Richard Dawkins Lecture on Evolution

friends thank you for joining the phylum ethene society this evening as we celebrate 200 years of raising hell with our brains sometimes in a rather literal way my name is Paul Mitchell and I'm a member of the phylum a thean Society and its annual oration director this year now tonight we are convened with about 1,500 of our closest friends to take part in one of the Society's oldest and dearest traditions the annual oration a free public lecture by a prominent intellectual on a topic of scientific cultural or philosophical importance now before we begin I would like to thank you all for coming congratulate you on getting a seat and ask that you join me in thanking the many co-sponsors who have helped in making this evening possible could we have a round of applause for our many co-sponsors now particularly I would very much like to thank the Office of the provost and the Penn Museum for their generous support and their unquiet enthusiasm for this event and I think that as a result of their efforts and the efforts of all of our co-sponsors we're going to be enjoying one of the most edifying nights of the year here on campus so now I do beg your indulgence as I issue a few personal thank-yous to my many filum a thien's for all the time and talent you put into this event thank you I would especially like to applaud the efforts of Chris Willis John Mel Barlow Holly Holly Tinashe Manzo Kyle Hargrave Andrew jackubowski Hasbrouck Bailey Miller the third and a twin Nora Castle Kat Cleveland Casey Boaz and James Kwok I would also very much like to thank my mentors and friends here this evening who have contributed greatly to help making this event a success Peter Dodson Michael Weisberg Steven stich Martin Seligman Lisa gamble and especially Janet Monge thank you without their efforts and their inspiration this event would not be possible now just a few quick notes on logistics the aeration this evening will last for approximately 50 minutes followed by a Q&A session will give instructions about the question and answer session following the oration in the back there's literature provided by some of our co-sponsors including the freethought society American Atheists as well as PA non-believers or we'll also be selling books from what I understand we've either run low or out of books the Penn bookstore is just around the corner we're going to be signing books this evening after the event so feel free to grab some books and get your book signed so back to the back to this evenings events the annual eration it's special this year for two reasons first it's Philo's bicentennial and is the oldest collegiate literary society in the United States we're proud to continue 200 a 200 year mission of promoting the learning is learning of our members and increasing the academic prestige of the university second it's the Provost's year of proof and we and the rest of the University of Pennsylvania unity have been engaged and entangled in considering the nature of proof and the process of questioning how we come to know what we know now in that vein the particular question which drives our inquiries tonight is the following where do we draw the line between our science and our philosophy when we discuss science as a way of knowing what is the extent of our epistemology from prying apart the biochemical mechanics of life to revealing the shadows of a counterintuitive quantum world over the past 200 years the sciences have advanced to a point that our understanding of the contours and the contents of the universe is forever changed furthermore we now understand our place in nature as evolved organisms as enculturated Apes constrained by our evolution to finite intelligence but faced with deeply challenging questions about the foundations of our knowledge our purpose our values and the history and future of our planet what can proof possibly mean in the teeth of such questions of course we are not engaging in the Herculean task of pondering these dense and ponder bowls alone indeed we are in very good company I am proud to introduce dr. Richard Dawkins of the phylum Athene societies 2013 annual order Richard Dawkins is the former child Somani professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University and the one of the world's most prominent evolutionary biologists and outspoken atheists among his books are The Selfish Gene the extended phenotype the blind watchmaker climbing mountain probable the ancestors tale The God Delusion the greatest show on earth and most recently the magic of reality how we know what's really true now dr. Dawkins is renowned not only for his beautifully lucid prose and his vocal criticism of intelligent design anti scientific thinking and religious fundamentalism but also his theoretical contributions to advancing the gene-centred view of evolution and coining the term meme to describe the evolution and spread of cultural information these ideas of fueled discussion and debate concerning the basis of evolutionary change and the nature of culture for decades since since they were first presented in his 1976 bestseller The Selfish Gene in recognition of dr. Dawkins pioneering contributions to evolutionary biology the scientific study of human culture and his eloquent promotion and defense of a naturalistic understanding of our species history and evolution I am pre pleased to invite dr. Julian singers Williams director of the Penn Museum to the stage to present the 2013 Wilton Krogman Award for in life for lifetime achievement in biological anthropology to dr. Richard Dawkins Julian thank you thank you very much Paul and good evening ladies and gentlemen it's um it's an enormous honor to share this stage with Richard Dawkins tonight the Krogen award is given to those individuals who are pioneers within the related fields of human evolutionary studies in the spirits and application of programs work the recipients research must be synthetic interdisciplinary and integrated into lifelong dedication to education and a service to all humankind so an easy task Krugman's own research found ways to illuminate the importance of biological and cultural variation to evolutionary process his database encompassed the vastly diverse communities of Philadelphia where he studied the growth and development of inner-city children from conception to adulthood and eventually to senescence his work continues today in the Krogman growth center as it enters its eighth phase of research his research the famous Samuel Morton collection of the Penn Museum laid the foundation for his seminal work in forensic anthropology where for the first time the techniques and analysis of physical anthropology were applied to real world legal cases in the relentless pursuit of proof within the criminal justice systems now so far there have been three recipients of the Krogman award and tonight we're very pleased to add a fourth the first was F Clark Howell often considered to be the father of paleoanthropology Howell excavated many Paleolithic sites in Africa and Europe and found many fossils of our ancestors he told the stories of Paleolithic like expertly combining the analysis of fossil hominid bones with archaeological contextual evidence ralph Holloway was the second recipient he was a pioneer in the study of the evolution of the brain and developed the field of paleontology applied to the human fossil record the last recipient was Donald Johanson a paleontologist who transformed our knowledge of the fossil record of human evolution with his excavations at the site of Hadar in Ethiopia he found the famous Lucy who's 40% complete skeleton forever changed our view of the earliest phases of human evolutionary history and tonight we honor the fourth recipient dr. Richard Dawkins dr. Dawkins synthesized real-time evolutionary process with the analysis of genetic processes that underlie the transformation of species much like Darwin in the 19th century Dawkins Marshalls vast amounts of data that overwhelmingly show how natural processes heavily based on a growing knowledge within genomics can explain life on Earth without reference to a supernatural being in his more popular work he has brought evolution into the living rooms of the world ladies and gentlemen please join me in giving a warm round of welcome to the latest recipient of the program award dr. Richard Dawkins what an honor thank you very much indeed I must say you know we go back more than 200 years but and we think we've got some pretty good buildings but I think I've never ever given a lecture in a building quite as splendid as this one but what a magnificent okay proof science and skepticism I'm not quite sure where that title came from it certainly didn't come from me I thought I was originally asked to talk about my latest book the magic of reality and a couple of days ago I looked at the website and saw that I was built to talk about proof science and skepticism so I hastily concocted a compromise and looked at my book and decided what I would do would be to take a chapter which I've never actually lectured about before usually I lecture about chapter 2 and today I'm going to lecture about chapter 10 which has a bit more to do with proof science and skepticism than the rest of the book the book is a book for children or for young people anyway and I hope you'll bear that in mind so in a sense listen to it as though you are a child as TS Hut th Huxley said sit down before the facts as a little child the book has several chapters that virtually all of them begin with a question and then the beginning of the chapter might be what is an earthquake what is the Sun what is a rainbow etc the beginning of the chapter has myths in answer to the question so myths about earthquakes myths about the Sun myths about rainbows and so on and then finally become on to the science what really is a rainbow what really is an earthquake what really is the Sun one of the chapters that I usually talk about is who was the first person and my conclusion is there never was a first person which some people find paradoxical but the opposite would actually be more paradoxical but today rather than talk about scientific facts which is what most of the chapters are about I'm going to talk about a more pedagogical chapter something about how in how we think about things or how children should think about things it's a chapter called why do bad things happen and as I said I want you to bear in mind that it's written for children and so we're trying to dispel misconceptions that children might have and I dare say a few adults have as well so why do bad things happen after a terrible disaster like an earthquake or a hurricane you may hear people saying things like it's so unfair what did those poor people ever do to deserve that fate or if a really good person gets a painful disease and dies while a bad person remains in the best of health once again we cry unfair one of the favorite children's sayings where's the justice in that it's hard to resist the feeling that somehow there ought to be a kind of natural justice good things should happen to good people perhaps it happen to bad people if they have happened at all many of you may know Oscar Wilde's wonderful play The Importance of Being Earnest the elderly governess miss prism who explains how long ago she wrote a three-volume novel when asked whether it ended happily she replied the good ended happily and the bad unhappily that is what fiction means real life of course is different bad things do happen and they happen to good people as well as bad they don't single out good people but they're as likely to happen to good people as bad so why do bad things happen coming on to a few myths lots of people believe that their gods intended to create a perfect world but unfortunately something went wrong and there are lots of different ideas about what went wrong there are lots of legends in Africa about how death came into the world all over Africa many many tribes I remember this from my own childhood in Africa many tribes believe that the chameleon was given the news of everlasting life and told to carry it to humans but unfortunately the chameleon walked so slowly that the news of death carried by a faster walking lizard or some other fast walking a lot of different parts of of Africa got there first in one West African legend the news of eternal life was brought by a slow toad but unfortunately was overtaken by a fast dog bringing the news of death a bit puzzled by white matters when the news arrives but anyway that seems to be the way these ledges lots and lots of legends disease is a special kind of bad thing and disease has spawned numerous myths of its own and one reason for this I suppose is that disease is mysterious our ancestors faced other dangers lions and leopards and things from enemy tribes the threat of starvation those who could understand but smallpox say or the Black Death or some other terrible plague or malaria must have seemed to pounce from nowhere without warning and it was unclear how to guard against this terrible misfortune was a terrifying mystery and so people it's no wonder that they resorted to superstition when desperately trying to understand where disease came from and resorted to magic spells supernatural spells in many African tribes until quite recently who had a sick child you'd automatically look around for an evil magician who was casting a spell or a witch if my child has a high fever it must be because an enemy paid a witch doctor to cast a spell on her maybe it's because I couldn't afford to sacrifice a goat when she was born or perhaps it's because that green caterpillar walked across the path this morning and I forgot to spit out the result ting evil spirit even today surprisingly large number of sick people travel to places like Lourdes where they plunge into a sacred pool in the hope that the holy water will heal them probably more likely to catch something from me other people have bathed in the water about 200 million people have made the pilgrimage to Lourdes in the past hundred and forty years hoping for a cure in most cases there's not a lot wrong with them and thankfully they mostly get better as they would have any way without the pilgrimage once when I was at school our teacher asked us to think about why diseases happen the man won't put his hand up and suggested it was because of sin there are many people even today who think that sin is responsible for the cause of bad things generally some myths very widespread myths suggest that bad things happen in the world because our ancestors did something wicked long ago the Jewish myth of the founding ancestors Adam and Eve as you know is based upon the idea that they committed a terrible terrible crime they at the fruit of a forbidden tree this mythical crimes original sin has reverberated down the ages and is still regarded by many people today as responsible for all the bad things that happen why does anything happen it's a complicated question to answer but it's a more sensible question than why do bad things happen all I'll come on to a special sense in which it is sensible to ask why bad things happen later there's no real reason to single out bad things for special attention unless there's some reason to think that bad things happen more often than we would expect them to by chance unless we think there's some kind of need for a natural justice which would mean that bad things only happen to bad people will do bad things happen more than we would expect by chance alone on the whole no many people refer jokingly to what they will call Murphy's Law or sods law which states that if you drop a piece of toast and marmalade on the floor it always lands marmalade side down more generally if a thing can go wrong it will we joke about this but I think a lot of people actually do have a sort of sneaking feeling that it's more than a joke they actually feel that the world's out to get them oh yes that's a a little little anecdote I do a certain amount of filming and filming people have to UM be very careful about external noise you have to worry about planes going overhead and so on and it's very annoying because if a plane goes overhead when you're trying to film a piece to camera you have to stop and do it again and it's very very irritating on one occasion when I was filming we went out to a remote meadow with miles from many buildings near Oxford and we thought it was very early in the morning we thought this would be safe and when we got there we discovered a lone Scotsman practicing the bagpipes sods law we said it doesn't have to be toast you toss a coin and there's a sort of feeling that the world is cussing you you desperately wanted to come down heads and so the wretched thing comes down tails some people think the more you want something the more likely it is that it won't happen if there's any truth in that it's simply because you notice it when it doesn't happen more often that's the pessimistic view the optimistic view the opposite the more you wanted to come down heads the more it will could call that pollyannas law the optimistic belief that thing is usually a turn out for the good you could call it patent losses law after the character of Voltaire his doctor Pangloss thought that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds well you can quickly see of course that both sods law and Pangloss as law are nonsense coins and slices of toast have no way of knowing the strength of your desires and no means of fulfilling them or thwarting them and what's a bad thing for one person may be a good thing for another you've seen rival tennis players both of whom pray fervently for victory both of whom think God gave them victory when they win no particular reason because even knew why God should favor one over the other what people sometimes say everything happens for a reason anyone says this is true things have causes tsunamis happen terrible tragedies like tsunamis happen because of a reason in this case because of an undersea earthquake in earthquakes happened for reasons we now understand shifts in the earth Earth's tectonic plates so in this sense everything does happen for a reason but people will often use reason in a different way and moral reason they will say something like the tsunami was a punishment for our sins the reason for the tsunami was to destroy the strip clubs and Disco's and bars and other places of sin and it's amazing after a major disaster how often you will see people preachers and so on saying such things perhaps it's a hangover from childhood child psychologists have shown that very young children when asked why for example a particular test asked why to the children think that rocks are pointy and they're given an alternative between a geological explanation for why rocks are pointy and a purposeful explanation which is they're pointy so that animals can scratch themselves when they get itchy and before a certain age most children prefer the teleological explanation prefer the explanation that the rocks are sharp for a reason of benevolent purpose and then they grow out of that later many people believe in runs of good luck or runs of bad luck or they may believe that some people are luckier than others or they may say I've had so many bad things happen to me lately I'm due for a bit of good luck in the law of averages is an example the fallacious law of averages in in the game of cricket it really matters which team bats first there's often an advantage in batting first and so the captains toss a coin to see who will get the choice of batting first or batting second and many people believe that some captains are better at winning the toss than others there's a news article about a match between India and Sri Lanka and it said I asked people will donate at the Indian captain be lucky once again with the toss and they had a competition for answers of the winning answer was I firmly believe in the law of averages so my bet is on Sangha Cora that's the thrill anchor captain being lucky and winning the toss II don't either Indian captain had won the toss in a series of previous matches coins are supposed to be unbiased so the misunderstood law of averages ought to see to it that Dhoni the Indian captain having been lucky so far should now lose the toss to redress the balance another way to put it would be to say it's now Sangha Cora's turn to win the toss it will be unfair if Dhoni won the toss yet again but of course the law of averages is nonsense in that case it's true that if you toss a penny a thousand times you'd expect approximately 500 heads and 500 taels but if you've already tossed the penny in 999 times and it's been heads every time what would you bet for the last toss according to the law of averages you should bet on tails because it tails his turn but needless to say everybody in this room would bet on heads because quite clearly this is a biased penny and of course it's complete nonsense to side mind I don't need to tell you this but children perhaps do need to be told it's complete nonsense to say you couldn't buy us your luck improve your luck by wearing a lucky charm or crossing your fingers behind your back or anything like that there are people who are described as accident-prone but that should only mean that they're clumsy like Inspector Clouseau bad things happen to inspector clues it because he's a bumbling oaf not because of some kind of statistical law now to come on to something a little bit more biologically interesting there may be a good biological reason why something like sods law is true of course it's true that the universe has no mind no feelings no personality the universe is not out to get you the universe is not out to make things difficult for you or bad for you nor is it out to make things good for you you have no right to expect any sort of comfort or the reverse from the universe the universe doesn't know or care about your existence some people find that hard to accept but now having said all that I pause for thought I do have to admit that there is something a bit like Suns law because of Darwinian natural selection well though it's definitely not true that something like the weather or an earthquake or a flood is out to get you if it gets you that's just too bad it's not out to get you it's not deliberately scheming to get you nevertheless when you turn to the living world if you're a rabbit a fox is out to get you if you're a minnow a pike is out to get you I don't mean that the Fox or the pike are scheming to get you although there may be they may have brains that are big enough to scheme but evolution by natural selection has seen to it that even viruses and certainly foxes and Pike's behave in ways that are actively bad for their victims and if their victims take steps to evade capture or infection or whatever it is then these menaces these enemies take active steps to penetrate to counteract the steps that you take earthquakes and hurricanes don't do that they do terrible things but they don't make it they don't improve their ability to make things worse for you natural selection really does natural selection sets up what you can call evolutionary arms races arms races between predators and prey parasites and hosts the more prey animals evolved to become better at evading predators the more evolutionary pressure there is on the predators to become better at catching the prey and vice versa and so there is an escalating arms race run not in animal time but in geological time an escalating arms race between predators and prey between parasites and hosts and when you look at beautiful adaptations that appear to have been beautifully designed like eyes and claws and teeth and running legs these are the end products or the intermediate lian products of an arms race usually against predators or against parasites predators and parasites really are out to get you this is an antlion it's a little insect it's an insect larva that lurks in the little pit that it digs for ants to fall in this is the ant lon and the only ads tumble into the pit and the ant lion eats them now the ant lion is out to get the ants in it and it's its adaptation to dig the pit and to develop the jaws that it has this is an adaptation to get ants it's out to the ants it looks as though it has foresight it looks as though it plans it of course it doesn't it's nervous systems too small for that but you could interpret it as though it does now it's easy to see that predators are out to get their prey but there is a sense in which prey are out to get their predators working for the downfall of their predators they work hard to escape being eaten and if they all succeeded the Predators would starve to death and the same thing happens holds between parasites and their hosts so on both sides of the arms raised the obvious side and the less obvious side it's true that there's a kind of malevolence against the other side it's different from earthquakes and and the weather now this has consequences for the sort of mental attitude that is set up in the brain of an animal imagine that you're a rabbit and you see in the long grass there you see a little rustling it could be the wind it could be the non malevolent wind in which case there's nothing to worry about but that rustle in the long grass could be a predator and that predator is out to get you that Lynx is most definitely out to get you so the animal the rabbit in this case has a difficult balancing act it's got to tow a line between being too risk-averse which means startling at every puff of wind that rustles that rustles the grass and if it does that if it's too risk averse then it'll never get any feeding down it'll bolt and whenever anything happens and it will die of starvation whereas its rivals who have not been so risk-averse will will prosper better on the other hand being too gung-ho being too eager to get on feed nevermind the danger is likely to end up being eaten by in this case the Lynx but it could be a leopard it could the alarm whatever it might be now in the language of Charles Darwin the language of natural selection we could say that those individual animals that act as though sods law was true might be more likely to survive and reproduce than those individual animals that follow what we might call pollyannas law but on the other hand if they act too much as those sods law is true then they go to the other extreme and they don't get enough feeding done our ancestors in Africa where they spent so much of their time millions of years were in mortal danger from lions crocodiles leopards pythons and so on so it probably made sense for our ancestors to be to take a suspicious even paranoid view of the world to see a likely threat in every rustle in the grass every rustle in the forest every snap of a twig to assume some things out to get you a deliberate agent scheming to kill you and I suppose even today when we hear a noise in the night our immediate thought might be is it a burglar is it a ghost we're more likely to jump to that conclusion than we are to the conclusion is just a creaking of the timber and maybe this is one reason why so many people take a view that the world is out to get them is even now umm predators aren't the only things that are out to get us there are parasites too parasites are a more sneaky threat but they're very dangerous and I want to talk a little bit about them now the body as you know has an extremely ingenious and very effective system of natural defense against parasites of all kinds the immune system it's too complicated to talk about in detail briefly when the immune system detects a parasite or or or something like that the body is mobilized to produce special cells which are carried by the blood into battle like an army tailor-made to attack the particular parasites concerned usually the immune system wins which is why we're all still here and the person recovers and after that the immune system usually quote remembers the molecular equipment that it had to develop in order to deal with that particular to win that particular battle and so next time it meets the same threat the same pathogen it remembers it and is able to deal with it quickly which is why when you've had a disease like measles or mumps you're unlikely to get it again and people used to think before we had vaccines for it that it was a good idea when a chart when the child had a chance to get mumps or measles to infect the child so that it wouldn't get it later especially with mumps because mumps is when you are a child is pretty unpleasant but it's far more unpleasant if you're an adult especially an adult male vaccination is a much better way of doing that of course in vaccination gives you a mild dose stimulates the immune system with a mild dose or a killed strain of the virus or whatever it is but once again we have a difficult discrimination problem it's analogous to the problem of the rabbit and the and the Lynx the immune system has the task of deciding what is foreign and therefore to be to be fought that's to say the suspected parasite and what it should accept as part of the body itself this is particularly tricky that's why I put a picture of a of a scan of a bob of a baby when a woman is pregnant the baby inside her is foreign babies are not genetically identical to their mothers half the genes come from the father and so unless very special steps are taken the baby would be likely to be rejected by the immune system this is one of this was the big problem I suppose one of the big problems anyway that had to be solved by the immune system when mammals or other creatures developed vivipary develop turn live live bearing and it works I mean plenty of babies do manage to survive in the womb long enough to be born but there are also plenty of miscarriages which suggests that evolution may have had a hard time solving this problem of distinguishing between a genuine foreign body and the baby which is which is foreign but it has to be treated especially and even today many babies survive early because doctors are on hand for example to change their blood completely as soon as they're born in some extreme cases of immune system overreaction the immune system can get it wrong by fighting too hard against a supposed attacker which might turn out not to be an attacker this is what colleges are the immune system needlessly wastes lessly damaging Lee fights harmless things pollen in the air is normally harmless but the immune system of some people over reacts to it and that's when you get the allergic reaction called hay fever you sneeze your eyes water it's very it's very unpleasant and in some cases allergies can be lethal you know there are some people who can't eat peanuts and if they have a slightest trace of a peanut they they die sometimes an overreacting immune system goes so far that the person is allergic to himself autoimmune diseases for example alopecia your hair falls out in patches the body attacks its own hair follicles psoriasis is another example and again it's not surprising that the immune system sometimes overreact because there's a fine line to beat rotten the rub the links all over again a fine line to be trodden between failing to attack when you should and attacking when you shouldn't as in the rabbit and the Lynx is it a rabbit sorry is it is it just the wind or is it a Lynx is it a predator and I suppose we should wonder whether people with a hyperactive immune system with things like psoriasis are paying the penalty of allergies or even autoimmune diseases like that they might be less likely to suffer from certain kinds of viruses and other parasites maybe even cancer because they have an overactive immune system maybe the price you pay for being very good at getting rid of real parasites is that your your hyperactive immune system actually fights against your own body sometimes once again the problem of being too risk-averse or of being too gung ho treading the line is difficult and there are penalties for straying off that line in either direction cancers are a special case of a bad thing that happens it's a strange one a very important one a cancer as you know is a group of our own cells as a rebelled that have broken away from doing what they're supposed to do and have become parasitic they usually grouped together in a tumor the tumor grows out of control feeding on some part of the body or robbing the body of its own food and the worst cancers then spread to other parts of the body metastasis and eventually kill it malignant as they're called tumors now the reason cancers are so difficult to deal with is that their cells are our own cells they're our own cells slightly modified by mutation they evolved to become by natural selection within the body to become better at being cancers but they are still our own cells and that means that unlike say a worm or a bacterium which could be attacked with poisons in the case of bacteria and biotics which which which kill the bacteria but not us that's relatively easy to achieve because the bacteria are not us but the cancer cells are our cells and so a poison that kills the tumor is likely to kill our own cells as well and as you know chemotherapy and radiotherapy and so on are very unpleasant and they are very debilitating and it the reason is quite simply that they whatever it takes to kill a cancer tumor is pretty much the same as what it takes to kill the to kill our other cells now I want to end this particular part of my talk with it with a speculation I'm wondering whether it's possible that autoimmune diseases think again of the rabbit and the Lynx autoimmune diseases might be a bright patre a byproduct of an evolutionary arms race I talked about evolutionary arms races between predators and prey before an evolutionary arms race between cancer and the immune system run over many ancestral generations the immune system wins battles against precancerous cells we all of us from time to time develop precancerous cells which unless the immune system detects them have a risk of developing into a proper malignant tumor and mostly the immune system wins and we never know anything about it occasionally it doesn't win and the cancer wins so the immune system wins battles against precancerous cells and my suggestion is that in its constant vigilance against precancerous cells the immune system sometimes goes too fast treads too far over the that side of the line goes too far and attacks harmless tissues after all the harmless tissues are very similar to cancerous cells and an immune system which is too ready to attack finds itself attacking our own cells as it were mistaking them for cancer cells and I'm wondering whether the explanation for autoimmune diseases could be that they are evidence of evolutions work-in-progress in an arms race against cancers now I've been asked to say something about proof and so I thought I ought to stick something in about proof although it's not in the book the word proof is you strictly by mathematicians you prove something when you show that it follows deductively inescapably from axioms the Pythagorean theorem about right-angled triangles which is immensely useful in all sorts of fields is proved deductively once and for all time for all right angle triangles in a plain surface it's necessarily true you don't have to go out with a ruler and measure hundreds of triangles in order to know that Pythagoras's theorem is correct and most biological facts most of the things we know about biology and not like that we do have to go and take lots of observations analyze them statistically set up hypotheses models test them experimentally some philosophers would say we attempt to falsify our models at a model that sticks its neck out a model that's vulnerable to being falsified yet is not falsified is a good model a successful model the more vulnerable it is the more precise the predictions that could have been disproved but or not the more but the more precise the predictions that are not falsified the more we are inclined to accept it as true but this is not proof in the mathematical sense nevertheless it's still powerful evidence for believing that something is true there are some things that we can do in biology which you could think of as armchair deductions and I want to single out one which is close to my heart there is a controversy in biology at the moment over the subject of the evolution of pal truism in kin in related organisms for example especially the social insects where many of you may know that the majority of biologists interpret the astonishing feats of the social insects of ants bees and wasps and to em termites as a result of natural selection acting on kin the worker ant is a sterile animal which cannot reproduce and the reason why workers do what they do which is feed other ants feed larvae which is protect the nest which is take great risks bees sting with a barbed sting which kills them they're their kamikaze fighters the reason why sterile workers do this is that their genes the genes that make them do it have copies in the young reproductives in the case of ants the young winged queens and males and so if a gene makes a worker ant behave altruistically towards a young queen or a young male then the gene has a good chance of being present in the body of that young queen which is going to reproduce or has at least a chance of reproducing this is the theory of kin selection and it was developed by my Oxford colleague he wasn't at Oxford then WD Hamilton his theory of inclusive fitness it was renamed the theory of kin selection by John Maynard Smith and it has been the dominant account of the evolution of the social insects ever since the 1960s it is now under attack from I suppose the most distinguished worker on social insects today which is e o Wilson Edward o Wilson who and I don't want to go into detail but he is now saying that all that his espousal of the theory of kin selection was wrong and Wilson is himself wrong in this and I haven't time to go into into it except to say that he mistakes the logical status of the theory of kin selection he writes as though he thinks that kin selection is a new theory that has to be added to the classical neo-darwinian synthesis of the 1930s and 40s the classical neo-darwinian synthesis of the 30s and 40s which recast Darwinism in genetic terms joined up Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian genetics and recast evolution as changes in gene frequencies that's the way it's been since the 1930s that's the neo-darwinian theory that's the theory that everybody in biology subscribes to today Wilson talks as though Hamilton's theory of kin selection working for collateral kin rather than your own offspring as though Hamilton's theory of kin selection is an extra theory that's kind of bolted on to the neo-darwinian theory of the 1930s that's his mistake it is not it follows deductively mathematically from the neo-darwinian synthesis as Pythagoras theorem follows from the axioms of Euclidean geometry Wilson is in fact doing the equivalent of Pythagoras going around with a ruler and measuring hundreds of right-angled triangles to see whether they obey Pythagoras theorem that's not what it's about you could deduce you can deduce Hamilton's theory of kin selection deductively from the depths of an armchair without ever leaving the armchair it's another question entirely whether the particular idea of collateral kiddin actually applies in practice to a particular species it probably does not apply you don't actually need to think about collateral kin in many species of animal but the theory is still there it still the pressure towards it is still there that and that is a deductive consequence of the neo-darwinian synthesis which follows inexorably ineluctably mathematically deductively from the synthesis of the 1930s and here's another example of armchair thinking which has the flavor of mathematics although it's not a totally rigorous proof once again you could do it in an armchair people sometimes say was there ever an Adam and Eve and of course there wasn't in the sense of Genesis but then people will say well yes but there probably was what about African II what about mitochondrial Eve what about this this woman whom were all descended from we get all our mitochondria which come down through the maternal line what about mitochondrial Eve there is empirical genetic evidence that a woman did indeed live in Africa something over a hundred thousand years ago who gave us all of us our mitochondria mitochondria that we inherited from our mother from our maternal grandmother a maternal maternal great-grandmother and so on that's empirical obstacle work the point I want to make now though is that it is logically necessary that there had to be such a woman it's nice that we've got the empirical evidence but actually from the depths of your armchair you could have concluded that yes there has to be a a woman from whom we are all descended from whom we get our all our mitochondria there I'm going to distinguish three different individuals mitochondrial Eve Y chromosome Adam and our most recent common ancestor and all three of those necessarily had to exist although we don't necessarily know when or where our most recent common ancestor is the individual from whom all of us are descended most recently and I can prove to you by the mathematical technique of reductio ad absurdum that there had to be such an individual in fact I can prove something rather more striking than that which is that if you go back sufficiently far in time in a time machine you will find that every individual you meet as you open the door of your time machine and get out every individual you meet is either the ancestor of all living humans or of none of them there are no intermediates between them that's a rather remarkable fact that I can prove it to you without ever leaving the armchair or conversely going forwards we can say that of all of us in this room if we go sufficiently far forward in time and look at humans in the remote future there are some of us in this room who will be the ancestor of everyone alive and there are other but others of us in this room who will be the ancestor of nobody alive and there are no intermediates it's either everybody or nobody isn't that a striking thought is it a striking thought yeah here's the proof it's the it's the mathematicians method of reductio ad absurdum suppose we go back ludicrously fast beause we go back to the Devonian era where our ancestors were fish so i can trace my ancestry back to a fish and so can you my fish has got to be your fish because in order for that not to be true the descendants of my fish and the descendants of your fish would have had to evolve in parallel through the same intermediate pathways all the way to becoming humans chastely refraining from ever mating with each other that's the only way in which it could be true that my as my fish is different from you from your fish so there has to be a most there has to be a fish which is the ancestor of every human and there are other fish of which are maybe its contemporaries who are the ancestors have none now it's easy to see that that's true if you go back as far as a fish we don't have to go back nearly that far we only have to go back well it's then it becomes a matter of more detailed calculation and an actual empirical measurement to say how far we have to go until we find an individual who is the most recent common ancestor of every single one of us in the world today and that individual probably lived a matter of a few tens of thousands of years ago that is not mitochondrial Eve mitochondrial Eve is our most recent common ancestor in the female female female female female line because mitochondria only go down the female female female line mitochondrial Eve lived earlier than our most recent common ancestor because there are so many more ways of being an ancestor than just the maternal maternal maternal maternal line you could be an ancestor by going father grandmother great grandfather great great-grandfather great great-great grandmother and so on there are millions of different ways of being an ancestor and so obviously given all possible ways of being an ancestor our most recent common ancestor has to be a more recent one than mitochondrial Eve since mitochondrial Eve is the most recent ancestor or down only one pathway this trickle of genes down the right hand end of the family tree similarly Y chromosome Adam all males have a Y chromosome though females do all males get their Y chromosome from their father their paternal grandfather their paternal paternal great-grandfather and so on once again the trickle from the left-hand end of the family tree so y chromosome Adam has to be another one who is earlier than our most recent common ancestor but Y chromosome Adam by totally different line of reasoning probably lived more recently than mitochondrial Eve and certainly Y chromosome Adam never met mitochondrial Eve the reason I say Y chromosome Adam lived more recently is that there are more ways of having descendants if you're male you're more likely to have lots of descendants if you're male than if you're female and the reason for that is that a male is capable of having hundreds of descendents and one or two males in history have if you look at the Y chromosome of many peoples in Central Asia they all derived from a single male who lived around about the time of Genghis Khan moulay Ishmael the bloodthirsty had more than 800 children he also had the charming habit of mounting his horse with drawing his saber as he did and beheading the slave that held the bridle as a method of quick release as he got into the saddle so many of us may well be descended from mullah Ishmael the bloodthirsty many of us may be descended from Genghis Khan we are all descended from all from Y chromosome Adam and before male our Y chromosome derives from Y chromosome Adam and he probably lived a lot more recently than mitochondrial Eve I'm now going to end by reading the final paragraphs from the magic of reality which talk about the about magic and miracles and how real science is always to be preserved I haven't talked about that in this lecture but is in the title the magic of reality and there is a chapter on miracles and it's sort of a response to the claim that scientists think they know everything there are things that not even the best scientists of today can explain but that doesn't mean we should block off all investigation by resorting to phony explanations invoking magic or the supernatural which don't actually explain at all just imagine how a medieval man even the most educated man of his era would have reacted if he'd seen a jet plane a laptop computer a cell phone a sat-nav device he would have called them supernatural miraculous but these devices are now commonplace we know how they work people have built them following scientific principles there never was a need to invoke magic or miracles or the supernatural and we now see that the medieval man would have been wrong to do so and we don't have to go back as far as medieval times to make the point a gang of Victorian international criminals equipped with modern cell phones could have coordinated their activities in ways that would have looked like telepathy to Sherlock Holmes in Holmes's world a suspect in a murder case who could prove he was in New York the evening after the murder was committed in London would have a perfect alibi because it was literally impossible in the 19th century to be New York and London on the same day the eminent science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke some the point up has Clarke's third law any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic the very idea of levitation has long been a byword for the supernatural for mysterious magic and I'm going to show you a little film now a demonstration from the superconductivity group of tel-aviv University of a feat of levitation that's done by purely naturalistic physics quantum physics levitation is no longer a Miss a miracle it's physics attract quite high can just rotate it so it's actually floating above the surface yeah I just broke a lot about the surface so I can you can tilt it as an angle on it yeah like this and you just go round like this I get it go and put it a different height and down like this lock it at the height lock it yeah different height different configuration and I can even lock it to the opposite way check it your score I hang upside down and then it is suspended the more you think about it the more you realize that the very idea of a supernatural miracle is nonsense if something happens that appears to be inexplicable by science you can safely conclude one of two things either it didn't really happen the observer was mistaken or was lying or was tricked all we have exposed a shortcoming in present-day science if present day science encounters an observation or an experimental result that it cannot explain then we should not rest until we've improved our science so that it can provide an explanation if it requires a radically new kind of science a revolutionary science so strange that old scientist scarcely recognized it as science at all that's fine too it's happened before but don't ever be lazy enough defeatist enough cowardly enough to say I don't understand it so it must be supernatural it must be a miracle say instead it's a puzzle it's strange it's a challenge that we should rise to whether we rise to the challenge by questioning the truth of the observation or by expanding our science in new and exciting directions the proper and brave response to any such challenge is to tackle it head-on and until we have found a proper answer to the mystery it's perfectly okay simply to say this is something we don't yet understand but we're working on it it's the only honest thing to do miracles magic and myths they can be fun and I have fun with them throughout the magic of reality everybody likes a good story and I hope that readers of this book will enjoy the myths with which I begin most of my chapters but even more I hope that in every chapter they enjoy the science that comes after the myths if you read the book I hope you'll agree that the truth has a magic of its own the truth is more magical in the best and most exciting sense of the word than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle science has its own magic the magic of reality thank you very much Thank You dr. Wilkins thank you dr. Dawkins all right so now we move into the question and answer section of the annual oration I will note this is a question and answer session not a declaration and answer session I would ask that if you have a question you come to one of the three mics in the rows here in the main auditorium we have three Philo's who will be able to assist you what we asked you to do is you run the question by them we're making sure that nothing is repetitive or inflammatory but we're very eager or dr. donkeys very eager to answer any questions you might have so I think what we'll do is we'll begin over there on the audience's right over here yes hello yeah so after listening to all this I was just a bit confused about what is your belief on God because I think it is right to say that we need to prove things before we believe in them so I come to the conclusion that we don't know if God exists or not is that the same conclusion you share yes we don't know for certain if leprechauns exist fairies exist hobgoblins exist we don't know all sorts of things and until we do then we take the best evidence that we have and we don't waste our time believing in things for which there is no positive reason to think that they do exist so we cannot disprove the existence of Thor and Odin and Jupiter Zeus Mithras etc and but until there's any positive evidence for them we don't waste our time with them hello professor thank you for coming here today you've inspired me to get into biology in the past you you've expressed your preference for television programs like Jacob Bronowski ascent of man and Carl Sagan's Cosmos over say more modern programs that are but they that cater to the attention span of of the public in the past when you prepare for your Christmas lectures or when you when you're writing the book the magic of reality how much did you focus on the level of appeal of the the subject matter and if like what is your philosophy and trying to package the material to gain its you to try to make the public understand like the top series I mean I think science can be difficult and so it's it's all too easy to sugar the pill and to only talk about the sexy fun aspects of science and bangs and smells and things to teach science in a coherent way I think you have to do to the whole thing but all of science should be interesting it's a very complete not not totally finished complete but it's a coherent body of theory I think obviously you have to be very clear Einstein said everything should be as simple as possible but no simpler so it's you can't gloss over the difficulties we try to put yourself in the position of the listener or the reader this is obvious but many people don't really do it very well say to yourself if if I were reading this how would I would I react what I understand it I find that when I'm writing a chapter say I will almost inadvertently find myself reading it again and again over and over again each morning and I start afresh work I will read through the chapter yet again and again inadvertently I find myself reading it through the eyes of a different possible person and it's not a deliberate thing I don't have a kind of checklist of imaginary readers it tends to be just a person that I just been speaking to on the phone or something like that and that person she's in my mind because I've just been speaking to her on the phone and so when I get next start reading the chapter I will as it were see the word through her eyes and if I think she wouldn't like something or wouldn't get a point that I'm making because I hadn't made it clearly enough I'll change it and so the chapter goes through a sort of Darwinian process of being naturally selected through the eyes of many imaginary readers and I suppose that has in any Darwinian process that improves it you mentioned the Christmas lectures the Christmas lectures are an institution started by Michael Faraday in when he was head of the Royal Institution and they're given every year in the Royal Institution in London five lectures given to children and nowadays for about the last forty years they've been televised by the BBC or some other company and I gave them one year it's a major undertaking you kind of give up a whole year to preparing the Christmas lectures it's a great privilege because they are such a British institution and it there is a tradition started by Faraday of having demonstrations Faraday didn't have slides what he had was demonstrations he would call people out he would do demonstrations on the bench and that tradition has persisted and so I got a lot of help with demonstrations that would inspire the children and calling the children up to to assist rather like a rather like a conjurer does and you find that when preparing demonstrations the fact that you're giving the Christmas lectures is a key that opens all and so you couldn't ring up a company that manufactures electron microscopes and say I'm giving the Christmas lectures this year they say right what can we do for you and they will hire a truck and ship an electron microscope into the lecture theatre so that you can demonstrate it so it's it's a it's a huge privilege but not everybody has that privilege and if you haven't got the facility to actually lift an electron microscope and put it on the table for children florell nevertheless you couldn't use use other simpler demonstrations than that metaphor I think is important using analogies using metaphors to try to explain things you have to remember not to let metaphor go too far there are some people they're often called theologians who are incapable of distinguishing metaphor from reality metaphor should illuminate reality it shouldn't take the place of reality yeah not to questions thank you so much for your talk professor Dawkins the first question involves religion you met with a rabbi from the Society for humanistic Judaism first is a religion of humanistic religion X of atheists good in your eyes and the second question is there's a group of transhumanists who believe that eventually were science will move into the realm of human beings living forever I was wondering what do you think of transhumanism what do you think of transhumanists are they crazy or they rational what do you think well there are two quite different questions human human istic religion humanistic Judaism or whatever it might be there are people who think that when you've given up the supernatural you're left the raft of I don't know ceremony ritual the companion of going to church and there are people who think that we need to substitute something like that and so they will have humanistic ceremonies humanistic rituals humanistic meetings have been Unitarians to some extent do this I think and my feeling is if that's what you need go for it I don't feel any need for ritual or anything like that but I'm not hostile to the to the idea except insofar as people mistake it and think that because you you're having these humanistic ceremonies that therefore you do believe in the supernatural I haven't looked into transhumanism at all I suppose I take a kind of science fictiony view a sort of arthur c clarke view that just as Clarke's third law says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic that's looking at the past if you look in the future anything that can be done probably will be done and there's nothing in principle impossible about extending the human lifespan for a very long time whether it's a good thing to do would be another matter there would be ethical concerns about whether if the present generation discovers how to live it forever that means that there's no more reproduction better not being a reproduction of you know the world will just become full of solid human flesh so that that particular ethical consideration would have to be would have to be taken care of there's also a personal consideration I'd quite like to live a bit longer than I'm going to but um somehow going on for millions of years I think probably get a bit boring anyway that's a person I don't have anything illuminating to say about that as someone who doesn't believe or obviously doesn't have a god to turn to and also unfortunately has a lot of the world against the atheists what do you ever feel lonely and also well I'm sorry I'd serious it's serious do you ever feel lonely and what do you turn to for solace if I felt lonely I would not turn to some ethereal spirit for solace I would turn I would turn to some solid human companionship even if it were true that a lack of a divine companion left people unhappy miserable lonely uncomfortable that of course is the worst possible argument for the existence of this spirit the world the universe doesn't owe is comfort and so if the the thought of there being no God or no afterlife whatever it is makes you feel uncomfortable sorry if the thought if the thought of being of having no God or no afterlife makes you feel uncomfortable that's just too bad okay Thomas Nagel has recently written an empowered phrasing slightly here that's premature to assert that strictly Darwinian processes can account for the existence of the mind speaking more broadly part of the issue is at physics which of course chemistry is based on which of course biology is based on has not yet been able to positive means whereby discrete particles that possess only objective physical States could produce whole subjective perceptions that and of course we don't want to rely on emergent properties because that'd be an act of faith and we don't believe in faith at this point so given that isn't it premature to say that artificial selection is a strictly dor-win Ian process as opposed to saying we don't yet understand I'm all for saying we don't yet understand I mean my parish in which I read out said we don't yet understand what I did add however was that because we don't yet understand we do not therefore resort to the supernatural cop-out we say we do not yet understand and we need to to work on it now there are aspects of the world that science certainly doesn't yet understand and physicists are up against them some of the most difficult questions and many physicists will frankly admit that they don't understand therefore they're working on it I don't have very much sympathy for this what I call the argument for personal incredulity which says I don't yet understand how something works therefore it's got to be something mystical so I I regard the confronting of things which we don't yet understand as a worthwhile challenging is the challenge that science needs to roll up its sleeves and do something about it's not it's not something it's not an excuse to to lie down in despair and say oh we don't understand it therefore we'll never understand it right but there are a couple important points here first off we don't want to argue from I think it's just somebody else needs to have a tournament thank you um I wanted to know what you thought about with the advances of medicine technology and basically the human races removal from the natural selection process do you feel we have halted our evolution or do you think that there's substantial room for evolutionary development within the human race I think you're asking about some human controlled evolution aren't you and well we know from artificial selection of agricultural animals and plants and domestic dogs and so on that of the two parts of the Darwinian equation mutation and selection a selection is immensely powerful and selection can turn a wolf into a Pekinese in a Pekinese is a wolf thinks it's a wolf anyway and is genetically speaking pretty much a wolf with minor minor differences so artificial selection is very powerful and if anyone were minded to practice artificial selection on humans there's not the slightest doubt but that it would work and so if you wanted to breed a race of super high jumpers or sprinters or something like that you could certainly do it just as people of bred gray hands to be much faster runners and race horses and so on so there's there's no doubt at all that breeding of humans would work if anyone had the stomach to do it and and I said I think one could say fortunately nobody actually or almost nobody has Hitler tried it fried it briefly the other half of the Darwinian equation mutation the artificial version of that we'd call genetic manipulation and that again is now being practiced with agricultural crops and agricultural animals and experimental animals and certainly works and once again in principle that that would that would work with humans and so again applying a kind of science fictiony view a sort of arthur c clarke view of the distant future it wouldn't be surprising if the techniques of artificial selection and artificial mutation did indeed produce extremely different kinds of humans and in a way the remarkable thing is it hasn't happened yet mr. Dawkins of all of the convictions you've ever had what is the simplest one that has changed the most well I suppose I used to have religious convictions I mean as sin Paul said when I was a child I spake as a child I thought of the child I understood as a child but when I became a man I put away childish things so that is an extremely simple idea the idea of the R in the religious idea is an extremely simple idea which meant many of us have have put away I suppose that's probably the top of the head answer to your to your question thank you so some time ago you produced a book review of jean bricmont and allen circles fashionable nonsense of what story of jean bricmont and a yes yeah yeah oh no sense Kay about post structuralist post modernist types and their ante scientific stances and this is a fairly liberal institution where you probably won't find many traditional religious reactionary types but you might find a few of the former camp of the the targets of Brickman Sokol i was wondering if you could briefly talk about they're about this form okay well this is this is a book by alan Sokol who is the physicist who perpetrated the famous hoax against a journal called i think social text and he wrote a book later with a Belgian physicist called jean reno so-called hoax was a paper called something like towards the transform formative hermeneutics and it was absolute solid from beginning to end total nonsense and because it used the sort of de rigueur Franco phony language of post modernist literary critics etc they lapped it up and published it and so-called then published his expose a of his own hoax in an in another journal and the editors of social texts ended up with egg all over their faces so Club Rick Moore wrote a beautiful book which quotes a lot of utterly amazing examples examples which I mean I can't possibly quote them I mean I'd like that there's they're just amazing I mean look at look at the book or look at my review of the book Peter Medawar who's a great hero of mine a great Nobel prize-winning medical scientist rumbled these people a very long time ago when he said something like this I could quote evidence of a whispering campaign against the virtues of clarity a writer in The Times Literary Supplement has argued that thoughts which are difficult to understand are best expressed in language which is deliberately unclear he goes on what a preposterously silly idea I'm reminded of an air raid warden in wartime Oxford who when somebody complained that the blackout was not being properly observed advised them to wear dark glasses he however was being funny on purpose Medawar is attacking people who used obscure language difficult language deliberately in order to obscure in order to impress in order to make people think that you're intelligent intellectual and profound when actually you have absolutely nothing to say I forget who it was coined the phrase physics Envy physics is a genuinely difficult subject with genuinely difficult material and physicists who try to explain their subject to laypeople strive and struggle mightily to do so they work hard at trying to find ways of explaining it if your subject has no depth has nothing to say then you can satisfy your physics Envy only by using language which is deliberately obscure going in the opposite direction from the physicists which as I've said are trying to make things make things clear I don't know how many people in the school of thought you're talking about a genuine charlatans but I'm damn sure some of them are and you can read their their stuff in circle and brick Moore's book or you could look up a magnificent website a magnificent computer program on a website called the post-modernism generator did you write it it was written I think by an Australian called called bull hack and he and what what you do is you as you go there and you just click and it generates for you a complete paper of post modernist claptrap complete with author citations everything is there and as I said at the end of my review I encourage you to go to the post modernism generator print out a paper send it to the editors of social text in triplicate was it is it fit yeah hi um first of all I'd like to say thank you for being you like you really like change me on a personal level so I really do appreciate that a nice tie second I'm quite nervous so forgive me I'm going to read a pre-prepared question from earlier but um yeah this effers to the reason rally your speech there so I've been following you and quite well and I know personally why you yourself call yourself a militant atheist nonetheless at least in your life as a public intellectual I think and my theist friends would agree that you come across sort of like an atheist Magneto and in that I mean you employed like the quote from the reason reality is that we should be ridiculing theus I don't think I find that inherently unjustifiable in that not all atheists are rational in everyday life and maybe theists are rational in some ways that atheists aren't how would you respond to like criticisms that perhaps we shouldn't like we as atheists shouldn't be ridiculing theists on like a personal level yeah well maybe I went too far I think what what I meant by ridicule was as opposed to the sort of rude to the point of obscene polemic which many of my colleagues indulge in and so I had been I was reacting against and remember the reason rally is talking to the to the troops so to speak and the I'm not really excusing myself I think I did go too far but the explanation is that some of my colleagues who would have been at the reason rally use language which is obscene which is polemical which is insulting in in a sort of a name-calling way and I was trying to erect ridicule as a more subtle I was thinking of subtle satire I was thinking of the kind of thing that Peter Medawar whom I quoted earlier did so well I mean Peter Medawar would never have dreamed of calling somebody a idiot like you'll see on set some atheist websites instead Peter Medawar used finesse and I think that's what I meant by ridicule just to give you an example meda were reviewed the theologian father tired - Ava's famous book the phenomenon of man and he did it beautifully I mean every every line is a rapier thrust and then he ends up asking how have people come to be taken in by tired ashada and he gives various reasons in his final reason is he says the spread of secondary and latterly of tertiary education has bred a large group of people with educated and refined literary and scholarly tastes who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought now that's a beautiful thrust in that that that's the kind of thing I mean that I was trying to encourage the people at the reason rally to employ that kind of satire that kind of ridicule rather than the kind of of outspokenly what really rather unpleasant polemic that that we so often see but I think you're right I probably did go too far thank you yeah thank you very much for coming to speak to us today yesterday was Douglas Adams 61st birthday I'm sure you remember as a result of his adoration for you I discovered your literature and I was wondering after writing the magic of reality how his love for teaching science to young people in may have impacted or influenced you to write this book and other literature yes and he was a remarkable writer he I think it's more or less unique the sort of science fiction comedy um taking taking the ideas of science which do have many absurdities about them I mean there is something absurd about many of the ideas of quantum theory though it's got to be true because the predictions are so good at somehow turning that into into comedy was with a magnificent literary achievement which I don't know of anybody else who who done who does or does that or did did that I miss him sadly he I think I'm right in saying it's the only fan letter I've ever written was to him and that resulted in his inviting me to come and see him because he he wrote me a fan letter as well and and so we always got on very well he but he was my guru on all anything to do with computers especially Apple Macintosh computers and so I would always go to him and he would his advice was always Ryan funny and and and sort of he kept laughing at himself it was just a just a lovely lovely man miss him so much and I he introduced me to my wife on his 40th birthday which is another sentimental reason for hi thank you um so I wanted to ask do I know of any evidence for the concept that perhaps particularly manzara netic leap Reedus posed to logic or to belief without proof sorry who who is any particular humans whether there's a genetic basis for rationality well it's it's an interesting philosophical question what why our brains are good at doing logic why our brains are good at doing sir doing science indeed and some people have even argued that because our brains are the product of natural selection we therefore should somehow should mistrust our logic I think you could make a pretty good Darwinian case for why we would be logical and rational if you're trying to survive in the African savanna with lions and leopards and snakes and things and running out of food and running out of water and so on your view of the world had better not be cockeyed your view of the world have better correspond with reality well you're going to die I mean you need to have a rational view of the world in a way that the puzzle is why why we also developed an irrational view of the world why we why instead of just getting on with the business of living and planting our crops and and things we would sacrifice a goat in order to make the crops grow wasting time and wasting goats to do it to do it but but but I don't think we need to ask where our logic comes from where our rationality comes from it's rather the reverse is that one more there all right no the questions have concluded for the evening well questions have concluded for the evening however if it's all right we'll have you out signing books yes I'll call excellent thank you for it's under very much

Channel: Prometheus Unchained

Views: 250,716

Keywords: Richard Dawkins (Author), lecture, full lecture, university, Evolution (Idea), College, Darwin, Biology (Field Of Study)

Id: Uga0QaKsdCk

Length: 94min 52sec (5692 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 13 2014