Richard Dawkins & Bret Weinstein - Evolution

first of all say thank you all for coming out and supporting intellectual discourse it's so important please give yourselves a round of applause there will be a book signing after the event in the lobby so if you have a book by Richard Dawkins that you want signed we don't do pictures or any selfies or anything but if you have a book that you want signed please meet us in the lobby after the event and if you just want to kick around and say hi that would be great as well and that's all I have so without further ado please welcome to the stage brett Weinstein and Richard Dawkins [Applause] [Music] [Applause] let us pray all right no that's not where the evening is headed did you want to say a few words or I'll say a few in a moment but so I wanted to give a little bit of an orientation to where we are this evening I think this is actually a unique opportunity that we have Richard and I are both evolutionary biologists dyed-in-the-wool and we come from a lineage of thought and that lineage of thought has brought us to many of the same conclusions but there are places in which our thoughts depart from each other and so tonight we're going to talk about biology and especially I believe what it has to say about human beings and the manner in which they evolve the fact that we disagree over some important things is you know potentially fraught but I'm hoping that to the extent that there is a confrontation between ideas here that it will be a friendly confrontation I believe we are both from a tradition in which we believe that honorable disagreement is important and it is essential to society functioning well and so I hope that even if the disagreements are intense at times that that it is in the context of a friendship good all right good so we're on the same page maybe I should also say that I am at something of an advantage here because Richard has done such an excellent job of documenting his thoughts on evolution in his many excellent books and for the 14 years that I taught evolutionary biology at Evergreen I without fail assigned The Selfish Gene to my students now The Selfish Gene you wrote in 1976 am I correct about that you were 35 years old so Richard wrote that book as a young gun and I find it shocking that I have to say this but I think that that book is still cutting edge the reason I assigned it to my students was that I thought that in general it presented the best encapsulation of what we understood about evolutionary dynamics that was available and while there are a few things that aren't in it that have emerged later I still believe that to be the case and so one of the things we may end up talking about tonight is why it is that there has not been more progress after the huge burst of activity that we saw in the late 60s and early 70s why my era has been much quieter with respect to important discoveries about evolution that we all agree are true you have anything to add yes I I don't quite know why you find it shocking I mean of course we all pay lip service to the idea that progress is good and we should be changing all the time but what if we're right and so it does it doesn't necessarily follow that that what people thought in the 1960s and 70s is still largely believed is a bad thing maybe it is actually right well I think this is a very interesting perspective and it's one that I held to when I was in college I was a student of Robert rivers as a contemporary of Richards and as his student I looked at the landscape of questions and I felt it wasn't resentment but I felt some sadness that it looked like Richard and Bob's generation had run the table and they had solved all of the big issues in evolutionary biology and that they had left only small issues for us and over time I came to realize that that wasn't the case that there were major issues left unsettled that we had to stop talking about because there was no progress and so I I took up looking at those issues and saying what is it that we have wrong that has caused us to stop making progress on questions like why do females in many species require males to engage in elaborate displays before mating with them that question is still not answered there are plenty of ideas on the table but as for one that we all agree on nothing has emerged why are there more species when you get closer to the equator and fewer species as you move towards the poles why do we grow feeble and inefficient with age these are all questions on which some progress had been made but that progress seemed to me to have stagnated so I don't disagree with you that your generation got an awful lot right but what I wonder about is why progress has slowed given the number of large questions that remain and their related question is why there does not seem to be a generation of biologists that followed you that appear to be working in a way that would allow them to solve big questions in the way that RA Fisher had or you did or Bob Trivers did I don't see that generation of biologists that are capable of wielding tools in the bold way that that you all managed I think then the onus is on you let's talk about a clear example like say the set the sexual selection one you raised and say what is it that you think hasn't been well obviously you're right it's still going on and there's much controversy going on it's a very flourishing feel there are lots of people working in the field doing work in the in the autumn in the field on sexual selection there are two major strands of theory of sexual selection perhaps you could trace them to Fisher on the one hand and well Wallis to Harvey handled him on the other and they're both very interesting theories they're both they probably might might both work I mean what what's wrong with that but it's a great question here's what's wrong with it so what what Richard is referring to and I believe both you and I would come out on the Hamilton side of this argument and we would both I would imagine be advocates for a good genes well no I mean III would be do we need to explain what this is I mean yeah maybe yeah Darwin noticed that many biological character and animal characteristics of male despair they are apparently advertising to females peacock tails gorgeous feathers beautiful fish that kind of thing and Darwin was content simply to say that's what females like it's an aesthetic thing of a matter of female whim and so in order for a male to reproduce successfully and pass on his genes he has to be attractive and therefore genes for being attractive get passed on to next generation because females choose them Wallace the co-discoverer of natural selection hated that idea Wallace was more of a utilitarian and believed that beautiful characteristics like peacocks tails had to be useful it wasn't enough just to simply say females love them you had to say this is somehow an advertisement for a good male lamellas going to be a good father or a GU provide good genes Wallace wouldn't use that phraseology of course and that divided between Darwin and Wallace has persisted from the 19th century through the 20th century Wallace felt that to invoke female taste was bordering on mysticism and Darwin's idea there was rescued in the 1920s and 30s by our a fish surely one of the great founders of modern population genetics and re Fisher made the doubt the Darwin theory respectable by allowing female choice to be under genetic control just as much as male anatomy male tails etc under are under genetic control and Fisher produced a model which must have been a mathematical model that he didn't lay it out in mathematical terms was to be there in which natural selection simultaneously works on genes in males for being beautiful and genes in females for liking beauty and when you realize that both baby males and baby females inherit the genes from their father for being beautiful and the genes from their mother for liking beauty those two go together and can produce something like a peacock tail that was the fish' theory which has been brought up to date by modern mathematical biologists but the Wallace strand of theory which Bret papers and to some extent said so do I agrees with Wallace that beauty has to be useful and adopts the idea that what a female is doing when she when she is beautiful is advertising to males legit sorry what a male is dead when I brought chastity females is advertising to females for example that he's healthy but he's strong in the extreme version of a fairy due to a Massa Harvey a male is is advertising that he has he's such a good fit male that he's capable of surviving in spite of having this ridiculous tale which should have killed him because it's barnable to predators you can't fly very well with it and so on and less extreme versions of that theory are attributable to WD Hamilton who thought that health was the primary virtue which a male is advertising to females and a beautiful tale is an advertisement to a female this is a healthy male he's not suffering from parasites he's resistant to pet to parasites otherwise he wouldn't have this beautiful glowing sexy tail so that was just an interruption because we were talking about the leader there's a Harvey Hamilton type theory which Brett favors sorry sorry okay so no that's perfect and it actually shows exactly the point that I was trying to make which is that you've now heard a lot there's plenty of good work that suggests that this could be handicapped that would demonstrate the the genes have to be heritable in order for females to be favored to be selecting for them but the problem is that there is a rotten piece of this theory right at the heart which is that females are choosing to inflict this burden on their male offspring which is ecologically certain to be costly to them so if females are attempting to find good genes by putting males through a test then they are inflicting bad genes on their male offspring those bad genes will be transmitted by their female offspring but not expressed so the females will not suffer the cost of that handicap but there's a question of how it is that females recover enough of a benefit for their female offspring to justify the costs for the male offspring so there's a way in which although one can make a mathematically compelling argument for a handicap idea or a good genes idea that it has to account for a very large benefit for female offspring and what's worse if you imagine a species like let's say we're talking about peacocks peacocks a female the peahen inflicts this marvelous tail on her male offspring by choosing father's that have it in peacocks like all creatures that have these elaborate displays males contribute nothing other than genes so if she's picking something valuable it has to be encoded in the genes so she inflicts this cost on her male offspring and presumably then acquires a benefit for her female offspring but they do this each and every generation only a small number of males in each generation mate females choosing these tails pick the same males again and again so that ought to leave the number of bad genes in the environment very small because females are eliminating those bad genes each and every generation which means that after a small number of generations there ought to be very little advantage in picking males with beautiful tails because there are no bad genes left and so the question is if one of these good genes hypothesis is correct why is female vigilance constant it should be females select against bad genes the number of bad genes drops female vigilance now has no value female vigilance should drop bad teams should crop back up female vigilance should rise again and we should an oscillating pattern but we don't see it what we see is generation after generation females choose the males with the most elaborate tails so it doesn't matter what the answer is here the point is this is a question that year after year remains with us and we make no progress on it we are still fumbling with explanations that have one value but don't completely answer the question so why is that but this is a matter for mathematical modeling and it's being done and there are various different mathematical models which we can't go into now but but but I mean this is something it is an active field of theoretical research well and it's going on um I must say I have become something of a skeptic of mathematical modeling because it suffers from two kinds of errors that are pretty obvious one is it will sometimes give you an answer that is not viable in reality in other words if we were to mathematically model the way a sphere sits on a razor as long as there are no other forces input into this system we will be told that a sphere will balance on a razor but we all know that a sphere doesn't balance on a razor right mathematical modeling will tell you that a cup of coffee in a room will take an infinite amount of time to equalize that it will approach the temperature of the room and the room will approach the temperature of the coffee but they will never reach each other we know that it's isn't the case so mathematical modeling has a way in which it can fool us into thinking that we have the right answer when we don't and the other problem is that these mathematical models very frequently have so many parameters in them that you can match any natural behavior even if the model isn't the reason that the natural behavior is what it is so I am I'm a little actually surprised to hear you but the remedy for that is better mathematical models it's not throwing out mathematical models altogether well I don't know I I had a mentor in graduate school who was himself a mathematician and he said something striking to me one day he said that math is the language we resort to when we don't know how to explain something and so I would argue yes mathematical models can reinforce an explanation that is itself sensible but if we don't have an explanation that's actually satisfying the fact that we have a mathematical model that suggests that I don't find especially compelling because there's lots of ways you can get there well to go back to what who first started saying about the the difficulty with the Zahavi theory that the the the the female inflicts on the way you put it was right there's female in inflicts upon her her offspring the that the handicap as well as the as the benefit I mean that's exactly what I said in The Selfish Gene when I ridiculed there's a Harvey theory and I was wrong because my student Colin Griffin is now a fellow professor at Oxford did produce a mathematical model which does show there's a matter of fact mr. Harvey theory can work and we were we were I was wrong everybody else was wrong and and Griffin showed that we were wrong by producing a mathematical model which says that the that this is a Harvey handicap theory can work and I not being a mathematician myself have to bow to that I understand the model and I think I think it works I think it said it's a very good one and I at humble pie I said I said I was I was wrong and and my student Alan Griffin was right well but I think I think you are too hasty to accept that you were wrong and in fact I'm not certain of this it's been a while since I have read it but if I'm correct what you said about so javi in The Selfish Gene was that this didn't am i right that you said it didn't sound like the way natural selection works I think I was a bit rude about it than that that's likely but I'm not quite sure what I mean how could you possibly argue the case without I mean there are some cases where you on the hill not news mathematics myself and I've done their vlog arguments when so I ought to be agreeing with you about this but there are times when I have to say a verbal argument simply isn't enough you've got to actually do the sounds well I think a verbal argument has to be proven out by data and one way to get data is I have to say not my favorite but one way to get data is to generate a model that is sufficiently robust that it will spit out a behavior that mirrors what you see but I I also think that in a sense the field has adopted this modality of proving things because it has forgotten what to do that there are actually features of the modern academic environment that are that effectively rule out the kind of wonderful work that RA Fisher did or that you did and so I think it is very much the fashion to to defer to these very powerful tools but that the powerful tools actually have yet to to reveal answers that are compelling and do predict things about nature that we that we do not know to be true at the point that we build the model so if we can take the example of George Williams and his famous paper on the evolution of senescence wonderful thing about this paper is that it says if if I George Williams and write about the cause of senescence senescence being the the feebleness and inefficiency that accumulates with age said if I'm right about the cause of this then you will see these patterns in nature and we knew for a long time before we could find the genes he had predicted we knew for a long time that his hypothesis was correct in other words that it was a theory because when we looked at nature we saw the exact pattern he had described and so I'm a fan of that kind of work you say well here's an observation here's the hypothesis that would explain it and if this hypothesis is correct this is the pattern we will see in nature which we don't know if it's there yet and then it's it's there I think we need to put Paul and explain George Williams's theory of senescence otherwise I don't think that sure makes sense the the problem of why natural selection favors going old and dying of old old age and there had been wrong ideas things like it's for the good of the species that the old ones die off and make way for the young ones something like that well that doesn't work that's not really natural selection works PV Medawar and then refined by it by George Williams came up with a much better genetically based theory which is that if you imagine a gene you know that any any gene has its effect at a particular time of life mostly during embryology but genes go on maturing making making their presence felt at different times of life now if you imagine a gene for giving you a fatal cancer when you're 10 and another gene for making you're giving yourself giving you a fatal cancer when you're 20 now I'm when you're 30 another when you're 40 another when you're 50 etc which one of them is going to get through to the next generation a gene that gives you cancer and kills you when you're 60 has already got through to the next generation by the time it kills you a G that gives you cancer when you're 10 and kills you does not get through to the next generation so there'll be natural selection in favor of late acting fatal or sub fatal genes that was the meadow a version of the theory the Williams version of the theory was a nice refinement of that which is that the genes are modified by other genes and so any gene which has a a good effect when you're young makes you makes you fit when you're when you're young but kills you when you're when you're old is likely to survive and the the reverse is not likely to survive so there's going to be a pressure in favor of perhaps rushing around them I'm expending all your energy when you're young in order to get your genes into the next generation when you're when you're young at the expense of becoming more likely to die when you're when you're old so that's a rather bad summation of the Williams theory but now we need to go back to know it's it's pretty good actually I don't know if you know that I worked on this puzzle and graduates ice I didn't know that no oh yeah so George Williams when a gene has two effects it's called a playa trophy and George Williams theory which was a an improvement Medawar theory was very good this is the place that you begin to understand what history really is and it actually lends a great deal of power to your point about the need to rebel against selfish replicators I mean let's let any much says the Second World War yes right even the terminology you had the fatherland effectively raping Mother Russia I mean that's even the terminology right so what this was was a lineage level phenomenon in which a population went after two other populations one that was internal to its borders or its near neighbors and one population that was distant but had a great many resources but the point is understood from the perspective of German genes vile as these behaviors were they were completely comprehensible from the level of fitness it was abhorrent and unacceptable but understandable that Germany should have viewed its Jewish population as a source of resources if you viewed Jews as non people then whatever resources they had could be appropriated for German genes and likewise the future of Germany lies in Russia all of the resources of Russian how many is it 20 million Russians it took to turn the German war machine around so what you have are these population against population conflicts if you view it as group selection it makes no sense but if you view them as lineages it makes a great deal of sense and the belief structures that caused people to step on to battlefields and fight were clearly comprehensible as adaptations of the lineages in question I think nationalism might be an even greater evil than religion and I'm not sure that it's actually very helpful to talk about it in Darwinian terms I think it's press here's that this might be a case where we do need to defer a little bit to historians and non biologists and think about it in other ways why I'm curious as to why you'd be resistant um because I think human affairs are so complicated and and so although ultimately we are evolved creatures we have our human affairs are historical if as our social affairs are so distantly related upon a superstructure part of biology that it's probably better not to extract am in simple biological terms so I think this is then why we disagree on the important citizen I would say it's absolutely vital for us to confront this in biological terms if one imagines that we are remote from evolution by virtue of the fact that cultural evolution has taken over and is not is not furthering the interests of the genes then this does become a complicated matter that is uniquely human if on the other hand human beings are engaged in a fundamentally biological phenomenon that they do not consciously understand then in order to confront it I really believe we have to look at what we are and that your point about rebelling against the selfish replicators is the key that if I mean here's my feeling if I'm a robot that is programmed to be willing to put other people in the gas chamber under the right circumstances but I as a conscious being find that idea horrifying then I as a conscious being have to look at that program and say under no circumstances will I be party to it I don't care if it's biologically advantageous it's not for me and so the ability to resist the will of the Replicators I think requires us to stare in the face what role this has played in our history up until the present day I think we'd be about that I think we've run out of time haven't we well that's a question for the audience really keep going so all right what we're gonna do wait wait okay well we should we should vote and we should give people the alternative is questions from the audience yeah so what we're gonna do is we're first gonna ask how many people would like to go to questions from the audience and then we're gonna ask how many people would like the discussion to continue in the way that it's going so first question is how many people would like us to move on to questions from the audience shout if you want questions from the audience all right and how many people would prefer that the discussion continue as it is that sounded unambiguous to me right yeah again you've got your microphone coming off your ear okay I don't know if you wanted to respond to the last point what I was saying is effectively that we must as ugly as it is we must confront what we are programmed for if we are to resist a recurrence of those patterns in the future okay let's let that one go okay we'll let that one go all right number six adaptation apt ation can directly explain obligate homosexuality suicide and celibacy in humans well I think we do have as Darwin Ian's we do have an obligation to try to explain things which are which are frequent enough to be not regardless just mere aberrations and so homosexuality in humans is frequent enough that it and and and and indeed it is it is a genetic thing and so we cannot duck our responsibility to try to at least it deserves to have a Darwinian explanation we know that there's a genetic component from such things as twin studies and and we know that is frequently frequent enough that it's not just a result of recurrent mutation so yes there has to be some sort of Darwinian explanation yeah and there's also fascinating pattern that also suggested Darwinian explanation although confusing so I would point to the older brother right hand rule yes the more older brothers you have the more likely you are to be gay but only so long as you're right-handed right that's a very interesting pattern that has been replicated multiple times and it suggests that there's something going on with homosexuality more than some failure due to novelty it suggests that there's some sort of structure to it and a meaning that we haven't yet figured out so how about suicide you see that one as likkle well I am NOT I haven't thought about that to the same extent have you thought about it I mean yes okay so or I mean I can easily think of psychological explanations inmate in limited explanations perhaps genetic explanations for suicide do you have them well I think in principle many of these things come back to the same couple of places where our field has instantiated a bad assumption and so the assumption about individual selection where lineage selection might be a more powerful concept has caused us I think to miss the boat on all three of these characteristics what I would say is let's just take a an example of the Middle East for example let's say you have two populations in the Middle East and both of them correctly recognize that 500 years from now they are not both likely to be there but it is likely to be one or the other but not both we're that the case then any fitness that was realized in the present day would be more or less meaningless if you were in the population that blinked out two hundred years from now so you would find a rational investment in behaviors that discounted individual fitness and prioritized lineage Fitness in other words you would see extraordinary levels of self-sacrifice in the interest of ensuring that the population to which the individual doing the sacrifice belonged was the one that continued to exist I don't know how clear that was but the basic idea is in extraordinary circumstances like for example a piece of land that isn't getting any bigger and is fully inhabited and has competing lineages that cannot simply live peaceably together that suicidal self sacrifice might be rational now again naturalistic fallacy being what it is just because something is doesn't mean it ought to be and I'm not defending it as a good thing but I'm saying can we understand it rationally if we think about adaptation occurring at the lineage level I think it's not hard to see cases where suicide I mean really it's one step past getting on a ship and going over the horizon to see if you can find a new land mass that nobody's discovered that's a near suicidal behavior that's somewhat comprehensible actual suicide can make sense if the circumstances are extraordinary enough and I would also say closer to home that if we look at cases where people commit suicide in our own culture very frequently they are beset by the sense that they are beyond worthless that they have no value that their existence is simply taking up resource and so you can imagine that this could be a matter of kin selection or lineage selection that if you and I think most people who believe that in our culture are not calculating correctly they have bad data on what what value they might contribute but nonetheless were you to be triggered to imagine that you had no value and yet you were simply burning up resources then this is a rational course of action I do not think it's helpful to couch this kind of explanation in Darwinian terms duh Darwinian evolution is about the natural selection of replicators and the primary replicators we're talking about genes and the vast majority of biological evolution and you've been advocating the priority of this genetic selection producing bodies and brains the way they are and now we come on to things like nationalism things like individuals sacrificing themselves for the sake of the long-term future of their lineage their society their nation the this is not Darwinism this is this is something else this is this is a complicated mixture of human level affairs which historians deal with sociologists deal with psychologists deal with this is not Darwinism it's not helpful to it it's it's it's it's not helpful to try to couch this in what what sounds like Darwinian terms well let me ask you a question let's just see where it is that we disagree my claim is that if it is true and I obviously can't say if it is or it isn't but if it is true that things like xenophobia genocide suicide are products of adaptive evolution that in order to address these things going forward in a useful way understanding their nature is likely to be beyond helpful and may even be essential so to give one example let's say that the impulse to genocide is something that lurks inside human beings awaiting certain indicators that it is the moment for that program to be triggered we're that the case you would want people to engage that question ahead of time when they were in possession of their full faculties and to recognize that they might have a program within them that violates the values that they believe are there their guide yes but I think I would prefer to say that these impulses are byproducts of something primitive and evolved so something like genocide we know that chimpanzees for example do practice genocide against rival groups of of chimpanzees one can make a genetic evolution case that says something like this in our wild ancestry using the Hamilton idea of living in villages living in small bands the companions that you know that are familiar to you from day to day everybody you know is a relative strangers or not and so killing strangers genocide killing neighboring bands of people like happens in some parts of the New Guinea Highlands for example that could be regarded as a byproduct of genetic natural selection and something like the the Nazi atrocities could be regarded as a manifestation of that genetically evolved tendency but it's in a totally different context and of course I agree with you that we need to resist the we need to rebel against the set of the selfish genes but I prefer not to talk about the things that we do in our modern society in a sort of straightforward biological way but rather to say these are relics by-product relics of our genetic past and one can do it do this all the time and I think that we do it at we just a lot we do things like them the desire for business executives to have a bigger thicker our office car fit that kind of thing this is all you can you couldn't interpret that in a sort of biological way as being as representing something like something that came from our biological past but you have to be very careful when you do it and I don't I think it's very often not very helpful to try to apply Darwinian ideas directly to the sorts of things that we we get in in modern society whether it's horrible mechanized warfare or executives demanding bigger desks or whatever it is I just think we've got to be very careful in in applying I'm right I am in favor of evolutionary psychologists who do this kind of thing but I think they do do it up in a care away and and I I think we've got to be very cautious in the way we do it well you and I are in a hundred percent agreement that we need to be extremely careful in applying evolutionary logic and it is possible to get carried away I for example would not argue that we can apply evolutionary logic to anything so new that we don't know if it stands the test of time right so I have a test of adaptation that just simply tells you whether or not you are on solid ground to presume that something is adaptive and it involves looking at whether something has a complexity whether it has a cost of variable cost that could be reduced and whether it persists over evolutionary time so wanting a bigger desk is I think you and I would agree certainly a manifestation of something evolved but it's very hard to analyze desks with Darwinian tools because desks are new but something like genocide is not new warfare is not new and so these things are complex expensive we're seeing a history that goes into antiquity and beyond and that I believe not only gives us license to apply Darwinian tools but I would say a it is the most parsimonious explanation and be it is our best hope of ending these patterns permanently if I didn't believe that I would be much less enthusiastic about what is revealed by these analyses I would say they are justified but I might not be a champion of doing it and I might not be so interested in doing it personally but to the extent that I would love to see an end to genocide I think facing what it actually appears to be is essential okay but suppose but suppose you take the example of the of the Nazi invasion of the lands to the east which you did before you've got you've got a nation taking a decision which is a dictator and advisors and the Parliament and and it's a complicated matter of a state taking a decision to invade another state using modern weapons and using the weapons of diplomacy to argue the case in in in international courts and so on and then you've got the individual soldiers going out there and killing people and the the psychological motives of the individual soldiers are going to be so different from those I mean they're not the ones who are actually taking the decision to go and invade Poland they are doing quite different things they're obeying their officers there they're perhaps giving vent to revenge motives because their comrade was killed at a previous battle or something of that sort these are very very complicated mixtures of motives psychological motives and yes they are all of them products of brains which were honed by natural selection but I don't think it's helpful to do unite them all and say well this is this is all one biological impulse to deuce do something of it they're different things at different levels well I do think you're right about that at in one level so if we look at the genocide between Hutus and Tutsis these distinctions were actually phenotypically imposed in other words this is the rare case where you have a genocide Olymp ulcers to be triggered by the artificial amount it may mirror an actual lineage phenomenon but what you had was people measuring noses and eyes and things like this and imposing the sense that these are your people and those are the enemy and it triggered a genocide on the other hand what I think we need to be aware of and this is a dangerous topic to open but I would say during the last presidential election we had a cynical fella who began to intone some of the same ideas that lead people to some sort of nationalistic fervor and to the extent that the program that is looking for the moment in history at which this is the correct way to behave that those detectors might have been up and waiting for somebody to use that kind of rhetoric that we may find ourselves dragged into something we could anticipate but won't if we don't confront it and that it is much better to understand for example that when you move from a phase where you have growth or something that seems like growth that makes people feel comfortable makes them keep their head down makes them treat their neighbors basically all right when that breaks down at the point that you run out of growth the natural impulse is to become tribal and go after those who aren't so closely related to you and so to the extent that we can be taken advantage of by a leader who would cynically or otherwise lead us into some sort of tribal warfare we need to recognize that danger and say actually is there a way out of here that is novel can we do something that isn't evolutionary but actually matches the values that we believe ourselves to hold the values that are defensible I think that's right I think I think that it is important to recognize things like tribalism I think that that's a probably a real a real phenomenon which it is important in which can be and is played upon by demagogues and so yes tribalism and there some other things like that which which are important and when I say that they're distanced from the biological or if some of them are more distance than others and and some of them are pretty naked I pretty are pretty close to the surface and I think that the the tribalism which is invoked both in the case of the Hutus and Tutsis and in the case of the recent election disaster that probably is severe is sufficiently close to to to the to the surface that it that it's not unreasonable to use biological terminology and make and notice resemblances to say the battles between New Guinea Highland tribes that kind of thing good well I guess then that suggests that there is something that I don't I don't think I've seen which is is there a program in which people are seeking what are the legitimate boundaries of discussion for Darwinian selection and when do we move into phenomena that are not amenable or don't benefit from that kind of perspective so I think I hear you and me converging on the idea that this is dangerous territory it is quite possible to extend it too far but that there may be great value if we wish to avoid the worst instincts that human beings have in understanding what their Darwinian underpinnings are and how we might you know in the same manner that you invoke birth control Family Planning is I think we both agree contrary to fitness in many cases how can we take that model where we have stepped away from a biological imperative to increase Fitness at all costs and we've done something more reasonable family planning how can we apply that same kind of logic to things like warfare and genocide and demagoguery it is a useful model because contraception is a case but we have stepped back from biology and so it shows that we can do it yes yes it does but it also shows us this arbitrary nature of when you can because the reason that we can do it with birth control is an accident of evolution which is that sexual pleasure and sexual reproduction are not synonymous we have been wired with a program that causes us to seek sexual pleasure in a way that results in reproduction but because they aren't the same thing they can be technologically decoupled which makes family planning and almost trivial matter you can engage in it without engaging in a fight with yourself had we would you say tribalism is de couple has been decoupled in sports football hooliganism and yes I would say this is a place actually where you loyalty loyalty to your team and yes yes not necessarily productively but that it is a case in which you see people's tribal impulses being applied to what is effectively one corporation battling another on a field I mean that's what they are corporation buys a bunch of players and other corporations buys one it's not like two towns are fighting each other but people get involved in it like it is and so yes I think it is it's a place where it's been decoupled almost by accident have you noticed what term soccer players do when they've just scored a goal they throw a sphere they they rush around me that's good that does seem like what they do all right should we move down the list to even more infuriating things all right number seven I really want to know your reaction to this one I've been waiting all night Catholics are you social everybody in the audience understand what the claim is that you have a non reproductive caste within Catholicism other religions too but Catholics are kind to us and that they make everything so elaborate that we can well worker bees don't reproduce right we just theoretically don't yeah priest theoretically don't and neither do not well I think most of them probably don't don't you agree yes yeah so all right the question is you know you allege in The Selfish Gene that a celibate clergy is a failure of Darwinian selection my claim here is that this isn't a failure that this is adaptive celibacy that it serves a lineage level purpose its meme level that's what's going on there but if it's meme level then each of those priests and each of those nuns is involved in a spectacular loss of a reproductive opportunity I mean this is the argument you lay out so the question is why are they so vulnerable to accept I mean most people couldn't forego romance and sex if they tried and yet you have a group of people that is triggered to avoid these things and they do so in the service of a bunch of ideas that yes are literally a bunch of ideas that's exactly right about a bunch of memes so memes that make some individuals in in Alan for example it's it has traditionally been a prestigious thing for one member of the family one brother to become a priest to celebrate a celibate priest so the priest devotes all his energy to proselytizing and spreading the mean and the other and all the all the other other memes it's the better to persuade other Catholics to have more children than they shouldn't so that ah but then that isn't it interesting that this person who according to you is involved in a failure of Darwinism just so happens to behave in a way that his genes are likely to be spread by virtue of the faculties of not his genes his memes no his genes he's part of a lineage Oh as it happens in it not as it well but I mean it that this is my claim is that it is almost always going to be the case in any persistent religion that where you have people engaged in what appears to be some spectacular failure of Darwinism that they just so happen to be spreading ideas that will result in the genes that are allowing them to fail as Darwinian entities to succeed by the lineage that holds those beliefs makes all their images to spreading Catholic memes and they they don't have to bother over the the time and responsibilities of a family so they're they're wholly devoted to spreading Catholic memes including incidentally more than incidentally the meme for celibacy well they spread the meme for celibacy which might claim I mean if I'm right about this then my point would be that Catholic Catholic lineages would actually do less well well if everybody reproduced that there is an advantage to having individuals who have stepped out of the reproductive market and therefore become capable of speaking on behalf of the lineage that somebody who is outside me and think about a priest can't make a ton of money right and they can't reproduce right at least not out in public and so the point is that takes them out of two modes through which they might be corrupted somebody who can't be corrupted because they're not in a position even if they were to accumulate money they couldn't spend it without calling attention to themselves and they're not in a position to be sexually corrupted at least not out in public and so those two mechanisms just so happen to put them in a position to speak for for the lineage so what are we disagreeing about I mean that I don't know maybe nothing but if if that is the case so all right you say what are we disagreeing about is catholicism a mind virus well it it's a complex of mind viruses yes that's what we're disagreeing about hey okay my claim is that Catholicism is a complex of adaptations that there are lineage level adaptations and that they are in large measure responsible for the success of lineages that hold this set of beliefs having spread around the globe and having been so successful efficient at creating adaptations of all types sort of argument let me attempt to place my worldview in a few sentences please Darwinian natural selection is all about the differential survival of replicators there are various kinds of replicators of which genes are some and memes are other and they are all engaged in a kind of tussle with each other to survive as replicators using vehicles which our bodies and which our brains and which are all sorts of other artifacts or things like that our separate genes although they are we you know them together under the one word genome are actually I regard them as similar to viruses in that they are changing their partners in every generation and you can regard the whole genome as a massive collection of viruses massive collection of independently tussling replicators who survive better because they go around together as a gang they survive better in the company of other such replicators and that's why we call them genes rather than viruses there are others which survive better not being around in gangs but going around by being sneezed into the atmosphere or whatever it is spike by spreading around by other means the only difference the fundamental difference between those replicators which we call genes and those which we call viruses are that the method of transmission to the future of what the ones that we call genes are through our sperms or our eggs and therefore they have an interest in common to preserve the body in which they share because that's the only way they're going to get into the next generation that minority of them which are not destined to get into the next generation get into the future via sperms or eggs but by being sneezed into the air or defecated into the sewage system or Varys or left as blood lying around or something like like that we call them viruses and the only difference is that their hope of getting into the future is not to cooperate with others in getting into an egg or a sperm but getting out of the body in a different way by being by being sneezed now memes are more of the latter category they go through sperms and or it or or or eggs they do however quite turned quite a large extent go down through generations long it usually so that though it's not sperms or eggs they do go from parent to child but we we we live in a great soup of replicators which are floating around some of them are memes some of them are genes some of them are cooperative genes which goes through the generations through sperms and eggs some of them are cooperative memes that go through the generations in the form of of parents and doctrine ating children or schools indoctrinating in indoctrinating children but everything we see around us is a soup of replicators and their phenotypic tools of replication among which are extended phenotypic tools of replication that's my piece said ok so I ever of course agree with most of what you said I in my own mind think of genes at the moment that the zygote is created they may be very uneasy with each other up to that moment but at the moment they are fused into a zygote at that single cell that then becomes a 30 trillion sell human let's say they fall in love because as you say they have no mechanism for reproducing other than creating such an effective coordinated creature that it is capable of reaching a moment of reproduction and so it is that being trapped with shared fate that caused them to causes them to behave as an organism that is united in its in its purpose so I think we agree on that in order to explain my perspective and where I think we differ I need to borrow a concept from you and I think you have described it as your most important contribution and you just invoked it the extended phenotype you want to explain what that means in brief form can you do it how long have I got I mean I can do it pretty briefly well um the normal finished normal word phenotype applies to bodies in the gene sits inside its body and influences the phenotype by means of embryonic dividend Bionic processes so wings and noses and toenails and pairs and things are all phenotypes extended phenotypes are outside the body and they include things like beaver dams and termite mounds and birds nests there are not part of the body but they are every bit as much to be regarded as phenotypes adaptations by genes for the propagation of genes so although the genes don't actually live inside the nest or don't actually live inside the caddisfly house or the or the beaver dam that nevertheless they these artifacts are all phenotypic devices for the preservation and propagation of the genes that created them you generalize that then to parasites influencing hosts for them for their own benefit parasites that cause their intermediate hosts to be more likely to be eaten by their final host and therefore passed on to the next part of the parasite cycle the genes of the parasite are exerting phenotypic effects on the host so that parasite genes have extended phenotypic effects on host bodies extend that further and you have things like cuckoos who manipulate their foster parents into feeding them the genes that make the baby cuckoo effective at manipulating and persuading the foster parent to feed it are exerting extended phenotypic effects on the behavior of the parent generalize it further and when a bird sings when and when a nightingale sings and influences the hormonal state of a female nightingale runner canary sings and so on then the effect on the female body of the male song is extended phenotypic effect of jeans in the singing mail and that's the story of the extended phenotype so let's take your example of a beaver pond just to make this crystal clear so a beaver is a rodent that creates a dam by cutting down trees and blocking a waterway that dam is necessary to its ecology it uses the water to preserve wood that it can eat over the winter and your point in the extended phenotype which i think is brilliant is that the pond is every bit as much a part of this story as the molecules inside the beaver that the genes inside the beaver create a system of physiology that is the Beavers cells but it also creates the pond which is part of the Beavers ecology and it is artificial to divide the pond from the beaver that it is the extended phenotype of the beader beaver that is in the pond I agree with this my point would be memes our extended phenotype and that the claim that memes are competing in their own memes fear is a little bit like saying that ponds reproduce themselves using beavers which you can definitely make that argument but it's not the most parsimonious explanation for beaver Pop's beaver ponds are created by beavers to facilitate their own ecology and they are passed down to next generation beavers right this piece of ecology is handed down some times over the course of decades or even a hundred years these ponds that these alterations of the landscape are handed down as an inheritance to future generations of beavers and that to me looks very much like a lineage handing down a belief system that results in it being ecologically effective at doing things like holding a piece of territory excluding others from it taking over new territory by dispersing and so memes are extended phenotype my way of thinking is they should not be analyzed on their own they should be analyzed as serving the interests of the underlying genome the same way pawns are serving the interests the underlying beaver Gino I'm familiar with the fallacy that is absolutely wrong there there is a succession that goes beaver gene pond beaver gene pond and so on and and you superficially you could say that either one could be regarded as the phenotype of the other replicator but the key point is that ponds don't mutate and therefore are more likely to survive than not genes do and that's the fundamental fallacy in this this argument I call it Bateson's fallacy who said that that birds at us and nests were making another another nest it's it's you got a look at the replicator is the one which mutates and as a consequence produces more copies of itself which is which survive that's what genes do that's what memes do but that's not what ponds do it's not what beavers do is not what let's do well I mean I must say that when you turn this back on me and you say that ponds do not mutate I'm just tempted to to take up that challenge because I think they do and I don't think that this is a good way to understand them this is my point is that we can treat them that way beaver ponds actually do empty when the dam breaks but then they don't give rise to daughter empty ponds well but the point is a beaver who builds a pond that empties is much more likely to suffer starvation precisely and it's the it's the it's the the beaver the beaver that does the building you're making an evil gene that makes it this is exactly my point that the way to understand something like Catholicism is not a thing unto itself it is a program that runs on the computer inside the head of a Catholic and so the way to properly understand it the way to get the maximum power is to understand it as extended phenotype of the creatures in whom the program is running just as the way to understand beaver ponds is to understand them as extended phenotype of the beaver they are a means to an end employed by beavers to preserve food over the way I can only quote WB Yeats you are still rekt among heathen dreams wait sorry let's speak English well enough to understand what you just accused me of [Applause] the fundamental logic of natural selection is that there are replicators which mutate yep and reproduce coffee's which may or may not survive because they're good at surviving the way they're good at surviving is by building phenotypes genes mutate ponds don't that is absolute when you say problems mutate you you didn't really mean that what you meant was that ponds change of course they do they drain they could they've they burst they're down labor totally but that doesn't replicate that doesn't give rise to a new generation of defective ponds or what does give rise to a new generation of defective ponds is a mutant gene in a Viva who builds a bad a bad dam we don't we don't disagree about we don't we agree about the beaver example and what we don't agree is how to map it on to the example of people and belief systems that exist over a long period of time that's the question we agree that it is an inferior understanding of beaver ponds to imagine that they mutate and either do or don't pass themselves down based on the quality of the information encoded there or whatever so the question is what is the best way to understand somebody who says something perfectly at odds with what we can discover in a science lab but that in saying this thing they are highly successful at recovering resources from their local ecology and spreading into new habitats and taking over territory excluding others all of these things and my point is simply that is the extended phenotype of the creature that is engaged in this behavior and to the extent that it persists over evolutionary time what it's telling us is that in spite of the fact that those beliefs are not literal that they are effective I think you can make a case that ideas for example if you're not talking about religious ID ideas yeah um religious ideas spread because they're spreadable its tautological just like natural selection um and the reason they're spreadable is that they appeal to people they field people psychology etc that's that's why they spread you are trying to say what he finds they extended phenotype the the the a meme is an extended phenotype no a meme is a replicator it is a replicator and I'm not arguing that absent any other system that there wouldn't be a trivial competition between memes in fact we see a trivial competition between memes on the internet I agree it it might be trivial and and I I don't think I ever wants to make the case that there really is an important evolution resulting from the natural selection of memes I think there might be it was a hypothesis that there might be I just wanted to say they do function as replicators I think it is unhelpful to call them extended phenotypes they're not phenotypes is it time okay well let me make one more point then you can make the final point and then we'll we'll close this down the key question and the prediction of the model that I'm presenting is that memes should show no interest in passing themselves down when it is not in the interest of the creature on whose minds they are operating so for example we both agree that a language is a meme complex and my point would be if you move to another country that doesn't speak your language you will have trouble adopting the language of that country but your children will not experience a tension between their ancestral language they will actually very easily acquire the language of the new habitat why because their old language is not struggling to survive they are struggling to survive and the very best tool that they can have to survive in this new habitat is the language that allows them to interface with the people who are there so the question is if you are right about the nature of memes and that their point of their stickiness is about their own propagation and is orthogonal to the propagation of the genomes of the creatures that have these cultural structures then those things should fight like crazy to stick around even in circumstances where they have no value in my model those things will gladly disappear in favour of superior meme complexes when it is advantageous to do so in some local circumstances so it actually predicts a different behavior I don't know whether I don't know whether mean differential meme survival really is an evolutionary important effect or not all I'm saying is that what matters in natural selection is the differential survival of replicators in the case of gene replicators then we know about the phenotypes that may cause them to survive and it's very clear we understand it pretty well in the case of memes we don't know and it may be that maybe the meme level that for selection is only in its infancy maybe the internet will see it developing further but I don't see any reason at all to regard that if there is a reason why some means spread more than others among those reasons is likely to be the predispositions provided by genes and genetic selection but that's not the only one the memes existed in ecology of their own and they might very well spread whether or not the ecology in which they spread is as you would put it the prior favorable one of that provided by G's legend it's an important component but not the only one all right well this has been a fascinating discussion I must say I think we made more progress than we might have let's give a huge round of applause to Richard and Pratt weinstein [Applause]

Channel: Pangburn

Views: 662,628

Rating: 4.7088704 out of 5

Keywords: richard dawkins, bret weinstein, evolution, theory, science, debate, argument

Id: hYzU-DoEV6k

Length: 71min 33sec (4293 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 28 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I really like having two people in the same field discussing issues in that field. Seeing more talks like this would be awesome.

Unfortunately there do seem to be parts missing or cut out. If they put an full and proper version online I'd be willing to pay for it, like a Dan Carlin style podcast.

[u/napanoyhta]

the video has parts of the conversation missing, what the hell

[u/ideas_have_people]

Bret discussing mathematical modelling was a bit painful...

[u/netengineer10]

That has got to be the worst video quality of an official event I have ever seen. Do the cameras have no zoom nor focus functionality? Did they take this video with a 2008-era smartphone from a seat in the crowd?

[u/feliksas]

Apparently according to one of the Weinsteins, Bret submitted a bunch of topics he wanted to cover to Dawkins beforehand.

I would say that the most interesting part was the last 20 minutes in religion, and Bret’s general argument for potentially personally destructive behaviour for the greater good of the collective.

The quality is terrible and it looks like parts were cut, but it seems that this is the best that we’ve got.

[u/lewikee]

This is a discussion, not a debate.

[u/nvr-remembr-my-login]

Bret is right that you can come up with an evolutionary explanation for any modern social phenomenon. But he's wrong that his ability to spin one of these stories provides any actual evidence for its truth. It might get Joe Rogan to nod his head, but it ain't good science.

[u/nvr-remembr-my-login]

You know that feeling you get when you watch a movie, and the one weird thing you actually know a lot about is portrayed really inaccurately?

That's how evolutionary biologists feel when Bret Weinstein spins an adaptationist story for the Catholic church.

[u/JohnM565]

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-01-12