The Shape of a Termite Mound

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Each individual bird is following a set of rules am and the emergent prope of all those rules is the murmuration of the entire flock. This has been shown beautifully in computer simulations, where er whatat the programmer does is to programme a single bird with rules. The cells in the embryo are obeying simple, little rules, local rules. I don't know whether that helps to clarify the question you were asking, about the sort of number of gens you need in order to make if you think think, think, think recipe rather an blueprint,. i think that's the key.

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.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.