Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Some 400 million years ago, humanity’s ancient sea-dwelling ancestors made a giant leap to land, sprouting weight-bearing fins that would eventually carry us out of the water forever. So what precipitated this evolutionarily pivotal change of terrain? According to recent research led by Malcolm MacIver, a computational neuroscientist and engineer at Northwestern University in Illinois, the jump to solid ground might have more to do with vertebrates’ eyes than limbs. Testing their theory that exponentially clearer views of bountiful prey above water led our ancestors to select for eyes atop the head, with primitive limbs coming long after, MacIver and colleagues ran extensive fossil-data simulations. They concluded that above-water sight did indeed provide an ‘informational zip line’ out of the water – what they call the buena vista (or ‘good view’) hypothesis. Moreover, they believe that those above-water views would eventually lead our land-dwelling ancestors to select for prospective cognition – the ability to mentally place oneself in the future – while fish were left in the muck of the moment.
Writer and Producer: Kristin Pichaske
Animation: Kaleida Studio, Cartuna
video
Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
video
Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
9 minutes
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
video
Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
7 minutes
video
Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
16 minutes
video
Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
video
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes