As a young teenager I read Carl Sagans book Broccas Brain and this led to over 40 years pondering brain evolution, morphology and mechanics. I was always eyes open for any studies that provided evidence for Lamarcian principles and how they might work in practice. Now about 45 years later I am fairly confident that they do play a role, a significant role. However constraint of evolutionary processes to the genome of humans in human evolution misses the totality of what is actually happening. A human is not so much an organism as it is a walking talking supercity for trillions of bacteria, phages and viruses we barely understand and believe we can never understand how 'we' work until they are all fully integrated into the model.
You are way, way ahead of the game in this podcast. There is a lot that we have to get through before we can get to ideas like yours. I agree with you. Although I would characterize us not too much as a collection of cells but as a collection of agents (eg cells, proteins) and processes
The womb is the 7zip of the human genome, i would assume that the human growing the child from an embryo passes ALOT of information during the 9 months spent in contact with its construction machine. It not just abou what order the genes are in, its also about when they are and where, and what the surrounding shape and influences are, heat,pressure, frequencies. All the small thing add up to make the smallest most insignificant seeming butterfly effects.
Nice video, thank you. Very curious about where this series will go. I noticed a few small details that I want to mention, which I don't think changes your premise. 1. At 11:00 mark you said that DNA methyl transferases exist "at least in plants". It is well known they exist in mammals. I think a distinction between DNA methylation inheritance from mother cell to daughter cells and trans-generational inheritance would have made the point clearer. 2. You said a few times that these changes to methylation do not come from the organism itself. But clearly an organism must contain a mechanism that allows the environment to alter its gene expression (and maybe pass it to another generation). So, philosophically speaking, it's not really environment too, but something within the organism that is sensing the environment in order to prepare for the future. 3. You focused on methylation as a potential mechanism for carrying the traits from parent to offspring, and those do get erased. Maybe a better example here might be other mechanisms for this inheritance to happen that are not related to DNA itself, but the things present within germ cells, like micro RNAs.
Thank you very much for these comments. I plan to revisit the scripts when I am finished and your points and those of others more knowledgeable than I are really valuable. Epigenetics is, as you have guessed, not my field. I am also aware that methylation in particular is not always, or even mostly, cued by the environment external to the organism. My point, as you correctly recognized, is that some of it is environmentally influenced and that the information this represents is exogenous.
Also your point that the genome must encode something that recognizes the environment is a major point of this series. The other major theme is multi-agent interaction and ... well let me not give it all away
Hope my comment didn't sound as criticism. As far as I can tell, you did an excellent job with epigenetics and you have a very clear way of presenting complex information in a sound and concise way. Really, really enjoyed both of your videos so far. Going to watch the next episode . Likely I will be a fan :)
Oh no. I hope that I did not suggest that I was in any way offended. I'm thinking about collecting the scripts as a manuscript and I need to know where I need to spend more time. Your comment was wonderful. I would be grateful if you would comment on other episodes as well. Not all of them are primarily biological and I seem to be learning a lot for my computer/information science viewers as well!
This is so underrated. Maybe if you used a more "video essay" style of editing you could have more viewer retention. It seems like videos with complex or abstract subject matter often perform better when paired with flashy editing. Anyway, good video!
I created this as a podcast for Spotify, etc. I didn't even know that RU-vid had a podcast section until I launched this. I think I'm going to keep this one pretty spare. My channel has lots of videos, albeit primarily about optics, AI, and eye surgery
