You guys are all sick.😒 Don't you know you should never eat plants babies. They fill them with poisons and addictive zombie chemicals, to enslave you to raise their babies, then turn you into compost at an early age. Plants have been around much longer than us, and are far more cunning and dangerous. 🙄
So it's come to this. I'm out of bread but still have peanut butter and jam... and I've got some newspapers lying around. Wish me luck - I'm so hungry I'm feeling deleterious...
Great video! One critique: I think a substantial number of biologist would disagree with referring to DNA that doesn't code for protein as "non-functional". That DNA impacts the cell whether it is the energy used for the frequent replication and transcription that DNA, or the interaction that DNA (and it's RNA) has with other molecules in the cell, or cis-regulatory elements within that DNA etc. The function of that DNA is typically more robust to point mutations, but that doesn't make that DNA non-functional
Yeah, it's horrible obsolete vocabulary. "Junk DNA" does encode and is functional, it's just not the bits where the protein chain are encoded as such but we're not just protein, we are "order".
Ah I have a bit of prognathism (my lower jaw is a bit more protruding than normal), and I perked up, thinking I might be more evolved than my fellow humans. Guess not... Haha!
I think accepting the assumption that a majority of DNA "has no function" is a fraught position to take. We thought a lot *more* of it was "junk" just a few years ago. There's a certain amount of hubris in the ideas here. as they make the almost manifestly wrong assumption that we now do understand what *all* DNA does, whereas we have a history of just ignoring the parts we don't understand now.
Ditto. But the point is not that it has no function but that it is variability that doesn't significantly alters fitness, that's what "neutral" means. Like people having slightly bigger or slightly smaller noses, slightly thicker or thinner eyebrows, etc. (mind you that skin color is not neutral, it was driven by dramatic selective pressures: solar protection first, vitamin D urgency later).
Interesting fact related to the panda segment. The evolution of the human thumb (enabling more complex tool use) is a similar example of pleiotropic changes put into motion by the older changes in the foot to allow long distance, energy efficient bipedalism. I would love to see a video on all the features of human evolution that set us apart from other species along these lines.
Drift is very real but only shuffling in the end. If your people randomly gets a bad hand, it will still lose in the end. Natural selection is more about culling the less fit than selecting super-fit ones, although by eliminating the worst hands, you end up with the ones with the best actually existing hands.
Thank you. Finally someone has simplified this debate to a level I understand. On "no environment without an organism", sorry, failing to grasp this concept as Big Bang, whole of lot exploding stars and billions of years passed without any organism present. Maybe I am missing something.
An environment is not defined plainly as the physical space organisms inhabit, but as the conglomerate of space and resources relevant to the organism you're studying. Bacteria and mammals might share a physical space, but their environments are differently defined cause you would highlight the relevant aspects of it for each group to define their environments. And because organisms change those relevant aspects to fit them better, there's no environment without organisms.
Darwin lived in an era in which natural theology was still popularly used to explain the existence of biological function (that is, god created organisms to live in certain ways), and introducing the idea that function could be created and maintained naturally (by natural selection) was revolutionary. But more than a century later we find the possibility of natural selection obvious and intuitive, so now we are free to investigate all of the traits of organisms that are non-functional, or at least non-optimal. Darwin himself discussed this in terms of sexual selection, of course. A similar debate happened in the history of geology. Initially geologists believed that Earth was largely shaped by catastrophic events, including the biblical flood. In response, other geologists argued that given enough time even gradual, uniform forces could change the face of the planet, and we don't need to use religious myths to explain things. Now we understand that the Earth does change slowly over long periods, but it also suffers periodic catastrophes, like erupting volcanoes, ice ages, and asteroid impacts.
The problem was many capitalist oriented mind saw it as the zero sum game (winners take all) between enterprises and coined the expression survival of the fittest while it just says natural selection logic is about the non-survival of the non-fit to their current environment.
@@The0ldg0atI think that it's partly an issue with the fluidity of semantic meaning. Something being fit for purpose just means it's features don't cause unnecessary frictions when applied to a specific purpose. When that purpose is survival, then it should just mean those with features that better help them survive, will survive. The catchphrase is not wrong but the question of what fitness looks like depends entirely on the situation. On its own It's an empty phrase that people read with a colloquial understanding and missed the entire point of the statement.
True, very true, most phenomena can be explained thoroughly with a natural degree, but the anima remains paradoxical and unexplainable under a mechanical and naturalist paradigm
@@The0ldg0atHerbert Spencer was the person who first coined the term "survival of the fittest" and was largely and more significantly derived from his Naturalistic view of life. His theories regarding naturalism bled into creating a world understood solely by nature and nature alone exempt from the influence of God. So "survival of the fittest" was his mantra which driven partly by Darwins book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life". "or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life"" should give you a clue why he would be called a White Supremacist today as he embraced the idea that Europeans where the favoured race. Capitalism was not the reason but naturalism
Man, you're channel is incredible! Your content is great! Congratulations And thank you for the discussion, i'll get deeper into this for sure, and i'll spread the word haha!
Love your videos!! I’ve always wondered if the things I learn at school are 100% accurate. Thank you for allowing me to think from different perspectives! If possible, could you do a video on epigenetics and the interaction of our genes and the environment?
The array of genes you possess is partially responsive, and like brain cells and muscle fibers, most of them are off at any time unless you’re discovering a real creative way to die. Epigenes are merely a class of genes dramatically less likely to activate than the rest of your genes.
I find that last segment incredibly fucking fascinanting because that same sort of approach (Environment and subjects as interrelated, mutually influencing parts of a system) is currently extremely relevant in humanities in fields like geography (As in, societies and their environments mutually influencing eachother). Its so bloody interesting seeing these sorts of concepts applied to rather different fields, as, in retrospective, shows a lot of their similarities, as well as their own positions within the own development of sciences as a whole. Epistemology is cool as fuck
It is obvious to anyone who has engaged in deep thought, that such intense pondering requires one to sit down, secure their elbow onto the leg, and rest the chin upon the hand. Clearly, as the only species known to engage in this deep thought activity, we are also the only species that requires this extended thinking platform, otherwise known as the "chin".
This was so well made and funny. Have you adapted your videos to gain the engagement unmotivated college kids who don't want to read the original paper.
Your videos are amazing man! Nice animations, funny moments, simple explanations, great pacing! Keep doing it my man! I hope this channel grows as it deserves. This content has great quality
My one criticism so far at 6:45. A deleterious mutation is a mutation that lowers an organism’s fitness. It doesn’t make a useless protein but a harmful one
Just be warned that the chin actually does have a purpose: it's a lever that allows us to have less chewing muscles than Neanderthals and still bite harder than them, this in turn allows for globularity of the head which almost certainly has something to do with our evolutionary success vs other Human (but chin-less) species.
2:07 - Your illustrative experiment does not include mutations. Without them we would have homogeneous populations and no evolution at all. The only prerequisite for a mutation not to be eliminated by selection is that it is not overly detrimental. Geneticists and other biologists would be well advised to use more mathematics and less hand-waving. Then there would be no "debates" about gene selection vs. kin selection vs. species selection etc. Mechanisms are the same, simple and few. The rest are just emergent effects stemming from statistics. With all due (umm, due?) respect for all these quarreling evolutionary biologists, all what you said in this video is a no brainer, and subject to pretty elementary mathematical analysis. People, evolution is not a religion with different sects, but scientific discipline which should employ quantitative methods.
Great video. I was familiar with many of the ideas presented, but it's been a long time since I learned about them and you did a great job of presenting the information in a concise and entertaining way.
As a hard determinist, I'm triggered by the gall to even ask such a question. Everything that happens in existance is part of a larger equation that we can sometimes peer into its workings to predict what is going to happen next. Nothing is random, everything's already happened... and I'm not saying this just to feel better about the 3 pigeon stinkbombs that fell on my jacket and beanie this afternoon.
You're the only non-textile manufacturer besides myself I've seen try to pull so many threads together. Big Liebnitz fan here, Voltaire straw-manned him, which made funny satire but bad argument. What does random mean, anyway? Back when, I noted that even if we could assume random mutation of genes, evolution couldn't be random if it SELECTED for fitness. (I had to point out that "fit" meant, not Most Buff, but tetrised into the eat and be eaten chain.) 16:37 In spite of Punctuated Equilibrium, Gould was considered a strict Darwinian, but I don't think even Darwin was a strict Darwinian. Wallace was the OG (Original Gradualist). Competitive publication problem, solved by cooperation, who'da thunk? Loving the advance of epigenetics! Give ol' Lamarck a crumb. In summary: What fun you are! Thanks for looking at all the little reduced pieces and making a coherent and detailed picture of them.
Nice video! Btw chins evolved to better protect teeth from punches, we are one of the few animals that instinctively punch, also it's an attractive sexual trait because woman like manly men who can take a punch, think about it like a lion's mane sort of deal.
Also beards are more masculine traits like chins that work together to exentuate the jawline, maybe some intimidation factor and posibly may help punches slide off a bit
The jaw is one of the hardest bones in the body. I don't buy the fisticuffs notion though. However, until a century or so ago, a damaged jaw from any impact could reduce your chances of survival. imo, until the advent of boxing gloves and Hollywood, you'd be better off hitting places that weren't the most likely place on the body to break some bones on your hand.
@@oakfat5178 Pre-gloves boxing and bareknuckle boxing still around today disagrees. Hitting the chin with your larger knuckles is the safest spot to hit for a clean punch to the head and hitting the head is the only effective way of incapacitating someone when weapons and grappling is not an option. Wrestling/grappling is way more important than boxing though and what fights reduce to if unarmed and not as rulebound. Wrestling is much more common as a sport for competition and play in the past and present since injury is much less likely. And elbows, feet, knees, and forehead are good for striking as well. Punching safely and effectively is definitely more of a refined, trained technique than it is instinctual fighting.
@@skyworm8006 In the journal The Physician and Sports Medicine, the article "Epidemiology of professional bare-knuckle fighting injuries" suggests that jw injuries and concussions were fairly unlikely in bare-knuckle fighting, compared with fractured hands and facial bones. Jaw bones are harder than knuckles, but if you think it's low risk, by all means try it out on a consenting adult's chin. A throat punch has been known to kill and often temporarily disables the victim. The temple is the thinnest part of the skull, and easier to break than the jaw. You might damage the cervical spine nerves with a punch to the back of the neck.
While random mutation can influence evolution, it's important to note that natural selection is still by far the most important factor. Mutations that may seem neutral may actually have very slight positive or negative effects on a species. Over a long enough period of time, mutations that have slight negative effects would be weeded out and vice versa for positive traits. You can see this in traits such as not having wisdom teeth, this has only a slight benefit but is still naturally selected on.
If only there were a way to prove that baseless assertion. Two hundred years of the theory and there isn’t one because that would mean having access to information that is simple not available. Of course environment exerts an evolutionary pressure. But it’s not a sufficient explanation for most things in complex organisms because there’s so much that’s simply superfluous to a given environment so it isn’t the environment that’s determinative. A “better” adapted species can go extinct while a nearly useless organism survives, even over millions of years. All of your so-called explanations are “just-so” post hoc reasoning and it’s very unconvincing.
@sgttomas Species only go extinct when their environment changes faster than the species can adapt. For example, if a new species comes to compete for the same resources. There are no "better" species that go extinct randomly, and there are no "useless" species that simply survive. Keep in mind that most beneficial mutations only give a slight advantage to an individual. If luck leading to individual outcomes was stronger than this, then evolution wouldn't exist.
@@gatuarhin this is post hoc reasoning and the video provides an alternative way to approach evolution, which of course occurs. It’s just only a small part of the overall story, which is entirely inexplicable at the moment.
Natural selection is when the organisms carrying a mutation a) can reproduce sufficiently more that those without, and eventually supplant them (adapting to evolutionary niche) or B) are the only ones capable of living to reproductive age after a major change in the environment or c) after a major extinction, there seem to have been explosions of diversity among a category of organism, presumably because the environment temporarily increases the rate of mutation and/or allow for easier survival of mutations in a depopulated and less competitive period. As per the video, mutations happen all the time, at a fairly predictable rate, and most either don't allow the mutated organism to live to reproductive age, or they don't influence the organism's chances of survival either way. My Dad had three kidneys and one testicle. Those mutations didn't prevent him from reproducing, but neither I nor my sisters inherited either mutation. TLDR: Without mutations, no species could adapt to better suit its environment, there'd be nothing for natural selection to select for.
A geologist once said, "If we ever find a planet that looks like Earth we can be certain that life has existed there, because it is living organisms that have shaped it" He was referring to granite and chalk and such
When you consider the hundreds of millions of years that can span between species, it’s easy to imagine that any specific trait may be a snapshot during a process that takes eons. Consider an animated drawing. Different key frames define the overall movement, but inbetween frames may or may not be intelligible, but they are necessary to get from one key frame to the other over time. Now imagine it takes millions of years to get form one key frame to the other instead of 24 frames. You’re not going to be able to tell if that weird squishing motion or that motion blur is a defined or useful state, but it’s a process. Mutations are random by definition. Who’s to say a mutation is useful or not ? If it doesn’t hurt the species in any way, it’s just propagated until it disappears naturally over eons. Language go through the same changes over time. Their particularities may or may not be useful to communicate anything, but we gain or lose spelling, grammar or even whole words by usage, code transfer, assimilation, erosion or obsolescence. Whatever the species’ trait looks like now may or may not be useful, but it’s just a snapshot from an extremely slow motion movie.
here's where i've been on all this for a few yrs now (from the most foundational, 'on up'): *Habitat Adaption, Habitat Survival, and Habitat Dominance, for > *Feeding, Breeding, and Status, for > *Passing on: Individual and Group Genes, Social Structures, Cultural Values, and Technologies (eg, beaver dam, bee hive)
I read an article that said we have chins because if we didn’t, our jaws would split in half when we got punched in the face. It explored how chins appeared at the same time that our hands started to be capable of forming fists.
Omg I just had the same line of thinking. I deduced: males have strong chins bc females prefer those and selected for them. But why would they like them? What comes to my mind when I think of a man with a strong chin? He is perceived as Dominant and intimidating. So this could be related to males fighting? And how do people fight different from apes? They use boxing! And in Boxing you often hear that you need a strong chin to not be easily knocked out. Super interesting that you found such an article!
It could be that by chance, the jaw genes are interconnected with some genes that at some point were essential for a person to live long enough to reproduce.
Mild correction. Males have heavy chins designed to take a punch and that is what started roughly the same time frame. Look at 2 men fight now; you can see the reason. The idea that the lower jaw was incomplete has never been shown in the fossil record even of our most primate ancestors.
Did John Wayne write that article? When fish evolved, they evolved with jaw bones, and the amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds thet have branched off since there have almost all kept the jaw bone. Hominim & hominid and ape and human jaw shapes have all been niche evolution, teeth shaped to best suit the available foods eaten, and jaw shapes to best accommodate those teeth. Getting enough to eat and being able to eat it would have had a greater impact on natural selection than winning fist fights.
i know that no one is proberly going to see this but i felt like expanding of from the perfect world hypothosis you mentioned, the ideas of perfect or good and bad are just subjective perspective based ideas, if we went from this world to a world that was better or perfect in our perspective we would believe it was perfect but if we had always been on that world we would have found different problems that we proberly wouldnt have even considered or cared about if we hadnt originated there. basically what im saying is no matter how good somthing is there will always be bad and vice versa our idea of one never compleatly disapears but would just get smaller but never reach 0, so to know how good or bad our world realy is we would have to know all others. problems may seem big or small to us but may seem bigger or smaller to others. say you are poor and have just won the lottery all of the problesm you can currently think of can now be fixed, old cloths buy some new onces, hungry you can get food when ever you want, your homeless well now you can by a mansion. now lets say you were always rich but have alot of problems. the money isnt going to help with that as thoes problems have arived regarless of you having alot of money becuase thoes problems are able to exist with you having alot of money the money has no effect or meaning for thoes problems so you will have to find other solutions to thoes problems. so in short we must know everything to know one thing
Your examples showcase that more knowledge is needed to ascertain anything about the adaptionism point of view. That's true for any theory. What are the testable predictions of the other factors of evolution. What knowledge do we need to say that was a factor (say for chin growth) with reasonable confidence.
Simply regarding the title and thumbnail text, it’s important to understand that at the end of the day what natural selection is really doing is weeding out reproductively non-viable traits. It doesn’t matter if something is the best or most optimal for a given task. All that matters is that it works well enough to continue to exist. So if something randomly evolves and it works then it stays. If it doesn’t work then it goes away. In this way things that don’t negatively effect reproductive success can stick around. The point isn’t to believe that natural selection is choosing a bunch of things that work. It’s just eliminating what doesn’t. What we’re left with is traits that are beneficial and traits that don’t matter. Or traits that are harmful but still work enough to not go extinct. I don’t think natural selection is over hyped. I think people get confused when we personify it. But those nerds who actually study it don’t make the mistakes that lay people do.
I would suggest to the presenter that he reads all of Stephen Jay Gould's essays before using him to bolster his case. Gould was a bit of a contrarian, and liked to turn things on their head, but he was a committed Darwinist, and defended Darwin against all comers. His biggest argument was against slow and steady evolution. He proposed the idea of "punctuated equilibrium", that is, long periods of relatvie stasis, interspersed wth shorter periods of rapid evolution. Most famously he argued with Richard Dawkins on this point. Personally, I think Dawkins was more correct, but I also think Gould had a point. There could very well be relatively rapid episodes of evolution amongst the more stately propcess of evolution. I also think they more or less resolved their differences before Gould passed away in 2002. Nothing in nature is really all that cut and dried, but Darwinian evolution still rules the roost. Natural selection is a very powerful force, and is responsible for most of what we see in organisms today.
there is a dynamic hidden in the gene and physical interaction of chemicals and cell behavior, against an environment, evolution is not as random as it may seem, families of species could be sharing a common evolution program that guides them through a subset of possibilities way faster and directed than we can prove right now. This program is life itself and it's extremely expensive to model accurately. Life is not only species and specimens, it's also a system that generates them, this is what we don't understand clearly, we can only point at some small aspects participating in the system. The high level understanding isn't there yet. Take nutrition for instance, we don't even have a clear picture of all the gut bacteria species and how they interact and help or work against us. We can't heal someone that has the wrong ones, it's still a science in its infancy, but it's critical to health and it's the most important aspect of any animal life. We can't read someone's epi-genetics, we can't read someone's immune system state (all memory gathered, all cells activation state, all produced antibody) we can't fix hormonal issues at the root (only compensate with huge side effects), mental health is still hard to improve. We seem to improve our way of life but disease rate skyrockets All of this is about only one species and we don't have a clue or we need all the science strength to diagnose one individual as a study only partially at huge costs. We're sill far from fully simulating an animal lineage to prove any theory. I suspect that individuals control their descendant evolution in a limited way but in a directed way, only a few generation exposed to big changes will evolve drastically. Then there is a superseding system in which descendant must belong, this system belongs to the species family, this system evolves slower and you do not need to evolve it a lot to produce seemingly completely different species. For instance cats, apes, dogs, horses have many variants but they share most of this framework within their group, what we need to learn is how signals go to living experience to evolution, what are the variable that are controlled when producing offspring. Could we live better lives by improving the evolution quality to our descendants ?
This is great news for me tbh I was always a little troubled by adaptation alone It just seemed to me like a creature adapting to its environment by randomly mutating and getting obscenely lucky by evolving the proverbial peanut butter and jelly gene would be just.. WAY too unlikely, and take far too long. Genetic drift, combined with a more complete consideration of the relationship between organisms and their environments, and maybe some natural selection sprinkled in for zest, sits much better with me
Same. Adaptationism is just post hoc reasoning which is a really fallacious way to go about asserting things. Seriously, try the same approach in the rest of your life and we’d call it superstition. Silly biologists. Never trying to be consistent in their thinking they reach any conclusion so long as enough others assent to it they call “facts”.
wum adaptaion alone??? this is adaptation at work randomness-bad gets removed-good and not bad->good ones are expressed not bad ones are not expressed. yk just over millions of years
@@redditreviews9698 except the video would like to draw your attention to the controversy of that idea beginning in the 1980s and today is regarded as an anachronism in the evolution of evolutionary theory. Ironic 😉
Amazing video. The niche construction thought is simply beautiful. It is probably very common thing to occur. We as humans took this to another level by adapting our environment to us (spanning from building cities to occupying space on the ISS). An interesting example came to my mind. It has been shown, that as we are using our smartphones, the number of connections between out thumb and the brain is increasing. Moreover, in some cases, the thigh is more responsive to touch (vibrations) as we carry our phones in a pocket. This isn't really a matter of evolution though. It simply isn't that fast. It's more like an adaptation of our nervous system to a new part of the enviroment. But we made this environment possible in the first place...
No, sir: chins are well known to be not a human trait but an Homo sapiens specific trait (no other Homo species had it) and they are also well known to serve a purpose: our jaws are immensely more efficient with chins than without them, our bite is surprisingly powerful in spite of relatively weak chewing muscles thanks to them. It's a lever!
The truth is the binary "Neutral/useful" is likely too simplistic all change have some effect to sexual/natural selection. change totally neutral will have to be very rare and likely might become positif/negative at some point in a continuously changing environment.
I'd think that when a mutation for a new trait occurs though, the large the current population the less likely it would be to spread... but, that said, in a larger population you'd have more random mutations occuring, so the overall chance of one of them spreading would remain fairly high. So, if the gene for chins appeared in humans (or one of our ancestors) it's chance of going from one individual to dominant would largely depend on it being a survival trait, or at the very least that individual having a good set of other genes. If it's spandrels, then I'd argue that the chin is not the adaptation... the smaller jaw do to smaller teeth would be the adaptation. The chin would just be an artifact of that adaptation. In addition to deleterious, neutral, and advantageous mutations I'd think a lot of mutations are situational. A mutation that makes you taller is great for a creature that eats leaves off of trees, but maybe not so good for a creature that lives tight caves.
I cannot tell you how often I refer to this video when explaining the adaptionist assumption in fields like behavioral evolution and so on. That is may be just an assumption and we should probably treat it as such until proven otherwise.
It's also important to note that previously useless traits can become useful again, selected for. As an example: The Chin (by raw chance) is sexually dimorphic, and is, as a result, small chins are strongly selected against in men, but not in women. Thus, the Chin started off useless, but became useful at a later time as a way of peacocking.
Describing it as selecting against makes more sense than selecting for. Although it’s all just words in the end. People get the idea that NS is creating traits or choosing from them. All it’s really doing is describing the fact that if something doesn’t replicate genes over the course of long time spans than that thing ceases to exist. So by definition, all things that exist are good enough at existing that they still exist. And if they aren’t good enough the go away (or get selected against by NS if you want to put it that way).
19:00 Would explain humans shifting from big and strong to medium and smart over time in terms of sexual success, especially in modern times. Humans created the selection pressures via society and pushed out the previous pressure from hunter-gatherers.
I instantly subscribed. You are destined to have at least 1 million subs soon. I'm an economist but I'veread Stephen J Gould ( Panda's Thumb?) What you are saying is super intriguing. I wi.l now have to study this. Than you.
this video is absolutely amazing! It even cleared up some questions I had about netrual evolution, which is part of an exam I have this week. Thank you, and godspeed SubAnima
I mean, there are a few environmental factors that organisms don't change, such as surface gravity, mantle composition, and irradiation of our planet by our star. A whole manner of other things have been created or changed by organisms though, such as atmospheric composition (see: great oxygen catastrophe and/or global warming) or the composition of the earth's crust (burrowing animals, lichen, root systems, human mining) and a whole lot more. So while there _is_ an environment without organisms, the vast _majority_ of the environment truly is because of organisms, and the independent part keeps shrinking as us humans continue to push technology to it's limits. I mean, we've arguably been the first ones to finally crack open the lithosphere and extract stuff. That has probably not been done by a life form before.
Great video! One minor complaint is that chins are an odd example to use, given that people with weak chins are typically far less attractive than other people. I don’t know how universal that viewpoint is, so I don’t know if attractiveness is a plausible explanation for modern chins, but most of your audience probably do view chins as more attractive than lacking them (even though super strong chins are far more polarizing), and may decide natural selection to be a more favorable interpretation of that particular trait than random chance. Also, quick question, isn’t it possible for new genes to occasionally arise out of non-coding DNA. Obviously not often given the low probabilities involved, and even more rarely positive, but isn’t it a possibility, or does something prevent noncoding DNA from ever being recognized as coding DNA again, and new genes have to always arise from duplicates of existing ones?
Awesome video! Held my interest and I have no background in such topics. But from various things I've read or seen about medicine, science, and their attending philosophies as of late, holistic approaches are succeeding and age old schisms becoming bridged as false dichotomies are revealed in thinking. Like neutralism vs adaptationism, nature vs nurture, etc. Thank you for sharing
Thanks so much for the feedback! Glad to hear it wasn’t too complex. I think this century will be very interesting for the development of biological theory indeed :)) - Jake
Great video! Also, genetic drift can destroy important genes which are currently neutral, but significant longer term. For example human's (and relatives) loss of ability to synthesize vitamin C, though its loss could also have been beneficial. Another is cats losing the ability to synthesize Taurine, which is only found in meat, which is all cats eat. These changes could severely harm the emergence of some herbivore cat or humans ability to travel the seas eating nothing but dried jerky and hardtack. Even if these examples turn out to be advantageous, it seems clear that genetic drift COULD destroy significant, but neutral genes, which hurt the long-term adaptability of a species.
Genetic drift can destroy important genes that are currently beneficial if they're held by a small enough percentage of the population. It is pure randomness, even if your population has better odds of surviving that doesn't guarantee anything. Another part of the neutral theory which wasn't touched on in this video is that not only are beneficial mutations rare, they're made even rarer by the fact that genetic drift destroys a significant amount of them. Within the first few generations of a gene's existence it is very vulnerable to simply having the entire population carrying that gene be wiped out completely. It doesn't matter how beneficial the gene is, there's always a chance that every member of the species with that gene is killed by a predator when we're talking about a gene that less than ten individuals may have.
This has an interesting implication for machine learning. Natural selection was a basis for hope for genetic algorithms to create incredible effects as our computers become more and more powerful (quantum computing was especially promising for this). But if the evolution itself, far more powerful than any computer we can dream of creating, gets stuck in its way and never changes, because positive changes in the functional element of DNA by random chance are extremely rare, this dampen the enthusiasm for self-improving programs, who will improve themself by the process of replication and evolution.
There are a lot of things about the human body that don’t make a ton of sense. I’ve wondered most about our torsos. Every other species of hominid, even Neanderthals, appears to have extra room for digestive organs, based on the shape of the ribs…which would imply none of them cooked their food, or at least didn’t know how to slow cook food. Then there is the aquatic adaptations. Sweating, sub dermal fat deposits. Able to hold breath. African tribes with the starts of a third eyelid, etc. One of the bigger benefits of our intelligence was probably the consistent and systemic use of aquatic resources for survival. And it appears to be mostly unique to us.
I think I love this channel. Obviously (now that I've watched this video) we're attracted to the world we see, hear and know. And that's the one we believe in. But there's more to a pale blue dot than you'd know from a distant fly-by on the way back to Andromeda Z-89/&~55.
I think we have a chicken and egg thing going on here. I totally agree with you that changes that arise generation to generation are entirely independent of the environment. But, it is definitely the case that *if* one of those changes makes an organism more fit for survival, it is more likely to survive. Natural selection has nothing to do with what genetic changes *appear* in the population - it has to do with the likelihood of each change *suviving*. When you look at the incredible complexity of life on Earth in general, you immediately recognize the need for something like natural selection. The unvierse just hasn't been here long enough for us to have "just gotten here randomly." There is some kind of engine contributing to the process.
Agh my picky eater autistic brain cringed at the thought of a nutella sandwich and especially at the thought of mixing nutella with jam (yuck!), but I adored the video. Your energy is great and your organization and presentation of the subject matter is top notch!
What you determine as the main drive of genetic variation depends on what you are focusing on. If you are focusing on the morphological changes, those selfish genes, or every individual transcription error. All those meaningless transcription errors that do nothing positive for the organism pile up in the gene pool. Passing from generation to generation doing nothing. Might do nothing for a million or more years, but they are in those genes for all that time just sitting there doing nothing. Then another transcription error (in another gene or maybe even in the same codon) does a thing, and that junk portion of the earlier gene isn't so junk anymore. This is where natural selection first starts to do anything at all. But it is also where the transcription error first makes any effect at all as well. So what is of more important then? The process itself. Focusing on the natural selection side of things or the transcription errors misses the boat completely. It is the process itself that is has all the hidden gems waiting to be found. Selecting for morphological change is easy. We have done it with everything from bananas to dogs. Increasing transcription errors is pretty easy as well. We are pretty good at giving things cancer and using CRISPR. Understanding all of those moving parts and deliberately manipulating them is what is really important.
I’ve always thought of rephrasing “the survival of the fittest” more accurately as “ survival of the mostly random, including the things that are just enough above unfitness not to get the organism killed”
@@name-nam lol “shorten” I know there’s got to be a much less clunky way to say it, but it was a spur of the moment TH-cam comment. Maybe something more like “survival of the highly random yet not egregiously unfit” or something. I don’t know. A better wordsmith than me should come up with a more pithy phrase
this is why scientists are more excited when the same trait evolves again and again independently, then we are more confident that there are adaptation advantages
This is pretty interesting in the context of genetic evolution - individual genes compete to reproduce most effectively within a genome, but a common end result of that competition is complex multicellular life, due to the emergent patterns of those genes cooperating for increased fitness. A trait that is a spandrel in a macroscopic perspective can easily be the result of a gene or genes that's reliant on other genes with more overtly beneficial traits at that level, or even be the product of a gene that's successful at the genetic level and merely neutral to the organism as a whole.
Im fascinated that Leibniz argument is explained by the Architect at the end of The Matrix: Reloaded. I know that scene seemed dull to a lot of people but im still fascinated that conversation happened in a blockbuster movie.
However they are completely different. Architect had to deal with humans with specific traits, and humans are not adapted to the Utopia at all, we are adapted to the environment where there is conflict, aggression and the need to compete for limited resources. All powerful God could just create different humans to fit this better world. Or just artificially support unstable world if it is not possible to be self sustained for some reason.
No one knew anything about genes when Mendel was doing his plant studies. This presentation still points out the importance of natural selection when you threw out the newspaper and peanut butter sandwich. After which, the 99% of neutral adaptions can allow variation without risking extinction. I liked that the presentation started with a question of why the chin, leading to an underappreciated aspect of genetics. Very good presentation 🏆. Definitely worth watching.
If I have a mixed bag of trail mix and I begin to shake it, quite randomly and with vast fluctuations, you'll still find that (despite some impure spots) the biggest pieces will sift themselves to the top. Evolution is random at each generation, but over time nature finds the best shapes for the best things for the most part
It's not random...but it's also not really selective. At the quantum level, still nothing is random...but it's "uncertain" There is a difference. But after that, everything is consequential. It's not deterministic, because the whole pile is quite expansive and dynamic, but it's not random because everything does follow linearly. It's just that there are more lines than you could ever possibly account for. What ends up happening is that any given factor...some chemical or compound, radiation, improper DNA recombination, any of a trillion different things...screws up a molecule somewhere. That causes the associated gene to express differently, or even not at all (and this is all without even touching epigenetics, which...holy fuck, is that a rabbit hole...). The biological consequences of that change of expression manifest in some way in the organism, and either it negatively impacts the creature in some way, or it doesn't (almost never is it actually advantageous). Over time, through similar events that additionally screw up various bits, that trait might correct itself, or become exacerbated by other circumstances, or the creature or its descendants might've just met an unrelated unlucky end, and that trait permanently died with it. At some point, it begins to impact other traits, and further changes happen, generation after generation. Eventually, either one or more given traits is impacted so thoroughly that they become functionally different from before, or a completely new trait has "finished" forming anew, or various otherwise unrelated traits combine in some odd new way. When it goes far enough, speciation happens and that's how we wind up with everything in the ecosystem. Nature or evolution doesn't have a goal, or a purpose. It's just common chemistry in particular conditions, with consequences related to the rules of chemistry. A molecule that can reproduce itself isn't going to "seek" to do so. Depending on the circumstances, it either will or it won't. If it does, then that matters. If it doesn't do so, then it doesn't matter. If it does, then there's a chance the follow-ups might do so as well. Or they might not. Life as we know it today, is just the unbroken chains of the precursor molecules that happened to kick off that streak. When life first began, it was just an assortment of unremarkable and mostly simple organic molecules floating in rich (super dirty, really) water. The conditions at the time were sufficient to cause various reactions, and certain molecules started to "eat" others they'd float next to as a result...attaching together to become larger and more complex (loosely speaking). Eventually, they'd become so large, that they'd break apart if they weren't stable enough. Some that got too big just became big, inert hunks...too big to be consumed, but unable to react and attach to anything anymore. Most of those that fractured would've lost the capacity to "consume" others because of their new structure, being consumed instead by those still proceeding. But some broke apart in ways that allowed them to continue on, but changed. Some of those developed chemistry that gave them a capacity to bond in new ways and become far, far larger than their predecessors. And it all kept growing until eventually structures similar to viruses formed, then those changed and eventually some amalgamated into prokaryotes, then eukaryotes, and on and on... 'Til...here we are. No intent. No plan. Just blind stinking luck across a field of circumstance. Not random, but not "selected" either.
@@oakfat5178 No, they haven't been. Nothing is ever random. Unpredictability and randomness aren't the same thing. Mutations have causes. Those causes can vary wildly, and they don't always cause mutations. But the fact is, no mutation just "randomly" happens. It's ALWAYS caused by something. And those causes are always circumstantial. It's not like the universe rolls a fuckin die or flips a coin. And if you want to distinguish design from naturalistic causality, that's fine. But in that case, mutations mostly haven't been natural for many millennia. Deliberate selective breeding and crossbreeding may be less direct and less precise, but they're very much a means of inducing mutation, and developing and expanding desirable traits in a population. All the cattle in the world are, and always have been in all respects, GMOs. As have been all agricultural crops since agriculture even began. That they weren't produced in a lab with equipment and a reasonably complete understanding of everything involved, has no bearing at all.
@@DoremiFasolatido1979 I was using the lay persons usage of "random". I'm crap at statistics, and pretty sure your argument about "random" as a statistical term, but if you want to go there, I won't be able to comprehend you. I scraped through 2nd year philosophy, and discovered that maths, physics and logic are three sides of the same coin, if you take any one of them far enough. I did work out a hillbilly version of statistical process control for when to calibrate a NIR machine at work. It was good enough, and thankfully no-one asked me to explain the mathematical theory behind it. I just copied examples from an Open University show I'd seen before work that morning. I'd be fine calling mutations "haphazard" or "unpredictable".
Genetic drift is most effective way of evolution in 'unknown' and 'dynamic' surroundings. The mutations with benefit ore no negative impact simply stays. (survival of the best fitted). Over numbers and in time.
Finding things that don't work isn't useless, it tests suitability, And things that don't work now might be useful in other circumstances Eg you rarely ever need the spare tire in your trunk, but if you get a flat you'll notice the usefulness of that "redundancy" Yes there are multiple factors, constraints, sources, reasons, purposes etc for everything including evolution That many things are compromises between what you can do and what you want to do Also in some ways it's subjective to your perspective and ability Kinda like the Pixar theory, the goal isn't to find an arbitrary pattern, rather the goal is to have fun making connections Similarly while we do sell for truth, that is only part of the goal, which is to utilize the stuff around us for good, however we can best define that to be You can look at dirt and say it's useless dirt, or you can say this is good soil for planting, or this is good clean sand for filtering water, or this can become glass or microchips We can look at poison as a curse to fear or tool for better hunting We can look at obstacles as obstructions or opportunities for fortifications Yes i agree that we often confuse causality, and often forget cyclicality, anthropomorphizing by projecting our perspective, or priorities onto arbitrariness Eg observation causes waveform collapse, it couldn't possibly be the titanic pressure applied to squash the waveform How does the electricity know what amperage to be at if it hasn't reached the end of the wire yet, maybe it just is, and naturally conforms to circumstances Etc That isn't to say though that patterns, reasons, etc don't exist, or even that we're completely wrong for assuming reasons and logic, just that we should be cautious and open to new interpretations and perspectives, ancients weren't wrong to postulates that powerful beings caused thunder and lightning, it was actually pretty smart, we start most scientific research by assigning unknowns, x, y, z, etc By acknowledging what we don't know and what we know we can start to puzzle out the relationships and discover details of the unknowns The problem arises, not from making hypotheses and naming variables, The problem comes when we stop asking, listening, learning, being open etc We arbitrarily call certain things disorderly, mostly along the lines of what we want and don't want, and write laws of disorder, forgetting to actually look without bias and see that fit the most part, we are disorderly, and these so called laws of entropy actually describe patterns of orderliness countering our disorderly pursuits
How much further would we have advanced in science and technology if the human ego wasn't a thing? So much time is wasted fighting over theories, not out of any search for truth, but out of sheer ego. But if it wasn't about whose name is on the paper and who gets the glory (and funding), we could just advance understanding at an exponential rate.
There is an obvious benefit to having a chin, especially for the safety conscious cyclist who wears a safety helmet, that being the chin is needed for the chin strap. Now one might argue (as you point out) that the humans might first have invented the helmet and the chin strap and from that the chin evolved. Or one might argue (more of the creationist mind set) that the creator saw that chins would be (sometime down the road) useful for that and directed evolution along that path (employing a bit of prescience in the process and added them proactively). Or maybe we just lucked out and got the chin as a spandrel or such. Either way one might get a chin out of the deal.
Also, in fist fights, the chin might give the jaw a bit more strength to take a punch in the jaw as well. So it sort of goes with being able to make a fist, something perhaps a bit unique to humans a swell.
for real, in my case I can't even finish one of these videos because I was expecting something else from the click bait titles and get something completely different..
I think the question of adaptation vs spandrels is a false dichotomy. There are multiple interacting factors which both transcend and influence the factors underlying genetic noise/signal selection and ontogeny. As one small example of what I mean, I see the human chin as a neotenic trait. If correct, this would imply the chin is somewhat both an adaptation and a spandrel, or perhaps an adaptation to a spandrelic condition. I appreciate how you describe the complexity that comes to light when we note object-subject reflexivity, and I think we get closer to the ground truth when we recognize subtle nuance in the vast complexity which characterizes natural systems. There remain countless questions in anthropogeny, as in natural history and speciation as a whole. Hybrid genetics is emerging as a surprisingly relevant field. Neoteny and domestication syndrome continue to prove their merit while opening new seemingly intractible questions. I am suspicious of any theory that starts with the belief that a large portion of the human genome is nonfuctional. The evidence from actual genetic studies is that we don’t understand enough about genetics to declare what function various codes have with any certainty, and that most of the genome seems to have some critical function as far as we can tell.
Watched this while eating a peanut butter bread with jam, and decided to subscribe.
relatable. I had just finished mine.
And here I am at the crossroads, to make a PB&J or to Not make a PB&J.
@@___Truth___ I chose oatmeal with fruit.
You guys are all sick.😒
Don't you know you should never eat plants babies.
They fill them with poisons and addictive zombie chemicals, to enslave you to raise their babies, then turn you into compost at an early age.
Plants have been around much longer than us, and are far more cunning and dangerous. 🙄
So it's come to this. I'm out of bread but still have peanut butter and jam... and I've got some newspapers lying around. Wish me luck - I'm so hungry I'm feeling deleterious...
Great video! One critique: I think a substantial number of biologist would disagree with referring to DNA that doesn't code for protein as "non-functional". That DNA impacts the cell whether it is the energy used for the frequent replication and transcription that DNA, or the interaction that DNA (and it's RNA) has with other molecules in the cell, or cis-regulatory elements within that DNA etc. The function of that DNA is typically more robust to point mutations, but that doesn't make that DNA non-functional
It is non-functional in terms of protein synthesis.
Yeah, it's horrible obsolete vocabulary. "Junk DNA" does encode and is functional, it's just not the bits where the protein chain are encoded as such but we're not just protein, we are "order".
If human close to chimpanzee doesn’t have chin as we only had it, we call ourselves the ‘Chinpanzee’
Haha funny!
Ah I have a bit of prognathism (my lower jaw is a bit more protruding than normal), and I perked up, thinking I might be more evolved than my fellow humans. Guess not... Haha!
@@carmensavu5122Hapsburg Jaw
I think accepting the assumption that a majority of DNA "has no function" is a fraught position to take. We thought a lot *more* of it was "junk" just a few years ago. There's a certain amount of hubris in the ideas here. as they make the almost manifestly wrong assumption that we now do understand what *all* DNA does, whereas we have a history of just ignoring the parts we don't understand now.
Agreed. This is one of those videos that I believe will not age well as we come to understand more about DNA
There are some bits of our chromosomal makeup that are retroviral.
Ditto. But the point is not that it has no function but that it is variability that doesn't significantly alters fitness, that's what "neutral" means. Like people having slightly bigger or slightly smaller noses, slightly thicker or thinner eyebrows, etc. (mind you that skin color is not neutral, it was driven by dramatic selective pressures: solar protection first, vitamin D urgency later).
It's not like it has no function, but it doesn't encode proteins.
Exactly the same thing happened with the brain in the past
Thanks for actually explaining pangloss and not just saying "it's not important"
Interesting fact related to the panda segment. The evolution of the human thumb (enabling more complex tool use) is a similar example of pleiotropic changes put into motion by the older changes in the foot to allow long distance, energy efficient bipedalism. I would love to see a video on all the features of human evolution that set us apart from other species along these lines.
For a second I thought he was going to say "The male panda's genitals no longer serve any purpose."
Have been looking for a theoretical biology/ philosophy of biology channel since forever. Happy to have found one now!
0:22 - Without waiting to watch more, my answer is "Why not? It doesn't harm..." I am curious in which direction will you go...
Drift is very real but only shuffling in the end. If your people randomly gets a bad hand, it will still lose in the end. Natural selection is more about culling the less fit than selecting super-fit ones, although by eliminating the worst hands, you end up with the ones with the best actually existing hands.
Thank you. Finally someone has simplified this debate to a level I understand. On "no environment without an organism", sorry, failing to grasp this concept as Big Bang, whole of lot exploding stars and billions of years passed without any organism present. Maybe I am missing something.
An environment is not defined plainly as the physical space organisms inhabit, but as the conglomerate of space and resources relevant to the organism you're studying. Bacteria and mammals might share a physical space, but their environments are differently defined cause you would highlight the relevant aspects of it for each group to define their environments. And because organisms change those relevant aspects to fit them better, there's no environment without organisms.
Darwin lived in an era in which natural theology was still popularly used to explain the existence of biological function (that is, god created organisms to live in certain ways), and introducing the idea that function could be created and maintained naturally (by natural selection) was revolutionary. But more than a century later we find the possibility of natural selection obvious and intuitive, so now we are free to investigate all of the traits of organisms that are non-functional, or at least non-optimal. Darwin himself discussed this in terms of sexual selection, of course.
A similar debate happened in the history of geology. Initially geologists believed that Earth was largely shaped by catastrophic events, including the biblical flood. In response, other geologists argued that given enough time even gradual, uniform forces could change the face of the planet, and we don't need to use religious myths to explain things. Now we understand that the Earth does change slowly over long periods, but it also suffers periodic catastrophes, like erupting volcanoes, ice ages, and asteroid impacts.
The problem was many capitalist oriented mind saw it as the zero sum game (winners take all) between enterprises and coined the expression survival of the fittest while it just says natural selection logic is about the non-survival of the non-fit to their current environment.
@@The0ldg0atI think that it's partly an issue with the fluidity of semantic meaning. Something being fit for purpose just means it's features don't cause unnecessary frictions when applied to a specific purpose. When that purpose is survival, then it should just mean those with features that better help them survive, will survive. The catchphrase is not wrong but the question of what fitness looks like depends entirely on the situation. On its own It's an empty phrase that people read with a colloquial understanding and missed the entire point of the statement.
True, very true, most phenomena can be explained thoroughly with a natural degree, but the anima remains paradoxical and unexplainable under a mechanical and naturalist paradigm
@@The0ldg0atHerbert Spencer was the person who first coined the term "survival of the fittest" and was largely and more significantly derived from his Naturalistic view of life. His theories regarding naturalism bled into creating a world understood solely by nature and nature alone exempt from the influence of God. So "survival of the fittest" was his mantra which driven partly by Darwins book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life". "or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life"" should give you a clue why he would be called a White Supremacist today as he embraced the idea that Europeans where the favoured race. Capitalism was not the reason but naturalism
If I could save a reply this would be the one. Geology is fascinating and I appreciated the context I wouldn't have remembered otherwise
this video needs like 10,000 views
Thanks againnnnn!!
it has 20k views now
@@thecritiquer9407 It's about time
Man, you're channel is incredible!
Your content is great! Congratulations
And thank you for the discussion, i'll get deeper into this for sure, and i'll spread the word haha!
well researched, insightful and simply explained. thank you so much
Love your videos!! I’ve always wondered if the things I learn at school are 100% accurate. Thank you for allowing me to think from different perspectives! If possible, could you do a video on epigenetics and the interaction of our genes and the environment?
Different environments select different characteristics.
The array of genes you possess is partially responsive, and like brain cells and muscle fibers, most of them are off at any time unless you’re discovering a real creative way to die. Epigenes are merely a class of genes dramatically less likely to activate than the rest of your genes.
I find that last segment incredibly fucking fascinanting because that same sort of approach (Environment and subjects as interrelated, mutually influencing parts of a system) is currently extremely relevant in humanities in fields like geography (As in, societies and their environments mutually influencing eachother). Its so bloody interesting seeing these sorts of concepts applied to rather different fields, as, in retrospective, shows a lot of their similarities, as well as their own positions within the own development of sciences as a whole. Epistemology is cool as fuck
Love your videos, man! Keep up the fantastic work.
Thanks you so much!
It is obvious to anyone who has engaged in deep thought, that such intense pondering requires one to sit down, secure their elbow onto the leg, and rest the chin upon the hand. Clearly, as the only species known to engage in this deep thought activity, we are also the only species that requires this extended thinking platform, otherwise known as the "chin".
This was so well made and funny. Have you adapted your videos to gain the engagement unmotivated college kids who don't want to read the original paper.
Thank you for the kind words, appreciate it!
Your videos are amazing man! Nice animations, funny moments, simple explanations, great pacing! Keep doing it my man! I hope this channel grows as it deserves. This content has great quality
My one criticism so far at 6:45. A deleterious mutation is a mutation that lowers an organism’s fitness. It doesn’t make a useless protein but a harmful one
I think what he meant was a mutation that turned a useful protein into a useless one, which is by definition bad for the organism
Fantastic! I would definitely use this as a supplement to readings and lectures. You even broke down the Panglossian part of it!
Thank you!!
Just be warned that the chin actually does have a purpose: it's a lever that allows us to have less chewing muscles than Neanderthals and still bite harder than them, this in turn allows for globularity of the head which almost certainly has something to do with our evolutionary success vs other Human (but chin-less) species.
2:07 - Your illustrative experiment does not include mutations. Without them we would have homogeneous populations and no evolution at all. The only prerequisite for a mutation not to be eliminated by selection is that it is not overly detrimental.
Geneticists and other biologists would be well advised to use more mathematics and less hand-waving. Then there would be no "debates" about gene selection vs. kin selection vs. species selection etc. Mechanisms are the same, simple and few. The rest are just emergent effects stemming from statistics.
With all due (umm, due?) respect for all these quarreling evolutionary biologists, all what you said in this video is a no brainer, and subject to pretty elementary mathematical analysis. People, evolution is not a religion with different sects, but scientific discipline which should employ quantitative methods.
Great video. I was familiar with many of the ideas presented, but it's been a long time since I learned about them and you did a great job of presenting the information in a concise and entertaining way.
As a hard determinist, I'm triggered by the gall to even ask such a question. Everything that happens in existance is part of a larger equation that we can sometimes peer into its workings to predict what is going to happen next. Nothing is random, everything's already happened... and I'm not saying this just to feel better about the 3 pigeon stinkbombs that fell on my jacket and beanie this afternoon.
There cannot be a coincidence in an inherently deterministic world
I appreciate your click bait title to your video. Kinda overhyped is understating the facts of all scientific studies. Great video !
You're the only non-textile manufacturer besides myself I've seen try to pull so many threads together. Big Liebnitz fan here, Voltaire straw-manned him, which made funny satire but bad argument. What does random mean, anyway? Back when, I noted that even if we could assume random mutation of genes, evolution couldn't be random if it SELECTED for fitness. (I had to point out that "fit" meant, not Most Buff, but tetrised into the eat and be eaten chain.) 16:37 In spite of Punctuated Equilibrium, Gould was considered a strict Darwinian, but I don't think even Darwin was a strict Darwinian. Wallace was the OG (Original Gradualist). Competitive publication problem, solved by cooperation, who'da thunk? Loving the advance of epigenetics! Give ol' Lamarck a crumb. In summary: What fun you are! Thanks for looking at all the little reduced pieces and making a coherent and detailed picture of them.
Nice video! Btw chins evolved to better protect teeth from punches, we are one of the few animals that instinctively punch, also it's an attractive sexual trait because woman like manly men who can take a punch, think about it like a lion's mane sort of deal.
Also beards are more masculine traits like chins that work together to exentuate the jawline, maybe some intimidation factor and posibly may help punches slide off a bit
This is my understanding as well
The jaw is one of the hardest bones in the body. I don't buy the fisticuffs notion though.
However, until a century or so ago, a damaged jaw from any impact could reduce your chances of survival.
imo, until the advent of boxing gloves and Hollywood, you'd be better off hitting places that weren't the most likely place on the body to break some bones on your hand.
@@oakfat5178 Pre-gloves boxing and bareknuckle boxing still around today disagrees. Hitting the chin with your larger knuckles is the safest spot to hit for a clean punch to the head and hitting the head is the only effective way of incapacitating someone when weapons and grappling is not an option. Wrestling/grappling is way more important than boxing though and what fights reduce to if unarmed and not as rulebound. Wrestling is much more common as a sport for competition and play in the past and present since injury is much less likely. And elbows, feet, knees, and forehead are good for striking as well. Punching safely and effectively is definitely more of a refined, trained technique than it is instinctual fighting.
@@skyworm8006 In the journal The Physician and Sports Medicine, the article "Epidemiology of professional bare-knuckle fighting injuries"
suggests that jw injuries and concussions were fairly unlikely in bare-knuckle fighting, compared with fractured hands and facial bones.
Jaw bones are harder than knuckles, but if you think it's low risk, by all means try it out on a consenting adult's chin.
A throat punch has been known to kill and often temporarily disables the victim.
The temple is the thinnest part of the skull, and easier to break than the jaw.
You might damage the cervical spine nerves with a punch to the back of the neck.
While random mutation can influence evolution, it's important to note that natural selection is still by far the most important factor. Mutations that may seem neutral may actually have very slight positive or negative effects on a species. Over a long enough period of time, mutations that have slight negative effects would be weeded out and vice versa for positive traits. You can see this in traits such as not having wisdom teeth, this has only a slight benefit but is still naturally selected on.
If only there were a way to prove that baseless assertion. Two hundred years of the theory and there isn’t one because that would mean having access to information that is simple not available. Of course environment exerts an evolutionary pressure. But it’s not a sufficient explanation for most things in complex organisms because there’s so much that’s simply superfluous to a given environment so it isn’t the environment that’s determinative. A “better” adapted species can go extinct while a nearly useless organism survives, even over millions of years. All of your so-called explanations are “just-so” post hoc reasoning and it’s very unconvincing.
@sgttomas Species only go extinct when their environment changes faster than the species can adapt. For example, if a new species comes to compete for the same resources. There are no "better" species that go extinct randomly, and there are no "useless" species that simply survive. Keep in mind that most beneficial mutations only give a slight advantage to an individual. If luck leading to individual outcomes was stronger than this, then evolution wouldn't exist.
@@gatuarhin this is post hoc reasoning and the video provides an alternative way to approach evolution, which of course occurs. It’s just only a small part of the overall story, which is entirely inexplicable at the moment.
Natural selection is when the organisms carrying a mutation
a) can reproduce sufficiently more that those without, and eventually supplant them (adapting to evolutionary niche) or
B) are the only ones capable of living to reproductive age after a major change in the environment or
c) after a major extinction, there seem to have been explosions of diversity among a category of organism, presumably because the environment temporarily increases the rate of mutation and/or allow for easier survival of mutations in a depopulated and less competitive period.
As per the video, mutations happen all the time, at a fairly predictable rate, and most either don't allow the mutated organism to live to reproductive age, or they don't influence the organism's chances of survival either way.
My Dad had three kidneys and one testicle.
Those mutations didn't prevent him from reproducing, but neither I nor my sisters inherited either mutation.
TLDR: Without mutations, no species could adapt to better suit its environment, there'd be nothing for natural selection to select for.
Wonderfully constructed video essay and thank you for all the new to me ideas you exposed me to!
A geologist once said, "If we ever find a planet that looks like Earth we can be certain that life has existed there, because it is living organisms that have shaped it"
He was referring to granite and chalk and such
When you consider the hundreds of millions of years that can span between species, it’s easy to imagine that any specific trait may be a snapshot during a process that takes eons. Consider an animated drawing. Different key frames define the overall movement, but inbetween frames may or may not be intelligible, but they are necessary to get from one key frame to the other over time. Now imagine it takes millions of years to get form one key frame to the other instead of 24 frames. You’re not going to be able to tell if that weird squishing motion or that motion blur is a defined or useful state, but it’s a process. Mutations are random by definition. Who’s to say a mutation is useful or not ? If it doesn’t hurt the species in any way, it’s just propagated until it disappears naturally over eons. Language go through the same changes over time. Their particularities may or may not be useful to communicate anything, but we gain or lose spelling, grammar or even whole words by usage, code transfer, assimilation, erosion or obsolescence.
Whatever the species’ trait looks like now may or may not be useful, but it’s just a snapshot from an extremely slow motion movie.
Great video, really good job with condensing so much work and theory down to such easy-to-understand explanations.
here's where i've been on all this for a few yrs now (from the most foundational, 'on up'):
*Habitat Adaption, Habitat Survival, and Habitat Dominance, for >
*Feeding, Breeding, and Status, for >
*Passing on: Individual and Group Genes, Social Structures, Cultural Values, and Technologies (eg, beaver dam, bee hive)
This channel deserves more subscribers. Some of the best explanations I’ve ever seen.
I read an article that said we have chins because if we didn’t, our jaws would split in half when we got punched in the face. It explored how chins appeared at the same time that our hands started to be capable of forming fists.
That’s very interesting. Do you have a link to the article?
Omg I just had the same line of thinking. I deduced: males have strong chins bc females prefer those and selected for them. But why would they like them? What comes to my mind when I think of a man with a strong chin? He is perceived as Dominant and intimidating. So this could be related to males fighting? And how do people fight different from apes? They use boxing! And in Boxing you often hear that you need a strong chin to not be easily knocked out. Super interesting that you found such an article!
It could be that by chance, the jaw genes are interconnected with some genes that at some point were essential for a person to live long enough to reproduce.
Mild correction. Males have heavy chins designed to take a punch and that is what started roughly the same time frame. Look at 2 men fight now; you can see the reason.
The idea that the lower jaw was incomplete has never been shown in the fossil record even of our most primate ancestors.
Did John Wayne write that article?
When fish evolved, they evolved with jaw bones, and the amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds thet have branched off since there have almost all kept the jaw bone.
Hominim & hominid and ape and human jaw shapes have all been niche evolution, teeth shaped to best suit the available foods eaten, and jaw shapes to best accommodate those teeth.
Getting enough to eat and being able to eat it would have had a greater impact on natural selection than winning fist fights.
Thought provoking. Thanks for making it!
i know that no one is proberly going to see this but i felt like expanding of from the perfect world hypothosis you mentioned, the ideas of perfect or good and bad are just subjective perspective based ideas, if we went from this world to a world that was better or perfect in our perspective we would believe it was perfect but if we had always been on that world we would have found different problems that we proberly wouldnt have even considered or cared about if we hadnt originated there. basically what im saying is no matter how good somthing is there will always be bad and vice versa our idea of one never compleatly disapears but would just get smaller but never reach 0, so to know how good or bad our world realy is we would have to know all others. problems may seem big or small to us but may seem bigger or smaller to others.
say you are poor and have just won the lottery all of the problesm you can currently think of can now be fixed, old cloths buy some new onces, hungry you can get food when ever you want, your homeless well now you can by a mansion. now lets say you were always rich but have alot of problems. the money isnt going to help with that as thoes problems have arived regarless of you having alot of money becuase thoes problems are able to exist with you having alot of money the money has no effect or meaning for thoes problems so you will have to find other solutions to thoes problems. so in short we must know everything to know one thing
Your examples showcase that more knowledge is needed to ascertain anything about the adaptionism point of view. That's true for any theory. What are the testable predictions of the other factors of evolution. What knowledge do we need to say that was a factor (say for chin growth) with reasonable confidence.
Interesting video, really sparks a thought.
I'll be waitning for more :))
Thanks so much! Got two videos planned and will be coming out soonish. Trying to stick to one a month :))
- Jake
New here I just wanna note that all this talk about chins and then BAM yours is like, RIGHT THERE.
Simply regarding the title and thumbnail text, it’s important to understand that at the end of the day what natural selection is really doing is weeding out reproductively non-viable traits.
It doesn’t matter if something is the best or most optimal for a given task. All that matters is that it works well enough to continue to exist.
So if something randomly evolves and it works then it stays. If it doesn’t work then it goes away. In this way things that don’t negatively effect reproductive success can stick around.
The point isn’t to believe that natural selection is choosing a bunch of things that work. It’s just eliminating what doesn’t. What we’re left with is traits that are beneficial and traits that don’t matter. Or traits that are harmful but still work enough to not go extinct.
I don’t think natural selection is over hyped. I think people get confused when we personify it. But those nerds who actually study it don’t make the mistakes that lay people do.
I would suggest to the presenter that he reads all of Stephen Jay Gould's essays before using him to bolster his case. Gould was a bit of a contrarian, and liked to turn things on their head, but he was a committed Darwinist, and defended Darwin against all comers. His biggest argument was against slow and steady evolution. He proposed the idea of "punctuated equilibrium", that is, long periods of relatvie stasis, interspersed wth shorter periods of rapid evolution. Most famously he argued with Richard Dawkins on this point. Personally, I think Dawkins was more correct, but I also think Gould had a point. There could very well be relatively rapid episodes of evolution amongst the more stately propcess of evolution. I also think they more or less resolved their differences before Gould passed away in 2002. Nothing in nature is really all that cut and dried, but Darwinian evolution still rules the roost. Natural selection is a very powerful force, and is responsible for most of what we see in organisms today.
there is a dynamic hidden in the gene and physical interaction of chemicals and cell behavior, against an environment, evolution is not as random as it may seem, families of species could be sharing a common evolution program that guides them through a subset of possibilities way faster and directed than we can prove right now. This program is life itself and it's extremely expensive to model accurately. Life is not only species and specimens, it's also a system that generates them, this is what we don't understand clearly, we can only point at some small aspects participating in the system. The high level understanding isn't there yet. Take nutrition for instance, we don't even have a clear picture of all the gut bacteria species and how they interact and help or work against us. We can't heal someone that has the wrong ones, it's still a science in its infancy, but it's critical to health and it's the most important aspect of any animal life. We can't read someone's epi-genetics, we can't read someone's immune system state (all memory gathered, all cells activation state, all produced antibody) we can't fix hormonal issues at the root (only compensate with huge side effects), mental health is still hard to improve. We seem to improve our way of life but disease rate skyrockets All of this is about only one species and we don't have a clue or we need all the science strength to diagnose one individual as a study only partially at huge costs. We're sill far from fully simulating an animal lineage to prove any theory. I suspect that individuals control their descendant evolution in a limited way but in a directed way, only a few generation exposed to big changes will evolve drastically. Then there is a superseding system in which descendant must belong, this system belongs to the species family, this system evolves slower and you do not need to evolve it a lot to produce seemingly completely different species. For instance cats, apes, dogs, horses have many variants but they share most of this framework within their group, what we need to learn is how signals go to living experience to evolution, what are the variable that are controlled when producing offspring. Could we live better lives by improving the evolution quality to our descendants ?
This is great news for me tbh
I was always a little troubled by adaptation alone
It just seemed to me like a creature adapting to its environment by randomly mutating and getting obscenely lucky by evolving the proverbial peanut butter and jelly gene would be just.. WAY too unlikely, and take far too long. Genetic drift, combined with a more complete consideration of the relationship between organisms and their environments, and maybe some natural selection sprinkled in for zest, sits much better with me
Same. Adaptationism is just post hoc reasoning which is a really fallacious way to go about asserting things. Seriously, try the same approach in the rest of your life and we’d call it superstition. Silly biologists. Never trying to be consistent in their thinking they reach any conclusion so long as enough others assent to it they call “facts”.
wum adaptaion alone??? this is adaptation at work randomness-bad gets removed-good and not bad->good ones are expressed not bad ones are not expressed. yk just over millions of years
@@redditreviews9698 except the video would like to draw your attention to the controversy of that idea beginning in the 1980s and today is regarded as an anachronism in the evolution of evolutionary theory. Ironic 😉
@@redditreviews9698 Adaption still requires some mutations to be selected for and others selected against.
@@oakfat5178 uhhhh yes??? ???? Bad ones are bad and bring down fitness so only the ones with good mutations survive. That waht I'm saying
Amazing video. The niche construction thought is simply beautiful. It is probably very common thing to occur. We as humans took this to another level by adapting our environment to us (spanning from building cities to occupying space on the ISS).
An interesting example came to my mind. It has been shown, that as we are using our smartphones, the number of connections between out thumb and the brain is increasing. Moreover, in some cases, the thigh is more responsive to touch (vibrations) as we carry our phones in a pocket. This isn't really a matter of evolution though. It simply isn't that fast. It's more like an adaptation of our nervous system to a new part of the enviroment. But we made this environment possible in the first place...
This is the best content I could stumb upon, cant believe you are not famous yet
Honestly thanks for explaining the chin thing. I’ve heard that my whole life but no one ever put it so simply. I feel dumb but a little smarter now
I feel dumber now
@@DanielAbreu-tz9bl you are duh
No, sir: chins are well known to be not a human trait but an Homo sapiens specific trait (no other Homo species had it) and they are also well known to serve a purpose: our jaws are immensely more efficient with chins than without them, our bite is surprisingly powerful in spite of relatively weak chewing muscles thanks to them. It's a lever!
The truth is the binary "Neutral/useful" is likely too simplistic all change have some effect to sexual/natural selection. change totally neutral will have to be very rare and likely might become positif/negative at some point in a continuously changing environment.
I'd think that when a mutation for a new trait occurs though, the large the current population the less likely it would be to spread... but, that said, in a larger population you'd have more random mutations occuring, so the overall chance of one of them spreading would remain fairly high. So, if the gene for chins appeared in humans (or one of our ancestors) it's chance of going from one individual to dominant would largely depend on it being a survival trait, or at the very least that individual having a good set of other genes.
If it's spandrels, then I'd argue that the chin is not the adaptation... the smaller jaw do to smaller teeth would be the adaptation. The chin would just be an artifact of that adaptation.
In addition to deleterious, neutral, and advantageous mutations I'd think a lot of mutations are situational. A mutation that makes you taller is great for a creature that eats leaves off of trees, but maybe not so good for a creature that lives tight caves.
I cannot tell you how often I refer to this video when explaining the adaptionist assumption in fields like behavioral evolution and so on. That is may be just an assumption and we should probably treat it as such until proven otherwise.
It's also important to note that previously useless traits can become useful again, selected for.
As an example: The Chin (by raw chance) is sexually dimorphic, and is, as a result, small chins are strongly selected against in men, but not in women.
Thus, the Chin started off useless, but became useful at a later time as a way of peacocking.
Describing it as selecting against makes more sense than selecting for. Although it’s all just words in the end. People get the idea that NS is creating traits or choosing from them. All it’s really doing is describing the fact that if something doesn’t replicate genes over the course of long time spans than that thing ceases to exist. So by definition, all things that exist are good enough at existing that they still exist. And if they aren’t good enough the go away (or get selected against by NS if you want to put it that way).
No, those traits are a consequence of other changes which were selected for, just as domesticated foxes changed in appearance.
19:00 Would explain humans shifting from big and strong to medium and smart over time in terms of sexual success, especially in modern times. Humans created the selection pressures via society and pushed out the previous pressure from hunter-gatherers.
your videos are so under rated in my opinion
I instantly subscribed. You are destined to have at least 1 million subs soon. I'm an economist but I'veread Stephen J Gould ( Panda's Thumb?) What you are saying is super intriguing. I wi.l now have to study this. Than you.
this video is absolutely amazing!
It even cleared up some questions I had about netrual evolution, which is part of an exam I have this week.
Thank you, and godspeed SubAnima
I mean, there are a few environmental factors that organisms don't change, such as surface gravity, mantle composition, and irradiation of our planet by our star. A whole manner of other things have been created or changed by organisms though, such as atmospheric composition (see: great oxygen catastrophe and/or global warming) or the composition of the earth's crust (burrowing animals, lichen, root systems, human mining) and a whole lot more. So while there _is_ an environment without organisms, the vast _majority_ of the environment truly is because of organisms, and the independent part keeps shrinking as us humans continue to push technology to it's limits. I mean, we've arguably been the first ones to finally crack open the lithosphere and extract stuff. That has probably not been done by a life form before.
Great video! One minor complaint is that chins are an odd example to use, given that people with weak chins are typically far less attractive than other people. I don’t know how universal that viewpoint is, so I don’t know if attractiveness is a plausible explanation for modern chins, but most of your audience probably do view chins as more attractive than lacking them (even though super strong chins are far more polarizing), and may decide natural selection to be a more favorable interpretation of that particular trait than random chance.
Also, quick question, isn’t it possible for new genes to occasionally arise out of non-coding DNA. Obviously not often given the low probabilities involved, and even more rarely positive, but isn’t it a possibility, or does something prevent noncoding DNA from ever being recognized as coding DNA again, and new genes have to always arise from duplicates of existing ones?
Awesome video! Held my interest and I have no background in such topics. But from various things I've read or seen about medicine, science, and their attending philosophies as of late, holistic approaches are succeeding and age old schisms becoming bridged as false dichotomies are revealed in thinking. Like neutralism vs adaptationism, nature vs nurture, etc. Thank you for sharing
Thanks so much for the feedback! Glad to hear it wasn’t too complex. I think this century will be very interesting for the development of biological theory indeed :))
- Jake
i love your videos, and your attitude, and also you’re pretty funny.
Great video! Also, genetic drift can destroy important genes which are currently neutral, but significant longer term. For example human's (and relatives) loss of ability to synthesize vitamin C, though its loss could also have been beneficial. Another is cats losing the ability to synthesize Taurine, which is only found in meat, which is all cats eat. These changes could severely harm the emergence of some herbivore cat or humans ability to travel the seas eating nothing but dried jerky and hardtack. Even if these examples turn out to be advantageous, it seems clear that genetic drift COULD destroy significant, but neutral genes, which hurt the long-term adaptability of a species.
Genetic drift can destroy important genes that are currently beneficial if they're held by a small enough percentage of the population. It is pure randomness, even if your population has better odds of surviving that doesn't guarantee anything.
Another part of the neutral theory which wasn't touched on in this video is that not only are beneficial mutations rare, they're made even rarer by the fact that genetic drift destroys a significant amount of them. Within the first few generations of a gene's existence it is very vulnerable to simply having the entire population carrying that gene be wiped out completely. It doesn't matter how beneficial the gene is, there's always a chance that every member of the species with that gene is killed by a predator when we're talking about a gene that less than ten individuals may have.
This has an interesting implication for machine learning. Natural selection was a basis for hope for genetic algorithms to create incredible effects as our computers become more and more powerful (quantum computing was especially promising for this). But if the evolution itself, far more powerful than any computer we can dream of creating, gets stuck in its way and never changes, because positive changes in the functional element of DNA by random chance are extremely rare, this dampen the enthusiasm for self-improving programs, who will improve themself by the process of replication and evolution.
There are a lot of things about the human body that don’t make a ton of sense.
I’ve wondered most about our torsos. Every other species of hominid, even Neanderthals, appears to have extra room for digestive organs, based on the shape of the ribs…which would imply none of them cooked their food, or at least didn’t know how to slow cook food.
Then there is the aquatic adaptations. Sweating, sub dermal fat deposits. Able to hold breath. African tribes with the starts of a third eyelid, etc.
One of the bigger benefits of our intelligence was probably the consistent and systemic use of aquatic resources for survival. And it appears to be mostly unique to us.
I think I love this channel. Obviously (now that I've watched this video) we're attracted to the world we see, hear and know. And that's the one we believe in. But there's more to a pale blue dot than you'd know from a distant fly-by on the way back to Andromeda Z-89/&~55.
I think we have a chicken and egg thing going on here. I totally agree with you that changes that arise generation to generation are entirely independent of the environment. But, it is definitely the case that *if* one of those changes makes an organism more fit for survival, it is more likely to survive. Natural selection has nothing to do with what genetic changes *appear* in the population - it has to do with the likelihood of each change *suviving*.
When you look at the incredible complexity of life on Earth in general, you immediately recognize the need for something like natural selection. The unvierse just hasn't been here long enough for us to have "just gotten here randomly." There is some kind of engine contributing to the process.
Agh my picky eater autistic brain cringed at the thought of a nutella sandwich and especially at the thought of mixing nutella with jam (yuck!), but I adored the video. Your energy is great and your organization and presentation of the subject matter is top notch!
Just wow, thanks for the algorithm that make me find this channel
Fantastic video. Absoluetly nailed it.
Great channel!
Thanks!
Natural selection brought me here
Great video😁
What you determine as the main drive of genetic variation depends on what you are focusing on. If you are focusing on the morphological changes, those selfish genes, or every individual transcription error. All those meaningless transcription errors that do nothing positive for the organism pile up in the gene pool. Passing from generation to generation doing nothing. Might do nothing for a million or more years, but they are in those genes for all that time just sitting there doing nothing. Then another transcription error (in another gene or maybe even in the same codon) does a thing, and that junk portion of the earlier gene isn't so junk anymore. This is where natural selection first starts to do anything at all. But it is also where the transcription error first makes any effect at all as well.
So what is of more important then? The process itself. Focusing on the natural selection side of things or the transcription errors misses the boat completely. It is the process itself that is has all the hidden gems waiting to be found. Selecting for morphological change is easy. We have done it with everything from bananas to dogs. Increasing transcription errors is pretty easy as well. We are pretty good at giving things cancer and using CRISPR. Understanding all of those moving parts and deliberately manipulating them is what is really important.
I’ve always thought of rephrasing “the survival of the fittest” more accurately as “ survival of the mostly random, including the things that are just enough above unfitness not to get the organism killed”
Exactly
we can even shorten it to SOTMRITTTAJEAUNTGTOK
@@name-nam lol “shorten” I know there’s got to be a much less clunky way to say it, but it was a spur of the moment TH-cam comment. Maybe something more like “survival of the highly random yet not egregiously unfit” or something. I don’t know. A better wordsmith than me should come up with a more pithy phrase
@@JohnMiller-mmuldoor survival of the least unhelpful mutations
Evolution is the survival of the good enough
this is why scientists are more excited when the same trait evolves again and again independently, then we are more confident that there are adaptation advantages
This is pretty interesting in the context of genetic evolution - individual genes compete to reproduce most effectively within a genome, but a common end result of that competition is complex multicellular life, due to the emergent patterns of those genes cooperating for increased fitness. A trait that is a spandrel in a macroscopic perspective can easily be the result of a gene or genes that's reliant on other genes with more overtly beneficial traits at that level, or even be the product of a gene that's successful at the genetic level and merely neutral to the organism as a whole.
13:24- VSauce did a video about why animals don't have wheels for locomotion.
Marvellous. Mind blown. Thank you. (A newly enlightened adaptionist) 😊
Im fascinated that Leibniz argument is explained by the Architect at the end of The Matrix: Reloaded. I know that scene seemed dull to a lot of people but im still fascinated that conversation happened in a blockbuster movie.
However they are completely different. Architect had to deal with humans with specific traits, and humans are not adapted to the Utopia at all, we are adapted to the environment where there is conflict, aggression and the need to compete for limited resources. All powerful God could just create different humans to fit this better world. Or just artificially support unstable world if it is not possible to be self sustained for some reason.
No one knew anything about genes when Mendel was doing his plant studies. This presentation still points out the importance of natural selection when you threw out the newspaper and peanut butter sandwich. After which, the 99% of neutral adaptions can allow variation without risking extinction. I liked that the presentation started with a question of why the chin, leading to an underappreciated aspect of genetics. Very good presentation 🏆. Definitely worth watching.
If I have a mixed bag of trail mix and I begin to shake it, quite randomly and with vast fluctuations, you'll still find that (despite some impure spots) the biggest pieces will sift themselves to the top. Evolution is random at each generation, but over time nature finds the best shapes for the best things for the most part
We are the only species with a chin, yet still Dream is still missing his 😢
It's not random...but it's also not really selective.
At the quantum level, still nothing is random...but it's "uncertain" There is a difference.
But after that, everything is consequential. It's not deterministic, because the whole pile is quite expansive and dynamic, but it's not random because everything does follow linearly. It's just that there are more lines than you could ever possibly account for.
What ends up happening is that any given factor...some chemical or compound, radiation, improper DNA recombination, any of a trillion different things...screws up a molecule somewhere. That causes the associated gene to express differently, or even not at all (and this is all without even touching epigenetics, which...holy fuck, is that a rabbit hole...). The biological consequences of that change of expression manifest in some way in the organism, and either it negatively impacts the creature in some way, or it doesn't (almost never is it actually advantageous).
Over time, through similar events that additionally screw up various bits, that trait might correct itself, or become exacerbated by other circumstances, or the creature or its descendants might've just met an unrelated unlucky end, and that trait permanently died with it. At some point, it begins to impact other traits, and further changes happen, generation after generation. Eventually, either one or more given traits is impacted so thoroughly that they become functionally different from before, or a completely new trait has "finished" forming anew, or various otherwise unrelated traits combine in some odd new way. When it goes far enough, speciation happens and that's how we wind up with everything in the ecosystem.
Nature or evolution doesn't have a goal, or a purpose. It's just common chemistry in particular conditions, with consequences related to the rules of chemistry. A molecule that can reproduce itself isn't going to "seek" to do so. Depending on the circumstances, it either will or it won't. If it does, then that matters. If it doesn't do so, then it doesn't matter. If it does, then there's a chance the follow-ups might do so as well. Or they might not. Life as we know it today, is just the unbroken chains of the precursor molecules that happened to kick off that streak.
When life first began, it was just an assortment of unremarkable and mostly simple organic molecules floating in rich (super dirty, really) water. The conditions at the time were sufficient to cause various reactions, and certain molecules started to "eat" others they'd float next to as a result...attaching together to become larger and more complex (loosely speaking). Eventually, they'd become so large, that they'd break apart if they weren't stable enough. Some that got too big just became big, inert hunks...too big to be consumed, but unable to react and attach to anything anymore. Most of those that fractured would've lost the capacity to "consume" others because of their new structure, being consumed instead by those still proceeding. But some broke apart in ways that allowed them to continue on, but changed. Some of those developed chemistry that gave them a capacity to bond in new ways and become far, far larger than their predecessors. And it all kept growing until eventually structures similar to viruses formed, then those changed and eventually some amalgamated into prokaryotes, then eukaryotes, and on and on...
'Til...here we are. No intent. No plan. Just blind stinking luck across a field of circumstance. Not random, but not "selected" either.
Mutations have been entirely random up until the last few decades.
@@oakfat5178 No, they haven't been. Nothing is ever random. Unpredictability and randomness aren't the same thing.
Mutations have causes. Those causes can vary wildly, and they don't always cause mutations. But the fact is, no mutation just "randomly" happens. It's ALWAYS caused by something. And those causes are always circumstantial. It's not like the universe rolls a fuckin die or flips a coin.
And if you want to distinguish design from naturalistic causality, that's fine. But in that case, mutations mostly haven't been natural for many millennia. Deliberate selective breeding and crossbreeding may be less direct and less precise, but they're very much a means of inducing mutation, and developing and expanding desirable traits in a population. All the cattle in the world are, and always have been in all respects, GMOs. As have been all agricultural crops since agriculture even began. That they weren't produced in a lab with equipment and a reasonably complete understanding of everything involved, has no bearing at all.
@@DoremiFasolatido1979 I was using the lay persons usage of "random".
I'm crap at statistics, and pretty sure your argument about "random" as a statistical term, but if you want to go there, I won't be able to comprehend you.
I scraped through 2nd year philosophy, and discovered that maths, physics and logic are three sides of the same coin, if you take any one of them far enough.
I did work out a hillbilly version of statistical process control for when to calibrate a NIR machine at work.
It was good enough, and thankfully no-one asked me to explain the mathematical theory behind it.
I just copied examples from an Open University show I'd seen before work that morning.
I'd be fine calling mutations "haphazard" or "unpredictable".
Genetic drift is most effective way of evolution in 'unknown' and 'dynamic' surroundings. The mutations with benefit ore no negative impact simply stays. (survival of the best fitted). Over numbers and in time.
Thanks for the awesome video. The Florida snail kite has grown their beak in one generation, in order to eat the African snail.
Finding things that don't work isn't useless, it tests suitability,
And things that don't work now might be useful in other circumstances
Eg you rarely ever need the spare tire in your trunk, but if you get a flat you'll notice the usefulness of that "redundancy"
Yes there are multiple factors, constraints, sources, reasons, purposes etc for everything including evolution
That many things are compromises between what you can do and what you want to do
Also in some ways it's subjective to your perspective and ability
Kinda like the Pixar theory, the goal isn't to find an arbitrary pattern, rather the goal is to have fun making connections
Similarly while we do sell for truth, that is only part of the goal, which is to utilize the stuff around us for good, however we can best define that to be
You can look at dirt and say it's useless dirt, or you can say this is good soil for planting, or this is good clean sand for filtering water, or this can become glass or microchips
We can look at poison as a curse to fear or tool for better hunting
We can look at obstacles as obstructions or opportunities for fortifications
Yes i agree that we often confuse causality, and often forget cyclicality, anthropomorphizing by projecting our perspective, or priorities onto arbitrariness
Eg observation causes waveform collapse, it couldn't possibly be the titanic pressure applied to squash the waveform
How does the electricity know what amperage to be at if it hasn't reached the end of the wire yet, maybe it just is, and naturally conforms to circumstances
Etc
That isn't to say though that patterns, reasons, etc don't exist, or even that we're completely wrong for assuming reasons and logic,
just that we should be cautious and open to new interpretations and perspectives, ancients weren't wrong to postulates that powerful beings caused thunder and lightning, it was actually pretty smart, we start most scientific research by assigning unknowns, x, y, z, etc
By acknowledging what we don't know and what we know we can start to puzzle out the relationships and discover details of the unknowns
The problem arises, not from making hypotheses and naming variables,
The problem comes when we stop asking, listening, learning, being open etc
We arbitrarily call certain things disorderly, mostly along the lines of what we want and don't want, and write laws of disorder, forgetting to actually look without bias and see that fit the most part, we are disorderly, and these so called laws of entropy actually describe patterns of orderliness countering our disorderly pursuits
Okay but this is so interesting!
Thanks Sun!
This was a very interesting and entertaining video, thank you.
Great explanation! Thank you for the effort!
How much further would we have advanced in science and technology if the human ego wasn't a thing? So much time is wasted fighting over theories, not out of any search for truth, but out of sheer ego. But if it wasn't about whose name is on the paper and who gets the glory (and funding), we could just advance understanding at an exponential rate.
the ego is what make you different than chimpanzee
Every single videos you make are super high quality, interesting and awesome. Keep on the good work!
Glad the algorithm showed me this channel
Very nice video. If you are ambitious, you can cover constructive neutral evolution next.
Thank you! CNE is certainly an interesting theory, I haven't thought much about it to be honest, but yes perhaps a future video
There is an obvious benefit to having a chin, especially for the safety conscious cyclist who wears a safety helmet, that being the chin is needed for the chin strap.
Now one might argue (as you point out) that the humans might first have invented the helmet and the chin strap and from that the chin evolved.
Or one might argue (more of the creationist mind set) that the creator saw that chins would be (sometime down the road) useful for that and directed evolution along that path (employing a bit of prescience in the process and added them proactively).
Or maybe we just lucked out and got the chin as a spandrel or such.
Either way one might get a chin out of the deal.
Also, in fist fights, the chin might give the jaw a bit more strength to take a punch in the jaw as well. So it sort of goes with being able to make a fist, something perhaps a bit unique to humans a swell.
Also, since humans (unlike say a monkey) do not have a snout, the chin can help protect the neck when one lowers their head.
Like the content of the video for the most part. Hate the super obnoxious click bait titles in every one of your videos.
Conflicted if I should sub.
for real, in my case I can't even finish one of these videos because I was expecting something else from the click bait titles and get something completely different..
Amazing how Genetic drift principles are applicable to almost… any process with multiple variables there is.
I think the question of adaptation vs spandrels is a false dichotomy. There are multiple interacting factors which both transcend and influence the factors underlying genetic noise/signal selection and ontogeny. As one small example of what I mean, I see the human chin as a neotenic trait. If correct, this would imply the chin is somewhat both an adaptation and a spandrel, or perhaps an adaptation to a spandrelic condition. I appreciate how you describe the complexity that comes to light when we note object-subject reflexivity, and I think we get closer to the ground truth when we recognize subtle nuance in the vast complexity which characterizes natural systems. There remain countless questions in anthropogeny, as in natural history and speciation as a whole. Hybrid genetics is emerging as a surprisingly relevant field. Neoteny and domestication syndrome continue to prove their merit while opening new seemingly intractible questions.
I am suspicious of any theory that starts with the belief that a large portion of the human genome is nonfuctional. The evidence from actual genetic studies is that we don’t understand enough about genetics to declare what function various codes have with any certainty, and that most of the genome seems to have some critical function as far as we can tell.
This is excellent content! Awesome job!
As soon as I saw your face, the whole intro about chins came into focus.
You are my inspiration on how as to be a student
I need you to make a video just about the animals with chins picture at 0:21.