Professor Steven Rose is Professor of Biology and Director of the Brain and Behaviour Research Group at the Open University, Joint Professor of Physics at Gresham College in London and visiting Professor, Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology at University College London

Area of Interest:
"Well I'm a neuroscientist and interested therefore in behaviour, but as a biologist I'm interested in evolution. Evolution simply means change over time, changing species, changing populations, change in the characteristics of individuals in a species. In that sense it actually can't stop, and in that sense it's not a theory, it's a fact. The theoretical issues are the motors of evolution, if you like."

On the questions about evolution that divide biologists:
"I think we can remove the creationist argument from this discussion, and then we can get to the interesting questions, which do divide biologists. The debates within biology I think focus on a number of features. One is whether evolution is only to be understood as a genetic mechanism in that sense. I mean there's a formal definition which some evolutionary biologists use as the rate of change of genetic frequency in a population, which says that what happens to organisms - you and I and the others of us in the audience - doesn't matter, it's only our genes that matter. Others would argue as I would, and Stephen Jay Gould would, that you have to see evolution acting at various levels on the gene, on the genome, on the organism, on the population, and on the species as a whole, and also, whether natural selection is the only motor of evolutionary change, or there are others as well. Anne talked about sexual selection, but there are other reasons and constraints on evolutionary change, which I think become very exciting for biologists to try to uncover."

On whether genes should be referred to as building bodies:
"I think one's just got to see that genes are strands of DNA. In order to build a body, you need the cell in which the gene is located, you need the genome in which the gene is there, and to give the genes this sort of master molecule metaphor, I think is to give them too much power, almost magical power, and as someone who started as a biochemist and cares about cells and metabolism, I feel uneasy when we rather glibly use that metaphor. I'm saying that genes are absolutely essential for the construction of brains but what the missing link was, was not just social and cultural history but also the developmental history of the organism which we construct ourselves. If you like, out of the raw material given by our genes and our environment, and if we miss development out, we're in deep trouble."

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