Top 5 Evolution Misconceptions

Evolutionary theory is often viewed as being controversial, but often the controversy is only due to a lack of understanding about the theory. Misconceptions about biological evolution are common even with teachers of evolution. How many of these misconceptions do you have?

#evolution #biology #clintexplains

[katelillo]

As someone who was raised in a jehovas witness family and has heard all of these misconceptions, I think this video is phenomenal 🤓

[myspiderungoliant]

2:50 This is the best explanation of why we may never encounter an extra-terrestrial species with an intellect equal to or greater than our own. Intelligence is not crucial for survival, unless a species uses intelligence as its means for survival (i.e. us). Planets that produce life are not guaranteed to produce a sentient species.

[drhexagonapus]

Evolution may just be the most commonly misunderstood phenomenon that everyone thinks they are an expert in

[lurpakspreadable]

In order to briefly summarise this video and these misconceptions, they can be ordered into 5 different criteria:

1. Handleability
2. Care
3. Hardiness
4. Availability
5. Upfront Costs

[joshwilson]

I love listening to an unbiased teacher (or at least one who removes his own biases before he begins teaching important concepts). Forget about your own beliefs for a second and just focus on the biology, there’s no reason that your religion or absence of religion should be affected by understanding biology, there’s no conflict between the two unless you choose to make one :)

[dustind]

Seriously the 'progress towards an end goal' thing drives me bonkers. Fitness, in biological terms, is basically 'lol whatever works'.

[loriw]

The most difficult 3 words for a Christian when discussing things like, how did life begin or what happened before the Big Bang or any other unknown scientific questions, are “I don’t know”. Sometimes the most honest answer is “I don’t know”. It’s NEVER “god did it”. For every unknown scientific question that has ever been answered, it’s been SCIENCE that provided that answer. It’s NEVER been a religion.

[Berendoever]

Evolution is not controversial.
In the same way the heliocentric model of our solar system is not controversial.

[jenniferloving]

Clint this is such a masterful, genuine, and kind explanation of a very contentious topic. You really are a master of your craft and frankly, stinkin' rad!

[clown]

Can't wait to show this to my pastor

[the-real-zpero]

I don't know if Clint will ever see this comment but I wanted to let everyone know that there is a whole field of engineering that takes inspiraton from evolution! (and other natural processes)
There are many "optimization algorythms" out there, and some are more primitive or more recent, and some have some benefits and some disadvantages. They can usually be classified into two huge categories: Gradient-Based and Non-Gradient-Based.

Gradient based are more limited because they can usually only handle a problem of optimization with a couple of variables, but they are typically very fast at coverging on the nearest solution. It's kind of like if you had a floor with many pits and valleys and you randomly dropped a marble somewhere. The marble will roll down to the nearest pit, but it probably won't find the deepest pit unless you dropped it next to that pit.

The other category is non-gradient, and these are the ones that tend to take inpiration from nature. Some of these, actually attemtp to simulate evolution, so if you have for example, a wing for an airplane that you want to optimize, you could represent that wing as potentially dozens of hundeds of variables, treat them like "genes" and then create an algorithm that "fills the space of possible solutions" evenly (usually Sobol-Space algorithm) and you use this as the starting population. Then you plug this in to some kind of simulation software to test each solution and see which ones are "stronger". The stronger ones mate, and so on. A very important part of the algorithm is the introduction of random mutations that are not inherited from the parents, and this is how the solution can "find" a new "pit" that was't previously known that goes has a more optimal solution than the previous "local solution" (if we're talking about a 3D surface, with pits and valleys, this these mutations allow the algorithm to find another valley that may end up being deeper.

There are other algorithms that simulate other things, like "Particle Swarm" which similates birds flocking to find resources, but with some individuals of the flock having a more "individualistic" behavior than encourages them to go explore new territory and so on.

The disadvantage of these is twofold:
A. You can't mathematically prove that you've found the best solution once you find one.
B. They take a long time to coverge on a solution, even if they're very close, because at the end of the day, it's a glorified trial and error method.

Sometimes people will combine two methods, so they might build into the algorithm a way for it to decide to switch over to a gradient based once the algorithm sees that the solutions are not "going in a new direction" for many generations, basically to speed up and finnish finding the "valley" quickly. But they can still switch back to non-gradient to keep looking for new solutions.

Keep in mind that the example of a valley is convinient but it is actually only three variables. You could make a problem with a hundred variables.

Sorry if anyone is an expert in this and they point out a mistake in my comment, I only took one course of it in university, but I learned a lot from it and found ir extremly interesting.

[kaitlynhiggins]

Wouldn't be amazing if schools, that teach evolution to everyone, actually bothered to STOP PROPEGATING THE MISCONCEPTIONS? I learned the misconceptions from teachers, I learned what evolution is suppose to be from books and critical thinking. But it raises the question: how long can something be misused before it ceases to be what it was originally meant to be? How long until it is JUST the misconceptions?

[CatFish]

"Progress to what?" If my dim recall of pop-sci is correct, it's progress towards evolving into crabs, not into humans.

[throckmortensnivel]

This video should be required viewing in schools from elementary on. The only thing I would add some stress to is the fact that evolution has no intent. In the English language, the word "adapt" can mean both intentional adaptation or unintentional adaptation. I think it is really important to stress the fact that in evolution, adaptation is not directed, it is a result of random changes in organisms, and random changes in environments. I think I would also add that plants evolve just as animals do, using DNA as the library of instructions. Anyhow, a great video!

[maxcovfefe]

My parents keep giving me Christian books to read that say "science is an illusion" that's meant to distract us from Heaven. Those books are sitting in a dark corner as I watch this. No drugs, no sex, no rock-n-roll at the moment, yet I feel kinda guilty.

[ItsMattF]

Such an important video! People need to see this as it clarifies things in a very easy to understand format and language. Thanks, Clint!

[upsettymachete]

2:45 life is instead composed of crabs and organisms that haven't yet become crabs but will one day

[berriblu]

I see that potatoes will remain potatoes and won't try to evolve to become more human-like.

[williamfowler]

I am very happy to see you taking on this topic. I have a very hard time explaining how I can believe both creationism and evolution to be true. While I know this isn't a religious channel this video follows my logic that bridges the two. Thank you sir and keep up the good work.

[haydenlucas]

I stayed up all night to be the first to your videos on your channels!