88 | Neil Shubin on Evolution, Genes, and Dramatic Transitions

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

🗓️ 16 March 2020

⏱️ 93 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“What good is half a wing?” That’s the rhetorical question often asked by people who have trouble accepting Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Of course it’s a very answerable question, but figuring out what exactly the answer is leads us to some fascinating biology. Neil Shubin should know: he is the co-discoverer of Tiktaalik Roseae, an ancient species of fish that was in the process of learning to walk and breathe on land. We talk about how these major transitions happen — typically when evolution finds a way to re-purpose existing organs into new roles — and how we can learn about them by studying living creatures and the information contained in their genomes.

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Neil Shubin received his Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University. He is currently the the Robert Bensley Distinguished Service Professor and Associate Dean of Biological Sciences at the University of Chicago. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical society. His first book, Your Inner Fish, was chosen by the National Academy of Sciences as the best science book of 2009, and was subsequently made into a TV special. His new book is Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA.

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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.
0:03.9	And as I'm recording these words, we are in the middle of a proto-pandemic with the coronavirus,
0:11.6	the COVID-19 disease that is happening because of this. I am certainly not an expert in viruses
0:18.5	or pandemics or anything like that. And this episode is not about viruses or pandemics,
0:22.8	but it is about evolution. And you know, this is part of why we get pandemics is because all
0:28.3	these little microbes bless their hearts. They keep evolving clever new ways to deal with us,
0:34.4	even if it hurts us in doing it. And it turns out when you go into the details that we human beings
0:40.3	sometimes take advantage. Like as you'll learn in this podcast, human DNA has a certain fraction
0:47.3	that is just borrowed wholesale from virus DNA in cases where we encountered a virus and we didn't
0:53.6	just combat it, we absorbed it or at least absorbed part of it. It's part of the whole question
1:00.0	of how transitions happen in evolution. You know, when Charles Darwin first invented the idea of
1:06.0	natural selection, he had the idea that it was more or less gradual, right? That there were slow
1:12.3	changes, minor changes, and some of them would catch on, develop and grow, others would be less
1:18.3	successful. But we do see examples of major transitions, whether they happen quickly or not,
1:24.4	is a complicated thing, but there are transitions like the first flight, right? You know, the first
1:30.4	animals that could actually fly and develop wings or the first climbing onto land on the part
1:35.7	of aquatic animals. So this has always been a question for Darwinian evolution. How does that happen?
1:42.6	How does a fish develop the right organismal abilities to live on and flourish on dry land? Like
1:52.2	it's not teleological. Evolution is not based on goals toward future success. So the fish can't
1:59.0	think to itself, I would like to be able to get up and get that yummy food up on land. Let me
2:04.1	develop some feet and some lungs and the ability to do that. So today we're talking to Neil Schubin,
2:10.0	who is a quite well-known evolutionary biologist. He is a distinguished service professor of
	...

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