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WIP video about evolution, based upon 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins (Patreon)

Published:
2025-10-28 18:56:28
Imported:
2026-09

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  • 555675162.mp4

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Content

DEADLINE FOR FEEDBACK 30/10 - 12:00 PM UK TIMEWe've got an exciting video coming out very soon!We’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions as we wrap up this video all about evolution!It's a little rough around the edges as we still need to finish a lot animations (as stated in the video) etc. but as always we appreciate you watching and reviewing this cut!Is there anything wrong? Any other questions? Anything more you'd like to see? Explanations you think don't do a good enough job or lack depth? Let us know!

Thank you so much!-Team Ve

Comments

Dakota Darkwolf

Ooooh! 3 minutes in and it already sounds like I’m back at Uni! Good job-altruism is always a confusing subject!

Wandyrer

Okay, your description of the process by which replication arose has some serious issues, but lets address them one by one. 95% of SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms, which you describe) are silent (meaning they express no phenotypical change) on the scale of modern species. This is less true for bacteria, but since bacteria use (generally) the same RNA/DNA to Protein map we do, no less than 20% of all SNPs are silent. You don't even mention the possibility of silent mutations. Furthermore you indicate several times, including by giving an avatar of what is literally a chemical machine a face and blinking eyes that evolution has direction, purpose, or choice. Please don't. You can't imagine the amount of time a college professor spends trying to teach students that mutation has no purpose or direction, and that correspondingly natural selection only operates on populations. Secondly, very few major gain or loss of function mutations are due to SNPs, and this has been true since life emerged. Gain of function and loss of function among bacteria is nearly always due to something eating something else, or (as in the case of mitochonidra) the parasitic relationship between a larger more complex bacteria and a smaller one become mutualistic over time. It would be far more beneficial to talk about the phenomena of chromosomal crossover or sexual reproduction in making an argument for how phenotype emerges, or even better just give a tiny refresher on mendelian genetics. Either way I would not throw my hat into the ring of trying to make a primer on the emergence of early life on earth considering we don't know and can't know exactly how it happened, only that it did. This leads to my next point(s). Dr. Lynn Margulis (an expert on the subject) argues that life emerged on earth nearly as early as the crust cooled and made way for primitive tidepool-like cells (4-4.5bya). That is, as far as I know, still accepted as generally the case, and given that we have now isolated nucleotides from the surface of Bennu, from comets, and from other intersolar bodies. It is LIKELY given that these locations can predate the earth that life started elsewhere. All of this is to say that the "hundreds of millions of years" postulated in the video is an incredibly deceptive timescale. Similarly, your probabilities for stable atoms forming as listed in the video in a high energy environment is probably postulated on some very old data. There has been a theory around for ages that was only really debunked in the 2010s that the early earth environment was strongly reductive that made way for things like nucleic acids to form, probably due to lightning strikes or other high energy events. It has now been geologically determined that this was not the case in early Earth. Finally, I say this with all of my love and appreciation for everything this channel does and as a supporter. I would not dream, no matter how famous or how big of a platform my channel had or how big my audience is, of making a video myself, as a biochemist and a life scientist describing one of the most complex and contentious subjects in all of physics, like the differences between string theory and dark matter, or quantum superpositional states, or even stellar nuclear fusion. I would highly suggest extending the same respect to the life scientists, evolutionary biologists, and biochemists. I say this having seen less than half the video, and I don't honestly expect things to improve. I love Veritaseum, I love the work you do, and I love to be able to say that this channel produces content with good science presented in a good way. If I've found this many errors in a video thats barely skimming over the top of the subject in only 8 minutes, I can't imagine its going to get better.

Kat Seibert

I think this is being reductive at its finest and while I think reductive insights are interesting we are also a very complex system which in my view is a more interesting take on being human. I could say our blood is 98% seawater for example but to say that blood functions or is somehow related closely to seawater seems like a big stretch. The pieces of complex things are interesting but the way the pieces interact are more interesting although maybe hard to describe in the case of a human. That is not to say the video is not interesting as it is, but maybe it sees the pieces as more important than they are.

Keith Arnold

I would be interested to hear how this behavior extends to cultures and thus how different cultures interact, thrive, mutate …

John Cox

Overall: This one's youtube reception is going to be rough. Good luck. You might improve the audience reception if you focused on the adaptation of the species rather than extending that all the back to the origin of life. The argument presented here for the origin of life rests heavily on persuasion of probability, but the effectiveness of that persuasion is going to have a very large variance. Correction: @6:30 Typo: "Change to form:" should be chance Feedback: Liking the intro on the street asking random people. 0:04 "this one weird question" Opinion: It's really hard to pull off this phrase with a straight face anymore and still come out respectable on the other side :) @7:47 Based on this, it sounds like "the fittest" is simply survivor bias, not the fittest. Was this the intent? @23:14 "Misfiring instincts seem to be common enough that.." Stray thought: If it is common enough, then are we sure they are misfiring instead of this being an alternate pathway? The term "instincts" is a human-defined collection of behaviors that the creature is expected (by us) to be doing, and any deviation from that expectation is categorized as a misfire, but if the collection of expected behaviors is incomplete, then is this a misfire? Future: Darwin had a half cousin, Sir Francis Galton, the creator of regression analysis. I did some research on him for a presentation and can provide the info I dug up and what I learned about the philosophically messy origins, so if you're interested in this topic for the future, let me know.

Zeus

I concur with some earlier voices that this is not the most convincing video. Even though I believe the Dawkins' way of viewing evolution from the genes' perspective has a merit. (But more as a useful metaphor than a 'truth'). Particularly the first half that talks about the origins. It starts with the mood 'it happened by chance' and ends with a simulation why it could be so but which features some pretty arbitrary parameters. The theory of origin is not well settled (unlike the evolution itself), and it's probably not wise to include it to make a point about the selfish gene. The topic doesn't need to go that deep. The question of sexual selection is an interesting separate topic, and also rather muddles the main point. The mechanisms of evolution are fairly counter-intuitive (for normal people), and throwing everything together doesn't help to clarify them at this level.

Biljana

Evolutionary geneticist here. "Selfish gene" was written a very long  (looooong) time ago, when we barely understood how things worked on a molecular level. Scientists used to think that DNA is is all genes, but then once we sequenced the human genome, we realized that only ~2% of the genome is genes. The rest is non-coding, sometimes called junk DNA. We are still learning things, and today we know that how genes work is a lot more complex -- and even many of those non-coding regions serve a purpose. The video is overly simplified, but I don't mind the simulations (modeling population growth in ecology uses a similar concept, where you factor in the capacity of the environment i.e. resources). My biggest pet peeves are the following: The meaning of sexual reproduction. Imagine you thrive at 28 degrees celsius, humid environment, tropical climate -- all your clones do too. You specialized for this. Then suddenly the climate changes, there's a dry spell for a couple of years -- what happens? All of you die out. Without diversity, the organisms can't adapt to novel or changing environments. Sexual reproduction creates this diversity. Sexual reproduction is what makes us more resilient to the ever changing environment. It's a much faster way to shuffle genes and mutations, than waiting for a chance that the right mutations will accumulate. Less diverse populations are less likely to survive -- because natural selection has nothing to work on if there is no diversity. I'm oversimplifying here, because ideal reproductive strategy also depends on how quickly an organism reproduces, and then bacteria can just absorb DNA from the environment etc.    see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26823/ 25:21 "it's hard to point where 1 gene ends and another begins" - we know exactly where each gene starts (starting codon ATG) and where it ends (stop codons TAA, TAG, TGA) -- this is how the machinery in the cell attached to the gene to create proteins, and how it knows where the protein is done. There's also a TATA box before genes, so the machinery that makes proteins knows to attach there. This was long used to discover and then sequence genes. It's why we know where genes are, even if we don't know their function. The video treats genes as deterministic -- but we know that the environment plays a huge role in who we are and how we develop. Say for example you have the genes to be 180cm tall (this is a fairly heritable trait) -- if you don't get enough food, you will not reach this height. It's a banal example, but very few of our traits are completely determined by genes. Our experiences, our lifestyles, these all shape us. You can think of genes more as a base, our capacity or predispositions, that then get shaped by our environment.

Kate Proctor

This sounds much like the comment that life was invented by water to transport it... And, I concur with earlier comments about an ape's mothering gene malfunctioning or her not recognizing the baby. In fact, I think adoption in the animal kingdom is a valid counter example to this entire argument. The genes being protected in adoption are by definition the _wrong_ genes. If genes were in any way controlling this, adoption would never occur in the wild.

Simon Cole

Just wondering if the squirrel acts as a guard from a certain age, i.e. after she's had a chance to reproduce?

laith alissa

Just found this in my inbox, I know I'm after the dealing so feel free to ignore. I'll watch anything you upload, but I sense that for people unlike me, there's too much of a disconnect between the opening question about what makes animals successful and closing the replicator explanation arc, I feel like the animal traits like competition and sacrifice etc should be linked to earlier, otherwise it's easy to disconnect from the video in the middle of the replicator statistical explanation. Also on a side note, I quite like the animals that are poisonous as an example for a trait that's bad for an individual but good for a species, as it also relates to adaptation in the predator system to avoid that animal/taste etc

Timothy-Douglas Alvey

Good topic. I missed hearing the one about “would you marry someone who always smelled bad” to you, or triggered your allergies?😁😁