Richard Dawkins: Who Was the First Human?

you may have noticed we're looking at lots of big stack of photographs and this is actually an image taken or a few images taken from Richard Dawkins his new book and I wonder actually you might explain the thought experiment yes this is from my latest book which is being published I think in three days time the magic of reality and what we're looking at here is a thought experiment in which the reader is invited to take a photograph of herself ordinary picture-postcard place it on a table then take a photograph of her father father's father father's father's father candid mother whatever you like and then go on and go on and go on stacking these photographs into an ever higher pile and I arbitrarily decided that the pile should stop after 185 million generations so we've got 185 picture postcards photographs of your ancestors stacked on top of each other that's about like 40 I think I some worked out of New York skyscrapers now I think it's even more than that and then I imagine tilting it on its side and so what you're seeing there is the stack of pictures tilted on its side and you wander along this this great long bookshelf full of pictures every now and again pulling one off and the ones you see there are an archaic Homo sapiens and then a Homo erectus which would have been our ancestor about a million and a half years ago what's interesting is that I asked the question who was the first person that's the title of the chapter every chapter in the book is is a question and every chapter in the book begins with a mythical with set of mythical answers and then what the true up the true arts are the scientific answer so who really was the first person and I begin with a slightly paradoxical answer that there never was a first person because every animal every person ever born belonged to the same species as its parents you couldn't take that back as far as you like and I take it back to 185 million generations ago you turn over the page and you reveal that you're 185 million greats grandfather was a fish do we have a picture of Fisher there might even it might even be there um and at first sight it sounds paradoxical to say that you 185 million greats grandfather was a fish but on the other other hand every single generation on the way back there belong to the ther it is yes belong to the same species as its as its parents and as its and as its children the point is of course that the whole process is incredibly gradual incredibly slow it takes millions of years we're familiar with this kind of gradual imperceptible change because we all of us started off as a baby and became a toddler and became a child and became a teenager and became an adult and there never was a moment when you could say yesterday I was a toddler and I am a child yesterday I was a baby and I am a toddler it doesn't happen that way it's the same as looking at your the hour hand of your watch you can't see it move but if you wait for an hour and look at it again you find that it has moved and that's like evolution so it's a kind of fortunate accident that all the intermediates are extinct and which is why we can divide the living kingdoms into separate species which can't interbreed with each other but if all the ancestors were still alive then there would be a complete continuum between every creature and every other and every other creature going back to the common ancestor and then forward again and as you go back every single generation the there never was a homo erectus parent who gave birth to a homo sapiens baby always they would have been classified if a taxonomist had been around at the time as belonging to the same species

Channel: FORA.tv

Views: 383,311

Keywords: richard, dawkins, human, evolution, history, past, evolved, origin, species, anthropology, biology, explained, creationism, adam, eve, genesis, new, yorker, festival, foratv, fora.tv, fora, tv

Id: j4ClZROoyNM

Length: 4min 29sec (269 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 15 2011