Hi Friend,

I'm so delighted to bring this new podcast episode with mathematician Ben Allen to you! We talk about mathematics and evolution and cooperation and queerness.

This podcast episode came about because last summer, I published an article on how very Queer our fellow animals, plants, and microbe kin can be. I wrote that in part because of the rise of some really inaccurate messaging from a (very) narrow but influential branch of Christian-infused thinking that was saying that queerness is "not natural." This is a really old argument... and it has been proven to be wrong. Multiple times. So I summarized some of that research.

An old friend of mine from college (we both went to Haverford College) read the article and reached out to me to say that he had been doing some research on that very topic. I thought to myself, I bet that when you say 'research' you mean something very different than when I say 'research'.

That's because Ben is a mathematician, not a social scientist turned public theologian/witchy minister. We are trained in very different research methods... though I think we have some very similar ethos.

I know him to be a really good communicator about complex ideas, and so I was pretty excited to invite him onto the podcast. As sometimes happens with old friends, I did not, actually, really know where his research had led him in the last decade or so, and it's been really cool to learn about how much work he has done, and how well received it has been. His work on the evolution of social cooperation was accepted as an article in Nature (which is quite a prestigious publication), amongst other things. As with many who study evolution, he gets to do a lot of cross-disciplinary collaboration, including with biologists, and he gets to learn a lot about a wide range of species, from iron-sharing bacteria to communal-nesting birds. Turns out that we have a lot we can learn from microbes!

After he helped us orient into thinking about mathematics and evolution, he shared about some of his research on social cooperation. The conversation then easily flowed into the natural queerness of evolution.

I hope you enjoy this episode.... and let me know if you have any questions you would like to hear us talk more about!

Blessings on all the forms of evolution that are moving in your life -

Sara Jolena