If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand evolution

In this Veritasium deep-dive, Derek Muller starts with a quirky question (“Why does poop smell bad?”) and then zooms out to tackle the origin of life, gene mutations, and how natural selection actually works. Along the way he breaks down kin selection, Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene concept, and even runs a live evolution simulation to show you how traits get passed on generation by generation.

Packed with expert insights from Dr. Jack Szostak, Dr. John Sutherland, Dr. Joanna Masel and more, this video stitches together real research, animations and hands-on demos to turn abstract theory into an engaging, interactive story of how life evolves.

Watch on YouTube