A Series of Fortunate Events - with Sean B. Carroll
Is simple chance the source of all the beauty and diversity we see in the world? Sean B. Carroll tells the story of the awesome power of chance.
Sean's book "A Series of Fortunate Events" is available now: geni.us/mPPrdQH
Watch the Q&A: • Q&A: A Series of Fortu...
Why is the world the way it is? How did we get here? Does everything happen for a reason or are some things left to chance? Philosophers and theologians have pondered these questions for millennia, but startling scientific discoveries over the past half century are revealing that we live in a world driven by chance.
Sean B. Carroll is an award-winning scientist, writer, educator, and film producer. He is Vice President for Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Balo-Simon Chair of Biology at the University of Maryland. His books include The Serengeti Rules (Princeton), Brave Genius, and Remarkable Creatures, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
This talk and Q&A was recorded by the Royal Institution on 6 October 2020.
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Came for Sean Carroll, stayed for Sean Carroll
Same here.
I have to admit, I clicked because I expected to see Sean Carroll the physics guy ... but stayed for a great talk.
There's a Mindscape episode where Sean M interviews Sean B - worth checking out if you haven't seen it!
Looool yup
Same
They mention each other often
Me too
Both Sean Carroll are great popular book writer and scientists.
If that's not random chance
I was fully engaged, had my attention all the way through, a great talk, thank you.
yeah was good and something I think about often
I give you an A
The common feature of scientists and comedians is humility. For the scientist, this is a way of remaining objective and honest, avoiding personal biases and assumptions, and thus following methodological naturalism wherever it leads. For comedians, this is often expressed as self-deprecating humor, though that humility serves as a basis and warrant to criticize society, not as if they are external from it (and somehow better) but as an often unfortunate member and participant of it. In both it is a central recognition of the folly of ego, that which often hinders discovery, a process necessary for both good humor and scientific progress.
Man, Sean B. Carroll has such a clear voice
Sean Carroll, as long as it is SB, then it s/ b great lecture, educational and entertaining. Thanks again and keep up with the good work. From Hker worldwide
Absolutely brilliant. To be fair he’s preaching to the choir with me but outstanding delivery.
If it could be two seans'z singing at X'mas is could be Xma S'Caroll's
Humanity will dethrone the reign of chance in the world, mark my words
Keep dreaming 😁😜
Should be made mandatory viewing in every public school in the USA.
Such a beautiful talk❤️❤️
What a life, for better or worse. Don't blame life. Even though we strive for ever for a perfect human situation. So we may still call it "Purpose" for lack of better word. Thanks again and keep up with the good work. From Hker worldwide
My life's philosophy. It's good to have a scientific confirmation of what I believe. Sometimes I'm so conscious of this I'm exhilarated.
Loved this video congratulations Sean on your book
What a great lecture! Pretty much sums up the whole bag. Wonderful!
Excellent presentation to put things into perspective. Thanks for sharing.
Excellent lecture version of Veritasium
what a great speaker. I've read his book 'endless forms most beautiful,' which is awesome and I recommend it to anyone. But I didn't know he's such a good presenter. His students are lucky, those proper lectures must be a treat
Great talk!
Very good presentation, thank you!
What a lovely talk!
Excellent!
Just found the time to watch... Dear, left me humbled about my existence and thankful. We should all watch more this video next time we think the world is against us, when we miss a train or something. No! The world simply doesn't care... 😜
Amazing beautiful vid
This is absolutely wild
Interesting perspective, thank you for sharing.
what a GREEEEEEAT talk!
I've often wondered what the mechanism was behind random genetic mutation in DNA ... fascinating talk!
great speaker
different sean carrol than expected but i was not dissapointed
Hit on this by *chance* & thought it was going to be the phamouse Fizzy Cyst. great video
Great delivery, what a nice perspective to apply to life. Thank You.
with all those really small odds piling up, no wonder I and so many others lost the gene lotto.
Dude got me straight trippin' yo!
Fascinating! 70 trillion compared to infinity isn't much, but when you consider that who we are is as much an expression of the environment we are born into, the chances of any particular state of existence must be pretty darn miniscule. But wow, what luck, here we are! Still no idea what any of this has to do with God, or causality though.
Really lovely talk. Thanks for sharing.
Wow nice.
The two Sean Carrolls should do an atheists' tour debating any two theists who dare to take them on.
I actually would get up in the middle of the night to watch that. 2 Absolutely fascinating people and great lecturers.
Sean mate, you and Sean should flip a coin to see who gets to remain Sean Carroll and who does not get to remain Sean Carroll.
Sorry, typo! I can't be exempted. SC as in Sean Carroll.
I agree. I'd argue tho, that "chance" is an assumption we make about something we observe. Not an undeniable truth. Consider this: Is the arrangement of billiards balls after a professional player hits them caused by chance? Does the fact that they end up, for all purposes, exactly where the player wanted (imagine they all go into a specific hole) say anything about what we think about chance? Random events still happen everywhere during the whole event, nonetheless, the macro end results are deterministic. People watching may applaud or may go Awww had he chosen to miss on purpose to fix a bet. Two different universes appear, not by chance, but by the will of the player. ^_^
Watched all of it 31:57
OOOOHHHHH, YOU WENT THERE!!! LOL @14:20
@Sean B. Carroll... Is it by chance that your audience comprehended and apprehended your lecture?
👍 👏
I'll listen to any sean singing any Carol
I just heard you on Bob's show.
captions are off
If the underlying 'chance' is governed by quantum physics, in turn, governed primarily by the uncertainty principle, can we from first principles - from the underlying uncertainty principle - derive the mathematical probability of biological life, of similar key features, elsewhere in the universe?
Me: Can we have Sean Carroll? Mom: We have Sean Carroll at home. Sean Carroll at home: this
While it must have been a bit awkward for him, i like the idea of keeping with the look and feel of a real public lecture instead of a notebook webcam+ slideshow.. People and their talks can still be amazing of course, but it still feels a bit wrong. Of course 2020 and Covid also have absolutely shattered my believe in our technological advance. Not in biology... But for microphione technology and voice transmissions in the age of "phones" with insane data rates, insane computing power and insane prices.... And dito macbooks....
WOW sir great work 👍😀😊😍😀✌️
there is an amazing coincidence that he wrote a book about what he is talking about, and that he says often that he wrote a book about what he is talking about
In "the planets" they move the line even further back. It is believed/known that the Solar System is very different from your avererage solar system. And without a incredibly long series of events happening, many to do with Jupiter, there would be no earth where it is and no (relatively) stable conditions for a mind boggling 4.5bn years. Our left and right shows how close a call it was. Mostly it's about Jupiters suspected early movement inwards, which shaped the solar system and the way it sends and stops asteroids.
Now, the question is: how this mutation engine first evolved, if there was no mutation engine before.
11:35 all the Star Trek Mirror Universe episodes are bunk, because as soon as the smallest change is made, it won't be long before all individuals are replaced with a sibling
yep, but I've learned to love them, since they are always so fun and wild
Aptus manet. The fit abides.
I got this guy confused with the other Sean Carroll, the theoretical physicist. Oops.
Same here 😁. Still a very interesting talk. And now I know there are 2 Sean Carroll’s that I’d be interested in hearing lectures from.
They could fuse if they meet though
They have met. Sean has interviewed Sean B on his channel.
It's unclear to me how he defines and uses chance. Is it 'chance' as in the inability to know the causes of an event because of complexity thus adopting a chaos theory deterministic approach? Or 'chance' as in pure randomness in the quantum physics approach? Some of the events in the talk might fall in the first view (most actually) and some maybe in the second.
Came here to ask about the same question. When he quoted from the theologian's book, it made it seem very much like he implies some actual randomness (and that with the certainty of factual knowledge). But he never gave the impression of having put much thought into the difference between actual randomness and pseudo randomness stemming from complexity, the latter even being compatible with the theologian's view.
@@desarankoe3939 It just enhances the point. Between you, you can't decide the source of the randomness, so that makes your eventual conclusions random. At the microscopic and sub-microscopic levels, randomness is more common than at the macroscopic level. Brownian motion is one of the simplest examples of this.
Sean Carroll has let himself go.
I was expecting Sean Carrol, not Sean Carrol
I see the Evangelists have been giving the thumbs down.
You assume too much. There are many reasons to give thumbs down to this presentation.
I expected better from the Royal Institution. Not an evangelist.
@@chadpt Such as ?
@@arthurspaff_80081ES Good point. Flippper has flipped his lid. I think same for whiteheadless.
Subtitles are way out of synch with the video.
Thank you for letting us know! It looks like they're off by the intro. We're going to fix them now and hopefully have a new set up ASAP.
Ok. Now try to explain Puma Punku artifacts, please.
after reading the wiki, yet another civilization who built stuff, what's your point ?
@@ffdv7458 Sorry for your academic enclosure.
Who is doing the typing?
You should read the 20+ studies done about why and how AIDS became a disease.
Death by Pirate Arrrrrrrrr!
All you did was assert that these incidents you listed are the product of chance and gave a summary of how you think we got here. You've provided absolutely no evidence to support your position that everything is governed by chance, good job.
Who's Anny Freeze?
Aunty not Anny:-D
So is he saying the Universe isn't deterministic?
8.09 in my not so expert opinion that android had "alien" DNA on it witch evolved and created us
When are you going to tell your audience about the DNA error correction mechanism. Also, about the fact that so few mutations actually are translated beyond 3 or 4 generations. Furthermore, if a mutation turns out to be severely negative, societies in both the animal and human realms have a tendency to not procreate with those members of their societies. After calculating those factors, how much influence does a mutation have upon societies as a whole. Further, how did something as complex as DNA occur, knowing that it is information on a vast scale. If CHANCE did all of those things, it could not be defined as random.
😅😅😅😅 DNA repair pathways repair DNA damage, not mutations. In fact many instances of DNA repair are done so via introduced mytation by the repair pathway. Also be aware that nucleo-bases exist as tautomers iow mutation is a feature of DNA, not a glitch
Comedians are the emotional feminine counterpart to the more objective masculine scientist.
Very, VERY informative and interesting. HST: I don't agree with the supposition that ejected rock would broil the planet to a cinder. A 55,000mph meteor isn't going to eject debris that enters the atmosphere at 55,000mph.
There’s overwhelming global physical evidence that the “broiling atmosphere” did indeed happen as described. Re-listen to the talk... you’re mixing up your numbers.
@@jackjstrange my "numbers"? I only used one number in my comment. As far as "overwhelming evidence" ...... no. There is no evidence of a global incineration. That's actually the whole reason for my initial comment. I didn't make anything up. I do know what I'm talking about. I'm not looking to insult anyone by acting smug either.
Chance or is there an infinite, unchanging Observer? Highly possible there is a defined structure to the past, present and future big picture, coexisting with our free will and "random" events! I don't think them missing the flight was chance, it was mercy.
“...without which we would not be here...”is a self-sensitive trope but not really meaningful. Whatever happened, something would follow
It's a pity he does not explain that one neutrino that comes from a star 10bln light years away and bumps out that one electron in your DNA causing a falt.
More likely to be a cosmic ray than a neutrino.
@Boodysaspie calm down. Just talking about the probability of it being so small it is an absurdity. But it is not zero.
We can be together bro. Just swing on by, sounds like u need a hug.
What.. I thought Sean B Carroll was the physicist.
Sean B Carroll being guest on Sean Carroll's podcast was fun.
when many worlds collide
Forgot about recombination of chromosomes
The problem with some gods is that they're non-falsifiable. You say the random movement of this hydrogen causes mutations and all someone else has to say is that God controls when that happens. The goal post can always be moved.
Don't lie to me. You thought it was Sean Carroll.
No matter which way you look at it, the odds against even the simplest living cell being formed accidentally, with over 250 essential processes needed to work in near-perfect harmony, are not even remotely favourable. If you take a sheet of A4 paper, no matter how long you sit and wait for it, it will never fold into the shape of a working paper aeroplane, and yet it only requires seven simple folds. An amino acid has far more folds than that, and RNA is one of the most convoluted and complex chemicals which can be found. Does anyone seriously expect it to assemble spontaneously within a few hundred million years? Life is no chance event; logic says that it has to be designed somehow. Natural selection results in diversification, but the basic cell is too incredibly complex to be an accident which can happen within a few tens of billions of years. Whether you believe in parallel universes, or in what many would perceive as a god, is up to you. But I cannot stretch my belief to accept that everything around us is _purely_ the result of blind chance; there have to be external influences at play. Just my two-pennorth, and of course you have every right to disagree with me. Thanks for reading, and thanks for being polite. 🙂
@Boodysaspie Short answer: No. Long answer: Imposing values upon people does not help them to become well-developed human beings. People need to develop their minds by being given the most accurate information available, along with the basic requirements for correct functioning within society which we all have to learn. If given the chance, I would have trusted their intelligence, taught them to read, given them as many of the facts as we know, both for and against the conclusions of others, shown them how to do things, and how to learn effectively, then taught them Mathematics, and let them draw their own conclusions. In essence, that is what good schools are supposed to do. My children have been parents for a long time, and I had almost no contact with them for most of their formative years. Not my choice, but it happened that way. Both completed tertiary education and have worked in technical fields. One chose to work in forensic biology, and knows much more than I do about the complexity of living cells. My field was in another branch of science. I tend to see the statistical probabilities behind the complex biology. It was interesting to hear that the biologist has similar views to me, despite my not steering their education, except for the first three years. So my 'imposing these values' played no part in their development. Thanks for your reply. 🙂
Jim Khalili is better
Hold on. Whales have hair?
Could you please lend the guest speakers a good mic and maybe camera for the recording. It would elevate the quality of the talk by a lot :) Edit: oh it gets better after the intro.
So much fact, so much analysis, such disappointing inference drawing. My dear Sir, what makes you so sure about your thesis. Hasn't progress of science been removal of mysterious chance in our ontology? Where exactly did you disprove, all existence is exquisitely constructed, and maintained by a magical deity beyond human characterization.
He didn't need to disprove it specifically; things not being true is the default, especially such a massive assumption. He only had to show what can and probably did happen.
So basically this much chance is impossible. Atheist are shocked.
Before you start sprouting ideas about who and what God is or is not, you should read his book.
Ah.. Which one? Because there's a number of gods and their books out there. Oh! You mean Frank Herbert! My god too. All the way. Merry Christmas to you if you're Christian.
He did a poor job at trying to disprove God. Im still a Christian AND believe in Science.
Actually (in my view at least) he didn't try to disprove anything. He merely describes what happened or happens. It's up to us how to place it in our view of the world. If you feel you can combine science and your faith, by all means do so.
What are the chances, that of all of the knowledge in the world, a person could actually know 1/2 of it. If this were to be possible, and I am not rationally entertaining the idea that it is, a person would still have a 50% chance, that he would not possess the true knowledge of God. Study to show thyself approved... Stop taking your wisdom from the great comedians of the world. They will make you laugh, but you won't be any better off.
Chance has no will, no direction, and no intelligence, and therefore, cannot be responsible for life, which has direction, intelligence, and the grandest of design.
Lost me at saying Colbert is a modern Philosopher.
You should perhaps come back to the video after you understand what a joke is
5 out of 5 negative comments really turn me off from watching. Always a commitment to watch 30 min and I think I will skip this one.
So I recommend you to change your attitude. See for yourself and take your own conclusions. Don't go by what others say. And by the way I'm not a fan of the guest in this video.
Same... I skipped it. Unfortunate, really, but there were just too many far leftists introduced at the onset... I do not have the time to give away 30 minutes of my life for some probable message that there is no such thing as God.
@@User-jr7vf The internet has unlimited content and I have stuff to do on my own as well. So if there is a good chance this video is below average, the best move is to aboard the ship. -It is the 1st time a video had 5 and only 5 bad comments. That is a rare sight. Might be by chance. Or “A series of fortunate events” to save some time.^^
Not able to think for yourself huh, you have to have your hand held.
@@antman7673 If you can't swim then it is better that you stay in the shallow end of the pool
You call it "accident", "random", or "chance" .. but it's "destiny" - the commands of the almighty creator, the chains of cause-and-effect that pave the way for our emergence. Remember that nothing happens by a chance, you may or may not know the reason behind, but it's all good
Ding ding you win a prize for being the first person to comment and showing you totally missed the point
@@pure46 Well, thanks for your dose of sarcasm
ok then in that respect what are the 'chances' of those 'commands' being given? What is the chance of a certain destiny.
@@inbox0000 It doesn't obey our earthling laws, it transcends our knowledge and our comprehension. So trying to quantify destiny or apply some math to it is pointless.
@Boodysaspie That's why it's called "Faith", otherwise, we all would be believers. There are so many signs and guides but most people just deny.
Great talk!!
How can a life be enhanced by a "trash talking teddy bear" ? What ever that is.