Richard Dawkins & Daniel Dennett. Oxford, 9 May 2012

you my great pleasure to welcome down to Oxford so I'd like to begin by asking you down at the beginning of Darwin's dangerous idea you said if I had to give a prize and best idea anyone ever had I give it to Darwin ahead of Newton Einstein and everybody else now I rather agree with that but I take it you don't need that Darwin's was the cleverest idea anyone ever had it was the most what revolutionary the best one that did the most heavy lifting in terms of changing people's ideas that's what I meant and I I still think it's right and I've been delighted how many times that's been quoted since then people seeing the point it's Darwin's idea that unifies everything from from physics and quarks all the way to ethics and art and and and morality and love through the idea of natural selection which is responsible for all the living things and all the artifacts that living things make not just the Beavers dam and the ant hill and the termite mound but the cathedrals and the poetry and the music systems of law and so forth now you could mean by that that I'm not for protection produces brains which then make lead rules and laws or you mean that none but something a bit like natural selection actually works on human artifacts which is a bit of a stretch but that is another way of applying dog and that's another way and funny you should mention it Richard because I cite you as the as the through principle author of that idea the idea of a meme of cultural evolution as you know and if acknowledge there are other people who had similar ideas before you but you're the one who clarified it and made it made it a really tempting theoretical prospect and I'm one of those who picked up the meme idea I thought well this is this is not just a metaphor this is serious this is a good idea and actually right now I'm planning as soon as I finish the book I'm working to write a book about mimetics and memes the bad arguments against them and what what it really can do and I think that it's not just memes I think that one of the fundamental insights that we can get from a Darwinian perspective is the idea that just as trees let's say there's many brilliant details - trees they're brilliantly designed but by nobody there's lots of reasons why trees have the arrangement of parts that they do and the same is true of many cultural entities they are cunningly organised to perpetuate themselves and to protect themselves and sometimes rarely there's a human being where a group of human beings or a cabal of priests or something like that that have actively designed this thing but usually not usually the design is exactly has exactly the same provenance as the design of the bird's wing it came about by differential replication of what are basically unintended more or less mindless mutations it's important to understand that in both cases both the genes and means natural selection does work at the level of the replicator it's changing the frequencies without replicators found in the replicator pool and so something like a bird's wing which in which you mentioned is is not a replicator it's it's its phenotype which is which is produced by a long succession of cumulative selection of genes improving birds ways something like a religion yes has not been designed or maybe it maybe some of them haven't in Scientology a good example yes there's there's an intelligent design for you right there so Scientology's design Mormonism it's possibly intelligent in a site of rather less intelligently and but but the more interesting idea is that is that religions and other cultural entities achieves a structure that they do by more than just kind of dance them in a real naturally therefore swatch of self-replicating entities and you'd mentioned just now bad objections to the idea I mean one of those bad objections it seems to me is the is that unlike genes which have a very high fidelity replication DNA has very high fidelity replication memes are often said to be so inaccurately copied that they won't function and I got an answer that adds that you have yes I certainly do but first let me just give you a nice example which I've much admire a French philosopher I think he was a philosopher may be an anthropologist observing canoes made in Polynesia and he made the lovely point that these Polynesians they're just they're not clever designers they're just making boats away my grandfather and his father before him made boats but the sea is the selector the boats that come back they copy the boats that don't come back they don't copy its natural selection right there a pure example of it I think that I think that the key for me is that language is the key element in in cultural transmission I think language which only one species has not you know real language as opposed to a simple communication system words themselves have replicative norms they're like they're like genes in this regard and it's the fact that we can transmit cultural information with language which secures the level of fidelity which is needed for cumulative selection if you could imagine doing an experiment what the English called Chinese whispers Americans call telephone where you have a line of twenty children and you whisper something into the ear of the first child to disprove it into the air of the second and it goes on down the line and the question is will it survive 20 generations of transmission and the answer is that it very likely will if it's short enough and if it's spoken in the language that the children understand well because even though one child may say it in the Scottish accent on an Irish accent what an American accent so that by no means is it is it replicated with the fidelity of DNA nevertheless itself normalizing no no um because all the children in the line have the same lexicon from which they draw the words as they hear them if on the other hand the message is given in serbo-croat assuming that we're not I'm assuming them then all the children can do is copy phonetically what they hear and then it really will change extremely rapidly and at the end of the twentieth child will be unrecognizable one of the points about language that I love to stress everybody is very impressed with the fact that language is a great vehicle of communication and comprehension they less often notice that language is great even when you don't understand it that language has the self normalizing power that permits the the transmission of semi understood or imperfectly understood information I have a little demo I want you to repeat after me exactly what you hear are you ready so repeat after me mum defy the epigastrium Monday 5e epigastric again Monday 5 e 8 at the gas stream again Monday 5e at the gas trail just about perfect you know what it means well you don't have to now I'm going to try another one same thing repeat after me are you ready how do you go over there missing little bit I'll go do it again now you can't do it the reason you is so easy in the first case is that you have norms phonetic norms you've got English and they automatically involuntarily you corrected the norm this means that you can transmit a line that you may not understand let alone believe but you can transmit it faithfully from person to person because language has this wonderful proofreading capacity built right into it it's language wasn't the first thing on this planet that had that power DNA has that power and it's the same power and this is the key I think to high high enough fidelity transmission so that culture can really be accumulating that's absolutely right and if you think about say it's transmission of a skill like a skill in carpentry or something the master demonstrates to the apprentice not using language now using building just signal demonstration and in this case the apprentice doesn't actually imitate every muscular movement I mean if the master carpenter hammers ten times the apprentice may need to have a thirteen times in order to achieve what is obviously now the norm your club is the target which is that the nail had to be flush with the with with the wood but the apprentice can clearly see what the target was and I suppose uses some kind of intelligence to to work out the bottarga yes I think I think so and I think that's a big difference between that is that's a very big difference but even there I think there are in effect alphabets of of excellence for human skills and where they don't exist transmission is really problematic if you've ever taken some courses in pottery and watched a good pot or a good instructor ceramics instructor show you techniques after a while you pick up a sort of alphabet of techniques then you look at a pot and you can see oh look I know how this was made I can see that this and then this and then this you've begun to you began as a word speak pottery you've got a vocabulary of norms people in in software engineering have a very nice term which I'm trying to spread being a meme vector we all know what a typo is a typographical error and software engineers talk about a think oh and a think Oh is like a typo but it's a level higher it's a simple thinking mistake well I've you've made a think oh here if if you put in an if you forgot a parenthesis that's just a typo but if you use the wrong subroutine that's a think oh and it only works where there's a clear norm - correct - and if you look at the arch that has still not solved this problem it's dance choreography there's Lobby notation but it isn't very good nobody has yet been able to come up with a self normalizing set of norms for dance that's really secure and that's why if it weren't for cinematography for having videotapes or films we wouldn't be able really to appreciate the the artistry of some dancers and choreographers because they don't have what the musicians have at least in the West where they have the system of musical notation there isn't a system of there isn't an alphabet for dance with one interesting exception square dancing contra dancing folk dancing where there's an alphabet and that's why at least in the United States there's people that can preserve the Virginia reel or something because there's everybody does a dosey doe a little bit differently everybody honors your partner a little differently but it's a it's it's an element in in basically an alphabet of MU and that's why it's so easily transmitted and and secure over generations but it probably does grift of a generation it doesn't it well I don't know if the Virginia reel has drifted in the last 200 years I mean that's that's my operational test for a good mean would be if we go back to the number of generations I talked about Chinese whispers but what about real generations the test is this if you take a recording of one up to number three number four etcetera document talk is good and you find and then you say then you you ask impartial observers judges just can you rank order them if you can rank order them then evolution is going on if you can't if say number three is a very poor reproducer of whatever it is but number four then recognizes the norm that is being aimed at and corrects it then you will you will find that there is no tendency for there to be drift downwards in quality as you go along the line well I think that the the cumulative evolution typically happens at a at a at a higher level that yes you do get you do get mutations that then are preserved but only against the background of error correction correction or yes well expose me apply these ideas to the question of why we have religion which is a question I'm often asked and I know you're off last so we've got our two sort of models of Darwinism both of which have a replicator genes on the one hand memes on the other and in both cases they're selected in the case of gene selection the selection is based mainly on phenotypes which are kind of in whole bodies usually so the bird's wing quote helps the bird to fly and therefore the bird survives that for the birds gene survived the very genes that did the programming of the way survive now the case of memes we should be able to do something similar but it's not so clear and we need to perhaps talk about that so it may be religion is a good vehicle for talking about it I'm not I'm not sure I think it has some of the features we want first of all I think we want to use again one of your ideas extended phenotype we want to look at what is parallel to post manipulation by parasites of which there's hundreds of examples in in biology beautiful and horrible beautiful and horrible yes just bizarre and amazing examples of bizarre behaviors being provoked by a parasite which benefits the parasites genes not the hosts and I think we see this in religion a lot and it's even honored it's even named it is it is the idea that a religious believer has been enslaved by or is submitting to another power which is governing his life it's it's setting aside its own reproductive advantage to spread the word to spread the gospel it's in Christianity it's in Islam is in Judaism it is a very common idea that this is this is a glorious thing to be the selfless spreader of the Word of God and if your Senate but priest you're denying your Darwinian hunch absolutely yes No so that's that's one obvious application but I think there are many others I think that I think it's no accident that religions around the world I have used unison singing and chanting because unison singing and chanting is itself a mechanism for high fidelity it's in a principle which has been endorsed by computer science fun women multiplexing if you have eight people and they all have imperfect memories of the words - god save the queen or pledge of allegiance the United States if they say it in unison the errors that individuals make along the way get drowned out and corrected and you hear what the majority says and you you refresh your own memory of the of the text in effect this is how religious content rituals Holy Scriptures text were preserved before writing they had to have mechanisms for maintaining the fidelity and unison was was the the beautiful excellent mechanism for doing that because it had this multiplexing capacity what other aspects of religion could you think of as being not intelligently designed but just plain evolved and what sounds something like life after death well oh that one's too obvious I think I think it takes a steely person somebody stronger than me to resist the temptation to say to a child whose parent or whose dog has died not to fall back on the comforting myth of there being some place where this loved one is gone and can watch you I mean that is that's sort of I think a no brainer it's not no surprise why that would have been invented over and over and over again it's a it's a good trick it's a good trick if you can persuade yourself that what you wish to be true is true which sign that's a good meta trick that's yeah which you find throughout religions one that's been interesting me more recently is how a number of of social institutions depend on the ignorance of those that they that they exploit whether it's a Ponzi scheme where the individual investors are sort of almost complicit in their ignorance of what's going on because it's not worth their while to be too inquisitive about what's going on until it's too late and in particular religions I think that perhaps the single most important change in the world as far as religion is concerned is electronic communication the internet and cell phones transistor radios for that matter going back a little bit for thousands of years religions thrived in an environment where information was hard to come by and it was you could more or less assume that individual members of each group were not only ignorant of other religions but even ignorant of a lot of their own religions history and practices and this easily maintained egrants as I think sort of the lifeblood of of religious solidarity our bodies are composed of maybe even a hundred trillion cells and they cooperate pretty well the human ones are only about 10% of those and the rest are all visitors of one sort or another and just take your human cells the ones that have your genome the body never has to worry about you know your thumbs learning something and then rebelling and deciding to abandon ship they are on a their their life mission has been determined in development from from the moment that they were born of became the daughter cell of some mother cell and they don't have any wherewithal to learn about the outside world and wonder whether or not maybe life would be better if they were not quite so cooperative and religions were like that religions could rely on and notice when I say rely on there's nobody doing this relying it's this is the religion itself that is designed by natural selection in such a way as to presuppose the relative ignorance of the parts that make it up you don't have to go to special lengths to shield the parts from information now that's all change it's changed hugely and I think every religion in the world is on the cusp of either going extinct or transforming itself in ways that are really radical if there's no other option they simply will not be able to continue with the information that is now readily available they can they can do the sort of religious equivalent of Bashar al-assad and you know enslave the people in prison that people kill the people but if you're not prepared to put all the people basically in prison they're going to get the information and that's going to change everything so my prescription for what we should be doing is very firmly but gently informing informing informing letting people all over the world know about each other's religions and letting them Mull those facts over and if the leaders of those religions have to revise their practices to account for the fact that this is happening they're going to transform religions in ways that are hard to imagine I think largely favorable not sure if I quite got the analogy with the the toes not being able to break away I mean that you gave us a reason for that that they don't they don't know how to do it and that's that's where the analogy with Italy with ignorance well well there is there is cancer of course that's the that's the rebellion that's Francois Jacobi who said the dream of every cell is to become two cells and that is a dream which is suppressed suppressed in in multicellular organisms through very good reasons but I think more about the the veil of ignorance in in meiosis which simply prevents germline cells from get from having any interaction with information about about whether whether or not they're going to be germline cells and this prevents them in in the main from exploiting features of their local environments that might otherwise be exploitable well you could do your rebellion trait with with not the toes but with genes where you could say that they no no not the whole genome is a collection if you could call them viruses almost I mean is there's nowhere a kind of symbiotic colony of viruses who are held together in cooperation because for generations they have had only one exit route from the body in which they sit which is the gamma rays the sperms or eggs occasionally if one of them discovers another exit route like being sneezed out or something then it might well adopt it and the dream of every gene in this sense is to get itself propagated as widely as possible but if there is only one way out namely through the ordinary processes of sexual reproduction that forces them into doing this cooperative enterprise of making a body of the right type and this gives rise to gene complexes because which are which are collections of mutually compatible genes which go together in the same well if you if you imagine genes that make carnivore teeth carnivore guts can't evolve sense organs carnivore behavior patterns they go together in in carnivore gene pools and they are certain selected to be mutually compatible with each other not as a group but each one for itself neutrally compatible as against another gene pool which is a herbivore gene pool where herbivore teeth above all guts have before but behavior patterns and so on also our mutually compatible so gene complexes are gene pools which are kept together by sexual reproduction and are prevented from contaminating each other because these don't cross food there should be something like that in memes and I think you're kind of suggesting it there should be something like mutually compatible means maybe the whole of Roman Catholicism is one mean complex where memes that maybe the transubstantiation and the Trinity and and the all the other bollocks where you go together as opposed to the Trotters don't all Islamic goods good and but I think that what we can already see is let it be true and to a first approximation I suppose it probably is true that the let's say the Roman Catholic consortium of of memes worked very well for a long time but that's breaking down now that's breaking down it's a great stamina because because of the information flow yes so it's as though you took biological evolution and you suddenly waved a wand and said no longer could species not crossbreed suddenly it becomes possible to do what bacteria do and copy and paste because bacteria don't have all resets they just copy and paste now you're suggesting that we may be moving into a transitional phase where that becomes possible and so as it were you suddenly transpose herbivore guts into carnivore gene pools and mess things up if you take a sort of bird's eye view you see that religions change one in the last hundred years than they did in the two millennia before that and they're probably going to change more in the next twenty years and they changed in the last hundred you mean spawning new ones or spawning the ones abandoning old practices abandoning the points of Creed things like sake it's all metaphorical we don't believe it yeah and and also I'm very curious to see what the Catholic Church is going to do about the dire shortage of priests yes I wasn't I was reaching oh it is I was in Ireland a year or so ago and the statistic that was really striking was that only 20-30 years ago there were three priests for every parish now there's three parishes for every priest that's a order of magnitude drop and it's getting worse getting messy yeah Brendon we're from from the Catholic point of view yes yeah this is no but I think it's encouraging but I think also I am a voice of a sort of moderation here saying relax things are going our way don't don't overreact just a little patience it's unraveling itself at a great rate the noise that we're hearing is not I think the press is partly responsible for this every now and then you get these breathless accounts in the press by commentators talking about how we're in the midst of a religious revival nonsense I don't think there's any religious revival I think what we're hearing the Fuhrer is that is the nearly hysterical response of churches to the handwriting on the wall that they're seeing and just say they're there it'll be all over soon just you know we don't have to they don't have to yes it's a good women perhaps to mention the clergy project it also must have been involved in it turns out from from your research with Lyndon Osceola that um there are lots and lots of clergymen and clergy women who have become atheists but who don't in most cases don't actually come out and say so and the clergy project is a project to write a kind of safe place a website a safe place for disillusioned clergy people to talk to each other compare notes climb each other's shoulders perhaps you could talk a bit about your in well and first of all I want to make sure that everybody understands that there's two projects here there's the La Scala Dennett research project where Linda's the is the brilliant interviewer and we set out not to fund a start a website we set out simply to find an interview in deepest confidence clergy active active clergy clergy that had parishes that were preaching from pulpits and find out what it was like to be them and we found some and there they're actually quite wonderful people and they're in there caught in a terrible trap because they wanted to do good they wanted to help other people they thought this was the right way to do it and they piled diplomacy on diplomacy until it became hypocrisy and there's no bright line between the two and they found that they were devoting their life to preaching doctrines they no longer believed in order to carry on their good works they had people that were deeply dependent on them they made lots of promises too and they so they were really caught in a in a set of circumstances that they had created not to get rich but to help their fellow human beings and it's a very painful and very lonely place to be to me one of the most amazing and moving facts is that our initial group of half-a-dozen interviewees I think in every case maybe I maybe not quite every case with just about every case Lindell escola was the first human being that these people had ever talked to about this they didn't talk to their spouses they didn't talk to their children they didn't talk to their superiors they didn't talk to their colleagues they were all alone until they found they could talk with Linda and they're so grateful for the chance to talk these painful issues over with a understanding no-nonsense and confidential person so that's the less Cola Dennett research we're in the middle of Phase two and we have now an embarrassment of riches there are more volunteer clergy than we can handle Linda's working as hard as you can to to enter do the interviews and we get them transcribed and then we edit there will be more publications coming out of that but then something really entirely distinct happened several of them got together with Dan Barker - they wanted to create a website a home a safe place for their fellow clergy and the rule was very simple you have to be either a current clergy person with a parish active clergy or a former clergy person and it started in October less than a year ago no advertising no canvassing no proselytizing we wanted not we they because I am NOT neither Richard nor I are members of this group we can't because neither one of us is former clerk cheek they started with a handful of members and I just checked yesterday they now have over 200 members and over 50 of them are active clergy now and it's turning out to be a very supportive group they have a waiting list they have 60 plus clergy from around the country who are who have applied for membership needless to say the application process is careful because they have to be vetted the clergy inside they all use pseudonyms inside but still they want to keep security high they don't want lurking journalists or or I got a I asked them about this a few of them yesterday and I got the amusing report back from one of them saying oh yes we had one nice gentleman who wanted to become a member so that he could out us all thinking this would be doing a good favor we discouraged him from membership so they have to keep those people at bay and it's a it's a careful process so there's a there's a bottleneck right now people standing in line to get into this organization Richards foundation provided the initial help in providing the website helping them get a website up and running and properly so but neither he nor I have any access to the conversations that go on there this is this is their secure thing that they're doing themselves they're incorporating so that they can be a recipient of charitable donations and their check out the website it's the clergy project they're they're growing by leaps and bounds and a handful of them have come out I think three in the last couple of months of active clergy who have actually taken the step of standing up in front of their congregation in effect and saying I'm an atheist and they get a lot of ostracism for a day they it's quite a courageous decision that they've taken in some cases you you realize how courageous it is when you see the reactions of some of their parishioners sometimes some of the reactions are humane and gentle but a lot of people are very angry and I have I think you have to acknowledge that if you'd been listening to the sermons of somebody for some years and confiding in that person with your deepest and most painful secrets and letting that person preside over the marriage of your daughter and the funeral of your father and mother and all this and then you find out that that person is an atheist I would think that would be a kick in the stomach for a lot of initiative way to do it which would be the sort of Karen Armstrong way where you don't say I'm an atheist you say oh well it's all symbolic it's all metaphorical of course now I believe it's literally true I mean that's the other that's the dishonest way of of dealing with it well one of the things that we can see and no surprise and we don't have enough data to say that this is a statistically significant pattern but the pattern in the early data are that there's a striking difference between what we call liberals and literals the literals are people coming from churches that are still quite literal about the Bible they none of this metaphor symbolism stuff and it includes of angelical Zinn the main and and Baptists whereas the Liberals are sort of like Church of England you know you know do you believe in God no we're CoV very very sophisticated and they would like to say in the way they manipulate the metaphors that help them say the things they say I mean the bizarre thing Karen Strom tries to say is that literalism is recent anyway in that the early church was always metaphorical oh well I think I find that she's she's the historical scholar but I find that on the face of it very hard to believe here's what happens every generation going back for several thousand years the great majority of the members of any church just don't give it much thought this is what the elders say is what mom and dad do we go to church we say these things and it's it actually is not a matter of great reflection for them so they go along and then there's always in every generation a few who just can't quite do that they are too skeptical they're too critical they're too reflective and so they think about it and they spend some serious time and effort trying to reconcile their regular beliefs with what they're told by their church they should believe that's not easy and they're the theologians and they're very clever and each generation has their theologians who who take on the the thankless task of creating this ever revising set of metaphors an analogy so that they can go on saying the things they feel obliged to say and finding a meaning in them that they can in good conscience accept needless to say that the great majority people don't need that and they don't pay any attention to the theologians who basically pay attention to each other one wonders why they both uh I mean it it doesn't seem like much of a way to spend your life well if if you're raised in our tradition loyalty to that tradition is of close to paramount importance perhaps because you believe the fib of all fibs that you can't be good without God if you believe that then if you have this frame of mind then I think it makes some sense to try to be a theologian if you believe that so then how could it how could you be true to your belief if what you're doing is in effect making up something which is unreal because to say that you need God to be good and yet you're saying actually God doesn't exist but we're making him into a metaphor or something well I think they convince themselves that they're not making it up they're refining something they're finding the hidden core of an idea and just scraping off the crude primitive trappings of earlier generations and getting at the nugget at the center I mean that's what they think they're doing and if they were that would be good work except that it presupposes that the primitives who began in the first place had some kind of forecasting wisdom such they could see that primitive as it sounds there must that there is a nugget there Why should there be a nugget at all well if you believe that God told them that solves that problem that we should open it up and open up for questions yes I'd like to revisit if I may and when you were talking about compatible means in religions so you were comparing the Catholicism for instance with Islam and and herbivores and carnivores I'm a biologist so when you and you talk about conversion evolution so if you remove the isolation between those two that you might see like a dilution effect which is what you're talking about might be happening now could also the opposite effect be happening whereby you're getting actually divergent selection could it be an explanation for the radical or some of the radical and religions we're seeing that actually you're getting religions or being pushed further apart there are people who've done serious historical scholarship about this I haven't myself but my understanding from them is that in fact there have always been lots of our chutes religions have come and gone it's it is like biology in this regard there's probably been 10 religions that or 100 religions that nobody's ever heard of for every one that we have any historical record of they have a very short life they live less than a generation little cults that start up and this seems to be part of the phenomena whether we're getting more of that breaking up into new cults whether the sort of productivity divergence that you speak of whether that's a new phenomenon could be but I don't I don't know that there's any evidence of something that's always happened I think it's a very why the biological analogy shouldn't accommodate the splitting apart the equivalent of speciation as well as the keeping together both happening biology and I don't see why position would happen in this case as well there's there are some differences of course it's interesting that Judaism has had almost no speciation individuation into into different groups just a little bit whereas Protestantism just just hundreds thousands of different little independent Protestant churches and an especially interesting case of course is there's Mormonism or a Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day saints where we can I think identify the feature that enables the splitting and that goes back to the original founders and the idea that in Mormonism God speaks to everybody you don't have to go through the leader the elder of the church you can you can hear God's voice yourself and what's happened over the years every now and then when a an elder in the church the Mormon Church decides what or when the group of elders I don't know what they call themselves decide on a new policy as they did recently not so long ago and they decided that you know blacks were actual people and could become members of the church there's always other Mormons who they listen and God doesn't agree with what they've just heard so they form a new sect and of course very often what God tells these people and it's always men is what God really wants you to do is to take that cute little fourteen-year-old girl next door and marry her and so you get a pattern of sects forming where polygamy comes back in in a big way because that's what God's told them to do I suppose it's similar in the recent splits tend to be more similar to each other those are cousins in evolutionary natural selection you have completely unintelligible things which is subject to chance and it seems the expansion powered natural selection is that this looks like a an intelligent process it looks like I know people carnival zoo evolving short teeth is something just designed by an intelligence for a function but in fact it turns out that it's actually arranged by chance whereas what you're saying with what would you see with sort of cultures is in fact well you have about about sinks or boat floats and then people actually do intelligently choose to pick the boat which flipped so it seems to be that there's an immense the fact that human beings are intelligent makes the analogy pretty pretty threadbare because well there's the one operates on chance and the other objects you know a conscious choice I think that's a very understandable reaction and skepticism about the memes approach but I think it ignores a few facts first of all nobody invented money nobody invented math nobody invented words a few words have been coined by intelligent designers word coiners most attempts to coin a word fail the words that we all use for the most part have no authors have no inventors and have have a history of evolution and mutation that can be traced back Darwin himself pointed out this strong analogy a long time ago so I think that we can acknowledge that at the top of the the frosting on the cake of human society is intelligent choice people using their brains to make better and better things science and politics and all manner of very highly cognitive problem-solving does occur it however is based on a foundation which was not created that way which grew up in some other way and it wasn't through genes so we need the mimetic base for the intelligent selection and in fact once you see that you begin to realize that the intelligence doesn't play that big a role all the time some of the would-be improvements turn out to be non improvements at all and they are wiped out just like any mindless mutation which doesn't work the the proof of the pudding in culture as in biology is whether the thing survives and replicates and that is actually independent of however brilliant and creative and intelligent the initiator was and so we still want to have a a Darwinian basis for our understanding of cultural transmission and change in Asia for instance you see the rise of a very aggressive disciplines of Christianity that's replacing a the passive non evangelical religions that came before so do you think that information flow will necessarily lead to a better sort of religion in you know whatever metric you're using good point I think that this is my eternal optimism showing perhaps I think that the aggressive religions that you're talking about I think this is a short live phenomena I don't think it can last because I think that it will accumulate so much tension because of the information that it swims in that that I don't see how this can last I may be wrong I think that the only the only trick the only innovation that could do this is not a barrier you know like preventing people from having cell phones or using the internet but a mental barrier which so poisons them against reason and evidence that they take on irrationality as a sort of cult I can imagine that protecting them from the great wash of information around them and we see that there are things on the web that have have that flavor you know conspiracy theories of various sorts for instance but I don't think that's I don't think that's a stable arrangement for one thing I don't think that the leadership of such groups can survive for long without turning reason back on at least in themselves and then you get a split between the leaders and the and the flock exacerbated and we've seen that before we've seen that in things like esthe and Scientology I don't think those are for the long haul do you think there are policy implications for governments with respect to cutting down for example on intelligent design byproducts of religion well I would obviously like to cut down on teaching scientific error so there will be policy implications yes I'm not sure about how to make sure those are are implemented the best way to do it is aggressively to teach about intelligent design in a course on sociology and epistemology not in biology and of course in political science can have a unit on intelligent design that's where it belongs it's a phenomenon it's a real phenomena in the world we should study it along with others I think if you do that instead of trying to outlaw it you'll you'll come out better in Canada there's some interesting developments in Quebec there was a recent case in which Quebec has instituted mandatory instruction on the world's religions to all the citizens all the children in Quebec including the you know home schoolers and a parent some parents sued and lost and they were basically told by the courts the highest court in Quebec no you do not have the right to keep your children misinformed or ignorant about these matters farther to the west in Canada I think in Alberta they tried something different they tried to have a policy which for bad oh I think it was in that case it was something about gay marriage or homosexual relations or something like this and and they're not getting very far with that legislation I think that's not what you should do I think instead of forbidding the teaching of this you should require the teaching of something which will tend to undercut the teaching of that and on the principle that parents do not have the right to keep their children ignorant that's child abuse but they can tell their children any garbage they want to but they're just going to have to tell children who have been informed by this other material do we know whether the results in Quebec are cold encouraging or is it to Eddie I think it's too early to say I think that the best thing that a theists and secular humanists can do is show and take whatever affected public relations and methods do this show that you can be good without God have projects that you do under the banner of atheism or secular humanism because I think this is actually the main reason at least in America why people cling to their religion the good news is they want to be good and they're just afraid that they can't be good without God and we just have to show them no not at all so I think giving examples of all the good things and all the good people who are good without God is probably the single most effective thing to do it doesn't do much good to ridicule the flock the parishioners but I think when their leaders say stupid things then I think laughter is probably the best thing but you have to be careful not to create victims martyrs by by your by your laughter I think that's a fine line there sometimes you just have to hoot though sometimes it's just so preposterous that that it's worth pointing out and letting people be embarrassed and discomforted and then of course the followers will be discomforted precariously and that's that may be enough but I think embarrassing people to their face in front of their friends or family is not a good idea ever there's a difference between using ridicule on a particular individual and expecting to change their lands which you probably won't and using ridicule on on a particular point of view no not on a person but I'm taking a point of view and letting third parties who haven't really thought about it very much as Dan was saying earlier that they then might be influenced I myself was influenced when I was an undergraduate I was rather taken I'm ashamed to admit with tire shadow and and the phenomenon of man and I was I was taken in by what Peter Medawar called that you for ristic tipsy prose poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the Frej spirit mm-hmm so I was taken in by that and then I read matter was review of phenomenon trellis and was completely won over I mean immediately this witty takedown of this pretentious theologian and I realized gosh I've been fooled i've been conned and so what are the things that that i try to do when i do occasionally indulge in ridicule is that I'm not trying to actually change the mind of a real dyed-in-the-wool deeply religious person I'm trying to change the mind of somebody who's sitting on the fence and who hasn't really given it very very much thought but I do want to come back your point about you can be moral without God of course I mean the reason that's the most important point to get across is quite simply the totally bizarre that there's an awful lot of people think you do need God to be to be immoral if they gave it a moment's thought they would realize that that well it's that you certainly don't get your morals from the Bible or the Koran so I mean anybody who does that hasn't read the Bible but then you're left with your only reason you're good is that you're sucking up to God which is very ignoble reason yeah to be good high in the sky yes I'd like to take this moment to point out which may be obvious to all of you maybe not that among the horsemen of atheism I'm usually regarded as the sort of Politis least least aggressive and now that hitch is on alas I guess the the title of most acerbic goes to Richard but if you haven't seen it let me recommend his I think brilliant interview of father George Coyne the Catholic astronomer Vatican astronomer an intelligent good man and Richard interviews him at something like and he is you're so gentle and diplomatic and just leading him leading him leading him and you never bark and you never hoot and you just let this nice man dig himself in deeper and deeper and deeper it's it's I thought it was an exemplary piece of of exposure and you were you were perfectly respectful of him at every moment I have that was well done well he ended up by saying that he had absolutely no reason to believe in God whatsoever so I said well why do you then he said because I was brought up Roman Catholic that was the only reason and he was quite frank about yeah I was wondering if evolution is the mechanism that can be sort of extrapolated to explain culture and religion how can we use this framework to explain people engaging in behaviors that seem to contradict this principles like a suicide bomber why do people engage in the dis sort sorts of behaviors and does it mean that beliefs or ideas can override somehow this kind of basic impulses for survival and could this be potentially a beneficial mechanism assuming that you have a rational idea I think this is I think this is an easy question to answer we're the only species that goes in for this craziness really and we do it because of our being infected by memes that have their own agendas in the same way that there are suicidal ants that climb up stalks of grass where they're more likely to be eaten by sheep or cows and it's because their brain has been invaded by a Lancet fluke Dyck Rossi Liam dendritic um that needs to get into the belly of a cow or a sheep this is hosts manipulation by parasite and once you recognize that cultural entities can do that can harness a person's energy and talent and cognitive skills and all the rest to further its replicative purposes and you say well wait a minute a religion doesn't have any it's not intelligent well what do you think a Lancet fluke is intelligent it has the IQ of a carrot it doesn't it doesn't have to be intelligent it just has to be designed to have this effect and it will benefit from it and similarly a religious meme that is designed by evolution by cultural evolution to have the effect of promoting selfless martyrdom behavior on behalf of those that it infects that's a very effective meme Sam Harris said the thing you have to understand is that these people really believe what they say they believe they actually believe that when they die a martyr's death they are going to a martyrs paradise and moreover every time a suicide bomber is successful there are numerous people who wish to emit it literally is a mean in the sense of self copy so it's not as dad says it's not at all difficult to understand how it happens once you grasp that natural selection doesn't only select genes in which case you couldn't have suicide but it selects memes as well in which case it's very easy I think most of us if we reflected good and hard could think of some purpose some averting some terrible catastrophe on this planet that we would be prepared to risk and even sacrifice our lives for it doesn't have to be religious that's what thinking beings do they take ideas seriously and that's how we differ from other animals we take ideas very seriously the good news is that the fastest growing category in the world is no religion at all it's growing faster than Islam which is the fastest growing religion and Islam is growing largely by birthrate not by conversion and for a religion to grow by birth rate presupposes that children inherit the religion of their parents that's right unfortunately they do but that's that's a loop we've got to try and break well yes it's actually it's not that hard to break the Baptist commissioned a survey by their own social scientists who said if current trends condition continued this is a few years ago reported in New York Times only 4% of the youngsters that were being raised as Baptists we're going to be Bible believing adults it takes it takes 20 years you know to raise a believer in 20 minutes to turn them into an apostate that's an encouraging soul you sure it happens it happens I mean you get mail I get mail you said earlier that you thought one of the best ways to see religion slowly dissolved was by showing all the followers the different religions and non religions and the ideas but surely that precludes two other scenarios which actually create the opposite effect that don't don't help dissolve religion they help strengthen it the first is that different religions with similar bases such as the out brown religions merely see what they have in common which increases the belief that they are correct not the atheists have to see how wide their wider believes are held in other cultures not just the rope the other is that by showing religious followers they're all different beliefs you don't confuse them you merely create a rally around the flag effect whereby they see what they see activate their opposition they see what even the casual previously casual believers see that what the beliefs that they've grown up with is under threat and so they merely grow stronger in that what would you say to that well that's I think that's a possibility in both cases I would insist on putting into the compulsory education on religions that I supported a good sympathetic account of the John frum religion the cargo cult which was started during World War two and it's hilarious it's its heart it's it's heartbreaking in a way because the natives in this little island are still marching around carrying American flags and waiting for John from their savior to come back with cargo and I think just letting people know that it just it puts a little seed into their minds and it may take a long time but if you show them that vividly at some point don't expect immediate recognition but at some point it may suddenly hit them wait a minute isn't that how sort of how my religion started isn't mine just as wacky as these the juxtaposition of different religions even though they can see some similarities they'll see similarities with even the wildest and most exotic religion between similarities between that religion in their own and and that will be food for thought I think the question that has a point there that does seem to be a tendency to say oh well that's just ridiculous but my religion is there's a tendency yes of course but I think I think that's a reaction which is a relatively brittle reaction I don't mind that people have that reaction I think you know for the time being that's of course how they're going to react give them a few years let them think about it for a while I am a believer in sort of slow working ideas here just let them settle in and and let people see what they think in a while I think it's always a mistake to press for a press for a conversion right now people just don't want to do that and don't try just settle for laying a few facts on them and letting them letting those facts percolate away in their heads for a while and see what comes of it science says that solidity is the power to exclude other bodies but we define other bodies as solid science doesn't actually explain the most basic notions of the world but kind of just shows the limits of our rationality well I think there's this much truth in that there are questions that are very very important that are not scientific questions they are in a very broad sense political questions there are questions where we have to decide how we want to live and how we want others to live what we want the imaginary social contract to be science isn't going to tell you what that is a process which is a little bit like science is the way that can get done I think ideally and that is a bringing together people and letting everybody under rules of respectful discourse try to persuade each other of what they think the most important things are whatever consensus you get from that sort of exercise can do as good a job as any of settling you know what what should be important in this society and that's not science it's but it it's reasonable it's rational and I don't think there's any really important issues that can't be addressed in that way I mean it has been suggested that there are certain questions which seemed like scientific questions sort of what's the origin of the laws of physics or something of that sort might be forever unanswerable by science all I'd say to that is that if science can't answer them certainly nothing else can exactly we just have to get used to the facts as some questions we can answer fantastic well and thank you very much to you professor Richard Dawkins I'm professor Daniel Dennett and thank you very much for coming [Applause] you

Channel: Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science

Views: 223,495

Rating: 4.8575869 out of 5

Keywords: Dawkins, and, Dennett, High, Res

Id: WdU-UtEJEIA

Length: 72min 14sec (4334 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 01 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/WoollyMittens]

I rather liked this. Not so much attacks on religion, but an insightful analysis why these memes can't propagate for much longer with a worldwide decline in ignorance.

[u/lahwran_]

Ooh, another long Dawkins interview! I don't have anything to do tonight anymore.

[u/seedpod02]

What is that sticking out of Dawkin's right trouser leg? A gun? Or what?

[u/[deleted]]

Does anybody have a link to the interview by Dawkins mentioned by Dennett?

[u/[deleted]]

Can't wait for Dennett's book on memetics..

[u/garybc]

The choice of vocabulary is central to favorably framing an issue and people are thoughtful as Dawkins and Dennett spend a fair amount of time doing that. Others want to jump to a hot conclusion. If you take the time to framing things taking many factors into consideration you can reach some good understanding. Science does this all the time, but it bores some. It's simpler to take one arbitrary point of view and link it to emotions. Then you may create a barrier to understanding and further conversations as others have to climb over a barrier to get close to a fair conversation. For more see http://secularhumanist.blogspot.com/2011/06/framing-arguments-you-say-flaming.html