The Science of Being Human

But evolution is not a process of increasing complexity, nor any other measure of superiority you can find.

Our genus Homo contains just one species at the moment, and that’s us

none of us is an island and we all live out our lives surrounded by other humans.

and to my mind there is nothing more fascinating than the science of being human.

he system was invented back in 1735 by one of the great scientists of the eighteenth century, a Swedish naturalist called Carl Linnaeus

the humble and dull-looking lymphocytes turned out to be at the heart of the system. Not only that, there are three distinct flavours of lymphocyte: the B-cells make antibodies, the T-cells identify foreign agents in our bodies and the natural killer cells seek out and destroy our own cells that have become infected with viruses.

well over twenty different species. I

recall the problems of how to define what constitutes a species in the first place as discussed in an earlier chapter. While our genetics tell us that we are different from humans of 300,000 years ago, our skin colouration has diversified for a start, it is not enough for us to be classified as a different species

several dozen different biological species concepts have been put forward

human beings, are gloriously, unnecessarily and inexplicably complicated and counter-intuitive