Biological Innovation

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Do curso por Macquarie University

Creating Innovation

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Macquarie University

Creating Innovation

6 ratings

Curso 3 de 4 em Specialization Solving Complex Problems

The third course of the specialization CREATING INNOVATION will teach you what is at the core of all innovations that solve complex problems and how to foster methods to make big breakthroughs possible. It advances your knowledge of your own field by teaching you to look at it in new ways. CREATING INNOVATION is constructed in the following way: Week I. “What is Innovation?” – What lies at the core of all innovations. Week II. “The Evolution of Human Creativity” – How humans developed the ability to innovate and think creatively. Week III. “Innovation in a Complex Global Network” – How innovations emerge from human networks. Week IV. “Planning Innovation” – How organisations seek out and create the right conditions for new breakthroughs. Week V. “Market Innovation” – What makes innovations more likely to emerge in a market setting. Week VI. “Innovation in the Anthropocene” – How innovations are crucial to meet the problems of the 21st century.

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What is Innovation?

Welcome to Course 3 of the specialisation! In this module we will look at what innovation is, in the broadest possible context, and how the innovations humans devise to solve complex problems are the continuation of a much bigger and more critical trend.

Biological Innovation5:49

Conheça os instrutores

David Baker
Associate Lecturer
Big History Institute
David Christian
Professor
Big History Institute
Shawn Ross
Associate Professor
Big History Institute

The big question for this segment is how can natural selection generate complexity?

[MUSIC]

When we look at the living world, we're struck by the diversity and

complexity of living things and it's really hard for

us to understand how such complexity can arise, but there is a solution and

it's a solution first suggested by Charles Darwin.

This solution is called natural selection and it's based on a few simple principles.

Firstly, individuals within species exhibit variation.

Secondly, only some of these individuals get to reproduce.

These individuals are those that exhibit variation that suit them

to the current environment, so they might be able to survive longer or

track mates better or raise their young better.

The important thing here is that the variation

allows some individuals to reproduce.

Thirdly, the principles of heredity

ensure that advantageous variations are pass to offspring.

So, those variation that allow you to survive and

reproduce in the current environment are passed to your offspring.

So over time, how species look and

how they behave can change as variations accumulate generation by generation.

And given a very long time span, these differences

can accumulate into the huge numbers and complexity of species on Earth.

We still have trouble understanding this though,

partly because of the enormous length of time involved.

There are some complex things that we can understand,

because they happen right in front of our eyes.

Take a snowflake, for instance.

Snowflakes arise through the nine properties of water molecules and physics,

but what if snowflakes could reproduce?

That would land natural selection on top of these physical and

molecular principles, and that's exactly what happens in living things.

Natural selection is layered on top of physical and molecular principles, and

generates the complexity that we see in the natural world.

So now, I'm going to show you how the process of natural selection can

generate this complexity and I'm going to use three different examples.

The first example is from an experiment done by

biologists at the Imperial College London.

They started with some computer generated audio loops that sounded like this.

[MUSIC]

Listeners were asked to rate parts of the sound waves.

Those that got the most votes were allowed to reproduce and recombine.

After about 4,000 generations, this is what it sounded like.

[MUSIC]

So, simply allowing some favored variants to reproduce has generated complexity.

And incidentally, some beauty as well.

When humans apply selection to organisms, it's called artificial selection.

It's like natural selection, but often works faster.

So about 30,000 years ago, humans began artificial selection on

the gray wolf to generate our first domesticated animal, the dog.

Different traits that were already present and

variable in the gray wolf were selected over the millenia.

Long or short legs, long or short hair, body size, skull shape,

erect versus floppy ears, etc., to general the huge diversity of domestic dog breeds.

Again, selection generated enormous complexity simply by

focusing on particular traits of interest.

Finally, I'm going to focus on a recent and ongoing example of natural

selection that's of critical importance to human health and

that's the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

The discovery of antibiotics was one of the triumphs of 20th century science.

For the very first time, we could rapidly and effectively cure bacterial infections.

Your life and mine have probably been saved by antibiotics.

However, bacteria can hit back.

And just occasionally, a bacterial cell can acquire an extra piece of DNA

that confers resistance to antibiotics and

they do this by stealing it from another bacterial cell.

Natural selection by antibiotics kills all the bacteria,

except this one cell that's acquired the new gene, because it's now resistant.

As each new antibacterial compound is introduced into clinics, more and

more resistance genes can be assembled under this power of natural selection.

In fact, it's usually only a few years or

a decade before resistance to a newly introduced antibiotic is observed.

The continuing use of more and

more diverse antibiotic agents has resulted in the assembly of

highly complex DNA molecules that confer resistance to a wide, and

all of this has happened since the 1950s which is an evolutionary instant.

In each of the examples I've presented, selection that allows some

variance to reproduce at the expense of others has generated complexity and

it's done so over a comparably short period of time.

And you don't have to imagine the degree of complexity that selection on a very,

very long time period could generate,

because you just have to look at the natural world around you.

[MUSIC]

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