Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - What Do Our Genes Reveal About Our Past? w/ Richard Dawkins [Ep. 458]

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

What do our genes reveal about our past?  Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s most influential and thought-provoking scientists, explored the most profound principles of evolutionary history in his new book, The Genetic Book of the Dead.  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.  I had the extraordinary privilege of discussing his new book in our two-part interview. In addition to judging his book, 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 to learn about genes from one of the most prominent evolutionary biologists of our time! P.S. Don’t forget to check out part one of our interview: https://youtu.be/BdiOFaMUASU Key Takeaways: 00:00 Intro 01:30 Judging a book by its cover 06:01 Do genes die?  07:53 Can genes predict the future?  11:26 The extended phenotype  22:42 The hypothetical scientist of the future  28:53 A colony of symbiotic vertical viruses 32:51 Final exit to the future 36:10 What evolutionary purpose does music serve?  43:25 The palimpsest  49:38 AI, pain, and evolutionary processes  56:25 Outro Additional resources: ➡️ Learn more about Richard Dawkins: ✖️ Twitter: https://x.com/RichardDawkins/  💻 Website: https://richarddawkinstour.com/ ➡️ Join Richard Dawkins and me in Canada on October 6, 2014 https://admitone.com/events/richard-dawkins-vancouver-9488912 ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://x.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 ✨ Member's only playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUMOmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw 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 subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why does this peculiar desert lizard have such intricate patterns on its back? And what does it tell you about its long-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. 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. 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.

Open the pod bay doors, out. Would you do us the favor of doing what you're never supposed to do, which is to judge the book by its cover? Tell us the name, choice, the subtitle, and cover art. Well, here, can you see the book there? Yeah. Is that visible? Yes, okay. Yeah, it will be.

So that's the front cover and that's the back cover. It's called the Genetic Book of the Dead. It's a kind of play on the Egyptian books of the Dead, which were books that were buried with important people in ancient Egypt as a sort of guidebook to guide them into the afterlife. The connection is pretty tenuous, but I suppose you could say that the genes are guiding the animal into how to propagate the genes into not exactly the afterlife, but into the next generation. The subtitle is a Darwinian reverie. It means it's a kind of meditation on evolution. It's not a particular one theme. It's a meditation by the author of the selfish gene 40 so years later and not climbing down from the selfish gene, but expanding in various directions.

The art on the back cover is cobbled together from the art in the book, which is drawn by Jana Lentsova in color, computer artist. colour. The theme of the book, insofar as there is a single theme, is this. The animal, any animal, and its genome can be regarded as a description of a written description, a book about the ancestral worlds in which the animal's ancestors survived. The animal is a product of Darwinian natural selection of its ancestors' genes. Those genes that were successful in the past, getting themselves passed on are the ones that survived to the present, obviously. And therefore, they can be regarded as a kind of description of those selection pressures, those worlds in which the ancestors survived and reproduced were successful in reproduction,

successful in attracting mates, successful in rearing offspring. The book begins, the first illustration in the book is a picture of a Mojave Desert lizard which has its desert environment painted on its back, so to speak. It looks as though somebody has come along and literally painted the desert stones and sand on the back of the lizard. And you can see the same kind of thing in any camouflaged animal, a camouflaged moth, a camouflaged, snail, a camouflaged frog, etc. Natural selection has favored those ancestral animals that resembled their background.

And in some cases, the resemblance is uncannily exact. It's really remarkable. It really does look as though somebody's come along and painted the background, painted the desert in this case on the animal's back. The thesis of the book is that this painting is not limited to the superficial skin of the animal, but goes right through the animal. Every single detail of the interior of the animal must be a description of desert. in the same kind of way, but more indirectly as the picture on its skin.

So the chemistry of the blood, for example, if you were sufficiently educated in biology, which we're not at present, the zoologist of the future would be able to read the biochemistry of the blood as having a desert written all over it. And the same applies to any animal. Any animal will have its environment, the environment of its ancestors, written into every detail of the interior as well as the exterior of the animal. It's quite a beautiful book. It's beautifully written, and I assume it will be beautifully bound. It looks like it is behind you. I did some primary source research, so I looked up the Egyptian

book of the dead and how it begins, began, and it seems to begin with an homage to Ra, Akhenaten Ra, the art whose disc, thou great God, art in my boat, thou hast risen on the horizon, thou hast filled the lands with radiance, thou art beautiful, thou art young, thou art mighty, thou art born forever and ever. Are genes sort of like this all-animating force, Richard? Do they only live? Do they die? Are they like this all-powerful disc that illuminated the worlds of the Egyptians? Well, that's very interesting. They sort of are. I mean, that going on forever and ever is exactly what they do in the form of copies.

Of course, the individual atoms in a DNA molecule don't go on forever. They're very temporary. They only last a few weeks. But the information in the genes in the DNA, because it's copied and copied and copied and copied with great accuracy, it does go on, if not forever, for millions of years. And that's the whole point. The whole point of my worldview is that those genes, that any gene could potentially go on forever,

but only those genes are successful. Only successful genes do go on forever. And the reason they're successful, what makes them successful, is that they're good at pulling the strings of embryology to make bodies that are good at surviving and good at reproducing, good at attracting mates and so on. So yes, there is a resemblance. between the genes and the great god Ra.

But I wouldn't want to push that too hard. That's right. It's another delusional god, right, Richard? One of the many that hasn't even persisted to this day. I'm interested, quite frankly, not so much in the past. In my field, which is astrophysics and cosmology, of course, you know, Einstein plays a huge role in modern cosmology. And of course, he was wrong at least as many times as he was right. And, you know, if not for that, he could have had a good career.

But when you look at Einstein, the first thing that really catapulted him to fame and notoriety was a retradiction. It wasn't a prediction at first. It was the retradiction that explained why did the anomalous behavior of Mercury's orbit behave the way it did. And in fact, it wasn't until after the 1919 solar eclipse and the lobbying by the anomaly. Arthur Eddington and others, did he become a household name and so forth. But he really cut his teeth, so to speak, on making a retradiction, an explanation. And I wonder how interested you are in these things, because the genes, as you say, the iguana or the lizard that lives not too far away here in the Mojave Desert where I am in San Diego, that paints a picture, as you

point out, of the past of the environment that this thing was born into. Is there a sense that genes can sort of predict the future. And is there a way we could get glimpse into, well, this lizard will eventually be living in a megalopolis like Los Angeles or San Diego and it will have, you know, graffiti on its back? Can genes predict the future, not just adapt to them? No, they don't predict in that sense. They don't predict the distant future. However, there is a sense in which the retradiction, which is the painting on the back is based upon the past, insofar as it is an accurate prediction of the future, the immediate future, not the distant future, insofar as it's an accurate prediction of the immediate future, then the animal will survive. So if the prediction turns out to be wrong, if say there's a flood or some other catastrophe, which means that it's no longer living in a desert, or if it strays onto a golf green, and therefore the prediction, thou shalt be living in a desert, turns out to be wrong. It's now living on a green sword and it gets picked off by a predator.

So it is predictive in that sense and I do say this in the book that there is a sense in which genes are predicting the future because they will not survive unless they get the prediction right and all sensible prediction in the real world is based on the past. I mean you can't you can't predict if the world is a capricious randomly changing place such that the past is not a good guide to the future. Insofar as the past is a good guide to the future, insofar as the world is a conservative place, then any information about the past can be used to predict the immediate future

and therefore to survive in the immediate future. By the way, talking about Eddington, I presume you know that when Einstein was told about Eddington's successful fulfilling of his retradiction, he was asked what he would have said if it had turned out to be false. And he said, then I would be sorry for the dear lord. The theory is correct, which is not the way scientists are supposed to proceed. No.

Well, I always say, you know, one of my laws is that for every quote, there's an equal and opposite quote. So Richard Feynman is famous for saying, you know, if you can't explain it to your grandmother, you don't know what you're talking about. And then he won the Nobel Prize and the journalist asked him what you win it for. and he said, if I could explain it to you, pal, it wouldn't have been worth a Nobel Prize. And similarly, Einstein suffered from what we now call imposter syndrome. He called himself an involuntary swindler. 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 speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive was 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. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage.

For getting the attention and affection of others. But yes, you're absolutely right. That was an incredible quote. And it really came about prematurely because we couldn't really confirm general relativity to the precision that they claimed until after the advent of radar astronomy in the 1960s. So of course, Einstein was correct. But it was good that there was a delay by two years. And the first eclipse they tried to do this expedition was in 1914.

And it went through Crimea, which wasn't a great place to do astronomy or anything if you wanted to live in 1914, 1915. And Einstein had a factor of two error at that time. So the good lord would have been Iran. I had the eclipse. I want to ask you about this. It's impossible not to think about artificially engineered structures, intelligences. And we'll come to that in a little bit more detail later on when we get into one of the themes that makes a big appearance in this book, which is the extended phenotype, which is, of course, a groundbreaking hypothesis.

I have all these questions. I call these my ABBA questions, Richard. I hope it's not offensive to you. But my feeling is if I have the rock group Abba on my show and I don't ask them to play Dancing Queen, I'm not doing a great service to my audience. So I wonder if you'd be kind enough to explain what is the extended phenotype? One of your, surely one of your greatest hits. Can you explain the extended phenotype and its application in this book?

Phenotype is the external, not external, the manifestation of the genotype. And so, as I said before, genes survive in the gene pool by virtue of their effects on bodies, which means phenotype. So something like the color of the lizard's skin is part of its phenotype, its eyes, part of its phenotype, etc. And conventionally, and for most of the, almost all the time, we think of phenotype as being parts of the body in which the genes sit. So a beaver's tail is influenced by the genes that sit. inside the beaver, those genes that make the tail good for swimming, survive because the beaver is good at swimming, and that's good for survival of the genes and so on. So on the whole, genes live inside what I call a survival machine, which is the body, and successful genes

are the ones that build a good survival machine, a good, a body that's good at surviving. But if you think about the beavers, not the beaver's tail, but the beaver's dam, the beaver's dam, The beaver's dam is not part of the beaver's body, and yet clearly it is a Darwinian adaptation. The dam is shaped for the good of the beaver's genes, and you can therefore think of the genes as influencing the shape of the dam, the form of the dam, the size of the dam, via, of course, the beaver's behaviour, which is its nervous system, its muscles and so on. But there's a very real sense in which you would think of the beaver dam as phenotype, just as the beaver's tail is phenotype. A bird's nest, it's not part of the bird. It's made of grass or made of mud, not part of the bird's body,

but nevertheless the shape of the nest is crucial to the survival of the genes, which, in a sense, built the nest. It was the bird's behavior that built the nest, but you can think of it as phenotype influenced by the genes. And so the extended phenotype is those parts of the phenotype, which are not part of the body in which the genes sit. Artifacts like beaver dams and birds' nests are the simplest kind of extended phenotype. But there are others when parasites influence their host in such a way as to change the behavior of the host

so the parasite becomes more likely to get passed on to the next parasite in, sorry, the next host in the sequence. Worms, for example, many parasitic worms need to go from an intermediate host into a definitive host. A fluke in a snail needs to get into a sheep. A liver fluke needs to get into a sheep. And so it may influence the behavior of the snail in such a way as to, to perhaps make the snail more likely to be eaten by a sheep and therefore inadvertently eaten by a sheep and therefore get passed on to the snail. Well, anything that the parasite can do to change the behavior of the snail in such a

way to make it more likely to be eaten by the sheep, that's extended phenotype. That's extended phenotype of the worm genes manifesting themselves in these snails, phenotype. So lots and lots of examples, rather macabre examples, of parasites influencing the behaviour of their host, and that's extended phenotype. There's a real sense in which genes in the parasite are having phenotypic manifestation in the behaviour of the host. And that's when the parasite lives inside the host. What about parasites that don't live inside the host like cuckus? cuckus don't live inside their host, they live in the nest of the host, but they influence the behavior of the host. They have a very powerful gape, a very powerfully stimulating gait which causes the host parent to foster parent to drop food into the gape.

And that is manipulating the host. And that's once again, genes in the cuckoo baby, the nesting cuckoo, are changing the behavior. of the host, and that's extended phenotype of the host. So that's a very brief summary of the extended phenotype. 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 syndrome. 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 ebook, audiobook, or in physical hard copy or paperback form. Thanks a lot.

For many examples, there's even some pictures, some beautiful photos of birds dropping food, wasting their food and dropping into the gapes of fish that somehow have tricked them into thinking they're young. And in the book, it's quite lovely. I mean, this book is really remarkable in that it has illustrations, woodcuts, it has massive genetic charts. It has beautiful photographs. It's really, to be committed.

It's a very different book from your previous books, which I've all enjoyed. Thinking about the extended phenotype, it seems to me there might be some sort of And I'm just a simple, humble astrophysicist, Richard, but so feel free to abuse me and disabuse me of my inaccuracies. But it seems like there must be some sensory apparatus of the gene or the phenotype because it's not just the organism itself. You talk about these crickets that make megaphones, which I found delightful and we'll get into these and they're related to these creatures that plague us here in California, muddobbers

and other things. So a cricket in my mind could make use. of a megaphone for mating in some way. It could advertise itself. It could, you know, trumpet its CV or its H index. It could do a whole bunch of things. But with other processes like you're talking about, it seems like the one phenotype kind of has to know what the other phenotype is doing. In other words, it's a collective. There's some, there's some difference. As Philip Morrison said, you know, more is different, not just, you know, multiple, many, many times the individual. So, Can you say something? Is there some sensory apparatus or some sensor detector that allows a phenotype to say, well, actually, I have to keep modifying my extended phenotype because this other creature that I'm interested in in some reason or not, it's also waging a war where its phenotype is perhaps doing things. How do phenotypes interact with each other? Am I off here?

No, you're not off. It's very true, of course, that it's an interaction between one animal and another. It might be in. a male and a female of the same species, it might be between a cuckoo and a cuckoo and its host. It might be an angler fish trying to lure small fish by playing a fishing rod on its back. And it's an arms race, that's the term that I use, between, say, predator and prey or parasite and host. And when one side in the arms race ups the ante, the other one up to the ante, and the other one up to the ante. And so you get an escalation of the arms race. In the case of the cuckoo, the astonishing fact that a cuckoo may be fed, a baby cuckoo may be fed by a tiny, tiny wren, which it could swallow it whole, but the wren is dropping, working itself to the bone, dropping food into the cuckoo's great gape. So this is a culmination of an arms race between the cuckoo and the wren, or the ancestors of the cuckoo and the ancestors of the wren.

And each side is playing against the other. In the case of the cuckoo and the ren, it looks at the cuckus won the arms race because it's so one-sided. In the case of the arms race between, say, well, we talked earlier about males being more ready to mate than females. So there's an arms race within a species between the males and the females. The males trying to seduce, trying to become more attractive, trying to persuade females to mate with them, females resisting to a large extent. And the arms race escalates. And yes, so there is this constant interaction between the different parties to an arms race. You speak in the book of a hypothetical scientist of the future.

I want to harken to your many decades as a masterful educator. If you are sort of equipping the scientists of the future with her own academic book of the dead, what sorts of environments would you say that she has to be ready to interact with? What would you like to endow her with? What skills, what tools in 2024 would best serve a scientist of the future to do the type of work? that you lay out in this project? Well, I suppose my guess would be, and I'm just sort of crystal ballgazing now, my guess would be a big dose of computer science, molecular genetics. And molecular genetics is increasingly becoming a branch of computer science or vice versa.

It is something that would have amazed Darwin probably, the extent to which genetics is digital. It really is a branch of computer science. It's not binary, it's quaternary, but apart from that, it's exactly like a computer, and it's digital, and a chromosome is a long, long sequence of digital information, very much like a computer tape. And the technology that the scientists of the future, I call her SOF, S-O-F scientist of the future, certainly would be a lot of molecular genetics, and that means a lot of computer science. that would be the first thing, probably a lot of mathematics, I should think, probably more

mathematics than most biologists have at present. Those are the two main things, I think. Yes, I may think of others, but those are the two main things. Yeah. I asked your colleague, mutual friend Sir Roger Penrose, a similar question, but maybe slightly orthogonal, which was that he's a theoretical astrophysicist and a general relativist, And I asked him, well, what do you see as the skills that a theoretical astrophysicist should know about experimental astrophysics? In other words, I don't like my students to be siloed to just know how to turn wrenches and solder and make circuit boards.

What alternative, you know, adjacent fields perhaps, maybe physics in my field. What other tools would help soft distinguish herself in a career in a changing landscape that can only very vaguely be predicted, even now with a rapid change in technology. So what other branches, chemistry, quantum mechanics, what sorts of thermodynamics, what other fields might inspire her to great heights? I'm interested in what Roger said, actually, when you asked him that question. Did he have an answer? Yes, he's very conversant in data, somewhat troublingly so,

because I think he has a tendency to succumb to, you know, the bias that all of us, scientists are subject to, which is confirmation bias. So when, when results come out that seem to support his conjecture of what he calls hawking points, he immediately, he immediately jumped on those and later they were sort of falsified. His answer to that adjacency question was analysis, was data analysis, not just, you know, the theoretical or the application of data, but likelihood testing, frequentist approaches, Bayesian approaches. It's very far removed from the pencil and paper theory that he does. Interesting, yes. Well, I've mentioned computer science and molecular genetics, chemistry obviously, and that comes in as well. Data handling, yes. Nowadays, it's possible to

sequence the genes of any animal you like very, very quickly. And so in principle, you can take any pair of animals you like, sequence their genome totally. And then you can, by sophisticated data handling, you can calculate how long ago the common ancestor lived and what the closeness of cousinship is. And that has to be quite sophisticated. There are lots of traps you can fall into. Another aspect of data handling is signals of natural selection. You can look at the genome of an animal.

and you can use it to calculate which parts of the genome have been subject to selection, Darwinian selection in the past. And that's obviously very revealing. It tells you what pressures the animal's ancestors were under to survive. So data handling is very important, yes. What about field biological work? You do so much, I think you've been to every continent or close to, at least Antarctica, if you haven't set foot at the South Pole.

Don't worry you're not missing much. There's not much of going on there for my experience being there. But what about being in the field? Does that give an advantage to, you know, the pure pencil and paper, zoology, geneticists, would you recommend that they develop field skills? I think I would. I think it's a remarkable fact that Darwinian evolution, Darwinian natural selection, was not discovered until the middle of the 19th century.

And then it was not discovered by sophisticated mathematicians or philosophers. It was discovered by two traveling naturalists, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, both of whom were collectors in tropical jungles. And I'm actually genuinely puzzled as to why it took that kind of skill, that kind of experience, to tumble to this really, remarkably simple idea. It's a terribly simple idea when you think about it, natural selection. And it evaded really, really clever people down the centuries until two traveling naturalists in the 19th century. So yes, I think soft is going to, it would benefit from some field trips as well.

The core of the book, you make an argument at the end of the book, rather. You describe our genome as a swarming colony of symbiotic vertical viruses, suggesting that not just the 8% of our genes are actual viruses, but the entire gene pool operates as a type of cooperative virus hell-bent on traveling to the future. How should this view be influencing our perspective on the way that our genes and our bodies interact with one another? I'm afraid that's a rather typical piece of the kind of thing I do. That's me being provocative. like Francis Crick in a different way. I'm not saying that viruses that once were separate

came together and to form a colony of viruses. It's not that. It's rather that when you look at the world from the point of view of the genes, which is what I do, the reason why the genes within one species gene pool, such as the human gene pool, work together cooperatively to build bodies altogether as a cooperative unit is simply that they have the same expectation of getting into the future. The only way the vast majority of the genes

in your body can get into the future is through sperms, if you're female through eggs. Therefore, everything about the animal that conspires to survive, to reproduce, in the male or female way, whichever it is, they all benefit from the same thing. They all benefit from the body surviving, from the body reproducing, from the body being sexually attractive, from the body being a good parent, etc. Everything about the body is programmed in unison by the genes. They all agree simply and solely because they have the same exit route into the future. The few that don't are things like viruses which get sneezed out or spat out or ejaculated out or whatever, coughed out.

And these we call viruses because they have an alternative way of getting into the future. They don't go via sperms or eggs. They go via breath or spit or sweat or whatever. So all I was really saying is it's actually much less radical than it sounds. It's simply that cooperative viruses, would be those that have the same expectation of the future. A bacterium that passes from parent to offspring in the egg or sperm, again, has the same expectation of the future

because that's the only way you can get into the future is via the egg or the sperm. So the genes in that bacterium, insofar as they have extended phenotypic effects on the human body, those extended phenotypic effects will be in agreement with the phenotypic effects of the human's own genes. So they might as well be own genes, and mitochondria are in that category. Mitochondria are actually bacteria originally, but they've become so deeply embedded in our own cells that they might as well be our own genes.

genes. And the reason is that they have the same method of getting into the future, namely through eggs. It's really just a way of dramatizing the point that the way a gene becomes, the way genes become cooperative is by sharing the same expectation of the future. That means the same method of getting out of the present body into the next body, whether it's being via sperm, sperm or eggs, or being sneezed or coughed out. It made me think, and I, uh, and I, uh, exceptional colleague I have here at UC San Diego is Kim Prather, who's a National Academy of Engineering and Sciences member. She's, I believe, but she's incredible. She has a theory,

you know, we suffer from horrific droughts here, and you'll be here in California. We're going to talk about your tour in just a bit. You're coming to America. And she has, works on aerosols, and she's found that during periods of extended drought, that microbes actually find their way up into the upper atmosphere and seed the downpour, you know, that eventually causes the drought to sort of come to an end, which I find quite remarkable as almost the, it's a global extended phenotype in that these microbes, as you just described them, are influencing the Earth's climate as a way of, as you call it in the end of the book, making their final exit to the future. Are you familiar with this model that,

that, you know, these atmospheric rivers can be triggered by the stressors placed on colonies of microbes? I'm familiar with the same idea from my colleague Bill Hamilton, who I quotes extensively in the book. I wasn't aware of your colleague, but I wonder whether she is aware of Hamilton because he proposed, it sounds identical, actually, he proposed that bacteria and algae and fungal spores, find their way into the clouds and seed rainfall and get themselves spread around the world by getting up into the upper atmosphere and spreading around the world in clouds

and then getting rained down to earth. And this is this topic of a rather bizarre fact. He wrote a paper called My Intended Burial. And he said that when he died, he wanted to be not buried, but laid out in the Brazilian jungle where he did a lot of his research. And so he was devoted to the Brazilian jungle. And he would be taken down below the soil by burying beetles. And then the adult beetles would take off in the next year and fly up in a beautiful, iridescent cloud and carry him all through the jungle. Anyway, when he did die, very tragically, his partner, life partner, towards the end of his life,

Louisa Bozzi, an Italian woman, knelt down into the open grave and said something like this, Bill, your body is not, we cannot, we can't actually take your body to the Brazilian jungle. your body is buried here in Oxford. But eventually, the bacteria and algal spores and will rise up into the air and carry you around the world and will rain you down into your beloved Brazilian rainforest. Anyway, tell your colleague that she probably already knows of Hamilton's idea, but it sounds like exactly the same idea.

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 shouts. hours in a follow-up message once you join my Monday Magic mailing list. And if you have a .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, yes. It's, it's, it is incredible. In the book, we talk, you talk about the role of, again, extended characteristics like bird songs. What is the purpose of music? Is there, you know, In other words, if an intelligent alien were looking at the earth and it knew all of our, you know, technology and it could see our DNA and chromosomal, you know, patterns, would it predict that we, you know, have music to entertain and to woo?

or what could you predict based on genes alone and what could what requires sort of fieldwork of an evolutionary biologist, you know, or zoologist, naturalist like Wallace and Darwin? What could you predict just from knowledge of these phenotypic behaviors? I think music is a very difficult one. It's something that probably is best regarded as a kind of byproduct, I think. Although, of course, it can be used, as you suggested, for sexual attractiveness. I mean, it's arguable that in our wild ancestors, individuals who were good at singing, good at dancing,

might have been attracted to the opposite sex. I think that's a plausible idea. Stephen Pinker, who's one of my favorite intellectuals, he's in one of his book, talks about possible, origins of music and his idea is he called it the cheesecake theory. Our brains are equipped to analyze sounds, especially perhaps the sounds of language, to do some kind, some equivalent to Fourier analysis probably, to work out the, from the stream of pressure changes that are hitting the ear drum, we analyze them and decode

them into patterns which make sense to us in for speech and other things. If you have a brain which is inter-foray analysis, then pure tones or notes that are of a particular frequency or particular combination of frequencies might be attractive in the same way he says like cheesecake is attractive. It's not necessarily a good for you, but it stimulates your taste buds in a super, normal way. So that could be the origin of music, but then I suppose you could say something like the sexual attraction theory would take over and would fashion music into being attractive. In the book, in The Genetic Book of the Dead, I do talk about birdsong as, I mean, rather

speculatively, as aesthetic appreciation by the birds of music. If you look at the way birdsong develops in many songbirds, it looks as though there's good evidence that the young male bird, before it's singing properly, it teaches itself to sing. In American Song Sparrows, for example, they begin by singing for random fragments of song, which is not really proper song at all, and they learn to sing by whichever fragments of trial and error song fit, in with a built-in template. The template is built in genetically so that the bird on the sensory side of the brain, it knows what song, Sparrow song ought to sound like. And then it teaches itself to sing by random trial and error and repeating those sort of burbling phrases which fit in

with the built-in template. Well, there's evidence for that. Now, if you think about it, What this bird is trying to do is to seduce females. Female has a brain which is the same species and therefore probably has the same template built into its brain as the male has. So the male is teaching himself to sing with reference to a template which is also present in the female's brain. So in effect he's saying, if this appeals to me, it'll probably appeal to a female too,

because we have the same kind of brain. It probably appealed to a female because we have the same kind of brain. Well, that sounds awfully like aesthetic appreciation. The male is trying things out. Does that appeal to me? Do I like that? Is that the kind of music that I like?

Because if I like it, I'll repeat it because it'll probably appeal to a female as well. And I think you'd say the same thing about Bowerbirds. these magnificent Australian birds which build bowers out of grass and other things and beer bottle tops and anything beautiful things they can find,

colour things they can find, to lure females and the females come to the bower, they're attracted by the bower. It's better than a peacock tail in one way because although it looks like it's similar to a peacock's tail, the bird itself,

the male bird itself is not made vulnerable by it because it's not part of its body. It's an extended phenotype. in fact. Well, David Attenborough has beautiful films of Bowerbirds building, male Bowerbirds building bower, and they really do look like an artist, kind of standing back from the canvas and looking at it and sort of darting forward to make a little adjustment, standing back, looking at it with a head on one side, cocking its head and looking and then adjusting it. That looks to me like aesthetic appreciation again. And once again, the bird is trying out what it itself, male bird is trying what it as a male appreciates because the female is likely to appreciate the same thing.

Therefore, once again, we have an explanation for aesthetic appreciation by a bird. We've got a bit off music, but in the case of birds' song, it is music. It's bird music, and I think we can make a good case that the birds, both male and female, appreciate it aesthetically. I want to turn to a concept that's really a core inside of the genetic book of the dead, and that's the pamphalicest, which I wasn't familiar with, but until I realized my kids do these, make pamphal cysts all the time. You know, they write over, destroy stuff, usually what their siblings have made. They efface it to make room for new writing, but you can still see the traces of the older siblings work in the case,

at least sometimes when my kids get to it. And it made me think of, you know, in astronomy, we look at spectra, which we call the library of light, you know, the patterns of starlight that's traveled to us, perhaps from distant galaxies, which may no longer exist. And I wonder how these, you know, looking at the past, which is all we can do with astronomy, we can't do an experiment. I can't change the temperature of the sun and ask, how does that affect the number of sunspots, right? But we make use of vast collections, which are similar enough, but they're not. identical. And I guess how does this concept of the pamphal says, how does that explain, you know, which you've worked on, which is convergent evolution, which I understood I learned from you many things about it. But one of the things that strikes me, I think I learned from you that

octopuses have eyes that are quite similar to human beings, even though our genetic ancestors diverged, you know, 700 million years before the dinosaurs were exterminated. So how does the the pamphalcest, you know, kind of encode or pre-Pesage convergent evolution? Is there a relationship? Let me stop you. You've got the word wrong. Do you mind? It's palimpsest.

No, no, please. Polymcest. Okay, absolutely. Thank you very much. Yes. So the palm cest, does that, you know, kind of work symbiotically maybe with convergent evolution? Are they independent? And how is it possible that two different books of the dead, you know, which today look like as different as an Egyptian and a Bowerbird, but how can it be that they converged upon the same solution for things like eyes or you mentioned electric fields produced by fishes in the book?

How does it play into this rewritten archive over almost cosmic history? Wouldn't it be rather surprising if they didn't actually converge, wouldn't it? I mean, if there's a good way to make an eye, and we know that there is, because cameras work in the same way. It's not the only way. I mean, there are compound eyes which work in a different way, and there's the reflecting telescope method as well,

even some animals which have a quill of a reflecting eye. 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 ocean front 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. Parabolic reflector. But the camera is obviously a very, very good way to form an image. and to analyze that image. And so not surprisingly, the camera eye has evolved independently, at least twice, in mollusks and in vertebrates.

And it's different in interesting respects. In the mollusk eye, in the kephalopod, the octopus eye, the wires that lead from the photo cells, if you can call them that to the brain, go back. backwards from the retina in a sensible way, the way an engineer would have designed it. But in us, in vertebrates, the wires leave these photo cells from the front of the eye, and they travel over the surface of the retina, and then they dive through the retina in the blind spot. So that's an indication of, that's what, that's indication of the fact that they evolve from different starting points and have different embryologies.

But the design of the camera eye is the same. And why wouldn't it be? I mean, it should be because it's a very good way to form an image. And the whole chapter on convergent evolution is to make the point of the power of natural selection. It's an example. They're all examples of the power of natural selection to come up with a good engineering solution to a problem. Bats and dolphins use echoes, use sonar, use echolocation. They've independently evolved it.

Electric fish, you mentioned. There are two different groups of electric fish which use electric fields, which they generate themselves to navigate around. And they totally independently, one group in South America, one group in Africa, have independently discovered this way of doing things. and there are, once again, revealing little differences. You can only do this if your body is rigid, because if your body is moving in serpentine waves like a fish is normally does,

then that messes up the electric fields so you can't do it. So the body has to be rigidly straight. That means you can't swim in the normal fish way. So what they do is they have a fin that runs right the way the length of the body, which moves in a sinuous way like the whole body of an ordinary fish but the main body of the electric fish is rigid, is stiff

and both these groups of fish, the South American ones and the African ones, do the same trick, but in one of them, the longitudinal fin is on the back and the other one it runs along the belly. Once again, a revealing difference showing that they have independently evolved it

from different starting points. But I think you shouldn't regard convergence as something that excites your incredulity and needs a special explanation. It would be surprising if convergence didn't happen, because whatever is a good engineering solution ought to be there, and it is. I want to pivot to another modern subject, which has some bearing in the genetic book of the dead, and that's the role that pain plays in evolutionary process.

But I want to ask it from a slightly different perspective, and that is to pivot to artificial intelligence. And the way I want to do that with your indulgence and your forbearance is to remind you if you don't know or, you know, or if you do know or maybe not. But Albert Einstein once said that his happiest thought, I'm showing a finger puppet, by the way, to all my listeners who aren't watching me talk with Richard. But Einstein said his happiest thought, Richard, was that if he was in free fall, he'd experienced no gravitational field.

And I use that as sort of a hint that it may not be so easy to generate artificial intelligence in a human form for two reasons. One, what does it mean for a computer to feel happy? An artificial intelligent agent, a large language model of a Hilbert space, of a vector space. how can it sense happiness? A, that's one part of the question. And then B, how can it visualize a visceral experience like free fall, like the pit of your stomach as you go over a roller coaster or a bump in the road? How can it do that if it's not embodied in a physical organism? And Noam Chomsky and I debated this as well. But I want to ask you, first of all, how likely

is it that you do you think that we'll have artificial Charles Darwin's or Richard Dawkins? I mean, can a computer do, or a computational system, replicate human generative thoughts in physics in biology that rise to a level that would entertain us, interest us, and be worthy of research? I suppose as a materialist, I'm committed to the view that there's nothing supernatural in the brain and therefore anything that the brain can do must be doable in an analogous system, electronic system, computer system.

So we don't want to get mystical about it. On the other hand, you make a less mystical point about not being embodied in a body, and therefore things like the pit of your stomach feeling in a roller coaster, you have to have a body in order to experience that kind of thing.

And that may be non-trivial or it may be trivial. I mean, in a way one could say, oh, well, yes, I mean, of course, you've got to have a body to do that. But that's not the important thing in order to do really clever stuff, like doing what Einstein did or doing what Darwin did. You don't need a body. You just need a brain. and you just need the, well, the functional equivalent of a brain, which I think I'm committed to the view must be possible in electronics.

But I think the instantiation in a real body probably is non-trivial and probably is essential for certain kinds of experience which an animal, human, has and which perhaps a computer can't have. unless you put it into a body. I mean, you could put it into a robot and really could perhaps experience the feeling of losing your stomach when you were in a roller coaster, because it would experience the same acceleration forces as we do. Right, yes. That would be quite a trivial way to do it.

I had a different question to pivot off of that, which is where you bring up the role that pain plays in an organism. And that's to ask, well, maybe it's hard to replicate that feeling of Einstein called it the happiest thought, the one that titillated him most. So maybe perhaps you could replicate the titillation in some sort of a computerized form. But it seems maybe easier just from thermodynamic considerations, entropy consideration, that you could make its life much worse easily or make its existence much worse. Those of us, you know, who have children know that it's the happy. you could ever be, but also opens you up and exposes you to the greatest pain that you could ever experience. And that's by virtue of, you know, there's many more ways to ruin your life than to make you twice as happy. And I wonder with artificial agents, is there a way

that we could educate them, train them using pain and, you know, blow a capacitor every now and then to tea? Are there ways that we could instantiate pain rather than the, you know, the stick, you know, rather than the carrot, use the stick. How about that training these agents using negative reinforcement? Pain is a Darwinian adaptation. It's to train the animal not to repeat actions which are damaging to its body and which potentially might therefore lead to its death. So something like picking up red hot coals, we experience that as pain.

it's a warning, don't do that again, don't ever pick up a red hot coal again. It's dangerous. It can jeopardize your survival. What's puzzling is that it has to be so damn painful. Why couldn't it just be a flipping a switch in the brain? And just simply as flip because don't do that again, raising a little red flag, and the animal doesn't do it again. And I think that's a genuinely difficult question.

And I think it's maybe something to do with the day. that the animal might overrule the little red flag. Because the animal is conflicted, it's got to balance the need for to find a mate, to need to find food, the need to find water, the need to avoid danger, the need not to fall over cliffs. If pain was not really painful, if it really was just a red flag, then you could imagine the animal overruling. Well, when a human is tortured,

human is tortured in order to get a secret out of him. It would be trivially easy for a spy who's being tortured to overrule the torture and just say, well, I don't care. I mean, that's a red flag, but I'm ignoring it because my priorities are different. That's a sort of dim feeling my way towards understanding why pain has to be so painful as opposed to just being equivalent of a flag going up in the brain. Before we wrap up, I want to talk to you about your tour. So what inspired you to go on a tour when you could be comfortably home and collecting

or doing things by Zoom or Riverside as we're on now? What was the genesis of this tour? By the way, it's probably going to be my last tour. I mean, I'm 83 now. and I don't think I can imagine I'll do it again. It's going to be very strenuous. I suppose I have been in the habit of doing a book tour when I've got a new book out,

and it's just that this is a much bigger affair than I've ever done before. And it, well, we'll see how it goes. It's not being billed as an actual book tour, but that's sort of what it is. And as I say, it's going to be my last such big, big tour. Well, that's wonderful.

Yeah, unfortunately, you're only coming to Northern California, but I'll see what I can do to make it up to the Masonic up there, theater in San Francisco. Otherwise, you'll be really traveling quite a bit. I don't envy your travel schedule. I do envy your frequent flyer miles. You're sure to have a great deal. Join me and Richard Dawkins in an extraordinary conversation

on his final tour on October 6th in Vancouver, Canada. visit brian keating.com slash events for more information 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 Theater 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 Yamavah Theater.com only at Yamava Resort and Casino celebrating its 40th anniversary. UN must be 21 to enter.