The week of 23 September 2001 was important for American public education. That's when the Public Broadcasting Service, PBS, broadcast an eight-hour TV series exploring the subject of evolution. This should help in keeping the subject firmly in the mainstream of world culture, where it has been for a hundred years.
For better or worse, most Americans get much of their information from television. I say for better because it supplies the things that text lacks and that makes science hard to teach well: actual sound and real-life imagery. I say for worse because what it doesn't supply makes science hard to learn well: detailed discussion of complex concepts that can be reread and studied intensively. Science television works best by marrying good images with the simplest explanations, so that viewers will get the message in one viewing.
The PBS series "Evolution" was a good sketch of the basics of evolution, suitable for people without much background in the subject—students, naturally, but also most U.S. adults. Until the American school system becomes as effective as those of other industrialized nations, programs like PBS's "Evolution" will have to do. Here's what the series covers.
Show 1, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," recounts how Charles Darwin published the first scientifically useful theory of biological evolution in 1859, and how scientists and the public responded during the remaining 23 years of his life. There is a risk of focusing too much on Darwin, because he was not the first to publish a theory of evolution and because his theory was incomplete. But the program also documents current research projects that bring to life the ideas as well as the man.
Show 2, "Great Transformations," looks at life's history as recorded in the fossil record. It presents the unified tree of life as well as some of its main branching places.
Show 3, "Extinction!" treats the mirror-side of Darwin's work. His book was On the Origin of Species, not about extinction—which is the destiny of species. By examining the five greatest known episodes of mass extinction plus the sixth one going on today, the series demonstrates how what Darwin began grew into what we're working on now.
Show 4, "The Evolutionary Arms Race," describes how competition pushes evolution. In the 1800s this line of thought caused an uproar because of its seeming conflict with moral values—never mind that Darwinism was not meant to apply to politics or culture. Today we emphasize that evolution also advances through cooperation. Both competition and cooperation are forms of natural selection, a core element of Darwinism.
Show 5 is "Why Sex?" and it makes clear how useless natural selection would be without individual variation—if there were nothing to select from. The power of sexual reproduction to create variation underlies all the major changes in living things since a billion years ago.
Show 6, "The Mind's Big Bang," tests the boundaries of Darwinian evolution by exploring the change in humankind that led to the emergence of the mind as we know it today. While the rise of civilization and the explosion of language and culture are outside of Darwinism—which is concerned only with genetic inheritance—there is a place for evolution in studying what led up to those great advances.
Show 7 ends the series with "What About God?" This segment does the viewer the favor of letting real people speak for themselves. The creationist movement is fueled by valid human experience, and the correct approach for a program of this sort is to be sensitive to that fact. The producers say they hope to "underscore the point that science and religion are compatible, although they play very different roles in assigning order to the universe and a purpose to life."
It should be clear that evolutionary theory has nothing direct to say about the moral matters that are central to religion. Pope John Paul II stated in this regard that "truth cannot contradict truth." One thing his statement means is that the older truth, religion, has an obligation to take the younger truth of science seriously, with a readiness to explore apparent conflicts deeply and fairly.
PBS's "Evolution" is a good beginning, and rebroadcasts both on the air and in American schools will help to repair the foundations of science education. But a television show is just useless infotainment if we do nothing with the knowledge. The PBS Web site has some resources for further learning, and my own resources can help make evolution a working part of your thinking and activism as well as your vocabulary.
PS: The discredited but still active "intelligent design" movement has its own video programs. Multimedia is a powerful means of influencing the public, and PBS's job does not end with a single series. Neither can a TV show untangle the web of misdirection and conflation the movement's arguments rely upon. But I can.
