The Arguments: Dr Anne Campbell
Dr Anne Campbell is a Reader in the Psychology Department, University of Durham. Dr Campbell is an evolutionary psychologist who thinks that you can't have a full understanding of the human mind without looking at how the process of evolution has shaped it.

On her area of interest:
The brain is as much an organ of the human body as any other, and I think it's important that we should look at the kind of natural and sexual pressures that lead to the kind of brains we have now. On the other hand, if it's the case that perhaps evolution is reaching its end, this may turn out to be a largely historical enterprise but may not guide us very far in making predictions about the future.

On giving entirely Darwinian explanations of the human mind:
I was just reminded that of course evolution is a process, a process of change over time, and it doesn't have to apply only to genes, there's no reason why it couldn't apply to a large number of other things. And of course, one thing could be human ideas. In fact, culture itself is usually defined as the social transmission of ideas from one generation to the next. We can see those ideas to some extent, as kind of particular forms that are subject to variation and to subject to selective retention and transmission. So in that sense you can apply the idea of evolution beyond merely genetics and into the kind of ideas that we take around with us all the time. The kind of inventions that we have are all subject to evolution.

On the idea that human evolution has stopped:
I think, in terms of genetic evolution, you can make a very strong case for that in the West. The major differences in fecundity and mortality between individuals have been minimised a very great deal. But that doesn't mean that evolution in terms of ideas has not accelerated, and, in fact, it accelerated massively, even in the last fifty years or so. As we all know, our sons and daughters understand more about the workings of PCs than I do. So you have actually a rather odd situation where transmission is almost going in the reverse direction, generally where in which we're sort of hastening to keep up with children who have acquired massive amounts of cultural information that wasn't available to us when we were their age.

On the missing link between genes and cultural information:
We know obviously that genes build bodies, and we know that they build brains and the kind of brains we have are very, very interesting and unusual for a primate. And one of the main things that we're able to do that we suspect others aren't is to engage in representational thought. In other words, we can use symbols. We can use written symbols, we can use language - spoken language itself is a symbol - we can use mathematics which is a particular symbolic form. Because we're able to do that, it absolutely explodes massively, the kinds of ideas, the kinds of inventions we can have, and of course the rate at which they can be spread around a society from one mind to another, and I think that's what makes humans very unique, and which makes this rapid period of evolution quite frightening in how these ideas are proliferated.

The Arguments: Dr Steve Jones
Professor Steve Jones is a geneticist at University College, London. He is the author of The Language of the Genes and other popular science publications. Professor Jones thinks that the relaxing of natural selection in the developed world and the fact that families these days have more or less the same number of offspring means that human evolution has effectively stopped.

 

On the idea that human evolution might have stopped:
"I really just know about snails, and the beauty of evolution is that it gives biology a structure, so the rules that apply to snails or to fruit flies to some extent apply to ourselves. Obviously there's much more that applies to us. But if you ask the simple Darwinian question about natural selection, inherited differences in the ability to pass on genes (which is only part of the evolutionary argument) it's pretty clear to me that at least for the time being and at least in the developed world, natural selection has stopped or at least slowed down."

On the essential features of an evolutionary system:
"Darwin phrased it very neatly with three words, 'descent with modification', and we can rephrase that even more neatly today with three other words shorter ones, 'genetics plus time', and it's got a couple of components very straight forward. Evolution isn't really biology, it's almost physics. If you've got a system which is based on information, and it copies that information from one generation to the next, and if that process of copying isn't perfect, which certainly DNA copying is not perfect, then you will certainly have evolution, that's inevitable. As Steven Rose says, really you can't disbelieve in it. Darwin's great contribution was to realise that what's actually changing is itself a copying machine, so that some of the new versions are better at copying themselves, and those new versions are spread, and that's natural selection, and that really is all that evolution is in its basics."

On the creationist argument:
"Well if we were talking about astronomy, we wouldn't be sitting learnedly asking whether the earth was flat or not, because we know the earth isn't flat. There are a few cranks who might believe that it is, but it's a waste of your time, my time and the audience's time to discuss it, and I feel exactly the same about the creationist argument."

On the idea that there is a mechanism for transmitting cultural ideas from one individual across generations:
"As an experimental scientist, I do experiments of things which I can manipulate which are experiments for snails, experiments with fruit flies, DNA and so on, and I can map out genes, I can work out the history of population movements and that kind of stuff, exactly the kind of things that Darwin was doing. He didn't have a DNA machine, but he was a very good comparative anatomist, which is basically doing the same kind of thing. And really both Darwin and his very minor disciples like myself, manage to do all that without using universe. Evolution is often used as a kind of universal metaphor, and that's a real danger. I'm often reminded of the fact, not many people know this, that the United States' Constitution with the President and House of Representatives and the Senate and the like, was actually designed as a model of the universe, of the solar system. There should be a sun in the centre, and a certain distance away there should be planets, and around each planet there should be a few moons. Now that was a scientific decision as how to design your constitution. As it happened it worked pretty well, reasonably well. But the idea that we should design our way of life because of the way the universe is, everybody would laugh at. I rather think the same about us saying that we should understand our way of thought, our language, our culture, because of Darwinian natural selection, is really just a shallow."

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