"Evolution is not a process of improvement, it's a process of change"
THANK YOU!!! 🙏🙏 I say this all the time!!!
We are taught hierarchies when, in reality, nature and objective reality has none.
Evolution is there to make you *better adapted* to your environment. If you are better adapted by being an ameba, guess what? You are gonna be a f*cking ameba.
I’m surprised, unless I missed it, that there’s no mention of Alan Turing, who was forcibly sterilized as punishment after being prosecuted for being homosexual.
is this the reason why some people say communists hate religion, this is the origin of that belief wow it makes sense now. I noticed conservatives in USA tend to be very religious and very capitalist at the same time. There is a strong correlation between religious and capitalist, also many charismatic preachers are very wealthy too which adds to the belief
Have to defend Malthus – he wasn't wrong AT ALL. He was simply lacking key information – the development of the greatest human invention, birth control, and also didn't predict how effective the Agricultural Revolution would be. By the time the incredibly steep 'linear' growth of agriculture started to flatten out worldwide, the 'exponential' growth of human population was lowered by birth control. As long as birth control and agricultural improvements move in countervailing ways, human survival and wellbeing is possible.
it's rather ironic "social darwinism" was diametrically opposed to one of humanity's most important and vital strengths, our social ability to rely and provide for each other, and also through this specialise because one person can produce food while another can build a house when having everyone fend for themselves puts a greater strain on everyone because everyone has to do everything also on the fridge metaphor- one might point out that all of the magnets are "fine tuned" to lay flat against the fridge, and that if one peels them off just a bit, they would fall off. and in this case, there is the fact that most of the magnets lay unseen, fallen to the floor, and that the magnets "fine tune" themselves as long as they are decently close to the fridge, by pulling themselves towards it
I come back to this video from time to time just for the arsonist sketch. I vaguely remember there being other instances of it, any chance of a compilation video? got some potential nazis in my life who need a mirror. cheers, love your work x.
On the topic of eugenics, I think it's interesting how we apply the same process when looking at diseases and especially mental health conditions. As a child of a family with a solid history of support for eugenics, most of whom have "high intelligence" (5 rocket scientists between 3 generations and many capitalists) it's become extremely obvious that money and access and environment in general has way more to do with it than anything else. At the same time I have many chronic health conditions that are severe enough to make me unable to work and it gets credited to the same thing, genes. One of my children has a rare condition that's blamed on genetic mutation and inheritance, but it's only triggered by eating the standard American diet. If I had during pregnancy and breastfeeding and she'd only ever eaten a whole food diet nobody would have ever diagnosed her with anything. Similarly some are now theorizing that many if not all of my conditions are the result of not just my environment but the environment of my forebears. IMHO eugenics and similar ideas are missing the forest for the trees, but so are many who argue for evolution in general. We're trying to picture species as unimpacted by the environment over time and the impacts of pollution and climate change are only going to make this mistake more obvious.
Legit, Abigail is the kind of person I like hiking with. Finding out random bits of trivia while being surrounded by gorgeous nature is one of my favorite things.
Love how you point out commen misconceptions of how evolution and natural selection work on the example of the mice in the snowy environment. To believe that mutations happen because "we could need that right now" is magical thinking and not how stuff works. Had that misconception come up in random talks with religious people a lot and it's so funny cos you can see how they are trained to think about things.
I feel it's really late in my life to notice that I heard the term "social darwinism" loads of time but I didn't even know what it meant. Also DUCKS!!!
I like your work very much. I do. But what you are saying here is, that laws of nature don't apply to us. More food means – for everyone – more breeding. Less food means – for everyone – less breeding. Starving people, as well as starving animals, don't breed. Ask the people with less than 80 pounds. Denying overpopulation is dangerous, I think. Especially in our times. Yes, theoretically we can produce more. But the central myth of our culture is the myth of endless growth, so … To me this theory of yours sounds like a myth. More of one thing means more of another, and what is connected to food for everyone else on this planet? The theory of Malthus is not wrong, but his conclusion is. The unequal distribution of things does not mean that there is room for more people. It just means that if we we would make more room for workers and less for lords, there would be more room for living and working people and lords would land on earth like the rest of us. No need to chain this to population. Dangerous to chain this to more people, especially now. More people, more food, more waste, more consumption, more everything. Endless. Growth is not endless. Never was, never will be.
Please more talk about things. Talk may grow endless. No fuel needed but a person like everyone else.
I really liked this video! But I feel like you missed an opportunity of considering another 19 century socialist: the creator of the theory of mutual support as a factor for evolution and anarcho-comunist Piotr Kropotkin. He was really in the center of these debates with, at the time, rather unique and influent views: he was, according to himself, a darwnist. However he thought most readers (such as Malthus) had subverted Darwin's teachings for political gains, not considering that the beagle scientist admits himself that cooperation can also be a tool for natural selection. For Kropotkin,such influence would be much greater for evolution. Nowadays we know he was at least half right. The Kin Equations predicts a model for evolution which pretty much shows that cooperation, in the case of mammels living in small familiar groups, tends to be more advamtageous (from a gene's perspective) than competition. For Kropotkin that would have consequences in how we should organize as a society. He also wrote specifically about both Malthus's and Marx's ideas. But I didn't ready that yet so I can't comment on the specifics
The pigeons who died are slower yes but why are the pigeons slower? Because of the random mutation in the other pigeons didn't occur in the ones that died.
Yes, natural selection is random but the mutations that are needed by natural selection are random. The New Synthesis is grappling with this issue.
I would LOVE to see you return to the Darwin/Lamarck debate as it applies to what we know about epigenetics today!!! Especially behavioral epigenetics, not that I'm biased or anything.
I'm Belgian and I have clear memories of when I was a child, adults would say 'laissez-faire' to eachother whenever someone would be overprotective of children. Although, I also remember it being used as an 'insult' for very loose parenting technique.
I watched a Nova documentary recently which was fascinating and that it showed that rats who were exposed to the smell of almond just before a shock were actually found to develop extra smell perceptors, I don't know what they're called, specifically for almond and even more incredibly, they passed that trait on to their kids. There are other examples of this happening and I'll make a fool of myself if I try to explain it, but there have been well documented instances of this happening. I can't remember who it was, but the Nazis were starving some people as Nazis often did and even their children ended up having metabolical issues down the line. Somebody back me up here, it's really interesting.
After hearing in another video of yours that fire and smoking are used in your videos as a symbolic stand-in for fascism, it’s cool to actually be able to go into further videos with that knowledge and properly understand the scenes where that symbolism is used. If I’m honest, I was a little confused before, but it’s definitely a nice creative device you’ve set up.
Re the part about Lamarc (sp?): imo as a biology person, he was ~98% wrong about acquired traits. its definitely impossible to willpower your lineage to have a longer neck. however, the experiences that you have throughout your lifetime can be encoded not in your DNA, but on the proteins that "manage" your DNA: histones. i cant directly quote the studies off-hand unfortunately, but its been found that "histone codes" that regulate whether certain stretches of DNA (aka genes) are expressed 1) can be modified by experience (namely, traumatic events such as chronic starvation) and 2) are inherited by offspring. This is referred to as epigenetics (etymology: on top of/outside of DNA sequences). while these codes dont determine the substance of the gene products being produced, they can control the amounts that are made. TL;DR: Lamarck's theory of evolution was mostly wrong with the exception of some experiences changing how DNA expression is managed by histones (epigenetics)
As someone who broadly agrees with Darwin and a Christian I would ask you to consider what do you understand by "created"? a whizz pop and there you are human beings? Or a sculpting of mutations over generations that results in homosapiens? To me the latter is created just as much as the latter and consistent. 🤷
I've been watching every video on this channel from oldest to newest. I was wondering how obvious (with the benefit of hindsight) it'd be when you first started transitioning and yeah… Actually not subtle really. lol x
It sounds like the only real way to got out of commodity fetishism is for everybody to go back to rural village life. But Marx also talked about "the idiocy of the countryside." So if urban folks are fetishists and rural folks are idiots, what's left?"
@PhilosophyTube
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
Snatching the Whigs
@BL-sd2qw
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
"Evolution is not a process of improvement, it's a process of change"
THANK YOU!!! 🙏🙏 I say this all the time!!!
We are taught hierarchies when, in reality, nature and objective reality has none.
Evolution is there to make you *better adapted* to your environment. If you are better adapted by being an ameba, guess what? You are gonna be a f*cking ameba.
@af-wm8sn
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
You are so brilliant!!!!
@RylovesRory
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
I’m surprised, unless I missed it, that there’s no mention of Alan Turing, who was forcibly sterilized as punishment after being prosecuted for being homosexual.
@lisadotta4153
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
PANDA NOMINATED 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
@user-dy3xo8qq5v
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
You forgot about Sweden which has sterilization laws (eugenics) until the 1976 where more than 63 000 people got sterilized.
@TheUgo100
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
is this the reason why some people say communists hate religion, this is the origin of that belief wow it makes sense now. I noticed conservatives in USA tend to be very religious and very capitalist at the same time. There is a strong correlation between religious and capitalist, also many charismatic preachers are very wealthy too which adds to the belief
@yugonostalgia8961
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
Have to defend Malthus – he wasn't wrong AT ALL. He was simply lacking key information – the development of the greatest human invention, birth control, and also didn't predict how effective the Agricultural Revolution would be. By the time the incredibly steep 'linear' growth of agriculture started to flatten out worldwide, the 'exponential' growth of human population was lowered by birth control. As long as birth control and agricultural improvements move in countervailing ways, human survival and wellbeing is possible.
@astral_haze
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
it's rather ironic "social darwinism" was diametrically opposed to one of humanity's most important and vital strengths, our social ability to rely and provide for each other, and also through this specialise because one person can produce food while another can build a house when having everyone fend for themselves puts a greater strain on everyone because everyone has to do everything
also on the fridge metaphor-
one might point out that all of the magnets are "fine tuned" to lay flat against the fridge, and that if one peels them off just a bit, they would fall off. and in this case, there is the fact that most of the magnets lay unseen, fallen to the floor, and that the magnets "fine tune" themselves as long as they are decently close to the fridge, by pulling themselves towards it
@hendrixinfinity3992
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
I come back to this video from time to time just for the arsonist sketch. I vaguely remember there being other instances of it, any chance of a compilation video? got some potential nazis in my life who need a mirror. cheers, love your work x.
@Tattletale97
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
One is a scientist, another is a racist and misogynist freeloader who invented a political theory that indirectly responsible for millions of death.
George Orwell was right.
@NoshWare
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
"This – is an egg." Yes, yes it is.
@Beutimus
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
I never expected to walk away from this thinking that my credit card is a fetish.
@alostdasher
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
I can't breathe
@The_fusion_physics_guy
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
I honestly really like the chill-ass song
@The_fusion_physics_guy
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
It makes me happy that you carried an HP bottle all the way into the woods just for that bit. Hbommerguy would be proud.
@aprildawnsunshine4326
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
On the topic of eugenics, I think it's interesting how we apply the same process when looking at diseases and especially mental health conditions. As a child of a family with a solid history of support for eugenics, most of whom have "high intelligence" (5 rocket scientists between 3 generations and many capitalists) it's become extremely obvious that money and access and environment in general has way more to do with it than anything else. At the same time I have many chronic health conditions that are severe enough to make me unable to work and it gets credited to the same thing, genes. One of my children has a rare condition that's blamed on genetic mutation and inheritance, but it's only triggered by eating the standard American diet. If I had during pregnancy and breastfeeding and she'd only ever eaten a whole food diet nobody would have ever diagnosed her with anything. Similarly some are now theorizing that many if not all of my conditions are the result of not just my environment but the environment of my forebears. IMHO eugenics and similar ideas are missing the forest for the trees, but so are many who argue for evolution in general. We're trying to picture species as unimpacted by the environment over time and the impacts of pollution and climate change are only going to make this mistake more obvious.
@Vanalosswen
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
Legit, Abigail is the kind of person I like hiking with. Finding out random bits of trivia while being surrounded by gorgeous nature is one of my favorite things.
@JJamahJamerson
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
Is it just me or is lamarck’s theory of evolution true, but just for human culture?
@Mrs_Beanbag
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
Love how you point out commen misconceptions of how evolution and natural selection work on the example of the mice in the snowy environment. To believe that mutations happen because "we could need that right now" is magical thinking and not how stuff works. Had that misconception come up in random talks with religious people a lot and it's so funny cos you can see how they are trained to think about things.
@Coccinelf
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
I feel it's really late in my life to notice that I heard the term "social darwinism" loads of time but I didn't even know what it meant. Also DUCKS!!!
@blob-mouth
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
your hair in this video is so pretty
@heiker1351
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
I like your work very much. I do. But what you are saying here is, that laws of nature don't apply to us. More food means – for everyone – more breeding. Less food means – for everyone – less breeding. Starving people, as well as starving animals, don't breed. Ask the people with less than 80 pounds.
Denying overpopulation is dangerous, I think. Especially in our times.
Yes, theoretically we can produce more. But the central myth of our culture is the myth of endless growth, so … To me this theory of yours sounds like a myth. More of one thing means more of another, and what is connected to food for everyone else on this planet?
The theory of Malthus is not wrong, but his conclusion is. The unequal distribution of things does not mean that there is room for more people. It just means that if we we would make more room for workers and less for lords, there would be more room for living and working people and lords would land on earth like the rest of us. No need to chain this to population. Dangerous to chain this to more people, especially now.
More people, more food, more waste, more consumption, more everything. Endless. Growth is not endless. Never was, never will be.
Please more talk about things. Talk may grow endless. No fuel needed but a person like everyone else.
@Skilough
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
Darwin was a
Sickly, but idk thr disease he had i think yhere were times when he was physically stronger so who knows
@anonymoussaid9970
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
I got so confused when this started.
@gabrielsantanna112
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
I really liked this video! But I feel like you missed an opportunity of considering another 19 century socialist: the creator of the theory of mutual support as a factor for evolution and anarcho-comunist Piotr Kropotkin. He was really in the center of these debates with, at the time, rather unique and influent views: he was, according to himself, a darwnist. However he thought most readers (such as Malthus) had subverted Darwin's teachings for political gains, not considering that the beagle scientist admits himself that cooperation can also be a tool for natural selection. For Kropotkin,such influence would be much greater for evolution. Nowadays we know he was at least half right. The Kin Equations predicts a model for evolution which pretty much shows that cooperation, in the case of mammels living in small familiar groups, tends to be more advamtageous (from a gene's perspective) than competition. For Kropotkin that would have consequences in how we should organize as a society. He also wrote specifically about both Malthus's and Marx's ideas. But I didn't ready that yet so I can't comment on the specifics
@ryantaylor4015
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
and now social safety nets in america are all but non existent
@lizicadumitru9683
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
The pigeons who died are slower yes but why are the pigeons slower? Because of the random mutation in the other pigeons didn't occur in the ones that died.
Yes, natural selection is random but the mutations that are needed by natural selection are random. The New Synthesis is grappling with this issue.
@pizzamozzerrella8567
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
This is my first time seeing her brother
@chanibelle8
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
I would LOVE to see you return to the Darwin/Lamarck debate as it applies to what we know about epigenetics today!!! Especially behavioral epigenetics, not that I'm biased or anything.
@sebastienrobinson2758
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
The choice to talk about Darwin outside is masterful directorial vision on your part Abigail props!
@thegentilehunter
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
passing on lifetime traits is called epigenetics.
@user-jg8jc1gy2q
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
I'm Belgian and I have clear memories of when I was a child, adults would say 'laissez-faire' to eachother whenever someone would be overprotective of children. Although, I also remember it being used as an 'insult' for very loose parenting technique.
@animefurry3508
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
Evolution does not have a telology, its a process of adaptation.
@anthapersephone7311
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
Australia simply took all the babies away, taking a very nurture standpoint
@catalystcomet
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
I watched a Nova documentary recently which was fascinating and that it showed that rats who were exposed to the smell of almond just before a shock were actually found to develop extra smell perceptors, I don't know what they're called, specifically for almond and even more incredibly, they passed that trait on to their kids. There are other examples of this happening and I'll make a fool of myself if I try to explain it, but there have been well documented instances of this happening. I can't remember who it was, but the Nazis were starving some people as Nazis often did and even their children ended up having metabolical issues down the line. Somebody back me up here, it's really interesting.
@WTZWBlaze
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
After hearing in another video of yours that fire and smoking are used in your videos as a symbolic stand-in for fascism, it’s cool to actually be able to go into further videos with that knowledge and properly understand the scenes where that symbolism is used. If I’m honest, I was a little confused before, but it’s definitely a nice creative device you’ve set up.
@seamusburke3350
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
Well and truly late to this, but "I'm putting hot sauce in my omelette, and the hot sauce is COMMUNISM" is an incredible sentence.
Brilliant video Abby, as always!
@ericthompson3982
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
I would be happy to go on a nice walk in the woods with you. I think that would be a genuinely pleasant day. I'll bring lunch.
@gentlypassingthrough
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
Re the part about Lamarc (sp?): imo as a biology person, he was ~98% wrong about acquired traits. its definitely impossible to willpower your lineage to have a longer neck. however, the experiences that you have throughout your lifetime can be encoded not in your DNA, but on the proteins that "manage" your DNA: histones.
i cant directly quote the studies off-hand unfortunately, but its been found that "histone codes" that regulate whether certain stretches of DNA (aka genes) are expressed 1) can be modified by experience (namely, traumatic events such as chronic starvation) and 2) are inherited by offspring. This is referred to as epigenetics (etymology: on top of/outside of DNA sequences).
while these codes dont determine the substance of the gene products being produced, they can control the amounts that are made.
TL;DR: Lamarck's theory of evolution was mostly wrong with the exception of some experiences changing how DNA expression is managed by histones (epigenetics)
@jimisoulman6021
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
As someone who broadly agrees with Darwin and a Christian I would ask you to consider what do you understand by "created"? a whizz pop and there you are human beings? Or a sculpting of mutations over generations that results in homosapiens? To me the latter is created just as much as the latter and consistent. 🤷
@foggy227
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
48:45 Yes Abagail you are an egg
@stefrost4029
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
I've been watching every video on this channel from oldest to newest. I was wondering how obvious (with the benefit of hindsight) it'd be when you first started transitioning and yeah… Actually not subtle really. lol x
@pushingthroughthepaperthin9616
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
It sounds like the only real way to got out of commodity fetishism is for everybody to go back to rural village life. But Marx also talked about "the idiocy of the countryside." So if urban folks are fetishists and rural folks are idiots, what's left?"
@TalysAlankil
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
48:47 "This…is an egg" i don't know where in your transition timeline you were by the point this was shot but it's extremely funny in hindsight anyway
@RobSeib
April 18, 2024 at 9:09 pm
The Windwaker music during the egg segment felt so random