New Videos Explain Recent Human Evolution

I post a lot about human nature, and three videos on the subject dropped this week.

Why White People Are So WEIRD

Most of the world doesn’t think like us. So how did we become so WEIRD?

Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic societies are psychological outliers. From our individualism to our willingness to trust strangers, many things we assume are ordinary human nature are unusual by global and historical standards.

Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World offers a surprising explanation: the medieval Church’s campaign against cousin marriage weakened Europe’s clans and helped transform the Western mind. I explore his argument, the research behind it, and what it might explain about the civilisation we inherited.

Why Are We the Only Human Species Left?

We are the only human species left on Earth.

Once, we shared our planet with other human species, including Neanderthals and Denisovans. Today, they're gone, leaving behind fossils, ancient tools and traces of their DNA within our own. So how did Homo sapiens end up as the last humans standing?

For decades, we believed our ancestors survived because they were smarter, stronger or better adapted. But what if the real secret to our success was something far more unexpected? What if we survived because we were friendlier?

Some researchers believe our ability to cooperate, build relationships and form larger social networks may have given us a crucial evolutionary edge, an advantage of just 2 per cent that, over thousands of years, could have changed the course of human history

Why Europeans and Asians Evolved So Differently

Two strangers sit across from each other on a flight. One has pale skin and light eyes. The other has straight black hair and a fold at the corner of each eye. Their ancestors were probably neighbors 50,000 years ago. So why do Europeans and East Asians look so different today? In this video, we follow the ancient DNA to find out. You'll learn how evolution solved the same skin-lightening problem twice with completely different mutations, why Cheddar Man had dark skin and blue eyes, how Neanderthals and Denisovans left their mark, and why the ability to drink milk spread so recently.

We also cover the EDAR gene behind thicker hair, the single-letter change that decides your earwax type, the Tibetan altitude gene borrowed from an extinct species, and what science still can't explain, like the epicanthic fold.

And we cover the most important part: why these visible differences are real but tiny, and why human variation is a gradient, not a set of boxes.

These are all about genetic influences over humans. The first over the last millennium, the second over the last 100,000 years, and the third over 10,000 years.

Forty years ago, evolutionists claim that humans had not evolved in the last 100k years. There is overwhelming evidence that humans have evolved, evolved even in the last millennium, and that the evolved differences are crucial for understanding the world today.