"Here comes the year 2000:" "a lightweight, turbocharged, blown-molded, energy wise, fail-safe, nonpolluting, computerized, intercooled, hydro-sprung, carbon fiber, low-drag, chip-designed, high-speed, magnesium-chassised, crash-tested, polycarbonate set of wheels;" "build from seawater;" "burns a treat when you're finished with it;" "heats the house for a week." "And that's just one version of the future: an experiment." "We're like that in the late 20th-century west, aren't we?" "It's a dynamic, foward-looking, high-tech, recycled, "you name it" world." "The one thing you can be sure tomorrow will be is different because we'll make it like that." "We take nature and remake it a million ways and pretest 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" "till you want something else." "There's nothing we consumerists can't do to the world." "It's just so much raw material to be computer-modeled into new designs, everything blow-dryers to babies." "All you need's 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's Linnaeus, the fellow who'd been up north, a really dull botanist wandering around the really dull world they'd 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're sure, as they were, that the world was created at 9:00 a.m. on October the 26th, 4004 B.C." "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 Linnaeus: regimented." "Now, the trouble with all this flowery philosophizing was that it didn't work with flowers." "The great outdoors, in general, was a disorganized mess." "Linnaeus decided to sort it out." ""It may look confused," he said," ""but the one thing god wasn't was confused." "There's a pattern to all this, and if I can discover the pattern," "I'll be able to get inside god's head."" "Now, that may not sound very modest, but one thing Linnaeus 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 plants' sex organs:" "the stamens and pistils 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 pistils;" "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." "It's 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're all Campanulas, but this one is Campanula rotundifolia 'cause it's 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," "Linnaeus had got nature firmly under control, same as his garden here at Uppsala near Stockholm where he was professor." "It's laid out like a system:" "divided, subdivided, classified, as if god had been a gardener." "In 1768, the best seller that went with it was into its 12th edition and inflaming nature lovers uphill 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, uh, flux." "Of course, now you mentioned it, there was a concept that might fit the bill, been around for some time actually, 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 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 a 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 at them and at 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 till now." "150,000 years he reckoned that was." "Noted a few things you'd think would have worried him in world of individually created, separate, different species." "If all birds were separate creations, why one common structure?" "If each mammal was unique, why do 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 a cabbage." "But, no matter how things looked, no matter how similar things appeared, like bison and buffalos or all the members of the feline species or mushroom 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'd 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's more, every time they cut through a new layer of ground, there'd 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 hidebound 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, a thought to take a fellow's mind right off canal-building." "And that was the bare bones of it." "It was when real bare bones started turning up that things took a turn for the more complicated." "Back here in Paris, where, by 1794, Buffon's zoo had been turned into the Paris Natural History Museum and a certain Georges 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 into the museum here with bones they'd 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's 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's 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 hunting legs." "And they need a spine to hold them together in an overall shape built for speed or there'll 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're 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'd 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." "There 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 neighborhood." "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." "Meet William Buckland," "Oxford professor of geology and weirdo." "He reckoned the floods hadn't wiped out people because they hadn't been there." "They'd gone off on the Ark." "Buckland was a queer cove with even queerer teaching methods, and he'd only got his job on condition he wouldn't knock the Bible version of what had happened." "Ha-ha, my boys, an opportune arrival." "The proof." "Buckland was set on proving that some animals were extinct because god had sent the Old Testament flood deliberately and that the flood was what made the Earth's surface the way we see it today." "Footmarks..." "His approach got mixed reviews." ""Some doubts were once expressed about the flood," they said." ""Buckland arose, and all was clear as mud."" "See?" "But he seemed right about deep valleys having been made by the flood, not the little rivers in them now." "On the other hand, could you be sure of a fellow whose gastronomic preferences ran to such delicacies as grilled mice on toast?" "But never mind his eccentricities;" "the reason people listened to Buckland was that a recent universal deluge ordered by the Almighty was the only thing that explained all the unexplainables:" "the bones they'd found buried under mud in Moorland caves, the giant boulders sitting in isolated positions miles from any mountain, the fossils discovered-- and this was a real mystery-- of lowland animals on mountain peaks." "By 1823, Buckland reckoned he'd solved all the riddles." "We might consider the bones of animals caused to perish by this great inundation upon which I have copiously written and, of course, upon which you have copiously read, hmm?" "Such bones..." "However, there was still one minor snag that made even Buckland think about eating his words:" "how come the flood, which was supposed to have knocked off all living creatures, knocked off all the fish who could swim, eh?" "Of course, I could be wrong." "Now, the trouble with floods and catastrophes and stuff was that it require interference by the Almighty and supernatural finger in the pie, which wasn't exactly very scientific, so a lot of people started looking for a more down-to-earth explanation." "One such type was a dour scot called Hutton who went around poking into ditches and riverbeds 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 the 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, another of Buckland's pupils who didn't agree with him, a pompous bore called Charles Lyell, headed purposefully up the slopes of Etna." "Lyell took the view that the way geology probably 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 19 miles wide and 10,000 feet 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 the crater, panting in the thin air and choking on the sulfur," "Lyell realized 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've dragged you down here is because these little beauties rocked the stuffy world of geology to its paleolithic 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 descents down at the market: these." ""Okay," you say. "So what?" "Maybe they're not that old."" "And this is where Lyell took a deep breath, because you know where that limestone goes?" "All the way out across that 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'd 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'd caught his little friends and stuck pins in them, the more he'd seen something that intrigued him." "Now, to you and me, see one beetle and you've seen them all." "Not Wallace." "He'd noticed differences in his bugs that seemed to relate to where they came from." "The basic beetle shape was the same, but varieties seemed 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've been watching nature out here, and I think I've 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'd written to feel a prize idiot for a start, because he'd 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 english 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." "Nice color, but, you see, he's got gaps in his muffs and broken foot feathers." "Fair at marks." "Yes, fair." "It's nothing better than fair." "Toenail is twisted." "Well, his new theory looked like it'd been an old theory because it was precisely the same as Wallace's, and he'd been working on it for longer than Wallace, and he'd 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 realized-- flash-- that that's what nature was doing but without the restraint, so everywhere there would always be a desperate struggle for limited supplies of food." "Any variety that was able to live off of some kind of food nobody else wanted would survive and multiply." "The rest?" "They'd die of starvation." "That's why there were so many varieties around." "They'd 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'd 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 a 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 where 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 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." "Break off the debate." "Church attacks Darwin." "Professor claims ape as grandfather." "The press leapt at the idea of the ape-man, a concept that horrified decent victorian society." "Darwin will destroy our 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." "8 men 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 fossilized Archaeopteryx." "And if you look very carefully, you can see it's half bird and half reptile." "Bony tail: reptile." "Feathers on the wings: bird." "The missing link wasn't anymore, so Darwin was foolproof, which was fine by certain gents here on the lunatic fringe." "Lunatic?" "Well, what would you call people who built grottos 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 build castles like this one, Neuschwanstein, where he could live out his fantasies about being a wagnerian hero" "like the Swan King guarding the Holy Grail." "Be gone, 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;" "favorite color: 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'd beaten the French in 1870 so they're top of the military league." "Industrial production is going up like a rocket." "They're talking about having a colony or two." "They've invented themselves an emperor." "And, still, polite european society treats them as if they've got collective B.O." "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's an unsung figure behind all the nationalistic hoo-ha;" "in this case, a fellow called Haeckel, a zoologist and Darwin fanatic." "Without him, all this might have remained so much bavarian baloney." "But Haeckel did what he did, so I'll tell you all about it next time I got the chance." "Well-- thank you" "This is what happened." "In 1868, Haeckel, 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 starting spreading Darwinism "Haeckel version."" "Over the next few decades," "Haeckel 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 sterilized or shot." "Racial hygiene, it's 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, Haeckel's next modest little number called The riddle of the universe sold 1/2 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 Haeckel had said." "So was his friend." "You know, the one that misquoted Darwin so often in speeches here, at Nuremberg." "Uns liegt Deutschland, in uns marschiert Deutschland, und hinter uns kommt Deutschland!" "Sieg heil!" "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 weak, 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'd breed more like them and drag the country down." "In a heartwarming 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's 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 America 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 stay 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 O.K. Corral." "4.5!" "300!" "We are buying 6" "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 like 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." "How to make a million, Darwin-style." "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 minutes of a trip that had 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'd always used," "Vladimir Ilich Lenin." "In 1917, Lenin designated Russia as the center 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 believe that change in history was a matter of molding 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 would achieve the power necessary to change the world." "And the struggle continues to bring the whole family of man to socialism because a revolutionary ideal admits no half measures." "For Marx, the logical and necessary end of social evolution is socialism, just as for Darwin, the logical and necessary end of natural evolution is the organism that exists because it's 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's 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 any time you read the Bible." "Thanks to Darwin and the people who built on his work, the universe no longer looks so straightforward." "we're made of the same stuff as the rest of nature, not different or special in the universe." "And if there is an immediately recognizable 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's what you want it to be, and so is your future." "And if that doesn't turn out right, well, you've only yourself to blame."