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Quote by Marcus du Sautoy

“It does appear that some parts of our evolutionary process seem inevitable. It is striking that throughout evolutionary history, the eye evolved independently fifty to a hundred times. This is strong evidence for the fact that the different rolls of the dice that have occurred across different species seem to have produced species with eyes regardless of what is going on around them. Lots of other examples illustrate how some features, if they are advantageous, seem to rise to the top of the evolutionary swamp. This is illustrated every time you see the same feature appearing more than once in different parts of the animal kingdom. Dolphins and bats, for example, use echolocation, but they evolved this trait independently at very different points on the evolutionary tree.”

Quote by Marcus du Sautoy

Book:The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science
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The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science

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Marcus du Sautoy
Marcus du Sautoy

Marcus du Sautoy is a renowned British mathematician known for his work in group theory and geometry. Born on August 26, 1965, he currently holds the position of professor at the University of Oxford. Professor du Sautoy has also made significant contributions to mathematics education and outreach, authoring several popular mathematics books and participating in the production of several educational programs on mathematics. more

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“In order to avoid the deafening of conspecifics, some bats employ a jamming avoidance response, rapidly shifting frequencies or flying silent when foraging near conspecifics. Because jamming is a problem facing any active emission sensory system, it is perhaps not surprising (though no less amazing) that similar jamming avoidance responses are deployed by weakly electric fish. The speed of sound is so fast in water that it makes it difficult for echolocating whales to exploit similar Doppler effects. However, the fact that acoustic emissions propagate much farther and faster in the water medium means that there is less attenuation of ultrasound in water, and thus that echolocation can be used for broader-scale 'visual' sweeping of the undersea environment. These constraints and trade-offs must be resolved by all acoustic ISMs, on Earth and beyond. There are equally universal anatomical and metabolic constraints on the evolvability of echolocation that explain why it is 'harder' to evolve than vision. First, as noted earlier, a powerful sound-production capacity, such as the lungs of tetrapods, is required to produce high-frequency emissions capable of supporting high-resolution acoustic imaging. Second, the costs of echolocation are high, which may limit acoustic imaging to organisms with high-metabolisms, such as mammals and birds. The metabolic rates of bats during echolocation, for instance, are up to five times greater than they are at rest. These costs have been offset in bats through the evolutionarily ingenious coupling of sound emission to wing-beat cycle, which functions as a single unit of biomechanical and metabolic efficiency. Sound emission is coupled with the upstroke phase of the wing-beat cycle, coinciding with contraction of abdominal muscles and pressure on the diaphragm. This significantly reduces the price of high-intensity pulse emission, making it nearly costless. It is also why, as any careful crepuscular observer may have noticed, bats spend hardly any time gliding (which is otherwise a more efficient means of flight).”

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“Ah, but it is an interesting thing, that these things can so seldom be proved. If I were to perform some piece of, hrmf, magic for you, here in this room, you would claim a thousand ways it could have been done. Indeed, those ways might be exceedingly unlikely, but you would cling to them rather than accept the, mmn, the chance that magic, the eternal inexplicable, might be the true agent, and if you were strong enough in yourself, unafraid, unthreatened, here in your own chambers, well perhaps there would be no magic worked at all. It is a subjective force, you see, whereas the physical laws of the artificers are objective. A gear-train will turn without faith, but magic may not. And so, when your people demand, mmn, proof, there is none, but when you have forgotten and dismissed it, then magic creeps back into the gaps where you do not look for it.”

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