evolution

Daniel Dennett gives a Royal Institution talk toward a unified theory of information, tying together evolution, learning and engineering. He argues that design can arise bottom-up through small steps without a designer.

Veritasium visits Richard Lenski's lab to explain the decades-long E. coli evolution experiment, which asks how repeatable evolution is and shows bacteria evolving to use a new food source.

A two-minute time-lapse from the Kishony Lab showing bacteria spreading across a giant petri dish with increasing antibiotic doses, evolving resistance as they go.

Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky lectures on the evolution of behavior, including the Prisoner's Dilemma and tit-for-tat strategies in animals. It is part of his Human Behavioral Biology course.

Karl Sims's 1994 demonstration of evolved virtual creatures: block-bodied creatures whose bodies and controllers are evolved through selection, mutation and recombination to swim, walk and compete.

An excerpt from Richard Dawkins's lecture on Climbing Mount Improbable demonstrating how a complex eye can evolve through incremental steps. It answers the creationist irreducible complexity argument.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk introducing Polyworld, an artificial life simulator used to evolve artificial intelligence by designing worlds rather than minds. It presents results from ongoing attempts to evolve intelligent behavior.

Lex Fridman talks with Tufts biologist Michael Levin about bioelectricity, embryogenesis, xenobots and how cells collectively pursue goals. They range into cognition, evolution and the possibility of aliens.

Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote argues that the computer revolution has not really happened yet, reflecting on how computing, objects and the web fall short of their potential.

Eric Weinstein interviews economist Timur Kuran on The Portal about preference falsification and how societies where people hide their real views can tip into revolutions.

Bill Atkinson shows and explains his binder of Polaroids taken during Lisa development, documenting how its graphical interface evolved. Recorded at the Computer History Museum.

A 1979 BBC Nationwide report asking whether word processors and networked microprocessors could end office commuting. It shows early word processing and a woman working from home, with surprisingly prophetic predictions.

The first episode of Crash Course World History, in which John Green covers the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and how it shaped civilization. It is delivered fast and with jokes.

Energy scholar Vaclav Smil argues that global energy transitions are slow and that renewable targets should not rest on wishful thinking. He appraises how energy dependencies are likely to change and asks for using much less.

Revolution OS is a feature-length documentary on the history of free software and Linux. It covers Stallman and the GNU project, Torvalds and the kernel, and Raymond and Perens on open source, starting from the era of freely shared hobbyist code.

Ross Scott's Game Dungeon episode critiques Deus Ex: Human Revolution, looking at its design, politics and visual style. It is part of his series of opinionated game reviews.

A BSidesLV 2013 talk from the Sixteen Colors project on archiving the ANSI and ASCII art scene. It traces the scene's evolution from BBSs to the NFO and IRC era.

Chuck Spinney, a long-time associate of John Boyd, presents Boyd's thinking on the OODA loop and evolutionary epistemology. The talk runs about two and a half hours and includes Q&A.

Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote, preserved on YouTube after being lost from Google Video. He discusses what object orientation was meant to be, messaging, system design, and the state of computing practice.

Tech Ingredients shows how to make a homemade radiative cooling paint, with a custom liquid panel that cools below ambient temperature outdoors. The video covers the materials and how to apply the paint.

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison visits the village of Garavadi in Maharashtra, India, which took part in the Paani Foundation's Water Cup competition. It shows the water harvesting structures the villagers built in 45 days and how they restored groundwater and the local economy.

A roughly ten-minute scene from the movie The Pentagon Wars showing how the Bradley Fighting Vehicle's requirements ballooned through committee demands into a compromised design. It is a satirical dramatization of military procurement.

David Sachs of InvenSense explains how gyroscopes, accelerometers and compasses work on their own and together, demonstrated on a modified Android handset. He covers sensor fusion algorithms and why rotation math such as Euler angles matters.

Jeff Geerling interviews Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton about the Pi shortage, the RP2040, RISC-V, the Sony investment and the origin of the name.

Lex Fridman interviews mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein about science, mathematics, and society. The conversation ranges across physics, academia, AI and job displacement.

Sandy Munro and Cory discuss how Tesla Model 3 and Model Y bodies in white have evolved over five years, including giga castings and lean design.

A satirical Onion News Network piece announcing the 'MacBook Wheel', a laptop with no keyboard where users type by spinning and clicking a wheel. It parodies Apple product launches and minimalist design.

Theo Jansen shows many of his Strandbeests, wind-powered walking kinetic sculptures, set to Khachaturian's Spartacus. It presents his work since 1990 on creating new forms of life on beaches.

Primer simulates green beard altruism, where individuals recognize and help others carrying a shared marker, and shows how imposters affect its evolution. It is an animated evolution simulation based on published papers.

A short PBS Eons episode on carcinization, the repeated independent evolution of crab-like bodies in unrelated crustaceans, and what makes that form so successful.

A clip from Channel 4's Inside Nature's Giants in which Richard Dawkins shows the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe during a dissection. The nerve takes a long detour down the neck and back up.

A restored 1994 video of Karl Sims' research on evolved virtual creatures, where simulated block creatures are bred through artificial evolution to swim, walk, follow and compete. It is a landmark demonstration of genetic algorithms in physics simulation.

Veritasium explores the Prisoner's Dilemma and Axelrod's tournaments, showing why tit-for-tat and forgiving strategies win in repeated games. It extends the ideas to cooperation in evolution and conflict.

A clip from Attenborough's Life of Mammals following a San tribesman in the Kalahari on an eight-hour persistence hunt, running down a kudu through harsh heat. It shows tracking, endurance running and the hunter's reaction after the kill.

A long Portal podcast episode in which Bret Weinstein tells Eric Weinstein the story of his lab mice telomere work, the prediction behind it, and what it means for science and aging.

A Capella Science parody of Despacito that sings through evolutionary developmental biology, explaining how a single cell becomes a body, including body-axis genes and dormant snake leg DNA. It runs about four minutes.

Kurzgesagt's hour-long animated film that compresses Earth's 4.5 billion year history into one hour, roughly a million years per second. It follows the evolution of life through to humanity's tiny final stretch.

Daniel Dennett's Royal Institution lecture on whether the brain is a computer and where its software comes from. He argues that minds are built by evolution and culture, with competence arising without comprehension.

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues in this TED talk that evolution shaped perception to track fitness rather than truth. He uses evolutionary simulations and the Australian jewel beetle as examples.

A Royal Institution lecture in which Nicholas Humphrey presents his theory of phenomenal consciousness and its evolution. He draws on the book Sentience and discusses evidence for animal sentience.