Richard Dawkins - Giving Thanks in a Vacuum

[Applause] the fact of your own existence is the most astonishing fact you'll ever have to confront don't you dare ever get used to it don't you dare ever say that life is boring monotonous or joyless one obvious way to express this is the improbability of your own personal existence of course with hindsight the probability of your existence is one since you're here but that's the hindsight of a lottery winner the probability of winning a big lottery before you go in for it is so close to zero as to render it an irrational decision unless which is not totally irrational you gain measurable happiness from a flickering glimmer of the lawn hope I don't need to spell it out the argument your parents had to meet they have to copulate on a particular occasion particular sperm had to penetrate a particular egg and even that wasn't enough to determine your personal identity because after that fertilized egg was formed it might have split to become a pair of identical twins I can't get my head around the question of whether if that had happened one of those twins would have been you and if so which one and of course the same conditions had to be true for your grandparents or great-grandparents all the way back through the wonderful film that we just see and I wish we could have seen more of it all the way back to the origin of life as I put it before if the third dinosaur to the left of the tall's cycad tree had not happened to sneeze at exactly the moment when he did your umpteenth great-grandparents would never have met you wouldn't be here and the same goes for the existence of every species genus family order class phylum and so on the following is a fact that once was a species all interbreeding split into two one half or some geographical accident split it one half was destined to become us and the half of the animal kingdom which means along the other half was destined to become shall we say an octopus and the half of the animal kingdom to which the octopuses belong so the existence of every phylum class order etc is a contingency depending upon a series of freak accidents which had almost vanishingly unlikely probability of happening but this emphasis on improbability raises a danger of a grave misunderstanding and the misunderstanding is this with so much chance about so much contingency you might run away with the idea that evolution itself is a process of chance a process of luck nothing could be further from the truth it is chance which particular species are here which particular individuals are here but it's very much not chance that there are some individuals here some species and moreover we can say a lot about the properties that the animals that would be here anyway would have had there is luck there is contingency its massive luck and contingency with respect to individuals and species but there is a force that's constantly dragging the evolutionary process back on course not in detail but in general as it happens Australia is a particularly good place to talk about this for Australian mammals evolved separately and independently from the rest of the world over the same period so it's almost as though some godlike being at the time of the breakup of the Great Southern continent of Gondwana planned a beautiful natural experiment let's run the mammal experiment twice actually more than twice because South America too was an island at the time let's run the mammal experiment at least three times and see what happens and the remarkable thing as you know is that much the same thing happened there is a force it's natural selection there is a force that's pulling evolution in similar directions not identical nothing like a kangaroo in the rest of the world but in similar directions and so we have in Australia marsupial mice marsupial moles marsupial flying squirrels marsupial rabbits marsupial wolves and so on so I'm Chuck stop posing the extreme luck of our individual existence with the extreme not extreme the the moderately respectable degree of predictability which natural selection provides we have these two opposite lessons to take away from the evolution of life and both of us should give us cause to give thanks for our existence our individual existence clearly but also give thanks for the existence of evolution itself which is this astonishing process which contrived to take the blind forces of physics which are the same all over the universe and by this remarkable process of evolution by natural selection produce at least on this planet this wondrous panoply of complexity of beauty and the illusion of design and illusion of design so strong that it has fooled almost everybody who's ever lived and caused humanity to wait until the middle of the nineteenth century before two traveling naturalists worked out that it actually wasn't design I talked about this predictive force this this force of evolution which is pushing life in a particular direction evolution is progressive it's not a very fashionable thing to say nowadays I feel inclined to say beware of forth profits claiming not to be what they are pleased to call adaptation ists a foolish word at the same level of straw during foolishness as that other favorite word reductionist beware of false prophets who try to tell you that evolution is not progressive certainly evolution is not progressive if by progressive you mean progressive towards humanity but evolution is progressive in the following sense when you've got a complicated adaptation like an eye something that bears the apparent stamp of design all over it and I or an ear say then it is absolutely obvious that evolution of that had to be progressive it started out as something that could barely see anything at all it had to for logical reason you can't suddenly get an eye that sees it had to be a rudimentary eye that could hardly see anything at all and now we have the eye of an eagle the eye of a hawk the eye of a human which is a superb instrument with variable focusing with variable stopping down color vision correction for Apfel aberration and the all the computational machinery behind it that goes to analyze the scene in highly sophisticated ways the building up of complex adaptations like that is of course progressive and it has a strong vein of predictability it's been calculated that eyes or optical apparatus have evolved some dozens of times independently around the animal kingdom and one can say the same thing of ears in the case of echolocation sonar it's evolved at least four times in bats as is well known in tooth wave and in two independent families and birds I don't know how many times nervous systems have evolved but we can say that enlargements of the nervous system that could be called brains have evolved in several different invertebrate groups and big brains brains big enough to be plausibly argued as conscious have evolved several times within the vertebrates certainly in primates in Wales in carnivores in elephants in probably some others Simon Conway Morris the Cambridge paleontologist has even gone so far as to suggest that humans or generate bipedal creatures with big brains stereoscopic forward-looking eyes and skillful manipulating hands would have evolved again if the tape of life had been rerun if you could restart evolution say at the origin of the mammals perhaps in the origin of the vertebrates this is an interesting thought experiment the idea of rerunning the tape of evolution it was originally suggested by the American biologist Stuart Kaufmann and he used it in a very interesting way and I like to use it from time to time I think Conway Morris is probably going a bit far when he says that humans would certainly have evolved again he's certainly going too far when he says that it is evidence for his weird belief in Christianity but I think he's not going much too far when he speculates that something like humans is not that improbable to have evolved more than once now natural selection as I've said is the great engine of the predictable half of what I'm talking about today natural selection is predictable natural selection is lawful natural selection will produce the sort of results that that it has produced before we could see that in the natural experiment of Australia South America and the old world mammals and we can predict now that if some catastrophe were to wipe out the mammals in the same way as a meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous we can predict here and now that if there are some surviving vertebrates they will evolve into a similar range of ecological types as the mammals produced several times over in different parts of the world as the dinosaurs produced before them as the so called mammal-like reptiles produced before that you're going to get the same range of carnivores big carnivores middle sized carnivore small carnivores ditto for herbivores you're going to get gliding animals burrowing animals and gnawing animals these are all predictable things the great predictable engine of evolution however requires the other half of the equation the luck the contingency in order to get through certain stages and I think the origin of life is the obvious one here once the origin of life has happened and that means once you have the arising on a planet of some kind of self-replicating coded information which not only makes copies of itself but which influences the world on this planet it does it through the processes of embryology influencing the world so as to affect its own probability of surviving and being replicated once you have that natural selection takes over the engine of predictability takes over and you can you can be sure not sure but you can say it's very likely that something like a range of life forms that we see will come to pass but the first step might be a very very lucky step indeed it might be the kind of lucky step with which I began when I encouraged you to bless your own luck for your own personal existence how lucky was the origin of life we actually don't know theories of the origin of life are so far none of them conclusively even very even highly plausible so this is one of our the great gaps in our knowledge and people are working on it actively and it's a very good thing that they are to ask the question how lucky is the origin of life is tantamount to asking how many times do we think life has arisen independently around the universe and our present state of knowledge allows us to countenance all extremes it could on the one hand be true that life has arisen only once anywhere in the universe or the other extreme it could be that the universe is simply teeming with life my gut feeling for what it's worth it's worth almost nothing is that life is probably reasonably common around the universe in the sense that there probably are some millions of independent evolutions of life dotted around the universe but the number of planets in the universe is so vast in the billions of billions that even if there even if there are a million independent planets all of whom have independently evolved life they could still be so far scattered away from each other that no one life-form on these islands of life ever has any likelihood of encountering or even knowing about any of the others I've told you my gut feeling and I've told you that it's not worth anything gut feelings on the whole are not worth anything but the following is not a gut feeling the following is a logical deduction if you are one of those who wants to believe in other words whose gut feeling is that life has arisen only once in the universe and there are many whose intuition points that way then I will now deduce for you a consequence that you may find extremely paradoxical if it is true that life has arisen only once in the universe of course it has to be here because here we are talking about it then that means that the event that we call the origin of life has to be an event of such stupefying improbability because of all the billions of planets that any chemist who is working in the lab trying to find a plausible theory of the origin of life is totally and utterly wasting his time we don't want a plausible theory of the origin of life the only theory that should satisfy us if we are one of those who thinks that we are the only life form in the universe the only theory of the origin of life that should satisfy us is a deeply deeply implausible theory because if it were plausible then life would have arisen many times [Applause] let me now go back to an earlier candidate for a stroke of blinding luck that might have been necessary in order for us to be here and this is going right back long before the origin of life which probably happened between three and four million years ago back to the origin of the universe and the laws of physics several physicists have argued that the origin of the laws of physics and the physical constants was an event of of tremendous luck Martin Rees the present astronomer royal in in Britain and the president of the Royal Society of London has written a nice little book called I think just six numbers in which he takes six of the fundamental constants of physics these are numbers that physicists know the value of the great accuracy but don't have any rationale for why they have those values given that they've got those values then physicists can deduce an awful lot of other things and they build their their edifice of physics on them but at present they don't know why these constants have those values and Martin Rees and others have calculated that if any of those constants had different values then the universe as we know it couldn't exist and life couldn't have evolved so they're things like the gravitational constant the weak force the strong force and so on and the image that you could imagine is that at the origin of the universe there are six knobs that you can twiddle and these are tuning knobs and every one of these six knobs has to be twiddle to exactly the right tuning position because if any one of them is a tiny bit off the correct value then the universe wouldn't happen for example if the gravitational constant was wrong the universe would never have got beyond the stage of being distributed hydrogen galaxies would never have formed stars would never have condensed that means that there would never be chemistry the the the heavier elements anything heavier than hydrogen would never have been forged in the interior of stars because there wouldn't be any stars so and you could do the same thing for twiddling any of those six knobs well if we accept the notion of fine-tuning we have something that we need to explain not all physicists do accept it Victor Stenger who's written some excellent books and could could be a candidate for what you might call the fifth Horseman Victor Stenger has pointed out that the assumption that people like Reiss have made is that you're twiddling these knobs one at a time so you hold what you hold the other five constant and then you you twiddle one of them and then you show that the whole universe collapses if you if you twiddle the one knob but what if you triple more than one at once that makes the calculation much harder it means that the range of possible universes becomes enormously increased and it could very well be then that it's no longer true that the fine-tuning argument holds it could be that there are actually lots of universes which could give rise to some form of life we also have to remember that we may have a rather blinkered view of life because we are it's been called carbon chauvinism and where we think of life as being our kind of life but suppose we we take seriously the suggestion of Martin Rees and others that the universe really is fine-tuned then what conclusion or how might noops how might we deal with that suggestion the first thing to say is even if the universe is fine-tuned we should not jump to or even countenance the conclusion that some conscious intelligence had to be there to do the fine tuning in that really would be a lousy argument because it doesn't solve any problems at all that the whole exercise is to explain how it is that a very improbable set of state of affairs came into being the improbable state of affairs is of course the correct value of all all the six constants to postulate a divine knob twiddle ER [Applause] why is that funny Ellen to postulate a divine tuner who knows who knew the exact values of the six knobs of the set of the six tunings to postulate a divine tuner is it is tantamount to simply saying well let them be tuned in the first place it doesn't explain anything this is a familiar argument which we meet over and over again it's the it's the big argument that theists just don't get Martin Rees and others resort to what's been called the anthropic principle which weirdly theists seem to think is is their property actually the anthropic principle is a deeply atheistic principle and the anthropic principle states that all observable universes must have whatever properties it takes to give rise to life otherwise there would be nobody to observe them now on the face of it just as stated that's rather unsatisfying because it still seems to lead to leave unexplained why it is I mean it's one thing to say that because this universe is being observed there is no choice but for it to have the correct values of the fundamental constants but that still leaves us a bit uncertain up you still don't actually quite see why it has those values so you combine the anthropic principle with the multiverse theory or the mega verse theory which derives from other parts of physics such as the inflationary universe theory the idea that the universe that we observe is only one of billions of universes which are like bubbles in a foam mutually incommunicado and that an observer in any one universe is unable to see any of the others and these different universes have different values of their fundamental constants maybe just random values or maybe they give birth to baby universities which have mutated value something of that sort and now if you've got billions of universes with different values of the fundamental constants now the anthropic principle really can kick in in a plausible way because we now say that there may only be a small minority of universes that has the current that have the correct values where correct means conducive to making stars making chemistry and making life there may only be a minority of universes that have these properties but of course we have to be in one of those one of that minority because here we are observing it so that I think is actually rather a satisfying theory physicists don't find it satisfying I don't quite know why not I think it's actually rather a rather elegant maybe because it's a kind of quasi Darwinian theory it's not really Darwinian there is a more Darwinian version of it which is that of the theoretical physicists Lee Smolin who suggests that not only is there a multiverse of many universes but that the universe is really do give birth to baby universes in the events that are called physicists called black holes at the moment of birth a baby universe inherits the physical content constants of its parent but slightly mutated slightly mutated now you see you have the raw material for a crew evolution of universe is a true evolutionary progression of universes where fitness for a universe means whatever it takes to give birth to baby universes that's what Fitness always means to a biologist and what it takes to give birth to a baby universe is such things as lasting long enough to give birth it's no good if the universe fizzles out in the first femtosecond which some of them would if you've got that tuning wrong they've got to last long enough they've got to have whatever it takes to make galaxies and stars go to have stars you can't have chemistry can't have life if you don't have chemistry so life could be product of whatever it takes to make a fertile universe whatever it takes to evolve the kind of university is good at making baby universes it's not that life itself is part of the fitness in the in the smullin model it's rather that life happens to be a byproduct of other properties that cause a universe to have Fitness in the smullin model smullins theory has not found favor with other physicists but I think it's hard to find a strong objection to it in this rather speculative area of physics so a combination of one-shot mega lock-in the origin of the universe perhaps and in the origin of life so we've got one shot mega lock on the one hand and we've got the predictable processes the lawful processes that give rise to chemistry in the first place and then give rise to the evolution of life in the second place which has a strong element of predictability in it both of those processes are wondrous amazing and their cause for us to give thanks give thanks give thanks to whom or to what to Providence to the fairies to the gods I want to turn finally to this rather strange question because I think it bears upon another interesting question which is why we have religion at all it's a question that I as a Darwinian have often been asked I think it deserves an answer because religion does appear to be in some sense a human Universal it doesn't mean that all individuals and religious far from it this is wonderful audience is testimony to that but in the same way as heterosexual lust is a human Universal even though not all individuals have it anthropologists will tell us that all cultures that have ever been knocked at have something that you could call religion and that seems to demand an explanation various kinds of explanation then from a Darwinian it demands a Darwinian explanation in The God Delusion I speculated that it's not religion itself that has a Darwinian survival value but this is a very common thing that we have to do we adaptation ists we don't say what is the adaptive significance of this particular thing we happen to be observing we say this particular thing we happen to be observing may be a byproduct of something else and that's something else maybe what is being favored by natural selection so perhaps there are perhaps there's a cluster of psychological predispositions which have survival value because of some of their consequences in nature and religion maybe an inadvertent consequence an extra consequence a by-product which only manifests itself under certain circumstances because it would be the right cultural circumstances I mentioned as one possible example of a psychological predisposition the predisposition especially in child Minds to obey authority to believe what your parents tell you and I speculated that there would be strong survival value in children to believe parents when parents give good advice about life about danger about not walking into the fire or not walking over cliffs of that kind of thing and I suggested that a byproduct of this built-in rule of thumb which the brain is programmed with that says believe what your parents tell you a byproduct of that would be vulnerability to mental viruses such as religion in the same way as a an electronic computer is vulnerable to computer viruses by the very virtue of the fact that it is programmable computer has no way of knowing whether the program that it's being given is a good program like a word processor or spreadsheet or something of that sort or whether it's a bad program like a virus which simply says spread yourself copy copy this program and while you're about it delete this poor person's doctoral thesis so that was the suggestion that I made in The God Delusion and that was but I made it clear that this was only one candidate for a psychological predisposition that might have a byproduct of religion and today I want to mention a couple of other possible psychological predispositions and one of them is gratitude abstract gratitude the gratitude that I've been encouraging you in the first part of my talk to feel towards what a vaccum gratitude for your own existence the human species is an intensely social species we swim through a sea of each other we need to cooperate we need to bargain we need to trade once upon a time each family probably fended pretty much for itself and now I don't know how maybe the father went out hunting and the mother gathered berries of this kind of thing and there may have been some barter and trade between families but barter and trade became really important when different skills developed when people were growing different kinds of crops or when perhaps trades like Smith's arose who had a skill that they could trade they could trade digging implements with farmers who needed them in exchange for food say so I'm trying to build up the case for viewing bargaining trading as being a very very important part of human life and the need to develop the appropriate calculating machinery for mediating trade and bargaining eventually money was invented and money serves as a handy and easy to count easy to keep token for debt for who owes what to whom but before money was invented we would have needed some sort of mental money something equivalent to money which enabled us our ancestors to keep a precise count of who owes what to whom the bit of our brain that calculates fairness obligation debt grudge gratitude the mental money calculator develops early which is why even small children are so obsessed with fairness one of the commonest things you ever hear a child cry not fair they will say that even when the entity accused of being not fair is not another human being at all not another child but for example the weather it's not fair that it should rain on my birthday as though the weather cared for anybody's birthday so you see where I'm going I'm trying to build up the picture of the idea of gratitude and the concept of debt as so-to-speak going off in a vacuum when there may or may not be a real target of this debt calculator I think that the debt calculator the mental money machine in the brain became so well developed that it possibly is the origin of our ability to do mathematics at all which is an emergent property which has often puzzled people why on earth is it that we have this capacity to do these extraordinary and calculations and higher mathematics maybe it all started with the debt calculator with the fairness calculator and just as sexual lust can in a sense go off in a vacuum sexual lust is built into the brain for obvious biological reasons to do with reproduction but the sexual lust remains even when cognitively we know perfectly well that there's nothing to do with reproduction we use contraceptives and it doesn't diminish our last one weird that's because natural selection doesn't built-in build into our brains a cognitive awareness of why we're doing things cognitive awareness of the need to propagate our selfish genes far from it rules of thumb are built into the brain because they have the consequence in nature under normal conditions where there aren't any contraceptives for example or propagating our selfish genes so we have a lustrous X for that reason and I'm suggesting that we have a similar lust to calculate debt indebtedness gratitude guilt grudges and it's such a powerful lust that it goes off in a vacuum that talked about children saying it's unfair does it rained on their birthday and we can also feel gratitude if we get a fine day for our birthday we thank Providence we Smith say thank God and this you can see where I'm going as I say this may be one of these psychological predispositions that leads us to postulate gods when a hurricane destroys our village destroys everyone we know or an earthquake or it sooner then we may say what did we do to deserve this how could this happen I've been good all my life I've I'd never sinned in my life why did this happen to me we've heard this over and over again or even more strangely when the Huracan or the tsunami kills a hundred thousand people and one child is discovered to be alive clinging to driftwood with nothing worse than a broken leg and we say thank God my child is safe never mind the other hundred thousand God saved my child we're constantly projecting onto abstract entities projecting out into the vacuum these feelings which are our debt calculator our grudge calculator our gratitude calculator going off in a vacuum vacuum activity is a technical term in ethology the biological study of animal behavior which is the discipline in which I was trained a vacuum activity is what happens when an animal does a piece of its normal behavioral repertoire but out of context when the normal stimulus for that behavior is no longer present I have seen you may well have seen a dog burying a bone where there is no soil to bury with and the dog will push nonexistence damn sorry nonexistent soil with its muzzle it's a beautiful sight to see it's it's it's what doesn't what's a the dog thinks there's soil there that's not the way to put it when when a man lusts after a photograph of a naked woman he doesn't think there really is a naked woman it's just that the lust goes off in a vacuum similarly the dog is pushing vacuum soil there is no soul tamping it down I've seen a wonderful film of a beaver you know what beavers build dams and it's a very complicated procedure it involves gathering wood gathering logs cutting down trees putting the logs into a dam the reason for it is that making a dam is good for the Beavers survival it provides a safe water way for the beaver to forage in and so on but so beavers have this lust to build dams and the film I saw was a beaver in a bear room with a concrete floor and nothing in the room there was no river to dam there were no twigs there were no logs there were no sticks the beaver was picking up phantom logs and putting them into the Phantom dam tamping them down arranging them rearranging them going off to get another Phantom log this is behavior going off in a vacuum the beaver has a lust to build a dam so I'm suggesting that this vacuum activity which we see in beavers which we see in dogs vacuum not burying in squirrels and so on but vacuum gratitude and the reverse bearing grudges against those individuals who don't pay their debts vacuum gratitude and similar things is one of the psychological predispositions that has led people to religion along with probably quite a lot of other psychological predispositions so that's a possible evolutionary reason why we feel an urge to give thanks even when we know that there's nobody to thank it's nothing to be ashamed of and I hope the first part of my talk gave sufficient reason for our gratitude to be alive even if it is gratitude in a vacuum but I end with my gratitude to you for listening thank you very much ladies and gentlemen we have an opportunity for Q&A and I'll start from the top can we have the house lights up yes so we could see as much as we can oh ritual that looks better yeah I just was wondering you mentioned your way wherever you are okay thanks yeah mention region religion being a byproduct of machinery in sort of witnessing a rise of atheism at at the moment I'm just wondering what your thoughts are long-term in regard to rational thinkers that perhaps could be a dying breed if if there are selected selective pressures for away from being prayer free thinker if there's some sort of genetic predisposition around being a believer or being a rational thought some sort of giving then I think that's I think that they're too pessimistic I I think you're being too too pessimistic of course it's only my guess I like to think that well audiences like this show show evidence that if you actually can get to people and talk to them there are quite a lot of people that you can convince to be rational I think if you if if you're move to pessimism by the thought that we have at any particular time political movements which seem to be gaining power I mean we've had eight years of Bush theocracy in in America for example which which naturally was very discouraging but I think if you take the broad sweep of history you're bound to expect a kind of sawtooth you've got a general trend upwards you're going to get a kind of sawtooth like that it's a bit like saying that because we happen to have a cold winter therefore global warming is nonsense that that kind of thing I mean you know you don't want to take too much notice of short term high frequency changes you want to notice I think the downtrend sorry what I was thinking was perhaps the birth rate of people in this room might be lower than of any relief particularly religious well that that is a worry but but bear in mind that that assumes the the iniquitous assumption that children inherit the religion of their of their parents unfortunately there's a lot of truth in that but I think that's one of the things we've really got to try to work on is to try to break that cycle whereby the assumption that if members of religion X have a higher birth rate than people who think Y that that means that people who think X is going to increase in that if you think about it that there is an additional assumption the additional assumption that that children inherit the religion of their of their parents and if we could do anything to stop that I think education would be the real focal point that we ought to be that we ought to be zeroing in on okay we have a question from the middle there right there yes oh hi my name's Alastair excuse my nervousness Richard I've read of your books and I can't put them down so thank you my question I guess is you call yourself an atheist and in The God Delusion you state that does God exist as a scientific question and I agree with that and I came to the conclusion that I'm agnostic I almost I just can't believe there's a god but there's that tiny tiny chance so therefore I'd call myself agnostic a secularist however you call yourself an atheist as I imagine everyone in this room or most people in this room would my question I guess in essence is is they're not the same chance of dogmatism in that definition as there is in any religion well I don't actually call myself an atheist in one sense that if you look in the God Delusion I got this seven point scale where one people who know there is a God and seven are people who know there isn't and I pulled myself I think a 6.9 or something like that the I mean we are all agnostic about really everything because you can't actually disprove the existence of people you know the argument fairies and leprechauns and things so I mean I'm an atheist in the same way as I'm an atheist and we're all and we're all a forest saz well you you say might there be a [ __ ] well there could be all sorts of chinks there are millions of possible chinks there are chinks of fairies chinks of leprechauns chinks of all all sorts of things the onus on somebody who wants to the onus is on somebody who wants to believe positively in the existence of something for which there is no evidence and so we should simply shove all gods into the same dustbin as we shall fairies leprechauns Thor's use Mithras etcetera down the front here hello my name is Justin Milligan I must say I'm quite I feel quite lucky having the opportunity to ask you a question I assume something must have caused that the my question is with regard to the with regard to with applicability of evolutionary principles we're quite familiar with it so selecting for survival through in sometimes using cooperative behavior and that's evolved as towards actually having a brain and I guess that's the ultimate adaptive system that we have available to us it allows us to a very wide range of pressures that may apply to us is is what we think part of the evolutionary process is there a natural selection is is the war of ideas part of a natural selection process and can a group of similarly cooperating systems such as humans in the society evolve that society forward using those principles you have to be careful don't you because brains clearly are the product of natural selection and they got big because of natural selection but what brains do is then very largely emergent and so you wouldn't wish to say that that there's a natural selection between say different languages between English and German and French and Spanish and things you wouldn't wish to say that there's natural selection or this great edifice this great Cathedral of flowering that brains brains produce it's the capacity to do that building that is naturally selected now there may be some other kind of natural selection going on something that is analogous to biological natural selection to true genetic natural selection I think it's important not to get carried away and to slide too easily to slip early from one kind of selection to another natural selection proper means the differential survival of genes in gene pools there may be analogous differential survival of ideas an idea or groups in group pools and there may be or even universes in universe pools if we take the Lee Smolin argument seriously but I'm all for clarity in language and so although it's nice to develop analogies and notice similarities it's also important to keep the distinctions clear in our minds as well there is something marvelous and wonderful about the emergent properties of the human brain that when we produce art and and and music and language and all the things that the human brain does produce and this is all an example of the the emergent power of natural selection because not natural selection itself up the Doug hi Richard when we're in school we learn how to critically argue so for example if we're told read this book and give your opinion we have to support that with evidence now most people be the Matias tortillas will take that skill with them later into life but how is it that in your opinion when it comes to their personal beliefs with regard to religion they're able to put this down and just accept it on face value it is remarkable I guess you speak with feeling from your home country ok yeah it is remarkable isn't it that the sort of people who in their everyday life when they're planning a holiday planning a journey cutting the go grocery shopping or how to mend their car it was perfectly good logical reasoning skeptical reasoning you know what might have gone wrong with the car you eliminate things you do you use a sort of scientific method and you use logic and reason and sense and then when it comes to religion it all goes right out of the window and these very same individuals who show no deficiency in any other field of life their entire mental mean Christopher Hitchens says religion poisons everything it does and it certainly poisons the ability to use your brain in the middle in the middle there thank you hello mr. Dawkins I'm not an atheist and I will give thanks and gratitude to God tonight for my life and for being a part of the design and purpose what I would like to ask you is about DNA can you tell me what DNA is what comprises DNA what underpins DNA and why are we all you leave please please please yes could you just finish your question sorry do you want them again well I think I was getting you ask me a lot of questions about about DNA and I got lost because of the okay what I'd like to know is what is DNA and what underpins the DNA right also where does it come from we all unique right DNA is a very high-tech replicator it is the replicator which underlies natural selection as we know it in life in the whole of life today all living creatures have the same genetic code give or take a few tiny details and this means that it's almost certain that all living creatures are descended from the same common ancestor the same origin of life it's a very very strong deduction from the fact that the youth of the genetic code is universal that does not mean however that even though we are all descended from a common ancestor that used the DNA protein system which is a very very high-tech system of interaction between molecules that have different abilities DNA for replication protein for influencing the world for influencing embryology for catalyzing chemical reactions and doing it there by the DNA protein system very probably was not the original system which started the evolutionary process off on this planet it seems as Graham can Smith has argued and others have that DNA is probably a late usurper that came on the scene after an earlier forerunner which we no longer have any trace of an earlier replicator that did something like the same job as DNA something like the same self-replicating job as DNA but was not DNA was a low-tech replicator the problem with DNA as a high-tech replicator is that it requires protein in order to do its job of self replication so that's what being called the catch-22 of the origin of life so the can Smith idea and I think it's probably right in general although his particular candidate for the pre for the precursor probably may not he thought it was inorganic crystals I think he's right that something had to come before DNA and the most promising candidate at the moment is the so called RNA world theory if you think about it DNA is very good at replication proteins very good at being an enzyme and each of them is lousy at doing the other thing protein is that is a hopeless replication because a protein molecule is all tied up in a knot and therefore the amino acid sequence that defines the protein is not accessible it cannot be read out in the way that you can read out the sequence of DNA so proteins are good catalysts DNA is a good replicator each of them is lousy to the other RNA is reasonably good at doing both RNA is a replicator and the same kind of system as DNA and RNA is also not a very good catalyst but it isn't it is it can serve as an enzyme and so the RNA world theory is that before DNA took over it was RNA that served both roles both the replicator and the and the executive role of of of enzyme and the DNA came in as a later takeover and I find that an appealing theory but there may be others and as I said in my letter the the origin of life is a is a is a present a gap in our knowledge we have a question dela fun hi I've got a question about Mary MacKillop um later this year we'll have our first Saint sort of a long who Mary MacKillop Australia's first a right got it yep um later this year we'll have our first Saint um do you first of all I wanted to ask you for if you think it'll do us any harm having a saint and it's a serious question and do you find it discouraging that it's been reported very prejudiced ly by the media and even with gratitude by people like our prime minister yes I do very discouraging I mean what it's the whole idea of creating Saints I mean it's pure Monty Python the idea that the idea that they have to clock up to miracles I mean these are people we're supposed to take seriously these are the people who when I'm accused of going after the easy targets the fundamental nut bags why don't you take on a real theologian well the real theologians that one could take on of people who believe that Mary MacKillop all with whatever she's called and and and Pope not see what would ever hit him [Applause] have miracles and they actually solemnly get doctors to give testimony that somebody got better from cancer somebody should remission from from cancer after being I don't know prayed over or something by I mean as I said that that's just surreal and it completely gives the lie to the claim that sophisticated theologians somehow should be able to be to look down upon the the fundamentalist wingnuts they're all the same the upper gallery again Thank You professor my question is uh when do you think we will be able to criticize Islam without threatening our very existence on the face of it it's a remarkably effective tactic isn't it to say okay I've lost the argument therefore if you if you try to argue against me I'll cut your head off it's really an admission of defeat I am NOT one of those who thinks that we should go out of our way to insult Islam recklessly or foolishly because it doesn't do any good to get your head cut off what we should say is something like this I may give way to you I may refrain from torture we say publishing a cartoon of your your prophet but it's because I fear you don't for one moment think it's because I respect you in the middle again thank you very much prop I I enjoyed your talk very much just one very brief question are there any identifiable organic or physical differences between the brain and mind of an atheist as opposed to the brain and mind of a religious person this is very difficult I mean there that there are people who are trying to do experiments on shoving people into MRI scanners and comparing people who have different beliefs or comparing people of thinking different thoughts this is a very exciting growing area of research I think we're going to see a lot more of it in the future I I think it would be premature to try to I mean there's so little straws in the wind but I think it'd be premature to to try to say anything about it yet I guess they're probably some sense they've got to be differences between all our brains that determine or associated with our various differences in beliefs our tastes were our taste in music our taste in food these all some sense of got to have physiological correlates but I think it we've got a long way before we can actually produce anything very very clear on answering that question to Australia thank you Adam thank you for coming to Australia and talking in front of us it's a great privilege the question is I read a book by tamás's also spoken tonight it's called against religion now I may not be representing the thesis of this book accurately it's just my interpretation of the idea so sorry if I get it wrong tell us if you're still here it's about the narcissism of youth being a candidate for a motivator to religion in later life it's so it's based around the idea that you when you're young and when you're very useful you don't have and I a very distinct idea but of the difference between yourself the inner world and the outside world and so it gives you like this narcissistic feeling of omnipotence and you cry and something will happen and you'll get sustenance but later you have to move out of a metaphorical Eden into like a and lose your ignorance and gain the power to model the world around you and I think I'm listening to you with great interest but this is going to amount to you giving me a tutorial on what he says because I haven't read it and so I don't think I'm going to be able to give you an interesting answer what I must do is go away and read it and thank you for calling it to my attention but I don't think I can actually give you a very interesting answer to your to your question okay just a quick one okay would a Deinonychus evolve into a form that would adopt religion given enough time and enough patience anything might evolve into anything else given enough time and and enough patience the question is would it be at all likely and the answer is probably not the middle war again nothing you were talking about the mental dispositions that could lead to religion and I was wondering if there are also cultural dispositions which are a mix of mental dispositions which could lead to religion and I was wondering if in the animal kingdom which you're very well-versed in whether or not there would be any which resemble something which could bring about the context for a vision inside past yes well I think it goes without saying that that that there a cultural predisposition that of course is immensely important as it as a biologic a biological Darwinian I was trying to find a biological Darwinian explanation for religion and it goes without saying that culture is going to be the medium in which that actually happens and my suggestion was that biological psyche logical predispositions manifest themselves as religion in the right cultural context other animals that have a culture which could be regarded as in any sense they're just non-human animals of course we all say because we are animals people have suggested I think that the most haunting suggestion comes from the work on elephants by Iain douglas-hamilton and others suggesting that elephants have a respect for their dead and show some kind of something that looks like reverence for the dead and you know but these are anecdotes who knows what to say about them it's I find it moving and I don't know what I want to make a strong case that you could call this something like religion and I'm afraid ladies and gentlemen that's all we have time for please thank you you

Channel: Atheist Foundation of Australia Inc

Views: 202,035

Rating: 4.8527222 out of 5

Keywords: atheist, atheist foundation, Global Atheist Convention, GAC, Richard Dawkins

Id: kGGmuUvA2Mg

Length: 65min 29sec (3929 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2011