Baby Yoda doo doo doo doo doo doo doo Baby Yoda doo doo doo doo doo doo doo Baby Yoda doo doo doo doo doo doo Baby Yoda! Grandpa Yoda doo doo doo doo doo doo doo Grampy Yoda doo doo doo doo doo Grampy Yoda doo doo doo doo doo Grampy Yoda! Darth Vader doo doo doo doo doo doo Darth Vader doo doo doo doo doo doo Darth Vader doo doo doo doo doo doo Darth Vader! Forced cHoKiNg doo doo doo doo FoRcEd ChOkInG doo doo doo doo FoRcEd ChOkInG doo doo doo doo fOrCeD cHoKiNg I always hated that song... -_- [Film Theorists Theme] Hello Internet! Welcome to Film Theory The show that takes the Internet's most adorable meme obsession and then turns it into cold hard emotionless... LEARNING As much as, well, Empire heading up an intergalactic government. It's gotta be a hard job! It's at the retirement age to 55 and Yoda gets to retire before he can barely string a sentence together backwards "Do or do not, there is no try." But if you set the retirement age to like I don't know... 550! Han Solo's never gonna see his pension Don't wonder there was a rebellion against these guys! Now in case you aren't hip with the kids lately or didn't trample your loved ones And your rush to sign up for Disney+ I'm talking about... BABY YODA The tiny, cuddly, wobbly, bubba kins of the new Disney+ show, the Mandalorian. The baby version of a member of Yoda species who is in, one episode, already the most endearing character in this franchise Move aside Korg's! Get the boot Ewoks! Baby Yoda filled the void that you never could Baby Yoda is like cute ception, but the kicker is that by our standards? He's not even a baby The Mandalorian depicts him as a 50 year old toddler. "Their age. That's all you can give me?" "Yes, they're 50 years old." By Star Wars standards, that would make baby Yoda part of the Silent Generation By that, I mean the one that came before the baby boomers Which, of course in Star Wars, were all the babies that were born right after Alderaan went BOOM! Okay boomers, there's one less planet in the galaxy Listen! This topic hits really close to home for me because I currently own a toddler. You'll hear parents saying stuff Like I wish they could stay little forever But half a century of diaper changes is something no one is signing up for But all those diapers and memes got me thinking, 50 years is a really long time to be a baby A relatively, helpless baby and I'm saying that as a human the species with the longest adolescence on the planet So how does this insanely long childhood happen? And is there any way that 50 years of tummy time could be remotely plausible scientifically? Well, I started researching, as I do and it turns out that it's not just scientific precedent But an explanation here for almost everything that we know about the entire Yoda species That's right! Understanding the biology of baby Yoda isn't just a fun fact from The Mandalorian or me overthinking a sci-fi franchise But it's the single key to understanding the most beloved character in Star Wars history and why he, Yoda, by the time we get to the main series of movies is pretty much the only One of his species left I got to say between this theory And the last one I did over on Game Theory about Star Wars' force being pretty much scientifically accurate, which if you haven't watched you absolutely should after this episode I'm starting to think that George Lucas might secretly be a scientific genius Almost... let's not give him too much credit So join me! As I take a look into the evolutionary biology of baby Yoda and finally figure out why they're so cool and also, why they're practically extinct. Before we open your biology textbooks to chapter 5, we need to clear the air on one thing. No, I don't know the actual name of the species Yoda comes from but, you know what? I'm in good company because George Lucas didn't either. George Lucas specifically didn't want Yoda's species to have a name and rarely sanctioned work that revealed information about their Lord So even though the Yoda's species existed in places like Knights of the Old Republic the video game, Information about them doesn't appear in anything that's officially canon anymore So instead of spending this entire episode Saying the word Yoda and having to clarify between whether I'm talking about Yoda the species or Yoda the individual member of that species I'll instead be referring to the Yoda species as the Tridactyls because their extremities have three digits, right? But bear in mind that's really just a fan-made designation for all the members of the Yoda species that were currently aware of Which are just three... Honestly, you got original Yoda You got Yaddle, from the Phantom Menace who just appears for a couple seconds and baby Yoda Whatever his name ends up being from The Mandalorian So with that bit of housekeeping out of the way and with the very short list of actual known members of the Yoda species, what do we know about the Tridactyls? We know that Yoda lived to the ripe old age of 900 in Return of the Jedi, which everyone else was surprised about but he isn't. Seeming to indicate that it's not really that big of a deal for him. Baby Yoda, who's just stuck with that name for this episode I guess, is 50 but functionally he's about at 10 months old, if my kid is any indication He's nonverbal, but he is capable of walking and getting into trouble So we know as a Tridactyl, you get 900 years in the galaxy on the high end but at least the first 50 of them, are spent as a baby Which I guess leaves like a 100 to make it through high school Another 200 years of living in your parents basement before finally getting your own apartment At the tender age of 300 now, because we're working in outer space and in a fictional franchise, it's worth double-checking when they say that baby Yoda is 50 years old in the Mandalorian Does that translate to years as we understand them here on earth and it appears like it does? according to Wikipedia the Republic's standardized It's time based on Coruscant which conveniently rotates its son exactly once every 365 course auntie in days which are broken down themselves into 24-hour increments and then minutes that are incredibly close to our own minutes. So when Yoda says that he's 900 years old It's pretty close to what we think nine hundred years is and the Mandalorian has every reason to be surprised that his 50 year old Mark was still a baby So knowing that it's time to talk about the biology Having such a long development period is more than just an interesting evolutionary quirk It actually tells us a lot about how try dactyls may have evolved over time mostly because it parallels a lot of our own human evolution You see most animals evolved to shorten the amount of time between birth and reproductive maturity so that they can go on and grow their Population as fast as possible, but that's not the only successful evolutionary strategy You may have noticed that us humans have incredibly long and particularly vulnerable childhoods When a baby giraffe is born, it can stand almost almost almost Right away ~its sho kyoot!~ Humans on the other hand not so much it is taking months If not a year for a baby human to actually get up on its feet So why do humans the smartest animals on the planet come out so useless? Well, it turns out that the whole issue comes down to our brains you see our brainy heads and the fact that they're so fat have changed our entire course of human evolution Our ancestors who many believe emerged from sub-Saharan Africa we're among the first species of animals to stop walking around on four legs and start walking upon two Our brains were big enough that we were able to logic out the idea that it took less energy to walk on two legs And it minimized our bald skins exposure to the extremely hot ground temperatures in those African deserts as newly bipedal people Our evolution started favoring other members of our species who could also walk upright good for us natural selection at its finest But there's always a price to pay for innovation You see as we evolved to be more and more capable of walking and running around on two legs our bodies evolved to facilitate that and compensate for our changed center of gravity primarily doing this by narrowing our hips this in turn helped us to walk upright like champs and all of a sudden we had a problem that big fat head of ours was Literally too big to be born sure We had ourselves a big brain But now there was nowhere for it to go because our hips were too narrow to accommodate birthing ahead that huge So human evolution had to change again as the theory goes we started having babies earlier in their gestational period earlier at a time when the baby was still tiny and smooshy and helpless which would be pretty darn bad for our survival except for One thing the heads were still small enough to squeeze up on out of there still a very painful process but now at least it was doable and then once the baby was on the other end there would be what's known as the fourth trimester An extra trimester of development that happens Outside in the real world where we as parents would have to take care of that helpless newborn because technically it still Should have been developing in the womb It just needed to be you know evicted from its home before it was too big to leave its doors Now, let's take a look at her friendly Yoda. What features do we see? Well, he's bipedal. He's small with a disproportionately huge head for his highly evolved brain He's got a short highly efficient body with diminutive narrow features, including his hips even looking at the basic character model You can see how in order to procreate the Tridactyls would have to have themselves radically different proportions You can also see how having a big brain is a HUGE evolutionary advantage humans are so far at the top of the food chain that we protect other members of the food chain Tridactyls in the Star Wars universe are the wisest and most powerful force users in the galaxy But the downside is that they like us are essentially born too early helpless for months. If not, years Until at least their dad makes them pay rent and their mom stops doing their laundry This theory continues to hold water if we look at infancy for humans versus infancy for Tridactyls In their first two years, human baby brains grow to 75% of their full adult size. We don't know if this is the same for Tridactyls But we do know that the proportions of human babies paralleled the proportions of baby Yoda enormous head adorably tiny body besides making babies hilariously top-heavy these proportions also serve a function in infancy human brains command up to 87 percent Of the total energy that the body uses at rest meaning that even while sleeping the body is diverting a massive amount of energy to growing the brain because of this the rest of the Baby's growth lags behind the head where the brain is. This according to the expensive tissue hypothesis, we can see that baby Yoda is an extreme version of this principle with a wildly huge and merchandisable head and a teeny tiny body, making me think that baby Yoda is an extremely evolved version of what the human race could look like someday. The process of evolutionarily along gating the development period is called Neoteny and after humans benefited from it Surviving when our relatives didn't while evolution didn't stop its role, humans are actually still experiencing longer development periods Now than we even did 10,000 years ago The shape of our faces and heads are continually becoming less like our Neanderthal cousins by becoming flatter less hairy less oblong again We share a lot of these same features with Yoda whose small flat faced with an enormous head But if human evolution continues to make our childhoods longer and longer the question, of course becomes where does it stop? Well, it stops at Yoda. The problem with a long childhood Is that a lot can happen when you're tiny and helpless Eventually, there's an evolutionary tipping point where childhood becomes so long that it actually leaves the species too vulnerable to survive into adulthood Tridactyls could very well be the extreme end point of a species like ours. As The Mandalorian clearly shows, baby Tridactyls, even 50 year old baby tridactyls aren't capable of taking care of themselves. Sure They have impressive force powers, but very little control over them Human children similarly are pretty darn helpless and it means that we have to do things like baby prove the house and make up all kinds of Safety rules for kids imagine having to worry about that sort of stuff for fifty or even a hundred years It becomes extremely hard for the species to get their offspring to a place of self-sufficiency And that's just the tip of the iceberg natural disasters plagues drone attacks from the Empire All of those things are gonna be pretty darn hard to avoid but they become a lot easier To bounce back from if suddenly your species can repopulate quickly but if all of a sudden you're spending a hundred years or more to reproduce a single generation, I mean You're just begging for the next Death Star to give you a little zap. Which brings us to Yoda, we know so little about his history, but what we're able to theorize is pretty darn incredible He's practically the last of his species because of the evolutionary double-edged sword that he's dealing with on one hand He's one of the most highly evolved beings in the galaxy But he's so evolved that his species can no longer survive. They're completely obscure It's incredibly tragic and no we don't have any of the details about how the Tridactyls were wiped out But that elongated childhood that extended neoteny to the extremes of 50 plus years of childhood That is certainly a massive Contributor as to why so incredibly Star Wars the series often derided as being space fantasy and not science fiction Turns out to be scientifically plausible yet again. So gotta hand it to you Lucas. I'm pretty stunned know I've tried to help you out with this and the whole midi-chlorians powering the force thing But I got to admit still have some quibbles to level at you about the Jedi's recruitment practices now It'll be coming up pretty soon. We have some bones to pick on that front Ok friend in the meantime, if you didn't see the real-life equivalent of midi-chlorians And how they're actually powering the real-life force in your day-to-day life. Click the video that you see on screen right now That'll take you to my other science of star wars episode over on Game Theory looking at midi-chlorians, Mitochondria, and how we're all just a little bit Jedi In the meantime, remember that's just a theory, A FILM THEORY! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand CUT
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I have to say I'm disappointed that MatPat would put out an episode that misunderstands evolution so badly. There is no such thing as being "highly evolved". Moreover even if there were it would clearly be a contradiction so say that their "advanced" state of evolution lead to their extinction. This kind of Hollywood style thinking about science is something Film Theorists needs to fight against not spread. I don't mind when you have to stretch to make something fit, I have students who watch your show and getting them interested in scientific thinking is great, but I worry that this video does more harm than good.
Also I'm sure it wasn't intention but given that the evolution is so poorly displayed here I have to say that presenting head shape as evidence that we are now "more evolved" veers awfully close to phrenology.