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What's the Difference?

What's the Difference?

Big Picture Science

October 6, 201454m 0s

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Show Notes

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

Descripción en español

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