Darwin was born on the 12th of February 1809: Darwin Day.

In honor of Darwin
Day we issued an appeal for questions on evolution that I might answer. And
I'm going to now answer them.

Is Homosexuality Nature's
Population Control?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQlw4PpDs4o&list=PLKSmsr0k7vdmKRiKv
3u4IgdrvFAGTPChQ&index=5

"I've always believed homosexuality was nature's population control so that we

don't overpopulate. Thoughts?"

That's a very tempting error, not with respect to homosexuality, but with respect
It has the smell of Group Selection

to the idea that nature does population control. That's not the way nature works.
It's so tempting to think "Oh well, things would be best for the species
so nature will do whatever it takes to keep the species going." And that's just
not the way evolution works. Natural selection works at the levelof the individual
gene. So in order for natural selection to favor population control, natural
selection would have to favor a gene or genes in an individual that limited that
individual's reproduction. Homosexuality would do that, but of course it wouldn't
actually be naturally selected because the individual that doesn't have the
children doesn't pass on the genes for not having children.
Population control Closest in Nature

In order for natural selection to favor population control, it would have to be the
case that an individual that has too many children ends up rearing fewer. And
this was worked out by the great ornithologist David Lack who studied clutch
size in various species of birds. A bird that lays more than the optimum number
of eggs ends up rearing fewer, because there's not enough food for them. A
bird that begins by laying too few eggs, also ends up rearing fewer for more
obvious reasons. There's an optimum number of eggs which a bird species will
lay. That's the extent of population control adaptation.

So I am afraid it couldn't be true that homosexuality is an adaptation to keep the

population size down.
 How does evolution explain
homosexuality?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDmQns78FR8

"My question is, for things such as homosexuality, which people who argue
against evolution ceaselessly will insist, there appears to be no linear Darwinian
reason to possess this trait."

Now that's a very common question; it's one of the commonest questions I get
Homosexuality, only a problem for

asked.How can it be that homosexuality gets passed on from generation to

generation. Why doesn't it just disappear? Why doesn't natural selection
remove it? Well, the first thing to say is that it's only a problem if it's a
genetically inherited thing. And you need evidence for that. And the evidence for
Darwinian Selction only

that comes from twin studies. If you take monozygotic twins, identical twins, and
you find, for anything - it doesn't have to be homosexuality, for height or weight,
or musical ability, anything you like -and you find that identical twins,
if it is heritability

monozygotic twins are more like each other than non-identical twins,
significantly more like each other, then that suggests that the characteristic
concerned is heritable. Heritable means that there is a genetic component to
the variance in the population with respect to the character concerned. In the
case of height, in the case of musical ability and so on, we find that to a greater
or lesser extent, there is a genetic component; there is heritability.

And in the case of homosexuality, yes, there is, too. If you know the sexual
component
a genetic
sexuality

orientation of one twin, then you're better able to predict the sexual orientation
Homo

of the other twin, if they are monozygotic, than if they're dizygotic. So there is
Yes

heritability, which means we do have a Darwinian problem.

We do have to ask the question, why is it that male homosexuality has survived
down the generations, given that one might think natural selection would get rid
of it. There are various things that are being suggested.

Worker Bee There's, for example, the worker bee hypothesis that males can look after their
Hipothesis nephews and nieces, for example, rather than look after their own children. And
so, not being sexually active yourself, not being heterosexually active yourself,
could not necessarily be selected against in natural selection because of that.

Bisexual A related idea, which is a bit fanciful perhaps, is that in our wild ancestors
Traidor there might have been a time when dominant males, who had harems,
Hipothesis
went off hunting, and left the women and children in charge of males that they
could trust. And you could say, I suppose, that an ostentatiously homosexual
male would be trustworthy to a dominant harem holding male. But of course
many homosexual males are actually bisexual to a greater or lesser extent.
So this might have produced, this might have provided, an alternative way for
males to get access to females. As it were, pretend to be not interested in
females, not deliberately pretend,

A gene only So that's another hypothesis, but I'm not very keen on either of those two
has the effect theories.I prefer to say something rather more nuanced, which is that when we
it does in the
right environ- talk about a gene for anything, whether it's homosexuality or anything else,
ment
we don't necessarily mean that the gene inevitably has that effect. A gene only
has the effect that it does in the right environment. So it could be that a gene
that has the effect of causing a male to be homosexual in the present
environment, in our present technological environment, civilized environment,
would not have had that effect in a different environment. A possible example,
and this only is for example, there is absolutely no evidence for it, a possible
example would be what if bottle feeding, as it were, brings the gene out,
brings out the effect of that gene? What if a breastfed boy, who has this gene, is
heterosexual but a bottle fed boy, who has this gene, is homosexual? Well, in
the days before bottles were invented that gene would not have expressed itself
as homosexuality. So now what we may be looking at is a different expression
of the same gene. Now I'm not wedded to that particular idea at all,
I find it a good example to get across the point that the effect of a gene is not
inevitably tied to it, but depends upon the environment in which the individual is
brought up.
How does learned behavior evolve
into inherited instinct?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sdqg-jn_tBk

Well that's a very advanced question because it wouldn't occur to many people. There is a very
interesting theory about how that happens and why it happens. It's called the Baldwin effect.

In the Baldwin effect, the idea is that an animal learns, for example, some skill. A good example
might be thrushes, which smash the shells of snails and then eat them. And the closely related
blackbirds don't do this. If you give a blackbird a snail that's been taken out of its shell, it's very
happy to eat it, but a blackbird hasn't the faintest idea how to smash a snail, whereas thrushes
do it all the time, they do it on so called anvils.

Now the Baldwin effect idea would be that some ancestral bird, ancestral to thrushes, learned
how to smash snails. A very, perhaps a very skilled bird, a very clever individual bird that
learned how to smash snails and then maybe other thrush ancestors copied it. They also
learned how to smash snails and got rewarded for it and so they learned and learned and
learned. And then as the generations went by, the progeny, the next generation, of these
ancestral birds also learned. Perhaps by imitating their parents. And as the generations went
by, the ones who learned fastest, were the ones who got the most food. And so any genetic
tendency to be fast at learning how to smash snails would have been favored by natural
selection.

And so natural selection, by choosing genes over many generations, would eventually build into
the gene pool a skill which started out as a learned skill. Now learned skills are very important in
birds. A beautiful example is the habit of tits, blue tits and grey tits, of opening milk bottles.
Nowadays not many milk bottles are delivered on doorsteps, but there was a time when I was
young, when every day the milkman would deliver milk and place it on the doorstep. And grey
tits and blue tits discovered, some individual birds discovered, how to open the either tinfoil or
cardboard tops to these bottles and drink the cream. Fascinatingly, this habit spread like an
epidemic. Birds copied each other and ornithologists were able to actually trace the flow of this
habit, of this skill, in radiating circles outwards from focal points in the country in Britain, where
particularly clever individual birds had discovered how to do it. So it was a learned skill.

As far as I know, nobody has investigated the Baldwin effect in this particular case, but the way
it would work would be that as the epidemic, the learned habit spread, over generations, those
individual birds who learned fastest were the ones who got the most cream, therefore had the
most offspring, passed on the genes, not initially genes for opening milk bottles, but genes for
learning quickly to open milk bottles. And in the end they would learn so fast, they wouldn't need
to learn at all and then you might call it an instinct.

And that would be the full Baldwin effect. So the Baldwin effect would be a way in which a
learned habit can get built into the gene pool as an instinct by natural selection of genes.
Superficially, the Baldwin effect sounds like Lamarckism. Lamarck was the French naturalist
predating Darwin, who had a theory of evolution which was based upon the inheritance of
acquired characteristics and that's wrong, that doesn't happen, or almost certainly doesn't
happen. But the Baldwin effect produces something which looks like Lamarckism and is
therefore very interesting. Acquired characteristics, something that an animal learns, are not
automatically incorporated in the genes. That would be Lamarckism. Injuries, uh...My mother
once had a dog, who sometimes, like many small dogs, limped on three legs. And there was
another dog in the village who had lost a leg in a car accident, and the owner of this three-
legged dog thought that her dog must be the father of our dog, because it limped on three legs.
That would be Lamarckism.

In the case of the thrushes or the tits that I've just been mentioning, it would be Lamarckism if
the learned habit just was pumped straight into the genes, but the way it happens is not like
that. The way it happens in the Baldwin effect is that there must be some genetic variation in
there, which affects the rate of learning this particular habit or even the rate of learning
generally, and that is what's being naturally selected. So it's not that the habit gets pumped into
the genes. What happens is that there is spontaneous variation among the birds, in proper
 Darwinian fashion, ultimately due to mutation; variation in ability to learn a habit such as this.
And then natural selection favors those individuals who learn fastest, until in the end they learn
so fast that it looks as though they haven't learned at all.

What if DNA was infallible?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rcDU6ypofo

If DNA was infallible, there'd be no diversity. Would it go extinct all together?

Yes, I mean, as you know, DNA has to mutate, otherwise evolution can't
happen. Mutation is the random mistakes, which happen in genetic
transmission, which provide the variation on which natural selection works. So
it's actually true that if DNA was literally infallible, and it's in fact very very good,
it's very nearly infallible, if it were totally infallible then evolution would indeed
grind to a halt, because there would be no variation. Mutation happens because
DNA is not perfect, because of the laws of physics. It's not possible to make an
absolutely perfect copying system in DNA.
It has the smell of Group Selection

Then it's tempting for people to suggest 'Well maybe since mutation is
necessary, maybe natural selection actually favors mutation as a way of
keeping evolution going.' And that is a very tempting thing to suggest. I think it's
actually wrong. I suspect that, as I just said, mutation only occurs because of
the laws of physics. That natural selection insofar as it influences mutation rate,
natural selection is driving mutation rate down to zero, but fortunately never
actually gets to zero, because if it did get to zero then evolution would stop. But
that's not why it doesn't get to zero. The reason it doesn't get to zero is because
of the laws of physics.
Is Evolution a Fact?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wp3Awd3MIk

I had said that evolution is a fact in the same sense that it's a fact that the Earth
orbits the sun. And somebody wrote in about that saying "it isn't a theory the
earth moves around the sun, it's a fact we can observe, evolution is not." I see
why he says that, because you sort of think 'well, the earth is moving around the
sun all the time and therefore you can observe it, whereas you can't actually
observe evolution cause it happened a long time ago', well mostly it did. But
really you can't observe that the earth moves around the sun. What you observe
is the changing seasons, and you infer that the earth moves around the sun
because you have an interpretation, you have a theory to account for why you
get changing seasons. In the same way you observe that night follows day and
day follows night. You don't actually observe that the earth is spinning; you
have a theory that the earth is spinning and it accounts for the facts. And it's just
the same way with evolution. It's true that we can't actually observe at least the
major features of evolution happening. We can observe very very recent, very
tiny bits of evolution happening. It's true that we can't watch dinosaurs evolving,
and we can't watch fish emerging from the sea and becoming land animals. We
have to make inferences. We make inferences on the basis of the evidence
available. In just the same way as we make inferences about the earth's orbit by
looking at the seasons and the earth spinning by looking at the day night cycle.

I have likened this to a detective coming on the scene of a crime after the
crime's been committed. You can't actually watch the crime being committed,
but you can see footprints, you can see fingerprints, you can see all sorts of
clues that remain in the room where the murder was committed. And you can
put forward a hypothesis as to how the murder happened, and then check the
hypothesis against the facts. And to a greater or lesser extent, the detective can
come to a firm conclusion about who the murderer was. It's just the same way
with evolution, except that the number of clues that we have after the crime so
to speak are enormously more, enormously richer than those that any detective
normally is privileged to see.
 Is every offspring a 'slightly new'
species?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv6Th7UwAVY

How does this work?" Well, I see what you mean, because the variation that
exists in every population could be thought of as a tiny step towards a new
species, but I think it's pretty misleading to put it that way, to say every offspring
is a slightly new species.

When two populations spring off from one, when a population splits into two, by
some kind of random accident, some kind of separation, a geographical
separation, onto different islands, or separated on different sides of a river or a
mountain range, or something like that. Then the ordinary variation that
happens in every population is no longer tied to each other. These two
populations are now free to move in different directions in evolutionary time. So
one of them may become a bit darker, one of them may become a bit lighter.
One of them may become a bit bigger, one a bit smaller or something of that
sort. Every individual offspring is just similar to its parents. You wouldn't really
notice that there's any evolutionary trend going on. But over a long period of
time, the population on one island might become a little bit different from the
population on the other island. And these are starting to divert; these really are
starting to move towards becoming a slightly new species. They only become a
truly new species when they become so far apart, when they diverge so far
apart that if they ever do meet, they can't interbreed. And that's the point when
by definition we say they become a new species. But you are right that there's a
sort of continuum between just ordinary variation in different geographical
regions and becoming a new species. But of all the different taxonomic
categories, the species is rather unique, in that it's the only one where we
actually do have a proper objective criterion for saying 'now it's happened, now
a new species has been born.' And the new species has been born at the
moment when the new species or the species on this island is no longer
capable of interbreeding with the species on that island. As for why they're no
longer capable of interbreeding, well that's because their genes become
progressively more incompatible. Their chromosomes may become unable to
work together to produce offspring of the next generation, something of that
sort. Mules, as you know are a hybrid between donkeys and horses, and a mule
is a perfectly functioning organism, but the donkey chromosomes and the horse
chromosomes are not capable of coming together, to work together to produce
the offspring of the next generation. So that the mule, though it's a perfectly
functioning organism, cannot produce offspring of its own.