The only one

Unexpected Elements

BBC

Science

4.4 • 566 Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Olympics is all about flying the flag for your home country, shoulder to shoulder with your team-mates. But what if you have no team-mates? At this year’s Olympic games, four countries had just one competitor. Like Sean Gill from Belize, Somalian runner Ali Idow Hassan, or Romano Püntener, a mountain-biker representing Liechtenstein.

This got us thinking about the only one. The panel discuss what it must be like to be an ‘Endling’ – the last remaining animal of an otherwise extinct species, and wonder if there might be ways to bring them back.

We delve into the intriguing psychology behind the urge to collect things, why collectors are so entranced by rare items, and how the psychological pull of ‘exclusivity’ and ‘limited editions’ can make us vulnerable to marketing scams.

And what about a baby, born of only one parent? A ‘virgin birth’ – a miracle perhaps? Not so, as we discover that females giving birth without any help from males is surprisingly common. It is called Parthenogenesis, and although humans cannot do it, a dizzying array of animals can. Alexis Sperling from the University of Cambridge explains the science.

News montage sources: Channel 5 Belize, BBC News

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton with Chhavi Sachdev and Andrada Fiscutean Producer: Emily Knight with Florian Bohr, Julia Ravey Sound engineer: Emily Preston

Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh, hello. You have chosen a BBC podcast, but before you listen to it, we thought you might
0:04.7	like our podcast too. You might. You might. It is called Sightracked with me, Nick Grimshaw.
0:09.2	And me, Annie Mack. And we talk about the week in music. All the news, all the cultural
0:14.0	happenings in the UK and beyond. And great guests. And it's on BBC Sounds. Yes, where you can
0:19.7	also enjoy lots of playlists, music mixes and
0:22.6	live radio. Everything from my six music breakfast show to Radio 3 Unwind. But obviously start
0:29.2	with our podcast, sidetrack. Obviously. Obviously. So if you like music, listen on BBC
0:33.7	Sounds. So this week, I found myself on BBC Sands.
0:44.0	So this week I found myself staring at an extraordinary photo.
0:48.9	It's a picture of a huge celebration on the streets of central Paris.
0:56.3	No, not from the Olympics, but from 80 years earlier as the French reclaimed their capital from the Nazis.
1:03.0	The Allied leaders were keen to choreograph this event correctly, in inverted commas here. The French leader Charles de Gaulle wanted the liberation to be run by French soldiers.
1:08.5	The Americans said, fine, but they have to be white. This proved difficult
1:14.1	to organise, given that the majority of French troops at this point came from the French colonies
1:19.5	in Africa. Black troops fighting in Paris were confined to barracks for the liberation event.
1:26.9	Apart from 22-year-old George Dukson from Gabon,
1:31.4	who seems to have not got the message. So here he is, preserved in black and white history,
1:37.8	arm in a sling marching alongside the French president as an official man handles him out of the shot. He's just one man,
1:47.3	but he's also the key to understanding that black fighters were being written out of history
1:52.4	as it was taking place. His presence makes me realize that I need to rewrite the story
1:58.5	I currently have in my head of the last World War.
2:02.7	I'm Marnie Chesterton from the BBC World Service.
	...

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