Steve Jones Enlightenment Lecture - Is Human Evolution Over?'

I and thank you very much welcome to the University of Edinburgh and to the McEwen Hall this is one of our fine buildings it's where we have many of the graduation ceremonies we have exams we have open days and we have lectures like this unfortunately although it's a very beautiful building it is one of the buildings that's actually very hard to keep but it is built completely with beer money from the McEwan's many years ago so this is the burst in this year series of enlightenment lectures and we've had quite a lot of very good lectures ireenie comm Tom Devine jose Barossa ian wilmut so there's been a whole series of absolutely excellent enlightenment lectures and today is the first day of a new term and a new academic year so it's really nice to also have the first of this series of enlightenment lectures and I'm especially pleased because we've now got a number of postdoc societies around the University and the postdoc Society have been the ones who've organized this lecture and chosen the speakers so very pleased that I'm going to be introducing professor Steve Jones he's professor of genetics and he's head of genetics at UCL in London Steve was born in Wales but he saw sense and came to Edinburgh to do his degree and his PhD so he's an Edinburgh graduate and so we're particularly pleased we lay claim to our ex graduates when when they do really good things so we're very pleased to have Steve back again to give this talk he's a prize-winning author with many many books on evolution but what I won't to say is really that Steve has worked an awful lot on evolution he's written over a hundred scientific papers serious scientific papers on things like snails and fruit flies so he's one of those rare people that bridges that gap in doing hard science and then engaging with the public about what he does and he's written huge numbers of books he won the michael faraday prize from the Royal Society for his activities in public engagement and he's been a TV presenter he's been a radio broadcaster he's been involved in various TV series and he also has a column in The Daily Telegraph so welcome to the first University of Edinburgh enlightenment lecture of the series for this year and deeb is going to talk to us about is human evolution over welcome Steve for those of you who've got a train to catch the answer is yes so you can leave now if you want to okay I think the idea of evolution goes back I think we think we all know that the idea of evolution goes back long before Charles Darwin they people may not have had a mechanism for evolution but the notion of change is a very very ancient one you can see Italy you could see it among the ancient Greeks among the Egyptians and the like the feeling that things are going to alter in the future and nearly always that change has a direction to it often and often an optimistic one here we have perhaps the very first model of the human future which is written by Thomas More who was a English cleric of course on the 16th century executed for not going along with the religious orthodoxy of the day and he wrote a book and invented the word called utopia and he wrote he drew a map of utopia which looks rather like the Isle of Wight which is not where I'd expect to find utopia but be that as it may and in Thomas More's mythical utopia many things have changed it's an interesting book at other hard to read but it's an antique language both an interesting book and what happens is that society undergoes a great revolution in that book on in several others which descend from it which are very similar things happen like chamber pots are now made of gold because gold is useful as an easy as an easily malleable metal people who become ill are sent to prison because they haven't looked after themselves people who who people who commit crimes are put into hospital because there must be something wrong with them and it's an interesting model of the future the utopia which will emerge as the years go by and there are many books like that and the interesting aspect of that utopia is a lot of society may change the people stay the same the utopians who lived in this in this carefully mapped place here would looked just exactly like you and I and all perhaps they behaved in a very very different way but about a hundred years ago there was a complete switch in people's models of the future the future of human evolution as you might call because there are plenty of utopian models and novels and thunder and films and so on around today the whole of science fiction is utopian talking about what's going to happen in the future and generally they all have one simple plot one simple kind of utopian who looks like this this i'm told comes from Star Trek although I've never actually seen Star Trek I'm ashamed to say being an ignorant person and what happens in Star Trek and its many many similar books and series is that actually society is much the same that are warring tribes there are hierarchies of command there's a bit of love interest here and there lots of violence so we'd recognize the society but the people change the people generate unlikely eyebrows like this or non-functional ears or pointed teeth and peculiar noses so actually what we now have in most people's view of the future is not a social change but a biological change and I think you can actually relate that event to to to a particular book which has a rather interesting history and it's his book is actually wells is the time machine written in the late 19th century and it's I'm sure not nearly all of you will have read the book but it's the first modern utopian novel really and the plot is at first sight straightforward what happens is a somebody called the time traveler who's never actually named this time traveler this time traveler develops a machine bit like a bicycle which you could leap on and zoom off into the future so he gets off on his bicycle zooms off in the future some unspecified time and the years to come and slows down and stops and wakes up in somewhere which actually is a bit like Morningside what I think it's full of charming people who have had their tea I have to say by the time he arrives it's full of charming intelligent people who live in nice buildings and read The Guardian and chat chit chat over the hedge perhaps a slightly insipid place to live but certainly perfectly tolerable and he settles in this place a little bit of decorous love interest takes place between himself and one of the locals and these people of the future in this utopia this charming wonderful suburb called the Eli and he stays among the Eloi for some weeks and months and slowly it transpires that the Eli have a terrible secret because there's another group of people - who don't live in some metaphorical morningside rather they emerge from some a theoretical leaf walk the lower end thereof and their terrible terrible thugs okay actually they come out at night quite an accurate statement when it comes to leaf walk in my memory of Edinburgh they come out at night and they get drunk and they throw up and they beat up these unfortunate Eli and their berdal their houses I'm so not much has changed really in the last twenty or thirty years and in fact they even kill and eat them and even in Leith that doesn't happen very often okay and what's actually happened is that the human race has split into two different species the Eli who are charming but ineffective and these brutal thugs who actually live underground and come out and brutalize them for much of the time so that's an evolutionary model of the future it's a it's a dystopian model of the future and of course world's being a good novelist there is a twist in the tale and the twist in the tale is that actually the Eloi are just the domestic animals of the Morlocks they're just the equivalent of sheep and cattle and the Morlocks feed them and let him have a nice time in and drink tea in this metaphorical morningside and then they kill him and they eat em so what's actually happened is that the human race has evolved into a brutal race of thugs now you can actually trace that fear of the future of the biological future to one particular individual Francis Galton Francis Galton was the founder of my laboratory at UCL the gulten laboratories of course it was Charles Darwin's cousin I was very interesting as a remarkable man he was the classic example of a flawed scientist he was somebody who had he started a PhD would never have finished it because once he'd done one thing he left off and did something else partially you never really thought things through he did a number of remarkable things he was the first person to use fingerprints in detective in detective work for example he wrote a paper which baffles me called arithmetic by smell he was the only person he was the only person to me a beauty map of the British Isles based on going round British cities and scouring the local females on a five-point scale from attractive to repulsive and the high point was in South Kensington where perhaps it still is outside Harrods and the low point you become out to here was in Aberdeen I once pointed this and I once said this in Aberdeen and I had to run I managed to bite my tongue without saying where it still is so that got away with that and Gorton was very much concerned about human quality and that beauty map was only part of his exploration of human qualities he looked at height and weight and strength and intelligence and that kind of stuff and he was convinced that human quality was inherited he wrote a book called hereditary genius which is sometimes called the first human genetics textbook it really isn't it's a political book Ravana they're all in a scientific book but he was the founder of the science or the quasi science of eugenics who found that the human race would decay decline unless something was done about it his views were really quite stark um here's a summary of an interesting diagram this is Goldman's diagram of racial ability it's an interesting diagram because it's the first ever statistical distribution first ever published there's a stable distribution it's rather a crude one but it's the it's the it's that's what it is if you look down the ancient Greeks are pretty smart but they're they're extinct so that doesn't matter that's the English that's the English not the British the English were almost as smart smarter than the Asians the Asians being smarter than the Africans and you'll see a considerable overlap between Australians and dogs again I once showed this at Sydney and that didn't go down too well either well you can you can you can disapprove of that of course I do but it is a statement of the way that people thought that there were huge differences in an ability among individuals and among races and the second-rate genes were taking over but ident notion needless to say is an evolutionary one it's a Darwinian one that comes from Charles Darwin himself and I want to argue that actually things have now and now in such a city way in such a state in biology and a good state not a dance state that we know so much about the process of evolution the past of human evolution that unlike Dalton unlike HG Wells unlike Thomas More who simply guessed about the future we are now in the position to make some at least educated guesses about what might had come in the next few hundred the next few thousand years so let me talk briefly first about Charles Darwin about what his theory actually is and I'm sure you all know but it I think it's worth reminding ourselves Darwin defined the three theory of evolution in three simple and pregnant words descent with modification descent the passage of information from one generation to the next modification the fact that that passage was imperfect that there were mistakes and therefore there was bound to be changed it was very very simple but the evolution is so simple it could almost be physics in fact it's inevitable it's going to happen we can rephrase Darwin's notion in modern terms as evolution is genetics plus time you've got you the next you've got DNA you've got mutation errors in transmission you've got time three and a half thousand million years since the origin of life and it is absolutely inevitable and unavoidable that things will change so that's what the the core of Darwin's theory was and it was an old idea it had been used many years previously by linguists and by other people Darwin had a second part on a much clever apart he's entirely his own of the evolutionary mechanism which was natural selection and our return to natural selection a little bit later in the lecture simply because it is so important evolution is fundamentally about differences it's about differences among individuals it's about differences in individuals responds to the environment they face and it's about random differences that take place through the accidents of sampling from generation to generation mutation selection and genetic drift to use the somewhat slightly technical language that we would use to describe those three components and my case is and I think there's some there's some merit in it that actually all those three processes mutation selection and drift have greatly modified and reduced their activity in modern human populations at least in the developed world and at least for the time being which means that evolution is in effect over I put health warning on that statement I mean evolution in the sense you as it's usually described by the general public some change in structure or inform some development in something different certainly evolution is not over in the biologists sense because to a biologist evolution is simply a change in gene frequencies from generation to generation and that's still going on but I'll talk about it in the general sense as seen by most of the public so what we need to do is to look at these three processes mutation selection and genetic drift now mutation errors in in in copying DNA it's universal everybody will be a different person at the end of this lecture from what they were at the beginning because everybody will have made several hundred miles of DNA in their bodies and there will be many many mistakes made some of which I have to tell you may kill you because they cause cancer during that process so mutation goes on all the time it's not a rare process it's a common process and we know a great deal about it there are mutation builds up diversity and we have a huge amount of genetic diversity in the human race I used to proudly boast that to my undergraduates that every person alive was different in form of the integral twins every person alive was different from every other person not only alive but everybody who ever had lived whatever would live in the future because of the accumulation of difference and mutation the latest estimates are much more startling they are because we've begun to look at a variation of the DNA level every sperm and every egg ever made in the history of humankind is different from every other sperm and every other egg and given that every time a man has sex he makes enough sperm to fertilize every woman in Europe that's a lot of difference okay so there's a huge amount of difference out there which traces itself ultimately to mutation and one of the common themes in utopian or dystopian novels and science fiction here's some terrible mutation event caused by an exploding nuclear power station or by raised from outer space that gives rise to giant rats who run around eating people and the like and there was a real here in the days of genetics even 40 or 50 or maybe 60 years ago there was a geneticist a great analysist who worked a while here in n bruh HJ mullah who worked on the effects of x-rays in causing mutation which they most emphatically do another concern was the effect of chemicals in causing mutation genetics is such an amazingly young subject is it hard to believe that I myself in my own undistinguished way was taught my elementary genetics by the woman here in Edinburgh who discovered the effects of chemicals in damaging DNA Charlotte Alba who is an amazing woman it's a bit like a physicist being taught by Newton you know if somebody who founded an entire branch of the science teaching the next generation so there was real concern particularly about the time of the Second World War that we were going to damage our DNA with chemicals and radiation and God knows what perhaps the most perhaps the most cynical scientific experiment ever carried out is summarized by this slide here which is a picture of the atom bomb dropping on Hiroshima in August on August the 6th 1945 and of course it another one was dropped a few days later on Nagasaki and the Japanese Emperor in a classic piece of party political broadcast speak spoke to his nation for the first time ever they'd ever heard from him fellow Japanese he said the war is developing in a direction not necessarily to our country's advantage in other words we surrender and they surrender and within a week team of scientists had been sent into Hiroshima and Nagasaki there were two kinds they were physicists who want to know wanted to know what damage the bomb had done and they were horrified by what had he done and there were biologists who were going to look not just at the effects of the radiation which was massive on those who'd experienced it and it killed lots and lots of people and lots more people died a radiation sickness but more interesting in a rather cynical way of the effects on their children because there was a strong expectation that there would be a massive effect on the DNA of the next generation a huge increase in the mutation rate which had been brought about by exposure to radiation well this is in 1945 and I have to say and the benefit of hindsight it was an entirely futile exercise because we didn't have any means for looking for human mutations but the atomic bomb control commissioners it was called the ABC C turn stayed in Japan stayed in Hiroshima until five or six years ago when it's told its task was complete and the short answer is at the end of the short answer is they found no effects of the bomb whatsoever at the end of 60 years in Russian DNA technology was beginning to emerge and they were able to look at the DNA of parents and offspring they found altogether 27 different mutations 27 changes out of many hundreds of thousands of or more of genes that they looked at 27 changes in pit in children compared to their parents as I said the bombs have had no effect but there was one very interesting and remarkable observation 24 of those changes had taken place in the father and not the mother now we know that for many mutations at least perhaps not at all that's the universal truth that many many Meucci many more mutations take place in the male line than in the female line and that has some rather a rather important implications it's easy to see why it's it happens like that males and females make their sex cells sperm and eggs in quite different ways females make their eggs women make their eggs effectively before they're born they're generated and put in sort of suspended animation and then released at intervals throughout their reproductive lives and what that means is there's only a limited number of cell divisions each of which has a chance of error between the egg that a woman makes and the egg the cheapest is on to her son or due to her child in fact it's about seven nine seven or eight cell divisions most people say not very many males are quite different men never rest men make sperm all the time even when they're giving lectures in the McKuen hall and that means that there's a huge number of cell divisions between the sperm that makes a man and the sperm that he passes on to the next generation and for the mean age of human reproduction in the West for men which is now about 26 there are something there are something like 700 cell divisions between the sperm that made him and the sperm that he passed on and every time that that sperm is made it's a division of a division of a division of a division it's copy of a copy of a copy there's a chance of mutation and that's why there are more mutations among men that among women but the effect is worse than that because actually it means that the older the man is the more mutations he's likely to pass on in the next generation and the effect is not small for a for a 51 year old father for example there are something like 2,000 cell divisions and for a 75 year old father and such people certainly exist there may be three or four thousand seven divisions each of which has got a chance of error and which of which can increase the mutation rate and here's a slide we don't have to look at in detail which finally on understates the case actually of various kinds of mutation which are generated and new the one we show isn't as the is the but a focused painting of the of the dwarf achondroplasia short arms and legs and you can see a striking increase from 24 year old fathers to 50 year old fathers it goes up by about five or six times but if you go to 70 old fathers it goes up by about ten times and for these various other things the same there's a recent paper which I find hard too hard to accept but the evidence seems clear which asks about the effects of paternal age and maternal age for that matter on the intelligence of children and the effect is reasonably striking let me get this right I want to just dug this out so I have to remind myself what it's like these are various these are various I measures of IQ that's under measures of IQ and paternal age let's just look at the top left one okay for the paternal age from from around around sixteen to about sixty IQ score drops on the average for fathers the the downward pointing line is the far the age of fathers IQ drops on the average from 108 points for eighteen-year-old fathers to about a hundred points or a bit less for the children of 60 year-old fathers now that might be due to mutation might be due to mutation the thing which is really strange is if the other line the one that goes up is the age of mothers so then actually Oldham others tend to have more intelligent children that I don't understand but it's a hint that there may be something interesting going on so if you want to know about what's going to happen to the future of the human mutation right don't start worrying about radiation and chemicals because their effects are really very small ask about the age of fathers and actually the figures are really rather surprising what actually happens what's actually happened in the developed world is that there are fewer older fathers than there used to be and that might seem surprising but what's happen in the developed world for both men and women is that actually we now confine our reproductive lives into a very very short period in the in ancient times and to a degree still in Africa in such places what happened was that any everybody who reached sexual maturity began reproducing as soon as they were biologically able to and ceased reproducing as soon as they were biologically unable to perhaps of course they were dead what perhaps it was they reach menopause but there was a strong a wide spread of maternal and paternal age that's changed here's a diagram that shows the fertility with age of men age of fathers in effect in a variety of countries in Cameroon which is shown as the red dotted line in Pakistan the blue dotted line and in the most advanced country of all of course which is France which is the black solid line and if you look at Cameroon in fact in Cameroon more than half for about half of all children are born to fathers over 45 which is when this effect begins to begins to come in in Pakistan which has moved further on in the developments takes something like probably ten ten or fifteen percent of children are born in fathers over forty-five in France about five percent okay and the same is true in Britain so there are far fewer all the fathers than before so that rather counter-intuitively if anything has happened to the mutation rate it's gone down so the notion that our biological future our evolution is going to be damaged by an increase in the mutation rate is simply wrong okay so let's move now I don't think mutation is the central is the central mover in this argument but it's interesting to see that effect let's move now to perhaps the more important part of the Darwinian argument which is natural selection a natural selection is is simple at least in principle natural selection consists of inherited differences in the chances of reproducing okay if you bear a gene which makes it more likely that you will survive find a mate and reproduce than people who bear a different version of the same gene your version will become common in subsequent generations and it will help the evolving line to adapt to new circumstances and in time as Darwin suggested may give rise to new forms of life many people find natural selection almost impossible to accept the entire entire intelligent design movement the stupid non design movement says the eye is so complicated that natural selection couldn't do it well that's just plain silly I often think of natural selection as a factory a factory for making almost impossible things everybody in this room is an almost impossible thing some possibly more impossible than others how would I know it's highly unlikely that any one of us is here but every one of us stands on a mound of billions of corpses of people who did not survive and reproduce that's why we look the way we do and natural selection inherited differences in reproduction it's a kind of series of successful mistakes there's no planning there's no foresight but it worked hydronic a Knopf I myself was first exposed to the power of natural selection you know genuine factory I made the perhaps unwise decision because every University in Britain turned me down one year then only Edinburgh accepted me the next year standards were low in those days I made the perhaps on why this is no in retrospect I think it was a good idea I left school and I went to work I started training as an engineer or fitter in a sub factor and Merseyside okay and I went around the factory learning things I did a lot of stripping or asbestos off of valves and I'm still waiting for the possible effects of that so far so so far so good but one of the things I spent I spent a couple of months in what was called the detergent shed and to make detergent to make washing powder the principle is simple how the practice is much more difficult but what you do is you take a huge vat not quite as big as this hall but big and you fill it with a boiling hot chemical liquid under pressure and you force that liquid through a nozzle and as it comes out of the nozzle it bursts into two phases it bursts into a vapor which is I've taken away by fans and recirculated and the powder which is your famous washing powder and in my day the nozzles looked like this about that long made of stainless steel heavy rather pretty beautiful things expensive to make and they were useless they kept getting blocked they made grains of different sizes one nozzle would only work with one particular formulation of chemicals they were really very very primitive things so what the factory owners did it did it across the world was to hire a series of intelligent designers really intelligent designers mathematicians physicists giant brains of that kind to try and improve this and they had very limited success because the physics of moving from a liquid to a solid plus a powder a phase transition as it's called is very hard to understand almost without understanding it I think at the time the the the engineers and the designers then moved on to classic Darwinian natural selection what they did was to make ten copies of that nozzle and mutate them to change them slightly at random longer or shorter a bigger a smaller whole different angle of attack as the liquid went in and so on and they tested them against each other and maybe one of them was marginally better 1% better than what had gone before so they took that one allows you to reproduce made 10 copies of itself changed it at random and carried on the process inherited differences in the chances of reproduction or natural selection and very quickly they saw a remarkable change here's a the primitive model of what happened over the generations they began to evolve and I use that word I use that word advisedly they began to evolve through natural selection but highly unlikely almost impossible muzzle which looked like that and worked a hundred times better than what had gone before and nobody designed that there was no foresight it happened by the simple Darwinian machine so it works and it works on inherited differences well it works on humans too I'll just give you one example of how it works on human that it does work on humans as much as on nozzles one of the odd things about the human race two other things about the human race first of all we're biologically very similar from place to place at the DNA level compared to chimpanzees for example we're remarkably homogeneous but with physically we look pretty different from place to place and need us the same most of all in terms of skin colour and the evolution of white skin is a classic of Darwinian natural selection really it turns on we all know that the people in the tropics have dark skin people in northern parts tend to have lighter skin and the question is why it turns on a chemical called melanin and everything we know about knowing is good having a black skin having lots of melanin in almost every way is a big big plus it protects against skin cancer protection against aging of the skin improves your eyesight even improves your hearing everything all those things are worse in people with white skin so why this strong effect of whiteness as we moved away from Africa Oh somewhat less than a hundred thousand years ago well it has the term as you probably know on vitamin balance on a particular vitamin called vitamin D which is made in the skin if ultraviolet light from the Sun can actually get through it we know a lot about the genetics of this system now and it's really a classic of what the power of modern genetics the gene for much of a melanin variation from place to place was actually found in a fish a zebrafish in which is a mutation called the golden zebra which the melanin is taken away people did some classic experiments of crossing these fish they found the gene sequence the DNA look through the human genome which you can do in a second with these extraordinary programs which are freely available these web these databases found the gene in humans and discovered there was an almost complete shift between different parts of the world let's just see that it's yes let's just look at Africa and Europe and this is one of the genes that control skin color something like 99% of all sub-saharan Africans have one amino acid in one part of this molecule one building block and something like 99% of native Europeans have got different amino acid in the same place it's actually the most strikingly structured gene that we know in the human genome so it's a big big effect something caused it at something as you'll see in a moment was natural selection there's a spin on the tail look over to the tutu Asia and Japan now people in Asia and Japan have rather light-colored skins they've lost most of their melanin but they have the African form of what's of this gene so what's going on what's actually happened is that natural selection which doesn't plan ahead has picked up a different mutation in China and Japan so that white skin has evolved with light colored skin has evolved at least twice perhaps more times and so the actual tree of it looks like that so whatever it was that changed us from black to white must have been pretty powerful because it happened twice that might even happen more and it happened quickly it probably happened within within 50,000 years or less it's quite likely in fact that the first Britons the first modern humans to live in Britain were black which is a startling thought putting her which I recommend to the anti-racists among you okay so what did it what was it due to well as I'm hinted it's almost certainly due to vitamin D balance if you have a whiten fewer black skin you cannot make vitamin D successfully in the set and the Sun if you have if you're a black skin you can't make enough vitamin D if you have a white skin you can and an absence of vitamin D does all kinds of horrible things it causes rickets for example soft bendy bones because the bones can't be laid down and the calcium and the phosphate isn't metabolized properly and were you to look in Glasgow is necropolis cemetery particularly also in Edinburgh a children's bones from the 19th century and earlier you would find a high proportion of them particularly in Glasgow would have rickets that was because it was smoky there was no Sun there was the window tax which closed up windows people never went outside and they got rickets and they died in their thousands and their tens of thousands people think that rickets is a there's an ancient disease that's gone away it's not it's still the second Communist non communicable disease of childhood in the world all those children who died the rickets were fueled for natural selection because those with lighter skin could make could make vitamin D those with darker skin died the rickets and those dark skin genes were replaced by LED skin genes really quite quickly they we now know that actually the vitamin E is actually much much more important than we ever thought it's actually absolutely central to all kinds of health problems in terms of muscles and bones and blood pressure control of pathogens it even high low low levels of vitamin D mean that you actually have difficulty in controlling the spread of cancer some people even say that the rot the rather poor health of the Scots compared to the English particularly in the west of Scotland maybe due to a shortage of vitamin D simply because of the absence of sunshine I think that the liquor that built this hall may have something to do with it I don't know but certainly that's an interesting thought has even been there's even being claims that the Scottish diet should be supplemented with vitamin D I don't think we're going anywhere because why du Midi has dangers if you have too much of it but it's an interesting thought and the effect as I say is quite big if you look at plasma and vitamin D levels in african-americans shown solid here and in European Americans most African Americans even today are short of vitamin D and most European Americans are I've got plenty of vitamin D and there are spins on the store so that's natural selection through climates in humans there's a spin on the story I mentioned briefly there are of course some superhumans particularly common here in Scotland and in Scandinavia you know enormous be admired by the rest of us and these are people with this very rare and aberrant mutation this is Boris Johnson the Mayor of London characteristically alert pose and you can see the Boris's are blonde science has at last solved the mystery of the blonde okay where did blondes come from what is the point of blondes for God's sake I've often wondered I'm not being one myself all right well it's actually the same story if you look at the spread of farming across Europe it began about ten thousand years ago it didn't actually get to Western Europe blonde blondes of course are very very geographically limited this is a map of blondes before people began to move I've seen about 1,700 and you can see that in Scandinavia mainly in Scotland plenty of blondes and redheads in Ireland almost none in southern Europe before when spring farming began to spread with grains in the early days and that caused great problems with health as it happens if you cannot grow grains primitive grains north of a line of somewhere that goes roughly speaking through Liverpool and that's because grains of the primitive kind need a warm spring to germinate and that means in most places that means a warm sunny spring to germinate and you can't grow them north of that line across they were pull through somewhere like through somewhere like like Hamburg and across so farmers stopped and didn't go any further than that for a long time there's one exception to that statement and that's in northwest Europe and Scandinavia and in Britain because here we can grow grains because we have a warm spring because of the Gulf Stream so we have warmth brought in even though we have no Sun in the springtime so that when spamming arrived people could move that is very unhealthy diet almost absent in vitamin D even though they never saw the Sun so any mutation which further which further lighten the skin the famous blonde was favored and that's why we have blondes and redheads in Northwest Scotland in Ireland and in Scandinavia and it happened quite recently this is a very crappy slide on the frame but it shows that farming got to Scotland probably about 6,000 years ago it got to Scandinavia parts of Scandinavia less than a thousand years ago so all this happened very very quickly so natural selection can work on humans and if I wanted to I don't I'm sure you don't want either I could give you many many more examples of that happening so you could speculate about what's going to happen to natural selection by asking about are we going to control malaria are we gonna put vitamin D in the food but we don't need to do any of that because we can make some very precise statements about what's going to happen to natural selection not with biological information but with demographic information information about numbers and it's interesting indeed that Darwin himself was drawn to the idea of natural selection by thomas malthus's book on population populations growing and it was those numbers that made Darwin think about natural selection and that population went up he thought geometrically and resources only arithmetic Lee well we have figures on human survival too I start my first-year lectures in UCL which I won't do until next week my asking well I charge I always start them in the same pathetic joke I say I'm a geneticist and my job is to make sex boring and the students look blankly at me but twenty-five lectures later by God they agree but then I then I say okay look to the person to your left and the person to your right and - and this is only for those geneticists in the audience this is only a part of the accurate statement I say two out of every three of you will die for reasons connected to the genes you carry of cancer heart disease of diabetes all of which have got a strong genetic component so they look a bit blank at that but I say don't worry if I'd be giving this lecture in in Shakespeare's time - or delivery three of you would be dead already and that's actually true and here are the figures for life and death of children in England and Scotland figures I'm probably more less identical you can see in roughly speaking Shakespeare's time a third of all British children died before they were 21 in Darwin's time 1800 1809 was his birthplace but something rather less than half died before they're 21 in 2001 99% of all babies were lost for the first month will last until they're 21 now because natural selection turns on differences particularly differences among young people if there are no difference is there's no natural selection okay so you don't have to go through lots of examples and hand-waving you just look at these figures there are no differences there's no natural selection it's as simple as that so a van part of natural selection has stopped and I'm pretty confident of that statement maybe just for the time being and certainly only in the developed world it isn't true in Africa but it stopped okay however there's a spin on the story as Darwin himself the great god Darwin realized that natural selection is like the driving test it's a two-part exam you've got to pass both papers the first one's easy by definition we've all passed it because we're all still alive at least I hope it all still alive and if you know you stay alive I'm basically we stay alive second part is the practical exam and that's much more difficult you've got to find a mate have sex and have children okay and from evolutions point of view I'm sad to report I might just as well be dead because I have no children so you need to understand the power of natural selection the action of natural selection you need also to ask how much variation how much difference is there in the number of children the people and as Darwin realized and it's obvious indeed there is much much more chance of variation in sexual success among males than among females because males are limited only by the number of females they can persuade or force to mate with them females are limited by the simple facts of biology of the number of children they can have and child care and that kind of stuff and there's plenty of evidence of you know people in the old days who had many many children but that's that's I'm not even happened quite recently here's a picture of a family on holiday in Sweden you probably recognize the chap he's in the 60s you probably recognized the chap with a red circle around his head that's Osama bin Laden okay everybody in that photograph he's our that his brother his sister his half brother or his half sister and a sama bin Laden's father Mohammed bin Laden had 22 wives and 53 children the last time that Osama was allowed allowed people to count his family he had five wives and 22 children well if somebody has 22 wives there's 21 other blokes out there who were smiting their brows or doing something because they're not getting mates okay so there's a massive variation in male mating success some people are having huge numbers of children men more than with more variation in men than in women others are not and if there's any genetic basis to that then that's a agent of natural selection that was Darwin's argument for the Peacocks tail of sexual selection and that leaves its mark in many ways for example we can work out how many males have mated in the past by looking at the patterns of Y chromosome variation the mark the male chromosome in different populations all of us or men and half the people also in this room have got a Y chromosome the other half females don't and the Y chromosome has quite a lot of variation on it and there's a whole industry now of which I've played a small part of going out and looking at patterns the geography of Y chromosomes across the world and what you find generally speaking is if we were to take a bunch of Scots or Brits not I insist on saying it's big you would find that most of us in this room most of the men in this room and really pretty different Y chromosomes from everybody else it's quite a variable chromosome and there's lots and lots of diff kinds none of which gets particularly common in most populations however there are exceptions to that here's a map of y-chromosome variation in Ireland and there is a focus at one particular y-chromosome in Donegal and there abouts where up to 20% of men have an identical my chromosomes identical to other men in or almost so to other men in the same population they all own belong to a group of families with surnames and I'll come back to the surnames in a moment with surnames that they believe to descend from the high kings of Ireland the people who ruled the warlords the wall Lords the asama bin laden's of ancient Irish history which they certainly were Oh roll ruled for hundreds of years there's one called Niall of the Nine Hostages who lived in the 6th century who's recorded as having had 20 wives and many children and his sons did just the same thing as a result many other men had no children at all and that y-chromosome still persists a thousand years and more later so the effect is very real so we to answer our question about the future of natural selection we need to know about the patterns of reproduction - and it's very clear that they have changed in many ways here's there is no longer almost anywhere in the world is that anywhere where men have fifty three wives 122 children some men might have eight or ten children possibly even 20 but most men have zero one two or three children women ditto so that's collapsed - and you can see that in many ways here's fertility in Europe from 1882 to 2000 in West Europe Eastern Europe and in Russia don't we know we don't need to look at the details fertility levels have gone down largely because many more children survived but the interesting thing is that the variation in fertility from place to place and from family to family has also collapsed and you can put those two figures on variation in fertility and variation in mortality together to get us the distich called the opportunity for natural selection and in the last 200 years in Europe the opportunity for natural selection the differences have lost their power by 9/10 so natural selection is finished forget it it's over at least for now so let me turn finally to the to the last to the last the Darwinian argument the arguments about random change here particularly in small populations and Darwin the great gone Darwin who left the University of Edinburgh of course after a year a great mistake of all I always thought he was a bloody smart cookie he immediately realized that there was something special about populations on islands he noticed of course as we all know that on the Galapagos the birds the plants and so on and the tortoises were different from those on the mainland on the Cape Verde Islands which is the first islands he went to there was just the same they were African birds and the like but they were different from those on the mainland why was that well if you read the Origin well you even better you read my rewrite of the origin it's called almost like a whale still available in all good bookshop Darwin admits that a lot of that happened an accident just by accident a few individuals were blown across the sea they carried as we would say in modern parlance a small sample of genes and so things changed at random in small populations and that effect is big and the effect in humans was in fact first discovered rather surprisingly maybe by Francis Galton and golden as I say was was a clever guy he had the hat he was also a rich guy as was Darwin and gaunt and had the habit of going on walking holidays in the middle of the lay of the 19th century in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland which in those days was remote and isolated and poor and it scarcely changed in several hundred years and he went twice and he went walking from village to village and he noticed something very old and prepare yourself for a crushingly bad joke he was interested in surnames and there is a whole science of surname genetics surnames are inherited like Y chromosomes generally speaking so you can do a lot with a telephone directory it doesn't cost very much it was time it was founded by golden golden turned up in his first village and he found to his surprise that everybody in effect in the village had the surname spaghetti okay week joke I told you all right so he noted that the curiosity went over the hill to the next village everybody had the same surname but it was pasta next village over the over the hill they're all called cannelloni and golden thought now this is interesting there must be some big advantage to being called spaghetti in village one and so on but being a smart cookie it couldn't take him a minute to work out what was going on if these villages are small let's say with 10 families in them 10 surnames when they were found it anytime if man has no sons his name will disappear he might have no children he might have only daughters his name will disappear the other nine would become more common and in time purely at random one name will take over and that's random genetic change that's genetic drift in small populations and the effect is powerful we're used to thinking of ourselves as an enormous lis abundant species but we're not if you look at where we what in terms of the number what the numbers of humans ought to be given our body size in relation to other primates the real number the natural number or the hue of the human population is about one ten-thousandth of what the population is nowadays the natural pre civilization if you can call it that number of humans it's about the population of Glasgow whether the world would be better if it was filled by the population of Glasgow I do not know but that's clearly the case and for most of human history 99% of human history we were effectively an endangered species living in small groups that never encountered each other everyone in this room saw more people on their way to this lecture than the average human being saw in his or her lifetime when we were hunter-gatherers so everything has changed historically we were rare and historically random accident as a result played a large part you can see that to an extent nowadays if you look at the population movements a slightly complex diagram here let's look at the purple the purple bars there what this is the number this is the amount of genetic variation in various populations in Africa they occur butI African populations and then in European and Middle Eastern populations the Druze Danes Chinese Japanese we're basically following the track as humans went across the world okay so finally we got to the southern tip of South America not very long ago about 15,000 bit less years ago and you can see the amount of genetic variation goes down absolutely linearly and if you draw a map of the amount of human variation in relation to distance from Addis Ababa it's amazing it's quite it's statistics it's not biology it's physics is not biology it kind of fits and that is because it is physics it's mathematics we went through bottleneck after bottleneck after bottleneck in small populations and lost variation so the effect was big and the effect in some places still is big let me illustrate its power okay let me just think about this there we go okay let me illustrate its power here's a here's a picture of a young girl I took about 15 years ago in Finland and I'm sorry to say that this young lady is certainly dead now because she had a rare genetic disease variant late infantile neural apophis Khoi ptosis it's not going to be in the exam which you need two copies of the gene to show the effect it's like cystic fibrosis and all these things this is Finland Finland is an amazing place genetically it has 33 genetic diseases no nowhere else in the world and a huge human genetics community which has done a vast amount of research on them partly because Finland also has extraordinarily good pedigree records and for much of history fiddling consisted of a few islands of people surrounded by a sea of trees and if you live on Islands you have no choice but to marry from within the small group which is available to you which generally speaking means that you marry your relatives and this disease is common and only one it's not common but it's found in only one part of Finland and everybody who's got the disease can be put onto that pedigree the young girl is the round black blob at the bottom there black means affected empty means probably not affected and we can trace her mother and her father who has shown as a heavy circle on a heavy square we can trace them back actually to a shared ancestor who lived in the 17th century and in fact every case in the whole Finland apart from one which I also show in a can be traced back to that guy so what happened was he was perfectly healthy he had one copy of the gene but because the population was small people married their relatives they became inbred as we said and finally the gene began to show its effects and the effect is amazingly powerful there's a very recent piece of work which let me talk you through it's quite complicated but it's interesting because it's Scottish all right we're talking about surnames one our surnames surnames are lengths of work letters which are held together and passed down the generation Jones my wife's name is her surname is Percy if we had any kids they'd be called Jones I'm not my wife they probably called Percy but because it may we don't scramble the surnames together okay now in general genetics does scramble stuff together but on a very short length of DNA it doesn't we don't get this recombination as it's called within the DNA over very short lengths so that if you look at populations which have got lots and lots of long lengths of identical DNA in them they probably are very very inbred because there be because there's small populations and there hasn't been the random exchange of genes among unrelated people and what we've got here is a kind of complicated thing just look at the right-hand thing that says greater than 10 all right well that is the proportion of the population you know these different places that have lengths of DNA genetic surnames more than 10,000 DNA letters long if you look at the yellow let's just take the best you take the Scottish ones okay let's take the list of next there are no Thames in mainland Scotland let's take the Scottish five 29.9 Scottish ones are shown dark brown and there's this quite a few there's yes it's quite a few by half the population has a lengths of DNA which are that long but then let's go to Orkney and da Gama's that's the purple one and you'll see there are fewer of them and that's true at all lengths okay and that's true in Orkney in general if you look at all kadian DNA there is much much more evidence of inbreeding and small population size up on the or cleese compared to Scotland as a whole Scotland as a whole is quite an parade but the Orkneys are inbred because they've been isolated in small populations and they do indeed have certain genetic diseases which are more common there and elsewhere so that evolution can take place quite rapidly in small populations so what's going to happen to population size it's going to it has increased evolution as biologists often say evolution is made in bed evolution turns on mating patterns and mating patterns have changed and they've changed in a very very obvious way for example if you go to London which is now arguably the most racially mixed population in the world then you're in a situation where actually skin colour afro-caribbean versus white makes very little difference to who you mate with and marry in New York for example in the United States rather New York the chances of a black woman marrying a white man are 300 times less than a black woman marrying a black man in Britain in London the figure is 3 times less so that the skin colour variation is having very little effect actually the best predictor who you would make mate or marry is education level thanks I think most people would be - University know that to be true ok so that these choice mechanisms are breaking up but you can measure them without reference to skin colour ask yourself the following question how far apart were you born and your wife or partner born compared to the distance apart that your mother and father were born your mother's mother and your mother's father were born and so on back into history and I can almost guarantee that always true like I can almost guarantee but in every case that figure that marital distance has got much greater my case is rather extreme my wife and I were born 3,000 miles apart because she was born in Manhattan in New York my parents were born three miles apart in West Wales and as a student once pointed out it shows but the effect is big arguably the most important event in the history of human evolution was the invention of the bicycle ok no longer did you have to marry the boy or the girl next door you can get on your bicycle or your train or your 747 to a large larger pool of people and spread your genes much much more widely so that too has actually made the case that indeed things are changing you can see it with my own family name here this is going back to golden land is and golden and his surnames but now we have maps of British surnames this is a map of Jones in 19 1881 and you don't appear on the map until the frequency of the surname gets above 2 percent so there are no Joneses in England or hardly any in West Wales where I come from my village was awkward even and when I was born in the 1940s was more than off jones's okay there has been enormous progress we've been allowed out beyond the electric fence and there are now Joneses all over the Midlands we've got to London and as I remember well I even met a couple of Joneses in Edinburgh so to summarize them all three parts of the Darwinian machine mutation natural selection and genetic drift have lost their power so if you if you're worried about where what utopia is going to be like you shouldn't be worrying about it because you're living in it now thank you okay thanks very much Steve for a really exciting and interesting talk we're going to now take some questions for maybe 20 minutes or something like that if you want 20 minutes worth of questions now when you want to ask a question please wait for somebody to come running to you with a microphone because otherwise in this hall is really difficult to hear so who would like to ask the first question is it going to be in the exam this is always the first you have basically demonstrated that evolution wise we are at the beginning I can't hear you can you speak so you have demonstrated that we are now evolution wise at the beginning of new era but would you expect that new patterns would emerge like selection for inability to use or immunity to contraception yes that's a very gold tone Ian argument actually well I don't want to get too much into the technology of it but one of the things which try very much great evolutionists are a quarrelsome lot okay they dependence I spend their time arguing splitting hairs about my new tie to do with snails and fruit flies and indeed humans and one of them will go into the depths of it but one of the arguments which there's been for years and years the factory was started out by a guy called Wynn Edwards in Aberdeen in the 1950s is the argument of group selection that actually doesn't matter what individuals do to evolution what happens is which groups succeed okay and to the genic future of a particular species and that was greatly poo-pooed but actually it's absolutely right and you can see that in humans and you can see it happening in the evolutionary sense to humans today against in fact my own case let's if we were to look at the proportion and then let's go back to the skin color genes if we were to go back to 1492 and ask what are the proportions of white and black gene roughly speaking in the world I don't know what the answer would be my guess would be for the world frequency of wipe of light : European genes would be something of the order of 10% of the total okay if we were to go back to 1892 when Europeans had filled the Americas Australia present in large numbers in Africa the incidence of of what light-colored genes across the world would have gone certainly are perhaps to 20 or 30 percent maybe more and that's in the global sense that's evolution that's group selection nothing to do with the fact that it's good with its sunlight or something like that it's something that one group is expanding itself more rapidly than another and that's happening today in quite a subtle way I'm new reading the paper on the other day it it's clearly the case that the world population the sexual behaviors of all population is undergoing a huge revolution it's called the demo I'm sure many of you know it it's called the demographic transition you go from high death rates high birth rates and high death rates to low birth rates and low death rates and the Western went through that in the late 19th and early 20th century China went through with an astonishing speed in the last 20 years partly because of the government coercion the one-child policy India is going through it at great speed far far quicker than anybody imagined Africa has not gone into it but in some senses that doesn't matter to be rather cruel because what that means there's a high birthrate but a high death rate because of HIV and the like but the one place that's been aberrant and has gone into it but hasn't come out is the Middle East and the Middle East has got very high birth rates the highest completed family size in the world are Palestinian Arabs okay mean family size for women I think is it 11 that's the mean that's huge okay but they haven't but they haven't come out of they have they've got they've gone into high survival rates they've gone into high what am I talking tangled in it they've got high birth rates but they don't have they haven't gone they've they've got survival right first medical care in the Middle East is good but they continued their high birth rates so if you look at the global picture the one group in the world which is massively expanding is the Middle East and if you go over to the Middle East as I sometimes do it's obvious immediately obvious you go to a place like Syria or Iran I can't remember the exact figures but more than half the population is under 25 now that is has all kinds of interesting political implication but it's an evolutionary phenomenon that this groups genes which are distinct to a degree are going to get much much more common and so in that sense I suppose my case is false but don't tell anybody that I said no thank you and so at one point you see that there are less old fathers so there's less mutation but then another point you emphasize the fact the human population is is massive and more much much bigger than it should be uuugh first you emphasize that there are less old fathers so less mutations but then you talk about the large human population size so surely a huge human population size would have innumerably innumerable mutations in it and that would overtake the that would be a much more important factor and giving mutations than that's much talked about any Lucian apologies what is the rate in evolution biology what is the relationship between population size and meter and and the evolutionary progress it's gone for hours about that I won't that's an interesting question I don't think we know the answer in humans but it's clearly the case that if you got enormous ly abundant animal populations then you're much more likely to get a response the rapid response to a sudden but dose of natural selection the classic example of that and actually that effect was worked out here in Edinburgh the hill Robertson effect the cloud the classic example about his freezer his house flies okay house flies I haven't counted the world's house flies recently but there are lots and lots of them there are millions or billions of them they were in the 1950s they were sprayed with DDT and that worked fine for a couple of years and then inevitably there was a mutation which spread so did he no longer works if you look at the mutation in the world's house flies in Australia South Africa South America it turns out that every single one of them has got the same DDT mutation same change in the same gene and also a great length of DNA unchanged on either side of that gene so what that tells you is that mutation only happened once and what be cooked and because there are so many fruit flies it was bound to happen the other classic example of that is HIV HIV is actually not very infective it's hard to get hey you don't want to get it but once you've got it you've got it once you've got HIV you're done for because all possible mutations in the HIV genome will happen with inside yourself simply because there are so many particles they're going to happen so there will be resistance to all possible drugs in the HIV genome which is exactly what's happening so population size is really really important quite where we stand in its effect in humans I don't know I don't not sure that anybody else does too because it turns on a historical thing called the effective population size and the effective population size is still small because they were rare for so long but it's an interesting question I might dig around and see if anybody's looked further into it couple over there a man in the Liberal Democrats shirt thank you Rockwell's talk have two questions the first is which page of the textbook should I read for the exam depends which textbook I don't know the answer to that we always tell kids the exam questions anyway nowadays so they can read the pages they need I said you know I don't know the answer the second one by natural selection we have actually got rid of genetic material but whereas now with this process is not happening so we're keeping more genetic material alive could that be exploited to advantage in the future well most people I mean the question is has natural selection the relaxation that translation has it all out of genes to survive which otherwise would have died out I think that's clearly true it's got nothing to do we've met some medical events or very little to do with medical advance it's got everything to do with sewage works clean water that kind of stuff the reason all those kids died long ago were in London was things like cholera and there are certainly genes that give resistance to cholera and many of those who died did not carry those genes now there's no cholera so those bad genes in inverted commas that make you susceptible to cholera are now being passed on okay so that's certainly true and that was one of one of Galton's arguments that you know by being kind to people allowing them to survive you were polluting the genetic future I always use what I think of as the spectacles argument I wear glasses okay and if I take life becomes even more of a blurred if I take them off in the days before glasses if I was a hunter-gatherer I would starve to death or be eaten by a saber-toothed tiger because I'd see this large animals coming towards me and I'd stroke it and say nice tiger and then it would burn my head off alright so so there was strong natural selection against people with defective eyesight and they certainly are certainly as a genetic basis to defective eyesight but and that's stopped when spectacles were invented but as long as we've got spectacles it doesn't matter so I think the case is that as long as we've got medical care clean water and that kind of thing it doesn't matter and Golden's argument was you know we should go back to being living you know short lives that are short British and nasty life was held in Britain in hand-in-hand together a days probably or in early farmer days life is much much better now what would you prefer to live in comfort in morningside what to be struggling to pull a crop off the starving fields of East Lothian I think I know I think I know the answer to that about using this data and these genes in the future I don't really know there is one observation which is really very odd which has to do with with hiv/aids which is a whole big story in its own right but a number of genes that protect against HIV some of which are in Africa and it's arguable that they've evolved to protect against HIV because HIV has been in Africa for a long time but something like one person in six in this room has got a copy of a variant in a gene called ccr5 a deletion a little bit missing which if you've got one or even better two copies of that and you're unfortunate enough to become infected with HIV then you are much more likely to survive than somebody who has no copies of it now that's really really weird because we know that HIV the virus did not get to the outside Africa until 1971 and there's no way in hell that it's gonna spread this gene it's going to a spread of it at that time but if you look at the map of where this gene is common it's common in North Germany it's common in Denmark it's common when it's gone longer it is in England it is said it is said that it overlaps the area of I think high cholera attacks no higher the black or black death histories of high levels of black death so it may have been a gene that evolved to protect against the black death which is an incidental is now able to protect against the totally different disease which is HIV so maybe in some ways by retaining all this variation than a large population allowing people to survive maybe we are having an insurance policy for the future but you come back and ask me in 500 years and given that human populations are now exercising much more freedom of choice over fertility is there likely to be a sense in which natural selection will favor the desire to have children rather than just the desire to have sex that may well be true and that's I kind of made that point and rather confused way when I talked about the Middle East where there's a desire to have children it's interesting if you if you if you go around the world and you and you interview people how many children do you want how many children would you like to have when you get old that's the question almost everywhere apart from a Middle East the answer is - okay and it's quite striking it's a very narrow distribution of actually I've got a slide of it thank you for that question all right that's the figure for Europe but the same is true in India the same is true in China except for the Middle East so I think in the end there will be some people who choose to have no children but there is there seems to be a strong desire to have two children which is of course the number of children that people have had almost exactly since humans evolved there they had many more but most of them died but for 99 percent of human history people had two surviving children and people still roughly speaking have two and a bit surviving children I don't think that these are not to reproduce although it certainly it's certainly appearing there's no question of that I don't think the effect will have much but how much of an effect yet but it may do in the future I guess confused by your talk you began by saying the answer is yes so you can leave and finish it by saying the answer is no but don't tell anybody I mean when when asked will they be selection for new behaviors like contraception or wanting to have children you said yes is there an enormous well of mutations in our 8 billion population vastly bigger than ever before the answer is yes and are there large scale gene frequency changes for it for genes for diabetes and all the thousands tens of thousands of other lethal and seemingly thil mutations that are now increasing in frequencies as they've never seen her that are the ones that are in Utopia so I just can't see how the answer can remotely be yes it's not I'm not sure I agree with you I mean that first of all when you talk about things like diabetes okay the reason for the great increase in diabetes is not a great increase in diabetes genes if such a thing exists which probably do actually but a greater increase in obesity and in overeating so the jeans are just manifesting their effects in a way which they had not done before so the genes themselves have not changed frequency I did put that sort of health warning on at the beginning which are you I accept which is if you're talking if you're asking are gene frequencies changing let's just talk about Britain in the British population the answer is obviously yes perhaps less obvious in this audience than in a London audience which will have kids of Asian of African of South American ancestry in them and there will be more or less random mating among that crew now that's a gene frequency change and I'm very happy to put my hands up and say that's happening but if you talk about evolution in the sense that most people believe it in the utopian or the dystopian sense that the human race is going to alter its it's its behavior it's see its appearance everything that makes us human in the way that it has done very rapidly over the last few hundred thousand years I'm still pretty confident the answer is No a very few very few thank-yous to say first of all miss I'd like to thank Steve and taking time out of a very hectic schedule to give us this talk this evening which is very enjoyable and as Mary mentioned this this lecture is not just an Enlightenment lecture it's actually also a research staff development event and the University and the research funding bodies have put a lot of effort into trying to develop research staff and particularly skills to do with Communication and Media and so events like this give us the opportunity to hear world-class communicators talk to us and that's a very important aspect of being a scientist in the current era it's worth pointing out the university venom is very good at this and the university has been nominated this year for the fourth year running for a times higher education award in this area I would like to thank some of the people involved in organizing this so vice principal Mary bounds deep fetus Olivia Williams Jane Holly and Colin sharp for their help in supporting and organizing the event and also to Sheila Thompson a Natalie poison responsible for the research Developer Program at the University so it remains to me to ask you all to show your appreciation once again to Steve for this evening [Applause] this production is copyright the University of Edinburgh

Channel: The University of Edinburgh

Views: 38,908

Rating: 4.7490196 out of 5

Keywords: edinburgh, university, enlightenment, lecture, series, steve, jones, human, evolution, science, biology

Id: XE_Oy1eRyVg

Length: 75min 32sec (4532 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2009