How to Make a Human -Alice Roberts

National Darwin day is an event held every year on the 12th of February globally, celebrating Darwin's birth on the same day in 1809. In central London Richard Dawkins chaired an event where Alice Roberts took on a packed lecture hall of 1,000 to talk about embryology and evolutionary biology; the lecture orientated mainly around the developing embryo and historic nature of the Epigenis theory.

 

Professor Roberts took on this complex and controversial topic with amazing grace and made the subject accessible to everyone in the lecture hall, the majority of whom had no higher education in biology. She gave a brief overview of the history of how our knowledge of embryo development came about and then talked about how an embryo is made. A particularly interesting point came up when she enlightened the audience with the fact that our ears evolved from ancient fish gills and how at early stages in our development they could differentiate into just that (if we were going to be a fish of course).

Roberts also discussed the ethical morality of killing an embryo and whether she thought that it could be viewed as a living thing and why it is important to continually question this.

She proposed the argument -do we save a baby or a dish of 4 week old embryos from a burning building, given the choice? This makes us truly question whether we view an embryo as a human life.

Alice Roberts talk was really very thought provoking and it made me question my own opinion as to whether abortion of an embryo is ethical- I now doubt whether abortion is ethically just. I can say I'm proud to have two X chromosomes in common with such a fantastic biologist.

-Izzie