YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Prum

lines on the record: 61
first: 2021-06-30
most recent: 2021-06-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You just get these responses. Luckily, well, I've had privilege teach lots of really amazing people, but you're explaining something to somebody, giving them a bit of a context. And then all of a sudden, you know, you get a shot back. You get a response back. And you're like, oh yeah, they got that, right? They got that. Oh, and then you get, and it pitches back, right? That interplay where you link something out and they see where you're headed and ask you a question. And they often will say, wow, this is a real, I don't know if this is a dumb question, but what about blind? It's like, that's not a dumb question. That's the fundamental focus of where this whole field is going. You know, I used to teach at the University of Kansas, and in Kansas, it was a big, very huge university, but the great students were as good as anywhere. And then you would have a marvelous experience of discovering a student who was really smart and didn't actually know it. They might have been the smartest kid in their town coming off somewhere in West Kansas. They had never had an opportunity to experience what they were capable of. It's really that response.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. That's a big one. And then natural history, their introduction to flowers and ferns and to another way of being outdoors, which actually I related to much better than the Boy Scouts, right? Which I left pretty quickly. But then I met a young Yaley, then hippie, a guy named Tom Will, who's just recently retired from the Fish and Wildlife Service. And he was a great mentor early on in birding.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a kid, I interacted with a number of people that were mostly garden club ladies, right? They were my mom's age or older or retired people. They had cars. I did not have a car in fourth grade, fifth grade. So it was a great deal. And they certainly did a great deal to cultivate me.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really care about birds. I think that birds are really interesting. So I am not necessarily worried about what the other guy, here's the deal.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, a lot of my science is deeply rooted in natural history. I am not interested in lawlike properties of nature, but in the idiosyncratic instances. And a lot of that view grew out of birdwatching, grew out of my childhood and being interested in birds. And a lot of people do birding and they go into science, right? But for me, somehow that birding experience affected how I do science. And I think that somehow I have kind of a minority style of mind in modern science, a lot of great scientists out there, but most of them are not thinking the way I do. And so as a result, there just seem to be more opportunities laid out.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. But I'll tell you that the data for cats is way bigger than that. So cats kill more birds than all the skyscrapers and windmills. And these are pets, feral cats that are maintained by humans.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, because that is really, really clear. You have concocted, created an artificial predator that you're keeping really happy and healthy and feeding it, keeping it in a peak condition so that you can have it go outside and entertain itself. And its entertainment is damaging the world. I mean, the scale of cat death, I don't know the numbers, way more birds are killed by cats than are killed by all the wind power in America. It's devastating. It's billions of birds.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's true. But there seem to be some kind of resilience despite this change. But I don't know. I wish I had a better answer, but I'm still a historian rather than a predictor in my work.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm just grading term papers right now in ornithology, and how to turn paper in ornithology exactly on this question. That was pretty good by a political science student with interest in environmental policy. I don't know if I've got the training to say that, except to understand that, yeah, it is real trade-offs. I think we're making them all the time. I think in general, I mean, if there were enlightened policy like carbon tax, et cetera, even a little bit of it, we'd be in much better situation to see maybe it would solve itself. There's certainly a lot of reason for concern. It's also a lot of interesting resilience, right? We're looking in New England here, where I live. We used to have chestnut trees, and they disappeared. And we used to have elm trees, and they basically became irrelevant, right? And now we're looking at hemlocks disappearing because of the Woolly Adelgid. And now ashes, the emerald ash bore from China has arrived. We're losing matrix trees, yet there still seem to have forest. We still have a lot of birds in them. Now, less birds, fewer birds.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find this rewilding or revivification to be really off-putting. However, and mostly because I... I mean, the reason why it went extinct is that it needed continental scale richness of chestnut and oak forest in order to survive. And there's just no place in the world where that is, right? They're extraordinarily social. They only laid one egg, right, a year, which means that they were at what we call K-selected. And so as a result, there's very almost no place for them in the world. Having said that, most of my criticism are also framed by the unrealism of the technology, just like, okay, so we find a few genes and we put them into bantail pigeon, the sister group, the closest extinct species, and we put them in and we kind of make it a little bit more like a pasture pigeon. Wouldn't that be cool? It's like, well, no, that's not really cool. I mean, if we really had the technology, really bring back pasture pigeons, sure, I'd be into that, but we were very, very far from that.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wow. You know, the oceans are getting deeply screwed up and climate change, both of these combinations are really affecting the Arctic or Northern. I don't think the puffins will go extinct on a couple century scale, but their distributions and lives are really going to change, I think.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, for one example of culture, half the birds of the world learn their songs from other members of their species, almost always not their parents. And what that means is you've got a decoupling from genetic variation and the phenotype or the presentation of the animal. So what do they do? They learn from other individuals and they learn preferences. So the birds in areas around Chicago, New York, and Boston sound differently, just like the people do. And for pretty much the exact same reason, right? And it's not because of the wind in Chicago or the baked beans in Boston. It's isolation by distance and historical contingency and cultural change. So birds have been doing culture for tens of millions of years, which puts us to shame, certainly in terms of diversity. Of course, we piled a lot of culture on our one little invention, and that's notable and interesting in its own right too.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I do think there are examples of birds. Carl Sefina has cataloged these, and I don't know that literature, but there are certainly examples of birds that appear to be mourning or understanding that their compatriots are physically present, but I'm no longer living, right? Whatever that is, I wouldn't be surprised if they do, right? I mean, they know each other as individuals deeply. You were mentioning albatross earlier. One of the things about albatross, the big ones, they nest every other year. So at every albatross colony, there's an even year cohort and an odd year cohort that returns. They take off the other year, then come back to reproduce. And they're monogamous over decades if they live long enough. And so they'll spend that year off, nine and a half months or 12, 15 months, whatever it is, and they'll even fly around the entire southern continents around Antarctica a couple times, then return to the Farallon or Malvinus Islands, and then meet that same mate and then mate again, right?”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. I think that there are lots of examples of extraordinarily specific smartness in birds that doesn't apply. But the birds that are really smart tend to be smart at a lot of stuff. So there's a few of them that stand out with breadth of smarts. And I'm thinking parrots and crows, corvids, and parrots, they're the most noble. They stand out above everybody.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Return up through Florida to these. And then, what do they do next year? They go down to Florida, jump over to Cuba, come down the islands. So it's a combination. So what do birds need to migrate? They need to have a magnetic compass. They also have a sun compass. They have to have a clock and an experience of the sun. They need a map about which we don't know much. And then they have to have a bearing, like where they're going and then a sense of how far to go or from a map, whether they've reached their destination. And then in real life, they experience the world and then refine that with experience. So they have some innate capacities and then a lot of experience. And of course, a lot of them fail to learn. And I'm sure some of those birds that wander out in the ocean fail.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is great. And this is actually an area where we're learning a lot because of new technology. So now we have these GPS transmitters that you can get satellite information in real time on where those birds are. And this is the work mostly, I believe, of Rob Beregard, who has done this in Ospreys. And most ospreys spend the winter in a very narrow area of the Yanos of Venezuela and Colombia. That's where the ospreys go, or at least in this continent. What the young ospreys do is they fly off the east coast, kind of wandering around in the ocean. Sometimes they hit Bermuda, sometimes they want to, they might return to South Carolina. They basically mess it up. It's somehow or other, eventually they get down to the Antilles and they realize, oh, and they follow the chain of the lesser Antilles down to South America. And then on the way north, they realize, oh, we've got the Guar Peninsula in Northern Colombia, and then Passover, oh, we get to Jamaica, and then they go boop, and they...”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's that mostly that you get the animal while it's young. So traditionally Falcon 3, you would get the bird on southern migration and capture it. You could tell it was naive. You could fool it easier so it's easier to capture. You either hold it for a year or over the winter and then let it go. And then later you kept with it. They haven't become a domesticated strain, if you will, like a chicken or a dog. You're co-opting the capacity. It's like having a pet parrot, right? The parrot thinks it's a human and the way it develops in this new environment with human social partners is extraordinary and different. And that's how that works. The fishing in the cormorants, I don't know if it's still going on. It was a tradition in areas of Japan, I know, but I've never witnessed it or seen it happen. I think that those birds are captured from the wild. They don't breed them, I don't believe.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And unfortunately, critically endangered, but being well conserved at this site. So there are a number of things like that. An oil bird cave is in a number of incredible thing for the right person. These are nocturnal frugivores. They live in caves in South American Andes, and they fly out of the cave at night and fly dozens or even hundreds of miles out to forage on avocado and palm fruits that they bring back to the cave and feed to their babies. And they're called oil birds because they used to capture them and render them down for oil and cook with it and make candles out of it. That's how fatty they are from the avocado oil. But going to an oilbird cave is amazing. And often you have deep in the cave, you'll see a forest of idiolated seedlings, all white, no photosenses. They've started to propagate in the guano, and the guano look like guacamole green because that's what they're actually eating avocados, you know, sort of the edges of ornithological experience. So for the right person, some things like that could really be the”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem with some of those places, of course, is that the bird watching is hard. It really is hard work, right? And I know I've taken students who know little, they had half of my ornithology course taken them to Ecuador. We've seen 490 species of birds in 10 days. Usually their brains are fried, right? It's a lot of work, but I think you need to be over a little hump before you do that. Spectacle would be good. One thing I did in 2018 in Brazil, I went to see a nesting site, a nesting colony of Learism. It's a sort of aqua bluish green turquoise parrot, and it nests in a cliff face where there are holes. They come out of this cliff face in the dawn. It's kind of a huge cliff with a kind of cavern in front of you. And they fly around. It was unbelievably moving. It was unbelievably beautiful. These are intelligent birds that live for decades, know each other as individuals.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's fascinating. I think one of the things that can impress a person without the experience to understand that the hard work is worthwhile or will be worthwhile is spectacle. And so things like penguin colonies in the Antarctic are just profoundly amazing. So that would definitely be a possibility. Other kinds of ornithological specul, it depends how young they were. There are some things like,”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't been in more than a decade, but you should definitely go. It's a marvelous part of the world. I think it's on hard times in recent decades. Beautiful, beautiful people and marvelous avafana.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An artist knows George Miche Sutton. George Sutton, who is an American watercolorist of American birds, fantastic, fantastic renditions of birds. He really was amazing at both the art and the ornithology.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just the sinister turn that all of nature is out to get us. Maybe it is black and white. I saw it in TV and black and white as a kid. I just crossed my arms and I don't know. I never seen it since”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overrated I think that's a lot of damage to be afraid of nature, right? I know people that are bird phobic, I'm not sure whether it rises from something like that movie. So, yeah.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know it when I hear it. I actually have albums where I know which cut is which. I haven't looked at the liner notes to know.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, it could be a combination of Rorschach test too because what do we think of the thing that's named? But yeah, go for it. We'll go for it.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, there are some good things. So if you're, say, an aerial insectivore, you're catching insects in the air, you'll be territorial if you catch insects that are 15 inches away from a branch, right? Just going out for a little sally. You can defend all those branches. That's my territory. But if you're a swift or a swallow and you're flying hundreds of meters or hundreds of feet up in the air and all over, it's very hard to defend that, right? So you give it up, right? Lots of marsh birds, marshes are very rich, lots of bugs. So if you can grab your patch of lily pads or bullrushes or cattails, you can really do well. You want to defend that. But if you're a puddle duck, there's going to be lots of water in there. The thing's somewhere, you know, 18 inches below the surface of the water. You can't really defend that. And so very with your body, your ecology, et cetera. And we can do experiments. So, for example, sometimes hummingbirds will defend a floral resource. And then when it gets big enough, they'll just give it up because”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that Malthus did take into account was, or much account was variability, right? The fact that an ice storm, for example, a lot of birds in the winter, if we think about birds at your feeder, they can do fine at minus five, minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit, minus 20, you know, if you get chickadees, right? If they have enough food. But if they don't have access to the food, they will die in a single night, right? And so these ice storms, which could be just 32 degrees covering all the food, the whole environment with ice for a day can be just devastating for lots of birds if there weren't feeders their pipes would really harm. Things like Carolina Wren, which is a bird that's kind of expanding. I think a big ice storm will set Carolina wren populations at the edge of the range in New England or the mid-Atlantic for five years. It'll take them to rebound after that.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. I love my bird feeders and I really enjoy them. And I think that there are some downsides, in particular being sites of potential infection for diseases that are moving through the opposite of social distancing, right? They're social concentrating. So they can be centers for conjunctiveitis like illnesses in finches recently in the United States, et cetera.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world. You know, the interesting thing about progress is you never know what is going to turn up, right? I mean, and that's where the opportunities are, but figure out what's the best way to use that technology to answer or address a cool issue in birds.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've only just begun to skim the surface. I mean, I'll say this proudly, just to embarrass myself. I used to think that the chicken genome was the most uninteresting thing I could ever imagine, right? And it turns out, you know, genomics has really been fantastically revealing four features. We ultimately want to know about, like, the funny features that characterize birds. So transcriptomes, taking a tissue and sequencing all of the RNA that's being expressed at the moment, getting an idea of what expression states are in different kinds of cells. On your tagging technology, that's been fantastic. The Max Planck Institute for Animal Movement in Germany has put up Icarus, a big satellite that is capturing in real time data on animal movement, individual animals. So they're getting basically the whole entire movement of the life of a wild animal. And you get enough of those. And sure enough, you get a very new view of what's going on.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can say, well, I've seen these and these species, but I haven't seen these yet. What's the species most unrelated to any species I've seen? What would be the species that would give me the best addition to my total sample of avian diversity, right? Well, you know, the answer right off the bat for most people would probably be the Watson. And the Hawatson is a very weird vegetarian or leaf-eating Amazonian bird. The bird probably most unrelated to any other living bird. After that, it gets a lot of specific things to what you've seen. The next trip you're planning, those are the most important birds to see”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's lots of different measures, but sometimes it's all, there's no rationality to it, right? I once took a trip five, six years ago. I took a trip up to northern Norway to see Steller's Eider, a duck. If you imagine, you know, between Norway and Alaska, what is there? Way, way up there. That's where they nest. In the winter, they only barely come down to Norway or Alaska. So I wanted to see them and I got up there 10 years ago. I would have seen on that date, I would have seen a thousand five years before I would have seen a hundred. And by the time I got there, climate change was happening so rapidly in the Arctic that I got there and there were none to be seen on that date, right? And so I've been really desperate to see Stellar Zeider just because, right? It's because you take a notion. That's the beautiful thing. What I really love would be like, what's, because history of life is a tree, I've been very interested in the phylogeny birds. You know, who's related to whom? The big tree of life and the tree of birds.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, I guess my fingers aren't quite enough on the pulse. We went through a long time because as a kid, I grew up bird.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my gosh, it revolutionized it. There are two programs produced by the Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University that have really transformed birding. One is called eBird, right? where you can keep live checklists on your phone as you go. And then the other is Merlin, which will actually identify photographs using artificial intelligence of birds. So they take a photograph of a bird and load it up, and it'll tell you what it is for most parts of the world with incredible accuracy for common birds and really quite elaborate ability for even obscure birds. What you have to say now is in addition to an electronic camera, young folks today are birding with their phones. Their data are going up to the cloud in real time and influencing what other bird watchers are doing and becoming the subject of science through sort of citizen science. So it's really been a huge revolution.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, it definitely counts. The question is what does it count for, right? And I am one of those birders. And moving from animal subjectivity to birder subjectivity, right, bird watching is, I mean, what the list really is about is accounting for your subjective experience of the bird, right? It doesn't just matter that there's that bird in that tree. What matters is, did you see it or did you hear it? And that's your experience of it. Hearing a bird for some birds is more spectacular than seeing them, obviously. But people do make different sorts of lists. And typically for what's called one's life list, people really want to see the bird. Have I ever seen the bird? But if it's for a more minor list, your day list, your state list, or actually data points, then hearing it is just as good as seeing it if it's for the purposes of data, right?”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About that, but what is a fisherian process? A fisciarian process is a self-organizing sexual selection mechanism where genes for preference, liking long or short tails become correlated with genes for the trait, having a short tail or having a long tail, right? Individuals who like long tails are going to find mates with them. And even though like short tails are going to find mates with those. So those two forms of variation will start to co-vary. And that means when individual selects on a mate, they're also indirectly selecting on co-varying or correlated genetic variation for preference. So that means the whole thing can just run itself. And of course, it does and produces a lot of diversity.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Faction and actually electric. It turns out hummingbirds and insects establish a static charge as they fly. And so as they approach the flower, when you have rub a balloon on your hair and you feel the balloon getting near your hair, your hair starts to stand up or whatever. As they approach the flower, they can actually experience this electrocharge. The hairs on their bodies stand up. And so they can tell, and of course, when the bee forages at the flower, the charge is neutralized, right? So they can tell how recently that flower has been visited before they even get there by the static force acting on their hairs. This is a subjective experience that really influences their choices in the world. What does that have to do with bird breeding, your question? Well, it has to do with the fact that we put the subjective experience of the animal at the center of our analysis. And indeed, that leads, I think, to really accurate understanding of what's going on in nature. Now, you mentioned Fisher. We didn't talk about it.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particular flowers and particular pollinators interact. And of course, those do occur, but the vast majority of flowers are pollinated by generalists, and the vast majority of pollinators are generalist pollinators, right? So they have to be memorably rewarding. So some of them are like Doritos. You know, you reach over and you grab one, but it's not really what you need. And then some products, you'll go further for because they're really rewarding. And this implies actually that bees are making choices. And if bees were not making choices, then the world wouldn't be full of beautiful flowers, right? All the flowers would be exploiting that one button that was the most efficient way to get that bee just to show up and feed. But of course, all the flowers would come to look like each other. And then they wouldn't be carrying their pollen to another one of their same species. So the whole thing would fail, right? So bees are making choices and they're making aesthetic choices based on the memorably rewarding experience of visiting a flower. Of course, for a bee, a flower is like architecture.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing about pollinator and plant interactions is that they're different species, right? From the pollinator perspective, the pollinator is getting food, nectar, and sometimes eating the pollen. But from the plant perspective, the plant is getting animal aid in dispersing their gametes to reproduce with other plants, right? So what is the plant doing? The plant is investing in another animal in order to do that, it has to advertise its opportunity. So this is really in the realm of advertising. And so what the flower really has to be is memorably rewarding, right? And so to me, that's like going into the grocery store and you look at a Coke can or a box of cereal, and there's literally nothing on the can or on the box that will tell you anything about what the experience of eating or interacting with that product will be like. And that's exactly what flowers are like, right? And so there's a whole realm of this field in biology trying to emphasize co-evolution that”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're responding to the same flower odors in a similar way. I don't think it's bits because the olfactory space is just filled with all sorts of other things. And that's where they're left and we learn about that. I think they are generally positive. So there are graduate level research questions to be pursued in interspecific aesthetic impression.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is deeply cool. I think that's because humans are intelligent and we have time on our hands and excess cognition and curiosity to burn. And that leads us to become fascinated by nature. But interspecific aesthetic regard is a fascinating thing. I mean, in the case of color and the case of song, it's explicable in some ways because at least some of this is physics, right? There is an inherent wavelength relationship between various color combinations. The same for acoustics, right, which we can imagine the harmonic relationships between notes in a bird song, just like we could analyze piece of music. But the real fundamental mystery is why do flowers smell beautiful? And that one does not have at least immediately appealing answers. It turns out there are no receptor genes in common between a bee and a human.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The process of producing the ballet. We like it because of the aesthetic impact of the ballet. There are other hypotheses for why traits are extreme and may be at performance limits or health limits of those individuals. How do we differentiate between those two? Well, it's been a lot of time thinking about that. I think that these special hypothesis, the one that demands specific evidence, is that the correlation is actually a result of the relation between the signal and some other kind of benefit other than the benefit of”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know the interesting thing is that I think you have there, you have multiple ways to predict that outcome. One, for example, is that I'm going to take an aesthetic. Say you went to the symphony and there was a violin concerta, or if you prefer a blues concert or even rap concert, right? And in the middle of the cadenza or the solo or the biggest thing, the performer begins to break out into sweat, right? They're really exerting themselves. And the question is this. Do we like the music because they're sweating? Or do they have to sweat in order to make the musical performance that the audience likes? And both of those are equal, but most people would say that this is an indicator of quality because they're pushed to motor limits. But aesthetic processes are going to do the same, right? We don't like the ballet because many amazing artists and athletes are injured in the process.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is an irrationally exuberant market bubble in a genetic mating market, right? And that they're off the ranch. So I am really fascinated by those kinds of communication that are about suasion and not about information. And so there are some contexts where, of course, the signaling theory applies well, but there are plenty of others where it doesn't.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. The question is is that a bug or is that a feature? Because nature really does look diverse. So the idea that there could be multiple equilibria is not a problem for us, or at least for me. And also, as you could tell from a lot of my answers, I'm really interested in history itself as interesting explanatory powers. The other feature, though, is that most of my colleagues in evolutionary biology have bought the economic line, that communication is about efficient exchange of information. But there's a lot of things we communicate about that isn't about information, right? And that's been a lot of my work has been on ornament and sexual display, right? And the popular idea is that beauty and the sexual attraction in birds and in nature in general is a kind of efficient way to communicate actionable information about mate quality. But the other possibility is that it's merely beautiful.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, that is a deep question. I actually have a student working on delayed maturation. What are they getting better at, right? Because life tells you that you could never, there's no upside to delaying reproduction if all things are equal. But they must be getting better at something. A lot of people think it's foraging, right? Raising that one young on an island, you know, and foraging hundreds of miles out of the ocean and returning. And this whole social relationship to raise an albatross family is tough being efficient enough to raise may take years to develop. You got to get good at foraging before you can raise a baby. And certain diets certainly require that. And we have the same thing in many gulls, large gulls. So it could be that they're getting better at foraging.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And ducks, and then you got the rest of birds, and that's a bunch. That's the vast majority of them. And that lineage leading to the rest of birds, the penis evolved away. And the question is why, and my own theory is that female birds preferred mates that did not have a penis. One of the ancillary benefits of that, one of the correlated benefits of that, is that they were no longer subject to sexual coercion or sexual violence. They could be coerced behaviorally, but they couldn't be forcibly fertilized. And that means that they have freedom of choice. What do they do with their freedom of choice? They choose beauty. So one of the reasons why birds are so beautiful is that males don't have a penis. So they have to be subject to choice in order to affect reproduction. And also, they have to invest if females require it.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's a lot. So that's where we start. Most birds don't have a penis, which means that one of the things that happens in avian evolution that's distinct from mammals is that the kids require a lot of care, but they also have to, they're growing up in the nest, right? The hashing of egg, but they're very, very vulnerable until they can fly. So birds have a very rapid period of rapid development. That means that they grow up and leave eggs. And you need two parents to do that efficiently in most diets or most kind of ecologies. That means the dad's got to be at the nest, right? So we usually thought that you have social monogamy, at least two birds helping raise the young because the young are so needy and they have to grow up quickly. But there's another possibility, which is that they could evolve to be so needy and grow up quickly because they manage to get males at the nest. And one of the things that happened in the phyloga birds, you've got ostriches and their relatives, and you got chickens.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, but I'd have to say a large amount of it, 30%, 50%, is history because a lot of these groups originate like Australian birds. One of the interesting things. All of songbirds are out of Australia. They persisted there for a very long time. So there are a lot of lineages with lots of female song and some duetting and complexity in Australia and then a few, very few lineages that came out of Australia. And that kind of long history in a place means that you're likely to keep something like that or not or not have the opportunity or reason to change it.”
2021-06-30 · Conversations with Tyler · Richard Prum on Birds, Beauty, and Finding Your Own Way · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source