#32 Richard Watson - Evolution Requires More Than Natural Selection

The dominant view of evolution is that of natural selection. But is it enough to generate all the complexity we see around us?

Natural selection suggests that those organisms who outcompete others survive and end up passing their genes to the next generation. According to our today's guest, Richard, there is another mechanism at play which is something he calls Natural Induction. This view explains how adaptions can arise in biological systems without natural selection. Evolution is the reason why we see all the complexity around us, so understanding it from a new lens is going to be very enriching.

== About the guest ==
Richard Watson is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Life Sciences at the University of Southampton. His research interests span artificial life and mechanisms of evolution.

== What we talk about ==
0:00 - Introduction
1:10 - How did you get interested in the mechanisms of evolution?
4:43 - What is natural selection?
8:57 - Your take on the debate on the unit of natural section
17:10 - What made you question natural selection?
26:05 - Can you talk more about your thesis on random accidents in cooperation evolution?
40:27 - Do you mean if individual species do not compete and go their own way, it is beneficial for the group as a whole?
45:23 - What is generalization or induction?
48:08 - Is the ecosystem robust or catastrophic to changes?
49:40 - When an ecosystem, at any moment of the time, is in a particular configuration, what is it really anticipating?
56:08 - In what way natural selection explains the emergence of higher levels of units from cells to organisms or from genes to chromosomes?
58:47 - Is ‘collectively increasing the biomass’ the implicit goal of natural induction?
1:01:37 - Natural selection in the world of businesses
1:09:20 - More about the page you have on your website - ‘What’s love got to do with it?’