Scientists talking to scientists, but accessible to anyone. We are living in a golden age of biology research. Big Biology is a podcast that tells the stories of scientists tackling some of the biggest unanswered questions in biology.
Your hosts, Marty Martin and Art Woods, talk to leading scientists from around the world about topics like why we drink alcohol, human consciousness and artificial intelligence, where diseases come from, and whether Godzilla could actually exist. From each conversation, we produce two podcasts—a condensed version lasting 5-10 minutes, which focuses on just the highlights, and a longer, lightly edited version of the entire conversation. You can listen to the podcasts here, on the BigBiology web site, or get them on iTunes and Google Play.
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Episode 124: Spiny, but social (with Aubrey Kelly)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
What are spiny mice and why are they so social? What about their brains makes them gregarious? Might network neuroscience be a useful framework for understanding spiny mice behavior?
On this episode, we talk with Aubrey Kelly, an Assistant Professor in Psychology at ... Read More -
Episode 123: The long and winding road (with Rosemary Grant)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
What was life like in wartime England for a young female scientist? What about living and doing research for months each year with your daughters and husband on a remote island?
On this episode, we talk with Rosemary Grant, Emeritus Professor of Ecology ... Read More
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Episode 122: Ahead of the (thermal) curve (with Ray Huey)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
How do biologists study the influence of heat on organisms and how can this be applied to the study of climate change? What impacts mountaineer survival at high altitudes?
On this episode of Big Biology, we talk with Professor Emeritus at University of Washington and ... Read More
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Episode 121: Stickle-back to the future: experimental evolution in nature (with Alison Derry and Andrew Hendry)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
Can we study evolution in the wild? Are some species “super-evolvers”?
On the episode, we talk with Alison Derry, a professor of biology at the University of Quebec in Montreal, and Andrew Hendry, a professor in the Department of Biology at ... Read More
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Episode 120: Shifting mutational landscapes (with Deepa Agashe)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
What is mutation bias and how can scientists study it? How does changing a population’s mutation bias influence its evolutionary trajectory?
In this episode, we talk with Deepa Agashe, an Associate Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India. We ... Read More
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Episode 117: The time of your life (with Rosemary Braun)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
How should we study complex biological networks? How do cells keep time and stay in sync? What does it mean for a network to be resilient?
In this episode, we talk with Rosemary Braun, Associate Professor at Northwestern University in the Department of ... Read More
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Episode 116: Rewilding Biology (with Harry Greene)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
How do biologists strike a productive balance between descriptive natural history and manipulative experiments in the lab or field? Should we bring back species to areas where they’ve gone extinct and what values do we use to make these decisions? What is wildness and how ... Read More
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Episode 115: Does a porpoise have a purpose? Agency and goals in evolution (with Samir Okasha)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
What is an agent, and does an organism have to be conscious to be one? How does organismal agency affect evolution?
In this episode, we talk with Samir Okasha, a Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Bristol. Samir studies fundamental ... Read More
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Episode 114: How power explains the history of life (with Geerat Vermeij)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
If the tape of life were replayed, how recognizable would today’s species and biomes (environments?) be? How and why does power increase over evolutionary time? How have humans unleashed so much power, and what are the consequences of that power for life on Earth?
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Episode 113: Cephalopods: aliens among us (with Danna Staaf)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
Does biological plasticity have a cost? Are there evolutionary consequences of plasticity and of organisms acting on their environments?
In this episode, we talk with Danna Staaf, a science communicator and marine biologist with a lifelong love of cephalopods. Danna earned a PhD ... Read More
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Episode 112: The Entangled Organism (with Sonia Sultan)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
Does biological plasticity have a cost? Are there evolutionary consequences of plasticity and of organisms acting on their environments?
In this episode, we talk with Sonia Sultan, the Alan M. Dachs Professor of Science in the Department of Biology at Wesleyan University. Sonia ... Read More
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Episode 111: Evolution of the Invaders (with Ruth Hufbauer)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
How do small, founding populations establish and thrive in new places? What is biocontrol, and how is it carried out responsibly?
In this episode, we talk with Ruth Hufbauer, a Professor of Applied Evolutionary Ecology at Colorado State University about the ways that ... Read More
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Episode 110: Tempest in a barcode: how rapidly can we (and should we) identify new species? (with Michael Sharkey)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
How do biologists categorize species? What’s the best and quickest way to describe millions of unknown species?
On this episode, we talk with Michael Sharkey, an entomologist and taxonomist who spent much of his career at the University of Kentucky, and is now ... Read More
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Episode 109: Nothing in biology makes sense except through time (with Kevin Mitchell)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
How do living things exert agency in a world of strict physical and chemical laws? Do humans have free will?
In this episode, we talk with Kevin Mitchell, an Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. The question of ... Read More
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Episode 108: The dialectical biologists: challenges of studying evolution in nature (with Erik Svensson)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
How has evolutionary biology evolved over time? What does it take to study evolution in natural populations?
On this episode, we talk with Erik Svensson, an evolutionary biologist at Lund University, Sweden. Historically, evolutionary theory has focused largely on population and quantitative genetics, ... Read More
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Episode 107: Cooperation versus conflict and the path to multicellularity (with Joan Strassmann and David Queller)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
How can we reconcile the evolutionary problem of cooperation? What can social amoebae tell us about the origins of multicellularity?
In this episode, we talk to Joan Strassmann and David Queller, professors at Washington University in St. Louis, about the evolution of cooperation ... Read More
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Episode 106: Long-term experimental evolution in the wild (with Katie Peichel and Andrew Hendry)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
Can we predict evolutionary outcomes if we know starting conditions? Do the products of evolution in nature differ from those studied in well-controlled lab experiments?
On this episode, we talk to Katie Peichel, head of the Division of Evolutionary Ecology at the University ... Read More
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Episode 105: Follow the data: the search for COVID’s origin (with Alina Chan)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
On this episode, we talk with Alina Chan, postdoc at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and co-author with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 could have plausibly jumped into humans in Wuhan via ... Read More
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Episode 104: Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture (with Andreas Wagner)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
Where does biological innovation come from? Why do some innovations wait millions of years for their spotlight?
Life must constantly innovate for evolution to occur, but many forms of biological innovation often lie dormant, sometimes for millions of years. In this episode, we speak to ... Read More
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![[Episode 104b]: Little Biology: Why can’t I regrow my arm? by Art Woods and Marty Martin](https://scholarworks.umt.edu/bigbiology_podcasts/1106/thumbnail.jpg "[Episode 104b]: Little Biology: Why can’t I regrow my arm? by Art Woods and Marty Martin")
[Episode 104b]: Little Biology: Why can’t I regrow my arm?
Art Woods and Marty Martin
Why can some animals regrow limbs while others can’t? Will understanding regeneration in other vertebrates help us regrow arms one day?
Our intern team has taken over the channel to talk about one of their favorite biology topics, limb regeneration! In the episode, Dayna and ... Read More
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Episode 103: Pest-o, change-o: how culture shapes our view of animal commensals (with Bethany Brookshire)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
What makes a pest? Why are some animals revered in one culture and vilified in another? How do our ways of life bring us into conflict versus companionship, and what do these interactions mean for us and them?
Rats, squirrels, coyotes, pigeons...often, we view ... Read More
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Episode 102: Inherency in evolution (with Stuart Newman)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
What is inherency? What are the potential flaws with our understanding of biological function?
On this episode, we talk with Stuart Newman, professor at New York Medical College. In his recent paper, “Inherency and agency in the origin and evolution of ... Read More
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Episode 101: NEON: The promises and challenges of large-scale ecological research (with Collins and Knapp)
Art Woods and Marty Martin
What is NEON? What hopes and concerns do we have for large-scale research projects in ecology?
On this episode of Big Biology, we talk about the challenges of doing…big biology! The National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, is a US National Science Foundation-funded ... Read More
