What Darwin Didn't Know (2009)

What Darwin Didn't Know
Prof Armand Marie Leroi
Imperial College, London
BBC Four, 2009

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/what-darwin-didnt-know/
http://www.alluc.org/documentaries/watch-what-darwin-didnt-know-online/194857.html

EXCERPTS:

 "In this film, I'll chart the decline, fall, and ultimate triumph of Darwin's ideas.


Darwin's explanation of how evolution works was riddled with holes.
its logical foundations were shaky.
His evidednce was weak.
There was so much he did not, could not, know.


Richard Owen, who wrote one of the first reviews of The Origin.
Richard Owen, premier palaentologist, coined the term 'dinosaur'
...
He thougt that species change intermittently under the influence of some divine law.
and that periodically, they are swept away in some great catastrophe.


Sixth and Final edition of The Origin,
... Can it be that Darwin, in his dotage, is becoming less Darwinian?
WEll,yes.
Perhaps natural selection is not as powrful as once he had thought.
... Just the candour of an old man.
 

Everyone , that is, who mattered - agreed that evolution was a fact.
But natural selection?
No Thanks.


Hugo De Vries and his fellow mutationists had argued that species
originate instantaneously by single dramatic mutations.


By the end of the 1950s evolution had a new formula.
A combination of natural selection, isolation, Mendelian inheritance, and mathematical theory.
it was called the neo-Darwinian synthesis.

The forumula wasn't entirely Darwinian, but that didn't matter.


Natural selection does not count the fates of individuals,
it counts the fates of genes.


THOSE rocks over there are Cambrian.
That makes them around 525 million years old.
And they contain animal life, wonderful creatures such as
brachiopods, ostracods and trilobits.

THESE rocks are Precambrian, they're only about 30 million years older.
And yet they are empty.
Threre are no animal remains in them whatsoever.

But how could it this be?
If these Precambrian rocks didn't have any fossils in them,
Where did the animals come from?
Characteristically, Darwin did not shirk the problem.



Perhaps the simplest of all animals is a microscopic creature called
Trichoplax.
It doesn't have a gut, a mouth, a brain, or even sense organs.


WE're genetically closest to chimpanzees and bonobos.
5 to 6 million years ago our ancestor was theirs.
7 million years ago, we shared ancestor with the gorilla.
12 million years ago, with an orangutan.
And so on back to the very beginning of life.

"Who do you think you are?" asked Haeckel.
And answered.
"You are an ape, a mammal, a reptile, a fish, a worm, a ball of cells and finally a single cell, floating in the saline womb of the primordial seas."


Everyone just knew that human eyes and fly eyes
had evolved independently.
How could it be otherwise - they just looked so very different?
But the discovery that they shared a gene
told us that they shared an evolutionary history.


In the evolutionary long run.
success needs something else,
it need flexibility.
On being able to respond to a mutable and contingent world.

Let me put it another way -
In the short run, creatures evolve.
In the long run, they evolve evolvability."

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