00:01
Okay, so there's this important principle of independent contrasts.
00:15
And the idea here is that we often tend to think of and indeed study evolution within a given species or even given population of the same species.
00:29
This can be, of course, useful because the changes are easy to witness, they're easy to model, and there should be a significant degree of similarity between them.
00:39
So, for example, the famous darwin's finches are able to look at a given species and watch its evolution in response to a change in an environment and see that happen pretty rapidly.
00:52
Now, this isn't always the most useful approach, though.
00:59
In independent contrast, what we'll often do is we'll study the how morphological and other features interrelate between other.
01:10
Species.
01:11
So for example, we might look at something like brain size as it correlates with four limb dexterity.
01:22
In fact, that's exactly what happens in one of the papers we looked at.
01:26
And when we want to see if there's a correlation between those traits, it can be more useful to look at that when trying to assess an overall evolutionary pattern between different species...