♪ ♪
TYSON: If an extraterrestrial scouting party were to survey Earth,
what would they make of us?
Who are we?
Are we as a species capable of fundamental change?
Or is there something in our DNA that will determine our fate?
[groaning and moaning].
[speaking in native language].
TYSON: Do the dead hands of forgotten ancestors impel us
in some direction beyond our control?
Can we free our children from the demons that torment us and
haunt our species?
Can we be trusted with our own future?
Since the civilization of Ancient Persia,
and probably even before, we've wondered if there's
something about human nature that contains the seeds of our destruction.
[theme music plays].
♪ ♪
TYSON: If there are places on Earth that are sacred to our species,
surely this must be one of them.
The earliest site we know of where fire was tamed for human needs.
More than a million years ago, here,
in what is today known as Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa,
our ancestors gathered and first kindled the hearth of human culture.
Every human being alive today on Earth is a member
of the species Homo sapiens.
The so-called "wise ones."
And our forbearers here tonight are Homo erectus,
"those who stood up."
They're not yet us, but we carry them within us.
We don't know much about them.
We think they took care of each other when they became old or ill.
We know they were skilled toolmakers.
It was around fires such as this one that we began to cook our food.
To tell each other stories.
And to create a shared learned identity with our kin.
Had life and humans first evolved only hundreds or even
thousands of years ago, we might know most of what's
important about our past and how we came to be the way we are.
But instead, our species is hundreds of thousands of years old.
Homo erectus,a couple of million.
Primates, tens of millions.
Mammals, more than 200 million.
And life, about four billion years old.
All but a few of our ancestors are wholly unknown to us,
and we sift through the Earth to find the bits of ash and
animal bone that are the only surviving evidence of our humanity.
We only began living with a future in mind,
consciously leaving a detailed record of who we were and what
we believed around 5,000 years ago.
And yet, one thing remained constant from Homo erectus to
the greatness of Ancient Persia.
Our fascination with fire.
And this was true here at Persepolis,
a magnificent complex built by the Persian emperors of the
sixth century BCE,
when Persia was the only superpower on Earth.
These great kings worshipped a God named Ahura Mazda,
whose origins in time are lost to us.
His prophet was Zoroaster.
Every Zoroastrian temple was consecrated to fire.
It played the central role in Zoroastrian worship,
symbolizing both the purity of their God and the light
of the illuminated mind.
Tending an eternal flame through the centuries was one
of the few ritual obligations of the Zoroastrians.
They chose this first truly human achievement,
the domestication of fire,
as the focal point of their worship.
The God Ahura Mazda didn't ask much.
He didn't want your ritual sacrifices,
he didn't want your money.
All he asked of human beings was good thoughts,
good words and good deeds.
But for some reason, most people couldn't fulfil
these simple requests.
Often they had bad thoughts and said evil things,
and some of them committed crimes that were evil.
Why?
It was all because of Ahura Mazda's polar opposite,
Angra Mainyu.
This is where the devil was born.
From his short horns, to his hooves,
Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion from Greece
to India for 1,000 years.
No wonder they were so influential on the religions
that came after.
For the Zoroastrians, all the evil in the world,
the crimes committed by humans,
as well as the catastrophes of natural disasters and disease,
were the results of Angra Mainyu's unceasing mischief.
Their God, Ahura Mazda,
looked to human beings to help him defeat the devil.
Any person by their actions could tip the scales of the
whole future of the universe in either the direction of good or evil.
In this prescientific world,
when evil reared its ugly head,
what better way to understand it than demonic possession?
[barking]
This is not a story of good and evil,
of the struggle between a God and a demon.
It's actually just a story of a predator and its prey.
In this case, the predator is microscopic and it's been
incubating in its victim.
Diseased microbes can be formidable predators.
Not only attacking and eventually killing,
but also taking over their hosts.
Changing their behavior to spread their microorganisms to other hosts.
We're in the bloodstream of that poor,
unlucky dog, who, through no fault of his own,
just because of a chance encounter with a rabid bat,
now finds himself the main character in a zombie horror story.
Those bullets are the rabies virus.
On being injected into the bloodstream of this placid,
people-loving dog, they head to the dog's brain,
right to the limbic system,
where the control buttons for rage reside.
By attacking the nerve cells,
the rabies virus is converting the poor animal
into a marauding, snarling,
vicious predator without loyalties or love for anyone.
[baby crying].
Rabid animals can be fearless.
Now that the limbic system has been conquered,
another detachment of rabies viruses are dispatched to the
saliva manufacturing machinery in the dog's throat.
Their assignment is to put it into overdrive,
while paralyzing the nerves for swallowing.
This maximizes the chances for the infected saliva
to leave the dog and invade the next target.
But how is such a degree of tactical coordination
possible by a virus?
How can a virus know which part of another creature's
brain is the seat of anger?
We ourselves didn't figure that out until very recently.
This is the power of evolution by natural selection.
Given enough time, a random mutation,
no matter how highly specialized...
Say, a virus' ability to paralyze a victim's throat,
will take hold.
If it enhances the virus' chance of survival,
it will be passed on.
All it needs in every generation is a victim to
carry the disease.
Keeping that wicked flame alive.
The transformation from the family guardian to the
ferocious wild-eyed demon is complete.
The dog is furious, although he has no idea why.
[speaking in native language].
A helpless pawn of the viruses within him,
he can't resist the impulse to attack.
If the attack is successful,
the viruses in the dog's saliva will enter the
bloodstream of the victim through the lesion or laceration.
And then, they'll set about taking over this new victim.
The rabies virus is a brilliant manipulator.
It knows its victims and how to pull their strings.
It coordinates its attack, circumventing defenses,
infiltrating, outflanking, accomplishing a coup d'état
within its prey and turning the most gentle among us into
the most violent.
We are at the mercy of unseen forces.
Viruses, microbes, hormones, our very own DNA.
Where does the programming end and free will begin...
[buzz]
If it ever does at all?
TYSON: Do honeybees have free will?
When a honeybee dies, it releases a special chemical.
It's a death pheromone that has a characteristic odor,
signaling its fellow bees to remove it from the hive.
The death pheromone is oleic acid.
What happens if a perfectly healthy bee is dabbed with a
drop of oleic acid?
Then, no matter how hearty it might be,
it's carried, kicking and screaming,
out of the hive by oblivious pallbearers.
Do the bees understand the danger of infection from corpses
decomposing in the hive?
Are they aware of the connection between death and oleic acid?
Do they have any idea what death is?
Do we?
In the tens of millions of years of collective bee
experience, there's never been a way that a bee could give
off oleic acid other than by dying.
So, for bees, there's no ambiguity here.
Scent of oleic acid always means dead bee.
There's been no reason for evolution to develop a greater
sense of nuance about it.
Elaborate, contemplative machinery is unnecessary to
assess the situation.
Bee perceptions are adequate for bee needs.
Something similar is true for moths.
This poor guy has no idea what the problem is.
There have been moths for 190 million years,
and clear glass windows for only about 1,000.
No wonder there isn't a voice in the moth's brain that tells it:
if you keep bumping into something,
even if you can't see it, you should try to fly around it.
Until very recently on nature's time scale,
there were no penalties for moths without any such inner voice.
Moths evolved in a world without glass windows.
What then are we to conclude when we find similar,
very simple behavioral programs unsupervised by any
apparent central executive control in so-called
"higher animals"?
When a goose egg rolls out of the nest,
does the mother goose who has been incubating her eggs
for weeks understand the importance of retrieving one that has rolled away?
Can she tell if one is missing?
In fact, she will retrieve almost anything placed near the nest.
Including ping pong balls and beer bottles.
The value of this behavior for goose genes is clear.
She understands something, but by our standards,
not very much.
Does a beetle have any emotions?
Any consciousness?
Or is it only a subtle robot made of organic matter?
A carbon-based automaton packed with sensors and actuators,
programs and subroutines, all ultimately manufactured
according to its DNA instructions?
We might be willing to grant the proposition that insects
or even geese are mindless machines.
But what about us?
What, if anything, do the other animals think?
What might they have to say to us if we could only communicate?
When we observe them carefully,
don't we find evidence of spontaneous decision-making?
When we consider the genetic kinship of all life on Earth,
is it plausible that humans have immortal souls and all
other animals do not?
In nature, the goose's egg retrieval program is adequate.
But when the goslings hatch, and especially just before
they're ready to leave the nest,
the mother is delicately attuned to the nuances of
their sounds, looks and smells.
She has learned about her chicks.
Now she knows her own very well and would not confuse
them with an alien object, or even someone else's goslings,
however similar they may seem to a human observer.
Consider our friend the beetle again.
It can see, walk, run, smell, taste,
fly, mate, eat, excrete and lay eggs.
It has internal programs for accomplishing these functions
contained in a brain with a mass of only a milligram,
and specialized,
dedicated organs for carrying the programs out.
But is that all?
Is there anyone in charge?
Anyone inside?
Anyone controlling all these functions?
And what do we mean, by "anyone"?
Or is the beetle just the sum of its functions and nothing else,
with no executive authority, no insect soul?
A stowaway.
See how it's triangulating on me,
trying to get a sense of this immense,
looming three-dimensional monster before it?
The fly strides along, unconcernedly,
until you lift a rolled newspaper and it quickly buzzes off.
We know this behavior is wired into the fly's neurons.
[buzz]
Some scientists get nervous if you ask about the
consciousness of a housefly.
On the inside, within its tiny brain,
does it have no perception of making choices?
No awareness of its own existence?
Not a milligram's worth of self-consciousness?
Not a hint of hope for the future?
Not even a little satisfaction at a day's work well done?
If its brain is one millionth the mass of ours,
shall we deny it one millionth of our feelings
and our thoughts?
And if, after carefully weighing such matters,
we insist it is still only a robot,
how sure are we that this judgment doesn't apply to us as well?
What is distinctly human?
Is there anything that's ours alone?
TYSON: Would our imaginary extraterrestrial observer
think that there's anything we do that distinguishes us from
every other living thing on Earth?
Something that all or almost all of us,
of every culture throughout history,
have done and still do?
Something that no other animal does?
Plato was one of the earliest commentators to define
what is human.
He declared, "Man is a featherless biped."
When news of Plato's definition reached the philosopher Diogenes,
he brought a plucked chicken to Plato's academy,
asking the assembled scholars to salute Plato's man.
[laughter]
Plato's protégé, Aristotle,
took another crack at it.
He said, "Man is a social animal.
Man is a political animal."
But ants,
bees and termites
have much better organized and much more stable social structures than we have.
The 16th century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote,
"As to fidelity, there is no animal in the world so treacherous as man."
But he never dated a firefly.
You know how fireflies blink on and off to attract a female?
Well, some males sabotage their fellow fireflies come-on
by adding their own blinks.
It's like hacking a friend's romantic message to his
girlfriend and turning it into an insult.
The female gets turned off and the saboteur now has his
chance with her.
Man, that's cold.
Adam Smith, the 18th century Scottish philosopher,
wrote in his classic justification of free
enterprise capitalism that the propensity to barter,
to exchange one thing for another,
is to be found in no other race of animals.
Is this true?
Chimpanzees are fond of trade and understand the idea very well.
Food for sex, a back rub for sex,
betrayal of the leader for sex,
"spare my baby's life" for sex.
Virtually anything for sex.
Okay, but we're the only species that makes art, right?
Except this work of art was created by a bowerbird.
As was this one.
And this one.
We're the only species that parents their young through
adolescence into adulthood.
Wrong again.
The elephants parent at least as long as we do.
All right, well, we're the only species that enslaves and
exploits other animals, keeping them in captivity.
Tell that to this poor cockroach of the African savanna.
An emerald wasp is stalking it to drug and enslave
it in its basement.
The wasp administers a venom which robs the cockroach of
its will to escape.
Turn on the lights, and this is one roach that
won't scurry away.
Now the wasp drags the roach to her lair,
depositing a single egg on the roach's body...
before boarding up the entrance with rocks and pieces of wood.
The idea is to keep the roach alive as long as possible so
that its organs will remain fresh.
The wasp's offspring will bore into the roach's body and
feast upon it.
When it's full grown,
it will tunnel out of the roach's grave.
Yeah, but what about using tools, technology?
Kissing?
♪ ♪
Could it be that after all,
our species' only real distinction is our neurotic need to feel special?
Remember this place?
It's the memorial to the broken branches of the tree of life.
It's mostly filled with the casualties of environmental
catastrophe and competition that happened long before we ever got here,
but there is a corridor that we built ourselves.
What lies beyond are all those species we ourselves
have rendered extinct.
Could there be some connection to that widespread delusion of
our separateness from the rest of nature?
A sharp distinction between humans and animals is
essential if we are to bend them to our will,
make them work for us, wear them,
eat them, experiment on them, wipe them out entirely without
any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret.
[thunder]
But we all know that this carelessness is starting to
catch up with us.
Are we automata, robots, our destiny written in our
DNA with no possibility of escape?
Is DNA destiny?
And if it is, does it have the power to write epic tales of heroism and saintliness?
♪ ♪
TYSON: Okay, just for argument's sake,
suppose we're nothing more than the sum total
of our genetic inheritance.
That's not as bad as it sounds.
There are passages in our DNA that are every bit
as heroic as anything ever written in any epic saga.
[growl]
The mother is stotting, deliberately putting her own
life in danger to alert the herd and buy time for them...
so that her offspring and the rest of the herd can get away.
If this isn't heroism, what is?
And yet, this act of valor is encoded in the Thomson's gazelle's programming.
Does that make it any less brave?
She risks being eaten in order to save her kin.
And that's the key.
Kin selection is that genetic impulse for self-sacrifice
prevalent throughout the kingdoms of life, even us.
Skeptical?
Then do this thought experiment with me.
Imagine trying to sleep soundly at night,
knowing that your children are starving,
homeless or gravely ill.
For almost all of us, this would be unthinkable,
but 16,000 children die each day of easily preventable
hunger, neglect, or disease.
Children continue to die as we sleep well and watch this show.
They're far away.
They're not directly related to us.
Now tell me you don't believe in the reality
of kin selection.
We will die to protect the carriers of our DNA and
turn away from the suffering of those who don't.
Kin selection can inspire us to die saving a brother,
but it's also the drive exploited by the demagogue
and the supremacist.
The "us" against "them."
Another thought experiment:
Imagine you're making the first approach to a
newly discovered planet.
You've used various techniques to ascertain that this world
supports an astonishing variety of life-forms.
You want to make contact, but not with their version of a
scorpion, cobra, or great white shark.
You want to find the life-form that's most likely to respond gently,
with empathy and intelligence.
These macaque monkeys are members of what might
be the most compassionate species on earth.
This was demonstrated in a ghastly series of experiments
conducted in the 1960s.
15 macaques were fed only if they were willing to pull a
chain and electrically shock an unrelated macaque whose
agony was in plain view through a one-way mirror.
If they refused to shock another macaque, they starved.
After learning the ropes,
the monkeys frequently refused to pull the chain.
In one experiment, only a small percentage would do so,
while more than two-thirds preferred to go hungry.
One macaque went without food for nearly two weeks
rather than hurt its fellows.
Here's the part that really gets me.
Macaques who had themselves been shocked in previous
experiments were even less willing to pull the chain.
The relative social status or gender of the macaques had
little bearing on their reluctance to hurt others.
These experiments permit us to glimpse in non-humans a
saintly willingness to make sacrifices in order to save others,
even those who are not close kin.
The heartless selfishness of the rabies virus,
and the transcendent empathy of the macaques,
are the extreme ends of a continuum,
one that we, ourselves, are on.
It was the evolution of successively larger brains
through the generations of our ancestors that transformed
human childbirth into an excruciating experience.
[speaking in native language]
TYSON: Feeling, in mammals at least,
is mainly controlled by lower,
more ancient parts of the brain...
And thinking, by the higher,
more recently evolved outer layers.
A rudimentary ability to think was superimposed on
the preexisting programmed behaviors.
This is the evolutionary baggage we carry with us into
the schoolyard, into the marriage,
into the voting booth, into the lynch mob,
and onto the battlefield.
So, what does that tell us about our future?
Will it be nothing more than a series of dreary repetitions,
with no escape for our children?
I know a story that gives me hope.
It's the saga of a life that means we can change.
From this distance in time,
it's hard to know how much of it is true.
It happened a couple of thousand years ago,
which is a long time to us,
but only about five seconds ago on the Cosmic Calendar.
The Cosmic Calendar
compresses all of time into a single year.
I know no better way of wrapping our heads around the
fact that we are still very young,
very new to the universe.
January first is the big bang,
and midnight on December 31 on our cosmic year is this very second.
All of cosmic evolution, nearly 14 billion years,
compressed into a single earth year.
Only five Cosmic Calendar seconds ago,
which represents about 2,200 years,
much of the world was in the grip of absolute rulers.
Their armies rampaged across the planet, bringing
torture, rape, murder,
and mass enslavement wherever they went.
A young man came out of an obscure backwater called Macedonia and,
in less than a decade,
carved out an empire that stretched from the Adriatic to
beyond the Indus river in India.
Along the way, Alexander the Great crushed
the implacable Persian army.
And at about the same time,
King Chandragupta conquered all of northern India.
His son, Bindusara, assumed the throne after his death.
As Bindusara's own death approached,
he intended to bequeath his empire to a favored heir.
And legend has it that another son,
one who had been rejected by Bindusara,
was so ruthless in his quest for power that he murdered
every one of his 99 half-brothers.
[screaming].
Dressed in the finery that only an emperor was entitled to wear,
the hated son stood before his dying father and declared contemptuously,
"I am your successor now!"
This was Ashoka...
And he was just getting started.
TYSON: In the 2nd century BCE, the Indian emperor Ashoka
initiated a reign of terror known for its new heights of sadism and cruelty.
When Ashoka's ministers balked at his command to cut down all
the fruit trees surrounding his palace,
Ashoka said, "Fine, we'll cut off your heads instead."
[screaming].
His fiendishness knew no bounds.
Ashoka built a magnificent palace for his unsuspecting victims.
They did not know until it was too late that deep inside the
palace were torture rooms designed to inflict the five
most painful ways to die.
It came to be known as Ashoka's Hell.
But that was not Ashoka's greatest atrocity.
He now set out to complete the conquest of India that his
grandfather had begun.
The nation of Kalinga, to the south,
knew no peace could be made with such a madman.
They courageously stood their ground as Ashoka's army
besieged the city.
When they could bear no more,
Ashoka sent his troops in for the kill.
[screaming].
[grunting].
As Ashoka surveyed his triumph,
there was one who dared to approach him.
MONK: Mighty king, you, who are so powerful you can
take hundreds of thousands of lives at your whim.
Show me how powerful you really are,
give back but one life to this dead child.
TYSON: Who was this fearless beggar who dared
to confront Ashoka with his crimes?
His exact identity is lost to us,
but we do know that he was a disciple of Buddha,
then a little known philosopher who had lived
almost 200 years before.
Buddha preached nonviolence,
awareness and compassion.
His followers renounced wealth to wander the earth
spreading Buddha's teachings by their example.
This monk was one of them.
And with his courage and wisdom,
he found the heart in a heartless man.
Ashoka was never the same.
TYSON: He erected this pillar,
one of many, on the site of his greatest crime.
Engraved on it was one of the first edicts of Ashoka.
ASHOKA: All are my children.
I desire for my own children their welfare and happiness,
and this I desire for all.
TYSON: It wasn't that Ashoka was violating the
laws of kin selection.
It was that his definition of who was kin to him had
expanded to include everyone.
He banned the rituals of animal sacrifice and
hunting for sport.
He established veterinary hospitals throughout India,
and he counselled his citizens to be kind to animals.
Ashoka saw to it that wells were dug to bring water to the
towns and villages.
He planted trees and built shelters along the roads of
India so that the traveler would always feel welcome and
animals would have the mercy of shade.
Ashoka signed peace treaties with the small
neighboring countries that had once trembled at the mention of his name.
He would govern India for another 30 years,
and he used that time to build schools, universities,
hospitals, even hospices.
He introduced the education of women and saw no reason why
they could not be ordained as monks.
He instituted free health care for all and made sure
that the medicines of the time were available to everyone.
He decreed that all religions be honored equally.
He ordered judicial review of those wrongfully imprisoned
or harshly treated.
The temples and palaces of Ashoka's reign,
and most of the pillars he erected throughout India,
were destroyed by generations of religious fanatics,
outraged by what they considered to be his godlessness.
But despite their best efforts, his legacy lives on.
Buddhism became one of the world's most
influential religious philosophies.
Ashoka's edicts were carved in stone in Aramaic,
the language of Jesus,
a couple of hundred years before his birth.
[echoing].
Ashoka sent Buddhist emissaries to the Middle East
to teach, compassion, mercy, humility,
and the love of peace.
Hear that?
This is one of the few temples of Ashoka that survived the vandals,
a cave in the hills of Barabar in India.
It's famous for its echo.
The sound waves of my voice ricochet off the walls until
they're completely absorbed by the surfaces of objects,
and there's nothing left at all.
But Ashoka's dream is different.
Its echo grows louder and louder with time.
[baby crying].
Who are we?
You tell me.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.