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Richard Dawkins: LIVE! · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Get a humans welcome to the safe space of dangerous ideas, what a man, what a mind, what
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  an individual.
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  This is one of those true delights of my life, surreal delights of my life, Richard Dawkins
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  came to Australia and did a number of events, one of which I had the honour of hosting
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  at this beautiful venue, Brisbane City Hall, which is this old, you know, so often nowadays,
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  now I sound like an old man, so often nowadays when your young kids come along and do their
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  bloody concerts with their full flame and rock acts, they take place in these sterile environments,
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  these sort of international conference centre type things, when you're giving talks,
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  you know, with these hard-backed sort of chairs and great acoustics, I'm sure, but completely
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  charmless. Well, this place was beautiful, kind of a renaissance style thing, it looks glorious
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  and fabulous, befitting the occasion, befitting the man, and when I talk about the man, I mean
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  me, of course, Richard was good too, I guess. There was a moment during this interview with Richard
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  where he was talking on at length about some answer that I was wrapped, and so was the audience,
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  and I just sat there on the stage gazing out at this packed, sold-out event, all these people,
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  here I am, Dawkins, back with Dawkins, I'd interviewed him a few times at live events or so on
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  half-post live, but mainly those live events because I used to do charity work for the Richard Dawkins
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  Foundation, and I used to host a podcast called Point of Inquiry for the Centre for Inquiry,
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  which later merged with the Richard Dawkins Foundation because I've always been involved in
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  charities that try to push for the spread of science, reason, rationality, and secularism.
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  So during that period while I was living in the United States, I did some events with him,
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  but he's old, and I wasn't sure I'd get to share a room with him again,
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  and so I was sitting there as he was talking, and I'm gazing out, and I really just took a moment,
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  and I thought, feel this, zaps, like, think, experience this. Don't just think about the next question,
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  don't try to think about the next zinger that you can say, that'll be funny, just be present.
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  And like I looked at him, I was like, I'm fucking lucky. Just appreciate this.
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  You're here on a stage with one of the most legendary evolutionary biologists and scientists,
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  and one of the greatest minds in the world, you lucky son of the bitch.
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  And I am a lucky son of the bitch, and in a strange way, we're all lucky sons of bitches because
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  we get to hear conversations like this, we get to breathe the fine air, and we get to be not
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  six feet in the cold cold ground. I hope you enjoy the audio recording of this very special
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  event between me and Richard Dawkins.
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  G'day. Welcome. A full house. Fantastic. I'm Josh Steps. I host the afternoon show on
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  ABC Radio in Sydney, and I came up just for this because I'm so excited. I also have a podcast
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  called Uncomfortable Conversations. I won't talk anymore about myself. That's the end.
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  We're all here for Richard who in 1976 wrote a book that changed the world, the selfish gene,
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  in which for the first time he made the case that it's really genes, not individuals or groups
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  that are the driving force behind evolution. It was a revolutionary idea, and now it's standard
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  science. He founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and has become a best-selling
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  popularizer of science through so many books, so many classics, the instant they were published,
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  the blind watchmaker climbing mountain probable, unweaving the rainbow. And then in 2006, he rocked
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  again with the God Delusion, which firmly placed him as one of the sort of leading atheists of the
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  post-911 movement. He has written a two-part autobiography. He's a member of the Royal Society.
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  Without any further ado, please welcome one of the world's most beloved and influential minds.
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  Richard Dawkins, Richard.
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  How are you? Great, thank you. We last met in Philadelphia at an event much like this in the week
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  of Donald Trump's election. He wasn't elected.
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  Only by the electoral college. We can spend the next 90 minutes talking about the American
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  electoral process. And we were all shell-shocked. Brexit had just happened. You remember what
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  the end of 2016 was like when everyone had assumed that Hillary was going to win,
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  and the Brexit wouldn't pass. And I'm interested in your sense, Richard, whether the world is more or
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  less sane now seven years on than you might have feared it would be in 2016.
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  Well, we got rid of that awful man, and Uncle Joe is actually decent in our fellow.
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  Now we've got Putin, though, which is a disaster. So it's difficult to say.
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  What do you make of the world's response to Putin?
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  Well, it's pretty good, I think. I mean, what shocks me is that anybody is in favor of anywhere
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  in the world, but since a few people are. There is a whole movement of sort of soft
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  legislation in the West about that. We don't have to dwell on Ukraine, but since you mentioned
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  Putin, that I see quite a lot, especially on social media, of, well, NATO shouldn't have
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  expanded to the East. And really, this is sort of a US proxy war and a provocation, and
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  you must understand Ukraine's only a few decades old anyway. Do you notice that?
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  Yes. I mean, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's annoying. It's, it's the Russian
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  propaganda line, and apparently large numbers of Russians believe it, which is distressing.
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  But I hope nobody outside of Russia falls for it or not many.
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  Lord, they are. I care less about the Russians who believe it, and more about our fellow country people.
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  There are not many of them though. You don't spend a lot of time on my Twitter feed.
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  My own is bad enough. Your latest book is about flight. Why flight?
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  Don't we all want to fly? Don't we all have dreams of flying? It's a, it's a liberation from
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  the tyranny of two dimensions. And that's how the book begins, myths about flying.
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  And it's, but it's technically interesting. It's the physics of it is interesting. The physics
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  of how you get off the ground and how you, if, in effect, defy gravity in the various ways of
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  doing it, and both human technology and birds and bats and insects and terraces have conquered it.
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  It's also quite an amazing thing from an evolutionary point of view, isn't it? Because sometimes
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  flight, much like the human eye, will be used by creationists as a way of saying, well, I mean,
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  you can't have a little bit of flight, a little bit of sight, so obviously God must be behind us.
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  Yeah, there's this thing about what's the use of half a wing is what you're talking about.
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  Of course, it's true that you need a whole wing in order to fly properly, but the question is,
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  is there a gradient of improvement from knowing to, to a full wing? And of course, there is,
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  and we see it in lots and lots of gliding animals, flying squirrels, flying felongers here,
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  sugar gliders, that kind of thing, where just any little increase in the flight surface, any
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  increase in the surface area of the body would enable a tree dwelling animals, a squirrel say,
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  to leap just one little bit further. So however far you can leap without an additional
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  square inch of flight surface. You can leap just that much further, and therefore you can
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  reach a branch in the forest that you couldn't have reached without that slab. And then you've just
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  got a gradient of improvement until you have a membrane, a so-called pategium, going all the way
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  from the wrist to the toe, which is what flying squirrels and flying felongers have. And the
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  Forest of Southeast Asia, we have a so-called flying lemurs, which incorporate the tail in this
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  parachute, really. And they're quite skilled with their parachutes. They can guide themselves and
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  can leap maybe a hundred yards from our tall tree to a lower tree and guide themselves by
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  moving the limbs. It's not that far from true flight. True flight means you stay in the air
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  indefinitely, which is what birds and bats do. Have you seen those YouTube videos of people with
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  wing suits flying through the Alps at high speed? Are they like hang glides? They're kind of,
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  well, it's an actual suit where your arms, much like a sugar glider or something, have a membrane
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  to your arms. I love that. And they're flying at 300 kilometers an hour. I wish I had the courage
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  to do that. It would be wonderful. You've missed out. Yeah. It's a wasted life, Richard.
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  Should have been a base jumper in another life. I can still feel people thinking, well,
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  so you have a little bit of a wing and you can sort of glide a little bit and we kind of get that.
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  But how do you get an eagle? Well, that's gliding, that's soaring, that's using
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  thermals, and that's another trick that many animals use. A thermal, you have a rising
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  hot air rising. And you see these wonderful birds, eagles and vultures circling round and round
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  and round, just going gently without moving, without flapping their wings, they're sensitive
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  adjustment to the flight surfaces and they're spiraling up, spiraling up. And then they will,
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  when they reach a great height, they can then glide gently downwards to the next thermal
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  and then climb again and human glider pilots do the same thing. They spot a thermal,
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  often by watching the birds, by seeing a group of birds circling round and they can glide
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  to the next thermal and then the next. They're called streets, streets of thermals.
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  I imagine you ask for the window seat on a plane. Always. Yes. I once had a conversation with a friend
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  who said that they take the aisle seat of a plane and I said, but just imagine when you're looking
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  at the window, what Leonardo da Vinci would have given to be able to behold the sight of being
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  above the clouds and you're listening it away and you don't even care and you don't even know.
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  What really nice is when somebody's sitting in the window seat and just doesn't ever look after
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  the window time away. That's right, yes. Yeah, my friends,
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  that I like to be able to go to the toilet quickly and I was like, well, I suppose that's a point.
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  Touche. This sort of infectious enthusiasm that you have for science every time one hears you talk
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  about the eagle or about the sugar glider or about evolution or something, your eyes light up
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  and you're kind of full of wonder about the natural world. And I'm seeing more and more,
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  especially along among millennials, just to throw you under the bus, the millennials, sorry,
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  I know you're always the butt of our jokes, but nonetheless, a kind of sense that
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  real wonder is to be found in the mystery and majesty of the occult or of mysticism. There's a rise
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  in, I mean, I was talking to, I was interviewing a journalist on my ABC radio show about
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  tarot and the sort of rise and interest in witchcraft and things like this. And halfway through
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  the interview, she says, I mean, as someone who does tarot myself, and unlike your journalist who's
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  reporting on this phenomenon and she herself is a tarot practitioner, and when I asked her about it,
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  she said, well, why does, why does life have to be so boring? Why can't we be open to mystery,
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  she said? And I said, but when you talk to someone like Richard Dawkins, and she rolled her eyes
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  in the studio, Richard Dawkins, Fadi Dadi, supposedly. Fadi Dadi, isn't there enough mystery in the
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  real world without going to tarot, let me tell you about tarot cards. I, I knew that a fire
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  about, I was, I was doing a television show for Channel 4 in Britain called Enemies of Reason.
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  And I was, I had to interview a tarot card woman, and she was communicating with the dead,
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  that was her, that was her thing. And so I sat down with her, and she looked at her tarot cards,
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  and then she looked at me, and then she said, oh, well, I can see your father now, he's,
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  he's happy where he is, and he's, he misses you, and he's sorry he didn't properly say goodbye,
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  but he wants you to know that he's happy where he is, and he hopes you will realise that.
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  And I said, well, that's very interesting, I had dinner with him on your last night.
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  What, what, what these people do is they, is they rely upon, upon the fact that they're victim,
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  wants them to succeed, and so they watch your face, and they were, and they were, I just had a
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  poker face, so I wasn't giving her the cue, she wanted. She must have looked at my gray hair
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  and thought, well, the chances are, his father's dead. And little did they know, he went on
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  until he was 95, he said to me, I'm 96 years old, and I said, no, you're not your 95, and he said,
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  is that all? It does touch on something though, I mean, I'm interested in, we all sense of what
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  people think is majestic, and what people think is mysterious, and what people think
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  instills wonder. I mean, my favourite book of yours is Unweaving the Rainbow, because it is
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  this ode to the majesty of science. It's about the poetry of knowledge. If you haven't read that
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  book, you must read it. It's a terrific appeal to the beauty that can be found in understanding
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  the world, and in knowing things, instead of relying on superstition and thinking that the greatest
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  majesty is to be found in that. And I just have a general sense from my talkback callers,
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  from my listeners, from my audience, from social media, that that sense of wonder is slipping
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  through our fingers a little bit, like sand through our hands. Which would be a huge pity,
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  because when you think about it, the fact of our own existence is the most astonishing fact.
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  I mean, the fact that we are, the laws of physics, given enough time, has been enough to generate
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  things like us with a brain big enough to appreciate the universe, to appreciate where we come from,
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  to appreciate why we exist, what it's all about. That is an astonishing fact, and yet we take
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  it for granted when it's mundane, we're flooded out, because we think about that,
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  it is such a shame, because it is an amazing fact, that we exist at all, it's an amazing fact.
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  I think the beginning of that book, Unweeding the Rainbow, goes something like this,
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  we are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die,
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  because they're never going to be born. It's such a privilege to be born, and to understand why you
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  were ever born in the first place. And although we're going to die, we have the privilege of living
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  and understanding why we live before we die, and that's a huge privilege, that's so exciting.
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  I don't know how anyone could not be interested in science. Do you reflect more on that as you get
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  older? Not more, just the same. Do you think about death? Sorry, do you think about death?
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  Yes, I always have. Really? Yeah, when you were young. Yes,
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  yeah, there's no particular reason to, to, to, I'm not like, I think it was actually an Australian
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  Australian friend of mine who who said something like, why is it that when you go to church you see
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  lots of old people, and he said, cramming for the final?
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  Well, there is that conception, isn't there, that there are no atheists in foxholes? I mean,
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  even I mentioned your, you know, the period in your life when after the God delusion,
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  you became one of these celebrated atheists, and one of your co-conspirators there was Christopher
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  Hitchens, the wonderful articulate firebrand, and after his death, there was this sort of movement
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  to rewrite his final days and to suggest that he'd actually seen the light and it would become
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  more sympathetic to religion in his, which I absolutely am certain that Hitch would not have done.
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  So my, that was contemptible, I won't mention the man's name, but he wrote a book, I think
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  what it was called, something like the conversion of Christopher Hitchens. And, and he, he,
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  I mean Christopher was, was very polite and, and they spent a long time on, I particularly,
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  a car journey together. And this man, my name I won't mention, actually alleged that he,
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  that he had a kind of conversion, which is obvious nonsense. I mean, what I, I made a speech
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  in honor of Christopher Hitchens, very, very shortly before his death actually, and, and made the
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  point that he, Christopher is in a foxhole, I said, and, and, and he's an example to all of us,
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  to be courageous, to stand up and be courageous and to face the coming oblivion, which faces
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  all of us, but to rejoice in what we have while we have it. Do you, are you afraid of the oblivion?
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  I find the idea of eternity frightening. I mean, when you think of eternity going on and on and on and on and on,
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  and I think the best attitude to that is we want to be, we want to avoid it by being under a general
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  anaesthetic. And that's the way we're all going to spend eternity. And in terms of the, the wonder of
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  knowledge and the kind of majesty of existence, one of the things that is a hot topic in this part
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  of the world, and I know you're about to go to New Zealand, is the teaching of science, and also the
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  teaching of First Nations ways of knowing things as well. Not all of you may know, but in New Zealand,
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  they have a policy which they implemented in 2019 under the Ardern Labor Government of introducing
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  Māori ways of knowing into the curriculum into the final leaving, like the equivalent of the year 12
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  leaving exam. And last year in 2022, they did a pilot program where all students in alongside
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  so-called Western science would be taught Māori science and Māori ways of knowing. And seven very
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  prominent scientists in New Zealand wrote an open letter to one of the big magazines over there,
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  Listen to Magazine, objecting to this. And they were accused, of course, of being, you know, old
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  Fadidhadi, white supremacist, narrow Western chauvinists who were dismissive of First Nations people,
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  of the Māori people. It's probably only a matter of time before we have similar things here. We
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  certainly already have plaques in national parks that say, well, the geological explanation for
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  the land you're standing on is this, but the indigenous one is that there's a rainbow serpent and
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  so on. What do you make of that whole kerfuffle? Well, first I would say that the phrase Western
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  science is a terrible phrase. It's an insult to Japanese Indian Chinese scientists. I think the idea
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  that indigenous people somehow need special treatment is patronizing and condescending to them.
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  I think that science is science. It's not Western, it's human. Science belongs to everybody.
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  Science is the way we find out what is true about the universe. The methods have been honed and
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  developed over four or five centuries and they work. Science can land a spacecraft on a comet.
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  Science can go to Pluto. Science can land men on the moon. Science can cure smallpox.
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  It can immunize against smallpox and do all these kinds of things. That is science. It belongs
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  to humanity as a whole. The idea that scientific truths are somehow local to a particular region
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  is a travesty and nonsense. I'm deeply distressed that not just in New Zealand, but
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  all over the world. There's a tendency to, I think, originating from a certain philosophical trends
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  in France that knowledge scientific knowledge is just something that white Western males do,
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  as though it was restricted to a certain kind of person and that equally valid would be
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  a different kind of so-called way of knowing utter nonsense. It's of course important to learn
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  about indigenous ways of knowing in study of culture and study of history, but not in science.
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  Science is something that is bigger than that. If there were valuable scientific insights coming
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  from the Maori people and there may be, then they should be taught all over the world, not specifically
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  in New Zealand. There can't be the case that there is scientific truths that only matter in New
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  Zealand and nowhere else. It's utter nonsense. I respect those New Zealand scientists who have stood
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  out against this trend and who have actually suffered for it. Yes, believing that it's Western science
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  sort of suggests that when we send a space craft to Jupiter and it orbits in precisely the right
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  way that somehow Jupiter knows that it was a straight white man who did the equations. Jupiter can't
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  know such a thing, being a gigantic, gassy giant. How then should we teach such things? Because
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  presumably there needs to be a space that we carve out for the different ways that different cultures
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  have arrived at different traditions, some of which will have a sprinkle of science in them, some
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  of which will have a sprinkle of superstition, not all of which will be quite as cut and dried as
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  the traditional scientific method, but nonetheless we may not wish to lose to the sands of time.
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  Yes, I mean, imagine that somebody were to insist that we should teach tarot card reading in
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  what's coming. The woman I interviewed. Of course, these things should be taught somewhere else,
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  they should be taught in cultural studies, they should be taught in anthropology and history.
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  There are plenty of places where it's important that such subjects should be taught,
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  and there is a reason to teaching specifically in New Zealand the folklore and the religion,
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  the history of indigenous people, but not in science.
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  And then how do we teach science? Because it wasn't until I was in my mid to late teens and I
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  discovered your books and Carl Sagan's books and Richard Feynman's lectures that I realized
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  that I loved science. My experience in the education system in Australia of science was
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  roast learning of the periodic table of the elements,
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  Bunsenburner's, Petri dishes, and nowhere anyone to say what you just said earlier about how
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  incredibly lucky we are to be alive and what specs we are in the cosmos and how unimaginably
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  extraordinary evolution by natural selection is. I had to get the map through books.
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  Yes, it is a pity. I think perhaps education in Britain anyway is sort of
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  graduated from teaching Latin where we're a dead language and it was taught everybody had to
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  learn Latin and you had to learn the regular verbs and things like this. If you
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  come from that sort of tradition then you might teach science in that sort of way.
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  There's another actually potentially more laudable way of approaching science which is to teach
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  it as a practical subject and to say it's useful and the science of the kitchen, the science of
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  cookery. I call this the nonstick frying pans school of teaching science and it comes from
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  the justification for space exploration that one of the spin-offs from building space rockets
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  was the nonstick frying pan because they needed some sort of coating to these space crafts.
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  As opposed to the Carl Sagan where teaching it which is the wonder of it which is not so practical
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  more poetic actually and I think it is important to do practical science because we do need
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  practical scientists but for many people it's a bit like music you don't necessarily have to
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  learn to play an instrument in order to appreciate music at a fairly advanced level. You can
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  actually become a connoisseur of music without being able to play the violin or do five finger
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  exercises on the piano. In the same way you can appreciate science to us like you can appreciate
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  music without actually ever knowing which end of a Bunsen burner is which. Yeah it can be hazardous
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  if you don't know which end of a Bunsen burner is which though. Yeah that's a good analogy.
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  I mean it's almost like you could be a food critic without knowing how to chop an onion without
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  crying. I'm sure plenty of food critics are angry. They don't know which end of a knife is.
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  Yes so do we need like a philosophy of science class or poetry of science class?
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  I like the phrase poetry of science very much yes and I think I mean Carl Sagan exemplifies that
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  definitely well. Let's look at his chapter headings and wonderful. Well a demon haunted
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  world is another amazing. That's a wonderful book demon haunted world. Yes go and get that
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  and on weaving the rainbow. We'll come back next week we'll have a little book session we'll have a
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  book club we'll talk about it. Imit all of this kind of trying to figure out knowledge and how we
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  understand the world we're also currently engaged in the biggest psychological experiment that has
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  ever been conducted in the form of social media and the fracturing of where we get our information
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  from and I was pleased that you have been able to insulate yourself from the cohort of our peers
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  who thinks that the war in Ukraine is western folly and the burden has a point but trust me they're
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  there. There are a lot of people who think that COVID was a hoax or a man made event. There are
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  the Q&N on people in the state. There are people who think that Donald Trump actually won the 2020
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  election. There are people who think that climate chaos is something made up by the United Nations
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  and scientists to try to enslave us all and it's becoming harder and harder as a broadcaster on
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  a public broadcaster which has the impromptu of mainstream press to cut through that cacophony
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  and I wonder if you have thoughts about our fate. Can you reassure me or are we all doomed?
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  No, I mean I'm actually intrigued by this phenomenon. I'm intrigued by the way
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  misinformation seems to be so popular. I mean we always just treat slatherism as a sort of joke
• 30:26
  but the quite a large number of people who believe in the slather. I think part of the explanation
• 30:36
  is they find each other and because the internet social media enables people to
• 30:43
  form a kind of village of co-conspirators who recognize each other and although they're
• 30:51
  in different parts of the world they can talk to each other and reinforce each other and
• 30:56
  gain prestige from the praise of each other and they get the impression that because
• 31:02
  they are talking to this narrow circle of people who believe in the slather or whatever it is
• 31:07
  or believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election they get reinforced and they get the feeling
• 31:13
  that this is a real movement. This is this is really you know really a lot of people believe this
• 31:19
  there has been a suggestion that being a various social species is a kind of Darwinian
• 31:28
  explanation. We thrive you know Darwinian sense in a survival value sense from
• 31:36
  being in agreement with our fellow human beings and normally that in the state of nature that
• 31:44
  would have meant the tribe in which we lived the local population in which we live. Now in
• 31:51
  the internet the tribe in which we live can be dispersed all over the world so there's a
• 31:55
  flat earth tribe who are not living in the same village but they feel as though they are they're
• 32:02
  using the same communication methods that they would have used in the primitive village although
• 32:08
  it's actually distributed around the world but they get the feeling of reinforcement and so that
• 32:15
  may be part of it if you if you only live inside your bubble of people who believe the same
• 32:23
  things as you you actually think that bubble is much more important than it is you actually think
• 32:28
  there really is a significant number of people who believe in the flat earth or the Trump one
• 32:34
  that 2020 election. Yes and I mean there is another ingredient that's going into this cauldron of
• 32:39
  misinformation which is that the algorithms that dictate what we see at the top of our feed
• 32:46
  on social media are intentionally tweaked to favor content that is likely to get us to engage
• 32:54
  which means it's it's it's an extremification machine in the sense that if we are likely to
• 32:59
  click on it or share it or comment on yes then the algorithm is going to put it push it to the
• 33:04
  top of our feed yes either going to reinforce or it's going to you know caricature our opponents
• 33:11
  yes yeah um and I don't know how we get out of that get out of that hole um why is the earth flat
• 33:18
  how do we know do you want to just put putting in to that right here just in case we have any flat
• 33:22
  earth is in the is it flat or why is it how do we know that the sorry how do we know that the
• 33:28
  earth is not flat well if the earth is flat what's Australia doing we're dangling off the bottom
• 33:40
  mate yes what's something that we sort of take for granted now that you think that
• 33:50
  I suppose when I'm your age everybody will have will completely understand that well we were
• 33:55
  just entirely mistaken about I don't know um I suppose if I could answer that I I would get
• 34:07
  a Nobel Prize you deserve a Nobel Prize anyway someone asked me that the other day and it was
• 34:12
  interesting it took me a long time to think about it and then I thought maybe the fact that we
• 34:18
  don't seem to pay any heed to whether or not sentient animals suffer yes that's an obvious one
• 34:25
  and and it came up actually in my um similar event to this in Melbourne where my interview was
• 34:32
  Peter Singer who's the well-known philosopher singer has a dog in that fight absolutely and he wrote
• 34:39
  the book animal liberation which is a very fine book he's working on a new edition of it at the
• 34:43
  moment and I think he's the most moral man in the world actually and I said so in in Melbourne um I
• 34:51
  think it's true that um we are speciesist you that's not he didn't invent the word but he's
• 34:58
  it's one of his favorite words um in that we um we treat the human species as though it was
• 35:04
  absolutely unique and that the human species is deserves a kind of moral concern um which
• 35:12
  no other species does and we can that's only possible because um the intermediates to other
• 35:18
  animals have all gone extinct if if you if we suddenly discovered in the African forest a
• 35:26
  relic population of homo erectus or homo habilis or Australopithecus um so that we could actually
• 35:34
  see the intermediates between us and chimpanzees or if somebody produced a hybrid between a human
• 35:39
  and the chimpanzee that would completely revolutionize our attitude to humanity we could no longer
• 35:47
  regard humans as being uh morally completely um on their own so something like um the abortion
• 35:57
  debate where because a fetus is human it is regarded as infinitely more valuable than
• 36:05
  than an adult pig say um just by virtue of being human and it's the intermediates between us
• 36:14
  and pigs of course there was a continuum of between us going we have a common answer to the pigs
• 36:20
  which which in all the intermediates if all the intermediates still survived and were capable of
• 36:26
  interbreeding all the way along the way I actually contributed an essay to a book which Peter
• 36:32
  Singer edited called The Great Eight Project and I fantasized about um a sort of thought experiment
• 36:41
  of standing holding your mother's hand and then she holds her mother's hand to holds her mother's
• 36:47
  hand to holds her mother's hand and you go all the way back to the common ancestor with chimpanzees
• 36:53
  there must have been a single individual who was the common ancestor of chimpanzees and us and so she
• 37:01
  hold with her other hand holds her daughter who holds her daughter who holds her daughter's hand
• 37:07
  all the way down to modern chimpanzees so we have a chain of hand holders which are which link
• 37:13
  modern humans to modern chimpanzees and as it happens all the intermediates of course are dead
• 37:21
  so we don't notice we don't think about it as being a continuum but it is a continuum
• 37:27
  and if the intermediates were alive they say if they were discovered in Africa we would have to
• 37:33
  really really rethink all sorts of attitudes all sorts of moral attitudes towards other beings
• 37:41
  but quite apart from that you use the word sentient and and there's there's no particular reason
• 37:45
  why they may have factor being related to chimpanzees should give them a special privilege what if
• 37:50
  what if dogs say are well but we're related to them as well of course we are but a bit further
• 37:58
  back the common ancestor with dogs would have lived many tens of millions of years ago
• 38:06
  and so what would the common ancestor between humans and pig's bait?
• 38:11
  something like a shrew like a shrew like a little furan amulet yes yes a sort of a rodent
• 38:18
  well not a rodent but small like a rodent I don't really know what a shrew is as you could tell but
• 38:24
  well they're not they're not rodents but they but they kind of look like looks a bit like a rod yes
• 38:29
  so you do the thought experiment of the holding hands that you said and you go past the common
• 38:35
  ancestor to the chimpanzee and you go all the way back back back back back and at some point you've
• 38:40
  got a little wee rodent like true things yes holding its little paw up yeah that's right and hanging
• 38:46
  on to another yes and then you double back the other V so and paws become and you get to a pig
• 38:53
  yes so a pig is my cousin yeah to quote the man outside with his loud speaker a potato is your cousin
• 39:02
  we literally believe things as crazy as the christian protestor out there thinks we do
• 39:20
  we'd like to you think a potato is your cousin and Richard's like yes I do
• 39:25
  so you go down down down down down you end up shaking the hand of your little shrew
• 39:36
  then does that make you question whether or not setting aside the pita singer argument well one
• 39:45
  objection to veganism for example might be it's the natural order of things if you're a hunter
• 39:50
  and you need to survive then you're out in the wilderness you know should you be allowed to kill
• 39:54
  a deer or something let's put aside those questions and just look at the actual way to most of the
• 39:58
  colleague of mine said I didn't get to the top of the food chain for nothing that mindset right
• 40:04
  I didn't get to the top of the food chain for nothing therefore even though I could absolutely
• 40:09
  live a healthy life without eating meat I do eat animal flesh because I like the taste so I'm I'm
• 40:17
  torturing you know the lives of animals are pretty lousy in most farms unless I'm buying organic more
• 40:23
  free range and even then I don't know but let's suppose I'm not I'm just going to the supermarket
• 40:27
  I'm buying the cheapest meat that I can so my cousin in that hand holding V is leading a terrible
• 40:35
  life and then being slaughtered in horrible conditions because I prefer the taste of its flesh
• 40:43
  to toe through will that not be looked back on as being horrendous I think there's a historical
• 40:53
  reason for thinking possibly yes because just as we look back on on slavery with horror now
• 41:00
  but by the way of course your cousin is a lion as well and it eat me and they and they couldn't
• 41:05
  survive without it yes it's true yes yes indeed and I'm not sure I mean what life in a farm
• 41:14
  animal may be unpleasant but it's probably unpleasant in the wild as well I mean a what a wild pig
• 41:22
  would probably be constantly looking over its shoulder fearful of predators and domestic pigs
• 41:30
  don't have that's here they're they're leader pretty cushy life until the end
• 41:38
  I suppose it has to be nice to think actually they probably don't know because they
• 41:41
  would have to ask you feel it probably I think they're generally generally done yeah no I think
• 41:47
  that's right life I think there are reasons to I said this to Peter Singer I think there are
• 41:53
  reasons to think that a Darwinian account of pain would actually give you a rather paradoxical
• 42:04
  result of paradoxical answer we're up to think that because we have big brains and we have
• 42:10
  conscious highly developed consciousness therefore we're capable of feeling more pain
• 42:17
  than other animals and I think I can give a Darwinian argument why that's probably not the case
• 42:24
  pain is all about warning the animal not to repeat actions which lead to injury so
• 42:33
  anything that leads to injury like cutting yourself or burning yourself or or breaking a limb
• 42:41
  that not only makes you more like to die threatening to your survival it is the highly painful
• 42:48
  and pain is the nervous systems warning don't repeat what you just did because it's dangerous
• 42:55
  it's like to make you die next time it happens so that's what pain is all about now that raises the
• 43:02
  question why does it have to be so damn painful why couldn't the brain have something like a little
• 43:09
  red flag that pops up the simply says a little warning says don't do that again
• 43:14
  because that theoretically ought to work but there evidently is a perfectly good reason why it's
• 43:22
  is extremely painful it's difficult to resist now you can make a very good argument that says
• 43:30
  that an intelligent animal would actually need less pain in order to warn it against doing the
• 43:37
  in potentially injuring thing again so a relatively unintelligent animal with a less will
• 43:45
  develop brain would need actually more pain in order to have the same effect on its future
• 43:52
  behavior and so the fact that we are very brainy animals should not be used as a justification
• 43:59
  for saying we are capable of feeling more pain it might be used as justification as saying
• 44:03
  the capable of feeling fear more or of being bereaved more but not in the case of pain I think
• 44:13
  so I think this is an argument actually against the idea that humans are deserving of special
• 44:21
  treatment where pain is concerned so because a cow is too stupid to understand what it shouldn't
• 44:31
  do it needs more pain larger in its own business experience yeah interesting at least it's an
• 44:38
  argument for giving them the benefit of the doubt yeah so why don't we why haven't we reached that
• 44:44
  tipping point well maybe and give it another century yeah yeah the other thing that we might
• 44:52
  need to give another century is weapons of mass destruction which it's sort of a bit uncool to
• 44:58
  worry about at the moment because we don't feel like there's a cold war on and yet when I was
• 45:05
  leafing back through the selfish gene I was thinking of the world in which you wrote that book
• 45:11
  in the mid 70s when there was a very real and present existential possibility of the planet
• 45:18
  annihilating itself through a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the West I didn't
• 45:24
  live through that period so I don't know what that's like but well that is what it felt like and
• 45:31
  in in in the Cuban Missile Crisis for example it really did feel like that and I think it was
• 45:37
  like that and there were and other things as well the Berlin there were a couple of Berlin crises as
• 45:43
  well which were very very similar I happened to be staying with a college friend of mine in Devon
• 45:51
  as one of those Berlin crises and the my friend's father was a general in charge of
• 45:59
  the southwest region of Britain in the event of war so he knew what he was talking about and he
• 46:08
  came down to breakfast looking very juggle and said well you boys I think there's going to be a war
• 46:13
  and he said I don't want to alarm you boys but I think there's going to be a war and
• 46:18
  he seemed very cheerful about it I suppose being a general but it did feel like that and quite
• 46:26
  sure it doesn't feel like that now I mean well we don't have the adversary we don't have the same
• 46:30
  ideological adversary but well don't we I mean what about Putin good point I mean I suppose
• 46:37
  there isn't the same trenchant hostility there it seems like a more conniving kind of villainy
• 46:45
  that he's that he's expressing rather than the kind of I don't know Stalinist bombast
• 46:52
  but I just wonder I mean thinking ahead into the future since you said you know in 100 years time
• 46:57
  we might think differently about animals are we going to make it 100 years if we don't get
• 47:01
  our hands around nukes well I wouldn't be around to see but yeah I mean we do have very
• 47:13
  things to worry about how do you feel about the climate situation well I think we've got to
• 47:19
  worry about that too and and my attitude to that is is to try to be optimistic and to say
• 47:27
  science has usually found a way to solve such problems and science probably could solve
• 47:34
  these problems but it isn't enough for science to know what to do it how they have to persuade
• 47:40
  humanity to adopt the solutions and that means persuading having the political will
• 47:47
  to put into practice what science prescribes that is a more difficult problem than actually thinking
• 47:54
  what the solution is and while we're going through this gloomy portion of the conversation don't
• 47:59
  worry to get lighter in a moment but just talking about existential threats let's just touch on
• 48:04
  pandemics since I last saw you we've had a global pandemic I can't say that the world
• 48:13
  passed with flying colors in our response to COVID necessarily what lesson do you take from
• 48:21
  the experience of the pandemics well I'm encouraged at this speed with which
• 48:26
  several different groups of scientists produced vaccines that this was unprecedented
• 48:32
  and to produce vaccines in a matter of months just is a huge achievement and what's even better about
• 48:42
  that is that some of these vaccines use the principle the mRNA vaccine principle which potentially
• 48:50
  lends itself to quick discovery of new vaccines when the next virus comes along so because of the
• 49:01
  way mRNA vaccines work when if if well I say let's say when that the next virus arises it will be
• 49:11
  instantly sequenced very quickly sequenced the DNA of the RNA the virus will be sequenced and then
• 49:20
  the it will be a matter of rather a short time to devise a vaccine once you've got the
• 49:26
  sequence which will be quick so that's a spin-off from the COVID pandemic that we not only have
• 49:33
  vaccines against COVID but we have a method for producing new vaccines in our hurry when the next
• 49:41
  one comes along I mean yeah I think the mRNA vaccine even for COVID was basically done in a week
• 49:46
  or two and then all of the remaining months were testing and safety and that stuff but there is
• 49:51
  an adage richer that vaccines don't save lives vaccinations save lives you need to get it into
• 49:58
  people's arms and there is also enormous resistance to that well that's an amazing phenomenon is
• 50:05
  the is the worldwide misinformation campaign against vaccines there was a moment last February
• 50:17
  when I was on Joe Rogan's show and he was talking about how you know he's a big podcaster in
• 50:23
  America who was talking about how the mRNA vaccines cause heart inflammation myocarditis and
• 50:29
  pericarditis which is a side effect of you know an occasional side effect especially among young
• 50:34
  males I was making the point that COVID itself is worse in terms of inflammation inflammation
• 50:41
  the heart and all kinds of other things than the vaccines and he didn't think that it was and so
• 50:46
  it was fact checked in real time and it turned out that I was right and he was wrong but the whole
• 50:50
  internet blew up for about five seconds I don't know if anyone remembers that moment and all of a
• 50:54
  sudden I have subsequently spent the past 12 months being the target of enormous hate and
• 51:00
  hate and threats from vaccine deniers as if I'm an apologist for a big farmer and trying to hide
• 51:09
  side effects and I do wonder whether the elite institutions of universities and the media
• 51:18
  are equipped enough to do a good enough job of I guess giving credence to some of the fears by
• 51:25
  talking about them openly and honestly I mean I do feel that at my institution there was
• 51:29
  sometimes there has sometimes been a reluctance to even talk for example about myocarditis as a
• 51:34
  consequence of vaccines because you're so afraid of scaring people but then your the lack of
• 51:39
  conversation about it is more fuel on the fire of the conspiracists who say look at mainstream
• 51:44
  media isn't even talking about this so do elite institutions bear any of the blame for the lack of
• 51:51
  trust yes probably I think that is a real problem one of the things is that because it happened
• 51:58
  in such a hurry it was necessary to for these sort of elite pundits to put out messages which
• 52:09
  maybe were designed to be reassuring and because it was in such a hurry they couldn't be tested
• 52:18
  adequately in the way that they would normally have been so normally it would take maybe 10
• 52:25
  years of testing to come up with really confident expectations for possible side effects
• 52:39
  almost any medication will have side effects and there may be a few casualties which are very
• 52:45
  tragic and but when you compare it to the to the to the casualties that come from the disease
• 52:51
  itself that that's the point we've got dwarfed by it when the I think it was a hooping cough
• 53:00
  that vaccination came out and I and there was a sort of campaign to say maybe they're not safe
• 53:07
  and maybe maybe the vaccination causes problems and I asked my doctor whether there's any worry
• 53:14
  about this vaccinating my child about I think it was hooping cough it might have been maybe it
• 53:20
  was MMR my mom's me measles marks rebella and he got up and took down a volume and he and he said
• 53:32
  there may be a slight risk from the vaccination but the risk from the disease itself is 2000 times
• 53:38
  greater so it's a it's a matter of statistics on the other hand if you did vaccinate your child
• 53:46
  and the child did have one of these extremely rare side effects you would blame yourself
• 53:52
  in a way that you might not blame yourself if you didn't vaccinate the child and the child
• 53:56
  got got the disease so somehow the positive act of sticking a needle into the child's arm
• 54:03
  and of course there are cases when the child would have got ill anyway and you stick the needle
• 54:07
  in the arm and it and it gets ill and and people are so ready to infer causation when it's just
• 54:17
  with accidental coincidence and of course if you are one of those tragic cases who suffer a side
• 54:23
  effect then coming back to what you were saying earlier about social media and the self selecting
• 54:28
  tribe of flat earth yes you then amplify that situation and there's a really a really huge tribe
• 54:35
  of a virtual tribe of antivacus there was a television program on channel four in Britain
• 54:43
  lionizing the man who produced that false report about about MMR vaccine I'm not going to
• 54:49
  mention his name false report about MMR vaccine causing autism and they
• 54:56
  made him out to be some kind of a hero and he's quite a good looking man and this probably helped
• 55:07
  and there was one woman who was an ardent foe to the vaccination and the interviewer said
• 55:18
  on the whole the interview was that was the the channel four program was a white wash of this
• 55:23
  dreadful man and the but the interviewer said to this woman but surely you're not a doctor
• 55:29
  and do you have the authority to say that she said I may not be a doctor but I am a mother
• 55:36
  and that was sufficient to regard her as an authority she's now an expert on everything
• 55:41
  on all pathology yeah in terms of you know vaccine side effects I think it was Sam Harris who
• 55:47
  said that if the cure for COVID was peanut butter and of course you would have tons of people
• 55:53
  dying from peanut butter yes yes yes people are allergic to peanut butter so yeah that really
• 55:58
  does kill you too it's all the numbers game in in about five minutes we'll start taking questions
• 56:04
  for Richard there are microphones I believe it both ends over here so feel free to start noodling
• 56:12
  on things and if you do want to get up you can I will be sort of trying to keep it roughly
• 56:18
  gender and age equal so don't feel bad if I pass over you but yes hop up if you wish
• 56:26
  Richard what what excites you about the future what do you what do you wish you could live long
• 56:33
  enough to see oh well I think the origin of life is still a big mystery and I would like to see
• 56:40
  that solved it may never be definitive is solved because it happened a very long time ago and
• 56:47
  it may be that the best we can ever hope for is a theory a model which is so good so elegant that
• 56:54
  you want to sum myself it's got to be true but it may not be ever there may not ever be direct
• 57:00
  evidence for it but I would like to see that I'd like to understand subjective consciousness I think
• 57:06
  that's a big one and it's not even clear to me whether that would be solved by biologists
• 57:13
  or computer scientists or even philosophers what does that mean explain the problem
• 57:20
  well the extraordinary fact that we all of us have conscious awareness that the color red is
• 57:28
  something that we actually makes an impact and we see this redness I don't think anybody
• 57:36
  thinks that computers have that kind of awareness or or feeling emotions that well they could they
• 57:45
  well I'm sure that potentially they must be capable of it because after all I'm a materialist
• 57:53
  I believe that emotions and all these other things are consciousness is a product of brain
• 58:00
  staff and it's just there's nothing non-physical about it and therefore I have to be committed to
• 58:07
  the view that it must be replicable in in a computer but it's very hard to know how you would
• 58:17
  ever know that that was true the the tearing test of when you're sitting in a room with a
• 58:24
  communicating with a computer or a human you're having a conversation with with with with it
• 58:30
  and you can't tell whether it's a human you're communicating with or a computer then that's
• 58:35
  that's the test that that's the demonstration that it is conscious I don't think that's right and
• 58:40
  I think I think you could be fooled yes a lot I'm not sure that that's quite what cheering meant
• 58:48
  by the tearing test I don't think he was saying that it means that the computer is conscious
• 58:53
  if it's indistinguishable from a human I think he's just saying that you have you stand in
• 58:57
  relation to it as if it were and functionally we have to sort of functionally the question almost
• 59:02
  becomes moot because you run into the same philosophical conundrum of how do you know that I'm conscious
• 59:08
  well that's right and and I don't know that you're conscious of course I am a robot yes
• 59:15
  um that's right um my friend David McFarlane used to say I'm not conscious when you when you've
• 59:21
  got to that point of the argument um yes I mean I I I I've often you when you know what solipsism is
• 59:31
  solipsism the beliefs that only I am conscious and all the rest of you are just part of a kind of
• 59:36
  dream in my in my head and and I'm rather fond of the story the Bertrand Russell used to tell with
• 59:42
  he got a lesson from a woman who said dear Lord Russell I'm so pleased to hear that you're a solipsist
• 59:47
  there are so few of us around these days ladies and gentlemen Richard Dawkins come on up to
• 1:00:03
  the front if you have a question for Richard we'll do about half an hour of anything that you
• 1:00:07
  want to talk about and we'll take it anywhere and we will interject as we as we wish um there's
• 1:00:13
  uh there was a mic over there there's a mic over there uh just a reminder the question should
• 1:00:19
  usually end with a question mark and to have an opportunity for Richard to say something otherwise
• 1:00:23
  it is a speech I'm sure you have a very interesting speech planned but this is probably not the forum
• 1:00:29
  for it um should we start uh over here Gale Gale are you concerned with all the social tribalism
• 1:00:37
  that you've talked about tonight that's going on are you concerned that people will be turning more
• 1:00:42
  to religion because of that fracture rather than reason well I would be concerned if I thought
• 1:00:48
  they were or would it's not clear to me why they should um is it clear to you why they should I
• 1:00:56
  I can't really see why that's would follow well I guess they just see they look at people
• 1:01:03
  the phenomenon that I've seen recently is the Hogwarts fallout where a lot of people are screaming
• 1:01:09
  if you play the Hogwarts game you're transphobic because it's yeah rolling has gone in and so
• 1:01:16
  they're screaming if you play it you're transphobic and then so 257 million people in the world
• 1:01:24
  are now transphobic because it's one of the biggest selling games so they're like
• 1:01:27
  yeah I'm not that um okay um so you're seeing and this is it's not religion in the conventional
• 1:01:34
  sense but there isn't there is a new kind of religion which regards JK rolling as a heretic that
• 1:01:42
  there's that and also there's a spec a part where people like well these people are
• 1:01:50
  um accusing me of something that I'm not whereas religion is more accepting of me yeah so
• 1:01:57
  I mean they certainly are certainly like medieval religion in in the zealous something out of
• 1:02:03
  heretics and and ruthless punishing of heretics like like JK rolling yeah go for it oh hi um a
• 1:02:13
  number of years ago you didn't appearance on Q&A with Australia's most famous cardinal George Pell
• 1:02:21
  um his death seemed to have sparked a bit of a resurgent public debate in how much respect we
• 1:02:29
  should show religious authority and religion in general I was wanting to know over your lifetime
• 1:02:39
  how much progress do you think we've made on that front and what would you say to us younger people
• 1:02:46
  who sometimes feel a bit hopeless in the way it's going and wish did all this nonsense would
• 1:02:54
  just go away once and for all the nonsense being religion you mean yes yes um
• 1:03:01
  yes I'm I'm not sure that we should hold cardinal Pell against religion I mean uh it for me
• 1:03:14
  religion stands or falls on whether it's true not whether it's practitioners are in moral or not
• 1:03:21
  um so although I didn't really warm to cardinal Pell and I met him I must confess um I wouldn't
• 1:03:29
  hold that against the the Catholic Church I'd hold lots of other things against the Catholic Church but
• 1:03:34
  not necessarily that um but I think yeah I'm sorry to interject with you but I think in the context
• 1:03:41
  of Australia he probably represents um the real world sins of the church in the sense of an
• 1:03:49
  association with cover-ups of of barbaric crimes against children there's no doubt at all that
• 1:03:56
  that those cover-ups are the crimes against children themselves of course and the cover-ups of them
• 1:04:02
  have enormously damaged the Catholic Church and and once see this uh all all over the world and
• 1:04:10
  Ireland I think in particular um the the church is losing a lot of authority because of that um
• 1:04:17
  and uh once again I think that in a way that's deplorable though it is that's the wrong reason
• 1:04:25
  for losing confidence in the church you should lose confidence in the church because they
• 1:04:28
  talk nonsense and but and that's another matter um so I I mean I am encouraged by the the the
• 1:04:39
  figures that show um adherence to particular religions getting down all over the western world
• 1:04:46
  including even America which is lagging behind um in in this respect but even in America the
• 1:04:53
  number of people who no longer subscribe to a religion is um something like 25% um what whereas
• 1:05:01
  in in Australia I imagine it's much higher and Britain it certainly is much higher um so things
• 1:05:06
  are moving in the right direction but going back to the first question over this over this side
• 1:05:13
  it could be that what's replacing it is another kind of religion which which may be just as bad
• 1:05:18
  does that I mean this is sometimes the case that religious conservatives make which is don't think
• 1:05:26
  that when you get rid of religion you're going to end up with a secular paradise you're going to end
• 1:05:30
  up with tribal quarreling of the worst sort much worse you'll be you'll be you'll be you'll be
• 1:05:38
  wishing that you still have the Catholic Church because you'll have a whole bunch of crazy
• 1:05:41
  wokesters going nuts yes yeah does that bother you yes I think yeah go for it
• 1:05:52
  I haven't I have an important question to ask but first I'd like to personally thank you
• 1:05:55
  Professor Dawkins everything you've done for me personally um my question will give context to that
• 1:06:01
  appreciation up until about four years ago I I was raised in the Mormon or LDS church
• 1:06:08
  at watch point a friend who had left the church opened my eyes to some truths about the church
• 1:06:14
  that were kept away from me last four years have been very difficult specifically to do with
• 1:06:20
  my family and friends that are still involved in the religion what advice would you give to someone
• 1:06:27
  that has often sleepless night sleepless nights trying to decide whether they push to help them
• 1:06:34
  from my perspective help them out of that bubble or let things be and try and keep the relationships
• 1:06:39
  alive is one of the great tragedies I think of of departing from a religion is in the
• 1:06:46
  split in the case of something like Mormonism or Jehovah's Witness you are apt to be disowned by
• 1:06:53
  your family if you if you announce that you have forsaken the religion if it's Islam you
• 1:07:00
  forsaken you're apt to have your head cut off um so it's a big it's a really big problem um
• 1:07:08
  it's hard for some of us to understand the power that it has because our thought is it's just a
• 1:07:14
  a philosophical disagreement you should be able to have a philosophical disagreement with your
• 1:07:19
  family with your parents say or your spouse without it causing a rift without it causing them to
• 1:07:27
  cease to be on speaking terms with you disowning you banishing you from the home refusing to acknowledge
• 1:07:33
  your existence that kind of thing it's an demonstration of the power the really sinister power the
• 1:07:40
  hideous power that religion has over the human spirit that um it it does have this this to this
• 1:07:48
  power to alienate people from their families just simply from um a disagreement you could disagree
• 1:07:55
  about the football team you support or make a thing like that or maybe even the politics but
• 1:08:01
  with religion it's out you're clearly not Australian Richard you can't disagree about football team
• 1:08:05
  is here okay without disowning each other but it is it is the i i think it's a it's a demonstration
• 1:08:13
  of of of the evil that religion can cause that it actually does um disrupt families and and cause
• 1:08:20
  great personal tragedy i'm not sure what are you asking what advice do you if i don't know i mean
• 1:08:26
  i think come to to me the right the right solution would be patient argument but i'm afraid
• 1:08:34
  experience shows that doesn't always work down barker who who who was a preacher he described
• 1:08:42
  himself as the kind of preacher you don't want to sit next to on a bus he would ask you whether
• 1:08:46
  you were saved and and um he became an atheist and one by one he's savlleted too and and so he
• 1:08:54
  he seems to have had a gift of persuasion have you tried the god delusion i just finished the
• 1:09:01
  audio book about two weeks ago i mean that that would and sam harris has a great little book called
• 1:09:06
  letter to a christian nation i was also he's already books about an excellent companion to that i mean
• 1:09:11
  what can you do i mean give people books out in the in the case of of Mormonism the beliefs are so
• 1:09:16
  preposterous it's amazing anybody could believe them um why did he 30 years i know i i feel like
• 1:09:22
  a fool now but when you're involved it's i know you you know that that lovely line in Douglas
• 1:09:27
  Adam one of Douglas out of this book books about the electric monk which was a robot a robotic monk
• 1:09:36
  that you buy in order to do your believing for you and the advanced version of the of the monk
• 1:09:47
  was described as capable of believing things they wouldn't believe in salt lake city
• 1:09:56
  thank you yes next question um what do you think next is coming in human evolution
• 1:10:07
  so i didn't quite hear that sorry what do you think is coming next in human evolution
• 1:10:13
  so did you hear that yes what's coming next in human evolution oh right um
• 1:10:20
  well whatever it is it's not going to come in our lifetime indeed the process we're talking about
• 1:10:26
  is we'll take uh tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of years we're talking about really
• 1:10:31
  biological evolution as opposed to cultural evolution um you might look back at the the past
• 1:10:39
  three million years and ask what has been the trend that we've seen in the past three million years
• 1:10:45
  and it is largely an increase in brain size so three million years ago our ancestor would have
• 1:10:50
  been a member of the genus australopithecus and would have been pretty much like a chimpanzee but
• 1:10:57
  walking on its hind legs so it would have a brain only slightly larger than a chimpanzee
• 1:11:03
  and what's happened in the meantime is that we stayed on hind legs obviously and our brain
• 1:11:08
  has swelled enormously blown up like a balloon so you might say well well that trend continue
• 1:11:14
  and it might but in order for that to happen it's necessary that the brainiest individuals
• 1:11:20
  among us are the ones who have the most children so so we might we might set that on one side
• 1:11:39
  it's hard to know what else to expect I mean natural selection the survival of the
• 1:11:45
  fittest is rather going into a strange phase at least in our society because it's rather
• 1:11:51
  difficult to die young nowadays so if you reach reproductive age then you what sorry most of us
• 1:11:58
  do reach reproductive age it's rather difficult to to to die young so there isn't much
• 1:12:03
  selection in favor of survival skills it no longer is necessary to be athletic to have good
• 1:12:12
  sense organs to have the prerequisites for surviving rather we have to ask the question
• 1:12:20
  who is doing the reproducing and who is not doing the reproducing and the if you could find a
• 1:12:27
  genetic difference if we if you could say put everybody who has more than four children
• 1:12:35
  one group of people and everybody who has no children on the other side and the last question
• 1:12:38
  is there any genetic difference between this lot and that lot and if that's consistent over
• 1:12:44
  many generations then you have selection you have an evolutionary pressure it doesn't seem
• 1:12:51
  likely because if you ask the question why do some people have more children than others it's
• 1:12:55
  unlikely to be a genetic reason it's more likely to be something like cultural reason or religious
• 1:13:00
  reason and in any case whatever it is even if it were genetic it's unlikely to be sustained
• 1:13:07
  over a large enough number of generations to cause an evolutionary change so it's very doubtful
• 1:13:15
  whether we could make a prediction about what's next for humans interesting though it is if
• 1:13:24
  Elon Musk's dream of putting a human colony on Mars wherever realized then you might
• 1:13:29
  then get a separation into new species given enough time because there would be very little if
• 1:13:35
  any gene flow between the two between the two planets and that that might be interesting
• 1:13:41
  but it would take longer than any of us will have by long chalk Richard when you say that
• 1:13:48
  there might be religious and cultural reasons why some people would have lots of children or not
• 1:13:53
  lots of children could there be are there likely to be biological correlates to for example personality
• 1:14:00
  trays like ambition or openness or secularism versus tribalism and close mind didn't
• 1:14:06
  well yes if those cultural trays were reflected in numbers of children and then that would be
• 1:14:15
  the case but it's got to be genetic remember in order to have an evolutionary consequence
• 1:14:19
  is it likely to be I don't think so I mean as I said if you do that experiment of dividing
• 1:14:25
  people up into those with lots of children and those with none and then look for genetic differences
• 1:14:29
  you might find some well I rather doubt whether the differences would be sustained over
• 1:14:33
  over lots I'm just sort of thinking take the example of the person from who was the Mormon
• 1:14:38
  who just asked that question I mean is it possible that people who leave the faith and subsequently
• 1:14:42
  have fewer children have a genetic reason for being more open-minded and more rebellious
• 1:14:48
  that would not be totally surprising but I doubt if that would have a major impact because it
• 1:14:54
  probably doesn't affect large numbers of people right yeah go for it who is your favorite
• 1:15:03
  philosopher and why well I'm not very big on philosophers I'm fond of my friend Dan Dennett
• 1:15:16
  who is a philosopher who has taken the trouble to learn a lot of science and so he does not
• 1:15:24
  just do it sit another armchair and and think deep thoughts he actually informs his thoughts
• 1:15:30
  by scientific knowledge and so I think I would probably say Dan then it's my favorite philosopher
• 1:15:37
  the most moral philosopher I already said is Peter Singer thank you very much yeah next question
• 1:15:46
  hello hello everyone I'd like to say first highly recommending a vaccine my
• 1:15:51
  5G's never been better just kidding but on that topic I recently watched the
• 1:15:57
  Joe Rogan podcast with Brett Weinstein and I did mention that brief exchange you had
• 1:16:02
  what was it feel so nervous about a year ago and as a follower Richard Dawkins Joe Rogan perhaps
• 1:16:08
  even your radio show I'd like to see you follow up on that as a consumer of media I would find
• 1:16:13
  that very interesting so I appreciate that but Richard very much would appreciate watching
• 1:16:19
  a YouTube in your books I'd like to ask about a biogenesis because oftentimes in evolution
• 1:16:24
  well he talks about evolution they get conflated between a biogenesis and evolution and I wonder
• 1:16:31
  I want to know what you think about the RNA world hypothesis and if there's any promise in that
• 1:16:35
  really is possible to know definitively the origin of life in a biogenesis sense yes
• 1:16:43
  a biogenesis is the process of going from non-biology to biologists the in other words the origin
• 1:16:50
  of life and the question that asks about the RNA world hypothesis this is very appealing
• 1:16:57
  the origin of life in my view would have to have been the origin of the first self-replicating
• 1:17:03
  molecule the first molecule careful making copies of itself which is what DNA is extremely good at
• 1:17:10
  but the first genetic molecule would not have been DNA because DNA is a what's been called a
• 1:17:17
  high-tech replicator it requires a elaborate protein enzymatic infrastructure in order to do
• 1:17:27
  its replication and you don't have DNA without protein and you don't have protein without DNA and
• 1:17:34
  so therefore we have a catch 22 the RNA world hypothesis gets around that potentially because RNA
• 1:17:43
  is both a replicator potentially a replicator although not a very good one it's not as good as
• 1:17:49
  DNA and it also is an enzyme or can act as an enzyme as a catalyst although it's not as good as
• 1:17:56
  protein and so the idea is that the origin that the first self-replicating molecule and the
• 1:18:03
  first enzyme was RNA combined that combining the two roles and that later the replication
• 1:18:13
  function was usurped by DNA and the enzyme function was usurped by protein and DNA
• 1:18:21
  causes or influences controls the synthesis of protein so that's the RNA world hypothesis and
• 1:18:29
  it's probably the front runner at the moment as the as a theory of a biogenesis and I think it looks
• 1:18:37
  promising. Thanks for the question and I did do a podcast called what I got wrong about COVID as
• 1:18:44
  the follow up but I will go back on Joe Rogan's show if you want to subscribe to one comfortable
• 1:18:48
  conversations and you can find it there. We're just getting a bit bro heavy can the first female
• 1:18:54
  of the species go to the mic over there and go for it over here thanks. Hi Richard. I'm delighted to
• 1:19:06
  be in the same room as you tonight. Thank you. Sure I can speak for everyone here your real
• 1:19:13
  hero to us all especially for me. Yeah you're like David Bowie's song hero I think of that song and
• 1:19:31
  I think of what you've done for humanity and yes I just wanted to ask you according to neuroscience
• 1:19:46
  what mind-changing really is is a learning machine incessantly and simultaneously
• 1:19:53
  burning in and sending away you're standing a bit close to the microphone.
• 1:19:59
  According to neuroscience what mind-changing really is is a learning machine
• 1:20:05
  incessantly and simultaneously burning in and sending away encoded information
• 1:20:14
  and if our brains work by these laws of physics I was just wondering if you've had a paradigm shift
• 1:20:22
  over time as to not being totally on board with Sam Harris's view on free will with determinism.
• 1:20:33
  I yeah I always hate the just if you're not familiar with Sam Harris and free will I think the
• 1:20:38
  question is do we have do we have free will yeah I always hate the free will question
• 1:20:45
  um I often parrot Christopher Hitchens answer to do you have free will he said I have no choice
• 1:20:59
  I suppose I do have to be a determinist I suppose I do have to have to as a physicalist as a
• 1:21:06
  materialist I do have to believe that what we do is determined and the and free will is an illusion
• 1:21:16
  and it's extremely hard to understand that to relieve that because it doesn't feel like an
• 1:21:20
  illusion of course it wouldn't that's what illusions are like you don't seem like it
• 1:21:25
  I feel as though I'm making decisions all the time there are as a rather dominant school of
• 1:21:32
  thought amongst philosophers who call themselves compatibleists and compatibleists believe that on
• 1:21:38
  the one hand they are determined but on the other hand that doesn't in any way diminish the
• 1:21:43
  value of free will and for example they don't take the view that if you're a determinist therefore
• 1:21:51
  you shouldn't hold people responsible for their actions you should hold them responsible you should
• 1:21:59
  you should feel guilt really means something and you might even believe in punishment even if you
• 1:22:04
  are a determinist if you're a compatibleist um the philosophers that I respect tend to be
• 1:22:11
  compatibleists I cannot quite grasp it um have you seen the the episode of 40 towers where
• 1:22:21
  basil beats his car because it won't it won't start and I sort of feel that if you were really
• 1:22:31
  take determinism seriously you should not punish people anymore than basil should have beaten his
• 1:22:36
  car it's not it's fault and and it's not a person's fault either if you're a determinist but I'm
• 1:22:45
  I get I get beaten around the head by Dan Dennett if I say that because he's a compatibleist
• 1:22:52
  I've never heard of anybody going to the court of law of prisoner and saying Milad it wasn't me
• 1:23:00
  that did it it was my gene sort or it was it was my it was my molecules in a way why not because
• 1:23:08
  after all um insanity is taken as a defense as a legal defense so um in a way you might say well
• 1:23:15
  why why wouldn't um genes or molecules be equally a legal defense but these are deep waters and
• 1:23:23
  I tend to slug in such I mean we sort of do do that don't we in the sense that there's that famous
• 1:23:31
  case of the the shooter in America who who wanted who wrote a letter and said that he wanted
• 1:23:36
  his brain to be a autopsy afterwards and it was found that he had a huge tumour growing on
• 1:23:43
  inside of his brain and Sam Harris's point about that is well it's tumours all the way down for
• 1:23:48
  all of it yeah there's always a biological there's something going on in your head that you didn't
• 1:23:53
  author but if you take that seriously then then you would never actually punish anybody only to the
• 1:23:58
  extent of deterring others yeah deterring others or or or pest control yes and also just another
• 1:24:06
  very interesting wrinkle in that with that Sam Harris also denies that we even have the illusion
• 1:24:10
  of free will he says if you actually pay close attention when you're deciding whether or not to
• 1:24:14
  have Chinese or Italian for dinner tonight if you're going out to dinner it'll go around in your
• 1:24:19
  head for a while and then at some point you'll decide on one of them yeah and the reason why you
• 1:24:24
  decided on it is completely opaque even to use if you actually pay attention we don't even feel
• 1:24:29
  like we have free will but I get that it was getting up in the morning I never quite know why I get
• 1:24:34
  up and I do it decision was taken 10 seconds earlier and I didn't know about it which which there
• 1:24:41
  is neurological evidence by the way yeah yeah next question hello hello my question is generally
• 1:24:50
  how do you feel about memes knowing that you sort of coined the term in 1976 and it's run off to
• 1:24:58
  cat videos and like just how do you feel in general about the trajectory that that's going on and
• 1:25:06
  whether that lends towards misinformation so the idea of a meme Richard coined that term in 1976
• 1:25:15
  and it laid dormant for 30 years and then all of a sudden we've got grumpy cat and doge dog and
• 1:25:21
  sad Ben Affleck he didn't exactly lie dormant I mean there were
• 1:25:28
  journal of mimetics was there and there is books I'd say rather not a book about we didn't have
• 1:25:34
  doge dog originally. No memes are units of cultural inheritance which are analogous to jeans
• 1:25:42
  because at the end of the selfish gene which which was all about the gene as the
• 1:25:47
  unit of selection I wanted to make the point that any self-replicating entity would do the job
• 1:25:52
  or could do the job of being a unit of selection unit of drumming in selection and on other
• 1:25:58
  planets for example if we ever discovered life on other planets we would I would expect it to be
• 1:26:02
  I'd be pretty certain it would be Darwinian life and therefore there would be some equivalent
• 1:26:05
  of a gene but it probably wouldn't be DNA so so all those a whole book would have been about DNA
• 1:26:12
  as the unit of selection it didn't have to be that and then I said well maybe we don't even have
• 1:26:17
  to go to other planets maybe there's a new replicator staring us in the face and this was the
• 1:26:24
  meme the unit of culture unit of cultural inheritance unit of imitation so when imitation
• 1:26:31
  when a closed fashion spreads through through the population when I use this example I think of
• 1:26:39
  reverse baseball cap as being as being a meme that spreads as an epidemic through and a very annoying
• 1:26:46
  one too through the population or a craze at a school you know how at schools crazes for
• 1:26:58
  particular kind of toy or particular games spread like an epidemic really very like an epidemic
• 1:27:03
  same epidemiological time course so that means that there is a cultural replicator there is
• 1:27:12
  something equivalent to DNA spreading through the population from brain to brain and the internet
• 1:27:18
  of course provides a rich ecosystem for the spread of memes and the name to anybody under about
• 1:27:29
  25 years old the word meme tends to mean a picture with a caption and it's a subset of a meme
• 1:27:40
  to the extent that it spreads through the population spreads through the memeosphere and may
• 1:27:48
  mutate may change that makes it a meme it's an interesting meme if it gives rise to evolution
• 1:27:56
  if it gives rise to actual evolution if it evolves in other words if selection favors some memes
• 1:28:02
  over others and that does happen because a tune if it's a catchy catchy tune the very word catchy
• 1:28:12
  reminds one of a virus virus of the mind I wrote an essay called virus of the mind about memes
• 1:28:19
  a catchy tune will spread through the population people will whistle it or sing it hum it
• 1:28:26
  others will copy them and whistle it so that's a catchy tune and that's a a spreadable meme a meme
• 1:28:33
  with high survival value in the memeosphere so there is a potential for Darwinian evolution going
• 1:28:40
  on and when I wrote when I invented the word mean the internet hadn't been invented and the internet
• 1:28:48
  as I say does provide a very rich ecosystem for the spread of memes in the original sense and also
• 1:28:55
  in the under 25 years old sense and I think the questioner was sort of saying it doesn't bother you
• 1:29:01
  that it has come to be associated with the flotsam and jetsam of the internet well it is a special case
• 1:29:09
  and I'd rather it was used in the original sense but yes it is a special case yeah we have about
• 1:29:15
  five minutes left so apologies to everybody we'll take one more from each side thank you thank you
• 1:29:22
  Professor for coming here it's like you see it seems that Charles Darwin was still believing in
• 1:29:29
  hereditable acquired characteristics at the time of the joint publication whereas Wallace
• 1:29:35
  specifically wrote against the can you just go a little bit further away from the mic it's a bit
• 1:29:40
  hard to hear yet thanks professor and apparently August Wiesman settled this Lamarkey in
• 1:29:46
  dynamic that it doesn't exist because 22 generations of mice or 20 had their tails cut off and
• 1:29:52
  not one of them produced offspring without a tail and I can't seem to find in my Google searching
• 1:29:57
  that it was confirmed whether that they had offspring with more dense tails or stronger tails which
• 1:30:03
  I would have guessed would be the Lamarkey in dynamic could you please steal man a case for
• 1:30:09
  Lamarkey in revivalism using what we know about the genetic inheritance what's the what's the
• 1:30:18
  strongest possible case for Lamarkey's theory of evolution Lamarkey was a predecessor of Darwin
• 1:30:27
  as a as a theorist of evolution he believed in a kind of evolution was a very strange kind of
• 1:30:31
  evolution actually he thought that all creatures were on a kind of ladder and they moved up a ladder
• 1:30:36
  it's really very different from Darwin's own conception of a branching tree and he believed in
• 1:30:44
  the inheritance of acquired characteristics and the question was describing an experiment by
• 1:30:52
  the German biologist August Wiesman who cut off the tails of mice for generation of generation of
• 1:30:57
  generation and unsurprisingly we there was no tendency for the mice to be born without tails
• 1:31:07
  he might have looked at circumcision among certain religious groups
• 1:31:17
  would have saved the mice a whole lot of hassle yeah yeah actually that's not a very good
• 1:31:23
  experiment to have done at all I mean I have a great admire advice when he actually
• 1:31:28
  was a major contributor but not not that experiment
• 1:31:34
  Lamarkey and evolution would be not really about injury like cutting off a tail the more about
• 1:31:45
  Lamar talked about the principle of use and disuse it's things like if you exercise the muscles
• 1:31:52
  of a particular part of the body then they grow bigger that's nested that's obviously true
• 1:31:57
  that's what people do exercise bodybuilders do and if there were any tendency for the children
• 1:32:04
  of bodybuilders to be born with great bulging muscles that would be what Lamarkey had in mind
• 1:32:10
  and he thought that that was a good explanation for adaptive evolution he thought that animals
• 1:32:18
  would be would strive for a particular outcome so for example of the giraffe striving for
• 1:32:27
  leaves up at the top of the tree and striving and stretching its neck stretching its neck
• 1:32:32
  and then because its neck got stretched with its striving its children would be born
• 1:32:38
  slightly longer next and this was his explanation for the evolution of the giraffe's neck
• 1:32:45
  it's it's wrong it not only is it factually wrong because acquired characteristics are not
• 1:32:52
  inherited but even if they were it would not be a big enough theory to account for evolution if
• 1:33:01
  you think about something like the evolution of the eye where vision gets more precise as the
• 1:33:08
  generations go by you could get more more acuity of vision that is not going to come about
• 1:33:14
  through striving for anything it's not going to come about as a principle of use and disuse
• 1:33:19
  what if I squint really hard when I'm reading yeah you could you mean that that kind of thing would
• 1:33:24
  work but the lens doesn't become washed clear by photons whizzing through it it's not I mean the
• 1:33:30
  the detail the the precise precision details of of the eye not just the eye but but everything
• 1:33:39
  inside the body the details of biochemistry that can only come about through a Darwinian mechanism
• 1:33:44
  where the slightest improvement in in however internal however detailed over small the slightest
• 1:33:52
  improvement which which makes it more likely to survive will be will get inherited so that the
• 1:33:59
  Darwinian theory can account for all improvement whereas the market theory can only apply to
• 1:34:04
  can only explain improvement and things like muscles getting bigger when you when you use them
• 1:34:11
  so the market theory cannot work it's it's not a big enough theory to account for it the question
• 1:34:16
  is more concerned with is there any evidence for inheritance of acquired characteristics
• 1:34:23
  and he used the word epigenetics which is a much banded around word epigenetics is actually just
• 1:34:30
  about embryology epigenetics is the phenomenon whereby as embryology proceeds different genes get
• 1:34:39
  turned on in different tissues so in the liver for example only a certain subset of genes get
• 1:34:48
  turned on even though the whole not the whole genome is present in every cell in different tissues
• 1:34:54
  only a smaller number of genes among the that genome get turned on so that's epigenetics
• 1:35:02
  the reason it's become associated with the markism is that some people have suggested that
• 1:35:07
  the differential turning on of genes can be inherited into the next generation and possibly
• 1:35:13
  into the grandchild generation there is a certain amount of rather weak evidence that that that
• 1:35:18
  can happen but it doesn't really rescue the Lemarkian theory of evolution partly for the reason I've
• 1:35:24
  just said and partly because it only goes on for a couple of generations of most if it if it happens
• 1:35:29
  at all just before we take the last question if you're a VIP ticket holder then when this ends
• 1:35:37
  just stay in your seats and and you'll be able to to stay here while everybody else leaves
• 1:35:43
  if if you want to hear this conversation back again it will be released in the future on my podcast
• 1:35:49
  uncomfortable conversations if you want to hear more conversations like this then you should
• 1:35:53
  subscribe to uncomfortable conversations as well and Richard Dawkins will be engaging with the
• 1:35:56
  VIP ticket holders at the end of the show go for it. I'm on 37 and over the past year recently
• 1:36:05
  discovered that I have ADHD which leads to sort of questions of where did it come from in evolutionary
• 1:36:12
  evolutionary purpose or whatnot so I wanted you would hazard a guess as to sort of where it would
• 1:36:18
  have come from and other alongside along other neurological development or disorders like ADHD
• 1:36:26
  and autism and if there's a purpose for it all along that path. I cannot speak specifically about
• 1:36:34
  ADHD and I'm sorry about that but it is it is conceivable that certain psychological variants
• 1:36:45
  do have some evolutionary value some some genetic I don't even know was ADHD has a genetic component
• 1:36:53
  I'm afraid it does it does okay so if it does then and if it exists in a significant number of
• 1:37:00
  people then it's worth asking the question has there been a selection pressure in favor of it
• 1:37:09
  and yes there's a possibility for so-called polymorphism that would be the presence of
• 1:37:17
  more than one genetic type actually under positive selection and this is known in wild animals
• 1:37:24
  to some extent there can be selection in favor of variation especially if the the rarer type
• 1:37:31
  has an advantage because it's rare and so and this is this is something that that does lead to
• 1:37:38
  a polymorphism you can see that if if by virtue of being rare it has selective value then it will
• 1:37:44
  be maintained in the population I can't for the moment think why ADHD should be should have an
• 1:37:51
  advantage when it's rare I did once think why short-sightedness might if you imagine that
• 1:38:01
  but well in fact it's true that very short-sighted people would be capable of before the
• 1:38:06
  invention of lenses or glasses very short-sighted people might have been very good at fine
• 1:38:12
  needlework fine manipulation close up to the eyes and and you could say something like
• 1:38:20
  in a society short-sighted people because they had this unique ability to do fine
• 1:38:27
  precision work would have been would have had an advantage in in some rare numbers
• 1:38:34
  then you could have selection in favor of a certain number of short-sighted people
• 1:38:40
  whether you could make a case for ADHD along those lines I'd be interested to know I think it's
• 1:38:46
  not impossible that you could please thank the very far-sighted Richard Dawkins