Jesse Rogerson
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And this is, as you point out, it's a fantastic look into how science works and how scientists are very open with how wrong they can be.
That doesn't mean that everything they've done is incorrect.
It just means they're willing to admit mistakes and try and be better.
You should be scared of anybody who's claiming something, claiming some sort of scientific result and has been found to be hiding things, right?
And so when a researcher sweeps data under the rug, that is eventually found and those people get in trouble and those people pay professional consequences as a result.
It didn't work?
So this is, I also agree, evolutionary biology is amazing, especially convergent evolutionary biology where you take something like an eye and it evolves from a few different paths.
Anyway, this group was looking at, you know, where do our eyes come from and how do you compare vertebrates and invertebrates to each other?
And they were looking at, there's, if you, they took,
sample of a large amount of animals covering most animals and they found that there was two main types of eyes one where you have an eye that's right on the top of the head it's sort of like right in the midline and then you have another where it's paired set of eyes like you and me right now where it's like sort of on the face and you have these two these two styles so one's a cyclops and one is a non cyclops is what you're saying
That's right, exactly.
But what they found is that our common ancestor probably evolved from the single one.
So way back hundreds of millions of years ago,
gooping around in the ocean.
There was a common ancestor of ours and many other animals that likely had the midline one right in the middle because they developed a lifestyle that was very sedentary.
They were burrowing in the sand and they wanted to just stay in one spot.
They were filter feeders.
meaning they could just sit where they are, filter the water around them, and that's all they needed to do.
They didn't need to crawl around or chase food or anything.
There's a million, yeah.