Daniel Dennett - The Genius of Charles Darwin: The Uncut Interviews

damn anyone meeting you might run away with the idea that you're an admirer of Charles Darwin would that be true yeah in fact in my book Darwin's dangerous idea I say if I could give a prize to the single best idea anybody ever had I'd give it to Darwin ahead of Newton had Einstein and everybody else why because Darwin's idea put together the two biggest worlds the world of mechanism and material and physical causes on the one hand the lifeless world of matter and the world of meaning and purpose and goals and those had seemed really just an unbridgeable gap between them and he showed no he showed how meanings and purposes could arise out of physical law out of the workings of ultimately inanimate nature and that's just a stunning unification and opens up a tremendous Vista for for all all inquiries not just for biology but for the relationship between the second law of thermodynamics and the existence of poetry well I totally agree with apps on the other hand there have been people who have said that Darwinism is a bleak cold ruthless view of life I suppose in two different ways one one is that natural selection itself seems like a very destructive process a lot of suffering involved and so on and the other is that precisely by kicking away the the support for the supernatural for explaining things in terms of of supernatural designers and things that removes the support that people have felt they had for their own life for their own psychology and when well-being do you do you think that that this does undermine people's comfort I think it only undermines a crutch that that they don't need and that's the crutch of an absolute say an immortal soul an immaterial immortal soul that's an idea that a lot of people think is very important and what it does of course is it replaces it with the idea of a material mortal soul yeah we have souls but they're made of neurons and the little neurons individually are just blind little bio robots they don't know they don't care and they're just doing their jobs the amazing thing is that if you put enough of them together in the right sort of teams you have basically a soul you have the the control system in the memory of a being that can be held responsible that can hold himself or herself responsible that can look into the future and because we can look into the future because we can imagine the world in a better way we can hold each other responsible for that in a way no other species can now traditionally the idea is God implants that soul in us but we don't have to see it that way we can see that the soul itself the human soul is itself a product of natural selection and both genetic natural selection and cultural selection and that's why we are responsible for the future of the planet in a way no other species is I think a lot of people have trouble getting the point that something like a soul can emerge from lots of little so less neurons they kind of feel well if we've got a soul if the whole brain has a soul somehow each little bit of it must must be a little bit of a little fraction of a soul in in each one and it's quite a stretch isn't it it's not that difficult but but people do in the same way they have trouble with the idea that proteins aren't alive proteins are just great big macromolecules they're not alive how can you make a living thing out of dead stuff well you can that's the wonder of it and that's what the scientific image shows us you can make a living thing out of dead stuff you can make a conscious thing out of unconscious stuff you can make a thing with a soul out of things that don't have souls and in every case it's science that shows us how that's possible it shows us how over eons natural processes have generated the design improvements that make this all possible we've been talking about this at the level of the mechanism of the body and the brain and so you have lots of little things building up to make one big what appears to be one one big soul and now you've just alluded to the same thing in historical time and that you start from very simple beginnings of the at the origin of life and you gradually build up to the sorts of complexity that we see now in evolutionary time I think you once said something about how difficult it is for people to grasp the idea of complex things being made by anything other than even more complicated in fact I think okay I think this is an idea that may be older than the species in a certain sense it may be that our possible ancestor Homo habilis the handy man the toolmaker maybe you've had some dim appreciation of the fact that it seems it always takes a big fancy thing to make a lesson thing you never see you never see a horseshoe making a making a blacksmith you never see a pot making a Potter and what darlin did is over through this he showed how indeed mindless goalless purposeless processes can over time generate things that have purposes that's a stunning fact and I mean that's a really stunning fact that purpose can emerge bottom up this is this is the the bottom up theory of creation rather than the trickle-down theory of creation yes and I suppose Darwin not only showed that with respect to his own subject of of evolution but in a sense he raised our consciousness to the fact that it's over and over again going to be possible to do that same trick indeed in fact they're they're all tied together in one great Tree of Life we're learning everyday about how the brain is itself a Darwin machine how there are evolutionary processes of development evolutionary process of learning so that the way your brain is wired up now is not all just due to the genes the genes have actually a rather negligible role and a great deal of the wiring there's just too much information there so how does it happen it happens by processes of generation and testing and pruning and making more and trying it out and pruning it and pruning and drying it and making more it's an evolutionary process that goes on very fast in the brain of a child and going on in our brains right now and as we go up levels we get swifter more powerful processes of exploration and once we've got language and human culture we have all these mind tools now we can really start moving around zipping around in this great space of possible designs I mean look we've got we've got tobacco plants that glow in the dark now because they have Firefly genes spliced into their genomes I mean how long would it take for whether they eat at natural selection to produce such a thing well but it did because it produced the people that produce the science that produced the technology that produces so that tobacco plant is just as natural in a way as any daizy to see what a crane is you have to know what a skyhook is or would be if there were any ever since Darwin skeptics have thought well there's got to be some things that are just so wonderful that you just couldn't get to them from this Darwinian beginnings you can't get there from here or you can't get here from there and so they've looked for things that were irreducibly complex or just too marvelous to have been themselves the products of this inexorable grinding process of natural selection so they've gone looking for skyhooks in the in the in the sense of a miraculous device that just floats floats of the sky and then you can pull things up with it are deneece kayaks but there are cranes and in fact if you look at the history of evolution you see that again and again evolution has mindlessly produced a new crane which actually speeds up makes more efficient the evolutionary process so that we have for instance lovely book by by John Maynard Smith and Rashad Mary on the major transitions and evolution each one of those is a crane sex is a crane multicellularity is a crane language is a crane obviously these are innovations which once they arise it's like shifting into a higher gear they the evolution the exploratory processes can go faster you can see farther can can be more efficient than the exploratory processes lower level and Darwinian natural selection is the kind of model for four cranes it's that right yes it's and it sets up all the rest of them it set up all the rest of them that's right unless they're I suppose they might have to be a crane in cosmology in the in the inflation of the universe or something like that which is a pre-darwinian yeah yeah brain I think that the idea that well okay it's it's cranes all lowdown to the origin of life but then we have to have a skyhook at the origin we have to have that's a that's an idea that some people find very attractive I don't because it strikes me as incoherent that what we have to account for is how the complexity to get clear reproduction going could itself in some sense evolved not by natural selection but by an evolutionary process from something less complex and I think that we can see in fact I think there are an embarrassment of riches for how that early process might go they're being sorted out now but there is chemical evolution and there's differences in stability so that say amino acids can form as it were spontaneously so we've got some pretty good building blocks down there I've always felt that cranes in your sense having the power starting from in each case some some lower almost from nothing or services something simple can produce the the wonderful complexity of life and as you say of language and other things that is itself hugely uplifting when people say where do you get your consolation from I sort of feel well how much more do you want I've grid what indeed what could be more wonderful than being part of this in amazing living tapestry of of growth and exploration and innovation all happening in not Emilia not a billion but in a trillion places at once the the just to look just at our planet the exuberance of the life processes going on around us and all of the creativity that is there it's just great to be alive and that's with tremendous exuberance of exploration and processes of life all around us and those very same processes have given rise to our brains which are capable of understanding the very phenomena that we're that we're talking about so the we have the added wonder that not only are we a part of it not only are we a part of this of this evolutionary process but we are able to understand it using brains that have been given to us by this very same process so when people say something like oh you've taken away my consolation I feel like say well how much more do you want how what could be more wonderful than to find yourself on this planet by the way against incredible odds of statistically weeks exist we find ourselves here we find ourselves not only able to appreciate what's going on around us but also able to appreciate the fact that we appreciate it and where we get it from yeah sometimes I like to say the the planet has has grown a nervous system and it's us and for the first time in five plus billion years if the planet is endangered by say an asteroid it's possible that if the planet can take some action against it we we have we are actually capable now of looking far enough into the future so that we may bill we no other species we might be able to save the planet from a catastrophe for instance the planet has grown a nervous system in the sense that we are each individual neurons of some huge huge and nervous system perhaps and maybe now it's even starting to we're starting to get the beginnings of a realization that those separate nervous systems are kind of coalescing and making a larger systems that civilization the internet world literature that kind of thing yes and of course it's not gonna be easy and it's not going to be smooth or going to be reverses there have been lots of reverses in the past but but I think in general this is a great reason to believe in progress because of the the connectivity that we now have people around the world can contribute to this process in a way they never could before if you think back just a just a hundred years the tremendous isolation of people from each other and I think most of the chaos and turmoil and violence that we see in the world today ultimately has its explanation and the fact that never before have people been so flooded with information about each other and we're we're we're drowning in information about about the planet and we haven't accommodated at all yet and that's there's a lot of growing pains but we're getting there and the growing pains show themselves in things like mental illness and things I suppose but in a way it's it's it's quite remarkable how good we are at coping with it I mean when you think I'm radically different our environment is from the one in which we were naturally selected for most of our our history we're not doing a bad job and I think that's not because of our genetically given our god-given brains it's because of our culture given minds which is designed by cultural processes and it uses the brain if it's it it molds the brain that shapes the brain it gives the brain it's it's its software its functional structure and that has grown a pace we'll think just the last several thousand years Plato and Aristotle didn't have brains that were importantly different from anybody's today and they were really smart fellows but look what they didn't have look at all the thinking tools they didn't have and the high school kid can now have thinking tools at her disposal that were unimaginable smartest people in the world a couple of thousand years ago that too has an evolutionary history yes people often use the phrase cultural evolution as though it was the same process there clearly some kind of an analogy there but do you think this a bit more than just an analogy I think there is more than an analogy because I think we can see at least some very deep parallels Darwin begins the origin as you well know with with a three-way comparison he compares artificial selection methodical selection he calls it and he talks about unconscious selection which is where human beings without knowing what they were doing or even trying to do it we're we're domesticating plants and animals and then there's natural selection where no human intervention at all and I think we see the same thing with culture I think we see for instance languages have evolved but they're not invented they're not very few words are coined so words are our human creations but who made them no individual they nobody tried to make them they just rose music the the form of music the the shapes of music arose without any inventors without any any people laying down the law later later you get composers and poets and people making artifacts that they're really designing and thinking about but all of this has to rest on a process of differential replication languages go extinct words jump from language to language musical ideas persist and change and get mutated over hundreds or thousands of years and the culture that we're now living and breathing every day is a product of many processes only a few of which are the deliberate design processes of four-sided designers yes one difference occurs to me is that in biological evolution at least on this planet we seem to have almost nothing but divergence once at once as species have split apart into two daughter species they don't merge again whereas languages presumably do I mean Dutch and German are clearly descended from the same real common common ancestor and they're very similar but there's no reason why words can't be borrowed across and of course they'd have been English is a is a notorious example of that I think that's a good reason for putting a little more emphasis on the evolution of words rather than on languages because words jump very promiscuously from language to language but we can still track them and it is it is very much like horizontal gene transfer which is rare but does occur and in fact if you look back to come earlier you can go back and look at the earliest days of life as you know in the the the tree doesn't look like a branching tree at all it looked like a great mixed-up bush with gene transfer happening all over the place and I think in a way human culture is is sort of continuously in that state where there's tremendous horizontal transfer as possible it's like that Terrell evolution rather rather than great yes who knows whether he'll move on yes he might not have to yeah down I know that you had a fairly recent brush with mortality and was an actress moment for all your many friends I can tell you and and came out of it with with some splendid thoughts well yes my aorta burst but fortunately I got wonderful care now I have an artificial a order and a lot of people wondered if this was going to change my mind about about whether or not I believed in God or believed in an afterlife and absolutely not but I did I did have a an epiphany of sorts I realized that first of all I was of course tremendously relieved to be alive and and very much buoyed up by all the affection and support I got from family and friends all over and I realized that when I said thank goodness I didn't just mean that as a euphemism for thank God I really meant thank goodness the reason that I was still alive was because of all the goodness technological goodness medical goodness just good-hearted people really wonderful caring love lovely people and all of that had was what saved my life and I was very grateful and then I realized what I can do with that gratitude is back I can try to create some more goodness I can add to the supply of goodness in the world we don't need a middleman why why yes I love that phrase we don't need a middleman that that's why thank God whatever thank God's creatures when I think the doctors why not thank the nurses when I think the the medical journals that peer reviewed the the technologies that were so beautifully honed so that they could save my life there's a lot of goodness in the world and I'm very glad there is I wouldn't be here if they weren't now I can try to do my share to add a little goodness directly back into it so don't bother praying go plant a tree go keep some particularly impressed in it I read I read the written thing that you that you wrote on your on your recovery bed and of course I was moved by your tributes to the nurses and people who actually cared for you but the one thing that might not not have occurred to people was the knew also thanked the as you say the scientific journals in which the results were published the peer review process the the the Nobel Prize winner who'd invented the CT scanner which which it was a sort of the whole scientific enterprise which is a a marvelous example of collective human cooperation worldwide international it transcends boundaries languages it was a beautiful tribute to all those best humanity was what I felt about your that thing you read and I think we can be so proud of what our species with its different cultures has produced and we can have a tremendous loyalty to it I think that's what we want to preserve that's what we want to send into the future we want to add to that we want to improve it it's got flaws it's got problems let's fix them let's make the world better for our children and our grandchildren the the vision of purpose that comes out of this is just as inspiring in fact I think it's more inspiring I am I am more inspired by the idea that I am a living grateful part of this great fabric of creation and and exploration that is the evolutionary process that's more inspiring to me than the idea that I'm I am something at all made by God to pray to pray to Him other examples of this I think the the Human Genome Project the space exploration enterprise these are superb examples of what humanity can do when it gets together collectively with a collective purpose a collective will cooperation at the same time we have to remember that that same collective purpose has been used appallingly to to ferment Wars to build armaments to build to build mass weapons hydrogen bombs and things it is double edged and and one of the things I suppose we have to do is use our collective wisdom to deploy scientific skills in the right direction and I think we have to we have to recognize that the current democratization of information created by the Internet and the web and cell phones and the like creates a sort of chaotic condition where we we can't control information the way we used to think we could and so we'd better start thinking if you like epidemiologically about this we've got to recognize that these ideas are going to spread all over the world and the effects of the ideas may not always be what we want so we have to we have to start thinking of this sort of environmental impact of our own ideas and how to how to help people for whom these ideas are very threatening help them help them overcome their fear and see why these are this is the right way to look at the world not the wrong way I like your sort of thinking epidemiologically and thinking back to what we were talking about languages being more like bacterial evolution and indeed culture generally be more like that Terrill evolution where information is exchanged freely rather than being wholly divergent I suppose there has been a time in history when cultural evolution has been more less watertight in different countries and the Islamic civilization Christian civilization not much interchange between them a bit more like ordinary biological species that don't exchange information now we seem to be reverting to a more bacterial stage where we're Abedini illogically swapping information the internet is doing that I find that rather a cheerful thought that work that we're no longer in these isolated diverging cultures which are potentially enemies of each other the cross fertilization that we can now get could actually be a very good sign couldn't it I think it can I think I think we better hope it is because we're not going to stop that and in fact I think that's one of the main problems in the world leaders in societies with traditional cultures have never had to deal with the fact that that they couldn't they never had to deal with the fact that they're that they're the people that that they were leading had access to information as they just didn't and now I think every traditional society is facing what is really a very scary prospect just as we would if we were invaded by outer space aliens and they had a technologically very advanced culture and they also had a popular culture that was very alien to us and somewhat threatening and we saw our children just laughing it up Oh we'd feel very anxious and worried we'd be afraid that oh my gosh everything that everything that we hold dear is is going to going to go extinct and a lot of it is going to go extinct languages are going extinct at a great rate and and whole cultures are are going extinct so we shouldn't minimize the pain we should appreciate that this is a painful process at the same time we treat each other as rational knowledgeable people and people make informed choices and we have to honor that and if and if the natives want to use outboard motors well why not that's a very good idea is it going to change their culture oh yeah it's gonna change their culture tremendously in ways that we may regret and that they may regret before you leave by the way I want to show you a stunning a little bit of film that Homer graining the father of home of Matt craning who did the sanctions it's a short see it's just beautiful it's mine comes from yeah it's my it's my sort of atheist Tim it's fantastic yeah Dan it's lovely to see you looking so fit and obviously pull through so marvelously from your your operation but there's come up there's gonna come a time when we don't do we get consolation from science from Darwin from what well I guess we do a dear professor of mine just died just a few days ago and I've been thinking quite a bit about it and the idea that he lives for eternity in heaven give me any consolation at all the idea that his memory lives on with his children and his friends and his colleagues and of course he has his work but he had his work which which will live on not everybody gets that kind of legacy and I think that for those that we love that the die young or without that sort of issue the best consolation is just that they had a chance they they got to be on this stupendous planet and lived for a while and they may have suffered and I think seeing our suffering in the guise of the the whole cosmos can make it seem not quite so earth-shatteringly special yeah we suffer further you're right it's it is a consolation to have a few folks behind one all musical compositions inaudible or I suppose a great family life and there there are plenty of things of that sort I I'm rather moved by the astounding improbability of my own existence they when you think about the odds the games that are coming into into existence it is a huge privilege to be here and I sort of feel that you want to say that when people say they're born you've no business to be bored you you you you exist there are gazillions of people who could have existed in your place and then many of them would have been a lot better than you so stop whinging and the same thing when when people they moan their lot or indeed bemoaning the fact that life is going to come to an end you're lucky to have had anything at all is what I feel like like say to them oh stop moaning exactly and we're not filled with fear and trembling at the thought that there were all those years before we were alive so which would mothers-to-be all those years and we're not a lot Mark Twain I think said I I was dead for billions and billions of years before I was born and never suffered the slightest inconvenience well sure of course I wouldn't dream of saying stop whinging when somebody had just love lost a loved one of you if you've just lost your your professor there's something immensely precious about human friendship and and human closeness and to lose somebody can be like losing a limb and so that very much doesn't come under my heading of of stop winning me of course you you give thanks to what if you thank goodness for what they were and what they did and what they achieve and what they were to you but of course you warned them you weep you you wish they were still here but you get on with life you you face life and you can you get on without them you know I think gratitude is one of the wonderful human emotions and one of the great springs of I think a belief in God you get up and you look around they say I'm so lucky to be alive and there's nobody to thank yes and so you have to thank your lucky stars and then you can make well at least I can make more reason for people to other people to be thankful and that I think is that is that I think is the is the the most positive response to the fact that does there's nobody to accept our thanks I think we can do even better than that we can say that that given that there's nobody to thank being able to reflect upon the process that gave rise to you is the nearest we can come to thanking and it's actually rather better than thanking because it's a thoughtful thing to do it's an understanding a comprehending thing to do so you're not just kind of thanking your sky daddy you're you're marveling in the fact that you are here and the process that gave rise to you is the same process that gave rise to all these trees and the and the end and the earth and it's no accident that we are surrounded by by an entire ecosystem we couldn't exist without it thanking something it can be sublimated into understanding how it all happened and I think you get the same sort of comfort from that not not just comfort I think oh I think I think exactly I think yes hallelujah it's just spectacular it's so wonderful and that that sense of exaltation is if anything I think stronger in me because of my atheism then it would be if I if I were a believer I see the universe itself as a thing which is not quite what Anselm said God was our being greater than which nothing can be conceived but certainly I can't think of anything greater than the universe it's it's it's fantastic yes hallelujah for the universe and for the fact that we can understand it you'd find just once more from your things on you know somebody in science and in Darwin in the sense that I'm just lucky to be alive and to have a chance to appreciate you oh you want me to say that again but why again the technical reasons yes yeah that's here you are hiding behind that anyway you would deal personally with great loss or you'd help somebody off doing this great loss in that way so I think would be a big break yeah I mean I think when you're actually mourning a loved one I'm not sure that try to try to try something like this I mean the very fact of your morning shows the value well I can see them I mean what mortality is an is an essential part of that for selection but okay grieving there is of course they're still being born but there is a you know it's something they could take from knowledge of someone their own little dance it's given us about whatever it is about to leave ultimately on was listed live for a little bit for us in our lives things to know that we could understand that world or something like that yeah I do but I think I think we've done it better with the hallelujahs please um can we have it and then later on we can see which one kind of works more views the best bits of everything okay our own mortality is in a way no worse than as you've said what it was like before you were born or having up anesthetic I mean you might say you know dying is not going to be great so why don't we just have a general anaesthetic and stop when when they're ready for it however when were bereaved when we lose a loved one when we lose somebody who's really close somebody who's been part of our life that's terrible there's no other way around it it's it can be like losing a limb and we have to get what comfort we can and we can get it from remembering them looking at their favorite poems listening to their favorite music things like that I think there is comfort to be had from the thought that we're all part of the evolutionary process it is a process of successive deaths over countless generations that has that he is a natural selection that has given rise to to vote to the way we are we have plenty of time to anticipate it nothing will ever bring back the lost person and I can imagine sort of howling the despair at the loss of somebody that I really love but nevertheless the the boying up effect of the reflection that we are lucky they were lucky to have come into existence if they're the sort of person we want to know that they will have left the world a better place anyway we can give thanks again for them I mean give thanks to them for what they did our grief isn't it is an effect a measure of how wonderful they were exactly and we you can't have you can't have the one without the other and I think that reflection is always available you think the the I feel so terrible now I'm just just a howling with wood this bear that's that's how wonderful David's life was it's how wonderful this is yes that's yeah that's what that's wonderful but it's it's also the sort of thing you can't you know you can't say we are lone among animals in foreseeing our end but also lone among animals would be able to say before we die yes this is why it was worth being born in the first place it's not just that our improbability makes us thankful to be here because we are so improbably we're also privileged not just to be here we're privileged to belong to the human species because the human species really is rather unique among all animals we are alone in knowing that we've got to die and that's no farm I supposed to know Toton to know that to be able to foretell your end but we're also unique in knowing why it was worth being born coming into existence in the first place why are we unique well okay but I mean that that's all that hallelujah stuff again so shall I start that bit again then of course it's hard dealing with grief and dealing with loss there is some consolation to be had in the reflection of how privileged we are to be here at all statistically were so unlikely to exist it's astonishingly unlikely that you and I exist and yet yet we do that's a privilege but also we're privileged to belong to the human species because the human species is unique in all sorts of ways it's unique in knowing that our life is going to end but we're also unique in knowing why it was worth coming into existence in the first place here we are we find ourselves on this planet it's like coming awake after a an anaesthetic you you open your eyes and you say where am I in you and you you gradually learn where you are and you understand it because we're human and because we're scientists we we not only see where we are we understand why we're here and we owe it to our human history the history of ideas the history of philosophers the history of scientists perhaps in my case above all Darwin we now understand what it is that has brought us here and that is a wonderful thought that is goes a long way to removing the grief and the fear that as humans we inevitably also experience well I didn't know that they what should I lie like what you what you said at the end of unweaving the rainbow we can get outside the universe I mean in a sense of putting a model of the universe inside our skulls not a superstitious small-minded parochial model filled with spirits and hobgoblins astrology and magic glittering with fake crocks of gold whether rainbow ends a big model worthy of the reality that regulates updates and tempers it a model of stars and great distances where Einstein's noble space-time curve upstages the curve of Yahweh's covenantal bow and cuts it down to size a powerful model incorporating the past staring us through the present capable of running far ahead to offer detailed constructions of alternative futures and allow us to choose Peter and Jean meadow ax in one of their books said only human beings guide their behavior by a knowledge of what happened before they were born and a preconception of what may happen after they are dead thus only humans find their way by a light that illuminates more than the patch of ground they stand on the spot light passes but exhilaratingly before doing so it gives us time to comprehend something of this place in which we fleetingly find ourselves and the reason that we do so we are alone among animals in foreseeing our end we are also alone among animals in being able to say before we die yes this is why it was worth coming to life in the first place now more than ever seemed it rich to die to cease upon the midnight with no pain while thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad in such an ecstasy John Keats Keats and a Newton listening to each other might hear the galaxies sing hallelujah that's that's the end of my book unweaving the rainbow which I wrote in 1998 which was a kind of attempt to convey the poetry of science the title comes from Keats who complained that Newton by explaining the rainbow by unweaving the rainbow had removed all the poetry and really the point of the book is that the exact opposite is the case I think that's beautiful Richard in fact I think we should probably try to gather more such wonderful passages together and treat them as part of the literature of of science of humanism of of the Enlightenment and that's a wonderful idea I mean things like Carl Sagan right we could get that would be a really nice sort of an anthology of no scientific hymns to the universe there's your title yes yes the universe is so wonderful on its own it doesn't need a boss doesn't need a creator the fact that it can in effect create itself is wonderful enough and I can sometimes even get in a frame of mind where I think well I'm probably in some dim way that's what the human beings who've been worshipping God have been up to all along they they've they felt the gratitude they felt the wonder and they've thought well who do I thank who do I sing hymns to but you've just had couldn't I mean it had to wait until science came along to give us the understanding it wouldn't have worked if they said well I expect an explanation will come along someday isn't that wonderful that has to actually be the explanation at least the beginnings of it they haven't finished yet of course as a long way to go but it's reached the stage now where we are we can we can actually grow out of the of the earlier kind of Thanksgiving and and move on many years ago I was about to replant a hay field in my neighbor said well then you should you should plant oats as a nurse crop along with the Timothy oh what's that he said well a nurse crop like oats it comes up first and it's Hardy or and it keeps the weeds down and it protects the hay the Timothy when it comes up then once it's once it's up you can you can harvest the oats who can do what you wanted to make oat hay or sandy jim was the nest crop religion was the nurse crops for science yes and and I think it's very possible that we would never have had science if we didn't have the the sort of religious era first and we can be we can be grateful for those oats and now we've got science and it's not clear that we need to plant any more oats yeah absolutely

Channel: Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science

Views: 256,088

Rating: 4.8837991 out of 5

Keywords: Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Daniel C. Dennett, Daniel Dennett, Charles Darwin, Evolution, Science, Reason, Atheism, Biology, Philosophy, Philosopher, Conversation, Interview, Natural Selection

Id: 5lfTPTFN94o

Length: 49min 20sec (2960 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/Daemonax]

Wow, this is great, thank you.

About 1/3 through it now... I think that Dennet's term 'cranes' would be better if he used 'ramps'.

I worry when they talk about society being like a huge consciousness in that vague way, I know what they mean well enough to know that they're not talking about some kind of new age rubbish or anything telepathic, but it sounds like something that nuts could latch on to.

On the topic of 'natural selection' I've been thinking that perhaps we could come up with a new term that would be easier for even the typical creationist to understand. Perhaps something like 'natural boundaries', nothing can survive outside of these boundaries. Life forms within the boundaries, the boundaries aren't made for the life that exists in them.

That's the problem many creationists seem to have, they look at all the balance in nature. They think that the environment has been shaped for the life within it. The reality as we know is that life is shaped to fit in and survive within the environment it lives in. If we can get more people to understand that their thinking is backwards, I think that would be a great step.

That was good, thank you. Time to cut down all the oats.