Michael Le Page

speaker

517 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 17 Aug

Michael Le Page’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

Appearances

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The World, the Universe and Us · Wildfires Changed Human Evolution - Is It Happening Again? · 17 Aug 2026 podcast

Yeah, and you get a different response to variable conditions and to stable conditions. voice-verified

And obviously you uh i coping with variable conditions is more difficult, so you're gonna select for sort of more complex traits that might help you cope with both. voice-verified

Yeah, like flexibility and a voice-verified

And of course cooking has always been thought to be a key step in human evolution as well, as at least be that's been suggested. voice-verified

So that switch to eating cooked meat and cooked plants. voice-verified

They are, but evolution can happen extremely fast when you put a lot of pressure on a population. voice-verified

So we're talking about human evolution. voice-verified

Let's say, let's hope this doesn't happen, but let's say we had sort of mass heat deaths w which were severe enough that we had large numbers of young people dying. voice-verified

The result of that would be a population where uh you know, some of the people dying would have genetic mutations that made them more vulnerable. voice-verified

So you have have natural selection against that you're left with a population that has now s evolved over the course of less than a generation to be more heat resistant. voice-verified

Now of course we don't want that to happen. voice-verified

Let's hope we're smart enough to avoid it by adapting and that means everything from m air conditioners to uh migrating away uh to to sort of more favorable climes. voice-verified

we end up uh adapting in the evolutionary sense, that's gonna be really bad, yeah. voice-verified

Yeah. voice-verified

Oh oh yeah, th they're huge changes al already. voice-verified

So some of them are adapting in the sense we're talking about of migrating and and we're seeing that particularly clearly in the oceans where s there's sort of shifts of sort of hundreds of kilometers in some cases of in the sort of w the habitat where certain animals are are being found. voice-verified

Others are staying in place, but we're seeing some plants are showing signs of adaptation to higher temperatures. voice-verified

But of course there's there's a limit because of the time scale is so compressed. voice-verified

a limit to how much evolution can happen in such a short time. voice-verified

And the other problem is that there's so many other pressures on wildlife. voice-verified

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