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ANDREW MARR: For 150 years,
a revolutionary idea has been
spreading all over the world.
It has helped us unravel
the mysteries of creation,
transforming our understanding of life
on Earth and our own place in nature.
But this idea has implications
that go far beyond science.
Its legacy reaches deep
into every area of our lives,
challenging our culture, our politics,
our religious beliefs.
It forces us to re-examine
the foundations
of human behaviour and morality.
And it's been used to justify
imperialism, war and genocide.
(SPEAKING GERMAN)
In this series,
I'm going to tell the story
of the most important idea
to emerge in the modern world.
Darwin's theory of evolution
by natural selection,
is now widely accepted
as a scientifically
truthful description
of the course of life on Earth.
And scientific truth
is never a bad thing.
But this is an idea so big,
it's now got a life of its own.
Understand Darwinism correctly
and it can offer a key to many
of humanity's greatest problems.
Get Darwinism wrong
and it leads you straight to hell.
Welcome to the world
of Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
In 2006,
next to a photograph of the 9/11 attack
on the Twin Towers in New York,
the influential Turkish writer,
Adnan Oktar,
wrote that those responsible for acts
of terror are in fact Darwinists.
Darwin's theory of evolution, he argued,
is a philosophy that values
and promotes conflict.
After 150 years,
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution
still has the power to provoke
fierce opposition.
And Oktar is one of his most
extreme and vocal opponents.
Adnan Oktar is regarded by some
as the leader of a dangerous cult.
But he is a big player in creationism.
He believes that Darwin
was unscientific,
evolution has never happened
and God created
all living things as they are.
He's hardly alone in that,
but he goes a great deal further.
"The evil in the world," he says,
the violence, the wars, the terrorism,
are the responsibility of Darwinists.
Oktar is no scientist,
but he's written a lavishly illustrated
book, The Atlas of Creation,
which contains spurious evidence
that life on Earth
is not the result of evolution.
Many Muslims and Islamic scientists
are opposed to Oktar's views,
but his influence is growing.
He's now taking his extraordinary
campaign to the rest of the world,
by sending The Atlas of Creation
to schools,
universities and international leaders.
Of course, Oktar's hardly the first
to campaign against
Darwin's Theory of Evolution.
We don't believe that men
have come from monkeys.
God has created men.
I just heard the majority would say
it was Charles Darwin's fault.
Our school systems teach the children
that they are nothing but glorified apes
who are evolutionised
out of some primordial soup.
MARR: Many religious fundamentalists
are disturbed by the implications
of Darwin's Theory of Evolution.
They believe it's unleashed a godless
era of conflict and moral decline.
To this day, Darwin's idea
has the power to challenge
some of our most deeply held beliefs.
Charles Darwin
and his followers have shown
how all life on the planet
evolved from a single source.
The mechanism they call evolution
by natural selection means competition,
extinction and the emergence
of new forms of life
without the need
for a director or conductor.
The creator shimmers
and vanishes like a mirage.
Has Darwin killed God?
Charles Darwin's dangerous
idea began to take root in 1831,
when he set off
on a trip around the world
aboard HMS Beagle, aged just 22.
He would later call this voyage,
"By far,
the most important event in my life. "
His adventure lasted almost five years.
And Darwin's historic encounters
with iguanas, finches and tortoises
on the Galápagos Islands
have passed into legend.
In fact, Darwin spent
just five weeks in the Galápagos.
But he spent more than a year here,
at the southernmost tip
of South America.
Tierra del Fuego.
Darwin's encounter with the natives
of this distant land would lead him
to a radical new understanding
of man's place in nature.
The Beagle came here
to return three of Darwin's
fellow passengers to their homeland.
The first was a 27-year-old who Darwin
described as moody and taciturn.
The second, a dandy,
who became distressed
if his shoes weren't polished.
And the third, a little girl,
said to be as broad as she was high.
The Beagle's captain had captured
the Fuegans on a previous voyage.
They'd been taken back to Britain
to be introduced to civilised society.
The Fuegan three had been treated
more as objects of curiosity
to be prodded and goggled at
than as human beings.
They'd been taught English,
dressed in Western clothes,
converted to Christianity,
shown to the king and queen.
And they'd been renamed.
Fuegia Basket, Jemmy Button,
York Minster.
Well, these are names for dolls,
not for people.
During the long voyage,
Darwin was charmed and intrigued
by the three Fuegans.
He thought they were different
from civilised Europeans,
but not that different.
Now they were coming home
to set up a Christian mission
and convert their fellow Fuegans.
So, a simple, heart-warming story.
Except that when the Beagle
finally landed here,
on the wild shores of Tierra del Fuego,
Darwin was in for a shock.
When the Beagle dropped anchor
at Wallaceton Island in December 1832,
Darwin encountered uncivilised
Fuegan natives for the first time.
"These were the most abject
"and miserable creatures
I anywhere beheld, "
he wrote later.
"Their hideous faces
bedaubed with white paint.
"Their skins filthy and greasy.
"Their voices discordant
and their gestures violent. "
Darwin was fascinated to see humans
in such a primitive,
almost animal state.
But worse was to come.
After a month, the Christian mission
was established and the Beagle set off
to explore more of the coastline.
Jemmy, Fuegia and York Minster
were left behind
with the mission's leader,
the Reverend Richard Matthews.
Ten days later,
Darwin and the crew returned
to see how they were getting along
with their civilising Christian mission.
Darwin was aghast to discover
that all the mission's property
had either been stolen or destroyed.
The Reverend Matthews
was in a state of abject terror,
at the mercy of a group of Fuegans
who were curiously
plucking out the hairs of his beard
using a pair of mussel shells
as pincers.
Even more shocking, Fuegia Basket
Jemmy Button and York Minster
were already slipping back
into their savage state.
"One's mind hurries back over past
centuries," wrote Darwin later,
"and asks whether our ancestors
could be such as these."
Civilisation suddenly
appeared thin and fragile.
Darwin was shocked to see
how quickly his Fuegan friends
had reverted to their original state.
This would lead him to question
the biblical account
of man's place in God's creation.
Dangerous territory for an outwardly
respectable Christian gentleman.
When the Beagle finally turned for home,
Darwin carried with him
five years' worth of notebooks,
and specimens and thoughts.
But it was the Fuegans
who really seemed to have haunted him.
Because they showed him
just how changeable humanity is.
Not safely fixed outside nature,
but a piece of the rest.
Mingled and mutable.
Darwin found this place
deeply unsettling.
And it obliged him to ask
that most unsettling question,
where do we, all of us,
Fuegans, natives, Europeans,
where do we come from?
Back in England,
this question would turn
into something even more dangerous.
On a trip to the zoo in 1838,
Darwin was captivated
by a young orang-utan called Jenny,
the first ever to go on view in Britain.
Jenny was being teased by her keeper,
who was holding out an apple
just beyond her reach.
She was kicking, crying and sulking
like a naughty child.
The keeper said that if Jenny would
behave, she could have the apple.
After a while, Jenny, who clearly seemed
to have understood every word,
pulled herself together
and was given her reward.
Darwin was delighted to see
that she jumped into an armchair
and began to eat the apple with the most
contented countenance imaginable.
And later he wrote, "Let man visit
the orang-utan in domestication
"and see its intelligence."
He wasn't alone.
The young Queen Victoria visited
the apes in London Zoo and said,
"The orang-utan is too wonderful.
"He is painfully and frightfully
and disagreeably human."
A few weeks later,
Darwin returned to the zoo
to take a closer look at Jenny.
The more he studied her,
the more he felt haunted by his memories
of the natives in Tierra del Fuego.
Something unthinkable was pressing
to the forefront of his mind.
"Compare the Fuegans
and the orang-utans, "said Darwin,
"and dare say the differences
are so great. "
He then picked up a mirror
and he looked at his own face.
And then back at Jenny.
And then back at himself.
And he stared at his own face
more intently than he had
ever done in his life before.
And the more he looked,
the more the unthinkable became obvious.
There was a deep connection
between himself,
the Fuegans and the apes.
Darwin was speaking evolution,
but in 1838 it sounded like revolution.
He was so disturbed
by the potential impact of his work
that he'd started keeping his dangerous
ideas in a set of secret notebooks.
In one of them, he'd begun
to sketch out a new kind of family tree
to illustrate his emerging
theory of evolution.
Darwin represented the different species
by different twigs on his tree,
and he suggested that, for instance,
mankind and orang-utans were related
through a common ancestor.
Then he went a great deal further,
leaping forward in thought,
rather bravely, to suggest that perhaps
all life on the planet had a single,
common source.
This was an extraordinary leap of logic,
and Darwin was modest enough
to write at the top of the page,
"I think."
These few sketchy lines
represented the evolution
of all life on Earth.
Darwin had unleashed
the idea that human beings
were not created separately by God,
we'd evolved,
just like everything else in nature.
"Man in his arrogance, thinks of himself
as a great work, "Darwin would write.
"More true is to consider him
created from animals. "
Darwin's revolution was in motion.
But his explanation of how one species,
including man, evolved from another,
would be even more challenging.
He found the key while talking
to gardeners, pigeon fanciers,
and animal breeders.
With dogs or pigeons or horses,
the traits are selected by breeders
looking for longer legs or floppy ears
or decorative feathers,
or whatever it is.
The choosing is done by the breeder.
But here's the question,
what is the force in nature
that selects?
Darwin found his answer
in a book about population growth
written by an economist and clergyman
called Thomas Malthus.
Malthus claimed that
the world's human population
was expanding faster
than its food supply.
Famine was killing off
weaker individuals
in a perpetual struggle for survival.
He saw this as nature's way
of restoring the population balance.
This was hardly a Christian view.
It was a brutal selection process
that defied religious morality
and the sanctity of human life.
But Darwin now applied Malthus' warning
about the fight for survival
to his own theory.
Perhaps all life was engaged
in the same perpetual struggle
to survive and reproduce.
Darwin proposed one general law.
Namely, multiply, vary,
let the strongest live
and the weakest die.
He called this law natural selection.
This was creation, according to Darwin.
No Adam and Eve, no need for God.
And in God's place,
an indifferent mechanism.
A mechanism that
relentlessly scrutinised
every individual of every species.
It selected the best adapted
and remorselessly eliminated the rest.
Over time, it has created today's world
and today's creatures, including
Oh, yes, us!
"Man, wonderful man", wrote Darwin,
"must collapse into nature's cauldron.
"He is not a deity. He is no exception."
At a stroke, Darwin had demolished
the biblical account of Creation.
One of his old teachers would warn him
that his new creed would bring
ruin and confusion, undermining
the whole moral and social fabric.
Riddled with self-doubt,
Darwin was tormented by dreams
of being hanged or beheaded.
Darwin knew that if he went public
without enough evidence
for this strange, strange theory,
he'd face public ridicule and attack,
so he spent the next 20 years
working on it in private.
He knew perfectly well
he was taking on religion.
He said the Old Testament
was no more to be trusted
than the views or beliefs
of any barbarian.
On November 24th, 1859,
Darwin finally published
On the Origin of Species
by means of Natural Selection.
Dull title,
but it did what it said on the cover.
It upended our understanding
of life on Earth.
But just as Darwin had feared,
the press were most interested
in his ideas about mankind's ancestry.
Darwin himself deliberately
downplayed human evolution,
leaving any talk about it
until right at the end of the book,
with this crazily coy throwaway line,
"Light will be shed
on the origins of man."
It didn't work.
Everybody was talking about whether
mankind was descended from monkeys.
The great Victorian statesman,
Benjamin Disraeli, famously asked,
"Is man an ape or an angel, my Lord?
I am on the side of the angels."
Some of Darwin's Christian colleagues
acknowledged
the importance of his theory,
but the hierarchy
of the Church of England
pounced on Darwin's degrading suggestion
that man was not divinely created,
but descended from animals.
The attack was led by the Bishop
of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce,
otherwise known as Soapy Sam,
on account of his
hand-wringing gestures.
Soapy Sam had already criticised
Darwin's ideas in print,
but he now intended to shred them,
in person and in public.
It happened here, in Oxford,
in June 1860,
at the annual meeting of the Association
for the Advancement of Science.
Darwin was too ill to attend
the meeting himself,
but his friend,
the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley,
was there to defend his theory.
Thomas Huxley
thought up the word "agnostic"
to describe his own
scepticism about religion,
and he was deeply hostile
to the Church of England
interfering with science.
A great beefy hunk of a man
with a hot temper,
he'd become known as Darwin's bulldog.
And today he was spoiling for a fight.
Nearly 1,000 people
crammed into the museum library
to watch the big fight.
The room was said to be
crowded to suffocation.
And so in this broiling intellectual
hothouse, the debate began.
After half an hour of serious scientific
argument against Darwin's theory,
Soapy Sam decided to try to lighten
the mood with a little joke.
And so he turned
to Thomas Huxley and asked him
if he would prefer
to be descended from a monkey
on his grandfather's side
or his grandmother's.
Now, for the time,
this was rather vulgar.
And Huxley turned
to a neighbour and said,
"The Lord hath delivered him
into mine hands."
And he stood up
and he said to Wilberforce
that if the choice
was being descended from an ape
or being descended
from somebody who was prepared
to use his intellect and eloquence
to descend to cheap, vulgar points
in a serious debate,
then frankly he'd prefer the monkey.
When he heard about the row,
Darwin said to Huxley,
"I honour your pluck.
"I would have as soon as died as answer
the Bishop in such an assembly. "
And it was generally agreed
that Darwin's bulldog
had, with a snarl and a chomp,
seen off the bish.
To be honest, we can't be sure
just what was said so long ago,
during what was clearly
a knockabout event.
But one thing is clear.
The Oxford debate of June 1860,
was a really important moment
in the history of ideas.
The established Church took a body blow.
Her authority never really recovered.
Scientific thinkers
moved into the intellectual lead,
and a gap opened between
religious ways of thinking and science,
which has never truly closed.
The theory of evolution
by natural selection
was now spreading far beyond science,
and it was about to take on
an unpredictable life of its own.
Within months of publication,
Karl Marx had already picked up
on Darwin's idea that all life
depended on relentless conflict.
He claimedThe Origin of Species
gave him a natural scientific basis
for the class struggle in history.
This was just the start.
One of the most excited
reactions to Darwin
came from a young German philosopher
called Friedrich Nietzsche.
"By breaking the faith in God",
he wrote,
"one breaks the whole.
"Nothing essential
is left in one's hands."
For Nietzsche,
Western civilisation was doomed.
In 1882, he baldly declared,
"God is dead".
Nietzsche believed that Darwin's theory
tore down Europe's old system
of God-given authority and morality.
He had a long-term influence
on many German intellectuals.
He challenged them
to abandon their traditional
Christian attitudes and values.
"When one gives up the Christian faith",
said Nietzsche,
"one pulls the right to Christian
morality from under one's feet."
Now, Nietzsche was a man who could never
see an idea without pushing it too far.
But on this he had a point.
He was confronting the post-Darwin world
with this question.
Give up religion
and what is the structure,
what is the architecture
behind any system of moral values?
In August 1914,
the Great War broke out in Europe.
Tanks, trenches and casualties
on an unimaginable scale.
As the Great War slithered
to industrial slaughter,
new stories began to filter out
of German barbarism and atrocities,
the shooting of women and children,
the gassing of soldiers.
The world was aghast.
How could such an advanced,
civilised nation be doing these things?
One answer emerged here,
in northern France,
where the Kaiser and his generals
had their headquarters.
And it was uncovered by an American,
a scientist, pretty much forgotten now,
but back then, hugely influential.
Professor Vernon Kellogg arrived here
at the headquarters of the German
High Command in 1915.
As America wasn't yet involved
in the fighting,
and Kellogg was a pacifist,
he'd come to organise humanitarian aid
to the victims of the war.
By day, Kellogg was engaged
with U.S. Government relief agencies.
By night, he would dine with members
of the German High Command.
Their after-dinner conversations
went on into the early hours,
and Kellogg was horrified
by what he heard.
"The creed of natural selection,
"based on violent
and fatal competitive struggle
"is the gospel of the German
intellectuals," Kellogg wrote.
They told him that if Germany
was beaten,
it showed she was on
the wrong evolutionary line
and deserved to be beaten.
But if Germany won,
it showed that the rest of the world
was on the wrong evolutionary path
and should be stopped for the sake
of mankind or else destroyed as unfit.
Kellogg was shocked
by this grotesque Darwinian motivation
for the German war machine.
He began to question his own pacifism
and he decided that these ideas
could only be beaten by force.
Kellogg published an account
of his chilling late-night conversations
with the German officers in a book
called Headquarters Nights.
He began to campaign
for American intervention in the war.
Kellogg was very well connected
to the United States'political elite,
and his message echoed
through Washington.
On April 6th, 1917, America abandoned
her isolationist policy in Europe,
and declared war on Germany.
For many Americans,
Darwin's ideas were now tainted
by association with militarism
and the atrocities of war.
The U.S. Secretary of State,
William Jennings Bryan,
had also been influenced by Kellogg.
"The same science that manufactured
poisonous gases to suffocate soldiers, "
he said, "is preaching
that man has a brute ancestry. "
Darwinism was eliminating the miraculous
and the supernatural from the Bible.
So, a simple moral -
Darwin and ape behaviour, bad,
Christianity and miracles, a lot safer.
It set off a row which is still
ringing in our ears today.
(GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME
RELIGION PLAYING)
At the end of the war,
William Jennings Bryan
feared that if Darwinism continued
to be taught in American schools,
it would corrupt the nation's morality,
just as it had in Germany,
and he launched a campaign
against the teaching
of Darwin's evolutionary theory.
Bryan's most popular lecture
was called The Origin of Man,
and in it he asked,
"What is the role of man?
"What is the purpose of man?"
For Bryan, this question
could only be answered by the Bible,
for religion was the foundation
of all morality.
And he wrote that,
"The theory of evolution has been
"the most paralysing influence
"civilisation has had to deal with
in the past century."
# Give me that old-time religion
# It's good enough for me #
# You can't make a monkey out of me
# Oh, no
# You can't make a monkey out of me,
no, no #
On January 28th, 1925,
Bryan was victorious
when a bill called the Butler Act
was passed in Tennessee.
It made it a crime
for state schools and universities
to teach that man had descended
from a lower order of animal
or to teach any theory that denies
the story of the divine creation of man,
as taught in the Bible.
The American Civil Liberties Union
rejected this law
as an assault on the constitution.
They offered to finance
a legal test case
and called for volunteers
who had violated the law.
In the small, rural town of Dayton,
Tennessee,
a clean-cut, 25-year-old schoolteacher
called John Scopes stepped forward.
John Scopes was a popular football coach
and general-science teacher.
He wasn't even entirely sure that
he'd been teaching evolutionary theory.
But he saw the battle against
the evolution law as an important way
of defending intellectual freedom
and serving his country.
And so he pleaded guilty
to teaching evolutionary theory.
He was an entirely willing puppet
in the courtroom drama
that was about to divide America.
ANNOUNCER ON TV:
The quiet town of Dayton
awakes to find its name emblazoned
in headlines around the world.
The scene is set for what is now being
ballyhooed as the Monkey Trial.
MARR: And so, on 10th July, 1925,
one of the great trials
of the 20th century began.
The defence brought in a criminal lawyer
from Chicago, called Clarence Darrow.
His goal was to provoke
the Supreme Court to rule
that outlawing the teaching
of evolution was unconstitutional.
For the prosecution, the World's
Christian Fundamentalist Association
secured the services
of William Jennings Bryan.
The opening statements presented
the trial as a titanic struggle
between good and evil,
truth and ignorance.
William Jennings Bryan said,
"If evolution wins, Christianity goes."
Clarence Darrow accused the prosecution
of opening the doors
to an age of bigotry
equal to anything in the Middle Ages.
And he added, "John Scopes
isn't on trial, civilisation is."
During the trial, the streets of Dayton
turned into a seething carnival.
Tourists, preachers, dressed-up monkeys.
Full-scale ballyhoo.
Here in the courtroom,
Bryan was playing to the gallery.
"It was bad enough," he said,
"that Darwinists thought,
"men were descended from monkeys,
but they weren't even American monkeys.
"They were Old World monkeys."
Darrow told Bryan, "You insult every man
of science and learning in the world,
"because he does not believe
in your fool religion."
After eight days of trial,
the jury took only nine minutes
to deliver its verdict.
(INAUDIBLE)
Shortly after 11:00,
on the morning of July 21 st, 1925,
John Scopes was found guilty
and fined $ 100.
The crusade against Darwin's ideas
continued to grow.
Many more evolution bills were
introduced across the United States.
In Tennessee, the Butler Act
remained law until 1967.
The Scopes Trial
was a great American drama,
and thanks to broadcasting,
nearly everybody could hear it, see it,
and they were all talking about it.
And, despite some educated
mockery afterwards,
it proved a great shot in the arm
for the American Christian
fundamentalist movement,
which showed the scale of the political
and cultural gap between
believers in the old-time religion
and the modernisers.
It divided America,
and, of course, it still does.
While fundamentalist Christians
in America
battled against the idea
of their animal ancestry,
Darwin's revolution was being pushed
across new frontiers in Europe
by one of the 20th century's
most influential thinkers.
Sigmund Freud had idolised
the great Darwin since he was at school.
He bought a first edition
of Darwin's work as a teenager.
Freud said he was strongly
attracted to Darwin's ideas
because they held out hopes
of an extraordinary advance
in our understanding of the world.
If Darwin had shown that all species
are driven by the urge to reproduce,
Freud went a stage further.
He argued that all human behaviour
was driven by *** urges.
Just under the veneer
of our civilised conscious lives,
our animal,
unconscious selves are seething.
Without Darwin, this would
have been a piece of furniture
and not the psychoanalyst's couch.
Darwin's theory suggests
that everything about us,
every detail of our biology,
has some significance for our own
evolutionary survival.
If not now, today, then back somewhere
in our evolutionary past.
Freud applied this same Darwinian law
to human behaviour and emotion.
Freud said that science had inflicted
three wounds on humanity's pride.
The first was when Copernicus had shown
that the Earth was not the centre
of the solar system.
The second was when
Charles Darwin had shown
that man had evolved from other animals.
And the third, no false modesty here,
was when Freud himself had shown
that mankind was not in control
of the most important aspects
of his own behaviour and emotions.
Human nature began with animal nature
and so, for Freud,
Darwin's dangerous idea
was alive and almost visible
inside every one of us.
As Darwin's ideas fuelled
new discoveries in psychology,
his theory of natural selection was
inspiring a dramatic advance in science.
For years,
scientists had been trying to understand
how evolutionary changes
were transmitted
from one generation to the next.
In the 1920s, they were beginning
to make the breakthrough.
It's all in the genes.
One of the great pioneers of genetics
was also one of the great eccentrics
of modern science.
Enter, stage left, Jack Haldane,
as mischievous and funny
as he was brilliant and original.
Jack Haldane was a committed atheist.
"When I set up an experiment,"
he once said,
"I assume that no God, devil or angel
will interfere with its course."
He was also fearless
in exposing himself to danger,
even risking death
in pursuit of scientific truth.
In one experiment involving
a decompression chamber,
he badly perforated an eardrum,
and shrugged it off saying,
"Although one is somewhat deaf,
"one can blow tobacco smoke
through the ear in question,
"which is a social accomplishment."
In 1922, Haldane came here,
to Trinity College, Cambridge,
and concluded that genes
were the mechanism
by which natural selection worked.
This meant that Darwin's theory
of natural selection
wasn't so much about
the survival of the fittest individuals
as the survival
of the best adapted genes.
This changed the focus entirely,
and began a new line of enquiry
into what the scientist,
Richard Dawkins,
would later call the selfish gene.
Haldane then applied this
to human behaviour and morality,
and he came up with a playful,
but shrewd example
to illustrate the ruthless logic
of the selfish gene.
One of Jack Haldane's friends
once asked him if he'd be prepared
to sacrifice his life
to save a brother from drowning.
Haldane paused for a moment,
and then answered,
"No, but I would be prepared to die
for two brothers or eight cousins."
Haldane knew that, on average, we share
about half of our specific
genetic information with a sibling
and about an eighth with a cousin,
and so he was giving a cool appraisal
of how many relatives
he could afford to die for,
and still break even
in the genetic struggle.
There you go.
The slightly bleak
mathematics of goodness.
By the mid-20th century,
the scientific evidence supporting
Darwin's ideas was overwhelming.
Even the Catholic church
had started to come to terms
with Darwin's theory of evolution.
But in his 1950 encyclical,
Humani Generis,
Pope Pius XII
drew a firm line in the sand.
"If the human body takes its origin
from pre-existent living matter",
he pronounced, "the spiritual soul
is immediately created by God. "
By stressing the distinction
between the soul and the body,
the Pope was able
to live with evolution,
so long as the process of ensouling
the body was left to God.
But he offered a stern warning
to evolutionary scientists
about the importance of boundaries.
"Let them strive
with every force and effort
"to further the progress
of the sciences," he said,
"but let them be careful
"not to transgress the limits
of Catholic faith and doctrine."
Or, in other words, have the body
so long as you leave the soul to us.
Too late!
By the second half of the 20th century,
scientists were already using
Darwin's theory of natural selection
to examine every aspect of our humanity.
Observing our closest cousins,
they showed how sympathy,
empathy and compassion,
the building blocks of human morality,
weren't unique to humans at all,
but part of our animal inheritance.
Darwin's explosive idea
was reaching deep into the human soul
(SCREECHING)
with sometimes tragic results.
It's 6th January, 1975.
A squat near London's Euston Station.
A tall, craggy man
has been called to identify a body.
He sees a mattress on the floor,
a few cheap clothes,
an ammunition box and papers scattered.
It's a terrible scene, for here
a good man has killed himself.
The tall man was an Oxford-based
biologist called Bill Hamilton.
The dead man was his American colleague,
George Price,
a brilliant scientist
and mathematician.
Using Darwin's theory of evolution
by natural selection,
Price had been investigating
the genetic basis for good and evil.
He was deeply troubled by what he found.
Price was always unpredictable,
always eccentric,
but he had an extraordinary mind.
In his 20s,
he'd worked on the Manhattan Project
developing the atomic bomb and then,
over at IBM, he developed the prototype
for the computer keyboard and mouse.
Next, at the height of the Cold War,
he developed a bizarre plan
to free Hungary from Soviet control.
He wanted the American government
to spend $2 billion,
not on new weapons,
but on buying two pairs of well-made
shoes for every Russian citizen.
Perhaps unsurprisingly,
the U.S. Government passed on that one.
But George Price
was about to turn his fertile mind
to the evolution of human morality.
He came to London in 1967
and discovered the work
of the biologist, Bill Hamilton,
who was exploring why animals,
including humans,
are genetically programmed
to take care of others,
even when they aren't directly related.
Now, Price was an atheist,
and he was fascinated
by Hamilton's quest
for the evolutionary purpose
of human kindness.
Using a mathematical equation,
he came up with a way of explaining
the evolutionary logic of altruism.
Well, if you've got the maths,
this is as beautiful as it gets.
Professor Cedric Smith,
here at University College London,
told Price that he had never seen
anything like his equation.
It was very interesting and very pretty.
What it apparently shows is that
acts of altruism and kindness,
far from being driven
by noble morality or religion,
are really just our selfish genes
pursuing their own interests.
Price found this shocking enough.
But there was more.
Price's equation also suggested
that acts of violence
against unrelated outsiders
can also make evolutionary sense,
even if you lose your own life
in the attack.
Price was confronted by the idea
that violence is rooted in our genes,
as much curly hair or brown eyes.
It is an inevitable,
unstoppable fact of human evolution.
Now, at this point,
we are in deep waters.
Goodness doesn't come from God,
evil is bred in the bone.
This was a scientific revelation.
But Price was deeply disturbed
by the cold evolutionary logic
of his own equation.
For years, Price had been suffering
from depression and schizophrenia,
and the implications of Darwinian theory
now added fuel
to Price's personal crisis.
In the early summer of 1970,
he experienced
a sudden religious conversion.
"On June 7th, I gave in
and admitted that God existed,"
Price told a friend.
And a week later
he attended his first service,
here at All Souls,
in the centre of London.
Price decided
that as a committed Christian,
he must uproot
all selfishness from his life.
Bearded and sandaled,
be began to give away all his money
to homeless alcoholics on the street.
Then he had them back to stay with him.
When he was down to his last 15 pence,
Price wrote to a friend
that he looked forward to the time
when that 15 pence will be gone.
But as he selflessly
ministered to others,
Price's own life
disintegrated into chaos.
The people he was trying to help
stole his belongings,
he lost his job and then his home.
In January, 1975,
Price killed himself by slitting
his throat with a pair of nail scissors.
Until recently, George Price's equation
was largely ignored or forgotten,
but it's become very important
in the study of evolution.
It's still the best
mathematical explanation
any scientist has come up with
to show why altruism, or goodness,
survives and thrives.
This is not just science.
It drills down into
why we do what we do,
and therefore who we are.
You could even say,
the meaning of what it is to be human.
150 years
after Charles Darwin first published
his theory of evolution
by natural selection,
most of us are still struggling
to come to terms
with the full implications
of our animal origin.
Some religious fundamentalists
still accuse Darwin's theory
of justifying human conflict
and causing universal moral decline.
But many world religions have
made their peace with Darwin's theory.
In September 2008, the Church of England
issued a belated apology
for its attack on Charles Darwin.
Darwin hasn't killed God.
Religious people have simply found
different ways to justify their faith.
Has he destroyed morality?
Again, no.
To understand the origin of morality
doesn't mean you must cast it aside.
But Darwin has changed
the terms of trade.
He's returned us to nature,
to its wonder,
to its glory and to its danger.
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution
questions almost everything
we thought we knew about ourselves.
Where we come from,
why we behave as we do,
the origins of our morality.
It isn't comfortable and it isn't easy,
but the more science
looks at this theory,
the truer it turns out to be.
Man is the truth-seeking primate.
Darwin has given us a great truth.
And there is no going back.