The Most Controversial Idea in Biology

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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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From:
Date: November 1, 2025

39 thoughts on “The Most Controversial Idea in Biology

  1. For me this entire approach is absurd and so is Darwinism and neo-Darwinism. I wonder how many professional biologists still believes this nonsense. What we know is that Genes are primeraly resposible to provide the infrastructure that alow the cells to grow, specify and duplicate. The rest is primarily the responsibility of cells, the organs and the entire organism. That's why changes to the genom very rarely contribute to improved organism survival and most mutations either kill the organism or do nothing at all. Biology are many orders of magnitude more complex and wonderful than the credit Veritasum gives it.

  2. My current way of viewing evolution is "whatever exists, exists and if something has a higher chane of existing, it might exist longer". It accounts for random chance and doesn't even discriminate between organic and inorganic. I feel that this video was a good reminder that the purpose of science isn't to just create vague philosophical views of the world, but to actually answer questions like "why do we see so much animal diversity?"

  3. I think what confuses evolution sceptics most is the humanising language used to describe it. Your genes don't "care" about survival. Evolution isn't a "battle" that intentionally "selects" for reproduction. It's as simple as, if the mistake in your genetic code happens to effect the efficiency of your reproduction compared to others, that mistake will probably survive the next few generations at least.

  4. “The fact that the theory of natural selection is difficult to test has led some people, anti-Darwinists and even some great Darwinists, to claim that it is a tautology. A tautology like “All tables are tables” is not, of course, testable; nor has it any explanatory power. It is therefore most surprising to hear that some of the greatest contemporary Darwinists themselves formulate the theory in such a way that it amounts to the tautology that those organisms that leave most offspring leave most offspring. And C. H. Waddington even says somewhere (and he defends this view in other places) that “Natural selection …turns out …to be a tautology”. (6) However, he attributes at the same place to the theory an “enormous power …of explanation”. Since the explanatory power of a tautology is obviously zero, something must be wrong here.
    Yet similar passages can be found in the works of such great Darwinists as Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and George Gaylord Simpson; and others.
    I mention this problem because I too belong among the culprits. Influenced by what these authorities say, I have in the past described the theory as “almost tautological”, (7) and I have tried to explain how the theory of natural selection could be untestable (as is a tautology) and yet of great scientific interest. *My solution was that the doctrine of natural selection is a most successful metaphysical research programme*. It raises detailed problems in many fields, and it tells us what we would expect of an acceptable solution of these problems.
    I still believe that natural selection works in this way as a research programme. Nevertheless, I have changed my mind about the testability and the logical status of the theory of natural selection; and I am glad to have an opportunity to make a recantation. My recantation may, I hope, contribute a little to the understanding of the status of natural selection.
    What is important is to realize the explanatory task of natural selection; and especially to realize what can be explained without the theory of natural selection.
    We may start from the remark that, for sufficiently small and reproductively isolated populations, the Mendelian theory of genes and the theory of mutation and recombination together suffice to predict, without natural selection, what has been called “genetic drift”. If you isolate a small number of individuals from the main population and prevent them from interbreeding with the main population, then, after a time, the distribution of genes in the gene pool of the new population will differ somewhat from that of the original population. This will happen even if selection pressures are completely absent.

    (6) C. H. Waddington, “Evolutionary Adaptation”, in S. Tax (ed.) Evolution After Darwin: volume I –
    The Evolution of Life, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1960, pp. 381-402; see p. 385.

    (7) Objective Knowledge, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1972, p. 241.”
    ___________
    Quoted from:
    Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind by Karl POPPER December 1978 Dialectica vol. 32, issue 3-4, pp. 339-355

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