Are humans still evolving?

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I'm Brian Cox.

I'm Robin Inch, and today we're looking at natural selection.

We've gone from a lifeless planet to one which has creatures upon it that are bright, some that are beautiful, great and small, and wise and wonderful.

And if we get all the way to the end of that song, we actually save a lot of time doing this show because then we just get to the Lord God made them all.

Thank you very much for listening.

Goodbye.

Are you still trying to get on thought for the day?

I would love to be on thought for the day.

I would be perfect for thought for the day because I only have one thought a day.

So I feel that I am.

In fact, I was hoping to have one during the show, but I had one earlier, so we'll have to wait for next week.

So, in the absence of any further thoughts from Robin,

we are asking a distinguished panel for their thoughts instead.

Today we're asking: Are humans still evolving?

Have we reached peak human?

Do the principles of evolution by natural selection still apply to us in an age of technology and modern medicine, or have we transcended the Darwinian paradigm?

Today we're joined by three people who, through a mix of genetics and cultural influence, have evolved into the sort of people who we like to have on a panel, i.e.

two proper scientists and a comedian who's refined the skills of making it look as if they know what they're talking about.

And they are.

I'm Adam Rutherford, and I'm a geneticist.

I'm the presenter of BBC Insight Science on Radio 4 at 4:30 on Thursdays.

And I think that the most remarkable thing about evolution is just how bad it is at designing, well, humans.

You know, 97% of all species are already extinct.

That is not a good track record.

And we have back pain, our retinas are the wrong way round.

Childbirth really hurts.

I understand.

I know I'm not supposed to interject immediately, but I don't agree with the bit about retinas being the wrong way round.

Because I read that there was, because an octopus is the other way around, of course.

But I read that it was

likely that the blood supply to our retina being wired allegedly the wrong way around, so we have a blind spot, actually allows us to recover from our

night vision when we get bright lights and things like that.

You know, this is exactly what my PhD was.

Is that not correct?

Anyway, while you continue, I'm not sure if the not really.

Let them keep talking if we fade the mics down.

It's absolutely fine.

The blood supply actually ends up.

And our other guests are while they continue talking.

Because once they get onto retinas and octopi, you'll find that Brian just won't shut up.

I've got a thought about eyes.

We'll introduce you all.

We don't know who you are.

I'm David Bedeal.

I'm a comedian and writer.

I'm not an I know you haven't spoken.

Do you want to speak?

We can change the order.

It's not a problem.

I have a woman being allowed to speak on this programme.

So Sasha warned me that this programme could be a little chaotic.

I didn't think it would go off script before we finished introducing everybody, but anyway.

The trouble is, you need to be on a script before you can go off it.

Now this is the mistake we made.

Okay, so I'm Aoifa McClauset and I'm a professor in genetics in Trinity College Dublin where I work in molecular evolution.

And the thing that I find most fascinating about human evolution is how we have evolved the ability to have complex communication.

So we can do things like this and we can develop ideas over generations and generations, things that are difficult and tricky, like evolution.

Hello, I'm David Peteil,

and I'm a comedian and writer.

And

the most remarkable, I would say, and perhaps the best feature of human evolution is that it has proved conclusively that apes are our cousins, and yet we still don't have to have them over at Christmas.

This is our panel.

Can I say something about the eye?

Yes, of course.

No, no, no, no.

Now we've removed your sense of structure.

Yeah, can I say something about the eye?

Because that's interesting.

The eye is very structured.

But because whenever you see creationists banging on about how evolution versus intelligent design, blah, blah, blah, they always bring up the eye, don't they?

They always say, oh, the eye, the human eye, is so extraordinary.

It could never have developed without intelligent design.

And what I always want to put to them when they say that is glasses, right?

The all-powerful creator had to rely on the divine intervention of spec savers.

So it feels to me like the eye clearly wasn't designed to be the best thing it could possibly be.

Yeah, it's a terrible argument against evolution.

And Darwin points it out himself.

He says in The Origin of Species that this is a problematic concept.

And that's when the quote finishes, if you're a creationist.

And then he goes on to say, oh, but I can quite imagine the various steps in developing an eye, which would start with a sort of a slight pit with some photoreceptors, and blah, blah, blah, and describes all of the steps.

And now we know all those steps.

And in fact, we know animals, organisms that have every single incremental step that goes from having a single patch of photoreceptors, a euglena, which is a single-celled type of amoeba, all the way up to octopuses, cephalopods, us.

We know every single step in the evolution of eye.

Is this problem about eyes?

I wish it was because we've got five minutes, which is unusable but fascinating.

So,

I did just want to give you the right of reply because when David said apes are our cousins, you shook your head mournfully.

Well, it wasn't mournfully.

No, we are apes.

We are apes.

Yeah.

Yeah, but because there are another thing that creationists sometimes say, and actually I sometimes think I don't know the answer to this, and as a fundamentalist atheist, I should.

They say, oh, yeah, but if we were related to apes, then why haven't apes turned into us?

Because they keep on evolving.

And the answer, I thought, was, no, they're cousins.

They're all the apes that exist, bonobos, orangutans, other apes, they are our cousins.

They're a different branch from the same ancestor.

So they are our cousins, no?

Well, what you can do is if you change for your joke next time it to chimpanzee or gorilla, I think that's acceptable because then that allows the shared common ape ancestor without a change.

You have to laugh.

Yeah.

What this show is about is about getting a comedian on to get a laugh and then for the next half hour explain to that comedian how it was a wrong laugh.

Feels very guilty afterwards and says, We had a lovely time, but looking back, we're filled with existential anxiety.

I see.

So, just for the record, if he's had chimpanzee, a specific species, it would have been okay to say that they're our cousins, but because he said apes, that's the generic name for a group of which we are also a member.

Yeah, sort of, except apes is a non-scientific term, really, anyway.

So, I think we can bring people talk about Europeans as others instead of realizing you're them as well.

Brexit reference.

It's a hominid.

All right.

Ethan, the title of the show, we should remind ourselves at this point.

The title of the show is Are We Still Evolving?

which I sort of think is a silly title anyway, because self-evidently we are.

What I think we are.

What do you mean by self-evidently, though?

Well, because evolving in the sense that the great genetic database of humanity is changing moment by moment.

I think what we really mean is...

It's not self-evident, is it?

Not everyone's walking around going, oh, do you know, I was down Oxford Street earlier on today.

Stephanie evolved, that bloke over there, hasn't hasn't it?

You don't notice it, it's not as self-evident.

Yeah, also, something like 50%, it's true there, something like 50% of Americans don't believe in evolution, which I think is a good example of how they haven't evolved.

Okay, given that even Robin, as a co-presenter, doesn't understand the question or the title of the programme, let's start with the definition then.

We have evolution and there's evolution by natural selection,

which are two

different things are relating.

Yeah, so if you talk about evolution,

what we mean by evolution is really just a change in the genetic composition of a population over time.

But that's kind of boring, and it's not what people are really asking when they ask, are humans still evolving?

What people care about is, are we still adapting?

So are we getting better at fitting into our environment,

doing things better that are important for us, interacting with other people better?

So that's what people really care about, and that's trickier.

Could you give us the one-minute summary of evolution by natural selection?

Evolution by natural selection is essentially you survive better because of a heritable difference in how well you live long enough to also have children.

So you have some gene that allows you to be stronger or more attractive or you know all of those things, and you have more children than the next person who doesn't have that.

Therefore, the future generations all carry that gene, which gives them that trait, which allows them do that thing.

So we essentially have random.

Sorry, I just wanted to pick apart that for a second, which is that Heat magazine have a sort of

freaky bloke we fancy of the week, right?

Like men will be considered who are sort of not sexually attractive to be sort of attractive in one way or another for weird reasons.

Well then they are attractive right to somebody.

You don't need to be.

But they're not for evolutionary reasons.

They're not bringing with them any adornment to the species.

Well you don't necessarily know that.

So I mean the thing that somebody's responding to when they find somebody attractive, they're not necessarily consciously knowing what that is.

But

if there is something in that person that makes them more attractive and therefore more likely to get a mate and have children, then so long as that isn't just a passing fad, that will then result in changes in the future generations as well.

But when you watch Life on Earth or whatever,

and it's like a peacock's got a big tail,

and that attracts the female peacock, that's fairly straightforward, right?

But Robin Ince Ince has mated.

So what I'm saying is that human sexuality is a much wider spectrum than peacocks.

See, the peacock's a good example.

Users of Vandecraft generators get that.

There is nothing better than being an old grey bespectacled man, being insulted by an old grey bespectacled man who says, I can't believe that that grey bespectacled man managed to mate.

I, on the other hand,

is fighting over who's actually going to reproduce.

This is how we're doing.

The peacock tail is an interesting example because you say it's obvious, but it's it's also a big impediment.

It's one of these things that's a slight puzzle.

So, why did the peacock evolve such a conspicuous tail?

It's enormous, it obviously gives a predator a bigger thing to catch on to if you're going to try and catch the peacock, and it makes them really conspicuous.

It's a kind of anomaly, in a way.

Well, no, it's not an anomaly.

We see lots of examples like that, but it's weird.

So, this is an example where you say specifically this thing has evolved only for attracting a mate.

So, it's an example of a special subset of natural selection, which is sexual selection.

So, it's something that its only purpose is attracting a mate.

And in fact, it might even be a disadvantage in other ways.

And there's some ideas that this is some kind of show-off mechanism as well.

It's like, look, I managed to be strong and still be here despite this, like big, this big target I've got painted on my back.

But it's, yeah.

Adam, why would we suspect that we are not still evolving, which is implicit in the title of the show?

Right, well, because we don't behave in the same way as all other organisms, which are definitely under the auspices of natural selection.

We do loads of stuff which isn't primarily designed to live longer or have more children.

You know, we do radio programs and play sports and do all sorts of stuff which isn't just devoted to having sex.

I think.

We also intervene.

I think that's right.

I think one of the things people think about when they're asking that question is that we intervene.

We don't just let people die of the things that they're born with.

And so sometimes people think that's

intervening and

unshackling us from natural selection.

It's a pretty cruel way of looking at it, but I think that's what people are thinking sometimes too.

So is that, I mean, does that change the way, do we change the definition of natural selection?

Do we need to change the way that we use that term if as a species we are changing our environment rather than adapting to the environment around us?

Would that require different terminology?

Not for me.

I think that because I think we've been doing it all the time.

We just haven't necessarily consciously been doing it.

So there's an example I like, which is that

we need vitamin C in our diet.

We all know this, right?

So, if you don't eat vitamin C, you get scurvy.

And it's just this thing we know, so we don't even question it.

But actually, other animals can make vitamin C in their body.

They can make it from the stuff they eat.

They biosynthesize vitamin C.

But humans and other apes can't do this, and also guinea pigs can't do this.

So, this is an ability that we lost.

It was a gene we had, and we lost it, it degraded over time.

And why did we lose it?

Well, possibly because we were eating, our ancestors, our ape ancestors, were eating a diet that was naturally rich in vitamin C.

So what matters is you don't get scurvy.

If you don't get scurvy, you'll be healthy and live longer.

If you don't get scurvy because you eat vitamin C, or if you don't get scurvy because you eat something else which gets converted into vitamin C in your body, it doesn't really matter.

Either way, you're still strong and healthy.

So there was no selection then at that point for maintaining that gene.

to make vitamin C.

So when a mutation arose which disabled the gene, it didn't matter.

And so then that

that managed to basically take over in the population.

That was a case where we intervened, or our ancestors intervened in a sense.

They changed their environment by what they ate, and it changed the path of evolution in a sense.

But we've been doing it all the time, because evolution isn't just

being born, hanging around for long enough to get sexual maturity, having offspring, and dying.

It's all the interactions you have as well along the way.

And so

the environment is not just the air and the water and the stuff you eat.

The environment is all the interactions you have and everything you do with each other and the things you do to yourself as well.

Yeah.

No, well, I was wondering, I'm not sure why he died, whether it was we did give him vitamin C, but he died anyway,

possibly because it was those enormous orange tablets we were forcing down his throat.

But he died just before the England-Sweden game, which I thought was a good omen because his name was Bjorn.

And actually, what was particularly weird about that guinea pig was we had two of them, and they die very easily, guinea pigs.

And they were originally called Benny and Bjorn after Abba.

But when Benny died, that just meant we had a very bleakly Scandinavian-named guinea pig called Bjorn.

So, in a sense, his death was like Bergman-esque.

You always had a sense that he was going to go.

Is this what this show is about?

I don't know.

It is now.

Well, Adam, just to get back to the subject,

why how could it be that we would even suspect that we may uh s have stopped or be in the process of stopping evolving?

Well, there's a couple of reasons.

One is that it's very difficult to test.

Evolution as a science relies heavily on history, right?

So in some senses, it is a historical science, and we just can't do experiments on us like we can do with fruit flies or mice, which can actually demonstrate that evolution is occurring by natural selection in us.

We're not allowed to do those experiments, although I can think of some pretty good ones.

The second reason is that we have culture, we have technology, and we have loads of stuff that we do, which appears to

not enhance our reproductive success or our longevity.

And we've been doing this for tens of thousands of years, but there are specific examples

where you can begin to question whether that particular action has that resulted in us, in our genomes evolving to enhance our survival, or has it not?

And that's really what the question fundamentally is.

Evolution is supposedly supposed to be helping us anyway with mortality issues, but gradually through technology, this is sort of Brian's point, isn't it?

We've created a sense where we can almost cheat mortality completely, and that is anti-evolutionary.

Perhaps there's a position where technology will lead to de-evolution, as it were.

That's evolution too.

Well, that's evolution two, perhaps, but to a sort of curve of evolution whereby, for example, to use a stupid example, but memory will start to de-evolve in humans because we'll just have Google.

So evolution doesn't necessarily mean things get better.

So that's one thing.

So,

because that was the little discussion we had at the beginning, the difference between evolution and evolution by natural selection.

So, evolution...

in the boring sense is just that things are changing over time.

And so even if they're getting worse, they're still changing over time.

And but, yeah, so are we going to be better adapted or better at doing things?

Some things we'd probably be worse at, but does it really matter?

Like we were talking earlier about glasses.

I think that's another example where you could say, you know, you can imagine in in a species totally in the wild without any technology, having poor eyesight might be one of those things that means you don't make it to sexual maturity because you're going to not see the predator or you're not going to find the stuff you need.

But we've intervened and we don't consider it at all controversial that we've intervened to give people glasses who need them.

I just thought that thing about technology though and change that, that's what I wonder is, is that one of our perhaps disadvantages, which is we as a species don't react to our changed situation.

So for instance, like with talking about child mortality, infant mortality, like in my own family, one of my sisters has four children, another has two, and I have one, because as David pointed out, it was very difficult for me to mate.

And

so, we kind of averaged out correctly, I think, at 2.33 children each.

You know,

that was the mathematical thinking there behind that, obviously.

But we still have, as we see, an incredible rise in population in this century and in this second half century.

So, we are now this incredible burden as well at times.

Is that, yeah, that we're not reacting quickly enough to go, hang on a minute, the situation has changed, but are still our patterns of reproduction have not changed quickly enough to

slow down the number of human beings on the earth.

So, yeah, so we've got a larger population partly because of lower infant mortality.

So, that's what you're saying.

Yeah, so clean water, vaccination, all of these things.

Yeah, so well, it's a tricky one, right?

Because who do you pick who has to die?

Because that's the awful thing about natural situations.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean that.

Then we shouldn't be quickly.

Sorry, I didn't mean children.

This has been terribly misunderstood.

We shouldn't have watched Logan's Run before this show.

No, but that is just the harsh thing, right?

So, natural selection is really, really harsh.

It's just some people make it, some people don't.

So, you know, if you can do something that means that people survive better, it's immoral not to.

I want to choose a specific example of,

I suppose,

the fast nature of evolution.

So,

the ability to digest milk

is a relatively recent adaptation, isn't it, for humans and only in certain populations?

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, this is a classic example which, in some ways, answers the question: Are we still evolving?

And it's one that geneticists like me and IFO quite like, but our time scales are not necessarily what normal people think of, because when you say recently, it's about 8,000 years ago.

Now, that's a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.

And what you're referring to is the fact that almost all white Europeans can drink milk after weaning.

Most people throughout history and most people on earth today, cannot.

It causes them all sorts of tummy troubles, and it's to do with the existence of a particular enzyme called lactase.

And this, what we have, everyone on this panel, is that we are

lactose persistent rather than lactose intolerant.

Now,

the question was: well, where did that arise?

Why did that arise?

Why 8,000 years ago did a group of pastoralists, probably somewhere in Germany, suddenly evolve the ability to process milk after they're being breastfed.

And

the answer is because we were farming goats and cattle,

and there was milk, and there was dairy produce there.

So, then the more interesting question then becomes: well, were we drinking milk from cattle and goats before we had the ability to process it, or is it the other way around?

And we now know the answer to that as well, and it was the other way around.

We were probably eating soft cheeses and other dairy products and yoghurts, maybe, which don't have this particular sugar, before we had the ability to drink milk.

So, we already had the technological and cultural background and subsequently evolved the ability to drink milk on top of this.

And this is a great example of what we refer to as gene-culture co-evolution, which is maybe a better way of thinking about humans rather than natural selection because our culture, the way we behave, influences our genes, and our genes influence our culture.

Milk drinking is the classic example.

It doesn't answer the question of whether we're still evolving today,

but in evolutionary terms, 8,000 years ago is basically today.

And how do we know that, Eve?

Okay, I just wanted to add, though, because I think it's important to add that it happened independently in dairy cultures in Africa, because there's a certain group of people who think it's a white supremacist thing to be able to digest milk, which is really peculiar.

But anyway,

people think what?

It's like you see these white supremacists drinking milk on the street, going, oh, I can drink milk.

Really?

Well, Nesquick and everything.

Yeah, I don't know.

Well, you know, they're not known for their high intelligence, but.

Yeah.

Maybe they're just trying to get milk on their faces to look more white.

Maybe that's it.

Actually, that would be a better explanation.

So do we know what the process is?

Adam's explained it to an extent, but from a genetic perspective, so could you talk us through what happens?

There's a mutation.

Do we know what it was?

It happened in different cultures at this point.

Yeah, so there's the gene.

that produces this enzyme lactase, which digests the milk sugar lactose into simpler sugars.

And beside the gene in the DNA sequence, beside the sequence for the gene, there's a sequence which controls the gene when it's turned on and off.

So a mutation happened in that part.

So in basically the switch.

So

in other mammals, the gene is on from birth and then turns off.

after weaning.

So in humans, it turns off at about five years old on average.

But then in certain individuals, this mutation, this change in the sequence, means it doesn't turn off anymore.

So it's a simple, it's quite a small, actually, I don't think we know we don't know exactly what the exact change is.

There's a few mutations which are probably the

small, just one-letter mutations, which are most likely the ones that just mean this gene doesn't switch off anymore.

And it's

when we think about evolution, we think it's easy to think of it in quite simple terms, isn't it?

Something, there's a mutation, it gives you an advantage.

But what would be the advantage of turning the ability off to be able to?

It was awful already.

So the advantage, so in other mammals,

it's just less wasteful to produce an enzyme throughout your whole life for something you're not going to eat.

So if you're a cow and you only drink your mother's milk for

whatever, how long, how long do cows drink milk for anyway?

But for that amount of time, and then you're only eating grass afterwards,

it's wasteful to keep producing an enzyme throughout all of adulthood when you're not...

in you're not eating anything that contains lactose.

Which seems so intricate, doesn't it?

But the statement is that there is a slight advantage if you can just save that energy or whatever we do.

Natural selection is extremely sensitive.

Things that we can't even observe experimentally.

So just a really peculiar example.

So there are genes in mice that if you look at these genes, you can tell from the way they, you can tell from looking at them that these are important genes.

This is tons and tons of genes.

There isn't just one example.

And one of the ways you know they're important is that they've been maintained by evolution over really, really long times.

So that tells you that it's an advantage to keep this gene.

If you do an experiment and totally turn off that gene or remove it entirely, there's no effect.

And this is true for tons and tons and tons of genes.

So they call them like basically nothing happens.

So we can't observe it in a lab or looking at this mouse.

The mouse looks totally normal, they do everything normally.

But evolution can see something that we can't see because it's sensitive to really, really subtle effects.

So maybe it's something that it would encounter in a natural environment that never arises in a cage in a lab because it doesn't have to do something, doesn't have to forage for something, some very, very slight thing.

Which is fascinating.

It gives us some insight, I think, into how such complex organisms can develop given 3.8 billion years because of the absolute sensitivity of the.

Can I just tell you what I think is one problem with the idea that humans are still evolving?

And that is that drawing of the ascent of man,

which starts off, as you know, with the sort of monkey.

Is it a monkey or an ape at the bottom?

Something like that.

Right, and then it's like a Neanderthal man, something like that, one of our cousins.

And then.

I always wonder our ancestors.

Okay, and then

there's a guy in the middle.

there's always a guy in the middle who slightly seems not to know whether he's coming or going evolutionarily, and then eventually you get Homo erectus, don't you?

Now if we're still evolving, what's going to be the next one?

Well, on that picture.

We're Homo sapiens.

Are we?

Homo erectress.

But at the top, at the end of it, you've got someone just standing up, haven't you?

But if we're still evolving, that spectrum's going to have to go a bit further.

See, that image is one of the most pernicious ideas in the whole of evolutionary biology, and most of us absolutely hate it.

Yeah.

Because it's so Aoifera agrees, because it's so sticky, and because people refer to it all the time.

It implies two things which are fundamentally wrong about evolution.

The first is it implies there is a direction to evolution that you start off on the left-hand side.

It's called the March of Progress, and it comes from a 1960s French textbook.

And on the left, you've got some sort of simian, some sort of monkey creature, and as you say, it becomes more and more upright.

And eventually, in the original and in most versions, you've got an upright white guy with a beard and a spear, and his right leg is in front of his left, so you can't see the main engine of evolutionary change.

Is that why?

So, you can't see his genitalia.

It's prudishness.

So, it's always the right thing.

It's not that he's taking a penalty.

Yes, I'm just doing the action now.

Yeah.

It's interesting you say it's a man, by the way, because I'm going to credit this, because I did actually see an American comedian do this, and I don't like to nick any material.

So, it's a guy called Adam Newman, who said this very funny thing, I thought, which is that he had seen that, presumably for diverse and good reasons, done with a woman.

And it was so it's a female creature and then a female, whatever, the middle creature, and then a woman.

And he said he found the woman quite attractive.

And then he asked the question, at what point is it okay to find any of the other ones attractive?

At what point is it, could you fancy a Neanderthal?

Is that all right?

I think it's a very good point.

It's very much all right, and it very much happened.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Is that why we're here?

Because.

Well, it's definitely part of our history.

We all have Neanderthal ancestry, which means your ancestors, well, your ancestors, some of them were Neanderthal.

And all your other ancestors definitely found out.

If I went back in time and I had sex with a Neanderthal woman, would that be misagination?

I don't even know what that word means.

Me neither.

Okay,

would it be a type of bestiality?

No, we're the same species.

Okay.

But

this is where I've never seen that.

People disagree on this.

I shall acknowledge that people disagree.

I say we're the same species.

I mean, a lot of geneticists say so.

Aren't they a bit too much monkey?

No, not at all.

They're not at all monkey.

Neanderthals we can't.

Neanderthals we can't.

Stop it, David.

Stop it.

We are ape too, so they're not too much ape, but

they can't have too much ape.

That's what we're saying.

We're apes.

Well, I have a friend of mine who, a man once tried to flirt with her by saying, Do you know you look like Helena Bonham Carter in Planet of the Apes?

We genuinely felt that that would be.

That's kind of saying you're kind of sexy, but maybe overly hairy.

Still being flat.

But this is interesting as an example.

So

the difference, the physical differences between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens

were caused by because those populations were separated?

Yeah.

Separated for something like 600,000 years, which is a decent chunk of evolutionary time.

But then Neanderthals were in, they were primarily a European species or a European type of human, although also into Eurasia.

And Homo sapiens is primarily an African type of human.

We now think from all over Africa, not just the Rift Valley, which is what we've thought for the last 30 or 40 years, because the oldest Homo sapiens are actually from Morocco now, about 300,000 years ago.

And then about 80,000, 70,000 or 80,000 years ago, there was this big migratory event, which happens over thousands of years and features a very small number of Homo sapiens.

And they eventually reach Europe.

And we overlap in time and space with Neanderthals for about 5,000 years, during which time there were multiple what geneticists refer to as gene flow events.

Which is what David referred to.

Generated gene flow events.

Yeah, so yeah, genetics is full of those types of euphemisms, lots of gene flow events.

Now the fact that we're all sitting here with about 1.5% of our genomes being Neanderthal means that your ancestors, my ancestors, all of our ancestors, did successfully have fertile children with Neanderthals about about 45,000 years ago, which means they cannot be a separate species if that species definition is correct.

But even the way you phrased that, you said your ancestors had sex with Neanderthals, your ancestors are Neanderthals.

It's like, you know, you've got eight great-grandparents.

It's not like that you're, you're not going to say, my, you know, my

grandfather had sex with somebody.

It's like, no, she's your grandmother, right?

So, you know.

So.

Whoa, there.

Whoa, whoa, slow down.

No.

You can say that Adam's grandmother is a Neanderthal.

Well, yes.

Do we know how different,

to get a perspective on genetic, the rates of genetic change, do we know how different our ancestors, let's say, 40,000, 50,000 years ago, were in genetic terms to us?

Would you see the difference?

If you sequence the genome

of one of our ancestors, let's say 50,000 years ago, how different would it be?

So hardly different at all.

And this has been done because you can get DNA DNA from archaic samples now, from old samples, and people are doing this all the time.

And so you can see

when you do this, you see, like, so if you make a graph, you map out all the human genetic diversity that exists on the planet today, and then you get one of these archaic samples and you put it into your graph, it usually doesn't come out somewhere way off, you know, totally different from the variation we see today.

It usually falls in the middle of this cloud of variation based on the stuff that we can see.

So they're not so different and it evolution takes quite a long time.

So this, I think, is actually the most interesting question in human evolution at the moment because what Afe has just said is absolutely correct.

And if you took,

if you took

the humor of genetics, I would just say, professor meet doctor, doctor meet professor.

But what you're saying is an interesting question, right?

If you took someone from 40,000 years ago or even 100,000 years ago or maybe 200,000 years ago and looked at their genomes and said, are they significantly different from ours today?

Well, physically, from their bones, they're not.

If you tidied up someone, a Homo sapiens from 150,000 years ago, and gave them a haircut and then put them in a nice suit or dress and sat them in this audience, you would not be able to spot them, right?

Right, so physically, we haven't changed.

As Aoife says, genetically,

not significantly.

There's been a few bits and pieces, like in lactose persistence, you know, the ability to process milk or whatever.

But actually, something really fundamental does happen or has happened in the last 100,000 years, which is that we start doing loads of really sophisticated things that we have no evidence happened before.

And what I'm talking about is, well, art, the ability to process complex, abstract ideas.

All of that

sort of suddenly emerges around about 50,000 years ago.

There's not much evidence for it before.

And after that point, it's just everywhere.

Does that mean there's a selection effect for intelligence because you have to live in this more complex culture?

It kind of depends on how you define intelligence, but definitely a cultural selection effect for the ability to live in social groups and do all the things that we do really naturally, but we have no evidence that our ancestors 100,000 years ago did at all, which is to be social and to be cultural and to have art and have music and comedy and all of those things.

Now, it's very difficult to ascertain whether those to put a metric on whether that is something that has been selected.

But we do know that there was a small population 50,000 years ago which didn't, or 100,000 years ago, which didn't do this kind of stuff.

And today, everyone does it all the time.

And there are, what is it, seven billion of us.

So we are cultural beings.

It doesn't mean we have totally freed ourselves from the shackles of natural selection under

the genetic model, which is correct.

That is still happening.

But to a much lesser extent in the last 50,000 years, than selection on things like know whether you're good at playing the flute or carving a statue or tattooing or you know, and all those things might be related to the stuff that Aoifer and David were talking about earlier, which is how attractive are you?

The ability to carve a flute is not something that any other organism has ever done because it

doesn't appear to be something which is going to help you reproduce if you're a peahen.

Oh man.

You can give me these images.

I've just got this image now of James Galway being tattooed while he plays.

Anyway, the kind of humanocentric, what you've said a bit, because obviously we do have a civilization, but as far as I understand it, you know, it's possible that octopuses, octopi, toctopus with the word I in it, which is now going to set Brian off again.

But

they are possibly as intelligent as we are, are they not?

Well, I don't know.

Possibly.

They just don't have animals.

They're very intelligent, definitely.

Well, there are lots of animals that are, you know, much more intelligent than we think they are, I think.

And we've, you know, prioritized the human to allow us to eat animals and to essentially be top of the food chain.

But actually, the idea that there is no civilization besides ours, I don't think is correct.

I would say that many, much marine life might have a type of civilization.

It's a valid point, and human exceptionalism is a problem within science.

But the fact of the matter is,

it partially depends on how you define intelligence.

Yes, octopuses, that is the plural.

Is it?

Yeah.

Because it's polypus in Latin, so it'd be poly pie if it was a Latin word, but it's an English word, which is a very important thing.

This is very important.

I'm glad you said that.

It is quite important because octopi does actually suggest a pie as well.

Eight of them eight pies, I would eat.

Eight pies, yeah, which I would eat.

If it was Greek, if it was Greek, it'd be octopodes, but you know you wouldn't pronounce the English pieces.

This is so much the wrong show for you today.

Anyway, anyway.

Countdown, that's what you want to hear.

The point being that

we have massively, historically, underestimated the abilities of all sorts of animals to do all sorts of things in a very human-centric way.

And now we're beginning to be much better at not anthropomorphizing animal abilities and recognizing that, you know, octopuses don't give a monkeys.

Well, that's a terrible way of phrasing it.

That's a terrible way of phrasing it.

Octopuses really don't care about a lot of the stuff that we do.

Like, you know,

being able to process milk, if you're an octopus, really isn't going to happen.

Dolphins are super intelligent at loads of stuff.

They have.

Not the flute.

They're terrible at the flute.

They have flat paddles instead of hands, so they can't hold stuff.

They're never, ever going to be able to create fire.

It's no good in the sea.

Right.

It's just no good in the sea.

Which means that they miss out on a whole set of technological innovations which have had a significant effect on

our own evolution.

But two million years worth of tool use.

Octopuses are never going to do that.

They're never going to be able to forge metal.

Which means they're never.

Or dolphins, yeah.

But dolphins have a separate hole for eating in and breathing in, so they never choke.

So do we.

No, we have the same hole for eating and breathing.

Oh, yeah, these ones.

I forgot about that.

This is blocking.

This is why I'm not a scientist.

But it's a joyous thing to just see you go, I have a nose?

It was like

the final moment in a late 80s Richard Dreyfus movie.

But David, you've had a nose all the time.

It's such a beautiful nose as well.

How could I not have seen it?

It's a good point.

You're right.

You're right, Nathan.

I just thought he was folding his glasses on.

You know what?

I saw Neil deGrasse Tyson say this thing about dolphins about five weeks ago, and how I thought, yeah, brilliant.

Dolphins are clever.

We're not clever than us, but they've evolved not to choke.

And he must know about noses.

He's a physicist.

He knows nothing about biology.

He doesn't work on that level.

Because Dawkins comes up with the idea of a meme.

I mean, he's not the first person to come up with it, but he comes up with the idea of a meme, doesn't he?

Which is the idea of an idea.

An idea that spreads like a gene or whatever, that will have sort of Darwinistic possibility.

So I read, you probably know about this, but there was a study in Yale that some monkeys were given coins, and with the coins they could buy grapes.

And if you want to know just how much monkeys are like us, within like a week, one monkey had nicked all the other coins, and a female monkey had found a way of getting coins without using grapes or whatever.

She had just decided to become a prostitute.

But what I think is that those social learnings, what I'm interested in is social learnings, if they're passed down sort of just by education, as it were, and they improve your reproductive stroke survival capabilities, that's a type of evolution, but it's not straightforwardly genetic.

That's correct.

And that's called cultural transmission.

Now, lots of organisms do cultural transmission, which is apparently not obviously genetic transmission by learning mostly.

Humans do it all the time.

We're doing it now.

Every time you communicate with another human, you are effectively culturally transmitting an idea.

There are some lovely examples in

organisms of cultural transmissions.

My favourite of which is dolphins, bottlenose dolphins.

There's a pod in Shark Bay in Australia where a few years ago it was observed that a proportion of them were wearing conical sponges on their beaks, on their rostra.

And on closer inspection, it turns out the reason they were doing this is to

protect their beaks when they were foraging at the bottom of the sea, which is rocky and they're eating shellfish and things which might scratch their noses.

On closer inspection, it turns out that only the female dolphins were doing this, and the males were not interested, and there's never been a male dolphin observed wearing a sponge.

They're called sponging dolphins.

And so it's a weird thing, because it's one animal using a second animal to eat a third animal, which is just like, you know, a weird sort of Russian doll thing going on there.

What do you say?

They've seen the sponges in Graxia?

What are you saying?

I'm not sure.

Well, so

when you look at the genetics of the dolphins that are doing the sponging, it turns out that they're not very closely related.

So it's definitely not

a genetic thing.

It's not passed down in families in a way which can be observed in a straightforward genetic way.

And to the extent that we now know that there is an originator, if you look at the pattern of who sponges, which female sponge,

in this population, there is a single originator of this behavior in the middle of the 19th century that we now refer to as sponging Eve.

So, this is a rare example.

How did we find that out?

Well, so you just look at the pattern of who, you can tell the relatedness by looking at the genetics of each of the sponges.

But in the 19th century, generational time, so we know it's six generations, generational time of the dolphin is 25 years or something like that.

And basically, it's got a single point of origin at an approximate time in the middle of the 19th century.

So, we didn't know personally the dolphin that started.

Well, It's genetic clocks.

Sponging Eve is a hypothetical but real.

Inferred.

Yeah.

It wasn't a lawsuit that happened in an aquarium in New York.

Yes.

But it does appear that this is a very unusual, weird example of one organism one day waking up and going, I'm sick of having a scratched up rostrum.

I'm going to stick this conical sponge on my nose.

And then for reasons which we fully don't understand, loads of other dolphins copying that or passing on that information, but only the female ones.

And the the males just not interested.

There doesn't appear to be any sort of reproductive differential success in non-sponges and sponges.

I was about to ask that.

It wasn't sexual selection for having maybe more likely to be a little bit more expensive.

Apparently, not, not sure.

But

it's a unique example of cultural transmission.

Is it the case that all of us being quite woke men and not saying

are resisting saying women more worried about what they look like?

Is that what's happening here?

No, I think they're more worried about having infections on their noses as a result of that.

So then why wouldn't the men be worried about that?

Because they're idiots.

Gentlemen, to be fair,

a lot of men don't even know they've got noses until they're specifically taught.

I just wanted to, just a final question.

We asked this question: are humans still still evolving?

So I just wanted to very briefly ask you, did did that question have any sense at all to it?

And if so, what's the answer?

The simple version of the question is, are humans still evolving?

Yes, as long as we keep having children who are genetically distinct via the process of sexual reproduction, we are still evolving.

Are we evolving under the auspices of natural selection?

Ask me again in 10,000 years.

Ethan.

I'll be here in 10,000 years to answer the question.

No.

Yeah, well, well, I suppose I think the same as Adam.

It's

there probably are things that we are,

probably are ways in which we are evolving under natural selection right now, but we won't know until we can look back on it.

So there are, it's definitely different stuff than it used to be.

So it's not the ability to survive those childhood infections that we now have vaccines for.

And it's not the ability to survive.

Those are the things that

we've managed to take care of with better hygiene and all those.

So those things are no longer as important, at least in certain parts of the world.

They're not no longer as important.

Also, run fast away from tigers and stuff.

Yeah, things like that.

There's things that we're no longer selecting on, but this is the story of evolution anyway, in that there's been times when there are things that have been important and we've dropped them.

We've stopped using them and then they've been lost.

The capacity has been lost.

So it's not new now.

Maybe it's happening more now.

That's possible.

But I would expect that we are still selecting for things, but we can't identify them in the current moment.

Have we left the ability to speak?

What would you, if you,

in terms of for the survival of the human species, or at least to go out having fun, what would you like to see as the next human trait to evolve?

Wings.

I would like human beings to evolve wings, and by that I mean I would like all human beings to sprout little Paul McCartney's, Linda McCartney's, and Denny Lane's.

I think that would be very helpful for us in future years.

That and and noses.

That and noses would be very helpful as well, yeah.

Aoifer?

Live and let die is basically a theme of evolution, isn't it?

Yeah, well done.

Well done.

Well done.

Tying in that very weak joke that might have been cut.

I'd say I'd like to evolve the ability to do politics.

Seems to be kind of like it.

Yes.

I would like immortality, actually.

Is immortality ever going to happen?

Is that actually going to happen?

Yeah, just for some cells, though.

Aren't lobsters immortality.

You mean for a whole organism?

Yeah.

I'd like immortality.

I've only got a little while left.

Can you sort that out?

Well, on a whole organism level, not so easy.

I mean, you can get immortal cells, but that tends to kill you.

Immortal cells tend to kill you?

Basically, cancer.

And on longer time scales, absolutely not.

Because the universe is accelerating in its expansion.

You've always got to bring that up, haven't you?

You've always got to bring up the death of the universe.

Yes.

The laws of physics forbid immortality.

I would like humans to evolve the ability to understand evolution because I just want a break.

We asked the audience as well the same question: what trait would you most like human beings to evolve next?

And the answers included the ability to gaze at the night sky in wonder and talk about nothing in particular.

But everyone is interested anyway.

Thank you, Gabby.

This goes to the heart of our evolution at the moment and our response to technology.

I like this.

An eye on the base of the chin so we can look at our phones while pretending to pay attention to what's amazing.

Natural selection will eventually eradicate people who say literally before something that is factually correct.

Penny says, telekinesis, so I don't have to get up to find the TV remote.

But can't you just change the television channel with your mind if you could do that?

Do you need to find the remote to do it?

No, no, no.

Oh, is that telekinesis?

What they're saying, excuse me for a moment.

So, what they're saying is: if you evolve the ability to lift physical objects up and manipulate them in space with just your mind, why can't you just change the channel by thinking about it?

Yeah, anyway.

So,

very good.

So, thank you very much for that.

Thank you to our panel from Losat, Adam Rutherford and David Bedeor.

Next week, we're joined by Super Vet, a man who I believe was bitten by a radioactive vet.

Talking about the possible bionic future of human beings.

Goodbye.

In the infinite monkey stay without your travel.

In the infinite monkey cage.

Till now, nice again.

It's 1994, and two puff stars are flying to a remote Scottish island.

Did you see Billow and Jimmy?

With two suitcases,

each containing half a million pounds.

Do that thing when you crawl it around yourself and it looks like it's fastened.

They're about to do something really stupid.

Tell it your suit, Casey's.

Are really clever.

You decide.

This is the story of two men who burned a million pounds of their own money.

Why?

Why would you do that?

How to Burn a Million Quid by Sean Grundy and Kara Dillings.

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