the fourth wonderful installment of symphony of science, with david attenborough, jane goodall and, of course, carl sagan:
lyrics:
[david attenborough] all life is related and it enables us to construct with confidence the complex tree that represents the history of life
our planet, the earth, is as far as we know unique in the universe; it contains life here plants and animals proliferate in such numbers that we still have not even named all the different species
darwin's great insight revolutionized the way in which we see the world we now understand why there are so many different species
[carl sagan] every cell is a triumph of natural selection and we're made of trillions of cells (within us is a little universe) those are some of the things that molecules do given four billions years of evolution (we are, each of us, a multitude)
now how did the molecules of life arise?
[attenborough] it began in the sea some 3 thousand million years ago complex chemical molecules began to clump together
these were the "seeds" from which the tree of life developed they were able to split, replicating themselves as bacteria do
[sagan] the secrets of evolution are time and death there's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us
(refrain)
[jane goodall] there isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom it's a very wuzzie line
it's a very wuzzie line, and it's getting wuzzier all the time
we find animals doing things that we, in our arrogance, used to think was "just human"
(refrain)
[attenborough] its continued survival now rests in our hands
