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.

We are entering the murky world of the placebo, and its evil twin the nocebo, effect.

One of the big issues with any experiment involving human beings is that it is very difficult to test a scientific hypothesis without straying into unethical territory.

The technology seemed to give a large proportion of the audience a headache.

Most of these bacteria can be found in your intestines, but they are also all over your skin. The figure you see often quoted of 100 trillion bacteria inside a person has recently been downgraded somewhat to a mere 40 trillion bacteria, a number about 10 per cent greater than our body cell count. So, technically, if you consider the number of cells, you and I are more bacteria than we are Homo sapiens.