Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Richard Dawkins On Genes, Memes, AI, Religion, and Life Beyond Earth [Ep. 454]

Episode Date: August 18, 2024

Why are men's sex drives so strong? Can genetic information be destroyed? And why does the desert lizard have such intricate patterns?  I had the extraordinary privilege of exploring these topics with Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s most influential and thought-provoking scientists! Dawkins is a renowned evolutionary biologist, zoologist, and author. He is also a prominent figure in New Atheism alongside Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens and is well known for his criticisms of creationism and intelligent design.  In our wide-ranging conversation, we explored the evolution of sex drive and aesthetic appreciation, genetics, the intersection of theoretical and experimental science, the potential of artificial intelligence, and more.  Tune in! — Key Takeaways:  00:00 Intro 01:56 Why is the sex drive in men so strong? 04:44 DNA, origin of life and panspermia  10:28 Is there life elsewhere in the universe? 14:58 Memes and their evolution  21:13 Homage to Daniel Dennett  23:20 Natural selection and evolution  26:59 The threats and opportunities of AI 31:05 A shifting moral zeitgeist  35:15 Science communication  43:02 Audience questions  47:01 Technology, magic, and time capsules 56:22 Outro — Additional resources:  ➡️ Learn more about Richard Dawkins: ✖️ Twitter: https://x.com/RichardDawkins/  💻 Website: https://richarddawkinstour.com/ — ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

40%, 45% of the American people believe literally in Adam and Eve, believe literally that the world is only 6,000 years old. I mean, that's a shocking figure, and you can't duck out of it. Imagine being able to decipher the history of every creature ever to have lived on Earth based on its evolution. Why are men's sect drives so powerful? Why does this peculiar desert lizard have such intricate patterns on its back? And what does it tell you about its long-dead relatives? dead relatives. Today we have the extraordinary privilege of exploring these topics and more with one of our greatest living treasures, Richard Dawkins, one of the world's most influential and thought-provoking scientists. Jeans are predicting the future because they will not survive unless

they get the prediction right. Richard is a renowned evolutionary biologist, zoologist, and author, a prominent figure in the new atheism along the other so-called horsemen of the Apocalypse, past guest Sam Harris and the late great Daniel Dennett. He's well-known criticism of creationism and intelligent design. You can't opt out of science because it goes against a traditional faith. In our widely ranging conversation, we explore the evolution of sex drive and the aesthetic appreciation of genetics as well as the way genetics intersect in theoretical and experimental science. We talk about the potential evolutionary outcomes of artificial intelligence as it augments humanity. We talk about what it's like to be a scientist and a scholar with a career ranging

over 50 years. And we encounter along our journey some of the greatest figures in all of science. I know you're going to love this episode. So let's go. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Richard, I've always wanted to ask you, why is the sex drive in men so strong? I mean, surely we could have gone through the replication of the species if it were 10% less powerful, maybe even 25% less powerful. I mean, what accounts for the behavior in men such that they will copulate with female angler fishes in ways that allow them to be digested or ingested into their female

target? Or say, a male human being who buys a social media app when he already has a quarter trillion and 11 or 12 children. What is the reason, the biological necessity, that the male sex drive is as strong as it is? I think perhaps you're misled when you say something like replicate the species. It's not about replicating the species. It's about replicating genes. And genes that are in males have a different way of getting themselves into the next generation than genes that are in females. And because sperms are so numerous, and eggs are rather few in number.

Eggs are economically valuable, well endowed with food. Sperms are not, and therefore they can afford to be much more numerous. What this means is that in general, throughout the animal kingdom, males can pass on their genes by mating with lots of females. Whereas with a female, mating with lots of males doesn't benefit her, because once she's been in a mammal pregnant, let's say, talk about mammals, there's no benefit in mating with another male. Whereas in the males case, once he's mated with a female,

there is some benefit in mating with another one because he's got lots of sperms to go around. And therefore, the male sex drive is, when there's any difference between them, the male sex drive does tend to be stronger, males tend to be more promiscuous, tend to be more open to mating with lots of different females, males tend to be less fussy about who they mate with, etc.

So that's, I think, the answer. It's about gene replication, not species replication. And if it were diminished by a few percent, would that affect the relative fecundity of replication of genes? Or is that level that we have it at as males, does that seem to be a necessity, or could it be diminished a bit? It varies from species to species. I mean, not all species are promiscuous in the males. There are many species in which the sexes contribute equally to reproducing and to nurturing the young. And that's different. I mean, different species differ according to their ecological circumstances.

So you're talking about diminishing. Yes, it does happen. It happens in some species, monogamous species. It is diminished, yes. We in physics and especially our friend Sir Roger have looked at the possibility of the destruction of information, what's called the information paradox of black holes, where there's actually pretty vehement disagreement between scientists on whether or not information is truly conserved or can it be destroyed. And Hawking radiation plays a significant role in that.

Can genetic information be destroyed, Richard? Is there a sense in the same way that, you know, at some level you cannot destroy genes any more than you can destroy information, even when you throw it into a black hole. I think it's less philosophically interesting than in the case of the physics you're talking about. The information in DNA is preserved in living organisms over millions of years. But if you want to actually look at the DNA itself, ancient DNA, people who, for example, dig up Neanderthal people and look at their DNA, that decays. So there's no almost certain.

certainly no hope of Jurassic Park of actually getting dinosaur DNA. It decays. You're talking about 10,000 years, maybe 100,000 years, but not millions of years. So, yes, it does decay. Some have suggested that DNA is sort of the nucleator, the originator of life in some sense. And I do want to talk to you about that. I'm here at UC San Diego, where we're Jeffrey and Margaret Burbage, the late Great Burbage duo used to work, and they would bring quite frequently Fred Hoyle, who as you know is a proponent of panspermia, which I always remind my listeners, if you're young, it sounds dirty, but it's not a dirty word. The notion of origin of life is obviously a question.

I always point out it's not exactly related to life itself, right? I mean, I can study cosmology, the evolution of the universe without knowing exactly how it came about. In fact, we don't know how it came about exactly. Can you say something about origin of life? Is that possible to divine or to read the Genenica Book of the Dead and learn about the origin of life itself? Or is it merely, not merely, it's a huge topic, obviously, but is the genetic book of that, are the encryptions and encoding and the carving of natural selection, does that not have the ability to penetrate the firewall of the origin of life itself? There has to have been originally a self-replicating entity like DNA.

That has to have been the start. Once you've got a self-replicating entity, then you have the capacity for Darwinian evolution to get going. But it cannot have been DNA. DNA is what's been called a high-tech replicator. It needs a sophisticated infrastructure of cellular machinery to copy itself. And so that wouldn't have been available. So there has to have been a forerunner, a kind of John the Baptist molecule, a forerunner which was capable of replicating without sophisticated copying machinery.

It may not ever be possible to definitively prove one or the other. The currently most favored theory probably is it was RNA, which, as you know, is related to DNA but is a bit different. The reason why DNA can't be the origin is that it requires enzymes, catalysts, in order to replicate. The catalysts, the enzymes that it requires are proteins, and proteins require DNA, so we've got to catch 22. RNA is a moderately good replicator and a moderately good enzyme. DNA is a superb replicator and is not an enzyme at all. Protein is a superb enzyme is not a replicator at all. So protein and DNA are great partners, but neither of them can do the job that the other one can do.

RNA can do both. So RNA, in a rudimentary kind of way, can act as a catalyst, and it can even catalyze its own replication. So the RNA, so-called RNA world theory is a good candidate for something like what must have gone on, the origin of life. I think all I would be prepared to say is that the origin of life must have been the origin of a self-replicating molecule, a self-replicating without the need for sophisticated machinery and therefore without the catch-22. I suppose we know roughly when it was. I mean, since the Earth itself is, what, four and a half billion years old, and the first fossils are 3.8 or so billion years. old. So somewhere between those two dates must have been when it happened. You mentioned Fred

Hol and panspermia. I wouldn't rule out panspermia, but I would rule out Fred Hoyle's reason for wanting it. I mean, Fred Hoyle thought it was too improbable to have arisen on earth, and therefore you needed to have panpsomnia. Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel, also in San Diego, played around with the idea of directed pansepermia. The idea that actually life on earth was seeded by an intelligent life form elsewhere in the universe. I think they were tongue and cheek. I don't think they really believed it, but it was an interesting idea to sort of toy with. Yeah, I had Thomas Chek, winner of the Nobel Prize for the catalytic properties of RNA on,

and he and I definitely came to the agreement that RNA is much more interesting, and useful. He was almost trash-talking DNA, but Nobel Prize winners are want to do that. I guess the argument I've always made, I'd love to run this by you if you'll indulge me for a moment, but when we look at Mars, Mars is fairly similar to Earth in size. It's not too, it's smaller, but it's not microscopic in comparison.

It's in the so-called Goldilog zone of the Earth. It has exchanged materials with the Earth for literally billions of I actually have a fragment of Mars here. Oh, wonderful. I would give you if you're in person. Yeah. And I give out other, I give out meteorites to my listeners who are listening and enjoying the show. But I point out that, you know, I have a Mars meteorite, which means that Mars has a lot of

Earth meteorites on it and probably a lot more. And some of those could have carried genetic material. But the fact that we don't see life on Mars, and yes, we haven't explored every square, you know, millimeter of it to know that, but it seems pretty probable that at least the surface of Mars is not inhabited by macroscopic life forms. Can that be seen as sort of an estimate or be used to estimate in a Bayesian sense how hard it is for a light? We always hear about how easy life is to start. Yes. As you just said, once it got kicked off. But can we use just the other data point? We have so few data points, and we have no obvious data that suggests life is abundant in the universe

other than the probability that it could be. But that's not an argument. So what would you make of an argument that we haven't discovered life with all these technology? It's actually, maybe it's a lot harder to get started than we naively might have thought. If we found life on Mars or Enceladus or anywhere in the solar system, then you do your Bayesian statistics and immediately say, right, that means life is, the universe is crawling with life. I mean, it's immediately, it's a huge data point to change the estimate of the likelihood of life being elsewhere, provided it's a separate life form. I mean, you'd have to look at its genetic system. If it uses DNA, especially if it uses the same genetic code, then it would, then it's,

it's been transferred by a meteorite going either from Earth to Mars or from Mars to Earth. A key question would be to look at its genetic code and say, first, is it DNA, second, does it have the same genetic code? If it has the same genetic code, it's far too improbable that that would arise spontaneously twice over. That must mean contamination. If it has a different genetic code, and I stick my neck out and say there must be a genetic code of some sort, And I think I'd stick it so far as to say it must be digital. But it doesn't necessarily have to be quaternary, it doesn't necessarily have to be binary. It could be octal.

I mean, there are various other possibilities. But if it's different, then immediately we know that life is common rather than rare. Now, what's the chance? I mean, could it be that we are literally unique? Could it be that we are the only life form in the universe? Well, I think, yes. I mean, we can't disprove that. If you want to believe that we're the only life form in the universe,

then that immediately commits you to the belief that the origin of life on this planet was a quite stupendously improbable event because the sheer number of available planets in which life could have started is so huge. That means that when we think about theories for the origin of life, we are not looking for a plausible theory. We're looking for a highly implausible theory, because if there's a plausible theory, then the universe has got to have a lot of life forms.

We don't know, but if you're the kind of person who thinks that we are unique in the universe, then be aware that you are committed, therefore, to the belief that the origin of life on this planet is so implausible, is so improbable that any theory that a chemist comes up with has got to be vanishingly implausible. and that's an interesting kind of paradoxical result.

Last week I spoke with a neighbor of yours, George F. Statue, who's at Cambridge Universe. I guess you guys aren't neighbors, but. Well, he was at Oxford until recently. That's right, yes, he is an eminent cosmo. Yeah, we've poached him as an advisor for our observatory in Chile. But he quoted something that startled me. And it was a quote from Francis Crick, who, you mentioned earlier. This is George summarizing what Francis Crick said, and then I want your

reaction. So this is very many meta layers, Richard. I hope you'll indulge me. But Francis said, yeah, Francis said that if your theory agrees with all the data, it's bound to be wrong. How do you react to that? Are there theories that are too good? That seems to be typically sort of provocative. I mean, you could say it's a useless theory or something like that, but it's not bound to be wrong. I mean, that can't be right. I think he was just being provocative. Sorry for this brief interruption and this wonderful conversation with Richard. I just want to let you know that to get these great guests like Richard and many, many others, their time is so limited. They often look to see how many subscribers I have to this channel on YouTube and the audio

feed. And I'm sorry to say it, but I understand it. They want to make use of their time. They don't have infinite amount of time. None of us do. So you can really help me out, and this will help you out to get even more of the great guests like of Richard's caliber to come on the Into the Impossible Podcast. And that's to just subscribe and maybe if you're charitable, leave a comment, leave a thumbs up, or a review on your favorite podcast player. It really helps us grow the podcast, get great guests, and break through the noise of the 5 million other podcasts, that these folks often get invited to. This will really help me out.

So just take the time while it's in your mind, just push that button, and you'll be doing me a tremendous favor. Thanks so much. Now back to the episode. Yeah, that would not surprise me, although not as provocative as Jim Watson, right? I want to talk about artificial intelligence and so forth. But before I do, I'd like you to, if you're willing to indulge me

in another one of my Abba questions where I ask you to not say sing Dancing Queen, But it's impossible for me, Richard, to not ask you about to define a meme. Would you please, for the benefit of my audience who may not know, can you explain meme? And my question is, if there are gene pools, are there also meme pools? So first, could you start with a meme? What is a meme? And are there meme pools? Yes.

A meme is a unit of cultural inheritance. I was interested in the last chapter of the selfish gene, the first edition of the selfish gene, and the whole book has been about the gene as a unit of selection, and Darwinian selection is the differential survival of genes in gene pools. And I wanted to make the point that there's nothing magic about DNA. Anything self-replicating can potentially be a unit of natural selection. And a computer virus, for example, would have been a good example if I'd known about computer viruses then. But what I did know about was human culture, not much about it, but it was clear to me that

certain aspects of human culture could behave as replicators because they get imitated. So something like clothes fashions or tunes, yes, and habits of speech, things like that, anything that gets copied around the meme pool, the meme pool being the same. set of humans which imitate in a position to imitate each other. So something like the one example I use is the reverse baseball cap, which spread as an epidemic of memes because people think it looks cool and so they turn their cap backwards. And so that the act of imitation is analogous to DNA replication, but it's memetic replication, not DNA. replication.

I mean, it's quite clear that memes exist in that sense. What's not clear is whether they really are subject to Darwinian selection. I think they have to be in some sense. There are certain things, well, I said the backwards baseball cap is cool. Cool means in this case it has good survival value. It's equivalent to a gene which is good at surviving in the gene pool. So something like that or a catchy tune that when you hear somebody whistling it or singing it, infects your mind and you find yourself whistling or singing it yourself and that infects

somebody else. So that is a catchy meme. Something like a craze at school. You know when we were at school there would be a craze for a particular toy or particular game, a particular way of doing things, a particular word, a private word that people in the school use and is not outside the school. I think many schools have such words. These are all memes which, which if they spread successfully, by definition, they therefore have high survival value. That is a kind of Darwinian selection. What's more problematic is whether that can give rise to interesting evolution. And there I think we come to the idea of the meme complex, something like a collection of memes which go well together, which cooperate well together.

Rather like I was talking earlier about the genes cooperating with each other because they have the same exit route. Well, a cooperative of memes might be something like the Roman Catholic Church where a whole lot of different replicating ideas survive in each other's presence and therefore could be regarded as a meme complex. or memeplex. And you perhaps can think of other examples of possible memeplexes. I've talked to... It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast.

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This past year to Friends of Your Sam Harris, I actually was honored to do the last final interview with Daniel Dennett before he passed away earlier this year. And I've also spoke with Donald Hoffman. It's been a year of talking to a lot of eminent thinkers on natural selection, evolution, but also consciousness, free will. etc. What are your recollections of Dan Dennett now that he's departed this mortal coil? We miss him so much. You have any favorite stories of interactions with Daniel? Oh, well, a great bear of a man, genial, jovial, very kind, but also strong and didn't suffer fools gladly. But if anybody was sincerely interested in learning. He was up for it. I miss him enormously. I mean, not just as a friend, but as an intellectual go-to person, really. I mean, I would, I would, he's so intelligent

and so good at talking about anything. You know, there are some people who, when you talk to them, sort of feel they raise your game. And I would say that he did that. He did that. He, he, he not only was a highly intelligent converser himself, but he raised what intelligence one has oneself to a higher plane by just being there. I admired him enormously and miss him hugely. Yeah, one of the things that spoke to me so loudly. Yeah, he was such a mensch. You could ask him anything, but yes, he would he would harumph away, you know, the, the foolish questions, but he was, he was always a gentleman and he just had such a good cheer. And I regret that I only had a chance to talk to him or just before he passed away, because he could literally

fill an entire podcast with him. I wonder if you've encountered in your work, Richard, or just in your natural intellectual parapetitism and being so curious about, I don't know, I ideas from other fields that kind of enter in to the role of natural selection. I'm thinking about two people in particular, Donald Hoffman, who's got this perception-based reality concept, and Lee Smollin, both past guests on the podcast, who talk about black holes as nucleating what he calls cosmic Darwinian evolution. What do you make of these sort of concepts where, are they legitimate, you know, venues, to pursue? Are they mainly, you know, kind of trying to hitch their wagon to the star

that is natural selection, the brilliant idea that is perhaps, you know, the most foundational idea in all of science? As a Darwinian, I very much like, I mean, I warm to the kind of Smolin idea. Whether it's plausible, I think that's for a physicist to answer. To me, what I like about it is that it does the same job in cosmology as, as, um, natural selection, Darwinian natural selection does in life. Insofar as people sometimes point to the fine-tuning of the universe, the idea that the physical constants are fine-tuned in such a way that if any one of them was different, life wouldn't be here,

or perhaps galaxies wouldn't be here, stars wouldn't be here, chemistry wouldn't be here. It's a challenge to think, well, how did this fine-tuning come about? And talking about a multiverse is obviously one way to do it. And if we have a very large number of universes, all with different physical constants, then by the anthropic principle, we have to be in one of the minority of universes that happens to have physical constants, which give rise to stars and chemistry and life. The Smolin spin on that, refinement of that, helps because instead of just saying we've got billions of universes and some of them just happen to be conducive to producing the world as we see it and live in it, because he postulates a kind of Darwinian selection of universes and the qualities that make for fecundity, that make for reproductive success of a universe, good at making baby universities, good at making baby universities.

universes, those very same qualities are the qualities that eventually make for chemistry and life. That's got to be an appealing idea to any Darwinian. But when I talk to physicists about it, some of them say it's rubbish and some of them say it's a nice idea. Right. It is somewhat controversial, as is the multiverse. I know you were very generous with your encomium for our mutual friend, Lawrence Krauss and his book, A Universe from Nothing, I think you did call it, you know, comparable to the origin of species, which a lot of, you know, cosmologists were quite startled to hear

because the multiverse is really, right now it's a consequence of an unproven theory and actually more viewed as a paradigm rather than a true, elevated to the true level of it. I thought it was a consequence of inflation. Yes, no, that's absolutely correct. but inflation itself. In fact, my research is to build experimental apparatuses that can look for the imprimatur of inflation, which are gravitational waves, but primordial gravitational waves, not from black holes that LIGO and other instruments have detected relatively recently, but from the origin of the universe, the quantum field that causes the nucleation of our universe and then can't potentially spawn other universes.

But there's no necessarily physical evidence for that. or else I wouldn't be building the $100 million Simon's Observatory with my colleagues and friends. So we don't know. It is consistent. Inflation is consistent, but that's not quite enough to rise to the level of, in my opinion. And I've told this to Lawrence in comparison with the great Charles Darwin. If we did have access to truly artificially intelligent agents that are human level, AGI as my past guest and your neighbor there, Nick Bostrom asserts, more than that, it will lead to a

form of utopia. I'm less sanguine and I'm concerned about these agents as, you know, I think Jeremy Bentham said, you know, not whether they can, you know, are they human, but can they experience pain? Will we have obligations to AI agents if they achieve, you know, the Turing test or the, the Keating test or the Dawkins test, whatever we want to formulate. Once they pass some critical threshold that people like, no, will they have rights? Will we ask if they suffer too? Well, earlier you said just sort of knock out a capacitor to make them feel pain. Only if we've only if the programming has built in something equivalent to to real pain,

I suppose. But yes, if that would that would the case, then I think they probably would have rights. Talking about artificial intelligence, it makes me think of the threats and opportunities to what you and I do, which I sometimes call the second oldest profession, maybe the third oldest profession, depending on who's counting, but being professors. It's a core part of your identity, and it is for me as well. What threats or opportunities are you seeing come about thanks to perhaps artificial intelligence, that may or may not threaten what we do because it hasn't changed much in a thousand years since the University of Bologna opened. And there was a guy scratching with a piece of rock on another rock and sitting in front of rapt attention. The only thing I point

out, Richard, is that back then, as you know, the students could go on strike. And that was barbaric because then the professors wouldn't get paid. And so thank God we have tenure now. But how is your job? And how has it changed? Is it gone? Is it has it? Has it? have gotten better, more enjoyable, less enjoyable, and what do you see as the future threats to what we do for a living? Well, if you're asking, could our job as professors be taken over by an intelligent AI? I think, yes, I don't see why not.

Whether they'd be better at it, certainly better at it than some of one's colleagues. But I suppose, since we are human, we empathize with a human who's lecturing, if it's a really good lecturer than somehow the fact that he or she is human and is gesturing and seems to be sort of seizing ideas out of the air and passing them on and thinking aloud, it might be harder to simulate that in an artificial environment than simply to simulate the imparting of knowledge. The imparting of knowledge is certainly this kind of thing that can be done, is already done actually. It doesn't have to be an intelligent professor. It can just be a, I mean, Google is a, or Wikipedia, is a teacher, if you use it right. I think got a long way to go before, before you can simulate a really great lecturer who really does inspire students, but I expect that could happen as well.

And now pivoting to another one of these Abba questions, you know, you're not going to sing Dancing Queen, I wonder if you could recapitulate the concept of the shifting moral. zeitgeist. And then I want to apply it to what's come about on campuses. I date it, you know, for about 10 years now. Something has changed. It's palpable on campus. Speakers, you know, will be protested, shut down. There'll be violent threats against administrators. I just testified to the U.S. Congress two weeks ago about my experiences with anti-Semitism. I'm a Jew and my experiences and my students' experiences here at the University of California. I wonder, first, could you define the shifting moral zeitgeist? And then could we explain and perhaps segue how it is as a subset affecting campus culture, again, where you and I do our work?

Yes. I think if you think about going back a few centuries, we're going back decades, actually. You don't need to go back centuries. You'll find a completely, well, gradually shifting moral positions. if you look at, say, just trivial crime fiction, detective stories, Agatha Christie, Bulldog Drummond, James Bond. Agatha Christie, I think in 1920s, 1930s perhaps, you'll find rather shocking anti-Semitism, racial prejudice of various sorts, anti-women prejudice. which would have been normal and expected. If you go back further to, say, the middle of the 19th century and look at, say, somebody like Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Henry Huxley, both of whom were in the vanguard of advanced liberal thought of their own time, yet they were by modern standards flagrant racists. I mean, both Lincoln and Huxley took it for granted that black people were inferior to white and were incapable of having the same reasoning processes. Women didn't get the vote in various countries until the 20th century in Switzerland, until rather late in the 20th century.

In America, I think, in the 1920s, in Britain in the 1920s, the assumption was that women were incapable of exercising proper judgment, and so they couldn't be in terms. be trusted with the vote. I mean, it's palpable, manifest that the moral zeitgeist shifts as the decades go by. As to why it shifts, I think that's an interesting and complex question. It's a sort of quasi-evolutionary process.

It changes gradually. And what changes it? I'm not really sure. I think it's a combination of, when it says sort of it's in the air, it's dinner table conversation, it's politician speeches, its legal decisions,

its journalistic articles, its books, all these things conspire together to move on the moral zeitgeist. So, I think it's an empirically observable phenomenon and a very important one.

You go back to medieval times and you get truly appalling things. I mean, public executions for entertainment. People would sort of, with the idea of a good day out to entertain the children would be to go to a public hanging. Inconceivable nowadays, but routine and normal in medieval times. In Roman times, gladiatorial contests, people getting entertainment in the Coliseum from watching prisoners being mauled by lions and bears and, And I mean, the shifting moral zeitgeist is an empirically observable phenomenon. You said this place was steps from the water.

We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now.

Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. I'll pivot to a different question for you. Let's say you open your email today and you get an email from a friend. It says, Richard, I am very poorly today and very stupid. And I hate everybody and everything. One lives only to make blunders. I'm going to write a little book for Murray on Orchids today. I hate them worse than anything. So farewell. And in a sweet frame of mind, I am forever yours. What would you say to a colleague if you opened your email one day and got such a message?

I didn't understand that. What are you getting at there? Sorry, this is a quote from Charles Darwin that he apparently wrote to, looking up who he wrote this to. He said, it's a quote where he was depressed from 1861. He wrote, I am very poorly today and very stupid and I hate everybody and everything. one lives only to make blunders. I'm going to write a little book for Murray on orchids. And today I hate them worse than everything.

Fascinating. I use that as a quote. Yeah, I never come across that. I'll send it to you. Yeah, Murray was his publisher. He did write a book about orchids. And I don't think I've been quite that depressed, but I'm interested to hear. That's a genuine letter, is it?

I mean, I have a picture of his handwriting. I'll email it. I post it on Twitter. Okay. That's very interesting. Yeah, the comment is, if you had a colleague and you got such a minute, not you, but if you got a colleague like that, someone who's doing work, it's very tedious to do science, as you know. And I wonder if part of the tedium and boredom and just the committee work and the stuff that is not so great about what you and I do,

if you find great satisfaction from your public-facing side, your writing, your popular writing, where does it rank? How do you compare your research life and writing papers and you're extremely highly cited to writing books, to communicating with the public? Is it a tonic? Is it something that buoys you to be with the public to go on tour as you are going? How do you balance the public life with the academic life and synthesize them into one coherent intellectual whole? Yes. Well, first of all, before we leave Darwin, your quote begins by I'm very poorly today. And Darwin was, of course, a chronic invalid. And so he had an illness, a mysterious illness. Nobody quite knows what it was, but he was permanently, more or less permanently ill. And so on a bad day, I could well imagine that he would be hating everybody and hating life and things. I mean, just simply something like being seasick. You sort of want to die. I mean, if Darwin felt like that, I could understand him anyway. But going back to your question about balancing, talking to the writing for the public and writing for scientific

colleagues, I try to do both. I think insofar as it's possible, and I think it probably isn't possible in physics or as much harder in physics to write for colleagues and for the general public at the same time because physics is so difficult. Modern physics is so difficult. Both cosmology and quantum physics are so difficult that you couldn't really imagine papers to nature being written in a way that could be understood by any layperson. I think my field is, because I've concentrated on evolution, it is possible to write in a way that is understandable by the intelligent layperson and at the same time makes a contribution

to the field. My late colleague John Maynard Smith, in reviewing two of my books, The Self-Ristine and the Extended Phenotype, said that both books were unusual in his opinion in that they attempted to talk to both audiences at the same time. He said that David Lack, the ornithologist David Lack was another example of somebody who did that. But it was rather unusual. That is what I try to do. Not sure how successfully, but I do try to make contributions at the same time as talking to lay people. I sometimes joke that we have almost a moral obligation as scientists who get paid by the public, after all, here in the U.S. and there in the UK, to explain things.

And if you were to work as a plumber or, you know, installing stone countertops and your employee, employer said to you, well, what are you doing today, Richard? And you said, I can't explain it to you. You can't possibly understand what I'm doing. I mean, you probably get fired pretty quickly. And yet we have a whole host of people. I've had this kind of online battle with Sabina Hosenfelder, you know, about the fact that all scientists should receive at least some training in communication to the public. And yet it's almost looked down upon. I mean, you surely know of the travails that Carl Sagan had in the U.S. and never being elected to the national Academy. Some say out of spite for his popularity. And we have many examples of that, oh, you know,

a real scientist is in the lab or at the computer and not communicating with the public. How do you react to my statement that scientists who are paid by the public have a moral obligation to give some return on investment to the public who pays their salary? I think there was a time when the National Science Foundation, when giving a grant, demanded that a certain percentage of the output of the grantee should be devoted to explaining to the public what the research was all about. I'm not sure if that's still the case, but I think that's a very good idea. You mentioned the Carl Sagan effect, and it's notorious, of course, that he obviously should have been a member of the National Academy and wasn't.

I've been sometimes asked whether I suffer from the same thing. I actually have been elected to the Royal Society, despite the fact that most of my books are aimed at the general public. So I haven't suffered from the Sagan effect, I'm happy to say. Yeah, I mean, I think that communication to the public should not just be left to professional journalists who do a good job of actually reading up the science and then translating it into a leg. terms, I think the scientists themselves ought to do it themselves, and ideally even make contributions to their science in language which is generally understandable. Darwin wrote for the general public and was at the same time making a stupendous contribution to science. And that's a model which we might well follow. This is an out-of-this-world conversation, isn't it? And if you're

interested in getting a fragment of our early solar system something that's truly out of this world, I know you're going to want to go to my Monday Magic mailing list. And you can subscribe at briankeating.com slash list. And if you have a dot edu email address, you're guaranteed to win one of these beauties, a real fragment of our early solar system. Who knows? Perhaps some of the schmutz was on this very meteorite that brought life to Earth some billions of years ago. I don't know about that. But I'll teach you all about meteorites and how to observe meteor showers in a follow-up message once you join my Monday Magic mailing list. And if you have a dot edu email address, you're guaranteed to win one of these beauties if you live in the United States. Go to Brian Keating.com

slash edu if you're a fellow academic like me and Richard. Now, back to the episode. Absolutely. Yeah. And the people that we look to most of all, at least in physics, Richard Feynman, you know, nowadays we have no real peer of his. But Sir Roger Penrose, your colleague, as well, these are exceptional writers as well as scientists. I mean, you really can't do climb higher. I have a question from a listener who asked Thomas Payne is his name. Is evolution not being taught in America at the K-12 level? Is that still a problem affecting society?

And how would you change the educational system in America or maybe even in the UK if you could? What is sort of the best educational system right now? I don't know what K-12 means. What is that? This person's asking everything from a five-year-old up to a 17-year-old, but let's just restrict it to 14-to- 17-year-old, say. Well, I think it's a pity that if you look at textbooks of biology, commonly evolution comes rather near the end of the textbook. And that doesn't make any sense because you're learning all about the facts of biology without being taught why. And it really should be the first chapter, because otherwise nothing.

nothing makes sense. So that would be one change would be to put it early in the curriculum rather than late. Another thing would be to teach it unashamedly and without intimidation from religious fundamentalist interests who try to stop you doing so. I mean, some of my colleagues feel the need to boulderize their teaching so as not to give offence to religious fundamentalists. And so instead of talking about evolution, they'll talk about, I don't know, modification by descent or use a euphemism. I think we need to confront it head on and say this is science and you've got to learn the science. And you can't opt out of science because it goes against a traditional faith.

Would you advocate dialogue with trying to teach, say, the concept of religion as part of an extended phenotype? Is that something that you would expect would curry favor with proponents of intelligent design or, in your opinion, should they be ignored? It wouldn't carry favor. I think they'd hate it. One of the things that Dan Dennett's book, Breaking the Spell does, is to try to explain why people believe in evolution or sorry why people believe in religion and I differ from many of my colleagues

who don't bend over backwards to say evolution and religion are totally compatible you don't have to give up your faith and I see why they do it it's politically very sound because otherwise you're going to just turn people away but I'm too much wedded to the actual truth to do that

And so I would be a very bad teacher in America probably because I would have people walking out of my classes rather than trying to seduce them. I've been accused of sort of just sort of setting it out there and not engaging in an exercise of persuasion or seduction. And I just believe in just telling it like it is. I was not talking to one of the lawyers in that famous case, Kitsmiller case, in, I think somewhere in Pennsylvania. After talking to me, he said, well, thank goodness we didn't call you as an expert witness. You'd have lost the case for us. Because, I mean, what they did was they got religious scientists to come along and explain that they're fully compatible. So I want to conclude with a set of questions that I have basically stolen from the late grades or Arthur C.

Clark, and that is because I am here at UC San Diego, we're honored to have the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination, and the center was endowed by his charitable foundation, and I'm honored to be the associate co-director of it. So I have all sorts of different questions that mainly relate to different sayings. As you know, Sir Arthur was quite quotable, and he said things like, for every expert. There's an equal and opposite expert. But I want to start with the first one that is probably very familiar to you and my audience. And that's his famous quote, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

You've surely heard that, Richard, right? Yes. So I want to ask you, what form of technology or invention of the human mind is most magical? If you could go back to the time of, I'll say, Elizabeth I first, in a Boeing 747 and get out your smartphone. And, I mean, indistinguishable from magic, obviously. I mean, it would be just mind-blowing for them. And I suppose if people from 500 years ahead would time travel back to us. now, we would be so overawed that we might fall on our knees and worship them as gods because

they would have godlike powers. I think Clark's third law is very wise and obviously true. Another question that is somewhat related to that, and we touched upon it, comes from 2001, a space odyssey, where there are these monoliths that appear on the African savannah and then later on in space and there are hominids that, you know, hitting it with, with bones and so forth. But we don't really know what they are. They could be time capsules. They could be, you know, other types of phenomena. I want to ask you, if you had a time capsule and it could last a billion years, what would

you put on it or in it? It doesn't have to be your work. It could be or it could be, you know, a Bach, you know, Cantata or something like that. What would you put in order to, you know, time travel throughout. all of eternity. Perhaps send it out into space as a sort of cosmic tombstone for humanity, because we're going to be destroyed, obviously, eventually. And it would be nice to think that something of our culture would be at least a slight

possibility of being discovered by other civilizations, so we wouldn't be totally forgotten. Well, I would put Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert. and in hope that if they didn't have ears, at least they could appreciate them in some mathematical form. Shakespeare, well, the problem is language, I suppose, but again, they'll be very advanced, so maybe they can decode the language. And as for science, well, Newton, Galileo, Einstein, Darwin, Watson and Crick, there's so much that we would wish to preserve, to advertise ourselves. I suppose various different languages.

I like to think of a cosmic tombstone. I asked that question to, this is a finger puppet of Carl Sagan. We have to get Richard Dawkins' finger puppet. I do have a Noam Chomsky one, and he was a guest on the show. So I think we can get Dawkins one if there's not already. But Richard, I asked this of Carl Sagan's widow. I never got to meet Carl, but I asked his widow, Andrewian, the same question I just asked you about putting a basically a time capsule out in the cosmos. And she said, oh, I did that.

And I said, oh, really? She said, yeah. And they were launching Voyager 2. Carl and I just started dating. And he put me in a EEG scanner and scanned my brain. and scanned my brainwaves as we were just falling in love. And that was put on the Voyager Golden Disc. So she was told by NASA that thou will last at least four billion years.

So she was the first person that actually did embody that question. Okay. The second penultimate question, Richard, and then I'll let you go. I know it's getting late. And I just am so appreciative for your forbearance and indulgence of these silly little questions. But a question that Sir Arthur asked or statement, that he made was the following. He said, when a distinguished but elderly scientist says something is possible, they are almost certainly right. But when they say something's impossible, they're

probably wrong. And Arthur C. Clark called these failures of imagination in his book Profiles of the Future. Nowadays, we call them limiting beliefs. But I want to ask you the question in the form of, in this way. What have you been wrong about? What have you changed your mind about, if anything? but it's sort of too small in a way to, I mean, I can give you one example, but first, you know there's some wonderful ones of, I think it was Lord Kelvin in the 19th century who said that flying machines are impossible. Maybe it wasn't Lord Kelvin. Maybe he said radio will turn out to be a hoax. the various 19th century eminent physicists who got egg all over their faces by denying the possibility of things

which are now absolutely commonplace but anyway you asked me about Kelvin Kelvin yeah it was Kelvin who said heavier than air flying machines are impossible that's right that was in 1895 eight years before the Wright brothers proved them wrong yes yes that's right

there are quite a few of those which are well worth quoting as a cautionary tale. I was wrong about the so-called handicap principle of animal communication, particular sexual selection. The idea of the Israeli scientist Amat Sahavi that the reason why sexually selected signals like peacock's tails are so extravagant and beautiful and wasteful is precisely because they're extravagantly

wasteful and costly and handicaps. That's why they work. That's why they are favoured by natural selection. Always before, and I went along with this, I admitted that they were handicaps, but I thought that they survived despite being handicaps. So Harvey's revolutionary thought was that they survived because they're handicaps, because they're costly.

And only by being costly do they establish their creditors. credentials with whoever they're trying to impress, which might be a female. And I was wrong about that. And this was proved by my ex-student and now colleague and now actually mentor, Alan Graffen, who'd done mathematical modeling to show that the Harvey's handicap principle really does work. And costly signals really are favored precisely because they are costly. And if they were not costly, they would not be favored. So I was wrong and I had to climb down.

Hey, there's a good chance you might be a scientist or an engineer aspiring to be, maybe going to school, graduate school, or after school, or maybe you're a professor like me. If you're wanting to learn the greatest tips and ways to become your best scientist, you might want to get my book into The Impossible. Think like a Nobel Prize winner with a forward by my friend Nobel laureate, Barry Barish. In it, we describe an incredible series of tips on how to collaborate better, unlock your creative genius, and get over common pitfalls like the imposter's, I hope you'll take a deep dive into it, and I know you'll enjoy it.

You can read a free chapter at my website, briankeating.com, slash books, and you can buy it at amazon.com, an e-book, audiobook, or in physical hard copy or paperback form. Thanks a lot. Very good. Okay, Richard. The last question I have relates to Arthur's Law that actually is the namesake of this podcast or what gave this podcast its name. and it goes like this.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them a little way into the impossible. So that's why this podcast has its name. I want to ask you if you could go back and see 20-year-old, 30-year-old, Richard, and you had 30 seconds to speak to him. What would you say to him,

to give him the confidence, you know, to do as you've done, to go into the impossible? Well, something pretty similar to what Arthur C. Clark's said, believe that you can do it and go ahead and do it. Have confidence to actually do it. Richard, this has been a delight for me and for my audience. Like I said, we will make it into many versions and I hope you will continue to write and be well. And if I don't see you in San Francisco, I hope to visit you at Oxford, the UK. This has been a great honor and a great delight. I want to thank you

so much. Thank you very much. It has been a delight for me as well. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theatre stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at yamava Theater.com. Only at Yamava Resort and Casino celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter.