Our Declaration • 2015 • episode "S1E2" • Curiosity Retreats: 2015 Lectures

47:58

The second episode delves into the moral framework that religions are often cited as providing and argues against the indoctrination of children. Dawkins compares religious faith to a virus, being passed from parents to offspring and teachers to pupils. He visits a London Hasidic Jewish school, where students are largely isolated from outside ideas, and Phoenix Academy, a semi-independent city academy following the American Accelerated Christian Learning curriculum. Dawkins interviews the headteacher about the integration of biblical stories into various academic subjects and explores the differences between secular ethics and morality based on religious law. He also discusses concepts from evolutionary biology, such as reciprocal altruism and kin selection, as explanations for morality.

S1E2 • The Root of All Evil • 2006 • People

58:38

Jenny Clack recounts how she overcame setbacks before she found and described a fossil which offered new evidence of how fish made the transition onto land. For paleontologist Professor Jenny Clack, who solved one of the greatest mysteries in the history of life on Earth, success was far from inevitable. A chance discovery in 1986 in the earth sciences department of Cambridge University, of long-forgotten fossils collected from the Devonian rocks of East Greenland in 1970, was to shape the rest of her career. She recounts how she had to overcome a series of setbacks before she found and described the fossil Acanthostega, a 365 million-year-old creature that offered dramatic new evidence of how fish made the transition onto land. She authored or co-authored more than 120 research papers as well as numerous popular articles and book reviews. A measure of the significance of her work is that 15 of her research papers were published in the journal Nature. Her one book, "Gaining Ground, The Origin and Evolution of Tetrapods" (2002), summarises the results of research on early tetrapods over the previous 25 years.

S2E1 • Beautiful Minds • 2012 • People

44:10

Bill Gates talks to Amol Rajan about wealth, conspiracy theories and recent controversies. They visit a remote region outside Nairobi in Kenya, where Gates supports local farms and hospitals through his charitable foundation, for a rare, in-depth interview with the tech entrepreneur. Gates has spent much of his life being the richest man on earth. He excelled at school, founded Microsoft and helped to realise his vision of having a computer on every desk in every home. His public image has changed over the years, from geek to business titan and philanthropist. In recent years, he has become the subject of endless conspiracy theories and has attracted unfavourable headlines on the subject of his divorce and his association with Jeffrey Epstein. In this challenging and personal interview, Rajan tackles these issues head-on, talking to Gates about his early success, his wealth, how he uses it now, and the controversies that have arisen over the years. In this unusually candid interview, Gates is often revealing in his responses.

2023 • People

47:51

In the first episode, Dawkins examines the unproven beliefs held as facts by many religions and the extremes to which some followers take them. He argues that faith is not a way of understanding the world but is fundamentally opposed to modern science, which tests hypotheses and builds theories to describe the world. Dawkins visits the United States to interview Pastor Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and travels to Jerusalem to interview Yousef al-Khattab, an American-born Jew who settled in Israel before converting to Islam. He uses Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot analogy to respond to charges that scientific understanding does not entitle one to reject religion.

S1E1 • The Root of All Evil • 2006 • People

69:41

The incredible story of a mysterious nanny who died in 2009 leaving behind a secret hoard - thousands of stunning photographs. Never seen in her lifetime, they were found by chance in a Chicago storage locker and auctioned off cheaply. Now Vivian Maier has gone viral, and her magical pictures sell for thousands of dollars. Vivian was a tough street photographer, a secret poet of suburbia. In life, she was a recluse, a hoarder, spinning tall tales about her French roots. Presented by Alan Yentob, the film includes stories from those who knew her and those who revealed her astonishing work.

2013 • People

123:06

The Zeitgeist Film Series is about examining the world we share, the values we hold, the problems we face, along with what we can do to make it better.

S1E2 • Zeitgeist • People