What Darwin won't tell you about evolution - with Jonathan Pettitt
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Publicado 2022-09-08
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In this talk, Jonathan Pettitt explains how living systems tend to make simple mechanisms more complicated than they need to be. He will show how such ‘unnecessary complexity’ can both restrict and expand an organism’s evolutionary potential.
Jonathan is the 2020 Genetics Society JBS Haldane Lecturer.
The JBS Haldane Lecture recognises an individual for outstanding ability to communicate topical subjects in genetics research, widely interpreted, to an interested lay audience. This speaker will have a flair for conveying the relevance and excitement of recent advances in genetics in an informative and engaging way.
This lecture was filmed at the Ri on 14 June 2022.
0:00 Intro and complexity in the visual system
4:43 Population genetics
5:59 What is genetic drift?
14:46 Where non-coding DNA came from
19:57 Self-splicing introns
22:50 How mechanism that saved eukaryotes
28:00 What C. elegans can teach us about genetics
30:14 How C. elegans translate DNA differently
39:01 Why trans-splicing is important
42:35 Using trans-splicing as a drug target
43:39 Constructive neutral evolution
Jonathan Pettitt is a Professor in Genetics at the University of Aberdeen. He has a long-standing interest in applying the manifold advantages of C. elegans to study the genetics of basic animal biology. His current research investigates the molecular basis of post-transcriptional RNA processing, including nematode-specific mechanisms; the understanding of which may facilitate the development of new drugs to treat parasitic nematode infections.
Jonathan is strongly committed to public engagement with genetics. He believes that the explosion in the availability and application of human genome sequence information, coupled with the development of genome engineering technology, means that there has never been a more urgent need to ensure genetic literacy beyond the traditional areas of research and healthcare.
As a passionate and enthusiastic communicator of genetics, Jonathan has written and presented a broad range of events, including The ‘Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas’ at the Edinburgh Fringe, the Royal Greenwich Observatory, the Royal Institution, and science festivals in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Sofia, Bulgaria. He was the genetics consultant for Helen Keen’s book, ‘The Science of Game of Thrones’.
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Todos los comentarios (21)
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Good lecture, but it needs more beavers
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This is the best explanation I've heard, yet. So basically, Eukaryotes are known to hoard materials and parts for later use. Sounds like my parents.
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Seriously though, labeling a blue line, a green line, an orange line, a red line, and a purple line as "the red variant" is not an optimal data presentation strategy. Especially right after showing a graph of the "red variant" represented by a red line.
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Please rethink and change titles! "What
won't tell you about " is a depreciation of science and teaching / lecturing! -
When clicking on this I guessed it was going to focus on mutation rate/ population size stabilization and was very happy to find out it was on introns and translation. He presented the information very well, hope to see more like this, Cheers.
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I'm begging you, RI...I'm down on my knees here. Please please please get someone who knows how to do audio so we can get talks that aren't saturated with mouth noises. I can't watch more than about a minute of these before I'm grossed out to the point where I have to turn it off.
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first off - love the Sub-Pop sticker affixed to the laptop......as much as i was able to grasp - which was definitely more than i expected - i found this talk absolutely fascinating. thank you for sharing Mr. Pettitt...
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Thanks a lot. This was highly informative and there were quite a lot of surprises.
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Excellent lecture! I only disliked his equivocation of "complex" with "complicated"... I understand they are synonymous in ordinary language, but they couldn't be more different in scientific parlance.
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Thank you! It was amazing 🤗
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Brilliant! Love learning the history of introns and complexity and evolution, drift, selection.
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I really enjoy listening to someone with amazing insight, explain something extremely complex in a clean, simple way that I can actually understand.
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That was very interesting. Thanks.
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...and so they make a "choice". Despite just correcting himself on using that terminology. I know we're all conditioned to speak in this way but it makes it difficult for those who regularly follow the science to separate processes from agency when we use words like choice and want, etc. To describe things that aren't capable of making choices or having desires.
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Thank You! This was really interesting. But I think some small changes to some "slides" would have done a world of good. Without the laser pointer some things got kind of lost. I think.
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I’m really impressed by the amount of views this video has. If at least 20 % of the people who clicked on it viewed at least half of it without being biologists, I can now say I have faith in humanity. Me, being a theoretical biologist, struggled sometimes to understand the intricacies of this talk, but it was definitely worth it.
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It’s content like this that keeps me subscribed to the RI channel. Thank you. Far better than some of the earlier “buy my book” talks
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Graphs were not clarifying to me. I can see the wilder swings for a small population, which would be expected. But why something died out or didn't, and whether it was blue, or green or whatever, and why, no, totally opaque. The rest was interesting. Unsure I got it all but maybe another viewing would help.
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I found the key word to be "substrate": neutral genetic drift generates a background of biochemical complexity that natural selection might use to solve a problem somewhere down the road. But doesn't this resemble the basic relationship selection has with the environment in general? Can't this "substrate" be seen as just another feature of the world that selection adapts to and seizes opportunity from? A feature of the genome's environment that just happens to reside within the cell?
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Thank I learned a lot and this was to great help.
