#843 - Richard Dawkins - Why Can No One Agree On Evolution, Race & Religion?

30:59The marriage thing, just the companionship. So you can see there's this degree of responsibility bringing another life into the world, And 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, I can kind of see it. I would like to think that one of the only two things we need to do, survive and reproduce, I'd 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.

31:39They're sort of working on themselves, are they 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'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.

32:20There's definitely one. This one necessarily explains 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. And now 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 or it will... That's a better way around, actually. The conventional ways have your cake and eat it, but actually that doesn't make any sense.

32:56Of course you've got to have it before you can eat it, but each okay can have 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 Unibomber 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 each your cake and have it too, as opposed to the... Well, the Unibum was actually using the most sensible wording. Correct, yeah, exactly. But unfortunately, the one that was a lexical fingerprint that allowed him to be identified.

33:44I never knew that. Yeah, yeah, it'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, the last five, I've seen an increasing number of evolution skeptical comments. I don't know whether that's the 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.

34:35It'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 do? I'm going to say before getting out of that, it's hard to see what you could, what you could possibly put in its place. I mean, I don't see how you could be anything but religious, if you object.

35:17I mean, 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 the prodigious complexity of living things down to the very cellular level by a chemical level, then you cannot be sane and not seek for some kind of explanation for that. And if it's not evolution, it's got to be presumably, it's got to be some story. God. So I think if anybody calls himself an atheist and a non -evolutionist, he's probably not really thought it's through very hard.

36:07Okay, but you were asking me about how to convince people. Yeah, 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 graphical 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.

37:09If you actually look at the data of DNA sequencing in different aspects, the in different animals, it forms a perfect hierarchy. And what could that hierarchy be? I mean, a branching hierarchy. What could that be about a family tree? So you find that if you take say, shru and mole, and you looked at their molecular sequences, they would be very, very, very close, so they're very, very close cousins on the evolutionary interpretation. And all the different molecules agree. So it's not that half of 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.

38:06For example, if you looked at those genes, specifically involved in hearing, you would find a apparent cussinghip between bats and toothed whales because they both use echoes. So that's an exception that proves the rule. But mostly the tree of cussinghip is an obvious signature of a pedigree. There is a two, I mean, they 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 of the hand of a human, the flipper of a turtle, full, the leg of a horse and so on.

39:09And nowadays we can do the same thing with enormously more data. He was looking at either protein sequences or DNA sequences. So those are things. I mean, those are the fascinating piece of evidence. The fossil record is very nice, if it is as well, because you get sequences. is there are not fossils in the wrong place when JBS Hogan was asked for what would be convincing falsifying evidence of evolution. He promptly said fossil rabbits in the pre -cambrian. Hmm, they don't happen. There are no fossils that are out of place, out of the sequence. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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41:19Is there such a thing? No. No. So not missing anymore. What was the status, was that when you began your studies? No, no, 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 and 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. And so, anyway, that has proved to be the case both in East Africa and South Africa.

42:05Very rich fossil record now of ancestral humans, not of ancestral chimpanzees, but there are of ancestral humans. Have you got a particular favorite or ancestor of ours that you're fascinated with some other branch of the not really know. I was reading a really great book about Australopithecus. Yes. I thought that was really cool. That seems like a, you know, if you're going to be one of the being us isn't bad. Homostapiens is pretty cool. But Australia, a Pythicus seems like a cool... Yes, they were... They were upright walking, but they had brains not much bigger than a chimpanzee. So it was like they were sort of upright walking chimpanzees.

42:57And they're pretty charismatic. I mean, Mrs. Plays, and they've got names like Mrs. Plays, 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, so is that right? It depends how you define it. The preceding homospheres is often thought to be homo erectus, but then there are various are the ones which are dubiously a science -specific status like homo -radiasy, insists, homo -hidle -blur -gensists, these are, I mean, as you would expect, they're all intermediates. I mean, why wouldn't there be, be worrying if they weren't intermediates?

43:46But the widespread one is homo erectus, which originally was meant by the names like Oh, peaking man and Java man. But they existed all over Asia and Africa. Was there a shorter, smaller version of us? Was that over? Oh, you're thinking of homophluorisiensis. That's it. Yes. Indonesia? Well, yes. There's one island, Floreys, in Indonesia and archipelago, where these little midgety creatures lived. And it's a bit controversial. Some people think that they were not different species at all, but just just a freak examples of homo sapiens. But some people think that they were an island version of Homo erectus.

44:45It's fairly common for island mammals to be either giants or dwarfs. For example, on the Mediterranean islands like Cyprus and Crete, there were dwarf elephants, which must have been very sweet. I'm a writing thinking, at least the story that I'd heard about home of flurrenciences 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, that's one I can't, that's one theory for why you get island autism, 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 steaks, which, yeah, it's a shame that we eat.

45:46That we didn't have that. What's your latest thinking around the hard problem of consciousness? Where are you out with that? You're asking the wrong person. I'm a humble biologist and I don't And as far to the philosophical heights, I'd rather doubt whether philosophers actually succeeded in that either, but 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. It's the white philosophy is taking over.

46:38I 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 huge number of connections between neurons in the brain. And 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 would have to be. I'll be don't know what the answer is, but I know the sort of answer I would expect.

47:19But in the case of consciousness, I'm not even sure what it would look like. Traveling should be about the journey, not the chaos of packing. That is why I've partnered with Nomadic. They make the best backpack on the planet. This thing is absolutely glued to me and it's phenomenal. It is the 14 -litre travel pack and it's a complete game changer. They've got compartments for everything. Your laptop, your shoes, your sunglasses. It is so well -organized that even your toothbrush will feel important. It's like the Marie Kondo of luggage. Everything has got its place. No more folding your t -shirts up into a burrito to make them fit into wherever it needs to go.

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48:34Well, 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 always necessary to survive and reproduce and yet didn't have self -awareness. I think it must have a use. I think consciousness must have a use, but not everybody thinks so. There are people who think that, well, I mean, the rather prodigious feats of the trapped GPT and other artificial intelligences that we have now. If they were controlling the behavior of a robot animal, it could very well survive I've do a very competent job.

49:36Effective bizombie. When we print yes. And so I, I mean, people have worried about what consciously 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.

50:39And 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. That to me just seems like, okay, and then the sense and the ability to do math and consider the universe and all the rest of it is maybe a bit spandrally and it just sort of a bit, just immersion 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.

51:22You have to look inside yourself and... The first guess. Yes.

51:31Yes, 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 of the rarrier. We touched on this a little bit last night. Behavioral genetics were about, I think, on the cusp of gene embryos 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 probably 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 that.

52:21Oh, well, are you talking now about genetic manipulation? No, in terms of the fact that we have a terrible trait from a behavioral perspective. Oh, it's a fairly flourishing field. Yes, so on. Yes. I don't think I don't have a problem with it. You don't have a problem. Not at all. For some reason, 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 hanker after a blank slate and hanker after the idea that human mind is sort of open to a sort of an even pouring thing into it.

53:22And does that make you want to sort of face palm yourself into eternity? A bit rather, yes, a bit. and I don't understand the hostility, for example, to evolutionary psychology, which, as you know, Floresh is here in Austin. I mean, every other species has a perfectly good behavioural genetics, and every reason why he went astroton. Yeah, 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?

54:22And then if we were to take it one step further to the outright manipulation getting into the heart. 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, as 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, or 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 and instead of choosing random choose one of the say 50 % that don't have the deleterious gene in question.

55:45If only that could have been done for the Zauravich Alexey who and similar, I mean other members of the European world 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. Down syndrome actually is not hereditary. What is it that? Oh, so this is... Well, no, I mean, it's an effect of an embryological defect, but there's no hereditary tendency to get down a syndrome. That's interesting. And so it would not be a eugenic, in the strict sense, it would not be eugenics.

56:44Do you know if a to a dance syndrome parent are more likely to have a dance 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, you're 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.

57:31I think Gene Embryer's 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 Embryer's selection that much? Well, I was talking about getting rid of disgenic effects like he Mithilia becomes more controversial when you're talking about taller, strongest martyrs. Yes, musical genius and that sort of thing. What do your feelings are under? Well, I don't understand why people are quite so hostile to it, because very least people don't show the same hostility towards parents who are ambitious to have a musical child and force the richer child to have to practice scales all day long.

58:20So 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, exactly, however long. So there's a certain amount of self -contradiction, I think, inter -sistency going on there. But nevertheless, positive eugenics of that sort does have a bad wrap. Poor branding. Well, I suppose because of Hitcher 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 and this is not government dictated.

59:16The own possible objection, they precisely 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. I think the original iPhone adjusted for inflation was like $10 ,000. The very first iPhone that came out. Yes. And it's still now prohibitively expensive to many people. Yes. But it's significantly lesser. Yes. So, yeah, 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.

1:00:12It's one of those things that maybe doesn't, doesn't immediately make sense. Yeah, it'll be, 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, of, yes, whether it's from IVG. Are you familiar with this? Yes. 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.

1:01:04Yes. You have such a higher volume that you can pick from, which allows you to spread the range, which then gives you more options. So that, 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. I've never seen the mechanism of it happening. There's just something about it that, I just don't know, I don't know, I stand on getting in and tinkering with our source code quite.

1:01:49You're squeamish about that. Yeah, a little. I don't really know why. Yes, yeah.

1:01:58I 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, you're going in and you've got some dashboard on the back end of a website and you say, oh, this, based on the data, it looks like this is going to be that particular preferable child to have. We're 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.

1:02:49I 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'm never really looked at nuts and bolts of reproduction like that. I think I'm right in saying that the haploid gira type of a sperm doesn't influences phenotype. Therefore, the selection of 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?

1:03:33Yeah. I think the answer is no, because I think that the the phenotypic characteristics of a sperm are those of the diploid. What's that? The the genotype of the father, rather than of the particular particular individual sperm. I mean, each sperm has a unique haploid genotype, which is what determines the the redatory aspect of the of the children, but that haploid genotype I think does not affect things like the swimming speed of the sperm. I think that that's under the control of the diploid genotype of the father, I believe. That's interesting. Yeah, there is this, uh, I guess we just look at survival and reproduction as well if we make things harder, the tougher ones that get through very effective, but there can be areas like when it comes to sperm swimming speed, where that isn't necessarily indicative.

1:04:31I believe that happens. Again, I'm not totally certain. I believe that's the case. That's fun. Richard Dawkins, ladies and gentlemen, Richard, I've had so much fun. yesterday was fantastic. Today's been really great as well. We've got new book as well. Yes, good. That'll be available. What, once you've got your tour out of the way, which I'm aware, you've still 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. Tails from Heckle. Ernst Heckle was a German biologist and artist.

1:05:13He was sometimes known as the German Darwin. He was Darwin's greatest disciple in Germany. And he was also a very good artist. And so I'm using his pictures and basing each chapter around one of his chapters, based upon a different one of his animal pictures. Richard, I really appreciate you. Thank you for having me last night. I'm for being here today. Thank you very much indeed Chris.