[music playing]
>>Male presenter: Welcome everybody. I would like to especially welcome our families
and friends and our young guests today who are joining
us to celebrate science. We have lined up some exciting events in about
an hour from now you will have a brilliant punk science team from the London
science museum and that they will be doing, in their own words, "old science" show. Please stay with us and enjoy that show. The end of the meantime, you will find the
desks for the science fair, the science fair team is organizing a science
competition in association with National Geographic and Lego and The Scientific American, and
if you, you would like to join that competition, you can go talk to their desk and find out
more about that. And what more privileged way
to celebrate science than to have Professor Richard Dawkins here with us
to talk about his latest book. Professor Richard Dawkins was the first holder
of the Charles Simonyi Chair in Public Understanding of Science at the University
of Oxford. He's a fellow member of the Royal Society
and the Royal Society of Literature. And he's a prominent scientist and evolutionary
biologist and perhaps one of the world's most outspoken
atheists. He's, of course, the author
of numerous books, including his landmark text, The Selfish Gene, his sensational take
on religion, The God Delusion, and The Greatest Show on
Earth in which he makes a stirring defense of Charles Darwin's theory of
evolution. And today he's here to talk with us about
his book, which most of you have among in the audience
at your hands, his latest book, The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really
True. And at the end of his speech,
Professor Dawkins will be taking questions. Please use the microphone on the floor
to ask questions if you do have any and then he's also offered to stay with us and sign
his books. It will be on the stage
right after his speech and Q and A session. Without any further ado and with great pleasure,
I would like to give you Professor Richard Dawkins. [Applause] >>Richard Dawkins: Thank you, Baran, very
much. I am delighted that, of course,
that so many copies of my book are to be seen in the room, slightly disconcerted as well. My Uncle Bill told me that when he was an
undergraduate at Oxford many years ago in the 1930s, it was the custom for Oxford
undergraduates to read out their essays to their tutor. And he, one week, had been caught a bit short
and so he had actually just copied out his essay
from a book. And his tutor listened to his essay for a
while and then silently got up, walked across to a bookshelf, pulled the volume
off the shelf, opened it, and then started following with his finger. [Laughter]
And then at the end, my uncle valiantly soldiered on reading out his essay,
and then at the end the tutor snapped the book shut and said, "I see you agree with
Mr. So and So." [Laughter]
So I'm a little bit worried that people may be following what I say in the book,
so I'll try not to make it too word for word. The Magic of Reality,
it's a book for young people, the sort of optimal target age that I was aiming at was
about twelve. But I hope, and I think believe, that it can
be read by adults as well they can understand it. And also younger children as well. It’s a little bit difficult
to pitch in talk to the full range of ages that I see in the audience today,
so I hope I won't be boring some age groups. There are twelve chapters in the book,
and those show the twelve chapters. They're nearly all a scientific question,
like who was was the first person, what is the sun, what is a rainbow. Every chapter begins with myths from around
the world in answer to the question and then goes on to the meat
of the chapter, Which is the scientific answer what really
is the sun, what really is a rainbow, what really is an earthquake, and so on. The title, The Magic of Reality, I need to
clarify the word magic. I see the word magic is used in three different
senses. The first kind of magic is fairy tale spells,
fairy godmothers waving a wand
and turning a pumpkin into a coach or a frog turning into a prince, that kind of thing. Nobody believes in that kind of magic. The second kind of magic is stage magic, conjuring. In America,
conjurors are called magicians but everybody knows,
of course, that what conjurors do is only a trick although it looks like are real magic,
it looks like something supernatural. And the third kind of magic is the one that
I am really most keen on, and the title of my book, which is the magic
of reality. When we're moved to tears by a beautiful piece
of music we describe it as magical. Or we look up at the stars,
we look up at the Milky Way and we say what a magical sight. The whole of science, the whole of what science
reveals it seems to me
is magical in that sense, not supernatural, but fills one with a sense of wonder, a sort
of swelling of the chest which one can describe as magical. The purpose of my book is to show that reality,
the facts of reality, as understood through science, is magical in this third
sense, the poetic sense, the 'good to be alive' sense. Now, I said that nobody believes in supernatural
magic, nobody believes in fairies turning pumpkins into coaches, and frogs into
princes. And I want to make the point,
a really rather important point, it's actually not just that no one has ever actually seen
a frog turn into prince, there are very good reasons for saying it will never happen,
it's impossible. And it is important to understand that, in
order to understand how it is that frogs and princes and kangaroos and tigers
came into existence at all because they did not come into existence by magic, of
course. They came into existence by evolution. So why is it that things can't magically turn
into other things from one magic blow? Why can't frogs turn into princes? Why can't pumpkins turn into coaches? Well, the reason is, frogs and princes, and
pumpkins and coaches are all complicated things. And complicated means statistically improbable. And statistically improbable means that
it isn't going to just happen by luck. So if you imagine making the task for our
fairy godmother, making a coach by magic a little bit easier,
well imagine that instead of giving her a pumpkin to start with,
we give her a sort of IKEA kit for making a coach. It comes in a box, and she takes all the bits
in the box, puts them in a great big sack and shakes them,
and shakes them, and shakes them for a billion years, and every
time she shakes she looks to see whether a coach has tumbled out. And of course it won't, not in a trillion
years, it won't. Coaches, and princes, and frogs, and us, and
aardvarks, and dinosaurs are all much too complicated to happen by
chance. So how did they happen? Oh, first of all, I should say that in some
cases we can calculate the odds against happening by chance. If we're playing cards and we deal thirteen
cards to each of four players as you would in Bridge and imagine that I
pick up my cards, I pick up my thirteen cards and I gasped in
astonishment because I've got the perfect hand of all spades. So I lay down my cards on the table and I
say no good going on with the game I've obviously won this game because I've
got a perfect hand, and then to my amazement, one by one the other three players
lay down their hands and somebody's got all the diamonds, somebody's got all the clubs,
somebody's got all the hearts. Well,
that could happen. What are the odds against it? Well, you all have worked out in your head
[Laughter] that the odds against that are 536,447,737,765,488,792,839,237,442,000
against. However the particular deal is no less likely
than any other particular deal is, just that we notice, we notice it because
there's something special about it. You could arbitrarily designate any particular
deal and say the odds against that happening are also that number of
octillions, etcetera. By the way,
once I was reading that out while giving a lecture in America,
and they have a rule there that you have to have someone standing at the side of the stage
doing sign language so I couldn't help stealing a look at her while I was doing
all this. [laughter]
And I also, this is only totally an aside now,
but I also during the same lecture had an occasion to refer
to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva and I was talking about how moved I was when I
went to visit the Large Hadron Collider and I told as an aside the story that in the
first edition of one of my books, this was misprinted as Large Hard on Collider,
[laugher] and I, again, have to look at this woman and
see how she was--.[laughter] Anyway, as I was saying, in the case of a
perfect bridge, of a perfect deal in bridge, you can calculate the odds against it. You can't calculate the odds of shaking up
the bits of a prince, or shaking up the bits of a frog
and getting a prince, but it's going to be just as high, just as
unlikely. Probably even more so than getting a perfect
hand in bridge. So how do
we get tigers and kangaroos and frogs and princes? The answer is it certainly does not come about
by chance, it comes about by the nonrandom process,
of evolution by natural selection. The key to understanding that is that although
there is chance involved, there is luck involved,
it's a very small amount of luck in each step of the way. The point is
that there are millions of steps of the way, one after the other through an immense amount
of geological time and each one of those tiny steps means that a frog, for example,
turns into a slightly different kind of frog, and then a slightly different kind of frog
again, and a slightly different kind of frog again. Each of those tiny steps is not improbable,
is not a wildly improbable thing like shaking the bits of a frog and getting
a prince. It's because there are so many steps, it's
because the luck is smeared out into gradual steps that it works and that's
why we've been able to go from some kind of bacterial ancestor three billion
years ago to all the different kinds of animal and plant that we see today. Now, … [pause] I'm now going to take the
first, take the next chapter, chapter two, which is the first of the chapters that follows
the plan of having a question followed by myths followed by the true scientific
answer. And the question of this chapter is who was
the first person? And, as you know,
this has been the subject of many myths, and a particularly familiar myth is the Hebrew
myth of Adam and Eve, the Jewish myth of Adam and Eve, which has
been adopted by Christians and by Muslims, as you know. And just to give you another myth, the myth
of Odin, the Norse myth, which is just a quite separate myth. And there are thousands of origin myths
which account for the who was the first person. They're all colorful,
they're all nice stories but they're, of course, not true. And we're now going to come onto the true
answer to the question who was the first person. The scientific answer. Well, this may surprise you there never was
a first person. Because every person had to have parents and
they had to have parents, and they had to have parents, and so on. And the same is true of rabbits and crocodiles
and, and, and lizards and everything. Every animal ever born, every creature ever
born belonged to the same species as its parents and its
children, and its grandparents and its great grandparents. How far back can we take that? Can we take about forever? No, obviously we can't. Um, and this is the main lesson I want to
reach in this part of my talk. Even though every species ever born is the
same species as its parents and its children, nevertheless, if you go back a sufficiently
large number of generations, then you come to something very different. So let's do a thought experiment. Imagine that you take up, a thought experiment
is an experiment you don't actually do, you just imagine. Imagine that you take a picture of yourself
and put on top of it a picture of your father, then on top of that, his father, and then
his father, and then his father, and then his father
and build a gigantic skyscraper of pictures going backwards in time. How far back should we go? Well, I think we should go back 185,000,000
greats so I am going to go back to your one hundred
eighty-five million greats grandfather. How high would that skyscraper be? It would be more than one hundred eighty New
York skyscrapers piled on top of each other. So we're going back quite a long way. Obviously that skyscraper would simply fall
over, it's much too high. So let's tip it
on its side and put the pictures all the way along a great big long bookshelf. How long would that bookshelf be? About forty
miles. So the near end of the bookshelf has a picture
of you, the far end of the bookshelf has a picture of your one hundred
eighty-five million greats grandfather. What did he look like? Was he an old man with wispy hair and side
whiskers? Was he a cave man in a leopard skin? No, forget any such thought. Your one hundred eighty-five million greats
grandfather looked something like that. Your one hundred eighty-five million greats
grandfather was a fish. [laughter]
So was your one hundred eighty-five million greats grandmother which is just as well. If we now walk along our forty mile long bookshelf,
we can pull off pictures now and again to see how we're going. Every picture shows a creature belonging to
the same species as it's immediate neighbors on the
shelf. Yet if you go back sufficiently far,
where your four thousand greats grandfather is, who you see there looks pretty much like
us, your fifty thousand greats grandfather looks
just a bit different. He would have been perhaps a member of the
species homo Erectus,
not the same species as us, but pretty similar, nevertheless. Imagine that we take a time machine and we
ride backwards in time and we go back in steps of ten thousand years. If every step of ten thousand years, we get
out of our time machine, and we look around and we see which of our
great, great, great, great grandparents we can see. And we take on board one of them, and then
we hop another ten thousand years and then we open the door, we look again at
who's out there, and we take on board a passenger from that time
and we hop back another ten thousand years. Well, what we'll notice
is that every ten thousand years stop, the new people that we see or the new animals
that we see are going to be pretty similar to the last
lot that we've, that we saw the previous ten thousand year
hop and indeed they can interbreed if they feel like it. And they can probably
interbreed with several more ten thousand year hops as
well but there will come a time when they can no
longer interbreed with us. So if we go back a million years, then we
will probably find that we can just about not interbreed with the people that we
discover. Yet all the intermediates could interbreed
with their neighbors, with the most recently joined party on the
time machine. Let's now pick out some more distant ones,
Your two hundred fifty thousand greats grandfather who lived about six million years ago,
would have probably looked a bit like a chimpanzee. However, he wasn't a chimpanzee, he was the
common ancestor of ourselves and chimpanzees. He was no more a chimpanzee than we are except
perhaps he looked a bit more like a chimpanzee than
he looked like us. Your one million and a half, sorry, your one
and a half million greats grandfather, twenty five million years
ago, would have looked like a monkey and would
have been the ancestor that we share with modern monkeys. Your seven million greats grandfather would
have lived sixty-three million years ago, and would have been the common ancestor of
us and modern lemurs. Once again, it would not have been a lemur,
it would have perhaps looked bit more like a lemur than it looks
like us, but would be the common ancestor of ourselves
and lemurs. Your forty-five million greats grandfather,
who lived one hundred and five million years ago would have been sort of like a shrew
and would have been the common ancestor of actually probably most of the mammals, all
the mammals perhaps. Your one hundred and seventy million greats
grandfather would have would have looked kind of like a sort of lizard. And would have been the common ancestor of
us, that is to say all the mammals, and all the reptiles, including birds, including
dinosaurs, birds are dinosaurs actually. Your one hundred seventy-five million greats
grandfather would have looked a bit like a salamander, the one on
the right there and would have been the common ancestor of modern salamanders
and frogs, and of all the other reptiles, and mammals and birds. And then finally we come back your one hundred
eight-five million greats grandfather, and the fish that you've already seen. We can carry on this process, I won't do it,
but you can carry on. The line of pictures wends its way off into
the distance and eventually comes back to something like
a bacterium. I'm now just going to whiz through the chapter
titles of some of the other chapters just to give you a feel
for what other questions we tackle. Tackle first by giving mythical answers, and
then by giving the true scientific answer. "Why are there so many different kinds of
animals?" "What are things made of?" If you, if you take stuff, matter, and cut
it into smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller pieces, you eventually
come to a piece that no longer is that stuff at all. It's about the atomic theory. It's about chemistry. It's about atoms. It's about molecules. "Why do we have night and day? Why do we have winter and summer?" Most people have a pretty good idea of why
we have night and day, it's because the earth is spinning on its axis
and therefore a different side of the earth is turned toward the sun at different times. And I think most
people know why we have winter and summer, but actually you'd be surprised how many people
think that winter is when the earth is furthest from the sun in its orbit, and
summer is when it's nearest to the sun in its orbit. Nobody in Australia thinks
that. In the course of that chapter, I try to explain
what being in orbit means and this is a good opportunity for me
to mention that there is an app that goes with the book, because the app, in addition
to being the complete book, including illustrations, so you can read it like a Kindle
book, it also has simulations and games. And can we turn on this one now, is
that, who is in charge of that? [pause]
Good, okay. So, here's the book, on the app. There are all the chapters you see swinging
along at the top. And then you can choose a particular chapter. We happen to have to have got to "Why do we
have night and day?" so I choose
that, and then you see all the pages of "why do we have night and day?", and I want to
stop at the game which is in the middle. Which is this one. Isaac Newton illustrated the principle of
things being in orbit by imagining a cannon, and you see the cannon
there, sitting on top of the world. And Newton imagined firing a cannonball,
and if you fire a cannon ball rather slowly, it will splash into the sea there. If you fire it a bit stronger, it will go
there. A bit stronger stronger still, it will go
there. What it's doing is trying to go in a straight
line, but being pulled down by gravity. And if you fire it yet stronger still, it
will go on and finally go round the world altogether. And I'm going to show that here, I hope. Um, so you fire the cannon by pulling back
this pea shooter affair and that one went into orbit. You fire it a bit less strong, it splashes
into the sea. If you fire it very strongly, it goes into
outer space. That one reached escape velocity. The principle is the ball is actually falling
all the time, but it's falling around the world, because the world is curving away
from it. And if it's given sufficient horizontal velocity,
then it will go on falling forever, which is what the moon does,
and it's what artificial satellites do. So each chapter in the app has a game of that
sort which illustrates some sort of principle, but the app does have the
complete book in it as well. So if we could go back to the Mac, and I'll
switch off the app, thank you. So the next chapter is "What is the Sun?" And I think there's another simulation here,
oh yes. There we are, we are zooming away from the
sun, and you see how small the sun is compared to the universe. We're going
away, and away, and away. We're seeing lots of other stars, the sun
is now invisible and we are moving away from sun, away from
the sun. And now we are coming to our galaxy,
that's the Milky Way Galaxy. We're zooming away, and away, and away from
the Milky Way Galaxy. Now there's another galaxy, and now all those
things there are now galaxies, comparable to ours, similar to ours. [laughter]
That, that doesn't really belong. That's because there's another chapter which
is on "Are we alone?" And I'll come to that in a moment. The next chapter "What is a rainbow?" Next chapter is "When and how did everything
begin?" Which is a very difficult question, a very
profound question. A
question that we still don't know the answer to, but it's worth talking about because we
are getting a long way towards understanding the answer to it. The next chapter is the chapter on "Are we
alone?" And that the very speculative chapter because
we don't know if we're alone. We don't know if this life elsewhere in the
universe, and one can argue the case either way. Some people think we're literally alone in
the universe, other people think that there's life, that the universe is teeming
with life. And you can argue it both ways
and I do that in the book so it's good to learn, it's good to realize that
we don't know everything in science and we can actually speculate and an informed way
using our knowledge about the various possibilities. Next chapter "What is earthquake?" And you know that's all about plate tectonics,
the movement of the continents. "Why do bad things happen?" Um not much different than why does anything
happen but some people rather superstitiously think
that the world is out to get them and so why do bad things happen. Other people might say 'why do bad things
happen to good people' as though there were some rules that
said bad things should only happen to bad people. And the final chapter is "What is a miracle?"
which is sort of back to magic, but miracles are magic, supernatural magic,
that people believe in, as opposed to supernatural magic
they don't believe in. And there's no reason to believe in any kind
of supernatural magic at all. So I'm going to read the sort of final bit
of the book now: 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 involving magic, or the supernatural,
Which don't explain anything 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 or laptop computer, a mobile telephone or sat-map device. He probably would have called them supernatural,
miraculous, but we don't have to go back that far. If you even go back to
Victorian times, a Victorian detective like Sherlock Holmes would have thought, for example,
if somebody, if a murder had been committed in London,
and the accused could prove he was in New York the same day,
then he couldn't have done the murder. Because in Victorian times it was literally
impossible to be in London and New York on the same day. Now, of course, it's commonplace. The eminent science fiction writer, Arthur
C. Clarke, summed the point up as Clarke's third law. Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic. The more you think about it, the more you
realize the very idea of the supernatural miracle is nonsense. If something happened that appears to be inexplicable
by science, you can safely conclude one of two things. Either it really didn't happen, the observer
was mistaken or was lying or was tricked, or we've exposed a shortcoming in
present day science. If present day science encounters an observation
or experimental result that it cannot explain, then we
should not rest until we've proved our science so that it can provide an explanation. If it requires a radically new kind of
science, a revolutionary science so strange that it, sorry, so strange that old scientists
scarcely recognize it as science at all, that's fine too. It's happened before. But don't ever be lazy enough, defeatists
enough, cowardly enough, to say it must be supernatural because I don't understand
it. Or it must be a miracle. Say instead that 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've found a proper answer to the
mystery, it's perfectly OK to simply 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 book. Everybody likes a good story, and if you read
the book I hope you'll enjoy the myths, with which
I begin most of my chapters, but even more I hope that you will enjoy the science that
comes after the myths. 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. [Applause] >>presenter: You want to answer questions? >>Richard Dawkins: And now I'm very happy
to take questions. There is a microphone there I see is that
meant for-- >>presenter: There is a microphone in the
middle. >>Richard Dawkins: If anyone would like to
ask a question, do come up to the microphone here. >>presenter: Actually can I start with the
first question? >>Richard Dawkins:Yeah, mmm. >>presenter: In your book, you often times
refer to online material, at one point you also ask your readers to Google one of the
phenomenon that you're talking about, [laughter]
and this means people have access to some times random information on the Internet. How do you find the impact of the Internet
for new media on the teaching of science? Is it good or bad? >>Richard Dawkins: Well, I'm delighted that
the word Google has become a verb. And I presume it's gotten its way into the
Oxford Dictionary by now, hasn't it? Do people know? I imagine you know that, um, anybody know
that? I mean it ought to. [audience responds] The criterion for getting
into the Oxford Dictionary is that it has to be used without explanation. So, as it were, I Googled something, I Googled
so and so. And it doesn't count if you say 'footnote,
Google means.' But
provided you can use the word without explanation, without definition, without attribution then
it gets into the dictionary. I'm sure it must have done. The web is a superb resource for factual information
and also superb resource for utter rubbish. [laughter]
And we can to switch off our critical faculties, but I think the overall impression that I
get is overwhelmingly positive. Before the
web came along, if you were having an argument with somebody, so often it might turn on a
factual point and you couldn't actually establish the correct
answer without going into library. Rather absurdly, I remember after dinner
one evening with a group of people, there was a dispute about whether New Mexico has
a coastline and somebody bet somebody else, I don't know, a bottle of wine or something,
that New Mexico has a coastline. You can do that now because everybody
would whip out their IPhones and simply, simply look it up. So disputes can now be resolved very much
more quickly than ever before because you can instantly
Google something and discover the true answer. And if you need to look of three
or four times just to make sure, that's fine, because you may hit on a Creationist web site
or something the first time, and gets a lot of nonsense. [light laughter] But you do have the, the
world is at your fingers tips literally. So I think it's overwhelmingly
positive. And by the way I'd like to put in a good word
for Wikipedia, because that often gets a lot of bad press. Somebody
had said to me before Wikipedia was launched what their plan was, that they're going to
have an encyclopedia that the users could edit and was going to be done from thousands
of users, I'd have said don't be so silly! [laughter]
Couldn't possibly work. And yet, my impression is that it overwhelming
does. Whenever I've looked up something I happen
to know a little bit about, I've been immensely surprised
at how, how accurate it usually is. So I think, um, I think my view of the
world wide web is overwhelmingly positive. >>male #1: Professor Dawkins, thank you very
much for coming and I'm a great admirer of your work and as
yourself a proud atheist. When I was reading The God Delusion, I thought
of course in the end he's professor, his job is to spread knowledge. And I was thinking, how can I when I discuss
with friends or family, how can I justify, to try to
change their minds about religion and about what they believe, if they themselves are
not active in trying to proselytize, or to convert others. Why, what is my justification in trying to
explain to them with, mostly with the help of your
arguments I must admit, that there is no God? >>Richard Dawkins: Well, you question implies
that they be allowed to sort of retain their illusions without disturbing them. You
know why go out of your way to shatter somebody's illusions? Um, if it were just that, then I think I would
say don't do it, because why make somebody less happy, but
you're actually making them more happy because you're showing them
the wonder of truth. I mean, to go through your life laboring under
a Bronze Age delusion when you could be exposing your
mind to the glories of the universe as modern science understands it is a terrible shame. And it's actually positively wicked if you
bring up children, if you indoctrinate children with Bronze Age myths as though they were
true, instead of exposing children to the wonders of the truth. And so I wouldn't have any compunction in
arguing, and what I would suggest that you say to
them is why do you believe what you do? And the answer almost always, if they're religious,
the answer almost always will be because that's what was handed down to me
through my family tradition. Our family has always believed so and so. Our family
is part of the Christian tradition, or the Jewish tradition, or the Muslim tradition
that's why we believe it. What a
terrible reason for believing anything! For a start, your tradition is different from
his tradition and her tradition and they can't all be right. So that would be one point you could make. You should say evidence is the only good reason
to believe anything. Bad reasons for believing are tradition, authority,
I believe it because the priest or the pope or the
imam or the rabbi told me to believe it. That's a terrible reason to believe anything,
too. Or I believe it because of
private revelation. Somebody said I just felt it inside me, I
just feel this inner revelation, that something must be true. That's probably the worst reason of all for
believing anything. The only reason to believe anything is evidence
and nowadays we have enormous amounts of evidence. It's not as though we're living in the Middle
Ages when evidence was a bit, a bit scarce on the ground. Nowadays we have, we're overflowing with evidence
not least the World Wide Web as I'd just been saying. It's such a privilege to be living now when
there is so much evidence and as such fun to understand it. It's such a
glorious experience to understand the answers to questions like how big is the universe? How old is the universe? When does
life start? How did life give rise to us? Why are we here? These are all fascinating questions, exhilarating
questions and it's our privilege living in the twenty-first
century to be able to answer those questions. And is really a disreputable
thing to bring children up with Bronze Age falsehoods when they could be being exposed
to this wonderful truth. >>male #2: Hi Professor Dawkins, I was particularly
interested in the the question aspect of your latest
book. We at Google are running this competition
called the Science Fair. We're encouraging teenagers to come up with
questions and use questions to drive scientific inquiry, which advice to the child or the
teenager who is looking for inspiration for their question? How did they find questions in their world? >>Richard Dawkins: Well, I suppose read up
some science, look at videos, look at some, look at some scientific findings,
And then questions will automatically occur to you. There are lots of questions, um, I have lots
of questions that I would like answered. And I, whenever I meet a physicist or a chemist
or something, I usually do answer them. So there's a very,
very rich field of questions. Many of which have answers, some of which
we don't, that are no answers. And that's
intriguing to because it may be that your competition will expose some questions which,
as of yet, do not have an answer. And that might actually stimulate scientists
to examine what possible answers there might be. [clears throat]
>>male #2: But sparking curiosity where curiosity doesn't already exist in a child? How do we go about doing
that? >>Richard Dawkins: Show them films by David
Attenborough. [laughter]
I mean, I honestly think that's not the problem. I be surprised if that was a problem. If that really is a problem, we're
doing something wrong. Because, because, give them my book. [clears throat]
[laughter] >>male #2: Thank you. >>Richard Dawkins: Anymore questions? >>male #3:Thank you again, Professor Dawkins. A question about the actual writing of the
book. How did you
find the process of writing a book targeted, as you say, at the twelve year olds versus
pretty much the rest your previous writings which have been pretty much adult
focused? >>Richard Dawkins: Right. Pretty much the same, actually. The only thing that I found was that I some,
I sort of had to modify my vocabulary a bit. I had to, um, uh, just use, I suppose, a bit
of a more restricted vocabulary. Um, I've always liked the idea of extending
both my, and my readers vocabulary. If I've always felt that the dictionary is
your friend and it shouldn't be a bad thing if, if you have to, if you're driven to the
dictionary to look up a word, but there are limits to that and so a child should
not be expected to go to the dictionary too often. Um, and but it is a
problem, I mean, there are people in the audience today who, who are obviously too young and,
um, I sort of didn't, maybe another time might try to write a book for
very young children. Um, twelve is really not that different than
adults in comprehension. >>male #3: Did you find it easier or harder
in general? >>Richard Dawkins: I found it a little bit
harder. Um,yes, and I don't know how well I succeeded. I did try it out on
various young people and the trouble is I got quite a variety of answers. Some of them said this is too easy,
but perhaps they were rather unusually bright. And others didn't. There were some rather curious things. One time, I needed to refer to a soccer ball,
I needed to, I was using the soccer ball as an analogy for the sun
and then if you, the idea was to get a scale of the universe. You get a football, and you put it in the
middle of a field, and then you walk, I forget how many, twenty
paces, and then you put down, a, uh, I think it's a peppercorn,
for earth, and so that gives you an idea of the scale. Peppercorn versus football and twenty paces
away and then to the same scale, the moon I think is about an inch away,
from the peppercorn, and it is a pinhead. And then the nearest other star,
which is still pretty near, Proxima Centauri, is two thousand miles away. Um, okay, so in order to do that analogy,
I referred to a soccer ball, and I got complaints,
"What's soccer?" [laughter]
Um, I had to say soccer because in America, if you say football it means something like
a rugby ball. Um, so I got rather
silly complaints like that but um[chuckles] Next question if there is one. [laughter] >>female #1: Hi, I just wondered your opinion
about school science and and teaching falsehoods, I wondered
how you think I can, I mean a particular example would be the teaching of shells, were you
teach a model that explains the evidence that child is going to encounter
but we know it's false, it's an oversimplification that will help a child to make
predictions >>Richard Dawkins: Did you say shells? >>Unknown female speaker 1: Yeah. You know you teach shells and then you teach
more about it as you go along. How do you
feel about that? >>Richard Dawkins: You're a teacher? >>female #1: I have been, yes. >>Richard Dawkins: Yes. And what do you teach about shells? >>female #1: I've always said this be an oversimplification
of what we currently know to be true that will
help you at this stage, but next year we'll give you a model which will help you make
better predictions. But some teachers
just said, this is how it is. They are >>Richard Dawkins: By shells you mean snail
shells? >>female #1: [giggles] No. You know, groups of orbitals around a shell,
Yeah. >>Richard Dawkins: Oh, I got it. Okay sorry. >>female #1:I just hated having to teach it
when next year you have to tell them to forget, but I wondered
what your opinion, do you think it's okay to teach an oversimplication >>Richard Dawkins: yes , got it. >>female #1: to children with that limited
understanding >>Richard Dawkins: I was confused by your
use of the word shells. I'm sorry. Because actually, um, snail shells are very
interesting as well. It is a very useful lesson about the way science
proceeds, because science does proceed by successive
approximations. And it is in a sense, in a real sense, true
that earlier models need to be superseded and in some sense are
false. The atomic theory model of, say of, Niels
Bohr, which is sort of a solar system model with a nucleus and the electrons as particles
whizzing around the outside. That works up to a point. But is then superseded and so the
lesson that what you learned in last year's class was actually getting on for wrong, that
is a valuable lesson in itself about the way science proceeds. So I wouldn't shrink from that. If >>female #1: As long as it's pointed out. >>Richard Dawkins: Yes, as long as it's pointed
out, yeah. >>female #2: Hello, my question is also related
to education. I worked with a science teacher who was also
a Creationist, which I found to be a bit of
a contradiction. I just wondered what you think of teaching
of evolution in schools currently, because I know there's
been quite a lot of stuff you've been working on recently. >>Richard Dawkins:Yes. Was your Creationist colleague what you might
call a Young Earth Creationist who believed the world is
only 6000 years old? >>female #2: I don't know the details, sorry. [giggles] >>Richard Dawkins: That's an important question
to ask actually. Because that really sorts them out, just to
say a Creationist, it could mean, was it a he or
she? >>female #2: He. >>Richard Dawkins: He. Could mean that he believes that pretty much
the whole scientific story is true, including the age of the universe, the age
of the earth, but that God just started it off. Which is a very different matter
from those Young Earth Creationists who think that the book of Genesis is literally true,
and on the first day God created this, and on the second day God created that,
and the whole process only took six days, and it all happened six thousand
years ago. Um, if the teacher was teaching them that,
then in my opinion, he should be fired instantly. >>female #2: He wasn't teaching that, but
that was his belief. So it was a contradiction in terms
of the way that he taught evolution in schools, even though he didn't actually believe that
it occurred. >>Richard Dawkins: He taught, he taught what
he didn't believe >>Unknown female speaker 2: Yeah. >>Richard Dawkins: Yes. >>female #2 : He obviously would have had
a bias when he was teaching. >>Richard Dawkins: Yes. Um, I've actually got into a bit of an argument
about this, because in America, it's very--.The idea that your beliefs are private is sacred,
it's built into the American Constitution, and rightly so. Which means that
I was trying to get my American colleagues to accept that if a teacher privately believes
something which is different than what he publicly teaches, there there at least could
be an extreme example where you would not wish to employ him as a teacher. So I tried to think of the most extreme example
I could, and the example I thought of was a doctor teaching medical students
who doesn't believe in the sex theory of reproduction but believes in the stork theory of reproduction. And I said, surely, even you
Americans will accept, such a doctor should not be employed teaching medical students. I was kicked all around the room because his
private beliefs are not important so long as what he teaches is the truth. I'm sorry I shouldn't have said that, the
scientific orthodoxy which is that babies come because of sex. And that was where I parted company from my
American colleagues because it seemed to me that somebody who
is capable of holding two such contradictory beliefs in his head is not somebody I would
wish to have teaching any child of mine. I then tried to push an even more extreme
example, which is a teacher of geography who believes of the earth is flat but nevertheless
teaches that the earth is round. Once again, a very substantial number of
people who wrote in to this American web site were scandalized that I thought this teacher
of geography should be sacked. I
mean, I'm left bewildered by this because it seems to me that somehow he has damned
himself as a teacher by this contradiction. Another example, which is actually a real
one, not a hypothetical one, the professor of astronomy at Oxford told me of
a colleague of his who is a professional astronomer and writes learned papers in astronomical
journals and mathematical papers had tacitly assume that the universe
is 13.7 billion years old. He writes these papers and gets them published,
privately believes universe is only six thousand years old and I can't get my head of around
this, absolutely flat contradiction. I don't see how you can say this person is
a proper astronomer if he holds these contradictions in his head. Um, that's all I've got to say. I'm just baffled. >>female #2: I just got to say I'm a geography
teacher and that if I taught the world was flat, I would've
been sacked by Ofsted so >>Richard Dawkins: No. well. That’s right, but the hypothetical case
is that you teach that the world is round, but
privately believe it's flat. >>female #2: Okay. Thank you. >>male #4: Hi, my name is Mehdi. I just have a quick question considering that
the extremely small is more or less equal to the extremely big. Do you consider the solar system as just a
molecule? >>Richard Dawkins: No, I am not sure it's
true that the extremely small, in a way that came up earlier, because the Bohr model
of the atom was indeed sort of inspired by the solar system. But it's actually rather wrong, and so one
can make a, maybe that's what you're doing, make a kind of science
fiction fantasy that actually our solar system is just an atom in some
gigantic universe. It's a nice science fiction idea, but I don't
think it's very realistic. >>male #5: Hi, I like the way you presented
evolution by the pictures and stuff. Obviously, you had to stop at
some point, um and maybe the more inquisitive children here would still be wondering if
they had heard the answer or not, Who is the first man? So my question is, in the book do you attempt
to tackle and explain abiogenesis and like the chemical
origins of life >>Richard Dawkins: Oh oh okay, so you're going
back much much further than just the first person. >>male #5: Yes. >>Richard Dawkins: Yes, yes of course. It is true that the whole process of evolution
couldn't get started until a rather singular chemical event happened, which was
the origin of, let's call it the first gene. It wouldn't have been DNA, but it would have
been some kind of molecule which had the property
of self-replication. The property of making copies of itself. Once you've got
that, and the copies have to be very accurate. Once you've got that, you're well on your
way to evolution and then the rest of evolution will follow. But we do have to have that first step, which
is the origin of the first cell replicating molecule. That would have been a phenomenon of Chemistry
which would have been a chance, a stroke of luck, which had to come
about probably in the primeval sea, and it only had to happen once so that really could
have been a massive stroke of luck. And we don't know whether it was a massive
stroke of luck. So far, no chemist as far as I know, has come
up with a plausible theory for exactly what happened. It is actually a rather interesting thought,
that if you are one of those people who believes we are alone in the universe, if
you're one of those people that thinks that this is the only life in the entire
universe, and there are people who think that, than that automatically commits you to a very
strange view. Since there are
probably at least ten to the twenty-two planets in the universe, that's a one with twenty-two
naughts after it, then in order for you to believe that we are alone in the universe,
than you would have to believe that the origin of life, on our planet, is a
staggeringly rare improbable event. Because it only happened in one of the ten
to the twenty-two opportunities for it to happen. Well, when you put it like that than you realize
that, um, it's actually very, very improbable that we are the only
planet in the universe that has life, but we could be. We could be because if the origin of life
really was that improbable, that there's only one planet in the ten to
the twenty-two that has life than we would have to be that planet. Because here
we are talking about it. And so it's actually not impossible. I don't believe it, I think that the origin
of life was a much more probable event than that. Which, the flip side of that automatically
means that I have to believe that there's lots of life all around the universe. The universe is teeming with life but because
universe is so big even if there are a billion examples of life dotted around the
universe, they will still be so spread out, so far apart from one another that
none of them will ever meet any of the others. Which is rather sad, a sort of celestial Polynesia
without the canoes to, um, to bridge the, to bridge the gaps.
[laughter] But maybe chemists will soon come up with
with the theory, of the theory of the origin of life so plausible that everyone will
say yes of course that's the way it had to happen. And once we've done that then, then we can
be pretty sure there's lots and lots of life all around the universe. >>male #5: Thanks. >>presenter: These will be our last three
questions for tonight. >>Richard Dawkins: All right. >>male #6: Hi there. You gave a little tidbit of wisdom around
how you should generate your beliefs, how you
shouldn't generate them, from number five, people in authority. And I was interested in understanding from
you how you generated your very strong beliefs when you
were young and how you actually grew up to be in a position where you are now,
where you have very strong beliefs based on facts and are vocal with that. But you didn't always have that,
and so taking yourself to the target age of your book, twelve, or to age of children here
how you actually as you grew up as a child developed these beliefs and everything >>Richard Dawkins: Yes. I, I prefer not to talk about very strong
beliefs because it seems to me nobody's beliefs should be
so strong they're not open to change if new evidence comes in. And so, um, I think I prefer to say that if
the evidence for something is very strong then there comes
a point when you might use the word belief. But you ask about my own childhood, and I
was brought up in, well, I was sent Anglican schools, so I was brought up to believe, which
I did, Bronze Age myths and shed them when I became old enough to understand
the true scientific explanation for our own existence because I was very
impressed by the complexity and elegance of living things. And very impressed by the argument that there
must be a designer is it looks as though it's got a designer. It was only when I learned the Darwinian explanation
which we now know to be true, at least broadly true, that I was able
to shed that belief. Other people, they base their religious belief
on something else and so they will shed it for a different
reason. But my case it really was discovering Darwin. >>male #6: Were you a minority amongst your
peers at that time and age? >>Richard Dawkins: No, I wouldn't say so,
no. >>male #6: Thanks. >>male #7: Excellent, the guy in front of
me always takes the question I was going to ask. [laughter]
Anyway, firstly I'd like to say thank you for that really excellent excellent explanation
one hundred eighty-fifth million greats grandfather, my son actually turned to me
and said there really is a family resemblance. [laughter]
And so thank you for that. I guess my question would be because there's
a lot of children in the audience, which I count
myself amongst, what, apart from your own book, what else would you be recommending
for children, you know, eight, ten, twelve to be reading, or what experiences
do you suggest they have to drive that inspiration about science? >>Richard Dawkins: Gosh, I'm not the best
person to ask. I haven't actually looked into that question
very much and maybe there are others here who could make suggestions. I bet there are some very good books,and probably
films, probably things on YouTube. There's some very inspiring things on YouTube
actually. I've already mentioned David Attenborough's
films. I think they're
very, very inspiring. Carl Sagan's Cosmos. It's a bit old now but it's available on DVD
and is superb. There are some good
things on the Discovery channel. I think we live in an extraordinarily rich
time for resources to explain the wonders of
science. >>male #7: Do you think technology's going
to play an increasing part in that, you know a ten year old, and
you showed your Apple hopefully Galaxy Tab as opposed to an IPad.
[laughter] Do you think technology will increasing play
a part in that? >>Richard Dawkins: Yes, I do. And in a way today's children are kind of
spoiled, I mean it's, if you can imagine going back to my childhood when I mean the sort
of thing you can see on everybody's laptop computer would have just dazzled the
socks off of me as a child. And I mean I was desperately covetous of a
little toy where you could project little film strips
onto the wall. And I desperately wanted one of these things. The idea of having my own little projector
and could project onto the wall. And I tried to even make my own but getting
a roll of transparent, semitransparent loo paper and drawing on
each sheet and then shining a light through and of course, it didn't work. And I prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed
to be given one of these little projectors for
Christmas and lo and behold I was. [laughter] And, um, but I mean that was the
height of ambition of a child in, when I was a child. And of course nowadays such a projector are
would would be big deal you know just think which you can do on your own laptop. And so, yes, I think that the Internet is
a magnificent resource and children should appreciate what wonderful opportunities
they have, and no doubt it's going to get better if Moore's law persists as
that as it looks like it will for a while. >>male #7: Great to know. I would just like to say one final comment
about people you discussed in terms of teaching something they don't necessarily
believe in, and our world we call those salesmen. [laughter] >>male #8: And my question is, did you consider
a psychology, or scientific psychology approach to the
question why does religion exist? And because >>Richard Dawkins: Yes. >>male #8: I live in Ireland my kids go to
a state school which is, of course, a Catholic school, >>Richard Dawkins: Yes.
and I think they must look around them and think if one nearly everybody else is Catholic,
everybody else believes, why? Why do people believe? And when you think of it and then they look
at it, I've introduced them to lots of different religions, I took them
to Greece two years ago. I think that's an interesting question, why,
why does religion exist? >>Richard Dawkins: Yes. Will you pose it as a psychological question,
and I think as a question in psychology, you almost
answered it because if children are sent to a school, in the case of Ireland it would
be a Catholic school as you say, where they're indoctrinated, and everyone around
them is indoctrinated in the same way, then requires a great deal of independence
of mind to break away from that. Fortunately, a large number of people actually
do but too many of them unfortunately don't and so childhood indoctrination of course
persists to the next generation and the next and the next because those people who
don't break away end up teaching in Irish Catholic schools because obviously the ones
who do break away wouldn't be employed in teaching so it does persists from generation
to generation to generation. And so that's the psychological answer. >>male #8: But there's hooks that religion
must fit into in our brains >>Richard Dawkins:There are hooks and I would
agree with you and and a one of those hooks is that people tend to want to go
on believing what feels good. And so, for example, if you want to survive
your own death and religion tells you you will
survive your own death, than you find that an agreeable thought. I never quite got why it was that agreeable
when that also threaten you with going to burn forever in
hell. If you commit some footling list on offense,
I say footling because in a way, um, there's a sort of law
that says if you're trying to persuade people of something by threat then the more
implausible threat is. The more horrible and nasty it has to be to
counteract its intrinsic implausibility. So if the threat is if you do something wrong
then if you'll be given some punishment like write out hundred lines or so,
or something, if the threat is very real because you know is highly plausible that you will
have to write a hundred lines. In my youth, it would have been being beaten. Also that was plausible because it really
did happen, but because the threat of hell is so ludicrously implausible, it has
to be made very, very nasty indeed. [chuckles] So that you take it seriously because
it just might be true and if it is true you're going
to burn in a lake of fire forever, and ever, and ever, and ever. Every time a
layer of skin is burned off, a new layer grows that can be burned off you again. I mean, they pile it on, they pile on the
agony because it's so intrinsically implausible. Now that's another of the psychological hooks. Ultimately, as a Darwinian, I would need to
explain where those psychological hooks come from, from the evolutionary point of view,
and I think we can do that too, but I think that perhaps is another story which perhaps
we've have gone on long enough >>male #8: Next book.. >>Richard Dawkins: Yes. >>presenter: Professor Dawkins, thank you
for joining us today and providing us with such a powerful book to teach science to our
young ones. And thank you for coming today and joining
us, and all of the Googlers joining us live through the web stream around Europe, thanks
for dialing in. Don't worry if you didn't get a chance to
ask a question to Professor Dawkins because after the signing session, he will uh,he told
me he would like to stay around and chat to us for a bit more while. Let's hear it one more time for Professor
Richard Dawkins. [Applause]
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