Life on Earth

"I read the book Life on Earth when I was quite young. I knew about paleontology, classifications and things like that, but this book took a different approach – it was the evolutionary story, starting off with nothing, and ending up with primates. I don’t think the book has been bettered since, and that’s because it just seems to be the most interesting way to talk about life, through a narrative. Subsequently, other authors have tried introductions to biology by looking at different regions in the world, different behaviours and so forth but it is the evolutionary tale that makes a story worth reading. I guess that’s the criticism of the book; it gives the sense that evolution is progression, which of course it isn’t. People argued about whether it was or not at the turn of the 20th century, but we know now that evolution is neutral. In fact, I’ve wanted to write a book for a while now, looking at the 19th-century German biologist Ernst Haeckel who was an ultra-Darwinist and really pushed the idea of evolution as progress. He was very influential and actually still is, despite being wrong. He is even quoted in school textbooks, which is rather alarming. It’s not really something Attenborough looked at, but Darwin actually started off in his The Origin of Species, talking about how humans changed nature through domestication. Modern methods of artificial selection such as GM are just an extension of this same process. GM doesn’t worry me, though. It’s just a more efficient way of doing things than artificial selection, with less unpleasant side effects. With GM, in fact, the idea is that the farmer should be using less fertiliser, less pesticide, and so on. The sooner we get into GM and the sooner I can have GM decaffeinated coffee rather than chemically decaffeinated coffee, the better."