'Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious'
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
Many things in the book that amazed me. You talk about the Arctic turn of obviously a bird that engages in long distance navigation, manx, sheer waters. Some of the names of these birds are beautiful manx. Shear waters are sure birds that migrate between the east coast of South America and several small islands near Wales and Scotland where they breed and raise their young. Besides the long distance, there are several other notable aspects of sheer water migration. One is that the adults initiate their return flight to South America before the juvenile birds depart. So the young birds must make the journey without any guidance from the adults. This is not uncommon in bird migration and it means that the information defining the navigation route must be pre programmed. Again, that is just astonishing to me. Absolutely astonishing. Yeah, and that's one of the most amazing things about this that we really don't understand completely how this information is actually programmed into these animals, again, it is programmed, so that means presumably that means it's fast down genetically. So it must reside in the genome in some fashion, and then when the next generation of birds are born, they already know what direction to fly to their migration. And everything about that is hard to explain because it involves first of all information. What are the information you can come from? How does it get into the genome if that's where it's located? And then it's programmed into their brains.