That means males take more than one mate if they can. You stress if they can because if some males take more than one mate, that means other males aren't going to get any mates at all. And so it's a huge winner-take contest to see who gets mates. And they square off on the beach and they battle until one of them lumbers off, bloodied and exhausted four or five hours later. And the winner claims a huge prize in the Darwinian scheme. It's 50 to 100 females. Every one of them are going to carry his genes for larger body size, which were what helped him win the fight with the other would-be dominant male. It's bad for the seals as a group to be so big. They'd be all of them better off. They weighed half as much. They're much more vulnerable predators. They have arthritis at a younger age. They have to, their work day is very onerous. They have to eat way more fish than they would if they were smaller. But for any individual male to be smaller, that would be a disaster. So it's an interesting theory that sort of pops into your mind if you've got some background principles. You see things that make sense to you and you learn the principles a lot more effectively by seeing them in action. It's everywhere. So in a polygynous species, the elk have way broader antlers than would make sense for elk as a group to have. When they're chased into a woods, they're dead meat. They're surrounded and killed easily by wolves. But if a male had smaller antlers than other males, he wouldn't end up having a crack at being the dominant male. And so the genes for his smaller antlers would die with him. That's the ultimate loser category in the Darwinian scheme. It's a useful theory. And if you're willing to think about this kind of theory in scientific terms, the test is to look for circumstances where the theory doesn't apply. People, I think, mostly use the exception that proves the rule incorrectly. They've got some theory, somebody points out a counterexample, and they dismiss it saying, oh, that's the exception that proves the rule. Well, how exactly does that prove the rule? It seems like it disproves the rule, and you're sliding away from the uncomfortable fact of that. I think the correct understanding, or at least the one that makes sense to me of the expression, is that... it refers to the older sense of the verb, to prove, which means to test. It's the exception that tests the rule. So you look at a species that's not polygynous, a monogamous species like the albatross. The prediction there is not that males will be bigger. There's no reason for them to be. They're not fighting for access. And so, in fact, in the albatross and in other monogamous species, it's typically very hard to tell the males from the females. They're about the same size and color. are all examples of what's come to be called the narrative theory of learning. You know, there's stories. There are actors in them. There's a plot. The human brain absorbs narrative like a water sponge gets sucked up into a sponge. It's just like a key sliding into a lock. There's no swimming upstream if you're trying to get a narrative into the human brain. That's how we evolved as storytellers. We didn't squat and draw equations in the dirt with a twig. It was, you know, you told your story to someone and that's how it got across. And that's just the easiest way for people to absorb information. And if you can get it into a narrative, why not take advantage of that natural strength of the human brain? Jerome Bruner says that if a kid doesn't catch an experience in narrative form, it's lost forever. The kids who do manage to tell a story about an experience can access that experience multiple times, mull it over, learn from it. If you don't catch it that way, it's lost forever. Students aren't so different from children. Adults aren't so different from students. You know, this goes all the way up the chain. I tell my students, and I have to do two of these a semester, one at midterm, one at the end of the term, their question has to be interesting. I tell them, if I don't think your question's interesting, why on earth would I want to read your answer to it?