Once, people thought God had created
the world and every living thing,
each with a purpose
in an ordered universe
over which our creator presided,
rewarding good deeds
and punishing sin.
Charles Darwin's theory
of evolution by natural selection
blew a hole in this
comfortable explanation of life
and faced us with a blindingly
obvious yet disturbing truth -
humans don't have dominion
over animals.
We are animals.
We are the fifth ape.
But even Darwin hesitated
to say this out loud.
It throws into question our trust
in our fellow human beings.
Are our morals and manners
just a veneer?
Since a struggle for existence
drives evolution,
why don't we humans run an entirely
dog-eat-dog world?
How about genocide and ethnic
cleansing?
Are they some kind of survival
strategy?
In this programme, I want to confront
the issue that Darwin skirted around
in The Origin Of Species,
the evolution of human beings.
I want to ask what it means
for us to be evolved.
The question
is more urgent than ever.
Increasingly,
religious people and others
attack Darwinism for, in their view,
excusing selfishness and barbarism.
Throughout my career,
I've wrestled with how to reconcile
my liberal values
with what Darwin revealed to be
the pitiless war of nature.
So now I'm going to take you into
the Darwinian heart of darkness
and look for answers...
and for hope.
Natural selection is
the driving force of our evolution,
but that doesn't mean that society
ought to be run on Darwinian lines.
As a scientist, I'm thrilled
by natural selection,
but as a human being,
I abhor it as a principle
for organising society.
Evolution by natural selection
is a very simple idea.
Over thousands of generations,
in a struggle for existence,
successful variations have survived
to reproduce,
the process
that gradually carves life
into more and more specialised forms.
Life forms that include the apes -
gibbons, orang-utans,
gorillas, chimps...and us.
Here, at London Zoo,
back in the 1830s,
the arrival of the first apes
outraged polite society.
Queen Victoria, for one, found them
painfully and disagreeably human.
But another visitor was spellbound.
The young Charles Darwin
saw the unmistakable truth
staring back at him
from the other side of the cage.
The uncanny familiarity of ape hands
and the humanity we seem to glimpse
in their eyes
was, for Darwin, further evidence
to support the idea of evolution,
that all life was related.
The African apes, he realised,
were our closest evolutionary
cousins.
East Africa - my birthplace
and, rather more importantly,
the birthplace
of the human species itself.
Between
five and six million years ago,
there lived in Africa an ape
who had two children.
One of those children was destined
to give rise to us,
the other was destined to give rise
to the chimpanzees.
If I stood here
and held my mother's hand,
and she held her mother's hand,
and she held her mother's hand,
and so on,
back to the grand ancestor
of all humans and all chimpanzees,
how far would the line stretch?
The answer is about 300 miles.
Over that surprisingly short
distance,
the fossil record shows evidence
of extraordinary changes.
The palaeontologist Richard Leakey
and his family
have uncovered the hard evidence
in Kenya's Rift Valley,
evidence that charts the evolution
of our ancient human ancestors.
About 1.9 million years ago,
you have skulls like this
turning up.
This is what they were calling
Homo habilis.
Largish brains,
still got a flat, big face,
and probably ancestral
to Homo erectus,
which turns up in Africa
at about 1.8 million years.
This, then, is the ancestor
to Homo sapiens.
This persists for almost
a million years, this condition,
and then it gives way to something
with an even larger brain -
things that are
much more like ourselves.
These whopping great vaults.
The brain has really expanded.
It's much more like a modern
human brain in terms of size
and in terms of shape,
and by the time you get to this,
all of these others have disappeared
from the fossil record.
So all the major steps
in the human story
are, in fact, told in Africa.
I often meet people who say to me,
"Nobody's going to tell me
I'm an ape."
Is there a kind of visceral
revulsion? Do you meet that, as well?
Yes, I do,
but it seems to be so misplaced
because, as you know,
we are the fifth ape.
We never separated from the apes,
we just do things differently.
I've often found it fun
to go to an ape exhibit
in one of the big zoos
and you can watch people looking
at a group of chimpanzees,
and what is very clear,
if you watch their
facial expression,
you can see that they're not so sure
that that ape's like them
but they can look around and say,
"There's a similarity
"between the person
on the other side of the cage."
We're closer to chimps,
African chimps,
than a horse is to an ass.
Horses and asses put together
produce offspring.
"Wow!" says everybody. "Are you...?"
"Yeah, I am."
It's an unsettling thought.
In evolutionary terms,
we're so closely related to chimps
that it's not ridiculous to ask
whether we might still be able
to breed with them.
We're the human animal,
upright, big-brained ape cousins
who evolved to out-think
the competition.
As a biologist, I've wondered at
the challenging implications of this,
what it tells us about human society
now.
But over half the people on Earth
are so horrified by what Darwinism
reveals about our origins,
they just refuse to believe it.
I'm an ape. Are you an ape?
No, I'm not, I'm a human being.
I'm on a journey exploring
the dark side of Darwinism.
I want to confront
what it means for us
to have evolved in nature's
brutal struggle.
Why should the fifth ape
love thy neighbour?
The thought of our animal origins
can upset people.
Read The Origin Of Species,
Darwin's masterpiece
that set out his theory of evolution,
and you will find only a handful of
passing references to human origins.
That man was made in God's image,
having dominion over the animals,
defined what it meant to be human,
so discussing human evolution
was just too risky.
Darwin shied away from it
and simply wrote near the end,
"Light will be thrown on the origin
of man and his history."
But when the book came
to be published in 1859,
the buzz was all about
the extraordinary implications
for mankind.
Were we just beasts in fancy dress?
Evolution become known as
"the monkey theory".
The row has not gone away.
In Kenya, the cradle of mankind,
religious groups are trying
to block the opening
of the National Museum's
exhibit of human fossils.
The fossil record of human ancestry
has a particular fascination.
To me, these are far more precious
than the Crown Jewels.
This is the Turkana Boy.
Homo erectus, 1.5 million years old.
The most complete ancient
human skeleton ever found.
It's one of the most precious relics
in any museum
anywhere in the world.
It would be an enormous pity
if there were any pressure
not to allow it to be seen.
CHOIR SINGS A PRAISE SONG
The ten-million-strong
Evangelical movement in Kenya
has run a hide-the-bones campaign.
By coincidence, I was born
right next door to the church
where the protest is being led
by Bishop Bonifes Adoyo.
Bishop, how do you do? Very nice
of you to agree to this meeting.
Same here to meet
the great professor.
Let's go in, shall we?
I was born just over the road, there.
No, I'm told over the other side.
Well, we'll have to work that out.
Yeah, yeah.
'It was clear
that we weren't going to see
eye-to-eye from the beginning.'
I'm an ape. Are you, Bishop?
I'm not. I definitely am not.
(LAUGHS)
I'm special.
Made in the image of God,
in the creative mind of God,
creative as God is, who made me.
That's the difference between
the ape and me.
Well, I'm an ape. I'm an African ape.
I'm very proud to be an African ape,
and so should you be.
Don't you think the evidence
should be displayed
for all to see
and make up their own minds?
Sure.
You are against displaying it.
Everybody should
make up their own mind.
No, I am not against the display,
I am against the attachment
of the evolution theory
to the display.
See, that's all we're talking about.
You'd be happy
for them to be displayed
but not the evolutionary messages?
They are complete
human being skulls.
Well, not really.
They're very much smaller than ours
and they've got very much less brain.
The three-million-year-old one had
the same-sized brain as chimpanzees.
They were kind of chimpanzees
on their hind legs,
so it was a first step towards
becoming human.
The next step was then,
in the Turkana Boy,
to have a bigger brain,
and the final step was to have
an even bigger brain, like us.
If that's where we originated
and evolved into this stage,
why aren't those chimpanzees
also evolving...into man?
Why aren't they extinct?
Because by the time
they developed to this level,
they should have been extinct.
No, that's not the way
evolution works.
We're not descended from them.
We are cousins of them.
So we and they go back
to a common ancestor.
There are the chimpanzees,
there's us.
We go back to a common ancestor.
Now, that common ancestor was not
a chimpanzee and it was not a human,
it was something else.
And it evolved
towards being a chimpanzee
and in a different direction,
it evolved towards being a human.
So chimpanzees have been evolving
all that time,
and humans have been evolving
all that time,
and they'll probably both
go on evolving but we can't
predict where that will go.
'Our discussion now threw up
an important point about evolution.'
So what is the goal of evolution?
What is the ultimate goal?
Is it for us to have big heads?
There is no goal.
No goal?
It just happens.
That doesn't answer my question.
Where are we heading to?
I mean, up to where shall we say
that this is the limit?
It doesn't have goals.
It's a misunderstanding
to say evolution has goals.
It never had. It just changes.
This is crucial. To understand
evolution by natural selection,
you have to grasp that it is not
a grand scheme with goals.
It's a harsh, unguided process
which simply favours those
that are most successful
at passing on their genes.
It has no morality or purpose.
And we humans are just
one of its products.
Darwin took man off his pedestal
and made him an animal,
like all others.
We evolved in the ruthless
competition of nature.
So what does that mean for us
and our society?
To begin to grapple with
this problem,
we have to understand what nature is
in all its brutal glory.
It looks like nature in harmony.
Actually, as Darwin realised,
there's a struggle out there.
All the players are working
for their own benefit
and because they are surrounded by
others working for their own benefit,
they tend to exploit each other.
In the shady forest,
all the plants are struggling
to get to the light.
Big trees pay the price legitimately
by growing up to the sun.
But this strangler fig
does a very strange and cruel thing.
It started life high up in the tree
from a seed,
perhaps dropped
by a fruit-eating monkey.
It then sent roots down
towards the ground
in order to get nourishment
from the ground.
And then these roots proliferate
all around the original tree
and strangle it to death.
Eventually,
the original tree will die
and the fig will be left standing
on its own,
having usurped its position
in the sun.
The bitter struggle for survival
in nature
has been the dynamic force
that has driven
the evolution of life.
And this is where
my own struggle with
the consequences of Darwinism begins.
Attacks on Darwin have claimed
that his goalless, soulless theory
has unleashed the worst
of human nature.
If nature is ruthless competition,
and nature is where we evolved,
then is this the model
for human society?
Every man for himself?
Well, let's look at this.
There is one area of human affairs
in which the dog-eat-dog mentality
seems to many entirely natural.
In business.
Certain elements of business
have always loved what they perceive
as Darwin's message -
the strong must survive,
the weak perish.
Here is apparent justification
for unrestrained capitalism
and denying help to the poor.
Several of the great entrepreneurs
of the early 20th century,
the so-called "robber barons"
like the oil tycoon
John D Rockefeller,
were unashamed social Darwinists.
They believed human progress
would be delivered
by modelling business and society
on nature,
on the unceasing struggle
of the jungle.
NEWSREEL: 'Today,
the giants of the oil industry
'stand as monuments to Rockefeller,
the architect of our business age.'
Social Darwinism is still with us.
In the 1990s
the American energy company Enron
ran a kind of nasty
Darwinian experiment,
lining up 15% of the least fit
of their workforce
to be fired each year.
It didn't end well.
Enron selected
not necessarily the best
but the most ruthless individuals,
who turned a blind eye
to the widespread fraud
that brought the company down
in scandal.
Ken Lay, chairman and
chief executive officer, Enron.
CHEERING
I've come to a convention
of entrepreneurs in London
to observe today's business animal
up close.
My best friend's a money-broker
in the City
and has more money than he knows
what to do with...
One thing's confusing me,
and that is why you're here.
Your presentation -
I'll put my cards on the table.
I don't like the recruitment
industry generally...
For a very long time,
people have noticed
the similarities between economic
systems and biological systems,
in particular, the notion of
competition in both systems.
When businesses compete,
we can think of them as designs,
so you might have a design
for a bank, a way to run a bank,
and each of the banks
along the high street
will have a slightly different way
of running a bank,
a different design,
and the evolutionary competition,
it's a competition for you
walking down the high street
to determine which bank will
serve you best, which design
suits your needs best.
'So are we looking at corporate apes
fighting for supremacy
'without compassion, teeth bared?
'I wonder if it's more posturing
than reality.'
Do you think there's a risk of
overdoing the Darwinian analogy?
< Yes, very much so.
The press loves
to play up company CEOs
and entrepreneurs as these heroes,
and in many ways they are.
They work incredibly hard,
make great sacrifices.
But the myth is that they were
these great visionaries,
these people who could predict
the future
and drive an organisation
toward that future.
The reality is, economic systems,
just like biological systems,
are hugely complex
and being able to predict
what's gonna happen in the long term
is extraordinarily difficult,
or even impossible.
And what some companies do
is rather than try to outguess
where the market's going,
they'll create some notion of
variety within their company
and let the market choose -
let customers decide which products
and services they like best.
These legendary moguls who...
I mean, is it sort of luck
that they're the ones who've just...
they just happen to get it right?
With hindsight, you could say
that they got it right.
But it's just hindsight.
Well, not to take away
from the talent that these
individuals may have,
but if you imagine a room full
of people flipping coins,
if the room's big enough,
one of them is going to get
ten heads in a row.
Then if you ask that person,
"What did you do?"
they'll say,
"I'm an expert coin-flipper.
I've got my wrists just right."
And we see the same thing
in business.
CHATTER
So Darwinism in business seems to be
little more than a metaphor,
an analogy.
It certainly doesn't provide
a straightforward natural law
for economic progress,
as social Darwinists used to argue.
But can Darwinism be applied
to other areas of human affairs?
What about taking back the reins
of our own evolution?
Don't copy nature but control it.
Speed up the elimination process.
NEWSREEL: 'Once they have been born,
defectives are happier
and more useful
'in these institutions than when
at large, but it would have
been better by far
'if they had never been born.'
It's been tried before.
The eugenics movement
of the early 20th century
aimed to stop the weak procreating
through compulsory
sterilisation of the unfit.
Eugenics seeks to apply
the known laws of heredity
so as to prevent
the degeneration of the race,
and improve its inborn qualities.
Here was a slippery slope
down to a nightmare.
At its worst,
eugenics became a dark, tribal vision
ultimately used to justify
ethnic genocide in Nazi Germany
with horrific echoes
in Bosnia and Rwanda.
I feel strongly that the barbarism
that was the culmination of eugenics
in the 20th century was atrocious.
But it's important to say
eugenics is not Darwinism.
Eugenics is not
a version of natural selection.
Hitler, despite popular legend,
was not a Darwinist.
Every farmer, horticulturalist
or pigeon-fancier
knew how to breed
for desired outcomes.
Eugenicists like Hitler
borrowed from breeders.
What Darwin uniquely realised
was that nature can play
the role of breeder.
Darwin has been wrongly tainted.
I've always hated how Darwin
is wheeled out
to justify
cut-throat business competition,
racism and right-wing politics,
and throughout my career,
I've grappled with the apparent
paradox
of the way co-operation,
being nice to each other,
even morality, could evolve from
the mindless brutality of nature.
Charles Darwin argued
in Origin Of Species
that evolution of life on Earth
had been driven by a brutal struggle
for existence.
Natural selection can seem bleak
for many biologists.
Certainly,
nature can be pitiless and cruel.
But I've been intrigued
by what appear
to be acts of kindness in nature -
warning cries,
huddling for warmth and comfort,
and mutual grooming.
Animals like these are displaying
what we call altruism.
They're giving something to another
at a cost to themselves.
The question I've grappled with
as a biologist is why.
The explanation must, at some point,
involve the brain.
Altruism, like any other behaviour,
must have evolved over time
as brains have evolved.
'So now I want to talk to somebody
who knows about our evolved
psychology.'
Hello.
Hello. Nice to see you.
When we teach about evolution,
we naturally tend to focus on anatomy
but you could equally well say
that psychology, that our minds,
are evolved organs, or organ systems,
couldn't you?
Well, yes.
We've every reason to believe
that the mind is a product
of the activity of the brain.
I happen to have one here.
It's clear that the brain
is an organ.
It's got an evolutionary history.
All of the parts in the human brain
you can find in the brain
of a chimpanzee
and other mammals.
And we also know that the brain
is not just a random neural network,
and we have reason to believe that
a lot of the products of the brain -
our perception, our emotions,
our language, our ways of thinking -
are strategies
for negotiating a world -
surviving, bringing up children,
finding mates,
negotiating relationships.
I suppose we can all understand
why sexual lust
has a Darwinian survival value.
Are you now saying that
the mechanisms for guilt, trust,
that those are a bit like lusts?
There's a lust to trust...
or is that not a...?
Indeed!
And people have...no problem
accepting Darwinian explanations
for emotions that are triggered
by the physical world -
fear of heights and snakes
and spiders
and the dark and deep water,
disgust at bodily secretions
that might be carrying parasites,
or rotting meat and so on -
um...but often feel
a little more surprised
and even resistant to the idea
that some of our moral emotions
might have an evolutionary basis -
like trust, sympathy or gratitude.
But I think that, as clear as it is
that fear has an evolutionary basis,
I think our moral emotions
can be analysed in the same way.
I think Stephen Pinker is right
and we do have an evolved morality.
But I also understand
why there is resistance to the idea.
Why would the genes
for the parts of the brain
that involve giving
at a cost to oneself
be inherited in nature's
brutal struggle for existence?
Darwin defined this
as sexual selection.
To explore this,
I want to look at another case
where individual survival
doesn't appear to be the priority.
A peacock's plumage is gorgeous
but it must get in the way
of its own survival.
It's easily spotted by predators
and its huge weight
must hinder a quick escape.
So why isn't the peacock's tail
eliminated by natural selection?
Charles Darwin was puzzled.
"The sight of a feather
in a peacock's tail
whenever I gaze at it," he wrote,
"makes me sick."
But it was Darwin himself
who hit upon the answer -
sex.
The peacock's tail
is a burden to himself but a boon
to the genes that built it.
Why? Because the tail
wins sexual partners.
Something about the peahen's brain is
attracted to bright feathers
and extravagant, maybe costly,
advertisement.
Peacock evolution has been shaped
not jut by individual survival
but by peahen brains.
Peahens, in effect,
selectively breed peacocks
as pigeon fanciers breed pigeons.
Darwin defined this
as sexual selection
Evolution, he now realised,
wasn't just about
which animals survived,
but which could prevail in winning
the favours of the opposite sex.
# The naked cowboy
Keeping it real for you
# I'm the naked cowboy
You gotta do what you gotta do
There are two ways for an individual
to pass his genes on
to the next generation -
you've got to survive
and you may have to be attractive
to the opposite sex.
A peacock is a walking
advertising hoarding.
A peacock's tail with its eye spots
is like a walking neon sign.
Here in America,
I'm looking into an unexpected way
in which women
could be said to be practising
a form of selective breeding.
I'm going to meet some single women
who, in the cold light of day,
are choosing the attributes
they want to mate with
and hope to pass on
to their children.
Is it even possible that kindness,
altruism,
is one of the things they go for?
Hi.
You must be Stacey.
I am. Welcome.
I'm Richard.
And this is?
'These women want to become mothers
through a sperm donor.
'It's a kind of hi-tech
sexual selection.'
Thank you for...
Did you think you were choosing a man
you yourself would be attracted to?
Absolutely. I joke
that it's a little bit
like going on match.com -
you pay for a three-month membership
and you look at the photos
and I know some women
that look at it that way.
You're looking for healthy,
attractive, fit and intelligent.
So I would want those qualities
for my child -
the same qualities
I would want in a partner.
They're appealing for people
in general,
that's how I look at it.
For the women's potential partners,
partners whom they never meet,
the process begins here.
Here we have the donor rooms where,
you know, they can do their thing.
And...
Suitable pictures on the wall.
Of course you've got to have
some inspirational material
to help them along.
'But who are the women
going to pick?'
Are there any women who say,
"Just give me something at random"?
Very, very, very rarely.
Tell me a woman that has walked
into a shoe shop
and said, "Just give me
whatever you have."
That doesn't happen.
You spend time on your decisions.
Of course, but in our society,
we pay lip service to the idea
that there's something taboo
about eugenic choice.
So you might think that women might,
as it were, go along with that
and say,
"I don't approve of eugenics, so..."
It's America - it's a society
of consultation and consumerism.
People are used to... You go online,
you buy products, you ask questions.
'Donors have to provide
full and intimate details
of all aspects of their life.'
Shoe size and allergies
and skin tone -
if he tans easily.
(Woman) There is one
that caught my eye.
6'1", hazel eyes, curly brown hair.
Favourite pet - dog.
If he's a smoker.
He likes James Bond.
He likes the Aston Martin.
He likes jazz music.
'But I want to return to the enigma
of altruism.
'Is it possible
that among the qualities
women want in a sperm donor
'is niceness - kindness?'
I'm interested in this donor
because he explained that someone
in his family had difficulty
getting pregnant
and so it was important to him
to be able to help others
who...um...were in need
of assistance in that area.
So I liked that.
'What's fascinating
is that the women don't just want
'the obvious alpha male qualities.'
There's so many things
that go into it
than just looks and/or intelligence.
One of the donors that have been
really popular
is actually the nicest guy.
And...
I don't know how you put that
in a form,
but he's the nicest guy.
He's not the smartest guy,
he's not the best-looking guy.
How do they know he's the nicest?
He's actually written a really good
extended profile about himself.
I've actually met him
and the profile checks out -
he is a really nice guy.
So what's going on here
at a more fundamental level?
This goes back
to an old interest of mine.
I became fascinated by the issue
of how animals evolved to be nice
when I started teaching biology
at Oxford in the 1960s.
This was barely ten years after
the structure of DNA and genes
had first been cracked
by Watson and Crick,
and I was intrigued
how the new science of genetics
could help provide an answer
to the puzzle of altruism.
Genes are coded instructions
that build every living thing -
body and mind.
They give rise
to the distinctive family nose
down through the generations.
They dictate what colour eyes
you have.
But such examples
are just the outward
and visible tip of the iceberg.
Now here's the point -
we organisms - you, me, an octopus,
a forget-me-not or a giraffe -
are survival machines.
We are vehicles for the genes
that ride inside us -
vehicles that are
thrown away after we've handed
the precious coded information on
to the next generation
through reproduction.
Genes are copied from one generation
to the next, on and on.
So they, and they alone,
are immortal.
I advocate a kind of genes'-eye view
of nature.
The genes that survive are the ones
that consistently provide
slightly longer necks,
slightly keener eyes
or improved camouflage
and so help their vehicle to survive
and therefore pass
those same genes on.
The survival of the fittest
really means the survival of genes,
because it is only genes
that really survive
down through many generations.
A gene that didn't look after
its own interests would not survive.
That's the meaning of the phrase
"selfish gene".
OK, so how can selfish genes
support kindness?
If genes are striving selfishly
to make more copies
of themselves,
how can a gene achieve
this selfish objective
by making its bearer
behave altruistically?
One part of the answer is kinship.
An altruistic gene can spread
through the population
so long as the altruism is directed
at other organisms
that have the same gene.
In other words, at family.
So selfish genes build parent animals
who protect their young.
In human terms, parents who'd rush
into a burning building
to save their children.
This is called kin selection.
The other part of the answer
is reciprocal altruism.
You scratch my back
and I'll scratch yours.
When animals live in groups where
they encounter each other repeatedly,
genes for returning favours
can survive.
Individuals sacrifice themselves
for each other,
they give food to each other,
to close kin and to other individuals
who might be in a position to pay
back favours on another occasion.
Selfish genes give rise
to altruistic individuals.
In the '70s, I wrote a book
bringing these ideas together,
called The Selfish Gene.
The idea that altruism
ultimately boils down
to a survival game for genes
raised hackles, but it's now
widely accepted among biologists.
But it's not the end of the story.
I realised there really does seem
to be something odd about humans.
Aren't humans rather nicer than even
the selfish gene theory would expect?
We donate to charity, give blood,
weep in sympathy
at the plight of complete strangers.
Now I want to explore why.
I've been struggling all my life
with why people should be quite so
kind and decent to each other.
At first glance, it seems to
go against the dog-eat-dog
viciousness of Darwinism.
To be sure, Darwinism was softened
because it was
in the selfish interests
of genes to build altruistic animals.
There are good genetic reasons
for limited acts of kindness.
But I can't help wondering
is this enough
to explain the kindness
of humans or even chimpanzees?
'The Dutch primatologist
Frans De Waal
'has been a critic of the selfish
gene idea. He studies chimps.
'He believes that
our closest living relatives
'exhibit empathy and moral concern
'that goes beyond the kin altruism
and tit-for-tat of selfish genes.'
Let's say there's a big fight,
someone loses the fight,
very often
another one will put an arm
round them, try to calm them down,
groom them.
We call that consolation behaviour
and that's common enough
that you can collect data on it.
'De Waal has accused my work
of promoting what he's
labelled "veneer theory",
'the idea that morals
are a thin veneer
'on top of the inherent nastiness
of our animal nature.'
Well, the reason
I speak of veneer theory
is because we've seen 30 years
of books published
on how humans
are not inherently kind.
Humans are deep-down nasty
and if we are kind it's only to make
a good impression on each other.
And if we are moral, it's just
a little veneer over human nature.
I take opposition to that.
My feeling is that
the phenomena that we see,
which you've described as empathetic,
are phenomena which need explaining.
And we're going to
explain them, in my case,
in terms of selfish genes.
Selfish genes are just as good
at explaining altruistic behaviour
as they are at explaining
selfish behaviour.
But maybe the problem is that...it's
certainly a self-promoting gene,
and so the word "selfish" has
a motivational content, of course.
And I think that's where people
sometimes get confused
between if we have selfish genes,
that means that we must be selfish,
and those things
need to be kept apart.
They really do.
It's a very unfortunate confusion,
because most of the book
is about altruistic behaviour.
You know that in political ideology,
it has also been used,
so for example,
what we call social Darwinism,
which is very prominent
in this country, in the US,
is a sort of ideological streak
which says animals are not
nice to each other,
we humans should not be nice
to each other.
There's no reason to help the poor
because the poor need
to help themselves
and if they cannot,
they perish and that's fine.
'I hate social Darwinism too,
'but that doesn't mean
we should romanticise nature
'or not face facts when it comes
to the genetic roots of altruism.
'I think altruism has been favoured
'by kin selection
in small groups in nature.
'But when it comes to humans,
something special is going on.'
We've gone beyond kin selection.
Our world now has been scaled up.
We live amongst large, anonymous
populations of strangers,
not kin who share our genes
and not people who we might expect
to return favours.
And yet we still have a lust
to be nice.
The rule that's built into your brain
says, "Be nice to everyone you meet."
And that works in nature
because everyone you meet
is part of the small group.
Everyone you meet
is probably going to be a cousin.
So when I see another human being
in distress,
weeping, or something like that,
I have an almost uncontrollable urge
to go and console,
to maybe put my arm around them.
"What's the matter? How can I help?"
"Um...please let me help you."
And that's a strong inner urge
which, as a Darwinian,
I believe has ancestral roots
in a past
when I lived in small groups
like this, small bands
in which I was likely
to be surrounded by kin
or surrounded by individuals
who could reciprocate.
I no longer am.
This person who's weeping
is a complete stranger to me.
They will never reciprocate,
and yet the lust is still there.
I can't help it.
Oh, she lost it.
She got it last time.
I got another one.
Oh, brilliant!
Why are humans often so good
to complete strangers?
Could it be
because our selfish genes are,
in some sense - a blessed sense -
misfiring?
Compare it to sexual desire.
The lust to copulate, even though
we deliberately use contraception
to thwart its evolutionary purpose,
is still there because of hardwiring
from the genes.
Similarly, we have a lust to be nice,
even to total strangers,
because niceness
has been hardwired into us
from the time when we used to live
in small groups of close kin
and close acquaintances
with whom it would pay
to reciprocate favours.
This, for me, is the antidote
to the darkness some have seen
in our Darwinian heritage.
And it goes further.
The joy of being
conscious human beings
is that we rise above our origins.
Our misfiring selfish genes
mean we don't ape the nastiness
of nature
but extract ourselves from it
and live by our values.
As Darwin recognised, we humans
are the first and only species
able to escape the brutal force
that created us -
natural selection.
We civilised men
do our utmost to check
the process of elimination.
We build asylums for the imbecile,
the maimed and the sick.
We institute poor laws
and our medical men
exert their utmost skill
to save the life of every one
to the last moment.
This is the 999 Club
in London's East End.
It takes in the less fortunate,
alcoholics, drug addicts
and the homeless,
providing them with tea
and hot meals.
Such altruism is, I believe,
among the pinnacles
of human civilisation.
We care for the most vulnerable
in our society.
We look after the sick,
we give welfare to the needy.
I feel, which I've always felt,
that they need something hot...
to warm 'em up.
When they've been out all night
sleeping and...they've got no warmth
in their bodies.
If they only have a cup of soup...
And what makes you feel the need
to be so nice and so good?
Well, I was a war child,
so we never had a lot of food,
and that's why I've always tried
to look after these as best I can.
If they're hungry, I'll feed 'em.
You felt hungry as a child,
so you felt you didn't want that
to happen to others.
That's it. That's how I felt.
We can empathise.
We can imagine how it is for others.
A society
run on crude Darwinian lines
would be a ruthless, merciless place.
Fortunately, natural selection
gave us big brains.
With those big brains,
we can plan a gentler society -
the sort of society
in which we would want to live.
Evolution has no purpose.
There's no benevolence there,
no forward planning.
Some people find that disturbing,
but there is a better way
to think about it.
We, alone on Earth, have evolved
to the extraordinary point
where we can understand
the selfish genes that shaped us.
They're not models for how to behave,
but the opposite.
Because we are conscious
of these forces,
we can work towards taming them.
Through kindness and morality,
modern medicine, charity,
even paying our taxes,
we can overthrow the tyranny
of natural selection.
Our evolved brains empower us
to rebel against our selfish genes.
Next time, into the lion's den -
today's religious backlash
against Darwin.
The ever more elaborate strategies
to deny the evidence of evolution
and how Darwin himself struggled with
the implications of his own theory.
