The Genius of Charles Darwin — Hosted by Richard Dawkins: Episode Two Summary.

As promised, this is my summary of the latest episode of Richard Dawkins’s new Channel 4 series on Charles Darwin, for the benefit of those overseas who do not have access to YouTube. These are in effect little more than notes I made whilst watching and whilst I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible, there may be a few errors — though I would hope not!

Feel free to ask any questions and I’ll do my best to answer them.

The Genius of Charles Darwin Part Two Summary.

Humans don’t have Dominion over animals. We are animals. We are the fifth ape. This raises questions about our morals and manners. Are they just a veneer? If survival drives evolution, why don’t we live in a purely dog eat dog world?

Is genocide etc a survival method?

This episode deals with the questions that Darwin himself skirted around — questions concerning the evolution of human beings, what it means for us to be evolved. The question is more urgent than ever. Darwinism is increasingly being attacked by religious groups and others for excusing selfishness and barbarism.

Dawkins takes us into the Darwinian heart of darkness to look for answers and hope.

Natural selection is the driving force of our evolution but that doesn’t mean that society should be run on Darwinian lines. Dawkins abhors it as a principal for organising society.

A brief summary of evolution by natural selection then follows.

At London Zoo back in the 1830s the arrival of the first apes outraged polite society. The young Charles Darwin saw the truth staring back at him, however. All life related, Darwin realises.

East Africa — the birthplace of Dawkins and more importantly the birthplace of the human species. Between five and six million years ago there lived in Africa an ape that had two children. One of those children gave rise to us, the other was destined to give rise to the chimpanzees.

Richard Leakey and his family have uncovered the hard evidence in the Rift Valley. Charts the evolution of our human ancestors. A brief examination of fossilised human skull development. Leakey talks about the way we react to the fact that we are the fifth ape. He tells a story about watching people at a zoo who in turn were watching apes. He says that you can see that as an individual looks at an ape he/she will be unconvinced that the ape is like them but as they look around at the other people with them they think, Yeah, there is a similarity between those people and the ape… (I’ve paraphrased this to make it clearer.)

We are so closely related to chimps that it isn’t entirely ridiculous to ask if we might breed with them.

We are the human animal. Dawkins has often wondered what it tells us about human society now. Half the world is still horrified by the reality of our origins. As we go into the break, Dawkins asks a black guy, “I’m an ape — are you an ape?”

“No,” he answers. “I’m a human being.”

Why should the fifth ape “love thy neighbour”? Darwin shied away from the evolution of man.

In Kenya, religious groups are trying to ban the National Museum exhibit of human fossils.

Turkana Boy. Homo erectus. More precious than the Crown Jewels to Dawkins (and me!)

The Evangelical movement in Kenya is running a “hide the bones” campaign. A minister shows a complete unwillingness/inability to understand evolution. He asks, “What is evolution’s goal?” Dawkins explain that it has none. It has no purpose or morality.

What does that mean for us/society? Struggle. Each working for its own benefit. Explanation of strangler fig.

Next Dawkins addresses the claims that Darwinian ruthlessness/purposelessness damages society. Business likes the dog-eat-dog concept. Summary of robber-barons and social darwinism. Similarities between economic systems and biological systems. A businessman says that there’s a risk to the analogy. Not a straightforward law for financial success. Merely an analogy.

Eugenics overview. A slippery slope to horrific consequences. Eugenics is not Darwinism. Hitler was not a Darwinist.

Darwin argued that evolution was driven by brutal struggle for survival. So why altruistic behaviour — grooming, warning cries etc? Brings on Steven Pinker to explain the brain’s evolution. Guilt and trust operate in much the same we as lust. Moral emotions can be explained in evolutionary terms, just like fear.

Darwin on peacocks tail. Tail wins sexual partners. Peahens perform “selective breeding” much like pigeon fanciers. This Darwin defined as “sexual selection”. Survive and be attractive.

A segment on American single women selectively breeding. Sperm donors. Their criteria for donors include everything imaginable — from shoe-size to pets. Do they want altruism/niceness, though? Yes! Don’t want typical alpha males. Nice guys win!

How did animals evolve “nice”? How can genetics explain altruism? We are vehicles for the genes inside us. They are “immortal” because they are passed on. Summary of the concept of the selfish gene.

If they are selfish, why do they promote altruism in bearer? The first part of the answer is kinship selection. Altruism directed at “family”. Parents protecting their offspring. The other part of the answer is “reciprocal altruism”; you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

Humans are still “nicer” than this explanation seems to suggest, however. Dawkins explores this problem.

We are introduced to the primatologist Frans De Waal. He is critical of Dawkins’s selfish gene theory, of what he calls “veneer theory” — the idea that morals are a thin veneer on our underlying nastiness. De Waal then moves onto “social Darwinism” (yawn)… Dawkins also hates social Darwinism.

Dawkins believes the urge to help has ancestral roots. Hardwired into us. It benefited us once, we behave as if it still does. (And it does.)

But we also rise above natural selection. Altruism is the pinnacle of human civilization. Dawkins asks a charity worker why she feels the need to help/be good. She was a war child. She knows what it was like to be hungry…

Natural selection gave us big brains. We can empathise, plan and build a society we want to live in. Our evolved brains empower us to rebel against our selfish genes.

[Episode two can be seen here.]

Episode One of “The Genius of Charles Darwin.”

Part Two.

Part  Three.

Part  Four.

Part  Five.

[Episode two can be seen here.]

The Genius of Charles Darwin — Hosted by Richard Dawkins: Episode One Summary.

Last night, the first episode of The Genius of Charles Darwin was aired on Channel 4 here in the UK. The reviews I read this morning were, perhaps predictably, of the usual sneering variety — full of ridiculous statements such as “Dawkins, for such an enthusiastic Darwinist, seems to have no faith at all in social Darwinism” (of course he doesn’t; he is not nor ever will be a social Darwinist — episode two should clarify why, judging by the trailer) and, “He then proceeded to shout out the order of the evolution of species at them. “Fish! Amphibians! Reptiles! Birds! Mammals!” he yelled, as if the message would become plainer if it were delivered at elevated volume” (funnily enough, it didn’t sound at all like yelling to me!) As I read these reviews, from so-called professional journalists, I wondered firstly if they’d been watching the same documentary that I had and, secondly, how much these poorly informed imbeciles were being paid.

With this in mind, I’d like to offer my summary, as promised to Baba, of episode one. My main concern is to share the points Dawkins made during the show, for the benefit of those not living in the UK and with problems accessing YouTube. Where necessary, I will share my impressions.

At the very outset of the show, Dawkins once again stipulates that Darwin’s work is one of the reasons why he doesn’t believe in God. This has already been sneered at in the press (“as if we didn’t know already”), but it was a relevant and important statement. No duality can exist. It is one thing or the other.

The first programme essentially deals with who Darwin was and how he discovered his theory, what it is and why it matters. Dawkins wants to convince the viewer that evolution is a fact with undeniable evidence.

He begins at the time of Darwin’s birth two hundred years ago, explaining that sailors and explorers were sending home a dizzying array of animal specimens from all parts of Britain’s growing empire. Every animal was believed to have a unique place in God’s creation. At school in Shrewsbury, Darwin was taught that God had created the earth and all its rich variety of life just six thousand years ago. Today, thanks to Darwin we  [some of us, at least] know, differently.

In the UK today, four out of ten people still cling to the old ideas. In order to attempt to show how little evolutionary theory is taught in our schools, Dawkins visits a class of 15- to 16-year-olds. He was immediately faced with religion-based opposition. One young man politely points out that he prefers the evidence of “the holy book”. There seems to be a complete lack of understanding of the difference between believing in something and having enough evidence to know that something is a fact. One pupil asserts that people can believe whatever they want.

Dawkins takes the class to the coast to show them fossil evidence.

Before seeing the results of this visit, however, we are told that Darwin as a child was probably as much of Creationist as some of these children. This leads into a biographical section. Those familiar with Darwin will already know much of this, those who aren’t should follow this link.

In 1831 at the age of twenty-two Darwin’s family connections secured him a round the world trip on the survey ship HMS Beagle. Over a period of five years he collected samples but wasn’t satisfied. He had doubts about the biblical story of creation. He questioned why God had made two very similar but slightly different types of Rhea birds. Dawkins retraces his steps on the Galapagos Islands. Darwin wonders why God would create different types of iguanas etc on more or less identical small islands? Were they related rather than separately created? The picture becomes all the more intriguing when Darwin discovers fossils.

We are then told that Darwin was struck by the difference in size between large ground sloth fossils and the smaller modern sloth. Darwin also immersed himself in the work of Charles Lyell, applying geological principles to the problem of life.

Back on the beach with the schoolchildren, Dawkins teaches them about fossils, layering etc. There is muted enthusiasm… an unwillingness to commit, accept. They seem to be learning, or paying attention, at least, but there is a definite barrier there. Very real and, for me, alarming. I can’t help but compare it to what it would have been like in my day. In my fairly run-of-the-mill comprehensive school in the late 1970s/early 1980s it would have been quite different. We’d have given Dawkins a hard time, but religion would not have been an issue — or at least not the issue it seems to be today. There certainly would have been at least one (me!) who would have been quick to share his atheistic tendencies.

Back to Darwin. He returned from his round the world trip changed. He is a celebrity. He sees that the various forms of life aren’t fixed. They must have evolved.

Without the benefit of modern tools such as the Internet, Darwin sent out thousands of letters to the experts of the day in order that he might accurately develop his theory. He saw cross-species similarities in skeletons and embryos etc.

Dawkins uses Emma Darwin’s piano to explain the scale of geologic time, an understanding of which is vital to Darwin’s theory.

Darwin still needed to understand how life had evolved. The process. He became fascinated by pigeons and realised that breeders had used “artificial selection”. Species can change. Nature works in a similar way. Natural selection favours those better equipped to deal with certain tasks etc.

We next visit Kenya, where Dawkins himself was born. It is a harsh environment — with the “kill or be killed” way of life more than obvious. For the animals in the wild there is no central authority, no safety net. Darwin connects nature’s brutal reality with ideas from economic theory on population growth etc. Variation in individuals provides a crucial difference in chances of survival. Those better equipped to survive live on to reproduce. A fairly standard introduction to these ideas. Dawkins also adds that one species hones his skills on another. The predictable reference to an “arms race”.

In an attempt to highlight our personal war with viruses, Dawkins then visits Nairobi. We meet a prostitute with HIV resistance. We Europeans, we are told, are descendants of those who were able to withstand the plague. The unstoppable force of natural selection.

Back to Darwin. The point is made of just how aware Darwin was of the implications of his work — how upsetting it would be from the religious perspective. He was nevertheless persuaded to publish.

Next we are introduced to Randal Keynes, the great-great-grandson of Darwin. He describes Darwin as modest. He was confident of his theory but nevertheless doubted at times. On the Origin of Species sold out in two days and has never been out of print since (one hundred and fifty years.)

One gap remained. How were improvements preserved from generation to generation? This gap is addressed by genetics. Mapping of the genome is proof of Darwin’s “Tree of Life”. It is not a theory in the common sense anymore. Evolution is fact. Genetic code is proof.

Modern science answered Darwin’s problem. Fact.

Returning to the schoolchildren. They are still predominantly unpersuaded. Still no understanding of the difference between belief and knowledge.

To finish, I would just like to stress that this is just a very brief summary. Any mistakes are mine. (Incidentally, it appears that the show is in the process of being uploaded to YouTube. Watch this space.)

[EDIT: episode one in full can now be seen here.]

[EDIT: episode two summary can be seen here.]

The Genius of Charles Darwin — Hosted by Richard Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins examines the legacy of Charles Darwin. The three part programme will be broadcast on Channel Four at 8 pm on Monday 4th, Monday 11th and Monday 18th August.

One for the diary, if you live in the UK, I think. I’m certainly looking forward to it.

(If you’re not in the UK and want to watch this series, keep checking YouTube. I’m sure it will be up there or on Dawkins’s site sometime soon.)

[EDIT: see also Episode One Summary.]

Queerer than We Can Suppose.

Richard Dawkins on the strangeness of science.

Blasphemy!

Oh, damn. Now I’ll have to find another silly law to break on an almost hourly basis. Any suggestions?

The Beauty and Wonder of Science.

I’m always rather shocked when science is accused of being “cold” or bereft of “meaning” by those outside the field. As a non-scientist who has been increasingly drawn to the discipline over recent years, it was in fact the sense of beauty and wonder I felt when I read about Darwin, Chaos Theory, the Big Bang etc that prompted me to read and learn more. I didn’t feel threatened or afraid, I felt exhilerated and, yes, a little surprised that I could understand a lot of this stuff (albeit in a fairly rudimentary way.)

So today I’d like to share this video with those of you who haven’t already seen it (I’m also including a transcript, but I would urge you to watch the video if you can.) The article was written by Richard Dawkins on a trip to Galapagos and originally published on The Guardian website.

The Lava Lizard’s Tale.

TRANSCRIPT:

A guide at the Natural History Museum stated confidently that a particular dinosaur was 70,000,008 years old. When asked how he could be so precise he replied, “Well it was 70 million when I started this job, and that was eight years ago.” The evident experience of Valentina Cruz, our wonderful Galápagos naturalist guide, suggests that I must add a similar margin to the estimate of 100 years that she gave us for the age of the black lava fields on the island of Santiago. The exact date of the great Santiago eruption is not recorded, but it definitely happened on one particular day in one particular year around 1900. I shall call it SV day (Santiago volcano day). I need to seem as precise as the museum guide, although the exact date doesn’t matter. Perhaps it was January 19 1897, 100 plus eight years before my visit to the island.

SV day was one day in the late 19th century, a day on which, elsewhere in the world, somebody’s grandfather was born at some particular hour. Somebody else died. A moustached young man in a straw boater met his true love for the first time and was never the same again. Like every day that has ever been, it was a unique day. Every second of it. It also was the date of the great Santiago volcano, the one that made the lava fields that I walked this January in the company of lava lizards, Tropidurus albemarlensis, although I knew it only when they moved and betrayed their camouflage.

Lava lizards are pretty much the only things that do move over these barren fields of black, clinker-ringing rock. And as they do so their splayed hands are feeling – though they do not know it – the fingerprints of past time. Fingerprints? Past time? Wait, that is the theme of the lava lizard’s tale.

Santiago was one of the four Galápagos islands on which Charles Darwin landed in 1835, and it was the only one where he spent any time, camping for a week while Captain Fitzroy took the Beagle to fetch fresh supplies. Darwin called it James, for he and his shipmates used the English names of all the islands: the evocative Chatham, Hood, Albemarle, Indefatigable, Barrington, Charles and James. He and his small camping party had trouble finding a clear spot to pitch their tent, so thickly did the land iguanas carpet the ground. Today there are no land iguanas left on Santiago. Feral dogs, pigs and rats did for them, although there are still plenty of land iguanas on other islands of this iconic archipelago, while the closely related marine iguanas abound on all the major islands including Santiago.

The black lava fields of Santiago are an unforgettable – almost indescribable – spectacle. Black as a female marine iguana (of course the simile really should go the other way) the rock is called rope lava, and you can soon see why. It is drawn out and plaited in twisted ropes and pleats, folded and gathered like a black silk dress, coiled and whorled in giant fingerprints. Fingerprints, yes, and that brings me to the point of the lava lizard’s tale. As the lizard scuttles over the black lava of Santiago it is treading the fingerprints of history, rolled out by the sequence of particular events that tran-spired, minute by minute, on one particular day late in Darwin’s century, marking the minutes of that day, the day of the Santiago volcano.

There cannot be many other ways to see, laid out before you, a complete history, second by second, of one particular day, more than a century ago. Fossils do the same thing but over a much longer time scale. The molecules of a fossil are not the original molecules of the animal that died. Even fossil tracks, like those Mary Leakey found at Laetoli, don’t really do it. It is true that Laetoli shows you the exact places where two individual Australopithecus afarensis (those diminutive hominids carrying chimpanzee brains around on human legs), perhaps a mated couple, placed their feet during a particular walk together. There is a sense in which these footprints are frozen history, but the rock that you see today is not as it was then. That couple walked in fresh volcanic ash which later, over thousands of years, solidified and compacted to make rock. The lava ropes and pleats of Santiago, those giants’ fingerprints, are still composed of the very same molecules that were frozen into precisely those positions, only a century ago. And the time scale over which the distinct ropes and pleats were laid down is a time scale of seconds.

Tree rings do it on a time scale of years. Where the whorls of lava fingerprinting are laid down second by second, and fossils are laid down by the millions of years, each tree ring marks exactly one year. Thick rings or thin label good growth years or poor and, because every sequence of half a dozen years or so has its own characteristic pattern of good and poor years, the patterns can be recognised, again and again in different trees, as labels of particular clusters of years. Old trees and young trees show the same fingerprints so, by counting rings and daisy-chaining the patterns from increasingly ancient wooden relics, archeologists can compile a catalogue of fingerprints outspanning the longest-lived tree.

Something similar can be done with sediment patterns laid down on the sea bottom and revealed in cores of mud taken up in deep sampling tubes. And, over the longer time span of hundreds of millions of years, the named strata of the geological series are, in their own way, fingerprints of time. What is so remarkable about the lava fields of Santiago is that these fingerprints were set out on the timescale that we humans deal with every second of our lives, the time scale of musical notes, the time scale of an artist’s brush, the time scale of everyday actions and the stream of human thought.

This is a real thought for a surreal landscape. And the Galápagos islands are replete with images that could have come straight from a surrealist’s canvas. A tiny desert island off Santa Fe (Barrington to Darwin) looks fit for Man Friday except that instead of palm trees there are giant cactuses. As if the Arizona desert had been transplanted into an azure sea; no surrealist could have done it better. And what are sea lions doing in the Arizona desert, to say nothing of shocking pink flamingos, equatorial penguins, or flightless cor morants earnestly hanging their impotent, stubby wings out to dry? As for the large flounder that I saw when snorkelling off North Seymour Island, it was pure Salvador Dalí. Changing colour to match the corals over which it slid like an oval carpet, I would certainly not have spotted it if Valentina had not gracefully dived to point it out to me. It was only later that my wife compared the flounder to the flowing, bending watch of a Dalí painting. And wasn’t that very painting, the one with the bent watches, called The Persistence of Memory ? Not a bad title for the lava fields of Santiago, scuttling ground of the Galápagos lava lizards.

Reality, if you go to the right place, and see it in the right way, can be stranger than a surrealist’s imagination. No wonder Darwin drew his early inspiration from these enchanted islands.

 Still can’t see the beauty and wonder?