 All right, thank you and welcome to everyone to today's presentation of the science circle I'm happy to see so many eager Faces here to learn about in many ways. What is a bit of an esoteric topic? And that is historically what did people think? before We considered evolution of the eight Darwinian mechanism but And what I hope to do especially by the end is to convince you that the relevance of understanding the history of a theory and Help us understand both the criticisms or the invalid criticisms that you can sometimes face with them So again formally I am Steven Geyser I Am a former biology instructor currently working in industry and Here is Steven Zutfly to talk about updating Darwinian evolution part 3 evolutionary theory before Darwin and This is a part of a series an ongoing series. I have where in the first two parts I talked about the molecular biology the genetics the modern science updates to Darwinian theory and then we talked in the second one about the idea of sexual selection and how that Comes about especially in the human mating game and this time What I want to do is go back to before Darwin because we do need to I think update in some cases this Misconception or really mispresentation of how Darwin came about a theory and so This next slide is kind of ace just hungry a bit of a simplification of how in In many common discussions discourses and to some degree and even some textbooks They portray the idea that really everyone believed in Special creation by a divine Christian creator again, this is more specific to the the European geography and that Basically Darwin wrote this book and just changed everything and now it's true He changed everything in terms of the theory of evolution but the idea that he basically went straight from thinking about the Bible to Coming up with this whole theory is I think a false misleading one and one reason why I think this is important to Kind of update in terms of how we think about Darwin is that a lot of people like to Focus on the personality of Darwin as a criticism to his evolutionary theory And I think again, I'll talk about that more at the end that this is kind of nonsensical but just be sure to make the the claim that Without Darwin, we would still have something very akin to what we currently understand as evolutionary theory so And this again like in much of science there were contributions that people were putting forth and then a theory was developing and there were cracks in the theory and One or two people came along with those things that helped explain it so Let's just have a quick update about the core representation of what Darwinian theory is and that is Just this basic idea that species Again some sort of organizational units of creatures and organisms that we recognize as a breeding unit can vary within their characteristics or behaviors any number of traits and That that varies within the population and that some of them have an advantage for survival or passing on their genes than others and that The reproductive capacity of any given species of organisms vastly outweighs Or vastly can outpace the ability carrying capacity of its environment and so there's always this competition and I think that was one thing I wanted to update that Darwin had in his second book that Mating selection is of course actually usually one of the most primary Competitive forces with foreign organ for an individual within within a species You're always competing to be able to pass on your genes at least in these like sexual mating Species and so his theory really rests upon the idea that the best Reproducers and this again has to do with fitness. It's not necessarily the strongest but those that have the ability to pass on more genes to another generation and Contribute more to the next generation and that over time these favorable traits accumulate and again something that Darwin didn't specifically go Into but something we talk about now in modern biology these barriers That allow a species to be one unit that's distinct from its ancestors and other other You know related species that had a common ancestor and so His theory Connected a lot of dots and we'll come back to that a little bit But this is really understanding this mechanism of how speciation occurs and that this is unique To the evolutionary theory at the time just some degree that he put these together in a way that just made a nice coherent sense And then again like any good scientific theory had strong predictive powers And it has stood the test of time for the most part Okay Let's talk let's back up a little bit again One thing I didn't want to do today was go back too far in history to talk about a lot of the things that say the Greeks believed or You know go back far enough to the Aristotle way of describing species But I do think there's this one core element that persisted up until Darwin's time and this idea of vitalism And that is the idea that the reason living organisms are different than the rest of things that you see in the observable universe that are Matter and energy is that they have this fundamental Vital force something supernatural metaphysical Spiritual again some call it the Elon That basically drives what exactly they are and that is Again a very metaphysical supernatural way of describing what makes things different And this is again something that persisted now again one way of describing this would be from a Christian context The life force idea so and a lot of what connected vitalism to biology was the idea that whatever this life force was this Elon was also its characteristics drove the characteristics of the organism and also drove its adaptation or evolution over time and so One example I have here in the bottom right hand corner anybody here fans of the transformers I think I think the age group for a lot of people here That was something they enjoyed on Saturday mornings A lot of the updated versions of the transformers included this thing called the spark or the all spark And if you've seen this they really play this up in the most recent movies where there's this like energy force that animates and Helps basically read you know drive all the transformers to be these living but you know living sentient animated beings and this idea I think is something that is a Good way if I think about an analogy to Well, okay, so George the Energon cubes were actually just like food I don't think they were distinctly the same as what were all sparks and all that so Anyway, this this type of idea. I think was a good example or analogy of that type of thing that people Want a good example this and again, this is someone who's you know just a generation before Darwin is like from Friedrich Wolf he talked about the Homunculus and again, this is something my scene is fantasy or science fiction terms, but The next page shows like the most common pictorial example of this is that the adult human form of having a brain a head two arms two legs is actually Premade is preformed inside the sperm and so that when a sperm Then gets into a female and that leads to the next generation That that is the everything that happens is just building upon this template form in order to become the fully realized adult And so this is a concept that you see Again very similar to this idea of a vital force that forms this and then it's the template for further development Now is there any sort of creature or any sort of thing that that happens or a term from biology That makes this on its face a somewhat nonsensical concept And this is one thing I'm hope to do today is include a little bit of this thought experiment that we can all participate in Or why some of these things don't make any sense even at the time would not make sense any animals We're having some sort of preformed body to describe its adult form Is just completely nonsensical Adrienne points out frogs and butterflies And I think those are really pretty good examples that the idea that Metamorphosis is something that occurs Is Kind of flies in the face of this idea of a preform thing. Yeah Um Day brings up kind of an interesting one that scientists used to think some some very interesting things about fossils Baragon sent me a YouTube video that some of the old shells of mollusks some of them were called the devil's toe and that Just you know people like to make up fantastical things to Explain again what they could see at their face and I'm sorry That was one thing I meant to mention a bit earlier is that one thing to give to remind to be be mindful of Is that all the science at this point was very philosophical and observational right the whole idea of the scientific method You know Sir Francis Bacon type Idea of progressing through science that really did not exist. So to some degree. Let's keep keep in mind And yeah, Katya mentions ontology recapitulates phylogeny something we'll come back to a little bit later Actually, it's a fun bear work Okay now Again even before one comes up with the idea of how species came about and what sort of mechanism You'd have to explain that you can of course catalog these and so Of course, you know from early Greek times we have documentation of how Aristotle decided to categorize Species and animals on the planet But again in terms of a more modern synthesis John Ray made the case that really To understand how we understand species where you need to come up with these like key characteristics type organisms The idea of what is a species? Again the mechanistic idea Although to some degree I'm sure some people were thinking of it even at the time that obviously an elephant Doesn't interbreed with a cat. You know, there's some aspects that people understood that they were isolated in terms And Linnaeus of course is the father of taxonomy that Um while he was again most famous for having set up these categories in cataloging the wide variety of species that existed at the time Uh, one thing I want to point out that was that in his Own viewpoints and philosophy of science They were all specially created that there was in fact one individual Um pair or in the case of hermaphrodite She only need one so why make more than one just make one that Basically were there from some sort of beginning point and basically propagated forward through time and so In Linnaeus's viewpoints species were also for the large part constant And again, this is something that we now know as this taxonomic classification That again even among modern science There are lots of reasons that we are moving away from this once we understand more about dna And can set up relationships with dna We still want to name things and so this idea of the genus and species But then also grouping things together within higher categories makes sense now at the time again, let's face at the time In terms of observational science We want to say, you know cats are related Dogs are related dogs relates to the wolf. Uh, these are both mammals And so these classification systems set up now, they were limited, you know Linnaeus really only described mammals other Largely called quadrupeds birds amphibians which included reptiles Pisces insects and then worms the vermies and so And you can imagine that if you're a european and trying to figure out what are the best Categories that describe the vast majority what we can see around that actually makes a lot of sense Uh, what I have here are some screen captures um from from Linnaeus's work Showing again both the uh, the reptiles as well as the mollusks the vermi from the vermi's group And so I do want to point out one thing so again, you can kind of see how these are categorized and They work together to make it looks, you know, like you would categorizing these these things as a class You're not even necessarily saying they're related in terms of any sort of biology or physiology But they all resemble each other and so they were you know, you can group them in some sort of categorization Now I do want to point out one thing which we're going to come back to in just a second when you think about at the time people believed in increasing complexity and that these different groups uh Are related and are especially or created in a sense to be increasing complexity towards man Notice the top two organisms on the right and the left So on the right in the vermi's a lower category The uh, you know the worm resembles a lot in terms of morphology The snakes or other salamanders that you might have on the left-hand side And so this idea is something that also starts to Uh make some other theories, you know contradictory And so Kai mentioned something about a loop I'm not really sure what you mean by a loop with cats and wild cats and links in line I'm not sure what sort of loop idea you mean, but maybe we can come back to that at the end Especially when we talk about the donkeys and horses, which will come in up uh And then again, so this is common From again, particularly in the christian tradition the idea of the the ladder of life this idea that there is this uh increasing complexity And that of course The top part of it ends in man that man is the highest expression of god's complexity or again If there's some sort of nature driven force of vitalism that man is at the top be the most complex and elegant and Again same idea that again specifically ordering these from lowest to highest You have the ordering of lists you see here with at the base you have the vermi's At the top you have mammals and humans Now again, one thing I pointed out is if you do have this idea of increasing complexity Then why are some examples in amphibia very similar in complexity to the lowest rung on the ladder? Uh, so tagline mentions about whether the greeks conceptualize a great chain of being as well and That sounds familiar. I'm not you know My uh, my historical readings of greek biology Don't go aren't aren't all that fresh so Let's talk about some of the predecessors before garland That again started to again from this basic building block uh in terms of natural philosophy of You know things have vital forces and have always been the way they are and they were specially created Where are the areas where this started to change? And so poofan is one of the first ones again writing the you know history of nature that Really formed this uh basis for modern Classification of organisms, which really started to group organisms in a way to say that they are You know related to each other in a more Uh observable way one thing that's people credit His works is that they're very understandable That one thing he went for was having a nice readable way of describing science as compared to lineas It was just very very dry and One thing that he he did which is I think an important part is that He pointed out this continuity between species that you can see that they are gradations between them In sin in a sense that You know the horse is closely related to the ass And that could that mean that there's some sort of relationship between them that is that is You know a just a a mechanism of how they came about Again, it's very easy to One should not necessarily invoke the idea that they were thinking biologically again This is something that could have been designed And he came up with this idea of unity of type And so this is just basically trying to clarify and organize this idea that when you think about Any given species being described categorically that you have this the key features of it that are most important for understanding its its biology Uh and one thing that he also did that was a little bit different So in the ladder of life one thing we have is this idea that things are continually improving to a higher form to be more like Um a higher level beam And he was actually one of the few people that argued for the degeneration of species and in fact if you have things like vestigial Well, again, I don't know about his particular arguments and some of these But that when you look overall you can you can imagine that there are Uh a pinnacle of the species, but then there are you know variants or versions of it or close related ones that just look less Less elegant and that would actually potentially been a degeneration version of the original He was also one of the first major scientists to incorporate the idea that the earth is very old So one thing um Anybody know according to the bishop usher in what year the world started? this is uh That the term you'll hear quoted from Christians many times That the earth was started very close scissor g. It's actually four thousand four bc is typically the term. Yeah, very good. Vic. You got it Um, so yeah about six thousand years ago and again, they calculated based on oh If you believe the bible is an authoritative source of history and you count the number of generations going back That's in the old testament. You can come up with an argument for You know you can make up a year that the earth is created so, um And that's the other thing too is that he also in terms of this idea of having degeneration You can also say at the scale of natura doesn't make sense So his categorization of species was not a matter of one being more You know highly highly complex than the other It's just the idea that they do group categorically differently and so here's a couple of uh You know illustrations from from his work where again comparing the horse To the ass and then one thing that he you know, I actually went through and read through the argument That uh went through these pages that he gives these these Very long descriptive versions of how elegant he thought the horse was that the ass was you know, not as elegant but he did But he still kept them as distinct species He said these are very distinct species and one thing that we know from Breeding a horse to an ass is that the the combination of two is a mule Which again looks somewhat intermediate between the two very hearty And Yet cannot Perpetuate itself. You cannot breed a mule with again the other genders called a burrow, but you cannot breed those and get get offspring Actually, maybe you sometimes can't very rarely, but they largely do not propagate So again that would make the argument that the horse and ass are in fact different species And this idea of and one thing that I think you really have to stop and think about is this is actually A way of determining experimentally whether things are different species or not. And so this idea of Maybe to some degree testing a hypothesis and saying, oh You don't get offspring from this is a way of saying things are different species Um, okay, but the one thing that I also think it's a little bit contradictory. So I was reading through Through the work. He compares like the gray hound versus the shepherd dog And what you know, if you look at these two they look way more different In many regards than the the equine example So where is it then in terms of observational descriptive science? Do you say that These are more or less close. How does describing something tell you really something whether it is or is not a species And I think maybe in his case, he would make the argument that these dogs can't interbreed So in fact, they do represent a species So again, one of the next major luminaries in the field would be buffon And again, he wanted to write 50 volumes of his major work, but it only got through 36 before he passed away and What is one of his major contributions to to the biology and evolution is the idea that um Epigenetics and again, this is not the modern epi. I haven't quote because people use the term epigenetics differently now but that What are the characterizing and organizing forces of biological beings actually has to do with their like chemical composition and their organic particles No, again, he was um, this doesn't Fit and square with any sort of like particular theory today, but the actual idea That there are not there's not some sort of supernatural metaphysical force that's driving the organization And the vitality of a being that actually comes from some sort of You know natural system of chemistry. I think is you know a very unique step forward Because then once you start thinking about the idea of the chemistry of something the physical aspects of the being Driving what it does and how it reproduces and the why it's a species Means that you can start moving away from supernatural forces and and yeah, we'll be talking about creation and Cataclysm just a little bit vick. Um I think that again If we want to think about how old species are and how rapidly they can evolve and the ways that we know this from dna I would actually go back and refer you updating darwin part one Um, and barrigan mentions embryology. Again, we'll have a brief mention of that as well Um, sorry, I thought oh, I'm sorry. Uh, let me go back. Let me say one last thing about buffon is that well on the other hand There was still while he got away from the idea the homunculus. Okay that this homunculus idea Doesn't doesn't really work and make any sense He still had this idea But you can build a little bit vague in terms of science was of an interior mold that there was some still still maybe some degree Of organizing force that drives Um The characteristics of any given species Okay, so now if we go specifically to two generations before darwin and we know this because this was darwin's grandfather Erasmus darwin was a physician and he was again quite literate quite widely read Uh, he put out a pamphlet called zoomania, which is actually a pamphlet like 1200 pages, but Again, a lot of it is a physiology textbook. And so as you read through he talks about circulatory system diseases Um, the lymphatic system these types of things, but Some of the widely quoted stuff that that comes from him that that again He didn't want to make any strong case that would get him in trouble culturally But that he did make Basically some claims about how evolution works. And this is the idea that warm-blooded animals Have arisen from one living filament, which the great first cause again, this idea is still of supernatural Creation Endured with animality, but had the power of acquiring new parts Attended with new propensities directed by irritation sensations volitions and associations And thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity and that That are capable of basically delivering these down to to of their improvements By generation to its for all posterity again world without end that Again, he's actually again invoking this idea of variability within organisms in a species the ability to Uh passes on to the next generation and that some That they're starting to becoming an argument here that some are better than others Or more fit now again, and I have here this in the next slide That some of the other quotes from from that is that the strongest and most active animals should propagate the species Which should hence become improved. So this idea that Or some sort of you know Again, this is survival of the fittest or the survival of the strongest Is a mechanism by which some individuals survive over others and again this did not confuse the issue darlin talked about fitness in terms of number of offspring Can have and whether they maintain an advantage from generation to generation, but This idea that there are some that are better than others and compete is important And that again he describes this idea that again What are the the things that create the volitions of what species what organisms want to do within the species has to do with Lust so again sexual mating maybe to some degree trying to describe hunger And then also security again one thing he doesn't mention is The desire to have offspring, but I think that that's a fairly good case for saying here are some driving forces behind evolution and organisms another Luminary from the field again, this is someone who was more in the geology and again, and we'll talk I'll give a little bit more of a summary of geology in just a second, but James Hutton And he put out large volume investigations of the principles of knowledge again a lot of this is philosophical I tried to read and find some good quotes and got lost in the 1800 pages of the pdf But he did actually have a very important idea in terms of the principle of variation And again without reading the whole thing the idea here is that Uh, there are adaptations to an environment And that those Provided advantages to that individual within a species and they can then you know Pass that on to more individuals of their of their race Now this principle of variation of course is One of the key founding ideas of what Darwin had and so You know this idea was again between him and Erasmus this idea of variation with the species is not Is not new But I do want to point out that in context, you know, he's still a creationist and that the idea that um The the source of organisms was something other than Special creation and then maybe they can go and carry on do things on their own and then Try and survive and pass on their genes was still Um, again, he was a strict creationist So And that says actually a good time to have a little bit of a brief geology interlude Is that one thing to keep in mind is that when you think about bishop usher And a lot of the common idea of how we describe how old the earth was again Uh Six thousand years is not a lot of time And so when you think about the idea that there even can be variation with the species If you're still stuck with only six thousand years with which to work Then how can you come up with any sort of? evolutionary theory and Yeah, so you bring up an interesting point and I will try and remind me at the end of it we can come back to that that um What was happening within the field of geology was this idea that um, if you look at lava flows or or um Or volcanoes or if you start looking at like Cliffs where you've had lots of degradation or you start looking at What we now know is the boundary between tectonic plates That you can actually see formations That Indicate a lot of activity happens in the earth And so again a lot of people talk about how Darwin had a copy of liel's book about geology Um And liel of course was making this very Kind of relatively unique arguments that the geology of the earth can change That was like to some simple idea the idea that geology can change Is something that was again important for darwin to incorporate into his thinking other interest in the hunton was one of the first people to really put Uh a time stamp on how old the earth must be At over a million at millions of years old right now. It's still off by You know a factor of a thousand times times four for how old it actually is but um Again the idea that there's millions at least starts gives you the ability to start thinking about evolutionary change over time And here's a nice illustration from Hutton's booking and he was not the illustrator But this is uh from example in I think the countryside where it actually had um Like a cliff side or maybe some sort of um Uh construction that allowed you to actually see these geological strata and so the idea that there might have been Adap changing things over time and this layering on pieces of Dirt and other stuff over a long period of time allowed this to suddenly make sense And one thing that this really helped people do so where there's been some discussion in the chat That of course the old greeks thought that Fossils were remnants of you know the monsters from their mythology But the idea that if you can start believing in the ancient earth You can start making more sense of what these weird little bone formations are but again, they rocks But they also look like bones of animals or shells And so the idea that they may actually represent extinct species When is something that can now start helping you incorporate how evolution and species and organisms can change over time okay, so um Lamarck so again one of the few nods that you usually do get in textbooks before darwin is um Is talking about lamarck again as a way of contrasting what darwin had to say And i really dislike the way they put that a lot of times is because there's a lot more that lamarck And darwin i would say had in common as you look back on over time Then really how many differences they had primarily because of some of the mechanistic So in His major work the philosophy of animals He coined this term this inheritance of acquired characteristics Which we now again typically refer to as lamarckism that um It really kind of represented this first cohesive theory of biological evolution And what he had were two main parts is the idea that there was an alchemical Complexifying force that drove organisms up a ladder of complexity. So again, kind of to some degree adhering to the idea of Compared to older organisms or some sort of scale in natura that there was something that drives you towards more complexity But then also a second force that adapted them to local environments through the use and disuse of characteristics and so here is You know one example of the most common example of this again, this was not in his in his work It was something by contemporary but that If you have a giraffe That has a potential food source In trees that again, maybe other organisms can't take advantage of then Over generations again the giraffe can actually in a sense grow their neck. There's some sort of the environment is telling the giraffe Hey This is useful for you And then there's some sort of organizing forces says hey more complexity More advantage advantages out of being able to eat these leaves and boom. You suddenly get this evolving force that um And that this would explain again a lot of what you see in variation nature This is perfectly adapted these well adapted creatures and environment the fact that they um Do vary and that different species can evolve from some common types again lamarck was Again still adhering to taxonomical classifications But one thing that was actually very interesting about lamarck is that he did have he did propose some ideas of branching evolution that the idea of These different categories that lineas knew as just being some being some sort of co-equal Where each one representing an original type that then evolved over time Was not true. And so if you look up here Again, not in english But on the right hand side, you can see the vermes are something that gives rise to the insects And that insects even though these are Largely land-based flying creatures you can recognize a lot of similarities the spiders and crustaceans even though The crustaceans live in the sea and so this idea of having some sort of Tree of life and this branching idea of one Organism giving rise to another one that means there must have been enough individuals that were different or adapting in a way to make them distinct again in this case is whole different Fila that This is something that again Is a precedent to what darwin ultimately proposed again one thing though In terms of the origin of Original species. He did believe in spontaneous generation again not something that was necessarily a vital force not something that was supernatural But that there was some degree of spontaneous generation that led to the original organisms Okay, so again kind of contemporary to to lamarck. Uh, it was coupier Again, someone who also started from a geology background then developed a distinct interest in Uh Systematics and biology once he actually took over professorship From a friend of his who died and he wrote um essay in the theory of the earth and He was someone who also again now that we had a better sense of The geology over time He was one of the first people who made a big a big case about the fossils In taxonomy are things that you can group and relate to species that exist today in terms of categorization Now, um, what his theory of the origin of species and how the earth has developed over time were in Periods of catastrophe where essentially you'd have mass extinction events and then everything would be recreated every time Uh, so for example while he named the mastodon The fact that the mastodon was extinct and you could say it's related to elephants of the current time They actually weren't evolved from one another. There was no relationship between the two But that when they got recreated from one cataclysm to the next you would see these same types come back together Yeah, the a biogenesis is this idea that again from Uh, what would you call inorganic matter you can have And that this was a very extreme version of this where boom You have this very rapid regeneration of of whole species and organisms Uh, again one thing to point out that his life his context was he was a fierce anti-evolutionist He was even though he proposed some very important things and helped contribute to these ideas um You know that uh, that was not his worldview in the end Now one thing that he did come up with though, even though he wasn't saying that these were evolved He did come up with this idea Especially I think because he was such a fossil specialist of the principle of the correlation of parts And that says something that broke from tradition where a lot of characteristics that were described within species by the Taxonomist these were all independent parts right that the teeth were different than the feet that were different than the hair And were different than the internal organs and he's saying they are interrelated And that the important essentials of some traits can tell you more about the rest of the animal. So again, if you um teeth for example that Again, if you look at any given species right now You can you can look at their teeth and get actually a very good sense of what their diet is And then if you start thinking about their diet means something that is very particular say to Bamboo, then you start getting a sense of where they live. Maybe other adaptations that allow them to You know eat acquire um bamboo for example And so this is something that again like there's a the denosevins our example of a human Uh Of a homo species that we really only know now we have its dna Well, we actually could tell a little bit because we found it's tooth So this is not like any sort of other um ancestral human tooth And then also he made this very important thing that is again in modern biology and evolutionary theory is very important He distinguished the idea between homology The identity of parts by descent versus analogy, which is now something that we call conversion evolution And so that for example bats and birds both have wings But they're not from some sort of commonly descended part and so I think um Oh, actually, yeah, and vic actually mentioned something else that's been in the news lately is that we actually take teeth We can laser ablate them and actually look at the minerals and the different subcategories by mass spec And actually learn a lot about the diet of species You can also learn a lot by the plaque the bacteria that are on the remnants of the of the bacteria that were on them It's amazing how much we can learn from teeth And so I think this is something where again the genesis of this idea comes from kuvie saying look you can look at these And that this relates to the whole organism But again the point I want to make is that once you start thinking about organisms as these interconnected parts But it makes very sense how mutations or again what darwin would call monstrosities Can help the whole organism survive in a different way, right? These now the fact that they're not disconnected parts that they are connected and important That's where mutations and phenotype differences start becoming important for darwin's theory And again, uh kuvie. He was someone who reorganized the tax on a tax tax Taxonomy does how about vertebrates mollusks? Articulates and radiates again something where again you look at the body type And you can see how these body types are very important for the functionality The way the organisms work again vertebrae can tell you a whole lot if you just had only the The vertebrae of an organism. There's a whole lot you can learn about that for example Um, so again, but the idea that you may have common original body plans That then led to other species that make variations on that body plan I think is something that when you think about darwin's use of embryology And those ideas are very important All right, um, I'll make a brief mention someone who um Kind of one of the smaller people here, but he was someone who I think initially influenced or immediately influenced darwin And I want to make one point. So this is fran's hunger and his Major work is attempt of the history of the plant world Which I gotta tell you what sort of self-deprecating scientists are you that it's not just The authoritative history of the plant world you're gonna say it's an attempt It's the best I can do. It's what what you all might enjoy So I hope one day that write some sort of attempt book myself One thing that he made the argument was that thalafites that he's types of very basal algae that Um gave rise to plants again plants have always been thought of again, they are Fauna they are their whole distinct thing That is not related to other organisms on the planet again This is also around the time where a lot of microbiology is coming up But the idea that algae Which again are photosynthetic and then you have these Kind of they look like degenerate plants that thalafites that those deferns type of Cheese can give rise to all but the degenerate fern can give rise to all plants was this really conceptually important idea that very Unorganized simplified organisms can over again millions of years give rise to something highly complex and highly differentiated So I think that that's something where again, he doesn't get a lot of a lot of play But I think he's one that uh, again, particularly Ernst Meyer said was important Okay, now the last one Is not a scientist. He's actually more of a popularizer of science. He's a book publisher And at some point I'm not I would like to know I would love to see a biography of this but why he decided as a publisher Clearly a very observant smart guy decided to publish messages of the natural history of creation and this is Robert Chambers And again, this is just a lot of his observations. He wasn't a scientist He wasn't conducting conducting experiments. He wasn't a member of the Royal Academy or anything But he just was very observational And one of the things that he came up with this again, his book covers a lot of stuff covers a lot of geology physics everything But he did come up with this one idea this idea of the principle of progressive development That fauna have evolved through time And he again, he was mentioning Vaughn Bayer as well as um, I think Unger that That these are things that evolve And that catastrophes are unnecessary to explain life That when you look at this unity of body organization that these are old ancient body plans that progressed And that um, and this is where phylogeny Phylogeny recapitulates ontology that That embryonic development again something worked on by Vaughn Bayer reflects like older body types of organisms that then Have modifications and adaptations look at it Ontology recapitulate phylogeny is not exactly correct It represents something different in terms of how evolution and development occur But accepting that idea at the time Um There's something that he was putting out now. What's important to realize is that the vestiges was an incredibly popular book It actually got a lot of people talking and so um, it was Uh Something that really put a lot of conversation into Into the culture now. He was not a scientist and as I tried to read through some of this I'm like, oh man that science that's not how I describe it. That doesn't make any sense So a lot of professional science professionals in terms of scientists Criticizes details and thoughts without necessarily recognizing he was proposing some very important big picture ideas And so yeah Like I have you I can only imagine how much he would get savaged on his twitter feed from from scientists From from that type of work and again, that's something that you can easily do is you can criticize the minor things With while missing the big picture And so this is an example of kind of both the good and the bad He actually was showing some degree of these trees of life these um adaptations and phylogenetic relationships Again showing trees of life But we actually look at the description of this. He's making the argument that humans or again any given Classification of animals like the birds there's going to be some sort of most organized version of it it's like most elegant version And they're going to be ones that are more degenerate from that again He did believe in degeneration And that they can you can see how closely related they are to these different groups But that you have the most elegant one. So again, it's one of these ones where you know, there's the parts and the pieces are there Where when we think about Darwin's tree of life and everyone I show the picture textbook I'll show the picture of his branching the organization of species Again between so for example chambers lamarck these ideas You know were something that were already percolating and stewing in the scientific literature Okay, so to kind of summarize You know leading up to Darwin and again, I'm not including Like contemporaries like Mendel and Wallace and people who had important contributions to The final theory. I just want to make this more global hundred year idea of what was coming up to Darwin that He didn't have to say garden of Eden doesn't make sense, right? He just had to come up with Species you did not actually did not have to come up with the idea that species are well adapted or that offspring or form But can vary and that when you think about all the species on the planet They have relationships that actually may have evolved from one From each other or from or ancient organisms and these old ancient organisms had the ability to They can survive and adapt in a different world so This constant and then also that existing species are related to dead species this idea of Demand being something related and something that is ancestral biologically sperm passed down from generation to generation Is something that can explain the diversity of life on the planet now And you did not need supernatural metaphysical forces in order to explain Although again, I don't want to dismiss the idea of course Cataclysms can represent Very strong stresses on organisms And so this is not the only way but one thing I'm also not talking about is Thomas Malthus Who of course had this theory That humans were in big trouble because we would propagate and our population would increase faster than our ultimate agricultural capacity give it enough time And again technically that is true and so um And that of course a few of food restrictions Then fewer people have to survive or sorry You're gonna have fewer people survive and then there's more intense competition among people Which again also decreased the population. You know think mad max type of world view Either the mel Gibson or the or the reboot and so But I think one thing that this did help contribute to to To darwin's thinking is that the idea that you have changes environment that can be a strong pressure You can't have very strong competition within a species is something that can accelerate And makes more sense how those variants within a group can actually have that survival advantage And so Before I go to my last slide, I just want to just kind of point out that What I think we have here is this What's important to think about in terms of darwin as place and time is that he helped Contrude immensely to how evolution is thought about and helped put into context and make sense by incorporating Uh Again a lot of pieces of evidence if you ever read on the origin of species on I feel like I'm one of the few biologists who's read it um Well multiple times, but even just once that if you walk through his arguments and the way he describes stuff it's very powerful And very very convincing and well written and a lot of what he had to spend time on rhetorically was Saying that certain things in you know Theology do not make sense and if he could have gotten away from how to spend all the time on that I think we could have even had better better book um And so You know one thing that kind of drives that drove me crazy a few years ago was when steven meyer from the design institute or sorry discovery institute That there's a proponent of intelligent design He came up with this book called darwin's doubt and he wanted to make this argument that oh darwin didn't necessarily believe in all this Stuff and he's had he said oh, maybe divine creator or oh, I don't know I don't want to say too much about this You know that's nonsense and that one Science doesn't really care too much about what individual scientists believed Beyond what they put into the scientific literature It's also you know, it's face at 150 years old what darwin's doubts may or may not have been for his theory at the time But that also if we're you give this opening To if we if we try to put scientists too much on a pedestal We give people who want to create controversy who want to make Good sounding rhetorical arguments even though they're very weak logically in opening to To criticize the theory based on on the people who were involved with it And so that's one thing I just want to point out here is that even absent darwin You know within this time frame of by the early 1900s There would have been some form of evolutionary theory again wallis Maybe not because wallis while he is considered a competitor darwin was not very good at understanding The mechanisms of natural selection and he also himself was actually still devout theist so there may have been aspects Where we would have had different things if we didn't And one thing I think what's worthwhile to really think about in terms of darwin's main contribution to evolutionary theory Is the idea that's very similar what happened with the with the work of Watson and Crick That people were trying to come up with Um How dna is structured and again someone actually just mentioned paul air like I think about population stuff, but he actually I think had high ideas for how dna was structured um But when Watson and Crick came up with their model for how dna works This is the structure again the structure was not known But then as you looked at the structure It created this very clarifying way to understand How dna replication occurs again how dna gets replicated is an important is a very important thing in terms of Cell biology and so the fact that the structure gave insight into The mechanism of replication and that replication mechanism was very elegant made even more sense to help support the idea that the structure had to be correct And so I think this is something where when you think about darwin's contribution Is that the way he described with natural selection as well as the inheritance and variability is something that Made just made everything click for everyone to understand All of the important biology that was helping contribute to the understanding of the diversity of species on the planet And so I think that's where I will end my talk And thank you for your attention listening. There's been some comments in the chat which I may have missed But I will take again kind of formal questions now and then remind me if there's something you want addressed from earlier So thank you all for listening Hope you enjoyed it. Do I have a back? Yeah Thank you. Thank you all for coming. It's I'm I'm so much a molecular biologist and bench scientist, but I of course do enjoy the philosophical Aspects and historical aspects of this too So the question from george newberry. Am I familiar with the town in poland that has only had female babies for the past two years? I am not I hope there are some scientists looking into that Or um Because that sounds interesting. I can imagine that there are mechanisms for how you will have Biases that can crop up of course engenders Yeah, so aurora talks about the garden of eden being kind of a touchstone of you know western philosophy And that's one thing to point out is that again, I don't really know a lot about other major Cultures theories about evolution or how that impacted darlin But it's not very clear that darlin would have read much of their literature So synergy asks the question. Do these pre darwinists help explain how our understanding of biology evolved? and That's a little bit of a pretty wide open question. I mean in terms of I think the point I was trying to make at the end the idea that um How maybe scientists understand and maybe the thomas kuhn idea of how a theory finally gets accepted Is that you know, what's really I find very interesting is a lot of them If they could have given up this adherence to a supernatural understanding of the world They could have come up with much more elegant theories That would have explained the natural world better, you know, so I think this idea of How the personality or the philosophy of a scientist influences what they can and can't do in science is important um In terms of other theories again, thomas kuhn does talk about darwinism and evolution as a part of his The structure of scientific revolutions and I think we can sit back and look at how You know to me like many other theories a lot of the pieces and parts were out there And you just needed someone to kind of push aside the veil To get to that final thing that wraps it together nicely and that makes powerful predictions That's one thing that you know lamarckism wasn't great at making predictions and in fact lisenko who was this Scientist and developed this whole idea of agriculture based on lamarckism for the sovi or for soviet well ancient russia Really kind of messed up the agriculture, right? and so You know this That's how theories evolve. I think there's some lessons you can learn from that Yeah, the evolution of evolution is kind of what it is um Okay, so it's polish town aurora mentions has a population of 300 and only 12 births in 10 years. Yeah You know binomial distribution Can get you all girl births Again, but there actually are other mechanisms. I actually just had this discussion lunch their day talking about what are the things that influence the gender of offspring and there are environmental factors that could do that again if you think about how the microbiota of The female genitalia can influence acid alkaline levels So these are things that actually you can see things that would be give you a baseline. That's not 50 50 Yeah, barrigan kind of mentions this idea um The idea of paradigm shifts, which was a term coined by thomas kuhn um Created this weird popularizing. I think ways of misconception Advances in science. I mean sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's bad I think the idea that we've tried to think of darwin as this complete revolution of evolution Sorry the complete revolution of evolutionary theory Has kind of given us, you know, a false view in context of what it really was I mean if you really sat down and said, you know, tons of people believed in evolution before darwin They just had it slightly off in the details. That's a very different argument than um No one believed in evolution and darwin came up with it right these very different ways of thinking Yeah, thank you. Well Yeah, we do like paradigm shifts aurora and I think it does make for a good story and that's something that I think Popularizers of science and the news media like to do now is really talk about the characters And the people involved and that's can be very annoying again kuhn was really trying to more in a very Stayed sense just give descriptive characteristics of what a revolution was So I wouldn't you know something that People have taken and ran with in different ways Vic I'm glad you came So tagline asks a question that I'm not sure Again, I fully understand it says When do you think humans proceed that their own existence arose from bisexual reproduction? Oh, like the idea that having sex led to babies Uh, again, it's one of these things that you have to imagine is Completely very obvious from the very early days um You know as much as we're aware of things. I think it's very clear That yeah in prehistory we think even go back, you know tens of millions of years ago and you have probably relatively important cognitive developments in What would really be primate ancestors? You know, they had some degree of cognition of the pecking order of the alpha male versus sub you know the non alpha males that you know Would compete and you have to sneak around again lots of the times the non alpha males Could reproduce by sneaking around from the alpha male, right? So some of that is instinctual some of that is coded I don't know but the idea You know It's it's funny that you can go backwards and thought that maybe there are other things that happen like storks, you know Yeah jinx mike, you know People sometimes do you like to tell convenient stories? Yeah, it's hard to I mean Maybe to answer the question tagline I don't know when people came up with formal theories of how sperm propagated things the next generation and um But one thing that darwin did have is he had these things. Uh, what were they called granules or granulites or something? They he was trying to propose mechanisms of how this occurred and again the idea that people were examining under the microscope The sperm trying to think oh, do I see a homunculus in there or not? Clearly oh max max has a right gemules gemules. Thank you max Well, yeah, I think you know if you look back and even like ancient civilizations You can see attempts at making condoms. You can find these in as historical artifacts So they were made out of things like lamb skin or other species animals Okay All right, any any more questions Okay, so here's kind of maybe a philosophical question from arian and that do you think if darwin Were to still be alive would he win the noble prize alone or together with other people I mentioned? That is actually kind of an interesting question. Um One you know the categories of noble prizes doesn't really include Evolution there's physiology and medicine or chemistry, which is where a lot of biologists get their stuff But let's just say there was some sort of equivalent like lasker prize or bio biology prize um Yeah, I don't know. I think I think if you were to take him And they would find maybe one or two people who were like lamarck I could imagine given how well red lamarck was at the time that you could imagine be lamarck and and And darwin and then probably it's like the third prize would be mendel who helped explain the mechanism again That would be the type of way I would organize the three pillars of the important people were Yeah, caught you didn't you have a question earlier in the um chat that was Yeah, you know mendel Mendel's a great story. Uh, there's actually a really good The history channel was doing this series called biographies and I did a really good mental Biography if you can find that online somewhere Oh, okay. Sorry a little discussion about fertility idols, but I think I'll I'll just pass on that one in terms of That conversation Yeah, the individual All right. Well, anyway, if um If there really aren't any more questions again I will be doing more darwin updates. Maybe one day I'll do a summary Lecture just to to do that um Anyway, I'm gonna close off voice here real quick. I'll stick around me for a little bit for a little bit of chat but otherwise gonna head out and Thank you all again for coming If you have people you think might be interested in this remember that things will get posted to youtube look for announcements from Science circle from shawn tall shawn tall. Thanks again for hosting Have a good day everyone