The Science of Being Human

But evolution is not a process of increasing complexity, nor any other measure of superiority you can find.

none of us is an island and we all live out our lives surrounded by other humans.

and to my mind there is nothing more fascinating than the science of being human.

he system was invented back in 1735 by one of the great scientists of the eighteenth century, a Swedish naturalist called Carl Linnaeus

the humble and dull-looking lymphocytes turned out to be at the heart of the system. Not only that, there are three distinct flavours of lymphocyte: the B-cells make antibodies, the T-cells identify foreign agents in our bodies and the natural killer cells seek out and destroy our own cells that have become infected with viruses.

Our genus Homo contains just one species at the moment, and that’s us

To find the answer to this I have taken an eclectic approach and poked about in branches of science you may not have expected.

A species by name

I am a member of the species Homo sapiens. This is not, I hope, too controversial a statement. Furthermore, I assume that you are also a member of Homo sapiens. It is the scientific way of saying you and I are both part of the human race. However, what does that really mean? It seems clear that we are all human and yet, once you begin to pick at this statement, it becomes a bit less certain.

The two words Homo sapiens form just the last part of the biological taxonomic system that allows a scientist to nail down precisely what type of animal, bird, reptile or plant is being talked about. The system was invented back in 1735 b

The seabird genus of Larus gulls has a worldwide distribution with well over twenty different species.

Things became even more complex in 1942 with the work of Ernst Mayer, one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the twentieth century.