You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.

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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As we were thinking about how to get into this episode, our assistant producer, Shannon Geary, shared a relevant personal story that seems like a fitting way to proceed.

She joined us to kick things off. Hi, Shannon.

Hi, Seth. So take it away. For this story, I'm going to take you back to when I was in the fourth

grade. We had a science teacher who would visit our classroom once a week. And one week, our science lesson

was all about light and color, how we see color, what color is, how color is a light wave.

And as we were learning all about color, my science teacher brought up the point that technically

we can't be sure that every individual person is seeing and perceiving color in the exact same way.

Okay, so the idea is that you and I could be looking at the same

object, for example, in Apple, and each of us would call it red, but how do we know that we're both

perceiving the color the same way? I mean, it is weird. I also thought about that as a kid.

Yeah, I have to admit, I was a little freaked out by it. The idea that here I was looking down at my

shirt and I thought my shirt was blue, maybe a dark blue, but my friend sitting next to me might

think it was more of a greenish blue. My classmates all thought this was such a cool concept

and while I was nodding along with everyone else that, yeah, isn't that so cool, I was also a little bit frightened.

Just the fact that we might physically perceive the world in different ways was mind-blowing to me as a fourth grader.

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