16 April 2006
My friendly local evolutionary biologist
Posted by tony under: Science/Religion .
Professor Steve Jones lives down the road from me in Camden Town and this year was invited to lecture to the Royal Society. His talk was forthrightly entitled ‘Why Evolution is right and Creationism is wrong‘. It’s bloody brilliant. Jones contrasts Western and Chinese creation stories (the Chinese one sounds more fun) but doesn’t spend too much time on this. Instead he offers a very clear explanation of evolution as fact. Much of his talk is taken up with an example of evolution that we can see occurring in the course of our lifetimes, namely the story of the HIV virus.
Jones shows how the virus has been modified through descent over the last few years, so much so that some variants seem completely different to others. It is also interesting to note that people with multiple variants of HIV seem to be affected less than those with a single strain, and that primates who originally gave us the disease and seem fairly unaffected by it in fact have many more copies of this disease than we do. Jones contends that we are currently going through a process that Chimps went through millions of years ago and that at some point in our future, if we hadn’t the drugs and intelligence to combat HIV anyway, we would have evolved a way to live with HIV in the same way that primates have.
Jones’s speech is always interesting with a great example of natural selection in industrial processes beating out intelligent design and the best George Bush slide I have ever seen. He is not the ardent atheist that Dawkins is, and sees no problem with the late Pope’s approach to evolution that human beings evolved and then at one point obtained a soul. This seems a curious acceptance of wild speculation as postcript to a talk based on fact verified by experiment, but who am I to judge. If you have an hour to spare watch the video, it won’t be a waste of your time.
