Podcast Cutting: Why "…most of us aren’t evolved to handle milk…" is wrong.

"…most of us aren’t evolved to handle milk…"

This statement was uttered by presenter Tim Samuels of the “Scary Dairy” episode of the podcast “All Hail Kale” at about 5:52. I was so annoyed when I heard this, I had to stop the podcast. This was the first episode I had listened to of the BBC broadcast, and it lost major science cred for me when I heard it. Let me say, the argument I’m about to make is not about the facts of this story or the statement, it’s about communicating clearly. It will seem pedantic and I have sympathy for that perspective. However, this is the kind of statement that is confusing to listeners by failing to accurately describe the process of evolution. There is already so much confusion and controversy surrounding evolutionary biology, misplaced skepticism and outright religious opposition, we don’t need bad language to make matters even worse.

First, my suggested alternatives, then I’ll rant a bit about why I think this is better.

“…most of us do don’t have the gene(s) to digest milk…”

The additional (s) is to indicate that I don’t know or care whether there is one or multiple genes involved in lactose digestion. It’s probably many (it’s so rarely just one), but this is not actually about milk, it’s about language.

“…only some human populations are adapted to adult milk consumption…”

It’s a pretty subtle difference, I understand. Actually the researcher being quoted in the podcast (David Levitsky) uses the much better language, not surprisingly. Levitsky’s wording is:

“…Only people from Northwestern Europe who maintain an amount of lactase…

“…most adults can’t digest milk…”

“… they [Western Europeans] evolved to handle milk products…”

Catch the difference? Anyone who has studied evolutionary biology will spot this immediately. When biologists talk about evolution, even when it is targeted at the general population, the concepts of evolution as a process rather than a state, that evolution occurs on populations rather than on individuals, and the very important difference between evolution and adaptation will hang between the words. Unfortunately, what I see when i look past the words of Tim Samuels is…. a lack of any such understanding.

I used to grade a lot of undergraduate evolution essays and papers, and if I read one that looked like this podcast’s script, my immediate thought would be “this person didn’t do the homework…” I might end up giving them something like a 68%: the topic was well chosen, and reaching out to these researchers was well done. However, the fact the podcasters were utterly incapable of putting the basic concepts of the people he interviewed into their own words without stumbling all over them means these podcast producers need to get back to basics and LEARN THE CONCEPTS before preaching to the world.

So, after getting that rant out of my head, I decided to give the episode another chance. Maybe it would redeem itself if I listened all the way through. Sadly, that was not the case. Further along in the episode, Samuels says “…so, who is meant to drink milk?” and even actually used the word “designed”, twice, in the context of the evolution of lactose tolerance. This is a cardinal sin in evolutionary biology, a big no no.

With this, my suspicions at the top of the episode were confirmed, no more mincing words: this podcast is straight up garbage. One of the very most basic ideas in modern evolutionary biology is that the evolutionary process is not directed, not moving towards any particular end goal. Yes, certain forces like natural selection and sexual selection occur in ways that are somewhat predictable, but nowhere will you every hear an actual biologist suggest that the process has a “meaning” except in one particular case, which brings me to the word “designed”. In evolutionary biology circles, that word has an unmistakable connotation: the patently biased Christian philosophy of Intelligent Design.

If you don’t already know about Intelligent Design (or ID), by all means go look it up yourself and make up your own mind about it. I’m not going to bother discussing it here because it opens up a whole controversial can of worms. All you need to know for the purposes of this discussion is that ID is religious philosophy, not science. So, this leads me to my final thought about Samuels and the All Hail Kale podcast. In summary, the best possible light that I can cast on this program (based on this episode) is that they are well meaning people who are unfortunately more interested in catchy titles and provocative topics than they are in disseminating a well researched view of a complex academic field. If that’s true, I can kind of get it: these people are BBC news presenters, not scientists, and if this is the case my advice to them is to let the interviewed scientists speak for themselves, and don’t bother trying to recap their ideas.

On the other hand, there are signs in this episode of something potentially darker. It’s possible to detect not just science illiteracy, but the language of religious bias within this script. Whether that is there to catch a broader audience of “evolution skeptics” or to provoke people like me to write articles like this (a.k.a. trolling), I’m not sure. Whatever the reason, it’s enough for me to have no interest in listening to this podcast ever again, and I will say the same to you: steer clear.

This is how you do it, folks :)

If you’re interested in a program that takes popular topics and does interviews with scientists along with real, thorough literature reviews (as opposed to “I emailed 200 people and got through to 4, so that’s what I have for you here”) the podcast you want is Science Vs. with Wendy Zukerman. She is amazing and manages to walk that line between the popular/provocative and the researched/informed with grace and poise and humour. It’s actually one of the only podcasts where I can recommend listening back to episodes a few times, because there is so much great info jammed into each one. Go listed to the entire backlog!

Science Vs. Podcast