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So welcome to this and cross ethics lectures. We have two of these per term for those of you who haven't been before.

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And I'm actually filling in for Matthew Hussey, the love guru who was supposed to talk tonight,

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but instead you've got genetic enhancement or extinction.

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And I'm particularly interested in this talk on the nature,

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our human nature and our biology and how it contributes to cooperation and various forms of moral behaviour,

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but more importantly, the limitations that are inherent in our biology and what these represent in a modern world.

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About a decade, I'm sorry, about a year or so ago, Stephen Hawking, the famous physicist from Cambridge,

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ran a poll on the Internet and he asked, How can the human race survive the next hundred years?

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And at the end of the poll, they asked him, What do you think the biggest risk to humanity continuing to exist are?

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And he said, Well, the traditional risks still exist of asteroid strikes or radical epidemics from naturally evolved viruses.

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But now we have the possibility of the intentional engineering of viruses, climate change and still nuclear war.

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And he finished his interview with this statement.

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He said, there's a sick joke that the reason we haven't been visited by aliens is that when a civilisation reaches our stage of development,

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it becomes unstable and destroys itself the long term survival of the human race in many centuries.

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We'll be safe only if we spread out into space because that planet has a limited lifespan.

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And then to other stars, this won't happen for at least 100 years. So we have to be very careful.

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Perhaps we must hope that genetic engineering will make us wise and less aggressive.

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Now, this seems fantastic to claim that genetic engineering could make us wiser and less aggressive,

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and that somehow the fate of humanity lies, at least in substantial part, within our own biology.

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But I want to talk up the plausibility of Stephen Hawking's claim.

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And in fact, I argue that it's one of the most pressing, practical, ethical problems that we face today that is,

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our own nature represents the greatest threat to humanity this century.

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So I'm going to talk about whether we're fit for the future.

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And by fit, I mean the fit between our nature, which I take to be dispositions, to act and to be in various ways.

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And the external world, whether it's the social world or the natural world, to realise some valuable outcome.

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But in this talk it's going to be just be a survival.

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Traditionally people have talked about biologists and evolutionary biologists have talked about evolutionary fit,

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the fit between our nature and our survival and reproduction.

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I'm going to argue that this century we are about to enter a Bermuda Triangle of extinction.

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On one corner is a radical technological power.

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Another corner is liberal democracy. In the last corner as our own moral nature.

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Now the first corner, our radically enhanced technological power.

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We have newfound abilities to destroy ourselves this century.

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Indeed. Martin Rees, the astronomer royal and president of the Royal Society, former president,

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said that we stand a roughly 50% chance of annihilating ourselves this century.

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And various people have written books on this, including Richard Posner,

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and those who have looked at it in a scholarly way have put the risk of us destroying ourselves at between 20 and 50% this century.

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Last century, only a handful of people could have brought about this kind of destruction during the Cold War.

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Only a small number of people had the power to launch a nuclear attack.

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However, today, many more people have that power.

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And indeed, I'll argue in perhaps a decade or two, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people,

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will have the capacity to, if not destroy the world, create enormous devastation.

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It only takes one of those people to realise that potential for there to be an unimaginable disaster.

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Indeed, technology continues to exponentially advance Moore's Law.

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The computing power doubles every two years. It's probably also true for genetic technology and indeed all forms of advanced technology.

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So we're really on the beginning of the very steep part of the exponential technological curve.

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And some people have predicted the so-called singularity halfway through the

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century where artificial intelligence will radically outstrip human capacities.

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Whether or not that's true. It's certainly going to be true that we will have much enhanced powers of self-destruction.

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So you're all familiar with the ease in which we can harm people.

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A couple of years ago, a student in Virginia Tech killed 32 people in a matter of minutes with two handguns.

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However, today, it's possible that many countries could have access to poorly secured stockpiles of enriched uranium.

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Richard Posner, a Supreme Court judge in the US,

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says there's enough plutonium outside secure military installations to furnish the raw material for 20,000 atomic bombs.

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It's only a matter of time before a terrorist organisation or rogue individuals access that material and detonate a nuclear device.

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Even more scary, however, a biological weapons because these are much cheaper and easier to produce.

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The mass on the top there is infected by mouse pox. About five or six years ago, researchers in Canberra,

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in Australia were looking at ways of creating a new strain of mouse pox to control the mouse plague, thereby rendering mice infertile.

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A very laudable aim. They didn't want to kill the mice. They just wanted to become infertile and control the plague that way.

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However, they unexpectedly produced a super strain of mouse pox that was 100% lethal, much, much more devastating than the natural version.

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They published the findings on the internet.

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It was realised that the modification in the interleukin gene could easily be done on human smallpox that was eradicated in the 1970s.

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So at its peak, human smallpox was the most deadly disease and it has killed more people throughout human history than any other disease.

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At its peak it was 20 to 30% lethal.

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And this is the sort of picture that was routine and common last century before it was eradicated.

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But you could easily engineer a super lethal strain of 100% lethality using the sort of genetic modification that the scientists in Canberra produced.

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Down the bottom is this is an image of polio virus.

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Now this was artificially synthesised recently from small units of DNA that are easily available and in fact could be ordered over the Internet.

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So in the matter of a decade or so, it won't be beyond the realms of imagination.

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Indeed, pretty simple possibility for an individual to order components across the Internet

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and in a small laboratory construct a smallpox virus that would be 100% lethal.

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Now, I don't know if any of you have seen the film 12 Monkeys, where this scenario unfolds to destroy humanity.

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But it wouldn't be very difficult to release smallpox, a number of major international airports.

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And because it takes two weeks for the science to become apparent and it's rapidly spread by aerosol,

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you would have a major pandemic that would be very difficult to control.

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Okay. So that's our potential. So let's now move on.

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What are people like in virtue of that power? Well, you're all familiar with sociopaths and psychopaths.

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This is the extreme end of human moral limitation. He's just one story.

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But you'd be familiar with lots of these stories, Ted Bundy and so on.

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So in 1993, two bodies were found on a road in Texas.

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One was a boy, age 14, who'd been shot. But the 13 year old girl had been stripped, raped and dismembered.

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Her head and hands were missing. The killer was a Jason Massey, 20, decided he was going to be the worst serial killer Texas had ever seen.

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He tortured animals and revered other killers. He was nine years old when he killed his first cat.

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He had thousands more over the years and even six cows.

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He had a long list of potential victims, and his diaries revealed fantasies of rape, torture and cannibalism.

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When you look at some of the quotations from parents of psychopaths such as Massey, you find these sorts of things.

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I've had to work so very hard to distance myself from my daughter emotionally.

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I would have done anything to make it right. My husband and I have done everything in our power to help her.

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We can do no more.

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I still love her, but I know that she is who she is and that just about kills me and other parents that I also have a son aged 18 years of age.

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He's exhibited problems since childhood. He's now off to a very good college and is extremely bright, which actually makes it more lethal.

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And that's typical of psychopaths are often very intelligent and very personable.

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He just hasn't been right since birth. My therapist said I did everything I possibly could for him, including therapy since the age of three.

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When you look at the biology of this, there is at least some genetic contribution to antisocial personality disorder and psychopathic

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personality disorder five times more common amongst first degree biological relatives of male males,

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ten times more common in first degree relatives of females with that condition.

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And twin studies have revealed a significant shared contribution.

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These are not genetic disorders, but genes and biology will play a role as they'll go on to argue what's likely to be.

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The cases of people who have a genetic disposition to these sorts of personality disorders,

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given the right environmental circumstance, are highly likely to develop them.

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75% of inmates in English and American prisons have antisocial personality disorder.

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25% of inmates are psychopaths, and psychopaths are highly likely to be recidivist criminals.

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Okay, so that's the extreme end of the spectrum, but it's even worse than that when you in many ways when you consider ordinary folk.

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Now, here, I'm going to go on and talk about ordinary morality, what I called evolved moral psychology of morality.

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I don't mean moral theories or justified morality that philosophers talk about high minded

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theoretical ideals like Kant's two formulas of humanity or utilitarianism or virtue ethics.

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I mean, to talk about the sorts of moral disposition,

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moral concepts and behaviour that characterise ordinary people in their ordinary lives, their sense of justice and fairness and dessert.

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And for example, many people ordinarily believe that there's some morally relevant distinction between what they do and what they fail to do.

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I'm not going to talk about whether there really is a distinction. I don't believe there is.

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That's what I call justified morality. I want to hear look at what the folk believe and how they act.

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Now our evolved moral psychology is a feature of our evolutionary history.

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So essentially we have a set of dispositions that haven't changed over the past couple of hundred thousand years.

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We essentially have a biology and a psychology of a hunter gatherer, a Pleistocene man.

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And during that time, humans had to compete for resources.

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By the time of adulthood, they were fit to survive on their own resources.

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It was easier to hum than to benefit, and morality evolved to facilitate cooperation.

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The promoted, inclusive fitness, the ability of that tribe or that group to pass on its genes to the next generation.

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We have very limited morality and moral dispositions at this folk level.

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We have, first of all, a bias towards the near future.

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So tools and other means at our disposal in our long pre scientific history enabled solely to affect our immediate environment in the immediate term.

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So we're much more focussed in bias towards the near future.

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We have biases towards small numbers of people and indeed we're involved.

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Russell Powell and Steve Clarke on a potential project with Robin Dunbar, who's famous for the Dunbar number.

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Yes, a number of numbers, but the Dunbar number of 150 is meant to be the basic unit of human cooperation.

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If you look at societies across the world and even today on Facebook and modern human networks, we tend to cooperate with a maximum of 150 people.

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We have about five very close people, 15, who we're moderately close with.

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We recognise I think about 50 names or 50 faces and we cooperate with 150.

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That's how humans have evolved and that's how we continue to behave.

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So we have limited abilities to cooperate with each other inherently when we're on.

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Zoom has a famous example of a rowboat that if one person on the boat fails tomorrow,

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the boat will go in circles, will be obvious that the person isn't cooperating.

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But when humans are in larger boats or in larger groups where their contribution is not obvious to all,

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they tend to free ride, they tend to not contribute and to draw the benefits of the other's efforts.

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Indeed, distrust of strangers is typical of our reaction to free riding and xenophobia.

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Xenophobia and distrust of strangers protect protected protected us from being exploited through other free riding human beings.

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So humans have a capacity to be altruistic, but they also have a capacity to free ride.

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Our altruism extends to our family, friends, to individuals who we personally know,

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grow to like and are concerned about all those who it's beneficial to cooperate with.

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And as I said, there's an evolutionary reason for this.

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A disposition to do favours indiscriminately to strangers would expose us to too great a risk of being exploited by free riders.

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So suspicion of strangers has protected humanity or human beings in small groups from being exploited.

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So here are some basic features of our history.

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It's been easy to harm people, much easier to harm them, to benefit them.

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So what's morally most important at a folk level are proscriptions against harming.

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So we have very strong rules against harming.

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We have no strong rights to aid in any form of folk morality.

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We believe also that we're primarily responsible for what we cause in proportion to our cause of contribution.

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And this grounds the belief in ordinary morality that acts are more important than omissions.

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Even if there is no justifiable defence for that, we've had a limited capacity to affect the distant future.

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So we're psychologically myopic, disposed to care more about what happens to us in the near future,

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in excess of the probabilistic uncertainty of the future.

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We live in small groups and we're capable of empathising and sympathising with only single individuals.

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It's very difficult to empathise and sympathise with collectives in proportion to their numbers.

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These are all features of our psychology. Now, maybe you don't believe that we're, you know, we're much better than you were suggesting.

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We're not psychopaths and we cooperate all the time. And, you know, man is made in the image of God.

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He's really he's really a great thing. Well, here are some some evidence that we're pretty limited.

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And what I'm going to argue is there's no reason to be optimistic based on our evolutionary history that in our inherent biology, in psychology.

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So let's look at aid, first of all.

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In 2008, only five countries had reached the very modest UN quota set decades ago of of donating 0.7% of GDP to aid those countries Sweden,

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Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands, all northern European countries.

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The average for all OECD countries was only 0.4 7%, and the two largest economies did the worst.

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Japan in the US only giving point 2% of their of their budget to aid.

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One staggering figure, which Dara drew to my attention from Toby's website is that the.

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I think this is correct us do this from memory.

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The US has spent $3 trillion already in its war on terror and it spent over the last 50 years, 2.1 trillion on aid.

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So we're much more we're much more prepared to go to war and obliterate innocent enemies

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and cause vast amounts of collateral damage and instability than we are to provide aid.

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I mean, that's a staggering figure. And I think just, you know, is objective evidence of what humanity is like.

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So the fact is, for our unwillingness to aid other countries,

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despite having enormous amounts of ability to improve things in the developing world, are the inherent acts of mission doctrine,

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the belief that we all have inherently that there is something more important about what we do and we're not responsible for what we fail to do now.

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Limited altruism. So Americans value a non-American life in the poorer nations at 1/2000,

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the value they put on an American life figure from Cass Sunstein and the sheer numbers of

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people in the developing world to whom we would have to respond can also present an obstacle.

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As I mentioned, we're only capable of empathising and being compassionate with a small number of people.

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We're unable to vividly imagine the suffering of 100 people, even if they're in sight, let alone a thousand, let alone a million people.

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This insensitivity to numbers of sufferers cause a vast moral underestimate is

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underestimation in our own imagination of the amount of suffering in the world.

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And it's getting worse. Inequality is not reducing. It's increasing in 3 to 1.

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The difference between the per capita incomes of the richest and poorest countries is only

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3 to 1 united in 2011 to 1 in 1913 35 to 1 in 1950 44 to 1 in 1973 and 72 to 1 in 1999.

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And I'm sure it's doubled since then. In 2000, the wealthiest fifth of the world's population stood for 86% of the world's gross domestic product.

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The poorest fifth stood for only 1%. The richest three single individuals in the world owned as much as 600 million people in the poorest countries.

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So these are just facts that express our moral nature.

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Another crisis that is going to continue and has been caused and won't be resolved

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as the recent Copenhagen summit vividly demonstrated in the environmental crisis.

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It's an example of a familiar problem of the tragedy of the commons, where herdsmen, for example, have a small area of pasture,

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and if they don't restrain their grazing, they'll over graze the pasture, eventually exhausting it and all suffering starvation as a result.

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Under such circumstances of limited resources and the need for restraint,

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people stop consuming only if they have good reason to believe that a sufficient number of other people will do so as well,

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and especially if this number will not be sufficient without their own contribution.

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So when you've got a small number of people and an observable commons,

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people are more likely to know each other personally and have concern and trust for each other.

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It's easy for them to keep an eye on each other and to take free riders.

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However, this is not the situation with the tragedy of the commons of the environmental crisis,

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which is a global problem caused by huge states which are which have millions of citizens,

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which are anonymous to each other, have little reason to trust each other.

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And it's easy for free riders and defectors to escape notice.

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There's little disposition to cooperate as the number of agents involved in a cooperation problem grows.

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The stage is reached when contribution of each agent to the total outcome becomes negligible or imperceptible.

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Then an agent can have no altruistic or even stronger, no self-interested reason to contribute.

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Nothing that you do will ever affect the environment.

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That's why many people don't engage in restraint.

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The contribution of each of us to the environmental degradation is virtually negligible, but it is negligible.

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And the prohibition of common sense morality that governs most of our moral actions against causing harm directly doesn't kick in.

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What could make us cooperative,

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some sense of fairness or justice that it would be unfair to free ride on the efforts of others to restrain themselves.

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But this feeling of unfairness is going to be much weaker when many of the other parties are anonymous,

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and there is no concern for them because their strategies.

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So the reasons why we fail to address the global problem of climate change and global warming is the uncertainty.

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It's the effects are going to happen in the distant future. And we have a bias to the near future.

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The effects will be borne by people mainly in Africa and Southeast Asia.

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And we don't have strong altruistic dispositions to strangers.

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And the sustainable level of welfare that we could sustain as a as a global community is considerably lower than the one that we currently enjoy.

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If all 6 billion people were to reach the current standard of living in countries such as the UK,

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the consumption of resources and the release of waste products would be 12 times higher than it is today,

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which is clearly impossible for the world to sustain. So if we were really serious about sustainable lifestyles, we would have to cut down.

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Are people going to cut down? Evidence says no.

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When you do a survey of Americans, the 52% wouldn't even spend $50 an extra month per household to conform to Kyoto.

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And if you ask them to spend $100 more per month, only 11% would do that.

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So people are selfish. They don't care about strangers.

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And it's unlikely that we're going to address the climate the climate problem through voluntary cooperation.

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Inherent biases and psychological states places at great risk prevent acceptance of

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any justified morality and interfere with the motivating force of any accepted,

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justified morality. So controversial that we should protect the planet.

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So controversial that we should improve the lives of people who are starving.

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But we don't because of our biology and our psychology.

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Now this is going to be increasingly more significant as our technological power increases for two reasons.

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First of all, the capacity directly Hamas cells will vastly increase.

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And secondly, the capacity to do good in parts of the globe that we failed to do will also significantly increase liberal democracy.

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The third point on the Bermuda Triangle. So we've discussed our nature.

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We've discussed our technological power. The third point that creates a triangle of heightened risk of extinction is liberal democracy.

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Liberal democracies is characterised by tolerance and liberal neutrality two different conceptions of the good and different ways of living.

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It maximises the freedom of individuals. It's tolerant to multiple cultures and provides a poor basis for coordination,

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such as necessary to deal with the environmental crisis in China more rapidly.

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Remove lead from its petrol vastly more rapidly than any Western country.

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It's it's a poor base of coordination, especially when you have small,

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overdetermined causal contributions that affect small strangers in the distant future.

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It's also obviously tolerant of minorities.

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So at the moment, things are fairly stable with liberal democracy.

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But you could expect that these kinds of problems will increase as we continue to maintain a neutrality of different conceptions of the good,

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different values and so on. So how could we address this problem of the risk of extinction?

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We can either change the natural world. We can change society through enhanced surveillance.

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Encroaching in privacy and confidentiality occurred in the US following September 11.

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We could change our psychology through moral education by inculcating a form of justified morality, attempting to persuade people.

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But we could also attempt to understand and use our knowledge of biology to influence our biology.

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Biology. I'm going to tell you a little story now that it might be possible to do that.

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And while it might not be the most effective means at the moment,

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it may in the future be a very important means, and it should be a means that we shouldn't exclude.

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So. We have a basic set of dispositions for sense of justice or fairness that we actually also share with other primates.

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The most basic of these is the so-called [INAUDIBLE] for tat strategy. And the idea here is that someone does you a favour out of altruism.

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You should respond with gratitude and and a desire to return the favour.

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If someone harms you, the proper response is to retaliate with anger and a desire for retaliation.

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More sophisticated, emotional responses are possible.

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Remorse and feelings of guilt if you act wrongly by harming someone without good reason.

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Shame if you're less successful than others in returning favours or retaliating in wrongs.

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Pride. If you're more successful in these respects. Admiration and contempt for others who are successful and unsuccessful in these respects.

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And forgiveness. When you realise that someone is not responsible for something wrong or shows remorse.

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These are primitive versions of the [INAUDIBLE] for tat strategy.

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That's why we feel these emotions and that's why we express them.

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These emotions which make up [INAUDIBLE] for tat behaviour, are very bound up with concepts, inherent and innate concepts of dessert and of justice.

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When you feel gratitude to someone, you, this individual deserves a good turn and it's just that she has a good turn when you're angry at somebody.

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This individual is thought to be deserving of punishment or harmed.

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And the treatment is thought to be just.

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Now we can test the effect of these senses of fairness and how written they are into our biology through various games,

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economic games and cooperative games. One game is called the Ultimatum Game, and this game shows, I believe,

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that our moral dispositions not only have an evolutionary origin, but as we would expect, a biological basis.

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Now, the basic idea of this game, for those of you who are unfamiliar with it,

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is there is a proposer and a responder, and the proposer divides a reward.

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So when this is done with chimps, you might have ten raisins and there'll be two pots distributed in different ways.

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So for example, one set will have five and five and the set will have eight and two.

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And the proposer chooses which of these two distributions to have for himself and the responder

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by pulling it halfway to his cage so the proposal can pull the I raisins towards himself.

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And so he's the responder will get the two raisins. The responder then can respond either by rejecting the offer altogether.

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So not getting any raisins or by accepting their share.

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When you do this with chimps, they'll accept up to 28228 distributions without any sign of dissatisfaction.

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So chimps chimps are quite prepared to accept unequal office, and this is thought to be a reflection of their sharing of food in the wild.

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Human responders, however, typically reject offers that deviate much from five and five.

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So they reject reject the offer even if they even if that entails rejecting some kind of as a way of punishing the proposer for unfairness.

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Now, what's most interesting about this is not the fact that humans have an inherent bias towards greater degrees of fairness,

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but that they do deviate from each other. So while you might only accept five and five, I might accept six and four.

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Somebody else might even accept seven and three of some reward.

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But when you do this without any twins, the twins except identical twins separated at birth,

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the twins accept the same distributions with a much higher statistical likelihood than fraternal twins or people who are unrelated.

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So if one twin will accept six and four, the other twin is highly likely to accept six and four.

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So this is led these researchers to estimate that the rejection of unfair offers,

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the sense of fairness that people have is about 40% or more than 40% genetically determined.

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So whether you're a person who responds in a certain way to an offer is going to be largely at least significant,

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not the kind of person you are, which is pretty obvious.

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And that's going to be genetic. So there are other there's other good research which shows that we're inherently racist,

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as you would expect from our evolutionary history, even when we consciously claim not to be.

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There's various studies that showed that, you know,

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even people with very anti racial tendency or anti racial kind of beliefs still have inherent racial biases when showed.

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Implicit Association tests. Okay, so could we change this?

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Could we enhance human beings? Could we change their moral nature?

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Now I'm going to just sketch a story that might be possible at some point to actually change our nature,

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or at least select the sorts of people we bring into the world.

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Okay. And I've called this in other places by liberation. Hawking's claim that we should make humans wiser and less aggressive.

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We could do this in two ways. One, by cognitively enhancing people,

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by making them more better able to see the consequences of their decisions to make more rational choices or directly by moral enhancement.

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Now, cognitive enhancement is an area where there's a lot of progress being made there, being drugs such as Modafinil, Ritalin,

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Adderall that have been shown to improve cognitive performance as we develop drugs which improve concentration,

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memory for diseases like Alzheimer's disease.

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These are likely to improve cognitive performance. So cognitive enhancement, I think, is not going to be something difficult to achieve.

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I think that we will develop very powerful cognitive enhancers.

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These, however, would also increase the capacity of people to act badly.

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You know, if you're smarter as that parents said, not you, you can be even more lethal.

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So, in fact, in another paper that I've argued, we think in my person, if we do go down the route of cognitive enhancement,

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which we're likely to, we also need to enhance ourselves morally to deploy this increased power more safely.

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So genetics may hold the key to influencing behaviour.

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Crude genetic experiments been run for 10,000 years.

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The selection of dogs by breeding the 300 different dogs that you see today are the result simply of genetic selection.

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Now those dogs have very different character. Some are placid, some a vicious.

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That's all genetic. It's the result of genetics, of selective breeding.

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We could do this in humans now, not through a project that takes 10,000 years, but in a single generation by genetic manipulation.

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The rabbit on the left is a fluorescent rabbit created by introducing a gene from a jellyfish into a rabbit.

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On the right is an embryo which fluoresce in the dark. It's a human embryo created by transferring gene from a jellyfish into a human embryo.

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So we are understanding the basis of various phenotypic qualities and being able to intervene at a genetic level.

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I'm sure lots of you have seen this before, but I'll quickly show it.

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This is the power of genetic modification. The back is a normal mouse.

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On the front is a mouse that's been genetically modified, running at 20 metres per minute.

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They both fall off the treadmill periodically for a matter of minutes.

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There goes the genetically modified mouse off after 200 metres.

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The normal mouse's exhausted. Can't continue. He doesn't get back on at all.

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That's 200 metres. 6 hours later, the genetically modified mouse collapses with exhaustion after five kilometres.

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So that's the power of biological modification.

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We've done, we've changed the behaviour of non-human animals.

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We've made voles monogamous rather than polygamous.

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We've made monkeys work harder. We've also produced various other physical improvements, but we've also produced a massive bit of memory.

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So there is no reason in principle why human moral behaviour or its biological underpinnings couldn't likewise be altered.

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So we could do this today through by a prediction.

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We could use genetic testing once we identified the various genes or the

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collection of genes that increase the risk of sociopathic personality disorder.

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You could test embryos for these and select out those embryos which don't have the disposition.

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This is relatively possible.

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If we understand the genetic basis of these conditions.

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You could target social psychological interventions for people at higher risk of sociopathic personality disorder.

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You could increase surveillance. Or you could segregate. You could also modify behaviour biologically.

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This is done in a very crude way already. When paedophiles are given female hormones to reduce their sex drive as an alternative to imprisonment,

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now this is simply a modification of their behaviour.

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Biologically, we'll be able to do that in a more fine grained way once we understand the biology.

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Just an example of how we could do it by a prediction in the 1980s.

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There was a famous Dutch family identifier brought forward by the grandmother to a geneticist called Bruna,

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where half of the males in the family were criminals in jail, guilty of violent crimes like arson and assault and rape.

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And when they looked at this family, they found that this clearly was an X-linked genetic disorder.

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So half of the males would be would be affected.

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They looked at the X chromosome. They found a mutation in a gene that coded for the metabolism of a neurotransmitter in the brain.

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I mean, oxidised type I. And this was highly, essentially perfectly correlated with the males who were in prison.

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There was no other family found to have this mutation in this way.

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But when a large group of New Zealand males were studied by Caspi,

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he found that people who had this mutation and social deprivation very early in life were much more likely to exhibit antisocial behaviour and to

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be imprisoned than people who either were mistreated but lacked the genetic change or people who had the genetic change but weren't mistreated.

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So the combination of of social deprivation plus the no, I mean oxidase II mutation was highly linked to criminal behaviour.

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This raised the possibility of manipulating that level of neurotransmitter.

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But you could easily use preimplantation diagnosis to have children without this mutation or prenatal diagnosis.

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You could identify people early and increase social support, or more controversially, you could segregate at the time.

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Offenders with this kind of genetic mutation are the substance of have also been associated with moral behaviour or dispositions to cooperate.

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Serotonin is a neurotransmitter. When it's lower in the brain, people tend to behave more aggressively.

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When you deplete it, you get more aggressive behaviour and when you increase its level through drugs like Prozac,

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you increase cooperation and reduce aggression.

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Oxytocin is another natural hormone women release when they're breastfeeding, but all people have it to a degree.

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It's been shown to influence the ability to infer other people's mental states.

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So oxytocin increases the willingness to trust other people and it prevents decrease in trust after betrayal.

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So this is obviously not the solution to global warming or psychopathy,

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but it shows that we can understand the biological bases and influence the ways in which people cooperate and behave morally.

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Many of the world's problems, such as poverty and climate change,

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will require cooperation and a change in behaviour that has not so far occurred through human history at a global level.

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There's no reason to believe that we will be able to overcome those biases to the degree that is necessary to address these problems.

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So in this talk, I've I've described what I've called the Bermuda Triangle of Extinction with at one corner,

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radical technological power, unprecedented through human history, liberal democracy and human nature.

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We need science to understand our own moral limitations and the ways to overcome them.

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We need ethics to decide whether and how we should reshape our own nature.

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We could, of course, take political steps to address these problems.

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We could reduce our commitment to liberalism. We could restrict privacy and increase surveillance, as has happened in the US.

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We could promote certain values. We could give up political neutrality. We could attempt to inculcate morality and address the problem in that way.

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We could attempt to restrict consumerism and lower standard of living.

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And we could potentially restrain or segregate people at greatest risk to the community.

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This is the century where humanity will become the greatest threat to humanity at an individual level through sociopaths,

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psychopaths or fanatics gaining access to technologies with the immense power of destruction,

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but more generally through global collective action problems,

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inability to cooperate to address problems like climate change or the plight of developing countries.

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The answer to these problems may lie partly in ourselves, in the human condition.

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What can practical ethics learn from human nature?

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We've been very interested in our nature as animals, not as man made in the image of God, the man as the animal and the product of evolution.

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When you look around at the world's problems,

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they are predicted and increasingly understood as products of our own evolutionary history, our own nature.

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I believe we should acknowledge our vast human imperfection and identify our moral limitations and take steps to reduce these.

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As I said, this is not to exclude other psychosocial responses.

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We could reduce our commitment to liberal neutrality, use moral education to correct or to inculcate certain behaviours.

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But we could also change our moral nature. So when Hawking said, perhaps we must hope that genetic engineering will make us wise and less aggressive.

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I hope that doesn't sound as implausible as it might have seemed.

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Thank you.