 Thank you for coming to this celebration of one of the great minds and scientific advancements in the past couple centuries. That is Darwin Day, where my talk is going to be structured into three main parts and the first part will be some general introductions to the theory of evolution and genetics, setting up the important experiments of Kettlewell, having to do with moths, and then we'll finish with kind of injecting the personality of Michael Majeris and the odd conflict that came about from what is relatively settled science, and I want to talk somewhat, especially on a Darwin Day presentation about this interplay of modern culture versus science, but thank you all for coming and we'll be talking about moths and the march of science, but I will begin first with a general introduction to evolution, and I used to, of course, each biology at college, and one of the things that I wanted to impart to students was just this underlying importance of evolution to how we think about all biology, and one thing that I always found kind of curious in a lot of these is that a lot of times evolution is put at the back of textbook, so what I'm showing here are some excerpts from a lecture textbook I used, Pearson, and again they have very nice illustrations of evolution, especially talking about the history of Charles Darwin, who most famously went on a voyage around the world as the naturalist. This was something that was common back in the early 1800s, was that you'd actually bring along a naturalist on even a military cartography expedition, and it was fortunate for Darwin in that it gave him the first opportunity as a young man to go see the world, although it was also unfortunate, because apparently he suffered from a horrible amount of seasickness, and so this is a map of his voyages, so you see he started in Great Britain, went around South America, and then saw a little bit of the tip of Africa, and then back to Great Britain, and South America at the time was really considered a very exotic wild land, but there were a lot of tales, there was a naturalist named Humboldt who had explored it, I think 30 or 50 years earlier, and had written wonderful descriptions about the nature that could be seen in South America, and so this was something that really influenced a lot of naturalists in the 1800s in England of really wanting to see these amazing...what I'm also showing in the top right corner is the USS Beagle, and if you get the opportunity, you should go see a reproduction of this that is present over here on the land, something that I think was originally made by nature for a nice little evolutionary exercise they used to have in second life. So in the course of these voyages, again, Darwin wasn't setting out to change how we think about evolution, but he was being very meticulous about taking notes and being very observant about the types of things he saw and documenting them in terms of the natural wildlife. And the most famous and classical example of this is the Darwin's Finches, and so on the Galapagos Islands there he noticed that there were a lot of what seemed to be highly related birds, but that seemed to have very small important adaptations for how they would eat. Now, Jenny asks if the original USS Beagle sunk, and I have to admit I don't really know much about the history of it, maybe so we can look it up in the local chat, but what he noticed is that there seemed to be this very particular keen adaptation of each one of these finches to their own individual environment, and that even though...and this is one important thing is that the islands are relatively new geological formations. And so the presence of birds on the island, again, probably some small number of founding pairs that must have been blown over from the mainland, had to have been probably the original settlements that led to these other variations. And this is something that really got him thinking about the course of evolution and also how species adapt to their environment. And not...but not only did Darwin look at a lot of natural samples of species adaptations to their environments, he also took the logic of what we think of as animal domestication. And so that was something he called artificial selection where, again, if you have anyone here a fan of dogs or anyone here a fan of, you know, cattle or goats, that these are all...these all demonstrate this radiation of types that we call breeds. And especially when you think about dogs, you have dogs that are highly adapted for hunting, dogs are highly adapted for sniffing out truffles, dogs that are highly adapted for hunting, dogs are highly adapted and very intelligent for, say, sheep herding. And so...now his main example he talked about on the origin of species was pigeons, but I think dogs is a little bit more relatable of an example in today's world. But this...but the fact that all these different breeds exist is all due to the manipulation of their owners selecting for specific traits and saying, I want...I have a dog that's really smart and so I'm going to breed it with other dogs and keep its offspring and as compared to this other dog who's not as smart and I'm not going to keep his offspring. So that type of process was something called artificial selection and made the observation and again I'm summarizing a lot of evolutionary theory is that you have variation of individuals in a population and that when you take subsets those offspring, the ones that are surviving more often are the ones that tend to pass on those same traits onto subsequent generations. And so he then applied this to call it natural selection which is in the environment where instead of having a breeder select for the traits, you just have life, right? So predation, disease, all these things are the main forces that in the wild in the natural environment can lead to some individuals surviving over others because of the traits they inherit and then also because the traits they pass on to the next generation. And so he was some delay because there was some concern about how those would be greeted by society and culture at large. He did eventually publish On the Origin of Species in 1859 and it just was the first to make the very clean argument that the adaptation of species and environment is not due to some sort of Lamarckian evolution, it's not due to the hand of God saying I'm going to make this animal perfect for where I'm going to put it. He said it's an interplay of the environment and also the inheritance of these traits which he called descent with modification. One thing I'll just quickly mention is that one of the influences is Malthus who was someone proposing in terms of human populations that we would outstrip the number of people would grow geometrically whereas the amount of food could only grow erythmetically and so eventually he gets a starvation conditions. And so let me just summarize that when Darwin proposed evolution he was saying individuals in a population vary, they produce lots of offspring, there are different selective forces that keep some around but not others and then over time those variations that diversity that's present can lead to speciation and this is I think most famously graphically illustrated and you'll see this diagram from Darwin's textbooks or textbooks that cover Darwin this idea of the tree of life where a branch point represents a new species developing and again let's just what in our modern day way of describing the generation of new species we call that macroevolution and I want to introduce this topic now because a lot of the talker is going to focus on something that's now termed microevolution, shuffling of genes within a population not the generation of new species but the important thing to keep in mind is that these are related phenomena that help us understand how evolution occurs so that basic interaction to Darwin that kind of brings us up to date to the 1800s. The other concept something that a lot of people get as kind of a in some ways a math exercise in biology classes is mental and the idea that how does inheritance work and that's the important thing is that to realize what Darwin he had no understanding or science to describe how inherited characteristics got passed from one generation to the next and in fact in his writings he had a very as we would now think of it a very kind of misguided view how inheritance work but mental a contemporary was working on peace now again one thing he mined he was a muck he was not necessarily integrated into the larger scientific community but he had a very keen mind and a very good sense of math where his key observation and I just there's a lot of words on here and you don't have to worry about those the key observation is that when you you can have these different people plants that always have the same characteristic from generation to generation as long as you breed it to itself and so this term true breeding parents is the idea that you have purple flowers if you're always pollinating the plant with itself you're always getting purple flowers as a result of offspring and this was also true of the white flowers white flowers always begat more white flowers now what he did was he crossed the purple to the white and noticed that the white disappeared that all the plants were purple however when he took that generation and cross it to itself that the F2 generation the next generation one fourth again were white and so one of the the key lesson here is that the inheritance of genes and how they display a phenotype in an organism are actually discrete characteristics so the reason why this is important to understand compared to what Darwin thought about evolution is that a lot of people thought traits got blended together and that's you know if you the expectation that case would be that purple flower breeding with a white flower you would have a light purple or lavender flower and that all the resultant next generation would also be that same light purple color as a sort of blending and so kind of like you know mixing crayola crayons together and the fact that they're discreet is something that is was contrary to what people thought at the time you can think of this exercise as something that is like flipping a coin and that is if you were to flip two separate coins what distribution would you have of having two heads the heads and the tails and two tails and I think this math is very straightforward and easy that if you're flipping a coin you have half probability of heads half probability of tails and then you just combine that with the other coin flip that's half and half of heads and tails and so one fourth of the time it's both heads one fourth of times it's both tails and half the time or two times one fourth of the time it's one heads one tails so again don't worry this is this is some math but I'm just introducing the basic concepts of it this is important for for kind of understanding process of science it to the one thing that we then also observed is that this population this generation of white flowers for multiple generations that Mendel applied this mathematics to understanding that the inheritance of traits from offspring to sorry of a parent to offspring had to do this 50-50 coin flip chance that is you have two copies of a gene that held the plant to have be this color and that half the time that gets passed on as one of the two copies the other time that gets passed on as the other so this is denoted as capital P lowercase p to represent purple versus white but that the important thing is you're taking two copies of genetic information and this is the term diploid and that as you pass on your gametes next generation it's splitting that that content in half every time then reconstituting the diploid the double copy of genomics of genetic information that next generation so again this is an important concept that Mendel presented to the world although it's the realization of how important it was later was not you know much later and then the last one is the developments of science in which we now start applying a little bit more math to this concept of not just thinking about one parent or one one parent mating with another parent and having offspring but actually think about this in terms of the most important unit of evolution which is the a population a whole whole group of individuals and in this particular case the the example we use is how about flowers and so flowers can be red or white and we're representing red as being a capital R and that the white is represented as a capital W and the thing to keep in mind is if you have a whole field of flowers and for whatever reason the the population it's not 50 50 for white versus red it's say 80 percent of the genes floating around are red and 20 percent of the genes floating around are white and so this is just a way of thinking about the math as applied to a population not in terms of these Punnett squares these individual crosses that you probably had and so the example here is that now if you think about this just the random coming together the random you know flipping of heads and tails of a coin as being 80 percent versus 20 percent then the representation of red in this case pink a blending characteristic as well as white would be represented by these different proportions so instead of being one fourth of the different characteristics each you have 64 percent in other words you know 80 percent times 80 percent is 64 percent being the red flowers and then 20 percent times 20 percent equaling 4 percent for the white flowers and then the rest being the mixture of one red with one white now again it's a little bit easier to see when you have a when you have a phenotype where the half where being half red in terms of gene copy is pink but that helps illustrate the point in this case and so this idea of how do we use this type of statistical power to understand evolution and the idea here is this Hardy Weinberg concept where if you have a large population of some individuals and some alleles and in some sort of species that from one generation to the next things shouldn't change that just large populations you're just shuffling alleles around is all random chance and boom things don't change and that is something you should be able to observe from generation to generation that things don't change and this is an indication that the tenants of Hardy Weinberg are true and that one of the tenants of this is that evolution there's no selective pressure for red being better than whites or pink being you know worse than the other two and so the concept is if you see a break from that pattern if you see things change then that's an argument that evolution must be occur and so here's an example where if in one generation you have 70% of the alleles in the population being red again which is something you can count by just looking at the actual colors of the flowers and then the next generation you notice that the frequency of red goes down to 50% which again you can count by just looking at the flowers then that's an indication that perhaps red is bad for the flowers or perhaps that white is good. Again you could think of this in Valentine's Day coming up so this is a nice little kind of analogy that if you were if a bunch of guys were going out to the wild fields to pick flowers for their girlfriends for Valentine's Day and red is the in vogue color for Valentine's Day in that culture then if they pick a bunch of the red ones before they have a chance to pollinate to send out seed then the next generation that field will have a lot fewer red flowers just because all the red ones were taken away and that would be an indication that something is better than something else. This can also work the other way you know if you have a very fast movement to where all the flowers are becoming red that might be an indication that red is a really good trait and favorable for breeding or it might mean that white, pink are particularly are particularly bad and yes I have to agree with to you that having a heart is good and being heartless is bad so again just reminder that Valentine's Day is coming up as well. Okay so just as a representation of the math the idea here is that there's this Hardy-Weinberg equation that we then use to understand whether evolution is occurring in population and it's actually a relatively straightforward math this is you know if you're familiar with exponents you've probably seen this type of thing already in you know simple algebra and just a reminder that the power of this is that if you have a population where you can see the phenotypes then and you can then count up what percentage these are of a population you can go back and actually figure out those allele frequencies right so this is actually understanding the genes by looking at the population and they can look at this over time. Okay so the setup here for what is again talking about the next part oh is yeah let me summarize I'm going to slide on here that the the setup here is that there was three threads that were occurring by the mid 1900s and that first of all you had Darwin which is publication of on the origin of species you had again a co-publishing author Alfred Wallace who had subsequent follow-up publications that talked a lot about biogeography but also had the same idea of natural selection and variation of populations that occur due to evolution. Mendel's work again originally published in 1866 but because he wasn't engaged in the community he actually he actually was told to stop doing his experiments with peas in the monastery it wasn't until the early 1900s that his work was actually rediscovered then brought it back into the scientific community and then Hardy Weinberg again also independently working from each other that's actually two separate people where they published their work on this concept of applying math to how selective processes work although it really wasn't until the 1920s where the work of Holiday and Fisher and Sewell Wright really brought in this concept of using the math to look at natural populations and to understand how evolution could be occurring and this is something that again they could go out and look at populations to see what sort of selective pressures you can imagine are changing the illegal frequencies in a population and get a measurement of evolution. Now the setup here and this is the important you know contribution that Kettlewell makes based on the work of his advisor E.B. Ford that no one actually experimentally has demonstrated evolution in action yet and I think this is the important contribution we want to understand from Kettlewell and how we can look at evolution, macroevolution in a sense is that this actually requires a lot of experimental work and so let's talk about moths. So this is a metulary, it's also just commonly known as the British peppered moth and it's typical it's type presentation and again you might have to look very closely at the screen actually see the moth on top of the lichen because that it's just got this very peppery white powdery look which helps it blend in very nicely to the tree trunks that have lichen on them and so again what's the purpose for having this? This is your standard concept that again you have from you know people like Bates and a blank on the other guy of camouflage right. Camouflage is a survival advantage if your predators can't see you then they can't eat you and you can pass on your genes the next generation. Now what was observed for the first time in 1848 so again you know the beginning or you know sometime after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is the carbonia morph of this moth and again you look at it and it's just black and when you think about this concept of wanting to blend into your environments that this is really not good that this is something that if you were a bird or if you were some sort of predator who could you know observe this difference you would say wow that's an easy snack that was easy to find. Now of course I'm mentioning the Industrial Revolution because what is the advantage of being black is that on certain tree trunks you actually blend in better because of all one you've basically put a lot of pollution onto onto the tree itself some ash but then also you you're killing off the lichen due to the pollution and so you know you're missing out on this nice white background so in fact there is some sort of survival advantage to being black and this general concept is something known as Industrial Melanism. So this existence of this you know binary look of moths at the same time that the environment is changing due to a very fast change in the environment due to pollution and also a very strong selective pressure in theory and so this is the setup for Henry Bernard Davis Kettlewell again shown here from again some some photographs derived from Oxford which is where he ended up doing this work showing him both in his natural environment to being around moths and one thing to keep in mind that I'm gonna mention now because otherwise I'll forget it it's not the amount of work that went into his experiments involved meticulously and carefully capturing and breeding and raising moths in a laboratory and we're talking probably thousands of moths over a decade of time in order to make sure that he had enough of a population now in modern-day biology and this is something I love about modern-day biology you could probably order these from a catalog these days in order to do this experiment there's so many things that we can just do now so it's important to appreciate that not only did they not have color back in those days but they also had to basically raise and deal with a lot of their own material themselves so a little bit of biography on Kettlewell and again I don't we're not going through all the particulars here but I do want to point out that his background and his training was as a zoologist but in the context of a medical profession and so he actually technically was a medical doctor that actually served on location in different hospitals for the you know the British arm services and so again he did he did that work you know involved being primarily involved in understanding insects and the interplay of insects with you know troops and diseases related to those but that it wasn't until later where he actually came into the more scientific academic environments at Oxford University and again he was brought in as someone by E.B. Ford who was again one of the founders of the the field of population ecology and trying to use these Hardie Weinberg equations to really understand how that was working so but as an academic researcher he was incredibly prolific during the 1950s at putting out this research where the you know both did some small field trial fall small field experiments which I'll describe about how moths are evolving and how they're responding to these changed environments and how predation is changing the alleles in the population so again publishing both an academic environment in academic journals and eventually I think the thing that really got his work into you know more well-known knowledge across the culture is in time science review in 1956 as well as Scientific American Darwin's missing evidence again things that you we could probably look up now I would recommend you look at now and take a look and read so I'm going to describe in brief the work that he did and its impact and then but this is right mostly straightforward let me say and the the concept here is that within a small enclosure what he could do was score moths on trees and then actually just sit and observe how often birds within that same enclosure end up eating them and so this is some of the first publications where pollution heredity demonstrating that you know by observation it looks like the birds are more often eating the ones that are a little bit more visible again some criticisms of this is that some of the in some of the cases the experiments actually just use dead moths right these weren't live moths these were just moths that were pinned and then observing how often they're pretty or how often the ones targeted the other thing too is that these were you know placed and put up on trees by the scientists so again this is one of these concepts that's important to recognize in science is that to some degree you might call it a biological uncertainty principle which is the more clean you make an experiment in terms of reducing variables from it the more you can be criticized for it not being a natural environment right and this is one of these given takes that is important in science for understanding how to generate clean experimental results and that also is a cautionary tale to not necessarily over interpret those but they are parts of developing the theory of how things work and that's science the other thing he also would do is go place moths on trees with an environment and then just go back and count them right so again this is experiments and some cases were used with not even live moths these are things where the scoring and and the experimental conditions are not necessarily most natural but again trying to make that next step of not having it in an enclosed space where you've also brought in you know predator birds but in fact again going back to to more natural environment now the the next step was to oh sorry and then well the nice thing though about that particular environment about that particular experiment was that he could place moths both of both types on both the natural trees then also ones that are polluted so you can get a sense of how to score these either way now the set appears that what he can with the next step of experiments was to do what we're called release and recapture and the idea here is that he would take hundreds of moths and go out to the natural environment and release the moths into the wild let them settle in on trees do it do you know let them go and do what they naturally do find the resting spots and then come back and try and recapture all of his moths and then count up how many survive from the two different types the the exciting so i'm showing actual data from the paper but you can just focus on the the arrows at the bottom one thing to keep in mind that this environment the birmingham recaptures were done in a polluted environment so birmingham being an industrial center had a lot of trees that were you know highly dark and so this observe versus expected this is math this is numbers but the main idea here is that on the left the column that has to see on it he observed 140 moths that were present that were carbon oh yeah when he basically recaptured them from what he'd released and that that number was much higher than the expected so again he knew the the carbonia versus tipica percentages that he released and of the ones that he recaptured he could make this count and he actually observed many more coming back that were fitting the environments as compared to the ones that don't fit the environment and that's what you see in the columns that are labeled t for tipica morph that he observed and recaptured many fewer of the tipica than he expected based on how many he had released and when he performed basically the the converse experiments and this is in dead end where the trees were typically a more natural environment that there were many fewer of the carbononia that were recaptured again looking at the blue area blue arrows versus what he expected versus the tipica that were red or sorry that are amending came by the red air red arrows that many more of those came back than expected so again the idea that over the course of a few days the predation was much uh was very effective on the type of more on the type of moth that was not as easily blended into that particular environment and then finally his follow-up work was to really look at the overall distribution of the different types of moths and track this in a biogeography type of way compared to the areas that were more or less polluted and so again this is uh you know kettle well i think should be applauded for the amount of work and the amount of time he put into trying to in multiple ways build a story build an explanation of how evolution works and he was celebrated in his time for being this evidence of evolution in action now i want to remind you that he was doing work by himself in the 1950s with probably the best available thing that that he could work with um and that will be an important part of the story but i want to pause here and see does anybody have any questions about you know this basic concept of how to experimentally prove that evolution is something that occurs now is the time and i'm sorry this this does seem a little bit esoteric and dry uh but we'll get a little bit a little bit spiced up with some controversy in the moment i have a question from jenny and while while she's typing that i just want to point out that again there's a lot of theoretical work that involved explanations of how evolution works but science the march of progress in science is to actually as best as you can experimentally demonstrate that these predictions you have based on a theory actually fit the observations you have when you have these things actually going on and that's what the science at this time and this was the first you know in action evolution demonstration that was presented all right um yeah so jenny asks the problem i see is as you already pointed out how you would conduct experiments on the moths or any other predated species uh yeah i think you know this is something to point out i'll just let me philosophically talk a little about science that you know science is not fact science is an attempt to create an explanation of the world for how it works and you don't have to have a true absolute thing occur to help you generate those ideas and those explanations they just have to be consistent predictable and useful in many ways and so i think you know the idea that predation in a small enclosure fits the model is a part of saying that this is a good explanation but we're not necessarily saying it's absolutely and so actually this is actually a good setup um yeah and that's one thing about the interpretation of science is that as long as you do science the right way what you're ultimately usually doing is putting forth claims for what it means for how to describe the universe at large and there is a scientist understand this as a limitation for how science works and in fact this is a good setup this is a very good question and i think you'll get more answers from this as i talk about the rest of the talk the third part is to talk about michael majeris and so michael majeris again this is there's a flowering of people who worked in looking at evolution particularly in this like population industrial melanism side so much to the point that mike majeris a professor at cambridge basically wrote a whole book called melanism right and this is something that probably not one you saw on the new york times bestseller list but something that within the academic field an update to understanding uh this very important aspect of evolution in action he himself was actually a scientist who worked on lady birds which we call also lady bugs in the us lost the pond now what he was doing as a scientist in this book was trying to update work from multiple samples of industrial melanism in insects but then also point out that you know if you experimentally look at what kettlewell did there are issues with how we would do that experiment today and some of the things he pointed out he some of the things that are important to question is bird vision the same as human vision that again the aspect of predation of this black versus white moth do birds even see that right birds might have some ability to detect moths on that camouflage that's actually where the camouflage is useless for them uh do the high numbers of release moths change the predation right you actually could be changing the predators by having so much food suddenly available or maybe just so many visual stimuli of the different types of moths that is not a standard natural environment uh kettlewell also released again for experimental sakes he released the bugs during the day because that's easiest way to do it um and so is that something that maybe had the moths a different behavior so it's not really again a good natural expert a good natural example of how that evolution actually occurs and then also just the idea of placing things on trunks was that necessarily even where moths naturally would um rest in terms of natural environment so you know these are all things that are very important experimental considerations that if you were to take the original experiments and say how would i refine these and do these better uh you would do that and it's important to note that this is an important process of science where making sure you're not over interpreting or having you know things that impact the math or how the science or the experiment is conducted is an important thing to do and to keep revisiting now the one thing that um that majeris was not saying is that he thought that the concept of industrial melanchism and evolution in action was wrong right he was saying these are modifications to how you do the experiments where the numbers that kettlewell was getting may not really represent the true selective pressure or maybe that may not represent the true mechanism of how it was occurring but again he wrote a book on melanism not because he thought it was false but because he wanted to have the best science being put forward now can anybody here see the setup and how what this was going to happen in modern day culture to release this type of book uh and this is this is kind of the the response and this is a book called of moths and men put out by judith hooper published in 2002 where she takes up on these criticisms that was primarily put forth by majeris and basically creates this as a huge talking point for anti-evolutionists uh and here's a quote i took from it majeris's book left no doubt that the classic story was wrong in almost every detail and again if you read the book uh which again it's actually kind of an interesting book and it does cover good amount of science but i i do want to caution you to be careful about some of the details that she's trying to put forward although i think it does it's a nicely readable background the history of the study um and you know what and i'll talk more about this later but you know the oddball history of me with this book was that i was teaching biology at university new orleans and a book publisher a textbook publisher came by and said hey here's some books that we have and i was like oh i'm not interested in any new textbook but then she says hey we have all these like you know not textbooks but just regular paperback books that you might have students read and be discussion points and so you know i in terms of just looking at this i thought oh this is awesome this is something i've always wanted to learn about in a nicely readable format and i think my students would enjoy it and as i was reading it i was starting to get questions of what is this book actually about and when i looked up the reviews of the book realized that in many ways again and i don't want to necessarily impugn the intentions of the author but that it's certainly something that that clearly is more of a hit piece on the scientists doing the work and so uh i i find it very interesting that you know book publishers are helping you know promote something that is ultimately being used by you know anti evolutionists to argue okay so um in addition to giving a little bit of a background to the science she actually is trying she puts forth a lot of she tries to imply a lot of reasons why ford and kettlewell might have just been fraudulent and that's uh you know there were pressures and publishing academic science there was a lot of people who were looking at this so even before you publish a lot of other scientists know the work that's going on and so then the the pressure to get it out there can be pretty immense and the one thing that also just drove me crazy in readings for the book is that she actually even invokes thomas coon who wrote on the structure of scientific revolutions which is you know a very important major piece in how we understand the process of science that you know oh these people are trying to publish fraudulent work because they don't want to let go of the way they think things work and so of course they're trying to push this moth story even though they know it's wrong and not working out and i really have issues with people trying to use coon in that context and that's what i was pointing trying to yes i've pointed out multiple times this is science and this is how science works and if you are a non-scientist trying to look and read this and skim the concepts behind thomas coon you can easily misinterpret what that is really trying to do so i'm just going to show a couple of examples that in the kettlewell revisited that the you know avalanche anti-evolutionist you know populist picked up on this and said hey uh this whole peppered moth example is a fraud it's a flaming fraud it's actually amazing how scientists are trying to put one over on us and then you know at the same time where they point out that there are you know first of all they extend the argument of saying well there's some questions of fraud to actually saying oh it is fraud and that once you start questioning what the scientists are doing then it really makes you think that you know there's nothing that makes evolution true and that if the moth example is gone there's just no examples of evolution having been shown to be true and that's just someone who's sitting from a perch of ignorance not really sitting down and trying to make sure they are being proper to the context that there's a lot of other stuff that's been done since 1956 to understand how evolution works and in particular multiple multiple examples these types of industrial meldism just as one example alone again anybody want to just pop out any other examples of evolution in that action that is relevant that is also pertinent to the common man again something where human culture and science is changing the environment and then organisms are clearly responding in no antibiotic resistance anyone bacteria being antibiotic resistance or how about resistance to herbicides that we find in the corn fields or how about resistance to pesticides that we find in insects that are also trying to eat our crops right these are you know multiple great examples of other things that are occurring urban rat populations that's a good one oh another good one is also thank you too yeah also you know fish populations as we as people fish they tend to keep the larger ones and throw back the smaller ones and one thing that effect that has had is that the average breeding age of fish and average breeding size of fish is actually smaller so these things are all lots of examples that have occurred since the 1950s but that was the start of trying to understand here's another example for another webpage where again that you know they're trying to in a short point point out some of the very reasonable flaws but to act as if that completely undermines the entirety of science that if you do have this artificial situation of putting dead moss on trees for the birds to feed on or that they may or may not necessarily go on trunks that it means science must be wrong and again this is going back to the idea that in science you do try and work on experimental conditions then you followed up with better and better experiments i kettle well did and yeah i think jenny you know she she makes a comment and i think this is a good one thank you for contributing personal attacks are making me suspicious about people trying to convince me of anything and this is one of these rhetorical tricks which i'll talk about in a second of you know if you disagree with someone it can sound very convincing to impugn the person and then if but at the same time if you're completely ignoring the topic of what it is you know what the argument is about then you're really not refuting what they said and that's one thing that is i think a very important criticism about the judith hooper a book of moss and men while she implied lots of examples of fraud there actually are ways to scientifically validate whether fraud occurred right you can actually go back look through notebooks you can actually do the math yourself if your attempts to replicate the experiments don't give you the same results then that's those are evidence potentially of fraud but that was never found she just implied the possibility of fraud by saying well there's a reason for them to commit fraud but not actually do it and i think this is important you know this is an example in modern day culture where you know climatologists are attacked for having a job and profession where they derive a salary and money from being climatologists and that must mean other science is wrong or they're faking it like you know you don't even address the actual science itself so i have just a few minutes left just a few things and i want to summarize this that when you think about the bad faith rhetoric that you have in these types of scientific versus the non-science people trying to attack the science that you know this this is example of the nitpicking where if you say oh this one example is wrong then everything must be wrong well that's ignoring how science works science is always about a body of uh ignoring the independent evidence right the human genome was published by this time repeat sake right you can't tell me science hasn't moved on from trying to release and recapture moths we actually have so many more things that that science has told us about how evolution works in very particular detail and so again i've given talks before and i'll recommend it again if you want to have a nice introduction to an update on evolution what darwin never knew it's a documentary put out by nova by pbs and just a great summary of how we know a whole lot more than what darwin never did based on the march of science and then third as i've mentioned imputing the motives of scientists without really addressing the science itself now and this is where i do want to point out that science does is influenced by the personalities of the scientists who do it that we cannot take that out of the equation to say that scientists are people and that there are egos there are mistakes all these things that can occur in terms of the science and so this is where the final part of the story is i think a very poignant one that majeris himself actually felt very guilty that his book was used to impugn kettlewell and that he had made a bunch of criticisms about the work and i'm summarizing these here and i don't want to go we're getting a little short on time so i don't want to go through them too much i want to leave time for questions but if you look at this he's like well maybe i can do the experiment better right and so this is some work that he presented in 2007 to a evolutionary biology conference where over time he said you know i'm going to do the kettlewell experiment and the criticisms i made i will address those and i want to point out a reminder this is science right you can criticize someone and then say hey let's just go back and revisit it and try again and so something basically what he did was he let moths naturally he recorded moths in the natural environment he recorded them over a long period of time over several years and did his best to address these different questions and so again trying to largely avoid lab bread trying to do stuff in the wild environment letting them go to the natural resting places etc again and other improvements again now again the limitation here is that he didn't like kettlewell go throughout the entire area of britain to look for this he basically had limited himself to his home where he was living and you know other limitation is that he couldn't do the polluted environments is that by this time Cambridge and this area was relatively cleaned up so they could only do the one-sided experiment and try to as much as possible directly observe what actually did or did not happen now one of the criticisms that people had was saying oh kettlewell was putting moths on trunks and we don't even know if moths go on trunks by themselves naturally so one thing he did do is a part of this analysis was to observe that without his his placing anything anywhere is that you know almost a third of the population or more than a third of the population of moths just would naturally go and land on trunks that in fact a natural resting place was trunks so stop criticizing kettlewell for putting stuff on trunks is what now the results of his work and this is kind of the the interesting part he ultimately did not publish this in a scientific journal himself he died and i don't know the nature of his illness but he died suddenly while this was something that was being worked on and and being submitted for publication and so actually a bunch of his colleagues made sure it got written up submitted to science and reviewed and shepherded through that and that gets one thing the reminders that you know science is this important process of publishing your results and what we're showing this is the key figure from the paper and the comparison is the typical morph which is represented by blue versus the carbononia, carbonium morph which is represented in red and this is the percent that survived in these different time periods of observation and so the fact that the blue line always has a higher survival rate again in this environment that favors their camouflage you know over multiple years and statistically analyzed that this is statistically significant demonstrated that again in terms of an improved experimental protocol the same results were seen and so this was again the last the last experiments of Michael Majeris again something that he was prompted to do i don't think necessarily because he thought it was scientifically the most important thing to do but in many ways as a hero of evolution someone who said he needed to address something that he felt many ways guilty about because the pollution of the conversation about whether the moth story was true or not and so again this is another diagram of of some of the work from Michael Majeris that he presented and i want to conclude here i think can you offer coming to explain the you know this Darwin day and that there that Darwin in the march of science and how we understand evolution is this combination of the process of science and the scientists who are behind it and i think Jenny saying she could explain the high of 2006 that if you look at this chart in one year it seems like the carbononium morph is equivalent that particular season and i don't know was there a lot of pollution or something that year i'm not aware of the specifics of that particular year but otherwise as she puts maybe that fourth and in local chat i'll stop here and take any questions anyone anyone just also maybe want to comment on the dismay one feels about the conversation that that is out there now about evolution oh interesting so Jenny is saying 2006 was a pretty hot year with a warm with warm winter before so predators had a lot of other food sources so the argument there is that they both had the moss both had a high survival rate because you know there was just the strength the predation was much lower than typical so yon asked an interesting question and yon for those of you who don't know or people watching this video he's actually from Japan and his question is are there any states in the usa where teaching evolutionary theory is prohibited and the answer is no and in fact there's a really nice um you cannot prohibit the teaching of evolution because that would fall under you know free speech however and this is when he sings to keep in mind is that well you can't make it illegal to teach evolution what you can try and do is insert uh things that detract from learning evolution uh and actually as i kind of mentioned before this is one thing i found from a nephew of mine who was living in georgia that they would put evolution at the end of the semester and that sometimes the teacher wouldn't even get to it right they talk about cell theory and everything but not actually get to evolution um that's harder to do in a world where science standards are becoming much more typical that these are the expectations of what you teach and that within the academic school environments at least in the public schools you have this basic requirement to teach evolution but you can't outlaw it it's required to be taught however what people like the design institute a lot of anti-creationists or anti-evolutionists try to do the creationists is that they will try to insert you know creationism and evolution into the textbooks now ultimately this was in a supreme court decision found to be illegal that's actually promoting religion to teach evolution in science classes you can teach it as a cultural phenomena but not as science so that's actually it is actually illegal to try and teach creationism as science however what they also then try and do is muddy the waters and invent things like intelligent design which is they're claiming a scientific theory but in fact is just another branding of type of creationism and so the uh the dover case um I always forget the the I always forget the first name the verses but there's a very nice documentary called Darwin I think Darwin on trial also put out by by PBS describing that even intelligent design is something that is now considered creationism and that's illegal to teach in school so people keep trying right this is the thing people keep trying to muddy and confuse refuse the conversation uh Jenny asked what Utah I don't know anything in particular about Utah's science standards or their teaching but it's definitely not illegal to teach evolution but that was a good question Jan I don't know if Japan has a slightly different situation well okay Utah is also a great place to find caffeine-free coke so that's there so yeah Yosane mentions there has been an ongoing evangelicalistic driven battle against teaching evolution in many states that has been revitalized under the current administration and yeah I think that's that's important to point out you know a lot of you know when it comes to the point where we're having to litigate whether creationism or science can and can't be taught then one let me say that that that's already the beginning of a cultural failure okay um that's already the beginning and that the courts can be again not necessarily the most rational when the push has been to put people who make irrational arguments and have this again dedication to religion as a science explanation on supreme but yeah there's always this push to keep doing so I think one thing to keep one thing that has been effective you know is that people do get upset about this right people will get upset and petition directly schools and teachers when they see you know science being mistreated uh Jenny no I think I okay so Jenny says I won't go so far to actually reject id intelligent design they just have failed to prove it yet and I think that's that's not the right way to think about it is that it's not a theory that has scientific validity because it doesn't have predictable outcomes it is one thing I mean there's lots of things you can criticize but um yeah I mean that's the thing is that every intelligent design is this explanation that's in many ways just kind of a god of the gaps argument that you know they say oh evolution doesn't explain this and so it must have been designed um that is that in and of itself is not a balanced scientific theory yeah yeah exactly and in many ways it's again it's it's put out there it's just intelligent design is designed to be a way to give highly religious people who don't who want to believe something and want to reject the science a kind of argument and a bit of solace for it so I think that's an important point um so you know two yes it's a really interesting question what is the relevance of natural selection theory to human society and boy that's a large question to you is there something you want me can you narrow it down a little bit for me uh because I think I mentioned some of the things too that in terms of understanding say agriculture and that the use of pesticides leads to a situation where the pesticides don't work anymore so we need to make sure we keep investing and developing new ways to kill pests to make sure we keep feeding ourselves right that's I think one example that comes to mind or antibiotics that we need to keep developing ways of understanding how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics so we can keep having surgeries there's a book that I did in this honors class that I taught um where you know the topic was microbial resistance by a New York doctor and and you know he was making the the important point that if we can't fix the antibiotic resistance problem we can't have surgery surgery for even minor things becomes more threatening than what you are trying to fix but I think you know there are a couple examples of the relevance uh Jenny wants to say the problem is far worse I I will likely agree with that as you put that together Jenny I'm going to address something that Jan said which is you know society is already selecting people and this idea there's actually an article that just came out that I saw pushed across my my facebook feed of talking about human selection that we are selecting on ourselves that the concept of the argument is that you know more mild-mannered men is something that helps integrate and keep society as a whole successful and so that this um so as we keep in a sense finding if women find those men more attractive in a certain cultural context then the next generation of men tend to be the more mild-mannered men and that we think about the way society works is that you know people are pretty vicious right when you think about torture in England in the you know dark ages people are much more vicious and is there something actually that in our genes in behavior has something that has occurred over time due to these types of internal selective pressures in society I think that's an interesting concept I'm not saying it's true because I think it's a proposal but it's a very intriguing one so um George Newberry says you know all antimicrobials they'll kill off you know 99.99 percent and there's always that remaining 0.01 percent but that 0.01 percent that survives now probably has um this genetically inheritable trait where the next time you apply that antimicrobial 100 survive well Jenny okay so um Jenny makes some point that maybe we shouldn't talk about the dark ages as harshly as we do but uh again I've actually you know watched a good amount of um Richard Burke documentaries and I think the case can be made pretty well that in terms of advancing human society this period of time after the fall of the Roman Empire into about the Renaissance was clearly backwards moving in terms of um technology the development of technology um and a greater influence of religion into life than ever before so I think you can make the argument that that's like one of the worst times of things going backwards um now there was lots of things that did occur during the dark ages and a lot of amazing art but I think from a technological science point of view uh really until you started getting you know the Renaissance times I think it's fair to say that from it was pretty bad yeah I'm not saying there weren't you know the idea of of the vacuum the idea of understanding how um electricity works um you know development of printing press you know that would I think fundamentally fundamentally be considered during the dark ages time period so yeah some inventions occurred but as a totality of where things were going from the Romans inventing plumbing you know that's I think it's a definite backwards movement all right so so we're hitting 908 and again this is Darwin Day but it's also a work day and so I can't spend that much extra time doing this um oh okay so actually this is a thank you for coming Nakina uh actually so this is let's finish on this because I think George brings up this really interesting point and that is humans rely much more on human invention for survival than genetics while genetics do help humans have derived methods to supersede genetics or let's just say any sort of natural selection or natural processes uh to supersede genetics corrective surgery medication therapies etc and I do want to point out that this idea of this more like Lamarck um inheritance that society has now is one that helps that can help us move away from those same selective pressures and I think that's a great point George but you know I think the important point I want to make is that yeah we have the technology but we're not sitting down and learning the lessons of the natural world of trying to understand the interplay of human biology especially very old programming that we still have in our brains for how things work and what we kind of do and don't want to do with our personal lives and how we integrate society and the types of things we invent to make in theory our lives better we can be taking a lot of steps backwards with technology and we can't and we may get to a point where we burden ourselves with so many problems that you know survival is tough right so industrial revolution leading to climate change not good even something simple where we think oh wow it'd be great if we could have a mobile phone that allows us to make calls wherever we want to go but at the same time we're learning that the impact of those on attention our ability to interact with each other and for the development of of young minds spending too much time in front of these screens is bad for society and if we don't spend the time learning and thinking ahead of time what are the best things to do i think creating a context in which people try to get rich off of other people's off of disavaging other people's development you know technology is not necessarily better than genetics you know it's we have to be caught we i think we have to take a right a good path forward try and make sure we keep track of both i think that's a great point that you know there's a point at which technology helps us we don't have to worry about surviving because we have good genes we survive because we work as a community that can solve problems yes shantel thank you thank you all for coming and sticking through i know some of it was dry at the beginning but i think it's important to talk about how evolution works and the setup the actual science the contributions that kind of well ford the jaros made and one thing to note i hopefully jess can send out that note card i actually worked with another scripture to design a little exercise that teaches moth evolution it's hosted here on the science circle land but it's also present in a few other places and if you can send that note card out at some point today or also post it to the website for this video but that would be great and i think that's a fun little exercise people can any anyone else thank you all for coming thank you all for listening thank you all for helping contribute to the conversation as well all right i am going to go ahead and put this back home and turn on a voice