The BBC TV series Darwin’s Dangerous Idea

“Charles Darwin and his followers have shown how all life on the planet evolved from a single source. The mechanism they call evolution by natural selection means competition, extinction and the emergence of new life forms without the need for a director or conductor. The Creator shimmers and vanishes like a mirage.”

So says political pundit Andrew Marr, one of the BBC’s most senior journalists, in the first of his three BBC2 programmes celebrating evolution and its legacy during the last century and a half. While there was much to agree with in this thought-provoking series, Marr is careful to point out, “At a stroke Darwin had demolished the biblical account of creation.” Of course, it’s hardly surprising to see that the BBC would be celebrating Darwin, given its self-confessed anti-Christian bias. At a 2006 “impartiality” summit called by its chairman, Michael Grade, “Senior figures admitted that the BBC is guilty of promoting Left-wing views and an anti-Christian sentiment. … executives admitted they would happily broadcast the image of a Bible being thrown away—but would not do the same for the Koran.”

Marr himself admitted that the corporation was unrepresentative of British society: “The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly-funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people.”

The full implications of Darwinian philosophy are given considerable treatment during the course of three hours of footage, so it is not possible in a short review to do more than distil a few of the many major points made. 

The first programme, Body and Soul, shows how evolutionary theory was taken to logical, but extreme conclusions by some world leaders and dictators and has been used to justify war, atrocities, ethnic cleansing and genocide. While Marr tries to argue that these were abuses of Darwin’s theory, this is at odds with his own statement: “Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die. He called this law Natural Selection. This was creation according to Darwin, no Adam and Eve, no need for God. And in God’s place, an indifferent mechanism that relentlessly scrutinised every single individual of every species. It selected the best adapted and remorselessly eliminated the rest.”

During 1915, American pacifist and entomologist Vernon Kellogg had cause to dine with members of the German high command. “Kellogg was horrified by what he heard. ‘The creed of natural selection, based on violent, competitive, fatal struggle, is the Gospel of the German intellectuals’, Kellogg wrote. … Kellogg was shocked by this grotesque Darwinian motivation for the German war machine.”

 Marr discusses how the likes of Sigmund Freud and JBS Haldane applied Darwin’s ideas to human behaviour and morality, not least in the area of sexuality. In the second half of the twentieth century, “[Darwinian scientists] … showed how sympathy, empathy and compassion, the building blocks of human morality, weren’t unique to humans at all, but part of our animal inheritance.”

Marr opines that many of the world’s religions have embraced or accepted Darwin, but realises that those with traditional biblical and Christian moorings have put up a resistance. “[Darwin] has returned us to Nature, to its wonder, to its glory and to its danger. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution questions almost everything we thought we knew about ourselves: Where we come from, why we behave as we do, the origins of our morality.”

Yes indeed. One must wonder how Christians compromising with Darwin’s big idea cannot see that ‘theistic evolution’ is an oxymoron because it tries to embrace two systems of thought that provide competing and diametrically opposing world views.

In Born Equal, Marr explores the influence of Darwin’s theory on culture and politics—and particularly the issue of racism and the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution’. Following the publication of The Origin of Speciesin 1859, Darwinism began to influence a number of the leading thinkers of the day. Herbert Spencer, a champion of ruthless extreme business tactics, coined the now-famous term ‘survival of the fittest’ to describe natural selection. “Spencer was the first to turn Darwin’s theory into a political manifesto … go with [the struggle of life], don’t resist it; reward the strong and purge the weak. But it gave Darwin’s theory a misleading spin. Darwin proposed that Nature favours the best adapted individuals, not necessarily the strongest.” 

 Nonetheless, Darwin was happy to use Spencer’s description of his theory in his 1869 revision of The Origin: “Darwin’s adoption of those four words would have consequences for a hundred years. … Darwin might have been an enemy of slavery, but [his ideas] were soon being used to justify the triumphs of the white colonialists over indigenous populations.”

However, Marr’s attempt to relieve Darwin of guilt by association is unconvincing, as Darwin himself wrote in his Descent of Man that the ‘civilised races’ would exterminate and replace the ‘savage’ ones. And he really was a “social Darwinist”.⁴ Genuine skulduggery involving the Royal College of Surgeons in London and the Tasmanian authorities is described honestly by Marr and will undoubtedly have shocked some viewers—aboriginal people certainly suffered greatly at the hands of Darwin’s dangerous idea.

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