The Genius of Charles Darwin

To mark the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, Richard Dawkins presents the ultimate three-part guide to Charles Darwin. The documentary has just won the award for 'Best Documentary Series' at the British Broadcast Awards 2009. The important issues that are raised in this documentary must be dealt with if we are to understand and solve many important problems in our modern society and political climate. I hope you enjoy!

The Genius of Charles Darwin
by Andrew Pettie

It is almost 150 years since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a treatise which, according to Professor Richard Dawkins, contained ‘the most powerful idea ever to occur to a human mind: the idea of evolution by natural selection’. It would probably startle Darwin to know that, despite overwhelming scientific evidence in his theory’s favour, only four out of 10 Britons currently believe it to be true. Dawkins, a fearless crusader for rationalism and the author of The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene, sounds baffled by this statistic.

‘It’s bewildering,’ he says, ‘and an indictment of our education system. Most children are taught evolution at the age of 15. It should be taught much earlier than that because it’s so incredibly important and interesting: it’s the explanation of why we all exist.’

In the opening episode of Dawkins’s three-part documentary series, The Genius of Charles Darwin, he asks a group of schoolchildren what they think of the theory of evolution. Many insist, despite Dawkins’s patient explanation of the scientific evidence to the contrary, that the world was created in the manner described by the Bible or the Qur’an. ‘I found it rather depressing,’ says Dawkins, ‘when the children said, “It says this in my holy book and so this is what I believe.” I asked them why they believed a holy book rather than the evidence and they said it was the way they’d been brought up, as though that in itself was a self-evidently knockdown argument.’

Although Dawkins doesn’t think that believing in evolution precludes people from believing in God, he says that ‘a full understanding of the world of evolution does tend to push against religion.’...