Our Lives Matter S1E12: Africa 7 Million Years Ago

02/15/24 • 24 min

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...

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

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 S1E13: The Three First Principles of Evolutionary Psychology

Our story has led us from philosophy to math to physics to chemistry to biology to the origin of our species and the evolution of our intelligence. The next step is evolutionary psychology. That means understanding how the evolution of our intelligence affects how we think and feel now. That starts with our looking at three underlying themes in everything people think, feel, and do. ACT I Scene 1 [110 bpm] Charles Darwin’s discovery of evolution brought together centuries of observations scientists had made of living things into the science of biology. That was with The Origin of Species,...