The late Francis Crick, one of Britain's most famous scientists, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. He is best known for his discovery, jointly with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, of the double helix structure of DNA, though he also made important contributions in understanding the genetic code and was exploring the basis of consciousness in the years leading up to his death in 2004.
Well, the essence of the idea is that there is variation in-in what is inherited and the favourable variations are selected because the other ones- other ones don’t leave sufficient offspring. They- they die or don’t- don't leave offspring in the right way. It's- it's a very simple mechanism. I mean, we use it in the test tube nowadays. I mean, people evolve new molecules by natural selection, for example, because we can use- we can do it very rapidly because we can handle vast numbers, we can- we can handle more than 10,000 billion little molecules at once and so on and so forth and so we can select for rather rare events in a very rapid space of time. We can’t do it, of course, for large organisms, we can’t speed them up but- so the process is very well understood. What is not understood is all the little gadgets and devices which nature has done in order to make it work a bit better or make it work more efficiently and there will probably be some surprises there. So, we don’t understand all the gadgetry which nature has evolved to make this process work in a better way but as far as we can see, that is the main and, if not the only process which is involved. There is a certain amount of drift of things but there seems to be very little of what’s called the Lamarkian inheritance of something from the experience of the organism being passed onto the offspring which is the obvious idea to have, you see, that if you exercise your muscles then your children will have bigger muscles, you see. That seems unlikely and certainly isn’t common.
Title: Natural selection: the essence of the idea
Listeners:
Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
In 1993 he and his wife, Lotte, made a series for BBC2 called 'Seven
Wonders of the World', in which outstanding scientists were invited to
talk about themselves and their own seven wonders... Francis Crick
declined to play this particular game (on the basis that 'everything is
wonderful'), but he did agree to spend a couple of hours talking about
his life and and work. The footage did not appear in the 'Seven
Wonders' series, and has never been publicly shown. When Crick died in the summer of 2004, BBC TV kindly gave permission for it to be included in 'Peoples Archive'.
Technical note: the videotapes from which the Peoples Archive streaming version has been prepared had timecode-in-vision in the lower third of the picture. We have reframed the material to exclude this timecode because it is distracting, although this does mean that the image is sometimes a more extreme close-up than either director or cameraman ever intended!
Duration:
1 minute, 42 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
08 January 2010
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