The Truth is Much Wilder? Awe and Atheism in BBC’s Evolution

Dr Zachary Ardern writes: The Nicene Creed affirms:

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

The BBC Science Unit apparently neither shares nor countenances this belief. 45 seconds into the first episode of the beautifully produced new five part series “Evolution”, science and theology are placed in quite direct opposition; the series states and restates with various formulations that evolutionary processes rule out divine involvement. The much-dismissed “new atheism” is perhaps not yet as passé as we’re often told. The series ends in a similar way, teaching that we simply were not “made”.

Here are some quotations from series narrator Chris Packham; repeatedly the message is that because there are processes involved, we are the product of nature rather than foresight.

It’s easy to imagine that all of this is like somehow preordained … that it’s been made, a world of balance and purpose. But the truth—the truth is much wilder. This is a world of survivors. [Ep. 1: 0m 45s]

There was no blueprint, no grand design. Evolution is a process, shaped by powerful invisible drivers. [Ep. 1: 4m 51s]

We’re not perfect, and we weren’t made. We’ve been shaped by exactly the same forces that have shaped every living organism on this planet. [Ep. 5: 52m 5s]

Theologically of course, humans per se (One excepted) are neither perfect nor the center of the universe—we are after all, a little lower than the angels. And the idea that God uses secondary causes, such that processes and providence are in no conflict, is thoroughly biblical. We can talk intelligibly about secondary causes without mentioning God, and that’s fine and how science generally works. The overstep comes when theological concepts of providence, design, and human uniqueness are asserted to be simply ruled out by the science.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dr. Adam Rutherford, genetics populariser and president of the British Humanist Association (BHA), loves the series. “Evolution should be compulsory viewing for everyone over the age of five.” It seems the BHA’s opposition to “indoctrination” of children ends swiftly when they like the message. Rutherford starts his review citing the famous statement that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. This is the title of a 1973 essay by a founding father of modern evolutionary genetics, Theodosius Dobzhansky. Few who quote it actually read the essay. In it, Dobzhansky (an Eastern Orthodox Christian) was at pains to emphasise that science and Christian faith are not in conflict, ending the essay stating that in the view of one of his own heroes, “Creation is realised in this world by means of evolution”.

Back to the BBC series. Setting aside the secular humanist lens reflexively but not reflectively propounded, there is much to enjoy here. While I have some minor technical quibbles, I definitely appreciate how the science was communicated and displayed. Each episode starts with a charismatic modern organism and traces the history of some feature of the organism. This involves some repetition of key evolutionary events across the episodes, which might make it hard to follow closely, for those not very familiar with the history of life on Earth; or perhaps rewinding the tape of life multiple times will help to reinforce the narrative.

Some will watch critically, looking for scientific implausibilities. I encourage them to consider the full weight of the evidence (which the series can only touch on). It’s typically much easier to be a skeptic than to put forward a positive position that tries to account for all of the data; I find this is true both for naturalistic critics of Christian faith and Christian critics of evolution. With this perspective, here are some comments on the first three episodes, from my perspective as a Christian active in evolutionary research. 

Episode 1: the Elephant—the evolution of complexity

This episode is an introduction and looks at the evolution of complexity via natural selection. One of the interesting aspects is how it introduces the concept of the “last universal common ancestor”, LUCA. This is the farthest point which we can trace evolutionary history back to based on currently available genomes—not to be confused with the origin of life itself, or the first complex cell, or any particularly special point in evolutionary history. The episode is somewhat unclear on these distinctions, but they’re subtle and mixing them up is common!

The idea of the universal ancestor is a remarkably elegant theory, and in my view modern genetics has given it a strong boost. We find, for instance, that the genome of any given living organism you might show me encodes some proteins which are extremely widely shared across diverse forms of life, with an overall pattern of similarity in gene sequences which points to a tree of life. These shared proteins and “nested hierarchy” pattern of similarity allows us to trace out the broad shape of the history of life (including parts which do not strictly follow a simple “tree” shape), using the sequence of letters.

This approach is rather like the way in which we can trace the history of languages by comparative linguistics, or can trace the history of many minor scribal errors in New Testament manuscripts (and infer the original text) through comparing geographically diverse manuscripts. “Errors” in genomes are mutations, which accumulate over the generations as the genome is copied by replication.

As we find more diverse genomes (as is very likely to continue) or improve our phylogenetic methods (also very likely), the exact nature of LUCA inferred will shift. LUCA is the most recent ancestor of all known modern species, and as our knowledge of modern species expands, our understanding will shift slightly. What has been consistently inferred in recent studies (thus far) however is that LUCA was remarkably complex. As is noted in the “evidence” section at the end of this episode, a recent study suggested LUCA had 2600 genes; more than many modern bacteria or archaea.

If this ancestor, like modern cells, really was “more complex than any machine ever made by any human”, and did arise not long after Earth became habitable, its existence is truly remarkable indeed. At some point there was a break between non-life and life, and while it is an active field of research and there are some very interesting hints, we are very far away from a good understanding of the trajectory between the two. Some more awe and wonder at life itself may be in order.  

Incidentally, for a different Christian review of the series (with which I’m in partial agreement), including a more critical take on LUCA, see Prof. Richard Buggs’ recent blogposts, starting here.

Episode 2: the Ostrich—the evolution of sex

This focuses on the evolution of sex and reproduction. The early stages of the evolution of eukaryotes and the evolution of sex are highly debated, with many different models available—but a clean story is presented (~7mins). It’s also massively oversimplified, as other forms of genetic mixing had existed long prior to the events discussed. The series has a tendency to advance somewhat speculative hypotheses about what selective factors drove the evolution of particular biological features.

In reality, these are often highly contested. Inventing biological “just so stories” about events in the distant past is easy, but finding decisive evidence for any particular suggestion is hard. How much major events in evolution are really driven by natural selection is also debated. The evolution of land-dwelling tetrapods from lobe-finned fish is however much better evidenced and nicely explained in this episode.   

Discussing the origin of asymmetric flight feathers, Packham notes “if it was a mistake, it was a very fortunate one.” [47:05] The same could be said about many events in the evolutionary past. Do we have a right to take repeated good fortune for granted? 

Episode 3: the Bat—the evolution of feeding

Tracing the evolution of jaws provides persuasive evidence of how vertebrates are related to each other, and this episode spells out some of this evidence. Talking about the ear bones, as at various points throughout the series, we hear that “no designer was involved in making these bones” [38:26]. But, also consistent throughout the series, Packham alternates between insisting we know there’s no underlying providential guidance and wondering at the sheer improbabilities of particular events occurring in the order that they did. We do indeed have good evidence that these events occurred, but they remain remarkable.

A few minutes later, for instance, we learn of the remarkably precise asteroid hit (falling near land rather than the nearby deep ocean, on the spinning Earth) which led to the decline of the dinosaurs and the rise of mammals.

And it was such a twist of fate. Had that asteroid impacted just 30 seconds later […] those giant reptiles might not have died out.

Similarly, a study has suggested if the angle of incursion of that asteroid were not approximately 60 degrees, the consequences would have been less severe and presumably evolution would have played out differently. Life’s history involves many such fortunate events, and it seems to me that whether you’re inclined to ascribe the full set of such events ultimately to many remarkable and fundamentally inexplicable twists of fate or divine providence over the natural order is not a scientific question.   

From the 51 minute mark in this episode there is some dramatic music and an attempt to draw some significance from evolution; seeking to inspire us towards caring for our environment. To one sharing the host’s worldview, this will be music to their ears, but to me it seems like a stretch. While creation is of course inspiring, creatures are indeed extraordinary, and creation care is one of the human race’s great responsibilities, naturalistic evolution by itself does not give us any moral instruction. Confusing this, committing the naturalistic fallacy with an evolutionary angle, has led to all kinds of unfortunate errors.  

Summary

The philosophy of atheistic materialism is in this series, as in a large proportion of British popular science, presented as both intimately bound up with the project of science and just the way the world is. On deeper investigation, I suggest, it is actually a surprisingly poor fit with the project of science, a poor fit with human dignity and a poor fit with the (rightly) urgent message proclaimed regarding creation care. But, on the other hand, these very real failures of atheistic materialism don’t undermine the very real evidence for an evolutionary history to life on Earth.

Conflating the evidence for evolution with a naturalistic philosophy is a rhetorical move common to many atheists and many Christian opponents of evolution, but it is mistaken. Evolution is a very successful and impressive scientific theory, and has a lot going for it as a big picture view of life’s history. But it doesn’t answer our biggest questions as human beings, and the project of evolutionary biology, for all the difficult and interesting questions it may raise, fits within a wider finely tuned and remarkably comprehensible universe.

In my view, the events of evolution really are wonderful and genuinely worth studying. We are not just the obvious outworkings of simple natural processes, but should count ourselves fortunate to be here. I can happily agree with Chris Packham that (whatever he meant by it) the great interconnected family of life that we are part of really is “always undeniably miraculous” [Ep. 1, 51:50]. Is this beauty that we all see merely epiphenomenal on a deeper chaos, or a hint of a deeper order and rationality?

This same question has been asked at least since the ancient Greek philosophers, with defenders of each view among them, as well as in diverse cultures around the world. In my own research into evolutionary processes, I see both remarkable fortuitous contingency and underlying lawlike processes which give a deep structure to evolutionary change. A robust Christian doctrine of creation has room for both, and both provide at least a gentle challenge to an unreflective atheism.

Charles Darwin summarised the beauty of an evolutionary view in the closing sentence, the peroration, of his masterpiece On the Origin of Species. There have been multiple leading evolutionary biologists over the last ~170 years who have been able to affirm both the Nicene Creed and Darwin’s Peroration. Perhaps we and the BBC can learn from them.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Dr Zachary Ardern is a research fellow in microbial evolutionary genomics at a leading research institute in Cambridge. He is also an Associate of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion and a Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR). For occasional writing from him, see his Substack.