25 Red Lion Square
London WC1R 4RL
UK
The BHA and the Central London Humanist Group presents
The Ancestors Trail Evening lectures – Speaker event @ Conway Hall
This is the start of the Weekend’s entertainment
7pm – Andrew Copson – Chief Executive BHA
Andrew became Chief Executive in January 2010 after five years coordinating the BHA’s education and public affairs work. His writing on humanist and secularist issues has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times and New Statesman as well as in various journals and he has represented the BHA and Humanism extensively on television news on BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky, as well as on television programmes such as Newsnight, The Daily Politics, Sunday Morning Live and The Big Questions. He has also appeared on radio on programmes from Today, You and Yours, Sunday, The World Tonight, The World at One, The Last Word and Beyond Belief on the BBC, to local and national commercial radio stations.
8pm – Professor Armand Leroi – Professor of Evolutionary Development Biology at Imperial college, author and broadcaster.
Armand Leroi is not your average Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology. As a scientist, his expertise lies in tiny worms and why they grow to precisely the same size. But outside the lab he has written a book about human mutants, presented several TV shows about biology and done (serious) research into the evolution of pop music.
Though accessible, Mutants was grounded in Leroi’s scientific expertise in evolutionary developmental biology, or ‘evo-devo’ for short. The field tries to explain how our developmental processes work. For example, how do our arms, eyes, kidneys, brains and other organs form from just a few cells? And why do they look like they do? It’s when these processes go wrong that we tend to get the most unusual mutations, so studying mutation can tell us a lot about our developmental processes.
But why evolutionary developmental biology? Well, studying evolution shows us why we are different from all the other living things on Earth. Development is a big part of that difference. You might expect us to develop completely differently from, say, a microscopic worm, but you’d be wrong. In fact, over millions of years evolution has never really reinvented development. Instead, small mutations mean that similar genes, used in a slightly different way, can give rise to the millions of different forms that exist today. So in evo-devo, biologists compare how different organisms develop to find out how they (and we) evolved.
In 2004, Leroi adapted his book into a television series called Human Mutants for Channel 4. This became the first in a string of biology documentaries he has presented, covering subjects like evolution, its discoverer Charles Darwin, and the ancient Greek philosopher/naturalist Aristotle.
Today, Professor Leroi is working on several new books and regularly publishes new research. If you want to find out more about him his work, visit his website at www.armandmarieleroi.com.
9pm – Dr Yan Wong – Evolutionary Biologist, co-author of ‘the Ancestor’s Tale’ and broadcaster for TV’s ‘Bang goes the theory’.
Dr Yan Wong is an evolutionary biologist who studies the theoretical underpinnings of life. This gives him a wide-ranging expertise, covering the maths, the chemistry, the genetics, and the ecology of the natural world. Coupled with a strong interest in statistics, this broad background means he can appear (and usually is!) well-informed over a extensive set of scientific disciplines.
His DPhil involved modelling the evolutionary effects of self-recognition systems in plants, which was followed by a number of years at the Oxford Museum of Natural History, where he helped to research and write ‘The Ancestor’s Tale’, an expansive history of life with the renowned biologist, Richard Dawkins.
In 2009, following a lectureship in evolutionary biology and ecology at the University of Leeds, Yan was invited to join the presenting team of BBC1’s prime-time series “Bang Goes The Theory”, demonstrating a wide and eclectic range of scientific ideas to members of the public. His current research interests include a nationwide experiment into the evolutionary aspects of human dance, statistical analysis of patterns in DNA packing, and the evolutionary biology of self-replicating patterns on computers.
As a television presenter, Yan enthuses about our scientific understanding of the world in diverse ways: ambushing unsuspecting passers-by with ‘street science’, setting brainteasers for viewers, producing video guides to many hands-on science experiments, and answering questions posed by members of the public via his (allegedly) infallible ‘Ask Yan’ feature. He delights in the challenges of live science demonstrations, having wrestled with live broadcast demonstrations, nationwide stage shows, and the reconstruction of historical science experiments (such as Fizeau’s measurement of the speed of light – with a blender). Yan also incorporates live science demonstrations into his talks.
Friday night accommodation is bookable at Cheshunt YHA via our website.