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Welcome to Arts and Ideas in the Air, online and around Baltimore.
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This is Wondrous Wednesday, where I talk about something wondrous.
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So in the past, I've talked about physics, so I'm moving on from that.
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I'm going to go into the world of biology, specifically evolution, because I actually
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know a little bit about evolution.
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I know less about actual biological mechanisms, although that'd be kind of cool to get into.
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There's a wonderful video I saw once about the protein machines, you might say, working
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around in the cell.
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So cool.
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But anyway, evolution.
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So what is it?
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Well, it's this theory, pretty much fact by now, but you know, it's not like we were around
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to witness the past 2 billion years.
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But the idea is the world was once lifeless, and through some kind of process, life began,
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and then it evolved and evolved and evolved until where we are now.
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And it's still evolving, of course.
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And so that's kind of what evolution is.
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And so the description of sort of what exactly, how does it work, what are the mechanisms
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involved?
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Those are some of the questions.
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And I hope to pursue that over the next few weeks or so.
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My approach will be kind of, not surprisingly, a more mathematical one, I think, more numbers-oriented
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approach, perhaps, and it's largely influenced by Richard Dawkins, which is, he has some
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wonderful books to read.
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He's not quite a friend of religion.
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But if you just focus on the evolution books, it's pretty clear and straightforward.
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I really recommend The Blind Watchmaker.
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And just to kind of, you know, set up the kind of dilemma, imagine that you find a very
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intricate watch or a Boeing 747 buried in the past, you know, 100 million years ago.
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And you look at it and be like, well, this had to be made by somebody, right?
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And at first, you think that because it's just really complicated, right, it's got lots
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of internal machinery, it's got all this metals and stuff.
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But then when you sit down and think about it, it's like, well, life is really complicated.
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Even a cell is extremely complicated, let alone all these multicellular organisms, let
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alone human beings that have not only, you know, 50 trillion cells inside of them, and
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all sorts of complicated organs, but they even have a brain, you know, they're thinking
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and, you know, emotions and consciousness and what is all that stuff and, you know,
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it's really complicated machinery, whatever it is, it's got to be complicated.
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And so it's like, well, why don't I just think that that's got to be designed?
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And some people do think it's got to be designed.
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In a certain sense, it is designed.
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It's not just random, right?
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You would never think that you just throw a bunch of like, ingredients of life into
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a pot, stir it around and out comes a human.
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That's just not how it works.
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So there is some process in place, you know, that's what evolution is trying to describe.
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So it's a gradual process.
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One generation after another will look pretty similar.
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Over a sequence of generations, you know, you'll be able to see differences perhaps
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as it marches towards some different form based on the pressures.
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My understanding of it is that typically it's in small populations, perhaps with a lot of
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selection pressure, where it manifests itself the most.
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So yeah, but, you know, basically, things change and if those changes are, you know,
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useful changes, or at least not harmful changes, then you know, they can get propagated along
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to the next generation, and then maybe further changes along a certain direction.
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And that's sort of, that's kind of the idea, that's evolution.
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So in future weeks, I will talk about, well, there's the extremely large length of time.
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There's a notion, I want to kind of suggest that, like, in the past, there was a, you
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know, a time when there were two siblings of something, and one sibling is the ancestor
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to squirrels, and the other ancestor is, my other sibling was the ancestor to us.
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It's just kind of interesting to think about that, like, two siblings and their life paths
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lead to such divergent animals, and it's just not mammals, of course, you know, one sibling
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of something led to reptiles and one sibling of something led to mammals entirely.
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Yeah, I mean, I just find that utterly wondrous, just if you go back far enough, you're all
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related and that's fine, that's not somehow too shocking.
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But then when you take the viewpoint of, well, what is that common ancestors?
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Children's that are no longer a common ancestor, well, that's what that means.
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They have the same parent, but their descendants diverged dramatically.
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That's just so hard to believe, I mean, if you have a sibling yourself, can you imagine
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their descendants being like a totally different species than your descendants?
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It's mind boggling.
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So, I don't know, maybe I just talked about it, but I might talk about that some more.
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Talk about, you know, just some of the immense things going on in evolution, the billions
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of years that it takes to work its magic and some of the things that accelerated it.
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So, and some experiments where we have seen some really dramatic changes, you know, in
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a species, you can still kind of consider them in the same species, but, you know, dramatic
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differences based on selection criteria.
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So, anyway, that's what's to come, I hope.
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So, well, this was Wondrous Wednesday, I hope I left you with something to think about,
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and talk to you all later.