The time for experts, we are told, is over. Undaunted, my Ladybird Expert book on Evolution came out on Tuesday, accompanied by others on climate change and quantum mechanics, with more to come.

Nobody can speak a language without understanding how it fits together. Evolution is the grammar of biology. It unites the study of plants, animals and people into a single science. Without it, the subject would be a list of disconnected facts, as it was until 1859, when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. Most people in the world do not believe him, or in evolution. The new American Vice-President, Mike Pence, is among them and insists that life is the product of a designer, perhaps 6,000 years ago.

Creationists, unfortunately, do not know what Darwin’s ideas actually were. They involve “descent with modification”: the accumulation of errors over the generations.

This raw material is refined in the furnace of natural selection — inherited differences in the chance of reproducing — to give new forms of life. Darwin called his book “one long argument”. It moves from the obvious to the outrageous: from cattle-breeding to the claim that “light will be cast on man and his origins”.

My own shorter version goes from foxes to human frailty. In 1959 a Russian biologist set out to breed silver foxes, their fur used for winter hats.

At first, the animals were terrified by humans and almost impossible to deal with. He began to breed only from the five per cent that allowed him to approach their cages without going into a frenzy.

Within a few generations the animals became calm and began to bark and wag their tails. They were not black with a few silver hairs but much paler. They now sell for thousands as pets, but they are diminished versions of their wild relatives. We are just the same: domesticated apes, and reduced renditions of our ancestors.

The road to mankind is littered with discarded talents. We are as hirsute as chimps, but most of our hairs are downy. We have canine teeth but they are unimpressive. Men have tiny testicles and, unlike chimps, no spines on the penis to hold a female in place. We have feeble digestive enzymes and cannot live on raw food alone. Without an external stomach — a cooking pot or microwave — we would starve.

In physical terms Homo sapiens is enfeebled indeed, but for the grey matter things are different. We have brains four times bigger than those of chimps. Our talents have invented a new way to transmit information down the generations. Language does that far better than DNA and means that, uniquely, the arena of human evolution has moved from body to mind, which explains why we have Ladybird books.

Darwin called the 170,000-word The Origin a sketch of his ideas. Mine is sketchier at a mere 6,000 but I hope that it reveals the bare bones of his theory.

It’s both for schoolchildren and grown-ups, and I am using it as a textbook for my first-year evolution course at UCL (although my lectures are longer and much more boring).

The pictures are nice — and I don’t even mind if the followers of the Veep on this side of the Atlantic burn my book, as long as they buy it first.

Steve Jones, Evolution; Ladybird Books 2017, £7.99.