Amanda Scott

And so they've evolved a behaviour and presumably a resistance to bad stuff.

And there's a...

cod, I can't remember its name.

The tom cod, that's it, that can survive levels of heavy metals that would basically kill everything else, stone dead.

And they're still surviving.

And they're surviving when other things are just not.

We're in the middle of a mass extinction, as far as I can tell.

And up until now, the definition of a mass extinction has been 70% of species loss over 2 million years, and we're achieving it in one human lifetime, which is not a great achievement, frankly.

But we're bringing the might of our military industrial complex to bear on the rest of life and wiping it out quite effectively.

But some things are surviving.

And some things are changing such that they're evolving whole new species.

The swallows that are getting stubbier wings, because then they can twist and turn out of the way of the trucks on the American highways.

It's amazing.

There's so much stuff.

And this is latent within us.

And how much of it is...

Genes that are not expressed, so an epigenetic change, and how much of it do you think is at the level of the DNA?

And is that a thing that we don't know and it doesn't matter?

This is purely for my interest.

And this is survival of the fittest at its most basic, which I don't really... Social Darwinism has been debunked so often that I don't even really like Darwinism happening, but it clearly is.