Course Twelve · The Complete Micro-Course
The whole introductory biology canon, rebuilt as 1133 numbered videos — each one a single idea, built in the order the ideas depend on each other. The largest course on this site, and the first natural science: from what makes a claim scientific to how energy moves through an ecosystem.
How the course works
Biology is usually taught as an enormous vocabulary list with the reasoning left out. This course is built the other way. Chemistry comes before the cell that runs on it; the cell comes before the division that copies it; division comes before the inheritance it explains; inheritance comes before the evolution it makes possible. Nothing appears before the thing it depends on, and every dependency is a number you can follow back.
Three kinds of video: atoms (one definition, mechanism, or distinction, about twenty seconds), procedures (one method, shown step by step — reading a pedigree, tracing a reaction), and capstones (several ideas run together on one real case, from a signal reaching a cell to an infection being cleared).
Dozens of entries exist purely to name a common misconception and sit beside the correct idea, linked in both directions — that evolution is “just a theory,” that organisms evolve because they need to, that energy is recycled through an ecosystem.
The whole map
New videos post daily until the course is complete. Live ones link straight to the short; the rest are on their way.
The receipts
Behind the course sits a reference document in which every definition and mechanism is traced to its source. The anchor is an openly licensed university text — OpenStax’s Biology 2e — read against an independently authored second text so that where the two differ, the difference is noted rather than smoothed over. The experiments that settled a question are cited to the papers that ran them: Griffith, Avery, Hershey and Chase, Franklin and Gosling, Watson and Crick, Meselson and Stahl.
Where a question is genuinely open — whether a virus is alive, the relative weight of drift against selection — the course says so and presents the competing positions instead of picking one. Where a topic touches human health, the video carries an on-screen note that it is educational content and not medical advice.
This is outside my own teaching fields — philosophy, logic, and ethics — so the sourcing carries more of the weight than the résumé does. That is the point of publishing it. Spot an error? Tell me the video number and the claim — corrections get made in the open.
Follow along
The course releases in order on YouTube — one idea at a time until all 1133 are live. Subscribe to catch each one, or leave your email for an occasional note when a course finishes.
A note when a course finishes. Nothing else.