Hello friends, welcome back to the show.
My guest today is Richard Dawkins.
He's an evolutionary biologist, author and emeritus fellow at the University of Oxford.
I spoke to Richard on stage in Austin, Texas, as part of his final ever live tour.
Then the next day we got to sit down and discuss all of the things that we didn't have time to talk about the night before.
I expect to learn what Richard thinks about the recent rise of cultural Christianity, whether religion was an influential factor on the evolution of humans, what Richard meant by race is a spectrum, sex is pretty damn binary, where people without a religious worldview should get their meaning from, Richard's
explanation for evolution for those who don't believe in it and much more.
Can't lie. After spending an hour and a half on stage really trying to do my absolute best to make a phenomenal conversation, the following day was a little bit more tough.
So there's a few left turns in this one, which I actually really appreciated.
And I got some answers out of Richard that I didn't think I was going to hear before.
Side point, I did manage to get him the night before you're not going to hear this, but I did get him to agree that he might consider taking psychedelics, which as an 80 year old atheist, evolutionary biologist is pretty cool.
So I'm chalking that up as a big W, but today's fun.
Richard's an absolute legend and I really hope that you enjoy.
But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Richard Dawkins.
What do you make of this recent rise of cultural Christianity, given that you were a big part of popularizing atheism over the last few decades?
Yes. It seems like, have we already forgotten that?
Is this sort of coming back around?
Cultural Christianity means nothing.
We're all cultural Christians if we were brought up in a Christian culture.
And I was, and you probably were as well.
It doesn't mean anything at all.
It doesn't mean we believe it.
That's what's important, is whether you believe it or not.
And I don't believe a word of it, but it is a simple matter of fact that I'm brought up in a Christian culture, so I'm a cultural Christian.
It seems that there are gradations of belief now.
I think people that you might not have expected to have used it so much, Jordan Peterson's of the world, the Russell Brand's of the world, the Andrew Tate's of the world.
I think is it Latin Mass that is one of the quickest growing denominations, especially for young people.
It's an entire ceremony that no one, unless you're educated in Latin, that nobody can understand.
So beyond just the moniker of cultural Christianity, it seems like some kind of religious belief is increased.
Of course it's an advantage to be in Latin that nobody can understand, because if you can understand it, you realize what nonsense it is.
Some people would say that the reason that they like it is that it's got this sort of like a pomp and ceremony, and it makes them feel connected to sort of the roots of what's going on.
Yes, I get that. Imagine that.
But it does seem, it's interesting to me that what was rebellious and sort of revolutionary and a bit kind of cutting edge was the atheism conversation only not so long ago.
And there has been some rebranding, whether it's men getting their passports and talking about wanting to convert to Islam, which I think would have been a very surprising thing to have heard, or Christianity too.
It seems like that's the on -trend du jour way to live your life.
You follow trends in society.
I'm not that interested in trends in society.
I'm interested in what's true.
And if there are trends this way, trends that way, that'll be different in a few years' time anyway.
I do think that there are leading indicators of what we may see in future.
That is possible, or the reverse.
Also true as well. I think we spoke about this last night, and obviously I do need to call it out.
We had a great conversation on stage for 60 minutes and then another 30.
I do rather wonder how we're going to cover something else.
We covered a lot of ground last night.
One of the topics I really wanted to touch back on was much of people's beliefs and worldviews were pulled apart by typically where they would have got their worldview from, being religion, if that is no longer as prevalent, if it's been disproven, if it's been criticized to the point where someone
can't hold on to their belief anymore, that causes a vacuum, that causes them to not have something to believe in in the same way.
What do you say to people that miss their life being imbued with meaning in a way where maybe they can't take it from rationality immediately like you do?
I think it's rather demeaning to humanity to suggest they need anything like that.
It's rather disrespectful, I think, if you manage it to say you have to have some crutch to boil you up in life and if you haven't got Christianity, you'll turn to something else.
Why denigrate humanity in that sort of way?
I think the problem is, and I agree, and I very much appreciated your answer last night, the rational perspective on human psychology is to understand its irrationality a lot of the time, and that is sort of an odd circle to try and square.
I think this is what is true and this is what you should believe, but then there's this other branch which is what we tend toward, stories and narrative and personification.
Yes. I was very impressed both in Dallas and here in Austin with the number of people come up to me and say they thank me for helping them to get rid of their religious crutch.
I'm very heartened by that.
I guess maybe they're the people who do come up to me.
A little bit of a selection effect perhaps, yes.
But it is very encouraging and I do find that enormous numbers of people do seem to be turning against religion and not turning to some other kind of nonsense.
Why do you think it is we were talking about convergent evolution last night.
Religion seems to be a, would you call it a convergent meme -olution?
You could. I mean, yes.
You could say, oh, by the way, talking of convergent evolution, I looked up the crabs that you, yes brilliant.
Okay, a little bit of a primer for everyone that wasn't there last night.
I asked whether crabs are the pinnacle of evolutionary trajectory because apparently lots of creatures go to it.
What's true? Have I been psy -opt?
Okay, no, I looked it up.
It's an article in Scientific American and it simply is that there are a fair number of about half a dozen separate lineages of decapod crustaceans which are converging on the crab way of doing things, which is to, as it were, lose the abdomen make the abdomen very small and curl it up underneath the big
carapace. And it's just happened half a dozen times, which is convergent evolution.
And that's very nice.
I mean, that's a nice example, but talk about the pinnacle of human evolution.
Doesn't mean that humans in a few thousand years are going to become, okay, well that's a, that's a shame.
Religion as a independently arising system that humans seem to have used culturally.
It does seem to arise all over the world, everywhere in the world.
Anthropologists tell us that people converge upon some kind of supernatural belief, and that's very understandable psychologically, I think.
But it does seem to be a convergent thing and I can well believe it.
I can understand it.
People hunger for explanation.
And when they didn't have science, they would naturally turn to, oh, the spirit of the river and the spirit of the mountain and the spirit of the waterfall and all that kind of thing.
And then that graduated into gods like Thor and Wotan and Zeus and Apollo and then graduated into the monotheistic religions.
But there's no reason to believe any of them.
Is that a tendency towards supernatural explanations when we don't have one that we can grasp onto firmly a byproduct of the fact that most of our lives are lived through story and personification and death and battle and so on and so forth.
And also the desire, the hunger for agency, we want there to be agents that are responsible for things.
So rather than just say the weather is due to the laws of nature, earthquakes are due to the laws of nature.
You actually want it to be an agent.
You actually want it to be some kind of conscious being.
And that sort of does make sense because when you live a perilous existence, as our ancestors did, then any kind of random change in the environment could be danger.
And the specific kind of danger that they would have feared would have been predators, would have been enemies.
So rather than say, oh, it's a fact of nature that there's an earthquake or a volcano or a hurricane, it had to be a deliberate agency of some kind.
There's an idea called compensatory control, which is interesting in psychology.
So if somebody is given uncertain news, like uncertain medical diagnosis in lab setting, they're more likely to see patterns in meaningless random static.
And what it appears to be that when we feel like the world is chaotic and outside of our control, we begin to personify and create stories around it.
I think this very much, even before the lab leak hypothesis had maybe been given more of the research and the grounding that it perhaps now has, a lot of people turn to that, because I think it's oddly more comforting to believe that a global pandemic is caused by a malign scientist than just chance
mutation of a silly little microbe.
Yes, I think that's another aspect of what I was just saying.
That's right. Is there such a thing as a kind of belief structure, a story that you tell yourself about the world, which doesn't involve the historical inaccuracies that you criticize, but that does sort of add comfort?
Is there a way to view the world?
Is there a halfway house between rationality and religion in your view?
I can't think what it would be if there is, can you think of what it might be?
People talking about energy, the sort of more yogic side of things, even if it's not energy between people, but, you know, channeling senses of themselves, better versions of themselves, you know, imbuing them, you know, you could look at it maybe from the lens of positive psychology if you wanted to actually
do this thing, that they're maybe projecting a version of themselves into the future that they're using, the expectation effect as David Robson would call it.
What about that? Energy, rather, makes me reach for my revolver.
Perilously close to work.
Yes, yeah. What was that article that you wrote recently in Colette?
You said, Race is a spectrum.
Sex is pretty damn binary.
OK, yes, that was republished from somewhere else.
We just come out in Colette as well.
Everywhere you look in life, in human life, in biology, you see a continuum.
Tall and short, there's a continuum between them, fashion thin, there's a continuum between them, black and white, continuum between them.
The one place where there is no continuum is sex.
Sex really is a binary, just about the only binary we've got in human biology.
Male versus female really is an either -or.
It's extremely rare to come across some creature, some human certainly, which is neither male nor female.
Does that exist? It depends how you define it.
I mean, there are people with ambiguous genitalia, there are people who don't fit quite neatly into the diagnostic features which a doctor might use, like X, X, X, Y, chromosomes, for example.
There are people with XXY or X naught.
They usually come out pretty clearly one or the other.
XXY comes out as male, X naught comes out as female.
The most important point I think I would make is that, never mind about X and Y chromosomes, never mind, because that applies to mammals and a few other things as well.
Birds have the XXXY system, but it's back to front.
In birds, it's the female sex that is XY, or the equivalent of XY, and the male sex which is equivalent of XX.
That's not a universal, what is universal is gamete size.
There really is a disjunct between large gametes, which we call eggs, and small gametes, sperms, and right the way through the animal and plant kingdoms, you have this divide between male gametes and female gametes.
There are hermaphrodites, like earthworms and snails, who do both.
They have both male gonads and female gonads.
But the origin is called anisogamy, the unequal gametes.
There are very interesting mathematical models which I could talk about, because I think it is interesting.
There is a system called isogamy, which is found in certain algae, where the gametes are equal sized.
You just have medium -sized gametes which fuse together.
Now, economically speaking, you need two isogametes to make a full -sized zygote.
Mathematical modelling has shown that isogamy is unstable in evolution.
If an individual produces slightly smaller than average isogametes, then they need to pair with a slightly larger one in order to produce a fully equipped zygote with all the necessary economics.
We're talking economics now, the economic resources to make a zygote.
So, you have a tendency for a runaway selection, runaway evolution, towards half the isogametes getting smaller and smaller, and the other half getting larger and larger.
This has been shown mathematically.
It's a plausible mathematical model.
The end product of this runaway process is eggs and sperms, eggs being the large ones and sperms being the small ones.
Although isogamy does exist in algae and some fungi, it's unstable.
In the vast majority of animals and plants, you have an isogamy, meaning large gametes and small gametes.
That's the fundamental difference between the sexes.
That's the one you can always rely upon anywhere in the animal kingdom.
Sex really is binary.
There's no such thing as a human that would produce both large and small gametes.
That would be impossible.
I think that is true.
But even if it wasn't true, it would be a very insignificant minor fact.
It would be a kind of freak fact.
I mean, binary would assume that there is never any crossover between...
I suppose it would.
But if you think about it as a frequency distribution, think of it as a frequency histogram, and you set up a histogram with unambiguous males, unambiguous females.
I think I calculated once that you couldn't possibly plot that histogram on paper, because the number of intermediaries, if there are any, would be so rare.
I represented it as the New York, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
If one of them is male and the other one is female, then the intermediaries, if there are any, which is itself dubious, would be the size of a mole hill.
Compared with the Twin Towers?
Compared with the Twin Towers, yes.
Wow. Yeah. It is interesting.
I guess we get into sort of lexical jujitsu a little bit, where what you actually mean by binary, and if you can find edge cases, if there are any like that, does that outlier disprove the fact that you've rolled the dice so many times and it ends up always falling the same way?
Let's make a distinction.
You mean bimodal and binary.
Bimodal would be where you have a distribution like that, sort of two mountains with a sort of valley in between.
And there are plenty of examples of that.
But binary would be that the intermediates, it is virtually non -existent or non -existent.
So it's not a sort of gentle undulating curve like that, but a huge...
Two Twin Towers. Yes.
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What was that Fleming article that troubled Darwin?
Ah, Fleming Jenkins.
Yes, he was a Scottish engineer and he pointed out wrongly because in those days everybody believed in blending inheritance.
They believed that when male mated with female, you got an intermediate.
You got, say, if black mated with white, you got red with blue, you get purple.
It's a blending, which is how they thought heredity worked.
And it doesn't work like that.
Mendel showed that, Gregor Mendel showed that.
But in the time when, in Victorian times, when people thought heredity was blending, Fleming Jenkins argued that natural selection couldn't work because as the generations go by, variation would disappear.
Everything would disappear into a kind of schmear of grey and therefore there'd be no variation to work on.
Well, that's obviously not true because as the generations go by, you don't get a schmear of grey.
Variation is, as a matter of fact, maintained.
And what Fleming Jenkins got wrong and everybody got wrong was thinking that heredity was blending.
It's not blending. Genes are either there or not there.
Every single one of your genes you got from either your father or your mother.
And every single one of your genes, you will either pass on to any particular child or you won't.
They don't blend. They don't mix.
They don't fuse. And because of that, the entire argument, Fleming Jenkins' entire argument disappears.
Hardy and Weinberg showed...
Did that trouble Darwin though?
It did trouble Darwin, yes.
And if only Darwin had read Mendel, he would have got the answer.
But what's interesting is that although Darwin hadn't read Mendel, he came very close to discovering Mendel's laws himself, to discovering that actually, which they didn't call them genes in those days, the particles of heredity really are particles.
They really don't blend.
Darwin actually did experiments on peas, which is what Mendel did as well.
Edible peas. Yes. Well, actually sweet peas.
Right. Okay. No, I think Edible too.
And he found that the progeny were either or.
They didn't blend, which is Mendel's laws.
And then he said something very significant.
He said, but I do not consider this any more remarkable than the fact that when you get a male mates with a female, you get either male or female offspring.
See, that is pure Mendelism.
And all that anybody had to do, all that Mendel had to do, all that Darwin had to do, all that Fleming Jenkins had to do was to say, what goes for sex goes for everything.
Because when a male mates with a female, you do not get an intermediate hermaphrodite.
You get either a male or a female offspring.
That's just Mendel's principle writ large.
And all that Mendel did was to show that the same thing applies to everything, not just sex.
What has this got to do with race in the discussion?
Oh, well, race is interesting because race really does appear to be blending.
If a black person mates with a white person, you tend to get an intermediate.
And that's why so -called African Americans are a complete spectrum from white to black.
And what's going on there is polygenes, that's to say, lots and lots of small genes, each one having a little additive effect.
So although each one of those genes is Mendelian, is either there or not there.
As a particulate, either there or not there, it doesn't blend.
The effect of having lots of genes summating their effects is to look as though it's blending.
So rather than thinking of mixing black paint and white paint and you get gray, what you're doing is mixing black beads, black balls with white balls.
And you get a... There are still black and white in the bag that you're mixing them, but the effect from a distance looks gray.
Well, that's interesting.
And that's polygenes.
So, I don't know, but I'm going to guess that being transracial or identifying, using how you feel to say that you're a different race.
Some people seem to have done this and then other people said that they couldn't do this.
I don't know how prevalent that is, but I'm going to guess that there would be significantly more pushback against that than there would be about as transsexual.
Despite the fact that, based on your position, the evidence actually allows somebody to be...
I am both Korean and Uruguayan.
It's an extraordinary paradox that if you attempted to be transracial, as a woman called Rachel Dollarzell did, you get Brit -Bats hurled at you from all directions.
You're disgraced, you're pushing the stocks and have metaphorical tomatoes thrown at you.
Whereas if you decide that you're a different sex from the one that you actually are, then you're lorded to the skies.
It's exactly the wrong way around, because race really is a spectrum when sex isn't.
What do you make of the primering of race and the focus on it over the last few years?
Why do you think that's happening?
Well, I think it's a very American phenomenon.
It's an American obsession with race.
A lot of it is white guilt because of slavery, which is, of course, understandable.
Never mind about slavery itself.
That's bad enough, but the conditions of the slave ships are absolutely appalling.
What like? I'm not familiar with it.
Oh, God. There are pictures.
Just Google it. There are pictures of slave ships in which you have rows and rows of people chained up, lying like sardines in a tin for the whole of a voyage across the Atlantic from Africa to America.
How were they fed? How did they go to the bathroom?
It doesn't bear thinking about it.
It just doesn't bear thinking about it.
It's among the most cruel things I can ever ever been perpetrated by humanity.
So there is ample reason for guilt, but there's no particular reason why white people should feel the guilt of their ancestors just because they're white.
I mean, everybody we're all human and we should feel utter disgust at what was done by the slave owners and the slave shippers.
Who were also varying races.
The people who were selling people into slavery.
In Africa, of course, African chieftains were selling people into slavery all the time.
Even if they weren't the captains of the boats.
Exactly. But all I'm saying now is that the behavior was absolutely appalling, but there's no particular reason why, because you happen to be the same color as somebody who perpetrated these awful things that you should feel guilt.
Can you or can we draw a line between an increased focus on identity politics and a decline in religiosity?
Is this people grasping at something trying to find their meaning elsewhere?
Well, that's often said and I think you brought it up earlier that those of us who opposed Christianity and have attempted to dissuade people from being Christian are to blame for not quite.
I may be asked. Well, some people have said that.
We're to blame for opening the door to a new kind of nonsense.
And what do you think about that?
Well, it's ridiculous.
I mean, I'm an all purpose enemy of irrationality wherever you find it.
Do you think that there could be a compulsion, disposition, predisposition that humans have to look for those kinds of answers and with that religion dropping away, that they would find it somewhere?
Social justice, activism, so on and so forth?
Well, so they told me.
I mean, enough people have said that there may be something in it.
It doesn't ring plausible to me, but still.
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Speaking of Darwin, did you ever see, read the list of reasons that Darwin wrote down when he was deciding whether or not to become married?
I wanted to read this out.
It's one of my favorites.
Oh, it's better than a dog anyway.
Phenomenal. So Darwin, he got married a little bit later in life because he'd been away on voyages and stuff and he's in Victorian England.
So people, expectations and I think he nearly sort of had a pen pal relationship, maybe a couple of times, maybe a cousin, something like that, and then that didn't happen.
And then finally he needs to make the decision.
He's going to make the call.
Document has two columns, one labeled marry, one labeled not marry.
And above them, circled are the words.
This is the question on the pro -marriage side of the equation were, children, if it please God, constant companion and friend in old age who will feel interested in one, object to be beloved and played with.
After reflection of an unknown length, he modified the foregoing sentence with better than a dog anyhow.
He continued, home and someone to take care of house, charms of music and female chit -chat, these things good for one's health, but terrible loss of time.
Without warning, Darwin had from the pro -marriage column, swerved uncontrollably into major anti -marriage factors, so major that he underlined it.
This issue, the infringement of marriage on his time, especially his work time, was addressed at great length in the appropriate not marry column.
Not marrying, he wrote, would preserve freedom to go where one likes, choice of society and little of it, conversation of clever men at clubs, not forced to visit relatives and to bend in every trifle, to have the expense and anxiety of children, perhaps quarrelling, loss of time, cannot read in the evening, fatness
and idleness, anxiety and responsibility, less money for bucks and, if many children, forced to gain one's bread.
Such, so fascinating.
Immense selfishness.
Yes, well, time's changed, aren't there?
Yes, the shifting moral zeitgeist, I've, yeah.
I was actually asked to read that at somebody's wedding.
Oh, fantastic. What a morbid way to begin a marriage.
Yes, yes, yes. Did you accept or no?
Well, I did, but I think got a few laughs anyway.
So good. What's, you know, we're going through a population decline, fewer people being bothered about getting into relationships, lowest rates of marriage that we've seen ever on record, childlessness, so on and so forth.
What do you, what do you make of that?
What do you think about the, Yes, you read this last night.
I was not aware of it and I haven't had time to look it up.
So, so I'm not can't say anything more than I did last night.
Nothing. Yeah. True.
Well, the population thing, like I say, is an interesting question, the marriage thing, you know, just the companionship.
So you can see there's this degree of responsibility, bringing another life into the world, especially if you were during your formative years during COVID and under socialized and risk averse and helicopter parenting and screens and social media and all that stuff.
Like, you know, I can kind of see it.
I would like to think that the own, one of the only two things we need to do survive and reproduce like to think that the reproduced thing was sufficiently powerful to kind of overcome that.
So it's kind of impressive in a way that it's not.
But when it comes to the marriage side, and even pulling back from that in survey data, there's a lot of young people that say they're just not fussed with dating, they're sort of working on themselves, or they're not ready to meet somebody or whatever it might be.
And given that there's very little financial responsibility, at least in a relationship that's not married.
It's very surprising.
I kind of feel like, I don't know, I feel like there's something else going on that I, even though I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, I still feel like there's something that I'm not seeing.
Yes, I have nothing to say about that, really.
I don't, I'm not a sociologist.
And I don't quite understand why it is that there are certain trends that seem to go through society like that.
There's definitely one, this wouldn't necessarily explain the casual relationship thing, but it would explain at least part of the marriage thing, that if in order to be able to have sex, you need to first become married, there is quite a high.
Well, in past centuries, that would have been the case, yes.
Yeah. And now that that's no longer the tradition, yes.
Perhaps people are having their cake without having to eat it or eating their cake without having to have it.
That's a better way around, actually, the conventional ways have your cake and eat it, actually, that doesn't make any sense.
Of course, you got to have it before you can eat it, but eat your cake and have it.
It obviously is the necessary wording of the paradox.
So I don't know how much truth this is.
But apparently, the way that the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, was caught, was his brother was reading the manifestos that were being posted in the newspaper, and noticed certain literary artifacts, linguistic artifacts, and one of them was, eat your cake and have it too, as opposed to the more.
Although the Unabomber was actually using the more sensible wording.
Correct, yeah, exactly.
But unfortunately, the one that was a lexical fingerprint that allowed him to be identified.
I never knew that. Yeah, yeah, that's cool.
I've noticed this recently.
Over the last few years, I've talked about evolutionary psychology, biology on the channel a lot.
And I mean, in the last five, I've seen an increasing number of evolution skeptical comments.
I don't know whether that's a part of an underlying trend that's going on.
That is disturbing.
Where do you see these comments?
On YouTube. Also, in discussions that happen on something like Twitter.
Are they religiously motivated?
It's hard to tell. I would guess, at least in part, but then there'll be a small, perhaps non -insignificant portion of people that are sort of largely skeptical about lots of things.
It's skeptical about whether Australia exists or Antarctica exists or the Earth is flat.
You mentioned yesterday about belief structures clumping together in reliably predictable ways.
But I kind of wanted to, you're the guy.
If anyone's the guy, you're the guy.
If people have a skepticism about the accuracy of evolution, what explanation or evidence do you tend to take people through when you're wanting to?
Before getting onto that, it's hard to see what you could possibly put in its place.
I don't see how you could be anything but religious.
You've got to have some explanation for the extraordinary complexity of life and the apparent design of life, which is just phenomenal.
I think some people are not even aware of it.
But if you actually are aware of the prodigious complexity of living things down to the very cellular level, biochemical level, then you cannot be sane and not seek for some kind of explanation for that.
If it's not evolution, it's got to be presumably, it's got to be - Some story.
A God. I think if anybody calls himself an atheist and a non -evolutionist, he's probably not really thought it through very hard.
But you were asking me about how to convince people.
You're explaining to somebody the evidence of evolution, what's your favorite way to - Of course, there's an enormous amount of convincing evidence.
I think that the evidence of geographical distribution is one that doesn't first spring to mind, but is an important one.
Why are all the mammals, all the native mammals in Australia, except bats, marsupial?
When Noah's Ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, why would all the marsupials march in a column to Australia and not leave any relics or fossils behind on the way?
I mean, that would be a very simple elementary thing.
But perhaps a more serious piece of evidence would be molecular genetics.
If you actually look at the data of DNA sequencing in different animals, it forms a perfect hierarchy.
What could that hierarchy be?
I mean, a branching hierarchy.
What could that be but a family tree?
So you find that if you take, say, shrew and mole, and you looked at their molecular sequences, they would be very, very close.
They're very, very close cousins on the evolutionary interpretation.
All the different molecules agree.
So it's not that half the molecules make them close cousins and the other half make them distant cousins.
They all agree with very few exceptions, which are interesting in themselves.
For example, if you looked at those genes specifically involved in hearing, you would find an apparent cousinship between bats and toothed whales because they both use echoes.
So that's an exception that proves the rule.
But mostly, the tree of cousinship is an obvious signature of a pedigree.
You can do the same thing not with molecules, but with bones and anatomy generally, which is what Darwin had available to him, of course, because Darwin didn't have access to molecular information.
What Darwin had access to was comparing things like the limbs of vertebrates, the hand of a human, the flipper of a turtle, the leg of a horse, and so on.
Nowadays, we can do the same thing with enormously more data.
He was looking at either protein sequences or DNA sequences.
So those are fascinating pieces of evidence.
The fossil record is very nice evidence as well, because you get sequences.
There are not fossils in the wrong place.
When J .B .S. Haldane was asked for what would be convincing falsifying evidence of evolution, he promptly said fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.
They don't happen. There are no fossils that are out of place, out of the sequence.
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What's the current status of the missing link from primate to human evolution?
I remember this is old stuff and it's not something that I've looked into very much, but that the lineage, maybe fossil record, I'm going to guess, there's certain chunks that seem to have large blocks missing.
Is there such a thing?
No, not missing anymore.
What was the status?
Was that when you began your studies?
No, no, no, no, no, long before that in Victorian times, in Darwin's own time, there were no fossils to speak of.
Now we have lots of fossils in Africa.
As Darwin predicted, Darwin guessed that Africa was the place to look.
Why? Why did he choose Africa?
Because of resemblances between humans and chimpanzees and gorillas, which are the African apes as opposed to orangutans and gibbons, which are the Asian apes.
Anyway, that has proved to be the case both in East Africa and South Africa.
A very rich fossil record now of ancestral humans, not of ancestral chimpanzees, but there are ancestral humans.
Have you got a particular favorite or ancestor of ours that you're fascinated with?
Some other branch of the...
Not really, no. I was reading a really great book about Australopithecus.
I thought that was really cool.
That seems like a...
If you're going to be one of the...
Being us isn't bad.
Homosapiens is pretty cool.
Australopithecus seems like a cool...
Yes. They were upright walking, but they had brains not much bigger than a chimpanzee.
So it was like they were upright walking chimpanzees, and they're pretty charismatic.
Mrs. Plez, and they've got names like Mrs.
Plez, Dear Boy, Lucy.
I remember reading as well about...
I think it was only...
When was the last other Homo branch still alive?
It was only 12 ,000 years ago or so.
Is that right? It depends how you define it.
The preceding Homo species is often thought to be Homo erectus, but then there are various other ones which are dubiously assigned specific status like Homo rhodesiensis, Homo heidelbergensis.
These are... As you would expect, they're all intermediates.
Why wouldn't there be...
It would be worrying if there weren't intermediates, but the widespread one is Homo erectus, which originally was meant by the names like Peking Man and Java Man, but they existed all over Asia and Africa.
Was there a shorter, smaller version of us?
Was that over it? Oh, you're thinking of Homo floresiensis.
That's it, yes. Indonesia?
Well, yes. There's one island, Flores, in the Indonesian archipelago where these little midgetty creatures lived.
It's a bit controversial.
Some people think that they were not a different species at all, but just a freak examples of Homo sapiens.
But some people think that they were an island version of Homo erectus.
It's fairly common for island mammals to be either giants or dwarfs.
And for example, on the Mediterranean islands like Cyprus and Crete, there were dwarf elephants, which must have been very sweet.
Am I right in thinking, at least the story that I'd heard about Homo floresiensis was that because of resource limitation, the smaller versions of everything are better able to survive because they need less, fewer calories.
That's one account.
That's one theory for why you get island dwarfism, yes.
Yeah. But I think those miniature elephants may also have been on that island in Indonesia, too, which would mean, if that was true, that you would have had these tiny versions of humans chasing these tiny versions of elephants, presumably with tiny sticks, which it's a shame that we didn't have that.
What's your latest thinking around the hard problem of consciousness?
Where are you at with that?
You're asking the wrong person.
I'm a humble biologist and I don't aspire to the philosophical heights.
I rather doubt whether philosophers actually succeed in that either, but I think it's called the hard problem for a good reason.
And I don't have anything to contribute.
Even from a... What does biology have to say about consciousness?
Does it have anything to say?
It ought to. I mean, one day it will because it is obviously a biological problem.
Why have the philosophers taken over?
I suppose it's just very difficult to see what evidence you could bring to bear on it.
It clearly has something to do with brain activity.
It clearly has something to do with the immense complexity of the brain, the huge numbers of neurons, the even I don't even know what a theory of consciousness would look like.
I can sort of see in the case of the other great baffling thing at the moment, which is the origin of life.
I can see the kind of answer that that would have to be.
Well, we don't know what the answer is, but I know the sort of answer I would expect, but in the case of consciousness, I'm not even sure what it would look like.
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Well, even that's controversial because there have been people who've argued quite reasonably that you could have a robot which was unconscious, which could behave in all ways necessary to survive and reproduce and yet didn't have self -awareness.
And so I think it must have a use.
I think consciousness must have a use, but not everybody thinks so.
And there are people who think that, well, I mean the rather prodigious feats that GPT and other artificial intelligences that we have now, if they were controlling the behavior of a robot animal, it could very well survive, do a very competent job.
Effective zombie. Yes.
And so I, I mean, people are worried about what consciousness is for a long time.
My favorite, I mean, this is total bro science from me as the least educated person out of two people that don't specialize in consciousness.
But my favorite explanation is it seems like human brain size is at least partly driven, maybe largely driven by our requirement to be able to track the size of the social groups that we were in, the complexity of that.
And that to me seems like a fundamental driver of what humans needed to do was related to our social environment.
Therefore, our ability to have a phenomenological experience, a sense of being us, allows us to have a sense of what it's like to be somebody else.
Yeah. And that theory of mind predicting, I know Richard, I know Richard's demeanor, but Richard's not friends with Derek, but Derek's friends with John and John's friends with Richard.
And actually, but John's a little bit more friends with Richard than he is with Derek.
And that to me just seems like, okay.
And the sense and the ability to do math and consider the universe and all the rest of it is maybe a bit spandrel -y and it just sort of...
A bit, just emergent properties.
Yes. I like that sort of theory.
I associate it with Nick Humphrey or Robin Dunbar.
I think Nick Humphrey's version is in order to second guess what your social rivals or friends are going to do, you have to look inside yourself and - First guess.
Yes. Yes. Yes. I mean, I like that.
Good. Good. Well, I'm glad that I've got a speculative seal of approval with regards to that.
One other area, we touched on this a little bit last night, behavioral genetics were about what I think on the cusp of gene embryo selection, then probably getting into just outright manipulation of genes for humans.
Where would you get people to start?
I do think that behavioral genetics and properly understanding that, or at least having a baseline understanding of that in the way that most people do or many people do about evolution is important.
Behavioral genetics seems to be something that I don't think has had necessarily a Richard Dawkins yet for - Well, are you talking now about genetic manipulation or - No, in terms of the fact that we have heritable traits from a behavioral perspective.
Oh, it's a fairly flourishing field.
Lohmann and so on. Yes.
Yes. I don't think...
I don't have a problem with it.
Do you have a problem?
Not at all. There seems to be a lot of pushback against it.
Maybe it's just that the work is more recent.
Maybe it's that people seem for some reason to think that it gets perilously close to eugenics.
Oh, I think that's probably the reason.
Yes. I think it's politically scary to some people.
They don't like the idea of...
I mean, there are still people who hank her after a blank slate and hank her after the idea that the human mind is open to even pour anything into it.
Does that make you want to facepalm yourself into eternity?
A bit, rather, yes.
A bit. I don't understand the hostility, for example, to evolutionary psychology, which, as you know, flourishes here in Austin.
Every other species has a perfectly good behavioral genetics.
There's no reason why humans shouldn't.
Yes. I guess many of the same people that would have a problem with heritability explanations for behavior also have a hypoallergenic cockapoo for a dog.
Yes, quite. Yes. What do we think this is?
What's that? Exactly.
Yes, exactly. If it's not the same over here, which is oddly interesting.
What's your sense around the ethics of gene embryo selection for humans?
And then if we were to take it one step further to the outright manipulation, getting into the hard work?
I don't see any problem with...
I don't think anybody else should see any problem with attempting to remove dysgenic effects like hemophilia, where you can do it without draconian measures.
You can do it with in vitro fertilization, where the current procedure is to have the woman super ovulation, and then you have a dozen or so embryos, zygotes in a petri dish, and you choose one at random and implant it back into the woman.
Well, why choose at random?
Why not choose non -randomly?
In those cases where there is a danger of a hereditary disease like hemophilia, you can examine the genes of these very early embryos.
Instead of choosing at random, choose one of the, say, 50 % that don't have the deleterious gene in question.
If only that could have been done for the Zarevich, Alexei, and similar, I mean other members of the European royal families, it would have been a wonderful thing to do.
Iceland has, I think, completely eradicated Down syndrome in the country.
Obviously not through IVF with screening.
I don't think that that's the way that every woman's getting pregnant.
No. Well, Down syndrome actually is not hereditary.
What is it that... Oh, so this is...
...a neurological defect, but there's no hereditary tendency to get Down syndrome.
That's interesting.
And so it would not be a eugenic.
In a strict sense, it would not be eugenics.
Do you know if two Down syndrome parents are more likely to have a Down syndrome child?
I think not. But I don't know.
No way. That's fascinating.
Well, don't be too...
If it's true. Yes. Okay.
If it's true. I haven't pinned your colors to the flag of that particular claim, don't worry.
Yeah, I think this is...
I've had a number of conversations with guys who are philosophers in this space, who are geneticists in this space, a couple of them that are spinning up companies as well to do this, to bring this service to the general public.
Not cheap. But I think this is probably going to be one of the big frontiers.
I think Gene Embryo Selection and large language models and whatever they end up growing into will be two huge forks.
But who is talking about sort of Gene Embryo Selection that much in comparison?
I was talking about getting rid of dysgenic effects like hemophilia.
It becomes more controversial when you're talking about...
Taller, stronger, smarter.
Yes. Musical genius and that sort of thing.
What's your feelings around that?
Well, I don't understand why people are quite so hostile to it because at the very least, people don't show the same hostility towards parents who are ambitious to have a musical child and force the wretched child to have practice scales all day long.
So you might say it's somewhat less draconian to do an IVF selection in the first place.
And to force your child to sit on the seat and play piano for however long.
So there's a certain amount of self -contradiction I think in consistency going on there.
But nevertheless, positive eugenics of that sort does have a bad rap.
Poor branding. Well, I suppose because of Hitler and but that was a government dictatorial eugenics and similarly in this country actually in America as well.
Whereas what you're talking about with rich people in America, this is voluntary.
This is not government dictated.
The possible objection there is precisely they are rich.
And fair advantage.
These advantages are not available to poor people.
As with most technologies, though, the rich people begin to use them, which increases the supply and then drives the car.
I think the original iPhone adjusted for inflation was like $10 ,000.
The very first iPhone that came out.
And it's still now prohibitively expensive to many people, but significantly lesser.
So yeah, it's that's a very odd circle to square.
I think that the initial advantages that are given to rich people that can afford things before everybody else can are this odd kind of capitalist philanthropy type trickle down effect, which then allows everybody later on to be able to do it.
It's one of those things that maybe doesn't immediately make sense.
Yeah, it'll be very interesting to see, I think, where that world ends up.
And then we get into, I think, the real sort of final frontier, which is if and when we can get in and really tinker with the code of… Yes.
Whether it's from IVG.
Are you familiar with this?
Okay, so IVG, as far as I'm aware, allows you to take any human cell, or a much broader range of human cells, turn them into pluripotent stem cells and from there you can turn them.
So, as opposed to your, what's a normal IVF egg harvest 10, maybe something like that?
10, 12, pick your number.
You have such a higher volume that you can pick from, which allows you to spread the range, which then gives you more options.
But then on top of that, when you can actually get in, and we can start to manipulate individual traits through polymorphic expression, or whatever it is, I think for me, that's one that as yet, I haven't managed to get myself sort of across the line with.
If there's just something, I don't know whether it's a weird naturalistic fallacy, despite the fact that I've never seen genetics at work, like I've never seen the mechanism of it happening, but there's just something about it that I'm not, I just don't know, I don't know where I stand on getting in and tinkering
with our source code quite… You're squeamish about that.
Yeah, a little. I don't really know why.
I was looking, I was actually listening on the way in about some of the ways in which the sperm is selected for, naturally.
So what we're talking about here, when we're talking about embryo selection, I think you're going in and you've got some dashboard on the back end of a website and you say, oh, based on the data it looks like this is going to be that particular preferable child to have.
Are you talking about sperm donors now?
No, this is still about your fertilized embryos that you can have a look at.
But I was listening on the way in to a podcast that was talking about how even before you get to sperm fertilizing eggs naturally, that much of the female reproductive system is actually hostile to weaker sperm.
I didn't know this, that it's slightly acidic, which means that weak sperm don't make it through and there's sort of all manner of different ways that sperm are selected for as well.
I was fascinated, I've never really looked at nuts and bolts of reproduction like that.
I think I'm right in saying that the haploid genotype of a sperm doesn't influence its phenotype, therefore the selection against weaker sperm would not manifest itself in the form of - Stronger children.
Yes. Wow. So this was the exact question I had while I was listening to it in the car, which is, does the strength of the sperm indicate the strength of the strength?
Yeah, I think the answer is no, because I think that the phenotypic characteristics of a sperm are those of the diploid - What's that?
The genotype of the father rather than of the particular individual sperm.
I mean, each sperm has a unique haploid genotype, which is what determines the hereditary aspects of the children, but that haploid genotype I think does not affect things like the swimming speed of the sperm.
I think that's under the control of the diploid genotype of the father, I believe.
That's interesting.
Yeah, there is this - I guess we just look at survival and reproduction as, well, if we make things harder, the tougher ones that get through are very effective, but there can be areas like when it comes to sperm swimming speed where that isn't necessarily indicative of what can happen.
I believe that once again.
I'm not totally certain.
I believe that's the case.
It's fun. Richard Dawkins, ladies and gentlemen.
Richard, I've had so much fun yesterday.
It was fantastic. Today's been really great as well.
We've got a new book as well.
Yes, good. That'll be available at what, once you've got your tour out of the way, which I'm aware you've got quite a few dates and a few continents to get through.
What are you interested in working on next?
Have you got anything in your mind?
Yes, I'm working on another book.
Not like you. Tales from Heckel.
Ernst Heckel was a German biologist and artist.
He was sometimes known as the German Darwin.
He was Darwin's greatest disciple in Germany.
He was also a very good artist.
I'm using his pictures and basing each chapter based upon a different one of his animal pictures.
Richard, I really appreciate you.
Thank you for having me last night and for being here today.
Thank you very much indeed, Chris.
Thank you.
