I DO not watch the idiot box anymore; as an undergraduate I got my full share of it. What kept me glued to the television at that time were BBC’s amazing nature programmes produced by David Attenborough.

A 13-part nature special takes almost four years of hard work. He has done countless ones. After 50 years in the field he is still going strong — and is more forceful than ever about the fundamental importance of Darwin’s unifying theory of evolution.

Considerable pressure would be needed to persuade our TV channels to show Attenborough’s one-hour special, Charles Darwin and The Tree of Life, which BBC aired on Feb 1. This is part of a year-long series to mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s masterpiece The Origin of Species and his 150th birth anniversary. Going by clips on the Internet, the focus in the BBC programme appears to be the misconceptions that people have had about Darwin’s ‘dangerous’ theory. Were it to be aired here, it would clear these.

Antagonism towards the theory is widespread in Darwin’s own country as well. A recent poll showed that a third of UK teachers want creationism (or its new incarnation, intelligent design — ID) to be taught alongside evolutionary theory. A significant source of resistance, other than from those who believe in the literal interpretation of Genesis, comes from the feeling of being devalued — a consequence of being lumped together with other primates — instead of being regarded as a superior creation. However, it is only when we see other living beings and ourselves as part of an interacting, mutually beneficial system that we can begin to reverse the environmental crisis which is a partial consequence of the views mentioned above.

The US has seen fundamentalist Christians trying to use the ID idea to introduce creationism in school science courses, to discredit the theory of evolution. For them, the theory is little more than conjecture. But for the overwhelming number of biologists, it is as close to scientific fact as one can get.

The ID movement’s main claim is that there are things in the world — most notably life — which cannot be accounted for by known natural causes and that show features which, in any other context, could be attributed to intelligence. Living organisms are too complex to be explained by any natural, more precisely mindless, process. Instead, the design inherent in organisms can be accounted for only by invoking a designer.

According to Darwinism, evolution largely reflects the combined action of random mutation and natural selection. A random mutation in an organism, like random change in any finely tuned machine, is almost always bad. That’s why you don’t, screwdriver in hand, make arbitrary changes to the insides of your television. But, once in a great while, a random mutation in the DNA that makes up an organism’s genes slightly improves the function of some organ and thus the chances of the survival of the organism.

In a species whose eye amounts to nothing more than a primitive patch of light-sensitive cells, a mutation that causes this patch to fold into a cup shape might have a survival advantage. While the old type of organism can tell only if the lights are on, the new type can detect the direction of any source of light or shadow. Since shadows sometimes mean predators, that can be valuable information. The new, improved type of organism will, therefore, be more common in the next generation. That’s natural selection.

Repeated over billions of years, this process of incremental improvement should allow for the gradual emergence of organisms that are well adapted to their environments and that appear as though they were designed. By 1870, about a decade after The Origin of Species was published, nearly all biologists agreed that life had evolved, and by 1940 or so, most agreed that natural selection was a key force driving this evolution.

Until the 1970s, complicated mathematical and physical models were used to explain complex natural phenomena. It seemed reasonable to think that simple things had simple explanations and complex ones, such as humans, intricate ones. Complex systems that are invariably non-linear (i.e. effects are not proportional to causes) can now, in some cases, be explained by simple mathematical rules. Simple equations, often programmable on hand-held calculators, can generate the most complex visual and mathematical objects.

In Pakistan, fossil finds of whales in the past 15 years have shown how this largest of mammals, came from the sea, became an amphibian, evolved into a land animal and then returned to the sea. Some of the missing links, namely Ambulocetus (49 million years old) and Pakicetus (found in 2001) are now in our museums. See the video on www.tinyurl.com/bacn48 about the evolution of the whale, which ends with the description of the new find, Indohyus, in Kashmir on the Indian side. With such wonderful finds in the Indus River valley we should be working overtime to get our schoolchildren and the public enthused about paleontology and our past. The enthusiasm for dinosaurs in the West can be matched by that for our whales.

For this to happen, the Natural History Museum in Islamabad should stop treating its fossil treasures and other artifacts like a disjointed stamp collection. Darwin’s beautifully simple theory can bring it order. Today Darwin is not mentioned on its website and its public displays. This is not worthy of the Islamic civilisation that once pushed the frontiers of knowledge.

THE day after the great fire burned through central Victoria, I drove from Sydney to Melbourne. Smoke obscured the horizon, entering my air-conditioned car and carrying with it that distinctive scent so strongly signifying death, or, to Aboriginal people, cleansing.

It was as if a great cremation had taken place. I didn’t know then how many people had died in their cars and homes, or while fleeing, but by the time I reached the scorched ground just north of Melbourne, the dreadful news was trickling in. Australia has suffered its worst recorded peacetime loss of life. And the trauma will be with us forever.

I was born in Victoria, and over five decades I’ve watched as the state has changed. The long, wet and cold winters that seemed insufferable to me as a boy vanished decades ago, and for the last 12 years a new, drier climate has established itself. I could measure its progress whenever I flew in to Melbourne. Over the years the farm dams filled less frequently while the suburbs crept further into the countryside, their swimming pools oblivious to the great drying.

Climate modelling suggests the decline of southern Australia’s winter rainfall is caused by a build-up of greenhouse gas, much of it from coal burning. Victoria has the most polluting coal power plant on earth, and another plant was threatened by the fire. There’s evidence that global pollution caused a significant change in climate after the huge El Nino event of 1998. Along with the dwindling rainfall has come a desiccation of the soil, and more extreme summer temperatures.

This February, at the zenith of a record-breaking heatwave, Melbourne recorded its hottest day ever — a suffocating 46.1C, with even higher temperatures in rural Victoria. This extreme coincided with exceptionally strong northerly winds, followed by an abrupt change to southerly. This brought a cooling, but it was the shift in wind direction that caught so many in a deadly trap. Such conditions have occurred before. In 1939 and 1983 they led to dangerous fires. But this time the conditions were more extreme than they ever had been, and the 12-year “drought” meant plant tissues were bone dry.

Despite narrowly missing the 1983 Victorian fires and then losing a house to the 1994 Sydney bushfires, I had not previously appreciated the difference a degree or two of additional heat and a dry soil can make to the ferocity of a fire. This fire was quantitatively different from anything seen before.

My country is still in shock at the loss of so many lives. But inevitably we will look for lessons from this natural tragedy. The first, I fear, is that we must anticipate more such terrible blazes, for the world’s addiction to burning fossil fuels goes on unabated. And there is now no doubt that emissions pollution is laying the preconditions necessary for more such blazes.

When he ratified the Kyoto protocol, Australia’s prime minister Kevin Rudd described climate change as the greatest threat facing humanity. Shaken, and clearly having seen things none of us should see, he has now had the eyewitness proof of his words. We can only hope Australia’s climate policy, which is weak, is now significantly strengthened.

Rudd has said the arsonists suspected of lighting some fires are guilty of mass murder, and the police are pursuing the malefactors. But there’s an old saying among Australian firefighters: “Whoever owns the fuel owns the fire”. Let’s hope Australians ponder the deeper causes of this horrible event, and change their polluting ways before it’s too late. n

The writer is a scientist at the University of Macquarie, Sydney, and author of The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change.

— The Guardian, London