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Okay, you ready? Yep. All right, let's open the show today. Test, test, test. On a sunny street corner. Okay.

So where are we now? We are on Washington Street, which is the main thoroughfare in Hoboken. It's a nice day in Hoboken. People are out and about after work. Is that sangria? What are you guys doing here? And we're here with a guy. His name is John Horgan. I'm a science journalist. He's also a teacher. It is hot. And John is out today with our producer, Lulu Miller, doing what he often does. Here comes someone. Which is to go up to someone he doesn't know. Excuse me, sir. We're doing a survey.

It'll only take a minute at most. A minute I can give you. And he asked them this one question. Here's the question. Will humans ever stop fighting wars once and for all? No. Because of greed and one-upsmanship. To explain, John has been asking this question. Will humans ever stop fighting wars? For years. Because for him, this question, it's not just about war. It gets at something really basic. Do we feel we can change who we are?

Any case, the first time it popped out of his mouth, it was 2003, and a friend had asked him to give a talk at a church just a few days after the first invasion of Iraq. And so here I was in this church, and I can remember the mood was very somber. I was determined to try to make people feel that, okay, this is a setback, but still, you've got to believe that peace is possible, and I tried to list all the reasons why.

And as he was making his case and getting worked up, he looked at the 60 or so people who were there in the audience. He said, all right, how many of you here believe that war will end someday? And I think one or two people raised their hands. Out of 60. And John thought, wait.

Is this really who we are? And so that's actually when I started reading as much as I can about all these things and dug up some surveys from the 1980s. What he found was that about 20 years ago, people were asking this question. Do you think war will ever end? Taking surveys. Now granted, they were not the most scientific of surveys, but what the results seemed to indicate is that we used to be optimistic back in the 80s. Only one in three thought that war was inevitable. So

So it was a minority. Yeah. Whereas today... Will humans ever stop fighting wars once and for all? If you take that question to the streets of Hoboken, as we did, you'll find... No. No. No. No. No. No. About nine out of ten people say no. Yes. Yeah. I think so. No. No. No. No. Never. No. Never. No. Now, depressingly, the worst part...

Is it when he asked him the next question, why do you think this? Invariably, he gets something like... I think there's a human nature for greed and to always want more. It's just human nature. A lot of people are big, dumb animals, and they're just going to keep fighting over useless things. It's in our genes. It's just the way people are. And I don't think we're ever going to learn. Why do you say that? I just think that it's too ingrained in our human nature. So...

So. So. So. So. So we want to challenge that last statement. Too ingrained in our human nature. That one. Okay, we know some things have been handed down to us from our primate ancestors. Violence, maybe. Who knows? Question is, how ingrained is that stuff? Well, yeah. I mean, if you think that we have inherited something, yeah, what can we do about it? Are we stuck or... Can we change?

if we make the right choices. Yeah. So what we've got for you this hour are three stories where choice, individual choice, challenges destiny. Right. Maybe. We hope. I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radio Lab. Stick around. ♪

To get things started, let's just take the question that was just in the air. Are we human beings violent forever and forever and forever? Amen. Is that just who we are? That's a good question. It's a good question, right? And the people who usually say yes, say yes because, in part, because of our ancestors. We're like them. They're like us. That's how it goes. On the other hand...

Let me tell you a story. I was hoping there would be another ham. Yes. Do you remember this guy? Um, Robert Sapolsky. Oh yeah, that's right, Robert Sapolsky. We've had him on the show a couple times. He's a neuroscientist, spends most of the year at Stanford. Being a lab rat scientist, doing neurobiology in the lab. But in the summers. Most summers. I go and spend time in East Africa in the Serengeti studying wild baboons there.

Why? What is he working on? What's his reason to do that? Well, Sapolsky is interested in studying stress. The effect that stress has on the body. And it turns out baboons are a perfect source of data because they're always under stress. You know, the one thing we know about baboons and have known forever is that they fight. Baboons? Constantly.

Not just metaphorically, but literally have been the textbook example of a highly aggressive, male-dominated hierarchical society. Because these animals hunt, because they live in these aggressive troops on the savannah, parentheses, just like we humans used to, and thus we evolved very similarly, they have a constant baseline level of aggression which inevitably spills over into their social lives. Which is why he studied them.

So what Sapolsky does basically is he goes into the bush and he watches. His office is covered with these field notebooks, each one containing detailed notes of who groomed who. And he tells the following story of a particular moment in his baboon watching, which completely changed his life.

changed how he sees the world. It happened about 30 years ago. Sapolsky was a young guy just out of grad school studying his first troop. My first baboons. A troop he really loved. These were animals I was very connected with. In most ways,

It was a pretty average group. Yeah, your basic baboon troop. The females were highly affiliated with each other. They had a very stable ranking system. The males, meanwhile, highly aggressive, dumping on each other. Because that's just what males do. Right. Or so he thought.

Okay, mid-80s, a big boom in tourism in Kenya, wonders for the economy, lots of new lodges, lots of lodge expansions, and there happened to be the next territory over, the tourist lodge. And this one particular lodge, he says, had gotten really big, really fast. And during that time, the lodge greatly expanded their garbage dump. Which means basically that they just dug a hole out behind the lodge. And each day, a tractor came out with the leftovers and dumped it there.

So what we're talking about here, if you can nasally imagine, is a big steaming pile of trash, half-eaten food, baking in the sun, smell wafting in the breeze for miles and miles and into the nostrils of baboons everywhere. So it was not long before a troop of baboons, not Sapolsky's, but one nearby, discovered the garbage and just started feeding on it. ♪

And here they are eating leftover desserts and chicken whatevers. To find a dump full of food must be to a baboon like...

like wandering into heaven. - Manna in the wilderness. So this troop almost immediately shifted their entire behavior to they just slept in the trees above the garbage dump and instead of getting up at six in the morning to start foraging, they would waddle down around two minutes of nine and the tractor would show up at nine o'clock and dump the food and they would have 20 minutes of sheer frenzy. And then they'd go back to sort of being couch potatoes.

And this is how it went for a while. So they're over there living off of garbage, and somehow some of the males in my troop figure this out. These males think, we've got to get in on this. We've got to go over there and take their food. What emerged was each morning a bunch of males would run a kilometer or so to the garbage dump and fight their way in.

to get some of the garbage. So every morning there would be a showdown, basically. Yeah, and they would come back with canine slashes and stuff like that. But they'd also have drumsticks, cakes, hamburgers. And this ritual, says Cebulski, went on for years. And then a

Some guys from the lodge had called him and said, "Hey, you better get down here and look at this." And when he got there, what he saw

was horrible. Animals with rotting hands walking on their elbows. Oh yeah. I mean, just really bad. So, trying to figure out what this is about, get veterinarians involved, and we finally figure out it's tuberculosis. Turns out some infected meat had been thrown in the dump and then eaten by the baboons, and this was really bad news. Because while tuberculosis in people

is a really slow-moving disease. TB kills non-human primates in weeks, and it's a nightmare of a disease for them. In just a short time, the garbage dump troop was completely decimated. Not to mention that the tough guys in Sapolsky's troop, the ones that had gone to the dump every morning, they got it too. The same kind of rotting hands and... They all die of it. That must have been really kind of tragic to witness. This was not a good period for me.

These were my animals. I had grown up with these guys. But, you know, while Sapolsky was heartbroken now that half the alpha males in his troop were dead, he did notice some strange things started to happen. Changes. How did they change? Well, grooming spiked.

So you and I sit on a branch and I take little fleas out of your fur. Yes, well, you know, usually when a female grooms a male, the males never reciprocate. But suddenly they were. Even weirder... You saw adult males sitting in contact with each other and grooming each other. You know how rare that is? Be like if suddenly in the middle of round five of a heavyweight bout...

Mike Tyson just decided to stop boxing and... And nuzzle his opponent. Or comb Evander Holyfield's hair. It would be like that. If you're a baboonologist, it would have been less shocking if these guys had wings or were photosynthetic or something. Up to then, I had seen like 30 seconds of male-male grooming in the course of 15 years. But at the time, Sapolsky kind of wrote it off.

This was just some freak event that wasn't going to last. So he actually stopped studying them. Even after that big investment of time. Scientifically, they were ruined by such a non-natural event, removing half the study subjects. Oh, as a scientist, it became less interesting to you. You know, that was the rationale. It was just too painful to go and watch these guys. So I moved to the other end of the reserve and

about 40 miles away and started with a new troop there. And for six years, I would not go anywhere near this corner of the park because I just didn't want to be there. Now, fast forward six years, and we come to the moment that really changed things for him, really flipped him into a different way of thinking. And it happened immediately.

Kind of by accident. So about six years later, I'm out there for the first time with who was soon destined to become my wife and decided I wanted to kind of show her where I had grown up, what part of the park. Ah, you wanted to go to the old haunt. Yeah, basically.

So went there and the troop was there. And they were acting pretty much the same as before. Lots of grooming, not so much fighting. Isn't that nice? And they're still like this great remnant troop. And he's sitting there with his wife, just pointing out all the different baboons. Oh, there's Teva. There's, I don't know, whoever. And then it hits him. This epiphanal whatever. Wait a second. There was only one male left. We'd been there at the time of the TB outbreak. Dun-dun.

I don't follow this. What? One male? Stick with me for just one second and you will get it. The thing about male baboons, first thing you gotta understand, is around puberty, the males get a little antsy. They get itchy, they're bored, and they just pick up and leave. So in a troop, any of the adult males grew up someplace else. Which meant that these new guys that were coming into Sapolsky's troop...

We're coming in from the outside, from the old world order. The jerky, real dog-eat-dog world out there. So you gotta figure these new males are coming in with old expectations that they're gonna have to kick ass to be respected. Which would mean that this whole kumbaya situation should evaporate the moment these guys show up. But it didn't. It stuck. Oh my god.

the new guys are learning we don't do stuff like that here. And if the new guys are learning a new way, well that means the old way, the violent way, isn't the only way. And this floored me. It was one of those moments. It will be one of the three or four best science moments of my life.

The key question was, how did these guys unlearn their entire childhood culture of aggression, blah, blah, and somehow learn? We don't do stuff like that around here. Well... Well, what? Well, how did they unlearn something that was supposedly built in? No, um...

Well, he doesn't really know exactly. But here's Sapolsky's hunch. Here's his hunch, and this is really cool. It may have to do with that precarious moment when the new guy comes in. Now, normally what happens in this sort of status quo is

is that the new guy arrives and it's just a really bad experience for him. It's awful. I mean, you look at them and you just identify with like freshman year in college or something. They're completely peripheral. Every male who's higher ranking dumps on them. And even worse, this freshman baboon is completely ignored by the ladies. And you just sit there and say, somebody groom him. My God, I went till sophomore year until somebody groom him. Come on.

Why don't they Google him? Well, because if they did... Some adult male would have attacked them. Oh. So the lady's hanging back while he's out there biting and clawing and trying to scratch his way in. What you've got here is a cycle. ♪

that has existed for a long, long time. But if you make one small change, just remove the alpha male, take him out of the equation, suddenly... The females are more relaxed and more likely to take a social gamble of reaching out to somebody new. The key thing is the females. Spolsky thinks that it's all about timing. If the females can get to the new guy early enough...

Everything is different. It's remarkable. In your typical troop, it's three months on the average before the first female grooms you. In this troop, six days. Get out. Six days as compared to three months? Yeah. In a world in which from day one, as an adolescent male, you're treated better, something about the aggressiveness melts away. The thing, though, is, Jad, that...

Before we get too carried away, we do have to ask the question just how permanent this change is, as nice as it is. So I explain this whole story that you've just told to a professor at Harvard named Richard Wrangham. Richard Wrangham: Yep, Professor Wrangham is here. He's an evolutionary biologist, studies chimps particularly. So I asked him, "Well, okay, you've heard the story about the baboons. What do you think?" Richard Wrangham: Yeah, no, it's a nice example of the potential for some change.

Clearly, we should put boundaries on it. You know, lots of baboons have been studied across Africa, and this sort of example has never been found in a natural context. But... You mean, I think, aren't these guys wild baboons that just happened upon a garbage dump? Yeah, it's just not a very natural context to have humans provide food that leads to...

Several males dying. But that means that I could imagine going on a helicopter all over Africa, shooting all the alpha males, and then giving all the ladies a chance to create a different baboon culture. And me, what I guess I'm wondering is, do you think...

in an absurd situation like that, that the baboonery might change its essential nature. I don't think it'll change its essential nature. I can see that there can be a cultural influence that may last a little bit of time. But the larger influence clearly is the set of genes that produce a particular kind of brain. A baboon is basically a baboon until you get some kind of genetic change. And that is something that Sapolsky has not seen there.

So Professor Wrangham wants a genetic change to make sure that this is really real, permanent. Yeah, but here's the thing. I don't know if this constitutes a genetic change, but it has been 20 years. Really? Yes, 20 years, and Sapolsky's original baboon troop is still operating in this peaceful mode, even though dozens of new males have come and gone at this point. And the idea that something that was thought to be so unchangeable could change, and change quickly,

and then stay changed as a result of something so airy and undefinable as culture. Well, that has caused Robert Sapolsky, dare I say it, to hope. Absolutely, and it's not something that I do by chance.

By nature. You're not a hopeful guy by nature. No, not at all. In fact, this story got him so hopeful, he decided to send it to Foreign Affairs Magazine, which is a magazine read by a lot of politicians. Yeah. And they went for it. And so we had to ask him after it was published. Did anyone write you back? Um,

No, basically not. I basically heard nothing from anyone. Nothing from anyone? Yes, big yawning silence. I'm sure George Bush and Cheney read it each evening and trembled at its implications. But no, basically, as far as I can tell, it was a huge waste of time for me to write it. Ah. Well, we read it. Yeah. Thanks. My mother didn't even...

All right, so six or seven years have passed, and so we decided that it was only right for us to catch up with Robert Sapolsky. Hello. Well, hello. Hi. Is the person next to you taping? Yeah, no, we're trying to close a window here to decrease some noise. We found him in a very odd place, actually, for a baboon scientist in the library of a middle school with a bunch of kids outside. Ha ha.

How did that happen? My wife now directs the musical theater productions. So somehow I'm playing piano as a rehearsal pianist at this school. What's the musical? We are doing Oliver this year. Really? Oh, I know.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with anything we should... Okay, so, anyway, so... I told Robert that we talked to Richard Wrangham, reminded him that Wrangham says, no, no, baboons are hardwired to be a certain way, and circumstance is never going to change them in the end. Yep. Well, he and I... This isn't the first time we've disagreed. And I think we probably had a we shall see sort of finish. Yeah.

So what have we seen since you last talked to us? What's been happening? Yeah, what's been happening? Well, he says, well, there were a few possibilities here. There's one scenario where it could have turned into exactly what was being predicted there, which was that the troop would go back to being a typical, highly aggressive baboon troop. The other possibility is the one that I was always like dreaming of, which

Which is, so you're a kid who's grown up in that troop and you've grown up on the commune there and along comes puberty and it's time for you to pick up and you move to a different troop. And what happens when the kids who grew up in this baboon culture switch to other troops? Now, Sapolsky admits that if just one baboon from the nice troop went off to join the meanies, he'd probably get his ass kicked. But he thinks...

that if you get two nice baboons together, they make a little bit of a team, and it would be kind of like a critical mass of niceness that just might spread and turn all the other guys nice. In principle, this, like, great, unique Pacific culture in these baboons could be transmissible. Oh. In theory. Love that. Okay. Well, don't leave us hanging. What has happened? Okay, so what actually happened is pretty damn grim. ♪

Oh, did they go back to being mean? In some sense, it's really worse than that. Remember how this whole thing begins because there's a troop next to Sapolsky's troop and they've been eating garbage in a garbage dump? Right. Well, eventually Sapolsky's troop, because now the garbage dump is open and available...

They went over there and began living at the tourist lodge and just living off of garbage. Now they just sort of squat with the garbage. And essentially stopped functioning as a coherent troop. So this question of will they all become nice baboons eventually or will they all revert back to being mean baboons, that got totally trumped by the garbage situation. There

There was so much food to eat for these baboons, and it came so free and so available that the natural business of baboonery just broke down. A lot of the males wound up being killed by game park rangers there because, as per usual with this sort of thing, they got dangerous to the humans there because they got too habituated to humans. So lots of males were killed there.

The rest of the troop is just sort of fragmented. So I never got to find out what would happen in the long run. Because the garbage got in the way again? Yep, exactly. That's Sean Wheeler, our senior editor. Well, so the troubling thing here for me is that, you know, there was a traditional baboon culture which was violent and hierarchical. There was this hint of a hope of a different baboon culture which was grooming and happiness.

And we had a question about which one of those two would spread or last. But the truth is they ran into some junk food and then they have no culture. Exactly. Which, I hate to say it, that sounds depressingly like America. Yeah. And there's bunches of them still there, I'm sure, as we speak. Actually, not as we speak. But 10 hours from now, they'll be...

waddling over to get some leftovers. They're probably not missing the culture that they had, but yeah, those were my guys. They had my last season out there four years ago and haven't been back since. You know, it sounds like you need a little picker-upper to quote the artful... I don't know who's... We would do anything for you. Anything. We would climb a hill...

We're a daffodil. So, just so you know. Leave you all our will. Okay. Oh, God. I just managed to get that stupid song out of my head from the rehearsal earlier today. Thanks a lot. We'll be right back. WNYC Studios is supported by Rocket Money.

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I'm Maria Konnikova. And I'm Nate Silver. And our new podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. We're both journalists whom we light as poker players, and that's the lens we're going to use to approach this entire show. We're going to be discussing everything from high-stakes poker to personal questions. Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. And of course, we'll be talking about the election, too. Listen to Risky Business wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. And I'm Robert Krolwit. This is Radiolab. Our topic today... Choice and human destiny. Yeah, the way we are. Is that the way we're going to stay? Ah, very nicely put. Yes. In the last section, we were talking about baboons and their propensity to serious change, which is a maybe or a maybe not. We don't really know. Yeah, we'll know in a thousand years. But let's switch our ape. We'll go to Oregonians, which is a rare subsect of human beings. To set it up, we were thinking a lot about...

small groups on this show. You know, because that's what we are. We are small group primates. That's the phrase that's sometimes used to describe us humans, and it's a phrase that can carry some negative connotations. As in, we evolved in these small groups, so we are predisposed to be small-minded. No! Small is not always a bad thing. I'm going to tell you a story now. This is a small group story. It's just as a warning, contains a moment or two that's a tiny bit graphic, but...

But, we hope you'll stick with it because it's a really cool story. It takes place in a small town, like really small. The kind of town where you can dial the wrong number and still have a conversation. Because you know everybody. So tell me where we are in...

Beautiful downtown Silverton. Essentially, our downtown has not changed since the late 40s, early 50s. Oh, yes, it has. But we'll get to that. This is Stu Rasmussen. He is our main character. A little while back, Stu gave myself and producer Aaron Scott a tour. Movie theater on the corner, the old hardware store on this corner. A tour of his favorite place on earth, Silverton, Oregon, which is about 40 miles from Portland. It's about 40 years from Portland, actually. You know, it's the town I grew up in, and this is...

my image for what I want Silverton to be. You know, I rode my bicycle down this street and came to the hardware store to get it. We're doing good, Vince. How are you? Does that happen to you a lot? People just honk and wave? All the time. Oh, yeah? It's a small town. Everybody knows me. If it were up to Stu, this town would never change. It would stay frozen in that quaint Norman Rockwell candy-coated image from his boyhood. The weird thing, though, is that that image in his head would probably never have included a guy like Stu.

At least do as he is now. And if this is a show about change, here is a story about a pretty radical bit of change where you wouldn't expect to find it. Speaking of which, can you describe where we are and what we're looking at? Well, we're standing in front of the Palace Theater on the corner of Oak and Water Street. This is one of those gone-with-the-wind theaters where it's the big marquee and the bulb lights and everything. Built in 1935 and in continuous operation ever since.

Stu pulls out some keys and opens it up. He suggested that we do the interview here in the town's only theater. It even smells like a Gilded Age theater. Which at 1 p.m. still smelled like popcorn from the previous night and was filled with nothing but 200 empty red velvet seats. It's not what you expect in a small town theater. No, this is beautiful. Are you going to go ahead and turn the lights off? Yeah. Okay, see you later.

Okay, thank you. We plopped ourselves best seats in the house right in the middle. Let's sit and pretend we're watching the movie of your life. Well, there's a dull movie. Hardly. So, the movie of Stu begins in 1975. He's 27, and he's in a theater just like this. The seminal moment in my life was when the Rocky Horror Picture Show came out.

Stu is in the projectionist booth, because that's his job. He's changing the reels, and at some point during one of the musical numbers, he glances at the screen. And it was like, oh. What was the oh? Here was this movie with a guy in drag on screen. Just a sweet transvestite. He's a sweet transvestite. From transsexual. From transsexual Transylvania. Those are words that I've never heard. Ah ha.

I watched that again and again. Fast forward ten years, Stu now owns the theater, just like his dad had before him. He's an upstanding member of the town. He's on the Silverton City Council, then on the library board, and then he starts to transform. And everyone will tell you, it began with the nails. I think I probably started having my nails done in 94 or 95.

And started out with very masculine nails without polish and square ends. And then slowly grew them out. And then I went into what I considered a masculine nail color of blue. And then he says he gradually started to paint them red. And then he put acrylic tips, which got longer and longer. This was the first test of the community. Hello, Lori. Good evening, sir. How are you? How are you? Because I would be at the theater taking tickets. Can I have two tickets? He'd be dressed as usual in his plaid shirt and jeans. And his hand would come out for their ticket. And...

What in the hell are those? You can't miss it. And you know, he had long fingernails. That's Dennis Bean, longtime Silvertonian. One time when I had to give him my ticket. And that's Megan DeSalvo, she's 17. And he ripped it and his nails went down the palm of my hand and just gave me the chills. Yeah, I think probably his nails were the first thing most people noticed. Kyle Palmer, veterinarian and city councilman. Born and raised here in Silverton. Was there time?

Oh, definitely talk. But it happened so gradually. Which is something you hear again and again. It happened gradually. You know, first it was the nails and then...

At some point in time, he changed the focus of the movie theater and was really making a game attempt to get new releases. And frequently, you know, when there was a theme kind of movie, he would get into costume. My name is Ken Hector, former mayor of Silverton, Oregon. And very often, the costume would be female attire. This was step two of Stu's very careful transition. According to everyone we spoke with, for years after the nails, he would...

Quote, promote that week's movie by dressing up. One of the new Star Wars movies was out and it wasn't a coincidence he was dressed as Queen Amidala. Come back. I love you. Whatever name is from the movie. Years ago, you remember, some years ago there was a movie called My Big Fat Greek Wedding. That's Sean Bach, also a lifelong Silvertonian. That whole day he wandered around town in a wedding dress.

Complete with the veil. That, of course, got everybody talking. You know, a lot of people laughed about it. And at first, I don't think people put it together with... This is Linda Webb. She's a registered nurse. Sexuality, transgender, or any of those things. I think we thought he was just dressing up to go along with his movies. There was clearly a let's go by the movie theater tonight because we've got to know what Stu's wearing. For Stu, this was just the beginning of something. He was...

He wasn't just clowning around. When did your gender complexities begin? Probably 14 or 15. I think I was a shy young man and interfacing with girls. My mother was a bit strange on that in that girls were evil and they would, no girl was good enough for her son and

Did you date at all? Not until I was out of high school. So girls were kind of scary, it sounds like. Oh, girls were scary, yeah. While everybody else went on dates, he says, he would build computers from scratch. And even today...

In his basement, you'll find an entire electrical shop. Oh my God. Fun stuff. RF generator, spectrum analyzer, logic analyzer. In any case, Stu says the best that he can explain himself, gender-wise, is just to say that when he looks in the mirror, he likes himself better when he's dressed as a woman. I don't know how to describe it. It's just...

I can't understand it. I mean, some people like to dress up and look like a cowboy or a lumberjack, whatever. You know, it's your mental image of yourself that you look in the mirror and you like. So, after the nails, after dozens of episodes of socially acceptable cross-dressing, Stu took the next step. He began to perform some experiments, like he would go to the lumberyard just to get some stuff. A couple of pounds of nails or something. All the while, he would be wearing a padded bra under his flannel shirt.

Just to see what would happen. So this for you was like a test. It was like a calculated test to gauge. Absolutely. If it was possible. If I could survive with breasts. ♪

So, when he was 52, he drove into Portland, visited a doctor, put him to sleep, and the doctors made two small incisions. One under each breast, about an inch and a half or two inches long. And they pulled back the skin on each side, slid in an uninflated balloon. And then pumped it up with water until the skin was stretched to the point that it was almost transparent. That sounds very painful. Was it? Well, I was asleep at the time. But when he woke up, he was a different man.

Because he now had several pounds of new stuff hanging off his chest. What were you thinking at that moment? I was thinking, what have I done? It was like, there's no going back. I can remember being in Mac's place downtown at a table, and he was coming across the street with his breasts cut.

prominently showing and it was the first time any of us realized that he had actually had surgery and one lady was going "Look! Look!" and the other lady was going "Don't look! Don't look!" You know you'd see Stu going across the street and "Oh my God, look at Stu!" "My God, what is he doing?" It's just sort of shocking. There was a buzz around town? Was it a situation where he'd walk by and heads would turn, hushed voices would ensue? Yes, basically. This is Victoria Sage, Stu's longtime girlfriend.

They've been together for 36 years. So we would be walking in our local Goodwill, and we'd be a few aisles away from each other, and I would hear, that used to be Stu Rasmussen. Like he had changed somehow. Stu's just trying to fulfill that body image he's got in his head. But he's also going to, in a way, ask you to adjust your body image of your mate. Has that been difficult? Hmm. No. Okay.

No, I'm sorry. If you want to get kinky about it, a man with tits is kind of cool. Huh. Okay. Was there ever any concern? There was for me. Not so much for Stu, I think. Partly because he didn't hear as many whispers as I felt I did. But I was concerned for the theater business. Not without reason. A lot of kids in the town stopped coming to the theater because their parents wouldn't let them. Ticket sales took a hit.

And it wasn't long before pickup trucks full of teenage boys would drive by the theater yelling slurs. Oh, I don't know that I go so far as... Well, yeah, I guess faggot is a slur, I guess. So you get to this point in the sped-up movie narrative of Stu, this point right here, where even though he took it so slowly and was so careful, it's still easy to imagine things turning ugly. I don't know. What was that movie about the boy that was...

drug and beat to death because he was gay in a small town in the Midwest. You know what I'm saying? Matthew Shepard? Yeah. But according to Linda Webb, Silverton's not so different from Laramie, Wyoming, where Matthew Shepard lived. It's a small town. Very traditional. Very conservative. You know, you've got a lot of rednecks in Silverton. That's how Dennis Bean puts it. So it's not crazy to expect the worst. But here's the surprise.

and the whole reason we came here to Silverton. The worst did not happen. There was no redneck rebellion. In fact, the opposite happened. Something historic. On January 5th, 2009, the town of Silverton elected Stu mayor. Congratulations.

Steve Sobotin has elected the nation's first openly transgender mayor. The nation's first openly transgender mayor. Well, change is definitely in the air this election. Take Stu Rasmussen, for example. As openly transgendered as he runs his hometown in heels. Speaking of heels, this is in fact the sound of Stu's four-inch heels pounding on linoleum as he goes to a city council meeting. Hello, Harold. Couldn't be better. How are you?

Good. Now call us, you know, city elitists or whatever, but a mayor in a plunging V-neck sweater and a black miniskirt, not what you would expect in a tiny conservative Republican town.

So we wanted to know, you know, why did this happen here? So producer Aaron Scott and I walked around town for a couple days, and we interviewed dozens of people, including a guy named Ken Hector, who Stu beat out for mayor. He's a conservative Republican, definitely not one of Stu's big fans. It was just a difference in philosophy about, I don't want to sound pretentious, but, you know, as a mayor, I think there's certain expectations about professionalism that you should exhibit. He would come in with...

a tight clinging top with cleavage down to here. You're almost pointing at your belly button there. Well, a little bit higher. Come on, you know, when you're at the council meeting, show some dignity here and just dress in the appropriate attire for the occasion. Ken even tried to get the city council to impose a dress code on Stu. But when we asked him, you know, are you surprised that the town has embraced Stu and even gone so far as to elect a mayor?

He said, "No." Not in this case. You know, Stu's a rarity in that, you know, there's a lot of people in this town who are extremely religious, very conservative people. Were it a stranger who came into town suddenly, I'm sure the support and perception might have been different, but you're talking about a native son who grew up here.

And he said, look, Stu runs the only theater in town, so he's out there every weekend. Standing out in front of the palisader, taking tickets. So everybody knows him. Not only that, back in the day, he used to be the cable guy. So he's literally been in everybody's homes. He's still the guy you call if you have trouble with your computer. So it might sound strange to you, but it's really not. And that is when it hit me. Actually, under the right circumstances, a small town can be like the most progressive place on earth.

And it's exactly because everyone's all up in your grill. You are forced to know people. Like for instance, how long have you known Stu? Oh my goodness. I grew up with Stu. I mean, we, um, I remember when Stu was like an altar boy at the church with my brother.

This is Susie Seamus, a retired teacher. Yeah, his parents and my parents were friends. Like a lot of folks in Silverton, she has known Stu for so long and in so many different contexts that she can't do that New York thing with him where you see someone on the sidewalk and you size them up instantly and think, eh, freak. No, to her, he's way too complicated for that. You know, to her, he's Stu the altar boy, Stu the computer geek. Yeah, I probably would call him a geek. Stu the city councilman, Stu the mayor.

Or... It's just stew. Just stew. Just stew. Whatever, that's him. You know, go on about your business. Now to be clear, a lot of the people we talked to, in fact some of the same folks who said, yeah, stew's just stew, are still not happy about this situation. No, I mean, I don't think God's a cross-dresser. They either felt it was morally wrong, as in the case of this minister, Tom Smith. And Genesis 1, 27 says, So God created man in his own image...

Or some folks, like Linda Webb's husband John, just felt like he takes it way too far. It's right there. It's in your face. He dresses kind of like a streetwalker. You feel that that's confrontational? I do. But most of the people who had objections...

It was a little more nuanced, and it went something like this. Well, I personally did not vote for him for mayor because I didn't feel it was a good idea to have someone that looked like that representing us. But on the other hand, he is a good man, and he's got this town at heart. In other words, according to John Bach, the problem really isn't Stu or the town. It's the outside. All those people out there who are going to hear about Stu and then judge them.

Which is what makes November 25th, 2008 such an interesting day. Stu had just been elected mayor. He'd squeaked it out by about 400 votes, but he hadn't yet been sworn in. When a group of Christian extremists from Kansas showed up in town and started marching up and down Main Street, yelling at people. And at one point, they even unfurled an American flag, put it on the ground, and stepped on it.

just to show how offensive they found Stu. It's our duty to come out here and preach to everyone. The mayor is disgusting. These folks hate Stu.

Because they will not by any means warn him about the sin that's taking him to hell. So unpleasant. And then bringing up signs that say things like, God hates sobering, God hates your mayor, God hates fags, your pastor is a whore. It's an abomination for a man to put on a woman's clothes and to be...

A few folks from the town decided to start a counter-protest. Just a few guys at first. Now earlier someone had suggested... Yossi Davidson said his initial reaction was, yeah right.

But there he was, in a dress. He says that at first, he and the two or three other guys who had on women's clothing felt a little weird. But then...

People just started coming. It was just amazing. Of a couple hundred people, I mean, men dressed like women, women dressed like men. Some of the people that I saw down there were surprising because I had labeled them in my head as conservative. People would drive by, people with signs. God loves Sultan. God loves Stu. With costumes. The town was really alive.

And the crowd just kept getting bigger and bigger. What were you thinking at that moment? From what I understand, you were standing off to the side just watching. What was going through your mind? Yeah, well, honestly, I tried to discourage people from even giving them the time of day, saying, don't give them any attention. I couldn't get that to happen. They were so angry. They came out, 200 people, men in dresses, grandmothers, babies. It's just amazing. That was the town. That wasn't me.

Sorry, I get a little emotional. That must have been a turning point for you. The biggest one, yeah. Props to Aaron Scott, who did a huge chunk of the reporting for that piece and co-produced it with me. We'll be right back. Okay, so that story, we did that years ago. And it just feels like the world is different now, like with regards to transgender issues. I wondered, like, how have things changed for Stu in these last six, seven years? So...

Hello there. Hello. Long time no see. We decided to send producer/reporter Aaron Scott back to Silverton to sit down with Stu and with Stu's partner Victoria just to catch up. I mean it's been seven years since, or will be going on seven years, six years since we ran this story the first time. What has been going on in your world?

Well, since the election, that's been about it. So the first thing he told me was that he got reelected after two years, and then he was reelected again, and then after six years as mayor, he's now out of the game. Hallelujah.

I am truly enjoying my vacation. And he did tell me that back when this story first aired, things did get kind of nutty. Well, you know, it's probably the most unusual phone call we've ever received. Victoria and I were sitting at home, the phone rang, and it was a fellow who

From New York City, you said, I was bicycling on Manhattan, listening to the original Radiolab piece, and you thought it would be really fun to do my life story as a musical.

And he did. That fellow is Andrew Russell. He put on a big production up in Seattle. It got standing ovations. The most surreal and bizarre experience in my life, sitting in an auditorium with 400 strangers watching as, in song and dance, my life goes by. He can call me she, and she can call me he. And he can call me she, and she can call me he.

And he can call me he and she can call me she when you refer to me by gender. So there was this musical which seemed to do pretty well. And then a movie producer called him up and said that he wanted to option Stu's life for a movie. And now Victoria says those whispers that they used to get, those have turned into people wanting autographs or stopping them in the shoe store and saying, Aren't you Stu?

Aren't you that mayor? Can I get a picture with you? Well, sure. What's the big deal? But one of the most interesting things for me was that a lot of that attention was at the beginning. These days, Stu says that, you know, as transgender issues have grown in the national news and on TV shows, Stu says that back in Silverton, the fact that he's transgender... It's become pretty much passe. So here we are.

He says it's just kind of routine now for him and everyone else. Except he did say there's this one thing. Every time the story airs or re-airs, which it does from time to time. When it goes, the phone starts ringing and we can tell where it's from. He says he gets these calls from people who are struggling with their own gender issues.

or trying to figure out how to come out to their families. And people actually call your home phone. Yeah. Usually anonymously, they won't identify themselves necessarily because they're still either closeted or not really ready to come out. But they're saying, thank you so much for being yourself and for telling your story to others so that I can, you know, I can validate my life from that. Thank you. Does that ever get old?

No. For somebody who was in the position that I was and made the change, and then to have other people either following along or emulating it in one way or another is very gratifying because it validates my life and it says, well, you weren't a complete waste of time. A lot more than a lot of people get. Yeah. Special thanks to producer Andy McKeown for helping us on all the update parts of this show.

We do have some sad news. Stu Rasmussen, the two-time mayor of Silverton, Oregon, cinema proprietor, card-carrying member of both the ACLU and the NRA, and good neighbor, passed away in November of 2021. He is and will continue to be missed. Are we about to do Fox's? Yes, we are. Okay. Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radiolab, and today we're talking about...

Well, change, really, or what looks like change. So you remember back to the baboons when we started this program? Yeah. The question we were asking then was, will those baboons, if they do enough generations, will they create a new culture? Yeah, will it stick? Will it stick? Let's hope. Let's hope, but we don't know. Nope. And the town that chooses a mayor, is that town expanding the sense of possibility, or is this just a little blip? Let's hope. Yeah, exactly. But now let's get really serious. There are indeed changes that do stick. What?

And we're going to examine a rather startling example of it right now. Yeah.

But to do that, we need an evolutionary biologist, and we found one at Duke University. Can you guys talk to each other now? Yeah. Hello. Hello. Who's this? That's Brian Hare. That's fantastic. And the first thing Brian Hare did was tell me about another guy. Dmitry Belyaev. Named Dmitry Belyaev. And Dmitry Belyaev was a very famous geneticist in Russia. He was alive during World War II and doing genetics work. But after World War II, he was in a little spot of trouble.

What? What did he do? Well, because he was a real Darwinian. He believed in evolution and genetics. But thinking about evolution like a Darwinian evolutionist does, that was not popular in Stalin's Russia. Is popular the word or was that a death sentence? It was a death sentence.

So the writing was on the wall, and he knew that he should probably take the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Moscow. Quickly. Quickly. And he went to Novozabirsk. And the way that Dmitry Belyaev decided to hide his continued interest in studying Darwinian evolution was he would begin a fox farm where he would make fur coats. So what is Mr. Belyaev actually doing? What Dr. Belyaev was actually interested in

was to understand how does domestication happen? That's his question? That's a dumb question. No, it's not a dumb question at all. Well, you just bring the... No, think about a wild animal. It is impulsive. It is aggressive. It growls. What is that, a wolf you're playing there? That's a wolf that I've got there in the background. Now, this is a domesticated version. Good boy. Good boy. Come here.

Doggy. The nature of the animal has completely changed here, and if you want to learn something about the nature of a creature, how it can change... Domesticated animals are a wonderful place to start.

So Belyaev, he decided, why don't I just experimentally domesticate some animals? And his cover was that he was going to make better fur coats. When was this, by the way? 1959. So Sputnik was up, Russians were feeling good, and he was making fur coats, so to speak. So to speak. Began one of the most exciting experiments in biology.

So here's what Dmitri Belyaev does. He goes to a bunch of fox farmers and he says, "Okay, I want to buy a bunch of foxes." And he says, "Well, all I got to do is take this group of foxes and break them into two groups."

And one group, I'm not going to change them in any way. Okay. So it's like a control line. So one group is just normal foxes. Normal. But. The other line, I'm going to decide who is going to be allowed to breed and who is unfortunately going to be a fur coat. So some of the foxes get to have puppy foxes of their own. And some foxes become fur coats.

So what he did, and the test was marvelously simple. He would go where one of his assistants would approach a cage. Where the fox was kept. A baby fox. Sort of a juvenile fox. The experimenter would stand, say, a foot away and would just try to touch the fox. Hi, little fox. Come on. Hi, little fox. Run, fox, run. But if the fox would make this kind of sound...

and sort of cower in the corner like most foxes would do. What is that? What's that sound? That is the sound a fox makes when it's frightened. Really? Yes, frightened fox sound. So what happens if it makes that sound? Well, they did not breed that fox in the next generation. Or to put it another way...

They kill them. That, pretty much, yes. That's just wrong. But now, every so often, like maybe one out of every 20 foxes, there would be a fox that would not run back, would not... So it wasn't afraid then. Then they would choose that fox to breed in the next generation. Yay! Yay!

And they did this over and over again, generation after generation. They would breed the nice foxes together, get rid of the bad foxes, breed the next set, get rid of the bad foxes, breed the next set, next set, next set, next set, next set. Right, right. What happened in the end? Well, eventually... They had foxes that were attracted to humans. Now, Jed, how long do you think it would take to get foxes from being wild, ferocious animals

animals to being animals who would lick your face. After this kind of like exterminating breeding technique? Yes, after the breeding technique. I would think, well, a long, long time. I mean, I would think like how many years? How many years? How many years? Well, it took wolves like thousands of years to become dogs. I don't know. I mean, a long time. Well, here's the thing. Ten years is the answer.

Ten years. No, shut up. Don't tell me to shut up. I'm telling you it's ten fox generations. You serious? Ten years? But now here's the crazy thing. What was exciting and surprising was that these same foxes, they actually show a whole suite of changes that he did not select for on purpose. Like what do you mean? Physical changes.

These foxes, as they became more gentle for some unaccountable reason, their ears, instead of pointing straight up, flipped over. That's right. It was a big accident that they now have floppy ears. The tails on a fox, which in a wild fox they're straight,

They have curly tails. They have multicolored coats that are no longer just gray. The tips of their paws lose color. The teeth get smaller. And their bones became very thin. Their bones got thinner? Yes, so what happens to the skull and the face is it actually becomes more feminine. The whole animal becomes more delicate and more puppy-like. Wow. I doubt sir.

I don't know what to make of that. And it's not over. This experiment has been going on. It's now been 50 years, 45,000 foxes later. 45,000? And Brian, by the way, who has read about this, said, I got to see this for myself. So he went to Novosibirsk.

Just to check it out. I did. I took the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which, you know, two days of looking at green grass, and there's like one species of tree, and I think there was a butterfly that was kind of pretty. And was it birch trees you were looking at? Birch tree, then another birch tree, then another birch tree, then another birch tree. Pretty much. You got it. Another birch tree. You got it. Another birch tree. You got it. Another birch tree. You got it. So I show up, and they had thousands of foxes. Giant buildings that are probably, you know, as long as a football field.

full of just rows and rows of foxes. And when you see them, they actually wag their tail, they whine like a puppy dog. Ha ha ha!

They're cute and cuddly and they love people and they don't bite. So it sounds perfect, except for the one thing I forgot to tell you is that when they're yapping and excited to see you, they cannot help but pee for joy. As I do whenever I see you. What I don't understand, though, is it makes sense to me that they're getting nicer because they're breeding them to get nicer. But why is all this other stuff happening to their bodies? What's going on? I...

Well, you know, this is the unsatisfactory answer to that problem. Nobody really knows why. Duh. But. Okay, I'm rolling at my end. This is Tecumseh Fitch. So here's a synchronized.

An evolutionary biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. And he has a notion. My hypothesis for what's going on here, and this is just a hypothesis. Here's what he told me. He said, you've got to go back to when a fox is a very, very little itty-bitty thing. An embryo. Inside its mother's womb. Very, very, very early embryo, like two months old. To become a fox that can survive in the world, this little embryo needs to grow strong teeth. Yep. It has to grow fur. Need the fur. It has to have muscles.

bone-strong bones. Gotta have the bones. Needs to grow glands. Yep. Needs to grow hormones. Check. And all of these things that you need as an adult fox... All of them come from the same founder population of cells in an embryo. Ah, wow. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. They're called neural crest cells. Neural crest cells. When the fox grows these cells... They're doing these epic migrations. These guys are like pioneers that are...

that are moving throughout the body and blazing these trails all over the place. Some of them go out into the skin. Some of them go up into the cartilage of the fox's ears. Some of them go into the jaw. And they form all these different tissues: teeth, tail, big parts of the nervous system, major parts of the brain, and the adrenal glands. What's the adrenal gland? Well, that's the most important one for our purposes. The adrenal gland pumps out when to be afraid.

The adrenal glands say, "Run away! Run away! Run away!" That's the thing that makes the fox go "Yah!" Whatever that sound was? It's the one that makes that sound. So, when you're breeding fear out of an animal, maybe what you're doing is you're slowing down the migrations of these cells. They don't deliver the fear, and then they don't deliver all the other things that they usually do. What you're focusing on, what you as the experimenter are doing, is saying, "I want the guys whose adrenal glands don't mature quickly."

That might have the function of making the animal more tame, but what you're doing as a byproduct of that is selecting for guys who don't get as many of those cells into their ears and don't get as many of those cells into their skin and don't get as many of those cells into their teeth. So if you get some of the cells you need to make your ears firm and straight, but not quite enough, then your ear will go up to a certain point, and since the cells aren't going to complete the deal, the rest of your ear flops over.

Really? Yeah, you haven't completed the task. Is that why the dogs have little floppy ears? Yeah, because the cells have been slowed down to the point where they don't finish the job. Oh, they are literally arrested. Bingo. The argument is that actually when you select against aggression in animals, you're changing the timing and the rate of development such that the experimental foxes are actually frozen as juveniles. They actually never really grow up.

So then to domesticate a fox, just like to domesticate a wolf into a dog, what you're doing is you're making them permanent puppies. It's a Peter Pan kind of thing. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

So if we wanted to apply this to us, and we wanted to, say, breed a gentler, sleeker human being, we should just kill the football players? Is that the idea? What do you mean, kill the football? You don't have something against football players? No, actually, I like football. But I mean, like with the foxes, you just eliminate the meanies. Oh, the meanies, yes. Would the same thing happen to us? That's where it gets really interesting. Remember the professor we interviewed a few hours back, Richard Wrangham? Vividly. Well...

When we think about humans, obviously, we're getting just super speculative. But... He says, if you choose to go back... If we go back just 30,000, 50,000 years... And you look at the collection of skulls of the early versions of us from way back then, you see some interesting fox-like changes. Well, if you look at domesticated animals, they have smaller teeth...

than their wild ancestors. And in humans, we've been getting smaller teeth over the last few tens of thousands of years. Just like the foxes. We've been getting more gracile bones. That means to say that for a particular length of limb bone, it becomes a little bit narrower. Just like the foxes. So it is tempting to think...

that the same kind of process has been going on in humans as has been going on in domesticated animals, which is that there has been natural selection in favor of a kinder, gentler human. Wait a second, though. Who's doing the selecting? In the case of the foxes, Mr. Bialyf shot you if you were...

too aggressive. Who's selecting the, who's domesticating the humans? Well, one idea that has been specifically suggested is that it was the growing tendency for our hunter-gatherer ancestors to settle down in stable camps.

You mean like summer camps? Like sing songs around the fire kind of camps? No, I'm talking about communities. Look, if you are in a very small family group, well, then it pays to be big and strong and mean because if you're the biggest guy and you meet a smaller guy and he's got some potatoes, you grab him, eat his potatoes, beat him up, and then move on to the next till you never have to see him again. But let's say that as time passes, human society grows a little bit. You form camps because...

We might have 30 or 40 people. That way, you can build bigger fires and you can catch more bunnies and you can defend against enemies. But in this world, if you beat everybody up, you may not survive that. When pitted against anybody else, one-on-one, the

The big, strong, mean guy is generally going to win. When big, strong, mean doesn't win, and we see this in some primates, is when you can start to form coalitions, when you can start to have multiple individuals who say, hey, mean guy, stop it. Yeah, you're bigger than any one of us, but you can't take on both of us or all three of us or our whole...

Now we've got other males in the community who aren't going to go away and they say, OK, we've got to deal with this guy. And maybe they deal with him by shouting him down, ostracizing him or even capital punishment. And Richard Wrangham's theory is that if that happens enough times to enough bullies who then can't have kids and spread their genes because they have the unfortunate condition of being dead, then we've essentially bred out the more aggressive genes. Or...

we have domesticated ourselves. We're really talking about groups versus individuals here. And so in a sense, I think we're really talking about the beginning of society and a kind of rule of law in the way that we think of it today. And this pressure...

to be a little more gentle and to be a little bit more cooperative. This hasn't gone away. I think, if anything, we're being selected to work together more, to be able to tolerate being packed in even tighter. If you put 20 chimps on a jet plane and tried to send them across the Atlantic, let me tell you that only one or two would walk off that plane alive. We do this all the time. We take it for granted as human beings that big groups of people can get along with one another.

I do think that it's reasonable to imagine that humans have a future of increasing self-domestication. What I sense you proposing is that as the Earth gets more crowded, all the creatures on Earth, or at least sentient creatures, have to start learning to live with each other a little more because they keep bumping into each other. The winners will be the domesticated ones. Everyone will get more empathetic to each other because that's the only way you survive.

And we get gentler and gentler and gentler till lambs literally lie down with lions. You said it beautifully. But do you believe it? Well, we may have to go through one or two ups and downs before we get there. And, of course, there's something slightly alarming about the fact that one possible mechanism by which domestication has happened in humans is through literally execution of the more aggressive types.

But in the long term, sure, let's hope that all of us become more... Floppy-eared? More floppy-eared, exactly. Little white patches on the ends of our tails. Remember when we started working together and how mean I was? You have... Oh my God, we've domesticated you. Yes, you have domesticated me. I haven't noticed your ears have been looking a little different recently.

Show me your teeth. Smile. Anyhow, we should go to break. Or not break. We should just go to the big break. Yeah. Which is the break that exists between us and everything else. Yes. Let's listen to the way we end it all. Bye. Bye.

Thank you for listening. Lulu, again, before we let you go, just wanted to leave you with a fun or actually kind of rather depressing fact, which is that only 0.02% of people are members of the lab and support Radio Lab in that way. And if we could get that number up even a tiny bit before the year's end, it would help us hugely. So if you are curious, if you're thinking maybe if you got a couple bucks to toss in, there's a way you can do it.

Just go to radiolab.org slash join. That's radiolab.org slash J-O-I-N. Thanks so much. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Our staff includes: With help from Andrew Vinales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.