The genius of Charles Darwin. Part 1, Life, Darwin and everything.

Presented by Richard Dawkins, this is the first in a three-part series looking at Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through the process of natural selection. Dawkins speaks to a group of secondary school students about creationism versus evolution, then traces Darwin's own childhood shift of belief from religion to science, giving close attention to Darwin's earliest inklings of a theory of evolution and his inspiration from geology. Illustrated by footage of African animals Dawkins gives a full, comprehensive account of how Darwin deciphered a process of natural selection as the key to evolution. He shows how in the same way that animals battle in a 'war of nature', our human species is battling bacteria and viruses in order to survive. We hear about people who have a genetic resistance to the AIDS virus and consider their role in the future evolution of Africans. Dawkins describes Darwin's moral dilemma about publishing The Origin of the Species and describes how today the human genome project is finally producing irrefutable evidence to back up his theory.