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Richard Dawkins, welcome back to the show.I am very excited to spend some time with you again.So thank you for joining me.
Well, thank you very much.
Well, you are for anybody that doesn't know, you're a legendary evolutionary biologist as well as a prolific author.
You have a new book out called Books Do Furnish a Life and really taking a pretty beautiful aesthetic look back at science writing and many of the
the really sort of famous conversations that you've had over the years, and the scope of topics that you cover are really breathtaking.The one theme that really stands out to me is just how evolution works, how science works, how we've gotten here.
And as you build trying to get momentum behind secularism and bringing science into a place of prominence almost as an art form, and I don't even know that you would use the word almost.I think you're pretty comfortable with that idea.
And what I find fascinating and I think will be a great jumping off point for us is that the very thing that you're fighting against this tendency towards religiosity, for lack of a better word, is itself a function of evolution.
And then the tools that you use to try to sway the cultural conversation and move people into something that you think would be more beautiful, more useful, I'm not sure what word you will slot in there, is also a tool of evolution.
And so I want to start with this idea of what I'll call the physics of human behavior.What is that base level of how we are as a species.How does our mind work?Why do we tend towards the things that we tend towards?
And how can we move people, nudge them in a direction that might be more useful?
It's a curious matter, isn't it?That our brains were fashioned by natural selection to survive and reproduce on the African savannah.
And for that you didn't need, well, you certainly didn't need quantum theory and relativity and anything other than fundamental physics of the way things move when you touch them and drop them and throw them and things, that of course we had to have.
But it's clear that we've moved hugely beyond what was in a utilitarian sense useful for our evolving ancestors.And I suppose the same goes for art as well.It goes for the aesthetic sense, I suppose.
We have to, as evolutionists, make a case to understand why it is that we are capable of doing science, capable of doing poetry, of doing art, of responding aesthetically, being moved by things. These are mysteries.
They're not beyond solution, but I think they are mysteries that are well worth talking about and thinking about.
Yeah, I agree with that very much.And when I think about what are the things that make life as joyful, as beautiful, as exhilarating as it is, For me, that leads me to face back inward and to look at the nature of my mind.
And so one thing that I've been talking a lot about socially recently is not to think about things, but to think about the nature of things and how they are at a base level.
if I were to prognosticate about what, and I'll say it a different way, what I hope to be remembered for is getting people to really understand that they're having a biological experience.And by that, I mean that your brain works in a specific way.
There are just certain things that it does.And I want someone to write a book about what is our sort of true and fundamental nature?
And so I'm gonna throw out some things that I think are true, and I'd love to hear either your pushback if you think I'm crazy, or if you agree that they are true, then how they came to be true and what their repercussions are.
So one of the most fundamental things I think to the human mind and for people to understand about themselves is that we are constantly deciding what to think about the thing that's happening to us.
So there's a region of the brain, the deep limbic system, that isn't necessarily there to tell you what's happening, it's there to tell you how to feel about what's happening.
And to me, that is, when I think about the journey that you're on, the battle that you're in the midst of, it's anchored in that moment that we feel things that we then, they feel true.
So if somebody says something mean to me or that I perceive as being mean, then I perceive that person as having attacked me, for instance.
And it feels justified for me to have a strong, aggressive reaction back against them until I realize, wait a second, I can insert myself into that moment.
I don't have to believe that emotion because there is an area of my brain that told me that that thing was bad, that that statement was aggressive.But in reality, it may not have been meant that way.It may merely be somebody pointing out a
a falsehood in my thinking or something along those lines.But for me, I was trapped in the emotional cycle until I understood that evolution has delivered this region of my brain that is designed to paint with emotion my experience.
One, do you think that that's a fundamental thing?And if so, how did we get here?
So you're talking about a kind of tussle between the call it the reptilian brain, which responds emotionally in the way that you say it could be an aggressive response, for example.
And the higher mammalian brain, which comes, which steps in and says, no, wait a minute, let's think about this. Yes, that seems plausible to me.It has affinities, I think, with Daniel Kahneman's fast and slow thinking.
And there is a certain tussle, and I think perhaps we have to balance those two.And I suppose what I've tried to do in my writing career is to emphasize the rational
thoughtful side of the brain and to not deny the existence of the emotional, but to try to foster the control of the emotions by reason.
The reason I think that this has come to pass is when I think about the brain from an evolutionary standpoint, it seems like because everything is so context dependent,
And because my brain has to be nimble, and this speaks to sort of why we may have stalled out in the field of artificial intelligence in terms of getting something that is true general artificial intelligence, is that one thing may be good in one context and then bad in another context.
And so for the human animal to achieve what it has achieved, there would have to be a region of the brain that is focused on context dependency, how to feel about something happening.
When I get down and I look under the hood of the brain and I start thinking, why do people act in ways that run contrary to what would be useful to them?
I just keep coming back to that emotional painting has either become pathological given the space that we're living in now in a modern context or was always a difficult thing.
It may be that just this is the nature of the human condition and we're always going to suffer from this.
After reading Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning, and him talking about between stimulus and response, there's a gap and you can insert conscious control over that gap, I really became obsessed with
That to me seems to be the single most important point in any human life, is to understand that, okay, evolution gave you this region of your brain, which is going to read the context, tell you how to feel about what just happened.
So in one context might be good, in another context might be bad.And then you have to understand that you don't have to be a slave to that.You don't have to dance to that tune, that you can insert that conscious control.
Does that feel right to you in terms of, when I think about the trajectory of your career and what you're trying to accomplish with your center and trying to swing people back towards reason and logic, that to me feels like the piece of evolution that you're fighting against.
Yes, I think that could be so.When you say insert consciousness, Strictly speaking, it doesn't have to be conscious.It happens.It is conscious.
But you could imagine an evolved life form which did everything you say, but did not have the spark of consciousness that we subjectively know we have.I think that may be a separate issue from the one you were raising.
I think I'm not entirely sure if I understand what you're raising, actually.
So I, where I'm trying to understand are the things that are very fundamental to the human mind, the things that are going to happen whether you want them to or not.
And so because of what I do, I'm constantly coming into contact with people that are looking for help.
And that help may be I wanna build a better business, that help may be my marriage is imploding, that help may be I want to get better at my job, make more money, whatever.
As I have tried to walk people through those things, I keep asking myself, what has it been that's allowed me to have the kind of success that I've had?
And to me, it always comes back to that moment, the ability to, the frame of reference to distrust my emotions, to not just take them as factual.So, hey, that thing that just happened made me angry.
Is that because what just happened to me is quote-unquote wrong, that there is some moral judgment to be passed on that?
Or is it, hey, evolution has given me this thing which reads the context of my environment, tells me how to feel about it, but that thing isn't tied to my goals, it's tied to evolution's goals.So what I'm trying to get your take on is one,
Do you agree that that's one of the most fundamental things happening in the human mind?And if it is, and we can certainly talk about how it's played out in your life, how you've addressed it.
And then I want to layer on other things that I think, like for instance, we're an active species.I think it is innate to the human brain.
You will go into a space, you will explore it, and you will try to dominate it, and then you will try to exploit it.I think that is just, that is the wiring of the human mind.
And where I find society goes awry or where people end up in just tremendous emotional distress is when they don't recognize that their brain is a product of evolution.It is imperfectly created for a modern context.
And because of that lack of understanding, they end up in these just emotionally tumultuous places with no idea of how to get out.
And so my hope is over our time together, we can lay out and you really touch on so many of these issues in books do furnish a life.
And I'm going to try to thread that needle of what those fundamental things are about the nature of a brain that is the product of evolution.
I think I agree with you insofar as I understand it, but perhaps we should get on to threading the needle and looking at the book itself to see where you're taking this, because this is very much your thesis you're talking about, not mine.
And I'm not sure I understand well enough to, I think I understand what you're saying well enough to take it to, to repeat it to anybody else, so to speak.
fair.So let me ask a really direct question.What do you think are some tenets that are fundamental to the human mind?
Well, many of them would be fundamental to any animal's mind, any surviving creature's mind.So things like hunger and thirst and sex and
the need to dominate fellow species members, the need to do whatever it takes to survive, to reproduce all those sorts of things.
And the discipline of evolutionary psychology studies those in taking account of their evolutionary origin and also in so far as they are modified in the very foreign environment of civilization. So there are all those things.
Then there seem to be emergent properties which have nothing to do with evolutionary survival or only in a very, very indirect sense.
And it's those that mystify me, the capabilities of the human mind in a civilized environment building upon by cultural evolution, building upon the achievements of others. as Newton said, standing on the shoulders of giants.
What the human mind achieves today in the form of science in particular, technology, is utterly bewildering when you think about it in an evolutionary context.It's so far beyond what we're ever naturally selected to do.
So do you think that that's just sort of a almost accidental result of what we have been selected to do?
I think in one sense it is accidental.It would have been very hard to predict it.It would have been very hard to look at Pleistocene ancestors and predict that one day they would be capable of producing Einstein.
And it's hard to see why our brain is capable of reaching so far beyond what was necessary for survival. We mustn't get mystical about it.
I mean, we see it in the form of computers where computers were originally designed as calculating machines and then without any modification to the fundamental architecture.
Lo and behold, they become chess playing machines and simulation machines and AI machines and musical composition machines, et cetera.
Those are all emergent properties, which had nothing to do with the original function of calculation, but simply emerge as a result of the architecture which was originally built to calculate.
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So you recognize that it's happening.We have this sort of emergent phenomenon that is, you know, whether it's music, poetry, wonder, awe, insights into the universe, things that seem wholly unnecessary for just our basic survival and procreation.
Do you have a hypothesis as to how we've ended up here?
Not really, I can only think that something about what was necessary to survive in our particular ecological niche had that emergent consequence.There are various ideas about how that was good for survival.
One idea is that we are a social species, we're a competitive species.We exist in, we swim around in an environment of each other.
And an important part of that, as it is with many species, but in our ancestors, no doubt it was important to dominate, to rise to the top of the tree.
And so the ability to think and to reason and to be intelligent could have been a device for out-competing rivals.
Another theory which is fully compatible with that is that it's sexual selection, that being brainy is sexually attractive, and so those individuals who showed evidence of being able to think well, of intelligence, perhaps artistic ability, the ability to
to recite epic poetry or to do complicated dancing or to do all the sorts of things which don't appear on the face of it to have economic value, to have survival value.
Nevertheless, they might've been appealing to the opposite sex and might've been a vehicle to success in competitive interactions.
Those are two possible pressures that pushed us into having emergent properties which went beyond what would seem to be the utilitarian needs of survival.
That's really interesting to me.So one sexual selection in and of itself is utterly fascinating.It was funny.
There was a really funny part in the book where you talk about how had evolution fully understood what we were doing by inventing condoms, the act of rolling on a condom should have become extraordinarily painful.
And I was like, that is very funny and true.And OK, so as I think about that, what I love about that is As I look at what it would have been like to be coming up from an evolutionary standpoint,
Creativity, for instance, so I meditate to get into a creative state.And when I try to explain to people what the purpose of meditation is for me, one, it's lowering your stress and anxiety just at a physiological level.
But two, it does seem to shift your brain into a different brainwave pattern that I'll call calm and creative.I forget where I first heard that.I'm not making that up.And so I feel like I'm more able to get these
far-flung ideas to connect together, a unique way to use something.
And so if I think back to, you know, whether it's the first use of tools and things like that, you know, using like, you even see some animals doing this where they'll stick like a reed into a honeycomb so that they can pull out the honey without having to just destroy the honeycomb.
And that has to occur to you at some point.And that moment of creativity would have to be one of two things.
So it fits, I am truly just echoing what you're saying, where you've got this, okay, I want to be the best at hunting, gathering honey, whatever the case may be.
So I've got that competitive edge, which makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, but where this gets really fascinating is when my sexual partner is turned on by the fact that I have made this interesting breakthrough of now I can use this tool.
And now you put these two things together and you get this ever escalating arms race of, I want to be more competitive.
And I'm super curious to see if you think this breaks along the sexes at all, if there's going to be a difference in terms of what they find interesting. but I'm going to try to be the best hunter, the best honey gatherer, whatever.
And then that's getting me a sexual mate and my desire to out-compete and then be more clever.And then also that the other person is feeling a sense of awe or wonder when you see somebody do something new and exciting or useful.
That is really, really fascinating.Do you think that explains it, or are you haunted by the idea that there's something more learning there now?
I think that could well be part of it.There's an evolutionary psychologist called Jeffrey Miller who's written a book expounding the idea of sexual selection as a pressure towards becoming, well, towards the expansion of the brain, actually.
Tool use is interesting because If you look at the history of the use of flints, knapping flints, it goes for a very long period without any improvement.And you'd think that if you think about the way we use tools, we copy each other.
An apprentice copies a master tool user and learns from the master and then gets an idea to improve the technique over what the master is doing.
So you see a carpentry or whatever it might be, you're constantly devising new ways, new inventions and mentally visualizing, imagining a better way of doing something that is Obviously, very important in our technology.
And yet, I forget how long it is but but but if you look at the at the record the archaeological record. huge expanses of time when Flint implements didn't get any better.
They stayed at the level they'd got to as though there was no ingenuity going on.And if it was, if sexual selection was driving, you'd expect to see again, improvement.So it's as though something changed at some point and the emergent
race took off, arms race perhaps, arms race with rivals took off.And I'm not quite sure when that would be.I think that there was a moment about 45,000 years ago when there seems to have been a big leap forward in art and creativity.
And who knows what that was due to.
If you had to guess, what guess would you make?Because that's interesting.So my initial, as you were saying it, my initial thought was the innovations were just happening in another area that maybe didn't survive as well.
I would like to think that the boost was given by language, but that's not plausible.I mean, it's not plausible that language wasn't invented until 45,000 years ago.It seems much more plausible if language is older than that.
Nobody knows exactly when language started.And I suppose it's still conceivable that there was no language until the so-called Great Leap Forward.
That strikes me, it's so funny to push back on you who knows 10,000 times more about this than I do, but I know just enough to be dangerous.
Given that whales, for instance, have the equivalent of a name, essentially, they have a lyric, I don't know what words to use around this, but they have a lyric that's unique to them. That strikes me as the beginnings of language.
So if we're seeing it, if we've all, you know, come out of the sea and we're seeing that in creatures that are still in the sea, it strikes me as either it's co-evolving.
And so language just happens to spring up, you know, in several different places and that I forget what animals, but they have like different sounds that they make if they see something red versus if they see something blue.
So there are identifying characteristics across a lot of species that we could sort of lump into, you know, being prototype languages, if you will.So that, to your point, does not seem like it would be... Well, let me say something about that.
There are all sorts of attributes of animal communication, which you could say are sort of using different sounds to mean different things.You can find it all over the animal kingdom, even in bees, in monkeys, in whales, but that's not language.
Language, human language, has this extraordinary capacity of indefinite complexity due to hierarchically embedded syntax.
So the ability to say something like, the man who I saw yesterday who was at the water hole and was drawing water for his wife said to me, so-and-so.
Now that is a grammatically complex sentence with multiple openings of brackets and then closing of brackets.And that is unknown anywhere else in the animal kingdom.
This hierarchical embedding of phrases and clauses within sentences, which in principle are indefinitely expandable. This is the house that Jack built.This is the so-and-so that so-and-so that so-and-so that so-and-so that Jack built.
This capacity to embed sub-clauses within the main sentence and sub-sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses.It's that, I think, that makes human language utterly unique.And the fact that bees and
vervet monkeys can communicate things like, in the case of the bees, where and how far away and what direction food is, the fact that whales can have a name, the fact that monkeys
can give three different alarm calls, one for leopards, one for snakes and one for eagles.That's really small beer compared to the grammatical hierarchical syntax which human language has.
Yeah, that is for sure.So, all right, if we're ruling out language because we know that it didn't or it's implausible that it happened 45,000 years ago, and I'm guessing just because of the complexity that would take far longer than that?
Well, I don't know.I mean, nobody knows.It's possible, I suppose, that linguists do suggest that language evolved once, that all human languages are descended from one single common ancestor.
And if they're right, then that one ancestral language had to come into being at some point.And I suppose it could have been as recent as 45,000 years ago.I mean, it could be.Nothing changed in the brain.
I mean, the brain itself was as fully developed before that time as after. So it doesn't go with any kind of increase in brain size, if that were the case.
And you don't think that the evolution of language would follow a very similar trajectory that, okay, whales have names, there are different calls that monkeys can make based on whether it's an eagle, a leopard, or a snake.
You don't think that that is the early building blocks that then lead to what we have now?
I think that those building blocks had to be there. But the final human advance was syntactic grammar, hierarchically syntactic grammar.
When was the Great Leap Forward?
Well, archaeologically, I quoted 45,000 years, and I dare say it's different in different parts of the world, but that's when you start getting cave paintings and sculptures and things like that.
And do they show up in different places around the world at the same time?
I don't know.I think I'm thinking of Europe there and I'm not sure whether we have the same kind of things in different parts of the world.
That would be utterly fascinating if for whatever reason it takes a certain amount of time for the brain to sort of make that leap.Very, very interesting.I want to go back to sexual selection.What are some of the most fascinating things?
Like one thing that I love about you and that you cover in the book is these moments where
the natural world is so profound that you have, you have a truly elevated, I mean, I will say, basically, it's got to be, to me, the same sort of part of the brain that triggers when you're having a religious experience.
You have that same sense of transcendent awe.What has sexual selection given us that leaves you that sort of gobsmacked?
Well, that transcendent sense I get all the time, not just from biology, but from astronomy, from looking up at the Milky Way galaxy and things like that.Sexual selection has produced some of the most extravagant
I suppose, the most extravagant flowerings of evolutionary exuberance, birds of paradise, peacocks with equivalents in fish, amphibians, mammals in their calls, sexual selection,
has been controversial in evolutionary, in the history of evolutionary theory.It was a controversial matter between Darwin and Wallace.Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, who described himself as more Darwinian than Darwin.
Wallace hated the idea of
what Darwin called sexual selection, because the female choice aspect of sexual selection, in Darwin's view, involved just postulating that females have some kind of aesthetic sense, that females just simply liked, that pea hens, for example, for some reason unknown,
just liked the mesmerizing beauty of peacock tails.Wallace hated that idea because it seemed to him mystical.It's odd that he hated it because Wallace himself got quite mystical later in life and became a devotee of spiritual seances.
However, in the field of sexual selection, Wallace wanted things like peacock tails to be useful.
It's hard to see how they could be useful, but he wanted it to be, if not directly useful, he wanted the peacock's tail to be a badge of utilitarian usefulness in some sense.
And this disagreement between Darwin and Wallace, it's all in a wonderful book by Helena Cronin called The Ant and the Peacock.She traces the,
history of Darwin and Wallace's disagreement from each other and traces it through the 20th century after their deaths.
And so the modern study of sexual selection can be divided between those followers of Darwin and those followers of Wallace in a modern sense.The accusation of mysticism isn't right, you can accommodate it.
You can accommodate the idea of female choice, of female aesthetic preference in a proper model of natural selection, R.A.Fisher did this, R.A.
Fisher, the great statistician and one of the three inventors of population genetics in the 1920s and 30s, where he suggested that you can put a genetic value on female aesthetic preference.
So you say, not only are there genes that make males have tails of a certain shape, size, color, et cetera, there are genes in females that make them like certain features in males.
And you have a co-evolution between the female genes and the male genes.
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as the females evolved to like certain characteristics in males, in parallel to that, males evolved to fit in with what the females like.And if you set up your mathematical model in the right way, that can lead to a runaway process.
whereby tales or whatever it might be become more and more extravagant, more and more ridiculous from a utilitarian point of view.So that was what Fisher achieved.Fisher, as it were, resolved the disagreement between Darwin and Wallace.
But what we might call neo-Wallacians, neo-Wallacians today, don't necessarily disagree with Fisher, but they carry the idea, the Wallacean idea, of sexual selection being a badge of utilitarian functionalism.
So an extravagant peacock's tail can be seen as a badge of health, for example, because W.D.Hamilton suggested this. A female is looking for a healthy mate.
So in a way, natural selection is favoring females that become good diagnostic doctors, that become able to diagnose whether a male is healthy or not.
And using the brightness of a male's plumage, for example, is one way in which females could diagnose whether the male is healthy. And same time, this is the really difficult part of the Hamilton theory.
Males are selected to become easier to diagnose.It's as though natural selection favors males that come with the equivalent of a thermometer sticking out of them to enable the female to diagnose them.
and the theory works even if the male is unhealthy.He's still, natural selection still favors the evolution of thermometers, blood pressure meters in male, not literally, of course, but something equivalent to that.
And so for the Neo-Wallacians, sexual selection favors females that become good diagnostic doctors and males that become advertisers of health.
And the more extravagant, sorry, the more healthy the male is, the more he can afford costly advertisements like extravagantly beautiful long tails, which only a really healthy male could afford to display.
So that's the kind of neo-Wallacian approach to sexual selection.Both of them produce aesthetically pleasing results to us, results that are aesthetically pleasing to us.
And at the same time, results that are aesthetically pleasing to the opposite sex.
You use the word healthy in there, and I want to get a clear definition of what you mean by that.So when I think about humans and what certainly as a guy you're drawn to are signs of fertility, so that we could certainly round to health.
Are females necessarily looking for health or are they looking for signs of fitness, which may be given the evolutionary context an even more complicated word? But yeah, define health for me in that scenario.
In the context I was talking about, health means what we as humans and doctors think of it as meaning.It means freedom from bacteria, from viruses.
For example, one of the points Hamilton, I think it was Hamilton made, is that diarrhea would be a badge of ill health and a long tail might become dirty if you have diarrhea.And so having a long tail, which is clean, is an advertisement of health.
I didn't put that very well. red bear skin in things like turkeys or some monkeys, some baboons, for example, are ways in which the female might gauge the colour of the blood.
I'm not sure how plausible that is, but that's the kind of thing that Hamilton is talking about.
If the male is advertising health for the female, what he does is to bring to the surface those characteristics which would enable a vet, a veterinarian, to diagnose health.
temperature, blood pressure, perhaps breathing cleanly without wheezing, anything that makes health, in the conventional sense, in the sense that a doctor would understand as being health is exactly what Hamilton's talking about.
And what about where some of these things, and they may not indicate ill health, but they certainly become risky from a fitness perspective, whether that's the antlers of a buck, and he's putting so much of his micronutrients into that to build that out, that if he doesn't shed them, he's going to die because he's not going to make it through the winter with
all of his vitamins being stored in his antlers.Or the peacock that has such massive plumage, it'd be far easier to catch and eat by a predator.So is that part of that debate?Is that there?Or is this something else entirely?
No, it is there.The sort of underlying theory we can now attribute to the Israeli zoologist Elmott Zahavi, his so-called handicap principle, which was unfashionable when he first proposed it.And I'm afraid I rubbished it in The Selfish Gene.
And then I had to climb down in the second edition of The Selfish Gene because my colleague Alan Graffin produced a workable mathematical model that shows that it works.
The handicap principle, which is a more general case of what I've just been talking about in the Hamilton health theory, states that a costly display like huge antlers or a huge tail, in the case of a peacock,
only a really fit male could afford to produce this great big tail or these great big antlers.So it is an advertisement that says, I'm capable of paying the genuine cost of this display.And if I were an unfit, weak, unhealthy male,
I would not be capable of it.My antlers would be small.So it goes with a female tendency to choose males who are displaying a costly display such as antlers.
the graph and model shows that this will work under some circumstances, that it is evolutionarily stable, that it can work, but at the same time as males, let's call them males, it could work the other way, but usually it would be males, at the same time as males who have a range of possible displays that they could put out,
And among those are costly ones.So a strategy might be produce a very costly display.
And females at the same time, or the receivers of the signal more generally at the same time, are selected to choose either cost-free displays, something like padded shoulders, which any fool can do,
versus genuine muscular shoulders, which only a genuinely strong male could afford to do.So something like antlers are an unfakeable signal.They are heavy.They endanger the stag.He's more likely to get tangled up in the bushes or caught by a
by a predator.So the male strategy, make your displays as costly as possible, is stable at the same time as the female strategy, insist on only mating with males who make costly displays.That's what we call evolutionarily stable.
And so that evolves, that's why, according to the Zahavi theory, and the Hamilton theory is just a branch of it, that's why, according to the Zahavi-Hamilton-Graphen theory, we see costly displays.
And the thing about peacock's tails is, above all, that they are costly.
They probably cost the male his life because he's more likely to be eaten by a predator if he has a very long, heavy tail that makes it difficult for him to take off, things like that.
Now, how does this manifest in humans?There's obviously the cliches of women flaunt their physical beauty, men flaunt their wealth.Is there truth to that?Is it just a stereotype?What are we doing?
Well, I'm always rather hesitant about what we are doing, although everybody wants to go in that direction.
I'm curious, why are you hesitant?
Oh, because it's politically sensitive.I mean, there are all sorts of political strands which you get dumped on if you start talking about humans in this kind of way.Well, the Zahavi himself loved talking about humans.
And so things like buying a costly engagement ring, taking the woman out to an expensive dinner, that kind of thing, it fits in with his way of speaking.
In the case of humans, we have an apparent reversal because it looks as though, and it's females who wear lipstick and do the kind of peacocky kind of displays.So that kind of works the other way around, if it works at all.
in females, not in all cultures, actually.
I mean, there are cultures where males do the displaying, males do the peacock thing and have great big headdresses and dances where they'd see how they rival with each other, who can jump the highest in a ritual dance, that kind of thing.
But in our culture, it looks as though it's females who are doing the equivalent of the peacock display.
It's really interesting.And if this goes to a point where you're no longer comfortable talking about it, just let me know.But so needless to say, I find humans absolutely fascinating.
And we are, if not the only one of the only animals that where the female obfuscates her when she's able to conceive her. her fertility cycle.
And so one idea that I heard was that the version of wearing makeup is to show sexual signs of like sexual receptiveness.So the blushing of the cheeks, things that mimic sort of being aroused.And whether that's true or not, I don't know.
But that certainly is a an interesting way to look at it if, OK, I hide it and so I need to have ways where I can cue somebody in. is one particular way.
Do you have a take on why female reproductive cycle is hidden when in all other animals, at least that I know of, there's like a grand display to let you know?
It's a pretty hot topic, female concealed ovulation.There's a certain amount of evidence which is probably controversial as to whether it really is completely concealed.
One of the studies that's been done by evolutionary psychologists is the study of dancers at clubs, pole dancers or hostesses at clubs where they live on tips, they have drinks bought for them and they get tips.
And somebody, I forget who, did a study in which they measured the amount of the tips that these women got and correlated it with their sexual cycle.And what the study found was that the tips went up when they were ovulating, which might suggest that
Maybe there's some kind of pheromone that's subconsciously being detected by the men who are doing the tipping.
Or it might suggest that the women have some kind of subconscious knowledge of when they're ovulating and this changes their behavior in some way.But that's one study that I know of about women. concealed ovulation.
As for the evolutionary advantage of concealed ovulation, the obvious advantage in not concealing it is you tend to get mated when you're ovulating, which is what chimpanzees do in a promiscuous fashion.
But in a species where the female needs to count on male loyalty,
if the male doesn't know when she's ovulating, that might provide a pressure for him to stick around and be loyal to one female rather than go dashing off away from a female who is not ovulating and simply homing in on whichever females are ovulating, which is what male chimps do.
this is to me where this stuff starts to get really fascinating.
You know, obviously I know right now it's very taboo to talk about the differences between sexes, but that to me is crazy making because it's so disconnected from what actual life experience is like.
And I mentioned this to you the first time that we met that five years ago, if you had asked me, I probably would have described humans as being more or less a blank slate.And then the more that I,
get in there and really look at what's going on, I realize that we're not, that there are, you know, let's call it 50% that's hardwired, 50% that's malleable, and then there are differences between the sexes.
And it's like the more I look at the differences between the sexes, the easier it becomes to relate to my wife, to understand, to like get how she approaches the world.And it's
It's absolutely enlightening and I don't think that one is better than the other.I just find it utterly fascinating from an evolutionary standpoint how we've got this race of different needs and I'll be curious to get your take on this.
From what I've read and what seems logical to me, the real big thing comes down to for a woman, it is just obscenely resource intensive to have a child.
From nine months of having to carry that child to then having to take care of it after it's born to this years long period where it has to be cared for just constantly.Whereas for the guy, it's very low, right?So there's low investment.
It's basically whatever the biological cost of the semen is. And that's it.
And so you would expect, from an evolutionary standpoint, that you would get into this sort of fascinating co-evolution to be sure, but that they would go in opposite directions, that women are going to be tuned to what I've heard referred to as a sort of detective mode, like you said, of being able to see, is this guy going to be loyal?
Are they going to be there?Are they going to help me raise this child? What are ways that you see that play out differently in men and women that give you hints to our evolutionary past?
What you've just laid out is the standard evolutionary argument which applies to any species. It's due to Robert Trivers, to Bill Hamilton, to R.A.Fisher, in various forms.
And it's the economic imbalance between the sexes where the female sex is the economically valuable sex, the scarce resource.
because, as you say, the female makes a tremendous investment, especially in mammals, but it starts off with the fact that eggs are bigger than sperms, and from that much else follows, including in mammals the fact that females are invested in
in prolonged pregnancy and then lactation and so on, which males do not have to pay that cost.And so it is possible for males to distribute their genes among lots of females and get away with it.But so that there is
potentially a selection pressure on males to become promiscuous, which there isn't in females.So because the female doesn't benefit once she's pregnant, there's no further benefit in mating with anybody. and so on.
I mean, it's all pretty obvious stuff.And Trevor develops a theory in a very sophisticated way.And you've just applied it to humans.
And it seems to me entirely sensible that there seems to be no reason why you should not apply to humans if you want to.You get into political trouble if you do.And there's a kind of
standard sociological response, which is the blank slate, the view that humans come into the world knowing nothing and there's everything about them, everything about us comes in through the environment, through education and imitation and so on.
And there's no predisposition among the sexes. The Blank Slate, well, have you seen Steve Pinker?Have you ever interviewed Steven Pinker?
I haven't interviewed him, but I've read the book, The Blank Slate, for sure, which informed much of, I would love to.So yes, hopefully one day soon.
He's a very, very clever intellectual and knows an enormous amount about lots of different things.And The Blank Slate is one of his excellent books.
So, yes, I mean, the issue of the balance between genes and environment in any animal, but including humans, what we're really talking about there is the study of variance, the study of variation.
How much, what proportion of variation can be attributed to genes? And this is really just a sub-department of the analysis of variance, which statisticians use all the time.
Fisher developed the analysis of variance looking at agricultural data, where he was looking at the contribution of fertilizer and rainfall and genetics of wheat plants and so on, and calculating the proportion of the variance that you can attribute
to fertilizer, to rainfall, to soil quality, and to genes.And you can do that in any creature, it doesn't have to be wheat plants, you can do it in humans, you can do it in anything you like.
And heritability is the word he used, one uses for that proportion of the variance which can be attributed to genes. And it's not an absolute figure because it depends upon the environment that you provide.
But one of the ways in which it's studied is with twin studies, where you know that identical twins have all their genes in common, and you know you can compare them with fraternal twins, twins who are just like ordinary siblings.
And you can calculate, therefore, the proportion of the variance which can be attributed to genes.You can calculate this by comparing monozygotic, identical twins, with fraternal dizygotic twins.
And you get a figure which varies from what you're measuring to what you're measuring.So in the case of height, it's, it's a very high correlation, a very high correlation between identical twins as opposed to fraternal twins.
So if you know how tall one twin is, you can predict with pretty good accuracy how tall his or her identical twin will be, but with less accuracy, how tall fraternal twin will be.
Now, what you do is you compare those figures with those cases where identical twins are reared apart.It doesn't happen often.
but it happens sufficiently often that you can get some data, twins that are separated at birth for one reason or another and given different foster or adoptive parents.
And so by comparing identical twins reared together, identical twins reared apart, fraternal twins reared together and fraternal twins reared apart, you come up with a heritability figure.And for Haida, say it's very high,
For weight, it's not so high because it depends more on how much you eat.For IQ, it's remarkably high, which is politically unfashionable, but it's true.
Because people don't want IQ to be tied to genes?
Yes. But nevertheless, the facts are there, and so you can study the heritability of anything you like by doing twin studies.
And so as you look at the things that are heritable, not heritable, how does that help us better understand as men and women are co-evolving for sure, but there are these divergent paths.
One, I'll give an example of the kind of thing that I'm asking towards.So one example that I heard was when you understand female power structures, then you really begin to understand sort of this dynamic between men and women.
And the person speaking was saying, look, to think that women don't have hierarchical structures within their own female-to-female peer groups would be just a gross misunderstanding.
And she was saying, basically, you don't look at men and go, oh, I'm going to go compete on a physical basis.You find another way to make sure that you can, you know, get safety, get cooperation, you know, get your own needs met, all of that.
And she said, so it becomes this very social thing, which is why you see in female peer groups, there is this like status ranking.
And when you talk to women in a N of one study, to be sure this is not, you know, a truly controlled study, then they'll say, yeah, there's, you know, you get these sort of pecking orders, but it's all psychological, it's all social.
And then when you get men, it's very physical, whether it's jumping the highest, running the fastest, fighting, whatever.Like it's just very obvious.
And understandably so, in terms of our evolutionary past looking at a hunter-gatherer society, guys are going to evolve to be better at things like, and tell me if this is controversial, I think this is well accepted, that men are better at tracking movement, for instance.
And you can understand why that would be advantageous out on a hunt. and that in terms of upper body strength, men on average, these are obviously just averages, men on average have better upper body strength.On average, they're taller.
But when you start looking at ultra long distance running, for instance, the sexes begin to even out.And so if as a tribe, we had to move over tremendously long distances together, then you would understand why that would end up evening out.So one,
I'm sure some of what I just said is controversial, but to be honest, I don't know which parts.So I'd love to know, like in there, are there people that, you know, would dispute any of that?
I don't know about the rivalries in female groups.It does seem to me to be utterly implausible to suggest that given that males and females have different
physical organs, their different sizes, different physical strength, as you say, different roles to play in reproduction.It would be really remarkable if they didn't have psychological differences as well.
And that, of course, is not to say that one is better than the other.But if the difference is in everything else, why wouldn't there be differences in psychology as well?
So I think, as Steve Pinker himself says, it would be very implausible if the sex differences in bodily features were not reflected in brain and mind features as well.
Yeah, that makes sense to me.So my grandest curiosity around evolution is probably the difference between the sexes.
For you, is there like one question that, man, if I could ask a magic machine and it would give me the definitive answer on this one thing, what question would you ask?
I think there'd be two. One would be the evolution of consciousness, subjective consciousness, which I think is a big mystery. I'm not even sure what a solution to it would look like.And are we talking about the hard problem of consciousness?
The hard problem.I'm not even sure whether it would be a matter of brain physiology or computer science or philosophy, but it's the hard problem.And I'd like to see that solved.Much less difficult and much less profound, the origin of life.
a bit of a barrier.Once you have DNA and then natural selection, genetics gets going, natural selection gets going, evolution gets going, we understand really everything that happened.
In principle, we understand everything that happened once DNA was in place, and up and running.
And then it's a straight run through to all the different, the panoply of different kinds of animals and plants that we see, all the different ways, predators and prey and trees growing and humans too.
But the very first step before you got DNA, before you got the origin of genetics is a barrier.It's not understood yet.
It's not a profound thing like the hard problem of consciousness, but nevertheless, it's something which I would like to know the answer to.
It lies in the realm of chemistry, which is not my field, so I'm not going to understand it in detail, but it'd be nice to have that problem solved.
And now, I'm not surprised those are your answers.I actually should have been able to predict that.
So those are the two things that I would say really come to the core of what I think you will say is the sort of central purpose of your life, which would be that so many people default to there was a creator to explain those two very things.
And that's got to be the place where I'm sure people come to when debating with you around those two.
Like that, hey, isn't it ironic that the two things that science don't yet have an answer for are the exact two things you don't need an answer for when you have a creator.
If you had to guess, and I get that it's chemistry, do you think that one day we will find, oh, when certain molecules are at the center of a volcano and they are struck by lightning, then it's going to be something like that or like those hot plumes in the core of the ocean?
Okay, so we have like a really, your prediction is there'll be a very straightforward set of circumstances that need to occur in sort of unusual places and that will be that first spark of life?
Yes, with a reservation.I mean, one reservation is that it is possible, I think it's highly unlikely, but it is possible that we are unique.It's possible that this planet is unique. and there's only ever been one origin of life.
There's only one life form anywhere in the universe, and it's us.If there is only one life form, it has to be here because obviously we're here talking about it.So we cannot rule out that possibility.
Now, if that's true, and I don't think it is, but if it were true, then it would follow that the origin of life is a,
ridiculously improbable event, a freakishly, stupendously, staggeringly improbable event, which would mean that although there has to be an explanation, it must have, because it did happen here, it might never yield to any kind of research strategy.
Because if it's only happened once in the universe, then we are not looking for any kind of plausible explanation.We're looking for a highly implausible explanation.
If there was a plausible explanation, then it would have happened all over the universe, which it probably has, or at least billions of times.Note, by the way, what a small number a billion is.
when we're talking about the universe as a whole, there could be billions of independently arisen life forms dotted around the universe, but so widely scattered, since the universe is so huge, so widely scattered that none of them ever meets, ever encounters any of the others.
So as far as they're concerned, they might as well be the only ones. I don't think that's the case.
I think that life is probably, I think the universe is crawling with life probably, in which case the origin of life on this planet is not a highly implausible event, is not a very rare event, and is an event which students of chemistry should eventually solve, at least come up with a plausible explanation.
They might not be able to prove that it's the right one, But it might be such an elegant explanation that it pretty much has got to be right.
Or yes, I think it's unlikely that we'll ever be able to say this is definitely the way it happened because we can't witness it.It happened so long ago.But I think that's a different order of difficulty.
That's a much easier problem than the hard problem of consciousness.
Before we move on to the hard problem of consciousness.
Don't even try to move on to the hard problem.
Oh, I definitely have some questions I want to ask you around some of the prevailing theories, even if you just say they're ridiculous.
But before we do that, so in the book you talk about, I didn't realize you used to code, like literally code for computers.And so you have deep insights into just how much like code DNA really is.
Give us a quick explanation, because until I heard you talk about it, I knew that you could like write a book in DNA, which I still find utterly startling. But what is code?And why is DNA just like it?
Well, in computers, as you know, it's all binary.And in DNA, it's quaternary.Otherwise, it's pretty much the same.
Okay, so really fast, let's define that.So binary for computers, for people that don't know, zeros and ones.That's it.Everything comes up from that.
Everything is zeros and ones.And so in some computers, it might be. plus four volts and zero volts, or it might be minus four and zero, it could be any, it doesn't matter what it is, as long as it's two different states.
And those states are represented mathematically as zeros and ones.And then you have built upon that, you have machine codes where various combinations, it might be, you know,
bytes, that would be eight bits, eight zeros and ones might represent one kind of coded instruction to the computer, like add or move this number to this place.And at machine code level, what you're doing is, forgive me if you know all this.
No, please speak to the audience, if nothing else.
When you're writing machine code, you're writing pretty close to the bottom level, to the level where you've got bytes of, say, 8 bits of information or 12 bits of information, something like that, and the
the binary digits either represent instructions or they represent numbers.And so instructions operate upon numbers.So you're writing code at a level which is very close to the binary.
You don't actually type naught, one, naught, one, one, one, one, one.What you type is, it might be three-letter codes which translate directly into a binary number.
And then built on top of that, you then have higher level languages, which are closer to human language, closer to English or some human language.And they look like instructions, like
loop a hundred times, and as you do so, call this subroutine, which calls this subroutine, which measures, does something or other.
So you're writing in a language like C, or Algol, or Fortran, or COBOL, or lots of different languages, Python, which get translated into a binary form.
by either a compiler or an interpreter, which are two different ways in which that translation can take place.So you're writing in something akin to the way humans think. and that gets translated into the binary form for the computer to operate.
Well, DNA is quaternary, not binary.So instead of having noughts and ones, you have A, T, C, and G. At the machine code level, it's triplets, which get translated into the binary form.
instructions for stringing together amino acids, which make proteins.And proteins, in terms of what matters, are enzymes, which are catalysts, which catalyze chemical reactions in the cell or in the body.
And the embryonic development, the embryological processes that give rise to development,
are things like sheets of cells coiling up, invaginating, spreading around, moving around in the embryo in ways which are ultimately determined by DNA, slightly more proximally determined by proteins acting as enzymes, which speed up chemical reactions, particular chemical reactions rather than others.
And so the orchestration of the embryonic development is done by enzymes, proteins, being called into action, being called into existence indeed in the cell at strategic times during embryonic development. And that orchestration is achieved by DNA.
So natural selection, which works on changing the frequencies with which some genes, some strings of DNA exist in the population relative to others.
that has the immediate effect of changing which proteins get synthesized in which cells when, which has a slightly more distant effect of changing the processes of embryonic development, which has an even more distant effect of changing the way the animal actually is and behaves and looks and so the DNA in this
rather long cascade of causal influences, starting with proteins and going on through embryology, influences the shape of the animal, the behavior of the animal, the form of the animal, which influences whether the animal survives, whether the animal reproduces, and that influences whether the genes which made the animal do that survive in the gene pool or not.
So genes survive in the gene pool by virtue of their effects on embryology, which has the effect of making animals, which have the effect of causing the genes to survive or not survive, depending upon whether the animal dies or lives before it manages to reproduce.
So that's, what causes some genes to survive and other genes not to survive and that is natural selection.
Okay, so this is so fascinating.Is the only thing that DNA does tell the body what proteins to produce and when?
Well, that's the main important thing it does, but it also influences what other genes do.So there's a kind of cascade of control.
But by do, does it always come down to the creation of a protein?
Yes, I think it does.But what that protein might do is cause some other genes to get turned on.So you could have a kind of hierarchy of control of genes, controlled by other genes, controlled by other genes.
And we will definitely get to that.But this is so fascinating in terms of Going back to my central thesis in life, understanding you're having a biological experience.We talked about this in the first interview.
For me, once I can imagine it, I don't know, I can somehow insert my conscious mind into that thing because it is no longer mystical.It is something I can picture.
And when I can picture it, I feel like I have a certain level of ability to orchestrate.We'll set that aside.But that's why I'm gonna press on this, because I think it's so useful.So, all right, my DNA is,
telling some sort of compiler, which I think is RNA, right?The RNA reads the DNA and like helps somehow orchestrate this.I don't want to get lost in the weeds, but for anybody paying close attention.
Okay, so my DNA is a set of instructions, like computer code.And what it's saying is, hey, create this protein at this point, because that protein is going to go do something.
It could be acting as an enzyme to speed up a chemical reaction, as you said.
And all of those things, as it layers and stacks, like you were talking about with the subroutines within a computer, as it layers and stacks, it becomes you, it becomes me, it becomes all of us.
So we get sort of the end state level of complexity from that we have consciousness that the Krebs cycle works, that we're moving along the electron transport chain appropriately.I mean, it is just, immeasurably complicated.
But it starts with this really, really basic thing, which is create this protein at this time.Now I want to get into genes.So when we think about DNA, are genes a snippet of that code that is a complicated string of create this protein at this time.
So basically subroutines that it calls, and it's literally a display.Can I go in and cut out that chunk of DNA and go, this is a gene?
Yes, you can.It would be a length of DNA, which would code for one polypeptide chain with one protein chain.There's nothing obvious
if you look along the length of a chromosome, just a huge, great long string of DNA, that there isn't a kind of obvious divide between where one gene ends and the next one begins.There are punctuation marks, which are just other three-letter codes.
So not only are there codes for the 20 amino acids, There's also a stop sign.There's also a full stop, which just looks like any other codon, any other triplet.There are, by the way, I'm going to sneeze.Excuse me.
There are lengths of DNA which are called introns. which is sitting in between exons, which are actually expressed.The introns are not expressed.So they're rubbish.They're not doing anything, but they're just there.
I suppose it's a bit like on a hard disk of a computer, there are bits of the disk which aren't doing anything.And what looks like a coherent,
chapter of a book you're writing, for example, it appears to be all in one place because you can read it as a single tract of text.
Actually, it's fragments dotted around the hard disk of the computer with signals to say, now go to this bit, now go to this bit, now go to this bit, and string it together.So the genome is a little bit like that, where the introns are the kind of
gaps of meaningless rubbish between the exons which are expressed.And there are lots of old genes lying around which used to do something useful but aren't used anymore, have been kind of shut off.
Which by the way is a big problem for creationists because it's hard to imagine why the creator would litter the genome with these genes that once did something, and you can see what they once did, but they no longer do.Really?Give me an example.
Well, we have a very inferior sense of smell compared to dogs, for example, but we still have many of the genes for smelling things that we can no longer smell.They've just been set aside.They've been sidelined.Like what?
Well, I don't know specifically.I mean, I suppose maybe champion wine tasters may have managed to get the heat turned on.I don't know about that.
That's so interesting.I didn't know that that was true.So could you go in and turn them back on?
Wouldn't that be lovely?I mean, I would like to think you could.I don't think it's ever been done.
So when we get into CRISPR-Cas9, for anybody that doesn't know what that is, it's basically using a virus, if I'm not mistaken, getting it to go in and actually edit out pieces of DNA and either then just glue them back together or replace it with itself, I can't remember.
But it's going in and changing our genes.Is it doing that?Is it turning on old things?Is it Or can we insert whatever code we want?
Yes, I mean, I think the way the future is that it will be in principle possible to do all kinds of insertions of that sort.And you probably know that it's being done in animals and plants, inserting antifreeze genes from Arctic fishes.
and in vegetables so they don't perish that's because I mean it it's it's a remarkable fact that that the molecular genetics revolution has brought about it brought into our consciousness that dna is just dna is dna it's the same the whole of the living kingdoms over and so in principle you can pick up a gene it's just like a
a subroutine for computing square roots or something.You could just borrow it.You can borrow a square root subroutine and stick it in any program you like and it'll do its job.
And so genes are in principle like that and can be transplanted and they will do whatever it is they're supposed to do in another creature.
That is insane.Did you say within reason?
Well, yes.I mean, they find themselves in a foreign genetic environment and so they may not do what you hope they'll do, but they often do.
I don't know that this is true, but I remember hearing that people were experimenting with things like cats that glow in the dark because there are, have they actually done that?
Yes.I forget where the gene comes from, maybe a jellyfish or something like that.
That's yeah, what I think, yeah.
That's insane.So it's legal or people are doing that just in secret labs?Not legal in humans.
As to whether it's legal in cats, I guess that might depend on which country you're in.
Wow.I mean, this really becomes this sort of crazy Wild West scenario.I haven't forgot about the hard problem of consciousness, but this does remind me.So I know at one point you were writing a science fiction book, which I hear you have shelved.
But the core thesis is so interesting that I do want to put myself in the cacophony of voices asking you to finish it. But if you don't mind walking people through sort of what the core idea was behind the book, because it feels sort of tied to this.
Yes.OK.I'm not the only person who thought of doing this.My idea was to have a scientist, my heroine, who wanted to revive a prehistoric species of human.
Originally she wanted to revive Australopithecus Lucy, but she was persuaded to switch to Homo erectus.
So her method was, in my story, I've written about six chapters of it, her method was to, what she called triangulate, take a human genome, which is known, and the chimp genome, which is known, and reconstruct
the common ancestor by triangulating back from these two modern genomes and trying to work out what the ancestor could have been which gave rise to both these two modern genomes.
And then having got the common ancestor, then split the difference between that common ancestor and modern humans and reconstruct the genome of an Australopithecine, that would be a fossil human lived about 3 million years ago in Africa.
And then put that into a woman.She was going to be that woman.I mean, she just became so dedicated, so absorbed in the program that she insisted on being the, woman into whom the cloned Australopithecine egg was implanted.
And then the rest of the book was going to be, which I never got around to writing, was going to be the social, psychological, political problems faced by this woman giving birth to
a prehistoric, long extinct hominin and all the political, religious debates and the fury that would erupt around her and things like that.I never got, that was going to be a part two of the book and I never got as far as part two.
Well, hopefully you will get to that at some point.I forget who the science fiction writer was that said the following quote, but I think this is brilliant.
Our job as science fiction writers is not to imagine the car, it's to imagine the traffic jam.And I've just always found, oh God, it's so good.And it's so true.It's like,
You're touching on these ideas of morality and what would it mean and putting us in a position where we have to make decisions.To me, in fact, your book raises the exact same kinds of questions.
They're not the same questions, but the same kinds of questions that we have to answer as we create autonomous vehicles. because they will have the ability to make a decision between killing somebody here or risking the driver's life.
And so you actually have to program that.Is it better to kill the pedestrian or to risk the driver?Like, where does the obligation lie?I mean, it's so fascinating.
As you know, moral philosophers have this so-called trolley problem where they, it's a whole family of problems where you have the dilemma of whether to pull the lever that moves the trolley so that it kills
one person as opposed to killing five people and you know on the face of it it seems that the moral thing to do is to pull the lever so it kills the one person but you'd actually murder that one person you actually kill that one person and then another version of it is that the trolley is going down the track is about to kill people and there's a very fat man sitting on a bridge above the track and if you push him off that's the only way you can stop this trolley from killing those those people and
almost everybody shies away from saying yes, they will push the fat man off the bridge.It's different from, somehow it's different from the earlier dilemma of putting the lever and killing the one rather than five.
Because by pushing the fat man off, you're actually using him as the bridge. obstacle.But now you've pointed out that with autonomously driving cars, this is no longer an academic dilemma for moral philosophers, it's actually an engineering dilemma.
You have to decide how to program your autonomous car When it's faced with a decision, shall I swerve to avoid the old lady on the road crossing?If by doing so, I kill the child or vice versa?What if one of the people is Beethoven?
Well, not Beethoven, but some modern equivalent of Beethoven.And these are the stuff, the stock in trade of moral philosophy, which has suddenly come to practical fruition in the design, the programming of self-driving cars.
Yes, and then we're also going to see similar things.There was a doctor in China, I believe, that cloned two girls.Wait, I might be conflating two things.
There was definitely a doctor, again, I believe it was in China, that edited the genes of two twins.If I remember the story correctly, he was trying to give them an increased resilience against HIV.
But I guess there's also a knock on that it may also increase their intelligence.And so then it becomes a question like, should you be able to edit that?
I mean, it would be great for if you step back and take a thousand year view, if we could make humans exponentially more intelligent, that to me seems like a good thing.But there will inevitably be just massive turmoil in the short term.
And so it becomes a question of, Do we, I mean, at that point we certainly are playing God, like, but what if it's a gene, like a single gene mutation that gives them a debilitating and painful disease?
Okay, everybody's gonna agree that you go in and fix that.So, oh man, it gets really interesting.
I think, I mean, as you say, most people would accept that if there's a deleterious gene,
Say you were using IVF, in vitro fertilization, where you have in your petri dish, you have say 10 fertilized eggs, and you know that half of them on average will have hemophilia.
Well, at present what you do is, when you're doing IVF, what the doctor does is to pick one of these zygotes at random and implant them back in the woman.But you could do it non-randomly.You could
investigate, you can tell when these things have reached the eight cell stage, you can remove one of those eight cells and test it for its genes.
And if you could test it for say hemophilia, then it would seem to be an obvious thing to, instead of choosing a zygote at random, choose one of the 50% that does not have hemophilia.And yet there are some people who would object to that.
and say it was playing God and you should let nature take its course, et cetera.Well, most people probably would accept that kind of selective choosing to avoid hemophilia.
But if instead you could test whether genes for, I don't know, being a brilliant musician or a brilliant mathematician whether you could choose non-randomly from these zygotes, choose one that predisposes the baby to be born.
as a musical genius, another Mozart, well, not a Mozart, but just say a good musician, then why wouldn't you do it?But there are many people who draw the line at that.They say, it's okay to select against haemophilia.
It is not okay to select these eggs in favor of a desired characteristic like intelligence or musical ability.
Yeah, or even good looks.So there, I don't know how accurate it is, but I've seen people purporting that you can now scan somebody's DNA and get a rough estimation.It looks like you're looking at them through sort of lightly frosted glass.
But you get a sense, like you can see sort of the shape of the face and, you know, the color of the hair and stuff.It's really quite interesting.And they show here's what the image we got from their DNA.And then here's what they actually look like.
And it's if that's what we're getting already, it's very eerie in terms of how well we'll be able.
And can you give me a reference to that?
Yeah, I'll have to send it to you.I'll have to re-look it up.This was something I saw a couple of years ago and just thought, whoa, this could get very interesting very fast.
Yeah, let's see.I certainly don't know, but it seems like it would be plausible.The only catch is how much of your nutrition, early encountering parasites, things like that would alter something like that?That is, I suppose, a big question.
But theoretically, you should be able to.I mean, the information is there, right?
Oh, yes.It's entirely plausible that facial features would be included in deeds.Of course, of course, they are.What I'm skeptical about is whether yet technology... Yeah, that's another question.You can read it.
No doubt.All right.So I want to talk really fast about the hard problem of consciousness.Even if, again, just to get your take that it's all baloney, I had never heard of panpsychism before.
And it is just quickly the theory that basically consciousness is sort of the bottom layer.It's everywhere.It's in rocks.It's in the very fabric of the universe.
That's people, I think, saying, I just can't get to the point where you add another brain cell and suddenly you're conscious.
And so if it isn't a sort of progressive stacking that gets you there, then it would, by their estimation, need to be sort of ever present.The first time I heard it,
It didn't seem like there was really anybody talking about it or that it was very serious.It has continued to gain steam.And I'm just curious what if you had to guess at where we're going to end up.Is it something like that?
Is it something entirely different?
I think it's bollocks. I think it will be, I mean, consciousness will be a manifestation of very large numbers of neurons, computational units of one sort or another, interacting with each other.
The idea that every particle in the universe has a minute mote of consciousness seems to me to be complete rubbish.And I, I would be hugely surprised if there were any decent evidence for that kind of thing.
You talk a lot about how, you know, look, physics is just hard to understand.A lot of people that are even physicists say that there are, you know, parts of physics that they just can't wrap their head around.
That's how I feel about this, about the hard problem of consciousness.I just can't, I don't know what that would mean
because what we think of as consciousness, like being aware that you're having an experience, that red is a thing, that it has qualities.OK, so if that's consciousness, I know that I can damage that just by damaging your brain.
And so but like there are a lot of smart people that just are not compelled by that.And that's where
Yeah, I don't know, something breaks down where I can no longer understand, and I am perfectly willing to accept I'm just not bright enough, but I don't understand how then the default answer is... No, nobody understands it.
I mean, that's not unusual. But I don't think it helps to say that the whole universe is conscious or every grain of sand is conscious or every atom is conscious or anything like that.
I think it's got to be a manifestation of great complexity of interacting units. no one of which is conscious in itself, but when you put them together, consciousness emerges from the interactions among them.
That's certainly what it seems like to me, I will say.Yeah, I don't know, I can't reach beyond it, my intellect unfortunately is not capable.
Yeah, it'll be very interesting to see if and when any sort of new breakthroughs happen on that.It's a fascinating problem, but yeah, I don't see any end in sight for that one.
I want to ask you, of all people, about what's happening to culture in the age of hyperconnectivity with the idea of memes.
So for those who don't know, you were the one that popularized this idea of memes, which is now like, I mean, we talk about culture as being meme culture.One, a quick definition of a meme.
Do you think it's being used accurately when people say that this is a meme culture?And then what happens when ideas are able to spread globally so rapidly through memes as they're defined now?
Well, a meme is the cultural analog of a gene.
So just as evolution by natural selection is a matter of the differential survival of genes which are self-replicating entities, and they're very high fidelity self-replicating entities, and they influence their own survival in the gene pool in the ways that we talked about earlier.
Culture, cultural evolution is a real phenomenon.It really looks like evolution.It really has the same progressive qualities as evolution does.
And I wanted to end the Selfish Gene, my book Selfish Gene, by saying that although the whole of the rest of this book has been an advocacy of the gene as the replicator which underlies evolution.Any replicator could do the job.
Anything that is self-replicating with occasional mistakes, occasional errors in replication could do the job.And I pointed out that on other planets in the universe, which have evolved life.
There has to be some equivalent of DNA, but it may not be DNA.It certainly isn't DNA, but it will have the same property of self-replication with occasional error.Well, memes are that thing in human culture.
They are anything that is copied from one brain to another. might be a tune, it might be a clothes fashion, it might be an accent of speech.
Anything that is copied is potentially, well it is a replicator, and potentially it might be a unit of selection if there is selective survival in the mean pool of some memes rather than others.And trivially, this is true of things like catchy tunes.
We call them catchy.That means they are self-replicating.They get, not only, they replicate.When you hear a tune whistled and you whistle it as well, if it's a good tune, it gets copied and passed around.So it's a hypothesis that
Cultural replicators might be units of Darwinian selection in the same kind of way as genes are, in which case memes are evolutionarily interesting.
The internet opens up a whole new opportunity, a whole new ecosystem in which memes could flourish and a whole new, environment in which research on memes could take place.
You could use the computer techniques looking at the internet to study the propagation, the survival value of alternative memes and presumably advertisers, market researchers, people who are trying to
work out how best to influence us and persuade us to buy their product rather than a rival product or persuade us to vote for this candidate rather than that candidate could benefit from doing mimetic research and studying what it is that makes
certain ideas go viral, as we say.And I introduced the idea of the meme as a virus of the mind.Something that goes viral is a successful meme.
And the whole aim of an advertising agency is to try to find ways to make their advertisements go viral, to sell their product.
So it starts out as an analogue of a gene, then becomes evolutionarily interesting insofar as natural selection of a kind, not Darwinian, not genetic selection, but a kind of Darwinian selection operates within culture.
Now, so when I look at this, the speed of replication seems to be a big component of this.In fact, I will describe meme as I understand it, and I'm curious to get your take if you think these are the right layman's terms to use.
So memes require a simplification of an idea. Memes require that the, and now I'm talking specifically like what we call internet memes, so simplification of an idea, an idea that can be replicated with new context over and over and over.
And then it has a lock and key effect to something in the brain. So that I'm either I have a receptive nature to the emotion that it evokes.That's right.I think that's the right way to say it.
So take, for instance, you've got there's a meme going around where it's like these four panels.It's taken from one of the Star Wars films where a young Anakin is talking to Princess Amidala.
And it shows he's, you know, got some like vague emotion on his face and then she's smiling in response.And then the third panel is he's leaning in like with this sort of mischievous grin.And then in the fourth panel, she's serious.
And so you layer on top of that.He says something like, you know, I'm going to build.
a drone army and she goes oh that's amazing for good and then he has the wicked smile and then she says for good right with the like concern on her face and dude people insert like anything into that like four sort of beat moment
And so it could be a restaurant could use it about we're launching a chicken sandwich, you know, for good.Right.Or it's spicy.Right.I mean, just like over and over and over and over and over.And so what's interesting is that they will.
catch on because they lock into something.It's a simple idea.There's this emotional resonance and it can be recontextualized over and over and over.
And so it will go fast and it will burn through the culture and convey this idea really, really quickly of that in this, the exact case that I'm using of the flip, right?So I'm doing something for the right reasons, right?
And so you get that whatever that reversal is,
over and over and over and then it will burn out and it'll be gone but it will have sent that idea of the reversal throughout culture for three to four weeks whatever you know sort of the timeline is and it fucking travels so fast and it when i think about how that lets us meme an idea whether it's the banking institution cryptocurrency whatever we're able to get these these big ideas simplified and transmit them very very quickly
Does that make you, one, does that feel like the right understanding?
Yes, in one way it's more complicated because to me, a meme could be much simpler than that.It could just be, I mean, what you're talking about is where the same template is used to convey different messages in different contexts.
And that's a very sophisticated idea, which is not necessary to the idea of the meme, which just simply spreads.So it could just be a,
a particular picture which spreads because it's funny, a particular joke that spreads because it's funny, a particular tune that spreads because it's catchy.
This additional point you've just made where the four panels are used to convey different messages.So it's a kind of vehicle in which you can graft your message
A bit like there's another one which is a picture of Hitler losing his temper and he's talking German.And so it is assumed that the internet users don't speak German and so the subtitles
are then varied, and the clip is not really Hitler, it's an actor playing Hitler.
The clip of this actor playing Hitler, losing his temper, and the generals that he's talking to getting scared, it transmits itself, again, with a different set of subtitles.There's even one subtitle with me being, That's a more sophisticated idea.
That's not necessarily the idea of a meme spreading.It's a sophisticated idea in which there's a template on which other meanings are grafted.It's a lovely thought.I haven't thought of it like that way.
I think that the idea of what I'm calling lock and key, which I think is very much the whole definition for you of a meme, it's something that whether it's the catchiness of a tune or the funniness of a joke, whatever, it is that thing that gets people to want to replicate it, to put it out there.
When we had to slowly tell those ideas and they spread from one town to the next, you know, slowly over months or years, culture sort of moved in an ebb and flow that felt a little more predictable.
Now I feel like those ideas sweep through culture like a raging inferno and can then create all these little fractionated groups
For instance, there's a whole documentary on the Flat Earth Society, and never in a million years could you have convinced me that that meme would gain traction.And yet it has, and watching the documentary, I'm like, oh my God, it is startling.
Yes, it is.In medieval times, there were epidemics of strange ideas, there was dancing mania that spread.Then you have things like witch hunts, the Salem witch trials and the spreading of the idea of searching for witches.So there were
spreadable memes, in this case, evil one, in the case of witch hunts, an evil meme, the internet just speeds the process up, as you've said, dramatically.
Yeah, it's crazy.All right, well then, as we wrap up, what is a meme you'd like to leave people with?What's an idea that you want to spread?
I don't like really to think of it as a single meme, but things like critical thinking, insisting on evidence.I would love to find ways in which an insistence on only believing that for which there is evidence could be spread virally.
And it's not obvious why, it's not like a catchy tune.It's more difficult than that.But I would like to find ways in which that could be. is spread in the nicest possible way.
I mean, spread because it's a good meme, and there's no reason why a meme shouldn't be good.
I'm with you on that.Well, your work takes leaps and bounds towards that.They may be more complex than your average meme, but they certainly are just full of amazing information.Where can people follow you?
Where can they get the latest book, all your other books?
Well, Books to Furnish a Life, you've mentioned, and that is published in America, I think, any day now.You have a copy, don't you?I got a PDF copy, so I didn't get a physical book.You don't have the actual book itself?I don't, no, unfortunately.
Okay.I'm sorry about that.You should have.They should have sent you one.I believe it's published in America on the 1st of September, which is, what, two days' time?
Yeah, so by the time this comes out, it'll be out.
Yes, good.My next book is called Flights of Fantasy, and that's coming out in Britain on the 1st of November.Whoa.
And that is a book for young people about flying, about ways of defying gravity in animals, let's just say insects, bats, pterosaurs, and birds, and in humans, in human technology.So it's all about the different ways in which
animals, including us, get off the ground in defiance of gravity.
It's pretty extraordinary that you've written two books that close to each other.That is daunting.
Well, Books to Furnish Your Life, of course, is an anthology of past writings, which makes it a bit easier.
and was put together, by the way, with Gillian Summerscales, who's a wonderful editor, and he's woven it into different sections very successfully, I like to think.But it is
past writings, past book reviews, forwards to books, afterwards to books, that kind of thing.Also in interviews between me and various other people like Steven Pinker, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Christopher Hitchens, Matt Ridley, Lawrence Krauss.
So that's an anthology.Flights of Fancy is written with an illustrator, Jana Lentsova, who's a very talented artist, and it's a very heavily illustrated book for the benefit of young people, teenagers, the young adult market.
I love it.Richard, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and for all of your incredible works.They really are just awe-inspiring in their breadth.
It is really the mark of an extraordinary mind, the number of things that you've pursued and put down on paper.So thank you so much for that.Guys, speaking of things that will expand your mind, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe.
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