How – and how not – to think about the role randomness plays in evolution

As you almost certainly learned early on in your scientific education, species survive and perpetuate in large part due to their fitness for their environment. However, there’s more to evolution than just natural selection. Robin May is professor of infectious disease at the University of Birmingham and professor of physic at Gresham College in London, and in this lecture at Gresham College from November 2023, he explains why small random events compounded over time (as in the case of genetic drift) or anomalous events that occur in an instant (as in the massive meteor strike that killed off the dinosaurs) should also very much inform how we understand evolution. Using a combination of easy-to-digest explainers and fascinating examples from Earth’s evolutionary history, May lays out the multitude of ways we should – and should not – understand the role random chance plays in the evolutionary process.