Sex is Weird 1: The world's first d*ck pic
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Why is sex considered weird in biological terms?
ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. I'm David Maher, host of Late Night Live on Radio National.
Very suave, erudite kind of guy.
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Hello, Anne Jones and a duck from What the Duck. Just letting you know that the program which follows will be talking all about animals getting to know each other in the biblical sense. Which vertebrate species has the longest penis proportional to its body length? Let me ruin my search history so that you don't have to. It's a duck. An Argentinian lake duck whose penis, when fully out for a picnic, is over 40 centimetres long, more than 10 centimetres longer than its body. If ever there was a reason to hand in the library card of life to resign from the board of nature lovers, duck penises might be that reason. It looks like Miss Piggy's tail deflated of helium with a bunch of spikes around the bottom.
And when the duck is ready to tango, he can use his lymphatic system to pump up the jam to 121 kilometres an hour. Quick, to the point, absolutely rude. Like an early morning naked jiggly sprint to put the bins out. So how did a bird with a voice like this end up with a 46cm swirling hydraulic penis that corkscrews counterclockwise and travels faster than the speed limit? The answer lies in the evolution of sex. Sex is weird. I know you know it. I know it. God has seen whatever you do when you're doing it. And so I'm going to make a series about it. And the thing is, when you really think about sex, it gets even weirder. There's an outie that has to get stuck inside an innie that then links to a production line of eggs to assemble a perfect little baby.
So many things have to line up. Why do we do it like this? Congratulations, you have just swiped right on an ardent adventure with me, a series where we are going to try and unpick how we, and I mean all living things really, not you and I personally, but how we went from splitting ourselves in half to double the population, to periodically feeling compelled to copulate in such a vigorous and sometimes highly embarrassing manner. And in this first romp, we are going to time travel through Earth's history right up until it needs fresh underpants with the very first erection. But to get there, we're going to have to go way back to the primordial soup where we're going to trace every single partner that nature has had since coming of age.
Earth, this is your sexual history
So the Earth is about four and a half billion years old. And life started relatively quickly at around four billion years old.
Four billion years ago. And for the first half a billion of those years, it was just fire, brimstone, meteors. I don't know, I wasn't there. And then one day, we still don't know how this happened, by the way, but life just popped into existence. From the minestrone of early Earth's oceans arose your great, great, great, great nana. And what we think they were was these tiny little microbes. Dr Emily Mitchell is assistant professor with the Department of Zoology at Cambridge, and she wasn't there either. But she is as close as we can get to a time traveller, because she's a deep-time ecologist.
Kind of bacteria type of organisms that lived on Earth, so microbials, so you couldn't see them with the naked eye.
These were prokaryotes. They didn't have a nucleus, they didn't have organelles, they were hashtag simple life all the way. Oh, oh, they didn't have sex either.
The very first life would have reproduced asexually by essentially splitting in two. You go from one to two and then two to four over time. We don't have really very many big major evolutionary transitions for a very long time. Time passes.
In fact, it's about another billion years which bubbles by as a matter of microbes line the bottom of the waters of time.
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