Natural Selection Is Kinda Overhyped 

Watched this while eating a peanut butter bread with jam, and decided to subscribe.

If human close to chimpanzee doesn’t have chin as we only had it, we call ourselves the ‘Chinpanzee’

I think accepting the assumption that a majority of DNA "has no function" is a fraught position to take. We thought a lot *more* of it was "junk" just a few years ago. There's a certain amount of hubris in the ideas here. as they make the almost manifestly wrong assumption that we now do understand what *all* DNA does, whereas we have a history of just ignoring the parts we don't understand now.

Darwin lived in an era in which natural theology was still popularly used to explain the existence of biological function (that is, god created organisms to live in certain ways), and introducing the idea that function could be created and maintained naturally (by natural selection) was revolutionary. But more than a century later we find the possibility of natural selection obvious and intuitive, so now we are free to investigate all of the traits of organisms that are non-functional, or at least non-optimal. Darwin himself discussed this in terms of sexual selection, of course. A similar debate happened in the history of geology. Initially geologists believed that Earth was largely shaped by catastrophic events, including the biblical flood. In response, other geologists argued that given enough time even gradual, uniform forces could change the face of the planet, and we don't need to use religious myths to explain things. Now we understand that the Earth does change slowly over long periods, but it also suffers periodic catastrophes, like erupting volcanoes, ice ages, and asteroid impacts.

Great video! One critique: I think a substantial number of biologist would disagree with referring to DNA that doesn't code for protein as "non-functional". That DNA impacts the cell whether it is the energy used for the frequent replication and transcription that DNA, or the interaction that DNA (and it's RNA) has with other molecules in the cell, or cis-regulatory elements within that DNA etc. The function of that DNA is typically more robust to point mutations, but that doesn't make that DNA non-functional

Interesting fact related to the panda segment. The evolution of the human thumb (enabling more complex tool use) is a similar example of pleiotropic changes put into motion by the older changes in the foot to allow long distance, energy efficient bipedalism. I would love to see a video on all the features of human evolution that set us apart from other species along these lines.

I read an article that said we have chins because if we didn’t, our jaws would split in half when we got punched in the face. It explored how chins appeared at the same time that our hands started to be capable of forming fists.

Thanks for actually explaining pangloss and not just saying "it's not important"

Great video. I was familiar with many of the ideas presented, but it's been a long time since I learned about them and you did a great job of presenting the information in a concise and entertaining way.

Have been looking for a theoretical biology/ philosophy of biology channel since forever. Happy to have found one now!

Wonderfully constructed video essay and thank you for all the new to me ideas you exposed me to!

Great video, really good job with condensing so much work and theory down to such easy-to-understand explanations.

Man, you're channel is incredible! Your content is great! Congratulations And thank you for the discussion, i'll get deeper into this for sure, and i'll spread the word haha!

This channel deserves more subscribers. Some of the best explanations I’ve ever seen.

Your videos are amazing man! Nice animations, funny moments, simple explanations, great pacing! Keep doing it my man! I hope this channel grows as it deserves. This content has great quality

I love what you're doing. Thank you so much.

well researched, insightful and simply explained. thank you so much

Great explanation! Thank you for the effort!

Love your videos!! I’ve always wondered if the things I learn at school are 100% accurate. Thank you for allowing me to think from different perspectives! If possible, could you do a video on epigenetics and the interaction of our genes and the environment?

Awesome video! Held my interest and I have no background in such topics. But from various things I've read or seen about medicine, science, and their attending philosophies as of late, holistic approaches are succeeding and age old schisms becoming bridged as false dichotomies are revealed in thinking. Like neutralism vs adaptationism, nature vs nurture, etc. Thank you for sharing

This is excellent content! Awesome job!

Love your videos, man! Keep up the fantastic work.

this video needs like 10,000 views

Great video review, thanks !

I’ve always thought of rephrasing “the survival of the fittest” more accurately as “ survival of the mostly random, including the things that are just enough above unfitness not to get the organism killed”

Thought provoking. Thanks for making it!

Thank you. Finally someone has simplified this debate to a level I understand. On "no environment without an organism", sorry, failing to grasp this concept as Big Bang, whole of lot exploding stars and billions of years passed without any organism present. Maybe I am missing something.

This was so well made and funny. Have you adapted your videos to gain the engagement unmotivated college kids who don't want to read the original paper.

Fantastic! I would definitely use this as a supplement to readings and lectures. You even broke down the Panglossian part of it!

This was a very interesting and entertaining video, thank you.

i love your videos, and your attitude, and also you’re pretty funny.

Great channel!

While random mutation can influence evolution, it's important to note that natural selection is still by far the most important factor. Mutations that may seem neutral may actually have very slight positive or negative effects on a species. Over a long enough period of time, mutations that have slight negative effects would be weeded out and vice versa for positive traits. You can see this in traits such as not having wisdom teeth, this has only a slight benefit but is still naturally selected on.

your videos are so under rated in my opinion

Interesting video, really sparks a thought. I'll be waitning for more :))

This is the best content I could stumb upon, cant believe you are not famous yet

Amazing video, thanks!

I find that last segment incredibly fucking fascinanting because that same sort of approach (Environment and subjects as interrelated, mutually influencing parts of a system) is currently extremely relevant in humanities in fields like geography (As in, societies and their environments mutually influencing eachother). Its so bloody interesting seeing these sorts of concepts applied to rather different fields, as, in retrospective, shows a lot of their similarities, as well as their own positions within the own development of sciences as a whole. Epistemology is cool as fuck

It's also important to note that previously useless traits can become useful again, selected for. As an example: The Chin (by raw chance) is sexually dimorphic, and is, as a result, small chins are strongly selected against in men, but not in women. Thus, the Chin started off useless, but became useful at a later time as a way of peacocking.

Amazing video. The niche construction thought is simply beautiful. It is probably very common thing to occur. We as humans took this to another level by adapting our environment to us (spanning from building cities to occupying space on the ISS). An interesting example came to my mind. It has been shown, that as we are using our smartphones, the number of connections between out thumb and the brain is increasing. Moreover, in some cases, the thigh is more responsive to touch (vibrations) as we carry our phones in a pocket. This isn't really a matter of evolution though. It simply isn't that fast. It's more like an adaptation of our nervous system to a new part of the enviroment. But we made this environment possible in the first place...

0:22 - Without waiting to watch more, my answer is "Why not? It doesn't harm..." I am curious in which direction will you go...

Honestly thanks for explaining the chin thing. I’ve heard that my whole life but no one ever put it so simply. I feel dumb but a little smarter now

Marvellous. Mind blown. Thank you. (A newly enlightened adaptionist) 😊

Drift is very real but only shuffling in the end. If your people randomly gets a bad hand, it will still lose in the end. Natural selection is more about culling the less fit than selecting super-fit ones, although by eliminating the worst hands, you end up with the ones with the best actually existing hands.

very interesting topic & engaging presentation! i think this video offered a different perspective of just how complex & varied the mechanisms & techniques that play into this thing we define as "life". also instant subcribed! 😊💚

I appreciate your click bait title to your video. Kinda overhyped is understating the facts of all scientific studies. Great video !

I instantly subscribed. You are destined to have at least 1 million subs soon. I'm an economist but I'veread Stephen J Gould ( Panda's Thumb?) What you are saying is super intriguing. I wi.l now have to study this. Than you.

Thank you for these videos. They are very enlightening for someone like me who only learned biology in hischool but creeps on thinking about it and doesn't always get it to work out.

You're the only non-textile manufacturer besides myself I've seen try to pull so many threads together. Big Liebnitz fan here, Voltaire straw-manned him, which made funny satire but bad argument. What does random mean, anyway? Back when, I noted that even if we could assume random mutation of genes, evolution couldn't be random if it SELECTED for fitness. (I had to point out that "fit" meant, not Most Buff, but tetrised into the eat and be eaten chain.) 16:37 In spite of Punctuated Equilibrium, Gould was considered a strict Darwinian, but I don't think even Darwin was a strict Darwinian. Wallace was the OG (Original Gradualist). Competitive publication problem, solved by cooperation, who'da thunk? Loving the advance of epigenetics! Give ol' Lamarck a crumb. In summary: What fun you are! Thanks for looking at all the little reduced pieces and making a coherent and detailed picture of them.

As a hard determinist, I'm triggered by the gall to even ask such a question. Everything that happens in existance is part of a larger equation that we can sometimes peer into its workings to predict what is going to happen next. Nothing is random, everything's already happened... and I'm not saying this just to feel better about the 3 pigeon stinkbombs that fell on my jacket and beanie this afternoon.

It is obvious to anyone who has engaged in deep thought, that such intense pondering requires one to sit down, secure their elbow onto the leg, and rest the chin upon the hand. Clearly, as the only species known to engage in this deep thought activity, we are also the only species that requires this extended thinking platform, otherwise known as the "chin".

Nice video! Btw chins evolved to better protect teeth from punches, we are one of the few animals that instinctively punch, also it's an attractive sexual trait because woman like manly men who can take a punch, think about it like a lion's mane sort of deal.

A geologist once said, "If we ever find a planet that looks like Earth we can be certain that life has existed there, because it is living organisms that have shaped it" He was referring to granite and chalk and such

A while ago, I made my own extremely basic life simulator where each organism had a set of instructions it would follow, sort of like DNA. These instructions would randomly mutate upon reproduction. What I found was that the organisms would gradually accumulate hundreds of instructions, with most of them being completely useless except for a select few. I was originally kinda confused by this and came up with wild theories, but after watching this video, everything makes sense. There was no reason, it was just random chance.

I think I love this channel. Obviously (now that I've watched this video) we're attracted to the world we see, hear and know. And that's the one we believe in. But there's more to a pale blue dot than you'd know from a distant fly-by on the way back to Andromeda Z-89/&~55.

Adorei conhecer esse canal!

You've earned a new viewer!

Cool! Thanks for the video

this is why scientists are more excited when the same trait evolves again and again independently, then we are more confident that there are adaptation advantages

this video is absolutely amazing! It even cleared up some questions I had about netrual evolution, which is part of an exam I have this week. Thank you, and godspeed SubAnima

Simply regarding the title and thumbnail text, it’s important to understand that at the end of the day what natural selection is really doing is weeding out reproductively non-viable traits. It doesn’t matter if something is the best or most optimal for a given task. All that matters is that it works well enough to continue to exist. So if something randomly evolves and it works then it stays. If it doesn’t work then it goes away. In this way things that don’t negatively effect reproductive success can stick around. The point isn’t to believe that natural selection is choosing a bunch of things that work. It’s just eliminating what doesn’t. What we’re left with is traits that are beneficial and traits that don’t matter. Or traits that are harmful but still work enough to not go extinct. I don’t think natural selection is over hyped. I think people get confused when we personify it. But those nerds who actually study it don’t make the mistakes that lay people do.

Just wow, thanks for the algorithm that make me find this channel

i know that no one is proberly going to see this but i felt like expanding of from the perfect world hypothosis you mentioned, the ideas of perfect or good and bad are just subjective perspective based ideas, if we went from this world to a world that was better or perfect in our perspective we would believe it was perfect but if we had always been on that world we would have found different problems that we proberly wouldnt have even considered or cared about if we hadnt originated there. basically what im saying is no matter how good somthing is there will always be bad and vice versa our idea of one never compleatly disapears but would just get smaller but never reach 0, so to know how good or bad our world realy is we would have to know all others. problems may seem big or small to us but may seem bigger or smaller to others. say you are poor and have just won the lottery all of the problesm you can currently think of can now be fixed, old cloths buy some new onces, hungry you can get food when ever you want, your homeless well now you can by a mansion. now lets say you were always rich but have alot of problems. the money isnt going to help with that as thoes problems have arived regarless of you having alot of money becuase thoes problems are able to exist with you having alot of money the money has no effect or meaning for thoes problems so you will have to find other solutions to thoes problems. so in short we must know everything to know one thing

Great video! One minor complaint is that chins are an odd example to use, given that people with weak chins are typically far less attractive than other people. I don’t know how universal that viewpoint is, so I don’t know if attractiveness is a plausible explanation for modern chins, but most of your audience probably do view chins as more attractive than lacking them (even though super strong chins are far more polarizing), and may decide natural selection to be a more favorable interpretation of that particular trait than random chance. Also, quick question, isn’t it possible for new genes to occasionally arise out of non-coding DNA. Obviously not often given the low probabilities involved, and even more rarely positive, but isn’t it a possibility, or does something prevent noncoding DNA from ever being recognized as coding DNA again, and new genes have to always arise from duplicates of existing ones?

Great video! Also, genetic drift can destroy important genes which are currently neutral, but significant longer term. For example human's (and relatives) loss of ability to synthesize vitamin C, though its loss could also have been beneficial. Another is cats losing the ability to synthesize Taurine, which is only found in meat, which is all cats eat. These changes could severely harm the emergence of some herbivore cat or humans ability to travel the seas eating nothing but dried jerky and hardtack. Even if these examples turn out to be advantageous, it seems clear that genetic drift COULD destroy significant, but neutral genes, which hurt the long-term adaptability of a species.

Every single videos you make are super high quality, interesting and awesome. Keep on the good work!

My one criticism so far at 6:45. A deleterious mutation is a mutation that lowers an organism’s fitness. It doesn’t make a useless protein but a harmful one

Your examples showcase that more knowledge is needed to ascertain anything about the adaptionism point of view. That's true for any theory. What are the testable predictions of the other factors of evolution. What knowledge do we need to say that was a factor (say for chin growth) with reasonable confidence.

Agh my picky eater autistic brain cringed at the thought of a nutella sandwich and especially at the thought of mixing nutella with jam (yuck!), but I adored the video. Your energy is great and your organization and presentation of the subject matter is top notch!

You are awesome 💯

Okay but this is so interesting!

Glad the algorithm showed me this channel

Very nice video. If you are ambitious, you can cover constructive neutral evolution next.

When you consider the hundreds of millions of years that can span between species, it’s easy to imagine that any specific trait may be a snapshot during a process that takes eons. Consider an animated drawing. Different key frames define the overall movement, but inbetween frames may or may not be intelligible, but they are necessary to get from one key frame to the other over time. Now imagine it takes millions of years to get form one key frame to the other instead of 24 frames. You’re not going to be able to tell if that weird squishing motion or that motion blur is a defined or useful state, but it’s a process. Mutations are random by definition. Who’s to say a mutation is useful or not ? If it doesn’t hurt the species in any way, it’s just propagated until it disappears naturally over eons. Language go through the same changes over time. Their particularities may or may not be useful to communicate anything, but we gain or lose spelling, grammar or even whole words by usage, code transfer, assimilation, erosion or obsolescence. Whatever the species’ trait looks like now may or may not be useful, but it’s just a snapshot from an extremely slow motion movie.

New here I just wanna note that all this talk about chins and then BAM yours is like, RIGHT THERE.

here's where i've been on all this for a few yrs now (from the most foundational, 'on up'): *Habitat Adaption, Habitat Survival, and Habitat Dominance, for > *Feeding, Breeding, and Status, for > *Passing on: Individual and Group Genes, Social Structures, Cultural Values, and Technologies (eg, beaver dam, bee hive)

The mutations that solve adaptive problems occurred _randomly_ relative to the adaptive problem that they solve . In other words, inheritance of acquired characteristics or LaMarckian inheritance does _not_ occur in natural selection. Lamarck’s idea of evolution ( how did the giraffe get a longer neck ? ) is a natural selection model ! But the adaptive changes are caused by the adaptive problem that they solve . The fictional giraffe stretches its neck to adapt to high up food ; the problem of food up causes its own solution : stretch the neck . This is none random selection: it does not occur.

Natural selection brought me here Great video😁

As soon as I saw your face, the whole intro about chins came into focus.

long necks of giraffes to reach tree tops; long necks of camels and llamas so they can graze.

There are a lot of things about the human body that don’t make a ton of sense. I’ve wondered most about our torsos. Every other species of hominid, even Neanderthals, appears to have extra room for digestive organs, based on the shape of the ribs…which would imply none of them cooked their food, or at least didn’t know how to slow cook food. Then there is the aquatic adaptations. Sweating, sub dermal fat deposits. Able to hold breath. African tribes with the starts of a third eyelid, etc. One of the bigger benefits of our intelligence was probably the consistent and systemic use of aquatic resources for survival. And it appears to be mostly unique to us.

there is a dynamic hidden in the gene and physical interaction of chemicals and cell behavior, against an environment, evolution is not as random as it may seem, families of species could be sharing a common evolution program that guides them through a subset of possibilities way faster and directed than we can prove right now. This program is life itself and it's extremely expensive to model accurately. Life is not only species and specimens, it's also a system that generates them, this is what we don't understand clearly, we can only point at some small aspects participating in the system. The high level understanding isn't there yet. Take nutrition for instance, we don't even have a clear picture of all the gut bacteria species and how they interact and help or work against us. We can't heal someone that has the wrong ones, it's still a science in its infancy, but it's critical to health and it's the most important aspect of any animal life. We can't read someone's epi-genetics, we can't read someone's immune system state (all memory gathered, all cells activation state, all produced antibody) we can't fix hormonal issues at the root (only compensate with huge side effects), mental health is still hard to improve. We seem to improve our way of life but disease rate skyrockets All of this is about only one species and we don't have a clue or we need all the science strength to diagnose one individual as a study only partially at huge costs. We're sill far from fully simulating an animal lineage to prove any theory. I suspect that individuals control their descendant evolution in a limited way but in a directed way, only a few generation exposed to big changes will evolve drastically. Then there is a superseding system in which descendant must belong, this system belongs to the species family, this system evolves slower and you do not need to evolve it a lot to produce seemingly completely different species. For instance cats, apes, dogs, horses have many variants but they share most of this framework within their group, what we need to learn is how signals go to living experience to evolution, what are the variable that are controlled when producing offspring. Could we live better lives by improving the evolution quality to our descendants ?

People kept getting uppercutted and women started realizing that people with big pointy chins got uppercutted less

Beautiful

I think we have a chicken and egg thing going on here. I totally agree with you that changes that arise generation to generation are entirely independent of the environment. But, it is definitely the case that *if* one of those changes makes an organism more fit for survival, it is more likely to survive. Natural selection has nothing to do with what genetic changes *appear* in the population - it has to do with the likelihood of each change *suviving*. When you look at the incredible complexity of life on Earth in general, you immediately recognize the need for something like natural selection. The unvierse just hasn't been here long enough for us to have "just gotten here randomly." There is some kind of engine contributing to the process.

I'd think that when a mutation for a new trait occurs though, the large the current population the less likely it would be to spread... but, that said, in a larger population you'd have more random mutations occuring, so the overall chance of one of them spreading would remain fairly high. So, if the gene for chins appeared in humans (or one of our ancestors) it's chance of going from one individual to dominant would largely depend on it being a survival trait, or at the very least that individual having a good set of other genes. If it's spandrels, then I'd argue that the chin is not the adaptation... the smaller jaw do to smaller teeth would be the adaptation. The chin would just be an artifact of that adaptation. In addition to deleterious, neutral, and advantageous mutations I'd think a lot of mutations are situational. A mutation that makes you taller is great for a creature that eats leaves off of trees, but maybe not so good for a creature that lives tight caves.

The truth is the binary "Neutral/useful" is likely too simplistic all change have some effect to sexual/natural selection. change totally neutral will have to be very rare and likely might become positif/negative at some point in a continuously changing environment.

Desperate evo cope artistry is overhyped? Who could've guessed

We need more if your video

I need you to make a video just about the animals with chins picture at 0:21.

What actually shocked me in this clip was how emotionally charged some scientists are with their pet theories and hostile to contra-dictionary ideas. Some of these ideas are so obvious that it's more shocking that science in general haven't realized it before those papers as it's just common sense.

Thanks for the awesome video. The Florida snail kite has grown their beak in one generation, in order to eat the African snail.

I mean, there are a few environmental factors that organisms don't change, such as surface gravity, mantle composition, and irradiation of our planet by our star. A whole manner of other things have been created or changed by organisms though, such as atmospheric composition (see: great oxygen catastrophe and/or global warming) or the composition of the earth's crust (burrowing animals, lichen, root systems, human mining) and a whole lot more. So while there _is_ an environment without organisms, the vast _majority_ of the environment truly is because of organisms, and the independent part keeps shrinking as us humans continue to push technology to it's limits. I mean, we've arguably been the first ones to finally crack open the lithosphere and extract stuff. That has probably not been done by a life form before.

No one knew anything about genes when Mendel was doing his plant studies. This presentation still points out the importance of natural selection when you threw out the newspaper and peanut butter sandwich. After which, the 99% of neutral adaptions can allow variation without risking extinction. I liked that the presentation started with a question of why the chin, leading to an underappreciated aspect of genetics. Very good presentation 🏆. Definitely worth watching.

In a sense, having 4 limbs is genetic drift, as you describe with the aliens who miscategorise them as clearly adaptive. However, *keeping* 4 limbs is in part due to selectionism, because mutations that deviate are so unlikely to be successful, given how complicated our bodies are, as they've evoled under the assumption of 4 limbs for so long. So we didn't adapt to have 4 limbs, but selection keeps us in the (local) maxima of 4 limbs, because each gene's environment involves all the other genes it is bundled up with. So 'adaptationism' doesn't say why we have 4 limbs, but in a way it does contribute to explaining why we keep them.

If I have a mixed bag of trail mix and I begin to shake it, quite randomly and with vast fluctuations, you'll still find that (despite some impure spots) the biggest pieces will sift themselves to the top. Evolution is random at each generation, but over time nature finds the best shapes for the best things for the most part

This has an interesting implication for machine learning. Natural selection was a basis for hope for genetic algorithms to create incredible effects as our computers become more and more powerful (quantum computing was especially promising for this). But if the evolution itself, far more powerful than any computer we can dream of creating, gets stuck in its way and never changes, because positive changes in the functional element of DNA by random chance are extremely rare, this dampen the enthusiasm for self-improving programs, who will improve themself by the process of replication and evolution.

i laughed so much during this video. thank you

Great video! I studied the genomes of hybrids formed between nascent species in my PhD (I’ll not name the specific organism). There the central assumption is that the vast majority of fixed genetic differences between species/populations are the result drift. To my knowledge I never met anyone up in arms about drift vs. selection. It is interesting to reflect on the Spandrels debate - I often found it difficult to get to grips with the history of these apparently earth shattering debates after the fact. Especially when your field doesn’t see it as a controversy in the present day. Thanks for the insightful video. 😊

Dude, you are smart. I'm impressed.