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Evolution:
The Series
With Richard Hutton
"Evolution" Series Executive Producer
Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2001; Noon EDT
Monday, Sept. 24, PBS will begin airing the seven-part television series, "Evolution," which travels around the world to examine evolutionary science and the effect it has had on society and culture. From an in-depth look at Charles Darwin's key concepts of evolution to the struggle between science and religion, the series seeks to explain what the theory of evolution means for our past, present and future.
Richard Hutton, executive producer of the "Evolution" series, will be online Wednesday, Sept. 26 at Noon EDT, to discuss the series.
Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.
Hutton came to WGBH from Disney. Prior to that, he served as senior vice president of television programming for WETA in Washington, D.C. His productions included The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, Washington Week in Review and The Civil War. His books include "Bio-Revolution: DNA and the Ethics of Man-Made Life," "Genetic Prophecy: Beyond the Double Helix" and "The Cosmic Chase."
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over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
Colorado Springs, Colo.:
The Discovery Institute in Seattle, which houses an intelligent design think tank, has strongly criticized the PBS Evolution Series for not including intelligent design proponents. What distinguishes the scientists whom are included in your program, such as Sean Carroll, from their intelligent design counterparts, such as Jonathan Wells? Is it the science or is it just viewpoint discrimination?
Richard Hutton: First, the Discovery Institute was invited to participate in Evolution, but declined, because it disagreed with its placement in the series.
Be that as it may, what distinguishes Sean Carroll from Jonathan Wells is neither science nor viewpoint discrimination. It is evidence.
As science journalists, we make sure there is real scientific evidence for the ideas we portray, even if some are controversial and still speculative. That means pieces of original research, hypotheses, and theories that have been peer-reviewed, published, and debated someplace in the thousands of scientific periodicals and journals that exist. (Biological Abstracts, a well-known scientific database, includes about 7,000.) Carroll’s work exists in this scientific marketplace of ideas. Wells’ contentions, expressed in trade books, do not.
This is not a trivial point. The process that allows information to be transformed from assertion to evidence has been tested over time, in every scientific discipline. As a science journalist, not a scientist, I don’t judge the science behind intelligent design assertions that there is evidence to contradict evolution. For example, I don’t perform experiments to test Michael Behe’s theory of irreducible complexity. But I do make a determination as to whether or not the assertions reach the level of evidence.
If you go to Biological Abstracts, for instance, and type in the keywords "evolution and adaptation," you’ll get about 38,000 hits over the past decade. If you type in "intelligent design" or "irreducible complexity," you’ll get hits in the single digits, under 10. And none of these hits involves actual scientific research providing evidence about the claims being made. (You can perform the same test on MEDLINE, or other scientific and medical databases.)
Does this mean that Behe is wrong? No. It means that we journalists can’t assess the scientific validity of his ideas appropriately. And we shouldn’t include them in our series.
Madison, Wis.:
I was sorry that in the first episode the work of Alfred Russel Wallace was used only as the goad for Darwin to publish The Origin of Species, rather than actually having an actor play Wallace as someone who independently developed the same theory. If Darwin never had lived, your first episode would have been about Wallace. What considerations went into this decision?
Richard Hutton: Wallace was an amazing man -- naturalist, world traveler, theoretician. But we had to make choices, and we didn't have time both to go into his story and to do justice to Darwin.
Darwin came up with his theory in 1838,and spent the next 20 years finding evidence. By the time Wallace wrote him, describing the same theory, Darwin was already deeply into a very long book on the topic. Obviously, Wallace's letter galvanized him.
What I like about what happened next is the honor in these two. Their papers were presented simultaneously (even though Wallace was not in England); and Wallace never seemed to resent the fame that Darwin received.
But chronologically, natural selection was Darwin's idea first, and his book was so clearly and carefully reasoned that the idea couldn't be ignored. We don't know whether Wallace would have had the same impact.
Montville, N.J.:
What would evidence for intelligent design look like in your opinion?
Richard Hutton: I'm not sure. Some of the assertions presented in Behe's book have already been overtaken by subequent research. But the evidence would be presented, debated, and evaluated in scientific circles. And scientists could either build on it, or disprove it.
Washington, D.C.:
So what was it like working with Ken Burns on "The Civil War?"
Richard Hutton: I came to The Civil War late in the game. Ward Chamberlain, who had been the President of WETA, was really Ken's first contact. But I remember going up to Ken's house and screening portions of the rough cut.
What was it like working with Ken? Probably a bit like working with me, when I'm deeply into a subject. We get obsessed, and can't stop thinking about it. And it shows.
Baltimore, Md.:
Are there any components of the Evolution project besides the TV series?
Richard Hutton: The series is just one piece of the Project. There is a fabulous, rich web site (pbs.org/evolution), a companion book ("Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea," by Carl Zimmer, a wonderful science writer), and an online continuing education course for teachers, with a range of materials linked to it. (Ignore the adjectives; I'm biased.)
Our hope was that we'd be able to help dispel some of the misunderstandings about evolution, and that we''d clarify what it is -- and isn't.
Williamsburg, Va.:
What are some of the larger questions which are still unanswered by evolutionary theory?
Richard Hutton: There are open questions and controversies, and the fights can be fierce. Just a few of them:
The origin of life. There is no consensus at all here -- lots of theories, little science. That's one of the reasons we didn't cover it in the series. The evidence wasn't very good.
punctuated equilibrium vs. more-or-less steady change
the relative values of natural and sexual selection
anything to do with evolutionary psychology
issues with the molecular clock
genes vs. morphology as indicators of relationships
I should say that these (and others) all have to do with mechanisms associated with evolution; they are not controversies surrounding the core theory itself. As Bruce Alberts, President of the National Academy of Sciences, has said:
Evolution is neither
a political agenda, nor a matter of controversy within the
scientific community. Rather, Darwin's work provides
the foundation for modern biology: it is the central organizing principle
that scientists use to understand the similarities between living things,
the enormous diversity of life, and many features of the physical world
we inhabit.
Washington, D.C.:
Hello,
First of all, thank you for NOT including a lot of material on the bogus theory of intelligent design. So far, the series is very good, in my opinion, and I'm a biologist.
However, in Slate magazine has criticized it as kissing up to the Creationists. How would you respond to this accusation?
Richard Hutton: And thank you for noticing.
I saw the Slate piece, and I think it misses the point. As I remember, it suggests that we avoided dealing with the darker implications of evolution for religion. But our intent was to focus on science. When we said that science and religion are reconcilable, we were focusing on the core definition of what science is, and what it isn't. A decent definition (there are many) is: "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena."
It's not about faith. It's not about religion. It's an explanation of natural processes in the natural world. As Genie Scott says, "It's about what happened. Not who dun it."
Saying that science forces religion to confront the implications of advancing knowledge is not exactly news, and I'm not sure why Slate thinks it is a new idea. When Copernicus and Galileo figured out that the earth revolved around the sun, it blew away a cherished religious construct. Religions adapted to it, and most of them have adapted to evolution. In fact, most major religions have no doctrinal issues with evolutionary theory.
Columbia, Mo.
I'm a biochemist who studies evolutionary processes in a test tube; I also teach a science course for non-majors (mostly journalists). The series is great. However, a major hangup for the ID crowd (and my students) is the origin of life, where we don't have many scientific answers yet. How much of the series will address the ways in which evolution allows us to ask questions (even when we are far from satisfactory answers) while creationism doesn't?
Richard Hutton: I think the series does what you ask by portraying scientists actually doing science. Last night, we had Peter Ward in the Karoo desert, David Burney in Hawaii, Alan Rabinowitz in Thailand, Phil Gingerich in Egypt, Jenny Clack in Greenland, etc., etc. To my mind, the illustrations of real work being done accomplishes this more effectively than anything didactic.
Montville, N.J.:
What type of evidence would lead you to question the validity of the theory/idea of evolution? (i.e. is the theory falsifiable?)
Richard Hutton: There are dozens of tests. A simple one, for common ancestry and descent with modification, would have been if rats had been shown to be closer genetically to humans than chimpanzees are, with no satisfactory explanation. (This one's been done -- but a lot of species have not been extensively analyzed genetically). In evolution, with its model of a branching tree of life, the order of relationships is extremely important.
Another: if Crick and Watson's molecular structure of DNA had been found not to be consistent with evolutionary theory about the passing on of inherited traits.
There are all sorts of other ways to take down evolutionary theory. But it's probably important to remember that thousands of scientists have performed millions of experiments in dozens of independent fields since 1859 -- and evolution is not only still the best explanation we have, it's gotten stronger.
Portland, Ore.:
Do you have any opinions about evolutionary
psychology?
It seems to me that it has become very
popular lately and of course, its very
much at odds with traditional views of
morality.
I think that evolution applied to physical
characteristics is well-accepted, but our
concepts of our mental self is still to
primitive and still very controversial.
Richard Hutton: My journalist's opinion of evolutionary psychology is that many of its assertions are provocative and fascinating, but advocates have a long way to go to prove much of what's been proposed.
It is, however, being debated constantly in scientific journals and periodicals. And new research keeps getting presented.
We cover a bit of evo-psych in Show 5 ("Why Sex?") -- of course, with a warning that it is controversial. Criticisms of evo-psych can be found in our companion book, "Evolution: Triumph of an Idea," by Carl Zimmer.
Alexandria, Va.:
Will the series be re-broadcast soon? I hope so. I taped the first one but didn't have another blank tape for the second installment.
Thanks!
Richard Hutton: I don't know when it's being re-broadcast. I hope soon, too. (We're selling the tapes...)
Laurel, Md.:
Speaking broadly as a science journalist, not just about evolution/creation, what are the most important issues facing science communication in a modern democracy? We have school boards dominated by creationists in some juristictions; many people fear (legitimately) that new discoveries often make the world more dangerous; people like Madame Cleo make lots of money peddling to the non-scientific; and too many of our college science classes serve almost exclusively the foreign-born.
From a communications/media perspective is science winning?
Richard Hutton: I think the biggest challenge is the yawning chasm between what the public understands and what science actually is, does, and knows.
Years ago, most science was simple enough to be understood with a bit of effort. Now it is extremely complicated -- and, as if gets more complicated, the public's attention span gets shorter. Given that we are in a world both buffeted and buttressed by science and technology, and that, as citizens, we're being asked to evaluate the risks and benefits of new research nearly every week, science literacy seems like a huge issue.
Science, I think, is losing....
Vienna, Va.:
One of the hardest questions for evolutionists to answer is the ape-to-man line. If Cro-Magnon man and Homo Sapiens actually DID evolve from primitive apes through the Australopithecus and Neanderthal stages as we are told, then why do these primitive apes still exist? One day we are told one thing by the anthropoligists and the next day we are told something else, based on whatever the latest skull finds are. The oldest "humans," depending on who you believe, come from Africa (Olduvai Gorge), China, Mesopotamia, or any one of a number of different places. Each new "ape-man" find is assigned a new date and alters the so-called "evolutionary" path. The whole thing to me appears to be one big hoax, and I am really surprised that this kind of stuff is actually taught in the schools today. What is even worse is that so many students believe it.
Richard Hutton: The past ten years have witnessed an explosion of knowledge about human origins. Nobody has anything clase to a complete picture, but the details are becoming clearer. I don't understand how it can be called a hoax. If I know anything about scientists, it's that they are intensely competitive, and would NEVER collaborate successfully to pull off what would have to be one of the most complicated scams in history.
And I have to say that the fact that anthropologists are changing their assessments of our family tree indicates that science is going on -- new-found evidence is challenging existing ideas, and the result is a clearer understanding of what happened.
The answer to your question as to why "primitive apes still exist" -- well, that is easily answered by evolution. Ancient species were not PARENTS of modern humans; they were antecedents. When hominids branched off from a direct ancestor, the original line probably continued for some time. It may have branched again and again.
Finally, modern humans did not descend from the apes alive today. Both diverged from a common ancestor millions of years ago.
Richard Hutton: Thank you everyone, for your questions. Sorry I didn't have time to get to more of them. This has been great fun. Please check out the shows tonight and tomorrow -- and go to our web site, pbs.org/evolution.
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