Summary
Why do these salamanders get their own powerpoint in every biology class? What is a ring species, and what if the animals between us and chimps were still alive? Come learn about one of the most theoretically important creatures on earth on this episode of Species.
Bibliography: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KXT7pHVzxkAtr1JXtAwgW-WeXXqdkwCxvS8YTcvwqvU/edit?usp=sharing
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | teaching people about evolution would be so much easier if all the intermediate species were still |
| 0:07.2 | alive. People really struggle with the idea of a new species coming about by evolution, as a child |
| 0:14.6 | I struggled with the idea, and for me and for others, a huge part of it is that we know no mother |
| 0:20.4 | can give birth to a baby |
| 0:22.0 | of a new species. |
| 0:24.0 | And therefore, no mother could have been born to a grandmother of a different species to |
| 0:29.2 | themselves. |
| 0:30.2 | And no grandmother could have been born to a great grandmother of different species to |
| 0:35.0 | themselves, and you could take this all the way back |
| 0:38.3 | to the very first life on earth if you wanted to. It seems almost like a logical paradox, right? |
| 0:45.2 | You could be nerdy, you could try to formalize it, right? A must be the same species as their |
| 0:49.6 | parent B, B the same as parent C, C the same as D, the same as E, all the way through the alphabet, |
| 0:56.8 | and therefore A couldn't be a different species from Z, because everyone in between them is the |
| 1:02.3 | same species as those next to them. Right? Wrong. Bad logic, but maybe it's tricky to show exactly why. The truth is that while the |
| 1:14.5 | premise is right that every letter in the animal alphabet is the same species as the letter |
| 1:20.7 | before and after themselves, it doesn't follow that A is the same species as Z. |
| 1:31.3 | And it would be so much easier for me to convince you of this if the letters B through Z weren't all fossils. |
| 1:35.3 | It'd be so much easier if I could resurrect the ancestral line of any organism |
| 1:40.6 | and show you that while A can reproduce to produce fertile young with creatures |
| 1:46.8 | like B, A can't reproduce with creatures like Z because between A and Z a lot of small |
| 1:53.1 | differences accumulated and now there are too many for reproduction to occur. |
| 1:57.8 | If I could just show you that, not in the abstract, but in real life, or something like it, |
... |
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