Artists are commanded to “show not tell”. Scientists are under a similar obligation, particularly when they appear on television. In this respect, Richard Dawkins, as Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has a problem. Evolution by natural selection takes such a long time it does not permit eyewitnesses. In The Genius of Charles Darwin, he told a group of schoolchildren that it was like judging a murder case: no one saw the deed but there were millions of bits of circumstantial evidence to convict the culprit. It was an unfortunate comparison, a few days after the release of Barry George, but there you go.

The pupils at Park High School in London looked sceptical. One replied he would still prefer the “greater evidence” of the holy book (probably the Koran). Dawkins asked, with some restraint, if it was intellectually sound to stick to the first theory you were taught. I began to wonder if a trip down to Lyme Regis to crack open some ammonites was going to help very much but Dawkins stopped short of demanding an immediate Ofstedding of Park High. He did, however, call the lack of emphasis on Darwinism in our school curriculum scandalous.

So it is, if as Dawkins claimed, four out of ten Britons prefer to believe that the origin of the species is God. On the other hand, it may just be that to put fire in his belly, if not food on his table, he overemphasises the national resistance to Darwinism. Perhaps Park Hill students are able to hold, like many of us, contradictory thoughts in our heads. We know, for instance, that nature is red in tooth and claw, but on a country walk I bet even Dawkins can go a bit Wordsworthian about its harmonies.

What we deserved from a programme called The Genius of Charles Darwin was not Dawkins arguing the toss with pubescent creationists but a clear and inspirational exposition of Darwinism. Dawkins was the right man to deliver it but Channel 4, with its low production values, was not the channel to help him. That said, there were several moments of inspiration when Dawkins got on to explaining the theory. I liked him sitting at Mrs Darwin's piano - Darwin, apparently, was so tone deaf that he had to be nudged to stand up when God Save the Queen struck up - and explaining that if the keyboard represented Earth history then man's years on the planet would take up less than the width of piano string.

There was also a powerful oration, delivered as if on safari in Kenya, about the practicalities of natural selection: “The total amount of suffering in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation.” Best, if saddest, of all, he was able to provide an example of the theory acting on humanity now. In a Nairobi slum he found a prostitute with a genetic immunity to HIV. In 1,000 years, he posited, the proportion of the African population with this immunity would have increased. Aids will have killed too many other women before they ever got a chance to reproduce.

What we still need, however, is a six-part series on evolution that combines wildlife footage with computer animation. Dawkins has produced this work on paper in his beautifully illustrated book The Ancestor's Tale. If Channel 4 can't film it, and the BBC won't, Spielberg will need to step up.

For all the infinite variations of reproductive mutation, nature has yet to produce the perfect human being. It does throw up the occasionally perfect hand, calf and bottom. Yet even “Rachael the Body”, as I'm Kylie's Body Double somewhat reductively rechristened her, is not so perfect that she is not resorting to a “tiny boob job” and “lipo-sculpture” to ensure that she still gets employed as a stand in for Britney, Pink and Kylie.

Her namesake, “Gavin, the Body”, claimed that he had performed Jude Law's sex scene for him in Alfie. When word got back, Law's publicists pinged off an e-mail denying Law's body was “in any way unsuitable or inadequate” and, anyway, none of Gavin's takes was used. Gavin's proud and resentful mum, who knew her own son's elbow, was having none of it. But it did strike me that the most striking aspect of Gavin's body was its tattoos, none of which were visible on the clips shown of Alfie's snooker-table bonk.

Rowan Deacon's film was jolly enough. It was fun to see a perfect pair of hands attached to a former road digger who otherwise resembled the Missing Link. But the models with their perfect hands and feet sadly failed to come up with anything even close to a perfect quote.

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