The Spiciest Ideas Of Evolutionary Biology - Dr Jerry Coyne - #960

How do you describe the central thread of your work over the years? Well, I'm retired now, so the thread has sort of changed direction, but when I was a scientist, I call myself a superannuated scientist now, but when I was working in the lab, I worked on the problem of speciation or the origin of species, which is, of course, the title of Darwin's 1859 book. It's a problem that Darwin didn't solve. So that's why I took it up when I was a graduate student. I think we know a lot more now.

We certainly Darwin l knew almost nothing about speciation. So to call his book, The Origin of Species is a bit of a misnomer. He should call it the origin of adaptations, which might be a natural selection. But in terms of species, that is the lumpiness of nature, the fact that creatures are not a spectrum, but they're discrete, more or less discrete entities.

That's the problem that Darwin didn't solve, and that's the problem I was working on. Right. How do you what's the layman's description of speciation? Well, are you talking about them how it happens or what how I define it? Give us both.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (81 minutes, 13,684 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.