348 | Jessica Riskin on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Life as Creative Agency
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio
Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. There's kind of a pattern that we each individually go through when we learn something about science, some aspect of how the natural world works. First we start by looking at the world and we know that it looks very complicated. Later, we learn that there's this brilliant scientific insight that actually simplifies our description of the world, and we're very happy because we have this compact, austere
powerful formalism that can explain so much. And then we realize that actually that really simple, powerful formalism gets complicated a little bit, either intrinsically complicated when we want to include more things, or just complicated because applying it to the real world is a little bit trickier than we originally thought. So Newtonian mechanics was an enormous simplification. You know, if you read about Aristotle or other degrees of uh other ways of thinking about physics back in the day, there was a lot going on, it wasn't clear what was biology, what was physics, etc.
And then through the work of many, many generations of smart people, we learned to start by ignoring air resistance and friction, and Galileo showed us how to do these experiments to really isolate the simple essence of it. And we culminated in Newtonian mechanics in an extraordinarily powerful theory of the world. And then we learn later, when we as individuals learn about Newtonian mechanics, it gets complicated because there is friction in the real world and there is quantum mechanics and relativity and things like that. So this pattern of enormous complexity being simplified and then maybe a little bit complicated again is true both for individuals learning science but also for
We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (75 minutes, 13,375 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.