Our Lives Matter
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Are you a student activist? Or do you feel school is missing something? Or is someone trying to keep you from learning about racism or sex or evolution or transgender people and you wish you had a way to push back? Many scientists and teachers have been working for decades reboot the public education system. Shouldn’t we use our 21st century knowledge to tell a story of the world for the 21st century?
I’m from a tri-racial family of teachers, artists, and scientists. We’ve been connecting ideas to tell a bigger story of the world for almost a century. I’m a professional theatre artist and also a Certified Flight Instructor. I help create worlds to tell stories, and I can also teach you to feel science happening with your hands and feet.
How do you help people see a bigger picture of the world? Do you raise your hand in class and ask insightful questions? Do you set up an after school club? Do you organize open mic nights? Do you go on strike every Friday like Greta Thunberg? Do you…
(Teachers, parents, and supporters of science and education are welcome to listen too. Education is a community effort!)
I’m from a tri-racial family of teachers, artists, and scientists. We’ve been connecting ideas to tell a bigger story of the world for almost a century. I’m a professional theatre artist and also a Certified Flight Instructor. I help create worlds to tell stories, and I can also teach you to feel science happening with your hands and feet.
How do you help people see a bigger picture of the world? Do you raise your hand in class and ask insightful questions? Do you set up an after school club? Do you organize open mic nights? Do you go on strike every Friday like Greta Thunberg? Do you…
(Teachers, parents, and supporters of science and education are welcome to listen too. Education is a community effort!)
26 Episodes
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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…
Constantin Stanislavski pioneered modern theatre by discovering a set of artistic principles. They let actors construct the subconscious levels of their characters’ thought processes. Those discoveries are parallels to first principles of evolutionary psychology. We can talk about those artistic principles using ordinary words, and we can see actors using them in movies and TV shows. That makes the concepts of evolutionary psychology much easier to relate to everyday life. ACT I Scene 1 [106 bpm] How does real life happen? Most people don’t think about that most of the time. When everything people care about happens they way…
Theatre turns human behavior into an art. But people are very perceptive of human behavior. We have highly developed instincts for interpreting why people do the things they do. For actors to produce realistic human behavior onstage is very complicated. Theatre artists struggled with that problem for about 2,400 years. They found many ways to make human behavior interesting, but all of them fell short of consistent realism. In the 1890s Constantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor and director, finally solved that problem. His discoveries elevated the art of theatre to a new level. Consistent realism lets actors play characters…
The development of farming led to further social and technological developments. The increase in food production led to the specialization of labor and population growth. Population growth led to cities and kingdoms. The specialization of labor led to the inventions of metal working and writing. The growth of cities led to plagues. Each of these developments made the societies that had them even more physically powerful. The increase in food production and these new developments combined with each other to create new developments. Metal tools let farmers grow even more food. Metal weapons and armor made armies more powerful. …
Farming was developed first in the Middle East, about 10,000 years ago. It was developed in China 1,000 years later, and in three parts of the Americas several thousands of years later. The environmental conditions of the Middle East at the time made it the most favorable environment in the world for people to develop farming. Several geographical factors fit together to make it the easiest place in the world for people to figure out how to domesticate plants and animals, and made it the easiest place in the world for people to produce food. That combination of…
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,…
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…
Religion played an important role in the evolution of our species. Many people still feel it’s important today. But it can also lead people to make bad decisions. How do religions make people feel like they’re finding what they’re looking for in life? And how can that bring people’s feelings into conflict with each other? How do religions seem to give people the answers they’re looking for, but do it in ways that keep them from noticing better answers from outside their religion? Where does religion turn into religious fundamentalism? ACT I Scene 1 [104 bpm] Which came…
Human intelligence lets us see a big picture of the world, and makes us wonder how to see an even bigger picture. All over the world people have asked the same questions about life, and have used what they knew about the world to look for answers. Religions tell stories about the origin of the world, what make the world function, morality, and the purpose of life. The answers people have found are different, but the questions they asked are the same. Which part of religion is more important? The answers people believe in, or the questions people ask?…
If we have survival instincts, why do people commit suicide? Why do people sometimes sacrifice their lives? If we have reproductive instincts, why are some people homosexuals? Why do some people not want to have children? These questions seem to some people to disprove evolutionary psychology. But in fact, they give us some of the best pictures of how people’s feelings come into conflict, and how the decisions people make are the best ways they find to move forward on the combination of motivations they feel. ACT I Scene 1 [108 bpm] Evolutionary psychology is zoology applied…
Archeology shows us that 50,000 years ago our ancestors had invented art, religion, music, and all the other patterns of behavior we have today. That means people 50,000 years ago had all of the brain components we do. What sets us apart from people 50,000 years ago is that we’ve had 50,000 years to think of new ideas and inventions. But the instincts, feelings, and motivations we have for making our decisions today are the same as people had back then. Some things people do today don’t seem to make any sense. Some things we do because they feel…
Intelligence, for any animal species, starts with brains doing five basic things. All of animal behavior is the results of the interaction of those five mental functions. Everything people think, feel, and do begins with the same five mental functions. The next step in understanding human psychology is to look at how our instincts for survival and reproduction, and our memories, our imaginations, and communication with other people affect our thoughts, feelings, and decisions. x ACT I Scene 1 [106 bpm] What does biology show us about psychology? At the level of molecular biology, genes are molecules that…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
Genes are molecules. Evolution is caused by the replication, variation, and selection of genes. For life to begin on Earth, the geology of the Earth had to start a chemical reaction that could evolve. How did that happen? How did the evolution of genes lead to cells? To chromosomes? To multicellular life forms? The evolution of genes eventually created our brains. We use our brains to keep ourselves alive, which makes us keep evolving. How do the underlying themes of evolution show through in things people have thought about throughout history and think about today? ACT I Scene 1…
The Big Bang was a huge explosion of energy. Some of it condensed into matter. That set the universe in motion. It led to the formation of atoms. It also led to the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets. Physics is the study of matter and energy. Atomic physics leads directly into chemistry. Electrons are attracted to the nuclei of atoms. What happens because of that? That sets the stage for the evolution of life on Earth. How did chemistry create biochemistry? ACT I Scene 1 [72 bpm] The universe began with an extremely dense concentration of…
Math is the metaphysics of science. Every scientific discovery is the discovery of a mathematical pattern in the world. To tell a mathematical story of the world that people can grow up with, we need to start with games we can show to preschoolers to help them visualize the fundamental mathematical patterns in the world. As they get older they can use what they learned from their game to understand the world better. The scientific story of the world only depends on 4 mathematical laws that you can demonstrate with building blocks. ACT I Scene 1 Gym class…
Science is a philosophy. The metaphysics are math. The epistemology is the five step process of observation, self consistency, universality, reproducibility, and debate. Those lead to hypotheses and theories. But we could just as easily call these the underlying themes in the story of the world. A scientific story of the world doesn’t turn the whole world into science class. A scientific story of the world is everything fitting together at once to tell a reliable story of the world. ACT I Scene 1 [105 bpm] Y’all know what themes are? Telling a good story depends on…
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