that's right. Um, we've done evolved in isolation to put together an extinction. Yes, bam, that's probably all of them. But um, this one's kind of like a nuanced version of it of the evolution suite, of the idea of evolution, but it actually is a fulcrum or lever something on which a buttress the the the whole idea of evolution and natural selection and what drives it or if it's even real kind of swings. It's easy to overlook, but there's a real problem. Like Darwin had all this great stuff laid out with his theory of evolution by natural selection, and um, it basically goes as everybody knows, a little something like this A one and to do so, I wish we had a natural selection song we could play boom uh. Well, it goes like this. Animals need to reproduce for the species to survive, and it's hard sometimes for little eggs to survive harsh environments and seeds and things. So they make lots and lots of them. That's right, that's part one. And they make lots and lots of them because a lot of them don't survive. Like you said, um, but a lot of these things that try to reproduce don't have the good genes, right, so they fail to reproduce. They've got tough skins, not Levi's, so they're right, So the tough skins tend to die out right. Instead, the levies continue on because they've got the good genes. So therefore they are more apt to survive and reproduce and be successful than they are the tuskan counterparts. So what we have there is called survival of the fittest. You are reproductively fit if you are likely to go on and bear fruit as it were. Yeah, baby fruit. Darwin realized early on to the variation was a big key to all this. Um. You take two sets of pigs and they have baby pigs, They're not all going to be identical. Some of those pigs will have little, seemingly insignificant details about themselves. Brown spots maybe, And but it turns out that brown spots drive the lady pigs wild. It might be that easy. So this guy's mating left and right and has a bunch of kids, so his brown spots make him reproductively fit. That's right. What looks or not even looks like what could be a random variation could really lead to the survival of that pig and maybe an entire species. Yeah. I've heard this really interesting UM article on Nautilus I think recently, and it was basically the idea that the human body is just a hackathon of Well, we need to fix this problem, so let's come up with this or they humans started standing up on two legs, so we need to fix it with this um and but if you stem back and look at it, the human bodies, is this really cluji thing held together with like duct tape and bubblegum right, um like a v W you buck um and uh. The the author interviewed like I think ten different biologists and said, you know, what's something you would change about the uh, the human body to improve it. That was basically just the hack. It was pretty interesting. That's awesome. See if I can find it. Is that going to be in your best things? I've read this week post blog post. I think so maybe it should be. And you read it while you were working out on your Nautilus machine. Now I read it on Nautilus website. Got you and they have a clever website. It's and a U T I L dot us. Oh see what they do? Yeah, so it's not a lie. Dot us are not told dot us not till Yes. Okay, so you talked about fitness. The more offspring you have, the more fit you are as a parent and as a mammal or animal or whatever. You've hit the nautilus so often that you're just totally fit. If you've had a bunch of kids. That's right, because uh, as we all know, not all, not of your genetic material goes into each one of your little babies. Because you you know, you have sex with someone else, you gotta share, you share compromise. So in order to increase the chances of one of your little babies having all of your genetic material, you need just need to more and more babies. It's amazing. That's weird, um, because I always thought that the you're the amount of genes that you pass on with set like or whatever went into your kid, right, Well, yeah, but you have sex, and of these genes goes in you have sex again, another set of your genes might get picked. I've never heard it put like that. That makes sense, though. I always thought the more like the drive to keep having kids and and reproduce was two because you were going to have fifty percent of your genes out there in the world no matter what. But all those kids could like you know, bite the dust. And so the more you have, the more insurance you have that those go on. Never thought of it the way you just but the upshot of all this and by extension, the upshot of Darwin's entire theory of evolution by natural selection driven by variation is that you any any any trait that an organism has that improves its capability to reproduce or its likelihood of reproducing, is going to be selected for, and that's going to lead to the evolution of the species. Right, And that basically the whole point, this is the unspoken part, The whole point of everything is to reproduce, to pass your genes along. That was Richard dawkins contribution with the selfish gene. Right. The problem is, and Darwin saw this while he was coming up with his theory um was that there is behavior found in nature that does the exact opposite of that, where organisms choose it seems to live a life where they don't reproduce and instead help others of their kind reproduce, which is called biologically altruistic behavior. And it makes zero sense whatsoever under um Darwin's theory of evolution. And it's just been a puzzle and a challenge to the theory ever since he first noticed that. Well, I think that's a great place for a break, my friend, and we'll talk about this weird thing after we get back. So Darwin Um talked a lot about competition. That was one of the big keys to his theory working is unfortunately, in nature, it can't be like elementary school field day where everyone gets a participant ribbon. Um. There's gonna be winners and losers, and the winners will go on to survive and the losers might not. But where this wrinkle comes in is what you mentioned before the break, biological altruism. Um. It's remarkable that there are, and we'll talk about some of them, that there are species that don't even try to reproduce. So yeah, so well there's members of certain species, right, yeah, So a really good example is the b right, A drone is a female and a female that I think, and and some be species are totally sterile, so they can't reproduce anyway. But even if some of them could, they don't. Instead, they go out and collect honey, or they collect the nectar they make honey, They choose the pollen and spit it back up, and then do that a bunch of times, and all of a sudden you have honey, which, as everybody knows, is nothing but be vomit um. They tend to the offspring the young, they bring food to the queen, who is the only one to reproduce. Doesn't make any sense whatsoever. They serve the queen because not only does that. So there's there's two things that play here that make the whole thing weird. One, if an individual organism is basically here to pass along its genes, then why would any individual organism not attempt to do that? Right? And Then secondly, and this is the real mystery, how could these traits that um that the organism is driven by to be helpful and altruistic rather than be reproductive. How could that possibly be passed on from one generation to the next If that organism isn't passing that trait along, it's a big question mark. Man, Well it was, and it's not proven. But in the nineteen sixties there was a kid in school. It would later go on to be a very famous evolutionary biologist, but he was a graduate student in the sixties named William Hamilton's. He said, you know what I got this idea. It's called inclusive fitness or kin selection k I n Jerry selection. Not like a kindall, but kin selection. Inclusive fitness. Basically, Uh, here's what's going on here. It's not random when you see in nature this altruistic behavior of a part of a species, of a member of family helping. Most times they're helping their family. Yeah, this is actually supported by some studies. Very famously, it was supported by a study of um. Well, the number of studies of Florida scrub jays, which are pretty little blue birds, and some members of the Florida scrub jays species UM don't mate when it comes time to mate during mating season, right. Instead, they help um gather food, They help defend nests and protect the eggs. They helped build their like here, let me build you a little sex room, brother, and you know, I'm gonna put a tie on the hen nesto later if you're tired. But you just go in there and do your business. Hugs hugs brother deeply. He's like the whole family's proud of. But I'm gonna go out here and not have sex. I'm just gonna stay in guard and and maybe listen. That's that's the scrub jays and exactly. Uh, it's remarkable. So it doesn't make any sense, right, No, it doesn't until you investigate it through the lens of kin selection and so UM. This one study in particular UM that followed scrub jays as they didn't mate and instead carried out this altruistic helping behavior. They found that of the seventy four relationships that were observed, forty eight assisted their parents, gross uh sixteen helped their father again, Grody uh seven assisted a brother, two assisted their mother, and then one one out of all seventy four helped the stranger. And you can imagine that bird was probably just a little dim witted. Well, I was about to say, I thought it was confused maybe, but like you're my brother, right, or the researchers were confused and didn't realize that this was their close kind. But the point is this altruistic behavior. The study supports the idea that the organism, the animal, the person whoever, is helping somebody related to them, and therefore it does make sense an evolution because the person is helping ensure that some of their genes, not necessarily their specific genes they are passing down through reproduction, but some of their genes through their direct blood relative. Um, they're helping make sure that those get passed long and then then altruism starts to make sense. It's amazing. Uh you want to hear an ever evolutionary biologist joke about this? Yeah, I would gladly die for two brothers or four cousins or eight second cousins. That's that's pretty good. Yeah, that makes sense. I read that and I thought that kind of describes it perfectly. It's well, it's not very funny because it's an evolutionary biology jokes, but it does describe it. Uh. So this happened in the nineteen sixties, and like I said, Hamilton's went on to write books and he actually came up with math it, he says, proves this to be the case. Yeah, because he used letters instead of numbers, So you know, it's legit. It's actually a pretty smart little equation. It's called Hamilton's rule. I like it. Do you like it? Yeah? I mean it makes sense, it's distinct. I can understand it. You can dance to it. I'm right, it's got a good beat. I'm not threatened by it. So I like it. All right, Well, should we talk about it? I know it's a little uh esoteric to talk about a math formula. Uh is easier looked at? Well, just close your eyes, everybody and imagine this. Okay, uh, well, in math terms, what we're talking about, it's an individual's relative genetic representation in the gene pool in the next in the following generation. So if you literally look at it, it's be the letter B greater than the letter C. Over are right, So in this case, the B is greater than So that's the benefit, which I guess would be the likelihood that their gene were passed down. Okay, that would be the benefit. So the benefit is greater than the cost incurred by the person or the organism not reproducing, divided by the relationship. Right, So the closer you are, the likelier it is that you're going to enjoy a benefit over the cost. Yeah, there was. There's a PhD uh, a PhD um online named Bjorn b Ms. It was much smarter than me because I had a little trouble wrapping my brain around around how this math proves it um and and we'll we'll get into the alternative theory here in a minute, proves it over the alternative theory of group success um. And he basically said the altruistics the altruist act must be at least double the receiver's fitness in order for that altruist to gain representation in the next generation. Yeah, and and and it makes sense. So here's how it makes sense. If you, um are going to have two kids. Um, if you did reproduce and you were going to have two kids, but instead of having those two kids, you helped your brother and he was able to have three. There you go. Yeah, they I saw. So I saw Hamilton's rule expressed differently somewhere else, and it made it easier for me to understand. Let's hear your version RB minus C is greater than zero. So if the relationship coefficient um times the benefit minus the cost is greater than zero, then go for it, says nature. Then it makes sense altruistically. All right, Well, let's my math brain hurts. So let's take a break. And uh, we even bragged about how we got that. I sort of get it. We'll take a break and talk more about some more animals who do this and the idea of group selection. All right, So we mentioned the scrub J, the scrubby little scrub J who likes to build sex dungeons or his family. Uh. We talked about bees. They are also ants and wasps and other insects. Who served the queen. Um these workers. It's sort of like insects socialism, almost working side by side for the benefit of the group. Forgetting my own yeah, forget my own reproduction. I want the colony to survive, and this is my job, and so I'm gonna do it well. Um. Another example is, uh, some animals have a call. They will signal out, hey, there's an intruder coming family toward the house. And I might be giving up my own life by drawing attention to myself, but I'm still going to do that now. I actually did see an explain for that that doesn't have to do with actual altruism merging selection them. Among mere cats, they have sentinels. Anytime a gang of mere cats is out hunting, one of them is just standing up, looking very cute in all directions, and when they see danger, they call out to a warning to the rest of the group. But um, this one study that included like two thousand hours of of UM watching and observing these mere cats found that not one sentinel was killed during this time. And as a matter of fact, they were the ones that get away first because they're the ones watching, so they see first and then they call but it's actually that call is not much of a cost to the individual. Well, that's a mere cat. They're super smart. What about the dumb squirrel? I don't know. I mean maybe, although mere cats do very famously engage in altruistic behavior themselves. Like mere cat pups can't feed themselves, but apparently they can squeal and beg and um. Most of the time they will be fed, but the mere cat feeding them is not necessarily and in most cases isn't their biological parents. It's somebody else. And mere cats definitely have that whole village to raise a child thing going on for sure. Um, And it makes a lot of sense through kin selection and not another way. It's interesting. It's hard not to think of politics when you're reading this stuff in the animal world. You know, what's a good model for It depends on what you think. Well, I mean, it's a good model to understand it, I should say, yeah, I saw. I had a this funny. I was driving home from the grocery store the other day and there was a major intersection, uh near my house where the traffic lights were out, like four four away intersection and each one had their own turn lane, and it was rush hour, and I just laughed looking around like the American political system was entirely represented. Oh yeah, man. Some people just barreled through, didn't care. Some people, uh just wouldn't go. They were just like frozen and fear. Some people are like no you go, well, no you go? Will you go? And then someone behind one Honker, was like all right, I'll go, And you could just really kind of see everything, just like it really opened my eyes. And I think, I don't know what you would call me, because I'm the by the book guy. I'm like, blinking yellow doesn't mean stop, it means proceeds slowly, cautiously. But one was red and one is yellow. Everybody was stopping because it was just so crowded, exactly. Yeah. And there's definitely people who do see it the way you do and then go ahead and do that. But it does seem like humans have recently decided like, no, if it's red, blinking red and blinking yellow, the people with the yellow are going to stop eventually and let the people with the red go altruistic act. Very interesting, all right, So let's uh we teased group uh multi level selection or group selection. This is something Darwin talked a little bit about in the descentive man, but he is main focus was on the individual, but he dabbled in it. Uh, he dabbled in group play. But this is a theory where there are these altruistic traits. No one's denying that. We see it all over the animal kingdom. But it's not necessarily toward a family. It's just for the good of the whole group. Yeah. So the the whole idea of kin selection, apparently UM has been challenged, although not widely challenged UM by the idea that if you really look at some species, the species that are closely related, some of them don't do anything altruistically, and then others that do engage in altruism don't necessarily do it for close relations UM. So if that's the case, then the whole idea of kin selection is challenged because the basis of kin selection is that these are UM organisms helping to pass on some of their related traits that their relatives are passing along through reproduction. And if that's not the case, then that's that's the question. Mark returns. Well, yeah, and then there's the whole thing that there are in in groups of animals, some are related, some aren't. So it's hard to tell where one where group behavior stops and family behavior begins. So you have a lot of biologists saying this is just sort of semantical. We shouldn't be arguing about this. It's sort of the same their equivalent basically, helping the family is helping the group. Right. But then a few years back, very famous um aunt man EO. Wilson, who actually awesome guy, Like as far as scientists go, this guy should have statues erected to him. He's a very brave scientist. He's known as the father of sociobiology. Right. Um. He also, when he was a teenager, was the first to observe and um study fire ants when they just happened to be transported to South America as ballot or from South America to New Orleans as ballast in a ship. He happened to notice him for the first time fire ants in the Southeast red ants. He was there when they when they came about, and he ended up they didn't originate here, No, they were brought as like as in scoops of dirt from South America and they just took over. But he was a teenager and he was studying him. So he's a really great scientist, but he um has uh attracted the ire of his fellow scientists by saying Kin selections bunk. Yeah, he reversed his position though, right. Yeah, he was an early and longtime champion of of Kin's selection and he he apparently changed his way of thinking and now says it's group selection instead. Yeah. And Richard Dawkins, we mentioned him earlier, he's uh. He fired back at E. O. Wilson was basically, you know what, dude, you're wrong. I know you wrote a book about it. But he said, there are quote pervasive theoretical errors in your books are and Wilson's Is he still alive? I think he has. Dawkins isn't Wilson's old though, because eighty five when in two thousand and eleven, so he'd be no, you know, right, he maybe alive. I'm not sure if he's not or if he is. Well, Dawkins is. Dawkins is very famous for his freeloader effect too, Yeah, as part of the selfish gene. And that's the problem. I think that's one of the reasons why E. O. Wilson has attracted so much iger from the scientific community because a lot of scientists built their careers on things like Kin's selection and explaining it. Um. And they were doing so following in the wake of E. O. Wilson, who was a huge prostalytizer for it, and then all of a sudden, this prophet like turns around on him towards the end of his life and after his own career, you know, um, and he a lot of people were ticked off by it, But it makes sense the group selection doesn't. Basically, it's saying, like you said, a lot of people are like, this is just semantics, we shouldn't be arguing about it. But group selection says it's not the relatives that these organisms are looking out for. It's their group, it's their species. They're making sure their species continue along, and that's enough for an altruistic act to exist. Yeah. And so, like I said, Um, with all these other scientists that were upset by this, Dawkins is included. And one reason Dawkins would be upset about that is because he wrote the Selfish gene, which helps explain kin selection. Yeah. Uh and altruism and uh yeah. He was taking shots at E. O. Wilson and the press over the whole thing. Yeah, and his freeloader effect, which I mentioned a few minutes ago, was basically he said, you know what um you get, you call it a mutant freeloader. One of these freeloaders can take it down, take down this altruistic society or species because they're just lazing about and they have more time to have sex and reproduce, and they can reproduce faster. So everyone else is out there working for everybody altruistically. His freeloaders just having sex and having babies. So that's gonna be the gene that gets carried down the most. Which, yeah, I guess that supports can selection. I don't know. I'm not sure either. I don't have to read the selfish gene and find out. Yeah, I just thought it was interesting. Yeah I do too. But then also chuck um with the whole idea as well of whether kin selection or group selection explains anything. If you are helping somebody, If an organism helps UH related or just a group organism reproduce, and that organism who gave up reproducing was going to have two kids but only helps that other organism have one, then isn't that a net loss for the species or the family. Well, yeah, but I think that's what that math formula was aught about all about, is as it has to be double or else it's not gonna keep happening. I got so. I wonder then if there's been study that shows, yes, it's typically double. I think that's what he said. The math proved crazy stuff, biologists going nuts on one another and we're just sitting on the sidelines, and even pop coin talking about it. If you want to know more about sociobiology and other stuff like that, including kin selection or group selection, you could type in kin k I N into the search part how stuff works dot com and it will bring up a pretty interesting article. Since I said, Ken, it's time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this companion to the previous listener Maile Finland rules, and I'm gonna call this Sweden rules. Starting some static on more crazy Scandinavians. Hey, guys, a long time listener, just finish with the dark money and want to give me some insight about our socialist paradise of Sweden. Yes, we do pay quite a bit of tax. A regular Joe pays about of his or her income as tax. If you earn more, you pay more tax. There's also a VAT tax and everything between six percent on food to on everything else. So yes, we never stopped paying the man. So what do we get, Well, we're guaranteed healthcare. There's a small fee about ten dollars for a medical situation, but after that it's all free X rays, cancer treatments, it's all free. Also, you can, if you have enough visits to the hospital. I guess you get a punch card. You get a free card, which means you don't even have to pay that ten dollars or pay for medicine. Sweet deal, he says. Uh, school is naturally totally free. We actually even get a salary for attending university about three hundred dollars a month is a stipend, all for free. We can also take out a student loan with very affordable payment plans that don't kick in until after you graduated. Uh makes it common. Uh, that makes it so it's common for all people of all ages to go to university. And lastly, we have kids. When you have kids, the parents can take out four hundred and eighty days of paid to pattorney leave. Oh yeah, the US is so far behind other industrialized nation. Yeah, they're like two weeks and then good luck, get back to work, and we need you responding to emails the whole time too. Uh if they must say, our company had a more generously than that, So I'm talking about us even for dad's Yeah, um, if they take an equal amount, they get a bonus payment. Um. After that, there's a system of kindergartens that takes care of the kids until they reach school age. Again free. We do have some problems, of course. A lot of the health care has been privatized in recent years, which hasn't been all great. Also, there's a movement of xenophobia sweeping the nation, fueled by the terrible refuge refugee situation in Europe. The third largest political party has its roots and far right, anti democratic, even Nazi movements, is what he says. That's really surprising because usually they point to the rise of things like that as the result of economic woes. Yeah, it doesn't sound like Sweden has too many economic woes, so I mean, what accounts for that? I don't know. Follow up, he says, on the whole, it's great place to live. Thanks for the show. Entertainment at its very fineness, and that is from a gurn Dextrom great name, g B. He said. If I can pronounce his name, I get a prize. Canna send you as the film because you got it right. That'd be great. Thanks Garen, I'd like your other film. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff podcast the house. Stuff Works dot Com has always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com

Welcome to you stuff you should know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry, puzzling us as always with their jibber jabber, Wait jars. That was funny. Should we say what happened? No? No? I used to be leieve it mysterious al right, like whether Jerry exists or not? Oh, she exists. You know a lot of people out there and not convinced. Yeah. Still even though she's we've shown pictures of her with her face blurred, could be a workaday actress. She's appeared at scores of live events and met people in person, same actress but with like a gig. And she even spoke on our Guatemala episodes. That was Stanley Kubrick's doing. How are you sir? Good? Good? I'm excited about this one. This is Nieto. Are you a Kins selection? I thought it was you know me, like any you bring up the name Charles Darwin and you just see my face light up. Yeah, so you know that? Um that How Stuff Works trivia event that you and longer hosted. You guys had some hard questions, but one that my team got right. It was a sixth part question, yes, and there was a couple of tough ones in there, but it was Charles Darwin or Chuck D from Public Enemy Charles D or Chuck D. And then we named off five or six things. I think it was six, and it was basically, who was it Charles D or Chuck D? Yeah, like, who's the peskytarian? You don't know? Well we did. It was Chuck D who married his first cousin, Charles Darwin. That one I definitely knew, because I remember Darwin was kind of anxious as he was learning about evolution and natural selection in genetics that he had married his first cousin. He started to get kind of worried about his kid. Yeah, he said, should I marry her? And then he said it was Jennifer Connelly. She's beautiful. Where did you pull that one from? Well? She played Darwin's wife in the Darwin movie. Oh, well that makes a lot more sense. Had I known that, I would have been like, great reference. Sorry, man, he's like, I gotta marry her? Did you see her? And uh? Who played Darwin? Paul Bettanya, Well, he was her husband already were they married. I don't know if they are not anymore, but they were for a while. Okay, whatever became of him, he was great and he's around good. Nobody's treading the bowlds. Oh yeah, I'll but he is too. It sounds like something do Uh. I didn't even get to say that Jennifer Connelly movie. I was gonna say proof. Nah, let's just move on. What was it? I can't think of the name of it. The Darren Aronofsky. Uh oh, Requiem for a Dream Yeah. Yeah, it's like I gotta marry here. Did you see her in recrect for a dream Man? That was a That was a crazy movie, great movie, but not for the faint of heart. No, no, so Chuck. We've got a whole evolution suite going on here, and this contributes to evolution natural selection. We've covered Charles Darwin, the man himself, that's right. Um, we've done evolved in isolation to put together an extinction. Yes, bam, that's probably all of them. But um, this one's kind of like a nuanced version of it of the evolution suite, of the idea of evolution, but it actually is a fulcrum or lever something on which a buttress the the the whole idea of evolution and natural selection and what drives it or if it's even real kind of swings. It's easy to overlook, but there's a real problem. Like Darwin had all this great stuff laid out with his theory of evolution by natural selection, and um, it basically goes as everybody knows, a little something like this A one and to do so, I wish we had a natural selection song we could play boom uh. Well, it goes like this. Animals need to reproduce for the species to survive, and it's hard sometimes for little eggs to survive harsh environments and seeds and things. So they make lots and lots of them. That's right, that's part one. And they make lots and lots of them because a lot of them don't survive. Like you said, um, but a lot of these things that try to reproduce don't have the good genes, right, so they fail to reproduce. They've got tough skins, not Levi's, so they're right, So the tough skins tend to die out right. Instead, the levies continue on because they've got the good genes. So therefore they are more apt to survive and reproduce and be successful than they are the tuskan counterparts. So what we have there is called survival of the fittest. You are reproductively fit if you are likely to go on and bear fruit as it were. Yeah, baby fruit. Darwin realized early on to the variation was a big key to all this. Um. You take two sets of pigs and they have baby pigs, They're not all going to be identical. Some of those pigs will have little, seemingly insignificant details about themselves. Brown spots maybe, And but it turns out that brown spots drive the lady pigs wild. It might be that easy. So this guy's mating left and right and has a bunch of kids, so his brown spots make him reproductively fit. That's right. What looks or not even looks like what could be a random variation could really lead to the survival of that pig and maybe an entire species. Yeah. I've heard this really interesting UM article on Nautilus I think recently, and it was basically the idea that the human body is just a hackathon of Well, we need to fix this problem, so let's come up with this or they humans started standing up on two legs, so we need to fix it with this um and but if you stem back and look at it, the human bodies, is this really cluji thing held together with like duct tape and bubblegum right, um like a v W you buck um and uh. The the author interviewed like I think ten different biologists and said, you know, what's something you would change about the uh, the human body to improve it. That was basically just the hack. It was pretty interesting. That's awesome. See if I can find it. Is that going to be in your best things? I've read this week post blog post. I think so maybe it should be. And you read it while you were working out on your Nautilus machine. Now I read it on Nautilus website. Got you and they have a clever website. It's and a U T I L dot us. Oh see what they do? Yeah, so it's not a lie. Dot us are not told dot us not till Yes. Okay, so you talked about fitness. The more offspring you have, the more fit you are as a parent and as a mammal or animal or whatever. You've hit the nautilus so often that you're just totally fit. If you've had a bunch of kids. That's right, because uh, as we all know, not all, not of your genetic material goes into each one of your little babies. Because you you know, you have sex with someone else, you gotta share, you share compromise. So in order to increase the chances of one of your little babies having all of your genetic material, you need just need to more and more babies. It's amazing. That's weird, um, because I always thought that the you're the amount of genes that you pass on with set like or whatever went into your kid, right, Well, yeah, but you have sex, and of these genes goes in you have sex again, another set of your genes might get picked. I've never heard it put like that. That makes sense, though. I always thought the more like the drive to keep having kids and and reproduce was two because you were going to have fifty percent of your genes out there in the world no matter what. But all those kids could like you know, bite the dust. And so the more you have, the more insurance you have that those go on. Never thought of it the way you just but the upshot of all this and by extension, the upshot of Darwin's entire theory of evolution by natural selection driven by variation is that you any any any trait that an organism has that improves its capability to reproduce or its likelihood of reproducing, is going to be selected for, and that's going to lead to the evolution of the species. Right, And that basically the whole point, this is the unspoken part, The whole point of everything is to reproduce, to pass your genes along. That was Richard dawkins contribution with the selfish gene. Right. The problem is, and Darwin saw this while he was coming up with his theory um was that there is behavior found in nature that does the exact opposite of that, where organisms choose it seems to live a life where they don't reproduce and instead help others of their kind reproduce, which is called biologically altruistic behavior. And it makes zero sense whatsoever under um Darwin's theory of evolution. And it's just been a puzzle and a challenge to the theory ever since he first noticed that. Well, I think that's a great place for a break, my friend, and we'll talk about this weird thing after we get back. So Darwin Um talked a lot about competition. That was one of the big keys to his theory working is unfortunately, in nature, it can't be like elementary school field day where everyone gets a participant ribbon. Um. There's gonna be winners and losers, and the winners will go on to survive and the losers might not. But where this wrinkle comes in is what you mentioned before the break, biological altruism. Um. It's remarkable that there are, and we'll talk about some of them, that there are species that don't even try to reproduce. So yeah, so well there's members of certain species, right, yeah, So a really good example is the b right, A drone is a female and a female that I think, and and some be species are totally sterile, so they can't reproduce anyway. But even if some of them could, they don't. Instead, they go out and collect honey, or they collect the nectar they make honey, They choose the pollen and spit it back up, and then do that a bunch of times, and all of a sudden you have honey, which, as everybody knows, is nothing but be vomit um. They tend to the offspring the young, they bring food to the queen, who is the only one to reproduce. Doesn't make any sense whatsoever. They serve the queen because not only does that. So there's there's two things that play here that make the whole thing weird. One, if an individual organism is basically here to pass along its genes, then why would any individual organism not attempt to do that? Right? And Then secondly, and this is the real mystery, how could these traits that um that the organism is driven by to be helpful and altruistic rather than be reproductive. How could that possibly be passed on from one generation to the next If that organism isn't passing that trait along, it's a big question mark. Man, Well it was, and it's not proven. But in the nineteen sixties there was a kid in school. It would later go on to be a very famous evolutionary biologist, but he was a graduate student in the sixties named William Hamilton's. He said, you know what I got this idea. It's called inclusive fitness or kin selection k I n Jerry selection. Not like a kindall, but kin selection. Inclusive fitness. Basically, Uh, here's what's going on here. It's not random when you see in nature this altruistic behavior of a part of a species, of a member of family helping. Most times they're helping their family. Yeah, this is actually supported by some studies. Very famously, it was supported by a study of um. Well, the number of studies of Florida scrub jays, which are pretty little blue birds, and some members of the Florida scrub jays species UM don't mate when it comes time to mate during mating season, right. Instead, they help um gather food, They help defend nests and protect the eggs. They helped build their like here, let me build you a little sex room, brother, and you know, I'm gonna put a tie on the hen nesto later if you're tired. But you just go in there and do your business. Hugs hugs brother deeply. He's like the whole family's proud of. But I'm gonna go out here and not have sex. I'm just gonna stay in guard and and maybe listen. That's that's the scrub jays and exactly. Uh, it's remarkable. So it doesn't make any sense, right, No, it doesn't until you investigate it through the lens of kin selection and so UM. This one study in particular UM that followed scrub jays as they didn't mate and instead carried out this altruistic helping behavior. They found that of the seventy four relationships that were observed, forty eight assisted their parents, gross uh sixteen helped their father again, Grody uh seven assisted a brother, two assisted their mother, and then one one out of all seventy four helped the stranger. And you can imagine that bird was probably just a little dim witted. Well, I was about to say, I thought it was confused maybe, but like you're my brother, right, or the researchers were confused and didn't realize that this was their close kind. But the point is this altruistic behavior. The study supports the idea that the organism, the animal, the person whoever, is helping somebody related to them, and therefore it does make sense an evolution because the person is helping ensure that some of their genes, not necessarily their specific genes they are passing down through reproduction, but some of their genes through their direct blood relative. Um, they're helping make sure that those get passed long and then then altruism starts to make sense. It's amazing. Uh you want to hear an ever evolutionary biologist joke about this? Yeah, I would gladly die for two brothers or four cousins or eight second cousins. That's that's pretty good. Yeah, that makes sense. I read that and I thought that kind of describes it perfectly. It's well, it's not very funny because it's an evolutionary biology jokes, but it does describe it. Uh. So this happened in the nineteen sixties, and like I said, Hamilton's went on to write books and he actually came up with math it, he says, proves this to be the case. Yeah, because he used letters instead of numbers, So you know, it's legit. It's actually a pretty smart little equation. It's called Hamilton's rule. I like it. Do you like it? Yeah? I mean it makes sense, it's distinct. I can understand it. You can dance to it. I'm right, it's got a good beat. I'm not threatened by it. So I like it. All right, Well, should we talk about it? I know it's a little uh esoteric to talk about a math formula. Uh is easier looked at? Well, just close your eyes, everybody and imagine this. Okay, uh, well, in math terms, what we're talking about, it's an individual's relative genetic representation in the gene pool in the next in the following generation. So if you literally look at it, it's be the letter B greater than the letter C. Over are right, So in this case, the B is greater than So that's the benefit, which I guess would be the likelihood that their gene were passed down. Okay, that would be the benefit. So the benefit is greater than the cost incurred by the person or the organism not reproducing, divided by the relationship. Right, So the closer you are, the likelier it is that you're going to enjoy a benefit over the cost. Yeah, there was. There's a PhD uh, a PhD um online named Bjorn b Ms. It was much smarter than me because I had a little trouble wrapping my brain around around how this math proves it um and and we'll we'll get into the alternative theory here in a minute, proves it over the alternative theory of group success um. And he basically said the altruistics the altruist act must be at least double the receiver's fitness in order for that altruist to gain representation in the next generation. Yeah, and and and it makes sense. So here's how it makes sense. If you, um are going to have two kids. Um, if you did reproduce and you were going to have two kids, but instead of having those two kids, you helped your brother and he was able to have three. There you go. Yeah, they I saw. So I saw Hamilton's rule expressed differently somewhere else, and it made it easier for me to understand. Let's hear your version RB minus C is greater than zero. So if the relationship coefficient um times the benefit minus the cost is greater than zero, then go for it, says nature. Then it makes sense altruistically. All right, Well, let's my math brain hurts. So let's take a break. And uh, we even bragged about how we got that. I sort of get it. We'll take a break and talk more about some more animals who do this and the idea of group selection. All right, So we mentioned the scrub J, the scrubby little scrub J who likes to build sex dungeons or his family. Uh. We talked about bees. They are also ants and wasps and other insects. Who served the queen. Um these workers. It's sort of like insects socialism, almost working side by side for the benefit of the group. Forgetting my own yeah, forget my own reproduction. I want the colony to survive, and this is my job, and so I'm gonna do it well. Um. Another example is, uh, some animals have a call. They will signal out, hey, there's an intruder coming family toward the house. And I might be giving up my own life by drawing attention to myself, but I'm still going to do that now. I actually did see an explain for that that doesn't have to do with actual altruism merging selection them. Among mere cats, they have sentinels. Anytime a gang of mere cats is out hunting, one of them is just standing up, looking very cute in all directions, and when they see danger, they call out to a warning to the rest of the group. But um, this one study that included like two thousand hours of of UM watching and observing these mere cats found that not one sentinel was killed during this time. And as a matter of fact, they were the ones that get away first because they're the ones watching, so they see first and then they call but it's actually that call is not much of a cost to the individual. Well, that's a mere cat. They're super smart. What about the dumb squirrel? I don't know. I mean maybe, although mere cats do very famously engage in altruistic behavior themselves. Like mere cat pups can't feed themselves, but apparently they can squeal and beg and um. Most of the time they will be fed, but the mere cat feeding them is not necessarily and in most cases isn't their biological parents. It's somebody else. And mere cats definitely have that whole village to raise a child thing going on for sure. Um, And it makes a lot of sense through kin selection and not another way. It's interesting. It's hard not to think of politics when you're reading this stuff in the animal world. You know, what's a good model for It depends on what you think. Well, I mean, it's a good model to understand it, I should say, yeah, I saw. I had a this funny. I was driving home from the grocery store the other day and there was a major intersection, uh near my house where the traffic lights were out, like four four away intersection and each one had their own turn lane, and it was rush hour, and I just laughed looking around like the American political system was entirely represented. Oh yeah, man. Some people just barreled through, didn't care. Some people, uh just wouldn't go. They were just like frozen and fear. Some people are like no you go, well, no you go? Will you go? And then someone behind one Honker, was like all right, I'll go, And you could just really kind of see everything, just like it really opened my eyes. And I think, I don't know what you would call me, because I'm the by the book guy. I'm like, blinking yellow doesn't mean stop, it means proceeds slowly, cautiously. But one was red and one is yellow. Everybody was stopping because it was just so crowded, exactly. Yeah. And there's definitely people who do see it the way you do and then go ahead and do that. But it does seem like humans have recently decided like, no, if it's red, blinking red and blinking yellow, the people with the yellow are going to stop eventually and let the people with the red go altruistic act. Very interesting, all right, So let's uh we teased group uh multi level selection or group selection. This is something Darwin talked a little bit about in the descentive man, but he is main focus was on the individual, but he dabbled in it. Uh, he dabbled in group play. But this is a theory where there are these altruistic traits. No one's denying that. We see it all over the animal kingdom. But it's not necessarily toward a family. It's just for the good of the whole group. Yeah. So the the whole idea of kin selection, apparently UM has been challenged, although not widely challenged UM by the idea that if you really look at some species, the species that are closely related, some of them don't do anything altruistically, and then others that do engage in altruism don't necessarily do it for close relations UM. So if that's the case, then the whole idea of kin selection is challenged because the basis of kin selection is that these are UM organisms helping to pass on some of their related traits that their relatives are passing along through reproduction. And if that's not the case, then that's that's the question. Mark returns. Well, yeah, and then there's the whole thing that there are in in groups of animals, some are related, some aren't. So it's hard to tell where one where group behavior stops and family behavior begins. So you have a lot of biologists saying this is just sort of semantical. We shouldn't be arguing about this. It's sort of the same their equivalent basically, helping the family is helping the group. Right. But then a few years back, very famous um aunt man EO. Wilson, who actually awesome guy, Like as far as scientists go, this guy should have statues erected to him. He's a very brave scientist. He's known as the father of sociobiology. Right. Um. He also, when he was a teenager, was the first to observe and um study fire ants when they just happened to be transported to South America as ballot or from South America to New Orleans as ballast in a ship. He happened to notice him for the first time fire ants in the Southeast red ants. He was there when they when they came about, and he ended up they didn't originate here, No, they were brought as like as in scoops of dirt from South America and they just took over. But he was a teenager and he was studying him. So he's a really great scientist, but he um has uh attracted the ire of his fellow scientists by saying Kin selections bunk. Yeah, he reversed his position though, right. Yeah, he was an early and longtime champion of of Kin's selection and he he apparently changed his way of thinking and now says it's group selection instead. Yeah. And Richard Dawkins, we mentioned him earlier, he's uh. He fired back at E. O. Wilson was basically, you know what, dude, you're wrong. I know you wrote a book about it. But he said, there are quote pervasive theoretical errors in your books are and Wilson's Is he still alive? I think he has. Dawkins isn't Wilson's old though, because eighty five when in two thousand and eleven, so he'd be no, you know, right, he maybe alive. I'm not sure if he's not or if he is. Well, Dawkins is. Dawkins is very famous for his freeloader effect too, Yeah, as part of the selfish gene. And that's the problem. I think that's one of the reasons why E. O. Wilson has attracted so much iger from the scientific community because a lot of scientists built their careers on things like Kin's selection and explaining it. Um. And they were doing so following in the wake of E. O. Wilson, who was a huge prostalytizer for it, and then all of a sudden, this prophet like turns around on him towards the end of his life and after his own career, you know, um, and he a lot of people were ticked off by it, But it makes sense the group selection doesn't. Basically, it's saying, like you said, a lot of people are like, this is just semantics, we shouldn't be arguing about it. But group selection says it's not the relatives that these organisms are looking out for. It's their group, it's their species. They're making sure their species continue along, and that's enough for an altruistic act to exist. Yeah. And so, like I said, Um, with all these other scientists that were upset by this, Dawkins is included. And one reason Dawkins would be upset about that is because he wrote the Selfish gene, which helps explain kin selection. Yeah. Uh and altruism and uh yeah. He was taking shots at E. O. Wilson and the press over the whole thing. Yeah, and his freeloader effect, which I mentioned a few minutes ago, was basically he said, you know what um you get, you call it a mutant freeloader. One of these freeloaders can take it down, take down this altruistic society or species because they're just lazing about and they have more time to have sex and reproduce, and they can reproduce faster. So everyone else is out there working for everybody altruistically. His freeloaders just having sex and having babies. So that's gonna be the gene that gets carried down the most. Which, yeah, I guess that supports can selection. I don't know. I'm not sure either. I don't have to read the selfish gene and find out. Yeah, I just thought it was interesting. Yeah I do too. But then also chuck um with the whole idea as well of whether kin selection or group selection explains anything. If you are helping somebody, If an organism helps UH related or just a group organism reproduce, and that organism who gave up reproducing was going to have two kids but only helps that other organism have one, then isn't that a net loss for the species or the family. Well, yeah, but I think that's what that math formula was aught about all about, is as it has to be double or else it's not gonna keep happening. I got so. I wonder then if there's been study that shows, yes, it's typically double. I think that's what he said. The math proved crazy stuff, biologists going nuts on one another and we're just sitting on the sidelines, and even pop coin talking about it. If you want to know more about sociobiology and other stuff like that, including kin selection or group selection, you could type in kin k I N into the search part how stuff works dot com and it will bring up a pretty interesting article. Since I said, Ken, it's time for listener mail, I'm gonna call this companion to the previous listener Maile Finland rules, and I'm gonna call this Sweden rules. Starting some static on more crazy Scandinavians. Hey, guys, a long time listener, just finish with the dark money and want to give me some insight about our socialist paradise of Sweden. Yes, we do pay quite a bit of tax. A regular Joe pays about of his or her income as tax. If you earn more, you pay more tax. There's also a VAT tax and everything between six percent on food to on everything else. So yes, we never stopped paying the man. So what do we get, Well, we're guaranteed healthcare. There's a small fee about ten dollars for a medical situation, but after that it's all free X rays, cancer treatments, it's all free. Also, you can, if you have enough visits to the hospital. I guess you get a punch card. You get a free card, which means you don't even have to pay that ten dollars or pay for medicine. Sweet deal, he says. Uh, school is naturally totally free. We actually even get a salary for attending university about three hundred dollars a month is a stipend, all for free. We can also take out a student loan with very affordable payment plans that don't kick in until after you graduated. Uh makes it common. Uh, that makes it so it's common for all people of all ages to go to university. And lastly, we have kids. When you have kids, the parents can take out four hundred and eighty days of paid to pattorney leave. Oh yeah, the US is so far behind other industrialized nation. Yeah, they're like two weeks and then good luck, get back to work, and we need you responding to emails the whole time too. Uh if they must say, our company had a more generously than that, So I'm talking about us even for dad's Yeah, um, if they take an equal amount, they get a bonus payment. Um. After that, there's a system of kindergartens that takes care of the kids until they reach school age. Again free. We do have some problems, of course. A lot of the health care has been privatized in recent years, which hasn't been all great. Also, there's a movement of xenophobia sweeping the nation, fueled by the terrible refuge refugee situation in Europe. The third largest political party has its roots and far right, anti democratic, even Nazi movements, is what he says. That's really surprising because usually they point to the rise of things like that as the result of economic woes. Yeah, it doesn't sound like Sweden has too many economic woes, so I mean, what accounts for that? I don't know. Follow up, he says, on the whole, it's great place to live. Thanks for the show. Entertainment at its very fineness, and that is from a gurn Dextrom great name, g B. He said. If I can pronounce his name, I get a prize. Canna send you as the film because you got it right. That'd be great. Thanks Garen, I'd like your other film. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff podcast the house. Stuff Works dot Com has always joined us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com