Without further ado, here's Professor Richard
Dawkins and Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Well, Neil, we're here to talk about the poetry
of science. I would say that science is the poetry of
reality, and one of the things that I feel a bit humble in your presence, biology being
a kind of junior science to physics, I suppose we both have something to learn from each
other; but I can't help feeling I've got rather more to learn from you than you've got to
learn from me. Maybe we're both a bit naïve about each other's
subject, but I think I'm a bit more naïve about yours because there's more to be naïve
about. I forget who it was that coined the phrase
“physics envy,” and I think this shows itself in lots of fields, perhaps less so
in biology than others, so what we're going to try to do is to have a conversation between
a biologist, an evolutionary biologist and an astrophysicist, a kind of mutual tutorial
without a chairman to get in the way. I thought we might begin by noting that what
we can see with our sense organs is an extremely narrow band of what there is to see, and this
is particularly so with the visual sense. We can see a tiny, narrow band of the electromagnetic
spectrum, the rainbow; but the rainbow's width is tiny compared to the vast expanse of the
electromagnetic spectrum. I see that as a kind of symbol for how limited
our understanding of the universe is, as well, because after all, we are evolved beings who
evolved to understand the interactions between medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds. And this ill equipped our brains to understand
the very small quantum theory and the very large, which I supposed is covered by relativity. So, I find myself, as a mere biologist, baffled
by some of the things that physicists talk about, and jut to throw out one example, in
the expanding universe, we are told (and I have to believe it) that everywhere is as
it were the same as everywhere else. There's no one place which is the edge of
the universe. How can that be? Well, Richard, first of all, you're told it
so you have to believe it. I will never require you to believe anything. Good for you. It will only ever be about how compelling
is the evidence to you, but you started with our sensory organs and landed in the expanding
universe. Can I take us back to the organs and then,
perhaps, land in the universe? Yes. The urge to think of our senses as being powerful
or good is strong because, first, that's all we have; second, we like having nice thoughts
about ourselves, rather than miserable, depressing thoughts, so we're prone to talk around celebrating,
for example the power of sight or of taste or of smell, when of course, when you really
smell something, you bring a dog, and they smell...their nose smells much better than
your nose smells. I was going to say the dog smells better than
you, but that would insult you. So, we already know that our sense are feeble,
and we reach to other creatures in the animal kingdom, cite them as having better examples
of our sight, of our taste, of our smell; but little did people know much before a century
and a half ago that our sense of vision is limited only, as Richard said, to the colors
of the rainbow, and it's quite extraordinary to realize that, for example, beyond red,
there's something called infrared; and beyond infrared, there are microwaves. And beyond microwaves, there are radio waves. Go the other direction, you go beyond violet,
ultraviolet. Beyond that, x-rays and gamma rays. Energy goes up as you approach gamma rays,
with dramatic consequences if you have gamma-ray exposure, by the way. Of course, we all know you turn big, green,
and ugly as The Hulk had experienced. But the point is the visible light part of
that spectrum is a tiny slice, and the universe doesn't only communicate with us through that
slice, as we had taken for granted for so long. Most of the history of the telescope, which
is itself an extension of our eyes, extended the power of our eyes but not the range of
our eyes. It wasn't until we first understood that maybe
we're missing something in the 19th century, the 20th century came decade by decade, new
telescopes in each newly-discovered band of light. Only then did we learn about black holes in
the universe or remarkable violent forces operating in the centers of galaxies, discovered
by radio telescopes. So, yeah, we're practically blind out there,
and it's humbling, by the way, but that's the whole point of the methods and tools of
science, to not only extend your senses in the domain in which you understand, but to
take them to places they've never been before. On top of that, we have methods and tools
that detect things that are not even extensions of your senses. You have no clue what the magnetic field is
around your body right now. You have no clue whether or not you're being
bathed in ionizing radiation right now. You'll eventually figure that out, as limbs
start falling off; but while it's happening, you actually don't know. There are other things that are more subtle
like polarization of light. So when I think of the scientist's tool kit,
especially the astrophysicist's tool kit, it's all about how many different senses can
you bring to bear, technological senses can you bring to bear on decoding the universe. One of the things we have discovered, now
getting to your horizon question, we look around the universe, and it looks like we're
in the center. What an ego-supporting concept that is! You can either go around continuing to think
that, feeling good about yourself, or study the problem and learn that, in an expanding
universe, where the speed of light is finite at 186,000 miles per second...forgive me using
miles per second... I'd prefer miles. You do. You got that on tape? An Oxford professor, I prefer... No, it's true. Nobody talks about kilometers in Britain. Oh, good. All right. We share not only most of our language, we
share miles still. And inchworms. What do they call them? They're not centimeter worms, right? They're inchworms. We don't have that sort of stuff in Britain. That's Europe. Of course, Britain is not Europe, as we are
constantly reminded. That's right, here we have the English breakfast
and the Continental breakfast. They're very different breakfasts that you
can order here. So, this horizon problem is actually quite
simple; and rather than explain the full up nature of it, let me just give a simple example
that is entirely analogous. When you're a ship at sea, and you look out,
your horizon in every direction is the same distance from you. It depends on your height above the sea level. That's why ship decks are high. They see farther beyond the curvature of the
earth than you do just standing on the main deck. So, your horizon is a perfect circle centered
on you. You can conclude that is the extent of the
entire earth, or you can imagine, suppose I'm in another spot. Well, that horizon is still true for whoever
happens to be in the middle of it, but now, you've moved to a new place, and you will
see a horizon corresponding with that spot. So, everybody has a horizon at sea; yet no
one at any time is thinking that that's the full extent of the ocean or the full extent
of the earth. We have a horizon in the universe, so does
the Andromeda Galaxy, the galaxies with names that look like phone numbers. If you travel to those galaxies, they will
see the edge of the universe now in three dimensions in every direction at the same
distance from them, just as we see for ourselves. That does it for me, provided that the horizon
is that which we are capable of seeing. I could follow that if you said that, for
any part of the universe, the horizon is the bit before the expending universe has disappeared
over the horizon. Yes. It's just no longer visible, but it's still
there, even though we can't detect it. That's true of the ocean when you're at sea. Yeah, but...anybody on my side here? You want it to be a harder problem than it
is. I'm just simply saying... So, here you go. Here you go. The radius to our horizon is about 14 billion
light years. Got it. Okay? If we sat here or returned to this spot a
billion years from now, that horizon will be 15 billion light years away. It's actually an expanding horizon because
the light from 15 billion years, light years away, will have had time to reach us. Right now, it's still en route. I have no problem with that, but beyond the
14 billion year... The problem is the universe wasn't born yet. Yes, okay. That's the problem. I know. Okay? So, you can't see the universe before it existed. So why doesn't somebody... ...invent the kind of telescope that can? No, no, no. Okay, I'm getting out of my depth here. Let's get back to... Just to clarify. It takes light time to reach us, and the universe
hasn't been here forever. You combine those two facts, you get an edge
of the universe. And so, the universe has been here for 14
billion years. The farthest thing that could send us any
information is 14 billion light years away. I get that, but what about the guys who are
on the edge of what we can see? How can they see beyond the other side? Oh, because...here's an interesting point. They don't know whether or not the entire
universe is infinite. The universe could be twice our horizon or
infinitely larger than our horizon. Same with the ocean. You don't know how much bigger the ocean is
than your horizon is. You can keep sort of wandering around. Maybe you'll hit land as we've done, of course. So, now you go there. If the universe is really, really big, that
will be the center of their own horizon. And whatever is the age of the universe is,
for them at that time, that will be the radius to their horizon. Yeah, okay. I just want to make a remark. You drew the analogy of the sense of smell,
and what a poor sense of smell we have. It's a fascinating fact that, although dogs,
for example have a much better sense of smell than we have, as you mentioned... That's why I say sense of smell. That's what I should say, not that dogs smell
better, but they have a better sense of smell. Thank you for that. But we have the genes that would have once
enabled our ancestors to have as good a sense of smell as dogs, but the genes have mostly
been turned off; so we have vestiges. We have historical relics of those genes. It's like your hard disk on your computer
that's cluttered up with remains of old chapters you've written here and there and things that
have now been cut off. Those genes have been turned off, but they're
still there. Isn't that the premise of X-Men? I don't know. They're human, but they have a genetically
different...different genes are turned on and off within them, giving them special powers. So, are you suggesting the day might arise,
we go inside the human genome and flick the dipswitches on and off, and we come out as
superheroes? Put it this way. It's not as unlikely as it might have appeared
before we realized that we do have those genes still. You don't have to import the genes from dogs,
although the technology of this coming century may enable that to happen. I'd still rather it be the dog that sniffs
the bomb than me. But we would probably have robots to do the
sniffing. What about this point about the difficulty
of...maybe I chose too easy an example. The brain, how is it that the human brain,
which evolved to do really rather mundane things... ...to not get eaten by lions. To not get eaten by lions in the Pleistocene
of Africa because, as you'll learn this evening, we are all Africans. We all come from Africa, and our brains were
shaped by natural selection on the African plains to do things that involve objects like
this. Medium-sized objects. Macro-sized objects. Macro-sized objects that don't move anywhere
near the speed of light. It's a tremendous tribute to our species that
we are capable...at least some of us are capable...of understanding things that don't belong on
that ordinary macroscopic, slow-moving scale. Yeah, and so therein is the value to us, not
only of the methods and tools of science, but also of the language of the universe that
we call mathematics. Remarkable thing, a point first advanced by
Eugene Wigner that math has an unreasonable utility in the universe since we just invented
it out of our heads. You don't discover math under a rock, as you
might find grubs. You invent it out of whole cloth, yet is empowers
us to provide accurate the predictive descriptions and understandings of the universe. So, what comes of this is you learn to abandon
your senses. That's a like from the Broadway musical Phantom
of the Opera...abandon your...never mind, sorry. I want to write Broadway lyrics one day in
another life. You train yourself to abandon your senses
because you recognize how they can fool you into thinking one thing is true that is not. You abandon them. You use your tools that do the measuring to
say, okay, that's the reality. Then you make a mathematical model of that
that you can manipulate logically...because math is all about the logical extension of
one point to another...and then you can make new discoveries about the world that, frankly,
you'll just have to get used to you. No longer do you have the right...right is
not the right work, but no longer are you justified saying that idea in science is not
true because it doesn't make sense. Nobody cares about your senses. Your senses came out...forget the Serengeti,
just growing up. As a kid, something's in your hand, you let
go of it, it falls. You tip a glass, water spills. You are assembling a rule book for how nature
works in the macroscopic world. The microscope takes you smaller than that;
the telescope takes you bigger; and the other laws of physics manifest themselves in those
regimes that you have no life experience reckoning. It's math that allows you to take these incremental
steps beyond the capacity of your senses and perhaps even the capacity of your mind. Yes, it's the mind that's taking the steps,
but your mind was not deducing that by just looking at the world with your senses. It was helped out. It was aided by these tools that, yes, we
invented. And at some point when you get so used to
doing the mathematics, it becomes kind of intuitive in rather the way that I'm told
that pilots get used to flying a plane, and they start to feel the wings of the plane
as being almost part of their own bodies. They develop... Before or after the drinks before they took
off? Is this a common sensory perception of pilots. Yeah, I think it is. It's a common thing that I think that, when
people get skilled at using micromanipulators where they're using their hands, and what
actually going on is tiny little miniscule movement going on under a microscope... ...so it becomes their hands. It becomes their hands. The plane becomes the pilot, or the pilot
becomes... Just as you said, the telescope is an extension
of the eyes. My advisor in graduate school...one of my
advisors, I spoke to him one morning. He was doing research on star clusters that
have these huge orbits around the center of the galaxy. He said he had a dream the night before where
he was one of these clusters, and he was orbiting the center of the galaxy. I thought that was so cool. Yes, yes. If you start becoming in your cosmic dream...I
want to have those dreams because then, you think creatively about what remains to be
discovered. Absolutely. I sometimes wonder about whether surgeons,
maybe even surgeons of the present who are using micromanipulators inside a body, something
like when they stick that thing up you, and it goes... They stick a lot of things up you, the last
I've heard. Okay, and already you have surgeons driving
an endoscope inside and turning left to get round the intestine, turning right. I imagine the time will come when a surgeon
will have virtual reality goggles on, and the surgeon will actually feel herself to
be inside the body of the patient and will turn left and literally walk across the room,
and that will be translated into the micromanipulators, the endoscope, moving. This sounds really cool. I like this idea. And you know what you'd have to do? You would have to alter the dominant laws
of physics in that regime because, if you're small enough a la Fantastic Voyage, the 1960's
film, when you're that small, capillary action and surface tension and all manners of other
forces take over and that then becomes your new reality, your new sensory standards. That's right. You would have to become sensitive to surface
tension. D'Arcy Thompson made the point, I think in
1919, that to the world of an insect, gravity is negligible. A completely...it's who cares? What matters is surface tension, and you'd
have to be...I never thought of that, but what I'd do... That's because you didn't see the move Bug's
Life, okay? Okay. In Bug's Life, they serve up a cocktail to
an insect that goes up to a bar, and all the bartender does is pour out water from a spigot
and hand him the ball of water, like that, and the surface...this was brilliant of the
cartoonist, of the illustrator, and then, he sticks a straw into the sphere and sucks
it out. No receptacle needed. You got to get out more. Well, I imagine my surgeon of the future being
armed with a virtual saw, one of those...what are those things you cut trees down with...band
saws, and what's really going on is a tiny little micro scalpel inside, but the surgeon
is wielding an axe, and it's all done by virtual entity. I've got a question back to you. I lose sleep over this, and I've always wanted
to be in the company of a leading biologist to get insight into this. As an astrophysicist, we've seen throughout
time the hubris that comes with any discovery that gets made, or the hubris that prevents
the acceptance of a discovery that might demote your sense of self from whatever you previously
imagined it to be. Among them is where is earth? Is it the center of all things? No. It's not even a significant planet in orbit
around an ordinary star in the corner of an ordinary galaxy, one of a hundred billion
galaxies in the universe. And so, here we are saying let's search life
in the universe, intelligent life like us. Well, who are we to say that we're intelligent? I pose that not as a joke questions, but as
a very serious question. We define ourselves to be intelligent in ways
that no other creature can rival. Okay, now, what do we credit that intelligence
to? So, you look at the genome, and let's take
the chimp. I guess that's a really close relative of
ours, and we have...what is it? High 90's percent identical, indistinguishable
DNA, and the chimp does not build the Hubble telescope, and the chimp does not compose
symphonies. So, we must then declare that everything we
say about us that is intelligent is found in that one-and-a-half percent difference
in DNA. First, is that a fair statement to make? Yes. Okay. Let me invert that question. If the genetic difference between humans and
chimps is that small, maybe the difference in our intelligence is also that small. Maybe the difference between stacking boxes
and reaching a banana, putting up an umbrella when it rains, whatever are these rudimentary
things a chimp does that the primatologists roll them forward and boast about, which of
course, our toddlers can do, maybe the difference between that and the Hubble telescope is as
small as that difference in DNA. I pose the question: suppose there was another
life form on earth or elsewhere that, in that same sort of vector, that one-and-a-half percent
difference we are to chimps, suppose they were one-and-a-half percent different from
us? Then would then roll the smartest of us in
front of their hematologists and say, Hawking, there's Hawking. Oh, this one is slightly smarter than the
rest of them because he can do astrophysics calculations in his head. Like little Timmy over here. So, I wonder if we're just blithering idiots
in the presence of even a trivially smarter species than us. Therefore, who are we to even assert that,
number one, we are intelligent, and we're looking for others at least as intelligent
as us out there to talk to. By the way, is there any other species on
earth that we can talk to? Can we have a conversation with a chimp? That has identical DNA, and I don't think
we can actually say, hey, what movie do you want to see tonight? You don't have that conversation with a chimp. Yet somehow, we believe, we want to believe
that an alien on another planet that's not even based on DNA and, even if it is, it's
not nothing like us, that we could communicate with it. I'm screaming at you. I'm sorry. So there! Are we as stupid as I'm saying? Well, I'm all for deflating hubris; but it's
also true, of course, that our brains are anatomically very, very much bigger than chimps,
and so that also must be contained in some sense in that tiny little percentage of DNA. I think the way to sort of look at the DNA
problem is to say that the sort of DNA that has been sequenced, and the sort of thing
on which we base that calculation of the 98 percent...again, look at a computer, and you
will find that most of the programs that are written at the machine code level are calling
out the same set of subroutines. There's a subroutine for pulling down menu
bars and a subroutine for moving windows and so on. That's what we're looking at in this 98 percent. What we're not looking at is the set of sort
of high-level instructions that say call this subroutine now, now call this one, now call
this one, now call that one. It's not just humans and chimpanzees; all
mammals have pretty much the same repertoire of genetic subroutines. The difference between a man and a mouse,
like the difference the difference between a man and a chimpanzee is the order in which
they're called, the sequence in which they're called during embryology which causes the
really quite substantial anatomical differences between a human and a mouse and the quite
big differences in brain size. If we assume we're not some measure of things,
then as I said earlier, that tells me that the day might come where we could go in, understand
which sequences are called in what way, and invent whole new sequences never before dreamt
of by biology? Yep, absolutely. Empowering us in ways never before... It's very, very difficult. It's much more difficult than it sounds; but
still, it's in principle possible. But the other point about intelligent life
in the universe, never mind how we define intelligence. We're only going to encounter them if they
are intelligent enough either to come here, which is very difficult indeed, or to send
radio transmissions to us, which is a lot easier but still requires...let's just define
it as the quality that you need in order send information across the universe. Now, you don't have to call that intelligence,
but whatever it is, that's what it needs in order to get here, in order for us to apprehend
it. And I wonder, you know, surely you've walked
past a worm that had just crawled out of the earth; and when you did so, you weren't saying
to yourself, gee, I wonder what that worm is thinking because you just simply didn't
care. You're so far beyond the...I don't want to
put words in your mouth, but I'm imagining you simply really don't care what the worm
is thinking; and conversely, the worm has no clue that you consider yourself intelligent. You're just this thing that went by. So, can you imagine a species that has such
high intelligence that the prospect of communicating with us is simply of no interest to them? Yeah, I can. Yeah. And they go by, and their intelligence is
on such a level that we can't even recognize it as intelligence. Yes. Moreover, I think it would more or less have
to be that much ahead of us if we were ever to meet them because we're never going to
get there. Yeah, we sure as hell ain't getting there. See the massive budget lately? If not... So, anything that gets here has got to have
a very, very highly-developed technology, far more than we've... That brings us to Stephen Hawking's concern
about any civilization sufficiently advanced to visit us, what does that say about the
consequence of that encounter? And he's worried, of course, because he's
taking his cue from the history of humans. When one has a more advanced technology than
the other, and they visit, it almost is always bad for those with the lesser technology. South America, one of the more obvious examples,
in their first encounter with the Spaniards...so, I don't know if I want to be the first one
to shake hands...shake whatever appendage...whatever they're sticking forward, I don't know... I want to do it, but I still have my concerns. What do you think are the odds that there
is life elsewhere in the universe? They must be high, and I'll tell you why. People say, well, have you found life yet? No. Well. That's like going to the ocean...this has
been said before...taking a cup of water, scooping it up, and saying there are no whales
in the ocean. You know? Here's my data. You know? You need a slightly bigger sample. If you look at, for example, what we call
the radio bubble. This is the sphere around earth, centered
on earth, which is the farthest our radio signals have reached in the galaxy. They're about 70 light years away. We've been transmitting radio signals, inadvertently
leaking into space, for about 70 years. Seventy light year radius sphere. Well, how big is the galaxy? Well, shrink that sphere down to maybe the
size of a BB, and then, the galaxy, on that scale, would be the size of this stage. That's how far our radio signals have traveled,
and those aren't even the ones we sent on purpose. The ones we sent on purpose have traveled
much less. So no, we haven't actually reached as far
into the galaxy as we'd like before we would say definitively that there's no one intelligent
living today. But here's some very simple facts. I can review them in 90 seconds. You look at the formation of the earth and
the earliest sign of fossil life. Subtract a few hundred million years at the
beginning of earth when earth was a shooting gallery, earth was still excreting the birth
materials of the solar system. It's hostile to complex chemistry over that
time; not fair to start the clock then. Wait a couple of hundred million years. Now start the clock, and wait around and see
when you have the first signs of single-celled life. At most, 400 million years. At most. Earth has been around for four-and-a-half
billion. So earth, without any help from us, with basic
ingredients found throughout the universe, managed to create life, simple though it was. And earth, one of eight planets...get over
it...sorry. Earth around an ordinary star? To suggest...and what are the ingredients
of life? The number one atom in your body is hydrogen. Number two atom is oxygen, together making
mostly water that's in you. Next is carbon in this order. Next is nitrogen. Next is other stuff. My favorite element, other. Yeah? You look at the universe, the number one element
in the universe is hydrogen. Next is helium, chemically inert, couldn't
do anything with it anyway. Next is carbon. I think I left out oxygen there. Next is oxygen. Next is nitrogen. One for one. We're not even made of odd things. The most common things in the universe are
found here on earth, and we're made of them. And carbon? The most chemically fertile element on the
periodic table? It's not a surprise we're carbon-based. Life is just the extreme expression of complex
chemistry. That's what biology is. All these people who want to imagine, because
they remembered the chemistry class that silicon sits right below carbon on the periodic table,
so it bonds similarly to carbon, so they want to imagine silicon-based life. I'm saying, okay, fine; but you don't have
to. There is five times as much carbon in the
universe as silicon. There's no need to even have to go there. We've got enough to imagine just simply with
the carbon atom at the center of these huge biological molecules. Point is, it happened relatively quickly with
the most common ingredients in the universe. To now say life on earth is unique in the
universe would be inexcusably egocentric. Yeah, I agree with that; and I would go further
and say that, if ever you meet somebody who wishes to claim that he believes or she believes
that life is unique in the universe, then it would follow from that belief that the
origin of life on this planet would have to be a quite stupefyingly rare and improbable
event, and that would have the rather odd consequence that, when chemists try to work
out theories, models of the origin of life, what they should be looking for is a stupendously
improbable theory, an implausible theory. If there was a plausible theory of the origin
of life... ...it wouldn't be it. That's right because then life would have
to be everywhere. Now maybe it is everywhere. My hunch is that there's lots and lots of
life in the universe; but because the universe is so vast, the islands of life that there
are are so spaced that it's unlikely that anyone of them will meet any other, which
is rather sad. It's sad. However, let me make you happy a little bit
more from that. We've learned now that we can model the formation
of the solar system, and this period of time where earth was being bombarded heavily...that's
called the period of heavy bombardment in the early universe. We call it like we see it in astrophysics,
let the record show. I don't know if I've ever in my life ever
understood the title of a biology research paper. I just want to say that. The words just...I'm not feeling them, you
know? They're too big, too many syllables. I'm off topic here, so... The period of heavy bombardment and, with
computer simulations you can model what happens when an impact hits a planetary surface. It's not much different from if you sprinkle
cheerios on a bed, which you would never do on purpose, but your kids would do this; and
then, you smack the surface of the bed, there's a sort of recoiling effect, and cheerios pop
upwards. It turns out Mars may have been wet...we know
at some point, it had water...and fertile for life before earth. At this period of heavy bombardment, if it
had started life, surely it would have been simple life. There's no reason to think otherwise. We've learned that bacteria can be quite hardy,
as you surely know. So, we imagine a bacterial stowaway in the
nooks and crannies of one of these rocks that are cast back into space. In fact, if you do the calculation, there's
hundreds of tons of Mars rocks that should have fallen to earth by now over the history
of the solar system. Maybe one of those rocks carried life from
Mars to earth, seeding life on earth. My great disappointment would be going to
Mars and finding Mars life based on DNA. Then it would not have been a separate experiment
in life. We would just all simply have to get over
the fact that we are Martian descendants. What we need is a second sample of life. We have only one at present. Why have you only given us one? It would be a disappointment, as you say,
if we found life on Mars based on DNA; but at least, if we found life on Mars based on
the same DNA code, just about imagine DNA evolving twice, but you couldn't imagine the
same four-letter code evolving twice. But I wanted to make a point that your calculation
that it took only about 400 million years at the most for the first life to arise. For the first life capable of broadcasting
radio waves capable of being detected elsewhere in the universe, it took approximately just
under four billion years. Well no, about four billion years, which is
about half the life that we can expect the solar system to exist. Sure. An important point, by the way, because we
were human before we had the technology to broadcast. So if your criterion for whether a planet
has intelligent life, and if we are the measure of intelligence, then there could be plenty
of planets out there with Roman Empires and whatever else and them not sending radio signals;
but any close enough observer would surely declare them to be intelligent. The time interval between Roman Empires and
radio signals is negligible compared to the total time we're talking about. It's an interesting question, how long it
takes once you get language, once you get civilization, once you get culture, how long
does it take to get radio waves? Indeed, how long does it take to get self-destructive
weapons that blow the whole lot up? That's the next... And you're even...there's an implicit assumption,
that you're making inadvertently possibly, that intelligence is an inevitable consequence
of the evolutionary record, and I'm skeptical of that because, if that were the case, what
we call our intelligence would have happened multiple times in the fossil record, and it
hasn't, whereas other things have shown up plenty of times, like the sense of sight and
locomotion. There's some rather inventive ways things
can get around the world. My favorite is the snake, of course; no arms,
no legs, yet it gets around just fine. I'm imagining an alien visiting earth, stumbling
on a snake, the only creature it sees, right? And then, it goes back and tells its home
people, you're not going to believe what I saw. There's a creature on that planet, no arms,
no legs; it can still get around. It detects its prey with infrared rays and
can eat things five times bigger than its head; and they'll think the guy was on drugs. It's an ordinary snake, sitting here on our
earth. While I'm on the subject, a big disappointment
I have are Hollywood aliens, and I don't know who to blame for this, Hollywood or biologists
that advised them. Hollywood aliens are way too anthropomorphic
for me. Even ET, he had a head, shoulders, arms. Okay, he had three fingers instead of five;
they're still fingers at the end of a hand. He had legs; he had feet. That's human. And look at the diversity of life on earth
to draw from? If you want to think about the ways of being
alive? I'm just so disappointed. Not even that I know I can help them, but
one of my favorite aliens ever was the Blob. Did you see that movie? No, I don't see as many movies as you. Blob is classic. So, that alien was a blob. That's what it was. And it would just kind of move along, and
it would grab onto you and suck out your blood, and keep moving. It was non-anthropic in concept, and it came
from space. I just thought that was an attempt to try
to create some kind of way of being alive. That's a very laudable attempt. It is very interesting to look around the
animal kingdom and count up the number of times that some things have evolved. I mean, eyes several dozen times; ears quite
a large number of times. Echo location, that's finding a way around
by sonar, only four times. A bat and who else? A bat, whales, and two different groups of
birds, cave-dwelling birds. And a few rudimentary examples in some shrews
and sea lions, but really four different times. Intelligence and language of a human kind,
only once, as you pointed out. So, it can't be that important for survival. If natural selection is at work, it should
have shown up many more times. You'd think so. It's a genuinely interesting point that I
think biologists haven't thought about enough is to go around the animal kingdom, counting
up the number of separate arisings of something because that does tell you something about
what you might expect elsewhere in the universe. You'd expect eyes. You might expect echo location. Hypodermic syringes, stingers. About a couple of dozen...I'm talking about
independent evolutions now. You talk about spiders... Our version of that would be called guns. Yeah. What? Our version of the hypodermic stinger would
be called a gun, allowing you to sting someone with... Yes, okay. But I'm talking about it as something that
penetrates the body and injects poison. That's an interesting question. Another relevant point is look around the
world at different island continents and say how similar are they? Look at Australia. The Australian mammals, for example; and there
are very, very power similarities between Australian mammals, which evolved entirely
independently of mammals in South America, independently again of mammals in Asia and
Africa. Again, that gives you a kind of a clue for
how predictable evolution is. Other worlds are going to be very different,
but we perhaps shouldn't write off the possibility that the Hollywood aliens might not be that
unimaginative. I mean, my colleague Simon Conway Morris has
even suggested that it's very likely that there will be, if not humans, at least bipedal,
big-brained, language-toting, hand-toting, forward-looking eyes for stereoscopy, pretty
much humans. He thinks it's highly likely. He's got a religious agenda, I'm sorry to
say, for that; but like him, I appreciate the power of natural selection. By the way, I think if he were a creature
other than a primate, he might be giving a different list of things that matter. I think that's probably right. The horse doesn't have two eyes facing forward,
but the horse damn near can see directly behind it; and so, the horse would be valuing that
fact. Oh, I'm not denigrating horses at all. I'm just saying your first sign that there's
bias is you start listing the human features that you would want in an alien. No, no, no. I don't want to say that I'm not picking on
humans because they're superior but because they're us. I mean, we have stereoscopic vision. We have three-dimensional vision. Horses don't. They have a different kind of vision. Insects have a different kind of vision. Bats have echo...I mean, it's not vision,
but it's using sound to produce what I would guess inside the bat's brain is probably perceived
rather the same way we perceive visually because why wouldn't you use the tools of the brain,
the mammalian brain to create an image, to create a model of the world. They show that in the, forgive me, movie Daredevil. Do they have bats...? He's blind, and he likes when it rains because
the rain hits people, and he hears the different sort of reflections of the sound, and he saw
his girlfriend for the first time in the rain. There's the image of her... Okay, but my speculation is that bats hear... This is America. I've got to talk about our movies here, you
know. My speculation is that bats hear in color
because why wouldn't you use color? Color is just a hue, a perceived hue. It's nothing more than a label the brain uses. Precisely. That's all it is. Color, you attach it to some sequence of changed
phenomenon. So, bats would usefully use color as a sign. For example, if you're between a furry moth
and a leathery locust, it might be perceived as red versus blue, and that would be a very
useful way for natural selection to have tied the labels of hue onto something that would
seem very strange to us. We're coming to the end of our time. Did we just begin, like a second ago? Well, that's rather what I felt. If we want to have some time questions... ...which I would very much like that, but
I had a couple more bones to pick with you. Okay, well, let's go quickly through those
bones. Okay. And if you start formulating questions in
your head... Some years ago, 1994 was it? Or 1996, there was this rock in Antarctica,
a meteorite discovered ALH84001, which had tantalizing evidence...by the way, that rock
was from Mars, one of the tonnage of rocks that we know are out there, and there was
evidence in one of the nooks of that rock for possible life, traceable not to earth
but from Mars. The evidence was very circumstantial but interesting,
nonetheless. There was chemistry there that could only
happen in the presence of oxygen, and there was chemistry there occupying a similar spot
that could happen only in the absence of oxygen. Well, you might say who cares? Well, life is just such a machine. When you breathe in oxygen, you oxygenate
the hemoglobin, that oxygen gets used for your metabolism, and it goes back without
the oxygen. In the same body, you have oxygenating and
deoxygenating forces operating within you. So, life does it for free. If you don't appeal to life, you have to have
the rock hang out over here for a while and then roll down a cliff and go anaerobic for
a while. You have to sort of patch it together. So, it was all the news, page one story. They even had an electron microscope photo
of what looked like an itty, bitty worm. It had little segments on it. It was intriguing. That was not the lead evidence of the authors,
it was just kind of interesting. It was about one-tenth the size of the smallest
worms on earth but interesting, nonetheless. I'm invited to comment on this. In fact, it was Charlie Rose. He had four people. I'm the astrophysicist. They had a biologist. They had a philosopher. And a picture of the worm comes up. The biologist, who is piped in by screen said,
“That can't possibly be life.” So, I said, wow, what have I missed? “So, tell me, sir, why is that?” “Oh, because the smallest life on earth
is 10 times that size,” and I'm still waiting for him to give me the reason why it can't
be life. Then I pause and reflected at that book. That is the reason he's giving me that it
can't be life...his comparison with life on earth. And then I said, “Last I checked, we're
talking about a rock from Mars. Why are you using earth to constrain your
capacity to think about what exists out there?” My question to you: are biologists closed-minded
or open-minded about what is possible in terms of biology in this universe? Because at the end of the day, you go behind
closed doors, and you confess to yourselves that you only have a data sample of one because
all life on earth has common DNA. Yeah. Well, he was being closed-minded. Most any other sciences, we would say that's
not...how do you make science out of a sample of one? No, that's right. He was being closed-minded, no question about
it because he was using his experience of life on this planet to make that generalization. On the other hand, one could make sure a statement
by using the laws of physics, and you could say that there are certain things that wouldn't
work for physical reasons. I'm not saying that a tiny worm wouldn't work
for physical reasons, but I could imagine somebody making an argument that said you
cannot have...for example, maybe there's a certain minimum size of eye that could form
an image, for purely physical reasons. That would be a good reason why. And I'm there, all the way. It's just that he cited earth as his measure
of what is possible. Well, he was just wrong. Okay. You don't align yourself with his closed-mindedness. That was the biggest thing I had to get off
my chest here. Okay. Shall we bring up the lights, and see if there
are... Are there microphones...? In the aisle apparently, so if you'll just
line up in the two center aisles behind those microphones. I guess we can pick left and right for what
questions you might have. Professor Dawkins, we're very pleased to hear
that you're writing a children's book on the beauty of science. We'd like both of you to write one for adults
or a video special on TV because we don't want this wonder and awe that you all have
been discussing today to be co-opted by religious people in the world, and it is really wonderful. What can we do to spread the word that science
is not something to be afraid of, but something to really be in wonder of? Right. Can I just slip in there? You commented that there's a children book,
and we need one for adults. Indeed, we need one of those for adults. Interestingly, we probably don't need it for
children because children are born inquisitors of their natural world. They turn over rocks. They jump in puddles. They pour water down your back. They do things that are odd by...you can look
at it as wreaking havoc in the house, or you can look at it as a long series of science
experiments, some of them gone playfully wrong, but nonetheless, explorations into the natural
world. What happens is, over time, that gets beaten
out of them because that is not the behavior of...not the sign of obedience. That's the behavior or disarray, plus adults
far outnumber children, so I think the real problem in the world is adults, especially
since they control the world, not the kids. What I would say about how we convey the wonder,
which you and I are both extremely interested in doing that, and following your mentor Carl
Sagan, for example. I like to make a distinction between what
I call these two schools of why we should pursue the space race, space exploration. The nonstick frying pan way, which is it's
useful because you get spinoffs like nonstick frying pans, and it's wonderful. I go for the wonderful part, and I find that
one of the problems with people who attempt to convey science to lay people, whether it's
children or adults, is that they tend to be obsessed with bringing it down to earth and
making it ordinary and mundane and the sort of thing you might meet in your own kitchen. I'm glad somebody's doing that, but for me,
I prefer the wide open spaces of space, the wonder of looking down a microscope at the
very small and thinking about it from a sort of more poetic point of view rather than from
a more utilitarian point of view. Hi. First, I'd like to say thank you. This is very stimulating, and it's wonderful
to have this here at Crampton Auditorium, at Howard University. I have a practical application question for
technology and its impact on humans, specifically cell phones, cellular cell phones. I'm in healthcare, and I'd like to know where
you stand on the effects...and I know we've come a long way since the first cell phones
came out, but I get particularly apprehensive when I see young people putting cell phones
to the heads of little infants and saying, “Talk to Daddy,” or something like that. That's my first question, the impact of the
waves and things like that, which is out...I've look at some studies on human beings. Then, my second question is about the references
for the origins of calculus in the Egyptian culture. Thank you. Okay, given how many people are in line, I
think we should try to answer as quickly as possible to do this, and I'll take a first
stab, and if you want to try that as well. I don't know of any first efforts at calculus
in the Egyptian culture. Perhaps Richard does. And with regard to cell phone use, there's
a very important fact of science, and that is the active measurement...it's a fascinating
thing, measurement. Because you can never measure anything precisely,
that is, with unlimited precision. You can only measure it with the uncertainties
of your measuring device. And all you can do in the lab is try to constrain
how uncertain that measurement is; but at some level, it will always be uncertain. And here's what happens. If you're trying to measure a phenomenon that
does not exist, the variations in your measurement will occasionally give you a positive signal,
as well as a negative signal. If that positive signal is the idea that maybe
A causes B, in this case, cell phones cause cancer, a paper gets written about that result,
and then, people get concerned that cell phones might cause cancer or power lines might cause
cancer. This goes way back. In fact, if you look at the full spate of
these studies, even those that they fought not to publish because there was not a positive
effect, there are some cases where, in fact, there is less cancer. And so, these are the phenomenon of a no result. When you actually have A causing B, the signal
is huge. It is huge, and it's repeatable in time and
in place. With cell phones, that repeatable signal is
yet to emerge from the total experiments that are done on it. That being said, if you are worried, almost
every cell phone you can have...you know, they have the cell phones on your hip, and
you've got an ear piece, so just do that if you're worried. Otherwise, I can either say the jury's still
out, or the experimental results are consistent with no effect at all. I have nothing to add to that. About the calculus in Egypt... Can we have this one now? Yes, I was interested when you were speaking
about the bubble of radio waves, as far as the limitation of our communication. I read recently that the Large Hadron Collider
had some crazy experiments, but there apparently are particles that are seemingly unconnected
but they react to each other in symmetrical patterns of some kind. I'm very amateurish on this, but what do you
think would be the possibility of instantaneous communication across vast distances using
some kind of particle manipulation? That's exactly an example of the kind of thing
I meant when I said it's beyond me, so... Yeah, so quantum physics is the physics of
the world of the small. In fact, quantum rules apply macroscopically,
but they don't reveal themselves as exotically as what happens with single particles. A particle can pop into existence, go out
of existence, what we call tunnel from one place to another, instantly, with no time
delay between the two. It could exist in all places at once and then
show up instantaneously here when you make the measurement. These are quantum rules that don't make any
sense to us because we don't live in a quantum world. If we did, these would be phenomena that would
be quite natural. So now, can we exploit the quantum world for
faster-than-light communication is what you are suggesting here; and there's no known
way to do that, given the laws of physics. In other words, you can have what's called
a wave form, a wave function of a particle, and it's everywhere. You make a measurement, and the particle instantly
shows up here, even though the wave had a probability of existing...the particle had
a probability of existing over here. And so, it's just odd, and we don't know how
to exploit that fact to our advantage; but as far as we know, no, you cannot have faster-than-light
communication, which we would desperately need to get bigger than the bubble to talk
to the rest of the galaxy. Again, I'll try to make my answers even shorter
than that. Making the distinction between life in the
universe, which I think is inevitable, and intelligent life in the universe, which I
question or challenge at least the probability of, given our planet being in the right location,
the star being the right type of star in the right location, etc., what are the odds that
you would...and given the time it took, four-and-a-half billion, 4.6 billion years...for us to get
to the point where we can ask the question is there intelligent life in the universe. What do you think those odds are? The universe is huge, in time and in space
and in content. So, the good thing about the universe is extraordinarily
rare phenomena happen every day someplace in the universe. So however rare we might calculate it would
be here for life as we know it, you multiply up the numbers...stars in the galaxies, galaxies
in the universe...these are staggeringly huge numbers, 1021 stars, 1,000 times bigger than
the number of grains of sand on an average beach, itself 100 times bigger than the number
of words ever spoken or uttered by all humans who have ever lived. These are staggeringly large, stupendously
large numbers, to use Richard's word, that give us the confidence that, even if intelligent
life is only short lived, grows up, and then, grows so smart it kill itself, that there's
bound to be one out there that we're hitting it right at the right time that they are happy
to have a conversation with us, if we're smart enough to have a conversation with them. This question is primarily for Professor Dawkins. I come from a family where there are two skeptics
and three religious fruitcakes. You can guess which side I'm on. Anyhow, I was just wondering, with your experience,
if you've ever found a good way to hit the fruitcakes upside the head with some rational
thinking and actually get them to pay attention. It would be nice to say that all we need to
do is to expose them to scientific evidence, and that's certainly a very important part
of it is what Neil and I both are trying to do. Unfortunately, there's a certain amount of
evidence that there's a certain kind of mind which is so dyed-in-the-wool wedded to a scriptural
version of the world that they more or less admit in advance that, no matter what evidence
comes, they will refuse to budge. My favorite example of this is the geologist
Kurt Wise, who is a young earth creationist, but who knows very well all the evidence for
an old earth from geology. He has actually said, in these very words;
I think I quote him approximately right, “If all the evidence in the universe pointed to
an old earth, I would be the first to recognize the evidence, but I would still be a young
earth creationist because that is what Holy Scripture tells me.” Somebody who's actually prepared to come out
and say that, and at least he's honest...somebody who actually comes out and says that is pretty
much advertising himself as beyond reason. He's absented himself from the rational discussion
which the rest of us are having by announcing in advance that scripture is going to take
precedence over evidence. And here's a man who knows the evidence. He has a Ph.D. from Harvard in geology. He knows the evidence, and yet, he's announced
in advance, so there are certain people who are unreachable; but my hope is that the vast
majority of people are imminently reachable and just simply haven't been exposed to the
evidence which is plentiful and wonderful. Next question here. Thanks for the great job on the Poetry of
Science. I wonder if you could say just a few words,
both of you, on the philosophy of science. I just read Stephen Hawking's book, The Grand
Design. The first page, philosophy is dead; and here
at Howard, our administration is proposing the abolition of our philosophy programs. Could you say a few words? I have a couple of words to say about that. Up until early 20th century, philosophers
had material contributions to make to the physical sciences. Pretty much after quantum mechanics, remember
the philosopher is the would-be scientist but without a laboratory, right? So, what happens is the 1920s come in. We learn about the expanding universe in the
same decade as we learn about quantum physics, each of which falls so far out of what you
can deduce from your armchair that the whole community of philosophers that previously
had added materially to the thinking of the physical scientist were rendered essentially
obsolete at that point. I have yet to see the contribution...this
will get me in trouble with all manner of philosophers, but call me later and correct
me if you think I missed somebody here, but philosophy has basically parted ways from
the frontier of the physical sciences, when there was a day when they were one and the
same. Isaac Newton was a natural philosopher. The work physicist didn't even exist in any
important way back then. I'm disappointed because there's a lot of
brain power there that might have otherwise contributed mightily, but today simply does
not. The philosophy has other...not that there
can't be other philosophical subjects. There's religious philosophy and ethical philosophy
and political philosophy, plenty of stuff for the philosopher to do, but the frontier
of the physical sciences does not appear to be among them. Even in biology, I think, is an interesting
point that the idea of evolution by natural selection, which came independently to two
traveling naturalists in the 19th century. It's a simple enough idea that any philosopher
could have thought of it from the depths of an armchair anywhere back to the Greeks, and
none of them did. I don't really understand that. It seems to me to be a strange thing that
it had to wait to 19th century scientists, living 200 years after Newton did something
that seemed a lot more difficult. Check Anaxagoras, first theory of evolution
in pre-Socratic Greece. Oh, well, okay. But natural selection is something that came
in the 19th...not just to Darwin and Wallace. I mean, there were a couple of other scientists
who thought of it. The philosophers that I really respect in
the world today are philosophers of science, are ones who have actually taken the trouble
to learn some science, and there are some. And they're very good, clear thinkers, and
they do help other people to think clearly; but they're really the same as scientists. There are scientists who are also trained
in philosophy. Sir. Thank you both for coming. There's a group of scientists in Europe that
have developed a Large Hadron Collider, and they're trying to recreate the conditions
of what has been known as the Big Bang, slamming antiprotons and protons to try and find a
particle known as the Higgs boson, which has been misnamed the God particle. It's a particle that gives matter mass. Could you guys talk about the conditions of
the universe at that time? Will this prove anything? This experiment? The interesting thing about physics is that
there is very little physics left to be discovered on a tabletop. The way physics works is, the way discoveries
in physics, by and large, work is you need to go someplace you've never been before,
either in scale...large, small, energy especially, speed...once you've explored these extremes,
you're at the hairy, bleeding edge between what is known and unknown in the universe. So, if you want to discover something you've
never done before, build an accelerator that hits an energy level that's never been hit
before. And the early universe is our best particle
accelerator we know, so now we have the very large tabletop version of the early universe,
large and expensive, and it allows us to test our ideas about what was going on. And so, yes. It's regime of the early universe that we
have theoretical understanding of but we have yet to have experimental verification for
it. I have visited the Large Hadron Collider twice;
and on both occasions, I was more or less literally reduced to tears. I was moved so much by this stupendous effort
of human ingenuity, human cooperation, multinational; and I attempted to express my poetic fascination
and interest in this terrific enterprise in my latest book. There was an unfortunate misprint. It came out as the large Hardon collider. Just the D and the R, right? I spotted the misprint, and of course, I left
it in; but alas, the publisher's proofreader also spotted it. She removed it. I begged her on my knees to leave it in. She said it was more than her job was worth. Just a quick social comment. The 1990's cancelled superconducting supercollider
that was to be built in Texas had peak energies three times as large as the Large Hadron Collider
in Switzerland. Congress voted to not continue its funding. The project was scrapped, and now, the center
of mass of particle physics is no longer in the United States. It's in Europe. Now interesting to the scientists, while we'd
rather it be here in America, we really celebrate the fact that science continues to advance,
and it's just a matter of whose nation's priorities values it; and I saw that as the beginning
of the end of America's leadership in this realm. Sure. All right. Thank you so much. I probably have a question which is rather
mundane in this setting, but one doesn't get these opportunities very often. I wanted to see what you thought about this. Life that's been discovered at the point of
sea floor spreading on earth is, I assume, because I haven't heard otherwise also DNA
based, as is everything else we know of. My curiosity is whether there is a hypothesis
or an explanation that has been, in fact, devised as to how DNA can have this effect
with the distance of 5,000 or 6,000 miles in the ocean itself between that point and
the surface. Not miles in the ocean. I mean, the diameter of the earth is only...you
mean feet down? I'm sorry. Five or six miles. Yes, thank you. Exclude the thousand. Okay. I can give an astrophysicist's view, but I'd
welcome the biologist. I didn't actually hear the question, so you
start off by... Sure. So, these extremophiles...these are creatures
that thrive under conditions that would kill the rest of us instantly, under high pressure,
high temperature. In fact, at the ocean vents, they're thriving
at 300 degrees Fahrenheit. The pressure of the water is high enough to
prevent boiling, but the temperature is high enough that it would cook anything else. One of the great advances in exobiology was
the discovery that life on earth is hardier than anyone had ever previously given it credit. We no longer need the room-temperature pond
water to have life thrive. The more we've looked in the earth, the more
we have found life doing the backstroke under extraordinarily hostile conditions, hostile
to humans that is. What that has done for us, astrophysically,
is allow us to cast for life with a much wider net than we had previously thought we had
available to us. Whereas before we would look in the habitable
zone, the Goldilocks zone; not too close to a host star, you water would evaporate; not
too far away, water freezes. You're looking for that liquid water zone
made liquid by sunlight. We find out all we really need is an energy
source. It doesn't have to be the sun. Jupiter keeps Europa warm, one of its moons. It has a liquid ocean. It's been liquid for billions of years. You want to look for life armed with this
diversity of life, the hardiness of life, even we find here on earth. It has only broadened our search for life
in the cosmos. Among the many theories of the origin of life,
recently people have started thinking about life might possibly have started under what
we now think of as extreme conditions of high temperature, and it could be that we are now
in the cold zone, which was not the way it was when it first started, and that's an interesting
possibility. So, they would look at us like we're the extremophiles. Exactly. They look at us as though we're the extremophiles. MS: My department chairman said that he wants
you to go and ask your question. I'm not going to tell him no, so please ask
your question. Keep it brief, and this is the last one before
we go onto the book signing. Thank you, Howard, for making this free. Anyway, I read a book Consolation of Philosophy. The main guy, Boethius, is condemned to death. He has everything taken from him. All he has is his reason and his sense of
self, not even that; but he attempts to console himself to this execution by reasoning that
the world has order, that there is something that keeps things together. He uses his reason to try and get to the root
of why he should be at peace with death. The problem is his source of origin is a belief
in God. What would you do? Well, I don't know if I fully understand the
question. I do know that, if he's about to be executed... How about you are about to be executed? Oh, I'm about to be executed. You have nothing except your knowledge, your
knowledge of science, your experience. I would request that my body in death be buried,
not cremated so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that
flora and fauna can dine upon it just as I've dined upon flora and fauna throughout my life. What about you, Professor Dawkins? END OF AUDIO FILE
STAGE 2 PRODUCTIONS DAWKINS TYSON 1
Some posters seem to be attacking the view they would like to attack rather than the view expressed by Tyson in this video. Tyson is primarily interested in the frontier of the physical sciences and thinks that philosophers are no longer in a good position to contribute to that, because, due to the modern academic division of labor, they aren't doing that kind of empirical work. There may be counterexamples, but generally, this doesn't strike me as a crazy thing to think.
Where I would resist Tyson's view is to suggest that there's a lot more to understanding our world, and understanding science itself, than can be found in the frontiers of the physical sciences. A robust understanding of what science does and how it differs from other kinds of intellectual pursuits can be deeply informed by the work of several philosophers; I have in mind guys like Carnap, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Dennett, the Churchlands, Boyd, and Bickle, to name a few from a very long list.
In my view, Tyson could be more cognizant of the fact that when he's talking about science, as a method, or as a social practice, he's doing philosophy.
They seem to have a slight definition problem... any philosopher who uses science isn't counted as a philosopher but as a "scientist" no matter what he actually does, and any philosopher who was engaged in pure theorizing, no matter how rigorous, is useless even if he later turns out to be right simply because those insights came from philosophy.
Sadly, that inconsistency seems to be one that would need to be resolved by a deeper understanding of philosophical inquiry and methods, but those are the very methods they're devaluing.
I'm a fan of both Dawkins and Tyson for their work in popularizing science, but they really are outside of their area of expertise here. I can sympathize with the frustration they might feel when it comes to people who misuse bad philosophical arguments as a weapon against scientific evidence, but turning around and tarring the whole field is just false.
Unfortunately they're both shooting themselves in the foot when they do that, since it undermines any arguments that can be made for the value of science.
Wow...
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding from both NDT and Dawkins when discussing the scope of science and philosophy.
Sure, philosophy isn't good at producing empirical facts. I don't think anyone is questioning that today, and philosophy of science isn't interested in making those kinds of claims. What NDT and Dawkins argue is that the last "good contribution" came from philosophers who were also scientists, as if their interest in making empirical claims made them valuable for science. If you're not making empirical claims, you're not valuable for science.
This is mistaken. Of course science is going to be better at making empirical claims than philosophy because that is not philosophy's aim. However, there is another leap here. The leap of logic is that you must make empirical claims to be important to science. However, I argue that this isn't the case. To name a few, questions about scientific explanation, computer simulation, and the nature of science are still important and relevant today.
I would be interested at what these two think sociologists and psychologists are doing with their time. Clearly, the results of those fields have been less revealing about the natural universe than our inquiries into say classical mechanics. But if all three are sciences, what unifies them? Are they all investigating natural laws? Are laws what science is really concerned about?
Look, I might not have the clearest scope of what science or philosophers of science do, but it doesn't take a Ph.D to distinguish between the aims of the two, and see how the two relate. Sure, a philosophy can't do NDT's research from an armchair. But what NDT and Dawkins do isn't the entirity of science. There is some serious oversimplification happening here.
TL;DR Tyson and Dawkins misunderstand that philosophy doesn't have to make empirical claims to contribute to science in an important way. This results from a misunderstanding of the breadth of science and the types of claims philosophy makes.
Its interesting that the new atheist types all seem to want to turn science into the only acceptable means of inquiry, and label all other means heresy. Careful when fighting monsters I guess.
NDT posted this link in response to the recent criticism/open-letter to him, also on the front page of this subreddit. You can see that short exchange here.
Interesting. I guess this puts an end to the apologist's defense of "he said that on a comedy show so don't take it too seriously."
He truly thinks that philosophy has, since the early 20th century, and will have, nothing to contribute to science.
The only thing that bugged me about this was that he said that the philosopher is "the would-be scientist without a laboratory"... to me that's only philosophers who are trying to answer the wrong questions i.e. trying to contribute to what could be studied empirically.
I suppose he basically corrected himself by later pointing out that there are other areas of thought to which philosophers can contribute, which I appreciated.
Given the frequency with which scientists in my field try to discredit each other with claims that the other's work is "not scientific," I think there is still a need for clear discussion on what is and is not science.
“It has often been said, and certainly not without justification, that the man of science is a poor philosopher."
Source: Albert Einstein (1936). “Physics and Reality.” Jean Piccard, trans. Journal of the Franklin Institute 221: 349.