The ReMembering and ReEnchanting Podcast

A mathematician sets out to participate in the study of evolution... and ends up engaging in some fascinating research about social cooperation and the queerness of evolution! In this episode, Sara Jolena sits down with her old college friend Ben Allen, a mathematician whose work models how cooperation evolves — from iron-sharing bacteria to communal-nesting birds. They consider what this research might illuminate about cooperation in human communities. They then turn towards some of Ben's current research on queerness in evolution. Same-sex behavior has now been documented in more than 1,500 species... and it just keeps getting more interesting!

Key Topics & Timestamps

00:00 — Intro: welcome to ReMembering and ReEnchanting
01:05 — Meet Ben Allen: mathematician, old friend, and a researcher on evolution
02:56 — From pure math to evolutionary biology: how Ben's path unfolded
04:26 — Why organisms cooperate — and why "survival of the fittest" is an incomplete story
06:27 — The bacteria that share iron with their neighbors
08:18 — Modeling evolution mathematically: networks, neighbors, and cooperation
09:13 — From microbes to mammals: what changes (and what doesn't) when culture enters the picture
11:03 — Local connection as a strategy for large-scale engagement (including activism)
12:52 — Other paths to cooperation: kin selection, reciprocity, and reputation
14:26 — What evolution actually means: reproduction, inheritance, and mutation
16:53 — A parallel to religious traditions: continuity and change in tension
17:42 — What "reproduction" really means across the tree of life (sexual, asexual, horizontal gene transfer)
19:37 — What biologists actually mean by "male" and "female" — and why the definition breaks down
23:04 — Evolution "finds a way": clonal fish, sex-changing clownfish, and the limits of a human template
25:45 — Sex beyond reproduction: play, pleasure, and social bonding across species
26:43 — The 2019 paper reframing same-sex behavior in animals
31:28 — Ben's current research: could early marine life not even "see" sex at all?
33:15 — Deep-sea squid, imperfect filtering, and why indiscriminate mating can be an evolutionary advantage
36:37 — Two evolutionary strategies: cost of mating vs. population density
38:36 — Connection, yearning, and sociability across species
41:10 — Individual variation: why generalizing about any species misses the truth
42:16 — "A very queer evolutionary story"
43:20 — Darwin's Victorian assumptions that we are still unlearning
44:40 — The perspective of the scientist shifts the questions and analysis that the scientist does. We need many, many different perspectives for these big complex questions!
45:31 — Situated knowledge, Donna Haraway, and the case for multiple vantage points
46:23 — Closing reflections and thanks

Ben Allen is a Professor of Mathematics at Emmanuel College, Boston, MA. Their research focuses on mathematical modeling of evolution—in particular the evolution of social (other-directed) behavior. Their work has appeared in Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and The Atlantic.