(MAMMA MIA PLAYING)
ANDREW MARR: Here's a question,
what's the connection between ABBA's Anni-Frid Lyngstad
and Charles Darwin?
The answer?
(MUSIC STOPS)
(CROWD CHEERING)
Adolf Hitler.
Like thousands of babies conceived during the Nazi occupation of Norway,
Anni-Frid Lyngstad was the child
of a young Norwegian and a German soldier.
The Nazi leadership encouraged these relationships.
They had a selective-breeding scheme to create an Aryan master race.
Their scheme was inspired by a crude manipulation
of Charles Darwin's, theory of evolution,
or the survival of the fittest.
In this programme, I'm going to explore how Darwin's theory
has been used to influence culture and politics.
Since the Second World War, it's been used to discourage racism
and promote the idea of human equality.
But before that it was abused, to justify discrimination,
imperialism and mass murder.
And here, in this villa in Wannsee, Berlin,
the Nazis quite explicitly used a perverted interpretation
of Darwin's theory of evolution
as they finalised their plan for the Holocaust.
Charles Darwin could never have imagined such a plan.
But here at Wannsee, the Nazis took his survival of the fittest,
his theory about the diversity and complexity of life on the planet,
and crunched it down as the motor
behind one of the most evil ideas of our times.
MARR: The seeds of Charles Darwin's dangerous idea
were planted in his mind more than 170 years ago,
during a five-year voyage around the world on the H.M.S. Beagle.
Darwin's first port of call in South America
was here in Bahía, in Brazil.
Darwin was an exuberant 23-year-old from a liberal family
of scientists and freethinkers.
Bahía would be an experience he'd never forget.
Beagle had just arrived here in what was
then the major port in South America for the slave trade.
And what Darwin found here genuinely shocked him.
Slave labour on plantations owned by European settlers
was the foundation of the local economy.
A landowner called Mr Patrick Lennon invited Darwin to visit his estate.
Mr Lennon was pleasant enough company on the road when they were travelling,
but as soon as he was in the presence of his slaves
he turned into a terrifying tyrant.
There was a trivial incident, and he rounded up all the women
and the children and then told them he was going to separate them
from the men and sell them off at auction.
Darwin was disgusted.
He wrote in his diary,
"Against such facts, how weak are the arguments
"of those who maintain that slavery is a tolerable evil."
Most Europeans believed that slaves from Africa
belonged to an inferior race.
Some believed they were a different species.
But Darwin was sure they were fellow humans,
and he hated everything that he'd heard about how the slaves were treated.
He was told about the Maticans or slave-hunters.
When slaves escaped,
their job was to hunt them down and murder them.
And then, to prove what they'd done and get their bounty,
they'd cut off the ears and bring them back.
When he was a young boy, Darwin had done exactly the same thing
for his father when he was hunting rats.
For the men in charge here, slaves weren't really humans.
Bahía was a powerful experience.
As he prepared to leave,
Darwin had an argument about slavery with the captain of the Beagle.
He became so angry, he was nearly thrown off the expedition.
During the rest of his voyage, Darwin would encounter a vast variety
of plant and animal species he'd never seen before.
He'd discover fossils of giant, extinct creatures
that seemed to resemble the living animals around him.
And in the Galápagos,
he'd encounter different species of birds and tortoises,
uniquely adapted to the conditions on each of the islands.
(HOOTING)
Everywhere he looked, he seemed to find evidence
that life on Earth was constantly changing.
But as he left South America,
the liberty and equality of the human race
was uppermost in his mind,
and he believed more fervently than ever,
that all humans belonged to the same species.
Back aboard Beagle,
Darwin wrote very bluntly in his field notes,
"Man springs from one stock."
And then he added, "This leads one into many speculations."
Well, Darwin's many speculations would lead him
to his revolutionary theory of evolution through natural selection.
But that did not describe a world of liberty, equality and fraternity.
It described a world of violence, competition
and the remorseless struggle for survival.
When Darwin returned to Britain,
brimming with new ideas from his voyage,
he found London in turmoil.
The city had been through a construction boom
and two million people now teemed through the narrow streets.
The poor were rioting, unemployment was rising,
a depression was looming.
Darwin's friends were talking about the ideas of an economist
called Thomas Malthus.
Malthus had predicted that the rising population
would soon exceed the available food supply.
"The result,"he said,
"would be famine, distress and havoc."
Thomas Malthus, I think it's fair to say,
wasn't blessed with a sunny nature.
In fact, he was a full-time, full on and highly effective prophet of doom,
who thought that the government's poor relief,
designed to help people at the bottom, actually made things worse.
Because if life was semi-tolerable for the very poor,
they'd only go and have more children,
which meant more poor people and more handouts and so on and so on.
"Life is a perpetual struggle," said Malthus,
"and if men were not encouraged to compete,
"society would be drowned in want, misery and barbarism."
Malthus's warnings helped push
a draconian new Poor Law through Parliament.
The poor were now forced into an even sharper struggle for survival.
Compete for work or off you go to the degradation of the workhouse.
Malthus would help Darwin find the key to explaining
the diverse and ever-changing nature of life on Earth.
Malthus' notion of perpetual struggle
is really the breakthrough for Darwin, as he squares up to the notion
that in nature only one thing really counts, survival.
Darwin proposed that keener eyes, a bigger beak,
or better camouflage, can be decisive
for an individual's chances of surviving long enough to reproduce.
Those individuals with the best adaptations survive
and pass them on to their offspring.
The rest perish.
By 1842, Darwin had a name for this mechanism,
natural selection.
But he spent nearly 20 years
testing and refining his revolutionary theory
before finally publishing On the Origin of Species, in 1859.
Darwin's theory quickly took on a life of its own
beyond the world of science.
It was gleefully adopted by politicians and economists
with bracing plans for the poor.
One influential enthusiast was the philosopher Herbert Spencer.
Herbert Spencer was a champion of the free market,
who railed against the idea of supporting good-for-nothings
at the expense of the industrious,
so creating an increasing population of imbeciles and idlers and criminals.
In 1864, he became interested in Mr Darwin's natural selection
and even coined a new phrase for it, the survival of the fittest.
A catchy phrase, it quickly caught on.
Spencer was the first to turn Darwin's theory into a political manifesto.
All life was struggle. So don't resist it, go with 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.
At the time, Darwin made no public comment
on Spencer's application of his theory.
But in a later edition of the Origin of Species,
published in 1869,
he also adopted Herbert Spencer's vivid words.
Survival of the fittest.
Darwin's adoption of those four words would have consequences for 100 years.
He meant them as a description of the evolution of life
on the planet over countless millennia.
But they were seized and turned into a prescription,
scientific justification for political ideas,
some of which were vile.
Charles Darwin was a naturalist.
But the would-be engineers of humanity
were delighted by what he said and they were waiting.
Darwin might have been an enemy of slavery,
but survival of the fittest was soon being used to justify
the triumph of the white colonialists over indigenous populations.
In 1877, the novelist, Anthony Trollope, took the fashionably Darwinian view.
"The native races have perished by their contact with us, "he wrote,
"as the weaker, weedy grasses of nature's first planting
"wither and die wherever come the hardier plants. "
Darwin himself wrote, "At some future period,
"not very distant, the civilised races of man
"will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races."
Well, in the 19th century this was already happening.
On the 3rd of March, 1869, a man called William Lanney
died of cholera in the Dog & Partridge Inn
in Hobart, Tasmania.
Lanney was the self-proclaimed last male survivor
of the Tasmanian aboriginal population.
Victorian anthropologists saw his death as the extinction
of an inferior species,
a decisive illustration of the survival of the fittest.
And poor William Lanney's body
became a valuable collector's item and scientific prize.
As soon as his death was announced, a surgeon called William Crowther
set out to get his hands on the body
on behalf of The Royal College of Surgeons in London.
Two nights later, he crept into the hospital mortuary
where Lanney's body had been laid out.
Working by candlelight, William Crowther decapitated Lanney's body.
And then he carefully peeled back the facial skin,
took out the skull, and replaced it with another skull
he happened to find elsewhere in the mortuary.
When the Tasmanian Royal Society discovered about the theft,
they were determined to stop any further attempts
to steal the valuable skeleton
and so they ordered the hospital to amputate Lanney's hands and feet.
His desecrated remains were then buried the following day.
But even now Lanney wouldn't be allowed to rest in peace.
That night, the Tasmanian Royal Society sent another surgeon
to dig up his body and harvest the rest of his bones
for their own collection.
The grisly fight over Lanney's remains was lampooned in the Tasmanian press.
This was a battle over evidence for the evolutionary triumph
of European civilisation.
A shameful tale.
A Tasmanian government inquiry into the Lanney affair
descended into a slanging match with each of the surgeons
accusing the other of butchery.
In the end, the Royal Tasmanian Society kept Lanney's skeleton.
Nobody knows what happened to his skull.
The collection of human remains from Tasmania,
here at the Royal College of Surgeons in London,
was finally sent back, in 2002.
(MOOING)
Back in Britain, Darwin's theory was now being used
in an attempt to improve the future of the human race.
The idea came from Charles Darwin's own cousin,
a scientist called Francis Galton.
Galton was fascinated by Darwin's observations
in the Origin of Species
about the extraordinary improvements brought about by animal breeders
in the creation of new varieties of dogs and cattle.
Francis Galton became obsessed by using Darwin's selection
for a practical political purpose: Breeding better humans.
"If one twentieth of the cost and pains were spent
"on measures for the improvement of the human race,
"than is spent on the improvement
"of breeds of horses and cattle," he wrote,
"what a galaxy of genius might we not create."
And he called this application of animal breeding to humans, eugenics.
Galton was driven by the idea
that Britain's human breeding stock was degenerating,
because the working classes were having much larger families
than what he called, "Families of genius,"
among which, surprise, surprise,
he counted the sparkling Galtons and the dazzling Darwins.
He suggested the government should give financial incentives
and even honours and houses,
to encourage the best families to have more children.
Galton's theory depended on him showing that traits such as intelligence,
genius and memory were inherited in just the same way
as the physical traits of cattle or sheep.
And so he started to study the family trees of judges,
statesmen, scientists and poets, though he wasn't entirely scientific.
He described one of his study as, "A painter, and an eminent one,
"judging by the prices that his paintings now fetch."
Galton meticulously studied the pedigrees of 330 eminent men.
He then circulated a questionnaire among leading scientists.
As well as details about family status, he wanted to know their hat size.
Oh, yes, he believed clever people must have bigger heads.
Darwin himself completed the questionnaire.
His hat size was an entirely respectable 22-and-a-quarter inches.
His other answers were disarmingly modest and earnest
as, for instance, memory.
"Memory, very bad for dates and for rote learning.
"Special talents, none.
"Energy of mind shown by rigorous and long-continued work
"on the same subject, as 20 years on the Origin Of Species. "
After drawing together his vast collection of data,
Galton published a book called Hereditary Genius.
It concluded that intelligence was inherited,
and introduced Galton's idea of a breeding programme for humans.
Darwin chewed over Galton's eugenic breeding plans.
But he was level-headed as well big-headed,
and he quickly decided this idea was impractical.
"Families would refuse any selection scheme, "he said,
and he thought that a compulsory scheme would be completely unacceptable.
Galton's eugenics had very little influence for nearly 30 years.
But when the Boer War broke out in 1899, Army recruiters began a panic
about the physical condition of the British working class.
In some areas of Manchester,
70% of men were found to be unfit to fight.
Medicine and charity were allowing the survival of the unfit.
Time to toughen up!
At the opening of the 20th century, Darwin's theory of evolution
was about to be manipulated for politically fashionable purposes.
Winston Churchill wrote to the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith,
"I am convinced that the multiplication of the feeble-minded
"is a very terrible danger to the race."
Eugenics seemed noble.
Nothing less than a crusade for the future of civilisation.
H.G. Wells was an enthusiastic supporter of both Darwin and eugenics.
His 1895 novel, The Time Machine,
shows how the human race of the future has evolved into two species.
Wells said, "Society must take control of the laws of evolution,
"so that mankind could become their master,
"rather than their victim."
The Time Machine was a stark warning
about the dangers of ignoring the degeneration of the human race.
(BIG BEN TOLLING)
Back in the real world of 1912,
a bill was brought before the House of Commons,
the Feeble-Minded Persons Control Bill.
Its aim was to segregate selected men and women
in different institutions,
to prevent the increasing propagation of half-witted people.
Many MPs found the category of feeble-mindedness
both unscientific and dangerous.
But the bill's advocates lobbied for support
at the First International Eugenics Conference in London.
At the eugenics conference,
Winston Churchill went so far as to call for sterilisation.
"Simple surgical operation, so the inferior
"could be permitted to live freely
"without causing much inconvenience to others."
But when it was debated by the House of Commons,
the Feeble-Minded Persons Control Bill
was voted down by Parliament.
The 1912 eugenics conference
marked the end of any real idea of state-sponsored eugenics in Britain.
But not in Scandinavia, not in Germany, not in America.
By the early 20th century,
Darwin's ideas had taken root in the United States.
When the vast influx of refugees and immigrants
caused alarm about the health and strength of the American people,
they'd soon be abused again.
A distinguished Harvard biologist, called Charles Davenport,
came up with a massive social programme
based on the Darwinian law of survival of the fittest
and called it, "The preservation of human quality."
What he meant was eugenics.
In 1910, Davenport received funding from the Carnegie Institute
to help establish a scientific organisation
dedicated to encouraging the breeding of a superior American population.
Over the next three decades, the eugenics records office
would systematically interview almost a million U.S. Citizens,
registering their physical, behavioural and racial traits.
Most had no idea why this data was being collected.
Charles Davenport chose this quiet backwater,
at Cold Spring Harbour, Long Island,
for the first Eugenics Records Office in the United States.
Now, why here?
Because he'd just come back
from visiting Charles Darwin's country house,
Down House in Kent, which Davenport thought was a wonderful retreat.
"It seems to me to give the clue to Darwin's strength."
But "retreat" could hardly be a less appropriate word
for what Davenport was planning here,
which was to strengthen the breeding stock of Americans
by making sure there would be no hiding place for weaklings.
Davenport drew up family trees,
believing that traits like criminality were inherited.
He was trying to identify those people who should be prevented from breeding.
Supported by the scientific authority of Darwin's theory,
the idea quickly caught on.
Eugenics stalls were set up at agricultural shows across America
to proclaim the virtues of selective breeding in humans.
Davenport said it was, "A reproach to our intelligence
"that we as people, proud in other respects
"of our control of nature,
"should have to support half a million insane,
"feeble-minded, epileptic, blind and deaf,
"80,000 prisoners and 100,000 paupers."
Davenport calculated that all this was costing the American people
$100 million a year.
"The world, in its ignorance," he said,
"had always looked upon crime,
"disease and degeneracy as necessary evils."
But they weren't.
Thanks to the new science of eugenics, this plague could be cured.
Davenport's first superintendent,
here at Cold Spring Harbour,
was a eugenics obsessive called Harry Laughlin.
He devoted his life to collecting thousands of human pedigrees.
He even lived onsite at the records office,
while he drew up a series of model laws
for compulsory sterilisation across the United States.
Laughlin's campaign hit the headlines
when an 18-year-old, unmarried mother, called Carrie Buck,
was selected for compulsory sterilisation.
On the basis of very crude intelligence tests,
social workers announced that Carrie, her mother,
and even Carrie's seven-month-old daughter,
all displayed the hereditary traits of feeble-mindedness.
The case eventually came before Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Laughlin had never met Carrie Buck, but, no matter,
he was called to give evidence.
The United States Supreme Court, ruled that Carrie Buck
should be sterilised to prevent the birth of more "defective children".
In his summing up, Justice Holmes said,
"Three generations of imbeciles is enough.
"Better for all the world, that instead of waiting to execute
"degenerate offspring for crime,
"or to let them starve for their imbecility,
"society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit
"from continuing their kind."
Don't kill them, don't lock them up,
just make sure they never happen.
Carrie Buck was sterilised in 1927.
Between 1907 and 1970, more than 60,000 people
in the United States were forcibly sterilised.
Born among liberals in Britain, growing up in liberal America,
the corruption of Darwin's theory would come to its hideous maturity
in not-so-liberal Germany.
In 1921, a group of German scientists,
Erwin Baur, Fritz Lenz and Eugen Fischer,
seized on Darwin's theory and the influential new science of genetics
to justify their belief that the Nordic Germans or Aryans
were a biologically distinct master race.
They believed some races were inferior species of human,
and that Aryans had the most highly sophisticated culture
and a special capacity for leadership, which had evolved by means of,
yes, Darwinian natural selection.
The superiority of the master race
was now being threatened by contamination from inferior races.
Baur, Lenz and Fischer argued that civilisation
was blunting natural selection, and the purity of the German race
was therefore being undermined by lesser groups.
For truly modern Germans, there was now a new scientific ideal,
racial purity.
Darwin's theory gave a veneer of scientific respectability
to the struggle for racial purity that was central to Nazi philosophy.
Here's Adolf Hitler in his 1925, personal manifesto, Mein Kampf.
"The state has the responsibility of declaring as unfit
"for reproductive purposes anyone who is obviously ill,
"or genetically unsound, and it must carry through
"with this responsibility ruthlessly."
(SPEAKING GERMAN)
MARR: After the Nazis came to power in 1933,
the brutal message of survival of the fittest
became part of the national culture.
(SPEAKING GERMAN)
Bad science and bad politics were now about to be woven
crudely and disastrously together.
In 1933, Adolf Hitler appointed Eugen Fischer
rector of Berlin University.
In his inaugural address, Fischer laid out
the Nazis' dark conclusions about humanity very clearly.
"What Darwin was not able to do," he announced triumphantly,
"genetics has achieved!
"It has destroyed the theory of the equality of man."
In 1935, Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS,
introduced a eugenic breeding programme to strengthen the Aryan race.
German officers were encouraged to father children
with Nordic or Aryan mothers.
The so-called Lebensborn, or Source of Life project,
provided welfare benefits and maternity homes
as incentives for cooperation.
Anni-Frid Lyngstad was one of more than 10,000 children
fathered by German soldiers in Norway during the Nazi occupation.
But by the time she was born on the 15th of November, 1945,
the war was over.
Women who'd had babies with German fathers in occupied countries
were now publicly humiliated and treated as outcasts.
Anni-Frid and her grandmother fled to Sweden.
The Lebensborn project was only one small part of the Nazis' attempt
to create a fitter master race.
In 1933, the American Model Laws for Compulsory Sterilisation
were adopted as the basis of the Nazis'
Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.
In the first year after the law was passed,
more than 70,000 people in Germany were sterilised.
Doctors had to nominate patients they'd diagnosed with epilepsy
or hereditary blindness, feeble-mindedness or severe alcoholism.
Any doctor who refused was intimidated and fined.
By 1937, the Gestapo had started to round up people
and sterilise them for the crime of impure race.
Two years later, the campaign to root out the unfit went further.
Here, on the outskirts of this park in the centre of Berlin,
the Nazis coordinated the selection of thousands of people
judged to be mentally handicapped and sent them to the gas chambers.
Between 1939 and 1945, almost 250,000
men, women and children were killed.
Codenamed Operation T4, this became the model
for the Nazi regime's ever-expanding programme of extermination.
Survival of the fittest had become translated to mean,
murder of the weakest.
Centuries of prejudice
were now given a modern, scientific gloss,
and the Jews were singled out as a particularly dangerous,
genetically inferior race.
On the 20th of January, 1942,
at this stolid-looking lakeside villa, at Wannsee, Berlin,
15 Nazi bureaucrats and SS officers sat down to seal the fate of millions.
The aim of their meeting was to cleanse German living space
of Jews in a legal manner.
It was officially described as
"The final solution to the Jewish problem, "
and it meant, of course, genocide.
The minutes of the Wannsee Conference reveal just how important to the Nazis
was their perverted interpretation
of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection.
"The Jews who survived the work camps," they said,
"would be the most resistant, thanks to natural selection."
That's why they'd survived.
"And if released,
"they would provide the seed for a new Jewish revival."
Therefore, according to the Wannsee protocol,
they must be treated accordingly and eradicated.
The final solution resulted in the death of gypsies, communists,
Poles, Slavs,
the mentally and physically disabled, homosexuals,
political and religious dissidents,
and six million Jews.
ANNOUNCER: The magnificent structure
was built at a cost of 12-and-a-quarter million dollars.
In this room will be discussed and perhaps resolved
the vital issues on which the east and west are divided.
Let's hope the new United Nations Headquarters
proves to be the workshop for peace.
MARR: The Holocaust was a defining event of the 20th century.
After the Nazi atrocities, politics, public attitudes,
basic notions of good and evil were reshaped.
And in this great rewriting,
something very striking happened to Darwin's theory of evolution.
It had been used to justify genocide.
Now it was pulled out of the débris
and became a founding idea for the new world of human rights.
Darwin's conviction
that all humans belonged to the same species was reasserted.
In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
the United Nations enshrined equality in international law as a principle
to be respected and upheld by all nations.
It ambitiously claimed to extend fundamental rights
and freedoms to all humans,
without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.
In 1950, the United Nations made a public statement
on what it called the race question.
"Scientists have reached general agreement
"in that all men belong to the same species, Homo sapiens. "
From now on, perceived differences between people
were put down to culture rather than inheritance.
The United Nations' statement on race credited Charles Darwin as,
"The great biologist who had recognised the unity of mankind."
And it concluded,
"That the likenesses among men are far greater than their differences."
From now on, social policy began to focus on welfare and upbringing,
nurture not nature, as the best way to improve human life.
Just three years later,
in 1953, a British and American scientist,
working together in Cambridge,
announced they had discovered the structure of DNA.
It confirmed Darwin's theory that
all life is linked by common descent,
including humans.
The discovery of DNA would have thrilled Charles Darwin.
It provided the missing link in the puzzle
of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
It showed how traits were physically passed
from one generation to the next.
It confirmed his belief that all living things were related,
and it proved once and for all, that he was right
in believing that all human beings are one species.
Darwin's insight into the laws of natural selection,
which had been abused to justify eugenics and genocide,
would now be used creatively and positively by,
well, as it happens, Jews.
AJewish community in Brooklyn began to use new developments
in our understanding of DNA to try to eliminate
a fatal genetic disease, Tay-Sachs.
Babies born with the condition appear healthy,
but at six months the disease begins to attack their nervous system.
It causes blindness, deafness and paralysis.
None survive beyond the age of six.
Rabbi Joseph Eckstein survived the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Hungary.
Between 1965 and 1983, he suffered the loss
of four of his children to Tay-Sachs.
As a result, he funded Dor Yeshorim,
a charity dedicated to the eradication
of genetic diseases found in the Jewish community.
No question, this is a horrible disease. It's very, very difficult to cope with.
It's the point that the child can't turn around,
can't move around, you have to turn them every few minutes
that they shouldn't get bedsores.
Can't swallow.
MARR: Orthodox Jews are opposed to prenatal testing and abortion.
Dor Yeshorim offers a way to avoid the conception of babies
with a genetic disease.
Here's how it works.
At Jewish schools they collect blood samples
to determine if the children are carriers of a genetic disease.
The results are held in a confidential database.
If these kids then want to get married and have children themselves,
they can go to Dor Yeshorim
and ask if they're genetically compatible.
If they're not, it means that both, man and woman,
are carriers of a genetic disease
and their children would have a one in four chance of having that disease.
Armed with that information, most people choose not to get married.
Last year, the ward in a Brooklyn hospital
where Tay-Sachs children came to die, closed.
Thanks to Dor Yeshorim, Tay-Sachs has almost been eradicated
from New York's Jewish community.
It's a triumphant story of salvation, and a kind of redemption,
for Darwin's ideas, which have been used to justify
so many crimes against humanity.
But the use of selective breeding has been criticised.
Some have accused Dor Yeshorim of offering a service
informed by the same science as eugenics.
Rabbi Eckstein disagrees.
I think there's no other person who can understand better
what eugenics is, than I do.
Thank God, I'm a survivor.
And my father used to tell, "You are here for something.
"I don't know why, but you are still here for something."
Because it was not usual, a baby should survive all this...
But here, what we are doing is, we are trying to eradicate
disease and suffering and grief from the mankind,
and instead we have healthy children like you see here.
Dor Yeshorim's tests are, of course, voluntary,
but they're also anonymous, so that people who are carriers
of genetic diseases can't be pointed out and stigmatised.
It does leave the people concerned with an agonising decision.
They're in love, they want to have children,
do they go ahead or not?
But this is a personal decision, the state is not involved at any point.
And this is the kind of choice that,
with genetic testing spreading further and further,
many more of us are likely to be faced with.
The uncomfortable truth at the heart of Darwin's theory
is still with us in the 21 st century.
We are all one species, but we aren't all the same.
As conditions change, some are better adapted than others.
In 2003, scientists published the entire genetic blueprint
for a human being, the Human Genome.
And it's revealing all the inherited differences
between individuals,
everything from hair colour,
susceptibility to disease, even personality.
All sorts of inherited personal information
can now be read by testing tiny fragments of our DNA.
This is the final frontier of Darwin's dangerous idea,
and I've come to Cambridge to have my own DNA tested.
A small white blob. This is my DNA.
It doesn't look like much, but it contains information
that describes and defines who I am,
why my face is this shape, the colour of my skin,
diseases that I may be susceptible to.
It is my genetic evolutionary history.
More than that, it tells me things about my future.
A DNA test can predict our chances of developing diseases,
such as cancer, diabetes or Alzheimer's, and it allows us to find out more
about our own evolutionary history than ever before.
In the not too distant future, scientists are going to use our genomes
to create individually targeted medicine.
But a little bit like Darwin's theory of natural selection,
misunderstood or in the wrong hands,
this could cause great unfairness, great political problems.
If you are tagged with a particular genetic disease
or a certain character type, you could be refused health insurance,
you could be turned down for a job unfairly,
and looking ahead,
there are even more sinister kinds of choosing to come.
In 2005, a team of scientists, led by Bruce Lahn,
announced they'd discovered a new gene variant
that had evolved relatively recently, about 6,000 years ago.
Some humans today still have the old, ancestral type,
but some have this new variant.
So what does the difference mean?
Bruce Lahn suggested that this gene variant
was associated with bigger and smarter brains.
Now, identifying intelligence with our genes is dangerous territory,
but Professor Lahn's study went further.
It showed that the new variant gene was more commonly found in Europeans,
than in sub-Saharan Africans.
He was connecting a gene associated with intelligence
with different human populations or "race".
One observer gleefully said,
"This is the moment the anti-racists and egalitarians have been dreading."
Genetic testing is confronting us with the latest political dilemma
to be raised by Darwin's dangerous idea.
What does it mean for our ideals of equality and fairness,
if evolution has made some of us more equal than others?
I'm about to get the results of my DNA test
to find out if natural selection has given me the new intelligent gene,
or the old ancestral type.
I'm curious, but, to be honest, slightly daunted, too.
MAN: You see a typical DNA sequence, this time of the ASPM gene.
Mm-hm.
MAN: Which is thought to be connected with the development of the brain.
And some people speculate that it might be connected with intelligence.
I'm not sure I want the answer to this one.
MAN: And, in fact, you have an interesting situation.
Where you see these white circles, for example in Africa,
you have the ancestral type of this particular gene
involved in brain development,
and where you can see these black pie slices that's where the derived type is.
This is the position, 44,871.
So you have an A at that position.
The A now, in fact, is the ancestral position.
The G is a derived one.
So, you would have the same type as is found in most Africans today.
Oh, so I don't... I don't have the clever gene?
MAN: I'm afraid, uh...
I don't. That's very... That's worrying for the BBC.
MAN: Well, as I say, this is a controversial study,
in the sense that although it is undisputed
that this is the distribution of the ancestral and the derived genes,
the conclusion that this is connected with some particular
intellectual capacities, that is still very much open to debate.
So I can stand with my black brothers on this one?
MAN: I would say so, yes.
MARR: I'm mildly relieved to report that these tests have been criticised
for suggesting something as complicated as intelligence
could be associated with a single gene.
But most scientists agree that, as more genes are identified,
predictive genetic tests will soon be available
for even the most complex traits,
like personality, behaviour, and, yes, intelligence.
And those tests could be used to influence
the way we're treated by governments, schools, employers,
even potential partners.
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection
is one of the most powerful ideas of all time.
It's a vivid description of how life on Earth has evolved,
and goes on evolving through competition and remorseless struggle.
But Darwin's theory is not, and was never intended to be,
a political manifesto.
We're free to make our own choices about how we treat each other
based on our own values.
Human beings are not born equal.
But the idea of equality in a legal and democratic sense,
well, that does survive, so long as we want it to.
And we know what happens when we chuck it to one side.
So, too, did Charles Darwin.
He said that, "Whatever the effect on evolution,"
"to neglect the weak would be an overwhelming present evil,
"and that human sympathy was the noblest part of our nature."
Wise words, as ever.