Richard Dawkins’ Perspective on Faith, Philosophy, and the Layers of Human Existence

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1:07Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

1:56Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. One of my kids is back in school. The other is not yet. So we're trying to squeeze in like sort of last minute family time together. This weekend, we went to Krause Springs. I thought it was Krause Springs, but then I called because I forgot my GoPro there, or I thought I did. And the way they pronounced it was not even on the map of how I would have guessed, but it was absolutely amazing. About an hour, 20 minutes from Austin. I'd never been before. Just insanely good. The weekend before, we went to the Blue Hole in Georgetown, which we hadn't been to before, but my kids absolutely loved.

2:42And it's funny, at the Springs, someone was reading Cal Newport's book, slow productivity, which I just thought was the absolute perfect place to be doing that. And it turned out he had been listening to Right Thing right now on the car on the way there. So that was funny. And then a dad with two kids doing the same thing as me up in Georgetown had been reading one of the books. So I've been trying to take my kids out, get outside, and just swim before the weather turns. And we've been having an amazing time. One of the things though, I think when I'm out in these beautiful things, like swimming holes aren't why I live in Texas, but it's one of the reasons I would say I have stayed in Texas.

3:21Barton Springs is incredible. Deep Eddie is incredible. We did that last week. We're probably going to do another one in San Marcos next week. Anyways, one of the things I think about is this quote from Seneca where he says, the whole world is a temple of the gods. He was talking about the beauty, the natural wonder of the world. To me, it's akin to walking into a cathedral or listening to a beautiful hymn. It's just a celebration, a testament to some larger force, some greater idea, something incomprehensible, something inherently humbling. My guest today would say that we should celebrate and be fascinated with this explicitly because there was no God behind it.

4:11At an earlier time in my life, I would have vehemently agreed. I read Richard Dawkins when I was 18, 19 years old and found it fascinating and persuasive. I read The God Delusion. I read The Blind Watchmaker. I read The Selfish Gene. And then I just read his new book, The Genetic Book of the Dead, which is absolutely fascinating. He's about to go on his last US tour. where I would say, and I talked about this in Stillness is the Key, I've moved closer to being what you would call agnostic today in that I wouldn't say I know for a fact that there is no God, but I would say I don't know. I just, I don't know.

4:50I'm not religious in that sense. One of the things that Richard and I talk about is this idea of being culturally Christian, the idea of being very steeped in the Christian myths. I grew up that way. I've actually read the Bible more in the years since and come to understand it quite deeply. I'm reading about Lincoln now, and I've just been fascinated in his journey from sort of vehement atheist to agnostic to some, I guess what you would call spiritual place, sort of greatest speeches or informed by the stories that he'd read in the Bible and his sense of some greater purpose or meaning. I don't know.

5:26One of the questions I get the most from people is like, where does Stoicism fit with Christianity or fit with religion. The Stoics and the Christians didn't always get along to various points, depending on who was most in power. It was one side's fault, and then it was the other side's fault. Both religion and philosophy have persecuted each other over the years. But certainly when you read the Stoics, I don't know if you saw the clip we posted or you watched the movie, The Holdovers, there's this scene where Paul Giamatti's character gives the kid a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. And he says, it's one of the greatest books ever written.

6:05And the thing is, not a single mention of God. Well, that's not true at all. Like, not true at all. There's many, many mentions of God slash the gods in Marcus Aurelius, and then many, many in Epictetus as well. So anyways, I wanted to talk to Richard Dawkins about this in his fascinating new book, which is about this sort of the way that our evolutionary history is written literally into the skin and the makeup of certain animals. It's basically how humans have progressed and evolved, how we're all books of the dead, which to me is actually kind of a fascinating stoic concept. Fun fact, Richard is also the inventor of the concept of memes, which he describes as cultural equivalent of genes.

6:51Anyways, I'll go right into the episode. Now you can check out Richard's work and tour dates on his website, richarddawkins.com, or you could follow him on Twitter at Richard Dawkins or don't because I think Twitter is a cesspool that gets both the followers and the tweeters in trouble. I don't agree with all the things that Richard has posted, especially recently. I think it brings out the worst in people. So maybe don't do that, but definitely read Richard's wonderful works. He is one of our preeminent evolutionary biologists and popular science writers for a reason because he is a very, very brilliant man and he's probably the most famous atheist in the world.

7:28So whether you're religious or not, his perspective is an interesting one. Here we go.

7:49There's a quote from Flaubert that I love that I thought you might enjoy. He says, just when the gods had ceased to be and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius when man stood alone in the universe. Now, he's not exactly right on the timing there. I'm not a classical scholar. I don't know. Well, Jesus comes right between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. So that doesn't exactly make sense. And certainly Marcus Aurelius is accused of persecuting the Christians, as were several Roman emperors before then. So it doesn't exactly line up. But the general sentiment to me is really interesting that there is sort of this moment where the gods plural ceased to have as much sway over people, but before God singular, you know, became the predominant view in the West.

8:49And we sort of had this choice between religion and philosophy, and we chose religion. Okay, you're telling me. I don't know any history. No, I just think the idea of choosing between faith and reason, the choice that society makes at some point, strikes me as this sort of pivot point in history. But even if historically it wasn't a singular moment, it also is the choice that we make as individuals to this day. It's a very important choice, absolutely. And obviously, I'm on the side of a reason as opposed to faith. Faith means believing something without evidence. And I think that evidence is the only good reason to believe anything.

9:35Yes, I would side with you. I read your books when I was in college and they sort of opened my mind to a bunch of things. The idea of reason being the sort of thing that rules your life, it's also, I guess, a little aspirational. It's hard to always get there. But I try to side more towards that than the alternative. Yes, of course, there are plenty of things where you have to depart from pure evidence, things like moral judgments, which are not necessarily founded deeply on evidence, although secular moral philosophy does use the same kind of reasoning as science once you have the premises in place.

10:13But the actual premises you have to start from maybe don't come, strictly speaking, from evidence. But that's always what's been interesting to me, because I think when some people make the case for religion, they highlight all the moral either arguments or they highlight all the accomplishments of religion throughout history. I've yet to hear many of those claims that one doesn't also see in philosophy. It's not like philosophy is morally bankrupt. Certainly, certainly not Western classical philosophy. I mean, Christianity and Stoicism independently come to the same cardinal virtues of courage, discipline, justice and wisdom.

10:52Well, clearly philosophy is not morally blind. I mean, moral philosophy is an extremely important branch of philosophy, one that interests me. I've heard you described as a Christian by people who know you, not in the religious sense, but in the how you live your life. I have described myself as a cultural Christian, and it seemed to cause a lot of upset. I mean, it's obvious. Anybody who has the kind of upbringing I had, the kind of schooling I had, is a cultural Christian. It doesn't mean you believe it. I think it's nonsense. But, you know, I know the hymns, I know the Bible pretty well, and so I am a cultural Christian, but it doesn't mean anything in terms of belief.

11:34What does it mean to say what is culturally Christian? Well, I mean, it means that you're familiar with Christian, with biblical literature, and you can take the allusions when you meet allusions in literature, which is, of course, extremely common. I mean, you can't really understand, you can't follow English literature unless you are grounded in the Bible. And so that's an important part of it. I know the hymns. I play the hymns on a musical instrument. I'm not exactly interested in going to church. I find going to church very boring. But nevertheless, I know when to stand up and sit down and that kind of thing.

12:12I mean, I am a cultural Christian in that sense, but it's a very trivial sense. It doesn't mean anything very much. Yes, I think I know what you mean. I've always found it strange, too. And I know you're not as well versed in classic philosophy, but I just that moment in time is so interesting to me because I grew up Christian. I grew up going to Catholic Church. And when you don't understand what was happening in the world then and what was going on in Rome then, you can sort of get presented that this is the sort of sum total of the ancient wisdom. And so you gravitate towards it. It's not until later that I realized Jesus and Seneca are born in the same year.

12:53They're both born in provinces of the Roman empire. They're both enormously popular philosophers in their own time. They're both put to death by the emperor and sort of go to their deaths very bravely and sort of become a metaphor in that sense. But when you read one of their writings, it sounds like a regular human being who seems grounded in reality and doesn't think that he's a mystic in any way. And then the other one is you know, is speaking in riddles and parables and believes he's the son of God. And you sort of go, I can wrap my head around this one a lot easier. This seems like a person that would exist today.

13:35And this one, you know, I maybe need to see a little bit more evidence. Yes, I'm not sure that Jesus really did think he was the son of God. I think that may be something that was invented later by the early Christians, especially Paul. I think that Jesus might have a little bit more modest than that. Even Paul was pretty well versed in philosophy. He had sort of sampled all the different schools before, you know, settling on Christianity. Yes. It's also weird, you know, Seneca's brother is in the Bible. That was the other sort of weird convergence of all these worlds that I didn't know. Oh, really?

14:08Who is he? Gallo. I see. He's the judge that lets St. Paul go. I see. Yes. So I guess my other thing about religion that I sometimes wonder, you meet very intelligent people. And I'm not saying that I'm not making a judgment of their intelligence, but I'm always intrigued by religion being the part of one's life where you turn off reason. So someone might be a scientist, someone might be a doctor, someone might be sort of very reasoned based in every other place in their life. And then in this one area, they're like, no, none of that applies here. I've always found that very interesting. I agree.

14:50I think it's very surprising. It is worth asking them exactly what they do believe, however. In some cases, they really do believe the whole thing. But often you'll find that actually they don't believe it. They are sort of religious in a kind of Einsteinian sense, the religion of Spinoza. They don't actually believe anything supernatural. They feel kind of spiritual, they might use that word. I mean, Einstein used the word God as a kind of symbol of that which we don't understand. And he said, you know, what I'm really interested in is did God have a choice in creating the universe? He really meant by that, is there only one way for a universe to be?

15:29He didn't really mean God. Unfortunately, he's much misunderstood. And I think he, in a way, asked for it. But I think you'll find that many of these very intelligent people that you meet who describe themselves as religious are probably no more religious than Einstein, which means not religious at all, in the kind of sense that a supernaturalist would understand the word. It's sort of a compartmentalized part of their life where they're like, I don't look at what's in this compartment. It was filled when I was a kid, or I've handed it over to tradition, and I'm just going to leave some of these assumptions unquestioned or unconsidered.

16:08Yes, you're now talking about the genuinely religious ones, the ones who really do go to church and actually do claim to believe it, not the Einsteinian kind. I mean, there are some. Francis Collins, for example, the head of the Human Genome Project, is genuinely religious, actually believes in Jesus and Trinity and things like that. And those people are the ones you're now talking about, the compartmentalizing of the mind. But the Einsteinian ones don't need to compartmentalize because it's all one big compartment for them. How do you think about our ability to do that? Because it's as frustrating as it can be.

16:41It's also kind of fascinating, our ability to apply totally different standards to different parts of our lives or our explanations for why we do things. I am mystified by it. I think it's very, very difficult to understand. There are people who take it to a really remarkable extent, this compartmentalization. They really do, as it were, leave their mind, leave their mental ability behind when they enter the church. And they seem to have no trouble with it. I mean, there are perhaps an extreme example. I was told about this by the professor of astronomy at Oxford who said that he had a colleague in America who has a professorship of astrophysics, writes learned papers, mathematical papers, published in the astronomical journals, which make the assumption that the universe is 13 billion years old, whatever it is, 13, 14 billion years old, and yet privately believe that the universe is only 6 ,000 years old, and managed to write papers in the astronomical journals, whose mathematics makes the assumption of a 13, 14 billion year universe.

17:55And yet at the same time, they privately believe something utterly, utterly contradictory. And that is something that I find totally incomprehensible. I cannot imagine that level of compartmentalization. I gather you can't either. No, it's impressive in its own kind of perverse way. Yes, perverse is right. Yeah, it's strange. Although in another area where perhaps we see this positively, I've always been curious to ask you, what do you think about like in 12-step groups or Alcoholics Anonymous? Why do you think the step four, the idea of accepting a higher power, the people who have experienced what that has done for them sort of swear by it?

18:42What do you think about this sort of necessity is a strong word, but what do you think about the efficacy of needing to or being forced to accept some kind of higher power? And why does that seem to be a step on the road to conquering an addiction or a destructive life pattern? That doesn't seem to me to be anything like so mysterious. I think that if you're deeply depressed, if you're alcoholic, if you're in despair, I think it's easy to imagine, especially if you're not very bright. I mean, it could be easy to imagine that some kind of father figure, some kind of everlasting arms to hold you when you're in distress.

19:21That's very understandable. What I can't understand is the intellectual compartmentalization of something like that professor of astronomy, where you have a direct contradiction. But if you're feeling suicidal, if you're feeling deeply depressed, if you're alcoholic, if you're a drug addict trying to escape, I could well imagine that it would be very, very appealing if somebody comes along to you and tells you there's an everlasting father looking after you, beating down at you from heaven. I don't know if the step is so much about accepting that there's a benevolent God who's looking out for you.

19:56I've always understood the idea of accepting a higher power as part of the recovery process to be about removing the inclination, which has gotten out of control by nature of one's addiction, that one is the center of the universe or that one is all powerful in their own life. And so there's something to the humility and the accepting of a kind of powerlessness that goes along with that step that is integral in terms of rebuilding one's life. The self-centeredness that is endemic to addiction or destructive habits is what the acceptance of a higher power is aimed at combating. That's how I've understood it.

20:42That makes a lot of sense, too. Yes, I can understand that. How do you think that? Because I think some people think once one gets rid of the idea of God, that one makes themselves a kind of God or that it's sort of self-inflating. I've always found that atheism or being agnostic has a certain humility to it that I actually think is quite healthy. Yes, I'm not sure I'd bring in the word humility on either side of that equation, actually. I think it could work both ways. I mean, some people would say that atheism is an arrogant sort of opposite reason to what you just said. I don't think it is, but I can see it being argued both ways.

21:29We just took our kids to an outdoor performance at The Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that, but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr.

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24:34So people go, well, if you get rid of the idea of God, you have to replace it with something. And I think I don't follow that exactly. But how do you think about this sort of randomness and the overwhelmingness then of existence? How do you process that philosophically once you eliminate the idea of there being a higher power of some kind? Well, with science, I'm not personally sympathetic to the idea that if you get rid of God, you've got to fill it with something else equally irrational. What we're doing in science is trying to understand. And so the randomness, the feeling of being alone in the universe is something that requires courage.

25:16but it doesn't require resorting to some alternative superstition, having got rid of the religious superstition. It doesn't require it, but it seems like we gravitate towards it, right? I'm thinking about this world that we're living in now, where, you know, in most of the developed Western nations, organized religion is on the decline, and you see people sort of on both sides go in one of two directions. I mean, some people have referred to sort of wokeism as a kind of religion, And so you see people going there for sort of an animating principle or a kind of energy or purpose. And then the other end, you see people gravitating towards conspiracy theories or towards certain cultish figures.

25:59Or why do we fill that vacuum? I take your point that it takes courage. Yeah, I take your point that people do seem to gravitate. It's not a position I would defend. I mean, I think it's an inadequacy in the human mind that some people do seem to need to gravitate towards some alternative. I think they should grow out of that. I mean, I think scientific understanding is all you need for understanding. It's not all you need for life, of course. I mean, you need human warmth and relationships and things like that. But as far as understanding where you stand in the universe is concerned, why you exist, what the meaning of existence is and so on, science is it.

26:42Well, that's why I was going to say that Flaubert quote is so interesting to me because the idea of man standing alone in the universe, it's a thought that clearly terrifies a lot of people. It's not a position that they want to be in. And so perhaps that's why we go one way or the other way. Well, terrified is one thing, but you should stand up to the terror. Don't give in to it. I mean, it's real. Maybe there is something to be terrified of. So what? Tough. That's where the courage comes in. It takes courage to turn to science and all these other things. Turning to something equally irrational is not praiseworthy.

27:17Right. Even to sit with the unknowing, right, the difference between being an atheist and an agnostic, there's something perhaps clearer even in going, no, I definitely know that it doesn't exist. to sit with the ambiguity of it strikes me as something that is existentially terrifying to people. I'm not sure that necessarily an atheist is somebody who absolutely knows. I'm not sure whether I call myself agnostic or atheist. I suppose I call myself atheist because although I don't know, I live my life as though there were nothing supernatural. There's no reason to think there is anything supernatural.

27:54I'd be very surprised if there was, but perhaps I'm a kind of agnostic verging on atheism. Yeah, I probably categorize myself similarly, although, and I forget who pointed this out, I'm quite comfortable being an atheist to all the Greek gods or to the Hindu gods. Yes, indeed, yes. Yes, quite. And the North gods and the Hindu gods, yes. And perhaps that's because when I was a little child, nobody made me afraid of those gods. Yes, I suppose so. I suppose there are people who feel that there must be something out there. I I don't know what it is, but there must be something. I don't think there must be something in that sense, anything supernatural.

28:34I certainly don't think there must be a supernatural creative intelligence, whether it's polytheistic or monotheistic. I think the sort of two things that people maybe struggle with as they think about this. So one is, yeah, the idea of like it leads to some kind of moral collapse or maybe that it's terrifying. And then the other is that it makes it all very ugly. It makes the world very ugly. And that's why I was fascinated by your new book. It's very much a celebration of the beauty of all of these millions of years of evolution and the stories that are written in each of us and every animal through that.

29:15Well, yes. I mean, actually, all my books, I think, are celebrations of the beauty of it. I can't understand anybody thinking that it's ugly. On the contrary, I mean, I think that I wouldn't say belief in the supernatural is ugly, but I would say it's petty and parochial and undignified. Whereas actually getting down to understanding the nature of existence and why we exist and why anything exists, that's a dignified, wonderful thing to do. In some ways, almost more miraculous and incomprehensible than the simplicity of somebody made all this. Yes, I'm not sure I use the word miraculous, but I suppose miraculous in the sense of being amazing.

29:59Yes, it is. So talk to me about that, this idea that we are made up of the dead. Right. We are a book. Any animal is a book describing the worlds in which its ancestors lived and survived. And that follows from natural selection, which over many, many, many generations has shaped our ancestors and finally shaped us to be the way that we are. So any animal has its ancestral environments written all over it. And this is superficially obvious in those cases like camouflaged animals, like moss sitting on tree bark or a desert lizard, which has pebbles and sand painted on its back, almost literally, not quite literally.

30:49And my thesis is that that's just superficial. And the same attention to detail must pervade every detail of the interior of the animal as well, right down to the cells, right down to the biochemistry. Everything there is a description of the worlds in which that animal's ancestors lived. And I think that's a wonderful thought. Yeah, then the way that you would sort of look at when they do those cutouts, and you can see layers and layers of rocks and sand, and you can see all the different eras, that that's sort of operating on us as living organisms also. Yes, exactly. I call it palimpsest, which is, as you know, a manuscript that's been overwritten and overwritten and overwritten.

31:36And our Book of the Dead is overwritten from many ages past, superimposed on each other. In a sense, it's like an evolutionary version of reincarnation, that we are the sort of, in a sense, right, that within us is all of the people that came before us and many different other species and animals that no longer exist. The remnants of that are inside us also. Yes. I mean, in a sense, that's right. The problem is it's just begging to be misunderstood. and we'll see the headline, Dawkins is a Buddhist or a Hindu and subject to the same misunderstandings as cultural Christian, I fear. But so give me an example.

32:18So for people who are trying to wrap their head around this idea that each of us is this sort of book of the dead, what does that look like? What was an example where you came to understand that that's what we are? I've just used the example of camouflaged animals where it's superficial, where it's only skin deep. J.B.S. Holden, the great biologist of past age, said that we carry seawater inside us, the ancestral seas inside us, the salt water. Our blood is salty because of ancestral seas. He even suggested that the seas in our ancestral past were less salty than they are now, and so that's why our blood is less salty than the sea.

33:00That's possibly a little bit fanciful, but that's his example. He was a great biologist. And so if camouflage is a superficial example on a sort of more genetic level, what do you mean that we're books of the dead? Well, I believe that a biologist of the future, I call her SOF, scientist of the future, SOF, sort of supposed to resonate with sophisticated and things like that, that she will be able to read the genome of an animal and actually reconstruct the ancestral worlds of that animal from the genome. You can't do that now. I mean, that's in the future, but I believe that that will be the case.

33:42That we'll be able to see what earlier versions of humans look like, as well as all the things that lived around? Yes, not so much earlier versions of us as earlier environments where our ancestors lived. Okay. And of course, earlier versions of ourselves, yes. So there's something quite, I guess, beautiful about that, the idea of us being books of the dead, that it's impossible for us to ever be sort of fully a unique individual so generous, that we're part of this network, this process, this sort of endless flow. And by the way, not just in the past, but happening now and forever. Yes, I think that's right.

34:27That's not an aspect of it that I have stressed, but I think you could stress that, yes. Yeah, I don't know. That's what I went to. There's something kind of philosophical about that, even that each of us is inseparable from each other as in that way. And none of us or nothing ever really fully disappears either. Once again, I haven't made that leap, but it's a nice poetic leap to make. You sort of deliberately don't go there. I wouldn't say deliberately. I hadn't thought of it that way. And I would need to think about it further, whether I want to go that way. Yeah, I mean, what I like about the Stoics is there is this kind of sense of us all being this one kind of large interconnected being for which each of us have sort of an individual role or purpose, even if that role or purpose is quite small.

35:26Yes, at a poetic level, I can appreciate that. I'm not sure I'd be able to translate that into rigorous scientific terms, but I like poetry. There's a place for poetry. Being an atheist or a biologist doesn't strip you of your interest in beauty and poetry, I imagine. Of course not. How do you think about that then? That there is something sort of vicious and violent and tragic, I guess, about natural selection. Is it not? Yes. This is something that troubled Darwin. It is vicious. And it's not only, it doesn't just only happen to be vicious, it's intrinsically vicious. There's something, because every animal is out for itself, there's something inherently vicious, to use your word, if it wasn't.

36:18I mean, suffering is intrinsic to the process. Starvation is intrinsic to the process. If you're not starving, you're not trying hard enough. I mean, animals are constantly pushing up against the limits of survival, and they are struggling against each other. They're struggling to survive against being eaten by other animals, or they're struggling to avoid starvation by other animals escaping from them, not being eaten. They're struggling against parasites all the time. They're pushing against the limits of survival, and that's intrinsic, necessary to the very nature of natural selection. Yeah, it seems less so Darwin, but certainly the generation or two of the scientists that came after him, some of them seem to be kind of corrupted by or broken by the conclusions.

37:11The discoveries of Darwin intersected with other beliefs of the time, and it became kind of a toxic combination. Do you know what I'm saying? Are you talking about social Darwinism? Social Darwinism, eugenics, the sort of embrace. When you look at evolution, there is something violent and tragic and dark about it. And for some people, that is a dark void for them to look into, and it brings out the worst in them. Yes, I agree. You have to face up to the facts. I mean, there is an alternative way of looking at it, which is that nature is all benevolent and nice and group welfare is what counts and species welfare is what counts and everybody's nice to everybody else.

37:55I prefer to stay away from that's almost kind of theological kind of argument. I prefer to stick to the facts. And the facts of natural selection are, as I stated them, that it is fundamentally a struggle, as Darwin described it. Darwin, I think, was right. I guess that to me is an interesting question. And again, kind of a moral pivot point. You can stare at the facts and decide to apply those facts in your own kind of personal interactions, how you go through the world. Or you can make kind of a distinction between this force that is acting upon all living things and how you as an individual go goes through the world.

38:41A very important distinction to make. I think it's as humans, we live in a society, we are free to depart from our Darwinian heritage. And thank goodness we do. It would be a very horrible society to live in if we lived in a society built on Darwinian principles. We are biologically Darwinian. We are the products of Darwinian natural selection, which is a vicious process. But we have manifestly the power to rise above it, and we do rise above it. And human society is not a vicious place, or nothing like as vicious as it could be if it followed Darwinian principles. I think you mentioned Darwin's successors.

39:23Well, T.H. Huxley, one of Darwin's contemporaries who was younger than him, made the point that natural selection is a nasty process and we need to rise above it. And that would be my view as well. Yeah, we have the ability to transcend some of the facts of our existence, not sort of not biologically, but personally in the choices that we make as individuals. Exactly. Yes. And I think it's very important to realize that. I think it would be a very nasty society in which to live. And I think we can, well, almost intelligently design our society so that it's a non-Darwinian society. Thank goodness we do.

40:02Yeah, or really over thousands of years, having seen the dark places that we can go without these sort of checks, we have invented and created ideas that have allowed us to spring forward. I mean, this is obviously where one of your major contributions come in, the idea of a meme, that we have these ideas or these concepts that can sort of take on their own version of the evolutionary process and allow us to go in positive directions. Well, I'm not sure that memes are that helpful. I suppose they could be. But I think that the human brain has transcended its biological Darwinian origins. and we can plan.

40:50We look after the sick, we look after the old, I mean, to different extents in different parts of the world, but we are not the sort of ruthless, neglectful creatures that our biological nature would tend to push us in the direction of. We're getting better. We're getting better at looking after the weak, the vulnerable, the disadvantaged.

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42:52My eight-year-old came up to me yesterday and he was very excited to tell me about this kind of lizard, that if it feels like the environment that it's in are not particularly safe, it eats its own eggs, preferring to have the nutrients than allow it to be taken by a competing species. And he was very fascinated and excited about this. And that's kind of precisely the type of ethical dilemma that human beings have considered and would decide, hey, it's better not to kill and eat your own young, even if there is some minor nutritional benefit to doing so in a way that another species unthinkingly would engage in this sort of mere cost-benefit analysis.

43:41And he's a little young for me to explain this to him, but it was interesting to watch him wrestle even then with the ethical implications of this biological decision. He's obviously a bright child. He's a handful. I've told this story in the podcast before, but we were driving and there's a small Mennonite community near where we live. And they had like a little garage sale and we stopped and I was buying him a toy there. And I was asking the people, I didn't know that there was a Mennonite community. And I said, oh, I didn't know, is there a Mennonite church around here? And they said, oh, yes, it's right down the street.

44:17And they said, we'd love to have you sometime. And I said, oh, that's very nice. Thank you for inviting me. And they went to get me like some literature so I could come. You know, I'm just I'm just being polite. And, you know, they hand me the thing and they say, hey, you know, it's this Sunday. You should definitely come. And I was like, OK, I appreciate this. And my son, my son goes, Dad, no. oh yes don't tell him we're gonna come you know i don't want to go and i you know the innocence of it i've laughed at a lot very nice yes as we think about this sort of evolutionary what are the lessons that you feel like we take out of this idea that we're written on us on these pages are these these uh evolutionary lessons from the past what do you what do you take from that well if by Lessons, you mean lessons for morality or how we should run our society?

45:11I don't think there are any. I think it's more academic lessons about understanding life. And that's what I've been about most of my life. Most of my books are about the fascination with science and in particular the life science. Where did that fascination come from for you? What lit you up there? I think, well, it's the sheer complexity of life. It's something that perhaps above all else couldn't possibly come about by just sheer chance alone. Life is so beautifully apparently designed. It's not really designed, of course, but it looks designed. And that's what's always fascinated me. It's complicated and it's got purpose written all over it, which the physical world really doesn't.

45:57I mean, there's no purpose to a mountain. There's no purpose to a rock. But in the case of a living thing, there's really a very, very strong, powerful illusion of purpose. And a living creature, it flies, it swims, it chases food, it looks for a mate. And these are all achieved by stupefyingly complicated machinery, which there's not a hope in hell that could come about by chance. It's come about by a non-random process. And that non-random process is the one that Darwin discovered. And it's beautiful. The absurdity of it is interesting to me, too. I was just in Australia with my family, and I was just trying to wrap my head around what it must have been like to be a post-enlightenment figure and think you understand the world and the type of things that are in it, and then come across a kangaroo for the first time.

46:53I know, exactly. The silliness of it. Yes, I quite agree. Do you think part of it for you is the ability to partially comprehend it? Like there is this element of design and complexity to each one of these things, of which 99.999 % of everything else that's alive isn't capable of noticing or appreciating exactly what you are reveling in and trying to understand. Yes, you say partial understanding. That, of course, is right, because nobody understands everything in detail. But Darwin took a great leap forward in understanding. I mean, pre-Darwin, our level of understanding was virtually nothing.

47:37And then after Darwin, most of the way there, I mean, the details need to be filled in. But the great riddle of life was solved by Darwin, and people have been adding to it since. But I think partial understanding is understating it. But I just mean the fact that we can notice is itself kind of a marvelous, fascinating thing. The kangaroo isn't thinking about what an absurd creature it is. Yes, exactly. We are the only species that can do that. And even we have only been able to do it for a rather short time. Yes. Yeah. Oh, it's endlessly fascinating to me. Yeah, to go back to the idea of sort of our ability to transcend some of the Darwinism, I was writing about this in my last book.

48:31I wrote quite a bit on Gandhi. And it was just fascinating to me to think, you know, the idea of nonviolence, that you could solve problems without violence, that there was, you know, von Klaus was said that war is the extension of politics by other means. You know, war being the sort of one of our first inventions and then politics being another invention. And then the idea of, hey, you can resolve political disagreements or injustices without necessarily killing people. Just our ability to invent some of these things and to see them as inventions is an interesting way to to sort of understand human development.

49:12Yes, I quite agree. And it's one of the things that as you look at history, we've progressed mightily over. We are getting nicer. Hopefully. Are we getting smarter or nicer? Well, I'm not sure about smarter. I mean, but I like Steven Pinker's books on the subject where looking at the broad sweep of history, we do appear to be getting nicer. Yeah. And that these were breakthroughs, that it wasn't, you know, there's that idea, it was Martin Luther King, he was quoting someone else about how the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. Like, unlike evolution, which doesn't have anyone directing it, it's fascinating to think, as you said, you know, Darwin, one singular individual fundamentally changes our understanding of who we are and why we're here and where we're going, and that the development of human society has been so impacted by just a collection of individuals is kind of a mind-blowing thing.

50:15Yes, Darwin wasn't the only one, of course. I mean, there was Wallace as well, and possibly one or two others. But it was Darwin who wrote the book, which really converted people, really made the impact. So I think it is right to revere Darwin for that reason. And as I said, it was a major leap forward. The great philosophers of the past, great as they were, they were fumbling in the dark when it came to the reason for existence, the reason for our existence. Well, yeah. And as a writer and as a lover of books, there's something wonderful about how everything was in the dark and then a book can flip on a light, so to speak, and change how we see things or how we understand things.

50:59And then And the way that book spreads through culture, it's a magical thing. That's scarcely an exaggeration. I think that puts it well. How do you think about your own role in that? You must think about it sometimes. You have articulated concepts and explained things as well as popularized them in books to a degree to which you can't really go back. We can't go back. You have helped us understand and explain things that we now understand. I suppose others should be the judge of that. I like to hope that I've contributed something to public and general understanding of what Darwin started. Yeah.

51:42And then people write on that and people write on that. And that's sort of been the process now for four or five thousand years. Yes. Although some people think that's the sum total of time we've been here. Indeed, yes. That's always a fascinating thing where you're like, your explanation of the universe, which would include all species and animals that we've ever discovered. Are you not aware that we have books older than that? Yes, quite. Anything else you want people to know about your new book? Well, there are other chapters. I've sort of told you what the main thesis, which is mostly in chapter one and two, but there are other chapters, including really sort of expounding the power of natural selection, which is part of the background you need for it, and also replying to critics, misunderstandings, and so on.

52:36And yes, I mean, I think the whole book hangs together, but the main thesis is in the first two chapters. What do you feel like the big misunderstandings of your work are? Well, there's a chapter which takes to task the idea that genes are only incidental and are not causal influences in the whole Darwinian process. They've even been described as mere bookkeepers, bookkeeping a record of what's really going on, which is changing animals. All the genes are doing is making a record of it. That's back to front. That's putting the cart before the horse. Genes have to be causal. They have to be the major causal influence in the evolutionary process.

53:19Otherwise, it doesn't work. So there's a whole chapter criticizing that point of view. Why do people have that point of view? They don't understand the importance of, they don't understand Darwinism. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Your argument with genes is effectively that the genes are operating, not intentionally, but operating in this sort of causal way beneath the surface that is obscured by everything we're seeing on the outside. They are the ones that go from generation to generation. They're the information that passes down the generations for actually millions of years. The ones that survive are the ones that are good at surviving, and they're good at surviving because they program the development of bodies that keep them going, that keep them surviving, that reproduce them.

54:07And so everything about a body can be regarded as, in the selfish gene, I call it a survival machine. And the genes have this crucial causal role in the evolutionary process, which nothing else has. And the reason they have it, the reason they're unique, is that they are the information that passes from generation to generation. Nothing else does. And am I wrong in my understanding of evolution? You pick something that people would say would have a genetic component. It's not just that it has the genetic component. Like that gene's desire is the wrong word, but its attraction towards self-perpetuation is there.

54:49But then on the other side, there's always the matching thing. So, you know, big, strong, tough person. Then you have on the other side, the gene that is attracted to the big, strong, tough person. So the replication of the genes is driven on both sides. Am I wrong in that? I'm a little confused, but I think perhaps you're talking about sexual selection. Yeah, yeah, in sexual selection. But I'm saying for anything that it's not simply a gene wanting to continue. There's always the corresponding gene, if that makes sense. Well, I wouldn't want to talk about wanting to continue. It's more the other way around, that the genes that do survive are the ones that have what it takes to survive.

55:30So with hindsight, you can say, why is it that certain genes pass through the filter of generation, the filter of natural selection? They do it because they have what it takes. And you can get a long way with the rather fanciful idea of their wanting to survive, but that can be misleading if you take it seriously. Yes, because there's no intention in any of it. There's no intention. It's just that some of them survive and some of them don't. And the ones that survive are the ones that we see. And the ones that survive are the ones that are good at surviving. And the reason they're good at surviving is that they program the embryological development of bodies in whatever is good for that species, whether it's flying or swimming or digging or jumping, whatever it is.

56:12The actual mechanics of it are different from species to species. but fundamentally what's going on is gene survival. Right. Yeah, it's fascinating. Well, it's been an honor to talk. I appreciate you taking the time and thank you for all you do. Thank you very much indeed. I've enjoyed it. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode.

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