- Self - Host: Of course, Darwin was bound to go down well here in the States, where another academic preached his gospel of evolution, free enterprise style this time. Name of Sumner, a professor at Yale. He took Darwin and made it socially meaningful for the upwardly mobile. That is to say, the struggle for survival was part of the great American tradition that brought all comforts to those who worked for them. The struggle weeded out the weak, the unfit, and the stupid. Unless you gave them unfair help with dangerous nonsense like government aid, or welfare, or education. In which case they'd breed more like them, and drag the country down. In a heartwarming little pamphlet published in 1883, Sumner asked the question "What do the social classes owe each other?", and came up with the reassuring answer: nothing. For Sumner, Darwin gave proof that what America should be all about was liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest. In other words, the meek should inherit what's left. For Sumner, the best equipped to win the struggle was the great American businessman. As long as his survival wasn't endangered by evils like taxes, regulations, factory acts, that stuff. Absolute freedom of action was what made America great. And now, that was a scientific fact. Well, in a country founded on the principle of individualism, out here in the west where a man walked tall, might was right, life was rugged, where you could be anything you wanted to be if you had the guts to fight for it, in that sort of country Darwin's theory made no more than good horse sense. All you had to do was stay on the horse.
- Self - Host: There's nothing we consumerists can't do to the world. It's just so much raw material to be computer-modeled into new designs. Everything from blow dryers to babies. All you need's the specifications. Today, the only constant in life is change. And it's like that ironically, because 250 years ago, somebody here in northern Lapland set out to prove that the one thing the world never did was change.
- Self - Host: We're like that in the late 20th century west, aren't we? It's a dynamic, forward-looking, hi-tech, recycled, you name it world. The one thing you can be sure tomorrow will be, is different. Because we'll make it like that. We take nature, and remake it a million ways, and pretest them under every condition from the tropics to up here in the frozen north, so that when the consumerist finally gets his hands on it, it will be everything you ever wanted. Til you want something else.
- Self - Host: Here comes the year 2000. A lightweight, turbo-charged, blow-molded, energy-wise, fail-safe, nonpolluting, computerized, intercool, hydrosprung, carbon fiber, low drag, chip-designed, high speed, magnesium chassis, crash-tested, polycarbonate set of wheels. Built from sea water, burned to treat when you're finished with it, heats the house for a week. And that's just one version of the future. An experiment.
- Self - Host: So that makes these fossils millions of years old. You see what I'm getting at. If you can't tell the difference between two shellfish millions of years apart, then the rate at which things happened, changed, through history, can only be described somewhere between dead slow, and dead slow. Over a period of time that can only be described as geologic.
- Self - Host: Thanks to Darwin, on both sides of this east-west border here inside the Arctic Circle in northern Lapland where we began, or anywhere else you find it, on both sides the view is the same: People and societies can be changed. The argument is about how to do it, and what kind of change. They engineer daily life, we engineer genes. They suppress antisocial individualism, we reward it because it's maverick. And yet on both sides, the view ahead is equally clear, equally optimistic in terms of our ability to manipulate nature. Equally materialist, in the philosophical sense of the word.
- Self - Host: The 19th century industrial robber barons went for social dominism like flies to a honeypot. It gave what they liked to call their entrepreneurial activity the cachet of scientific respectability. After all, hadn't Sumner said millions are the product of natural selection? Financial giants like Rockefeller and Carnegie showed just how far that process could take you.
- Self - Host: Wagner himself was heavily into the new imperial Teutonic stuff. You know, Aryans being the super-race, war is good for the health, total obedience to the state, favorite color white, all the slogans. His fellow Germans couldn't get enough of it, operatic or otherwise. Well, put yourself in their place, if you can take it. Germany has just been united, they'd beaten the French in 1870 so they're top of the military league, industrial production is going up like a rocket, they're talking about having a colony or two, they've invented themselves an emperor, and still polite European society treats them as if they've got collective BO. What they need for their national paranoia is a touch of class. And here's Darwin with his scientific proof of the survival of the fittest, that struggle is natural and necessary, that even slime can get to the top if you give it long enough. He must have been music to their ears.
- Self - Host: We're made of the same stuff as the rest of nature, not different or special in the universe. And if there is an immediately recognizable purpose, it is like everything else a manmade one, here or on the other side. And as for the truth, well in the absence of belief, it's what you want it to be. And so is your future. And if that doesn't turn out right, well you've only yourself to blame.
- Self - Host: Once we lived in the image of the Creator, according to the Divine Plan, in a perfect and unchanging world, created and functioning with a purpose you could clearly identify anytime you read the Bible. Thanks to Darwin and the people who built on his work, the universe no longer looks so straightforward.
- Self - Host: On a Sunday afternoon in April, at the Sweden-Finland border, the last stage of a momentous journey was taking place. Hurrying to catch this train was a man called Ulyanov, coming by sleigh the last few miles of a trip that had brought him all across Europe in secret. Which was how he had lived for 17 years, moving from place to place, using a network of agents, codes, clandestine operations. Ulyanov carried a message from a man already dead, that would change the course of history. A message that would almost certainly put Ulyanov in danger. The dead man whose message Ulyanov carried was a German ideologist who had seen in Darwin scientific support for his beliefs. Beliefs Ulyanov kept alive. The view of the world drove Ulyanov towards possible death for his beliefs, and that had inspired his German mentor, was a social version of Darwin's views. Those views of Darwin would be echoed in the struggle that lay ahead. Darwin's theory that successful species annihilated their opposition, would be mirrored in the total victory that would come. Darwin's denial of any supernatural design in nature, would put control over their destiny into the hands of ordinary working people, not princes and kings. Darwin's mechanism of evolution according to natural laws fitted the plan that those laws would be used to design a new society. Darwin's concept of the evolution of a species towards its perfect form, strengthened the dream of a new society, forging ahead to a new world where superstition and oppression would be made redundant by reason and equality. Above all, Darwin's claim that change was inevitable, served to show that the success of the new ideology was equally inevitable, and that a new world could only be built on the ruins of the old one. Ulyanov, of course, was carrying the message of Marx to Russia. And after his triumphant arrival at the station in St. Petersburg, he would come to be revered by millions not as Vladimir Ulyanov, but by the revolutionary alias he had always used: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
- Self - Host: In 1917, Lenin designated Russia as the center of world socialism, in which the first benefits of the evolution of the new society would be enjoyed. The fruits of the Marxist struggle that was as basic to the improvements of the human species as the fight for survival was in nature. A struggle that would sow the seeds of world revolution with the new tools available to those who believe that changing history was a matter of molding the ideological attitudes of whole populations. Through indoctrination, directive, propaganda. Above all, that victory would only be won as Darwin had said it was in nature. Through violent struggle, the only way the proletariat would achieve the power necessary to change the world. And the struggle continues, to bring the whole family of man to socialism. Because the revolutionary ideal admits no half measures. For Marx, the logical and necessary end of social evolution is socialism. Just as for Darwin, the logical and necessary end of natural evolution is the organism that exists best it's best fitted to exist. But with half the world committed to the other side of the argument about how humanity should progress, committed to individualism and free enterprise, the struggle has taken a form with which we have become all too familiar.
- Self - Host: In 1868, Haeckel, having read Darwin and decided that he was the answer to everything in the known universe, produced a book modestly entitled "The Natural History of Creation", and started spreading Darwinism, Haeckel version. Over the next few decades, Haeckel and followers produced some rather interesting variants on the Darwin message. Let me treat you to some of the choicer samples. 'The fittest survive', says Darwin. So victorious Germans must be biologically superior to any losers, and they must be kept that way. So anything that might weaken the race--criminals, defectives, imbeciles, democrats--must be sterilized or shot. 'Racial hygiene', it's called. Also involved breeding stations where pure Aryans could get together with other pure Aryans to produce more pure Aryans. 'Man is an animal', says Darwin, and obeys the laws of nature. So, just as the cell dies in order to save the body, so the life of the individual may if necessary be sacrificed for the greater good of the state. 'The struggle is necessary', says Darwin. So nothing must prevent wars to eliminate or enslave the lower races. 'Hybrids are sterile', says Darwin. So marriage between Germans and non-Germans would be unnatural. By the way, is all this 19th century pseudoscientific garbage beginning to sound familiar? Well in 1899, Haeckel's next modest little number called "The Riddle of the Universe" sold a half a million copies and really spread the word. In order to get the message across to the next generation, they founded a youth movement. Founding member: Heinrich Himmler, crazy about everything Haeckel had said. So was his friend. You know, the one that misquoted Darwin so often in speeches. Here, at Nuremburg.
- Self - Host: [images of waves crashing on rocky cliffs] The Romantic Movement went rambling off in more senses than one. This was what life was all about. Never mind your lists and classifications. Nature in the raw held the secret of the universe. So they turned up the Beethoven, and went looking for the meaning of life, out there where a man could be alone with the elements. With the turmoil of the soul. With the restless, ever-changing world of nature. Come to think of it, it WAS ever-changing, wasn't it?