Manolis Kellis

So basically that, I still have the same heart.

Like very, very little has changed.

The blood going through my veins, the oxygen, the, you know, our immune system, we're basically primates.

Our social behavior,

We're basically new world monkeys and old world monkeys.

We're basically this concept that every single one of these behaviors can be traced somewhere in evolution.

And that all of that continues to live within us is also a testament to not just not killing other humans for God's sake, but like not killing other species either.

Like just to realize just how united we are with nature and that all of these biological processes have never ceased to exist.

They're continuing to live within us.

And then just the neocortex and all of the reasoning capabilities of humans are built on top of all of these other species that continue to live, breathe, divide, metabolize, fight off pathogens, all continue inside us.

It's extraordinary that humans have evolved so much in so little time.

Again, if you look at the timeline of evolution, you basically have billions of years to even get to a dividing cell, and then a multicellular organism, and then a complex body plan, and then these incredible senses that we have for perceiving the world, the fact that bats can fly, and they evolved flight, they evolved sonar in the span of a few million years.

I mean, it's just extraordinary how much evolution has kind of sped up.

And all of that comes through this evolvability, the fact that we took a while to get good at evolving.

And then once you get good at evolving, you can sort of, you have modularity built in, you have hierarchical organizations built in, you have all of these constructs that allow meaningful changes to occur without breaking the system completely.

If you look at a traditional genetic algorithm, the way that humans designed them in the 60s,

you can only evolve so much.

And as you evolve a certain amount of complexity, the number of mutations that move you away from something functional exponentially increases.

And the number of mutations that move you to something better exponentially decreases.

So the probability of evolving something so complex becomes infinitesimally small as you get more complex.