During the past year scientists have been celebrating the work of Charles Darwin for the insight the 19th century naturalist had into how evolution works. It is truly amazing how much Darwin got right, but there was also a lot that Darwin didn’t know. Indeed, Darwin recognized a group of disciplines that were relevant to what he was proposing, from paleontology to embryology, but despite his discoveries there were still mysteries in each field. A new NOVA program, What Darwin Never Knew, looks at what we now know about some of the questions Darwin’s research raised but could not immediately answer.

Despite the title of the show, however, the first portion of the program might as well have been called