Episode 19
Of Mermaids and Men
Benoit de Maillet believed that life, all life, came from the sea. And not only did it come from the sea, but it continued to evolve into different sp...
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Explore 159 episodes covering the who, what, why, and how of evolution
Episode 18
Lucretius – Evolution's Poet
In the first century BC the Roman poet Lucretius wrote On the Nature of Things. A poem with 7400 lines of verse that covered everything from the tinie...
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The Father of Zoology
Aristotle actually came close to explaining natural selection, 2200 years before Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace did. Evolution Talk is also...
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Darwin and God
Charles Darwin questioned everything when it came to the origin of species and the evolution of life here on earth. That questioning led him into some...
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Darwin or Design
As a young man, the more Charles Darwin learned about nature the more he began to question things. If species were immutable, meaning they never chang...
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Darwin's Doubts
Throughout his life Charles Darwin suffered bouts of anxiety and often went off alone by himself to think. His work afforded him the perfect escape an...
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The Beginning: Out of the Sea
The sea was full of life a half a billion years ago. Arthropods fought to survive and there were some interesting things happening on land as well. We...
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The Beginning: An Arms Race
As predators evolved to better catch their prey, their prey evolved unique and efficient ways to avoid being eaten. It was because of this sudden arms...
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The Beginning: Multicellularity Rules
The reason natural selection had such a grand old-time with multicellular organisms is because it gave it something to select for. These organisms inc...
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The Beginning: Sexual Reproduction
One day, millions of years ago, something occurred between two unsuspecting eukaryotes. When they bumped into one another something magical happened. ...
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The Beginning: Cyanobacteria
3.5 billion years ago microbial organisms appeared on the earth. These organisms combined, split, and combined some more, until the formation of micro...
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The Beginning: Life
In the beginning the Earth wasn’t exactly a hospitable place. It was hot, volcanic, and oxygen was a rare commodity. So the question now is how did li...
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Only A Theory
Charles Darwin had a hypothesis was that animals evolved due to a process he called natural selection. He strengthened his hypothesis with tests and o...
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Alfred Russel Wallace
In 1858, Charles Darwin received a paper authored by a young naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace. In it, Darwin found that the young man had reache...
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Why Darwin Matters
Over the last 150 plus years there is one subject which has caused its advocates and detractors to butt heads, often with incredulity at their opponen...
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On the Origin of Species
On November 24, 1859, “On the Origin of Species” was published. To say that it made a splash would be an understatement. It changed the world. Evolut...
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Darwin: The Calm Before the Storm
In the years following his return from his voyage on the Beagle, Charles settled into a life as a naturalist. On all fronts, both personal and profess...
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Darwin on the HMS Beagle
Charles Darwin, at 22, had never sailed before. With his notebooks, gear, rifles, and trunks loaded, he stood on the deck of the HMS Beagle to bid Eng...
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Darwin Before the Beagle
Charles Darwin will be forever known as the man who came up with the brilliant, and magnificent, idea that life evolved on this planet from a common a...
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