"Here comes the year 2000." "A lightweight, turbocharged, blow moulded, energy wise, failsafe, non-polluting, computerised, intercool, hydro-sprung, carbon-fibre, low-drag, chip-designed:" "high-speed, magnesium-chassis, crash-tested, polycarbonate set of wheels." "Built from sea water, burns a treat when you have finished with it, heats the house for a week." "And that's just one version of the future, an experiment." "We are like that in the late 20th century West, aren't we?" "It's a dynamic, forward-looking, high-tech, recycled, you-name-it, world." "The one thing you can be sure tomorrow will be is different, because we will make it like that." "We take nature and remake it a million ways, and pre-test them under every condition from the tropics to up here in the frozen north, so that when the consumerist finally gets his hands on it, it will be everything you ever wanted." "Until you want something else." "There is nothing we consumerists can't do to the world, it's just so much raw material to be computer-modelled into new designs, everything from blow dryers to babies." "All you need is the specifications." "Today, the only constant in life, is change." "And it's like that, ironically, because 250 years ago somebody here in northern Lapland, set out to prove that the one thing the world never did, was change." "See, to your 18th century mind, all this, you know, nature worked according to strict mathematical laws that gave it no rope for any messing about." "They felt they had a firm, rational grip on what was obviously an orderly universe." "You can hear what they thought in their orderly music." "Okay, let's get the story off to a cracking start." "Here is Linneus, the fellow who had been up North." "A really dull botanist, wandering around the really dull world they had all made for themselves." "Not a hair out of place, so to speak." "Symmetrical." "Balanced." "Like their architecture." "This is the kind of stuff you go for if you are sure, as they were, that the world was created at 9 a.m. on October 26 4004 BC, and was never going to change." "Cool." "Geometrical." "They put nature in a pot in a garden, because that was the way the world was for people like Linneus." "Regimented." "Now, the trouble with all this flowery philosophising, was that it didn't work with flowers." "The great outdoors in general, was a disorganised mess." "Linneus decided to sort it out." "It may look confused, he said, but the one thing God wasn't, was confused." "There is a pattern to all this, and if I can discover the pattern, I will be able to get inside God's head." "Now that may not sound very modest, but one thing Linneus wasn't was modest." "He noticed, perspicaciously, that things tended to come in pairs, you know, male and female." "So, in the most decorous Swedish way possible, he took a close look at the kind of sex going on in the bushes." "What he had his eye on, were plant sex organs." "The stamens and pistols down inside the flower." "So, he listed plants in classes, according to the number and position of stamens." "Then orders, on the position of the pistols and then types, like this, it's a vine not a snowdrop, and then the bit you see at the local horticultural gardens, the varieties, based on the one feature of a variety that is different from all others of that type." "This one, in Latin Hedera, its feature: five leaves, in Latin 'quinquefolia', so, 'Hedera quinquefolia'." "Well, that double name system got rid of all the confusion, no matter how many varieties." "I mean, for instance, look at these they are all Campanula." "But this is Campanula rotundifolia because it has got round leaves." "This one is Campanula pyramidalis because it looks like a pyramid." "This one down here, is glomerata, because the flower's in a head." "This one, latifolia, broadleaf." "And this one persicifolia, with a leaf like the peach, and so on." "With this kind of approach, Linneus has got nature firmly under control." "Same as his garden here at Uppsala, near Stockholm where he was professor." "It is laid out like his system." "Divided, subdivided, classified, as if God had been a gardener." "In 1768, the bestseller that went with it was into its 12th edition and inflaming nature lovers up-hill and down-dale." "In here, the great outdoors was now orderly, balanced, everything in its place, and a place for everything." "Every species created individually by God." "A complete world, no gaps no failures." "Perfect, unchanging, fixed:" "the way God had left it at creation." "Boring, isn't it?" "Don't worry, it all went wrong." "Remember those nature lovers, inflamed by this?" "The Romantic movement went rambling off in more senses than one." "This was what life was all about, never mind your lists and classifications." "Nature in the raw held the secret of the universe." "So they turned up the Beethoven, and went looking for the meaning of life, out there where a man could be alone with the elements, with the turmoil of the soul, with the restless ever-changing world of nature." "Come to think of it, it was ever-changing, wasn't it?" "In the last quarter of the 18th century, everybody was getting away from it all, looking for the mysterious life-force that united everything in a world that wasn't static, but in a constant state of flux." "Their problem was to find an explanation of the universe that would let all this flux, flux." "Of course, now you mentioned it, there was a concept that might fit the bill." "It had been around for some time actually, a Swiss idea." "Called the 'Great Chain of Being': a giant list of how everything shaded into everything else as you went up in importance from rocks, to plants, to animals, then on up to man and eventually to angels and God." "All-inclusive, you see." "And it offered the possibilities of change because of where it placed things." "Like truffles." "Above rocks, but below mushrooms." "That is, more than stone but less than a mushroom." "But almost a mushroom, you felt, given a chance." "Now, truffles have always gone down very well with the French, and it was an 18th century French zookeeper called Buffon, here in Paris where he ran this zoo, who took a closer look at them, and that the rest of nature." "After years of watching plants and animals, in 1778, he came up with a few thoughts, well, 44 volumes to be exact." "History of everything, from the beginning, until now." "150,000 years he reckoned that was." "Noted a few things you would think would have worried him, in a world of individually created, separate, different species." "If all birds were separate creations, why one, common structure?" "If each mammal was unique, why did they all have four limbs?" "Could you claim separate creation for just varieties of things?" "Of camels, monkeys, dogs, cats, apples, cabbages?" "But Buffon stuck to the Bible." "The varieties were just degenerate forms of God's original two of everything." "Or one, if you were cabbage." "But, no matter how things looked, no matter how similar things appeared, like bison and buffaloes, or all the members of the feline species, or mushrooms and truffles, each was originally a separate creation." "There was no cause for panic." "If God hadn't created every single, separate thing there could possibly be, back at the beginning, well, there would be extra ones being discovered, and gaps in the total, wouldn't there?" "And there weren't extra ones turning up, or gaps, were there?" "Were there?" "The fellow who blew holes in the idea that nothing had changed since creation, was an engineer called Smith, who in 1796, was busy exploding his way across the English countryside, building canals for the Industrial Revolution," "and finding the oddest things in the rubble." "Fossil things." "And what is more, every time they cut through a new layer of ground, there would be new fossils to consider." "It looked as if, far from everything having always existed, different animals had been alive at different times." "Smith, not being hide-bound by the philosophical garbage of the zookeepers, wrote down everything he came across and concluded that this business of 'different fossils in different strata', was so clear-cut, you could tell what level you were at" "if all you had to go on was one fossil, or no fossils, in the case of strata that didn't have any." "See what I'm getting at?" "What was going through Smith's mind was the awful possibility that, what with some more modern layers" "(which meant more modern periods of history) having no fossils, and others having fossils of animals that might turn out to be extinct, well, what that meant was, that things had changed during history, that God had made mistakes." "It was when real bare bones started turning up that things took a turn for the more complicated." "Back here in Paris, when, by 1794," "Buffon's zoo had been turned into the Paris Natural History Museum, and a certain George Cuvier was resident Professor of Vertebrate Zoology." "That is to say, all this lot." "Cuvier, like Smith, had also turned up a fossil problem, but one on the grand scale." "People had been coming in to the museum here with bones they had dug up that, very definitely, did not belong to any animal Cuvier had ever seen." "So, he thought up a way to work out how the whole animal would look if all you had to go on, was one bone." "Let me show you how this detective approach called "comparative anatomy", worked." "Say all you have is this tooth." "Well, it is strong and sharp, so the animal eats meat." "Now, to hold these teeth, doing that kind of work, you need a jaw this shape." "And to hold the jaw, a skull this big." "Now, it is a meat eater, so its lunch will tend to be running away, if possible." "So it needs flexible claws to grab with, on the end of good Huttong legs." "And they need a spine, to hold them together in an overall shape built for speed, or there will be no lunch, and the species will die out, won't it?" "So, from tooth, using Cuvier's comparative anatomy, you get tiger." "And all the cat family." "But, when Cuvier got a bone like this, and did the same trick, working out what it did and then reconstructing the animal, he got nightmare monsters, and a real problem." "You couldn't say, as you might with little fossils, "oh, they are all around somewhere, I just haven't come across one"." "This was very definitely not just hiding in the bushes, it was extinct." "And that meant God had to have changed his mind." "But, like Buffon, Cuvier couldn't go for that, there had to be another answer." "And it was around 1808, when he had been digging holes all-round" "Paris and finding more monster bones, all of them in strata, incidentally, also containing fossil oysters and general marine life, that he got it." "Of course: oysters, water, it was in the Bible." "A flood." "They had to be what Cuvier described as "catastrophes" in history." "Giant inundations caused by mountains rising or something, and causing huge tidal waves that would wipe out any dinosaur, or whatever, in the neighbourhood, that would account for it." "Which left us." "I mean, when it shouldn't have." "Any catastrophe that could take out the monsters, should have made short work of the human race." "This was no academic problem." "Now, the trouble with floods and catastrophes and stuff, was that it did require interference by the Almighty, and a supernatural finger in the pie, which wasn't exactly very scientific." "So, a lot of people started looking for more down-to-earth explanations." "One such type was a dour Scot called Hutton, who went around poking into ditches and river-beds everywhere he could find them." "And announced that, in his opinion, the whole lot could have been caused by the ordinary effects of erosion." "Wind and water." "I mean, if you give enough time, water will make a stone smooth." "See?" "Now that would have taken a lot longer than the biblical version of events would have." "So, others went looking for more evidence further afield." "One George Scrope, a pupil of Buckland, no less, found volcanoes and very old lava, cut through by rivers." "And you could see they had taken forever because of the different layers of rock exposed in the walls of the gorges." "It began to look as if it had all taken a great deal longer than the Bible said." "The answer lay, it appeared, in river gorges and volcanoes." "And what better volcano than this one?" "Etna." "In 1826, Charles Lyell headed purposefully up the slopes of Etna." "Lyell took the view that the way geology happened probably didn't change from one period of history to another, from distant past to modern present." "So he went looking for evidence of recent activity to give him a yardstick, and it was the kind of evidence you see going up Etna in a tourist bus that gave him his first hint." "Look, see those little Hills down there?" "They are mini volcanoes, cones, sticking out of the side of Etna." "Like that one." "Well, Lyell did some reading and discovered that only one cone, that big one, Monti Rossi, had come into existence since the beginning of local records." "Lyell reckoned at that rate, not exactly greased lightning, it must have taken the hundred or so cones there were coming out of the side of Etna, at least 12,000 years to happen." "And then, up here, he saw a valley cutting right into the side of Etna, that one." "And in the wall of the valley, he could see traces of hundreds of earlier cones, thrown up and then covered by lava flow from Etna, later on." "So, he took it slowly." "A few cones down at the bottom, there, had taken 12,000 years." "Hundreds more cones had happened earlier, and then got covered by lava, coming from Etna up there, therefore they must have all happened before Etna, itself, happened." "But Etna was now a pile of built-up lava 90 miles wide and 10,000 ft. high." "So, at the rate things seemed to have happened, Etna must have started millions of years ago." "All of a sudden, as he stood up here looking into crater, panting in the thin air and choking on the sulphur," "Lyell realised that if the Bible was that wrong about the age of the Earth, then the truth was going to turn out to be very, very scary." "So he went and had a plate of shellfish, down at the coast to think it over." "Observe, as Lyell did, these gastronomic delights." "To be found in plenty in the fish market down in Catania, the city at the foot of Etna." "The reason I have dragged you down here is because these little beauties, rocked the stuffy world of geology to its palaeolithic foundations." "Because this wasn't the only place Lyell found shellfish." "He found fossils of them elsewhere." "Here, this limestone is full of them, anywhere you look." "Ha!" "Only these have been off the menu for some time." "Fossil shellfish." ""Okay," you say, "so what?" "Ancient seafood."" "Only these are identical to their modern descendants down at the market, these." ""Okay", you say, "so what?" "Maybe they are not that old"." "And this is where Lyell took a deep breath, because you know where that limestone goes?" "All the way out across the plain to where that cloud is, that's Etna, and then under Etna." "So that makes it older than Etna." "So that makes these fossils millions of years old." "You see what I'm getting at?" "If you can't tell the difference between two shellfish millions of years apart, then the rate at which things happened, changed, through history can only be described as somewhere between dead slow and dead slow." "Over a period of time, that can only be described as "geologic"." "Lyell?" "He took the next boat home to his publisher." "Lyell's book, "Principles of Geology", about how wrong the Bible chronology had been, became the prized possession of an intense young Englishman, who was collecting things-tropical for museums back home, and who went by the name of Wallace." "Here he is in 1857, beetling along a Malayan Beach, collecting beetles." "120,000 species by this time, and thinking about something that had bugged him, ever since he had read what Lyell had said about how long everything took to happen in nature." "A fact that could account for what Wallace was getting a bee in his bonnet about." "The more he had caught his little friends and stuck pins in them, the more he had seen something that intrigued him." "Now, to you and me, see one beetle and you have seen them all, not Wallace." "He had noticed differences in his bugs that seemed to relate to where they came from." "The basic beetle shape was the same, but the varieties seem to be dictated by the kind of life the beetle led." "Well, there was only one way this amazing observation was going to get publicity." "So, Wallace wrote to somebody important back home." "It was a letter that changed the world." "The letter Wallace wrote, said, essentially, "Dear Sir, I have been watching nature out here and I think I have come up with a theory that might explain why all the life I see around me" "comes in such a wide variety of shapes and sizes." "And I think I can explain how they all ended up that way."" "To say Wallace's letter 'put the cat among the pigeons' would be to underrate the shock horror it caused." "It made the fellow he had written to feel a prize idiot for a start, because he had just spent three years being deeply involved with the pigeon breeding crowd, getting the bird right-and-left from his colleagues, ruffling the feathers of everybody in the scientific establishment" "as he investigated pigeon breeding to find evidence to back up his new theory." "A theory, which would fly in the face of everything the Bible said." "A new theory, so all-embracing as to survive even the most devastating criticism." "Well, his new theory looked like being an old theory, because it was precisely the same as Wallace's, and he had been working on it for longer than Wallace." "And he had read Lyell, and been all over the tropics, and come to the same conclusions, because, like Wallace, he had also read a key book by a political parson called Malthus, who had frightened the wits out of everybody by pointing out" "that the population always rose faster than the food supply, inevitable result: too many mouths to feed unless you could restrain people from having children." "Our pigeon fancier and Wallace realised, flash, that that was what nature was doing, but without the restraint." "So, everywhere they would always be a desperate struggle for limited supplies of food." "Any variety that was able to live off some kind of food nobody else wanted, would survive and multiply." "The rest?" "They would die of starvation." "That was why there were so many varieties of around." "They had survived because they were varieties." "But what did variation have to beef up the argument that God hadn't done it all at creation?" "Well, nothing, unless you could show how variety happened." "Which is why our pigeon fancier was fancying pigeons." ""Look", he said, "at a pouter, a runt, a tumbler, a fantail, or a barb"." "You would never say that lot were the same species, not in a million years." "Which was the point." "In more than a million years, nature could surely do what it took a breeder no time at all to achieve." "Look at the way, in just a few generations, by pairing birds with the right features, you could go, say, from the bird with no feet-feathers and breed, at each stage, the right pair of birds to develop the feet-feather characteristic more and more," "until you ended up with a bird that had been changed beyond recognition." "Well, you couldn't see the feet for the feathers." "Doing that, backwards, as it were, in theory, our pigeon fancier was able to show that all pigeon varieties, and there are a lot, all of them were descended from one, common ancestor, the humble rock pigeon." "So, varieties that could fit every ecological niche and so survive, had come into existence." "Some of them were so very varied as to be different species." "The problem was, no fossil had yet turned up of an animal halfway between one species and another." "Still there was plenty to go on, and Wallace to worry about, so our pigeon fancier rushed into print with a slim volume entitled "Origin of Species" by C. Darwin and waited for the feathers to fly." "He didn't wait long," "Read all about it, God is dead, Great Oxford debate." "Church attacks Darwin." "Professor claims Ape as grandfather." "The press leapt at the idea of ape-man, a concept that horrified decent Victorian society." "Darwin will destroy society." "Was man an animal?" "The Church wasn't having any of that nonsense." "Christianity suppresses science." "Pope bans Darwin." "But Darwin's theory went beyond upsetting the Church, it was to influence life in the 20th century in three fundamental ways." "Read all about it." "Riots in Germany, ape-man found in German cave." "Meanwhile, down a hole here in southern Germany, somebody plugged the only hole in Darwin's argument." "You remember, the gap in the fossil record." "If there had been evolutionary changes from one form of organism to another, where were all the half-and-half versions that must have existed at some point?" "Well, in 1862, here was one." "It's a fossilised, Archeopteryx." "And if you look very carefully, you can see it is hard bird and half reptile." "Bony tail: reptile, feathers on the wings: bird." "The missing link wasn't any more." "So Darwin was foolproof, which was fine by certain gents here on the lunatic fringe." "Lunatic?" "Where would you call people who build grottoes with doors in the wall?" "Eh?" "Excuse me" "Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, all this." "You must admit he cornered the market in bad taste." "Speaking of which, he also fell for Wagner, which is why he covered the walls with scenes from the operas and built castles like this one, Neuschwantein, where he could live out his fantasies about being a Wagnerian hero like the Swan King," "guarding the Holy Grail." "Begone swans, Ludwig." "He used to dress up a lot on the quiet." "Wagner himself, was heavily into the new Imperial Teutonic stuff." "You know, Aryans being the super race, war is good for the health, total obedience to the State, favourite colour white: all the slogans." "His fellow Germans couldn't get enough of it, operatic or otherwise." "Well, put yourself in their place, if you can take it." "Germany has just been united, they have beaten the French in 1870, so they are top of the military league, industrial production is going up like a rocket, they are talking about having a colony or two," "they have invented themselves an emperor, and still, polite European society treats them as if they have got collective BO." "What they need for their national paranoia, is a touch of class." "And here's Darwin, with his scientific proof of the survival of the fittest, that struggle is natural and necessary, that even slime can get to the top if you give it long enough." "He must have been music to their ears." "Well, as usual, there is an unsung figure behind all the nationalistic hoo-ha." "In this case, a fellow called Heckel, a zoologist and Darwin fanatic." "Without him, all this might have remained so much Bavarian bolony." "But Heckel did what he did, so I will tell you all about it." "Next time I get the chance." "Well, thank you." "This is what happened." "In 1868, Heckel, having read Darwin and decided that he was the answer to everything in the known universe, produced a book modestly entitled, 'The Natural History of Creation' and started spreading Darwinism, Heckel version." "Over the next few decades, Heckel and followers produced some rather interesting variants on the Darwin message." "Let me treat you to some of the choicer samples:" ""The fittest survive", says Darwin, so, victorious Germans must be biologically superior to any losers, and they must be kept that way, so anything that might weaken the race:" "criminals, defectives, imbeciles, democrats, must be sterilised or shot. "Racial hygiene" it is called." "Also involved, breeding stations where pure Aryans could get together with other pure Aryans to produce more pure Aryans." ""Man is an animal", says Darwin, and obeys the laws of nature." "So, just as a cell dies in order to save the body, so the life of the individual, may, if necessary, be sacrificed for the greater good of the State." ""The struggle is necessary", says Darwin, so nothing must prevent wars to eliminate or enslave the lower races." ""Hybrids are sterile", says Darwin, so marriage between Germans and non-Germans would be unnatural." "By the way, is all this 19th century pseudoscientific garbage beginning to sound familiar?" "Well, in 1899 Heckel's next modest little number, called 'The Riddle of the Universe' sold a half a million copies and really spread the word." "In order to get the message across to the next generation, they founded a youth movement:" "founding member Heinrich Himmler." "Crazy about everything Heckel had said." "So was his friend you know, the one that misquoted Darwin so often in speeches." "Here, at Nuremburg." "Of course, Darwin was bound to go down well here in the States where another academic preached his gospel of evolution." "Free enterprise style, this time." "Name of Sumner, a professor at Yale." "He took Darwin, and made it socially meaningful for the upwardly mobile." "That is to say, the struggle for survival was part of the great American tradition that brought all comforts to those who worked for them." "The struggle weeded out the week, the unfit and the stupid, unless you gave them unfair help with dangerous nonsense like government-aid, or welfare, or education, in which case they would breed more like them, and drag the country down." "In a heart-warming little pamphlet, published in 1883, Sumner asked the question" ""what do the social classes owe each other?" And came up with the reassuring answer, "Nothing"." "For Sumner, Darwin gave proof that what America should be all about was liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest." "In other words, the meek should inherit what is left." "For Sumner, the best equipped to win the struggle, was the Great American Businessman." "As long as his survival wasn't endangered by evils like taxes, regulations, factory acts, that stuff." "Absolute freedom of action was what had made American great." "And now, that was a scientific fact." "Well, in a country founded on the principle of individualism, out here in the West, where a man walked tall, might was right, life was rugged, where you could be anything you wanted to be if you had the guts to fight for it." "In that kind of country, Darwin's theory made no more than good horse-sense." "All you had to do was stay on the horse." "American business saw things in terms of the Wild West:" "you had to be tough and self-reliant just to say solvent." "In a country expanding incredibly fast, the only way to get anywhere in commerce was to go hell-for-leather for what you wanted, before anybody else got to it." "And then, make sure they knew your mark was on it first." "So, the second way Darwin put his brand on modern life, was bolstering the idea of success in the American-frontier sense, where nothing came to you on a plate." "Darwin had proved that the basic animal struggle for food, applied to everything human society did, too." "Only for "food" read "possessions, power, money"." "America took Darwin's cowboy ethic into its boardrooms and turned every business deal into a rerun of "Gunfight at OK Corral"." "In the sudden-death encounters of business life, ambitious Americans saw the finest example of evolution in action." "Crushing the incompetent, outsmarting the competition, and coming out 'king of the heap'." "The 19th century American industrial robber barons went for social dominism like flies to a honeypot." "It gave what they liked to call their 'entrepreneurial activity' the cachet of scientific respectability." "After all, hadn't Sumner said, "millionaires are the product of natural selection"." "Financial giants like Rockefeller and Carnegie showed just how far that process could take you." "The third way Darwin's theory helped to change the world was very different." "On a Sunday afternoon in April at the Sweden/Finland border, the last stage of a momentous journey was taking place." "Hurrying to catch this train, was a man called Ulyanov." "Coming by sleigh the last few miles of a trip that brought him all across Europe, in secret, which was how he had lived for 17 years, moving from place to place, using a network of agents, codes, clandestine operations," "Ulyanov carried a message from a man already dead, that would change the course of history." "A message that would almost certainly put Ulyanov in danger." "The dead man whose message Ulyanov carried, was a German ideologist who had seen in Darwin, scientific support for his beliefs." "Beliefs Ulyanov kept alive." "The view of the world that drove Ulyanov towards possible death for his beliefs and that had inspired his German mentor, was a social version of Darwin's views." "Those views of Darwin would be echoed in the struggle that lay ahead." "Darwin's theory that successful species annihilated their opposition, would be mirrored in the total victory that would come." "Darwin's denial of any supernatural design in nature, would put control over their destiny into the hands of ordinary working people, not princes and kings." "Darwin's mechanism of evolution according to natural laws, fitted the plan that those laws would be used to design a new society." "Darwin's concept of the evolution of a species towards its perfect form strengthened the dream of a new society, forging ahead to a world where superstition and oppression would be made redundant by reason and equality." "Above all, Darwin's claim that change was inevitable, served to show that the success of the new ideology was equally inevitable and that a new world could only be built on the ruins of the old one." "Ulyanov, of course, was carrying the message of Marx to Russia." "And after his triumphant arrival at the station in St Petersburg, he would come to be revered by millions, not as Vladimir Ulyanov but by the revolutionary alias he had always used, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin." "In 1917, Lenin designated Russia as the centre of world socialism, in which the first benefits of the evolution of the new society would be enjoyed." "The fruits of the Marxist struggle that was as basic to the improvement of the human species as the fight for survival was in nature." "A struggle that would sow the seeds of world revolution with the new tools available to those who believed that changing history was a matter of moulding the ideological attitudes of whole populations, through indoctrination, directive, propaganda." "Above all, that victory would only be won as Darwin had said it was in nature, through violent struggle." "The only way the proletariat will achieve the power necessary to change the world." "And the struggle continues, to bring the whole family of man to socialism, because the revolutionary ideal admits no half measures." "For Marx, the logical and necessary end of solution evolution is socialism." "Just as for Darwin, the logical and necessary end of natural evolution is the organism that exists because it is best fitted to exist." "But, with half the world committed to the other side of the argument about how humanity should progress, committed to individualism and free enterprise, the struggle has taken a form with which we have become all too familiar." "Thanks to Darwin, on both sides of this East/West border here inside the Arctic Circle in northern Lapland where we began, or anywhere else you find it, on both sides, the view is the same." "People and societies can be changed." "The argument is about how to do it and what kind of change." "They engineer daily life, we engineer genes, they suppress antisocial individualism, we reward it because it is maverick." "And yet, on both sides, the view ahead is equally clear, equally optimistic, in terms of our ability to manipulate nature." "Equally materialist, in the philosophical sense of the word." "Once we lived in the image of the Creator, according to the divine plan, in a perfect and unchanging world, created and functioning with a purpose you could clearly identify anytime you read the Bible." "Thanks to Darwin, and the people who built on his work, the universe no longer looks so straightforward." "We are made of the same stuff as the rest of nature, not different or special in the universe." "And if there is an immediately recognisable purpose, it is, like everything else, a man made one, here, or on the other side." "And as for the truth, well, in the absence of belief, it is what you want it to be." "And so is your future." "And if that doesn't turn out right, well, you have only yourself to blame."