Big Biology

This week on Big Biology we're sharing an episode from The Naked Scientists Podcast about how humans lost their tails. Humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans do not have tails. It sets us apart from other primates, but suggests that our shared evolutionary ancestors had them. So why did we lose them, and how? Speaking with Chris Smith, from The Naked Scientists Podcast, N

At what levels does causation happen in biology? Are metaphors useful for understanding biology? In this episode, we talk with Phil Ball, a science writer who was also an editor for the journal Nature for over 20 years. Phil has written over 25 books, but our conversation focuses on his most recent: “How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology.” In the book, Phil covers

How should biologists deal with the massive amounts of population genetic data that are now routinely available? Will AIs make biologists obsolete? In this episode, we talk with Andy Kern, an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Oregon. Andy has spent much of his career applying machine learning methods in population genetics. We talk with him about the fundamental q

How should we study complex biological networks? How do cells keep time and stay in sync? What does it mean for a network to be resilient? In this episode, we talk with Rosemary Braun, Associate Professor at Northwestern University in the Department of Molecular Biosciences and a member of the NSF-Simons Center for Quantitative Biology. Rosemary is broadly interested in learning wh

How do biologists strike a productive balance between descriptive natural history and manipulative experiments in the lab or field? Should we bring back species to areas where they’ve gone extinct and what values do we use to make these decisions? What is wildness and how do we cultivate it? On this episode, we talk with Harry Greene, a herpetologist and adjunct professor of Inte

What is an agent, and does an organism have to be conscious to be one? How does organismal agency affect evolution? In this episode, we talk with Samir Okasha, a Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Bristol. Samir studies fundamental philosophical questions in evolutionary biology, most notably how selection acts on various levels of biological organization. Our

On this episode, we talk with Alina Chan, postdoc at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and co-author with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 could have plausibly jumped into humans in Wuhan via one of two paths. The first is zoonotic transfer from wild bats to humans, possibly via an intermediate animal host. The second is some kind of lab

How can we reconcile the evolutionary problem of cooperation? What can social amoebae tell us about the origins of multicellularity? In this episode, we talk to Joan Strassmann and David Queller, professors at Washington University in St. Louis, about the evolution of cooperation and conflict. From social insects to humans, we can find instances of individuals seemingly sacrificing

If the tape of life were replayed, how recognizable would today’s species and ecosystems be? How and why does power increase over evolutionary time? How have humans unleashed so much power, and what are the consequences of that power for life on Earth? In this episode, we talk with Geerat Vermeij, a paleoecologist and evolutionary biologist in the Department of Earth and Planeta

How are cephalopods like us, but also completely alien? How can they become so intelligent when they have such short lives? How do they coordinate a distributed set of brains? In this episode, we talk with Danna Staaf, a science communicator and marine biologist with a lifelong love of cephalopods. Danna earned a PhD from Stanford University studying baby squid, and she has written