The Scale of Life (or were dinosaurs just too big?)

The Infinite Monkey Cage

BBC

Comedy, Science

4.7 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2023

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

Brian and Robin are joined by palaeontologist Dr Susie Maidment, evolutionary biologist Dr Tori Herridge and comedian Dave Gorman to pitch giant creatures against tiny creatures in their bid to avoid extinction. They explore the scale of life and ask why are some organisms large and some small and what is the optimum size for successful survival. From the prokaryotic cell to the grandest dinosaur, how does the modern synthesis explain the huge variation in scale, form and function. What are the advantages and disadvantages to being huge like the dinosaurs, or was it their size that really did them in, in the end?

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Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service.
0:04.7	Join me as I serve up personal conversations with my sensational guests.
0:08.8	Do a leap interviews, Tim Cook.
0:11.2	Technology doesn't want to be good or bad.
0:15.0	It's in the hands of the creator.
0:16.7	It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room.
0:20.7	If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes,
0:24.6	you're doing the wrong thing.
0:26.0	Julie, at your service, listen to all episodes on BBC Sales. B. Now today we are exploring the scale of life. Why are some organisms large and some small?
0:45.6	From the prokaryotic cell to the grandest dinosaur, how does the modern synthesis explain
0:50.5	the observed variation in scale, form, and function.
0:54.0	Elicantly put, and I presume that everyone who have
0:56.6	listened to this knows that we spend most of our time
1:00.4	exploring deep questions and carefully formulating our prose to transfer these ideas
1:04.7	to listeners with economy and precision not dissimilar to the ideas of the Darwin paradigm.
1:10.9	It didn't go out there.
1:11.9	That's what we've actually spent the whole afternoon after about five minutes of you know doing some research
1:16.4	It's talking about why do big things always talk like this if you have a big elephant and all the little things always talk like this like if they're in
1:23.4	bad puts we will fix it we will mend it we did that for three hours and that's
1:27.9	basically the show that we've got is the equivalent of watching Johnny Morris's
1:31.0	animal magic with him doing the voice,
1:32.8	Hello, I'm a very big bear.
	...

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