Episode 01 Free
Why Mammals Don't Lay Eggs
A short research paper about why mammals do not lay eggs, explaining the hypothesis, the evidence for, notable issues, and general conclusion
42 notes 18 sources
Scholarly Companions
Go deeper than the video
Each video is backed by extensive research — notes drawn from books, papers, and primary sources, organized and cross-referenced. The Scholarly Companions make that research available to you.
Episode 02 $12.00
The Pyramid Quagmire
The Great Pyramid is one of the most studied objects in human history, and one of the least understood. This paper takes the most sophisticated conventional construction theory in current circulation — Huni Choi's, presented by Dami Lee — and follows it honestly to where it leads. The conclusion is not that we need a better theory. It is that the framework within which all theories have been built — the unstated assumption that the builders were primitive, that they could only have had access to the tools and methods we associate with pre-industrial societies — is itself the problem. Working through three "quagmires" any construction theory must actually satisfy, a thought experiment set in 1000 CE, and what Ancient Egypt shows on its own terms, the paper argues for a different reading of what Egypt was. Great Issues of A Species, Research Paper No. 2.
57 notes 10 sources
Episode 03 Free with email
The Founding Inquiry/Why I Started This Channel
This is the paper that inaugurated the inquiry. It names an unease — the sense that modern life, however comfortable, is producing something that is not thriving — and works through what that unease is tracking. Drawing on data (over a billion people with diagnosed mental health conditions, nearly half a generation on formal psychiatric diagnoses, disengagement as the modal experience of work), the paper argues that the narrative of perpetual progress conceals a species-level mismatch between the human animal and its current habitat; that "the leavers" — the pre-modern peoples still living outside the mismatch — carry knowledge that is not nostalgia but data; and that the radical shift required is not another upgrade of the system that produced the problem. Great Issues of A Species, Research Paper No. 3.
82 notes 10 sources
Episode 04 $9.00
What Even is African Time? (Against the Clock)
There's a familiar argument that African cultures, because some of their languages lack an elaborate future tense, never developed a proper relationship to time — and that this explains a supposed civilisational lag. Against the Clock takes that argument seriously, and then dismantles it. What looks, through a European lens, like a deficient grasp of time turns out to be a different and in some ways richer one: not a line running from past to future, but a living sphere — sasa and zamani — in which the present is inhabited rather than rushed through, and the ancestors walk ahead of the living rather than receding behind them. This is not a defence of lateness. Where the critique is right, the paper says so. But the deepest thing the argument stumbles onto is something the modern world, exhausted by its own clock, is only now beginning to remember.
112 notes 12 sources