Why Trees Are Taller Than They Need To Be

>> YOUR LINK HERE: ___ http://youtube.com/watch?v=-zShHRkwSoI

A forest is like a meadow on useless stilts. • Most amazing thing about trees: http://bit.ly/TFilQ8 • We often imagine that unregulated competition produces optimal outcomes, behaviours, efficiencies, but trees and baggage carousels are two examples where the stable solution is worse for everyone than another strategy. This I find surprising and interesting - that evolution doesn't come to the best solution, it comes to the most stable one. • The Forest of Friendship was a concept I first came across in Richard Dawkin's book The Greatest Show on Earth. One point I'd like to clarify is that being taller comes with a cost - having a longer trunk requires costly expenditure of energy. However, in a forest of uniformly short trees, being a little taller conveys an advantage. That is until all the other trees catch up, at which time the extra height no longer provides a benefit. So over time as the whole forest rises up the conditions are getting worse for each tree, but they are powerless to stop the evolutionary arms race. • Huge thank you to Brady Haran for filming (and summarizing the main points at the end of the film). He is the amazing creator of: • Numberphile: / numberphile • Sixty Symbols / sixtysymbols • Periodic Videos / periodicvideos • And many more...

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