Top 50 Alice Roberts Quotes

I don’t think anyone is saying that we should be treating boys and girls exactly the same and that we should try to eliminate all differences. What the psychologists who do this work are saying is we should be aware of it and careful about it, especially if we think it could be limiting choices.

Choosing my career was always based on job satisfaction rather than financial security. I wanted to get a job in science; I enjoyed being a surgeon and I now enjoy being an academic and having a media career.

Of course ‘Horizon’ had made an impact on me from a young age, but it was also humbling to meet and interview eminent scientists, and hear their high opinion of the series and of the science presented on the BBC more generally.

We have plenty of young women coming into biology and medicine, but we don’t have enough coming into physics and engineering. It’s a really weird thing because, of course, all these subjects are completely neutral.

The history of palaeontology is littered with examples of famous frauds and fakes, often with eminent researchers in the field being thoroughly hoodwinked by some fairly shoddy fabrications.

Science offers us the possibility of understanding natural rhythms and events that must have seemed like the work of angry and unpredictable gods to our ancestors.

My childhood hero was David Attenborough. He opened my eyes to the wonder of the natural world. In fact, he’s still my hero. I interviewed him at the Science Museum in 2015, and he is such a thoughtful, humble and inspiring person.

Around 4000BC, the Mesolithic, hunter-gatherer way of life here gave way to a more settled, farming existence. Those Neolithic people built wooden trackways across the salt marshes and reed beds.

Just as your own existence is unlikely and far from inevitable, the evolution of modern humans as a species depended on a whole string of chance events – some happening in the environments our ancestors inhabited, and some inside their own bodies, including random mutations in their DNA.

Educated guesswork’ is what science is. You form hypotheses, test them against the evidence, and if they fit the evidence, you can assume you’ve got close to the truth.

I love Roger Deakin’s writing, and enjoyed making a programme about wild swimming for BBC4, inspired by his book about his own aquatic adventures, ‘Waterlog’.

The scientific method is about trying to remove our own bias and subjectivity, and be as objective as possible. But then you can put it back into context and you’re allowed to be emotional and human about the way you engage with it.

If a group of humans began to run regularly, perhaps allowing them to hunt or scavenge more effectively, anatomical changes would follow, especially among the still-developing youngsters.

Always attempting to tame and subjugate nature is not the solution. But the latest science is helping us to map out a path across this shifting landscape in uncertain times, showing us how to work with natural forces, not against them.

I consider myself to be a relatively sceptical person. I like to see evidence for myself, and try to avoid speculating beyond available evidence. But I also have to accept some things on trust.

From a very young age, parents are pushing their boys to achieve in a way they don’t always do for girls.

You’re not tapping into the widest possible pool of talent if you’re shutting some people out of particular careers.

After a few days of vegetable curry I crave my husband’s home-made pizza.

We’re not the only mammals who are partial to blackberries, far from it. Foxes and badgers will also gobble them up, helping to distribute the seeds, which survive the transit through the gut.

People who believe in creationism say that by teaching evolution you are indoctrinating them with science, but I just don’t agree with that.

The fate of the vast majority of species on this planet has been extinction, eventually.

There should be regulation that prevents all schools, not just state schools, from teaching creationism because it is indoctrination, it is planting ideas into children’s heads. We should be teaching children to be much more open-minded.

Our ape legs make us great generalists – we can walk, run and climb. But when you try to do too many things at once, you can end up with problems.

It’s incredible that the layout of the centre of Chester, for instance, is still essentially that of the original Roman fort.

It seems that humans have been enjoying the taste and health benefits of blackberries for thousands of years. Gathered blackberries have been found at Neolithic sites, while a preserved iron age bog body, known as Haraldskaer Woman, provides definite evidence of blackberry ingestion.

Pagan Romans started their midwinter celebrations with the feast of Saturnalia on 17 December, ending them with a new year festival, the Kalendae Januariae, at the start of January – both were celebrated with parties and the exchange of gifts.

So I had this fascination with old bones and being able to diagnose disease in old bones. And I was doing that, and started to do bone reports for the Channel 4 series ‘Time Team’.

Science is about questioning things.

Eighteen years later, pregnant with my first child, I started eating fish. Oily fish in particular contains plenty of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, essential for neural development.

The important thing is when you look at areas like physics and you realise that only one in five A-level students is a girl. We know it isn’t about aptitude.

I know a bit about vertebrate anatomy and I’d like to think that I’d spot if a skeleton was entirely fabricated or cobbled together from existing bits and pieces.

At Bristol I found it quite difficult to continue trying to balance three things – teaching, research and public engagement, for which television was obviously the most prominent part.

In fact, humans have less variation genetically than chimpanzees.

As well as tasting fantastic, blackberries are good for you. Anthocyanin isn’t just a pigment, it’s a flavonoid, a heroic antioxidant! The stuff of superfoods!

More useful than beautiful perhaps, my favourite regular programme is ‘Question Time’. And Charlie Brooker is just hilarious.

I love prehistory – particularly the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. These were times when our ancestors made a revolutionary change from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers, and when great migrations of people spread languages – and genes – across Europe.

Easter is an ancient festival of rebirth, but it’s also an excellent excuse for eating eggs. I really like eggs, of both the chocolate and chicken variety. But the chocolate ones, you must admit, can sustain only a fleeting interest. A sweet, sugary hit – and then it’s gone.

And when you take something like the changing colour of autumn leaves and start to ask why, you’re starting off on an intellectual journey which will take you beyond that moment of visual satisfaction, while robbing nothing from that experience.

One way I try to manage it is by not having a princess party for my daughter and trying to do things that are not so stereotyped. But if she’s invited to a princess party, of course I’m not going to stop her going.

We have been talking about public engagement for a decade. For me it is about recognising that the mission of science has to be embedded within our culture – the direction in which science is going has to be determined by all of us, and so we need a dialogue with the public.

While planting woodlands along rivers has been shown to work in small areas, it has been unclear whether it would be effective on a larger scale. But computer modelling indicates that restoring forests on floodplains could slow floodwaters and reduce the height of the flood downstream.

It’s tempting to look back into history with rose-tinted glasses. Most people in the Stone Age didn’t live anywhere near as long as we’re living now. Today we can enjoy a more wide-ranging diet and we have fruit and vegetables available all year round.

So I think as a biologist I would like us to focus on this planet and finding solutions to sustaining humanity, to improving people’s lives globally, but doing our absolute utmost to preserve as much biodiversity as we can, knowing that we have already been responsible for the loss of thousands of species.

I grew up in the Seventies; my dad is an aeronautical engineer and my mum was an English and arts teacher and for a while my family had to exist on one salary.

I’ve seen many dinosaur fossils, some mounted in museums, others in the process of being extracted from their rocky matrix, and it has never occurred to me that any could be anything other than genuine.

My mum was an art teacher, so we used to have fantastic dressing-up costumes when we were little.

The access to information the web provides is both daunting and exciting. Information that was once secreted away in library stacks is now so much more easily available.

Lunch on the road is usually the same as breakfast and tea in remote places – packet meals. I’m veggie and generally get vegetable curry or rigatoni.

You can somehow get access to what is perceived to be a better school by either being religious or appearing to be religious. That is unfair.