Radiolab — ‘The Good Show’

Huffduffed by allwhitelegos on April 19th, 2011

In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another?

The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today’s plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness … or even, self-sacrifice. Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?

download

Tagged with

Also huffduffed as…

  1. Radiolab: The Good Show

    —Huffduffed by lach on February 14th, 2012

  2. Radiolab: The Good Show

    —Huffduffed by Heronheart on January 19th, 2011

  3. Radiolab: The Good Show

    —Huffduffed by chezfugu on January 8th, 2011

  4. The Good Show

    —Huffduffed by eflclassroom on January 25th, 2011

  5. The Good Show

    —Huffduffed by jomz on April 12th, 2012

Possibly related…

  1. Radiolab — ‘Lost & Found’

    In this episode, Radiolab steers its way through a series of stories about getting lost, and asks how our brains, and our hearts, help us find our way back home.

    After hearing about a little girl who gets lost in front of her own house, Jad and Robert wonder how we find our way in the world. We meet a woman who has spent her entire life getting lost, and find out how our brains make maps of the world around us. We go to a military base in New Jersey to learn about some amazing feats of navigational wizardry, and are introduced to a group of people in Australia with impeccable orientation. Finally, we turn to a very different kind of lost and found: a love story about running into a terrifying, and unexpected, fork in the road.

    download

    Tagged with

    —Huffduffed by allwhitelegos 2 years ago

  2. Radiolab — ‘Pass the Science’

    Richard Holmes went to Cambridge University intending to study the lives of poets. Until a dueling mathematician, and a dinner conversation composed entirely of gestures, changed his mind.

    In this short, Robert asks Richard how he came to write The Age of Wonder, a rollicking book full of adventure and discovery about the rise of modern science in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Richard tells us the poignant story of mathematician Évariste Galois—and how dropping his name at the High Table at Cambridge University led to a wordless demonstration of cubic equations by a cutlery-wielding Russian mathematician (who spoke no English). In the end, Richard was so taken with the lengths scientists will go to in order to explain their work (even when they fail), that he decided to give it a go himself. We get that.

    download

    Tagged with

    —Huffduffed by allwhitelegos 2 years ago

  3. Radiolab — ‘Gravitational Anarchy’

    A mysterious case of the topsy turvies and a return to the question of what felines feel when they fall.

    In this podcast, we revist some ideas from our recent epsiode on Falling. We begin with a story excerpted from an essay by Berton Roueché, which first appeared in the New Yorker in 1958 and was later published by Dutton in a book called "The Medical Detectives." Read for us by the actress Hope Davis, it tells the true tale of a woman named Rosemary Morton, who had a little, um, trouble with gravity. After that, we return to a segment from the Falling episode that has troubled some of our listeners: the mystery of falling cats. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist extraordinaire and Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, takes us to task for using "bad data." We call on science writer David Quammen to help us fight back and, in the end, we wonder how we can ever know the mind of a falling cat.

    download

    Tagged with

    —Huffduffed by allwhitelegos 2 years ago