Professor Steve Jones: "The Joy of Sect; rewriting the bible as a scientific textbook"

The Bible was the first scientific textbook. The double helix and the mushroom cloud have joined the Cross, the Crescent and the Star of David as global icons. Like the ancient scribes, the people who invented those two images seldom ask new questions, but - unlike them - they do sometimes come up with new answers. The topics studied by today's physicists, astronomers and biologists have obsessed mankind since long before their subjects began. Although science does rather better at providing answers than do the Testaments, we sometimes find it as hard to decide what to do with the information as did the prophets of old. Steve Jones will discuss in particular the overlap between new work on genetic predisposition with the ancient idea of inborn human frailty, of original sin, in fields as distinct as sport, obesity and crime.
This is a co-talk with Oxford BioSoc
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Head of the department of Genetics, Environment and Evolution at UCL, Professor Jones is a television presenter and prize-winning author. In 1996 his writing won him the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Prize. In this week's talk (co-hosted by the Oxford University Biological Society), Professor Jones will discuss the overlap between new work on genetic predisposition with the ancient idea of inborn human frailty, of original sin, in fields as distinct as sport, obesity and crime.
Oxford University Scientific Society website: users.ox.ac.uk/~science/
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[@impossibleexperiments]

Sound quality wasn't at its best but the lecture itself was most interesting.

[@juliaisacescu5190]

Very nice lecture, I can't wait to read the book :)

[@valsopuseight]

30:00 Climbing Everest without using 'supplemental' oxygen.

[@educatedmanholecoverbyrich8890]

Did I detect a form of editing at 3m

[@cheekymonkey3929]

wow.yeah😇

[@WorthlessWinner]

I dislike when people say genetics are immutable, with gene therapy that's not true.

[@qcislander]

True in a sense... but gene therapy is such an incredibly small modifier of the overall gene pool (and will be for quite some time to come) that it doesn't really moot the original point... for now. Repeat what you've just said 2 or 3 centuries forward from today, and it might well be true.
Remarkably short in evolutionary time (but still possible), what you propose is dependent all the same on the unknowable likelihood of such technology becoming so widely used that it results in effective deletions from (or universal insertions into) the human genome.

[@FreeThinking999]

This is a perfect example of thee God Delusion.

[@paulwl3159]

Misleading title and introduction. This is a lecture about genetics.not a review of the Bible from a scientific point of view

[@chrish12345]

this guy is hilarious, apparently talking to a load of pot plants

[@viviennemakepeace6666]

Study to find yourself approved. Talking proves you have not studied.