Is Man Just Another Animal? - Professor Steve Jones

thank you for that I'll make the immediate admission that I'm a serial plagiarist not only have I plagiarized the Bible and I've said I plagiarized Darwin's Origin of Species as well and a couple of others but I haven't realized that sea skirt comment is in fact plagiarism somebody I went to a lecture and somebody said it I thought oh I can use that but in fact it's one of the best-known stories in told by brain scientists so I deny or I deny all responsibility for it even though it is true okay so my talk is given the question is man just another animal and it's a question that's often asked and it's summarized to some extent by this statue here and this image here is of a little brass statue of about that big that used to sit or sits on the staircase of these what was then the zoology department in the University of Edinburgh in Scotland when I was an undergraduate and a postgraduate and briefly on the a very junior members staff and I walked past this thing probably thousands of times and it's still there the only difference really is that when I was there in the 1960s I was just sitting there now it's screwed down I think that tells you something about progress but I will post it many times and a vague idea what I'll do bad but I'm probably in curious and of course in those days we didn't have the universal key to old knowledge which is Google and one day five seven years ago I thought what does that mean there it is secret Deus okay well actually it's it's it's it's you can see it written there on one of the of the open page of a book which the animals sitting on one of the other books in the pile you can see is by Darwin and the unfortunate chimpanzee is looking with great puzzlement as a human skull and the era tiss secret dares statement is actually a quotation from Genesis it's it's quotation from the Latin it says if you a to this urn I will translate if you will eat of this fruit then you shall be as God's knowing good and evil and it's actually said to Eve by the serpent and it is secret De Santis Bono mad-marlin then you're I shall be open an issue be as God's knowing good and evil CNT I was knowledge the word science is actually quite a recent one and that's the real statement that if you know you become godlike and that in some ways is I think why many people are rather put off by science particularly perhaps the science of ourselves human biology because they have a concern that we will no learn things about ourselves which perhaps we would prefer not to not to not not to know not to know and that's an old idea it is brought up perhaps most stirred powerfully in recent history by this chap here oh I'm sure you recognize and that's Alfred Russel Wallace some I'll remind you who didn't know that Alfred Russel Wallace died 100 years and four days ago on November the 7th 1913 and he of course is the chap who wrote to Darwin from the Far East pre-empting Darwin's theory and they jointly presented a paper to Iranian society in 1858 it's remarkable at his last paper 1913 was called on the use of flying machines in modern warfare which is an amazing thing that somebody could talk to write to Darwin and speculate about about in fact there was two drones rather than aircraft and what this was a great Darwinian but he was also a spiritualist and he very much believed that actually there was something which biology could not tell us about ourselves and he was deeply religious it wasn't particularly Christian he had a rather unformed elated view of spiritualism and he felt as we see it here but man as something which has not derived from his animal progenitors a spiritual essence of nature that can only find an explanation in the unseen universe of spirit and he actually went to spiritual seances and things of that nature so he took me very seriously Darwin was very miffed by this he didn't like it at all and he wrote a sarcastic note to Huxley saying that at least this is not worse than that prevailing superstitions of the country by which of course he meant the Church of England so there's an odd thing and it's actually quite a deep felt quite deeply by Regis people who are not creationists somehow there is something more to us than what Darwinism can actually explain and what it wasn't wasn't alone at about the same time here's this distinguished individual here there's an orangutan that Queen Victoria was the one on the left as you can see she went at about that time to London Zoo and she noted in her diary when she saw the around return that it was frightfully and painfully and disagreeably human okay and that's the same kind of feeling it's rather horrible that these creatures are like this if they're if they're as much like thus because it does it could be that we're being dragged down to their actual level now that notion strangely is still alive today most of you know I'm sure all of you know that we share a great portion of our own DNA sequence with our closest relative the chimpanzee it's about 95 percent the 98.8% figure is old and a bit too high but it's a lot um I'd like to show this to school kids and I say well this is a picture of your biology t-shirt we always get a cheap laugh for that but I would never dream of doing that here of course this distinguished company and the question is okay if we share so much with chimpanzees the girls with rowing interns does that mean that in some senses they're just like us now that seems to me as far the odd argument but it's certainly very much alive both in victorious time and indeed today here's a cartoon from that extremely unfunny and now-dead magazine called punch and it's called simply called mr. gorilla and it's the ultimate horror in some senses because here we have a gorilla dressed very grandly in evening dress walking up to a human servant who's terrified his hair standing on end and telling the servant to announce him to this grand dinner as mr. gorilla so gorillas are able apparently to boss around the poorer members of human society well that's a joke not a very funny one but actually goes further you'll know no doubt again who this dividual is mrs. Jane Goodall and Jane Goodall's remark of a woman she developed a great interest in chimpanzees and primates in general when she was a young rather young woman without any formal training she went out and spent most of her life in Africa studying chimpanzees in the wild and she's done extraordinary things there's no question of that she's completely our altered our behavior our view of chimpanzee behavior and they're much less nice and we might imagine she but she's also formed a real bond as you can see with her experimental animal now I work on snails so I'm not going to do this but but although actually I rather like them they have a charm of their own and if you use a lot if you use them a lot actually the slime makes your hands very soft so I'm not I'm not I'm not neutral about them but I never get quite as close as this I have to say and I have to say also this is a big mistake there are many many good reasons not to kick it not to kiss a chimpanzee but but Jane Goodall is passionate about chimpanzees and primates in general and she set up about 10 years ago a big honor a system called the great ape project and the argument of the great ape project sites simplified and purpose apparently is is to say okay well we now know the chimpanzees are very very like us in biological terms that DNA tells us that therefore if they're almost human then they deserves some version of human rights in other words that almost like us therefore we have to treat them as if they were like us and that indeed has been some suggestion that the Latin name of the chimpanzee pan should be changed to homo okay or more per discus now these names are arbitrary but it shows how how powerful her feeling is and it's had a considerable effect in many countries in Europe and in the United States it is now illegal to carry out experiments on chimpanzees chimpanzee research has been banned in the lab that includes behavioral experiments inclusive surgical experiments and that kind of thing now one can argue about the the benefits or otherwise of animal experimentation I'm not particularly article I don't particularly carefully control you can do what you like too and rats but you can't do anything to chimpanzees so there is some suggestion then but this argument the chimpanzees are us or we are chimpanzee has had some rather profound effect on the legal system and perhaps for some people at least on our view of ourselves and I want to kind of explore that of data what do I ask is it the case that does Gilbert and Sullivan put in princess Ida Darwinian man though well behaved is nothing but a monkey shaved are we indeed shaved monkeys all right well what's the mind oh it's clear that we have evolved from an ancestor shared with the chimpanzee probably about 7 billion years ago let's just remind ourselves what the theory of evolution tells us and I'm sure you don't need reminding but many what many audiences do many people think that the theory of evolution somehow is a theological theory it's much more interesting than that it's a scientific theory ok which means that it could be disproved unlike theology which can never by definition be disproved and and it's remarkably simple it took Darwin himself described it as in three words descent with modification we can rephrase that as to say that theory of evolution is genetics plus time genetics a mechanism of passing information from one generation to the next and time which means that the imperfections which happen as these things over with these genes are passed on will build up and over time you will get change it's extremely simple it's so simple in fact it could almost be physics [Music] put that in for Frank I put that in for Frank close okay so but in fact it's an old idea the idea of of descent with modification is much older than Darwin in Darwin himself admitted this didn't admit that is to be said it he used the analogy again and again it's a good general rule there are no well-known scientists in the world called germs but there's one here who did who did remarkable work the William Jones cousin 18th century linguist and he went to Harrow school and at Harrow school then no doubt as now all the pupils learn to speak fluent Latin Greek and in his case Hebrew I'm sure nothing has changed he also learned from his own volition all the European languages and then when he was in a young man he went was sent to India with their two as a trait as a as a trade as a trader and he discovered to his great surprise that there were he learns I mean than Indian languages new discovered to his great surprise that there were similarities between some Indian languages and some of those of Europe and it's worth reminding ourselves that in those days the model of the origin of language was a creationist model that language had appeared instantaneously this is the Tower of Babel and you will know of course that rather foolishly mankind decided to build a tower which would reach up to heaven so they could come up to this tower and find out what heaven was really like well God didn't like this notion at all so people were building this so he simply threw down a few Thunderbolts and generated languages all the plumbers spoke English on the earth Krishna spoke well sure we all hold the carpenter's toe spoke Chinese and so on and not surprisingly in the tower fell into complete disrepair I'm not sure who spoke polish but they probably there weren't anybody okay well that was a creationist model of language and that was the view of course that was felt by many people for the origin of life that it had happened has put forth in the in the book of Genesis on October 4 2004 BC and on Thursday at 10:30 in the morning life had come in to being and people just accepted that and Darwin actually again and again refers to language as a parallel to his theory of evolution and of course language it's just like that now William Jay you could hear it I mean if you listen to if I were to listen to if I listen to my students if I first came to UCL forty-two years ago god help us they all spoke faithfully Friday nights are like this where they came from now they all speak or it's might wherever they come from and it's changing actually quite rapidly in the last couple of years now they're beginning to speak in a bit more or afro-caribbean way so I can just about understand what they're saying I could really understand what they're actually talking about but I no doubt that a hundred years I couldn't even understand what they were saying so the language can change and change remarkably quickly the first person that noticed that was indeed our friend William Jones and here's a rather trivial example these are some numbers in English Latin Greek and an extinct northern Indian language called Sanskrit maybe extinct but it has a large literature of its own and well in Jones actually described Sanskrit as the purest and most beautiful language that he knew and it's clear the two door duo and DA are related okay now if somebody is related to somebody else what do we mean we mean of course that they share a common ancestor so William Jones began to think just a minute maybe these languages have descended from a shared ancestor and he drew the first of all family evolutionary trees and here it is which is the descent with modification of the word for father in the romance languages Italian Spanish Portuguese and like panther a pair pi all of which show similar great similarities to the latin partir of 2,000 years ago or so and 2,000 years ago we had Petare in greek peter in sanskrit found out in gothic and so on and now people have gone much further and they've actually reconstituted what the fossil words which we no longer have any direct evidence of might have been and the word for father was something like Petare okay and they've regenerated a language which is called pi for proto-indo-european and you can go to you can go to conferences where people talk but do not throw pie at each other okay um and this language has been reconstituted and we know quite a lot about it now if you do something rather daring and assume and it's a big assumption that languages change at a standard rate you can begin to make a tree not just of relatedness but of history and here we have the origin of some of the indo-european languages the split between the romance and Germanic languages happening about 2,000 years ago something like that that's between the Romance languages Latin and Greek and the like Burtka French either like from Germanic languages German and of course English with a lot of romance vocabulary as you can probably tell I'm not speaking my native language at the moment I was brought up speaking Welsh and that's split apart another five thousand years before that and as we go further and further back we get into deeper and deeper splits and if you really want to wave your hand about and dance madly in the air you can make a world tree of languages which covers the whole world and actually may well go back for something like fifty or sixty thousand years the very origin of proper language with grammar and the like may have started them interestingly enough and this is a paper this doesn't come up all up well in the PowerPoint but there's actually a map of Europe hidden away there somewhere what we've got is Europe Britain is at the end on the left corner there and in India on the right corner I don't know whether you can see any of the lines that doesn't seem to have worked out particularly well but what we've got is that the most ancient group of the languages certainly the root of the language of both the Indian languages and the European languages sits in Anatolia okay so if you go back and you ask which the language is its most like a common ancestor of English German and Sanskrit it's the an effective and it Anatolian language and interestingly enough that language is sits absolutely in the place where farming began and farming began in Anatolia in the Middle East in the Fertile Crescent something like fifteen something like ten thousand and that led to an enormous population explosion it led incident it brought Tyrol elected today actually where food has suddenly became remarkably available and a remarkably poor quality people's health went down very severely when they started eating porridge every day which is what they basically did as early farmers but the numbers spot exploded so from the Fertile Crescent large numbers of people were pushed out because of population pressure some went to the West some to the east and as they moved as groups they passed on the Native Tongues to their children to their grandchildren to their great-grandchildren and as that happened divert changes built up and we had the languages we see today and as I said if you really want to go mad you can make a world tree of language of all my languages in the world and you get this you get this date of some sixty thousand years so that's what evolution actually is and of course we've already had there we've already had the commercial break and at UCL we have to have a commercial break every 20 minutes and my book the language of the genes which is now rather old volume but still selling still available in oracle book shops and it turns on the the predicates on the idea of genetics as a language and it's a simple not ethically original idea which works to a degree we met the genes are indeed the individual words of an instruction manual which are altered by error by mutation as as as we time goes on and we could draw a family trees which relate different creatures to each other oh we can do it for example to the primates the modern humans the species to which many of us paint to belong and you can see that modern humans and chimpanzees split apart well he had a common ancestor about 7 million years ago Neanderthals were extinct but they were they're much closer gorillas have spit apart from the common ancestor of the human chimp duo about 8 million years ago unless we go all the way back to 80 or so million years ago we get to our distant relatives like the tree shrews and the flying lemurs all of which are somewhat related to us and that process is exactly the process William Jones used to disentangle the origin of language and now it's a kind of it's a it's a can-do it's a kind of anatomy it's it's DNA reading DNA from end to end just completes the process which the anatomist Vesalius didn't have started in the 15th century when he cut open the human heart and found that it had four chambers and not three has been it had has had been assumed for 1,500 years before now we've gone much further than that we've cut cut open the human genome and we found that it's got three thousand million DNA base pairs rather surprisingly it's got a small number of genes about 23,000 of them rather fewer than tomatoes have and I have no explanation of that fact but there is there but we can use that statement to make these family trees and we can begin to us the question okay how similar are we at the genetic level to creatures like chimpanzees how will be changed why have we changed and what if anything does that tell us about the question that posed in the title of this talk is man just another animal well here is our relative the chimpanzee big teeth big muscles and lots of hair all right and I'll let you into the secret which is the big surprise of the comparative analysis of human and chimp chimp genomes which is now under full steam and of course you can sequence the human genome in 3 or 4 hours or a chimp Jemma or 3 or 4 hours is that it's a story of loss humans have lost an enormous amount of talents number of number of talents since the split from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee 7 billion years ago if they have chimpanzees are very hairy ok well I can tell you rather surprising me you may well know that you're just as hairy as the average chimpanzee look at the back of your hand and you will see that there are lots of hairs on it now they're not big thick and matted hairs but that you can't the number of hair follicles which we have those as chips have then we have the same numbers of follicles but our hairs are feeble in comparison ok same is true teeth we have incisor teeth but nothing like that mayor bee there was a just a single mutant a single error a single change which made us bald some of us I can see bolder than others but I'm not that's hinted at by these charming creatures here which are on the left of Mexican hairless dog which has got a mutation in the keratin gene the gene which makes the substance of hair which means it's got hair follicles but no hair and then this even more repellant cat called the Sphinx hairless cat and it saw that everything if you look at them both of them have a rather charming sort of hair you know it sort of punk haircut on the top of their heads so it may well be that this is indeed something to do with a loss of information in this in our line compared to chimpanzees but it goes much further than that we saw a picture of Jane Goodall coddling a chimpanzee okay one of the reasons not to do that is suggested by these headlines from recent American newspapers chimps shot after a vicious attack on woman u.s. student mauled by chimps in critical condition and if you pick up a chimpanzee which I've actually done a baby chimpanzee in London Zoo it is a problem to be frightening experience the animal was not at all aggressive he just wrapped its arms around me and I couldn't get him off and and that's because we have lost an enormous amount of our muscular ability and you can see that in this draw the boring slide here but I've talked your way through this is what geneticists do all day they read the four letter the four letter words or the three letter words in a foreign that envelope alphabet of DNA G GAC CTTT blah blah blah and this is a section of the muscle genes which are call it which is called myosin and myosin is one of the muscles one of the elements of muscles a bit like a rack and pinion system and they slide past each other myosin and actin and this is one of them now if you look at a number of primates at the top to a position number 39 is it'll 38 you will see that every single one of them has got the letters C na ya see na okay chimpanzees gorillas orangutans pigtailed macaque miss spelt woolly monkey they're all saying okay humans don't have it those two ladies are missing and human small over the world Spain Iceland Japan and Russia they simply don't have those services and what that has done is to remove a large quantity quantity of our muscular strength and that's particularly the case you can see that for example in jaw muscles if a chimpanzee bites you it will bite your hand off more than likely and that's manifest in the attachment and the attachment points where jaw muscles are held on the skull now if you move your jaw up and down you can feel that your jaw muscles and actually attached about here and here we go to the right there we have a human bottom right we have a human's go and the red mark is the attachment level the attachment point for the human jaw muscles okay and it's it's relatively limited but if we compare that with our relatives gorillas in the middle of macaques on the left you will see that the red section is far far greater and indeed that in both macaques and gorillas there are crests on the skull which give you even more surface area for the muscles to attach and that's because these creatures have got far far more powerful muscles in the jaw than we do but why is that well it's pretty obvious that they have to chew a lot okay humans in this McDonald Eyes universe of ours spend about three quarts on our chewing every day chimpanzees spend about ten hours a day chewing and that's because of their diet here we have the chimpanzee diet lots and lots of leafy greens a lot of purplish fruit their seed pine bark and insects but he saw it so they missed it this comes from a school some website and they missed off a little red bit which is chimpanzees because they're like eating their enemies as well but that's another story and you compare that with the standard while I was going to say the standard human diet standard American diet which I have to say is not very is not very different from the poor people's British dog diet in Britain and you will see in that enormous segment there of bread pasta potatoes and the right huge amounts of soft starchy food almost no dark leaving a little bit of fruit and then a whole pile of meat and then a few vegetables and oils and that kind of stuff and so what we eat tends to be softer and mushy err not what chimpanzees eat how did it get to be softer and mushy well actually it's remarkably simple it does it by cooking and it's one of the most remarkable things about ourselves as a species which is really unique genuine is unique that we are the only animal that's ever existed in history that cannot digest its own food if you decide to go on a diet which involves eating only raw food you will lose weight it's guaranteed unlike most diets it will you will lose milk weight I have to say when I say raw food I mean raw food I don't mean pickled food and not mean minced food I don't mean feed the food that's warmed up I mean a dead chicken with feathers on it and the potato okay and you can eat dead chicken and potato and or dead or fish or carrots or anything you like or nuts you can eat ad libitum until you're blue in the face of probably more likely green in the face and within six months you will die of starvation so we cannot live on raw food we in fact depend on an external stomach and that external stomach kind of depends where it me where you live in Glasgow it's the deep fat fryer okay in in in in the states it's a barbecue in my kitchen I'm ashamed to say it's quite often a microwave but you have to pre digest your food before you can eat it and that goes back a long way cooking goes back far far earlier than modern humans the ability to cook and the fact that we have fires and they've been found inside caves a long way from the entrance so they're not just lightening fires as much as half a million years ago that may well be the propelled us what propelled us into our evolutionary path which has been so different from the chimpanzee evolutionary path and so we are the we are the the we are the the ape that can we have a dyspeptic ape the ape that cannot digest its food with blanch baked boiled braised and sometimes burn but we can't do it without external help and you can see the power of that by looking at the at the kana kanum not the greatest term image there but there we have a chimpanzee with its gut there on the left and a human of about the same dimensions with its got on the right and in terms of absorptive area in the gut chimpanzees have got about three or four times as much as we have and they need that and they have much more powerful enzymes than we do we've lost many of our digestive enzymes that allow us to break down a raw meat let's say they need that because they can't cook their food interestingly enough if you feed pet chimpanzees or cooked food they become obese just the same as we do okay so maybe the raw food diet has got a certain amount to to commend it so that's another way in which we've lost our our abilities compared to the ability that must have been held by the common ancestor or ourselves and chimpanzees some 7 million years ago but the news is not good it goes even further it goes to the murky world of sex here we have Michelangelo's David check out his thumb okay clear that Michelangelo's David it's not a particularly realistic image of a gentleman but of course in Greek statuary it's a segment of purity and the like to have a per ticket to have small you know for a man to have a small penis so left over states the feebleness of the human penis and the human testicles if you look at this rather gloomy looking chimp on the right I don't quite see why it's looking so depressed he has a to role of prominent features which are considerably more impressive than us those of our own okay and in fact chimpanzees have got testes far greater than ours and produce far far more sperm than we do but he goes further than that here's a chimpanzee making oh this is a things are getting worse rapid evolution going on the supreme sperm count is going down there a tremendous rate at least in France I tried to put they aren't my teaspoons I tried to find them but I couldn't find them but the so the sperm count is probably a quarter or fifth that of a chimpanzee okay but it's not just the sperm that's feeble it's delivery system here's a chimpanzee demonstrating its masculinity you can see fairly well-endowed they're obviously in wrong a bad temper one reason or another and chimpanzees have rather large genitalia but quite unexpectedly chimpanzees and all our relatives unlike ourselves of spines on the penis okay and those spines which are quite quite solid looking things are using what we call mate guarding in other words once the chimpanzee is mated with a female he wants to ensure that the female stays in place until his own personal sperm has had a chance to impregnate her and so the spines make it very difficult for her to get away her cats have them too which is why cats make this horrible Rauh when they're mating in your garden late at night okay and it's it's a striking thing that we lost it here we have some it's some experiment done with with castrated galagos with your monkeys did it with mice normal mice a big big whiskers and big spines on the penis castrated mice and monkeys no spines on the penis giver give them testosterone they grow back again now if you look in humans if you look at a thing called the androgen receptor the androgen is the male sex hormone we have and missing androgen receptor compared to nearly all or many other mammals so that it's the presence of the androgen receptor that picks up some testosterone from the bloodstream and that persuades these spines to grow and we don't have that we said but you'll see at the top the chimps macaques and mice have got it the red triangle in the box but we simple don't simply don't and we don't have spines as well so that too is really quite startling ok so well we can go further than that so I don't acute I want domina depress you all that much further except to show you this slide which is really quite startling well this is is a diagram of the human genome all the human DNA 3,000 million letters and of all the all the all the chimpanzee DNA put together and what we've got at the top there is a map of human chromosomes one to 22 plus X or Y and the lines on the heat on the human chromosome which you can see mark places where DNA is missing in our own genome compared to that of the chimp and you can see there are many many many places where that's true and some of those deletions as we call them losses of DNA information involve something like 120,000 DNA bases and many much many of them but many of them are much smaller but there are lots of them so we've lost an enormous amount of information compared to compared to Jim pansies so it's not just the penis finds it's not just the being digestion it's everything so that's very very strange we'd like to think of ourselves perhaps as being at the summit of creation but in terms of biomolecular genetics it's clear that we are really failed chimpanzees we are really diminished chimpanzees and that's odd so what's going on well what's clearly going on is that we changed the way we evolved now here modern humans appeared people argue about it endlessly but modern humans appeared on earth something like a hundred and fifty two hundred to two hundred thousand years ago clearly in Africa we are on African species everybody in this room is an African some of us perhaps more African than others but we are an African primate when we got out of Africa something like and again endless boring arguments going about this 120 thousand years ago and didn't get very far but then finally we began to move when we got to civilization or or or Britain about forty thousand years ago strangely enough we didn't get to the new world to the Americas until twenty-one thousand years ago and they finally walked across what was then the bering land bridge before the ice melted and it became the Hoodoo became the Bering Strait and we filmed the new world within about two or three thousand years so we ran out of East kind of species okay now what's now been done and it's now very much underway is a thing which was called the thousand genome project that's now finished we now got the ten thousand general project which is to sequence the DNA of 10,000 people from across the globe and an awful lot interesting stuffs coming out which I'm not gonna talk about in detail but there's one aspect of ourselves which makes us immediately distinct from that of our relatives we can use the DNA to draw a family tree of humankind and it's worth remembering that in the 1960s I hate to say it when people began to look objectively at the differences between let's say Africans and Europeans there was a strong expectation or semi-scientific expectation that Africans and Europeans would say oh the Chinese and and Papua New Guineans would be biologically quite distinct from each other and that wasn't a you know a stupid thing to think because it is frankly clear that Africans and Europeans of Chinese and Native Americans look fairly different from Italy but that wasn't true at all and vivid memories in the early days of protein variation when we were working on this and many other people working on it be quite astonished to find how similar how simple our small the genetic differentiation of humans from different places actually was where the most boring primate of all across the globe at the genetic level and you can see that in this family tree here this is a family tree one particular kind of DNA which you don't have to bother ourselves about in detail but what we've got here are chimps bonobos with your pygmy chimpanzees orangutans gorillas all on the same family tree and the length of each line is a statement of how distinct the animal or human which is represented by that line is from its closest and more distant relatives and it's immediately obvious that if you look at humans we're all the same okay that that group of red lines includes people from Africa from France from Papua New Guinea from China Native Americans people from the South Seas people from Finland and wherever you go really where brothers and sisters over the skin and we have not changed physically scarcely at all as we filled the world if you look at the chimpanzees let's see the picture is totally different but two groups of chimpanzees living a couple of hundred yards apart called 100 miles apart are more genetically distinct from each other than are two very distinct human populations I'd say the most advanced human race which of course the French compare to somebody like let's say that saying whatever you like Native Americans there is almost no difference between them okay so we have not changed in biology since we began so what's happened well clearly something which has got nothing to do with biology has happened and it's got to do with this organ here which has definitely got something to do with biology which is the brain and the human brain has shown a quite unprecedented degree of expansion human brain of the treatment cortex which is the thinking bit of the brain is five times bigger in terms of body mass than is the that of the chimpanzee and indeed if you look at a newborn baby more than half of all its metabolic energy goes into its brain okay and indeed even with adults a great proportion more their metabolic energy goes into their brain in banana resting state that into any other organ so the brain is expensive and it may well be that cooking gave us the brain because cooking gave us tons and tons of cheap and available protein and energy foods which allows the brain to grow chimpanzee brain simply can't afford to get that big because the extent to which they can soak up nutrition is so much less so we have big brains with lots of nerve cells and lots of connections within them they've got big bigger and bigger over time in fact strangely enough our our own brains are a little bit smaller than the and details but Neanderthals were bigger and more brutal creatures than we are and it's continued to go up and up and up since the human chimp common ancestor the human brain has gone up in size but probably above for about five or six times and various events have taken place with honor I can't talk about one of them in a moment if you count the number of nerve cells exactly all that interesting - if you compare ourselves with chimpanzees we have twice as many nerve cells but in fact they're much much more connected to each other whales have got quite a lot of nerve cells in the brain but whales are big animals most of those nerve cells are saying you know flap flap your flippers now mate they're not that they're not thinking about thinking about about theology dogs you will notice a very stupid okay and that's what makes them into good pets pets are stupid that's why cats are not such good pets as dogs because cats are they : control of us and we're in control of dogs but most pets lose lose it lose their brains wolves have got twice as many no sells as dogs but those figures understate the extent of complexity of the human brain because now we can count the numbers of connections in brains and the number of connections from one nerve cell to another in the human set brain is several times that of a chimpanzee so we have very very complicated brains and of course what brains do is that they give you all kinds of abilities that other animals don't have and the greatest ability of all is that which was studied by William Jones which is a language okay if you ask me what the most futile piece of biological research in the last 50 years has been and that it can tell you there is a lot of competition the most futile has been the endless attempt to teach chimpanzees to speak now let's have many people are trying to do that it's strictly they can't formulate words because they haven't got the right kind of a hyoid bone at the bottom bottom back of their mouth so they can't make complicated words but people have tried to teach them sign language they're trying to use plastic cutout shapes so they can put them together and the best they can ever get is dirty potty we don't think I mean they they put to spec shapes together and but they're not really saying anything at all so chimpanzees are really pretty damn dim when you think about it the only interesting thing about chimpanzees is that they ape but they don't teach if you you've seen no doubt on david number programs chimpanzees let's say bashing open and not with a stone or elsewhere in Africa using a twig to put it into an ounce nest and lick off the lick off the animals leg lick off the food and they do the Hat and a well done chimpanzee but what's interesting is that they don't teach their offspring to do it their offspring might be they're looking at their mummy and daddy baton or not with a stone but the but their parents don't change their behavior when their offspring is there they don't say you look you pick up the stone you put this thing there and you bash it they just don't do that it's a simple matter of aping each other rather than another pedagogy which were also expert at in our own species okay and one of the reasons we teach of course one of the ways we teach is by turning cheese sandwiches into hot air which is what I'm doing at the moment by talking and when you speak to give a grossly oversimplified explanation of speech a part of the brain on the Left cortex called Broca's area breaks into action and there is this is a bit of molecular phrenology and want me to begin to talk about futile biological research I better change the subject but if you do brain scans of people who can speak normally a little bit on the left side of the brain Broca's area begins to become very active okay in fact much more the brain becomes active but this is clearly important because if somebody has a stroke the Dom it damages Broca's area they tend to lose the ability to speak well about ten years ago a bit more than that now a family was found in West London where what's called verbal dyspraxia and verbal dyspraxia there are many use but speech defects some of which are quite a strong genetic component but this one's really particularly interesting because these kids on any on other tests of IQ numbers and shapes and puzzles and that kind of stuff are of normal intelligence they find it almost impossible to deal with language and what they find particularly difficult to deal with is not for capillary but guarana okay and in some ways that's a biological tale I think you could write down genetics is the language of genetics is that is is a language evolution is the grammar of that language so these kids can't deal with grammar for them the cat sat on the mat is effectively indistinguishable from the mat sat on the cat which is kind of bad news for the cat I guess but if you scan their brains you can see I think that there's chaotic activation of the of the center centers all over the brain and this is quite strongly genetic now this is a growth this has been much publicized and talked about the gene for speech which is far far too simple way of putting it but it's got something to do with speech and it's a gene that's called Fox p2 and one of the baffling things what are the men baffling things in genetics and it really is baffling is that genes which in fruit flies say this is called Fox Fox stands for fork head box and fork head is simply a abnormality in the in the antennae of the of a fruit fly for some reason something to do with speech in humans don't ask me what's going on nobody knows what's going on but Fox p2 is the gene involved and it's damaged okay it makes a protein like this which is involved in binding nerve transmission between synapse is in the brain and it's you can make a family tree of it okay now we make family trees as I said by looking at the similarity of DNA between different species there are two kinds again to oversimplify there are two kinds of changes in DNA there are those which are sometimes called silent changes in other words they change the DNA code but they don't change the protein and like as they'd like the muscle one did they simply they they have rather little effect on the protein level and they're shown as blue lines here but there are others which do change the DNA coat and that makes a protein so they change the building blocks of the body itself and I think you can see that at first glance the fox p2 family tree shows humans chimps gorillas orangutans so on or very similar to each other except that if you look a bit more carefully you'll see that there are two mutations in fox p2 which do change the structure the protein structure of this substance in humans and not in chimpanzees the Dover simplified that might be something to do with what gave us our unique language to speak no other creature can speak they can make particular sounds but they're not what we call transitive they can't put different sounds together to make sentences okay so we can speak and if Fox p2 is remarkable stuff it turns out chimps are useless at it it turns out that birds that don't sing I'll have very inactive Fox B twos but birds like parrots that can copy human language have really active Fox p2 whether they are whether they commands to understand what they're saying when they're saying pretty Polly science is not yet ready to disclose but there's something going on there definite has something to do with them with with speech one of these slight embarrassments is that Neanderthals have the same version of fox p2 as we do and the ANA tars nominally went extinct or originated long before human language is thought to exceed thought thought to have originated but if you look in more detail at human fox p2 and I did many many of the changes in the enormous piece of DNA involved little tiny changes in fact there are lots and lots of minor changes in humans which are not present in Neandertals so it suggests that actually Fox b2 in humans as it evolved very actively since they split with Neanderthals and that family tree only tells you part of the story so you know that that really is what makes us to some extent what we are is the ability to speak and once you've got the ability to speak in some ways you've got in in many ways you've got a new kind of genetics because genetics is a way of passing on information from one generation to the next and so of course it's language okay except that uniquely language doesn't pass prepares the children the grandchildren it passes horizontally as well so that we I can spread my words around this audience in a way I simply but would be far too tired to spread my genes around this audience okay it simply wouldn't be feasible so you've got this astonishingly powerful method of changing the way we think which stands outside genetics and what that does in some ways is to move us into a completely new evolutionary universe it makes us unique and evolution of biology is rather bad at dealing with unique attributes because the evolution is overwhelmingly a comparative science Darwin constantly compared different creatures all those family trees turn on the comparison of the DNA sequence of chimps and humans anything else you like and if you can't compare it's very hard to know what's going on and you can illustrate that difficulty with the language I can notice very it actually with a joke that my father told me many years ago set in the town I went to primary school and I've got a spoof in West Wales and I went to a wall speaking primary school and in Aberystwyth or 95th when I was there it was very much a welsh-speaking town which it is as long as there are English people in the room even today but it was very much Welsh speaking and the tale my father told me turned on the on the appearance of avarice to its first Chinese restaurant and I donuts with strangely enough it's got some other nice restaurants in it now including a couple of good Chinese restaurants but in 1950 this is quite unprecedented a Chinese restaurant opens up in Aberystwyth so the customer goes into the restaurant and it's quite astonished to be served known as Chinese food by very tie to clearly Chinese waiter who speaks perfect Welsh well the customers astonished by this so he beckons over the owner and asks him in Welsh of course and I will translate for you he said well boy where did you get this amazing fellow a Chinese person who couldn't speak Welsh and the only looked alarmed don't he said no keep your voice down boil he thinks he's learned English well actually is a perfect illustration of the importance of the comparative method because of course to a Chinese native speaker Welsh and English are dialects of a language called indo-european and he or she would be completely correct in that statement to a Welsh or an English speaker the various Chinese mainland languages there are several of them how can the like they're simple they're all the same but they're not they're mutually incomprehensible okay now because we've got all the languages of the world that we have and the fossils of language in the books and so on which are in Latin or in Sanskrit we can disentangle that we can make a family tree of language we can work out how they're related to each other where they spread the way they fit together all those kinds of things we could do okay and that's what William Jones did and that's what the proto-indo-european people did in much more detail but let's imagine sometime in probably not too distant future when there's only one word or only one language in the world I don't think it's going to be Welsh unfortunately it might well be Chinese but for the sake of argument let's make it English and let's simplify matters even further by first of all burning all the books it's going to happen anyway and secondly reformat reformatting all the computers every 10 years so you can't read what happened about 20 or 30 years ago and that's already happened to so we've got one oral language and we all speak the same language we would have no idea we could have no idea how that language had emerged when it emerged where is it emerged how it emerged how either travel across the globe how old it was the way its grammar work the weights vocabulary work will be a complete mystery to us it could not be penetrated because there's no standard of comparison now we are the only speak species that have language proper but of course we are least as far as we can tell the only species that has many other attributes to we are the only species as far as we can tell that has a sense of history a sense of the future perhaps the distant future to come in terms of let's say global warming we're the only species that finds it necessary to be concerned by people who are not our close relatives we're worried about hurricanes in the end of in in in the fight in the far east and the like and all the we have religion as far as we can tell no other creature has any sense of spirituality and in that sense I suppose Alfred Russel Wallace was it was it was right but once it we then faced the problem because these are unique to ourselves all these attributes they are not open to the investigation by evolutionary biologists or perhaps by biologists at all because they have no standard of comparison so that they theater which is which was put out so often the concern that's been put out so often it was put out by Queen Victoria when she's so sure Jennie the orangutan to me is quite wrong many of the people who don't like and who didn't like Darwin's theory of evolution didn't like it and feared it because it made them feel less human than they had thought they were I find exactly the opposite the theory of evolution makes me feel far far more human than I ever imagined I could be so I'll stop there thank you [Applause]

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 54,251

Rating: 4.7700205 out of 5

Keywords: darwin, charles darwin, genetics, epigenetics, darwinian theroy, darwinian man, gene, gene theory, evolution, human evolution, biology, steve jones, dna, human biology

Id: 7e3JqdKQz8Q

Length: 52min 40sec (3160 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2013

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