Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…I don’t think that’s an exact quote, but it’s pretty much correct. They end up presenting their ideas together in the spirit of sportsmanship. Why was this period in the 1850s or 1860s the right time for these ideas to form? You can come up with different ideas. One is geology. In the 1830s, Charles Lyell figures out that there’s been millions and billions of years of time that’s existed on Earth. The paleontology shows you that fossils have existed for that entire time. Life goes back a long way. In fact, you can even find fossils for intermediate species that show you the tree of life. Between humans and other apes as well, there’s intermediate humans. There’s also the age of colonization, and we have all these voyages doing biogeography. That all must have been necessary. In fact, there’s a huge history of parallel innovation and discovery in the history of science. So maybe it is another piece of evidence that more had to be in place for a given idea to be discovered. Because if it’s not discovered for a long time and then spontaneously many different people are coming up with it, that shows you that the building blocks were in some sense necessary. This example of Lyell and other geologists in the early 1800s having this idea of deep time does seem to have been crucial. I know Darwin was very influenced by Lyell. If you don’t have at least tens or hundreds of millions of years, evolution starts to look like a non-starter. In order to make it work on a timescale of 5,000 to 10,000 years or 6,000 years with Bishop Ussher you would need to see evolution occurring at a massive rate during human lifetimes, and we’re just not seeing that. That does seem to have been a blocker. To your question of what other blockers were there, were there any others? I don’t know.…

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