Prakhar Ke Pravachan

Future of Evolution | Evolution Theory part 3

Episode Summary

This is Part 3 of a 3 part series on the Theory of Evolution and its implications Show notes: I spent the first 2 years at @columbia primarily focusing on the education of evolutionary theory. 🎓 📚 After having read enough books, research papers - having written a few myself, I bring to you a quick summation of the entire concept in a 3 video series.

Episode Notes

_You can also watch this episode on Youtube

A group for mindful discussions around psychology, philosophy, religion and personal growth.
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Episode Transcription

00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:09,542

But as soon as we have 80, 90, 100 percent control

over our evolution, we'll have a decision to make

00:00:09,542 --> 00:00:15,615

and that decision will be "What do I pass on and what do I

stop?"

00:00:16,149 --> 00:00:21,187

And to answer that, we must answer

another important question

00:00:21,888 --> 00:00:28,328

What is the purpose of keeping these people alive,

or for instance, propogating human race

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Welcome to the court

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So, Bro, Partly the whole idea of this pravachan game

isn’t just me giving out advices, or self help talk or ...

00:00:48,681 --> 00:00:52,352

concepts of psychological reality construction

I want to...

00:00:54,020 --> 00:00:59,759

But part of me also instills, the sense of curiosity

which we all leave behind in our childhood

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The primary reason behind leaving

this ‘sense of curiosity’ in our childhood is that..

00:01:03,396 --> 00:01:09,502

...we develop a sense of aversion towards the

primary source of information, like our school books

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And in my case, this whole cycle finally

came to an end when I started realizing that the...

00:01:19,279 --> 00:01:24,017

So today we’ll be talking about another such similar issue

and ...

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we'll dive deep into this issue on a

complicated level and examine it. Let’s see what we find out

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Okay?

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From what I know, whatever we talk about right now

I won't be addressing any personal application of this issue

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But what will happen is...

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And no matter who you are, this type of thinking...

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It's is that kind of an idea, which will

make you think of things beyond the issue itself

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Today we will be talking about the theory of evolution

and we know it by the Darwinian name of it

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Theory of Natural selection

And the concepts of the theory of natural selection are very

simple

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You'll survive, you'll bear kids and eventually only the

offsprings of these fit people will keep on surviving

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But before Darwin came up with this theory

Many people speculated about this natural life order

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One of them was Lamarck

And Lamarck's theory...you can call it the proto-theory of

evolution

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It came before Darwin's consolidated theory of evolution

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It was like an almost attempt, to understand what was

happening

and Lamarck's idea was this...

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The necks of Giraffes, are so long because of

constantly stretching it to reach their food

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And eventually it elongates

So his idea was that the stimulus of life...

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The situations in this life, will determine your natural

evolution

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Darwin rejected his theory

Nothing happens in the span of one generation

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Some traits pass on from one generation to the other

and this process takes place over hundreds of generations

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Now, I think about 70 years after Lamarck, Darwin comes,

Darwin announces his theory of evolution with Gregor Mendel

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Was it Mendel? Anyway...

Darwin announces his theory of evolution...

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And then it's established, everyone accepts that the theory

of evolution operates on natural selection

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How the nature selects the fittest

eventually populates the entire population

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However, all the biologists, doctors, psychologists

run away after listening to this analysis

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And from this comes the concept, that you have to be

nature's

strongest specimen to survive and what not

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But we forget, actually Lamarck wasn't entirely wrong

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Darwin talks about evolution, beginning from the single

celled organism, and gradually leading up to humans

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And when it comes to the question of human

language being formed or human art being formed...

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Why is it that even the dumbest, least intelligent human

beings

are still more intelligent than the smartest of any other

animal

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Darwins doesn't answer this, he leaves this out

He doesn't consider this necessary

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And everyone closes the books on this, how language evolved

what was the reason for it?

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Infact there's no academic or philosophical speculation

about this either

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But a hyper interesting factoid about this is that...

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Lamarck says, the circumstances of this life

determine how you'll become

Exactly! That's what happens

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But for that to happen it's important that I can pass on

what

I've earned in this life

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If a giraffe elongates his neck by stretching,

then his children will also have a long neck, automatically

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All this is not possible in Darwin's theory

because according to Darwin, the genes are passed on...

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Information earned in the same life

cannot be passed on

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But because we had the means of language because we had the

means of culture,

information acquired in this very age could be passed on

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And that gets passed on to your son or your daughter

|and from there their children and from there their children

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And this keeps compounding and whatever remains of it

over a long period of time, we call it culture

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This is the role of culture in evolution

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So think about somebody who has a particular set of genes

goes to jail and never has children, then it's not possible

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And this prison system is a cultural artifact in itself

Likewise there are many reasons that are culturally

restricted

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and this way our evolutionary stream gets controlled

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...and we don’t know when or why it occurred,

we started becoming Darwinian as well as Lamarckian

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What we can extract from this concept is that...

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The amount of information retained in one lifecycle

which can be passed on, is what determines the evolution

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So the future of our species, according to Darwin, is

limited to the information which is coded in our genes

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As soon as we get the benefit of language, and the language

starts evolving...

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that same information can now be linguistically coded,

stored in books or uploaded on Netflix and then passed on

our future generations

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And Memes is a very very fascinating idea, what memes are

essentially

are ideas that are so compatible to your genes...

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...that they propagate themselves through riding on your

genes. For instance religion, or money

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This concept of money or the concept of religion is so

compatible with our genes or our biological behaviors...

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we are status beings, socially organize yourself from top to

bottom,

you put in money in the equation then money makes that easy

for us.

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So these memes, they essentially have a strong efficacy,

or a strong efficacy ratio with our genes,

and they survive on their own

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Alright? From Darwin to Lamarckian movement,

from natural selection to cultural movement...

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Now sometimes, over the last hundred years or so,

but I would say 100 years is giving it too much weight..

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...but sometimes over the last 60 years or so, we developed

something far more interesting and these are called...

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Or, we don’t know but maybe

twitter and facebook are examples of good Temes

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because as soon as we interact with them,

our biology starts exploiting

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Our feel good hormone starts pumping faster,

likes make our serotonin levels start going up

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The ratio of our hormonal profile and our

social media activity acquires 1:1

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Maybe even Youtube is a Teme, or even Joe Rogan for an

instance, Howard Stern...

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there are 50 different people who by

the means of technological ideas have been stored for ever

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And the gradient is the same

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And the more information you have

the greater control you have on evolution

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If I know exactly what kind of offsprings I want in the next

generation

I'll frame the culture of the surrounding in such a manner

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And then only the people who fall within the accepted

bracket

will have sex and reproduce

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With temes, the information processing power

becomes exponential

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We can understand and quantify

waaay more than we could with just memes

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And from this fundamental movement, from memes to temes

the game is going to change

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Up until now, with Darwin, with Lamarck, our evolution was

guided by randomized forces, but as soon as we have

80, 90, 100 percent control

00:10:41,240 --> 00:10:50,783

...over our evolution, we'll have a decision to make

and that decision will be "What do I pass on and what do I

stop?"

00:10:51,684 --> 00:10:56,722

And to answer that, we must answer

another important question

00:10:57,423 --> 00:11:03,863

What is the purpose of keeping these people alive,

or for instance, propogating human race

00:11:04,163 --> 00:11:05,965

We have to sort it out on that basis

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And answering this question is not easy

because at least up until now, it's been very difficult

to understand the collective meaning of us all

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We've barely ever been on the same page, all of us at once,

ever

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And we would have to create means to do that

And usually the means that are created to do that...

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...are Authoritarian means

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And what they eventually lead to

is genocidal measures

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And when you have the tool to decide who gets to live

further

what genes get to go forward, be that through CRISPR of

whatever

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What is the purpose of us all, our species

of our awareness, of our consciousness, of our existence

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Why I am I aware of what I'm doing?

Why can I experience saying all of this?

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Until we answer what the purpose of our species is,

and it cannot be something as flaccid as just being good to

each other

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That just doesn't work

So if everyone is suddenly good to each other, shares and

cares, now what?

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What now? We'll get bored, You have to have a game which you

can play

for a very long time with some sense of incremental

achievement

100

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And to find that... Exploring space, exploring 6 dimensions

we have no idea how we'll do that

101

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We have not even begun to think about that question

102

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And we have no idea