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01:14Here comes the year 2000, a lightweight, turbocharged, blow-molded, energy-wise, fail-safe, non-polluting, computerized, intercool, hydro-sprung,
01:24carbon-fiber, low-drag,
01:25chip-designed, high-speed magnesium chassis, crash-tested, polycarbonate set of wheels.
01:32Built from seawater, burns a treat when you're finished with it, heats the house for a week.
01:36And that's just one version of the future, an experiment.
01:43We're like that in the late 20th century West, aren't we?
01:46It's a dynamic, forward-looking, high-tech, recycled, you-name-it world.
01:50The one thing you can be sure tomorrow will be is different, because we'll make it like that.
01:55We take nature and remake it a million ways, and pre-test them under every condition, from the tropics to
02:00up here in the frozen north,
02:01so that when the consumerist finally gets his hands on it, it will be everything you ever wanted, till you
02:06want something else.
02:07There's nothing we consumerists can't do to the world.
02:10It's just so much raw material to be computer-modelled into new designs, everything from blow-dryers to babies.
02:17All you need is the specifications.
02:19Today, the only constant in life is change.
02:23And it's like that, ironically, because 250 years ago, somebody here in northern Lapland
02:28set out to prove that the one thing the world never did was change.
02:40See, to your 18th century mind, all this, you know, nature, worked according to strict mathematical laws
02:47that gave it no rope for any messing about.
02:50They felt they had a firm, rational grip on what was obviously an orderly universe.
02:56You can hear what they thought.
02:58In their orderly music.
03:07OK, let's get the story off to a cracking start.
03:10Here's Linnaeus, the fellow who'd been up north.
03:13A really dull bottomist, wandering around the really dull world they'd all made for themselves.
03:19Not a hair out of place, so to speak.
03:22Symmetrical.
03:24Balanced.
03:26Like their architecture.
03:28This is the kind of stuff you go for if you're sure, as they were, that the world was created
03:33at 9 a.m. on October the 26th, 4004 B.C., and was never going to change.
03:40Cool.
03:41Geometrical.
03:43They put nature in a pot in a garden because that was the way the world was for people like
03:47Linnaeus.
03:49Regimented.
03:55Now, the trouble with all this flowery philosophising was that it didn't work with flowers.
04:01The great outdoors, in general, was a disorganised mess.
04:04Linnaeus decided to sort it out.
04:06It may look confused, he said, but the one thing God wasn't was confused.
04:11There's a pattern to all this, and if I can discover the pattern, I'll be able to get inside God's
04:16head.
04:17Now, that may not sound very modest, but one thing Linnaeus wasn't was modest.
04:22He noticed, perspicaciously, that things tended to come in pairs, you know, male and female.
04:27So, in the most decorous Swedish way possible, he took a close look at the kind of sex going on
04:33in the bushes.
04:37What he had his eye on were plant sex organs, the stamens and pistils down inside the flower.
04:45So, he listed plants in classes, according to the number and position of stamens,
04:51then orders on the position of the pistils, and then types, like this.
04:55It's a vine, not a snowdrop.
04:57And then the bit you see at the local horticultural gardens, the varieties,
05:01based on the one feature of a variety that is different from all others of that type.
05:06This one, in Latin, Hedera, its feature, five leaves.
05:11In Latin, Quinquifolia.
05:13So, Hedera, Quinquifolia.
05:19Well, that double name system got rid of all the confusion, no matter how many varieties.
05:23I mean, for instance, look at these, they're all Campanulas.
05:25But this one is Campanula rotundifolia, because it's got round leaves.
05:29This one's Campanula pyramidalis, because it looks like a pyramid.
05:33This one down here is Glomerata, because the flower's in a head.
05:39This one, Latifolia, broad leaf.
05:42And this one, Presicifolia, with a leaf like the peach.
05:47And so on.
05:48With this kind of approach, Linnaeus had got nature firmly under control.
05:52Same as his garden, here at Uppsala, near Stockholm, where he was professor.
05:56It's laid out like a system.
05:58Divided, subdivided, classified.
06:01As if God had been a gardener.
06:04In 1768, the bestseller that went with it was into its 12th edition,
06:09and in flaming nature lovers, uphill and down dale.
06:11In here, the great outdoors was now orderly, balanced.
06:16Everything in its place, and a place for everything.
06:20Every species created individually by God.
06:23A complete world.
06:25No gaps, no failures.
06:27Perfect, unchanging.
06:29Fixed the way God had left it at creation.
06:34Boring, isn't it?
06:35Don't worry.
06:36It all went wrong.
06:37Remember those nature lovers?
06:39Enflamed by this?
06:50The Romantic Movement went rambling off in more senses than one.
06:54This was what life was all about, never mind your lists and classifications.
06:57Nature in the raw held the secret of the universe.
07:00So, they turned up the Beethoven, and went looking for the meaning of life.
07:04Out there, where a man could be alone with the elements.
07:07With the turmoil of the soul.
07:08With the restless, ever-changing world of nature.
07:12Come to think of it, it was ever-changing, wasn't it?
07:25In the last quarter of the 18th century, everybody was getting away from it all, looking for the mysterious life
07:31force that united everything in a world that wasn't static, but in a constant state of flux.
07:36Their problem was, to find an explanation of the universe, that would let all this flux, flux.
07:47Of course, now you mentioned it, there was a concept that might fit the bill, been around for some time,
07:53actually, Swiss idea, called the Great Chain of Being.
07:57Giant list of how everything shaded into everything else, as you went up in importance from rocks, to plants, to
08:05animals, then on up to man, and eventually to angels and God, all inclusive, you see.
08:11And it offered the possibilities of change because of where it placed things, like truffles, above rocks, but below, mushrooms,
08:23that is, more than a stone, but less than a mushroom.
08:27But almost a mushroom, you felt, given a chance.
08:31Now, truffles have always gone down very well with the French, and it was an 18th century French zookeeper called
08:37Buffon, here in Paris, where he ran this zoo, who took a closer look at them, and at the rest
08:42of nature.
08:54After years of watching plants and animals, in 1778, he came up with a few thoughts.
09:02Well, 44 volumes, to be exact.
09:05History of everything from the beginning till now.
09:08150,000 years, he reckoned that was.
09:11Noted a few things you'd think would have worried him, in a world of individually created, separate, different species.
09:19If all birds were separate creations, why one common structure?
09:23If each mammal was unique, why do they all have four limbs?
09:27Could you claim separate creation for just varieties of things?
09:31Of camels, monkeys, dogs, cats, apples, cabbages?
09:37But Buffon stuck to the Bible.
09:39The varieties were just degenerate forms of God's original two of everything.
09:44Or one, if you were a cabbage.
09:46But, no matter how things looked...
09:49No matter how similar things appeared, like bison and buffalos, or all the members of the feline species,
09:57or mushrooms and truffles, each was originally a separate creation.
10:04There was no cause for panic.
10:06If God hadn't created every single separate thing there could possibly be back at the beginning,
10:11well, there'd be extra ones being discovered, and gaps in the total, wouldn't there?
10:15And there weren't extra ones turning up, or gaps, were there?
10:20Were there?
10:41The fellow who blew holes in the idea that nothing had changed since creation
10:46was an engineer called Smith, who, in 1796, was busy exploding his way across the English countryside,
10:53building canals for the Industrial Revolution, and finding the oddest things in the rubble – fossil things.
11:00And what's more, every time they cut through a new layer of ground, there'd be new fossils to consider.
11:05It looked as if, far from everything having always existed, different animals had been alive at different times.
11:13Smith, not being hidebound by the philosophical garbage of the zookeepers,
11:18wrote down everything he came across, and concluded that this business of different fossils in different strata
11:24was so clear-cut, you could tell what level you were at if all you had to go on was
11:29one fossil.
11:30Or, no fossils, in the case of strata that didn't have any. See what I'm getting at?
11:37What was going through Smith's mind was the awful possibility that what with some more modern layers,
11:43which meant more modern periods of history, having no fossils,
11:47and others having fossils of animals that might turn out to be extinct,
11:51well, what that meant was that things had changed during history,
11:55that God had made mistakes.
11:57I thought to take a fellow's mind right off canal building, and that was the bare bones of it.
12:04PHONE RINGS
12:22It was when real bare bones started turning up
12:26that things took a turn for the more complicated.
12:28Back here in Paris, where by 1794, Buffon's zoo had been turned into the Paris Natural History Museum,
12:36and a certain George Cuvier was resident professor of vertebrate zoology.
12:40That is to say, all this lot.
12:44PHONE RINGS
12:53Cuvier, like Smith, had also turned up a fossil problem, but one on the grand scale.
12:59People had been coming into the museum here with bones they'd dug up
13:03that very definitely did not belong to any animal Cuvier had ever seen.
13:06So he thought up a way to work out how the whole animal would look if all you had to
13:12go on was one bone.
13:14Let me show you how this detective approach, called comparative anatomy, worked.
13:20Say all you have is this tooth.
13:23Well, it's strong and sharp, so the animal eats meat.
13:27Now, to hold these teeth, doing that kind of work, you need a jaw this shape.
13:32And to hold the jaw, a skull this big.
13:38Now, it's a meat-eater, so its lunch will tend to be running away if possible.
13:42So it needs flexible claws to grab with, on the end of good hunting legs,
13:49and they need a spine to hold them together in an overall shape built for speed,
13:54or there'll be no lunch, and the species will die out, won't it?
13:58So, from tooth, using Cuvier's comparative anatomy, you get tiger, and all the cat family.
14:07Meow! Meow!
14:09Meow!
14:11But when Cuvier got a bone like this, and did the same trick,
14:16working out what he did and then reconstructing the animal,
14:19he got nightmare monsters.
14:21And a real problem.
14:25You couldn't say, as you might with little fossils,
14:28oh, they're all around somewhere, I just haven't come across one.
14:30This was very definitely not just hiding in the bushes.
14:34It was extinct.
14:35And that meant God had to have changed his mind.
14:38But, like Buffon, Cuvier couldn't go for that.
14:41There had to be another answer.
14:43And it was around 1808, when he'd been digging holes all around Paris and finding more monster bones,
14:48all of them in strata incidentally also containing fossil oysters and general marine life,
14:54that he got it.
14:55Of course.
14:57Oysters? Water?
14:58It was in the Bible.
14:59A flood.
15:00There had to be what Cuvier described as catastrophes in history.
15:04Giant inundations caused by mountains rising or something,
15:07and causing huge tidal waves that would wipe out any dinosaur or whatever in the neighbourhood.
15:13That would account for it.
15:14Which left us.
15:15I mean, when it shouldn't have.
15:18Any catastrophe that could take out the monsters should have made short work of the human race.
15:22This was no academic problem.
15:38Meet William Buckland, Oxford Professor of Geology and weirdo.
15:42He reckoned the floods hadn't wiped out people because they hadn't been there.
15:46They'd gone off on the ark.
15:48Buckland was a queer cove with even queerer teaching methods.
15:52And he'd only got his job on condition he wouldn't knock the Bible version of what had happened.
15:57Ha-ha, my boys.
15:58An opportune arrival.
16:02The proof.
16:03Buckland was set on proving that some animals were extinct
16:06because God had sent the Old Testament flood deliberately
16:10and that the flood was what made the earth surface the way we see it today.
16:14Foot marks.
16:15His approach got mixed reviews.
16:17Some doubts were once expressed about the flood, they said.
16:20Buckland arose and all was clear as mud.
16:24But he seemed right about deep valleys having been made by the flood,
16:27not the little rivers in them now.
16:29Ha-ha-ha.
16:33On the other hand, could you be sure of a fellow
16:36whose gastronomic preferences ran to such delicacies as grilled mice on toast?
16:40But never mind his eccentricities, the reason people listened to Buckland
16:44was that a recent universal deluge ordered by the Almighty
16:48was the only thing that explained all the unexplainables.
16:51The bones they'd found buried under mud in moorland caves.
16:55The giant boulders sitting in isolated positions miles from any mountain.
16:59The fossils discovered, and this was a real mystery,
17:02of lowland animals on mountain peaks.
17:06By 1823, Buckland reckoned he'd solved all the riddles.
17:09We might consider the bones of animals caused to perish by this great inundation,
17:15upon which I have copiously written,
17:17and, of course, upon which you have copiously read.
17:21Hmm?
17:22Such bones...
17:23However, there was still one minor snag
17:26that made even Buckland think about eating his words.
17:29How come the flood, which was supposed to have knocked off all living creatures,
17:33knocked off all the fish?
17:34Who could swim?
17:36Eh?
17:36Of course I could be wrong.
17:46Now, the trouble with floods and catastrophes and stuff
17:49was that it did require interference by the Almighty
17:52and a supernatural finger in the pie,
17:55which wasn't exactly very scientific.
17:58So, a lot of people started looking for more down-to-earth explanation.
18:03One such type was a doer-scot, called Hutton,
18:07who went around poking into ditches and riverbeds everywhere he could find them
18:12and announced that, in his opinion,
18:13the whole lot could have been caused by the ordinary effects of erosion,
18:16wind and water.
18:17I mean, if you give enough time,
18:20water will make a stone smooth.
18:22See?
18:27Now, that would have taken a lot longer than the Biblical version of events would have.
18:31So, others went looking for more evidence further afield.
18:36One George Scrope, a pupil of Buckland, no less,
18:40found volcanoes and very old lava cut through by rivers.
18:46And you could see they'd taken forever
18:48because of the different layers of rock exposed in the walls of the gorges.
18:51It began to look as if it had all taken a great deal longer than the Bible said.
18:56The answer lay, it appeared,
18:59in river gorges and volcanoes.
19:02And what better volcano than this one?
19:05Etna.
19:16In 1826, another of Buckland's pupils who didn't agree with him,
19:20a pompous boar called Charles Lyell,
19:22headed purposefully up the slopes of Etna.
19:26Lyell took the view that the way geology happened
19:29probably didn't change from one period of history to another,
19:32from distant past to modern present.
19:36So, he went looking for evidence of recent activity
19:39to give him a yardstick.
19:41And it was the kind of evidence you see
19:43going up Etna in a tourist bus that gave him his first hint.
19:46Look.
19:47See those little hills down there?
19:49They're mini-volcanoes, cones,
19:52sticking out of the side of Etna.
19:54Like that one.
19:56Well, Lyell did some reading
19:58and discovered that only one cone,
20:00that big one, Monte Rossi,
20:02had come into existence since the beginning of local records.
20:08Lyle reckoned at that rate,
20:10not exactly greased lightning,
20:12it must have taken the hundred or so cones there were
20:14coming out of the side of Etna
20:16at least 12,000 years to happen.
20:36And then, up here, he saw a valley cutting right into the side of Etna.
20:43That one.
20:44And in the wall of the valley,
20:45he could see traces of hundreds of earlier cones
20:48thrown up and then covered by lava flow from Etna later on.
21:05So, he took it slowly.
21:08A few cones down at the bottom there had taken 12,000 years.
21:12Hundreds more cones had happened earlier
21:14and then got covered by lava coming from Etna up there.
21:17Therefore, they must have all happened before Etna itself happened.
21:26But Etna was now a pile of built-up lava
21:3090 miles wide and 10,000 feet high.
21:34So, at the rate things seem to have happened,
21:38Etna must have started millions of years ago.
21:41All of a sudden,
21:42as he stood up here looking into the crater,
21:45panting in the thin air and choking on the sulphur,
21:48Lyle realised that if the Bible was that wrong about the age of the earth,
21:52then the truth was going to turn out to be very, very scary.
21:56So, he went and had a plate of shellfish down at the coast to think it over.
22:10Observe, as Lyle did, these gastronomic delights
22:13to be found in plenty in the fish market down in Catania,
22:17the city at the foot of Etna.
22:19The reason I've dragged you down here
22:21is because these little beauties
22:23rocked the stuffy world of geology
22:25to its Palaeolithic foundations
22:27because this wasn't the only place Lyle found shellfish.
22:31He found fossils of them elsewhere.
22:35Here.
22:36This limestone is full of them,
22:38any way you look.
22:44Ha!
22:45Only, these have been off the menu for some time.
22:49Fossil shellfish.
22:52Okay, you say, so what?
22:54Ancient seafood.
22:56Only, these are identical to their modern descendants down at the market.
23:00These.
23:02Okay, you say, so what?
23:04Maybe they're not that old.
23:05And this is where Lyle took a deep breath.
23:08Because you know where that limestone goes?
23:13All the way out across that plain to where that cloud is.
23:17That's Etna.
23:18And then under Etna.
23:21So that makes it older than Etna.
23:24So that makes these fossils millions of years old.
23:27You see what I'm getting at?
23:29If you can't tell the difference between two shellfish millions of years apart,
23:33then the rate at which things happened, changed, through history,
23:37can only be described as somewhere between dead slow and dead slow.
23:42Over a period of time, that can only be described as geologic.
23:47Lyle?
23:48He took the next boat home to his publisher.
23:53Lyle's book, Principles of Geology,
23:55about how wrong the Bible chronology had been,
23:58became the prized possession of an intense young Englishman
24:01who was collecting things tropical for museums back home
24:04and who went by the name of Wallace.
24:09Here he is in 1857, beetling along a Malayan beach,
24:13collecting beetles, 120,000 species by this time,
24:17and thinking about something that had bugged him
24:20ever since he'd read what Lyle had said
24:22about how long everything took to happen in nature,
24:25a fact that could account for
24:26what Wallace was getting a bee in his bonnet about.
24:31The more he'd caught his little friends and stuck pins in them,
24:35the more he'd seen something that intrigued him.
24:38Now, to you and me,
24:39see one beetle and you've seen them all.
24:41Not Wallace.
24:42He'd noticed differences in his bugs
24:45that seemed to relate to where they came from.
24:52The basic beetle shape was the same,
24:54but the varieties seemed to be dictated
24:57by the kind of life the beetle led.
25:02Well, there was only one way
25:03this amazing observation was going to get publicity,
25:06so Wallace wrote to somebody important back home.
25:09It was a letter that changed the world.
25:31The letter Wallace wrote said, essentially,
25:33dear sir, I've been watching nature out here,
25:36and I think I've come up with a theory
25:38that might explain why all the life I see around me
25:41comes in such a wide variety of shapes and sizes,
25:44and I think I can explain how they all ended up that way.
26:03To say Wallace's letter put the cat among the pigeons
26:06would be to underrate the shock horror it caused.
26:09It made the fellow he'd written to feel a prize idiot for a start,
26:12because he'd just spent three years
26:14being deeply involved with the pigeon-breeding crowd,
26:18getting the bird right and left from his colleagues,
26:20ruffling the feathers of everybody
26:22in the English scientific establishment,
26:24as he investigated pigeon-breeding
26:26to find evidence to back up his new theory,
26:29a theory which would fly in the face
26:31of everything the Bible said,
26:33a new theory so all-embracing
26:35as to survive even the most devastating criticism.
26:39Nice colour, but you see he's got gaps in his muffs
26:43and broken foot feathers.
26:47Fat marks.
26:49Yes, fair. It's nothing better than fair.
26:54Toenails twisted.
26:59Well, his new theory looked like being an old theory,
27:02because it was precisely the same as Wallace's,
27:04and he'd been working on it for longer than Wallace,
27:06and he'd read Lyell,
27:08and been all over the tropics,
27:09and come to the same conclusions
27:11because, like Wallace,
27:13he had also read a key book
27:14by a political parson called Malthus,
27:17who had frightened the wits out of everybody
27:18by pointing out
27:19that the population always rose faster than the food supply.
27:23Inevitable result,
27:24too many mouths to feed,
27:25unless you could restrain people from having children.
27:29Our pigeon fancier, and Wallace,
27:31realised, flash,
27:33that that's what nature was doing,
27:34but without the restraint.
27:35So, everywhere,
27:37there would always be a desperate struggle
27:39for limited supplies of food.
27:41Any variety that was able to live off
27:43some kind of food nobody else wanted
27:44would survive and multiply.
27:46The rest?
27:47They'd die of starvation.
27:49That's why there were so many varieties around.
27:51They'd survived because they were varieties.
27:55But what did variation have
27:57to beef up the argument
27:58that God hadn't done it all at creation?
28:01Well, nothing,
28:02unless you could show how variety happened,
28:05which is why our pigeon fancier
28:07was fancying pigeons.
28:08Look, he said,
28:10at a pouter.
28:12A runt,
28:13a tumbler,
28:15a fantail,
28:16or a bob.
28:18You'd never say that lot were the same species,
28:20not in a million years.
28:21Which was the point.
28:23In more than a million years,
28:25nature could surely do
28:26what it took a breeder
28:26no time at all to achieve.
28:30Look at the way
28:31in just a few generations,
28:33by pairing birds with the right features,
28:36you could go, say,
28:37from a bird with no feet feathers
28:38and breed at each stage
28:40the right pair of birds
28:41to develop the feet feather characteristic
28:43more and more
28:44until you ended up with a bird
28:46that had been changed beyond recognition.
28:49Well, you couldn't see the feet for the feathers.
28:54Doing that backwards, as it were,
28:56in theory,
28:56our pigeon fancier
28:58was able to show
28:58that all pigeon varieties,
29:00and there are a lot,
29:01all of them
29:01were descended
29:02from one common ancestor,
29:05the humble rock pigeon.
29:09So, varieties
29:11that could fit
29:12every ecological niche
29:13and so survive
29:13had come into existence.
29:15Some of them
29:16were so varied
29:17as to be different species.
29:19The problem was
29:20no fossil had yet turned up
29:22of an animal
29:22halfway between
29:23one species and another.
29:25Still, there was plenty to go on
29:26and Wallace
29:27to worry about,
29:28so our pigeon fancier
29:30rushed into print
29:30with a slim volume
29:31entitled
29:31Origin of Species
29:33by Sea Darwin
29:34and waited for the feathers
29:35to fly.
29:39He didn't wait long.
29:44Read all about it.
29:46God is dead.
29:48Great Oxford debate.
29:49Church attacks Darwin.
29:51Professor claims ape as grandfather.
29:53The press leapt at the idea
29:55of the ape-man,
29:57a concept that horrified
29:58a decent Victorian society.
30:00Darwin will destroy society.
30:02Was man an animal?
30:03The church wasn't having
30:04any of that nonsense.
30:09Christianity suppresses science.
30:11Pope vends Darwin.
30:12But Darwin's theory
30:13went beyond upsetting the church.
30:15It was to influence life
30:16in the 20th century
30:17in three fundamental ways.
30:19Read all about it.
30:21Riots in Germany.
30:23Eight men found in German cave.
30:31Meanwhile,
30:32down a hole here
30:33in southern Germany,
30:34somebody plugged the only hole
30:36in Darwin's argument.
30:37You remember the gap
30:38in the fossil record.
30:39If there had been
30:40evolutionary changes
30:42from one form of organism
30:43to another,
30:44where were all the
30:44half-and-half versions
30:45that must have existed
30:46at some point?
30:52Well, in 1862,
30:57here was one.
30:58It's a fossilised
31:00Archaeopteryx.
31:01And if you look very carefully,
31:02you can see it's
31:03half bird and half reptile.
31:04Bony tail, reptile,
31:06feathers on the wings,
31:07bird.
31:08The missing link
31:09wasn't anymore.
31:11So Darwin was foolproof,
31:12which was fine
31:13by certain gents here
31:14on the lunatic fringe.
31:19Lunatic?
31:20Well, what would you call
31:21people who build grottos
31:22with doors in the wall?
31:24Eh?
31:26Excuse me.
31:28Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria,
31:30all this.
31:31You must admit
31:32he cornered the market
31:33in bad taste.
31:35Speaking of which,
31:37he also fell for Wagner,
31:39which is why he covered
31:40the walls with scenes
31:41from the operas
31:41and built castles
31:42like this one,
31:43Neuschwanstein,
31:44where he could live out
31:45his fantasies
31:45about being a Wagnerian hero,
31:47like the Swan King
31:48guarding the Holy Grail.
31:50Big on swans, Ludwig.
31:53Used to dress up a lot
31:54on the quiet.
31:56Wagner himself
31:57was heavily into
31:58the new Imperial Teutonic stuff.
32:00You know,
32:01Aryans being the super race,
32:03war is good for the health,
32:05total obedience to the state,
32:07favourite colour white,
32:08all the slogans.
32:09His fellow Germans
32:11couldn't get enough of it,
32:12operatic or otherwise.
32:14Well,
32:14put yourself in their place,
32:15if you can take it.
32:17Germany has just been united.
32:19They've beaten the French
32:20in 1870,
32:21so they're top
32:21of the military league.
32:23Industrial production
32:24is going up like a rocket.
32:25They're talking about
32:26having a colony or two.
32:27They've invented themselves
32:28an emperor.
32:30And still,
32:31polite European society
32:32treats them
32:32as if they've got
32:33collective BO.
32:34What they need
32:35for their national paranoia
32:36is a touch of class.
32:39And here's Darwin
32:40with his scientific proof
32:41of the survival
32:42of the fittest,
32:43that struggle is natural
32:44and necessary,
32:45that even slime
32:45can get to the top
32:46if you give it long enough.
32:48He must have been music
32:49to their ears.
32:50in heaven's name,
32:57in heaven's name,
32:59I'll be kept in.
33:04In heaven lead, I lead the way.
33:42CHOIR SINGS
33:57Well, as usual, there's an unsung figure behind all the nationalistic hoo-ha.
34:02In this case, a fellow called Heckel, a zoologist and Darwin fanatic.
34:06Without him, all this might have remained so much Bavarian baloney.
34:10But Heckel did what he did, so I'll tell you all about it.
34:14Next time I get the chance.
34:24CHOIR SINGS
34:28Well, thank you.
34:30This is what happened.
34:32In 1868, Heckel, having read Darwin and decided that he was the answer to everything in the known universe,
34:38produced a book modestly entitled The Natural History of Creation, and started spreading Darwinism, Heckel version.
34:46Over the next few decades, Heckel and followers produced some rather interesting variants on the Darwin message.
34:52Let me treat you to some of the choicest samples.
34:55The fittest survive, says Darwin.
34:58So, victorious Germans must be biologically superior to any losers, and they must be kept that way.
35:04So anything that might weaken the race, criminals, defectives, imbeciles, Democrats, must be sterilised or shot.
35:12Racial hygiene, it's called.
35:14Also involved breeding stations where pure Aryans could get together with other pure Aryans to produce more pure Aryans.
35:23Man is an animal, says Darwin, and obeys the laws of nature.
35:27So just as a cell dies in order to save the body, so the life of the individual may, if
35:33necessary, be sacrificed for the greater good of the state.
35:36The struggle is necessary, says Darwin, so nothing must prevent wars to eliminate or enslave the lower races.
35:46Hybrids are sterile, says Darwin, so marriage between Germans and non-Germans would be unnatural.
35:57By the way, is all this 19th century pseudoscientific garbage beginning to sound familiar?
36:03Well, in 1899, Heckel's next modest little number, called the Riddle of the Universe, sold half a million copies and
36:12really spread the word.
36:13In order to get the message across to the next generation, they founded a youth movement.
36:19Founding member, Heinrich Himmler.
36:22Crazy about everything Heckel had said.
36:24So was his friend.
36:26You know, the one that misquoted Darwin so often in speeches.
36:30Here.
36:32At Nuremberg.
36:33Bring Germany!
36:36In us!
36:37Forkiert Deutschland!
36:38Und hinter uns!
36:39Kommt Deutschland!
36:41Krieg Heil!
36:46Krieg Heil!
36:48Krieg Heil!
36:50Krieg Heil!
36:51Krieg Heil!
36:52Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!
36:56Jesus!
37:06Of course, Darwin was bound to go down well here in the States,
37:10where another academic preached his gospel of evolution,
37:13free enterprise style this time.
37:15Name of Sumner, a professor at Yale.
37:18He took Darwin and made it socially meaningful for the upwardly mobile.
37:24That is to say, the struggle for survival
37:27was part of the great American tradition
37:29that brought all comforts to those who worked for them.
37:33The struggle weeded out the weak, the unfit and the stupid,
37:37unless you gave them unfair help with dangerous nonsense
37:40like government aid or welfare or education,
37:43in which case they'd breed more like them and drag the country down.
37:48In a heartwarming little pamphlet published in 1883,
37:52Sumner asked the question,
37:53what do the social classes owe each other,
37:55and came up with a reassuring answer, nothing.
38:00For Sumner, Darwin gave proof that what America should be all about
38:04was liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest.
38:08In other words, the meek should inherit what's left.
38:12For Sumner, the best equipped to win the struggle
38:15was the great American businessman.
38:18As long as his survival wasn't endangered by evils like taxes,
38:23regulations, factory acts, that stuff.
38:26Absolute freedom of action was what had made America great.
38:29And now, that was a scientific fact.
38:37Well, in a country founded on the principle of individualism,
38:41out here in the West where a man walked tall,
38:44might was right, life was rugged,
38:47where you could be anything you wanted to be
38:48if you had the guts to fight for it,
38:51in that kind of country, Darwin's theory made no more than good horse sense.
38:54All you had to do was stay on the horse.
39:15American business saw things in terms of the Wild West.
39:19You had to be tough and self-reliant just to stay solvent.
39:22In a country expanding incredibly fast,
39:25the only way to get anywhere in commerce
39:27was to go hell for leather for what you wanted
39:30before anybody else got to it.
39:32And then, make sure they knew your mark was on it first.
39:42So, the second way Darwin put his brand on modern life
39:46was bolstering the idea of success in the American frontier sense,
39:49where nothing came to you on a plate.
39:52Darwin had proved that the basic animal struggle for food
39:56applied to everything human society did, too.
39:59Only for food read possessions, power, money.
40:03America took Darwin's cowboy ethic into its boardrooms
40:06and turned every business deal
40:08into a rerun of Gunfight at OK Corral.
40:14In the sudden death encounters of business life,
40:18ambitious Americans saw the finest example of evolution in action,
40:21crushing the incompetent, outsmarting the competition
40:24and coming out king of the heap.
40:27The 19th century American industrial robber barons
40:30went for social dominism like flies to a honeypot.
40:33They gave what they like to call their entrepreneurial activity
40:35the cachet of scientific respectability.
40:39After all, hadn't Sumner said
40:40millionaires are the product of natural selection?
40:44Financial giants like Rockefeller and Carnegie
40:46showed just how far that process could take you.
40:51The 19th century American industrial
40:51The 19th century American industrial
40:51The 19th century American industrial
41:19one megamillion Darwin style.
41:31The third way Darwin's theory helped to change the world
41:35was very different.
41:55On a Sunday afternoon in April at the Sweden-Finland border,
41:59the last stage of a momentous journey was taking place.
42:02Hurrying to catch this train was a man called Ulyanov,
42:06coming by sleigh the last few miles of a trip
42:09that had brought him all across Europe in secret,
42:11which was how he had lived for 17 years,
42:14moving from place to place using a network of agents, codes,
42:18clandestine operations.
42:20Ulyanov carried a message from a man already dead
42:24that would change the course of history.
42:26A message that would almost certainly put Ulyanov in danger.
42:34The dead man whose message Ulyanov carried
42:37was a German ideologist who had seen in Darwin
42:39scientific support for his beliefs,
42:42beliefs Ulyanov kept alive.
42:57The view of the world that drove Ulyanov towards possible death
43:01for his beliefs and that had inspired his German mentor
43:04was a social version of Darwin's views.
43:10Those views of Darwin would be echoed in the struggle that lay ahead.
43:26Darwin's theory that successful species annihilated their opposition
43:29would be mirrored in the total victory that would come.
43:33Darwin's denial of any supernatural design in nature
43:35would put control over their destiny into the hands of ordinary working people,
43:39not princes and kings.
43:42Darwin's mechanism of evolution according to natural laws
43:45fitted the plan that those laws would be used to design a new society.
43:50Darwin's concept of the evolution of a species towards its perfect form
43:54strengthened the dream of a new society,
43:56forging ahead to a world where superstition and oppression
43:59would be made redundant by reason and equality.
44:03Above all, Darwin's claim that change was inevitable
44:06served to show that the success of the new ideology was equally inevitable
44:10and that a new world could only be built on the ruins of the old one.
44:14Ulyanov, of course, was carrying the message of Marx to Russia.
44:19And after his triumphant arrival at the station in St Petersburg,
44:22he would come to be revered by millions,
44:24not as Vladimir Ulyanov,
44:26but by the revolutionary alias he'd always used,
44:29Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
44:44In 1917, Lenin designated Russia as the centre of world socialism,
44:48in which the first benefits of the evolution of the new society would be enjoyed.
44:52The fruits of the Marxist struggle that was as basic
44:56to the improvement of the human species as the fight for survival was in nature.
45:00A struggle that would sow the seeds of world revolution
45:03with the new tools available to those who believed that changing history
45:07was a matter of moulding the ideological attitudes of whole populations
45:10through indoctrination, directive, propaganda.
45:14Above all, that victory would only be won as Darwin had said it was in nature,
45:19through violent struggle,
45:21the only way the proletariat would achieve the power necessary to change the world.
45:36And the struggle continues to bring the whole family of man to socialism,
45:40because the revolutionary ideal admits no half measures.
45:44For Marx, the logical and necessary end of social evolution is socialism.
45:49Just as for Darwin, the logical and necessary end of natural evolution
45:53is the organism that exists because it's best fitted to exist.
45:58But with half the world committed to the other side of the argument
46:02about how humanity should progress, committed to individualism and free enterprise,
46:07the struggle has taken the form with which we have become all too familiar.
46:35grounded Juliet
46:39on that invariant
46:41at the Vontaeego
46:56Thanks to Darwin, on both sides of this east-west border,
46:59here inside the Arctic Circle in northern Lapland, where we began,
47:03or anywhere else you find it, on both sides, the view is the same.
47:08People and societies can be changed.
47:10The argument is about how to do it and what kind of change.
47:14They engineer daily life. We engineer genes.
47:18They suppress antisocial individualism. We reward it because it's maverick.
47:23And yet, on both sides, the view ahead is equally clear,
47:27equally optimistic in terms of our ability to manipulate nature,
47:30equally materialist in the philosophical sense of the word.
47:44Once we lived in the image of the Creator, according to the divine plan,
47:50in a perfect and unchanging world, created and functioning with a purpose
47:55you could clearly identify any time you read the Bible.
47:59Thanks to Darwin and the people who built on his work,
48:01the universe no longer looks so straightforward.
48:12We're made of the same stuff as the rest of nature,
48:15not different or special in the universe.
48:17And if there is an immediately recognisable purpose,
48:21it is, like everything else, a man-made one, here or on the other side.
48:26And as for the truth, well, in the absence of belief,
48:29it's what you want it to be, and so is your future.
48:32And if that doesn't turn out right, well, you've only yourself to blame.
48:36Thank you very much.
49:06Thank you very much.
49:30VIOLIN PLAYS
49:47VIOLIN PLAYS
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