I grew up in an evangelical household and went to a Christian school where they only taught creationism (and a little “micro evolution” but not much).
It’s been many years since I left Christianity but I never really re-schooled myself on all the science I missed out on. I started watching some YouTube videos, and while they’re very informative, I realized they’re about 10 years old. I got to thinking there have probably been a lot of scientific discoveries in the last 10 years. So I googled “recent evolutionary discoveries” and the amount of info that came up was overwhelming.
What’s a good source that I could focus on to learn about discoveries over the last decade or two?
10 years is actually considered not bad by most academic standards. The core ideas of evolution via selection, genetics, and population dynamics (the kinds of things taught in any general biology class in high school and college) really haven’t changed much in 25 years.
You may want to find a biology class and learn about the vocabulary, founding principles, and big ideas. Here is a free open source biology textbook, chapter 18 starts the unit on evolutionary processes. And keep watching YouTube! There are tons of good videos aimed at different levels. “Crash Course” with Hank Green is fantastic and the series covers many academic science topics as an entire course. Biology alone has 20 or 30 ten-minute episodes.
Thanks so much for the textbook link!
Crash Course is the channel I was watching, specifically the Big History series. I LOVE Crash Course, but of course the nature of it is that they can’t get too detailed with any given subject. I kind of wish they drilled down into a couple of things more: 1) evolution of animals during the time between dinosaurs going extinct and the arrival of hominids, and 2) different types of hominids. So that’s the sort of stuff I want to learn about next.
Ah, well this just happens to be something I’m into! There is a NOVA movie about the chicxulub (pronounced chick-zaloob) asteroid that hit Mexico and initiated the extinction of the dinosaurs. It’s called The Day the Dinos Died, season 44 episode 21. It’ll show you the ways scientists use different pieces of evidence to create a timeline of the destruction based on new fossils in South Dakota. Very new and cutting edge. They actually found a fragment of the original asteroid.
At the time, our mammal ancestor was kinda like a squirrel rat, nocturnal and lived underground. It would take 5 million more years before our intrepid grandma would venture out of the ground and inherit the Earth. 65 million years later, mammals are the wonderful animals we see today.
Ok, want your mind blown? There is a book called Evolution by Stephen Baxter. It’s fiction but it tells the story of hominid evolution starting from the Chicxulub asteroid. Each chapter is a segment of the life of one likely ancestor on the road to modern humans over those 65 million years. It’s very well written and puts together many well accepted pieces of evidence in a compelling way.
By the way, physical anthropology is the name of the field that covers hominid and human evolution and is it’s own subject.
Scishow is good for up-to-date info about a variety of scientific fields. If you want to check if your scientific knowledge is up to date (or if you want to keep it up to date), I highly recommend checking them out. As for evolution in particular, I can’t really say. Biology is an umbrella term for a vast number of incredibly niche sub-fields, and even something that would seem straightforward, like evolution, can be broken up into multiple fields of study. For instance, I know people who study evolutionary microbiology, which is the study of how bacteria evolve.
I’m not sure if you’re looking for general knowledge of scientific concepts or if you’re looking for in-depth analysis of leading-edge, niche scientific concepts. If it’s the former, I’m sure that videos from even 10 years ago is probably fine. World-changing breakthroughs don’t happen that often. And while maybe there might be minor inaccuracies, overall it’ll still be accurate enough to get a general understanding. If it’s the latter, you’ll unfortunately have to learn how to read scientific literature
Thanks for the rec! I’m not looking for anything too incredibly detailed, just a teensy bit more in depth than the videos I had been watching. I’ll give SciShow a try!
Possibly the “Nature” section of ScienceAlert?
This is great, thanks! Lots of good stuff to read here.
