Information science for biology

Declining variation in the human gene pool : is human evolution over?

UCL Lunchtime lecture, Prof Steve Jones. Is human evolution over?
Steve Jones’ website at UCL

Steven Jones is head of the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment and gave the first UCL Lunch Hour Lecture for the new term, entitled ‘Is human evolution over?’

[Note : If you're thinking of attending one of these Lunch Hour Lectures, it might be worth turning up before 1pm - I arrived at five past and the place was nearly full.]

Jones introduced his lecture with a brief meditation on Moore’s Utopia before plunging into a whistle-stop tour of evolution, natural selection, variation and whether Homo sapiens is steering itself into an evolutionary cul-de-sac through relatively recently changes in our migration and sexual habits.

Though certainly an entertaining speaker, I think I missed any over-arching opinion the Professor held on whether the patterns he was arguing are becoming a common feature in the development of our species (reduced variation in the gene pool due to patterns in male fertility, when we decide to have children, the movement of genes with migrating persons across the globe, racial mixing) are a good thing or a bad thing.

His term ‘one genetic continent’ neatly captures his view on the current state of global human evolution, but whether this a temporary state of affairs, the beginning of the end or a happy terminus for our species was not clear.

A true Darwinist, I was struck by Jones’ commitment to certain elementary facts. Firstly, that variation exists and is worth paying attention to. Genetics is premised on small changes being passed on from generation to generation and the geneticist ‘decides’ what a significant difference is. Height, skin colour, blood pressure or wing span are observed through successive generations – that these facets are interesting is a given.

Secondly, natural selection is a process by which positive attributes are in a sense ‘picked out’ from a population. That an attribute is positive is post-selection or in other words, selection is natural and useful because we can look backwards through time and say, “Yes, it was handy we humans developed webbed feet because the Thames barrier broke and the south east submerged by floodwaters, a la ‘Waterworld’.”

Thirdly, there was no doubt in Jones’ use of scientific language. ‘Evolution’, ‘natural selection’, ‘fertility’, ‘mutations’, ‘variation’ – these words were used liberally and casually. They were possessed by a mythic quality and having read Kuhn over the last week, when one listens to a scientist one understands why Kuhn used words like ‘tradition’, ‘convention’, ‘community’ and the nebulous term ‘paradigm’ to try and capture how normal science is sustained through commitments to scientific beliefs.

From an information perspective, there is likely to be mileage in delving into how scientists decide what to observe, the descriptive languages, terminologies and standards they develop to describe these observations and also how a community decides on acceptable degrees of difference.

Variation from norms is not restricted to evolutionary biology and genetics, but extends to all scientific observations. Measurements outside the norms are regarded as mistakes.

It is perhaps ironic that modern biology is both committed to paradigmatic norms and at the same time is built around the notion of ‘mistakes’ (or mutations) in genetic codes. Normality and abnormality in messages might be something I could investigate from an information science perspective.