100 Greatest Discoveries: Origins And Evolution

[The One]

This show attempts to explain our deep psychological questions such as, why we exist, why we try to stay alive and how we try to understand planets, other ecosystems, environment and species. From explaining the misconceived bacterial sludge to deep sea chemosynthesis, or from the theory of comets, volcanoes and an explosion bigger than all nuclear forces, this documentary, hosted by Bill Nye, is an important summary of popular and common science theories.

This documentary discusses such topics as Charles Walcott’s analysis of the Burgess Shale; the Linnaean classification system; Darwin’s theory of natural selection; Donald Johanson’s “Lucy”; Mary Leakey’s Laetoli footprints; and Michel Brunet’s Toumai skull


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[music]

The Linnaean classification system is a great example of how we seek to understand the natural world. It's clunky and unwieldy at times, but allows us to compartmentalise organisms and organise them, with room for fine-tuning as our understanding and techniques of phylogentic analysis improves. The major drawback probably comes from the fact that there is not even consensus as to what constitutes a "species", not from the compartmenalisation approach. As a species, we tend to need to be able to understand something in isolation first, before we understand it in relation to other things.