Charles Darwin turned our world upside down.
His theory of evolution by natural selection
is one of the most profound and far-reaching ideas in human history.
It's also, alas, one of the most controversial.
Science now has the evidence that proves evolution is true.
Yet today, incredibly,
the opposition to Darwin is more fiercely vocal than ever -
denying plain facts in more and more elaborate ways.
You haven't seen it and I haven't seen it,
so please stop calling it science!
If we had gone from slime to human beings,
there'd be an overwhelming amount of evidence.
You are a teacher of science,
and you think that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old?
Yes, I do.
In this programme, the increasingly aggressive backlash.
"Right now, your destiny is all (BLEEP) up. (BLEEP) atheist!"
The battles that I think really matter...
We can't get into the business of knocking down kids' religions
and the religions of families.
Why not, actually?
Because...
..and how the first man to understand evolution
himself wrestled with religious faith.
For Darwin, the problem was close to home -
his beloved wife was a devout Christian.
Today, we have public battles
as we confront the ranks of religious fundamentalists
eager to attack Darwin's great legacy,
which they just don't understand.
When I was a young boy, I looked to God to explain life.
And then I was introduced to Darwin and evolution by my father.
At first, I didn't get it.
It didn't seem possible to me that something so simple
could explain so much.
But then I learnt, thought about it a bit more
and then suddenly the penny dropped.
I really got it.
This incredibly simple theory
really was capable of explaining everything about life -
the beauty, the complexity, the diversity.
Then I thought, "Well, if science can explain something
"so apparently inexplicable as life,
"who knows what the limits might be
"on what science could explain more generally,
"without any recourse to the supernatural?"
At that moment, I became an atheist and I've never looked back.
Charles Darwin too changed his mind about this biggest of questions.
As a young man, during his voyage on the Beagle,
Darwin still believed that God
had created the world and everything in it.
But then he came across more and more evidence
that showed that life must have evolved.
Fossil ancestors, patterns of anatomical resemblance,
startling similarities in embryos
and the power of domestic breeding
all showed that life forms had changed over time.
Darwin believed there was an entirely natural explanation.
All animals vary, and in the competition of nature,
some variations are more successful
and more likely to reproduce than others,
passing their variation on.
Here in his study at Down House,
Darwin grasped that the religious story of creation
ran against the evidence of the natural world.
With evolution, God just wasn't part of the picture.
But there was a problem for Darwin. His wife, Emma, was religious
and the trouble began soon after they got married in 1839.
Emma wrote him a letter describing her deep faith.
But Darwin was no longer convinced there was a God.
He agonised over the letter and scribbled on it,
"When I am dead, know that many times
"I have kissed and cried over this."
Darwin never criticised religion directly in public.
I think he didn't want to hurt his wife's feelings.
Instead, he let his science do the talking.
He predicted science would bring about
a gradual illumination of minds.
Yet sadly today, it seems harder and harder for people to see the light.
Here, in the 21st century, people are retreating from reason,
trying to turn back the clock to a world before Darwin.
Genesis chapter one says everything that God made was very...?
None of you think kill or be killed, survival of the fittest,
nature red in tooth and claw is good.
Is the world really 6,000 years old?
D'you realise, up till Noah's day,
people lived to be nearly a thousand?
You don't die because you get old, you die because you're a sinner.
Up till Noah's day, there's no record of rain.
The Australian John Mackay
is a celebrity among evangelical Christians.
He's a creationist.
He believes in the literal truth of the Bible's creation story
and attacks evolution on the very crudest level.
I didn't grow up brainwashed with this.
It's the result of finishing my university course,
listening to students say,
"If evolution is true, why can't we see it happening?"
Third-year genetics question to the professor.
You take that seriously?
Oh, yeah! The professor, his answer,
I took even more seriously when he said,
"It happens so slowly you wouldn't expect to see it happening."
All of a sudden I thought, "Hang on!"
And that's true.
Good! In other words, what you don't see happening is not science,
it's unobservable, and you were the first person to admit it on PBS.
You're using the word "see"
as meaning "see within one lifetime".
If a phenomenon takes millions of years,
of course you won't see it.
Which means you have a faith position...
It does not mean...
..and you need to admit it, as you weren't there.
It means you use other evidence than the evidence of one man's eyes.
You have to look...
Oh, sorry, Darwin was only 1859.
That's only 150 years ago almost, right?
And you haven't seen it and I haven't seen it,
so please stop calling it science.
Call what you're teaching philosophy or atheism
if you're gonna really be honest, and my time is up.
That's ridiculous, but anyway... Thank you very much and bye.
The refusal to believe in anything you can't see yourself is absurd.
Think about it.
I never saw Napoleon with my own eyes,
but that doesn't mean Napoleon didn't exist.
'John Mackay can't see a cell or an atom
'or weather systems on the other side of the world.
'Does that mean they don't exist?'
Darwin didn't just trust his own eyes.
He checked his theory against evidence gathered
through extensive correspondence with naturalists across the world.
Mackay, it seems to me,
misunderstands science at a deep level.
Science is precisely not limited
by what we can see with our own eyes in one lifetime.
'The whole wonderful endeavour of science
'is to investigate phenomena beyond human experience,
'from far-off galaxies to microscopic bacteria.'
'Creationism's next best strategy is not flat denial
'but to claim there is evidence against evolution
'and that a genuine debate is yet to be had.
'This is the creationists' favourite claim in America,
'where the battle between faith and science really rages.'
Charles Darwin's struggle with religion was private.
'Today, the battle has become public.
'In my lifetime, opposition to evolution has grown,
'particularly in the United States.'
50 years ago, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik
and the space race began.
In response, the Americans made science priority number one.
The Government poured money into science education.
For the first time,
evolution was taught in every classroom in America.
But the religious fundamentalists hit back.
Tell me, Joe, how does he explain away God?
Well, why don't you come to the science club meeting?
Let him tell you.
'To defend their Bible against the biologists,
'they developed creation science,
'a bizarre fusion of scientific language and religious doctrine
'that they touted as a real alternative to evolution.'
Our eyes are amazing little instruments.
But they're only one part of the wondrous body that God has given us.
'I worry that this is brainwashing, not science.
'And I've felt compelled to take a stand.'
'40th floor.'
'My book, The God Delusion, has put me firmly in the front line
'in the battle between religion and reason.'
Can I sign in? Richard Dawkins.
Hello.
I'm one of your biggest fans.
Can I speak to the number one British intellectual?
I've read all your books.
That's very kind. Thank you.
Can I touch the hem of your gown?
LAUGHTER
'The most powerful nation on Earth is polarised.
'At this conference of atheists, I'm treated almost like a rock star.
'But there are sections of American society
'that would happily lynch me.'
Are you religious at all? I mean, do you pray?
No, of course not.
You're not religious at all?
Do I look religious?
"I hope you die slowly and you (BLEEP) burn in hell,
"you damn blasphemy.
"And you should realise that your entire life has been a delusion
"and that right now your destiny is all (BLEEP) up. (BLEEP) atheist!
"Go (BLEEP) yourself. You, sir, are an absolute ass.
"Your feigned intelligence is nothing more
"than the fart of God.
"You suck. Go burn in hell.
"Satan will enjoy torturing you. Christian living for God."
"There is a God. Her created all of us.
"The only one who is blinded are the unsaved and stubborn.
"Everything Darwin said is wrong and evolution has never been proven
"and nothing is evolving now. The Bible is the best book.
"Nothing even comes close to its accuracy
"and if you think God's judgment is bad
"the devil has worse in store for all unbelievers."
No punctuation at all in that one.
'It doesn't scare me. I mean, I rather pity these people.'
They react in a way that sounds defensive
and, actually, really rather pathetic.
"Ha-ha, you (BLEEP) dumb-ass.
"I hope you get hit by a church van tonight and you die slowly."
(LAUGHS)
'But there's also an entirely different kind of opposition -
'slick in style and with a more polished line of attack.
'Wendy Wright is president of Concerned Women for America.'
Wendy Wright, yeah.
'She represents half a million evangelical women
'concerned about issues ranging from lesbians on TV to poor old Darwin.'
Hi.
Hello. I'm here to see Wendy Wright.
I'll take you right in.
Thank you very much.
'I worry that her organisation
'would condemn American children to ignorance
'by attacking sound, scientific evidence.'
Why is it so important to you
that people not believe in a creator?
That's not the point.
The point is that as a scientist,
I'm concerned that children in American schools
and in schools elsewhere
should be exposed to the evidence
and allowed to make up their minds about the evidence.
We completely agree. In fact, that's why the challenge in America,
whenever this debate comes up,
is teach the controversy, teach the evidence,
because as it is now, in many cases,
school children are only being taught about evolution,
they're not being taught about the frauds in evolution
and the lack of evidence in evolution.
So it's actually us who are arguing for teaching all the evidence,
not just the ones that are favourable to evolutionists.
You could say, "Which controversy?" I mean...
'Teach the controversy. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it?
'And it would be if it was a controversy
'between equally valid points of view.
'But it isn't.
'I doubt if Wendy Wright would "teach the controversy"
'about the Earth being flat
'because the evidence for the Earth being a sphere is so massive.
'There's also massive evidence in favour of evolution,
'but she doesn't seem to want to know about it.'
Oh, really?
And actually, the way you frame this and your very closed mindedness
really is a very good example of the kind of censorship we see
within the scientific community that won't even allow discussion
about the controversy that if evolution had occurred,
then surely whether it's going from birds to mammals
or even beyond that, surely there'd be at least one evidence...
There's a massive amount of evidence.
I'm sorry, but you people
keep repeating that like a kind of mantra.
Because you just listen to each other.
I mean, if only you would just open your eyes
and look at the evidence.
Show it to me. Show me the bones.
Show me the carcass,
show me the evidence of the in-between stage
from one species to another.
Go and look at some modern palaeontology labs,
talk to some modern palaeontologists.
Look at that evidence, it's beautiful.
The evidence for the transition between
the reptilian jaw and the mammalian jaw.
The reptilian jaw has several bones,
the mammalian lower jaw has only one bone,
and the other bones that were in the reptile
have now moved into the inner ear.
It's a beautiful transition. There are so many beautiful stories.
You would be fascinated.
'So, is there evidence for evolution or isn't there? Let me show you.'
'I'll begin with fossils.
'There are now literally millions of fossils
'in museums all over the world.
'They've been dated and documented
'and the relationships between them analysed.
'When mapped out through time,
'the anatomical connections can only be explained by evolution.
'All life is related in a vast family tree.'
Fossils also show how life forms change over time
along individual branches of the tree.
Look at these skulls.
The so-called "missing links" show the growth of our ancestors' brains
over the last three million years
as we evolved from something like a chimp on hind legs to modern humans.
But there's even more convincing evidence.
There is a code of four chemicals in every cell of every living thing -
DNA.
Today, machines like these
can analyse and compare DNA with absolute precision.
So Darwin's theory can be tested.
Is it true?
Yes. The results match the fossils.
DNA links all life through the code
and the more closely related two species are physically,
the more similar their code.
'This is just part of the mountain of evidence that supports evolution.
'Some religious people just don't know enough about it. But some do.
'And their strategy is even more bizarre.
'They see God's infallible hand in everything.'
Well, the evidence that we have is the same for both of us.
Whereas you might see fossils as evidence for evolution
I might say this is evidence for a worldwide flood.
'Would you want someone like this
'teaching your children science in Britain in 2008?
'This is Nick Cowan, chemistry teacher
'at a well-respected Northern grammar school.
'And he uses American creationist material
' in his general studies class.'
But you know, it's not just fossils, don't you?
The molecules of DNA, the molecules of protein,
when you look at a mole and a rat
and a kangaroo and a human and a monkey,
they're all hard molecules that you can see,
just as you can in your chemistry teaching,
and they fall on a perfect family tree.
It all fits. It's so elegant and you, as a scientist,
would appreciate it, if only you could remove your blinkers
and look at it as a scientist should.
How old do you think the world is, by the way?
I don't have a...
If I said less than 6,000 years,
you'd probably feel, "This man is crazy,"
but I've had a look at this, I don't know,
the dating methods we have are flawed in their methodology.
You are a teacher of science in a major British school
and you think that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old.
Yes, I do.
I would rather believe God who was there, who's told us,
than scientists who are fallible,
who don't know the past, who weren't there.
And again, all I'm doing is...
'This is a classic old chestnut -
'God is infallible, therefore the Bible is right.
'It's as if I claimed Darwin was infallible
'so what he said was always right.
'Luckily, scientists don't work that way.
'We sustain our ideas not through sacred texts,
'but through reason and evidence.'
And again, all I'm doing is bringing
healthy debate into the science lesson.
We have about a dozen different radioactive clocks
and they all point to roughly the same answer,
which is that the world is between four and five billion years old.
And when you say, "God told us,"
you're talking about a particular document
for which there is no particular historical authenticity
and you're putting that above the whole of science
and you are a science teacher.
If there is a God, his word must be more important
than the work of fallible human scientists.
I'm all in favour of teaching children to think for themselves
and to question for themselves - that's great.
But there are limits to that
and I think that when the evidence is so massive,
you owe it to the children to teach them what the evidence is.
What creationists like Nick Cowan claim is God's perfect creation
is in fact the result of evolution's arms race.
Animals have evolved extraordinary adaptations
to fit their environment, but they're not perfect.
Designers can go back to the drawing board.
Evolution is condemned to modify what's already there.
So nature is full of compromises and imperfections.
Creationists also ask how something so apparently perfect as the eye
just sprang into existence.
Well, it didn't.
The basic chemistry that makes up a light-sensitive cell
is shared right across the animal kingdom
and natural selection has seized on this time and time again.
Science has uncovered species
at every stage in the evolution of the eye.
It is a cumulative process and each step of the way
is more useful than the one before.
The eye has evolved independently at least 40 different times
around the animal kingdom
and it has evolved gradually, improvement on improvement.
And yet...
No sensible person would have ever left the body the way it is.
Like what? What's a good example of that?
The most dramatic is... is the human eye.
You know, it's held up as this example of perfection in the body.
It's not perfect!
It's the perfect example of... of why the body is not designed.
Cover one eye if you would, please.
And we take the pin and we move it right...
You have to keep looking right at the bridge of my nose.
Right, OK.
Keep your eye fixed.
Now we'll move it out a bit, about 15 degrees and right about there...
Yeah, it's gone.
It's gone. You can't see it?
No.
Now can you see it?
Yes.
Now can you see it?
Yes.
Now can you see it?
No.
A blind spot. That's lousy.
Our bodies are so fabulous in some respects.
Our heart keeps beating and never takes a five-minute vacation
for decade after decade, that's astounding!
But we have an appendix, and wisdom teeth, birth is difficult,
many people get near-sightedness,
and the combination of some things so perfect
and other things being being such botched jobs
is what should make us all sit up and take notice
this is something shaped by natural selection -
it has a lot of vulnerabilities built in
explained only by how natural selection works.
'So our botched, compromised bodies
'are themselves evidence of evolution.
'They're shot through with history.
'Evolution is a fact.
'It's documented by science to the same degree Napoleon is by history.
'Some things are just true, they're not a matter of choice or opinion.
'But you'd never guess that in the place
'where this matters more than anywhere - in our schools,
'where the teaching of evolution
'has become a hugely sensitive issue for science teachers.'
This is multicultural Britain and one of its fault lines
runs straight through our children's classrooms.
How do we reconcile scientific truth
with the deeply held convictions that bind religious communities?
Charles Darwin was the first person to grasp the extraordinary idea
that life on Earth had evolved, without the intervention of any God.
And I've always been intrigued by how he himself
wrestled with what that meant for religion.
Darwin was deeply worried about how religion spread,
not through reason and evidence,
but by being seeded in children's minds at a young age at school.
He wrote that it would become
"as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God
"as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake".
Darwin became concerned by what he saw as the "stupid classical education"
at Rugby School, dulling his eldest son William's once-lively mind.
So he was prepared to brave the snobbery of Victorian society
to send his four other sons to the less prestigious Clapham Grammar School,
because it had strong science education.
150 years later, Darwin would find reason to be equally anxious
about what his children were being taught at school.
The compromised values of multicultural Britain
mean that teachers hesitate to offend the religious beliefs of their pupils,
even when these directly contradict scientific fact.
Earlier in the series, I took a science class
from Park High School in north London fossil-hunting.
'I was amazed by their lack of knowledge and understanding of evolution.
'So what do their science teachers have to say about this?
'I worry they're tiptoeing too respectfully around traditional beliefs.'
Some kids just won't accept it.
You know, they're brought up in families where they just don't believe it
and that's an end to it.
There's no lack of understanding of it necessarily,
it's just, you know, we can't get into the business of knocking down kids' religions
and religions of families.
Why...why not, actually? Why...why not? Because...
Because we... because we teach science and...
I would not feel comfortable talking about anything but science,
so if I present the scientific case,
and I make sure they understand the scientific case,
I think I've done my job.
< But their acceptance of it is a separate issue.
For some students, truth isn't something they see coming through science.
Even though our emphasis is on ideas and evidence to support these ideas,
a lot of students have a religious narrative that is very important to them,
it's an important part of their life, through their family and their culture.
'Would it be too unfair to suggest
'that these well-meaning teachers are running scared? Who could blame them?
'Obviously, what we believe is affected by our upbringing,
'but that doesn't mean we can't change our minds.
'We all have the right to see the evidence and re-evaluate our beliefs.
'These science teachers shouldn't be afraid
'to spell out the scientific truth derived from evidence.'
I don't see that we can expect to convince them just by showing them the evidence.
< Really? Why not? Because they've got other evidence
which they've been brought up with. < But that's not evidence.
No. To them it's evidence, though, isn't it?
And to their parents.
We're talking about something very fundamental. >
We're talking about young people and identity. >
It's not our place to...to...
to fly the banner of science and say there's no room for anything else.
All we can do is present - this is a way of thinking, this is...
Science has given us so much.
This is one way of interpreting life. We believe this is...
< Just one way of interpreting?
We believe this is the way, because we are scientists,
but it's not my place to tell you that you're wrong.
"We believe it because we're scientists"?
Do you mean that, or that we believe it because the evidence is in the rocks?
That's what I'm saying -
because I'm a scientist and that's the way I view the world.
No, it's not because you're a scientist, is it?
The evidence is there. Their evidence is not there. It's just made up.
'You don't believe that the Earth is round only if you're an astronaut.
'You don't believe Napoleon existed only if you're a historian.
'You believe these things because they're facts, proved by evidence.
'Evolution is also a demonstrated fact.
'The truth really is out there. It's not a matter of opinion.'
Relativism, the quaint notion that there are many truths
all equally deserving of respect even if they contradict each other, is rife today.
It sounds like a respectful gesture towards multiculturalism.
Actually, it's a pretentious cop-out.
There really is something special about scientific evidence. Science works.
Planes fly, magic carpets and broomsticks don't.
Gravity's not a version of the truth, it is the truth.
Anybody who doubts it is invited to jump out of a tenth-floor window.
Evolution, too, is reality.
You don't decide whether to believe it or not believe it
on the basis of whim or culture. The evidence supports it.
Evolution is the plain truth.
'Where has all this wobbling come from?
'Well, it started right back in the 19th century, in Darwin's time.
'Rather than just denying the evidence,
'the Church of England developed the most sophisticated strategy
'to face the challenge of evolution.'
It saw evolution as one truth within a bigger one
and embraced Darwin in what one might call a comfortable, relativist fudge.
Science would explain the workings of nature
and God could take the credit for getting science started in the first place.
It's a subtle argument put forward by the most powerful Christians in the world.
Let's take it on in its modern guise.
Darwinism as a theory of how evolution works, a highly plausible,
highly credible theory about biological history.
I don't have a problem with that.
Do you see God as having any role in the evolutionary process?
For me God is...is the power or the intelligence
that shapes the whole of that process.
As creator, God's act is the beginning of all creation...
By setting up the laws of physics in the first place,
in which context evolution takes place. Things unfold within that.
What about intervening during the course of evolution?
I find that that rather suggests that God couldn't have made a very good job
of making the laws of physics in the first place
if He constantly needs to be adjusting the system.
I think that's a slightly different question.
(Dawkins) 'But there's a problem for the Church of England.
'Isn't it trying to have its cake and eat it too?
'Trying to have both God and the laws of science
'means that one or the other is compromised.
'Either God can't interfere and has no impact
'or if he does get involved, it can't be squared with science.'
You do believe in some of the New Testament miracles...
I mean, such as the virgin birth...
Any others? I mean, the raising of Lazarus?
The empty tomb and the raising of Lazarus, yes.
Now, isn't there a kind of mismatch between your view of science
as something that God doesn't interfere in and that somehow he made it right
in the first place?
How do you reconcile that with what looked to some of us
more like cheap conjuring tricks
and not the sort of grand creator that you've been portraying?
I think if you start with a picture of God outside messing around with the works,
you are in danger of getting into the conjuring tricks model.
I think that there are certain moments when there is an opening in the world
in which the underlying divine action comes through in a fresh way.
Take the birth of Jesus.
Here you have a long history of preparation for the coming of God
in a new way, here you have a particular life, that of Mary, opening itself up
to the action of God in a certain way and then something fresh happens which is not,
if you like...a suspension of the laws of nature
but nature itself opening up to its own depths, something coming through...
I'm not sure what that means. It sounds awfully like suspending...
It's poetic language.
I realise that there are ways of talking about that,
which do simply sound like God interrupting things.
I, of course, love poetic language, but there comes a time
when you worry people will misunderstand it as...
Or that it's a way of wriggling out of hard questions.
Well, it's one thing to say in some poetic way,
it was sort of right that Jesus should have been born of a virgin...
but when you say, "I actually believe it happened,"
that's a statement of fact, that's a statement of scientific fact.
It...it...it happened.
It's true or not, yes.
It's true or not.
I don't think you can wriggle out of that by doing poetry, much as I love poetry.
On the one hand, I've got a lot of sympathy
with the decent, middle-of-the-road, moderate Christians.
On the other hand, I sort of feel that the decent, middle-of-the-road Christians
are tying themselves in knots trying to have it both ways,
trying to have both God and Darwin.
And in a sense, they're opening the door, letting in the rabid creationists
by making it respectable to believe things
on the basis of faith rather than evidence.
So deny, attack, absorb.
Now we've gone through the range of strategies
by which religion tries to deal with Darwin.
I think they all flounder.
But even I can see why religion puts up this resistance.
'I get letters from readers who have understood the truth of evolution,
'but somehow wish they hadn't.
'Darwinism can be unsettling, even frightening.'
Darwin himself was shocked by what he called
the low and horribly cruel behaviour he observed in nature.
And yet it was integral to natural selection.
One piece of research shook Darwin to his core.
He knew how some insects, like this parasitic wasp,
lay eggs in the larvae of other insects
so that their young, when hatched, can feed on them.
they also sting each part of the prey's nervous system
so as to paralyse it but not kill it,
to keep the meat fresh.
So the victim may be aware of being slowly eaten away from inside
but unable to move a muscle to do anything about it.
How do we face this deeply disturbing truth?
Duck under a security blanket of faith in God?
But then, Darwin wondered,
what kind of God would create an animal that can only exist in this horrible way?
Isn't it better to embrace reality, bleak as it sometimes may be,
than to avoid it and live a lie?
In the teeth of life's hardships, Darwin was determined to live authentically.
He hadn't just observed suffering as a scientist,
he experienced it himself, in his own life.
Darwin had always had a particularly strong bond with his eldest daughter, Annie.
He was charmed by her make-believe worlds and her neat little scrapbooks,
while she liked to smooth his hair and pat his clothes into shape.
But at just ten years old, she suffered a painful, lingering death
following a bout of scarlet fever. Darwin was devastated.
"We have lost the joy of the household and the solace of our old age."
His devout wife, Emma, told the other children that Annie had gone to heaven.
For Emma, suffering helped
"to exalt our minds and to look forward with hope to a future state".
Darwin, by contrast, could find no meaning or religious consolation
as he faced the desperation of bereavement.
After the initial period of mourning, he and Emma scarcely spoke of Annie,
but they never forgot her. Religion became a source of tension between them.
Finally, I think the tension had to spill out.
In his 60s, Darwin wrote an autobiography
in which he revealed his anger at what he called the "manifestly false" Bible story.
And he added, "I can indeed hardly see
"how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true
"for if so, the plain language of the text
"seems to show that the men who do not believe,
"and this would include my father, brother and almost all my best friends,
"will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine."
Though his autobiography was written for his family,
Darwin must have known it would be published after his death.
And he grasped the opportunity to finally say in public
what he had long struggled with in private.
But if Darwinism demolishes the religious delusion, what can go in its place?
How did Darwin himself find consolation in a Godless universe?
Religious people attack Darwin for,
in their view, draining some of the wonder out of our world,
for the bleakness of his vision of nature.
The playwright George Bernard Shaw really hated Darwinism. He said,
"When its whole significance dawns on you,
"your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you.
"There is a hideous fatalism about it,
"a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence,
"of strength and purpose, of honour and aspiration."
There's no doubt that people do find a Darwinian view of life
bleak and unsympathetic, but it's still true and we can't get away from that.
And further, in any case, there is a sort of happiness,
there's a sort of bliss in understanding
the elegance with which the world's put together and Darwinian natural selection
is a supremely elegant idea.
It really does make everything fall into place and make sense
and I find great consolation, great happiness, in that level of understanding.
Just ponder for a moment Darwin's central idea, the tree of all life,
now verified as fact by our decoded DNA.
It means we are related to every living thing on the planet.
And, what's more, we are descended from ancestors who were winners,
adapting in any way possible to survive and pass on their genes.
You and I and every living creature can make the following proud claim.
Not a single one of my ancestors died young,
not a single one of my ancestors failed to copulate.
Plenty of other individuals died young and failed to copulate,
but they didn't become ancestors.
It's blindingly obvious, but from it much follows.
It means that every single living creature has inherited the genes
of an unbroken line of successful ancestors.
We have, all of us, inherited what it takes to survive and reproduce.
That's why we're so good at what we do, why fish are so good at swimming,
why birds are so good at flying, why aardvarks are so good at digging,
why humans are so good at thinking.
That, in essence, is Darwinism.
Darwin had to bury two more of his children in his lifetime.
Another daughter and a son died in early infancy.
"In memory of Mary Eleanor
"and Charles Waring,
"children of Charles Darwin."
'Darwin confronted grief in his own way.
'He found solace, I think, in the very earth
'in which he had to bury his children.
'For his last book, he turned to earthworms.'
Darwin was fascinated by how, little by little, over huge lengths of time,
their slow turning of the soil churned the whole surface of the earth.
Nature's ploughs had their own extraordinary, underground economy,
a damp, dark, life-and-death struggle to which we humans were totally oblivious.
"I doubt," Darwin wrote, "whether there are many other animals
"which had played so important a part in the history of the world."
Darwin didn't wallow in man-made notions of the supernatural or an afterlife.
'His down-to-earth wonder at nature was his cure for loss of faith.'
'I'm going to visit someone with a similar outlook - the philosopher Dan Dennett.
'I've known him for 25 years.
'We're the same age, but I think of him as a kind of intellectual elder brother.'
'But recently, he had a brush with mortality.'
There was a terrible crisis with his heart
and his friends were all told that he was going to die.
It was a very scary moment.
Afterwards, when he was recovering in hospital,
he made the point that many of his friends had said that they prayed for him
and he thanked them,
but then added, "And did you also sacrifice a goat?"
'Dan has no shred of faith in God or eternity.
'Does he think his Darwinism would deny people comfort?'
'I think it only undermines a crutch that they don't need
'and that's the crutch of an absolute immortal soul.'
That's an idea that a lot of people think is very important.
And what it does, of course, is it replaces it
with the idea of a material, mortal soul.
Yeah, we have souls, but they're made of neurons
and the little neurons individually are just blind little bio-robots,
they don't know, they don't care, they're just doing their jobs.
The amazing thing is that if you put enough of them together
in the right sort of teams, you have, basically, a soul.
You have the...the control system
and the memory of a being that can be held responsible,
that can hold himself or herself responsible,
that can look into the future.
And when people say, "Where do you get your consolation from?"
I sort of feel, well, how much more d'you want?
Indeed.
What could be more wonderful than being part of this amazing, living tapestry
of...of growth and exploration and innovation,
all happening in not a million, not a billion, but in a trillion places at once?
The...the... Just to look just at our planet,
the exuberance of the life processes going on around us,
all of the creativity that is there is...is just stunning.
It's great to wake up in the morning and realise you're a part of this.
And not only are we a part of it,
but we can reflect on the fact that our ability to realise that,
our ability to understand it and to exult in it
is itself the product of the same process. Our brains that are so...
..so capable of appreciating this...
have been produced by the very same process that we are now appreciating.
Yep. Sometimes I like to say the planet has grown a nervous system and it's us.
Yes.
Charles Darwin died in 1882.
"I'm not in the least afraid to die,"
he whispered to his wife, Emma, in his last days.
Darwin had wanted to be buried in Down, next to his two dead children.
In the event, however, the scientific establishment
insisted on the accolade of burial in Westminster Abbey.
A host of scientists, philosophers and celebrities attended on the day.
In true C of E style, the Church attempted to absorb the man
who had brought down the house.
Yet, even so, the Archbishop of Canterbury turned out to be indisposed
and God-fearing Prime Minister William Gladstone pleaded prior engagements.
Perhaps not for them the funeral of the scientist whose work,
more than any other,
has proved the Biblical creation story shallow and wanting.
'I revere Charles Darwin. He made sense of life.
'The world is amazing, even more amazing than Darwin knew and the more we discover,
'the more petty our little private beliefs seem.'
'Does Darwinism leave a gaping hole where religion once was?
'No. Rather it opens our minds to a world of majesty, the real magic all around us,
'not based on uncertain faith, but sound science.'
In this handful of soil there are about 25 billion bacteria.
That's four times the entire human population of the planet.
We humans and the animals we can actually see
are a tiny fraction of life on Earth.
In the perspective of the universe,
the vastness of the universe and of geological time, we are insignificant.
Some people find that thought disturbing, even frightening.
Like Darwin, I find the reality thrilling.