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Monkey magic? No, just time and nature
Tom Foot listens to leading biologist Professor Steve Jones (right) demolish the arguments of creationism and strike a blow for Darwin
ONE hundred and fifty years after Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was published the pivotal work is under threat from resurgent doctrine of ‘super-natural selection’.
Darwin’s Origin of the Species is yet to achieve Biblical proportions, according to a recent poll showing a majority of people refute his theory of evolution in favour of spiritual explanations including Creationism and most notably Intelligent Design (ID).
The scientist and columnist Steve Jones, last month voted Secularist of the Year, has set out to restore the balance touring the country with a popular lecture that he delivered to a packed Conway Hall.
The eminent professor of genetics at University College London who gave a lively and animated lecture for the annual conference of the Ethical Society, described himself in modest terms.
“I’m a biologist,” he said. “My job is to make sex boring.”
The professor’s lecture was called ‘Intelligent Design is Stupid, Evolution is Clever’.
This recent and unexpected return of the argument last month saw ‘educational’ ID textbooks sent to all secondary schools preaching the belief that life did not evolve but appeared by supernatural means.
“Genetics and time – that’s how we came to be here,” he said.
“There is irreducible complexity to life. Advocates of ID say it is just too complex – there must have been a creator. But this seems stupid to me. Just because we don’t have the answers to the whole, it doesn’t mean we should ignore the argument.
“After all, we share 98.8 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees and if that doesn’t make us just another animal then I don’t know what does.
“I have had one sensible line from a Creationist,” he added. “One once said to me: ‘you evolved, we were created’.”
Professor Jones lives in Kentish Town and, like Darwin in the Galapagos, the experience of commuting to his offices in Gower Street by Underground has clearly informed his argument.
“If I was transported back in time to an early human I don’t think they would notice much difference,” he said. “We are physically almost the same, but we are intellectually different. It is our minds that have evolved. I get the Tube through Camden Town each day and I doubt I’d notice much difference if an early human sat down next to me, except for some grunting – but then again, this is Camden Town.” Gilbert and Sullivan composed a song ‘Darwinian man, though well behaved, is really but a monkey shaved!’
“The similarities are, in America, most palpably clear,” said the prof, who drew guffaws from the gallery as images of George Bush and chimps striking identical poses appeared on a big screen.
Jones’s lecture is full of laughs but the professor has some serious support for Darwin’s The Species and some almost apocalyptic predictions.
“Next stop is a baking nuclear wilderness,” he declared. “I do believe there are five out of six stages of evolution and we are near the sixth.”
One of the most interesting parts of the lecture was about how through the ages monkeys had developed immunity to Aids.
“Darwin himself would have been delighted to see it and in spite of the undoubted tragedies which it has caused to millions of people it is a wonderful. I’d go so far as to say a beautiful, example of Darwin’s mechanism in action.
“Monkeys actually carry HIV on the same scale as humans but it is called SIV. But it doesn’t kill them. Through time they have developed a gene that prevents the disease from killing them.
“Let’s imagine, magically, that I could come back and give this lecture in 200 years time.
“My guess is that if the Aids epidemic becomes a pandemic it will have evolved into a mild disease simply because all those people, the great majority of the world’s population who don’t have a copy of this gene will have died.
“Now what’s probably happened is that the chimps and the other apes, many, many of them died and we see the descendants of the survivors who are able to resist the illness.
“Africans are already developing this protective gene. But non-Africans are in trouble.”
The prof ended his chilling address on an upbeat note – revealing the secret of eternal youth.
The discovery of telemeters, tiny receptacles at the end of human chromosomes that if prevented from decay can stop the ageing process, could hold the secret to immortality, according to the professor.
“In cancerous cells the telemeters do not shorten. If we could control this division, we could make people that could not only live forever, but would have eternal youth.”
But the professor, his faith in evolution unflinching, thought science would always be hoodwinked by natural selection.
He said: “Evolution doesn’t care when I die. Once we have passed on our genes it is done with us. Once we push against the biological barrier that is old age, evolution being clever as it is will find a way of finishing us off.” |
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