#230 Rutger Vos: Natural Selection, Human Behavior, Race, And Adaptations
Dr. Rutger Vos is an evolutionary biologist from Leiden University and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, both in The Netherlands. He does work in computational biology and contributes to various open source software projects.
In this episode, we talk about some general topics in evolutionary biology. We first discuss the basic ingredients we need to have evolution by natural selection, and the mechanisms associated with it. We refer to some of the issues about the “extended evolutionary synthesis”, as proposed by some biologists. We then talk about the interplay between culture and biology in humans, and why human behavior is more complex than the behavior of other species. We also discuss the issues surrounding the concept of “race”, and how to properly think about human variation. Finally, we talk about how we can know that a trait is an adaptation in evolutionary biology.
Time Links:
What do we need to have evolution by natural selection?
Levels of selection
Problems with the “extended evolutionary synthesis”, and things like epigenetics
The influence of culture on human evolution and behavior
Studying human behavior
Human variation, and the concept of race
The usefulness of “race” for the medical field
How do we know if something is an adaptation?
Follow Dr. Vos’ work!
Follow Dr. Vos’ work:
Naturalis Biodiversity Center Personal Page: http://bit.ly/2LHRo1n
Naturalis Biodiversity Page: http://bit.ly/2YloLsA
Blog: http://bit.ly/2yd7yHd
ResearchGate profile: http://bit.ly/2YmLg0f
Coursera profile: http://bit.ly/2Y7NPbl
Twitter handle: @rvosa
Got Academy (YouTube): http://bit.ly/2K4Txkx
Got Academy (podcast): http://bit.ly/2SJedlL