Random Chance in Evolution - Robin May 

I’m currently watching several of your uploads , wonderful way to spend the afternoon, thanks so much to the folk involved! All the best Jules

A really interesting and understandable presentation. It would be interesting to hear about the 1300 population idea and how it was determined.

I a, glad this series came up in my algorithm. Thanks!

Very well done and educational. Worth viewing.

Great lecture, very interesting!

I finally subscribed to science group via facebook as Gresham recommended.

Thank you Gremshaw.

The subjective sensitivity of some posters betrays their biases. Getting over yourself can be a Sisyphusian task.

As a physicist I noticed that the concept of "fitness landscape" seems very similar to the physical conceptof (scalar) potential. Which actually kinda makes sense, as every natural science is ultimately based on physics.

As fascinating as the previous lecture.

Technically, your ICE car already has an alternator and a battery. You can increase the alternator power, then add an electric motor to assist the propulsion (like in certain motor sports). Congratulation, you have an hybrid car. You can then reduce the direct contribution of the ICE to propulsion and directly transfer more power to the electric motor until the ICE is only there to power the electric parts (the second mode is more efficient) Since you don't need the complex transmission anymore, it can start disappearing, and a mutation of the battery to a big lithium one is beneficial. And you can add a plug to charge the battery instead of using only the ICE Since you use the ICE less and less, its size decrease until it's gone and voila, you have an electric car "evolved" from an ICE with only "small" beneficial changes

I love the analogy that you can't gradually evolve from an internal combination engine to an electric engine in a car.

WONDERFUL!!! WHAT A RIVETING LECTURE!!

Wonderful, provocative topic! I can eagerly accept the role of chance in evolution, and I don't think we should stop there. Contingency, paradox, compounded effects, dynamic filters, dialectical enhancers, redundancy, feedback mechanisms, potentiation, dynamic pulsing, bootstrapping and conditions that act as gauntlets or multipliers or course correctors are all undeniable powers of change in dynamic systems like natural selection. And speaking of dynamic systems, how can we ignore phase-change thresholds and transformations!? In other words, anything that we use today as metaphors or memes in modern life--think siloes, influencers, resonance, opportunism, settler gaze, willful ignorance, disruptive innovation--might be profitably applied to illuminate the long, incredibly complex history of evolution. And this can happen without denying or defying Darwin's essential idea, in all its brilliant, generative grandeur.

I feel the same on the Issue of Extinction. Lost Cures. ❤

That's one problem with natural selection, it works great as a thought experiment, as we constantly act according to our own anticipated/desire future. But take that human anticipation away, and natural selection is a much weaker force against a backdrop of chaos.

I hadn't heard about the bottleneck 900,000 years ago, but I had heard about the one 72,000 years ago that left about the same number, and seems to appear on the chart. So why wasn't this later bottleneck mentioned?

Yay ! Brilliant !

All species seem wonderfully adapted and to offer different ideas to survive in a changing Environment. There is a considerable confusion about Randomness. for example cosmic catastrophes such as meteorites or chance events like founder effects are clearly on the selection side. Mutations on the other hand concern the production of Proteins, made of up to 35 000 amino acids. And even small changes can change the folding and function in dramatic ways. May points to genetic drift as the source of mutations, which is reasonable but seems unproven. How multicellular organisms transform in cohorts is not known, pretension we do won't help.

Wow!

I love the Founder Effect....i've often thought some evolutionary reasoning istautological based on wide assumptions. The founder effect explains how random differences can develop between two populations that don't offer any advantages .. but without careful thought we migh infer the difference signal some advantage.

there are two types of evolution: incremental and leap. incremental is a slow visible gradual change driven by constant evolutionary selection. leap is when something complex appears all of a sudden ( EV on the market). the background of it is gene duplication and latent mutations. functional gene got an extra copy which can start accumulate mutations while the other part functions as normal. when a, set of such genes manage to cooperate in a cascade of functions and either by evolutionary pressure or just that the last modul of a, system clicks into place the new trait appears and will be subjected to evolutionary selection.

It was said that species specialize and at its peak, that species could go extinct because it is very difficult to go backward. Would you say this is happening to humans? As we in some situations intentionally eliminate biodiversity in food for example or the overuse of antibiotics; are we creating multiple pitfalls that could lead to our own extinction? And how likely is it without (if possible) factoring in unnatural causes like nuclear war.

"If you roll enough dice enough times sometimes you can get 25 sixes in a row" Ok, I'm going to take what was almost certainly meant figuratively literally like a pedant. If you were only rolling 25 dice then that's 6^25, there's one microstate that satisfies the macrostate condition, which if you were rolling one a second would take about 600bn years before you'd expect to roll all 25 as sixes. Obviously that changes massively with more dice. If you roll trillions of dice then the chances of it not happening become vanishingly remote with a single roll. So yes, even pedantically, it's a valid statement.

The theory of evolution was tinged with political overtones that still persist. Then, they resulted in the writing of two books that had profound though unexpected effects on the future of natural history. On the sociological plane, a valiant attempt to stem the tide of the French ungodly was made by Thomas Robert Malthus with his Essay on Population, while on the theological side William Paley set out in his Natural Theology to prove that the study of natural history inevitably led to belief in a divine Creator. Malthus generalized the principle that "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio I can see no way by which man can escape from the weight of this law which pervades all animate nature." Unwittingly, no doubt, Malthus here placed man on the same plane as the rest of the animal kingdom. Among plants and animals the growth of population was kept down by mortality due to "want of room and nourishment" and falling a prey to predators. In man, if in spite of famines and epidemics and the preventive checks imposed by reason, the population nevertheless increased too fast, those of its members who could least afford the necessities of life were doomed to misery and death. On the other hand, if the checks to the increase in numbers of a population through delayed marriage and abstinence were artificial and too effective, there would be no competition or compulsion to work exerted on those whose livelihood depended on it, and the results would equally be misery from the effects of immorality, idleness, and sloth. It followed, as H. N. Brailsford has pointed out that all attempts to preserve life were contrary to the correct application of principle, charity was an economic sin, altruism "unscientific," and presumably the medical profession pursued an anti-social aim. Since the possibilities of variation, shown by cultivated plants and domestic animals, were in Malthus' view strictly limited, progress was impossible; attempts to achieve it as in the French Revolution were doomed to failure; and mankind could neither improve nor be perfected. Malthus' book was reprinted several times and the main lines of evidence on which his argument rested were on his own admission more and more undermined, but he nevertheless stuck to the slogan like antithesis between geometrical and arithmetical rates of increase for growth of population and of subsistence. In this, Malthus performed a service to science, because most of those of his contemporaries who were aware of the struggle for existence in nature ran away from the horrors of tooth and claw and tried to veil it, minimize it, or moralize on the greater 439 class UH Manoa

What is the fundamental difference between the random chance asteroid incident and any other sudden chance of eco-system change (i.e. humans landing on an island) except for the global impact? Why is the former an example for a random chance while the latter is not?

I thought that the current analysis of the Dodo's going extinct was primarily caused by rats, a different introduced species.

“Random” and “chance” are words we use to describe a process too complicated to calculate. However, that is just about not knowing all the variables. In theory, everything random can be known and thus no longer random.

So, some 1000s of years hence, it'll be Planet Of The Pandas?

That's all fascinating and makes perfect sense. Except that randomness excludes teleology and purpose in evolution. Only a little thought shows how the two are not correlated concepts. And... vegans associating with other vegans is a form of genetic isolation? This was a joke. Right?

Actually, evolution is not random. Mutation is random. If a particular mutation proves to be more advantageous in survival and procreating, then that mutation (along with other such mutations) will go on to form new species.

1300 humans is very suspicious

05:00 it is odd to argue that species can't be adapted to random events like meteorite strikes. While no organism can be adapted to resist every random event, it is plain that many species were well adapted to resist the effects of that meteorite strike. Ie the one out of four that did not become extinct.

If homosexuality is genetic, who does the charcteristic not die out ?

Its not chance driving evolution.

Brilliant presentation, but the constant body movement rather wore me out. lol

30:49 "Now, hopefully pretty much all of us in this room have fairly had a COVID-19 vaccination." Would there be funding by the pharma industry involved?

Why does the lecturer find it necessary to make remarks about the race and gender of early evolutionary scientists, i wonder. Virtue signaling comes to mind.

Random Chance in Evolution 1835pm 20.11.23 random and arbitrary do not have the same meaning. though your thesaurus would suggest they are. optimizing meaning and clarification may be worth indulging in.

"Random chance" is redundant. Chance is random. It wouldn't be chance if it wasn't. Also, arbitrary choices are not random choices. Arbitrariness and randomness are different things.

BS is BS no matter how its presented.