Wonders of Life. Andrew Cohen

in the face of evidence collected over centuries, that it can only be politically motivated; there is not a hint of reason in it. And more than that, taking such a position closes the mind to the most wonderful story, and this is a tragedy for those who choose it, or worse, are forced into it through deficient teaching.

      As someone who thinks about religion very little – I reject the label atheist because defining me in terms of the things I don’t believe would require an infinite list of nouns – I see no necessary contradiction between religion and science. By which I mean that if I were a deist, I would claim no better example of the skill and ingenuity of The Creator than in the laws of nature that allowed for the magnificent story of the origin and evolution of life on Earth, and their overwhelmingly beautiful expression in our tree of life. I am not a deist, philosopher or theologian, so I will make no further comment on the origin of the laws of nature that permitted life to evolve. I simply don’t know; perhaps someday we will find out. But be in no doubt that laws they are, and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is as precise and well tested as Einstein’s theories of relativity.

      If this sounds a little strong, then perhaps it reveals my genuine excitement in learning about the sheer explanatory power of Darwin’s theory when coupled with recent advances in biochemistry and genetics. Modern biology is close, in my view, to answering Schrodinger’s ‘How’ question. There are unknowns to be sure, which is what makes the subject of these films doubly exciting. Some parts are speculative, but that is nothing to be ashamed of in science. Indeed, all science is provisional. When observations of nature contradict a theory, no matter how revered, ancient or popular, the theory will be unceremoniously and joyously ditched, and the search for a more accurate theory will be redoubled. The magnificent thing about Darwin’s explanation of the origin of species is that it has survived over a hundred and fifty years of precision observations, and in that it has outlasted Newton’s law of universal gravitation.

      My favourite moment in the series is the final scene of the final film, which unusually, was filmed on our final evening; television shows are rarely made in chronological order. We found a tiny rocky island off the coast of northern Madagascar, no bigger than the average suburban garden, isolated in the warm waters of the Mozambique Channel. The idea was to sit down and chat about the experience of making the series, and film the result. I won’t tell you what I thought and said, because that should wait until the end of the book. But I do want to say one thing here in the introduction. I recall a conversation in March 2009, just before we started filming Wonders of the Solar System. Andrew, my co-author and executive producer, said that we would have achieved our goal if those who watched never again looked at the night sky in quite the same way. This is in the spirit of Feynman’s flower. Deeper understanding confers that most precious thing – wonder. A sky filled with tiny, twinkling lights is one thing, but a sky filled with other worlds is quite another. I have known this for virtually all my life, because I have always been an astronomer at heart. Perched on my island, thinking about what to say, I realised that I now felt precisely the same about a single blade of grass.

      On Christmas Eve 1968, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders became the first humans in history to lose sight of their home planet as they orbited the Moon on board Apollo 8. As Borman looked into the crystal dark, pitted by the faint light of a billion worlds untarnished by atmospheric gases, framed by a virgin lunar surface unseen since its formation 4.5 billion years ago, he described his universe without Earth as a ‘vast, lonely, forbidding expanse of nothing’. On the ninth orbit, the crew made a scheduled live television broadcast in which they chose to read the Genesis creation story back across the quarter of a million miles to Earth.

       ‘We are now approaching lunar sunrise and, for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you:

       In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.

      And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’

      The act of reading from the Bible proved controversial, and was challenged in court as a violation of the 1st amendment of the United States Constitution, which prevents the promotion of religion by the federal government, of which NASA is a part. The Supreme Court dismissed the case, on the grounds that it had no jurisdiction in lunar orbit.

      While the Genesis story is a myth, I have always found this broadcast moving; not merely because the King James version of the Bible contains some of the greatest prose ever written in the English language, but because it speaks to an ancient, resonant desire to understand our origin and the origin of our home. Why is the Earth a living oasis amid, as far as anyone can tell, a forbidding expanse of nothing? What is special about our pale blue anomaly of a world that makes it home to life?

      These questions are complex, and we do not yet have all the answers, but there is a scientific consensus on at least some of the ingredients a planet requires to allow the emergence of life and the evolution of complex organisms capable of taking their first, faltering steps into a wider Universe. Many of those ingredients are common throughout the Solar System and beyond, but we have as yet no evidence for life, simple or complex, beyond Earth. That may be because the emergence of living things required a significant slice of luck and billions of years of relative stability; spacecraft builders may be a rare and precious commodity.

      This thought may have been adrift somewhere in Frank Borman’s consciousness, catalysed by his feelings of isolation 400,000 km from home, when he ended the 1968 Christmas broadcast with a phrase I have always found overpowering in its simplicity and depth of meaning. To me, it was an instinctive plea to all of us to value our home – the absolutely necessary platform for the continued existence of, just possibly, the only living civilisation in the Universe:

      ‘And, from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.’

      ‘Earth rise’, first observed from Apollo 11 in 1969, gave us a totally new perspective on the planet we call home.

      In early September each year, monarch butterflies gather in their millions east of the Rocky Mountains before migrating south to the evergreen forests of central Mexico.

RETURN OF THE KING

      With its vivid orange colour and beautiful markings, the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) is a striking example of the simple aesthetic beauty of life. But as is so often the case in the natural world, the superficial beauty of these butterflies is immeasurably enhanced by a deeper scientific understanding of their life cycle and biochemistry, and the reasons for their form and function.

      Each year, as autumn approaches across Canada and the northern United States, millions of monarch butterflies begin preparations for an arduous expedition. To survive the harsh northern winter, they embark on one of nature’s great migrations, travelling up to 4,000 km to warmer domains in the south. It is a vast distance for such a small and seemingly fragile creature to travel, and requires the birth of a special generation of butterflies. An average adult monarch has a life span of little more than four weeks, but, when faced with the journey south, a ‘methuselah generation’ emerges; a generation that lives nearly ten times longer than its parents and grandparents.

      Living