Discovering Darwin

Mar 15 2024 25 ep. 50

Discovering Darwin Podcast artwork

An ongoing discussion of the writings and musings of Charles Darwin.

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Season 5 Episode 6: Gender Bender

In this final episode of Season 5, Sarah, Mark, and James discuss the last chapters from Lucy Cooke's book Bitch: On the female of the species. Sarah described the sex lives of barnacles and encouraged us to watch the Green Porno episode that illustrates the impressive size of a barnacle penis. Image from https://bodegahead.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-long-reach.html The

Season 5 Episode 5: Hot Orcas and Superfluous Males

In this episode Sarah, Mark and James continue their discussion of the book Bitch by Lucy Cooke where they explore menopause in humans and non-human animals and discuss those animals that have forwent males when they reproduce. The first conversation explored how orcas are an unusual mammal in that the males do not disperse from their mother's pod, but instead they retain a close r

Season 5 Episode 4: Ken the Naked Mole Rat

In this episode Sarah, Mark, and James continue their coverage Bitch by Lucy Cooke. We discussed systems where female aggression was common and the subjugation of other females and males was done by "alpha" females. We were surprised to learn how murderous and violent naked mole rats and sweet little meercats could be. Photo from Akron ZooNaked mole rats are eusoc

Seson 5 Episode 3 - Variable Vaginas and Punchable Penises

We continue our discussion of Lucy Cooke's book entitled Bitch: On the female of the species focusing on chapters 5 & 6 which covered variation in female genitalia, the evolution of the human penis, and maternal care. We spent some time talking about the baculum, a bone that is found in the penis of many mammals, but not in humans. Sarah described how intricatel

Season 5 Episode 2: Your O face

In this episode we continue our conversation based upon Chapters 3 & 4 of Lucy Cooke's book Bitch: on the female of the species. We started off the conversation doing a deep dive on the famous Bateman experiment that purported to reveal 3 principles concerning variation in male and female reproductive success and how those differences drive sexual selection. After r

Season 5 Episode 1-Incubated in misogyny

We have returned from a long hiatus to discuss a wonderful book entitled Bitch: On the Female of the Species by Lucy Cooke. Sarah asked James and Mark to read this book that gives an updated look at Darwin's original model of sexual selection, a topic we covered extensively in Season 4. In this episode we cover the introduction and first 2 chapters of the book. In our con

Season 4 Episode 10: Darwin is WRONG! Click here to learn more

In this final episode of Season 4, Mark, Sarah, and James finally critiqued Darwin's analysis of secondary sexual characteristics in humans and his clumsy attempt to apply his model of sexual selection in explaining the diversity of forms in what Darwin called "races" and we call geographically distinct phenotypes (GDPs). We found that Chapters 19 & 20 of Descent of Man distill

Season 4 Episode 9: Love Antics and Conspicuous Ornamentations

After a long COVID induced hiatus, we have returned to tackle the meaty middle of Charles Darwin's magnum opus The Descent of Man. It was actually most of Volume 2, three hundred and nineteen pages of anecdotes, observations, wild conjecture, and chuck'splaining his crazy system of inheritance. The dense plodding Victorian prose was diluted, a bit, by the amazing woodcut pri

Season 4 Episode 8: Sexy time and selection

In this episode we dive into Chapter 8 from Darwin's Descent of Man. James incorrectly attributed this chapter to the end of Volume I of the two volume set but it is actually the first chapter of Volume II, which makes more sense given its dramatic shift in focus and topic. Sarah tried to get us to differentiate between adaptive traits that come about from sexual selection w

Bonus Episode - Are Angels moral?

image from:https://www.artsales.com/ARTistory/angelic_journey/index.html In this bonus episode we return to our conversation with our favorite ex-monk philosopher friend Dr. Jack Furlong where he discusses whether angels, as described in scripture, could actually be moral. We then briefly discuss the Yale baby lab where clever behavioral experiments are done on human ba