Darwin’s Brave New World
Darwin’s Brave New World is a three hour miniseries from Screen Australia that was produced to coincide with the sesquicentennial of the publication of On the Origin of Species. The production tracks the voyage of Darwin on the HMS Beagle through South America, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands where he formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection (post-Galapagos). Below is the first of three in the miniseries, the complete playlist can be found here.
“Darwin’s Brave New World is the story of how four young voyagers to the southern hemisphere, Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley and Alfred Russel Wallace revolutionised science and gave birth to an extraordinary theory about the evolution of life on earth.
Featuring a cast of Australian and Canadian actors and commentators such as controversial author and Oxford academic, Richard Dawkins, the Canadian scientist and broadcaster, David Suzuki and Australian scholar and author, Iain McCalman, from the University of Sydney, this brilliant drama-documentary tells the story of Charles Darwins struggle to produce one of the greatest scientific theories of our age and the roles played in it by Hooker, Huxley and Wallace – Darwins fellow voyagers to the southern hemisphere.”
