AMBIENT MUSIC PLAYS
People of Science, take one.
David, why did you choose Charles Darwin?
He inspires me,
because he made sense out of the natural world.
And not only just physical sense of why animals have antlers
or why birds have fine feathers,
but to suggest the mechanism
which led to all these multiplicity of forms.
And that's a huge change in the mind-set.
So Darwin is the founding father of, really, scientific zoology
and botany.
And it's interesting to look back on his early career
and his motivations, really, or his inspiration. How did he get there?
He was absolutely mad about collecting beetles,
and when you do start collecting things,
you say, "This one is different from that,
"is it more different or less different from that?"
And that means you start building genealogies.
That was the trigger which led him to these extraordinary thoughts.
Yeah, it seems that one of the...
a very pure expression of what it is to be a scientist,
that it's actually understanding the natural world is all that matters.
I am really entertained by a sentence that he wrote in one of his
letters in which he says,
"Every time I see a peacock's tail, I feel sick."
And he feels sick because he can't understand how it could have been,
that individual bird put in all that energy into growing this
vast and immense tail with its complex patterns and colours,
and one thing and another.
How it could happen and the thought that he couldn't understand it
was what made him say it.
But in the end, Darwin explained sexual selection.
Back then, that's a bold statement.
Was he a bold character in that sense?
He was intellectually bold in himself,
but he wasn't aggressive,
because I think he knew that the majority of the society
would have found it deeply blasphemous to suggest that we were
descended from simian ancestors.
The more you know about Darwin,
the more you realise that he was enormously considerate.
I mean, he had these strong,
steely convictions, but he was gentle with people.
He was a courteous, kind human being.
He was an extraordinary man.
That's a marvellous portrait of him in his old age.
This is 1868. Yes.
And there, there's his Beagle.
What was the route that they took?
Well, they were commissioned to go down to the farthest tip
of South America and do a survey around the Cape Horn.
But then, of course, they decided to go home by crossing the Pacific,
and so he then on that way calls upon the Galapagos,
where the moment of enlightenment strikes him,
if one is to believe the stories.
What do you think would fascinate Darwin about the world today?
Oh, undoubtedly the discovery of genetics.
The key that he really needed to have was the physical basis
in which characteristics were handed from one generation to the other.
And he postulated things he called gemmules,
which would do that sort of job, but he had no idea what they were.
But to a certain extent, you could say that he, as it were, predicted
there would have to be a thing like that which we now call chromosomes
with DNA, which carry DNA from one generation to the next.
He was a wonderful writer as well, wasn't he? Absolutely so.
I mean, this book, this is a first edition of The Origin of Species.
And what is marvellous about it is that anybody can read any page
and it makes absolute sense to them.
It's not full of jargon, it's full of argument and observation.
And that's another reason why I admire him so much.
"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."