An Evening with Richard Dawkins: In Conversation with Nick Rawlins (7 March 2023)

[Music] [Applause] good afternoon everyone thank you for being here on what's still probably a gorgeous day outside um some things are very very easy to do and introducing Richard Dawkins is one of them because you're all here because you know who he is or you've got friends who know who he is and they've told you so there's very little I have to say um honorary degrees Lots prizes many fellow of the Royal Society founding professor of the public understanding of Science in Oxford that's a very singular one um but also someone I've known for I'm guessing just over 50 years he and I moved into what we thought of as a kind of well I thought of as a kind of Space Age lab uh the psychology department and the zoology Department were co-host in a prized winning building second prize of the Year from the concrete Society I believe the first prize went to the new Runway at Heathrow but I'm not quite sure um psychologists and zoologists have real overlapping interests um Richard when I first knew him was working in the ex Animal Behavior group I was working in animal experimental psychology I messed around with them and he watched them to see what they would do when they were left to themselves I was never able to leave them to themselves uh but I suppose that the particular reason that you'll be here today is because of Richard's quite extraordinary series of books on science um he I think it would be fair to say founded the genre of Popular Science that we have today and what I think is truly remarkable about the way he did it and continues to do it is he makes it accessible without oversimplifying it beautiful Pro beautiful prose but truthful all the way down to the foundations that's an extraordinary achievement and I think without Richard having done that we wouldn't have had A Brief History of Time very probably and the world would have been an easier place um I asked Richard if he happened to know how many copies his first book The Selfish Gene that's old and he thought it was about 3 million in English um how many languages 30 plus I thought we would start by reading a brief piece not actually from the selfish Gene but from the blind watchmaker and Richard might tell you a little bit about why it's called that and what it's about but it illustrates to me exactly what the selfish Gene had told us so much maker is a natural selection because natural selection um is blind it doesn't have foresight it doesn't know where it's going the watchmaker comes from William Paley an 18th Century theologian who wrote a book on natural theology in which he imagined that you've stumbled across a watch and you looked at the watch and you realize it must have had a watchmaker and how much more he thought if you stumbled across a living thing an organ of a living thing and I for example must it have had a Divine designer so he popularized the watchmaker as a metaphor for God and I adopted the blind watchmaker to refer to Natural Selection I should apologize to begin with I I'm going to do so in verse uh please forgive me if I croak it's because I had a stroke basal ganglion on the right makes me walk as if I'm tight so if I sink to groans I'm pleading Lala will you do the reading I'm going to do a reading now from the blind watchmaker which I think summarizes the message of The Selfish Gene it is raining DNA outside on the bank of the Oxford Canal the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree and it is pumping Downy seeds into the air there is no consistent air movement and the seeds are drifting outwards in all directions from the tree up and down the canal as far as my binoculars can reach the water is white with floating cottony flecks and we can be sure that they have carpeted the ground to much the same radius in other directions too the cotton wool is mostly made of cellulose and it dwarfs the tiny capsule that contains the DNA the genetic information the DNA content must be a small proportion of the total so why did I say that it was raining DNA rather than cellulose the answer is that it is the DNA that matters the cellulose fluffle though more bulky is just a parachute to be discarded the whole performance cotton wool capkins tree and all is an aid of one thing and one thing only the spreading of DNA around the countryside not just any DNA but DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new generation of Downey seeds those fluffy specks are literally spreading instructions from making themselves they are there because their ancestors succeeded in doing the same it's reigning instructions out there it's raining programs it's raining tree growing fluff spreading algorithms that is not a metaphor it is the plain truth it couldn't be any planer if it were raining floppy disks floppy disk dates it a bit nowadays you'd have to say it was raining data from the Internet or something like that but that doesn't have the same ring to it that piece really does describe I think in beautiful terms what the selfish Gene itself the original book was telling us but I think my first question to Richard was when the selfish Gene came out it really appeared as as a surprise why why were people surprised by something whose logic is so clear right um well Darwin thought of the individual organism as the level at which natural selection acts he saw it as being a choice between individual organisms but he recognized of course that it wasn't just a matter of the individual surviving it also had to reproduce that was the point it was reproductive success that mattered and hence his theory of sexual selection where animals are chosen by members of the opposite sex for their capacity to attract members of the opposite sex so Darwin saw natural selection as choosing between individual organisms for their capacity to survive and reproduce but if you think about it survival and reproduction what is it that actually survives what is it that actually goes on from generation to generation it's certainly not the individual we all die the only thing that goes on to the next generation and then the next and then the next and then the next is the gene or genes so you couldn't think of natural selection as working at the level of the genes themselves as the generations go by through geological time what happens is that some genes survive and some genes don't survive what we see today are organisms animals and plants admittedly but what we see are genes that have made it through countless Generations so natural selection is this differential survival of genes through generations and the method by which they survive is by manipulating the development of individual bodies via the process of embryonic development so genes survive or don't survive there's unsuccessful ones don't survive the successful ones do survive and the way they ensure their survival is by manipulating the embryology of organisms so that those organisms are good at surviving and good at reproducing good at parental care or did everything required to pass on those genes so I see and this was the phrase I developed in the selfish Gene the individual organism is a survival machine for the genes that ride inside it it's a great big robot that has been built by genes that have survived through countless generations for their capacity to build robots just like this one I can't help thinking when you say that Richard of a of a story I heard of your being interviewed by I think a Japanese television crew who insisted on doing all the interviewing in a black London taxi driving around Oxford unaware of which roads it could go up and which it didn't would you just briefly explain why that happened um a Japanese television crew came in a London taxi and they greatly filled the taxi with all their camera gear and everything and um they would I was told that I had to be interviewed in the taxi and it turned out there wasn't room for the interviewer in the taxi as well as the cameraman so I had to improvise and I had to sort of talk to the camera much as I just been talking to you now and I also had to direct the driver because he was a London taxi driver he didn't know his way around Oxford and the uh the films are definitely film director wanted it to go through scenic routes as I had to say turn left here and then expound a bit more about the selfish intern right here and and um anyway I then got back to the room and I asked the director well that was all right but why the taxi and he said oh isn't your theory the taxicab theory of evolution and it must be that the Japanese translation of um my idea of the survival machine survival machine for genes it must have been translated as the taxicab for genes and but this I was bewildered by this reference to the taxicab theory of evolution at the time it's nice to know that one comes up with truly original thoughts even when one doesn't know it um I I have no idea how the Cantonese version of The Selfish Gene translates as a vehicle of this kind but maybe it's the same um Richard given that the logic of The Selfish Gene that what what is being selected for is if you like the unit of in of inheritance whatever that may be um clearly we've seen people then trying to extend this do you think it's as a metaphor I'm not sure to memes so that selection of particular behaviors or thoughts could be regarded as just another example of the same kind of process and I think I'm right and saying you coined the term mean I mean they wouldn't be fed up with it now that's right at the end of The Selfish Gene having the whole book having been devoted to the gene as the unit of selection because it is a replicator it makes copies of itself um and I thought well I didn't want to leave readers with the impression that that was the only possible replicator that could serve as a unit of darwinian selection and um I thought well done could imagine on another planet if there's life on other planets then there would have to be some equivalent of DNA um to act as the unit of selection but perhaps we don't have to go to other planets we can look right here at the meme which would I coined as the unit of cultural selection so anything that is replicated is a unit's potentially a unit of natural selection and in a human society there are things that are replicated through a culture they're things like closed Fashions they're things like hairstyle Fashions things like catchy tunes that people whistle the very word catchy suggests that it is catching like a like a virus and I I called the phrase virus of the mind at the same time um so the meme was the cultural equivalent of the Gene and um it I don't really know whether it's the science of mimetics as it's been called has actually come up with anything very fruitful in the way of darwinian analysis but potentially it's there potentially it could become a unit of selection a unit of a form of darwinian selection but that's all I want to say about memes I'm getting a bit fed up with them really well you notice I I approached it slightly tangentially and I hope tactfully so it's not to stick with it too long um I also thought it might be interesting just to to get your view on the way in which as people have started thinking of if you like the units of evolution the ways in which they've started using that information in design and I I know that there's an example yes um there have been attempts by Engineers to design in a darwinian way and in some sense you could say that all Engineers are designing in a darwinian way when they have ideas which they then discard or keep but one engineer that I know a German engineer called reckenberg actually did it more explicitly for example he designed windmills the the precise shape of the blade of a windmill to be optimal in getting the the most um most energy out of the Wind and he did this by constructing the blade of a windmill out of little veins of metal which was stuck together and the angle of each vein next to the next one was determined by what he called a gene so it was this would just be a number and this number would be the angle that each of these little strips of metal was held at stuck next to the next one and so the blade of the windmill could be a rather strange higgledy-piggledy shape of strips of metal glued together and he would then put the blade in in a wind tunnel and test how good it was and then he would breed from it if it was successful breed from it would mean make a new one using the same genes but the genes were allowed to mutate in a darwinian sense in a genetic sense they were they were allowed to change slightly and he could then breed which windmills were most successful in the wind tunnel and after many generations he ended up with an optimal wind windmill he did the same thing with the injection nozzle for diesel engines oddly enough so he make them make the nozzle out of bits of metal with holes in them and again the genes would be determined would the genes would determine the size of the holes in the nozzle and again breed from the most successful ones in actually putting into a real diesel engine and seeing how successfully it worked and what was rather remarkable he claimed that if he started with for a different random point it would Converge on the same optimal diesel in injection system from different starting points that's a very good moment thinking of convergent evolution from different starting points to consider reading our second piece which is an illustration of exactly that kind of thing and perhaps we can then extend the discussion after that to slightly different domains um this is also from the blind watchmaker and it's about convergence between two kinds of ants which form great armies that March through the jungle and they don't have any fixed Abode uh they they they're constantly on the move like a traveling Army these are driver ants in Africa and army ants in South America and Panama and Central America and I was brought up as a child in Africa and I was frightened of driver ants I was terrified of them I'd heard stories about how they would March through a whole Villages and devour everything kill everything that they found in the in the Villages and I was very frightened of them um and this is what I wrote In The Blind watchmaker much later of course as an adult in Panama I have stepped aside and contemplated the new world equivalent of the driver ants that I had feared as a child in Africa flowing by me like a crackling River and I can testify to the strangeness and wonder hour after hour the legions marched past walking as much over each other's bodies as over the ground while I waited for the queen finally she came and hers was an awe-inspiring presence it was impossible to see her body she appeared only as a moving wave of work of frenzy a boiling peristaltic ball of ants with linked arms she was somewhere in the middle of the seething wall of workers while all around it the massed ranks of soldiers faced threateningly outwards with jaws at gape everyone prepared to kill and die in defense of the queen forgive my curiosity to see her I prodded the ball of workers with a long stick in a vain attempt to flush out the queen instantly 20 soldiers buried their massively muscled pincers in my stick possibly never to let go while dozens more swarmed up the stick causing me to let go with alacrity I never did Glimpse the queen but somewhere inside that boiling ball she was the central Data Bank the repository of the master DNA of the whole colony those gaping soldiers were prepared to die for the queen not because they loved their mother not because they'd been drilled in the ideals of patriotism but simply because their brains and their jaws were built by genes stamped from the master dye carried in the queen herself they behaved like brave Soldiers because they'd inherited the genes of a long line of ancestral Queens whose lives and whose genes had been saved by soldiers as Brave as themselves my soldiers had inherited the same genes from the present queen as those old Soldiers had inherited from The ancestral Queens my soldiers were guarding the master copies of the very instructions that made them do the guarding they were guarding the wisdom of their ancestors the Ark of the Covenant I felt the strangeness then and the Wonder not unmixed with revivals of half-forgotten fears but transfigured and enhanced by a mature understanding which had lacked as a child in Africa of what the whole performance was for enhanced too by the knowledge that this story of the legions had reached the same evolutionary culmination not once but twice these were not the driver ants in my childhood nightmares however similar they might be but remote New World cousins they were doing the same thing as the driver ants and for the same reasons it was a night now and I turned for home and all struck child again but joyful in the new world of understanding that has supplanted the dark African fears so that explains for us something about why it is that the social insects have what in other respects would seem an almost incomprehensible life um I wonder if you could say a little more about how the understanding of what's really going on that if you like the payoff Matrix for the individuals in those colonies how did we come to understand that high flown language about the Ark of the Covenant and wisdom of their ancestors and things that's all about the social insects being um the Queens the lineage of Queens down Generations is the repository for the genes going down through the generations the workers are sterile they don't reproduce but they contain the genes which are copies of the genes in the queen so what they're in effect doing is guarding protecting fighting for copies of the same genes in the body of the queen and of them other young Queens um so in a sense you could think of the worker bodies as being similar to the cells in our own body where the the reproductive cells in our in our gonads in our ovaries and testes are equivalent to the queen and our hands and our feet and our kidneys and our livers and so on are equivalent to the workers they don't pass on their genes to the future if only the genes in our gonads that do similarly in an ant colony it's only the genes in the queen that actually do and the males that actually do get passed on to Future Generations but the workers contain this copies of the same genes and so a copy of a gene in a worker that causes the muscles in the brain of the of the worker to to work for the queen to guard her to to for this in case of soldiers they have these huge great Jaws that they that they attack any enemies with they are guarding the queen because genes in them are carried in the body of the queen copies of the genes the carried and bodies of the of the of the queen now what the whole Enterprise is aimed at is towards the certain time of the year in in Britain it would be in towards the end of summer um or mid-summer um suddenly out of the ground would boil great quantities of wind young queens and males they they have wings unlike worker ants and they fly up in the air mate preferably with members of other colonies and then the young Queens fly off to a different distant Place land on the ground dig a hole bite off their wings where they don't need them anymore or pull them off dig a hole and start a new nest the first few eggs that they lay will develop into workers which then help her and then gradually The Colony develops it get becomes bigger and bigger more and more workers more and more workers which gather food to feed the young and eventually they start making more young queens and males and the whole cycle repeats so the whole Enterprise is based upon the the presumption that is going to be um the genes are going to be carried out of the colony in Wing in the winged bodies of young queens and males but all the workers are doing is working to the to that end they're protecting the queen they're protecting the colony they're feeding the larvae Gathering food um doing all the things that are necessary to make sure that there's a successful Exodus from The Colony as the young queens and males fly out um in in on on their wings and start the cycle again the same thing happens with termites who have quite independently evolved the same habit um completely different they're nothing they're not related at all and as I said this particular habit of of wandering armies has evolved twice in driver ants and and armians but the social insects are a beautiful illustration of the principle of The Selfish Gene precisely because it is sterile individuals who are working for copies of the same genes in the bodies of queens and males they're not reproducing themselves it's the genes that matter not the reproductive success of the individuals doing the behaving who are the sterile workers so that leads me to think of two ways in which we could extend this line of thought one would be [Music] um to think about other species that exhibit very much that sort of behavior to have a a queen and a bunch of workers who have no Reproductive Rights of Their Own um that's one and I think then taking that somewhat further still it's it's interesting to start thinking about the way in which the well-being of one's closest relatives in some respects are well-being for oneself as well in the sense that the genes in your nearest relatives are yes potentially yes so the social insects are a special case because the workers are sterile but the same principle applies to lots and lots of animals where animals will take care of their kin take care of their not just that their own offspring which is kind of is obvious since Darwin's time but also their siblings their brothers and sisters their nephews and nieces their grandchildren their great great nephews and so on and a lot of the of what we um can understand about animal behavior animals that work together that cooperate that work for the benefit of other animals can be uninterpreted because they share genes so a gene that makes an individual gives give some food to a relative has that that Gene is is ensuring the copy of copies of itself in the body of the relative in the reproductive success of of the relative so taking care of siblings taking care of brothers and sisters you see all over many birds do it many mammals do it but the social insects the ants bees wasps and termites show it to an extreme extent and and I have to ask you about naked mole rats I mean okay no no day is complete without being asked about naked mole rats and I don't want an incomplete day for you naked women rats are mammals which behave rather like social insects um they live in Africa um they burrow underground there's almost never a scene above ground um they live in huge colonies um they are naked they have no hair they're spectacularly ugly by human standards at least I imagine they quite like each other um they um have one female who's called the queen who is almost the only female who reproduces is a certain amount of reproduction in other females but not much so you can call her the queen and you can call the others workers because they help the reproductive success of the Queen the queen has far far more offspring than any other mammal than any mammal normally would I forget the exact numbers but there but there's huge numbers like a queen ant or a queen termite I mean a queen termite you've probably seen pictures of them huge great bags of eggs they can't move they're just horrible great big white bags of eggs well a queen naked mole rat isn't quite like that which when she's the kind of nearest mammal equivalent to a termite and these colonies become extremely large they dig burrows underground which extend for huge distances Underground um and as I say they never come up there's something wrong with that I can't help feeling because I remember I told you that in the case of ants and termites the whole Enterprise is aimed towards this end product of winged reproductives bubbling out boiling up out of the ground and then flying off carrying the genes elsewhere it looks as though the naked mole rats don't do that and they ought to do that something's gone wrong there they they don't fulfill the full analogy to the social insects and I was upset about this and I predicted I I now predicted my prediction hasn't yet come true but it will um I've redeemed we've all heard it you've all heard this this is a definite prediction I predict that one day somebody will discover a dispersal phase of the naked mole rat um they they don't my prediction is they don't just stay underground the way they're supposed to my prediction is that this for some reason we're not seeing them but there must be a dispersal phase I'm not suggesting they literally have wings like wind dance I I did like the the notion of naked mold bats yes um well um actually the only reason why there aren't winged rodents is that bats have got there already I suspect um anyway um so my prediction is this maybe it will turn out that that sun there's some other species of Mo rat there are other species of mole rat which are not naked they're hairy mole rats maybe one of these species of hair removal rat will turn out to be the dispersal phase of the naked mole rat and that's a detestable prediction because the Genome of the naked mole rat has been sequenced so all we need to do is capture some hairy mole rats and sequence their genome and and I predict that one of them will turn out to have the same genome or another possibility is that it could be a bit like Locust you know that locusts are really just grasshoppers who under some circumstances change into locusts they become they look different they behave differently they they form into huge swarm as it's spread all over the countryside and you know in in America for example there are grasshoppers which are known to have turned into swarming locusts in the 19th century but had not done so since for some reason the conditions haven't been right for these American grasshoppers to turn into locusts well what if it's naked Mo rats are a bit like that what if the conditions for turning into the dispersal phase of a naked mole Raptor never quite been met and maybe one day we'll suddenly see mole rats boiling after the ground and swarming all over the countryside so that's my my the alternative version of my rather daring prediction I I love the prediction I'm not sure whether I do or don't want to be there when it happens yes there's something about being boiled having your feet boiled over by naked mole rats that is well about which one might have ambivalent views they are very ugly indeed they are they are very ugly um so those are sort of thinking about the ways in which altruism um perhaps we might just touch on one other thing too um which is something you and I talked about earlier today which is competition so who are your competitors for survival and in some respects the the harshest competition must come from those who are trying to occupy exactly the same Niche want to eat the same things want to do the same things want to claim the same sorts of mates in other words in some respects you might think that the greatest competition will be those closest to you and yet as we've heard we also look after those with whom we have kin relationships so there's a sort of a balance perhaps to be struck and we were talking about how it is that in small villages where people all know one another or how it is one gets a sense of community such that we do look after one another and obviously that sort of community side is one of the things that we try to develop in other circumstances as well colleges and universities for example so yes yes um that's right um a small village which is sort of stable where the same people live in the same Village for a long time it's pretty likely that anybody you meet will be kin will be a cousin um and so you might say well um the brain could have built into it a kind of rule of thumb by natural selection which says be nice to everyone well be nice to everyone because everyone is a member of the same Village which means they're kin but on the other hand as Nick's just pointed out everyone is also your closest competitor because you're competing within the village um so it's not quite clear how to resolve that problem um I mean when I'm asked why it is that humans uh have show altruistic Behavior why humans go to give give blood blood donors why we give to charity why we feel empathy for people who are suffering and indeed for non-human animals who are suffering and I usually say something like well in our ancestral past we lived in small villages and you can't expect natural selection to build into brains a cognitive understanding of the theory of genetics and kin selection what natural selection would build in would be a rule of thumb which would be something like be nice to everyone because everyone is kin but as we've just been talking about everyone is also the closest competitor so I think that's that's an unresolved Paradox I think there which I'd maybe just leave there really no I think that's I think that's entirely reasonable it's a good dilemma for people to think through I mean I think the one other thing that we know exists in some vampire bat colonies is that individuals sometimes if a vampire bat hasn't had a good meal it'll beg for a gift of blood from one of the other ones hanging from the cave roof and vampire bats are capable of recognizing one another as individuals and if you beg for blood from me and I give it for you to you but then a few days later I beg for blood from you and you pay no attention to my hopes then next time you ask me I won't give it to you so there's an individuation and a sort of recognition component which perhaps can at a slightly different level account for part of the reason why groups that know one another look out for one another because it might be you next time um yes well we're now talking about reciprocation rather than kin but but it's the same principle and and you could make the same argument about reciprocation and the the the the bat blood donor scheme which is I think you're referring to the work of Williamson yeah um yes that that that's quite right they do recognize each other as individuals and Williamson showed this very cleverly um experimentally um yes and reciprocation is another very important principle of the evolution of altruism and um again you could apply this to the small village case a small village not only consists of your cousins it also consists of people you're going to meet again and again and again throughout your life and therefore you have every opportunity to reciprocate to to pay back favors or deny favors and to learn who is good for a favor who is good for a bargain and who's a cheat and yes there's a that's it that's a nice example so we've talked a bit then about the social groups I wonder if we could then think a little bit more going back to convergence and one of the Paradigm examples I would think of of convergent evolution is the development of of the eye eyes have evolved many times independently in the animal kingdom um one of my estimates put it at more than 40 times independently has has the eye of all different kinds of eyes compound eyes reflect our eyes camera eyes we have camera eyes and so we have a lens which projects an upside down image on a retina and so do lots of other animals and most notably careful upon mollusk things like octopuses and squids and this is convergent evolution on a grand scale the the the the the the similarity between an octopus eye and a fisheye or a human eye is very considerable it's very great um in in both cases you have a lens in both cases you have a retina project the upside image on the retina um the um retina consists of a great Bank of light sensitive cells which project onto the brain interestingly the the vertebrate retina the light sensitive cells point the wrong way they Point backwards which it seems to be a bad design um in the the the wires that connect the light sensitive cells to the brain have to travel over the surface of the retina and then they dive through the retina in the blind spot into the optic nerve in in octopuses the retina is the right way around so it's a nice little illustration in fact although it's converted although it's very very similar you've got this crucial difference um which as it will gives the game away that it's independently evolved quite independently evolved um and um yeah so it's a very spectacular example of of convergent evolution there are many others and things like um electric fish which which um have independently evolved electric fish which find their way around by Electric fields in in muddy water and they've independently evolved in South America and in Africa quite independently and again a a a single revealing difference in order to use electrolocation it's necessary that the fish's body should be absolutely rigid if it's if it's swimming around like that then that completely distorts the electric field and so they they can't use they have to keep their body rigid so what they do is they have a Single Fin which runs right their way along the the either the the back or the belly and in one of them it's the back and the other one is the belly and that's the thing that does the swimming and the body itself remains absolutely rigid and it's again this revealing difference that one of them I forget which it is whether it's the African one with the American one that has the the single thing on the belly and the other one has a single thing on the back so they've independently converged on the same solution and it's uncannonly similar the um Australian mammal fauna a whole range of mammals in Australia which are all marsupials have independently evolved the same ways of life as mammals that we're more familiar with who have marsupial moles marsupial mice marsupial flying squirrels um marsupial rabbits Etc marsupial dongs marsupial um cats um there's one major difference which is the equivalent of marsupial antelopes the browsing great grazing herbivores are kangaroos and so they're very different because they hit upon this idea of using the hind legs and hopping on the hind legs but but so that's the case where they don't converge but in most other cases they converge and I wonder if there's anything one can I mean the other another aspect that sort of looks like convergent evolution I don't know whether it's correct to think of it that way would be mimicry yes um and clearly there's another trade-off there as well because if you are a harmless and delicious insect mimicking a vile tempered and defensive insect you can only be successful up to a certain point because if there are enough of you then whoever eats you will take its chances that's right yes any thoughts on on that yeah I think you're you're right to say it's like convergence when when a um uh when a harmless butterfly mimics a poisonous butterfly and there are many cases of this there are lots of poisonous butterflies which which have bright colored Wings to advertise the fact that they are poisonous and birds avoid them because they learn that these butterflies are poisonous and then there are a whole lot of other species of butterfly which mimic them which develop almost identical patterns um to gain protection from the fact that the birds that have learned to avoid the poisonous ones mistake the mimics for the poisonous ones but as Nix just said if the mimics become too numerous then the birds will start to learn that actually this pattern tastes rather good and so there has to be a balance and one of the things that happens rather interestingly is that some species of mimickling butterfly um have what's called a polymorphism where they um they split into two different or two or even three different patterns some of them mimic this distasteful butterfly some of them existence taste for a butterfly some of them they make that displaceable butterfly so that they don't outnumber the distasteful ones which would as you point out destroy and so what's one of the solutions is that they actually produce this polymorphism where they they mimic different species and this raises big problems for genetics because how do they have it's all very well mimicking this species are not that one but what if the the spot pattern mimics this species and the stripy pattern mimics that species you've got to get the whole thing right and that's a difficult genetic problem there is no now it's solved by the way but and then I guess the last area of thought I have arising from the two things we've heard so far would be we've been kind of talking about the Gene and the vehicle if you like in which it is carried um what about the concept of extended phenotypes where does that take us okay um my second book is called the extended phenotype and um perhaps a bit of take a bit of time to explain that I think okay um the phenotype is the um normally considered to be the parts of the body which the genes are using um but which the dean's cause to have the shape that they do so the the pattern on the wings of a butterfly would be part of the phenotype and the shape of the tail the shape of the antennae and so on as part of the phenotype well from my point of view the phenotype is tool or set of tools by which the genes lever themselves into the Next Generation I talked about a survival machine in the beginning so um the body is a whole set of phenotypes which are part of the Gene's equipment to lever itself into the Next Generation different genes using different parts of the of the body different phenotypes but if you think about it something like a bird's nest it's beautifully shaped it's beautifully adapted a beautifully constructed to serve its purpose of keeping eggs safe and chicks safe and warm it's obviously designed by natural selection it's obviously evolved by natural selection and that means that there has to have been genetic variation in the shape of the nest otherwise it couldn't have evolved so there must have been genes for big nests and smallness and roundness and shallowness and deep nests and and weave about nest for great tubes that that keep the snakes out so all the different shapes of bird's nest must have evolved by the same kind of evolution as the shapes of the body and I call that extended phenotype it's clearly phenotype it's clearly in caused by genes influenced by genes evolved by genetic selection there must be genetic variation in the shape of nests bar birds in Australia and New Guinea uh the male bird builds a bar a beautiful structure often made of grass a lovely a lovely shape decorated with red berries or blueberries or blue beer bottle tops anything they can find to make it look attractive and the females are attracted to the bar so the male instead of being like a peacock which has its decoration on its own bodies phenotype itself this is an extended phenotype in the bower bird case it's it's safer because the peacock is obviously highly conspicuous not only to females but to predators the bar bird exports its finery from its own body from its own tail to the bar which it is not is not part of its body so it doesn't get eaten by the Predator that is attracted to the Bower so once again you can think of the bower as an extended phenotype um a beaver dam is an extended phenotype built by beavers and for their own purposes we should to make a lake which is good for fishing in and good for for um transporting logs through and things like that so animal artifacts of which of course there are many can be thought of as part of the phenotype of the genes of the animal but it's extended phenotype well that's an inanimate artifact like a beaver dam or a bird nest but what about parasites which live inside the host and influence the body and behavior of the host to their own advantage there are many parasites who have a definitive host which might be a sheep a liver fluke a fluke is is a worm a flatworm which needs to get into a sheep and it does so via an intermediate host which might be a snail or it might be an ant this is called the intermediate host and the parasite when it's in the intermediate host needs to influence the behavior of the intermediate host so as to make it more likely to get into the definitive host which is the Sheep in the case of a fluke which is gets into ant bodies what it does is it is it crawls into the it's a very very tiny worm now it crawls into the head of the ant and makes a tiny lesion in the brain of the ant which causes the ant to change its behavior and to climb to the top of brass stems instead of going down into the ground so that means that the ant is sitting at the top of a grass stem vulnerable to being eaten by sheep which is exactly what the worm wants and so the worm gets into the Sheep well the the change in behavior of the ant is extended phenotype of genes in the fluke in the worm it's um clearly an a darwinian adaptation that must mean that natural selection has worked on fluke genes but the phenotype that is being influenced is the behavior of the ant so those cases and there are many and they're very bizarre and rather Sinister those cases were a parasite influences the behavior of an intermediate host to get itself eaten by the definitive host by the eventual host these are all proper examples of extended phenotypes well those are parasites that live inside their host but what about Cuckoos which are parasites that don't live inside the host but live in the host nest and the host feeds them so you know that Cuckoos lay their eggs in the nest of another species and then they disappear and the other species is fooled into rearing them and there are all sorts of complicated detailed adaptations like egg mimicry which is fascinating probably no time to go into but then when the cuckoo nestling grows up becomes fledgling and becomes a bit bigger it can be 10 times as big as the host as the foster parent of the foster parent goes on feeding it which is crazy but that's because we see it through human eyes and we say well how can this little Wren really feeding a gigantic cuckoo how could it be so stupid or it's not being stupid it's just that it's it's brain is being manipulated by something about the cuckoo something about maybe the cuckoo has a super normal gate which it does um it's there's a there's a Japanese cuckoo which has a not only a great big yellow gape which is waiting to be have worms dropped into it see but it has a full Scape on each shoulder and so it has three games and that that super normal stimulus which attracts the foster parent which might be a kind of Robin um and so the these Cuckoos are experts in manipulating the behavior of their foster parents the change in behavior of the foster parent is extended phenotype of the genes in the cuckoo because the G the cuckoo must have been selected to do this manipulation and that means that genes in Cuckoos have been favored by natural selection and that means that the the phenotype that's been selected is actually the behavior of the host well now we've got extended phenotype reaching from parasite to host whether not in the parasite is not inside the host well let's go one step further and talk about action at a distance where you can have say a male singing and influencing the behavior not just the behavior of a female actually influencing the ovaries of a female has been shown in canaries and in doves when a dove sings that doesn't it does a thing called a baraku which is noise canaries thing of course as you know in both cases it's been experimentally shown that the effect of the song and the and the behavior the courtship behavior is to cause the female ovaries to massively swell and this changes the whole behavior of the female which is to the male's Advantage you could say the male is manipulating the the the female the male you might say would like to be able to inject hormones into the female if he had a syringe and could do it but he can't do that but the next best thing is very effective is to sing and that has exactly the same effect it causes the females ovaries to swell um the poet keeps in is Ode to a Nightingale compare the effect of the Nightingale on him to a drug he said my heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense as though if Hemlock I had drunk or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute passed and Lethy Woods had sunk so Keith was actually drunked by the song of a nightingale well it says has a vertebrate nervous system like a female Nightingale um what could manipulate the the brain of Keats could manipulate the behavior of a female Nightingale much more effectively and I think that's what's going on this is the the change in the I'm guessing the ovaries the not female Nightingale soldiers like those of a canary um changes in the in the female bird in its behavior in its in its gonads in its hormones is extended phenotypic effect of genes in the male because it's genes that are being selected in the mail for their capacity for their effectiveness in manipulating the behavior not by injecting hormones but by singing and having the same effect and so I I picture the whole of but the whole dawn chorus is is a network of extended phenotypic influence throughout the wood where the song is being is being percolated throughout so okay that's my little lectures on the extent of phenotype that that's Richard's second book yes in the sort of the the 10-minute extended phenotype fantastic um one of the problems of course in charting these changes is that they take a very long time but it it's a very long process to get from being whatever cuckoo started off as to being a bird that knows which nests to parasitize is good at counting how many eggs have already been laid there can throw the other eggs and nestlings out can induce the parents to feed it and then when an adult can fly off to Africa on its own and meet another bird of a species that's never seen in its life recognize it as a cuckoo mate and come back and do the same thing all over again it takes practice as they say or a long time so the next reading we have is really moving from genetics as such into I think time and space and it's from unweaving the rainbow I was going to read it thank you on a moonless night when the stars look very cold about the sky and the only clouds to be seen are the glowing smudges of the Milky Way go out to a place far from street light pollution lie on the grass and gaze out at the sky superficially you notice constellations but a constellations pattern means no more than a patch of damp on the bathroom ceiling note accordingly how little it means to say something like Neptune moves into Aquarius Aquarius is a miscellaneous set of stars all at different distances from us unconnected with each other except that they constitute a meaningless pattern when seen from a certain not particularly special place in the galaxy here a constellation is not an entity at all not the kind of thing that Neptune or anything else can sensibly be said to move into the shape of a constellation moreover is ephemeral a million years ago our Homo erectus ancestors gazed out nightly no light pollution then unless it came from the species brilliant Innovation the campfire at a set of very different constellations a million years hence our descendants will see yet other shapes in the sky and we already know exactly how these will look this is the sort of detailed prediction that astronomers but not astrologers can make and again by contrast with astrological predictions it will be correct because of Lights finite speed when you look at the great Galaxy in Andromeda you are seeing it as it was 2.3 million years ago and Australopithecus stalked the high velt you are looking back in time shift your eyes a few degrees to the nearest Bright Star in the constellation of Andromeda and you see mirac but much more recently as it was when Wall Street crashed the sun when you witness its color and shape is only eight minutes ago but point a large telescope at the Sombrero Galaxy and you behold a trillion Sons as they were when your tailed ancestors appeared shyly through the canopy and India collided with Asia to raise the Himalayas a collision on a larger scale between two galaxies in Stefan's Quintet is shown to us at a time when on Earth dinosaurs were Dawning and the trilobites fresh dead takes me a minute to get my breath back one of the things that comes from that of course is the enormous periods of time over which evolutionary processes have taken place but in a more anthropocentric sense it reminds me that we all came out of Africa and we now know we've come out of Africa or humans have come out of Africa on several occasions and that is a bottleneck experience so genetic variation amongst Western Europeans amongst Europeans is far less than the genetic variation in Africa and I wonder if there's anything one can start to say about bottleneck species some of us but also some other species which we know to be bottleneck species and in a way I suppose the importance of genetic diversity yes um I have something personal to say about this because um when I was writing my biggest book The ancestors Tale um my co-author Yan Wong did a beautiful analysis of my own genome which demonstrated this bottleneck effect beautifully it so happened that I had my genome this was quite a long time ago now I'd had my genome sequenced completely not many people had in those days the reason was a rather strange one I was doing a television program called sex death and the meaning of life and in as part of this program the they wanted to to India they did sequence my genome and then my genome was to be buried for a thousand years and then the conceit was on television you know how television works that somebody would dig it up and would make a clone of me um and so it would be my identical twin A Thousand Years hence and the idea of the television program was that I would then talk about was it various issues that arise like um would this clone be me but of course it wouldn't be and we could demonstrate that by getting a couple of identical twins and getting them to talk to each other and realizing they're not the same person um I would be able to to teach my young thousand year hence clone not to make the same mistakes in life as I made you've got the same genes as me but don't make the same mistakes I made um and all sorts of things like that personal identity problems was it was anyway it never happened um the the television program turned into something completely different um but by then they'd paid for my genome to be sequenced it was sequenced and they gave me the disc Jan Wong my co-worker my co-author of the ancestors table then took my genome and did an analysis of it a very clever analysis which actually demonstrated that the population from which I came which is Western European went through a bottleneck 60 000 years ago and he did it by taking well how can I explain this you I'm sure you know that um you have within everyone of yourselves except your gonads every one of your cells um a complete set of your paternal chromosomes and a complete set of your maternal chromosomes they're just swimming around like that not not meeting each other they only meet each other when they when they come together to make sperms or eggs but that they're they're separate you've got 23 maternal and 23 paternal chromosomes and you can what Yan did was to compare them looking at each gene from my father and my mother comparing them and then calculating how far back you have to go before you hit so-called coalescent point which is the point at which they sprang from a common ancestor and in some cases it could be quite recent but but um in in he he found that in most cases they converged 60 000 years ago and that indicates that there was a population bottleneck sixty thousand years ago such that the population was so small that individuals had no choice but to mate with close relatives of each other that that's the implication of this of this this analysis he then compared it to a similar analysis on a Nigerian by the way note that this is a single individual who's doing this analysis just my genome it's not a population just me from my genome alone from his co-author of this book um he was able to to reason out that there was a bottleneck in my ancestor my ancestral population 60 000 years ago he then did the same thing for a single Nigerian and found that there was no such bottleneck and that's what just what Nico said that that um whereas Western Europeans passed through a bottleneck presumably when they came out of Africa 60 000 years ago in Africa the people who stay our ancestors were in Africa for much much longer than that as you know we evolved in Africa for over for millions of years and so there's much greater diversity genetic diversity in Africa than there is in the rest of the world um and um I think that was the point you were trying to make yeah absolutely and I mean one of the things that many of you in the audience will know about is that there's lots of concerns for example in um the kinds of grains that we grow that they now come from a very very very small genetic pool and as such we could be really unlucky and a disease could wipe them all out and so the interest in Crossing back to some of the ancestral uh strains and bringing in a bit more diversity is a kind of an insurance policy um I think cheaters would be the other obvious animal that I'm used to thinking of as having clearly gone through a tiny population at some point and now cheetahs reproduce rather ineffectively in a way it's hard to keep the numbers up and I often wonder whether the different subspecies of cheetah would be sensibly crossed so it's together a little more genetic diversity into each of the subspecies but then there are purists who think it would be a tragedy to dilute the subspecies so there's a strange I mean I think it's better to have some cheaters even if they're sort of a bit of a mixture then no cheaters of at all knowing they would have been very pure if we still had them but genetic variation and of course we see it in lots of other things too um there are new world monkeys in which color vision the color detectors are different in I think I'm right in saying different subgroups of the males yes that's correct I forget which I think that's right the females have three color vision like we do so they have light sensitive cells in their retinas which are since it's both red green and blue and the males are polymorphic some of them they all have blue some of them have red and some of them have green so um they um if you've got several males together between them they can they can see all the colors but but anyone can't um isn't there some legend about bomber Cruz in the second world war wanting to have a colorblind member because the colorblind person could see through camouflage um in in you know about that yes my my my father wasn't the bomber pilot in World War II but worked with the Royal Air Force for a very long time afterwards and certainly the Air Force claimed that it was very helpful to have a colorblind person because a lot of camouflage relies on color and if you don't see the color you can see the object yeah um my father himself told me once gone for a walk in the desert in California with a colorblind friend who kept pointing out you know carefully uh camouflaged healer monsters and the like which my father could see when they were pointed out to him but which for someone with normal color vision were almost completely cryptic but for someone with you know who just saw it all in black and white it seemed to be simple so so some quite curious effects from these aspects of um I would guess from that that these animals were aimed at a bird avoiding birds not mammals because most mammals are actually colorblind and a red green color blind I think and so so um yeah interesting yeah so one other thought that comes out of that this piece and just perhaps we could briefly touch on it I mean I the comment about astrology and astronomy I think might one make a general statement that all modern science almost all will have had precursors in which people were looking at the same things and thinking about them fairly differently but in some cases like astrology mostly people think well probably astronomy gets it right I mean people may enjoy trusting astrology but I don't think they say the astrologers are definitely seeing things and predicting things that the astronomers can't but maybe I'm wrong in chemistry the Alchemists certainly just gave up Alchemy became chemistry or maybe abstruse forms of physics I think there's an interesting point about how the precursors of science either hang on and put themselves up as an alternative or become absorbed into the current scientific Corpus um yes I don't know if you I know you were in New Zealand yes um about this I've just I've just come from New Zealand a couple of days ago and I got in into a bit of a row um in New Zealand because there's official government policy in New Zealand is to incorporate Maori Polynesian so-called ways of knowing it's called mataranga Mari Mari ways of knowing into science education classes alongside science and with equal status with with science and um I feel this is nonsense and several New Zealand scientists do as well and they and I feel that Maori mythology indeed mythologies all over the world are of great cultural value great cultural interests great historic interest but they're not science um and in New Zealand uh seven I think seven academics um many of them fellows of the New Zealand and Royal Society uh wrote a letter to a magazine in New Zealand called The Listener complaining about this well deploring this education policy of the government of Jacinda Adam um which was dreamed up by the way by Chris Hipkins when he was minister of Education he's now the prime minister um bringed up by his education department and they became ostracized and they were um investigated they were threatened with investigation by the New Zealand Royal Society because of they were because they were accused of cultural insensitivity maybe even racism for not supporting the government policy of teaching Maori ways of knowing which include vitalism which include um creation myths by the the Earth mother and the sky father and and whatever you know the the Maori equivalent of of the Book of Genesis Adam and Eve and so on um vitalism the belief that everything has a spirit and and is driven by the by the spirit which is very foreign to science um they refer to science as Western science which I think is an insult to Chinese and Japanese and Indian science they refers Western sounds as though buying into the sort of cultural relativism beliefs that science is just the the tribal myth of one particular tribe of humans namely white Western Europeans and of course that's not what science is about science is Humanity it belongs to all of humanity it belongs to the um Humanity's best shot at finding the truth science has methods in place for avoiding self-deception things like with medical research the the double-blind trial where medical researchers who are investigating for example the efficacy of a new drug a new a new medicine they will have some pills which are the actual medicine itself and some which are control which don't contain it and they'll have say 100 patients or a thousand patients and they'll give half the patients the the drug and the other half the patients the control and the point about the double-blind trial is that neither the doctors nor the patient nor the nurses nor anybody involved knows which patient has received the drug and which patients receive the the control it's all concealed in a computer and it's not unmasked until the experiment is ended well that is a wonderful guard against self-deception because anybody all scientists are human and they are vulnerable to wanting their own pet Theory to come out right if they're if they're pushing a new drug they want it to succeed but the double-blind trial protects against self-deception you cannot cheat science is filled with devices for preventing cheating not just the double-blind trial peer review ing experiments and if the experiment can't be repeated then it's not taken seriously um so science really isn't some kind of tribal myth science is unique science is a is a entirely separate Enterprise which belongs to the whole of humanity and for which of which the whole of humanity can be proud so I said all this in Auckland and Wellington and actually was enthusiastically received by the audience I got heckled by one person in in Wellington and she was invited to participate in the discussion for likely invited but she chose to walk out instead um and I then wrote an article in The Spectator which is a London Journal of a British magazine it's in this week's spectator if you want to look it up explain describing my whole experience and I think it's the general lesson is that so-called indigenous ways of knowing which are different all over the world different in in every part of the world that you have indigenous myths which are of great poetic value in many cases and great historic interest but they're all different from each other they can't all be right science can be right because it's different it's science has its own methods which are unique and worldwide and and and Universal science is true all over the scientific truths are true all over the universe physics is true all over the universe if Maori physics were true it would have to be true all over the universe which would mean that they shouldn't just be taught in New Zealand which would be taught everywhere and of course that's not what's being accept what was being asked for at all the idea is that there's some something special that because the the maar is arrived in New Zealand before Europeans did that somehow they're they're wisdom their ancestral wisdom should be taken seriously respected and actually taught in science classes and that's what we objected to I wonder if we could read a piece about education it seems the most yes both that's right Lara and I will do a double act on this one um this is about the Headmaster of um my old school which was Andrew in Britain um it's boarding school and it had a great Headmaster in the late 19th century he died in 1922 giving a lecture he dropped dead in the middle of getting a lecture and um he was a great innovator in education he had took the view that boy it was only boys in those days the school now takes girls um he took the view that every boy had something valuable in him when it had to be found and developed and so he was passionately against rote learning and cramming facts he wanted boys to be Innovative and to learn on their own um so Ronaldo and I are going to read an essay that I wrote I was actually invited by the andal school to give a to give the first um in inaugural so-called angle lecture and I chose to lecture about this great Headmaster Frederick William Sanderson as I say died in 1922. just over 100 years ago now sanderson's passionate desire to give boys the freedom to fulfill themselves would have thrown health and safety into a hissy fit and set today's lawyers licking their chops with anticipation he directed that the Laboratories should be left unlocked at all times so that boys could go in and work at their own research projects even if unsupervised the more dangerous chemicals were locked up quote but enough was left about to disturb the Equanimity of other Masters who had less Faith than the head in that Providence which looks after the young end of quote the same open door policy applied to the school Workshops the finest in the country filled with Advanced Machine Tools which are sanderson's pride and joy under these conditions one boy damaged a surface plate by using it as an anvil against which to hammer a rivet the culprit tells the story in the book Sanderson of Andel that did disconcert the head for a little when it was discovered as well it might for a surface plate is a precisely machined plane surface used for judging the flatness of objects but my punishment was quite andelian I had to make a study of the manufacture and use of surface plates and bring a report and explain it all to him and after that I found I had learned to look twice at a fine piece of work before I used did ill incidents like this lead eventually and not surprisingly to the workshops and Laboratories again being locked when there was no adult supervision but some boys felt the deprivation keenly and in true soundathonian fashion they set out in the workshops and the library another of sanderson's personal prize to make an intensive study of locks in our enthusiasm we made skeleton keys for all angle not only for the Laboratories but for private rooms as well for weeks we used the Laboratories and workshops as we'd grown accustomed to use them but now with a keen care of the expensive apparatus and with precautions to leave nothing disorderly to portray our visits it seemed that the head saw nothing he had a great gift for assuming blindness until Speech day came round and then we were amazed to hear him as he beamed upon the assembled parents telling them the whole business and what do you think my boys have been doing now sanderson's hatred of any locked door which might stand between a boy and some worthwhile enthusiasm symbolized his whole attitude to education a certain boy was so keen on a project he was working on that he used to steal out of the dormitory at 2 am to read in the unlocked of course Library the Headmaster caught him there and roared his terrible wrath for this speech of discipline he had a famous temper and one of his maxims was never punish except in anger again the boy himself tells the story I told him of the work that had taken possession of me worked for which the daytime was all too full yes yes he understood that he looked over the notes I'd been taking and they set his mind going he sat down beside me to read them they dealt with the development of metallurgical processes and he began to talk to me of Discovery and the values of discovery the incessant reaching out towards knowledge and power the significance of this desire to know and make and what we in the school were doing in that process we talked he talked for nearly an hour in that still nocturnal room it was one of the greatest most formative hours in my life go back to bed my boy we must find some time for you in the day for this I don't know about you but that story brings me close to tears do I'm going to leave you all to think about that for yourselves I'm going to ask Lala actually to get up again I think and read one last piece which I think is I would say a perspective piece this is from I'm weaving the rainbow again fling your arms wide in an expansive gesture to span all of evolution from its origin at your left fingertip to today at your right fingertip all the way across your midline to well past your right shoulder life consists of nothing but bacteria many selled invertebrate Life Flowers somewhere around your right elbow the dinosaurs originate in the middle of your right palm and go extinct around your last finger joint the whole story of homo sapiens and our predecessor Homo erectus is contained in the thickness of one nail clipping as for recorded history as for the Sumerians the Babylonians the Jewish Patriarchs the dynasties of pharaohs the legions of Rome the Han emperors the Christian fathers the laws of the medes and Persians which never change as for Troy and the Greeks Helen and achilles and Agamemnon dead as for Napoleon and Hitler The Beatles and Vladimir Putin they and everyone that knew them are blown away in the dust from one light stroke of a nail file I said that Richard writes science with beautiful prose but he also writes poetry without poetic license Richard thank you very very much Lala thank you and to the audience

Channel: Morningside College

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Id: iWrUqII1I-Y

Length: 87min 56sec (5276 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 15 2023