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.

has become a popular image to copy and originally dates back to 1965 and a section of an American Time-Life publication called the Life Nature Library. In that book the image is entitled the ‘March of Progress’.

The Larus gull ring species

Things became even more complex in 1942 with the work of Ernst Mayer, one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the twentieth century. He came up with the idea of biological species concepts and focused on not only the ability to reproduce but also geographical isolation. Since then, several dozen different biological species concepts have been put forward.

Darwin was much perplexed by the nature of species and grapples with this in his seminal work On the Origin of Species (1859).