I'm looking to something Astronomy/space/astrophysics to listen to while I work that isn't Techbro Elon slop, AI voice, or clickbaity
EDIT: Thank you thank you thank you these are all great I'm so excited for space facts
this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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Veritasium is still one of my favorite channels on Youtube. Derek is an incredible communicator. It's not entirely focused on the topics you mentioned, but he has some great videos about space.
He has many good episodes but I've also seen some eye he's now obviously shilling for a sponsor that were misses. This isn't to turn someone away from the channel, but I think it's worth noting.
His recent episode where he fully endorses Richard Dawkin's theory that evolutionary selection acts causally on strictly a genetic level was disappointing in how underinformed / disinterested in alternatives it was.
At least they had the discretion to leave out the hack theory of memetics that Dawkin's was pushing.
Memetics as initially laid out by Dawkins seemed fine? The idea of viewing ideas as discrete bits of information transmitted from person to person and subject to mutation seems fine? Like it's not really a falsifiable claim or one that is subject to an internal mechanism that can be mapped out (What is the DNA code equivalent in a meme?) and I don't think it's supposed to be or have that.
I'm not in the social sciences though.
Isn't Dawkins biggest achievement being a racist and inadvertently coining the term meme? I genuinely don't know tbh because I remember reading somewhere (when I used to read) his actual meme theory was completely disproven.
It isn't disproven because it isn't falsifiable. It doesn't rise to the level of scientific theory, it's a framework to understand cultural ideas through a biological lense. It's basically "Check out this cool idea I had" level of rigor. There was a brief attempt to turn Memetics into a serious area of study but that died out.
Dawkin's biggest achievement was writing The Selfish Gene, which presented an extremely good (Or at least extremely widely accepted) argument for a gene based view of evolution, which has basically become the assumed standard for most introductory biology at this point. There are many arguments against it that have been presented since, and gene centered evolution becomes less and less the standard the further your education goes, but it is what it is.
Thanks for explaining
Sometimes Veritasium does incredibly thoughtful work and explains a very interesting or ubiquitous topic, and sometimes he goes to Crane Naval Research Facility so that the u.s. Navy's R&D guys can teach him about night vision goggles and he can do a little military propaganda. I'd say it's about 50/50 whether a vid will be really cool or propaganda. There was a pretty recent math one that was a neat topic and also was used as a vehicle for a little anti China propaganda.