Our Lives Matter S1E11: Plants and Worms to Fish, Amphibians, and Reptiles

02/08/24 • 27 min

How did we get from single celled organisms to all the diversity of life in the world today? If you focus on how many differences there are between one species and another, you’ll be overwhelmed with information. But if you look at the critical differences between one species and another, suddenly it’s a coherent story. Now you’re looking at how few differences it took between one species and another to make all the rest of the differences evolve. What had to change in those original cells to make the simplest plants evolve? Then the simplest animals? Then more...

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Our Lives Matter S1E10: A Conceptual Detour of Evolutionary Biology

There are a lot of steps in between the evolution of multicellular life and the evolution of the plants and animals as we think about them today. We can fill in that part of the story by talking about the meanings of vocabulary words from biology. Each of those words refers to a concept in biology that tells a story about some part of evolution. Each vocabulary word is a piece of the puzzle, and together they tell a much bigger story of the patterns of life. ACT I Scene 1 [90 bpm] Our story of the evolution of...

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Our Lives Matter S1E12: Africa 7 Million Years Ago

Seven million years ago our ancestors were chimpanzees living in a forest in Africa. Then a drought caused a food shortage, and some of them walked into the grassland looking for food. That change in their environment set the evolution of human intelligence in motion. ACT I Scene 1 [113 bpm] 7 million years ago, in southeastern Africa, there was a forest, where chimpanzees lived. They weren’t chimpanzees as we know them today. They were the ancestors of the chimpanzees of today. But I’m still going to call them chimpanzees. Scene 2 Chimpanzees, and all other primates, have...