Dr. Spencer Wells Cross-Disciplinary Science and the Genographic Project | Big Think

Dr. Spencer Wells Cross-Disciplinary Science and the Genographic Project

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Wells discusses the eureka moments provided by paleoclimatology.

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Spencer Wells:

Spencer Wells is a leading population geneticist and director of the Genographic Project from National Geographic and IBM. His fascination with the past has led the scientist, author, and documentary filmmaker to the farthest reaches of the globe in search of human populations who hold the history of humankind in their DNA. By studying humankind's family tree he hopes to close the gaps in our knowledge of human migration.

Wells's own journey of discovery began as a child whose zeal for history and biology led him to the University of Texas, where he enrolled at age 16, majored in biology, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa three years later. He then pursued his Ph.D. at Harvard University under the tutelage of distinguished evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin.

His landmark research findings led to advances in the understanding of the male Y chromosome and its ability to trace ancestral human migration. Wells then returned to academia where, at Oxford University, he served as director of the Population Genetics Research Group of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford.

Following a stint as head of research for a Massachusetts-based biotechnology company, Wells made the decision in 2001 to focus on communicating scientific discovery through books and documentary films. From that was born The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, an award-winning book and documentary that aired on PBS in the U.S. and National Geographic Channel internationally. Written and presented by Wells, the film chronicled his globe-circling, DNA-gathering expeditions in 2001-02 and laid the groundwork for the Genographic Project.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Topic: Dr. Spencer Wells Cross-Disciplinary Science and the Genographic Project

Spencer Wells: You know, every region we study has interesting tales to tell, genetic tales to tell and it’s piecing together the details of all of this and then kind of stepping back and looking at the broader picture, doing a kind of meta analysis and that’s where, you know, taking into account other fields of scientific endeavor like Paleoclimatology and seeing those correlations, that’s what really excites me right now, it’s, you know, the genetic data, yes we’ve got it and it’s gets more and more fine grained and, you know, we get more and more details and then we start to ask the how and the why. So we’ve got the who, where, when over on the genetic side and then the how and the why is where we have to start to kind of fit in these other areas of research and that cross disciplinarity is what gets me so excited right now, it’s not any particular genetic result in isolation, it’s the sum total of this amazingly complex story we’re flushing out and then trying to explain it, trying to explain why people were moving from a certain point to another point at a certain point in time. Well linguistics is a really good example, you know, we tend to get the language that we speak from our parents, 80, 90% of the time perhaps and so languages in a way are inherited almost like genes. So a priori you would expect there to be a correlation between linguistic patterns and genetic patterns and we typically see that so, you know, in a broad scale, language, families tend to occur in the places where the genetic data would suggest they would occur and show similar relationships to what the genes are telling us. Sometimes they don’t and that’s when things get really interesting, you have a language moving into a place without the spread of genes or vice versa, tells you something about the, you know, the mode of cultural change, you know, why people are moving and how they moved and all of these things. But in general linguistics is a really important field of research to make sense of the genetic data. Archeology obviously, you know, the other fields of, you know, human history and pre history so archeology, history, paleoanthropology for things that happened prior to the archeological era if you will so, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago. What else, Paleoclimatology, clearly, you know, the climate changes again as I’ve said several times here, you know, climate change is often the motivating factor for people to move. Not just because you have to move, because a desert is chasing you out and there’s no food and no water.

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