Hi, I'm Hank. And I'm a human,
but let's pretend for a moment that I'm a moth. And not just
any moth, a peppered moth. Now let's pretend that I'm living
in London in the early 1800s, right as the industrial revolution
is starting. Life is swell. My light-colored body lets me
blend in with the light-colored lichens and tree bark, which means
birds have a hard time seeing me, which means that I get to live. But it's starting to get noticeably darker
around here with all these coal-powered factories spewing
soot into the air, and suddenly all the trees have gone from
looking like this to looking like this. So thanks to the soot-covered
everything, I've got problems. But you know who doesn't have
problems? My brother. He looks like this Yeah,
he has a different form of the gene that
affects pigmentation. Moths like him represent about
2 percent of all the peppered moths at the start of the
industrial revolution. But by 1895 it'll be 95 percent! Why? Well, you're probably already
guessing, as the environment gets dirtier, darker moths will be
eaten less often, and therefore have more opportunities
to make baby moths. The white ones will get eaten
more, so over time, the black-colored trait
will become more common. As for me? [Eaten.] This, my friends, is a
wonderful example of natural selection. The process by
which certain inherited traits make it easier for some
individuals to thrive and multiply, changing the genetic makeup
of populations over time. For this revelation, which remains
one of the most important revelations in biology, we have to
thank Charles Darwin, who first identified this process in his
revolutionary 1859 book, On the Origin of Species
by Natural Selection. Now lots of factors play a role
in how species change over time including mutation, migration and
random changes in how frequently some alleles show up, a
process known as genetic drift. But natural selection is the most
powerful and most important cause of evolutionary change, which is
why today we're going to talk about the principles behind it,
and the different ways in which it works. Darwin came to understand the
process of selection because he spent his adult life, even most of
his childhood, obsessed with observing nature. He studied barnacles, earthworms,
birds, rocks, tortoises, fossils, fish, insects and to some extent,
even his own family. I'll get back to that in a bit. But it was during Darwin's famous
voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle in the 1830s, a surveying
expedition around the world, that he began to formulate
this theory. Darwin was able to study all kinds of organisms,
and he kept amazing journals. Looking back on his notes,
he hit upon a couple of particularly important factors
in species' survival. One of them was the many examples
of adaptations he noticed on his journey. The ways in which
organisms seemed to be nearly ideally shaped to enhance their
survival and reproduction in specific environments. Maybe the most famous example of
these were the variations of beaks Darwin observed among the finches
in the remote Galapagos Islands off the coast of South America.
He observed more than a dozen closely-related finch species,
all of which were quite similar to mainland finch species,
but each island species had different shaped and sized beaks
that were adapted to the food available specifically
on each island. If there were hard seeds,
the beaks were thick. If there were insects,
the beaks were skinny and pointed. If there were cactus fruit,
the beaks were sharp to puncture the fruit's skin. These superior inherited traits
led Darwin to another idea, the finches' increased fitness for
their environment, that is, their relative ability to survive
and create offspring. Explaining the effects of
adaptation and relative fitness would become central to Darwin's
idea of natural selection. And today we often define natural
selection, and describe how it drives evolutionary change,
by four basic principles, based on Darwin's observations. The first principle is that
different members a population have all kinds of
individual variations. These characteristics,
whether their body size, hair color, blood type,
facial markings, metabolisms or reflexes, are called phenotypes. The second is that many variations
are heritable and can be passed on to offspring. If a trait
happens to be favorable, it does future generations no
good if it can't be passed on. Third: this one tends to get
glossed over a lot, even though it's probably the most interesting,
is Darwin's observation that populations can often have way
more offspring than resources, like food and water, can support. This leads to what Darwin called
"the struggle for existence." He was inspired here by the work
of economist Thomas Malthus, who wrote that when human
populations get too big, we get things like plague
and famine and wars, and then only some of us survive
and continue to reproduce. If you missed the SciShow Infusion
that we did on human overpopulation today and Malthus's predictions,
you should check it out now. This finally leads to the last
principle of natural selection, which is that, given all of this
competition for resources, heritable traits that affect
individuals' fitness can lead to variations in their survival
and reproductive rates. This is just another way of saying
that those with favorable traits are more likely to come out on top
and will be more successful with their baby-making. So to wrap all these principles
together, in order for natural selection to take place,
a population has to have variations, some of which are
heritable, and when a variation makes an organism more competitive,
that variation will tend to be selected. Like with the peppered moth.
It survived because there was variation within the species,
the dark coloration, which was heritable,
and in turn allowed every moth that inherited that trait to better survive the
hungry birds of London. But notice how this works.
A single variation in a single organism is only the very
beginning of the process. The key is that
individuals don't evolve. Instead, natural selection
produces evolutionary change because it changes the genetic
composition of entire populations, and that occurs through
interactions between individuals and their environment. Let's get back to Darwin
for a minute. In 1870, Darwin wrote to his
neighbor and parliamentarian John Lubbock requesting that a
question be added to England's census regarding the frequency
of cousins marrying and the health of their offspring. His request was denied,
but the question was something that weighed heavily on
Darwin's mind, because he was married to
Emma Wedgwood, who happened to be his first cousin. Her grandfather was
Josiah Wedgwood, founder for the company that
remains famous for its pottery and china. Oh, and he was also
Darwin's grandfather. In fact, much of Darwin's family
tree was...complicated. His marriage to Emma was far from
the first Wedgewood-Darwin pairing. Darwin's maternal grandparents and
mother were also Wedgwoods, and there were several other
marriages between cousins in the family, though not always
between those two families. So Darwin, and to a greater extent
his children, carried more genetic material of Wedgwood origin than
Darwininan. And this caused some problems, the likes of which
Darwin was all too aware of, thanks to his own scientific research. Darwin of course spent time
studying the effects of crossbreeding and inbreeding
in plants and animals, noting that consanguineous pairs
often resulted in weaker and sickly descendants. And the
same was true of his family. Emma and Charles had 10 children,
three of whom died in childhood from infectious disease,
which is more likely to be contracted by those with
high levels of inbreeding. And while none of Darwin's seven
other children had any deformities, he noted that they were
"not very robust" and three of them were unable to
have children of their own, likely another effect of inbreeding. Now, so far we've been talking
about natural selection in terms of physical characteristics,
like beak shape or coloration. But it's important to understand
that it's not just organism's physical form, or its phenotype,
that's changing but its essential genetic form,
or genotype. The heritable variations we've
been talking about are a function of the alleles that organisms are
carrying around. And as organisms become more successful,
evolutionarily speaking, by surviving in larger numbers for
longer and having more kids, that means that the alleles that
mark their variation become more frequent. But these changes can come about
in different ways. To understand how, let's walk
through the different modes of selection. The mode we've been talking about
for much of this episode is an example of directional selection,
which is when a favored trait is at one extreme end of the range of
traits, like from short to tall, or white to black, or blind to
having super-night-goggle vision. Over time this leads to distinct
changes in the frequency of that expressed trait in a population,
when a single phenotype is favored. So our peppered moth is an example
of a population's trait distribution shifting toward one
extreme, almost all whitish moths, to the other extreme,
almost all blackish. Another awesome example is
giraffe necks. They've gotten really long over time because
there was selection pressure against short necks, which
couldn't reach all of those delicious leaves. But there's also stabilizing
selection, which selects against extreme phenotypes and instead
favors the majority that are well adapted to an environment.
An example that's often used is a human's birth weight: Very small
babies have a harder time defending themselves from infections and
staying warm, but very large babies are too large to deliver
naturally. Because of this, the survival rate for babies has
historically been higher for those in the middle weight range,
which helped stabilize average birth weight.
At least, until Cesarian sections became as common as bad tattoos. So what happens when the
environment favors extreme traits at both ends of the spectrum,
while selecting against the common traits?
That's disruptive selection. Now examples of this are rare,
but scientists think they found an instance of it in 2008, in a
lake full of tiny crustaceans called Daphnia.
The population was hit with an epidemic of yeast parasite,
and after about a half-dozen generations, a variance had
emerged in how the Daphnia responded to the parasite.
Some became less susceptible to the yeast, but were smaller and
had fewer offspring. The others actually became more susceptible
to the parasite, but were bigger and able to reproduce more,
at least while they were still alive.
So there were two traits that were being selected for, both in
extremes and both to the exclusion of each other: susceptibility
and fecundity. If you got one,
you didn't get the other. An interesting example,
of selection being driven by a parasite. Now while these are the main ways
that selective pressures can affect populations, those
pressures can also come from factors other than environmental
ones like food supply or predators or parasites.
There's also sexual selection, another concept introduced by Darwin and described in The Origin
of Species as depending "not on a struggle for existence,
but a struggle between individuals of the same sex, generally the
males, for the possession of the other sex." Basically, for individuals to
maximize their fitness, they not only need to survive but
they also need to reproduce more, and they can do that one
or two ways: One, they can make themselves
attractive to the opposite sex. Or two, they can go for the upper
hand by intimidating, deterring or defeating the same-sex rivals. The first of these strategies is
how we ended up with this: I mean, the peacock tail isn't
exactly camouflage. But the more impressive the tail, the better
chances a male will find a mate and pass its genes
to the next generation. Sad-looking peacock tails will
diminish over generations, making it a good example
of directional sexual selection. The other strategy involves
fighting, or at least looking like= you want to fight, for the
privilege of mating, which tends to select for
bigger or stronger or meaner-looking mates. And finally, thanks to us humans
there are also un-natural forms of selection, and we call
that artificial selection. People have been artificially
selecting plants and animals for thousands of years, and Darwin
spent a lot of time in Origin of Species talking about the breeding
of pigeons and cattle and plants to demonstrate the
principles of selection. We encourage the selection of some
traits and discourage others. It's how we got grains that
produce all those nutrients. Which is how we managed to turn
the gray wolf into domesticated dogs that can look like this or like that, two of my favorite
examples of artificial selection. Now these are different
breeds of dogs- Oh, where you goin'?
No. No. But they're both still dogs.
They're the same species. Technically, a corgi and a
greyhound could get together and have a baby dog, though it would
be a weird looking dog. But, what happens when selection
makes populations so different that they can't even be the same
species any more? Well, that's what we're going to talk about next episode on Crash Course Biology: How one species can turn into another species. In the meantime, feel free to
review what we've gone over today, ask us questions down in the comments below, or on Facebook or Twitter, We'll see you next time.
He also has a vlog channel called vlogbrothers. I highly suggest you watch their videos
This guy:
http://youtube.com/scishow
http://youtube.com/hankschannel
You're welcome.
His world history segment is very enjoyable and interesting, unlike high school history in Canada.
Ugh, arguably the most bland and uneventful country in terms of history
It's not just one guy, it's both of the vlogbrothers. Making videos to help educate the masses! Great stuff there.
Thanks for that :) subscribed...
I met him and his brother in January. Amazing guys.