mutations some of a clock terrible in the way that a flick does once we identify the genes we can reverse engineer the human body as it were we can discover the program that makes us write that's what the story that the book told. when you us does something a little bit different is about well now that we know so much about how to make a human body about the genes that make us can we and should we manipulate them to make something new. well that's a very difficult question to answer. there are different kinds of manipulation that you can do one which i think. is coming and which is basically ok. is to use the information in our general is

in order to. discover what we should do in life you've got a kid right sequence it's to know you discover the disease that it's most likely to be at risk at risk of and possibly you can prevent those diseases right that's the good side of it and that's the good side of it and i think most people are going to do that and i think it's we it's now understood that within our lifetimes practically no everybody is going to get their genome sequenced i mean with your in mind lifetime and already here in britain there are huge programs underway to sequence every kid who comes along and we can then use that information to say what kind of diseases they get as especially the possibility of. of really deleterious late life diseases such as all timers and so on which breast cancer most obviously which in principle we could intervene and if we knew that they were coming down the road before we get to the disease part you know and correct me from rocks i may not

be understanding everything in the way that you wanted to put forward in the book but from what i understand the if there were ability of genetic information people with started choose partners based on genetic comp of the military right. that ok so. you really think that feelings will actually forgo this whole thing of attraction and chemistry and all that jazz with just for the sake of you know being compatible genetically. you know. so. what is sex all about ultimately part of a strain on chemistry notes come on it's about having babies. there's so many people who don't want to have been either and they have sex all the time i know i know but speaking as a biologist actually sex was designed for making babies who said that biologists

too. and believe me we know more about sex than anyone ok i'll take your word for it ok let's look a letter so let's assume this ellipses in that i don't want to say oh it's only right that 2nd is it designed to just make babies then what all the rest is just incidental it's just that it's just getting us to that point right so. so the question is there's no sex without attraction there's no way the right caring for that woman if there is a bit irrational attraction part right i think it's completely irrational but yeah totally i mean i think that you know there's a little algorithm in our heads right which does a little calculation you know when we look at each other and we think yeah i do you so that's what i'm saying how can you hold another level that missionising all sorts of things are going into it but you know we don't it's real but they are you know we're evaluating someone's beauty right we're looking at their face right and

we are evaluating their intelligence you know do they have a good sense of humor g s o h right well what we're asking really is are they witty and funny are they smart right we're looking at their earning power stuff like that right all that stuff goes into a calculation no really i think that what we're doing is we are evaluating in many ways their genetic health we are asking are they going to make us a good baby really sure what i'm suggesting only is that. it is that our d.n.a. sequences as it were our general. could provide another source of information about the person and a very important source of information because even if i look at you for example and say. so beautiful so clever wouldn't you be perfect what i don't know

is how your general would combine with mine it's conceivable that you are the carrier of a recessive genetic disorder or some disease cystic fibrosis most obviously we're both northern europeans so there's a high frequency of the plants actually fairly south on georgian i.c. but that's a purpose so. well that just makes your better. for me. so. let's suppose. there is a. you could be the carrier of some disease i could be the carrier of the genetic disease and neither of us would know it because it's not expressed in either of us because through recess of mutation and yet if we are both carriers then our child would have a 25 percent chance of having that disease and that disease could be a very terrible but such assisted fibrosis and the only way in which we can know that is not by looking at our family histories the only way we could do that is if

we see construction and cook them together and made little virtual babies in a computer and see how they pop out and i'm suggesting that that is what we are going to want to do and i suggest that any couple who is rational in this day and age in or very soon from now is that before they decide to have babies they will want to look at their genomes and see the possibility of genetic disease and it from that is so near a small step to say even before we fall in love. that we should take a look at our genomes ok but i'm still something of a signal. this is just rational this isn't this is all this is raised this is just what else is matching is sort of to me in the eugenics of the thirty's just hear me out are just yet because here we are because let's say bill like you say in his d.n.a. we discover that you know he carries some chances of fathering a child with a down syndrome or it could be schisms friendly bill most

probably will that alone and childless because no one would ever want to associate with him. i mean it's kind of like what not his were doing only they don't it will be for some to people you know what i mean the one thing that we know is that the eugenics society is here already and it has been with us for a very very long time. the number of children with down's syndrome that are being born is declining all the time it is now vanishingly small and you can do the calculation and ask what fraction of the children with of the children who were conceived with down syndrome are actually born and the answer is in countries like france for example that about 90 percent of them just disappear where did they disappear the answer is that the terminated they're diagnosed in terminated that is

pure eugenics it is basically say here is a child with a genetic disorder and we are going to remove it why because the parents don't want to and this is the same thing except it is even less acute because i'm not asking to terminate the life of a charge i'm just saying we're making our choices members but morally my position is far far. easier for anybody to accept surely than to terminate the life of a child which i bought by the way i make no judgment absolutely but like let me let me just ponder on this because we humans are really pretty silly beings it's so easy to sort of fool ourselves our brain we believe in everything we want so we always believe that there is like this special made up ideal that we'll with strife or so with this whole eugenics we'll probably end up breeding specialized humans like dogs you know people are who are better soldiers better artists someone with

an acute night vision and one that sort of resolve into this whole cast based society like in middle ages because they have peasants who are from peasants and soldiers that were from the soldier class and it will be just like that only not so show but like a biological nor. well it's worthwhile pointing out that for the most part at the moment we still have a very poor understanding of the genetic variation that allows people to become one to excel in one kind of profession and another we know some genes for instance that are important for sort of kinds of affluence we know almost nothing about the genetics of intelligence at the moment still. and so we can point to a few things but the notion that you can breed people for particular aspects. although in principle is possible in practice it's very far away what we do is we

what i'm suggesting will happen soon is selection for such an attribute and but the number of choices that you can add are relatively few what i simply mean is that you've only got a handful of eggs and embryos in a petri dish and you can only make a limited number of choices between them and the choices that you're going to me. call them it's basically to eliminate the bad things you're not going to be breeding soldiers were super super intelligent kids out of that a lot of the i'm going to take a short break right now. the

tense situation in venezuela is still all over the news the problem in venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented but that socialism has been great only employment from the inside venezuela things look different we're going to announce sanctions against petroleum to venezuela so see it down in a split to have a son of the moment goes. down for some tackle football and battle song from the people on the back of the moment the focus of the whole story isn't new nixon called in henry kissinger to tell him that it would not be tolerated that in latin america an alternative economic and social system could take hold and therefore the policy would be to make the chilean economy scream so once in the making the economy of venezuela screed.

manufacture consent to public wealth. when the ruling class isn't protect themselves. nor middle of the room sick. leave the real new route. rather than to follow on their covers out of. the set up one among them. a product from a t.v. they tell you not the hi i'm my.

salon montreux but other along on. the phone totally unknown to me but a lot of the. fans here is someone that we did the board. and we're back with a lot of want and lead me on the process of mutation in general what is it is that random or does it slowly actually humanity to somewhere or is it just you know.

adapting to changing environment around us. so mutations occur in all our genomes. they are variation there are just changes in the in the letters the genetic letters nucleotides that make up our genes and they happen all the time. and we are riddled with mutations now. when i say that it's. you have to distinguish between mutations and variants they really the same thing they're just differences in d.n.a. but variants are the things that are relatively common in the population especially considering globally the things that make us look different from each other especially geographic right you know you have all burnt hair i used to have brown hair right there are these other things that make us make us different these

are just natural genetic variants their idea useful or at least they're not harmful . does that make sense so mutations are much the same except they're rather rare and the reason they are rare is because mostly they are harmful and they cause as temptation has a hard full connotation that's correct so embryo actually becoming a full fledged human is not in essence and utilization. well no embryo becoming full fisherman is just development but the question is what sort of human did you get out the other end do you get a suit do you get a perfectly healthy human or do you get one that is unhealthy in some way and the answer is if it's unhealthy in some way then it's a mutant but here's the thing that it's important to understand is that we are all mutants we're all a little bit messed up by our d.n.a. in some way or another look at me i'm bald that surely isn't such

a great thing you know i'm sure you look better now than when you had hair. well it's nice of you to say so but i went bald when i was 25 a new muslin so great them right anyway so my point but for the start i should have brought my own physical features into the but we are all messed up in some way but the thing is that some of us are more moved into than others right now about how much more messed up records for instance i have a huge nose and my sister from the same parents as a tiny nose is that all flagrant neither of those noses are harmful to us but is that a kind of. you know what i mean that i would say is more variance frightened so far that it doesn't mean that your nose enormous though it is has individual career. as a horn so i'm guessing. it's not just a bad thing right so. when i talk about bad nutritions i really

mean the things that we inherit the causes all the for all the sort of inherited diseases and there are there are catalogues of these inherited diseases and there are tens of thousands of them these are the diseases that their parents grapple with all the time right as their kids are messed up in one sort of a way you know they could affect it and some of many of them a psychological you know the schizophrenia is inherited autism is inherited all these diseases right depression is inherited to a considerable degree and then there are you know all the things that make our bodies go wrong in various ways and and actually there's an epidemic of these diseases so we don't actually perceive it and the reason is because there's so many diseases. and because there are so many of these diseases they're not viewed as one thing and yet this is the middle mutational burden that weighs upon our species if the possibility comes of lifting this burden from our species i suggest you that we

will take it well i suppose the fundamental problem in what you're saying is not what you're saying is that where do healing stroh a line of just using that and stopping there because as far as we know and we know the history of heels we'll probably won't stop there for instance all those like edit it yourself or do it yourself genome editing kits that people do at home they actually do that at home ok what do you think of that what do you think bacteria to my knowledge nobody is doing it at home nobody's engineering human babies that that would be truly a really that fire a wave. doing that at home yeah yeah report mainly reproductive technology is really really tricky you basically the really good lab to do it you know so i would have sent to you a short while ago that. we offered far we are still quite far away from gene editing. humans not for technical reasons but for ethical reasons but of course

that has been blown away recently by the announcement that there are some kids in china who have been edited for the c c r 5 dollars or $32.00 mutation a mutation that can confer resistance against h i v there as you know has been no published proof of the sea but the claim it's been made that it's been done and people are taking it seriously that it's being done and they you continue that editing on yourself and that's possible then how do we save ourselves from ourselves it's kind of like getting that horrible tattoo at 19 at the right class very and then being stuck with it for the rest of your life you know he's you know sort of something i mean as a real grown up person to convert egypt editor genes we're talking about editing them in that we're talking about editing embryos in the test tube right mr speaker about this i mean by the time you're grown up it's kind of too late you there are certain genetic thing as you can do for trick to cure diseases by certain kinds of

cancers and so forth but that's a sort of a separate issue. but currently you are what you are right so the only question is can you add a gene at a baby isn't the answer is technically in principle is no reason you cannot there's an ethical reason you arguably should not that's the consensus do you think genetics is actually something that's going to make pharmaceuticals absolutely in the future. no i think at least not in the near future what i think most people would view it this way. is that it's going to make pharmaceuticals more precise that is to say the kinds of. the kinds of drugs that you're going to get if you've got a disease it's going to depend upon the results of getting your genome sequenced and we already have lots of this so if it's if you have breast cancer you will get now you're going to see the the your genome and your humor strain of sequence and

they will give you the drugs accordingly because some kinds of breast cancers are certain drugs work better and on others others do that's personalized medicine ok let's talk about something you really want so you apply your evolutionary biology as a method to research not only human body's own cells but also products of human action like music. when you're using all these are all go ravens and internet mapping so i really wonder because music is also such an abstract product of the mind how can science really actually study that so subjective. well it's not written for innovation and you know what i mean it just written so how do you sort of fall that invalidate that scientifically.

so i'm an evolutionary biologist and as an evolution biologists i study how things the diversity of life all the stuff in the world that evolution has made and the way i study there is by looking at the genes as we've been talking about the general the genomes and and that is to say by analyzing information. but there's a whole of the domain of things which. evolution has produced not organic evolution but cultural evolution and that is the stuff that fills our world that we have made because art itself has a history and sometimes a surprisingly deep history and because humans have a history and a very deep history of generic evolutionary street since possible that sometimes those things can in fact coincide. so we know for instance. that

look human language is very ancient and we know that if we look at the distribution of genes genetic variation in people around the world the 2 considerable degree it maps on to the distribution of languages right there indeed europeans who speak all the indo-european languages. including english. they are genetically relatively similar to each other because of that shared ancestry so the reason that they share a language and their genes it's the same thing that's because they've migrated out and spread across europe in much the same way and you can do that with all the other people in the world the matches and of course perfect because of course you can learn a language even if you belong to some or all together different genetic group right . so here's the surprising thing it turns out and this is what. one of the things which we've been studying is that music can have

a surprisingly deep history too you can show that there are certain styles of music which are very very ancient and which map onto genetic variation let me give you an example. you can listen to the 7 kinds of singers and siberia is the throat singers and you can listen to the. talk of of of japan. these secure group of people living in the north of japan and you can even listen to the new it of the arctic and you can listen to the wreck recordings of the now extinct patagonia amerindians and you can hear you can just hear this that they all sing and sort of pretty much the same way basically they're all just sort of groaning. or. sort of like that and it goes on

for hours and a varies a little bit but it's style of singing that is stretches right across the americas into siberia around the north of japan that is all remarkably consistent remarkably similar and you can show that numerically because you can analyze the songs and what does it tell you about the history of that music that particular style will raise the question how is it that the same kind of music is spread right across the americas you know and one through siberia and one obvious explanation. is that it came across into those into the americas from siberia precisely when the original people came across which is $10000.00 yes even longer right if that's true then these song styles are thousands and thousands of years away that's what we're listening to and who would have supposed that was true we think

of music as changing all the time and that's because we're listening to the modern world right we listen to our to to to to modern music to pop music which seems to change all the time actually we've recently shown that it's remarkably conservative but it's the songs that change but actually the music remains the same and it turns out that you can show this all over the world for instance you can show that there's. a style of singing. a call in response sort of a harmony. that you can hear in the blues you know and that's an african star which you can find throughout sub-saharan africa you can hear it among the among the swans you can hear right through up into the camera and through the congo and that is maps entirely into the bunch of people and the banks who emerged out of the area of the camerons of west africa around 2 and a half 1000 years ago and they speak very close related sort of languages so the

language the genes and a chance out the way in which they sing all deeply deeply related and then carried across into america where it became the basis of the blues and therefore much of american music this is really fascinating thank you very much for this one for your wonderful and. best of luck with all your future endeavors for my pleasure. this is a story about what happens auster a stray bullet kills a young girl in the street. what happens to have family and daughters in florida. no mother daughter is buried in a cemetery it really messes with your head what happens to the community the public

was screaming for a scapegoat the police needed a scapegoat so why not choose a 19 year old black kid with a criminal record who better to pen this than him and what happens in court the. shock shock is from our office i feel. we don't know just. end of this trial unfortunately you. will still not know she'll just. in 2040 you know bloody revolution here to correct the demonstrations going from being relatively peaceful political protests to be creasing the violent revolution is always spontaneous or is it still or hiccough what if i mean your list put video

of freedom in the new bill is that i mean you split needle the former ukrainian president recalls the events of 2014. of those who took. invested over $5000000000.00 to assist ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic. join me every thursday on the alec simon show and i'll be speaking to guests of the world of politics sports business i'm show business i'll see you then.

there were. today u.s. democrats. to get donald trump out of the oval office no. instead the key word is ukraine to numerous previous attempts at ousting the president of failed. generation of genetically modified soldiers immune to chemical and biological attacks. streets of new york when they think about the ethics of. i think i think how god created them is enough good enough for me. has got to be. the most outrageous thing i've ever heard head to the program with kevin though in an aside.