 Welcome to episode number 12 of what sex got to do with it. And we have here the author, Heather Remoff, who is my favorite 84-year-old great-grandmother in the whole Western Hemisphere. Len, it's good there aren't too many chapters. You'd run out of excess. We don't have too many chapters. You know, you'll be surprised, you know. But anyways, this chapter 11 is called Painting by Numbers. And we ended the chapter 10 saying that, you know, this was coming. So you want to tell us a little bit about why it's called Painting by Numbers? Because Darwinian theories of evolution are very, very dependent on numbers of offspring. He was convinced that the most successful members of the species would have the most offspring. I happen to believe that he was wrong in that. But there, in terms of evolutionary theorists, there's been reproductive success has been calculated by how many offspring there are. Now of course Darwin did argue that the individuals who are best adapted to whatever change there might have been in the environment, they were the most fit and would therefore have the most children. But his measure of success was always numbers of offspring, and I'm saying particularly in humans, that's not accurate. And yet when I did the research that inspired me to work in this field, I believed that. I went into it with an absolute assumption that the women I interviewed when they described men as successful, those men that were described as successful would have the greatest number of offspring. And I was shocked to find out that wasn't true. And I also went into it believing, because I asked women about all kinds of things, and then correlated the traits they ascribed to a man, to their behavior with the man. I assumed women would be careless users of birth control when they met men that they wanted to father their children, and that was not true at all. Two Darwinian assumptions sort of smacked me in my face, because I believed that I'd been very careful at how I structured my experimental design. I was really surprised when the outcome was not what Darwin and I predicted. So I trust your research course. One question that's popped into my head now is, I'm thinking about sperm donors. Oh, this really does change things, Len. Yeah, they've been doing it for a while. They've been doing it for a while. But now you can find out. Yeah, and it's become more popular. Does that change? Oh, the whole sperm donor thing does change things quite a bit. First of all, it actually exaggerates kind of the innate differences between men and women, which is two different ways to approach reproductive behavior. Women invest heavily in very few children. You know, biologically, men could have a whole lot of children. I mean, they could aspire 20 children, or sire 20 children at once. Once a woman's pregnant, she's got one, maybe two. It makes headlines if it gets to be too many more than two. And her whole reproductive machinery is tied up. And men, meanwhile. So sperm donors really exaggerate it then. In fact, there was recently an article a couple of years ago about this generous man who was offering to donate sperm to women who wanted to be pregnant without a charge. Of course, sperm banks do charge. And I thought to myself, that's not really generous. All he's given is his sperm. And he's getting a lot of reproductive success out of that. An awful lot of women, I forget how a lot of children are enduring the rigors of pregnancy, the damage to their bodies, the changes to their bodies, lifelong investment in children. And he's skating away. He's not helping to raise them. He's not picking up the college tuition bill. So, yes, sperm donors, oh, that really, really changes it. But does that change the nature of the type of person that reproduces me? Because you're saying that, to your surprise me, the wealthier men don't. In terms of, well, women certainly, when they're viewing those sperm donor profiles in a legitimate sperm bank in opposition to this man who just was generously going to donate his sperm to anybody who wanted it. In a licensed sperm bank, menless profiles, their college degrees, their photographs, their athletic interests. So women are still selecting for the traits that make men attractive. But the difference is that one man now can really do that biological imperative of having a whole lot of children. So now, given that they look at the profiles, do you feel that that might skew the results that you have noted that the wealthier men don't tend to have as many children? Not really, because in cultures, for example, where men might have a harem or in some religious groups where one man has lots of wives, there, men are having more children than women. But the traits that women select for, like the women who are willing to be in a harem of a powerful man, if he were not a powerful man, I don't think they'd be willing to be in that harem. So the individual woman, though, the individual woman, and the couple, we're mostly a pair bonding species. I think Dan Savage, the sex guru, he describes humans as being monogamish, and we are monogamish. So we're mostly pair-bonded species, and a pair that has reliable control of resources. You know, again, biology is destiny, not statistical, or is not destiny, but is statistical probability. Most families who have reliable control of resources don't have very many children. It's that old adage, what is it? The rich get rich and the poor get children. We certainly discussed that. I think it was when we dealt with chapter 10. So now we're really thinking, focusing a bit on wealth inequality, and this chapter talks a lot about wealth accumulation. So do you think that wealth accumulation would be okay if those with wealth did more good with it, or did good things with it? No, I think that's so arrogant. I'm not impressed by the philanthropy of extremely wealthy people. The Bill Gates, the Jeff Bezos, the Elon Musk. Elon Musk is kind of proud of not being too philanthropic. But to me, that's so arrogant to assume you know what other people need and want. Let's let everybody have enough control of resources that they can direct their own lives and decide what's important to them. I mean, yes, certainly Carnegie with his libraries. That's all very lovely. And I'm glad somebody did it. So wealth can accomplish good things. And I'm very appreciative when I go to libraries. I'm very grateful. There are various concert halls. I mean, the wealthy do subsidize the arts. So I'm grateful for that. But it sort of enables them to turn a blind eye to what the extreme accumulation of their wealth has inflicted on other people. You know, I talk I think in the chapter on language about how good our brain is at tricking ourselves. And so, yeah, but I'm a little more extreme than most people and I don't talk too much about my strong kind of answer I've just given you. I'm not quite that blunt in the book. But yeah, I would like an egalitarian society to start with so we don't need someone to rush in and rescue. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. So egalitarian is pretty much saying that people have about the same, right? Have the ability to have the same. Not everybody would want the same. You know, I have a very sweet life. I mean, obviously anybody who lives in Arlington has a very sweet life. So I'm not saying that I'm economically deprived. But I'm very happy without too many possessions. I find possessions to be extremely burdensome. That's not true for everybody. But we certainly have far more than we need. When I was once politically active and because I'm a writer I was asked to host a letter writing campaign in my home to help other political activists kind of master writing letters to the editor. I was so delightfully charmed and amused but I think it's such a funny thing to say to someone. A woman I'd never met walked into my condo, looked around and said, oh my goodness, it doesn't look like you put any of your furniture at the same time. And I didn't. Most of my furniture has kind of been handed down. Somebody died who wants the bed. You know, I have my great-grandmother's bed, you know, things that have been handed down. So, you know, I'm very comfortable living that way. But not everybody is. And even I have far more than I need. As I'm approaching the end of my life, I look at the stuff, just the accumulation of stuff. I think I could have done without almost all of this. And when I die it's just going to be a burden for someone to give it away. But as a species we over accumulate, we all do. So I guess what I'm getting at is, do you feel that there is a threshold for which we should aim, for people to have either yearly or over their lives. And as long as you have reached that threshold, then it's okay to have inequality. I think there's always going to be a measure of inequality. But I mean, inequality, like really, let's just say wide disparities. I'm very much against the wide disparities. And I don't think wide disparities would be possible if we outlawed the kind of monopoly that enables those. And when I say outlawed, just make people pay. I'm particularly, and we'll get to this more in the later chapters, but I'm particularly concerned about how the ownership of naturally occurring resources enables some people to exclude others from the very things that they need in order to live it all. And in terms of thinking a citizen's dividend or a minimum annual income, I'd be in favor of that. As long as it was funded by the collection of resource rents from the people who control the commons in nature, who claim ownership to the commons in nature, as long as they were charged the resource rents that accrue to those control resources that others need, then I think that would be a good, you know, to pay a, you know, there's talk of every child that gets born, maybe born with a certain account. And I'd be in favor of some of that kind of thing. Right, we'll definitely get to the resource rent. I think if not in the next chapter and chapter after that. So if I was this idea off of you, because part of me is like, how do we get from here to there in a way that is politically palatable. And so this is maybe a little bit, not so much the case. I mean, we'll come back to maybe what I was thinking about earlier about a threshold and then having inequality over that. What do you think of this notion that you can earn as much as you want, however you earn it, you know, or you can accumulate as much money in a given year as you can. But then you have to spend it all, you know, in one or two years. I mean, you can put maybe a small amount of site, I mean, for retirement all, but it kind of gets the money back in the economy. So it kind of stops you from accumulating at least the money. You can still accumulate things, but my thinking is that if you buy something, you have to pay someone for it and that money gets into the accounting. You know, I love these discussions because it forces me to think about things. It's one of the really great things about writing a book. I get to talk to people and every time I do, I get new ideas. This is an idea I'm not thrilled with and I'll tell you why, because I'm very concerned about overconsumption. And so you're forcing people to buy things. You're encouraging a growth economy and I'm not sure that kind of growth economy is sustainable. And so this consumption, in fact, the one thing that I have really liked about the supply chain issues we have going on now, I think it teaches people, hey, we don't need instant gratification or all things. You go to the store looking for a particular item and they don't have it and you think, you know what, I can probably live without that. To me, that's great training for us to realize we don't need to have everything. What happens, because we evolved, we're an evolved species and when a species that's shaped by evolution does something that contributes to survival, there's a release of dopamine so you get that dopamine rush. So for example, early hunter-gatherers, they find berries and they're picking them and that gives them that dopamine rush. But we get that same rush now when we purchase something, but it's not that we're just finding something that we need to eat to sustain us. We've taken it to extremes. It's out of control. So again, because it triggers a metabolic reaction that's reinforcing behavior that people need to eat. We need to eat to live. When I say humans, the human brain has been shaped for two purposes, survival and reproduction. And survival of course is finding enough to eat and a place to be housed, but because of our symbolic control of language, because we have language, we define what we need if we're in excess of what we want. One of the economists that I admire has an expression about when you're asking about people can earn as much as they want as long as they have to buy, spend it. His little slogan is, pay for what you take, not for what you make. So he would eliminate all taxes on income and that way people could keep what they earn, but they'd have to pay for what they've taken from the commons in nature. So then they wouldn't earn as much. So that's the slogan that I favor, you know. Gotcha. So at this point, I mean, I'm going to just dip into some evolutionary stuff for a little bit and maybe I might borrow something from an upcoming chapter, an upcoming chapter, you know. So with respect to evolution, and you're referring to Stephen J. Gools, I mean, his notion of punctuated equilibria and that he could see a stable set of species, I mean, for 10 millions of years. But then you have these periods of rapid evolution that could spawn a new species in 5,000 to 50,000 years. Do you think it could be even less time than that? Oh, absolutely I do. I mean, in the early chapters of my book, you know, for example, of the change in, what was it, the snail kite, that Florida species of bird. They evolved larger beaks in just a matter of a few generations when the species of snail on which they'd been dining was suddenly threatened by a larger snail that was taking over their ecosystem. And it was in just a couple generations. But that's sexual selection that drove that. And that was a new species within? Well, it was not a new species. I mean, again, our definition of species is not real sound. I quibble with it. What is a species? I actually heard an interview, someone interviewing Franz Dual, asking, are orangutans and chimpanzees, are they different species? Would they be subspecies? My definition, and this is not universally accepted, I think a species has the same number of chromosome pairs. So we're definitely a different species from chimpanzees with our 23 chromosome pairs, and they have 24. But the great apes all have 24 chromosome pairs. So I would be more inclined to consider them subspecies. Now, Darwin and those finches, we call them different species of finches. That doesn't work fully for me. Humans have imposed a definition of species on an animal world that doesn't always neatly match. Because some species don't breed with each other, even though they have the same number of chromosome pairs. They may have been evolving or living in different areas long enough that they have different coloration, different bird song. And those can be barriers to being a reproducing pair, but they're barriers that can be overcome in the case of scarcity. In the early chapters I talked about supposedly new species of finch on the Galapagos Islands. It came from a result of two other species, existing species breeding with each other and producing offspring that have a population that mates within itself. But should there be no available birds of that particular type? I forget what they call them, big bird or something. They'll mate within what I call a species, but not everyone would. I once heard some mycologists. I went on my daughter as an amateur mycologist and we went on a mushroom walk. It's one of those wonderful things where they spread out tables and everybody comes back and puts the various fungi that they found on a table and the experts are identifying them. They were talking about different species and I asked the question around species and the two gentlemen were explaining they looked at each other and they laughed and they said, are you perhaps indicating that the animal world and the living plant world does not necessarily behave in a way that corresponds to the human definition of species and clearly that's what they believed and that's what I believe also. I thought the definition of species, I thought it was separated species with the ability to produce progeny that could reproduce. And I go with that, I would agree with you. I mean, I forget the species of fish and I heard a woman speak at the Radcliffe Institute about how quickly different species within that species of fish evolved. And I asked her, but if you took individuals from what you're calling different species back into the lab and put them together, would they and could they mate with each other? And she said, oh sure. So to me, but again, we don't have, I don't think we have a, I wish we had a more precise definition of species. I don't think we do. Well I guess for now then I'll just kind of stick with me the ability to have progeny that can reproduce. So okay, so and just something, maybe I could look this up on my own but you talk about the whale and elephants. Are whales closely related to elephants? Len, I'm not qualified to give a good answer on this but the information in my book in which I'm discussing whales and elephants, I had not realized that whales kind of came out of the ocean and elephants evolved from them and then when they got so big that their legs really couldn't support the weight on land back into the ocean of whales. So yeah, I think elephants, well of course whales are a mammal. So I think elephants and whales are probably pretty closely related but there was a forget the title of the book that the science book club read on whales and that's where I got that aha moment. So the whales came out of the ocean, became elephants? Well I mean I don't think it was quite, you know quite that obvious but in fact yeah there was a movement out of the ocean onto land and their very heavy size made it hard because whales weigh more than the largest dinosaurs. The very heavy size made it difficult like to be mobile on land. You know how can legs support that much weight and so it'd be you know back into the ocean but I'm not the expert on that but I love those kinds of, I love picking up little bits of information from people who are the experts. Yeah and that's what makes me reading your book so enjoyable and why I'm having a lot of fun just talking with you a lot about it because you do have these little tidbits of information so I was really trying to guess, like I said when I did Evolution, Population Genetics it was really on the small scales with fruit flies and then mostly DNA sequencing and I hate to tell people to a certain extent that I did Population Genetics because they would probably expect me to be able to tell you like how close the related species are and it's like that wasn't part of what I studied I wasn't particularly interested in it I mean intellectually so but not enough to really like study and absorb it so that's why when you said that elephants and whales were close related it's like are they really? And Lynn this is what is so much fun to me you know I've probably mentioned that there's some phrases that my family doesn't like to hear me mention because I talk about it so much one is referring to humans in which I say we are not a pretty species but in fact one of the things I really love about it is that our language is made possible our language is the double-edged sword it's made some great things possible and some awful things possible one of the wonderful things that's made possible is the cumulation of knowledge in a single individual like I don't have to know everything about elephants and whales to get an insight from someone who does and that to me is just fabulous I agree, I agree so you know I thought that we might get out of this chapter a little early I thought it might be actually earlier than this so I was going to maybe go back to another chapter but we have about three minutes now and so you mentioned that if you remove one thread and the whole web of life is at risk and I know that that is to a certain extent a metaphor for me but what's your sense of how many species there are in a thread? Oh, they're trillions of species But when you say a thread I think we have extinctions going on all the time even before humans became a part so we could probably lose a species or two and not have the whole web disintegrate But the thing is if you start what we might call the bottom of the food chain problems there escalate up through the food chain pretty quickly E.O. Wilson, I forget the exact number of years he said if humans died off the planet and I forget how many thousands of years the planet would be fine, we'd be gone but you remove insects, all insects from the population and everything gets wiped out But that's a lot of species though I think there's been a 40% reduction extinction rate of insects in the last decade That's a large number You're not old enough probably to remember the days when you went for a drive in the summer and you had to keep stopping to clean the insects off your windshield Nobody has to do that anymore Nobody has to do that I grew up seeing yellow spots all over the windshield Almost never does an insect get smashed on a windshield Certainly not disputing that we lost a lot of species I was just trying to get a sense of how many species you think we could maybe tolerate Essentially I was thinking how many species there are in a thread, I know it depends on the type of species and where it's located That's where I was hoping to take the conversation but you know what, maybe we can take it there when we cover the next chapter which is going to call the economics of desire Thank you very much for talking to me on chapter 12 Thank you everybody