A moral philosopher and an evolutionary biologist in conversation | A Conversation with Peter Singer

foreign [Music] but if you want to get early access to our episodes consider becoming a paying member if you enjoyed this episode please subscribe and share it with your friends thank you for all your support hello everyone it's great to see you on this warm Melbourne day with a cooler evening as the change came through that was welcome I'm Peter Singer I'm going to be in conversation with Richard Dawkins glad some of you know me um this is my city this is where I was born grew up spent most of my life I am now a professor of bioethics at Princeton University but I've switched to doing that only half time which is why I'm here at this time of year um and as many of you will know I'm the author of a book called animal liberation thank you and those of you who cheered there's a completely updated edition coming out in in June so don't forget to get it but I'm you're not here to see me I know you're you're here to see and hear Richard Dawkins um I think you probably already know the basic facts about Richard that's why you're here but just to run through them Richard was born in Nairobi Kenya in 1941 and his parents moved to England when he was eight years old so he had some years in Africa um when he went to England he studied at Oxford University not at eight but 18. um did zoology did his PhD under a famous ethologist called Nicholas tinbergen whose book on the Herring gulls or seagulls I read when I started to become interested in animals was a very enlightening study that really treated animals as beings living their own lives not just running rats through mazes and giving them electric shocks and seeing what happens um so he studied zoology he became a professor briefly at the University of California Berkeley and then went back to Oxford where he was a fellow at new College and became internationally known in 1976 with the publication of The Selfish Gene a wonderful book that we'll be talking about and went on to have a really illustrious career writing a whole string of books um I'm particularly fond of the blind watchmaker which came out 10 years later in 1986 um and uh other books we're going to be talking about the devil's chaplain mostly about Evolution the river out of Eden climbing man improbable uh really spreading information about Evolution and its significance um and its significance in developing a view of the world without God and that led to the writing of The God Delusion which uh perhaps is books that um caused the most public controversy particularly in the United States uh and he also founded with procedure that the Richard Dawkins foundation for reason and Science and was appointed in uh Oxford as the Charles Simone professor of for the public understanding of Science and he's been a tremendous promoter of understanding science and the importance of science he's also written uh two books of uh um essentially autobiography about his life in science uh the second of those called a brief candle um a life of science so I want you to join me in welcoming Richard Dawkins [Applause] [Music] wonderful to see you here Richard and welcome to Melbourne um let's get straight into it as I just said in introducing you uh I first came across your work with the selfish Gene um so it's so I think is a really wonderful book and got me thinking about evolution in a way that I hadn't before because I had perhaps somewhat naively thought for example that things develop because they help our species to survive right um yes a terrible mistake I know but you know I was a naive young person then um so maybe you could briefly say where the level of evolution is I mean I guess the title The Selfish Gene gives it away to some extent but where and and why that matters why it's important to understand that it really matters because if you think about it and natural selection is the survival of something and uh this thing that's special about the gene is that if it survives it survives for a very very long time in the form of copies of itself so a gene in the form of copies of itself can potentially survive for millions and millions of years and so the difference between a successful Gene and an unsuccessful Gene really matters the difference between a successful individual or a successful group or a successful species doesn't matter in the same sense because it's going to die anyway uh the the thing about a gene is that you come back a million years later and some of them have made it through and some of them haven't so that's the significance of why the the gene is the unit of selection and and so you know you gasp when I said I thought that selection was for the benefit of species maybe you can briefly say why that's why that's wrong and we know that it's wrong I understand why it's wrong now but well because um it's a very tempting error because of course you talk about um uh reproduction can we have the lights a little bit more because it's nice to see the audience and yes um it's it's tempting to think that um reproduction is often called perpetuation of the species and so and so you think of it but natural selection doesn't choose between species species is not the kind of thing that work to preserve themselves if you look at a at an animal and you say what's wing for what's its teeth for what's its tail for you can give a kind of teleological answer to that you can say it's about survival of something or other it's not about the survival of the species nobody would ever say uh the tail of a squirrel is there to preserve the species of squirrels it's it's it's it's about the it's about the preserving the individuals of the individual can pass on its genes right I think yes but it is tempting to say you know I say cheaters were good because they stuck around because they could run fast that's uh of course and that's correct and that's correct they they they run fast and they pass on their genes because they because they run fast but you don't want to say the species cheetah survive because it because it runs fast because that's not the level at which with natural selection acts right okay so um soon after the book appeared there was some criticism and some of it that I saw perhaps because it was by a philosopher Mary Midgley uh focused on the title and claimed that the title was misleading because although we can be selfish humans can be selfish maybe some non-human animals can be selfish but you have to be an agent you have to have intentions in some way you have to prefer your own interests you know so your your child eats all the ice cream that was meant for the your child and the friends and you say don't be selfish your your friend should get some ice cream too um but genes don't have intentions like that and they can't choose between eating all the ice cream or not eating all the ice cream or whatever the equivalent is for a gene so um what's your response to the idea that um it's misleading to say that genes are selfish or or not selfish well Mary images they've focused on the title because that's all she read she she confessed that letter to ulica segastrala who wrote a book about the um and it's very clear because the the very opening words of her critique were dawkins's main thesis is that humans are selfish there's nothing to do with humans I didn't write about humans at all she assumed I must be writing about humans and I wasn't I wasn't interested I'm not interested in humans actually um um so um yes and and as for the thing she says something like um jeans can no more be selfish than biscuits and meteorological it was you know a bit of sort of rhetoric like like that a philosopher of all people should know that you use language in a special way and and I was using language the language of selfishness in a special way when I said just now that the the gene is the unit of selection as opposed to the species the selfish Gene was about that saying if you want to talk about the level at which selection acts let's use the word selfish for the entity in the hierarchy of Life which works to preserve itself the selfish entity it could be the selfish elephant it could be the selfish oak tree it could be the selfish species it could be the selfish individual none of those were the one level at which it works is the selfish Gene and so that was the point about the selfish Gene if she had read beyond the title to the book itself the rather extensive footnote to the title which is the book itself she would have got the point okay well um I'm not proud of anyone in in my field who criticizes books for that reading them carefully so I'll certainly reading them at all okay um so I'll certainly Grant you grant you that point um still um is there no implication there you said a moment ago you were not really interested in humans but is is there no implication that uh altruism is either as I know some people have said maybe not you that that altruism is something that really doesn't evolve I I can't remember who it was no no there isn't um the book is actually largely about altruism it's largely explaining altruism and and several other chapters in in the book are explaining how you get altruism from selfish genes so the the selfish Gene programs the individual organism to be altruistic that's the point because that helps the selfish Gene to survive exactly it helps the selfish Gene to survive if it programs the individual to be altruistic for example towards kin towards those that from whom it can expect to get reciprocation say um uh you written book about that um so uh yes the the the cell the selfish Gene is precisely not about the selfish individual it's about the altruistic individual and does it allow for altruism Beyond altruism towards kin which is fairly easy to see why that would help genes to survive and reciprocal altruism if you're in a Cooperative partnership uh then yes that would help the genes to survive but suppose that I believe that we should be donating some of our spare money that we spend on luxuries to people in developing countries far away to complete strangers you'll never see yes um piece has written a wonderful book um called the expanding Circle um which which deals with this and starts with the idea that um you have altruism towards kin and towards potential reciprocators and then the idea is it expands outwards towards members of her own species and then even to members of other species and this expanding circle is a very uh Noble idea um it does not follow from Darwinism directly nevertheless because humans undoubtedly do have this altruistic impulse the impulse to give to charity uh to donate blood for example way or not hate to do so um to feel empathy to feel sympathy towards individuals who are not only not kin but having the slightest chance of ever being in position to reciprocate towards you you feel pity for somebody who's bereft and weeping and and in in great pain and great distress we all have this well most of us have this feeling of empathy towards people and that doesn't need ex that does need explaining and it doesn't have a simple naive darwinian explanation in order to get the circle to expand we have to be a bit more sophisticated in our Darwinism and I try to do this by suggesting that the altruism towards kin and potential reciprocators evolved at a time when our ancestors lived in small groups Villages small bands like baboons and at that time everybody you ever met or had any strong acquaintance with would probably be your kin I'll probably be in a position to reciprocate you you knew everybody in the village you knew that if you did a good turn to anybody in the village there'd be a good chance that they would reciprocate later in life because they're going to be with the same people again and again throughout your life mostly they're cousins anyway or their uncles and nephews and nieces and things anyway so um natural selection does not build into us a kind of cognitive awareness of Hamilton's Inclusive fitness equations that we don't we don't actually um we're not programmed by natural selection to calculate coefficients of relationship where program with rules of thumb and in our ancestral past our original ancestral past living in villages the rule of thumb would have been something like be nice to everyone because everyone is tends to be kin be nice to everyone that's the rule of thumb now when you live in a big city like Melbourne um everyone is of course not kin but nevertheless the rule of thumb is still there I liken it to the rule of thumb of sexual lust where obviously the darwinian function of sexual lust is procreation and in the state of nature where there's no contraception copulation tends to lead to reproduction and so the rule of thumb is enjoy sex and that works in in the state of nature it no longer works because we all use contraception but nevertheless the rule of thumb is still there we still have sexual lust in the same way we still have a lust to be nice uh dating from the Primitive past when the rule of thumb worked from a darwinian point of view so that's how I explain the expanding Circle and I have no difficulty in generalizing from that to other species um because once again the rule of thumb builds into our brains a tendency to feel empathetic towards um creatures who are evidently in distress are suffering that kind of sin yes I can understand that explanation and I'm sure that it is a part of the truth but and again perhaps this is because I'm approaching it from philosophy more than uh evolutionary science um but I'm I I think that our reason plays a role as well I think clearly we evolved a capacity to reason and no doubt that conferred advantages on those who could reason better or the genes that produce reasoning therefore survived but I think that once we can reason then we can understand certain things so we can understand that um I would be miserable if I were not getting enough to eat or I would be miserable if I was watching my child die from malaria and then I understand that there are people elsewhere in the world complete strangers to me who are also hungry and unhappy because of that oh whose children die from malaria and they're unhappy with that and I feel that that matters it's not just that I have happened to have this desire but that I would somehow be wrong if I ignored that and overlooked it um and if I didn't give some weight to the fact that their interests are like my interests there's no really relevant difference I'm taking out imagining myself as taking a larger point of view and I think that that's helps us to develop an ethic that is um to a degree obviously not perfectly by any means but to a degree impartial in recognizing concerns for others and particularly of course we talk about Universal human rights and equal equality of all humans you mentioned animals a moment ago and I'm going to come back to that later on but at least at that level I do think that our reasoning is playing a role I agree with that and and I I mean it's it's not for nothing Peter I've described you as the most moral man in the world and and I mean not only moral but understand why you're moral and this is what moral philosophers do and I'm very glad that that's what moral philosophers do I'm very glad we've got moral philosophers and uh when I think like a moral philosopher I agree with you it's not a darwinian explanation though it's a it's a it's a rational explanation um it's when we apply our reason to moral questions and we have things like the Golden Rule which you then generalize uh and um I'm all for that and and applaud that kind of application of reason to moral questions but I thought I was being asked for a darwinian explanation and and it in a if I was for a dominant explanation then I have to produce one sure so but it's interesting then that the dominating explanation doesn't have to be all comprehensive that it can leave room for an explanation in terms of reasons uh and reasoning process so so it's it it what you just said counts against the idea that we're somehow genetically programmed machines um yes um I think I put it it's all of a piece with the question like um what said they'll win an explanation for doing mathematics doing philosophy doing doing art doing music these are all things which don't have any obvious darwinian survival value and they're part of the product of what you get when a big brain is produced by natural selection for No Doubt mundane purposes of of survival during survival and then lo and behold it turns out to be big enough to have emergent properties uh like the ability to do mathematics and the ability to do moral philosophy yes I think mathematics is a really interesting example because no doubt there are survival reasons why you want to be able to count the number of tigers who went into the bush and the number of tigers who came out and work out if there's still a tiger there um but just from that capacity then to get to higher mathematics seems quite extraordinary and you you just sort of wonder what's going on how is it we we stumble into this kind of Realm of numbers and then we start having all of these complicated theories yeah it's quite clear that there are there's massive emergence in the human brain which it just does things which in no easy unders easily understood since contribute to survival but nevertheless having a big brain contributes to survival and then it turned out to be big enough to do relativity and quantum theory as as well as just counting Tigers right okay so let's um talk a little bit about uh religion and some of your your views on that um I understand that you you said that you had a fairly conventional Christian upbringing that you uh were a Christian until sometime in your teens and one of the reasons why you're a Christian was that you thought that there needed to be an explanation of what appeared to be at the way everything fitted together in in nature the design in other words of nature um until you encountered a darwinian explanation which you thought actually then was Superior and that led to your belief in Christianity falling away is that roughly yeah so I mean I suppose before that I I would have been a Christian because I was a child and um as support said when I was a child I thought the child I spoke as a child and so on um when I became a man I put away childish things um not in the sense that's unfolded well no no okay um but but it's true that that by the time I reached the age of about 15 I had a residue not so much of Christianity as of a sort of deistic belief in some kind of the need for some sort of a Creator um and um no more than theistic actually I mean a Creator who put together who designed living things and you're you're right that then when I discovered Darwinism and understood it uh I I that that pulled away the last vestiges of religious belief and when you wrote the the blind watchmaker which I think is another marvelous book that I I greatly enjoyed reading um was that a way to sort of get that realization across to a wider public that we didn't need to think that the watchmaker designer was was actually I suppose I suppose it was I mean I was I was and I'm fascinated by the problem of design it it it is a a stunning fact about living creatures that they are are both complex and uh and designed I mean they really really look designed and they're beautifully designed uh and so it's easy to see um how anybody would the four Darwin came along would have been tempted to think that they were designed um I had I tell an anecdote at the beginning of the blind watchmaker about how I had was having dinner in my college in Oxford new college with a very distinguished philosopher um I didn't mention him in the book but it was in fact AJ air and um he said uh I think I said something like I I found it um hard to imagine being an atheist before Darwin and he said why uh Hume managed it all right so I said well how did Hume explain uh the evident design apparent design of living things and he said why does it need excellent explaining so I I sort of almost wrote the book as a reply to to Freddie air um and actually much later um about 20 years later he said we again met at dinner and he said um just read your book The Blind watchmaker glad to have inspired it he said all right okay yes I knew air as well I attended some of his classes when I was I didn't mention him by name but he recognized the anecdote oh I see right even the book yes yes very good okay so what was your encounter with him do you uh so he he was teaching classes when I went to Oxford as a graduate student from after studying here at the University of Melbourne for my undergraduate and my Master's Degree so I went to Oxford to do graduate work in 1969 and I think I was pretty close to retirement um then but I did go to some of his some of his classes in Oxford um he was most famous in the area that I was working in in ethics he was most famous for having developed um so yeah let me go back a little bit um air was part of this group of logical positivists a movement in philosophy that started in in Vienna in the 20s um and essentially the The View was the only things that um are really worth saying are things that can be verified so it's like you know verified through observation through science or they're just uh logical truths truths of logic um and where did that leave ethics was the question um and his view was well if I want to say um that it's wrong to torture people really what I'm saying is Boo to torture and if I want to say it's good to help people who are hungry and give them food then I'm saying hooray for helping people who are sorry hooray for helping people and giving them food when they're hungry um so I was called the buharray theory of Ethics I think by the time I got to Oxford and here sorry air uh published that in a book called language truths and logic in the 1930s by the time I got to Oxford it was it was a somewhat more sophisticated view but it was still basically along those lines and my problem was that it didn't leave again much role for reasoning in ethics I wanted to say look you can make arguments in ethics um you can argue that some things are right and some things are wrong and it's not just a matter of saying you know like you do for well we're famous for doing this for our football teams in Melbourne of course you know hooray for Hawthorne Boo for Collingwood um which will evoke positive reactions in some people in this audience and negative reactions for others I guess but I I wanted to think that ethics was more than that um so let me just go back a little bit to the questions about uh about God and religion um you have another book called The Devil's chaplain and the title of that book is a quote from it is taken from a a quote from Darwin who said something like I'm not quoting it word for word um a devil's chaplain could tell a terrible story of the cruelties and horrors of nature um and in other words you know if you were trying to make an argument for the fact that there isn't an all-powerful God but there's a devil or something like that or there's a powerful devil you would just have to point to Nature and all the suffering that occurs in nature so I take it so that was the inspiration for that book um but I find that really interesting because it relates to the argument which which I for me is the most powerful argument against the existence of God um in a way the the what you did in the blind watchmaker was to knock down a very powerful argument for the existence of God but to me the most powerful argument against the existence of God is the argument from Evil now if you just make that to a Christian um and say look there's a lot of evil in the world look at what Putin is doing in Ukraine right now for example um then the reply will come yes but God gave us Free Will and Free Will is such a great good that it's worth it even though some evil people will do terrible things when you give them free will but uh the argument that Darwin imagines the devil's chaplain making is immune to that because it's not talking about the evil that humans using their Free Will are actually creating but it's talking about what happens in nature the the suffering in nature we've seen it here I'm sure many people here will have seen the images when there were huge floods in um uh north of Western Australia and there was a dramatic photo of a group of kangaroos marooned on a tiny Island no bit smaller than this stage and obviously about to be swept away by Rushing Waters um so there was no human evil agent causing those uh kangaroos to drown and of course this is something that is just going on all the time another I think rather horrible kind of response to the argument from Evil is to say well yes but Adam sinned and we all bear his original sin and that's why they're suffering in the world I think that's just an appalling moral view even not only appalling moral let me suggest you believe Adam ever existed well that's true too of course that's right um but but when you talk about the suffering in nature then you know these these animals that are suffering are not descending from Adam so yes darling said uh something like um I find it impossible to believe in a benevolent deity who would knowingly have created the igneumonidi the igneumonia a group of wasps which um lay their eggs in the bodies of other insects and then they eat them alive from within it's very very common and parasitoid insects do do that a lot and it's not just that that there is Horror in nature is that natural selection is actually produces horror I mean it natural selection is a horrific process it's it's it's about violent death it's about disease from parasitism it's about um natural selection is a cruel horrible process which produces the wonderful Elegance of a leopard or a cheetah but it is a cruel horrible process that does it it's about um dying violent horrible deaths either because of predators or because of starvation or because of Paris parasitism and it has to be that way natural natural selection wouldn't work if it wasn't horrible so that's an even more powerful argument against a benevolent deity right um yes I think it is very powerful but that that leads me to want to ask you another question um so I mentioned my my book animal Liberation and uh I'll ask you something else about that in a moment but just on this topic in animal Liberation I focused on what we humans are doing to animals both in in factory farms in particular but also for example in the fur industry or um in uh some use of animals in in experimentation um but more recently there's a group of people in the animal movement who think that we ought to think about the suffering of wild animals as well and whether there are ways in which we can alleviate that and that's depending on on what exactly we do I mean that may be a somewhat more controversial area now you know I think there are some things that we should do to relieve the suffering of wild animals again that that we perhaps this time inadvertently cause so if we put out windows that birds are frequently flying into and killing themselves we might try to change that but those stickers of decals of birds of prey that so they don't fly into it or something like that but but what about trying to intervene intervene in nature um to reduce animal suffering is you have a view about that well good luck without him you do you have the Hope um it's it's no I mean um I don't think you're gonna get any anywhere with that Lions hunch and kill in horrible ways and parasitoid wasps nature is a horrible place it's it's it's it's violent and it and it's vicious and um you can't get away from that it's it's part of natural selection it's horrible but it's true and would that press be a reason for saying that it's not such a terrible thing to replace a forest with a housing estate well no I mean I I don't think so I I think if you really wanted to you you could shoot all the lands in the world and and then the antelopes wouldn't get wouldn't get you know we'd have to distribute birth control for the antelopes I suppose yeah I I think you're on onto a loser that Peter uh well I'm I'm I do raise this question in the in the new edition of animal erosion coming out as I mentioned um I do raise the question but I think we I I'm trying to agree with you that there would have to be limits to what we can do in that in that area certainly I would like to see very loud fireworks banned because they they actually cause enormous amounts amount of stress right I mean that's an easy thing to do you don't they don't need Great Big Bangs um okay yeah I think there are some easy things and we can we can put tunnels on the freeways so that yes animals don't cross them and get hit but in in general um you go to the South American jungle and everything is eating everything else and and um that's what natural selection is about Darwin was right about that right he tried to mitigate it by saying the end is is Swift and merciful but it's not it's not always okay um right I want to come back to to the The God Delusion briefly um I haven't really mentioned that um and I'm curious as to what you thought of the reaction in the United States I know the book sold hugely there and you spoke there um and as I've lived quite a lot now both in Australia and United States and I was four years in England when I was in Oxford um did you find a very different reaction in the United States to what you had in England or um what you would say in in the sort of obvious way I suppose so um it's true that the United States is a much more religious country um I found um oddly enough I found that when I toured with The God Delusion in the Deep South which is much more biblically fundamentalist there I got very large enthusiastic audiences and you could imagine why because there there are the beleaguered non-believers in this in the South who turn out in their thousands when somebody like me turns up um but if you go to a sophisticated place like San Francisco or New York on their own big deal yeah um yeah one of my first experiences of giving a talk in the South I was in um Charleston South Carolina and I gave a talk about animals of the time that I usually do and afterwards there were groups of people you know there was an animal organization involved and we were mingling and a woman came up to me and asked without any sort of preliminary it said Professor singer I want to know whether you think that the animals are going to be joining us in heaven yes yes yes yes yes no you know no preliminaries do are you atheist do you believe in heaven you know just the Assumption yes and she was someone taken aback where I when I said no because we're not going to be there either yeah um good uh so just a couple more more questions um you have also been um I think accused of taking a a sort of a scientistic Viewpoint if you like now I know that you have for 13 years you hold a chair for the public understanding of Science and you set up this foundation for reason and science but um some people have pushed back and said well it's all very well for science to explain the material world uh out there but there are things that science can't explain it isn't able to explain and depending on how philosophically sophisticated they are or whether they what they want to talk about you know they may talk about things that I think we would dismiss Maybe ghosts or phenomena like that um but they may be talking about the phenomenon of Consciousness for instance we've already talked a little bit about values they may come into it too do you think is there any area that is science is not going to be able to fully explain well that's a very interesting question I I think first thing I would say is if science can't explain it nothing can but maybe nothing can um I certainly don't think that any kind of uh if to take Consciousness for example which is which admittedly that's very difficult and I don't think science has really made much inroads into explaining Consciousness and that's profoundly important interesting question but vitalism is not going to explain it either so I think I I stick my neck out far enough to say um consciousness does must have a physical explanation of some kind it may be that the human intellect is not big enough to solve that problem although it's done pretty well on very profoundly difficult problems like quantum theory I I think that um that there may well be problems that are so difficult that the human intellect cannot solve them and in a way it's remarkable what the human intellect can do since it was as we were talking about earlier since the the brain evolved as an organ for survival for Gene Survival on the African Savannah one that should we expect to solve difficult mathematical physical philosophical problems it's a one that we managed to solve as many as we have and there may be deep problems like unconsciousness may be one that are beyond the human capacity to understand maybe elsewhere in the universe there are superhuman not Supernatural but superhuman beings which must have evolved by some sort of if darwinian process I think stick my neck out and say maybe they can understand them but maybe we can't maybe that we will never understand them but if we can't understand them if science can't understand them there's certainly theologians can't and certainly um say philosophers can't yeah I wasn't pushing for the theologians but I was wondering about the philosophers hey do you think that we will um ever get artificial intelligence that is conscious well again I I think I would have to commit myself to saying that since I'm I'm a physicalist I I believe there's nothing Beyond physical stuff in the brain and we're conscious at least I am and I presume you are too and everyone else is too um yeah not solid solipsistic you know the Russell's story about about solipsism he got a he got a letter from a woman who said dear Lord Russell I'm so pleased to hear you're you're a solid sister are so few of us around these days um so so um how do I get into that um uh we're talking about oh artificial intelligence yes um I I'm I'm a physicalist I I believe that um there has to be a physical explanation for how the brain does it and therefore um in principle it should be possible to simulate that in silica uh and um it's very hard to get your mind around that it's very hard to imagine feeling pity for a computer when you pull the plug on it or something of that sort it's it's it's something that's foreign to our nature but I think I'm committed to the belief that it must be possible to simulate everything that we know as Consciousness everything that we know as emotions Etc yes right and I guess the other question then is will we be able to tell given that we have chat Bots uh now um that can simulate this but um you know we have no reason to believe that they can't just because when we understand how they're programmed that doesn't seem to involve so I know yes but I still think I'm sure you do too actually that that ultimately it must be possible I agree I think ultimately it must be possible I as I say I wonder how we will know how we'll get there how we'll ever know yeah yes but that is because the simulation could be so perfect yeah I think that's the point about solipsism as well that you the only person you really know is conscious is yourself yes and so if you argue by analogy and you say well you've come into being in the same kind of process as everybody else and so they must be conscious and that doesn't bother us as a general you know living the world in the world we assume that all the people we're talking to are conscious but but with artificial intelligence we will get to the point where it should bother us yes how are we treating this being yes appropriately or not because if it is conscious I think then it ought to be treated in a way that as with animals has concern for its interests and if it's not there's no interest to be concerned right yes yeah and I would then like to move on to some of these questions about animals and just by way of preliminary um I think we first came into contact in the early 1990s when I was working with an Italian um thinker about animals called Paula Cavalieri on what we initially thought we were going to call the chimpanzee project and the idea of the chimpanzee project was something like this you know I had written animal Liberation at this point 15 to 20 years earlier it had got some attention but essentially it hadn't achieved what it what I wanted it to that is to awaken people at the very least to the terrible things we do to animals in factory farms and get them to stop eating them so um so Paula calderi came up with the idea that said look let's focus on those animals who are closest to us and who we're not actually eating but who you know we can most closely relate to and she suggested initially chimpanzees and maybe in that way we can bridge this huge Gulf between humans and animals you know all humans are equal we say animals are not equal all humans have human rights animals don't have rights um that kind of enormous divide that people saw as separating humans from animals we wanted to bridge so we had this idea of collecting essays from people who might be sympathetic to that for a book called the chimpanzee project and we wrote to you um and you firstly um we're sympathetic and was willing to write and secondly you suggested why stop a chimpanzees I don't know if you remember this correspondence but um you said well for example there are uh bonobos uh they're gorillas there are orangutans um they also you know whatever you want to talk about about capacities um the way the cognitive capacity is the the close relationships they form with their kin and their group would apply uh to those well perhaps not so much to orangutans who are more solitary so anyway we ended up calling it The grade 8 project and you contributed a an essay called gaps in the mind which was against the discontinuous way of thinking about humans and animals that I just mentioned that this is great Gulf between them and you Illustrated this was something that I've always remembered and it went like this you imagined uh a human a girl standing on the coast of uh Africa I think you said in Somalia um holding her mother in her right hand let's say facing This Way South and holding her mother's hand and her mother was holding her mother so the first one's grandmother and on and on and on through or back through the generations until you got to the point at which you had got to the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees the great ape that we are most closely related to and you estimated allowing about a yard per person that that might take about 300 miles you would get into Kenya but not as far as Mount Kenya I think you wrote and then you imagine this ancestors anstresses and great great whatever grandmother of us in her other hand she had the sister of the girl who from whom were humans were descended and so these siblings were facing each other but then that one had her her daughter and her daughter and so on so you had first cousins second cousins all the way down until the line stretched back to the modern chimpanzee um and when you think about that and all of those gradual differences going on then I think it does become very hard to think that uh humans have rights you know there's some point in this series of gradual differences that humans have rights and uh animals don't have rights so that was uh I really still appreciate that you supported that that project then we didn't have much contact for quite a while but in 2009 you were making a program where the BBC was making a program with you called the Genius of Darwin and I was in Princeton in the time and you were going to be in New York and they asked if we could um if they could film an interview a discussion that we had so we had this discussion which you can still see although the the BBC Genius of Darwin only took uh shortcuts of it as you'd expect but the full 40 odd Minutes interview is still on on YouTube it's filmed somewhere near the world uh World Trade Center which at that time had not been fully rebuilt but so we're in this big Skyscraper with a distant view of New York I watched it this afternoon it's good actually yeah it's good so um we talked about uh the differences between humans and animals and I think we agreed that um ethically even though we have obviously Superior cognitive capacities and no non-human animal could understand what we're talking about now that that wasn't really important for how we ought to treat non-human animals and um that question that you know Bentham asked this question back at the end of the 18th century he said the question is not can they reason nor can they talk but can they suffer I think you you agreed with that view that that's what's really important and I then ask you um if you were eating meat and or if you felt you could defend eating meat and um you said well I could if animals had good lives again I'm paraphrasing you may not have said exactly this and you're if you watch it this afternoon you may have seen it more recently than I did you have but you said if animals had good lives and were painlessly killed perhaps I could defend eating meat but um I expect that that's not the case no what really goes on is unconscionable um and I push a little harder and said yes but I think if you're eating meat you have a responsibility to inform yourself about what it's like and so now I want to come back and ask you have you informed yourself and if you have are you still eating me I am not well I I believe there's been little Improvement I mean I think I think it's it's it's it's I think it's probably true that that animals are very badly treated in farms and slaughterhouses and being transported to to um to slaughterhouses um we do not eat meat at home with not a drop of meat ever enters the home and we don't make a fuss when we go out to dinner if somebody asks us out to dinner but we don't say vegetarian so we it's a it's a compromise and and uh moved a fairly long way in being purely vegetarian at home um I have something I mean at that that same conversation I suggested what about eating human roadkills um because if they if they've been not deliberately killed but killed by accident and if you had any reason to suppose that they didn't mind um before they were killed if they perhaps carried of like one carries one right I carry a kidney card that says that says you never mind my kidneys I could carry a car and say I don't mind being eaten if I if if I'm um and um and I think we we realized then that what what remains is a is a kind of yuck factor uh and a sort of um taboo against cannibalism which which is very deeply ingrained in in us and I I think I pay more respect to this slippery slope argument than you do perhaps I I think that there really is a strong case for um avoiding slippery slopes and so something like even if if it's very hard to think of an actual moral objection to eating humans um I wouldn't do it on on partly for yuck reasons and partly for slippery slope uh reasons um I do have [Music] um an interesting but I think it's an interesting one I'd like to put to you um firstly on the Bentham quotation the the question is not can they reason can they think but can they suffer it's also are they related to us that's also irrelevant it doesn't matter if they're closely related to us um if if octopuses are um capable of feeling pain um then that's what matters can they suffer that's what matters it doesn't matter that they are exceedingly unrelated to us and so it's it's not um the thing that's important about great apes should not be just that they're close to us in terms of kinship to us which they are but also um whether they can suffer now the additional argument which I want to put to you is this if you ask yourself that darwinian question what is pain for why why has natural selection built into our nervous system built into our brains the capacity to feel pain the answer is of course it's a warning to the animal don't do that again if you've if you have just done something which causes bodily injury to you um physical trauma to your body then that causes pain that also increases your probability of dying and so it's a warning to the animal do not repeat whatever you've just done do not repeat it if it causes pain that's what pain is for now um that's uncontroversial I suggest um in fact I I believe you could probably buy artificial selection breed a race of animals that enjoyed pain but that's a separate issue um now here's the here's the argument I want to put I want to put to you if pain is a warning don't do that again you might ask the question well why did it have to be so damn painful why couldn't it why couldn't the brain just have a little red flag that pops up it says right like your self-driving car doesn't it yes exactly fully self-driving yes deviation don't do that again yeah and the and well possibly the answer to that is that the the brain might Rebel there might be a conflict between needing between wanting sex and wanting food and wanting to avoid danger and so on so that's why it has to be painful but now it comes the interesting point an animal Which is less intelligent less capable of reason than things that Bentham mentions actually might need more pain in order to be deterred from doing whatever is endure is to itself a very intelligent animal it's like a human might well require less pain and therefore it could be that so-called lower animals animals that are less capable of reason and thought might actually be more capable of feeling pain in other words the equation which we have unconsciously taken up which is that it's okay to be unkind to animals because after all they can't really think they don't really probably don't really feel pain they probably feel more pain because they need to feel more pain in order to be to to uh be deterred from doing whatever it is that they're just doing the the equivalent of the little red flag that that pops up it might actually need to be more painful you see animal is less capable of uh ratiosa Nation so that's a very interesting point um I'm sorry that the new edition of animal Liberation has already gone to press I'm not going to be able to change it anymore and add that interesting possibility um because yes I I mean it it it certainly does seem to be uh something that might have worked that way uh of course you know this gets back to Consciousness and it's inaccessibility in a way to science and the is is there a way that we can tell whether that hypothesis is correct uh I think that probably is not um it's it's a plausibility argument but it's a pretty plausible one yeah it it does seem so to me um and certainly you know I think it has already been said that animals rely on their senses very much um you know Acuity of vision or smell or whatever it is so at the very least we should give them the benefit of the doubt and anyway I think that's a very a very good point yes thank you very much for that um I think we are at about the point where we should be moving to questions so there is a microphone up there in the back of this Central block um so if you would like to ask a question um you would make your way up there and we will have about half an hour for questions please do not make statements this is not an occasion for giving us a speech about your point of view it's uh for asking a short sharp question please so um I would suggest questions to Peter as well as me if I may uh thank you that's if you wish to ask a question to me I'm I think it's primarily your evening so I'm expecting the questions to be mainly for you but somebody has one for me I'll I'll take it thank you see the people at the marketplace at the moment here yeah it's a good time to see the microphone it was easier when we were just looking people down the front but there's a number of people there um okay so that's where the microphone is I pointed too high I'm sorry thank you okay we have quite a few it's probably already more people than um we will have time for but I'm going to do a little bit of sorting um I've noticed that it often happens in events like this when you ask for questions the men in the audience raise their hands first or get to the microphone first so I'm going to ask if there are the first couple of women I can't really see people there if there are a couple of women in that line if they could boldly assert themselves somewhere closer to the front thank you you could getting actually I don't know I can't see it is there only one woman there that's yes thank you okay we've got a couple so why don't we um why don't we just mix it up a little bit okay um I don't mind who asked the first question go ahead if you want whoever's at the microphone now and uh then we'll we'll go on please Richard I have a question for you how would you define consciousness in your own words that's a question for a philosopher we have one on the stage um uh I find an extremely hard question to answer it's it's something that I think we all subjectively know we have um and uh I feeling of self-awareness the feeling that um uh self personal identity the the feeling that that it's me that's uniquely me that goes back from when I first became capable of remembering anything um I don't have a philosophically sophisticated answer to that question I think each of us know inside ourselves what it means to be conscious but I can't offer you an actual verbal definition I think so if I will just jump in a little bit firstly um I agree with what you said but I think that's really self-awareness rather than simply Consciousness um because going back to what you just said about simpler beings without our cognitive abilities they're not going to be thinking back to themselves and saying I'm the same bird that was in the nest and now I can fly and I couldn't fly then I don't think they're going to be thinking that but they are going to be capable of feeling pain so I think there's a level of Consciousness that doesn't require self-awareness but it is very difficult to Define because you tend to Define it with other terms that you then you know need to go around in circles they can say Well it's having subjective experiences but what does that mean the philosopher Tom Nagel wrote an article called what is it like to be a bat in which he tried to ask what it might be like to be a creature using Sono rather than vision and he said there that further for being to be conscious there has to be something that it is like to be that being and I think that gives us a reasonable Common Sense explanation so I think in an example I've I've used um if there's a stone in your path as you're walking and you think just for fun you kick the stone along the road a few times it's not a problem because there's nothing that it's like to be a stone being kicked but if it was a let's say an injured animal that was in the path they are a mass and you kicked it along the the path for a while just for the amusement of it that would be wrong because there is something that it's like to be to be a mass being being kicked now I don't know that we can say more than that but I'd say that's the difference between saying the mass is conscious and the stone is not yes next question please thank you I'll jump in now at the risk of not being a woman um it's fine I'm not against uh you know I'm egalitarian on this Consciousness they've been to I'm speaking sort of as a last physicist so I'm coming from a scientific point of view not philosophical but I've got a question um there have been two recent relatively recent um I think major findings on Consciousness um one was sort of Penrose hammeroff work that suggested microtubules in the neurons give rise to Consciousness and there's been some very recent work that suggests there's possibly a truth to that but it's still a work in progress the other one is there was a paper in nature recently that suggested about a half a billion years ago there was a common ancestor which has given rise to a number of conscious borders I guess of animals including primates I think Birds such as Ravens and blackbirds octopus uh squared Etc um I guess the question is should the focus of um does this support animal Liberation and is it at odds with humanism which sort of puts Humanity above other creatures when there's seven billion of us who by almost by necessity then push animals to the background or other conscious organisms to the background I think it's impossible to know what other organisms are conscious and I think the only reason we're we're confident that each other are conscious is because we we are can we come from the same sort of place we look like each other I I have no idea whether octopus is a conscious I've got a strong emotional suspicion that they are um uh I don't know what you're talking about this half a billion years ago um a conscious being gave rise to primates and octopuses I mean half a billion years ago is long before um that could possibly be be correct I think um but it but if octopuses are conscious then they will have evolved it independently and they would very well may have I don't know how we're ever going to know that um as for the Penrose Theory I am not qualified to judge that but it's still a physical Theory it's not a it's not there's nothing mystical about it yeah exactly yeah yeah and maybe it was 50 million not 500 million but uh but if it was if it was a common ancestor of the octopus and the vertebrates it's going to have to be a lot more than a lot more than that it's going to be more than more than a billion but I think the interesting thing about the octopus and I do think that octopus I mean it's very hard to explain their behavior without assuming Consciousness I think uh but you could say the same about the computer couldn't use it well it's possible um I suppose yes uh I think octopuses are conscious but but I I couldn't defend that I see yeah um okay I I mean they went created with a with an intention to make beings to do things in the way the computers are um so I think that they they probably are um you did ask a question about whether this pushes animals into the background um I don't think so yeah I mean it's true that there's a lot of us and and in fact we've pushed them into the background and we've also of course greatly affected the kinds of non-human animals that exist because um the number of of chickens in the world now I think is you know vastly in excess of the other birds of any individual species and even I think close to equaling uh the number of birds in total because we we're something like 60 or 70 billion of them each year so we are pushing um we are changing things through uh uh dominance of the planet there's no question that we we dominated and change it in that way but ethically I don't see that there's a justification for us ignoring uh the interests of of the others given that they that at least it's highly probable that they do feel pain thank you let's have the next question hello when did Humanity Peak when does Humanity what when did Humanity Peak I think is that is that right yes be nice to think we haven't peaked yet wouldn't it um I I don't think that there ever is a peak in evolution it just it just goes on as as that was selectioning favors different different things it's a it's an interesting question whether uh humans are going to go on evolving and and there are reasons I think that we're a bit different and that we've rather feather bedded ourselves and no longer a subject to The Cutting Edge of natural selection um so it may be that um we're not going to evolve any bigger brains for example if you look at our fossil history for the last three million years the most dominant feature is the increase in brain size very dramatic and there's no reason to think that's going to go on in in order for that to go on it would be necessary that bigger brained individuals have the most children it's this idea that we picked uh this this is kind of irrelevant but I can't refrain from telling you um I published animal Liberation when I was 29 and I was appointed a professor at Monash at 31 and a year or two after that um an acquaintance said to me it must be difficult for you having peaked so early okay let's take the next question uh this is a question for both of you I I'm assuming both of you are vegetarian but not as far as vegan uh I just wanted to know what you thought of hunting and fishing for the purposes of both survival and for sport right Richard you can go first and then I'll say something about my views you may have both you may have both answered this later and I'm not a big reader so I'd answer for my sake but I I have no respect for anybody who hunts and fishes for sport Fitness um and and I think Richard explained that he's a vegetarian at home but not uh always when eating out and um I think that's you know a big step to take and I appreciate that you have taken that step I think that that's important because that's a great amount of your support for um uh what we do to animals in intensive farms and slaughterhouses is taken away when you don't buy them to consume at home um I describe myself as a flexible vegan um I request vegan food when I can get it we just had something to eat before this event and I'd ask the organizer to provide vegan food and it was provided um so mostly what I eat is vegan but I'm not absolutely strict about that and particularly I think the the the Animal product that is most readily accessible that I think could best be justified is eggs from truly free-ranging hens because I think they do have reasonable lives it's true that the males of the laying breeds will get sorted and killed within the first day of hatching and it's also true that the laying hens once their rate of lay drops off or even after a year or so will also get sent out to slaughter but still you could say well you know they get to run around us they have a good life they're protected and fed and that's not too bad and here in in Victoria I know we do actually have pretty good labeling systems and we have free range eggs and some of the boxes will even tell you how many hens per hectare they're running and basically I've actually been a chicken catcher before for a free range Farm it's not as glamorous as you might think okay well I'll have to watch that then myself um but I think you know you'd probably agree that some are better than others or they're all heinous as far as I'm concerned okay all right um so anyway um I you know I do think that um it's better to avoid animal products to be confident that you're not supporting suffering and and you've just given another reason why it's difficult to be confident about that with that being fully vegan um but I also you know respect people who've taken serious steps along the way because I would rather have you know I would rather let's say that half the population did what Richard is doing um than have 10 of the population being completely vegan because I think that would you know there would be more animal suffering continuing if 10 of the population were vegan but everybody else was eating meat all the time yes let's take the next question um I've just got a two-part Evolution question um the first you may have already answered so perhaps ignore but um given that contraception is largely taken up uh more commonly and highly educated and less perhaps less available to less educated people and perhaps um also not taken on by more religious people do you think we are evolutionary moving towards being less scientific and secondly um how do you feel that artificial intelligence will impact Evolution ongoing I think the first question is is about um um contraception being uh more prevalent among Highly Educated people um and um if there were a a strong genetic component to that then there would be a an evolutionary Trend um it's controversial uh how much of um a genetic component there is you see it seems certain there's a strong genetic component in IQ as measured um that that's been shown in twin studies for example where um if you if you compare monozygotic twins identical twins how much they resemble each other compared to fraternal twins who are less closely related and you say what is the uh the extra correlation between um identical twins to fraternal twins then IQ does come out fairly high so there is there is a strong genetic component in IQ but you said educated and um plenty of people who have high IQ are not well educated because of economic circumstances and so um I I thought perhaps less scientific rather than less intelligent well no not I don't I don't know I mean I I think that that um uh it it it's probably hard to say that there's an evolutionary Trend towards uh towards less scientific education something of that sort I wouldn't wish to say that um you're treading political politically Dangerous Ground too when you get into that kind of thing um uh the other question was about um artificial intelligence was it yeah how do you think artificial intelligence might impact Evolution well humans it could be that if if say in in a thousand years we look our descendants look back it could be that that there will be a a strong tendency for humans to be to have um electronic components built into their bodies you know instead of carrying your iPhone around it'll be built into your head um and and you control it with thought rather than with your fingers um so there could be a sort of merging of of um technology with but with Biology I'm not sure I would want to call that Evolution because it's no longer no longer genetic Evolution it would be a a cultural Evolution and this is getting into science fiction which I love by the way and and but it is it is it is a fictional speculation but it may not be fictional all that long right I mean there are people working on this Elon Musk was working on one of these programs that got in the news recently because he was using monkeys and rather experiments that they were not being well looked after um but uh but it's possible and I have to say you know I wouldn't mind having uh some of my memory implanted in a chip that I had ready access to as long as nobody else has access to it that is an interesting question it could be hacked into good thank you next question good evening Richard it's an honor to be in this room with you um I'm Iranian I was born a Muslim thanks to you and Christopher Hitchens I'm an atheist now and um and um I embraced uh secular values um I believe in secular values and I believe that the western civilization has made tremendous uh improvements and advancements however unfortunately listening to people like Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson they believe that we should go back to the way things were to traditional um Christian values because of the new forms of religions uh in forms of identity politics and tribalism that's been formed today and um that we should go back to Catholic values and Christian values and and embrace where we came from you know these are the words of Douglas Murray I don't agree with that I believe that we should move Beyond uh what we are doing at the moment um but we really wanted to get your perspective on this and I highly value your judgment yes I think it would be a great pity if we if we thought that in order to um improve things we had to go back to Christian values as you say there are much better ways of doing things than that and we should govern Our Lives by um well moral philosophy actually rather than traditional religious values I even suggested we should in intelligently design uh uh morals and our ethics rather than to derive them from some traditional holy book um well goodness heavens above and businessman let's not do that um to think about the Holy books that are on offer the Old Testament and the Quran um would be an appalling idea to base things on on that um I I'm delighted to hear you your your story from Iran and I hear other stories similarly from from other is Islamic countries uh Peter mentioned that The God Delusion had sold very well in America that's true but um I can also say that um it an illicit Arabic translation of The God Delusion has sold 13 million not sold has been downloaded 13 million times as a PDF in Arabic um and this is this is um this is uh um not paid for this this is a free pdf um my my uh Foundation the Richard Dawkins foundation for reason and science is now um actually um translating my books The God Delusion and others into Arabic Farsi uh Urdu and Indonesian um to try to and and again for for free download as as PDFs and that that project is flourishing at the moment with we're having large numbers of of PDFs downloaded in those Islamic countries very good thank you next question uh hello uh I am a woman and it's not because I have a magical inner feeling it tells me that I am uh but my question today would be uh um following on I guess in the previous questions uh you've talked a lot about I guess religion and we know it has a bit of a tension between religion and Science and um scientific uh reason I was wondering whether you felt that there was some didway attention between scientific reason and political ideologies on both the left and the right I know from my experience people have been very resistant um when I tried to explain for example the role of genetics in personality and aggression because of obviously the political tension associated with that idea I was wondering whether you recognized that that was a phenomenon and how we might get past that in explaining science to people so tension between scientific and political beliefs sorry about starting my bad um they're my defense too I'm assurity yeah um yeah so tension between uh I guess like the scientific what the science tells us which is for example that our genes have a strong influence on our personalities and our tendency to be aggressive and that is I think poetically and convenient particularly uh for people on the left which might explain why there was such a strong response to a book titled the selfish Gene that this philosopher didn't even bother yes well I am aware that there has been a political there was a political uh pushback against the selfish Gene again I think because it was misunderstood as being an advocacy of of uh selfishness um if there were some scientific reason for pessimisms there were some scientific reason for um believing that humans were innately selfish which I don't think necessarily um then I would my feeling would be that it would be all the more reason to educate people to rebel against their genetic Heritage if there was a genetic tendency to be uh selfish to be violent to be aggressive then I would wish to see that overcome by education and it would be a political decision to implement such an educational program I have often said that Darwinism is such a horrible idea although it's true um and we mustn't shy away from the fact that it's true insofar as we studied Darwinism it should be as a lesson in how not to organize Society rather than in how to organize society and societies which have aspired to be organized on darwinistic lines have been appalling Societies in which to live uh yeah I absolutely agree I guess the other part of my question is given that people on the left don't like these ideas um how would we go about communicating them despite I think there's a confusion among some people on the on the Left End of thinking that if you could if there's a scientific reason for believing something is true um then you should oppose the truth of it rather than rather than um try to educate people out of it so that I've been attacked on the left in Britain for example um and by people who to try to make out that it might it must not be allowed to be true that certain scientific Things Are that because it would be so nasty if it were I prefer to say maybe they are nasty so that so then let's try to change things um by education but uh let me just add I I think there's also a kind of a Heritage of uh Marxist ideology here because Marx thought that um there is no such thing as human nature that if you transform the economic basis of society you will transform human nature so if we all own the means of production in common then instead of having the egoistic selfish individuals of capitalism we'll have the Cooperative uh socially benevolent individuals of the Communist Society um obviously that didn't happen when the Soviet Union was established um but um I think there is still a lingering of that tradition which is an anti- idea that there is a genetic basis to Human Nature let's have the next question please firstly just thank you for the common sense and reason that you have both brought to our world in our lives my question is quite simple if Charles Darwin was sitting on the stage with you right now what would you ask him and what would you say to him I did something a little bit like that happened to me a Japanese television Company um dressed up an actor as Charles died and um he he came to my door and knocked on the door and I opened the door to him and I I knew it was going to happen I mean what wasn't it wasn't impromptu and I so I sort of said you know I was delighted to meet you sir and and come upstairs and and we'll talk um there it was more a question of what of what he could learn about what had happened since since he was around and um so I was supposed to bring him up to date and I told him about Mendel I told him about DNA and and he played his part well um and was duly enlightened by what I had to say um um I um well I I would be awestruck obviously I I would be delighted to make his acquaintance he was um well Dan then it said if I had to give a prize for the for the greatest idea any anyone ever had I'd give it to Darwin ahead of everybody else um so uh yes I I would be awestruck I I I'm not sure what I would ask him um I I think I would just sort of vanish into quietness really okay all right when you have time maybe for two more questions you want to answer that one quickly sorry did anything come to your mind Peter did anything come to my mind about what I would ask Darwin yes um so as you know I'm more interested in ethics um I down said a lot of positive things about um animals um uh he wrote one of perhaps his one of his less well-known works is called the expression of the emotions in humans in in animals um and uh he says things like you know it is only a matter of degree it's not a it's not that there's a wholly different kind of humans and non-humans so I suppose I would invite him to look at what we're doing to animals today and again I would especially focus on on factory farming which because of its scale you know that's dwarfs all of the other things harms that we inflict on animals um something like 80 billion animals in raised and slaughtered in factory farms each year worldwide and I would ask him to comment on that and this would be you know I guess I would hope that he would say something that could be used to try to reduce this so this would be a rather more pragmatic question than uh than an inquiry but I would I would like to know what he would think of this world that we've created thank you next question hi Richard hi guys um this question is for my dad um yeah so my family and I are ex-muslim and just living in the age of social media it's common for people to share verses of the Quran and like the Holy Bible I guess however these are the posts that often get banned in accounts suspended so what would you like what what's your opinion on that and is there something that you didn't quite sure something about the account suspended oh so just when people Express themselves especially through verses on like the Quran it often leads to account suspensions and like if they criticize the Quran no just like General expression and just so you can't quote the Quran on Twitter you're saying without getting your your account is it a particular verses that they're being quite um yeah like certain verses and certain ideas that are expressed are often so they're verses that would be regarded as offensive to non-people who are not Pious Muslims is that I think yeah just in regards to like life and I know your opinion on like the Quran and stuff but I I've never heard of people having their accounts suspended for quoting the Quran I thought rather the reverse that you've got your account suspended if you criticize the Quran no it's that's not my information especially with like Islamic countries can you tell us what verses are you able to quote a verse so that we have I want to know it's from my dad oh in in Islamic countries yeah oh well that's different you you mean um in in Islamic countries your account gets suspended yes oh I believe that yes um okay uh yes um well uh I uh my response to that I I don't approve of um y'all can't be being suspended I believe in freedom of speech thank you thanks a lot okay um I think we have to make this to the last question thanks sorry about the other Super Why thanks so much for coming to Melbourne it's funny how you reconcile the philosophical and ethical understandable drive to be vegetarianism with the selfish Gene that's got us to this point eating meat [Music] is that a question yes how do I reconcile well the drive to be vegetarianism with the fact that we've arrived at this point over many years as essentially your omnivores but eating meat uh yes we have arrived as omnivores and there's no doubt about that that we are we are biologically omnivores it doesn't mean we have to be omnivores we can have ethical reasons for uh being vegetarian um and um so we might have to take special dietary steps I don't know whether Peter takes extra vitamin pills or anything like that I take B12 that's the only supplement that I take um so so but we are we're omnivores we're not if if we were if we were intelligent Lions then I think it would be probably impossible um and um uh it wouldn't the the the the ethical considerations would be overruled by dietary ones but but we're omnivores and so we can we can cope with it but I I touched back a little bit if you don't mind about the Assumption there that because we've evolved in this way therefore in some way it's it's all right to continue to do it um and I think that's not true because we've also evolved through a lot of violence and conflict um and uh you know those humans are around today probably our ancestors got rid of some other people um certainly you know we're here in Australia we know that if we're if we're not of indigenous descent then we know that our ancestors um or or well not all of us depends when our ancestors came I suppose but that a lot of them did push indigenous people off the lands but that's no justification for continuing to do so or saying therefore because we got here by that reason that way it's okay to keep doing it we're involved to walk around naked yeah good I think we have to bring this to an end um yeah uh thanks very much Richard um but before we before uh I do thank this and and uh ended so let me say uh it's been a great pleasure having you here and and talking to you and having this conversation I've greatly enjoyed that um some of you have bought VIP tickets I want to remind you that we will you get a chance to mingle or have books signed or something like that um uh after the event closes so you will be shown where to go um and for the rest of you thanks a lot for coming making this event uh such a successful one thanks for all of those who got to ask questions apologies for those who didn't and have a good rest of the evening thank you thank you if you enjoyed this episode you can show some support by subscribing to the podcast sharing it with your friends and leaving a review foreign [Music]

Channel: The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins

Views: 70,170

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Id: VTLMEIBUic8

Length: 91min 2sec (5462 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 26 2023