To find and film animals. This is the biggest flower in the world. The blue whale! It's the biggest creature that exists on the planet.

 

In a new BBC program called Charles Darwin and Tree of Life, Attenborough marks the bicentenary of Darwin's birth and shares his personal view of Darwin's brilliant but controversial idea that all life is a result of common descent by natural selection. In this interview for the science journal Nature, he talks about the program and how the fact of evolution has always been obvious to him.

 

You would have to have been extraordinarily blinkered if you didn't stub your toe against the theory of evolution, very early on in your life, I mean that if you collect fossils, which I did as a kid. You know that the ammonites change as you go up in the geological column. Evolution is not just a theory as many a correspondent writes me and says. It is a historical fact like any other historical facts as certain as the fact that William the Conqueror landed in 1066, except it's more certain, because the evidence for it is from a much wider range of fact. Yet of course I can't remember time when I wasn't aware of Darwin, to be honest. I know because it's written in my copy of the Origin that I bought them, the Origin when I was 18, but I am sure that I knew about Wallace certainly when I was 14 or 12.

 

It's not about the ethical program, it's not about Darwin's life. It is about the various objections which people in Darwin's time and ever since Darwin's time have found to accepting the proposition of evolution. So that in Darwin's time, geographical distribution of animals was not understood, the mechanism of genetics was not understood at all. Those were the sort of obstacles which people over and over again said to Darwin it can't be true because of these reasons. 

 

Now the solution to these questions has only been fully found in my lifetime, surprisingly recent. I mean, we've only really understood about DNA for less than 50 years, we have understood about continental drift for 50 years. The reality, the fact that the continents have moved in special part wasn't proved even when I was an undergraduate, and I was in Cambridge and demanded of my professor the talks about continental drift. He said I refuse to do so, because you can't demonstrate that there is any power which would shift continents by a millimeter. All those answers to the obstacles to the theory have only recently been out there, but now they are out there, and that together accumulatively, they validate Darwin's insight to a degree which we all ought to be aware of.

 

The influence of the Book of Genesis, which says as the Lord God said, go forth and multiply to Adam and Eve, and the natural world is there for you to dominate. You have dominion over the animals and plants of the world, and that basic notion that the world is there for us, and that if it doesn't actually serve our purposes, it is dispensable, that has produced the devastation of vast areas of the land surface. Of course, it's all known, gross oversimplification. But that's why Darwinism and the fact of evolution is of great importance, because it is that attitude which has led to devastation of so much and way on to the situation that we are in.