Our Lives Matter S1E20: The Critical Race Theory of Evolution

04/11/24 • 26 min

Genetic evolution for our species is slow, because it depends on parents passing genes down to children generation by generation. Human intelligence evolved over millions of years and hundreds of thousands of generations. Our intelligence has evolved from genes to ideas. We evolve mentally much faster now by thinking about ideas and deciding which ones we like the best. Racism is the assumption that people from one continent have less mental ability than the people from another continent. But our brains evolved along with the rest of our bodies, while our ancestors still lived together in Africa. When people...

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Our Lives Matter S1E19: Around the World in 40,000 Years, and 7 Failed Explanations of Race and Intelligence

Our ancestors originated in a small part of Africa and spread all over the world. They adapted to life in different places by using their intelligence to figure out how to live there. Many people have tried to explain the differences in people’s lifestyles on different continents by explaining how people in different parts of the world could’ve evolved different levels of intelligence. All of those hypotheses failed because they never defined human intelligence correctly in the first place. The history of failed explanations for the relationship between race and intelligence lays the foundation for the real connection between intelligence...

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Our Lives Matter S1E21: The Evolution of Farming

The first people in the world ate wild food that they hunted and gathered. Over the millennia they learned about the lifecycles of plants and animals and used that to increase the food productivity of their environments. In five places on Earth, and maybe four others, people had combinations of environmental factors that led them all the way to full time farming. That changed the world. Farming led to population growth, cities, kingdoms, metal working, writing, plagues, and imperialism. ACT I Scene 1 [105 bpm] Our story is up to 8,500 BC. Humans are spread over all the continents,...