The Infinite Monkey Cage - Are humans still evolving?

Episode Date: January 28, 2019

Are humans still evolving?Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by comedian and author David Baddiel, Professor of Evolutionary Genetics Aoife McLysaght, and geneticist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford to ask whether human beings are still evolving? Has the invention of modern medicine, and technology meant that survival of the fittest is a thing of the past or are humans evolving new adaptations that will help us cope and survive better in our ever changing world (better thumbs for texting anyone?). If evolution happens over 1000's of years, could we even tell if we were evolving as a species, or have humans reached peak human?Producer: Alexandra Feachem

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Tax is extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince 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 that i would be perfect for thought 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 have 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, and I'm the presenter of BBC Inside 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 round, of course. But I read that it was likely that the blood supply to our retina being wired allegedly the wrong way round, 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. Do you know this is exactly what my PhD was actually in? Is that not correct?

Anyway, well, you can... Let's move on to the... Not really. Let them keep talking. We've faked the mic sound. It's actually fine. The blood supply actually ends up... And our other guests are, while they continue talking, because once they get on to retinas and octopi, you'll find that Brian just won't shut up.

Actually, I've got a thought about eyes. Well, introduce who you are. We don't know who you are yet. I'm David Baddiel. I'm a comedian and writer. I know you haven't spoken yet. Do you want to speak? We can change the order.

It's not a problem. We 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.

OK, so I'm Aoife MacLeysit 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 Patil. 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. And this is our panel. Thank you. christmas and this is our panel just yes of course 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 because whenever you see creationists banging on about how evolution versus intelligent design blah blah they always bring up the eye don't they always say oh 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, right? 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 pointed out himself he he says in the origin of species that this is a problematic concept he 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 and describes all of the steps and now we know all those steps and in fact we know steps in developing an eye, which would start with 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 programme about eyes? I wish it was because we've got

five minutes which is unusable but fascinating. I did just want to give you the right reply because when David said apes are our cousins you shook your head mournfully. Well, it wasn't mournfully. Not our cousins. No, we are apes. We are apes. Yeah.

Because 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, ah, 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 or angiotanks, other apes.

They are our cousins. They're a different branchanks, 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 ancestor... Look, it got a laugh. Yeah, I know.

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. Everyone thinks he was 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 said chimpanzee, a specific species, it would have been OK 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. It's like when British people talk about Europeans as others instead of realising you're them as well. Brexit reference. Is it a homonym? Ethan, the title of the show, we should remind ourselves at this point, 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. Hang on, 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 need... That's not self-evident, is it? Not everyone's walking around going, I was down Oxford Street earlier on today. Stephanie evolved that bloke over there, hasn't he? It's not as self-evident.

Also, something like 50% of Americans don't believe in evolution, which I think is a good example of how they haven't evolved. OK, given that even Robin, as co-presenter doesn't understand the question or the title of the program let's start with the definition then we have evolution and there's evolution by natural selection which are two different things or related yeah so if you talk about evolution and 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 and 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 could you give us the one minute um summary of evolution by natural selection the 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 to 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... They 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 to somebody. 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 has mated, right? So what I'm saying is that human sexuality is a much wider spectrum than peacocks. See, the peacock's a good example. He uses a van de Graaff generator to get that hair, by the way. 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... What we're doing is fighting over who's actually managed to mate. I, on the other hand, am fighting over who's actually going to reproduce. This is how we do it. The hawk tail is an interesting example because you say it's obvious, but 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 onto if you're going to try and catch the peacock and it makes them really conspicuous. It's a kind 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 big target I've got painted on my back. 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 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, 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. There 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 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 it we've been doing it all the time because evolution isn't just um 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 um the 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 with each other and the things you do to yourself as well yeah that died uh over the summer 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 um possibly because it was those enormous orange tablets we were forcing down his throat uh no but 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? It is now. Well, Adam, just to get back to the subject. How could it be that we would even suspect

that we may 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. 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 like

where we you know 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 then 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 devolution,

as it were. That's evolution too. Well, that's evolution too, 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 right so that's one thing so um because that's that was the 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 um 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 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 I think, at 2.33 children each. That was the mathematical thinking there behind that, obviously. But we still have, as we see,

an incredible rise in population in this century, in this second half century. So we are now this incredible burden as well at times. On the family. Yeah, that we're not reacting quickly enough to go, hang on a minute, the situation has changed, but still our patterns of reproduction have not changed quickly enough to, you know, 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 um has to die that's because that's the awful thing about natural oh sorry i didn't mean that then we should get quickly oh sorry i didn't kill the children this has been terribly misunderstood we shouldn't have watched logan's run before this show um no but that is that's the harsh thing

right the 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 add and choose a specific example of... I suppose the fast nature of evolution. So the ability to digest milk... Yeah. ..is a relatively recent adaptation, isn't it, for humans,

and only in certain populations? Yeah, that's right. I mean, this 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 Aoife quite like. But our timescales 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 what we have, everyone on this panel, is that we are um 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 uh probably somewhere in germany suddenly evolved the ability to process milk after they're being breastfed and you know the answer is because we were farming goats and and cattle and and 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 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 yogurts, 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 okay i just wanted to add though 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 i can drink milk really well less Nesquik and everything?

Yeah, I don't know. Well, you know, they're not known for their high intelligence. 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. 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 different times. 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 is 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, 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. 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 that gives you an advantage. But what would be the advantage of turning the ability off to be able to digest? 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, you know, whatever, how long do cows drink milk for anyway? But, you know, 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 so the but the statement is that there is a slight advantage if you can just save that energy or whatever it is natural selection is extremely sensitive things that we can't even observe experimentally so just a really peculiar example so there are um genes in mice that if you look at these genes you can tell from the way, 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 tonnes and tonnes 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. It's a 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. 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, yeah. And then it's like a Neanderthal man, something like that, one of our cousins. Those ones are 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? We're Homo sapiens You've gone backwards Homo erectus But at the end of it You've got someone just standing up haven't you?

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 end of it, you've got someone just standing up, haven't you? 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. Because it's so... Aoife 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 genitals? It's prudishness. It's always the right leg. It's not that he's taking a penalty. Yeah, I'm just doing the action now. 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, right? And 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 OK 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 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. So if I went back in time and I had sex with a Neanderthal woman,

would that be miscegenation? I don't even know what that word means. Me neither. Would it be a type of bestiality? No, we're the same species. Okay. I've never seen a man look like he has such vig vigor to invent a time machine

i should acknowledge that people disagree on i say we're the same species i mean a lot of geneticists say aren't they a bit too much monkey no not at all they're not at all monkey we are ape too so they're not too much ape but no they're not too much apes. So you can't have too much apes, that's what we're saying. We're apes. 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. And he genuinely felt that that would be,

that's kind of saying you're kind of sexy, but maybe overly hairy. I'm still being flirtatious. This is interesting as an example. So the difference, the physical differences between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were caused 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 european type of human although you know also into eurasia and homo sapiens is primarily a an african type of human we now think from all over africa not just the rift valley which is what we thought for the last 30 or 40 years because the oldest homo sapiens are actually from morocco about 300,000 years ago. And then about 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.

R-rated gene flow events. 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 ancestors5 percent of our genomes being neanderthal means that your ancestors my ancestors all of our ancestors did successfully have fertile children with neanderthals 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, you know, my grandfather had sex with somebody. It's like, no, she's your grandmother, right? So, you know...

So... LAUGHTER Whoa, there. Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. No. Can I ask you... Are you saying that Adam's grandmother is a Neanderthal? LAUGHTER

Well, yes. Do we know how different... To get a perspective on 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 sequenced 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 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... 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 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 evolution takes quite a long time. So this, I think, is actually the most interesting question

in human evolution at the moment, because what Aoife has just said is absolutely correct. And if you took... Phew. If you took... LAUGHTER He took a human... What about the professor of genetics over there?

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 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 so physically we haven't changed as Aoife says genetically not 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 what 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 a hundred thousand 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 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 you know the 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 you 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 Aoife 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 it doesn't appear to be something which is going to help you reproduce if you're a peahen oh man yeah you can give me these images i've just got this image now james galway being tattooed while he plays anyway it's kind of humanocentric what you said a bit because obviously we do have a civilisation, but as far as I understand it,

it's possible that octopuses, octopi, I've said octopus 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? Possibly. They're very intelligent, definitely. There are lots of animals that are much more intelligent than we think they are, I think.

And we've prioritised 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 civilisation besides ours, I don't think is correct. I would say that much marine life might have a type of civilisation. 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 would be polypi if it was a Latin word, but it's an English word. 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. Eight pies, yeah, which I would eat. If it was Greek, it would be octopodes, but you know you wouldn't pronounce the X. 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 anthropomorphising animal abilities and recognising that, you know, octopuses don't give a monkey's... Oh, 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. But if you can... 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.

We've got noses. 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 Dreyfuss 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. He just thought he was holding his glasses on. I saw Neil deGrasse Tyson say this thing about dolphins about five weeks ago, and I thought, yeah, brilliant. Dolphins are cleverer 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. He's not the first person to come up with it, but he comes up with the idea of a meme i mean he's not the first person 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 uh that some monkeys were given coins uh 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, you know, 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're 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 um 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. It's a weird thing because it's one animal using a second animal to eat a third animal, which is just a weird Russian 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 now what do

you say they've seen the sponges in grazia what are you saying i'm not sure well so when 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 a genetic thing it's not passed down in families in a way which can be which can be observed in a straightforward genetic way and to the extent that we now know that the there is an originator if you look at the pattern of who sponges which female sponge uh in this 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 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 doing it. It's genetic clock. Sponging Eve is a hypothetical, but real. It's inferred. 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 male's just not interested. There doesn't appear to be any sort of reproductive differential success in non-sponges and sponges oh it's bad to ask that it wasn't sexual selection for having maybe more like apparently not not sure but it's it's a it's a unique example of cultural transmission is it the case that all of us being quite woke men and not saying i know not you but all of the woke men are resisting saying... I know, well, come on. I know, not you, but all of the woke men 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 eating. But then why wouldn't the men be worried about that? Because they're idiots. Well, a lot of them. David, to be fair... APPLAUSE

A lot of men don't even know they've got noses until they're specifically tired. I just wanted to, just a final question. We asked this question, are humans still evolving? So I just wanted to very briefly ask you, 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, years i'll be here in 10 000 years to answer the question no yeah well i i suppose like i think the same as adam it's um there probably are things that we are uh probably are ways in which we are under evolving under natural selection right now but we won't know until we can look back on it. So 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 so those things are not 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 yeah things like that there's all there's things that we're no longer selecting on but this is the story of evolution anyway and that there's been times when there are things

that have been important and we've dropped them and 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 lost 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 McCartneys, Linda McCartneys and Denny Lanes. I think that would be very helpful for us in future years. That and noses.

That and noses would be very helpful as well, yeah. Aoife? Live and let die is basically a theme of evolution, isn't it? Yeah, 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 lacking. Yes. I would like immortality, actually. Is immortality ever going to

happen? Is that actually going to happen? Yeah, just for some cells, though. Lobster's immortal. 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. You can get immortal cells, but that tends to kill you. Immortal cells tend to kill you? Yeah, basically cancer. On a longer timescalecales, 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. The heat death, 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 include the ability to gaze at 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 it. 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 a TV remote. Well, 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... It can evolve the ability to lift things, 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... LAUGHTER Very good. So thank you very much for that. Thank you to our panellists, Adam Rutherford and David Baddiel. Next week, we're joined by SuperVet, a man who I believe was bitten by a radioactive vet. LAUGHTER

Talking about the possible bionic future of human beings. Goodbye. Turned now nice again It's 1994 And two pop stars are flying to a remote Scottish island With two suitcases Each containing half a million pounds

They're about to do something Really stupid Or really clever You decide This is the story They're about to do something really stupid. Chill out, take your suitcases. Or really clever. No! 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 Cara Jennings. Download the free BBC Sounds app and subscribe or visit bbc.co.uk slash sounds. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet,

we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts. you