Curiosity Daily

Heredity Isn’t What You Think (w/ Carl Zimmer), How Nudge Theory Changes Behaviors, and Could Cockroaches Survive a Nuclear Blast?

Episode Summary

Learn what it means when you have something “in your genes” with help from award-winning author Carl Zimmer; whether cockroaches really can survive a nuclear apocalypse; and how to change behaviors using a subtle suggestion.  Carl Zimmer, award-winning author and columnist for The New York Times, explains how our growing knowledge of genetics could change the way we understand ourselves.   In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Could Cockroaches Really Survive a Nuclear Apocalypse? — https://curiosity.im/2tGXOmo  A Subtle Suggestion May Be More Powerful Than Direct Instruction — https://curiosity.im/2tF0Szd More from Carl Zimmer: Carl Zimmer’s website — https://carlzimmer.com/  “She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity” — https://amazon.com  “Matter,” Zimmer’s weekly science column for The New York Times — http://www.nytimes.com/column/matter  “What Is Life,” a podcast series of live conversations between writer Carl Zimmer and eight leading thinkers on the question of what it means to be alive — https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-life/id1451004288?mt=2  Follow @CarlZimmer on Twitter — https://twitter.com/carlzimmer Additional publications from Carl Zimmer — https://amazon.com  Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing! Just click or tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing. 

Episode Notes

Learn what it means when you have something “in your genes” with help from award-winning author Carl Zimmer; whether cockroaches really can survive a nuclear apocalypse; and how to change behaviors using a subtle suggestion.

Carl Zimmer, award-winning author and columnist for The New York Times, explains how our growing knowledge of genetics could change the way we understand ourselves.

In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:

More from Carl Zimmer:

Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing! Just click or tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.

 

Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/heredity-isnt-what-you-think-w-carl-zimmer-how-nudge-theory-changes-behaviors-and-could-cockroaches-survive-a-nuclear-blast

Episode Transcription

CODY GOUGH: Happy holidays. We're wrapping up the year with two of our favorite episodes from 2019 featuring science writer Carl Zimmer.

 

ASHLEY HAMER: Hope you enjoy this classic conversation today and tomorrow, and stay subscribed to Curiosity Daily for brand new episodes starting January 1st.

 

CODY GOUGH: Hi. We're here from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.

 

ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn whether cockroaches really can survive a nuclear apocalypse and how to change behaviors using a subtle suggestion.

 

CODY GOUGH: But first, you'll learn what it means when you have something in your genes with help from award winning author, Carl Zimmer. Let's set up some curiosity.

 

ASHLEY HAMER: Cody and I recorded a couple of live podcasts at the annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS. And we got this super cool chance to interview one of my favorite science writers, Carl Zimmer. He's a columnist for The New York Times and author of the bestselling new book called She Has Her Mother's Laugh-- The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. I've read the book, and it's awesome. And the thing is it turns out that what our genes tell us about ourselves is really complicated.

 

CODY GOUGH: Right. For instance, let's say you've got someone with no history of any autoimmune disease anywhere in his extended family, and yet he gets diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Where did that come from? Shouldn't those traits have come from somewhere? Well, I asked Carl about this partly because, well, that kind of happened to me. And here's what he said to help us understand what it means when something is, quote, unquote, "in our genes" a little bit better.

 

CARL ZIMMER: The connection between our genes and diseases is still a work in progress. So what the genetic influence might have been that led to you getting type 1 diabetes and your relatives not is really kind of an open question. What scientists can do now is they can look at like thousands of people who develop type 1 diabetes and then compare them to hundreds of thousands of people who haven't and try to find if there are any genes that are more common in the diabetics than not.

 

But a lot of times what happens with diseases like, oh, I found a gene that's strongly associated with this disease. But when you say strongly associated, that only means that it's going to raise your risk a tiny amount. And also sometimes genes, this is actually seems to be true with autism in particular is that there is a strong genetic component to autism. However, these mutations that are being associated with autism, they tend to be mutations that people do not inherit, they're mutations that pop up in a person for the first time, de novo mutations, which makes it even more complicated.

 

CODY GOUGH: Is there anything simple about this?

 

CARL ZIMMER: Why should there be? I mean it's life. It's cool. And it's always a peril of science writing. You don't want your nut graph to be, it's complicated. I mean, you want to get people excited about just how cool the complexity is. Like in the way that you walk into a rainforest, a rainforest is not simple but it's pretty cool.

 

CODY GOUGH: So is there anything that science education is getting wrong right now? Because I'm not a genetics expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I remember sixth and seventh grade doing those tables where you've got the blue eyes, the brown eyes. Is that wrong? So that science is still right. Where's the disconnect?

 

CARL ZIMMER: It's kind of saying, OK, we're all going to build rocket ships and try to get them into orbit, and we've learned arithmetic. It's like, OK, great, great place to start, but we've got to move on to calculus here. So Mendel and Punnett squares, that's a great place to start but that is a terrible place to stop. Nobody then says, oh, by the way, these genes that Mendel found, they only are a very small part of the story. How tall you are is actually very strongly influenced by genes, and I write about this in the book.

 

It's totally clear that it's a very heritable trait, but it's not like there's some Mendel gene, you're either tall or your short, then that's it. That's not how we humans were. There have been, I think, almost 4,000 genes now that have been identified that influence your height, in one way or the other. And so if we're going to try to make sense of these 23andMe reports and so on and start making decisions about CRISPR and things, we have to get beyond the Mendel stage of our understanding.

 

ASHLEY HAMER: We'll put links to Carl Zimmer's new book, his podcast, and other resources in today's show notes.

 

CODY GOUGH: You've probably heard that cockroaches can survive a nuclear explosion. Have you heard this, Ashley?

 

ASHLEY HAMER: Of course.

 

CODY GOUGH: Right. Well, if you look into the facts, I hate to break it to you but that's not really true. And that's according to a Nobel Laureate named Tilman Ruff. He's a professor in the School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. And he happens to study the health and environmental consequences of nuclear explosions. As reported by Futurity, he says that in all his research he's never come across documented evidence that cockroaches were crawling around a new clear fallout. He's not the first person to bust this myth either.

 

In 2012, the TV series Mythbusters exposed cockroaches to radiation to see what would happen they survived longer than humans would have. But they still died when they were faced with extreme levels of radiation. That test did not look at how radiation would affect a cockroaches ability to lay eggs though. I'll get to that in a second.

 

Now, there are more than 4,000 species of cockroaches. But in general, they're fast breeders and they lay lots of eggs that are hard to kill with chemicals, not to mention they can slide into hard to get places since they're basically flat. So yeah, they're pretty tough to get rid of. But as living creatures, they've still got to eat. And since they eat the waste of other living organisms, they might have a hard time surviving if humans and other animals are wiped out. They'd be able to eat bodies and other decaying materials for a while, sure.

 

But eventually, in a human-free post-apocalyptic wasteland, even cockroaches will run out of food. Add all that to the dozens of other large scale effects of a nuclear fallout like chronic exposure and genetic effects across generations and the writing is on the wall. Even cockroaches wouldn't survive a nuclear apocalypse. Does this upset you, Ashley?

 

ASHLEY HAMER: No. I feel like that makes them a little bit more like us. And I think they're a little bit more personable now.

 

CODY GOUGH: That's our goal, humanized cockroaches.

 

ASHLEY HAMER: I mean, yeah. They're animals, too.

 

CODY GOUGH: They are.

 

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CODY GOUGH: That's skillshare.com/curiosity.

 

ASHLEY HAMER: If you need help convincing someone to do something, then you've come to the right place. There's a thing called nudge theory that works so well it helped Richard Thaler win a Nobel Prize in 2017. He's a leading academic in the field of behavioral economics. And to be honest, you've probably heard him before if you listen to a lot of other podcasts. His ideas are kind of everywhere. In case you missed it, though, here's a quick primer on nudge theory to help you get people to do something.

 

It's different because most economic theories pretend that people make choices based on rational self-interest. But nudge theory works based on the idea that most of us make decisions on autopilot or based on external factors we're not aware of. Basically, it realizes that humans are not always rational. Shocking, I know. The basic idea is that making an indirect suggestion will get you better results when you're dealing with people who could just say, no, thanks.

 

You've probably used nudge theory on yourself. Have you ever set your clock ahead to avoid being late? Have you bought fun sized snacks instead of a huge bag to avoid overindulging? Or have you set up your bank account to automatically deposit part of your paycheck into savings? These are all ways to nudge you toward making a responsible or healthy decision. And this works at a large scale level to.

 

Take Spain for example, citizens are automatically registered for organ donation in Spain unless they choose to opt out, and that's why the country is the world's number one source for organ transplants worldwide. Supermarkets have seen fruit and vegetable sales skyrocket just by placing arrows on the ground leading shoppers to them. On the flip side, a cashier asking if you want to supersize your meal ends up with most customers saying yes without even thinking about it. Knowing that you make a lot of decisions on autopilot can help you set yourself up for good decision making. If you're trying to start a good habit, set up your day so that sticking to those behaviors is your easiest option, and you're more likely to succeed.

 

CODY GOUGH: Read about today's stories and more on curiosity.com.

 

ASHLEY HAMER: Join us again tomorrow for the award winning Curiosity Daily and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.

 

CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.

 

ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.

 

ANNOUNCER: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.