These recordings were taken of each talk within the Darwin Lecture Series from 1986-2011 for which we have physical carriers. Until 1995 each lecture was recorded on cassette tape and only the audio was captured, apart from Noam Chomsky's talk during the 1989 series which was recorded on VHS as well. From the third talk in the 1996 series until 2008, and the first talk of the 2009 series, the talks were all recorded in audio only cassette as well as video captured on VHS or later, from 2002, in DVCAM format. Where there are both audio only and video recordings only the format with both audio and video have been digitised, therefore for information related to quality of digitised version of the talks refer to the VHS or DVCAM entries for these talks. For Darwin Lecture Series talks from 2007 to 2022 the digital formats of the talk can be found at https://sms.cam.ac.uk/institution/DARWIN. And for talks from 2020 to the most recent series the digital formats of the talks can be found at https://www.darwin.cam.ac.uk/lecture-series/