Age of Wonder - Richard Fortey, March 29th 2014

well despite that extravagantly generous introduction i'm uh rather typical scientist in many ways because i'm very cautious um and i wave my arms in an extravagant way very rarely i have as you've heard written several books which are narrative books trying to express very well i hope what has happened in historical time deep historical time um but i thought i really would since this is a a festival about ideas and about new ideas and controversial ideas i thought i would air in front of you today some ideas i've been having about come on in please about the history of life and evolution which are not entirely conventional so whenever everyone's settled down we'll give them a couple of minutes um okay well i'll just tell you a little bit about me first um i've worked for many years a long time in the natural history museum in london which is a rather splendid high victorian building which houses the national collections of natural history specimens everybody knows the public side of a museum but if you go behind the scenes of course there are researchers hiding away working for decades to become experts on things sometimes on general theories of evolution but more specifically in this sort of museum on particular kinds of organisms and before i picked up my pen and started writing for the general reader i spent many years studying my organisms my favorite organisms and their fossils and they've been extinct for a very long time and they're called trilobites now this lecture is not about trilobites but it would be foolish of me not to mention them since they uh i've had such a long relationship with them they're an extinct group of arthropods joint-legged animals that were around for at least 250 million years and they were marine and they evolved in all kinds of different ways into all different sorts of ecological niches so um trilobites in a way we're a kind of paradigm in miniature for evolution as a whole in fact one of the books i wrote subsequently to the book that was referred to earlier was called trilobite eyewitness to evolution and eyewitness because the trilobites did actually have here here the first really well preserved eyes in the fossil record so this was a book about seeing the world the marine world through the eyes of a trilobite well you might imagine i don't suppose anybody here would be surprised to learn there aren't that many people in the world uh who spend their lives studying trilobites and loved them though i did i felt an urge at some stage to communicate with a wider audience which is why i started writing what might be called popular science books and the one that put me on the map i suppose which was referred to was this one that's what it was called published in england under that title life an unauthorized biography in america as always they changed the title to life a natural history of the first four billion years of life on earth and it was even translated into dutch i think under title 11 is that right well this was a readable account of the history of life from the first cell to humankind so it was a very broad canvas and of course it got me to thinking about the generalities of evolution i'd been concerned for several decades with the particularities of evolution but not the generalities so it got me to think more broadly which is always good and i suppose as i've got older i've thought broader and of course when you talk about evolution you have to go back to charles darwin there he is shown as an old man which is kind of everybody's image of darwin and it's rather hard to you have to remember that when he actually conceived of evolution he was young and vigorous and hadn't deter turned into you know the very image of the wise sage um well of course the subtitle of darwin's original work evolution was on the origins of species by natural selection or and there's the quote the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life now often that was replaced in the popular imagination by another phrase which is the survival of the fittest by the survival of the fittest now that was not delawan's phrase this is a very important point that was a phrase that was introduced in a book a textbook on biology by another man called herbert spencer five years after the publication of the origin of species but it seemed to be such a neat phrase that it became adopted as it were for any uh instant description of how evolution works i mean it is actually much more elegant and in in a nutshell to use the english phrase than the preservation of favored racism the struggle for life by means of natural selection um so you can see why that happened uh but in my reading of evolution um i think in some ways this has had unfortunate consequences and somewhat later on i will explain why but what it does obviously and almost immediately is i lead to the idea of progression that is the story of the history of life is a story of progression from one stage to the next stage and the next stage each stage being an advance on the previous one after all that's what we mean by these expressions um now that has become i think deeply ingrained in our own well now 21st century unconscious and was certainly there for most of the 20th century too and those of you who were here yesterday uh and heard the um lecture about the arrival of these super computers which will uh equal and then surpass human beings and maybe eventually kick them into into the trash can must have realized that this was actually itself this idea was strongly imbued with the idea of that's the next step in this logical progression it struck me very strongly when i was listening to those words last night so what i will do first i think is take you through what is the progression this is a kind of insult to the history of life in a way because you know with i'm doing in sort of ten minutes or quarter an hour what took four thousand million years to achieve um but it's gotta be done um if you want to see what the pre-cambrian world looks like back towards the beginning of the history of life this is a living image of it this is a place i visited a few years ago with my wife uh shark bay in western australia and those low mounds you can see here are alive they're not rocks uh they are called stromatolites and stromatolites are a living community of bacteria blue-green bacteria particularly uh some other types of algae among them and they don't do very much or they don't seem to do very much they're preserved in this particular part of australia thanks to some very special ecological conditions which have kept away all the animals virtually all the animals that evolved after the pre-cambrian it's very hyper saline it's very hot it's not a very pleasant place for life to be what it's done though is allowed the pre-cambrian world the world of billions of years ago to be reconstructed in a protected environment so this is a snapshot of life 2.5 billion years ago uh i'm not going to talk about the origins of life itself because that's a separate topic would take too long uh you'll have to accept the idea that at least by 3.5 billion years ago there were reproducing living cells we can find them as fossils but they're very rare by 2.5 now we know them quite well as fossils and many of them are found inside mounds looking much like these traumatoliths some of the fossils actually look like um whoops like these living blue-green algae actually i should call them cyanobacteria and it's very hard to tell the difference in some cases between three billion year old fossils and those still living admittedly they're pretty simple organisms they're simple threads but they have one enormously important property for the history of the planet to whit uh they are photosynthetic they photosynthesize they exhale oxygen they use carbon dioxide now when life first appeared on the earth the planet was extremely unfavorable to life it had an atmosphere with lots of carbon dioxide and probably a lot of poisonous gases besides also nitrogen uh but very little oxygen some people think no oxygen so it was the activity over billions of years of these algae these blue-green bacteria that transform the atmosphere from something that would be inimical to us that kill us instantly into something that animals could subsequently breathe so when i say that these simple cushions were the most important organisms in the history of life i'm not telling you a lie they were they made the rest of life that it's still with us possible of course some of these very very early even earlier organisms that die in the presence of oxygen are still with us living in crevices uh in the absence of oxygen around the world or deep smokers in the ocean and so on they never went away it's just that the oxygen loving things took over well we can fast forward at an absurd rate now these are simple a nucleate organism so-called prokaryotes a little bit later in the history of life organisms with organized nuclei appeared by a very interesting process of collaboration between different simpler organisms which i'm not going to explain in detail tonight and about 1.3 billion years ago that's still a long time ago the first sexually differentiated organisms are found in the fossil record uh this is one or this had the record this is called bango morpha that's extremely similar to a living brown alga called bangya which is sexually differentiated and as we all know once you differentiate uh the sexes you've got more possibility of cross-breeding and you've got more possibilities of variation and inherited variation and then darwin and the survival of the fittest can get to work so it ups the whole evolutionary stakes so so far we are talking definitely about progression even in quite a simple way about 540 million years ago we arrive at the base of the cambrian period um and it is here that my beloved trilobites appear in the fossil record now it's not i don't have to to say much to persuade you that that is an immensely more complicated organism than anything we've seen before it's furthermore recognizable as belonging to a living group of organisms the arthropods the jointed legged animals but sadly trilobites themselves are no more they died out as we'll hear about 250 million years ago that still gave them a pretty good run of 300 million years uh when we how long have we we've been around 100 000 200 at most so the trilobites did remarkably well um these were animals with hard parts they had the first toughened exoskeletons in this case whoops i meant to point not move the thing here you see the little bubbles on the surface here that shows how well preserved they are that's little little uh tubercles lying on the hard calcite exoskeleton of these trilobites if you picked up a trial about and bit it it would be decidedly crunchy uh and some animals at the time did do just that because we can find trilobites with bites taken out of them now that means already we have another step up in this story of complexity uh there were predators around at the time most of the earlier organisms were minute trilobites can be well the largest trilobites almost a meter long but most of them would fit comfortably into the palm of my hand so a very important thing happened at the base of the cambrian animals got large and they distinct the animals and they got hard parts some of them skeletons and that was a threshold which once crossed never went backwards so that is certainly progression by any um conventional measure but alongside the trilobites were other fossils um this is one of them from the famous cambrian burgess shale of canada which didn't have hard parts didn't have skeletons but were soft-bodied and one of the difficult things about the fossil record is finding places where you can see the whole fauna and not make assumptions about what there was but some things are very hard to preserve this is an animal called i shear and it's related to a charming animal still alive called the velvet worm paripetus but the point about this is that the cambrian one i and i could have taken many more examples for you is although marine is clearly related to the living one they share all kinds of features not least these funny antennae at the front and little stumpy legs made out of little rings that slot together now in the cambrian 540 million years ago and thereabouts most of the living fire the largest groups of animals that we know have their first representatives so evolution has done at that point it's usually referred to because it appeared to have happened fast as the cambrian evolutionary explosion um evolution worked very fast and produced designs which are still with us and again whichever way you look at it uh that is a progression but it is one that has set into motion the main animal groups that we have today so this is moving up the ladder of life if you like very fast indeed there were even ancestors in the cambrian of our own group and these have only just been recognized in the last year or two it used to be thought that the vertebrates us lot were an exception they weren't there in the cambrian but in fact ancestors of this lovely um living lamprey uh were already present there in the cambrian so a lot of evolutionary work had been done already 540 million years ago but life so far was fully marine and in the sea but it wasn't long before life found its way onto land now each time this each of these thresholds that was crossed of course made for a new ecology and that's progression two of a kind uh these were the trail blazers um this is of course a living one but fossil ones are known a liverwort simply crawls over the surface of wet mud but the green pads which have very little internal support are photosynthesizing and therefore releasing yet more oxygen into the atmosphere and as that happened it made it more suitable for terrestrial animals to follow them on to the land so that's certainly progression now when you go on to land you're opening up a whole new environment the possibilities for evolution are prolific so that's the creation of a new ecosystem and that's certainly progression if you want to see the next stage something like that here we're not just crawling on the ground we're moving upwards if you're focused in photosynthesizing pad one way to get it over your neighbors is to grow upwards and it wasn't didn't take long before the plants learned the secret of this uh now it won't have escaped your attention as i've been wittering on that these animals that i'm showing you and plants that i'm showing you are actually not just fossils they're still with us so the first qualification to the idea of progression uh is that when organisms evolve as it were to the next stage they don't uh the ones in the earlier stage don't die out they don't disappear they actually are still with us they they have a niche that um um it that enables them to survive and a few years the last book i wrote in fact was a book called survivors which was about the organisms that time had left behind um so this we already see that the simple idea of progression of one thing giving rise to another which out competes the earlier one which then replaces it which goes on to the next stage and so on and so forth is already seen to be not an adequate description of what really happens in the world those blue green bacteria are still with us they're ubiquitous if you put a jar on the window ledge and leave it in the sunshine it will turn green and it'll be those guys if you put some mud out uh on your back door and let the rain rain on it for a bit and keep it out of the sunshine you will find liverworts growing on it the opportunities are still there this past is still with us so life moves on but the history is retained not all things like my friends the trilobites of course but many things and of course the next stage is to support that photosynthesizing column and carry it upwards to make a tree this happens to be ginkgo which is another of those famous survivors this comes through from the age of the dinosaurs but the tree habit if i can describe it like that was something that was acquired a long time before this i just chose this particular example um well the plants led the way the animals followed and very shortly and the first animals were tiny little insects or insect relatives and of course where the insects went there were things that like to eat insects and ultimately our own ancestors most distant ancestors the first quadrupeds the first four-legged animals came from their fishy relatives in the sea onto land well do we have any of those fishy relatives still living yes we do the australian lungfish neoceratodus is generally reckoned now by uh both zoologists and dna studies to lie closest to our tetrapod relatives that came out from the sea or at least on from brackish water onto land um well it does look a bit primitive it's got no um bony skeleton at all it's entirely cartilage and i was privileged to to hang on to a big six foot long one when i was in australia a few years ago and it's quite an unusual sensation it's like um uh like holding some sort of alien creature in a way because it kind of wiggles around but it's a wonderful survivor but sometime possibly during the devonian period more than 400 million years ago it came out onto land now one of the great things that's happened to paleontology my own particular field in the last few years is that people have gone out to look for what you might call missing links and actually found them and this is an extremely satisfactory one um uh called tiktaalik which was found in the canadian arctic whoops okay i'm doing this um that's what i want um the problem is a fin doesn't look much like a hand uh and when you're going on to land you something you want something that can turn into a hand if i can put it like that and that fossil was always missing until tiktaalik came along uh which has this rather complex series of bones in the feet that form a very satisfactory halfway point as it were between a fin and a load-bearing hand i might say some of these early vertebrates that came on to land had seven digits or six digits and not r5 and if one of those had succeeded in um giving rise to descendants rather than the five-fingered ones uh you know we might all be playing the piano with 12 fingers it might have been an improvement who knows um this is a sort of rather odd flattened uh animal that's what it that's a reconstruction of it which is almost certainly a predator so we've already got really the sort of structure ecological structure that you might say applies today you've got prey you've got predators you've got plants you've got tall plants you've got low plants it didn't take long for that ecology to establish itself but we can still talk within the progression paradigm paradigm of a progression to a next stage another threshold crossed new ecologists created so it all sounds rather linear if i can put it like that so let's fast forward to the age of the dinosaurs everybody's favorite fossils the terrestrial animals continue to evolve and famously get larger and the dinosaurs were simply the top tier of a very complex ecosystem which in many ways was rather like our own as well as large dinosaurs obviously the meat eaters and the large herbivores lower down the food chain they were insectivores some of them dinosaurs some of them early mammals and the whole kind of botanical situation that you'd expect today but no flowering plants some of those dinosaurs went on to develop the fur the feathery covering that has now only recently been discovered from mostly in china even tyrannosaurus rex you know the fiercest of all dinosaurs had a fine fuzz of feathers rather take it sort of takes away its beastly kind of fearsomeness doesn't it somehow but i wouldn't have patted one if i were you um however one group of these dinosaurs went on to give rise to the birds and it had already this particular threshold had been crossed of course several times earlier by reptiles this is the threshold from the ground to the air another tier in evolution in this progression and i've just chosen to show one of the birds that wasn't so lucky uh the dodo as the first emblem of extinction about which i'll be talking shortly well the birds which evolved at the same time as the dinosaurs from the dinosaurs did not die out when the dinosaurs died out uh and of course are still with us and prolific even today um those small insect eating mammals after the extinction of the dinosaurs gave rise to large herbivorous dinosaurs and large predatory did i say dinosaurs dinosaurs to large herbivorous mammals uh and to large carnivorous mammals that preyed on them uh bison is merely one of them um the bison itself of course being a a survivor from the last ice age um which did not die out with its ice age compatriots no thanks to us and then of course we go the final step up this rather diagrammatic idea of progression to an animal that not only is a mammal but is one that has this fabled consciousness and high intelligence that we've been hearing so much about over the last couple of days and in paleontology and biology you know we have uh something called a type specimen when you describe a new species which i've done many times you're allowed to give it a latin name which is a great privilege you can name really nasty things after the people you don't like and really beautiful things after things you people you do like and the specimen on which it's based is called a type specimen or holotype so if you wanted to have you know the holotype the type specimen for the brainy intelligent human being who would you choose well darwin may be but einstein almost certainly so that is our sort of linear line of progression from the first cell to the intelligent human being and i would think that uh um you know if we followed that line of argument yesterday um nick bostrom would have said well the next stage is obviously the supercomputer that takes the brain element further into its next stage it's the next dot on on what looks to be rather a straight line or maybe it's a um an exponential line anyway it's another point on the graph um i don't think however that's an adequate description of what really go what evolution really does and i'll now explain why i hope um if that was simply an upward and upward story uh that would be fine but of course it's not the history of life has been punctuated by mass extinctions this is a these are times when all bets were off when hundreds of species sometimes millions of species became extinct within a very short period of time most people know something about the so-called katie or event the the extinction event that brought around the demise of the dinosaurs and many other organisms besides but there were other mass extinctions one of them at least at the end of the permian period still more extreme now these were times when all bets were off the normal rules of progression if you like were suspended uh like the survival of one of these events may have been a lottery just luck or it may have been some quality that i'm going to put this terribly teleologically maybe some quality that you didn't know you possessed or come it would come in useful until the crisis time arrived let's suppose for example that you happen to have a very very long gestation period at this time that might prove to be the thing that gets you through let's suppose that you can eat seeds uh or hard food that can remain dormant in the soil for a long time it might be that quality that gets you through the extinction event none of these animals beforehand or plants could say to themselves aha this will come in useful when the meteorite arrives uh so um there was certainly an element of serendipity in the organisms that pass through the kt event took out dinosaurs it took out other organisms in the sea it reset life and conventionally at least it gave the mammals a chance to evolve into the fauna we have today including ourselves what it certainly did and this is again part of the progression line if i took the whole story from the first cell to us i think i wouldn't be telling a lie if i said that smartness brain power did increase in general that mammals as a whole are smarter than reptiles as a whole metabolic rate also increased say between the reptiles and the mammals this has a cost because because we have to eat more so there are certainly some progressive at the largest scale some progressive aspects to what happened in spite of these interruptions the biggest one that's not a terribly informative slide was at the end of the permian period when about 250 million years ago when all the continents were united as a single drown partially drowned continent pangaea and the oceans that covered the rest of the world went very seriously anoxic and there was an extremely nasty um and long-lived violent eruption in what is now siberia of volcanic gas and these effects together produce the biggest extinction the world has seen 90 percent of organisms of species probably went all of which um that's the ammonite that went at the end of the cretaceous not just big serious things like dinosaurs disappeared but some very large prolific groups like the ammonites and at the earlier event my beloved trilobites went out too well the one thing these extinction events do which is the brings me to the main part of my talk in a way apart from resetting the clock is they gave a chance for evolution the survivors to re-evolve uh to regenerate ecologies now i've talked about some of those ecologies um and how they appeared for the first time but the point is that they didn't appear only once they appeared several times and every time a mass extinction has intervened evolution has as it were filled up the gap afterwards and it's very often filled up the gap with a very rapid period of evolution almost like the cambrian explosion where the ecology reasserts itself and uh i think this is the sort of neglected fact about the history of life which is probably more relevant to us than this slow and rather attractive idea of progressive progression of everything leading up to us in a sense like the old chain of being and perhaps onwards to some super organism um let's explain what i mean with a couple of examples i can't do many because we take too long you all know what that is it's a coral reef a living coral reef and in the sea at least that's taken as a paradigm for the biologically varied community we all know that the number of species on a coral reef per square kilometer is greater probably than in any other marine habitat in the world it's a byword for richness it's not just corals you've got clans you've got fish you've got worms you've got sea urchins all the filer the animal filer that appeared in the cambrian go berserk as far as species are concerned on coral reefs it's a very biologically rich or biodiverse to use the common word habitat and you might think it was rather unique in present day it's often presented on television as if it were unique well it's not unique the reef habitat goes back in geological time for hundreds of millions of years in fact it goes back not just past one mass extinction but past four the first reefs and at each stage the reefs die out completely but shortly afterwards i'm i'm using the words correctly here they re-evolve the ecology re-evolves and not only that as far as we can see it's immensely rich in each case so evolution very rapidly produces fills all the niches and the natural state of the coral reef is species rich i'll just show you to show you i'm not making it up that's um i hope you can see in the middle there a kind of lump this is in morocco it's a 400 million year old coral reef and if you went into that coral reef you wouldn't you'd think that they might be the same sort of corals that you've got living today they're not remotely related they just happen to look the same because they're doing the same coral reefy job that's a drawing of that sort of reef and you'll see lurking i hope you'll see lurking there number nine most important organism the trilobite and but making up the frame of the reef are these corals and there are nautiloids but they're straight nautiloids not like the curly ones we've got today and sea lilies of a kind that don't exist and those corals although they look like corals and they smell like corals are not actually the same group of corals that we have forming reefs today but i suspect that those reefs were as biodiverse then as they are now i've got probably a dozen examples of these through time but i'm only going to give you a couple if you fast forward to the time just after the extinction of the dinosaurs you've already had two extinctions between before that between that last reef and reefs have re-evolved twice more and this is one that's going the ancestor of our own present-day reefs and it's got different corals different uh other sorts of organisms different sorts of snails crawling about but you'd look at that and you say my goodness that's certainly a coral reef um all the actors have changed but the play goes on somebody once rather beautifully put it now um i'll take another example this is a typical woodland in the south of england where i live trees in this case mostly beech trees uh with an whoops with understory plants here uh and ferns and another survivor from the carboniferous in fact forming the ground story in this particular habitat you can go around the world and find similar habitats but as i think i've already mentioned this ecosystem this structure uh had evolved certainly by 350 million years ago most of us are aware of the coal forests in the carboniferous period more than 300 million years ago that produced ultimately uh coal deposits that were the foundation of the industrial revolution in europe and you might say the beginning of the anthropocene and uh carbon dioxide pollution of the planet but the point is the structure of those forests is not so different from that of the forest near my home they're trees that reach up into the light there's a middle story there's an understory it happens to be a whole lot wetter in these carboniferous ones and it's extremely species-rich but not so species-rich as the living recent tropical rainforest this happens to be taken in ecuador which where we went a few years ago which of course almost defies you in its complexity there are so many species there each with their own particular niches and it is the richest habitat probably on earth but i've taken the richest habitats because they're the they make the point most clearly but i think you could you could probably replicate my our argument with most of the major habitats on earth they are very rich in species and after an extinction event they restock and become rich in species again uh now what's wrong or how does that seem not to fit in with my first account of the survival of the fittest you see if you if and many experimental zoologists do this too uh the notion should be that if you've got something that's very good at a particular task in nature it will out-compete the other species so instead of getting this kind of fantastic enrichment you would expect much more of a one species takes all situation but actually when it works out on the ground when natural selection is allowed to play out under natural circumstances which i regard these events after the mass extinction events as kind of um what should we say test cases if you like but natural experiments people say you can't do experiments experimental science with history or historical science well you can in a way because each of these extinction events allows life to replay itself you know in a sense and it replaces itself always towards saturation of species not the dominance of one or two after a very short period just after the extinction event where sometimes in some rock sections around the world you get mysterious and horrible boring rocks with only two sorts of fossils in but after that richness comes back so this is the end product of evolution as it really works the huge incomparable this is just the beatles huge incomparable diversity of organisms we have on the planet um almost any specialist working in natural history museum course will witter on about their trilobites or their beetles or whatever i happen to also be very interested by by fungi so i thought i'd show you some of those as well these i might say are silent partners in my story because we know they were there because they have intimate relationships with other organisms but you very very very seldom find fossils now i might i should tell you in case you don't know that conventional wisdom has it that the most biodiverse organisms on earth are the beetles but recent molecular work is suggesting these chaps the fungi might actually be even more diverse than the beetles in fact every beetle might have its own fungus and many trees anybody that's tried to grow oak trees or something will know that there are many fungi that you find only on oak trees so my bottom line is i suppose that yes there is a progression in life which i've described in the broadest possible terms from a single cell to einstein but the way evolution works out on the ground in the natural habitat if natural selection is allowed to work as darwin said the preservation of the favored races results in large numbers of species biodiversity and this sort of thing now i wasn't quite sure what to do with this notion but i thought i'd explore it some more because one of the difficulties scientists have and we've seen it several times at this conference is imputing value human value or moral value to the stuff they do and generally speaking we fight shy of it and i'm certainly no exception to that if you read my books you won't find anything about it at all i don't think but with the examples i've given you and many other that have occurred to me uh it did seem to me that one might say and this is a moral statement that the way the world is supposed to be is like this it's not supposed to be the dominance of just one or two species now i've had conversations with people perhaps some you i hope there's nobody like this here but there might be who've simply said to me we now are as you know in a period where we are decimating perhaps more the biodiversity of the planet we're putting species extinct very fast and if we're not making them extinct we're reducing their numbers to almost zoological garden proportions you know come and see the last six black rhinoceros they're breeding quite nicely thank you um now i had i've had a feeling as a biologist for a long time uh that this this is morally wrong uh but it's very hard if you're talking to a skeptic to get them to agree with you i mean they will say something like and i parody not much uh i don't care if a whole lot of beetles go extinct in in fiji you know what does that do to me i don't really care why should i worry about a small south american rodent and indeed extinction does happen naturally so one can't say let's stop the time let's stop time and have no extinction at all always has done otherwise not just at mass extinctions uh at ordinary times as well but i think if you can say as a precept that the state of nature that should be is one that maximizes richness that's that's the term i'm going to use for reasons you'll understand then you have a moral ground for saying uh why what we're doing is wrong the right state of the world is this rich one and we're going against it as for what drives evolution as in the uh the progressive sense i particularly like a work published a few years ago by great dutch biologist called vermeil who pointed out that a lot of this speciation richness is generated by uh antagonism between prey species and the prey er if a prey species if a prayer losing uses a new technique evolution favors the prey that can evolve away from that technique he used being a mollusk expert he used the examples of crabs that learned to bake through crab shell through mollusk shells which result in a dramatic increase of spike in spiny and thick shelled mollusks the two operating and of course then you have a thicker claw too still and then you get a thicker shell mollusk too and so on and he used many many examples of this happening through geological time and i'm sure he was right that this richness or tendency towards richness is driven by these kind of interactions all right that leads me to the to the kind of uh a summary of richness and when i'm now from now on i'm going to explore its implications which is when i get a bit nervous uh first of all of course it's got nothing to do with money um and i've said already that's the end result of natural selection operating through a geological time that is we don't get a one species takes all situation we get richness i don't want to just use the word biodiversity because it's much more than that biodiversity just means the sum of the animals really or some of the organisms uh i think we have to work into it the ecology and indeed uh the geology because a tremendous amount of the of what goes on in the world is actually dictated fundamentally by a geological underpinning you don't find the same sorts of organisms on granite as you find on limestone you don't find the same organisms on limestone as you find on clay the two netherlands well mars and sand yeah but they must have different floras and faunas the next statement is obvious it's what i just said if allowed to play out under natural circumstances that is not being interfered with major extinctions it will the richness will rise and it's not just rain forests and coral reefs you can turn over a rotting log on a forest floor which i did i recently bought a wood and uh we've been exploring the biodiversity in an ordinary southern english wood and under one rotting log you can find probably hundreds of species all living there in a complex web of interdependence which is richness and that's where the moral statement comes in it's the way the natural world is and that's a description and should be that's my putting a value on it and then we'll come to that at the end because the point here the the next the next point or the next stage in the argument would be well we humans are of course just another species so if you can apply this ideas of of of richness to the natural world to ecosystems to rainforests to coral reefs even rotting logs maybe it's not so irrational to apply it to human beings as well and to weigh to the way our societies operate as well perhaps we in society human societies should also regard richness however you define it as a desirable end right we'll come back to some of those points that's just the simplest possible geological map of britain and ireland uh the different colors of different rocks and superimposed on everything i've been talking about is this kind of geological underlay uh which applied globally of course it's extraordinarily important so i would add to the biodiversity aspect something called geodiversity at the most human level of course it immediately reflected or is reflected in such things as our in britain geo-diverse landscape yields wonderful heterogeneous towns like this that grow out of the local geology and which most people find aesthetically pleasing okay well now i'm going to go from my logical argument which i hope you find logical to what i call the misapplication of darwinism and this is particularly when survival of the fitness of the fittest uh is misapplied in what i think is the wrong situation i call it the win of winner takes all justification um and particularly which we hear these days all the time and this is where i know i'm treading on to extreme quagmire and i can claim no particular personal expertise uh but that's what this meeting is supposed to be about isn't it um i've been thinking about in particular with a lot of statements that we hear certainly in britain and i wouldn't be surprised here in holland on the netherlands as well uh you equating the market as uh as if it were a darwin darwinistic phenomenon um we famously had a prime minister of whom you all have heard margaret thatcher and when talking about market forces she famously said there is no alternative there's a flat statement what she meant was that communism had failed which i suppose it had and therefore the other model for human existence had to be led by the market and poor old darwin and the human brain have a lot to answer for well how does this work out i've forgotten now right let's go now to think about the market and the corporate business model for the market now i i just would trawl through the newspapers to see what i could find and whether the phrases i found were consistent with this notion of uh the market must be darwinistic right now if you if none of these streets ring any bells with you i'd be surprised uh we must adapt or die um companies usually going through a difficult time use this sort of language hilariously we mustn't be dinosaurs uh that's used almost as a common place phrase for uh well we're not very well adapted uh we must immediately get on to do something new and be different well of course the dinosaurs didn't die out because they weren't adapted they were superbly well adapted they died out because of an extraneous event the arrival of a very large meteoritic body the growth idea we must continue to grow or will cease to be profitable competition is threatening our market niche i.e we must eliminate the competition by usually swallowing the competition up that doesn't lead to richness uh it's a jungle out there you've come across that one uh even the language which we very often hear of one large company or corporation taking over other large companies or corporation they use the words the language is the giveaway they talk about launching an accret aggressive takeover bid they go out out there hunting and they gobble them up as for what we say confinement to natural ecology the brand is can never be big enough it wants to go global um so as it goes global of course all that local variation what i would call richness is lost so you can see why i needed a general term like richness because it embraced rather more than just the animals under a rotting log uh and then there's the managing director or chairman saying there will soon be a starbucks or whatever you like on every street corner which is unfortunately true but it's also a diminution of richness at the local level because of all those nice little coffee shops that disappear and of course the sky is the limit which mostly means the pay packets of the people in charge of these organizations but not us so there we are that's my rather provocative view of the misinterpretation of darwinism as applied in the market business model and the corporate model which dominates uh so much of western european or indeed global thinking these days how did it get there well i guess that the model in the business man's mind is something like that of what has happened to our squirrel population this may not apply in the netherlands i don't know enough about it but we used to have in southern england the rather charming little red squirrel in some abundance my wife remembers when they were on her farm in southern england uh and the american vader comes in the grey squirrel uh um it's extremely clever it's much more aggressive than the red squirrel it even i believe brings with it a bit of a nasty disease it's a much more successful animal it has done a takeover bid rather like starbucks there's now a grey squirrel on every street corner and the poor old red squirrel is probably up where you are up in sky still expect i'd love where i think we had to go can you remember we went to take the photograph of this one aberdeen show yes that's right but i suspect this kind of model is the the winner takes all model is the one that lies behind this kind of misinterpretation of the darwinian process as applied to a lot of human activities and people rather easily say it has the status of natural law of darwinism misused that you know one group or company or whatever out competes its rivals and well there's got to be one winner hasn't there uh and so i should be paid accordingly what it is of course in my terms is a violation of the principle of richness that the good state because i've applied a moral judgment to it which i'm probably entitled to but possibly not the good state is a proliferation of many products and many places to make life as rich as possible so another working example like the grey squirrel the end product of the capitalism i've described is nearly always very similar what it is is you get a reduction in richness which eventually relies or results in a perhaps a duopoly not usually a monopoly of two companies with a very very similar product that have eaten up all the other companies and then uh um have to sell one another on superficial difference this is coca-cola is anybody from coca-cola here no good signing be as rude as i like um the the point is these are coca-cola bottles from around the world they have subtle differences um they're the what coke has replaced what were originally local brands with this one for example is i think an indian one that used to have its own drink called thumbs up and lurking in the background there yes we actually have a pepsi bottle and uh if you i mean anybody can really tell coke from pepsi they'll all put you no yes definitely we have one definite taker but it's two but um they are whichever way you look at it they're very similar products and if you look at the whole coke line there are there's sprite and there's was it seven up i can't remember seven up okay sprite's the other one isn't it yeah seven up and sprite virtually identical the whole line of these two companies which are the mega companies in soft drinks uh have a kind of one for one correspondence and the only difference is in the amount they spend on advertising as we know the cost of the contents of the bottle is negligible so that is my the end product of this what we say the the the way that capitalism and other things can proceed to minimize richness are there other examples yes i think the wine industry the wine industry is the opposite this if you like is the coral reef this was just one small section that we happen to take just before we came here for the purposes of this talk which as i've said i've never dared to give before and well you all know right wine shops there are infinite varieties of apparently infant varieties of wine to choose from many of them are small businesses they occur in all parts of the world to the winemaker the word tebowa which is geodiversity of course is extremely important so these are you know these are species actively evolving actively changing which add i think to richness and therefore on the moral criteria that i've devised are a good thing and of course like coming to the netherlands i have to show beer as well um and there has been a revival in what you might call small breweries in britain uh which has been very welcome which is a reassertion strangely of richness because we had a during the 60s and 70s we had very aggressive takeover campaigns of small breweries by the large companies and we were danged in danger of getting down to about two species just like coke and pepsi of beer carlsberg and tuborg have already done it in denmark uh but um uh there's been a reaction we now have something resembling a rainforest again uh well i don't have to labor the point i'm sure you can think of other examples in your own mind i've mentioned coffee and you can probably apply it to cars you can apply it to many many aspects of the capitalist system now that is not i don't want you to think that i am anti-business anti-capitalist here because as i've said here there is a phase where the creative side of capitalism results in innovativeness new things variety it's that evolutionary process that made the coral reef so rich it's just something goes wrong with the process later on which results ultimately in diminution of richness and that's where i think mrs thatcher was wrong because it's simplifying the problem grotesquely but i when i as a student uh research student i went to the former soviet union a number of times a couple of times and the you know the worst thing about it in some ways was not the command economy in by itself which was another way of reducing richness by the way but with the fact that people's lives were so incredibly dull there was very little richness in their lives and i think that ultimately um the command economy didn't help but you could say that that lack of richness in people's lives was one of the things that accelerated the fall of communism it wasn't necessarily just down to karl marx and flaws in his philosophical systems um okay so does this concept have any use um well i've said already that it reinforced the idea to me reinforces our connection to the natural world so if this richness isn't a real idea with any legs it should include us um it does give me a base or basis for arguing a moral reason why it is wrong for human beings now to make species extinct the world will get a much less rich place if we carry on as we have been maybe it's too late um the concept i think allows for visions at least of of um economies like the brewing the wine they have to make money of course but they could operate on somewhat different rules from the ones of just maximizing profits for shareholders maybe they could look at the results of the variety of outputs as a measure of success rather than just um the yielding of profits what this boils down to everything i've said is that it there's it's i'm trying to argue for what isaiah berlin for example would have called pluralism the non-monopolistic view of government and human welfare um i wonder just how how far i could take it of course um and uh the answer is too far um but i was thinking about it even just a few days ago uh we in britain we've had a long uh a very vigorous what you might call anti-religious or at least anti-god campaign by my colleague richard dawkins christopher hitchens various others who kind of blamed belief in god on a lot of the bad things that happened in the world it occurs to me that if you actually take the richness view you have to ask the question of whether god does or does not exist is not actually relevant the relevant question is is richness increased by the presence of religions in society and i think the answer to that is yes but then you have to go further to say well what goes wrong then that turns and there's so many examples to enumerate the terms religious wars and so on into the damaging things that they are and the answer of course is usually in fact invariably that one of the religious groups believes they alone or their book has all the answers and this makes them oppress the others in other words they're concerned with reducing richness so if you apply my principle i don't care and i don't really know whether god does or does not exist but if you apply the idea of maximizing richness you've got a moral basis for pluralism and for a more tolerant society this brings us to one of the nubs of the matter whichever way you cut it human numbers are increasing they've now passed seven billion um it's too many and uh one of the things i've also noticed at this meeting is it's something that's mentioned but usually glossed over if i don't i think we're going to be feeding seven billion people with shrinking resources how are we going to build supercomputers take off to the to the stars i think we've got more important things to do uh but if we were to maximize richness it might actually provide some sort of moral argument for um cutting our population to a a point where ecologists could really be supported at the moment we're just chipping away at them slowly every generation which leads me to my last question the answer which is yes is it too utopian almost certainly but then you new ideas i think it is a new idea often are somewhat utopian anyway so just to finish up i think um uh so there's our model for richness a rainforest and here as always is the hero but the hero i think is somebody who has been misinterpreted and this has led us to claim for darwin things that darwin himself would never claim and partly at least that was because of the hijacking of the phrase uh the survival of the fittest as a kind of a good thing a moral criterion i think richness probably provides a better one on which point i will shut up thank you if anybody has a question or remark i will keep the microphone hand over the microphone to you thank you this very wonderful presentation um i'm not a biologist i'm just curious with evolution as a whole idea and you've mentioned uh on your presentation about how how evolution is also can be applied to this at the market where non-non-living non-biological evolution and you've also mentioned about uh richard dawkins with i've read of uh the selfish gene of the mimetics and everything i'm not i've just actually quite a few books that i've read but i mean that's very interesting ideas that evolution can also be applied to non non biological uh living being and how what's your view on that and how how yeah i mean just well i thought you feeling a lot of what dawkins has done has been to defend the idea that the gene is the operating unit for evolution rather than necessarily the species and i don't think i would dispute that the i think he has a very mechanistic view of the way evolution operates in the world and he himself is not as he would be the first to admit somebody who's very interested in species and in biological interactions he's essentially a person who likes to see take the single organism apart and see how it works um so perhaps we come from a slightly different philosophical position as for the god thing well that was something that occurred to me only recently um and in dawkins and his friends case it's because they like to be seen although they do regard themselves as a reductionist as reductionist scientists they like to get things down to basic physical physics and chemistry um and he would probably dislike this because it would be in his eyes anti-reductionist but i think that there is a difference between um how a single organism behaves and the way evolution acts out in nature the literature is absolutely stuffed with examples of setting up artificial experiments where you allow two species to compete with one another under various initial conditions the result is always something you can measure and will show the advantage of one species over another but the fact is if you leave evolution alone and let it work out as you did after the extinction events then the result is a proliferation of species and the increase in richness so experimental time is not geological time i was really fascinated by your story thank you and i uh i was getting great comfort in a way from uh the examples uk of uh the earth the ecosystems regenerating themselves i'm personally not very optimistic about the chances of mankind to to turn in the right direction again but your story seems to suggest that even if we continue our sixth extinction as you say i'm sure we'll go down uh along with it um but ecosystems will recover yeah i think that's right i do think that's right i mean if we if we probably deservedly don't survive as a species yeah there will be a we've done poisoned enough of the oceans already for example for there to be a big period of recovery but by a big period might mean a million years which is not much in geological time uh it's the thickness of a of a rock bed perhaps rather typically um but it's nothing if you think of you know geological geological time high cliffs yes i'm sure that those ecologists will reassert themselves in our absence and i was also further wondering a question for you maybe whether you've speculated at all about the implications perhaps were extraterrestrial life you're saying that after extinctions similar ecosystems arrive right on earth um could you extrapolate that to potential other planets where similar kind of struck that are sort of a kind of structure that would evolve well i can only i can there's an awful lot of speculation about what happens on other planets and that every year that gets more as more earth-like planets are discovered but we've yet to receive any positive evidence for extraterrestrial life that everybody believes in and i think would be rather foolish for me to speculate on ecologies uh on other planets when i've been quite foolish enough about speculating on ours okay okay well my i think i'm going to ask something similar actually i was thinking wondered what you thought why is it because of our consciousness which is something that's also come up here in other lectures that is that the reason why we kind of fell out of the loop and stopped being part of everything ecological and what are the com the implications of that but it sounds like you think the implications are we might make ourselves extinct if we don't yeah it is a i mean there have been there have been phases in human history where the attitude to the natural world has been and this does sometimes arise from religion that it is there for our use and pleasure if we've gone back to the the original book on the age of wonder it was by a historian english historian called richard holmes it was about the 18th century particularly in the 18th century there was no concept of extinction it simply did not exist as an idea uh because the seas were full of fish uh the if you found the fossil the assumption then was made that it was still living somewhere else in the world the world was you know full to bursting by the mid 19th century uh people still had that attitude of the profusion of the earth but they would quite happily hunt species to extinction and if you believe some of my anthropological colleagues they think we've been doing that all along there are those who think that the arrival of human beings in north america for example uh resulted in the extinction of the mammal megafauna there hunted to death so we're a lethal little species but now you know this could be the time when we get a kind of an awareness of how we should relate to the rest of the natural world and let's hope it isn't too late but i think you know we simply wouldn't have given extinction a thought until the mid-1800s i i loved your talk um i i just want to know um how do you suggest that we control our population whilst increasing richness thank you for that question um i mean there is no question i mean no no civilized person can suggest um uh what we see mandatory means for controlling population um but i would say that there are i mean the first thing to say i don't know if it's true here in the netherlands but it's not on the political agenda that i've seen anywhere i've never heard a british polit politician mention is a problem though everybody knows it's the elephant in the room now it is possible to conceive of democratic acceptable procedures like you know tax breaks for smaller families or tax penalties for larger families which might push the boat in the right direction without being too punitive some of the methods of preserving natural richness are um well they're sort of in place but they reek of desperation that's it's the fencing off idea i mean the idea that you have of making the built environment part of of a richer total environment is rather a good one at the moment we seem to want to fence off and declare a wilderness area in the states for example uh this has sometimes been a disaster i i know quite a lot about for example national parks in australia and the national parks in australia at least one of one of them has actually witnessed a decline in the marsupial mammals that they were supposed to be helping simply because the australian government which is not most enlightened in the world generally regards it as primarily as a tourist resource so it's not about the animals or the ecology at all it's about giving people a good time and this after a film called crocodile dundee which some of you may have seen uh involves having lots of water buffalo around you might remember crocodile dundee wrestled one to the ground yeah so it's part of the tourist attraction water buffalo have an absolute disastrous effect on the local ecology there and should be taken out um i just i you know i think a lot of people don't get it and they don't get it on an emotional level because they think the natural world is there just there for them to have fun in now i'm hoping i'm you know and maybe it's ludicrous but i hope that this idea of of of nurturing the notion of richness could be something could be felt on an emotional level as well because as many people of this meeting have said you know it's all very well talking about the number of brain cells and the number of neurons that fire per millisecond but a very important part of the human being is the emotional side and if we're really going to to get to grips with these kinds of problems we've got to engage that through the mind with the emotional side too and that means making moral statements did i'm not aware that charles darwin talked about the cultural component in this whole yeah i'm afraid he did and i didn't want to mention that too much because um his traditional his usual way of he did have some expressions which you could infer regarded as as implying there was a scale of human kind of evolution he often refers to for example the savage mind and but it's easy to forget that at that time that was a very common way of expressing what was going on in primitive peoples although i think i'm sure he was basically a a um a compassionate man um so yeah i think some of the some of the stuff that he did on on humans has probably been abused yeah i mean one of the the outcomes of the concept of richness is that the amalgamation and blurring out of our regional and cultural and differences is obviously a diminution in richness so be an argument for cultural diversity as well um yeah that would be very much part of the argument like you rich i'm a huge fan of diversity richness and super abundance in general and you've pointed up an interesting paradox that sometimes when viewed at least in the economic realm which i'm not an expert it seemed to lead to the opposite to monolithic dominance of the market by one or two brands but at other times as in the wine case might lead to a proliferation of interesting new species and i was wondering if this is as much a paradox as that seems or whether it's actually to do with the the length of and breadth of view that one takes that even in evolution there might have been a moment at which if you'll excuse me for saying so one might have thought christ there's a lot of trilobites around any anybody got a nautilus like i get tired of all this um but in the long run of course there's been lots of other species and so it doesn't look quite so monolithic you know what i mean it might be one of those things that looks on the short scale like a problem but actually isn't over a longer one um coca-cola will go you know that's the point coca-cola expends a tremendous amount of money and skillful advertising expertise on trying to make sure it won't go i mean i think you pro you might be right but i mean just to go return to the the facts of the fossil record again briefly uh after the big extinction of permian the terrestrial uh vertebrates were tremendously reduced and for a brief period i think that it's recently been up to three genera that's just three sorts of vertebrates which were free actually at that time for the turn only time in human history to walk from one end of the earth to the other because it was a single continent actually diversity is helped by continents splitting apart into separate continents but those were the basis for the subsequent explosion in diversity so that was a moment when you could have said uh too many too many specimens of this one reptile you know can't we have something more interesting but leave it leave it to play out in geological time and that's exactly what you get every time well when i say every time we've had five experiments but that's quite good for history ladies and gentlemen oh okay you get the last question and then we have to quit because some of you maybe want to call the performance and we want to finish in time so you can go there so the last question coming up yeah uh i just want to ask about cultural extinction what do you think about cultural extinction affecting or of illusion as a global you mean the extinction of cultures yes yes well i mean it should be obvious that if my axiom is correct you know if richness is a good thing then the extinction of cultures is a tragedy and you can't have too many different cultures and the imposition of one culture on another of course which has happened many times in history and indeed is still happening in some parts of the world is if my principle is the moral principle then it's morally wrong simple as that um okay it's just because she's a special friend richard 40 that she will have the last question and then we really will i have more personal question where did your first nation for twilight started oh well that's um i i was um i was 14 lonnie asked when i first got interested in trilobites and i can say i was i was 14 on holiday in western wales uh when it where it rains a lot and i we had a local map and it just said on the map the cliffs jut out into the sea it said trilobites can be found here so i took a coal hammer and started bashing up rocks and i found my first trilobite and you know it was sort of love at first sight really so they will answer your question well thank you a lot mr forte

Channel: OpenWebcast

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Keywords: Age of Wonder, Baltan, Natlab, Richard Fortey

Id: YVVttzetyeY

Length: 90min 47sec (5447 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 03 2014