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I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Safeguarding Sound Science, Evolution Edition.

Evolution is the unifying principle of biology, yet it still breeds controversy a century

and a half after Charles Darwin.

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Forget your troubles. Come on, get happy. You better chase all your kids. you like to listen.

Forget your troubles. Come on, get happy.

You better chase all your cares away.

Ah, happiness. Come on.

Get it.

I have a very pessimistic view of life.

You should know this about me if we're going to go out. You know, I feel that life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.

Those are the two categories, you know.

The horrible would be like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, cripples. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. You know, and the miserable is everyone else. So when you go through life, you should be thankful that you're miserable. Because that's, you're very lucky. Yes, you feel lousy, miserable, but wait, there's hope.

That's what every pessimist

wants to hear, right? Hope, blue skies, somewhere over the rainbow, all that sort of stuff. I can hear

your eyeballs rolling now, but deep down in an evolutionary sense. Humans are optimists. And not only that,

we have these regular peak moods of positivity and we're happy at times when we don't expect to be.

So now there's a whole science devoted to understanding the happiness of human and non-human animals.

Including why our brains didn't get the memo and keep screwing things up for us. You'll be dazed by the science.

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