Professor Steve Jones
The more we know about genetics, the more important environment seems to be. Professor Steve Jones is touring New Zealand as a guest of the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution. The Friends of Te Papa have been offered a discounted ticket price to hear “one of the world’s leading thinkers in the exciting and powerful field of human genetics.”
Click here to go to the Allan Wilson Centre registration page. Select the Member Ticket option.
Professor Steve Jones, University College London, geneticist and popular science writer, looks at the implications for our big obsessions: obesity, IQ, the education system, and sporting ability. The idea of an inborn, set IQ is dead. Generally, we get smarter as we get older, and humans are getting smarter on average. We are not doomed to play out the destiny our genes have scripted. We cannot blame our genes for mediocrity and bad behaviour. It seems Shakespeare’s Prospero was wrong about Caliban when he called him “a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick”.