"200 years ago he was born" "He wanted to know how the whole of the natural world interconnected." "He wanted to know how continents emerged." "How ocean basins formed." "He wanted to know how life evolved." "150 years ago it was published." "It's transformed the way that western cultures have regarded the divine in the natural world." "One man on one voyage changed the way we see ourselves." "He dared to question the need for a supernatural Creator." "But what drove him to explore a new explanation for the existence of all living things?" "And why was it so controversial?" "I've studied Darwin all my life and behind that great big beard he still remains an enigma." "150 years later we explore this enigma, examining the ideas of Charles Darwin in the light of today's knowledge." "Do they still have relevance?" "Does his science still make sense?" "We embark on a journey of understanding." "We revisit the voyage that shook the world." "One of the astonishing things about Darwin as a thinker, was the way that he always asked questions, and we can see it from an incredibly early age that he always wanted to know things... why this, why that," "why not something else?" "But isn't that the way science gets made?" "Isn't that how a good scientist proceeds- they're never content with taking things at surface value." "I always thought I would love to know Darwin as a little boy." "Inventive, charming, interested in natural history... quite a solitary child, liking to take long walks on his own - inventing things." "Darwin himself says that as a child he used to lie... or at least he puts it around another way, he says he used to fabricate big stories, big imaginary stories." "The ability to theorise, to create fantasies, to bring stories out of nowhere is one of the great gifts of a scientist." "And these are skills that Darwin had from Avery early age." "The foundations of Darwin's ideas were laid before he was born in 1800." "His father was a wealthy society doctor from Shrewsbury." "His mother, from the famous Wedgwood pottery family." "Charles was surrounded by massive religious influence." "The Church of England." "His mother's Unitarian faith." "Most of all, the ideas of his grandfathers laid the foundation for Darwin's later career." "Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood were free-thinking rationalists and humanists." "As members of the Lunar Society, they were noted for challenging conventional thought on philosophy, politics, religion and science." "They were interested in invention." "And they didn't set any limits for themselves." "Erasmus Darwin, his grandfather, for example imagined 'chariots in the air', imagined air travel, and some people made fun of him but, you know, of course it's happened!" "Erasmus Darwin is a fascinating character." "He developed a world view which did include the general idea of evolution, and it comes into some of his poems and it's expressed in a biological treatise he wrote called the Zoonomia." "There's a whole chapter in that about what we would call 'evolution'." "Granddad's Zoonomia inspired a boy whose greatest delights were creating grand stories and investigating nature." "Later in life, when Darwin explores the possibility of evolution, passages of Zoonomia would be added to his beloved notebooks." "Notebooks filled with thoughts, questions, ideas..." "Ideas that grow as the boy becomes a man." "Let's go!" "He was a thinker who liked to enjoy himself" "With his friends he would spend hours hunting, collecting specimens and discussing the wonders of the English countryside." ""... the head is of a golden green and armed with a slender blackhorn which is curved backwards... "" "It seems that Darwin was also a serious young man." "He wasn't just out to amuse himself." "He went to Cambridge with the understanding that he would ultimately train to become a member of the British clergy." "And that he would become a country vicar which would be a career path that would suit him as a naturalist very much." "However, Charles was beginning to question some teachings of the established church." "Then in 1831, at the age of22, he received the chance of a lifetime." "It would seriously challenge Darwin's vision of a comfortable life as a country vicar" "A voyage around the world." "Darwin..." " Captain Fitzroy!" "Welcome aboard HMS Beagle!" "As I sit here in the room that Darwin occupied at Christ's College, I think about him going out from Cambridge onto the voyage of the Beagle, making discoveries that changed his whole way of looking at things" "Whilst Darwin was on the Beagle this commitment to becoming a parson faded away." "He writes about it less and less." "He begins to see a different kind of life opening up in front of him, a life to which he really, really wanted to give himself." "It's often said that Darwin was the naturalist on board the Beagle and that's true in away." "But he wasn't appointed as the naturalist, he was asked to join that voyage more as a companion to the captain, somebody who would pay his own way and contribute something of value to science." ""I'm quite fascinated with the makeup of the island." "The lower parts are extremely arid, whilst the top possesses... "" "It was an amazing experience for anyone, but for a young man like Darwin who had the intellect and the curiosity to make something of it, it was just an incredible voyage." "The first leg of this grand ocean-going adventure gave Darwin two months to think." "His thoughts were fueled by a gift from the Beagle's captain, Robert Fitzroy." "A book that appealed to Darwin's primary passion" "Principles of Geology, Volume One by the Scots lawyer, Charles Lyell." "Darwin as a young man was a geologist originally, and he was a follower of Lyell's uniformitarian geology which supposes very slow changes over an immense span of time for the earth's history." "And in this book Lyell argues that "the present is the key to the past"." "That is, that currently operating geological forces are sufficient to explain all of geological history." "By the way, Lyell in Volume 1 of the Principles of Geology really attacked this point of view of trying to use" "Genesis as a guide to geology." "Lyell couldn't accept the biblical account of a recent creation." "Indeed, his express wish was to "free science from Moses"." "Yeah, I think it is worth remembering that, for the young Darwin, some of the questions which have been reopened by modern debates for instance about the age of the earth... he would have regarded them as largely settled." "Darwin arrived in South America with ideas and influences swirling around him." "His quirky grandfather." "The teachings of the church." "Lyell the lawyer, with his immensely old earth." "So for Darwin, it was not enough to simply marvel at the natural world." "He needed to consider far bigger questions." "Where did it come from?" "How was it made?" "Recently, on the beaches north of Punta Alta in Argentina, giant fossil footprints were discovered." "Darwin explored this area in August 1833, where he found fossil remains of the animals that made these footprints." "Geologist Emil Silvestru considers the question - what if Charles had also found these tracks?" "The big fellow that we see here is Megatherium that is, "large mammal"." "And one of his kind produced the footprints we could see up the coast from PuntaAlta." "Megatherium is a member of a group of nine different species of fossil animals that Charles Darwin found here and he believed that these animals were killed somewhere else and transported by water" " and laid down as carcasses because their bones were still together" "It seems that something else has happened here." "These animals were trying to escape something happening on that flood plain." "Maybe incoming water, some sort of a catastrophe, but they were stranded there and they eventually died and were buried and found by Charles Darwin later." "Science today continues to uncover vast amounts of new information" "Perhaps if Charles had seen these footprints his story might have changed." "But like the scientists who discovered these footprints, Darwin didn't just record the observed data, he also tried to make sense of what he was seeing." "Just like a detective studying a crime scene where the clues can be interpreted a number of ways" "Darwin's thoughts reflected his eager application of uniformitarianism " "Lyell's idea of an old earth, changing ever so slowly." "This would become an important part of Darwin's theory of evolution." "Lyell had given the young scientist a framework for interpreting what he was seeing." "But at the risk of missing other possibilities." "I think it is important to remember that any scientist, when they look at empirical data, they look at that with preconceived ideas, with various assumptions-with their own worldview, and that can have a big impact on how they interpret that data." "As scientists we have to be really careful, because it's very easy to get locked in by your ideas, or by the search image that you have when you go in the field." "In spite of the fact that you think you have an open mind, very often your perceptions of what things should be, or your search image, or your cultural beliefs in some cases, will actually be working on your mind" "so that your eyes are open, but they're not really open." "They're missing something that could take you in an entirely new direction." "Today, as science progresses, intriguing new possibilities are emerging, that run counter to Darwin's understanding." "But as the Beagle spent eighteen months surveying the Atlantic coast," "Darwin was convinced that Lyell was right." "He believed he was seeing the results of slow, uniform change." "And at the mouth of the mysterious Rio Santa Cruz, he thought he had found the remains of an ancient sea channel." ""I firmly believe that Mr Lyell perfectly explains how this came to be." "The ocean rising and lowering over great eons of time... "" "The river was strong, but not enough to wear through layers of hard basalt rock." "Darwin believed that millions of years ago, the ocean had cut this river valley." "Through the continent." "Coast to coast." ""April 26th." "No possible action of any flood could thus have modelled the land, either within the valley or along the open coast... "" "By travelling upstream, Darwin hoped he would find an ancient channel to the opposite coast." "Unfortunately, due to the fast-flowing water and with food nearly gone, they were forced to turn back." "After nearly 140 miles." "Had he reached the river's source," "Darwin would not have found an ancient sea channel." "Up ahead lay an unexpected force of nature" "This is the real source of the Santa Cruz river." "It is the Perito Moreno Glacier." "This, according to present standards, is a large glacier; but it's nothing compared to what was happening here during the Great Patagonian Glaciation." "But try to imagine - this topped by more than a kilometre of ice, higher than the mountains here and extending far east, all the way out to the sea." "It was an enormous amount of water in storage." "The melt water accumulated at the foot or underneath the glacier, and that's a time-bomb ticking, because when such water accumulates, the pressure increases." "At some point it's going to be released, like a huge catastrophe." "Enough water to cut valleys like the Santa Cruz - not one, but many." "Darwin's views on geology left little room for this kind of catastrophe in a uniform world." "A gigantic release of glacial water that carved this massive channel, 200 miles to the sea." "In days, not eons of time" "And similar situations have been found and proven in places like Washington State , in Canada - even the English Channel today is believed to have been cut by such a flood." "Darwin had his own encounter with the raw power of glaciers, at the extreme tip of South America." "His voyage almost ended when a huge ice fall hurled a tremendous wave at their camp." "But what shook Charles even more was his encounter with the indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego." "An encounter that would influence the development of his theory." "Captain Fitzroy had visited a few years earlier." "On the Beagle with Darwin, were natives from the area." "They had spent the last several years in Britain being trained in civilised English manners." "Charles became friends with one of them Jemmy Button from Wulaia Bay." "Fitzroy and Darwin both hoped that because they were now educated they would be able to teach their own people that the benefits of civilisation and of course this went terribly wrong." "And by the standards of that time, they reverted to savagery, very rapidly" "A year later, the Beagle returned, to begin the Pacific leg of the voyage." "Charles found his friend Jemmy Button again, but nothing of the English gentleman remained." "To Darwin, it was as if Jemmy had slipped right back down the ladder of human progress." ""These are the most abject and miserable wretches, I anywhere beheld..." "Viewing such men one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures... "" "And that raises several questions in his mind." "One is, is this telling us something about the original state of human beings or have the Fuegians fallen back to that savage state from an originally higher state." "But the other question that Darwin then has to contemplate is whether that difference is something deeper, something biological?" "Jemmy would have a profound impact on Darwin's later writing, when he applied his theory of evolution to humanity." "By the time he writes The Descent of Man in 1871, it's pretty clear that he by that time shares the growing suspicion or conviction of many Europeans, that the non-white races simply do not have the capacity to be elevated properly into civilised human beings-that" "they are mentally and morally at a more limited level." "In a sense, they are stuck at an earlier stage in the biological evolution of the human species." "Such ideas are now seen as racist with no basis in science." "Today biology and genetics reveal that all people-groups are very closely related" "But in 1834,this experience, as well as his grandfather's evolutionary ideas, had given Darwin another way of looking at human origins." "A picture very different from the traditional biblical view that all people are descended from Adam and Eve." "He had been away from home for two and a half years, when the Beagle headed north to warmer waters" "Ahead lay Chile and access to the Andes Mountains." "Darwin's devotion to Lyell's "slow and steady' was about to be challenged." "Would he follow the idea other evidence?" "Darwin" "Believed in the "fixity of continents' and just vertical movements - very, very slow ones." "But in order to explain folds and buckling of high mountain ranges you need lateral movements." "Well today, according to plate tectonics, there is a process known as 'underplating' when there is an injection of magma from, actually, the mantle, lifting the continents very quickly." "And also coming with many earthquakes." "And earthquakes can be a clear explanation of sudden jolts which push the continents up today." "What's interesting, in February 1835, Darwin lived through an earthquake in Chile and he saw how the mainland was uplifted in places by three feet, but also howan island, offshore of Chile was uplifted about ten feet, three times more." "Well that, ran counter to his model, to his paradigm, so he decided he had better not use the idea that the earthquakes could be a cause for regional uplift." "As Darwin explored Chile, he discovered shells in these hills." "According to Lyell's long ages of uplift, they should be fossilized or decomposed." "They were neither." "So here we are, 150 metres above sea level today, and we have clear evidence that this was the bottom of the sea." "We have shells, we have barnacles on them, we have even shell beds here... showing that this land has been uplifted." "Rapid geological events like these, are not limited to the coast of Chile." "In fact, all over Chile and the Andes mountains, Darwin saw physical features that can be interpreted in ways that challenge Lyell's notion of 'deep time'." "By the time he got to this point," "Darwin had already taken in all three volumes of Lyell's Principles of Geology" "He was in search of one very important thing: 'Deep time' - long, long durations of time, so that evolution later on could be possible." "And that's exactly what he was looking for in here, having this paradigm in mind and no alternative." "The whole understanding of 'deep time' did have an impact on Darwin's thinking, which certainly gave him an impetus for developing the whole theory of evolution." "He was well into the third year of the voyage when he found some fossilised trees here." "This is one of the most impressive fossil trees that we find in this original Darwin area." "It is actually just a cast, what was left after the tree was removed except for a little piece in the centre." "Lyell's thinking completely influenced Darwin's understanding of these trees." "He believed they grew here and were slowly buried over millions of years has the land sank into the ocean." "This particular upright fossilised tree stump is of extreme importance because it reveals one of the things that are not visible with the others, that is the very low end of it." "Now if this was a tree that grew in place, we should see two things in here." "First, a thick layer of soil into which it has sent its roots to stand up - it's a big tree" "Well, there's no soil or paleosoil, here;" "and absolutely no sign of any roots." "This evidence suggests a different scenario." "This tree, like many others around, has been actually broken from some distant forest, carried by moving water, and later sunk into the sediment." "Vertically, like that- because they got water-laden and heavier, so they sunk like that." "They were very rapidly buried-they couldn't wait thousands or hundreds of thousands of years to be slowly fossilised, they would have rotten away." "They had to be rapidly buried and then fossilized." "They would have rotten away." "They had to be rapidly buried and then fossilized." "In the light of modern geology, Lyell's theory has been seriously eroded." "Rapid catastrophic change is now an accepted geological mechanism." "But it maybe unfair to judge Darwin by today's standards of science." "In the early 1800s, science, philosophy and religion were all still very closely linked... and they were about to collide in astonishing ways- in the Galápagos Islands." "Well, when Darwin came here, he went to several islands and he made collections." "And one of the things that he found here- and actually much of what he learned- he learned when he later got back to England which is important to point out." "There's this common misconception that Darwin came up with the theory of evolution according to natural selection while he was here on the Galápagos, but this is not true." "At this point in his career, he's much more of a geologist than he is a biologist." "In Principles of Geology, Lyell argued for 'centres of creation', with particular groups of species created in specific places." "For Darwin, the Galápagos represented one specific 'centre of creation' with fixed, unchanging species." "But because he was locked into this particular view, he was about to miss vital information." "Because he was so influenced by Lyell's ideas on centers of creation, he didn't bother writing down which islands he'd collected particular specimens from and undoubtedly one of the contributing factors to that was that he hadn't realised that he was collecting so many different species of finch" "And it wasn't until he returned home to England and had to explain where the different finches had come from, that it became important." "And this is one of the few occasions where Darwin allowed a theoretical viewpoint to influence how he gathered his data." "In Darwin's day, animals weren't believed to change or adapt." "It was a view called 'Fixity of Species', a concept from the philosophers of ancient Greece." "Fixity of Species was so strongly accepted by academics, it overturned the religious scholars' belief in a biblical Flood that destroyed nearly all life." "Anyone who believed in a Noah's ark would likely also believe species can disperse and adapt." "This happens through natural selection and was exactly what Darwin was seeing in the Galápagos." "But he wouldn't recognise it, until long after leaving the islands." "In his mind, the label 'Made by God' meant unchanging fixity of species." "This is a ridiculous idea, it's demonstrably false, but not everyone of the day believed it." "In fact, there were significant people like Edward Blyth, who was a creationist, and yet he came up with a fully-fledged theory of natural selection." "Darwin got Blyth's first paper when Darwin was in South America" "So when he came here to the Galápagos, he had Blyth's idea of natural selection, and Lyell's idea of geology, on his mind." "Yet for some reason," "Darwin still missed the idea that natural selection was occurring all around him." "Lyell called evolution 'transmutation'." "At the end of the book, he comes to an anti-transmutationist point of view but" "Charles reads this and he thinks," "Ooh, wait a minute, not so fast" " I think this transmutation thing has more going for it. "" "So, you know, later he sets up a "Lyell versus me" on the back of the book." "Points for Lyell - points for me. "" "On one point though there was complete agreement -vast geological time which would prove vital to Darwin's biology." "Really, all the geologists at the time thought that the earth was of great, great duration." "So that meant that there was time enough for a process of change in species, for transmutation to happen." "Charles began to see that species weren't fixed after all." "He noticed slight differences between mockingbirds on the mainland and the islands." "And that makes the birth of new species seem a very modest sort of thing" "You know, it's not a robin appearing out of nowhere; it's a slightly different mockingbird." "So by the end of the voyage he has away to picture new species coming into existence." "If Darwin was seeing new species, this was a revelation." "In his mind divine, supernatural creation had been proven wrong" "Leading up to Darwin and in Darwin's day there was a strong disdain for miracles and when Darwin came along there really was quite a bit of pressure for a natural history that did not involve miracles, for religious reasons." "And so Darwin's theory of evolution played very well, where he described God as the 'law-giver' but not haste 'miracle-maker'." "Like many at the time, he thought the Greek philosophers had it right." "God could only create harmony." "Charles couldn't accept the Bible's account of a perfect world broken by original sin, with death and suffering the result of a cursed creation." "Since the world is clearly full of suffering and cruelty, he thought God must have taken his hands off the wheel a long, longtime ago." "Divine creation as popularly understood wasn't making sense as science was uncovering one atrocity after another." "It just didn't seem like this is what God would have created." "If Lyell was keen to free science from the Bible, had Darwin found the key?" "Could these species be evolving into different species?" "But what exactly is a new species?" "While there is debate, a new species cannot or will not breed or hybridize with other species, even closely related ones." "Yet, recent mating behaviour on the Galápagos has astounded biologists." "Well, more and more we're finding that hybridisation does occur." "I mean, there are very clear examples on this island especially, where small and medium-beaked ground finches will hybridise." "But when we saw hybridisation between a land iguana and a marine iguana, that was very strange to us because they're completely different genera, they have absolutely different habitats and lifestyles, and they're so different physically" "that when they - twas thought completely impossible that they could hybridise" " and when they did hybridise, twas pretty much an amazing occurrence." "Clearly these iguanas are ignoring current scientific thought." "And while iguana romance is redefining speciation, it also raises questions about the time involved." "This is much more likely that this is an evidence of a recent population explosion, than it is deep time and slow speciation events." "For marine iguanas can swim across the gaps between the islands and you could expect overtime, a blending of the various traits" "If species can merge rapidly like this, why is such extraordinary variety preserved in the Galápagos?" "Why is a tortoise on one island so different from those on another?" "And why is there a unique land iguana on Santa Fe island just 20 miles from its closest neighbour?" "The species made the jump from the mainland in the first place and it's 600 miles away, but the major islands are some 30,40-odd miles apart." "There should be quite a bit of interaction amongst the islands, and so over deep time, over millions of years, you would expect species to jump again and again and again and again, and you get all sorts of hybridisation, and you get a blurring of the species lines." "But when I look around, I don't see the evidence for that" "I see a perfectly compelling alternate viewpoint that these islands are thousands of years old." "That they're young, and the species on the islands are also young." "On the order of several thousand years." "Also causing surprise are Darwin's very own finches." "New research has discovered that changes due to natural selection are actually happening in the space of a year or so." "The finches in the Galápagos, they change rapidly, but the species doesn't change." "It is the morphology that changes rapidly." "So first of all they thought that these were different species, but actually they are the same species." "Biologists still have a problem with this." "You know, there's still gradualism - it's still an important part of biology and the demonstration that finch evolution could occur very rapidly was shocking in itself, when that occurred." "The phenotype of the Darwin finches is cyclic." "It stays within certain boundaries." "So some years you have finches with big beaks, depending on food environments and the other years you have the same species of finch with thin beaks." "Darwin's theory requires progress by small changes that build on each other over vast amounts of time" "Instead, researchers see beaks getting large, then small, then large again." "It's a rapid cycle from one generation to the next, haste climate affects the food supply." "Darwin couldn't see this cycle." "He was there for only five weeks in the latter part of 1835." "But does this change due to natural selection equal evolution as Darwin imagined it?" "When I hear the word 'evolution' it has many meanings and we have to define the word." "And in this context we are talking about evolution turning molecules to man." "And in this grand scale I don't see any evidence, really." "I think that nature has been created to be able to modify itself and fitting the circumstances where living organisms are." "We see a lot of variation potential in nature, but real novelties are not there." "People talk about different species and speciation in nature." "That's something that we can observe, but it is not the same thing as creating novel structures, novel information." "I don't see that." "This novel or new genetic information is essential for Darwin's theory to work." "But he had his own information to process as he left the Galápagos." "It would take many years before he was ready to show his theory to the world." "And the world would not be the same." "Of course it's huge, because once you commit yourself to a transmutationist explanation, you have to explain everything." "So you know, it's going to be a long road, but he's a very young man and he has the time to work it out." "So that's what he does for the next twenty years." "After a voyage of almost half a decade, Charles Darwin returned home a celebrity." "A friend had been publishing his journals and they were a sensation." "Three years later, he married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood." "With an inheritance to support them, Charles settled into a life of writing and research." "His approach was simple." "Develop a concept and see how well the observed data fits that concept." "He also had preconceived ideas about how science should work." "Especially about what God would do and what He wouldn't do." "I think he was caught up in his times, in his culture" " the religious thought that was baked-in." "I don't think he was malicious." "He was trying to find the truth." "He was convinced that he had found the truth." "And he knew that what he was thinking about, what he was writing about, what he was developing in his mind, was terribly radical." "He couldn't have been more radical." "It was undermining everything that he could see around him." "And this probably did give him a great deal of personal anxiety." "People in Darwin's day thought they had been created in God's image." "Darwin's suggestion that we descended from animals, was very disturbing for many of his friends, including Lyell." "And such radical thinking was taking a physical toll." "He became ill." "And historians have long thought that this is not a coincidence, that in some way Darwin's anxieties were being expressed physically." "What we might today, even call a nervous breakdown." "For Charles, it wasn't just about objective science, but about good and evil." "The natural world seemed so full of suffering - like a parasitic wasp laying eggs inside a living caterpillar." "This apparent evil demanded a solution." "Darwin's response was to explain life as a 'survival-of-the-fittest' ordeal- in nature, and tragically, in his own family." "Darwin encountered many hardships in his life, including the deaths of three of his children." "This had a tremendous impact on his intellectual life because he was working with a theory that requires death." "His theory of natural selection is built on the idea that the unfit are going to die, that they're not going to contribute to the next generation." "And he had a theory that was suddenly being played out in front of his eyes." "That his own darling children who, he had imagined, were fit, healthy, happy children- that they're just taken away- and it gave him very deep philosophical difficulties." "How could a supposedly good God allow three of his ten children to die?" "This was to eventually become a major theme in Origin of Species, but it would take him two decades to refine his thinking" "Finally, he was spurred into action by an essay on natural selection by Alfred Russell Wallace" "It looked like Charles Darwin had been beaten to the post." "He was devastated, but friends encouraged him to begin writing" "15 months later, in November 1850," "On the Origin of Species was published 1250 copies." "A modest first edition, but the impact was enormous." "So was the controversy." "Darwin spent the rest of his life promoting and defending evolution." "The wonderful thing about what Darwin did was that he managed to through very, very careful observation, and just thinking about things, present it in away that became palatable to people." "And although, of course, it's caused a tremendous amount of controversy, that was inevitable." "Once you go through any kind of major paradigm shift like that, not everybody's going to like it." "I mean, people today still don't like it." "Darwin phrases a lot of his book as a personal invitation to- look at things my way for a little while, see how well it works, see all the difficulties - see howl can explain some of the difficulties. "" "Darwin had no idea of course, what the cell looks like, what the information system is like, what the complexity of the cell is." "It seems that nature is resisting change." "Living cells resist change." "30 years ago, 20 years ago, in the early days of genetic engineering, people were envisaging changing organisms at will" "It hasn't happened." "The examples are minor." "We can produce insulin with bacteria." "We can produce EPO hormone with bacteria, but we can't change bacteria to anything else than bacteria." "Darwin was heavily involved with pigeon breeding, and he knew what the breeders had known all along - that there were limits, or apparent limits to biological change." "That did not support his theory very well." "So Darwin shoe-horned that evidence into his theory and speculated how it may not be relevant in the wild." "But if natural selection has limits or boundaries, what provides the additional new genetic information that Darwin's theory requires?" "Most believe that random genetic mistakes called mutations are responsible." "Modern biology is information science, and as far as we know, information always has an intelligent source behind that." "So when we look at biology, we are asking automatically the question," "Where does the information come from?"" "Enzymes are information molecules." "They are actually the tools that nature uses to modify things." "So, it's totally inconceivable that an informational molecule could be created by random mechanisms." "When we introduce randomness, the informational content disappears." "The enzymes are degraded, they are non-functional." "I think if he was here today he would be very disappointed in the evidence for his whole theory of evolution." "I think there hasn't been the evidence showing that the whole theory works in the way in that he thought it did." "Well I think most modern biologists would say it's stacking up pretty well - that it is with lots of additions and modifications, it's still playing an important role in the way we think today" "Evolutionists now believe that the theory is well supported by the evidence." "Now if you ask them to explain that, they will have difficulties, and they will describe those difficulties as 'research problems'." "Despite these problems, Darwin's theory remains the reigning paradigm in the life sciences." "Yet after 150 years the debate is still fierce" "Is this just about the science?" "The structure of his arguments are still very relevant today." "Specifically, Darwin argued that the evil in the world, and the apparent lack of design in the world, falsifies design, falsifies creation." "But when I look at the natural world," "I don't see imperfections in the concept of design." "For example, if you take the human being  the human being, I would say has a perfect design in terms of concept." "You can't improve the concept of the joints, the skeleton and other aspects of design." "Of course, there is death, disease, there is injury." "These are bad things" "His response to that was, let me contrive a naturalistic explanation for the species." "How can I explain how the world came about by natural laws, not by God's hand?" "Darwin had embraced Lyell's goal of freeing science from the Bible." "His book dared to challenge the best-selling book of all time" "If new species emerge by a mechanical process, Charles had solved the problem of evil in nature." "God is off the hook, but also out of the picture." "And if the Genesis account of origins was gone, there were severe implications for the rest of the Bible." "Without the bedrock of accepting the truth of Genesis you can't rely on the other aspects of the Bible's teaching... about moral values and indeed about the salvation of the human race." "So evolutionism, is perceived as a threat because it undermines that foundation in Genesis, and at the same time, here are these scientists promoting this radically materialistic alternative, which seems not only to get rid of the veracity of the Genesis account of creation," "but to undermine even anymore general idea of design in nature." "Bertrand Russell put it this way - "science is all there is to know, there's nothing beyond science as far as knowledge goes, it's only beliefs that are supported by science that are respectable or worth holding. "" "But then the irony is, that belief itself is not supported by science." "You can't give empirical evidence for that belief." "That belief is a piece of philosophy, or it might even be a kind of a piece of theology, but it's not a piece of science." "Naturalism is today propagated dogmatically." "The alternative idea, that God has created the universe, is excluded by ridicule, which is hardly scientific." "It's not religion versus science, it's religion versus the materialistic worldview that is seen to stem from science." "What we forget, I think very often, is that really science started off as a branch of philosophy, and it was much more integrated at that time, in the way people thought and approached things." "And particularly in Darwin's case, because of course, he was coming up with something that was taking things in a totally new direction." "Something that was anti-religion, in essence." "Today, Darwin's ideas are used to support a philosophical worldview that seeks to exclude any reference to the supernatural." "According to Darwinism, a Creator God is no longer needed as the cause of human origins." "As Richard Dawkins once said," "Darwin makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist"." "So, if you were an atheist prior to Darwin, you really have no answer to the question," "How is it-why is it the case that there is this enormous variety of the living world, how can that come about?"" "Complicated theories don't influence culture - simple and crude stories have a power on human thinking, and Darwin's gift was in kind of popularising a crude, simple idea and creating the illusion that this simple mechanism could explain everything that there is." "By drawing on the ideas of his grandfather and others, the boy who loved to tell stories had created a grand narrative." "A story of origins that would change the world." "But ironically, Darwin's book avoided the obvious question." "The origin of life itself." "Darwin's theory is very much a theory of time and things changing and developing through time." "And hence, it forces us to think about where we came from as human beings, our origins, according to Darwin, in the animal kingdom - and then about the ascent of life through vast periods of geological time." "And then about the ultimate origin of life itself, where that comes from - which is a question that scientists are still puzzling over today." "About40 years ago, I first heard that evolution might not be true, and I reacted very violently." "I was furious." "I was angry about this kind of proposition." "When I went back to think about my reaction" "I realised that it was really a faith commitment from my side." "I knew very little." "I started to study biochemistry at that time and I saw that the biochemistry behind the evolutionary story is not that strong." "And after 40 years of doing science now," "I see even much less evidence for this evolutionary story." "Biology has proved to be much more complex than we thought40 years ago." "I don't think that science would be where it is today if it wasn't for Darwin." "150 years later, it is clear that Darwin's theory of evolution is really not about science." "It's about God." "Darwin understood the power of his argument," "This was about philosophy and religion as much as it was about science." "He ignited the fiercest kind of human debate." "Where worldviews collide." "For some, the Bible answers the big questions." "The origins of the fossil record, humanity, good and evil." "For others, Origin of Species says these questions are answered by unguided processes that took millions of years." "Some say the two views can co-exist, but Darwin himself strongly resisted such a conclusion." "He died knowing his voyage shook the world." "But questions about where we come from and why we're here, refuse to go away."