How are we evolving?
CrowdScience
BBC
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 31 May 2019
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Medical intervention has disrupted natural selection in humans as many more children survive into adulthood than did a few centuries ago. And as our DNA continues to evolve, in order to adapt to our environment, how might human beings of the future be different from us? Anand Jagatia explores how some humans, over just a few thousand years, have adapted genetically to live at high altitudes of the Tibetan Himalayas or in the cold climates of Inuit Greenland. Several Crowdscience listeners got in touch to ask about the ways in which humans might evolve in future but understanding how we’re adapting to modern ways of living is much harder to measure. So what adaptions do evolutionary biologists expect for the human race? How will IVF, gene-editing, mass migration and our constantly changing culture affect how we evolve?
Presenter: Anand Jagatia. Produced by Dom Byrne and Melanie Brown for BBC World Service
(Photo: People in a crowded street. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of |
| 0:07.0 | Happiness Podcast. |
| 0:08.0 | For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want |
| 0:14.4 | to share that science with you. |
| 0:16.1 | And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley. |
| 0:19.4 | I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that |
| 0:25.4 | calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds. We are currently in West London inside Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital, which is the oldest maternity hospital in the UK, |
| 0:46.2 | and we're standing in the corridor of the Labour Ward, and I am with Mandish-Danjo, and you're the clinical director here. |
| 0:52.7 | How have the infant mortality rates basically changed in that time? |
| 0:57.4 | They've changed dramatically over that period of time. |
| 1:00.2 | So we're talking about the mid-17 hundreds when at that stage one in 13 babies would die |
| 1:09.0 | Which is a pretty stark statistic actually If you fast forward 250 years to when I qualified in |
| 1:17.0 | 1992 at that stage about six babies per a thousand would die antinately as a stillbirth. |
| 1:26.8 | This is crowd science from the BBC World Service. |
| 1:29.8 | I'm Annan Jagatia and we're at this hospital to see how modern medicine is interacting with human evolution. |
| 1:37.0 | Back in the 1960s you wouldn't expect a baby who was born at about 31 weeks gestation to survive. Nowadays a |
| 1:48.0 | baby born at 31 weeks gestation has about a 95% chance of survival, so it's completely different now. |
| 1:57.0 | And it's been due to medical advancement, the advancement of neonatal care, |
| 2:02.0 | fetal steroids to make sure we had fetal lung |
| 2:05.9 | maturity. Steroids have also been shown to reduce the risk of bleeding in the |
| 2:10.8 | baby's brains and also to protect the baby's gut. |
| 2:14.0 | We are ventilating the babies. |
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