A few notes ........ First, Punnett Squares was not the best recommendation for a path to answering the pop quiz question. Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium would have been a better recommendation for something to look up. A square diagram involving alleles *is* very useful for the question, but the diagram isn't a typical Punnett Square, since it requires assigning uneven probabilities to alleles, as if the two alleles were randomly selected from the population rather than from two specific parents. ........ Second, a common question: Isn't aging good for the species, since older creatures get out of the way? Yes, it could be. This pattern would increase genetic diversity by allowing more new mutations to exist in a gene pool. And that genetic diversity would make the population more likely to survive environmental changes. But! Natural selection usually doesn't work at the group/species level. Even if aging is good for a population in the long run, the individuals with less aging would still have an advantage during stable periods and be favored by natural selection. It's the same in the videos about cooperation. Cooperating is good for the species, but defecting can still be favored by natural selection in some circumstances. Group selection is only a thing for tightly knit groups that reproduce together. Multicellular organisms are the best example of this. Each cell could be viewed as an individual, and the body as a group. Cancer is when cells decide to stop cooperating with the body and instead work for their own individual reproduction, at the expense of the rest of the body. Since bodies reproduce as a group, bodies that have mechanisms to enforce cooperation among their cells do better under natural selection. Even so, individual cancer cells don't really care about this, so cancer is a never-ending battle between the selection happening at the body level and selection happening at the level of an individual cell. It would be the same with ageless individuals, except the blob population doesn't even reproduce as a whole, so group-level selection would be much weaker if it exists at all. (Also, I would argue that longer-lived individuals aren't necessarily destructive like cancer and could even benefit the population in social species, especially in humans.)
Shouldn't there be a chance to get a positive mutation? From the last model it appeared to me as the avg age was not stable and trending downwards there was too much shortening.
I'll be honest, I dont typically donate to youtubers, but the fact that you have a patreon and aren't taking ads, I respect that, that's a level of integrity. So i will be donating to your patreon.
That's actually way too true When the rock paper scissors video came out I saw it and I enjoyed it. I then completely forgot about primer, then here we are now
I really appreciate your transparency with your choice to not use sponsors to support the channel monetarily! I think it is quite important that content creators promote themselves and fund themselves in the ways that they believe is right for their channel and community! Love your content, can’t wait for more great stuff!! :)
@@PrimerBlobs I'm on premium so sponsor spots are really really obnoxious since I literally pay to avoid ads. Thank you for doing it this way (and the super high quality videos!).
This is such a great summary of something so often misunderstood! Thanks for the shout-out and I’m proud to have played a small role in making it happen. :)
Good to see another Steele doing well. Regards, George H Steele (The northern Steele line - 14 generations going back to George Steele on the ship Lyon as an indentured servant. I hold the signet ring of George W Steele of the Steele Mansion in Painesville.)
I'd love to see the evolution of caring for children vs. abandoning them. Like how some animals have 1 or 2 children they care for for a long time vs. how some have like 10 they just leave and hope for the best
@@NoombatIsMe I think it depends on how much the offspring can benefit from excess care. If a plant supplies a seed with 10 times more nutrients, it will not increase the chance of germination by 10 times. Too much depends on where the seed lands. But if you leave a human child aged 1.8 years in the forest, his chance of survival will decrease by 1000000 times compared to an 18 years old. Not 10. So 1) Environmental unpredictability reduces care for offspring 2) The ability to non-genetically adapt to the environment increases care for offspring
@@Magnifico145 What about _grand_ parenting, then? Perhaps blobs can only make new blobs for so long, but some blobs have a gene that codes for being "doting grandparents", lowering the mortality of their grandchildren blobs for as long as they're still kicking
It depends on how many young you have and how helpless they are. Tadpoles are relatively helpless, but there is a LOT of them. Kittens aren't as helpless, but there is still a whole litter. The mother will nurse them until they are capable. Primates are special. We give birth to usually one baby that is very helpless and we invest a lot of time in it. This is because of our brain. We have to nurture our young until their big brains mature. Because we just have one young we HAVE to put effort into making sure it survives. That's our lineage, after all.
When you mentioned antagonistic pleiotropy, I thought of sickle-cell trait. People with sickle-shaped red blood cells are more susceptible to anemia, but less susceptible to malaria, so for a given prevalence of plasmodium and mosquitoes, there is a sort of optimal level of sickle-cell trait.
Iirc, 1 copy of the gene is enough to provide malaria immunity, while it takes 2 copies to cause the malformed blood cells. So 2 parents each with 1 copy will have a 25% chance of having a kid vulnerable to malaria, 25% chance of having a kid with sickle cell, and a 50% chance of having a child with the ideal allele make up for this scenario.
@@malaineeward5249Yes, this mutation modifies hemoglobin, causing it to stack on itself like Lego bricks. Or like spears. If only half of the hemoglobin is stackable, the spears will not grow long before depletion of modified hem. And they will float in a normal hem. But this is enough to make hemoglobin indigestible for plasmodium. But if all the hemoglobin is stackable, the spears grow so long that they stretch the red blood cell membrane into an elongated thing. And make it hard as a rock. And make it fragile like a condom full of nails.
@@malaineeward5249 Having one copy still allows cells to become sickled at a higher rate, it just usually happens from more extreme events, like dehydration, low oxygen, infection etc. Someone with both copies will have their cells become sickled under pretty normal circumstances. The shape and lifespan of the sickled cells is what gives a resistance to malaria because the cells will be inhospitable to the parasite.
There's something you touched on briefly around 6:40 that I would have expected to be one of the major takeaways. Natural selection is not about surviving, it's about having kids, and your kids having kids. If everyone needs resources to survive, and you're consuming resources that could otherwise be going towards your descendants, then you are actively getting in the way of your genes propagating. In other words, there's probably a genetic advantage to dying: it gets you out of your kids' way.
I would put it this way, if new generations were not necessary for evolution (i.e. an individual could change its genetic and material makeup extensively while being alive) you could have ageless (or nearly ageless) lifeforms without them having a disadvantage.
I think the point of the video is that you would continue to reproduce even at older ages, why don't we have horses that reach maturity at 5, live to a thousand, and reproduce every 5 years? Surely this wouldn't impact diversity since we don't now if the offspring are actually more suited to the environment than the parents.
This is actually a really common misconception-to the extent that it was the first ever evolutionary theory of ageing proposed in the late 1800s! The problem with it is, imagine you did a simulation with a bunch of blobs all of whom altruistically died to get out of their kids’ way and leave plenty of mangos for them. Then, one blob randomly gets a mutation where it doesn’t die, but instead keeps on reproducing. Its kids will also keep on reproducing, and all of them will be profiting from the altruistic blobs’ mangos, meaning they can reproduce even more. It doesn’t take long for the ‘selfish’ blobs to take over the whole population. So alas dying for the sake of your kids is evolutionarily unstable in most cases-and it’s an example of ‘group selection’ which, for broadly similar reasons, only happens very rarely in biology.
Please please don't take this the wrong way, but the face cam has drawbacks. Whether I want it to be or not, the shape of a human face is very engaging, so I spent much of the video distracted in the corner instead of focusing on the science and learning. Also, it subconsciously cheapens the perceived production value; it makes it look like I'm watching a streamer or a "react" video, rather than highly produced educational content. Having a face pop up to say hello for small parts of the video would be better, although if it was up to my autistic ass, having just the voiceover would be preferable. Thanks again for making these!
yeah somehow it makes the video appear less professional or something. Like I always got the mood from these videos that they were expertly crafted explorations of various topic in evolutionary game theory, but something about seeing that the person behind the voice is just another normal human makes the allure smaller. I would love videos with this guy in another setting, but something about slapping a facecam onto highly produced videos like this just doesn't fit
Good to see a new video. I actually appreciate your jokes, funny mimics and overall light-humorous style. It helps with the understanding of the ideas.
I think that the disembodied voice suited the channel better. Throughout the video, I spent most of my time looking at you instead of the animations and graphs. I hope this doesn't sound mean, I simply liked the old style more and wanted to give some feedback.
Yeah I agree, not in a bad way at all but since those videos are so information-dense, visually AND in the content, it's hard with something more ! My focus gets redirected and I cannot keep it fully on the content :( I really love those videos but idk my brain is too easily distracted I guess or something cause I'm having troubles getting into it/staying focused😊
Agreed, it's distracting. Maybe it's something I just have to get used to, but there's probably a reason why you don't see that often with similar content.
9:26 this is completely unrelated but your dna visual makes me so happy that it's made of the actual molecules instead of just vague blobby bits and bars ❤ like i understand the idea of a simplified model but sometimes people try to make a less simplified model and just end up making it confusing 💀
Fascinating video! I'm curious how the environment plays into aging - could imposing a carrying capacity cause natural selection to favor aging in and of itself, culling the population so more of those evolutionarily valuable young reproductions can happen?
Hey, just letting you know that I appreciate the changes you made! I've been keeping an eye on your channel for a long time, and I really appreciate the simple animations that you use to help introduce people to very complicated problems.
Hey! I love the channel. Small criticism tho: I found the face cam too distracting. It's okay on the beginning of the video but as soon as the explanation starts I find myself gravitating towards the face cam instead of paying attention to the graph and explanation.
0:53 Once again, someone who puts quality above quantity getting less views than some really lucky TH-camrs who put quantity above quality, yet somehow get millions of views for each daily video they upload (or even multiple per day). You deserve all views you get and so many more.
NGL "mutant death allele" is a sick band name ✊ also thank you for another video! I've never been great at math but I love these sort of statistical analyses. ♡ you make it very easy to understand!
One aspect you didn't include in the video, but that I think would be interesting to see in a sim, is that a population that ages (and therefore replaces it's population sooner), is more flexible towards environmental changes than a population that doesn't age. In this case, older blobs don't compete with younger ones as much and genetic variation is favored.
70... Or three score years and ten... People who don't die tend to live to 70-80 A few live to 90-100 A very few to 110 ... If sanitation and healthcare happens then more live to higher ages ...the oldest person 50 years ago was 115 The oldest person today is 115
@ Although rare and possibly not completely accurate, there are reports of known people over 100 in medieval times. Which could serve us to at least say, they were surely hitting 70, so yeah, child mortality really skewed the number.
@ In my country according to mortality data, if you as a man has passed the age of 30, you are reaching 70. For women if born, they reach 70. The most amazing detail of this is that this is an aberration only present in the last 30 years.
I really really like this long-form content from you. I really feel like I understand everything with the repetition, slow adding of concepts, and thorough analysis of graphs. Keep up the great work, man :)
I've got an example of antagonistic pleiotropy! Mosquitoes with a mutated form of the "ester" allele - coding for acetylcholinesterase - overproduced the enzyme, which protected them from certain insecticides by allowing their bodies to process the toxin more quickly. Unfortunately for the mosquitoes it also interfered with their nervous systems, increasing death rates by pretty much everything except the pesticides. So the mutation allowed them to survive _just_ long enough to reproduce in areas with heavy pesticide use, at the cost of fitness across nearly all other categories.
Im just going to put my feedback/opinion here. If I'm the only one saying it and there aren't many likes on this comment, feel free to ignore it. But if enough people agree, something to consider? In my opinion, having your face in the corner is a bit distracting. Totally fine during the Patreon segment, but during the actual video, it doesn't really add much. Part of what makes your videos so great are the animations and the visual simulation and the animated graphs. Your voice obviously adds a lot of value to the video. Your face and hand gestures aren't really imo. Imo, they're distracting from all the hard work you did animating and editing. Don't get me wrong, you're a good looking dude. It's just harder to focus on and appreciate the animations when there's a moving and occasionally cutting head in my field of vision. Again, having your face there during the Patreon section was totally ok, I'm just referring to the main part of the video. I hope you don't take this the wrong way. I have a lot of respect for how much effort you put into making your videos.
I read this comment before watching the video and thought "well that seems a little rude" but you're right lol. I kept catching myself looking at the facecam instead of the animations. Would probably be a good idea to have no cam during animated segments so we can focus on what is being talked about instead of who is talking.
This is what I thought when watching as well. I agree it was very fitting for the patreon section, but after that the face cam adds no value that the animations already do. Especially him waving his hands when a diagram or graph is appearing makes my eyes unsure where to look. Our instinct to move our hands probably comes from working with static powerpoint presentations where moving your hands adds necessary movement to the presentation, but here it is only distracting.
26:28 i remember i read somewhere. that the reason we humans can't produce certain vitamins we need to survive. was just pure bad luck, our ancestors could just as most other living animals can today. but since we could get it in the food where we evolved or someting. the populations that could produce more vitamin types had no advantage so it just happened to get thrown out of the gene pool by chance and many many generations later humans would sail on ships. (away from our plants) and low and behold we discovered scurvy. but i was too late the gene for vitamin C synthesis was loooooong gone
Vitamin C is abundant in meat and organs. Fresh meat is hard to preserve on long trips, they are mostly grain...do you people seriously think people across the world had access to modern tropical fruits at all time or something? 😂
Another gene that all mammals missed is photolyase. It's used to efficiently repair DNA damage, particularly from UV, using blue-violet light. It's present in all multicellular lifeform except for mammals, because our ancestor lives nocturnally so it didn't need to UV protection. As it turns out, dinosaurs got wiped and we became diurnal, thus needing to overdrive less efficient DNA repair.
@ your right back in the day just as now people got it from their diet. but on ships back in the day. those foods were not the foods that they happened to bring with them that's why land scurvy wasn't really a thing
I love your videos man. It's refreshing how you are so open and plain about your assumptions each time, and when you are trying to tailor your assumptions to get a specific result. It feels like you respect the viewer a lot. That stuff is very often glossed over at best or actively hidden at worst. The "learning together" format is so strong. And it's obvious you put an incredible amount of work into your videos.
Feedback on little you in the corner: It is fun having a face attached to the voice, and you're clearly very confident presenting like that. Naturally skilled! The script becomes more freeform compared to your other videos, for obvious reasons. I personally prefer the tighter scripts of your older stuff, it makes the videos flow a bit smoother But that's not to say I dislike your face there. It makes the videos longer, which is fun, and we get some of your genuine wit and humour through too
This is great. I've thought about making a simulation of ageing before but could never think of a good way of doing it. Your explanations are so clear and the graphics really well put together. Amazing work.
25:53 I think it’s important to remember that evolution doesn’t favor things that are good, it favours things that are just good enough. In other words not every trait must have been good for something at some point, every trait just needs to not have negatively impacted the procreation of its bearer.
I really like the way you approached discussing revenue and patreon and stuff! You approached it with a lot of integrity, and it was refreshing to see. I love your videos so much, also. One of my favorite rewatches. I like how you encourage the learning process. You seem to really care about educating your audience and encouraging critical thinking
This watched like a lecture in how interesting it was, but also like a youtube video in that it was still very entertaining. i really enjoyed the fact you put yourself into the video, it didn't at all feel cringy. thanks for making this
bro literally look like Robin Lord Taylor, It feels like stealing to watch such quality content for free btw all love from Syria before even watching the video ❤
Thanks for the great content-I really enjoyed every video! By the way, I think your voice alone is enough. I placed a small window over your video to stay focused on the data you’re presenting (also you're taking some valuable space :p). Nothing wrong with you, I found the older videos more immersive. Keep going!
You barely uploading is the best for me and other people I hope because it makes your videos more exciting to watch so I don't miss a valuable lesson or the fun simulations! Thank you for not quitting and going on!
11:39: Before modern medicine, there were essentially a bimodal survival rate for humans. Childhood mortality was very high, But if you survived childhood, you were likely to be "tougher" and would have a good chance of living to be an old person of 50 or 60. What\s going on here in the simulation is reminiscent.
A new Primer video! Let's go! I think the facecam might work when explaining the stuff, but you could get rid of it when running the animation and graphs. I think it's a bit hard to follow it on my own when there's someone to look at, haha. After it runs, you could put the face cam back on and continue to explain.
Thank you for articulating why I found the facecam distracting! His head and hands moving around in the foreground distracted me from the content in the background. I would prefer to just have the simulation content with a voiceover.
I don't wanna be rude or anything and I really don't know a better way of saying this: I liked it better when you were not on the video. I have nothing against you, but the reason I liked it better without you is because the other videos kinda pulled me into this simulated world. It was relaxing and made me think about the concepts you were explaining. But now it feels more like you're teaching something, almost as if it is a presentation, whereas the other videos were like a movie. I think that I prefer getting pulled into this world rather than having the awkward feeling of needing to pay attention and being taught is because I have ADHD. Sometimes it's easier for me to focus on something when my mind gets sucked into a topic. Not to mention it was also just your old style which I just got used to over time. Every time I saw a blob, I knew that it was you. But now it feels kinda weird. Don't take my opinion personally. These are just my first thoughts that went through my mind when I saw the new video. I have tried to formulate it as nicely as possible, although this text may not be perfect. But overall the quality was top notch as always and props for the hard work!
Agreed, though, I think for me it was the persistence through the whole video (a streamer convention) that distracted me and I wouldn't have minded some 'in-person narration' in certain important moments. But either way, it was super weird.
I agree - I also have ADHD and found it harder to focus when my attention was being split three ways between the blobs, the subtitles (which I use), and the facecam. I don't mind it when it's used to better illustrate or explain a point, and once or twice it was nice to see his expression to help double-check my understanding of his tone of voice was correct, but otherwise it was much more difficult to concentrate. Which is a shame cause he's a lovely looking fellow!
Great video! I really enjoyed the face cam. Other commenters have said they found it distracting, but I found it very personable, and I liked seeing your excitement explaining this. It was like a passionate professor giving a lecture.
Primer is really speeding through the entirety of "The Selfish Gene" one at a time. It would be really interesting how you would present "The Battle of Generations" or "The Battle of Sexes" chapters in this format
Hey ! Genius video as always ! Two comments though : First, for the "mutation accumulation" problem, your explanation starting at 17:40 is ambiguous, because you said _"instead of one test gene, there are ten of them",_ ok, but in the previous scenario the yellow allele could only mutate back to the blue "sane" allele. So one can understand your sentence to mean that now you have 10 yellow alleles than mutate at a 5% rate... But they can only turn into the blue allele through mutation... Like in the previous scenario. This completely changes the prediction of course, because now the yellow alleles would interfere with each other. Second, I am surprised you didn't explore what happened to be my number one guess regarding aging in the natural world : adaptability. If individuals in the population don't die, they keep using up ressources, so a niche can be rapidly saturated by individuals that have no ability to evolve (individuals don't "evolve", only populations do). But in the natural world niches keep changing, so a population that has very short life cycles can have a very high degree of responsiveness to any change in the environment, whereas longer life cycle entails larger "inertia" in allele distribution, and thus lower adaptability. This capacity to evolve can be measured against the rate of change of the niche : if it allows for adequate adaptive speeds, the population will be selected, if not, it will be selected against. This alone could be a reason for nature to select senescence. It would select a rate of senescence that allows the best balance between adequation to the rate of change of the niche, and reproductive costs. A species which leaves space for their young to take over is a species that have less chance to be overtaken by a change in environment that is too fast for its ability to adapt to it. This is not a case of antagonistic pleiotropy, because the alleles don't give a reproductive advantage, they give the entire population an adaptability advantage.
Tysm for this! You're already an inspiration to the project I'm setting up, and I've been thinking about how to handle anging recently, so this is perfect! My plan was just to lower food's effectiveness slightly every tick. Will probably become a patreon in the future, if nothing else for those private streams. Would love to pick your brain!
@vulcanfeline Yeah... At least it's realistic. The plan is to use Minecraft as the virtual space to train conscious AI(OpenWorm + GPT-J; though distilled r1 might be better). I need a way to softcap their lives so there will be a final scoring without forcing a death, so there is always actions to extend their own lives. A debuff to things like food effectiveness and heart regeneration was my best plan, with a far higher buff for each achievement, allowing full control of the parameters they are graded on.
Genuinely - your videos are one of the few things i get a notification for on youtube and am excited to sit down and watch it! We all joke about the time between, but absense makes the heart grow fonder - and constant uploads would probably make for less interesting topics (althogh i wouldnt complain about a few more!!! :p) so dont let the comments bully you intk trying to produce more often either I also either didnt know or forgot you had a patreon so i guess ill go give that a peek too
Incredible video. While parts were super clear, I was completely lost and could not follow even after relistening a few times in the middle. Thank you for posting.
Ther are are a few reasons why aging might be benificial, besides just Antagonistic Pleiotropy: 0. If organisms can't reproduce after a centrain age, they are just using up resources for nothing. 1. If an organism gets injured at some age, then it's using up resources, while a more "optimal" organism could be using them instead. 2. Shorter lifes = more generations = more mutations = faster evolution = lower chance of extincion when enviroment chaneges. This is also a reason why sexual reproduction exists. 3. Imagine if there was a genetical disease that activated when an organism is 1000 years old, but is unnoticeable before. By the time it activates, the organism already had hundrets of children, which are all infected now. Not only is the organism now unatractive (therefore suboptimal), but also it's children are weakening the population. Reasons 0, 1, and 3 aren't problems if an organism lives long, but has few offspring close to the end of it's lifespan. Hoever if it has few offspring, it has lower evolution rate (see reason 2).
One thing you mentioned but didn't explore to deeply. - Each blob requires resources And the longer they live, they more likely they are to get injured in such a way that they can't reproduce any more. In this situation, this blob continuing to live is a detriment to the species. I'd be very interested in seeing a simulation where the blobs have a hat, and they need the hat to reproduce. But over the course of their life, their hat may become lost/damaged/etc - and then they can't reproduce. I suspect in this simulation, the 'death genes' would be much more prevalent. Thanks for the great video as always!
Something similar for why one might continue to live on past reproductive age might also occur, IE Humans having grandparents who can help raise the grandkids through what they learned or just by being an extra body to provide for others.
@sunname6252 Yes and there's the very interesting case of menopause which sort of demonstrates that. It makes female humans unable to reproduce, but there must be a trade-off which might be that it makes the female elder individual more efficient in helping out its family (because it saves a lot of resources and time). Male reproduction is far less costly for the individual than female reproduction which could explain why there's no need for this type of mechanism in males, the increased efficiency or resources spared at an elder age being minimal for a 'male menopause' and the opportunity of spreading its genes destroyed. But those are just my thoughts on it, I haven't actually looked into it seriously. Interestingly menopause only occurs in humans and some whale species among the mammal world.
A good example of antagonistic plieotropy would be sickle cell anaemia. In countries where malaria is common, so is sickle cell anaemia, because it makes it far harder for malaria to get into the bloodstream, but also leads to blood related issues later in life, but it still takes precedence as malaria kills earlier than those blood issues.
This was an interesting topic but I found the face cam and the unwarned reveal so distracting that all i can remember now is that genes that affect early life/reproduction have a much stronger selection pressure than those that effect late life
I'm pretty new to evolution and Ive been learning about it mainly through your channel. Now, I've actually been wondering about aging decay specifically, so I was very delighted to see this video, and am very thankful I subscribed. Now, I'm also wondering if you'd expect that natural selection would elongate our reproductive age as the external death causes decrease.
A few notes
........
First, Punnett Squares was not the best recommendation for a path to answering the pop quiz question. Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium would have been a better recommendation for something to look up.
A square diagram involving alleles *is* very useful for the question, but the diagram isn't a typical Punnett Square, since it requires assigning uneven probabilities to alleles, as if the two alleles were randomly selected from the population rather than from two specific parents.
........
Second, a common question: Isn't aging good for the species, since older creatures get out of the way?
Yes, it could be. This pattern would increase genetic diversity by allowing more new mutations to exist in a gene pool. And that genetic diversity would make the population more likely to survive environmental changes.
But! Natural selection usually doesn't work at the group/species level. Even if aging is good for a population in the long run, the individuals with less aging would still have an advantage during stable periods and be favored by natural selection. It's the same in the videos about cooperation. Cooperating is good for the species, but defecting can still be favored by natural selection in some circumstances.
Group selection is only a thing for tightly knit groups that reproduce together. Multicellular organisms are the best example of this. Each cell could be viewed as an individual, and the body as a group. Cancer is when cells decide to stop cooperating with the body and instead work for their own individual reproduction, at the expense of the rest of the body. Since bodies reproduce as a group, bodies that have mechanisms to enforce cooperation among their cells do better under natural selection. Even so, individual cancer cells don't really care about this, so cancer is a never-ending battle between the selection happening at the body level and selection happening at the level of an individual cell. It would be the same with ageless individuals, except the blob population doesn't even reproduce as a whole, so group-level selection would be much weaker if it exists at all. (Also, I would argue that longer-lived individuals aren't necessarily destructive like cancer and could even benefit the population in social species, especially in humans.)
Question isint death bad for the dna mutation itself
@@Aarush.A.S Could you clarify what you mean?
@@PrimerBlobs I think he means the creature that gets a gene defect is more likely to die and not reproduce if they age faster.
I enjoy this type of science, so this was a fun watch and read. Thank you.
Shouldn't there be a chance to get a positive mutation? From the last model it appeared to me as the avg age was not stable and trending downwards there was too much shortening.
The section "In which I beg for money" was expertly written. I love you, please never stop.
Not even with a donation? How dare you! (I'm joking)
@@KrullfathHello! I know you from the SF discord lol
998 likes
lol
when the world needed him most, he returned
Hooray 🎉🎉🎉
W
😂😂😂
The Messiah
Not even returned really, just posts once every 5 months or so.
"The beard [...] doesn't have anything to do with their survival." oh, phew, as a beardless adult, I was worried for a sec there.
Well a human beard drastically increases survival, but that is hard to replicate in a simulation.
:)
@TannerJ07 It does? Don't beardless humans statistically live longer?
@TannerJ07 How so?
He meant that in terms of the simulation. Reality is different.
Love your content, please keep making them
Thanks so much!
💶💶
I'll be honest, I dont typically donate to youtubers, but the fact that you have a patreon and aren't taking ads, I respect that, that's a level of integrity. So i will be donating to your patreon.
Life cycle of primer
Upload a video > everyone's really happy > everyone forgets about you > wait 6 months
Doesn't upload, wait another 3 months
>> Upload a video > everyone's really happy > wait 6 months > everyone forgets about you >>
That's actually way too true
When the rock paper scissors video came out I saw it and I enjoyed it. I then completely forgot about primer, then here we are now
I never forget about him
@@DjSapsan So you keep waiting 6 months then
I really appreciate your transparency with your choice to not use sponsors to support the channel monetarily! I think it is quite important that content creators promote themselves and fund themselves in the ways that they believe is right for their channel and community! Love your content, can’t wait for more great stuff!! :)
ok?
@trintalex is probably a bot at this point
Dont make assumptions@@Edward-cb5fc
@@PrimerBlobs I'm on premium so sponsor spots are really really obnoxious since I literally pay to avoid ads. Thank you for doing it this way (and the super high quality videos!).
The whole "videos don't come out very often" thing made me realize I'm subbed since the 3rd video. 6 YEARS AGO. Wow. Time flies.
Yeah same, that was quite the Shock.
We are all aging, and this is a very interesting thing to think about while watching this video.
Yeah! I subbed in August 2019 almost 5 1/2 years ago!
Time is about to really start flying, watch the movie Ferris Bueller
I’m not subscribed but I’ve seen every video since “simulating natural selection” because the TH-cam algorithm is relatively kind to me
Thanks for creating these amazing simulations! 🥭
Thanks!
Just wanted to donate to show my support for your videos!
Thanks!
This is such a great summary of something so often misunderstood! Thanks for the shout-out and I’m proud to have played a small role in making it happen. :)
Good to see another Steele doing well.
Regards,
George H Steele
(The northern Steele line - 14 generations going back to George Steele on the ship Lyon as an indentured servant. I hold the signet ring of George W Steele of the Steele Mansion in Painesville.)
@George4943 Way to steele the show
@@c_n_b Hah...😄
??
@@c_n_b You guys Steel making jokes about this?
I'd love to see the evolution of caring for children vs. abandoning them. Like how some animals have 1 or 2 children they care for for a long time vs. how some have like 10 they just leave and hope for the best
@@NoombatIsMe I think it depends on how much the offspring can benefit from excess care.
If a plant supplies a seed with 10 times more nutrients, it will not increase the chance of germination by 10 times. Too much depends on where the seed lands.
But if you leave a human child aged 1.8 years in the forest, his chance of survival will decrease by 1000000 times compared to an 18 years old. Not 10.
So
1) Environmental unpredictability reduces care for offspring
2) The ability to non-genetically adapt to the environment increases care for offspring
There are primer vids about altruism like "Simulating the Evolution of Sacrificing for Family" and "Simulating Green Beard Altruism"
@@Magnifico145
What about _grand_ parenting, then? Perhaps blobs can only make new blobs for so long, but some blobs have a gene that codes for being "doting grandparents", lowering the mortality of their grandchildren blobs for as long as they're still kicking
It depends on how many young you have and how helpless they are. Tadpoles are relatively helpless, but there is a LOT of them. Kittens aren't as helpless, but there is still a whole litter. The mother will nurse them until they are capable. Primates are special. We give birth to usually one baby that is very helpless and we invest a lot of time in it. This is because of our brain. We have to nurture our young until their big brains mature. Because we just have one young we HAVE to put effort into making sure it survives. That's our lineage, after all.
If you wanna do some of your own research, this concept is known as R-selection vs K-selection in biology!
It's always a great day when your favorite TH-camr uploads a new video
£4
@MarkRayers why does the specific amount matter, any donation is valuable
Thank you!
@codeboitutorials yeah ik i was just saying
@@codeboitutorialshes simply stating the amount, because there are bound to be people who ask how much that is
Another incredible video-thanks for expanding on parent-offspring competition in the comments; I had that misconception myself.
Thanks!
TH-cam needs more content like this! Math, science, and how things work. Your videos are amazing!
When you mentioned antagonistic pleiotropy, I thought of sickle-cell trait. People with sickle-shaped red blood cells are more susceptible to anemia, but less susceptible to malaria, so for a given prevalence of plasmodium and mosquitoes, there is a sort of optimal level of sickle-cell trait.
Iirc, 1 copy of the gene is enough to provide malaria immunity, while it takes 2 copies to cause the malformed blood cells. So 2 parents each with 1 copy will have a 25% chance of having a kid vulnerable to malaria, 25% chance of having a kid with sickle cell, and a 50% chance of having a child with the ideal allele make up for this scenario.
@@malaineeward5249Yes, this mutation modifies hemoglobin, causing it to stack on itself like Lego bricks. Or like spears.
If only half of the hemoglobin is stackable, the spears will not grow long before depletion of modified hem. And they will float in a normal hem. But this is enough to make hemoglobin indigestible for plasmodium.
But if all the hemoglobin is stackable, the spears grow so long that they stretch the red blood cell membrane into an elongated thing. And make it hard as a rock. And make it fragile like a condom full of nails.
@@malaineeward5249 Having one copy still allows cells to become sickled at a higher rate, it just usually happens from more extreme events, like dehydration, low oxygen, infection etc. Someone with both copies will have their cells become sickled under pretty normal circumstances. The shape and lifespan of the sickled cells is what gives a resistance to malaria because the cells will be inhospitable to the parasite.
@rainbowhyena1354 oo, thank you for the more indepth explanation!
@@malaineeward5249rainbows comment was deleted
There's something you touched on briefly around 6:40 that I would have expected to be one of the major takeaways.
Natural selection is not about surviving, it's about having kids, and your kids having kids. If everyone needs resources to survive, and you're consuming resources that could otherwise be going towards your descendants, then you are actively getting in the way of your genes propagating.
In other words, there's probably a genetic advantage to dying: it gets you out of your kids' way.
Maybe...but if your kids are mixed in with other kids the effect gets diluted. Also in lots of cases higher population densities favor survival.
I would put it this way, if new generations were not necessary for evolution (i.e. an individual could change its genetic and material makeup extensively while being alive) you could have ageless (or nearly ageless) lifeforms without them having a disadvantage.
I think the point of the video is that you would continue to reproduce even at older ages, why don't we have horses that reach maturity at 5, live to a thousand, and reproduce every 5 years? Surely this wouldn't impact diversity since we don't now if the offspring are actually more suited to the environment than the parents.
not really cause your genes are 100% of you but only 25% of your grand kids
This is actually a really common misconception-to the extent that it was the first ever evolutionary theory of ageing proposed in the late 1800s!
The problem with it is, imagine you did a simulation with a bunch of blobs all of whom altruistically died to get out of their kids’ way and leave plenty of mangos for them. Then, one blob randomly gets a mutation where it doesn’t die, but instead keeps on reproducing. Its kids will also keep on reproducing, and all of them will be profiting from the altruistic blobs’ mangos, meaning they can reproduce even more. It doesn’t take long for the ‘selfish’ blobs to take over the whole population. So alas dying for the sake of your kids is evolutionarily unstable in most cases-and it’s an example of ‘group selection’ which, for broadly similar reasons, only happens very rarely in biology.
Not a patreon, but I still enjoy the videos
Thanks!
I love your videos. So well done.
I have never donated online before.
Thank you!
I want to support this vídeo!
That’s fine
I really enjoy your content, thanks for producing it!
+
Thanks!
Amazing videos, really interesting. Hopefully we will see more soon.
Thanks!
probably in a year
@Mizai it's funny because it's true
Thank you for the great video and all of the prior videos! You have an excellent way of delving into topics that always leave me more knowledgeable!
Thanks!
Thanks for all these wonderful videos
Thanks!
I really love your videos I’ve never donated to anyone before but I hope this helps!
Thank you!
Please please don't take this the wrong way, but the face cam has drawbacks. Whether I want it to be or not, the shape of a human face is very engaging, so I spent much of the video distracted in the corner instead of focusing on the science and learning. Also, it subconsciously cheapens the perceived production value; it makes it look like I'm watching a streamer or a "react" video, rather than highly produced educational content. Having a face pop up to say hello for small parts of the video would be better, although if it was up to my autistic ass, having just the voiceover would be preferable. Thanks again for making these!
yeah somehow it makes the video appear less professional or something. Like I always got the mood from these videos that they were expertly crafted explorations of various topic in evolutionary game theory, but something about seeing that the person behind the voice is just another normal human makes the allure smaller. I would love videos with this guy in another setting, but something about slapping a facecam onto highly produced videos like this just doesn't fit
Yes, I agree. It was super distracting
He's too pretty to appear
I agree. Maybe he could use the face cam sporadically, to put emphasis on something to say.
I agree with this, kinda hinders the vibe in a way
YEARLY PRIMER UPLOAD 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Fr
Hey, it's bi-yearly
He does it every 6 months
@@PrimerBlobs Hey, it's every 182.5 days
@@PrimerBlobs you mean once in 2 years right? 😂
Good to see a new video. I actually appreciate your jokes, funny mimics and overall light-humorous style. It helps with the understanding of the ideas.
I was more nervous about the jokes than anything else, so thank you. :)
Thank you for the great Video.
I think that the disembodied voice suited the channel better. Throughout the video, I spent most of my time looking at you instead of the animations and graphs.
I hope this doesn't sound mean, I simply liked the old style more and wanted to give some feedback.
Seconded.
I'm very shallow and he's handsome so I'm happy with the videos done either way
@@creshiell i wish more people had your taste 😂
Yeah I agree, not in a bad way at all but since those videos are so information-dense, visually AND in the content, it's hard with something more ! My focus gets redirected and I cannot keep it fully on the content :( I really love those videos but idk my brain is too easily distracted I guess or something cause I'm having troubles getting into it/staying focused😊
Agreed, it's distracting. Maybe it's something I just have to get used to, but there's probably a reason why you don't see that often with similar content.
9:26 this is completely unrelated but your dna visual makes me so happy that it's made of the actual molecules instead of just vague blobby bits and bars ❤ like i understand the idea of a simplified model but sometimes people try to make a less simplified model and just end up making it confusing 💀
Fascinating video! I'm curious how the environment plays into aging - could imposing a carrying capacity cause natural selection to favor aging in and of itself, culling the population so more of those evolutionarily valuable young reproductions can happen?
I know it’s not much but thank you for making your content!
Hey, just letting you know that I appreciate the changes you made! I've been keeping an eye on your channel for a long time, and I really appreciate the simple animations that you use to help introduce people to very complicated problems.
Nice to see you again!
yep, my comment for the algorithm.
??
Hey! I love the channel. Small criticism tho: I found the face cam too distracting. It's okay on the beginning of the video but as soon as the explanation starts I find myself gravitating towards the face cam instead of paying attention to the graph and explanation.
or you could also cut to the face cam only when there's nothing to show on screen, like when you were talking about senescence in nature
Yea I guess it is a little distracting, but at least he is so handsome
@@Frau_Brotchen exactly
was fine for me so I guess it could be just what you're used to or whatever
As a non-native English speaker, it helps to see the speaker's face when they talk.
"I hope you find it less cringe than i did"
I find it to be super engaging and natural
Supporting!
Great animation work right there. I really thought that a human was talking in this video.
E
😂
😂😂😂
Lol
Dead Primer theory
Awesome video!
Amazing video as always!
Well well glad to see another one of these vids!
Thanks
edit: forgot to edit this before buying so thanks for keeping up with the awesome content
I liked seeing the disembodied voice as a person when it was important, but during the sims and math stuff I liked the disembodied voice more :(
100%
True
ok?
Thanks, super interesting and well made!
22:27 amazing post production fix
I went straight to the comments as soon as i heard it. It is magnificent indeed
Same😂 @@-_-noxe-_-5623
Thanks for the video!
Thanks!
0:53 Once again, someone who puts quality above quantity getting less views than some really lucky TH-camrs who put quantity above quality, yet somehow get millions of views for each daily video they upload (or even multiple per day). You deserve all views you get and so many more.
Danke!
NGL "mutant death allele" is a sick band name ✊ also thank you for another video! I've never been great at math but I love these sort of statistical analyses. ♡ you make it very easy to understand!
One aspect you didn't include in the video, but that I think would be interesting to see in a sim, is that a population that ages (and therefore replaces it's population sooner), is more flexible towards environmental changes than a population that doesn't age. In this case, older blobs don't compete with younger ones as much and genetic variation is favored.
I was also hoping to see some analysis/simulation along these lines.
Bättre att bidra med något än ingenting! Tack för dina videos ❤
Love your vids Primer, keep up the fantastic work!
Everyone should agree that it's the best day when a Primer video comes out
8:00 you quite literraly explaning how in medieval times life expectancy was 30 years old, but people were actually dying at 50 to even 65 years old.
70... Or three score years and ten...
People who don't die tend to live to 70-80
A few live to 90-100
A very few to 110
... If sanitation and healthcare happens then more live to higher ages
...the oldest person 50 years ago was 115
The oldest person today is 115
I dont think we’ve found evidence of medieval people achieving ages over 100, i think atmost 70 but in very very rare cases
@ Although rare and possibly not completely accurate, there are reports of known people over 100 in medieval times. Which could serve us to at least say, they were surely hitting 70, so yeah, child mortality really skewed the number.
@ In my country according to mortality data, if you as a man has passed the age of 30, you are reaching 70. For women if born, they reach 70. The most amazing detail of this is that this is an aberration only present in the last 30 years.
@@cactilainen4301Thomas Hobbes lived up to 91 years old in 16th century
I really really like this long-form content from you. I really feel like I understand everything with the repetition, slow adding of concepts, and thorough analysis of graphs. Keep up the great work, man :)
I love these educational videos! Thanks a bunch for making learning fun!
I've got an example of antagonistic pleiotropy! Mosquitoes with a mutated form of the "ester" allele - coding for acetylcholinesterase - overproduced the enzyme, which protected them from certain insecticides by allowing their bodies to process the toxin more quickly. Unfortunately for the mosquitoes it also interfered with their nervous systems, increasing death rates by pretty much everything except the pesticides. So the mutation allowed them to survive _just_ long enough to reproduce in areas with heavy pesticide use, at the cost of fitness across nearly all other categories.
Im just going to put my feedback/opinion here. If I'm the only one saying it and there aren't many likes on this comment, feel free to ignore it. But if enough people agree, something to consider?
In my opinion, having your face in the corner is a bit distracting. Totally fine during the Patreon segment, but during the actual video, it doesn't really add much. Part of what makes your videos so great are the animations and the visual simulation and the animated graphs. Your voice obviously adds a lot of value to the video. Your face and hand gestures aren't really imo. Imo, they're distracting from all the hard work you did animating and editing. Don't get me wrong, you're a good looking dude. It's just harder to focus on and appreciate the animations when there's a moving and occasionally cutting head in my field of vision. Again, having your face there during the Patreon section was totally ok, I'm just referring to the main part of the video. I hope you don't take this the wrong way. I have a lot of respect for how much effort you put into making your videos.
I read this comment before watching the video and thought "well that seems a little rude" but you're right lol. I kept catching myself looking at the facecam instead of the animations. Would probably be a good idea to have no cam during animated segments so we can focus on what is being talked about instead of who is talking.
@@Nae_AyyI was trying to make it not rude :(
@@zperk13 it’s not rude at all, you’re just giving fair criticism based on your own preferences and experience! I agree btw, it’s quite distracting
This is what I thought when watching as well. I agree it was very fitting for the patreon section, but after that the face cam adds no value that the animations already do. Especially him waving his hands when a diagram or graph is appearing makes my eyes unsure where to look. Our instinct to move our hands probably comes from working with static powerpoint presentations where moving your hands adds necessary movement to the presentation, but here it is only distracting.
I didn't finish the video... 😢
The face distracted me too much.
7:39 "this graph is for babies" sounds like a really nerdy slam, lol. "What? THIS graph?? This graph is for babies!"
I love your videos! Continue
You're one of the exceptionally few TH-cam ideas like to support
I really hope to get "My eternal and undying love professed reverently to the stars each night" ;) 3:05
Watch it at .25 speed
26:28 i remember i read somewhere. that the reason we humans can't produce certain vitamins we need to survive. was just pure bad luck, our ancestors could just as most other living animals can today. but since we could get it in the food where we evolved or someting. the populations that could produce more vitamin types had no advantage so it just happened to get thrown out of the gene pool by chance
and many many generations later humans would sail on ships. (away from our plants) and low and behold we discovered scurvy. but i was too late the gene for vitamin C synthesis was loooooong gone
Vitamin C is abundant in meat and organs. Fresh meat is hard to preserve on long trips, they are mostly grain...do you people seriously think people across the world had access to modern tropical fruits at all time or something? 😂
@@helmaschine1885I don’t think you understand the comment
Another gene that all mammals missed is photolyase. It's used to efficiently repair DNA damage, particularly from UV, using blue-violet light. It's present in all multicellular lifeform except for mammals, because our ancestor lives nocturnally so it didn't need to UV protection. As it turns out, dinosaurs got wiped and we became diurnal, thus needing to overdrive less efficient DNA repair.
@ your right back in the day just as now people got it from their diet. but on ships back in the day. those foods were not the foods that they happened to bring with them
that's why land scurvy wasn't really a thing
Author's face in the beg for money section is a great move. Same face in the meat section is a BIG MISTAKE.
I love your videos man. It's refreshing how you are so open and plain about your assumptions each time, and when you are trying to tailor your assumptions to get a specific result. It feels like you respect the viewer a lot. That stuff is very often glossed over at best or actively hidden at worst. The "learning together" format is so strong. And it's obvious you put an incredible amount of work into your videos.
Feedback on little you in the corner:
It is fun having a face attached to the voice, and you're clearly very confident presenting like that. Naturally skilled!
The script becomes more freeform compared to your other videos, for obvious reasons. I personally prefer the tighter scripts of your older stuff, it makes the videos flow a bit smoother
But that's not to say I dislike your face there. It makes the videos longer, which is fun, and we get some of your genuine wit and humour through too
This is great. I've thought about making a simulation of ageing before but could never think of a good way of doing it. Your explanations are so clear and the graphics really well put together. Amazing work.
Thanks! I hope you're doing well. :)
25:53 I think it’s important to remember that evolution doesn’t favor things that are good, it favours things that are just good enough. In other words not every trait must have been good for something at some point, every trait just needs to not have negatively impacted the procreation of its bearer.
I really like the way you approached discussing revenue and patreon and stuff! You approached it with a lot of integrity, and it was refreshing to see.
I love your videos so much, also. One of my favorite rewatches. I like how you encourage the learning process. You seem to really care about educating your audience and encouraging critical thinking
This watched like a lecture in how interesting it was, but also like a youtube video in that it was still very entertaining. i really enjoyed the fact you put yourself into the video, it didn't at all feel cringy. thanks for making this
bro literally look like Robin Lord Taylor, It feels like stealing to watch such quality content for free btw
all love from Syria before even watching the video ❤
Thanks for the great content-I really enjoyed every video! By the way, I think your voice alone is enough. I placed a small window over your video to stay focused on the data you’re presenting (also you're taking some valuable space :p). Nothing wrong with you, I found the older videos more immersive. Keep going!
You barely uploading is the best for me and other people I hope because it makes your videos more exciting to watch so I don't miss a valuable lesson or the fun simulations!
Thank you for not quitting and going on!
I'm not sure if I've commented on these before, but thank you so much for these videos. They're such an invaluable edu-tainment resource.
22:29 love you cutting in one more "Zero" because you forgot to say it the first time. Amazing vid btw!
I just want to thank you for making these videos. They don't come frequently, but when they do, they make my (and probably many other's) day better.
11:39: Before modern medicine, there were essentially a bimodal survival rate for humans. Childhood mortality was very high, But if you survived childhood, you were likely to be "tougher" and would have a good chance of living to be an old person of 50 or 60. What\s going on here in the simulation is reminiscent.
A new Primer video! Let's go! I think the facecam might work when explaining the stuff, but you could get rid of it when running the animation and graphs. I think it's a bit hard to follow it on my own when there's someone to look at, haha. After it runs, you could put the face cam back on and continue to explain.
Thank you for articulating why I found the facecam distracting! His head and hands moving around in the foreground distracted me from the content in the background. I would prefer to just have the simulation content with a voiceover.
I don't wanna be rude or anything and I really don't know a better way of saying this: I liked it better when you were not on the video. I have nothing against you, but the reason I liked it better without you is because the other videos kinda pulled me into this simulated world. It was relaxing and made me think about the concepts you were explaining. But now it feels more like you're teaching something, almost as if it is a presentation, whereas the other videos were like a movie.
I think that I prefer getting pulled into this world rather than having the awkward feeling of needing to pay attention and being taught is because I have ADHD. Sometimes it's easier for me to focus on something when my mind gets sucked into a topic. Not to mention it was also just your old style which I just got used to over time. Every time I saw a blob, I knew that it was you. But now it feels kinda weird.
Don't take my opinion personally. These are just my first thoughts that went through my mind when I saw the new video. I have tried to formulate it as nicely as possible, although this text may not be perfect. But overall the quality was top notch as always and props for the hard work!
Agreed, though, I think for me it was the persistence through the whole video (a streamer convention) that distracted me and I wouldn't have minded some 'in-person narration' in certain important moments. But either way, it was super weird.
@@x--. fr
I agree - I also have ADHD and found it harder to focus when my attention was being split three ways between the blobs, the subtitles (which I use), and the facecam. I don't mind it when it's used to better illustrate or explain a point, and once or twice it was nice to see his expression to help double-check my understanding of his tone of voice was correct, but otherwise it was much more difficult to concentrate. Which is a shame cause he's a lovely looking fellow!
Great video! I really enjoyed the face cam. Other commenters have said they found it distracting, but I found it very personable, and I liked seeing your excitement explaining this. It was like a passionate professor giving a lecture.
Primer is really speeding through the entirety of "The Selfish Gene" one at a time. It would be really interesting how you would present "The Battle of Generations" or "The Battle of Sexes" chapters in this format
Hey ! Genius video as always !
Two comments though :
First, for the "mutation accumulation" problem, your explanation starting at 17:40 is ambiguous, because you said _"instead of one test gene, there are ten of them",_ ok, but in the previous scenario the yellow allele could only mutate back to the blue "sane" allele. So one can understand your sentence to mean that now you have 10 yellow alleles than mutate at a 5% rate... But they can only turn into the blue allele through mutation... Like in the previous scenario.
This completely changes the prediction of course, because now the yellow alleles would interfere with each other.
Second, I am surprised you didn't explore what happened to be my number one guess regarding aging in the natural world : adaptability.
If individuals in the population don't die, they keep using up ressources, so a niche can be rapidly saturated by individuals that have no ability to evolve (individuals don't "evolve", only populations do). But in the natural world niches keep changing, so a population that has very short life cycles can have a very high degree of responsiveness to any change in the environment, whereas longer life cycle entails larger "inertia" in allele distribution, and thus lower adaptability. This capacity to evolve can be measured against the rate of change of the niche : if it allows for adequate adaptive speeds, the population will be selected, if not, it will be selected against.
This alone could be a reason for nature to select senescence. It would select a rate of senescence that allows the best balance between adequation to the rate of change of the niche, and reproductive costs. A species which leaves space for their young to take over is a species that have less chance to be overtaken by a change in environment that is too fast for its ability to adapt to it.
This is not a case of antagonistic pleiotropy, because the alleles don't give a reproductive advantage, they give the entire population an adaptability advantage.
The longer an individual lives, the higher the probability that it ceases to be adapted to its (changing) environment.
Tysm for this! You're already an inspiration to the project I'm setting up, and I've been thinking about how to handle anging recently, so this is perfect!
My plan was just to lower food's effectiveness slightly every tick.
Will probably become a patreon in the future, if nothing else for those private streams. Would love to pick your brain!
speaking as an "old person", i can verify that eating does get less effective every day it seems
@vulcanfeline Yeah... At least it's realistic.
The plan is to use Minecraft as the virtual space to train conscious AI(OpenWorm + GPT-J; though distilled r1 might be better). I need a way to softcap their lives so there will be a final scoring without forcing a death, so there is always actions to extend their own lives.
A debuff to things like food effectiveness and heart regeneration was my best plan, with a far higher buff for each achievement, allowing full control of the parameters they are graded on.
Genuinely - your videos are one of the few things i get a notification for on youtube and am excited to sit down and watch it!
We all joke about the time between, but absense makes the heart grow fonder - and constant uploads would probably make for less interesting topics (althogh i wouldnt complain about a few more!!! :p) so dont let the comments bully you intk trying to produce more often either
I also either didnt know or forgot you had a patreon so i guess ill go give that a peek too
Incredible video. While parts were super clear, I was completely lost and could not follow even after relistening a few times in the middle. Thank you for posting.
Ther are are a few reasons why aging might be benificial, besides just Antagonistic Pleiotropy:
0. If organisms can't reproduce after a centrain age, they are just using up resources for nothing.
1. If an organism gets injured at some age, then it's using up resources, while a more "optimal" organism could be using them instead.
2. Shorter lifes = more generations = more mutations = faster evolution = lower chance of extincion when enviroment chaneges. This is also a reason why sexual reproduction exists.
3. Imagine if there was a genetical disease that activated when an organism is 1000 years old, but is unnoticeable before. By the time it activates, the organism already had hundrets of children, which are all infected now. Not only is the organism now unatractive (therefore suboptimal), but also it's children are weakening the population.
Reasons 0, 1, and 3 aren't problems if an organism lives long, but has few offspring close to the end of it's lifespan. Hoever if it has few offspring, it has lower evolution rate (see reason 2).
One thing you mentioned but didn't explore to deeply.
- Each blob requires resources
And the longer they live, they more likely they are to get injured in such a way that they can't reproduce any more. In this situation, this blob continuing to live is a detriment to the species.
I'd be very interested in seeing a simulation where the blobs have a hat, and they need the hat to reproduce. But over the course of their life, their hat may become lost/damaged/etc - and then they can't reproduce. I suspect in this simulation, the 'death genes' would be much more prevalent.
Thanks for the great video as always!
Something similar for why one might continue to live on past reproductive age might also occur, IE Humans having grandparents who can help raise the grandkids through what they learned or just by being an extra body to provide for others.
@sunname6252 Yes and there's the very interesting case of menopause which sort of demonstrates that. It makes female humans unable to reproduce, but there must be a trade-off which might be that it makes the female elder individual more efficient in helping out its family (because it saves a lot of resources and time). Male reproduction is far less costly for the individual than female reproduction which could explain why there's no need for this type of mechanism in males, the increased efficiency or resources spared at an elder age being minimal for a 'male menopause' and the opportunity of spreading its genes destroyed. But those are just my thoughts on it, I haven't actually looked into it seriously.
Interestingly menopause only occurs in humans and some whale species among the mammal world.
A good example of antagonistic plieotropy would be sickle cell anaemia. In countries where malaria is common, so is sickle cell anaemia, because it makes it far harder for malaria to get into the bloodstream, but also leads to blood related issues later in life, but it still takes precedence as malaria kills earlier than those blood issues.
"She was very supportive" is so relatable.
your channel has inspired me so much throughout the years, please never stop making awesome content.
The annual primer video released... my life is complete
This was an interesting topic but I found the face cam and the unwarned reveal so distracting that all i can remember now is that genes that affect early life/reproduction have a much stronger selection pressure than those that effect late life
Well that's the main thing, at least.
For me the face cam was fine.
Primer's back babyyyyyy
I'm pretty new to evolution and Ive been learning about it mainly through your channel. Now, I've actually been wondering about aging decay specifically, so I was very delighted to see this video, and am very thankful I subscribed. Now, I'm also wondering if you'd expect that natural selection would elongate our reproductive age as the external death causes decrease.
Please remind about patreon information more frequently! I am broke right now but would love to contribute as these videos are fascinating.
WE ARE SO BACK PRIMER BROS
This is the only time I will accept behind a *channel name* bro, because YEAH WE ARE SO BACK
Face cam and new patreon tiers are great. Thanks for the video!
I really enjoy the facecam. You're very expressive and funny in the way you talk