Jacob+Improbable+Destinies+Science+Cafe

On December 14th, I went to the science cafe to attend a lecture by Jonathan Losos, a professor at Harvard University and just wrote the book “Improbable Destinies”. During his lecture, he taught us about various topics such as divergent and convergent evolution. He also referenced various movies such as The Good Dinosaur and Jurassic Park to help teach us. He also referenced various experiments in his lecture including one where there were guppies that were very colourful in one place and guppies in another location that had large predators and were not colourful. In the experiment, they moved the non colourful guppies to the other location and after a couple years, the guppies were colourful. He used this to show that evolution can occur rapidly in nature I was most interested when he talked about if humans would exist if the asteroid had not killed all the dinosaurs. He also discusses the dinosauroid, which was made by Dale Russell. Russell said that if dinosaurs had not been killed they would have taken on human-like characteristics and developed a larger brain. Losos said in the lecture that the model Russell made would not be accurate and the dinosauroid would look more like a chicken-human. This relates to various parts of environmental science such as evolution, convergent and divergent evolution, and natural selection.

