DAVID ATTENBOROUGH:

Our Earth is the only known planet that sustains life. And it does so in abundance. I have been
fortunate enough over the years to travel to some of the most extraordinary and remote places
on Earth to find and film animals. This is the biggest flower in the world. The blue whale! It's
the biggest creature that exists on the planet!

ATTENBOROUGH:
The sheer number and variety of animals and plants is astonishing. Estimates of the number of
different species vary from six million to a hundred million. Nobody knows exactly how many
different kinds of animals there are here. Wherever you look, there's life. There are often a
multitude of variations on a single pattern. Nearly 200 different kinds of monkeys, for example.
And 315 humming birds, nearly a thousand bats. And beetles, at least 350 thousand species of
them. Not to mention a quarter of a million different kinds of flowering plants. The variety is
astounding.

(CHUCKLES)
(CHIRPING)

Even in this one small English woodland, you might see four or five different kinds of finches.
Why should there be such a dazzling variety? And how can we make sense of such a huge
range of living organisms? Two hundred years ago, a man was born who was to explain this
astonishing diversity of life. In doing so, he revolutionised the way in which we see the world
and our place in it. His name was Charles Darwin. This book, The Holy Bible, explains how
this wonderful diversity came about. On the third day, after the creation of the world, God
created plants. On the fifth day, fish and birds, and then, on the sixth day, mammals and finally,
man. That explanation was believed, literally, by, pretty well, the whole of Western Europe for
the best part of 2,000 years. And generations of painters pictured it for the faithful. This version
was painted in Italy in the 16th century. Here is God in the Garden of Eden, which is now filled
with all kinds of animals. Here he is pulling Adam out of the Earth and here creating the first
woman by putting Adam to sleep, and then taking one of his ribs and extracting Eve from his
side. And she comes out assisted by two angels. And when God had finished, he said to Adam
and Eve, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth and subdue it, "and have dominion
over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, "and over every living thing that moveth
upon the Earth". That made it clear that according to the Bible humanity could exploit the
natural world as they wished. This view of mankind's superiority still stood when, in 1831, a
British surveying ship, the Beagle, set off on a voyage around the world. On board, as a
companion to the captain, was the 22-year-old Charles Darwin. They crossed the Atlantic and
made landfall on the coast of Brazil. There, the sheer abundance of tropical nature astonishes
the newcomer, as I discovered when I retraced Darwin's steps, 30 years ago, for a television
series about the diversity of nature. Darwin, as a boy, had been a fanatical collector of insects.
And here, he was enthralled almost to the point of ecstasy. In one day, in a small area, he
discovered as he wrote in his journal, "It's enough to disturb the composure "of the
entomologist's mind to contemplate the future dimension "of a complete catalogue". They went
south, rounded Cape Horn, and so reached the Pacific. And then, in September 1835, after they
had been away for almost four years, they landed on the little-known islands of the Galapagos.
Here, they found creatures that existed nowhere else in the world. Cormorants that had lost the
power of flight. Lizards that swam out through the surf to graze on the bottom of the sea.
Darwin, who had studied botany and geology at Cambridge university, collected specimens of
the animals and plants. And as usual, when he went ashore to investigate, described what he
found in his journal.
"My servant and self were landed a few miles to the northeast, "in order that I might examine
the district mentioned above "as resembling chimneys". Volcanic chimneys, presumably. "The
comparison would have been more exact if I had said "the iron furnaces near Wolverhampton".
(CHUCKLES)
The British resident in the Galapagos claimed that he knew from the shape of a giant tortoise's
shell which island it had come from. If it had a rounded front, it came from a well-watered
island where it fed on lush ground plants. Whereas one from a drier island had a peak at the
front, which enabled it to reach up to higher vegetation. Were these tortoises, each on their
separate islands, different species? And if so, was each one a separate act of divine creation?
The differences that Darwin had noticed amongst these Galapagos animals, were, of course, all
tiny. But if they could develop, wasn't it possible that over the thousands or millions of years,
a whole series of such differences might add up to one revolutionary change? On his voyage
home, Darwin had time to ponder on these things. Could it be that species were not fixed for
all time, but could, in fact, slowly change? On his return, he sorted out his specimens and sent
them off to relevant experts so that each could be identified and classified. Most of the mammal
bones and fossils he sent to Richard Owen. Owen was one of the most brilliant zoologists of
his time. He was the first to recognise dinosaurs, and indeed had invented their very name. And
he would later become the creator and first director of the Natural History Museum in London.
Many of the specimens that Darwin collected are still preserved and treasured here among the
70 million other specimens housed in the museum that Owen founded. And here is one of them.
It's obviously the lower jaw of some great animal, and when Darwin discovered it, it had bits
of skin and hair attached to it so at first it was thought to be the remains of some unknown
living species. But now we know that it is a species that was extinct for some 10,000 years, a
giant ground sloth. Owen examined it in great detail and eventually described it and gave it the
name of Mylodon darwinii in honour of its discoverer. But that mutual respect between two
great men of science was not to last. Soon after his return from his voyage, Darwin made his
home here in Down House in Kent. Here, he wrote an account of his travels and worked on
detailed scientific treatises about corals and barnacles and the geology and fossils of South
America. But he also pondered deeply on what he had seen in the Galapagos and elsewhere.
Maybe species were not fixed. Every day, he took a walk in this small spinney that he had
planted at the end of his garden. And it was here that he came to ponder on the problems of
natural history including that mystery of mysteries: how could one species turn into another?
He noted that most, if not all, animals produce many more young than live to breed themselves.
This female blue tit, for example, may well lay a dozen eggs a year, perhaps 50 or so in her
lifetime. Yet only two of her chicks need to survive and breed themselves to maintain the
numbers of the blue tit population. Those survivors, of course, are likely to be the healthiest
and best-suited to their particular environment. Their characteristics are then inherited so
perhaps over many generations, and particularly if there are environmental changes, species
may well change. Only the fittest survive. And that was the key. He called the process natural
selection.
(BIRDSONG)
That would explain the differences that he had noted in the finches that he had brought back
from the Galapagos. They were very similar except for their beaks. This one has a very thin,
delicate beak, which it uses to catch insects. This one, on the other hand, which came from an
environment where there were a lot of nuts, has a big, heavy beak, which enables it to crack
them. So maybe, over the vastness of geological time, and particularly if species were invading
new environments, those changes would amount to very radical changes indeed. Darwin drew
a sketch in one of his notebooks to illustrate his idea, showing how a single ancestral species
might give rise to several different ones, and then wrote above it a tentative, "I think". Now he
had to prove his theory. And he spent years gathering abundant and convincing evidence. He
was an extraordinary letter writer. He wrote as many as a dozen letters a day to scientists and
naturalists all over the world. He also realised that when people had first started domesticating
animals they had been doing experiments for him for centuries. All domestic dogs are
descended from a single ancestral species, the wolf. Dog breeders select those pups that have
the characteristics that happen to please them. Nature, of course, selects those young animals
that are best suited to a particular environment. But the process is essentially the same. And in
both cases, it has produced astonishing variety. In effect, many of these different breeds could
be considered different species, because they do not, indeed, they cannot interbreed. For purely
mechanical reasons, there's no way in which a Pekingese can mate with a Great Dane. Of
course, it's true that, if you used artificial insemination, you could get crosses between almost
any of these breeds. but that's because human beings have been selecting between dogs for only
a few centuries.
Nature has been selecting between animals for millions of years, tens of millions, even
hundreds of millions of years. So what might have started out as we would consider to be
breeds, have now become so different they are species. Darwin, sitting in Down House, wrote
to pigeon fanciers and rabbit breeders asking all kinds of detailed questions about their methods
and results. He himself, being a country gentleman and running an estate, knew about breeding
horses and sheep and cattle. He also conducted careful experiments with plants in his
greenhouse. But Darwin knew that the idea that species could appear without divine
intervention would appall society in general. And it was also contrary to the beliefs of his wife,
Emma, who was a devout Christian. Perhaps for that reason, he was keen to keep the focus of
his work scientific. He made a point of not being drawn in public about his religious beliefs.
But in the latter part of his life he withdrew from attending church. On Sundays, he would
escort Emma and the children here to the parish church in Down, but while they went into the
service, he remained outside and went for a walk in the country lanes. Perhaps because he
feared his theory would cause outrage in some quarters, he delayed publishing it year after year
after year.
But he wrote a long abstract of it. And then, on July 5th 1844, he wrote this letter to his wife.
"My dear Emma, I have just finished this sketch of my species theory". Some sketch. It was
240 pages long. "I therefore write this, in case of my sudden death, "that you will devote 400
to its publication". He then goes on to list his various naturalist friends, who would be asked to
edit it and check it, and he ends the letter, charmingly, "My dear wife, yours affectionately, C.
R. Darwin". He continued to accumulate evidence and refine his theory for the next 14 years.
But then his hand was forced. In June 1858, 22 years after he got back from the Galapagos,
here in his study in Down, he received a package from a naturalist who was working in what
is now Indonesia. His name was Alfred Russel Wallace. He had been corresponding with
Darwin for some years. But this package was different. It contained an essay that set out exactly
the same idea as Darwin's... of evolution by natural selection. The idea had come to Wallace
as he lay in his hut semi-delirious in a malarial fever.
But although his idea of natural selection was the same as Darwin's, he had not spent 20 years
gathering the mountain of evidence to support it, as Darwin had done. But whose idea was it?
In the end, the senior members of the Linnean Society decided that the fairest thing was for a
brief outline of the theory from each of them to be read out one after the other, at a meeting of
the society here in Burlington House, in London. The Linnean, then, as now, was the place
where scientists studying the natural world held regular meetings to present and discuss papers
about their observations and thoughts. The one held on July 1 st 1858 was attended by only
about 30 people. Neither of the authors were present. Wallace was 10,000 miles away in the
East Indies.
And Darwin was ill and devastated by the death, a few days earlier, of his infant son. So he
was still at his home in Kent. As a consequence, the two papers had to be read by the secretary.
And as far as we can tell, they made very little impression on anyone. Darwin spent the next
year writing out his theory in detail. Then he sent the manuscript to his publisher,John Murray,
whose firm, then as now, had offices in Albermarle Street, just off Piccadilly, in London.
Murray was the great publisher of his day, and dealt with the works of Jane Austen and Lord
Byron whose first editions still line these office walls. Darwin regarded his work as simply a
summary, but, even so, it's 400 pages. It was published on November 24th 1859. This is not a
first edition, more's the pity. First editions are worth, literally, hundreds of thousands of pounds.
This is a sixth edition. My copy, which I bought as a boy, at 18, I notice, and it cost me the
princely sum of one shilling. The first edition, of 1,250 copies sold out immediately. and it
went for a reprint, and then another reprint and another reprint. It's a book that contains very
few technical terms. It's easily understood by anybody. And, predictably, it caused an outrage,
not only throughout this country, but indeed all the civilised world. What scandalised people
most, it seems, was the implication that human beings were not specially created by God as the
book of Genesis stated, but were descended from ape-like ancestors. A notion that provided a
lot of scope for cartoonists.
The leaders of the Church, headed by Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, attacked it
on the grounds that it demoted God and contradicted the story of creation as told by the Bible.
"That Mr Darwin should have wandered "from this broad highway of Nature's works "into the
jungle of fanciful assumption is no small evil. " "I have read your book with more pain than
pleasure. "It is the frenzied inspiration of the inhaler of mephitic gas. " "Fails utterly. " Darwin's
theory implied that life had originated in simple forms and had then become more and more
complex. He knew perfectly well that the whole idea of evolution raised a lot of questions. In
fact, some of those questions would not be answered until comparatively recently. But in his
own time, many distinguished scientists raised what seemed to be insuperable difficulties. And
foremost among them was Richard Owen, the man who, 20 years earlier, had named the extinct
ground sloth in honour of Darwin.
Over the years, the two men had developed a deep personal dislike of one another, and had
quarrelled frequently. It wasn't that Owen thought that the story of the Garden of Eden was
literally correct, but nonetheless he was a deeply religious man. He had, after all, ensured that
his museum, which would display the wonders of creation, echoed, in its design, the great
Christian cathedrals of mediaeval Europe. And Owen knew about the diversity of life. Indeed,
he had spent his whole career cataloguing it. But even so, he refused to believe that a species
could change over time. He, and other pioneer Victorian geologists, as they established their
comparatively new science, recognised that the outlines of the history of life could be deduced
by examining the land around them. Look at these rocks in Northern Scotland. We know from
fossils that were associated with them that they are very ancient. And they are sandstones.
Compacted sand that was laid down at the bottom of the sea layer upon layer upon layer. But
look how many layers there are. Clearly, those at the top must have been laid down after those
beneath them. So, as you descend from layer to layer, you are, in effect, going back in time. So
a fossil species, if it comes from a particular layer, is of a particular age. And if you can
recognise each one, then you can begin to piece together the outlines of life's history.
My krafta. The ability to identify fossils and place them in their geological time zone was still
an essential skill when I was at university a century later. We worked our way through drawers,
like these, which are full of fossils of one sort or another. But none of them had labels. Only
numbers. So you were expected to be able to pick up one and say, "Yes, that's a belemnite".
Actually which belemnite it is, I can't remember now. And when you came to your practical
exam, your examiners would produce one of these and say, "Okay, what's that?" And you either
knew or you didn't. And the way you knew was because of all the work you did in drawers like
these, hour after hour. Owen did not deny the sequence in which all these different species
appeared, but he believed that each was separate, each divinely created.
Darwin's theory, however, required that there should be connections, not just between similar
species, but between the great animal groups. If fishes and reptiles and birds and mammals had
all evolved from one another, then surely there must be intermediate forms between those great
groups. And they were missing. And then, just two years after the publication of The Origin of
Species, Richard Owen himself purchased the most astonishing fossil for his museum. It had
been found in this limestone quarry in Bavaria. The stone here splits into flat, smooth leaves
that have been used as roofing tiles since Roman times. Most are blank, but occasionally, when
you split them apart, they reveal a shrimp or a fish. It's almost impossible to resist the
temptation of pulling down almost every boulder you see and then opening it like a book. to
look at each unopened page to see whether, maybe, it contains yet another fossil. But this fossil
was something unprecedented. It is still one of the greatest of the treasures that are stored in
the Natural History Museum. And this is it. It's called Archaeopteryx. It has unmistakable
feathers on its wings and down its tail. So Owen had no hesitation in calling it a bird. But it
was unlike any other bird that anyone knew of, because it had claws on the front of its wings,
and as was later discovered, it didn't have a beak but jaws with teeth in it, and a line of bones
supporting its tail. So it was part reptile, part bird. Here was the link between those two great
groups that was no longer missing. Gosh, you really can see the filaments there. Other examples
of the same creature show its feathers even more clearly. We know from the bones of the
Archaeopteryx that it was at best a very poor flyer. So, it's not surprising that eventually it was
superseded by more modern, more efficient birds. And that's the fate of these links between
great groups. Eventually, they become extinct. And the only way we know they existed is from
their fossilized remains. Even so, there is a bird alive today that illustrates the link between
modern birds and reptiles.
The hoatzin nests in the swamps of tropical South America. There are caiman in the water
beneath, ready to snap up any chick that might fall from its nest. So, an ability to hold on tight
is very valuable. And the nestlings have a very interesting way of doing that. The young still
have claws on the front of their wings as Archaeopteryx did. Here is vivid evidence that the
wings of birds are modified forelegs and once had toes with claws on them. There's another
creature alive today that represents a link between the great animal groups. A descendant of a
group of reptiles that took a different evolutionary course and evolved not feathers but fur, the
platypus. When specimens of this creature first reached Europe from Australia at the very end
of the 18th century, people refused to believe their eyes. They said it was a hoax. Bits and
pieces of different creatures rather crudely sewn together. And, yet, in a way, those early
sceptics were right. The platypus is the most extraordinary mixture of different animals. It's
part mammal and part reptile. And so it can give us some idea of how the first mammals
developed. When it comes to breed, it does something that separates it from all other mammals
except one. In its nest, deep in the burrow, it lays eggs. It's this that links the platypus with the
reptiles. This that entitles it to be regarded as the most primitive living mammal. So, the links
between the great animal groups are not, in fact, missing, but exist both as fossils and as living
animals. Although the fossil record provides an answer to the problem of missing links, it also
posed a major problem. It started very abruptly. The earliest known fossils in Darwin's time
came from a formation called the Cambrian.
And there were two main kinds. These, which look like fretsaw blades and are called graptolite,
and these, like giant wood lice, which are called trilobites. Could it really be that life on Earth
started with creatures as complex as these? As a boy, I was a passionate collector of fossils. I
grew up in the city of Leicester, and I knew that in this area, not far from the city, called
Charnwood forest, there were the oldest rocks in the world. Older even than the Cambrian. So,
therefore, by definition, they would be without fossils. There was no point in me looking for
fossils in these ancient rocks. There were, it's true, very rarely, some rather odd shapes in these
rocks, like this one here. But they were dismissed as being some kind of mechanical aberration.
I mean, after all, how could there be anything living in these extremely ancient rocks? And
then, in 1957, a schoolboy with rather more patience and perspicacity than I had found
something really remarkable. And undeniably the remains of a living creature. And here it is
in Leicester museum, where it's been brought for safe-keeping. It's called Charnia. Who could
doubt that this is the impression of a living organism? It has a central stem, branches on either
side. In fact, it seems to have been something like the sea pens that today grow on coral reefs.
Since its discovery, a whole range of organisms have been found in rocks of this extreme age.
Not only here in the Charnwood forest but in many other different parts of the world. Fossil
hunters searching these rocks in the Ediacara Hills of Australia had also been discovering other
strange shapes. At first, many scientists refused to believe that these faint impressions were the
remains of jellyfish. But, by now, enough specimens have been discovered to make quite sure
that, that indeed is what they are.
So, now we know that life did not begin suddenly with those complex animals of the Cambrian.
It started much, much earlier, first with simple microscopic forms, which eventually became
bigger, but which were still so soft and delicate that they only very rarely left any mark in the
rocks. The question of the age of the Earth posed another problem for Darwin's theory. In the
17th century, an Irish bishop had used the genealogies recorded in the Bible that lead back to
Adam to work out that the week of Creation must have taken place in the year 4004 B.C. That
may seem to us to be a very naive way of doing things, but what other method was there
anyway? The Victorian geologists had already concluded that the Earth must be millions of
years old. But how many millions, no one could say. Then, less than 50 years after the
publication ofThe Origin, a discovery was made in what seemed a totally disconnected branch
of science that would ultimately provide the answer. A Polish woman working in Paris, Marie
Curie, discovered that some rocks contained an element called uranium that decays over time
at a steady rate through a process called radiation. Today, a century after she made her
extraordinary discovery, the method of dating by measuring changes in radioactivity has
become greatly refined. This is a sample taken from those very ancient rocks in Charnwood
forest. And these tiny crystals are revealed to be 562 million years old.
That provides more than enough time for natural selection to produce the procession of fossils
that eventually leads to the living animals and plants we know today. But there was another
objection. If all animals within a group have a common origin, how is it that some kinds of
animals are distributed throughout the continents of the world except for Antarctica? How is it
that, for example, frogs in Europe and Africa are also found here in South America on the other
side of the Atlantic Ocean? Bearing in mind that frogs have permeable skins and can't survive
in sea water. Darwin himself had a couple of suggestions. One was that they might have floated
across accidentally on rafts of vegetation. And the other is that maybe there were land bridges
between the continents. But even he was not convinced by either explanation. Even as late as
1947, when I was a geology student here at Cambridge, there was no convincing explanation.
It's true that back in 1912, a German geologist had suggested that at one time in the very remote
distant past, all the continents of the Earth that we know today were grouped together to form
one huge supercontinent. And that over time this broke up and the pieces drifted apart. That
would have provided an answer. But when I asked the professor of geology here, who was
lecturing to us, why he didn't tell us about that in his lectures, he replied rather loftily, I must
say, "When you can demonstrate to me that there is a force on Earth "that can move the
continents by a millimetre, I will consider it. "But until then, the idea is sheer moonshine, dear
boy". But then in the 1960s, it became possible to map the seafloor in detail and it was
discovered not only that the continents have shifted in just the way that the German geologist
had suggested but that they were still moving. New rock wells up from deep below the Earth's
crust and flows away on either side of the mid-ocean ridges, carrying the continents with it.
Amphibians had originally evolved on this supercontinent and had then travelled on each of its
various fragments as they drifted apart. Problem solved. Perhaps, the biggest problem of all for
most people was the argument put forward for the existence of God at the beginning of the 19th
century by an Anglican clergyman called William Paley. He said, supposing you were walking
in the countryside and you picked up something like this. You would know from looking at it
that it had been designed to tell the time. There must, therefore, be a designer.
And the same argument would apply if you looked at one of the intricate structures found in
nature, such as the human eye. And the only designer of the human eye could be God. Anti-
evolutionists maintain that the eye would only work if it was complete in all its details. Darwin,
on the other hand, argued that the eye had developed becoming increasingly complex over a
long period of time. That would only work if each stage of development was an improvement
on the previous one. And today, we know enough about the animal kingdom to know that is
indeed the case. Some very simple animals have nothing more than light-sensitive spots that
enable them to tell the difference between light and dark. But if a patch of such spots formed
even the shallowest of pits, one edge of the pit would throw a shadow and so reveal the direction
of light. If the pit got deeper and started to close, then light would form a blurred image. Mucus
secreted by the cells would bend the light and focus it. If this mucus hardened, it would form a
proper lens and transmit a brighter and clearer image. All these different fully functional stages
at different levels of complexity are found in living animals today. This single-celled creature
has one of those light-sensitive spots. Flatworms have a small pit containing light spots so they
can detect the shadow of a predator. A snail's blurry vision is good enough to enable it to find
its way to food. And the octopus has an eye with a proper lens and can see as much detail as
we can.
So the structure of the human eye does not demand the assistance of a supernatural designer. It
can have evolved gradually, with each stage bringing a real advantage as Darwin's theory
demands. Natural selection, of course, requires that an animal's characteristics are handed from
one generation to the next. It's obvious that children resemble their parents. Anyone knows
that. But when you come to think of it, how does that come about? In Darwin's time, nobody
had the faintest idea about the mechanism or the rules that govern that process.
Except, perhaps, for one man, who was working in the city of Brno in what is now the Czech
Republic at exactly the same time that Darwin was writing his book in Kent. That man's name
was Gregor Mendel. He discovered the laws of inheritance by breeding thousands of pea plants
and observing how they changed from one generation to the next. He found that while many
characteristics were passed down directly from one generation to another, others could actually
skip a generation. How could that happen? Mendel explained this by suggesting that each plant,
each organism, contained within it factors which were responsible for creating those particular
characteristics. Today we call those things genes. But nobody had any idea how they worked
until a hundred years after Mendel's time. And then the answer was discovered in Cambridge.
In 1953, here in the Cavendish Laboratories, two young researchers Francis Crick and James
Watson were building models like this. It was their way of thinking about and investigating the
structure of a complex molecule that is found in the genes of all animals, DNA. The crucial bit
are these chains which encircle the rod. And here is a second and entwined. This is the double
helix. The workings of the DNA molecule are now understood in such detail that we can
demonstrate something that is truly astounding.
A gene taken from one animal can function in another. The gene that causes a jellyfish to be
luminous, for example, transplanted into a mouse, will make that mouse luminous. The genetic
code can also reveal relationships. Even our law courts accept that DNA fingerprinting can
establish whether a man is the father of a particular child. And it can also reveal whether one
kind of animal is related to another. It proves, for example, that kangaroos, ground-living
animals that run with great leaps are closely related to koalas, that have taken to climbing trees.
That insect-eating shrews have cousins that took to the air in search of insects, bats. And that
one branch of the elephant family, way back in geological history, took to the water and became
sea cows. So, 150 years after the publication of Darwin's revolutionary book, modern genetics
has confirmed its fundamental truth. All life is related. And it enables us to construct with
confidence the complex tree that represents the history of life. It began in the sea, some 3,000
million years ago. Complex chemical molecules began to clump together to form microscopic
blobs, cells. These were the seeds from which the tree of life developed. They were able to
split, replicating themselves as bacteria do. And as time passed, they diversified into different
groups. Some remained attached to one another, so that they formed chains. We know them
today as algae. Others formed hollow balls, which collapsed upon themselves, creating a body
with an internal cavity. They were the first multi-celled organisms. Sponges are their direct
descendants. As more variations appeared, the tree of life grew and became more diverse. Some
organisms became more mobile and developed a mouth that opened into a gut. Others had
bodies stiffened by an internal rod. They, understandably, developed sense organs around their
front end. A related group had bodies that were divided into segments, with little projections
on either side that helped them to move around on the sea floor. Some of these segmented
creatures developed hard, protective skins which gave their body some rigidity. So now the
seas were filled with a great variety of animals. And then, around 450 million years ago, some
of these armoured creatures crawled up out of the water and ventured onto land. And here, the
tree of life branched into a multitude of different species that exploited this new environment
in all kinds of ways. One group of them developed elongated flaps on their backs which, over
many generations, eventually developed into wings. The insects had arrived. Life moved into
the air and diversified into myriad forms. Meanwhile, back in the seas, those creatures with the
stiffening rod in their bodies had strengthened it by encasing it in bone. A skull developed,
with a hinged jaw that could grab and hold onto prey. They grew bigger and developed fins
equipped with muscles that enabled them to swim with speed and power. So fish now
dominated the waters of the world. One group of them developed the ability to gulp air from
the water surface. Their fleshy fins became weight-supporting legs, and 375 million years ago,
a few of these backboned creatures followed the insects onto the land. They were amphibians,
with wet skins, and they had to return to water to lay their eggs. But some of their descendants
evolved dry, scaly skins, and broke their link with water by laying eggs with watertight shells.
These creatures, the reptiles, were the ancestors of today's tortoises, snakes, lizards and
crocodiles. And, of course, they included the group that, back then, came to dominate the land...
the dinosaurs.
But 65 million years ago, a great disaster overtook the Earth. Whatever its cause, a great
proportion of animals were exterminated. All the dinosaurs disappeared, except for one branch
whose scales had becoe modified into feathers. They were the birds. While they spread through
the skies, a small, seemingly insignificant, group of survivors began to increase in numbers on
the ground beneath. These creatures differed from their competitors in that their bodies were
warm and insulated with coats of fur. They were the first mammals. With much of the land left
vacant after the great catastrophe, they now had their chance. Their warm, insulated bodies
enabled them to be active at all times, at night as well as during the day. And in all places, from
the Arctic to the tropics, in water as well as on land, on grassy plains and up in the trees. There
can be no doubt about our close relationship to these chimpanzees. Our bodies are so similar.
The proportions of our limbs or our faces may differ, but otherwise we are very, very similar.
The arrangement of our internal organs, the chemistry of our blood, the way our bodies work,
all these are almost identical. And DNA confirms that. Indeed, we are as closely related to
chimpanzees and the rest of the apes and monkeys, as say, lions are to tigers and to the rest of
the cat family. Suddenly, an image from our remote past comes vividly to light, the time when
our distant ancestors, in order to keep up with the changing environment, had to wade and keep
their heads above water in order to find food.
That crucial moment when our far distant ancestors took the step away from being apes and a
step towards humanity. The Natural History Museum is one of the most important museums of
its kind in the world. Richard Owen brought it into existence, but, over a century later,
discoveries from many branches of science have shown that his belief that species can never
change but always remain exactly the same was mistaken. It was Charles Darwin's profound
insights that have proved to be true. And now, to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth, his
statue is being taken from its out-of-the-way location to be placed centre stage in the main hall.
Darwin's great insight revoluionised the way in which we see the world.
We now understand why there are so many different species. Why they are distributed in the
way they are around the world. And why their bodies and our bodies are shaped in the way that
they are. Because we understand that bacteria evolve, we can devise methods of dealing with
the diseases they cause. And because we can disentangle the complex relationships between
animals and plants in a natural community, we can foresee some of the consequences when we
start to interfere with those communities. But above all, Darwin has shown us that we are not
apart from the natural world. We do not have dominion over it. We are subject to its laws and
processes as are all other animals on Earth to which indeed we are related.