How Jane Goodall changed the world; How the universe ends; How “selfish sperm” affect male fertility

0:00Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:On this week's show we hear how Jane Goodall changed the world. We've lost this connection to our heart, to love, compassion to nature. And we speak with a primatologist who studies tool use in chimps in Gombe and worked with Jane Goodall. She starts to realise that they have personalities and she's able to actually bring humanity closer to the natural world. We're also welcoming physicist Katie Mack to the pod and we're going to be discussing the small matter of the end of the universe. Spoiler, it's not happening tomorrow. We also hear about a new theory as to why older men are more likely to pass on disease-causing mutations to their children.

0:36Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:What does it mean for older men who might be considering starting from... I'm just excluding myself from this. Asking for a friend.

0:46Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:This episode is sponsored by Yakult, the gut experts for over 90 years. I'm Dr Penny Sarchet. And I'm Dr Rowan Hooper. Welcome to the world, the universe and us. We're going to start with Jane Goodall. When she died last week, aged 91, there was a huge response from around the world. And that's a sign not just of how much she was respected and admired, but also what she achieved. She changed the world, didn't she? Firstly, with her discovery of tool use in chimps. Amazing discovery. And then again with her conservation advocacy around the world. And Rowan, you wrote about her. Yeah, I mean, the top line is that discovery of that chimps make and use tools.

1:22Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:and that overturned our assumptions of human superiority. That was the key thing. That's what makes her such an important figure in the 20th century. But I think that something that perhaps gets overlooked a bit is that her compassion and empathy for animals, that kind of enabled her to make those discoveries in the 60s. And then after those discoveries, she read Animal Liberation by Peter Singer in 1975. After that, she immediately became vegetarian. and then she was vegan in became vegan in 2015 and I think that's an important part of what drove her and her advocacy. So let's talk about her legacy then and to do that we're excited to welcome Alejandra Pascual Garrido to the pod.

2:06Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:Alejandra is a primatologist at the University of Oxford and the University of the Algarve in Portugal and she works at Gombe National Park in Tanzania which of course is where Jane Goodall made some of those amazing findings. Alejandra welcome to the pod and can you tell us about your work in Gombe and with Jane? Yes thank you for having me so yes I've been lucky enough to work in Gombe for now more than 10 years and I've been working and actually on termite fishing in chimpanzees which is what actually made this greatest discovery that was this was the greatest discovery like you just said Jane Goodall when she sees one of her favorite chimpanzees actually making and using tools to fish for termites.

2:51Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:So it's many of us who have actually built on her legacy. And actually, there's a few of us that study termite fishing, not only in Gombe, but in other parts of Africa. Termite fishing is actually done or practiced by many different communities of chimpanzees. So that was basically my research at Gombe. there's many different aspects that we all study on termite fishing and actually I was lucky enough to be with Jane in the field with her a few times Wow, tell us about that what was it like learning from her? Yeah, it's actually very special as you know she was an endless she had a mission and she would work endlessly and she actually would visit Gombe twice a year and she was always willing to meet people, hear stories, exchange stories and with us researchers she was very welcoming and she has a house in Gombe that has been there for decades and actually it's very interesting because this house, it's like you go back on time it hasn't changed for all these years so when you go into a house it's like there's lots of bones of animals and books and it's the history of Gombe in this house.

4:11Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:So as researchers of Gombe, we have the opportunity many times to have meals with her and share stories. I mean, I was really impressed by her because she still had the fascination and curiosity and passion for Gombe, for the animals, for the chimpanzees. Like one day she, you know, when she goes to Gombe, she has her schedule. She has to do things. She gives talks, inspirational talks. She wants to listen from all of us. What's going on? What are the chimpanzees doing? Tell me a story. And actually, that day, one of her favorite chimpanzees, which is called Gremlin, she's now, I think, 54. So Jane has known her since she was an infant babe, really.

4:56Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:And when Jane was in her house, Gremlin just passed by with her family. And Jane actually didn't care. Like, she had probably another very big schedule of things. she threw everything and she just went out with rambling into the forest and that was it and then after like a long time like i think it was like an hour or two she came back with a huge smile and she said that was magical because for her like the chimpanzee you know the gong bay is well it's it's a national park it's 35 square kilometers but of course the chimpanzees are not really very often uh close to the areas where we live they heard that jane was there honestly it was magical and especially these chimpanzees in particular with her kids.

5:39Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:And off they went. And that gave me the opportunity of seeing Jane walking in the forest. I'm talking she was already in her late 80s. And for me it was a lesson because she quickly became like, she let the chimpanzees guide her and she had quite a distance and she walked so calmly. and then it reminded me of myself. I don't think I have done it for many years, but it was so easy, so calm, just letting them guide her. That showed me after 80 years, she still can go back and be the same Jane she was when she was in her early 20s. She was crossing logs. Sometimes there are big logs and she would cross them easily.

6:28Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:and I remember then I said oh that was a big log you had to cross and she looked at me and she said there was nothing so that shows her character and she wouldn't like sometimes we would have meals and you would want to bring her the meal or help her no, she wanted to do the things herself and you could see all these signs of her characteristics of her personality that you've read in all her books it was there even in her late 80s and fascination she would comment oh the trees the flowers the butterflies the birds everything everything and and I think that shows her her mind her her character that that's part of what she she's Jane right yeah well you're really bringing that to life for us um and and she must have I mean she's inspiring you then in her late 80s but she must have inspired you when you were very young even before you became a primatologist right I mean yes and that's what she did didn't she And another thing that you've got in common with her is that you're supported by the Leakey Foundation.

7:33Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:And she was, of course, selected by Richard Leakey in the beginning to go to Gombe. And he thought, well, no one's ever studied wild chimps before. And he thought she would be great for it. He had this insight and flash of genius. He hired her to do it. Yeah, so that we could learn more about our own evolution too, right? That was his idea. Yeah. So actually it was Louis Leakey. Anyways, it's part of the family. But so absolutely. So the Leakey Foundation actually supported Jane, like, I think 17 runs. And then the Leakey Foundation continued to support lots of us that follow Jane's path. So the Leakey Foundation has actually played a very important role, not only in Jane's life, but with many of us that follow her path.

8:24Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:And regarding Louise Leakey, so Jane basically, her dream was to live with animals. And when she was a little girl, she was still very curious about the animal world. And she was reading books, and one of the books she really liked was Tarzan. So then her dream becomes, I want to go to Africa and live with wild animals. So people would look at her and say, oh, that's a girl's dream, you know, at that time. And she persisted. And one day she had a very good friend and she said, you know what? My parents have a farm in Kenya. You should come. You should come to Africa because I know you're passionate about this dream of yours.

9:03Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:So she didn't have enough money, but she did some waitressing and she saved the money. She took a boat. which took many days, and she arrives in Kenya. And when she gets to Kenya, this same friend says, you know what, you should meet Louis Leakey, who at the time was the head of the National Museum in Nairobi. So she goes and meets with Louis Leakey, and as soon as she gets into that office, she's surrounded by bones, animal skulls, books. And Louis Leakey there, he sees her passion, and actually he kind of started talking to her about animals and she knew a lot already because she read any possible book that existed at the time of animals.

9:47Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:So Louis Leakey sees this on her and he starts to see that she has some qualities that would be actually very good for someone that needs to go to the forest and live with chimpanzees. And actually at the time, no one has done this. Well, there was a few tests, some people that tried, but they didn't last really. So Louis Leakey said, I think she has the patience. She's brave. She can observe. And surprisingly, she didn't have any training. So she goes, and actually Louis Leakey actually likes that because he thinks with an uncluttered mind, with not having all the academic background, she might see this with fresh eyes.

10:32Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:I did wonder about that, that it wouldn't happen now, would it? But is and I think generally, perhaps it's a good thing that scientists are trained and then they do the science. But there is something positive that we well, certainly with Jane, we got this amazing thing that we don't we wouldn't get that opportunity. Well, if you think how much our view of animals has changed, partly because of her work, you just weren't supposed to think then that animals had an inner life or a consciousness or anywhere near as smart as we now know that some of them are. And so I guess she had the advantage of not having that kind of bashed into her at university.

11:08Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:And so she could, like you say, come to it with an open mind. Yes. And actually, when she arrives there, then she starts, what she just says, she just goes out. Basically, she went there with a pair of binoculars, a notebook and her shoes. And then she goes there and she starts to see. So at the beginning, of course, chimpanzees would run away because they were scared about humans. but with a lot of patience and determination and bravery, and she was fearless. She manages to get closer and closer to chimpanzees. And then she starts to see this careful observation. She starts to realize that they have personalities, they have emotions.

11:49Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:And she gives names to the chimpanzees, which at the time was terrible for people in the academic. In academia, they would say, no, you should give numbers. And then she says, that's my way. I'm going to do it my way. Actually, a lot of people thought, well, she's a National Geographic girl cover. She's there because she has great legs and all these kinds of things that today wouldn't be acceptable. And she knows that, but she continues. And she develops a kind of relationship with them that allows her to get deep inside their lives. So she starts to describe their emotions, culture. They fight.

12:28Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:They could fight. They also have a darker side. She discovers that they hunt, that they eat animals, that they can kill each other, that they have wars between communities. So this starts to show that there were very lots of human-like behaviors in our closest living relatives. So until then, we used to, we consider our great ape cousins to be a very distinct family, very, you know, very different from us. And she's able, with all of these, to actually bring humanity closer to the natural world and to our relatives. So that's one of her biggest legacies is there. And actually now, even today, there are many chimpanzee field sites across Africa and we all use names.

13:16Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:So we are still using her methods that were so highly criticized at the time. Can I ask you about termite fishing then? Because that finding she made with using a stick as a tool to get termites out of a hole, that, I mean, it sort of meant we had to redefine ourselves because at the time we saw tool use as this uniquely human thing. But decades later, you and others are still studying this particular behaviour. What more have we found out about it since? We have found out a lot of things about termite fishing. And actually, chimpanzees are incredible tool users. And they make and use lots of tools in different contexts.

13:56Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:And the more complex tools are those that they use for foraging. And not only termites, they can forage on army ants. So these are very aggressive ants that they are in the forest. And if an army ant gets hold of you, you're going to be bleeding and it's terrible. They use tools for collecting honey from honeybees. But termite fishing is particularly interesting because, first of all, it's very easy to know whether they're going to do it because you just go out to the forest and you look for the termite mounts. Unlike army ants, where it's not so easy to get these nests to see them. So this has allowed researchers to spend...

14:36Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:Actually, termite fishing is mostly... It's highly practiced by females because if you have an infant, it's a great way to get a food resource without having to carry your infant trying to hunt a monkey. So the chimpanzees, females, might spend actually up to five hours. So it allows you to be there for a long time. So across the years, we have done many studies. And for example, we have learned that chimpanzee mothers teach their infants on how to use and make these tools. So how do they do that? What they do is when they have an infant beside them, which the infant will be with the mother for a long time, they share the tool.

15:15Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:So it's like if you would have your kid and you're using a fork and you give your kid a fork so that he starts getting use on how to use that fork. So it exactly operates the same way in chimpanzees. So the mother is very happy for the kid. Sometimes the kid steals the tool from her or sometimes she gives the tools intentionally. So it allows us to, we know now that teaching is happening in chimpanzees. It also, we can understand the cognition behind Tullius. For example, sometimes chimpanzees will be walking in the forest and suddenly they go and they hold, they strip a piece of stick or plant and there's no termimount that you can see ahead.

16:00Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:but the chimpanzee would walk for a few more meters and then suddenly goes directly to the termite mound. So that's future planning, planning ahead. So it tells us about the cognition. And we have learned recently, actually, our work has shown that chimpanzees are also capable of selecting the right materials to make these tools efficient to fish termites. Because not every tool would fish a termite. because if you use a very thick stick and you put that into the termite mound hole, you will not get any termites because the termites cannot bite on them and it would not go into the termite holes.

16:37Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:So basically you insert the tool that goes into the holes that inside tunnels and these tunnels are convoluted tunnels. So you need a material to be very flexible. So we did a study at Gombe and we showed that the materials they're choosing, there are hundreds of plants, you can imagine how many plants around a termite mound, They're using only a very few number of plants, and these plants provide very flexible materials compared to those that they are not using. So that, again, is showing you the cognition behind all these tool use. And what is very interesting, like Louis Licky wanted to know, is when we study chimpanzees, we can be opening a window into our own evolutionary past.

17:18Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:So we know very little about how our earlier ancestors were using plant tools, because they don't preserve in the archaeological record. But because we know that chimpanzees have an extraordinary technology around plants, we can assume that at least our last common ancestor with chimpanzees between five and seven million years ago was already doing the same. So we can go really, really back in time that, for example, from the archaeological record, we couldn't because we cannot simply see those tools because they do not preserve. As you've shown us, like the work on chimps is flourishing across different sites in Africa.

17:54Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:And we're learning, still learning all these things. So in that sense, we are, you know, Jane's legacy is totally preserved there and it's carrying on. But what about in the world of advocacy and conservation work? And, you know, she was an absolute force of nature, speaking like 300 times a year. You know, there are offices of the Jane Goodall Foundation around the world and Roots and Shoots, the one for kids. How are they going to replace her? Well, to be honest, I think Jane's work will continue throughout all of us, throughout all her Roots and Shoots programmes all around the world, through all the Jane Goodall Institute offices that there are more than, I think there are 25 or more across the world.

18:41Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:throughout the people she has inspired, not only to follow her steps, that's my case, and many others of my colleagues, but also people who have been inspired by reading her popular books. And then when you read her popular books and you listen to her messages, you feel also inspired to try to make a change, to recognize that everyone can make a change in their everyday actions. so the legacy will continue. She was an incredible storyteller. So people would love her stories and she was calm. I remember in Gombe, in the evening she would call everyone that was working there, which is quite a lot of people now.

19:30Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:And as soon as she entered the room, everyone went quiet. And then her silent presence was more powerful than anyone speaking. She just had this, she could connect with people and tell stories. She was fanatic of, she would tell stories because if you tell stories, people, it touched people. So you're more likely to, if you are trying to win a battle, to make people understand that animals are not supposed to be seen as objects, but they have the role in the natural world and in our world. And we have also our place in nature like they have. Alejandra, thank you so much for sharing. What a pleasure to hear those memories of Jane Goodall.

20:15Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:Thanks. Did you know that Yakult has an amazing amount of science behind its iconic bottle? Yakult's founder, the Japanese scientist Minoru Shirota, spent many years investigating intestinal bacteria. He selected and cultivated a unique strain of friendly bacteria, L. kesai Shirota. and in 1935 the first bottle of Yakult was produced. Fast forward 90 years and Dr. Sharota's work is continued with passion by hundreds of scientists and researchers seeking future applications for this unique, friendly bacteria. For more information visit yakult.co.uk OK, let's talk about the end of the universe. We have with us Katie Mack who's an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute in Canada where she holds the Hawking chair in cosmology.

21:02Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:That's such a cool title, isn't it? The best, surely. In cosmology and science communication. Yes, that's right. And Katie is the best-selling author of The End of Everything. Welcome to the pod, Katie. Thank you. Straight from the airport. Thank you for coming. Let's dive in. You know, you're not a doomsday, a doomy person, but why? So why The End of Everything?

21:21Katie Mack:You know, I do cosmology. That's my research. And mostly I study dark matter and things like that. But I've also done a little bit of work on the beginning of the universe. And through just my cosmology career, I would encounter different ideas about the end. And I was always fascinated with this. And I hadn't really done my own research on that aspect. But I always thought it was a really interesting question, like what's going to happen in the future? And there are lots of different possibilities. And so when I started thinking about writing a book, I realized that there were a whole lot of books about the beginning of the universe.

21:54Katie Mack:And there were very few about the end. And some of the ones that had come out were sort of before we knew a lot of what we currently know about the future of the universe or about what the universe is made of. And I thought it would be a fun way to share some cosmology, some physics with people, but also get into some of these really deep questions about, you know, that part of our cosmic story. Because, you know, everybody knows the beginning of the story is important, you know, where we come from. But we also really want to know how it ends.

22:23Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:So give us a give us a flavor, because there are several scenarios, aren't there? And people argue and think about which ones they could be. What's the current favorite? it.

22:33Katie Mack:Yeah. So as you say, there are a lot of ideas. The current, I think, sort of default idea among cosmologists is something called the heat death, which is where it's also sometimes called the big freeze. So the idea is that the universe is expanding. It's been expanding for a long time, and that expansion is speeding up, and it kind of just is emptying out. The universe is getting more and more diffuse, colder, darker, emptier, and over a very, very long time, you know, trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of years, the energy density of the universe will go down so much that there's basically nothing's really going to happen.

23:07Katie Mack:You know, in the future, you get to this point where everything kind of decays into sort of waste heat, you know, through sort of just entropy, just disorder increasing. And eventually everything's so spread out and all that's left is like little bits of stray radiation from the decay of everything. and you end up with this state where there's basically nothing is happening anymore in the universe and that's called the heat death and it's an ending in the sense that like everything is done that doesn't destroy space or whatever it just everything kind of decays inevitable running down yeah yeah yeah so we talk about the second law of thermodynamics and in physics this is this idea that in the future um you know disorder increases entropy increases and so at some point you get to a point where everything is decayed so much that entropy can't increase anymore.

23:56Katie Mack:And that's why it's called the heat death, this sort of heat is this disordered energy, where you get to this point where there's basically no future anymore, because you've defined the future as the direction of time where entropy keeps increasing, it can't increase anymore, your maximum entropy, and kind of time stops having the same kind of meaning that we usually assign to it. So that's the usual picture. A lot of people think that's a very sad story, but it does give us a very, very long time before we get there, which is nice. Some of the other ideas could be, you know, not immediate necessarily, but sooner.

24:31Alejandra Pascual-Garrido:Sooner on the galactic scale, on a cosmic scale. Exactly, yeah. Are they slightly more flashy and glorious endings?

24:37Katie Mack:Yes. Yeah. So, you know, an idea that was very popular in sort of the 1960s, where astronomers knew a little bit less about how the universe was evolving, was the idea of a big crunch. So this is this idea that, you know, the universe is expanding now. Maybe at some point it'll stop expanding and everything will collapse again into, you know, a singularity and just destroy everything through, you know, in this giant fiery, you know, collapse. That is not the favorite idea now because we know the universe is expanding and it's speeding up in its expansion. So you'd think that if it were going to re-collapse, it would have to slow down and stop and everything would have to come back.

25:16Katie Mack:But, you know, it all kind of hinges on this question of what dark energy is. Dark energy is some kind of mysterious, invisible stuff that's making the universe expand faster. It's what's causing that acceleration. We call it dark energy because we do not know what it is and we also can't see it. But depending on how that acts, we could have a situation where it could just be a sort of property of the universe called a cosmological constant. And that would just give us this heat death in the future. The expansion would keep accelerating, but at some point, you know, there's not really very much happening.

25:51Katie Mack:But it could be something that changes over time, something called dynamical dark energy. And in that case, you know, it could increase the rate of acceleration. it could stop the expansion and turn it around, right? Like we don't really know. And it's been really interesting since the book came out, there's been some interesting results in cosmology, galaxy surveys, that kind of hint at the possibility that maybe dark energy is dynamical. And then, you know, maybe it could change over time. Maybe it could get less powerful. Maybe it could get more powerful. We don't really know. And then that puts a few of these other ideas kind of back on the table, in a sense, because, you know, if it's not just a cosmological constant, then we really don't know what dark energy is going to do.