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Want humans mimic what other people want, not just with material things, but with all kinds of abstract objects of desire. Things like majors that we choose in college, brands, even our very identity. It is keeping up with the Joneses, but it goes deeper than that.

Also, how you talk to a child when they're hurt really matters. And understanding human evolution. How are we evolving and is evolution going the way it's supposed to be going?

There is no supposed to be going. In evolution. We weren't heading toward anything. It's not like all going toward a goal that we've now lost sight of. There is no goal.

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Something you should know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with Mike Carruthers.

Hello there. Welcome to something you should know. Where we start today with science experiment. That could also be a good way to win a bar bet. Here's what you do. You dare someone to hold a strand of spaghetti at both ends and bend it and break it into two pieces. And when they try, it never works. It's impossible, well, almost impossible to do. This has been a mystery that has baffled scientists for a long time. It is almost impossible to break it into two pieces because it usually breaks into three or four or five pieces. Surprisingly, this has challenged some of the best minds in physics for decades, including Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman. Recently, some french physicists, using high speed cameras and a lot of math and computers have worked out exactly why. This is basically when you bend the spaghetti, it breaks. And after the first break, the spaghetti snaps back to straighten out, and the force of straightening it out breaks it again on the way back to becoming straight. It happens so fast, it seems like it's breaking in multiple places at the same time, but it's not. That's the simple explanation.

In reality, it's a little more complicated. And depending on where and when it breaks in the first place, the subsequent breaks can change. But it's almost a sure bet that it will not break into just two pieces. And that is something you should know. Think for a moment about the power of desire. I mean, you want things. All humans want things. And if you didn't want things, you wouldn't have much of a reason to get up in the morning or go to work or do anything else. Desire drives us all, and we all have our own personal desires. Maybe you want a certain kind of car or a house or a specific job or clothes that you want to get, or you want to get married. You want to have kids. You want a lot of things. So why do you want those things? Why do you want what you want? Well, you're about to find out from my guest, Luke Burgess. Luke is an entrepreneur and philosopher, and he's author of the book wanting. Hi, Luke. Welcome. Thanks for coming on. Something you should know.

Hi, Mike. Good to be here.

So, what's the quick answer, if there is one? Why we humans want certain things over other things. Why we want what we want?

Humans mimic what other people want. We imitate the desires of other people. And when somebody else wants something, it imbues that object of their desire with a special value for us. Because we're such social creatures, we're constantly looking to our fellow humans for cues about what is desirable.

So is that just keeping up with the Joneses?

That's certainly part of it. It is keeping up with the Joneses, but it goes deeper than that, because if we're taking our fellow humans as models of our own desire, it means that our desires can fundamentally lead us into rivalry. So it's not just keeping up with them, but we actually come to think of ourselves as rivals to other people, usually without knowing it. And this usually happens at a preconscious or subconscious level, not just with material things like jobs and the Joneses cars and possessions, but with all kinds of abstract objects of desire, things like the majors that we choose in college, brands, even our very identity is sort of shaped in relationship to other people.

But as opposed to what? Because if we didn't have other people and we didn't get those cues from other people, we would choose differently, or we wouldn't choose at all, or we wouldn't care or what?

Well, this is as opposed to the romantic notion of desire and the romantic lie, or the romantic notion of desire is that I, Luke Burgess, because I'm a rational creature, I choose the objects of my desire through these purely rational means. So, for instance, when I was an undergrad in college, that I chose to work on Wall street because it paid the best, paid the most of any job, which seems like a rational reason to choose that career path. But at the same time, it's more than just a rational reason. It was a highly memetic desire of mine because it's also the career that all of my classmates wanted to pursue. So we don't often take into account that social influence, and we tend to hyper rationalize why we're pursuing the things that we're pursuing, not realizing the influence that others have had in shaping our very desires.

What about those people, though, who seem to march to a different drummer? You know, every high school class has one or more of those people where most people go off and get married and have a job and have kids, but then there's always those few that, you know, go live on a mountaintop or so. So they didn't do what you're talking about, so they have some other motivation.

Certain people are more important to us than others. You know, we choose models of desire, usually unconsciously, and they're not all created equal. So if there was a person who chose to pursue a very different path, one reason may be that they happen to find a model of desire outside the fishbowl that we were all in. Just to continue with the example of my undergrad college experience, they may have had some transcendent model, somebody else that had meditated on a mountain before. They certainly weren't the first person to ever do that. So this is not to say that all human behavior is contagious and memetic. There are various degrees of it, but people have very different models of desire. And I had some classmates whose models were very different than mine. Some of them had amalgamations of different people that had influenced them throughout their lives.

So, knowing this, knowing that our desires are fueled by others, does knowing it help you not do it? And then if you don't do it, if you don't allow yourself or you push back on those desires that are being driven by other people, well, then what drives your new desires? Something has to drive them.

Knowing it helps you be more intentional about choosing the models and not just having them chosen for you by the culture, by companies that are advertising to you. So you can't transcend, at least according to Rene Girard, who first named mimetic desire in the late 1950s. The idea is not that you can transcend this, as we're sort of memetic by nature, by virtue of being human. We can't be completely antimemetic and just escape from this. But we can be more intentional about who we're influenced by and just knowing who's shaping our desires. And there is such a thing as what I call a thick desires. And these are the ones that have been built up kind of like solid rock formations over time, probably near the beginning of our life, that are formed more of a core part of our identity and who we are. As opposed to the thin ones, the thin desires are the ones that come and go on a daily basis, even an hourly basis. Social media peddles them to us all the time, and we can find ourselves with whiplash, wanting one thing today, another thing tomorrow, or year by year.

We're constantly switching jobs and not really understanding those forces that are acting on us.

Do we have, though, some inherent desires that are us? And my example that I'm thinking of is, say, a baby. A baby. Like, when my son was an infant, he had little toys strapped to his stroller, and he liked the bee. And it wasn't because somebody else liked bees. He was an infant. He had no knowledge of that. But he really liked that beef, and that was just his desire.

There are certainly objective qualities of things that are attractive to us. There's objective beauty. There are certain colors. We know that human attraction, there's a physiological basis for it. Pheromones are involved. There's all kinds of reasons why we have certain desires, but it's not limited only to the material sphere alone, to those objective qualities. There can be cases when, where a baby, a child is attracted to something because it's bright and shiny. It's a bright and shiny object at the same time. It's sort of a both. And here at the same time, if you turn a bunch of toddlers loose in a room full of toys, one of them may pick up one object and have a certain level of fascination with it. You will also see the other children begin to be interested in whatever the one little boy or little girl is holding up and expressing this deep interest in. We can say that both things are involved. We are memetic. But there are also certain reasons why we're attracted to certain people and to certain objects.

You often hear people talk about, they go into careers and then decide, that's not the career for them. And maybe, like your undergraduate class, they went into a career because everybody else, it seemed like the thing to do. And then they realize once they get there that it's. That's not for them. And so then how do you then define what is for you? Do you just look to some other role model and say, well, I don't like what Bob did. I tried that. That didn't work. So let's see what Fred's up to, and I'll go do what Fred does? Or can you be much more introspective and say, well, what do I want to do?

I think we can learn a lot about our sense of identity and our self by doing some serious introspection, and in particular, looking into our past and asking ourselves, what was it that I've done in my life? Go back as early as you can, go into little league baseball, fifth grade science class, whatever it is, and say, what are those things that I've done, those actions that I've undertaken where I was in a state of flow, I kind of lost track of time, and achieving whatever that action was brought me this deep sense of satisfaction. And if you can bubble up a few of those stories, three, four, five, begin to see if there's a pattern there, a pattern to your kind of core motivational drive because you're getting at some essence, something that has seemed to be with you for your whole life. And it's one way to kind of discern the thin desires from the thick.

You mentioned that this theory of mimetic desire came from Rene Girard. Can you talk a little bit about him and how this came about?

Rene Girard was a french social theorist who came to the US shortly after World War two. He originally was at the University of Indiana, was at Johns Hopkins, and he eventually landed at Stanford, where he was for many years and had some very famous students, the most famous of whom was probably Peter Thiel, the co founder of Paypal. So Girard taught there. His background was in history, but his initial discovery of mimetic desire actually came from classic literature. He was sort of forced to teach a class on literature and was reading a lot of these books for the first time and noticed the way that the characters wanted things in the novels. And he saw that in fact they didn't just want anything spontaneously. And Girard triangulated that he saw it in literature. Then he studied history, which is what his degree was in, and he realized that imitation goes far deeper than anybody had realized. Aristotle had said almost 2500 years ago that humans are the most imitative creatures in the world. Girard's discovery was that this imitation goes all the way down to the level of desire.

Well, this is interesting because it seems like what you're saying is that people only desire things, or mostly desire things because other people desire things. It seems like people desire things because they really want them, not because other people want them. Anyway, I am talking with Luke Burgess and the name of his book is wanting. It's been a while since I've talked about the Jordan Harbinger show, but I've been listening all along. The Jordan Harbinger show is a podcast that I'm going to predict you will really like since you like this podcast, something you should know. With each episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show, Jordan digs deep into fascinating topics with fascinating people. Its a little different than the topics we cover, but still so, so interesting. Recently he had a great two part conversation with ex federal agent Robert Mazzeur about how money laundering works. Now, I've always, I've always wondered about that and well, now I know. And there was another great conversation with Adam Gamal. He's an american Muslim who fought terrorism in one of the US's most secret special forces units. It is a riveting conversation if you want to broaden your worldview and discover some truly thought provoking ideas and insights, you really should try the Jordan Harbinger show.

As you'll hear, Jordan is a great interviewer and really gets people to open up. Search for the Jordan Harbinger show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Luke, what about when the desire to do something is driven? Maybe initially because somebody else has it. You want to imitate them, like, say a kid who watches a basketball player, an NBA player, and says, boy, I'd like to be like him. I'd like to do that. And then he tries playing basketball, and he's really good at it. And so the desire to continue with it isn't because somebody else has it, it's because he's really good at it. He enjoys it. That's a different, seems to me, anyway, that's a different kind of desire.

Absolutely. The initial decision to even try that, I, at one point in my life, I thought that I would be a professional basketball player, too. But I'm five nine and I can't jump very high and I've got a terrible jump shot.

Other than that, though.

Other than that. Other than that. I sure had the desire as a young kid playing basketball growing up in junior high. And then I realized very quickly that I am five nine and I'm probably not going to grow a whole lot more. So, yes, we take these objective qualities and skill sets into account and certainly affected my desire as I became a little bit more of a realist. This is a very easy example with basketball because we're talking about some, you know, some physical traits that make, that make it much easier to make it to the NBA. It gets a lot trickier when we're talking about abstract things like career ambition and professional prestige and things like this. I mean, there are some things that you can be very, very good at. You know, just to give you an example, I'm pretty good with numbers and pretty good at math, and therefore, I did well in the world of corporate finance and on Wall street. So by my skillset, that was telling me to keep pursuing that path, there was nothing that was going to quelch my desire. And my memetic desire was raging. I saw people getting bigger and bigger bonuses the longer that they stayed, measuring myself according to them.

But I was totally miserable in that career. And it wasn't until I saw somebody that I respected who was a couple of years ahead of me in the investment banking kind of gauntlet and process leave and basically moved to a farm in the midwest and just decided he was going to live an incredibly different life. And it affected me tremendously, and I had to take stock, say, okay, Luke, you are good at this, but that doesn't necessarily mean that this desire is authentic or that it's going to lead you to ultimate fulfillment.

So what is an authentic desire? If our desires are driven by what other people want or have, then how do we figure out what our own authentic desire is?

Authentic sort of comes from authorship, the word authorship, and we can be more or less authors of our desire, but probably not the only authors. So you're absolutely right. Our desires are sort of formed as part of this social process, but we can have more or less self possession, more or less intentionality, more or less authorship over which ones we feed and which ones we starve. Just even being able to identify them is a good start. So I believe that human beings are fundamentally relational creatures. The self is relational. You can't understand who I am without understanding the relationships that I have in my life. I'm the son of Leonida Burgess and the husband of Claire. So we're relational creatures. Our self is constituted partly through relationships, and the same is true of our desires. The idea of 100% authentic desire, it's kind of like saying, well, what does it mean to be 100% authentic person? As if I just sort of constructed myself and my identity from a blank slate. And that's really not the way that it works. We're always in relationship and working that out in a dialog, quite frankly, with other people.

Yeah, well, I've always thought it was interesting that most people, the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree that I've heard statistics that people end up usually doing about as well as their parents, adjusted for inflation and all that, the examples we have right in front of us tend to guide us to some extent.

Yeah. Those people that are closest to us, meaning our parents, our mother is usually our first model, are more important to us, and that's why it's very important to surround yourself, you know, with. With the kinds of people whose desires you admire. And this is changing now, and I think has become more difficult in the world of social media, where, you know, it may have been. I grew up in a small little town in West Michigan where, you know, I. My models were kind of the kids that went to my high school, and we didn't have social media. Now, you know, I'm surrounded by billions of them 24 hours a day. So, you know, what does that mean in terms of this idea of social proximity and the way that people are influencing us? It seems to me that everything has changed in the last ten or 15 years.

Well, and it seems that when you look at your desires, it seems a lot of people now desire what celebrities desire, because they can see celebrities, the housewives of Beverly Hills in Atlanta, they can see it on social media. They can see it isn't just the people around you like it used to be. It's everybody. And you can see how royalty lives and think, geez, I kind of like that.

Yeah. And it's why it's important to kind of put some barriers or boundaries up in our life, really, you know, what are we going to pay attention to? There's a lot of noise, and we can't pay attention to everything. One of the tricky things with reality tv and social media and celebrity is that it seems to be that the lines are sort of being blurred now. Some of the biggest celebrities are people that seem the most like us, not like otherworldly people that are billionaires, that are featured on tv shows. They're people that are taking home videos with their camera and putting them on YouTube. And when we see them getting millions of followers, it has a slightly different effect on us than seeing the Kardashians, for instance, who seem to inhabit this other world that it's kind of hard for us to relate to. But when we feel like we can deeply relate to other people on social media, it has almost a power of attraction over us in terms of our desires, because we have more in common with them, and we can, in some sense, relate to them and compare ourselves to them even more.

We can say, hey, that could be me.

Desire is always looking into the future. It isn't about having, it's about wanting. So, because everybody knows that, like, if you desire and you obsess about getting that new car, and then you finally get it, well, within a month or so, it's not so exciting anymore. And so you go on to desire something else, and it's that state of desire which can really never be satisfied. Yeah.

So all desire has some element of transcendence to it. It's always pushing us forward into the next thing. And when there's no desire, there's really no life. We're dead. Desire is that thing that constantly propels us forward to transcend whatever circumstances that we find ourselves in. So there is almost a religious dimension or a spiritual dimension to desire. There's some aspect or some quality of being that we seek, that we're constantly looking for. And desire is a mysterious and a beautiful thing. We'll probably never understand desire fully in this life, but it is always pushing us forward to the next thing.

Yeah, see, that's what's so amazing to me about this, is when you stop and think about it, desire is this really incredible, powerful force in all of humanity. It drives all of us to do the next thing, and it's really great to explore and understand it better since it is such a powerful force. Luke Burgess has been my guest, and the name of his book is wanting. You'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for coming on, Luke. I enjoy the conversation.

Thanks so much, Mike, for having me on. It's been a pleasure. And I really enjoyed the conversation.

Who you are, how you look, how tall or short you are. It's all partly the result of evolution. Populations evolve. People, animals, fish, everything is evolving all the time. And interestingly, there's a lot of confusion about how evolution works. Some people believe we've stopped evolving. Others believe that our modern world has interfered with where evolution was going and could have disastrous consequences. But Marlene Zook disagrees. Marlene is an evolutionary biologist and author of the book Paleo Fantasy, what evolution really tells us about sex, diet, and how we live. And she's here to talk about how evolution works and how you are the result. Hi, Marlene. Welcome.

Thanks for having me.

So why is it important to talk about evolution? Evolution is going on, and it goes on the way it goes on, so why talk about it?

I'm an evolutionary biologist, which means that I study how evolution affects lots of things, mostly, in my case, animal behavior. But I'm also really interested in the way people think evolution affects their own lives. And people sometimes talk about evolution in a way that is not necessarily all that accurate. So one of the things I think is interesting to talk about is that everything that's alive right now is just as evolved or just as highly evolved as everything else that's alive right now. So you don't really have more evolved species, which, of course, we always think is people, and less evolved species, whether you want to call that a worm or a crocodile or anything else.

So when you say the idea that all these species are just as evolved, that's a question I think a lot of people have, is so we've evolved from apes, gorillas, whatever, but not all of them, because they're still apes and gorillas.

So here's the deal. We evolved from an ancestor that we share in common with modern day gorillas and chimpanzees and, you know, bonobos and so forth. That ancestor looked like both of us, but was not either one of us. So we did not evolve from gorillas. Gorillas did not evolve from us. Instead, both of us had an ancestor, however many hundreds of thousands of years back that looked like both of us, and both chimpanzees and gorillas and people have evolved since the split from that ancestor. And so that's really, you know, and that's why, you know, like, the common creationist thing of, like, well, if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? And, you know, because we didn't evolve from monkeys as we know monkeys today, us and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor that's a primate. So human beings are still evolving, just like, you know, fish are still evolving or gorillas are still evolving or anything else.

And how are we evolving? How do you know we're still evolving?

Oh, lots of ways. So, okay, brief refresher course. What I mean by we're still evolving is that the kinds of genes we have in populations are changing. And you can look at that by understanding how stuff has changed genetically over time. And we can show that populations have changed in lots of ways over time. One of my favorite examples is looking at how human beings can now easily digest milk, because, of course, we're mammals. And mammals, while they drink milk from their mothers, as infants, usually lose the ability to digest milk at weaning. And so it's not just that they stop, it's that they can't digest it anymore because they lack an enzyme that allows them to break down the sugar in milk. So they don't have lactase, which allows you to break down lactose, which is the sugar that's in milk. Human beings, or at least a proportion of them, still have that enzyme. And can, you know, I had milk in my coffee just this morning. Why can I do that? Because of evolution. And what happened was that anywhere from five to 10,000 years ago, there were herding peoples who kept cattle, and they kept them for hides and for meat, not for milk.

But if they could use the milk and if there was a genetic variant in the population that could digest the milk, because there's genetic variation for everything, you know, what you can eat, how tall you are. If there was somebody who could do that, then that somebody was able to get a food source, and anthropologists speculate a source of uncontaminated fluid that nobody else could, and that gave them an advantage. So they had more kids than the people that couldn't digest the milk, and their kids inherited that variation that allowed them to break down milk. And so there you go. That meant that the population contained people with different genes than it had generations before. And what it's led to is about 40% of people on earth can digest dairy, and we've evolved from our ancestors. So if you say, oh, no, no, it's not natural to have dairy products because other mammals don't have it. Well, sure, other mammals don't have it, but we've evolved and we've changed. And so that's just one small example, but it's a good one because it's really well understood. And we know a lot about the genes that have changed, and so we.

Hear a lot about how the way we live our life is not how we evolve to be that, you know, we sit around when we were evolved to move and that kind of thing. Is that a fair statement?

Well, yes and no. So, in a sense, sure, if you put people on a couch and feed them, you know, cheese puffs and soda, then that's really not how their bodies work best, and their bodies don't work best that way, because we didn't evolve with cheese puffs and soda. So, in a sense, it's true. But at the same time, there wasn't any magical point in our history where we could go, oh, phew, we've now stopped evolving and we've reached the pinnacle and we're done. And that gets back to my earlier point, that evolution's continuous and it's always happening, because you don't ever get to a point where you say, oh, well, that was fun, but it's over now, and we can go on and binge on Netflix. It's just not how it works.

And so does it work in the sense that we evolved to get better or we just evolved to adapt to what we've got?

The latter. So, better, of course, is a value judgment, and you could say, oh, well, it's better now than it was before. We lacked the gene to digest milk. But that's only true if you need to digest milk. I mean, for people who can't digest milk, are they better than people who can or worse? I mean, it only makes sense in the context of the environment you're in. So if you're in an environment where you need to drink milk in order to survive, then, yeah, it's better to be able to digest lactose, but if you're not, then it kind of doesn't matter.

But are we evolving to be better specimens, healthier mentally, physically, or do again, do we just evolve because of what's in front of us?

The latter, again, because what does better specimen mean? So doing better only means it's all about how many offspring you leave. And under some circumstances you might leave more. Under some circumstances you might leave less.

Yeah, right. Well, there's potentially some objective milestones, like, we now live longer than we used to. That's probably a good thing. And that's better than.

Well, we think it's a good thing. But there's lots of organisms that don't live as long, and then there's other organisms that live longer. Are they better than us or are we just better than any organism? We don't live as long as.

No, no, I'm not comparing us to other animals, other creatures. We don't evolve with other creatures. We evolve from who we used to be. And so what I'm asking is, are we getting better in the sense of, for example, we walk on 2ft. We didn't always walk on 2ft. And now that we do walk on 2ft, a lot of people have back problems and things are we, is evolution in the process of fixing that so the back problems go away at some point? And if that is the case, then I think you can make the case that then evolution is making us better.

That's a really good point because everything's in the process of evolving. And we think that, oh, you know, being bipedal means that, you know, as you say, we have back pain or, you know, it's difficult for women to give birth or whatever, but everything in evolution has trade offs. And you could look at lots of other animals and, okay, let's take guppies. Okay, you know, the little aquarium fish. So a guppy can either have lots of fairly small babies, which is really good because having lots of babies from an evolutionary standpoint is awesome, or it can have fewer babies, but if it has fewer babies, then they're bigger. Well, bigger babies is also good because if they're bigger, then they're less likely to get eaten by a predator in the stream that they're in, out in nature, not in your aquarium. So how did guppy baby size evolve? Well, it evolved as a trade off. So depending on the circumstances that you're in, if you're in a stream where there's lots of predators, you're likely to have fewer, larger babies.

And so how fast does evolution work? I mean, how much time has to pass before you start to say, oh, look, look at that, that's changed really fast?

It can happen again. If we're taking as the definition kind of the schoolbook, one of changes in the genes that make up a population, not an individual, but a population. So individuals don't evolve, but populations do, then it can happen very quickly. It can happen because some individuals are having different numbers of kids than other individuals. It's been demonstrated that, and there have been a lot of really cool studies of this in humans where you can look at changes in things like height and weight and the proportions of them in the space of maybe 40 years.

Well, that's it. Because I remember asking someone, if you go back to the 18 hundreds, the 17 hundreds, people were substantially shorter on average. And you can tell that by going into houses that are still around from back then and the doorways are pretty low, but now we're taller. Is that evolution or is that just because we have better diets and or what?

Well, so it's both. Absolutely. And that's actually another really good thing to think about because, of course, all characteristics, whether they're physical or behavioral or anything else, get input from the genes and input from the environment. And it's really hard to say, okay, the change in height, which is a really good one to look at, is just due to changes in diet. Even though we know that diet affects how tall you grow. Absolutely. But we also know that how tall you grow is affected by your genes because tall parents on average have tall children and short parents have short children. But take kids of short parents and you can feed them a lot and they're still not going to get to be as tall on average, as the kids of tall parents because it's both. And it has to be. So I'm willing to suggest that since the 18 hundreds, there's been. I mean, it depends on whether people who were shorter had an advantage or people who were taller had an advantage. There's some suggestion that people who are taller have an advantage and they might, you know, have had more kids. And so if they have more kids, then that means that genes associated with being tall are more common in the population.

But it also doesn't negate that having a better diet increases your growth.

We tend to think of evolution, or I tend to think of evolution as a primarily physical thing. But what about mentally? Do we evolve mentally or do we just change because we get smarter and we understand things better?

Well, as somebody who works on behavior, you know, I think behavior evolves the same way that other things do. And we know that. I mean, think about, again, think about other animals. So other animals behave in certain ways. Of course, that has something to do with their genes. It also has something to do with their environment. Otherwise, all animals would behave the same. And you could sit down with your dog and have a heart to heart discussion about politics or the way they like their food or when they do and don't want to go out for a walk. And obviously you can't do that, for which I suppose we can all be grateful. But the point is that their behaviors evolved just like their bodies and everything else has evolved. So has ours. Our brains have evolved, and our brains are physical, and our brains and our nervous systems have a lot to do with our behavior. Right. So I've actually gotten really interested recently in the way people often want to set behavior apart as like, oh, but that's just only affected by, at least in people like, oh, it's just affected by culture.

And so it doesn't matter in terms of the biology, but it has to matter in terms of biology, because behavior is a manifestation of our nervous systems and our genes and our environment, and so is our liver size or any other characteristics. But somehow we're more kind of weirded out by it when it's our behavior.

I wonder, too, if, because we are so intelligent compared to an oak tree, does that cause lots of other problems like mental illness and things like that, that other species don't have because they're not smart enough to figure that out?

Ooh. The question of whether other species have mental illnesses is a really hot topic and also something I'm kind of interested in. So there's a great quote from a book called Animal Madness, the author of which I can't remember at the moment, in which the author says, I'm paraphrasing here, that anybody with a mind could be reasonably expected to lose it from time to time. So that, I suppose, punts on the question of whether you think other animals have minds, but certainly other animals can behave in ways that seem like they're mentally dysfunctional. Whether you could qualify it as exactly the kind of mental illnesses that people have is not clear. Dogs, for example, are well known for having a number of behavioral slash mental disorders. There's one that's been intensively studied called canine compulsive disorder, and it's related to obsessive compulsive disorder in humans. We don't call it obsessive in dogs because obsessive implies that you know what's going on in somebody's mind. Like, that they're thinking repetitively about something, and we don't know what dogs are thinking. But in dogs, like in people, the disorder consists of normal behaviors that are done too much.

So with dogs, they'll, like, lick their flanks over and over and over again. Or they'll turn in circles and turn in circles and turn in circles repetitively. And of course, in humans, they'll do things like check to see whether the door is locked, or they'll straighten papers, or they'll wash their hands over and over and over again. So there's a lot of similarities. Does that mean that they're experiencing exactly what humans are? We're not sure, but clearly it suggests that humans don't have a monopoly on dysfunctions that have to do with behavior.

When we do things as humans, because we can, does it affect evolution? And I guess an example of this might be, okay, so we invented shoes. So is that going to affect how rough and tough our feet develop? Because they don't need to be rough and tough like they used to be because we have shoes.

So, first of all, there isn't any, like, ideal environment for your feet to evolve in. It's always evolving in some environment. But maybe a better example is eyesight. Lots of people, including me, I don't know, maybe you wear corrective lenses of some kind. And, you know, back in the old days, probably, you know, we would have been eaten by a saber toothed tiger because we couldn't see it coming. And now there's lots more variation in how well our eyes work simply because there's no selection against it. So people with bad eyesight can survive and reproduce, whereas back in the day, they probably couldn't. So, yeah, there's this constant back and forth between how we respond to our environment and then how evolution occurs. But that's true for lots of other organisms as well. It's not just with people, but people are certainly a really good example of it.

Is there any reason to think that as humans, because of our intelligence, we do things that have either sped up or slowed down evolution, or does evolution just march on?

No, the rate of evolution is super interesting to people, and lots of people are studying it. So, yes, it's very possible that we're doing things that speed up the rate of evolution. Just having a really big population, which humans have, whether you could attribute that to our intelligence or not, is an interesting question. But just having a big population means that there's lots more genetic variation out there for evolution to act on. So there's lots of things that humans do. And also, of course, we modify our environment in tons and tons of ways. The shoes is a good example. A bigger example, of course, is healthcare an even bigger example might be contraception. So we control our reproduction in a way that no other organism on earth does.

So what's the. Where does this all go? Do we ever stop evolving? It seems like that can't possibly be true.

I don't see how we could stop evolving because all evolution requires is for there to be individuals that differ in their characteristics, and some of those characteristics end up being passed on more than others. I don't see how you could put a stop to that, unless you. I mean, we have put a stop to it a little bit by tightly controlling breeding, not in people, obviously, but like in our domestic animals. So, you know, we can do that, sort of, but it's a big. It's a big thing to try and do, and it won't happen in nature.

But what about, as you pointed out, eyesight is a good example of. It doesn't matter now because we can correct your eyesight. So people with bad eyesight aren't dying off, and we can control for certain diseases that would have killed people in the past that now doesn't. So I guess you could say we're artificially keeping people alive. And how does that affect evolution?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. We are. I mean, we are totally changing the trajectory that evolution would have taken if we didn't change the environment we're living in. I mean, that's absolutely true. Whether one could say for certain, oh, it would have gone this way or that way or the other way, I don't think anybody's prepared to say. But I think the other point is, it's not like we've taken something. People sometimes act like we were going along this particular foreordained path, and then something happened. Whether you want to call it the industrial revolution, whether you want to call it the onset of agriculture, whether you want to. I don't know what you want to call it, the invention of computers, whatever you want to talk about. And then, oh, my God, we all kind of fell from grace, and now we're going somewhere we're not supposed to be going. There is no supposed to be going in evolution. We weren't heading toward anything. It's not like all going toward a goal that we've now lost sight of. There is no goal.

Yeah, it just goes the way it goes, as fast as it goes. And it's interesting to get an understanding of how that all works. Marlene Zook has been my guest. She's an evolutionary biologist, and the name of her book is what evolution really tells us about sex, diet, and how we live. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Marlene.

All right, thanks a lot.

When children get hurt, you, as the grown up have to be careful how you react. For example, if a child falls and cuts themselves, you don't want to say, oh, my God, look at all that blood. Oh, no. Because when kids get hurt, they check to see how others react to what just happened. Then they react depending on what they see. So it's better to stay calm and comforting because your kids will defer to your reaction. If you get mad and say something like, I told you not to climb on that tree. Well, that really doesn't help the situation one little bit. But there is more to it than just keeping a child calm and reassured. If your child sees you get all excited, they get excited, which can release adrenaline, which can make bleeding worse and aggravate other symptoms. The calmer you remain, the calmer your child will be, and that's always a good thing. In fact, in a study, kids who were reassured and kept calm actually did better throughout the treatment process of going to the hospital, and they recovered quicker from their injuries. And that is something you should know. I need your review.

If you haven't left, well, even if you have left one, if it's been a while, leave another one on Apple podcast. You can leave a review of this podcast and, and I would appreciate it. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.