Professor
Steve Jones is a geneticist at University College,
London. He is the author of The Language of the
Genes and other popular science publications. Professor
Jones thinks that the relaxing of natural selection
in the developed world and the fact that families
these days have more or less the same number of
offspring means that human evolution has effectively
stopped.
On
the idea that human evolution might have stopped:
"I really just know about snails, and the beauty
of evolution is that it gives biology a structure,
so the rules that apply to snails or to fruit flies
to some extent apply to ourselves. Obviously there's
much more that applies to us. But if you ask the
simple Darwinian question about natural selection,
inherited differences in the ability to pass on
genes (which is only part of the evolutionary argument)
it's pretty clear to me that at least for the time
being and at least in the developed world, natural
selection has stopped or at least slowed down."
On
the essential features of an evolutionary system:
"Darwin phrased it very neatly with three words,
'descent with modification', and we can rephrase
that even more neatly today with three other words
shorter ones, 'genetics plus time', and it's got
a couple of components very straight forward. Evolution
isn't really biology, it's almost physics. If you've
got a system which is based on information, and
it copies that information from one generation to
the next, and if that process of copying isn't perfect,
which certainly DNA copying is not perfect, then
you will certainly have evolution, that's inevitable.
As Steven Rose says, really you can't disbelieve
in it. Darwin's great contribution was to realise
that what's actually changing is itself a copying
machine, so that some of the new versions are better
at copying themselves, and those new versions are
spread, and that's natural selection, and that really
is all that evolution is in its basics."
On
the creationist argument:
"Well if we were talking about astronomy, we
wouldn't be sitting learnedly asking whether the
earth was flat or not, because we know the earth
isn't flat. There are a few cranks who might believe
that it is, but it's a waste of your time, my time
and the audience's time to discuss it, and I feel
exactly the same about the creationist argument."
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On
the idea that there is a mechanism for transmitting
cultural ideas from one individual across generations:
"As an experimental scientist, I do experiments
of things which I can manipulate which are experiments
for snails, experiments with fruit flies, DNA and
so on, and I can map out genes, I can work out the
history of population movements and that kind of
stuff, exactly the kind of things that Darwin was
doing. He didn't have a DNA machine, but he was
a very good comparative anatomist, which is basically
doing the same kind of thing. And really both Darwin
and his very minor disciples like myself, manage
to do all that without using universe. Evolution
is often used as a kind of universal metaphor, and
that's a real danger. I'm often reminded of the
fact, not many people know this, that the United
States' Constitution with the President and House
of Representatives and the Senate and the like,
was actually designed as a model of the universe,
of the solar system. There should be a sun in the
centre, and a certain distance away there should
be planets, and around each planet there should
be a few moons. Now that was a scientific decision
as how to design your constitution. As it happened
it worked pretty well, reasonably well. But the
idea that we should design our way of life because
of the way the universe is, everybody would laugh
at. I rather think the same about us saying that
we should understand our way of thought, our language,
our culture, because of Darwinian natural selection,
is really just a shallow."
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