Darwin Day Lecture 2014: How To Make A Human

It’s the process which starts every life, and it’s extraordinary.

Presented by Professor Alice Roberts and chaired by Professor Richard Dawkins.

It’s the closest we ever come, as humans, to a transformation as profound as that from a caterpillar into a butterfly. In the first two months of our existence, each of us changed from a single egg to a flat disc, to a hollow tube, to a little creature with stumpy arms and legs, to something that looked recognisably human. And in the course of that embryological development, there were echoes of earlier stages of evolution, harking back to very ancient ancestors - ancestors we share with insects, fish, amphibians and reptiles.