"Oh... you going to talk to William, hmm?" "Go on, Brodie." "William?" "William, wait for us!" "She'll soon talk him round." "She has the knack." "You look pale." "My stomach rejects food." "I'm not strong anymore." "I'll never achieve anything in science now." "What rot!" "You're coming back to London with me." "No, I'm not." "Yes, you are!" "I'm not letting you stagnate down here while your rivals make all the progress." "You must visit your publisher." "You don't understand, Ras." "Even when I talk about my theory with you" "I feel like I'm confessing a murder." "No, I can't publish." "Well, you're coming back to London with me, Charlie whether you like it or not." "If only to remind the opposition you're still alive and kicking!" "Take care." "And make sure you get plenty of rest." "Erasmus, he's not to spend all night at the club with you." "No, Mother..." "I mean it, or he'll be utterly done for the next day." "Yes, Mother." "Don't worry, it'll do him good." "Come on." "Your sloth awaits you, sir." "What a magnificent beast, eh, Ras?" "My word." "Owen's done a remarkable job." "He really is a splendid specimen." "Yes, I thought you'd be pleased." "Come through." "See what I've been working on." "The chimpanzee being the highest organized four-handed ape every difference between its anatomy and a human's is instructive." "I've been studying..." "For example the irrational ape has doglike canines used as weapons of destruction quite unlike the masters of the animal kingdom." "Yes, though..." "And the human foot is of decisive taxonomic value." "Our feet are made for walking upon, our hands for grasping." "This brute's hands and feet are made for nearly the same purpose." "There is a striking similarity..." "I'm writing a book on the subject." "My brother is working on a new book, too." "Come here, let me show you what I mean." "All the same pattern." "The bone structure in the hands and feet are all nearly identical." "The blueprint, if you will that existed first in the Creator's mind." "Of that there can be no doubt." "Utter tosh!" "The similarity of structure indicates one thing and one thing only:" "an ancient common ancestor." "Real, flesh-and-blood parents." "Why didn't you say so, then?" "Hmm?" "You must publish your ideas." "If only to establish your priority." "What's holding you back?" "What is it?" "I've completed a sketch of my species theory." "I believe it's a considerable step in science." "If anything should happen to me..." "What do you mean?" "If I should die..." "Die!" "Charles, for goodness' sake..." "Please, my love, it's important." "If anything should happen to me" "I'd like you to see to it that it gets published." "£400 should be enough to see it printed and promoted." "Nothing's going to happen to you." "You say here that the human eye" ""may possibly have been acquired by gradual selection of slight, but, in each case, useful deviations."" "Yes." "That's a very great assumption, Charles." "Well, if I'm wrong about that, I'm wrong about everything." "My entire theory's in ruins." "Can your theory account for the way my eyes and ears and hands and heart combine to reproduce the sounds that Chopin heard in his head?" "Isn't that a God-given gift?" "It's given." "But not, I think, by God." "You are a man of science." "You don't want to believe anything until it's proved." "But some things are beyond proof." "It would be a nightmare to me if I thought we didn't belong to each other forever in Heaven." "Emma was a sincere believer in the Christian plan of salvation and that those who trusted in Jesus and his resurrection from the dead would spend eternity in Heaven." "She saw that her husband's speculations about the origins of species and of humanity would jeopardize the Christian plan of salvation." "God was being made remote in her husband's universe." "Now, if nature by itself, unaided by God could make an eye then what else couldn't nature do?" "Nature could do anything, it could make everything." "In Darwin's day, the very existence of an organ of extreme perfection like the eye was taken by many as proof of God as proof of a designer." "How else could all of the intricate organs and substructures of the eye have come together in just the right way to make vision so possible and so perfect?" "But it turns out the eye isn't exactly perfect, after all." "In fact, the eye contains profound optical imperfections." "And those imperfections are proof, in a sense of the evolutionary ancestry of the eye." "Eyes are imperfect because evolution does not create things the way a designer or an artist does." "Natural selection simply favors random changes that make an organism more fit to survive and imperfections in design often result from evolution's constant tinkering." "One such imperfection proved traumatic for artist Valerie Young." "We had just come home from a party and I saw a lot of lights flashing inside my eye, especially on the outside edge of the right eye." "And I thought, "We may be in trouble here."" "And it took me a while to really see that it was my... this was coming from inside my eye." "Luckily, my husband was with me because I wouldn't have been able to drive to the hospital." "So my vision was pretty obscured." "The only way I can describe it is like a jellyfish with lots of little bubbles in it and it just kept turning and floating in front of my eyes." "Valerie had a retinal tear, not an uncommon problem due to the way human eyes evolved from light-sensing patches of brain tissue in our ancient ancestors." "In the human embryo eyes develop from bulges in the brain's neural tube that pinch in to form cavities." "This top layer, the retina, contains cells that collect light." "It rests against a second, darker layer that lines the back of the eye." "But the two layers are not attached to one another." "And when the jelly that fills the eye liquefies as we age it can cause the retina to tear." "The jelly can then seep into the space underneath leading to a retinal detachment and, in some cases, blindness." "When Valerie Young came in her floaters were an immediate clue that she could have a retinal tear." "We were able to successfully apply laser treatment in the office that day to seal it off, like applying sandbags around something to wall it off so that the vitreous jelly would not get in the break and detach her retina." "Valerie Young's retinal tear is just one example of imperfections in the design of human eyes." "Another occurs because nerve cells and blood vessels evolved to lie in front of the retina where they interfere with its ability to form sharp images." "It's like trying to take a picture through a foggy piece of glass." "And the optic nerve itself evolved to connect to the brain through a hole in the retina." "So the eyes of all vertebrates have a small blind spot, right near the middle of the visual field." "Evolution starts with what's already there tinkers with it and modifies it but can never do a grand redesign." "So even the eye, with all of its optical perfection has clues to the fact that its origin is of the blind process of natural selection." "Darwin believed that what he called" ""an organ of extreme complexity," like the eye could evolve by small steps, given enough time." "Any trait that improved vision would aid in the search for food, or a mate or in the avoidance of predators so natural selection would most certainly favor those traits." "And what Darwin was able to do was to point out that you might think, in logic that it's difficult to imagine a set of intermediary stages between the simplest little spot of nerve cells that can perceive light" "to a lens-forming eye that makes complex images." "But, in fact, these intermediary forms do exist in nature." "At the University of Lund in Sweden zoologist Dan-Eric Nilsson has developed models to show how a primitive eyespot could evolve through intermediate stages to become a complex, humanlike eye in less than half a million years." "I've been interested in eye evolution for a long time." "In particular, I've been interested in the question of how long time it would take for an eye to evolve." "Nilsson envisioned a sequence of stages by which a flat patch of light-sensitive cells on an animal's skin could evolve into a camera-type eye." "As a first step, nature would favor any changes that made the flat patch more cuplike." "As soon as you've created even the slightest depression in the center means that the edges of the cup will actually shade light from parts of the environment." "And of course, all the light-sensitive cells in this little cup they won't measure light in exactly the same direction so already this cup has some pictorial information." "Another model demonstrates what a primitive cup-eye can do." "The brightly lighted skulls cast an image onto a translucent screen" "Nilsson installs at the back of the cup to act like a retina." "But the image is not at all well-defined." "The cup-eye can do little more than detect movement." "This kind of eye can be found in nature today, in flatworms." "Their eyes evolved no further." "In their environment, that's all they needed." "But if the animals need to move faster or evolve to become fast predators or to see other fast predators then the construction needs to be improved." "And one way of doing that is to constrict the opening." "To make it smaller." "That's just what happened to creatures like the chambered nautilus." "Over thousands of generations natural selection favored those with slightly more constricted eye openings which focused light more sharply." "This worked well, up to a point." "Since this strategy of making a sharp image also has the drawback of creating a very dim image it's not very popular in the animal kingdom." "And, um..." "There is an alternative solution which has become very popular in the animal kingdom the solution that we use in our own eyes and that is to put in a lens." "Nilsson's model lens uses two thin layers of clear plastic." "He can inject water in between them to make the plastic windows bulge out like a convex lens." "This mimics what natural selection might have done over a few hundred thousand generations favoring animals with a rounded, transparent layer in their eyes that caused light to be focused more sharply on the retina." "So we can make it gradually from no lens at all and just continue to inject more water... making the lenses bulge more and more and the image becomes gradually sharper and sharper." "So we can go all the way, gradually, in very small steps from a simple pigment cup-eye which has barely got the ability to determine the direction of a light source all the way to a complete camera-type eye" "of the same type as we have ourselves." "And that is really exactly the way eye evolution must proceed." "The extreme complexity of the eye left Darwin "in a cold sweat," he wrote to a friend." "But still he was convinced that an eye could be formed by natural selection." "He later wrote that eyes must have evolved by "numerous gradations from an imperfect and simple eye" ""to one perfect and complex with each grade being useful to its possessor."" "Nature, unaided by a designer, could produce an organ of seemingly miraculous complexity." "What a horrid smell." "Annie." "Come and look." "When I first started looking" "I thought lots of the barnacles had tiny parasites." "That's an animal or plant that lives on another animal or plant and gets its food from it, like mistletoe on an apple tree." "But they're not." "Do you know what they are?" "No." "They're little, tiny husbands." "The females carrylittle, tiny males around with them clinging to their skirt tails." "Just like you and Mama." "Just like me and Mama." "I think it's the most interesting barnacle in the whole wide world." "What do you think we should call it?" ""Barnabus."" ""Barney," for short." ""Barney Ickle."" "The tiny parasitic males are rudimentary in a way that I believe can hardly be equaled in the whole of the animal kingdom." "They have no mouth or stomach." "They are really little more than a tiny head atop an enormous coiled penis." "A bit like me, really apart from the bit about the mouth and the stomach." "What's funny?" "Nothing, nothing." "Charles!" "Charles, are you all right?" "Erasmus, take him home!" "Why must you work so hard at your... horrid little mollusks?" "Ooh!" "They're not horrid little mollusks they're horrid little crustaceans." "And I have horrid pigeons and horrid worms, too." "They're providing the evidence I need for my theory." "I don't have the right to publish the idea unless I have the evidence." "We must do something about you." "Your stomach condition is nervous in origin, brought on as a result of excessive mental exertion." "Cold water is used to stimulate the circulation and draw the blood supply away from the inflamed nerves of the stomach." "No sugar, no salt, no bacon no alcohol, no tobacco." "In fact, anything at all that's good is forbidden." "I don't know how or why but I feel so much better." "I look around me..." "and I don't care two hoots how any of this came to be created." "Children!" "Last one back to the house is a rice pudding." "Come on, William, you're last!" "Come on, run, quick, quick, quick!" "Come on, Etty." "Annie!" "Annie, you won!" "Come here, my darling!" "Oh, Annie, my dear and good child!" "Come on." "Come on, darling." ""While I draw this fleeting breath..."" ""When my eyelids close in death"" ""When I soar through tracts unknown"" ""See Thee on Thy judgment throne"" ""Rock of Ages, cleft for me"" ""Let me hide myself in thee."" ""Amen."" "Papa, Annie's woke me up." "Annie's woke me up." "Mum, wake up, wake up, Annie's crying." "Oh, now, what's the matter, my darling?" "What's wrong?" "Does your head hurt?" "Ah, there's no fever." "Does it hurt here?" "That's all right, my darling." "You'll be all right." "The doctor's coming." "You go and get dressed." "I'll stay with her." "What if she's inherited my wretched digestion?" "She'll be fine." "Poor dear." "What did he say?" "Itisher stomach, but he has no idea what's wrong." "Perhaps I should take her to go see Dr. Gully." "He cured me." "You'll be back soon and Papa will look after you." "Soon there's going to be a new baby and I shall need your help." "Say good-bye to Etty now." "I want you to sit up." "Now, come on, girl, take one big gulp of this." "Come on, that's a good girl." "That's a good girl." "Oh, quickly." "Oh." "Come on, lie back." "That's a good girl." "She seems so weak." "Isn't there anything you can do?" "All you can do is pray." "It's my fault." "First-cousin marriages always produce weak children." "It's my fault." "Why?" "!" "I've given the cause of death as bilious fever with a typhoid character." "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away." "Please!" "Don't!" "Oh, Charles, God grant us strength." "Please, Charles, please." "Come along, children." ""All things bright and beautiful"" ""All creatures great and small"" ""All things wise and wonderful"" ""The Lord God made them all."" "What Annie's death did to Darwin's faith was mainly to destroy Christianity." "He could no longer see that a good God ordered and superintended all the events of human life and of the universe." "And he believed that she did not deserve punishment by God, or by nature either." "She had simply fallen victim to the struggle for existence:" "the amoral, purposeless struggle that ran according to laws of nature." "Darwin certainly didn't think that evolution spoke either for or against the unprovable existence of..." "God, or a form of God." "He didn't desire to cast disparagement on anyone's religious convictions." "He regarded it as a private matter which he was never able to hold with conventional zeal following the tragedy of his life." ""All things bright and beautiful"" ""All creatures great and small"" ""All things wise and wonderful"" ""The Lord God made them all"" ""The purple-headed mountains"" ""The river running by..."" "Today scientists hold all conceivable views on religion:" "from atheism to agnosticism to a general spirituality." "And many, like biologist Ken Miller adhere to very traditional beliefs." "I am an orthodox Catholic, and I'm an orthodox Darwinist." "My idea of God is a supreme being who acts in concert with the principles and the ideas that Darwin explained to us about the origin of species." "My students often ask me, "You say you believe in God." ""Well, what kind of God?" ""Is it a fashionable, new-age God?" ""A pyramid-power kind of God?" ""Do you think, like some scientists do that God is the sum total of the laws of physics?"" "And I shake those off and say that my religious belief is entirely conventional." "Our Father, who art in heaven" "Hallowed be thy name." "It surprises students very often that anyone could say that that kind of very traditional, conventional religious belief could be compatible with evolution, but it is." "...peace and unity of Your Kingdom where you live forever and ever." "Amen." "I find this absolutely wonderful consistency with what I understand about the universe from science and what I understand about the universe from faith." "Tennessee's premier morning radio talk show;" "the Hallerin Hilton Hill Morning Show on NewsTalk 99, WNOX-AM/FM, Loudon/Knoxville." "12 past the hour of 6:00." "It's my pleasure to welcome to the broadcast this morning" "Dr. Kenneth Miller." "He's a professor of biology at Brown University." "His book is entitled" "Finding Darwin's God:" "A Scientist's Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution." "He's in town tonight." "Let me ask you this:" "as a cellular biologist when in your experience..." "are you studying something reading something, or doing some research... when do you come to the point where you go, "That's God"?" "As an experimental scientist, I don't find God in the insufficiency of science to explain things." "In other words, I don't find God in ignorance;" "I don't find God because we say, "Well, we can't explain that, that must be something that God's doing."" "But what did God do?" "Did he just create some kind of primordial soup and say, "Go"?" "Well, a long time ago people were sufficiently unknowing of how things worked in the natural world to see when the Sun moved across the sky they imagined that God had to push that Sun across the sky." "And gradually we began to realize that the world works according to physical laws." "Science investigated those laws." "So, what room is there for God in... in present-day life?" "Well, I think if you ask people who are believers" ""How does God act?"" "they would say he acts in a variety of ways:" "he answers our prayers, he inspires us." "No doubt there are events that take place that are part of what some people might call "God's plan."" "And what I would suggest is if you look back in Earth's history if God is working today in concert with the laws of nature, with physical laws and so forth." "He probably worked in concert with them in the past." "In a sense... in a sense" "He's the guy who made up the rules of the game and He manages to act within those rules." "For Miller, and millions of followers of all major religions notions of God and evolution are fully compatible." ""You take away the sins of..."" "But not everyone agrees." "When we replace the traditional idea of God, the creator, with the idea of the process of natural selection doing the creating the creation is as wonderful as it ever was." "All that great design work had to be done." "It just wasn't done by an individual; it was done by this huge process distributed over billions of years." "God created man in His image." "In the image of God, He created him." "Male and female, He created them." "Whereas people used to think of meaning coming from on high and being ordained from the top down now we have Darwin saying, "No, all of this design can happen" ""all of this purpose can emerge from the bottom up, without any direction at all."" "And that's a very unsettling thought for many people." "In Darwin's day, science and politics and religion were all of a piece when you talked about the origins of life and of species." "Astronomy could go along pretty well because it could testify to the wisdom and power of God in holding the planets in place... but the idea of evolution or "transmutation," people said with a snarl, put in jeopardy the whole established social order." "What is in this "Big Book" of his do you think?" "Transmutation." "Another Darwin blotting God out of creation." "We want to support your scheme for a museum of natural history." "Some people see it as rash, extravagant, grandiose." "If it's grand, it's because it should house as wide a display as possible." "But we need your help in return." "It is up to you as the country's leading anatomist and paleontologist to prove man's superiority." "We won't have street ruffians tout man's monkey origin in Her Majesty's museums." "You can rely on me, Bishop Wilberforce." "The human brain differs markedly from that of all other mammals." "In man, not only do the cerebral hemispheres overlap the olfactory lobes and the cerebellum... but they extend in advance of the one and farther back than the other." "Their posterior development is so marked, that I have assigned to that part the character of a third lobe peculiar to Homo sapiens:" "the hippocampus minor." "Peculiar mental faculties are associated with this highest form of brain, and I am led, therefore to regard man not merely as representative of a distinct subclass... but as the inhabitant of one reserved for him alone." "The human brain is in itself proof of man's moral and religious faculties." "Such are the powers with which we, and we alone, are gifted." "I wonder what a chimpanzee would have to say about that, Mr. Huxley." "I think it's priceless." "His theory is a house built on sand, a Corinthian portico on cow dung." "Yes." "Damn all the sanctimonious meddlers who try and stifle troublesome research." "The ultimate court of appeal of science is observation and experiment not authority, wealth and rank." "Your disagreements with Owen should not be personal." "I can't help it." "He's so pompous." "The prospect of his slipping on one of his pickled brains is just too good to be true." "Bad feeling will only cloud the issue and lead to bad science." "Tell that to Owen." "Huxley's saying in public what you think in private." "Charles, you've stalled long enough." "You've collected enough barnacles to sink a ship-of-the-line." "Meanwhile, you're being upstaged." "That's not important." "My book is the thing..." "once my work is done." "Will it deal with man?" "It's too surrounded by prejudices." "Well, whether it does or it doesn't you must publish." "Oh, my God." "Ras..." "What is it?" "Who is Alfred Wallace?" "My dear Huxley it's like a précis of my theory." "All my originality, whatever its worth, has been smashed." "Had Wallace a copy of the essay I'd written in '44 in front of him he couldn't have written a better short abstract!" "Variations being pushed further and further from parent species by a struggle for existence... overpopulation... it's all there." "Is your book ready for publication?" "Publish!" "How can I publish?" "Honorably?" "I'd sooner burn the blasted thing than have him, or anyone else, think that I behaved in a paltry spirit." "Then publish a joint paper, excerpts from your work along with Wallace's essay." "And then you must prepare a manuscript for publication." "Who knows?" "It may all be for the best." "At last we'll finally get to learn your views in full." "Charles, what is it?" "This book will be the death of me." "Oh..." "Shh..." "What a miserable wretch I'd be without you near me." "When on board H.M.S.Beagle as naturalist" "I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South America... and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent." "These facts seemed to throw some light on the origin of species... that mystery of mysteries..." "The Times is very positive." "I should think so, it's Huxley." "The Athenaeum wants me tried, in the Divinity Hall, the College the lecture room and museum." "My book is no more unorthodox than the subject demands." "I don't discuss the origins of man;" "I don't discuss Genesis." "Charles, don't be so naive." "It's clear you think man is no exception." "Whether you're right or wrong you must finish what you started." "Darwin?" "Darwin!" "Ah, Owen!" "How dare you?" "!" "How dare you paint me as a reactionary?" "!" "I didn't paint you as a reactionary." "How dare you put my name with the defenders of immutability?" "Is my concept of the ordained continuous becoming of living things to be ignored?" "But what does it mean?" "I don't know what it means." "It means..." "It means animals appearing out of thin air!" "Not at all!" "You believe that selection is the only possible creative law." "Pure chance, the roll of the dice." "In fact, new species are created by natural birth according to God's law!" "Well, I don't believe..." "I know who's put you up to this." "Huxley!" "Please, Richard." "I will have absolutely no truck with the Huxleys of this world and nor should you!" "It is an abuse of science." "You should be ashamed of yourself!" "Your book is a snub to the clergy and an insult to humanity." "It's nihilism!" "Only a man devoid of a soul could find solace in a bestial ancestry." "Well, it's as respectable to be modified monkey as modified dirt." "Huxley, please..." "I think it's splendid." "Old ladies of both sexes say it's a dangerous book." "Splendid." "Don't worry." "I'll deal with him." "I'm sharpening my beak and claws in readiness." "Any contribution to our natural history from the pen of Mr. Charles Darwin is certain to command attention." "His latest publication, The Origin of Species, is manifestly regarded by him as the opus upon which his future fame is to rest." "Mr. Darwin claims that every living thing, every fish, plant, fungus... fly... elephant... man... turnip... are all equally the lineal descendants of the same common ancestor." "Such a notion is absolutely incompatible with the word of God." "Hear, hear." "Man was made in the image of God and redeemed by the Eternal Son." "Natural selection is an ingenious theory for denying the working, and therefore the existence, of the Creator." "In fact, the human brain differs markedly from that of all other mammals." "Unfortunately, my Lord Bishop you have been misinformed." "If we are unprejudiced judges, we have to admit that there is as little interval between the gorilla and the man as there is between the gorilla and the baboon." "It is... it is speech alone, and not some spiritual gift that makes man a reasonable being." "That is the source of our unlimited intellectual progress." "But that does not disguise the fact that to the very root and foundation of his nature man is one with the rest of the organic world." "No one... no one who has ever dissected the brain of an ape agrees with Professor Owen." "His findings are wrong." "I can only assume that Professor Owen's brain must have shrunk in the pickling jar." "I meant, of course the chimpanzees' brains he had examined." "Oh, Lord!" "It was then that God delivered Wilberforce into my hands." "I wonder, Mr. Huxley." "Is it through your grandfather or your grandmother that you claim descent from an ape?" "I stood up... very quiet, very grave and said my say with perfect good temper." "If the question... if the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man, highly intelligent possessed of great means of influence and yet who employed these faculties and that influence" "for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion" "I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape." "You didn't!" "I said that, or something very like that." "How dare you attack a live bishop in public?" "Have you no respect for the purple waistcoat?" "Lady Brewster fainted, had to be carried from the room." "And then Admiral FitzRoy got to his feet." "FitzRoy?" "This!" "Believe in this!" "Believe in God, not man!" "Oh, my." "We'll probably never know the truth." "Well, the truth, Charles, is in your book." "It's the most interesting thing I've ever read." "The reasoning is so entirely satisfactory to me that... if the facts don't fit then, well... so much the worse for the facts." "The shakes." "Time I was naturally selected." "For more than a century, people have often thought that the conclusion to draw from Darwin's vision is that Homo sapiens, our species that we're just animals too, we're just mammals;" "that there is nothing morally special about us." "I myself don't think this follows at all from Darwin's vision but it is certainly the received view in many quarters." "Ever sinceThe Origin of Species was published strict believers in biblical creation have attacked Darwin's vision." "Their concerns aren't only about the science of evolution." "At stake, many believe is nothing less than the human soul." "To suggest that animals and plants and us, humans, came into being in a natural law-like way in the way the planets move was to put in jeopardy the human soul." "And the human soul is the crux of the matter because if we are not different from animals if we don't live forever in heaven or in hell then why should we behave other than like animals in this life?" "In the 19th century, in Darwin's time it was audacious to claim that humans and chimps were closely related." "There wasn't that much scientific evidence." "But since that time the evidence has become strong." "First, we saw the fossil record appear." "Evidence of human ancestors that had apelike features established the plausibility of the idea that humans and chimps had common ancestors." "And then in the last 20 years we've seen the emergence of a whole new type of data that's established a close relationship between chimps and humans." "And that comes from the analysis of DNA." "This is DNA." "We've got DNA, chimps have got DNA, bacteria have got DNA, petunias have got DNA, crabs have got DNA." "Every living animal, plant, fish, frog has got DNA and if we compare the DNAs of any two species we can establish how closely related they are one to another." "In the early days of DNA research a double strand of DNA was extracted from each species to be compared." "When heated, the strands split apart." "When the single strands from each creature were put together and allowed to cool the two always combined to form the familiar double helix." "The degree to which the strands mated successfully was a measure of their similarity." "It turned out that human DNA and chimp DNA combined almost perfectly." "Today, this similarity can be seen even more precisely." "DNA sequences can now be "read" letter by letter." "Here we're looking at the DNA sequences of one particular gene as found in human and chimp and what's immediately evident is that humans and chimps have DNAs that are 98% identical." "They're basically the same;" "there are just a couple of spelling changes." "Why are there only a couple of spelling changes?" "Because we and chimps had a common ancestor only a few million years ago and these few spelling differences have accumulated during the propagation of this DNA during those few million years." "If more time had passed since we had our last common ancestor more spelling changes would have accumulated." "If the same gene from a rat is compared many more spelling differences are seen." "That's because our common ancestor with the rat lived about 80 million or 100 million years ago and there's been much more time for spelling differences to accumulate." "Chimpanzees and humans are made from blueprints that are 98% the same." "But what about the ways humans and chimps think and act in the world?" "Are there similarities there as well?" "Boy, doing some pull-ups." "Oh... be careful." "Psychologist Sally Boysen explores the commonalities between the minds of chimps and humans, a quest that may help explain how the human mind evolved." "The developmental milestones really, throughout the life of a chimp are almost exactly the same as humans." "Everything is so similar." "They respond to new things and new toys and they have the same kinds of rough-and-tumble play." "Harper's rough and rowdy and runs all over the place and climbs." "And Emma really can almost entertain herself." "One of the things that our work allows us to see is that chimpanzees can acquire very sophisticated, complex cognitive skills like learning to count which they normally wouldn't learn in the wild." "One, two, three... four, five!" "Ooh..." "Yet they have the requisite neural capacity to do that." "Where did that come from?" "Okay, Sheeb, we're going to do another turn now." "Here we go." "One of those." "Ooh, and a malted milk ball." "Can you tell me the answer to this?" "With blue and brown?" "Show me, yeah, go ahead." "Excellent!" "There's almost nothing that the chimps haven't been able to learn that we've tried to teach them." "We've seen their ability to grasp extremely complex notions like the concept of zero, for example." "Okay, Sheeb, look." "What if I didn't put any candy here at all?" "What would you say?" "(computer beeping)" "Zero, that's right." "There's no candy here." "Oh, that's too bad..." "There's no way the chimps would be able to do this if they didn't have a great deal of commonality in, literally, the neurological structure that supports their ability to learn... just like we do." "Those things are absolutely comparable and had to come from a common ancestor." "The similarities that we have with our primate relatives are extraordinary." "We share so much of our DNA we share so much of our morphology we even share our blood types." "But for all of those similarities there are striking differences." "I think the reason for this is really very simple." "And that is, the line of evolution that led to us led, for reasons which we are only beginning to understand to an explosive development of mental capacity." "And what clearly happened is that natural selection favored the evolution of organisms that could communicate that could manipulate symbols, and could construct language." "Darwin's great idea is a grand and marvelous explanation that shows us that we are united with every other form of life on this planet." "And I find that an exciting and maybe even an ennobling way to look at things." "Darwin died in April 1882, at the age of 73." "The family thought he would be buried in the parish churchyard." "Darwin had said, months before he died that he would have to look forward to it as the sweetest place on earth." "It was not to be." "In London, Darwin's friends determined to make his death and burial a state occasion." "They went to the Royal Society and they got signatures." "They went to the House of Commons and got up a petition." "They telegraphed the Dean of Westminster who was abroad and got his approval." "A special anthem was even written for the occasion." "And on the 26th of April, a week after the death" "Darwin's body was borne mightily in procession down the aisle of Westminster Abbey to be interred in the shadow of the grave of Sir Isaac Newton." "Darwin's interment celebrated the vast social transformation that England was undergoing." "There were new colonies, new industries and new men to run them." "Darwin's body was enshrined to the greater glory of these new professionals for he had naturalized creation and delivered human nature and human destiny into their hands." "Society would never be the same." "Darwin's vision of nature was, I believe, fundamentally a religious vision one with which he ended his most famous work" "On the Origin of Species." ""There is grandeur in this view of life" ""with its several powers" ""having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one" ""and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on..." ""according to the fixed law of gravity" ""from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.""