1 00:00:52,000 --> 00:00:55,430 Today's lecture is about the problem of design. 2 00:00:56,300 --> 00:00:59,000 So the obvious place to begin is with things 3 00:00:59,140 --> 00:01:00,810 that are clearly not designed. 4 00:01:01,910 --> 00:01:04,640 This is just a plain, ordinary stone. 5 00:01:05,080 --> 00:01:09,510 The laws of physics, left on their own, will produce something like that. 6 00:01:10,650 --> 00:01:12,720 They can also produce something like this, 7 00:01:13,220 --> 00:01:15,150 which looks superficially like a boot, 8 00:01:15,650 --> 00:01:17,890 but the resemblance is purely accidental, 9 00:01:18,020 --> 00:01:19,830 it means absolutely nothing. 10 00:01:20,260 --> 00:01:22,730 Nor does the resemblance of this to a fish mean anything, 11 00:01:23,130 --> 00:01:25,800 nor the resemblance of that to a duck's head. 12 00:01:26,270 --> 00:01:27,700 This is slightly more interesting 13 00:01:27,930 --> 00:01:29,400 but it is still purely fortuitous. 14 00:01:29,500 --> 00:01:33,640 It looks like an egg and inside is a little dummy embryo, 15 00:01:33,770 --> 00:01:37,410 but again, it is pure luck that is just produced by physics alone. 16 00:01:39,040 --> 00:01:42,680 That is also true of these rather beautiful looking crystals. 17 00:01:43,450 --> 00:01:44,950 But this is rather more interesting 18 00:01:45,450 --> 00:01:47,420 because crystals are what you get 19 00:01:47,520 --> 00:01:49,560 when atoms, all of the same kind, 20 00:01:50,020 --> 00:01:54,290 are allowed to stack up together in a way that they "want to do". 21 00:01:54,960 --> 00:01:57,060 This is a different kind of crystal, a desert rose. 22 00:01:57,330 --> 00:01:59,870 Almost looks as if it might have been made by a jeweler. 23 00:02:02,600 --> 00:02:07,970 But all these objects are fortuitous. 24 00:02:08,470 --> 00:02:10,340 None of them is designed. 25 00:02:10,980 --> 00:02:14,010 All the stones belong in the category I am going to call 26 00:02:14,380 --> 00:02:15,650 "simple." 27 00:02:16,780 --> 00:02:18,850 The same is true of clouds and stars. 28 00:02:18,950 --> 00:02:20,150 Nobody designed them, 29 00:02:20,290 --> 00:02:21,820 they came to be the way they are 30 00:02:21,950 --> 00:02:25,390 by the simple consequences of unaided laws of physics. 31 00:02:25,620 --> 00:02:28,760 They're examples of the way things just happen to be. 32 00:02:30,860 --> 00:02:32,430 Now we are ready to look at some objects 33 00:02:32,560 --> 00:02:34,000 that really are designed. 34 00:02:34,800 --> 00:02:36,400 This microscope, 35 00:02:37,240 --> 00:02:38,570 nobody could possibly mistake that 36 00:02:38,700 --> 00:02:41,310 for an object which just happens to be the way it is. 37 00:02:41,910 --> 00:02:44,440 Everything about it has "design" written all over it. 38 00:02:44,780 --> 00:02:46,480 It has a long tube 39 00:02:46,610 --> 00:02:49,410 to look down, a lens this end, another lens that end, 40 00:02:49,650 --> 00:02:52,680 a mirror to reflect light up through the tube, 41 00:02:52,820 --> 00:02:55,450 knobs to change the focus, 42 00:02:55,720 --> 00:02:57,390 other knobs to move the slide 43 00:02:57,660 --> 00:02:59,960 from side to side and back and forth. 44 00:03:00,860 --> 00:03:03,330 Even the knobs themselves are roughened 45 00:03:03,430 --> 00:03:04,960 to make them easier to grip. 46 00:03:06,630 --> 00:03:08,600 A designed object. 47 00:03:10,000 --> 00:03:12,100 The same is true of this calculating machine, 48 00:03:12,470 --> 00:03:14,770 the same is true of this watch. 49 00:03:16,940 --> 00:03:19,140 There are some slightly more difficult cases. 50 00:03:19,380 --> 00:03:20,610 These flint arrowheads. 51 00:03:20,750 --> 00:03:22,480 There is not much doubt that they are designed. 52 00:03:22,750 --> 00:03:25,580 They are shaped in a way you would'nt normally expect 53 00:03:25,720 --> 00:03:27,650 a stone on the beach to be shaped. 54 00:03:27,890 --> 00:03:29,320 This one is a bit more doubtful. 55 00:03:29,720 --> 00:03:31,790 Experts tell us, archaeologists tell us, 56 00:03:31,920 --> 00:03:33,830 that that is a designed object, 57 00:03:34,060 --> 00:03:36,760 that some primitive people did indeed shape that 58 00:03:37,030 --> 00:03:39,330 for a purpose. I'm prepared to believe them. 59 00:03:39,600 --> 00:03:41,770 But that is a slightly more difficult case. 60 00:03:43,040 --> 00:03:44,300 Never mind about them. 61 00:03:44,770 --> 00:03:49,510 There are plenty of objects which are absolutely, obviously designed 62 00:03:50,740 --> 00:03:53,780 What do they all have in common, these designed objects? 63 00:03:54,410 --> 00:04:01,150 They are all good for some purpose, and they couldn't have come to be the way they are by luck. 64 00:04:02,650 --> 00:04:05,620 The microscope is obviously very good at its purpose 65 00:04:05,760 --> 00:04:07,360 of greatly magnifying objects 66 00:04:07,460 --> 00:04:09,760 and most certainly it couldn't have come about by luck. 67 00:04:10,700 --> 00:04:13,730 If you take a lot of atoms and shake them up at random 68 00:04:13,870 --> 00:04:15,600 then you may get a crystal 69 00:04:16,170 --> 00:04:19,570 but you will not in a billion billion billion years get a microscope. 70 00:04:24,340 --> 00:04:28,410 This is a guzunder, so called because it goes under, 71 00:04:30,120 --> 00:04:33,420 and it clearly has a more humble purpose then the microscope, 72 00:04:33,850 --> 00:04:36,320 but it works very well for its purpose, it's clearly designed. 73 00:04:36,620 --> 00:04:38,390 Once we realize what its purpose is, 74 00:04:38,520 --> 00:04:39,490 which is to hold water, 75 00:04:39,730 --> 00:04:42,790 we can come up with crude measure of how good it is. 76 00:04:43,230 --> 00:04:46,360 We can measure, we can say the cost of the pot 77 00:04:46,500 --> 00:04:48,400 is the amount of clay that goes into it 78 00:04:48,630 --> 00:04:51,370 and the benefit of it is amount of water that it holds. 79 00:04:51,500 --> 00:04:55,880 And so its efficiency is the ratio of the weight of water that it holds 80 00:04:56,100 --> 00:04:58,380 to the weight of clay that goes into making it. 81 00:04:59,810 --> 00:05:02,920 We compare it with this pot 82 00:05:03,720 --> 00:05:06,220 which is not made by man 83 00:05:06,320 --> 00:05:08,020 but is a natural stone. 84 00:05:08,350 --> 00:05:12,690 It also would hold water but it would not hold very much water 85 00:05:12,960 --> 00:05:15,260 for the amount of stone that goes into it. 86 00:05:15,530 --> 00:05:18,460 Its efficiency ratio is not very high 87 00:05:18,600 --> 00:05:21,330 and indeed it is not a designed object. 88 00:05:21,430 --> 00:05:25,040 It is a simple object which just happened to be. 89 00:05:27,810 --> 00:05:31,740 So we have divided these objects into those that are designed 90 00:05:32,180 --> 00:05:34,180 and those that I'm calling "simple." 91 00:05:35,580 --> 00:05:37,180 But now I want to introduce 92 00:05:37,320 --> 00:05:39,750 a large and very important category of objects 93 00:05:39,950 --> 00:05:41,920 that are certainly not simple 94 00:05:42,490 --> 00:05:45,320 and I shall argue that they are not designed. 95 00:05:46,230 --> 00:05:51,230 But they look overwhelmingly and compellingly as though they were designed. 96 00:05:51,500 --> 00:05:54,830 And I'm going to call them "designoid" objects. 97 00:05:56,130 --> 00:05:58,500 Designoid objects look designed 98 00:05:58,940 --> 00:06:01,470 but they actually got their designed look 99 00:06:01,740 --> 00:06:03,710 from a very different process 100 00:06:03,810 --> 00:06:05,110 which we will come onto later. 101 00:06:05,210 --> 00:06:07,280 You may find it hard at this stage to believe 102 00:06:07,480 --> 00:06:11,050 that designoid objects are not designed but just wait. 103 00:06:14,120 --> 00:06:17,890 So, let's have our first designoid object. 104 00:06:20,090 --> 00:06:22,630 This is Andrew, isn't it? And what's the snake called? 105 00:06:22,860 --> 00:06:23,500 Squeeze. 106 00:06:23,630 --> 00:06:25,330 Squeeze. The snake is called Squeeze. 107 00:06:25,460 --> 00:06:31,200 It's a boa constrictor and it is a magnificent example of a designoid object. 108 00:06:31,770 --> 00:06:35,610 It looks as though it has been beautifully designed for a purpose. 109 00:06:35,940 --> 00:06:39,280 One of those purposes is swallowing prey 110 00:06:39,510 --> 00:06:42,480 which look very much too large for it to swallow. 111 00:06:43,720 --> 00:06:47,090 And one of the ways in which it achieves this is by the head - 112 00:06:52,860 --> 00:06:57,560 The bones of the head, the bones of the skull are capable of detaching, 113 00:06:57,900 --> 00:07:00,100 coming apart, under the skin, of course, 114 00:07:00,330 --> 00:07:04,440 so that the head swells to a huge size relatively to what it starts. 115 00:07:04,770 --> 00:07:06,770 And there is a great gaping maw 116 00:07:06,910 --> 00:07:11,380 which is capable then of swallowing very much larger prey than you'd think. 117 00:07:12,410 --> 00:07:16,420 The skin here is a beautiful mottled color 118 00:07:16,650 --> 00:07:18,250 which you can imagine would be 119 00:07:18,750 --> 00:07:22,150 very, very highly camouflaged in a forest. 120 00:07:23,160 --> 00:07:24,660 The snake has lost its legs. 121 00:07:25,090 --> 00:07:28,360 Losing legs is a very common thing among reptiles. 122 00:07:28,490 --> 00:07:34,930 There are many lines of evolution of reptiles which have lost their legs. 123 00:07:35,230 --> 00:07:38,700 What the boa constrictor is best at is throttling its prey 124 00:07:42,240 --> 00:07:45,910 and I think both Andrew and Squeeze deserve a round of applause. 125 00:07:46,140 --> 00:07:48,110 Thank you very much. 126 00:07:57,060 --> 00:08:01,530 Just looking at the outside of Squeeze gives us no real idea at all 127 00:08:01,790 --> 00:08:04,460 of what an extraordinarily complicated structure 128 00:08:04,600 --> 00:08:06,730 he and all other living things are. 129 00:08:07,630 --> 00:08:09,430 A living thing like Squeeze is not just 130 00:08:09,540 --> 00:08:12,200 more complicated than the microscope. 131 00:08:12,670 --> 00:08:16,070 It is billions of times more complicated than the microscope. 132 00:08:19,480 --> 00:08:21,180 Let's come back to pots. 133 00:08:22,180 --> 00:08:24,220 We have seen a designed pot 134 00:08:25,320 --> 00:08:28,120 and we have seen a simple, accidental pot. 135 00:08:29,020 --> 00:08:31,590 Now, here is a designoid pot. 136 00:08:34,130 --> 00:08:35,860 This is a pitcher plant. 137 00:08:36,730 --> 00:08:38,960 Here you see the individual pitchers. 138 00:08:39,060 --> 00:08:39,900 There is an enlargement. 139 00:08:40,430 --> 00:08:44,370 They are filled with water and they are traps for insects. 140 00:08:44,740 --> 00:08:47,040 Insects fall into the trap and drown. 141 00:08:47,270 --> 00:08:48,940 This is how a pitcher begins, 142 00:08:49,040 --> 00:08:50,580 this is the next stage in development. 143 00:08:50,680 --> 00:08:51,440 It begins as a leaf. 144 00:08:51,580 --> 00:08:53,410 You see the hole just beginning to form. 145 00:08:53,550 --> 00:08:54,480 This is a young pitcher 146 00:08:55,080 --> 00:08:56,580 and then we are going to see the full pitcher. 147 00:08:56,720 --> 00:08:58,050 There is a fly climbing up it. 148 00:08:58,320 --> 00:08:59,990 There is a slippery area at the top. 149 00:09:00,390 --> 00:09:02,920 The fly is down, into the water. 150 00:09:03,220 --> 00:09:11,100 It's now going to drown and in due course its products will be digested by the plant. 151 00:09:11,500 --> 00:09:13,500 Here is a live pitcher plant. 152 00:09:13,900 --> 00:09:15,500 Here is one of its pitchers. 153 00:09:15,770 --> 00:09:17,100 You can see the little lid over it. 154 00:09:17,370 --> 00:09:20,640 There is the slip zone there, and inside is the water. 155 00:09:21,070 --> 00:09:23,610 It appears to be a well designed object, 156 00:09:23,710 --> 00:09:24,810 a well designed pot. 157 00:09:24,940 --> 00:09:27,180 If we were to do our cost/benefit ratio, 158 00:09:27,280 --> 00:09:29,620 our measure of the amount of water that it holds 159 00:09:29,980 --> 00:09:32,990 over the weight of the plant material itself, 160 00:09:33,120 --> 00:09:35,720 we would find that it is a very efficient pot indeed. 161 00:09:36,120 --> 00:09:40,160 But we would also find that if we looked inside, cut sections of it, 162 00:09:40,430 --> 00:09:43,000 it would have a very complicated structure. 163 00:09:43,400 --> 00:09:47,200 This is the inside of a single cell of a pitcher plant 164 00:09:47,530 --> 00:09:48,900 through an electron microscope. 165 00:09:49,330 --> 00:09:50,970 And you can see the complexity of it. 166 00:09:51,270 --> 00:09:56,440 What is more interesting is that this internal structure is very well fitted 167 00:09:56,580 --> 00:10:01,950 to make a lot of oxygen and secrete it into the water of the pitcher. 168 00:10:03,350 --> 00:10:05,650 And this has a very useful effect 169 00:10:06,320 --> 00:10:09,190 because in the water of the pitcher are living 170 00:10:09,420 --> 00:10:13,560 a motley crew of little maggots and other insects. 171 00:10:13,860 --> 00:10:15,090 Now, what are they doing? 172 00:10:15,760 --> 00:10:17,960 Well, it is all very well eating insects, 173 00:10:18,100 --> 00:10:19,460 like a pitcher plant does, 174 00:10:20,170 --> 00:10:21,900 but a plant doesn't have any teeth 175 00:10:22,270 --> 00:10:24,840 and it is difficult to eat insects if you haven't got teeth. 176 00:10:25,640 --> 00:10:32,310 So what the pitcher plant in effect does is to borrow the teeth of these maggots in its pitcher. 177 00:10:33,180 --> 00:10:37,250 For what the maggots do is they eat the prey that fall into the pitcher 178 00:10:37,520 --> 00:10:42,390 and then their excretory products are what are finally absorbed by the pitcher plant. 179 00:10:42,650 --> 00:10:44,860 So really the pitcher plant is just getting 180 00:10:45,420 --> 00:10:48,990 the same thing as any other plant gets when it eats manure, in effect. 181 00:10:49,630 --> 00:10:54,270 But what the pitcher plant is doing is sequestering for itself a private supply of manure 182 00:10:54,770 --> 00:10:58,770 by luring insects and by supplying 183 00:10:59,040 --> 00:11:04,410 the maggots that live in the pot with a nice, oxygen rich, fresh water atmosphere 184 00:11:04,510 --> 00:11:06,510 which otherwise they wouldn't like to live in. 185 00:11:11,750 --> 00:11:16,890 Here is another sort of pot, a designoid pot. 186 00:11:17,590 --> 00:11:21,930 This is made by a trapdoor spider, you see the trapdoor at the top. 187 00:11:22,060 --> 00:11:23,530 The spider lives inside. 188 00:11:27,100 --> 00:11:28,430 And another one here. 189 00:11:29,100 --> 00:11:32,300 This is the pot of a potter wasp. 190 00:11:32,440 --> 00:11:35,910 That's a solitary wasp, not like the social wasps 191 00:11:36,110 --> 00:11:38,510 which build combs, more like this honey comb here. 192 00:11:39,180 --> 00:11:43,650 The potter wasp, female, builds a pot like that out of mud 193 00:11:43,780 --> 00:11:49,090 and lays her eggs in it and then the larvae grows up inside the pot. 194 00:11:50,160 --> 00:11:54,330 Look how beautifully it resembles this designed pot. 195 00:11:54,460 --> 00:11:55,860 This is a truly designed pot, 196 00:11:56,090 --> 00:11:58,300 made by somebody in Mexico. 197 00:11:58,930 --> 00:12:03,900 See how similar it is to the pot made by the potter wasp. 198 00:12:08,570 --> 00:12:10,210 Yet another animal pot. 199 00:12:14,010 --> 00:12:16,720 This was made by a mason bee. 200 00:12:18,980 --> 00:12:20,290 Exquisite little thing. 201 00:12:20,820 --> 00:12:24,390 It is used for the same purpose as a potter wasp's pot 202 00:12:24,720 --> 00:12:26,430 buy has a different structure. 203 00:12:27,390 --> 00:12:30,630 It is just like a house built by humans. 204 00:12:30,730 --> 00:12:36,670 These are little individual stones which the bee, the female bee, has gathered and has cemented together 205 00:12:36,870 --> 00:12:40,010 to build up this delightful pot structure. 206 00:12:40,810 --> 00:12:42,370 And the story doesn't end there 207 00:12:42,470 --> 00:12:44,140 because we can only see one pot, 208 00:12:44,810 --> 00:12:48,250 but underneath here are four more pots. 209 00:12:48,580 --> 00:12:51,550 And they've been carefully covered up by the bee 210 00:12:51,780 --> 00:12:56,560 who has gone to the river and gathered clay to cover over her pots. 211 00:12:56,790 --> 00:13:00,460 The clay is exactly the same color and texture as the rock 212 00:13:00,830 --> 00:13:02,830 on which the pot is placed, 213 00:13:03,400 --> 00:13:05,860 so that bee's predators, 214 00:13:06,000 --> 00:13:10,370 the predators who might come and eat larvae out of the pot, 215 00:13:10,770 --> 00:13:15,640 would never know in a million years that there were any pots under there. 216 00:13:16,340 --> 00:13:20,450 Here is another beautiful example of designoid architecture. 217 00:13:20,850 --> 00:13:24,920 These gigantic megaliths, like Avebury or Stonehenge, 218 00:13:25,220 --> 00:13:28,550 are built by the compass termite of Australia. 219 00:13:29,760 --> 00:13:33,160 They are huge structures, like blocks of flats. 220 00:13:34,760 --> 00:13:37,830 Certainly, on termite's scale, they are like blocks of flats. 221 00:13:38,260 --> 00:13:42,000 They are all pointing exactly north-south, 222 00:13:42,330 --> 00:13:44,040 which is another very cunning feature 223 00:13:44,370 --> 00:13:47,670 because that means that they get the morning sun on one side 224 00:13:48,340 --> 00:13:50,610 and they get the evening sun on the other, 225 00:13:50,740 --> 00:13:53,410 so they get nicely warmed up in the cool parts of the day. 226 00:13:53,750 --> 00:13:56,110 But in the hot part of the day, 227 00:13:56,220 --> 00:13:59,480 the midday sun hits them end on, 228 00:13:59,620 --> 00:14:01,120 and so they don't heat up too much, 229 00:14:01,190 --> 00:14:04,290 which is why all these termite nests, they're called compass termites, 230 00:14:04,390 --> 00:14:06,590 when you are in the desert, you can always tell which direction 231 00:14:06,690 --> 00:14:09,730 is north-south by looking for a compass termites' nest. 232 00:14:11,000 --> 00:14:15,800 Even larger is this other kind of termites' nest. 233 00:14:15,900 --> 00:14:17,200 You can see the scale there. 234 00:14:17,700 --> 00:14:19,670 This is a most colossal structure. 235 00:14:20,070 --> 00:14:24,640 The Austrian ethologist, Karl von Frisch, remarked 236 00:14:24,940 --> 00:14:32,120 that if humans built structures on the same scale as termites do 237 00:14:32,580 --> 00:14:38,320 the structures would be four times as high as the Empire State Building. 238 00:14:38,620 --> 00:14:41,890 So termites are very, very impressive architects. 239 00:14:42,130 --> 00:14:45,560 These designoid objects are very impressive indeed. 240 00:14:46,430 --> 00:14:54,340 We are switching now from objects which are apparently designed by animals 241 00:14:54,610 --> 00:14:57,810 to the design of animals themselves. 242 00:14:57,910 --> 00:14:59,750 The apparent design of animals themselves. 243 00:14:59,880 --> 00:15:01,380 And I am beginning with camouflage. 244 00:15:01,510 --> 00:15:04,080 If you are walking through the desert you will probably think, 245 00:15:04,180 --> 00:15:06,220 to casual look, that that was a stone. 246 00:15:06,650 --> 00:15:09,290 But it's not a stone, it's a grasshopper. 247 00:15:09,520 --> 00:15:14,130 It just looks like a stone and it gets protection from looking like a stone. 248 00:15:15,730 --> 00:15:17,260 And the next example. 249 00:15:18,260 --> 00:15:21,570 This looks to me exactly like seaweed. 250 00:15:21,700 --> 00:15:24,040 It is one of my favorite of all designoid objects. 251 00:15:24,470 --> 00:15:25,870 It is, in fact, a fish. 252 00:15:26,000 --> 00:15:26,940 It's a seahorse. 253 00:15:27,210 --> 00:15:29,710 There's its head, there is its neck, there's its body. 254 00:15:30,010 --> 00:15:34,350 And these objects sticking out here are parts of the fish's body. 255 00:15:34,810 --> 00:15:37,220 But anybody would think that they were parts of a seaweed. 256 00:15:37,350 --> 00:15:39,120 They look exactly like parts of a seaweed, 257 00:15:39,350 --> 00:15:43,120 and the seahorse hides among seaweed of just the right type. 258 00:15:43,560 --> 00:15:45,420 It is almost perfectly camouflaged. 259 00:15:46,690 --> 00:15:48,360 And we have a few more examples. 260 00:15:49,530 --> 00:15:54,830 This is a film of a leaf insect. 261 00:15:55,030 --> 00:15:57,300 There's the shield over the thorax, there's the head. 262 00:15:57,600 --> 00:15:58,640 Here come the wings, 263 00:15:59,070 --> 00:16:02,410 and when it isn't moving, perhaps even when it is moving, 264 00:16:02,540 --> 00:16:03,980 it looks exactly like leaves. 265 00:16:04,110 --> 00:16:04,810 It's just flown off. 266 00:16:05,040 --> 00:16:05,780 Here is another. 267 00:16:05,910 --> 00:16:07,410 The thing looks just like a plant. 268 00:16:07,550 --> 00:16:09,450 Turns out to be a green snake. 269 00:16:11,380 --> 00:16:13,750 And this you would think was a plant, with a bud on the end, 270 00:16:13,890 --> 00:16:16,260 a long, green stem. More buds. 271 00:16:17,060 --> 00:16:18,460 Only when we get to the front end 272 00:16:18,590 --> 00:16:21,990 do we just about spot that it has an eye, antennae and legs. 273 00:16:22,260 --> 00:16:24,530 It is, in fact, a stick insect. 274 00:16:25,800 --> 00:16:27,130 Look at these leaves here. 275 00:16:28,070 --> 00:16:29,540 Autumn leaves. 276 00:16:31,270 --> 00:16:33,740 Look at the vein up the middle of the leaves. 277 00:16:33,940 --> 00:16:35,640 Look at the veins on either side. 278 00:16:36,440 --> 00:16:41,410 Look at the little splotches of dark colored mold on the leaves. 279 00:16:43,720 --> 00:16:45,120 But those are not leaves. 280 00:16:46,150 --> 00:16:47,220 Those are butterflies. 281 00:16:48,350 --> 00:16:51,390 Look, you can just see the body, there, there, there, there. 282 00:16:51,490 --> 00:16:54,130 That's what these butterflies look like when they open their wings. 283 00:16:54,960 --> 00:16:57,300 This is what they look like on the underside of the wings. 284 00:16:57,430 --> 00:16:59,300 And they normally sit with the wings folded 285 00:16:59,430 --> 00:17:01,630 so that you only see the underside of the wings. 286 00:17:01,730 --> 00:17:06,140 And you are very hard put to it to see that they are not dead leaves. 287 00:17:06,170 --> 00:17:09,510 Only when they open their wings you get this flash of brilliant coloration. 288 00:17:13,580 --> 00:17:17,350 Camouflaged animals resemble inedible objects. 289 00:17:17,850 --> 00:17:22,390 Designoid objects sometimes resemble other designoid objects for other reasons. 290 00:17:22,750 --> 00:17:25,120 Because they are doing the same job. 291 00:17:25,660 --> 00:17:28,230 And this is called "convergent evolution." 292 00:17:29,600 --> 00:17:31,930 This is an ordinary hedgehog. 293 00:17:32,760 --> 00:17:35,100 That is nothing whatever to do with a hedgehog 294 00:17:35,470 --> 00:17:37,440 but superficially it looks like it. 295 00:17:38,100 --> 00:17:39,870 This is a spiny anteater. 296 00:17:40,140 --> 00:17:41,170 It is a mammal 297 00:17:41,310 --> 00:17:42,910 but you might say, only just a mammal. 298 00:17:43,040 --> 00:17:45,410 It's an egg laying mammal, a very primitive mammal 299 00:17:45,440 --> 00:17:47,880 from Australia and New Guinea. 300 00:17:48,380 --> 00:17:51,680 As a matter of fact its way of life is not that close to a hedgehog's way of life 301 00:17:51,920 --> 00:17:57,090 This is an ant eater whereas hedgehogs eat more general things: insects and worms and things. 302 00:17:57,320 --> 00:18:00,660 But both of them gain protection from having spiny skins. 303 00:18:00,930 --> 00:18:04,060 And so they both superficially look very alike. 304 00:18:04,730 --> 00:18:08,700 An example of convergent evolution. 305 00:18:09,740 --> 00:18:12,600 An even better example of convergent evolution 306 00:18:12,700 --> 00:18:15,470 is the so called marsupial wolf. 307 00:18:21,550 --> 00:18:26,120 Now, if you saw that going along on a lead down the street you would think it was a dog. 308 00:18:27,120 --> 00:18:29,320 A slightly odd sort of dog, perhaps. 309 00:18:29,560 --> 00:18:33,190 There are not many dogs that have quite that structure at the tail end. 310 00:18:33,860 --> 00:18:37,600 But you would think that that would not really be out of place at Crofts. 311 00:18:39,330 --> 00:18:41,400 But this is not a dog. 312 00:18:41,500 --> 00:18:43,570 It has nothing whatever to do with dogs. 313 00:18:44,040 --> 00:18:45,400 This is a marsupial. 314 00:18:45,940 --> 00:18:50,710 It's much more closely related to kangaroos and wombats and koalas. 315 00:18:51,510 --> 00:18:53,710 It's now, most unfortunately, extinct. 316 00:18:53,810 --> 00:18:57,780 Only fairly recently extinct. It went extinct this century in Tasmania. 317 00:18:57,920 --> 00:19:01,720 It went extinct some thousands of years ago on the mainland of Australia. 318 00:19:02,190 --> 00:19:04,320 And the reason it looks so like a dog 319 00:19:04,860 --> 00:19:07,060 is that it does the same job as a dog 320 00:19:07,190 --> 00:19:08,390 or did the same job as a dog. 321 00:19:08,990 --> 00:19:15,500 It ran and hunted prey in the same sort of way as a dog does. 322 00:19:16,440 --> 00:19:19,300 And that is why it has the same shape as a dog. 323 00:19:25,140 --> 00:19:30,450 The structure inside also resembles that of a dog. 324 00:19:30,580 --> 00:19:32,820 This is a dog skull. 325 00:19:35,650 --> 00:19:38,590 And this is the skull of the Tasmanian wolf. 326 00:19:39,060 --> 00:19:40,460 It's a bit larger 327 00:19:40,560 --> 00:19:43,760 but the size of a skull would depend on how big the dog is 328 00:19:43,900 --> 00:19:46,130 And we could easily get a bigger dog's skull than this. 329 00:19:46,700 --> 00:19:50,670 The only reliable way to tell that this is a marsupial and not a real dog 330 00:19:50,770 --> 00:19:52,000 is if you look underneath. 331 00:19:52,100 --> 00:19:54,540 Those two holes in the palate there 332 00:19:55,010 --> 00:19:57,340 give the game away. Those are the telltale clues 333 00:19:57,480 --> 00:20:00,450 that tell us that this is a marsupial and not a real dog. 334 00:20:01,350 --> 00:20:04,350 Real dog doesn't have the same kind of holes there. 335 00:20:10,790 --> 00:20:15,660 Well, that's convergent evolution among designoid objects. 336 00:20:17,230 --> 00:20:20,670 Designed objects, too, sometimes resemble each other 337 00:20:20,770 --> 00:20:22,270 because they are doing the same job. 338 00:20:25,170 --> 00:20:29,980 Two airplanes closely resemble one another 339 00:20:30,380 --> 00:20:37,320 not because of industrial espionage not because of imitation 340 00:20:38,150 --> 00:20:41,890 but because the wind tunnel is a great leveler of differences. 341 00:20:42,420 --> 00:20:45,760 These planes have both been designed for the same purpose 342 00:20:46,260 --> 00:20:50,500 and when you design planes for the same purpose of flying very fast through air 343 00:20:50,600 --> 00:20:52,530 and carrying a large payload of passengers, 344 00:20:52,760 --> 00:20:55,100 those planes are going to come out looking pretty similar, 345 00:20:55,670 --> 00:21:00,270 in just the same way as the dog and the marsupial wolf come out looking similar. 346 00:21:02,010 --> 00:21:06,010 So we have seen convergence between two designoid objects 347 00:21:06,780 --> 00:21:10,250 and we have seen convergence between two designed objects. 348 00:21:10,820 --> 00:21:15,720 How about convergence between designed and designoid objects? 349 00:21:17,160 --> 00:21:21,360 Well, here is a camera, which is a designed object, 350 00:21:26,030 --> 00:21:29,940 and here is an eye, a designoid object. 351 00:21:30,370 --> 00:21:32,300 They both do something very similar. 352 00:21:32,500 --> 00:21:34,740 They both have a lens at the front 353 00:21:35,740 --> 00:21:40,010 which focuses an image on a light sensitive surface at the back. 354 00:21:40,150 --> 00:21:43,950 In the eye it is called the retina: in the camera it is a film. 355 00:21:45,080 --> 00:21:47,620 There are detailed resemblances as well. 356 00:21:48,220 --> 00:21:52,590 Both of them have an iris diaphragm. 357 00:21:52,930 --> 00:21:57,730 It opens and closes to regulate the amount of light that goes in. 358 00:21:58,260 --> 00:22:05,840 In an automatic camera the amount of light that goes in and out is automatically regulated by a light meter, 359 00:22:05,970 --> 00:22:07,110 which when it gets brighter 360 00:22:07,340 --> 00:22:10,510 closes down the hole, when it gets darker, opens up the hole. 361 00:22:10,840 --> 00:22:16,110 And the human eye also has an automatic light meter. 362 00:22:16,250 --> 00:22:18,750 I wonder whether we could have a volunteer? 363 00:22:19,790 --> 00:22:21,820 Right. In the front row there. Yes. Right. 364 00:22:25,290 --> 00:22:26,120 What is your name? 365 00:22:26,690 --> 00:22:27,560 Gillian. 366 00:22:27,690 --> 00:22:29,760 Would you like to take your glasses off, Gillian. 367 00:22:30,030 --> 00:22:32,400 Thank you. Come and sit down here, please. 368 00:22:34,070 --> 00:22:39,340 Now, what you do is look into the camera there 369 00:22:39,740 --> 00:22:44,610 and they are going to take a picture of your eye, of your iris. 370 00:22:44,740 --> 00:22:49,080 What I'm going to do is I'm going to shine this light into the other eye. 371 00:22:50,050 --> 00:22:51,950 And I hope it won't be too bright. 372 00:22:52,280 --> 00:22:58,560 And what we hope to see is that your iris will contract when I shine the light in. 373 00:22:58,790 --> 00:23:02,460 So, look into the camera and I'm going to shine the light. 374 00:23:04,930 --> 00:23:06,900 Did you see it contract? 375 00:23:08,700 --> 00:23:10,140 Look into the camera. 376 00:23:10,800 --> 00:23:12,240 There, it contracts. Did you see it? 377 00:23:12,340 --> 00:23:15,440 I think it's best perhaps to look into the eye that I'm actually shining the light into. 378 00:23:15,770 --> 00:23:16,640 No, not you. 379 00:23:18,410 --> 00:23:20,780 Look into the camera. Is it too bright for you? 380 00:23:21,080 --> 00:23:22,950 No, okay, look into the camera. 381 00:23:24,450 --> 00:23:26,290 There it goes. Did you see it? 382 00:23:28,450 --> 00:23:30,290 Thank you very much, Gillian. 383 00:23:40,100 --> 00:23:42,600 And there are numerous other examples of living things 384 00:23:42,730 --> 00:23:46,770 being exactly the way a human engineer would have designed them. 385 00:23:47,870 --> 00:23:50,140 I hope that's enough to convince you 386 00:23:50,240 --> 00:23:52,510 that there's something special about living objects. 387 00:23:52,610 --> 00:23:53,650 They look designed, 388 00:23:53,910 --> 00:23:56,480 they look overwhelmingly as though they're designed. 389 00:23:57,180 --> 00:23:58,680 I call them "designoid" 390 00:23:59,220 --> 00:24:01,550 and I ask you to accept this different title. 391 00:24:02,190 --> 00:24:05,690 But it is terribly, terribly tempting to use the word "designed". 392 00:24:05,820 --> 00:24:09,760 Time and again I have to bite my tongue and stop myself saying, 393 00:24:09,860 --> 00:24:12,530 for example, that this swift is designed 394 00:24:12,970 --> 00:24:16,070 for rapid, high speed, highly maneuverable flight. 395 00:24:16,170 --> 00:24:18,370 And, as a matter of fact, when talking to other biologists 396 00:24:18,470 --> 00:24:19,540 we none of us bother 397 00:24:19,670 --> 00:24:21,740 to bite our tongues, we just use the word "designed". 398 00:24:22,510 --> 00:24:24,880 But I've told you that they're actually not designed 399 00:24:24,980 --> 00:24:26,580 and coined a special word "designoid" 400 00:24:26,710 --> 00:24:30,050 and I said that there is a special process 401 00:24:30,180 --> 00:24:32,890 that brings designoid objects into existence 402 00:24:33,020 --> 00:24:35,190 and gives them their apparently designed look. 403 00:24:35,750 --> 00:24:38,090 What is that special process? 404 00:24:39,990 --> 00:24:43,260 The answer to this question was discovered surprisingly recently, 405 00:24:43,360 --> 00:24:44,830 in the middle of the last century. 406 00:24:45,830 --> 00:24:48,200 One of the greatest discoveries of all time, 407 00:24:48,600 --> 00:24:53,640 made by one of the greatest scientists of all time - Charles Robert Darwin. 408 00:24:55,470 --> 00:24:57,880 A surprisingly long time after he discovered 409 00:24:58,140 --> 00:25:00,320 his principle of evolution by natural selection, 410 00:25:00,650 --> 00:25:04,390 he wrote this famous book, The Origin of Species. 411 00:25:04,650 --> 00:25:09,390 This is an original first edition, inscribed by the author. 412 00:25:10,660 --> 00:25:11,920 Very valuable. 413 00:25:17,030 --> 00:25:20,800 Darwin began his argument on natural selection, 414 00:25:21,000 --> 00:25:25,700 he introduced it, in terms of another process called artificial selection 415 00:25:26,000 --> 00:25:27,710 or selective breeding. 416 00:25:28,540 --> 00:25:30,110 All these vegetables here 417 00:25:30,910 --> 00:25:32,080 have been bred 418 00:25:32,340 --> 00:25:36,420 by human breeders for different food purposes. 419 00:25:36,650 --> 00:25:40,590 There is an ordinary cabbage, cauliflower, 420 00:25:40,720 --> 00:25:46,330 red cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi. 421 00:25:46,460 --> 00:25:49,170 Each of these different sorts of plants has emphasized 422 00:25:49,460 --> 00:25:53,170 a different aspect of the original wild ancestor - the wild cabbage. 423 00:25:53,300 --> 00:25:57,240 So kohlrabi for example has a greatly swollen stem. 424 00:25:57,970 --> 00:26:00,910 Cauliflower has a greatly enlarged flower. 425 00:26:01,270 --> 00:26:04,080 So does broccoli but in a different way. 426 00:26:05,110 --> 00:26:09,280 They're all descended over the last couple of thousand years 427 00:26:09,380 --> 00:26:14,020 from the same wild ancestor, the wild cabbage. 428 00:26:15,320 --> 00:26:19,120 Now that's the wild cabbage as grown by Bryson. 429 00:26:19,220 --> 00:26:23,630 Bryson has many virtues but green fingers are not among them. 430 00:26:25,230 --> 00:26:28,230 Nevertheless, if you were to take this home 431 00:26:28,500 --> 00:26:29,970 and grow it for a little while, 432 00:26:30,070 --> 00:26:33,070 water it properly, look after it, it would grow up into a wild cabbage. 433 00:26:33,170 --> 00:26:36,380 It wouldn't look very like any of those cabbages. 434 00:26:36,510 --> 00:26:39,810 That's the point I'm making: they've all come from the wild cabbage 435 00:26:39,950 --> 00:26:42,850 but they are all very different from the wild cabbage. 436 00:26:45,420 --> 00:26:49,320 All the breeds of domestic dogs have been bred from 437 00:26:49,590 --> 00:26:51,690 the same common ancestor, namely a wolf. 438 00:26:52,390 --> 00:26:54,130 Those dogs look terribly different. 439 00:26:54,230 --> 00:26:56,090 You would never think they were the members of the same species 440 00:26:56,200 --> 00:27:00,070 but they all, in fact, come from the same species, a wolf. 441 00:27:00,800 --> 00:27:04,900 Now, what is this artificial selection, this selective breeding 442 00:27:05,040 --> 00:27:08,440 that enables you to go from a wolf to something like that 443 00:27:08,570 --> 00:27:09,980 or that or that? 444 00:27:10,780 --> 00:27:12,810 Well, I'll tell you very, very briefly what it is. 445 00:27:13,350 --> 00:27:16,480 You start with the ancestor, the wolf. 446 00:27:16,720 --> 00:27:18,320 And I am going to suppose for simplicity 447 00:27:18,450 --> 00:27:22,020 that everybody on this side of the room is going to imagine breeding 448 00:27:22,120 --> 00:27:25,260 for smaller and smaller wolves, 449 00:27:25,390 --> 00:27:27,390 and everybody that side is going to imagine breeding 450 00:27:27,530 --> 00:27:29,860 for larger and larger wolves. 451 00:27:30,300 --> 00:27:32,530 So in every litter of wolves that we get, 452 00:27:32,660 --> 00:27:35,500 if you are on the small side - what you do is to look out 453 00:27:35,600 --> 00:27:38,670 for those individual puppies that are a bit smaller than the average 454 00:27:39,270 --> 00:27:41,040 Those are the ones that you breed from, 455 00:27:41,470 --> 00:27:44,540 and on this side you breed from the larger ones. 456 00:27:45,040 --> 00:27:46,680 Now, it is going to take a long time, 457 00:27:47,250 --> 00:27:48,710 generation after generation. 458 00:27:48,850 --> 00:27:52,520 You mate together relatively small dogs, wolves. 459 00:27:52,620 --> 00:27:56,460 And on this side you mate together relatively large wolves. 460 00:27:57,060 --> 00:28:00,960 And after many generations, perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands of generations, 461 00:28:01,060 --> 00:28:04,400 perhaps a couple of thousand years of this selective breeding, 462 00:28:04,630 --> 00:28:12,770 because there are genes involved in controlling the differences between the cubs, 463 00:28:13,170 --> 00:28:17,610 eventually you may end up with something like 464 00:28:17,980 --> 00:28:19,710 ...what I hope is now going to come in. 465 00:28:22,150 --> 00:28:27,590 That would be the end product of breeding for larger and larger sized wolves. 466 00:28:27,820 --> 00:28:30,190 That would be something like the original 467 00:28:30,320 --> 00:28:31,960 ancestor that you started from, 468 00:28:32,090 --> 00:28:36,530 and that would be the end product of breeding for smaller and smaller wolves. 469 00:28:41,130 --> 00:28:42,300 What are their names? 470 00:28:44,000 --> 00:28:45,240 Jemima and Wilf 471 00:28:45,540 --> 00:28:49,710 Jemima is a smooth coat Chihuahua. Wilf is a rough coat Chihuahua 472 00:28:50,310 --> 00:28:56,880 and both of them comparatively recently are descended from a wild wolf. 473 00:29:00,350 --> 00:29:01,020 What's her name? 474 00:29:01,150 --> 00:29:01,850 Sequin 475 00:29:03,020 --> 00:29:03,990 Sequin 476 00:29:04,290 --> 00:29:06,460 This is Sequin, a German shepherd 477 00:29:06,890 --> 00:29:08,430 and I think we could say that Sequin 478 00:29:08,560 --> 00:29:11,130 is the one who most resembles the ancestral wolf. 479 00:29:12,300 --> 00:29:15,170 And this is Archie, that's a fine name, 480 00:29:15,400 --> 00:29:17,340 Archie, a great Dane, 481 00:29:17,770 --> 00:29:22,010 and he is what you get from breeding for larger and larger size 482 00:29:22,210 --> 00:29:24,410 but they all descended from a wolf, 483 00:29:24,510 --> 00:29:30,620 they're all cousins of one another and Sequin is showing great interest. 484 00:29:30,880 --> 00:29:33,390 Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. 485 00:29:46,100 --> 00:29:48,170 Charles Darwin was very interested in dogs. 486 00:29:48,300 --> 00:29:50,900 He was also very interested in pigeons. 487 00:29:53,940 --> 00:29:54,970 Thank you. 488 00:30:00,680 --> 00:30:01,950 You're on my notes, pigeon. 489 00:30:08,550 --> 00:30:10,960 This is a Marchenero cropper. 490 00:30:11,360 --> 00:30:16,060 It's a pigeon which has been bred by artificial selection 491 00:30:16,300 --> 00:30:17,900 from the wild rock dove 492 00:30:18,000 --> 00:30:23,470 and in this case it has been bred for the thickness of feathers and for size of crop. 493 00:30:23,600 --> 00:30:25,040 You see the great big crop at the front 494 00:30:25,170 --> 00:30:26,410 which is blowing up like 495 00:30:26,540 --> 00:30:28,270 that and see how big the feathers are. 496 00:30:36,010 --> 00:30:40,550 In the cage here - we didn't quite trust these ones to be let out. 497 00:30:40,950 --> 00:30:42,020 We trust this one. 498 00:30:46,260 --> 00:30:49,130 This is a domestic flight pigeon and you see how it has been bred 499 00:30:49,230 --> 00:30:51,930 for this curious little ruff round the back of the neck. 500 00:30:52,160 --> 00:30:54,700 And also the red ring around the eye. 501 00:30:56,940 --> 00:31:00,510 The other one is an English short-faced tumbler pigeon. 502 00:31:00,640 --> 00:31:04,710 You see the extraordinary short face and the tiny small beak. 503 00:31:05,510 --> 00:31:07,780 That again is a product of artificial selection, 504 00:31:07,910 --> 00:31:09,780 just like in the case of dogs and cabbages. 505 00:31:10,280 --> 00:31:13,320 The beak is so short in the case of English short-faced tumbler 506 00:31:13,550 --> 00:31:17,390 this breed is no longer capable of feeding its own young. 507 00:31:18,190 --> 00:31:20,460 And so the only way that breed can be reared 508 00:31:20,560 --> 00:31:25,300 is by its babies being reared by pigeons of another breed. 509 00:31:26,160 --> 00:31:29,470 That sort of thing often happens, by the way, with artificial selection. 510 00:31:29,740 --> 00:31:31,340 It's true of bulldogs. 511 00:31:36,910 --> 00:31:41,550 You probably know that the bulldog breed of dog has a head that is so big 512 00:31:41,680 --> 00:31:42,880 that it can't be born 513 00:31:43,220 --> 00:31:46,150 and the only way a bulldog can be born is by Cesarean section. 514 00:31:46,420 --> 00:31:48,920 So the entire breed depends upon humanity to keep it going. 515 00:31:49,050 --> 00:31:51,390 If we went extinct, bulldog would go extinct. 516 00:31:53,190 --> 00:31:55,190 Artificial selection, 517 00:31:55,330 --> 00:31:58,630 the process that produces these dogs, these pigeons, and these cabbages, 518 00:31:58,900 --> 00:32:02,030 is too slow for us to see during the course of one lecture. 519 00:32:03,270 --> 00:32:05,870 But we can imitate it on a computer. 520 00:32:06,310 --> 00:32:09,840 And I'm going to do it with a program called "arthromorphs." 521 00:32:11,710 --> 00:32:14,510 These are arthromorphs. 522 00:32:15,180 --> 00:32:17,180 This is the parent arthromorph 523 00:32:17,820 --> 00:32:21,390 and round the edge of it are eight child arthromorphs. 524 00:32:21,890 --> 00:32:25,060 They resemble the parent very closely 525 00:32:25,260 --> 00:32:29,530 but there may be a genetic change, a mutation, 526 00:32:29,560 --> 00:32:30,860 a random genetic change, 527 00:32:31,130 --> 00:32:32,630 as you go from parent to child. 528 00:32:32,760 --> 00:32:34,770 So that one, for example, has longer legs, 529 00:32:34,900 --> 00:32:37,270 that one has got legs up instead of down. 530 00:32:37,840 --> 00:32:41,210 The way you breed arthromorphs - Could I have a volunteer - 531 00:32:41,840 --> 00:32:43,110 My goodness. 532 00:32:43,780 --> 00:32:45,080 Right. Yes. Yes. 533 00:32:46,450 --> 00:32:48,750 Have you ever used a computer with a mouse? 534 00:32:48,880 --> 00:32:50,320 Yes. 535 00:32:50,420 --> 00:32:53,790 What you do is you choose the one you want to breed from 536 00:32:54,120 --> 00:32:55,790 and just click it once. 537 00:32:56,190 --> 00:32:57,920 So you are going for the long legged one, I think. 538 00:32:58,190 --> 00:32:58,620 Click it. 539 00:32:58,760 --> 00:33:02,130 It goes to the center and becomes the parent of the next generation. 540 00:33:02,260 --> 00:33:04,930 Now you see, all in the next generation have longer legs. 541 00:33:05,230 --> 00:33:06,100 What's your name, by the way? 542 00:33:06,230 --> 00:33:06,500 Lawrence. 543 00:33:06,730 --> 00:33:07,300 Lawrence. 544 00:33:07,500 --> 00:33:09,440 Lawrence seems to be breeding for longer legs. 545 00:33:09,500 --> 00:33:11,440 I wonder if he is going to continue that. 546 00:33:14,170 --> 00:33:17,110 That's right. Keep going. Don't wait for me. Just keep on breeding. 547 00:33:18,810 --> 00:33:24,680 Okay, Lawrence likes long legs and they are getting longer and longer. 548 00:33:25,050 --> 00:33:25,850 Okay. 549 00:33:26,120 --> 00:33:32,520 What I said was that these creatures have genes which are going from parent to child. 550 00:33:32,820 --> 00:33:35,660 What would I mean by talking about genes in a computer? 551 00:33:36,330 --> 00:33:38,860 In a computer, of course, genes would just be numbers. 552 00:33:39,260 --> 00:33:41,500 They are not real genes, they are not made of DNA, 553 00:33:41,800 --> 00:33:47,510 but nevertheless they are genes in the sense that they are what go through from generation to generation. 554 00:33:49,070 --> 00:33:50,980 There is no sex in these creatures, by the way, 555 00:33:51,110 --> 00:33:53,410 these are all reproducing asexually, 556 00:33:53,680 --> 00:33:57,250 like stick insects and like aphids. 557 00:33:58,450 --> 00:33:59,520 Carry on. 558 00:34:04,460 --> 00:34:07,160 Breed as fast as you can to get through a lot of generations. 559 00:34:12,460 --> 00:34:14,600 So what we are seeing now, what Lawrence is doing, 560 00:34:14,700 --> 00:34:16,240 is artificial selection, 561 00:34:16,370 --> 00:34:18,070 just like our ancestors did 562 00:34:18,200 --> 00:34:19,400 with dogs and pigeons. 563 00:34:19,640 --> 00:34:22,370 But he is managing to achieve in a couple of minutes 564 00:34:22,610 --> 00:34:26,780 what would have taken several centuries for our ancestors to have achieved. 565 00:34:40,590 --> 00:34:41,960 What are you going for, Lawrence? 566 00:34:44,360 --> 00:34:46,730 You're trying to get a lot of zigzags in the legs, are you? 567 00:34:53,110 --> 00:34:55,140 All right. Perhaps we better proceed now, 568 00:34:55,270 --> 00:34:56,780 so thank you very much indeed, Lawrence. 569 00:35:02,650 --> 00:35:07,390 I think that we are all convinced by now that artificial selection works. 570 00:35:07,720 --> 00:35:10,260 We've seen the results of it in dogs, cabbages and pigeons, 571 00:35:10,490 --> 00:35:14,290 and we have seen it happening before our eyes in the computer arthromorphs. 572 00:35:15,160 --> 00:35:16,660 But this is just artificial selection. 573 00:35:16,760 --> 00:35:19,000 We began talking about artificial selection 574 00:35:19,130 --> 00:35:21,030 because we're really interested in natural selection. 575 00:35:21,630 --> 00:35:24,470 Natural selection is like artificial selection 576 00:35:24,740 --> 00:35:28,810 except that instead of humans doing the choosing, nature does the choosing. 577 00:35:29,540 --> 00:35:32,780 Of all the puppies in a litter, wolf cubs in a litter, 578 00:35:32,910 --> 00:35:35,310 instead of our choosing which one shall breed, 579 00:35:35,410 --> 00:35:38,050 what happens is that nature chooses which one shall breed. 580 00:35:38,150 --> 00:35:39,320 The ones that have 581 00:35:39,420 --> 00:35:44,060 what it takes to survive will be the ones that breed, automatically chosen. 582 00:35:44,190 --> 00:35:46,590 The ones that are good at running fast, 583 00:35:47,230 --> 00:35:50,500 the ones whose legs are not too short and not too long. 584 00:35:50,730 --> 00:35:55,670 The ones whose teeth are not too blunt and not too sharp, 585 00:35:55,800 --> 00:35:58,240 because if they are too sharp they might break easily. 586 00:35:58,570 --> 00:36:00,240 Natural selection, 587 00:36:00,340 --> 00:36:01,810 nature, is constantly choosing 588 00:36:01,940 --> 00:36:03,310 which individual shall live, 589 00:36:03,580 --> 00:36:05,040 which individual shall breed. 590 00:36:05,410 --> 00:36:08,580 And the result, after many generations of natural selection, 591 00:36:08,710 --> 00:36:10,150 is much the same as the result 592 00:36:10,420 --> 00:36:13,250 after many generations of artificial selection. 593 00:36:13,550 --> 00:36:15,590 So what would it take to change 594 00:36:15,720 --> 00:36:17,120 the arthromorph program 595 00:36:17,820 --> 00:36:21,930 so that it simulated natural selection instead of artificial selection? 596 00:36:22,390 --> 00:36:26,930 Because at present the arthromorphs are just being chosen by the eyes of a human. 597 00:36:28,200 --> 00:36:31,400 Could we somehow make the computer do its own choosing? 598 00:36:32,470 --> 00:36:36,140 Choosing on the basis of quality of arthromorphs. 599 00:36:36,410 --> 00:36:37,980 The trouble is, it's not easy to judge 600 00:36:38,210 --> 00:36:40,280 what quality in a arthromorph might mean, 601 00:36:40,410 --> 00:36:43,680 because these arthromorphs are living in a very strange environment: 602 00:36:43,820 --> 00:36:46,050 a two dimensional computer screen. 603 00:36:46,220 --> 00:36:48,250 They don't have a real world in which to live, 604 00:36:48,490 --> 00:36:50,090 they don't have predators, they don't have prey, 605 00:36:50,220 --> 00:36:52,060 they don't have food they've got to catch. 606 00:36:52,560 --> 00:36:58,560 Perhaps we'd do better if we made a computer model of a two dimensional designoid object. 607 00:36:59,600 --> 00:37:00,600 Like a spider web. 608 00:37:01,570 --> 00:37:03,200 Now if we could have the lights down, 609 00:37:03,300 --> 00:37:05,100 I think we might be able to see - 610 00:37:08,710 --> 00:37:11,810 There is a spider in the middle 611 00:37:11,940 --> 00:37:14,310 of its web and that, I think, shows quite nicely. 612 00:37:14,410 --> 00:37:14,980 Good. 613 00:37:19,990 --> 00:37:22,090 You know what the spider web is for: 614 00:37:22,220 --> 00:37:24,090 it is for catching flies and other prey. 615 00:37:24,360 --> 00:37:30,860 It is a net and it works in two dimensions. 616 00:37:31,400 --> 00:37:34,270 We would've liked to actually shown you a spider building its web 617 00:37:34,370 --> 00:37:39,100 but this one seems to be pretty satisfied with the web it has already got. 618 00:37:39,640 --> 00:37:44,740 So what I'm going to do instead is to show you a computer reconstruction 619 00:37:44,880 --> 00:37:48,750 of a spider's movements while it builds a web. Do watch carefully. 620 00:37:48,980 --> 00:37:50,050 This is rather speeded up. 621 00:37:50,450 --> 00:37:52,550 Can we have that more slowly now, Peter? 622 00:37:54,290 --> 00:37:57,660 What the spider is now doing is the radii of the web. 623 00:37:57,760 --> 00:37:59,590 Now it's doing the structural spiral, 624 00:37:59,730 --> 00:38:01,460 which is a kind of scaffolding. 625 00:38:01,590 --> 00:38:03,260 And now it is doing the sticky spiral 626 00:38:03,360 --> 00:38:08,670 which is the bit that actually does the business of catching the flies. 627 00:38:09,000 --> 00:38:10,670 Let's have it once more, slowly. 628 00:38:15,710 --> 00:38:17,380 There are the radii. 629 00:38:19,110 --> 00:38:21,380 Now it's doing the scaffolding. 630 00:38:21,680 --> 00:38:24,480 And now it is doing the real sticky spiral. 631 00:38:25,650 --> 00:38:29,220 What we've seen there is not actually a picture of a web itself. 632 00:38:29,320 --> 00:38:32,220 That's a picture of the movements of a spider 633 00:38:32,590 --> 00:38:36,760 that were recorded on a particular day. That's a particular spider on a particular day. 634 00:38:36,900 --> 00:38:42,000 Its movement were all fed into the computer and now the computer is playing it back to us. 635 00:38:42,670 --> 00:38:47,240 But that's just a recording of the web of a real, particular spider. 636 00:38:47,570 --> 00:38:52,410 In order to do our trick of making an arthromorph-like program out of spider webs 637 00:38:52,540 --> 00:38:55,580 we've got to make the computer behave like a spider. 638 00:38:55,880 --> 00:38:59,150 And this is the program written by Peter Fuchs who is next door, 639 00:39:00,020 --> 00:39:01,490 controlling the computer. 640 00:39:01,920 --> 00:39:04,060 And what his program does 641 00:39:04,290 --> 00:39:07,160 is to make the computer build the web 642 00:39:07,260 --> 00:39:08,990 as if it was a spider. 643 00:39:09,360 --> 00:39:13,700 So the computer is holding in its little head the rules, 644 00:39:14,070 --> 00:39:18,270 that we know something about, of how a spider builds a web. 645 00:39:18,700 --> 00:39:24,310 So the computer does the radii like that. It does the spiral like that. 646 00:39:26,510 --> 00:39:29,180 Just as in the case of the arthromorphs, 647 00:39:29,480 --> 00:39:37,220 what Peter has done is to make the building rules of the computer spider, under genetic control. 648 00:39:37,560 --> 00:39:40,590 There are genes in the computer, just as they were for the arthromorphs, 649 00:39:40,860 --> 00:39:44,560 and just as they were for the arthromorphs, the genes are simply numbers. 650 00:39:45,600 --> 00:39:47,600 That is the parent web, 651 00:39:48,770 --> 00:39:51,400 these are the daughter webs more strictly, 652 00:39:51,500 --> 00:39:53,670 that's the web that was build by the parent spider, 653 00:39:53,940 --> 00:39:56,380 these are the webs that were built by the daughter spiders. 654 00:39:56,810 --> 00:39:59,040 To begin with we can treat this just as if it was 655 00:39:59,180 --> 00:39:59,980 an arthromorph program. 656 00:40:00,110 --> 00:40:01,880 So we want another volunteer, 657 00:40:02,010 --> 00:40:03,850 let's have a girl this time. 658 00:40:04,050 --> 00:40:05,180 Yes, please. 659 00:40:06,450 --> 00:40:07,290 What's your name? 660 00:40:07,420 --> 00:40:08,050 Ursula. 661 00:40:08,190 --> 00:40:08,720 Ursula, 662 00:40:08,850 --> 00:40:09,860 Come here, Ursula, please. 663 00:40:10,090 --> 00:40:11,590 have you ever used a computer with a mouse? 664 00:40:11,720 --> 00:40:11,890 Yes. 665 00:40:11,990 --> 00:40:12,490 Yes, good. 666 00:40:12,690 --> 00:40:14,960 So this time is just like the other one only 667 00:40:15,060 --> 00:40:16,930 you have to click twice instead of once 668 00:40:17,030 --> 00:40:19,060 to choose which one you think is the best web. 669 00:40:23,670 --> 00:40:26,640 Okay, now that web has gone up to the top there. 670 00:40:26,770 --> 00:40:27,810 That's now become the parent. 671 00:40:28,070 --> 00:40:30,940 And here are the daughter webs that are being drawn. 672 00:40:31,340 --> 00:40:34,250 And now you can choose another one, another generation. 673 00:40:51,730 --> 00:40:54,570 So you see we're doing just the same as we did for the arthromorphs 674 00:40:54,700 --> 00:40:56,740 but now we have got spider webs coming. 675 00:40:57,400 --> 00:40:59,170 But the point we were going to go for 676 00:40:59,570 --> 00:41:00,870 was not artificial selection. 677 00:41:01,010 --> 00:41:05,410 The whole point of doing this with spider's web is to do something like natural selection. 678 00:41:06,250 --> 00:41:07,480 And to do that 679 00:41:07,610 --> 00:41:09,750 we simply make the computer work out 680 00:41:09,880 --> 00:41:13,450 how good each web would be at catching flies. 681 00:41:13,690 --> 00:41:14,520 And we can do that 682 00:41:14,620 --> 00:41:16,360 because, unlike the case of the arthromorphs, 683 00:41:16,620 --> 00:41:18,560 the webs are two dimensional structures 684 00:41:18,790 --> 00:41:20,860 and we know what they are for. They're for catching flies. 685 00:41:21,330 --> 00:41:24,460 So the benefit is simply going to be the number of flies caught 686 00:41:24,730 --> 00:41:26,730 and the cost we can calculate 687 00:41:26,870 --> 00:41:30,940 because the webs are made of silk. as the amount of silk used, 688 00:41:31,470 --> 00:41:33,310 So the cost of a web is the amount of silk 689 00:41:33,640 --> 00:41:35,710 used and the benefit is the flies. 690 00:41:35,940 --> 00:41:38,680 If you would like to stop now, Ursula. Thank you very much. 691 00:41:44,520 --> 00:41:47,950 Now, we no longer have a human selector, 692 00:41:48,090 --> 00:41:50,360 we now have the flies doing the selecting. 693 00:41:50,660 --> 00:41:53,030 So the flies are going to hit the web 694 00:41:53,160 --> 00:41:54,630 and Peter gets to start it up again. 695 00:42:02,570 --> 00:42:05,340 Now we've got a new generation of webs being built 696 00:42:05,740 --> 00:42:08,710 and we are now going to see the flies hitting the webs. 697 00:42:14,350 --> 00:42:16,320 There come the flies. Flies again. 698 00:42:17,350 --> 00:42:19,150 Now the computer is going to calculate 699 00:42:19,280 --> 00:42:22,750 which of the webs is best at catching flies and it's that one that has gone dark. 700 00:42:22,860 --> 00:42:25,920 So that one will now become the parent of a next generation. 701 00:42:28,430 --> 00:42:29,800 And now, once again. 702 00:42:29,930 --> 00:42:32,400 The webs are being built, the child webs are being built. 703 00:42:32,630 --> 00:42:37,240 Once again. the flies will come, the computer will measure which one of them is the best. 704 00:42:43,810 --> 00:42:44,540 There it is. 705 00:42:44,810 --> 00:42:47,080 And that becomes the parent of the next generation. 706 00:42:49,250 --> 00:42:52,250 It wouldn't take very long for us to see the evolution 707 00:42:52,480 --> 00:42:55,520 starting from nowhere at all and going to a nice 708 00:42:55,620 --> 00:42:57,120 web that works very well, 709 00:42:57,490 --> 00:42:59,290 but we haven't quite got time for it. 710 00:42:59,390 --> 00:43:04,500 So instead, what we did, was to let the computer run all night, all last night, 711 00:43:04,600 --> 00:43:10,200 and we've got a "fossil record" of all the webs that were built during that time. 712 00:43:10,340 --> 00:43:11,740 This was the starting web, 713 00:43:12,300 --> 00:43:14,310 the thing that started at the beginning of the night's run 714 00:43:14,570 --> 00:43:16,440 and then, every 20 generations, 715 00:43:17,010 --> 00:43:21,280 we have a printout of the shape of the web. 716 00:43:21,410 --> 00:43:23,850 So you see, we start with almost no spiral at all, 717 00:43:24,220 --> 00:43:27,350 and you could imagine the fly just whizzing straight through and not getting caught. 718 00:43:27,850 --> 00:43:30,560 But then natural selection in the computer 719 00:43:30,690 --> 00:43:33,190 led to a gradual improvement in the web, 720 00:43:33,290 --> 00:43:36,330 more and more spiral, more and more flies caught, 721 00:43:36,560 --> 00:43:40,300 and so evolution went in the direction of a nice full web 722 00:43:40,600 --> 00:43:44,900 with a nice full spiral like that, catching lots of flies. 723 00:43:45,370 --> 00:43:48,140 That all went on in the computer last night, 724 00:43:48,240 --> 00:43:51,240 very fast, telescoping into one night 725 00:43:51,510 --> 00:43:56,050 what would have taken thousands of years, perhaps millions of years in nature. 726 00:43:56,380 --> 00:44:00,920 In nature, the successful and the unsuccessful webs 727 00:44:01,150 --> 00:44:04,360 would not, of course, be judged by the computer doing a calculation, 728 00:44:04,550 --> 00:44:08,360 about how many flies would have been caught - would be expected to be caught - 729 00:44:08,960 --> 00:44:15,300 the webs would be judged automatically and without any thought by the flies themselves. 730 00:44:15,400 --> 00:44:17,940 The flies themselves that fly into webs, 731 00:44:18,070 --> 00:44:19,640 thereby choosing webs for breeding. 732 00:44:19,740 --> 00:44:21,870 The flies don't know they're choosing the webs for breeding. 733 00:44:22,110 --> 00:44:24,210 They don't particularly want to fly into the webs, 734 00:44:24,540 --> 00:44:28,250 but nevertheless the consequence of their inadvertently flying into webs 735 00:44:28,380 --> 00:44:31,320 is, that the spider that built the successful web, 736 00:44:31,580 --> 00:44:33,650 is a spider that is more likely to breed 737 00:44:33,890 --> 00:44:37,990 and therefore more likely to pass on the genes for building that sort of web. 738 00:44:38,590 --> 00:44:40,190 So, as the generations go by, 739 00:44:40,330 --> 00:44:42,290 webs get better and better and better, 740 00:44:42,530 --> 00:44:45,560 just as they did in the computer in our overnight run. 741 00:44:47,370 --> 00:44:51,400 That's natural selection in the case of spider webs and exactly the same principle works 742 00:44:51,500 --> 00:44:54,270 for every living creature, for the bodies of every living creature. 743 00:44:54,510 --> 00:44:56,380 Every lion and tiger, every camel, 744 00:44:56,480 --> 00:44:57,280 every dog, 745 00:44:57,610 --> 00:44:59,110 every human, every giraffe. 746 00:44:59,240 --> 00:45:01,650 They all have evolved by the same process 747 00:45:01,780 --> 00:45:03,950 of evolution by natural selection. 748 00:45:04,380 --> 00:45:05,720 So the Darwinian view 749 00:45:05,850 --> 00:45:11,130 is that designoid objects are not designed at all. 750 00:45:11,150 --> 00:45:13,330 They have evolved by natural selection. 751 00:45:14,660 --> 00:45:16,360 The most popular alternative 752 00:45:16,630 --> 00:45:20,430 to the Darwinian view is called "creationism." 753 00:45:21,230 --> 00:45:25,500 Creationists believe that designoid objects are really designed objects. 754 00:45:26,340 --> 00:45:27,740 The only difference is that whereas 755 00:45:27,870 --> 00:45:30,310 these designed objects were designed by humans, 756 00:45:30,840 --> 00:45:34,980 these designed objects were designed by a divine creator. 757 00:45:35,980 --> 00:45:37,580 And the favorite argument of 758 00:45:37,720 --> 00:45:40,520 creationists is the so called "argument from design," 759 00:45:40,620 --> 00:45:44,790 which was most famously expressed by Archdeacon William Paley, 760 00:45:45,260 --> 00:45:50,330 in 1802, in the book, Natural Theology. 761 00:45:50,900 --> 00:45:52,160 Paley begins his book: 762 00:45:53,400 --> 00:45:54,930 "In crossing a heath, 763 00:45:56,070 --> 00:45:59,810 suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, 764 00:46:00,540 --> 00:46:03,140 and were to ask how the stone came to be there; 765 00:46:03,810 --> 00:46:06,450 I might possibly answer that, for anything I knew to the contrary, 766 00:46:06,580 --> 00:46:07,880 it had lain there forever." 767 00:46:08,080 --> 00:46:10,720 In other words, the stone is the kind of object 768 00:46:10,950 --> 00:46:14,920 which had always been there and doesn't need any special kind of explanation. 769 00:46:15,890 --> 00:46:17,260 But, Paley goes on: 770 00:46:17,390 --> 00:46:20,290 What if I accidentally kicked a watch? 771 00:46:22,230 --> 00:46:26,200 The watch, I open it up, I see the mechanism, I see the cogwheels, and the springs, 772 00:46:26,430 --> 00:46:27,970 everything about it looks designed. 773 00:46:28,070 --> 00:46:29,430 It had to have a designer. 774 00:46:29,540 --> 00:46:31,500 It had to have a watchmaker. 775 00:46:32,870 --> 00:46:34,840 And if the watch had to have a watchmaker, 776 00:46:35,270 --> 00:46:37,610 then how much more - Paley argued - 777 00:46:38,310 --> 00:46:41,790 must these objects, these living objects, 778 00:46:42,110 --> 00:46:46,790 including ourselves, have had a "Divine watchmaker." 779 00:46:47,020 --> 00:46:48,620 For Paley it follows, as clearly 780 00:46:48,720 --> 00:46:50,090 as the night follows the day, 781 00:46:50,420 --> 00:46:52,760 that just as the watch had to have a designer, 782 00:46:52,890 --> 00:46:55,060 so do we have to have a designer. 783 00:46:56,160 --> 00:47:00,300 But, of course, just to show that animals and plants look as though they have got a designer 784 00:47:00,730 --> 00:47:04,700 begs the question. I've spent much of this lecture trying to persuade you 785 00:47:04,840 --> 00:47:07,640 that animals and plants look as though they've got a designer. 786 00:47:07,840 --> 00:47:10,140 But I've spent the other half of the lecture showing you 787 00:47:10,280 --> 00:47:12,480 that there's another very good alternative explanation 788 00:47:12,580 --> 00:47:14,480 for why they look as though they had a designer, 789 00:47:14,610 --> 00:47:15,710 namely, natural selection. 790 00:47:15,950 --> 00:47:17,650 Well, Paley, of course, lived before Darwin, 791 00:47:17,750 --> 00:47:21,120 so he couldn't be expected to know about the alternative. 792 00:47:22,020 --> 00:47:28,060 Nevertheless, it was even without knowing about Darwin, it was possible 793 00:47:28,290 --> 00:47:29,960 back in the 18th century to know 794 00:47:30,100 --> 00:47:32,100 that Paley's argument was a pretty bad argument. 795 00:47:32,330 --> 00:47:34,500 And this was pointed out by David Hume, 796 00:47:34,600 --> 00:47:36,500 one of the greatest philosophers of all time. 797 00:47:38,870 --> 00:47:40,670 Hume made the point 798 00:47:41,510 --> 00:47:43,240 that the argument from design, 799 00:47:43,780 --> 00:47:45,540 which was Paley's argument, 800 00:47:46,310 --> 00:47:49,950 is that things like elephants and humans are too complicated 801 00:47:50,050 --> 00:47:53,320 to have come about by chance. They have many parts, just like a watch, 802 00:47:53,590 --> 00:47:55,750 too complicated to come about by chance. 803 00:47:57,260 --> 00:48:00,260 A designer, a watchmaker, an engineer 804 00:48:00,530 --> 00:48:02,160 is certainly one way 805 00:48:02,290 --> 00:48:07,070 in which these objects could come about. 806 00:48:08,870 --> 00:48:13,140 But a watchmaker or a designer or an engineer, 807 00:48:14,010 --> 00:48:16,980 if he is to be any good as a watchmaker or an engineer, 808 00:48:17,210 --> 00:48:19,510 must be pretty complicated object himself. 809 00:48:20,080 --> 00:48:22,380 It's no good just postulating a designer 810 00:48:22,780 --> 00:48:25,720 because a designer is just the very kind of thing, 811 00:48:25,850 --> 00:48:28,220 just the very kind of complicated, ordered thing, 812 00:48:29,020 --> 00:48:34,990 that seems to need the very kind of explanation that we are searching for. 813 00:48:36,830 --> 00:48:39,630 If a human is too complicated 814 00:48:41,430 --> 00:48:43,140 to have come about by luck 815 00:48:43,570 --> 00:48:47,740 or if a swift is too complicated to have come about by luck 816 00:48:48,270 --> 00:48:52,980 then a thousand times more so any being capable of creating humans 817 00:48:53,080 --> 00:48:55,550 must be too complicated to have come about by luck. 818 00:48:56,820 --> 00:48:58,350 The argument from design 819 00:48:58,580 --> 00:49:01,690 certainly proves that living things couldn't have come about by chance, 820 00:49:02,450 --> 00:49:05,360 but by the same token, and even more strongly, it shows 821 00:49:05,490 --> 00:49:08,930 that the divine creator couldn't have just come about either. 822 00:49:09,160 --> 00:49:13,700 The creator would have needed an even bigger creator, and so on. 823 00:49:14,670 --> 00:49:19,570 The argument from design is a powerful seeming argument 824 00:49:19,840 --> 00:49:22,170 and it powerfully shoots itself in the foot. 825 00:49:23,910 --> 00:49:27,810 The Darwinian argument of evolution by natural selection, of course, doesn't suffer from this problem. 826 00:49:28,180 --> 00:49:29,450 The Darwinian argument 827 00:49:29,680 --> 00:49:31,920 does not explain things as due to chance. 828 00:49:32,820 --> 00:49:36,090 Chance, in form of random genetic mutations, comes into it, 829 00:49:36,460 --> 00:49:39,290 but by far the most important part of the Darwinian explanation 830 00:49:39,420 --> 00:49:42,830 is the non-random process of natural selection. 831 00:49:44,060 --> 00:49:46,530 There's another, rather interesting, little curiosity 832 00:49:46,870 --> 00:49:50,800 which is that natural objects, designoid objects, have imperfections 833 00:49:50,940 --> 00:49:52,670 which you wouldn't expect to get 834 00:49:52,800 --> 00:49:55,310 in objects which were designed by a real designer. 835 00:49:56,010 --> 00:49:57,780 This is a flatfish, a halibut. 836 00:49:58,380 --> 00:50:00,310 Its ancestors once 837 00:50:00,580 --> 00:50:04,320 swam normally in the water like a normal fish does, like that. 838 00:50:04,680 --> 00:50:08,290 But the ancestors of the halibut settled down on the bottom of the sea, 839 00:50:08,750 --> 00:50:10,090 one side down. 840 00:50:10,490 --> 00:50:11,890 They lie on the bottom of the sea, 841 00:50:12,020 --> 00:50:15,660 and now a modern flatfish moves along like that. 842 00:50:15,890 --> 00:50:17,030 You have probably seen them doing it. 843 00:50:17,730 --> 00:50:21,870 But when it did that the ancestor found that one of its eyes was looking straight into the sand. 844 00:50:23,340 --> 00:50:24,570 Only the other one was looking up. 845 00:50:25,300 --> 00:50:27,070 And so, gradually in evolution, 846 00:50:27,170 --> 00:50:29,270 the other eye, the one that was looking into the sand, 847 00:50:29,410 --> 00:50:32,980 migrated round the side of the head and came up to the top. 848 00:50:33,580 --> 00:50:36,180 With the result that the skull of the halibut 849 00:50:36,180 --> 00:50:40,080 is now an extremely distorted object. 850 00:50:40,190 --> 00:50:44,020 It's like a sort of Picasso painting of a fish. It's got its two eyes on one side. 851 00:50:44,460 --> 00:50:47,290 Anybody who was going to design a flatfish wouldn't do it that way. 852 00:50:47,730 --> 00:50:51,800 You would do it like a skate, which is another kind of shark, which is also a flatfish. 853 00:50:52,060 --> 00:50:56,000 And it flattened itself, its ancestors flattened itself, by going on to its belly 854 00:50:56,600 --> 00:50:59,570 so that both its eyes were looking upwards and it had no need 855 00:50:59,670 --> 00:51:01,070 to do any kind of distortion. 856 00:51:01,340 --> 00:51:04,210 But by some kind of historical accident the ancestors of the halibut 857 00:51:04,440 --> 00:51:05,740 and the sole and the plaice 858 00:51:05,980 --> 00:51:07,580 all did it by lying on their side 859 00:51:07,710 --> 00:51:09,950 and that meant that they had this distortion. 860 00:51:10,080 --> 00:51:12,150 So this is an imperfection in design. 861 00:51:13,050 --> 00:51:15,190 Which is just the kind of thing you'd expect to see 862 00:51:15,420 --> 00:51:16,990 if these creatures had evolved, 863 00:51:17,420 --> 00:51:19,790 but is very much not the kind of thing you'd expect to see 864 00:51:20,060 --> 00:51:22,360 if these creatures had been created. 865 00:51:24,830 --> 00:51:27,300 Evolution starts from simple beginnings. 866 00:51:27,830 --> 00:51:29,870 The starting point of evolution 867 00:51:29,970 --> 00:51:31,600 is the kind of thing we see here. 868 00:51:32,070 --> 00:51:34,940 Something like crystals, something at least as simple as crystals 869 00:51:35,470 --> 00:51:37,540 And it builds upon simplicity 870 00:51:38,040 --> 00:51:40,650 to get towards complexity. 871 00:51:40,910 --> 00:51:44,420 We start with a simple foundation, 872 00:51:45,080 --> 00:51:48,320 simple things are easy to understand. We do not have to start 873 00:51:48,420 --> 00:51:49,520 with a complicated thing, 874 00:51:49,660 --> 00:51:50,690 like a creator. 875 00:51:51,660 --> 00:51:59,100 On this simple foundation are built designoid objects by natural selection. 876 00:51:59,670 --> 00:52:02,840 And only when we have designoid objects with brains 877 00:52:03,140 --> 00:52:04,640 as big as human brains, 878 00:52:05,070 --> 00:52:08,570 does design finally emerge. 879 00:52:10,210 --> 00:52:12,440 But why do I say just humans for design? 880 00:52:12,580 --> 00:52:13,910 Isn't it rather unfair 881 00:52:14,250 --> 00:52:15,980 to the wasps that built 882 00:52:16,110 --> 00:52:18,150 these pots, and bees and spiders and things, 883 00:52:18,250 --> 00:52:21,250 rather unfair to this ovenbird that built that mud nest 884 00:52:21,390 --> 00:52:23,120 or that nest of social wasps, 885 00:52:23,360 --> 00:52:25,260 which is very similar to that convergently, 886 00:52:25,390 --> 00:52:26,490 also built of mud? 887 00:52:26,960 --> 00:52:30,200 Why do I use the word "designed" only for human creations 888 00:52:30,330 --> 00:52:33,230 and not for the manufactures of these animals? 889 00:52:33,700 --> 00:52:35,830 The difference is that human designs 890 00:52:36,070 --> 00:52:38,040 get their goodness and efficiency 891 00:52:38,140 --> 00:52:39,910 from conscious human foresight. 892 00:52:40,340 --> 00:52:42,110 Wasp pots and ovenbird nests 893 00:52:42,370 --> 00:52:44,740 get their efficiency directly from natural selection 894 00:52:45,040 --> 00:52:48,510 by a kind of hindsight rather than foresight. 895 00:52:48,850 --> 00:52:51,050 Gene are selected which influence the bodies 896 00:52:51,180 --> 00:52:53,120 of the ovenbird and the wasps 897 00:52:53,420 --> 00:52:57,590 and particularly the nervous systems which influence the building behavior. 898 00:52:58,420 --> 00:53:03,230 The birds and the wasps have no idea of why they are doing what they do. 899 00:53:03,360 --> 00:53:05,800 Natural selection simply favors those that build 900 00:53:05,900 --> 00:53:06,900 good nests. 901 00:53:07,270 --> 00:53:08,600 Humans, on the other hand, 902 00:53:08,700 --> 00:53:10,670 do build with foresight. 903 00:53:10,770 --> 00:53:12,070 At least they do usually. 904 00:53:12,340 --> 00:53:18,180 This is an engineer called Ingo Rechenberg from Germany who designs windmills and he claims 905 00:53:18,280 --> 00:53:21,050 that he designs his windmills by a kind of natural selection. 906 00:53:21,910 --> 00:53:24,650 He does it by putting his windmills in a wind tunnel, 907 00:53:24,750 --> 00:53:26,250 measuring how good they are 908 00:53:26,390 --> 00:53:28,920 and then - as he calls it - breeding 909 00:53:29,020 --> 00:53:31,920 from those windmills that are good at spinning around in a wind tunnel. 910 00:53:32,490 --> 00:53:35,130 The windmills have genes, and again, not real genes, 911 00:53:35,230 --> 00:53:38,230 but they are numerical attributes, they're numbers 912 00:53:38,360 --> 00:53:40,070 that are used to make other windmills 913 00:53:40,200 --> 00:53:41,730 that resemble the parent windmill. 914 00:53:42,170 --> 00:53:45,600 And in every generation of windmills he breeds from the ones 915 00:53:45,740 --> 00:53:47,240 that do best in the wind tunnel. 916 00:53:47,370 --> 00:53:50,240 And after many generations of testing them 917 00:53:50,510 --> 00:53:54,310 and breeding, testing and breeding, he ends up with a windmill, he claims, is better 918 00:53:54,410 --> 00:53:58,620 than you would get by the ordinary processes of engineering design. 919 00:53:59,690 --> 00:54:03,290 But you could say that all engineering design and even all art 920 00:54:03,390 --> 00:54:05,460 has a certain Darwinian component. 921 00:54:05,690 --> 00:54:08,690 I want to illustrate this with another computer program 922 00:54:08,960 --> 00:54:10,360 called "biomorphs". 923 00:54:10,630 --> 00:54:14,300 So, can we have a volunteer to run the biomorphs? 924 00:54:18,200 --> 00:54:19,170 What's your name? 925 00:54:19,270 --> 00:54:19,770 Rachel 926 00:54:19,910 --> 00:54:21,470 Rachel. Have you ever used the mouse before? 927 00:54:21,610 --> 00:54:22,140 Yes. Good. 928 00:54:22,440 --> 00:54:23,440 Now, 929 00:54:23,580 --> 00:54:25,180 there you have some biomorphs. 930 00:54:25,540 --> 00:54:26,880 Try one of those now. 931 00:54:34,350 --> 00:54:38,560 What she is doing is guiding the evolution of biomorphs. 932 00:54:38,690 --> 00:54:42,330 The biomorphs are controlled by genes, just like the arthromorphs and just like the spider webs. 933 00:54:42,860 --> 00:54:47,130 And they are coming by random mutation 934 00:54:47,570 --> 00:54:53,370 but the direction of the evolution is being guided by the human eye. 935 00:54:53,870 --> 00:54:57,480 Just like the direction of breeding cabbages or dogs. 936 00:54:57,570 --> 00:55:01,080 In this case we are just looking for pure aesthetic appeal. 937 00:55:01,480 --> 00:55:02,680 Just looking for the prettiest ones. 938 00:55:04,620 --> 00:55:05,850 I think you might imagine 939 00:55:05,950 --> 00:55:09,920 breeding wall paper or bathroom tiles or something like this. 940 00:55:14,060 --> 00:55:16,130 Okay, thank you very much indeed, Rachel. 941 00:55:21,240 --> 00:55:25,170 But in any case, all creation, 942 00:55:25,440 --> 00:55:29,410 all design, all machines, houses and paintings and computers and airplanes, 943 00:55:29,740 --> 00:55:31,580 everything designed and made by us, 944 00:55:31,980 --> 00:55:34,310 everything made by other creatures, 945 00:55:34,810 --> 00:55:36,480 is only made possible 946 00:55:36,820 --> 00:55:41,550 because there are already brains put together as designoid objects. 947 00:55:41,690 --> 00:55:46,090 And designoid objects come about only through gradual evolution. 948 00:55:46,960 --> 00:55:49,930 Creation, when it does occur in the universe, 949 00:55:50,060 --> 00:55:51,230 is an afterthought. 950 00:55:51,960 --> 00:55:54,800 When creation appeared on this planet, it came locally 951 00:55:54,900 --> 00:55:56,100 and it came late. 952 00:55:56,940 --> 00:56:02,310 Creation does not belong in any account of the fundamentals of the universe. 953 00:56:02,770 --> 00:56:08,050 Creation is something that, rather late in the day, grows up in the Universe. 954 00:56:08,450 --> 00:56:09,520 Thank you very much! 955 00:56:10,620 --> 00:56:14,750 forums.mvgroup.org