coatless changes making us who we are today. very different and yet very many with the latest technologies can we make it will be any even the perfect and where do we draw the line i talked today in an amazing evolutionary biologist author arm on my. arm on a while it's a great pleasure to have you on our show. so we're going to start off with the book that you wrote earlier and i thought i know that you moved on but we'll talk about the topics that are inspiring you just a little bit but let's start with mutants on genetic variety in the human body and in that book you put forward their idea of genetic exploration genetic experiments being a good thing yeah yeah ok now we should be afraid of them so well in your own words tell me what does that mean is it ok to actually maybe change the

human race manually. oh. well. let's backtrack a little bit so mutants the book it wasn't really about engine us it was mostly about how we had changed actually about all the variety that humans show . when we look at each other some of it good some of it bad i mean and when i say bad i mean medically bad and so what the book is all about was what is all the variety tell us about how we as humans are constructed how the human body is starts out as a single cell in the multiplies into a walking talking copulating thinking creature when i do all the stuff that humans to that genetic program and it turns out that what all the ferocity of those mutations. some of the truck terrible in the way that he flicked us 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 that 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 that 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 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 and my 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 of really deleterious late life diseases such as all timers and so on which is 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 ability right. ok so. you really think that feelings will actually forgo this whole thing over traction 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 history month chemistry notes come on it's about having babies and there's so many people who don't want to have the eyes and they have sex all the time i know. but speaking as a biologist actually sex was designed for making babies who said that biologists do

. 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 dissolute is in that it's a 00.0 that sex is a design that just made 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 why i'm saying how can you hold another level that mission is in all sorts of things are going into it but you know we don't assume you know what 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 of some disease cystic fibrosis most obviously we're both northern europeans so there's a high frequency of the plants actually feel it south on georgian icy. purposes so . well that just makes you a better. for me. so. let's suppose so there's a. you could be the carrier of some disease i could be the carrier of the genetic disease 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 very terrible 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 it's just in 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 xavier. this is just rational this isn't just 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 a bill most probably will go up alone and childless because no one would ever want

to associate with him i mean it's kind of like what nazis were doing only they did it would be forced onto 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 then to terminate the life of a child which i bought by the way i make no judgment absolutely but lake 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 will we strive for so with this whole eugenics will probably end of breeding specialized humans like dogs you know people are who are better soldiers better artists someone with an acute night vision and when 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 would be just like that only not so show but like a biological norm. 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 another we know is some genes for instance that are important for sort of kinds of applicants 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 get are relatively few what i simply mean is that you've only got a handful of eggs in 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 make all the it's basically to eliminate the bad things you're not going to be breeding soldiers or super super intelligent kids out of that a lot of i'm going to take a short break right now over this. like richard marles worst nightmare is like right hi i'm richard. dead planet

everything on planet earth is dead because been securitized and we can send it all well there's a teenager in the us more and more they're heartbroken crying her eyes out because she's going to go up on a dead climb. it because all been secured and sold and resold and. were left with nothing except a dream of what it was what it was and it is no more. but if she won you posted by you could not do the dishes at the baltimore there's no nudist beach and you see me we need you. in the news i mean that is without infringing ball. as if parts about to cut out the bill for the most called.

in by. god that they were days doing needs to. be a thing people. knew. she would include in total. and we're back with a lot of the want and lead me on the person. 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. simulations occur and all

options. they are variation they're 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 there is you have to distinguish between mutations and variants they've 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. used to have brown hair right there are these other things that make us make us different these are just natural genetic variants they are either 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 harmful connotation that's correct so embryo actually becoming a full full fledged human is not in essence and utilization. well no i remember you becoming a 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 a start i should have brought my own physical features into the but we're all messed up in some way but the thing is that some of us are more mr to than others right now about how much more messed up records for us is i have a huge nose and my sister from the same parents has a tiny nose is that also made neither of those noses are harmful to us but is that the 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. result 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 catalogs 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 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 to 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 humans drove a line of just using that and stopping there because as far as we know and we know the history of heels well it probably won't stop there for instance all those like edit it yourself or do it yourself do you know mating 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 staring at a nobody's engineer a human baby said that would be truly a really that fire a wave. that i don't want your report mainly reproductive technology is really really tricky you basically don't really good lab to do it you know so i would have sent to you a short while ago that. we offer before 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 at the c c r 5. dulcet he too mutation a mutation that can confer resistance against h i v there as you know has been no published proof of the set but the claim has been made that it's been done and people are taking it seriously that it's been done and they you can do you that editing on yourself and if 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 no reason i started something i mean as in a grown up person to convert egypt editor jeans we're talking about editing them in that we're talking about editing embryos in the test tube right let's just be clear 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 is an 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 francis if you have breast cancer you will get now your genome see the your genome and then your humors genome sequence and they will give you the drugs accordingly because some kinds of breast cancers are

certain drugs work better and on others others too. that's personalized medicine ok let's talk about something you really want to talk about so you apply your evolutionary biology as a method to research not only human bodies and cells but also products of human action like music i mean you're using all these are all the rhythms 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 follow 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 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 in general make every tree 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 in the 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 of 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 when all raises 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 and response sort of a harmony of that you can hear in the blues you know and that's an african style which you can find throughout sub-saharan africa you can hear it among the souvenir 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 bond to emerged out of the area of the camerons in west africa are around 2 and a half 1000 years ago and they speak a very close related set of languages the language the genes and a chance out the way in which they sing all deeply deeply related and then kept

carried across into america where it became the basis of the blues and therefore much of. this is really fascinating thank you very much for this one for your wonderful and great ideas were shelled 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 in the streets. what happens to her family and daughters in florida the 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 be. shocked shocked as far as i feel. we don't know just for. the end of this trial unfortunately due to the. still not know the actual just. going to. come. out it may not.

democratic house committee subpoenas to secretary of state by seeking to compel him to hand over documents concerning the trumpet ministrations contacts with ukrainian . the west is failing to admit the last. of its dominance in world affairs that is the message russia's foreign minister had for delegates in his address to the un in new york. and rights campaigners accuse the u.k. government of failing in its commitment to protect young girls from female genital mutilation after britain's high court accepted it was powerless to prevent the deportation of a 10 year old risk.