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lectures > lectures spring 2000

Mendel's Demon: gene justice and the complexity of life

Speaker: Mark Ridley
20th May 2000

The evolution of complex life forms (such as ourselves) is a scientific puzzle; it could easily have been that only simple life forms (such as bacteria) ever evolved on Earth. In order for complex life to evolve, two big problems had to be dealt with: copying mistakes in the DNA, and uncooperative genes that could exploit complex life forms for their selfish advantage. This talk will look at examples of these two problems and how they potentially threaten the existence of complex life. Mark Ridley will also suggest that cloning is unlikely to play much of a part in future human reproduction, but that other future technologies, which may help against our genetic defects, may allow our descendants in the distant future to evolve to become more complex than us.

Mark Ridley is an evolutionary biologist who works in the Department of Zoology, Oxford University. He was a student and later a research fellow at the Universities of \oxford and then Cambridge in the 1980s. He then worked in the Department of Anthropology and Biology, Emory University, Atlanta, U.S.A., before moving back to Oxford a few years ago. His research has mainly been on the reconstruction of the evolutionary past and on the evolution of reproductive behaviour. He is the author of the acclaimed textbook, Evolution, and contributes frequently to the New York Times, The Sunday Times, Nature, The New Scientist and The Times Literary Supplement.