Most people don’t fully understand evolution. Sponsored by Hostinger – visit https://ve42.co/hostingern8n and use the code VERITASIUM to get an extra discount on top of the sale prices.
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0:00 Why does poop smell bad?
2:51 The Beginning Life
7:15 What is gene mutation?
8:01 Simulating Evolution
13:25 How natural selection works
16:39 What do we pass on?
19:40 Kin Selection
22:04 The Selfish Gene
25:35 It’s all a simulation
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A big thanks to Dr. Jack Szostak at the University of Chicago, Dr. John Sutherland at Cambridge University, Dr. Joanna Masel at the University of Arizona & Dr. Gerald Joyce at the Salk Institute for their expertise and help with the video.
And a huge thank you to Joe Hanson from @besmart for his help!
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Check out Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene here – https://ve42.co/SGRD
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References: https://ve42.co/SelfishGeneRefs
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Writers: Gregor Čavlović, Casper Mebius, Daniel Leonard & Derek Muller
Producer & Director: Gregor Čavlović
Editor: Peter Nelson
Camera Operator: Andrew Abballe
Animators: Fabio Albertelli, Andrew Neet, Emma Wright & Peter Nelson
Illustrator: Jakub Misiek
Simulations: Callum Cuttle
Researchers: Aakash Singh Bagga & Callum Cuttle
Thumbnail Designers: Abdallah Rabah, Ren Hurley & Ben Powell
Production Team: Josh Pitt, Matthew Cavanagh, Anna Milkovic & Zoe Heron
Executive Producers: Derek Muller & Casper Mebius
Additional video/photos supplied by Getty Images, Storyblocks
Music from Epidemic Sound








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Definitely the best description of early evolution I've heard in my life.
Awesome that you collaborated with Primer. Daninblue would have made this awesome too. Side note: a recent study also shows that having a vertebrae was likely due to a viral infection in vertibriates, except in eels
What a clickbait, selfish gene idea in its core is the evolutionary synthesis and it's so uncontroversial. Talking about genes being "selfish" is only pretty anthropomorphic and thus misleading from the theoretic grounds.
Maybe consult an evolutionary biologist (hell, actually ANYONE with a biology major degree suffices) next time to not make a major blunder in the hopes and aims of clickbaiting ppl.
The way Survival of the Fittest is actually described in On The Origin of Species is so vague that it essentially means "survival of those who happened to survive" because fitness is relative and has a strong random component to it.
An organism can be supremely unfit for survival in its current environment, but a sudden random change happens to benefit it massively, and its previous "negative" trait ends up being what allows it to survive and thrive.
The idea gets further complicated when we consider heritability and plasticity, especially when it comes to trait or genetic fixation within a population.
So the great revolutionary idea about evolution is that the organisms that end up surviving were the ones that happened to be able to end up surviving, and in hindsight there are genetic and epigenetic factors that allowed those organisms to have the potential to survive. Pretty insane how vague that is – survival of the fittest has next to zero predictive power on evolution except for ones made under a lot of pre-conditions and assumptions.
humans as a vessel for replicators, are served for the replicator's survival, we humans make vessels of iron, just to make ourselves cooler, same same but different
26:12 everything you said is deterministic, am I missing something? why are genes less deterministic than they might seem?
Richard Dawkins: 'The Selfish Gene'
that is WILD. now GENUINE QUESTION: why my gene doesn't want me to survive or propagate tho (Im a lesbian and so as other who dont wan a kid) T^T
Awesome video! The visuals really helped me to understand how something like abiogenesis could have realistically occurred!