Darwin’s Biggest Problem | Long Story Short: Evolution

It’s 1859 and there was this guy named Charles Darwin and he rode on a beagle to these islands, and had a little idea....(Evolution). Just like humans can take the variety that they saw in animals (descent with modification) and breed horses to be faster or dogs to more hot-dog-like; given enough time, Ol’ Charlie D. figured, nature could take even the smallest, slimiest, of creatures and create the biggest and most baddest of T-Rexes (random mutation & natural selection). Nice.

BUT, there was one doubt that he couldn’t shake, a problem that threatened to undo his entire theory. here’s the story...

[Lauren-sebu]

What drives me insane is not so much that Darwin's theory is full of problems, but that people including scientists believe it so wholeheartedly and call you an idiot for even daring to question it.

[righty-o]

If the question of life that you are referring to is, how life started. Then you should probably know that evolution doesn't answer that question, because evolution doesn't even attempt to answer that question. Evolution is just the change of life after it already exists. The beginning of life is abiogenesis, not evolution. They are two different things

[Brammya]

Darwin was NOT the first to hypothesize evolution. The idea that humans descended fro some other type of creature dates back to Miletus, a Greek philosopher who lived in the 500s B.C. In the early 19th century Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and others proposed his theory of the "transmutation of species", the first fully formed theory of evolution.

Charles Darwin's contribution has to do with natural selection which greatly advanced the mechanism of speciation. Darwin's contemporary, Alfred Russel Wallace, also developed the theory of evolution by natural selection. .... but Darwin was the one who wrote the book that became well known.

[trilobite]

"They remained unchanged" Anomalocaris went extinct during the Cambrian and it's relatives that remained where quite different, with the main thing connecting them being, guess what, homologous traits. Also, although not necessarily reflecting if the overall accuracy, that anomalocaris is highly inaccurate.

[sebcw]

have you ever noticed the ratio of fossilized soft creatures vs fossilized hard creatures? and then notice the ratio of older fossils to younger fossils. it makes perfect sense that we have so few pre-cambrian fossils. and "suddenly" means tens of millions of years. which is quick in terms of the timescale of evolution. there was likely a lot of pressure to evolve during that time. new niches were suddenly opening up due to a shifting climate.

[orange]

I just found this video. It's great! Will have to check out your channel. I hope there's more like this.

[Groggle]

Its hard for skeletons to fossilize. There need to be specific requirements for animals and other life to fossilize and last millions years. People point to animals with little transitionary fossils and claim that evolution isn't real, but ignore animals that do have transitionary fossils (like horses, humans, elephants, primates, ect.)

[Jaggerbush]

Let me guess - the god of Abraham made all this? Right?

[toja]

Can you write down those names of those mathematicians properly . Because I’m not sure they are real or you made them up. I can’t Google them because writing is so unclear

[jaysmith]

Darwins biggest problem is modern biology. Disproves his theory.

[dougsmith]

Folks analyzing / critiquing evolution seem to be focused only on one part of the evolutionary narrative, seemingly oblivious to the fact that evolution has TWO interactive components, not just one. ... i.e., biology is only part of the evolutionary dance, while environment is just as absolutely necessary as biology is. Biology provides the variations, while environment determines which of those variations survive long enough to pass their genes on to the next generation.

So ... what was the environment doing during the Cambrian explosion? Was it static / unchanging? Or was it varying at a fairly rapid rate -- i.e., repeated volcanic events (every few tens or hundreds of years) would affect temperature / circulation over the entire planet over periods of hundreds or thousands of years, a fairly rapid change that would repeatedly change the selection criteria for any biology in that loop ... resulting in relatively rapid biological changes as a consequence.

The resolution / granularity (i.e., error margins) in radiometric dating has been no finer than a few million years until fairly recently -- enough time for whole new species to emerge and become extinct -- but not fine enough to establish a chronological sequence of events that would demonstrate transitions.

Some recent measurements claim an accuracy of 0.1%. But even 0.1% accuracy -- in 575 million-year-old samples -- is +/-575, 000 years, and even 575, 000 years is long enough for whole species to come and go.

So -- it's not as if that record isn't there, but rather that the instrumentation necessary to analyze the record more precisely just hasn't been available.

[inspiredme]

So why we still have those pictures in our textbooks?

[chaotickreg]

This early fossil record argument is so funny. You have what is called a Selection Bias because your view of early life history is limited by the amount of fossils that can be found. Hard shelled things are MORE LIKELY to fossilize. This is why science relies on consensus and double checking, so you iron out mistakes.

Stick to animating please.

[pigzcanfly]

Hey LSS my brother has been trying to find your channel for a while and I sent him the link recently. He said your stuff was buried under about 300 other videos from random content creators. I think that YouTube is trying to stifle your information and ability to get it out to people. I will do what I can to promote your content. God bless you brother.

[Roedygr]

Darwin wrote his book in 1859. He took his voyage on the Beagle many decades earlier. If you can't get basic details like that correct, I cannot trust you on more important facts.

[kichigan]

Darwin wrote a lot about this in his Origin Of Species in Chapter 6: Difficulties of the Theory, He was very intellectually honest. It doesn't matter nowadays; Genetics has said the last word. Evolution happened, is happening and will continue to operate for the rest of the biological life.

[cameron]

I like how we evolved from Primates yet there are still Primates and we just reached a point where we said nah were good here and stopped evolving. The body went through all this change and it had an alarm clock set at a certain point to stop? Sure makes sense

[jamesdownard]

Well this typical ID-ish "Origins or Bust" presentation still doesn't make the therapsids go away, or account for why we have so many Alus in our genome.

[SamDunaway-ib]

I'm trying to find the source for Stephen Jay Gould's quote "I have been reluctant to admit it..." Please reply with that reference. Thanks for the cool videos!

[johnnytruble]

It's amazing how some people cannot grasp the fact that Darwin is not the end all be all for evolution. Even if he thought every one of his ideas was ludicrous that still wouldn't change the amount of corroborating evidence that proves the theory. Which is a hell of a lot, enough that it is spread out over several fields of study.