Dave Hone: evaluation

Transcript context

…And when you focus in on a single species and trace its history, you can see how effective evolution is, natural selection is, and then you just have to, like, go across species and you’re gonna realize- Yeah, but it’s also a massive compromise, which is the bit that people always miss. You know, it’s Darwin’s line: “It’s descent with modification.” Yes, over time, you can end up with extraordinarily weird things, but mostly what’s happening is you’re changing something fairly simple. You’re making edits to the existing plan, which is why you don’t have animals with tentacles. They have legs, which have joints, which have fingers, and they all have one bone, then two bones, then a bunch of little blocky bones, and then a few more, and then the little ones that make up the digits for hands and feet, and basically everything has that. …because you’re modifying that pattern. And occasionally, you’ll get something weird, like most of the modern lungfish have basically reduced those down to—well, they had a more simple plan to begin with—but reduce it down to a stump, and then they’ve got something like a flail-y tentacle. But yeah, you know, snakes have gotten rid of them, all of the various legless lizards and things like that, and again, caecilians, and all the rest. But yet, you’re subtly changing certain things in certain ways is mostly what’s going on, and then those build up over time. But also, again, it’s that compromise of there’s things that do and don’t work. There’s things that are interlinked, and so you can’t modify A without modifying B. Modifying A will kill you, therefore B never modifies, because the two are genetically linked in some way. Or yeah, like the compromise of the lion’s mane. Making it darker makes you sexier, but more likely to kill you. I think people think evolution is, like, perfecting things in some way. And they’re not. They’re bodge jobs, you know? That’s why we have a blind spot in our eye, but things like squid don’t. But that process nevertheless does have inventions in it. You have Tiktaalik. You have a fish that learns to breathe, that crawls out.…

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