Outgrowing God: Richard Dawkins in Conversation

it is such a pleasure to introduce professor richard dawkins who is a fellow of the royal society he was the inaugural holder of the simonia chair in public understanding of science at oxford and of course is a legendary and influential evolutionary biologists as well as one of the finest literary writers of non-fiction probably ever and um so if you will help me welcome richard it's such an honor to have him [Applause] plea please forgive me if i croak no longer blame it on my stroke basil ganglion on the right made me talk as if i'm tight today on up-to-date reflection i think i'll blame it on infection so if i think to groans and squawking jane i'll have to do the talking we'll we'll be speaking in rhyme for the rest of the conversation um richard you have this new book out outgrowing god which we're thrilled to be launching in your us tour here it's really such an honor for us and um you dedicate it to young people who are old enough to decide for themselves i really appreciated that dedication and i wanted to ask you was there a time when you became aware of feeling old enough to decide for yourself uh not at any sudden time the reason for saying that is that i'm very conscious of not wanting to indoctrinate that's what they do we don't indoctrinate we try to open minds try to encourage thinking for ourselves i just one anecdote about that i was once at an atheist conference in the united states and uh it was a perfectly good conference and there were quite a lot of children there children of bit of delegates to the conference and they had a crash and sort of people looking after them and giving them toys to play with and things and then at the end the chairman on the stage said all you little atheist children come up on the stage i hit the roof that's not what we do uh we rather say when you're old enough to decide for yourself so the book is dedicated to william who is my only grandchild born just a year and a half ago and to all young people when they are old enough to decide for themselves um i remember i told really the story to you that when my son had started the sixth grade um maybe it was the fourth we're trying to remember and um he came home from school and shouted have you ever heard of jesus and we burst out laughing and he's like what is this and so he runs out that day and he gets uh christopher hitchens god is not great and i had the god delusion and he begins to read and it really gave him a language to express himself and um they're very difficult books this book is also very sophisticated it's it's not a childish book it's it definitely challenges the reader to think on a very deep level well i'm glad of that i'm glad it challenges them to think um but i hope it's not difficult i mean i i hope it's written in a style that that anybody from age 12 upwards can yes it's a pleasure to read i can attest uh so were you raised with religious background well only in so far as i went to school and and most schools in britain are church of england schools in one way or another and so i had to go to chapel every sunday i ended up refusing to go to chapel by the way but um how did that go down well it was anglican so they're remarkably tolerant i mean they don't they don't really believe it themselves uh i've heard you say there are so many gods to not believe in well that's right well the the first chapter of outgoing god is about that it doesn't list all of them but it lists a fair number of them and uh evolution as i understand it when you began to learn about evolution it also had an impact on this move away from yes very much so and that's kind of why the second whole of the second half of outgrowing god is about that is about evolution yes it has a lot of science in it actually that's right in the second half it's all science no first half it's all it's all atheism one of the things that riles me often is when people say but you believe in science and that's just a kind of a faith and you have this wonderful story in the god delusion about one of your professors from oxford when you were studying biology that i think is this kind of archetypal story of the scientist behaving as a scientist and not as a believer you want me to tell that story i would love you okay um well i didn't give his name in the god delusion but he he was in fact john r baker who was a kind of elder statesman of my department and um he was a cytologist which means he studied cell biology and he did not believe that the golgi apparatus if you've done biology you'll have learned about the golgi apparatus which is in all eukaryotic cells he did not believe the golgi apparatus was really there he thought it was an artifact and so we were all taught that the golgi apparatus is probably an artifact or at least there's no evidence that no good evidence that it exists and then on a particular day when i was an undergraduate a visiting scholar from america a man called novikov came to give a lecture and at the end of his lecture john baker strode to the front shook his hand and said my dear fellow i wish to thank you i have been wrong these 15 years and we all clapped our hands raw this demonstration of the way a proper scientist should behave when he is confronted with evidence that he's been wrong that story i found so moving when i read it and i remember my own experience of discovering science i was not a student of the classics but i studied some in some philosophy and i was always frustrated that we were talking about what did some continental philosopher mean when he said and we agonized over it and there were papers and and i just felt one day i learned about the theory of relativity and nobody was saying what did einstein mean it was this gift that felt like it belonged to all of us absolutely if you're if you're if that was an attack on so-called continental philosophy i'm all for it i mean why don't we talk about continental chemistry why don't we talk about continental geology because geology and chemistry are universal i mean it's simply chemistry and geology but content but continental philosophy everybody talks about and takes seriously why yes so you have said something like um i'm not a diplomat i'm no diplomat actually i think one of my problems is that i love truth too much i said that did i yes good i'm all for it and i i think that juxtaposing science as a vehicle to alter people's impressions of the supernatural or the mythical is is a very powerful one um it gives people an alternative to thinking about um individuated faiths reconcilable um i mean i'm perhaps a little unusual in thinking that whether or not a god exists is actually a scientific question um that doesn't mean that we'll ever be able to answer it by scientific means but it is a scientific question in the sense that the universe in which we live would be a totally different kind of universe if it had been created by a supernatural intelligence rather than if it came into being by the unaided laws of physics uh you speak a lot about the wonder of science and i also think this is something that's misunderstood which is that science seems cold and bright and i remember as a child having that impression thinking science was cold and uncreative and heartless and and you really appeal to a sense of wonder in your writing i try to do that in all my books but one particular book unweaving the rainbow is especially aimed at that misunderstanding um the title comes from keats who upgraded newton for spoiling the poetry of the rainbow by explaining it and so i wanted to make the point that not only the rainbow but everything else that's beautiful becomes even more beautiful if we understand it rather than if we shroud it in self-satisfied mystery and desire not to understand we want to understand actually um uh richard feynman the great physicist put it well when he said uh when you an artist sees a red flower you're moved by its beauty when i a scientist sees a red flower i'm also moved by its beauty but but also by the knowledge that the red color is favored by natural selection to attract insects to pollinate it he got that wrong actually because insects can't see red [Laughter] but the sentiment is right red red flowers are probably aimed at hummingbirds or other vertebrate predators i mean not predators pollinators uh who who do see red as an example of that in the beginning of climbing mount improbable you talk about the fig you say there's genuine paradox and real poetry in the fig enough subtleties to exercise an acquiring mind and enough wonder to uplift an aesthetic one i just said what a great gorgeous line i couldn't do that word for word um well it it's that book starts off by saying i've just been listening to a lecture about the fig it was not a scientific lecture it was a philosophical lecture uh and the lecturer having talked a lot about all sorts of artistic ways of approaching the fig said he suspected that the fruit in the garden of eden the forbidden fruit was not an apple but a fig well i said that that kind of thing um irritates me um because it doesn't contribute anything of course there was no garden of eden so what does it mean and and of course it does mean something to a literary scholar in some sense if i may put it this way it had to have been a fig it kind of feels right that it should be a fig well i don't give a damn how it feels i want to know the truth and the truth is there was no garden of eden so um i then said that the fig actually as you just quoted um has wonders enough for i can't do it word for word like like janna can um and as i returned in the last chapter to a minute and detailed explanation of the fig and its relation to fig wasps which are fig soul pollinators it's an astonishingly complicated beautiful story much too complicated for me to remember i sweated blood over you want me to do it i bet you can't it's too complicated but um it is the last chapter of climbing mountain probable i'm pretty proud of that last chapter although i couldn't possibly write it again now because i i'd have to read up all the details again it is a wonderful passage where you describe the fig uh as an entire garden in and of itself with flowers and with wasp pollinators that some of which live their entire lives inside this garden yes the chapter is called a gardening clothes which you'll all of course recognize from the bible um it's from the song of songs sometimes wrongly called the song of solomon um a garden enclosed is my beloved um so a fig is actually a garden enclosed it's a it's a a flower garden turned inside out it's a dark garden with a little hole in the top of the of the figure and each species of fig there are about 900 separate species of fig and every one of them has its own species of fig wasp which is its sole pollinator isn't that a marvelous thought and the details differ but the pollination is done inside this dark garden enclosed and it involves for example male fig wasps doing the rounds of the garden and inseminating female fig wasps inside before they're even born so uh the male fig wasp copulates with unborn fetuses um and then when the female hatches out she flies out of this fig he looks for another one but the details differ from species to species and they're all wonderful there's this beautiful description when the female enters the fig that she recognizes as one of her kind and rips off her wings in order to get through to the inside of the figs we she will no longer need but it's quite a brutal process that is so and it's similar to the to what happens to a queen ant you know queen ants have wings and they fly out of to found a new colony and then when a queen ant has founded a new colony she loses her wings often actually biting them off um so wings are all very well if you need them to fly but they're a hindrance if you if you're going to live underground and so she she actually bites off her wings in the case of the female fig wasp the wings are torn off as she struggles through the hole in the top of the fig it's a spectacular chapter it really is it's a spectacular story and and it really invokes that wonder that you describe you use douglas adams quote i believe it's in the opening of the god delusion where he says isn't it enough that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too and that's just a perfect demonstration i guess how i miss him how i miss him yes he were friends yes um of your titles we've already mentioned some i have title envy with you you have wonderful title so uh unweaving the rainbow climbing mount improbable you have a lot of books i'm not going to listen all um and uh the god delusion and none so misunderstood as probably your most red book famous book the selfish gene it is a lesson that before you criticize a book we'd have to go further than just reading it by title only um you have to read the somewhat lengthy footnote which is the book itself this the selfish gene has been misunderstood as a statement that all living creatures are selfish was almost the opposite of that and it's misunderstood as meaning that we either are selfish or we ought to be selfish those are all grotesque misunderstandings which i suppose i should have anticipated but i didn't think that people would stop it just reading the title how naive of me you've said it should be called the selfish gene and uh with the emphasis on gene to distinguish it from the selfish organism that's right um if you think about it there was one philosopher a silly remarkably silly philosopher who began her critique by saying genes cannot be selfish any more than biscuits can be altruistic or something she went on like that and of course if you're that naive of course genes can't be selfish however i had thought that by applying the adjective selfish to the noun gene i was immune to misunderstanding because any fool knows that a gene is just dna and of course dna cannot be selfish in the same sense as a human being can if i called it the selfish elephant or the selfish lion that really would be open to misunderstanding because elephants and lions have big brains and it's perfectly feasible that they might be selfish in the same way as humans are selfish i thought i'd immunize myself to that misunderstanding by talking about the selfish gene the book is actually about how selfish genes give rise to altruistic individuals and i'd love to talk about the gene as immortal and selfish because i think that genetics has become so widely part of the conversation that that people are becoming more scientifically literate in understanding genetics and yet this is something i don't think is widely appreciated and i really got from from your books which is that the gene is striving for immortality while we are just a kind of disposable vehicle for the gene you put that's exactly right um it is the gene is immortal and one of the things i perhaps should have done is called the book the immortal gene which actually sounds a bit more poetic a bit more spiritual um than the selfish gene um and i perhaps went wrong with that but genes are immortal in the sense that because they are coded replicas in every generation of the previous generation it is theoretically possible for a gene in the sense of a stretch of code just like computer code to be immortal or at least to last for a very very large number of thousands or even millions of generations and what that means what that immortality means is that at the end of a very large number of generations the genes that are good at surviving are the ones we see and the reason they're good at surviving is that they're good at programming the development in every generation of individual bodies i call individual bodies survival machines for the for the genes that they bear so the individual is a disposable survival machine which is built by its genes passes on its genes to the to the offspring and then dies uh so the immortality of the gene is what singles the gene out as the unit of natural selection so any other alleged units of natural selection like the individual or the group is a misunderstanding uh the true unit of natural selection that which survives or does not survive in the long run is the gene rather than rival gene so-called alleles it really shifted my perspective on this it really gave me a jolt the idea and you say things that are so clearly obvious but you provoke the reader to really think about it things like you donate only your dna to your progeny you don't you don't give them one cell that comes from food legs are made of food you said exactly and and so that really is what we're passing on we owe this really to the 19th century german biologist august weissmann he didn't put it the same way i do but he put it in in the form that the genetic mate didn't know about genes but the genetic material is a river which flows through time the main river is the is the is the parent a child a grandchild a great grandchild uh stream and within each generation there's a side branch of the river which is the body of the individual what i call survival machine in that generation and it's almost as though the gene thought oh this is a good idea if i make an organism i can have faster reflexes i can sprint i can run farther a lot of the genetic changes happen on very slow time scales so it was an invention in some sense of dna to build organisms that could carry it around and help it survive that's just the way i put it and you can immediately see how open to misunderstanding that is the gene thought to itself i know what i'll do i'll build a body um i mean another another way to put it is if you take a really big body like an elephant you could say an elephant is a jean's way of making more genes that's not original with me um an elephant is a gene's way of making more genes and you could regard from a programming point of view you could regard an elephant as a gigantic computer program whose end product is the passing on of the uh instructions that that built it it's a gigantic digression uh on on the ordinary generation to generation um descent bacteria do it without bothering to build elephants they do it rather more directly and that and they're very successful at it and you'll notice my croaking voice which is probably due to bacteria but a minority of the dna in this world has discovered more elaborate and roundabout ways of propagating itself such as building this gigantic digression in the computer program which is an elephant body and as you say all of our ancestors were successful in the sense of passing on our genes so ancestors are uh rare well descendants are more plentiful that's right um i think i put it that um you can every one of us can look back on our ancestors as an unbroken chain of successful individuals where successful means that they achieved at least one heterosexual copulation and survived long enough to rear the children or whatever was necessary to propagate the genes that made them do it now let's be clear because our audience is very um sensitive you are definitely not homophobic i've heard you you have to be terribly on your guard we'll talk about twitter later um oh now you threw me off so the gene in that sense is selfish and that's the sense in which you mean that it's selfish because the gene is fighting to survive more than the organization and one of the ways in which it fights to survive is by building altruistic organisms right so i love that as the major argument in the selfish gene is that it is definitely about altruism as being in our code being being possibly an incidental or a misfired byproduct of our code but it's in our code uh yes and it would only be a misfiring in those cases where it does not actually serve the interests of the gene for example when a cuckoo uh follows its built-in program the built-in program says look after and feed any small squawking thing in your nest and other birds from other species exploit that built-in rule and in some cases it looks as though the as though natural selection has worked on the host species to avoid being fooled by cuckoos in other cases it hasn't so how do you justify this claim that a selfish gene leads to altruism and kindness in human beings well um two two ways one is that altruism towards kin such as children grandchildren nieces nephews sisters brothers and so on because they have a statistically high probability of sharing the same gene for altruism i mean a gene for being altruistic towards your niece for example has a 25 probability of being in the body of the lease that you care for so if you feed your niece then a gene that makes you feed your niece has a 25 chance of being uh of being passed on by the niece when she comes to reproduce um so that that's one way and the obvious example of that is of course the the off the parent offspring relationship parents care for their young um there's no actual genetic reason why caring for your own children should be favored any more than caring for your sisters or brothers because in both cases the odds that the gene for caring is in the body of the beneficiary is 50 but it's more convenient it's more practical to care for your own children because they're younger than you your siblings may be older than you and less in need of care and so on but genetically speaking there's no difference between caring for your own offspring and caring for your siblings and we see altruism in animal behavior as well even chimps which get a bad rap yes i mean and altruism uh doesn't have to be kin related it can be reciprocation related it can be um you scratch my back i'll scratch yours um it it can be uh where something like a chimp would would remember which individuals of the troop have done a good turn in the past a nice example of this is the work of wilkinson on uh bats vampire bats which feed on blood and the thing about these vampire bats is they feed at night uh finding a large vertebrate such as a cow to suck the blood off and it's a very hit-and-miss affair sometimes they strike lucky when they strike lucky they come back to the roost to the daytime roost gorged with with blood whereas when they're unlucky they come back to the to the roost starving and in real danger of starving to death and so reciprocation arrangements are very powerful um individuals who when they replete with blood it regurgitates some to other individuals who are starving to death then the following night it may be the other way around the individual to whom you did the good turn maybe the one who struck lucky and came back to the daytime roost caught up with blood so reciprocation is a very very powerful force in these vampire bats and wilkinson was able to show that um it it only works for bats that know each other in the individuals who know other individuals if they don't know each other they don't regurgitate they don't give blood um that's an extreme example but reciprocation is probably powerful in not so powerful but still powerful in lots and lots of species you see again the chimps that get a bad rap we had franz de waal here for a conversation on animal consciousness and i believe you've interviewed him before and spoken to him and he describes how even these very aggressive chimps will console each other they have very complicated friendships and relationships and they care about fairness and this was uh his work originally was considered radical when he first began working on these things franz duvall knows his chimps very well indeed he does not understand evolutionary theory however he thinks that people like me who promote the idea of the selfish gene are advocating selfishness for example and he thinks that by showing that chimps are nice to each other within their own troop whether that somehow goes against our theory of the self-regime absolutely not we are trying to explain altruism by the selfish gene as i've said before and you've said before um so so when he when he when he sets it up as a kind of selfishness versus altruism and the fact that chimps are altruistic to each other evidence against the selfish gene theory that is poppycock right so you would say that's evidence that it's in our genetic code actually it could be used in favor of your argument absolutely that's not just a social norm yes and of course chimps are very far from altruistic towards members of other troops they indulge in wars so just before we turn to uh the idea that we need god to be good because this is also a counter-argument if it's in our genes uh i wanted just to ask you about the argument people make about group selection which i know you don't buy so the idea that well we're altruistic not because we have an individuated selfish gene but because it's important to us to see the survival of the group that really follows from my objection to that really follows from what i said before that it's genes that are immortal so genes can program individual bodies to work for the survival of relatives and reciprocators and that we understand so the individual is a plausible vehicle for the immortal genes if you can find an example where genes influence group behavior then the group becomes a plausible vehicle as well i don't believe there are well many or even any examples where the group is a unit of vehicle in in that in that sense you you raised the excellent counter argument that if uh one person just decides to be phenomenally selfish in the group that the time scale on which their survival matters is much shorter that's right than the time scale of the group so the group could be wiped out before anyone notices that the selfishness is not advantageous to them that's right and i think about climate science yes um fortunately humans uh are can rise above all that and humans are indeed capable of looking ahead to the welfare of the group not all of us do that but at least some of us do um al gore for example um so i can assert that until humans came on the scene there was no foresight there was no looking ahead to welfare so if the survival selection on selfish genes is actually driving the species extinct which has almost certainly happened then there's no mechanism for stopping that the species just will go extinct and most species have gone extinct but humans are the one exception a wonderful exception we can look ahead we can say if we go on behaving like this then it will be terrible for the future of life on earth that's nothing that's nothing that never happened before in the history of the world humans are unique in their capacity to look ahead to the future and take steps for future welfare the selfish genes cannot do that it makes you think of the survival of the group depending on changing our attitudes towards the climate versus the individual who behave selfishly for short-term profit and denies the evidence of climate change yes it does make you think that but you have to rise above darwinism we're no longer uh doing darwinism when we say that we we've removed ourselves from darwinism i've often said that i'm a staunch darwinist when it comes to explaining why we're the way we are but i'm a passionate anti-darwinian when it comes to prescribing how to organize our society how to organize our politics when you say we don't need god to be good are you in this camp of atheists there are two one is it seems i mean there are more than two this is not subtle enough but it religion simply is not true versus religion is harmful whereas some people will hold both of those ideas at once well as a scientist i'm mostly interested in whether it's true but insofar as i think about its harmful effects um it it certainly can be extremely harmful um and i'm open to persuasion that it can be good as well but in neither case does that bear upon the interesting question of whether it's true now your good friend christopher hitchens was very aggressive very much in the uh when he says religion poisons everything it's very much in the camp that religion should be obliterated i remember you said about christopher hitchens actually if you are a religious apologist and you are invited to debate christopher hitchens decline yes well yes he he saw the abrahamic god as a kind of celestial dictator a celestial kim jong-un and uh heaven would be a kind of celestial north korea so his his driving motivation i would say was a moral and political one my driving motivation is a scientific one but i'm prepared to endorse his belief that religion poisons everything and tell me why you think religion is not required for us to be good i heard your genetic argument i think we all heard that but do you believe that this pressure if we remove the pressure of religious belief that somehow we will fall into anarchy and people will be burning up yes this is one of the things that's poisoning american political life i think that so many many people including members of congress um and people who vote for them think you need religion in order to be a moral person they cannot understand how it's possible to be a moral person without religion when you think about the ways in which religion might make you a moral person it's ghastly i mean think about it's a take take the bible for example if we based our moral values on the bible we would be stoning adulterers to death we would be well that does happen sadly it doesn't happen exactly um stoning people who break the sabbath by by picking up sticks on the sabbath day um it's possible of course to find nice verses in the bible they're pretty rare but you can find them you can cherry-pick you can go through and say well we're going to scrap that verse and that verse in that verse oh here's a nice one we'll have that one scrap this one scrap this one scrap this one oh that's another nice one but the criterion by which you decide which other nice verses and which of the nasty verses has to be extra biblical it has to be a criterion that's based on something other than the bible obviously otherwise it's circular in which case whatever that criterion is let's go straight for it and cut out the middleman which is the bible why bother to use that criterion to decide which verses you like and which verses you don't like just cut out the whole bible and decide what's good or bad on the basis of the very criterion which you would have used to decide which verses were good and which were not i know you're very i know you're very outraged by injustices that are hidden behind the cloak of faith or protected by the cloak of faith i got into a debate in anticipation of your arrival with someone where uh i brought up honor killings like in pakistan where there was a recent case of a brother who was offended by his sister's social media and strangled her and he absolutely confessed to the murder but he thought he would be acquitted because it was an honor killing and the argument i was having in this building was whether that was our business to have opinions about that given that that's his faith i i of course got very incensed but i'd rather hear you be incensed hiding behind faith as a as a reason as a justification for murdering somebody uh it is a it is a fact that there are people who say oh well it's his faith so we we can't reproach him for that it's it's his business it's it's part of their culture what a condescending patronizing thing to say it's part of their culture to murder a young woman who for example is seen in conversation with a man not her husband that's an honor killing what a patronizing condescending thing to to say oh give that a free pass we justify that we are feminists when it comes to american women but when it comes to women in pakistan it's none of our business that's their faith what a condescending patronizing thing to say why do you think evolution provokes particularly religious people into such paroxysms of hate i mean i study the origin of the universe and i don't get the hate well actually i don't want to spoil it but i don't get that degree of hate actually before we answer that question can i ask you to read some of your fan mail oh yes [Laughter] these are love letters i have i have professor richard dawkins yeah i have um uh on tour two occasions put on youtube my own readings of my fan mail uh um my hate mail and um it's the funniest thing you've ever seen these these are i've been quite startled by how many people actually like this and they're sort of begging me to do it again i'm making him do it again so jenna asked me to to look to to read a couple of new ones which we haven't already done i salute only jesus when i was praying in depth with my prayer group jesus told me that you are the devil i saw him with my own eyes eyes that were created by him he spoke to me directly he said that you do satan's evil work my fellow humble christians said that when i was praying i was floating floating off the ground that's proof that gravity is just a theory i i often say to that well why don't you go and jump off a high story just like evolution see how easy it is to prove you wrong why doesn't the moon fall down to earth if there's gravity i can feel that one i am not a monkey it's so obvious how stupid science is put that in an experiment test how hot hell is when you hopefully die soon bring your prestigious scientific tools so you can accurately measure it god will smite you i would have you burned alive but i'm a christian and that's and that's not what jesus christ would do i would only do that if i was an atheist you should be happy that i'm not an atheist because if i was i would do horrible things to you have you ever had a cactus shoved up your ass [Laughter] that's only a taste of what i like to think about doing to you you should be thankful that there is religion because if there wasn't we would come after you you are a shit-eating fascist like hitler you can go burn forever in hell while hitler you you are the kind of person who would have eaten from the tree of knowledge you are the snake who tempted eve you tempt happy christians into hell with your books and your videos of evil their blood is on your hands dick dawkins just like a blind watchmaker can't make a watch you can't make a person only god could why don't you realize it because you're a stupid atheist and i hope you die a horrible death you your worst enemy hello dawkins a few questions this is a new one now hello dawkins a few questions wanker wanker wanker haha you have to publish this in the good section oh that's because on my website we have three sections for the for the fan mail the good the bad and the ugly empty you have to publish this in the good section now because that's where i picked the category and what that means take that no cheating this will not go to the ugly section should improve your website for gaggart pwn you you dawkins your pathetic left you pathetic leftist chill for islam save the nhs destroy the nhs that's the national health service ridiculous i have to pay for old jihadists like you to get dental operations go suck andy chowdhury's dick you shill for islam i think it was is what he meant to say but anyway sorry and go rape karl marx's dead corpse fa hayek forever sign someone who hates your guts um i'd like to add one one more um i'd like to add one more which is my favorite after all those things like hope you die horrible death and things and it's this i hope you lose your watch and are late for an important [Applause] appointment well that was worth it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so um so you don't need god to be good why which is how i started to ask you does evolution in particular provoke such animosity it's a mystery to me i mean it's simply a disagreement about a scientific matter and we can agree to differ we can look at the evidence if we do look at the evidence then it's impossible for any rational purpose to deny that evolution is true white provokes such visceral horror as hatred is i suppose if i had to guess it would be that the religion that you're brought up with from your parents becomes a part of your identity so to attack your religion is rather like say you have an ugly face um and um i think it's a sort of tribal thing that there's actually good psychological evidence that what people believe uh owes more as less to their examination of the evidence and more to with the particular tribe let's call it tribe to which they belong so if you if you hear something which goes against our people our tribe our in-group then you reflexively react with hatred rather than looking at the evidence stephen pinker has made the additional point that this actually might be a good strategy in the sense that if you go against your tribe then you lose all friendship you lose all influence you lose your perhaps even your income if you're a a priest um my foundation with the center for inquiry has a thing called the clergy project we started the clergy project which is it which is a a website for clergy people who've lost their faith and become atheists helping them to escape if you're a clergy person who has become an atheist and you admit it you lose your livelihood you lose your respect to your community and so on so steve pinker makes the point that to come out in favor of evolution if your entire tribe thinks it's evil means that you actually lose a tremendous amount of what's valuable to you so it can be said to be a sort of rational strategy to embrace a falsehood if the tribe to which you belong also embraces the falsehood you discuss in outgrowing god not just altruism and kinship but maybe it's not such a hard distinction morality in general and as you said earlier when you think at the level of society you don't want to be a social darwinist you you want to think of of us being able to rise above uh some of our that's right pretty much the the final words of the selfish gene let let's rise above darwinism so if uh genetically we're given predisposed to altruism and a kind of a morality why are we still evolving socially why was there ever in any group a notion that slavery was condoned and acceptable well i mean as we've seen altruism towards kin and potential reciprocators is favored by darwinism but now we no longer live in small groups where that would have been the case we now live in big cities where the people that we meet and interact with on a day-to-day basis are unlikely to be either kin or potential reciprocators yet we still follow the rule built into us by our ancestral natural selection when we did live in small groups where everybody you meet was kin everybody you meet is somebody who could reciprocate a favor later that's not surprising because natural selection doesn't favor a kind of all-wise understanding of what's good for your selfish genes it favors rules of thumb in the brain so i mentioned the rule of thumb that enables cuckoos to exploit host species the rule of thumb they exploit is feed squawking things in your nest cuckoo puts its own eggs into the nest of say a reed warbler and the reed wobbler parent simply obeys the rule of thumb in its nervous system and so the cuckoo benefits from that and in the same way we in our large urban civilized societies obey the rule that was built into us be nice to everyone you meet because they might be they are probably kin or reciprocators that rule is still there so the fact that we tend to be nice to each other the fact that we tend to show pity compassion for each other when we never we're never going to meet again is rather like it's a kind of mistake a blessed mistake a wonderful mistake a mistake we should all approve of a mistake in the same sense as cuckoo's exploit before we came on uh somebody came up to me and said that when he was 19 he was a born-again christian he was completely consumed by it he had already been in a multi-year relationship with his girlfriend and they were on a certain path and then they discovered your writings and uh the phrase maybe i'm projecting but i believe the phrase he used was it saved us and i know that's ironic to go from born-againism and being saved to truly being saved and you must as an antidote to these uh hate mail get quite a lot of testimonials like that a lot and i'm always very very pleased to receive them i've lost count of the number of times i get letters or my website gets letters along those lines that's quite a huge impact from writing so for something like outgrowing god if you can reach younger people is that part of the motivation for having written a book for that generation yes because i am distressed by the obvious fact that those people who are religious will almost certainly have the same religion as their parents um as you said you object to atheist child you very strongly object to calling a child catholic child exactly it is a child of catholic parents but for some reason we in our society have accepted a convention that we talk about a catholic child or a protestant child or a muslim child you should be you should have your consciousness raised so that you wince every time you hear that phrase catholic child or protestant child don't ever let anyone get away with talking about a catholic child stop them and say you mean of course a child of catholic parents that child is too young to to made up her own mind as to what she actually believes about the cosmos and the origins of morality and so on speaking of the cosmos i did notice you're very well read in physics do you have a special penchant for physics beyond biology i hear you talk about physics a lot i do my best i mean i i cannot claim to understand the details of because they're so profoundly difficult and modern modern physics but um i make it my business actually the last chapter of outgrowing god talks about the remaining puzzles the remaining gaps in which god can hide uh which are in things like the origin of the cosmos because physicists don't fully understand where say the fundamental physical constants of the universe come from things like the gravitational constant they can calculate what the gravitational constants value is and they can calculate that if it was ever so slightly different there would be no stars no galaxies no chemistry and no life and so um it looks as though we are an incredibly lucky improbable accident it's not only the gravitational constant it's half a dozen other uh physical constants and um in the last chapter of outgoing god i try to make the point that this is a remaining mystery but we should take courage from darwin because before darwin came along it was an even greater mystery how living things could be so beautiful so elegant and have design apparently written all over them darwin solved the big problem and that should give us courage to believe that uh physicists will before very long perhaps solve the lesser but still profound problems of where the laws of physics come from and the fundamental physical constants come from we you're inspiring me to ask this question we now know that there are 4 000 or so exoplanets identified planets and other solar systems and the projection is in our 300 billion stars that um if one-fifth of them has planetary systems they're with multiple planets we could exceed the number of stars with the number of planets in the galaxy it is a new thing that when the drake equation was first put forward the drake equation is uh a long equation specifying with a whole series of unknowns the likelihood that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe which might communicate with us and one of the unknowns in the drake equation was the number of stars which have planets and we now know that probably most if not all stars have planets because exoplanets have been discovered by uh wonderful almost miraculously clever techniques of astronomers for example looking at the doppler shift of color of a star as a planet rotates around it so as you know rotation is a mutual system we think about the earth rotating around the sun orbiting around the sun but actually they're both orbiting around their shared center of mass so there is a slight shift in the position of the sun and of any other star caused by the planets rotating around it and that shift shows itself in the spectrum of the light either red shifted or blue shifted um see what i mean about physics and it was awarded the nobel prize recently for the first discovery of an earth size just this month of an earth-sized planet around us a main star a typical star well this this kind of discovery meant that a major unknown in the drake equation could be filled in and it increases the likelihood that there are other life forms um elsewhere in the universe they could be very rare i mean it could be that there are shall we say only a billion other life forms a billion is a tiny number compared to the number of planets that we now know there are in the universe so if there are only a billion life forms the chances are that they're too spaced out too rarified spaced out to ever encounter one another which is rather a sad thought so do you believe that natural selection and darwinian evolution will be universal across the universe in terms of dictating the emergence of life i would stick my neck out and say that however alien and strange and unknown life elsewhere in the universe there's one thing we can be confident of it will be darwinian life it will be based upon some version of darwinian natural selection and that means some version of genetics almost certainly not dna probably some other self-replicating molecule that does the same job as dna but it will be darwinian that that's my i put my shirt on that guess but it is only a guess that's a a beautiful sentiment when we think about evolution on our planet to our place and the larger scheme of the cosmos which i think you do beautifully at the end of this book i want to give our guests a chance to ask questions but i feel that you have something on that paper i just wanted yes so we're going to have a book signing uh with richard we ask that you take no picture selfies and don't ask for personal inscriptions the reason is that we won't be able to get to the end of the line before richard has to leave and so we want to give everyone a chance to to get a signed book and richard has a way of putting it i just made this out before we came on no selfies and no dedication that requires an explanation i'm not a lazy reprobate just trying to be considerate you will applaud the rule if you are at the back end of the queue thank you [Applause]

Channel: Pioneer Works

Views: 199,299

Keywords: richard dawkins, hate mail with richard dawkins, richard dawkins outgrowing god, richard dawkins janna levin, richard dawkins panel talk, is there a god, religion richard dawkins, why there is no god, why there is a god, science and god, science explain religion, science explain god, god explainer, religion explainer, janna levin panel talk, physics on god, was jesus real, is god real, can you explain god, richard dawkins physics, richard dawkins biology, janna levin

Id: D9Sf2eNVWVs

Length: 57min 21sec (3441 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021