Ecotypes Make the Idea of a Species Even Fuzzier
6/9/202627 min
How do you define a species? The question has been controversial since the days of Darwin. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel speaks with writer Marlowe Starling about how recent advances in genomics have both clarified and complicated the picture. This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.
Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
[gentle music] What if your discovery of a natural gene-editing mechanism launched a revolution?
Samir Patel· Host0:06
What if your abstract math proofs had unexpected connections to the real world?
Speaker 10:11
What if your Nobel Prize-winning work on the expanding universe was just the beginning of the story?
Samir Patel· Host0:17
And what if you joined us, Steve Strogatz- And Janna Levin ... to learn about all of this and much more on one podcast?
Speaker 10:24
Listen to season five of Quanta Magazine's- The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday starting June 11th.
Samir Patel· Host0:33
[gentle music] In a few lakes in East Africa's Rift Valley, there are fish called cichlids. From what was likely one species, they've evolved into hundreds and hundreds of them, each specializing in a different ecological niche or type of food, and they did this in the blink of an eye, evolutionarily speaking. They're cited as an example, like Darwin's finches in the Galapagos, of what's called adaptive radiation. It's a process where natural selection turns one species into many species, and fast. It's this fast part that leads to some interesting questions. Evolution is driven by the slow accumulation of mutations, some of which are helpful, some of which aren't, and then selection acts on those mutations. So why would these fish or birds or a few other species be able to