The chicken and the egg (E)

0:00Question 1. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Question two, why did the chicken cross the road? In this special two-part episode of Akimbo, I'll be answering both questions. The answers are more clear than you thought. Hey, this is Emily in the Bronx, and you're listening to a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:31Okay, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Before we can talk about chickens and eggs, we need to talk a little bit about how we all got here. It begins with this. Creatures have sex. All creatures, all the ones we can see anyway, reproduce. And that leads to lots of little creatures, usually way more creatures than will actually grow up. Those babies, those babies, they look a lot like their parents, but not exactly like their parents, simply a lot like them. So what it means is that traits are inherited. You don't have to know anything at all about genetics to know this just by looking at puppies or kittens or little baby calves.

1:22So these babies, some of them have traits that are lucky enough to fit in with the world around them and help them survive long enough so that they can have babies passing on those traits. And generation after generation, that's what happens. Creatures have babies who look like them, but not exactly. And those traits, the traits that work, get passed on to grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Over time, the creatures start looking a little different. They start adapting, apparently, to the environment. Now, the wording here matters because they're not actually adapting. What's happening is the ones who are left are the ones who fit in.

2:09So this actually can happen right before our eyes, certainly over a lifetime, but maybe over a week or two. Consider the famous example of moths in Britain. There are lots of moths in Britain, and most of them were a shade of white. When two white moths have little baby moths, those moths range from bright white to a little bit gray. Well, this worked great for millennia until they started using coal to power things in the United Kingdom. That coal, of course, put soot all over everything, and the cliffs went from white to dark gray. And over time, what would happen is moths that were born white got eaten by the birds that eat moths.

2:57But the ones that were sort of on the gray end of the spectrum, they were the last ones to get eaten because they were a little harder for the birds to find. Those moths would have little baby moths, and the little baby moths ended up a little bit closer to gray on the spectrum. And over generations, what happened was the common moth went from white to gray. It evolved over time. A few hundred years ago, the broccoli family of Italy spent decades breeding, carefully, artificially selecting plants from the brassica family until they ended up with a vegetable, a unique vegetable that they could sell in the market.

3:41That's where we got broccoli. And that's where cubby broccoli got enough money to buy the rights to make James Bond movies.

4:00We can do the same thing with fruit flies. We can take fruit flies in a jar, put just a little bit of pesticide in there, and the, quote, weak ones will die. But the ones who are more resistant to pesticide will actually have more access to food, and they will end up having more kids. those kids, the ones who survive, will be even more resistant to pesticide, not because they were exposed to pesticide, but because the ones who died, died because of pesticide. Over time, generation after generation, the genes get passed down and the species evolves. One other thing that's worth noting here, as a species evolves, it's still possible for the variations within the species to reproduce with each other.

4:53So it might not be pretty, but a Doberman and a Dachshund can still have puppies. But if we separate branches of the family tree long enough, they evolve away from each other so much that they can no longer do that. And so we have lizards that got isolated inside a cave and became their own species. or the fact that it's really difficult to get broccoli and cauliflower to crossbreed again. That by isolating species from one another over time, they can no longer reproduce with each other and they become separate species. It's important to note here that none of the evolution happens while the creature is alive.

5:47Lamarck, one of Darwin's predecessors, said that giraffes had long necks because they spent all day stretching to get to leaves way up above. That's not true. The creatures don't know how you spent your day when you have grandchildren or children. That's not where it comes from. So all of the change of evolution happens when two creatures get together and create a third one. It's this exchange, this exchange of chromosomes, of genes that lead to the new creature. That's a random process that's then put into the world, and it either works and matches and leads to success, or it doesn't. So this is the opposite of what we've been talking about when we talk about culture, because culture is plastic.

6:41Culture changes. Culture happens in real time. None of these things is true for the physical evolution of species over time. They are not responding to the outside world. They are what they are, and then the outside world determines whether or not those traits get passed on. Consider the case of the Beak of the Finch. Some scientists in the Galapagos have visited a desert island there over the course of more than 40 years. It's almost impossible to get to. You have to take a boat and then scale a cliff. On this isolated island are finches, and finches are born with a range of beak sizes. The same way you'll rarely see a human being with a 12-inch long nose, you're probably not going to see one of these finches with a 12-inch long beak.

7:36But the beaks do have a range. And what happened year after year is the ones who survived, who were lucky enough to have children, had a beak that matched the weather. So if the weather was damp, the seeds that they needed to eat responded to one sort of beak, stronger or longer, and years when it was dry, a different kind of beak would help the finches survive. So we can plot the weather in the Galapagos by the beaks of the birds that are born year after year. It's always a little out of sync because it takes a year for the finches who survived in one weather pattern to have the babies that matched the beaks they were lucky enough to have.

8:25But we can see it over and over again. So before we get to the idea of chickens and eggs, let's talk about hedgehogs. During the 1930s and 40s in the United Kingdom, seeing dead hedgehogs on the road was a commonplace. That's because slow hedgehogs had no way to deal with cars, brand new, just invented cars. As a result, hedgehogs got squashed all the time. Now, it's pretty rare to see a dead hedgehog. Is that because all the hedgehogs are dead? No. It's because the slow hedgehogs didn't have kids, and the fast hedgehogs did. And so hedgehogs co-evolved with the invention of the automobile to become faster.

9:16I can now answer your chicken question, and then I can begin to tell you why this matters. It turns out that the only thing that can get born from a chicken egg is a chicken. But the thing that can lay a chicken egg is something that's almost a chicken. Because that's how the mutation part of evolution works. That two creatures get together to have a baby creature, and that baby creature isn't exactly like them. And sometimes that baby creature is enough not like them that we give it a new name. So the chicken, the chicken had to come from an egg, a chicken egg. The chicken egg had to be first.

9:57Okay, wise guy, you might ask, how do we explain peacocks? Because after all, there's no good survival benefit to having a huge tail, a tail that you have to eat extra food to support, a tail that makes it difficult to run away from a predator. How is it then that peacocks have big tails? Well, it turns out that one of the factors is, did you survive long enough to have grandchildren? The other factor, called sexual selection, is, did a peahen think you were cute enough to mate with you? It turns out there's really good reasons for a peahen to look for a peacock with big feathers, because it shows that the peacock has a surplus.

10:46It shows that the peacock isn't ill. It shows that the peacock is strong enough and successful enough for his body to invest extra calories in growing all this plumage. And so sexual selection leads to bird calls and to plumage and to all sorts of factors that don't make sense from a straight-up survival method. These are signaling strategies, a way to make sure you're finding a healthy and strong mate. so that your genes and your kids' genes are likely to be passed on. It's about this point that we need to start anthropomorphizing genes. Because after all, genes don't have a narrative. They don't make decisions.

11:32They simply are. But human beings are really good at telling stories. And one of the ways we tell stories is by imagining that that thing that we're talking about is like us. So we say things like, oh, the sun is trying to break through the clouds. Well, no, the sun doesn't even know there are clouds. It's just easier to use that expression. So what is it about genes? Well, Richard Dawkins famously coined the term the selfish gene. It doesn't mean that genes make us selfish. What it means is that all genes care about is having grandchildren. Of course, they don't care because they can't care. They're just a gene.

12:12but they act in ways that it seems that they care about survival, that the gene itself wants to reproduce. So if cooperation, as we can see in a beehive, makes it more likely that the B genes will get passed on, then the gene, quote, chooses, unquote, to cooperate. It's selfish that way. It's selfish in that it seeks places where it can reproduce. And so when the environment changes, a species only has two options. I'm calling them options or choices, even though, of course, the species isn't really deciding. One thing it can do is co-evolve with that change in the world. So when the weather changes or another species starts acting differently, if this species ends up changing in a certain way from generation to generation, more of the genes will get passed on.

13:12But other times, it can't get with the program, and so it becomes extinct, because the new environment isn't hospitable to those baby creatures. So what does this all mean to us? Well, the other thing that Dawkins talked about is that we, once we start anthropomorphizing genes, can take a small leap and say, what if we think of ideas as little genes? What if we think of ideas as things that spread and that the more they spread, the happier they are? That over time, ideas evolve. They start one way, then they interact with the world. They reproduce in other people's brains, and they adopt and they change just a little bit.

13:56He called these memes. and the science of memes is not genetics but memetics. And when we think about memetics, when we think about ideas evolving over time, spreading from one brain to another, suddenly a whole bunch of the shifts in our culture make sense because the ideas that spread the fastest evolved the fastest, infected the most people, had the most hosts to live in, and thus change the culture again. With just a few principles, evolution can make an extremely complicated world. The idea that there's inheritance but with mutation, the idea that some genes spread and some don't, the idea that the world keeps changing as genes spread and species adapt or don't adapt, all adds up to an extremely complex, beautiful world.

14:58But the same thing is true for our culture, because we can look at our culture through the eyes of genetics and evolution. We can see the beginning of an idea. I know, mass production. Let's make a car with mass production. Well, that advantage leads to another advantage, which leads to the idea spreading to how should we make a pen, which leads to the ballpoint pen instead of the fountain pen, and on and on. Then when we try to examine how our culture changes, one thing that we can look for are the very elements that enable us to see how an ecosystem changes. Something is influential. There's a technology or a rift or a shift, and then a new idea comes along, and it lands in fertile soil, or it doesn't.

15:48But if it does, then it spreads. And as it spreads, it replicates. But every time it replicates, it's not quite the same as the time before. And the replications that catch on begin to spread. So Gil Scott Heron can be the pioneer of spoken word. You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to... And then 30, 40 years later, we discover that rap is popular. Don't catch your slipping now. Look what I'm whipping now. This is America. Did one directly lead to the other? Well, it was certainly its ancestor. And that idea of ancestors, and then over time, Ideas, memes, replicating, mutating, spreading, some going extinct, some hopping across, unable to cross-fertilize with the ones that came before.

16:47It all informs the way we think about our culture. Along the way, the myth developed that a good idea is all we need, that a good idea comes fully formed out of someone's head, out of an organization, and that's it. because when we look back at history, we say, oh yeah, a genius thought that one up. But that's not actually what happens. What actually happens is an idea comes into a tiny portion of the world and maybe it collides with another idea and maybe it replicates and maybe it mutates along the way. And that idea, that idea might be perfect for its time, like the newspaper was in 1904. But over time, that idea might become extinct.

17:35In our culture, the idea can thrive for a while, but it continues to replicate. It continues to change the culture and may end up making itself extinct. But along the way, that idea replicated and mutated and became something completely unrecognizable to the person who originally put the idea into the world. So when we think about how fast ideas replicate, how much more quickly they are ricocheting around our culture, how much more mutation goes on when person A sees it and hands it to person B who changes it and then person C times a million and then times a million again, is it any wonder that our environment is so raucous?

18:20What we've done is built an incredibly fertile ground for ideas to replicate and spread. And many of them go extinct along the way, and the ideas don't really care about us. They're just replicating, infecting us, and then spreading again. That's what our culture is, the sum total of all the ideas we've intercepted and the ideas we've spread to others. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week to talk about why the chicken crossed the road. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hi Seth, this is Anupam.

19:07Hi, this is Caitlin. Hi Seth, warm greetings from Curacao. Hey Seth, my name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey Seth, this is Rex. Hey Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. We love hearing your questions. I hope you can submit one. We'll do our best to answer it. Visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and click the appropriate button. It works best on your desktop or Android phone. We got a few questions this week that I think get to some fundamental misunderstandings about words and about how we see things.

19:50So I'm just going to play a little bit of an excerpt from each question because I'm sort of giving each one a new interpretation. And then I'll do my best to answer them. And the narrative that one can tell himself about. So is this trade-off always worth it? Are there situations in which it's not worth it and it makes sense to be very risk averse, maybe such as healthcare or any other situation where you can't really get a certainty of means? Thank you very much. Love the show. It's really common to confuse things that feel risky with things that are risky. Years ago, a few interns who worked for me during a rainy night when I was out of town took a shortcut from my old office to the train station.

20:50Instead of walking around the long way, they took a shortcut. It felt fun. It felt efficient. The shortcut ran along the railroad tracks. And you already guessed what happened. Someone slipped and fell on the third rail, was electrocuted. someone else dragged them to safety, but they also, in the dragging, got shocked. And then a third person managed to rescue the first two. Well, I'm delighted to tell you that everyone is okay, but that was stupid. It was stupid because it's insanely risky in a rainstorm to walk near an electrified railroad track. But I can assure you that as these somewhat intelligent human beings were doing it, they didn't feel like they were doing something risky, but they were.

21:38And the opposite is even more true. The opposite happens all the time. In our industrialized world filled with guardrails, it's the opposite that's the real issue. It feels risky to ask a question to this podcast. It feels risky to raise your hand in a classroom. It feels risky to tell someone your truth. Blogging every day doesn't cost anything, but it feels risky. It's not risky. It simply feels risky. What we know is that people, for example, who complain about certain kinds of privacy saying it's a giant risk, turn right around and use credit cards and other tracked things because those things don't feel as risky because they're not in the news today.

22:32My rant is about the simple act of distinguishing between the two. Are we hesitating to do work we care about, work that matters, because it feels risky or because it is risky? And I got to tell you, the best shortcut I can propose to you is to get ahead of everybody else by doing the things that feel risky to them, that you know aren't risky at all. So I guess where this stems from is that there's a natural tension between building commercial products and technologies, such as the record player. The long tail can exist because of it, because of these technologies, and that changes the culture over time.

23:17But then on the other side of it, there's products that are built for the long tail, like the electric guitar, which was, as I'm sure you know, It was built in the 20s and 30s as something that jazz musicians and eventually blues musicians ended up using. And that product, that innovation, became commercial. So it came from the long tail and it became commercial. In my book, This is Marketing, I coined the phrase the minimum viable audience or the smallest viable audience. And it's easy to conflate that with the idea of the long tail. I want to distinguish between the two here because I think it's an important distinction.

23:57The idea of the smallest viable audience begins with the word viable, meaning that if you're only going to make your burritos for two or three people, that's small, but it's not going to keep your burrito truck in business for very long. It's not enough. The goal here when we're doing a project is to identify the smallest audience that we can thrive on, the smallest audience that will help us get by. That if we can delight those people, if we can make an experience for them that's over the top, that's so remarkable they can't help talking about it, they will talk about it. And if they talk about it, the word will spread.

24:43and you will be a meaningful specific who stands for something. The alternative is to try to make something for everyone, in which case, I assert, you will fail. So, a famous example like Twitter. Twitter wasn't built for everyone. It was built for geeks and nerds at South by Southwest. It was built for a small cadre of people who wanted that kind of interaction. And that would have been enough. Everything that happened after that was a bonus because they made something on the edges that the masses chose to embrace. So this has nothing to do with the long tail, with Chris Anderson's magical idea that when a store has unlimited shelf space, there's room for everything.

25:34And when there's room for everything, half the things that sell are things that people who do have shelf space could never even carry. That what it does is it gives consumers way more choice, but the long tail is rarely good for providers. Because if you're way out on the long tail, there are millions of songs in the iTunes store that sell one or fewer copies a year. None. They sell none. That's not a good place to be on the long tail. It's a rounding error. You can't make a living at that. That's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about instead is the idea of moving out of the basement of the long tail, but being specific.

26:22Because it turns out there are 7 billion people on earth. And if you're a coach, you only need 100 of them to be your clients. Then if you're running a restaurant, you only need 10 ,000 people to come to your restaurant over the course of a year. Do the math. You don't need that many people to make a difference. The challenge that we have is to find the guts, to do the thing that feels risky, to be specific so that we can say to people we didn't make it for, oh, I'm sorry, it's not for you, but there's a place down the street that I can highly recommend. The ability to do that is essential in a world with this much choice.

27:05That's all for this time. I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening.