Darwin's Dangerous Idea

For 150 years,

a revolutionary idea has been spreading all over the world.

It has helped us unravel the mysteries of creation,

transforming our understanding of life on Earth and our own place in nature.

But this idea has implications that go far beyond science.

Its legacy reaches deep into every area of our lives,

challenging our culture, our politics, our religious beliefs.

It forces us to re-examine the foundations

of human behaviour and morality.

And it's been used to justify imperialism, war and genocide.

In this series, I'm going to tell the story

of the most important idea to emerge in the modern world.

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection,

is now widely accepted as a scientifically

truthful description of the course of life on Earth.

And scientific truth is never a bad thing.

But this is an idea so big, it's now got a life of its own.

Understand Darwinism correctly

and it can offer a key to many of humanity's greatest problems.

Get Darwinism wrong and it leads you straight to hell.

Welcome to the world of Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

In 2006,

next to a photograph of the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York,

the influential Turkish writer, Adnan Oktar,

wrote that those responsible for acts of terror are in fact Darwinists.

Darwin's theory of evolution, he argued,

is a philosophy that values and promotes conflict.

After 150 years, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution

still has the power to provoke fierce opposition.

And Oktar is one of his most extreme and vocal opponents.

Adnan Oktar is regarded by some as the leader of a dangerous cult.

But he is a big player in creationism.

He believes that Darwin was unscientific,

evolution has never happened

and God created all living things as they are.

He's hardly alone in that, but he goes a great deal further.

"The evil in the world," he says, the violence, the wars, the terrorism,

are the responsibility of Darwinists.

Oktar is no scientist,

but he's written a lavishly illustrated book, The Atlas of Creation,

which contains spurious evidence

that life on Earth is not the result of evolution.

Many Muslims and Islamic scientists are opposed to Oktar's views,

but his influence is growing.

He's now taking his extraordinary campaign to the rest of the world,

by sending The Atlas of Creation to schools,

universities and international leaders.

Of course, Oktar's hardly the first

to campaign against Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

We don't believe that men have come from monkeys.

God has created men.

I just heard the majority would say it was Charles Darwin's fault.

Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes

who are evolutionised out of some primordial soup.

Many religious fundamentalists are disturbed by the implications

of Darwin's Theory of Evolution.

They believe it's unleashed a godless era of conflict and moral decline.

To this day, Darwin's idea has the power to challenge

some of our most deeply held beliefs.

Charles Darwin and his followers have shown

how all life on the planet evolved from a single source.

The mechanism they call evolution by natural selection means competition,

extinction and the emergence of new forms of life

without the need for a director or conductor.

The creator shimmers and vanishes like a mirage.

Has Darwin killed God?

Charles Darwin's dangerous idea began to take root in 1831,

when he set off on a trip around the world

aboard HMS Beagle, aged just 22.

He would later call this voyage,

"By far, the most important event in my life. "

His adventure lasted almost five years.

And Darwin's historic encounters with iguanas, finches and tortoises

on the Galápagos Islands have passed into legend.

In fact, Darwin spent just five weeks in the Galápagos.

But he spent more than a year here,

at the southernmost tip of South America.

Tierra del Fuego.

Darwin's encounter with the natives of this distant land would lead him

to a radical new understanding of man's place in nature.

The Beagle came here

to return three of Darwin's fellow passengers to their homeland.

The first was a 27-year-old who Darwin described as moody and taciturn.

The second, a dandy,

who became distressed if his shoes weren't polished.

And the third, a little girl, said to be as broad as she was high.

The Beagle's captain had captured the Fuegans on a previous voyage.

They'd been taken back to Britain to be introduced to civilised society.

The Fuegan three had been treated more as objects of curiosity

to be prodded and goggled at than as human beings.

They'd been taught English, dressed in Western clothes,

converted to Christianity, shown to the king and queen.

And they'd been renamed.

Fuegia Basket, Jemmy Button, York Minster.

Well, these are names for dolls, not for people.

During the long voyage,

Darwin was charmed and intrigued by the three Fuegans.

He thought they were different from civilised Europeans,

but not that different.

Now they were coming home

to set up a Christian mission and convert their fellow Fuegans.

So, a simple, heart-warming story.

Except that when the Beagle finally landed here,

on the wild shores of Tierra del Fuego, Darwin was in for a shock.

When the Beagle dropped anchor at Wallaceton Island in December 1832,

Darwin encountered uncivilised Fuegan natives for the first time.

"These were the most abject

"and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld, "

he wrote later.

"Their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint.

"Their skins filthy and greasy.

"Their voices discordant and their gestures violent. "

Darwin was fascinated to see humans

in such a primitive, almost animal state.

But worse was to come.

After a month, the Christian mission was established and the Beagle set off

to explore more of the coastline.

Jemmy, Fuegia and York Minster were left behind

with the mission's leader, the Reverend Richard Matthews.

Ten days later, Darwin and the crew returned

to see how they were getting along with their civilising Christian mission.

Darwin was aghast to discover that all the mission's property

had either been stolen or destroyed.

The Reverend Matthews was in a state of abject terror,

at the mercy of a group of Fuegans

who were curiously plucking out the hairs of his beard

using a pair of mussel shells as pincers.

Even more shocking, Fuegia Basket Jemmy Button and York Minster

were already slipping back into their savage state.

"One's mind hurries back over past centuries," wrote Darwin later,

"and asks whether our ancestors could be such as these."

Civilisation suddenly appeared thin and fragile.

Darwin was shocked to see how quickly his Fuegan friends

had reverted to their original state.

This would lead him to question

the biblical account of man's place in God's creation.

Dangerous territory for an outwardly respectable Christian gentleman.

When the Beagle finally turned for home, Darwin carried with him

five years' worth of notebooks, and specimens and thoughts.

But it was the Fuegans who really seemed to have haunted him.

Because they showed him just how changeable humanity is.

Not safely fixed outside nature, but a piece of the rest.

Mingled and mutable.

Darwin found this place deeply unsettling.

And it obliged him to ask that most unsettling question,

where do we, all of us,

Fuegans, natives, Europeans, where do we come from?

Back in England,

this question would turn into something even more dangerous.

On a trip to the zoo in 1838, Darwin was captivated

by a young orang-utan called Jenny, the first ever to go on view in Britain.

Jenny was being teased by her keeper,

who was holding out an apple just beyond her reach.

She was kicking, crying and sulking like a naughty child.

The keeper said that if Jenny would behave, she could have the apple.

After a while, Jenny, who clearly seemed to have understood every word,

pulled herself together and was given her reward.

Darwin was delighted to see that she jumped into an armchair

and began to eat the apple with the most contented countenance imaginable.

And later he wrote, "Let man visit the orang-utan in domestication

"and see its intelligence."

He wasn't alone.

The young Queen Victoria visited the apes in London Zoo and said,

"The orang-utan is too wonderful.

"He is painfully and frightfully and disagreeably human."

A few weeks later,

Darwin returned to the zoo to take a closer look at Jenny.

The more he studied her,

the more he felt haunted by his memories of the natives in Tierra del Fuego.

Something unthinkable was pressing to the forefront of his mind.

"Compare the Fuegans and the orang-utans, "said Darwin,

"and dare say the differences are so great. "

He then picked up a mirror and he looked at his own face.

And then back at Jenny.

And then back at himself.

And he stared at his own face

more intently than he had ever done in his life before.

And the more he looked, the more the unthinkable became obvious.

There was a deep connection between himself,

the Fuegans and the apes.

Darwin was speaking evolution, but in 1838 it sounded like revolution.

He was so disturbed by the potential impact of his work

that he'd started keeping his dangerous ideas in a set of secret notebooks.

In one of them, he'd begun to sketch out a new kind of family tree

to illustrate his emerging theory of evolution.

Darwin represented the different species by different twigs on his tree,

and he suggested that, for instance,

mankind and orang-utans were related through a common ancestor.

Then he went a great deal further,

leaping forward in thought, rather bravely, to suggest that perhaps

all life on the planet had a single, common source.

This was an extraordinary leap of logic,

and Darwin was modest enough to write at the top of the page,

"I think."

These few sketchy lines

represented the evolution of all life on Earth.

Darwin had unleashed the idea that human beings

were not created separately by God,

we'd evolved, just like everything else in nature.

"Man in his arrogance, thinks of himself as a great work, "Darwin would write.