Making Sense with Sam Harris - #60 — An Evening with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (2)

Episode Date: January 10, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Richard Dawkins at a live event in Los Angeles (second of two). They discuss Richard’s experience of having a stroke, the genetic future of humanity, the analogy between genes and memes, the “extended phenotype,” Islam and bigotry, the biology of race, how to find meaning without religion, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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Please forgive me if I croak. I've just had a minor stroke. Basal ganglion on the right makes me walk as if I'm tight. So if my voice descends to squawking, Sam will have to do the talking. Thank you all for coming. This is what a sold out house looks like when the Cubs are in the seventh game of the World Series. There's a place in hell for those people who bought tickets and didn't use them.

Needless to say, it's an honor to be here and a real honor to be doing this with Richard, and I get to do this twice in one week. This is the second night, I think you know. And Richard and I were worried about this. We were worried about this event because we thought we would have a great conversation last night and then we didn't want to spend an hour in front of you here trying to recapitulate that conversation. So as a way of avoiding that fate, I went out to all of you, I think, online asking for questions and I got thousands of questions. I've picked many. So the questions we'll track through tonight are different from the ones we did last night and this is all being videotaped and You can see what you missed last night once that video is available

But I wasn't actually planning to ask this but I wanted to talk about your stroke because we haven't spoken about this and I'm gonna guess that the sock choice is not evidence of your stroke evidence of your stroke. Well, I was explaining last night that at the recent skeptics conference in Las Vegas, we had a workshop on cold reading, which you know that system whereby you pretend to thought read and all you're doing really is sizing the other person up. And my partner was a young woman who said, I seem to see there's something wrong with your eyes. Maybe color blind. She was looking at my, sorry, sorry. I am trying to make a point. I'm trying to spread the meme of odd socks. Now this is not for the reason given in Stephen Potter's

lifemanship. Under woomanship he recommends the odd socks ploy as a way of arousing the maternal instincts. And then there's a footnote that says, buy our patent odd socks brand. But my point is different from that. It is that we should not be compelled to buy socks in pairs because unlike shoes, which have genuine chirality, you can't switch a left shoe and a right shoe. Socks do not have this property

and therefore it's ridiculous having to buy socks in pairs. If you lose one sock, you have to throw the other one away. So I want to make the point in as vivid a fashion as possible and encourage everybody to wear odd socks.

as possible and encourage everybody to wear odd socks. Tell us about the experience of having a stroke. Okay, well it was a bit scary. I just suddenly became aware that my left hand wasn't working. I couldn't pick things up, or if I managed to pick something up, I couldn't let go of it again, which is sort of kind of scary. And I was sort of staggering about and not able to stand up straight. I couldn't drop buttons. I think I'm pretty much recovered now. I can both do up and undo buttons. This was in February? Yes. The only thing is I can't sing. I never could sing very well, but I could at least sing in tune and now I can't. And my voice does tend to croak, so hence my introductory apology. Was there any immediate emotional or cognitive or perceptual component to it, or was it just

a motor thing that you noticed? No, it was just motor. I mean, I was obviously scared. It's in the basal ganglion, as I said, which doesn't affect cognitive function. So I hope that will become evident tonight that I'm not… Well, we will see if you come out as a Mormon at any point in the next hour. I think it would take more than a stroke to do that to me. Our first question that one of you may have asked, if you had a time machine and could

travel 500 years into the future, what do you think you would find biologically? Assuming our direct descendants still exist and haven't uploaded themselves into the matrix, will we be recognizably human? 500 years is too short a time to expect any genetic evolutionary change. What about with our own metal and the genetic engineering that we're surely going to do? That's a possibility, yes.

I mean, I suppose that is a possibility. If by then we've colonized Mars such that there's a barrier to gene flow between the parent planet Earth and the colony on Mars, then it's possible that the Mars colony might have diverged. But 500 years is a short time. But how much of an appetite do you think we will have, given what we currently are, to change ourselves,

given the ability to do so in radical ways? are to change ourselves given the ability to do so in radical ways? Well, we've had the ability to change cows and horses and pigs and cabbages and dogs and roses for hundreds, thousands of years. And although we've changed all those species almost beyond recognition, when you think that a Pekingese or a poodle or a pug or a bulldog is a wolf, it still thinks it's a wolf. The world's worst wolf. And yet we haven't done that to humans.

So it looks as though we don't seem to have had much of an appetite to do that with respect to the selection part of the Darwinian equation. We're now just beginning to have the possibility of doing it to the mutation part of the Darwinian equation, namely genetic engineering. But it's not obvious why if we didn't have the motivation to selectively breed humans, why we should have the motivation

to selectively mutate humans. Kind of a related point. You're obviously very famous for having introduced this concept of a meme. How seriously should we take the analogy to a gene with a meme? It was intended as an analogy to a gene. And the idea is that anywhere in the universe where self-replicating coded information arises. That could be fair game for Darwinian evolution, for Darwinian selection.

And I wanted to end The Selfish Gene by making that point because the whole of the rest of the book had been extolling the gene as the unit of selection. So I wanted to make the point it doesn't have to be DNA. It could be anything which is self-replicating. Well, one could speculate about life on other planets being mediated by a replicator other than DNA, but then I thought, or a computer virus would have done the job as well, but I didn't know about them in 1976.

So I thought, well, what about cultural inheritance? Anything where we have imitation is potentially analogous to genetic replication. So something like a craze at a school, something like a craze for a particular kind of toy. I introduced to my boarding school a craze for origami paper folding to make a Chinese junk and it spread like exactly like a measles epidemic through the school and

Then died away like a measles epidemic Interestingly I had learned to do this from my father and he had learned it from an almost identical epidemic at the same school 26 years earlier So the epidemiology of meme spread is very similar to gene spread. But it's only interesting from a Darwinian point of view if the memes that spread are the ones that are good at spreading. If there is some kind of selective effect, and it's plausible that it should be, clothes fashion spread because people find them cool or something like a reverse baseball cap, which, by the

way, lowers the IQ by a full ten points. That's probably the first remark that he's going to get in trouble for. But I think you can probably treat religious memes in the same way. I mean, religious ideas spread like a virus. So I call them virus of the mind. So they either pass down the generations like DNA does, and of course obviously religions pass down generations, but they also spread sideways in epidemics when you've got a particularly charismatic vector of the virus like Billy Graham or one

of those types. So I think it's a genuinely interesting question whether the really successful religions like Roman Catholicism and Islam spread because the memes have high spreadability in their own right, like genes in Darwinism, or whether they're spread by Machiavellian priests who get together and work out what's the best marketing strategy to spread them and I'm inclined to think that the pure mimetic spread is plausible and I'm interested in that I haven't really run

very much with the meme idea the people who have are Dan Dennett the philosopher whose talks in a very interesting way about memes in most of his recent books and Susan Blackmore's another one who wrote a book called the meme machine who talks in a very interesting way about memes in most of his recent books. And Susan Blackmore is another one who wrote a book called The Meme Machine. Actually, there are about 20 books now with the word meme in the title, which emphasize various aspects of it. The fact that memes don't change truly randomly, does that run roughshod over the analogy? I don't think that really matters.

change truly randomly? Does that run roughshod over the analysis? I don't think that really matters. Genes mutate randomly in the sense that they're not – mutation is not directed towards improvement. The only improvement comes from selection. But mutation, nevertheless, is induced by things like cosmic rays, radioactivity, various mutagenic chemicals. The fact that memes are introduced by human creativity doesn't detract from the idea that some memes spread better than others for selective reasons. What do you think your most important contribution to science or culture at large has been or will be? I suppose The Extended Phenotype, which is the title of my second book. It's the only book that I wrote with a professional audience in mind.

I could expound it, but this is supposed to be a conversation, not a monologue. I mean, the question is for both of us, so I can answer it. You can answer it. Well, okay, you do your answer first, then. I can tell you what I hope it will be. I don't tend to think in these terms this globally, but I think what

I'm doing most of the time and have done in most of my books is attempt to argue for the unity of knowledge and to resist this balkanization of our epistemology by essentially what I view as the dictates of university architecture. You know, the fact that there's the biology department over here where you study biology, and then there's the psychology department over there that seems to articulate two separate spheres of inquiry that in the centers, they do have different methods, but there really are no boundaries between those disciplines. And I see that as true for not just for canonical scientific disciplines, but just fact-based thinking about the nature of reality across the board. And also the distinction that people make between third-person facts,

classically physical facts, and first-person subjective facts. And some people think that distinction is so hard and fast that they imagine there are no subjective facts. That, I think, is a boundary that I am consciously trying to erode. And I think questions about moral truth and the truth of possible human experience or the experience of conscious systems those are questions that are every bit as grounded in reality as any

questions we ask in physics or chemistry or... So introspection is a way of getting scientific data? Yeah, I, you have to issue certain caveats there. There are ways in which introspection is a dead end. For instance, I can't tell, even with my best efforts, I cannot tell that I have a brain. That's a pretty big blind spot. That's a pretty big blind spot. But there are many things that you can introspect about which give you scientifically valid data. And, in fact, you only, I mean, if you're studying the mind,

if you're studying what it's like to be a person, at some point you are correlating third-person, quote, objective methods with first-person report. You know, somebody says, you know, I ask you what it's like to have a stroke, or your neurologist does, and he needs to know what your experience is. I mean, it's not, I mean, with a stroke, it's the final analysis seems to be looking at your brain at the, you know, actually what has been physically affected, but the cash value of those physical effects is always what is showing up in your experience and what's showing up in

your function. So if some canonical language area, say, was affected, but you spoke fine and appreciated understood language fine, and there was no discernible change in your language use, understood language fine, and there was no discernible change in your language use, well, then that would be the definition of those being non-linguistic areas of the brain being affected, no matter how close they are to, you know, the standard, you know, average atlas of language use. So, we do always link up with a subjective report, too, and first-person performance. And so, yeah, I mean, in terms of the contribution I want to make, I want to argue that there's a larger set of truth claims we want to make when we're reasoning about reality, and those include things that we will never know. I mean, they include

abstract things like mathematics, you know, which the physical foundation of which is kind of hard to specify. And they include the example I always use is a question like, what was JFK thinking the moment before he got shot? Well, we know we'll never know. That's data we'll never get. But there's an infinite number of things we know he wasn't thinking. So it would be wrong to say he was thinking, I wonder what Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins think about what I'm thinking right now before I get shot. There's an infinite number of things we could

assert about the character of his subjectivity there which we know are wrong, you know, and we know that as fully as we know anything in science. And there are things that get rid of it, like things that get, like the mystery or pseudo-mystery of how to integrate free will or experience of free will with our scientific worldview, I think can be easily resolved if you can introspect with sufficient perspicacity and notice that you don't even have evidence for free will in your first person experience. I think that those are subjective data that are available. So there are ways to get access to interesting things

through introspection, but they don't actually include the existence of your brain. Very hard to communicate to other people. Yeah. But that's true of many things that we don't begin to doubt. Just imagine what it would be like if only 1% of the population had vivid dreams at night. So most of us just sleep like animals. There's nothing that it's like to be us for eight hours a night.

But then some percentage of the population talk about traveling and meeting people and having all of these illogical encounters. Dreams would be much stranger, and many people would doubt their existence, but they would exist just as much as they do now. And we doubt the sanity of people who had them probably as well. Yeah, yeah. But did you answer, did you fully answer your question?

Do you want to say more about the extended phenotype? Well, I'll try. I mean, what is a, tell people what a phenotype? A phenotype is the manifestation of genetic effects. And from a Darwinian point of view, the phenotypic effects by which a gene is selected. So there'll be genes that affect wing size, eye color, hair color, intelligence. These are all phenotypic effects. hair color, intelligence. These are all phenotypic effects. Conventionally, phenotypic effects are confined to the body in which the gene sits. So genes exert their phenotypic effects by influencing embryonic, post-embryological

processes. And so the shape of the body, the color of the body, the behavior of the body are all influenced by the genes inside the body. That's conventional phenotype. Extended phenotype is phenotypic effects of genes which are outside the body in which the gene sits. And the easiest examples to think of are artifacts, things like beaver dams, bird's nests. These are quite clearly phenotypes. They quite clearly influence the survival of the genes that make them. So a bird's nest is made by genes in the same limited sense or not so limited sense as the bird's tail and the bird's eyes and the bird's wings. And the nest contributes to the survival of the genes,

which is what matters in the selfish gene view of life, just as surely as the wings and the tail of the bird contribute to the survival of the genes that made them. So although the nest is not a part of the bird's body, it is a part of the phenotype by which the genes lever themselves into the next generation. Well if you buy that and I think you have to, then effects that parasites have on hosts, there are numerous examples, fascinating

rather lurid examples of parasites which affect the behavior or the morphology of the host in such a way as to improve the survival of the parasite. Well, that means that parasite genes are influencing host behavior and host morphology. In the same kind of way as any gene influences phenotype. So when an animal is induced by... There's a thing called a brain worm, for example, which is a worm that gets into a fluke or a snail,

there are things like that, and causes the intermediate host, the snail or the fluke. Let's stick to snail. It causes a snail to be eaten by a sheep. Sorry, the brain worm is a fluke and it gets into the snail and causes the snail to be more likely to be eaten by a sheep. And it does so by moving into the eyes of the snail and making the eyes pulsate in a sort of rather frightening way. And calling the attention of an animal like a sheep or a cow to eating the snail, which means that the parasite, the fluke, then gets into the next part of its life cycle.

So the fluke genes are influencing the behavior of the snail, the eyes of the snail. The change in the snail is part of the phenotype of fluke genes, extended phenotype. If you buy that, which is a sort of further step, then something like the bird song, say male bird song which say influences female birds actually physically causes the ovaries of the female to swell. This does happen. The swelling of the ovaries of a female bird is extended phenotype of genes in the male which make the male sing the song which

has this effect. So the extended phenotype then becomes a way of looking at the whole of animal communication where one animal influences the behavior of another. I have not done justice to the extended phenotype. Read it. So what are the prospects that religion or something like it is part of our extended phenotype? Yes. I don't think I want to say that. No, I imagine you wouldn't. Well, in order to qualify as extended phenotype,

it would be necessary that genes... Well, say you took two preachers, one of whom was a very good preacher who recruited lots and lots of people into his church, another of whom wasn't. That could be extended phenotype, but only if there was a genetic difference between these two preachers, which caused one of them to be an effective recruiter and the other one not. That would be, but I don't think that's very likely to be true.

Well, wait a minute. Just to quite literally play devil's advocate here. If there's a gene for religious enthusiasm or a set of genes for susceptibility to that range of experience and a fundamental lack of intellectual honesty or a lack of concern that whether what you're saying is true. So an increased capacity for self-deception and therefore deception of others, say. I mean, that seems to me plausible. So that's a very effective preacher who's filled with the charisma of being absolutely sure about what he's saying and energized by his passion

for the whole project. That's true. And I think it probably is true that there are genetic, when you say a gene for something, all you ever mean is a genetic difference that causes a phenotypic difference. So the best way to show that would be twin studies. If you can show that identical twins,

monozygotic twins, if one of them is a religious maniac, the other one probably will be as well. If that's true, and if that's not so true of fraternal twins, dizygotic twins, then you've shown that there is a genetic effect on religiosity, and that's probably true, and I think that's certainly true. To be extended phenotype, I think you've got to say that genes engineer their own survival

and passing on into the next generation by making their victims religious. And I suppose, yeah, maybe that works actually. So quickly a life's work is undone. Yes, I mean, I suppose that, let's not go there. What do you think are the most misunderstood topics in science by otherwise smart and educated people? Or what's one that you think is often misunderstood?

Oh, evolution, surely, especially in this country. But what do you think, even many people in this room who obviously are well-educated and interested in the topic to even be here, what do you think many people here may be confused about

or be wrong about and not know it that's of consequence in science? Well, I mean, certainly there are no creationists in this audience. You were screened at the door, right, with that wand? I suppose there may be people. I mean, I would say it was a misconception to believe that the majority of evolutionary change as we observe it is non-selective. There are people who believe that natural selection is relatively trivial compared to random genetic effects. Now, that's a genuine scientific controversy,

and there may be people here who subscribe to that. And it's true if you stick to molecular genetic changes, but if you're talking about actual externally visible phenotypic changes, then I don't think it is true. And I think that's a confusion which I would expect to find in this sophisticated audience. So just to traverse that one more time, the belief that much of what we notice about ourselves was not selected for, but just kind of came along for the ride,

you think that's very likely untrue? Yes, but you have to be sophisticated about it because you may be looking at the wrong thing. We talked about this last night. Perhaps it doesn't matter doing it again. Many people think that quite a lot of characteristics are trivial, sort of frivolous. I mentioned eyebrows last night as being something

which nobody could seriously think that eyebrows are doing anything useful. How could eyebrows possibly be naturally selected for? Well, I think that's a mistake. It's a very tempting mistake. But something that seems trivial is almost certainly not trivial because the genes that make it have so many opportunities to be selected. They are represented in thousands of individuals and over lots of generations. And this has been worked out mathematically as well. So that is a very common misconception I think

that very slight effects are too trivial for natural selection to care about. And I think that that very slight effects are too trivial for natural selection to care about and I think that is wrong I think natural selection actually does care about even what looked to us like very tiny trivial effects. To make a disconcertingly lateral move here, how can we publicly challenge the more dangerous tenets of Islam without further inspiring bigotry against Muslims? Now, you and I have both, unlike many scientists, we have sounded off on this. It's been, for as long as I've been an atheist, it's been deeply unfashionable amongst atheists, even atheists who think it's a legitimate project

to criticize religion. It's been unfashionable to criticize any one religion more than any other. Yes, especially one more than any other. Yes, you can go to town on Mormonism or Scientology. Or Christianity, actually. I mean... The default assumption is that if you're against religion or if you think that the evidentiary claims

upon which all these revealed religions are founded are unjustifiable, well, then they're all on all fours together and you don't really need to weight your concern, but it just has seemed obvious, at least since September 11th, 2001, that one of these religions is producing more than its fair share of conflict and oppression. So back to the question, how do you, given that you and I both think it's legitimate to focus on the most harmful instances of religion as we see it, how do you avoid energizing those voices who are actually animated by bigotry and xenophobia?

Yes. Well, I think we both have this problem. I suppose, I mean, I listened to one of your podcasts about Islam and arguing against the point of view which says that the terrorists which we all know about in the Middle East are not motivated by religion. They're motivated by anything but religion. There is a kind of desperate desire to blame anything but religion for what is going on. This was the podcast where that issue of ISIS's magazine, Dabiq, where they just spelled out – they were as fed up with this as I was and they just wrote all of their reasons for killing infidels. It was amazing. I felt like I was in a lucid dream.

It's true. Do listen to it. What's it called, Sab? I forgot what it's called, but you'll find it. It's sometime in the last ten podcasts. I think what... Sorry? What jihadists really think. And it's why we hate you and why we fight you. Yeah. And it's absolutely... I mean, Sam could have written the script. It's just completely... We hate you because you're not Muslim.

It amounts to nothing more than that. Yeah. And we fight you for the same reason. But what do you do? Actually, I had a podcast I just released today where I was interviewing our mutual friend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And I asked her a related question. Yeah. Thank you. This is the true feminist hero who was just declared an anti-Muslim extremist

by the Southern Poverty Law Center. That's absolutely unbelievable. But since I asked her... And has been disinvited by at least several campuses in this country, including Brandeis. So I asked her more to the point of conspiracy thinking on the right. So it's often, it is simply a fact that Islamists

and jihadists are scheming to spread their views and both by the sword and otherwise throughout open societies. And they're using the norms and institutions of our open societies and they're using the norms and institutions of our open societies against ourselves in a very cynical and calculated way. And it's not even a conspiracy as Ayaan pointed out, it's just there in the open. This is an agenda that Islamists have. They're totally open about it, totally honest about it.

Yeah, yeah. But the issue is you can take this, one's concern about this, in truly paranoid directions. So I hear from people who think Ayaan is a stealth Islamist or jihadist. I hear from people who think that Majid, who I wrote Islam and the Future of Tolerance with, is a stealth Islamist and jihadist. And so there's no obvious signage on the way to complete insanity where you're told that you are now too fearful and too concerned about things that actually are contiguous with real reasons for concern.

But I asked Ayan, so where's the boundary here? How do we differentiate a reasonable fear about genuinely scheming people and right-wing paranoia in this case? And she just said, facts. Just one word. You're either talking about facts or you're not. And when you're talking about facts, you can't go wrong in this space.

And I thought that was a great answer. I think one point to make is that the main victims of these awful people are actually Muslims themselves. But what about the attack from the left, which in liberal left circles in America and Britain, where Islam gets a free pass on all sorts of terrible things like misogyny, which no liberal would actually sanction, and yet if a Muslim behaves in horrifically misogynistic ways, somehow that's ignored, as though that's somehow legitimate. Oh, it's part of their culture, so they're allowed to do that. I must say, I despise that kind of thing. Thank you. Well, there was some, I think it was an anthropologist who's quoted this, I'm about to butcher,

but it's a great point. He said when one person grabs a little girl and cuts off her clitoris with a septic blade, he is a dangerous lunatic. When a million people do this, it's a culture and we need to respect it. And that's the little crystal of moral confusion that's just at the center of the liberal worldview that we need to fully crush. I dare to suggest that there's too much respect in the world. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast,

along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes, NAMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.