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The Insight, episode 18: Lee Berger, H. naledi, and open science


On this week’s episode of The Insight (Stitcher and Google Play) we talk to Lee Berger, author of Almost Human and a  paleoanthropological revolutionary. Or, less sensationally Lee tells us his view on the practice and results of science in his field (which is literally in the field).

Like most scientists, Lee is passionate about his work, but unlike many, he’s really good at talking about it. That’s an important skill going forward because science is usually funded by the public or private foundations.

Here is the original paper on Homo naledi, Homo naledi, a new species of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa. This small hominin had a brain 30% the size of our own, and lived until at least (and likely later than) 200,000 years ago in southern Africa. At some point they’ll get DNA out of naledi. Lee’s current opinion based on morphology seems to be that this is a highly basal lineage. That is, it separated from the one group that led to anatomically modern humans 2 million years ago!

Also, if you haven’t, please give us 5 stars on iTunes/Stitcher! I know how many readers I have, and 59 ratings aren’t the limit of reach of my audience.

7 thoughts on “The Insight, episode 18: Lee Berger, H. naledi, and open science

  1. The podcast is great, but what kind of mic set-up are you using? In early episodes your voice was very muffled — things are clearer now, but the “air puffs” on certain consonants are very pronounced. (Spencer Wells’ speech is clearer.)

    I have a few other suggestions, not sure what the right forum is to convey them to you.

  2. Razib — Here are my suggestions. Take them for what they’re worth; I’m not a podcaster, but I listen to a lot of podcasts, and do some science communications work for the day job.

    (a) If you are planning to make the podcast a long-term thing, it’d be wise to speak to someone in audio production and get pointers on how to set up the mics to best record your voices. Your vocal timbre is much different than Spencer’s and the imbalance is striking.

    (b) Who is your audience? At times, the podcast seems to be oriented toward the scientifically literate general public (which seems very reasonable); at other times, it seems to be aimed towards genetics / genomics insiders. Ideas come fast and furious at times, very jargon-laden, with Spencer sometimes going back to fill in the gaps. It would be useful to spend a good amount of time setting context at the beginning of each episode before you address a topic. Refer to recent episodes if you need to. It’d help the general-public audience immensely.

    As an example, I listened to the interview episode with the prof from Michigan — it kind of leapt right in — why not spend 3-4 minutes talking about your guest, who he is, what his major contributions are, why you’ve brought him on the podcast. It was interesting to hear his comments but I wasn’t really sure until the very end why you’d brought him on the show. Help people understand WHY you’re talking about what you’re talking about.

    Do all of this without overly emphasizing your connection to the topic — the “When I first read this paper, I thought that …” and “ABC is a mutual friend of ours from XYZ lab …” stuff is good once-in-a-while, but too much of it is not a good thing. IMO.

    (c) Start off each podcast by introducing yourselves (before asking for ratings or subscriptions).

    “Hello, and welcome to the Insight podcast. I’m Razib Khan, and I’m Spencer Wells. In today’s episode, we’ll be interviewing Prof. IJK from Nowheresville University about blah-blah-blah, but before we get there, I’d like to thank everyone who has subscribed and left ratings for us on iTunes and Google Play. It really helps new listeners find us! If you haven’t rated us yet, we’d really appreciate it.”

    And at the end, instead of saying “Let’s end it here”, close it out more completely — “That’s all the time we have for today. On our next episode, we’ll discuss the genetic drivers of ear-wax consistency, so stay tuned. I’m Razib Khan, and I’m Spencer Wells. Thanks for listening, see you next time!”

    Hope these suggestions help. I make them because I like the podcast and think a bit more of a polished approach would help you gain listeners.

  3. This was a great podcast, one of your best so far.
    Something that wasn’t touched on too much but which I would like to know about is the status of H. naledi DNA. Do you know if there is active work on extracting DNA from these samples?

  4. Ah cool, fingers crossed I guess. It seems counterintuitive that these samples would have DNA extraction issues because of how “well preserved” they were. Reading that 2015 paper on the geologic context made me think that it would be a snap.

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