I grew up in an evangelical household and went to a Christian school where they only taught creationism (and a little “micro evolution” but not much).

It’s been many years since I left Christianity but I never really re-schooled myself on all the science I missed out on. I started watching some YouTube videos, and while they’re very informative, I realized they’re about 10 years old. I got to thinking there have probably been a lot of scientific discoveries in the last 10 years. So I googled “recent evolutionary discoveries” and the amount of info that came up was overwhelming.

What’s a good source that I could focus on to learn about discoveries over the last decade or two?

  • Foggyfroggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    1 year ago

    10 years is actually considered not bad by most academic standards. The core ideas of evolution via selection, genetics, and population dynamics (the kinds of things taught in any general biology class in high school and college) really haven’t changed much in 25 years.

    You may want to find a biology class and learn about the vocabulary, founding principles, and big ideas. Here is a free open source biology textbook, chapter 18 starts the unit on evolutionary processes. And keep watching YouTube! There are tons of good videos aimed at different levels. “Crash Course” with Hank Green is fantastic and the series covers many academic science topics as an entire course. Biology alone has 20 or 30 ten-minute episodes.

  • Contramuffin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Scishow is good for up-to-date info about a variety of scientific fields. If you want to check if your scientific knowledge is up to date (or if you want to keep it up to date), I highly recommend checking them out. As for evolution in particular, I can’t really say. Biology is an umbrella term for a vast number of incredibly niche sub-fields, and even something that would seem straightforward, like evolution, can be broken up into multiple fields of study. For instance, I know people who study evolutionary microbiology, which is the study of how bacteria evolve.

    I’m not sure if you’re looking for general knowledge of scientific concepts or if you’re looking for in-depth analysis of leading-edge, niche scientific concepts. If it’s the former, I’m sure that videos from even 10 years ago is probably fine. World-changing breakthroughs don’t happen that often. And while maybe there might be minor inaccuracies, overall it’ll still be accurate enough to get a general understanding. If it’s the latter, you’ll unfortunately have to learn how to read scientific literature