Elaine Morgan says we evolved from aquatic apes

445,604 views ・ 2009-07-31

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00:12
Well, this is 2009.
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And it's the Bicentenary of Charles Darwin.
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And all over the world, eminent evolutionists
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are anxious to celebrate this.
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And what they're planning to do is to enlighten us
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on almost every aspect
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of Darwin and his life,
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and how he changed our thinking.
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I say almost every aspect,
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because there is one aspect of this story
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which they have thrown no light on.
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And they seem anxious to skirt around it and step over it
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and to talk about something else.
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So I'm going to talk about it.
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It's the question of, why are we so different from the chimpanzees?
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We get the geneticists keeping on telling us
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how extremely closely we are related -- hardly any genes of difference,
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very, very closely related.
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And yet, when you look at the phenotypes,
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there's a chimp, there's a man;
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they're astoundingly different,
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no resemblance at all.
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I'm not talking about airy-fairy stuff
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about culture or psychology, or behavior.
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I'm talking about ground-base, nitty-gritty,
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measurable physical differences.
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They, that one,
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is hairy and walking on four legs.
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That one is a naked biped. Why?
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I mean --
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(Laughter)
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if I'm a good Darwinist, I've got to believe
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there's a reason for that.
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If we changed so much, something must have happened.
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What happened?
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Now 50 years ago, that was a laughably simple question.
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Everybody knew the answer.
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They knew what happened.
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The ancestor of the apes stayed in the trees;
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our ancestors went out onto the plain.
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That explained everything.
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We had to get up on our legs to peer over the tall grass,
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or to chase after animals,
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or to free our hands for weapons.
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And we got so overheated in the chase
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that we had to take off that fur coat and throw it away.
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Everybody knew that, for generations.
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But then, in the '90s, something began to unravel.
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The paleontologists themselves looked a bit more closely
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at the accompanying microfauna
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that lived in the same time and place as the hominids.
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And they weren't savanna species.
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And they looked at the herbivores. And they weren't savanna herbivores.
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And then they were so clever, they found a way to analyze
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fossilized pollen.
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Shock, horror.
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The fossilized pollen was not of savanna vegetation.
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Some of it even came from lianas,
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those things that dangle in the middle of the jungle.
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So we're left with a situation where
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we know that our earliest ancestors
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were moving around on four legs in the trees,
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before the savanna ecosystem even came into existence.
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This is not something I've made up.
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It's not a minority theory.
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Everybody agrees with it.
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Professor Tobias came over from South Africa
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and spoke to University College London.
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He said, "Everything I've been telling you for the last 20 years,
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forget about it. It was wrong.
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We've got to go back to square one and start again."
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It made him very unpopular. They didn't want to go back to square one.
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I mean, it's a terrible thing to happen.
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You've got this beautiful paradigm.
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You've believed it through generations.
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Nobody has questioned it.
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You've been constructing fanciful things on top of it,
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relying on it to be as solid as a rock.
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And now it's whipped away from under you.
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What do you do? What does a scientist do in that case?
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Well, we know the answer because
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Thomas S. Kuhn
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wrote a seminal treatise
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about this back in 1962.
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He said what scientists do
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when a paradigm fails
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is, guess what -- they carry on as if nothing had happened.
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(Laughter)
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If they haven't got a paradigm they can't ask the question.
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So they say, "Yes it's wrong,
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but supposing it was right ..."
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(Laughter)
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And the only other option open to them
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is to stop asking the questions.
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So that is what they have done now.
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That's why you don't hear them talking about it. It's yesterday's question.
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Some of them have even elevated it into a principle.
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It's what we ought to be doing.
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Aaron Filler from Harvard said,
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"Isn't it time we stopped talking about selective pressures?
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I mean, why don't we talk about, well, there's chromosomes, and there's genes.
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And we just record what we see."
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Charles Darwin must be spinning in his grave!
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He knew all about that kind of science.
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And he called it hypothesis-free science.
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And he despised it from the bottom of his heart.
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And if you're going to say,
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"I'm going to stop talking about selective pressures,"
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you can take "The Origin of Species" and throw it out of the window,
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for it's about nothing else but selective pressures.
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And the irony of it is,
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that this is one occasion of a paradigm collapse
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where we didn't have to wait for a new paradigm to come up.
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There was one waiting in the wings.
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It had been waiting there since 1960
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when Alister Hardy, a marine biologist,
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said, "I think what happened,
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perhaps our ancestors
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had a more aquatic existence
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for some of the time."
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He kept it to himself for 30 years.
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But then the press got hold of it and all hell broke loose.
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All his colleagues said, "This is outrageous.
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You've exposed us to public ridicule!
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You must never do that again."
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And at that time, it became set in stone:
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the aquatic theory should be dumped
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with the UFOs and the yetis,
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as part of the lunatic fringe of science.
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Well I don't think that.
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I think that Hardy had a lot going for him.
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I'd like to talk about just a handful
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of what have been called the
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hallmarks of mankind,
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the things that made us different from everybody else,
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and all our relatives.
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Let's look at our naked skin.
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It's obvious that most of the things we think about
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that have lost their body hair, mammals without body hair,
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are aquatic ones, like the dugong, the walrus,
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the dolphin, the hippopotamus, the manatee.
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And a couple of wallowers-in-mud like the babirusa.
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And you're tempted to think, well perhaps,
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could that be why we are naked?
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I suggested it and people said, "No no no.
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I mean, look at the elephant.
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You've forgotten all about the elephant haven't you?"
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So back in 1982 I said,
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"Well perhaps the elephant had an aquatic ancestor."
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Peals of merry laughter!
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"That crazy woman. She's off again. She'll say anything won't she?"
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But by now, everybody agrees that the elephant had an aquatic ancestor.
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This has come 'round to be that all those naked pachyderms
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have aquatic ancestors.
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The last exception was supposed to be the rhinoceros.
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Last year in Florida they found extinct ancestor of a rhinoceros
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and said, "Seems to have spent most of its time in the water."
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So this is a close connection between nakedness and water.
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As an absolute connection, it only works one way.
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You can't say all aquatic animals are naked,
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because look at the sea otter.
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But you can say
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that every animal that has become naked
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has been conditioned by water, in its own lifetime,
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or the lifetime of its ancestors. I think this is significant.
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The only exception is the naked Somalian mole-rat,
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which never puts its nose above the surface of the ground.
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And take bipedality.
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Here you can't find anybody to compare it with,
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because we're the only animal that walks upright on two legs.
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But you can say this: all the apes and all the monkeys
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are capable of walking on two legs,
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if they want to, for a short time.
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There is only one circumstance in which they
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always, all of them, walk on two legs,
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and that is when they are wading through water.
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Do you think that's significant?
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David Attenborough thinks it's significant,
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as the possible beginning of our bipedalism.
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Look at the fat layer.
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We have got, under our skin, a layer of fat, all over:
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nothing in the least like that in any other primate.
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Why should it be there?
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Well they do know, that if you look at other aquatic mammals,
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the fat that in most land mammals
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is deposited inside the body wall,
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around the kidneys and the intestines and so on,
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has started to migrate to the outside,
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and spread out in a layer inside the skin.
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In the whale it's complete:
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no fat inside at all, all in blubber outside.
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We cannot avoid the suspicion
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that in our case it's started to happen.
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We have got skin lined with this layer.
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It's the only possible explanation of why humans,
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if they're very unlucky,
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can become grossly obese,
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in a way that would be totally impossible for any other primate, physically impossible.
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Something very odd, matter-of-factly, never explained.
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The question of why we can speak.
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We can speak.
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And the gorilla can't speak. Why?
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Nothing to do with his teeth or his tongue or his lungs or anything like that --
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purely has to do with its conscious control of its breath.
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You can't even train a gorilla to say "Ah" on request.
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The only creatures that have got conscious control of their breath
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are the diving animals and the diving birds.
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It was an absolute precondition for our being able to speak.
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And then again, there is the fact that we are streamlined.
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Trying to imagine a diver
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diving into water -- hardly makes a splash.
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Try to imagine a gorilla
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performing the same maneuver,
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and you can see that, compared with gorilla,
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we are halfway to being shaped like a fish.
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I am trying to suggest that, for 40-odd years,
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this aquatic idea has been miscategorized as lunatic fringe,
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and it is not lunatic fringe.
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And the ironic thing about it is that
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they are not staving off the aquatic theory
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to protect a theory of their own,
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which they've all agreed on, and they love.
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There is nothing there.
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They are staving off the aquatic theory
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to protect a vacuum.
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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How do they react when I say these things?
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One very common reaction I've heard about 20 times
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is, "But it was investigated.
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They conducted a serious investigation of this at the beginning,
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when Hardy put forward his article."
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I don't believe it.
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For 35 years I've been looking for any evidence
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of any incident of that kind,
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and I've concluded that that's one of the urban myths.
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It's never been done.
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I ask people sometimes, and they say,
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"I like the aquatic theory!
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Everybody likes the aquatic theory.
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Of course they don't believe it, but they like it."
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Well I say, "Why do you think it's rubbish?"
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They say "Well ...
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everybody I talk to says it's rubbish.
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And they can't all be wrong, can they?"
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The answer to that, loud and clear, is, "Yes! They can all be wrong."
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History is strewn with the cases when they've all got it wrong.
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(Applause)
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And if you've got a scientific problem like that,
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you can't solve it by holding a head count,
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and saying, "More of us say yes than say no."
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(Laughter)
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Apart from that, some of the heads count more than others.
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Some of them have come over.
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There was Professor Tobias. He's come over.
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Daniel Dennett, he's come over.
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Sir David Attenborough, he's come over.
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Anybody else out there? Come on in.
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The water is lovely.
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(Applause)
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And now we've got to look to the future.
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Ultimately one of three things is going to happen.
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Either they will go on for the next 40 years, 50 years, 60 years.
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"Yeah well we don't talk about that. Let's talk about something interesting."
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That would be very sad.
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The second thing that could happen
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is that some young genius will arrive,
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and say, "I've found it.
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It was not the savanna, it was not the water, it was this!"
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No sign of that happening either.
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I don't think there is a third option.
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So the third thing that might happen is
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a very beautiful thing.
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If you look back at the early years of the last century,
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there was a stand-off, a lot of bickering and bad feeling
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between the believers in Mendel,
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and the believers in Darwin.
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It ended with a new synthesis:
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Darwin's ideas and Mendel's ideas
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blending together.
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And I think the same thing will happen here.
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You'll get a new synthesis.
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Hardy's ideas and Darwin's ideas
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will be blended together.
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And we can move forward from there,
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and really get somewhere.
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That would be a beautiful thing.
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It would be very nice for me if it happened soon.
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(Laughter)
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Because I'm older now than George Burns was when he said,
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"At my age, I don't even buy green bananas."
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(Laughter)
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So if it's going to come and it's going to happen,
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what's holding it up?
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I can tell you that in three words.
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Academia says no.
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They decided in 1960,
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"That belongs with the UFOs and the yetis."
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And it's not easy to change their minds.
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The professional journals
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won't touch it with a barge pole.
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The textbooks don't mention it.
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The syllabus doesn't mention even the fact that we're naked,
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let alone look for a reason to it.
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"Horizon," which takes its cue from the academics,
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won't touch it with a barge pole.
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So we never hear the case put for it,
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except in jocular references
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to people on the lunatic fringe.
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15:39
I don't know quite where this diktat comes from.
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15:45
Somebody up there
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15:47
is issuing the commandment,
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15:51
"Thou shalt not believe in the aquatic theory.
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15:55
And if you hope to make progress in this profession,
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15:58
and you do believe it, you'd better keep it to yourself,
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16:02
because it will get in your way."
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16:04
So I get the impression that some parts
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of the scientific establishment
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are morphing into a kind of priesthood.
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But you know, that makes me feel good,
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16:18
because Richard Dawkins has told us
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how to treat a priesthood.
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16:23
(Laughter)
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16:25
He says, "Firstly, you've got to refuse to give it
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16:28
all the excessive awe and reverence
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it's been trained to receive."
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Right. I'll go ahead with that.
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16:35
And secondly, he says,
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"You must never be afraid to rock the boat."
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I'll go along with that too.
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Thank you very much.
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16:44
(Applause)
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