The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss Onstage at the Orpheum Theater, Nov 15, 2022

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

On Nov 15th and 16th, 2022, The Origins Project Foundation hosted their first public events in North America at the beautiful Orpheum Theater in Phoenix, AZ (we had hosted an event in Iceland in September during our Greenland-Iceland Travel Adventure). There was no better way to begin this new series than with a dialogue onstage with Richard Dawkins, and that was the substance of our first night’s event. As all those who have followed us will know, Richard and I have done many dialogues together, onstage and online, and so it was important that this dialogue be new and different. Richard had just published a new book entitled “Books do Furnish a Life”, which is a compilation of essays he had written about other scientists and writers, and also transcripts of dialogues he had had with numerous people, including me. I decided this new book would provide a wonderful opportunity to jump off in new directions, and it turned out to be just that. The response from the audience and from those who had seen many of our previous dialogues was very positive, and we came off stage feeling like it was one of the best public conversations we have had. I hope those of you who watch it, or listen to it, here will agree. Following our 90 minute dialogue onstage we asked for questions from the audience, and after an intermission, we answered many of these. This Q&A will be offered as an exclusive post for Critical Mass paid subscribers, to thank you for your support of our efforts. It will remain behind the Critical Mass paywall for 1 month, and then will be released to the general public. I hope all of you enjoy this conversation, and Richard’s remarkable enthusiasm about science and writing, and his insights about the world. In a future post, we will release the video record of the second night’s conversation, a panel discussion with leading physicists about the current state of cosmology. Finally, later this month we will open our newest travel adventure, a trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos Island, for booking for the general public. Critical Mass subscribers will have an advance opportunity to book one of the 36 berths on this voyage. Stay tuned.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

And welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. This is a special week for the podcast because in November, the Origins Project Foundation hosted its first public event series, a series which had been long delayed because of the pandemic and the events associated with the pandemic. It was a two-night event, and we're going to release the videos of both nights. And today is the first. the first of those, which involves a dialogue between me and Richard Dawkins. Richard and I, as many of you know, I've done many dialogues over the years, but what surprised us in this case was the novelty of this particular dialogue. I wanted to talk to Richard about his book, Books Do Furnish a Life, which is a series of writings he's made about books and other authors, including myself and dialogues with myself. And we discussed those things in detail, and there was a complete departure from our previous dialogues.

And we both came off stage, very excited, and the response of the audience was remarkable. It was filmed by the same film crew that made our film The Unbelievers, so you'll be able to see it with five cameras and high-deaf, and it's been edited. So it's a very special visual edition of the podcast, as well as an audio version. and I hope you'll enjoy it and find it a fresh new take on ideas that matter to both of us. So please enjoy this dialogue between me and Richard Dawkins that was held in November at the beautiful Orphium Theater in Phoenix. And you can see once again from the images how beautiful the theater is. It's appropriate also that at the same time as I announced this dialogue with Richard Dawkins, that I announced that we are the Origins Project Foundation

is going to release the general public, open up to the general public on March 23rd, bookings for our newest trip to the Galapagos Islands, made famous, of course, by Richard Dawkins. And we'll have several guest speakers as part of this voyage to Ecuador in the Galapagos Islands, including Franz Duval and Elizabeth Colbert, who have both been on this podcast before,

were both remarkable in their breadth of knowledge and a variety of areas. And attendees on that eight-day-long cruise and land trip will be able to spend time with both of these authors, myself and some other special guests. So I hope you'll consider joining us again. March 23rd is when bookings will go on sale for the general public. Previous travelers will be able to get an advance booking before that. And I hope we'll get to meet many of you there as well. The boat holds only 36 people, so the limited size, which is what we like to do, so people can have an intimate experience.

And we have a lot of special events planned for that period. So I hope you'll consider going to the Origins Project website, www.orgensproject.org and look at the trip and consider joining it. And, of course, I hope you'll consider subscribing to the podcast through critical Mass, our substack site, because the funds from subscriptions go to supporting all the efforts of the Origins Project Foundation, as well as the podcast. And of course, you can watch this podcast without any advertising breaks by watching it on Critical Mass. Or you can watch it, of course, on YouTube as one of our many YouTube subscribers, or listen to it on any.

podcast listening site. Either way, I think you'll find this new dialogue between me, Richard Dawkins, or at least I hope you'll find in a breath of fresh air as I did. Take care. Don't move. Okay, thank you so very, very much. It's so great. It is a wonderful

night. So for me, can you turn out lights up a little bit so I can see people? It's wonderful for me to see you here. It's great to be back in Phoenix. It's been a long time. and it's wonderful to see people from all over the place and I want to thank you. We met earlier before the show.

People have come here from Seattle, San Diego, Tucson, Texas, Denver, I don't know where else, but where? Michigan. Everywhere. They came from everywhere. Every state, every country is represented in this room right now, which is amazing.

And Richard and I got to spend, I'm really particularly happy that we have a lot of students here. And Richard and I got to spend, yeah, it's great. It really means a lot to us. There we go. Now I can see people.

We got to spend time with a number of student groups beforehand, and it was nice to get a chance to chat with him. We got to spend time with a wonderful teacher, Zach King, who brought his students and it means a lot to me because when I used to teach at ASU Zach used to come in as a student and ask me questions in my office

and it's so nice to see that he's inspiring a whole new generation of students. But we also, then we got to speak to, and I should say it's Apache Junction High School, right? Just to make clear, okay. We met students from bioscience. Let's come on. Okay. Caesar Chavez?

Ah, okay. You win. And what other schools? I forgot. Shout it out. Which high school? There we go. Any others? And a university in Chile, right? Okay. Well, that wins, too. Okay. Well, thank you for being here, and I hope you'll have a fun night. and as I say, it means a lot to me,

and I'll talk about the Origins Board who've worked so hard to make this happen. It's been a long time coming with a lot of work and a lot of people. Before I want to start talking, obviously, what I want to do is introduce my special friend and guest tonight, Richard Dawkins. I first met Richard probably 15 to 20 years ago when I asked a nasty question

when he was lecturing. And he said it wasn't the average nasty question. And so we started to talk and it was a meeting and we had a chat later and had a dialogue, which later on led to a piece by the two of us in Scientific American. But it also led to us being asked by Stanford to do a dialogue together. And Richard at the time was adamant

about the fact that we didn't want a moderator because he said they only get in the way, and I agree with them, actually. And so we tried it out, and it turned out to work. And if some of you have seen the unbelievers and other things, you know, we've done a lot of dialogues around the world, and I'll talk about that in a second. But Richard Dawkins does not really need an introduction.

He's certainly probably not only one of the most famous scientists in the world, but one of the most accomplished science writers. I was going to say popularizers of science, and that's true. But his book, The Selfish Gene, is, in my opinion, perhaps the best piece of science writing that's ever been written by anyone in history. And I know it's had a huge influence, rightfully so.

And in my life, getting to know Richard has had a big influence, and it's been a pure joy. And I'm going to call him out right now. Richard, this is not our first rodeo. and we have done, as you've seen, we've done dialogues around the world, and Richard in particular, but we never want to do the same one. It's kind of tempting, and so we try and find different things to talk about.

And what I thought I do tonight as a way to guarantee in some sense that we talk about new things is to base it on one of Richard's two new books. and this is a book by Richard called Books Do Furnish a Life, reading and writing about science. And books do furnish a life. I know that one of the students early on asked me and Richard what got us interested in science, and certainly for both of us,

I know for me it was reading books by scientists. That really made all the difference, and it's one of the reasons why I write books now. And it's a lovely book, and it prompted me to have some thoughts, and I thought we therefore base this discussion on more or less, to start with at least, on that book because it's new. And what it is is a compilation of some articles by Richard about other books, about individuals,

and also transcripts of conversations that Richard has had. And I have to say, one with me. And then also he was kind enough to write the, as many of you know, the afterword to my book, A Universe from Nothing, and that's in here as well. That's not the reason we're talking about this book, by the way. But it's about science and culture, and I think that's a perfect way to begin this,

because that's what really the Origins Project Foundation is all about. It's about science and culture. But the fact that science is a part of our culture, not just a small part of our culture, but it's central part of our culture. The other day I was speaking to some group and it occurred to me, I never thought it's for, but life is an experiment.

When I realized, if life is an experiment, then science should be a central part of life because it's a central part of every experiment. Our whole existence is trial and error, learning how to make it through our brief time in our moment in the sun. And while you are a selected set of people who I think recognize the importance of science and culture,

that's one of the central themes, and it's certainly a central theme of this book. So I thought I began, the first part of this book, in fact, is about the literature of science, and you make a really interesting point that too often science writing is not thought of literature.

And in fact, you point out that the Nobel Prize in literature has been given a few times it's almost always given to novelists and fiction writers almost uniquely, which I'll ask you to comment on, but a few times it's also been given to non-fiction writers, Winston Churchill, for example. And you mentioned someone who is, it's never been given to a real scientist, you say.

The only arguable exception is Henri Berksson. I have to ask you why that's an exception. Rory Berkson was a philosopher, I suppose, who counts as a scientist in many ways, and he's regarded as a scientist, was regarded as a scientist in his own time. He believed that life could be explained by what he called an elin vital. And Julian Huxley satirized that by saying he could explain the motion of a train by saying it was driven by eland locomotive. It explains absolutely nothing.

Yeah, that's the point. And similarly, Elen Vital explains nothing, whatever. You have to be scientific. You have to be reductionist, actually. You have to explain what it is about life that actually drives it, that actually makes it do the things that it does. Just to sort of repeat that there's a life force. That is not science.

It's bad science. And I think he's the only... recipient of a Nobel Prize in literature who is classified by people as a scientist. Bertrand Russell... Yeah, I was going to say, Bertrand Russell isn't mentioned your book, and Bertrand Russell I classify as a sort of a scientist. Bertrand Russell was a brilliant mathematician

and had a certainly scientific point of view. He had a scientific way of thinking. And Bertrand Russell would feel at home in any scientific gathering, of course. Yeah. So I would call him a scientist. Yeah, I was surprised him. It wasn't in the book because he's much more of a scientist and I already wrote.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, he certainly is. But it is true, fair to say that he didn't win the Nobel Prize in literature for his science writing, however. He really wrote it for the work he wrote about peace and history and so that and philosophy, which somehow classifies as being worth the Nobel Prize where science doesn't that all wrong. But isn't it a bit odd the way we classify books into fiction? and non-fiction. I mean,

isn't that rather a curious division? Why would the whole, even if 50% of literature is about things that never happened? But might. But then, you know, that's what science is about, often things that might happen. True.

And that's, you know, as a theoretical physicist, I've written about many things that never happened, I have to say. But that's a... The... I have... have to ask you this. For many years in physics, I was a nominator for the Nobel Prize. And it's supposed to be secret. But I, when you, not that I was a nominator, the process

of what goes on is supposed to be a secret. You're not supposed to know who's been nominated, although they often advertise the people in peace for some reason. But I have to ask you this, because when I was reading this, the first thing I wondered whether, was when I start to think of what piece of literature might be worth a Nobel Prize in, literature, I thought of the selfish gene. And I wonder, do you know if you've ever been nominated? I was going to ask you.

I think I probably should not answer that question. Okay, okay. I was only able to do physics otherwise. Well, I think you've gathered from my... Yeah, exactly. Yes, you gave the answer. That's good. Well, I'll keep my fingers crossed.

you give a piece of science writing in this book, which is by actually, it means a lot to me. It's by Sir James Jeans, who was one of the scientists I read as a young person. He wrote a book called Physics and Philosophy, which turned me on to physics, actually, and for a while to philosophy, but I grew out of that. And anyway, so he wrote a book in 1930 called The Mysterious Universe,

which was a big bestseller, at least in Britain. And it's interesting, and I will, give a little plug because, as you know, because you've read it and commented and helped me with it. I have a new book coming out next year, which is in the United Kingdom, is called the known unknowns, and in the U.S. is called The Edge of Knowledge,

because the known unknowns is a quote from Donald Rumsfeld, and then my U.S. publishers felt that it wasn't appropriate to use it. But they asked me, but the British publisher who I first talked about this, asked me if I could write a book, in the spirit of the mysterious universe, which I then read. But here's a passage from it,

if you really don't think of science as literature. Listen to this. Standing on our microscopic fragment of a grain of sand, we attempt to discover the nature and purpose of the universe which surrounds our home in space and time. Our first impression is something akin to terror. We find the universe terrifying because of its vast meaningless distances,

terrifying because it's inconceivably long vistas of time which dwarf human history to the twinkling of an eye. Terrifying because of our extreme loneliness and because of the material insignificance of our home and space, a millionth part of a grain of sand out of all the sea sand in the world. But above all else, we find the universe terrifying because it appears to be indifferent to life like our own, emotion, ambition and achievement,

art and religion all seem to equally foreign to its plan, which is just a beautiful piece of writing. Did you read that book? That's something that I often meet when people worry about the scientific view of the universe and of life as well, actually, that it is cold and empty and terrifying. and in many ways it is

but so what that's the way it is you better phase up to you can't you can't say oh it can't be true because I don't want it to be true well you can and a lot of people do I think someone was running for governor

in Arizona who I think thought that I thought that But, okay, well, I wasn't going to talk politics, but I, why I laid it back. But life is terrifying too, but that's what part of, it saddens me in a way, because that's what makes life exciting, is the fact that you'd never know, if you're living an interesting life, you'd never know what tomorrow's going to bring. And for some people, that's terrifying, but for others, it should be exhilarating, because who would want to know? what was going to happen.

I mean, who would want to know? Everything that was going to happen in mind. I don't think that's the most terrifying. I mean, more terrifying is the feeling that we are the product, possibly on this planet alone, of the blind laws of physics, millions and millions and millions of particles playing their infinite game of billiards and billiards and billiards.

And yet, those blind forces, acting through the Darwinian agency have managed to produce after a period of four billion years, produce us. I mean, I think that's an astonishing thought. It is. But I think it depends on how you're wired.

For me, it's exhilarating to think that I'm here by accident. Oh, yes. Because it just means that every moment it's such a lucky accident. Yes. And we're lucky to be here. Yes. Well, by accident in one sense, in another sense, not, because natural selection is very much not an accident, but the fact that you and I are here, everybody in here is an accident of stupendous magnitude.

I mean, just think of the luck of the particular sperm that had to, I mean, out of millions. Yeah. You know the Aldous Huxley poem about that. If you can remember it, I love to hear you were. say poetry. A million, million spermatozoa, all of them alive, out of their cataclysm, but one poor Noah dare hope to survive. And of that billion minus one might have chance to be Shakespeare, another Newton,

a new done, but the one was me. Shame to have ousted your betters thus, taking arc while the others remained outside. better for all of us Froad homunculus if you'd quietly died See I told you it's great I could just listen to you about my poetry that actually is a good segue

because one of the the statements you've made and in fact is a central part of one of your book is that science is the poetry of reality and which is a beautiful a beautiful sentiment Do you want to elaborate on that at all?

Well, I think it ties even with what you were talking about earlier. It's part of culture. The thought of the vastness of space and the improbability of life beginning at all, and given that life taking the course that it does, that's a supremely poetic thought. And the quotation from James Jeans

expresses it very well, was anything ever written by Carl Sagan you could take us the poetry of reality absolutely the cosmos any other some of the we'll maybe get to some because

you actually talk about several people you admire a lot I know you talk about Peter Medivar what do you tell people about the Peter Mettaverer I believe because they may not have he wrote my first knew him about with a book he wrote a book he wrote called Memoirs of a Thinking Radish that's right Peter Medaw was a noble

prize-winning medical scientist. He was trained as a biologist at Oxford like me, and he became a medical scientist, and he was very, very big in immunology. But he was also a superb essayist, a wonderful style. Not so much a poetic style. It was more a kind of lofty patrician, elegant style. One of my favorite of his essays is a book review

of the phenomenon of man by Pierre Tayard de Chardardar, was touted as a great French intellectual at one time. And it's wonderful. It's the best negative book review ever written, I think. Just to give, I could quote one phrase, I think. He asked the question, how have people come to be taken in by Taya Deshaada? Because many people were.

And he says, we have to remember that the spread of tertiary education has produced a large population of people of highly cultured tastes who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought. That's a typical piece of Medoa witch. I just remembered another one.

He began a lecture by saying, I hope I shall not be thought ungracious if I say at the outset that nothing on earth would have induced me to attend the kind of lecture you probably think I'm about to give. I love that. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly, and I hope we surprised it. But you know what?

I don't know if you remember, but you were one of the people that was taken in by Pierre Chardin. Oh, yes. We talked about it in the Unbelievers. Yes, I was. I was a student, and I read this book, and it is prose poetry. It's beautiful. Translated from the French, so I presume that it's the same in the French. It kind of evokes a kind of dreamy feeling of

oneness with the universe, that kind of thing. I think Medewa was perhaps a bit too negative about it. I mean, it is good prose poetry, but it doesn't actually say anything sensible. But I thought it was what woke. I don't want to use the word woke. It's what caused you to rethink your own view of religion, wasn't it? Well, yes. I mean, what it caused me to realize was that I was that I was an idiot.

And I use that example sometimes when people say, it's no good telling people that their religious belief is stupid because they'll just react negatively to them. You have to woo them. In fact, it was what you said. That was my question. When we first met, that was your point. And it's a very good point.

But in counter to that, I say, well, I didn't mind being told I was stupid, in effect, because I was. And so I changed my mind. And I think we all need to change our mind, as I think John Maynard Haynes said. What does he say? When the evidence changes, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? Well, that would be a wonderful thing if that happened nowadays. It should be a mantra for it.

It should be a meme, actually, is what it should be. And speaking of memes, I told those high school students who were, I mean, probably already impressed with Richard or Ray, but then I told him, this is the man that invented meme, and I could see their eyes, go, wow. But they didn't know what it meant. Speaking of science writers, actually Richard and I did an event last night

and a number of the people are here, we talked about, Richard actually did a reading from this book, but we talked about a wonderful scientist who was also a science writer, Fred Hoyle, Sir Fred Hoyle, and he wrote what is arguably, I think you and I agree, perhaps one of the best science fiction stories ever written called the Black Cloud. Tell us, explain to the people a little bit

what the story's about because I want to call it. Has anybody read the Black Cloud? One or two. You should. It's about a cloud of gas which appears and goes into orbit around the sun and it causes great havoc and destruction. because it blots out the sun and things like that.

And the first thing that I noticed about it, which is the point I made in the forward to the book that I wrote, what was that you learn a lot of science from this book. So it's not just a good story, you learn a lot of science. And the first thing you learn is that sometimes scientific discoveries are made from two completely different converging sources. In this case, the black cloud was first spotted by a telescope by a young astronomer who noticed a bit of the sky being blotted out.

So that was the observational evidence. Entirely independently, from this observational evidence in California, in Cambridge, in England, a mathematician deduced from... movements of the planets, planets were in the wrong place, exactly the way, by the way, the planet Neptune was discovered. So planets were in the wrong place, and so he calculated that there must exist an object, a foreign object, at a certain position,

and sent a telegram to the... It was foggy in England, of course, and so he couldn't look out into the sky. So they sent a telegram to California saying, does there exist so-and-so coordinates as in was this right declination that and

when the Californians read the telegram having just seen this thing the words of the telegram seemed to swell to a gigantic size or a magnificent piece of drama there so two different ways of discovering the same thing

that was point one then when they started to work out the nature of the black cloud, namely that it was actually a living organism of far superhuman capabilities. The process by which they worked out that it was living was a beautiful object lesson in the way scientists worked by making predictions and then testing them. And then another bit of science that I learned when I read the book as a student was that information theory.

The idea that information is a commodity which can be transduced from one medium to another and it still retains its quality because there's a dramatic scene where there's a young woman pianist who plays Beethoven sonata to the black cloud where they worked out that it's a living thing

and it absolutely adores Beethoven although it obviously hasn't got ears but it doesn't matter because the information goes out in the form of pulses or something to the black cloud and so it can still appreciate Beethoven except it it asks if they would play

at I don't know ten times the speed because it's too slow and then finally the book ends with what the black cloud calls the deep problem which sends chippers down my spine and the deep problems are kind of thing Lawrence writes about

what is the origin of the universe why do the laws of physics have exactly the form that they do why are the fundamental constants what they are and so I've always been intrigued by the deep problems although not being a physicist

I can't really understand them well now yeah that's true but there's few things that come to mind when you said you read it as a student why didn't that want to make you make you want to be a physicist or so. It's a biological book.

The black cloud is a biological book. The black cloud is a biological entity. In fact, one of the questions they ask is, why do you the black cloud consider yourself to be a single individual? Because you're this huge diffuse cloud of gas with radio communicating within the cloud. And the cloud kind of makes the point

that if all of us could communicate telepathically brain to brain with the same speed as we can communicate within our own brains then we would cease to be individuals, separate individuals, we would be one great big collective

individual. You know what we'd be, but you won't know it when I tell you. The Borg. Do you know what the Borg is? I know you know... I don't take the allusion I'm sorry to say. But the other thing is neat about the fact that it was foggy in the book and they

had to go, is that apparently that was exactly what happened with the discovery of Neptune. I didn't know that. There were British astronomers and French astronomers who, I think it was French. Predicted it. Predicted it. And the British wanted to look and it was cloudy and the discovery was made in France for that reason. Yes.

Now, I wanted to pick up on that. And there are a few reasons for what I want to talk about it. One is, and I told you last time I was going to I was going to allude to this. So when you write about this book, you say that Hoyle makes only one scientific mistake in your opinion. The eponymous superintelligence of the black cloud is asked about the origin of the first member of its species

and replies, I would not agree that there was ever a first member. And then you say, never mind the astronomers, I must protest as a biologist, even if Horace, even if Hohler and his colleagues have been right that the universe had been in a steady state forever, the same could not sensibly became for the organized and apparently purposeful complexity that life epitomizes. Galaxies may spring spontaneously into existence,

and by the way, they don't. I mean, they do, but they take longer than life. But complex life cannot. That is pretty what complexity means. So I get your point, but the interesting thing to me when it hit me is I remembered actually from our dialogue in, I think that was recorded in the Unbelievers.

I think it's in Sydney, Australia, I can't remember, that someone asked about the first fish or something like that. And you said there was no first fish. Yeah, okay, look, stop, stop, stop. Okay. Okay, first, as you probably know, Fred Hoyle was probably the leading proponent of the steady state theory of the universe.

So there was no origin of the universe. universe. It's been around forever and matter is continuously created. So when the scientists in the novel asked the Black Cloud about the origin of its own kind, its own species, it said, I wouldn't agree that there ever was an origin. This was one in the eye, as the astronomer said, for the big bang idea. It was, it was, Fred Hall was making a joke that it's in favor of the steady state. Fred Hoyle, but what strongly proposed that the universe was it was eternal and in what's called a steady state

that it never really changed and so he invented the term Big Bang to make fun of the idea and it caught on and in this book basically Black Cloud says the universe has been around forever more or less so then

I protested I protest about his saying that I would not agree that there ever was a first member of my species because that suggests that complex life, supremely complex life, which is what the black cloud is, just happened. And it's all very well saying that matter can come into existence spontaneously, because that

was the steady state theory. And there's nothing wrong with it except it wasn't true, but it was a very interesting theory. That's just matter coming into existence. But matter coming into existence is a very different thing from complexity. complexity of our kind of life, let alone the black cloud kind of life, that doesn't happen. It cannot happen. That's what complexity means. It means improbability on a gigantic scale. And evolution builds up to that gigantic scale by slow, gradual, incremental steps. That's what makes it possible. That's the whole point of Darwinism. And so that's by very strong objection to what the black cloud said. But I thought I'd give you a chance to explain because it's a neat bit of logic lesson

in evolution why there was never a first fish. Well, okay. Now that's quite, that's a different thing. It is, but it's the same sense, but there's a different reason. People often say, well, who was the first human? I mean, the first member of the species Homo sapiens.

And my answer to that is there never was a first member of the species Homo sapiens, because any individual that you choose to pick say I don't know 200 million sorry 200,000 years ago must have had parents and its parents would have been classified if taxonomists had been around at the time

it would have been classified in the same species every animal ever born was a member of the same species as its parents and its children so some people think that's a problem with how you can get new species because the intermediates are all dead and therefore we don't see them

but if by some magic wand waving every animal that had ever lived could somehow be magic back into existence it would be impossible to draw dividing lines between one species and its ancestor then so there never was a first human and there never was a first fish in that sense

but of course that doesn't mean that it didn't have predecessor. It doesn't mean it didn't have progenitors. It had parents. Just that they would have been classified as being the same species as it. Yeah. Okay. Now, I think it was a... I thought it would be a good point to illustrate the difference

between what they meant and what you meant by the same statement. But it also gives me, and it's self-serving, but I'm asking the question, so I can do that. At least right now, when you ask, you can... It turns out that in fact,

In cosmology, in my area of cosmology, people actually discuss now exactly the likelihood that something like the black cloud could come into existence spontaneously. And the argument is, well, it really comes related to the universe from nothing. The fact that quantum mechanics allows things to spontaneously arise from nothing, particles to emerge from empty space, etc. And if, as seems to be the likely case, the future of our universe is eternal, then you could ask what's the probability

that life would evolve, which is a very complicated process, versus what's the probability that spontaneously, And I mean spontaneously, a solar system would appear out of empty space due to the laws of quantum mechanics, and life forms would appear, and you and I would appear on this stage and all these people, and we didn't exist here five seconds ago, and it sounds ridiculous. But it's actually discussed as when you, the problem with infinity is that, of course, probabilities become really weird. But some people would argue that if you actually look at the likelihood of a long, complicated process,

evolution taking four billion years versus the likelihood that in an infinitely long universe we'd spontaneously rise because in an infinitely long universe everything that can happen will happen that it's much more probable that we didn't exist a half an hour ago and isn't that crazy as Bertrand Russell said we might have come into existence five minutes ago complete with holes in our socks yes I mean that that kind of argument is apt to leave a Darwinian cold because it's not just that you and I could be sitting here, but I could have a green mustache. Yeah.

And you could be standing on your head. And it all will happen. And this whole night would happen again and again and again with one word different. Yes. And I've gone to physics conferences and people talk seriously about this. Well, yes.

I cannot I'm going to tempted to quote the poet Yates you are still wrecked among heathen dreams it's it negates the entire point of everything that I've lived for which is Darwinism okay

and that doesn't mean it's not true but the whole point about Darwinian evolution is that it explains how you get improbability of a certain kind And things work. Birds fly because they're well designed to fly.

You don't get all the impossible freaks that don't fly because they're wings that are upside down or something like that. Your argument about everything that can happen will, somewhere out there's a cricket team to beat the Australians. it's sort of, it's a neelistic kind of idea. Yeah, it is a holistic. It makes science impossible to do, really. Yeah, in fact, that's the point I want to make.

And I think, I wanted to make it because I think, and I've argued this at meetings, the reason that one can do science, and in fact you're in your career early on, it was really doing probabilistic calculations with natural selection, which is really what you started to do in your research, is that probability is, that probability is an incredibly misunderstood thing in our society, but you can do it if you understand what the probabilities are, or you can calculate them or estimate them, if you know the all possible outcomes,

then you can do something. But when you have infinities, then you can't, then nothing makes sense. You can come up with anything you want. And that's why it really isn't science, in my opinion, because if you argue, you don't know what the, you don't know what the, the weight function is.

You just guess. If you guess what the probabilities of different infinite things are, you can come up with any answer. And the whole point of science just disappears. Well, perhaps I could ask you a question. I am

sort of, I'm aware of different interpretations of quantum theory, the Copenhagen interpretation and the many world's interpretation. And my colleague, David Deutsch, is a great proponent of the Hugh Everett, many worlds interpretation. And so, well, perhaps we could, I mean, explain what that is,

because it's very related to what we just been talking about. Yeah, it is, in a way, in a way, although in quantum mechanics, you actually can calculate probabilities, which is what's really, makes it science. But the idea is that quantum mechanics, that the central premise of quantum mechanics can be stated as saying that systems at the fundamental scales where quantum mechanics really operates, not the classical scale where we live, are doing many things at the same time. And even though that seems classically ridiculous, it happens and it's true. In fact, now it's the basis of quantum computers. That

an electron, which behaves like it's spinning before you measure it, is not just spinning in one direction, it's spinning in all directions at the same time until you measure it. Now, and measurement becomes the key part of quantum mechanics. People argue, therefore, that if all of these states are existing and you make a measurement, and it turns out there's a probability that you measure its spin going this way

or a probability that you measure its spin going that way. And we can calculate those probabilities in quantum mechanics. But once you measure it, it's doing that. So the idea is, what happened to all the other possibilities? And this argument developed by a guy named you to Everett is that reality branches every time you make a measurement

one possibility becomes real but all those other universes where it was doing something else are never accessible to you but they exist and every time you make a measurement it branches

and so you basically get an infinite number of universes branching into an infinite number of universes one of which is the universe we're all in at this time so Schroedinger's cat in some universes it's dead and in other universes it's alive

In principle The Schrodinger's cat experiment It's not experiment No one does it Sort experiment But at least I don't think anyone's done it Is a cat is in a box With a radioactive device

And if the device goes off A bullet goes and kills the cat But quantum mechanically You can think that the cat Is both alive and dead Until you open the box It's not the best analogy, but it made Schrodinger famous. Schrodinger did it as a way of satirizing.

Yeah, he did. He did it as a way of satirizing. I saw there was a wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker where he saw in a veterinary surgeon's waiting room and the nurse is coming to one of the people sitting there and saying, about your cat, Mr. Schrodinger, I have some good news and some bad news. By the way, another point. I've heard. If you're playing Russian roulette, you shoot yourself

that you've got one in six chances. You know it's safe because if you die, then you're not in that universe, but in five of the six universes, you're alive. And so you'll always be alive. In some universe, yeah. Don't try this at home. Don't try at home. But part of this, the reason I want to get to it is that part of it

demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of quantum mechanics. Because when you get those kind of absurd arguments, when science leads to absurd arguments, sometimes as we'll talk about, sometimes it just means you're not thinking the right way. But sometimes it means you're not

that you're interpreting the science incorrectly. In fact, in my new book, I talk a lot about this quantum mechanical aspect. That whole notion of the interpretation of quantum mechanics is not just in my opinion, but I remember learning it from a scientific colleague

in mine when I was at Harvard. It was much smarter than me. It was now passed away, Sidney Coleman. It's the wrong way of thinking. Because the world is quantum mechanical. So why do you try, you should not try and interpret a world that's quantum mechanical in terms

of a classical clues? Because you're always going to come up with some weird, nonsensical picture. The correct thing to do is think of the interpretation of classical mechanics to describe the apparent illusion that is the reality. we live in in terms of the fundamental theory instead of trying to analyze

the fundamental theory in terms of the illusion because when you do that you'll always come up with weird nonsense with the spooky action at a distance that bothered Einstein so much about quantum mechanics so so I I bristle when I read books about the interpretation of quantum mechanics and people still write them about the many

world's interpretation it's it's much ado about nothing in my opinion literally Richard Feynman said shut up and calculate Yeah, exactly. But, but, interestingly enough, Richard, the fact that the quantum systems are doing many things at the same time, as I said, is the basis of quantum computers. Because classical computers are based on bits, either ones or zeros, and you manipulate those ones and zeros in ways that allow you to do logical progressions that allow you to do calculations. But if you do it with quantum particles, You know, you can think of an electron that's spinning this way as one and spinning this way as a zero, but the electron is doing many things at the same time. So if you could do a calculation

without disturbing the electron in the middle, the electron would be doing a huge number of calculations at the same time because it's spinning in many different directions. And therefore, a quantum computer could do something a classical computer can't do, which is to do many different calculations at the same time, and therefore potentially do calculations that would take longer than the history of the universe

for a classical computer in a quantum computer. That's why so much money is being spent on quantum computers right now and the idea of doing it. But Feynman, who was one of the first people to propose thinking of quantum computers, did it for another reason. He said, I'm a classical person.

And as he said, and other people said, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't. because you can never intuitively picture quantum mechanics because we're not quantum beings, we only live in a classical world. And he said, if I can invent a quantum computer, the quantum computers, the whole basis of its thinking, if you wish, would be quantum mechanical.

And maybe the quantum computer could explain quantum mechanics to me. And I thought that was a wonderful argument. The other thing I want to mention, which is the interplay between literature and science, which happening personally, I did not know of the black cloud. I'd never read the story, but I was doing a physics problem.

I was having a debate with another scientist who was much smarter than me, Freeman Dyson, when we were at the Institute for Vance study together where I spent a year there, about the future of life. He had argued, he'd written a beautiful paper that life could persist forever in an eternal universe.

The ultimate optimism, could a species, can a set of life forms persist forever if the universe is eternal? And he argued the answer was yes, by a very typical Dysonian argument, which was tricky and amusing but naive. But in principle, right. And a colleague countered him and said,

you're wrong. And we spent a year debating this. And we came up with an example of why a lifeform could not do what he said you do. and he said, what about the black cloud? And he talked to us about the black cloud, and the black cloud would allow exactly what we said was impossible. We later on showed that it couldn't do what we wanted to do for other reasons,

and he finally agreed, I think we're wrong. But it was interesting to me that that invention, that science fiction invention allowed him to have an example that became a part of a real, and we both wrote scientific papers about that very subject from the black. cloud became a part of it. So I think it was a nice example of that interplay. But the last thing, I don't

want to harp on that too much, but you mentioned the deep problems. And Kleinly mentioned one of them is, can something come from nothing, which was my book. But do you there is a question of are there things that

might never be addressable with science, that there'll be limits to knowledge? And people often talk about that. And I want to ask if you think there... I mean, this is just pure speculation, but do you suspect that there are physical questions

that will never be resolvable because of limitations of our intellect? Well, I don't think so, but I'm not qualified to say. I don't think anyone is. Things like where do the fundamental constants of physics come from, just those numbers which physicists can measure

but don't have a theory to account for I don't see why they shouldn't eventually come to explain them all. I suppose I'm an optimist about this. I think it's in a way equally... I mean, it could be that the human brain, which is naturally selected to survive in Africa by hunting and gathering. In a way, it's absolutely amazing

that such a brain can do quantum mechanics and do relativity and do higher mathematics. What on earth prepared this animal to do such things when all it really had to do was to find a kudu to hunt and to dig up some tapioca roots. Absolutely, it's amazing. Actually, I forget where I was, but I was on the discussion where someone asked the question,

you think it is amazing. I mean, certainly humans didn't evolve to do quantum mechanics, but we can. But someone asked the question, if I thought that was an evolutionary maladaptation, you think this accidental fact that we can do science is a maladaptation or not? Well, in one sense,

and it probably would never have helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce, not directly anyway. Never mind about quantum theory, just Pythagoras is. theorem. I mean, even that is... You don't think, you know, it helps you survive and reproduce to go into a party

and say, hey, I'm a physicist. Well, actually... It doesn't. I mean, that, in a sense, has been suggested that intelligence is sexy. And so,

I mean, there's a biologist called Jeffrey Miller who has written a book suggesting that a lot of what's unique about humans is due to sexual selection. Darwin's other theory, the idea that what matters is not individual survival but reproductive success

and he's thinking in terms of success in attracting mates so that the human mind is a kind of mental peacock's tail which is

a display I think it's quite plausible but our brain seems to have utterly overreached anything that could be remotely useful exactly I mean as you know I'm very proud of the fact that nothing I've ever done in my research is remotely useful

and that's fine well I knew a mathematician when I was a student who said that one of the mathematician that he was studying his ambition was to discover a completely useless theorem and then some tiresome physicist came along and used it that's what happens but actually it's mathematics the reason I don't buy

I agree with you completely I don't think there's ever people always say well there's got to be a limitation because of the human mind but the human mind has discovered mathematics and language by the way and and Noam Chomsky who I've had many dialogues just pointed out that language allows it essentially an infinite number of progressions. But mathematics does.

So the minute you do mathematics, you're not limited. There's an infinite set of possibilities that the human mind can explore, and therefore I do not see just the fact that our hardware is evolved by evolution and is therefore limited. The software seems to be unlimited. And therefore I don't see,

if I ever had to guess, I don't think there will ever be limits to what will... I mean, there may be limits to what we can learn because of practical, of practical things, but not because of some fundamental limits of our intellect. I think it's one of the most inspiring things I know that the human brain does have this almost unlimited open-ended capacity in its software. Yeah, it's me too, and it'd be great if more people used it.

Let's move on. You had a conversation with service scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. No, he's a friend. and we just did a podcast together and it was a lot of fun you should listen to it if you didn't it was the last one came out but Neil is like

is it America perhaps the most well-known science popularizer and for many good reasons I think what I liked about that dialogue and I wanted to at least talk a little bit about

was the very fact and you say it I think there's a kind of unwarranted pride it being bad at mathematics. You'll never hear anybody saying how proud they are at being ignorant of Shakespeare, but plenty of people will say they are proud of being ignorant of mathematics. Well, the ignorant of Shakespeare, maybe Donald Trump, but the rest of, but the rest of people would be not. But plenty of people say they're proud of being ignorant of mathematics, and it's true.

And I want to ask you, why do you think that of all? I mean, it shocks me. I mean, many people admit to being ignorant of mathematics, but some people view it as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a badge of honor that they're somehow artistic or humanistic. Yes. And I wonder where you think that comes from. There's another quote from Peter Meda, which I'm trying to... No, I can't get it.

There was an editorial in the Daily Telegraph, which is a British conservative newspaper, and it was about the fact that some scientists had done some research on ignorance of science in people, in people. And they had discovered that I think it was 19% of the British population. I think it takes one month for the Earth to orbit the sun. And the editor of the Daily Telegraph put in brackets, doesn't it, Ed? So he was, obviously he didn't really think that,

but he was parading the fact that the editor of a major London newspaper could even pretend to be ignorant of such an elementary scientific fact. You know, it come, I don't know if it happened so much in biology, but it really hit me when I first started to write because every now and then you have to read reviews of your books.

But I read scientific reviews and I realized pick an economist like my era was John Kenneth Calbraith was a review and you read a review in say the New Yorker or some literary magazine and the person would go on for 10 pages about this whether they understood it or not.

But a really good review of a science book is it boggled my mind. I didn't understand it, but it boggled my mind. And the notion that somehow when it comes to science, you're allowed to stop thinking. Yeah. That you're not allowed to... That somehow you shouldn't puzzle.

That it's too much to ask you to puzzle through a scientific argument, but a historical argument or a political argument or an economic argument, that's okay for normal humans. But heaven forbid that you be forced to actually think through something and it's somehow, I don't know where it comes

from, if it's in our educational system, or where, you know, and you're from Britain and, well, I think it boggles your mind is not a disreputable thing to say, actually. It isn't, but don't you think the book deserves a little more discussion?

Oh, yes. I mean, that's what I'm saying, the best review is like half a page long. I didn't understand it, but it was amazing. Yeah. And that, if you wrote, if you wrote a review of a history book and said, you know, I didn't understand it, but it was amazing. Yes.

It wouldn't be in the New Yorker. That's true. Anyway, okay. There's a wonderful, there's a wonderful chapter on the uncommon sense of science. And it involves Lewis Wolpert, another. It's a book review. A book review of a, he was a wonderful, another wonderful, popularizer of science. And it really hit home for me because he, because I've used an example,

than I thought I was pretty clever. And then I realized when I talk about stuff, it would take me 15 minutes to explain it. And in one sentence, he explains it. But it relates to something that's an experiment I want to do here, at least. And so I want everyone to take a deep breath and hold it in. Okay, just keep holding it. I just want to make some notes.

Keep holding it. Keep holding it. You're not holding it. Okay, you let it out. Okay. Too many people are smiling. That actually wasn't part of the experiment, but I wanted to see if you do it. But it was sort of part of the experiment because it's a famous fact that I teach when I used to teach undergraduates,

that every breath you take, you are breathing in some of the molecules of air, of oxygen, or particular, that Julius Caesar breathed out in his dying breath when he said Et tu Brutus. And you can show that, it's true. It's not just true of that, but you're breathing in, the breath of almost everyone who ever lived. You're breathing in the... And I often would tell myself that, you know, when I'm working on physics I'm making nowhere,

that every breath I take, I'm breathing in some atoms that Einstein breathed out the moment he put the last dot on his theory of general relativity. But you're also breathing... You're also breathing in the atoms that Hitler breathed out when he put the last dot in mind camp. Hitler had bad breath, by the way. But anyway, so it's an amazing fact.

And I, you know, if we had enough time, I could work through it. But Walpert gave an example, which is a very similar example that you quote, which is that, and this is your writing, pour one glass of water into the sea, allow time for it to be thoroughly dispersed through the oceans of the world. And that's probably maybe 50 years. Then scoop another glassful out of the sea anywhere. Almost certainly you will retrieve at least. one molecule of water from the original glass.

And it's true. I've argued that if you take a drop of a blood and put it in the ocean and pick the glass, you'll find later on a bit of your blood, no matter where you are around the world. And also pointed out that every time you take a drink of water, you're drinking in secretions from virtually everything that's ever existed. Which, by the way, gives the light a homeopathy. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

But I do. I mean, it actually lends truth my mother who passed away. One of the reasons we had to delay this because of the past of my mother who had lived to 100 and had a great life. But she used to say, don't touch that. You don't know where it's been. And she was right. But in any case, so I would have given a long explanation.

But Wolpert's explanation was perfectly clear. He just said, that's because there are many more molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water. then there are glasses of water in the sea. It's pretty clear. And I was blown away that he didn't need to do all the math that I did. But you use that as an example of the uncommon sense of science, that science can take us places where our common sense doesn't take us.

And I love that. And I used to work in museums a long time ago, and we call it the aha experience. everyone has gone into a museum of any sort or anywhere. Suddenly you see the world in a new way. I just, it boggles my mind. But it's a new thing.

So I wanted to ask, I've had that experience as a scientist where I was sure something was the case and then working through it, I realized something that I would never have thought was possible, that it would have seemed totally to defy any of my own common sense. And I'm wondering if you've had that experience. That was a long way of asking that question. Yes. Well, not in a very big...

Well, yes, let me give... An example would be the handicap principle, which is a theory of sexual selection. I already mentioned sexual selection. Things like Peacock's Tale, where Darwin just simply said that the reason the peacock has a huge great fan is that females like it.

and so males with bigger and bigger and bigger tails got more likely to pass their genes on because the females like them and so genes for big tails got passed on. But in the 1960s, an Israeli biologist called Amatsza-Zharvi produced a radical new theory of sexual selection which was called the handicap theory

and it said that everybody agreed that having a great big tale was a handicap but we all thought that it evolved in spite of being a handicap. So Harvey said it evolved because it was a handicap. The reason why females like it is that it is a handicap. Only very, very tough, strong males can survive, carrying this really great handicap on their backs. and so they must be a good bet as a mate and essentially everybody else in the field

ridiculed to Harvey at the time because it seemed to say we're all very well saying that it must be a good mate but on the other hand he does have the handicap and so it just cancelled it out and John Maynard Smith the great John Maynard Smith tried to model it and said it doesn't work but then much later

my former student and now colleague and now indeed mentor, Alan Graffin at Oxford, produced a mathematical model which showed that the handicap principle does indeed work. And so I had to eat humble pie and say I was wrong. Part of the problem was that Zahavi had a rather colorful way of expressing things. He used anthropomorphic language. she said things like

if a woman watches a race between two men and they come in as a dead heat but one of them is carrying a sack of coal on his back she chooses him and so I think anyway you asked me whether I'd changed my mind and that was one case where I had to change my mind and did

and particularly where something that seems if not just change your mind something that seems like it's not common sense. It turns out to be common sense. Well, not common sense, but it turns out to work. And now that Alan Graffen has done the maths and shown that it can work, I now feel it intuitively.

Exactly. And, you know, that's, when I talked about earlier about how sometimes science leads to absurdity, what seems like absurd. Sometimes, though, the reason is you're thinking about it the wrong way. And so people, when I've had debates sometimes with religious people about

and they bring up common sense. Common sense is okay. But it's overrated when it comes to science because common sense is based on our experience. Yeah. T.H. Huxley said wrongly, I think, science is nothing more than organized common sense. Yeah, but it becomes common sense because it defies your expectations

and then once you learn it, you say, oh, gee, why didn't understand that all along? It makes sense. but common sense is not, it's certainly a first guide for a scientist, but you learn that our experience is just an example of myopia, that the world is far grander than our experience, which is one of the beauties of science

because it takes us outside our comfort zone. Yeah, totally. And makes us uncomfortable, which unfortunately in universities now is a bad thing, but it's the best thing that can ever happen to any of you students, and if you're never uncomfortable, you haven't learned a damn thing.

Yeah, yeah. Anyway, speaking, well, actually, speaking of changing your mind, I wanted to ask you, there's a nice piece about the shelf, I think it was written in the 50th anniversary or 40th anniversary of the shelfish gene. And there are two things that I liked about. You talked about eight fingers in Fred Hoyle. It was a lovely story.

A lot of our counting is done in powers of 10, and presumably it's because we have 10 fingers, and we learned to count using our fingers. And if we'd had only eight fingers, we would have, instead of having decimal-based arithmetic, we would have octal arithmetic. Or if we had 16 fingers, we'd have hexadecimal arithmetic. And that makes computing, using computers, binary computers, much easier. So if you've ever done programming in a computer machine code, you have to learn to think in octal or hexadecimal. And so I think it was Fred Hollis speculated that the same thing.

same Fred Hoyle speculated that if we'd been born with eight fingers, computers might have been invented a century earlier. Yeah, I thought it was a wonderful question. But that aside, this is the kind of question a journalist might ask, so I hesitate to say it, but is there, looking back on the selfish gene, is any of it particularly outmoded, or more importantly, what's the newest result you know of in biology that relates to an idea in the book? that you would have liked to have included back then

if it had been developed. Is there such a thing? One that comes to mind. The funny thing is that because it's all about Darwinian evolution and the central idea is that the unit of selection is the gene, that is the thing that goes through the generations, that is the entity in the hierarchy of life, which is potentially immortal.

And therefore, there is a significant difference between those entities, those genes, which actually succeed in being immortal, and those that don't. And that property doesn't apply to anything else like the individual or the group or the species or the ecosystem. Only the gene has that property.

And nowadays, we know a hell of a lot more about how genes work and what they do in the world. development and the whole, you don't hear the word genetic so often now it is, you hear the word genomics. And some people think that that ought to have changed the selfish gene, but it doesn't at all actually, because fascinating though it is, interesting though it is, it doesn't in any way change this fundamental point that that which is immortal, potentially immortal, is bits of DNA. It doesn't have to be a gene as a unit

in the way that a molecular biologist would understand it, but I think I said any length of chromosome which has the property of being replicated with sufficient frequency. So the book could have been called, not the selfish gene, but the slightly selfish big bit of chromosome and the even more selfish little bit of chromosome.

probably wouldn't have done so well. It's not a catchy title. Okay. I want to move on to someone we both admire a lot and you talk about Carl Sagan. And we both agree. I think the demon-haunted world science has a candle the dark. It's my favorite book of his. It's mine, yes.

And in there he talks about the great thing about science, the great gifts that science has to offer is a baloney detection kit. And I'll read from you're quoting him. I occasionally get a letter from someone who is in contact, which is interesting because he wrote a book called that, in contact with extraterrestrials.

In fly sources, that kind of thing. Yeah, I'm invited to ask them anything. And so over the years, I prepared a little list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, please provide a short proof of Fermat's last theorem or the Goldbach conjecture, I never get an answer. On the other hand,

if I ask something like, should we be good, I always get an answer, almost always get an answer. Anything vague, especially involving conventional moral judgments, these aliens are extremely happy to respond to, but on anything specific,

where there's a chance to find out if they actually know anything beyond what most humans know, there's only silence. And the baloney detection kit is what he talks about, as science as a way of Jews and just that, When I read it, it reminded me, I don't know if you know this story.

Groucho Marx, who I was a big fan of, used to love to go up to psychics, you know, who can, you know, they always ask you, you go in and you pay money. And they say, ask me any question. And he'd say, what's the capital of North Dakota? And they'd never get it right. But anyway. That was his baloney detection kid,

and I thought it was a nice convergence between Carl Sagan and Groucho Marx. But more interestingly, what about, you know, and people, in spite of the fact that they're taken in, have an innate trust of science. Something I once said,

and I've seen it as a meme now, is if you're choking, do you want me to pray for you or do the Heimlich maneuver? And most people, you know, will say, maneuver. We all know science is really the way to do things, yet

somehow we don't have a baloney detection again. I'm wondering why evolution didn't seem to provide us naturally in a baloney detection. Just on the Heimling maneuver, there's a lovely story in an old people's home somewhere in America.

One of the old people started to choke and another old man in the old people's home, let's stepped up and did the Heimlich maneuver. His name was Heimlich. It was Heimlich himself in the old people's home. I think the only time he ever actually did it. And that's where the name came from. That's wonderful.

Yes. But why don't we have a bologna detection? Have you ever thought about that? Because why isn't science more natural? I mean, in some sense we're all scientists. We're as young kids, babies. We're all scientists. We explore the world around us and we we touch things and if they're hot, we don't touch them again. But why does the trinity become so... When a plumber or an electrician has to diagnose, or a car mechanic is trying to diagnose what's wrong,

they use a perfect scientific method and isolate this. Is this fault here or here? Seems to be here. Okay, let's narrow it down a bit further. Right, let's change this one and see what. So we all, people who do that kind of job are using scientific principles all the time. Steven Pinker has just

written a book which I recommend came out this year called Rationality which is a book about the rational and how it's partly a manual on how to think rationally and he's very keen on Bayesian reasoning. But he begins the book

by talking about the San I won't attempt to do the San Hunter Gatherer in Kalahari. And he says, he points out that they are superb scientists in making inference about the game that they're hunting and working out how to track animals and things like that.

So in many ways, we are innate scientists. But we are susceptible to so much baloney, which is a central part of the problem of the water. Yes, we are. Somewhere else in the book, he says that, we quote somebody else is saying, we are not so much born scientists as born lawyers, born to persuade and argue and influence

because we're social animals, and one of the ways in which we succeed in a Darwinian sense is to outwit, outmaneuver, out general our rivals. Yeah, in fact, it's a great book, and I love that book, and he and I did a talk, a podcast about it actually and yeah and I think he points out

from the point of view of evolutionary psychology rationality is not always the best strategy and the example you gave is just a very clear if you can out persuade we are social animals and if you are surrounded by a group of

colleagues friends all of whom believe some kind of baloney like that Trump really won the last election.

Then you actually if you stand out against that, then you lose face with your peers. You lose prestige. You don't succeed in what really matters in a highly social animal like homo sapiens.

You're named. Because one way to succeed in a Darwinian sense is to be accepted and admired by your social group. Absolutely. I think that's the best possible answer to that, actually. By the way, there are various people

are getting very antsy in the back of the room and probably some of the technical people because it was listed in the program maybe that we were going to go until about 8.15 with our religious discussion. I put that in just in case it wasn't interesting. but I'm enjoying it, so we're going to go a little longer, okay? But, yeah.

So, and so we'll go till I say we stop. But anyway, there's just a few more things I want to get, but one of your conversations in there is with a joint hero of both of ours, and a friend of both of ours, the late Christopher Hitchens,

who we were both privileged to know an honor and a privilege, to know him and I'm still amazed that he liked me. But anyway, that but there's a at the very beginning of the discussion which was some time ago obviously because he's

passed away a while ago you ask him, do you think America is in danger of becoming a theocracy? And his answer was, no I don't. The people who we mean when we talk about that, maybe the extreme evangelicals who do want a God-run America

I believe it was founded on essentially fundamentalist Protestant principles. I think they may be the most overrated threat in the country. Now, do you think he would have changed his mind today? I never try to guess what he would have thought about anything. But do you think that, I mean, there was a time, and we were talking about this earlier together, I think,

and I don't know if he did in public, but, you know, we both, I certainly spent a lot of my time 20 years ago, fighting the effort to remove evolution or replace evolution in the public schools, whether it was inel Ginole. Probably the first way I became known to the public was probably

in that effort. I was upset that biologists weren't doing it and so I started to speak out. But that sort of Well, let me have to say it. I met one of the lawyers on our side in the case

in Kitzmilmiller. That's right. Yeah, Kitts Miller. And after a conversation with him, he said, well, thank goodness we didn't choose you as an expert. And I tell you why. It's because I would have, if I was being honest, I would have said not only is evolution true,

but there's no God. And that's not what you have to do if you want to win that case. Yes. what you should be, what you should say, and they got Kenneth Miller to come and say it. Ken Miller, who's a religious... Evolution is true, and you could have God too. Yeah, yeah. And so that's what they would have wanted me to say, and I would have, well, I could have perjured myself by saying it.

But you wouldn't. No, Richard, one of the many things I love about you is that you say what you mean, and you won't change that. And that's an important, very important thing. But I guess I want to ask you that question. Yeah. Because that aspect, that trivial aspect, not so trivial, but the effort to impose intelligent design in schools, that's kind of died away.

We've won that, for the most part. It still rises every now and then, but in every high school district where I went from Texas to otherwise, we more or less won that. But at another sense, in terms of the impact of people who claim that America is a God, country and that the and I say this in an objective way

I mean you see you can't help but watch the Trump rallies and see that that people are arguing that he is a been sent by God to help the country and so I would argue that it is a greater threat

than Christopher would have thought and it's and I don't know where it's setting now what do you but well you could be right and and it could be that that Trump is responsible for that, although I don't suppose

he actually believes in God himself. Oh, I'm sure he doesn't. Yeah. I mean, he's an astonishing, well, not he's not astonishing phenomenon, and the fact that he cons people

is astonishing. Actually, there's a, I was reading, not that I read the book, but there's a New York Times excerpt from the book by Mike Pence who talks about an episode in the last days of the administration where at the end, of course, Trump was very upset with Pence and Penn said, but I will play, you know, I pray for you.

And Trump looked up and said, don't bother. Which I think really, really represented his real ideas. Well, look, I want to, I do want to give people a chance to go to the bathroom before, and I'll talk to you about what's going to happen in a second. I should have said it at the beginning. Actually, I'll tell you now before we get to this last bit. you all have question cards and at the beginning of intermission we have four lovely

I think four lovely and wonderful young people and other not so young people with boxes that are going to be in the aisles and if you could hand those cards in over intermission I'm going to go through them and we'll be able to answer your questions but the last thing

I want to talk about it's a little bit modeling the introduction but I love I love the epilogue of this book, which is something you said you'd asked to be read at your funeral. So could you read it? Not that this is your funeral. I don't want to suggest that.

It may be too well known. It's the opening paragraphs of my book Unreading the Rainbow. Well, let's assume not everyone's read it. Okay. Oh, you need your glasses? I mean, I can read it, but I like this. Do you read it better?

we are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born the potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara

certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats scientists greater than Newton we know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DM so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I in our ordinariness that are here.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life, not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered, a gently spinning green and gold harvest festival of a planet. What are the odds as a planet picked at random would have these complacent properties. Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers,

deep frozen, would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet like the one that killed the dinosaurs. It's the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep freeze, soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceships ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life.

life. If one in a million planets is suitable at best and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe haven for its sleeping cargo. But imagine that the ship's robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After millions of years, the ship has the extraordinary luck to happen upon a planet capable of. of sustaining life, a planet of equable temperature based in warm sunshine refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers, Rip Van Winkles, wake stumbling into the light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls. A world bountiful with creatures darting through alien green things,

Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck. I am lucky to be alive and so are you, privileged and not just privileged to enjoy our planet. More, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open and why they see what they do in the short time before they close forever. I love that. I think that's worth an applause. I asked you to read it because it's a lovely statement, and I wanted to hear you say it, and I think I wanted the audience to have the opportunity

to listen to read it. Originally, I was going to take off on that as a chance for us to talk about aliens and such, but we have gone 15 minutes over, and I do want to get people in the answer to that. But I just want to say that that notion of our luck is I think what I want to leave as a central part of our dialogue here, but also what the foundation, the Origins Project Foundation is all about.

The incredible luck that we all have to be able to ask these kind of questions, celebrate them together, people like Richard, talk to each other about it, is really what makes life worth living. And I feel particularly lucky that you're all here, and I know that we're all very lucky that that sperm was made you. Thank you very much. So you have an intermission and please put your questions and Richard and I'll be happy to answer them.

And thank you very much for being here. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed watching the dialogue between me and Richard at the RPM Theatre in November for the Origins Project Foundation first public event. while you're watching, I shake my beard. And in any case, our dialogue was followed by a Q&A. And we're going to make that Q&A available, the video of that Q&A available uniquely for our paid subscribers for the next month.

And after that, we'll make it public just to thank you for your support for us. So I hope you enjoyed the dialogue. And I hope some of you will become paid subscribers. to see the Q&A session, which was quite interesting. But to all of you, thanks again for your

support and interest in the efforts of the Origins Podcast and the Origins Project Foundation. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation,

a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society

in the 21st century and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit Originsproject Foundation.org Thank you.