Episode 34 – Paleofantasy with Marlene Zuk

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Ikonokast
Episode 34 - Paleofantasy with Marlene Zuk
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Marlene Zuk image from a presentation at a Ted Talk. The backgrownd i black. The imagee also includes an ant.
Marlene Zuk presenting a TED Talk.

For this episode, Greg and Mike Zoomed with Marlene Zuk to ask her some pointed questions about her book Paleofantasy:  What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live.

We didn’t ask what she had for breakfast, nor what she suggests that we have for breakfast, because that isn’t the point of the book.  Zuk wrote about the complexity of evolutionary development and that it’s not necessarily so that modern people can look to the past to build our menus, our patterns of relationships, nor what we do for exercise.  We don’t need to be stuck in the past, since evolution doesn’t teach that we should.  Evolution doesn’t stop, so why should we?

As usual, the conversation touched on concepts that both Greg and Marlene developed during their field research. Even the Bing Chat AI made a contribution.  Not a great one, but then it’s just a bot.

Marlene will return to give us inside baseball on her most recent book Dancing Cockatoos and the Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man’s Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters.

(Purchasing through these links helps fund the podcast, so, if you’re going to buy a book, you know… especially if we turned you on to it.)

Episode 24 – Pump: A Natural History of the Heart, Part 1

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Ikonokast
Episode 24 - Pump: A Natural History of the Heart, Part 1
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We are back!

Bill Schutt
Bill Schutt, auther of Pump: A Natural History of the Heart

Join us with part one of an interview with zoologist and author Bill Schutt, as we discuss his latest book, Pump: A Natural History of the Heart, a delightful and informative exploration of the heart, in all its (anatomical) forms.

We have changed our format a little, and hope you enjoy it. Feedback is welcome as long as you are nice about it.

Material discussed in this and the next episode:

Pump: A Natural History of the Heart

Meteorite Crash-Landed in Canada Woman’s Bed

COVID-19 slows birth rate in U.S., Europe

Bat guts become less healthy through diet of ‘fast food’ from banana plantations

Threatened rattlesnakes’ inbreeding makes species more resistant to bad mutations

Episode 17 – Strange Survivors with Dr. Oné Pagán

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Ikonokast
Episode 17 - Strange Survivors with Dr. Oné Pagán
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Bald Scientist
Dr. One Pagan

Our podcast returns with a fun interview of the author of Strange Survivors: How Organisms Defend and Attack in the Game of Life.  Oné Pagán is a researcher and professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania and he blogs at Bald Scientist. This is his second book and it is a fascinating tour of adaptations that work well to enhance the survival of organisms in, as he refers to it, the game of life.

Here is an episode of another podcast interview he did at People Behind the Science.