"ANDREW MARR:" "For 1 50 years, a revolutionary idea has been spreading all over the world." "It has helped us unravel the mysteries of creation, transforming our understanding of life on Earth and our own place in nature." "But this idea has implications that go far beyond science." "Its legacy reaches deep into every area of our lives, challenging our culture, our politics, our religious beliefs." "It forces us to re-examine the foundations of human behaviour and morality." "And it's been used to justify imperialism, war and genocide." "(SPEAKING GERMAN)" "In this series, I'm going to tell the story of the most important idea to emerge in the modern world." "Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, is now widely accepted as a scientifically truthful description of the course of life on Earth." "And scientific truth is never a bad thing." "But this is an idea so big, it's now got a life of its own." "Understand Darwinism correctly and it can offer a key to many of humanity's greatest problems." "Get Darwinism wrong and it leads you straight to hell." "Welcome to the world of Darwin's Dangerous Idea." "In 2006, next to a photograph of the 9/1 1 attack on the Twin Towers in New York, the influential Turkish writer, Adnan Oktar, wrote that those responsible for acts of terror are in fact Darwinists." "Darwin's theory of evolution, he argued, is a philosophy that values and promotes conflict." "After 150 years, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution still has the power to provoke fierce opposition." "And Oktar is one of his most extreme and vocal opponents." "Adnan Oktar is regarded by some as the leader of a dangerous cult." "But he is a big player in creationism." "He believes that Darwin was unscientific, evolution has never happened and God created all living things as they are." "He's hardly alone in that, but he goes a great deal further." ""The evil in the world," he says, the violence, the wars, the terrorism, are the responsibility of Darwinists." "oktar is no scientist, but he's written a lavishly illustrated book, The Atlas of Creation, which contains spurious evidence that life on Earth is not the result of evolution." "Many Muslims and Islamic scientists are opposed to Oktar's views, but his influence is growing." "He's now taking his extraordinary campaign to the rest of the world, by sending The Atlas of Creation to schools, universities and international leaders." "of course, Oktar's hardly the first to campaign against Darwin's Theory of Evolution." "We don't believe that men have come from monkeys." "God has created men." "I just heard the majority would say it was Charles Darwin's fault." "Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionised out of some primordial soup." "MARR:" "Many religious fundamentalists are disturbed by the implications of Darwin's Theory of Evolution." "They believe it's unleashed a godless era of conflict and moral decline." "To this day, Darwin's idea has the power to challenge some of our most deeply held beliefs." "Charles Darwin and his followers have shown how all life on the planet evolved from a single source." "The mechanism they call evolution by natural selection means competition, extinction and the emergence of new forms of life without the need for a director or conductor." "The creator shimmers and vanishes like a mirage." "Has Darwin killed God?" "Charles Darwin's dangerous idea began to take root in 1831, when he set off on a trip around the world aboard HMS Beagle, aged just 22." "He would later call this voyage," ""By far, the most important event in my life. "" "His adventure lasted almost five years." "And Darwin's historic encounters with iguanas, finches and tortoises on the Galapagos Islands have passed into legend." "In fact, Darwin spent just five weeks in the Galapagos." "But he spent more than a year here, at the southernmost tip of South America." "Tierra del Fuego." "Darwin's encounter with the natives of this distant land would lead him to a radical new understanding of man's place in nature." "The Beagle came here to return three of Darwin's fellow passengers to their homeland." "The first was a 2 7-year-old who Darwin described as moody and taciturn." "The second, a dandy, who became distressed if his shoes weren't polished." "And the third, a little girl, said to be as broad as she was high." "The Beagle's captain had captured the Fuegans on a previous voyage." "They'd been taken back to Britain to be introduced to civilised society." "The Fuegan three had been treated more as objects of curiosity to be prodded and goggled at than as human beings." "They'd been taught English, dressed in Western clothes, converted to Christianity, shown to the king and queen." "And they'd been renamed." "Fuegia Basket, Jemmy Button, York Minster." "Well, these are names for dolls, not for people." "During the long voyage," "Darwin was charmed and intrigued by the three Fuegans." "He thought they were different from civilised Europeans, but not that different." "Now they were coming home to set up a Christian mission and convert their fellow Fuegans." "So, a simple, heart-warming story." "Except that when the Beagle finally landed here, on the wild shores of Tierra del Fuego, Darwin was in for a shock." "When the Beagle dropped anchor at Wallaceton Island in December 1832," "Darwin encountered uncivilised Fuegan natives for the first time." ""These were the most abject" ""and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld, "" "he wrote later." ""Their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint." ""Their skins filthy and greasy." ""Their voices discordant and their gestures violent. "" "Darwin was fascinated to see humans in such a primitive, almost animal state." "But worse was to come." "After a month, the Christian mission was established and the Beagle set off to explore more of the coastline." "Jemmy, Fuegia and York Minster were left behind with the mission's leader, the Reverend Richard Matthews." "Ten days later, Darwin and the crew returned to see how they were getting along with their civilising Christian mission." "Darwin was aghast to discover that all the mission's property had either been stolen or destroyed." "The Reverend Matthews was in a state of abject terror, at the mercy of a group of Fuegans who were curiously plucking out the hairs of his beard using a pair of mussel shells as pincers." "Even more shocking, Fuegia Basket Jemmy Button and York Minster were already slipping back into their savage state." ""One's mind hurries back over past centuries," wrote Darwin later," ""and asks whether our ancestors could be such as these."" "Civilisation suddenly appeared thin and fragile." "Darwin was shocked to see how quickly his Fuegan friends had reverted to their original state." "This would lead him to question the biblical account of man's place in God's creation." "Dangerous territory for an outwardly respectable Christian gentleman." "When the Beagle finally turned for home, Darwin carried with him five years' worth of notebooks, and specimens and thoughts." "But it was the Fuegans who really seemed to have haunted him." "Because they showed him just how changeable humanity is." "Not safely fixed outside nature, but a piece of the rest." "Mingled and mutable." "Darwin found this place deeply unsettling." "And it obliged him to ask that most unsettling question, where do we, all of us," "Fuegans, natives, Europeans, where do we come from?" "Back in England, this question would turn into something even more dangerous." "on a trip to the zoo in 1 838, Darwin was captivated by a young orang-utan called Jenny, the first ever to go on view in Britain." "Jenny was being teased by her keeper, who was holding out an apple just beyond her reach." "She was kicking, crying and sulking like a naughty child." "The keeper said that if Jenny would behave, she could have the apple." "After a while,Jenny, who clearly seemed to have understood every word, pulled herself together and was given her reward." "Darwin was delighted to see that she jumped into an armchair and began to eat the apple with the most contented countenance imaginable." "And later he wrote, "Let man visit the orang-utan in domestication" ""and see its intelligence."" "He wasn't alone." "The young Queen Victoria visited the apes in London zoo and said," ""The orang-utan is too wonderful." ""He is painfully and frightfully and disagreeably human."" "A few weeks later," "Darwin returned to the zoo to take a closer look at Jenny." "The more he studied her, the more he felt haunted by his memories of the natives in Tierra del Fuego." "Something unthinkable was pressing to the forefront of his mind." ""Compare the Fuegans and the orang-utans, "said Darwin," ""and dare say the differences are so great. "" "He then picked up a mirror and he looked at his own face." "And then back at Jenny." "And then back at himself." "And he stared at his own face more intently than he had ever done in his life before." "And the more he looked, the more the unthinkable became obvious." "There was a deep connection between himself, the Fuegans and the apes." "Darwin was speaking evolution, but in 1838 it sounded like revolution." "He was so disturbed by the potential impact of his work that he'd started keeping his dangerous ideas in a set of secret notebooks." "In one of them, he'd begun to sketch out a new kind of family tree to illustrate his emerging theory of evolution." "Darwin represented the different species by different twigs on his tree, and he suggested that, for instance, mankind and orang-utans were related through a common ancestor." "Then he went a great deal further, leaping forward in thought, rather bravely, to suggest that perhaps all life on the planet had a single, common source." "This was an extraordinary leap of logic, and Darwin was modest enough to write at the top of the page," ""I think."" "These few sketchy lines represented the evolution of all life on Earth." "Darwin had unleashed the idea that human beings were not created separately by God, we'd evolved, just like everything else in nature." ""Man in his arrogance, thinks of himself as a great work, "Darwin would write." ""More true is to consider him created from animals. "" "Darwin's revolution was in motion." "But his explanation of how one species, including man, evolved from another, would be even more challenging." "He found the key while talking to gardeners, pigeon fanciers, and animal breeders." "With dogs or pigeons or horses, the traits are selected by breeders looking for longer legs or floppy ears or decorative feathers, or whatever it is." "The choosing is done by the breeder." "But here's the question, what is the force in nature that selects?" "Darwin found his answer in a book about population growth written by an economist and clergyman called Thomas Malthus." "Malthus claimed that the world's human population was expanding faster than its food supply." "Famine was killing off weaker individuals in a perpetual struggle for survival." "He saw this as nature's way of restoring the population balance." "This was hardly a Christian view." "It was a brutal selection process that defied religious morality and the sanctity of human life." "But Darwin now applied Malthus' warning about the fight for survival to his own theory." "Perhaps all life was engaged in the same perpetual struggle to survive and reproduce." "Darwin proposed one general law." "Namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die." "He called this law natural selection." "This was creation, according to Darwin." "No Adam and Eve, no need for God." "And in God's place, an indifferent mechanism." "A mechanism that relentlessly scrutinised every individual of every species." "It selected the best adapted and remorselessly eliminated the rest." "over time, it has created today's world and today's creatures, including... oh, yes, us!" ""Man, wonderful man'; wrote Darwin," ""must collapse into nature's cauldron." ""He is not a deity." "He is no exception. "" "At a stroke, Darwin had demolished the biblical account of Creation." "one of his old teachers would warn him that his new creed would bring ruin and confusion, undermining the whole moral and social fabric." "Riddled with self-doubt," "Darwin was tormented by dreams of being hanged or beheaded." "Darwin knew that if he went public without enough evidence for this strange, strange theory, he'd face public ridicule and attack, so he spent the next 20 years working on it in private." "He knew perfectly well he was taking on religion." "He said the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the views or beliefs of any barbarian." "on November 24th, 1859, Darwin finally published" "On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection." "Dull title, but it did what it said on the cover." "It upended our understanding of life on Earth." "But just as Darwin had feared, the press were most interested in his ideas about mankind's ancestry." "Darwin himself deliberately downplayed human evolution, leaving any talk about it until right at the end of the book, with this crazily coy throwaway line," ""Light will be shed on the origins of man."" "It didn't work." "Everybody was talking about whether mankind was descended from monkeys." "The great Victorian statesman, Benjamin Disraeli, famously asked," ""Is man an ape or an angel, my Lord?" "I am on the side of the angels."" "Some of Darwin's Christian colleagues acknowledged the importance of his theory, but the hierarchy of the Church of England pounced on Darwin's degrading suggestion that man was not divinely created, but descended from animals." "The attack was led by the Bishop of oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, otherwise known as Soapy Sam, on account of his hand-wringing gestures." "Soapy Sam had already criticised Darwin's ideas in print, but he now intended to shred them, in person and in public." "It happened here, in oxford, in June 1860, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Science." "Darwin was too ill to attend the meeting himself, but his friend, the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, was there to defend his theory." "Thomas Huxley thought up the word "agnostic"" "to describe his own scepticism about religion, and he was deeply hostile to the Church of England interfering with science." "A great beefy hunk of a man with a hot temper, he'd become known as Darwin's bulldog." "And today he was spoiling for a fight." "Nearly 1,000 people crammed into the museum library to watch the big fight." "The room was said to be crowded to suffocation." "And so in this broiling intellectual hothouse, the debate began." "After half an hour of serious scientific argument against Darwin's theory," "Soapy Sam decided to try to lighten the mood with a little joke." "And so he turned to Thomas Huxley and asked him if he would prefer to be descended from a monkey on his grandfather's side or his grandmother's." "Now, for the time, this was rather vulgar." "And Huxley turned to a neighbour and said," ""The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands."" "And he stood up and he said to Wilberforce that if the choice was being descended from an ape or being descended from somebody who was prepared to use his intellect and eloquence to descend to cheap, vulgar points in a serious debate, then frankly he'd prefer the monkey." "When he heard about the row, Darwin said to Huxley," ""I honour your pluck." ""I would have as soon as died as answer the Bishop in such an assembly. "" "And it was generally agreed that Darwin's bulldog had, with a snarl and a chomp, seen off the bish." "To be honest, we can't be sure just what was said so long ago, during what was clearly a knockabout event." "But one thing is clear." "The Oxford debate of June 1860, was a really important moment in the history of ideas." "The established Church took a body blow." "Her authority never really recovered." "Scientific thinkers moved into the intellectual lead, and a gap opened between religious ways of thinking and science, which has never truly closed." "The theory of evolution by natural selection was now spreading far beyond science, and it was about to take on an unpredictable life of its own." "Within months of publication, Karl Marx had already picked up on Darwin's idea that all life depended on relentless conflict." "He claimedThe Origin of Species gave him a natural scientific basis for the class struggle in history." "This was just the start." "one of the most excited reactions to Darwin came from a young German philosopher called Friedrich Nietzsche." ""By breaking the faith in God", he wrote," ""one breaks the whole." ""Nothing essential is left in one's hands."" "For Nietzsche, Western civilisation was doomed." "In 1 882, he baldly declared, "God is dead"." "Nietzsche believed that Darwin's theory tore down Europe's old system of God-given authority and morality." "He had a long-term influence on many German intellectuals." "He challenged them to abandon their traditional Christian attitudes and values." ""When one gives up the Christian faith", said Nietzsche," ""one pulls the right to Christian morality from under one's feet."" "Now, Nietzsche was a man who could never see an idea without pushing it too far." "But on this he had a point." "He was confronting the post-Darwin world with this question." "Give up religion and what is the structure, what is the architecture behind any system of moral values?" "In August 1914, the Great War broke out in Europe." "Tanks, trenches and casualties on an unimaginable scale." "As the Great War slithered to industrial slaughter, new stories began to filter out of German barbarism and atrocities, the shooting of women and children, the gassing of soldiers." "The world was aghast." "How could such an advanced, civilised nation be doing these things?" "One answer emerged here, in northern France, where the Kaiser and his generals had their headquarters." "And it was uncovered by an American, a scientist, pretty much forgotten now, but back then, hugely influential." "Professor Vernon Kellogg arrived here at the headquarters of the German High Command in 1915." "As America wasn't yet involved in the fighting, and Kellogg was a pacifist, he'd come to organise humanitarian aid to the victims of the war." "By day, Kellogg was engaged with U.S. Government relief agencies." "By night, he would dine with members of the German High Command." "Their after-dinner conversations went on into the early hours, and Kellogg was horrified by what he heard." ""The creed of natural selection," ""based on violent and fatal competitive struggle" ""is the gospel of the German intellectuals," Kellogg wrote." "They told him that if Germany was beaten, it showed she was on the wrong evolutionary line and deserved to be beaten." "But if Germany won, it showed that the rest of the world was on the wrong evolutionary path and should be stopped for the sake of mankind or else destroyed as unfit." "Kellogg was shocked by this grotesque Darwinian motivation for the German war machine." "He began to question his own pacifism and he decided that these ideas could only be beaten by force." "Kellogg published an account of his chilling late-night conversations with the German officers in a book called Headquarters Nights." "He began to campaign for American intervention in the war." "Kellogg was very well connected to the United States'political elite, and his message echoed through Washington." "on April 6th, 1 9 1 7, America abandoned her isolationist policy in Europe, and declared war on Germany." "For many Americans, Darwin's ideas were now tainted by association with militarism and the atrocities of war." "The U.S. Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, had also been influenced by Kellogg." ""The same science that manufactured poisonous gases to suffocate soldiers, "" "he said, "is preaching that man has a brute ancestry. "" "Darwinism was eliminating the miraculous and the supernatural from the Bible." "So, a simple moral - Darwin and ape behaviour, bad," "Christianity and miracles, a lot safer." "It set off a row which is still ringing in our ears today." "(GIVE ME THAT oLD-TIME religion PLAYING)" "At the end of the war, William Jennings Bryan feared that if Darwinism continued to be taught in American schools, it would corrupt the nation's morality, just as it had in Germany, and he launched a campaign" "against the teaching of Darwin's evolutionary theory." "Bryan's most popular lecture was called The Origin of Man, and in it he asked, "What is the role of man?" ""What is the purpose of man?"" "For Bryan, this question could only be answered by the Bible, for religion was the foundation of all morality." "And he wrote that, "The theory of evolution has been" ""the most paralysing influence" ""civilisation has had to deal with in the past century."" "# Give me that old-time religion" "# It's good enough for me #" "# You can't make a monkey out of me # oh, no" "# You can't make a monkey out of me, no, no # on January 28th, 1925, Bryan was victorious when a bill called the Butler Act was passed in Tennessee." "It made it a crime for state schools and universities to teach that man had descended from a lower order of animal or to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man, as taught in the Bible." "The American Civil Liberties Union rejected this law as an assault on the constitution." "They offered to finance a legal test case and called for volunteers who had violated the law." "In the small, rural town of Dayton, Tennessee, a clean-cut, 25-year-old schoolteacher called John Scopes stepped forward." "John Scopes was a popular football coach and general-science teacher." "He wasn't even entirely sure that he'd been teaching evolutionary theory." "But he saw the battle against the evolution law as an important way of defending intellectual freedom and serving his country." "And so he pleaded guilty to teaching evolutionary theory." "He was an entirely willing puppet in the courtroom drama that was about to divide America." "ANNOUNCER ON TV:" "The quiet town of Dayton awakes to find its name emblazoned in headlines around the world." "The scene is set for what is now being ballyhooed as the Monkey Trial." "MARR:" "And so, on 10th July, 1925, one of the great trials of the 20th century began." "The defence brought in a criminal lawyer from Chicago, called Clarence Darrow." "His goal was to provoke the Supreme Court to rule that outlawing the teaching of evolution was unconstitutional." "For the prosecution, the World's Christian Fundamentalist Association secured the services of William Jennings Bryan." "The opening statements presented the trial as a titanic struggle between good and evil, truth and ignorance." "William Jennings Bryan said, "If evolution wins, Christianity goes."" "Clarence Darrow accused the prosecution of opening the doors to an age of bigotry equal to anything in the Middle Ages." "And he added, "John Scopes isn't on trial, civilisation is."" "During the trial, the streets of Dayton turned into a seething carnival." "Tourists, preachers, dressed-up monkeys." "Full-scale ballyhoo." "Here in the courtroom, Bryan was playing to the gallery." ""It was bad enough," he said," ""that Darwinists thought," ""men were descended from monkeys, but they weren't even American monkeys." ""They were Old World monkeys."" "Darrow told Bryan, "You insult every man of science and learning in the world," ""because he does not believe in your fool religion."" "After eight days of trial, the jury took only nine minutes to deliver its verdict." "(INAUDIBLE)" "Shortly after 1 1..00, on the morning of July 21st, 1925," "John Scopes was found guilty and fined $100." "The crusade against Darwin's ideas continued to grow." "Many more evolution bills were introduced across the United States." "In Tennessee, the Butler Act remained law until 1967." "The Scopes Trial was a great American drama, and thanks to broadcasting, nearly everybody could hear it, see it, and they were all talking about it." "And, despite some educated mockery afterwards, it proved a great shot in the arm for the American Christian fundamentalist movement, which showed the scale of the political and cultural gap between believers in the old-time religion and the modernisers." "It divided America, and, of course, it still does." "While fundamentalist Christians in America battled against the idea of their animal ancestry," "Darwin's revolution was being pushed across new frontiers in Europe by one of the 20th century's most influential thinkers." "Sigmund Freud had idolised the great Darwin since he was at school." "He bought a first edition of Darwin's work as a teenager." "Freud said he was strongly attracted to Darwin's ideas because they held out hopes of an extraordinary advance in our understanding of the world." "If Darwin had shown that all species are driven by the urge to reproduce," "Freud went a stage further." "He argued that all human behaviour was driven by sexual urges." "Just under the veneer of our civilised conscious lives, our animal, unconscious selves are seething." "Without Darwin, this would have been a piece of furniture and not the psychoanalyst's couch." "Darwin's theory suggests that everything about us, every detail of our biology, has some significance for our own evolutionary survival." "If not now, today, then back somewhere in our evolutionary past." "Freud applied this same Darwinian law to human behaviour and emotion." "Freud said that science had inflicted three wounds on humanity's pride." "The first was when Copernicus had shown that the Earth was not the centre of the solar system." "The second was when Charles Darwin had shown that man had evolved from other animals." "And the third, no false modesty here, was when Freud himself had shown that mankind was not in control of the most important aspects of his own behaviour and emotions." "Human nature began with animal nature and so, for Freud, Darwin's dangerous idea was alive and almost visible inside every one of us." "As Darwin's ideas fuelled new discoveries in psychology, his theory of natural selection was inspiring a dramatic advance in science." "For years, scientists had been trying to understand how evolutionary changes were transmitted from one generation to the next." "In the 1920s, they were beginning to make the breakthrough." "It's all in the genes." "one of the great pioneers of genetics was also one of the great eccentrics of modern science." "Enter, stage left,Jack Haldane, as mischievous and funny as he was brilliant and original." "Jack Haldane was a committed atheist." ""When I set up an experiment," he once said," ""I assume that no God, devil or angel will interfere with its course."" "He was also fearless in exposing himself to danger, even risking death in pursuit of scientific truth." "In one experiment involving a decompression chamber, he badly perforated an eardrum, and shrugged it off saying," ""Although one is somewhat deaf," ""one can blow tobacco smoke through the ear in question," ""which is a social accomplishment."" "In 1922, Haldane came here, to Trinity College, Cambridge, and concluded that genes were the mechanism by which natural selection worked." "This meant that Darwin's theory of natural selection wasn't so much about the survival of the fittest individuals as the survival of the best adapted genes." "This changed the focus entirely, and began a new line of enquiry into what the scientist, Richard Dawkins, would later call the selfish gene." "Haldane then applied this to human behaviour and morality, and he came up with a playful, but shrewd example to illustrate the ruthless logic of the selfish gene." "One of Jack Haldane's friends once asked him if he'd be prepared to sacrifice his life to save a brother from drowning." "Haldane paused for a moment, and then answered," ""No, but I would be prepared to die for two brothers or eight cousins."" "Haldane knew that, on average, we share about half of our specific genetic information with a sibling and about an eighth with a cousin, and so he was giving a cool appraisal of how many relatives he could afford to die for," "and still break even in the genetic struggle." "There you go." "The slightly bleak mathematics of goodness." "By the mid-20th century, the scientific evidence supporting Darwin's ideas was overwhelming." "Even the Catholic church had started to come to terms with Darwin's theory of evolution." "But in his 1 950 encyclical, Humani Generis," "Pope Pius xii drew a firm line in the sand." ""If the human body takes its origin from pre-existent living matter';" "he pronounced, "the spiritual soul is immediately created by God. "" "By stressing the distinction between the soul and the body, the Pope was able to live with evolution, so long as the process of ensouling the body was left to God." "But he offered a stern warning to evolutionary scientists about the importance of boundaries." ""Let them strive with every force and effort" ""to further the progress of the sciences," he said," ""but let them be careful" ""not to transgress the limits of Catholic faith and doctrine."" "Or, in other words, have the body so long as you leave the soul to us." "Too late!" "By the second half of the 20th century, scientists were already using Darwin's theory of natural selection to examine every aspect of our humanity." "observing our closest cousins, they showed how sympathy, empathy and compassion, the building blocks of human morality, weren't unique to humans at all, but part of our animal inheritance." "Darwin's explosive idea was reaching deep into the human soul... (SCREECHING) ...with sometimes tragic results." "It's 6th January, 1975." "A squat near London's Euston Station." "A tall, craggy man has been called to identify a body." "He sees a mattress on the floor, a few cheap clothes, an ammunition box and papers scattered." "It's a terrible scene, for here a good man has killed himself." "The tall man was an oxford-based biologist called Bill Hamilton." "The dead man was his American colleague, George Price, a brilliant scientist and mathematician." "Using Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection," "Price had been investigating the genetic basis for good and evil." "He was deeply troubled by what he found." "Price was always unpredictable, always eccentric, but he had an extraordinary mind." "In his 20s, he'd worked on the Manhattan Project developing the atomic bomb and then, over at IBM, he developed the prototype for the computer keyboard and mouse." "Next, at the height of the Cold War, he developed a bizarre plan to free Hungary from Soviet control." "He wanted the American government to spend $2 billion, not on new weapons, but on buying two pairs of well-made shoes for every Russian citizen." "Perhaps unsurprisingly, the U.S. Government passed on that one." "But George Price was about to turn his fertile mind to the evolution of human morality." "He came to London in 1 967 and discovered the work of the biologist, Bill Hamilton, who was exploring why animals, including humans, are genetically programmed to take care of others, even when they aren't directly related." "Now, Price was an atheist, and he was fascinated by Hamilton's quest for the evolutionary purpose of human kindness." "Using a mathematical equation, he came up with a way of explaining the evolutionary logic of altruism." "Well, if you've got the maths, this is as beautiful as it gets." "Professor Cedric Smith, here at University College London, told Price that he had never seen anything like his equation." "It was very interesting and very pretty." "What it apparently shows is that acts of altruism and kindness, far from being driven by noble morality or religion, are really just our selfish genes pursuing their own interests." "Price found this shocking enough." "But there was more." "Price's equation also suggested that acts of violence against unrelated outsiders can also make evolutionary sense, even if you lose your own life in the attack." "Price was confronted by the idea that violence is rooted in our genes, as much curly hair or brown eyes." "It is an inevitable, unstoppable fact of human evolution." "Now, at this point, we are in deep waters." "Goodness doesn't come from God, evil is bred in the bone." "This was a scientific revelation." "But Price was deeply disturbed by the cold evolutionary logic of his own equation." "For years, Price had been suffering from depression and schizophrenia, and the implications of Darwinian theory now added fuel to Price's personal crisis." "In the early summer of 1970, he experienced a sudden religious conversion." ""On June 7th, I gave in and admitted that God existed,"" "Price told a friend." "And a week later he attended his first service, here at All Souls, in the centre of London." "Price decided that as a committed Christian, he must uproot all selfishness from his life." "Bearded and sandaled, be began to give away all his money to homeless alcoholics on the street." "Then he had them back to stay with him." "When he was down to his last 15 pence, Price wrote to a friend that he looked forward to the time when that 15 pence will be gone." "But as he selflessly ministered to others," "Price's own life disintegrated into chaos." "The people he was trying to help stole his belongings, he lost his job and then his home." "In January, 1975," "Price killed himself by slitting his throat with a pair of nail scissors." "Until recently, George Price's equation was largely ignored or forgotten, but it's become very important in the study of evolution." "It's still the best mathematical explanation any scientist has come up with to show why altruism, or goodness, survives and thrives." "This is not just science." "It drills down into why we do what we do, and therefore who we are." "You could even say, the meaning of what it is to be human." "1 50 years after Charles Darwin first published his theory of evolution by natural selection, most of us are still struggling to come to terms with the full implications of our animal origin." "Some religious fundamentalists still accuse Darwin's theory of justifying human conflict and causing universal moral decline." "But many world religions have made their peace with Darwin's theory." "In September 2008, the Church of England issued a belated apology for its attack on Charles Darwin." "Darwin hasn't killed God." "Religious people have simply found different ways to justify their faith." "Has he destroyed morality?" "Again, no." "To understand the origin of morality doesn't mean you must cast it aside." "But Darwin has changed the terms of trade." "He's returned us to nature, to its wonder, to its glory and to its danger." "Charles Darwin's theory of evolution questions almost everything we thought we knew about ourselves." "Where we come from, why we behave as we do, the origins of our morality." "It isn't comfortable and it isn't easy, but the more science looks at this theory, the truer it turns out to be." "Man is the truth-seeking primate." "Darwin has given us a great truth." "And there is no going back."