>> you might wonder what qualifies me to tell you this story about these victorious scientists and, in fact, what qualified it to me to write the book "darwin's universe."

i was trained as an anthropologist. as a matter of fact you might say i am the very model of a modern anthropologist. ♪ i am the very model of a modern anthropologist permitted in west and geneticist . from man to man to program and up and down. indeed, when i know what to do to exercise an evil eye. in fact, i confess and burnt to the ground you will say a butter anthropologists has never yet been found. ♪ i can tear away. i know the cranium from all the light. i understand the structure of a

kinship group. i know the proper etiquette for a courtship in monkey troop. ♪ i can list the primate and tell you how they marry of progeny. i'll tell you all the details of a princess wedding gown. in short i can isolate the presence of a single gene. i can reconstruct the fragments of a cell of the disease. i can tell you all about pleistocene ecology. you'll say you met a man who really knows his anthropology. ♪ i have excavated pyramids.

gems and palaces. i'll breakdown in the language with analysis. i am up on tribal law. ♪ in fact, a chimpanzee can sign to me sociobiology. he knows he has met a men who really knows his anthropology. >> let's try it in double time. a chimpanzee can sign to me in sociobiology. he knows he really met the man he really knows his biology. ♪ >> thank you very much. [applauding]

now, we are going to talk about mr. darwin. the image that i had when i was a lad of darwin was this sort of aloof intellectual distant figure. this is a statue that we don't see very much in this country. it is in the moscow state darwin museum. here he is depicted around 1920 or so as almost a michelangelo god kind of figure, also a socialist hero. not very accessible. in the last few years with the anniversaries and so on we have cuts in a lot more familiar and maybe a bit more irreverent toward darn. some of the students in his own

hometown place a traffic on on this statute and made him into the wizard of shrewsbury. [laughter] and i have also seen him in the new york subways opposite curious george. [laughter] but now who was the real guy? let's get to know the real charles darwin.

>> darwin is the name. i was born a naturalist. but my father, dr. robert darwin, a prosperous english physician, did not consider that to marketable. when i was a boy he said to me you care for nothing but bird shooting and rat catching and will be a disgrace upon the entire family. he said you have got to get up proper occupation, charles. you can't be an idle squire. i loved collecting beatles and birds and fossils. that was my passion. father said enough of that style this stuff. you're going to be a doctor.

he sent me off to edinburgh medical school at 16 years of age. well, by i was bored with the endless lectures on material. you had to mix your own pills and potions. i'm much preferred going by the seashore with one of the teachers to was an invertebrate zoologist named plants. we would go to this place with a number full name. there i discovered starfish and jellyfish and anemones. i really wouldn't do well in medical school because first of all, i hated the sight of blood. i remember one time, operated on

people in those days before the invention of blessed anesthesiology. they would stuff you down and cut off whatever they were going to cut off. shove something in your mouth. so i saw that done to a young child in the operating theater. it sickened me so deeply. i ran out of that operating theater never to return. and so ended my medical career. well, my father said, well, if you can't be a doctor let's see if we can make a character out of you. that would be very respectable you. you could go to the best lawn parties. you could save souls and collect beatles at the same time. that sounded reasonable. off i went to cambridge to study theology.

i was a rather indifferent a theology student and then spent most of my time with one of the reverent gentleman named henslowe hunting for beatles and other natural history specimens whatever i got a chance. but all of that changed one day when i got a letter. there was a captain named fitzroy he was about to take a five-year voyage of discovery of round the world on hms beagle. he was looking for an unofficial ships naturalist. henslowe recommended me. oh, my. i wanted to go so badly. to leave england's dull, gray skies for the tropics, the beautiful bright skies, the tropical birds and flowers. my mind was in a tropical glow. my father said you will never come back alive, and he had his point. many young adventuress man went

out from england and never returned alive. oh, but i wanted so badly. finally my father relented and let me follow my heart. and so there i was. he hired and assistance to help me. i was seasick every single day for the entire five years. there i was, you know, a doctor who could not stand the sight of blood, a clergyman who did not really believe in the gospels, and a sailor who was seasick all the time. not a very promising beginning. i loved the life aboard the ship. i thought that once the seasickness, everyone should like to be a sailer. our duty was to map the coastline of south america.

and so we proceeded down the coast, and on the way i dredged the sea with the nets, and i collected specimens along the shore. i wore a hat like this one. everyday just after the sailors had finished swabbing the deck i would loaded up with hundreds of of new specimens to be sorted and labeled. this they soon became distinctly aromatic in the ecuadorean sun. in fact i remember a sailor asked me, mr. darwin, would you mind getting that stinking pile of refuse of my deck? sticking pile of refuse?

there are so many wonderful things here. someday people will pay just to see them on display at the british museum. ♪ i've dug in the ground, and these rocks that have found have the features of creatures no longer around. there are trilobites by the ton. what a glorious day. what a wonderful way to have fun. ♪ i've searched by the shore and collected some more worms and starfish and garfish and kolbe's galore. i have got shark heads and some seaweed and slime. i am having the loveliest this

time. the sailors can't fathom my pleasure. to my mind each new find is a treasure. every shall simply swells. every seashell by gemini and anemone. this place makes me smile. all these niches aggressors packed into a mile. black iguanas that swam in the sea. they are all so delightful to me. ♪ the sailors can't fathom my pleasure. it's putrefied ballast to them. to me it is the seas hidden treasure. each new species i find that it boggles my mind. at the end of the day when a

your voyage is through will you be able to say that your work was your play because you do what you loved and you loved what you do. ♪ [applauding] you. well, as we went down the coast of south america i wondered by myself for the first time in a brazilian rainforest. it made an impression that

lasted the rest of my life. . [birds squaking] i've felt like a blind man who was finally given his sight and gazing with the light. the light itself is a weak term to describe the feelings of a naturalist who has wandered by himself for the first time in the brazilian rainforest. the elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the person to go plants. luxurious this of the vegetation. oh, it is doing the with

admiration. attempted to follow the flight of some butterfly or bird. it was arrested by some strange tree. he attempted to watch some strange and exotic beetle you would be distracted by the incredibly bizarre flower it was crawling over. the mind but is a pillar of del. [birds squaking] well, we continued down the coast of south america. my teacher, reverend henslowe, had sent me some books to take on the voyage with me.

they were written by the foremost geologists' in britain. sir charles lyell, the principles of geology. up until lyell's time people thought that the great features of the earth were, oceans were scooped out and mountain's were raised up by some kind of divine or supernatural forces that were beyond human comprehension but lyell said after studying the surface of the earth for so long he said you could explain all the features of the earth by the ordinary processes of erosion by wind and water. occasional volcanoes and earthquakes. what you could see happening, and in a fact, i did see earthquakes and volcanoes along

the coast of south america. this was what was known as uniformitarian isn't. i started to see the earth through the lyell's eyes. i started to interpret it through lyell's brain. well, we got to argentina and there was no photography in my day. it came along a few years later. just an ostrich like a bird. i was looking to see if i could find one. i did ride 400 miles inland with a row of cowboys. one night we were gathered around the campfire. i told him about this magnificent bird.

i said, have you seen one of these birds? hey, si, senior, don carlos. you had just eaten them. >> well, okay. i told everybody gather up all the bones. we did. they didn't have a specimen. i also ran into general rojas that was slaughtering the pompous indians so that they spaniards could take their lands. it was a terrific. he had to get a passport from him. i came to general rojas. they asked me my name. i said don charles darwin..

your occupation? naturalistic? what is this i told them through my interpreter a naturalist is a man who is interested in everything, anything. a spy we were lucky to leave there with our friends intact. as we went down the coast the turned out there was a secret agenda to the voyage. it was not only to map the coastline of south america. the captain had his own ideas. on a previous voyage he recruited, some six elected for young indians from the most miserable tribe. he thought that if he lured them back to england as civilized christians british civilization was so superior to the savage that if they would return to their homeland they would teach

all these wonders to their kinsmen. you know, these ships in those days often racked off the coast of jera del fuego. that is the beagle in the storm. it almost went down. one day but british sailors woue greeted by english-speaking indians who would, perhaps, offer them a spot of tea and shepherd's pie. he had a vision. the captain had a vision. hi top hats. high ideals. read in the london times with meals. you'll see, said the captain, with inflation, oh, this will be the founding of a nation. ♪ savage squads in gowns and

bonnets. spear-toting natives quoting sonnets. for all you fans of internal rhyme. well, that is not what happened. what happened was that on making their kinsmen, the kinsman beat them, robbed them, took all their goods. i must say that i wrote in my journal that they were outfitted with beaver hats, silver soup tureens, financed. it was an unmitigated disaster based on culpable folly. that's what i said. so so much for fitzroy's dream about spreading the likes of britannia. well, i returned to england in 1835, and shortly thereafter i married my first cousin, emma

wedgewoods. had a history of an alliance between the two families. this sort of pushed us together. very remarkable family. famous for two things, their piety, and their crockery. in the case of my brother in law who believed he could speak to the spirits ofthe departed their cracked pottery as well. [laughter] well, i've worked in my home that in a and i bought. a georgian home. worked on barnacles first of all for eight years. those little creatures that attach themselves to ships holes and stockpiling, . the classification of barnacles was in a total disarray, and i realized that in order to meet to have have any kind of theorir influence that would be palatable to the majority of scientists i had to establish my credentials by doing a piece of hard, boring scientific work.

i took on the barnacles. i did revise the entire classification of barnacles. but i must say that after eight years no one, no man ever had to the barnacle as much as i did. not even a sailor on a slow-moving ship. i did make some very interesting discoveries with the barnacles. you know, for one thing the sexual habits of barnacles is quite interesting. they have all kinds of different sexes. not simply males and females. they have hermaphrodites. they also, there is one species in which the male has a penis nine times as long as his body. he is a little tiny little thing that attaches to a gigantic female and rides there except when this gigantic penis is called into play. if you want to give a nice

factoid at your next cocktail party or gathering just mentioned that you found that the animal that has the largest penis in proportion to body size is the barnacle. one of charles darwin's lesser-known contributions to science. [laughter] so involved was dark when with the barnacles that one one days little son went to visit a neighbor and looked around the house and said, but where does your father worked on his barnacles? [laughter] he thought all fathers did that my grandfather, hey, i'm switching back and forth between richard and darwin. i know i shouldn't do that, but you'll forgive me. now we go to the grandfather.

he had the first theory of evolution by natural selection of any european naturalist. he was a physician, poet, a naturalist. he did it all in verse. this is the sample of he had a view of the natural world where the thought man had inflated his sense of importance among the few living things. this is a little snippet of his poetry. imperious man who rules the best deal crowd of language, reason, and reflection proud. with broud erect who scorns this earth sod and styles himself the image of his god. this imperious man erose rose from rudiments of form.

darwin was a very good father. he was not, his children were not in awe him. they would come in and out of this study was he was writing. one story that is recorded is his son came into the studio once and was jumping up and down on the sofa. darwin said, you know that mama has said there is to be no jumping up and down on the sofa, and i have caught you. what do you propose that we do about that? lenny said, well, father, i propose that we do not tell her.

[laughter] of course his great sorrow was when his daughter, annie, died at the age of ten of tuberculosis. it really shattered him. he is usually thought of as such a, you know, theoretician and unemotional man, but reading his letters and diaries of his daughter was dying is absolutely heart-wrenching. and friend of his had a daughter who was very sick. by way of consolation he wrote him a letter in which he said, much trial, much pain, but when a desert is live without love. you don't often hear that one quoted to charles darwin. that is the man we're talking about. he had quite a nice life there.

fortunately it has been preserved for us to see. and recently it was refurbished, made into a museum. victoria station. you take a bus or a taxi, and you can see the study where "the origin of species" was written. their is a -- their is a -- their is t here is a roster of magistrates in the local courthouse. you can't see this because it is not on public display. he was a magistrate. he was a justice of the peace. he served as a justice of the peace. he was quite proud of that. well, one day all of this idyllic life was shattered.

he received a letter from alfred russel wallace who had come up with exactly the same theory of evolution by natural selection, a younger naturalist. he did not know what to do. he did not know whether to burn his whole book or whether people would think he stole something from wallace. he sort of toward his hair out in a little soliloquy. it lent itself to a song. so i will let darwin tell it. he says, a younger naturalists, alfred russel wallace, working alone in the jungles of malaysia came up with exactly the same theory. he wrote it down and sent it to

me by post. ♪ it reached me several months later and threw me into a panic. so all my originality would be smashed. wallace would be first to publish it theory of evolution by natural selection. well, that's in him be first. he will be the most hated and reviled man in all of england. but let him be first. there will be no celebration. let him be first. there will be no adulation. let him inform the human race that it came down from the trees. he can tell the bishops they are kin to chimpanzees. let him be first.

i'll offer no resistance. let him be first. i'll lend him my assistance. they'll hang the man who dared deny the stories we were nurtured by. in every british home he will be cursed. let him. yes, let him be first. ♪ let him be first. and i will take no action. let him be first to claim this vague abstraction. it is nothing but a theory any dreamer could conceive.

and not a thing a man of any substance will believe. so let him be first. though i've been sorely tempted. come, do your worst. it seems quite been pre-empted. my bid for immortality has been of the plea choke on me. i'll have to watch my pretty bubble burst. forget him. yes. let him be first. ♪ [applauding]

but wallace was not first. the papers were presented together at the society of london where i gave this little show a few weeks ago right in the premises where the two papers or originally presented. and it should actually be known as the darwin-wallace theory becuase they both came out at the same time. the presentation at the society just went out and out and out. before i go into all of those of want to just say a few words about alfred russel wallace who was the codiscoverer of the theory of natural selection. alfred wallace can't come up for family, whereas darwin, darman's father paid for an assistant to

ant to go aboard the beagle and help him with samples. wallace had to support his expeditions. he was a professional collector of specimens. he finances general explorations. he was a brilliant naturalist. a gifted comic gifted man. he set out -- he is 14 years and under. he said out with his partner to the amazon. there he is being mobbed after he had shot by an. they collected all of these wonderful butterflies showing the evolution of butterflies throughout the rain forest. wallace spent four years there. they were collecting specimens and gathering evidence. he had gotten malaria.

still worked on through it. he wrote letters home. his younger brother, his beloved younger brother was so entranced with the story of alfred's jumble adventures that became all the way from england to join wallace at his camp. however, no sooner had he got their he contracted malaria and died. wallace comes back from four days up river to find his younger brother is there and dead. now, totally grief-stricken, dispirited wallace packs up his huge collection of insects and birds can see, pressed plants, thousands of them. and a live menagerie of tropical monkeys and birds.

packs them up on a ship to go back to england to at least salvage the results of his labors. things went from bad to worse. in the mid-atlantic of bermuda wallace's boat caught fire and sank. he had to watch it go down from a lifeboat. ♪ it was a magnificent spectacle. the dax had had completely burnt away. as it heaved and rolled and the swells of the sea presented its interior to us, a liquid flame,

a fiery furnace tossing r elentlessly on the surface of the ocean. i thought at the time that all the reward of my four years of deprivation and danger was lost how many times had i dragged myself sick with malaria into the jungle to catch a glimpse of some rare or beautiful species. how many places where no european foot but my own had trotted would have been recalled to me by the rare birds and insects they had furnished to my collection? now everything was gone. i had not one specimen left to illustrate the wonderful, wild

scenes that i have beheld. but wallace's resilience was incredible. no sooner did he make his way back to england he financed a new expedition, this time to malaysia. he wrote a fantastic book about the home of the orangutan, the home of the birds of paradise. he was the first european to study apes in the wild. not always with their cooperation. as you can see. well, he had a very interesting and productive life after that. one of his little side trips, he believed in spiritualism. he believed that you could communicate with the dead.

that was a very popular fad in the 19th century. saw the seances. you could send messages. in fact, he and darwin came to a courtroom trial in 1876 over the reality of it goes to. because an american psychic was put on trial for fraudulent experiments. the first time a psychic had been put on trial by a scientist for fraudulent experiments. wallace was a star witness for the defense. he thought he was an honest man. darwin secretly contributed money to the cause of the prosecution. he hated anybody who would profit to the parents grief over a dead child, which she had been through, of course. so in those days you did psychics that can talk to the dead and he put him in jail. today we give them their on

national television shows. now, wallace also had some very other unpopular views, feminism, a land naturalization. he was a socialist. wildlife conservation. they thought he was really not sound that one. he was not afraid to enter all these controversies. star when, on the other hand, thought he had enough controversy and did not want anything like that. he hated speaking in public. everything i have drawn from darwin tonight is from his records because he never lectured. well, wallace went on to live a great, long live. at the age of 90 he was still functioning. darwin got a state pension for his contributions. he was greeting examination

papers to feed his family when he was 70. that last one, that is a famous victorian cartoon. what foxes will say geese and asses will believe. still true today. there is old wallace. now we get to a very interesting fellow that i have a great affection for. he is a very flamboyant and egotistical figure, sort of reminded me of the rex harrison. you will see that it is kind of my fair ladyish. a zoologist. he was the founder of a great intellectual lineage. there he is. julien became a well-known biologist, director of the

london zoo, and then the president of unesco and wrote the statement on human rights. his brother, the other grandson, was paul huxley who wrote brave new world. all of this was very concerned with the ethical complications of evolution, particularly what would happen if we took it on ourselves to alter their genetics. the huxley had and the famous student who was not related to him called h. g. wells. if you look at h. g. wells, we normally think of monsters and more of the world's. they're actually stories about evolution. war of the world's is about what would happen if the martian and humans had a stroke for supremacy. of course the humans won because they had developed immunity to the common cold which killed the martians. so huxley wrote a book called evidence as to man's place in

nature in 1863. he made comparative study anatomically of monkeys, apes, and humans. he vowed that muscle for muscle and bone bone for bone humans ad apes were much more similar than either were to monkeys. his life was changed by a book, "origin of species," when he read it in 1869. gave me a wonderful song queue. my first reaction on reading that book was how incredibly stupid not to have thought of that myself. ♪ of course. of course. it must be so. i should have seen it long ago.

twas adaptive radiation that produced the mighty whales. his hands go to flippers, and he had the fishtail. selections made him streamlined for his liquid habitat. why didn't i think of that? there was an agent mammal that could hop and leap around. with webbing twixted his fingers he could fly right off the ground. and so this bouncy creature evolved into a bat. why didn't i think that? there are fossils in the ground. all of these unrelated facts made a monkey out of me. now i see how species were selectively defined. how could i have been so bloody

blind? and now they say tyrannosaurus were cousins to the bird. i said it many years ago. no one said a word. now they say that meteors knocked dinosaurs out flat. why didn't i think of that? slow and steady evolution, i told darwin, would not work. i always thought that mankind must have started with a jerk. we wandered out of africa before we learned to chat. why didn't i think of that? from the eagles in the sky to the dolphins in the sea, evolution tells us why we are part of one great family. you have showed us we are related to all creatures great and small, and we are really part of nature after all. there was an agent monkey with a

long and curly tail. this ape evolves into a man. he is teaching now at yale. a champ could pass for upper-class. why didn't i think of that? the struggle for survival lies outside the jungle, too. take a look at parliament. it's better than a zoo. we are at each other's throats. why didn't i, why didn't i, your ideas on evolution of creative revolution. why didn't i think of that? ♪ [applauding]

thank you. now, i'll tell you another huxley story. huxley and bishop samuel of oxford in 1860 had a debate. and the bishop got a bad spot it off for a half-hour ignorantly putting down darwin and everything else. and finally he turned to young professor huxley and said, perhaps professor huxley would care to tell us where the ape ancestory comes in? is he descended more from an ape on the side of his grandmother or grandfather? well, one did not insult victorian womanhood and got away with it.

huxley. ladies and gentlemen, my lord bishop, it would not have occurred to me to bring up such a question as that in august assemblage when we speak of descent and biology. we speak of hundreds of thousands of years from about in terms of one's own familial, not just ancestry. the question is put to me would i rather have for an ancestor a venerable grinning ape or a man? a man of great depth, a man of greater orator, a man of great intellect, a man of great prestige, who uses that privilege and those gifts and that prestige and that power for the mere purpose of making a mockery of those engaged in serious scientific inquiry, then i unhesitatingly affirm my

preference for the ape. [laughter] well, the audience was agast. huxley became a celebrity . huxley and the bishop repeated that debate in various venues. he was quite popular. it was kind of like the gordon liddy-timothy leary show. they would do this. they were fairly civil to each other. except when the bishop died huxley said something that i think was pretty nasty. i really don't like to bring it up because we don't want to speak ill of the dead, do we? [laughter] here is how the bishop died. he was riding a horse on a friend's estate, country estate. the horse threw him in a rocky

field. he hit his head on a rock and split his skull and died. that is how the bishop died. huxley wrote, dear darwin, i see our friend the bishop has meant an end all too tragic for his life. his brain had finally come into contact with hard reality and the result was fatal. [laughter] still funny after 150 years, isn't it? ripples. ah, were there ripples. there are still ripples, aren't there? the german, he was darwin's greatest advocates and published best-selling books in many

languages. this was a wonderful photo. i have it in "darwin's experience". it tells so much. this is the way he would set up a theater when he lectured. he would have skeletons of monkeys, apes, and man, embryos, stuff ed apes which are hardly ever seen at that time in europe. he would stand in the middle and lecture this great gothic theater of evolution. he was a brilliant showman. had a great influence and a great impact. there is a cartoon that was made of heckled canonizing darwin in 1882 when darwin dies. heckle is offering up to him his halo as darwin ascends into the heavens with his beloved apes. but of course heckle did something that was a little more sinister. he carried the idea of evolution into all realms: moral,

yes. yes. you see. what we have here. what we have here is to apply the board, you see, there are so many unfit people in this world, for instance. there are, you know, people that have birth defects or people that for one reason or another would never survive in the wild. so we should eliminate them. it illustrates some of the stock of the german folk. eventually politics should be biology. eventually one will have to be master of the other races. this is a phrase we call the struggle for existence, what we call it in german .

♪ no. no. no. no. no. that is not what i meant at all, at all. no. no. just because i have read right t does not mean napoleon was right and every cheating dictator is also right. it is a nightmare. if the dog, the brother to the both can evolve into the guardian of the sheep we must

consider whether we came from the law of the general doesn't mean we have to stay there. i refute the gladitorial of existence. there is a lot of cooperation in nature. there are hives of bees. herds of muskets that all help and support each other not to mention communities of humans. what kind of humans do we want to become? don't want to become a more humane and compassionate species? i often thought that i had at least so many bad many bad thinn trying to figure out how nature works. of course i had this recurrent dream about being hanged for

blasphemy. a horrible nightmare, you know. i had it again last night. i read wrotie it down. ♪ i was lying awake with a dismal headache and my sleep was put off by anxiety, but i fear that my plan of explaining how man had evoked. i left for a home. i can't doze without dreaming i am back on the beagle. we were running the horn. we are running around. the crews almost drowned. coming unglued. i fear he is unbowed.

his complexion is close to perfection. as to my fears may suggest it. as the 10,000 miles the aisles. i feel that this place will result in disgrace when i use it tough for the my theory. i hear a snicker. a glance up and in a tree what do i see? an anglican vicar. it is not my heart to tell their all mad as hell. he tells me the source of his action. my client's demand satisfaction. he calls his first witness. the bird flips this tail and turns into a snail. the judges perplexed. the monkey is poised to descend

from an oyster. his honor says quiet. you are neck is in a noose. your off to eternal damnation. the streets awake. the iguanas merely a kitten. no champs are in sight. no wonder i'm back in great britain. ♪ i am a terrible brett with witha quick in my neck. my anxiety is hardly diminished. the darkness is passed. it is daylight at last. that night has been too long.

ditto ditto my song. thank goodness that both of them finished. thank goodness it is over. [applauding] [applauding] thank you. um, well, uh, by the turn of the century evolution had leaped the boundaries of science and was no longer exist for biologists. in fact, it became -- oh, no. i'm sorry. i got a few stories to tell you

before we get to that part. these are a few stories from darwin's universe. this like, well, let me go over here. this is alexander agassiz, the greatest zoologist in america. he refused to accept evolution to his dying day, and was very obstinate to darwin. after his death a statue was erected to him in stanford university on the zoology building, and there was an earthquake. the san francisco earthquake. agassiz statue fell down and embedded itself head-first. the president of the university had remarked that he preferred. he said i always thought he was much better in the abstract than in the concrete. [laughter] ..

they were hauling in thousands of napoleon's soldiers and bones to fertilize the fields of england and mummies from egypt and of italian skeletons from the catacombs. and if i couldn't go along very long. when this former brought these

coprolites to henslowe he said he had discovered gold because these fossils are not made of carbonate. they are made of phosphate and they can be used as fertilizers and it turned out they were great deposits of them that could be mined and so one commentator at the time said isn't it ironic that now england is going to be rescued by these fossil doo-doo just as it was rescued in the industrial revolution by oil and gasoline. all of these prehistoric deposits were fuelling the modern industrial revolution. well, and the coprolite the deposits were all over east anglia and particularly huge deposits in cambridge fire and

right under cambridge university and when i sit in england by said you know it is very hard for me to imagine one of the greatest universities in the world is founded on top of a huge pile of crap the record because they got the joke before i even knew where it was going. well, these coprolite mines spring up all over england and these young men that couldn't get work for now making big bucks mining the coprolite in very unsafe mines. they were not properly built. they were having havens all the time, they were big hits most people would drink up their profits. the men would take over and get drunk. this actually spawned an alcoholic village culture all

over east anglia. hundreds of clubs, thousands of pubs grow up around the coprolite mines and i found this wonderful little song i'm not going to sing because i don't know the tune but this is some of the lyric. , listen you farmers to what i do say, we coprolite diggers can now have a fair play. you once did us grind down but now it's our turn. as we can get work and farm labor sperm. we are jolly young fellows that do not work fear. we can work of the fossils, have a lot of good beer. with our spayed and pickax we have no work to seek. we are far worse for ten the week. your sons and your daughters with all of their fine clothes at the coprolite diggers don't turn off your nose.

here's another one from the rn university. it is ghost species. what is coast species? when a plant and animal coeval together and one needs the other for pollination and one becomes extinct you have these mysterious plants that don't quite make any sense and if you remember the movie, oh god with george burns and he says to him you are god, you are perfect and george burns says i'm not perfect and he said give me an example of something you did it wasn't perfect and he says as god the avocado. i made the pitch to big. the reason the avocado has the pit that seems too big is because that was eaten by ground sloths that would carry them miles and miles through the forest and these powerful digestive juices would prepare the seat to be deposited

elsewhere. this is a tree in central park, honey locust trees covered with fornes. there's no reason for a tree like that to have fornes except dustin bonds used to feed on those trees and go for the pond and the trees to put up a defense against getting the low work and limbs even. so they have been fornes to protect them from the mastodons. the search for the missing toomas. thar darwin found these long tubes in a certain orchid found a madagascar are and he said there has to be a malkoff or some kind of insect with a tongue 14 inches long that can get in there to get the nectar and this pollinates the plant by

carrying the nectar and entomologists told him that's ridiculous, that is impossible there is no insect like that, and about i don't know, 20 or 30 years after darwin died, they found the moth. and it was called the moth that was predicted. the search for the missing link of course in darwin's de africom de had denney hardly any fossils'. where's the missing link. people put up site shows living proof of the darwin theory. this is what the general public was and bribing. there is a very badly stuffed gorilla they were poorly known at that time. now here are some recent pictures by a wonderful

photographer friend of mine called mary m. brookner showing bonobos which is the last eight to be discovered in the 20th century and a sort of looks like a chimpanzee at first but it has a lot of special features. look at the hilarity of the young ones and you can't escape the feeling of familiarity. the walk almost by people the anyway chimpanzees never do. here's one flossing his teeth. he wasn't taught to do that. here is one showing his brother his boubou. if darwin had seen these he would have totally flat for the bonobos. they settle their disputes by sex rather than violence. they make love not war. and of course we have so many

missing links we don't know what to do with them. there is rudolph, lucey. it's clear we are not dealing with a ladder, we are dealing with a branching bush that were on earth at various times three, four, five, more different homonyms living in the same places the same time at least three human hahnemann's neanderthal a marrec to san jose bees in the same places in the same times it is a branching bush has stephen said which we are the sole surviving to waco twig. now we can get on to how evolution let the boundaries of science became the province of writers and poets and lovers.

♪ ♪ when you were a tadpole and i was a fish in the oceans of time then side-by-side on the ending tied we swam through the slime. winked once at me and i blinked back at you as we climbed up through. you could looking creature i just had to meet you because i love you even then. mindless we lived and mindless we loved and mindless at last we dance. as deep in a drift of the

african rift we slumbered petrified. i flipped for you in a time that nobody knows. yet here tonight by this candlelight we sit dining at delmonico's. your eyes are as deep as springs. you believe it is the first time that we met. your years are still few and your life is still new. the future before you and yet our sketches are etched in the cabins and where deserts' were served. we've buried our bones mixed with all of our stones and deep

down in the turf. here they come. ♪ yes, i remember it well. and so as we linker while sipping a standard awaiting hour favorite dish, let us both drink a new to the time when you were a tadpole and i was a fish. ♪ [applause]

thank you so much. now, let's see darwin on trial. every year in the united states of america charles darwin is put on trial and only in the united states of america i might add, and i found a wonderful cartoon from 1876 and they're their religious authorities henry beecher, the pope, the rabbis and every stripe of religion, working under an umbrella, shadow of superstition while the pure light of reason with jefferson and darwin and huxley and so on at the top eusebius

born with intelligence and reason and a lot and it's having its eyes and adults by clerics. here's a close-up of some of that. there they are. the clerics and there is the pure light of reason. i don't think we quite look at it that way anymore but it's close enough to show part of the controversy that goes on and of course in 1925, a young high school teacher named john scopes deliberately broke law, new the enacted law week, the butler law in tennessee against teaching evolution in public schools and this created the first big test case, the big trial we have william jennings bryant ran three times for president of the united states and evangelical preacher and clarence darrow and

old liberal horse from chicago who saw this as a battle for separation of church and state. and so they gathered to have it out and settle it once and for all, and the newspaper reporters gathered and radio for the first time in the little town of dayton tennessee. ♪ john scopes weighted won for the jury to reach its decision. ♪

waiting on the jury down in dayton tennessee. they are about to lock me up and throw away the key. yeah. you might think i'm some kind of crocus, my only finest teaching dr. darwin's book. the jury has got a little something to decide. down here you best be careful of your speech because you could get yourself bostick just for when you teach. and if you think out loud you will likely find the schools are going to put you out on your behind so you've got a little something to decide.

when i look around i realize it's really not so strange. people like to think the truth is something that can never change. no. well, you can make the fact that your help and your but knowledge keeps on changing down through the years and you've got a little something to the site. let's go to the trial. ♪ here is the wind made from that trial of course, he said he believed then rocket hs or age of rocks. now many times i wonder what this life is all about.

should we keep the faith or does it make more sense to doubt? the most sacred thing a man can do is tell the world what he believes is true, and i've got a little something to decide. the jury has got a little something to decide. we have all got a little something to decide. yes we do. we certainly do, you know. [applause] bodwell, let's talk about by

dino and also face. i was dino. we grew up in queens. there we are. if you know steve gold he can change a bit. he died five, six years ago very tragic but he was a great friend to me and a great influence and we used to go to the museum of natural history together. if i could interrupt myself there's a story about the trial i just want to throw in because i love it so much. you know, brian died right out of the trial some set of a broken heart because his beliefs or so mercilessly attacked by

the bureau. darrow so i don't care to go to heaven or hell after 30 years as a lawyer i have so many good friends in both places. [laughter] and there is the poem about that than i would like to quote from darwin's nemesis samuel butler who is a great writer and he wrote a poem that i thought connected him. it's called life after death and what he wrote was this a, a sonnet we shall not argue saying it was thus or thus. our arguments will drift. we shall forget who is right, who is wrong.

we shall not even know that we have met yet meet we shall in part and meet again where dittman meet on lips of living men. and now i will say back into the story of me and steve gould because steve gould was the continuation of that same argument, let some flooding in and participated in some of the recent trials, textbook trials and so on. now, when steve and i were kids we had a couple of interests besides evolution and animals and so on. one of them was we did a great interest in the use of language and we were both big solomon fans when we were kids and so some of the songs i have written to night in the sort of typicale

gould, and then we had other heroes besides, for taxable there is steve and a giraffe. joe dimond shia was his hero because his excellence and grace on the ball field and he was a lifelong yankee fan who had an amazing command of baseball statistics almost as great as his knowledge of evolutionary biology and you throw it into an essay on biology every now and then. and our other big hero was schnozzola because he main gulf english on the other end of the spectrum. but i was asked. we had a tribute to gould while

he was alive and i was asked why michael schirmer of the skeptics to write a song for steve and he wanted it to be a song i had been done yet and he wanted it to summarize all of steve's sa's in one gilbert and solomon song. you may know that i was the editor of his column for some years. and i had been away from him 25 years and when we met again and i said to him i wrote him and i said you have inherited huxley for teaching to a new generation, do you remember me and he wrote back blood may be thicker than water but junior high school friendships are thicker than anything so we met again and now he was a harvard professor with a great darwinian view of life. ♪

>> stevan gould is my name and fossils' and sells or my game. canadian shield and bahamian snails brought a measure of fame. darwin is your cup of tea but you don't have a lot of time for the you don't have to look in his wearisome book you can learn evolution from me. i could tell you a tale of a trial where brawling in and darrow once tangled, a courtroom selling gold with by all the truth got distorted and mangled. fundamentalist sheltered defiance, the textbook was told to read the bible contains all of the science biology class needs to know. i write of baseball statistics of dodos and freezes and scoundrels with provisional branches divisional watching them practically bifurcate practically. i write essays the medical

always grammatical asteroids cecil white's pessin moises tactical and home runs the magical. if my sec anyone lacks i've got the back issues and stacks. you can get them from me for a nominal fee if you drop me a line or a fax. ♪ i can find no cosmic mind behind life's eternal mystery. if an ape replete the tape, she would see only contingent history. a plan to make a man was not evolution's objective to believe all the fuss was all about us is an perspective. on a right of cranial capacity, allin's man has become huxley's audacity, insanity, how word without an apology, fake illustrations about embryology.

♪ there was marcion's collecting and butlers objecting and theology and teleology, co sociology and eschatology but i admit to a preference for wallace's difference for offered wallace's difference yes. my name is steven gould, in this audience i'm very well schooled be where adaptation is look of creation as i am not easily fooled. if my essays anyone lacks i've got the back issues and stacks you can get them from me for a nominal fee if you drop me a line or a fax. ♪ and please allow six to eight weeks for delivery. ♪ [applause] well we are almost to the end of

the trail looker -- buckaroos to read one thing remains to be done and that is searching the literature and knowing wallace and darwin and all these people were great evolutionary biologists negative what kind of tickle my friend, steve if i told about the greatest unknown evolutionary biologists of all time mr. james. ♪ wait a minute, stop the music. i want to reminisce. a soft, soft wood.

a little more. ♪ as i go along in her life you know i do the best i can and try whenever possible to help my fellow man. i show bing crosby how to sing and i taught betty boop how to boop boop badu to be on a promissory note if i ever heard on that note was given by pavarotti and was he glad they got rid of it. i've got a million of them. i've got a million of them i tell you. [laughter] but now that i look back on my career, i do recall one achievement that stands out above them all. so let's settle the break

because i'm feeling great and the guy who found natural selection. on was brought up to believe in adam and eve but the time was overdue for correction. we were all labor under a misapprehension. i was with alfred russel wallace in the jungles of malaysia. folks, i will tell you how it happened because i am sure it will amaze you. one day i'm walking through the rain forest with alfred russel wallace brushing aside and other renting or two when we see these butterflies, papillary butterflies, millions of them. he says to me to look at them and butterflies. there have bleeding all over the place. i sit in do badly alfred they are selecting their mates. it's only natural. he says that's eight. natural selection and he scribbles down some notes on a

handy piece of bark. the scene changes. back at camp alfred rights of the theory of evolution and what happens. does he send it to richard owens? no. does he send it to thomas huxley? no no. he sends it to charles darwin. ..

and i lose by a nose. how humiliating. but i don't care. does i know what really happened. and now the truth is out and it's beyond a doubt, i'm the guy who found natural selection. yes, sir. i'm the guy who found natural selection. goodnight, folks. and goodnight, stephen jay gould, wherever you are. ♪ [applause] thank you for coming. thank you. thank you for coming. thank you.

thank you. thank you. isn't that sweet. thank you.

>> this comic hidalgo it already is the baltimore map. the original is on display in the jefferson building in the great hall. if you haven't been over there to see it already, i strongly, strongly urge you to go do it. there's nothing like face time with the real thing. there's only one copy that survives in the world and it's this one. it's probably about that big. 8 feet by 4.5 p. to a might even be a little bit bigger. so please go over there at some point. as john and john both suggested, i did know anything about this map or the history of cartography when i started eared in 2003, when i was an editor at the atlantic and boston opening mamula came across a presley from the library announcement for $10 million into about what he called called america's birth certificate, the baltimore map, the map to give america its name. at $10 million was the most i ever -- the library have ever

spent on anything. and that kind of got my attention. i'd never heard of the map, never seen the map, but the library seem to think it was his most valuable piece in the market even seem to think it was more than original copy of the declaration of independence. i wanted to find out more. and at this point are thinking maybe it would do an article article, short piece for the atlantic. so i did some research and got the basics of the story pretty quickly. early in the 1500's, in the eastern part of france in the british mountains, there is a small group of scholars among them the mapmaker marcia ball struck and they came across letter's and at least one early sealers chart showing the coastlines of the new world and they decided that what they were reading about and what they were

seen on the charts was not a part of asia as most of us assumed it was, but in fact was a new continent. people traditionally have thought of the world as having three parts, europe, asia, and africa. baltimore and his colleagues decided this was the fourth word of the world, hence the title of the book. because they've made that decision, that is seen to represent the fourth part of the world thought you needed a name just like the other continents have names and they came up with the name america. it's a great story. there's a lot more to it than that and we'll get into more of it later. but as that was looking at the mouth, i learned pretty quickly that it also is significant for a lot of other reasons, not just for the naming of america. if you look on the left there, that's the new world, south america with north america about it. this is really the first map to show north and south america unambiguously surrounded by water. not at some undefined part of

asia or just some undefined place that really isn't identified at all. because it shows north and south america surrounded by water through the first not to suggest the existence of the pacific ocean and this is something of a mystery because europeans are supposed to note about the pacific ocean intel 1513, when balboa caught sight of it from the mountain top. so that's something that brings a lot of people back to the map and something that peter is written about extensively. it's not something that i dwell on it a lot in the book because i felt that the mystery is almost more fun to be missing the street and to try to resolve. but it's a great part of the story. it's not the only part of the story, though. there's more that is very, very significant about the map. if you look at africa, for example, this is one of very first printed box to show the full coastlines in africa. africa comics you think i have only been circumnavigated by the portuguese full and 1497 and maps from the beginning to show

all this year the frame at the bottom of the matter is broken. it would have been pretty easy to just push the frame down a little bit. i think the point is pretty clear this is a break with tradition and is exciting, possibly to a lot of use more exciting than the stopover on the left. the book and to forget that this is a great discovery because it means you can tell from europe around africa and into the indian ocean and beyond. even beyond that fact though, is of longitude the map shows a and it's one of the very first to do that as well. maps prior to this one i attended to that a certain portion of the globe i'm not, kind of implied on the back of the map as it were and the implication is that it was kind of uncharted oceanic space and you didn't really need to try to depict the yard here is one of the very first pictures of the world laid out in a full 360 degrees and what were seen

as a picture of the world roughly as we know today. it's obviously not fully correct. it's distorted and full of misconceptions and deliberately odd chest physicians. but it is basically a vision of the world that we've been refining ever spent and that to me was really what struck me. this was not just a map announcing the new world. it's declaring we can now see the whole world for the first time. so great story. i thought this would be a great article. it puts clippings and then i got sidetracked for things for other years. and only in 2005 when word came down to the atlantic was going to be moved from boston to washington did a search to try to think about the map again. and i did because i wanted to make a living in boston and i moved to washington. [laughter] excuse me. and when i went back to my article idea folder either brilliant idea.

i would write a little bit about the making of this map and it would come out in 2007 i'm a timed perfectly to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the naming of america. and they barely made it to 2009. [laughter] so what happened? why did it take me longer than expected? the simple answer is i just got in and i thought when i came to the map that i was going to be focusing on the new world and particularly this naming of america. very quickly, as john suggested, i started just seeing more and more in the map in feeling as though there was an opportunity to do a much more comprehensive book that would survey the map as a whole and could be an excuse for doing it kind of geographical and intellectual adventure story, with the map kind of as the backdrop. so what struck me most was that it wasn't just one world that's

depicted here. it's actually many worlds. and if you just change your perspective this whereabouts, it's, it's kind of like a kaleidoscope and you can tease out different stories, different coalitions of ideas, different ministries as well. and i want to do something that was sort of complex enough that it would do the map in full justice. even if you've never seen this map before or don't know maps of this period, it's pretty easier thing to see wetware not. in this. , it wasn't necessarily always the case. but there were plenty of maps that didn't have it. over there there was east. this is the part we now call the pacific, china, india, essentially shut, africa

obviously, and this is the most famous part of the map, north america appear the gulf of mexico here. this is the reason -- and this big long sunlight access south. the dominant visual impression you get from looking at the new world is looking at this giant southern place in god's really what was making an impression on europeans in the early days of discovery. it wasn't so much the wetness of the new world. it was obviously columbus had pioneered a great new route across the atlantic, but he thought he had reached asia. so she and just about everybody thought that he confirmed old geographical ideas. south america, which, excuse me, amerigo vespucci wrote about in the late 14 90's and early 1400's extended far into the south into a part of the globe

that people tended to think there wasn't any land. and i made a big impression and put it back to that in a minute. what dominates the map then is the southern part and that's why the cartographer put the word continent along the shores that amerigo vespucci sailed along. [inaudible] always zero in on it. it's probably on today what would be considered bizzell right name up and then put it on the map. as i said though, there's much, much more to the map in just a depiction of the new world. and i wanted stood us to a book for general reader, for someone like me who is reasonably well informed verbally to know anything about the map of history of early met world mapping to learn and read as much as possible from. and i wanted to come up the way of making it a kind of gripping narrative freed.

as many different stories as possible. the way i came up with organizing all that was to use the map as the guide and as the backdrop. the book is organized into chapters that move all over the map here at each chapter starts up a little detail from part of the map starts in about the 1200's in england at the very western edge of the known world at the time and then gradually moves acro the map or geography and through history as europeans gradually make their o china. comes back to europe amendments along the coast of africa and then eventually moves across the atlantic and over to the new world. >> this is a portion of a booktv program. you can view the entire program and many other booktv programs online. go to booktv.org. type the name of the author or book into the search area in the upper left-hand corner of the page. select the watch blank. now you eire program. you might also e booktv box or e

featured video box to find recent and future programs. we are in section 27 of arlington national cemetery. this is one of the oldest sections of the military cemetery at arlington. and it's where the story of arlington national cemetery actually begins. arlington has so much history tied up in the