Youtube comments of (@PrimerBlobs).
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Lots of comments relate to racism, so I think it's worth discussing that a little.
Racism in humans is a very complex phenomenon that can't be simply traced to genes. To be honest, I don't think I really understand racism, but I'm confident saying a full understanding would take inputs from biology, psychology, sociology, and history, perhaps more. But as the video explains, the green beard phenomenon is very brittle and rarely shows up in nature, so it's not an explanation, and certainly not a justification for something as complex as racism.
Thanks for reading, and be kind to each other. :)
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If you're about to leave a comment saying that faster creatures aren't actually less efficient, read this first. I presented that part a bit strangely.
At 2:14, I say moving quickly is less efficient, giving the example of a creature moving a unit distance in half the time, using twice the energy. Then, at 4:53, I show a formula for the energy cost per unit time, which depends on the square of the creature's speed.
I gave distance per time, energy per time, and distance per energy at separate parts of the video, and that was confusing.
So here's a more explicit summary.
If we double a creature's speed...
- its distance per time is doubled (the definition of speed)
- its energy per time is quadrupled (because it depends on the square of speed)
- its distance per energy is halved: (2x distance per time) / (4x energy per unit time)
That last bullet is the "efficiency" from the video. With its starting energy for a day, a 2x-speed creature can only travel half the distance.
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A number of people have commented that at 5:22, the green population should be expected to beat out the blue population because the blue population suffers from mutations while the green population benefits from them. That effect is real, but it's too small to tip the scales, and I determined it was too complex for the main message of the video. But because some people are interested, I thought I'd lay it out in more detail here.
Only 1% of replications by blue creatures produce a green creature (4:52), and another 1% produce orange creatures. This means blue's replication rate is effectively only 98% of the stated value. 9.8% instead of 10%. The green population gets an expected influx of creatures each time step equal to 0.001 (a tenth of a percent) times the number of blue creatures.
Here's a desmos graph of the expected changes per time step for blue and green, from the equation in the video. (The green equation has an added term for bonus creatures from blue's mutations.)
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/zhig0dcftg
x is the number of blue creatures, and there are sliders for the other parameters if you want to play with them. N is the total, and N-x is the number of green creatures.
We can see that when there are 49 or more blue creatures we expect to gain green creatures and lose blue creatures. And if there are 44 or more blues, we expect to lose more blues than greens. But for any number of blues less than this, we expect green to do worse. Green is never expected to outnumber blue.
This all assumes no oranges. The fact that the functions add to less than zero for any value reflects the fact that orange is gaining in any of these scenarios.
So it's true that in this setup blue suffers losses from mutations to different colors while green benefits, but the magnitude of this effect with the given parameters is too small to make up the difference in base replication chance between green and blue. Additional sims I ran reflect this fact, with green regularly losing, but I chose to animate the first sim I ran because it was a good reminder of how chaotic this system is.
I appreciate folks commenting with a critical eye, and this will help me know what to explain more clearly vs what to gloss over in future videos. It was also kind of fun to make the desmos graph. If you like it and want to see more desmos graphs when relevant to other videos, please reply to this comment and tell me so!
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A few notes
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First, Punnett Squares was not the best recommendation for a path to answering the pop quiz question. Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium would have been a better recommendation for something to look up.
A square diagram involving alleles is very useful for the question, but the diagram isn't a typical Punnett Square, since it requires assigning uneven probabilities to alleles, as if the two alleles were randomly selected from the population rather than from two specific parents.
........
Second, a common question: Isn't aging good for the species, since older creatures get out of the way?
Yes, it could be. This pattern would increase genetic diversity by allowing more new mutations to exist in a gene pool. And that genetic diversity would make the population more likely to survive environmental changes.
But! Natural selection usually doesn't work at the group/species level. Even if aging is good for a population in the long run, the individuals with less aging would still have an advantage during stable periods and be favored by natural selection. It's the same in the videos about cooperation. Cooperating is good for the species, but defecting can still be favored by natural selection in some circumstances.
Group selection is only a thing for tightly knit groups that reproduce together. Multicellular organisms are the best example of this. Each cell could be viewed as an individual, and the body as a group. Cancer is when cells decide to stop cooperating with the body and instead work for their own individual reproduction, at the expense of the rest of the body. Since bodies reproduce as a group, bodies that have mechanisms to enforce cooperation among their cells do better under natural selection. Even so, individual cancer cells don't really care about this, so cancer is a never-ending battle between the selection happening at the body level and selection happening at the level of an individual cell. It would be the same with ageless individuals, except the blob population doesn't even reproduce as a whole, so group-level selection would be much weaker if it exists at all. (Also, I would argue that longer-lived individuals aren't necessarily destructive like cancer and could even benefit the population in social species, especially in humans.)
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