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THE GENIUS OF CHARLES DARWIN -- SCREENPLAY

presented by Richard Dawkins
directed by Russell Barnes
© 2009 Acorn Media Group, Inc.

The Genius of Charles Darwin, presented by Richard Dawkins -- Illustrated Screenplay & Screencap Gallery

Part 1: Life, Darwin & Everything

[Richard Dawkins] This series is about perhaps the most powerful idea
ever to occur to a human mind.
The idea is evolution by natural selection,
and the genius who thought of it was Charles Darwin.

I'm a biologist, and Darwin has been an inspiration to me
throughout my whole career.
His masterpiece, "On the Origin of Species,"
was published 150 years ago,
and it changed forever our view of the world
and our place in it.

What Darwin achieved was nothing less
than a complete explanation
of the complexity and diversity of all life.
And yet it's one of the simplest ideas that anyone ever had.

In this series, I'm going to set out Darwin's big idea,
I'll explore how the human species
has struggled with the story of its own origins,
and take you into the storm
that is today's backlash against Darwin.

THE GENIUS OF CHARLES DARWIN

In this first program,
I'm going to tell you who Charles Darwin was,
explain how he discovered his theory of evolution,
what it is, and why it matters.
By the end, I hope to have convinced you of the truth
that evolution is a fact, backed by undeniable evidence.
And I want to give you a glimpse of the brutal elegance
of the force which Darwin realized drives evolution on:
natural selection.

LIFE, DARWIN & EVERYTHING

When Charles Darwin was born 200 years ago,
sailors and explorers were sending home a dizzying array
of specimens like these
from all parts of Britain's growing empire.
Every animal was believed to have a unique place
in God's creation,
each made by God according to his perfect, unchanging design.

At school in Shrewsbury, the young Charles Darwin
was taught that God had created the earth
and all this rich variety of life just 6,000 years ago.
Today, thanks to Darwin, we know differently.

But even now, according to polls,
four out of every 10 British people
prefer to cling to the old ideas,
and believe that God created our world
and every living creature in it.

I think it's scandalous how little our children are taught
about evolution at school.
A typical class gets just a few hours
to study one of the most important ideas in science.
This lot got me.

I went to meet a science class of 15- to 16-old-olds
at Park High School in London
to try to open their eyes to Darwinism.

[Boy] Why do we need to find out about evolution?

[Richard Dawkins] Why do we need to find out about evolution?
Because it is the explanation for our existence.
Because it explains such a huge number of facts.
Because everything we know about life is explained by it.

[Boy] I believe in my religion,
so whenever I read about evolution or that,
I can't understand it.
I don't believe it. I just believe my religion.

[Richard Dawkins] Right.
So you know what you believe when you start,
and any new book that says anything different,
you don't read it, or what?

[Boy] Even if you've got evidence, I just, like --
I follow the stronger evidence, which is the holy book, so ...

[Richard Dawkins] So the reason you believe it
is because that's the one you were told first?

I can see that a few hours in the science lab
is no match for a lifetime of religious indoctrination.

[Girl] I was brought up to believe it.

[Richard Dawkins] You were brought up to believe it.
Is that a good reason to believe something?

[Girl] Yeah, 'cause I went to church since I was little, so ...
And it says it in the Bible.

[Richard Dawkins] Yes, but in the Hindu sacred scriptures,
it says something different.

[Girl] Yeah, but they're brought up to believe that.

[Richard Dawkins] Yes.
So everybody should believe what they're brought up to believe,
even though they contradict each other?

[Girl] You can be made to believe something in science,
and then you can be made to believe something
in religious studies.
And then it's really up to you what you believe.
You can't just say that.

[Richard Dawkins] Well, look.
I hate this phrase "made to believe."
I mean, that's an awful thing.
And I would hate anybody to think
I was trying to make anybody believe anything.
I'm asking you to look at the evidence.
Perhaps you haven't got a full impression
of how strong the evidence actually is.
Nobody's actually seen evolution take place over a long period,
but they've seen the aftereffects.
And the aftereffects are massively supported.

It's like a case in a court of law
when nobody can actually stand up and say,
"I saw the murder happen,"
but yet you've got millions and millions of pieces of evidence
which no reasonable person could possibly dispute.
That's sort of the way it is.

There's only one thing for it.
I'm going to show them evidence --
something they can touch with their own hands,
see with their own eyes.
Later, we'll see if I can make them think again.

When Charles Darwin was a teenager,
he would have been as much of a creationist
as some of these children.

Darwin was born into a prosperous Shropshire family
in 1809.
His father was a doctor and keen that his son should follow
in his scientific footsteps.
But the adolescent Charles,
more interested in shooting and fishing than academic prowess,
was contemplating an easy life as a country parson.
Luckily for him, and for us,
he had the opportunity to open his eyes to see the world.

In 1831, as a young man of 22, Darwin's family connections
got him a once in a lifetime invitation.
A 'round the world voyage on the survey ship HMS Beagle.
Over five years,
Darwin collected hundreds and hundreds of specimens
to send back to the collections.
But increasingly, he wasn't satisfied
with just recording the animals and plants he saw.
He was beginning to have doubts
about the biblical story of how animals were created.

While ashore, riding across the South American flatlands,
Darwin amused himself by chasing after rheas --
shy, ostrichlike, flightless birds.
But he was puzzled.
Why had God bothered to create
two very similar but slightly different types of rhea?
Had an original group of rheas split in two
and, once separated, started to develop in their own way?

The mystery deepened
when Darwin noticed an even more marked effect on islands.

I was lucky enough to retread Darwin's footsteps
on the Galapagos Islands last year.
Here, he began to wonder why God would have created
distinctive kinds of tortoise, finch, or iguana
on more or less identical small islands.
Were iguanas like these related rather than separately created?
Were they cousins of the similar but different iguanas
on nearby islands?

This pattern of relationships became even more intriguing
when Darwin encountered fossils.
The evidence of fossils
would help Darwin develop a theory of life on Earth
far more wonderful and more moving
than any religious story of creation.

This team of American scientists has uncovered the remains
of 2-million-year-old ground sloths.
Today I'm joining the dig,
because it was fossils like these
that made a huge impression on the young Charles Darwin
during his voyage on HMS Beagle.
To Darwin, they looked like ancient, giant versions
of animals he saw around him.

[Richard Hulbert, Jr., Paleontologist] Certainly the ground sloths
flourished for a number of millions of years
and were quite successful.

[Richard Dawkins] They were huge, weren't they?

[Richard Hulbert, Jr., Paleontologist] Some of them were.
They varied from bear-sized all the way up to things
that were almost rivaling the mammoths and mastodons --
up to 5 to 6 meters in height
when they reared up on their hind legs.

[Richard Dawkins] What struck Darwin was how,
apart from their enormous size,
the fossils closely resembled in every other detail
the skeletons of modern sloths living nearby.

[Richard Hulbert, Jr., Paleontologist] You can definitely see similarities
in their details of their teeth,
peculiar features that they share with modern armadillos,
modern tree sloths, and actually modern anteaters.
You know we can infer that they are related to these animals.

[Richard Dawkins] The discovery of fossils was a huge challenge
to the religious orthodoxy of Darwin's youth.
What were these animals? When had they lived?
And why didn't they exist anymore?

Some suggested that fossils
were just God playfully ornamenting his world.
Others claimed they were the bones of sinners
drowned in Noah's flood.
But Darwin was one of the first scientists
to correctly identify them as long-dead species of animals.
He was starting to grasp that the earth might be a lot older
than the Bible led us to believe.
And how had he realized this?
Through a fascination with geology.

During the voyage of the Beagle,
Darwin had had time to immerse himself
in the pioneering work of Charles Lyell.
Lyell argued that the landscape we saw around us
was formed by the slow action of vast forces,
not thousands, but millions of years of gradual change.
So if the earth was shaped and reshaped
over an immense period of time,
was there room, Darwin began to wonder,
for life to undergo slow changes as well?

You know how old these rocks are?

[Boy] No.

[Richard Dawkins] They're about 200 million years old.

[Boy] Yeah.

[Richard Dawkins] Right back in the 19th century,
lots and lots of people came here to look for fossils.
And some of the most famous fossils have been found here.

[Boy] Uh-huh.

[Richard Dawkins] I'm taking the science class I met earlier
to the beach.
Many of these teenagers
have been brought up to mistrust the idea of evolution.
I'm hoping they'll find a small fragment
of the kind of evidence that made Charles Darwin think again.

Do you know what our ancestors were like 200 million years ago?
Because they were around.
I mean, they wouldn't have been here,
because this would have been the bottom of the sea.
They would have been kind of like shrews.
Sort of little whiskery, twitchy ...

[Boy] It seems to be like a dream, but it's real.

[Richard Dawkins] Yeah.

[Boy] Yeah.

[Richard Dawkins] Yes, it does, doesn't it?

This is all sedimentary rock,
meaning it's laid down at the bottom of the sea,
mud coming down layer after layer after layer.
That's what the fossils are actually in.

On a beach like this, the pounding sea
gradually exposes different layers of rock
and, within them, hidden treasure.
A history of past life on Earth.

So, each layer you go down to,
you find a completely different set of animals.
And if you look at the animals that you find and plants
over the great span of time,
you find that they form a kind of ordered sequence.
You find fish 400 million years ago,
but you find no mammals at all 400 million years ago.
The fish gradually changed into amphibians,
changed into reptiles.
Reptiles changed into birds, changed into mammals.

Did you find that?

[Boy] Yeah.

[Richard Dawkins] Oh, that's terrific.
That's really great. Yeah.
That's a beautiful ammonite.
That's really beautiful.
Well done for finding that. That's wonderful.

The fossil hunt has been a success.
Like Darwin, these teenagers have been brought face-to-face
with some tangible remnants of evolution.

The evidence Darwin had seen with his own eyes
on the voyage of the Beagle
seeded huge heretical questions in his mind.
And once he started thinking, he couldn't stop.
Darwin, once an easily distracted student,
returned from the voyage of the Beagle
a determined, even obsessive research scientist.
The trip had changed him,
and it was soon to change the world forever.

Back in London in the late 1830s,
the specimens he'd collected and his reporting of the voyage
made Darwin a scientific celebrity.
Even more importantly, while cataloging his finds,
Darwin realized that life-forms weren't fixed.
They had changed over time. They must have evolved.
Now he wanted to pull together all the evidence
to understand how and why this had happened.

It took Darwin 20 years of research on and off
to develop the ideas that would eventually be set out
in "The Origin of Species."
He wanted to be fully certain of his facts.
The hard draft was done here at Darwin's home,
Down House in Kent.

Long before the days of the Internet, of course,
Darwin drew upon the collective knowledge
of an entire generation of naturalists all over the world.
He sent out thousands of letters asking for data,
posing questions, trying out theories.
And back the letters flowed
from all around the world into Down House,
a river of information.

Darwin studied the detail of how different mammals
share remarkably similar skeletons.
Their limbs have the same bones in the same order --
just reshaped and resized to suit different ways of life.
He was drawn to the similarity of early embryo development
in very different types of animals --
fish, birds, reptiles.
Increasingly he became convinced
that every living thing must be related to every other.
Darwin began to see the history of life as a vast family tree.
Life began millions of years ago at the base of the tree.
And as time went by, our ancestors evolved,
split off, and multiplied along branches,
until now every species on the planet
is a twig at the end of a branch.
All are related, all cousins.

Life had evolved from single cells
into complex, sophisticated beings.
It may seem like a huge leap,
but Darwin realized it had been achieved by small steps,
over a vast span of time.
He grasped the immense age of the earth.
Darwin believed the world
was hundreds of millions of years old.
Today we know it's over 4 billion years old.
And the life we can actually see around us
has existed for an insignificant blink of that time.

Darwin's wife, Emma, used to play to him on the piano
in this very room.
And Darwin would lie on the sofa and listen.
It's not clear how much he got out of it, though,
because it was once said of him that he was so tone-deaf
that people had to nudge him to stand up
when they were playing "God Save the Queen."

But anyway, I want to use this piano
to illustrate the vastness of geological time,
and yet how comparatively little of it is occupied
by those animals and plants that we know anything about.

If we have the origin of life at the bottom of the piano there,
and recent times at the top,
I find it astonishing that we have nothing but bacteria
all the way up here past middle C,
way up to about here
when more complicated cells than bacteria first evolve.
The first large animals somewhere here.
Fish start around here.
The dinosaurs don't come in until about here.
And then the extinction of the dinosaurs around here.
About here, the apes and monkeys.
And the whole of human history would occupy a space
less than the width of one piano string
right at the top of the keyboard.

Life had evolved over time, but how had this happened?
Why hadn't creatures stayed the same?

[Pigeons cooing]

Darwin wasn't just an abstract theorist.
He liked to get his hands dirty testing his ideas.
And in the 1850s, he became fascinated by pigeons,
by how man had remolded the wild rock dove
into a rich variety of forms.

Darwin's bird specimens are now stored
at the Natural History Museum at Tring.

It's a very weird feeling.
These are actually Darwin's own specimens.
I see from Darwin's own label here
that this is a blue owl pigeon.
Tumblers are characterized by this curious tumbling behavior
that they show -- sort of falling through the sky.
This one has been relabeled. It is a Darwin specimen.
This one actually has Darwin's original label here.

Darwin realized that for centuries, through small steps,
pigeon breeders had been in the business of evolution.
Here was life in constant flux.

One of the big things Darwin had to fight against
was the feeling that people had that species were species,
and they never changed into anything else.
Artificial selection on dogs, pigeons, cabbages,
was a beautiful illustration for Darwin
of how plastic things were.
You could pull them.
It was like modeling clay almost.
You could take a wild animal and pull bits out,
press other bits in, enlarge bits.
It was showing that there's nothing static about species.
Species can change.

[Pigeons cooing]

Now in his 40s, Darwin became a pigeon fancier.
He kept some 90 birds of 16 types,
devoured books on breeding, and attended numerous pigeon shows.
What excited Darwin was the powerful comparison
that could be drawn between domestic breeding,
and what he'd observed of nature acting on wild animals,
like the finches he'd collected in Galapagos.

In the pigeons' case, it's artificial selection.
It's human breeders using their eye to choose.
I think I'll breed from that one.
I want the beak longer or shorter.
I want the plumage to be whiter or fluffier.
So breed from the one that has the quality you want.
And then after surprisingly few generations,
you can produce a change in the breed.

In nature, it's not like that, of course.
Nobody comes along and says,
"I want one that has a great big, thick beak."
Nevertheless, given that there are tough seeds
that only a thick beak can crack,
natural selection favors those individual birds
that succeed in cracking the seeds,
until you end up with this sort of climax beak,
which is really huge,
the product of tens of thousands of generations
of natural selection
breeding for ability to open tough seeds.

[Dog barking]

Man had utterly transformed many animals and plants
by selecting for particular characteristics
over and over again.
Nature was also doing this.
But how could nature make specific choices,
as humans could?
Darwin's answer would come
in understanding exactly what nature is.

[Indistinct conversations]

150 years ago, Charles Darwin's work
revolutionized the way we understand our world.
For 20 years, he had pieced together evidence
that proved the fact of evolution,
and developed a theory of how nature, not God,
selects life in a similar way to humans breeding pigeons.
How does nature select?
In the cruelest way.

Today much of the world
is controlled and cultivated by man,
but there are still a few remote places red in tooth and claw.

I've come to Kenya, where I was born.
It's one of the wilder places on Earth,
where the full force of natural selection can still be seen.

As night falls, it's kill or be killed.

[Animal growling]

The following was edited out of the movie:

The total amount of suffering in the natural world
is beyond all decent contemplation.  During the minute
that it takes me to say these words, thousands of animals
are running for their lives whimpering with fear,
feeling teeth sink into their throats.
Thousands are dying from starvation or disease, or
feeling a parasite grasping away from within.
There is no central authority.  No safety net.

For most animals, the reality of life
is struggling, suffering, and death.

For Darwin,
grappling with nature's horrors must have been a huge challenge.
As a young man, he had wanted to become a country parson.
He had believed in an orderly and harmonious animal kingdom.
Now he contemplated the brutal reality of nature.

Darwin's brilliance was to connect what he was seeing
with an idea from a completely different discipline --
economics.
Thomas Malthus had written a popular influential diatribe
about the perils of population growth
in early industrial Britain,
and how this would inevitably be stopped
by food shortage and disease.

Darwin seized upon Malthus' warning
about a human struggle for resources,
and he applied it to what was happening in nature.

As more individuals are produced than can possibly survive,
there must in every case be a struggle for existence.

Nature is an arena of pressure.
Of every individual born,
the chance of its surviving to reproduce the next generation
is very, very small.
Most animals die young.

The next step for Darwin was to realize this --
what makes the difference between success and failure
in the struggle for existence isn't just chance.
All living things vary, even if only slightly.
Darwin realized this was the key.
A tiny variation -- sharper teeth or faster legs,
keener eyes, better camouflage, better sense of smell --
can make a crucial difference in an animal's chances of survival.

If an animal survives, it is more likely to reproduce
and, crucially, pass those variations on to its offspring.
Nature's struggle for existence
means that organisms with helpful variations
tend, on average, to survive and reproduce.
Those without die without offspring.
The race is survival.
The finishing line is reproduction.
This is what Darwin defined as natural selection,
the key to evolution.

[Reading Charles Darwin] "Natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing
throughout the world every variation, even the slightest,
rejecting that which is bad,
preserving and adding up all that is good,
silently and insensibly working."

"We see nothing of these slow changes in progress
until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages."

Gradually, very gradually,
as successful variations are inherited,
natural selection sculpts life into different shapes
better and better adapted
to eke resources out of their particular surroundings.
Longer necks are favored to feed from tall trees,
thinner fur for warmer climates.
Life-forms become ever more specialized.
And if separated from their ancestral group by geography,
by a forest or desert or an island,
they can specialize to such an extent
that they no longer breed successfully
with that ancestral group.
They are then classified as a distinct species.
This is the origin of species.

But evolution doesn't stop there.
These species are then themselves
honed by the presence of other species.

The environment in the form of lions
is getting systematically worse.
from the point of view of a zebra.
And from the point of view of a lion,
zebras are getting systematically worse.
They're getting better at running away.
Predators are getting better at catching prey.
Prey are getting better at escaping from predators.
And so there's a kind of escalation.
It's an arms race.

Arms races account for the spectacularly advanced
engineering of life.
Camouflage systems, camera-lens eyes, venomous stings.

Arms races can be seen in unexpected places.
Mankind is certainly not immune
to the nightmare Darwin called "the war of nature."
We humans are currently in a battle with viruses.
It's being fought all around our world.

Today, in the slums of Nairobi,
natural selection acts through a virulent disease,
cutting through the population.
Nairobi's prostitutes have on average
seven to 10 clients per day,
with a high prevalence of HIV, which causes AIDS.
But genetic researchers have found
that some lucky individuals have a weapon
in the arms race with HIV ...

Salome?

[Salome Simon] Yeah.

[Richard Dawkins] How do you do?

[Salome Simon] How are you?

[Richard Dawkins] I'm Richard.

[Salome Simon] [Laughs]

[Richard Dawkins] ... a remarkable resistance to the virus.

Can I ask how long have you been a sex worker?

[Interpreter speaking foreign language] [Salome Simon] [speaking native language] 25 years.

[Richard Dawkins] And during that time, have you lost many friends to AIDS?

[Interpreter] I've lost many friends.

[Richard Dawkins] Many friends.
When did you first discover that you are resistant to HIV?

[Interpreter] Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Knew for a long time,
but she actually believed completely 1990
that she was resistant.
She feels maybe God has just been good to her
and she's the lucky one.

[Richard Dawkins] Yes.

[Children shouting]

It's not God at work here in all this squalor and suffering.
And it's not luck either.
The Canadian scientist Larry Gelmon
has studied the odds of survival.

[Larry Gelmon, Microbiologist] We knew the prevalence of HIV in the sex-worker population.
We knew the prevalence in the clients
that they were dealing with.
We knew how often they were having sex with these people.
And it was just a mathematical impossibility
that they should have been sex workers for as long as they have,
with the number of contacts that they had,
and not become HIV-infected.

[Richard Dawkins] The resistance these women have
seems to be a variation that can be passed on to their children.

[Larry Gelmon, Microbiologist] Some of the women are related to each other familially.
We also think that there is some factor going on
in their blood, in their cells, within their cells,
that is probably genetically transmitted.

[Richard Dawkins] I suppose if we came back in 1,000 years,
we might expect to see a major shift in the frequency
of these genes in the population.

[Larry Gelmon, Microbiologist] Yes, I think in any epidemic situation,
those people who are very vulnerable and susceptible
are gonna get sick and die,
and those people who are gonna survive
are going to have some kind of resistance,
which they're going to transmit on to their descendants.

[Richard Dawkins] Just as Europeans today
are descendents of those who had the genes to survive the plague,
so if Africa's AIDS epidemic took its course,
natural selection would favor descendants
of women with resistance to HIV.

This is the unstoppable force of natural selection,
first revealed by Darwin, now observed by modern science.

Back in England at Down House,
now 20 years after his voyage on the Beagle,
Darwin had worked out the answers
to the biggest questions ever asked.
But he was strangely reluctant to go public with his idea.

Darwin himself said that he'd become a kind of machine
for grinding theories out of huge assemblages of facts.
I think that wasn't really what it was like at all.
He was an extraordinarily imaginative, deep thinker.
He had a prodigiously curious mind as well.
He was drawn to facts that didn't fit.
He once said, "I cannot bear to be beaten."

Darwin's theory explained
how the diversity of life on the planet
had evolved spontaneously,
without interference from any god.
But he was acutely aware of how upsetting
this flat contradiction of the religious story would be.
He hesitated to publish.

Then, in June 1858,
Darwin received a letter from a naturalist
traveling in the Far East, Alfred Russel Wallace,
which set out similar ideas.
Darwin was in despair about being scooped.
He was even ready to drop his life's work.
But he was persuaded by Charles Lyell and others
to present his unpublished work alongside Wallace's notes,
and then complete his masterpiece for publication.

I've come to meet Randal Keynes, Darwin's great-great-grandson,
to try to understand Darwin's frame of mind
as he finished his book.

[Randal Keynes, Darwin's great-great-grandson] This is a book about geology by a Mr. Greenoff.
Has this wonderful inscription --
"Charles Darwin, Buenos Aires. October 1832."
So he's on the Beagle.

[Richard Dawkins] Yes.

[Randal Keynes, Darwin's great-great-grandson] Really getting into his stride as a geologist.
This is a scrapbook, a children's scrapbook
that belonged to Darwin's daughter Annie.

[Richard Dawkins] Darwin was no aggressive polemicist.
He didn't take to the stage to publicize his work,
but sought to influence leading thinkers behind the scenes
by sending them proof copies of the book,
with apologetic letters attached.

He would write things like,
"This vile rag of a theory of mine."
Was that genuine modesty,
or was there an element of false modesty about it?

[Randal Keynes, Darwin's great-great-grandson] It was entirely real.
And this is a very strange point about him.
Through the years,
when he was steeling himself for publication,
he was at different times enormously confident in it,
and then at other times, he was utterly uncertain.
He had a deep fear, I think,
that one species would be discovered
that had some element of its makeup
that could only have been designed.

[Richard Dawkins] Doubts might have lingered in Darwin's mind,
but finally, 150 years ago,
he set out his ideas on evolution and how it worked
in "The Origin of Species."
The book sold out its first run of 1,250 copies within two days.
It has never been out of print since.
"The Origin" turned our world upside down.
But still, there was one big gap in Darwin's understanding.

150 years ago, at the age of 50,
Charles Darwin finally published the big idea
he had sat on for almost 20 years,
a natural law that explains life itself,
and the evidence available to him to back it up.

This is the most precious book in my collection.
It's a genuine first-edition "Origin of Species."
But it's not just the most precious book in my library.
Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species"
is one of the most precious books
in the entire library of our species.
This book made it possible no longer to feel the necessity
to believe in anything supernatural.
It completely revolutionized the way we see ourselves,
the world, and our origins.

But what Darwin never cracked
was how the improvements of natural selection
were preserved from generation to generation,
why they didn't become diluted by interbreeding.
It was only in the 20th century,
in the near-Darwinian revolution,
that scientists married evolution with genetics.

Genes are the long strings of code,
instructions to the cells that build all living things.
Scientists now realize that genes from the parents
don't blend as they combine during reproduction.
Each gene is inherited in its entirety or not at all.
The science of the genes also showed how new variations arose.
When animals reproduce,
their genes are copied and put into sperm and eggs.
During that copying process,
occasionally there's a random mistake.
Those mistakes are mutations,
which give rise to new characteristics
on which Darwinian natural selection then adds.

And what's more,
genes can be compared with pinpoint precision.
The genes in every cell of every living thing are made up of DNA,
a code of the same four chemicals,
known as A, T, C, and G, which these machines can analyze.
Whether the cell builds a hamster, a horse, or a human,
simply depends on the order of the letters in the code.

Just as Darwin might have predicted,
animals more closely related by evolution
have more similarities in their code
than more distantly related animals.
And these codes can be printed out
right here in this man's lab.

In 2000, Craig Venter
was among the first scientists to map the human genome --
our sequence of code letters.
In the process,
this unlocked the ultimate proof of Darwin's tree of life.

[Craig Venter, Decoder of human genome] He was looking at the visible world
and seeing how different it was.
We now have the opportunity with this tool set
to look at the invisible world that he could only get hints of.

[Richard Dawkins] Yes.

[Craig Venter, Decoder of human genome] And it shows that there's vast continuity
from the simplest life forms to the more complex.

[Richard Dawkins] He, of course, emphasized diversity,
because that's what he saw at the whole-organism level.
But you're finding the incredible similarity
that there is between creatures.
I mean, even bacteria.

[Craig Venter, Decoder of human genome] To me, it's not a theory.
I've looked at the genetic code
of this wide diversity of species.
And it's a continuum.

[Richard Dawkins] Yeah.
Yes. Well, evolution is a fact.

[Craig Venter, Decoder of human genome] That's right.

[Richard Dawkins] There's no question about that.
And I'm always being asked,
"Well, produce the evidence. Produce the evidence."
And really, you're producing the best evidence of any.

[Craig Venter, Decoder of human genome] Yeah.

[Richard Dawkins] But if we hadn't got a single fossil anywhere,
the evidence from this lab alone
would be absolutely not just enough
but overwhelmingly, staggeringly enough.

Darwin anticipated problems with his theory.
Modern science has answered them.
Evolution by natural selection
has been triumphantly vindicated as fact.
Case closed, surely.
But can I convince those schoolchildren?

What's so beautiful about DNA is that it's turned biology
into a kind of branch of computer science,
that every animal and every plant
is carrying around inside every one of its cells
an instruction book for making that animal
or making its children.

You've got billions of letters.
And you could actually line them up,
and you can take the rat DNA and mouse DNA, and you line them up,
and you say, "Same, same, same, same, same.
Ah, a difference there.
Same, same, same, same, same, same.
A difference there."

And that means that when you say
that two animals like rats and mice have a common ancestor,
you can be totally confident that that's right,
because the sheer number of similarities is so gigantic --
far, far more than Darwin could ever have dreamed of.

And Darwin would have just loved to know about DNA.
It's such a shame that he didn't live long enough
to learn about DNA.

[Boy] I already believed in evolution,
but this has just helped me to understand a bit more about it.

[Girl] We have talked about it in class more,
but I still do believe in God.
But I don't know.
I'm starting to think whether evolution is true or false.

[Boy] I do believe in evolution,
but I don't think that it's ever gonna be 100% accepted
because, like, there are many religious people out there.

[Girl] I thought about it more,
but I still believe in what the Bible tells me.

[Boy] When Richard came to our school today,
I started learning about evolution.
And I'd really love to learn more about it,
but I don't want to, like, leave my religion
and go in that path.

[Boy] I think evolution is the main part of how the earth developed,
but I still say my prayers and just keep life going.

[Richard Dawkins] I only had a few hours with these children,
but I hope it will help them begin to open their eyes
to the wonderful reality of life --
and at the very least, ask questions
about what they've been brought up to believe.

Darwin used to do a lot of his thinking on solitary walks
along this path around his home, Down House.
At the end of "Origin of Species,"
he contemplated how an entangled bank along a lane like this,
with its teeming life of plants, birds, worms, and insects,
had been formed by the unseen laws acting around us.

[Reading Charles Darwin] "There is grandeur in this view of life.
Whilst this planet has gone cycling on
according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning,
endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
have been and are being evolved."

Thanks to Darwin, we alone of all species know
that each and every one of us
is a thread in the evolved fabric of life.
Darwin showed us that the world is beautiful and inspiring
without a god.
He revealed to us the glory of life, and opened our eyes
to who we really are, and where we've come from.

Part 2: The Fifth Ape

[Insects, birds chirping]

Once people thought
God had created the world and every living thing,
each with a purpose in an ordered universe
over which our creator presided,
rewarding good deeds and punishing sin.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection
blew a hole in this comfortable explanation of life,
and faced us with a blindingly obvious yet disturbing truth --
Humans don't have dominion over animals.
We are animals.
We're the fifth ape.

But even Darwin hesitated to say this out loud.
It throws into question
our trust in our fellow human beings.
Are our morals and manners just a veneer?
Since a struggle for existence drives evolution,
why don't we humans run an entirely dog-eat-dog world?
How about genocide and ethnic cleansing?
Are they some kind of survival strategy?

In this program, I want to confront the issue
that Darwin skirted around in "The Origin of Species" --
the evolution of human beings.
I want to ask what it means for us to be evolved.

The question is more urgent than ever.
Increasingly, religious people and others attack Darwinism
for, in their view, excusing selfishness and barbarism.

Throughout my career,
I've wrestled with how to reconcile my liberal values
with what Darwin revealed to be the pitiless war of nature.
So now I'm going to take you
into the Darwinian heart of darkness,
and look for answers and for hope.

Natural selection is the driving force of our evolution.
But that doesn't mean
that society ought to be run on Darwinian lines.
As a scientist, I'm thrilled by natural selection.
But as a human being,
I abhor it as a principle for organizing society.

THE GENIUS OF CHARLES DARWIN: The Fifth Ape

Evolution by natural selection is a very simple idea.
Over thousands of generations in a struggle for existence,
successful variations have survived to reproduce,
a process that gradually carves life
into more and more specialized forms.
Life forms that include the apes,
gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimps,
and us.

Here at London Zoo, back in the 1830s,
the arrival of the first apes outraged polite society.
Queen Victoria, for one,
found them "painfully and disagreeably human."

But another visitor was spellbound.
The young Charles Darwin saw the unmistakable truth
staring back at him from the other side of the cage.

The uncanny familiarity of ape hands,
and the humanity we seem to glimpse in their eyes,
was for Darwin
further evidence to support the idea of evolution --
that all life was related.
The African apes, he realized,
were our closest evolutionary cousins.

East Africa -- my birthplace and, rather more importantly,
the birthplace of the human species itself.
Between 5 million and 6 million years ago,
there lived in Africa an ape who had two children.
One of those children was destined to give rise to us,
and the other was destined to give rise to the chimpanzees.

If I stood here and held my mother's hand,
and she held her mother's hand,
and she held her mother's hand and so on,
back to the grand ancestor of all humans and all chimpanzees,
how far would the line stretch?
The answer is about 300 miles.

Over that surprisingly short distance,
the fossil record shows evidence of extraordinary changes.
The paleontologist Richard Leakey and his family
have uncovered the hard evidence in Kenya's Rift Valley ...
evidence that charts
the evolution of our ancient human ancestors.

[Richard Leakey, Paleontologist] About 1.9 million years ago,
you have skulls like this turning up now.
And this is what they were calling Homo habilis.
Largish brains, still got a flat, big face.
And probably ancestral to Homo erectus,
which turns up in Africa at about 1.8 million years.
This, then, is the ancestor to Homo sapiens.
This persists for almost a million years, this condition,
and then it gives way
to something with an even larger brain.
Things that are much more like ourselves --
these whopping great vaults.
The brain has really expanded.
It's much more like a modern human brain
in terms of size and in terms of shape.
And by the time you get to this, all of these others
have disappeared from the fossil record.
So all the major steps in the human story
are, in fact, told in Africa.

[Richard Dawkins] I often meet people who say to me,
"Nobody's going to tell me I'm an ape."
Is there a kind of visceral revulsion, do you think?
Do you meet that as well?

[Richard Leakey, Paleontologist] Yes. I do meet that, but it seems to be so misplaced,
because as you know, we are the fifth ape.
We never separated from the apes.
We just do things differently.

I've often found it fun
to go to an ape exhibit in one of the big zoos,
and you can watch people looking at a group of chimpanzees.
And what is very clear
if you watch their facial expressions,
you can see they're not so sure that that ape's like them.
But they can look around and say "Yeah, there's a similarity ...
between the person on the other side of the cage."

We're closer to chimps, African chimps,
than a horse is to an ass.
Horses and asses, put together, produce offspring.
"Wow," says everybody. "Are you ..."
"Yeah, I am."

[Both laugh]

[Richard Dawkins] It's an unsettling thought.
In evolutionary terms, we're so closely related to chimps
that it's not ridiculous
to ask whether we might still be able to breed with them.

We're the human animal -- upright, big-brained ape cousins
who evolved to outthink the competition.
As a biologist,
I've wondered at the challenging implications of this,
what it tells us about human society now.
But over half the people on earth are so horrified
by what Darwinism reveals about our origins,
they just refuse to believe it.

I'm on a journey exploring the dark side of Darwinism.
I want to confront what it means
for us to have evolved in nature's brutal struggle.
Why should the fifth ape love thy neighbor?
The thought of our animal origins can upset people.
Read "The Origin of Species,"
Darwin's masterpiece that set out his theory of evolution,
and you will find only a handful of passing references
to human origins.

That man was made in God's image,
having dominion over the animals,
defined what it meant to be human.
So discussing human evolution was just too risky.
Darwin shied away from it and simply wrote near the end,
"Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."

But when the book came to be published in 1859,
the buzz was all about
the extraordinary implications for mankind.
Were we just beasts in fancy dress?
Evolution became known as the monkey theory.
The row has not gone away.

In Kenya, the cradle of mankind,
religious groups are trying to block the opening
of the National Museum's exhibit of human fossils.

The fossil record of human ancestry
has a particular fascination.
To me, these are far more precious than the crown jewels.

This is the Turkana Boy,
a Homo erectus 1.5 million years old --
the most complete ancient human skeleton ever found.
It's one of the most precious relics
in any museum anywhere in the world.
It would be an enormous pity
if there were any pressure not to allow it to be seen.

[Mid-tempo music playing]
[Man] How wonderful ...
[Congregation] How wonderful ...
[Man] How wonderful ...
[Congregation] How wonderful ...
How wonderful ...
How wonderful ...
[Man] And how excellent ...
[Congregation] How excellent ...
How excellent ...

[Richard Dawkins] The 10-million strong evangelical movement in Kenya
has run a "Hide the bones" campaign.
By coincidence, I was born right next door to the church
where the protest is being led by Bishop Bonifes Adoyo.

Bishop, how do you do?
Very nice of you to agree to this meeting.

[Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, Evangelical Minister] Same here, to meet a great professor.

[Richard Dawkins] Oh, let's go in. You know, I was born just over the road there.

[Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, Evangelical Minister] No, I'm told over the other side.

[Richard Dawkins] Well, we'll have to work that out later.

[Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, Evangelical Minister] Yeah.

[Richard Dawkins] It was clear that we weren't going to see eye to eye
from the beginning.

I'm an ape. Are you, Bishop?

[Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, Evangelical Minister] I'm not. I definitely am not.
[Laughs] I'm special.
Made in the image of God, in the creative mind of God,
creative as God is who made me.
That's the difference between the ape and me.

[Richard Dawkins] Well, I'm an ape. I'm an African ape.
And I am very proud to be an African ape.
And so should you be.
Don't you think the evidence should be displayed
for all to see and make up their own minds?

[Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, Evangelical Minister] Yeah, sure.

[Richard Dawkins] But you are against displaying it.

[Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, Evangelical Minister] Everybody should make up their own mind.
No, I'm not against the display.
I'm against the attachment of the evolution theory
to the displays.
You see, that's all we're talking about.

[Richard Dawkins] So you'd be happy for them to be displayed
but not with evolutionary messages.

[Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, Evangelical Minister] Because they are complete human being skulls.

[Richard Dawkins] Well, not really.
They're very much smaller than ours,
and they've got very much less brain.
The 3-million-year-old one
had the same size brain as chimpanzees.
They were kind of chimpanzees on their hind legs.
So it was a first step towards becoming human.
And the next step was then, in the Turkana Boy,
to have a bigger brain.
And the final step was to have an even bigger brain, like us.

[Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, Evangelical Minister] If that's where we originated and evolved into this stage,
why aren't those chimpanzees also evolving into man?
Why aren't they extinct?

[Richard Dawkins] [Laughing]

[Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, Evangelical Minister] Because by the time we've developed to this level,
they should have been extinct.

[Richard Dawkins] That's not the way evolution works.
We're not descended from them.

[Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, Evangelical Minister] Yes.

[Richard Dawkins] We're cousins of them.
So we and they go back to a common ancestor.
There are the chimpanzees, there's us --
We go back to a common ancestor.
Now, that common ancestor was not a chimpanzee
and it was not a human.
It was something else,
and it evolved towards being a chimpanzee.
In a different direction, it evolved towards being a human.
So chimpanzees have been evolving all that time,
and humans have been evolving all that time.
And they'll probably both go on evolving,
but we can't predict where that will go.

Our discussion now threw up an important point about evolution.

[Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, Evangelical Minister] So what is the goal of evolution?
What is the ultimate goal? Is it for us to have big heads?

[Richard Dawkins] No, there is no goal.

[Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, Evangelical Minister] There's no goal?

[Richard Dawkins] It just happens.

[Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, Evangelical Minister] That doesn't answer my question.
Where are we heading to?
I mean, up to where shall we say
that this is the limit of evolution?

[Richard Dawkins] It's a misunderstanding of evolution to say it has goals.
It never did have goals. It just changes.

This is crucial.
To understand evolution by natural selection,
you have to grasp that it is not a grand scheme with goals.

It's a harsh, unguided process which simply favors those
that are the most successful at passing on their genes.
It has no morality or purpose.
And we humans are just one of its products.

Darwin took man off his pedestal
and made him an animal like all others.
We evolved in the ruthless competition of nature.

So what does that mean for us and our society?
To begin to grapple with this problem,
we have to understand what nature is
in all its brutal glory.

It looks like nature in harmony.
Actually, as Darwin realized, there's a struggle out there.
All the players are working for their own benefit.
And because they're surrounded
by others who are working for their own benefit,
they tend to exploit each other.

In the shady forest,
all the plants are struggling to get to the light.
Big trees pay the price legitimately
by growing up to the sun.
But this strangler fig does a very strange and cruel thing.
It started life high up in the tree from a seed,
perhaps dropped by a fruit-eating monkey.
It then sent roots down towards the ground
in order to get nourishment from the ground.
And then these roots proliferate all around the original tree
and strangle it to death.
Eventually, the original tree will die,
and the fig will be left standing on its own,
having usurped its position in the sun.

The bitter struggle for survival in nature
has been the dynamic force
that has driven the evolution of life.
And this is where my own struggle
with the consequences of Darwinism begins.

Attacks on Darwin have claimed
that his goalless, soulless theory
has unleashed the worst of human nature.
If nature is ruthless competition,
and nature is where we evolved,
then is this the model for human society --
every man for himself?

Well, let's look at this.
There is one area of human affairs
in which the dog-eat-dog mentality
seems, to many, entirely natural.
In business.

Certain elements of business
have always loved what they perceive as Darwin's message.
The strong must survive. The weak perish.
Here is apparent justification
for unrestrained capitalism and denying help to the poor.

Several of the "great" entrepreneurs
of the early 20th century, the so-called robber barons,
like the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller,
were unashamed social Darwinists.
They believed human progress would be delivered
by modeling business and society on nature,
on the unceasing struggle of the jungle.

[Man] Today the giants of the oil industry
stand as monuments to Rockefeller,
the architect of our business age.

The following was edited out of the movie:

[Richard Dawkins] Social Darwinism is still with us.
In the 1990s, the American energy company, Enron
ran a kind of nasty Darwinian experiment
lining up 15% of the least fit of their workforce
to be fired each year.
It didn't end well.
Enron selected not necessarily the best
but the most ruthless individuals
who turned a blind eye to the widespread fraud
that brought the company down in scandal.

[Man] Ken Lay, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Enron.

[Richard Dawkins] I've come to a convention of entrepreneurs in London
to observe today's business animal up close.

[Man] My best friend is a money broker in the city
and has more money than he knows what to do with,
and he's offered me whatever I need.

[Man] Okay, one thing's confusing me, and that is why you're here.

[Man] Mark, good presentation.
I suppose I should put my cards on the table
I don't like the recruitment industry generally.

[Eric Beinhocker, Business Analyst] For a very long time, people have noticed the similarities
between economic systems and biological systems,
and particularly the notion of competition in both systems.
When businesses compete, we can think of them as designs.
So you might have a design for a bank, a way to run a bank.
And each of the banks along the High Street
will have a slightly different way of running a bank,
a different design.
And the evolutionary competition,
it's a competition for you walking down the High Street
to determine which bank will serve you best,
which design suits your needs better than the others.

[Richard Dawkins] So are we looking at corporate apes
fighting for supremacy without compassion, teeth bared?
I wonder if it's more posturing than reality.

Do you think there's a risk of overdoing the Darwinian analogy?

[Eric Beinhocker, Business Analyst] Yes, very much so.
The press loves to play up company CEOs and entrepreneurs
as these heroes, and in many ways they are.
They work incredibly hard and make "great" sacrifices.
But the myth is that they were these great visionaries,
these people who could predict the future
and drive an organization toward that future.
The reality is, economic systems,
just like biological systems, are hugely complex.
And being able to predict what's gonna happen in the long term
is extraordinarily difficult or even impossible.
And what some companies do is,
rather than try to outguess where the market is going,
they'll create some notion of variety within their company,
and then let the market choose, let customers decide
which products and services they like best.

[Richard Dawkins] Now, these legendary moguls --
I mean, is it sort of luck that they're the ones who just --
They just happened to get it right,
and with hindsight you can say that they got it right.
But that's all. It's just hindsight.

[Eric Beinhocker, Business Analyst] Well, not to take away
from the talent that these individuals may have,
but if you imagine a room full of people flipping coins,
if the room's big enough,
one of them is gonna get 10 heads in a row.
And then if you ask that person, "What did you do?"
They'll say, "I'm an expert coin flipper.
I got my wrists just right."
And we see the same thing in business.

[Indistinct conversations]

[Richard Dawkins] So Darwinism in business
seems to be little more than a metaphor, an analogy.
It certainly doesn't provide a straightforward natural law
for economic progress, as social Darwinists used to argue.
But can Darwinism be applied to other areas of human affairs?
What about taking back the reins of our own evolution?
Don't copy nature but control it.
Speed up the elimination process.

[Julian Huxley, British Eugenics Society Film, 1937] Once they have been born,
defectives are happier and more useful in these institutions
than when at large.
But it would have been better by far
if they had never been born.

[Richard Dawkins] It's been tried before.
The eugenics movement of the early 20th century
aimed to stop the weak procreating
through compulsory sterilization of the unfit.

[Julian Huxley, British Eugenics Society Film, 1937] Eugenics seeks to apply the known laws of heredity
so as to prevent the degeneration of the race
and improve its inborn qualities.

[Richard Dawkins] Here was a slippery slope
down to a nightmare.
At its worst, eugenics became a dark tribal vision,
ultimately used to justify ethnic genocide in Nazi Germany.
Eugenics is not a version of natural selection.
Hitler, despite popular legend, was not a Darwinist.
Every farmer, horticulturist, or pigeon fancier
knew how to breed for desired outcomes.
Eugenicists like Hitler borrowed from breeders.
What Darwin uniquely realized
was that nature can play the role of breeder.

Darwin has been wrongly tainted.
I've always hated how Darwin is wheeled out
to justify cutthroat business competition,
racism, and right-wing politics.
And throughout my career
I've grappled with the apparent paradox
of the way cooperation, being nice to each other --
even morality --
could evolve from the mindless brutality of nature.

Charles Darwin argued in "Origin of Species"
that evolution of life on earth
had been driven by a brutal struggle for existence.
Natural selection can seem bleak for many biologists.
Certainly, nature can be pitiless and cruel.
But I've been intrigued
by what appear to be acts of kindness in nature.

[Chirping]

Warning cries,
huddling for warmth and comfort, and mutual grooming.
Animals like these
are displaying what we call altruism.
They're giving something to another at a cost to themselves.

[Engines humming]

The question I've grappled with as a biologist is, "Why?"
The explanation must, at some point, involve the brain.
Altruism, like any other behavior,
must have evolved over time as brains have evolved.
So now I want to talk
to somebody who knows about our evolved psychology.

Steve, hello. Nice to see you.

When we teach about evolution,
we naturally tend to focus on anatomy.
But you could equally well say that psychology,
that our minds are evolved organs or organ systems,
couldn't you?

[Steven Pinker, Evolutionary Psychologist] Well, yes, and we have every reason to believe
that the mind is a product of the activity of the brain.
I happen to have one here.
And it's clear that the brain is an organ.
It's got an evolutionary history.
All of the parts in the human brain
you can find in the brain of a chimpanzee and other mammals.
We also know the brain is not just a random neural network.
And we have reason to believe
that a lot of the products of the brain --
our perception, our emotions,
our language, our ways of thinking --
are strategies for negotiating the world,
surviving, bringing up children,
finding mates, negotiating relationships.

[Richard Dawkins] I suppose we can all understand
why sexual lust has a Darwinian survival value.
Are you now saying that the mechanisms for guilt, trust --
that those are a bit like lust?
I mean, there's a lust to trust, or is that not --

[Steven Pinker, Evolutionary Psychologist] Indeed.
And people have no problem accepting Darwinian explanations
for emotions that are triggered by the physical world --
fear of heights and snakes and spiders
and the dark and deep water, disgust at bodily secretions
that might be carrying parasites,
rotting meat, and so on --
but often feel a little more surprised and even resistant
to the idea that some of our moral emotions
might have an evolutionary basis --
like trust, like sympathy, like gratitude.
But I think that as clear as it is
that fear has an evolutionary basis,
I think our moral emotions can be analyzed in the same way.

[Richard Dawkins] I think Steven Pinker is right
and that we do have an evolved morality.
But I also understand why there is resistance to the idea.
Why would the genes for the parts of the brain
that involve giving at a cost to oneself
be inherited in nature's brutal struggle for existence?

The following edited out of the movie:

To explore this, I want to look at another case where
individual survival doesn't appear to be the priority.
A peacock's plumage is gorgeous
but it must get in the way of its own survival.
It is easily spotted by predators and its huge weight
must hinder quick escape.
So why isn't the peacock's tail eliminated
by natural selection?
Charles Darwin was puzzled.
"The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail
whenever I gaze at it," he wrote, "makes me sick."
But it was Darwin himself who hit upon the answer.
Sex.  The peacock's tail is a burden to himself
but a boon to the genes that built it.
Why?  Because the tail wins sexual partners.
Something about the pea hen's brain
is attracted to bright feathers and extravagant,
maybe costly advertisement.  Peacock evolution
has been shaped not just by individual survival
but by pea hen brains.  Pea hens in effect
selectively breed peacocks as pigeon fanciers
breed pigeons.

Darwin defined this as sexual selection.
Evolution, he now realized,
wasn't just about which animal survived,
but which could prevail
in winning the favors of the opposite sex.

[The Naked Cowboy] The Naked Cowboy
Keepin' it real for you
I'm the Naked Cowboy
You gotta do what you gotta do

[Richard Dawkins] There are two ways
for an individual to pass his genes on to the next generation.
You've got to survive
and you may have to be attractive to the opposite sex.
A peacock is a walking advertising boarding.
A peacock's tail, with its eyespots,
is like a walking neon sign.

Here in America, I'm looking into an unexpected way
in which women could be said to be practicing
a form of selective breeding.

I'm going to meet some single women who,
in the cold light of day,
are choosing the attributes they want to mate with
and hope to pass on to their children.
Is it even possible that kindness, altruism,
is one of the things they go for?

[Stacey K.] Hi.

[Richard Dawkins] Hello. You must be Stacey.

[Stacey K.] Yes, I am.

[Richard Dawkins] I'm Richard.

[Stacey K.] Very nice to meet you. Come in.

[Richard Dawkins] And this is?

These women want to become mothers through a sperm donor.
It's kind of high-tech sexual selection.

Did you think you were choosing a man
that you yourself might have been attracted to?

[Amy Averson] Absolutely.
I joke it's a little bit like going on match.com.
You pay for a three-month membership,
and you look at the photos.
And, you know, I know some women that look at it that way.
You know, you're looking for healthy, attractive,
fit, and intelligent.
So I would want those qualities for my child,
the same qualities I would want in a partner.
They're appealing for people in general.
At least that's how I look at it.

[Richard Dawkins] For the women's potential partners --
partners whom they never meet -- the process begins here.

[Claus Rodgaard, Sperm Bank Manager] Down here we have the donor rooms
where, you know, they can do their thing.

[Richard Dawkins] Suitable pictures on the wall.

[Claus Rodgaard, Sperm Bank Manager] You've got to have a little inspirational material
to help it along, you know?

[Richard Dawkins] But who are the women going to pick?

Are there any women who say,
"Well, just give me something at random?"

[Claus Rodgaard, Sperm Bank Manager] Very, very, very rarely.

[Richard Dawkins] Okay.

[Claus Rodgaard, Sperm Bank Manager] Tell me a woman that has walked into a shoe shop
and said, "Just give me whatever you have."
That doesn't happen.

[Richard Dawkins] No. That's right.

[Claus Rodgaard, Sperm Bank Manager] Anything you buy, you spend time on your decision.

[Richard Dawkins] Of course, but, I mean, we kind of in our society
pay lip service to the idea that there's something taboo
about eugenic choice.

[Claus Rodgaard, Sperm Bank Manager] Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Dawkins] And so you might think that the women might,
as it were, go along with that and say,
"Well, I don't approve of eugenics --"

[Claus Rodgaard, Sperm Bank Manager] It's America.
It's a society of contentation [???] and consumerism.
People are used to -- You go online,
you buy products, you ask questions about the products.

[Richard Dawkins] Donors have to provide full and intimate details
of all aspects of their life.

[Claus Rodgaard, Sperm Bank Manager] Shoe size and allergies and skin tone, if he tans easily.

[Stacey K.] There was one that caught my eye.
6'1", hazel eyes, curly brown hair.

[Richard Dawkins] Favorite pet -- dog.

[Claus Rodgaard, Sperm Bank Manager]  Favorite pet. If he's a smoker.

[Richard Dawkins] He likes James Bond.

[Claus Rodgaard, Sperm Bank Manager] And he likes the Aston Martin. He likes jazz music.

[Richard Dawkins] But I want to return to the enigma of altruism.
Is it possible
that among the qualities women want in a sperm donor
is niceness, kindness?

[Stacey K.] I'm interested in this donor because he explained
that someone in his family had difficulty getting pregnant,
and so it was important to him to be able to help others
who were in need of assistance in that area.
So I liked that.

[Richard Dawkins] What's fascinating is that the women don't just want
the obvious alpha-male qualities.

[Claus Rodgaard, Sperm Bank Manager] There's so many things that go into it
than just looks or intelligence.
One of the donors that has been really popular
is actually the nicest guy.

[Richard Dawkins] And,

[Claus Rodgaard, Sperm Bank Manager] I don't know how you put that in a formal --
but he's the nicest guy.
He's not the smartest guy. He's not the best-looking guy.

[Richard Dawkins] How do they know he's the nicest guy?

[Claus Rodgaard, Sperm Bank Manager] He's actually written
a really good extended profile about himself.
I've actually met the guy.
But I can tell you the profile actually checks out.
He is a really nice guy.

[Richard Dawkins] So, what's going on here
at a more fundamental level?
This goes back to an old interest of mine.
I became fascinated
by the issue of how animals evolved to be nice
when I started teaching biology at Oxford in the 1960s.
This was barely 10 years after the structure of DNA and genes
had first been cracked by Watson and Crick.
And I was intrigued how the new science of genetics
could help provide an answer to the puzzle of altruism.

Genes are coded instructions
that build every living thing, body and mind.
They give rise to the distinctive family nose
down through the generations.
They dictate what color eyes you have.
But such examples are just the outward
and visible tip of the iceberg.

Now, here's the point.
We organisms --
you, me, an octopus, a forget-me-not, or a giraffe --
are survival machines.
We're vehicles for the genes that ride inside us,
vehicles that are thrown away
after we've handed the precious coded information on
to the next generation through reproduction.
Genes are copied from one generation to the next,
on and on.
So they and they alone are immortal.

I advocate a kind of genes-eye view of nature.
The genes that survive
are the ones that consistently provide slightly longer necks,
slightly keener eyes or improved camouflage,
and so help their vehicle to survive
and therefore pass those same genes on.

The survival of the fittest
really means the survival of genes,
because it is only genes that really survive
down through many generations.
A gene that didn't look after its own interests
would not survive.
That's that meaning of the phrase "selfish gene."

Okay, so how can selfish genes support kindness?
If genes are striving selfishly
to make more copies of themselves,
how can a gene achieve this selfish objective
by making its bearer behave altruistically?

One part of the answer is kinship.
An altruistic gene can spread through the population
so long as the altruism
is directed at other organisms that have the same gene.
In other words, at family.
So selfish genes built parent animals
who protect their young --
in human terms, parents who'd rush into a burning building
to save their children.
This is called kin selection.

The other part of the answer is reciprocal altruism --
You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.
When animals live in groups
where they encounter each other repeatedly,
genes for returning favors can survive.

Individuals sacrifice themselves for each other.
They give food to each other, to close kin
and to other individuals who might be in a position
to pay back favors on another occasion.
Selfish genes give rise to altruistic individuals.

[Horn honks]

In the '70s, I wrote a book bringing these ideas together
called "The Selfish Gene."
The idea that altruism ultimately boils down
to a survival game for genes raised hackles,
but it's now widely accepted among biologists.
But it's not the end of the story.
I realized
there really does seem to be something odd about humans.
Aren't humans rather nicer
than even the theory of the selfish gene would expect?
We donate to charity, give blood,
weep in sympathy at the plight of complete strangers.
Now I want to explore why.

I've been struggling all my life with why people
should be quite so kind and decent to each other.
At first glance, it seems to go against
the dog-eat-dog viciousness of Darwinism.
To be sure, Darwinism was softened
because it was in the selfish interest of genes
to build altruistic animals.
There are good genetic reasons for limited acts of kindness.
But I can't help wondering --
Is this enough to explain the kindness of humans,
or even chimpanzees?

The Dutch primatologist, Frans de Waal
has been a critic of the selfish-gene idea.
He studies chimps.
He believes that our closest living relatives
exhibit empathy and moral concern that goes beyond
the kin altruism and tit for tat of selfish genes.

[Frans De Waal, Primatologist] Let's say there's a big fight, someone loses the fight.
Very often another one will go over to them,
put an arm around them, try to calm them down, groom them.
We call that consolation behavior.
Actually, that's common enough that you can collect data on it.

[Richard Dawkins] De Waal has accused my work
of promoting what he's labeled veneer theory,
the idea that morals are a thin veneer
on top of the inherent nastiness of our animal nature.

[Frans De Waal, Primatologist] Well, I think the reason I speak of veneer theory,
is because we've seen like 30 years of books published
on how humans are not inherently kind,
humans are, deep down, nasty.
And if we are kind,
it's only to make a good impression on each other,
and if we are moral, it's just a little veneer over human nature.
And I take opposition to that.

[Richard Dawkins] My feeling is that the phenomena that we see,
which you have described as empathetic,
are phenomena which need explaining.
And we're going to explain them.
In my case, we're going to explain them
in terms of selfish genes.
Selfish genes are as good at explaining altruistic behavior
as they are at explaining selfish behavior.

[Frans De Waal, Primatologist] But maybe the problem is --
it is certainly a self-promoting gene,
and so the word "selfish" has a motivational content, of course.
And I think that's where people sometimes get confused --
if we have selfish genes, it means that we must be selfish.
And those things need to be kept apart.

[Richard Dawkins] Well, they really do.
It's a very unfortunate confusion,
because most of the book is about altruistic behavior.

[Frans De Waal, Primatologist] You know that in political ideology it has also been used.
So, for example, what we call social Darwinism,
which is very prominent in this country, in the U.S.,
is a sort of ideological streak
which says, "Well, animals are not nice to each other.
We humans should not be nice to each other."
There's no reason, for example, to help the poor,
because the poor need to help themselves.
If they cannot do that,
then they perish, and that's fine, too.

[Richard Dawkins] I hate social Darwinism, too.
But that doesn't mean we should romanticize nature
or not face facts
when it comes to the genetic roots of altruism.
I think altruism has been favored by kin selection
in small groups in nature.
But when it comes to humans, something special is going on.
We've gone beyond kin selection.
Our world now has been scaled up.
We live amongst large anonymous populations of strangers,
not kin who share our genes,
and not people who we might expect to return favors.
And yet we still have a lust to be nice.

The rule that's built into your brain
says be nice to everyone you meet.
And that works in nature because everyone you meet
is going to be part of the small group.
Similarly, everyone you meet is probably going to be a cousin.
So when I see another human being in distress,
weeping or something like that,
I have an almost uncontrollable urge to go and console,
to maybe, you know, put my arm around them --
"What's the matter? How can I help?
Please let me help you."
And that's a strong inner urge
which, as a Darwinian, I believe has ancestral roots
in a past when I lived in small groups like this,
small bands in which I was likely to be surrounded by kin
or surrounded by individuals who could reciprocate.
I no longer am.
This person who is weeping is a complete stranger to me.
They will never reciprocate and yet the lust is still there.
I can't help it.

[Frans De Waal, Primatologist] [Laughs]
She lost it.

[Richard Dawkins] She got it last time.

[Frans De Waal, Primatologist] I got another one. Oh, brilliant.

[Richard Dawkins] Why are humans often so good to complete strangers?
Could it be because our selfish genes
are in some sense -- a blessed sense -- misfiring?

[Laughter]

Compare it to sexual desire.
The lust to copulate,
even though we deliberately use contraception
to thwart its evolutionary purpose,
is still there because of hard-wiring from the genes.
Similarly, we have a lust to be nice, even to total strangers,
because niceness has been hard-wired into us
from the time when we used to live in small groups
of close kin and close acquaintances
with whom it would pay to reciprocate favors.

This, for me, is the antidote
to the darkness some have seen in our Darwinian heritage.

And it goes further.
The joy of being conscious human beings
is that we rise above our origins.
Our misfiring selfish genes
mean we don't ape the nastiness of nature,
but extract ourselves from it and live by our values.
As Darwin recognized, we humans are the first and only species
able to escape the brutal force that created us --
natural selection.

We civilized men do our utmost
to check the process of elimination.
We build asylums for the imbecile,
the maimed, and the sick.
We institute poor laws.
And our medical men exert their utmost skill
to save the life of everyone to the last moment.

[Indistinct conversations]

This is the 999 Club in London's East End.
It takes in the less fortunate, alcoholics, drug addicts
and the homeless, providing them with tea and hot meals.
Such altruism is, I believe,
among the pinnacles of human civilization.
We care for the most vulnerable in our society.
We look after the sick.
We give welfare to the needy.

[Iris French, Charity Worker] 'Cause I feel, which I've always felt,
that they need something hot, to warm them up,
you know, when they've been out all night sleeping
and they've got no warmth in their bodies.
Nights you think, "If we only have a cup of soup."

[Richard Dawkins] And what makes you feel the need to be so nice and so good?

[Iris French, Charity Worker] Well, I was a war child.
So we never had a lot of food,
and that's why I've always tried to look after these best I can.
And I think, "Well, if they're hungry, I'll feed them."

[Richard Dawkins] You felt hunger as a child.
So you felt, "I don't want that to happen to other people."

[Iris French, Charity Worker] That's it. That's how I felt.

[Richard Dawkins] We can empathize.
We can imagine how it is for others.
A society run on crude Darwinian lines
would be a ruthless, merciless place.
Fortunately, natural selection gave us big brains.
With those big brains, we can plan a gentler society,
the sort of society in which we would want to live.

Evolution has no purpose.
There's no benevolence there, no forward planning.
Some people find that disturbing,
but there is a better way to think about it.
We alone on earth have evolved to the extraordinary point
where we can understand the selfish genes that shaped us.
They are not models for how to behave but the opposite.
Because we are conscious of these forces,
we can work towards taming them.
Through kindness and morality, modern medicine, charity,
even paying our taxes,
we can overthrow the tyranny of natural selection.
Our evolved brains empower us to rebel against our selfish genes.

Part 3:  God Strikes Back

[Richard Dawkins] 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.

[John Mackay, Creationist] You haven't seen it, and I haven't seen it,
so please stop calling it science.

[Wendy Wright, Concerned Women for America] If we have gone from slime to human beings,
there should be an overwhelming amount of evidence.

[Richard Dawkins] You are a teacher of science,
and you think that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.

[Nick Cowan, Secondary School Teacher] Yes, I do.

[Richard Dawkins] In this program,
the increasingly aggressive backlash

[Reading email] "Right now your destiny is all fucked up, fucking atheist."

... the battles that I think really matter...

[Joe Pich] We can't get into the business of knocking down kids' religions
and the religions of families.

[Richard Dawkins] Why not, actually?

[Joe Pich] Why not? Because -- Bec --

[Richard Dawkins] ... 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.

THE GENIUS OF CHARLES DARWIN (God Strikes Back)

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 learned about it a bit more,
I 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.
And 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 agonized over the letter and scribbled on it,
"When I am dead,
know that many times I have kissed and cried over this."

Darwin never criticized 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 that 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.

[John Mackay, Creationist] You see, Genesis 1
says everything that God made was very,
and 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?
Do you realize up till Noah's day,
people lived to be nearly 1,000?
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.

[Richard Dawkins] 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 he attacks evolution on the very crudest level.

[John Mackay, Creationist] 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. Right?

[Richard Dawkins] You take that question seriously?

[John Mackay, Creationist] Oh, yeah, yeah.
And the professor -- His answer I took even more seriously
when he said, "Well, it happens so slowly
you wouldn't expect to see it happening."
All of a sudden I thought, "Hang on."

[Richard Dawkins] And that's true.

[John Mackay, Creationist] Good.
So 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.

[Richard Dawkins] You're looking the wo --
You're using the word "see" as meaning see within one lifetime.
If a phenomenon takes millions of years,
of course you're not going to see it.

[John Mackay, Creationist] Which means you have a faith position,
and you need to admit it.

[Richard Dawkins] It means you have to use other evidence
than the evidence of one man's eyes.
It means you have to look --

[John Mackay, Creationist] 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,
and call what you're teaching philosophy or atheism
if you're gonna really be honest, and my time is up.

[Richard Dawkins] That's ridiculous, but anyway, thank you very much.

[John Mackay, Creationist] Thank you.

[Richard Dawkins] 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 endeavor 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' favorite 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.

[Woman speaking Russian]

[Beeping]

[Richard Dawkins] 50 years ago, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik,
and the space race began.

[Beeping]

[Richard Dawkins] In response, the Americans made science priority number one.
The government poured money into science education.
Evolution was taught in every classroom in America.
But the religious fundamentalists hit back.

[Boy] Tell me, Joe.
How does he explain away God?

[Joe] Well, why don't you come to the science club meeting?
Let him tell you.

[Richard Dawkins] 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.

[Man] Our eyes are amazing little instruments.
But, you know, they're only one part of the wondrous body
that God has given us.

[Richard Dawkins] I worry that this is brainwashing, not science.
And I've felt compelled to take a stand.

[Woman] 40th floor.

[Richard Dawkins] 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.

[Woman] Hello. Hello.

[Woman] I'm one of your biggest fans.

[Man] Can I speak to the number-one British intellectual?

[Man] I've read all your books.

[Richard Dawkins] Have you? That's very kind.

[Man] Can I touch the hem of your gown?

[Laughter]

[Richard Dawkins] The most powerful nation on Earth is polarized.
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.

[Man] Are you religious at all?

[Richard Dawkins] No. Of course not.

[Man] You're not religious at all?

[Richard Dawkins] Do I look religious?

[Email] "I hope you die slowly and you fucking burn in hell,
you damn blasphemy.
And you should realize that your entire life
has been a delusion
and that right now your destiny is all fucked up,
fucking atheist.
Go fuck 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 'stubern.'
Everything Darwin said is wrong,
and evolution has never been proven,
and nothing is evolving now.
The Bible is the best book. [Inhales sharply]
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 fucking 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.

[Bell dings]

She represents half a million evangelical women
concerned about issues ranging from lesbians on TV
to poor old Darwin.

[Woman] Hi.

[Richard Dawkins] Hello. I'm here to see Wendy Wright.

[Woman] Great. I'll take you right in.

[Richard Dawkins] Thank you very much.

I worry that her organization
would condemn American children to ignorance
by attacking sound scientific evidence.

[Wendy Wright, Concerned Women for America] Why is it so important to you that people not believe
in a creator?

[Richard Dawkins] Now, that's not the point.
I mean, 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.

[Wendy Wright, Concerned Women for America] 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,
schoolchildren 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 favorable to evolutionists.

[Richard Dawkins] Well, you could say, "Which controversy?"

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 favor of evolution.
But she doesn't seem to want to know about it.

Oh, really?

[Wendy Wright, Concerned Women for America] 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.
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.

[Richard Dawkins] 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 --

[Wendy Wright, Concerned Women for America] 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.

[Richard Dawkins] Go and look at some modern palaeontology labs.
Go and talk to some modern palaeontologists.
Just 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 analyzed.
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 3 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 analyze 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.

[Nick Cowan, Secondary School Teacher] Well, the evidence that we have
is the same for both of us.
Whereas you might see fossils as evidence for evolution,
I might well say this is evidence for a worldwide flood.

[Richard Dawkins] 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?

[Nick Cowan, Secondary School Teacher] 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.

[Richard Dawkins] You are a teacher of science in a major British school,
and you think that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.

[Nick Cowan, Secondary School Teacher] 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 ...

[Richard Dawkins] 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.

[Nick Cowan, Secondary School Teacher] And again, all I'm doing
is bringing healthy debate into the science lesson.

[Richard Dawkins] We have about a dozen different radioactive clocks.
And they all point to roughly the same answer,
which is that the world is between 4 billion
and 5 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.

[Nick Cowan, Secondary School Teacher] If there is a God, his word must be more important
than the work of fallible human scientists.

[Richard Dawkins] I'm all in favor 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 ...

[Randolph Nesse, Psychologist] No sensible person would have left the body the way it is.

[Richard Dawkins] Like what? What's a good example of that?

[Randolph Nesse, Psychologist] The most dramatic 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 why the body is not designed.

Cover one eye if you would, please.
And we take the pin, and we move it right --
And you have to keep looking at the bridge of my nose,
so keep your eye fixed.
And now we're going to move it just out a little bit,
about 15 degrees.
And right about there ...

[Richard Dawkins] Yeah, it's gone.

[Randolph Nesse, Psychologist] It's gone.
You can't see it.

[Richard Dawkins] No.

[Randolph Nesse, Psychologist] Now you can see it?

[Richard Dawkins] Yes.

[Randolph Nesse, Psychologist] Now can you see it?

[Richard Dawkins] No.

[Randolph Nesse, Psychologist] There's a blind spot. That's really lousy.
Our bodies are so fabulous in some respects.
Our heart keeps beating,
and never takes a five-minute vacation
for decade after decade after decade.
That's astounding.
But we have an appendix. We have wisdom teeth.
Birth is difficult.
Many people get nearsightedness.
And the combination of some things being so perfect,
and other things being such botched jobs,
is what should make us all sit up and take notice
that this is something that's misshaped by natural selection.
It has a lot of vulnerabilities built in
that can be explained only by how natural selection works.

[Richard Dawkins] 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 a 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.

[Joe Pich] 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 --
We can't get into the business of knocking down kids' religions
and the religions of families.

[Richard Dawkins] Why not, actually?

[Joe Pich] Why not? Because -- Bec -- [Laughs]

[Rachel Hughes] 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.

[Chris Scott] 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's very important to them.
It's an important part of their life
through their family and their culture.

[Richard Dawkins] 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.

[Joe Pich] I don't see that we can expect to convince them
just by showing them the evidence.

[Richard Dawkins] Really? Why not?

[Joe Pich] Because they've got other evidence
which they've been brought up with throughout their lives.

[Richard Dawkins] That's not evidence.

[Joe Pich] To them, it's evidence, though.

[Richard Dawkins] Yeah?

[Rachel Hughes] And to their parents.

[Chris Scott] We're talking about something very fundamental.
We're talking about young people.
We're talking about identity.
It's not our place to fly the banner of science
and say there's no room for anything else.
All we can do is present sci -- This is a way of thinking.
This is one way of interpreting life.

[Richard Dawkins] Just one way of interpreting?

[Chris Scott] We believe this is the way because we are scientists.
But it's not my place to tell you that you're wrong.

[Richard Dawkins] We believe it because we're scientists?
Do you really mean that,
or do you mean we believe it because the evidence is there?

[Chris Scott] Well, that's what I'm saying.
Because I'm a scientist and that's the way I view the world.

[Richard Dawkins] It's not because you're a scientist, is it?
It's there. 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 is not a version of the truth.
It is the truth.
Anybody who doubts it
is invited to jump out of a 10th 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 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.

[Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury] 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.

[Richard Dawkins] Do you see God as having any role
in the evolutionary process?

[Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury] For me, God is the power or the intelligence
that shapes the whole of that process.
As creator, God's act is the beginning of all creation --

[Richard Dawkins] By setting up the laws of physics in the first place,
in which context evolution takes place.

[Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury] Things unfold within that.

[Richard Dawkins] What about intervening during the course of evolution?

[Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury] I find that that rather suggests
that God couldn't have made a very good job
of making the rules of physics
if he constantly needs to be adjusting the system,
adjusting the works.
I think that's a different ...

[Richard 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 and -- Any others?

[Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury] The empty tomb, yes, and the raising of Lazarus, yes.

[Richard Dawkins] Okay.
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?

[Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury] 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, though, 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.

[Richard Dawkins] I'm not sure what that means.
It sounds to me awfully like suspending.

[Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury] Poetic language, I know.

[Richard Dawkins] It's poetic language.

[Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury] And I realize that there are ways of talking about that
which do simply sound like God interrupting things.

[Richard Dawkins] I, of course, love poetic language,
but there does come a time when you worry
that people are going to misunderstand it as --

[Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury] Or that it's a way of wriggling out of hard questions.

[Richard Dawkins] Well --
I mean, 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 happened.

[Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury] It's true or not. Yes.

[Richard Dawkins] It's true or not. And I don't think you can really wriggle out of that
by doing some poetry -- much as I love poetry.

On the one hand, I've got a lot of sympathy
with 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 behavior"
he observed in nature.
And yet it was integral to natural selection.

The following was edited out of the movie:

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 paralyze 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 could
only exist in this horrible way.  Isn't it better to
embrace reality, bleak as it may sometimes 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 10 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 honor 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 is 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 plows
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."

So 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?

[Dan Dennett, Philosopher] 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 control system and the memory
of a being that can be held responsible,
that can look into the future.

[Richard Dawkins] And when people say, "Where do you get your consolation from?"
I sort of feel, "Well, how much more do you want?"

[Chuckles]

[Dan Dennett, Philosopher] Indeed.
What could be more wonderful
than being part of this amazing living tapestry
of growth and exploration and innovation,
all happening in not a million, not a billion,
but in a trillion places at once.
Just to look just at our planet,
the exuberance of the life processes going on around us,
and all of the creativity that is there is just stunning.
It's great to wake up in the morning
and realize that you're a part of this.

[Richard Dawkins] Not only are we a part of it, but we can reflect on the fact
that our ability to realize that,
our ability to understand it and to exult in it,
is itself the product of the same process.
Our brains that are so capable of appreciating this
have been produced by the very same process
that we are now appreciating.

[Dan Dennett, Philosopher] Sometimes I like to say
the planet has grown a nervous system, and it's us.

[Richard Dawkins] 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 the 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.

Presented by
PROFESSOR RICHARD DAWKINS
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
With thanks to
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