Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion: Atheism & AI

Episode Date: June 1, 2025

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 In this thought-provoking installment, host Brian Keating sits down with legendary evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins for an electrifying conversation that spans the wonders of science, atheism, artificial intelligence, and the tapestry of human existence. A live audience in Vancouver brings their best questions, challenging Dawkins on topics from the acceleration of evolution to the place of hope in a godless universe. Throughout, Dawkins reminds us of the beauty and privilege of being alive—and the imperative to embrace science not just as a source of practical utility, but as a thing of wonder in itself. Get ready for a lively, no-holds-barred exploration of reason, mortality, memes, and meaning with one of the most acclaimed public intellectuals of our time. - Key Takeaways: 00:00 "Dawkins: Legacy of Rationality" 10:18 "Unveiling Life's Lottery" 16:29 AI and the Turing Test Debate 19:55 Altman Teases with "Project Strawberry" 27:16 Parasites Manipulate Host Behavior 31:16 Unique Oxford Tutorial System 36:34 Improbability of Life's Uniqueness 41:45 Darwinian Sleep Theory Explained 49:13 Molecular Genetics of Aquatic Mammals 55:40 "Shifting Moral Zeitgeist" 01:00:09 "Scientific Discoveries: Nature's Script" 01:04:25 Biological vs. Personal Life Meaning 01:14:20 Gene Purpose: A Misconception 01:19:31 Beyond Selfish Genes 01:20:58 Belief vs. Faith: A Civilizational Challenge 01:30:54 "Miller's Experiment on Life's Origins" 01:37:15 Creationism vs. Evolution: Missing Link Argument 01:38:58 "Evolution's Certainty Comparable to Orbit" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join Get a copy of my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/03ezQFu My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un   📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 Neil Turok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5cFLN65fI Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein vs. Stephen Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/g00ilS6tBvs Avi Loeb: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw   Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.S. College PC. What is the biological necessity of sleep? In other words, if there are exoplanets that have a diurnal,

anything that exist in the universe has some spin rate, will probably have some nighttime? Will they have creatures there? Will they sleep? Will they have diurnal cycles? It's a fascinating question. I mean, if you're asking as a Darwinian, I mean, the Darwinian theory that I'm acquainted with

is that because there is such a dramatic difference between the day and night, because of the irritation of the earth. It's not possible to be well adapted to both. And therefore, the best strategy is to be well adapted to one of them and to keep out of mischief for the other. And so sleep is, according to this theory, it originated with a man called Ray Medis.

Sleep is just a way of keeping out of mischief of not being conspicuous. time when you don't need to be. And then all the physiological consequences of that, which are definite, I mean, you certainly need sleep physiologically. That's a secondary consequence. There are people who claim never to sleep. They're very rare. They have been studied and it looks as they may exist. It's extremely rare. My main criticism of the way many people think science would be taught is that they think it should be made relevant to everyday life. And I think everyday life is what's boring.

But science itself is riveting and exciting. Welcome everybody. What an incredible turnout over a thousand of the brightest people in British Columbia. And handsome and beautiful. To enjoy science on a Sunday night. This is crazy. Give yourselves a round of applause. This is insane.

I... I am Brian Keating, a professor of astrophysics and cosmology down south in the southern border of California, UC San Diego. It's a great privilege and an honor to be here with my friend Richard Dawkins, who many of you know, and for those three of you who may not know, he was the inaugural Charles Simoni Professor in the public understanding of science at Oxford University. You all know how important science is, so I don't have to tell you that. You'll also probably know of his many, many books, which we'll be talking about tonight, and there'll be an opportunity for you to ask him questions and hopefully not rebut too much, but you'll ask some very, very good questions. I'm sure at the very end, I'll let you know when that is. He's, of course, written the God Delusion, the Blind Watchmaker, many, many other books. And his newest book is the very cheerfully titled Genetic Book of the Dead. The Dead, everybody. We'll talk a lot about life and death tonight.

And this is a work that was beautifully illustrated by an artist who's here tonight, Yana Lanzova. So give her a hand if you've read the book. Richard is perhaps one of the greatest living scientists and most admired scientists. He was born exactly 83 years ago in colonial Kenya, because of course that's where he'd be born to learn about how red and tooth and claw nature is. and under the tutelage of future Nobel laureate, Nico Tinburgeon Dawkins absorbed the truths that would later become his hallmark of rationality, of science, and of reason.

In 1976, before many of you were born, he hit the world with the selfish gene. Who's read the selfish gene? Now, this book did not just explain what Darwinian principles were all about. It literally punched you in the face with its truth and its reason. And he explained exactly what the same. these little sequences of code we're doing to kind of operate like little crime bosses,

like little Tony Sopranos making their way into the future and pushing out anything that got in their way. But he didn't stop there, no, far from it. He then followed up with an incredible book, The God Delusion, which, within his inimitable patience, explained for the benefit of any doubters out there the foolishness of relying on sort of theories and beings in the sky. And this was know how to win friends and influence people. He knew this would maybe turn away many, many people, but he has more courage than almost any living, so-called public intellectual, at least any of that I'm aware. And so many of you don't know this, but Richard should probably be one of the wealthiest people on earth because he invented the meme. Anybody, anyone who's ever shared

a bad boyfriend, a Drake meme, you know, where he's like this and like this, or especially the meme lord in chief, yes, Elon Musk owes Sir Richard, not a small amount of gratitude, and maybe some doge coin, which is a type of meme coin. So he should be rolling in that dough. But let's be honest, his main claim to fame, at least as I interact with him, is on Twitter, no, the other way around, X, formerly known as Twitter. And in that medium, no one is as adept as the pugilist Richard Dawkins, who's known to block people and then unblock them just to block them again. I mean, this is an amazing phenomenon that he is enabled himself. But Richard, you've given us so much for us to think about, and you've done more than, as I

said, any living in public intellectual with his writing, which is beautiful and lyrical, and I think it's appropriate. So tomorrow, many of you know, I've written several books about Nobel Prizes and with Nobel Prize winners, tomorrow is like Christmas Day for nerds. Tomorrow is the announcement of the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology, and I'd like you to stand up and perhaps give a round of applause if you think Richard should be the recipient tomorrow. Let's welcome Richard Dawkins. Well, Richard, it's a delight to be here. It's such a great treat. I have many, many questions. I know the audience has many questions. I have to get these organized here. But I want to start with a quote from you.

Actually, before we do that, you're the professor, the emeritus professor of the Charles Money Chair in the public understanding of science. I recall a 2015 study by the National Academy of Sciences in the United States that claimed that 25% of Americans believe the sun orbits around the earth. And you Canadians can take pride because it was 33% of Canadians that felt the same way. Is this hopeless, Richard? It's the same in Britain, unfortunately, as well. There was something like a similar figure

that thought it took one month for the Earth to orbit the sun. I think that was the way it went from Britain. Yes, well, we have an uphill struggle. The thing about science is that it's so fascinating. I mean, it's a tragedy that people should not know things like why they exist and things that we all are getting to know in the 21st century because we live in the age after Newton and Darwin and Einstein. It's such a privilege. Yeah, and in fact, that really brings to mind this wonderful quote, very joyful ones,

because it starts by Richard Dawkins, it starts by saying, we are going to die, okay? Newsflash, you're all going to die. But that makes us to us to. the lucky ones you said. Most people are never going to die because they're never even going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place, but it will, in fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. And then you complain about people. We privileged few who won the lottery of births.

against all odds. How dare we wind at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? What do you make of the recent rise in sentiments that go by the name anti-natalism that somehow humanity is a curse or a plague on this planet? And maybe the Earth would be better off to have fewer children and fewer people. Well, that's very sad because life is so wonderful and we are, as I said in that passage. That's the opening paragraph of my book Unweaving the Rainbow. I suppose I was partly thinking of the lottery of the number of sperms that converging on one egg. Aldous Huxley wrote a poem about that. He said, a million million spermatozoa, All of them alive, out of their cataclysm, but one poor Noah dare hope to survive.

And of that billion minus one might have chance to be Shakespeare, another Newton, a new done. But the one was me. Shame to have ousted your betters thus, taking arc while the others remained outside. Better for all of us, Froa Tremunculus, if you'd quietly died. on the flip side of that sort of existential coin perhaps is the fertility crisis and the diminishment of the number of spermatozoe, I don't know what the effect is on eggs and ova, but what is behind that? I've no idea. Is there a remarkable phenomenon?

It does seem to be a real thing and I don't know what it's due to. So, you know, sort of a thought that has come about in the non-shifting moral zeitgeist, see that, that's a Richardism, a Dawkinism, is this notion of the so-called simulation hypothesis that as computers, computing technology, advances Nick Bostrom, your co-worker, fellow colleague professor at the University of Oxford, has suggested that perhaps the most likely scenario is that we are not. born and even more outnumbered than spermatozoa are fictitious or simulated entities. And I would like to get your thoughts on that. Well, Nick Bostrom's theory is remarkable because it's very hard to disprove. And the idea is that simulation from the future, that we are a simulation in a computer that's built in the future. And I can't disprove it. I mean, do you think it's plausible? I have one question always for Nick whenever I talk to him, and that's, why are there so many Kardashians? And after that, if he could answer that, I asked, why are there so many Tim Hortons?

What's with the Tim Hortons? This is incredible. I mean, I had a sort of gloss on his theory, Yeah. It happened because my mother, I was showing her my iPhone, and she was aged 100 at the time. And she said, but all that knowledge really inside that little thing, is it really there? And I had to explain, no, it's not there. It's coming from outside.

It's coming from massive computers. It's called a cloud. And it's coming inside from out within this little tiny object. And then I thought, well, maybe Nick Bostrom was right. And perhaps the answer to the riddle of how the human brain can accomplish so much, even though it's in such a small volume, maybe we are connected to some cloud. And if we are a simulation from the future, then maybe it isn't all in our brain. Maybe it's all coming in. And I think you can't disprove that either.

I wonder if you can disprove it. I mean, I work as an experimental cosmologist who try to understand. theories of the early genesis of the universe. Was it caused by a pre-existing universe, or was it a singularity? And we like to look at data from the perspective of can you disprove it, can you falsify it? Not that that's the only criterion, but Carl Popper obviously made this quite prominent. And in this case of the simulation hypothesis, ironically, one of the virtues is you could effectively falsify it because there would be effectively a smallest resolution element, a violation, a a pixel in space.

Yes, I suppose they would. Not to mention the kind of, you know, the third rail is always, you know, don't talk religion with Richard Dawkins. You don't want to get into a debate with Richard Dawkins. I remember one of my favorite comebacks of yours that I often use without attributing it to you. I'm sorry, I'll pay you royalties later

when Elon Musk pays you for Dogecoin. But someone wants challenged you to a debate. Richard is scared to debate, and Richard said, yes, I can see how that would be very good for your CV for your resume. So I do use that. Actually, that wasn't mine. No, okay.

Bob May. Do you know Bob May? No, I don't know. Okay. Bob May was a physicist who became a biologist at Oxford. He came from Australia. And I'd like to think of it in an Australian accent. That would be great on your CV, not so good on mine.

But when we think about, You know, that's technological. I mean, to think that it was 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright, first took a 238-foot-long flight in North Carolina up 60 years later, landing on the moon, 65 years later, 66 years later, the pace of acceleration of technology has led people like Ray Kurzweil and others to speculate, yes, there is the singularity, it's coming, it's nearer, it's almost upon us. this notion that this rise is inevitable and inexorable, and we can't really do anything to avoid it.

I wonder, are you more scared of artificial intelligence or natural stupidity? I am intrigued by artificial intelligence, and I have this experimented a bit with just sort of chat GPT and a couple of others. And I'm bowled over by the... I mean, I long ago read Turing's criterion for identifying consciousness, and he had this thing, I think it called the imitation game,

I think it was called, where you sit in a room with a, in those days, it was a teleprinter, and you communicate with something in another room via the teleprinter. And you have to decide whether it's a human or a computer. And if you can't decide, no matter how rigorously you use, interrogate it, then the computer must be conscious. Well, I've interrogated chat GTP, and it seems to me that it passes the Turing test with flying colors, and yet I still don't believe it's conscious. And so where are we? By the way, its factual knowledge is not so great. I asked it a question about Helen Spurway, who was a geneticist.

She died long ago. She was the wife of JBS Haldane, the great British biologist. And Chatt GPT said, after Haldane died, she married Richard Dawkins. So I said, no, she didn't. And Chat GTP said, oh, sorry, I got that wrong. Actually, she married Aldous Huxley. It was also false. So it seems to me it needs to hook up with Google to get its facts right.

Yeah. Yeah, they made a great deal of fanfare. Recently, Open AI came out with the latest, greatest model called 01, and they were bragging about it. And this is incredible technology that's being developed. But their brag was that it has a 3% error rate now when adding together two, seven-digit numbers. And they claim it's PhD level. Now, I don't know about you, but I had a PhD,

and he or she could not add or multiply two seven-digit numbers together. I get the right answer. More than 97% of the time, I'd be quite upset. But this is hailed as a great improvement. And I wonder, you know, Philip Morrison at MIT said something about the branch of physics called condensed matter physics. It's not important exactly what that involves. But it's effectively the study of collectives, you know, when an atom by itself, a hydrogen atom behaves very differently than the hydrogen atoms in this room. And so he coined this term, more is different, that you get something, you don't just get 10 or 10 to the 23rd times the behavior of one hydrogen atom. You get something vastly different with vastly different ways of characterizing it. I wonder what you think

about that. When what CHFTPT is doing, you know, it has this vast training set of data and it's learning and it's predicting, but is that really thinking? Is that really what we do as human beings, as human minds? It's very different. The principle by which it works, I think, is very different. But I'm astonished to hear you say that it can't always do a simple arithmetic. I mean, because that's what computers do. Allegedly, Sam Altman trolled the world because there was a meme, courtesy of you, I can't deny the use of that phrase. that it would return the number two when you asked it, how many R's are in the word strawberry?

So the code name for this new model is Project Strawberry. Of course, it has three R's. So it couldn't even get, it wouldn't answer correctly the number of R. The previous model, GPD4, was getting that wrong very frequently. So it's very different. As you said, Google is for when you need answers to something, and now these chat are when you don't. But the question is, you know, which one are you going to get?

Are you going to get the one that says you were married, you know, this lady was married to you? But I don't understand why you can't combine them, why you can't simply give it a hotline to Google. Well, so they've made firewalls, at least Open AI, has made some firewalls to prevent that, because the worry is that you're going to get a version of, you know, remember, do they call mad cow disease, mad cow disease? Yes. Okay. So when mad cow disease, I understand it, you can explain it much better than I as a cosmologist.

But, you know, these cows were eating other cows and eating their brains, and this would do something with prions or something in the cow. By the way, I'll tell you something about that. During the mad cow disease scare, the sales of beef tomatoes, beef tomatoes, plummeted. Yeah, we had, four years ago, there's a city in Southern California called Corona, California, and it saw tourism drop precipitously. But this notion of bots trained on their own training data, and could that lead to basically mad bot disease?

I mean, could we find ourselves in a situation where some AIs do not access the web? And so that's why they can't just look it up. Yes. Yet. Well, I don't understand why they don't access the web. But maybe it's a regard to the kind of challenge to do it without. Sometimes they talk about AI safety,

and this could allegedly create some, some great challenge or AI apocalypse that many people are quite rationally concerned about. I mean, this technology, the fact that you use it and you're showing it to your mother, you were showing it to your mother, the iPhone. And now, is your mother still with us? She died at 102. Oh, wow. You know, quite good genetics.

Thank her for it. But, you know, that these are so incredibly, I mean, no technology has really influenced a two-year-old as much as a 102-year-old. I mean, I have young children, and when I first got an iPad and that showed it to them, 10 minutes later, when I was talking to them, telling them to clean their room, they tried to swipe my face, you know, to make me stop talking. This technology has only gotten more addictive and more, you know, kind of fascinating. So the fact that you're using at age 83 and that your mother would, you know, probably would have used it if she were around,

is there really any precedent for, are we entering this, you know, brave new world? I think we are. And it's worrying to some people. Jonathan Haidt has written a book about the dangers of young people, children, teenagers, immersing themselves in the virtual world and not having a normal interaction with their peers, not having a normal childhood, in fact. So on my podcast, The Into the Impossible Podcast, whenever I have someone of great renown like you, I've hosted 21 Nobel Prize winners, I'm quite proud of them.

that. I always ask them to what I call an ABBA question or an ACDC question, which is the following type of question. If I were to ever have on ACDC on the Into the Impossible podcast, it could happen. But if I ever did, and I didn't ask them to play, you know, she shook me all night long or back in black, then I'm not doing my job as a podcaster. I want to ask you to define the extended phenotype, one of the greatest contributions in evolutionary biology, but then in particular, apply it to things that humans are making, is Instagram, is Facebook. Are those parts of the extended phenotype of human beings? I think the answer is no, but I have to, you've asked me to explain what the extended phenotype is. The phenotype is the manifestation

of the genotype. So something like your toes and your, your, your hairs under your arms, This is all part of your phenotype. Your behavior is part of your phenotype. And in my worldview, genes are selected for their power, their capacity to survive by virtue of influencing the phenotype. So genes use the phenotype, genes use the body to get themselves into the next generation. So something like a beaver's tail is part of its phenotype, and the beeweens use the body. uses its tail to swim with and genes in the beaver influence its tail in such a way that the beaver survives and therefore the genes survive so that's the normal use of the

word phenotype the extended phenotype is something that is outside the body but yet is a Darwinian adaptation and therefore must be regarded as a product of genes the beaver dam is not part of the beaver's body but it's something that the beaver spends a great deal of time working on, and it's something that aids the beaver's survival. Therefore, it is part of the extended phenotype of beaver genes. Birds' nests are as well. A bird's nest is not part of the bird's body,

but it's quite clearly a piece of Darwinian adaptation. It's quite clearly designed to help the bird's genes to survive. So any kind of artifact like that is an extended phenotype. Now, if you accept that, then the next step in the argument would be something like a parasite influencing its host. There are many parasites that have more than one host. They have a major host, which might be a sheep. So a liver fluke has the sheep as its main host. but it has another host which is a snail

and part of the life history of the parasite is lived in the snail and then it needs to get the snail eaten by the sheep in order to get into the definitive host which is the sheep. So what parasites do then is to influence the behavior of the secondary host

in this case the snail to increase its probability of getting into the final host There are ants which are the intermediate host of another kind of flatworm another kind of fluke called a brain worm

and this ant again needs to be eaten by a sheep and so what the earliest age in the life history of the parasite does is it crawls into the brain of the ant and makes a lesion in the brain it manipulates the brain it cuts something in the brain which makes the ant crawl to the top of grass stems

instead of being down on the ground and going underground and therefore is more vulnerable to being eaten by a sheep. So the behaviour of the ant is part of the extended phenotype of genes in the fluke, in the worm, in the parasite. Well, the next step in the argument is parasites don't actually have to live inside their host cuckus are parasites of various species of bird and they trick the foster species into feeding them

so the cuckoo lays its egg in the nest of another species like a reed warbler and the baby cuckoo then throws the eggs out of the reed warbler's nest and then the adult reed warblers feed the baby cuckoo So this is a parasite, parasitizing the behavior of the host. Once again, we have to regard the behavior of the host bird, the re-wobber in this case, as part of the extended phenotype of the kuku. So that's...

Oh, and then you can generalize even further and point out that bird song it's been shown in canaries. When a male sings that a female, this actually causes her ovaries to swell, and it changes her hormonal state and therefore her behavior. So the change in the hormonal state of the female is part of the extended phenotype of genes in the male

because it is an adaptation selecting the male genes to influence the behavior of the female. So that's the extended phenotype. Now, Brian has asked me whether man-made things, one could take something like this theatre or any building. Twitter. Yes. And I ask whether this is an extended phenotype of humans.

And I think not, because it's not an adaptation by the genes of the, in this case, the architect or the designer of... of the software you're talking about. If it were true that there were genes in architects that influenced them to a particular architectural style, then you might have a case. Or if there were genes in these, you asked about software, about, yes.

If there were variation in software designers, that was genetic variation which caused them to design. different kinds of software. That would be extended phenotype, but I don't believe for a moment that's the case. It'd be very surprising if it was. Well, from parasitic birds to zombie ants to something lighter. Nuclear war. No, you and I are members of what I call the second oldest profession. We're professors. And literally almost nothing has changed since the year 180 in the University of Bologna in Italy, when some sage would scrape on a piece of rock with another piece of rock and rapt attention, the audience would gasp and awe.

Except back then, they had this barbaric practice. I don't know if you're aware of it. But the students could go on strike, and the professors wouldn't get paid. But thank God we have tenure nowadays. I mean, that was truly barbaric. But what do you make of being a professor nowadays? A lot of people out here are probably getting ready to apply to university. It's the university application season.

What do you make of being a professor in the year 23rd? I think it's a wonderful profession, and I've enjoyed it for much of my life. At Oxford, we have the tutorial system, which is rather unique. We have one-to-one tutorials, lecturer or tutor and student, and I absolutely loved it as a student. I mean, if anything was the making of me, that was it. The idea that you actually have face-to-face contact with a professor, and in my day you actually wrote an essay,

which you then had to read out, read aloud to your tutor and criticize it. And you had to go into the library and read up the original research literature. We didn't use textbooks. We had to go into the library and read the original research literature. and I would sleep and dream about the essay topic for that week. So I was well prepared when I became a lecturer at Oxford, a tutor at Oxford, what you would call a professor here, to appreciate it because I'd appreciate it so much as a student.

And then I became a real professor, which I didn't give tutorials anymore, but I had to give lectures. And it's a different part of the profession, but I think it's a wonderful profession, and I think it was wonderful being a student as well. Do you think universities deliver on the ever-increasing tuitions, which have outpaced inflation by a margin five to one? I couldn't say about that.

I mean, that's very unfortunate. Tuition, I gather, means money. Yes. Yes. Yeah, that's very sad. You could say, I suppose, that with the Internet, you don't actually need professors at all, and all you need to do is log on. Right.

And you have to be a bit selective about what you believe, though. Yeah, the previous subject matter of what do you trust when he comes to artificial avatars. But I've often wondered, yeah, why take a course with, you know, Brian Keating when you could take cosmology with Albert Einstein and avatar all of his 1,200,000 words are digitized? It requires great discipline to do it on your own.

And I think that's part of the problem. I think one of the things about university is that you have somebody supervising you, you have somebody guiding you. Although in principle, you could use the internet to learn everything that's known by humanity. You need great discipline,

to keep at it and also to know which bits are rubbish, an awful lot of it is, and which bits are not. How do you develop and cultivate that type of taste, coming at it at an issue? Well, I suppose look for the evidence and cultivate the view that only that for which there is evidence is to be trusted. So fellow professor Yuval Noah Harari has said and predicted perhaps that within 100 or 200 years, a new species of the homogenous will emerge and they may take control over homo sapiens. We may become their servants. Noah Harari is basing this upon technological development already at work and artificial limbs, prosthetic arms and legs, implanted chips.

I don't want to talk about transgenderism necessarily myself, but transhumanism. What do you make of this claim by Yuval that perhaps we may become the subservient entities to a new species? Well, there might be nothing left of the biology at all. I mean, we might become nothing but robotic products. I think Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, President of Astronomer Royal, things that if ever we encounter extraterrestrial civilizations, it will not be the original biological entities at all, but they're technological products who may have a much longer lifespan than the biological originators.

Yeah, there's an old joke that was popularized by Leo Salard. He was a great atomic physicist from the 1940s, the atomic era, and the Manhattan Project. He was asked, you know, where are they? Where are all the aliens, as Fermi's famous paradox suggested? And he said, they're here. They're called Hungarians. Yes. So let's turn to aliens and the like.

I'm a cosmologist. I don't study that per se, but I do think up a lot about the existence of life on other planets and on other domains. And, you know, right now, I believe it's a faith-based question. You know, people say, there's so many stars and there's so many planets around each star, we know of thousands that are just like the Earth. There's got to be life elsewhere in the universe. How do you react to that, RGIA? If you take the view that we are unique, if we are the only ones, we're alone.

If you take that view, then something remarkable follows from that, which is that the origin of life on this planet was a quite staggeringly improbable event because it has to be that improbable that it only happened once in a universe of, well, what, 10 to the 22 stars and a larger number of planets? And that would mean that when,

we try to speculate or do research on the origin of life, we are not looking for a plausible theory. We're looking for a highly, highly implausible theory. And I don't think we are. I mean, I wouldn't want to admit that when people talk about the origin of life, it's a difficult problem. We don't know the answer. But to be that improbable, so improbable that we are totally wasting our time even speculating about it. because it would be verging on impossible if it only happened once in 10 to the 22, greater than 10 to 22 possible places.

Well, that's a remarkable conclusion. It could be right. I mean, we are unique, but I don't think we are. Of course, you can make a distinction between just origin of some kind of life, something like bacterial life, say. And then you've got various, possible stages of greater complexity before you hit the kind of life that we would be likely

to encounter, intelligent life that can say send radio waves, radio signals. I mean, on this planet, we had the origin of the eukaryotic cell, which probably took place about two billion years ago, and then we have the origin of multicellularity, of many celled organisms, and then we have the origin of nervous systems, and then we have the origin of, well, let's say, language. And all those steps have to be taken before you hit a form of life which we would be at all likely to encounter in the form of radio signals. So it could be that the universe is teeming with bacterial type life, but it's extremely rare to find... intelligent life. It could be that intelligent life is so rare that there are only a billion

examples of it because the universe is so vast that a billion is a very, very small number. Right. Yeah, a ratio of a billion to 10 to the 24th is insignificant. Yeah, that is true. But again, this notion that the possibility of life, you and I have both been to Antarctica, We've spent a little bit of time there. I've spent maybe a few more weeks there than you. But, you know, one ninth or one-eleventh of the Earth's surface is Antarctica. The landmass of Earth is Antarctica. And yet, you know, something like 12 species or very few number, almost no mammals, just on the very coast.

And so the mere existence of Antarctica, you might say, well, there should be 11% of the land mammals should live there. But, of course, there's nowhere near that. And there's 200 people on the continent right now on the entire. of it. So yeah, possibility does not imply probability. And I think that's the conflation that people make. And this notion, you're absolutely right. There are 10 to the 22nd power, or 10 to the 24th power, a trillion,

trillion planets in the observable universe. But the observable universe is 14 billion years old, and it has a radius of 45 billion light years. So to think that we care about anything beyond a few dozen light years from Earth, really, that's almost impossible to consider. But

But speaking of things that may relate some of the research that you've done to stuff that I'm interested in as well, is sleep. People, you know, I'm fascinated by how much energy you have. Do you know that of this entire country, which makes up, what, 30% of landmass of Earth? In the entire country of Canada, Vancouver is the only city that Richard decided was worth coming to. So give it up for yourselves in Vancouver, Canada. It says a lot. It says a lot about his affection and respect for this fair city, and I love it too. But sleep is something you must engage in, although you're probably writing a book as we speak.

And it seems like you don't sleep. But I wonder, what is the biological necessity of sleep? In other words, if there are exoplanets that have a diurnal, anything that exist in the universe has some spin rate, will probably have some nighttime. Will they have creatures there? will they sleep? Will they have diurnal cycles as well? It's a fascinating question. I mean, if you're asking as a Darwinian, I mean, the Darwinian theory that I'm acquainted with

is that because there is such a dramatic difference between the day and night because of the rotation of the earth, it's not possible to be well adapted to both. And therefore, the best strategy is to be well adapted to one of them and to keep out of mischief for the other. and so sleep is according to this theory originated with a man called Ray Medis

sleep is just a way of keeping out of mischief of not being conspicuous at a time when you don't need to be and then all the physiological consequences of that which are definite I mean you certainly need sleep

physiologically that's a secondary consequence there are people who claim never to sleep. They're very rare. They have been studied, and it looks as though they may exist for extremely rare. I can't do better than that. There's an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer decides

that he doesn't want to sleep on the regular cycle and his diurnal periods keeps rotating in great hijinks ensue. But speaking of your boundless energy, the last chapter, of the genetic book of the dead. Let's show that to the audience. So they know many of you will be receiving this after the show.

And you'll also receive a special gift from me, a meteorite, a real live sample of the early primordial solar system. So we'll look forward to that later on. But mitochondria, you talk about them making an exit to the future, one of your many neologisms in this book. So what does that mean? What would be the imperative of such a statement? Well, mitochondria is now known.

our bacteria. They originated from bacteria and it's known which bacteria they're closely related to. And they are essential for our life. We would be instantly dead without them. And they are examples to me of parasites. They started out as parasites, but they are cooperative because they are they share the same exit route to the future as our own genes do. So they're longitudinal parasites, symbionts. Something like a cold virus, virus of the common cold, which I have at the moment, and I advise you not to shake my hand if you're coming to the meet and greet.

Unless you want some of Richard's microbes. That's right. If you want some Dawkins' microbes. They are ex-they passed to the next generation, not done through the gametes, but by being sneezed out or being held on the hand and shaken. I often wonder whether in Nazi Germany

there were less colds because people did that instead of shaking hands. Anyway, I make a distinction between longitudinal parasites and transverse parasites, horizontal parasites and vertigo parasites. Vertico parasites, are those that pass to the next host in the gametes, in the eggs probably,

potentially the sperms, of the present host. Because those ones have exactly the same interests at heart, so to speak, if you pardon that expression, exactly the same hope for the future as our own genes do. Whereas the virus of the common cold or the COVID virus, passed sideways, and therefore they have not the same interest in the survival of the present,

not just the survival of the present host, but the reproductive success, the sexual attractiveness, the competence as a parent, all these are things which a longitudinal parasite, or symbiont, like mitochondria, share with our own genes.

So to the extent that, parasites have an extended phenotypic effect upon the host's behavior or morphology or physiology. The effect will be exactly aligned with those of our own genes. And therefore, you could say that our own genes cooperate with each other for just the same reason. The only reason why the genes of an organism the genes within an organism all work together so harmoniously to produce a survival machine which works for the benefit of the whole. The only reason they work cooperatively in that way is that they share the same exit route to the future, namely the gametes. And therefore you could say, and I did say in the last chapter stuck my neck out,

that all our own genes can be seen as a gigaigion. A gigantic colony, a gigantic symbiotic colony of viruses. Another topic that features prominently in the genetic book of the dead is this concept of the palimpsest. Yes. I'm saying that right? You corrected me when we spoke on my podcast, but palimpsest? Yes. Well, the opening chapters are about the idea that the animal is a book, is a written description of ancestral worlds,

because the animal is a product of natural selection going back a long way. Its ancestors all survived because they had certain characteristics, and they passed their genes on because of that. The modern animal, including us, is a repository of those genes which survived, and therefore, in principle, a scientist of the future, a biologist of the future, should in principle be able to reconstruct the environments of the past which led to the animal as it is at present. It's a written description.

But it must be a palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript which is partially erased and then overwritten and then erased again and overwritten. And the reason it has to be a palimpsest is that the worlds of the past which have shaped the current animal are from all different vintages, from the very ancient through more recent times, more recent times, et cetera, to the present. And so in that same discussion, you mentioned the scientists of the future, and you talk about some things that she'll encounter. And I wonder if you could sort of be, act as a virtual advisor.

There are many scientists of the future, I'm sure, here tonight. What sorts of skills ranging from ecology to, you know, you know, study ethnic studies or sort of field work, what skills should she or he endeavor to obtain? I suppose it would be mostly molecular genetics, ultimately, and the book is not much about that because it's just in its infancy. I essayed an attempt at a sort of possible study, there must be something that,

or not must be, there probably is something that say all those mammals who've gone back to the water. Mammals are land animals, mostly land animals, and some of them like whales, dugongs, otters, beavers,

water ten wrecks, I've got a lot of, A little spider here. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month.

Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees, Google Fiore Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Went back to the water. And is there something that they all have in common? And it seemed to me it would be a nice thing to do to make a table of all these animals that have gone back to the water, like seals, sea lions, whales, du gongs, otters, beavers,

water shrews, water voles, etc. and then on the other side would be land animals which are related to them. So instead of water voles, we have voles instead of yapox, we have opossums and so on. And then try to find some gene which all the ones that went back to the water have in common, which the ones who stayed on land don't have in common. And that's just a particular example of the kind of thing, the scientist of the future might do. And there are some examples of that which have been done. It seems to me that the best way to predict the future is to create it in a sense.

And I wonder, you know, is there a... Who said that? That's a quote from somebody. Yeah, I don't know who. I saw it. Yes, it's Alan Kay. Is it? Okay. One of the Apple people... In fact, yes, I'm going to reference it. that. So, you know, it would be curious to know, predicting or explaining what the desert lizards environment was like based on its markings of a long, you know, ago of its, of its progeny, you know, many generations hence, is interesting, but maybe less interesting than predicting,

you know, in the future, will humans have, you know, two thumbs on each hand so we can text even more efficiently? Yes. I really up your Twitter block game. I can't even imagine it raised to the fourth power. But what, you know, is that a possibility? Can we look at a genotype, really, and then ask, well, if there's an extended phenotype,

what does that allow us to predict about our future environment? Or is it unknowable because we don't know what the heck's going to happen to the earth? I think the – sorry, I've got this cough. I think it's very difficult because the – The environment which surrounds us now is so heavily, culturally dependent and therefore changing so rapidly. So you talk about using thumbs to type on an iPhone. Of course, that is a great skill now. But who knows, in not just a thousand years, but even 50 years, it won't be like that anymore, will it.

I mean, it will be an implant in the brain which will control your... you won't need to use your thumbs. You'll just think aloud and it'll go. So because cultural evolution is so incredibly rapid compared to biological evolution, I don't think it's going to be possible to foresee in any easy way what future evolution might look like.

If you look at the past, if you look back to Lucy three million years ago, the biggest change has been increasing in brain size. And so clearly during that three million, at some point, some time, during that three million years, there must have been pressure to increase the brain. The brainiest individuals must have survived best or must have reproduced best. And that's undeniable. That certainly happened.

Would you expect that trend to continue? would you expect that in three million years' time in the future, our brains will be like that? Well, only if the brainiest individuals are the ones who have the most children. Well, I like to point out that nobody knows for sure how many children Elon Musk has. It's above 10, it's less than 20. I wonder if we could indulge me. When I met Elon Musk, he encouraged.

encourage me to have lots of children. I think he doesn't want to be alone on Mars. He wants to bring you. I wonder if you would indulge me in another one of my ACDC questions, which is to define the shifting moral zeitgeist, one of my favorite turns of phrase. Well, I coined that phrase in the God delusion, I think it was,

because I was very impressed by the way the speed with which we progress morally. If you go back to the 19th century and people like Abraham Lincoln, T.H. Huxley, Charles Darwin, who were in the mid-19th century right in the vanguard of advanced progressive thought. Yet their writings today read shockingly racist.

They said things like it's impossible to conceive that Africans would ever actually be expected to vote, for example, that kind of thing. Lincoln said that when freeing the slaves, obviously we're not going to let them vote.

I mean, that kind of thing. And yet Lincoln was in the vanguard, as I say, right at the front of progressive opinion. And you don't have to go back that far if you go back to the 1920s and look at just popular fiction, the equivalent of James Bond. Bulldog Drummond was the equivalent of James Bond in the 1920s. And he said things like foreigners and other unwashed folk. this Agatha Christie's detective novels are filled with racism

anti-Semitism and these are things which have moved on we in the 21st century we are creatures of the 21st century whether we are on the right or left of the political spectrum we are far progressed beyond

what what our our forebears were a century ago or two centuries ago. So there is the shifting moral zeitgeist is this steadily improving moral outlook, which is hard to explain. It's hard to pin down what caused it. I think it's a bit like Moore's Law, which talks about the doubling rate of computer power, which doesn't seem to be based upon any particular phenomenon.

It just happens to be, there's a summation of different effects, conspire together to produce a mathematically lawful relationship, an increase in power. The shifting moral zeitgeist, people sometimes say it's in the air, it's something in the air. That doesn't really explain anything. What is it then? It's something like a combination of,

journalism, of parliamentary discussion, of courts of law, dinner party conversations, all these sorts of things which influence us and cause us to move on, steadily move on. And it raises the question, what will our descendants a hundred years' time think looking back at us? That was my follow-up, because you could sort of forecast or, maybe simulate what types of things might we be canceled for. You know, I had lunch at Tim Hortons. I'm sorry, I did earlier today. I was no, well, I'd be canceled for that in the future

because maybe there was a piece of chicken in there and in the future we only eat, you know, Soylent Green or what have you. Yeah. What is most likely for us to be on the losing end of the Moral Zeitgeist stick? I suppose that that is the most likely thing is the way we treat non-human animals

and the way we are, it's been called speciesism by Richard Ryder and Peter Singer. The way we elevate the human species as the one species which is really deserving of our moral consideration. And, I mean, one human life is infinitely worth more than one non-human life. That may be something that the shifting moral zeitgeist will overtake.

Would you see abortion, perhaps, pro-choice individuals being on the so-called wrong side, even though nowadays they're considered progressive? But in the future, would that be something that would be looked down upon the same way we look down upon? I doubt that because abortion is not causing pain to a sentient being. with a nervous system, at least I mean, if it's sufficiently early. Yeah. But in any case, there's no particular reason to value the, to be concerned about. If a human fetus does feel pain, there's no particular reason to think it feels any more pain than an adult cow.

Do you think that there'll be discoveries or perhaps, you know, just these brilliant, you know, discoveries of science that you mentioned early on, we started off and we're about to turn to questions from the audience. But, you know, we talked about nature. And in effect, if I could summarize the way I feel, maybe you can comment on it. I feel like scientists are given the greatest possible script ever written, the script of nature. And we are ill-equipped many of us to read it and to act and be actors and actresses, to portray it in its grandeur. You know, I often say in physics, which is my specialization, we should teach the controversy with all due respect.

That actually Galileo came up with the laws of emotion of things rolling on inclined planes. And that's what we always start our freshman physics lectures with. We talk about incline planes and things rolling. And it's so mind-numbingly boring, you know, for the students. And it's not boring. Oh, I'm getting to that. I'm getting to that. I think it's genius.

And what he did to slow, he slowed down time with these inclined planes. He did something unimaginable. They didn't have clocks when he was doing these. It's wonderful. Don't get me wrong. But we never teach the Controvert. He was jailed. He was writing that book from his prison in Artetri, Italy, where I've been many times.

And the question is, we never teach the kind of science story. We package science. in just so stories. And I wondered, are we doing a disservice to this greatest, most unimaginably rich script that we're given

and we're just so bad at, you know, the old joke is, how do you know a scientist is outgoing? Because he looks at your shoes when he talks to you. Are we not...

Are we failing ourselves by not teaching our students to be communicating? You've had a renown... You mean we should teach the history of the ideas. The history. Communication, soft skills, presentation,

persuasion. You never teach that to science students. Yes. Ethics. We don't teach that either. Yes, I suppose we probably should, yes. Yeah. Are you hopeful about communicating science in the future,

now that you're a emeritus professor in the public understanding, if you had to predict the first derivative, are you sanguine? Well, I'm keeping at it. the figures you quoted earlier about the number of people who think that the sun goes around the earth is kind of distressing I especially for Canadian

my my view is that science should be taught in the sort of Carl Sagan way as wonderful and poetic and my main criticism of the way many people think science should be taught is that they think it should be made relevant to everyday life. And I think everyday life is what's boring.

But science itself is rivetingly exciting. And so rather than teach chemistry by looking at the chemistry of cooking or something like that, which is make it relevant to everyday life, teach it in a sense. an exciting Carl Sagan kind of way. I make a distinction between the Carl Sagan way of approaching the study of space, for example, and the non-stick frying pan school of thought, which says

that the reason why the space exploration is important is the non-stick frying pan was a byproduct. to hell with the non-stick frying can. Keep the, well, as an astronomer, I wholly endorse your endorsement of Carl Sagan. I want to conclude, you know, a typical thing, and I think I even asked you about this, and I've asked, you know, 11 Nobel Prize winners, the same question, what is life?

I'm not going to ask you that. You can listen to the two-part interview I did with Richard on the Into the Impossible podcast. But I want to ask you something deeper, perhaps. What is the meaning of life? The meaning of life from a, scientific point of view is the replication of DNA. That's what it's all about. That's what it's for. That's the purpose of life is the replication of, on this planet DNA, on other planets,

some equivalent of DNA, some self-replicating entity. But that's not what the meaning of my life is, I mean, nor yours, nor yours, because we each have our own meanings. We each give life our own meanings and our own purposes. And they're very different. And they can be very worthwhile. And they have very little to do with the ultimate biological meaning. It may be to write a symphony. It may be to score a goal at football. All sorts of things. What has it been for you? What has it given you the most meaning in your life? Well, it is science. For me, it's comprehending the world in which I live and why I'm here. So to me, that's the meaning, but if I were a musician, it would be very different and equally worthwhile.

No, well, I'm no doubt if you turned to your attention and considerable talents to music, you'd be ranked among the very best. So now we have reached the time when it's your turn to present questions to Richard Dawkins. And this may be your final opportunity, at least here in Vancouver, because it's Richard's so-called final bow tour. So I encourage people to queue up, as you say, We'll give people a couple minutes to queue up, maybe a minute or two, and there are microphones. I can't see anything. I can see there's a couple people here, but there are microphones somewhere. I think it may be over there.

I think it's on that side of them. Okay. So we encourage you to keep your questions brief. We only have 30 minutes. After that, we'll have another short break. I'll let you know when we've come to the final question. and then the people that have purchased book copies, signed book copies from Richard can remain in your seats after the final questions. Again, I will alert you to, and then we will reconvene a few minutes after the final question.

So, again, be courteous to the people in line behind you, and keep your questions rather brief, briefer than myself. perhaps, although we still have the same amount of time. Can we have a bit more light? It's nice to see. Yeah, can we have a little light on the audience, please? Okay. Hello. Hello?

Hello? Yes. Hi. My name is Gordon Anderson. Nice to meet you. Thank you very much for doing all this. Huge fan. You were the start to my scientific discovery,

and I just want to thank you for that. Question I have is, so this is your last, like the tour you're doing. What other things are you going to be doing? I just recently heard you on Sam Harris's podcast, and I'm wondering, are you going to be doing any more podcasts in the future?

Oh, yes, I shall be doing that. And also, I'm actually started writing another book, which is called Tales from Heckel. Heckel was, it's H-A-E-C-K-E-L. he was known as the German Darwin and he was also a great artist and I'm writing a book which is based upon his pictures, his biological pictures

and sort of riffing on on the animals that he drew so that I've made a start on that thank you I'm sorry about this question you're 83 congratulations statistically you probably got 10 years left, notwithstanding your mother at 102. And my father.

And your father. Okay. I'm going to give you 15. What are your thoughts, and I mean this seriously because I value your impressions, what are your thoughts about death? Death is what happens to you. It's just the same. before you were born. So I feel very privileged to have been born, as I said in answer to the Brown's first question. And all the time when the dinosaurs were around

and all the time when the mammal-like reptiles were around and all the time when the eukaryotic cell was being formed, I was dead. And I, as I think, I forget who it was, said, said I was dead for billions of years before I was born and never suffered the smallest inconvenience. So, Mark Twain, thank you. Yes. Thank you very much. I'm going to try and make this question as brief as possible. Forgive me.

The first book I read was the God delusion of yours. You, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens, enabled me to leave the Catholic faith, so thank you for that. But I'm having some issues currently, which are the following. Hitchens had a great line, which he said, the virgin birth is really important for Catholicism, because if you can believe a virgin can give birth, then you'll happily believe anything. And currently, I think that the four horsemen of the apocalypse of religion, which you are greatly won, have succeeded. And my fear is that the devil we know is maybe worse than the devil we don't. Where you have a woke, secular mob that could say, have a contrary statement to Hitchens, which is that if you believe that a man can become a woman and a woman can become a man,

then you'll conveniently believe anything on the other side. I know you've had some issues with that, but yeah, I'm honestly concerned that, you know, maybe there's a bit of, maybe I have to read the God delusion again. No, I mean, your concern is that if you get rid of Christianity, and other conventional religions, you'll open the door to a different kind of nonsense. Yes. And that is a concern.

I don't personally accept responsibility in the way... I'm not giving you responsibility. No, yeah. But I do... I mean, I often quote Hiller Belloc's line, always keep a hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse. And that's essentially what you're suggesting, that maybe we need, I wouldn't go so far as to say Catholicism,

but maybe we need some sort of religion. I don't hold that view. I think there was a time when Ayan Hesiali had that view. I think she saw Christianity as a bulwark against Islam. But I think now she's become a proper Christian. I mean, I think she really believes it, which is very sad. I won the bet, by the way. Richard and I bet before the show how many questions it would take

to mention transgenderism. I pick four. Thank you very much, sir. Next. I think I speak for a lot of people here when I just say thank you for the impact that you've had on the world. I don't want to be too sycophantic,

but yeah, just thank you. Yeah. Yeah. So I've been, you know, been a hobbyist study or evolutionary theory for 15 years or so when I first came across you. And I've, like, this is a tough thing for me. It's like, how do you resist the temptation in evolutionary thinking to avoid teleological or ends-driven reasoning in the sense that, like, genes want? to, you know, have an ends directed or goal in mind. Yes. Teleological reasoning comes from the idea, I think Aristotle talked about final causes, being drawn to a final cause.

It's a temptation which is easy to resist because the whole point about the Darwinian explanation of life is that it is not teleological in that sense. sense. It produces results which look as though they were designed for a purpose, overwhelmingly so. I mean, they look beautifully, the bird's wing is beautifully designed to fly, etc. But we know now the non-teleological explanation, which is Darwinian natural selection. We sometimes use teleological language as a shorthand. And I find that using it at the gene level, which I regard as the correct level, actually ought to immunize you against that kind of problem because nobody but an idiot

would think that genes actually have purposes. They couldn't. I mean, they're just DNA. They're just molecules. It's a bit different if you talked about, if I've written a book called The Selfish Elephant, then you might have been confused by the idea because an elephant probably does have purposes he's got a brain after all

but a gene is just a molecule so it can't have purposes and yet if you assume that it does if you take the working rule of thumb assumption that its purpose is to get itself into the next generation and the next and the next you get the right answer when faced with riddles about why animals do the way that they do.

I think physicists do the same thing, actually, when they talk about when you throw a ball in the air and it describes a parabola, you couldn't describe that as though the ball is trying to minimize something, can't you? Yeah, minimum action. Yes, minimum action. But physicists don't actually think balls have a will of their own. Well, actually, Aristotle, who you mentioned, did think that they had a natural inclination.

Although he was wrong about almost everything in the physical world. And the biological. And he was wrong about final causes as well, of course. That's right. My favorite blunder of Aristotle is that he thought women had fewer teeth than men, which probably tells you he was a bachelor at some point. He could have just asked his wife to open her mouth. You, sir, please open your mouth.

Lots of people think women have one fewer ribs than... I'm sorry, may not have what... Yes, sir. Thank you, Dr. Dawkins. What do you think about the idea of accelerated human evolution, such as in the 10,000-year explosion by Cochrane and Harpending, which argues that due to agriculture, humans could create larger populations,

which in turn accelerated evolution due to more mutations arising to be selected upon? I am not familiar with that book, and I shall look it up. And I apologize. Thank you. Next question, please. Hi. I will be a bit of a sick offense, so thank you for being here. And furthermore, thank you for being born. So I think of human beings, we've kind of broken free of natural selection. In the respect, we've eliminated pressures for reproductive success with medicine and convenience. We were talking a bit about cultural evolution outpacing. So you could say that the most recent pages of our own genetic book of the dead,

have had like an unprecedented impact, maybe unlike any other animal in the animal kingdom. So my question is, could this concept of the genetic book of the dead still apply to a modern and globalized human species, or is modernity kind of too impactful and to have like circumvented the whole natural order of things? I do have a chapter which is not actually about humans,

but which is about the script in the palimpsest, written during the animal's own lifetime. And I talk about birdsong as a main example there, where the animal actually learns to sing. But you've raised the issue of human culture, which of course is an even greater example of the same thing. And I could have included a chapter on that. It would have been a very relevant thing to have done. I didn't actually include it, but thank you. I'll wait for the next book. Yes. Thank you. sort of a philosophical question.

Oh, no. Only slightly. When you speak about the meaning of life or the purpose of life, more than meaning from a scientific perspective, it totally makes sense with the spreading of

genes and the spreading of DNA. I'd be interested in your thoughts more philosophically on those folks who for various reasons don't spread their DNA. Some choose not to have children.

There's people who are gay. There's people who don't have conventional opportunities. And some of them might be troubled by that sense of knowing deep down that somehow spreading DNA and carrying on that line is so key. I'd be delighted to hear your thoughts. I'd be sorry if people thought that. I don't think that's a very right way to interpret what I've written in the selfish gene. It is true that we, our bodies and our brains are put into the world as machines to propagate DNA.

but I rather warm to Stephen Pinker's dictum where he said, I don't intend to have any children, and if my selfish genes don't like it, they can go jump in the lake. We have, to a large extent, risen above that. We are put into the world by selection of our selfish genes, but we have risen above that, and we do other things. we've, as it were, subverted the Darwinian demands to other purposes which are immensely worthwhile.

And by the way, it's a remarkable fact. I think you can show it statistically that in the distant future, all of us here will either be the ancestor of everybody or of nobody. So you think about that. Thank you so much. A bunch of Genghis Kans. Yes. Sir Richard, Professor Dawkins. I read the selfish teen when I was a teenager

and had a huge impact on my thinking about what matters in the world and what I should do with my life. So thank you very much for that. I wanted to ask you about the difference between believing things and believing in things. Because I think we're at a point in human civilization

and our arts of this cultural moment where people find it very difficult to believe things. That takes effort to think through facts and understand and so on. It's much easier to believe in something where all you need is faith. You don't really need to actually analyze, to think, to understand,

to use the scientific process. this I think is a huge problem for our civilization. And I just wanted to hear your thoughts about that. I mean, how can we immunize ourselves against this effect? So you're using believing in as another word for faith. And believe is what we do when we accept, when we look at evidence and decide that we believe something because there's evidence for it.

Nobody believes that Donald Trump was a good president, but they believe in the idea that he was a good president. Not sure I believe either. I think that faith is a great evil because faith means believing in something without evidence. And if you believe really passionately because of faith without evidence, then you cannot easily.

be dissuaded out of it and you may do terrible things because your faith leads you to do so. And we have seen some terrible deeds perpetrated by people who sincerely believe that what they're doing is right. The 9-11 saboteurs were in their own way, righteous men. believed they were doing God's will. They believed they were doing Allah's will. They thought they were right. They thought they were good people. And they weren't. But that's what faith can do. That's what believing in something without evidence can do. And that's why it's one of the great evils in the world. Thank you. Thank you. Next question. Hello, Mr. Dawkins. My name is David. I'm a huge fan of your work. I'm sorry if I'm stumbling because I'm quite starstruck. I grew up in

what was it called extremely religious household and your work and content has really helped me get out of that. I'm actually brought the God delusion that I first got, which has helped me you know that. So my question is I know that you've, you said you mentioned you'd identified as a cultural Christian, right? Which kind of means that you're not, you don't, you don't believe in the religion, but you admire, enjoy the estate. and the culture, such as, like, you know, Christmas carols and, like, stuff like that, right? And I know that you've also spoken to Dr. Jordan Peterson and his views regarding, like, of religion and whatever benefits he spouses. My question is, would being, as you identified a cultural Christian, would that be an extended phenotype like you've described here in your lecture,

where it's like it could be something that could help, like, propagate your genes, either, like, you know, either meeting people, or like establishing a sense of community or something of that sort? I don't think I use the phrase extended phenotype for the same reason as I gave in my answer to Brian. As for saying I'm a cultural Christian, I wouldn't have I hadn't said that. People keep bringing it up. Oh, it was just an article I saw.

No, I mean, I did say it, but it just means that I was brought up in Christian schools, and so therefore I, I went to church every Sunday, went to chapel every Sunday, and we had daily prayers at school. And so I know my way around the Bible. But that doesn't mean I believe a word of it. I mean, it's quite different from believing in to direct the previous question. I think it's probably quite important for children to be taught about religion.

and in the case of a country like Britain or I would venture to say Canada that because it is both countries are dominated by Christian history, you can't understand the history of our countries, you can't understand the literature of our languages without some familiarity with religion. We are cultural Christians in that sense. but I would hate anybody to think that I had any belief in any of the Christian beliefs.

All right. Thank you. Yes. Hello, Dr. Dawkins. I want to talk about hope. I think believers have hope because they think somebody's in charge. God is in charge and God is good. So things are going to be good. Could you talk a bit louder, sorry?

I wanted to talk about hope. Yes. I think believers have hope because they think somebody is in charge. God is in charge and God is good, so good things are going to happen. As an Aecese, why do you choose to believe that things are going to be good when we actually do not know? Why do I believe things are good? Why do you have hope? If you have hope, why do you have hope in the absence of a creator of a God?

I find that a rather extraordinary question. Hope? I mean, I hope that somebody will win the American election and somebody else won't. I mean, one has hope all the time. One hopes that ambitions that we have, the things we're trying to achieve, that we will achieve them. We have hope that people will be happy and that we can help people to be happy. happy. I cannot understand why anyone would require to have some kind of supernatural supervisor in order to have hope. Quite the contrary. Thank you. Dr. Dawkins, you touched on this a little

earlier when you were talking about brain size. The question I have is how are humans evolving biologically right now in 2024, for better or for worse? Well, I think that was, wasn't that the question I answered before? That it was hard to forecast how we were evolving. In particular, I did mention brain size then. I don't think we can forecast any increase in brain size. I mean, we probably are evolving resistance to disease. It's very probable that our ancestors of recent, not that long ago, centuries, went through the great plague, bubonic plague, the black death, and the population that remained probably has a genetic tendency to be genetically immune for that sort of reason.

That's the kind of thing you're talking about. Yes, there'll be some of that going on. Okay, and then for example, like medical care helping people reproduce? Yes, I mean, the fact that many of us here ought to be dead but for doctors is I actually like doctors, so I'm quite glad about that. But you're probably right. I mean, that would have dysgenic effects. Very good.

Thank you. Hello. In 1964, the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan wrote, man as it becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world. Given the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, how do you view this statement in the context of modern evolutionary theory? Are humans becoming facilitators of AI evolution? And if so, what implications might this have for our own biological evolution? This statement was written by ChatTPT.

I think we kind of covered that earlier. It is possible that our life form will be replaced by our artificial creations. That's one possible scenario. And some people think that might be a good thing. I don't. Next question. Hi, Professor Dawkins. My question is, why do you think we don't talk about the Miller-Yuri experiment enough?

About what? The Miller-Yeri experiment about... Oh, this was an experiment on the origin of life. You say, why don't we talk about it? Yeah, I don't really see having much of an impact. Oh, okay. What Miller did was to set up an experiment in a chemistry lab where he tried to replicate,

tried to simulate the conditions of the early Earth and to see whether he could get the arising, the spontaneous synthesis of biologically interesting molecules, such as amino acids. And he did, and he had sparks to simulate lightning and he put various chemicals in which we thought,

he thought were present in the early earth. The chemicals which, Miller found are actually ubiquitous in the universe, as we know from looking at meteorites. So in a way, you could say the Miller didn't need to do his experiment because we already knew, or we didn't know by then, but we now know that carbon compounds of the kind that he found, like amino acids, are present in meteorites. And therefore, that part of the origin of life riddle is not a problem. There remains problem the origin of the first self-replicating entity, which is the true origin of life, which Miller didn't in fact find. So if that's probably why we

don't talk about it very much. If it's true, we don't. I thought we didn't talk about it. No, we do, actually, yeah. So Harold Uri was a professor at UC San Diego, where I am. But I'd look up a book by Jack Shostak, Z-O-S-H-A-K, and Mario Livio just came. I had them both on my podcast. He won the Nobel Prize 10 years ago. He's working on modern instantiations of the Miller-Uri experiment, but as Richard said, the simulated conditions of the early Earth are known to be radically different than what he simulated. It doesn't invalidate what he said, though. Thank you very much. Hi, Dr. Dawkins. Really appreciate this wonderful talk. Also, hey, Brian. Good to see you.

I have a lot of thoughts and questions, but I'll try to keep it succinct. I'm very curious about your thoughts and opinions, especially now more recently, on Jordan Peterson's criticisms of your particular ideas, and his criticism of your idea of memes being kind of a potentially shallower version of Jungian archetypes and how he has a very different view on faith being, as he describes it, not in sort of conventional religious terms, but in his understanding, faith being a commitment to a highest good and having a value structure for what you should pursue and what you should attain and him viewing different religious stories as containing universal symbols and ideas that are representative of archetypes that we ought to follow.

And so for him, it's not, the question is not what is the evidence for resurrection of Christ, but what does the resurrection of Christ represent psychologically and spiritually and how we can attain to it? And I mean, I know you and your podcast with him, I think last year or the year before, accused him of being drunk on symbols, which was pretty epic. You recently had another conversation with him I saw on Twitter. So I'm curious about your thoughts on his kind of hermeneutic for interpreting religion and not talking about it in any kind of religious manner,

and him actually accusing the evangelical kind of approach of being oddly scientific, but him having a very different paradigm, and I'm curious with your recent conversation with him, if you guys made any progress, I think it might be coming out in the coming weeks. If you have to be any progress in terms of that. I've had two conversations with him. both lasting about two hours. And, well, first of all, the idea that memes are a kind of Jungian archetype,

memes spread because they are, because they spread, because they spread. They're analogous to genes in that sense. So a successful meme is one which passes through the culture, passes from brain to brain because it's popular. And a Jungian archetype could do that, but they're not the same thing. I mean, they're both interesting ideas, but they're not the same idea. Now, his being drunk on symbols, that is what he is, he's not interested in facts. He doesn't care whether Christ rose from the dead.

he doesn't care whether Christ was born of a virgin. For him, that's not an interesting question. I think that such questions, factual questions, are the questions that matter. And I'm not that interested in the symbolic meaning of the virgin birth. I think the virgin birth is something that did not happen, but that if it did happen, it is a matter of the greatest biological interest. And similarly, with the... the resurrection.

So to be fobbed off with the statement that it is the symbolic meaning that really matters just leaves me cold. Well, on that helpful note, I have good news and bad news for everybody in line. The bad news is this is the final question. The good news is those of you have been standing for so long can now sit down. I'm sorry, that's cold comfort. but I want to remind folks that after the final question, we will adjourn,

and those of you who purchased the VIP meet-and-greet tickets can stay in your seats. Those that haven't or would like to buy a copy of Richard's latest magnum opus, the Genetic Book of the Dead, Special Tour Edition, are they signed? They're available for purchase, at least, in the merch section outside. So with that, we will take the very final question. I hope you are sufficiently proud of yourself for having your genes survive to ask this final question. Thank you.

Good evening, Mr. Hawkins. It's nice to finally see you in person. I grew up in a young Earth creationist family, but I'm here, so I turned out. My question is in my conversations with my family and relatives, one of the things they come up with is the quote-unquote missing link, which, if I remember correctly, there's like 34 extinct species of hominid.

But barring that, it seems like they want to have a filled gradient between Lucy and us. And one of my rebuttals to them is, you know, back in the 50s, tectonic plate theory was a theory. And I don't have evidence of every earthquake that separated Africa from South America. but geologists can sample the rocks and determine that they had the same origin. And so my question is, I don't know off the top of my head the dictionary definition of what a theory is,

but I do believe that evolution has graduated past that similarly to... We stop calling it a theory. It's a fact. Exactly. And as for missing links, you're quite right that we do have a more or less continuous series of fossils. And so at the time when the phrase missing link was coined, we didn't. But even if we had no fossils whatsoever,

the evidence of evolution would be absolutely secure, as is the evidence for plate tectonics, by the way. Thank you. I'm just curious, what would you define the metric by which something can graduate past theory in relation to evolution? Well, that's a more difficult one. I suppose it's when the...

I mean, Popper would say it never really does because you always have the possibility of it being falsified and you simply wait and say, so far it hasn't been falsified. But I think there comes a point where, I think Stephen Gould said, it would be perverse to deny... to deny acceptance of it. And the fact of evolution is approximately as secure

as the fact that the Earth orbits the Sun. Thank you for your time. We started with the Earth being orbited by the Sun. We've ended by the Earth going around the Sun as rightfully so. I want you to all join me thanking Richard for this one and only style. in Canada. Thank him. Thank yourself. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built

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