you gotta love this guy, always pissing against the wind

My favorite brand of developmental biologist

His Darwin/Wallace descriptions is rather unfair on Darwin, Darwin had been working for 20 years on what became "The Origin of Species" when he received Wallace's letter, He already had his theory of natural selection worked out, he just hadn't actually published yet. This is a pretty well known historical fact, based on extensive documentation(Darwins notes/letter etc, see http://darwin-online.org.uk/ .

Also the jump to "nazi Germany" is complete bullshit. If natural selection looks like any political system it would have to be unregulated capitalism or total anarchy. Both of which might turn out to be very bad, but why should you base a political system on natural selection anyway? He confuses Darwinism with "social Darwinism" which really has nothing to do with Darwin or his theory. At best, it was a complete misreading of the theory, confusing strength/looks/class with fitness and using it as an excuse to sterilize and or kill the "unwanted" and "weak". But even social darwinism really had nothing to do with "nazi germany", As the extermination of the jews were largely based on religiously inspired resentments and superstitions, combined with an exploitation of the frustrated german people, looking to place the blame for their post WW1 plight.

Seems like this guy also misunderstands why Darwin/Wallace is credited with "discovering evolution". Its correct that they didnt, but neither did Lamarck, really, as it was obvious for some time that animals seemed to have looked differently in the past, and that something had changed over time. What Darwin and Wallace discovered was the mechanism: How evolution actually works, why it works, and so on. Lamarck also presented a mechanism (inheritance of acquired traits), but it turned out to be wrong.

Lamarckian inheritance has been a dirty word for a long time, but recently studies of DNA methylation and its role in epigenetic inheritance have, at least to some small degree, redeemed him

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/411880/a-comeback-for-lamarckian-evolution/

Those are some weird results that shouldn’t really be possible, since the female is born with the eggs and thus the genetic material for the future offspring is already set when the mother is born. But nature is full of surprises.

But the other thing that separates Darwin from Lamarck, and even Wallace, was how much he really got completely right about evolution. Common decent, gradualism and the fact that evolution happens as a change in populations are all , in addition to natural selection, things that Darwin got spot on , and this was before we had even discovered genes. These insights is why we call it Darwinism, and not Wallaceism

The methylation turns off genes, so it alters the development of the embryo without altering the actual DNA.

I'm not arguing against Darwin, he was a careful and methodical researcher who did good work. It could easily have been called Wallaceism though, had things gone even slightly differently A lot of things which are now called darwinism should probably be more properly called "Spencerism" since they derive from Spencer's "survival of the fittest" and not Darwin (or, perhaps, from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. - Nature, red in tooth and claw).

Moving this video to chingalera's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.