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Our Ruined Lives with Mark Torrender - Ep 24
372 Plays6 years ago
Description: On this edition of Our Ruined Lives, we are graced with the presence of Mark Torrender. Mark is a hardworking YouTuber, podcaster and Instagram guru under the names of @evolution_soup and @talkbeliefs. He is very interested in evolution and understanding the relationships between evolution and modern religious beliefs. We talk about Mark’s journey to where he is, we talk about the lovely town of Watford, and also talk about how he deals with people who troll his comment sections on YouTube! Give this episode a listen and then follow Mark on the all channels and instagrams listed below!
Contact for Mark
- Instagram:
- @evolution_soup
- @talkbeliefs
- Youtube:
- https://www.youtube.com/talkbeliefs
- https://www.youtube.com/evolutionsoup
Contact
- Email: alifeinruinspodcast@gmail.com
- Instagram: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Facebook: @alifeinruinspodcast
- Twitter: @alifeinruinspod
- Website: www.alifeinruins.com
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
You're
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:01
Speaker
listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Stay tuned after this episode to hear some little tidbits about evolution provided by Mark that are actually really interesting. Check it out.
00:00:16
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 24 of A Life in Ruins Podcast, where we investigate the careers of those living a life in ruins. I'm your host Carlton Gover, and I'm joined by my co-hosts, Connor Jonnan and David Howe. Here we are again with another edition of Our Ruined Lives. Our guest tonight is our friend Mark Torender. Mark is the popular YouTuber and Instagrammer who runs the channels named Evolution Soup and Talk Beliefs.
00:00:42
Speaker
We've been wanting to have Mark on for a while now and we're glad to chat with him this afternoon. Mark, thank you so much for being on. How are you doing today? Great. It's great to be with you guys again. Yeah, it's been surprisingly warm over here. So even right now and it's 10 at night nearly. Yeah. Yeah.
00:01:01
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So you're recording this, you're over across the pond and you're in London, right? I am just outside of London and not far from the Northwest of London. So I could, I could, if I wanted to, I could cycle there, but I'm in no mood to do that. I'm in a town called Watford.
00:01:18
Speaker
So I think when you and I chatted last, you didn't grow up in Watford, but you grew up over here, right? Well, I was born in America, but my family, my mother's from England, my dad's from Ireland, and I had my teenage years over there, and I came over to Ireland for a while. My mom was actually still there.
00:01:40
Speaker
And then I came over to England and I've been here ever since. The idea was to go back to America, but I kind of fell in love with London, not just the Natural History Museum, but absolutely everything. Like the famous person said, if you get tired of London, you're tired of the world. I never get tired of London, so I stuck around. London was pretty cool when I went there. It's like,
00:02:02
Speaker
I can think of a bunch of countries that got tired of London real
Inspiration for Talk Beliefs
00:02:07
Speaker
quick. But anyways, so Mark, you run two very popular channels, Talk Beliefs, which was, was that your first one or was evolution? Okay. So Talk Beliefs was first and did evolution soup.
00:02:23
Speaker
me and David both did interviews with you. You interviewed us. I just checked on it today. I think the one I did for you is came out over a year ago and it's still at like 300 views and three comments. Not doing too hot, but thank you so much for having me. And of course, David did ethnocynology, which people just eat up. What was the impetus for kind of starting talk beliefs, like in the background?
00:02:45
Speaker
Yeah, well, and it all sort of leads into evolution soup and my interest or getting back into the interest of science and evolution. I grew up in, as I said, in America and I had kind of a religious upbringing. I wasn't in a cult or anything like that, but sometimes it kind of felt like it because I had a Protestant mother and a Catholic father. So I was being pulled this way and that.
00:03:09
Speaker
And both of these religions were ostensibly the same, but very, very different at the same time. Outside in the town, there were people who were calling themselves Christians, but my mom said, you know, stay away from them. Those are, you know, those are cults, you know.
00:03:25
Speaker
And I was wondering, what the hell are those? And why do people believe these things? And basically, I kept finding these weird people on street corners in all the countries I've lived in. And like I said, I've lived in America. I've lived in Ireland. I've lived in the UK. And there's always somebody in some funny robes on the street corner trying to tell you that their way is the best way and come along to a meeting. Yada, yada, yada. And I started talking to them. And that's kind of how it all started.
00:03:54
Speaker
Did you have like a specific encounter with someone on the street, like in either here or in America or London that that kind of sparked your interest in this? Yeah. Well, the whole point of starting talk beliefs is actually I was doing something called street epistemology. I didn't know that's what it was called at the time. It's basically just talking to these people in the street or allowing them to come up to you and then just sort of
00:04:20
Speaker
asking questions as to why they believe what they believe.
Religious Conflicts with Science
00:04:25
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And ever so often, they would bring up, you know, do you believe in evolution? What about the age of the Earth? And it quickly became very apparent to me that evolution really bothered a lot of these people. So a lot of the videos I did on top believe some of them were about were with me talking to these actual people in the street.
00:04:47
Speaker
And later on, it was people who actually came to me and I interviewed them on Skype originally. And it was about why they had left and they wanted to speak out about it. And a lot of it was because they couldn't reconcile belief in science with
00:05:04
Speaker
what the cult or the group wanted them to believe, which is that the earth was young. And yeah, and that God created us all perfectly, you know, in this one form. I started looking into creationist websites and videos, and I saw that they had a kind of like a propaganda campaign to convince people that basically scientists were lying. And I thought I have to do something about this. Sounds familiar.
00:05:34
Speaker
And I'm sure you guys all have encountered that. Yeah. Just a little bit. We had a booth for undergraduate anthropology or the undergraduate anthropology association at University of Tennessee, where I went. And, you know, the banner for it has the human evolution, like, you know, a little like ape going to man thing. And somebody came by talking to us about like how evolution is like not real and like how do you and it boiled down to like me and I think my girlfriend at the time discussing
00:06:04
Speaker
like evolution or whatever. And it boiled down to the person asking like, well, where does your, where does your like understanding of truth come from? And I was like, well, physical physics, I guess, like where everything should come from. Like, I don't know. It was just, you get into interesting conversations on the street for sure with people like about science.
00:06:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean I can relate because you know, I did my undergraduate in the South just like David and I remember there were You know, we'd have students in the class who were like forensic anthropologists and they were like
00:06:41
Speaker
Yeah, I don't believe in evolution. We didn't come from a bunch of monkeys. And it was just like, how are you in this major? Like, what is the cognitive dissidence where, you know, these fundamental principles that you need to do your work are just ignored? I don't know. It's definitely an interesting topic.
00:06:58
Speaker
Yeah, it always comes down to human evolution, definitely. If evolution was just about animals, they would be fine about it. There wouldn't be an arc park, there wouldn't be a creation museum, there wouldn't be all these videos which you see on YouTube saying why this proof of evolution is not true.
00:07:15
Speaker
They don't like the idea that they are not special. And this isn't just creationists and religious people. This is also people, you don't really get so much as religious people, but it's also people who want to feel that human beings are special and we're here for some purpose. And if we just evolved from an ape and before that, you know, slime, as they like to call it, or Kent Hovind says, evolved from a rock, then they just can't handle it.
Creationist Museum Experience
00:07:42
Speaker
You know, have any of you guys ever been to the creationist museum out in Kentucky? I fortunately have not. I've been. Yeah. On my way to Wyoming when I was driving from Virginia, I stopped at the museum and they, they have security. And if you're doing something, quote unquote, disrespectful.
00:08:04
Speaker
You, uh, you get removed and I was there for 30 minutes and I got to the human evolution bit where they had, uh, Roswell, Pithicus, Lucy, and I was giggling uncontrollably. Just that how ridiculous this whole thing was. And, uh, these two guys in suits, like you need to leave and escorted me out of the building. So, uh, 30 buck ticket for 30 minute visit.
00:08:28
Speaker
God, it was interesting. I wish I could have seen more. It was just silly. Lucy is the one thing that gets them more than anything. Anytime that I do a post on Instagram about Lucy or I do something about Lucy on either channel, it just attracts people like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. And I think it's because Lucy is the most famous one. She is the Australia pit that everyone has heard of. Not many creationists, if you mentioned,
00:08:57
Speaker
Homo hydrobregensis, or even the newer finds like fluorescentis, they haven't heard of them. But Lucy is like the poster child of evolution. And that's the one they feel they have to debunk.
00:09:10
Speaker
I know that when the Creation Museum is just basically just looks like, just like a gorilla on all fours, knuckle walking. Yeah. My, my favorite is that they acknowledge dinosaurs and they're like before, before sin, all, every animal and like dinosaurs included used to live in paradise and they all used to eat plants and they're just like, but once sin happened, that's when they started eating each other. Like their whole explanation for a lot of this stuff like was just, just, you know,
00:09:40
Speaker
It's different. It's a different point of view. That's the best way to explain it. But talk beliefs happen. You notice this going on in the street.
Encounters with Jehovah's Witnesses
00:09:49
Speaker
And then so your first episode was on Jehovah's Witnesses, right? Yeah. One of the early ones I did, I was in London and I saw these Jehovah's Witnesses. As you see almost every corner, they like to stand very near to train stations because people will come out there, you know, en masse and they'll see the magazines.
00:10:07
Speaker
And they had a magazine about was life created or not. And I just started chatting to them. And then they pulled out an iPad. And I thought, oh, this is interesting. I've never seen Jehovah's Witnesses with an iPad before. And they played this little animation similar to A State It Clearly or that type of thing. Really well done. Yeah.
00:10:28
Speaker
And it was just, I was obviously aimed at younger people, but it was basically saying, if you look around and you see cars and you see buildings and you'll see a watch, you will know that these things have been designed. Right. And then they made this huge leap in this animation, about five minutes. And they said, therefore, if you look at a tree or if you look at an animal, if you look at yourself, we must all be designed. And that was that was basically it. And I said, you are.
00:10:57
Speaker
you are making a rather big leap there. And it got into evolution. And I remember they brought up the Cambrian explosion. Now, I knew what that was. I hadn't been studying evolution in the way I have been recently. I was a little bit rusty on it. And so, of course, I couldn't answer him in a way that could have pleased me better. I was not too happy. But he seemed to think that this, as they call it, an explosion of life, which happened about 540 million years ago,
00:11:25
Speaker
is proof that everything was created at once. It doesn't matter that he's saying the Earth is millions of years old. As long as everything appears to have been created or to have appeared all at once, that seems to prove creation. He said, all sorts of things appeared, apes, T-Rexes,
00:11:47
Speaker
Of course, I now know that is not true. In the Cambrian explosion, which was 25 million years, not that fast, we had the beginning of vertebrates, of course, animals with shells. But I didn't know that at the time. So their skeletons could fossilize better then, and that's why you see that. OK, yeah. That makes sense.
00:12:12
Speaker
But still, I got into this conversation with this guy. And this has happened more and more. And I thought, in order to really have an interesting conversation and get these people thinking, I have got to go back to my evolution studies, which I've always been interested in since I was a kid, and really, really get the knowledge as best as I can.
00:12:35
Speaker
And, well, I started doing that. I started doing some debunking videos on Talk Belief, debunking their debunking videos. And in the end, I thought, this needs its own channel. I just need to put science and evolution out there, not necessarily pointing the finger at anyone like creationists. There were so many pseudoscience, you know, Flat Earth and all kinds of things on YouTube. I just wanted to put something out there with evolution in the title.
00:13:03
Speaker
And I started the Instagram about the same time. And really, it was just to get it out there. Right. Has it been easy for you to get access to information about evolution through scholarly journals or articles or whatever it is? Has that been fairly easy for you?
00:13:22
Speaker
through this process?
Collaborating with Scientists
00:13:23
Speaker
Not too bad, not too bad at all, really. I mean, thank goodness for the internet. But I found also that people who are in the world of science like yourselves, they're very open to not only being interviewed, which I have been doing now, but to answer questions. When I made a video which was debunking
00:13:43
Speaker
a debunking video about Lucy, I was basically had to prove that no matter what you guys say, Lucy is a transitional fossil and is or rather was a biped. And so I emailed a couple of people who had worked on the Lucy fossil recently and just asked all kinds of questions. I wanted to get it absolutely right. And they were very accommodating. And
00:14:06
Speaker
What I always find is that people in the sciences are very happy to talk about their work because, as you all know, they love it. That's awesome. That's definitely the case with me. I can talk for hours about it. One of my favorite arguments with the Lucy folks is how she died. You guys know that one?
00:14:28
Speaker
We're just like the, the recent one that came out. What was his, what was his name? He was Larry Todd. He came out with the paper stating that like Lucy died from falling out of a tree and I just don't like that. Yeah. They don't paleoanthropologists who've been studied for years. Do not, do not appreciate.
00:14:44
Speaker
or condone that interpretation in the slightest that I've come to find out. But he's an archaeologist that studied how animals have died archaeologically his entire life. And he was like, well, based on everything I've ever studied, it looks like the impact fractures on her legs are
00:15:01
Speaker
conducive to her falling out of a tree and all these paleoanthropologists were like, no. That was the first big fight I've gotten with Lana about, because you know, Lana is a paleoanthropologist and we had a couple drinks with her paleo-anth friends and they're like, have you seen this stupid shit about him, Lucy falling out of a tree? And I was like, yeah, and it looks legit. Like I buy the science and
00:15:24
Speaker
Oh boy, that was just a blowout fight that turned, it was just, whoo, whoo. As far as I know, the discoverer, Donald Johansson, what he said happened was that she had somehow died falling into this body of water. And over the three million years, the bones were crushed by animals who were feeding and that kind of thing.
00:15:46
Speaker
Yeah, that totally makes sense. Yeah. And they say, uh, yeah, there's a bunch of other, they're always like, yeah, the other australopithecines have the same fractures. So it's like, yeah, well, if they were all sleeping in the trees at night, it makes sense if they're all falling out of trees every now and then. Cause they were kind of bipedal at that point, but, uh, Oh,
00:16:04
Speaker
I love the diagram that they created of her falling out because it's just such an accurate representation of my life when something goes wrong. And on that lovely note, we are going to end the first segment of this interview with Mark Torender from Evolution Soup. So we'll catch you in the second segment.
00:16:26
Speaker
Welcome back to a life in ruins podcast episode 24 with Mark, Torinder, evolution, sloop, talk beliefs, all, all the channels. Um, and we wanted to start off this section by asking you because you obviously have so many, you have a couple of YouTube channels. Um, you're constantly engaging with the public. How have those interactions gone?
Reactions to Talk Beliefs
00:16:49
Speaker
Are they mostly positive or mostly negative? Are you getting a lot of hate mail? What, how does it, how does it end up coming out?
00:16:56
Speaker
Well, the comments section is a sight to behold, I'll tell you, especially on the Talk Beliefs channel, because if they perceive that you're having a, like we say over here, a pop at religion, they're going to come after you and they're going to dig their heels in as well. And initially with that channel, that's something I kind of wanted to come across as kind of like an atheist on a crusade. But in the end, I found out it's kind of counterproductive. Like I say, it just becomes a tennis match in the
00:17:26
Speaker
in the comments section. And I still get some very strange ones to this day, not necessarily aimed at me, but aimed at what is being said. And all these fights go on with all these viewers in the comments section, sometimes for months and even over the course of a year in one case. And I think that was a video I'd done on Mormons.
00:17:50
Speaker
Oddly enough, since starting the Evolution Zoo channel, it's been mostly positive comments about science, which is great. You'd think that the detractors would be really attacking. But so far, I know it's a much younger channel. So far, it's been very positive.
00:18:08
Speaker
That's great to hear. In the break, you were telling us a story about some of the kind of conspiracy theories associated with Lucy and its reconstruction or fake reconstruction, as people think.
Debunking Conspiracy Theories
00:18:21
Speaker
Yes. Well, a lot of the controversy around Lucy is the fact that as Donald Johansson and his team presented, it's a very human-like pelvis. It's not flared out like a chimps.
00:18:32
Speaker
It's more bowl-shaped to support an obvious biped, somebody was standing vertically. But when the pelvis was found in the Afar region of Ethiopia, it was broken. But it was kind of twisted and smashed together.
00:18:48
Speaker
in an anatomically impossible shape, he called it. And all that was needed to do was to take a kink out of it. And they were very upfront about this. They even reconstructed this process, refilmed it as it were for, I think it was Nova, which was a documentary that came out, I think in the late 90s.
00:19:07
Speaker
And then they put the pieces together, kind of like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, and they're all fit together. And hey, it doesn't look like an ape. It looks a lot like ours. And this animal was a biped. And we know that from other reasons as well. When you look at the legs, for instance, or look at the femur, it's sloping and are only
00:19:27
Speaker
human-like slope like that because we have to support our center of gravity as we walk upright. A chimp doesn't do that because their head is thrust forward and they knuckle walk. Anyway, so that is not enough for some people, the detractors shall we call them. They say, oh no, no, no, no. This pelvis was manipulated.
00:19:50
Speaker
And what I had said in the, in my video was that if it was some sort of deception, why would they recreate the whole scene and show it on a high, you know, high profile documentary like Nova and broadcast it all over the world? But no, no, no, it was manipulated. And all the other pelvises that were found, Australia, Pacific Africanus and Sadeba and all these that have come later, they have all been based on this fake pelvis.
00:20:17
Speaker
And you explained sometimes I go into the comments. I wish I wouldn't, but I feel I have to. Sometimes I go in there and I say, look, they just removed a kink, fit it together. That's it. They're very upfront about it. No, no, no. It was manipulated. Really? In some cases, you can't get anywhere. So this is the problem. It's really interesting. I've never heard that one.
00:20:44
Speaker
Yeah, that was right. I didn't know that. And it kind of reminds me of like, there was an article that came out.
00:20:50
Speaker
recently talking about the polarization of politics and, you know, radicals on either side and have how they just can't overcome arguments against their point of view. And I think a lot of that is applicable to some of these, you know, hardcore science and religion debates, of course, you know, I mean, think about people who are extremely religious, like that is a huge part of their identity and having anything that kind of picks apart that they really see it as an attack on themselves. And
00:21:16
Speaker
I'm not super religious. My mom's Catholic and my dad is Southern Baptist, but for a long time, I didn't think much of it until actually a paleoanthropology class. And we were talking about mitochondrial Eve, which is an Australopithecine that all humans are related to.
00:21:33
Speaker
And that was like an oh fuck moment for me. Like having that information really solidified some of the, you know, discussions I was having with myself internally about religion and science.
Identity and Belief in Science
00:21:46
Speaker
But, you know, that really sealed the deal in a lot of sense.
00:21:51
Speaker
But, you know, not many people are all that open to a lot of these things, right? No. And if you look on YouTube, the Flat Earth movement is there's so many. Oh, Jesus Christ. This is about identity as well. Because if you boil that down, I won't spend too much time on this because I know it's sort of going in a tangent. But if you look at these people,
00:22:14
Speaker
they usually have some sort of identity crisis going on as well. Because if you ask them, and keep asking them, why, why does it have to be flat? And they said, don't you see, if it's flat, and it's got a dome over it, like we think, that means somebody created it. And that means we were put here for a purpose, which is exactly what is the bugbear with creationists.
00:22:39
Speaker
Interesting. And then there's people in science too that like will stick very thoroughly to their like, honestly, like belief in like a theory or, you know, something that they think is true to such an extent that they're unwilling to like look at other theories too. So it goes both ways, but it's definitely, if you were to put it on a,
00:23:01
Speaker
you know, the lady Liberty scale, it skews one way. Yeah. And that's towards creation. But yeah. Yeah. I think like tying back into what David just said, you know, uh, back to the how Lucy died debate, you know, people are very entrenched in their views and no matter what scope you're looking at, you know, like religion versus science and like science within science and interpretations like those schisms and beliefs, you know, they're riddled throughout. So it's definitely not a science versus religion thing, but just kind of, uh,
00:23:31
Speaker
how we're engaging in public discourse and how we're interacting with one another. We should be having conversations, not confrontations.
00:23:40
Speaker
And one thing I've learned is not to try to take the god away from some people. Like I say, it's not always about religion. Quite often it is. But you can say to them, hey, you know, a god might have created the universe and kicked the whole evolutionary thing off. But please do not call scientists liars, because that's what some of them are doing. Not all of them, but some of them.
00:24:03
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It's like the clock in the clockmaker debate thing, too. I always enjoyed. I think it was Thomas Jefferson said that. Oh, the watchmaker? Yeah. Yeah, it was watchmaker, not clockmaker. Yeah. I mean, fundamentally, the same thing, right? A clock is just a watch.
00:24:22
Speaker
Yeah. The universe is a clock and God is the clock maker, but everything else happens. All the stuff that happens in it, we can understand and understand the mechanics of it and how that works. There's nothing wrong with understanding how that works and whatnot. As long as you can see a maker's mark on a tree or a cloud or something.
00:24:44
Speaker
with a watch you can and find the serial number. And I've said this too, too, you know, but that's where that analogy sort of breaks down. I mean, as far as I know, as far as I know, science is still there. I mean, we got genetic coding. It's kind of a serial number.
Creating Engaging Science Content
00:25:06
Speaker
Yeah, barcode. But not to get too far away from the topic, but, um, so,
00:25:14
Speaker
They'll do that from time to time. Uh, so I wanted to talk about in this segment for sure is like, so I wanted to start this like media thing, uh, Carlton as well and jump into it. And I had no like mentor in it or like advisor to be like, how do I do Instagram science? And like, there was no way to do that. And everyone was like, I don't know, just do it. But then I kept stumbling across your page on like the explore page on Instagram.
00:25:41
Speaker
Or maybe someone tagged me in your page or something But I remember finding it and then literally searching every one of your posts for anything that had dogs in the paleo art and I commented like dogs dogs looked at everything and then you started DMing me and We started chatting and then like we ended up web chatting and you like kind of just taught me everything like how you do stuff So like first of all, thanks because now we we're doing well because of you. Yeah
00:26:11
Speaker
But like, I guess we wanted to ask you, like, how did you learn to do this stuff? And how did you like, you know, build such a huge ass following? Because you got like almost 100,000 people now. I wish I knew. To be honest, if I put it in a nutshell, I am it's an ongoing process. It's almost almost like evolution, you know, with his sort of trial and error. But it's it's a case of slow and gradual making making some mistakes along the way. It's you make.
00:26:41
Speaker
you make an account that you yourself would want to see. And if every post doesn't have some sort of wow factor in it, you kind of have to throw it out. And I knew from the beginning that this was to get science out there and make it accessible and make it interesting, exciting to people who are scientists like you guys and who are not scientists like me. And so I thought the best way to do that is with paleoarch.
00:27:08
Speaker
not charts, as much as I like charts now, but I have very few of them. Beautiful paleo-art, which takes you back in time. And don't just leave it there, because I noticed some people had the paleo-art on their Instagram, but they didn't have any information. I thought, well, what is this creature? So you find the information wherever that is in journals, online, or whatever you know yourself, and you put it in there.
00:27:32
Speaker
And you put it in little bite-sized chunks, separate it so you can see these little paragraphs. Because again, you just ask yourself, what would appeal to me and what would turn me off? Look at other accounts. What turns me off about that? What excites me about that one? And it's just this gradual, you know, what excites you basically is, in a nutshell, is what I do. Yeah. Yeah. We learned real quickly that people on the internet don't give a shit about graphs.
00:28:01
Speaker
or they love memes. That's where we're killing it right now. Now it's right now we've turned into a meme page on archeology. Yeah. I'll spend six hours writing like a really thoughtful and poignant, like
00:28:17
Speaker
well-prozed post on my ethnocynology and then Carlton will like double the engagement with a shitty meme. Oh, no. Yeah, but bread and circuses, bread and circuses.
00:28:32
Speaker
At the core of it though, like the way, like we, we started building the podcast account with your format though, which like you taught us was like the, you know, the chunks and like spacing it out with the, cause I never thought to put like little bullet points between paragraphs and like, I think I learned that from you just to, you know, visually break it up a bit. So it's not just like, you know, a blast of information that someone's face and like, yeah, it's just all stuff like that. And then also one thing I like, we always respected about you is like,
00:29:01
Speaker
you always credited the artist and like in every way you could. And like, I think that made you stand out to me and like in another way too. Like some people just throw up someone's artwork and like don't credit it. So it's like, I can't appreciate it. Well, I gotta be honest. I think in the early days I didn't and somebody really, really went to town and in the comments, why the fuck didn't you, you know, so then on, you know,
00:29:28
Speaker
Like I say, trial and error. And sometimes you can't find the artist, but you just have to go on a dedicated search through the internet to find the artist. And if you don't find the artist, don't have it. Don't say unknown artists unless they're from the 1800s or something. Just keep looking to find the guy's name or the girl's name and not only credit them if they've got a website or a deviant art site, put that on there as well.
00:29:55
Speaker
No, I just want to, and I want to come out and say that, uh, your posts always grab me because of, because of those photos, because of those reconstructions. I'm always, always gravitate towards those because it's just, it's like, whoa, okay. Why is this rhinoceros with like a freaking antenna on its nose? You know what?
00:30:16
Speaker
Like what the heck is going on with that? And it really allows us to capture, yeah, it allows us to capture and visualize the deep past that we don't get very often. So I just want to applaud you.
00:30:31
Speaker
Oh, thank you very much. And sometimes you probably notice you swipe and then you will see the skeleton, for instance, shot taken in a museum somewhere. So you see the paleo art, so you get your little trip back in time and then you get a bit of science after it. But I think it's a good idea to overdo it, like to have 10 or 12 things. People just like to quickly go through things.
00:30:56
Speaker
And another thing people like is the moving image. So if you put, and I really should do more of this, if you have a bit of footage, always goes through the roof. Oh, the Tasmanian Tigers. Yeah. Tasmanian Tiger or the Mud Skipper. Yeah. People love it. Yeah. Well, the Mud Skipper. I haven't seen that one. That's a new one.
00:31:17
Speaker
Is that like the little, uh, name or salamander looking thing? That is a walking amphibian. Oh, okay. Yeah. And that freaks a lot of people out. It can literally go from one body of water, cross the road, and then go into another body of water, pushing it along in its front fins. Wow. Sounds a lot like those Chinese lungfish. Those were prom in the East coast a while back. Remember those David?
00:31:44
Speaker
The lung fish? The snakehead fish.
00:31:49
Speaker
I remember that being a thing in the news as a kid. Yeah. And they were like, don't go in the Hudson, but they say that every day. A little fish that can walk across land. Yeah, Mark, you have a really cool channel and we would definitely appreciate it because early on you helped us. I can't remember. I think David introduced me to you because he did his video first and we started chatting and then did mine. And then I thought I reached out to David first because I loved what he was doing with ethno-synology. That's the way I remember it.
00:32:19
Speaker
Possibly. I remember going through and just commenting dogs in every one of your posts, like just like spraying into the wind being like, love me. But yeah, but then I think, yeah, you contacted me after doing just like, you know, commenting. And then then I did an interview and then I hooked you up with Carlton or Carlton, like you maybe. Yeah, but something like that. And then, yeah, we've been planning on having you on here for a while because I remember when we first thought of these are ruined live sections.
00:32:48
Speaker
we called you and we're like, Hey, we have this idea. We want to do a couple episodes before getting to you, but we really want to promote you. And that was like in August. And then we were finally able to get you down to have you for, uh, yeah. Cause I remember I was like walking to class, like first day of class, telling me about this idea for a new segment. And now here we are nine months later, finally have you on now that we have the swing of things almost a year after the whole program started.
00:33:15
Speaker
We're going to go ahead and wrap up here with Segment 2. This has been a lot of fun. I can't wait for Segment 3 to show up here in a bit. We'll get to chatting about haters and copycats, some of our favorite people on social media. We'll be right back. Enjoy these messages from our sponsors.
Engaging with Scientists
00:33:34
Speaker
Hey, everyone. We're back with segment three, and just real quick before we begin this segment, just wanted to give a shout out to our friend Marley. Marley sent us a really kind email, not too long ago. Huge fan of the show. We're really happy that you like the show, Marley, and we're really happy that we could be an impetus for you continuing your education in anthropology. Also, for our listeners, we finally have a website.
00:33:56
Speaker
lifeandruins.com. You can find us there. David did an excellent job with getting it together. You can find our Instagram, our various social media, and also our podcast. It's on there as well. So please give that a check and from there you can contact us. Let us know what you think. We really do appreciate when listeners send us emails, get our DMs and let us know
00:34:20
Speaker
what they think of the show and who else we should, uh, interviews. Thank you all very much for being listeners and moving, moving on. Yep. So we're back with Mark Torinder. We're talking about his Instagram on evolution soup or at evolution underscore soup, if you're listening, but Mark also has two, like much more popular, I guess, let's say they were the, the impetus for making his, uh, is that the word they started his Instagram.
00:34:46
Speaker
has two YouTube channels. So Mark, do you want to talk about those? Well, I think it's talk beliefs, which happened first. And then I thought, I've got to do something on evolution. And yeah, I began with the Instagram. And then I thought, why don't I do some interviews with scientists, if that's at all possible. As I said earlier in the show, that sometimes all you have to do is email them and tell them you're passionate about science. And they're very happy
00:35:10
Speaker
to speak to you, and I've been very lucky. Yeah, Dave, I think you've been on Evolution Soup, and I know Carlton may be talking about something soon on Evolution Soup. I hope. Let's talk about candlewick, man. Yeah, let's do it.
00:35:25
Speaker
Yeah, that would be great. Just yesterday I was talking to Nizar Ibrahim who found the Spinosaurus tail in Morocco not long ago. He's going to come on the show tomorrow. So that'll be recorded tomorrow. We could talk about all things Spinosaurus. So I was very surprised that he said yes to that because he's, you know, he's being pulled left, right and center by news companies and everything because this is a big deal. No, he made some time for me.
00:35:52
Speaker
Oh, dude. That's second favorite dinosaur. I'm really excited for that one. Very excited for that one. In one sentence, what exactly was the find significant for the listeners? The tail of the spinosaurus had never been found before, and it was assumed it was going to be this long T-Rex, pointy tail, because all dinosaurs have that.
00:36:11
Speaker
and that's what seems Jurassic Park. He went back to the stick site several times and this time he found the tail. The tailbone suggested that it was a great big paddle.
00:36:27
Speaker
which means it used it for swimming a bit like a crocodile. So it spent a lot of time in the water. And in effect, it is the only aquatic dinosaur because we're not talking about plesiosaurus or anything that's something completely different. Dinosaurs, as far as we know, are on the land. But as far as we know, this animal is the only aquatic dinosaur, truly aquatic dinosaur. And that would explain like the big spine. Yeah, like the fin thing.
00:36:55
Speaker
The fin possibly used for steering, but nobody's really sure it could be sexual display. But the important thing is that tail, it's like a great big fin for paddle, which was not expected. Interesting. Because I know the thing has gone through so many changes. I love it so much because the original fossils were bombed in World War II because they're held in the National Museum in Berlin. Oh, God, it's such a fun dinosaur. Such a fun story.
00:37:20
Speaker
Those bones are gone. I know they're gone. So I guess we were going to jump into like how like the experience you've had being like, I mean, essentially a science educator, science communicator in the past few years, like the ups and downs of it, the, like how you've helped people, how people have reached out to you and like negatively and positively, like, is there anything you wanted to like start with, with that?
Impact of Educational Content
00:37:49
Speaker
I'm sure you've got plenty of,
00:37:51
Speaker
touching stories but I'm sure there's... Yeah, I think there are a couple of touching stories. It happens mostly on Instagram. People assume that I'm some sort of evolutionary biologist or something and they DM me and they ask me all kinds of questions and sometimes I know the answers and other times I have to go and research it. I learn a heck of a lot that way, I tell you. Or I point them in a direction to something to all of us here would seem, you know,
00:38:18
Speaker
very obvious, like, I don't know, the National Geographic Channel, or a certain book, or something like that. Or perhaps the person is interested in human evolution. Never heard of Lucy, never heard the word Australopithecus, and you just give them a link. In the case of one person, he said, I really want to learn this subject. Can you
00:38:39
Speaker
suggest two books for me and one I suggested was Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne and the other one was Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin and next thing I know he had posted on his story him holding up the two books saying thank you thank you thank you these are wonderful so that kind of you know gave me a warm glow.
00:39:02
Speaker
Nice. I do want to say very quickly, I get a lot of messages from people in, shall we say, countries which do not look kindly on evolution. I'm talking more Middle Eastern countries, and I know all of us have probably had this experience. Some of these people sound very timid, even worried that they should be talking.
00:39:26
Speaker
to me and they just sometimes they just want to chat sometimes they want like a book or a website or they just want to say you know thank you but one thing they all say is I can't talk about this to my family so yeah about the about you know I think that animals evolved in speciation happens
00:39:49
Speaker
Yeah. I think you and I have had the same person talk to both of us about that. And yeah, it's, it's, it's an interesting scenario. I also have people that are like, have asked me, I think it's from Iran where they're like asked permission, like, can I share your posts and like, they'll credit me.
00:40:10
Speaker
And I was like, I don't mind if you like, go ahead and credit me, but just make sure you credit the artist. Cause that's not my photo. And they were like, okay, great. And then like, it's been interesting to me cause I can see translation cause it's obviously it's in Farsi, but then I can like the translations of what I'm saying, they changed some of the words to be a little more like less.
00:40:33
Speaker
which I thought at first was just, you know, translation in general, but then like, I started to notice the pattern of it being like less evolution heavy. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. I think I'm like, I consider myself fortunate that I didn't grow up in a household that was very anti-evolution. Like even though my mom's Catholic and my dad's Southern Baptist, but like it was always taught.
Handling Online Criticism
00:40:56
Speaker
I never really had that problem until,
00:40:59
Speaker
you know, really going to school down south and having to teach evolution for the middle school science day.
00:41:07
Speaker
And I always kind of thought, you know, those honestly, it wasn't even the kids. It was the fucking janitor sitting in the back. Like that was, that's who got me. Not the students or the teacher. It was the janitor who was watching the patient. Yeah. Just like, but it was funny when he talked, he's, I was, he raised his hand. I was like, Oh, here we go. And he's just like, so the aliens built the pyramids, right? And I was like, no, no, no, no, no.
00:41:29
Speaker
And this is a talk on evolution, sir. You know, I think, you know, you guys definitely Mark and David, because you guys are far more active on social media and pushing these boundaries. Like, you know, I get I get upset when people talk shit about David on his Instagram. I couldn't imagine being the focus of being someone's punching bag when they disagree with you. So definitely my hats off to my hat off to you two for
00:41:54
Speaker
like really doing this public engagement, really doing the science communication and opening this dialogue on a place that is so full of vitriol where people can hide behind a screen and they can say whatever they want. I think, you know, it takes definitely some skin to do that.
00:42:12
Speaker
But I'm sure David will agree, because we both get comments from anti-evolution people. The best thing to do is not to insult them back. The best thing to do is just keep putting blocks of science and facts, if you are going to respond at all. And they're going to keep saying, no, it isn't. No, it isn't. But, but, but, no, that's wrong. And you just keep giving them facts. And then in the end, they go away.
00:42:42
Speaker
or perhaps they learn something. Yeah. And it will get heated sometimes only one way. And then like the people that are reading your comments will be like, all right, well, this person's clearly, it's a straw man attack at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Or David calls in his bulldog.
00:43:00
Speaker
Yeah. And sometimes someone told me that I compared indigenous peoples to cavemen too often. And I was like, well, hold up. I'm not comparing indigenous peoples to cavemen. I'm comparing Paleolithic Europeans to cavemen, which is, you know, who's in the post that I'm talking about because it's in France. And then I like tagged Carlton in it. And I was like, you want to handle this? And then Carlton just went in and like lit him up. But
00:43:27
Speaker
Yeah. Um, but those are interesting ones. And then I don't know if you get these Mark, but like people that comment, not even like a question or like a comment, they just like state something that they wanted to sound smart about. And like, like about like the post, like those ones are the most annoying ones. And it's like, I know I just said that and baffling as well. Yes. I've got an example here. If you want to hear one. Yeah, go ahead.
00:43:57
Speaker
Yeah. Are you sure about this? Oh, please, please, please, please, please, please. It's got to be better than any of mine. Okay. I did a video, this is on my talk beliefs channel, before I'd come over to do evolution soup, called the evidence for evolution. It was about ERVs, endogenous retroviruses, which is sort of like a date stamp that you can get on human cells. And it's a really good proof of evolution.
00:44:22
Speaker
So, a person posted, the theory of evolution is just a theory about a scientific theory adaptation. It is a faith. Jesus turns homosexuals into straight people supernaturally. That is observable evidence. Works on depression, heroin addiction, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, and many other things too. I go where the observable evidence is.
00:44:47
Speaker
There it is. That's just one. Let's unpack that real quick. If we can. That's just one. Supernaturally turns people into homosexuals. And that's scientifically proven, right?
00:45:05
Speaker
And the name of the poster is All Caps, We Obey Jesus. Mike Pence? Yeah. Oh, OK. Now, maybe it's a troll, but I think you do look at their profile and their videos and everything on YouTube, and you think, oh, gosh, they're genuine. Basically, they're saying, I don't know what they're saying.
00:45:27
Speaker
Those are my favorite when you get a troll and then you go to their page and just says, if you're here, it's because I'm an asshole. And they're just like, yeah, well, yeah. Nailed it. That's a lot of Instagram. But yeah, you have any others like that? Let me see.
Challenges in Science Communication
00:45:45
Speaker
Supernaturally.
00:45:47
Speaker
And you say Jesus cures bipolar disorder? Is that what it was? It's an observable fact, David. Yeah. They saw it. Yeah, Jesus. It works on depression, heroin, addiction, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, and many other things, too. So what he's saying is that your magic of evolution doesn't work, but our magic does work.
00:46:11
Speaker
So interesting has ever seen that movie division three football's finest and I promise it's relevant Andy Dick movie and the Assistant coach is extremely Christian and he's doing a Bit for the guys is as you know, it's like, you know Andy lead us into a lead us into a paper tonight's football game and
00:46:37
Speaker
He's just like, why one for talking about the Lord, but Jesus loves football. There's been a whole hell of a lot of talk about this here evolution.
00:46:48
Speaker
evolution's what I call it. It was the Holy Land, it weren't Jurassic Park, this is all bullshit. I'm dying watching this movie. I showed it to Dr. Melissa Murphy at University of Wyoming and she was crying laughing like, where do you find this shit? But every time I think of these conversations, I think of that one little bit from that movie where it's just gold.
00:47:13
Speaker
Yeah, evolution, E-V-I-L. Yes, I hear that a lot. Yeah. And they're not all as crazy as that one. There's this wonderful short one here. This is sort of a basic one you get. Absence of evidence is the big problem with evolutionism. It is a faith-based religion. From the beginning, evolutionism has been based upon religion, not evidence. Absence of evidence. Look at my chest hair. Exactly.
00:47:41
Speaker
I need to bring you along. Absence of evidence is not evidence for absence.
00:47:48
Speaker
You can't even start with those ones. You're not going to turn them. Yeah. I mean, there's just, I mean, I can imagine, you know, the evolution stoop stuff, that has to be pretty crazy. But I imagine the stuff you get on Talk Beliefs, like you talk about Jehovah's Witnesses, talking about Mormons is especially like a big one. I know there's like another big famous podcast, Lost Podcast on the Left. They had like a seven episode series on the history of Mormonism.
00:48:14
Speaker
And, you know, the comments and that were just, well, I, I challenge any of you to look at any of my Mormon uploads on talk beliefs and then look at the comment section and I will say no more. Firestorm. All right. I'll check that out. Oh boy. I had, here's a fun story before we wrap up. I had never, uh,
00:48:40
Speaker
encountered many Mormons growing up out East, some in Tennessee, and they were delightful people. Like they're really nice. Yeah. But out West though, they would come knock on doors all the time. And I wasn't used to that. And like someone came and knocked on the door and like, I could tell just the black tie, the white shirt. And before he said anything, I was like, Hey, I'm going to spare you the talk. She's a lesbian. I'm a Jew. Like just don't just go.
00:49:10
Speaker
And then he was like, Oh, you're Jewish. And I was like, yeah, and closed the door. And I felt like really bad. I don't always this time. Yeah. My mom's, my mom's family's from Utah where they are like the only Catholic, well, not the only Catholic family, but one of the, one of the few in, in Utah. And I have a couple of cousins that are Mormon. And so it's like, I've always been around that. Um, and you know, lovely people, nice people.
00:49:35
Speaker
Very family oriented. I do appreciate David's Kanye kind of thing. You know, I'm going to let you finish. And on that note, because we do this podcast called A Life in Ruins, we always like to ask our guests this question before the interview is over.
Valuing Science Communication Work
00:49:56
Speaker
So if Mark, if you were given the chance
00:49:59
Speaker
would you still choose to live a life in ruins or in possibly debating and maybe ruining people's... Ruining lives on YouTube. ...perspectives. Or educating the public. Yeah, absolutely. I absolutely would because what I said before about these messages you get and just little rays of hope you give people, it just sort of makes it all worth it.
00:50:28
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And again, on behalf of all three of us, you are the, I wouldn't say, I guess you sit on the Jedi council and we are a mere padawans. Absolutely. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Mark. Thank you very much. Everyone. That was oh, definitely. Before we go, you could definitely check out Mark here on just YouTube and Instagram evolution soup and on YouTube talk beliefs. Go check out Mark. They're absolutely amazing. So.
00:50:56
Speaker
Yeah, follow him on Instagram, follow him on YouTube. It is a blast. So yeah, just interviewed Mark Torunder for episode 24. Had to verify the episode number. So yeah, Mark, thank you so much for being with us today. We really appreciate your time. With that, we're out. Yeah, right.
00:51:23
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. So I wrote one that's really shitty, but I also researched another one. So I'll do the one I wrote first and then we'll go from there. But guys, what do you call a radical, death-defying evolutionist?
00:51:50
Speaker
Evil can evolution. What's Martha Stewart's recipe for chicken soup? First boil the chicken, then dump the stocks. Oh boy. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. We're done.
00:52:31
Speaker
All right, as I promised in the beginning of the episode, Mark's going to talk about some little tidbits you could talk about, about evolution, you know, at the dinner table at Thanksgiving or with anyone you meet on the street. Well, this is something you can definitely try at the dinner table. Ask anyone in your family or any of your friends if they can wiggle their ears. Now, if they can, that is demonstrating evolution. So not everyone can do this, but those of us who can do it, that means that we are hearkening back to the days when our ancestors had ears which could move a bit like
00:53:00
Speaker
horse or a cat to look for their young or to watch out for predators. So if you can do that, those three muscles attach to your ear. If they can make your ears move, there's no other reason to have that unless it's in the light of evolution. So that's a nice little tidbit that you can
00:53:21
Speaker
share with your friends. Another one is goosebumps. Why, when you get cold or if you get scared, why does the hair stand up? Now, there's absolutely no reason for this whatsoever. But again, this is vestigial, and it calls back to a time when our ancestors are more furry ancestors.
00:53:40
Speaker
if they were cold, they tried to fluff themselves up like you would see with a cat today for insulation or to make themselves look bigger to scare off predators. And we still have that. So that is another cool proof of evolution. That's really cool. So when you when you get like kind of nervous or scared or in a vulnerable situation, your hair stands on it. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of other weird things as well, but I don't think we have time. But there is plenty of. Yeah.
00:54:10
Speaker
Yeah, that sounds great. I think we can do another segment later on where we can just put you on our podcast page with fun facts from Mark. It's awesome. Yeah, appreciate it, Mark. With that, our episode is finally over. We're glad you guys made it this far for a little bonus, some little nuggets of info. All right, we're out. This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at The Reno Collective.
00:54:34
Speaker
this has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.