YouSaid · the spoken record

Max Telford

lines on the record: 31
first: 2025-04-24
most recent: 2025-04-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, I guess maybe it may be. Single species have been responsible for huge changes to the climate before. There's something called the Azolla catastrophe, which was an ice age caused by this plant growing around the Antarctic that sank in huge numbers to drawing down masses of carbon dioxide. It wasn't as quick as we've been. But we wouldn't be the first species to make a mess of things.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“we make of the world, it'll be just one of a series of horrible catastrophes that has changed the history of the world, changed the history of life, and it'll be a blink of an eye. There might be a terrible human derived catastrophe, but the world will keep going and the tree of life will keep growing. And maybe we'll be a sorry little footnote on it.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I do. I think you're absolutely right. It is an absolute tragedy. And the people who care about climate change do tend to focus on sea level rises and the effect on humans and human migration, which is all going very likely to be terrible. But there are literally thousands of species dying every year already due to climate change. It's terrible. But I think writing the book somehow gave me a different perspective on it and slightly made me very humble, not just as a human, but as a vertebrate or an animal, realizing that we're so recent, we've just appeared in the last over 4 billion years, we're the last tiny, tiny millimeter of the ruler of time, if you want. And whatever...”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've talked about these phyla, these distinct body plans and the vertebrates are one part of the chordates, which is the phylum. So vertebrates are a tiny twig and there are about 30 other phyla which are just as unique and important and different as the vertebrates are. So there's familiar things like arthropods and mollusks and analid worms, but there's 25 others that are sort of known only to geeks like me, the naphthosomy lids and the rotifers and the Kisognaths, etc. I could list I could reel off a whole list of them. But that's really where the diversity of animals exists. So the vertebrates themselves are fascinating obviously.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, absolutely. So I'm an invertebrate biology. So for me, vertebrates all look the same. You look like a fish from where I was standing. Fair enough.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Evolution would tell us that they're extremely, it's much better to have a jaw than not to have a jaw because those are the successful species.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess from our point of view it's important because it's how we eat. So you could come up with some reason for deciding from your point of view that it's important. But evolution actually tells us that it's important in that we came from fishes that didn't have jaws. And of the fishes that emerged from that jawless ancestor, there are only two tiny branches that don't have jaws and tens of thousands that do have jaws. So the jawless fishes are the cyclostomes, so the lampreys and the hagfish. So two tiny, tiny branches without jaws survived. And then the ones that evolved jaws took over the world and gave rise to almost all the vertebrates that still arrived today. So in a sense, that's a natural experiment into our jaws useful a lot.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You've really got me now because I'm an expert on worms. But the chin is the fact that it sticks out in front of our lower teeth rather than all jawed vertebrates have a lower jaw. So it's not the lower jaw itself. It's the protrusion beyond our teeth that makes it a child rather than just the lower jaw.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The chimpanzees don't, for example, they're our closest eight relative. And the point really I was making there is we often want to know”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The human chin does exist, but we're the only species that does have a chit. None of the other apes have a chin. If you think about a chimpanzee, it's sort of, I've got quite a big chin, but we all have chips.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think the most important thing, the most important message of the book is that the tree of life, if we know it, once we know it, it's something that can take us back in time and it's this sort of foundation, should I say, of understanding our own history. And if we don't know how we're related to everything else, then we can't know our own very long history.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I must say, I didn't write the previous one, I was the editor of it, so this is my first foray into actually writing a whole book. I love my subject and I think it's incredibly interesting but probably fairly little understood. So I think people know about roughly what a tree of life is than there is one. It's very interesting I find in understanding how a tree of life is made and the mistakes we can make in doing so the mistakes are almost always interesting in fact. So I've told you some stories about how Zina Tabella because it's very simple. Everyone thought it was a flat worm but it turns out it's related to more complex things and so these things that confuse us about building the tree of life are often some of the well they're what challenges me every day but they're often caused by some of the most interesting bits of evolution. So I really wanted to get across this field that I'm so passionate about.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So then we went in and did some experiments to show this and found the real DNA from this worm and we showed that it wasn't related to the flatworms as everyone had believed. It wasn't related to the mollusks that seemed the mistake that I've just described. And it turns out, according to me at least, that it belongs to a group called the Deuterostones. And the deutrostones is a great big branch of the animal kingdom that includes the chordates like us. So it turns out that this very simple worm is actually relatively closely related to us, which was a huge surprise at the time.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the first DNA that came from Zina Tabella showed instead that it appeared to be related to the mollusks, and mollusks seemed to pop up the whole time. And I started working on it at this point because it seemed very, very unlikely that Zena Tabella, this very simple worm, was related to the mollusks because it doesn't look anything like a mollusk. And what we discovered was that this first experiment that had looked at Xena Tabella and got DNA out of it had made a mistake and they'd actually got all the DNA they'd ground up a whole adult organism and the DNA that they'd actually analyzed came from the contents of its stomach and it turns out that it turns out that it eats mollusks.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. This is a very odd creature, and it was for a long time. I've worked on it for 20 years, and to put it mildly, not everyone agrees with me about where it belongs on the animal tree. Anyway, so the worm started off as a very simple worm, and it was thought to be related to the flat worms, which are things that it's a phylum of worms that includes the things that tape worms and things like that, because they're very similar. very similarly simple, should I say.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That some genes that are present in everything from humans to bacteria. And if we look at those genes and look for changes to the DNA sequences of those genes, we can use those in exactly the same way as I've just described for the backbone. So there can be a change in one tiny bit of the DNA which is then passed on to all the descendants of that creature at that time which defines them as a group, defines them as a branch of the tree of life.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're looking for things which define branches of the tree. So for example, we're looking for characters which are unique to a branch and not found anywhere else. So for example, one single branch of the animal tree are the chordates and the chordates share a number of characters, most obviously they have a backbone. And so this is a character that is unique to the chordates, not found anywhere else. And so anything that has a backbone must be a chordate and anything that doesn't have a backbone must be somewhere else. And so that one single character defines one branch of the tree of life. And so then we just need to look for more characters. So we look at more and more characters and these can be bits of armorology or our embryology as we've discussed or they can be bits of our DNA. So we share DNA with the whole of life. So there's some”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what's fair to say is that if you've got a dozen species, there are literally millions of ways in which they could be related. So there are literally millions of trees that could relate just a handful of species. And so the number of potential trees of life that we could decide are the truth is it's absolutely impossible to count. And so we have to try and find ways of finding the truth. So there is one tree of life, but which is it? Is it the one where sea squirts are related to mollusks or the sea squirts are chordates, etc. And there are countless questions like that which we need to sort out in order to get to the answer.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Evolution trees can be based on any character that is inherited. So ultimately, the characters will be encoded in the DNA so that they can get passed on from generation to generation. But those characters can be the DNA itself or the proteins that the DNA codes for or the phenotype that the proteins produce. So the shape of the body or the color of scales or whatever it may be. And for some organisms, of course, we don't have any DNA. So for fossils, we only have their phenotype. So for huge, huge bits of the tree of life, I should say, we can only use phenotype because most species that have ever lived are now extinct.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They've stopped running around looking for food and they've settled down on a rock and they feed completely differently. They don't need to move anywhere. They can use their legs for other things so they can use their legs to catch food in a very different way. They have these big shells which they need to protect themselves. And so evolution has made them look very different from their phylum. So they've sort of, but nevertheless they go through this phylotypic stage which shows that they are indeed arthropods.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even before Darwin, people were looking at embryos and realizing that there were sort of, they could classify organisms even in a pre-Darwinian sense, so a non-evolutionary sense, you're just classifying things that are similar to each other and discovering these deep relationships based on the similarities of their early embryology. So the sea squirts is one great example. Another really nice example are the barnacles. The barnacles are these things that you see encrusting rocks by the seaside. And they look rather like limpets. They sort of live side by side with limpets and they were initially classified as mollusks. I think everything seems to get lumped together with mollusks. But the barnacles go through a stage where they look, a larval stage again, where developmental stage. And so this was when it was first realized that barnacles are crustaceans. And they look weird because they've started.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“at some point all the members of a phylum come to resemble one another, and that's the phylotypic stage. So however different their eggs start off looking, so they might have big eggs with lots of yolk or little eggs with very little yolk, all the chordates pass through a stage when they all look very similar. So a human embryo will look like a chick embryo, will look like a fish embryo. And we get the same period of development in the arthropods and in the mollusks. They all pass through what we call this phylotypic stage, which is sort of the stage where the sort of fundamental of the body plan of that phylum are laid down in development.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I kind of think it's the other way around. So there's this within the animal kingdom, some of the oldest, most distantly related branches are these branches which we call phyla. So these are things that have very different body plans. And we can't really work out how these are the most difficult problems in terms of working out how they're related. A phylum would be the arthropods, which are things with a jointed legs like crustaceans and insects, the mollusks, which all have a shell and a sort of squidgy bit, squidgy body, and the chordates, which are things like us, which have a backbone. So those are three phyla. And they separated from each other in very long time ago in a period called the Cambrian, about sort of 500, 540 million years ago. And the phylotypic stage is a period during their embryonic development, they all start off as an egg, so a very, very simple.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interested in the sort of weird wormy things that live in the sea. But there's a group called the Sea Squirts, which are very common animals. They're rather ugly, attached to the bottom of boats, for example. And these were classified for a very long time as mollusks because they sort of look like mollusks. They're squidgy and rather plain and they don't go anywhere. They just sort of sit there filter feeding. And so this turns out to be a mistake that we were confused by their outward appearance. And at some point in the 19th century it was discovered that the sea squirts actually have a stage in their life. They go through a larval stage. And it turns out that sea squirts are not related to mollusks at all, but the clue is in their larval stage, which looks like a bit like a fish or a tadpole. It's got a mouth at one end and a tad.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Linnaeus and Aristotle were looking at the outside appearance of organisms to make their categories. And very often those categories that they made actually conform to the branches of the tree that we now know are true. So Aristotle had a group called the essentially the blooded animals, the animals with blood, and that corresponds to the vertebrates. And he had things that laid laid eggs and that were the reptiles and the birds. And so these groups you can do, you can find these groups with these classifications turn out to match map onto the tree of life we have. And then, of course, we make mistakes when we're just looking at morphology. We make mistakes even when we're using the vast amounts of information that we have in DNA. And a good example, there's a, I work on invertebrates, so I'm particularly...”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were looking at the right plant and you weren't going to poison them. So categorization is something that we did without any knowledge of evolution or that these species that we're looking at were actually related to each other. And the family trees, on the other hand, is something that we sort of realized that the species could be put into family trees much later. So we obviously are all interested in our own family trees over probably only a couple of generations and over their family trees of kings and Caesars and Tsars over sort of hundreds of years. So I think those two things come together and meet when we realise that animals are related by this process of evolution.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's kind of two parts to your question there because one of them is categorization where we're always keen in the Greek philosophers were keen in working out what ideals were what things were could be lumped together as more or less similar. So Aristotle was very interested in working out characteristics which lumped groups of animals together, but he had no idea of evolution. So he was, as far as he was concerned, he was looking at our ideals or whatever. Linnaeus similarly, his classification was a practical one. It was a way of finding the characters which allowed you, if you considered them one by one, to put a species that you had in front of you into bigger and initially big and then smaller and smaller and more precise groups so that if you were a botanist, you were trying to cure somebody's headache with a plant, you could make sure.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, all this extraordinary diversity of life that we can see around us has appeared through evolution. There's a process that started off with a single species and that over many, many millions and billions of years has produced the species alive today. And that process by which the species were produced were made and became different from each other can be described by a tree of relationships.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I guess it all started with Charles Darwin, who realised that rather than species being created by God in an instant, species had come to exist over time, over vast periods of time, in fact. And that the best explanation, the one that Darwin came up with in the 19th century, was that there was an initial event which caused life to come into existence, which is an extraordinary tale in itself. But since that moment, that single first species has gone on to divide into more species and that over time those species have become different from each other. And that's how we've got to, what we can see outside our windows today. So there's not a lot I can see outside my window here in London. But if you go into, even in our garden in London, we see foxes and trees and bluebells and butterflies, etc.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Professor Max Telford is an evolutionary biologist and the Jodrell chair of zoology and comparative anatomy at University College London, where he founded the Centre for Life's Origins and Evolution and the Telford Lab. Joining Telford to discuss the book is Ganesh Taylor, fellow at the Centre for Reproductive Health and Science Communicator. Let's join Ganesh now with more.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorenti. Understanding how the diversity of life on Earth came to be is one of the greatest puzzles in biology. In his new book, The Tree of Life, Professor Max Telford charts a four billion-year journey through the evolution of our planet, from humans, fish and butterflies to oak trees, mushrooms and bacteria. On today's episode, Professor Telford sheds light on an epic history of the family tree that records the relationships between every living thing. From Darwin's early sketches to the vast computer-generated diagrams scientists are building today.”
2025-04-24 · Intelligence Squared · The Tree of Life: Mapping Evolution’s Greatest Story, with Max Telford · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT