Natural Selection and You – in 3 minutes

This is my 3 minute presentation from the preliminary round of the Greek 2010 FameLab competition. Even though the judges were impressed, I never attended the finals because I wasn’t allowed out of Greek Army boot camp. If you liked the rainbow presentation, this one is much, much better.
The deer vs human bit was borrowed from Douglas Adams (a speech I have linked to on this blog on at least 3 different occasions). I was also heavily influenced by an article titled Human Evolution Has Stalled which, while quite incendiary, posits some interesting points. Mainly, that society currently holds two contradictory views:

The video is in Greek, but I’ve translated the text into English for posterity and the satisfaction of all my friends. Ελληνικό κείμενο εδώ.

Everyone, more or less, knows about Darwin’s theory of evolution, about natural selection.
The idea, roughly, is that if you take 10 deer, throw them in a colder climate and come back 10 generations later, the deer you find will have thicker fur. And the reason for that is that some of the original deer had slightly thicker fur than the rest. This gave them slightly higher chances of survival and slightly higher chances of sex, thus allowing them to spawn offspring with even thicker fur and so on and so forth.
So you can see that evolution is, in a way, much like vaccuuming.
No.
I don’t want to dwell too much on the mechanism of evolution, what interests me is the way it has influenced the human species.
Evolution has been especially generous to us. We have been gifted with logic, language, opposable thumbs and armpit hair. We could have been like the platypus, which has neither logic, nor language, nor thumbs, nor armpits (they can’t carry watermelons, they can only nudge them forward with their beaks).
In fact, I suggest to you that evolution has favoured us so effectively that we have surpassed it. We have transcended the very process that brought us to where we are.
Because if you take 10 humans and throw them in a colder climate, they’ll look at the deer and say “Hey… that fur looks thick and warm. I’ll take it.”
Modern technology, modern medicine and modern prophylactics have resulted in our exclusion from the process of natural evolution. Their very purpose is to provide the same opportunities in life to everyone, regardless of their genetic predisposition, whether they be diabetic, high-risk for cancer, or Olympiakos FC fans.
All of this makes us very nervous. We’re nervous because we’re aware that all this knowledge hasn’t been internalised. It’s not in our DNA. There’s no gene for building cars, cell phones or the Internet. If something goes horribly wrong, if, say, the ocean were to rise by a meter, or we get hit by an asteroid, 10,000 years of technological progress will be reversed overnight. We realise this whenever there’s a sudden power failure, or if we find ourselves in a strange neighbourhood after dark: not much has changed in the last 10,000 years. Our chances of survival are pretty much the same.
Fortunately, evolution has left us with one last present. A sort of parting gift: Foresight. The ability to predict the consequences of our actions and to act in order to avoid them.
Now, it’s up to us to use it.
But even if we don’t, we’ll be taken care of by natural selection.

You’ll find a transcript of the judges’ comments right after the jump.

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