@@philliambillingsworth7806 Don't be too sad. Most of the megastructures will have been built by then and most conceivable futuristic topics will have been covered. This channel won't be quite as exciting when most of it covers ancient history topics. I'd say 160,000+ videos is worthy of a graceful retirement.
@@MichaelDerryGameitect It might see reruns and syndication in the distant future. Next thursday AD. There's a channel called PeriscopeFilm that uploads ancient footage from the early 1900s in full color with sound. Including those shorts on "the home of tomorrow" and what the future will be like in the year 2000. People will look back and say: "they used chemical rockets...how quaint."
the development of robots is a good experiment in convergent evolution. lots of teams working on robots capable of different tasks that humans do. their designs are sometimes similar to humans and sometimes not. one finding is that humanoid robots are only used when mimicking the human form is an explicit objective, and i think this tells us a lot about convergent evolution
Ball bearings and wheels are hard to make real with 'wet' chemistry though. Dealing with signaling, wear and tear in a non-wet environment is hard. Maybe we should include technological evolution? Hopefully not too much metaverse convergence.. it is very efficient and powerful though..
Not really, robots designs aren’t randomly iterated on and don’t have reproductive selection pressure. “Bad” designs might be considered a “success” depending on the selection criteria, there’s nothing objective like in nature.
All current robots are very singular is use; they only have 1 task that they are optimised to. Humans are the shape they are in order to be adaptable to a multitude of different scenarios. Nature requires adaptability, and good luck building a robot as adaptable as a human without mimicking the human form.
@@Lashb1ade Robots with a human form are good for doing human tasks but it's not necessarily a perfect form for anything and everything. (Even in the face of hundreds of tasks instead of just one) Most things made by humans are designed to accommodate humans, of course. If a different form was predominant, the built environment, and the tasks it enables, would conform to that instead. Imagine 8 tentacle arms (each with 4 double-jointed opposable thumbs on their hands) emanating from a much smaller body. Enough cameras and sensors on the body and each wrist for full 360 views from 9 different locations at once... That should be enough to both mimick human sized & shaped tasks while also being more compact and flexible for more difficult activities. Standing human task: 4 bottom tentacles to replace human legs with extra stability with 4 tentacles for arms. Non-human task: climbing the interior of a narrow chimney. Alternate pairs of opposing hands can apply pressure against the walls to climb, from both above and below the body. That's just off the top of my head. Maybe another design could replace the human form with 3 smaller robots working together, which could then split up to do things not possible in human form. It's more complicated in biology but there could be other successful body plans, especially with different environmental factors. Higher gravity could render bipedalism impractical, for instance.
@@MichaelDerryGameitect you kind of countered your own argument with the tentacular element - we're built for energy-efficient walking, heat dissipation, and maximum generalization, but starting from the trees. Tetrapods came about to maximize response times at higher overall mass. So, assume heavier gravity. That's going to result in heavier bone structures in most cases, and smaller body size. The number of legs increasing would make locomotion less efficient at size due to support structures and energy distribution. Bipedalism is VERY optional, but general structure is unlikely to be vastly different. I can see hexapods, but expect a soft maximum of four locomotive limbs on land
Given long enough time, sci-fi enjoyers will find SFIA contents and instantly hooked up to them. I found mine on my local imageboard in a thread discussing non-rocket launch when someone posted the Orbital Ring episode, subbed right away.
Convergence is a profound challenge to the naturalistic model. It is exactly what we shouldn't see if evolutionary theory was correct. What makes this example of biological convergence especially significant is its occurrence across phyla. It is not just convergence within an order, class, or phylum. It is observed in at least eight different phyla. Biological convergence repeatedly arising in circumstances where the forces driving natural selection are vastly different strongly argues for the compelling necessity of supernatural, super-intelligent activity on the part of a personal Creator. Seeing convergence in biology is a huge problem for naturalism for many reasons beyond what I wrote. But what is interesting is the lack of reflection on the implications of convergence. We see the same thing across the board like with the logistics required for evolution to take place especially on the macro scale, or the feasibility of a naturalistic origin of life event for example.
Not just the Sci-Fi; but the realistic approach to world building and universe building needed for the very project I'm working on. Now, your work I loved as well; Inheritance saga was an absolutely great read that is still on my shelf
I think it's worth mentioning that video games being effected by quantum randomness and atomic activity isn't unprecedented. As an example one of the most well known and controversial Super Mario 64 speedruns had a apparent glitch that saved a lot of time by increasing the players Z value significantly. This glitch had a 1,000,000$ bounty on it for anyone who could explain and replicate it, that is until someone fired a electron at the circuit board and got the same result. Now a days that glitch is considered impossible because the consensus is that a random energetic particle from space smacked into the circuit and flipped a switch at random.
@@utetrahemicon I mean, if a single malfunctioning satellite can end us all then someone massively fucked up the design of their system. I mean, it's not impossible, see Command and Control (book) for a chilling example of when incompetence meets engineering and bureaucracy. But I'd like to think we've learned a few things about system design and handling apocalyptic threats since then.
I have to say it, that is almost surely not the reason behind whatever that glitch is and if there is still an actual bounty I would be more than happy to attack it and prove it can be caused by more than shorting things out and hoping for the best.
@@utetrahemicon Not true, there is so much redundancy in Data such a cosmic ray causing any issue is next to impossible. Computers are designed in such a way to check to ensure the data is what it is supposed to be using advanced mathematical formulas, hash tables and other processes such that if any bit is out of place it is immediately detected and corrected. You would need a hell storm of cosmic rays getting lucky and flipping extremely specific multiple bits at the same time and even if that happened odds are it would only trigger some sort of reboot. Voyager is still working last I checked and that is a shit system that has been exposed for decades to trillions and trillions of cosmic rays.
@@seditt5146 Eeeeh, how familiar are you with modern, and obsolete, processor architecture? Sure, data *transmission* (especially over the web) is hilariously well protected against cosmic ray fuckery, as are certain types of storage where you expect errors and are looking for them. Engineers also tend to build in safeguards when expecting trouble (like the high radiation counts voyager's had to deal with). But mid game on consumer hardware? In the RAM and CPU? How much redundancy is built in there? I legitimately don't know and if you do I'd be curious to hear about it.
Things will be economized so long as there is a mind to economize them; swap economics and sociology. You don't even need psychology to make judgements about economics, only that means are used to achieve ends. It's why so many economists are more like applied mathematicians, von Mises comes to mind. Really it should be left out of the lineup.
@@highmolecularweightRDX You overestimate the universality of economics. Economists are usually very bad applied mathematicians stuck in politically motivated dogmas that would get them laughed out of mathematics (the circular reasoning behind the EMH comes to mind). Economics requires information processing and decision capacity even at its most granular scales, and relies on the rules of psychology and sociology to exist in a definable way to do so. You're probably thinking economics goes there because there _is_ actually something missing between biology and psychology, though: ecology. If economics belongs on the list at all, it belongs in at least two pieces, starting with microeconomics emerging from sociology (even microeconomics requires multiple entities each independently capable of information processing and decision making, ergo a society) and macroeconomics emerging from microeconomics. The credible math is pretty exclusive to the micro side, though - macro is currently struggling with problems philosophy solved centuries ago because they need the answers to lead to foregone (erroneous, ideologically driven) conclusions, and it is vital to the preservation of the profit motive that the immune system analogue of regulation not recognize that the profit motive is a society-scale analogue to cancer. Personally I think this mechanism of profit-seeking behavior provides a strong candidate for Fermi Paradox solutions - the coherence required to be sustainably spacefaring (especially in the face of non-static environmental parameters) is incompatible with societies riddled with exclusively profit-motivated entities such as corporations, because the profit motive places ever increasing limits on system flexibility and robustness via continual "optimization", until either environmental changes exceed previously unprofitable design tolerances and collapse the underlying socioeconomic structure, or the energy spent to remain spacefaring is reduced to levels below those thermodynamically required in efforts to cut operational costs (or some combination of both).
@@Ink_Tide Usually? Yes, most macro papers are financed by the fed, not exactly apolitical. When done right? No, it's pretty hard to argue against supply and demand or marginal utility. Also, an organism can have a psychology in isolation, ecology is sociology for non-humans. And from your last paragraph, is the efficient use of finite energy is a bad thing?
@@highmolecularweightRDX As far as supply and demand goes - yeah, it actually isn't that hard to argue against. Supply is countable - demand is an imaginary countable construct that incorporates everything from access to carrying capacity to quantification of _desire itself_ ... into a single variable. Demand is an invention to explain supply behavior simplistically, not some fundamental property of the universe (which supply, being a simple count, is in the same sense that numbers are). Core to demand's assumptions are the invariance of desire across circumstance (or at a minimum the quantifiability of that variance as a calculable function of circumstance, which has the added benefit of also requiring circumstance itself to be quantifiable), invariance of access across circumstance (see previous minimum and related quantification), and a completely circular conclusion that price is optimized to some "equilibrium" because if it wasn't optimized it would optimize itself, and if it didn't optimize itself it would therefore already be optimal (see: the same circular logic found in the EMH) The idea that demand maps to a 2-axis function just because supply happens to do so and "demand" is an intuitive opposite to "supply" says more about economists than it does about economics - they successfully isolated a single variable and have been trying to reduce the rest of the field to only a single additional variable ever since. In short: "supply and demand" don't describe reality because the "demand" part is a category error. As for energy, energy efficiency is relative, because context and outcome of the work it is doing matters. Increased thermodynamic efficiency through direct competition via optimization functions is vulnerable to the hill problem, and those optimization functions when motivated by profit are in turn motivated to prefer behaviors that maximize the barriers to entry (by, for instance, resource consolidation, market manipulation, and regulatory capture) when those behaviors have higher ROI than product/service improvement. Even product "improvement" is relative, as a reduction in used materials may increase production efficiency while reducing the overall efficiency of the industry thermodynamically (a flashlight using 50% less material than the previous model but that has less than half the operating lifespan increases material used and, perhaps more importantly, doubles the rate at which any given material becomes waste after production). Optimization alone leads to specialization because it disfavors adaptability. When optimization favors specialization faster than the utility of adaptability can be demonstrated (either theoretically or by circumstance changes that previous optimizations have not been optimized for), specialization can outcompete adaptability, and when subsequently those hyper-specialized, hyper-optimized structures consume less efficient but potentially necessary behaviors (for instance, letting land go fallow to rebuild topsoil) the depletion of resources is broader reaching and more catastrophic. The reason cancer kills is because _cancer cells use energy more efficiently than, and thus outcompete, the functional cells of the body that the cancer is still reliant on to survive._ In the case of a human being, such a cancer has, through nothing but ruthless efficiency, irreparably destroyed one of the most efficient uses of energy we know of: a supercomputer made of water and carbon that weighs only a few pounds, runs on about the energy of a lamp, fuels itself with sugar, and is capable of self replication. Oh, and the cancer also dies shortly thereafter, as the now-corpse is now also not protected from decomposition by more adaptable, less specialized scavengers who don't need the active protection of a body to remain operable.
In fairness, most of the time they assume that the aliens are coming from a world very unlike earth. Aliens from a planet with 0.5 g or a planet with 9g of gravity aren't gonna resemble us. That said, if they come from a planet that is identical to earth in all the ways that matter, they'll probably look like us.
One thing we absolutely don't know is if there is a way to reach the status we are at, and be vastly different than us, logically there are things that should be better than what we have in certain categories, however we don't know if those have a side effect that weakens another, for example many creatures are far stronger than humans, however said creatures also require more food and/or have less stamina than us, that stamina likely played a big part in our survival. To be blunt, it's entirely possible that humans are the way they are because we evolved on a very narrow tightrope that just so happened to let us come together to reach this solution, a 10 to the hundred trillion trillion to chance in different possibilities that would lead to a singular possibility of civilization building intelligence, this would also work as a explanation for the fermi paradox, intelligence evolving to such a form being so rare as to be near impossible. TL;DR humans could be so great in our ability because we are so average that it made us jack of all trades, capable of many types of tasks but not being superior than another creature in them, but using other advantages from our averageness to overcome them and if so, it's entirely possible that aliens would have to be very similar to us in that same rule, to reach the same point.
@@LowMedow Yep. Just a reminder, we're still primates and modern apes. And that explains why we see mourning and other behaviours we often think of as human in the other primates. Some other primates have far better short-term memory than us, too.
Just as a factoid nearly every type of eye appeared within a geological instant during the Cambrian explosion. So objectively they never evolved or developed. Same thing with virtually every body plan, mouths, anus, and so on in the animal kingdom. It's a huge fact that is conveniently ignored in the conversation of evolution and it's feasibility.
@@WaterspoutsOfTheDeep The Cambrian explosion took place over millions of years though. It wasn't just like a one week event. And before the Cambrian explosion we didn't have almost any animals at all.
@@lunaticbz3594 No the timescale of the events have been reduced down to thousands of years at this point. That is why I said a "geological instant." Far too small a time period for evolution assuming it can even happen.
@@WaterspoutsOfTheDeep Radiometric dating when your measuring isotopes with a half life of 100's of millions of years is not going to give you that kind of accuracy. Which I suppose actually hurts both of our positions, but there's no way to date the Cambrian explosion to the accuracy of a few thousand years.
I was thinking, we can see other galaxies because we are in a spiral galaxy, and can look "above" and "below" the millions of stars on our plane. If an intelligent species was starting within an elliptical galaxy, so they were surrounded by stars, would they be able to see other galaxies? Could they theorize the Big Bang?
Can we see other galaxies that are in the plane of ours (at least in the outward directions, not through the center of the Milky Way)? That could be a way to estimate what they'd be able to see. I don't know the spherical-astronomic distribution of Earth-known galaxies, though.
Let me blow your mind. Elliptical galaxies have the same assortment of stars as spiral galaxies. The difference is that elliptical galaxies lack the dust which gives spiral galaxies their apparent shape.
@@stefanr8232 Very little. They are essentially swept clean, transparent. You can see right through them even at their thickest point. It was never the stars which got in the way.
The largest galaxy I've heard of is approximately 6 million light years across (60 times wider than ours), but it's also globular, so anyone evolving around a star relatively near the centre probably wouldn't stand much of a chance of observing much outside of their galaxy.
I think convergent evolution on other worlds is not unlikely. I mean if things can evolve into crabs like 6 times here, why would it be so hard to imagine finding something on another planet that looks like a crab?
Watching Isaac Arthur be like: Minute 1: this video will be about convergent evolution Minute 15: atoms are less or more involved in video games than you might think (I love this channel and I always giggle at how unrelated some moments seem to be to the topic, that if you zone out you miss the connections)
26:05 a lot of legal systems have, depending on the type of system, a lot of texts or laws in them that are literally just made completely meaningless by other laws but because they are meaningles because of other laws noone bothers removing them
Yup, I've heard the tautological explanation from biologists before. Usually it's like extremely truncated reasoning. They've probably had to explain it so often that they can't stop to teach it to everyone in it's fullest detail.
*The larger a peacock's array of tail feathers, the more likely it is to secure a mate.* *Conversely, the larger a peacock's array of tail feathers, the more likely it is to be eaten by a predator.*
Even further, it is a balance of resources. A peacock with a smaller plumage may be able to feed itself adequately when food is scarce, and maintain vibrant color. But a peacock with larger plumage may be less nourished and have less vibrant coloration. Further still, a peacock with larger yet still equally vibrant plumage may be an indicator of good foraging success.
Makes no sense. More metals dissipate heat more efficiently. We try to generate as little entropy as possible, while using the energy most efficiently to replicate life's own entities (proteins, cells, organisms). Forming complex molecules costs entropy. It is only driven by (generating) entropy in the system as a whole, because it is required for any process to proceed.
@@UGPepe Zoom out enough on the time scale and concentration = most efficient dissipation, so you're actually agreeing with OP, just using different words.
@@horsemumbler1 then it should be worded differently: being efficient at dissipating heat means trying to dissipate as much of it as possible in the shortest amount of time (eg. an atomic bomb).
10:25 finally! An aknowledgement that, yes human beings are, indeed, nature so what we do is natural no matter what that is. That doesn't mean it's "good" or "bad" but we can't forget that ultimately we are just an emergernt property of the universe and so is what we do. This is important because it's easy to overlook, and has implications that can make life a lot easier for us if we stop acting like the universe is separate from us or we are separate from it
I think we might be too late, specifically concerning climate change. Billions of years ago, green photosynthesizers killed just about every other form of life by introducing poisonous oxygen into the atmosphere. We seem to be doing a similar thing with greenhouse gasses. You have a nice thought there, though.
@@squirlmy not likely, humans are very bad at creating accurate models of such chaotic complex systems, I mean just look at what happened in the last year or two.
@@squirlmy that doesn't mean we can't fix things or at the very least drop all this bullshit capitalism brought with it about private property and "surplus" value (personal property and public property are obviously ok but I mean private business property needs to go) and keep the one good thing it brought, industrialization. We could easily make sure everyone on earth has decent housing, healthcare (including mental healthcare), education and nutrition. If we do and replace the persuit of wealth with the persuit of knowledge we will be dysoning the sun and living in O'Neal cylinders within the next 2 decades. Edit: getting rid of so called "surplus" value or "profit" means that workers get paid for what they do not the wage/salary which is always less than they make for the company, that's how profit is made. If we focus on giving everyone an ever increasing minimum standard of living (houseing, healthcare, education, and food) and then allow people to persue their passions/helping humanity instead of working to fill others pockets and hoping to take home enough to eat and make rent (plus all the debt they're probably in) we'd be out of this mess overnight
I think having social structure, gripping hands, and forward looking eyes are the most likely convergence for intelligent creatures. Those are the features that can happen to evolve and then provide the most obvious advantage for members with tool using intelligence. You need to be social so that others can observe the "throw rock at thing" technique for the first time and the smartest can copy it and gain a huge advantage. That sets off a chain of dominos that leads to interstellar travel, if you get lucky.
They would need some natural armor and strong weapons to ensure their survival, otherwise they couldn't last unless they had already gotten to the top of the food chain before dropping the flight part. But then they would still be in danger because strength, armor, claws, whatever is not going to save them from lightning, volcanic eruptions, floods, noxious gases, or wildfires. Mother nature does not always play nice enough for creature to max out their resistances, if game terms can be used. I'm still mulling it over. Interesting thought for bad guys in a story.
Just listened to “To Sleep in a Sea of Stars” and it was epic! It had a ton of obvious references to the technology presented on this channel which was a lot of fun. Thanks for the recommendation!
By the way, Sir Isaac Arther, on the topic of good narrator, your own self described speech impediment has never been an obstacle for me to greatly enjoy your talks (which are written very well before spoken on air. In fact, I find your speech to be clearly understandable, and quite endearing to listen to. You do you the best, and I'm a big fan. You've gently taught me of so many ideas and facts is a friendly yet knowledgeable way that I enjoy listening while being taught correctly on my level of understanding.
Needing to sense an environment at all favors having a lot of sensory collectors nearer to the organ responsible for overall stimulus response than most of the other organs less reliant on low latency input, which is all you need to essentially guarantee the evolution of something we would recognize as a "head". I disagree with Isaac's suggestions about latency being somewhat exclusive to rapidly changing environments, as the real driver of the concentration of sensory inputs is actually minimizing their latency relative to each other (your brain _actively delays your perception of your environment to maintain an illusion of simultaneous sensory input_, because that's the only way to align senses to a given stimulus with varied information speeds, e.g. light and sound) and the speed at which signals must be sent to various organs like muscles in response is also highly dependent on their ability to react in unison to a stimulus than their ability to react as individual organs. In the case of musculature, it's more important that signals reach each muscle in a reliable order to yield controllable, reliable results than it is for those signals to reach a given muscle faster. Decrease the signal travel time and you rapidly collapse the span of time during which musculature can activate sequentially, thus requiring a faster brain to process the reaction to stimulus that quickly, and thus increasing the pressure to have sensory organs near the brain. There are also some caveats that he neglects in suggesting that faster sensory processing/input to make sensory organ placement irrelevant is even possible - for instance, if part of neural function to achieve a brain is self-induction of current via unconnected neuron firing, then fiber optics as a neural substrate doesn't work as anything but sensory collection, and even then would likely be limited in selection for pure speed by needing to process inputs to eliminate variations in the transmission speeds of the various media being sensed.
@@Ink_Tide There's a much simpler, and therefore more persuasive argument for clustered sensory organs, I think. If they were scattered about your body, a simple fall might render you blind, or deaf etc, because the nerves or equivalents responsible for carrying the signal might be affected, either temporarily or permanently. A wound/injury that would severely compromise sensory information transport in Earthly creatures has a pretty high chance of being fatal anyway, so clustered sensory organs impose no additional selection pressures, whereas distributed ones would.
I remember Star Trek: Next Generation had a pair of episodes that explained why most of the races in the galaxy had similar traits. There was a precursor race that evolved before any other, found they were alone in the galaxy, seeded their DNA throughout the galaxy, then disappeared into history.
I really struggled with your speech impediment today. I have relatives who once had speech impediments, you have a lot of work ahead of you. Good luck.
I wonder if at some point, before self replicating proteins, came along proteins that made random things, and eventually one of them made one that made a copy of itself by accident, starting the process of evolution. What would we call those?
Our ears used to be able to swivel! It's why some people can wiggle their ears. In fact, it's reactionary, if there's a loud noise behind a person, those muscle groups (if present) will automatically constrict whether we notice them or not. It's fascinating. But also, my favorite case of convergent evolution... some pterosaurs had feeder bills akin to flamingos, in fact, this feeder mouth is so good at catching teeny tiny wriggly things in water that it's evolved independently all over the place. Also, crabs. Like... there are crabs everywhere and most of them aren't crabs... they're lobsters that lost their tails and became crabs. PBS Eons did a video on it. It's fascinating.
Right when I needed a simple way to refer to convergent evolution for my devlog of an evolution simulation of plants. Amazing explanation of evolution concepts!
These discussions are absolutely amazing. Excellent excellent. Does anybody know where Isaac gets his visual video clipart? Sometimes they're just perfect!
many are from artists made for SFIA, there given credit in the credits at the end. Others, I think are from generic video clip libraries (like Storyblocks, iStock, etc).
True, but two eyes can only produce depth perception (by overlapping fields of view, used by most predator species) *or* surround vision (by complementary fields of view, used by most prey species). With four eyes it would possible to gain both benefits at the same time, which surely would be useful.
Have the lore be that one of the gods originally planned for that to be the standard “humanoid” template Or maybe have the creature assert itself as the “perfect being”
I think the logical progression of this talk ,links nicely in to the development of space travel vehicles,which basic planetary life forms would inevitably be replaced by,some kind of thinking space ships(spaceships with nervous systems/brains)
The Inheritance Cycle is probably my favorite Fantasy Novel series ever. I don't even know how many times I've read those books and listened to the audio book version.
so long as that doesn't end up with crabs in a bucket mentality, it's all cool. Then again, that may explain the Fermi paradox, there are no sprawling alien empires because there all holding each other down to their respective planets, lol.
Beetles. J.B.S. Haldane was asked if there were anything that could be concluded about God from the study of natural history. He said, "I'm not sure, but he seems to be inordinately fond of beetles" There are at least 380,000 cataloged species. Although there are lots of parasitic wasps as well.
re: 19:00 - bilateral symmetry in chordates (us) and arthropods is actually also convergent evolution. Chordates are more closely related to echinoderms (e.g. starfish and sea urchins), which often feature radial symmetry, than to arthropods, which are more closely related to annelids (advanced worms). Our common ancestor seems to be something much older that gave rise to all familiar forms of animals outside of sponges and cnidarians (corals and jellyfish) and likely vaguely resembled a tardigrade.
Hi Issac! If you could, please add more merch to your store! I love the channel and want to support, but I don't see any hoodies on the store yet! Also, some merch with megastructure images would be insanely cool, I can't find stuff like that anywhere!
I think the whole deal with anthropomorphic aliens is that they were easy to make for the special effects departments. I for one like the idea of superintelligent lichen colonies much better.
Trust that the Aeldari would claim we look vaguely like them. Joke's on them, if they simply knew pataphyics. Perhaps they do, in their black library, and that's the real reason the Harlequins laugh at everything...
We software engineers don't call it spaghetti code anymore. We now say it was created "organically" rather than with a specific plan... It's a nice way of saying... We know it's really really convaluted.
Actually, when you were talking about different roof types a thought occurred to me. What if you designed roofs that could replenish ground water. All you would have to do is design a roof with the purpose of collecting water then sink a pipe deep underground to deliver the water as much as possible directly to the underground aquifer. Water table depletion is a serious problem globally since everyone pretty much uses the same farming methods so if you could adapt people's homes to help solve the problem that would be a big win for the environment.
@@sobertillnoon in part. Look up a falmer shield from Skyrim, and then imagine that the claw part could be fitted into the wrist of a mechanical hand optionally
22:00 and also a lot of these things do take a lot of time and luck to evolve they are useful so over a very long time, in creatures that are slightly less complex they can evolve over a very long time but I wouldn't expect exeballs in your hands to evolve any faster if anything slower than the first eyeballs and thsoe took a LOT longer than human hands have been around
I really loved To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, Christopher really upped his writing skills since his original inheritance trilogy. Or perhaps as a result of.
It seems to me one of the main factors in convergent evolution with aliens would be if the alien planet has tree-climbing creatures. As far as we know, intelligence and technology require opposable thumbs. I did some research: most if not all organisms on earth that have or have had opposable thumbs were tree-climbers. So if the alien planet has (a) trees and (b) tree climbing creatures, there's some chance of convergent evolution towards an intelligent creature with an opposable thumb.
Sci Show had an episode recently where they spoke of gut bacteria. It doesn't actually outnumber our cells, but does make up a large portion. I can't remember what the actual percentage was.
The part about why we don't have eyes on our hands reminded me of how if deprived of sight, and traind to read brail the human brain does co-opt parts normally associated with sight and reading, to boost the tactile fidelity of the index and middle fingers, but then again our bodies already have trunk lines running to those fingers for dexterity reason, so said shift doesn't require much, if any, new hardware
@@kingmasterlord only partially as they found those who with sight benefit from it less, but that said I put that last sentence on most the hardware already being there in for a reason
@@James-ep2bx yeah we really do seem almost embryonic in how generalized we are biologically speaking. We're a Swiss army knife of adaptability. Redundant systems galore!
Isaac Arthur's Centaurworld Theorum: Durpleton is peak efficiency and therefore should be the default evolutionary path in all environments able to sustain life.
I do not think bilateral symmetry would be that uncommon. One only needs the ability to distinguish between two opposite sides in two different directions to evolve bilateral symmetry. One of these directions come from simply having the capability to move, something that evolves in organisms that cannot make or get their own food from ambient resources once their food source starts to become rare, something that is bound to happen as organisms eating rarer and rarer lifeforms start to evolve. The other one comes from a directional input of the environment, something that is achieved by light and or gravity on a planet. These things will almost always result in some form of bilateral symmetry in any macroscopic life-forms.
you lost me at "organisms eating rarer and rarer lifeforms". Certainly organism can specialize more in diet, but that has nothing to do with that food getting "rarer". If the food of an prey animal gets rare, it will start to vary it's diet or die. Evolution works in the direction of expanding the diet as soon as any food source gets "rare". I'm not sure how you are relating this to bilateralism anyways. Are you speaking strictly of unicellular life forms gaining the ability to move? I think life forms have always gained mobility in order to escape from being food! Not to better search it! OTOH Just look at all the biomass of immobile plant life, which pretty much dominates over animal life. It's not too difficult to imagine a planet that evolves only plant-like photosynthesizers and fungi-like life forms -if conditions are harsh enough that mobility is selected against. You are correct in that anything mobile and animal-like will evolve into bilateral symmetry, but that's an animal-centric view of life. ;) A natural-enough mistake for a mammal to make. I imagine that there may be many planets of just "green goo" where life never becomes multicellular. Our own planet spent at least a billion years this way.
@@MrJero85 if we meet multicellular mobile animal or insect-like aliens. There might only be unicellular life, or maybe plants and fungi. Maybe that stretches the definition of "alien", but alien-life-forms might just be green goo.
@@squirlmy The organism that eats is always present in lesser numbers than the ones getting eaten. So lets say A eats B and B eats C. Even if A is super common C will be somewhat uncommon and anything(D) that eats C is bound to be rare. So anything above that will start to struggle with finding D. This is what I meant. And evolution does not always make the organism vary its diet as soon as its food start to get rare. That is one of the measures not the only measure that is taken. When I am talking about lifeforms gaining the ability to move and thus causing bilateral symmetry I am talking about macroscopic life. I mentioned as much in my comment. Bilateral symmetry does not make sense in unicellular life. If lifeforms gained mobility to escape from being food then the first lifeforms to start moving would be autotrophs and not heterotrophs since the former would be the first ones to get eaten, not the latter. This is because the latter cannot make their own food and thus have to get it from other organisms. Which one would that be ? The one that makes it of course i.e. autotrophs. This is why it was not avoiding to get eaten and rather trying to find rare food that made hetterotrophs start to move. When food is everywhere all you need to do is gulp. If food in your region runs out you need to move elsewhere. That is how movement evolved. I do not think that there will be any planets with only unicellular life(if it is old enough). This is because cells tend to aggregate as is. Eventually some of those clumps will start sticking more than others. As the clumps grow bigger the environment within these clumps will be less favourable to life that is used to live as free living cells. This will encourage different types of cells to exist on the insides. This variability will allow these clumps to utilize resources far more effectively and come up with survival strategies impossible for unicellular life. Thus multicellularity will evolve in a sufficiently old world. I also do not think that there would be any planet of only plant-like life. This is because life always aims at filling all available niches. As soon as there are too much plant life, something that eats said life is very likely to evolve.
you said you still use ms word? man, a few years ago when i was printing a lot of material at the library almost none of the computers had it any more, and only one printer ( in someone's office) was compatible. i'm glad to see it's still an option if i ever need to get at that saved material again
Not only eyeballs, we know that blood, nerves, bones, hearts, etc, even multicellularity evolved independantly dozens of times on earth alone. What happened only once - development of the genetic code and of eucaryotes, those are probably extremely rare.
Convergence is a profound challenge to the naturalistic model. It is exactly what we shouldn't see if evolutionary theory was correct. What makes this example of biological convergence especially significant is its occurrence across phyla. It is not just convergence within an order, class, or phylum. It is observed in at least eight different phyla. Biological convergence repeatedly arising in circumstances where the forces driving natural selection are vastly different strongly argues for the compelling necessity of supernatural, super-intelligent activity on the part of a personal Creator. Seeing convergence in biology is a huge problem for naturalism for many reasons beyond what I wrote. But what is interesting is the lack of reflection on the implications of convergence. We see the same thing across the board like with the logistics required for evolution to take place especially on the macro scale, or the feasibility of a naturalistic origin of life event for example.
@@WaterspoutsOfTheDeep it isn't. Math isn't a god. We see patterns repeal all the time, because of math. For example, spirals form in a toilet when it is flushed and also in galaxies. No god or gods required
I think one of the biggest factors in the way of human-like aliens the way we see them in Star Trek and Star Wars is that to get to a body plan as similar as many of those species have to us, they'd have to go through a whole history of very similar body plans. On earth, the vertebrate skeleton evolved once. Something looking more like an octopus or an arthropod when it first goes onto land is likely to evolve a body plan that makes use of what they already have to support their weight and enable the evolution of critical features like a large brain and prehensile appendages. And their support system will be primarily responsible for their overall shape. Something that looked like an average earth insect before evolving sapience is far more likely to have a mantis-like build than anything resembling us.
@@georgethompson1460 Yeah they might lose certain traits, but whatever they have will have come from some pre-adaptation of their ancestral body plans.
28:40 to be fair, the mutation rate caused by radiation, measured in mutations per generation can be adjusted by lifespan if radiation causes your dna to change at a certain rate, a loer lfiespan means fewer changes occur in the time until the next generatio nand the next sorting and selection of which errors are beneficial and which are harmful making it less likely for useful oens to be drowned out so life on a high radiation world coul hypothetically be kinda similar to life on early earth but just never make it past generations that are longer than a few hours or days limiing how complex it gets
The best examples are dinosaurs and flight,swimming etc,but this and size is relative to available nutrients -size ,and atmospheric pressure which I think would be the defining aspect in relation to practicality within the environ.i don't imagine humanity forms being practical in surface pressures and temperatures a thousand fold earth's,or jupiters,enjoying the recent shows,thanks
Specifically, it was about how survival of the fittest has been so often trumped by simply being first (temporally) in the non-biological parallels by copyright, patent, and trademark
I literally laughed out loud at, "Clippy was deemed and actual threat to survival."
I actually miss that little bastard, he added character, tho not a good one
@@DenethorDurrandir it's alright, windows convergently evolved Cortana.
The paperclip maximizer was destroyed before it became a threat.
I remember it... kinda sad it is gone, but if it were still here I'd hate its guts.
Let's trade cortana for getting clippy back
“You there, boy!”
“Who, me sir?”
“Yes, you, good fellow! What day is today?”
“Today? It’s Arthursday, of course!”
And so the time traveller turns to his friend and says "we are between roughly the years 2018 and 15266."
@@MarkusAldawn a narrow field to draw from when compared to the infinite vastness of all time.
@@MarkusAldawn it’s sad that this channel will only last for 13248 years.
@@philliambillingsworth7806 Don't be too sad. Most of the megastructures will have been built by then and most conceivable futuristic topics will have been covered. This channel won't be quite as exciting when most of it covers ancient history topics. I'd say 160,000+ videos is worthy of a graceful retirement.
@@MichaelDerryGameitect It might see reruns and syndication in the distant future.
Next thursday AD.
There's a channel called PeriscopeFilm that uploads ancient footage from the early 1900s in full color with sound. Including those shorts on "the home of tomorrow" and what the future will be like in the year 2000.
People will look back and say: "they used chemical rockets...how quaint."
I guess the blowfish giraffe centaur is now Isaac's OC.
Headcanon Accepted.
I'm going to guess there are a lot of space crabs running around.
Yup, carcinisation looks to me to be the big miss for this discussion.
Because everything evolves into crabs.
My (arguably silly) hobby is to
recommend science-channel and education-channel. Can i maybe?
@@nenmaster5218 You can. Just be aware that TH-cam often shadow bans comments that contain links.
Aren't humans just monkeys who've undergone carcinization?
the development of robots is a good experiment in convergent evolution. lots of teams working on robots capable of different tasks that humans do. their designs are sometimes similar to humans and sometimes not. one finding is that humanoid robots are only used when mimicking the human form is an explicit objective, and i think this tells us a lot about convergent evolution
Ball bearings and wheels are hard to make real with 'wet' chemistry though. Dealing with signaling, wear and tear in a non-wet environment is hard. Maybe we should include technological evolution? Hopefully not too much metaverse convergence.. it is very efficient and powerful though..
Not really, robots designs aren’t randomly iterated on and don’t have reproductive selection pressure.
“Bad” designs might be considered a “success” depending on the selection criteria, there’s nothing objective like in nature.
All current robots are very singular is use; they only have 1 task that they are optimised to. Humans are the shape they are in order to be adaptable to a multitude of different scenarios. Nature requires adaptability, and good luck building a robot as adaptable as a human without mimicking the human form.
@@Lashb1ade Robots with a human form are good for doing human tasks but it's not necessarily a perfect form for anything and everything. (Even in the face of hundreds of tasks instead of just one) Most things made by humans are designed to accommodate humans, of course. If a different form was predominant, the built environment, and the tasks it enables, would conform to that instead.
Imagine 8 tentacle arms (each with 4 double-jointed opposable thumbs on their hands) emanating from a much smaller body. Enough cameras and sensors on the body and each wrist for full 360 views from 9 different locations at once... That should be enough to both mimick human sized & shaped tasks while also being more compact and flexible for more difficult activities.
Standing human task: 4 bottom tentacles to replace human legs with extra stability with 4 tentacles for arms.
Non-human task: climbing the interior of a narrow chimney. Alternate pairs of opposing hands can apply pressure against the walls to climb, from both above and below the body.
That's just off the top of my head. Maybe another design could replace the human form with 3 smaller robots working together, which could then split up to do things not possible in human form.
It's more complicated in biology but there could be other successful body plans, especially with different environmental factors. Higher gravity could render bipedalism impractical, for instance.
@@MichaelDerryGameitect you kind of countered your own argument with the tentacular element - we're built for energy-efficient walking, heat dissipation, and maximum generalization, but starting from the trees. Tetrapods came about to maximize response times at higher overall mass.
So, assume heavier gravity. That's going to result in heavier bone structures in most cases, and smaller body size. The number of legs increasing would make locomotion less efficient at size due to support structures and energy distribution.
Bipedalism is VERY optional, but general structure is unlikely to be vastly different. I can see hexapods, but expect a soft maximum of four locomotive limbs on land
Given long enough time, sci-fi enjoyers will find SFIA contents and instantly hooked up to them.
I found mine on my local imageboard in a thread discussing non-rocket launch when someone posted the Orbital Ring episode, subbed right away.
I like to relisten to old episodes to fall asleep. Arthur´s voice is quite calming, and I enjoy the positivity in his visions.
@@zsoltsz2323 I’ve been doing the same throughout college.
The way I always saw convergent evolution was: given similar sets of tools, and similar needs, similar solutions are reasonably likely
What would be the tools? The laws of physics and chemistry?
@@TheSkullConfernece yes. More accurately context dependent, but reasonably applicable to all categories
Convergence is a profound challenge to the naturalistic model. It is exactly what we shouldn't see if evolutionary theory was correct. What makes this example of biological convergence especially significant is its occurrence across phyla. It is not just convergence within an order, class, or phylum. It is observed in at least eight different phyla. Biological convergence repeatedly arising in circumstances where the forces driving natural selection are vastly different strongly argues for the compelling necessity of supernatural, super-intelligent activity on the part of a personal Creator. Seeing convergence in biology is a huge problem for naturalism for many reasons beyond what I wrote. But what is interesting is the lack of reflection on the implications of convergence. We see the same thing across the board like with the logistics required for evolution to take place especially on the macro scale, or the feasibility of a naturalistic origin of life event for example.
@@WaterspoutsOfTheDeep so your saying we are all in a simulation!!
@@Enward834 No you are lol.
6:00 "What does it mean for two species to be related?" It means they have to deal with one another at family gatherings.
Isaac, thanks for the kind words! Really love your channel. It's a wonderful resource for any author, and especially those writing sci-fi.
Thanks Christopher! Keep turning out those great novels :)
Not just the Sci-Fi; but the realistic approach to world building and universe building needed for the very project I'm working on.
Now, your work I loved as well; Inheritance saga was an absolutely great read that is still on my shelf
I’m going to have to check out your sci-fi now! I only read Eragon
I look forward to meeting our future overlords; the mutant centaur giraffes
But how many can fit inside a Dragon? :3
"In the year 1,000,000 and a half
Human kind is enslaved by giraffe"
@@PowerfulSniff futurama?
@@rShakeford you know it
Is this a Humans don’t make good pets reference?
I think it's worth mentioning that video games being effected by quantum randomness and atomic activity isn't unprecedented. As an example one of the most well known and controversial Super Mario 64 speedruns had a apparent glitch that saved a lot of time by increasing the players Z value significantly. This glitch had a 1,000,000$ bounty on it for anyone who could explain and replicate it, that is until someone fired a electron at the circuit board and got the same result. Now a days that glitch is considered impossible because the consensus is that a random energetic particle from space smacked into the circuit and flipped a switch at random.
A stray cosmic ray could be the end of us all or at least a vital piece of technology. The Earth is somewhat shielded but satellites not as well.
@@utetrahemicon
I mean, if a single malfunctioning satellite can end us all then someone massively fucked up the design of their system.
I mean, it's not impossible, see Command and Control (book) for a chilling example of when incompetence meets engineering and bureaucracy. But I'd like to think we've learned a few things about system design and handling apocalyptic threats since then.
I have to say it, that is almost surely not the reason behind whatever that glitch is and if there is still an actual bounty I would be more than happy to attack it and prove it can be caused by more than shorting things out and hoping for the best.
@@utetrahemicon Not true, there is so much redundancy in Data such a cosmic ray causing any issue is next to impossible. Computers are designed in such a way to check to ensure the data is what it is supposed to be using advanced mathematical formulas, hash tables and other processes such that if any bit is out of place it is immediately detected and corrected. You would need a hell storm of cosmic rays getting lucky and flipping extremely specific multiple bits at the same time and even if that happened odds are it would only trigger some sort of reboot. Voyager is still working last I checked and that is a shit system that has been exposed for decades to trillions and trillions of cosmic rays.
@@seditt5146 Eeeeh, how familiar are you with modern, and obsolete, processor architecture?
Sure, data *transmission* (especially over the web) is hilariously well protected against cosmic ray fuckery, as are certain types of storage where you expect errors and are looking for them. Engineers also tend to build in safeguards when expecting trouble (like the high radiation counts voyager's had to deal with).
But mid game on consumer hardware? In the RAM and CPU? How much redundancy is built in there? I legitimately don't know and if you do I'd be curious to hear about it.
crabification and stoatification are my two favourite examples of convergent evolution.
Yeah, I was surprised this didn't come up.
Yeah crab convergent evolution is pretty cool
Order of Emergence:
Physics > Chemistry > Biology > Psychology > Sociology > Economics
Things will be economized so long as there is a mind to economize them; swap economics and sociology.
You don't even need psychology to make judgements about economics, only that means are used to achieve ends. It's why so many economists are more like applied mathematicians, von Mises comes to mind. Really it should be left out of the lineup.
I'd say swap out economics with engineering and it's probably accurate
@@highmolecularweightRDX You overestimate the universality of economics. Economists are usually very bad applied mathematicians stuck in politically motivated dogmas that would get them laughed out of mathematics (the circular reasoning behind the EMH comes to mind). Economics requires information processing and decision capacity even at its most granular scales, and relies on the rules of psychology and sociology to exist in a definable way to do so.
You're probably thinking economics goes there because there _is_ actually something missing between biology and psychology, though: ecology.
If economics belongs on the list at all, it belongs in at least two pieces, starting with microeconomics emerging from sociology (even microeconomics requires multiple entities each independently capable of information processing and decision making, ergo a society) and macroeconomics emerging from microeconomics. The credible math is pretty exclusive to the micro side, though - macro is currently struggling with problems philosophy solved centuries ago because they need the answers to lead to foregone (erroneous, ideologically driven) conclusions, and it is vital to the preservation of the profit motive that the immune system analogue of regulation not recognize that the profit motive is a society-scale analogue to cancer. Personally I think this mechanism of profit-seeking behavior provides a strong candidate for Fermi Paradox solutions - the coherence required to be sustainably spacefaring (especially in the face of non-static environmental parameters) is incompatible with societies riddled with exclusively profit-motivated entities such as corporations, because the profit motive places ever increasing limits on system flexibility and robustness via continual "optimization", until either environmental changes exceed previously unprofitable design tolerances and collapse the underlying socioeconomic structure, or the energy spent to remain spacefaring is reduced to levels below those thermodynamically required in efforts to cut operational costs (or some combination of both).
@@Ink_Tide Usually? Yes, most macro papers are financed by the fed, not exactly apolitical. When done right? No, it's pretty hard to argue against supply and demand or marginal utility. Also, an organism can have a psychology in isolation, ecology is sociology for non-humans.
And from your last paragraph, is the efficient use of finite energy is a bad thing?
@@highmolecularweightRDX As far as supply and demand goes - yeah, it actually isn't that hard to argue against. Supply is countable - demand is an imaginary countable construct that incorporates everything from access to carrying capacity to quantification of _desire itself_ ... into a single variable. Demand is an invention to explain supply behavior simplistically, not some fundamental property of the universe (which supply, being a simple count, is in the same sense that numbers are). Core to demand's assumptions are the invariance of desire across circumstance (or at a minimum the quantifiability of that variance as a calculable function of circumstance, which has the added benefit of also requiring circumstance itself to be quantifiable), invariance of access across circumstance (see previous minimum and related quantification), and a completely circular conclusion that price is optimized to some "equilibrium" because if it wasn't optimized it would optimize itself, and if it didn't optimize itself it would therefore already be optimal (see: the same circular logic found in the EMH)
The idea that demand maps to a 2-axis function just because supply happens to do so and "demand" is an intuitive opposite to "supply" says more about economists than it does about economics - they successfully isolated a single variable and have been trying to reduce the rest of the field to only a single additional variable ever since.
In short: "supply and demand" don't describe reality because the "demand" part is a category error.
As for energy, energy efficiency is relative, because context and outcome of the work it is doing matters. Increased thermodynamic efficiency through direct competition via optimization functions is vulnerable to the hill problem, and those optimization functions when motivated by profit are in turn motivated to prefer behaviors that maximize the barriers to entry (by, for instance, resource consolidation, market manipulation, and regulatory capture) when those behaviors have higher ROI than product/service improvement.
Even product "improvement" is relative, as a reduction in used materials may increase production efficiency while reducing the overall efficiency of the industry thermodynamically (a flashlight using 50% less material than the previous model but that has less than half the operating lifespan increases material used and, perhaps more importantly, doubles the rate at which any given material becomes waste after production).
Optimization alone leads to specialization because it disfavors adaptability. When optimization favors specialization faster than the utility of adaptability can be demonstrated (either theoretically or by circumstance changes that previous optimizations have not been optimized for), specialization can outcompete adaptability, and when subsequently those hyper-specialized, hyper-optimized structures consume less efficient but potentially necessary behaviors (for instance, letting land go fallow to rebuild topsoil) the depletion of resources is broader reaching and more catastrophic.
The reason cancer kills is because _cancer cells use energy more efficiently than, and thus outcompete, the functional cells of the body that the cancer is still reliant on to survive._ In the case of a human being, such a cancer has, through nothing but ruthless efficiency, irreparably destroyed one of the most efficient uses of energy we know of: a supercomputer made of water and carbon that weighs only a few pounds, runs on about the energy of a lamp, fuels itself with sugar, and is capable of self replication.
Oh, and the cancer also dies shortly thereafter, as the now-corpse is now also not protected from decomposition by more adaptable, less specialized scavengers who don't need the active protection of a body to remain operable.
People who say that there's no reason for aliens to resemble anything on Earth, I feel like they're not really taking basic physics into account.
In fairness, most of the time they assume that the aliens are coming from a world very unlike earth. Aliens from a planet with 0.5 g or a planet with 9g of gravity aren't gonna resemble us.
That said, if they come from a planet that is identical to earth in all the ways that matter, they'll probably look like us.
@@starshade7826 why wouldn't they look like any other species on earth? Why must humans be the only ones to be able to evolve ..
@@lee1130fromtwitter Were not, in fact primates have been observed using spears to fish recently. 🙄
One thing we absolutely don't know is if there is a way to reach the status we are at, and be vastly different than us, logically there are things that should be better than what we have in certain categories, however we don't know if those have a side effect that weakens another, for example many creatures are far stronger than humans, however said creatures also require more food and/or have less stamina than us, that stamina likely played a big part in our survival.
To be blunt, it's entirely possible that humans are the way they are because we evolved on a very narrow tightrope that just so happened to let us come together to reach this solution, a 10 to the hundred trillion trillion to chance in different possibilities that would lead to a singular possibility of civilization building intelligence, this would also work as a explanation for the fermi paradox, intelligence evolving to such a form being so rare as to be near impossible.
TL;DR humans could be so great in our ability because we are so average that it made us jack of all trades, capable of many types of tasks but not being superior than another creature in them, but using other advantages from our averageness to overcome them and if so, it's entirely possible that aliens would have to be very similar to us in that same rule, to reach the same point.
@@LowMedow Yep. Just a reminder, we're still primates and modern apes.
And that explains why we see mourning and other behaviours we often think of as human in the other primates. Some other primates have far better short-term memory than us, too.
The many different times and types of eyes that have developed has always fascinated me
What is more exciting, neurons, muscles and bones have developed independantly multiple times as well
Just as a factoid nearly every type of eye appeared within a geological instant during the Cambrian explosion. So objectively they never evolved or developed. Same thing with virtually every body plan, mouths, anus, and so on in the animal kingdom. It's a huge fact that is conveniently ignored in the conversation of evolution and it's feasibility.
@@WaterspoutsOfTheDeep The Cambrian explosion took place over millions of years though. It wasn't just like a one week event.
And before the Cambrian explosion we didn't have almost any animals at all.
@@lunaticbz3594 No the timescale of the events have been reduced down to thousands of years at this point. That is why I said a "geological instant." Far too small a time period for evolution assuming it can even happen.
@@WaterspoutsOfTheDeep Radiometric dating when your measuring isotopes with a half life of 100's of millions of years is not going to give you that kind of accuracy.
Which I suppose actually hurts both of our positions, but there's no way to date the Cambrian explosion to the accuracy of a few thousand years.
I was thinking, we can see other galaxies because we are in a spiral galaxy, and can look "above" and "below" the millions of stars on our plane.
If an intelligent species was starting within an elliptical galaxy, so they were surrounded by stars, would they be able to see other galaxies? Could they theorize the Big Bang?
Can we see other galaxies that are in the plane of ours (at least in the outward directions, not through the center of the Milky Way)? That could be a way to estimate what they'd be able to see. I don't know the spherical-astronomic distribution of Earth-known galaxies, though.
Let me blow your mind. Elliptical galaxies have the same assortment of stars as spiral galaxies. The difference is that elliptical galaxies lack the dust which gives spiral galaxies their apparent shape.
@@TheReaverOfDarkness Elliptical galaxies have dust.
@@stefanr8232 Very little. They are essentially swept clean, transparent. You can see right through them even at their thickest point. It was never the stars which got in the way.
The largest galaxy I've heard of is approximately 6 million light years across (60 times wider than ours), but it's also globular, so anyone evolving around a star relatively near the centre probably wouldn't stand much of a chance of observing much outside of their galaxy.
I think convergent evolution on other worlds is not unlikely. I mean if things can evolve into crabs like 6 times here, why would it be so hard to imagine finding something on another planet that looks like a crab?
Watching Isaac Arthur be like:
Minute 1: this video will be about convergent evolution
Minute 15: atoms are less or more involved in video games than you might think
(I love this channel and I always giggle at how unrelated some moments seem to be to the topic, that if you zone out you miss the connections)
Minute 20: Centaur Giraffe Peacock Kangaroo hybrid
Morphology (form follows function) is really about packaging - about how features are arranged and made visible.
Eragon, damn this takes me back, one of the Book series that got me started in reading way back when
Goosebumps and Spinetinglers for me.
@@Rattus-Norvegicus My (silly) hobby is to
recommend science-channel and education-channel. Can i maybe?
@@nenmaster5218 Sure, have at it.
26:05
a lot of legal systems have, depending on the type of system, a lot of texts or laws in them that are literally just made completely meaningless by other laws but because they are meaningles because of other laws noone bothers removing them
Yup, I've heard the tautological explanation from biologists before. Usually it's like extremely truncated reasoning. They've probably had to explain it so often that they can't stop to teach it to everyone in it's fullest detail.
*The larger a peacock's array of tail feathers, the more likely it is to secure a mate.*
*Conversely, the larger a peacock's array of tail feathers, the more likely it is to be eaten by a predator.*
Even further, it is a balance of resources. A peacock with a smaller plumage may be able to feed itself adequately when food is scarce, and maintain vibrant color. But a peacock with larger plumage may be less nourished and have less vibrant coloration. Further still, a peacock with larger yet still equally vibrant plumage may be an indicator of good foraging success.
I love the definition of life as "a system of chemicals that are driven by entropy to dissipate heat most efficiently."
Life is just complex advanced chemistry. Which we will eventually master.
Makes no sense. More metals dissipate heat more efficiently. We try to generate as little entropy as possible, while using the energy most efficiently to replicate life's own entities (proteins, cells, organisms). Forming complex molecules costs entropy. It is only driven by (generating) entropy in the system as a whole, because it is required for any process to proceed.
the opposite is true: life is the fight against entropy, is concentration of energy not dissipation
@@UGPepe
Zoom out enough on the time scale and concentration = most efficient dissipation, so you're actually agreeing with OP, just using different words.
@@horsemumbler1 then it should be worded differently: being efficient at dissipating heat means trying to dissipate as much of it as possible in the shortest amount of time (eg. an atomic bomb).
10:25 finally! An aknowledgement that, yes human beings are, indeed, nature so what we do is natural no matter what that is. That doesn't mean it's "good" or "bad" but we can't forget that ultimately we are just an emergernt property of the universe and so is what we do.
This is important because it's easy to overlook, and has implications that can make life a lot easier for us if we stop acting like the universe is separate from us or we are separate from it
I think we might be too late, specifically concerning climate change. Billions of years ago, green photosynthesizers killed just about every other form of life by introducing poisonous oxygen into the atmosphere. We seem to be doing a similar thing with greenhouse gasses. You have a nice thought there, though.
@@squirlmy not likely, humans are very bad at creating accurate models of such chaotic complex systems, I mean just look at what happened in the last year or two.
My first girlfriend was a biology grad and showed me this concept. Wish I had kept her, she was a sure keeper.
@@icaropereira3218 don't look for the best partner, be the best partner
@@squirlmy that doesn't mean we can't fix things or at the very least drop all this bullshit capitalism brought with it about private property and "surplus" value (personal property and public property are obviously ok but I mean private business property needs to go) and keep the one good thing it brought, industrialization. We could easily make sure everyone on earth has decent housing, healthcare (including mental healthcare), education and nutrition. If we do and replace the persuit of wealth with the persuit of knowledge we will be dysoning the sun and living in O'Neal cylinders within the next 2 decades.
Edit: getting rid of so called "surplus" value or "profit" means that workers get paid for what they do not the wage/salary which is always less than they make for the company, that's how profit is made. If we focus on giving everyone an ever increasing minimum standard of living (houseing, healthcare, education, and food) and then allow people to persue their passions/helping humanity instead of working to fill others pockets and hoping to take home enough to eat and make rent (plus all the debt they're probably in) we'd be out of this mess overnight
I think having social structure, gripping hands, and forward looking eyes are the most likely convergence for intelligent creatures.
Those are the features that can happen to evolve and then provide the most obvious advantage for members with tool using intelligence. You need to be social so that others can observe the "throw rock at thing" technique for the first time and the smartest can copy it and gain a huge advantage. That sets off a chain of dominos that leads to interstellar travel, if you get lucky.
Imagine aliens that evolved to have no flight response whose only response to fear was an adrenaline fueled rage. Halo’s brutes come to mind.
They would need some natural armor and strong weapons to ensure their survival, otherwise they couldn't last unless they had already gotten to the top of the food chain before dropping the flight part. But then they would still be in danger because strength, armor, claws, whatever is not going to save them from lightning, volcanic eruptions, floods, noxious gases, or wildfires. Mother nature does not always play nice enough for creature to max out their resistances, if game terms can be used. I'm still mulling it over. Interesting thought for bad guys in a story.
Just listened to “To Sleep in a Sea of Stars” and it was epic! It had a ton of obvious references to the technology presented on this channel which was a lot of fun. Thanks for the recommendation!
"The perfect organism doesn't exi-"
20:32
By the way, Sir Isaac Arther, on the topic of good narrator, your own self described speech impediment has never been an obstacle for me to greatly enjoy your talks (which are written very well before spoken on air. In fact, I find your speech to be clearly understandable, and quite endearing to listen to. You do you the best, and I'm a big fan. You've gently taught me of so many ideas and facts is a friendly yet knowledgeable way that I enjoy listening while being taught correctly on my level of understanding.
Thanks for another great episode Isaac!
Simon Conway Morris is a respected evolutionary biologist who thinks that extraterrestrials will look eerily like us
It's an interesting discussion
Needing to sense an environment at all favors having a lot of sensory collectors nearer to the organ responsible for overall stimulus response than most of the other organs less reliant on low latency input, which is all you need to essentially guarantee the evolution of something we would recognize as a "head". I disagree with Isaac's suggestions about latency being somewhat exclusive to rapidly changing environments, as the real driver of the concentration of sensory inputs is actually minimizing their latency relative to each other (your brain _actively delays your perception of your environment to maintain an illusion of simultaneous sensory input_, because that's the only way to align senses to a given stimulus with varied information speeds, e.g. light and sound) and the speed at which signals must be sent to various organs like muscles in response is also highly dependent on their ability to react in unison to a stimulus than their ability to react as individual organs. In the case of musculature, it's more important that signals reach each muscle in a reliable order to yield controllable, reliable results than it is for those signals to reach a given muscle faster. Decrease the signal travel time and you rapidly collapse the span of time during which musculature can activate sequentially, thus requiring a faster brain to process the reaction to stimulus that quickly, and thus increasing the pressure to have sensory organs near the brain.
There are also some caveats that he neglects in suggesting that faster sensory processing/input to make sensory organ placement irrelevant is even possible - for instance, if part of neural function to achieve a brain is self-induction of current via unconnected neuron firing, then fiber optics as a neural substrate doesn't work as anything but sensory collection, and even then would likely be limited in selection for pure speed by needing to process inputs to eliminate variations in the transmission speeds of the various media being sensed.
@@Ink_Tide There's a much simpler, and therefore more persuasive argument for clustered sensory organs, I think. If they were scattered about your body, a simple fall might render you blind, or deaf etc, because the nerves or equivalents responsible for carrying the signal might be affected, either temporarily or permanently. A wound/injury that would severely compromise sensory information transport in Earthly creatures has a pretty high chance of being fatal anyway, so clustered sensory organs impose no additional selection pressures, whereas distributed ones would.
I remember Star Trek: Next Generation had a pair of episodes that explained why most of the races in the galaxy had similar traits. There was a precursor race that evolved before any other, found they were alone in the galaxy, seeded their DNA throughout the galaxy, then disappeared into history.
Fire is neat, and it is all the rage.
Speaking of games, when are you streaming Stellaris, Isaac? hahaha
Isaac Arthur just casually inventing the perfect body plan like
🦚🦒🦘🐡
I really struggled with your speech impediment today.
I have relatives who once had speech impediments, you have a lot of work ahead of you.
Good luck.
I wonder if at some point, before self replicating proteins, came along proteins that made random things, and eventually one of them made one that made a copy of itself by accident, starting the process of evolution. What would we call those?
Our ears used to be able to swivel! It's why some people can wiggle their ears. In fact, it's reactionary, if there's a loud noise behind a person, those muscle groups (if present) will automatically constrict whether we notice them or not. It's fascinating.
But also, my favorite case of convergent evolution... some pterosaurs had feeder bills akin to flamingos, in fact, this feeder mouth is so good at catching teeny tiny wriggly things in water that it's evolved independently all over the place.
Also, crabs. Like... there are crabs everywhere and most of them aren't crabs... they're lobsters that lost their tails and became crabs. PBS Eons did a video on it. It's fascinating.
Maybe I'm focusing on the wrong thing here, but the accent in these videos is the best thing. It's fascinating to hear abour "Convorgent evolortion".
Can we expect a Fermi Paradox episode on goldilocks mutations?
20:33-21:09
This is the ideal human form, you may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like
Right when I needed a simple way to refer to convergent evolution for my devlog of an evolution simulation of
plants.
Amazing explanation of evolution concepts!
These discussions are absolutely amazing. Excellent excellent. Does anybody know where Isaac gets his visual video clipart? Sometimes they're just perfect!
many are from artists made for SFIA, there given credit in the credits at the end. Others, I think are from generic video clip libraries (like Storyblocks, iStock, etc).
@@Zarcondeegrissom thanks! They're just such great illustrations!
For some reason, your voice is most enjoyable on 0.75 of speed, at least for me…great analysis btw!
Two eyes are all that's needed for depth perception.
True, but two eyes can only produce depth perception (by overlapping fields of view, used by most predator species) *or* surround vision (by complementary fields of view, used by most prey species). With four eyes it would possible to gain both benefits at the same time, which surely would be useful.
@@JonSeverinsson insects?
@@ESL-O.G. particularly predatory spiders.
Jumping and wolf spiders have amazing eyesight, despite being so tiny.
20:30 I guess I know what creature I'm putting in my next dnd game...
Have the lore be that one of the gods originally planned for that to be the standard “humanoid” template
Or maybe have the creature assert itself as the “perfect being”
Is the game "where your trying to wipe out 'hostile' alien civilizations in a space opera themed war for galactic colonization and control" Stellaris?
No, its Spaceward Ho!
The last thing I expected from an SFIA episode was a reference to the Eragon movie.
I'm still mad by the way.
I think the logical progression of this talk ,links nicely in to the development of space travel vehicles,which basic planetary life forms would inevitably be replaced by,some kind of thinking space ships(spaceships with nervous systems/brains)
Was that a Terry Pratchett “Hogfather” paraphrase at the end!? Awesome.
This escalated from origin of the species to H.P Lovecraft really quickly.
It evolved
The Inheritance Cycle is probably my favorite Fantasy Novel series ever. I don't even know how many times I've read those books and listened to the audio book version.
OK
I heard everything is turning into crabs. Aliens will be 🦀
so long as that doesn't end up with crabs in a bucket mentality, it's all cool. Then again, that may explain the Fermi paradox, there are no sprawling alien empires because there all holding each other down to their respective planets, lol.
Beetles. J.B.S. Haldane was asked if there were anything that could be concluded about God from the study of natural history. He said, "I'm not sure, but he seems to be inordinately fond of beetles" There are at least 380,000 cataloged species. Although there are lots of parasitic wasps as well.
@@squirlmy I learned something
re: 19:00 - bilateral symmetry in chordates (us) and arthropods is actually also convergent evolution. Chordates are more closely related to echinoderms (e.g. starfish and sea urchins), which often feature radial symmetry, than to arthropods, which are more closely related to annelids (advanced worms). Our common ancestor seems to be something much older that gave rise to all familiar forms of animals outside of sponges and cnidarians (corals and jellyfish) and likely vaguely resembled a tardigrade.
Hi Issac! If you could, please add more merch to your store! I love the channel and want to support, but I don't see any hoodies on the store yet! Also, some merch with megastructure images would be insanely cool, I can't find stuff like that anywhere!
I think the whole deal with anthropomorphic aliens is that they were easy to make for the special effects departments.
I for one like the idea of superintelligent lichen colonies much better.
"You never seek to explain the difference in a... game by getting into how quarks and leptons interact." - Clearly you've never seen an any% speedrun.
Trust that the Aeldari would claim we look vaguely like them. Joke's on them, if they simply knew pataphyics. Perhaps they do, in their black library, and that's the real reason the Harlequins laugh at everything...
Did I miss it or did a video on convergent evolution not mention carcinization even once?
I mean we only have 1 data-point for intelligence.
Would be kinda funny if the human form was like the crab of intelligence.
Yeah that would be absolutely hilarious.
DNA is the original Spaghetti code.
We software engineers don't call it spaghetti code anymore. We now say it was created "organically" rather than with a specific plan... It's a nice way of saying... We know it's really really convaluted.
It is so circular, I imagine a ramen fueled programmer made by DNA making spaghetti code.
Idk why we only have one opposable thumb on each hand, but then I also wonder why we only have two arms when three or four would be much more useful.
One take is that additional limbs carry additional cost in energy, that might not be useful enough to justify the expense.
@@shenrr6802 okay but having three fingers and two thumbs wouldn't require any extra energy and would be much more useful than the 4:1 ratio
Actually, when you were talking about different roof types a thought occurred to me. What if you designed roofs that could replenish ground water. All you would have to do is design a roof with the purpose of collecting water then sink a pipe deep underground to deliver the water as much as possible directly to the underground aquifer. Water table depletion is a serious problem globally since everyone pretty much uses the same farming methods so if you could adapt people's homes to help solve the problem that would be a big win for the environment.
Actually, we do this all the time (where I live)! We even get money from the government to feed our rainwater into the ground instead of the sewer...
they're called gutters
You do a really good job of explaining the concept of underdetermination.
Everything eventually winds up crabing.
That's why I'm building mechanical exoskeletons
@@kingmasterlord crab shaped, I hope.
@@sobertillnoon in part. Look up a falmer shield from Skyrim, and then imagine that the claw part could be fitted into the wrist of a mechanical hand optionally
22:00
and also a lot of these things do take a lot of time and luck to evolve
they are useful so over a very long time, in creatures that are slightly less complex they can evolve over a very long time
but I wouldn't expect exeballs in your hands to evolve any faster if anything slower than the first eyeballs
and thsoe took a LOT longer than human hands have been around
I really loved To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, Christopher really upped his writing skills since his original inheritance trilogy. Or perhaps as a result of.
The Peacentagraff is the stuff of nightmares. This needs to go on merch.
21:00 welp, that's nightmare material right there :D
i smoked a joint halfway thru this amazing vid and actually felt my understanding of the info 'expand' lol. great vid as always sir
It seems to me one of the main factors in convergent evolution with aliens would be if the alien planet has tree-climbing creatures. As far as we know, intelligence and technology require opposable thumbs. I did some research: most if not all organisms on earth that have or have had opposable thumbs were tree-climbers. So if the alien planet has (a) trees and (b) tree climbing creatures, there's some chance of convergent evolution towards an intelligent creature with an opposable thumb.
Ah yes, nothing like another informative SFIA video start my day.
12:18
welcome back to weird stock footage with isaac arthur
2: 05 Mr. Pale in Pan's Labyrinth does this, albeit without any eyes on his face.
Autumn day in Hudson, break from indoor due to machine break down. This channel is always a treat 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
Sci Show had an episode recently where they spoke of gut bacteria. It doesn't actually outnumber our cells, but does make up a large portion. I can't remember what the actual percentage was.
Its awesome that one of my favorite authors and favorite content creator enjoy each other’s work
The part about why we don't have eyes on our hands reminded me of how if deprived of sight, and traind to read brail the human brain does co-opt parts normally associated with sight and reading, to boost the tactile fidelity of the index and middle fingers, but then again our bodies already have trunk lines running to those fingers for dexterity reason, so said shift doesn't require much, if any, new hardware
Yeah but that's more of a brain crosswire thing, like how I use spatial reckoning to do mathematics
@@kingmasterlord only partially as they found those who with sight benefit from it less, but that said I put that last sentence on most the hardware already being there in for a reason
@@James-ep2bx yeah we really do seem almost embryonic in how generalized we are biologically speaking. We're a Swiss army knife of adaptability. Redundant systems galore!
Very subtle rephrasing of Death’s speech from HogFather.
Isaac Arthur's Centaurworld Theorum: Durpleton is peak efficiency and therefore should be the default evolutionary path in all environments able to sustain life.
I don't know if I hate or love that I can't help but chuckle anytime someone says *big brain*
What has the internet done to me?
so... what you're saying is that Centaurworld is feasible as being evolutionarily advantageous. ;)
I love this show and have been watching for years. I still get excited every Thursday for Arthursday! Woooooo
A great, very interesting video as always. Thanks.
Another great and interesting video! Thanks, Isaac!
21:00 Behold, a human! - Diogenes Arthur
I do not think bilateral symmetry would be that uncommon. One only needs the ability to distinguish between two opposite sides in two different directions to evolve bilateral symmetry. One of these directions come from simply having the capability to move, something that evolves in organisms that cannot make or get their own food from ambient resources once their food source starts to become rare, something that is bound to happen as organisms eating rarer and rarer lifeforms start to evolve. The other one comes from a directional input of the environment, something that is achieved by light and or gravity on a planet. These things will almost always result in some form of bilateral symmetry in any macroscopic life-forms.
In the unlikely event we meet aliens, I'd be shocked if they weren't bilateral.
you lost me at "organisms eating rarer and rarer lifeforms". Certainly organism can specialize more in diet, but that has nothing to do with that food getting "rarer". If the food of an prey animal gets rare, it will start to vary it's diet or die. Evolution works in the direction of expanding the diet as soon as any food source gets "rare".
I'm not sure how you are relating this to bilateralism anyways. Are you speaking strictly of unicellular life forms gaining the ability to move?
I think life forms have always gained mobility in order to escape from being food! Not to better search it! OTOH Just look at all the biomass of immobile plant life, which pretty much dominates over animal life. It's not too difficult to imagine a planet that evolves only plant-like photosynthesizers and fungi-like life forms -if conditions are harsh enough that mobility is selected against. You are correct in that anything mobile and animal-like will evolve into bilateral symmetry, but that's an animal-centric view of life. ;) A natural-enough mistake for a mammal to make. I imagine that there may be many planets of just "green goo" where life never becomes multicellular. Our own planet spent at least a billion years this way.
@@MrJero85 if we meet multicellular mobile animal or insect-like aliens. There might only be unicellular life, or maybe plants and fungi. Maybe that stretches the definition of "alien", but alien-life-forms might just be green goo.
@@squirlmy
The organism that eats is always present in lesser numbers than the ones getting eaten. So lets say A eats B and B eats C. Even if A is super common C will be somewhat uncommon and anything(D) that eats C is bound to be rare. So anything above that will start to struggle with finding D. This is what I meant. And evolution does not always make the organism vary its diet as soon as its food start to get rare. That is one of the measures not the only measure that is taken.
When I am talking about lifeforms gaining the ability to move and thus causing bilateral symmetry I am talking about macroscopic life. I mentioned as much in my comment. Bilateral symmetry does not make sense in unicellular life.
If lifeforms gained mobility to escape from being food then the first lifeforms to start moving would be autotrophs and not heterotrophs since the former would be the first ones to get eaten, not the latter. This is because the latter cannot make their own food and thus have to get it from other organisms. Which one would that be ? The one that makes it of course i.e. autotrophs. This is why it was not avoiding to get eaten and rather trying to find rare food that made hetterotrophs start to move. When food is everywhere all you need to do is gulp. If food in your region runs out you need to move elsewhere. That is how movement evolved.
I do not think that there will be any planets with only unicellular life(if it is old enough). This is because cells tend to aggregate as is. Eventually some of those clumps will start sticking more than others. As the clumps grow bigger the environment within these clumps will be less favourable to life that is used to live as free living cells. This will encourage different types of cells to exist on the insides. This variability will allow these clumps to utilize resources far more effectively and come up with survival strategies impossible for unicellular life. Thus multicellularity will evolve in a sufficiently old world.
I also do not think that there would be any planet of only plant-like life. This is because life always aims at filling all available niches. As soon as there are too much plant life, something that eats said life is very likely to evolve.
Perfect thing to do on a break at work watch this video.
you said you still use ms word? man, a few years ago when i was printing a lot of material at the library almost none of the computers had it any more, and only one printer ( in someone's office) was compatible. i'm glad to see it's still an option if i ever need to get at that saved material again
reject humanity, evolve to crab
But humans are crabs already
Not only eyeballs, we know that blood, nerves, bones, hearts, etc, even multicellularity evolved independantly dozens of times on earth alone. What happened only once - development of the genetic code and of eucaryotes, those are probably extremely rare.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Abiogenesis and eukaryotes may make like life itself extremely rare. Regardless of what astrophysicists say.
Convergence is a profound challenge to the naturalistic model. It is exactly what we shouldn't see if evolutionary theory was correct. What makes this example of biological convergence especially significant is its occurrence across phyla. It is not just convergence within an order, class, or phylum. It is observed in at least eight different phyla. Biological convergence repeatedly arising in circumstances where the forces driving natural selection are vastly different strongly argues for the compelling necessity of supernatural, super-intelligent activity on the part of a personal Creator. Seeing convergence in biology is a huge problem for naturalism for many reasons beyond what I wrote. But what is interesting is the lack of reflection on the implications of convergence. We see the same thing across the board like with the logistics required for evolution to take place especially on the macro scale, or the feasibility of a naturalistic origin of life event for example.
@@WaterspoutsOfTheDeep That is stupid
@@tedarcher9120 How so? It's logical and factual. So no.
@@WaterspoutsOfTheDeep it isn't. Math isn't a god. We see patterns repeal all the time, because of math. For example, spirals form in a toilet when it is flushed and also in galaxies. No god or gods required
I think one of the biggest factors in the way of human-like aliens the way we see them in Star Trek and Star Wars is that to get to a body plan as similar as many of those species have to us, they'd have to go through a whole history of very similar body plans. On earth, the vertebrate skeleton evolved once. Something looking more like an octopus or an arthropod when it first goes onto land is likely to evolve a body plan that makes use of what they already have to support their weight and enable the evolution of critical features like a large brain and prehensile appendages. And their support system will be primarily responsible for their overall shape. Something that looked like an average earth insect before evolving sapience is far more likely to have a mantis-like build than anything resembling us.
Yeah... I could f*ck an alien mantis...
Or they might lose those traits due to them being less benificial than the ones we observed?
@@rommdan2716 Our ability to wanna bone literally anything is truly what separates humans from animals.
@@georgethompson1460 Yeah they might lose certain traits, but whatever they have will have come from some pre-adaptation of their ancestral body plans.
11:51 “All the gut bacteria in you which combined outnumber all your other cells including those blood cells.”
That’s actually an urban legend.
28:40
to be fair, the mutation rate caused by radiation, measured in mutations per generation can be adjusted by lifespan
if radiation causes your dna to change at a certain rate, a loer lfiespan means fewer changes occur in the time until the next generatio nand the next sorting and selection of which errors are beneficial and which are harmful making it less likely for useful oens to be drowned out
so life on a high radiation world coul hypothetically be kinda similar to life on early earth but just never make it past generations that are longer than a few hours or days limiing how complex it gets
The best examples are dinosaurs and flight,swimming etc,but this and size is relative to available nutrients -size ,and atmospheric pressure which I think would be the defining aspect in relation to practicality within the environ.i don't imagine humanity forms being practical in surface pressures and temperatures a thousand fold earth's,or jupiters,enjoying the recent shows,thanks
The eye ball is just an extension of the brain.
Thank you Isaac and team, you keep me sane.
How interesting that I was just talking about convergent evolution in regards to it's non-biological parallels in both innovation and branding
Specifically, it was about how survival of the fittest has been so often trumped by simply being first (temporally) in the non-biological parallels by copyright, patent, and trademark
Thanks for another great video arthur!