What is in the This Week in Science Podcast?

Interview w/ Dr. Melissa Wilson, Dirt That Helps, Fingering Variation, Coral Acid Trip, Food For Sex, Fish Skins!, More Planets, Not Neptune, Cracking Tortoises, Neander News, And Much More…

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DISCLAIMER, DISCLAIMER, DISCLAIMER!!!

SEX!

It’s that thing your parents did that made it possible

for you not to want to think about your parents having sex…

But they did it.

And did it in such a way that made you possible.

And that is the only reason you exist.

But that’s not the end of the story.

Turns out your grandparents also had sex.

If not for them having sex,

your parents would not have been able to swap chromosomal chemistry in the first place.

Which means that at some point,

your great grandparents,

all eight of them,

needed to get busy in just the right way

to set in motion the sexual behaviors of offspring that again,

no matter how you choose to,

or choose not to,

picture it…

is how you got here.

Sex is the reason just about every person who you could ever meet is meetable in the first place.

And with all of this sex is a coming together of more than just two individuals…

It is a merging of genetic information of tens of thousands of generations of hominins

With in-fluxing and out-moding of genes

With specialization, mutation, and epigenetic adaptation.

To put it most bluntly!

The simple act of parents having sex is the thing upon which most of life, love, and evolution is based…

That and

This week in science

Coming up next…

First up, an interview about sex!

Interview w/ Dr. Melissa Wilson – Associate Faculty, Biodesign Center for Mechanisms of EvolutionAssistant Professor, School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. Her research interests include sex-biased biology.