Big Picture Science - What's the Difference?
We make split second decisions about others – someone is male or female, black or white, us or them. But sometimes the degrees of separation are incredibly few. A mere handful of genes determine skin color, for example.
Find out why race is almost non-existent from a biological perspective, and how the snippet of DNA that is the Y chromosome came to separate male from female.
Plus, why we’re wired to categorize. And, a groundbreaking court case proposes to erase the dividing line between species: lawyers argue to grant personhood status to our chimpanzee cousins.
Guests:
- David Page – Biologist and geneticist, at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Stephen Stearns – Evolutionary biologist, Yale University
- John Dovidio – Social psychologist at Yale University
- Steven M. Wise – Lawyer, Nonhuman Rights Project
Permalink: http://radio.seti.org/episodes/What_s_the_Difference_
You can listen to this and other episodes at http://radio.seti.org/, and be sure to check out Blog Picture Science, the companion blog to the radio show.
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