Evolution Episode 1 Darwin's Dangerous Idea (PBS)

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Broadcast (2001) Why does Charles Darwin's "dangerous idea" matter more today than ever, and how does it explain the past and predict the future of life on Earth? The first show interweaves the drama of Darwin's life with current documentary sequences, introducing key concepts of evolution. Evolution determines who lives, who dies, and who passes traits on to the next generation. The process plays a critical role in our daily lives, yet it is one of the most overlooked and misunderstood concepts ever described. The Evolution series goals are to heighten public understanding of evolution and how it works, to dispel common misunderstandings about the process, and to illuminate why it is relevant to all of us.

The Evolution project's eight-hour television miniseries travels the world to examine evolutionary science and the profound effect it has had on society and culture. From the genius and torment of Charles Darwin to the scientific revolution that spawned the tree of life, from the power of sex to drive evolutionary change to the importance of mass extinctions in the birth of new species, the Evolution series brings this fascinating process to life. The series also explores the emergence of consciousness, the origin and success of humans, and the perceived conflict between science and religion in understanding life on Earth.

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(barking)

No, thank you.

No.

No, no.

No.

Venga.

¿Quieren un poquito de agua?

Me...

Me llamo Charles Darwin

y él Captain FitzRoy.

Me soy naturalista.

¿Hay hueso?

¿Hueso?

Bones.

Sí, hueso, hueso.

¿Sí? ¿Hueso gigante?

¿Aquí? Here?

Aquí estan los huesos.

DARWIN: FitzRoy!

FITZROY: A flood washed down part of a bank of earth.

Mi hijo le pegó con una piedra

y le sacó los dientes.

Por eso que se caí tan afuera.

It was perfect, but the boys knocked out some of the teeth

throwing stones at it.

How much?

¿Cuánto cuesta?

(conversation continues)

I wonder why these creatures no longer exist.

Perhaps the ark was too small

to allow them entry

and they perished in the flood.

(laughing)

What is there to laugh at?

Nothing, nothing.

Do you mock me, or the Bible?

Neither.

What sort of clergyman will you be, Mr. Darwin?

Dreadful.

Dreadful.

FITZROY: "And God said, 'Let the waters bring forth abundantly

"'the moving creature that hath life

"'and fowl that may fly above the earth

"in the open firmament of heaven.'

"And God created great whales

and every living creature that moveth..."

Hello.

FITZROY: "...which the waters brought forth..."

What are you doing here?

Why such beauty where no one can see?

(FitzRoy continues scriptural reading)

You can't have been blown here.

FITZROY: "And God saw that it was good."

MAN: If I were to give a prize

for the single best idea anybody ever had

I'd give it to Darwin for the idea of natural selection...

ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein

because his idea unites

the two most disparate features of our universe:

the world of purposeless, meaningless matter and motion

on the one side

and the world of meaning and purpose and design on the other.

He understood that what he was proposing

was a truly revolutionary idea.

MAN: The Darwinian revolution

is about who we are,

it's what we're made of, it's what our life means

insofar as science can answer that question.

So it, in many ways, was the singularly deepest

and most discombobulating of all discoveries

that science has ever made.

MAN: In Darwin's day, the idea of evolution was regarded

as highly unorthodox

because it went against all of natural history

in Great Britain.

It jeopardized the standing of science;

it did jeopardize the standing of a stable society, the Bible

and the church as well.

Darwin kept his thoughts to himself for many years

and agonized over the problem.

If it ever got out that he was doing something

that ran slap counter to established science

it would ruin his career, ruin his reputation.

He was a respectable man with a dangerous theory.

MAN: Did you never get your sea legs?

Not once in five years.

Whenever the sea was up

so was the contents of my stomach.

What a delightful thought.

We should be able to squeeze 400 a year

out of the governor.

Why? What has he said?

He hasn't said anything, but I've seen it

in his eyes, the way he pored over your letters.

A very proud father.

I told him you were going to publish

a journal of your travels.

There was a definite flicker of interest.

Publish?

Yes, of course.

No country parsonage for you, my boy.

You're under my wing now.

I'll take charge of your affairs;

introduce you to all my clever, witty friends.

Trade on your... your celebrity.

Celebrity?

Certainly!

Everyone wants to meet you,

hear stories of naked Tahitian women

and giant sloths or whatever.

(bird cawing)

DARWIN: Captain FitzRoy!

This is my brother, Erasmus.

Mr. Darwin.

Captain.

Good God!

A man can collect a lot of rubbish in five years.

It's a wonder you didn't sink the ship, Charles.

Named, I take it, after your grandfather?

Yes, and an uncle...

who drowned himself in the River Derwent.

And are you a free thinker like him?

I'm more of a free drinker, really.

And how was the voyage for you, Captain?

That's not for me to say.

No?

40 views of the coast as seen from the sea

80 plans of harbors and 82 coastal maps,

all for the Hydrographic Department of the Admiralty.

Bravo.

Dinner at sea must have been a jolly affair.

Here... from the Galapagos Islands.

DARWIN: Puma roasted over an open fire...

rather like veal.

(laughing)

Armadillo, roasted in its shell... a lot like duck.

Tortoise, of course.

(chuckling)

Of course.

Some of them weigh as much as 500 pounds.

One I measured was 96 inches around the waist.

If one of them ever needs a suit of clothes

we must send it to father's tailor.

(all laughing)

What else?

Llama, ostrich...

People wonder how it is

some animals come to be extinct.

Now we have the answer: eaten by Charlie Darwin.

(all laughing)

ERASMUS: You look as though you're going to the scaffold!

Dignity!

Poise!

Smile!

Remember, all eyes are on you.

The judging has begun.

Mr. President...

my lords, ladies and gentlemen...

No, no, no!

Start with a bang.

Men of Athens!

What?

Friends, Romans, countrymen!

That sort of thing.

Right.

I can't do this.

Yes, you can.

You mustn't let the fact

that every leading geologist in the land will be there

put you off.

Oh, God!

Now, let me hear an interesting bit.

There aren't any.

The earthquake.

Oh, stand still.

And don't wave your arms around like that.

Leave your tie alone.

Don't squint.

And speak up!

The earthquake ran for 400 miles along the coast

accompanied by the simultaneous eruption of a line of volcanoes.

We found fresh mussel beds lying above high tide

the shellfish all dead.

The land had risen eight feet.

Mountains must be the product

of thousands and thousands of such rises

occurring again and again throughout history.

Even at the very crest of the Andes

we found marine remains...

The fossilized shells of creatures

that once crawled about at the bottom of the sea

elevated nearly 14,000 feet above its level.

Time...

unimaginable tracts of time...

is the key.

(Erasmus applauding)

(others join in enthusiastically)

MEN: Bravo! Bravo! Well done!

Mr. Darwin, splendid.

Thank you, thank you very much.

Congratulations.

Interesting paper.

Thank you.

Where have you placed your fossil specimens?

I was thinking of the British Museum.

Ah... you're happy to have them languish

in some dusty Bloomsbury cellar?

No, not at all.

You'd better let me look over them for you then.

We'll let you know.

Thank you.

Pompous oaf.

Who does he think he is?

He thinks he's Richard Owen

the most brilliant anatomist in Europe.

And you're Erasmus Darwin's little brother.

Darwin of the Beagle Darwin!

Lord it while you can.

I don't want to lord it.

Liar.

What a brilliant red!

Brighter than the actual plumage.

I try to allow for the loss of color

that comes with death.

Can you do this

with my Galapagos birds?

I haven't finished identifying them yet, Mr. Darwin.

I do know that your "wren" is a finch.

Your "grosbeak" is a finch.

Even your blackbird is a finch.

And they're unique, all new, never described before.

There's even evidence that there are

separate species for each Galapagos island.

But I didn't label mine by island.

You didn't label them by island?

FITZROY: Why do you want them?

DARWIN: Why, I told you.

I failed to label mine by island.

No, I mean, why are the birds I collected

suddenly of such interest to you?

The vice governor of the Galapagos told me

he could identify which island a tortoise came from

by its markings.

Yes, yes... small variations are possible

from island to island.

Adaptations to climates and so on.

Yes, but the islands all have the same climate.

My expert, John Gould, tells me he's found

different species of finches.

What if these finches were blown to the Galapagos

from South America

and then began to change, adapt, if you will...

become more and more different from their ancestors

generation after generation?

First into varieties, then into new species

each new species marooned on its own island.

What are you talking about?

"What if the finches were blown to the Galapagos"!

God put those creatures there.

That makes no sense.

Why would God put different birds

on almost identical islands?

I have no idea.

It's not a question that requires an answer.

Species were commanded into existence by God.

They are perfect forms

and they've been perfect since the day of Creation.

It's divine law, God's will.

I'll see to it that your expert receives my birds.

Thank you.

It's God you should give thanks to.

Come on!

Tonight, and for one night only, ladies and gentlemen

a guided tour of Charles Darwin's Boneyard.

Shh!

And for goodness' sake, hurry up!

Yes.

OWEN: This is a large, extinct

llamalike creature...

(observers murmur)

and this is a giant ground sloth

discovered by Mr. Darwin at Punta Alta.

Lastly...

The remains of Mr. Darwin's breakfast.

This skull belongs to a huge rodent...

(observers exclaiming)

a relative of the South American capybara.

If that's the size of a rat

imagine how big the cats must have been.

(laughing)

I have named it Toxodon.

Thank you, thank you, Professor Owen

for identifying and describing

the extraordinary array of fossils discovered by Mr. Darwin

on his voyage to South America.

We allow the planets and the Sun

to be governed by natural laws

but the smallest insect

we wish to be created by a special act of God.

Surely the creation of life has to be explained

in the same way as geology

using natural, ordinary, everyday causes.

Well, in theory, yes.

But in practice

there can be no question

about the prime cause:

divine will.

Shouldn't men of science be free to investigate

each and every means

by which new species come into being?

If by that you mean wild accusations

about man's ancestry

the answer is no.

To destroy man's unique status

is to open the floodgates to anarchy.

You might just as well

throw muskets to the rabble.

ERASMUS: People like Owen think

that if there was no Church of England

cucumbers wouldn't grow.

If the globe has undergone

such profound changes

in its history, geologically

then surely all living creatures

must have changed with it

to adapt to their new conditions.

Otherwise they would have perished.

Some did perish, it seems.

Yes, but the continued existence of life on Earth

can only be explained by the assumption

that a creature like this was replaced

by the modern-day armadillo.

There must be a law

which causes new species to appear

in place of the extinct ones.

Oh, that, my boy, is the mystery of mysteries.

The person who can solve that riddle

will take all of the scientific prizes.

GOULD: It's the variety of their beaks that's so amazing.

They graduate perfectly in size.

From this large parrot-like beak similar to a hawfinch

perfectly designed for cracking nuts

to this tiny warbler finch

fine as a chaffinch

to feed on insects.

And they're all descended from this one:

the common ground finch.

I've started to prepare some color plates.

They'll put my words to shame.

Ras?

Ras!

Oh.

Ras.

Wake up!

What time is it?

Lunch time.

(groans)

Well, then go away

and come back at tea time.

The Galapagos Islands are almost identical,

the same geology, the same climate.

I'm glad to hear it.

Now go away.

So why should different finches

inhabit identical islands?

Ras?

(groans)

Small changes over ages and ages

can throw up mountain ranges

and sink continents.

If mountains can move

and rivers can move

then why can't animals?

Finches.

Tortoises.

Iguanas.

If you trace animals

across the surface of the earth

or dig down and trace them back through time

you come face to face

with the same truth.

Which is?

New beings can appear on the earth.

Perhaps everything is part

of one ancestral chain.

Man... mouse... armadillo.

No.

It's nonsense to think of animals or man

as climbing some ladder...

to talk of one animal

being higher than another.

No.

No.

I think... it's more like a tree.

A tree of life.

Each new species

springs from the parent tree like a shoot.

These shoots branch and divide in their turn

and so on and so on.

Some branches die out;

others keep developing.

The trunk, the ancient common ancestor.

The stock...

the stock from which all animals and plants sprang.

"Nurs'd by warm sun-beams in primeval caves

"Organic life began beneath the waves

"Hence, without parent by spontaneous birth

Rise the first steps of animated Earth."

Grandfather's Zoonomia.

"Would it be too bold to imagine

"that all warm-blooded animals have arisen

from one living filament?"

It's in our blood, Charles.

And grandfather was vilified for it.

It's in our blood.

NARRATOR: What Charles Darwin glimpsed over 150 years ago

is now the bedrock of biology:

All forms of life on Earth have evolved

on a single, branching tree of life.

MAN: One of the most important ideas that Darwin had was

that all living things on Earth were related.

How can you realize

that you are part of this single tree of life

and not be fundamentally moved by that?

It's... it's something that stirs the soul.

NARRATOR: Following in Darwin's path

biologist Chris Schneider and his colleagues

have come to South America to a remote region of Ecuador

near the base of the Andes Mountains.

The rain forest may be home to more species of animals

than anywhere else on Earth.

Darwin had been awestruck by its endless variety of life.

He wrote that he felt like a blind man being given sight

and that the sounds of the rain forest were

like a great cathedral at Evensong.

For biologists today

the lowland rain forest and the nearby Andes Mountains

are laboratories for exploring Darwin's ideas.

(chirps)

Did he bite you?

NARRATOR: Over the next several days

Schneider's team will track down rats and frogs

bats, birds and lizards through day and night

both here in the rain forest and high up in the mountains.

By comparing the two groups of animals

they hope to better understand

how changing environments might trigger

the evolution of new species.

SCHNEIDER: You just can't help but be awestruck by the fact

that there are so many different kinds of things here.

There are 12 species of primates.

There are 550 species of birds that have been identified here.

There are 100 species of frogs right here in this little area.

(low conversation)

SCHNEIDER: Why is there such diversity here?

We got some good stuff.

(laughs)

We got a mindblower or two.

MAN: Did you?

MAN 2: I'll show you this one.

NARRATOR: Ornithologist Tom Smith wants to compare the size of birds' beaks

from the rain forest

with those he hopes to find in the mountains.

(bird squeaking)

Even subtle differences may offer clues

about how and why new species arise

just as it was the beaks of finches

from the nearby Galapagos Islands

that spurred Darwin's thinking in the 1830s.

Darwin saw that the finches he brought back

had uniquely shaped beaks

adapted to the different foods on the islands.

He envisioned that these different species of finch

had all descended (with modifications)

from a common ancestral population

that had flown over from the mainland.

Darwin's bold insight was to apply this vision

to all of life

to see that the great variety of life on Earth,

leopards and lichens, minnows and whales

flowering plants and flatworms, apes and human beings,

all descended from one root, one common ancestor.

MAN: It was indeed another one of his radical proposals

not only to say that evolution happened

but that there was a root of common ancestry

to everything that lived on this planet, including us.

You could construe it in other ways

that, as I like to say, are more user-friendly.

You could have thought

well, God had several independent lineages

and they were all moving in certain preordained directions

which pleased His sense of how a uniform and harmonious world

ought to be put together.

And Darwin says, "No, it's just history all coming

with descent, with modification, from a single common ancestry."

The key to Darwin's thought in every realm is

that given enough time and innumerable small events

anything can take place by the laws of nature.

So whether it's the raising of mountains

or the evolution of new species

all of these things happen through time and change.

NARRATOR: The rain forest holds striking examples.

SCHNEIDER: Take a look at this mantis here.

This thing is almost perfectly disguised as a leaf

but you can see, if you look at the underside

that it's a praying mantis

just like you'd find in a garden in North America.

But this one is highly modified.

Its thorax is flattened out to look like a leaf

and its wings are modified to look like leaves.

You can even see the veins.

If you imagined a population of mantises

and some looked more like leaves than others

those ones that look like leaves may tend to survive

and reproduce more than others.

And so a series of modifications could build up over time

to result in an almost perfectly leaflike mantis.

But if you put it on a background

on which it doesn't belong

I mean, it just sticks out like a sore thumb.

It would almost certainly... hey, where you going there, pal?

It would almost certainly get eaten by something.

NARRATOR: Before heading into the mountains

Smith collects more birds

to add to what he's learned in the rain forest.

Bill length...

NARRATOR: How different will the highland birds prove to be?

...is 9.2.

Common is 10.

NARRATOR: Different enough to be considered new species

branching off in a new direction on the tree of life?

SCHNEIDER: When the Andes were uplifted

it created a whole variety of new habitats.

The animals that were in the lowland rain forest

had an enormous opportunity to colonize these new habitats

and they did so.

The real question is

whether adaptation to these new environments

can lead to the formation of new species.

NARRATOR: Flying less than one hour

Schneider and Smith move from the steamy lowlands

to the windswept Andean peaks.

Animal populations made the same journey

but gradually, over many generations.

And as the environment changed

from rain forest to the high, cool grasslands

animal populations were forced to adapt.

These grasslands lie nearly two miles above sea level.

Seasons never change here, so close to the equator

but it is said that winter visits every night.

Temperatures often drop below freezing.

Animals not well adapted will not survive.

SMITH: Hummingbirds are amazing.

It turns out

that they can drop their body temperature 50 degrees

and go into a state of hibernation

to withstand the frigid nights here.

You can imagine

a small-billed hummingbird living in cloud forest

some thousand meters down slope from us.

And if those individuals were to expand their range

up into this habitat where perhaps flowers are much longer

you could expect

that individuals with slightly longer bills

might survive better.

And in fact, there are many examples in hummingbirds

where we know that small changes in bill length

can make important differences in how that bird extracts nectar

and how well it survives.

We're seeing that changes in the environment

can be very important

in changing the characteristics of those animals

as they move between environments.

And we believe very strongly that, in many cases, anyway

that this can be very important

in the progression to new species.

NARRATOR: From one species of bird, the common ancestor

hummingbirds with beaks of different lengths evolve

over many generations.

And if these populations change so much

that they can no longer reproduce with one another

they are considered separate species on the tree of life.

Smith and Schneider want to see

how closely related the highland birds are

to the birds they examined in the lowland rain forest.

They compare color, beak length, wingspan...

just as Darwin would have done.

But they have another tool that Darwin never even dreamed of...

DNA.

Darwin was convinced that traits were passed on

from generation to generation, but he didn't understand how.

We now know

that the sequence of the four chemical building blocks of DNA

determines the traits of all living things.

Each generation passes on this text of As, Ts, Cs and Gs

to its offspring.

But occasional mistakes in copying (mutations)

can result in new traits.

SCHNEIDER: By comparing DNA

we can determine who is most closely related to whom

we can determine when they had a common ancestor

and when they diverged from that common ancestor.

NARRATOR: Laboratory analysis reveals

that DNA from the rain forest hummingbirds

differs only very slightly

from that of the highland hummingbirds.

They must have diverged from a common ancestor

relatively recently in the history of life on Earth,

about three million years ago.

SCHNEIDER: We're examining the genetic material

that makes organisms what they are.

And written in that DNA is the history of their evolution.

NARRATOR: The fact that the blueprints for all living things

are in the same language, the genetic code of DNA,

is powerful evidence

that they all evolved on a single tree of life.

SCHNEIDER: How is it that organisms that are so different can be related?

That we are related to a flatworm or a bacteria?

Darwin emphasized

that small changes would accrue every generation

and these changes could build up to amount to enormous changes.

It's not really hard to understand

how major transitions could come about

given that life has been around for 3½ billion years.

Darwin really had it right.

(man chuckling and applauding)

WOMAN: Come here, Squib.

There.

There we are.

Well, Emma, you're a remarkably good shot!

(both chuckle)

Hello, Parker.

Miss Wedgwood.

You've met my cousin, Mr. Darwin, before?

Sir.

He's fast, eh?

The fastest in the county.

Did you breed him yourself?

I mated him

with a bitch who was pretty swift.

And how would you breed a fellow like Squib here?

From the runts, I suppose.

(men laugh)

How dare you!

Squib is quite as nice as any of your rotten dogs.

It's true.

It's from the runts and monsters

that breeders can produce tailless cats

or pygmies like Squib.

I'm not listening to any more of this.

Take me back to the house at once

and stop saying horrid things.

From wolves to greyhounds

from bulldogs to fellows like Squib

in what, a matter of a few hundred years.

I take it you don't find

talk of dogs all that interesting?

I can think of more interesting topics of conversation.

Such as?

The novels of Miss Austen.

And what does she have to say about selective breeding?

Nothing, as I recall.

Well, that's a great pity.

Why shouldn't nature produce such differences

these different breeds of dog?

Why should it?

What would be the point?

Survival.

In nature, a little poppet like Squib

who was the smallest in her litter, would die.

You nearly did die, didn't you?

Yes, that's true.

But what about the one with a little more vigor

or a head start

because of some peculiarity?

Such as?

A puppy born with an extra-thick coat in a hot climate

would be a monstrosity

but in a cold climate that would be a good adaptation.

That puppy would have an advantage.

Got you.

Charles.

Emma.

Let me go.

Not until you've paid the toll.

Which is?

A kiss, for me rather than the dog.

You can make a big dog or a small dog

but you can't produce feathers on a dog

nor can you create organs as miraculous

as the heart and the eyes.

That can only be the work of God.

Hurry up.

It's these blasted ties!

"Marry. Not marry.

"Marry. Children, if it please God..."

Give me that!

It's private.

I'm your brother; you've no secrets from me.

Yes, I do; I have secrets from everybody.

Give it to me.

ERASMUS: Thank you, Garmon.

"Constant companion and friend in old age."

Ras!

(sighs)

"Object to be loved and played with

better than a dog anyhow."

(laughing)

You old romantic!

Well, it's intolerable to think of oneself

spending one's life like a neuter bee

working, working, working.

And all this is a response

to your trip to Cousin Emma's?

Not necessarily.

You don't know anyone else.

(both chuckle)

No, it's true,

your collection won't be complete

without that most interesting specimen

in the whole series of vertebrate mammals.

And why haven't you married

if it's such an enviable state?

Oh, I'm too lazy to take on anything requiring

as much effort as a wife and family.

But you're the marrying kind.

(glass breaks)

Good Lord, what was that?

We're being mobbed!

(yelling)

They probably think we're Poor Law Commissioners.

(people shouting)

Why would they think that?

It's enough that we're top- hatted toffs in a smart carriage

and they're scavenging on rubbish heaps, starving to death.

ERASMUS: Too many people, not enough food!

Thank God we'll always have food on our plates!

Speaking of which, I think I'll have

the turbot in the white sauce.

Cabbage, sprout, cauliflower,

all bred from the same ancestor.

Cabbage, the leaves; sprouts, the side buds;

cauliflower, the flower head.

All monstrously enlarged.

Sitting opposite me is that strange creature, Homo thesis:

half man, half theory.

A word of advice.

In my entire life

I have known only three women who were skeptics

and two of them were not permitted in polite society.

Keep your theory from Emma.

It's too late.

I told her... sort of... not a theory.

I don't have a theory, just thoughts.

How did she take it?

She asked me to read

her favorite part of the New Testament...

(laughs)

our Savior's farewell to his disciples.

You see what I mean?

"I am the vine, and ye are the branches.

If man abide not in me..."

ERASMUS: Wilberforce's ears have pricked up!

(softly): "If man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch

"and is withered; and men shall gather them

and they shall be cast into the fire, and they are burned."

And how is your sole?

What?

Your fish?

Oh... delicious.

I understand your carriage was stoned tonight.

Well...

We're meeting the threat on the streets head-on.

We're drilling with the Honorable Artillery Company.

Gentleman volunteers.

In the event of riots

we will back the police.

Every man, as long as he obeys

the law of the land

should be free to pursue

his own interest in his own way.

Yes, of course.

Charge what he likes for bread

or anything else for that matter.

Laissez-faire.

Let individuals compete and struggle

for their advantages.

Good night.

Good night.

Good night.

(snores)

(snoring lightly)

Whenever I can't sleep

I reach for Malthus.

Or, as I prefer to think of him

the Reverend T.R. Morpheus.

Still warm.

Two brandies, hmm?

Yes, sir.

"The natural tendency of mankind is to reproduce.

"Humans can double their numbers

every 25 years."

But they don't.

A struggle for resources slows growth

and death and disease, war and famine check the population.

I know the argument.

Yes, but don't you see

exactly the same struggle takes place throughout nature?

I don't know

why I didn't make the connection before.

Why are we not overrun with insects and frogs

given the rate at which they reproduce,

the number of eggs produced by each and every female?

Nature's broom sweeps away the ugly ducklings, the runts.

Yes, but it's not that simple.

(clears throat)

(quietly): It's not that simple.

Sometimes it's the ugly ducklings

that are better adapted to the situations of life.

They have longer legs and can run faster.

They have bigger beaks

that can crack harder nuts and seeds in harsh winters.

They survive, have more offspring.

Nature selects them to pass on their traits

to future generations.

And where do we fit in?

Hmm...

Well, the sun does not revolve around the earth.

Nature does not revolve around man.

Man must fall into nature's cauldron.

He's no deity, no exception.

Once you accept that species can pass into one another

the whole fabric totters and falls.

They'll burn you at the stake for this.

Yes.

But now you have a theory.

So I said, "Don't come down the ladder, Mother;

I've taken it away."

Good evening.

(pours brandy)

MOORE: Darwin's work began with the observation

that individuals differ from each other.

And these minute differences, Darwin believed

might be advantageous.

It might give each individual an edge

when it came to getting food

or finding a place to survive in nature.

NARRATOR: Darwin realized that in nature

individual organisms compete for limited resources.

Those with some kind of advantage

in coloration, for example...

or in speed...

or in vision...

are more likely to survive and reproduce

and pass on these advantages to their offspring.

Those who are less fit will not succeed.

Darwin called it "natural selection"

because the forces of nature

select which organisms will survive.

STEPHEN JAY GOULD: The survivors will be those

whose variation fortuitously adapts them better

to changing local environments.

And then because they pass on those traits to their offspring

the population changes.

That's natural selection; that's all it is.

It's not a principle of progress.

It's just a principle of local adaptation.

You don't make better creatures in any cosmic sense;

you make creatures that are better suited

to the changing climates of their local habitats.

That's it.

NARRATOR: Darwin couldn't actually see

natural selection acting in real time

but today, scientists can,

by observing the evolution of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Jeff Gustavson has been infected with HIV for over a decade.

He takes a host of medications, but to little avail:

the virus keeps adapting

evolving into new strains that evade the drugs.

GUSTAVSON: There's a pervasive feeling

that all you have to do is take your medicine

and you'll be okay, and that really isn't the case, you know.

HIV has the capacity to evolve no matter what you give it.

MAN: There are 19 HIV drugs on the market today, and of those 19

I've already been through 14 of them.

NARRATOR: Clarence Johnson, too, is locked in a daily struggle

against the rapidly evolving virus.

JOHNSON: Sometimes I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle.

I haven't given up yet but there have been times

that I just want to lay down and give up, but, um...

I can't leave my family behind.

NARRATOR: Clarence Johnson's doctor, Michael Saag

has seen HIV evolve into new varieties

over the last dozen years.

The virus is constantly changing

subject to the forces of natural selection

in the environment of a patient's body.

Imagine we didn't have the concept of evolution

and we started giving drugs to a patient

that in the test tube looked great

and all of a sudden the virus starts coming back

and it's not susceptible to the drugs anymore.

What a mystery!

How in the world did that happen?

There's only one way that it happened: through evolution.

NARRATOR: Once inside a patient's white blood cells

HIV replicates at an alarming rate.

Billions of new viruses are spawned every day

and each time it reproduces

random genetic copying mistakes

(mutations)

result in slightly different varieties of the virus

bursting forth into the bloodstream.

Some of these new varieties, just by chance

will have traits that make them resistant to certain drugs.

So when drugs enter the bloodstream

natural selection favors the drug-resistant forms:

they survive and reproduce.

Before long, drug-resistant viruses dominate

in the patient's body.

SAAG: Evolution seems pretty easy to understand

when we look at big animals.

We can kind of see it, in a sense.

But that's evolution that took centuries to develop.

When you're talking about something like a virus

that you can't see in everyday life

its hard to image how it changes.

In the case of HIV, we're talking about minutes to hours

to move from one species to another.

It's mind-boggling

in terms of the speed with which HIV can replicate.

Clarence?

SAAG: How are you feeling overall?

I'm doing okay.

Great.

SAAG: Every time I see a patient

in the back of my mind I'm thinking

"What is the virus doing in the environment of that patient?"

The virus is producing itself

on the order of billions of copies a day.

Those few that happen to be able to work in the presence of drug

say, "Hey, this is my chance," and they emerge.

So it creates the appearance

that the virus has thought this through

but in fact it's just a matter of chance.

It's a matter of a virus being there

that's not susceptible to the drugs.

It emerges, and the virus begins to win the war.

NARRATOR: That's just what happened to Jeff Gustavson.

Each time he tried a new drug, the virus evolved to resist it.

Even a cocktail of multiple drugs made little difference.

GUSTAVSON: Here's this puny little virus that doesn't have a brain

and yet it can outwit some of the top scientists in the world.

All the virus has going for it is

it can't copy itself too well.

I mean, that's pretty awe-inspiring and scary.

STEPHEN JAY GOULD: All that happens in evolution,

at least under Darwinian natural selection,

is that organisms are struggling

in some metaphorical and unconscious sense

for reproductive success, however it happens.

MAN: The process of natural selection feeds on randomness.

It feeds on accident and contingency

and it gradually improves the fit

between whatever organisms there are

and the environment in which they're being selected.

But there's no predictability about what particular accidents

are going to be exploited in this process.

NARRATOR: For millions of HIV patients, evolution is the enemy.

If only there were a way to take advantage of natural selection

to make it work in a patient's favor.

In 1997, at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany

a researcher may have discovered such a way...

quite accidentally.

WOMAN: We had a patient

and even though he was being treated with five drugs

his virus replication could not be controlled

and, at the same time, he was suffering

from a lot of side effects of the medications.

So at that point he asked his physician

if it wouldn't make sense

to just stop taking the drugs for a while

since he was really having nothing much from them

other than the toxicities he was experiencing.

NARRATOR: After three months off drugs

the patient's virus population was tested for drug resistance.

Dr. Miller could not believe the results.

At first I thought a mistake had happened

because the lab that did the resistance test

was not able to detect any resistance whatsoever

in this virus population.

We sent a second sample and this result was confirmed.

Within a matter of three months

his virus population had changed completely

from being resistant to every single drug

to appearing to be susceptible to every single drug

that we currently have.

NARRATOR: Here's what had happened.

With drugs present in the patient's bloodstream

only the drug-resistant strains of the virus could replicate.

But some of the nonresistant virus (the "wild type")

still lingered in the white blood cells.

When the patient stopped taking drugs

the environment changed, and the wild type came back.

It replicated extremely rapidly

and soon outnumbered the drug-resistant strains.

In Darwinian terms

the wild type virus was more fit in this drug-free environment.

NARRATOR: Dr. Miller's findings have led

to a new experimental treatment strategy:

take a patient off drugs for a time

and if the virus reverts to the nonresistant wild type

hit it hard with a combination of drugs.

Clarence!

How are you?

SAAG: The concept of a treatment interruption is a new strategy

that we might be able to apply in Clarence's case

but we've just got to make sure

that we aren't putting him at too much risk

if we choose that route.

SAAG: So one of the options

is to take all the drugs away for a while

let the virus spring back into its natural state

of not having any mutations

and then pounce on it again with the regimen,

and it might even be the same regimen that we used before.

SAAG: On first blush, the evolution back to wild type

would seem to be a great thing:

the drugs all of a sudden can work again.

But it's a double-edged sword:

as the virus goes back to wild type

it becomes more dangerous for the host,

it's a much more effective killer of cells.

And so we have to find a way to balance those two things out.

NARRATOR: Jeff Gustavson is also beginning a treatment interruption,

despite the risks.

GUSTAVSON: I feel like I've played all the cards that I have in my hand

with the medicines that are available.

I feel like it's worth the risk to try and take another card

or a different strategy and just stop taking medicine altogether

and hope that the next time that I do go on medicine

that it will actually work.

NARRATOR: After five weeks off drugs

Clarence Johnson is enjoying being free,

at least temporarily, from their debilitating effects.

If the wild-type virus is staging a comeback

it doesn't yet appear to be affecting his immune system.

SAAG: We took a bit of a gamble.

I think, so far, you know, it's paid off.

And the virus has gone from being resistant to certain drugs

and now that population has shifted

so that now they're susceptible again.

SAAG: What I hope for Clarence is that we can find the right course...

find a way to stretch his survival out even further

so that he's healthy and happy

until the next new approach to treatment

is able to get him to a point where he can live to 80.

JOHNSON: My greatest hope is that when I do go back on medications

those drugs will bring my viral load down

to an undetectable amount.

I don't know what it feels like to be undetectable

so that would be a great experience.

NARRATOR: Six weeks into his treatment interruption

Jeff Gustavson's virus also has changed

to the drug-susceptible wild type.

He's now on a new course of medication, and responding well.

SAAG: From day one of this epidemic

we were put into a race with HIV.

Over the last decade or so we've been catching up;

we've learned a lot about it; we've scouted out the enemy;

we've learned how it replicates;

we've learned how it tries to survive;

we learned how it evolves.

And we're now taking those principles that we've learned

and applying them

to putting the brakes on the virus in this race.

(birds chirping)

DARWIN: Towards me... towards me...

There!

The angle needs to be more acute.

DARWIN: More acute...

(knock at door)

Let's see if it works.

And... open!

Good God!

Ras!

What a horrible shock.

Thought I'd surprise you.

Welcome to Down House.

When is the moat to be dug?

When the drawbridge is in place.

Who are you trying to keep out, Charlie?

Everyone, especially you.

EMMA: Ras...

What a wonderful surprise!

My dear, what a journey.

It's not far.

Nature abhors a journey of 16 miles

almost as much as a vacuum.

Hello, Annie.

Tea, the man needs tea.

(laughing)

ERASMUS: One, and a two, and a three

and off you go!

I've thought of a new name for the village.

DARWIN: Oh, yes?

"Down-in-the-Mouth."

If you speak

I can find you really easily.

Shh!

How's your work progressing?

I've sent the manuscript off to be copied.

I've no idea what I'm going to do with it when it comes back.

Everyone be quiet!

Aren't we glad we're not blind?

If you're blind you can't see the sky...

BOTH: ...or the flowers.

Or anything else, for that matter.

I can get any of you any time I want!

Well, go on, then!

We feel sorry for moles, don't we?

DARWIN: Moles don't need to be able to see

because they live underground.

That's why their eyes have got smaller and smaller

BOTH: ...and owls' have got bigger and bigger.

WILLIAM: I can't play.

Everyone's talking about eyes all the time!

Oh... you going to talk to William, hmm?

Go on, Brodie.

William?

(chuckling)

William, wait for us!

She'll soon talk him round.

She has the knack.

You look pale.

My stomach rejects food.

I'm not strong anymore.

I'll never achieve anything in science now.

What rot!

You're coming back to London with me.

No, I'm not.

Yes, you are!

I'm not letting you stagnate down here

while your rivals make all the progress.

You must visit your publisher.

You don't understand, Ras.

Even when I talk about my theory with you

I feel like I'm confessing a murder.

No, I can't publish.

Well, you're coming back to London with me, Charlie

whether you like it or not.

If only to remind the opposition

you're still alive and kicking!

EMMA: Take care.

And make sure you get plenty of rest.

Erasmus, he's not to spend all night at the club with you.

No, Mother...

I mean it, or he'll be utterly done for the next day.

Yes, Mother.

Don't worry, it'll do him good.

Come on.

Your sloth awaits you, sir.

(gasps and chuckles)

What a magnificent beast, eh, Ras?

My word.

Owen's done a remarkable job.

He really is a splendid specimen.

Yes, I thought you'd be pleased.

Come through.

See what I've been working on.

The chimpanzee

being the highest organized four-handed ape

every difference between its anatomy and a human's

is instructive.

I've been studying...

For example

the irrational ape has doglike canines

used as weapons of destruction

quite unlike the masters of the animal kingdom.

DARWIN: Yes, though...

OWEN: And the human foot

is of decisive taxonomic value.

Our feet are made for walking upon, our hands for grasping.

This brute's hands and feet are made

for nearly the same purpose.

There is a striking similarity...

I'm writing a book on the subject.

ERASMUS: My brother is working on a new book, too.

Come here, let me show you what I mean.

All the same pattern.

DARWIN: The bone structure in the hands and feet

are all nearly identical.

The blueprint, if you will

that existed first in the Creator's mind.

Of that there can be no doubt.

Utter tosh!

The similarity of structure indicates one thing

and one thing only:

an ancient common ancestor.

Real, flesh-and-blood parents.

Why didn't you say so, then?

Hmm?

You must publish your ideas.

If only to establish your priority.

What's holding you back?

(playing soft, lyrical piece)

(stops playing)

What is it?

I've completed a sketch of my species theory.

I believe it's a considerable step in science.

If anything should happen to me...

What do you mean?

If I should die...

Die! Charles, for goodness' sake...

Please, my love, it's important.

If anything should happen to me

I'd like you to see to it that it gets published.

£400 should be enough

to see it printed and promoted.

Nothing's going to happen to you.

You say here that the human eye

"may possibly have been acquired by gradual selection

of slight, but, in each case, useful deviations."

Yes.

That's a very great assumption, Charles.

Well, if I'm wrong about that, I'm wrong about everything.

My entire theory's in ruins.

Can your theory account for the way

my eyes and ears and hands and heart combine

to reproduce the sounds that Chopin heard in his head?

Isn't that a God-given gift?

It's given.

But not, I think, by God.

You are a man of science.

You don't want to believe anything until it's proved.

But some things are beyond proof.

It would be a nightmare to me if I thought

we didn't belong to each other forever in Heaven.

MOORE: Emma was a sincere believer

in the Christian plan of salvation

and that those who trusted in Jesus

and his resurrection from the dead

would spend eternity in Heaven.

She saw that her husband's speculations

about the origins of species and of humanity

would jeopardize the Christian plan of salvation.

God was being made remote in her husband's universe.

Now, if nature by itself, unaided by God

could make an eye

then what else couldn't nature do?

Nature could do anything, it could make everything.

In Darwin's day, the very existence

of an organ of extreme perfection like the eye

was taken by many as proof of God

as proof of a designer.

How else could all

of the intricate organs and substructures of the eye

have come together in just the right way

to make vision so possible and so perfect?

But it turns out the eye isn't exactly perfect, after all.

In fact, the eye contains profound optical imperfections.

And those imperfections are proof, in a sense

of the evolutionary ancestry of the eye.

NARRATOR: Eyes are imperfect because evolution does not create things

the way a designer or an artist does.

Natural selection simply favors random changes

that make an organism more fit to survive

and imperfections in design often result

from evolution's constant tinkering.

One such imperfection proved traumatic

for artist Valerie Young.

YOUNG: We had just come home from a party

and I saw a lot of lights flashing inside my eye,

especially on the outside edge of the right eye.

And I thought, "We may be in trouble here."

And it took me a while to really see

that it was my... this was coming from inside my eye.

Luckily, my husband was with me

because I wouldn't have been able to drive to the hospital.

So my vision was pretty obscured.

The only way I can describe it is like a jellyfish

with lots of little bubbles in it

and it just kept turning and floating in front of my eyes.

NARRATOR: Valerie had a retinal tear,

not an uncommon problem

due to the way human eyes evolved

from light-sensing patches of brain tissue

in our ancient ancestors.

In the human embryo

eyes develop from bulges in the brain's neural tube

that pinch in to form cavities.

This top layer, the retina,

(which tore in Valerie Young's eye)

contains cells that collect light.

It rests against a second, darker layer

that lines the back of the eye.

But the two layers are not attached to one another.

And when the jelly that fills the eye

liquefies as we age

it can cause the retina to tear.

The jelly can then seep into the space underneath

leading to a retinal detachment and, in some cases, blindness.

WOMAN: When Valerie Young came in

her floaters were an immediate clue

that she could have a retinal tear.

We were able to successfully apply laser treatment

in the office that day

to seal it off, like applying sandbags around something

to wall it off so that the vitreous jelly

would not get in the break and detach her retina.

NARRATOR: Valerie Young's retinal tear

is just one example of imperfections

in the design of human eyes.

Another occurs because nerve cells and blood vessels

evolved to lie in front of the retina

where they interfere with its ability to form sharp images.

It's like trying to take a picture

through a foggy piece of glass.

And the optic nerve itself evolved

to connect to the brain through a hole in the retina.

So the eyes of all vertebrates have a small blind spot,

right near the middle of the visual field.

KENNETH MILLER: Evolution starts with what's already there

tinkers with it and modifies it

but can never do a grand redesign.

So even the eye, with all of its optical perfection

has clues to the fact that its origin

is of the blind process of natural selection.

NARRATOR: Darwin believed that what he called

"an organ of extreme complexity," like the eye

could evolve by small steps, given enough time.

Any trait that improved vision

would aid in the search for food, or a mate

or in the avoidance of predators

so natural selection would most certainly favor those traits.

STEPHEN JAY GOULD: And what Darwin was able to do was to point out

that you might think, in logic

that it's difficult to imagine a set of intermediary stages

between the simplest little spot of nerve cells

that can perceive light

to a lens-forming eye that makes complex images.

But, in fact, these intermediary forms do exist in nature.

NARRATOR: At the University of Lund in Sweden

zoologist Dan-Eric Nilsson has developed models

to show how a primitive eyespot

could evolve through intermediate stages

to become a complex, humanlike eye

in less than half a million years.

NILSSON: I've been interested in eye evolution

for a long time.

In particular, I've been interested in the question

of how long time it would take for an eye to evolve.

NARRATOR: Nilsson envisioned a sequence of stages

by which a flat patch of light-sensitive cells

on an animal's skin

could evolve into a camera-type eye.

As a first step, nature would favor any changes

that made the flat patch more cuplike.

NILSSON: As soon as you've created

even the slightest depression in the center

means that the edges of the cup

will actually shade light from parts of the environment.

And of course, all the light-sensitive cells

in this little cup

they won't measure light in exactly the same direction

so already this cup has some pictorial information.

NARRATOR: Another model demonstrates

what a primitive cup-eye can do.

The brightly lighted skulls cast an image

onto a translucent screen

Nilsson installs at the back of the cup

to act like a retina.

But the image is not at all well-defined.

The cup-eye can do little more than detect movement.

This kind of eye can be found in nature today, in flatworms.

Their eyes evolved no further.

In their environment, that's all they needed.

NILSSON: But if the animals need to move faster

or evolve to become fast predators

or to see other fast predators

then the construction needs to be improved.

And one way of doing that

is to constrict the opening.

To make it smaller.

NARRATOR: That's just what happened to creatures

like the chambered nautilus.

Over thousands of generations

natural selection favored those

with slightly more constricted eye openings

which focused light more sharply.

This worked well, up to a point.

NILSSON: Since this strategy of making a sharp image

also has the drawback of creating a very dim image

it's not very popular in the animal kingdom.

And, um...

There is an alternative solution

which has become very popular in the animal kingdom

the solution that we use in our own eyes

and that is to put in a lens.

NARRATOR: Nilsson's model lens uses two thin layers of clear plastic.

He can inject water in between them

to make the plastic windows bulge out like a convex lens.

This mimics what natural selection might have done

over a few hundred thousand generations

favoring animals with a rounded, transparent layer

in their eyes

that caused light to be focused more sharply on the retina.

So we can make it gradually from no lens at all

and just continue to inject more water...

making the lenses bulge more and more

and the image becomes gradually sharper and sharper.

So we can go all the way, gradually, in very small steps

from a simple pigment cup-eye

which has barely got the ability

to determine the direction of a light source

all the way to a complete camera-type eye

of the same type as we have ourselves.

And that is really exactly

the way eye evolution must proceed.

NARRATOR: The extreme complexity of the eye

left Darwin "in a cold sweat," he wrote to a friend.

But still he was convinced that an eye could be formed

by natural selection.

He later wrote that eyes must have evolved

by "numerous gradations from an imperfect and simple eye

"to one perfect and complex

with each grade being useful to its possessor."

Nature, unaided by a designer, could produce an organ

of seemingly miraculous complexity.

What a horrid smell.

Annie. Come and look.

When I first started looking

I thought lots of the barnacles had tiny parasites.

That's an animal or plant

that lives on another animal or plant

and gets its food from it,

like mistletoe on an apple tree.

But they're not.

Do you know what they are?

No.

They're little, tiny husbands.

The females carrylittle, tiny males around with them

clinging to their skirt tails.

Just like you and Mama.

(chuckles)

Just like me and Mama.

I think it's the most interesting barnacle

in the whole wide world.

What do you think we should call it?

"Barnabus."

"Barney," for short.

"Barney Ickle."

(laughs)

The tiny parasitic males are rudimentary

in a way that I believe can hardly be equaled

in the whole of the animal kingdom.

They have no mouth or stomach.

They are really little more

than a tiny head atop an enormous coiled penis.

A bit like me, really

apart from the bit about the mouth and the stomach.

(both laughing)

What's funny?

Nothing, nothing.

(gasps)

Charles!

Charles, are you all right?

(gasping)

Erasmus, take him home!

(gasps)

Why must you work so hard at your... horrid little mollusks?

Ooh!

DARWIN: They're not horrid little mollusks

they're horrid little crustaceans.

And I have horrid pigeons and horrid worms, too.

They're providing the evidence I need for my theory.

(gasps in pain)

I don't have the right to publish the idea

unless I have the evidence.

We must do something about you.

(gasping)

Your stomach condition is nervous in origin,

brought on as a result of excessive mental exertion.

(gasps)

Cold water is used to stimulate the circulation

and draw the blood supply away

from the inflamed nerves of the stomach.

(panting)

No sugar, no salt, no bacon

no alcohol, no tobacco.

In fact, anything at all that's good is forbidden.

(continues panting)

(children giggling)

(panting)

I don't know how or why

but I feel so much better.

(chuckles)

I look around me... and I don't care two hoots

how any of this came to be created.

(thunder rumbles)

Children!

Last one back to the house is a rice pudding.

(laughing): Come on, William, you're last!

(children shouting)

Come on, run, quick, quick, quick!

Come on, Etty.

(chuckling)

(children laughing)

Annie!

Annie, you won!

(laughing)

Come here, my darling!

(grunts and laughs)

Oh, Annie, my dear and good child!

(kiss)

(chuckling)

Come on.

Come on, darling.

(church organ plays intro to "Rock of Ages")

CONGREGATION: "While I draw this fleeting breath..."

(Erasmus singing loudly, out of tune and out of sync)

"When my eyelids close in death"

"When I soar through tracts unknown"

(children giggling at Erasmus)

"See Thee on Thy judgment throne"

"Rock of Ages, cleft for me"

"Let me hide myself in thee."

(children laughing noisily)

"Amen."

Papa, Annie's woke me up.

Annie's woke me up.

Mum, wake up, wake up, Annie's crying.

(crying softly)

Oh, now, what's the matter, my darling?

What's wrong?

Does your head hurt?

Ah, there's no fever.

Does it hurt here?

(groans in pain)

(baby cries)

(cries softly)

That's all right, my darling.

You'll be all right.

The doctor's coming.

You go and get dressed.

I'll stay with her.

What if she's inherited my wretched digestion?

She'll be fine.

(Annie continues to cry)

EMMA: Poor dear.

What did he say?

Itisher stomach, but he has no idea what's wrong.

Perhaps I should take her to go see Dr. Gully.

He cured me.

EMMA: You'll be back soon

and Papa will look after you.

Soon there's going to be a new baby

and I shall need your help.

Say good-bye to Etty now.

DARWIN: I want you to sit up.

Now, come on, girl, take one big gulp of this.

Come on, that's a good girl.

That's a good girl.

Oh, quickly.

(crying)

Oh.

Come on, lie back.

(whispering): That's a good girl.

She seems so weak.

Isn't there anything you can do?

All you can do is pray.

It's my fault.

First-cousin marriages always produce weak children.

It's my fault.

(breathing noisily)

(screaming): Why?!

(crying)

(sobbing hysterically)

I've given the cause of death

as bilious fever with a typhoid character.

The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.

Please!

Don't!

Oh, Charles, God grant us strength.

(weeping)

(sniffling)

(bird calling)

Please, Charles, please.

Come along, children.

(church organ playing "All Things Bright and Beautiful")

CONGREGATION (inside church): "All things bright and beautiful"

"All creatures great and small"

"All things wise and wonderful"

"The Lord God made them all."

MOORE: What Annie's death did to Darwin's faith

was mainly to destroy Christianity.

He could no longer see

that a good God ordered and superintended

all the events of human life and of the universe.

And he believed that she did not deserve punishment

by God, or by nature either.

She had simply fallen victim to the struggle for existence:

the amoral, purposeless struggle

that ran according to laws of nature.

STEPHEN JAY GOULD: Darwin certainly didn't think

that evolution spoke either for or against

the unprovable existence of... God, or a form of God.

He didn't desire to cast disparagement

on anyone's religious convictions.

He regarded it as a private matter

which he was never able to hold with conventional zeal

following the tragedy of his life.

CHILDREN: "All things bright and beautiful"

"All creatures great and small"

"All things wise and wonderful"

"The Lord God made them all"

"The purple-headed mountains"

"The river running by..."

NARRATOR: Today scientists hold all conceivable views on religion:

from atheism to agnosticism to a general spirituality.

And many, like biologist Ken Miller

adhere to very traditional beliefs.

KENNETH MILLER: I am an orthodox Catholic, and I'm an orthodox Darwinist.

My idea of God is a supreme being

who acts in concert with the principles and the ideas

that Darwin explained to us about the origin of species.

My students often ask me, "You say you believe in God.

"Well, what kind of God?

"Is it a fashionable, new-age God?

"A pyramid-power kind of God?

"Do you think, like some scientists do

that God is the sum total of the laws of physics?"

And I shake those off

and say that my religious belief is entirely conventional.

PRIEST AND CONGREGATION: Our Father, who art in heaven

Hallowed be thy name.

MILLER: It surprises students very often that anyone could say that

that kind of very traditional, conventional religious belief

could be compatible with evolution, but it is.

PRIEST: ...peace and unity of Your Kingdom

where you live forever and ever.

CONGREGATION: Amen.

I find this absolutely wonderful consistency

with what I understand about the universe from science

and what I understand about the universe from faith.

ANNOUNCER (on radio): Tennessee's premier morning radio talk show;

the Hallerin Hilton Hill Morning Show

on NewsTalk 99, WNOX-AM/FM, Loudon/Knoxville.

(electronic beeping)

12 past the hour of 6:00.

It's my pleasure to welcome

to the broadcast this morning

Dr. Kenneth Miller.

He's a professor of biology at Brown University.

His book is entitled

Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search

for Common Ground between God and Evolution.

He's in town tonight.

Let me ask you this: as a cellular biologist

when in your experience... are you studying something

reading something, or doing some research...

when do you come to the point where you go, "That's God"?

As an experimental scientist, I don't find God

in the insufficiency of science to explain things.

In other words, I don't find God in ignorance;

I don't find God because we say, "Well, we can't explain that,

that must be something that God's doing."

But what did God do?

Did he just create some kind of primordial soup and say, "Go"?

Well, a long time ago people were sufficiently unknowing

of how things worked in the natural world

to see when the Sun moved across the sky

they imagined that God had to push that Sun across the sky.

And gradually we began to realize

that the world works according to physical laws.

Science investigated those laws.

So, what room is there for God in... in present-day life?

Well, I think if you ask people who are believers

"How does God act?"

they would say he acts in a variety of ways:

he answers our prayers, he inspires us.

No doubt there are events that take place

that are part of what some people might call "God's plan."

And what I would suggest

is if you look back in Earth's history

if God is working today

in concert with the laws of nature,

with physical laws and so forth.

He probably worked in concert with them in the past.

In a sense... in a sense

He's the guy who made up the rules of the game

and He manages to act within those rules.

NARRATOR: For Miller, and millions of followers of all major religions

notions of God and evolution are fully compatible.

CONGREGATION: "You take away the sins of..."

NARRATOR: But not everyone agrees.

DENNETT: When we replace

the traditional idea of God, the creator, with the idea

of the process of natural selection doing the creating

the creation is as wonderful as it ever was.

All that great design work had to be done.

It just wasn't done by an individual; it was done

by this huge process distributed over billions of years.

God created man in His image.

In the image of God, He created him.

Male and female, He created them.

DENNETT: Whereas people used to think of meaning coming from on high

and being ordained from the top down

now we have Darwin saying, "No, all of this design can happen

"all of this purpose can emerge

from the bottom up, without any direction at all."

And that's a very unsettling thought for many people.

In Darwin's day, science and politics and religion

were all of a piece

when you talked about the origins of life and of species.

Astronomy could go along pretty well

because it could testify to the wisdom and power of God

in holding the planets in place...

but the idea of evolution

or "transmutation," people said with a snarl,

put in jeopardy the whole established social order.

What is in this "Big Book" of his

do you think?

Transmutation.

(sighing)

Another Darwin

blotting God out of creation.

We want to support

your scheme for a museum of natural history.

Some people see it

as rash, extravagant, grandiose.

If it's grand, it's because it should house

as wide a display as possible.

But we need your help in return.

It is up to you

as the country's leading anatomist and paleontologist

to prove man's superiority.

We won't have street ruffians tout man's monkey origin

in Her Majesty's museums.

You can rely on me, Bishop Wilberforce.

OWEN: The human brain differs markedly from that of all other mammals.

In man, not only do the cerebral hemispheres overlap

the olfactory lobes and the cerebellum...

but they extend in advance of the one

and farther back than the other.

Their posterior development is so marked, that I have assigned

to that part the character of a third lobe

peculiar to Homo sapiens: the hippocampus minor.

(audience murmuring)

Peculiar mental faculties are associated

with this highest form of brain, and I am led, therefore

to regard man not merely as representative

of a distinct subclass...

(approving laughter)

but as the inhabitant of one reserved for him alone.

The human brain is in itself proof

of man's moral and religious faculties.

Such are the powers with which we, and we alone, are gifted.

(audience cheering)

DARWIN: I wonder what a chimpanzee would have to say

about that, Mr. Huxley.

HUXLEY: I think it's priceless.

His theory is a house built on sand,

a Corinthian portico on cow dung.

DARWIN: Yes.

Damn all the sanctimonious meddlers

who try and stifle troublesome research.

The ultimate court of appeal of science

is observation and experiment

not authority, wealth and rank.

Your disagreements with Owen should not be personal.

I can't help it.

He's so pompous.

The prospect of his slipping

on one of his pickled brains

is just too good to be true.

Bad feeling will only cloud the issue

and lead to bad science.

Tell that to Owen.

ERASMUS: Huxley's saying in public

what you think in private.

Charles, you've stalled long enough.

You've collected enough barnacles

to sink a ship-of-the-line.

Meanwhile, you're being upstaged.

That's not important.

My book is the thing... once my work is done.

Will it deal with man?

It's too surrounded by prejudices.

Well, whether it does or it doesn't

you must publish.

Oh, my God.

Ras...

What is it?

ERASMUS: Who is Alfred Wallace?

DARWIN: My dear Huxley

it's like a précis of my theory.

All my originality, whatever its worth, has been smashed.

Had Wallace a copy of the essay I'd written in '44 in front of him

he couldn't have written a better short abstract!

Variations being pushed further and further from parent species

by a struggle for existence...

overpopulation...

it's all there.

Is your book ready for publication?

Publish!

How can I publish?

Honorably?

I'd sooner burn the blasted thing

than have him, or anyone else, think

that I behaved in a paltry spirit.

Then publish a joint paper,

excerpts from your work

along with Wallace's essay.

And then you must prepare a manuscript for publication.

Who knows?

It may all be for the best.

At last we'll finally get to learn your views in full.

(gasping)

Charles, what is it?

(breathing heavily)

This book will be the death of me.

Oh...

Shh...

What a miserable wretch I'd be without you near me.

DARWIN: When on board H.M.S.Beagle as naturalist

I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution

of the organic beings inhabiting South America...

and in the geological relations

of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent.

These facts seemed to throw some light

on the origin of species...

that mystery of mysteries...

EMMA: The Times is very positive.

I should think so, it's Huxley.

The Athenaeum wants me tried, in the Divinity Hall, the College

the lecture room and museum.

My book is no more unorthodox than the subject demands.

I don't discuss the origins of man;

I don't discuss Genesis.

Charles, don't be so naive.

It's clear you think man is no exception.

Whether you're right or wrong

you must finish what you started.

OWEN: Darwin?

Darwin!

Ah, Owen!

How dare you?!

How dare you paint me as a reactionary?!

I didn't paint you as a reactionary.

How dare you put my name

with the defenders of immutability?

Is my concept of the ordained continuous becoming

of living things to be ignored?

But what does it mean?

I don't know what it means.

It means...

It means animals appearing out of thin air!

Not at all!

You believe that selection

is the only possible creative law.

Pure chance, the roll of the dice.

In fact, new species are created

by natural birth according to God's law!

Well, I don't believe...

I know who's put you up to this.

Huxley!

Please, Richard.

I will have absolutely no truck

with the Huxleys of this world

and nor should you!

It is an abuse of science.

You should be ashamed of yourself!

Your book is a snub to the clergy

and an insult to humanity.

It's nihilism!

Only a man devoid of a soul

could find solace in a bestial ancestry.

(laughing)

Well, it's as respectable to be modified monkey

as modified dirt.

Huxley, please...

I think it's splendid.

Old ladies of both sexes say it's a dangerous book.

Splendid.

Don't worry.

I'll deal with him.

I'm sharpening my beak and claws in readiness.

(sighs)

(men cheering and clapping)

Any contribution to our natural history

from the pen of Mr. Charles Darwin

is certain to command attention.

His latest publication, The Origin of Species,

is manifestly regarded by him

as the opus upon which his future fame is to rest.

Mr. Darwin claims

that every living thing, every fish, plant, fungus...

(audience laughing)

fly...

(laughter)

elephant...

(laughter increases)

man...

(laughter and applause)

turnip...

are all equally the lineal descendants

of the same common ancestor.

Such a notion is absolutely incompatible

with the word of God.

MEN: Hear, hear.

Man was made in the image of God and redeemed by the Eternal Son.

Natural selection is an ingenious theory for denying

the working, and therefore the existence, of the Creator.

In fact, the human brain differs markedly

from that of all other mammals.

HUXLEY: Unfortunately, my Lord Bishop

you have been misinformed.

If we are unprejudiced judges, we have to admit

that there is as little interval (as animals)

between the gorilla and the man

as there is between the gorilla and the baboon.

It is... it is speech alone, and not some spiritual gift

that makes man a reasonable being.

That is the source of our unlimited intellectual progress.

But that does not disguise the fact

that to the very root and foundation of his nature

man is one with the rest of the organic world.

(booing and jeering)

No one... no one who has ever dissected the brain of an ape

agrees with Professor Owen.

His findings are wrong.

I can only assume that Professor Owen's brain

must have shrunk in the pickling jar.

I meant, of course

the chimpanzees' brains he had examined.

Oh, Lord!

It was then that God delivered Wilberforce

into my hands.

(audience clamoring)

I wonder, Mr. Huxley.

Is it through your grandfather or your grandmother

that you claim descent from an ape?

(uproarious laughter)

I stood up...

very quiet, very grave

and said my say with perfect good temper.

If the question...

if the question is put to me

would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather

or a man, highly intelligent

possessed of great means of influence

and yet who employed these faculties and that influence

for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule

into a grave scientific discussion

I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.

You didn't!

I said that, or something very like that.

How dare you attack

a live bishop in public?

Have you no respect for the purple waistcoat?

HUXLEY: Lady Brewster fainted, had to be carried from the room.

And then Admiral FitzRoy

got to his feet.

FitzRoy?

(audience clamoring)

This!

Believe in this!

Believe in God, not man!

Oh, my.

DARWIN: We'll probably never know the truth.

ERASMUS: Well, the truth, Charles, is in your book.

It's the most interesting thing I've ever read.

The reasoning

is so entirely satisfactory to me

that... if the facts don't fit

then, well...

so much the worse for the facts.

The shakes.

Time I was naturally selected.

DENNETT: For more than a century, people have often thought

that the conclusion to draw from Darwin's vision

is that Homo sapiens, our species

that we're just animals too, we're just mammals;

that there is nothing morally special about us.

I myself don't think

this follows at all from Darwin's vision

but it is certainly the received view in many quarters.

NARRATOR: Ever sinceThe Origin of Species was published

strict believers in biblical creation

have attacked Darwin's vision.

Their concerns aren't only about the science of evolution.

At stake, many believe

is nothing less than the human soul.

MOORE: To suggest that animals and plants

and us, humans, came into being in a natural law-like way

in the way the planets move

was to put in jeopardy the human soul.

And the human soul is the crux of the matter

because if we are not different from animals

if we don't live forever in heaven or in hell

then why should we behave other than like animals in this life?

MAN: In the 19th century, in Darwin's time

it was audacious to claim

that humans and chimps were closely related.

There wasn't that much scientific evidence.

But since that time the evidence has become strong.

First, we saw the fossil record appear.

Evidence of human ancestors that had apelike features

established the plausibility of the idea

that humans and chimps had common ancestors.

And then in the last 20 years

we've seen the emergence of a whole new type of data

that's established a close relationship

between chimps and humans.

And that comes from the analysis of DNA.

PAGE: This is DNA.

We've got DNA, chimps have got DNA,

bacteria have got DNA, petunias have got DNA,

crabs have got DNA.

Every living animal, plant, fish, frog has got DNA

and if we compare the DNAs of any two species

we can establish how closely related they are one to another.

NARRATOR: In the early days of DNA research

a double strand of DNA was extracted

from each species to be compared.

When heated, the strands split apart.

When the single strands from each creature

were put together and allowed to cool

the two always combined to form the familiar double helix.

The degree to which the strands mated successfully

was a measure of their similarity.

It turned out that human DNA and chimp DNA

combined almost perfectly.

Today, this similarity can be seen even more precisely.

DNA sequences can now be "read" letter by letter.

PAGE: Here we're looking at the DNA sequences

of one particular gene as found in human and chimp

and what's immediately evident

is that humans and chimps have DNAs that are 98% identical.

They're basically the same;

there are just a couple of spelling changes.

Why are there only a couple of spelling changes?

Because we and chimps had a common ancestor

only a few million years ago

and these few spelling differences

have accumulated during the propagation of this DNA

during those few million years.

If more time had passed since we had our last common ancestor

more spelling changes would have accumulated.

NARRATOR: If the same gene from a rat is compared

many more spelling differences are seen.

That's because our common ancestor with the rat

lived about 80 million or 100 million years ago

and there's been much more time

for spelling differences to accumulate.

NARRATOR: Chimpanzees and humans

are made from blueprints that are 98% the same.

But what about the ways

humans and chimps think and act in the world?

Are there similarities there as well?

WOMAN: Boy, doing some pull-ups.

Oh... be careful.

NARRATOR: Psychologist Sally Boysen explores the commonalities

between the minds of chimps and humans,

a quest that may help explain how the human mind evolved.

BOYSEN: The developmental milestones

really, throughout the life of a chimp

are almost exactly the same as humans.

Everything is so similar.

They respond to new things and new toys

and they have the same kinds of rough-and-tumble play.

Harper's rough and rowdy

and runs all over the place and climbs.

And Emma really can almost entertain herself.

One of the things that our work allows us to see

is that chimpanzees can acquire

very sophisticated, complex cognitive skills

like learning to count

which they normally wouldn't learn in the wild.

One, two, three...

four, five!

Ooh...

Yet they have the requisite neural capacity to do that.

Where did that come from?

Okay, Sheeb, we're going to do another turn now.

Here we go.

One of those.

Ooh, and a malted milk ball.

Can you tell me the answer to this?

With blue and brown?

Show me, yeah, go ahead.

(screen beeps)

Excellent!

BOYSEN: There's almost nothing

that the chimps haven't been able to learn

that we've tried to teach them.

We've seen their ability to grasp extremely complex notions

like the concept of zero, for example.

BOYSEN: Okay, Sheeb, look.

What if I didn't put any candy here at all?

What would you say?

(computer beeping)

Zero, that's right.

There's no candy here.

Oh, that's too bad...

BOYSEN: There's no way the chimps would be able to do this

if they didn't have a great deal of commonality

in, literally, the neurological structure

that supports their ability to learn... just like we do.

Those things are absolutely comparable

and had to come from a common ancestor.

KENNETH MILLER: The similarities that we have with our primate relatives

are extraordinary.

We share so much of our DNA

we share so much of our morphology

we even share our blood types.

But for all of those similarities

there are striking differences.

I think the reason for this is really very simple.

And that is, the line of evolution that led to us

led, for reasons which we are only beginning to understand

to an explosive development of mental capacity.

And what clearly happened is that natural selection

favored the evolution of organisms that could communicate

that could manipulate symbols, and could construct language.

Darwin's great idea is a grand and marvelous explanation

that shows us that we are united with every other form of life

on this planet.

And I find that an exciting

and maybe even an ennobling way to look at things.

(choir singing hymn)

MOORE: Darwin died in April 1882, at the age of 73.

The family thought he would be buried

in the parish churchyard.

Darwin had said, months before he died

that he would have to look forward to it

as the sweetest place on earth.

It was not to be.

In London, Darwin's friends

determined to make his death and burial a state occasion.

They went to the Royal Society and they got signatures.

They went to the House of Commons

and got up a petition.

They telegraphed the Dean of Westminster

who was abroad and got his approval.

A special anthem was even written for the occasion.

And on the 26th of April, a week after the death

Darwin's body was borne mightily in procession

down the aisle of Westminster Abbey

to be interred in the shadow of the grave of Sir Isaac Newton.

Darwin's interment celebrated the vast social transformation

that England was undergoing.

There were new colonies, new industries

and new men to run them.

Darwin's body was enshrined

to the greater glory of these new professionals

for he had naturalized creation

and delivered human nature and human destiny into their hands.

Society would never be the same.

Darwin's vision of nature

was, I believe, fundamentally a religious vision

one with which he ended his most famous work

On the Origin of Species.

"There is grandeur in this view of life

"with its several powers

"having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one

"and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on...

(Darwin's voice joins Moore's)

"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."

Continue the journey

into where we're from and where we're going

at the Evolution web site.

Visit www.pbs.org.

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