Carl Sagan Explains Evolution in an 8‑Minute Animation

Bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion: nev­er has a phe­nom­e­non so impor­tant so lent itself to such clear, under­stand­able, ele­gant expla­na­tions. But just as evo­lu­tion itself pro­duces a seem­ing­ly infi­nite vari­ety of life forms, so the human under­stand­ing of evo­lu­tion has pro­duced count­less edu­ca­tion­al and enter­tain­ing kinds of illus­tra­tions by which to explain it. In the video above, astronomer-astro­physi­cist-cos­mol­o­gist Carl Sagan, no stranger to demys­ti­fy­ing the once seem­ing­ly unfath­omable phe­nom­e­na of our uni­verse, shows how evo­lu­tion actu­al­ly works with eight min­utes of crisp ani­ma­tion that take us from mol­e­cules in the pri­mor­dial soup, to bac­te­ria, to plants and polyps, to lam­preys, to tur­tles, to dinosaurs and birds, to wom­bats, to baboons and apes, to us. Then he goes back and does the whole four bil­lion-year evo­lu­tion­ary jour­ney again in forty sec­onds.

This con­cise les­son con­cerns itself not just with how we human beings came about, but how every­thing else came about as well. That wide-angle view of real­i­ty won a great deal of acclaim for Sagan’s Cos­mos: A Per­son­al Voy­age, the 1980 tele­vi­sion series on which the seg­ment orig­i­nal­ly appeared. Though most of its orig­i­nal broad­casts on life, the uni­verse, and every­thing still hold up as well as this clip on evo­lu­tion, a 21st-cen­tu­ry suc­ces­sor has late­ly appeared in the form of Cos­mos: A Space­time Odyssey, host­ed by astro­physi­cist Neil deGrasse Tyson, doubt­less the most suit­ed heir to Sagan’s tra­di­tion of enthu­si­asm and rig­or in pub­lic sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tion. For a more extend­ed treat­ment of evo­lu­tion, see also our post from ear­li­er this week on deGrasse Tyson’s episode on the sub­ject, in which he spends an entire hour on his equal­ly fas­ci­nat­ing expla­na­tion of what, up to and includ­ing you, he, and I, nat­ur­al selec­tion has so far come up with.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Where Did Human Beings Come From? 7 Mil­lion Years of Human Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in Six Min­utes

Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Nev­er a First Human Being

550 Mil­lion Years of Human Evo­lu­tion in an Illus­trat­ed Flip­book

Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.