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The Current Transcript for September 13, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

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It is okay. What this is. We don't want hatred to ruin a positive event, right. So let's show people how we will treat someone with love.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: NDP leadership hopeful Jagmeet Singh in a video moment that clearly backfired for the woman who confronted him. The video shows her walking up to the candidate at the front of a rally, pointing, gesticulating appearing to be very agitated and challenging Mr. Singh on something about Islamic Sharia law, all while he remains polite and positive. Some say it was a defining moment in a leadership race that has the potential to reshape Canada's political landscape. In a few moments, we'll hear from a panel of pundits waiting to pounce on that. And speaking of politics and pouncing.

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DONALD TRUMP: She's back there, little Katy. She's back there. Katy Tur what a lie it was from NBC to have written that.

AMT: From the earliest days of his campaign for president Donald Trump ridiculed, scolded and belittled Reporter Katy Tur. The reaction against her from the crowds would become so problematic that NBC would end up hiring private security for her. But if candidate Trump expected to intimidate her and to influence her coverage he picked the wrong journalist. Katy Tur joins me in half an hour. Also today the quest to understand evolution has moved far from fossil hunting and into the gritty reality of field experiments.

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Logistical difficulties of getting 30 thousand pounds of steel into the middle of the desert catching mice, dodging rattlesnakes, it's tough.

AMT: From corralling mice to lassoing lizard, scientists are learning they can track evolutionary change not over centuries but over decades, even a few short years. Our ongoing project Adaptation introduces you to evolutionary biologists whose work will help predict the changes that are still coming. Hear them in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Jagmeet Singh's response to heckler puts spotlight on NDP leadership race, say media experts

Guests: Althia Raj, John Ivison, Shachi Kurl

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So, Just… One second. Let's just… What we believe in? We believe in love and courage, right?

[Sound: Crowd cheering]

Love and courage. Love and courage.

[Sound: Applaude and cheers]

AMT: While the race to replace Tom Mulcair, as leader of the federal NDP, has been underway for months, but it was that moment when candidate Jagmeet Singh deftly handled a confrontation from a woman who walked right up to him gesticulating wildly and yelling in Brampton, Ontario, at a rally a few days ago. That seems to have finally focused many Canadians attention on the leadership race. The moment has gone viral online and just in time. Party members start voting for their new leader Monday. In the running are Jagmeet Singh, Charlie Angus, Niki Ashton, and Guy Caron. And we have a panel of guests who have been watching the race closely. Althia Raj is the Ottawa bureau chief for Huff Post Canada. She's in our Ottawa studio. John Ivison is a columnist for The National Post. He is also in Ottawa. And Shachi Kurl, the executive director of the Angus Reid Institute, is in our Vancouver studio. Hello everyone, welcome.

GUESTS: [Cross talking] Good morning. Good Morning. Good Morning.

AMT: Althia Raj, let's start with you. What did you think of how Jagmeet Singh handled that confrontation?

ALTHIA RAJ: Beautifully. I think most people probably would have as their first instinct to want to counter the claims that the woman was making in her rant. You know for example, stating “Well I'm not a Muslim I'm a Sikh” and what you're saying is factually inaccurate. And he didn't do that. Instead he affirmed her and basically reassured the crowd that everything was going to be fine. He welcomed her. He said they believed - the crowd believed in her rights to say what she wanted to say. He very much presented a turn the other cheek. And he embodied his campaign slogan which is as the tape suggested love and courage. That's what he showed the crowd.

AMT: John Iverson, you believe this had a real impact.

JOHN IVISON: Well yeah I think I think he showed grace under pressure. And you know people who were unaware of it as NDP race, must have seen this video of 35 million hits or something, which you know just incredible. You only dream about such numbers. So I think in politics sometimes there are moments that are transformative and I'm thinking about Justin Trudeau’s boxing match. There was an academic at University of Toronto who looked at this subsequent media coverage and suggested that before the prime minister would be seen as somebody with precariously muscular, and he transformed it to somebody who is sufficiently masculine. What she meant was that the perception was that he was a lightweight before. Post-flight he was regarded as a courageous leadership contender. So I think at least in this case people will know where the Jagmeet Singh is there and I think having seen him perform in action, the NDP members maybe thinking this could be our guy.

AMT: Althia, when you look at the polling, the fundraising and the endorsements. Who has been the frontrunner in this race?

ALTHIA RAJ: Well Jagmeet Singh has signed up the most members, 47,000 out of the party’s 124,000 voting members. So you know when you say this could have not come at a better time, it probably could have come at a better time if it had been last month, where memberships were still being sold and he could have probably sold more memberships based on that video. The polling is really I would say not good. We don't have a good idea because the most pollsters have not gone into the field where Mr. Singh is quite popular. So he sold a lot of memberships in like Surrey and Brampton and ethnic communities and those communities tend to be under polled. So we had a poll at the beginning of the summer that suggested that Charlie Angus was way ahead. Now there is a poll from Main Street that suggests that Mr. Singh is slightly ahead, but we don't really know. Mr. Singh is ahead on fundraising. He's ahead on membership sales.

AMT: Shachi Kurl, I'm curious to know how you are watching all of this. I want to go back to the actual shouting at that video. The woman was yelling things like “when is your Shari'ah going to end.” She has since been identified as someone who is supportive of a group called Rise Canada, which says on its website: We defend Canadian values with which often conflict with the Islamic way of thinking. What are you thinking of what you were watching there?

SHACHI KURL: I think it's part of the undercurrent of a section or a subset of the Canadian conversation around this. Look, there is something simultaneously remarkable and also very pedestrian about what Jagmeet Singh is doing in running for leader of the federal NDP. On one hand, a generation ago we saw Canadians bitterly divided over issues such as whether or not turban Sikh could join the RCMP or join the Legion. Today our defense minister is a turban Sikh. So on one hand, you know, Canadians are very supportive and accepting of the wearing of the turban and what that represents, in terms of identity politics, it has been there, done that. But at the same time there is a difference between not batting an eye at the guy riding the GO train to work, if he is a turban Sikh, and looking at that person as a potential prime minister. And on that front you do still see a discomfort, a lack of acceptance around people who may wear a religious head covering. And we've done some polling on this, versus you know someone who is clean shaven, from a minority community, or has short hair from a minority community. So there is still as I say a level of discomfort or a sense of otherness among a significant number of Canadians on this front.

AMT: Tell us a little bit more about that polling then, Shachi. How do the numbers play out? What are you seeing across the country?

SHACHI KURL: Well it's depending on your perspective. It's a good news/bad news story in that just about two thirds of Canadians across the country, lower in Quebec, do say that they would vote for a party that was led by a Sikh. But that falls to just over half, again, if we're talking about someone who's wearing a religious head covering. And it's even lower if that person is also someone who openly wears a coupon for example, which is the ceremonial dagger worn by a number of Orthodox Sikhs. So where Mr. Singh has the potential to break ground in a very positive way - I think we've seen the positive aspects of that, through the video - although I would suggest that those who have been watching him for a while also know that he's able to put together a package as a candidate that enables him to really sort of set himself up as someone who could almost out Trudeau, Justin Trudeau. He's young. He's urban. He likes to make a thing out of being well-dressed. He could certainly [unintelligible] Justin Trudeau. And so there is that. And when we consider that the 2015 election was decided basically on where the left of center vote decided to land and ultimately landed on Justin Trudeau and the liberals. This could be a candidate, if he wins, who has the potential to steal some votes away from young urban liberal voters.

AMT: John Ivison, and playing in this background as well is the ongoing debate in Quebec about the wearing of religious clothing that that indicates religious adherence. How do you see that playing out in what we're talking about?

JOHN IVISON: Well I think Jagmeet, like Barack Obama, believes that race is more a social construct than a biological reality and that he can shift that culture. I mean he talks about how he's used fascism socialism or to shield itself from the negativity he's faced. And I think that there's nothing preordained that Quebec voters secular, as the more secular than the rest of Canada as they maybe, will not vote for a good candidate. No the NDP major challenge is that 56% of self-described left - left of center voters - are voted Liberal right now, compared to 24% for the NDP. You know when half the people who voted NDP last time are supporting Justin Trudeau, their major challenge is to win some of that vote back. And I think, as [unintelligible] just mentioned, of all the candidates he has that potential, even in Quebec to be somebody who can inspire confidence. Now I'm not dismissing Charlie Angus, or Guy Caron because I think they both have a chance of winning, particularly because of the poll that that Althia was mentioning earlier on the existing members - not the ones who been signed up but existing members - are likely to go for one of those two candidates, or even Niki Ashton. The other thing is that the way this vote works is like the conservatives. It's a ranked ballot. You've got to get a lot of second place votes. They're more likely I think to go to Angus and Caron, than they are to go to Singh. So he really needs to knock it at the park on the first ballot, because it is not going to get a lot of [unintelligible] ballot support. But I don't think it's, in any way, preordained that because he's wearing a turban he can't convince new Democratic members and Canadians that he's the guy.

AMT: And I want to talk more about the overall race, but I want to go back just to the issue of what was yelled at him and the turban, the connection with some of these groups that have been very strongly against any kind of use of Islam in society, whether it be in the schools or something else. I'm wondering how much coded language is happening around this, Althia Raj?

ALTHIA RAJ: I don't know. [Laughs]

AMT: Do you know what I mean?

ALTHIA RAJ: Go ahead.

AMT: Well when somebody confronts him the way that that confrontation took place, is there's something else going on there? When you know the Canadian values, that we are against an Islamic way of thinking, that kind of talk in the context of what is going of protests we see today, is there's something else going on there?

ALTHIA RAJ: Well I mean I think we saw that in the sort of undercurrent that existed that candidates like Kellie Leitch and Steven Blaney on the Conservative Party, during the Conservative Party leaders really need to tailor their message. Do I think there is definitely a sense from some people in our society who feel like there's too many immigrants, that they want to return to sort of the white Canada that previously existed? Even within ethnic communities there's a sense of that. But you know I can't speak to that woman's motivations. I wasn't at the Brampton meeting. I did not speak with her. I did see her video. She has a YouTube video in which she explains why she went to the Jagmeet Singh Meet and Greet and she's a well-known activist, I guess we could call her. Apparently some people who are involved in local politics in the area know her well she's storms at school board trustee meetings. But you know I don't want to make too big a deal out of this. And I think it was an isolated incident. It's not something that I've witnessed any other NDP events that I've attended, as far as this year.

AMT: And Althia, Charlie Angus and Jagmeet Singh have been considered front runners. What has Charlie Angus tried to do to distinguish himself in this race?

ALTHIA RAJ: Well Charlie Angus is very much the candidate the sort of the authentic voice of the NDP. He is trying to brand himself as that authentic voice. To me this is almost like the 2003 campaign all over again, when you had people like Joe Comartin and Bill Blakey who were very much the party's traditional, like nothing is wrong, we just need to keep doing exactly what we're doing. And then they got stormed by this guy named Jack Layton who came out from Toronto City Council who was like “oh we're going to become this electoral machine and we're going to change things.” And this to me, this campaign, it's almost like that campaign. You have Jagmeet Singh who's like totally different. In many ways he's the embodiment of everything they dislike about Justin Trudeau and the party is like “do we stay with somebody that we're more comfortable with or do we embrace something that we might have been hesitant and sort of looked at critically in the past.”

AMT: And where does Niki Ashton fit into this? Who wants to pick that one up? Why go ahead Shachi.

SHACHI KURL: [Laughs] So I mean I think if Niki Ashton, if Guy Caron, if Charlie Angus have any comfort to take from these last dying days of the campaign, it's that they need to stay focused on their own membership and delivering the vote, and remembering that as we saw just a few months ago, not long ago with the conservative leadership race, that it's not necessarily the shiny pony or the person who ends up taking up a lot of oxygen in the campaign who may end up being the winner. This this doesn't come down as John mentioned to those sort of tens of millions of people who watched that viral video it comes down, as Althea's said, to the hundreds of thousands who actually signed up and they have to vote. And so this now also becomes a time where that authentic voice, that familiar voice, that ability to not just inspire people but deliver your vote becomes so key.

AMT: And again let's talk a little bit more about Niki Ashton. This is her second leadership race. She's currently running behind the two frontrunners. What is her campaign missing?

SHACHI KURL: Well Nikki has placed herself really to the far left of the party. I mean she's endorsed by Sed Ryan, by the party socialist caucus. She's been trying to build what she calls a movement. She wants to be Jeremy Corbyn, theBernie Sanders of the NDP campaign. I think in the last recent weeks we've seen that Guy Caron has actually like catapulted ahead of her. I mean this is just obviously our perception. We don't actually have data really good data. I want to stress this, to say that this is actually happening. This is a perception that's happening with Guy Caron, the number of endorsement from caucus that he's gone. He put out a very thorough platform like it is even more fleshed out than the campaign that the NDP ran in 2015. It has bold ideas and national basic income, reducing the work week, renegotiating international agreements include climate change migrants into the country anyway. So there is a possibility that Mr. Ashton might be the first person off the ballot. So this is not like the conservative race in the sense that. It's kind of like Canadian Idol, basically where survivor or somebody gets voted off the island every week. And it's a pure one member one vote. It is not a weighted ballot. So this could go on for three weeks, or as John mentioned, if Jagmeet Singh actually gets his turn out, if the 47000 people that he has signed up, 90%of them vote for him, he has a chance of winning this on the first ballot.

AMT: And John as the Liberals and Conservatives watch this what do you think is going through their minds?

JOHN IVISON: Well I think, from a liberal point of view, on the one hand they would like a non-Quebecer to win because I think they see the route to victory into the 2019 through Quebec, they can pick up seats. At the same time, they must be worried about Singh. I mean he's obviously got the ability to grab publicity. They should be worried about Charlie Angus too, because you know as a foil to Justin Trudeau Charlie's authenticity - You know depending on how the economy goes and what happens between now and the next election. You know Justin Trudeau was alienated. Some people on the left, although the polls suggest that many of them are still with him, but people who were interested in electoral reform or who were anti pipeline, those people are looking for a home. And Charlie is the authentic voice of the NDP. I think he would pick up a lot of those people. From a conservative point of view, they just want somebody vigorous in that job because Tom Mulcair was an excellent leader. I thought he was very hard done by. He could be our prime minister right now. But since the last election he's been wandering through the corridors of Parliament like Banquo's ghost. That party has really not had a profile and they need somebody into, not only in the leadership, but in the house. So I think Jagmeet Singh, if he wins, he has to run in the house. That's seems to be a prerequisite. But the conservatives will be looking for somebody to take some votes away from the left wing of the Liberal Party and give them a fighting chance at the next election. There was a bi election in Markham recently. The NDP got 3%. Now the NDP gets 3% across the country, in some of these races, it does not matter what the conservatives do. They will never [unintelligible] them.

AMT: Okay, well. Althia then, what will the new NDP leader have to do to reinvigorate the party?

ALTHIA RAJ: Fundraising would be number one. I noticed yesterday Jagmeet Singh issued this very actually cute video with this little toddler saying like “my Uncle Jagmeet needs and hope to travel across the country because it's really expensive”. You know it's the type of video that we actually haven't seen the NDP do in a very very very long time. For them what the viral video did was put Jagmeet Singh's name to people who are not Democrats. Now people across the country know who this guy is, in a way that a lot of people don't know who Andrew Scheer is. That is not a bad thing for the party. And if Guy Caron wins the leadership or Niki Ashton wins the leadership or even Charlie Angus wins the leadership, they are and I have some catching up to do on the name recognition front, especially Guy Caron and Niki Ashton, because most people don't know who they are.

AMT: Okay, well. We have to leave it there, but thank you all of you for weighing in on this. We'll watch to see what happens in the coming days. Thank you.

SHACHI KURL: Thank you.

ALTHIA RAJ: Thank you.

JOHN IVISON: Thank you.

AMT: That Althia Raj, Ottawa bureau chief at Huff Post Canada. She's in Ottawa. John Ivison is also in Ottawa. He's a columnist for The National Post and Shachi Kurl is the executive director of the Angus Reid Institute. She joined us from Vancouver. Stay with us. The news is next and then:

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DONALD TRUMP: She, Katy, just said that many polls show that you are winning. I can't believe, are you Katy Tur, of NBC? [Unintelligible] go ahead.

[Crowd laughs]

AMT: Singled out, ridiculed by then candidate Donald Trump something NBC reporter Katy Tur got used to while covering Trump's wild campaign for the White House. She joins me after the news. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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What NBC'S Katy Tur learned from covering Donald Trump's campaign

Guest: Katy Tur

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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AMT: Still to come, our project Adaptation takes us to the frontlines of evolutionary science and the big questions being pondered there.

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Now people make fun of the platypus but that's extremely unfair. The platypus is actually exquisitely adapted to living in the streams in eastern Australia where it occurs, and yet the platypus or nothing like it has evolved anywhere else. Where I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, in my backyard essentially there were streams like this. Where's my duck-billed platypus.

AMT: Harvard scientist Jonathan Losos joins me in about half an hour. But first, watching the making of the American president, up close and surprisingly personal.

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So we have two more today in Florida and we have massive crowds. There's something happening. They are not reporting it, Katy. You not reporting it, Katy. [Crowd cheers] But there's something here happening, Katy. There is something happening, Katy.

AMT: Donald Trump from when he was campaigning for the U.S. presidency. The Katy he refers to again and again would be Katy Tur. She was a familiar face and name to Donald Trump because she was on his campaign trail from the earliest days, for the long wild ride, for NBC and MSNBC, getting to know candidate Trump, eventually getting under his skin as well as a reporter for the network. She became a constant target for Mr. Trump's well-known feelings of love and hate for the media. KatyTur reflects on her month covering one of the most unlikely candidates in U.S. presidential history, in a new book Unbelievable: My Front Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American history. Katy Tur joins me from New York City, hello.

KATY TUR: Hi. How are you?

AMT: Well, I'm fine. I'm wondering what it's like to hear that, that clip again, because I'm sure you've heard it many times since you know it.

KATY TUR: It's odd but at the same time you know I was reporting it. I was reporting that the crowds weren't going away. There was something happening. And yeah we were putting it out there. You know he has a - he had and still has - a flair for understanding how to rile a crowd and how to play to the television cameras. He knows how we work. He knows production. So when he says something like that, which is demonstrably not true, it's all part of his shtick. So I just it brings me back to that moment at re-inserted me into that reality of the November 2^nd, 2016 when that happened.

AMT: Your book begins on election night and you're at the New York Hilton and the first line is I'm about to throw up, why?

KATY TUR: Yes. Well you have to continue reading for a few more paragraphs to fully understand why. It's not a political thing it's not “Oh my God a Republican won” or “Oh my god a Democrat won”. It was the reality sinking in that this reality, this Trump reality, where facts did not seem to matter, was going to continue. And not only that, my life which I had been putting on hold for the past year and a half, up routing, was now thrown once again into limbo and it never…It looked like I had no end in sight to that, no real future where I could put my feet down on the ground and not move. So it was a combination of “Oh. I was waiting for this to end” and “Oh my god it's not ending”.

AMT: Well tell me what it was like for you as the results came in and it began to look as if Donald Trump was going to be president of the United States?

KATY TUR: It was, you know, it was a surreal experience. This is a guy who had no political experience. He had no civic experience in any way. He didn't serve even in the military. He was a public figure but he was a public figure because he was a reality show figure. He was a larger than life persona from the New York real estate scene. He was tabloid fodder. This was not a man who, up until June of 2015, had been a political person. Yes he did a lot of interviews on Fox News. Yes he led the birther movement but he was no one that anybody took seriously. And it took a long time for the political establishment to fully understand the tidal wave that was coming their way. They didn't even believe it, even though they were seeing it with their own eyes on election night. Even as I had gone to rally after rally after rally and seen all of it up close and personal and watched the enthusiasm and reminded people that that sort of enthusiasm cannot be discounted. And up until that evening I was telling the people I knew that I believed he was going to win. I didn't necessarily believe the New York Times Upshaw. I thought he had a real chance. Seeing it happen was mind blowing because I thought that I must be the idiot in the room not the other person who saw it coming.

AMT: But what made you so sure. I wasn't sure?

KATY TUR: I wasn't positive I mean obviously doubted myself because I am a political neophyte and I was covering a political neophyte. But I I found it hard to believe that these people who would you know stand outside, in four hours, in December, in freezing rain, in Michigan, or below zero temperatures in Iowa, or show up on maps from blue states in the surrounding rural areas or blue state lands in somewhere like Seattle, or who would you know at one point - And I don't tell this story in the book but it is really illustrative. There was a man in Atlanta who messed himself before Donald Trump took the stage and he had been sitting there and waiting and he wasn't going to leave. He was going to sit there and continue to wait for Donald Trump. He sat in his own mess for hours in order to see this political candidate. That sort of devotion is hard to come by. So even if there was a freak snowstorm on November 8^th, or it rained, or some sort of something happened, these voters were going to find a way to get to the polls. There was nothing that was going to stop them. I didn't see the same sort of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton. That's part of the reason why I thought the polling just didn't match up. I also - my producer Anthony and I would say what people say to pollsters and what people say on camera to reporters is not necessarily what they believe. It's not necessarily what they'll be thinking about when they walk into that polling booth, because voting is a deeply personal thing. We bet that a lot of the folks who said they would never vote for Donald Trump would walk into it, walk into the voting booth and then pull the lever for him.

AMT: It's interesting because you make the point that you are a political neophyte. You weren't a regular Washington reporter before this. At the same time, there's another point here, and that is you were on this campaign from day one. So you were actually absorbing and really feeling that you were really observing that those supporters day in day out. They weren't numbers for you. They were real people in front of you.

KATY TUR: Yes. Yes. So he announced - I think it was June 16th and I was on the campaign as of like June 23rd. So almost day one. But yes, the first rally I went to was a backyard pool on June 30^th. It was a couple of hundred people. It was just people who were excited to see Donald Trump but didn't look like it was going to amount to anything, but less than a month later, a few weeks later he went to Arizona, Phoenix Arizona. And this was after the interview that I did with him which got contentious at times. He started getting more airtime every day because he was saying wild things. And it was presumed that he was not running for office so much as blowing up his entire organization with all of the drama that was continuing and all the businesses who are refusing to be associated with him. We went to Phoenix and he had thousands of people in Phoenix. He had 5000 people that were trying to get into the Phoenix Convention Center. They were lined up around the block. They were screaming at protesters. The energy was wild. That was something you just - You don't see that for a primary campaign. You don't see that six months before the primaries even start. You barely see that in a general election campaign. So this was something that could not be discounted from there. And then secondly, the way he went after John McCain. You know, Anna Maria, he went after an American war hero. If there's anything that's sacrosanct in America it is our vets and our military and the service that they give this country. You don't go after them. And he did. And what happened after that his poll numbers went up. So who's to say that he can't go after Mexican immigrants, that he can't go after women, that he can't go after a federal judge, that he can't go after an entire religion.

AMT: So what was it like to be the reporter chosen by NBC to cover that candidacy?

KATY TUR: Well I mean I don't think they thought too seriously about it at the time. I was a London correspondent. I had just been moved overseas to do the foreign beat for what I anticipated would be at least two years, maybe four years, perhaps much longer. And I came back just to say hello to the bosses and remind them that I existed. I also was fulfilling a make a wish for a lovely young man in Aaron. While Trump was getting dropped by Univision and even NBC they realized they didn't have a reporter to cover it. And I just happened to be standing in the newsroom at the time, so I got the assignment. And then a couple of days later the head of NBC News at the time, Debora Turness, was demanding that there be a reporter on Trump's full time. She wanted him covered the same way the other political candidates were covered. And you know Washington D.C. was like “why would we do this. This guy is not serious.” And so she said “well you know what, Katy Tur is here let's put Katy Tur on it”.

AMT: [Laughs]

KATY TUR: And you know I got it and it wasn't supposed to be like a two year thing. It was supposed to be a six week thing.

AMT: It's interesting. So you did have this great job, this great new job in London . You had this hot new boyfriend in Paris. You weren't actually looking to come back to the States.

KATY TUR: No I was not looking to come back to the States. I had settled it and I was ready for my life abroad. I was ready for croissants and morning tea and beers at the pub.

AMT: So much for that.

[Laughter]

AMT: Now Katie you come from a journalistic family. I want to play part of a report that became iconic in 1992 Los Angeles riot. Listen to this.

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There's another driver badly beaten. So folks here's the situation from south central. Drivers of automobiles and trucks that enter this area can expect to – Oh> Look at that. Terrible, and there is no police presence down here. They will not enter the area. That's right. This is attempted murder.

AMT: Okay, that is your father who caught those awful images of Reginald Denny being attacked, but covering news from a helicopter was a family affair. Tell us about that.

KATY TUR: Yes my parents started Los Angeles News Service. They were stringers in Los Angeles, in the late 70s and 80s, around the time I was born. They used to just troll the city for overnight news, car crashes, shootings, whatever they could find. They have built that business into something that nobody had ever really experienced before. They bought a helicopter on just [unintelligible] mostly. My dad walked into the two Bell helicopters and then Jet Ranger, and you know a 24 year - I think he was 24 - a 24 year old kid at the time and said “hey lease me a helicopter”. One of the companies laughed him out of the room. The other one said sure. His plan was to do what they did on the ground, be stringers but stringers in the sky. So they'd cover police pursuits. They'd cover fires. They'd cover shootings when they could, any sort of news in Los Angeles, you could see it from the air because it's such a large flat area. And the helicopter company bought. They got the helicopter and they took to the skies to see what they could make of it. And one of the biggest stories they ever covered was the Los Angeles riots. And my mom had a knack for the scanners. She would listen to the radios all night long and nearby. It was always in her ear. My dad had a deep understanding of Los Angeles and they both figure that if the L.A. riots were going to explode anywhere, they thought it would be around the intersection of Florence and Normandy. They were right so they were there when this red gravel truck driver named Reginald Denny stopped at the intersection when he frankly should have just kept going - stopped at the light and he got pulled from his, from the carriage of the truck - that's a big red gravel truck - and beaten to within an inch of his life. And my parents were covering it live as it happened and the police were nowhere in sight. My mom was hanging out of the helicopter, because at the time we didn't have a gyro stabilized camera. They were shooting guns at the helicopter. They found bullet damage in the engine rotor blades which mechanic on the ground said could have could have brought the helicopter down, you know, mid-flight. So I grew up in this family where the news was to put it bluntly, very important, and risking your life to do it to bring that message to people was something that was normal. It's just something you did.

AMT: It changed the way news coverage was done by everyone else too of course, because of the use of the helicopter. We should mention he used to hover over your baseball game, sometimes too with that chopper, didn't he?

KATY TUR: Yes, my parents so they would - I would hang out with the Palisades Park when I was a kid and because they were always working and I would just you know be outside and hanging out with my friends and playing softball or baseball or whatnot. And they would hover over the games and cheer me on over the loudspeaker. It was totally mortifying at the time. I couldn't think of anything worse that my parents could do. In retrospect it was actually quite cool.

AMT: Hmm. I should mention that your dad, now Zoey Tur, is transgender and some Trump supporters trying to use that fact to go after you. How did you deal with people going after your family?

KATY TUR: You ignore it. You ignore it. My parents are amazing people and they're amazing people no matter what decisions they make, no matter what gender they take on and they will continue to be amazing people. And if you want to go after me for a decision my dad made, a brave decision my dad made, then screw you. I mean I don't care. It doesn't bother me in the least.

AMT: Well I want to talk a little bit more about how you're not easily intimidated and you're not afraid of criticism. And you had mentioned your first interview with Donald Trump. Tell us a little bit more about that first interview and how he reacted to it.

KATY TUR: I walk into the first interview of Donald Trump. It's July 8th 2015. I had never met the guy. All I knew of Donald Trump was what I read in the tabloids when I was a little bit younger about his persona as you know a real estate sign on, and from obviously the Apprentice You're fired. I watched that show when I was a kid.So I go into Trump Tower and the camera crews have set up in the Trump bar and I have a little piece of advice in my back pocket from Chuck Todd, a warning of sorts saying “He's going to go after you. You are NBC.” So I was prepared. I did as much research as I possibly could on him before the interview and I was intending to get some information out of him. He was talking about how Mexico was sending rapists in the country, while I wanted to ask him what he thought of a few statistics that didn't really match up with his idea of immigration. And so I presented this to him and I pushed him and I don't think it was the interview that he was expecting. I don't know maybe he thought I was going to be a little bit softer. Who knows. But it was contentious. In the moment, it felt ok to me because it felt like this is obviously what Trump would do. He would go after me. It's part of who he is it's what I saw on the Apprentice. It's his shtick. It's all playing to the camera. So it never bothered me. I smiled the entire time. You look back in the tape it's just me grinning at him, which probably incensed him further. But anyway, after the interview was over the camera shut off and he is furious, like he is angry. He's screaming he's telling me he is saying “You will never be president”. And I remember thinking in my head “I don't want to be president. I'm not running for president.” “When you stumble three times in that interview. You could not do this”. I said “Does it matter if I stumble?” And then he walked away and the camera crew I was with has interviewed him before. I mean most of the camera crews in New York have interviewed Donald Trump, have been an interview with Donald Trump or set up one. They've all like saw him to be a relatively jovial and nice person, maybe jovial is not quite the right word but magnanimous person. And he looked at me just wide eyed and said “I have never seen anything like that. He was so upset”. I got worried I got nervous. I thought oh my god what do they do. Did I just ruin my career? Did I say something wrong? Suddenly everything was a blur. I didn't remember anything I said. I got back to the office and I walked into - I barely got through the doors when on one of my bosses like ran into me and said “We're playing this whole thing live” not live “We're playing it the whole thing unedited. We're putting it on air. All 30 minutes of it”. And I said “Okay”. “Are you sure your facts were right?” and I am like “I they are pew facts. Yes”, And “Do you mind that you stumbled?” I said “Well no I don't really mind I stumbled”. And they played it live and I watched it. Not live, they played it unedited and I watched it in full sitting, next to Chuck Todd, NBC's political director. The moderator of Meet the Press. And I just thought “What am I doing here?” And as it was playing I saw what everyone else saw, which was that it was extraordinarily combative and he was very angry. In a way that I had perceived. I hadn't felt while I was sitting there.

AMT: Well you were asking questions of accountability and that was…

KATY TUR: Which is what you do with the political candidates. I don't understand how he didn't expect that from me.

AMT: Well and what you might have seen there, as you finished, as he just talked to you, other people saw as he stood on the podium. I have another clip from the campaign. This again is Donald Trump.

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DONALD TRUMP: What a lie was it from NBC. [Audience cheering] She's back there, little Katy, She is back there. What a lie it was [Audience booing] What a lie it was. What a lie Katy Tur from NBC to have written that, was a total lie. Third rate reporter, remember that, third rate. Third rate.

AMT: The crowds booing you. He's calling you a third rate reporter. How concerned are you for your safety at that rally?

KATY TUR: I was concerned. In the moment I just kind of kept my head down I really – When he really started going after me and saying my name and that's the crowd turned and spotted me on the riser. I was sitting down below my camera. I just smiled and I waved because he'd been calling me out a lot. I mean this was not the first time. It was the first time that everybody else noticed, but I found that if I smiled and I waved and I played it off it. It defuses the situation. It made people less furious at me. So I just dealt with it. I waited for the Muslim ban. I mean I had a job to do. It wasn't about me. A Muslim ban announcement and I stood up and I got on the air a couple of minutes later with Chris Matthews and he asked me about it but I couldn't hear him so I just started talking about the Muslim ban. And then once I was off the air with Chris Hayes, which was right after Chris Matthews, the crowds were - there were like stragglers and I remember looking at my producer Anthony and just saying “I don't feel comfortable”. And he didn't feel comfortable. And one of Trump's staffers came up and said “hey” he shoot off all the people that had that were straggling and waiting. And he said “these guys are going to walk you out” And I looked up and there was a couple of Secret Service agents, which was good because we had a long dark gang plank walk to our car. We were parked with everybody else. And it was pitch black. So I was thankful that somebody at least had eyes on me before I could get into my car and locked the doors.

AMT: Eventually NBC got you security, did they not?

KATY TUR: Yes, they did. We had security pretty much full time relatively soon after that; armed guards, a lot of former Secret Service guys for the most part, who went with us everywhere. When we went into rallies obviously they couldn't bring their weapons.

AMT: So I'm curious to know how covering, what you call the craziest campaign in American history, how it changed you as a journalist?

KATY TUR: It made me a lot better, a lot better. I got better at developing sources. I got better critical thinking, I got better at reporting on the fly. I learned about the American electoral system in a way that took it far beyond my high school civics class. I learned about human nature. I learned about who makes up this country and why they were frustrated and why Donald Trump is so appealing to still so many Americans and why he won. And I think that's invaluable.

AMT: Katy Tur, thanks for your work.

KATY TUR: Thank you. It's exciting to be here.

AMT: Katy Tur news anchor with an MSNBC, correspondent with NBC News. She joined us from New York City. Her new book is called Unbelievable: My Front Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History. Now that book was on the bookshelves yesterday and no surprise President Donald Trump has weighed in on Twitter with a veiled swing at Katy Tur. Yesterday he tweeted and I will quote it here: “Fascinating to watch people writing books and major articles about me and yet they know nothing about me and have zero access #fake news.” That was the tweet. Stay with us. In our next half hour, when you think of evolution you may imagine time scales of millions of years. The truth is some species can adapt more quickly than that, far more quickly. Why are evolving understanding of evolution could change the way we understand ourselves? In about 90 seconds. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio 1, Sirius XM, Online on cbc.ca/thecurrent and on your radio app.

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How woodpeckers and aye-aye lemurs can teach us about evolution

Guest: Jonathan Loses, Rowan Barrett

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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DOLPH SCHLUTER: It stickleback this small fish and it occurs in most coastal lakes in British Columbia. It's a humble fish. It's about five centimetres, ten centimeters long, not very large, in reality but they're very large in the imagination.

AMT: That is University of British Columbia evolutionary biologist Dolph Schluter. He is standing by ponds just brimming with those three spined stickleback fish. They form the basis of his research into evolutionary biology. And while the fish may be small they loom large in his imagination because of the big questions they've been helping to answer about adaptation. Dolf Schluter is studying evolution in a way that would have been unimaginable in decades past. He's studying it in real time in front of his eyes.

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DOLPH SCHLUTER: We are especially interested in how new species form and especially how environments causes changes to happen. The stickleback occur in different lakes, present so much variety in size and shape and behavior. So we do experiments to investigate those questions in these ponds. The ponds are meant to be sort of small scale replicas of lakes where they occur. As you can see they're full of insects and tadpoles in the vegetation. People often ask me why I work on stickleback you can't eat them. What are they good for? And the way I usually start to answer that question is to say that, okay, think about genetics. What we often do and we try to address the basic problem is to find a system that allows us to gain answers and those systems are often very humble like the stickleback. The techniques that were developed in an effort to find the gene underlying variation in spininess, bony armoring stickleback are now being used to identify differences between humans and chimpanzees.

AMT: Well Dulfer Schluter stickleback experiments are one example of a growing field, the experimental study of evolutionary biology. It turns out that what we once thought could only be explored through fossil records can actually be studied in controlled experiments over the course of just a few years. One of the questions being probed is whether evolutionary adaptations can be predicted in advance. Those answers could tell us a lot about ourselves; whether the appearance of human beings was inevitable or a lucky fluke. It could even give us some clues about whether aliens on other planets would look like us As part of our project this season, adaptation, we are taking a look at some of the forks in the road of evolution. Jonathan loses is a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University. He's the curator of herpetology that is amphibians and reptiles at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He's also the author of Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance and The Future of Evolution. And Jonathan loses joins us from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hello.

JONATHAN LOSES: Hello.

AMT: What fundamental questions about the nature of evolution are these experiments trying to solve?

JONATHAN LOSES: Well each experiment is looking at a specific question. In the case of sticklebacks for example, how do you explain why armor evolves in these fish in the presence of predators. But they also address a more general question and that is how predictable is evolution? How inevitable is it that evolution will produce the same outcome, time and time again, when species are faced with the same circumstances?

AMT: And what's the debate been in evolutionary biology circles over whether evolution is predictable or based on random circumstances?

JONATHAN LOSES: Well the debate is about how destined in the world is to be as it is. When you look at the plant and animal species around us, are they the inevitable outcome of the evolutionary process? Or if events had been different in Earth's history might we see a very different world something unlike what we see today? Would we humans or anything like us be here? And so this debate has gone on for decades. But the debate has usually been at a theory all realm in terms of philosophy, of theory, basically speculation to a large extent because we had no actual data. But in recent years that all has changed. Scientists have figured out several ways to actually collect data to ask this question about the predictability or repeatability of evolution.

AMT: Why is it important to understand how evolution happens?

JONATHAN LOSES: Well there are a number of reasons. I think at the grandest level we'd like to know how the world has come to be as it is and of course our place in the world. Why are we here? How did evolution produce us? But there are also practical applications as well. We now know as you mentioned a few minutes ago that evolution is going on all around us all the time. And of course we see that in the many species that are adapting to our presence and adapting in ways often that are not good for us. Pest evolving to be resistant to pesticides, of course bacteria evolving resistance to our antibiotics. So evolution is occurring around us and if we understand how it works and particularly how predictable it is, it will help us counter the evolutionary trends.

AMT: So when it comes to studying this we've all kind of grown up with the idea that evolution happens over the course of millions of years. So how do you study it experimentally?

JONATHAN LOSES: Well let me just step back for a second and say that that view that evolution is so slow that it occurs at such a glacial pace, goes back to Charles Darwin. Now Darwin was a brilliant man and he got many things incredibly right, but he got this one wrong. But we can't really blame him because there were no data back then. He was just going with his own intuition. Well what we now know is that when circumstances change, when natural selection is strong, evolution can occur very rapidly. And what that means is that it's possible to do experiments, the gold standard of the scientific method of the last century. We can do experiments to test evolutionary hypotheses. We can put species in new circumstances and expect that they may adapt to them and study how they do that.

AMT: Okay, well Jonathan loss is one of the experiments you write about is from McGill University. And to find out about it we reached out to Rowan Barrett. He's an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in biodiversity science at McGill. He's been studying deer mice in Nebraska in very large cages. And so Rowan Barrett actually now joins us from Montreal. Hello.

ROWAN BARRETT: Hi.

AMT: What are you trying to figure out with deer mice in Nebraska?

ROWAN BARRETT: In the sand hills region of Nebraska we have very light colored mice and off of the sand hills and more sort of agricultural soils darker soils we have darker colored mice. And the experiment is designed to test what processes underlying this, what's the mechanism that's driving this difference. Our general hypothesis is that the difference in pigmentation between these populations is driven by natural selection. So camouflage pigmentation that makes them difficult to spot by birds, primarily by owls. By putting the mice in these enclosures seeding the enclosures with a mixture of mice of different colors, we can test the basic prediction that mice that match the substrate better should survive better and be able to pass on their genes to the next generation, leading to mice with better camouflage in subsequent generations.

AMT: Okay, so you have large cages. What are these cages look like?

ROWAN BARRETT: So they are steel walls. They are about three feet above the ground and two feet below the ground. And the reason for that is these mice can burrow and so we need to stop them from digging out. And they're also remarkably good climbers. They're like little ninjas and they can climb a lot of different material. So the enclosures are built out of about thirty thousand pounds of steel so that they're quite large.

AMT: Wow. Okay. And so you've got one on dark soil and one on sandy soil.

ROWAN BARRETT: That's right. We have two very large enclosures on each habitat type.

AMT: And our birds of prey for example able to fly over and swoop in?

ROWAN BARRETT: That's right. Aside from these walls, we've tried to keep the experiment as natural as possible, so essentially we've just dropped walls down around natural habitat.

AMT: Whose land are you using?

ROWAN BARRETT: So on the sand hills we're working in a wildlife management area. Off of the sandhills it's a little more challenging because this is fertile agricultural land and privately owned, and so really required finding somebody who was friendly enough to let us conduct this crazy experiment on their land. Fortunately after a lot of trying, we found a guy, Bill Ward, who generously donated some land on one of his alfalfa fields.

AMT: Where did you meet Bill Ward?

ROWAN BARRETT: We actually met Bill in a bar in a small town called Valentine, on the northern edge of Nebraska. We were just there after a long day of work. I was sort of commiserating with him and telling him how difficult it was to find a place. Much to my surprise, he offered to show me some of his land the next day. We went by and it was perfect.

AMT: So I hang on a second. So, Professor Barrett walks into a bar and meets a guy named Bill and get some land [laughs].

ROWAN BARRETT: [Laughs] Yes. Our rent is basically a case of beer and we shook on it and everything has been good since.

AMT: And how long has this been going on so far this experiment.

ROWAN BARRETT: This has been going on since 2010.

AMT: And what have you learned so far?

ROWAN BARRETT: It's been fascinating. We have had quite rapid changes in the average pigmentation of these populations of mice, over the course of the experiment and in the directions predicted which is nice.

AMT: So that's interesting. So as you say as predicted, so in some ways like mice surviving better on light sand, dark mice surviving better on dark soil doesn't seem like a surprise.

ROWAN BARRETT: Right.

AMT: But there's an underlying thing going on here, just telling you, about evolution.

ROWAN BARRETT: So part of the story here is that we're interested, not just in this single trait, but when you do get natural selection on a trait like that, what are the cascading effects of that on the genome of the animal? So we may see changes in the mutations that are affecting pigmentation but there may be other mutations carried the mice, that have lighter or darker pigmentation, that also increase in frequency when those mice do well and they pass their mutations on to the next generation. So we can think of this in other situations where perhaps we are selecting on a trait that we want to increase in frequency in a crop that we want to grow or in a fisheries stock. Sometimes we get effects that we don't necessarily anticipate because of the genetic architecture of those traits. And so we can use this very simple intuitive system, of background matching and camouflage in mice, to understand these broader genomic effects.

AMT: So what have you learned about doing evolutionary biology work in the field?

ROWAN BARRETT: It's tough. It's much more challenging than some of the experiments I've done in more controlled settings. Logistical difficulties of getting you know 30 thousand pounds of steel into the middle of the desert, and you know catching mice under very hot conditions, dodging rattlesnakes. There's always things that pop up that are a little less controlled than you would have in the lab.

AMT: And have you learned anything about the significance of the word evolution working in rural Nebraska on project like this?

ROWAN BARRETT: Yes. I've learned that there are certain terms that have become highly politicized. Evolution is one of those terms. Climate change is another one. I've found that people have certain political leanings or religious backgrounds. It's a good way to just shut down the conversation. You know often there are a lot of themes that we can talk about particularly if somebody is a farmer you know they really have an excellent understanding of heritability. People are used to thinking about survival of the fittest. We have a lot of common ground and a lot of things to discuss in terms of the experiment. And so if I use the word evolution immediately, sometimes I've found that people just don't want to talk to me after that. I like to eventually circle back to those terms and I don't want to avoid using them entirely.

AMT: Will you stay in touch with the people of Valentine Nebraska when the project wraps up?

ROWAN BARRETT: Absolutely. We have some wonderful friends there that I really look forward to seeing every time we're back, having a barbecue, going to watch the high school football team. So I really couldn't ask for a nicer group of people to be living around the place that we are conducting this research.

AMT: How long will it last?

ROWAN BARRETT: That's a good question. Right now, hopefully as long as we can continue tracking the populations. The more interesting the project gets as we go through one generation off to the next, and you know sometimes you get a very dry year, sometimes you get a wet year. These sorts of shifts in environmental conditions can be useful that inform us about the process of evolution as well. But you know sometimes you get a tornado come through near to the plots and some of the walls apart. So we're always at the mercy of the elements when we try to do these sorts of evolution experiments in nature. If the walls come down and the mice get out, then our experiment is done.

AMT: Fascinating stuff. Thank you for talking about it.

ROWAN BARRETT: Thank you.

AMT: Rowan Barrett assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in biodiversity science at McGill University. Jonathan loses, I was struck by the fact that you know he's a serious scientist. You're a serious scientist but he said he's at the barbecues. He gets into the bar. He finds the field that he needs. He's dodging rattlesnakes. Meantime, you, in your work your last suing lizards. So let's talk about your own research. You are studying anole lizards?

JONATHAN LOSES: That's correct. These are lizards that occur throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America and occur in the southeastern United States. And what's interesting about them is that there are 400 species of this type of lizard. So there are a great evolutionary success story but they also open the door to many interesting questions about evolution. Initially we were comparing the different species to see how they've adapted to different environments and comparing species on different islands to see if they've adapted in the same way. But to do that you have to catch the animal and measure it. It turns out that one of the best ways to catch them, is to go out with a fishing pole, a 10 foot fishing pole, and put a little noose made out of dental floss on the end of the pole and you slip that around the lizard’s neck. And if all goes well, if the lizard lets you do it. Then you pull up and the lizard is caught. Now they have very strong necks so it doesn't really hurt them. And so you take them off the pole and you measure them and then you let them go, exactly where you found them.

AMT: [Laughs] How easy was that?

JONATHAN LOSES: Oh, well it's a real challenge because here you are, you're matching wits with an animal whose brain is the size of a pea maybe, and you've got a very primitive type of technology and you're basically trying to outsmart them. And unfortunately, usually the lizard outsmarts you.

AMT: You like these little guys. There's a picture on the book jacket you've got one hanging off your forehead.

JONATHAN LOSES: Oh they are fascinating creatures.

AMT: So what have you learned about how the lizard populations evolved?

JONATHAN LOSES: Well so the interesting question was that when you compare what has happened on the large islands of the Caribbean, the lizards there have evolved independently on each island. But when you look at the types of species that have evolved, they've produced the same types independently on each island. So each island has a species that's adapted to walking on very narrow twigs. It has very short legs. It has a short tail. And if you looked at the species on the four islands that have evolved to look like that, you would think they're the same species but they're not. They have evolved independently to adapt to that way of life. And the same is true about the lizards that live high in the canopy of the trees, and the ones on the tree trunks near the ground and so on. This is a phenomenon called convergent evolution when species independently evolved to be very similar in appearance. When they do that in response to living in the same environment, that's pretty strong evidence that natural selection is guiding that change. But we wanted to test how that actually occurs, particularly with reference to how long their legs are. As I said the species on that used narrow surfaces have very short legs and that allows them to move on irregular surfaces. Whereas the species that use broad surfaces, tree trunks on the ground, they have very long legs and those legs let them run fast and jump far. And so the hypothesis from this observation of the natural world is that the surface that lizards use leads to natural selection pressures that guide their evolution. Well we decided to try an experiment to test that idea. And so we took lizards in the Bahamas from a forest where they used broad tree trunks and had long legs. And we put them on tiny little islands that only had very scraggly vegetation. And our prediction was that they would evolve shorter legs. And it turns out that's exactly what they did.

AMT: Over how long?

JONATHAN LOSES: Over just a few years.

AMT: And when you realize that how did you react to that?

JONATHAN LOSES: I was completely surprised to be honest. The first experiment of this sort, which we did 25 years ago, that was still with the paradigm that evolution probably occurs very slowly. And so the lizards had been on these islands for that point a little more than 10 years. I sort of didn't really expect to see that they would adapt in that way.

AMT: It's exciting isn't it?

JONATHAN LOSES: It is very exciting. Yes absolutely.

AMT: Well let's look at two different examples of adaptation to specific environments. I want to ask you about aye ayes and woodpeckers. So first of all describe the aye ayes.

JONATHAN LOSES: Aye aye is a type of lemur. It occurs on the island of Madagascar it's about the size of an average sized house cat but it has a very unusual appearance. The aye aye is something from a nightmare, with glowing yellow eyes, big floppy ears and the most extraordinary feature is that its middle finger is extremely long and skeletal looking. It can rotate in all directions. So very sort of freaky appearance.

AMT: You can compare the eye to the woodpecker.

JONATHAN LOSES: Yes so everyone knows what a woodpecker is. You've heard the rat tat tat as it taps on wood. What the woodpecker eats, is it eats grubs and larvae that live in dead wood. And so what it's doing when it's tapping on a tree is it's trying to locate a hollow space, a tunnel created by these grubs, then jackhammers with its bill, you know as many as 20 times a second. It then sticks its extremely long tongue into the hole. The tongue is covered with little barbs and so it snags the larvae and pulls it out. Woodpeckers occur on most continents in the world, but they don't get to isolated islands. And so other species have evolved to basically take on the same woodpecker niche. But they have done that in different ways. And the most extraordinary example of that is the aye aye. It basically does the same thing but it has about very different tools to do that. Instead of having a beak like a woodpecker, when it locates a hollow sound, it then uses its very large incisor teeth to basically bite through the wood. And finally when it does that it then sticks its long finger into the hole and pulls out the grub.

AMT: What does it tell us when convergent evolution occurs?

JONATHAN LOSES: Well some people have argued that convergent evolution shows that evolution is repeatable. It is predictable, that when the environment poses the same problem that natural selection finds the same solution if you will. And we've learned that convergent evolution is much more common than we used to believe. As a result there is to some extent some predictability, repeatability to evolution. But as the case of the aye aye and the woodpecker show, this trend towards convergence is far from uniform. In many cases species do not converge, they adapt in different ways. There are many types of species that are well adapted for their environment, but have no parallel anywhere else in the world

AMT: And those that are what are referred to as evolutionary one offs?

JONATHAN LOSES: Yes evolutionary one offs, or evolutionary singletons.

AMT: And give me an example of that.

JONATHAN LOSES: Well my favorite example is the duckbilled platypus. Now people make fun of the platypus but that's extremely unfair, for the platypus is actually exquisitely adapted to living in the streams in eastern Australia where it occurs. It has lush fur. It has a powerful tail. It has webbed feet to swim, most extraordinarily It's bill is much more than just a duck bill because it's covered with receptors that can detect the slightest ripple in the water. If its prey moves, it can detect the water currents. So they're really extraordinarily adapted to living where they do. But where they live, the streams of Australia, there are similar streams on every continent in the world, except maybe Antarctica. And yet the platypus or nothing like it has evolved anywhere else. Where I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, in my backyard essentially there were streams like this. Where is my duckbilled platypus?

AMT: And why is that?

JONATHAN LOSES: Species evolve different genetic changes as they go through their evolutionary history. And those differences predispose them to adapt in different ways. I mean think about again the aye aye and the woodpecker. Well the woodpecker is a type of bird. It does not have teeth and they have a long bill so to adapt to excavate grubs from trees, they evolve by making their bill into a jackhammer. On the other hand, aye ayes are primates. They don't have a bill like a bird but they do have teeth. And so it was much easier because of their evolutionary history to evolve the same function but do so through different evolutionary means. And that's why species even exposed to the same conditions will often adapt in different ways.

AMT: And you know in the case of the platypus, it looks like it's made of other parts of other creatures. Is there convergence in its parts?

JONATHAN LOSES: Well certainly you can pick different parts and the platypus has done a great job of adapting in certain ways like other organisms. It's webbed feet are similar to many other aquatic animals. The electro receptors have parallels and other animals like electric eels. So the particular parts do show parallels, convergent parallels with other species, but the whole ensemble the platypus as it is, is completely unique.

AMT: What about the porcupine?

JONATHAN LOSES: So there are porcupines in North America but there are also porcupines in Africa and Asia. Those porcupines actually are much bigger than new world porcupine's but they look pretty much the same. And people I think could not be faulted for thinking “Well these are all members of the same porcupine family. They all evolved from the same porcupine ancestor and just ended up in different parts of the world”. But it turns out that's not true at all. The porcupines in the new world and the old world are independently evolved from different rodent ancestors. So they are a very good example of convergent evolution.

AMT: So what does this research tell us about human evolution?

JONATHAN LOSES: Well humans are another great example of an evolutionary singleton. Here we are a species that's obviously extremely well adapted to the environment in which we evolved. So well adapted, we've gone on to conquer the world. And yet nothing like us has ever evolved anywhere else in the world. I mean there were primates in South America for 40 million years, isolated from the rest of the world. Why didn't something like us evolve there? Despite selection pressures that might have favored us, we only evolved once.

AMT: And what does that say? Was human evolution inevitable?

JONATHAN LOSES: Well there are two points of view on this. The people who argue that convergent evolution is pervasive make a second argument. They argue that the reason that convergent evolution occurs so frequently is that there are particular best ways to adapt to the environment and so natural selection is very good at finding those best solutions, time and time again. And so they would argue that humans are extremely well adapted to our environment. So if humans hadn't evolved natural selection would have would have led to the evolution of something like us. Many other people argue however by reference to the platypus or the aye aye and the woodpecker, that in fact evolution is very contingent. It is the history of events that sends life down one course and not another. And that if we hadn't evolved there's no real reason to think that something is exactly like us would have.

AMT: And so, if we want to go on speculative note here, if we were ever to meet aliens would they have adapted to look like us?

JONATHAN LOSES: Well Hollywood certainly thinks so.

AMT: [Laughs] That is convenient.

JONATHAN LOSES: Yes it is. And you know the aliens are always just like us, with maybe pointy ears or green colours, like that. But I think that many people would argue the opposite that one of the things that we've learned is that the more distantly related species are, the more likely they are to evolve differently, when faced with different environmental circumstances. And certainly life on another planet, you couldn't be more distantly evolved. It probably based on different genetic systems different molecules life would probably be very different. So I think what most people would assume that life on even an Earth like planet, even if intelligent life evolved, it would probably be very different from humans.

AMT: So let's continue to be speculative here. Say intelligent Life comes to earth, would it then evolve to look like us because of the circumstance, because of the of the environment here?

JONATHAN LOSES: My suspicion is no. That is a different sort of life form colonized Earth, assuming that they evolve in some way, they probably would have found different ways to adapt. But I suspect they would look nothing like humans.

AMT: I don't want to take you too far down that rabbit hole or whatever animal we're talking about.

JONATHAN LOSES: True enough.

AMT: But it's fascinating to see what you're looking at and it's great to talk to you about it. Thank you.

JONATHAN LOSES: Well my pleasure.

AMT: Jonathan loses professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University, curator of herpetology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and the author of Improbable Destiny: Fate Chance and the Future of Evolution. He joined us from Cambridge, Massachusetts. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio 1 for Q. The Canadian Indie Pop band stars is in studio performing from their new record There is no love in Fluorescent Light. That's kind of true, isn't it? I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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September 13, 2017 Full Episode Transcript

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