Our Lives Matter

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 e...

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 pl...

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.  Farmin...

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 assumptio...

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 th...

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,...

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...

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,...

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 maki...

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 imaginatio...

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  Sc...

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...

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...

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, an...

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 kee...

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...

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 under...

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 s...

Teachers learn eight principles of learning in the course of their certification training, which show us different ways of making information memorable.  If you compare how religious leaders use them to make their religious stories memorable to how teachers use them in public school, you can see a number of ways that religious fundamentalists are competing against public school and winning.  What...

Archeology shows us a lot about the origin of religion.  History and current events tell us a lot about where religions went from there.  Different religions have different stories about the world.  But all of those stories are answers to the same questions people everywhere ask about life.    Religions bring people together into communities through shared stories and shared beliefs.  That means w...

Science is the systematic search for reliable information.  Religions are stories about the world that assume events have supernatural origins, but that bring believers together.  Those two seem incompatible at first.  But we can see common themes among them if we look at them both as philosophies.   ACT I Scene 1 (114 bpm) We got Christians in the house? We got Muslims in the house? We got Agnost...

People think and learn in terms of stories.  We think about how things happen in terms of a beginning, a middle, and an end.   All your classes in school tell stories.   A functional society depends on its members agreeing on a story of how the world works, because that that’s how they make plans for how they can work together.   Science and history classes tell the biggest stories in school.  So...

Greta Thunberg’s school strike has spread all over the world. Black Lives Matter and most other movements for inclusion have student branches. Student activists, and changes to the education system, are always a big part of every political movement.   Many scientists and educators have been finding ways to update the education system to the 21st century.  The information is readily available. But...