Life in the Fast Lane

After five years of inspecting fossils, studying countless species and jotting down copious notes, Darwin’s observations led him to challenge a belief that had stood for centuries: that life on earth was fixed, unchanging. Instead, he proposed something radical: that species evolved over time, shaped by a process he called natural selection. Life, he argued, was not created as is. It was constantly adapting, shifting, evolving.

 

Darwin’s theory of evolution was actually fairly simple, and was an idea that another scientist at the time, Alfred Russel Wallace, was also pondering. Essentially the traits that improved the likelihood that an organism will survive and reproduce will get passed on to future generations. But this process doesn’t happen overnight. 

 

Darwin argued that these small adaptations could take thousands or even millions of years to accumulate and lead to significant changes within a species. But not all evolution moves slowly. Sometimes this process happens quicker than we might think. In fact, we can see evolution happening right before our eyes, if we look in the right places.

 

00:01:48

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: They led me to this pretty amazing cave that had a really big entrance, but then it really narrowed down really hot and humid.

 

00:01:55

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Like deep in a dark cave.

 

00:01:57

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: And we squeezed through this little hole, and then it opened up into this quite large cavern.

 

00:02:03

Dr. Kaylee Byers: There’s an animal that’s a bit of an evolutionary superhero.

 

00:02:07

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: Spend a lot of time in caves as part of my work looking for bat colonies.

 

00:02:12

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Bats. Today we are diving into some of the really exciting ways that evolution is unfolding around us, from the crevices of secluded islands to the hustle of city life. How are some species, ourselves included, continuing to adapt to the modern world and doing it at a pace that could cause Darwin himself to stop and catch his breath? 

 

You are listening to Nice Genes!, the podcast that travels at warp speed through the genomic stories shaping our world, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m Dr. Kaylee Byers, your host and spelunker into the depths of science. You might remember the last time we talked about bats on this show. Ratwoman and Batgirl Assemble.

 

00:03:02

Dr. Kaylee Byers: That’s not trademarked.

 

00:03:03

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, Batgirl’s busy with a classified nocturnal detective mission, but fear not. Here with me is another fellow detective. It is The Bat Whisperer, also known as Dr. Cecilia Sanchez. Hey, Cecilia. Welcome to Nice Genes!.

 

00:03:20

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: Hey, Kaylee. Thank you so much for having me.

 

00:03:22

Dr. Kaylee Byers: I’m so excited for you to be here, especially because we have a little back- and- forth going in a WhatsApp thread about beautiful bats. But before we get there, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the bat research you’ve done?

 

00:03:34

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: So, I actually recently started a new position as a data scientist at the Yale School of Public Health. But actually I’m an ecologist by training, and so a lot of my research focuses on emerging infectious diseases and particularly diseases that can be transmitted from wildlife to humans. And bats are important because they can host different microbes, especially viruses, and usually without getting sick themselves. 

 

So, some of my work has focused on trying to understand if there’s certain features about the bats themselves or the environments that they live in that can make it more likely for interspecies virus transmission to occur.

 

00:04:15

Dr. Kaylee Byers: It’s so cool. And I have a soft spot for animals that get a bad rap, and bats definitely fall in that category. There’s this competition right now essentially for the most beautiful of bats.

 

00:04:26

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: Yes.

 

00:04:27

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Do you have a favorite bat or a bat that you think is the most beautiful?

 

00:04:30

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: I’m really rooting for Hoary Potter. H- O- A- R- Y, first of all. It’s so handsome.

 

00:04:36

Dr. Kaylee Byers: So handsome. I really can’t get over the name of Bat Damon. I really like Bat Damon.

 

00:04:40

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: That is really good. Just for the name.

 

00:04:43

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, I’m so excited for us today to be doing some bat detective work because this year bats made their way into the new cycle by getting up to some pretty funky evolutionary stuff. So, I know I don’t have to ask you, but are you ready to nerd out about some bats?

 

00:04:56

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: Yeah, there’s nothing I’d like batter.

 

00:04:58

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Ah, yes. First pun of the episode. Okay. Cecilia and I were just chatting about our own superhero names. If you had a superhero name, what do you think it would be?

 

00:05:13

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: Mammal Detective, something along those lines. I work with a guy that called himself The Snail Whisperer.

 

00:05:19

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: What would snails whisper about?

 

00:05:20

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: I don’t know.

 

00:05:20

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Oh my God, I do want to know what snails whisper about because they have all the best gossip. You know what I mean?

 

00:05:26

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: Not much else to when you’re a snail.

 

00:05:28

Dr. Kaylee Byers: As you heard at the beginning of the show, Dr. Tyrone Lavery, aka The Mammal Detective, ventures through wonderful caves in search of winged creatures. But when he’s not…

 

00:05:38

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: I’m a lecturer at the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. And I research mammals, so I do a lot of field- based research. Go out there looking for different species, and move from there into labs to sequence DNA, and try and work out how things are related, and then bring all those data together for an overall picture.

 

00:05:57

Dr. Kaylee Byers: So, off the very top of the episode, we listened to some recordings of you looking for bats in a cave in the Solomon Islands. Can you describe what exactly you were doing and what you were looking for?

 

00:06:08

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: We were headed into a cave in East Kwaio on the island of Malaita in Solomon Islands. And it’s a really special group of people that live up there in the mountains. And they led me to this big limestone cave up about 900 meters above sea level. And we went in there basically looking for bats, trying to catch animals so that we can collect tissues and sequence the DNA from those tissues. On that island we were looking for a couple of species that traditional knowledge says are there, a giant rat-

 

00:06:35

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Wow.

 

00:06:35

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: … and another type of bat called a monkey- faced bat.

 

00:06:38

Dr. Kaylee Byers: You essentially went in looking for rats and bats? What a dream.

 

00:06:41

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: That’s right. Yeah. A lot of my time is spent looking for bats and rats.

 

00:06:45

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: So with this particular study, could you tell us more about how it came about?

 

00:06:49

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: Sure. More broadly, I was just interested in a part of the Western Pacific that we call Melanesia, that includes Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and it’s a part of the world that’s been really integral for a lot of our understanding of how life evolves on this planet. I, as part of my PhD, went to those islands to collect tissue samples from different animals and see how mammals were related across those island landscapes. And I basically produced a family tree for those bats.

 

In the Solomon Islands in particular, there’s three species that I included that I was really interested in. One of those is really widespread from Indonesia through to New Guinea, Northern Australia and into Solomons, and it’s called the diadem leaf- nosed bat. There’s another really big species that’s only found in Solomons called the fierce leaf- nosed bat.

 

00:07:36

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: That’s a great name.

 

00:07:36

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: And that’s just a big, big bat. Huge, huge animal compared to others that are found in that archipelago. And then there was a third one that’s called the Makira leaf- nosed bat.

 

00:07:47

Dr. Kaylee Byers: So, we’ve got three different bats, a medium- sized diadem leaf- nosed bat, the big guy called the fierce leaf- nosed bat, and the smaller Makira leaf- nosed bat, all of which look very different from one another. But when Dr. Lavery analyzed their genetic data, he noticed something unexpected.

 

00:08:07

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: Two really big surprises came out when I looked at those three species and how they were related. The first surprise was that they’re almost exactly the same in the data that I was looking at. 

 

Even though they looked vastly different, you could barely split them. You would never call them distinct species if you were just looking at genetic data. And then the second surprise was that for that really big bat, the fierce leaf- nosed bat, we found a case where it was present in a couple of different parts of the tree. And in each case it was paired with that medium- sized bat, the diadem leaf- nosed bat. And that told us that rather than just being one big species, it had actually evolved multiple times on different islands. And we’d never even considered that big bat could be more than one kind of evolutionary unit.

 

00:08:52

Dr. Kaylee Byers: The evidence that Dr. Lavery found was that these big bats were evolving from the medium bats, not just once, but this very evolutionary change was happening in different instances across different islands at the same time.

 

00:09:07

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: So recently we went in and we dug deeper, we collected more samples, and we used more data. We sequenced some RADseq data, and we found the similar pattern that this big bat had evolved in parallel multiple times on different islands.

 

00:09:20

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Using genomics, Dr. Lavery and his team could confirm that what they were witnessing was something called parallel evolution.

 

00:09:29

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: How rare is this type of evolutionary phenomenon?

 

00:09:32

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: To answer that question, we have to talk about parallel evolution because you’re probably familiar with convergent evolution where things evolve to look very similar. Often that’s referred to as parallel evolution. And what I’m talking about here in terms of parallel evolution is when you have the same exact starting point, and that’s in this case, the same species across an archipelago, and that’s evolving into a similar endpoint independently. So, on each island you had that one starting point evolve in exactly the same way multiple times on different units, and that’s rarer.

 

00:10:03

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: Very cool. The larger bats and this idea of parallel evolution, that seems to be happening pretty fast, so is this also an example of rapid evolution? How long did it take for them to evolve this way?

 

00:10:16

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: Yeah, it’s happening rapidly. In terms of putting a time scale on it, can’t quite do that yet. What tells us that it’s rapid is the fact that you have such little difference between that medium bat and the big bat. They’re so incredibly similar genetically. 

 

In fact, if you take the medium bat in Solomon Islands and compare it to another animal from Papua New Guinea, quite close to Solomon Islands, the difference between those two animals is greater than what you find between the medium bat and the big bat. 

 

So, that’s the real evidence that we are getting out that tells us that it’s happening quite quickly. And most of these islands have been connected when sea levels were lower about 10,000 years ago, so the fact that we’re also finding this happening across different islands, again, tells us that it’s probably happening quickly.

 

00:11:01

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Quickly is a relative term when it comes to evolution. And for these changes to have likely occurred sometime within that 10, 000 year window, well, that would be considered very fast in the grand scheme of things. And bats aren’t the only animal that evolve on the fast track. Let me take you back to grade 11 biology class with a classic example of rapid evolution: a moth just looking to fit in.

 

00:11:26

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: That’s probably where we mostly think about rapid evolution is changes in a species, and exactly, that peppered moth example.

 

00:11:33

Dr. Kaylee Byers: In early 19th century England, a white moth with black spots thrived by being able to camouflage with its surroundings like on light colored rocks and tree trunks. But by the time the Industrial Revolution came around…

 

00:11:47

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: Soot was produced by factories and colored the trees black, and over time with selection pressure, that moth started turning black. Basically, it was changing so that it was better camouflaged against the dark surfaces of those trees.

 

00:12:00

Dr. Kaylee Byers: The well- disguised white moths soon started to stand out against the polluted environment and became more vulnerable to predators, so in just a couple decades, that black color morph of that same species had an evolutionary upper hand, and soon they became the more common moth.

 

00:12:17

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: And that’s what we usually think about when we’re talking about rapid evolution is that change in a species. And there’s a lot of good examples of that happening in nature. Antibiotic resistance in bacteria, for example, is another good one where a single species is adapting or changing.

 

00:12:31

Dr. Kaylee Byers: We’ve seen this earlier this season. Microbes are evolving to become resistant to our meds much faster than we would like. And if we look over to Eastern Africa, there’s been another case of evolution cruising in the fast lane. 

 

In Lake Victoria, scientists found that cichlids, a kind of fish often adored for their bright colors, evolved into over 500 species in just 17,000 years. Even though other fish arrived around the same time, cichlids quickly adapted to the lake’s depths and unique food sources, outpacing their rivals. 

 

Different species evolved specialized traits to thrive in different aspects of the lake’s environment, like a second set of jaws or picky mate selection. Cichlids show just how fast evolution can unfold. 

 

The researchers are currently looking into the factors that drove this incredible adaptive radiation of cichlids, and whether certain foods were a part of this. And food might also be the reason why the bats on the Solomon Islands are evolving in parallel. So, we’re dealing with bats that are all using echolocation?

 

00:13:37

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: Yep. This group of bats all uses echolocation, a really special kind of echolocation. A lot of bats will call across multiple frequencies, but these bats, leaf- nosed bats have a call that’s fixed at a single frequency. And it’s really specialized for picking insects out against background clutter, like really dense forests and those types of things.

 

00:13:56

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, yeah, and you mentioned that this echolocation is specialized. How might echolocation shape body size and ecology of these bats?

 

00:14:04

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: Well, that’s the really cool part of this story for me, the one I’m really interested in, is I think that’s what is really driving this whole pattern across the archipelago because, as you say, there is strong links between echolocation, body size and diet in this group of bats. 

 

So, if you are a big bat, you have a really low echolocation frequency, a deep voice, so to speak, and that’s really specialized for picking out bigger insects. And if you’re a smaller Hipposideros bat, then you call out a high frequency, and that high frequency is specialized to pick out smaller insects or smaller objects against that background clutter. 

 

I think that’s probably where it’s at for this pattern that’s happening. Island ecosystems where there’s often vacant niches, there’s probably a good opportunity, maybe some big insects that aren’t being eaten or another type of prey potentially that’s suited towards a bat with a low frequency call.

 

00:14:56

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: So, thinking about the context of your study, why are islands a common setting to study evolutionary adaptations? Does the island environment speed things up?

 

00:15:06

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: Yep. We tend to find that evolution happens faster on islands. And that’s been shown for mammals, that the rate of change is faster than what we find on the mainland. It’s become a bit of a cliche that we call islands natural laboratories. And there’s a reason why that’s a cliche, it’s because it’s true. There’s a few reasons for that. 

 

First is the fact that they’re isolated and they’re these little unique geographic units, so you can compare one island against. Another important aspect is that the species diversity is low on islands compared to the continents. Even though in the Solomons, it’s this incredible wealth of biodiversity and it’s unique, it’s not found in other parts of the world. And then we often find unique pressures or unique niches on islands that species have the opportunity to take advantage of. 

 

So, you can imagine a leaf- nosed bat arriving on one of these islands, and suddenly there’s no other leaf- nosed bats and there’s all these possible food sources. That can drive rapid change in those animals, to take advantage of those resources that no one else is using.

 

00:16:05

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: So, thinking about how islands are these unique ecosystems that can drive rapid evolutionary change, it sort of makes me think about humans living in cities, which can also be a unique environment that might drive changes. So, do you think there’s a comparison we might be able to draw between the two? Could modern urban lifestyles be influencing evolution to occur more rapidly?

 

00:16:28

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: I think so. And I’m familiar with examples that are being found in our cities. We are putting these drastic changes to the environment and creating these really new systems or habitats in our urban areas, parklands and streetscapes and all those types of things. And the animals that are able to survive in our cities are put under really new pressures in terms of their evolution. And so we see already here in Australia there’s a really good example with water dragons, this lizard that likes to live in our parklands, in our cities. 

 

Anywhere where there’s a pond or a lake, you’ll find water dragons living alongside it in the middle of Brisbane or Sydney. And there’s rapid change happening with those in terms of their morphological and genetic changes as well.

 

00:17:10

Dr. Kaylee Byers: These reptiles, called water dragons, are adapting in very specific ways to city life. Scientists have found that water dragons in different urban parks are developing unique traits like changes in body length and jaw width, all depending on the particular environment of each park. It’s almost like each species is shaped by its neighborhood. Life…

 

00:17:30

Ian Malcolm: Life finds a way.

 

00:17:31

Dr. Kaylee Byers: … finds a way. Unique environments, whether it’s islands or cities, can allow for faster evolutionary change. And as our society has transformed and now largely lives in cities, it raises a big question. Coming up, what’s in store for human evolution? 

 

You’re listening to Nice Genes!, a podcast all about the fascinating world of genomics and the evolving science behind it, brought to you by Genome British Columbia. I’m Dr. Kaylee Byers, your host, and we want to get more people to listen to the genomic stories that are shaping our world. 

 

So, if you like Nice Genes!, hit follow on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your shows. Help our audience grow and evolve by sharing the show with a fellow science batty. Batty. Batty. You get it. 

 

The first Homo sapiens appeared roughly 300, 000 years ago, which sounds like a long time, but when you consider that the first signs of life on earth date back to, oh, you know, 3. 7 billion years ago, human history is just a tiny blip on the timeline. 

 

If we crammed Earth’s entire history into a single 24- hour day, over 3 million years would fly by each minute, dinosaurs would vanish at 11:39 PM, and humans wouldn’t show up until the last two tenths of a second before midnight. And even in just the past few thousand years, with the rise of human civilization, our species has transformed our planet at a rapid rate. Our ancestors wouldn’t recognize the world we live in now. Can you imagine trying to explain how to use ChatGPT to a caveman?

 

00:19:10

Professor: So, ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chat bot that uses natural language processing to create human- like conversational dialogue. Here, you just type your question into your computer.

 

00:19:22

Caveman: Computer?

 

00:19:25

Dr. Kaylee Byers: It’s hard to know what’s speeding down the evolutionary highway, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make educated guesses. So, hop into your DeLorean, check your flux capacitor and kick it up to 88 miles an hour, baby, because to go back to the future, we first need to go back to the past.

 

00:19:43

Marty McFly: Are you telling me that you built a time machine out of a DeLorean?

 

00:19:47

Doc Brown: When this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you’re going to see some serious-

 

00:19:51

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Okay.

 

00:19:52

Dr. Nick Longrich: My name is Dr. Nick Longrich. I’m a senior lecturer in evolutionary biology and paleontology, and I work on dinosaurs and other extinct creatures and the evolution of life on earth.

 

00:20:03

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Not too long ago, Dr. Longrich wrote an article called “Future Evolution: From Looks to Brains and Personality, How Will Humans Change in the Next 10, 000 years?” Curious? Well, let’s find out. We often study evolution in terms of the past. We’re looking at past species, the evolution, but there’s often also this discussion for humans in the modern day. And folks might say, “Ah, we’re not evolving anymore.” What do you think about that? Are we, are we not?

 

00:20:33

Dr. Nick Longrich: You have to be evolving. How can you not evolve? We’re always under selection one way, shape, or form. And what happens is if you remove certain types of selection, you’re just going to have other types of selection dominate. So, it’s very, very difficult to avoid any sort of evolution. So, there’s going to be evolution, the question is: what type of evolution will you have?

 

00:20:50

Dr. Kaylee Byers: What are the things that you think would shape our current evolution of humans?

 

00:20:54

Dr. Nick Longrich: Yeah. Well, I think it might be worth starting by thinking about what we lost or what plays a smaller role than it would’ve in the past. Until around 10,000 years ago, for the first 300,000 years of human history, we were hunters and gatherers, and we were subjected to natural selection, not unlike what you would see in a zebra or a lion. 

 

So, you’re subjected to predation, so we had to worry about predators. Predators might remove somebody who is slow or not very aware of their environment from the gene pool, so that’s one thing. Lack of food. You could die of starvation if you weren’t very effective at hunting or weren’t very effective at gathering food. You could starve to death, you could die of disease. 

 

So, what we consider be natural selection was operating back then. And then increasingly as we start farming our own food, basically modifying the environment to create farms and pastures to generate our food, create our own inhabitations with cities and houses, what we consider to be natural selection plays less of a role, but that just means that other forms of selection now come into play. 

 

So, one of them is, for example, sexual selection. In addition to surviving until you’re old enough to reproduce, you also have to find a mate and then successfully raise kids. And if you can’t find a mate, you’re not going to pass on your genes. So, then increasing the selection becomes less about just being able to survive long enough to reproduce, and more about being able to reproduce once you survive.

 

00:22:04

Dr. Kaylee Byers: So, given the shift over the course of our existence from more natural selection to sexual selection, is there any evidence that evolution is quote, unquote, “happening faster now, slower now,” than it used to?

 

00:22:17

Dr. Nick Longrich: I think certainly in certain traits we’re evolving faster. And I think there’s some interesting evidence to suggest that, in fact, human evolution is accelerating, that as cultural evolution has become more and more important, rather than causing physical evolution to slow, that’s actually accelerating our physical evolution.

 

00:22:34

Dr. Kaylee Byers: We can already see evidence of some physical facial features changing, mostly due to our diets. Our jaws are shrinking. And wisdom teeth? So last year. Our palates have become more aged to perfection, let’s say. Two foods that I couldn’t actually physically live on exclusively, but I like to think that I could, which would be bread and cheese. These things probably were not part of our original diet, are things that we have created and cultured literally.

 

00:23:02

Dr. Nick Longrich: So, one trait that they find is the appearance of lactose tolerance, the ability to digest lactose as an adult. Because usually in most mammals you have the ability to digest milk when you’re suckling. You stop nursing, and then you start eating adult food and you don’t need to digest milk anymore, so you lose the ability to digest it. And humans, especially in Western Europe, retain that ability until later in life because we have dairy products. And so hunter- gatherers without dairy had absolutely no reason to have the ability to digest it. Breads, as you say, is another one.

 

00:23:29

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Can you imagine life without cheese? While our evolution as a species has allowed us to expand our diets, it’s also brought some new challenges. As we become more urbanized, disease spreads more quickly, and that’s something humans have had to evolve to cope with too.

 

00:23:46

Dr. Nick Longrich: We’ve become adapted to this strange artificial ecosystem we created called the civilization. As the civilization has unusual characteristics, people living in very high densities, it’s kind of a perfect environment in which diseases can emerge because you have lots of people that are packed close together where infection is very easy and then they travel from place to place. It’s actually remarkably similar to bat colonies. You get bats tied together and occasionally they go from colony to colony, so you have a lot of diseases evolve in there, and then we have to evolve resistance to them or we die.

 

00:24:16

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Living in crowded cities definitely brought its fair share of diseases, but it also created an environment for disease- resistant genes to thrive. One study found that people from long- established cities, like in Italy or Iran, are more likely to have a variant of a gene that was resistant to infection with certain intracellular pathogens, like the bacteria that caused tuberculosis or leprosy. So, while city life sparked the spread of illness, living in these cities also promoted adaptations that reduced infection for some diseases. Looking into our past can teach us a lot about how our genetics came to be and where they’re heading next.

 

00:24:51

Doc Brown: You’ve got to come back with me.

 

00:24:52

Marty McFly: Where?

 

00:24:53

Doc Brown: Back to the future.

 

00:24:53

Dr. Kaylee Byers: That being said, there are some ethical considerations we need to keep in mind for the future too.

 

00:25:00

Dr. Nick Longrich: So many people are getting their genome sequenced, 23andMe or whatever. We’re going to have very rapidly… You could easily imagine a future where within a generation or even matter of years it becomes routine to take the DNA of the population for diagnostic purposes or whatever, identification purposes the same way we do fingerprints. 

 

At which point we would be able to monitor evolution in a way that we and obviously no other species before us ever has. So, we can watch it now in real time. What do you do with that information? I think would be a fascinating question, but it seems the type of thing that’d be very easy to abuse. 

 

I think for me the issue is our understanding is so limited, that to try to identify any particular gene and say what it’s doing and understanding really what it’s doing or what the consequences of having it or not having it might be, I think we’re too ignorant to make those decisions. I don’t think we’re wise enough or smart enough to know what we’re doing. It does raise some interesting questions, some interesting kind of sci- fi possibilities.

 

00:25:53

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Genomic advancements like gene editing tools allow us to artificially accelerate evolutionary processes in ways we never could before. But these quote, unquote, “advancements,” aren’t necessarily better. In the immortal words of Ian Malcolm, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

 

00:26:10

Ian Malcolm: Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

 

00:26:11

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Release the T- Rex. So, while some predictions about our future evolution might sound like we are the masterminds behind it all, it’s important to remember that evolution is also about the bigger picture, about life on earth as a whole. Let’s bring back our bat squad and dive into why understanding evolution and biodiversity is so important for every little critter out there.

 

00:26:36

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: Why is it so important to understand how our genomes are still evolving today? What evolutionary secrets can be hidden in our DNA?

 

00:26:44

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: From a basic level, it’s awesome for us to understand life around us, and there comes big benefits from just understanding how our planet works and particularly how our biodiversity functions and evolves, without needing to put a benefit to humanity as that part of the story, but there definitely are benefits to us as well. Because we are causing big changes in the world, we are losing species and we are forcing things to evolve more rapidly than they might have had to otherwise, so it’s really important that we understand those changes and what drives them. 

 

So, we not only need to, I think, conserve what’s here today, we also have to look after the capacity for things to evolve into the future and for those processes to go on, and life continue to be shaped in the way it has been for millions of years. And the Solomons, this bat example, is a good example. 

 

We don’t just want to conserve one big bat, because it’s not one entity, it’s multiple evolutionary units. We need to understand what those processes are so that we can go out and protect all those independent radiations of different bats because they’re important for the future.

 

00:27:45

Dr. Kaylee Byers: When talking about the future, where do you think evolution is going to take us next? Any predictions for what we might see in the years to come?

 

00:27:53

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: For humanity, we’ll probably just be plugged into Instagram-

 

00:27:55

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: I already am.

 

00:27:57

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: … with a built- in microphone, your goggles on.

 

00:28:00

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Fully Matrix- ed in?

 

00:28:01

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: Yeah, I think so.

 

00:28:01

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Yeah. I love that.

 

00:28:03

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: I think I’m an optimist in terms of biodiversity. I think we’ll get it together. I just hope it’s quickly enough. I think we’ll look after life and biodiversity, and we’ll find ways to live alongside and let these wonderful species coexist and also coevolve into the future.

 

00:28:18

Dr. Kaylee Byers: I love that. I like the optimistic look. Thank you so much, Dr. Lavery, for joining us.

 

00:28:22

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: Yes, thank you.

 

00:28:23

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: Thanks a lot. Yeah, I really appreciate the chat.

 

00:28:26

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Well, Cecilia, this was super fun. Thanks for hanging out with me. And I love that we get to do this in our personal lives is nerd out about bats, so thanks for coming to do it more formally.

 

00:28:35

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me, Kaylee. Anytime you want me back, just flash the Bat- Signal and I’ll be ready.

 

00:28:42

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Will do. Our guests for today were Mammal Detective/ mammalogist and lecturer at the University of Melbourne, Dr. Tyrone Lavery, and senior lecturer in paleontology and evolutionary biology at the University of Bath, Dr. Nick Longrich. Special thanks to The Bat Whisperer, Dr. Cecilia Sanchez, who’s also a data scientist and ecologist at Yale University. 

 

You’ve been listening to Nice Genes!, a podcast brought to you by Genome British Columbia. If you liked this episode, go check out some of our previous ones wherever you listen from. Share us with your friends and leave us a review. You can also DM the show on social media by going to @ GenomeBC. And that’s a zip on season four of Nice Genes!. 

 

This season, we’ve been looking at the invisible forces that shape the world we live in. We hope you’ve enjoyed searching through the pockets of our collective genes. And don’t worry, we’ll still be dropping in your feeds with some itty-bitty minisodes coming your way very soon, so keep your eyes peeled for brand new Gene Shorts!. 

 

As we close out the season, I want to thank a few people that help make our show happen. Our producer this season is Jenny Cunningham. Austin Johnson is our associate producer. Audio design is Sam Seguin and Patrick Emile. Technical assistance from Ryan Clark. Project lead: Mandy Elkoreh. Safa Shahkhalili is our marketing specialist. And executive producer is Jen Moss. 

 

From Genome BC, Sarah Lando is our production consultant. Most of all, thank you to all of you fabulous listeners for tuning in. Your zest for zeroing in on the scientific zeitgeist keeps this show going strong, so thanks. Have you seen the most beautiful bat competition that’s going on right now?

 

00:30:18

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: No, I haven’t.

 

00:30:19

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: Oh, well-

 

00:30:19

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: I didn’t know about a beautiful bat competition.

 

00:30:21

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: Pit different species against each other. And they’re at the final stage, so there’s two bats left.

 

00:30:27

Dr. Tyrone Lavery: And who are the two bats?

 

00:30:28

Dr. Cecilia Sanchez: There’s a hoary bat. It’s Hoary Potter. And then the other one is Lestat. I’d forget which species he is.

 

00:30:41

Dr. Kaylee Byers: Release the T-Rex.