Radiolab - In Defense of Darwin?

Episode Date: July 14, 2009

When evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' daughter was six years old, he told her that flowers are not here for beauty, not here for the bees, but instead merely to copy their own DNA. Sigh, what a Dad. So is Richard Dawkins always so gloomy and reductionist about the world? Well yes, but he would say that his vision of the world is anything but gloomy, he even calls it romantic. In this conversation from the 92nd St Y, Robert challenges Dawkins on this and a number of other sticky spots on the topic of biological evolution.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts. From W. N. Y.

C. C. C? Yes. And NPR. Hi, I'm Robert Crilwich, and this is Radio Lab. The podcast, Jedda Bumrod, who's normally at my side, is still at home, eking out the very end of his paternity leave with his brand new baby. So I've been very careful not to disturb.

which means though I do have to find somebody else to fight with. And I did manage to get into a nice little tussle with Richard Dawkins, one of the great defenders of Charles Darwin. He's the Charles Simony Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. He also comes from a long line of combative Englishmen, including a guy who tried to burn down an Ivy League college in the United States. In fact, why don't we begin with a little biographical sketch of Richard Dawkins that I used to introduce him to an audience at the 92nd Street Y in New York City

and then we'll get on to the discussion. I told them that Dawkins's great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandfather going back to the 1700s. Was the major commander of the British forces who fought George Washington here in the American Revolution? And it was Richard Dawkins' Dawkins' great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great,

whatever, Sir Henry Clinton, who hired Benedict Arnold to be the British spy, who almost captured West Point, which is Washington's stronghold. Didn't do it, though, because they caught the spies and so forth. It was Dawkins' great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather who commanded, who commanded. the British occupation forces here in New York City in 177778. It was his great-great-great-grandfather who authorized raiding parties on a variety of seashore

communities. If you live in them, please hold your fire. Egg Harbor in New Jersey, attacked by his great-great-grandfather, New Bedford, Massachusetts, a part of Martha's Vineyard called Vineyard Haven. Most insidiously, he okayed an attack on New Haven, Connecticut, but he planned to burn down Yale College. Fortunately, his forces, as they often were, were repulsed. Ultimately, Sir Henry Clinton lost the war and went home. But Sir Henry's great, great, great, great, great grandson, Richard Dawkins has been back to America over and over and over again

to do battle with more modern Americans whom he calls the most scientifically illiterate populace outside the third world. So Richard Dawkins does not mince words, and when we began our conversation, which was about evolution in Charles Darwin, he opened with a surprisingly forceful statement. As an academic scientist, I am a passion. Darwinian, believing that natural selection is, if not the only driving force in evolution,

certainly the only known force capable of producing the illusion of purpose which so strikes all who contemplate nature. But at the same time as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs. So he's given us something of a riddle. I mean, he loves Darwin, but he's, He also loathes Darwin. And then for extra spice, he wants you to know that anybody who thinks there's a purpose, a reason why we live and look and behave the way we do is under a terrible illusion. There is no purpose to our existence, no reason why we're here.

That's basic Darwin, he says. So I thought, okay, let's do the purpose thing first. The Darwin's theory, I think, does a very good job on because. It can tell you why something is shaped the way it is, or has the color it is, or does the function is because, because. But if you step back and you ask the bigger question, what's it all for? This involves your daughter.

Your daughter is driving around with you, and you're looking, she's six years old. She sees a field of flowers. You say to her, well, what do you think they're for? She said, well, to make the world pretty and to help bees make honey for us. You think, well, I was sorry to tell her that this wasn't true. And I explained to her that the flowers

are not there to make the world beautiful. and they are not there to delight bees or anything else. They're in the world to copy their DNA. This is to a six-year-old. But essentially what you're doing there is you're opening the notion to her that the world is a purposeless, indifferent machine where the meaning of things is not clear if it exists at all. You found it, I think, kind of brave to say to your daughter, look, step as you're going,

to step into the wind of truth. Exciting, exciting, exciting. I mean, it's a far more exciting view of flowers. to understand what they're really doing. And a six-year-old, she had no problem understanding that. I explained it to her. But to come to your What's It For question, it's a piece of massive presumption

to think that the what is for question deserves an answer. There's no reason at all why something should have a for about it. If I said to you, what is a what is the sun for or what is Mount Everest for, you would say, don't be so silly. It's not, it's not an appropriate question. But because it's flowers, you sort of feel that there ought to be a what is it for question. No, actually, I think it's a harder question than that. I think human beings, I think most human beings have some deep impulse to explain their being here,

to wonder about the origins of here and the destiny of them. and here. And that question, the meaning of it all, is not a silly question. That's not a silly question, and it has a perfectly good answer, which is not an answer to be couched in the language of purpose. It's an answer to be couched in the language of scientific causation. What brought us all to be here? What is the explanation for our existence? That has a perfectly good scientific answer. And you go back in evolutionary time to the origin of life, and then you go back before the origin of life to the origin of the world, the origin of the solar system, the origin of the universe. And that becomes deeply mysterious,

needless to say, it's not a question I could even begin to answer. And I don't think that at the present stage physics can either. But to the extent that there's going to be an answer is going to come from science. And that is a deeply satisfying kind of answer to the question, why are we here? We already have in principle the answer to that question, and it is not an answer of the form we are here in order to achieve some purpose. It's an answer of the form, we are here because something happened which led to something else that happened, which led to something else that happened. Are you, let me just ask you the harder question. Is this hard-looking and this telling your six-year-old, this leads to this, leads to this,

this kind of reductionist way of thinking about everything. Does that seem to you to be less than joyously imaginative? No, I know. I think that's kind of super romantic. To actually understand that flowers are devices, beautiful devices, elegant devices, which are shaped precisely to attract insects and hummingbirds and bats to take pollen from one to another, that is such a mind-blowing thought compared to the tame, sort of washed-out view that flowers are just sort of nice things to have around. Don't encourage them. So I lost that round, at least with the New York audience. And I know that a lot of you listening who kind of agree with those New Yorkers that, you know, this is the name of the game.

If you know the details, the glorious, beautiful details, that's enough. If you've been listening to this podcast long enough, you know that for some of us, it's not quite enough, but anyway, I then asked about the second proposition. I asked him, what does it mean when you say that you're a passionate Darwinian and at the same time a passionate anti-Darwinian? As an academic scientist, I believe that Darwinism not only is the true explanation for why evolution happened, in particular why evolution led to the spectacularly elegant, beautiful, complicated, and apparently designed structures

that we see. It's therefore a theory of immense elegance, of immense power, of immense scientific beauty. But if you try to apply the lesson of Darwinism, as the social Darwinists did, to human society, then you end up with a kind of super Thatcherism. You end up with, or even Hitler. For example, he said, there are people who love Darwin. He mentioned the science fiction writer H.G. Wells. Wells assumed that survival of the fittest means that only the fittest

and the best creatures get to survive. But Darwin didn't say that. He didn't use the phrase survival of the fittest in his book, and he didn't ever say that evolution is there to make better and better creatures. As you just heard Richard Dawkins say, evolution isn't for anything. But when H.G. Wells read Darwin, he decided Darwin was teaching us to get rid of our less fit brothers and sisters.

The New Republic, where Wells outlines his Darwinian utopia, contains some blood-chilling lines, so unpleasant that I find it hard to read them aloud. perhaps I mean it's such a striking thing I'll bring myself too it's pretty bad sorry I'm having trouble oh yes here we are

and how will the new republic treat the inferior races how will it deal with the black the yellow man the Jew those swarms of black and brown and dirty white and yellow people who do not come into the new needs of efficiency well the world is a world

and not a charitable institution and I take it they will have to go. And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favor the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity, beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds.

And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness, is death. the men of the new republic will have an ideal that will make the killing worth the while. That was H.G. Wells in something like 1902. I forget exactly when it was published. But I understand this to mean your notion about anti-Darwinian is that in our brains we have these tendencies to make war against people who are not like us, to assign different roles to men and women to perhaps favor our biological children over stepchildren.

And in our brains we have the other places where we might make war against the tendencies that we've inherited. I think that's right. I mean, you put the dilemma rather well that here we do have our evolved tendencies which have these unpleasant features and it must be in some sense elsewhere in our brain

that we have the desire to fight them. And I think it comes after a long period of education. We have moved away from the mores of our wild ancestors. And thank goodness we have. I'm not quite sure it's a very difficult historical process to wonder quite how that's happened, but it very clearly has. I mean, that contraception in itself is good enough evidence that we do go against Darwinian principles. so it can be done and the fact that most of us spend most of our lives striving for purposes

striving for goals which have nothing to do with propagating our selfish genes is further evidence that it can be done so this notion then is that we we live in a world carved by these forces but our job in part is to recognize the good from the bad choose and fight for the good

as we understand it This is my suggestion. I mean, obviously that's a matter of taste whether you want to do that, but most people who live in civilized society do want to do that. And I would like to live in a sort of society which is not run on Darwinian principles while fully acknowledging that the brains and bodies that we possess were put there by Darwinian principles in the first place. You mentioned in the reading there's something about this unique gift of foresight.

Now, as I understand how normal evolution works, is you're in a particular place, a specific environment. It gets cold, say, and you've got a few more feathers than the other bird, so you have that advantage of having a few more feathers. So he shivers, shivers, shivers, and dies, and you go out and have a baby. Now, as I, this idea, however, is,

it's based in time, in this moment. Yeah. Now, you said something about how human beings have the unique gift of foresight. How does that plant? Well, the example you give of the bird with the most feathers surviving and laying the most eggs,

that's exactly how it would work and there is no foresight there. But human beings can look ahead and say, well, in a few decades' time, it's going to get cold. There's an ice age forecast. So let's develop some new technology that will... Coats. We could do coats. Yes.

That's foresight. and foresight has literally never happened before in the whole history of life. But if people with this foresight decide, okay, let's breed a set of flying horses so that we can leave the cold places and gallop off to the warm places. At that point, is evolution, as you understand it, over? In other words, does that new ingredient adding foresight to the mix take away one of the essential bits of this that somehow it happens without a plan, now there's a plan.

Yeah. I presume I don't need to say to this sophisticated audience that your example of the making horses that flies are hypothetical. Well, I have a horse that flies in the second role, but he's quiet at the moment. Yes. It does suggest that theoretically in future centuries, perhaps, evolution could take an entirely new human-guided term,

and you really could plan for, the future of evolution. Well, let me ask you the tougher question. If you know and I know that we as a group, as a species, are capable of creating flying horses or whatever, does that then take us above all the other animals and above all the other plants and give us back our special place that Darwin sort of made, I thought, tumbled us from? Yes, I think that there are lots of big differences between humans and other species. There are lots of big differences between each species in each other species, but humans are especially differently different. And one of the respects in which that's true is exactly what you've said.

I think there are others too. But the big, big, big difference, says Professor Dawkins, and when we finished our conversation at the Y, he and his wife, the actress Lal Award kind of gave it a final dramatic flourish. They did a reading from his book, A Devil's Chaplain. But he insists that our great advantage as a species is we finally have the brain power to make. make our own future for ourselves.

For good Darwinian reasons, evolution gave us a brain whose size increased to the point where it became capable of understanding its own provenance, of deploring the moral implications and of fighting against them. Stand tall bipedal ape. The shark may out swim you, the cheetah outrun you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin out climb you, the elephant out. power you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest gift of all. The gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence. The gift of revulsion against its

implications. The gift of foresight, something utterly foreign to the blundering short-term ways of natural selection, and the gift of internalizing the very cosmos. And speaking about gifts, when it comes to internalizing the very cosmos, we turn to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and to the National Science Foundation, and of course to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I'm Robert Krollwitch. Chad will be back with the very soon I'm thinking. You better be. So long for now.