An Evening with Richard Dawkins – Featuring Sam Harris – Night 2

and now i'd like to introduce to you richard dawkins and sam harris [Applause] thank you i must say i'd also like to see an openly female president [Applause] please forgive me if i croak i just had a minor stroke basal ganglion on the right makes me walk as if i'm tight so if my voice descends to squawking sam will have to do the talking well um thank you all for coming this is what a sold-out house looks like when the cubs are in the seventh game of the world series um so um there's a place in hell for those people who bought tickets and didn't use them um needless to say it's an honor to be here and a real honor to be doing this with richard and i i get to do this twice in one week this is the second night i think you know and richard and i were worried about this we're worried about this event because we thought we would have a great conversation last night and then we didn't want to spend an hour in front of you here trying to recapitulate that conversation so as a way of avoiding that fate i went out to all of you i think online asking for questions and i got thousands of questions and i've picked many so the questions we'll track through tonight are different from the ones we did last night and this is all being videotaped and you will um you can see what you missed last night once that video is available um but i wasn't actually planning to ask this but i wanted to talk about your stroke because we haven't spoken about this and i'm going to guess that the sock choice is not evidence of your stroke well i was explaining last night that at the recent skeptics conference in in las vegas we had a workshop on cold reading which you know that system where whereby you you pretend to thought read and all you're doing really sizing the other person up and um my partner was a young woman who said i seem to see the something wrong with your eyes maybe colorblind she was looking at my my i i i am trying to make a point i'm trying to spread the meme of odd socks now this is this is not for the reason given in stephen potter's lifemanship under under womanship he recommends the odd socks ploy as a way of arousing the maternal instincts and then there's a footnote that says buy our patent odd socks brand but my point is different from that it is that um we should not be compelled to buy socks in pairs because unlike shoes which have genuine chirality you can't switch a left shoe and a right shoe socks do not have this property and therefore it's it's ridiculous having to buy socks in pairs if you if you lose one sock you have to throw the other one away so i want to make the point in as vivid of fashion as possible and encourage everybody to wear odd socks so uh tell us about the the experience of of having a stroke okay well it was a bit scary i i just suddenly became aware that i that my left hand wasn't working i couldn't pick things up or if i managed to pick something up i couldn't let go of it again which is sort of kind of scary and i was sort of staggering about and not able to stand up straight i couldn't draw buttons i think i'm pretty much recovered now i can both do up and undo buttons this was in february yes um the only thing is i can't sing uh i never could sing very well but i but i could at least i could at least sing in tune and now i can't um and my voice does tend to croak so hence my introductory apology what was there any immediate emotional or cognitive or perceptual component to it or was it just a motor thing that you know no it was just it was just motor i mean i was obviously scared it it it's in the basal ganglia as i said which which doesn't affect cognitive function so so um i i hope that will become evident tonight well we will see if you if you uh come out as a mormon at any point in the next hour and he would take more than a stroke to do that to me our first question that one of you may have asked if you had a time machine and could travel 500 years into the future what do you think you would find biologically assuming our direct descendants still exist and haven't uploaded themselves into the matrix will we be recognizably human 500 years is too short a time to expect any genetic evolutionary change but what about with our own metal and gene the genetic engineering that we're that's purely going to do yes i mean i suppose that that is a possibility if if by then we've colonized mars such that there's a barrier to gene flow between the parent planet earth and and the colony on mars then then it's possible that that the the mars colony might have diverged um but 500 years is a short time but how much of an appetite do you think we will have given what we currently are to change ourselves given the ability to do so in radical ways well we've had the ability to change cows and horses and pigs and cabbages and dogs and roses for hundreds thousands of years and although we've changed all those species almost beyond recognition when you think that a pekingese or a poodle or a pug or a bulldog is a wolf he still thinks it's a wolf the world's worst wolf uh and and yet we haven't done that to humans so it looks as though we we don't seem to have had much of an appetite to do that with respect to the selection part of the darwinian equation we're now just beginning to have the possibility of doing it to the mutation part of the darwinian equation namely genetic engineering but it's not obvious why if we didn't have the motivation to selectively breed humans why we should have the motivation to selectively mutate humans okay kind of a related point you're obviously very famous for having introduced this concept of a meme how seriously should we take the analogy to a gene with a meme it it was intended as an analogy to a gene um and um the the the idea is that that anywhere in the universe where self-replicating coded information arises that could be fair game for darwinian evolution for darwinian selection and i wanted to end the selfish gene by making that point because the whole of the rest of the book had been extolling the gene as the unit of selection so i wanted to make the point it doesn't have to be dna it could be anything which is self-replicating well um and it one could speculate about life on other planets being mediated by a replicator other than dna but then i thought or a computer virus would have done the job as well but i didn't know about them in 1976 um so i thought well um what about cultural inheritance anything where we have imitation is potentially analogous to genetic replication so something like a craze at a school something like craze for a particular kind of toy i introduced to my boarding school a craze for origami paper folding to make a chinese junk and it spread like exactly like a measles epidemic through the school and then died away like a measles epidemic interestingly i had learned to do this from my father and he had learned it from an almost identical epidemic at the same school 26 years earlier so the epidemiology of mean spread is very similar to gene spread um but it's only interesting from a darwinian point of view if the memes that spread are the ones that are good at spreading if there is some kind of selective effect and it's plausible that it should be um fashion spread because people find them cool or some something like a reverse baseball cap which by the way lowers the iq by a full 10 points that's that's probably the first remark that he's going to get in trouble for i'm counting um but um i i think you can probably treat uh religious memes in the same way i mean it's a religious ideas spread like a virus um so i call them virus of the mind so they either pass down the generations like uh like dna does and of course obviously religions passed down generations but they also spread sideways in epidemics when you've got a particularly charismatic vector of the virus like billy graham or one of those types so i think it's a genuinely interesting question whether the really successful religions like roman catholicism and islam spread because the memes have high spreadability in their own right like genes in darwinism or whether they're spread by machiavellian priests who get together and work out what what's the best marketing strategy to spread them and i'm inclined to think that the pure memetic spread is plausible and i'm interested in that i haven't really run very much with the meme idea the people who have are dan dennett the philosopher who's talks in a very interesting way about memes in most of his recent books and um susan blackmore is another one who wrote a book called the mean machine they're about actually they're about 20 books now with the with the word mean in the title which emphasized various uh aspects of it the fact that memes don't change truly randomly does that run rough shot over there i don't think that really matters um genes mutate randomly in the sense that they're not mutation is not directed towards improvement the only improvement comes from from selection but um mutation nevertheless is induced by things like cosmic rays radioactivity various mutagenic chemicals um the fact that memes are introduced by human creativity doesn't detract from the idea that some memes spread better than others for selective for selective reasons what do you think your most important contribution to science or culture at large has been or will be i suppose the extended phenotype um which is the title of my second book it's the only book that i wrote with a professional audience in mind um i i could expound it but but this is supposed to be a conversation not a monologue so so i um well i can i mean the questions for both of us so i can i can answer it you cannot say well okay you do your answer first then um well i i think i can tell you what i hope it will be i i what i i don't tend to think in these terms this globally but i think what i'm doing in most of the time and have done in most of my books is attempt to argue for the unity of knowledge and and to resist this this balkanization of our epistemology by essentially what i view as as the dictates of university architecture you know the fact that there's the biology department over here where you study biology and then there's the psychology department over there that seems to articulate two separate spheres of inquiry that you know at the in the centers they do have different methods but there really are no boundaries between those disciplines and i see that as true for not just for kind of canonical scientific disciplines but just fact-based thinking about the nature of reality across the board and and also the the distinction that people make between third-person facts classically physical facts and first-person subjective facts and some some people make that think that distinction is so hard and fast that they imagine there are no subjective facts that that i think is a boundary that i am consciously trying to erode and i think i think questions about the moral truth and the and the truth of possible human experience or the experience of conscious systems those those are questions that are every bit as grounded in reality as any questions we ask in physics or chemistry or so introspect introspection is a way of getting scientific data yeah i mean that's obviously there are you have to issue certain caveats there i mean there are there are ways in which introspection is a dead end i mean for instance i can't tell even with my best efforts i cannot tell that i have a brain right so that's that's a pretty big blind spot um but there are many things you can that you can introspect about which give you scientifically valid data and in fact you only i mean if you're if you're studying the mind if you're studying what it's like to be a person at some point you are you are you're correlating third person quote objective methods with first person report you know somebody says you know i ask you what it's like to have a stroke or your neurologist does and um he needs to know what your experience is i mean it's it's not i mean with a stroke it's it's the the final analysis seems to be looking at your brain at the you know actually what has been physically affected but the cash value of those physical effects is always what is showing up in your experience and what's showing up in your function so if you if if some canonical language area say was affected but you spoke fine and and appreciated understood language fine and and there was no discernible change in your in your language use well then that would be the definition of those being non-linguist linguistic areas of the brain being ineffective affected no matter how close they are to you know the standard you know average atlas of language use so we do always link up with a subjective report too and and and first-person performance and so um yeah i mean in terms of the contribution i want to make i want to argue that there's a larger set of truth claims we want to make when we're reasoning about reality and those include things that we will never know i mean they include abstract things like mathematics you know which the physical connections are the physical foundation of which is kind of hard to specify um and they include the example i always use uh is you know a question like what was jfk thinking the moment before he got shot well well we know we'll never know unless there's data we will never get but there's an infinite number of things we know he wasn't thinking right so that it would be wrong to say he was thinking i wonder what sam harris and richard dawkins think about what i'm thinking right now before i get shot and so that's there's an infinite number of things we could we could assert about the character of his subjectivity there which we know are wrong you know so and we know that as as fully as we know anything in in science um so uh and there are things that get really like you know like the the mystery or pseudo-mystery of how to integrate free will our experience of free will with our scientific world view i think can be easily resolved if you can introspect with sufficient perspicacity and notice that you don't even have evidence for free will in your first person experience i think that that's those are subjective data that are available so there are ways to get access to interesting things through introspection but they don't actually include the existence of your brain very hard to communicate to other people yeah yeah that's that is a but i mean that that's true of many things that we have we don't begin to doubt so you know let me just imagine what it would be like if only one percent of the population had vivid dreams at night so most of us just sleep like animals there's nothing that it's like to be us for eight hours a night but then some percentage of the population talk about traveling and meeting people and having all of these illogical encounters that would be dreams would be much stranger and many people would doubt their existence but they would exist just as much as they would doubt the sanity of people who had them probably as well yeah yeah yeah but did you answer did you fully answer your question with the do you want do you want to say more about the extended phenotype oh well i'll try it um uh i mean what what is a peanut tell people what a phenotype is the is the the external natural external the manifestation of of genetic effects and from a darwinian point of view the phenotypic effects by which a gene is selected so there will be genes that affect um wing size eye color hair color uh um intelligence these are all phenotypic effects conventionally phenotypic effects are confined to the body in which the gene sits so genes exert their phenotypic effects by influencing embryonic prose embryological processes and so the shape of the body the colour of the body the behavior of the body are all influenced by the genes inside the body that's conventional phenotype extended phenotype is phenotypic effects of genes which which are outside the body in which the gene sits and the easiest examples to think of are artifacts things like beaver dams birds nests these are quite clearly phenotypes they quite clearly influence the survival of the genes that make them so a bird's nest is made by genes in the same limited sense not so limited sense as the bird's tail and the bird's eyes and the bird's wings and the nest contributes to the survival of the genes which is what matters in the selfish gene view of life just as surely as the wings and the tail of the bird contribute to the survival of the genes that made them so although the nest is not a part of the bird's body it is a part of the phenotype by which the genes lever themselves into the next generation well if you buy that and i think you have to um then effects that um parasites have on host there are numerous examples fascinating rather lurid examples of parasites which affect the behavior or the morphology of their of the host in such a way as to improve the survival of the parasite well that means that parasites genes are influencing host behavior and host morphology in the same kind of way as any gene influences phenotype so when a when a and when an animal is induced by well there's a thing called a brain worm for example which is which is a worm that gets into um into a fluke or a snail where there are things like like that and causes the the the intermediate hose the snail or the fluke let's stick to snail causes a snail to be eaten by a sheep so sorry the the brain worm is a fluke and it gets into the into the snail and causes the snail to be more likely to be eaten by a sheep and it does so by moving into the eyes of the of this snail and making the the eyes pulsate in a sort of rather frightening way and calling the attention of a of an animal like a sheep or a cow to eating the snail which means that the parasite the fluke then gets into the next part of its life cycle so the parrot so the fluke genes are influencing the behavior of the snail and the the eyes of the of the snail this the change in the snail is part of the phenotype of fluke genes extended phenotype and if you buy that which is a sort of further step then something like this bird's song it's a male bird song which say influences female birds actually it physically causes the ovaries of the female to swell this this does happen the swelling of the ovaries of a female bird is extended phenotype of genes in the male which make the male sing the song which has this effect so the extended phenotype then becomes a way of looking at the whole of animal communication where one animal influences the behavior of another i have not done justice to the extended phenotype read it so what are the prospects that religion or something like it is part of our extended phenotype yes i i don't think i want to say that i imagine you wouldn't well in order to qualify as extended phenotype it would be necessary that um jeans um well you say you took two two preachers um one of whom was a very good preacher who recruited lots and lots of people into his church another of whom wasn't that could be extended phenotype but only if there was a genetic difference between these two preachers which caused one of them to be a good um an effective recruiter the other one not that that would be but i don't think that's very likely to be true well wait wait a minute there's just to quite literally play devil's advocate here um if there's a gene for religious enthusiasm or or um a set of genes for susceptibility to that range of experience and a uh a fundamental lack of intellectual honesty or lack of concern that whether you're what you're saying is true so a a increased capacity for self-deception and therefore deception of others say i mean that that seems to me yeah plausible i think so that's a very effective preacher who's who's filled with the the charisma of being absolutely sure about what he's saying and energized by you know his passion for the whole project that's true and i i think it probably is true that there are there are genetic when you say a gene for something all you ever mean is is a genetic difference that causes a phenotypic difference so um the best way to show that would be twin studies if you can show that with that identical twigs monozygotic twins if one of them is is a religious maniac the other one probably will be as well if if that if if that's true and if that's not so true of fraternal twins dizygotic twins then then you've shown that there is a genetic effect on on religiosity and that's probably true and i think that's certainly true to be extended phenotype i think you've got to say that genes engineer their own survival and passing on into the next generation by making their victims religious and i suppose well maybe they may ask maybe that works actually so quickly a life's work is undone yes i mean i i suppose let's not go there what do you think are the most misunderstood topics in science by otherwise smart and educated people or what what's one that you think is is often misunderstood that oh evolution surely is is especially in this in this country is is but what what do you think i mean even many people in this room who obviously are well educated and interested in the topic to even be here what do you think many people here may be confused about or be wrong about and not know it that that's of consequence in science well um i mean that certainly there are no creationists in this audience um you were screened at the door right with that um i suppose there may be people i mean i would say it was a misconception to um to believe that the majority of evolutionary change as a as we observe it is non-selective and there there are people who believe that natural selection is relatively trivial um compared to random random genetic effects now that that's a genuine scientific controversy and there may be people here who subscribe to that and it's true if you stick to molecular genetic changes but if you're talking about actual externally visible phenotypic changes then i don't think it is true and i think that that's a confusion which i would expect to find in this sophisticated audience so so just to traverse that one more time the the belief that much of what we notice about ourselves was not selected for but just kind of came along for the ride yes you think that's very likely untrue yes but but you have to be sophisticated about it because um you may be looking at the wrong thing we talked about this last night perhaps it doesn't matter doing it again um many people think that quite a lot of characteristics are trivial um sort of frivolous that i mentioned eyebrows last night as being something which um nobody could seriously think that eyebrows are doing anything useful how could eyebrows possibly be naturally selected for well i think that that's a mistake it's a very it's a very tempting mistake but um something that seems trivial is almost certainly not trivial because the genes that make it have so many opportunities to be selected there is represented in thousands of individuals and over lots of generations and this has been worked out mathematically as well um so that that is a very common misconception i think that that um very slight effects are too trivial for natural selection to care about um and i think that is wrong i think that president actually does care about even what looked to us like very tiny trivial effects to make a disconcertingly lateral move here how can we publicly challenge the more dangerous tenets of islam without further inspiring bigotry against muslims now you and i have both both unlike many scientists we have we've sounded off on this it's been for as long as i've been an atheist it's been deeply unfashionable amongst atheists uh even atheists who are who think it's a legitimate project to criticize religion it's been un unfashionable to criticize any one religion more than any other and i've i've noticed especially one anymore yeah yes um yeah you can go to town on on mormonism or scientology but um it's christianity actually i mean yeah well but it the the the default assumption is that if you're against religion or if you if you think that the the evidentiary claims upon all of these revealed upon which all these revealed religions are founded are are unjustifiable well then they all go out they're all on all fours together and you don't really need to weight your concern but it just has seemed obvious at least since september 11 2001 that one of these religions is producing more than its fair share of conflict and depression um so but what so the back to the question how do you given that you and i both think it's legitimate to focus on the most harmful instances of religion as we see it how do you avoid energizing those voices who are actually animated by bigotry and xenophobia and yes um well i think we both have this this problem um i suppose um when i listened to one of your podcasts about about um his islam and um arguing against the point of view which says that the the the terrorists which um which we all know know about in the middle east are not motivated by religion they're motivated by anything but religion there's a kind of desperate desire to blame anything but religion for what is what is going on this was the podcast where where that issue of isis's magazine dobby where they just spelled that they were as fed up with this as i was and they just wrote all of their reasons for killing infidels uh it was amazing it was i felt like i was in a lucid dream that it's true i do do listen to it what's it called i forgot what it's called but you'll find it it's it's something in the last 10 podcasts and i think what right right what what what jihadists really think um and it's it's it's why we hate you and why we fight you yeah and it's absolutely i mean sam could have written the script it's it's just completely um we hate you because you're not muslim it amounts to nothing more than that yeah and we and we fight you for the same reason but so but what do you do actually it's a i had a podcast that i just released today where i was interviewing our our mutual friend diane hercieli and i asked her a related question yeah thank you this is the the true feminist hero who was just declared a anti-muslim extremist by the southern poverty law center that's absolutely unbelievable uh but since i asked her and has been disinvited by by at least several campuses in this country including brandeis so i i asked her get more to the point of of conspiracy thinking on the right so so it's often it is simply a fact that islamists and jihadists are scheming to spread their views and you know both by the sword and otherwise throughout open societies and they're using the norms and institutions of our open societies against ourselves uh and you know in a very cynical and calculated way and it's not even a conspiracy as ion pointed out it's just there in the open this is an agenda that islamists have they're totally open about it totally honestly yeah but the the issue is there are you can take this one's one's concern about this in truly paranoid direction so i hear from people who think ayan is a stealth islamist or jihadist i hear from people who think that majid who i wrote islam in the future of tolerance with is a stealth islamist and jihadists and so there's no there's no obvious signage on the way to complete insanity that you know where you're told that you are now too fearful and too too concerned about things that actually are contiguous with real you know real reasons for concern so but i asked dion so how where's the boundary here what how do we differentiate a reasonable fear about genuinely scheming people and right-wing paranoia in this case and she just said facts just one word it's like you're either talking about facts or you're not and when you're talking about facts you you can't go wrong in this space and that's i thought that was a great answer i think one point to make is that the the main victims of these awful people are actually muslims themselves um but what about the attack from the left which in in liberal left circles in america and britain where islam gets a free pass on all sorts of terrible things like misogyny which which no liberal would actually sanction and yet if a muslim um behaves in horrifically misogynistic ways somehow that's ignored as though that somehow legitimate oh it's part of their culture so they're allowed to do that i must say i i despise that kind of thing well there was some i think it was an ant i think it was an anthropologist who's quote this i'm about to to butcher but it's a great point he said when when one person grabs a little girl and cuts off her clitoris with a septic blade he is a dangerous lunatic when a million people do this it's a culture and we need to respect it and that's that's the little crystal of of moral confusion that's just at the center of the the liberal worldview that that we need to fully i i dare to suggest that there's too much respect in the world well hold on to that is the concept of race biologically valid or is it merely a social construct and and and and what do you think about taboo topics taboo topics and science for instance racial differences in iq are these taboos justified are there things we shouldn't study well first i i i can't imagine any good reason for wanting to study differences in iq um but as for the purely scientific question of is race a valid biological thing or is it a social construct yes it is biologically valid it's a valid distinction there's a widespread belief that it's purely a social construct this has been abetted by the very distinguished geneticist richard lewentin who made the point that the great majority of well first of all made the point that the human species is astonishingly unvariable compared to many other species we are genetically a very uniform species despite what we look like and the great majority of variation can be found across races not sorry not not not between not between races but but um within within them um nevertheless um the geneticist equally distinguished geneticist awf edwards pointed out what he called leontyn's fallacy which is that although there may be relatively little variation between between geographical peoples nevertheless it is correlated so um a simple operational distinction if you were to take um people from uganda um alaska say you know inuit um from the congo forest uh from india from china and um ask anybody in the world to guess where they came from given a list of countries where they might have come from everybody's going to get it right you can tell where somebody comes from if they're if they their ancestors have lived in a certain area for a long time um it's very easy to tell it's not it's not difficult it's it's dead simple that there really are geographical differences between between peoples what is deeply wicked is to base any kind of discrimination on those things you should never ever discriminate against somebody because of their skin color or anything else that that's wicked but to deny that there are differences seems to me to be perverse well let's take that can you can retract those applause after i say what i'm about to say um so but but the the inescapable conclusion of just the the implication of of natural selection here is that if you have isolated populations populations that are sufficiently isolated so as to give rise to phenotypes that differ sufficiently so that we notice we're in the presence of what we're now calling two different races it would be an absolute miracle if everything about us that we care about that is selected for were i was identically tuned across those different races i mean intelligence you know good care good psychological characteristics generosity conscientiousness aggression so undoubtedly we will find differences that we can generalize about if we look for them and um it's the fear of what that means the implications of that that i think yes you can you can probably find them but but what would be what would be wicked would be to say i will not give this person a job because he belongs to this category of people and there's some kind of statistical tendency for that for that category per person to be different from that from that category treat them as individuals treat them look at the qualifications of this individual and forget about the group race whatever you want to call it uh to which he belongs well that's where lewinton's point about variance is relevant because given that given that the variance there's enough variance within a population for all these characteristics that it would be irrational to think you know a lot about a person's whatever mathematical ability based on their race even if there were a population difference between two populations totally right yes but can you see so i i recently did a podcast where this topic came up and i got a lot of pushback from my position which is very much like yours where i just i don't see the point of doing this research what good is going to come of scaling intelligence in many different populations but i guess there's no guarantee that that there isn't something worth studying there that would be just just understanding human intelligence in general and the genes that maximize it we may just stumble into these differences and and we just wind up categorizing them but despite ourselves yes i i see no objection to studying whether there are genetic differences across the whole human population in intelligence or musical ability or mathematical ability or anything else i what i would object to i think is is categorizing somebody's belonging to this race or that race and therefore assuming that he is always not good at mathematics or more yeah well that means that final assumption obviously you would never want to make it just would make no sense to make it but yeah it is i mean this kind of science if we ever had these results in hand would lend itself so clearly to invidious comparisons between people that would be a political liability but that's again that's that's on the assumption that we know we're going to going to find negative comparisons uh in a way that would be disadvantageous to certain minority groups we want to protect but maybe in many cases it may be the other way around you know it may be that that i mean first there was this great result i think it still has stood up that that you know white europeans are the only ones walking around who are part neanderthal right aren't we well not not whiter i mean non-african non-africans okay so but it's also it's also asian yes okay so yeah so so the people africans are the only true home 100 homo sapiens no it could be europeans that that could be right yes i'm proud to have in the end um but i i don't see i don't see um anything wrong with say doing twin studies on on intelligence i don't see anything wrong with with saying let's look and see if there's a genetic component to intelligence there's almost got to be a genetic component to intelligence because if you think that intelligence has evolved by natural selection over the past couple of million years and you know we've got presumably we're more more intelligent than than lucy was um that must have come about through natural selection and there must therefore have been genetic differences in intelligence to have been naturally selected it seems to me that if you're going to go to the mat for eyebrows you can't really draw the line at intelligence exactly so the sort of almost religious um aversion to talking about genetic differences in inter intelligence is irrational and i suppose it does come from the fear that it might be applied to groups of people rather than to individuals yeah yeah well i think it is i think those taboos make some sense i i just wouldn't want to i mean we just we have to be able to talk honestly about the the intellectual real estate but but given a functionally infinite number of things to study that are interesting i i would question a real zeal for studying racial differences along these lines i mean just and and it's easy to see why one would question that and yet there are i think totally honest and ethical people who are still doing that work on in some sense so i i i if i were on the national science foundation grant giving committee i i wouldn't give a grant to study that because i don't see why it's interesting okay yeah i bet i i guess my concern is that it seems to pre-judge in advance that nothing of general utility would come out of it um so it's and i i think okay we're bored i don't know i don't know where we wound up on that but we're both in trouble with somebody what are your thoughts about how wealth will be distributed as our society grows more and more automated and human labor becomes less and less valuable depending on how we deal with this issue what kind of utopian or dystopian scenarios do you envision in the future that's a question for you really isn't it okay well i have an opinion on it well it's interesting to to meet economists who or people who think they're economists who think there is some law of economics that rules this out as a possibility what was that i'm sorry i'm hearing voices uh well somebody said something is there is there an issue we need to be aware of or just okay um so many people who who have looked at the history of economics think that there's some rule here that where technology never fatally cancels any area of human labor or human labor in principle people just move on to the next jobs that have been opened up by these breakthroughs so it used to be that some significant percentage of americans tilled the land but once we got machines to do that that has now diminished to a tiny percentage of the population but those people just moved on to do other presumably more gratifying work and there's this idea that that's going to happen just going to continue indefinitely but when you when you extrapolate from the kinds of gains we're now making with intelligent machines and automation there's just it seems obvious to me and i really have not heard a good argument against this that at some point we will be building machines that are capable not only of of manual work but intellectual work and so capable of it that there is never a space any longer for a person to occupy to do that work so self-driving cars is a is a great example is something like nine percent of men in this country drive for a living it's i mean that's it's i think it's the actual most common form of employment for men or it might just be white men but it's once we have self-driving cars and just imagine this and we bring down the the fatality rate from 35 000 people a year to you know 500 say so that it just becomes a a absolutely stark and undeniable choice between the slaughter of tens of thousands of people or not due to ape-driven cars we will you know we will not allow the apes to drive cars and and it seems to me that in the limit almost everything is like that and so then then what you're left with is this this possible utopia really where we have just canceled the need for human drudgery and we've opened a space where everyone should be free to do what they find most gratifying and it's you can be as creative as you want you can you can be as lazy as you want you can have as much fun as you want and but the thing you have to break in order to make that possible is this ethical connection or pseudo-ethical connection that many people feel in their bones especially in america between working and having a right to exist right so it's like you have to you have to have the political and and ethical wherewithal to spread this wealth you can't have it and so what i worry about is i think we would ultimately get there if we don't annihilate ourselves with ai in the meantime but i think that there's there'll be this transitional if you imagine the perfect development of of technology there still will be this this transitional kind of bottleneck where we won't have the the ethical and economic and political pieces in place and you'll get some ghastly level of wealth inequality that that is just of a sort we can't really imagine uh certainly in the developed world and um those those spasms you know politically could be very difficult to to absorb so yeah that's fascinating i hadn't thought about that and again it extends not just to menial or or physical work i mean it's you know you we the best biologist at some point will be a computer it's not it's it's nowhere written that that it's only chess that gets conquered by the machine this is a very common question it's a it's a question for which i'm sure we don't have a totally satisfying answer but this is if anything this this is the the center of the bull's eye with respect to a the the life horizon of atheism and the the future of religion how do atheists find meaning in life can there be a sense of the sacred in a truly rational context how do how does anything matter if there's no heaven to go to that and that final that final line is so the first the first two sentences seem really kind of level-headed but this to to the religious mind this final question is just as pressing uh as the first two and i i that this is where my my intuitions sort of fail i i've never understood this idea that without eternity nothing matters it seems to me you could all you could just as well run it the other way if in in light of eternity certainly whatever happens here doesn't matter i mean we have an eternity to make up for this catastrophe right so if anything life becomes each moment of life becomes more precious given the fact that there's no promise of eternity the trouble of being on stage with sam is i agree with everything he says and so um uh i i mean i completely agree with that the the idea that anybody could think that there is no point in life if there's no eternity to go to what a pathetically inadequate person that must be you who you you have to make your own meaning in life and and we we do that i mean we we we love each other we we listen to music or write music we we do science we are spellbound by the beauty of nature by the beauty of the universe by the beauty of the grand canyon where i've just just been um this gives you meaning in life meaning in life the next book you want to write the next baseball match you want to win that way you climbed um baseball match just just that was that now apologies for this uh comparison but that that was the moment that that should have ended donald trump's career with the at least with the christians when when he stood up and pretended to be this this devout christian and said my favorite book of the bible corinthians 2 but nothing was riding on that happily and your reputation is intact but i mean so don't you worry though the the the juicy things in life that religious people are afraid to lose are if not hard to capture by a piecemeal secularism they're not captured in a way where we can just point them to the replacements so this this community that people have by virtue of gathering every sunday to worship the the off-the-shelf rituals when it comes time to get married or or bury a loved one they have language that is ready made to do this uh yeah i mean it doesn't strike you as a problem that that that accounts for why it's it's we haven't just changed people's minds i don't think it occurs to you really does it i mean no i mean it occurs to me in in the sense that it's religious people continually advertise the inadequacy of of a worldview that doesn't have these things but actually i've experienced the problem i mean if i imagine someone in my life dying suddenly i would have more work to do to figure out how to to honor that occasion well we do that don't we i mean i i i've organized several funerals you you may have done um i haven't but but still you're in there you're kind of you're reinventing civilization for yourself but if you think about funerals you've been to um i've been to many church funerals where there is also a eulogy or two eulogies where there is perhaps music played by a string quartet as i had for my father's funeral um and the bits that you feel moved by the bits that you feel are worthy of the memory of the dead person they're never the prayers they're never the bits that the the vicar in tones who just the standard formula the sort of ritualistic formula that he cuts out for everybody that when somebody stands up who really knew the person and reminisces about the person and moves you perhaps to tears thinking about the person the music the favorite music of the dead of the dead person the poetry the dead person loved this is what's moving about funerals and i've i've organized funerals my father for the great evolutionary biologist w d hamilton i organized his funeral in new college oxford chapel and i had about four different people talking about his achievements i found that that there had been an anthem composed for darwin's funeral in westminster abbey especially for the occasion and i think it's never been played since but i i went to the british museum library dug out the manuscript copy of this of this anthem gave it to the choir master of new college oxford and he rehearsed the choir they sang this uh anthem that had never been sung since darwin's funeral for possibly darwin's greatest 20th century successor so i'm i'm not really very impressed by people who say that religion gives you rituals that you can't replace you can replace them and you can replace the best parts of them and ignore the worst parts of them do you feel though that there's a need to systematize that so that it's not upon everyone's shoulders to do this for themselves well i think it's it's almost an obligation to to try to do something for a loved one who dies or for a marriage or or for um you could you could imagine other things i mean a coming-of-age ceremony you could yeah you could you could imagine um by the way for my funeral yes i want to all together premature yes i hope so i want i want to have um verdi's um elephant march do you know what you know the trumpet it's triumphal if i hadn't had my stroke i'd sing it to you okay um all right wait a minute i may veto that maybe i'll find one more question here um i guess we haven't really touched on this please talk about the primacy of free speech for maintaining the standards of education and the openness of a society why is why in a contest between freedom of speech and religious sensitivity must free speech win it's amazing that this is not this really is not obvious to most people i mean it's amazing to hear freedom of religion and freedom of speech talked about it in this society as though there had to be a balance struck between them as though there were some use of speech that was itself an infringement upon someone else's freedom to practice their religion which is obviously not never the case there's absolutely nothing i could say about religion right now that is so disparaging of the project that that would cancel someone else's ability to practice their religion right so it's just there is no trade-off between free speech i totally agree and and i'm distressed at the at the disparagement of free speech which is which is creeping into universities both in britain and america i was in berkeley in the 1960s berkeley the home of the free speech movement and it's immensely distressing to me that berkeley today has disinvited people because because because of the fear that a speaker might hurt the feelings of some uh religious people on the campus what a betrayal of everything that a religion should stand for the people at berkeley and in london london school of economics and uh various other places like i think leicester you know birmingham university should hang their heads in shame for destroying the the fundamental principle of what a university should stand for university should stand for not just free speech freedom of thought ability to be challenged the ability to uh to be exposed to views that you find distasteful so you can evaluate them not be protected from them play pen full of play-doh kittens and puppies safe spaces well on that note we are open to your questions i think there are microphones coming to you uh this question is directed to both mr dawkins and mr harris um there's been a question rolling around in my mind about the authenticity of what counts as a follower of a specific umbrella religion say christianity islam or judaism i've been in some discussions with some people as to the subject of islamism for instance um using christianity as an example asking an individual is a catholic a christian is a lutheran a christian well what constitutes um a real muslim a um someone who's more liberal someone who's an islamist what's a real jew a um or someone who falls before in judaism is forced to the more of the orthodox interpretation of the religion what's your view on how an individual is a quote-unquote an authentic follower of a religion given that religions have crossed a vast amount of time and space from their origin from the point of origins to have evolved to include liberalistic interpretations and the what we would consider more fundamentalist yeah i mean this is one reason why i'm a fan of zeroing in on specific beliefs and their consequences so it's not trying to find the quote authentic muslim or authentic christian is a i don't think it's a project anyone needs to ever be engaged in you just need to know what someone believes on points that really matter so how do you think gays should be treated you know how do you think women should be treated what do you think happens after you die do you think there's a paradise that martyrs go to i mean these are all these are all crucial questions which you know any adherent of of any one of those faiths will use in their own mind as a litmus test to judge whether or not someone is devout enough or following or interpreting the scripture the way they're doing it but i don't think we ever really need to know i mean there's just there's just radical diversity and there's a range of commitments that we never really have to draw the we never have to bound in any any no i i agree with that except that um politicians may this arises in britain particularly where actually in the um every 10 years we have a census and people are invited to tick a box as to which which religion they belong to and um a quite a large number of people in the 2001 census ticked the christian box it dropped from 72 percent to about 54 in the 2011 census but you you might say well who cares whether they're really christian who cares if it's up to them whether they they really believe jesus was the son of god or jesus your lord and savior or burden of a virgin things but it does matter when politicians who after all commission the census make use of the figure 72 christian say right britain is a christian country therefore we need to pass legislation in accordance with christian beliefs and say about abortion or something of that sort and this actually did happen in britain so when my british foundation the british branch of the richard dawkins foundation for reason and science um we we actually commissioned a a poll in britain on the day on in the week after the 2011 census to ask people who took the christian box what do you really believe because we suspected that although they took the christian box they didn't really believe in many of the tenets by the way it's tenets not ten ants as with seven descendants um uh of of of of christianity um and the reason we thought it mattered was precisely that politicians had used the figure 72 percent christian in the 2001 census um to enact legislation in accordance with what they thought were the beliefs of the british people so i do think that to some extent it does does matter that's why though pew the pauline organization often does a religious religion survey and they ask specific questions they don't ask as many as i would want them to ask but they ask questions that tease out the gradations of belief you know how old do you think the universe is do you yes and by the way the the result of our of our poll was that the people who took the christian box very very few of them actually held the sorts of beliefs you might think were christian beliefs like jesus is my lord and savior virgin birth the bible is true that that kind of thing okay upper deck in the middle hi this question is for sam i'm curious what are your views on medical marijuana for the use of children and elderly as far as parkinson's and epilepsy are involved well i hadn't heard of its utility there but if it's useful i have no problem with it i mean i i think it's it's just you know it's it's a drug that it has a range of of effects and and some of them are good and so if you know it's i don't see it that the question seems to presuppose a a reason to stigmatize marijuana over any other you know pharmaceutical someone might be given i don't really see that um hi i'm curious when you were talking about measuring or studying intelligence across different races um what specifically because you mentioned the iq what specifically would be the measurement of intelligence you know considering that people are interested in different types of intelligence like emotional intelligence and like how would you determine what is the proper way what's the standard for the you know the with the universal standard for intelligence i guess is that the iq test or um we specifically did not wish to measure intelligence across different races although he was a little more emphatic than i was on that point however um but i i mean your question is a valid one with respect to measuring intelligence at all which which i would be in favor of there are lots of different ways of measuring intelligence as you say lots of different kinds of intelligence and iq tests themselves are very controversial and they measure different things but whatever you measure you can measure it and then you can look at genetic differences in it it doesn't matter that you met you may find different genetic effects in this kind of intelligence or that kind of intelligence and um when when i said that uh human intelligence must have increased during the last two million years i wasn't bothering to differentiate whether um that that was the this test of iq or that test of iq it doesn't matter i mean any of them you could you could once you've got something you can measure then you can look at genetic differences in that something but i think one aspect of that question is whether iq is valid and i think the the research suggests that there is such a thing as general intelligence and that iq is is a pretty good measure of it it's a pretty generalizable result and it's correlated with the things you would think general intelligence would be correlated with but you know i'm also a fan of the multiple intelligence description of the human mind iq obviously doesn't measure everything about us that we care about that produces creativity and and um certain forms of genius and so i it's not the whole measure but it is something and you'll meet many people it's certainly politically correct to say that iq is a fiction or that the tests are invalid or that they're culturally biased and my understanding of the research at this point is that that's not true upward so many people throughout the ages picture a man he lives his life he makes his meaning based on the religion he's been presented from a young person and he finds peace in that and a lot of the dogmas and beliefs of the religion he's presented he may not really subscribe to he doesn't read all the texts and think about it that much but he finds peace in it so my question for you is what's the harm i know beliefs have impact and beliefs have consequences so my question for you is what's the harm of an individual or so many people throughout the ages who live their lives finding peace having a religion live and die and believe as they do okay yeah all right [Applause] well i actually there is something that will be familiar to many of you that i think is worth saying at this point which is the problem with dogmatism is that you you actually can never be sure what the harms will be and they can be just astonishingly bad all of a sudden and because the dogmatism the state of being dogmatic the state of believing things strongly despite an absence of evidence or even in the face of counter evidence that is the state of having no error correcting mechanisms in your worldview i mean you're simply not available to reality so you are just going to continually bump into hard objects wherever you go and so you take and my favorite example of this i i just i should i've said this several times but it's just worth pondering that you can have a dogma which on its face is the most benign and life-affirming dogma there is so the dogma that life starts at the moment of conception and all human life is sacred right all of it is sacred we just cannot we just have to privilege the just the human being from the moment of conception uh as being a an entity that is that has to be treated as an end in itself as an and never as a means now what harm is going to come from that that is the most life-affirming and most careful disposition you could possibly have but then we get something like embryonic stem cell research or then we have the the the the family planning needs of women and girls who get raped right and then all of a sudden the people who are sure based on pure dogmatism that a that a soul that that if you could hold it in your hand would be invisible to you if you could hold a thousand in your hand they'd be invisible to you those souls in those fertilized ova are just as important as the souls in this room right that's a a dogma that that's responsible for an immense amount of harm and yet you wouldn't have foreseen it and so the problem is to have a way of thinking about the world that doesn't allow you to reliably navigate because you are not basing your your world view on evidence and argument that that's that's the problem and it's always a good way to tease people who think that uh the soul enters the body conception is just confront them with monozygotic twins which twin has the soul and which which twin of course perfectly right there all sorts of unforeseen evil consequences but i i have another answer to the to the this very very well thought out question which is that um i'm not sure that i really care whether it does harm or not i care about whether it's true and and even more strongly than that i care that children are brought up denied access to the very very beautiful truths which we are uncovering science in particular is uncovering over the centuries um we we live in a in a a wonderfully privileged century from this point of view we live at a time when not everything is known but an enormous amount is known and it's one of it's a great privilege of those who live who are born in this century to to be told what we do know about the world about the universe about life about how we come to be here and it always makes you weep to think of children who are being deprived of this by ignorant bigoted parents who are teaching them nonsense because it's i don't know because it's comforting or because it comes down through the family it's their tradition it's in the it's in the holy book i mean that what a tragedy for the children concerned to to to live their lives deprived of the wonder of knowledge [Applause] glad to be here tonight as a teacher i've been reading books on growth mindset versus fixed mindset by harvard psychologist carol dweck if you're familiar with her work i'd be interested but specifically i also want to ask about intelligence and how to what extent do you feel it is innate versus how much it can be changed and it's malleable with an individual and generally on that same theme how much to what extent is our dna our destiny what was that last sentence to what extent is our dna destiny if at all so specifically intelligence but what enters our dna what our destiny to what degree are you really bounded and determined you know you're in succeeding in life based on on just your genetics well that the short answer to this question is that virtually everything you care about seems to be half genetic i mean the the bound the boundary between nature and and nurture is is is just kind of a convenient and misleading fiction i mean everything that is a matter of nurture is affecting you by virtue of regulating the function of genes and i mean so you know if you're going to remember anything about what i say now it's because genes have been transcribing in your brain and and you've been laying down new uh connections and and changing receptor densities and i mean it's just there's a there's a physical mechanism and it's related to your genetics at every point and that is that is how your environment affects you so there is no clear boundary there but uh a 50 is is a ballpark figure for almost everything like intelligence or you know strong personality traits um that are obviously genetic which is to say that identical twins reared apart will be importantly similar you know correlated you know to the two and fifty percent uh in those respects and there's some disturbing research that suggests that the other fifty percent is really not a matter of what the parents do it's much more i mean the nurture is coming from friends it's coming from the culture it's coming from happenstance it's not uh the the similarity of let's say genetically unrelated people raised in the same home is very small and in some cases non-existent so that is very depressing for parents or liberating if you screwed up it is it is it is um you could you can measure heritability which is the contribution to variance of various factors genes and there is other other factors and and twin sided is a good way of doing it um comparing fraternal twins with with identical twins and for some characteristics it's it's more than 50 for other characteristics it's less than fifty percent it may sort of average fifty percent um so i think it's interesting work to do and and there are some fascinating twin studies that have been done often exploiting the uh the the rather rare cases where for reasons of rather unfortunate accident identical twins have been reared apart it does happen not very often but there are a few dozen cases which have been studied and in some cases identical twins read a part are uncannily similar um in for some characteristics in in other characteristics they're not and you can use fraternal twins both read together and read separately as controls so it's quite a neat sort of not exactly experimental design because it's not deliberately engineered but it's quite a neat design um for measuring heritability which is this defunct this quantity which is the proportion of of of variance which you can attribute to genetic variation upper deck to the right thank you mr dawkins and sam harris pleasure being here my question is for richard dawkins and uh i'm gonna try to format it in a way that you guys can understand it because it's kind of complicated so i always sit one of the thoughts that i always have when i sit down is i like oh i think about human species in the long term and one of the the flaws that i see is that is in the field of medicine that these pharmaceutical companies like to develop customers instead of cures and recently especially in technology and space travel we're talking about going to mars and colonizing another planet but i feel as though this has to be addressed first the question do you think the medicine industry will blossom into the type of industry that is actually trying to help the human species rather than create clientele thank you i i i mean i don't want to be cynical about this i i i'm aware that there are people who are very cynical about the pharmaceutical industry and i don't really think i know enough about it um i i admire the medical profession i like doctors i'm i'm glad to live in a society that has doctors and and hospitals and um i i suppose it probably is true that that you could probably accuse pharmaceutical companies of being manifested by commercial interests and not exclusively concerned for human welfare but but um i really don't know i know too little about it i feel like they they have been impressively hobbled by the now requirement that they put all the side effects in their television ads have you seen some of these ads who who is asking their doctors to prescribe these drugs where when the the litany of side effects are far worse than the disease these are terrifying ads with some smiling woman who's talking about anal leakage and it's a horror show we cannot end on anal leakage hi thanks a lot you guys i just have a quick question regarding your uh talk or conversation on terrorism do you think if there was economic equality and an equality of standard of living throughout the entire world terrorism would go down no no no um the the question is is there a correlation between economic inequality and terrorism and if economic inequality went down would terrorism go down well the only data that exists on this that i'm aware of show the opposite correlation in fact it's not the poorest of the poor who are terrorists or most supportive of terrorism and to speak specifically of the jihadist variety of terrorism and in fact when you see the biographies of the people who are most involved in these organizations you see engineers and you even see doctors and these are not um these are not peasants who you know graduate from being you know um the cleaners of latrines to the uh members of al qaeda or or isis and as you correct for literacy in the muslim world support for for suicidal terrorism and defense of the faith goes up so it's just not this this liberal dream and i'm sorry to use the word liberal in as a pejorative but it i mean this is a instance of the delusion that this liberal dream that if you could just spread more economic opportunity and more education around that would by definition nullify these the scariest variants of religion that's just there's no there's no sign of that being true and you can see you can there's just an endless number of examples where um it's not the case the the the issue we have to grapple with is that some ideas are so captivating that people even with people with a lot to live for who are psychologically sane who have lots of opportunity who may have already have families and even young children they think it is worth killing other people in defense of these ideas and and dying in the process um and it's uh it's just the the examples of this are endless and that's that's the fact that we need to to grapple with one of my favorite quotes from sam is these people really believe what they say they believe and how difficult it is for us who don't believe anything very much to to understand how powerful that can be ladies and gentlemen richard dawkins thank you

Channel: Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science

Views: 169,215

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Id: W_Ag-aNwySE

Length: 88min 55sec (5335 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021