The Reality Check Episode 26

Evolution's History+Carbon Dating

The Origin of Species

Part 1:

The Reality Check is going to do a general introduction, explore various issues about evolution, a little bit about intelligence design, and evolution psychology. 

"If I were to given an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein. And everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. But it is not just a wonderful scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea." - Daniel Dennett

So we are going to look at the how the idea of natural selection came to be, and the argument of design. 

There are three main things that are required for evolution to occur. The first thing is heritability. Second is variety and diversity. Last is selection. If all three of these exists, then you can have natural selection. 

Darwin was deeply effected by Sir Charles Lyell's book called Principles of Geology. Big things can happen over time, and things that seems fixed can be changing. Another theory Darwin got into his head was populations will just grow unchecked until something checks them. Basically creatures' populations will just grow and grow unless something makes them die. This was where Darwin probably got the idea of natural selection. He probably thought since things can change only a tiny bit over a long period of time, why can't the population and species do so?

At first evolution was called transmutation. People thought we are all fixed and can only be changed by mutation. There were many small published articles anonymously, so people didn't really take notice, but when Darwin published it with his name, it held a lot of weight on his name. 

William Paley came out and said that when you come across a design of just anything magnificent or beautiful, you would think that there would have to be a designer. This was when he used natural selection to try and prove the existence of God. 

Now on to evolutionary psychology, it basically states that the brain evolved like all other organism, and the behavior we now have are influenced by the genes we had a long time ago.  

Whichever sex invests more in offsprings will tend to be more selective and thus the other sex will compete for their attention. 

So basically the Darwinian idea of natural selection provides a refutation to the argument from design and explanations on how organisms developed, why there are certain constraints, as evolution has no foresight and can only modify what is already produced, and the underlying biological framer which various cultures influence to produce us.

"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." - Charles Darwin (Origins of Species)

Part 2: 

For most people, we mostly think scientists use Carbon dating for all fossils and it's the best way. But, actually you can only use it to find the age of something that's around 6500 years old, anything older than that, you'll have to use another method. It's pretty much useless for really ancient stuff, such as dinosaurs, but it can be used for a big part of human history.