195 | Richard Dawkins on Flight and Other Evolutionary Achievements

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2022

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Evolution has equipped species with a variety of ways to travel through the air — flapping, gliding, floating, not to mention jumping really high. But it hasn’t invented jet engines. What are the different ways that heavier-than-air objects might be made to fly, and why does natural selection produce some of them but not others? Richard Dawkins has a new book on the subject, Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution. We take the opportunity to talk about other central issues in evolution: levels of selection, the extended phenotype, the role of adaptation, and how genes relate to organisms.

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Richard Dawkins received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Oxford. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, where he was previously the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. He is an internationally best-selling author, whose books include The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:03.6	Back when I started blogging, so like 2004, 2005, the hot topic in the science blogosphere,
0:10.6	bleed or not, was creationism, an intelligent design in the battle with natural selection and
0:15.9	Darwinian evolution. It was a big story, it was not just on blogs, even the New York Times was
0:20.2	writing about this. I don't hear about this that much anymore. I mean, I'm sure it's still happening,
0:25.6	I'm sure that there are still people trying to get intelligent design in high schools or whatever,
0:29.8	but you don't hear about it that much. It makes me wonder what the connection is between what
0:34.5	happens in the world and what you hear about, right? What the hot topics are, what people are
0:38.9	actually talking about. It's probably pretty flimsy connection in some sense. But anyway,
0:43.2	that is not the point of this podcast. The point is that I thought about it because one of the
0:48.4	issues that is always brought up by people who are in favor of creationism or intelligent design
0:53.2	is that there are capacities that living creatures have that don't seem naively
0:59.0	evolveable by a series of small incremental steps. They even tried to quantify this idea in
1:05.2	the notion of irreducible complexity, something that was very complex and functional, but if you
1:09.8	removed any piece of the operation, it would be completely useless. And the idea was that things
1:14.8	like the eye would be hard to imagine growing gradually. In fact, that's completely nonsense.
1:21.6	Eyes are one of the easiest things to grow gradually. Even in a more simplified context,
1:27.3	one of the examples was a mouse trap. If you remove any piece from a mouse trap, it doesn't do anything.
1:32.9	Of course, someone instantly invented a reducible mouse trap that you could build up
1:37.5	piece by piece. I even wrote about it in the big picture. So the lesson was that things that you
1:43.2	are skeptical can be built up piece by piece are actually very buildable. So you have some good
1:48.1	science came out of that understanding how that works. One such example is flight. Either you
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