Evolve: documentary series on evolution

Here I post for you 8 hours of wonderful evolutionary viewing pleasure! This is a brilliant documentary series called Evolve and comes at the subject of evolution from specific traits of animals, 11 episodes are devoted to a single trait such as the evolution of ‘eyes’. Enjoy!

1. Eyes – Seeing is believing … not to mention evading, eating and surviving! Learn how the eyeball evolved from ancestors of jellyfish who developed light-sensitive cells to the unique adaptations that allowed primates to better exploit their new habitat, while the ability to see colors helped them find food.

2. Sex – Sex is a necessity for most species to survive. As evolution continues, are we approaching a time when sex will no longer be a necessity? How is this possible?

3. Size – How do we measure up? Understand the amazing processes that gave us vertebrates smaller than a thumbnail (a Cuban frog) and longer than a diesel locomotive (a blue whale). But what are the mechanisms of these adaptations, the evolutionary pressures that effect size, and the physical limits life can attain?

4. Skin – Skin is absolutely amazing, far more complex and versatile than we ever give it credit for. It makes up 16% of your body weight, is the largest organ in the human body, allows birds to fly, mammals to nurse their young, and provides a lifelong defense against predators and parasites alike.

5. Flight – In this high-flying episode, unearth the secrets, and the continuing mysteries, of the very first vertebrate flyer, the pterosaur, which escaped its earthly bounds 220 million years ago. This creature eventually evolved into flying Goliaths the size of small planes!

6. Communications – Communication isn’t just the key to a good relationship; it also goes a long way toward ensuring the success of a species. While humans, comfortable at the top of the food chain, have made the most out of this particular evolutionary achievement, organisms everywhere – from dolphins to amoebae – can be found speaking to one another.

7. Guts – It doesn’t just take willpower to survive. It takes guts. Life needs energy to exist and almost all animals get their energy in the same way – with a built in power plant, a digestive system that turns food into fuel. Take a close look at the role guts have played in shaping some of Earth’s most successful animals: dinosaurs, snakes, cows, and us.

8. Venom – The deadliest natural weapon employed in the animal kingdom has independently evolved in creatures as diverse as jellyfish, insects, snakes, and even mammals. Scientists from around the globe show how evolution adapted venom to fit the needs of the animals who wield it.

9. Speed – The ability to react and move can often mean the difference between life and death in the animal kingdom. Some animals have evolved into championship fliers, swimmers, and runners. What are the forces that create this need for speed, and how do animal bodies adapt to go into overdrive?

10. Jaws – Get ready to pry open some of the deadliest jaws on the planet as we expose this fierce and ferocious anatomical weapon. Sharp, menacing and more than an eating apparatus, the jaws of many animals are key to their survival. Go back along the evolutionary line to discover how various jaws developed in the first place.

11. Shape – Every shape in nature, no matter how bizarre it may appear, evolved as a result of the struggle for survival. Today, animals are shaped in so many different ways and most of them have strange bodies, weird looking. But shape is still vital.

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The First Australians

I’ve just finished watching a 7-part documentary series called The First Australians, which is on exactly that. It recounts our history here in Australia and how the first settlers all the way through to ‘white’ Australians’ in the mid 1900s treatment of aborigines in Australia.

It’s a pretty eye opening documentary I found, that almost brought me to tears at times when you hear stories from indigenous Australians about their parents and other ancestors who suffered at the hands of the Europeans during the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s and even today.

There were originally 250+ tribes covering every part of Australia. It’s believed Australia has been home to 1.6 billion human lives in the time following the arrival of the first Australians maybe more than 60 000 years ago. Within a few short decades of the first settlers arriving most were killed off either actively being shot to death like wild animals, or passively from European diseases contracted from the first settlers and passed on to countless other aborigines when they were corralled together in jails, camps and Christian missions.

Victoria was home to 60 000 or more aborigines when the first settlers arrived in the late 1700s. Within decades they numbered no more than 2000. Today, every single aboriginal with Victoria heritage can trace their ancestry to one or more of only ~350 aborigines. Tasmanian aborigines numbered less than 30 in the early 1800s after they were killed off by disease, shot by farmers worried about the price of their land and their livestock’s safety from inhabiting aborigines.

The 1800s saw the worst treatment of aborigines in our history, in my opinion, where they were systematically moved off their land, hunted, tortured, raped, hanged, shot, murdered, jailed, had their wives and children stolen, their lands poisoned, deforested and stolen, and worse. After white initially aimed to try moving them off their land, and when they refused to simply shoot them, they later tried breeding them out or ‘merging’ them into white society in the hope that the future Australians would forget the existence of the country’s original owners.

“Half-casts” were banned from living with their parents on reservations because they were part white. Whilst “full bloods” weren’t allowed to leave the reservations without legal documents having been signed and given to them. Even until the mid 1900s they were banned from pubs, ex-military members were banned from joining RSLs, they weren’t allowed to go into hotels, pubs or bars, giving birth in hospitals, they weren’t allowed to be served at stores unless no single white person was waiting to be served, they had no vote and no land rights.

For those who rose up initially in protest of their treatment, they were banned from reservations, had their rations restricted or completely taken from them so that they and their children would starve and hopefully die from the state’s point of view.

There were a few ‘white’ heroes along the way, don’t get me wrong, who stepped in where they could to do the right thing and learn from, protect, and fight for the safety and rights of the aborigines. Two brilliant examples are Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen. But most ‘heroes’, or those trying to ‘do the right thing’ were Christian missionaries who stripped the aborigines of their culture and heritage, and in the worst cases their children. They often also forced or conned large numbers of aborigines off their land and into missions to be ‘educated’ by in school and church, which quite often to the subsequent deaths of 100s of individuals from diseases to which they had no prior exposure or immunity to.

Anyway, I thoroughly recommend watching the full series. It’s about 6 hours in length through the 7 episodes, but it covers a sizeable portion of the first Australian’s history. A lot of which is either denied, hidden or lied about by past and present Australians.

Although I never had anything to do with what happened to the first Australians, nor did any of my Australian ancestors (at least to my knowledge) who only arrived in more recent years, as a ‘white’ European Australian I feel a great deal of disgust, shame and sorrow for what was done (and is still done to a lesser extent today) to these people by Europeans.

You can watch it all free here online, and find information on it there too.

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