Richard Dawkins at the University of Maryland

interviewing dr. Dawkins is dr. Christian Castillo Davis he has a PhD in evolutionary biology from Harvard University he got his poo stock at Harvard University and statistical genomics and he continues to perform research in these fields on campus and serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Biology so you guys taking biology maybe you'll run into him in one of your classes so with that I'd like to welcome dr. Castillo Davis and Richard Dawkins all right hi everyone it's so nice to see so many people coming out for an event like this this like to say it's my sincere pleasure and honor to introduce Richard Dawkins about twenty years ago I read a book that changed my life that book was a Selfish Gene and like a lot of people the ideas in that book inspired me to learn more about biology more learn more about white as we're here you know what it is that human beings are Richard Dawkins has a prolific an exciting canon of works where he well what can we say about what Richard Dawkins has done I can say for me basically inspired me to study evolutionary biology and to make that my life's work but what he has a an ability to do is an ability to push the boundaries with metaphor to make complex and sometimes very non intuitive ideas accessible to people just like you and me and in fact when I was very young I read those books inspired me to study this field of evolutionary biology later on in life what is so powerful about the ideas that Richard Dawkins talks about in in the way that he presents evolutionary biology has to do with an unapologetic view about examining what it is that natural selection is and how it has actually shaped us and to think about these things in a way that we take it home we take it to heart I know for myself I learned about evolution in high school somewhere around the you know somewhere in there maybe middle school my parents talked to me about it but I never really appreciated what it meant on a personal level as a human being you know that this is a force that that created us organically and it's a very difficult and intuitive concept to believe in I think because of the concepts of time and mutation a lot of things that were not familiar with but through Richard Dawkins work in The Selfish Gene later on the blind watchmaker he's basically found a way to make these difficult and counterintuitive ideas accessible to people like you and me and so the power of natural selection to explain things was taken to great to great heights I guess in the in the last five or ten years because of the genomics revolution so a lot of the ideas that we discuss and evolutionary biology in evolutionary theory a lot of things that Richard Dawkins just in his books we're at a time now where we may be able to get some answers genetic answers because of the genome project about some of our evolutionary origins about some of the features and traits that make us who we are and how we are the way we are physically and behaviorally and if you want to understand that from an organic perspective the only way to understand it scientifically that we have right now that is very powerful is Darwinian theory and process of natural selection and the extension of these ideas beyond the realm of the individual and below the level of the individual so I will stop talking there and say like you to please give me please join me in giving a warm welcome to Richard Dawkins thank you okay is this working here can everyone hear me okay yes all right hi so thank you very much for coming we're very excited to have you here I thought it might be a nice thing to do to start off talking a little bit about how you became interested in biology and then evolution and when it occurred to you as it did to me that this this very powerful idea is something central to shaping biological diversity the very powerful idea you refer to didn't really resonate with me until I was an undergraduate so I got into biology more or less by accident and then only when I became an undergraduate first in my second year I started to get really really excited about the Darwinian idea because as you said you're yourself it is the explanation for us for all living creatures for everything I venture in the universe which is conflicts because the world of physics is relatively simple it's very difficult to understand that it's not complicated it's not complex complexity pretty much means biology more the artifacts of biology and on this planet the only way we know for complexity of that sort to arise is evolution by natural selection and I would conjecture it's the only way that it happens in the entire universe but of course I can't prove that it is therefore enormous ly exciting enormous ly important because it is utterly shattering to the imagination to think of what has happened on this planet instead of just being rock and water and sand and ice and the sorts of things which are on rocky planets all over the universe on this planet and possibly some others on this planet have organized complexity on a stupefying scale and just the just to look at a single cell of a living creature a single cell of a bacterium and it blows your mind to think how complicated it is and we are many many orders of magnitude more complicated than that and the Darwinian process is the process which has given rise to that complexity including us with our nervous systems our brains which are so highly developed that we have finally become capable of understanding the process that gave rise to us I think for a lot of people it's very difficult to believe that the complexity comes from random physical forces and I remember reading in the blind watchmaker an analogy you had about a primitive person walking along a beach you know looking at the organization of the sand and the rocks you see that the bigger rocks are toward the water and the finer sand and pebbles are further up in there sometimes there's a line of garbage where I grew up but so you might be tempted to think that you know that that the Creator is organized and tidy and likes to have things in this way but we know now that the the creation of those patterns of organization from disorder is created by wave action you described in the book so how is it that um that this process you know in that way I think it's very easy for people to understand what's the central thing that people need to understand - to understand how human beings and the complexity that that we sort of entail came to be well I think we have to be very careful when we use the word like random because you just used the word random by which you meant undirected by which you meant not steered by any kind of conscious deliberate design but of course if it were random in the sense of taking a whole lot of bits and shaking them up at random and seeing if they fell into into place it very much is not random in that sense the the waves producing ripples on of sound or garbage on the the shore might be in a sense random in that sense but natural selection is a non-random process in the sense that it is cumulative over many generations of the waves shuffling the sand grains process the waves shuffling the sound grades you could think of as a kind of one generation a random process but natural selection cascades those processes into many succeeding generations where each one is selected so that it's a little bit better than the one before where better is defined simply as better at surviving and once you've got that and it can only come about through the existence of something equivalent to a genetics a self-replicating a self copying process once you've got that then cumulative non-random survival over many cumulative generations can give rise to the prodigious complexity that so impresses us another example that you use the idea that randomness is involved in this process it creates diversity and complexity seems counterintuitive and the wonderful example that you use is basically a sort of thorn in the eye of people who say well you know randomness you could write all the complete works of Shakespeare you have enough monkeys bashing away at a typewriter randomly but as you pointed out the selection doesn't work that way it actually preserves the beneficial mutations when they do come up and so there's the example where you you have the phrase from Shakespeare he thinks that like a weasel and if you wait and randomly bash to try to get that sentence it's very improbable statistically but if you preserve and I think the example from your book was your son randomly bashing way as soon as he hit a letter that was correct we preserve it and go on it only took about 40 generations right that's right I mean that's that's the the key point that the monkeys bashing away at a typewriter would take almost forever to produce even a single phrase of Shakespeare but if you have a sort of ratcheting process such that each generation breeds the following generation and of the offspring produced the ones that are most perfect in this case most resemble the target phrase are the ones that do you breed from in the next generation then it only takes about 40 generations to produce the phrase that I chose which was Shakespeare's methinks it is like a weasel that's just a very short phrase now that of course is a highly artificial example because it is aiming at a particular target right which natural selection doesn't do or if it does aim at a target the target is an extremely general one which is simply survival so there's no sense in which there's a kind of distant target on the horizon like a phrase of Shakespeare there was never the human frame the human body as a distant target of evolution other people think that that that somehow was the case absolutely not they're millions of independent results of natural selection none of them could ever be called a target the only criterion is survival strictly genes survival so this idea of genes as being the unit of selection is something that you've championed throughout your career what implications do you think that house for the study of evolutionary diversity well it's really a way of defining how the process has to be this process of non-random survival non-random ratcheting depends upon there being something that is capable of surviving and genes are the only things in the biological sphere which are capable of surviving in the sense required which is that the they make accurate copies of themselves very very accurate copies of themselves but not quite perfectly accurate there are occasional mistakes and so as you know it's these occasional mistakes these random mutations which give rise to the diversity which can lead to to improvement but nothing else in the hierarchy of biological organization has this property of being potentially immortal genes do genetic information not the genes themselves I mean they're the physical matter of DNA decays very rapidly but the information contained in the sequence of bases in DNA is potentially immortal it can go on for hundreds of millions of years mostly it doesn't but potentially it can and therefore there is a very real difference between those stretches of DNA which do go on for a very long time and those would don't and that is natural selection and nothing else in the hierarchy of life has that property of potentially going on forever which therefore makes the difference between those that do go on forever and those that fail because they don't cut the mustard so one of the one of the wonderful analogies that we have for replicating systems like that that it's brought up in many of your works are for example replicating create clay crystals there are things that have a property of replication where they're abundance is dictated by their fidelity of copying and the rate at which they do that and that's just simply what happens right and the way that a certain type of clay crystal can predominate and sort of end up taking over a bank if you will of a river is very similar process in this way with the exception that the replication machinery there is not very antistick 8um I mean crystals are a very nice case because because crystals grow by atoms getting out a solution and joining up in just the correct places in the crystal that's already there and so whatever structure is already there guess gets gets replicated however in order to be an interesting replicator by interesting I mean biologically interesting Darwinian ly interesting there has to be a as a possibility for variation it's it's not enough to say the atmosphere is full of oxygen atoms and so you might as well talk about the selfish oxygen atom as The Selfish Gene there has to be a sense in which a pattern or something is replicated with variation with the possibility of error they quit under mutation such that some variants some products of error some variants are more likely to survive than others and that of course DNA has par excellence and the clay crystals you're talking about according to the Scottish chemist Graham can Smith have a kind of rudimentary version of that because a crystal that for some reason develops a glitch there's a mistake in the in the in the way in which the atoms fall onto the existing crystal and if that mistake is then repeated forever after or until there's another mistake that does have kind of a rudimentary version of the of the property but it doesn't become biologically interesting until there's a population of alternative varieties such that there can be non-random success non-random survival of some variants rather than other variants can Smith actually went so far as to suggest that clay crystals in organic clay crystals could have been the forerunner of life because he his writing books about the origin of life correctly recognized that the key stage in the origin of life would have to have been we don't know what it was but it would have to have being the origin of the first self-replicating self-copying entity in the sense in which I've just said DNA cannot have been that original replicator because DNA is what Ken Smith called a high-tech replicator it needs too much infrastructure to to copy itself so he he tried to think of what might have gone before the eventual takeover as he put it by DNA so he saw DNA as a sort of late to usurper of the role of self replicate of genetic molecule and he saw as the predecessor of DNA he saw in organic clay crystals and he makes kind of reasonably plausible case but it's not it's not a case that's widely accepted by other researchers on the origin of life and this is fascinating as it seems then that there are intermediate molecules that are maybe on the way to becoming full-blown life like replicating replicators in the sense of they create life yes yes I mean it nowadays it's more fashionable to talk about RNA as being the possible intermediate in that sense and I think it's a very interesting idea because if you ask the question why in what sense is DNA too much of a high-tech replicator one crucial point is that DNA requires protein enzymes in order to replicate itself and the enzymes that are needed to help DNA to replicate itself have to be made under the tutelage of DNA itself so as a catch-22 you can't have have one without without the other enzymes are mostly proteins in in the in the world in which in which we know and enzymes have their catalytic properties because of their physical shape and the physical shape of a protein molecule or globular protein is determined by the the one dimensional order of amino acids which caused it to coil up into a tight knot shape and the shape of the coil the shape of the of the knot in which it falls is determined by the one-dimensional sequence of amino acids which in turn is determined by the one-dimensional sequence of DNA bases now it's the three-dimensional shape of the protein molecule that gives it its catalytic in enzymic properties RNA has some of the qualities of of an enzyme it can do the same job as protein to coil up into shapes which which have a catalytic function and RNA also has not so good as DNA but it has some of the properties of DNA as a replicator so modern life on this planet is a partnership between DNA which is a brilliant replicator but a hopeless enzyme and protein which is a brilliant enzyme but a hopeless replicator and they therefore need to be in partnership together but RNA is a moderately good replicator and a moderately good enzyme and therefore the thought is that before the partnership between DNA and protein got going RNA could have stood on the stage alone doing both jobs and then you've got a kind of bifurcation of the function of the functions later so the original thinking of can Smith is still there but instead of having inorganic crystals as the forerunner we have RNA as the suggested forerunner and that's a currently very fashionable idea the self catalytic activity of RNA is fascinating that makes it you know this idea of the RNA world that was a pre DNA biology one of the things we spoke about earlier eating with education and talking about evolution and having people appreciate that from an early age because it does sort of form the scaffolding upon which you can hang a lot of facts in biology when I learned biology I learned evolution sort of last I mean I first of all I learned about cells of and cellular chemistry other things like that how on earth can you appreciate cells and cellular chemistry without knowing what what it's all for in how can you learn it how can you even begin to learn biology without starting off by by an idea of what it's all for where it all comes from what the drove it is and so I would turn the to the textbook order in which biology is taught where very often evolution is left to the last chapter make it the first chapter and teach it young because it's not actually that that difficult so over the years I've had an ability to an opportunity to appreciate the ideas in your books and to understand that that not teaching evolution early has pretty big consequences so one of the things I remember reading as a graduate student was they had finished the the crystal structure of the protein that does a translation of genes into proteins and it is made up of many many globular proteins and it's very complicated structure it also has catalytic RNAs that are are part of it and the big question was you know is it the catalytic RNAs that do the translation that turned the DNA into protein or is it the RNA the proteins are RNA the Scott you know and in the paper where they describe the crystal structure and they say they say the catalytic RNA is the actual thing that that connects together the amino acids during translation and this is in support of the RNA world theory was not mentioned at all in the paper interesting yeah and you know that's the kind of thing is where we become so specialized yes in these different areas yes evolution seems to be one thing that can tie it yes so they just don't make that to that connection right um well how earlier should we start teaching people about evolution about six or seven I think well I mean you could certainly teach about evolutionary history at a very very young age because you can you can ask a child you say well you know who your parents parents were they your grandparents and and they must have had grandparents and you can kind of go back back back back back and ask the child to imagine what their 10,000 greats grandfather looked like and then their million greats grandfather looked like and you can gradually show the child a picture of what your million greats grandfather looked like or your your 200 million greats grandfather who would have been some sort of a fish and that's that's easy enough to get across and but but but then you need you need to to point out that it's actually not something a little bit counterintuitive here because there was never a sudden change from efficient to something that wasn't a fish if you were to you could easily amount ask a child to imagine getting your your your father his father his mother hit her mother her mother going back back back back back line them up in a great big line stretching for thousands of miles and you walk along this line going back back back to the fish to the two hundred million greats grandfather in that line would you come across an individual who belonged to a different species from its parents or its children that every single stage the successive members of the chain would be all but identical to the one before the land after as identical as parents and children ever are and yet because there's such an enormous number of generations imperceptibly by gradual degrees as you walk backwards in time you would make that the whole gamut of change from human to fish while then while it would never be a perceptible change in any one generation at all and people might find that counterintuitive until you point out to them children might find a counterintuitive attune till you point out you were once a baby then he became a toddler and then you became a what you are now but there never was a moment when you woke up and suddenly ceased to be a baby and became a toddler there never will be a moment when you ceased to be a child and become a teenager never will be a moment when you cease to be a teenager and become an adult there will be your 18th birthday when you're recognized by law as an but that of course means nothing you don't suddenly wake up and say oh I'm an adult finally and and yet we changed through through life that the changes is too slow to be perceptible just as the movement of the our hand of a watch is too slow to be perceptible but if you come back and look at it every now and again you see that it's moved but that should be any of that should be it should be easy to get across to accelerate and we have wonderful analogies for this idea of continuity in deep time that that that we can reference like the development of a human being you spoke then that you know there's a continuity but there's change there the concept of how much time has elapsed though - for these things to happen why they're so hard for people to appreciate well it's it's so off the scale with respect to at any time that we're used to dealing with mean where we are our lifespans are measured in decades and we are asked to I mean even studying history we can cope with centuries all right but by the time we get back to the ancient Egyptians or the Sumerians or the Babylonians we kind of get a tingling up the spine this is sort of lost in the mists of deep distant time it's nothing compared to evolutionary time and we've got to start learning to deal with not just millions of years but hundreds of millions of years and the human mind is not evolved to cope with time on that sort of scale we can do it by analogy and as you've said I mean the analogy of the developmental time of a human you couldn't analogize it to a clock as one way of doing it and you know that if you say that since the origin of life if it's one 24-hour clock what does it tell you somebody probably knows the answer humanity came on the scene what if I five minutes before midnight or something of that sort a favorite one of mine which is not my own one that I've adopted is is you hold out your arm and and you reckon the origin of life is is where your microphone is and then and the president is uh is out at the tip of your fingers and it's it's all bacteria out to about there and the dinosaurs are about there and human fossils that people like Lucy come at about that way or tip of you near the tip of your fingernail and the whole of human history recorded human history the Egyptians the Babylonians the Hebrews the Romans the Greeks the Middle Ages the whole of recorded human history falls as the dust from one stroke of the nail file this idea of I think this is what makes evolution so difficult for so many people that's one of the things they know that time spent is what time spent another a wonderful analogy that you use so everyone knows a koala and a Great Dane right you know that these are animals that are derived from a wolf and one of the great analogies that we use an introduction evolution course that I teach here is from one of your books I think it's blind watchmaker we say if you go from a wolf to a chihuahua and that's one human step that's about 2,000 years of human artificial selection not natural selection but just to get an idea that's kind of a radical change right like this wolf to a little thing great thing and if that's 2,000 years you ask us to imagine what would it be to walk through the history of life how many steps which you have to take and anyone have any idea so people in the class candidates you would have to walk from London to Cairo right and this is just something that I can't imagine doing that the I think the point the point there is is that the the the difference between a wolf and a chihuahua is a pretty substantial difference and if if that can be achieved in what what did you say a couple of points that one step if that can be achieved in in one step wolf to Chihuahua how much could be achieved on this the long slog from London to Cairo of course as you said the the wolf to Chihuahua is artificial selection not natural selection but there's really no difference I mean it's just differential survival of genetic types so whether it's not official selection on natural selection artificial selection shows the power of the principle of selection how you couldn't what can be achieved by selection going from wolf to Chihuahua in in one step where the whole of evolution is that is them is the march from from England to to do car Kairos so if we can place ourselves in that situation by way of these analogies why do you think it continues to be so difficult for people to appreciate that we have you know I I struggle myself in my own life I mean I teach this to students and I have spoken to about with my family for example but my mother says you know a human heart is made of the same interior less a chimpanzee heart I don't see the difference you I don't see what's going on you know I don't see what the big deal is you know somehow we're made of the same compounds or materials but when I take away from well I just with left with this essentially that the reason that the heart in me has the same shape the morphology and it works the same as and my mother's I inherited it from her and the reason HM Panzi heartbeats the same as a human heart in similarly not the same right it's because we inherited it from actually the same grandmother just as you said in this beautiful march of life that that individual existed at one time it's a common ancestor in this great chain of unbroken continuation from a fish to a person what does a genome look like how much does it change from generation to generation is it a very radical change or it's also Internet in the in the short term it's not a radical change it's it's just changes in the the actual phases in in particular particular genes there are of course larger changes because numbers of chromosomes change the size of the genome is different in different lineages and therefore at some point the genome does get larger or smaller it gets larger by gene duplication whole chunks of genome can get split off and parked somewhere else in the genome and that's how the genome can get larger and when that happens the different chunks that once upon a time were replicas of each other can then start evolving in different directions doing different jobs so for example there are a number of different hemoglobin molecules which clearly have the same ancestry they're all descended from a common molecular ancestor they split apart into different parts of the genome and went their separate ways in different parts of the genome doing different jobs and that that's a model for what happens over and over again and that that's how the genome becomes becomes bigger and more and more complicated but going back to the hearts I think I ought to qualify what I said when I said that as you go back back back in time there's never a moment when there's a radical step you do have to remember that that I mean we have a four chambered heart and fish have a two chambered heart so at some point there must have been I mean you it's it's not easy to imagine a two and a quarter chambered heart and so there must be a certain number of major steps of that type another example would be snakes have an enormous number of vertebrae but different species of snakes and all snakes have made many more vertebrae than we do but different species of snakes have different numbers of vertebrae and you can't imagine a snake that has that goes from 130 B to 101 vertebrae by going through an stage of a hundred and a half vertebrae so there must have been a mutant that had at least a whole number increase in the number of vertebrae at some stage in evolution maybe even more that's not actually as difficult to imagine as you might think because although each vertebra is complicated it's got the the the vertebral Birds itself has got ribs it's got muscles that go Whitten segmental muscles nerves blood vessels all built on this on this segmented repeat patent but because the pattern is there and because the genome already has the capacity to build a segment building a second segment is a very easy thing to do and so and nowadays the embryology of that is very well understood so-called Hox genes there are fish that have four eyes instead of the usual two eyes they have the usual two eyes looking out that way the way a normal fish does and they have a couple more eyes looking downwards and we can conjecture that this fish suffers from predation predators coming from from below and so it may be benefits by having this extra pair of eyes looking looking downwards but the evolution of the extra pair of eyes I don't think it's would be reasonable to suggest that it went through a stage of having 2.1 eyes 2.2 eyes 2.3 eyes etc it probably happened in a single step and again that's not difficult to imagine because the embryo logical and genetic machinery for making an eye is already there and so probably all that had to happen was the duplication of a Hox gene that said build two eyes instead of one using all the same machinery as you use to build it to build it before so that I wanted to put it that in as a kind of qualification exception wonderful tragedy this idea that there do gene duplications for example at the level of the genome which is in in a way this is the blueprint of how to make a human being or how to make a cabbage or an octopus right Rudy Roth has a wonderful analogy says you know this if this manuscript is the thing that we need to modify to improve you know it's kind of like trying to improve evolution is like trying to improve an engine while it's still running you know it has to perform because you want to tinker so question is how can you do that seems very difficult and what I'm going to do that is a duplicated gene so as you know we have hemoglobin binds oxygen there's alpha globin beta globin they have origin as genes that duplicated and diverged and function and now they work together to carry oxygen that's exactly the kind of thing that you see happening all over the place now that we've been able to sequence genomes we've seen massive evidence for gene duplication and this allows one to tinker essentially while still having the engine it's not quite as bad as still having the engine running of course because evolution is not a change of one adult body into another adult body goes back to a single single celled egg first and so then the new embryo develops and the engine in a sense stops in each generation but but that's a quibble I mean the analogy is a very good one so then if this process of the Replicators and if the information being can accumulate in via vivvy natural selection in this cumulative selection fashion what does that say about the probability or the possibility of life on other planets would it have a similar character would it have to be a replicator you think well that to me like yes I am we've only got a single sample of life to look at the one that we have on this planet and every every living thing that's ever been looked at on this planet is astonishingly the same at the machine code level we all run the same machine code it's not as though some creatures of IBM pc's and summer max I mean they're all they're all the same but but it's all kind of frills on the on the surface that makes the difference between between them if we start moving into other planets to exobiology then we have no idea we can only guess we can make informed guesses as to how similar it would have to be would it I mean that you asked would would have to be something equivalent to replicate some equivalent to jeans my very strong guess I put my shirt on the answer being yes that what whatever else you can say about life elsewhere in the universe if there is life elsewhere in the universe and I bet there is it's got to have a genetics I suspect it's got to be digital genetics not analog genetics DNA is digital it's not binary it's quaternary but it is digital and that gives it the extreme high fidelity which seems to be required in order for for selection to work so let's put our shirt on digital genetics does it have to be DNA well I doubt it I I said no no enough chemistry to be able to say but Mike my guess is there probably are other kinds of molecules that could do the job although I don't know that for certain and I would throw it out as a challenge to chemists here to try to imagine an alternative to DNA an alternative chemical system which could do the job of providing a replicator plus a great variety of coded information would there have to be something like protein or least enzymes I think there probably would I think there's got to be something capable of no I mean maybe that's being - that's being too unimaginative maybe maybe a chemist could produce imaginative schemes that didn't involve protein you can go on asking these questions would there would there have to be multicellularity I mean large creatures on our planet are all made of lots and lots of cells and all the cells have the same basic plan we don't know of a way of becoming large other than making lots and lots of cells but does that have that inevitable if that's something that has to be true of all life or is that something that just happens to be true of life on this planet I don't know the answer to that question does there have to be something equivalent to sex well no because not every creature on this planet has sex you can go on asking these questions where in every case what you're asking is how much of what we know about our kind of life had to be so because there's no other way of doing it and how much just happens to be so on this planet does it have to be so that you get a life cycle in which in every generation it returns to something like a single-cell something very small and simple or could you imagine a life form which evolved by just changing rather like getting a bit of clay and kneading it molding it into into shape my guess is it has to be something like what we have which is a return to a single-cell origin in every generation again maybe I'm being too unimaginative it the day when we first discover another life form on another planet will be if I'm still alive would be the most exciting day of my life it would be in the most astonishing thing to live through and I fear it's very unlikely I believe there is life on other planets but the reason for that belief it is the it is the extraordinarily large number of planets that there are available but the trouble is that the other side of that is that the universe being so huge the islands of life dotted around through the universe may be so spread out so sparse that although they all have life these these islands they may be so so widely separated from each other that they never meet never had not only never never meet face to face but never even meet by any kind of detectability so on this planet you know we had this question of historical contingency about whether we would ever be able to communicate with any intelligent life but there's no sense that the organisms evolving another planet would evolve to recognize for example their own asteroids I mean um I think it's it's vanishing me unlikely that that we would ever be visited by creatures from outer space mean if they exist that there's such enormous reaches of space why would they bother to come here but if they if they had radio technology then that's a better possibility because that can be broadcast outwards in all directions and ever increasing sphere of bathing in in raid radio activity it's not I'm sorry I'm great with Radio sate signals but you raised the question of of how we would know or how they would know I I think well the the the radio signals that would be picked up would be non-random probably in an interesting way and they could even be tailored to be deliberately labeled as the product of intelligent life I mean the sort of science fiction speculation I mean I think Carl Sagan advocated broadcasting prime numbers so if you if you send out a signal that goes 1 2 3 5 7 etc going up through the through the prime numbers it's all but impossible to think of a non-biological source of prime numbers and so if a life-form wanted to advertise its own existence then a simple way of doing it would be to broadcast a cycle of prime numbers and that would pretty instantly label it as as living so the very non-randomness that is sort of in evidence for life it would be the very thing we used to keep yes I guess that way that's that's right and there's something rather special about prime numbers because other sorts of non-randomness cannot generate yes I mean it prime numbers probably actually demonstrate intelligent life as well as just life not quite you can just about imagine a non intelligent origin of prime numbers and the main one that's been suggested is cicadas you know that cicadas have plagued ears and in America I think there are two separate cycles as is there a 17-year cicadas and a thirteen year is it a nineteen year 13 and 17 well those are prime numbers and there has been a suggestion that natural selection has shaped secada life cycles to plague in prime numbers of years to make it impossible or very difficult for predators to evolve their life cycles to be in synchrony with the with the Secada life cycles so if the cicadas say had their plague ears in every four in every four years then it would not be that difficult for natural selection to favor a predator that also had a four year a four year cycle or if it was eight years every other voice cycle that or something of that sort but thirteen years would be a very difficult number to come up with and seventeen even more even more difficult so there has been a suggestion that cicadas have I have arrived at their cycle times of 13 years and 17 years as a as an adaptation but at the end of an evolutionary arms race against similarly cycling predators so that's that's one way very far-fetched way in which prime numbers can be generated at the in principle by a non intelligent source is still a life source there so it seems that this idea of the replicators is so profoundly important to science and to understanding our place in the universe that people have put it up there this idea of evolution with a challenge to our very understanding of who we are with in comparison example the heliocentric view of the solar system with the Sun that you know versus the geocentric view that we're at the center but I think I would argue that it's even more unsettling and more sort of it really zooms us out from our place in the universe yes we feel and right I mean I think I think they both been very salutary lessons to humanity and the dethroning the earth as the center of the universe must have been quite a shock but showing where we come from showing that it's possible let alone plausible and indeed true that living things like us come from purely physical forces and also I mean another thing that's unsettling is showing that we are cousins of monkeys the Victorians didn't like that idea and I think some modern people too you hear people saying well I'm not descended from no monkey you may be but but so that's one of the challenges we have a wrap up now on Fortune's we have to if the room back what I would like to just ask you real briefly here at the end say um a lot of people here are interested not just in the extension or understanding of evolution and understand our physical place in the world a full appreciation of the complexity of these ideas but they're interested in your later work where you take things a step further to say not only is this the organic reason for our existence but this is a reason for example perhaps not to believe in other points of view such as you know some religious ideas because provenance and in their explanatory ability is in conflict in some ways with this story that we have from science it's grossly wasteful isn't it I mean the when you've got a beautiful idea a beautiful story that tells you how we get to be the way we are the complex way we are from simple beginnings by utterly explicable sensible step-by-step process to suddenly say oh but I want to believe that there's a supernatural being on top of all that what a wasteful idea what a profligate superfluous so there's this idea about false fixed beliefs that you talked about in The God Delusion and something that I think a lot of people have access to information now we try to understand decide for ourselves what's true and what's real and who's an authority so to what extent do you think that the Darwinian point of view or the scientific method is a useful tool to find truth I mean it's do you think that that is that that we apply science to fly planes and to make Teflon and it seems to me that you're arguing we should apply that same rigorous point of view to other aspects of human thinking yes I think it's I I would agree with Daniel Dennett that it's arguably the best idea anybody ever had I mean he if that's of course that's arguable I mean Einstein Newton Galileo but what I think one thing you can say about the Darwinian idea is that it is has an astonishingly high ratio of what it explains divided by what it needs to postulate in order to do the explaining it's a very very powerful idea in that sense that you you only need to postulate really high fidelity replication that's all that's all you need to get to get it going and once you've got that you can explain the whole of life all the complexity of of life so it's a very very powerful idea but an exceedingly simple idea need and an exceedingly simple idea it's it's very simplicity at the bottom of the ratio which divides into the complexity of what it explains and that simplicity not only makes it a powerful idea it also makes it in principle very easy to understand and so educationally it's a very very powerful a very valuable educational tool because it it it can it can convey what a what a powerful idea really really is this theory of general relativity is another very powerful idea but it's very hard to understand and so it may be a less of a vital educational tool that we can use on on a white on a white public I mean that the downside of that is that but because relativity is so hard to understand though it doesn't arise the same skepticism as as evolution by natural selection because as Jacque mana the great French biochemist said the trouble with natural selection is that everybody thinks he understands it alright well I think that's a wonderful place to stop I'm fortunately have to wrap things up so I think at this point we'd like to open it up to questions from the audience can you talk a little bit about the the origin of what we think of as in general morality is it a evolutionary construct simply because we need order to form communities at a human level or do we have certain truths that we can get at and how do we get around what David Hume described as kind of this is a dichotomy problem well the the is alt problem is the one where he says you can't say that what is is right you can't say that just because something is the case that makes it morally right I suppose that yeah I won't say more about that but the question of where morality comes from I think you can make a very good case that morality has its origins in the natural selection of brains in a world where we lived in small tribal groups where the tribal the small tribal groups were closely related Kin Kin groups which as those of you who knows something about natural selection will know that tends to favor altruism sympathy cooperation and also where the members of the small tribal group knew each other individually and were like you to meet each other again and again throughout their life that also there's good Darwinian theory to explain why that fosters cooperation and altruism and so under those conditions our brains would have been shaped to have a kind of lust to be good in the same way as our brains were shaped to have a lust for sex because that's that's more obvious but but just as the lust for sex remains even when its reproductive function is cut off from it as when we use contraception we still have the last similarly we now live in a completely different world where we no longer live in small tribal groups and therefore we are no longer surrounded by kin we're no longer surrounded by potential reciprocation of the who we know throughout our lives just as we haven't lost our sexual lust so we also haven't lost our lust to be good so that would be a perfectly respectable and you could elaborate on that and others have done so a perfectly respectable Darwinian basis for immorality but then a lot more comes in after that in in in history cultural evolution the development of laws and customs and moral philosophy indeed so I think that the moral sense is a very complicated amalgam of evolutionary history and and cultural history one thing that strikes me there is forcibly about it is that it does in detail change from decade to decade there's something I call the shifting moral zeitgeist the things that we consider right and wrong now a rather different from even what people consider right and wrong a hundred years ago if you go back to the Middle Ages it becomes even more more different and that seems to be an advancing change which happens regardless of whether we're religious or not it's something that in everybody who lives in the early 21st century has a broadly similar feeling of what's right and wrong we all agree that slavery is wrong we all agree that sexual discrimination is wrong and so on whereas a hundred years ago they didn't believe that sexual discrimination was wrong and two hundred years ago they didn't believe that slavery was wrong and this sort of changes is happening all the time and it happens in parallel on a broad front and it doesn't seem to anything to to religion which is quite interesting thank you and I wanna thank you for for being here tonight and this this question I am steering clear of religion on this one but I am gonna ask this with wagering that many of us here are part of the non-religious humanist atheist agnostic community one of the unfortunate side effects of last our last election cycle here in this country was many governorships and state legislatures being now controlled with with vast majorities by one party or being completely dominated in state legislatures and governors ships by one party I won't I won't name names but the downside and of this and something that many of us expected to be coming was the attempt to continue to jam creationism or intelligent design into science classrooms in their science classrooms so I want I wanted to ask you if you could just talk about the importance of people especially young people getting involved politically because I do think that people like you and me are a untapped voting bloc in this country and so please let us know how important is for this to happen I totally agree with you and have nothing to add all right hello there hi thanks for speaking for us really appreciate you coming I was I was curious I know a lot about your physical sort of theories on life but I was wondering do you have a cosmological worldview so how everything began or what it's all for or is that even a question that you think is worth pondering well how it all began is a question for a cosmologists or a physicist which I'm not and I've read the books and no doubt you have as well and I I don't have anything to add to that um what is it all for well it's not for anything it it just happened and it's a very fascinating story how it just happened it's a story that physicists are uncovering and in in the case of our universe have got back to a tiny fraction of a second since the origin of the of our present universe and they're still working on the time before that and indeed the origin of time itself the origin of the universe itself and that's something which physicists are now working on I'd like to recommend a forthcoming book by Lawrence Krauss on how you get something from nothing and Lawrence Krauss of the distinguished physicist makes the case that the universe originated from literally nothing by processes which modern physicists are beginning to understand and this book is going to come out in the next few months strongly recommended thanks professor Dawkins do you think our species has evolved to the point where we can now change natural selection for other species and for our own species for example postponing natural death processes beyond reproductive life and genetic engineering for other species and genetic counseling and is that good for our species in the long run or is it possible at some point will cease to evolve because we'll be in control of it well we already of course control selection by introducing artificial selection in agriculture etc and also genetic engineering so that's controlling both feed the selection part of the Darwinian equation and the mutation part of the Darwinian equation the you put a slightly different slant on it by talking about as it were the release of humanity perhaps especially from the forces of natural selection which is undoubtedly happening in a sense thinking more futuristically one could imagine a sort of science fiction scenario in the future where people plan for future evolution and that could be you could regard that as a form of eugenics you could regard it as as some ultra futuristic genetic engineering I think it's going to be feasible you ask whether it's a good thing very difficult to I mean it has potential to be a terrible thing but possibly potential to be a good thing as well and like any very powerful technology it depends on who gets their clutches on it which I suppose is ultimately going to be a political decision and some might take the view that they don't trust our capacity to control advanced technology enough to to want the advanced technology to come into being on the other hand that might be whatever the expression is pissing in the wind um I was having wondering about something which you alluded to a bit at the beginning of the interview which was the general problem of abiogenesis how you get from nonliving chemicals a chemical soup to a environment which there are replicators whether you want to call them living or not isn't important is there a good popular treatment on that presently available or available in the near future that you would recommend for somebody interested in specifically that question well I talked about the can Smith idea which is now not very fashionable and the RNA world idea which is fashionable I'm not sure is there Christian do you know of a single book which would you'd recommend on the RNA world there's a few but I'm not sure offhand know that title we can put them on the webpage for the face book yeah that would that be a good thing it's it's a very flourishing field in which lots of different people are taking part and so it might be a little bit like asking what would be a good book on biology in 1862 asked today well I think in 1860 there wouldn't be much doubt which book you'd recommend but I mean it's probably just my ignorance that I can't give you an actual name and a null and an author but as Christian says we can put something on the website thank you very much hi do you think sufficiently advanced alien life would have similar problems as we do with religion assuming of course intelligent and then I have one more we know you like program in computer programming my friend was to know if you have a favorite programming language well I'm a bit out of date on programming III mean I done a fair bit of programming in various machine codes but they're all obsolete now and I did a lot of programming in in Pascal I'm quite surprised I thought that was so but now I'm hopelessly out of date as for XO religion yeah I mean I suppose in a way that becomes another aspect of what I was talking about earlier when I said how much of what we know about life on this planet had to be true and how much just happens to be true is it in a way you're asking that very question with respect to religion and I certainly don't think it has to be true it's it mean it's not like replicators which had to be there it could be one of those things which is fairly likely to emerge given the shortcomings of nervous systems Oh sir you want to say firstly you've always been a huge inspiration to me and I've learned a lot about you on YouTube and I'd like that's to question first what is your favorite color and secondly being an evolutionary biologist I want to know what you felt about the link between evolutionary biology and your different viewpoints or thoughts on the presence of homosexuality not just in humans but also in many species that exist in this world favorite can I hate that sort of question I'll say I'll say white because it contains all the colors homosexuality it's it's an obvious conundrum for evolution because on the face of it it doesn't do much for the survival of genes promoting it it only becomes a problem of course if the RG is promoting it and the best evidence for that comes from twin studies where as you know if you take identical twins and compare them with non identical twins then and especially if you could find non if you could find examples of twins which are reared apart and compare them with twins reared together if you get all four boxes in your table and if you can find characteristics which are much more similar between identical twins than between fraternal twins regardless of upbringing then that pretty much shows you've got a genetic contribution to the variance and there is evidence from twin studies that homosexuality has a strong genetic component so that means we do have a problem because the frequency of homosexuality is is is high enough that looks as though it oughtn't to just be there by the kind of random drift so it might look as though we need a Darwinian theory to explain it various ones have been suggested there's the worker bee theory that animals that are that baby uncle's looking after their nephews and nieces not reproducing themselves but but preserving their did their genes in this case genes for homosexuality via collateral kin then there's the sneaky male hypothesis that so-called homosexuals may actually be bisexual and admit one could imagine a scenario in which in a primitive I mean a maybe an ancestral human society dominant males went off hunting leaving the females behind in the care of trusted males who were trusted not to mate with them and being homosexual especially ostentatiously homosexual might be a pretty good badge that you're trustworthy with a woman but it might not be entirely reliable I I actually favor a slightly more subtle theory which is that when one talks about a gene for anything a gene for X whatever X is you have to remember that there's not a kind of one-to-one inevitable link between the gene and the phenotype and a gene for X in one environmental condition maybe a gene for Y in another environmental condition and so what we detect with twin studies in modern societies as homosexual behavior might have been the very same gene might have been detectable as something quite different in a different environment I mean a fanciful example might be suppose that the difference comes from whether you're breastfed as a baby or bottle-fed as a baby purely out of my head I mean there's no evidence for it all but suppose that a particular gene tends to make you homosexual if you're bottle fed but not if you're breastfed then in days before bottles were invented it would not have been a gene for homosexuality at all it could have been a gene for something completely different and so we could be just asking the wrong question when we asked what is the survival value of of homosexuality thank you sir keep on trucking first of all on behalf of the internet so I would like to thank you for inventing the meme and secondly I was I was wondering um when it comes to interesting behavior what I guess you're a favorite interesting animal behavior be that you've been able to sort of describe in evolutionary terms besides the naked mole-rat favorite animal behavior for for what it was that just in general what you found the most interesting and well okay yeah there's a there's a caterpillar you want me to do we want me to tell the stories that is that right there's a caterpillar which pupate inside a wrapped up leaf and the way to achieved it is that it goes to this to the stalk of the leaf and bites it halfway across so that the leaf is still hanging from its yet the other half of its stalk but is cut off from its supply of water from me from the vessels in the in the stalk and so the leaf curls up and and wraps itself around the caterpillar well that's pretty nice but there's more the story goes on there is a risk to the caterpillar in doing that because if it was the only wrapped up belief among another lot of perfectly good leaves hanging from the same tree it would be a sitting target for deters so what it does is it goes round and bite through the stalk of a whole lot of leaves and then finally calls itself up in one of them I think that's a pretty good story good evening professor Dawkins in the now viral words of Bill O'Reilly side comes in tide goes out never a miscommunication while his words are easy to parody and make fun of it brings about a more serious idea that a lot of adults point to orderly physical laws such as gravity and natural processes such as evolution as evidence of some kind of larger more grandiose scheme what would you say to these people well the thing about the Tigers in the tigers out on that as you rightly say it stands for everything else is that we know how it happens I mean we know that the tide goes in and the tide goes out because the earth is spinning and the moon is providing a gravitational force and the sun's providing a gravitational force and it's proximally it is the spinning of the earth which causes the tide to to get to go in and out and the times when it does so that is an extremely beautiful example of something where it initially is mysterious you watch the tide go in and that and the tide goes out but now we know why and and the same goes for almost everything else and when I say almost for the rest we're still working on it thank you one of the great values of Darwinian thinking is that it is turned our attention toward the adaptive value of characteristics and in my field has mobilized something called evolutionary psychology looking at the adaptive value of behavior I wonder if you would care to comment on the adaptive value of superstition or the foreclosure of region and if you could speculate on what conditions might be necessary for their extinction yeah I mean it could be a little bit like the third answer I gave to the homosexuality quick question it may be that we shouldn't be saying what we shouldn't be focusing our attention on superstition as the thing that has adaptive value but rather we should be focusing our attention on a kind of psychological predisposition which manifests itself as superstition well if you put yourself in the position of a primitive human living in a very dangerous environment in Africa where there are dangerous predators I think it's reasonable to suppose that being very risk-averse to at least in certain directions would be a valuable thing to be so if you see a rustling in the long grass it could be wind it could be it could be a leopard and the default assumption if you're wise might be to guess that it's it's a leopard even if that's but a relatively low probability because if it is a leopard then it would be very dangerous to make the opposite assumption well leopards happen to be real you don't need to be superstitious to believe in leopards but you could sort of generalize that risk-averse mentality by saying be frightened of anything that happens I mean if there's a if there's a bang in the night the first recourse if you value your life would be not to assume that its course by some natural cause but caused by some malevolent force and malevolent forces could be lions or leopards or crocodiles or all sorts of things and which are of course real but psychologically you it might not show itself in the form of a fear of rational things like that it could be a more a more general fear of Ghoulies and ghosties and and and devils and all sorts of things like that i suspect that it's actually more distantly removed from adaptive value than than that and i suspect that it's rather more that superstition is is an emergent property which probably doesn't have very much of a very much value at all but if i'm forced to try to think of an adaptive value i might think along those sorts of lines thank you good evening mr. Dawkins uh I think it's a grand occasion to have you here at Maryland University with us tonight so I want to proceed to my question a while back I stumbled across the work of a gentleman named Terence Mckenna I don't know if you're familiar with him he was as strong he was actually more known for his uh promoting psychedelic drug use or I guess recreational in that sense drug use so um but he made an interesting and this would set out to me he made an interesting point on evolution by mentioning the role that diding played in how we evolved and well at what played I diets I died and he also he was known for saying that for the it's on Wikipedia the Stone eight stone ape theory which was basically that our level of consciousness came from psychedelic material within like the dung of other animals or I guess when we came from came down from trees as a species we started indulging him their diet with the diet consisting of feces and so forth and so I just want to get your opinion on that how to what extent do you agree what's what was the name again this he he promoted the stoned eight there what was his name Terence Mckenna yes III know nothing about him and I know nothing about his theory I'm interested that you should tell us about it thank you but I've got no knowledge of it thank you anyway I think we have a time just for one more question before we go to the books I thank you good news for doctors thank you for being here my question is on moral evolution if you will we can look back and see how we've evolved morally you know you mentioned slavery earlier women have gotten there a lot of a lot of rights and gays are now fighting for the rights and so much changing in our world today you know everything from middle east of people fighting for the rights here in this country I was wondering if you have any thoughts on more evolution in where we're headed and if we'll ever achieve maybe a standard of morality something like the state of being like something like the Nietzsche Superman or something like that if will ever achieve something like that and if so if anything that can be done to accelerate that process well I don't think I wouldn't know about us about a Superman that it does appear that the the shifting moral zeitgeist does move in a pretty consistent direction and so we could perhaps extrapolate the direction that it's that it's going in and I I don't know whether it would ever reach a reach an end but I mean if you're if you ask me to say well what what might be the next big step I would think that it might be a generalization of the idea of opposition to racism to opposition to speciesism because after all 200 years ago everybody was was racist and and now it's not respectable to be to be racist and now it's perfectly respectable to be speciesist and it's it's some people some moral philosophers are arguing that that will be the next the next step thank you very much you

Channel: Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science

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Keywords: Dawkins, UMD

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Length: 84min 32sec (5072 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2011