Review of “Major Transitions In Evolution” by Anthony Martin and John Hawks

Overall this series of 24 video lectures from The Teaching Company as part of their Great Courses series is a great introduction to evolution and many of its interdisciplinary sub-fields. I particularly enjoyed seeing the perspective of a geologist/paleontologist to start things off and then the tag-team to cover human evolution from primates.

Professor at Emory University; Ph.D., from University of Georgia

Professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison; Ph.D., from University of Michigan

I especially loved the philosophical conceptualization of “deep time” (in analogy with “deep space”) particularly as one considers the even broader idea of “Big History“. Though the professors here don’t delve into Big History directly, they’re covering a large portion of the cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary studies which underpin a large portion of the field. More specifically taking the general viewpoint of “transitions” in evolution underlines this conceptualization.

Though the transitional viewpoint seems to be a very natural and highly illustrative one to take, I would be curious in seeing alternate presentations of evolution from a pedagogical standpoint. It was nice to hear a bit of alternate discussion in the final lecture as well as discussion of where things might “go from here.”

I do wish that there were additional follow-on lectures that covered additional material in more depth. It would also have been nice to have included a handful of lectures from a microbiologist’s viewpoint and background to give some additional rounding out of the material and this could have been done either in the early parts of the material or certainly around the discussions of primate evolution. Overall all though, these are wonderfully self-contained and don’t require a huge prior background in material to understand well.

It’s always great to see lecturers who truly love their fields and have the ability to relate that through their lectures and infect their students.

From a purely technical standpoint, I’m glad to see that The Teaching Company only offers a video version of (as opposed to their usual additional offering of audio-only) as having pictures of the fossils and organisms under discussion and their relative physiological structures was very helpful. Additionally having the recurring timecharts of the portions of geological time under discussion was very useful and generally reinforcing of the chronology. Somewhat monotonous from a visual perspective was the almost programmatic back and forth pacing between two cameras during the lectures which at times became distracting in and of itself. Certainly including a third camera would have added some variety as would having had camera operators to zoom in or move the camera around while the lecturers stand relatively stationary. (Though the production value here is exceptionally high, small details like this over the span of several hours of watching become important. As an example of better execution, I prefer Glenn Holland’s “Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World” as a model – though there wasn’t as much additional visual material there, the lectures were simply more “watchable” because of the camera work.)